Bringing this over from the Batrep thread
batrep to avoid derailing it further.
Hena's assessment of this is accurate - it's forced to sit in the back of the table because it's an "artillery" formation. The problem is that the formation does relatively little during a game because of this issue. As the formation is primarily an AA platform it needs to keep pace with the other Tau formations to do it's job of air protection. Unfortunately that means they need to be forward not back and, as Onyx and Chroma and I found, they "die" like flies - meaning they
don't do their job because they're usually broken. Chroma used them to skip forward a little (or hide in the back with the long seeker range) and hit things with their seekers IIRC but they usually then got broken and had to wait to rally to do anything else -
if they rallied.
I don't doubt it does it's job well when it gets to unload all three vehicles on an aircraft squadron, but from what I can see that's not often if the opponent can put a single kill on a formation. So I agree with Onyx here about cost versus survivability.
I can't speak for others, but I won't spend 275 points on a single formation that doesn't do it's job all that well - let alone multiple, given their cost because they won't hold up their end. The Tau army is fragile and a list needs finessing when it's built. Costs add up very quickly and I need other formation types to make a solid army. 275 points is a Stealth formation - a far more versatile formation IMO.
Three, single Skyrays embedded in various formations is much more worthy of purchase IMO. They are tougher to kill off/ suppress. Even with the extra cost of 25 points I'd rather make the room elsewhere to incorporate them this way.
The Skysweep looks good on paper perhaps, but it's a bit of a glass cannon.
So that's my assessment of them so far at least.
