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Everyone complain's that Tau overwatch is silly, I'd like to point out that IG can get +1 when overwatching.

For the Greater Good is powerful but is useless if your being assaulted by half an Aldari Soup list turn 1.
They have no effective CC units to counter charge with, no allies to soup up with for a CC punch.

Headlss wrote:

Ouch. I need to get a Homoculas then, and a Autarch skyrunner, for the no overwatch masks. Or just find some corners. For LOS.

I knew about for the greater good. I've faced that before. Didn't know they could hit on 5s.

The good thing about greater good is they pack in nice and tight, once you get a unit of wythches in there you can just climb up the ladder with consolidate and pile in from one unit to the next. That was fun.


Are you sure the unit that greater goods can't overwatch if they get charged themselves? We were playing that they could. They could only greater good once, but they could greater good and then overwatch if they were charged themselves, and then over watch again if the first charge failed and they got charged again.

The good news is that counterfire defense systems basically do not exist on the tabletop. One of the rarest systems out there, everyone just takes more general use ones. There's two big tournament septs, T'au and Bork'an, so you can expect maybe half (or a bit more) of all Tau armies to have units Overwatching on 5s.

Ice_can wrote:
Everyone complain's that Tau overwatch is silly, I'd like to point out that IG can get +1 when overwatching.

For the Greater Good is powerful but is useless if your being assaulted by half an Aldari Soup list turn 1.
They have no effective CC units to counter charge with, no allies to soup up with for a CC punch.

Aeldari Soup is almost definitely the utmost strongest way to play this game. They have gak that ruins everybodies day.

Most the rest of the armies in the game can easily find Tau's overwatch to be an absurdly difficult wall unless they are able to make multiple assaults in the one turn. Armies that rely on pushing a single assault unit up quickly to tie something up and get their game going are kinda especially neutered hard by it

 SHUPPET wrote:
Armies that rely on pushing a single assault unit up quickly to tie something up and get their game going are kinda especially neutered hard by it

But that seems like a poor strategy rather than a problem with Tau. If you rely on a single threat with no redundancy then you should expect to lose a lot, because putting all your eggs in one basket is bad strategy.

 SHUPPET wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
Everyone complain's that Tau overwatch is silly, I'd like to point out that IG can get +1 when overwatching.

For the Greater Good is powerful but is useless if your being assaulted by half an Aldari Soup list turn 1.
They have no effective CC units to counter charge with, no allies to soup up with for a CC punch.

Aeldari Soup is almost definitely the utmost strongest way to play this game. They have gak that ruins everybodies day.

Most the rest of the armies in the game can easily find Tau's overwatch to be an absurdly difficult wall unless they are able to make multiple assaults in the one turn. Armies that rely on pushing a single assault unit up quickly to tie something up and get their game going are kinda especially neutered hard by it

With screening and fallback which army did this tactic actually work on? Plenty of armies can counter it fairly easily. Eg it's a bad tactic, Tau overwatch just exposes what a poor tactical decision it is.
Also BA, Raven guard, all Aeldari, Necrons choas and GSC have ways to prevent overwatch anyway, so please explain why Tau should be rewritten just because people don't want to take the options to counter their overwatch.
It's like people saying knights should be banned from match play yet they have nothing heavier than a s7 weapon in their entire list.
If your taking a list that can't work if you meet X army or Y army, congratulations you built a bad list.
It maybe your using a codex with overcosted units or some other factor outwith your control but if half the stuff Dakka Dakka claim is in need of an immediate ban/nerf why aren't these broken units steeling all the top spots at events.

 Peregrine wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:
Armies that rely on pushing a single assault unit up quickly to tie something up and get their game going are kinda especially neutered hard by it

But that seems like a poor strategy rather than a problem with Tau. If you rely on a single threat with no redundancy then you should expect to lose a lot, because putting all your eggs in one basket is bad strategy.

Swarmlord for example cannot double move two units a turn, just one.

Call it a bad tactic, but it works well on practically every army not Tau and the ones that don't just jump every single unit out of combat for free. It's not putting all your eggs in one basket, it's a tactic detailed and pushed by players WAY better than you, Matt Root for example goes into great detail on why he takes only a single unit of Genestealers, and he's #1 ITC player, so go ahead and say how it's a bad strategy, but You. Are. Wrong.

