Harlequin Misconceptions

The solitaire is very fast and very easy to hide. Combined with infiltrate he's quite easy to slip into a position and project a decent threat bubble around it. I think the ability to conceal him depends a bit on your terrain situation but most ruins typically have nice corners to slip him into. Also he can phase through solid scenery! That's cool!

T3, W3 and a 3++ is essentially killing 3 sisters of battle... not hard is it? Even overwatch is a worry with that defensive line.

Yes he is pretty fast and can hide easy enough but the problem arises from the fact that he is so very easy to put down by basic weapons.

I have a Purge Cortie with a Masque with 5 Shadow Seers. Because hey 10 psychic dice is just nice. That and you can use the Purge Coritie to do damage and blow up transports to get the harlies in to hurt things.

Korona wrote:

The solitaire is very fast and very easy to hide.  Combined with infiltrate he's quite easy to slip into a position and project a decent threat bubble around it.  I think the ability to conceal him depends a bit on your terrain situation but most ruins typically have nice corners to slip him into. Also he can phase through solid scenery!  That's cool!

Just a small note; Tau smart missile system crushed my tactics that is nearly same to the one suggested here ;(

Though, I agree with you that the infiltrating solitaire is a good option. That's why I prefer Heroes' Path solitaire to Revenge one nowadays.

SMS is really effective against us. Just the fact it has range and can ignore cover. Sadly, even the Solitaire cannot stand up to THAT many hits.

JackKnife01 wrote:

SMS is really effective against us. Just the fact it has range and can ignore cover. Sadly, even the Solitaire cannot stand up to THAT many hits.

Plus the fact that it ignores BLOS! My regular Tau opponent uses a couple of those new Tau R2D2 things, and thus there are always full of SMSs in the battlefield

Then you have the stormsurge that does a lot of then buy itself. Can they give SMS interceptor?

yes they can

I ran a pure harlie list for the second time ever tonight mostly inspired by ideas from this thread. The game was only 1000 pts, more for the practice than truly competitive. The opponent was a Tau gunline and I must say - it was a totally different experience to the blowout of my first try back when the codex was new!


Here's what I observed to contribute back to the discussion:

The idea to manipulate ranges using veil and rising crescendo is amazing. I got lucky and hit warlord trait 3 and the extra 3 inches across move run and charge made this even more broken and amazing.

Something that messed with my game plan - I struggled a bit to entice him forwards and he seemed happy to stay at longer range and plump for longer odds to get through veil. Regarding the maths of 17 inches being safe - the odds of rolling 9 or above on 2d6 isn't 1/9 as earlier advertised but more like 1/4. The Tau player tended to need 10 (1/6) or 11 (1/12) but he did hit it once, fortunately flubbing his rolls and only killing one harlequin with lackluster firewarrior shooting.

Regarding veil in general - I love how it shut down the Tau shooting. It was a very effective counter to a gunline and felt very fun to wrong-foot the opponent so heavily.
However having to roll veil on multiple squads is really nerve-wracking. When throwing 3 dice at the spell the odds of failing is about 1/8. The odds of failing over multiple turns is actually quite high even with a lot of dice. I definitely see the merit in adding more shadowseers and that's not viable to do with the pure revenge formation. Sad as it is to say the regular masque is much better for reliability even though the revenge is fun and the reroll to 1s is great.

On that note I used a masque for this 1k points game by taking a barebones third squad. This let me focus all my psychic dice into two squads which made veil a lot more reliable. Positioning and general game flow means you don't need to have all 3+ troupes in the open running at enemy units. Using LoS blockers to keep 1+ troupes safe means more psychic dice for the other 1-2.


On Death Jesters. I had been pretty down on this unit and they soak up a lot of points that could be otherwise buying seers and adding dice to the pool for veil. However having that threat at 24 inches to poke the enemy with is very valuable. I was able to run a unit of fire warriors off the flank of the table because he rolled poorly on his leadership test. It's like a mini psychic power that doesn't cost dice and gives some reason why your opponent needs to advance rather than sitting at long range hoping for high rolls vs veil. Great.

I also found he was handy to detach before charging, soaking up the ridiculous Tau overwatch and allowing the troupe to charge in unaffected. I ran the troupe first to make sure they got a good run distance before running the death jester up too. If the run had been poor I could have tried for the long shot and attempted to pull them into the squad before trying to roll an 11 for charge distance etc.


Other observations - the bikes are really good! I miss skilled rider from reavers but having 2 wounds does make up for it, letting you move aggressively through terrain without fear of killing off your bikes. The star bolas also came in handy vs broadsides once his hammerheads went down to haywire. The downside is that they're quite big models and can be hard to hide in a good spot given their puny 24 inch range. Still, the assault move is a lifesaver and they're much more survivable than scourges!

I strongly agree with you @Korona , and that's why I prefer Masque to Revenge nowadays. I use only one death jester (Spectre of course) and often drop the solitaire for 1500P. By doing this, I can hire 4 shadowseers and more starweavers (or the Faoulchu's Blade).

Last week, I also had an opportunity to try a void shield generator, which REALLY helped my bikes and skimmers to survive at least for two turns. Then they flat-out/turbo-boosted to objectives to earn a ton of VPs. The only problem is I cannot use the VSG unless organizing my army only with formations - thus no Masque detachment

Oooh a VSG is a neat idea, especially for that table - it looks very open! Being able to take guaranteed cover is nice, it feels a bit like wood elves from fantasy.

My next 40k project will be some eldar themed scenery. Open boards are deadly!

The blade formation looks pretty nice. Are you using voidweavers offensively or mainly to grab objectives?

I hold you all responsible for this:
http://www.thedarkcity.net/t14522-the-veiled-path

Nice read guys, I have had a harlequin army sitting on my shelf for a while. Have been wanting to get them back out since the Death Masque release. Thanks for the overall points.