Dark Eldar Codex Review

The simplest explanation is that Tau and Eldar were errors. When you have a relatively consistent power level consisting of DA, CSM, Orks, Nids, AM, DE, with SM being a shade above but only thanks to two comparatively narrow builds (Centstar and Biker Grav-Spam). Imperial Knights I completely agree are bad for the game, IMO super-heavies have no place in 'regular' 40k play and should be saved for things like Apocalypse. Daemons aren't as bad as they were and I've yet to see them be particularly game-breaking in 7th... sure, they have a couple of cheese-builds like SM, but the codex as a whole seems ok.

If we're forcing it into a tier-like system you've got Eldar as top dog with Tau a little bit below, and SM and Daemons a little bit above everyone else (Imperial Knights are harder to evaluate as they're predominantly used as allies rather than as a force in their own right). And again, a lot of the reviews and things I've seen focus on tournament play and stuff. For game nights with friends or club-mates, the Dark Eldar should be more than capable of holding their own. The tourney scene isn't the be-all and end-all, and some reviewers (not saying that anyone on this thread falls into that capacity) really need to get their heads around the fact that not everything -needs- to be compared to the ultra-competitive level.

Panic_Puppet wrote:

The tourney scene isn't the be-all and end-all, and some reviewers (not saying that anyone on this thread falls into that capacity) really need to get their heads around the fact that not everything -needs- to be compared to the ultra-competitive level.

^This. My gaming club as about two dozen regular players, only 1-2 of whom are die hard tournament players. The regular tournament goers are (in my experience) a minority in the hobby, but a vocal one. I see no reason why this codex wouldn't be just as good as any other (Tau and Eldar excepted) in the majority of gaming environments.

HERO wrote:

How is that positive?  I had a talk with them and for the most part, they're scrapping up what they can from the codex and taking it as an Eldar supplement.

I mean in their review:
The Warlord traits are garbage.
The Relics are largely junk
Vehicles generally got worse in the terms that they have more expensive or worse upgrades than they did
Grenades…or the lack thereof.

That's rather a selective reading of their review. You missed out the parts such as:

For one, just let it be said right away that Dark Eldar will be very competitive.

Fearless on turn 5 is awesome though, for holding objectives to the bitter end!

Vehicles generally got worse in the terms that they have more expensive or worse upgrades than they did, but, this is offset by the ability to take TONS of them. For example, in the Realspace Raider’s Detachment, you can take 6 Venoms by themselves which is absolutely brutal, or 14 total as transports, too! Razorwing Spam in this Detachment will be devastating too, which we will get to.

Webway Portals. Holy crap! These are incredible. They allow the model with it to Deepstrike from reserves with their unit and any transport which allows for some utterly insane combos.

Units of MCs. All of a sudden, the lackluster Talos and Cronos got better. Everything counts in large amounts!

The Dark Eldar detachment is excellent. It allows for some very powerful builds. As mentioned above, 6 Venoms would be brutal. But, 6 Razorwings would be crazy good, too. Deldar have a lot of power in the Fast Attack slots and being able to take 6 is really good, plus would make for a fun army to play with all of that speed.

Units that got a boost:

Succubus, Court of the Archon, Lelith, Drazhar, Warriors, Mandrakes, Grotesques, Reavers, the Razorwing, Scourges, the Talos and the Cronos all got anywhere from a small to a significant boost. These units will be seen on the table quite a bit, IMO.

Time will tell, but all of us here have been quite excited about some of the possibilities. I think that Deldar players may be upset in the short term, but good builds will emerge.


I agree with most of what they say in their review, it's pretty much what I was thinking. I'm not saying I disagree with yours HERO, but it does seem to focus more heavily on the negative changes. Time will tell, but I think the new book is stronger than the old one.

Quote :

I honestly think you would be less disheartened if you actually considered coven units (according to your blog, your not a fan). I can understand thinking the book is terrible when you won't consider two of the more solid units in the book (grots and talos).

