Poison Tongue venoms into tau?

So a lot of the big tau builds seem to be using a mix of crisis suits and broadsides (all sporting 2w shield drones for ablative wounds). I'm still at a bit of a loss for what to do against tau, but Poison Tongue venoms seem to be a decent counter in my mind.

A venom with two splinter cannons can kill about 2 drones on average or about 3/4 of a crisis suit. It's also helpful that venoms counteract markerlights with the innate -1 to hit and MSU helps against how well Tau can focus down big units. The redeploy from PT is also useful in a pinch.

The venoms are also decent at chipping down squads of fire warriors and pathfinders sitting in the back and poison tongue makes them feel the morale losses a bit more.

Is it worth it? Or are raiders still the better pick all round?

I think the Venom are a better choice with both the -1 to hit and the invlun against ranged attacks that the raider doesn't have it makes it a bit more survivable against tau shooting

II'm not sure that -1 to hit is better than -1 to wound. A lot of the Tau firepower is between Sr5 and 6. So T6 Raiders sounds way more appealing than T5 Venoms, expecially if you consider that pointwise, Raider spam can carry (i.e. protect) more bodies than the Venom spam. Bodies that will die badly with this saturation.


I think Raider Spam will be the way to go.

Cerve wrote:

II'm not sure that -1 to hit is better than -1 to wound. A lot of the Tau firepower is between Sr5 and 6. So T6 Raiders sounds way more appealing than T5 Venoms, expecially if you consider that pointwise, Raider spam can carry (i.e. protect) more bodies than the Venom spam. Bodies that will die badly with this saturation.


I think Raider Spam will be the way to go.

I can see this being a viable option too, using all of those raiders to charge and shock prow tau riptide, broadside battlesuits or crisis battle suits could be a great way to dump mortals onto them same with commanders ... but I guess it's really hard to know which will be better until both have been played a few times

Venoms have decent play into Tau. MSU units prevent their millions of Blast weapons from putting out maximum shots. For this reason I don't think big blobs of Wracks are as good anymore, especially if you run them as Prophets of Flesh. Venoms with -1 to hit make Tau hit you on 4-5's, which is a lot better than 3-4's, considering they have easy access to re-roll 1's.

Poison Tongue wounding everything on 3's is good but 0 or 1 AP is garbage in this meta. I may still consider Poison Tongue for the natural synergy with Venoms and the re-deploy being useful against Tau lists that go first and blow you off the board.

Right now though, there is just no good answer to Tau. They have indirect fire, bodyguard rules and fire and fade. Literally the trifecta of rules that allow them to play the game immune from return fire. This might have been offset by having less accurate or powerful shooting except that they also have accurate and powerful shots, even when shooting indirectly. Nice one GW.

Your chances of beating Tau as they are now are very slim, so don't over-commit to trying to counter them. You're better off building for Custodes, who we can actually beat because they don't have ridiculous rules, just very high resilience. Have a gameplan and certain units you think will play well into Tau, and then once they're FAQ'd to not be the broken mess they are now, your adjustments will start to show dividends.

Dont forget that Tau have access to Crisis Commanders that give a unit of Crisis "Ignore any and all hit modifiers", which would negate the Venoms -1 to hit.

Raiders are likely a better transport due to T6, which the Tau have a hard time ignoring while also hiding out of LOS

Would the Venom spam work in combo with Mandrakes using fade away to close with the Tau using cover if it also counts as a modifier?

Is the new Webway Gate an option to close in on T'au?