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Sorry i had a typo. The haruspex melee weapons do about 6.1 damage to a leman russ.

Which still is like 80% returns (depending on Leman Russ).

Well 3-1 to one shot is goal if you don't want to game be too lethal so still too lethal

It is melee so it needs greater efficiency.

80% returns is broken on a shooting unit but not so on a melee unit because there are a few turns in which it does nothing damage wise.

tneva82 wrote:
Gw is known for overcorrections. It matters less what it's worth and more what marketing department wants to sell.

Sooner or later marketing decides it has sold all haruspex it can for a while and can bring bigger profit by pushing something else. And they do it bluntly.

Their overcorrections aren't due to marketing. They're due to them not understanding their own damn games.

Imho the major problem with GW's design of Tyranids is that their very few AT units have a huge variance in damage output. Because most are D6 +X or something.

 Astmeister wrote:
Imho the major problem with GW's design of Tyranids is that their very few AT units have a huge variance in damage output. Because most are D6 +X or something.

I suspect that's an intentional part of their design and faction identity. Tyranids have very strong board control ability, good mobility, no issue at all with clearing troops, but their weakness is heavy armour. That was also the case in earlier 40k editions too, and the issue was much more pronounced due to how vehicles worked then. You could plausibly have your carnifexes picked off them be totally unable to damage a land raider.

Every faction has (or should have) aspects of the game they do well and other aspects they struggle with. I'd argue that a faction that can reliably kill any kind of target and also control the board is a faction that should be nerfed.

I would disagree and say that Tyranids (and especially monsters) were always bad when it considered shooting heavy targets or long range shooting. The latter is now pretty good but melee AT is really not good enough at the moment.
It is almost impossible to kill a knight with Tyranids.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Sorry I wanted to add: Tyranids were always good at AT in melee. Now not so much.

I don't know that I agree with the idea that Tyranids were always good at melee AT. Back in the day of armor values (going back to the halcyon days of 4th ed here), the only tyranid model that could actually damage a land raider in melee was the carnifex, and in those days they cost as much as a land raider in order to get that capability. Did I mention the part where any vehicle in the game in that era could move faster than a carnifex could? Good luck getting into melee with that land raider, if your opponent wanted to play keep-away, you'd have a tough time getting there.

That's the thing, they were good at damage in melee, it was getting there which was the issue for a long time. Tau were really good at mobile fireteams on Tyranids whilst Tyranid shooting back was haphazard.

That's why we started seeing GW push these options that allowed for faster crossing of the board to get into close combat, which of course meant that they then had to beef up ranged damage so that ranged armies weren't torn apart by close combat ones denying them several turns of shooting.

Basically instead of making ranged attacks weaker or giving close combat armies a few more guns; they kind of did everything else that led them down the path of increased lethality.

 Stormonu wrote:
Out of curiosity, does anyone know size-wise how the Norns compare to the old Hierodule models?

Here is a pic with a Hierodule and a Trygon which is about the same size as Norns.

Okay my idea was that if you're only good at killing tanks in melee than you better be awesome at this. Because it is still much harder to get into melee than shooting someone.

Also the Tyrannofex has its Rupture canon with 2D6 damage which is extremely swingy.

Back then, the Venom Cannon (with the Thudd Gun template) was a reliable anti-tank weapon, between being able to get up to four hits and decent strength and damage values. Same for spore mines that were actually scary.

As for vehicles being faster than a ‘fex… yeah, in a fairly predictable straight line forward. If you were chasing one down on foot instead of flanking it you were doing it wrong.

That said, dropping spore mines in front of them and watching the driver panic turn to avoid them, flip over, and explode anyway was always funnier.

The Heirodule has a significant amount of bulk on the Norns though. It might be a match height-wise, but not in terms of volume.

People really exaggerate how swingy is the rupture cannon.

2D6 is a curve. Most than half the time you will roll between 5 and 9.

It's the "anything that has dice roll involved sucks" mentality. Tournament try hards hate when they can't calculate game result before single dice is rolled.

tneva82 wrote:
It's the "anything that has dice roll involved sucks" mentality. Tournament try hards hate when they can't calculate game result before single dice is rolled.

...does it though? I've been to 1 non-narrative tournament in my life, where I placed in the bottom 25%. I don't like d6 anti-tank damage. Nids are demonstrably pretty weak at anti-tank in 10th.

But keep on strawing that straw man, bud.

 Tyran wrote:
People really exaggerate how swingy is the rupture cannon.

2D6 is a curve. Most than half the time you will roll between 5 and 9.

