I'm done. Until it has a major overhaul, there's not even any point in testing it any more as far as I'm concerned. The Nid list is every bit as bad as the Chaos list when it had unlimited Decimators and Sacrifice system for summoning daemons.
That 3000 points Chaos list chock full of MW, Ignore Cover barrages? Shut down in 2 turns. By the end of the second turn, Nids had backed the entire army save one formation of Raptors fighting for the Nid Blitz into a section of the board 30x45cm.
Concentrate fire? Sure. Do you think this is enough concentrated fire to perhaps kill a single Warrior swarm: Feral on Advance Feral on Double Decimator on Advance Decimator on Double Retinue w/ Havocs firing ~14 OW shots Swiftdeaths sniping exposed Warriors Decimator on Sustain Fire Decimator on Sustain Fire Swiftdeaths sniping exposed Warrior
All but the last couple barrages hit a minimum of 6 targets. Should that, maybe, kill a single swarm? It didn't. It got close but failed.
Here's another one: A Retinue with Havocs moves to support range and fires at a Hydraphant. A formation of 5 Chosen, Daemon Prince, and Obliterator assault. That's almost 1000 points of units used to their optimum offensive capability. I crunched some numbers on it. It averages about 6 points of damage. In other words, it likely won't kill 1/3 of its own points and doesn't even break the formation.
Yet another: 50 and 75 point activations will virtually never be balanced, let alone 50 and 75 point teleporting activations. Nodes are probably the single most broken part of this list. At the beginning of the third turn tonight, the Nids held or contested every single objective, most with multiple synapse formations. Total synapse count was 17 on the board, 4 dead. I swear if I hear one more person say you can stall against the bugs I will crawl through the internet and choke you.
By the way, the only other models in the dead tray besides those 4 synapse creatures were 4 gaunts and a Hydraphant which we just took off the board even though it didn't die.
Here's another tidbit: DC3 WEs have a name for the Tyranid army - snacks. You know what happens when a Node spawns Raveners? It has a 55cm radius around it that it can assault. A DC3 WE is highly unlikely to completely eliminate 2-3 Raveners in an assault. That means even with the experimental anti-token-assault rules, every Nid in support range will get full support fire. Half a dozen nodes and Spores for them to spawn with... think about if for a while and see if you're not horrified at the insane possibilities.
I've read all the recent batreps and despite boards with field of fire equal to the middle of a wheat field, using bad swarm composition, not optimizing objective positions, not using nodes to their full potential, and half a dozen other consistent minor errors (like inefficient use of Lictors), the Nids are still competitive.
Tyranids are 8-0 here. That's 8-0 with trading out commanders, multiple debriefs and "what if" sessions, lists optimized just to kill Nids, and a handful of "do-overs" to try out the results of different actions. None of the games were even close.
The list is broken.
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Nodes are a major problem. MAJOR. They should be gutted in effectiveness, possibly removed entirely.
Out of coherency assaults are broken. They should be removed entirely.
I'm almost convinced the Hydraphant is still too cheap.
Massive swarms are impossible to counter. There is simply no reasonable amount of firepower that will whittle down a 40-unit, unbreakable, regenerating formation. Minimum needed to adjust that is 5cm coherency among the synapse group and removing the out of coherency assault. I'm just about to the point I would accept an arbitrary max swarm size.
I'm also pretty much to the point I would have no objection whatsoever to burning down the Unstoppable rule and starting from scratch.
_________________ Neal
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