raider vs venom

probably gets asked a lot what us better right now?

Raider I think, because of the utility of the Dark Lance and Disintegrators.

I think Raider, currently.

Raider, because I personally don't own any venoms therefore it is inferior!

Actually, because poison is so common for our army combined with the nerf to the splinter cannon in 8th the raider has more value as a gunboat, plus a higher carry capability.

Overall, Raider. But if you've got a unit you're zooming up the field to get into combat ASAP like a 5 man Incubi squad? Venom moves faster and is -1 to hit in shooting.

Venom isn't as good offensively as it was in 7th. It's all about the Lances, Blasters, and apparently Dissies.

Agree with chippen.

Raider has some nice advantages: higher carrying capacity and lance is better then a few more poison shots.
But the speed and the -1 to hit are also great, and they are a lot cheaper.

So I think it depends a bit on what you like, i think that overal they are very well balanced with regard to each other. If you meet a lot of canned slaves (marines/ vehicles) go with the raider, are your slaves bad shots with little armour (orks/nids/demons) go for the venom.

I'll contend that the Venom is better. Now, keep in mind that hyper-specialization is my overarching theme in lists, Venoms can put out an impressive amount of firepower. True, poison isn't lacking but 20 shots isn't anything to ridicule for 115 points.

There are several points that I think make the Venom the superior platform.
1 - Target Value Dilution. Venoms are cheaper than Raiders, therefore you can field more of them. Venoms, when used en mass, can seriously mess with an opponents Target Priority. What it boils down to is that Venoms help with that sweet spot of Dark Eldar Redundancy where the loss of a single Venom is more like losing a single finger, where losing a Raider would be like losing a hand. In a sense, it dilutes your threat level across a greater number of platforms, making it a pain for your opponent to defeat or damage that segment of your army.

2 - Flickerfields. Don't doubt the power that -1 To Hit has. For Space Marines, it's a serious annoyance, for Guard, it's a flat out existential threat. Guard tanks hate my Venoms, given that reducing them to a 5+ or 6+ To Hit makes them blasted hard to remove from the table. Raiders are more durable, but against a Guard Lascannon, the difference is barely noticeable. It takes 11.54 Lascannons to take down a Venom, 12.80 to take down a Raider. Not bad for being 35 points less, eh?

3 - Degradation. True the Raider is far more durable than the Venom, but never doubt the utility of always having that 16" Move, always hits on a 3+, and always gets a reliable number of attacks. It's a small and fragile package, but due to not degrading in performance, your opponent has to focus on wiping it off the table, not being content to let it limp around with a 5+ BS. It also makes it a more reliable platform for assault units, your ability to reliably calculate your threat range should not be underestimated.

4 - MSU. I'd contend that Venoms are almost a necessity for an MSU Dark Eldar Force. Greater threat range, better area denial, and better maneuverability makes the Venom a solid choice for an army striving to keep its troops at minimum Squad Size.

Finally, as a counterargument for the Anti-Tank options provided by the Raider.
Allow me to put forth a scenario that I would imagine would reasonable choices in a Dark Eldar Army.

Four Raiders, with Dark Lances and packed with Kabs - 740 points for the lot.
From that, you're getting 80 Poison Shots, and 4 Dark Lances.

A solid choice, true, lots of warm bodies, lots of anti-tank, but using Venoms, and a list sleepily cobbled together at 1:30 AM, here's what I have to answer it.

Four Venoms, stock, packed with Kabs, and Two units of Dark Lance Scourges one with four, one with three - Exactly 740 Points.
You're getting 86 Poison Shots, and 7 Dark Lances.

Or, as an alternative, Five Kab Venoms, and only one of Four DL Scourges. - 725 Points
103 Poison Shots, 4 Dark Lances, and room for a Blaster to Boot

Granted, you're sacrificing durability for that, but since when has that been a problem for Dark Eldar?

In the end, there are several advantages that the Venom offers over the Raider, not the least of which is an absurd increase in firepower, which makes it the superior transport in my mind.

the thing i have is that i want to field 4x5 kabal squads with a blaster in each and 2x5 squad incubi and 2 blastchons and i dont want to pay for 7 venoms and thought ill just go with 3 raiders instead and one venom for the blastchons instead

Both are viable.

The Raider is more durable, and has access to DL and notably disintegrators. It can also transport more models per points spent so it reduces cost of transports. Personally I prefer to spam dissie Raiders but e.g. Lawrence from Tabletop Tactics aka the Spider apparently rates twin Splinter Cannon venoms highly in 8e too.

The Bacon Pope makes a good counterargument above. Although I would note that in those example lists, you would probably deep strike the Scourges which cuts their effective firepower by 25% turn 1, and gives soft targets for opponent after.

Darkin wrote:

probably gets asked a lot what us better right now?

They are two vehicles performing different roles.
Venoms are still one of the most reliable Splinter platforms in our codex that also transport troops. Raiders are dedicated transports that also have some nice shooting.

The Raider is pretty much a must for melee transports, while I think the Venom synergizes better with Kabalite Warriors.

However, I try to minimize my footprint of both transports and tend to field more vehicles and Scourges/Mandrakes.

Massive fan of venoms. The -1 to hit really irritates my opponents and I always stuff them full of trueborns. 16" move on a unit that can spout that sort of firepower makes me cackle.

Granted I typically face Space Marines and guard but I have won 14 games in a row at my local gaming store.

