Dark Eldar - Melee Army possible

Cerve wrote:

Reavers where good by flying over units two Codex ago.
Those D3/D6 dmg in impact never maked them as a "strong mele unit".

4 S4 + 2D6 S6, all auto-hit and rending, was extremely powerful. You could one-shot tanks with a single charge. You could exterminate entire squads before they even had the chance to attack.

I played 4 units of 6 reavers. There were few units in the game that would not be killed by those charges.

My first game vs Craftworld Eldar in 7th my opponent rolled up Invisibility for his Wraithguard, which sounded really tricky until they got run over by Reaver hammer of wrath.

4 S4+2D6 S6 rending hits....powerful...

We were (and are) playing different games.

Cerve wrote:

4 S4+2D6 S6 rending hits....powerful...

We were (and are) playing different games.

The important points:
1) Autohits. Not attacks, so Invisibility (the bane of that edition) or other defensive shenanigans meant nothing.
2) Rear Armour on vehicles. Against anything smaller than a Land Raider, that'll get you at least 1 Penetrating hit on average.
3) Initiative 10. And then you get an additional bevy of normal attacks at lower initiative.
4) That's out of a single squad of 6. You could (and people did) easily bring 24 or 30.
5) Reavers were fast enough that you could then bring any number of those squads to bear on any target on the battlefield.
6) Hit and Run. Anything remaining alive in the opponents turn just meant you were immune to shooting, before Hit and Running away to recharge something else.

It was a thing of beauty watching a wave of Reavers swoop on targets one by one like a flock of deadly birds, and leaving nothing but a carcass.

Voidhawk wrote:

The important points:
1) Autohits. Not attacks, so Invisibility (the bane of that edition) or other defensive shenanigans meant nothing.
2) Rear Armour on vehicles. Against anything smaller than a Land Raider, that'll get you at least 1 Penetrating hit on average.
3) Initiative 10. And then you get an additional bevy of normal attacks at lower initiative.
4) That's out of a single squad of 6. You could (and people did) easily bring 24 or 30.
5) Reavers were fast enough that you could then bring any number of those squads to bear on any target on the battlefield.
6) Hit and Run. Anything remaining alive in the opponents turn just meant you were immune to shooting, before Hit and Running away to recharge something else.

It was a thing of beauty watching a wave of Reavers swoop on targets one by one like a flock of deadly birds, and leaving nothing but a carcass.

Their resistance was really good. If you managed to get nightfighting (or give them stealth, through commander traits), you could jink for 2+ saves. And they were so ridiculously cheap... those were the times.

Those autohits were hitting the side of the veichles they were hitting. Only the attacks in melee were going to the rear.

Anyway they were good, I'm not saying the opposite. But that still an harras kind of attack, not a "powerful" attack. Guys come on, yeah nice those attacks bypass Invisibility...but did you remember the powercreep of units woth Invisibility casted above? Those hits were NOTHING against them.

I'm still argue that we had nothing really powerful in melee, but a lot of melee good for;
-taking down light/medium veichles
-taking down light units
MeQ units with few models (devastators, scout units etc)

Which is great! I like it! But can't say that 6 Reavers were a bomb in melee...they were great, because the were good to hit hard against light targets (above) not surely because they were an answer against Invisibility (that were casted on really, really strong units, anytjing too strong for the Reavers themselves).

So please when I'm talking about.powerfull melee units, I'm talking about real deathstars (and similar DS in 8th edition), nothing that we can manage in melee. And we will never be able too, for a game design choice.

But I'm kinda sick of it, it's an old topic, it's fine if we disagree (and I'm always talking about a competitive way).

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-taking down light/medium veichles
-taking down light units

Do you actually know what "Rending" does ? Did you actually play the Reaver spam before stating this ?

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But I'm kinda sick of it, it's an old topic, it's fine if we disagree

Well then let us celebrate the past glory of Reavers without your "We are playing a different game" bullcrap.
Legions of Dark Eldar players bought dozens of Reavers in 7th for how good they were. If you didn't take advantage of their cheese to win your share of tournies before they were gutted by 8th edition, that's your problem.

I barely played in 7th so I can only give my experience in a handfull of battles.

But that jink was mostly ignored by my opponents (not sure if that was mainly because I saw much eldar and tau).