Ice_can wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
Everyone complain's that Tau overwatch is silly, I'd like to point out that IG can get +1 when overwatching.

For the Greater Good is powerful but is useless if your being assaulted by half an Aldari Soup list turn 1.
They have no effective CC units to counter charge with, no allies to soup up with for a CC punch.

Aeldari Soup is almost definitely the utmost strongest way to play this game. They have gak that ruins everybodies day.

Most the rest of the armies in the game can easily find Tau's overwatch to be an absurdly difficult wall unless they are able to make multiple assaults in the one turn. Armies that rely on pushing a single assault unit up quickly to tie something up and get their game going are kinda especially neutered hard by it

With screening and fallback which army did this tactic actually work on? Plenty of armies can counter it fairly easily. Eg it's a bad tactic, Tau overwatch just exposes what a poor tactical decision it is.

Uhhh it works on screens, and screens can be worked past in general? Screens do not stop this from happening in fact at times they can even help your goals in multiple ways. I don't think you understand what you are talking about here.

Ice_can wrote:
Also BA, Raven guard, all Aeldari, Necrons choas and GSC have ways to prevent overwatch anyway, so please explain why Tau should be rewritten just because people don't want to take the options to counter their overwatch.

This makes literally no sense. If the case was that we could all just prevent overwatch and it wasn't so strong, the nerf that only you started talking about wouldn't be a nerf at all. It's incredibly strong and you are mistaken. Also, these things don't all stop FTGG anyway. What an absurd deflection.

Ice_can wrote:
It's like people saying knights should be banned from match play yet they have nothing heavier than a s7 weapon in their entire list.

Yeah that's really not even remotely similar comparison. An accurate comparison would be if shooting at knight allowed every enemy model in range of their other knight to have a free round of CC on the firing unit before the bullets are fired, but only at 5+, and then me saying "yeah maybe this isn't quite good design when playing against a lot of the shooting armies out there"

Also please show me where I said anything about banning Tau from matched play lmfao I still own a few thousand points myself bud

Ice_can wrote:
It maybe your using a codex with overcosted units or some other factor outwith your control but if half the stuff Dakka Dakka claim is in need of an immediate ban/nerf why aren't these broken units steeling all the top spots at events.

I didn't say anything was in need of a ban or nerf, while Tau does very well in the right hands at events, and there is two Tau players in the top 16 ITC, who are the same people who describe Tau players as being rigid and inflexible in their resolute beliefs of how bad their race is in the face of all logic, and Tau generally attracting the type of player who never develops beyond a poor understanding of the game. There's more Tau mains in the top 16 than IG, for comparison.

 SHUPPET wrote:
Call it a bad tactic, but it works well on practically every army not Tau and the ones that don't just jump every single unit out of combat for free. It's not putting all your eggs in one basket, it's a tactic detailed and pushed by players WAY better than you, Matt Root for example goes into great detail on why he takes only a single unit of Genestealers, and he's #1 ITC player, so go ahead and say how it's a bad strategy, but You. Are. Wrong.

Apparently it doesn't work because you're here complaining about how it doesn't work on Tau and armies that can disengage effectively. It sounds like what they've found is a tactic that works on some armies, and now you're complaining because it isn't an automatic win against every army.

 Peregrine wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:
Call it a bad tactic, but it works well on practically every army not Tau and the ones that don't just jump every single unit out of combat for free. It's not putting all your eggs in one basket, it's a tactic detailed and pushed by players WAY better than you, Matt Root for example goes into great detail on why he takes only a single unit of Genestealers, and he's #1 ITC player, so go ahead and say how it's a bad strategy, but You. Are. Wrong.

Apparently it doesn't work because you're here complaining about how it doesn't work on Tau and armies that can disengage effectively. It sounds like what they've found is a tactic that works on some armies, and now you're complaining because it isn't an automatic win against every army.

lol yeah thats right, The underlying point of my message is most definitely that a single unit of Genestealers are an automatic win against every single other army in the game, what an OP build, and I'm just complaining because my insta-win strat doesn't work against Tau. How astute of you to uncover that. Eexcellent comprehension as always buddy.

