Daemons... not the daemons!

hey guys.

My friend plays chaos daemons and wipes the floor with me every time. i dont know if he's a skilled player or not but he generally does really well in competitions too.

His list comprises of

Bloodthirster

Tzeentch herald

5 flamers

5 flamers

5 flamers

9 screamers

2 x 5 plague bearers

2 x 5 pink horrors

and 1 bad ass pimped daemon prince ( I HATE it so much)

i have most units in the dark eldar codex but every time i altar my roster around he denies me somehow. i run a dark lance heavy list... and he usually gets shot of them very quickly!

are daemons just good at beating dark eldar?

Venoms with splinter cannons LOVE monstrous creatures. Aside from DL heavy, what does the rest of your list look like?

i can literally make almost any list ive been collective DE since i can remember. TBH i think this guy is just awesome lol

well give us your standard list, and we can start with there.

Also what point value helps too.

Finally... daemons got a huge boost with the changes to flamers and screamers, but my question is... no fateweaver??? that is interesting...

Basically venoms love deamons... just poison him to death and you should be fine.

Cheap 125 point Kabalite/blaster/Venom+extra SC units are excellent to use against flying monstrous creatures. I used two of them against a Tyranid flyer in my zone whenever I didn't have gaunts/genestealers to shoot at. Between the two Venoms and two units inside shooting at it I pretty much grounded it every turn.

Venoms LOVE Flamers too - free FF, all day long!

Also, don't assault an assault army - keep your distance, keep mobile and shoot the crap outta them - Venoms and Dark Lances - SPLAT Deamon everywhere

The only vehicles he can possibly bring are Soul Grinders, so you don't really need a dark lance heavy list - swap out dark lances for disintegrators on more stuff, give every Venom the second splinter cannon, don't waste points on Incubi, agonisers or other power weapons as their daemonic saves are all invulnerable anyway. I'd favour warriors over wyches in this instance because of the volume of fire and the points saving. I'd still take some wyches, because they're quite good for holding stuff up - if you can ground the daemon prince, you can do what I did recently - charge it with wyches, and stop it zooming around for as long as possible. Two units of five or one of ten with shardnets would maybe be even better for this, as mine were basic and just took a wound off it over two rounds of combat, leaving a Venom to finish the job. Wracks could be a good bet if you take a haemonculus, as they'll be better for holding objectives, and poisoned weapons are what you want to be bringing.

Essentialy, take the basic stuff and give it the highest volume of shots that you possibly can - spam splinter cannons and disintegrators, maybe take a Razorwing to play with the flying monsters. Mount everything in vehicles. Maybe take Reavers with cluster caltrops, as AP- isn't an issue against all those invulnerable saves, and they can hit those flying monsters automatically with their bladevane attack.

After the first wave come in, don't be afraid to completely redeploy using your speed. If you sit still to unload everything into him, whatever is left (and there's a good chance there'll still be stuff left, with it all being fearless) will still be able to potentially wreck your stuff. And if you sit still, the rest of the army drops in and it's all together in one massive, gribbly wall of nastiness, hitting you without you getting a flat out cover save. If you move all of your stuff out of the way of the initial wave, at least you can deal with his army piece by piece, rather than trying to take it all on at once (unless he deliberately deep strikes all his units a long way away from each other, but looking at his list of multiple small units, this doesn't look like a smart move on his part).

Divide and conquer!

Take 9 venoms and grin happily.

Daemons are actually very favorable match-up.