8th Edition Beginner Guide

All hail Vect, our living Dark Muse!


This will be a guide for general 8th edition Drukhari were anyone can add good tips of information, play experience, starting the army, growing your army, and anything general with DE.

First, Dark Eldar (DE) is also Drukhari


First a very important note about 8th. 8th edition is a "Living rules set" meaning the rules will change a couple times a year, these rules can be core rules of the game, point changes, or just added missions and units. Anything is possible, so please when reading, note the date when something was posted.




In general there will always be certain things in every codex/army that will be viable or able to be played, DE is no different. But the most important thing whenever you buy a new army, you buy it for fun! You need to understand what type of play style you like, and what level of competitiveness is fun for you, some of us want causal friendly games, where others want o be pounded into the ground at GT's. This beginner guide will be meant for everyone.




The Units of the Drukhari

What type of DE do you want? Lets go over each faction


Kabal
Kabal are the generalist gun warriors, with better shooting than melee, but still able to do melee thanks to Power from Power (PFP), they can have anti-infantry, tank, monsters, etc.. Kabals focus more on fire power and speed of vehicles, they are able to walk on the ground and are used this way many times.


Units of the Kabal:

Archons
The HQ's, the leaders, you will for sure want 1-2 of these guys, they are a must, you can build them in many ways, as a melee unit, a shooting support one, or a auramancer. They are great in all of these forms.

Kabalight Warriors
The troop, every army should have at least 1-3 units, even if you are taking a specialist detachment, its still good to have 1 to protect your archon, they are cheap and plentiful.
You can set them as a defensive units, body guards, cheap no upgrades, as a screening unit.
You can also set them up with an offensive unit, give them a blaster, shredder, large numbers in Raiders, or small 5 mans in Venoms. They are cheap enough that you can take 40-60 of them with a few special weapons, our vehicles are fast enough to get them where you want, and with obsessions they can hurt others.

Trueborns (Index only)
These are specialist Kabals, you basically get a unit of all weapons, but at a price, if you feel you need 4 of a weapon in a unit, this is you pick



Other units that work great with Kabal: These units are both Kabal and Wych, but work much better as Kabal


Ravagers
These are our gun ship, are large hitting shooters, think of them as flying Predators, with 3 Guns that are assault on it, you can move and fire without penalty, combined with an auramancer, they can deal a lot of damage

Razorwing Jet fights (RWJF)
Are the Ravagers of the sky! They can get the same 2 guns as the Ravager, but only 2 instead of 3, they are also assault weapons, and they so get a set of Missiles, the missiles have many types of fire modes, but most importantly they are -1 to be hit due to being Airborne, they move just about any distance you want, a great pick.

Voidreaven Bomber
This is the other flyer, it has 2 weapons only this vehicle can get, tho at a price. Both weapons are great, its either a +1str Lance, or 2D3 S8 version of Dis cannons, it can too have missiles, but the important part of this vehicle is its Bomb, dropping up to 10 MW's onto a unit.

Raiders and Venoms
These are the transports, the Venom is smaller, faster, and has a load of poison weapons, great to stay cheap and move around the table. The Raider is larger, slower, but can hold more models, it has either a DC or a DL, great for 10mans or HQ+bodyguards. Both have a purpose and both are good. It is very common to take a Black Heart transport and give it to another DE faction (Wych, Haemonculus) so it has a 2nd save of 6+++, or Flayed Skull or an addition 3" movement, many options.


Building a Kabal force:

In general you want to be able to move fast and shoot a lot with limited melee. There are 2 popular ways to build Kabal, Battalion for CP and transports support or Spearhead for raw shooting damage.

Its popular and normal to have any of these
1-2 Archons
0-3 Kabals
2-3 Ravagers
0-3 Flyers
0-3 Venoms
0-3 Raiders

As you can see a lot of it is 0-3, thats because the Kabal can have many ways to build them, but in general are always played about the same. So pick your favorite units and have at it


NOTE: Mercenaries are always a viable option, tho they will have their own place to be talked about later on, it is common for a Kabal detachment to still have Scourges or Trueborns, these will be in details later in the post or by others.


Haemonculus
Haemonculus Coven, or the Coven, are the masters of the bodies, the king of torturing, the angels of pleasure. They specialize in adapting the body, changing it to be a better killing machine, or making the victim suffer for years. Either way the Coven are a farce to be scared of. The Coven are mostly a Melee force, a bit slower, but really touch, hard to kill and hits harder than any other DE units, they do have special but limited shooting, this is where we get our Sniper weapons and other oddities.



MORE TO COME LATER

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