I didn't say it worked on everyone. I specifically said otherwise, I said its a good strategy, but it gets shut down by aspects from other armies that are also really good.



Tau's overwatch is really strong, and the fact that you're genuinely arguing otherwise shows how little you understand this game.

 SHUPPET wrote:
lol yeah thats right, The underlying point of my message is most definitely that a single unit of Genestealers are an automatic win against every single other army in the game, what an OP build, and I'm just complaining because my insta-win strat doesn't work against Tau. How astute of you to uncover that. Eexcellent comprehension as always buddy.

Tau's overwatch is really strong, and the fact that you're genuinely arguing otherwise shows how little you understand this game.

Complaining is exactly what you're doing. You complained that Tau overwatch is too strong against single-threat strategies, I pointed out that the problem is a lack of redundancy, and your best response is to claim that it works against other armies so it's really a good strategy and all the PRO 40K GODS OF WARGAMING #1 ITC PLAYERS do it so of course they know best. And you somehow managed to claim that a strategy that depends on getting a single unit into combat is not putting all your eggs in one basket, when it's the very definition of doing so. The fact that a single-threat strategy fails against Tau does not mean that their overwatch is too strong, it means that they need to learn the IG rule that you always take multiple copies of a threat so that one still gets the job done after the others are killed.

 Peregrine wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:
lol yeah thats right, The underlying point of my message is most definitely that a single unit of Genestealers are an automatic win against every single other army in the game, what an OP build, and I'm just complaining because my insta-win strat doesn't work against Tau. How astute of you to uncover that. Eexcellent comprehension as always buddy.

Tau's overwatch is really strong, and the fact that you're genuinely arguing otherwise shows how little you understand this game.

Complaining is exactly what you're doing. You complained that Tau overwatch is too strong against single-threat strategies, I pointed out that the problem is a lack of redundancy, and your best response is to claim that it works against other armies so it's really a good strategy and all the PRO 40K GODS OF WARGAMING #1 ITC PLAYERS do it so of course they know best. And you somehow managed to claim that a strategy that depends on getting a single unit into combat is not putting all your eggs in one basket, when it's the very definition of doing so. The fact that a single-threat strategy fails against Tau does not mean that their overwatch is too strong, it means that they need to learn the IG rule that you always take multiple copies of a threat so that one still gets the job done after the others are killed.

The fact that you think because something doesn't work against literally every army in the game therefor its a terrible strat and a bad list, is why you have literally twenty-four thousand posts on dakkadakka and zero high level accolades, while Matt Root is ITC's #1 player with SIX first place finishes in a row at ITC events this year, using the exact strategy I describe, without the threat redundancy you feel is necessary for a unit to be able to have an impact. This is purely your entry level competitive understanding speaking, and is not actually how the game works.



I'm not complaining about anything. I'm saying something is very powerful. I didn't say Tau's overwatch is "too strong", or Tau need a nerf. The only person to say that is you guys. Did you two just see someone saying something positive about Tau and start frothing at the mouth? Remember, I'm the guy who was in here arguing that this thread was nonsense, assault is in a great place, and we do NOT need changes to help it, and I literally play Tau myself. Seems you've just extrapolated a bunch of nonsense based on your own poor understanding of competitive play, and run with it to this spot here.

 SHUPPET wrote:
The fact that you think because something doesn't work against literally every army in the game therefor its a terrible strat and a bad list, is why you have literally twenty-four thousand posts on dakkadakka and zero high level accolades, while Matt Root is ITC's #1 player with 6 first place finishes in a row at ITC events this year.

No, the reason I have zero "high level accolades" is because I don't give a about tournament 40k. It's a joke of a game often played in a joke of a tournament structure (see recent events won by blatant slow playing), and I have many better things to do with my money than dump tons of it into traveling to major 40k tournaments. So no, I don't really care about your sad attempt at a dick measuring contest by proxy.