Which happens when you want to play spikey space elves and not mutated freakish gigantic monsters.
If I wanted to build my force around Grotesques and pain engines, I would have played Nurgle with Spawn and daemon engines.
You want to play a fast and sleek dark eldar army? No problem... here is your fat and slow coven unit!

The_Burning_Eye wrote:

Panic_Puppet wrote:

The tourney scene isn't the be-all and end-all, and some reviewers (not saying that anyone on this thread falls into that capacity) really need to get their heads around the fact that not everything -needs- to be compared to the ultra-competitive level.

^This. My gaming club as about two dozen regular players, only 1-2 of whom are die hard tournament players. The regular tournament goers are (in my experience) a minority in the hobby, but a vocal one. I see no reason why this codex wouldn't be just as good as any other (Tau and Eldar excepted) in the majority of gaming environments.

There's also the fact that the more recent codices might be more what GW was aiming for. I.e. something they tried to do with Eldar/Tau/etc and missed. I definitely don't dislike the new codex, but I certainly want more games with it under my belt before I decide whether it's utter garbage, the new top cheddar, or just 'fine'... the codex hasn't even been out a week, that's nowhere near enough time to 'solve' it. There's obvious uses (WWP characters, troop-taxless transports for Eldar to borrow) and obviously less potent units (Dark Lance Ravagers, Wyches, Beastpacks) but until more people play more games and try new things, we're not going to have a great idea of what the codex is really capable of. For a true acid test, it needs to be put against the codices on the same level (not counting Tyranids, because we have a ridiculous inbuilt advantage due to the comparative army gimmicks). If we go about 50/50, we're fine. Anything substantially above or below, suggests whether our new toy is more or less potent.

(Mostly though, I'm determined to get the most out of the DE because my alternative is my poor BA army, who's now 18 months older than the second oldest army book currently in play...)

Klaivex Charondyr wrote:

Quote :

I honestly think you would be less disheartened if you actually considered coven units (according to your blog, your not a fan). I can understand thinking the book is terrible when you won't consider two of the more solid units in the book (grots and talos).

Which happens when you want to play spikey space elves and not mutated freakish gigantic monsters.
If I wanted to build my force around Grotesques and pain engines, I would have played Nurgle with Spawn and daemon engines.
You want to play a fast and sleek dark eldar army? No problem... here is your fat and slow coven unit!

I would not like to play Codex Coven, but some additions from Coven are a nice thing.

[quote="Panic_Puppet(Mostly though, I'm determined to get the most out of the DE because my alternative is my poor BA army, who's now 18 months older than the second oldest army book currently in play...)[/quote]

I feel your pain - I too have BA. And Necrons. In fact I've been solely a Marine player for most of this year for just that reason.

I have heard whisperings though that BA may be getting some kind of Sanguinary Guard terminator. Heavy dose of salt though...

Klaivex Charondyr wrote:

Which happens when you want to play spikey space elves and not mutated freakish gigantic monsters.
If I wanted to build my force around Grotesques and pain engines, I would have played Nurgle with Spawn and daemon engines.
You want to play a fast and sleek dark eldar army? No problem... here is your fat and slow coven unit!

This is exactly the same as chaos space marine and/or chaos daemon players getting upset that they can't run super competitive mono builds. If you wan't to limit yourself to a third of the options in a codex, by making a mono cult/coven/kabal list that's fine, just don't complain about it not competitive.

I honestly don't think any of our mono builds are good. Our strongest builds by far are those that combine a variety of kabal, cult and coven units. Kabalites in gunboats as core troops, reavers as rapid response objective contesters and assault units, grotesques or systhis as a bodyguard for our HQ and talos as area denial, and damage sponges so that we can keep the majority of our army in reserve.

I just don't see how you can complain about an army not being competitive when you yourself are limiting your choice of units to a subset of the ones available. It your decision to limit yourself not the codex's.

