Club Champs recap and T'au Thoughts.
Feb 23, 2022 10:25:20 GMT -5
Jack Shrapnel, VaUkos, and 1 more like this
Post by ohgodsnakes on Feb 23, 2022 10:25:20 GMT -5
I had originally started to type this up in Silverwhasp's thread, but it started to really balloon out, so starting my own here.
I honestly can't remember my exact scores throughout the weekend, but the full results should be posted soon on the Nexus site.
Game 1 - Vs Deathwatch - Win - Why are repulsor executioners over 300 pts gw? They did very little in this particular match up. Good charge by Danny did keep the game going longer by taking the Stormsurge out of the fight for a couple turns (tried to shoot my way out vs vets with Stormshields, didn't work at all), but a convincing victory for the Greater Good.
Game 2 - Vs Dark Eldar - Win - Dark eldar will still represent a challenge for T'au, but I got lucky and went second. This forced the opposing force to poke their heads out and try to score points early, but we were not close enough for them to completely close the gap. Stormsurge picked up two Talos in a single pulse blascannon barrage and I got a third with some crisis and a commander. An archon and a tooled up seccubus pushed hard on my right flank, so I gambled and put the riptide right next to them and shot the Archon with the Ion Accelerator turning off invuls from the Bork'An strat. pop. Seccubus went down to missiles from around the area.
Game 3 - Vs Farsight Enclaves T'au - Win - Probably came down to who got first turn, which happened to be me. Without that first turn advantage, my Stormsurge would have probably died or been severely crippled by the triple hammerheads Connor was bringing. As it turned out, it was still a close game up to the end of turn two, when things really started to crumbled for the Enclaves. A hammerhead exploding deep in Connor's lines did not help things out. For those who don't know both the Hammerhead and the Devilfish explode 6" for D6 mortal wounds. Big boom. Two hammerheads did get to nuke a riptide though. Big game moment for me was a single pathfinder who rolled a 1 on leadership after watching their whole squad get blasted taking the last wound off a hammerhead as the last action in my shooting phase. Only game where i didn't max To the Last (riptide, crisis unit, stormsurge).
Game 4 - Vs Thousand Sons - Win - Riptide actually came out to play in this one. In turns two and three it knocked out 7 of the 20 scarab occult terminators. Crazy roll. 8 shots, 4's to hit, allllll hit. Not really what's supposed to happen haha. Turn two I was able to get some good angles on supporting characters and got a couple good hits in. Stormsurge consistently put out good damage. Pathfinders all survived the game - remarkable.
Game 5 - Vs Deathguard - Win - A very fun game, with some dismal rolling on Kevin's part. "Alright, that's 7 saves on those Blightlord Terminators in cover. oh dear, that's 6 fails..." Repeat for a while. Crisis suits took the middle and stayed there for a long time. Stormsurge didn't do anything absolutely crazy, but continued to bring phenomenal value by laying down consistent firepower, both direct and indirect. Riptide took out a plagueburst crawler T1 with a crazy advance roll + mont'ka to go 18" up the board and still fire at full efficiency.
-Crisis suits are very sturdy now, and they have a very solid amount of high quality shooting. Mine had plasma, cyclic ions, and airburst frags. I brought shield gens and four shield drones, but I may switch that out for more drones and Target Locks (ignore light cover). Bottom line is I think a second unit of these guys would have done far more for my army than the riptide, though it did have its moments.
-An ethereal is now an auto take if you are not Farsight. The invocations are really good, they have that leadership bubble which actually came up a couple times, and the built in ability to allow a unit shoot and perform actions is awesome, especially since Crisis suits are infantry now. I didn't run out of CP ever during the tournament because of the CP invocation.
-Commanders are still super good. I only took a Crisis commander, but I can definitely see taking a coldstar in a patrol in the future. The buffs they hand out to Crisis units are unique and flavorful, and re-roll ones is amazing for things that overheat. He also had amazing damage in shooting with the re-roll all hits and wounds warlord trait. If I were to optimise mine further, I would drop his shield gen, bring another weapon, and include a couple bodyguards in the list.
-Broadsides are just really solid right now. Missiles are a little out of vogue due to the proliferation of -1 damage, but they still did a lot of heavy lifting. Units of three railrifle 'sides will be a tournament staple.
-Things that didn't quite work in the list:
-Firewarior strike team in the devilfish. I don't have breachers painted, so I brought strikes in a fishy. Didn't really do too much most games, and if I had been unlucky, probably would have blown up half my army turn one.
-More than one riptide would be bad. riptides in septs other than bork'an would be underwhelming. As it stood, the only thing that made the riptide worth it was feeding it two CP to ignore invuls on its ion every once and a while. It did come in clutch a couple times though.
-3 man stealth units. Not enough to reliably do RND, lose one and no more engage. Need to include more stealths and probably a couple drones. Usually ended up doing nothing.
