Are flechette dischargers on a Tau vehicle useful?

[The Man They Call Jayne]

Why make it an insulting option? If you are going to do that just scrap it.

It fits the Tau mentality perfectly. We cannot fight, we dont like fighting up close. We make things that keep people the hell away so we dont have to fight. However strapping what amounts to small explosives on anything less than a battle suit is basicly suicide, so only vehicles get them.

I dont have an issue with a reasonable price rise, or a reduction to a 5+. But making them stupidly expensive or so ineffective they arent worth taking just screams of "I hate that I can't have this" or "This makes it too hard for me to win".

There is alot of broken stuff out there, and like it or not, its legal. Find a way around it. I have never in all my games ever said "well you can do that which seems really unfair coz I cant.". I find away to deal with it.

Best way to beat Flachettes? Melta guns. Get inside that 12" zone and open up without getting into assault. Or dont DE have some Haywire gun thing? That works too. At less than 12" you only have to worry about the standard Jink save. Otherwise if your tactics arent working, change them. Be flexible. Flachettes are not a game breaker. They do not render everything useless. Mybe they are an inconveniance sometimes, but that is what they are FOR.

I havnt seen anyone complaining about Terminators since they became immune to powerswords, and that is a MAJOR change that affects far more people that the last 3 dozen Tau players.

Flachettes will change. And they will be what they will be, maybe they will suck. Maybe they will get scrapped altogether. Maybe they will cost 25 points and work as they do now. Who knows? But right now they work as they do for the low cost of them and they need to be worked around. Nerfing them to hell or making them prohibitavly expensive is just poor gamesmanship.

[Wargamer]

Jayne, the reason people don't complain is Terminators had a 3++ Invun anyway, so they really haven't changed much.

But seriously, people do complain about Terminators. I was shocked when the Chaos Codex didn't give them a cost increase to counter their indirect power boost. Thing is, your argument of "it's legal, deal with it" is a god-awful answer, because the way you 'deal' with that is to simply walk away from the game. Units need to be balanced, because otherwise it's a game won by who bought the right army, and that is not a satisfying mechanic. I'm already getting sick and tired of how underpowered mainline infantry feel; it seems my Tac Squads or Guard Platoons never do anything except die, and the game is pretty much riding on all the other force org slots. Back in previous Editions, Troops really carried the day for me time and again.

But anyway, that is wandering off onto a tangent. The Flechette needs to be balanced for this Edition, and GW's attitude of "we'll do it in eight years" is not helpful. At all.

[Scout Sergeant Mkoll]

I dont have an issue with a reasonable price rise, or a reduction to a 5+. But making them stupidly expensive or so ineffective they arent worth taking just screams of "I hate that I can't have this" or "This makes it too hard for me to win".

There is alot of broken stuff out there, and like it or not, its legal. Find a way around it. I have never in all my games ever said "well you can do that which seems really unfair coz I cant.". I find away to deal with it.

Best way to beat Flachettes? Melta guns. Get inside that 12" zone and open up without getting into assault. Or dont DE have some Haywire gun thing? That works too. At less than 12" you only have to worry about the standard Jink save. Otherwise if your tactics arent working, change them. Be flexible. Flachettes are not a game breaker. They do not render everything useless. Mybe they are an inconveniance sometimes, but that is what they are FOR.

I havnt seen anyone complaining about Terminators since they became immune to powerswords, and that is a MAJOR change that affects far more people that the last 3 dozen Tau players.

Flachettes will change. And they will be what they will be, maybe they will suck. Maybe they will get scrapped altogether. Maybe they will cost 25 points and work as they do now. Who knows? But right now they work as they do for the low cost of them and they need to be worked around. Nerfing them to hell or making them prohibitavly expensive is just poor gamesmanship.

5+ would be more reasonable, but they'd still need a points increase, just not by as much. If they were 10pts, wound on 5+ and strike simultaneously with whatever, fair enough. Sadly, they're cheaper, faster and wound more easily, which is why they're absurd.

