A few ideas, based on background

Wraiths:
Fearless and/or reinforced armour.  They can phase in and out of reality, so should be hard to take down.

Maybe even living metal and fearless.

C'tan bomb:
Why not make C'tan an extra objective or an additional BTS formation.  They are the lving gods of the Necrons and their loss (though temporary) would effect them.

This means the C'tan will not be thrown away hoping it will explode, rather it will be supported so that it isn't taken down.

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Tyranid air marshal

But you've never posted these playtests, so no one knows what's happening in them.

How can a model that has one shot that misses *50%* of the time it shoots be so dominating?  Even if there's four of them in play, that's an average of *two* lost models a turn...

A *Shadowsword* cost the same, shoots it's TK better and can *MOVE* and you don't hear people complaining about them being hideously broken.

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It's the AA that's the problem, not the ground fire. The enemy doesn't have to be air heavy, but having even a single transport aircraft is enough to be entirely shut down by multiple pylons. That's not fair.

I have no problem with the ground fire, but lessening the overkill on the AA shot is probably a good thing. AA5+, TK1 and a shorter range are all good ideas, and could be combined with in increase in DC or a price drop to make single Pylons less rubbish. The ground shot can stay the same as it is now.

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

600 points "shutting down" 200 points isn't fair?  Seems like it's wasteful to me... just don't deploy the aircraft until the Pylons are neutralized... or don't put anything in it and deploy your formations normally... or planetfall the transports if you've got the option... to me it seems like there's a lot of ways around it.

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What the heck about the Pylon allows it to do this?!?!?  What allows a Pylon to ignore LOS?!

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Hena is referring to the AA shot, which ignores line of sight.

600 points "shutting down" 200 points isn't fair?

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

The big problem for me with the Pylon is the D3 part of the titan killer for the AA only. It produces a 1/3 (33%) chance of downing a thunderhawk in one shot (excluding the 1/36 chance of a crit). 3 hydra, excluding the possibility of crits, has a 0.08% chance of taking it down. You'd have to get 7 hydra to reach the same level of threat as one pylon. When was the last time you flew aircraft through seven hydra?

By and large thunderhawks and similar transport aircraft are the things that are going to be disproportionately affected by the weapon, because it can only shoot down one aircraft - if your aircraft is 200 + 400 points of transported troops, that's a bitter pill. So ork fighta bommers probably don't give two hoots about the power of the pylon. There's a balance of sorts there - but I don't subscribe to this sort of paper-rock-scissors concept of balance.

I could live with the pylon just dropped the D3 and made it TK(1). That would - barring criticals - ensure that you'd need several pylons in concert to blow heavy transports out of the air while still retaining the same power against squadrons.

So, you're forced to think outside the box with a "Thunderhawk Army of Doom" when facing a Pylon-heavy Necron force... why is that a bad thing?  The TAD force can hammer almost any other army, why shouldn't there be one that can hammer it back?

If that same Pylon-heavy army is facing an army with little air or with hordes of infantry, those Pylons are basically useless.

It's, perhaps, "Rock, Paper, Scissors" against *one* type of army, "Air transported", but you're never *forced* to put your formations *in* those air transports, so that's why I don't see this being an insurmountable problem.

Against a low air army, it's a waste of Necron points.

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chroma i absolutely agree w/ everything you said. should we change the eldar lists because an army of nids has trouble dealing w/ all the skimmers?
the 7 hydra arguement is nice.... but it also takes 7 blast markers to render it useless rather then only 2 for the pylon.
what if both sides conceeded? would keeping the range and stats the same but dropping it to TK1 make both sides happy? i could live w/ it.

I will say this - changing the range on it makes no sense for the fluff.  This is something that strikes spacecraft from the ground, yet it can't hit something across the board?  

TK hit - same thing.  D3 is unreasonable until you think about what it does to a spacecraft coming into orbit.

Changing it to a AA5+ has some room for discussion, but we really need to ask if this is a broken unit or an unwillingness to change your tactics?

The other day I played a air assault Space Marine army against the Necrons and the end result was 2150 to 1960 (Necrons won by 190 points).  I had a pair of Thunderbolts, a Landing Craft, and a Thunderhawk.  If there was any army to get crushed it was this one, but I changed my tactics by unloading the Thunderhawk from the outset.  I used ground based attacks to soften and occasionally break the formation.  The Thunderbolts were used to do the same thing on one occasion - the rest of the time I flew around the range of the Pylon and attacked Necron formations without any problem (120cm still leaves room for maneuver).  In four turns, the Pylon hit and killed one Thunderbolt and struck the Landing Craft for 3 DC.  All three formations survived in some capacity. (No camera, no batrep, but there is the summary of the air parts of it).

Yes, I agree two or more Pylons would have been more difficult.  I also will tell you that this is the chance you take when you bring an all air assault army.  I've had worse games when I've played against ePilgrim's Guard where he brings a blanket of Hydras in every stinkin' army.  

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It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I've got my Milkbone underwear on.

But there hasn't been a *single* documented playtest that I'm aware of that has shown that the current Pylon stats lack "playability", it's all been anecdotal or "theoryhammer".

Why can't one of the "Pacify the Pylons" folk show us this problem in action, without the excuse of "It's so obviously broken no one will even try to play against it".

OF COURSE if you use the same, "Fly in and unload" tactics you'd use against any other army you're going to be in trouble, but why is it "unplayable" for an "air assault" army to have to try something different once in a while?

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