Need some basics

Brand new Dark Eldar player here. I'm a veteran 40k player. I play 3-5 games per week and in a tournament every 4-6 weeks. I've run Tyranids almost exclusively for the past 3 years. Bought into the Dark Kin on a whim when FLGS went belly up before Christmas and were dumping models at cost. I now own about 3000 points of DA. I'll post what I have below. I think this will be my main army for 2017 alongside with my large Harlequin army.

Here is what I have:
2 Archon
2 Haemoculae
1 Succubus
court: 3 sslyth, 3 meduasae, and the wanky looking gollumy dude
9 incubi
46 kabalites
12 witches
4 venoms
2 raiders (1 is raider/ravager dual build)
3 reavers
10 wracks
9 grostesques
10 scourges
5 helions
1 razorwing
5 mandrakes
2 beasmasters: 8 khymera
3 talos
1 ravager

My question is: where do I start? What 'core' do I need to get really good with to learn how to play DE effectively? What are the pitfalls I need to look out for? What upgrades seem good on paper but never really work with the army? What upgrades look bad on paper but just plain works in current meta? What unit sizes are ideal? How do you deal with deathstars? How do you score in ITC when you don't get the point for objectives until the top of your next turn?

Again, I'm a veteran player with a good grasp of the game. What I really need is the advice of players that are great DE players that can answer these general questions so I can begin to hone my skills for this army. I'm not expecting to rule the tabletop with them (I'd just play my Eldar), I just want to be able to surprise people with it and give a good game. I have a large Harelquin army and have played them for years so I am familiar with the glass cannon concept and it's inherent strengths and weaknesses, though at first glance DE seem to want to run around and shoot rather than get stuck in like the clown posse.

Thanks for your help.

Welcome to the Dark City. There are plenty of threads here on tactics for individual units and styles of lists and once you tell us what models you have I'm sure there will be lots of useful advice.

Just to add a little, I know I need more reavers but they are sold out at GW for the moment. Will wait to see what the new boxed game has. Also looking to pick up another 2 talos and chronos to be able to run some of the coven formations.

Quickly looking at the list you've got a pretty decent selection of units. DE lists tend to favour MSU builds. You already have plenty of infantry but you're a bit light on vehicles. I'm not a huge fan of Ravagers but I think you could do with at least 3 of them and the more Raiders and Venoms you have the better! You already know about the Reavers.

I was hoping my harlequin Starweavers could fill a similar role as more venoms. I realize the range is shorter but they do kick out S:6 bladestorm to deal with things that poison will struggle with.

You're missing the counts point. It's not so much that you NEED venoms, it's that you really need a transport for each unit you bring, and, unless you're fielding grotesques (do this) or are intentionally spamming raiders for disintegrator cannons, venoms are better than raiders.

Star weavers are alright, skyweavers thiugh are better. Take the Faiulchu? Blade formation. 280pts with prismatic cannon on the void and you get twos quads of decent jetbikers which ain't bad in assault either.

Archon Vitcus wrote:

Star weavers are alright, skyweavers thiugh are better. Take the Faiulchu? Blade formation. 280pts with prismatic cannon on the void and you get twos quads of decent jetbikers which ain't bad in assault either.

That's like saying reavers are better than venoms (maybe they are, I'm still new to DA); completely different roles. He suggested more venoms so I was wondering if they could fill the same roll. Bring empty and jump a unit of DE in on first turn. I agree, sky weavers are good, but without grenades or skilled rider they really suffer on assault because anything you typically want to hit with them will hide in cover and you will go at I:1. I'm not really a big fan of the Voidweaver. It's marginally OK. Maybe it synergizes well with DE, but in an all Harlequin army I have found it to be really lacking. It's usually just a tax I have to deal with to get some of the formations. Shame too because I got 3 of them after the codex dropped.

Okay, lets get to business. All I say here is for competitive play.

mattblowers wrote:

where do I start?

