How can the Dark Eldar become competitive??

From what i have read in a serious competition/ETC level, The Dark Eldar get their ass handed to them more often then not.

I would be interested in knowing exactly why is that? What makes it so bad and how could it be fixed.

The main complaints i have heard is
1: That the Dark Eldar are a pretty much either or army either you have poison which works well on troops or you have have lances which works well on vehicles.
however Poison doesn´t do crap against vehicles and Lances can´t do much against troops.
2: We lack the amount of shooting needed to do anything against horde armies.
3: Our armor saves sucks, even a bolter can hurt us and ignore cover shooting is the bane of our existence.  
4: Power from pain sucks the really good stuff comes way too late to any difference this late in the game.

But is that all that keeps the army back from being a serious treat in tournaments or are there more and if so what might be the solutions to those problems??

To bring Dark Eldar up to same level as other armies, we need what they have.
We need a decent selection of Detachments and Formations for a start (and I mean more than Coven ones - decent Kabalite detachments).
We need a LoW and decent special characters who help their squads as other armies have.

I think those alone will make us a far more competitive and useful army.
As is, we're an ally for someone else, and I think tyats it in the real tournament scene.

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We need a LoW and decent special characters who help their squads as other armies have.

I tend to disagree. While SC and LoW are flavorful they do not make or break an army. You do not see Marines mess around with their LoW and they are still a top tier army (even before the new dex). You also don't see a lot of Necron SCs and they are also still top tier.

1) Speed. While Speed is a nice theme, it is not a very useful one.
Yes. Speed wins games. That is why EVERYONE got it. Knights, Marine bikers, Eldar Jetbikes, Necron Wraiths,... they are all fast and spammable.
And most important: they are still resilent. They do not trade Toughness and Armor for beeing fast, they just add it on top of it.
A good example is the Drop pod. Although it is immobile it is still an AV12 vehicle with 3 Hullpoints and ObSec sitting on your objective. 35 points and needs around 9 Lance Shots to get rid off.

2) Resilence. The game has gone in a direction wher special weapons are not so special anymore as everyone has tons of it. So you need troops that can take a punch and still fight on or a lot of troops.
We don't have either. While we can argue that our pain engines and grots fall into this category very well, they are not special no cheap.

3) Firepower. Yes. We actually even lack Firepower. See that 3 Venoms over there? For only 195 points they kill 4 Marines on average. And that is if they happen not to have any FnP themselves. Besides Poison is scaling with the army. It gets worse against T3.
We can't even reliably stop any Horde.

4) Spoiler. If you fight Dark Eldar you know EXACTLY what is coming at you. Lances and Poison. No surprises. Even imperial guard has much more different builds than us. At tournaments we are basically the army that hinders a lot of Knight lists ffrom advancing.

5) Synergies. Our units are no big team players. And while we may have the best open topped vehicles, we lack worthy passengers. 10 Dire Avengers in a Raider or 5 Fire Dragons in Venom are much more scary than Trueborn or Kabalites. The Webway Taxi Archon also gets more punch out of Scytheguard than Grots. Also no psychic buffs for us.

So all in all we suffer from "too little from anything". While most other top armies combine Resilence, Speed and Firepower in spamable units we only have speed.
Worst offender are Eldar which are pretty resilent (AV12, 3+ save mostly... seriously this makes it like shooting marines for us as the numbers we need are exactly the same), have probably the best firepower in the game (supported by psi force multipliers) and easily match our speed.

Erikjust wrote:

From what i have read in a serious competition/ETC level, The Dark Eldar get their ass handed to them more often then not.

I would be interested in knowing exactly why is that? What makes it so bad and how could it be fixed.

The main complaints i have heard is
1: That the Dark Eldar are a pretty much either or army either you have poison which works well on troops or you have have lances which works well on vehicles.
however Poison doesn´t do crap against vehicles and Lances can´t do much against troops.
2: We lack the amount of shooting needed to do anything against horde armies.
3: Our armor saves sucks, even a bolter can hurt us and ignore cover shooting is the bane of our existence.  
4: Power from pain sucks the really good stuff comes way too late to any difference this late in the game.

