This week we saw another couple of reveals from the new T’au codex on Warhammer Community, but most T’au players would have been aware of the new rules anyway.
It’s not too difficult to find most of the new rules online. Points costs, new abilities, stratagems — it’s all out there for those T’au players who want to look.
It seems a little peculiar, then, to discuss only the reveals on WarCom, but I don’t want to get into a proper discussion about the new T’au codex until it is officially released.
I do, however, want to speculate about how the new codex will change the meta.
The actual strength of the codex remains to be seen, of course. We’ll have to wait a few weeks for the games to come in to get a proper idea of how good this new iteration of the faction really is.
If I had to nail my colours to the wall, I’d call it an upper mid-tier book, but maybe that’s only because that’s where I want the faction to be. I want my models and lists be strong, but not that strong.
Why? While playing T’au over the past year and a half has been a struggle sometimes, I did enjoy the fact that there just weren’t many T’au players around. It was always cool to arrive at the game store and have people comment on my army purely because they hadn’t seen many other T’au armies around.
Is this a good thing? Well, probably not. But I’m only human.
Let’s call it a pretty solid codex, then. It’s not going to break the game, but it’ll go a long way in the hands of a skilful player.
More interestingly, I do wonder how many T’au armies we’ll see come out of the woodwork over the next few weeks. Or, to put it another way, how many people have T’au armies that have been sitting in a box for a couple of years.
The pros will be able to get an army painted up in no time, of course. Through a commission service or sheer discipline, we’ll see the T’au on the top tables if the codex is strong enough.
But at the local gaming store? I’m a little more sceptical. I’ve heard anecdotally that the T’au are one of the more popular factions in the game. I don’t know how this fits in with the everyone-hates-the-T’au schtick, but I’ve heard it around.
I could see Battlesuit-heavy build be pretty strong. The ability to shoot is combat a significant upgrade to Crisis Suits, Broadsides, and Commanders. No longer will a meagre infantry model or two be able to casually lean on a Broadside and completely shut down its shooting.
Granted, those brave infantrymen can dictate what the Broadsides will shoot at — assuming that the T’au player is ineligible to fall back and shoot in this particular case — but that’s better than no shooting at all.
We’re going to be able to be quite aggressive with our Crisis Suits now, which I think will be a really interesting change. XV8s should be at the vanguard of most T’au assaults, and it’s going to be great to see them take the centre stage again.
While the humble Burst Cannon doesn’t have any AP on the datasheet, it’s going to be well within the realms of possibility to get a tasty AP-1 with the new Mont’ka rules. Now that the weapon has six shots instead of four, Crisis Suits with a hell of a lot of dakka are going to be dangerous.
Or we have the new and improved Flamer, offering D6 +2 hits at 12”, which, again, is likely to be right in the sweet spot to get those Mont’ka bonuses of AP-1 and rerolling 1s to wound.
The way we pay for weapons on Battlesuits is changing — there will be incentives to take multiple different weapons on the same suit — so we might not see, for example, triple Burst Cannons, but there will certainly be a variety of builds that will be able to do some work.
The changes to Commander Battlesuits look great as well, providing different benefits to nearby XV8s and XV88s based on the model of Battlesuit, which will further incentivise players to lean into Crisis and Broadside builds.
Any good codex will have a handful of strong ways to play, and this one should be no different, so we won’t see an all-Battlesuit meta, but I do think that we’ll see Battlesuits make a strong return.
And we’ve only got a couple of weeks to wait. T’au players will be able to pre-order the codex next weekend, meaning that it will be out in the wild on Saturday the 5th.
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