Dark Eldar right now work best as MSU. Realspace Raiders is the way to go becouse you get 6 FA slots to field more reavers, but if your tournament format allows you to field 3+ detachements, use double CAD for OS.

mattblowers wrote:

What 'core' do I need to get really good with to learn how to play DE effectively?

Heres an improvised tier list of Dark Eldar units
Tier 1 (Autoinclude): Venoms (x2 splinter cannons), Reavers (units of 3 with a cluster caltrop)
Tier 2 (Situational): Ravagers (dissintegrators), Scourges (haywire), Talos (barebones), Grotesques (in grotesquerie formation), Razorwing jetfighters (Barebones for reserve manipulation if you use DftS), Scalpel squadron (null-deployment)
Tier 3 (plain bad): everything else

mattblowers wrote:

What are the pitfalls I need to look out for?

1. Using an Archon/Succubi/Haemonculi as CG. It may sound cool but its not worth it. Take a lone llhamaean in a venom to cover the CG slots, they are a cheap way of incluiding venoms. A lone Medusae can do the trick too and be useful against MEQ/Eldar if you have points to spare.

2. Do not include units that cost a lot of points, rule of thumb is to keep everything as cheap and disposable as possible. By the same rule, dont overcost units by buying a ton of situational upgrades that you might never use. Remember, MSU.

mattblowers wrote:

What upgrades seem good on paper but never really work with the army

Shadowfield, aberration with agonizer, splinter racks, dark lances, night shields.

mattblowers wrote:

What upgrades look bad on paper but just plain works in current meta?

Sybarite with haywire grenade on mandatory kabalite warrior units.

mattblowers wrote:

What unit sizes are ideal?

As small as possible.

mattblowers wrote:

How do you deal with deathstars?

Mobility. Avoid them, throw them baits, hop on top of impassable terrain so he cant assault you, kill all satellite units and force them to split up to grab objectives in the last turns. Also Reaver jetbikes have rending, ignore invisibility and all their punch comes from a single model (cluster caltrop) so theoretically you can snipe targets, but the opponent has to be dumb as rocks and expose key targets. Not that it doesnt happen, I sniped more than one apothecary this way, but its not something you can rely upon in high levels of competition.

mattblowers wrote:

How do you score in ITC when you don't get the point for objectives until the top of your next turn?

No clue. ITC is not played in my country. I guess someone else can help you on that point.

I play an Harlequin-Dark Eldar alliance competitively with good results. Here you go:

I have a lot of articles in my blog about Dark Eldar and how to play them, but they are in spanish, I dont know if you speak it or not. Theres a guy, Lawrence Baker, that plays Dark Eldar too and has a youtube channel called Tabletop Tactics. He's pretty good, you should take a look at some of his batreps.

Anyways, welcome to Commorragh, have fun!

I agree with 90% of what showbiz wrote, the only exception is the venoms (I'm also not very good with reavers but I'm pretty sure this is my own limitation as I've seen reavers do amazing things in the hands of the right person).

Long post below on why I think venoms are not auto include but more of a sprinkle to flavor (in a pure dark eldar army, if you are using allies then it's a different story).

They seems auto include on paper but in reality you can run 20 venoms in an 1850 list and lose to an easy army like Tau, and top tier armies will utterly crush you (most mid-tier armies will as well).
Venoms are not top tier, 2 hull points and enough fire power to kill a couple marines is not amazing for 65points.

12 shots averaging 8 hits and 4 wounds leading to 1.3 wounds against 3+ saves. To reliably kill 10 maries you need 7-8 rounds of venom fire. Heck to kill 10 pink horrors out in the open you need 3-4 of them (never mind all the blue horrors that creates).

If you like them, then of course run them but don't assume you have to and don't think you can solve hard match ups by spamming them, we have TONS of options for killing troops some of them even work on things venoms can't kill (do the math on how many venoms you need to kill a double stormsurge in an ITC event and then cry).

