I am going to try to make the Ayyar work. It is just painful as I have the SMM model which is a point more that the Spitfire Asawira. The Ayyar feels like a situational unit to choose if you know if you are going to have to clear a lot of mines to get an objective. I also think it will become of more use once Hazfa are back to increase our shell game.
@ijw Going second exempts you to answer what is insite your grups? because if is that way I've been wrong all time
You have to say which models are in which groups right away, but you don't do your order count until the start of your turn. If your opponent goes first they don't know right away who is regular vs. irregular.
Everyone knows who the muttawia were, they are nerf for that, the point is that in 1 or 2 games we already know who is regular/irregular, I still don't get it.
So, you have no order pool to give the game away. This let’s the Ayar confound an Alpha strike. If you’re going first, the strategy would need to change. That’s really the neat thing about the profile. You can’t just plug it into an “x does y” in every game, you need to very carefully consider your options. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
>>Well that's still a -6 Surprise Shot MMR from a HI! It's 0 Surprise shot because 6th Sense does exist. And if you are using 40 point HI to hunt a single trooper that cannot resist Shock, than either your opponent did something stupid or you are wasting your points and orders. >>And if you use the Viral Pistols by getting close... a LOT of saves True, but Ayyars have no means to confidently go to 8". And if you are fishing chances that your opp will go to your 40 pts HI himselfI... well, that's fine for him, you are hiding your HI in a dug hole. >>You can deploy them as three Daylami, shit that's worth taking three more Daylami without camo just so you can have six of them and be like, half of these are fake BUT YOU DON'T KNOW WHICH ONES. You could deploy them as a Mutts, with an actual Mutt Well, finally, that's something. I personally do not believe though that non-camouflaged Daylamis worth taking over camo-infiltrators in 15-order limit world, but who knows? So no, realistically they are not great.
I really want to like them, but the more I look at the Ayyar the more it seems like a 37pt model that's barely optimised for killing things less than half its cost and which offers diminishing returns the cleverer my opponent is. Especially in Hassassins, every Ayyar taken represents an Asawira not taken (and then some; by god they're expensive) and that's a bad scene. I have a game this evening, I might try one out. But its going to have to do some work to justify displacing a BS14, linkable, faster, cheaper, better-armoured, dangerous in melee, regenerating AP spitfire platform.
Hey, I'm curious. Did you had a chance to use him? Did he made up his costs? Gesendet von meinem ASUS_I01WD mit Tapatalk
I did, and he didn't. For the same cost in Hassassins at least you're pretty much categorically better off with a similarly-costed, much better Asawira.
Ayyar in HB is faced with an extra challenge of being a holomask unit in an army which wants to hide presence of off-table units as much as it can (even if some of those should always be expected from HB now) while being one of the most expensive unit in that faction. While still being a unit in the game where having 3 identical loadouts on the filed very rarely fools anybody, not to mention extra problems TW brought us. You're basically stuck with open Holoechoes most of the time, but for most purposes something with camo and an actual punch will often look more impressive IMO. Even in vanilla it's still the case to an extent as Haqq units aren't expensive in general still. Back then during N3 I wanted to see Holo2 units being able to pose as larger S than they are (foregoing holoechoes for that) or as a cluster of different loadouts at least. That would be fire. But hey, wet dreams of weird things are just that. Guess I'm gotta grab what's offered - boring and reliable f2f pieces (that Haqq didn't really do before) and less boring, if still not very unique, scary HD guys.
Has anyone had more experience/success with Ayyar in the past 6 months? I think they are an interesting unit that struggles heavily against the other unit options available (especially in Vanilla) given their points and profiles. If the Ayyar was cheaper than an Asawira, I could see taking it if you are tight on points. If the Ayyar had better reactive weapon (at a minimum an AP sniper, but ideally a missile launcher, feuerbach, or MULTI sniper), it would actually be a very interesting bait-ARO. Similarly, an AP HMG or AP spitfire profile would also make it possible to hunt HI and redeem the cost of the Ayyar.