4s4 and 2d6 s6 hits sounds like a reasonable number but that usually mend 1 rending wound if I got lucky 2. I rarely killed any squad in 1 go with just 1 unit (about 1 or 2 rending wound and 5/6 saves: 3/4 wounds in total) and because a lot of the damage comes from the 2d6 hits it was also frequently a lot less than that. (Not that they were not good, but I also did not find them as great as some others seem to think).

Reavers could reliably knock wounds and hull points off of just about anything that the opponent could field.

Cluster Caltrops were a great way to up their CC damage, grav-talons less so.

Their shooting was somewhat lacklustre, but if required a Blaster could be taken for all-around stuff, and at 10 points, the Heat Lance was nice against Vehicles you were likely within Melta of as you planned to charge them immediately afterwards.

With the option for a 36" Turbo Boost that ignored all intervening terrain and models allowing you to redeploy great distances, they were great for objective grabbing.

Reavers were AWESOME in 7th.

Mppqlmd wrote:

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-taking down light/medium veichles
-taking down light units

Do you actually know what "Rending" does ? Did you actually play the Reaver spam before stating this ?

Quote :

But I'm kinda sick of it, it's an old topic, it's fine if we disagree

Well then let us celebrate the past glory of Reavers without your "We are playing a different game" bullcrap.
Legions of Dark Eldar players bought dozens of Reavers in 7th for how good they were. If you didn't take advantage of their cheese to win your share of tournies before they were gutted by 8th edition, that's your problem.

Lol, I know it better than you I guess. Take your math, count how many rending wounds were able to place.


Anyway, my argue were about a really powerfull melee unit like other armies have, and you continue to pull out Reavers.
It's fine, and yes we still playing a different game. But I got it, it's not a problem. There's none of your quotes were I agree with you. It's ok, I don't consider Reavers as a powerful melee unit, I consider them as a great harass unit. But if you consider them great as Wolfriders, DeathCompany, or (in 7th) any common deathstar of that time, I will not continue to argue.

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Take your math, count how many rending wounds were able to place.

See, unlike you, and like many, many others around here, I actually played those things like a madman, and I don't need to go into abstract calculations to know that spamming 800pts of reavers have won me more (competitive, semi competitive and casual)games than I can count.

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Lol, I know it better than you I guess.

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It's fine, and yes we still playing a different game.

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There's none of your quotes were I agree with you.

I'm not sure whether you are aware of it, but passive agressive behaviour isn't exactly encouraged. You should find other ways to defend your opinions than "lol, we are not playing the same game", "i know better than you anyway",  "i don't ever care coz i'm right", because you're making a fool of yourself.

Mppqlmd wrote:

Quote :

Take your math, count how many rending wounds were able to place.

because you're making a fool of yourself.

Ok

Does anyone think that the rules will change so much that at least melee could be a viable option or would it just be a polished index version?

Options are viable as long as you know how to play them and as long as they roughly fit your meta. I really doubt that 90% of playes play cookie cutter lists, which means we don't have to either. But most importantly don't let your unit evaluation be shrunk to numbercrunching. The game is about missions, movement, tactics, concentration of force, limiting enemy damage output, etc. Play, don't calculate. Start losing, think, get experience and if you can learn from your faults, you will start winning soon enough. Don't ask for rules to solve your problems. It is perfectly fine and logical that melee DE will have some uphill matchups, but we are really not that bad as some people try to make it.

OTOH yes, I think we will get some nice perks like stratagems to help smooth some edges our melee choices currently have, so it will not be that much of a hit or miss.

Yeah, Reavers were either overpowered or undercosted.

Let’s look at some of the other losers of our current index as well, the claim that Dark Eldar didn’t have any “heavy” hitters is just ignorance.

Talos and Cronos back in the day we’re monstrous creatures, as monstrous creatures, they could “smash” making half the attacks but doubling their strength. Now those were the good ‘ol days. And if that wasn’t enough, the Coven supplement allowed you to take a unit of 5 Talos. Flanking in from a board edge. Effing glorious.

Also, let’s not forget about our big meat boys. Grotesques were absolutely mad. The fact that you could, and many did, take big squads of them and just hoof it up field, to either charge in the 2nd or 3rd Turn was an absolute masterpiece.

