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Ice_can wrote:
It was stated in another thread that they have been doing very well at non ITC tournaments since january. Its been stated that it is ITC's secondary opjectives that make flyrent spam non viable in ITC rules tournaments, not flyrents being week.

Yeah Flyrants have been winning ETC tournaments left and right in Europe. They aren't the most broken thing ever but they deserve some kind of nerf.

 stonehorse wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
So because spamming flyrants has been getting its ass kicked at every major event, but then suddenly has ONE good showing, at a format that very clearly favors them (good luck earning kill points on Flyrants), they deserve to have half of their weapons removed? No...

I also play Tyranids, and this change proposed is the dumbest thing ever.

My proposal doesn't remove half the weapons, it simply aims to bring the rules into line with the model and the rest of the winged Tyranid design.

It also makes the Flyrant a complete no brainer, nothing else in the Tyranid codex comes close to the Flyrant as it is. It is a case of internal balance.

Okay so your proposal literally does remove 1 of 2 weapons, that is half.

What makes the Flyrant a no-brainer is that the rest of our HQs are pretty weak, or hilariously overcosted.

Should Nemesis Dreadknights be nerfed for the sake of internal balance with the GK codex? Of course not. Your assumption is that the Tyranid codex is in a good place without the Flyrant. It is not.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Galas wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
It was stated in another thread that they have been doing very well at non ITC tournaments since january. Its been stated that it is ITC's secondary opjectives that make flyrent spam non viable in ITC rules tournaments, not flyrents being week.

Yeah Flyrants have been winning ETC tournaments left and right in Europe. They aren't the most broken thing ever but they deserve some kind of nerf.

Which is why they should get the 1 per detachment rule that Commanders got. There is no need to ruin the effectiveness of a model for those of us who aren't spamming them.

I don't think the issue is a particular model being spammed; its the spam in general. Obviously we have seen that differing formats of missions results in various units power going up or down accordingly. LVO saw spamming PBC's and Dark Reapers becoming a thing, Adepticon saw spamming Flyrants, cultists, and the Dark Angels flyer, its just.... spam is an issue. Period.

And I get that people want to play what they want; but for the game to be competitive, there has to be limits in place. It would be like League of Legends allowing you to play 5 of the same hero in any given game.... they do it for lulz, but man does it sure break the game!

I would play in a rule of 1 tournament, where no unit can be repeated. But that isn't the standard because at the end of the day, there is no clear definition of spamming, and everyone who claims to be opposed to it, actually does it without thinking. Formalize an anti-spam rule and you'll find that it's a bit harder than you think.

 Marmatag wrote:
I would play in a rule of 1 tournament, where no unit can be repeated. But that isn't the standard because at the end of the day, there is no clear definition of spamming, and everyone who claims to be opposed to it, actually does it without thinking. Formalize an anti-spam rule and you'll find that it's a bit harder than you think.

Its hard for many Codices to operate with only a single unit of "whatever." But yes, spam is pretty prevalent, especially when someone discovers a strong combo or works with the way they play. Thats why I think that limiting the number of times a unit can be taken in an army, period (for example, 0-3 times for an HQ) may be a solution. You'll still get people spamming certain things, but it won't be the "be all, end all" that we see, where people only spam a single option ad-nauseum. JUst an idea.

 Marmatag wrote:
It's easy to make that case for a lot of armies. The good unit in the Tyranid codex is the Flyrant. What are these lists without flyrant spam? Is the tyranid codex fine?

I hope highlander becomes a thing. I'd love to play in highlander tournaments, if only they would gain popularity.

Ah yes let's screw some factions completely with artificial restrictions. Always a good idea!

tneva82 wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
It's easy to make that case for a lot of armies. The good unit in the Tyranid codex is the Flyrant. What are these lists without flyrant spam? Is the tyranid codex fine?

I hope highlander becomes a thing. I'd love to play in highlander tournaments, if only they would gain popularity.

Ah yes let's screw some factions completely with artificial restrictions. Always a good idea!

Yeah, I would just quit playing 40k at that point. My Blood Angels army uses 3 Devastator Squads instead of vehicles, for the sole reason that I just think Devastator Squads are cool. I like my crappy Tactical Squads riding in Rhinos, none of this would be possible in a Highlander type game, and that seems bland to me.

