Is reaver jet bike spam viable?

Lately I've been running more and more reavers in my army's and I'm finding that the more I use the better they get. In my last couple of games I played with 24 in total and I'm thinking of expanding to 36 or even 48. Does anyone have experience playing with those kind of numbers of reavers? Any advice on how to play that or what kind of support to run for them? So far I've been using them in units of 6 with caltrops. Ocassionaly I'll run them with Farseers on bikes trying to get invisibility.

Thoughts?

Depends on your meta. Mine has an abundance of "ignore cover" so I consider them quite useless on my tables. If you run them with Eldar anyways I would not stick to Reavers but Shining spears. While they are a good deal more expensive they have a 3+ armor, a 4+ cover save if they moved, a 3+ jink if they have to and S6 AP3 weapons on assault and shooting. Within a formation they even get WS5.

I need to calculate the average damage output but they are in any case way more durable, even more so with a Farseer attached (Fortune, Invis)

there is certainly plenty of ignores cover in my meta. I found however that even with that being the case usually my opponent only has 2 or 3 units with that rule at the most and so with enough separate units of bikes all but if you will still make it into combat on turn 2. In fact I've been finding this to be even less of a problem send the new Eldar book changed wave serpents, I'm seeing less and less of them on the table which in turn makes the reavers better.

you may be right that shining spears are tougher bend in some ways, or even in many ways hit harder. they also cost more points however and what I'm planning on doing is covering the table in bikes 5 putting nearly 50 in my deployment zone at the beginning of the game that's just not something you can really do with shining Spears. also more than that I just want to play with a lot of reaver jetbikes and was hoping for some advice as to how to make that work.

doctorz wrote:

there is certainly plenty of ignores cover in my meta. I found however that even with that being the case usually my opponent only has 2 or 3 units with that rule at the most and so with enough separate units of bikes all but if you will still make it into combat on turn 2. In fact I've been finding this to be even less of a problem send the new Eldar book changed wave serpents, I'm seeing less and less of them on the table which in turn makes the reavers better.

you may be right that shining spears are tougher bend in some ways, or even in many ways hit harder. they also cost more points however and what I'm planning on doing is covering the table in bikes 5 putting nearly 50 in my deployment zone at the beginning of the game that's just not something you can really do with shining Spears. also more than that I just want to play with a lot of reaver jetbikes and was hoping for some advice as to how to make that work.

There was a post somewhere about taking two realspace raiders detachments and grabbing 12 units of 3 reaver jetbikes with cluster calotrops and heat lances. That's around 900 points for insane threat saturation.

Well I bought 24 more reavers yesterday so we are going to find out.

Awesome. I think it's a viable tactic. I wish there were some kind of detachment, however, that could make your decision an easier one.

It sounds pretty gruesome. I might give a smaller version a shot sometime.

yeah, I think it might work fine right now what I'm trying to figure out is what else I play in the army. it comes out to just over a thousand points for the 48 bikes and the standard game in my local scene is 1850. obviously I need to take some troops and HQ but I'm not sure what the support units should look like.

Stay mobile? 2 squads of 5 warriors each, 1 blaster and a venom to a squad is 240 pts.

Add an archon with a blaster in a venom or whatever court choices you want in a venom for an HQ and go to town.

How are you gonna kit out your bikes, and what unit size?

I think the first thing I'm going to try is 8 units of 6 with max caltrops in 2 detachments. in my local group they let me get away with taking a court as an HQ choiceso if I really want to I can fill the minimum requirements 42 real space Raiders detachments for 180 points. my question with using venoms is do I need more anti infantry power in this list or should I be a more concerned with armor and possibly gargantuan creatures like wraithknights?

I also could go full stupid and do 3 detachments and make 16 units of 3

I'd like to see that battle report!

Yeah I'll have to do one as soon as I get it together.

I love my reavers more than is healthy for a grown man.

I always run 18 (3 units of 6 with caltrops) minimum + a unit of 3 windriders or 2 at 1500-2000 pts. They score more maelstrom pts than the rest of my army combined and win me games I should have lost time and again.

To support reavers a tough distraction unit(s) like dark artisan or a grotesquery WWPing or flat outing up into his grill will grab his attention and let your reavers do what they do so well.

Take some lance ravagers, haywire scourges and/or fire dragons to take out heavy tanks, knights and dreads. Reavers with CC will shred all other vehicles.

Venoms or disi ravagers for long range anti-infantry and MC is always useful but CC reavers are quite good in assault so load up on heavy AT first.

Ignore cover is not a problem. There's only a few units on the table that have it per turn and reavers are more than fast enough to be out of LOS and they can spread out to avoid to much damage from IC blasts.

Cant wait to read your reaver spam batreps soon!

The scary fact is....you van run 72 in 1850 list.

Oh, I've thought about it.

Mighty hard on the wallet.

Jimsolo wrote:

Mighty hard on the wallet.

My wallet hurts just thinking about it.

I second a unit like the DA. I would also consider a small eldar detachment for some fire dragons. You can use some eldsr bikes to fill the troops roll and they would fit your theme

I take 3 units of 12 with 4 caltrops each (no shooting) and run them with autarchs with banshee masks.
My god, the carnage they cause. Last game against tau, I multicharged 4 units, and he was crushed when he found out he could not overwatch.

Priceless

The problem is probably going to be in killing the big stuff. Imperial or wraith knights in particular come to mind.

Should I buy blasters for the or try to save the points?

Blasters on truenorn or ravagers with dark lances. The problem is though that u need a lot of them to make a difference against the big stuff

doctorz wrote:

The problem is probably going to be in killing the big stuff. Imperial or wraith knights in particular come to mind.

Should I buy blasters for the or try to save the points?

I wouldn't. Like I said I would take some combination of HW scouges, ravagers and fire dragons to keep knights in check. Wraithguard could be added to that list as well.

It starts!

Mush and I postulated reaver spam awhile ago ... here ios what Mush had to say

mush wrote:

MSU reavers give you a lot of scoring/denial power in maelstrom missions thanks to their mobility. They are mobile and cheap enough to be sacrificially used as blockers and obstructions (blocking the movement of Imperial Knights for example. They also create threat saturation as they are dangerous enough with caltrops and heatlances/blasters not to be ignored (if you ignore them they don't need to jink and fire at full BS). As a result they can draw fire away from the rest of your army. Finally because of their mobility, caltrops and heatlance/blaster even a single reaver can be a threat.

All of this forces a huge amount of cognitive strain on your opponent, there are so many factors and so many possible responses to the barrage of questions that you are asking him with all these reavers. After all the reavers only make up half the dark eldar army, which he hasn't even had time to think about!

And here is the list ...

Dual CAD Real Space Raiders

4x 1 Lhamaean, Venom Dual Splinter Cannons 300

5 Mandrakes 60

12x 5 Warriors, Blaster 660

6x 3 Reaver Jetbikes, Caltrops, Heat Lance 438
6x 1 Venom, Dual Splinter Cannons 390

So thirty-four units flooding the table. Twenty splinter cannons, twelve blasters, six heat lances and some baleblast for lols. Keep a lot of units in reserve and just let them trickle in and spread out. Obviously you will multi-assault - who cares about overwatch, eh.