And this isn't because other armies are better than dark eldar, it's because venoms are extremely limited and as such they have diminishing returns. There are usually 1-2 units in a lists that venoms work really well against (thunderwolves, nurgle marines, plague drones, wraiths, MCs, etc.) and using venoms against those targets is amazing, but when you look at what is really getting the work done in most games (Eldar Jetbikes, Marine spam, cultists, flesh hounds, necron warriors, pink horrors, crisis suits, WK, IK, StormSurges, RipTides) venoms are terrible against these targets.

Many top tier lists will utterly crush all kinds of list and sometimes the best you can hope for is that they brought paper to your scissors and not rock, but dark eldar don't have to always bring the scissors and if your not playing against top tier netlists bs then even more reason you shouldn't feel forced into one style of dark eldar (EDIT: by this I mean when you run a lot of venoms it's really hard to get points put in for other AI and still fill out your AT requirements).

I still like and use venoms, but I no longer base my lists around them and they are not my primary or even secondary source of troop killers. They are usually added in for flavor or in hopes that there might be a unit or two in the opposing army that they are prefect for (4 is my current max that I'm willing to put into a list below 2K).

So what DO you use instead?

Really depends on what you want your list to do,

Lately I've been using Grots and Razorwing Jetfighters for the majority of my AI (backed up by warriors in raiders to finish off units) and AT has been largely done with dark lances and haywire grenades. On paper it doesn't look great, but it preforms.

I've been toying around with the idea of using a fair amount of Medusae in raiders

Pain engines can also be quite nice though grav really hurts them.

Reavers, Grotesques, Court, dissie raiders with a shredder on the squad, Heat lance scourges. <-Anti-infantry.

BizarreShowbiz wrote:

Okay, lets get to business. All I say here is for competitive play.

mattblowers wrote:

where do I start?

Dark Eldar right now work best as MSU. Realspace Raiders is the way to go becouse you get 6 FA slots to field more reavers, but if your tournament format allows you to field 3+ detachements, use double CAD for OS.

mattblowers wrote:

What 'core' do I need to get really good with to learn how to play DE effectively?

Heres an improvised tier list of Dark Eldar units
Tier 1 (Autoinclude): Venoms (x2 splinter cannons), Reavers (units of 3 with a cluster caltrop)
Tier 2 (Situational): Ravagers (dissintegrators), Scourges (haywire), Talos (barebones), Grotesques (in grotesquerie formation), Razorwing jetfighters (Barebones for reserve manipulation if you use DftS), Scalpel squadron (null-deployment)
Tier 3 (plain bad): everything else

mattblowers wrote:

What are the pitfalls I need to look out for?

1. Using an Archon/Succubi/Haemonculi as CG. It may sound cool but its not worth it. Take a lone llhamaean in a venom to cover the CG slots, they are a cheap way of incluiding venoms. A lone Medusae can do the trick too and be useful against MEQ/Eldar if you have points to spare.

2. Do not include units that cost a lot of points, rule of thumb is to keep everything as cheap and disposable as possible. By the same rule, dont overcost units by buying a ton of situational upgrades that you might never use. Remember, MSU.

mattblowers wrote:

What upgrades seem good on paper but never really work with the army

Shadowfield, aberration with agonizer, splinter racks, dark lances, night shields.

mattblowers wrote:

What upgrades look bad on paper but just plain works in current meta?

Sybarite with haywire grenade on mandatory kabalite warrior units.

mattblowers wrote:

What unit sizes are ideal?

As small as possible.

mattblowers wrote:

How do you deal with deathstars?

Mobility. Avoid them, throw them baits, hop on top of impassable terrain so he cant assault you, kill all satellite units and force them to split up to grab objectives in the last turns. Also Reaver jetbikes have rending, ignore invisibility and all their punch comes from a single model (cluster caltrop) so theoretically you can snipe targets, but the opponent has to be dumb as rocks and expose key targets. Not that it doesnt happen, I sniped more than one apothecary this way, but its not something you can rely upon in high levels of competition.

mattblowers wrote:

How do you score in ITC when you don't get the point for objectives until the top of your next turn?