It is too easy for a Guard army to be made up of one of each type of Leman Russ and just laugh as Marine or almost any other army has zero counter to it.

 Marmatag wrote:
Hive Tyrants would be better served with the commander treatment rather than a nerf. It's the same overall effect but doesn't punish people who were playing Tyranids in a more balanced manner to begin with.

And if MRC are 20 points, everyone will just take MST, d6 damage is a no brainer.

You'll notice most of these people weren't even using claws anyway. They were using 2x Twin Devs, for 24 shots. Because even fully degraded a tyrant still hits on 4s in shooting.

That\s busted method of balancing though. If unit isn't brokenly good for points no harm in spamming. If it is people will max out on them anyway. Only scale of issue reduced but problem still is that it's too good for it's points. It also scales poorly.

Such # limitations are good for FLUFF reasons but balance wise it's at most bandaid to limit damage rather than actually fix the issue. Is so with tau, is so for others if GW is lazy enough to do that rather than fix the problem.

The power of the tyrant spam (or most spam reallly) does not only come out of the 'brokenness' of the unit.
It also is the result of overloading the opponents army with a certain type of target (here: high resistance, multiwounds, ++save), while presenting no other suitabe target.

So an army may be equiped to deal with 1-3 tyrants and then have some other weapons that are good at dealing with differnt targets.
But now there are only tyrants, so half of the army has no suitable targets to fire at.
For the spammer this is like facing half an army, because he can just ignore parts of it and shrug it off. And of course he will focus his own attacks on the dangerous part of that army, so the effect only gets worse in the following turns.

This is not exclusive to tyrants, the same goes for spamming only flyers, tanks, swarms and so on.
The unit being spammed does not have to be broken, to have this effect.

Nerfing that unit to the ground only punishes every player that would like to play them in a balanced setting.
If it was nerfed so much, that it is OK in a spammed form, it will be completely useless in a balanced setting.

 NH Gunsmith wrote:
It is too easy for a Guard army to be made up of one of each type of Leman Russ and just laugh as Marine or almost any other army has zero counter to it.

Eh, that would depend on the phrasing of the Highlander rule - after all, technically there is only the Leman Russ Battle Tank, which has options for turret armaments. They all (other than the Tank Commander, I guess) fall under one datasheet.

If they filled out that selection to a squadron of three, and took both a Tank Commander and Pask, the most you'd be facing is five Leman Russ variants.

...I'm not sure now whether that agrees with your position or not

Never really understood the scare-mongering and calls for nerfs whenever someone wins a tournament with a spam list. Competitively, this game is about spam and knowing what to counter. Outside tournaments which only a tiny fraction of people actually play in - it quite rare otherwise nobody ends up wanting to play against you for being "that guy".

The results here are not representative of the wider game. Mission types, scoring methods, terrain and anticipated lists all dominate the outcome and since the last big tournament, nothing much has changed between Eldar and Tyranids - the big difference were the points just mentioned.

Instead of screaming "nerf" - perhaps we should be screaming "buff". Which armies didn't make a showing or get very far? Which units were simply outclassed or are never worth taking? If GW had any sense - they would address those issues rather than simply having boxes on their shelves gathering dust because nobody wants to play such a useless army. How many new players read about the armies and pick Eldar over Orks because they see how good they are at tournaments at spamming? How many will start with Tyranids over Ad Mech for the same reason?

As for the big question - how do we stop spam lists in tournaments? The tournaments themselves are to blame. Make the missions as random as possible so that people are not making an army for one mission, but instead need to bring an all-comers list. There will still be some spam, but a lot of the typical spam armies will be undone on some of the different mission types and ultimately not win.

GW really needs to slap the 0-1 Pr Detachment limitation on a few more armies, which only seems reasonable giving these results.

FunJohn wrote:
GW really needs to slap the 0-1 Pr Detachment limitation on a few more armies, which only seems reasonable giving these results.

Sure if it is accompanied by actual fix to problem rather than band aid that simply putting 0-1 per detachment would be.

tneva82 wrote:

FunJohn wrote:
GW really needs to slap the 0-1 Pr Detachment limitation on a few more armies, which only seems reasonable giving these results.