I'm not complaining about anything. I'm saying something is very powerful. I didn't say Tau's overwatch is "too strong", or Tau need a nerf. The only person to say that is you guys. Did you two just see someone saying something positive about Tau and start frothing at the mouth? Remember, I'm the guy who was in here arguing that this thread was nonsense, assault is in a great place, and we do NOT need changes to help it, and I literally play Tau myself. Seems you've just extrapolated a bunch of nonsense based on your own poor understanding of competitive play, and run with it to this spot here.

Now I am confused. You said this:

Most the rest of the armies in the game can easily find Tau's overwatch to be an absurdly difficult wall unless they are able to make multiple assaults in the one turn.

and this:

and maybe because FTGG with 5+ to hit thanks to Sept is a bit absurd

and this:

TAU is the ones using special rules to break the rules of assault to stop that gak with their overwatch wall, not the other way around.

You emphasize how Tau are breaking the rules and it's "absurdly difficult" for most armies to cope with, and explicitly call FTGG on a 5+ "absurd". Now, maybe it's just me, but when I call something "absurd" like that it's generally a statement that it's too good and needs to be changed. Perhaps that's not what you meant, but it's sure the obvious reading of your posts.

I read "absurdly difficult unless they are able to make multiple assaults in one turn." Which is a hefty modifier you might be overlooking.

 Peregrine wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:
The fact that you think because something doesn't work against literally every army in the game therefor its a terrible strat and a bad list, is why you have literally twenty-four thousand posts on dakkadakka and zero high level accolades, while Matt Root is ITC's #1 player with 6 first place finishes in a row at ITC events this year.

No, the reason I have zero "high level accolades" is because I don't give a about tournament 40k. It's a joke of a game often played in a joke of a tournament structure (see recent events won by blatant slow playing), and I have many better things to do with my money than dump tons of it into traveling to major 40k tournaments. So no, I don't really care about your sad attempt at a dick measuring contest by proxy.

If you don't play this game competitively because it's a joke to you, why are you trying to say that possibly the game's most successful player right now that his successful strategy is bad?

Excuse it however you will, but you are still wrong.

 Peregrine wrote:

I'm not complaining about anything. I'm saying something is very powerful. I didn't say Tau's overwatch is "too strong", or Tau need a nerf. The only person to say that is you guys. Did you two just see someone saying something positive about Tau and start frothing at the mouth? Remember, I'm the guy who was in here arguing that this thread was nonsense, assault is in a great place, and we do NOT need changes to help it, and I literally play Tau myself. Seems you've just extrapolated a bunch of nonsense based on your own poor understanding of competitive play, and run with it to this spot here.

Now I am confused. You said this:

Most the rest of the armies in the game can easily find Tau's overwatch to be an absurdly difficult wall unless they are able to make multiple assaults in the one turn.

and this:

and maybe because FTGG with 5+ to hit thanks to Sept is a bit absurd

and this:

TAU is the ones using special rules to break the rules of assault to stop that gak with their overwatch wall, not the other way around.

You emphasize how Tau are breaking the rules and it's "absurdly difficult" for most armies to cope with, and explicitly call FTGG on a 5+ "absurd". Now, maybe it's just me, but when I call something "absurd" like that it's generally a statement that it's too good and needs to be changed. Perhaps that's not what you meant, but it's sure the obvious reading of your posts.

Perhaps you should actually read through the flow of the conversation before taking singular statements out of context then.


The topic of conversation was literally certain people saying that "assault is weak because it's only ever successful with all it's special rules that break the rules of assault, while all shooty armies need to succeed is a vanilla shooting phase to stop all that".

I countered this by pointing out the highly successful and equally strong shooting special rules that do the same. Overwatch being an ideal example. And for you to argue otherwise and say that a T'au gunline overwatch is actually NOT an absurdly difficult wall of fire to break through by assaulting it with one unit a turn, seems like the exact sort of statements that perpetuate the Tau-player memes.

I do think 5+ Overwatch may be a bit crazy, but I am not at any point asking for nerfs. Then you came in and apparently only caught the tail end of this conversation, and apparently decided I was saying Tau need to be banned from competitive play, and went into rabid downplay mode, when I was literally saying the opposite, that one of the ways a shooting army like Tau can get around some of these crazy assault rules with an absurd overwatch phase of their own.