No clue. ITC is not played in my country. I guess someone else can help you on that point.

I play an Harlequin-Dark Eldar alliance competitively with good results. Here you go:

I have a lot of articles in my blog about Dark Eldar and how to play them, but they are in spanish, I dont know if you speak it or not. Theres a guy, Lawrence Baker, that plays Dark Eldar too and has a youtube channel called Tabletop Tactics. He's pretty good, you should take a look at some of his batreps.

Anyways, welcome to Commorragh, have fun!

Thanks! Quite a response!

Why no splinter racks? I find anything that allows you reroll in this game to be golden. For the cost of a blaster all the splinter weapons become TL. I don't get why that isn't good. For the record, I always try to build redundancy as I fail a lot of rolls. It was a joke at the club I played when my hive crones testaclids and flyrants egrubs rolled all pentetrations rolls of a 1 for 2 turns.

My Spanish isn't the best, but I was able to get through your blog well enough with the help of google translator. It's been 20 years since I took it in university.

Because You're already hitting on 3's. Someone did the math out and for the 1 more point for 2 additional bodies instead of the racks the sum total of the number of hit's you will get after all is said and done is mathematically greater.

Venoms are pretty damn good for 65pts.
They are very fast, small, skimmer movement, jink, have an invuln, transport capacity, good shooting and often obsec too.

As my grotesquerie and reavers advance to cause merry hell in the enemies lines and grab the objs they need covering fire to perform at their best.

Venoms combined with other things like dissies, lances, haywire blasters etc combine fire to eliminate threats to the advancing grots and reavers while holding our dep zone.

I agree you don't have to spam them but i'd always advise taking 3-4 venoms min.

Hey guy nice to meet you. I thought I would take a look at your list and see whats what
Also I am going to suggest goign to google and checking out the dark eldar tactics board on 1d4chan.

2 Archon
-Generally used to get Web Way portals on the board and maybe armour of misery for leadership shenanigans, soul trap is ok if you can get it to work without losing him though, squishy as heck

2 Haemoculae
-less squishy, useful if you have massed grotesques talos/cronus. the covens list is fairly good.
-both books have decent kit and gear for him but you cannot choose to have a covens haemonculus with the D.Eldar kit, so feel free to mix and match.
-covens book can take these in abundance.

1 Succubus
-decent and cheap access to ap2 so long as you dont kit her too heavy, jsut like the haemie and archon can take a wwp

court: 3 sslyth, 3 meduasae, and the wanky looking gollumy dude
-sslyth usually outweigh the usefulness of the rest of these guys t5 lots of attacks, 2 wounds 25pts.
-i usually proxy medusae as wracks for my list, but the template they have is good.

9 incubi
-have not used them much myself, no grenades. people like them, i use the slot for grotesques, I mean, people REALLY like them.

46 kabalites
-bread and butter, 10 per raider at 60 max would net you 120 poisoned shots plus the raiders shots per turn, burning around the floor at max 36 inches is awesome. not as good as it used to be, but thats the motto of our codex. (flickerfields no longer avqailable) make sure to set aside some guys in there with blasters for true born because a couple of those in raiders can wreck a persons day easily.

12 witches
-turn them into harlies? thats what i did, slapped spare wrack masks on them, chose just the full smooth shields when i could and painted them up nice.

4 venoms
-four venoms is a good number. you did good.

2 raiders (1 is raider/ravager dual build)
-you know, moar. gg and all that.
3 reavers

10 wracks
-not enough to really make a difference, except for null deployment through venoms. i have around 40 wracks both converted and not, they are ok for capturing objectives and pouring them out of a raider nets you 30 attacks that are poisoned with potential 3 flamers (one from haemonculus). ossifactors are better though.

