I feel bad for anyone who can't find a use for a Devilfish better than as a bullet-catcher for a team of Fire Warriors. Alternately, if you're reduced to using a perfectly functional tank with good anti-personnell weapons to provide a cover save to your infantry, you've probably already won or already lost anyway and the presence or absence of the Devilfish isn't going to make a bit of difference.

I really get that Straylight. On that same point though - I've never felt that the Devilfish was a fantastic anti-infantry platform unless you're fighting a lot of light armor. For myself it was alway the tank with a 60-point upgrade to be scoring, and I did quite well in 5th with that. 6th is a new game, and I don't feel it fits well in it. Nor do Rhinos. Nor do a lot of other common transports from the 5th era.

The Warfish maybe thanks to some things you can pull off around Focus Fire with SMS, but with the Hull Point system if that thing is anywhere near a threat it'd pop quickly. At least this way a very valuable (ie: scoring), much more versatile (anti-mech, anti-infantry), and much more dangerous (pulse rifles) unit can live longer by deploying behind it and then using it for cover when they're not firing.

I agree completely; that's not what I'm questioning. I'm questioning why you feel it necessary to Flat Out the Warfish and thereby lose its shooting in the process. I can see no good reason to ever do so: the FoF still works for all the same reasons it used to, except that the additional range of RF Pulse Rifles makes it work better even despite the new assault rules.

Yes, the game has changed. Yes, we will adapt to it. Adapting to it doesn't mean throwing out all of our tactics in the process.

This is ATT. We invented the Mech Tau lists, strategies, and tactics during an edition where vehicles were "useless" and "pointless" and "free VPs", and we turned a mediocre army book into a viable and dangerous fighting force by doing something that conventional metagame wisdom said at the time was exactly, empirically the wrong thing to do.

In fifth, we adapted. Skimmers changed and people whined that Mech Tau was dead, that the FoF was dead, etc, etc. We made it work. We figured it out. We still had one of the better transports in the game, and possibly the best all-rounder tank in the game.

Now here we are in sixth, and I think people are being too quick to pass judgement on vehicles in the game. Sixth hasn't been around long enough for things to really shake out. Did vehicles get weakened? Honestly, I don't think so. I think it's a wash; defensive weapons are gone, which is good for us; Flat Out, Snap Fire, the new Skimmer rules... all to our benefit. Yes, Hull Points make our vehicles theoretically weaker, but how often did one of our tanks survive three damage rolls anyway? Most often, we either lost all our guns or Immobilized and crashed.

Don't condemn what we don't know yet. Give it six months and see how things shake out. Our vehicles have always been a cut above everyone else's in how well-rounded they are. That's still a strength we possess. We leveraged it to our advantage in 3rd. We leveraged it to our advantage in 4th. We leveraged it to our advantage in 5th.

I see no reason to break that trend now.

That isn't true. 'Scout Moving' no longer exists. Instead, you redeploy - pick up your devilfish and set it down 12" away. It never moved, thus no Jink save.

Decoy launchers may be useful for this tactic (and devilfish in general) as immobilizing a flat out skimmer will kill it.

So far, the only times I've had a Devilfish move Flat Out was when they were either (a) far out of range of any enemy fire, such as during the early turns of a Hammer & Anvil, or (b) to put the tank completely behind terrain, making the issue moot.