WestRider

Happy birthday, dude!

Yeah, the BaneHammer and DoomHammer are enclosed and have Fire Points and Access Points. The StormLord would function as an Assault Transport if you want to load it up with Ogryns or a Power Blob or something, tho. @Pax: The short range on the HellHammer is actually a serious downside to me. 36" is mediocre range for even regular Heavy Weapons, if I'm running IG Super-Heavy stuff, I want some reach out and touch someone capability. I've got plenty of other options for close in work.

Yep. Unless you were trying to make all-rounders, you could leave off either the Adrenal Glands or the Enhanced Senses, and the savings could add up. It just kind of annoys me when I see people talking about Fexen going from 85 Points to 120, when the current 120 Point Build is a lot more comparable to a 107 Point 4th Ed Fex.

Fortunately for the Revenant, Wave Serpents excel at forcing Grounding Tests. So do IG Support Units, really. The Harridan is hideously overpriced for something that can still be Grounded by Lasgun fire. Grounding takes away all the advantages it has over the other LoW.

Part of me wants to trade back the Gargoyles I got from you originally, but more of me wants to be able to field 40 Gargoyles ;)

Yeah, those stats were adjustable. The point, tho, is that if you build a Warrior or Tyrant with a statline as close to the current ones as you can get, the cost gap does narrow quite a lot.

Um, what? Seekers cost twice what Gargoyles do, and Daemonettes are more than twice the price of Termagants.

There's enough out there with mediocre-poor Init that I think Gargoyles still have a role as a fast Tarpit along with the Screening. They're fast enough to catch up to, say, a Wraithknight or Riptide, and it'll take forever for one of those to kill all of them especially when it's spending every other Turn at WS1.

You had to at least buy Weapons. The cheapest you could actually field was 22 Points per Warrior, 83 Points for a Tyrant, or 91 Points for a Fex. In practice, you were usually looking at a DakkaFex/Tyrant at 113/121, SniperFex at 148, and Warriors coming in between 25 and 40 per Model, depending on what you wanted to do with them.

Might work. I feel like you need at least some little gribblies for screening/nuisance work. Doesn't have to be much, maybe a couple Broods of Gargoyles. But I think you'd want at least some little stuff.

As I understand it, big chunks of Death from the Skies don't actually get used. It's also hardly Game-Changing. At this point, it's basically the Rules for the Ork Flyers, which are more or less a reprint from a WD, and bring that one Army up a bit. I think the fact that in many ways, it's just collecting and updating Rules that date back to 5th Ed contributes. It predates the impression that GW is trying to use these supplements to really change the core game, too.

StormLord (Anti-MEq+Heavy Weapon Squad fun), basic BaneBlade (All-rounder), and the ShadowSword (Gots the D) are the ones that have always appealed to me. Might want to look into whether it's feasible to magnetize among just those three options. I wouldn't bother trying to cover AA with one of them. Leave that to dedicated Units and let your very expensive Super-Heavy focus on what it's designed to do. Well, my very favorite is the StormBlade, but for some reason GW decided not to bring that one over to Plastic.

Yeah, that could become a problem. I'd probably take the burden on myself, as Captain, unless someone else volunteered.

At most, I don't think I'd want to see more than one of the "problematic" Lords of War per team. At that point, it's possible to have a counter-list on your Team and let the Matchup Process sort if out, but if everyone has to be ready to deal wit LoW, it cuts a huge chunk of the viable build-space out.

Not entirely clear. The bit on AoC on Pg. 112 does differentiate between AoC and actual Enemy Models. My guess at the RAI is that it's just supposed to work on stuff actually belonging to your Opponent.

Yeah, I've got a number of ideas for using the FSR with Nids. Especially with the Stronghold Assault updates to the Building Rules, where you can Charge out of them. The only reason there's an argument about Venomthropes is that people aren't reading the Shrouded Rule in the Main Rulebook. It clearly affects the whole Unit as long as at least one Model has it.

And I'm a bit conflicted about that, because I really like almost all of Stronghold Assault (especially the changes to the basic Building Rules), but Escalation is mostly just a big ball of "Do Not Want", and the fact that they're always getting lumped together bugs me.

S&P doesn't ignore Difficult Terrain anymore. It got changed to can't Run or fire Overwatch.

Unless there's something special in the Kill Team Rules, the Centurion wouldn't get to Scout, since it's Very Bulky, and thus doesn't benefit from RG Chapter Tactics. That said, they do kick out some pretty impressive firepower, and they're Relentless from Slow and Purposeful, so he doesn't just have to stand there.

What you list as a con (filling in weaknesses), I see as a pro. Allies let otherwise non-viable builds* get support from better Dexes, opening up more options and more more representation from weaker and more outdated Dexes. Individually, I feel like both Space Wolves and Imperial Guard are getting questionable at this point, but together, they're great. *Except for Nids of course :P

@Pax: I said most, not all. We both occasionally attend Tournaments or otherwise play other opponents. And we'd like to be playing the same game regardless, so we don't screw up all the time when we're playing other people because we're used to our huge mass of House Rules.

If the old FAQ is valid, IB: Feed still just gives Rage, too. And Hive Tyrants and Zoanthropes are ML1. And Models in Units Charging Venomthropes have to take Dangerous Terrain Tests. There's all kinds of stuff in there that could still have some effect if you allow it. Cherrypicking just that one ruling is meaningless. @Fluger: I think Rending Shrikes are probably the way to go if you're going to run them. Why couldn't they have worked that out before I ripped off the Rending Claws and replaced them with ScyTals, and then ripped off the ScyTals and replaced them with Lash Whips and BoneSwords? :P

Shrikes did drop 5 Points. Still not sure if they're worth it, especially since Boneswords take them back up to what they cost before.

I would vastly prefer to see Allies in. They expand the scope of the Game so much, in terms of both Rules and Fluff/Modeling. As a Captain last year, I didn't find Allies to be a problem when working out matchups, and, actually, it was one of the smoothest years I can remember in terms of making matchups. At the moment, most of the Lists I'm considering for this year don't involve Allies, but with IG, Orks, and SW all theoretically coming out between now and then, that may well change. Murphy's Lawyer makes an excellent point about the LRC, too.

See, here's the thing. I've played most of my Games over the past couple of years against the same guy. That was a big chunk at the end of 5th, and most of my play in 6th. During 5th, we usually had very close games, regardless of what we brought, fooled around with goofy lists, whatever. We approach the game in much the same way. Even before the new Dexes started dropping, that went away in 6th. Something like 3/4 of our games are blowouts, with semi-regular tabling, and it's far worse when we try to play casually or at a lower power level. Armies just seem to disintegrate when we do that, but when we go all out, it seems to balance reasonably well. I'm playing with as tight a gaming group as you can get. We're both in agreement about what we want from the Game, and we don't seem to be able to get it without actually re-writing the Rules.