Again, I pointed out the flaw with meltaguns earlier. Getting into 12" range is NOT as easy as it's being made out to be. I play a Hellion/Wych list at 2k, with the Wyches mounted, and I have still struggled like hell this edition to make it into close range. In one game I even started with Feel No Pain and it STILL wasn't enough. Unless you play MEQ you're not making it into 12", you might even struggle then.

As for the Haywires, yes Dark Eldar have those. Almost 150pts to get 2 in a 5 man unit though and the D-pod means you may as well not bother with the 2 frankly, so you need 4, which means a 10 man unit. Which is the best part of 300pts for the ability to inflict 1 damage result a turn (average) on a single bloody Devilfish/Piranha/Hammerhead IF you get into range. Oh, and that damage result would almost certainly be a glancing.

Flechettes alone are not a game breaker, no, but they do far too much given which race has them and how much they cost. Couple that with the D-pod and Tau vehicles are absurd to bring down because suddenly they have the best defences against everything for next to nothing and they start with decent armour anyway. (apart from Piranhas)

Actually, that's an interesting point. Restricting the availability of these so that you could only take Disruption Pods OR Flechettes would go along way to balancing them, and would mean that they wouldn't need to change too much because then your opponent would have ways to bring down vehicles without having to throw all his anti-tank into 1 a turn and hope like hell that you roll badly.

[Charistoph]

Yeah, I don't see that last one happening at all, not with how most vehicle upgrades have gon in both CSM and 5th Edition.

The funny thing here is that I never heard of complaints against them before now, and they really haven't changed one bit in 6th.  They still suffer from the same weaknesses and still have the same strengths. 

The biggest weakness with them is this: most things that Assault your vehicle will have the armor to survive it, and by that, I mean a Marine.  Yeah, some Eldar will have issues with them, but Orks are the ones that are screwed the most by them.  'Nids usually use a Monstrous Creature for Assault, and Eldar usually have more than one person with an AT attack in the Assault.  Tau and Necrons would prefer to shoot them in most cases, anyway.  But Orks are the only ones with both a strong AT melee weapon and low armour, so they're the most screwed in these situations.

[knightperson]

Interestingly, it's not the flechettes themselves that have changed, but the game balance itself and the disruption pods. In 5th edition, defeating vehicles was about equally possible with melee and ranged. In 4th it was all about ranged since you hit the nearest armor facing in melee. Now, because of the improved disruption pods, killing Tau vehicles is all about melee. That makes the flechette launcher a lot more useful than it used to be. Still, as Charistoph and others have said, it's dangerous against some armies, useless against others.

But even the armies that have trouble against it have a way around. You can get inside the disruption pod's range and shoot, you can have more than one guy with the vehicle-killing punch, or you can zap it with a psychic power. Oh, and I would add Chaos Daemons to the list of armies that would have problems against a flechette-equipped vehicle. My daemon list does most of its vehicle killing with Daemonettes, but there are other options. Heralds and Monsters can safely weather the Storm of Pointy Things, or breath of chaos can glance it to death and not worry about the cover save.

[Lord Sotek]

Had a thought about the flechette dischargers.

Since they are indeed packets of fragmentation explosives strapped around the hull... And a means for a long-ranged fighter to try and get out of a sticky situation where the enemy has gotten close. That makes it a last-ditch, somewhat desperate measure, and the rules could be made to reflect that.

What do folks think of the idea of balancing it by having flechette dischargers potentially cause a Glance to the vehicle that uses them? (Representing, something sav'y'xa'uk up in the installment, mixture, or detonation of the explosives, and so the explosive force doesn't just hurl shrapnel but damages the vehicle too.)

Say, a devilfish gets charged by an IG blob squad and so it shoots off its flechette dischargers.

