That's a fair critique of my comment. You're right, but let me unpack my thoughts a little just for full context. I get asked pretty regularly by new players 'how do I deal with symbiomates?'. There's a problem in this, because it's kind of the wrong question; the issue they're running into isn't symbiomates, it's Gao-Raels, Sukeuls, Nikouls, etc, but with an extra layer of extremely effective ablative defence layered on top, which forces them to spend more orders dealing with these pieces, which in turn means they're exposing themselves to more risk and have fewer other resources to spend in those critical initial turns, and so on. But explaining this isn't necessarily straightforward to a new player, so typically you want to just give the simplest answer they can actually action in their next couple games to give them some idea of how to progress. (For reference, at this point my usual suggestion is actually that they look to models with multiple wounds, good armour and powerful ranged weapons that don't necessarily rely on visual mod stacks, chiefly because the Gao-Rael and to a lesser extent the Nikoul are the most common overwatch elements locally, but also because as I noted one of the less obvious effects of symbiomates on the game is that you need to spend multiple extra orders to clear the Tohaa overwatch, which means your cumulative likelihood of running into a failure in the process is that much higher, so having models that can take a hit and continue gunfighting is of higher value than taking more dangerous but fragile pieces.) If you actually unpick the entire tactical situation (which you have, in your post), the answer isn't actually any more complicated than 'do whatever you'd do to effectively kill any other linked sniper/missile/etc, but understand that you'll need the patience to let it take a couple more orders', but that's not helpful to newer players who are still struggling to understand all the various nuances and how you might actually flank and enfilade an MSV2 sniper,. And even explaining that flanking an enfilading a sniper is still good when the net impact of catching them out of cover is only an increased likelihood of winning a F2F roll that emotionally makes the symbiomates seem comparatively stronger (because, they'll be stopping more hits) is still something I found was a challenge to communicate even to intermediate/good players, especially when they were hung up on the emotive rather than practical impact of having their success mitigated by the mate. Cut to March 27th and the change to ARM/BTS/Total Immunity of the new mates and it's now much easier to communicate, and for new/intermediate players to immediately grasp, how to mitigate the effectiveness of mates directly when engaging a Tohaa position. Because the new symbiomates are most effective when combined with cover, it's much more immediate and intuitive that tactics and/or weapons that focus on denying the enemy cover and catching them in a terrible engagement are going to be relatively effective. In reality, nothing much has changed here, although the proportional value of those tactics is higher and I think a good player engaging a position held by mate-equipped troopers will dislodge them faster and more effectively as a result of the change, because the tactical element of the engagement will have a proportionally higher effect. And in particular, these are changes that a player can implement at the tactical level, without necessarily having to change their list first to include tools with a certain level of firepower/resilience/etc. So yeah. This is the longform version of what I was shorthanding by saying there is now more effective counter-play (rather than counter-list building) against symbiomates. TL;DR: your analysis and counter-point is right, and I left a lot of context unsaid for the sake of brevity that probably rendered my position a little nonsensical to someone who actually has a very good grasp of the game and how to play against mates, which it's pretty clear you do :)
No that makes perfect sense and you've put a good counter point into my instinct. Plus I will never turn down a compliment :P. There are moments I forget I've played for 10 years and have so many games under my belt. I spend a lot of time teaching but barely anyone plays Tohaa locally, except me, so the Symbiomate question rarely comes up. And I do agree the old Symbiomates rule was inherently a 'feels bad' rule. I know I've expounded upon that in the old forums at length. I think the new rule does a lot to mitigate that. But I still have concerns over the loss of control and the hit they give the multi wound symbionts. It feels like with the new mates I have less ability to manage my risk with the mates which ultimately makes them unappealing to me.
Not sure if it's been brought up yet due to Tohaa, but I'm pretty sure that BTS boost and Total Immunity may wind up applying to Comms and Hacking Attacks, rules depending. The Gorgos would actually be looking at a major buff if it wound up the only TAG that wouldn't be screwed by the sudden reveal of an AHD, and every model I know of would like to be more resistant to Jammers and Exile.
Concur. I feel it makes little difference to a single wound model (I'm tempted to revisit the math on single wound models from my discussion with Vanderbane on that, but given it'll be relevant for a time now best measured in hours it seems a bit pointless) but for Rasails, Ectros and Gorgos it's a tougher tap than it needed to be - in about that order of severity. For the Gorgos especially it renders mates relatively worthless, which makes me a little sad, because Gorgos least of all needed the nerf. The most good I have to say about the Obligatory Equipment label is that it simplifies the use of mates for newer players. Ah well. It is what it is. Old symbiomates already worked against all these things. Anything with the 'attack' label could be mitigated by an old symbiomate.
Played two games with the new SymbioMates. They're useless now. Way too easy to play around and you can sneak damage in while doing it, Tohaa also lose a lot of the tricks we had. Kaletars need a discount or they're not very useful either, maybe with Bombs they'd do better. Definitely felt very bad to play with and pay so many points for. Here's hoping some of the unrevealed Spiral models are cool, otherwise it's almost nothing but nerfs. Weird for an army that wasn't exactly lighting the world on fire.
I mean one nerf and then a bunch of new units that fill holes in vanilla. still seems like a decent trade to me.