Sure if it is accompanied by actual fix to problem rather than band aid that simply putting 0-1 per detachment would be.

Nah, look at Tau commanders. If they would have made crisis suits worth taking, that would have fixed itself. At this point what is good for the goose is good for the gander. 1 tyrant per detachment.

 quickfuze wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

FunJohn wrote:
GW really needs to slap the 0-1 Pr Detachment limitation on a few more armies, which only seems reasonable giving these results.

Sure if it is accompanied by actual fix to problem rather than band aid that simply putting 0-1 per detachment would be.

Nah, look at Tau commanders. If they would have made crisis suits worth taking, that would have fixed itself. At this point what is good for the goose is good for the gander. 1 tyrant per detachment.

Precisely my point. they didn't fix commander issue either. They just bandaided it. Crisis commanders are still too good compared to crisis suits. The 0-1 was bad idea there, it's bad idea here. Fix the issue. Don't bandaid symptoms.

tneva82 wrote:

 quickfuze wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

FunJohn wrote:
GW really needs to slap the 0-1 Pr Detachment limitation on a few more armies, which only seems reasonable giving these results.

Sure if it is accompanied by actual fix to problem rather than band aid that simply putting 0-1 per detachment would be.

Nah, look at Tau commanders. If they would have made crisis suits worth taking, that would have fixed itself. At this point what is good for the goose is good for the gander. 1 tyrant per detachment.

Precisely my point. they didn't fix commander issue either. They just bandaided it. Crisis commanders are still too good compared to crisis suits. The 0-1 was bad idea there, it's bad idea here. Fix the issue. Don't bandaid symptoms.

But at this point it's expectation management. Do I think they will fix the Tau issue? Nope, in their minds they already did. So at this point I'll take the same treatment for tyrant over them doing nothing about that list.

Sumilidon wrote:

The results here are not representative of the wider game. Mission types, scoring methods, terrain and anticipated lists all dominate the outcome and since the last big tournament, nothing much has changed between Eldar and Tyranids - the big difference were the points just mentioned.

What is the wider game tho? That's what i find near infuriating about tabletop, it's impossible to get a balance discussion going when even the highest profile tournaments don't play with the same rules, nwm the thousands of FLG tournaments... it's like comparing football and handegg ... or i guess handegg and rugby... yeah you got two teams trying to move a ball around a field but the differance is night and day.
I wish GW would just nut up and after some playtesting and thinktanking would 1) create and run their own damn league like blizzard and riot and valve do 2) realease rules for "competitive-play" format to go with narrative and maybe matched, if not just outright replace matched ... things have DEFINETLY picked up in 8th, with faqs and codexes essentially being hotfixes and patches. Ofc GW considers itsself a hobby store / miniature company first and formost and go with a "to big to fail" attitude. ANYTHING besides modelling is an afterthought.

Tho again, since the new CEO took over pre-8th things have only gone up and up and up to bringing back old games, not only from a tabletop perspective but also as in the PC space, necromunda is due to launch, Mordheim was GOOD, vermintide is... awsome from the outside looking in, just suffers from "small dev" syndrome. BFG Armada was quite good , again, sans online balancing problems and BFG Armada 2 is looking good so far. Then there's mechanicus wich looks like fething XCOM IN 40K!!! ... Hell for the first time in.... ever?! Model bundles actualy SAVE you money... what a novelty huh?

I KNOW i'm in the minority, but i just want the damn game to go digital tbh ... go as far as imbeding models with RFID tags if you have to , to be able to use them online, with the MASSIVE popularity of 8th to just go digital so we can have a trully GLOBAL (not just Canada NA UK taking up most of the playerbase with some stragglelers around the rest of Europe, germany mostly and a few hardcore aussies) with a unified competitive ruleset. I mean you hear FLG goes on constantly about making tournaments as STREAMABLE as possible, imposing strict rules on for one the presentability of armies and for another introducing stopwatches to move game along so audiences can get an actual game not a staring contest.

HMint wrote:
The power of the tyrant spam (or most spam reallly) does not only come out of the 'brokenness' of the unit.
It also is the result of overloading the opponents army with a certain type of target (here: high resistance, multiwounds, ++save), while presenting no other suitabe target.

