Karol wrote:It is cheap for the stats, it respawns guants for an exisitng unit and spawns a unit from zero, and it untargetable if there are guants near by.
Like almost all tyranid monsters right now, it is good.
Go ahead and ignore all of Karol's advice, he has a hate boner going for bugs right now because there are a few units that dominate the meta currently.
I get why Swarmlord is dominating in 500 pt games, most any huge single model becomes a lot more oppressive when your opponent has less tools to deal with it. Consider that the Swarmlord in a 500 pt list is essentially what is known as a skew list.
Now in the frame of a 500 pt game I would say that it is incredibly unlikely that your opponent will be able to kill a Tervigon over the course of 5 turns, but the major difference is that the Tervigon is going to be doing a lot less to your opponent than the Swarmlord is. Tervigons are a big sack of wounds that are easy to protect with a big blob of gaunts but they have very little offensive capabilities.
All that said I would consider going for something even smaller if you want better games at 500 pts, the Tervigon is still a little under half your points in that range and unless you opponent brings some decent anti-tank/monster weapons it is just gonna sit there as a big road block for them. Wait to run the big bugs once you guys move on to 1000 pt games if you want to have better games.
As far as scaling I would say that the Tervigon scales well into high point games but will always be more of a support unit than getting much done on its own. Swarmlord in a 2000 pt game is still gonna be a monster, eating through anything he touches, but the Tervigon is going to act more like an anchor for your swarm. It can give out some nice buffs, do a little damage and is a great option for psychic actions if you want to go that route.