If we get a 6th Edition Codex...

I would expect some scout/infiltrate warlord trait...

Giving Incubi an assault grenade, a points break, or having the tormentor helm do something like removing overwatch or making the target unit fight at I1 would be useful. Leaving their weapons AP2 is a must.

The Mandrakes should get a rule similar to that Tyranid guy who can only be attacked by snapshots, remember they are only partially present in our reality, and the invulnerable save just doesn't do it well for their toughness.

Bloodbrides....A rule to only allow overwatch from assaults launched from greater than 6" away would work wonders for their survivability, maybe allow for 9" and 6" for regular Wyches.

I'd love for pain tokens to be more of an army-wide, spending resources type thing.

Perhaps:

When an enemy unit is destroyed, generate a pain token.

At any time you can spend a pain token to give a DE unit one of the following for the rest of the round (individual player turn):

Feel No Pain, Furious Charge, or Fearless.

Regarding Warlord traits, if we follow the trend set by Tyranids, some of the special rules of our named special characters will be reflected in the Warlord traits with that character having that trait as a fixed option. Especially Duke Sliscus' and Vect's special rules work well this way.

1 - Gods of the Arena: From the endless battles in Commorragh’s arenas, only the most skilled emerge. Enemy units fighting your Warlord or his unit in close combat, receive a -1 penalty to their Weapon Skill value. [Lelith has this Warlord trait]
2 - Serpent’s Venom: Whether through trade, research or other diabolical means, the Warlord has access to the most lethal of poisons. All splinter weapons in your Warlord’s unit are upgraded to Poisoned (3+), unless they already wound on a better value. [Duke Sliscus has this Warlord trait]
3 - Encroaching Darkness: Dark Eldar are masters of deception, able to approach enemy positions unseen. Up to two of your Troop choices from Codex: Dark Eldar, including any of their dedicated transports, gain the Scout special rule. In addition, these units have the Stealth special rule in the first game turn.
4 - Cacophony of Pain: The promise of a great feast amongst their victims drives the Dark Eldar to great heights. One use only. Declare your Warlord is using this ability at the start of one of your turns. All friendly units from Codex: Dark Eldar within 12” of your Warlord gain a Pain token. Remove these tokens at the end of the next turn.
5 - Collector of Skulls: A hunter beyond measure, a collector of great renown. Successful saves made against your Warlord’s close combat attacks must be rerolled.
6 - Ancient Nemesis: Your Warlord has the knowledge of the ages to support him in battle. Your Warlord has the Preferred Enemy special rule. Furthermore, he rerolls all to hit and to wound rolls in close combat against enemy models from Codex: Eldar and Codex: Dark Eldar (and their supplements). [Vect has this Warlord trait]

I think that Duke's Warlord trait will be the drug reroll thing. 3+ poison weapons is way too strong for a warlord trait IMHO.

aurynn wrote:

I think that Duke's Warlord trait will be the drug reroll thing. 3+ poison weapons is way too strong for a warlord trait IMHO.

It's not that good! There's certainly other results on Codex Warlord Trait tables that are as good or better (instant death weapons, infiltrate d3 units, +/-1 on reserve rolls).

Some ideas I thought of:

assault disembarking for open top vehicles that move 12" and change torment grenades to ignore overwatch within 12".

Blade vane get rending on 6's.

Hellions get 6" move in assault phase if they don't run in shooting phase.

As far as the void raven and razorwing is concerned, since the flyer rules came into play, drop missile points for some of the specials especially since we can't fire them all at once anymore. And give vector dancer to both.

2 modes of shooting for splinter cannons, what they have now but add in str 4 rending against armor.

Some kind of grenade for wyches to help negate over watch as they assault.

Allow the dias to purchase war gear.

As for warlord traits, y'all have them undercontroll from what I've seen earlier in this post,

And the fact that we don't need a new dex for this, just an errata printed in White Dwarf showing the corrections

There are more but these are great starts..

I would be more than happy for a WD "errata" if it comes soon enough. Our models are beautiful and with great conversion potential. And with Finecast being changed to FW resin, I cant wait to buy my first mandrakes. :-D

As for your suggestions - the bladevane rending is actually pretty good idea IMHO... and it should be possible to bladevane vehicles.

Given the amount of ways around Night Fighting and Cover Saves, I'm not sure why people are so enthusiastic for these things.

wanderingblade wrote:

Given the amount of ways around Night Fighting and Cover Saves, I'm not sure why people are so enthusiastic for these things.

Because they're plausible and they would help. We're certainly not getting a bonus to armor or toughness, nor do I want one. But there should be a way mitigate situations like having turn 2 on a board with little cover, or trying to assault through overwatch. Our army isn't designed for swarms and numbers.

Sure, there are creative ways to do this now, like screening your units with venoms if there's no available cover, or assaulting through terrain, but it would be nice to have an ability or something that helps with that, rather than sacrificing units or tactical advantages. I'm not sure if what I said makes sense. But basically, if that's how we have to play, I'd rather have an army book that accentuates and enhances those features.