So an army may be equiped to deal with 1-3 tyrants and then have some other weapons that are good at dealing with differnt targets.
But now there are only tyrants, so half of the army has no suitable targets to fire at.
For the spammer this is like facing half an army, because he can just ignore parts of it and shrug it off. And of course he will focus his own attacks on the dangerous part of that army, so the effect only gets worse in the following turns.

This is not exclusive to tyrants, the same goes for spamming only flyers, tanks, swarms and so on.
The unit being spammed does not have to be broken, to have this effect.

Nerfing that unit to the ground only punishes every player that would like to play them in a balanced setting.
If it was nerfed so much, that it is OK in a spammed form, it will be completely useless in a balanced setting.

Overloading a certain kind of resistance is a viable strategy - there is nothing wrong with that. When that resistence is too cheap - it becomes a problem. I can tell you right now if FHT was 220 points per instead of 193 - people wouldn't be bringing 7 of them to a tournament.

HMint wrote:
The power of the tyrant spam (or most spam reallly) does not only come out of the 'brokenness' of the unit.
It also is the result of overloading the opponents army with a certain type of target (here: high resistance, multiwounds, ++save), while presenting no other suitabe target.

So an army may be equiped to deal with 1-3 tyrants and then have some other weapons that are good at dealing with differnt targets.
But now there are only tyrants, so half of the army has no suitable targets to fire at.
For the spammer this is like facing half an army, because he can just ignore parts of it and shrug it off. And of course he will focus his own attacks on the dangerous part of that army, so the effect only gets worse in the following turns.

This is not exclusive to tyrants, the same goes for spamming only flyers, tanks, swarms and so on.
The unit being spammed does not have to be broken, to have this effect.

Nerfing that unit to the ground only punishes every player that would like to play them in a balanced setting.
If it was nerfed so much, that it is OK in a spammed form, it will be completely useless in a balanced setting.

This guy gets it.

 Marmatag wrote:

HMint wrote:
The power of the tyrant spam (or most spam reallly) does not only come out of the 'brokenness' of the unit.
It also is the result of overloading the opponents army with a certain type of target (here: high resistance, multiwounds, ++save), while presenting no other suitabe target.

So an army may be equiped to deal with 1-3 tyrants and then have some other weapons that are good at dealing with differnt targets.
But now there are only tyrants, so half of the army has no suitable targets to fire at.
For the spammer this is like facing half an army, because he can just ignore parts of it and shrug it off. And of course he will focus his own attacks on the dangerous part of that army, so the effect only gets worse in the following turns.

This is not exclusive to tyrants, the same goes for spamming only flyers, tanks, swarms and so on.
The unit being spammed does not have to be broken, to have this effect.

Nerfing that unit to the ground only punishes every player that would like to play them in a balanced setting.
If it was nerfed so much, that it is OK in a spammed form, it will be completely useless in a balanced setting.

This guy gets it.

What does he get? I can do the same thing with tactical terminators...Am I going to annihilate my opponent? . Rhetorical question obviously. The issue is the unit cost is wrong. It's like bringing a 2300 list against a 2k.

The full deep strike army is also problematic - it's always been problematic. how to fix? Instead of unit restrictions for deep strike (50% of units must start on table) Change to 50% of points must start on the table. Pretty hard to abuse that.

The unit is only costed incorrectly if you accept that Adepticon is indicative of game balance. I reject that assertion wholeheartedly.

I do not feel the Flyrant is undercosted in its current form. In a mission with proper secondaries & progressive scoring not based on kill points, and on a table with actual terrain, the Flyrant is a good unit but not OP.

No one takes a walking Tyrant. Why? Because without mobility, and the survivability of being held in reserve, Tyrants suck. It's not like they get a better save, or better weapons when they have wings. Fly in general makes things better in 8th edition.

HMint wrote:
The power of the tyrant spam (or most spam reallly) does not only come out of the 'brokenness' of the unit.
It also is the result of overloading the opponents army with a certain type of target (here: high resistance, multiwounds, ++save), while presenting no other suitabe target.

So an army may be equiped to deal with 1-3 tyrants and then have some other weapons that are good at dealing with differnt targets.
But now there are only tyrants, so half of the army has no suitable targets to fire at.
For the spammer this is like facing half an army, because he can just ignore parts of it and shrug it off. And of course he will focus his own attacks on the dangerous part of that army, so the effect only gets worse in the following turns.

