Darklance Scorges. What's your experience?

I have 2x5 blaster Scorges right now and im thinking of changing them to Darklances. What is your experience using them or defending agents them? I currently do not use the ravagers and have two razorwings five venoms and one rader for Incubi. Im feeling the extra darklance would serve me well.

I really like them. The extra range and more constant damage make them both very dangerous and tempting target.
But if you field Lances, you want to deploy them at the beginning, because of the movement penalty.
Unfortunately, you cant redeploy them with the PT strat, but it works the other way around.
People often tend to hide their vehicles from our Scourges, so you can redeploy some Raiders with Warriors to a direct LoS.

Scourges are hard hitting, but sometimes its more useful -ish... to think of them as bait or, well, traffic signs.

If you're going to eat the Heavy weapon penalty, why not just go with Heat Lances?

Thats the point. No movement, no penalty. 36" = no movement. 18" = jeah, well, lets say: more movement.
Heatlance is more the Reaver thing, especially with Splintermind.

If you can't take out five T3 4+ models on turn one you're gonna lose to Dark Eldar anyway. You deploy conservatively, then round a corner and shoot them to bits. Or if they position conservatively/deepstrike, you wait for the one shot they'll get before you shoot them to bits.
The only people who are gonna have a hard enough time with Scourges to let them shoot more than once at -1 to hit are the very ones who we don't need them against. To me that makes putting DL Scourges on the table seem like a "win-more", to borrow parlance from MtG.
I could see an argument being made for using them as a "Fleet In Being", as long as you don't mind accepting that you're paying all those points for exactly one salvo with a penalty to hit.

DL Scourges are 120 points, where a DL Ravager is 140.
That discount is losing you: half your toughness, over half your wounds, -1 to your invuln save, worse staying power (5 wounds off a Ravager and it's still firing at full capacity, 5 off a squad of Scourges and it's gone), and doctrines.
In return, you do get better mobility via deepstrike, equivilant damage on the move with a higher damage ceiling, situational access to rerolls (via a Black Heart Realspace Raid Archon), arguably easier to hide/utilize cover, access to infantry strategems, better defense against multi-damage weapons, and the ability to perform actions.

Overall, I would personally prefer the Ravager, though I can see the argument for Scourges. I think Heat Lance scourges are arguably better. Shorter, but not prohibitive, ranged shots with better average damage for a clean 100 points. Realistically, you're getting one turn of shooting out of a squad before they get shot off the board, you're going to want to make it count.

TheBaconPope wrote:

DL Scourges are 120 points, where a DL Ravager is 140.
That discount is losing you: half your toughness, over half your wounds, -1 to your invuln save, worse staying power (5 wounds off a Ravager and it's still firing at full capacity, 5 off a squad of Scourges and it's gone), and doctrines.

I agree on the whole, but most point out: Scourges have a 5++.

mynamelegend wrote:

If you can't take out five T3 4+ models on turn one you're gonna lose to Dark Eldar anyway. You deploy conservatively, then round a corner and shoot them to bits. Or if they position conservatively/deepstrike, you wait for the one shot they'll get before you shoot them to bits.
The only people who are gonna have a hard enough time with Scourges to let them shoot more than once at -1 to hit are the very ones who we don't need them against. To me that makes putting DL Scourges on the table seem like a "win-more", to borrow parlance from MtG.
I could see an argument being made for using them as a "Fleet In Being", as long as you don't mind accepting that you're paying all those points for exactly one salvo with a penalty to hit.

First, there's no rule saying you're only allowed to take 5 models in the squad.

Second, one army that has almost no ability to kill scourges that are shooting from 36" away is Drukhari. In the mirror match, whoever loses their Raiders first is very likely to lose. Their opponent then gets to dictate when and where all the combats happen. A duel of raiders throwing single dark lance shots at eachother is just horribly inefficient. One side having more lances and on a platform that cannot be efficiently removed with lances tips the scales drastically.

In my experience, people don't often have long range anti-infantry shooting. There are always exceptions, but in general, anti-infantry stuff tends to top out at 24" or 30". The stuff that operates at 36"+ tends to be designed for killing vehicles which is not good for killing scourges.

Beyond that, the trick to keeping them alive is to position other threats (ie raiders full of choppy things) between the scourges and the enemy. If they want to dedicate themselves to killing scourges, they must trade that piece.

In my most recent iteration of my competitive list (as yet untested), I'm taking a squad of 8 with 4 lances and plan on parking them in ruins. With Hunt from the Shadows and/or Lightning Fast Reactions most armies will struggle to dispose of 8 2+/5++ bodies at 36" range. If they do heavy damage to the squad after a turn or 2, just drop them back and wait for some of their threats to get distracted/killed so they can do some cleanup lancing on turns 4 and 5.