I would far rather see things that actually work. Phantasm/Torment/X Grenade Launchers that prevent a unit from firing overwatch if hit. Night Shields that reduce enemy ranges. Maybe some version of the Harlie psychic power where no one can target you outside a certain range. More mobile firepower to make getting our Alpha strike in easier. A really effective Webway Portal to hide vital units from enemy firepower then bring them on quickly. Maybe some version of Drop Pods.

And so on. More Cover Saves for Tau/Wave Serpents/Chaos/Thunderfire Cannons to take down is not what I'd want. We have enough of them.

Well I do not think that we should be going in the way of hard countering all other armies' advantages. The cover bonus is OK with me. I know it does not work against everything, but it should not. Balance is important. Not only ours, but gamewide.

aurynn wrote:

Well I do not think that we should be going in the way of hard countering all other armies' advantages. Balance is important. Not only ours, but gamewide.

I just wish that GW's staff would subscribe to fewer forms of "fake balance."

What I mean by that is balance which is based on assumed scarcity of a given unit or item. So, it's balanced, but only under these circumstances, and then, only certain armies can bring those circumstances to bear.

My inner casual weeps whenever someone loses the game in the list creation, deck building, or character building parts of any game.

Guys I think WE have to make the game balance. GW stated many times that they dont give a damn about balance. That they are creating models and rules for coolness and they DO NOT promote tournament play. So it goes down to everyone how they build lists. Example - my good friend plays Eldar and I have seen him play 2 serpents max. Because he wants to have fun and win because of his abilities and not some stupid OP tank spam. With good ppl in your group we do not really need GW to make balance for us.

aurynn wrote:

Well I do not think that we should be going in the way of hard countering all other armies' advantages. The cover bonus is OK with me. I know it does not work against everything, but it should not. Balance is important. Not only ours, but gamewide.

So instead we should allow other armies to have hard counters to our advantages? That simply does not work as a logical argument.

Moreover, the things I am suggesting are a) Not hard counters b) Already in the game.

Giving us a bunch of crap options and then charging us for them would not be balanced.

Finally, I completely and vehemently disagree that it should be up to us to make the balance. It is up to Games Workshop. That they are willing to abdicate their responsibilities does not make it OK.

You know, I have felt as you do for a LONG time. However with much more important things on my mind than being angry at GW for not tuning up the game, I just prefer to play with people who are reasonable and inventive.

In addition. I still hope that the new release system of GW will help balancing out the game in relatively short delays after a fault is found. On the other hand just wait and see how many whiners there will be about the fact that the rules are in WD, which is paid and after 1 year they dont know what rules are in effect and which are not. But we will get closer to balance. :-) Being attentive to such gamesystem is expensive for the devs. Lets see how many ppl will be able to pay for it.

As for the hard counters. Should we relinquish splinter cannons and venoms because Tyranids cry we are hard counter? We have our own rules that are considered broken by some armies. Tau and Eldar are, I grant you, the new black, and put hurt on us, but even they CAN be beaten as is shown in many batreps on this site. It depends if you play powergamers. I don't. If someone brings only serpents and WKs to the table, I just don't play.

And lastly. Gaming system with about 10 armies is extremely difficult to balance. If I thought I could do it better than GW, I would already started my own company. But I can understand the difficulty, not mentioning the effort HAS TO be profitable to shareholders...

Can't say much that hasn't been said. My wishlist:
1. Night Shields more powerful (the Hard to Hit idea is a good one)
2. Court of the Archon - all entries 0-X instead of 1-x - (this to me is the TRUE crime against the amazing updated model range. I've always been secretly happy Mandrakes are useless. They are nicely designed, but their Turbo-Weeabo 2Spooky Dragonball Z aesthetic clashes with the rest of the range IMO)
3. Shredder - rending? +range? large blast? something....
4. More psychic defense. One IC and a piece of crap wargear don't cut it. I don't want to see "psychic power analogues" for fluff reasons, I want to see "tech" shutdowns of said powers
5. Something big. Hated this trend at first, but something huge and tough (and fast) ALA Wraithknight could look SO cool with some good design.

Also most things need re-pointed, as many have mentioned

One of the more "easy" general fixes GW could implement is to have jink saves not be cover saves. This would fix one of the most hard counters (Ignore Cover) against our army that has become so prevalent in this edition.

But GW dropped the ball on Tau here. If you give a single army a counter versus everything in the game save one, you totally screw any semblance of game balance. And then the one thing they don't counter can be allied in as battle brothers. But I fear this can't be fixed.

I really wonder who in the design team thought that the Tau would be any fun to fight against.

eohall wrote:

5. Something big. Hated this trend at first, but something huge and tough (and fast) ALA Wraithknight could look SO cool with some good design.

I agree. Just for the fun of painting it. Although... I cannot imagine some kind of Dark Eldar Behemoth. I know we have Titans, but... We have a big ship - Tantalus, we have a Titan, but if I should imagine something equal to WK, I would not want it to be a bigger Talos.

The problem I see is that we have Coven and Kabals... so we should get TWO! :-D

aurynn wrote:

In addition. I still hope that the new release system of GW will help balancing out the game in relatively short delays after a fault is found.