9 grostesques
-you can get a decent grotesquerie out of this, or you could try fitting groups of 3 of them in clown cars...
-these guys are pretty self explanitory.

10 scourges
- I hate to admit it but i rely pretty heavily on these guys. min squads of 5 are usually the best what with teh real space raiders giving you all those slots it might be tempting to spam these buggers. I usually stop around 15-20 sometimes as few as ten now that i have more raiders.

5 helions
-use them as beastmasters? dont really have enough to run them as a hellion swarm and they are not good anyway (scourge are better). however there are rumors on BolS about a wych cult update so maybe.

1 razorwing
-remember you can shoot up to 4 missiles per turn...

5 mandrakes
-proxy them as wracks maybe?

2 beasmasters: 8 khymera
-good unit. 12" move and 5+save

3 talos
-maybe pick up or make out of scrap bits anoth 2 of these bad boys and you can have one threatening deathstar that is likely to make you bare minimum 1 vp every two turns.
-gives them scout

1 ravager
-use is as another raider?

I disagree with your analysis here in many places, because grotesques are objectively doing everything Wracks can do better for 1.6points more per wound, and all of the units you suggest turning into wracks are better then wracks in the widest variety of other cases and are actually quite decent units in their own right. Mandrakes are cool, medusae are great. That said I think you've provided an absolutelygorgeous thing @mattblowers can do that plays into their original question, with no additional models, that melds well with their harlies and lets them taste a huge variety of DE toys.

something like
Covenite Coterie
HQ
2xHaemonculus
Elite
3xGrotesques- [3xGrotesques]
Heavy Support
1xTalos- [3xTalos w/ichor injectors]

845 without raiders, 1010 with. The talos unit, and one unit of grotesques but then you'd just take a grotesquerie, can be cut to free up points for other stuff or conversely a third haemonculus could be added such as all 3 with WWP to pinpoint DS a masque's 3 harlie squads. The talos unit can also be broken into 3 units but I'm torn on either approach or just not suggesting them at all, anyway something like this would let you fill your starweavers with T5 bodies, spread up to 9 -1 leadership debuffs around the table that unfortunately do not stack anymore but do still stack with the mask of secrets. Super hearty All CC army with 3 different psykers casting psychic shriek within a -1 or -3LD bubble sounds like a ton of fun.

Matt Blowers wrote:

Thanks! Quite a response!

Why no splinter racks? I find anything that allows you reroll in this game to be golden. For the cost of a blaster all the splinter weapons become TL. I don't get why that isn't good. For the record, I always try to build redundancy as I fail a lot of rolls. It was a joke at the club I played when my hive crones testaclids and flyrants egrubs rolled all pentetrations rolls of a 1 for 2 turns.

My Spanish isn't the best, but I was able to get through your blog well enough with the help of google translator. It's been 20 years since I took it in university.

You are very welcome

Splinter racks arent good becouse to make use of them you have to get 10 warriors (80p) aboard a raider (55p) with splinter racks (15p), and then put this expensive unit 12" away from an enemy unit in order to rapidfire. That is average assault range of any unit in the game, with a 10/10/10 open topped transport full of T3 S5+ people. Its a death trap.

When the 7th edition codex came out I tested them thoroughly, my conclusion was that venoms are better in every way.

I find the splinterrack raider quite usefull as a mop-up device. I usually use 4-5 venoms with 2 raiders. Venoms tenderize the enemy, raiders close in to finish the job. Works like a charm on imp guards!

Horses for courses. I prefer to use lance raiders over venoms. The extra hull point, a longer surface for blocking enemy units and 3+ jinks make them more resilient and therefore more annoying.

I still persist with Darklight spam, so blaster in a min-sized squad and the Sybarite idea is good, too, for the access to Haywire grenades. For 150 points, you have a unit that is ob-sec, Ld 9, and can put hurt on any vehicle and any infantry squad in the game.

