Riptide Battlesuit
SWORD: what Riptide Battlesuit kills
Damage for its points
per 100 pts spent
Its 190 pts kill ~99 pts in one activation.Typical shooter: 44 per 100
Best against light vehicles and monsters, weakest against hordes
Into each enemy type
Units near it by SWORD
In T'au Empire
Across the game· shooters
SHIELD: how hard Riptide Battlesuit is to kill for its points
Toughness for its points
per 100 pts spent
Its 190 pts take ~624 pts of enemy units to kill.Typical shooter: 298 per 100
Units near it by SHIELD
In T'au Empire
Across the game· shooters
What creators say
5 creators- Tough all-rounder that kills elite infantry 2 of 5
- Suits the elite marine meta 1 of 5
- Still two per list where taken 1 of 5
- Price rises took it off the staple list 2 of 5
- Dies too easily to new melta guns 1 of 5
- Value is board control, not damage 1 of 5
Compare
| Unit | Letter | SWORD | SHIELD | Lists |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Riptide Battlesuit190 pts | B | Top 30% | Top 37% | 84of 226 |
| Razorshark Strike Fighter160 pts | D | Top 26% | Top 27% | 2of 226 |
| Broadside Battlesuits150 pts | A | Top 23% | Top 23% | 130of 226 |
How we got these numbers
What we ran
Riptide Battlesuit, 190 pts, with 1 Riptide fists, 1 Twin plasma rifle, 1 Ion accelerator - overcharge, 1 Ion accelerator - standard, in Starfire Cadre. On its own: no leader, no stratagems, no other units' auras. Counted as dice: its own abilities, the army rule and the detachment's rule.
SWORD
Enemy points it kills in one activation, per 100 pts of its own, against a mix of targets weighted like top tournament lists.
190 pts → kills ~99 pts → 52 per 100SHIELD
Enemy points it takes to kill it, per 100 pts of its own: the points of the cheapest units from top lists that kill it 80% of the time. It's per point, so a costly unit has to be much tougher to score the same.
~624 pts → 328 per 100Top and bottom %
Where each number ranks among the game's 407 shooters. How we score.
The letter
The average of 8 creators' newest T'au Empire tier lists: 6 Plus Plus Gaming (unit tier list, with its pinned comment) (13 Oct), Tau Tactics (meta watch of five top-cut lists from LVO and LGT) (4 Oct), Goonhammer / tabletopbattles.com (Competitive Innovations: 5 full post-dataslate winning lists and 16 summaries) (23 Oct), WednesdayNightWarhammer (State of the Empire, dataslate review; few units graded) (2 Oct), Puretide Program (WTC 2026 meta analysis: unit counts across the T'au lists) (6 Aug), Tawnis Tactics (Learn to Play Kroot: unit review inside Kroot Hunting Pack) (5 Sep), Invasive Wargaming (damage per point mathhammer after the July update) (28 Jul), Vanguard Tactics (competitive breakdown of the 1-DP detachments on preview rules; unit views inferred) (15 Jun). Questions? Get in touch.
Lists
226 public T'au Empire tournament lists, September – November 2026, from grimstat-corpus (CC BY 4.0). Also from Listhammer, MiniHeadQuarters, ChampionsHub. Questions about a list or an event? Get in touch. Numbers run 2 Nov.