One may hope. The intention is there: GW designers do care and they do want every army to be fun. It's just that there are only so many hours in the day, and there are priorities... and it seems that we are not very high up on the list.

I also don't think it's so much a matter of 'hard counters', really. I'd say it's about having recourse. Many of the changes to 6th edition are based on the idea that it wasn't fair that the big stabby guys could assault your guys in one turn and wipe them out without you being able to do anything about it. So, is it fair if a unit of shooty guys can appear on the board, shoot, and wipe out your guys without you being able to do anything about it either?

One thing is that against most shooting, there is no difference between 5+ or 6+ armour and no armour at all. In a game with a lot of melee fighting, those saves did matter. In a game that is mostly shooting they might as well not be there. In a game where cover mattered, we had recourse to that. In a game with abundant 'Ignores Cover', what recourse do we have?

As I see it, Dark Eldar were just designed for a different game, and we can still manage, but we just don't fit in well with the new game. What we really want is to be re-designed to fit in with the new rules. These are just a few ideas on how that could be done. If you don't agree with some of them, or any of them, that's fine, but something does need to change, hopefully soon!

Out of our codex only scourges, warriors and trueborn are ranged infantry, everything else is assault. That's a higher percentage than almost any other army I can think of, the bugs being a possible exception. If our codex hopes to achieve any sense of internal balance then buffing our assault is vital. Just give us the equivalent of dirge casters on our raiders (or make the PGL a backpack mounted dirge caster) and Str3 explosions and I'd be good to go. I'd like more but I'd accept that.


On a different note this popped into my head the other day. What do you think?

Court of the archon suggestion
Make them like the wolfguard and overlord court where you can assign them out to different squads. (remove the stupid 1-0 limit)

Lhamaeans: increase to 25 points. As long as an Lhamaean is in a squad the squad's CC attacks have the poison 4+ special rule. If they already have poison CC weapons improve the weapons by one (4+ becomes 3+ and so on. Note that this means you can't have two Lhamaeans in a squad without poison weapons and give 3+ poison. Also, the  buff is removed as soon as she dies.)

Sslyth: Reduce their cost by 5 and give them the bodyguard special rule, they automatically pass LoS checks on a Archon.

Ur-Ghul: Change the max number to three and increase the points to twenty each. A squad with an Ur-ghul in it has the preferred enemy rule against squads containing psykers. The squad's deny the witch roll is improved by one for each Ur-ghul in the squad. A psyker may not be in the same squad as an Ur-ghul.(Change the fluff so that they are used by Archons like blood hounds to hunt down rouge pskyers that break the ban on powers in the dark city. Or maybe used to hunt craftworld eldar through the webway for sport.)  

aurynn wrote:

I agree. Just for the fun of painting it. Although... I cannot imagine some kind of Dark Eldar Behemoth. I know we have Titans, but... We have a big ship - Tantalus, we have a Titan, but if I should imagine something equal to WK, I would not want it to be a bigger Talos.

The problem I see is that we have Coven and Kabals... so we should get TWO! :-D

We definitely need two! A dual kit would work. Maybe something big, from the shadowrealm that Mandrakes come from (similar in theme to a bound demon/c'tan shard but Dark-Eldarified) maybe ruleswise along the lines of a Mawloc w/some surprise or deep strike mechanic.

Not to keep stealing from the 'Nids, but some sort of sentient/mobile slave capture war-machine that might have mechanics similar to that new octopus mouth bug (whose name escapes me).

eohall wrote:

aurynn wrote:

I agree. Just for the fun of painting it. Although... I cannot imagine some kind of Dark Eldar Behemoth. I know we have Titans, but... We have a big ship - Tantalus, we have a Titan, but if I should imagine something equal to WK, I would not want it to be a bigger Talos.

The problem I see is that we have Coven and Kabals... so we should get TWO! :-D

We definitely need two! A dual kit would work. Maybe something big, from the shadowrealm that Mandrakes come from (similar in theme to a bound demon/c'tan shard but Dark-Eldarified) maybe ruleswise along the lines of a Mawloc w/some surprise or deep strike mechanic.

Not to keep stealing from the 'Nids, but some sort of sentient/mobile slave capture war-machine that might have mechanics similar to that new octopus mouth bug (whose name escapes me).

We have coven, kabals, and cults. Way I see it if our dark elf counterparts can enslave giant creatures why shouldn't we? After all a giant deadly alien gargantuan creature would make a nice addition to any cults menagerie.

Quote :

As I see it, Dark Eldar were just designed for a different game, and we can still manage, but we just don't fit in well with the new game. What we really want is to be re-designed to fit in with the new rules. These are just a few ideas on how that could be done. :)If you don't agree with some of them, or any of them, that's fine, but something does need to change, hopefully soon!

That I agree with. But that does not mean we are not fun to play. :-)

Three then. The more the merrier. :-D

And one more suggestion... how about cronos/talos going carnifex style? Unit of 3 per FOC slot? With 3 wounds and T7 it would not be something  tragic... and should be able to combine cronos and talos in single unit. That would bring some sales, dear GW... *winkwink* :-) And cabals would have taken care of their badass unit...