Well, it turns out I had a spare half hour between meetings and went back and did that math after all, ending up with; As previously noted by @Vanderbane , where EV < FEV, it's correct to not spend your symbiomate. EV=SCW*N FEV=((SCW*N)(Nf-SFW*Nf)-(1-SCW*N)(SFWa*Nf)(CNC) Which is all a bit of a hot mess, intended to account for all the multiple risks you run by entering inactive symbiont state (including chance you won't get to spend the symbiomate if you fail, the reduction you'll experience in ARM if you enter inactive symbiont state and then take the expected future hit, and the chance the enemy will crit you on their next attack). Anyway, it ended up in excel spreadsheet to actually test some hypothetical scenarios and long story short: if a Gao-Rael with an old symbiomate takes a hit from a combi rifle, you need to realistically expect that the next hit you'll take with that Gao-Rael will either be a missile, or three hits from a fatality 1 HRMC, or four hits from a HMG, before the decision to not spend the symbiomate represents a positive expected future return, at which point your future expected value exceeds your current expected value, usually by about a tenth of a wound. For reference, a Dragao's hyper rapid magnetic cannon has a 17.87% chance of landing three hits on a Gao-Rael through B2 opposed fire assuming both are in a good range band and cover. There are very few weapons/combinations of circumstance in the game that can realistically expect to put enough damage through to you in a subsequent engagements to make the risk worthwhile; it needs to be something like a haris-linked Yan Huo invincible with missile launchers or a fully-linked ORC feuerbach. But under that circumstance it would be correct to not spend your mate. That was a very interesting thought experiment that will remain relevant for *checks notes* probably less than twenty-two hours.
Your conclusion sounds a bit severe to me (I've played a couple games with them myself now), but if you've got time I'd still like to hear more about your experiences and what makes you think a 21pt chain of command triad filler is now a bad investment.
You need to stop thinking about Mates-Bearers as some frigging tanks to nullify a heavy enemy active order. They are now what should have always been. Incursion model able to withstand a heavy ARO to score points.
I'm not terribly far into testing, but for what it's worth so far I've found the ARO presence of models in symbioarmour with mates to still be pretty damn resilient. Doubly so with some of the new tech. I've had a Nikoul in sapper at the end of a long lane behind a prone Draal generating a stratuscloud absolutely stop an Panoceanian link dead in its tracks.
If my opponents allow it I will probably play it the way thaz the kaeltar with coc has one mate and one bomb without changing akything else so that i have a maximum of two mates and two bombs
Compare the Kaeltar and the Kamael: the Kaeltar already have a very tightly adjusted price, very difficult to give them a "discount" unless you use tricks like giving them Frenzy or Impetuous (something that don't make any sense for a CoC trooper). You could also remove the Flash Pulse and reduce WILL to 13, but then the Kaeltars would loose a very good ARO tool.
The data gathered and recorded by the official tournament management app shows otherwise. Tohaa and Aleph are overpowered top dogs. Actually Tohaa is the most efficient army by far. While the community playing Tohaa might be a small part of the total players and the army has the least profiles of all, it's performing so ridiculously well that, despite of the claims that the army is played by veteran players only, it's clear there's something wrong with this faction.
Yeah Tohaa are slightly on the stronger side but I don't think that they are really overpowered, I am still happy about the change to the mates because it is at least some change. Although it doesn't really feel like its the change thats needed. The Kaeltar doesn't need to get cheaper even without mates there are some lists he is worth it just because of coc with mates even the nerfed version he is cheap af. As I said in another post I would prefer if there are only two Kaeltar profiles one with light shotgun other with combi both with coc and 1 mate and 1 bomb. Only having two mates max in a game would make it way less annoying and the bombs would see playtime. I take mate kaeltar mainly for coc in my casual games
Aleph is in a heavy need for a nerf. It makes little sense they have received more OP stuff like Dart, that it's now autoinclude in any list.
I wrote up an article detailing my thoughts on the nerfs, in short it invalidates a lot of models and now Symbiont Armor is almost strictly worse than NWI. I'd rather keep my Abilities, that the model pays for, when I take a hit and be able to be Doctored on top of it. Tohaa simply take the hit, lose almost all the good parts of the model (there are a few that skate by) and then just stand around. I feel CB doesn't understand how Tohaa even functions as an army and they feel vision-less. I'd have been much happier if SymbioMates were simply removed from the game and Symbiont Armor was changed so that it can be Doctored back on. I won't be taking almost any of the models that become useless after taking a Wound, we went from underpaying (which needed to be adjusted) to overpaying and I doubt we'll see any compensation. With only two models to show from Spiral Corps and the Draal being my only useful pick from Sprial to Tohaa so far, it does look like they're attempting to squat the army, at least for competitive play. Time will tell but I'm very, very down on Tohaa right now. Just poor design to have us rely on SymbioMates so much and then remove them without understanding what else that change entails, or willfully ignoring it.
Nope, thats all wrong Cheer up its just an emotional reaction to loss Tohaa are great, symbio armour is still great. Most of my ITS losses against tohaa were not decided by symbiomates, I could elaborate but writing an essay on all the great stuff found in tohaa that is not found anywhere else could take hours. In the past tohaa was a small faction that struggled to play a diverse set of missions and strategies, that is not the case any more, from Thursday tohaa are in the big leagues, with a very complete set of tools dont go thinking otherwise.