-Things that worked like I expected:
-The Stormsurge. If you let him shoot with anchors down, it will ruin stuff. If you touch it with something slightly better than a guardsman, it will flounder around trying to hit it on 5's with no rerolls in its shooting phase, or fall back and miss a turn shooting. One is good, three would be a meme. Hmmm, do I want to meme it up next year?
-The Dominator Frag Launcher. A points upgrade for an airburst frag projector. 24" assault D6, S5, Ap-2, D1, Blast. Not too terrible, but it gets spicier when you read its abilities. No need for line of sight, and anything that is hit by it suffers -4 to their leadership! Over the course of 5 games it made my opponents spend 8CP for auto passes and caused a further 9 models to just run away! lots of fun.
Overall thoughts on the Tournament
-Super fun time, 5 great games.
-Love the sportsmanship scoring method.
-Really like the painting rubric.
-Wish I hadn't dropped my trophy.
-Keegan was the happiest boy in school when he won HeroQuest.
-Most of the "negative" feedback I heard was that people weren't finishing their games on time, and this really hurts in 9th editions format. With the shorter second day, I would be happy if we tack on 15-20 min per game. This would increase Day one's running time, but the short day two should hopefully make up for it. Part of the issue is also everyone is rusty, since there are far fewer games being played, so maybe this will resolve itself as we get more normal play in.
-We need more terrain on some tables, and that's coming from a T'au player! I think encouraging this with a "Best Table" award should be implemented and folks should be encouraged to sign up and bring a table's worth of terrain. Voting would work similarly to the best presentation on the second day. No extra work for the club/nexus, and the potential for some really cool themed tables.
Overall thoughts on T'au
-T'au are very good now. There are almost no explicitly bad choices in the codex, which is very exciting. On the flip side, it does make it tough to bring a casual list, since so many choices are good. Most of the terrible units are found in the Forgeworld book now. They are objectively terrible though, not just for T'au (oh my mighty Y'Vahras, how you have fallen so)
-Having watched some tournament coverage, I think part of the mitigating features will be a bit more terrain for casual play as well. T'au now at least have mobility to get around terrain, but they opponent will have more counterplay. This will allow a more dynamic game for both sides, and less getting-shot-out-of-your-own-deployment-zone-by-a-full-army feels.
-If I wanted to really optimise my list, it would have had two patrols for two commanders, more use of the amazing warlord traits we have now, no devilfish, some kroot hounds, no riptide, more railsides and another crisis blob.
I honestly can't remember my exact scores throughout the weekend, but the full results should be posted soon on the Nexus site.
Game 1 - Vs Deathwatch - Win - Why are repulsor executioners over 300 pts gw? They did very little in this particular match up. Good charge by Danny did keep the game going longer by taking the Stormsurge out of the fight for a couple turns (tried to shoot my way out vs vets with Stormshields, didn't work at all), but a convincing victory for the Greater Good.
Game 2 - Vs Dark Eldar - Win - Dark eldar will still represent a challenge for T'au, but I got lucky and went second. This forced the opposing force to poke their heads out and try to score points early, but we were not close enough for them to completely close the gap. Stormsurge picked up two Talos in a single pulse blascannon barrage and I got a third with some crisis and a commander. An archon and a tooled up seccubus pushed hard on my right flank, so I gambled and put the riptide right next to them and shot the Archon with the Ion Accelerator turning off invuls from the Bork'An strat. pop. Seccubus went down to missiles from around the area.
Game 3 - Vs Farsight Enclaves T'au - Win - Probably came down to who got first turn, which happened to be me. Without that first turn advantage, my Stormsurge would have probably died or been severely crippled by the triple hammerheads Connor was bringing. As it turned out, it was still a close game up to the end of turn two, when things really started to crumbled for the Enclaves. A hammerhead exploding deep in Connor's lines did not help things out. For those who don't know both the Hammerhead and the Devilfish explode 6" for D6 mortal wounds. Big boom. Two hammerheads did get to nuke a riptide though. Big game moment for me was a single pathfinder who rolled a 1 on leadership after watching their whole squad get blasted taking the last wound off a hammerhead as the last action in my shooting phase. Only game where i didn't max To the Last (riptide, crisis unit, stormsurge).
Game 4 - Vs Thousand Sons - Win - Riptide actually came out to play in this one. In turns two and three it knocked out 7 of the 20 scarab occult terminators. Crazy roll. 8 shots, 4's to hit, allllll hit. Not really what's supposed to happen haha. Turn two I was able to get some good angles on supporting characters and got a couple good hits in. Stormsurge consistently put out good damage. Pathfinders all survived the game - remarkable.