Well and the other half you will roll something else. So you're right it might be 7 mostly but even this 7 is not good enough with its 2 shots. I mean it is almost impossible to 1-shot a Leman Russ.

And why should a 200 pts heavy monster be able to reliably one-shot another 200 pts heavy tank?

 Tyran wrote:
And why should a 200 pts heavy monster be able to reliably one-shot another 200 pts heavy tank?

I don't think it should reliably one-shot an LRBT. But it's also basically the only tank killer that Nids have outside of medium range stuff that doesn't want to be in melee. I agree with you, but Nids (and many other factions are actually worse off than Nids in this department) are in a very weird place right now where anti-tank is just one or two units that have to deliver for the whole list, whether fighting a TAC list with a couple tanks or a heavy tank list.

In general, my gripe is that across the board in 10th, GW did not do the S/T transition very well.

New meal for us

I agree to what Mr Stealer said.
The tyrannofex is the titan/tank hunter in the tyranids army and is way worse regarding this than a 145 points Hammerhead from Tau (which also sucks).

 Astmeister wrote:
Imho the major problem with GW's design of Tyranids is that their very few AT units have a huge variance in damage output. Because most are D6 +X or something.

Maybe they should give Tyranids a "stuff the barrel" stratagem? Representing the story tropes they have of tyranid organisms sacrificing themselves to jam big weapons and to take them down. It'd be something like letting them take D3 mortal when in melee to deal the target's weapon damage to itself (as mortal?) - or something similiar.

Otherwise, I guess Tyranid's lack of AT is akin to Tau's lack of melee/psychic options - meant to be a sort of downside/drawback to the army?

Tyranid lack's of AT is mostly because some very weird design decisions like S9 Heavy Venom Cannons and S9 Massive Scything Talons, and of course Hive Guard being bad.

On the other hand Zoanthropes are fantastic and if you spam them you can deal with most tanks.

Don’t mind me. I can’t read.

 Tyran wrote:
Tyranid lack's of AT is mostly because some very weird design decisions like S9 Heavy Venom Cannons and S9 Massive Scything Talons, and of course Hive Guard being bad.

On the other hand Zoanthropes are fantastic and if you spam them you can deal with most tanks.

I think you are right. However Zoantrophes can't deal with very heavy armour so well. And besides in my opinion Tyranids could be bad at AT shooting, but AT melee should be great for some units. Why does a Trygon not have a Knight profile light? I mean he is almost their size and fluff wise (from epic 40k) the tyranids version of a knight for melee.

 Astmeister wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Tyranid lack's of AT is mostly because some very weird design decisions like S9 Heavy Venom Cannons and S9 Massive Scything Talons, and of course Hive Guard being bad.

On the other hand Zoanthropes are fantastic and if you spam them you can deal with most tanks.

I think you are right. However Zoantrophes can't deal with very heavy armour so well. And besides in my opinion Tyranids could be bad at AT shooting, but AT melee should be great for some units. Why does a Trygon not have a Knight profile light? I mean he is almost their size and fluff wise (from epic 40k) the tyranids version of a knight for melee.

That's historic stats not translating well post-armour value. Don't forget as a MC it used to get 2d6 armour pen + it's strength, so even at S6 or whatever it used to be it'd be glancing AV13 on an average roll and that's excluding the fact it'd often be hitting rear armour which was commonly lower. Then we had smash attacks which allowed half attacks at a double strength so it could still hurt big vehicles, but following the 8th transition it became a heavy infantry blender because it lost those supporting rules for punching into bigger things.

Well they could have made it a knight light as I said.

We should maybe take all of these discussions to the tyranids thread.

They reduced HVC down to d3 shots, and for some reason Monsters can’t tank shock, while vehicle walkers can.

I don’t know if GW wanted Nids to be less Killy into vehicles this edition, or they just made changes without really thinking things through.

 Souleater wrote:
They reduced HVC down to d3 shots, and for some reason Monsters can’t tank shock, while vehicle walkers can.

I don’t know if GW wanted Nids to be less Killy into vehicles this edition, or they just made changes without really thinking things through.

Considering in recent times GW tried to cater to competitive play and the continued release of new unit usually means a faction gradually loses the drawbacks and holes in its tactical lineup, I find it harder to believe that they would deliberately build a specific weakness into the army than that it's a result of the propagated improvement to vehicles survivability in 10th ed. It's easy enough to believe that the design team got feedback they boiled down to "tanks suck, why are monstrous creatures always so much better?", went about addressing them when they wrote 10th ed and didn't stop to think how an army without tanks would fit into the new paradigm.