Have the upgrade work as normal, but also roll a d6. On a 2+ (3+?) it's fine, but if it rolls under that, the 'Fish takes a glancing hit.

That way, taking and using a flechette discharger becomes a calculated risk with significant potential drawbacks, without having to axe the thing entirely or make it exorbitantly expensive.

[The Man They Call Jayne]

Things that risk damage to friendly units are not things the Tau tend to field though.

[Wargamer]

I still firmly believe the "flat wound" roll is one of the dumbest aspects of the flechette discharger. I mean, let's consider a few things here:

Guardsman - soft, squishy, easily shredded thing wrapped in a suit of body armour primarily designed to deflect ricochets, shrapnel and low-power kinetic impact (ie: stab wounds). Conclusion: going to get flayed alive.

Space Marine - not very soft, not very squishy, not very easily shredded thing wearing a small tank. Conclusion: Injury will come only through dumb luck, or possibly putting an entire flechette pack into the guy point blank.

Carnifex - 30+ tonnes of chitin, ultra-tough hide and layer upon layer of muscle tissue. Body specially evolved to withstand the most hostile conditions imaginable; a literal living battering ram that can shrug off an entire magazine of weapons fire and keep on coming.
Conclusion: Injury possibly only by lucky hits to the beast's few vulnerable locations. Statistically unlikely to occur.

Wraithlord - Inorganic, eight metre tall walker constructed of psionic super-alloy. No known weakspots. No known vulnerabilities. Body structure paternaturally resilient to compressive, shearing, rotational or stretching forces. Conventional weapons, including kinetic, energy, explosive and thermal weapons utterly useless - nothing short of dedicated anti-tank weapons are capable of damaging its superstructure.
Conclusion: No way in hell should a flechette discharger do anything to this guy.

You see the issue I'm sure. The "poison" mechanic is dubious at the best of times, but when said poison isn't a poison at all, but "a lot of sharp bits of metal", suspension of disbelief walks away in disgust.

[The Man They Call Jayne]

The bigger you are, the more you are going to get hit, the more damage you take.

[Scout Sergeant Mkoll]

Yeah, I don't see that last one happening at all, not with how most vehicle upgrades have gon in both CSM and 5th Edition.

The funny thing here is that I never heard of complaints against them before now, and they really haven't changed one bit in 6th.  They still suffer from the same weaknesses and still have the same strengths. 

The biggest weakness with them is this: most things that Assault your vehicle will have the armor to survive it, and by that, I mean a Marine.  Yeah, some Eldar will have issues with them, but Orks are the ones that are screwed the most by them.  'Nids usually use a Monstrous Creature for Assault, and Eldar usually have more than one person with an AT attack in the Assault.  Tau and Necrons would prefer to shoot them in most cases, anyway.  But Orks are the only ones with both a strong AT melee weapon and low armour, so they're the most screwed in these situations.

I've always had a problem with them since the first time I played against them way back in 4th. There's no justification whatsoever for an upgrade that cheap to be that good. As I've pointed out, the Dark Eldar equivalent (and supposedly more powerful as it's a new codex) is slower, less likely to wound against a lot of units (S3) and is significantly less likely to hit (Only hits enemy models who roll a 1 to hit, Flechettes auto hit). Oh, and Flechettes always work. If a Dark Eldar vehicle is stunned or Immobilised the enemy hits automatically, so no rolling, so the Dark Eldar don't get their defences, the Tau do. Yet Flechettes cost a measly 5 pts more.

And, no. Most times your opponent won't be a Marine. They're more common, but thy still only make up about half the gamers if you include all the Marine codexes. 'Nids might have a Monstrous Creature, but more often than not it'll be the Genestealers, or maybe even Gaunts with Furious Charge, that are getting busy ripping up tanks while the MC's laugh at infantry, because that's the best way to minimise casualties. Especially as Overwatch is in now. Charge the MC in while the little guys destroy tanks, means your little guys don't get shot on the way in. Oh, but if you want to go down the "your opponent gets a save anyway" then I can always factor that in to show the Envenomed blades are even less effective.

