The new face of the Fire Warriors

The previous post was about the basic weapons of the Tau army, so I decided to continue by writing about their users, the Fire Warriors, and what differences there are about them. Fire Warriors are percieved as a bit underwhelming as a unit in 5th edition, it is true that they wield the strongest basic ranged infantry weapon of the game, but they lack the numbers of guardsmen, the thoughness of tactical marines or the ability to at leaast hold their ground in hand to hand of most basic infantry units. Their fraility makes them poor choices to hold objectives and their only true use as of now is to mount them on a devilfish to storm some unfortunate unit with short range fire (and, if this does not succeed in breaking the target, you are in trouble) or using their superior range to pick on enemies from a distance, but this literally halves their firepower and exposes them to enemy fire and charges (yay, everyone can run now, and the poor footslogging FWs are more endangered than ever). I really didn't want to relegate the FWs to a mounted role only. They are the mainstay of the Tau army, you should want to field them both mounted and on foot.
The first step in bringing the FWs to the 5th edition was to give them free Shas'ui and grenades of both types. Secondly, I gave them the ability to equip a limited number of rail rifles (at BS3); this has to do with a bigger scheme in the army aimed at allowing for more anti-MEq firepower, of which I'll speak in another post. Lastly and most importantly, I wanted to solve their "we suck at holding objectives" problem. They cannot depend on toughness, numbers or hand to hand capability like other armies, so I needed to find a way to exploit their firepower to deter assaults.
Fluffwise the Tau are mostly known as a really mobile force, so the whole objective holding stuff looks counter-intuitive, but we should remember that Tau also employ the Kauyon, using juicy targets as a lure to get the enemy close enough to deliver the blow, while waiting patiently. That's what I tried to picture there: Fire Warriors that wait for the enemy to move close enough to be obliterated by their fire, by resurrecting an old 2nd edition rule: Overwatch. If a FW unit doesn't move or shoot for a turn, it may shoot in the opponent's turn instead, after the opponent ended his movement phase. The interesting thing about this rule is that it increases the threat level of closing in to Fire Warriors (if you move close to a Overwatching FW unit it's quite likely that you'll be selected as a target and fired upon, and maybe get pinned or break, before you can charge) without increasing their firepower in any way, which is good for general game balance.