DE Starting 750

Hi everyone,

Thanks for bothering to read my post!

So, after many years modeling but never playing WH & 40K my son (12) has taken up my SM army & I've decided to dive into the horribly under-rated (IMO) DE ahead of the potential new Codex later this year.

My model count is at this point quite limited & the list presented below represents virtually every model I have, however, I am just trying to see how completely wrong I have got everything & advice for where to take it next.

So, drum roll please......

DE 751 Real Space Raiders Detachment

Archon with Agoniser, Blaster, Shadow Field & dual Splinter Venom (205)
4 x Warriors, Blaster, Syb with Haywire Grenade & dual Splinter Venom (135)
4 x Warriors, Blaster, Syb with Haywire Grenade & dual Splinter Venom (135)
5 x Reavers, Arena Champ & 2 x Cluster Caltrops (136)
1 x Ravager, 3 x DL & Nightshield (140)

Hopefully this should leave me with a fast, mobile army, with which to try & either completely frustrate my opponent, or get destroyed early doors!

Please take my noob status into account when replying.

Humbly

Rewind

Welcome to the Dark City!

Generally speaking, unit upgrades for dark eldar are overpriced for what they give you. You can almost always do better by not upgrading squad leaders or special weapons, and just using the points you save to buy another unit that better fulfills the role for which the upgrade was originally bought.

For instance, if you drop both blasters, sybarites, and the arena champion, that gives you 70 points. In our current codex, Archon's aren't really worth taking, in my opinion. If you want a CC unit, a succubus is better, and if you want to shoot, you can afford much more shooting spending the points elsewhere. We can instead take a single Lhamean for 10 points and put her in a venom. That saves you another 130 points.

With the 199(instead of 200 since you were 1 point over) free points you'd then have, you could get 2 more venoms with dual splinter cannons, and a dark lance raider w/chain snares. Or you could just go with 3 dark lance raiders w/chain snares.

Either way, that would put you at 746 spent.

Thanks for your reply!

Some very useful pointers:

Dropping the Archon, this is purely personal, but I hate the idea of not fielding a 'proper' HQ unit & just running the cheap court, I know it's legal & probably I should make use of it, as it's one of the only things in our codex we can do that no one else can, but I'm too new to completely abandon fluff for competitiveness! Archons lead raids, in my head anyway!

I've umm'ed & arr'ed about the upgrades on the warriors, I like the idea of having units that can take on multiple threats, Blasters for vehicles & Syb with grenade to have any chance against a vehicle in melee, but paying to make it a 'jack of all trades' unit, may not be points efficient, only play testing will tell I guess...

Also, on a Meta note, I have just bought my son/opponent a Land Raider, any advice on how the hell I deal with AV14 with the limited list I have?

My full 'Pirate Fleet' composes:

Archon
1 x box warriors
3 x Venoms
2 x box Reavers
1 x box Hellions
1 x Ravager

He will most likely bring something like:

Captain w/ Artificer & Power Sword (125)
2 x min. Tactical Squads (140)
5 x Termies w/ Land Raider (425)

690 + a few upgrades

Thanks again for replying & for any futures comments!

Rewind

Rewind wrote:

Also, on a Meta note, I have just bought my son/opponent a Land Raider, any advice on how the hell I deal with AV14 with the limited list I have?

Haha, yeah. Follow the advice I gave the first time.

Honestly, your only options to deal with AV14 are going to be darklight weapons(lances or blasters) or haywire. In a 750 list, having a ravager plus 3 dark lance raiders would be pretty hard for your opponent to deal with. It's fast with decent output. You could expect to take 2 hullpoints off the landraider per turn, so you should probably be able to kill it by round 2.

After that, it's just a game of keep away, where you stay out of charge range of his infantry while you pick the termies off with your AP2 lances. Use the splinter fire and reavers to knock out the tacticals.

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If you're looking to get away without buying anything else, and you already have your models built the way you presented your list, then use the list you gave us! It's not terrible or anything, and will probably do fine against your kid. The advice I give is generally to make people's ideas as optimal as they can be, while still resembling their idea. That often will require new models.

With what you've got, go ahead and use your list you made. Just endeavor to always stay at maximum range(18") for your weapons. At max range, it's still possible that he will end up assaulting you, but it's not likely. A couple inches shy of max range, and the chance of him assaulting and destroying your vehicles goes up tremendously. He'll also be able to get within rapid fire range of your vehicles with his bolters, but that's the price of 18" weapons.

The advantage to my proposed list was a max range on your darklight weapons of 36" compared to the 18" of the blasters. Easier to play keep away. But you can certainly try the same tactics with the blasters. Good luck!

More food for thought & thank you for saying my list wasn't 'terrible'!

Currently nothing is completely finalised model wise, I've tried to glue as little on as possible while I slowly paint & magnetise options where I can.

As for future purchases, I'm definitely planning on growing the army in time, unfortunately there are just too many things I want lol.

I like the idea of a unit of Incubi in a Venom
I like the idea of more Ravagers
I definitely want a Razorwing

Sadly, my wife is not so keen & since I've bought all my current army in the last month, it's going to have to be slow OR sneaky!

Thanks again for the advice & play tips!

Rewind

While I can understand wanting to use Incubi they have to be used properly, they don't have assault grenades which hurts them a lot as a melee unit (they are an awesome looking model, I have 5 of the metal ones from 5th edition before they went to fine cast and have run them just for the fluff of it as an Archon bodyguard). It is one of those, fluff verses practicality choices.

CurstAlchemist wrote:

It is one of those, fluff verses practicality choices.

Yeah, I know what you mean

Seems to be one of the biggest problems with DE, is that we never get to actually field them the way they would fight.

How many Archons have ever agreed to a pitched battle with pre-supplied army lists? It just goes totally against their piratical raiding nature.

Especially as once our opponents know their facing DE, they can just counter us sooo hard!

I thought we were meant to be the sneaky raiders from the webway? Capturing slaves, then just heading home to enjoy them, rather than slugging it out for victory points, DE would just never care about.

It would be more on fluff to tell our opponents we were bringing a different army, then whip out DE at the last minute, possibly yelling 'Ambush' or something similar.

Won't make many friends, but then, who needs friends? We need slaves!

Rewind