Post by Frosty the Pirate on Jan 25, 2013 11:54:50 GMT -5
I completely agree. We're actually on the same page here. Believe it or not.
Something I maybe should of mentioned, is that I don't ever rank things like army tiers as umbrella terms, I rank them as to what's winning locally and why.
If you look back at our December tournament, what had strong showings and what did not? Necrons, Tyranids, Chaos all had very strong showings. I'm not doing power rankings for GW's Global Masters tournament, I'm looking at what's winning in our local meta and examining why.
Is it a case of 6th made people bring out the army they love most? I think so. People have realized since 6th is pretty fairly balanced (There's only 2 armies who've drawn the short straw with 6th who make up my 3rd Tier, and those are BA and SoB) and playing with an army you are comfortable with will make a bigger difference than bringing the latest internet-approved netlist.
EDIT: Important Note, I should point out the "tier system" I use to rank armies power levels, had to be condensed from 5 tiers to 3 for 6th, because that's how balanced it is. End Edit
Locally, People are playing the army they love atm, and that's very much changed the power rankings from what the internet says should be strong. This is why I rank Guard as second tier (along with every other army I haven't mentioned in this thread yet)
Back to the original point of the thread, Guard are good this edition, through they have a weakness in the scoring department. To counter this, Certain "Bad" choices in the codex (Read: Lord Commissar, Orgyns, Griffons, Aegis Line) are actually quite solid now, and can be used to shore up those weaknesses very well.
Go find an internet thread that recommends you run a Lord Commissar, Orgyns and a Griffon in the same list right now, I dare you. Guess what some of the best support pieces in the codex are right now?
Guard have some very "unorthodox" builds right now that are completely solid and viable, and that no one on the internet would ever say are good.
And don't get me wrong here. Vendettas, Russes and Blobs are strong (Heck, I'm running all 3 of those!), but if you mix the right units in with them, Guard rise to the top of that second-Tier very quickly. The thing is most people are mixing guard through allies atm, I haven't seen a strong Pure-Guard army locally yet. I'm hoping Tommy will change that. =P
2nd Edit: wrote Colossus, meant Griffon