But is that all that keeps the army back from being a serious treat in tournaments or are there more and if so what might be the solutions to those problems??

At an ETC level, Dark Eldar is a hard-counter army that can decimate certain armies despite having a terribly uphill battle in others. It's a great army; however, it's also an extremely unique army that plays unlike anything else.

A couple things to point out though:
- A lot of armies have specialty units with dedicated agendas. We have the most poison and the most lances than any other army out there; however, we don't really have a lot of hybrid units like Marine Sternguard. It's a lot like Orks and their Tankbusta unit - S8 AP3 shooting works against all targets but is a key unit for anti-tank shooting. Same can be said about Haywire Scourge or Blasterborn units.

- I disagree that we lack shooting to address hordes. I have little issues against the Nid players in my area and the Orks aren't bad either. The big issue with these units is how they control our movement phase. The liquifier gun is decent against horde (since many horde models are T3) as are Shredders. Razorwing fighters are one of the best anti-horde units we have also in my opinion. We have it but you have to account of it with units that have a special purpose once again.

- A lot of xenos armies have issues with Bolters. Orks have to pay +4pts in order to have a save against them, we have to jink or pray for misses, nids die but are fearless within synapse. CWE are more of an anomoly than the norm when it comes to xenos surviving bolters. Against Ignores Cover, that's where we have trouble and have to make sure we are more precise with our movements and target priorities. Missile-side spam remains a near auto-lose for us though I will admit.

- PFP from the codex is a bit meh;however when combining Coven Haemies with codex units, you can yield some interesting combinations while retaining the +1PFP turn for both tables.


As for how can we become more competitive, a lot of it is that the meta changes so quickly now with the rapid codex release cycle that there's almost no way to build a take all comers list. It's completely matchup base. Even if we got more formations or new ways to survive beyond MSU, I don't know if it'll matter until we have more than 2-3 weeks between releases. Not to mention tournament specific FAQs that are often different between events.

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- I disagree that we lack shooting to address hordes. I have little issues against the Nid players in my area and the Orks aren't bad either. The big issue with these units is how they control our movement phase. The liquifier gun is decent against horde (since many horde models are T3) as are Shredders. Razorwing fighters are one of the best anti-horde units we have also in my opinion. We have it but you have to account of it with units that have a special purpose once again.

Nids have stopped to be a horde army... in what? 3rd edition? 4th edition?
Most nids run multiple MCs supported by small squads of Gaunts. Nowadays they completely skip them as Mucloid spores are a cheaper troop filler. And this is also the reaon why we do quite well against them... spoiler army wiht lots of poison. MCs do not like that.
Orcs are pretty rough especially with green tide. And there you have the major problem:

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The liquifier gun is decent against horde (since many horde models are T3) as are Shredders.

You do not know if you will fight a horde. Chances are that your matchups are Eldar, Necrons + Knight, Eldar, Space Marines, Space Marines (and that is actally a really likely scenario). So your liquifier and Shredder will do nothing but set you even more behind.

Erikjust wrote:

From what i have read in a serious competition/ETC level, The Dark Eldar get their ass handed to them more often then not.

Herein, I think, lies the fundamental misunderstanding. I think the real reason behind such tournament results is that the players, the top-of-the-line-competitors, the ones who were going to take the top places anyway, choose not to play Dark Eldar.

The learning curve on the codex is too high, it's too unforgiving, and it requires too much unit synergy. Top-end competitive players prefer codexes that are easy to master, with modular units (ones that don't need support to handle a wide variety of threats), and a higher degree of army forgiveness.

