How Tyranids will improve in 6th edition

Hi everyone !!

I'm sure most everyone is busy reading all the new information and rumors circulating on the Internet. While we still don't have a complete picture so far it looks to me like Tyranids will significantly improve in 6th edition. We have to factor in the buffs for the other armies as well for a complete analysis but for now I'll just focus on the perceived perks for Tyranids:

— Rending is AP2; This is a major deterrent to the new 2+ armor save that will nerf power weapons (AP3)... This is great for our genestealers and raveners.

— Bone Swords ignore armor saves and are not classified as power weapons; We have to see if this could change with a new FAQ but my gut feeling is this won't change... If so then Warriors and Shrikes are going to suddenly get a lot better. If monstrous creature melee attacks are AP2 or less the Tyrant won't need a bone sword but the combination with a lash whip is still lethal. If monstrous creatures ignore the effects of terrain as well then you won't need the lash whip so you can take another biomorphic instead.

— Preferred Enemy affects both shooting and melee; I currently a fair amount of shooty units in my army and keep most of these units clustered together for synapse so it will be easy to add a foot slogging Tyrant with Old Adversary to my army in place of the Tyranid Prime for my second HQ... All that bio shooting suddenly got a whole better - especially for my devilgants! It helps my Tyrannofex as well.

— 2+ Sv negates power weapons (AP3); As I said above I'm planning to add a walking Tyrant to my army for preferred enemy and of course he will have an armored shell. I'm also planning to run a brood of two Tyrant Guard with bone swords - this will be an extremely lethal unit in melee and force my opponents to think very hard about assaulting my fire base.

— Monstrous Creatures with wings will function a lot like the new fliers (Vector Strike); This makes them much faster and a much bigger threat... You can play more aggressively with this unit more often and inflict a lot more damage.

— Psychic Powers; This has the potential to be very huge as you can field a lot of psykers in a Tyranid army... e.g., Tyrants, Tervigons, Broodlords, Zoanthropes, just to name a few. ; ) Now it's possible your Tyrant can get an invulnerable save and stuff like psychic hoods have no affect on powers that enhance your own army. Zoies can be used to buff your army. Like I said there's a whole heck of a lot of potential here.

— Beasts ignore the effects of terrain, move 12" and can reroll the 2d6 for the assault move; I'll probably be adding in a brood of raveners in place of my Yrmgarl genestealers. Raveners will be a go to unit that can assault those hard to reach units like frightened guardsmen hiding in a ruin. Heh!

— If you wreck or destroy a transport in melee your melee unit is then automatically locked in combat with the embarked enemy unit that spills out; This is a big one !!! No more popping a chimera then having to soak up a full turn of shooting before you can eat what fell out... A huge buff for genestealers in my opinion. I really like it a lot.

There are some other very interesting rumors floating around such as monstrous creatures will become Eternal Warriors... Yet another huge potential buff and I think we could see the return of NidZilla !! It's looking like monstrous creatures will come into a new level all their own after having been the weak sauce in 5th edition. It's very exciting. Things like snap fire I'm really not too worried about. So I'm thinking Tyranids are going to be a lot more popular again and they will definitely be much more competitive. All of this is great news for me after having done well at WarGamesCon this past weekend. It's time to start tweaking the current list and then see where it goes from there. It definitely can't get any worse and that's a good thing.