Monday, January 24, 2011

Dark Eldar Tactica - Dealing with Heavy Armour

It seems simple right? Take a bunch of Darklight Weaponry and boom, heavy armour means nothing to you. Land Raiders, Predators, Leman Russ's, Monoliths, and Black Templar Land Raiders..... Oops.

Hey look, that land raider is rampaging through your army because lance weapons mean nothing to it. That necron monolith pretty harmless? lol. Nothing says die to dark eldar MSU like a monolith in your face. (yes, just faced that the hard way). Yea yea yea, you can always just run circles around them, but do you remember that we play objectives in this game?


I tend to work a list to play vs everyone. So my list does not change vs different opponents. No I did not lose my game to necrons, but losing so much of your army to a two monoliths was ridicules. The same craziness can happen to a Blessed Hull Land Raider running around. While not popular yet, Black Templar are something I expect to start seeing since the new FAQs. Necrons with a new codex coming will explode the number of necron players around this fall.

It is simple really. Make sure you are carrying enough Haywire. We have several places to get it. Wyches, Bloodbrides, and even Trueborn can carry them. Your Archons can as well, however a single haywire is not enough in my book. You also get something I have just started using, and that is Haywire Blasters in your scourges.

Haywire Grenades. Round 1. 5 wyches are only 60pts with haywire, they need a raider. With Lady Malys you are always able to make sure you are able to get that great positioning across the board from that Land Raider, so get them round 1. Raider turn 3", move 12", disembark 3", run D6", and assault 6". Almost up to 30" in reach. I have been taking two such units. This gives me enough punch to disable a chimera wall, predator, land raiders, and anything else in armour. Yea, you might lose them, but no armour will be taking shots at them, and with the wyches right in front you really plug up their lines. What this does is really free up the rest of your shooting to take out other targets.

Haywire Blasters. 5 scourges with two haywire blasters takes you up to 130pts. The gun is set at 24" assault 1 S4 SP4. So what you end up with are units able to disable mech, and shoot down infantry units with 11 shots at up to 30" away with their carbines and 2 haywire shots. With as much mech as we see, and so many tournaments not geared towards win/loss but battlepoints instead, you need to wipe your opponent to do well. Haywire disables your opponents army. It doesn't care what it is, any armour value will do. With two blasters vs Haywire blasters: One missed, the other blaster bounced. Haywire, one missed, the other shot glanced. Target neutralized this round.

Haywire does something special in the Dark Eldar army. It disables your opponent, its like grabbing and pinning his arms, so that you can gut him. While Darklight weaponry is awesome, and it will blow stuff up, it is not reliable enough to destroy large amounts of armour on the field. Armour should be something you that fears you, with haywire, darklight weapons, and extreme close combat squads in your midst.

Sorry if I seem a little incoherent this morning, yesterday was long and the caffiene just isnt helping. There is a point though, so hopefully I got to it. No real time for editing.