Panic_Puppet wrote:

The simplest explanation is that Tau and Eldar were errors. When you have a relatively consistent power level consisting of DA, CSM, Orks, Nids, AM, DE, with SM being a shade above but only thanks to two comparatively narrow builds (Centstar and Biker Grav-Spam). Imperial Knights I completely agree are bad for the game, IMO super-heavies have no place in 'regular' 40k play and should be saved for things like Apocalypse. Daemons aren't as bad as they were and I've yet to see them be particularly game-breaking in 7th... sure, they have a couple of cheese-builds like SM, but the codex as a whole seems ok.

If we're forcing it into a tier-like system you've got Eldar as top dog with Tau a little bit below, and SM and Daemons a little bit above everyone else (Imperial Knights are harder to evaluate as they're predominantly used as allies rather than as a force in their own right). And again, a lot of the reviews and things I've seen focus on tournament play and stuff. For game nights with friends or club-mates, the Dark Eldar should be more than capable of holding their own. The tourney scene isn't the be-all and end-all, and some reviewers (not saying that anyone on this thread falls into that capacity) really need to get their heads around the fact that not everything -needs- to be compared to the ultra-competitive level.

It's one way of looking at things, but once you've made the error, what should you do?

You should fix it.

The three choices open to them were -

1) Nerf those two books, either through a new book, FAQs, or introduction of weapons that really did them over in most other books.

2) Consistently produce a line of books that offer the same power while producing updates for the two codices that went before bringing them into line.

3) Ignore it and just plough merrily on with the imbalance.


When they released the two books (saying two for the sake of argument), 6th ed was young. It had only three other armies out, of which one could definitely take on the two books. They could have gone with option 2. I would argue that for a while they did. Space Marines could and did compete (partially because they did have some of 1 going on) particularly with the help of some very powerful supplements. Shortly before Nids, it would be accurate to say that based on 6th to date at that point, Chaos Space Marines and Dark Angels were the errors.

Now they've gone with option 3 and those books look bad. So you could say Eldar and Tau are the errors. Or you could say not accounting for them is the error.


In any case, they are out there. We can both agree the balance of the game looks wrong with them there, and will continue to do so with the current spread if not revised.

And yes, this is entirely tournament based, and that is possibly unhelpful.

You'd be livid as an Eldar or Tau player if your book was re-written and re-released 6-12 months after it came out! I know someone who's only now thinking about coming back to 40k after 7th hit because he got annoyed there were only 2 years between rulebooks. Of course that was probably because he bought the 6th ed rulebook about 2 months before it was replaced...

Mushkilla wrote:

Klaivex Charondyr wrote:

Which happens when you want to play spikey space elves and not mutated freakish gigantic monsters.
If I wanted to build my force around Grotesques and pain engines, I would have played Nurgle with Spawn and daemon engines.
You want to play a fast and sleek dark eldar army? No problem... here is your fat and slow coven unit!

This is exactly the same as chaos space marine and/or chaos daemon players getting upset that they can't run super competitive mono builds. If you wan't to limit yourself to a third of the options in a codex, by making a mono cult/coven/kabal list that's fine, just don't complain about it not competitive.

I honestly don't think any of our mono builds are good. Our strongest builds by far are those that combine a variety of kabal, cult and coven units. Kabalites in gunboats as core troops, reavers as rapid response objective contesters and assault units, grotesques or systhis as a bodyguard for our HQ and talos as area denial, and damage sponges so that we can keep the majority of our army in reserve.

I just don't see how you can complain about an army not being competitive when you yourself are limiting your choice of units to a subset of the ones available. It your decision to limit yourself not the codex's.

