Tyranids white dwarf update

Thanks to the Hulking Behemoth special rule, none of our boys here will be able to get a Hive Fleet adaptation, So those chapter tactics are all pretty much useless for us. It then becomes looking at the stratagems, which ones can benefit us the most, and seeing that Leviathan is the only real answer.

This allows us some interesting opportunities when we are looking at these units. One of those things is by providing entire units of Carnifex invuln saves. We finally have a type of brawler that can exist in the middle of the table. I have been on the hunt for something to fill this role in my list and seeing the Carnifex and the amount of customization it provides us as players provides us with something to challenge the table.

When mixed with the pure shooting that can be put out by buffed Doom Balloons, I could see. The involved saves and the minus one damage begin to add up and almost feel like an oppressive match-up. When we are looking at things like thunderous impact or breaking through, suddenly our shooting base becomes a very scary close combat base.

My first list makes use of a lot of tools common to current Leviathan lists, like Synaptic Link Warriors, and Rerolling Hive Guard, as well as some of the best of the benefactors of the new rules to try and provide a solid base of forward pressure to generate board control and let the Hive Guard do their job.

Harpies provide board control and Spore Mine screening, while Dimachaerons try to do the damage. My Second list is a Harridan. The rest of the list is designed to provide support and back up the scoring a little. You could definitely go lighter on Dimachaerons if you wanted a more shooting heavy build, but I trust in the Dragon to get work done. A Flying Hive Tyrant specced for Resilience adds a bit more focus for our psychics and provides a scoring option with Warp Ritual or Psychic Interrogation.

When I made this list, I wanted a couple of things to be very clear right away. This is where the Heavy Venom Cannons on all my Carnifex, which would be 9 in total, and the heavy venom cannon on my Hive Tyrant come in. This provides us a huge threat against everything and being a high strength and damage, even competing lists in the same style, have a high chance of taking a ton. This becomes a great backline of models, allowing our shooting from the barbed stranglers to focus on infantry and hordes, allowing the big guns a chance to fire at what matters.

Chitlin Thorns is neat due to it activating at the end of -every- fight phase. Giving the Carnifex a cool ability to AOE hordes that may be trying to lock them down. I think something that we could see is people trying to swarm these, durable yet vulnerable models, to stop them from shooting at important targets, so having a turn-by-turn defensive upgrade that can help fight off say, a Harlequin grouping or a swarm of Hormagaunts, or some Blade Guard, could be very effective.

This allows us to do a couple of interesting things. First off, it allows us to put up to two units of Tyrannocytes into reserve without costing us any CP.

Is this something I would do? Most likely not. To help adjust to different matchups. For example, if we are unable to hide. These kinds of units against a major threat, being able to push them into reserve should help us get the maximum use out of these models.

We may miss out on using the synaptic link, But that allows us to give our, debatably to me, more important units, a small buff. Comments, questions and suggestions to contact goonhammer. You must be logged in to post a comment. Sign in. Forgot your password? Get help. Password recovery. About Us. Magic the Gathering Commander Focus: Look!

FromTheShire - January 13, PantsOptional and head58 - January 13, Editorial Goonhammer is Selling Out! Robert "TheChirurgeon" Jones - December 15, In spite of their limited unit roster Tyrands had all manner of upgrades, such as one that allowed a Carnifex to regenerate to full wound count with lucky dice rolls if it was killed.

Another example was the "Jones is acting strangely" card spoiler: one of your opponent's infantry models explodes with the same blast effect as if he'd been hit by a Barbed Strangler. For context, keep in mind that in 2nd, each vehicle position actually had a crewman in it, and these crewmen could individually be killed. Therefore this critter would, in theory, wait for the right moment to pounce out of its dark corner to claw the vehicle crew's faces off.

While the lurker would almost certainly be killed, in the meantime the crew would be very distracted, which was especially hilarious if it managed to kill the driver when the vehicle was moving.

Naturally this made Tyranids THE army for players to sperg on about how they were completely overpowered because they countered armies like the Space Marines and general Imperial factions with complete EASE. And then one of them was given a job at GW and it all went downhill from there for the space bugs.

