1000p Competitive Dark Eldar w Craftworld Allies

Hello! I'll be playing in a competitive setting in a few weeks. I've been told the other guys will be bringing all the cheese, and I don't like getting tabled like last time, so I tried to be a little cheesy myself. I don't have covens models, harlies aren't really cheesy, so for me that meant some CWE to address some shortcomings. Opponents are SM (with a high chance of land raider or a knight), Chaos Daemons, BA, CSM, Tyranid, AM and Grey Knights. Any allies can and will be used. Draft FAQ is not in effect afaik.

-- Dark Eldar Combined Arms Detachment (605p)

1x HQ: 1x Lhamaean
4x Troops:
- 4 kabalite warriors, sybarite with haywire grenade, raider, dark lance
- 4 kabalite warriors, 1 kabalite with blaster, raider, dark lance
- 2 x (4 kabalite warriors, 1 kabalite with blaster, venom, splinter cannon)
1x Heavy Support: Ravager, triple dark lance

-- Eldar Craftworlds Allied Detachment (392p)

1x HQ: Farseer, Eldar Jetbike, Spirit Stone of Anath'lan
2x Troops: 2x (3x Windrider w/ Scatter Laser, Windrider Warlock)

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997p / 1000p.

I also need a 750p list, for that we take out both the windrider warlocks, the ravager, and 1 scatter laser from both windrider squads. And the haywire grenade if people are going to get mad about 2p extra.

Overall plan: we have 10 pretty fast objective secured units here in a 1000p list which seems good enough - grab all the objectives with DE while CWE tank, murder and buff as needed. When possible get out of those transports to spread the threats out even more. I specifically hope the farseer and scatter bikes will be threatening enough that the enemy will target them and my squishier stuff can survive.

Specific plans: If I have to go second vs a shooty army. Hide with jetbikes and lhamaean, everybody else deep strikes. If I go first, deploy everything and alpha strike.

Land raider/other big armoured stuff - guide on the Ravager and dark lance it
Big tyranids/chaos dudes/grey knights monsters - guide on a Venom and drown them in poison
Flyrants - guide on a venom and try to hit it if we can't ignore it
Rhinos/metal boxes spam - I brought scatter lasers specifically to help with this, dark lances unfortunately couldn't do it in practice games
Flying metal boxes - I guess we're out of luck, can twin link scatter lasers
Infantry blobs - Eldritch Storm. If we don't get that then just outrun them

My main worry with this list is that it might not have enough redundancy. But I don't really know what to cut.

I'm a newbie, so feedback from experienced archons would be greatly appreciated how to improve?

I firmly believe you have too many wasted points for this to be a competitive list, as well as no way to deal with GMC's and superheavy walkers. 24 3+;6+'s isn't going to do anything against GMC's and you can't do anything against true AV13 vehicles like monoliths, knights, stompas, or baneblades.

I don't like to play msu but you do have the start of an obsec msu army, you just aren't quite there yet. 10 blobs is not nearly enough once you consider rhino/drop pod spam. I'd recommend cutting all of your fat and using it to get more individual blobs to move around the table. That means: cut both warlocks cut all the blasters cut the sybarite, cut the raider dark lances and grab 2 squads of empty wind riders or rangers. stay at the extreme end of threat range for anything you can't kill and be acutely aware that literally everything in your army is expendable.  

Welcome aboard. in the future this sort of post doesn't belong here. It belongs in the army lists sub forum. I'm sure a mod will move this one for you tho so leave it. Nevermind weird.

amorrowlyday wrote:

I firmly believe you have too many wasted points for this to be a competitive list, as well as no way to deal with GMC's and superheavy walkers. 24 3+;6+'s isn't going to do anything against GMC's and you can't do anything against true AV13 vehicles like monoliths, knights, stompas, or baneblades.

I don't like to play msu but you do have the start of an obsec msu army, you just aren't quite there yet. 10 blobs is not nearly enough once you consider rhino/drop pod spam. I'd recommend cutting all of your fat and using it to get more individual blobs to move around the table. That means: cut both warlocks cut all the blasters cut the sybarite, cut the raider dark lances and grab 2 squads of empty wind riders or rangers. stay at the extreme end of threat range for anything you can't kill and be acutely aware that literally everything in your army is expendable.  

Welcome aboard. in the future this sort of post doesn't belong here. It belongs in the army lists sub forum. I'm sure a mod will move this one for you tho so leave it. Nevermind weird.

Hi, thanks for the feedback! I'm obviously no tournament player, we have these friendly tournaments with a bunch of friends however where people who have been playing for years don't pull any punches. I'd like to give them a good run for their money this time. I probably won't win but might learn to play better while I'm trying to figure it out!

So your suggestion is to cut windrider warlocks for 2 units of naked windriders. I was concerned with warp charges and also wanted to get some runes of battle powers for buffs and debuffs where necessary. But since objective grabbing is the primary goal this seems like an improvement.

Can you help me understand the first part though? What would be appropriate things to add to deal with true av13 vehicles? How do I deal with vehicles in general if I cut the blasters and dark lances?

You don't. The issue your having is that at best your getting 2 s8ap2 lancing shots per unit, but only within 18 inches. That's spitting distance and you don't have enough shots to actually down those heavy hitters in one turn, and when they swing back multiple units will be getting wiped at that distance. Once you tack on that moving more than 6 inches will result in all of those blasters having to fire snapshots it becomes a fools errand.

To put it bluntly if your not using a DE IC HQ for a webway portal with either wraithguard, or more effective at these point values fire dragons, your probably not going to be able to take those things down so every point you put towards doing so is wasted. Furthermore, excepting the Wraithknight, which this list can not kill. Period. All of those things are expensive, and, compared to jetbikes and skimmers, slow. By just ignoring them you give yourself a ~400pt advantage towards the actual goal of the game: scoring points.