I contend that the top ten, twenty, fifty, or what have you, players in the high-end tournaments were going to wind up in that place anyway, and their choice of codex is irrelevant. If those players had chosen to play Dark Eldar, (and played the DE for as long as the armies they did in real life), they'd still have made the top-whatever list.

Seems like anytime we DE players make up forces to be competitive and start winning or adapt units to serve a dedicated 2nd role(Wyches BLOW in CC SO we make them Hay-Wyches, mount in venoms or raider and blow up tanks).... SOOO what does GW do to make sure all those $$$ vehicles still sell? Kill our suicide anti tank unit-which is supposed to be badass CC...... THEN they take shard carbines from trueborn--why? Because we use them 10 to a raider ,give it splinter racks so now we have a raider pumping out 30 'twin linked" splinter shots with reroll.. NOPE cant have that silliness......Cant have our unit leaders or HQ have a venom blade, because 2+ wound with always a save 'is toooo OP.. '

Cant have characters because they dont feel like making models for them...

Basically if we manage to come up with a list that starts getting too cheeky and winning tournies.. we will get another codex 'nerf upgrade' and will be worse off...... again.... and other armies will get more buffs to counter our nerfs.....

Dont get me started on the RETARDED formation that now gives SM 500 POINTS IN FREE Razorbacks........... yea play your 1850 against their 1850/cheater 2350 army...

Erikjust wrote:

From what i have read in a serious competition/ETC level, The Dark Eldar get their ass handed to them more often then not.

In an ETC format - DE are in a better place as the team event allows you to mitigate the match up issues they might face.

In a singles format - DE need a half decent draw in the match ups as well as focusing on a single engagement option from the codex. By this I mean spam. lots of spam. Spam poison and lances, or spam Grots or what ever else you feel like (razorwings could be fun!). This gives a level of redundancy in the list that few other lists can match and gives you the flattest curve in terms of performance on the table.

Klaivex Charondyr wrote:

1) Speed. While Speed is a nice theme, it is not a very useful one.
Yes. Speed wins games. That is why EVERYONE got it. Knights, Marine bikers, Eldar Jetbikes, Necron Wraiths,... they are all fast and spammable.
And most important: they are still resilent. They do not trade Toughness and Armor for beeing fast, they just add it on top of it.
A good example is the Drop pod. Although it is immobile it is still an AV12 vehicle with 3 Hullpoints and ObSec sitting on your objective. 35 points and needs around 9 Lance Shots to get rid off.

I think this is an excellent point.

Basically, we're still paying heavily for our speed with pitiful armour and toothless weapons, whilst a lot of other races are just handed speed on a silver platter.

Hell, our Ravager was even made slower.

Then you have our MCs. Perhaps it was fine for them to move just 6" back in 5th, but when you have Riptides, IK, Dreadknights and Wraithknights all zooming around the battlefield - not to mention MCs with much better ranged and melee weapons - ours still being stuck at 6" makes no sense.

Klaivex Charondyr wrote:

2) Resilence. The game has gone in a direction wher special weapons are not so special anymore as everyone has tons of it. So you need troops that can take a punch and still fight on or a lot of troops.
We don't have either. While we can argue that our pain engines and grots fall into this category very well, they are not special no cheap.

3) Firepower. Yes. We actually even lack Firepower. See that 3 Venoms over there? For only 195 points they kill 4 Marines on average. And that is if they happen not to have any FnP themselves. Besides Poison is scaling with the army. It gets worse against T3.
We can't even reliably stop any Horde.

4) Spoiler. If you fight Dark Eldar you know EXACTLY what is coming at you. Lances and Poison. No surprises. Even imperial guard has much more different builds than us. At tournaments we are basically the army that hinders a lot of Knight lists ffrom advancing.

5) Synergies. Our units are no big team players. And while we may have the best open topped vehicles, we lack worthy passengers. 10 Dire Avengers in a Raider or 5 Fire Dragons in Venom are much more scary than Trueborn or Kabalites. The Webway Taxi Archon also gets more punch out of Scytheguard than Grots. Also no psychic buffs for us.