Again, not much is remembered from this time, aside from the fact the strong and fast Tyranids from the 2nd edition were turned into slow, clumsy beasts, a move that nerfed them into oblivion. It was also notable for introducing silly looking metal miniatures that vanished soon afterwards like the ever popular grinfex and cool new plastic ones that are still used to this day. This codex was extremely limited, but did feature some None of these would last to 4th edition, but the nostalgia would linger for a long time after.

In , a new Tyranid codex emerged along with an entire host of redesigned units and metal kits. It was at this point that the modern designs for the Lictor, Genestealers, Raveners, and Hive Tyrants were introduced. Also, the first plastic Carnifex kit was released, and GW capitalized by giving the unit a cubic metric shit ton of options. Indeed, this was the theme of fourth edition 'nids. The codex deliberately axed 3rd edition characters like Old One Eye or the Red Terror in favor of giving players a wealth of options for customizing their models.

Go ahead. Want a Carnifex with a better BS? Few of these would last into 5th edition and the flaws were pretty glaring as time went by. When the 5th edition Codex released, it was met with split opinions , as usual. Some were angry at how overpowered the army looked, citing the facts that the Tervigon could create more units out of thin air using "broken" special rules, that the anti-psyker powers were so broad, and that the Hive Guard and Zoanthropes were so good at tank hunting at a time when tanks were kings.

However, after some time passed, people who decried the cheesy aspects of the army faded from view as people began to realize the army only seemed cheesy on paper, and that, in truth, any cheese the army had was drowned in the army's drawbacks.

The Termagants the Tervigon could spawn? Stats like a Guardsmen in close combat, but with half their weapon range and weaker armor. And to get Tervigons to the Troops slot from the HQ slot where they were practically useless , you had to pay Guardsman prices for a unit of them.

In other words, you had to use the "cheesy" special rule or they were overpriced into uselessness. Then there were the special powers that supposedly buffed the army. Again, at a first glance, they looked broken. Certain upgrades allowed any unit within 6" of certain models to gain rules like Feel No Pain, Furious Charge, Poison, cover saves, and so on. It sounded like a serious boon, but it had a funny effect. Aside from the fact that most Tyranid models are too expensive unless you capitalize on the bubble-buffs, it also does a horrible thing to your freedom to play the army.

Mainly, it forces players to keep all their units bunched up within 6" of a few key models, requiring them to spend the entire game in a rigid formation that can spell disaster for the army when broken.

Tyranids already suffered from this problem somewhat due to their synapse rules, but the 6" range on the mandatory buffs only shortened the leash.

Not to mention it also made blasts even worse for an army already vulnerable to them. Tyranids seriously lacked effective long range support as well.

While they possessed some weapons capable of mincing infantry units, most things with a range over 12" come at a premium.

With an army so focused on close combat this shouldn't be such a problem, but synapse and buff leashes actually make it a valid concern. Mainly, the short buff leash pressures a player into a castle formation, but the lack of medium and long ranged weaponry pressures the player to advance the entire castle towards the enemy, which has a way of creating chinks in the formation.

And you can't just move a few key units - when a unit moves forward, the model providing the buffs has to follow them, and then the other units relying on the buffs have to follow the model providing the buffs; it just makes the army obscenely inflexible. Tyranid monstrous creatures, their heavy support, also got drastically nerfed in the 5th edition update.

You just can't quite kit your heavy support to do the things you specifically want. Which brings us to the final problem: on top of mountains of tactical inflexibility, the Tyranids also suffer from the drawback of design inflexibility.

Unlike Guardsmen or Space Marines, the Tyranids don't get a lot of options to change the way the army works. When you buy Hormagaunts, you get them at face value - you can't equip them with frag grenades, give them pistols, add heavy weapons, or mess with their gear in any way. You can buy them the poison special rule if you want, or maybe the Furious Charge special rule, but those are your two choices.

Almost the entire army is that way, which is vastly different than the way they worked in 4th edition. The Carnifex alone lost eighteen weapon and biomorph options between 4th and 5th edition and it doubled in points value.

And with no upgrades taken! And for twenty points more, you can get a Trygon. Which is better than the Carnifex in almost every way. Cept looking good. It's possible that Tyranids are now the least adaptable army in the game.

The last kick in the teeth is that Tyranids are one of the more expensive armies to collect, requiring a larger number of models than most this is still true in For the fact that most Tyranid armies will play exactly the same way, having all the same exploitable weaknesses and no unique wargear surprises, it's not a wonder that the army has seen a huge drop in sales since the release of their 5th edition codex.

