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I havent seen/read/reviewed a bike army in yonks.
I recall WS and Ravenwing being very darm good in 6th.
Are they still viable or just outclassed by other stuff?

Imperial/Chaos bikes are pretty much universally overcosted. WS don't have a great Chapter Trait but Ravenwing are OK. The main problem with 2W models like bikes is the abundance of plasma in the game that deletes those units very easily.

Xenos bikes are a little more common, with Shining Spears, Reavers and Tomb Blades all being pretty good but Xenos struggle to build armies around their bike units so they tend to be added as supplementary units rather than the main element of a list.

One of the main things is that no army can take Bikes as Troops anymore. Eldar, White Scars and Ravenwing all could do this in prior editions.
With bikes getting constant upgrades or points drops, and the existence of the Outrider detachment, GW decided bikes could no longer be "Troops"

With a Battalion giving +5CP, there is no reason to take an Outrider for a measly +1CP. So full-on bike armies have disappeared.
Now there are some bike untis that are still very good options, such as Eldar Shining Spears or Necron Tomb Blades, but you don't build a whole army around those anymore.

-

GW decided they weren't fun so made them terribad.

Bike armies are currently viable on boards with heavy LOS terrain but only if combined with some sort of suicidal elements that takes care of long range threats early on.

But yes, overabundance of plasmas alone nearly completely invalidates the viability of elite 2W models.

In short, all bike army is like playing with GK's. The game is on mega hard mode.

Average all bike SM army with support elements nets you anywhere from 25 to 40 models., where 40 model is with minimal support and 25 is with being ample amount.

 skchsan wrote:
But yes, overabundance of plasmas alone nearly completely invalidates the viability of elite 2W models.

Like, for example, the entire Primaris Space Marines line. /rolls eyes/

Another blow to bike armies is that they can be defeated by placing units on the second level of any building. For chaos armies the loss of mark of nurgle to get T6 was big. Also lasguns wound bikes on 5s now instead of 6s and you can’t leave the bikes in CC to protect them from shooting.

I have a White Scars army. There are a lot of issues as mentioned above, but I also add: You can't even take your special character on his bike...So how can you be a bike army?
Scout bikes completely outperform regular bikes (except for special weapons, which to me is lame)
I will say that a unit shooting 6 times per model with a very good range (thanks to their movement) can do damage, but in general it is very hard to make up points because of overcost.

Until the following changes take place I have given up on my army except when I want to challenge myself: (none of these are new)
[

list]Bikes and/or scout bikers count as troops

Khorsaro Khan can be purchased on his bike

All bikes either: lower the point cost OR increase survivability (another wound, better save, -1 to shooting agains, something(I however, do not want to add more invuln saves to the game, too many already and my opinion is any invuln above 4+ is heading back to deathstars)

A return of at least one decent CC unit on bikes: Veterans or something

A better chapter trait for White Scars: The current one isn't terrible, but giving the ability to fall back and charge to units that are not built for CC is really poor thinking. Sadly, the White Scars trait seems to help most of my units EXCEPT my bikers...

More strategies that are useful. THe scout biker strategy entails they will survive a round of CC if charged by opponent, and TWO rounds if I charge. That rarely happens...

[/list]

More secondary characters with the option to take a bike

Anyway, done ranting about a topic I suspect few people care about, but someone asked and we all like to put our thoughts out there...

I play Evil Sunz and currently my go to army of 7th is virtually unplayable.

I'm praying for some sort of fix but given what's happened to other biker armies I can't see it personally.

Bikes are almost universally over costed and a poor choice with the current meta.

And Custodes bikes.

To further attest, direct port of my 7th ed 1850 pt list RW turns into something along the lines of 2500 pts in 8th ed.

2nd wound isn't worth much with lots of d2 or better weapons. Lost their invul save unless they advance, and then their not doing anything.

So the only bikes you see are Custodes

Bikes don't need a second wound. Take it back and make bikes cheaper again.

The issue is that the good bike units have tasks they're actually good at. Those examples would be Scout Bikers, Shining Spears, Tomb Blades, and Deathwatch Bikers. Then you have the Custodes ones of course...

Everyone else is paying for the sins of just not being garbage in previous editions is the issue. People complained about Bikers being broken when in reality it was most of those infantry just underperforming as per usual. Making Bikers bad wouldn't give incentive to take Tactical Marines and making Windriders bad didn't suddenly make Guardians appealing.

 skchsan wrote:
Bikes don't need a second wound. Take it back and make bikes cheaper again.

I disagree. The 2nd wound "feels" right due to the added bulk of the bike itself. It also makes bikes twice as durable against small arms fire, which makes perfect sense.
Just because the "meta" has a prevalence of D2 weapons, doesn't invalidate the reason bikes should have 2 wounds

But I do agree that bikes should be cheaper due to the prevalence of D2 weapons

-

I just built five, but that's just because I wanted some of the models in my army. I don't expect them to do great things (though mine can advance and charge, but they suck at combat...so that doesn't benefit me much).