If you were to ask my ideal vision of the game, well I wouldn't mind a bit of a tone down to both that, and some of the first turn assault opportunities at the same time. But I understand that both sides have crazy strong options here, and at no point did I ask for anything changed, and if you read through this thread, or just filter it to my posts, you will see my stance the entire time has been that assault has a great balance with shooting right now imo.


I'll take your apology whenever you feel like it.

I think the point is that the rules - assault rules, overwatch rules, falling back etc - place a high barrier on assault units. The result is that there are a lot of assault units which are almost worthless. This is different from say a bad shooting unit - while it might not be optimal it is still likely to do something against something.

A Tau fire base of 1000-1200~ points, hitting on 5+, is a significant obstacle. If you charge it with one unit odds are that unit will disappear or be crippled. This is possible even with 2 units if the Tau player can count reasonably well. Even tougher units have to worry about things like fusion blasters hitting on 5+.

You need to charge in half your army (points wise) in one go - and this can often be difficult to accomplish unless you are lucky on charge rolls. Even still if you just hit a few screening fire warriors its not great consequence, they just walk away next turn.

Can someone post the great good rule? I have a couple questions.

For instance, can a unit fire greater good over watch if it can see the threat but the unit being charged can't?

Wytches are great against tau. Especially with shard nets. But the fire warriors still have pistols, which is a drag.

Headlss wrote:
Can someone post the great good rule? I have a couple questions.

For instance, can a unit fire greater good over watch if it can see the threat but the unit being charged can't?

Wytches are great against tau. Especially with shard nets. But the fire warriors still have pistols, which is a drag.

2 Yes they fire overwatch as if they were also a unit being charged.
Also tau smart missiles don't need line of sight.

Ice_can wrote:
Everyone complain's that Tau overwatch is silly, I'd like to point out that IG can get +1 when overwatching.

For the Greater Good is powerful but is useless if your being assaulted by half an Aldari Soup list turn 1.
They have no effective CC units to counter charge with, no allies to soup up with for a CC punch.

You do realize T'au Sept overwatch on a 5+?

 BaconCatBug wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
Everyone complain's that Tau overwatch is silly, I'd like to point out that IG can get +1 when overwatching.

For the Greater Good is powerful but is useless if your being assaulted by half an Aldari Soup list turn 1.
They have no effective CC units to counter charge with, no allies to soup up with for a CC punch.

You do realize T'au Sept overwatch on a 5+?

Yeah they are one of my armies and mordians over watch on a roll of a 5 and 6 aswell and have bullgrins to countercharger with, not exactlly game breaking when tau have 0 effective CC units
Also plent of armies have relics or otherways to make units imune to overwatch aswell. It also one subfactions bonus, who happen to have most of the useful charictors hence why you see it more commonly than mordians.

The longer this thread runs on, I'm forced to ask "Why was it necessary to bag on 3rd Ed. when it had nothing really to do with balancing CC in 8.5?"

Ice_can wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
Everyone complain's that Tau overwatch is silly, I'd like to point out that IG can get +1 when overwatching.

For the Greater Good is powerful but is useless if your being assaulted by half an Aldari Soup list turn 1.
They have no effective CC units to counter charge with, no allies to soup up with for a CC punch.

You do realize T'au Sept overwatch on a 5+?

Yeah they are one of my armies

Lol you don't say? I never would have picked it
.

 Just Tony wrote:
The longer this thread runs on, I'm forced to ask "Why was it necessary to bag on 3rd Ed. when it had nothing really to do with balancing CC in 8.5?"

If nothing else it serves as a reminder of how powerful assault used to be back then. There was literally nothing a shooting army could do to beat our Deldar player in 3rd - if he got to go first you wouldn't necessarily even get to shoot his troops once, only take a few potshots at Raiders. So we can probably agree that going back to those days would be a bit too much in trying to repair assault?

Getting away from all or nothing options would IMO be good for the game anyway. What's the fun in setting up your models when you know it will be decided by who goes first?

