niv-mizzet wrote:
Hi! Let's delve right in!

Your death company feels too loaded. With 7 guys you should be totally fine with either a pair of fists or a fist and sword. Everyone else should be wearing the default "bullet catcher" outfit. Inferno pistol on guys that want to be all up in there is kind of a waste.

If you want a BA list to be stronger, use as few points as possible on troops, especially tacticals, and put those points onto some of our better things that are mostly in the elites section. Also you never want a vet sergeant with expensive wargear unless there's another tanky independent character in the squad to keep him out of challenges. The heavy flamer is probably the best upgrade to actually take on a 5 man squad, as it makes them go from ignorable to a minor-medium threat.

You might consider scouts instead though. Being much cheaper, being almost as good in every way except for the 1 point of armor, and having their own deployment tricks built in nullifying the need for an easily first-blooded transport really clears up some points to bring some actual threats.

The asm squad looks like a suicide melta squad, in which case the claw on the sarge is wasted points. After they drop in and melt a thing, they're going to get murdered, and stacking more points of offense on them just guarantees that when they die, it hurts you more.

There's plenty of room for point shaving, so you could easily get more DC, a podded fragioso, or some sanguinary guard with a veritas vitae-priest.

 niv-mizzet wrote:
On the vet sergeants, there are very few times when upgrading them to vets is reasonable:
-in core marines, rhinos spammed with 5 man tacs with a grav cannon will likely need to take Ld tests for vehicle damage snapfiring and pinning when the rhino dies. Additionally given the range of the cannon, they actually generally would like to not fall back for losing a couple meat shields. A bland vet sergeant can be useful here if you don't have any other Ld tricks. If the extra point causes a single cannon to not snapfire or fall back out of range for a turn, the vet probably paid for himself and then some.

-They make good supplemental damage dealers behind BAMF characters that aren't afraid of stepping up to the plate against enemy warbosses, tyrants, chaos lords etc. Dante for example.

They aren't super-amazing, but I enjoy running SG with a naked jump priest, with 1 fist in the squad. If you don't run into a few s8ap2 or better shooting attacks, they can get stuff done. My tyranid buddy that spams flyrants at our local events hates them, for example.

Martel732 wrote:
BA tac squads work fine with a Rhino and a heavy flamer and nothing else. Although they're much better in a CAD that way.

Martel732 wrote:
They would get objective secured. So you can literally not fire a shot and just drive up to an objective and potentially take it. Vanilla marines make their living off this idea with battle company.

Shotgun scouts and CC scouts are quite good as well.