The shorter lesson to take from all this is, if you're thinking about beginning a 40k army, even with how expensive it's all gotten, Tyranids are not the best army to start with. The one good legacy of the 5th edition codex was the radical expansion of the army list. The previous codex had featured the addition of a single new unit the brood lord and the removal of two special characters.

Both were brought back for the 5th edition codex and the total units jumped from fifteen to thirty-four. While several of the characters the doom of malan'tai and the parasite of mortrex did not survive past this codex, many others did and eventually grew into popular options in their own right.

Is it me, or does the Haruspex look like it belongs in a bad hentai movie? Again, this one was a mix of good and bad. They even lost the ability to use psychic powers from the Biomancy table along with their Hive Mind powers being nerfed. Why GW thought that the most underpowered army needed even MORE nerfing will remain a mystery, but odds are that Cruddace had something to do with it. On the good side, this one introduced the first piece of lore that showed Tyranids actually winning for a change the Shadowbrink campaign, during which they own the Chaos Daemons rather than coming close to winning but failing at the last minute due to the 'heroic' actions of some character who appears out of nowhere looking at you Calgar and Yriel , and also gave us the Hive Crone, a killer anti-flyer unit that finally gave us a reliable option to beat Kelly's supercharged Dark Eldar first by walking over their paper planes and then by liquefying infantry in and outside transports with the flame template.

Carnifexes got to use crushing claws as power fists as they have crap initiative Unwieldy doesn't matter, especially when you get to raise their Strength to 10 and the Exocrine was introduced to become the bane of Space Marines with its AP 2 cannon.

To compensate for Cruddace's additional nerfing, GeeDubs released some Dataslate formations which allow you to ignore the force organisation chart and spam flying monstrous creatures to overwhelm an opponents anti-air defenses because the flyer rules are an even bigger catastrofuck than the Tyranid codex.

Geedubs finally noticed how badly nerfed Tyranids have been during the last editions so they took opportunity to get your money by releasing new waves of Tyranid units supported by White Dwarf updates. Things started poorly with a pair of monstrous creatures who really didn't bring anything new to the table. The Maleceptor was just an overcosted, overcomplicated, and underpowered hunk of plastic that would be lucky to kill more than 20 points worth of models in a given turn.

The first pack that was announced was a dual kit for the Maleceptor and Toxicrene. While the Maleceptor proved to be unpopular within minutes of having its rules announced in White Dwarf as it was an overpriced drain of warp charges, the Tocxicrene proved to fare a bit better, as the copious amount of poison and Instant Death on a 6 to-wound using said poison made it a menace against Monstrous Creatures though its intended targets, the Riptide and Wraithknight , merely scoffed at it because they're jumping monstrous creatures, and thus able to kite it like a toy.

The second release proved to be the most popular by far: The return of Mycetic Spores now Tyrannocytes , the living fortifications known as Sporocysts , and new Mucolid Spores that not only assault flyers, but are also the cheapest troop choices, making starting an army of Tyranids a much simpler task. While the Tyrannocyte proved an incredible weapon that made several units including the infamous Pyrovore suck slightly less, that power came with a hefty price tag for a Transport, not as a Monstrous Creature , and Sporocysts are completely immobile and are equally pricey in exchange for synapse bonuses and the ability to spam spore mines.

Needless to say, people actually thanked GeeDubs for this rare show of intelligence. Not bad, but the new sprue was still welcome. After these releases, it became clear as to why the 'Nids got new shit: promotions for a new Campaign called Shield of Baal , which involves 'Nids chomping through a system near the territory of the Blood Angels , meaning that Dante has to call all the successor chapters to stop the mob.

He had to take help from Anrakyr to save even part of the system. This now concludes the awesome part of all things Tyranid. If you look at the gallery below the Cutenids, you will require a mind scrubbing and be lobotomized into a servitor.

No exceptions. Of course you now have players mocking 'Nids as being a DLC faction. Tyranids were an early-middle codex release of 8th and at that time were a contextually powerful army mostly due to how fast they were, like, "My Hormagaunts just moved 20" in one turn and my Stratagem can give them a second Movement Phase," fast.

