6th Edition Tau

Firstly i'd like to get the following out of the way; Much to my dispair the XV88 railguns have been reduced to a pitiful S8, i will admit to a little nerd rage over this on Saturday evening, but once i realised that 'what is taken is also given' i calmed down a bit. The XV88 suit had been a mainstay of my Tau lists since i started collecting Tau 7 years ago. i loved my XV88s, and they returned that love by reliably killing everything that they pointed at. But in return that are very cheap, still very killy and now can get skyfire. Was S10 AP1 overpowered on an infantry model? especially when you could potentially have 9 of them (and i did use lists with 9 broadsides), does that mean that infantry based Las cannons are over powered? Part of my frustration at the XV88 reconfiguration (i wont call it a nerf) comes from where i normally play 40K due to the <750 pts per game rule. There is usually 1 game type, its called "can you kill a landraider?". Before Saturday the answer was always yes. Now no so much so. I think the reasoning from GW is to improve the survivablilty of AV14, because being impervious to everything lower than S9 wasnt survivable enough evidently... Now i got that off my chest. The new Tau codex has brought the Tau inline with the other 6th edition codexes, and this is no bad thing. I have alway maintained that even the ancient codex the Tau were competative even in the 6th editon, even with the outrageous points costs and all else that went along with the codex. you could punish most opponants with lots of high strength low AP fire, in the right hands this was devastating. So in short not much has changed, its just removed most of the flaws. So in the right hands the Tau are now the annhilatory force they always should have been. The short bit; Tau still suck at hand to hand combat, so what, they should do, thats not what we use the Tau for. The Tau are now the perect tool to troll all of those space marine players who use outrageous special characters and landraiders in low point games. My personal favourite was a recent 750pt game against Kaldor Draigo, Castellen Crow and some (not many) paladins and purifiers. The result; a sound tabling by turn 3 for my erstwhile foe, for no loss. Multitrackers are now standard on crisis suits, i had a little chuckle at this. But the smile was wiped of my face quickly when i relised that targetting arrays no longer exsist. So my dreams of BS4 crisis suits have been cruelly crushed. But if i was going to start thinking enough about it, i would probably draw to the conclusion that the a Tau army with BS4 crisis suits would mean those suits would be self sufficient, and not reliant on the synergies the Tau are supposed to use. Fear not, now is the time of the markerlight (take as many markerlights as you can get in every list, you should have been doing this anyway) you can increase BS by +1 as many times as you like (my personal mission over the coming weeks is to get my firewarriors up to BS 10 in a game...) you can for 2 marker tokens remove cover, completely. Before i got too excited about this i realised the average cover save was 5+ and thats how many tokens you'd need to achieve that effect, gone to ground scouts with camo cloaks in bolstered ruins? especially those nasty objective sitters, they just became ineffective. that's enough for now. I still need to digest most of it and if i were to do a full analysis it would be rather extensive.