Knights and Super Heavies, what do we do?

So when facing down an Imperial Knight or any Super Heavy Shooter, what are the best tactics to make use of?

So far all I can think of is to spam Scourges with Heat Lances and hope they land some where close when they Deep Strike?

Honestly, we don't have the best tools for dealing with this sort of thing. An Allied Seer Council has usually handled SH's for me.

A single knight is fairly easy to deal with. 3 Tri-Lance Ravagers will rip chunks out of it and a few squads of Haywire Scourge will lay on the pain if they get some volleys off.
Just make sure you have your AT firepower all facing different angles so they can shield all of your attacks
Double gun knights do crazy damage but with msu tactics and cover+night shields they loose a lot of their lethality. The gun+chainsword knight is even easier to deal with since everything we own is faster than it so it should never be able to bring the sword to bear, and if it does... Congratulations you killed a <100 point transport

I have used a squad of scourges with heat lances deep striking in. In one turn they killed a knight in one turn. The five heat lances completely eliminated the thing.

JackKnife01 wrote:

I have used a squad of scourges with heat lances deep striking in. In one turn they killed a knight in one turn. The five heat lances completely eliminated the thing.

5??? think you mean 4 right?

I personally have used x2 Fw reapers and x3 haywire scourge units in an 1850 pt comp and was consistently taking a knight down a turn. It's around 630 pts of hawire.

i'll admit without that much haywire, it is rough though. I have also have used a webway on a unit of fire dragons, armor evaporates when they come down, but there eldar.

Working backwards... against the ever present imperial knight


6hp and 4++ save means you need 12 glances or better to nuke it.

12 glances = 24 hits = 36 shots from lance weapons

12 glances = 15 hits = 23 shots from haywire weapons


Outside the shield its better...

6 glances = 12 hits = 18 shots from lance weapons

6 glances = 8 hits = 12 shots from haywire weapons


As you can see - knights suck for DE to kill with our standard ranged AT options.

Sometimes it will be wiser to ignore and hide from the big jerks, while you slaughter the rest of his army and win the mission.

Other times in order to be in a position to win the mission you have to kill or at least block the giant cheese-wangs.

To do which and when is up to your skills as an Archon, so you better get practicing.

The dual gatling cannon one is just brutal, especially if they cheese up their cheese by adding in a "ammo depot" for the twinlinked shooting. I think our best bet is to use minimal allies.

My thoughts at this point are:

-Corsairs - Reaver bands get to DS, JSJ +Plus and can be armed with dual fusion gun and nades

-CWE - Flyer formation. The fliers have a million AT weapons, should be able to kill stuff right quick.

Both of these require minimal formations to ally, but they are allies. Playing pure DE, my plans to date are: Ignore it, or ask the opponent to seriously-dude-tone-it-down-because-I-am-playing-DE

Well Reavers might help. I mean they are fast enough and could optimally glace it to death if you hit with a few squads of then. Note that is unlikely. Though having Blasters on them might help. Concentrated fire power is always the answer.

See, I have wanted to take advantage of the Reaver squads with Heat Lances/Blasters and their Turboboosting moves after shooting.

Edit: Correction, the reaver 2D6 move in the assault phase after shoting.

However, a vast majority of consensus here shows that Reavers work beast as small squads for CC because once Reavers have to start Jinking, they lose any Anti-Tank/Superheavy capability.

Also, It only takes one enemy deep-striking squad with a flamer to wipe out a Reaver squad.

In just the MathHammer alone, Heat Lances seem to be the best option for taking down heavy armour and only Reavers and Scourges can take them.

That and you can't turbo boost after you shoot. It is a lieu of shooting action.

It also depends on the combat drugs you get. T5 reavers are pretty nice. That and FNP can always help. Still a heavy flamer is wound generally on 3s and normal Flamers are wounding on 4s. Would depends on placement and number of reavers. Running 3-4 squads of ten is something to think about as well. If they can't kill the squad then you will probably eat the unit that hits you.

The Dark Eldar codex isn't written to allow you to effectively deal with Knights. You'd be spending more points in anti-armor to reliably bring it down than the Knight costs. Honestly, the Death from the Skies book is probably where you wanna look for help with this problem if you're staying strictly Dark Eldar. The Voidraven Bomber and Razorwing Jetfighter are no slouches when it comes to anti-armor and the DFTS book makes them more useful, more resilient, and more effective. The 2 bomber 2 fighter formation is very expensive but that's 16 missiles for anti-infantry, 2 bombs, and 8 lances in whatever flight formation you want and you get to dictate reserves.

Alternatively just run a Corpsethief Claw and haywire/smash it to death.

smith1186 wrote:

See, I have wanted to take advantage of the Reaver squads with Heat Lances/Blasters and their Turboboosting moves after shooting.

However, a vast majority of consensus here shows that Reavers work beast as small squads for CC because once Reavers have to start Jinking, they lose any Anti-Tank/Superheavy capability.

Also, It only takes one enemy deep-striking squad with a flamer to wipe out a Reaver squad.

In just the MathHammer alone, Heat Lances seem to be the best option for taking down heavy armour and only Reavers and Scourges can take them.

Give the reavers guns a chance. Heat lances vs knights and blasters vs wraithknights and stormsurges. The general consensus is not 100% accurate.
Haywire grenades on characters are also quite handy vs knights.

Lawrence just took out the No Rereat tournament and made extensive use of both of these usually unpopular wargear choices.

Ok, so I faced another match against a knight. Once again, it was neigh-on unkillable (had librarian near by giving it 4++ whole game).

So as usual, I tried the "ignore it" tactic, but in the end it rampaged through a few squads and allowed the enemy to make an effective castle in the corner.

Due to the fluff of my Kabal, I cant ally CWE (I have a number of converted wraith units which my haemunculi have "acquired", so our CWE cousins are unlikely to help me now ). Obviously the best approach are scatbikes and WWP wraithcannons.

Have any of you esteemed archons tried our flier formation? I am told it grants us D on the void weapons. Alternately I think I will need to go full MSU with lance raiders and sybarites with HW nades.

Looking for any further ideas on how to deal with the knight scourge (even considering buying my own IK for this job)

fisheyes wrote:

Ok, so I faced another match against a knight. Once again, it was neigh-on unkillable (had librarian near by giving it 4++ whole game).

So as usual, I tried the "ignore it" tactic, but in the end it rampaged through a few squads and allowed the enemy to make an effective castle in the corner.

Was this an objective game or a simple 'kill each other' game?

An objective game, but I got very unlucky with the cards. With kill points I would have just given him the game without even putting models on the board.

Had a few 20 pt beast squads running around being a pain. Was really funny when he stopped the knight, and basted it off the table (due to having no other target available).

Hmmmmmm, personally i dont run Beast Squads.

I do however run a lot of reaver squads hoping around the board. I always bring a few with heat lances just in case i need some Lance+Melta.

If i know I am going up against a Knight, I spam the heat lances and bring a squad of Scourges with'em too.

Ya, I am thinking that I may need to buy a dedicated anti-tank block to bring alongside my usual list in the event that the guy brings a knight. Maybe set aside 500 pts or so to swap out as needed.

Reavers are one unit I have not yet played around with

I've got 24 of em built into my list in 4 squads. Standard 6 man with dual Blasters + dual Caltrops in each. runs about 146 pts per squad.

Gives me a couple nice anti-everything units.

Im also starting to run my Kabalites with Sybarite/Haywire the way that Lawrence has been doing.

I'll let ya know when I test the new build

Ya, even having a few HWG thrown around the list, it made a difference. I too will be playing with that one.