I am not saying that the other ideas before me are wrong. I just don't mind paying for a bit more battlefield resilience.

I don't have time to delve too deeply into this unless your questions become more specific, because there is so much to be said about general strategy and tactics. That said, I can vouch for BizarreShowbiz and amorrowlyday. While I don't always agree with them, far more often than not, these guys deliver sound tactical advice. Gotta adjust Shobiz's advice to the US meta, however. Some things don't transfer.

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If I had to give you 1 piece of advice in order to make DE the absolute most effective they can be, currently, it would be to use them to supplement your Eldar army. They're far better as support and fill in the gaps for Eldar than they are as a primary force due primarily to 2 glaring problems(1 that you hit on):

1. They have trouble holding objectives that you score at the top of your NEXT turn, as you asked. Most of the army is super fragile(T3 with 5+/6+ save), and the things that aren't like Cronos/Talos get eaten alive by Grav. Grotesques are an option with some staying power, but they don't have objective secured. I normally use Eldar Windrider jetbikes to secure objectives.

2. They don't have access to anything like a wraithknight, and they can't effectively kill a wraithknight/gargantuan creature without allies.(They can kill one, just not effectively. It shouldn't take 1800 points worth of firepower to kill a wraithknight, but it does for DE.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Because of these 2 issues, in ITC, you basically auto-lose the mission that uses killpoints, and you have a lot of trouble scoring objectives against resilient, obsec heavy armies like space marines.

Honorable mention:
Flamers also murder our entire army in surprisingly few hits due to the "no escape" rule and the facts that all our transports are open topped, which means D6 AP5 ignores cover autohits to our S3 5+ troopers PER vehicle the template hits.(I've seen a single template hit 3 before)

Those are the weaknesses that your allied force, whoever that might be(eldar, Harlies, etc), will have to overcome in order to make DE effective competitively as a primary force.

The hardest thing when starting out with DE is getting into the right mindset. It's the classic "I lost most my guys but have you beaten on objectives" type army.

You can't have any expectation of your units making it through the game. You trade units for turns and position. The real art is learning the balance. On the one hand DE units are super-fragile so if you're too aggressive you'll just get tabled. On the other, if you're too conservative your opponent will execute his game plan, defeat you in detail or just run you over in the objectives game.
The key concept is using your mobility to get your opponent to mis-spend his resources. Offer him bad choices, tempt him to run his titan into a bunch of 5 warriors etc.
I'd really recommend Skari's youtube series as those vids show it all much better than I can say it. At the end of the day you'll learn from experience. If you're playing so frequently you'll pick the feel up really quickly. I think the biggest thing I find is that the army rewards bold acts and aggression so don't be afraid to commit wholeheartedly to your moves.

Korona wrote:

The hardest thing when starting out with DE is getting into the right mindset.  It's the classic "I lost most my guys but have you beaten on objectives" type army.

You can't have any expectation of your units making it through the game.  You trade units for turns and position.

I've learned that quite well by playing Tyranids. Typically won with scoring more points and not with killing more. Frankly I'm a bit bored with Codex: Flyrants. With the nerf to MCs cover bonuses my mawloc spam list is now dead in the water. I wanted a new challenge and the opportunity presented itself, so here we are. I'm pretty effective with Harlequines so I'll probably rely on a detachment of them as a crutch whilst I learn the ropes DE.

BizarreShowbiz wrote:

Splinter racks arent good becouse to make use of them you have to get 10 warriors (80p) aboard a raider (55p) with splinter racks (15p), and then put this expensive unit 12" away from an enemy unit in order to rapidfire. That is average assault range of any unit in the game, with a 10/10/10 open topped transport full of T3 S5+ people. Its a death trap.

I missed that pesky little number beside the splinter racks and thought I could put it on venoms. That looks like it would rock! Yeah, never considered putting it on a raider.