In fact, stuff it. I'll mathhammer the comparison tomorrow and settle this once and for all.

[Aun]

The bigger you are, the more you are going to get hit, the more damage you take.

That's a pretty blatant fallacy. Simply because you are hit more times or more often does not necessarily increase the damage said object takes, it only increases the probability it will take damage. However, if your incapable of damaging said object in the first place, then the number of times you are hit with it is irrelevant.

A single flechette cannot pierce the nigh-invulnerable armor of a wraithlord, ergo no amount of flechettes will be capable of piercing said armor as Wargammer has aptly said.

[Lord Sotek]

Things that risk damage to friendly units are not things the Tau tend to field though.

Neither are things purpose-designed to kill your enemies from up close and personal, though.

I would also point out that although they weren't happy about it, the Tau Empire fielded rail rifles in battle even when the technology was still unrefined and its teething problems were potentially lethal for the firer.

The bigger you are, the more you are going to get hit, the more damage you take.

By this reasoning, a frag grenade should do more damage to a Leman Russ or a Tyranid Warrior than it does to a Grot, because the Russ and the Warrior are both way bigger. I'm pretty sure you'll agree that's certainly not true.

I find myself agreeing with the guys comparing Flechette Dischargers to the spiky bits on DE craft. FD's should have a plain old Strength value to wound, not a fixed roll. The idea that a bunch of tiny bits of sharp metal have even odds of injuring a Wraithlord when miniature RPG-7 rounds are almost unable to damage it at all is patently ludicrous.

[Wargamer]

The bigger you are, the more you are going to get hit, the more damage you take.

Yes, which is why people use BB guns to kill elephants; you just need to fire 3-4 at once.

[Charistoph]

Yeah, I don't see that last one happening at all, not with how most vehicle upgrades have gon in both CSM and 5th Edition.

The funny thing here is that I never heard of complaints against them before now, and they really haven't changed one bit in 6th.  They still suffer from the same weaknesses and still have the same strengths. 

The biggest weakness with them is this: most things that Assault your vehicle will have the armor to survive it, and by that, I mean a Marine.  Yeah, some Eldar will have issues with them, but Orks are the ones that are screwed the most by them.  'Nids usually use a Monstrous Creature for Assault, and Eldar usually have more than one person with an AT attack in the Assault.  Tau and Necrons would prefer to shoot them in most cases, anyway.  But Orks are the only ones with both a strong AT melee weapon and low armour, so they're the most screwed in these situations.

I've always had a problem with them since the first time I played against them way back in 4th. There's no justification whatsoever for an upgrade that cheap to be that good. As I've pointed out, the Dark Eldar equivalent (and supposedly more powerful as it's a new codex) is slower, less likely to wound against a lot of units (S3) and is significantly less likely to hit (Only hits enemy models who roll a 1 to hit, Flechettes auto hit). Oh, and Flechettes always work. If a Dark Eldar vehicle is stunned or Immobilised the enemy hits automatically, so no rolling, so the Dark Eldar don't get their defences, the Tau do. Yet Flechettes cost a measly 5 pts more.

And, no. Most times your opponent won't be a Marine. They're more common, but thy still only make up about half the gamers if you include all the Marine codexes. 'Nids might have a Monstrous Creature, but more often than not it'll be the Genestealers, or maybe even Gaunts with Furious Charge, that are getting busy ripping up tanks while the MC's laugh at infantry, because that's the best way to minimise casualties. Especially as Overwatch is in now. Charge the MC in while the little guys destroy tanks, means your little guys don't get shot on the way in. Oh, but if you want to go down the "your opponent gets a save anyway" then I can always factor that in to show the Envenomed blades are even less effective.

In fact, stuff it. I'll mathhammer the comparison tomorrow and settle this once and for all.

