Now that all 8th edition rules are officially out, it seems reasonable to have a new thread to discuss all the actual things about our newly redesigned CWE army. So, with Irisado's blessing, I thought that I'd go ahead and start one.
Please post here your thoughts on performance of individual units and army builds, new tactics, missions, enemies and, most importantly, learning points from actual games of 8th edition. We're all at the base of learning curve now (so to speak), so basically any experience of 8th edition that any of us can share would be interesting and helpful.
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Let me start by sharing the last two 2000 pts games I played this past Weekend. I faced two very different Tau lists: game 1 was vs an army with lots of infantry (fire warriors, breachers, kroot, even kroot hounds) supported with several Railheads and broadsides; game 2 was vs an army of 2 Stormsurges, 2 Riptides and Shadowsun (literally 5 models on the table!).
My list looked like this:
Avatar of Khaine
Eldrad Ulthran
3 x 10 Guardian Defenders
5 Dark Reapers
2 x Hemlocks
Fire Prism
Wraithknight w/Sword and 2 starcannons
It was essentially just a bunch of units that I wanted to test slapped together. However, this unit combination worked surprisingly well, as I effectively tabled the first army by turn 5 and the second one by turn 4.
What happened was that my melee WK charged straight at the heart of the enemy position with Eldrad and Avatar trailing close behind it. Eldrad kept WK Fortuned at all times, and WK effectively tanked for Eldrad and Avatar as they are both characters and so couldn't be targeted. Combined assault of WK and Avatar is pretty much unstoppable, while fortuned WK can take a lot of punishment and keep going (in both games by the end it was below half wounds but still standing).
Quick learning points:
1) Guardians still die.
I was super-happy with the new AP rules which made 5+ save meaningful, and in these games at first I was impressed with Guardians really being less squishy than before - but, once the first excitement passed, I realised that they are still squishy. If fielded on foot, they are there really just for the purpose of making your opponents feel good because they killed something.
2) Fire Prism is just as totally useless as before, perhaps even more so. It's damage output is pathetic for a 170+ pts battle tank. Even just a basic Wave Serpent with 3 shuricannons would've done more.
3) Eldrad is a fantastic psyker, feels like the most efficient choice of a Farseer on foot. The fact that he knows and can cast all 3 powers per turn (or 2 powers + Smite), combined with nice bonuces to cast, is great and well worth the points.
4) Dark Reapers are deadly but super-vulnerable. In game 2 I made a mistake of deploying them in range of several SMS systems, and they were gone in 1 shooting phase, despite being in cover.
5) WK is good, but in order to live long enough to actually justify its point cost it needs both an Invulerable save AND Fortune. Even with just one of that it won't last.
EDIT:
6) Hemlocks are very good; this is kind of obvious even on paper, and in their case practice confirms theory 100%.
7) Spirit Stones proved to be a surprisingly good upgrade. Initially I kind of dismissed it on the grounds of 6+ save being way too weak to seriously bother with it. However, it seems that in practice, when a model has as many as 12+ wounds, 6+ save still happens to go off 2-3 times before the model is killed. And that might mean an extra turn of life, or even an extra turn of firing at full capacity.
With its modest cost, Spirit Stone is an auto-include for me now for every Wave Serpent, and any other vehicle that I expect to take fire.