About Crisis Suits

Hey all! I've recently got a friend into the hobby and want to balance my list around her starter army. She chose Tau, which I thought would compliment my Dark Eldar really well, both with and against each other. The Tau Start Collecting box is actually a full, if suboptimal, 500 pts army. The problem is that the majority of the army consists of Crisis Suits, which interact with Dark Eldar really weirdly. The big doc of 8e damage calculations suggests Wyches, Kabalites and Clawed Fiends against suits. However, Wyches and Kabalites are forced to take a transport to work, which makes them very ineffective. This leaves us with Clawed Fiends. The issue with that is that I worry that they might completely crush the suits. So that creates this really weird situation where we only have one effective unit, which might be too effective.

I suppose my question is this: what units would have a edge over crisis suits, while not dominating them? Scourges? Wracks?

Why are vehicles ineffective ?
That's a weird idea for a Dark Eldar player ^^

As per usual the answer to your problem is darklight. Lots of it.

Well yeah, I see what you mean. They are highly effective in providing mobility and protection for the infantry, but seem disappointing offensively. The price is also rather prohibitive, especially at such low points levels as 500. I might be missing something though, I haven't fully wrapped my head around 8th edition yet.

FuelDrop wrote:

As per usual the answer to your problem is darklight. Lots of it.

It might be, but I'm not convinced. Four DL Scourges that don't move kill one shielded suit per turn, which sounds great. However, every suit can take two drones with them, and the one suit kill is the result of just one or two wounds - that's not even two drones per turn. Of course, the drones could be dealt with before firing the darklight, but that requires another substantial investment, which really drives the price up.

What i think is that he will struggle to kill your vehicles at that price tag.

Mppqlmd wrote:

What i think is that he will struggle to kill your vehicles at that price tag.

That's true, I didn't really consider attrition. That does seem like the answer I'm looking for. Thank you for that.

I find blasters to work really well against crisis suits, as well as the obvious Darklight. I guess if you don't want to be too killy then using our close combat stuff would be the best option (as our guns shred through them fairly well) For your friend though I highly recommend going for two Ghostkeels and a Stormsurge, that will put them in a really good place for expansion from that point with a competitive list, then kit out to taste

Furthermore crisis suits suck. If you want to be able to take an optimised list and still have trouble, tell them to run them as Commanders, three commanders calling Kauyon strike each turn optimised for different enemies (normally one with fusion, one missiles and one cyclic) is painful and will give you a very close and fun game.

Kabalite warrior spam, make those poison shots works =)

I've been looking at Tau for a bit as a second army as a break from the true kin ... And I've been looking at taking a Tau commander with two high output burst cannons and a drone controller following behind a couple units of 10 gun drones ... 88 str 5 shots at 2+ sounds like fun to me ... And as for the crisis suits 3 missile launchers watch that drop in like scourge and just stay where they are ... Or two missile launchers each with advanced targeting systems

Archon_91 wrote:

I've been looking at Tau for a bit as a second army as a break from the true kin ... And I've been looking at taking a Tau commander with two high output burst cannons and a drone controller following behind a couple units of 10 gun drones ... 88 str 5 shots at 2+ sounds like fun to me ... And as for the crisis suits 3 missile launchers watch that drop in like scourge and just stay where they are ... Or two missile launchers each with advanced targeting systems

Played tau since 4th, Gun drone spam is a very real threat, a friend ran it and it was nigh unbeatable with three commanders and a fireblade buffing them from behind. I will reiterate though that crisis are not very good this edition (that is unless the codex repairs them) and you would do much better proxying as commanders in the detachment available to them. Three commanders is the optimised list and honestly makes them only mid tier currently.

Disintegrators. Lot of them.