Not a huge change, TBH. Bokhtar parachustist gets NCO instead of Tac Aware, making her less terrible but still a lot of points. In Vanilla she competes with the Nahab. Sunduqbut is as discussed. Interesting but very expensive. Pandora looks terrible, I'm perfectly happy not to have her in Vanilla. Ayyar still doesn't look very good to me, but I'm happy they changed him so dramatically and we can start a whole new season of my favourite passtime, the Ayyar Debate. Also now there is an associated rules debate about the interaction between hidden deployment and holoprojector. Glad to see the Ayyar maintain his status as Most Debated Unit. Lasiq MMR is interesting and needs further thought, but like so many interesting units it's hard to see it competing with the Asawira Spitfire. Muyib and Govad paredowns are fine. Simplicity is good. Govad Engineer is uninteresting though. Yasbir is as useless as always. Bashi Bazook with E/M mines is maybe the most interesting addition. That could be pretty good. Bonus: points increase to netrods and imetrons is very welcome!
While I generally agree with @QueensGambit, I will push back a tiny bit on Yasbir. I think he actually has a role and purpose in Vanilla now. Being a specialist operative now gives him something to accomplish. The FTO has a nice bit of kit with the drop bears and you can mask him as something else (like an HI). The infiltration version seems like a great button pusher that can clear Mines themselves. It's expensive, but could be fun. I really like the idea of an infiltrating burst 3 boarding shotgun, though. Mind you, I generally think he might have too much going on, but it feels like he is worth testing now. EDIT: I fully admit that he could do those things before, but the update actually made me look at his profile
That was always an option, he's just traded his combi for a rifle+LSG, so brings DTWs to the party now.
I'm pretty happy with that change. It was nice he was different from the others but the LSG is much better up close.
I think the Bokhtar is actually worse. I was expecting it to lose Tac Aware and be cheaper, but she got NCO. NCO doesn't actually net an order, and Haqq is no stranger to high quality LT that can actually spend their orders (or quality NCO). Unless you had a list with no NCO and a ghulam LT, the previous Tac Aware version would've been better (for the value of extra orders on subsequent turn).
I agree with most points. I’m very excited over the improved Ayyar as he is a center piece for one of my lists. MMR Lasiq is most definitely an interesting model. I’ll be toying with the list builder to see what I can come up with. Though, I am sad to see the regular Muyib LT go away. He added a little bit of list flexibility for me.
Gotta say I'm happy with the Ayyar on first glance. The HD loadouts are not that interesting to me, but the FD ones really mitigate his issue of order inefficiency to some degree. Also breaker rifle is a nice upgrade to the barebones rifle he had before. Zapper instead of E/Mitter is a boost in my book as well, as he can now use intuitive attack (at WIP 14 no less) and have a nasty ARO response. Drop bears are something completely new to wrap my head around and I'm not quite sure how to make use of them yet. Throwing one before a FTF to force a bad decision onto the opponent doesn't quite work since you'd have to spend another order to reactivate the Holoechoes and make use of Surprise Attack. Maybe the way to go is just to throw one at the end of your turn to clog up the midfield and have the holoechoes reactivate automatically during states phase.
Core Fireteams don't give a shit about Suprise Attack, just use it on them where you can splash multiple dudes.