I do include 1 raider but it always dies first because my opponents hate shooting at venoms. Unfortunately, they might not kill it in the first turn which means I have a lumbering death trap just waltzing across the battlefield with 2 wounds left and 5+ to hit.

so you guys would say put the 2x5 incubi in 2 venoms or one raider?

Darkin wrote:

so you guys would say put the 2x5 incubi in 2 venoms or one raider?

I would go with venoms. that way one explodes result doesn't cost both squads, and the enemy will be splitting their fire trying to deal with the two priority targets. The -1 to hit with the venoms is also valuable for the delivery vehicles dropping off squads.

My personal favorite:

Expensive units (incubi, trueborn, possibly if I used them bloodbrides) go into venoms
Cheap units (warriors, wyches) I plan to put in a raider either with a char or 2 units of 5 (but right now I do not have enough vehicles yet to transport everything).

The fact that the venom only gets its full shots within 18" is pretty poopy. The paltry number of wounds is also pretty sad. It's also very expensive, which is another minus.

For MSU, the Raider is my preference now, since you can stick two squads in each one.

How are you guys running Venoms and Raiders?

- Are you using Dark Lances or Disintegraotrs on Raiders?

- Are you taking the extra Splinter Cannon on Venoms?

For shooting platforms (Blaster/Cannonborn, Kabalite w/ Blaster), Venoms are probably the better choice. For melee delivery, are you really just trying to deliver 5 melee troops at a time (the answer is probably no). That's a Raider thing.

But don't expect Venoms themselves to bring the heat in shooting. Poison in general isn't as good as it used to be honestly. In the event you do need a lot of poison, Cannonborn, Kabs, and Scourge are the ways to get it. The Venom's splinter fire is just a little bonus.

Also, the Splinter Cannon upgrade on Venoms is completely not worth it. It's one thing if you've got points left over, but it should be the last thing you put on your list - I'd rather have a few phantasm grenade launchers than a Cannon upgrade on a Venom.

Dissie vs Lance:
People keep saying Dissies are overall a better choice against all targets. There are some math folks on here, but I'm not one of them. If anyone knows where that idea came from I'd love to see it though. There was a post where someone put up a spreadsheet calculating wounds per weapon on a given turn against all toughness levels, I'll try to track it down.

http://www.thedarkcity.net/t16139-reaperspam

We had some decent math in this thread on expected damage output for dissies vs reaper cannons.

Found it. http://www.thedarkcity.net/t16118-expected-wounds-for-drukhari-index-weapons-vs-a-variety-of-targets

So the Dark Lance is just barely (like .05 damage per shot on average if i'm understanding that correctly) better against a Leman Russ or equivalent, Dissie is better against everything else until maybe T10.

I personally like to upgrade some Raiders to have Dissies if I got spare points. They reliably achieve something each round and especially against 2 TEQ/Primaris they are a blessing.

Also, I think the upgrade is much more worth it than the SC upgrade on the Venom too. Speaking of, the extra range on a SC Venom is nice, but I can think of quite a few ways to make better use of 15pts.

In theory, the extra SC would be worth it on a Venom that transports SC Trueborn, but I see no insentive to field that.

The Strange Dark One wrote:

In theory, the extra SC would be worth it on a Venom that transports SC Trueborn, but I see no insentive to field that.

If you need a lot of splinter fire, there's not a better source than Cannonborn. 180 points gets you 4 cannons(2 from trueborn, 2 from Venom), plus 3 rifles. Throw a PGL on there and you've got a pretty good GEQ killer. That'll take 5, maybe 6 GEQ just from the splinter fire if you get to 12", and you've certainly created a morale problem with that, so the PGL will get its points for sure.

Whether mass splinter fire is even a thing we care about now is the question. It sucks against marines, so your targets are GEQ and maybe high T targets with an good invuln but not a good base armor save?

The only thing splinter fire is really good at is, High T bad armour monsters (which are very very rare)
Things like orks i is ok.
I think it is les effective against GEQ than MEQ
You deal 2 times as many wounds against GEQ, but they cost less then half of a marine.

And yes I lack some lances, what also makes a difference is that I always need to kill vehicles or monsters (t6/7 and 3+ is very, very common, at least here)
But I do not always need to kill terminators or bikers.

Also the difference is not 0.5% it is 30%

Compared to dissie, the Dark Lance is 40% more effective  (avg. damage) vs a T7 model with sv3+ and more than 6 wounds, which is its best use case. Vs T8 sv3+ (Leman Russ) over 6-wound it is 5% more effective. The difference comes from the to wound roll which changes here for DL but not dissie.

Edit: here's a plot vs Sv3+ multi-wounds model where X is toughness and blue is the dissie, with the math. Hope I got it right, I'm pretty tired.
Edit2: no, of course it wasn't right. Deleted. Will work on it when less tired.

The Venom's role changed this edition. Spamming Venoms isn't effective against mass low toughness models or against vehicle heavy lists which both seem popular now. I think the second splinter cannon upgrade is overpriced for the damage output now. That being said I still like having Venoms for spreading kabalite warriors out on the board or small elite squads (incubi or an Archon's court). It's best chance of doing damage is within 18 inches so they can't really get much work done from the backline anymore.

I'm missing splinter racks on raiders. It would make them seem more like a gunboat. I also miss being able to overwatch from an open topped vehicle.

Aside from that, my raiders have been taking the dissie more often than not. Raiders do have the bonus of being able to take larger squads and multiple units. What is everyone putting in raiders?

Personally, I just put 10 Kabalites in a raider, throw in a Splinter Cannon and Blaster, give the raider a Lance, and call it a day.