Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Dark Eldar Army Breakdown 4: Heavy Support


Captain Obvious here with another installment of Dark Eldar units; theHeavy Support choices.
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First off ill knock one Heavy support choice right off because it is by far the biggest waste of points, money and would even be a waste of time spending 2 minutes priming them. This unit is Scourges. They are extremely overpriced warriors with extremely over priced heavy weapons. If someone has a viable way to actually field them please chime in and post a comment because i'd seriously love to see it.
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Ok now that we have that out of the way lets move on to some real heavy support choices. The second choice I will cover will be the Talos. Talos are about the coolest thing in the Dark Eldar list. At least to me they are, especially considering they are considered monstrous creatures now (read your FAQs haters) and STILL follow their special rules for armor penetration. For every successful hit a Talos does on a vehicle after the first hit he adds +1 to the armor penetration roll. So basically if you hit 6 times you would basically be at S12+2D6 pen. Granted it will rarely happen...but you never know. Talos are basically the Wraith Lords of DE. For me they fill two major roles.
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Role #1........Bullet sponges.....people see a couple Talos on the table and they are an instant threat to them. People will spend turns popping big guns into the Talos attempting to kill them, but while doing that they are neglecting your raiders and allowing you to get your raiders within combat range. Since raiders can move 12....disembark and then your troops can assault it usually pans out to be a big mistake if the enemy focus fires too much into the Talos.
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Their 2nd role is as close combat beasts. Talos in cc are just nasty. D6+1 attacks on the charge powered at WS5 S7 T7 is something that most units can't deal with. Granted you don't have an inv. save on them you still can not be insta killed so it usually takes a lot to drop those 3 wounds and most units are wounding them on 6+. Granted Talos are somewhat slow, they still have a niche in a full raider army. Usually Talos play out like this. People focus fire them and drop them down to 1 or 2 wounds each. Your main force hits their front lines and a huge combat begins. If you suffered losses on the way into combat you may not win a full out 4 turn battle, but with your Talos slowly creeping up they make the perfect clean up units. A Talos charging in with usually 4-5 attacks usually is enough to assist in routing a squad and helping turn the fight back to your side.
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The last heavy choice I will go over will be the ravager. These are armor 11 raiders with a lot of big guns. I prefer the 105pts version with 3 dark lances (S8 AP2 Heavy 1, Lance). Ravagers have the ability to pop any tank in the game with ease, granted you roll half way decent,which I haven't been doing lately. The other weapons setup on Ravagers is the 3 disintegrators (Dizzies). These have 2 firing options. They can either be 36' S7 AP2 blast (Basically plasma cannon) or they can shoot 24' S4 AP3 Heavy 3. The nice thing about this weapon setup is that you can move 6' and shoot the template OR you can move 12 and still shoot all three weapons at S4 AP3 Heavy 3(Defensive Weapons).
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If I make a list with a Dizzy Ravager I will almost always take 2 other ravagers with the x3 DL setup. This gives me the tank busting I need and the horde killing power of the dizzies from the other ravager. I have found from experience that you do not want to mix the weapons on ravagers. You want all 3 of the same. A ravager is either a tank popper or a troop killer, there is no in-between.
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Quickly i'll go over how I setup up my DE force that usually proves well for me. If I win the roll for table edge and first turn I will ALWAY Stake it. I set up my force so that my opponent is afraid of the center of the table. I will always stack my 2 dark lance warrior squads in the center in cover and spread my ravagers in the middle with them covering open lanes on the table. The rest of the force is up to you; given our speed you can completely redeploy your force in one turn and be ready to combat any setup that your opponent has thrown at you. Seeing as you have so many dark lances in the center of the table most people will stray away from setting up in the middle for fear of getting dark lance spammed. This works to your advantage because they will either bunch up in one corner or split their forces. In my opinion, I have found that splitting a dark Eldar as a horde seeing as we will out number most armies (Chaos, Space Marines, Eldar) well that is it for now.
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Any comments are of course welcomed and encouraged. I'd love to hear some feed back from some of the other dark Eldar players (we know you're there, you voted!). Let me know what you think.....fill me in on some stuff if I haven't covered it yet.

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