So all in all we suffer from "too little from anything". While most other top armies combine Resilence, Speed and Firepower in spamable units we only have speed.
Worst offender are Eldar which are pretty resilent (AV12, 3+ save mostly... seriously this makes it like shooting marines for us as the numbers we need are exactly the same), have probably the best firepower in the game (supported by psi force multipliers) and easily match our speed.

Agreed on all counts.

The main issue I think is that our army just lacks bite. You'd expect a glass-cannon army to be the hardest-hitting. That's the entire point. But, instead, the opposite it true. Whilst the nigh-indestructible Eldar are rocking D-weapons, we're stuck with pitiful Dark Lances that have been crap for 2 editions now and weren't even great in 5th.

Likewise, you'd expect our T3 HQs to be vulnerable but also incredibly deadly. And, whilst they definitely fulfil the first point they completely suck at the latter. Why does our Archon have no AP2, and what is considered his best weapon wounds on 4s with no rerolls? Bloody 4s. One of the new SM characters is rocking power fists that strike at initiative, along with a 2+/4+ EW and 4 wounds. Space Wolves can have a S6 AP2 Rending weapon on their wolf lord that also strikes at initiative and rerolls all misses, whilst he himself is T5 with a 2+/3+ and 4 wounds. So then, why is it that our own HQs can have neither power nor durability?

What's even worse is that they're not even paying for speed. They can move 6", whilst virtually every other army can buy a bike, jump pack, thunderwolf or somesuch that lets them move twice that - with many such options adding durability to boot.

Really, we're less a glass-cannon army and more a glass-peashooter army.

Yeah i agree it´s a balancing issue.
I think the best shooter army out there should be Tau why? Simple because they suck in close combat, or at least they did back when i last played 40k (which was around the time the first Necron Codex came out).

Such an army i can understand why they should have the best shooting in the game, because once they get into close combat even a lowly imperial guard can be a problem for them.

Dark Eldar are known for two things being fast/ if played right they can surround the enemy and pick them of one by one with the opponent being able to get a shot in.
The other things is having a wet cardboard as armor.

In other words we are obviously meant to be a raid army in out before anyone notice.
So if we do have to pay for our speed with low armor (which i don´t mind as each army has a theme) make us the fastest army in the whole game, even faster then our craftworld cousins.
Take our Reavers as an example when you read their fluff it says they constantly try to tweak their bike to give just a little extra.
And yet we only have the same speed as the craftworld eldar.
To me the Reavers should be even quicker then the Eldar version instead of 3d6, it should be 4d6
Plus their attacks in my book should either be the 40k version of a drive by shooting or the old  Bladevanes which is basically then running through at full speed through a unit damaging them with the knives on the speeders, with no overwatch allowed or maybe roll a d6 on a 1 - 3 no overwatch is allowed 4-6 overwatch is conducted as normal.

Yes we still have cardboard armor and will be gunned down easily but having the fasters army that can outrun anyone out there, could go a long way to make up for it.

I see the problem with our speed as being one of utilisation. A raiding army should be used to attacking at speed, so a fluffy rule would be to allow all our units to fire at full effect regardless of how fast they moved or even if we turbo boosted. You could balance that out by only allowing that shooting in a narrow forward arc before or after the turbo boost for example.

Something like that you could then get reavers moving 12", letting rip with a full salvo (upgrade every bike to blaster/heat lance like windriders?) and then blasting away 36" - or crossing a table 48" to leave them within half range of their heat lances? Now that's speed being applicable as a weapon in the game.

We are fast and have open topped transports. That's our theme. It allows for faster assaults and for more fire power. Otherwise I agree that we need more special weapons in troop and true born squads. Like Haywire Blaster...

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We are fast and have open topped transports. That's our theme.

So... we are Orcs?

Klaivex Charondyr wrote:

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We are fast and have open topped transports. That's our theme.