This speed has given them absolutely amazing board control combined with their easy access to deep striking units, good mix of swarms and big monsters for heavier damage. Carnifexes received a less-nerfed range of biomorphs, and proved to be useful and cheap Swiss-army knives capable of fulfilling a variety of roles.

Nevertheless, despite ostensibly being a melee focused army, Tyranids continued to suffer from relatively low strength melee attacks which compensate for their lowered wound chance by having higher damage. This means that while they dealt a lot of damage when they wound a vehicle it's a toss-up as to whether or not they could actually wound it; Space Marines have easier access to Anti-Tank melee than us.

Some of the big beasties are still overcosted and underpowered for their roles, and the flyers aren't too good either.

While the little guys still died in droves and our big guys were either very good or just suck, the mid-sized bugs were decent but tended to require some planning to make the most of them. For example, Lictors were fragile but useful as deep strike beacons, Warriors and Raveners were a bit overcosted but could stick around much longer than before now that Instant Death is gone, and Zoanthropes were stuck as the obligatory Smite spammers.

Even Tyrant Guard get some play here as a slow wrecking ball of damage. Models count as their current remaining w o unds as the numbe r o f models for purposes of controlling objectives. Of course, here is where the real money is. That problem is flat out gone here. Funny enough, it makes the Crusher Stampede a great counter to massed Hive Guard armies that have been popping up as Hive Guard do not like -1 damage and an army of it?

Just about any monster in our arsenal gets a lot of play from this. Even then, as Leviathan, you can give the Dima or any monster within 12 of a Synapse unit Objective Secured, so you can very much suddenly dominate an objective out of nowhere. I will likely do a full monster by monster breakdown in another article because honestly, this just changes them all so much.

Not a bad aura at all but situational. It can and does benefit your own warlord if they are a Monster, but really, it is about helping out several monsters that can hit the enemy line at the same time.

A Dimachaeron or Haruspex loves this aura, but keeping your Warlord close to the Dima is tough. This would have worked a bit better if it was just Units rather than specifically Monsters. Between that and Swarmlord, you can have two really tough anvil units that you can throw into melee and generally assume that they will survive a round or 2. Again, situational, but it can absolutely work. This is a really fun one that is all about making Hive Tyrants much more effective as melee threats.

The reality is that a Hive Tyrant is not a great fighter, mostly due to lowish strength and only 4 base attacks. Now, you are base attacks, which helps, especially if you get 6 or 7. You can go Reaper style, which is a Reaper of Obliterax with Murderous Size, so now you are S7 AP-3 D4, and a roll of 6 to wound is Damage 8, which can just obliterate super hard targets, plus this is Hive Fleet agnostic.

You do have to be Leviathan, but with their additional rules, that is likely the best choice anyway. So yah, this is absolutely a great Warlord trait if you want a Hive Tyrant that is actually going to get in there and kill things in melee. This is again just a standard, awesome power, and if you like the biggest of bugs like the Harridan or Hierophant, this is just money in the bank.

Very, very few things are going to kill that, let alone do any meaningful damage. This also works great on Exocrines, Tyrannofexes, or Barbed Hierodules who want to sit in the backfield and shoot. Warp Charge 6. Another just simple, absolutely money power. Most Tyranid monsters are melee oriented, so being able to give them an extra attacks is fabulous. Just a bonkers good power. Select one friendly Crusher Stampede, non-synapse unit. They gain full reroll to hit in melee. This one is fun because it is unit hello Raveners and Tyrant Guard and it is just a flat reroll to hit in melee.

Most times, you are going to throw this one on a big melee beasty like a Haruspex saving you 1 CP or any other non-synapse bug like a Scythed Hierodule. Just about any melee bug wants this, but it is a nice way to make Raveners or Tyrant Guard a bit more useful. Especially Tyrant Guard who have multi-damage melee weapons need a reroll to function, this makes them worth another look, depending on if their points are adjusted or not. Use on a Monster when it finishes a Pile-in move.

In AoS, there is Titanic Duel, and finally, the kings of crabs, the queens of quarrels, Tyranids, have a way to show other Monsters and vehicles who the top of the pops is. Sending even a lowly point double-scythe Carnifex into a hard target suddenly becomes a bit workable, but this really shines with say a Dimachaeron or even the super fighty Hive Tyrant builds.