This is not exclusive to tyrants, the same goes for spamming only flyers, tanks, swarms and so on.
The unit being spammed does not have to be broken, to have this effect.

Nerfing that unit to the ground only punishes every player that would like to play them in a balanced setting.
If it was nerfed so much, that it is OK in a spammed form, it will be completely useless in a balanced setting.

I disagree with the bolded part. If the effectiveness (performance relative to cost) of the spammed unit has no bearing on the overall effectiveness of the army you would see TAC spam marine lists at top tables. Instead you see spam fire-raptors (guess why...)

The truth is undercosted/overperforming units when spammed break the game more than just simple target saturation. Unit with is 3x baneblades is a problem because they are a good unit. Reaper spam is another one. If the majority of the points spent on your army are one type of unit that unit is probably too effective (either its offense is unbalanced to the point that different targets no longer mater or it is resilient to too many types of opponent offense).

Flyrants present both issues. Their dakka/psychics are good against most targets and their 4++ with t7 and a FNP they are super resilient for the cost. Throw in deepstriking and you have a criminally undercosted unit that only isn't spammed in ITC because it gives up too many secondaries.

The "I want overpowered units because I don't spam them" argument is weak. I brought up the problem facing flyrant spam when the Nid codex dropped. It's obvious that it is undercosted. Sucks that the rest of your HQs are terrible but you don't fix that problem by giving an army one auto-include to make up for the short comings of the rest of the dex.

 Marmatag wrote:
The unit is only costed incorrectly if you accept that Adepticon is indicative of game balance. I reject that assertion wholeheartedly.

I do not feel the Flyrant is undercosted in its current form. In a mission with proper secondaries & progressive scoring not based on kill points, and on a table with actual terrain, the Flyrant is a good unit but not OP.

No one takes a walking Tyrant. Why? Because without mobility, and the survivability of being held in reserve, Tyrants suck. It's not like they get a better save, or better weapons when they have wings. Fly in general makes things better in 8th edition.

"In a mission with proper secondaries & progressive scoring"
There is no such thing. Also - I don't think tyranids care about objective points - they just want biomass.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
The unit is only costed incorrectly if you accept that Adepticon is indicative of game balance. I reject that assertion wholeheartedly.

I do not feel the Flyrant is undercosted in its current form. In a mission with proper secondaries & progressive scoring not based on kill points, and on a table with actual terrain, the Flyrant is a good unit but not OP.

No one takes a walking Tyrant. Why? Because without mobility, and the survivability of being held in reserve, Tyrants suck. It's not like they get a better save, or better weapons when they have wings. Fly in general makes things better in 8th edition.

"In a mission with proper secondaries & progressive scoring"
There is no such thing. Also - I don't think tyranids care about objective points - they just want biomass.

Yeah, that's how you make an happy tyranid girlfriend, indeed!

More seriously, with my nids i always win on objectives, our troops are simply too good at it. (Standard GW missions in my area)

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
The unit is only costed incorrectly if you accept that Adepticon is indicative of game balance. I reject that assertion wholeheartedly.

I do not feel the Flyrant is undercosted in its current form. In a mission with proper secondaries & progressive scoring not based on kill points, and on a table with actual terrain, the Flyrant is a good unit but not OP.

No one takes a walking Tyrant. Why? Because without mobility, and the survivability of being held in reserve, Tyrants suck. It's not like they get a better save, or better weapons when they have wings. Fly in general makes things better in 8th edition.

"In a mission with proper secondaries & progressive scoring"
There is no such thing. Also - I don't think tyranids care about objective points - they just want biomass.

Yeah, to be honest, to say that Flyrant spam isnt good in the special ITC house rules and special missions and because of that it shouldnt be balanced for normal W40K is... thats not how it should be done.

I think Flyrants cost too little atm largely because of their 4++.

Shrikes also have two weapons options + Wings.

Martel732 wrote:
I think Flyrants cost too little atm largely because of their 4++.

They were absolute garbage with a 5++, so...

That's because 33% to ignore an attack is gak, but 50% is really good.