The other reason I suggest cutting those things is that I think you have to in order to get the points for more msu There simply isn't enough chaff elsewhere.

Currently the best units in the game (IMO) are:
Windrider jetbikes with ScatterLazers
Wraithguard with D
Wraithknight
Imp Knights
Grav weaponry
Necron Wraiths in the Harvest Formation

If you want to be super cheesy, you would need to bring a Wraithknight (to deal with anything in armour) and some Scattbikes (to deal with everything else). Flavour with DE with your remaining points.

It would look something like this:

Eldar CAD (572 pts)
-Farseer on bike
-2x Scattbikes (units of 3 bikes)
-Wraithknight

DE CAD (390 pts)
-Lhamean in a dual SC venom
-3x warriors in dual SC venom (units of 5 men, no upgrades)

This leaves you with 38 points to flavour as you like. The problem with allying CWE is that everything DE can do, CWE can do better.

I'm still debating the darklight thing with myself. I've had great luck just stunning and immobilizing vehicles in the past which is good enough.

If I'm going vs an AV12 to 14 thing and fire 8 darklight shots at it with BS 4, don't I get an average of 2.67 hull points with 1.78 of those being penetrating hits? Casting Guide on the Ravager will up that to 2.99 so that's not great. Casting Doom on the target will actually up it to 4 hull points on average which seems excellent, but can't do that every game. But then if you don't get Doom you would probably at least get Eldritch Storm for a probable 0.83 extra hull points (at great expense). I'm not sure if this is good or bad. Of course this is in 18 inch range which is probably bad but on the other hand people seem to take lance weapons in tournament lists and 18 inch range might come suddenly when people start grabbing for objectives.

Also, removing all the blasters, the sybarite, and the dark lances is just 70 more points and I'm actually not sure that another unit of bikes or another transport would be worth the loss of anti armor capability.

fisheyes wrote:

Currently the best units in the game (IMO) are:
Windrider jetbikes with ScatterLazers
Wraithguard with D
Wraithknight
Imp Knights
Grav weaponry
Necron Wraiths in the Harvest Formation

If you want to be super cheesy, you would need to bring a Wraithknight (to deal with anything in armour) and some Scattbikes (to deal with everything else). Flavour with DE with your remaining points.

It would look something like this:

Eldar CAD (572 pts)
-Farseer on bike
-2x Scattbikes (units of 3 bikes)
-Wraithknight

DE CAD (390 pts)
-Lhamean in a dual SC venom
-3x warriors in dual SC venom (units of 5 men, no upgrades)

This leaves you with 38 points to flavour as you like. The problem with allying CWE is that everything DE can do, CWE can do better.

With the disclaimer that I'm a newbie, don't DE have an actual strength in fast, cheap obj sec transports? In my newbie mind there's 4 strengths: Said fast objective secured skimmers, poison/lance weapons IF applied to the exact right target (unfortunately not always there), a 10 p HQ, and excellent battle brothers. I hear that Covens are also decent but I don't have them.

I really don't get why Reavers don't have a 3+ armor save and can't all take special weapons, or why Windriders do have a 3+ armor save and can all take special weapons, and why the latter can be troops and the former can't though. Hm. If they were reversed it would be so cool and fit stuff like Kabal of the Flayed Skull too. Is it to balance Bladevanes?

I did actually consider bringing a WK. I would have to buy it but it seems like a classic. The main problem with your list and anything decent I could think of is it would be eldar with dark eldar allies I want to play dark eldar here but take advantage of battle brothers. So I'm trying to build this list around a majority of DE good stuff and then take a minority of CWEldar stuff to complement it. This is probably a sub optimal choice but then after reading a lot of stuff online I'm starting to think the optimal choice would be to buy the models for a 1000p War Convocation list. But nah I'm sticking with dark eldar as the larger force because of preference, all the rest can be optimized.

Wraithknights won't appear as opponents, fortunately, since I'm the only one playing eldar of any kind.

Thing's over. For anybody curious, this list did really well and surpassed all expectations. Won on maelstrom of war most of the time. Was tabled by knights once, otherwise it held its own against everything.

The final format was 750p and 1500p; I brought a slimmer 750p version of the above which was

-- Dark Eldar Combined Arms Detachment (445p)

1x HQ: 1x Lhamaean
4x Troops:
- 4 kabalite warriors, sybarite, venom, splinter cannon
- 4 kabalite warriors, 1 kabalite with blaster, venom, splinter cannon
- 2 x (4 kabalite warriors, 1 kabalite with shredder, raider, dark lance)

-- Eldar Craftworlds Allied Detachment (292p)

1x HQ: Farseer, Eldar Jetbike, Spirit Stone of Anath'lan
2x Troops: 2x (3x Windrider w/ Scatter Laser)

This list felt strong.

For 1500p list I tried to fix the lack of anti-armor and the final list was

Spoiler:

This was the first time I did the deep striking fire dragons on a Raider thing. It was hilarious. RIP if it's gone soon.


Some lessons I learned:

The lances do/did absolutely nothing compared to the Craftworlds anti-tank firepower. I don't think they took a single hull point in any of the games They did destroy a weapon on one vehicle and took a hull point off a dreadnought but that's about it, but were still worth, since several opponents to my surprise devoted excessive resources to destroying lance weapons while leaving the IMO more dangerous scatter bikes and venoms alive. Would take again.

Dark Eldar objective grabbing power still seems really strong to me. I actually tried making a pure craftworlds 750p list but I keep missing the cheap throwaway bodies on fast obsec throwaway skimmers. I suppose scatter bike spam would compete but those are pretty expensive if charged and killed, whereas with kabalites I don't even care. We have vats for that.

Thanks for everybody's input, it was a good experience.