So... we are Orcs?

Pretty much. Actually, I realized the other day that we kind of have the worst of both worlds. We have the resiliency of a hoarde army but we pay elite army prices for the privilege of a majority T3 Str3 army. Exhibit A is Wyches. Wyches should cost no more than an Ork Boy. Yet, they cost just a few points less than a Marine, which has WAY better stats. I think in addition to what's already been stated above regarding speed, in order to be competitive, we need significant price decreases across the board as with a few exceptions, we pay way too much for way too little in return with regards to both offense and durability.

One thing I feel is worth mentioning is that the problem isn't just that we're no longer the absolute fastest - it's that speed just isn't the edge it used to be.

Speed was important in 5th because weapons that could reach across the table were pretty rare. So, if you manoeuvred right, you could protect yourself from a good portion of your opponent's army.

Nowadays, there are just so many weapons that can shoot you from the other end of the table. Not to mention that, with all the other fast units around, many weapons have an effective +12" of range. So, it's now a lot more difficult to just zip around outside your opponent's maximum range.

And that's to say nothing of stuff like drop pods.

I think an oft-overlooked nerf that ties into our loss of speed coupled with everything else getting much faster and there being much more long range shooting in the game now is the change to Night Shields. I often found that six inch range decrease to be enormously helpful when facing strong armies like Necrons, Space Marines, and Eldar, as it meant fewer Str 4-6 and Melta shots coming our way unless they got up close where they were much easier to charge or rapid fire to death.

I also miss the old Night Shields.

Another annoyance with the current ones is that they make our defences even more all-or-nothing. As in, against some weapons we have a 3+ jink/ruin save. But, against anything with Ignores Cover we have no defence at all.

The Shredder wrote:

I also miss the old Night Shields.

Another annoyance with the current ones is that they make our defences even more all-or-nothing. As in, against some weapons we have a 3+ jink/ruin save. But, against anything with Ignores Cover we have no defence at all.

Amen to that.

I'm not sure what I prefer. Both is fun and effective. But the old one grants a much better tactical advantage especially since Venom could take it too.

sweetbacon wrote:

Klaivex Charondyr wrote:

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We are fast and have open topped transports. That's our theme.

So... we are Orcs?

Pretty much.  Actually, I realized the other day that we kind of have the worst of both worlds.  We have the resiliency of a hoarde army but we pay elite army prices for the privilege of a majority T3 Str3 army.  Exhibit A is Wyches.  Wyches should cost no more than an Ork Boy.  Yet, they cost just a few points less than a Marine, which has WAY better stats.  I think in addition to what's already been stated above regarding speed, in order to be competitive, we need significant price decreases across the board as with a few exceptions, we pay way too much for way too little in return with regards to both offense and durability.  

Either that or our equipment and stats gain a significant boost to match it´s points.
One thing that might increase our survivability is if we got Feel no pain 4+ or 5+ from turn 1 and Eternal Warrior turn 2.
Sure our transports are as fragile as ever, but at least now we actually have a chance of surviving it and we can negate Strength D and Stomp much easier.

Yeah. A 4+ feel no pain would be really helpful! That could be enough actually...

Erikjust wrote:

Either that or our equipment and stats gain a significant boost to match it´s points.
One thing that might increase our survivability is if we got Feel no pain 4+ or 5+ from turn 1 and Eternal Warrior turn 2.
Sure our transports are as fragile as ever, but at least now we actually have a chance of surviving it and we can negate Strength D and Stomp much easier.  

Nope. I could imagine the PfP table giving +1 /+2 FnP instead of a fixed value but eternal warrior does nothing.
D ignores FnP no matter if you are Eternal warrior or not. Same with ID. You may ignore the effect on your hitpoints but you do not ignore the Instant death rule which also ignores FnP.

To be fair I haven't found FnP terribly useful on other units than Grots, Reavers or Pain Engines. Two of them get it as a special rule without the table.

