Reavers, help me understand their utility

Being able to double one shooting phase and split fire makes MSU vs. Tau extremely difficult. A good Tau player will also be mobile with his jet pack moves.

TeenageAngst wrote:

Being able to double one shooting phase and split fire makes MSU vs. Tau extremely difficult.

Double one shooting phase? Are you talking about the stormsurges anchors and riptide wing here?

If you are not running MSU vs tau you are simply presenting him with less targets for his formidable firepower.
You are making his target priority easier, markerlights and combined fire formation rule more efficient, and each target he does destroy will be a bigger chunk of your army/pts.  

You also have less units to sacrifice to overwatch so their mates can charge unmolested and less obj scoring ability, that's one way you beat tau... on obj pts.

TeenageAngst wrote:

A good Tau player will also be mobile with his jet pack moves.

Agreed.

I normally don't have trouble with Tau, however I don't have luck with reavers. However battle company is my biggest nightmare with my current builds.
It sounds like I may have more luck with more reavers against battle company but possibly at the cost of being less useful against tau?

You normally don't have trouble with tau.
What the hell army are you using cuz it's definitely not DE.
Or you are playing a sub par tau player or tau army.
When I play against tau it feels like you are getting assault because there's no way to hide or stop the onslaught of death and penetration. If I play a tau player in a tournament I usually just tell them congrats on their victory before we start and cry

I too don't often have trouble with tau. Not when I played straight DE and definitely not now that I play 3 faction alliances. The only game I've lossed to tau in the last 2 years was the very first time I ran into their reserve trap, retaliation cadre I think? and didn't quite understand what I was dealing with.

Tau are not difficult to deal with unless your playing with the bog standard spam venoms approach. Even Reavers are fine against Tau so long as you either stay out of range/LOS and aren't the first thing to charge. Scenarios like this where there will be plentiful ignores cover are precisely why I take min squads of reavers instead of 6 person squads and take blasters/heat lances on every squad.

Order of priority:

Marker lights > Broadsides > Stormsurge > ... > Riptides

Against straight riptide wing realize that your opponent is bad and you can just ignore them and win by objectives.

Might be a local meta thing (Northern California), but pure Tau just aren't on top here. Most the players actually feel sorry for Tau. Riptide wing is nice but it's generally used with other factions.

As for me, I typically use a Succubus, 3 units of mandrakes 1-2 units of grots (I take the formation if 2), 3-5 gun boats, 2-3 razorwing jetfighters, and ravagers and/or pain engines. Sprinkle in some reavers if points and slots allow.

My gun boats always have blasters and are usually 7 man strong with a lance on the raider (no other upgrades ever), and lately I've been adding in the champion with haywire grenade (146 points).
Lately I haven't had any venoms in my lists.

If I go double CAD, then the second CAD HQ will be a single Lammy.

I change things around a bit but the list seems to end up back to something similar. I was using alot of pain engines and no grots but grav was to devastating.

To be clear, I'm happy with my dark eldar's performance and win more than lose but there are plenty of lists that are very hard to deal with, especially battle company.

Must be a meta thing. Tau reign supreme up here in Washington.
That's the first I've ever read someone feeling sorry for tau.
Riptide wing by itself isn't good of course. The guys I play use other options within tau

If anyone has strategies for dealing with Tau please share them because they're the one hurdle I can't get over.

OK guys, I consider myself to be something an expert on this. I run 16 units of 3 at 1850pts. I run them all with a blaster and cluster caltrops and I make sure to put them on the same model so it's easier to protect. With that many units it's nearly impossible for my opponents to kill more than a third of them before they charge on turn 2. 16 blaster shots is more than enough for most heavy armor and you can always charge with the caltrops vs vehicles as well, remember they can pen AV 14. I've taken down Imperial Knights with reaver more than once. The key is to gang up on your targets. I like to think of my travers like a wolf pack with each squad representing a single wolf. Individuals they're not going to take down anything big but together they can kill anything.

Raiders can pretty much obscure the reavers 100%. Use them as LOS blockers if you really need them to get in.

But I feel raiders are more useful tankshocking the crap out of the Tau to force them out of cover, gib anchored Stormsurges, etc. In Tau matchups, Reavers are there to die, not to kill. Let them spend markerlights on the bikes, let them kill the bikes, hurt them with everything else.

I actually disagree. If you have enough reverse say 6 to 12 units they can do an off a lot of damage to Tau battle suits on turn 2. You don't even need to win the fights. Just get into them and lock the suits in close combat. And if you have many small units of three bikes they can't kill them fast enough.Tau units are very good at putting a lot of damage on a single enemy unit, but they generally are bad at shooting down multiple small units and end up wasting a lot of damage output in killing only a handful of models .