What I like best about them is they don't stop you from taking WWSWF. If you take ravagers, you just can't take that secondary. They are a target your opponent wants to kill anyway, almost certainly has good tools to do so, and can prevent you from making 5 secondary points per ravager you take. Scourges can keep some models out of line of sight and if it looks like your opponent has the ability to kill them at range, it is likely with several different units shooting at them. If that's the case, kill the lances first and just keep the others alive so no more shooting comes their way. 5 points earned.

sekac wrote:

mynamelegend wrote:

If you can't take out five T3 4+ models on turn one you're gonna lose to Dark Eldar anyway. You deploy conservatively, then round a corner and shoot them to bits. Or if they position conservatively/deepstrike, you wait for the one shot they'll get before you shoot them to bits.
The only people who are gonna have a hard enough time with Scourges to let them shoot more than once at -1 to hit are the very ones who we don't need them against. To me that makes putting DL Scourges on the table seem like a "win-more", to borrow parlance from MtG.
I could see an argument being made for using them as a "Fleet In Being", as long as you don't mind accepting that you're paying all those points for exactly one salvo with a penalty to hit.

First, there's no rule saying you're only allowed to take 5 models in the squad.

Second, one army that has almost no ability to kill scourges that are shooting from 36" away is Drukhari. In the mirror match, whoever loses their Raiders first is very likely to lose. Their opponent then gets to dictate when and where all the combats happen. A duel of raiders throwing single dark lance shots at eachother is just horribly inefficient. One side having more lances and on a platform that cannot be efficiently removed with lances tips the scales drastically.

In my experience, people don't often have long range anti-infantry shooting. There are always exceptions, but in general, anti-infantry stuff tends to top out at 24" or 30". The stuff that operates at 36"+ tends to be designed for killing vehicles which is not good for killing scourges.

Beyond that, the trick to keeping them alive is to position other threats (ie raiders full of choppy things) between the scourges and the enemy. If they want to dedicate themselves to killing scourges, they must trade that piece.

In my most recent iteration of my competitive list (as yet untested), I'm taking a squad of 8 with 4 lances and plan on parking them in ruins. With Hunt from the Shadows and/or Lightning Fast Reactions most armies will struggle to dispose of 8 2+/5++ bodies at 36" range. If they do heavy damage to the squad after a turn or 2, just drop them back and wait for some of their threats to get distracted/killed so they can do some cleanup lancing on turns 4 and 5.

What I like best about them is they don't stop you from taking WWSWF. If you take ravagers, you just can't take that secondary. They are a target your opponent wants to kill anyway, almost certainly has good tools to do so, and can prevent you from making 5 secondary points per ravager you take. Scourges can keep some models out of line of sight and if it looks like your opponent has the ability to kill them at range, it is likely with several different units shooting at them. If that's the case, kill the lances first and just keep the others alive so no more shooting comes their way. 5 points earned.

I really like your comment on the WWSWF aspect of the Ravager/Scourge debate.

However, DG are a very meta faction at the moment, and the Plague Burst Crawler (PBC) has a mortar that just kills small units. They generally hit my Reavers (the thing is flat D2), but if you had such a fragile squad kicking around, it would be dead after the first shooting phase...

For that alone, I would keep them on the shelves. Scramblers is changing soon, so maybe there is a good use for Shreader Scourges (they dont pose enough danger to get targeted #1 ASAP).

Thats my $0.02 anyway.

Wow lots of food for thought here thanks all

fisheyes wrote:

I really like your comment on the WWSWF aspect of the Ravager/Scourge debate.

However, DG are a very meta faction at the moment, and the Plague Burst Crawler (PBC) has a mortar that just kills small units. They generally hit my Reavers (the thing is flat D2), but if you had such a fragile squad kicking around, it would be dead after the first shooting phase...

For that alone, I would keep them on the shelves. Scramblers is changing soon, so maybe there is a good use for Shreader Scourges (they dont pose enough danger to get targeted #1 ASAP).

Thats my $0.02 anyway.

You're not wrong in your overall point, there are absolutely bad matchups for scourges. If I face DG, I probably won't take WWSWF, it's just nice to have that secondary available if the opponent doesn't have the tools to handle them. I'd also likely deep strike them in that matchup, guaranteeing they get a chance to shoot at least once before they're killed. But even so, it takes multiple PBCs to kill a squad of 8. They average about 1.8 dead scourges per mortar. So if all 3 put their mortars on the squad, they still don't finish them in a turn. And that's without LFR factored in either. They can't afford NOT to kill the scourges, but they don't have a quick solution either. It takes about 2 shooting phases, which means they aren't putting as much firepower into the raiders. That's fine by me.