There are basically 3 reasons why FnP is not really good with our troops

1) We sit in vehicles most of the time. If we do not, the vehicle is probably dead and we are useless now anyways.
2) There are tons of S6 weapons which just ignore it
3) FnP only gets really good if you stack it with armor. Havin a 3+/5+ is amazing. --/5+ not so much.

Klaivex Charondyr wrote:

Nope. I could imagine the PfP table giving +1 /+2 FnP instead of a fixed value but eternal warrior does nothing.
D ignores FnP no matter if you are Eternal warrior or not. Same with ID. You may ignore the effect on your hitpoints but you do not ignore the Instant death rule which also ignores FnP.

Whilst true, I still wouldn't be opposed to EW on our characters.

With regard to D-weapons, my preferred solution involves visiting the GW design team with a cricket bat.

Klaivex Charondyr wrote:

To be fair I haven't found FnP terribly useful on other units than Grots, Reavers or Pain Engines. Two of them get it as a special rule without the table.

To be honest, I feel this way about the entire PfP table. FNP 5+ is rarely much use on T3 models, and after that it's just a lot of melee buff for a primarily ranged army.

Also, why don't our Pain Engines have PfP? I thought that was the main reason they were called Pain Engines.

Klaivex Charondyr wrote:

1) We sit in vehicles most of the time. If we do not, the vehicle is probably dead and we are useless now anyways.
2) There are tons of S6 weapons which just ignore it
3) FnP only gets really good if you stack it with armor. Havin a 3+/5+ is amazing.  --/5+ not so much.

Good points. I think the 'stacking armour and FNP' aspect is really important. It also means that our Coven stuff is very all-or-nothing. They rely on high-toughness, FNP and multiple wounds for protection - but ID negates 2/3 of those, and ID due to high strength negates all 3. Compare that to stuff like Wraiths or TWC with Storm Shields. ID weapons negate their wounds, but they still have a 3++ against such attacks - whereas ID weapons also rob stuff like Grotesques of their only saves.

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Whilst true, I still wouldn't be opposed to EW on our characters.

To be fair our characters contribute so little that I really don't care if they die or not. Most of the time the 10 points Courtisan is the better option and an Abberration as Warlord also has the benefit of making use from a few more WL traits.
A useless Archon with S3 T3 is still useless if he is S3 T3, Eternal Warrior.

The Shredder wrote:

Good points. I think the 'stacking armour and FNP' aspect is really important. It also means that our Coven stuff is very all-or-nothing. They rely on high-toughness, FNP and multiple wounds for protection - but ID negates 2/3 of those, and ID due to high strength negates all 3. Compare that to stuff like Wraiths or TWC with Storm Shields. ID weapons negate their wounds, but they still have a 3++ against such attacks - whereas ID weapons also rob stuff like Grotesques of their only saves.  

Having used the Corpsethief Claw + the Dark Artisan + WL trait to re-roll one on FNP, in several games now, I can attest to this fact.  The 3+/4++ FNP makes Talos pretty much unstoppable to everything but D weapons and ID attacks.  The amount of fire power they can wade through and keep on coming is staggering.  Short of Grav spam, Scatter Bikes, and maybe Tau Missile Sides/Plasma Suit spam, most armies can't put out enough high strength dakka each turn to make a serious dent in them before they start racking up extra VPs.  

One of the huge hits to the DE with the new codex was a PfP mechanic that is borderline useless to most of our units, as except for FNP (which doesn't fully kick in until Turn 3??!!), all of the PfP buffs are only useful in assault, something which 90% of our army has no business doing.  I wish we had kept our pain tokens so that the few units that actually need those buffs to function well could actually get them before Turn 4/5.  Somethng similar to the Skiitari/Cult Mech Canticle buffs are what our Kabalite and shooty units SHOULD have.  The Deamonkin book implemented a much better, more useful PfP-like mechanic that really highlights how poorly conceived ours was.