I've tried to use the Ayyar a couple times and have come to the following conclusions: most people won't engage with any 4D-chess mind-game efforts around holo-echo; they'll either know immediately that you're doing something cheeky, or they won't care and it'll go over their heads. You'd get a better ROI just occasionally running 14-trooper armies than full 15-trooper armies for then drop troop / nadhir fakeout than trying to do something clever with holoecho. holoecho resetting at the end of each turn is very nice, but not enough to save the ayyar. It's an ok model to spend a few orders on, take a surprise shot, maybe get a kill and clear a mine then pull back, but that's pretty medium-impact for such an expensive model. any active attempt to engage the ayyar by your opponent will probably kill him dead because he has no reactive turn MODs, and pretty poor stats. There are a bunch of things that might really help the Ayyar but right now I feel it's ultimately a cost issue. Transitioning him to a NWI HI style model and knocking a bunch of his points cost so he isn't so directly competing with superior elements would help a lot, but based on my experiences he needs to come down to the low-30s at least to be attractive. 6-2 MOV would go a long way with his pistols as well, since they're his most useful weapon right now.
Oh and as an addendum: having used one a few times recently, the Tohaa Kotail Mobile Unit is like an Ayyar if it were mediocre rather than a little bit awful. Clocking in at 31pts for the B4 Combi profile, it's a little less durable and has a lower surprise MOD but is massively more mobile in a way that makes using a few orders on it then letting Holoecho re-establish far more efficient and its price point doesn't force you into a hard spot if you can't make use of it. I know, I know - cross faction comparisons etc etc. But the Kotail gives us an example of what a functional-but-not-great unit in the role looks like. An Ayyar needs to at least meet that benchmark, poor thing.
I believe the Ayyar has a very niche focus in the game, especially in N4. I started to see him as a specialist rather than an hunter, and his kit very much confirms it. It's a very tough point achiever, focused on fighting (or ignoring) middle field obstacles opposing him. Holoecho is a countereactive skill in his kit: is used against mines, and to be able to ignore lane fire through Aro baiting. His attack kit (surprise shot, shock ammos, viral pistols) are very much dedicated to deal against other midfield specialists, where he can be unchallenged. And the second wound is a safe net that allows him to do some diving toward the objective, if he wants to. Looking at him in this way his points are quite justificable (albeit still a bit too high, even if not so much)
The Ayyar Debate! It's back! I love the Ayyar Debate, although honestly I thought after the last iteration we had pretty much concluded the Ayyar definitively sucks. Still I'm happy there are still players out there trying to make him work. Those models deserve to be on tables. I agree that that's his role. But I still think he's too expensive for what he does in that role. On turn 1 or 2, it doesn't help to use his kit to push him through the obstacles to push a button. Sure you clear the mines and push the button, but then your opponent kills him easily now that he's in the midfield, and flips the button. You lose the objective and your 40-point model. So when I tried to use him, I found he just hid in my DZ for two turns, then maybe did an objective run on turn 3. But lots of specialists can do turn 3 objective runs. Clear the mines with a Daylami or whatever instead of a holoecho. By turn 3 you probably have some random guy in the midfield who can eat mines for you before you run up a Barid to push a button. Or for that matter, most missions have specialists that roll two dice on +3 - use one of them and it's a reasonably risk to just suicide into the mines to push the button. Ayyar is maybe sometimes a little more efficient than those options, but not enough to justify spending 40 points to hide for two thirds of the game. I also don't get the advantage of using holoechoes to aro bait to cross a firelane. Cautious Movement does pretty much the same thing. The Asawira Doctor is also specialist, is tougher than the Ayyar, a comparable close-range fighter, almost as good at clearing mines, better at crossing firelanes (6" Cautious Movement, great Dodge), can heal unconscious models, and is 4 points cheaper. Hell, if you really want to replicate the Ayyar, give the Asawira a Nasmat and use that to clear mines and ARO bait.
I will say in the Ayyar's defence that we probably need a moratorium on comparing things to Asawira. Even in vanilla where frenzy is live - there's very little in the entire game that stacks up pound for pound with Asawira, so it's not really a fair yardstick. On @Lareon 's take - I really like it (and extremely well-expressed), but I am a little sceptical of the idea of a good midfield specialist that needs to be walked manually into the midfield all the way from the deployment zone.
Fair enough! But as tough specialists go, I'm not sure the Ayyar even compares well to a plain old Orc Hacker. Let alone Evader, Sombra, Zencha, Montesa, etc. I guess I just think N4 has left the Ayyar behind. He really feels like an N3 unit, in both kit and price. (And he wasn't amazing in N3, either.)