I have a lot of subpar units availale in my army, this is just another one. On occasion they can put out lots of firepower due to their speed and ability to close in to rapid fire range.

Bikes tend to be a weird unit with GW, they tend to treat them basically as a heavy cavalry equivalent (despite such making zero actual sense, a bike is a terrible platform to fight from), and they swing wildly in power from edition to edition. They never seem to get Bikes quite right.

Bikes have a lot of weaknesses now compared to infantry. This is different from an edition ago where they were straight up better than infantry. Bikes aren't something you now really want to take as an entire stand-alone army, because you're not getting as much value as before. Here's a list of reasons why I feel you don't see Bikes as much (aside from points cost, which can be adjusted to "fix" or "break" anything):

#1 - Bikes used to be fast. They still are now, but Infantry became much faster through more prevalent means of teleporting abilities, and through Infantry units now being able to move and fire bigger guns.

#2 - Bikes used to be able to go up buildings. Now they can't. It's a big deal, because an Infantry unit on the second floor of a building is now totally immune to getting locked in combat with non-flying Bikes.

#3 - Bikes now provide an extra wound, instead of an Invulnerable save. Jink saves were all the rage an edition ago, because it allowed many things to shrug off big and powerful hits. Bikes now can't do that.

#4 - Multi-damage weapons. I'd be lying if I said these weren't a factor, but they are. At least, they are due to how much bikes tend to cost, and/or more appropriately, how little Plasma costs. Again, to put in perspective, Plasma firing at Bikes an edition ago would lose half of all their killing shots to Jink saves, now all those shots tend to go through, meaning that they die twice as fast now compared to how quickly they died to things an edition ago.

#5 - Bikes can't be Troops, and can't be Objective Secured. This might be the nail in the coffin. When bikes were able to be Troops, they gain access to Objective Secured, which meant they could speed over to objectives and snag them. Now they can't. But worse, going for a bike-heavy army means you end up with fewer Command Points, which is where all the cool kids are playing these days.


So, yeah, none of these things on their own would do bikes in. Heck, even half of them together would still leave them having a niche use. But all 5 of these things being true now compared to before, and you're looking at a serious strike against Bikes.

*Reads this post... reads Ork index... cries*.

Ravenwing Bikers with Meltas always do work for me, but obviously thats because the 4++ from Jink and the Speed of the Raven Stratagem.

Dark Knights on the other hand, I can't make them work.

The sad thing is that some units are actually really good, like Shining Spears. But due to the Rule of 3 and the lack of ObSec. you just cannot make an army with them as your Core.

Bike units are still good. They just aren’t good enough to build a whole army out of them, and SM bikes (outside of Scouts, Wolf Guard, and Deathwatch maybe) aren’t particularly good.

 Yarium wrote:
Bikes have a lot of weaknesses now compared to infantry. This is different from an edition ago where they were straight up better than infantry. Bikes aren't something you now really want to take as an entire stand-alone army, because you're not getting as much value as before. Here's a list of reasons why I feel you don't see Bikes as much (aside from points cost, which can be adjusted to "fix" or "break" anything):

#1 - Bikes used to be fast. They still are now, but Infantry became much faster through more prevalent means of teleporting abilities, and through Infantry units now being able to move and fire bigger guns.

#2 - Bikes used to be able to go up buildings. Now they can't. It's a big deal, because an Infantry unit on the second floor of a building is now totally immune to getting locked in combat with non-flying Bikes.

#3 - Bikes now provide an extra wound, instead of an Invulnerable save. Jink saves were all the rage an edition ago, because it allowed many things to shrug off big and powerful hits. Bikes now can't do that.

#4 - Multi-damage weapons. I'd be lying if I said these weren't a factor, but they are. At least, they are due to how much bikes tend to cost, and/or more appropriately, how little Plasma costs. Again, to put in perspective, Plasma firing at Bikes an edition ago would lose half of all their killing shots to Jink saves, now all those shots tend to go through, meaning that they die twice as fast now compared to how quickly they died to things an edition ago.

#5 - Bikes can't be Troops, and can't be Objective Secured. This might be the nail in the coffin. When bikes were able to be Troops, they gain access to Objective Secured, which meant they could speed over to objectives and snag them. Now they can't. But worse, going for a bike-heavy army means you end up with fewer Command Points, which is where all the cool kids are playing these days.


So, yeah, none of these things on their own would do bikes in. Heck, even half of them together would still leave them having a niche use. But all 5 of these things being true now compared to before, and you're looking at a serious strike against Bikes.

Agreed. Few things need to happen for bikes:

1. Return of rules such as [Smoke Cloud] and old [Jink]

[INSERT APPROPRIATE FLUFFY NAME HERE] - This model gains bonus of being in cover even in the open if it moved more than half of it's Move characteristic during its movement phase this turn.