Spetulhu wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
The longer this thread runs on, I'm forced to ask "Why was it necessary to bag on 3rd Ed. when it had nothing really to do with balancing CC in 8.5?"

If nothing else it serves as a reminder of how powerful assault used to be back then. There was literally nothing a shooting army could do to beat our Deldar player in 3rd - if he got to go first you wouldn't necessarily even get to shoot his troops once, only take a few potshots at Raiders. So we can probably agree that going back to those days would be a bit too much in trying to repair assault?

Getting away from all or nothing options would IMO be good for the game anyway. What's the fun in setting up your models when you know it will be decided by who goes first?

I'm legitimately perplexed at how, barring the DE sitting behind terrain for turns to eliminate possible shooting, none of your armies could handle them. The only army that had a walk over effect on the board was Blood Angels because of the godawful Gav Thorpe rules. Even then, nothing in the book said you HAD to nestle up to the 24" no man's land. Push back 12" from the deployment zone, concentrate fire on Rhinos, profit. Worked for every army, literally. The only hiccups were the AV of the front armor on the Wave Serpent or the Chimera.

Assault wasn't even that massive in 3rd when you think about how few units really had more than 2 attacks on the charge. Even the scariest average HQ choices, discounting Greater Daemons, maxed out at 6 attacks on the charge. Anything more was a rare exception. And the units that DID have a high number of attacks either couldn't be transported in the first place, or was so expensive that it was prohibitive to run them in any decent numbers.

I'm all for ideas to fix what's already wrong with 8th, but using it as a springboard to bash 3rd constantly over misconceptions rather than facts gets my dander up.

 Just Tony wrote:

Spetulhu wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
The longer this thread runs on, I'm forced to ask "Why was it necessary to bag on 3rd Ed. when it had nothing really to do with balancing CC in 8.5?"

If nothing else it serves as a reminder of how powerful assault used to be back then. There was literally nothing a shooting army could do to beat our Deldar player in 3rd - if he got to go first you wouldn't necessarily even get to shoot his troops once, only take a few potshots at Raiders. So we can probably agree that going back to those days would be a bit too much in trying to repair assault?

Getting away from all or nothing options would IMO be good for the game anyway. What's the fun in setting up your models when you know it will be decided by who goes first?

I'm legitimately perplexed at how, barring the DE sitting behind terrain for turns to eliminate possible shooting, none of your armies could handle them. The only army that had a walk over effect on the board was Blood Angels because of the godawful Gav Thorpe rules. Even then, nothing in the book said you HAD to nestle up to the 24" no man's land. Push back 12" from the deployment zone, concentrate fire on Rhinos, profit. Worked for every army, literally. The only hiccups were the AV of the front armor on the Wave Serpent or the Chimera.

Assault wasn't even that massive in 3rd when you think about how few units really had more than 2 attacks on the charge. Even the scariest average HQ choices, discounting Greater Daemons, maxed out at 6 attacks on the charge. Anything more was a rare exception. And the units that DID have a high number of attacks either couldn't be transported in the first place, or was so expensive that it was prohibitive to run them in any decent numbers.

I'm all for ideas to fix what's already wrong with 8th, but using it as a springboard to bash 3rd constantly over misconceptions rather than facts gets my dander up.

Giving me flash backs to the month I played DE. haha.
Close combat wasn't just about fighting it was about forcing units to fall back and then over run them. And the ..was it..the Cross Fire rule. (I think it was called.)
So my DE would set up a charge but park their transport or another friendly skimmer behind what ever they were going to charge. If they forced a fall back the enemy unit was just destroyed. But it also could be forced with shooting. due to LD neutering weapons and inflicting casualties. 25% was all that was needed and stack a -1 or 2 or what ever it was and it was rare not to force a fall back. Granted there were a lot of things that wouldn't directly work against but you could clear off a lot of enemy units fairly easily.
I guess the larger though is to use every took available.
Blood Angels were tough too. a 24" into combat was not uncommon on turn one.

What I am finding now is I am playing and things feel to me like I am playing an older edition and am using tricks/ doing things that just seem to come from XP from past editions and it's working well.