have you even seen floid play?
Not only did I see but also played once against him and kept him near his base (that was a 3 v 3 game on Calderis) with my OP Chaos units that deal too much damage to HI.
but loosing warriors sounds more like a passage of play thing, not a balance thing.
Do warriors need to be around their melee units in order to provide melee synapse? They do.
Does that mean they are more exposed to damage than their colleagues who provide ranged synapse? It does.
Are you aware that heavy armour is a DISADVANTAGE for melee combat? You should be.
Are you aware that a whole lot of melee units deal power melee damage along with most melee oriented heroes? Look it up on Codex.
Summing up all these factors I absolutely disagree with your statement that it is EASY to keep warriors alive. Even one more factor - they are hard to keep alive because nowadays every faction has a decent/sometimes even more than that answer in the form of a ranged unit. Sudden death of a warrior is almost a guaranteed victory for your opponent in an even melee fight.
What race has better T1 melee than it does ranged units?
That is an interesting question. Let me analyze. Let's take for examples races that have more than 2 melee oriented units in their T1.
Orks' ranged units are superior to their melee units. Very high damage coming from shoota boyz and a very useful trait for a setup team which is infiltration. But stormboyz and slugga boyz alone are better than tyranids' melee units even in T1. Stormboyz have crazy damage, their lack of on land effect is compenstated by suppression on demand from shoota boyz, so nothing gets away from them. Slugga boyz can be trashed by ranged fire but they are still good at chasing due to their flamers and tracking special attacks, their damage is also higher.
Chaos have really great melee units and I would not say that their ranged army composition is superior to their melee units. Aspiring heretics are probably the best counter-initiation unit among T1-units, raptors are good, definitely worse than say ASM but they do not die without completing their job like say raveners who take a lot of damage while they "jump", then they don't deal enough damage themselves to force off anything and then they just die due to their armour type because they can't withstand ranged fire (T1 it is mostly piercing ranged fire).
So I would say that slight adjustments to tyranids' T1 melee units could be done. Because they seem really unattractive to use.
I would move in these directions.
Increase hormagaunts overall DPS so they do more damage than slugga boyz. Why? They have a pathetic melee skill. Every other melee unit will toss them around. Their damage type is also nothing impressive. Such a big gap in melee skill won't let them beat other melee units anyway but at least when they manage to get their claws on something they will cause a little bit more harm before they retreat (ATM it is just pointless to send them against RANGED units like csm, tacs, strike squads, they don't beat them 1 v 1 if they need to close the distance, it just cannot be right). In T2 they don't have a leader with huge DPS or some useful ability so with the increased amount of ordinary models they cannot be OP. Also worth mentioning that almost every lightly armoured melee unit has some ability to DRASTICALLY reduce incoming ranged fire, hormagaunts don't, even their fast speed don't help, they just die under fire while other melee units tank it pretty well.
Warriors in T1 are alright given there are less counters to HI than it is in T2. So let's move on to raveners.
And here we have a completely incompetent jump unit. First thing that grates me is the requirement of energy to perform a "jump". 75 is just not right. I would reduce that to adequate 65. Another thing is just laughable. The point of any jump unit is to close the distance to a ranged unit without taking damage. When raveners perform their burrowing they DO take damage. Which is nonsense and absurd. Give them the standard 90% damage resistance while "airborne". Though we talk about T1 performance, let me mention this. They have a really overpriced T2 ability. It just shouldn't cost that much. I would just reduce that to 15 power or buff it somehow. Give them more melee damage if they equip it regardless they have already ranged weapons or not. One good thing about T2 jump units is that they all have on land effect and really high damage which instantly should force a setup team to retreat if no loses are welcome. Raveners cannot have their melee synapse, they will die before warriors get to them, so more damage is a fair addition to their performance.