Game 5 - Vs Deathguard - Win - A very fun game, with some dismal rolling on Kevin's part. "Alright, that's 7 saves on those Blightlord Terminators in cover. oh dear, that's 6 fails..." Repeat for a while. Crisis suits took the middle and stayed there for a long time. Stormsurge didn't do anything absolutely crazy, but continued to bring phenomenal value by laying down consistent firepower, both direct and indirect. Riptide took out a plagueburst crawler T1 with a crazy advance roll + mont'ka to go 18" up the board and still fire at full efficiency.
Takeaways
-I didn't mention them much, but some of the stars of my army were the Commander, Crisis Suits, the Ethereal, and the Broadsides.-Crisis suits are very sturdy now, and they have a very solid amount of high quality shooting. Mine had plasma, cyclic ions, and airburst frags. I brought shield gens and four shield drones, but I may switch that out for more drones and Target Locks (ignore light cover). Bottom line is I think a second unit of these guys would have done far more for my army than the riptide, though it did have its moments.
-An ethereal is now an auto take if you are not Farsight. The invocations are really good, they have that leadership bubble which actually came up a couple times, and the built in ability to allow a unit shoot and perform actions is awesome, especially since Crisis suits are infantry now. I didn't run out of CP ever during the tournament because of the CP invocation.
-Commanders are still super good. I only took a Crisis commander, but I can definitely see taking a coldstar in a patrol in the future. The buffs they hand out to Crisis units are unique and flavorful, and re-roll ones is amazing for things that overheat. He also had amazing damage in shooting with the re-roll all hits and wounds warlord trait. If I were to optimise mine further, I would drop his shield gen, bring another weapon, and include a couple bodyguards in the list.
-Broadsides are just really solid right now. Missiles are a little out of vogue due to the proliferation of -1 damage, but they still did a lot of heavy lifting. Units of three railrifle 'sides will be a tournament staple.
-Things that didn't quite work in the list:
-Firewarior strike team in the devilfish. I don't have breachers painted, so I brought strikes in a fishy. Didn't really do too much most games, and if I had been unlucky, probably would have blown up half my army turn one.
-More than one riptide would be bad. riptides in septs other than bork'an would be underwhelming. As it stood, the only thing that made the riptide worth it was feeding it two CP to ignore invuls on its ion every once and a while. It did come in clutch a couple times though.
-3 man stealth units. Not enough to reliably do RND, lose one and no more engage. Need to include more stealths and probably a couple drones. Usually ended up doing nothing.
-Things that worked like I expected:
-The Stormsurge. If you let him shoot with anchors down, it will ruin stuff. If you touch it with something slightly better than a guardsman, it will flounder around trying to hit it on 5's with no rerolls in its shooting phase, or fall back and miss a turn shooting. One is good, three would be a meme. Hmmm, do I want to meme it up next year?
-The Dominator Frag Launcher. A points upgrade for an airburst frag projector. 24" assault D6, S5, Ap-2, D1, Blast. Not too terrible, but it gets spicier when you read its abilities. No need for line of sight, and anything that is hit by it suffers -4 to their leadership! Over the course of 5 games it made my opponents spend 8CP for auto passes and caused a further 9 models to just run away! lots of fun.
Overall thoughts on the Tournament
-Super fun time, 5 great games.
-Love the sportsmanship scoring method.
-Really like the painting rubric.
-Wish I hadn't dropped my trophy.
-Keegan was the happiest boy in school when he won HeroQuest.
-Most of the "negative" feedback I heard was that people weren't finishing their games on time, and this really hurts in 9th editions format. With the shorter second day, I would be happy if we tack on 15-20 min per game. This would increase Day one's running time, but the short day two should hopefully make up for it. Part of the issue is also everyone is rusty, since there are far fewer games being played, so maybe this will resolve itself as we get more normal play in.
-We need more terrain on some tables, and that's coming from a T'au player! I think encouraging this with a "Best Table" award should be implemented and folks should be encouraged to sign up and bring a table's worth of terrain. Voting would work similarly to the best presentation on the second day. No extra work for the club/nexus, and the potential for some really cool themed tables.
Overall thoughts on T'au
-T'au are very good now. There are almost no explicitly bad choices in the codex, which is very exciting. On the flip side, it does make it tough to bring a casual list, since so many choices are good. Most of the terrible units are found in the Forgeworld book now. They are objectively terrible though, not just for T'au (oh my mighty Y'Vahras, how you have fallen so)
-Having watched some tournament coverage, I think part of the mitigating features will be a bit more terrain for casual play as well. T'au now at least have mobility to get around terrain, but they opponent will have more counterplay. This will allow a more dynamic game for both sides, and less getting-shot-out-of-your-own-deployment-zone-by-a-full-army feels.
-If I wanted to really optimise my list, it would have had two patrols for two commanders, more use of the amazing warlord traits we have now, no devilfish, some kroot hounds, no riptide, more railsides and another crisis blob.
They are absolute garbage.