2. Steal back [Hammer of Wrath] from inceptors.

[Crushing Charge] - Roll a D6 each time a Biker finishes a charge move within 1" of enemy unit; on a 6, that unit suffers a mortal wound.

2.1. Add a stratagem [Hammer of Wrath]

[Hammer of Wrath] Used when a BIKER declares a charge - when rolling a D6 to resolve the effect of Crushing Charge ability, mortal wound is dealt on a roll of 5+ instead.

There are stratagem for INFANTRY, DREADNOUGHT, VEHICLE, FLYER, & CHARACTER. There are however, no stratagems exclusive for biker/cavalry. (does DKoK have anything? Daemons?)

3. Add T & W values to ruins. Make ruins count as having BUILDING keyword as to add certain interaction (i.e. IF and chapter tactics)

4. Add [Stable Platform] rule to Attack bikes

[Stable Platform] - A model with this rule can fire heavy weapons without penalty even if it moved. It cannot fire heavy weapons if it advanced.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Galas wrote:
Ravenwing Bikers with Meltas always do work for me, but obviously thats because the 4++ from Jink and the Speed of the Raven Stratagem.

Dark Knights on the other hand, I can't make them work.

RBK's are good when coupled with SotR and WftDA. They are not, however, I-win buttons.

 Galef wrote:
One of the main things is that no army can take Bikes as Troops anymore. Eldar, White Scars and Ravenwing all could do this in prior editions.
With bikes getting constant upgrades or points drops, and the existence of the Outrider detachment, GW decided bikes could no longer be "Troops"

With a Battalion giving +5CP, there is no reason to take an Outrider for a measly +1CP. So full-on bike armies have disappeared.
Now there are some bike untis that are still very good options, such as Eldar Shining Spears or Necron Tomb Blades, but you don't build a whole army around those anymore.

-

Pretty much screwing over white scars

The Allfather wrote:

 Galef wrote:
One of the main things is that no army can take Bikes as Troops anymore. Eldar, White Scars and Ravenwing all could do this in prior editions.
With bikes getting constant upgrades or points drops, and the existence of the Outrider detachment, GW decided bikes could no longer be "Troops"

With a Battalion giving +5CP, there is no reason to take an Outrider for a measly +1CP. So full-on bike armies have disappeared.
Now there are some bike untis that are still very good options, such as Eldar Shining Spears or Necron Tomb Blades, but you don't build a whole army around those anymore.

-

Pretty much screwing over white scars

"But White Scarz aren't alwayz Bikerz and there Tacticial Marinez!!!!!!!1!"

“Counts-as troops” kind of died. The only one I can think of right now are Khorne Berserkers.

meleti wrote:
“Counts-as troops” kind of died. The only one I can think of right now are Khorne Berserkers.

The FAQ gave the ability to noise marines too.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

The Allfather wrote:

 Galef wrote:
One of the main things is that no army can take Bikes as Troops anymore. Eldar, White Scars and Ravenwing all could do this in prior editions.
With bikes getting constant upgrades or points drops, and the existence of the Outrider detachment, GW decided bikes could no longer be "Troops"

With a Battalion giving +5CP, there is no reason to take an Outrider for a measly +1CP. So full-on bike armies have disappeared.
Now there are some bike untis that are still very good options, such as Eldar Shining Spears or Necron Tomb Blades, but you don't build a whole army around those anymore.

-

Pretty much screwing over white scars

"But White Scarz aren't alwayz Bikerz and there Tacticial Marinez!!!!!!!1!"

Yes very true. However I personally feel bad for for all bike white scars armies. That may have been screwed over.

I almost made one myself.

Slayer-Fan is being sarcastic, what he actually believes is the opposite of his post.

Which is a fair stance, I think. When someone shouts about how cool they think the Mongols are, they don't usually envision the guy walking around on his own feet.

The Allfather wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

The Allfather wrote:

 Galef wrote:
One of the main things is that no army can take Bikes as Troops anymore. Eldar, White Scars and Ravenwing all could do this in prior editions.
With bikes getting constant upgrades or points drops, and the existence of the Outrider detachment, GW decided bikes could no longer be "Troops"

With a Battalion giving +5CP, there is no reason to take an Outrider for a measly +1CP. So full-on bike armies have disappeared.
Now there are some bike untis that are still very good options, such as Eldar Shining Spears or Necron Tomb Blades, but you don't build a whole army around those anymore.

-

Pretty much screwing over white scars

"But White Scarz aren't alwayz Bikerz and there Tacticial Marinez!!!!!!!1!"

Yes very true. I don't understand your need to exclaim with 15 ecxlemation marks are you offended? Wait don't answer that.

Alot of white scars players could now have unuseble bikes. I feel bad for them.

I

I'm making fun of the people who say White Scars aren't known for their Bikers and that they shouldn't actually have all-biker armies, even though such scenarios are entirely plausible.