So a good codex has mandatory units and any deviation should not be competitive?
Blame the fluff.
The Mighty Tzeench Daemon prince leading his khorne berzerkers into battle makes no sense.
Oh hey and these are my Emperors Childen Thausand sons is also odd.
Its not the people who are wrong here its GW. When only SM have the benefit of "oh let me play Space Wolves, or Blood Angels, or Dark Angels or Iron Hands,.." while Chaos gets a "hmm... nah no Legions for you. Just take only Mark of Khorne if you want to represent World eaters.. oh... no Legion Traits either" how can you blame them that they want to stay as competitive as marines while beeing able to build fluffy armies without breaking the fluff in several aspects?

Same with DE.
If you force players into certain choices without offering alternatives this is just plain bad design, no fault from the players here.

Don't forget that the marine and chaos dexes were still done back in the days of lead writers, so done differently. Next incarnation might very well be different. Personally i think it was done to represent a typical chaos marine force instead of a legion one, i reckon we'll see more legion supplements once the main dexes are all finished.

And it's not the case that a good codex has mandatory units, but the DE codex, and its predecessor, have both been written with three clear elements, Kabal, Coven and Cult. Kabal provide the firepower, Coven provide the toughness and Cult provide the speed.

Limiting yourself to any one or two of those elements means you will naturally be deficient in the others. I personally didn't take any coven stuff either from the last book, but by not doing so, i accepted that i was going to have an even more fragile army than the writer intended and I would therefore have to work harder to make it successful. Exactly the same thing applies to any codex - You should try using a space marine scout army list with no power armour outside the HQ section (I have, I came up against Salamanders and was basically extinct by the end of turn 2)

Quote :

For one, just let it be said right away that Dark Eldar will be very competitive.

Yeah, maybe for Eldar.  You just wait and see fellow Archon.  They even mentioned it in their review that Eldar armies will love it.

The_Burning_Eye wrote:

You'd be livid as an Eldar or Tau player if your book was re-written and re-released 6-12 months after it came out! I know someone who's only now thinking about coming back to 40k after 7th hit because he got annoyed there were only 2 years between rulebooks. Of course that was probably because he bought the 6th ed rulebook about 2 months before it was replaced...

You'd also be livid if you picked up you tyranid codex expecting to compete with Eldar and Tau, only to find your models make better paperweights than game pieces.

I'm with Panic_Puppet here.if you have a game you can't just ignore glaring balance issues. People will either switch over to what's winning, or simply stop playing you're badly designed game. It's absolutely critical to look at the tournament scene to define balance. I'm not a very competitive player myself, but you can't use friendly matches with unoptimal units to find balance. If I'm having a friendly match of Street Fighter and I choose Dan as my character, it's for fun, I don't expect to win. But if I had to pay $1000 with a $60 update to play as him, I expect him to be just as viable as every other $1000 character.

Eldar need a few changes to bring them back in line with the other codexes. I think Tau are pretty much okay to be honest. They have taken a pretty severe nerf with the changes to battle brothers and the removal of the ability to stick a buff commander with a Riptide.

When the TAU codex was release, we made a gauntlet to see if anyone could beat them. The TAU player had an all around list ( not even a competitive list ) and he just obliterated everyone. By turn 2 we all knew that he was going to win in every game. And we are talking about 10 years and more experienced players ( except me ). The TAU player now play his CSM because there is no fun to play against the TAU anymore.

Our new codex is by far not OP as the TAU codex is, but I think they managed to offer us more viable build.

I think we need to test that codex a lot before jumping to conclusion. It might not be OP as the TAU codex but, I am pretty sure we can get very competitive list nonetheless.


@Count Adhemar :

Do you play often against the TAU ? To me they are the strongest codex.

Expletive Deleted wrote:

You'd also be livid if you picked up you tyranid codex expecting to compete with Eldar and Tau, only to find your models make better paperweights than game pieces.

I know one.

He does ok with 4 carnifexes and a hive tyrant all with twin linked devourers with brain leech worms. 'Orrible things even managed to take down Astorath the Grim with overwatch fire!

Count Adhemar wrote:

Eldar need a few changes to bring them back in line with the other codexes. I think Tau are pretty much okay to be honest. They have taken a pretty severe nerf with the changes to battle brothers and the removal of the ability to stick a buff commander with a Riptide.