So it's bad because it's better tech than an ancient race provides their people?

And yes, the most common thing to be charging a Tau tank IS a Space Marine, at least in my Meta.  That may change when the next Codex: Orks is released, but for now, that's the case.  The Dark Eldar in my Meta would rip it apart with Dark Lances, the Eldar with Lances, Tau with any gun, and the Necrons with Gauss.  You have a case with Genestealers, but there will always be a few that survive the wave and can get their attack in, and that's assuming the FMC's don't catch them first.  Nobs are THE threat for an Ork mob, and if they're taken out, the chances of a Tank dying in Assault are minimalized.

So yeah, I stand by what I said.

The bigger you are, the more you are going to get hit, the more damage you take.

Yes, which is why people use BB guns to kill elephants; you just need to fire 3-4 at once.

And that's why we use toy guns in warfare...  Oh, wait, not even the Guard use BB Guns (unless you count Shotguns).  I would image that a Bouncing Betty would be able to hurt an elephant, though probably not kill (but an elephant isn't likely to have 1 Wound, either).

[Scout Sergeant Mkoll]

Ok, as promised, here's the mathhammer

Flechettes vs 10 man Guard squad
10 hits. 5 wounds. 3.333 dead BEFORE they get their attacks.
150% return on investment plus increased odds of survival due to less attacks coming in.

Envenomed Blades vs 10 man guard squad
10 grenade attacks = 1.666 hits, 0.888 wounds. 0.592 dead AFTER their attacks.
0 confirmed kills so 0% return and same odds of survival as attacks have already been resolved.


Flechettes vs 10 man Genestealer squad
10 hits. 5 wounds. 3.333 dead BEFORE their attacks.
420% return on investment, plus increased survival odds for the vehicle.

Envenomed Blades vs 10 man Genestealer unit.
30 attacks = 5 hits. 3.333 wounds. 2.222 dead AFTER their attacks.
560% return on investment. No change to survival odds for vehicle.


Flechette Dischargers vs 10 man Wych squad (with Haywires, otherwise they wouldn't be attacking the vehicle)
10 hits. 5 wounds. 2.5 dead.
240% return on investment. Improved survival odds for the vehicle.

Envenomed Blades vs 10 man Wych squad.
10 attacks. 1.666 hits. 0.888 wounds. 0.444 dead.
0% return on investment. No change to survival odds.


Flechette dischargers vs 10 man Marine squad.
10 hits. 5 wounds. 1.666 dead BEFORE their attacks.
150% return on investment guaranteed, odds are closer to 300%, plus improved survival odds for the vehicle.

Envenomed Blades vs 10 man Marine squad.
10 attacks. 1.666 hits. 0.555 wounds. 0.185 dead AFTER their attacks.
0% return on investment, no change to survival odds for the vehicle.


Flechette Dischargers vs 5 man Terminator unit.
5 hits. 2.5 wounds. 0.416 dead.
0% return on investment.

Envenomed Blades vs 5 man Terminator unit.
10 attacks = 1.666 hits. 0.555 wounds. 0.093 dead.
0% return on investment.


Flechette Dischargers vs 10 Nurgle Marines.
10 hits. 5 wounds. 1.666 dead BEFORE their attacks.
Not sure on the return on investment, but over 100%, decent chance of over 200%, plus improved survival odds.

Evenomed Blades vs 10 Nurgle Marines.
10 attacks = 1.666 hits. 0.278 wounds. 0.093 dead.
0% return on investment. No change in survival odds.

So, in almost every circumstance above, the Flechettes are substantially better, not only in terms of kills, but also in protecting the vehicle they're on.

The one case where Flechettes were better, it was by a similar margin to how much Flechettes won by elsewhere, however as usual, the Blades made no difference to the vehicle's survival chances.

When the margins are as big as they are, and it's striking first, there's no excuse AT ALL for Flechettes to be as they are.