I actually agree with you, but thats kinda tailoring the list which I generally dont do. And its a spam list which I dont do either. But that does not mean it is not effective. :-)

doctorz wrote:

I actually disagree. If you have enough reverse say 6 to 12 units they can do an off a lot of damage to Tau battle suits on turn 2. You don't even need to win the fights. Just get into them and lock the suits in close combat. And if you have many small units of three bikes they can't kill them fast enough.Tau  units are very good at putting a lot of damage on a single enemy unit, but they generally are bad at shooting down multiple small units and end up wasting a lot of damage output in killing only a handful of models .

My thoughts exactly.
Its not tailoring either as reaver spam is effective against most comp lists. Lawerce has proven this.

They just cant stop them all. It only takes an handful to charge (along with the rest of your army) to rip tau to pieces and own the obj game.

Alright, but at that point, especially when you consider that many folks put detachment limits on the game, you're heavily restricting your access to our FA FOC slots, even if you're opting to take an RRD. Yes Dual RRD's will give you FA slots for days but that is also extreme pigeonholing of a different variety. I think this is absolutely a viable TAC approach, but I don't think that Reaver spam is the only way to make them act cost efficiently, your aims simply must change accordingly.

That said you are hitting the nail on the head. Denied flank into a handful of surgical close combat is how I recommend dealing with Tau. You'll bleed buckets, but they're going to bleed out.

I'd like to know how even 12 squads of Reavers are going to stop a Riptide Wing. They will kill 6 squads of Reavers in one turn even with just a minimum 3 man wing.

"I move my Reavers up."

"Okay, I declare ripple fire."

And so goes about 450 points of bikes.

Why are you moving 12 units, that can move 48" per turn, simultaneously into the range of 3 riptides?

Because they have to get into charge range? I'm assuming you want to get closer so you can charge things and their range is 24".

Noooooooo, your thinking like a craftworlder. Make them engage you. The T4 thing and super maneuverability means that Reavers actually do get significantly better every turn. Stalemating outside of their range is often fine. They'll either move them, in which case you pounce because then they can't use hailfire, they'll expose their markerlight units, in which case you pounce on those to blunt the impact of return fire from the riptides since you'll actually get your jinks, or they'll leave an avenue where one of the riptides isn't covered by both the other two, and that's your path to CC.

Jetpack units like Riptides are surprisingly maneuverable, so they're not often going to leave themselves exposed very often. Crisis suits are a nuisance too, and many times Tau will deep strike meaning they have basically a whole shooting phase with you at optimal range. Most of these things are going to be supported by a long range fire option like a Stormsurge which will just be periodically smacking your bikes/boats around as well. Dancing out of range of Tau is not the game I want to play. Smashing through is.

I play Corsairs first and foremost, I'm well aware of the maneuverability of jetpack units. What I was pointing out is specific to the riptide wing in that they can't move before using hailfire, and the majority of their movement occurs in the assault phase.

Crisis suits in my face isn't actually a problem, there is no way they'll be getting their supporting fire from the actual scary thing.

This whole conversation is moot if you don't want to play this way though. That's how you accomplish this goal specifically with the tools at our disposal in the hypothetical.

For smash through you want the freakshow hands down.

That's why I heavily favor the Covens units. They're a battering ram that can turtle when need be and are especially fearsome against things with low AP and Rending, since all their saves are made with FNP. A Grotesquerie is going to take half the game to shoot down if it has any kind of a cover save and even against Tau, they're going to need to lay all their fire into the advancing Grotesques, leaving the boats behind them free to mow things down.

I wholeheartedly agree, though with detachment limits I'm almost never backing them up with boats. Why take obsec venoms with 2 splinter cannons when I can take 3 jetbikes with splinter cannons for basically the same price. I really wish tourny's would do away with the plithy detachment limits. I almost always hit the 3 detachment limit well before point cap, simply because I want things from different sources (that used to be 1 source mind) and we have no viable way of taking both of things as one detachment slot unlike everyone else... besides Harlies and nids proper.

Imagine running like 5 Scalpel Squadrons. You can null deploy, then deep strike 10 Venoms with 10 units of Wracks and still have about 500 points left over for anti-tank.

TeenageAngst wrote:

I'd like to know how even 12 squads of Reavers are going to stop a Riptide Wing. They will kill 6 squads of Reavers in one turn even with just a minimum 3 man wing.

"I move my Reavers up."

"Okay, I declare ripple fire."

And so goes about 450 points of bikes.

If you are dumb enough to move 6 units into range and LOS of 3 tides. While simultaneously ignoring the most basic of anti-tau tactics ie. kill the marker lights then yes, this may happen.

TeenageAngst wrote:

Imagine running like 5 Scalpel Squadrons. You can null deploy, then deep strike 10 Venoms with 10 units of Wracks and still have about 500 points left over for anti-tank.

You mean unlike space marines who can do something very similar with drop pods in a CAD + the Skyhammer? They're able to do this with a 2 detachment limit. We'd need to be playing in a no limit format to do something similar, and THEN all you'd be deep striking is venoms and wracks that aren't really effective vs vehicles or infantry with a 3+ or better save, and who are vulnerable to scatter, unlike the drop pods. Oooooh. Scary.