I haven't played against Tau since sixth. I yield if not many other codexes struggle against them now. I used to struggle against non-competative lists. I can accept bad match ups though. If the tau are to us what we are to tyranids I can live with that. I just thought they had a stronger presence against all the armies.

Tau in the hands of a good general are difficult to play against. Tau played by someone else however, well let's just say that last week the guy i played conceded on turn four against my generic marine list because he had one model left, which was a devilfish with one hull point.

Eldar though can rip anyone to shreds, and there are many different ways of doing so, so even if you tailor your list to play eldar you might be screwed. Example - a DE list might do ok against a wraithguard list, because with the exception of d-scythes, they don't have much that's scary when your transports are as flimsy as ours (I'm quite happy to see wraithcannons shooting at raiders when my 8 point warriors wound them back on 4's) and their armour saves aren't so good that weight of fire won't drop them. Conversely, a list full of wave serpents will make an almighty mess of most DE units, and a jetbike list won't get out maneouvred by our speed.

Eldar also (with forgeworld units) have some evil Ld shenanigans they can pull off.

Selvhan wrote:

When the TAU codex was release, we made a gauntlet to see if anyone could beat them. The TAU player had an all around list ( not even a competitive list ) and he just obliterated everyone. By turn 2 we all knew that he was going to win in every game. And we are talking about 10 years and more experienced players ( except me ). The TAU player now play his CSM because there is no fun to play against the TAU anymore.

Our new codex is by far not OP as the TAU codex is, but I think they managed to offer us more viable build.

I think we need to test that codex a lot before jumping to conclusion. It might not be OP as the TAU codex but, I am pretty sure we can get very competitive list nonetheless.


@Count Adhemar :

Do you play often against the TAU ? To me they are the strongest codex.

I play both with and against Tau and whilst I won't say they're easy, they are nowhere near the Eldar levels. Also, test games when a new codex comes out are not really a barometer of where that codex stands ~2 years later. As I mentioned, the 7e changes have taken a lot out of the Tau due to loss of all battle brothers (especially Eldar) and changes to IC rules.

I see a lot of people griping about the codex, but overall I'm happy with what we got, and that was dependability. No longer do I have to wonder will I get my FNP, or will my FF work, I can now focus on, I need to jink or I get my 5+ next round. The loss and nerf to wyches hurt definitely, but for my self a suicide unit isn't useful, it's wasteful.

Quote :

And it's not the case that a good codex has mandatory units, but the DE codex, and its predecessor, have both been written with three clear elements, Kabal, Coven and Cult. Kabal provide the firepower, Coven provide the toughness and Cult provide the speed.

And that was OK!
You could decide if you wanted to max on speed/melee, firepower or tough Monsters.
You had the freedom to mix and match all aspects as much as you like.
Now you are FORCED to go Coven for survivability as Firepower got severely reduced and they took away the "melee" from cults and mixed both of it into Coven.

I don't see any of the coven units as compulsory... The only coven units that got better are grots, and maybe the cronos, but that ones debatable. If you think grots are compulsory just use Sslyth.

Erm, Cults haven't been good at melee since 5th.
I don't agree that firepower has been severely reduced either - sure, the range on splinter cannons gets reduced when you move (and that doesn't apply to venoms where most people take them) and the ravager now can't move quite as far if it wants to fire at full effect. Scourges however got their firepower increased, as did the voidraven (yeah, it's expensive but the bomb is now a large blast) so I would say the firepower units have shifted a bit but it's hardly severe.

Count Adhemar wrote:

Eldar need a few changes to bring them back in line with the other codexes. I think Tau are pretty much okay to be honest. They have taken a pretty severe nerf with the changes to battle brothers and the removal of the ability to stick a buff commander with a Riptide.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Just take out the shooting profile for Serpent Shield entirely and the entire army dynamic changes.