Pepperidge Farm remembers

Barrywise wrote:

Yeah, Reavers were either overpowered or undercosted.

Let’s look at some of the other losers of our current index as well, the claim that Dark Eldar didn’t have any “heavy” hitters is just ignorance.

Talos and Cronos back in the day we’re monstrous creatures, as monstrous creatures, they could “smash” making half the attacks but doubling their strength. Now those were the good ‘ol days. And if that wasn’t enough, the Coven supplement allowed you to take a unit of 5 Talos. Flanking in from a board edge. Effing glorious.

Also, let’s not forget about our big meat boys. Grotesques were absolutely mad. The fact that you could, and many did, take big squads of them and just hoof it up field, to either charge in the 2nd or 3rd Turn was an absolute masterpiece.

Pepperidge Farm remembers

I would like to add that back in the day being a monstrous creature meant you had AP 2, and since melee hit rear armour most of the time and most rear armour was 10, a Talos reaching melee was an extinction level event for most tanks even without using Smash.

Grots were one of the few non character, non monsters with multiple wounds back then, which combined with T5 and a good FNP made them unreasonably difficult to kill with melee and small arms, the weapons of their intended prey.

aurynn wrote:

But most importantly don't let your unit evaluation be shrunk to numbercrunching. The game is about missions, movement, tactics, concentration of force, limiting enemy damage output, etc. Play, don't calculate.

There is some truth to that, but you are handwaving away the reality that some units are just objectively good or bad value too.

My guess for the Codex is the datasheets wont change very much. We wont get psychic powers, are unlikely to get good auras, but are very likely to get Kabal tactics, points reductions and useful stratagems. How good the improvements are relative to the things that probably wont change will determine whether we are good, middling or poor.

I was watching "Almost Pro Gaming" on YouTube, he made a good point. Melee isn't as strong as shooting, so when you see it in competitive play, its used by hordes or as a bomb. So i think we could hvae some melee potential, but we'll need a stratagem to make our DS bomb more reliable like blood letters or blood angels

Mêlée in a 1 on 1 situation is “technically” more powerful than shooting because your unit can attack in both your turn and your opponents, leading to a higher body count. However, now that there’s the “fallback” mechanic, yeah I would agree that shooting is more powerful than Melee.

Barrywise wrote:

Mêlée in a 1 on 1 situation is “technically” more powerful than shooting because your unit can attack in both your turn and your opponents, leading to a higher body count. However, now that there’s the “fallback” mechanic, yeah I would agree that shooting is more powerful than Melee.

Yeah, it was before, but since it's pretty darn hard to force your enemy to stay into a fight, the only way to attack twice is if your enemy wants that fight to happen. Which can lead to 2 conclusions : he's dumb, or you made a mistake with that charge.

Or our wyches get the slanesh rule where they cannot retreat from combat

Also that is one of the big things we are missing with our melee, the tratagems.
Most melee armies have some way of getting them into combat, right now we do not. give us some extra options there and suddenly melee is already more viable. Although some melee units need a bit more punch as well. And units like wracks should be either cheap or though enough to walk and not be completely shot to death before arriving.

Kantalla wrote:

aurynn wrote:

But most importantly don't let your unit evaluation be shrunk to numbercrunching. The game is about missions, movement, tactics, concentration of force, limiting enemy damage output, etc. Play, don't calculate.

There is some truth to that, but you are handwaving away the reality that some units are just objectively good or bad value too.

My guess for the Codex is the datasheets wont change very much. We wont get psychic powers, are unlikely to get good auras, but are very likely to get Kabal tactics, points reductions and useful stratagems. How good the improvements are relative to the things that probably wont change will determine whether we are good, middling or poor.

Are they OBJECTIVELY good or bad? I would argue that there is nothing objective about measuring unit's worth through its offensive power only. Not even offensive and defensive power together is objective. None of us is capable of an objective evaluation just because of too many variables of each particular battle. One piece of terrain can make your unit shine or its absence can make it do nothing the whole battle because it dies. So is it me handwaving away reality, or am I actually handwaving away irrelevant data? :-)

And that is why I always recommend playing the units over mathammering... Immerse in the reality. Do not get discouraged by numbers. Those numbers are vacuum data... And if the unit does not work, first reaction should be "I might be playing the unit wrong". Not "this unit is worthless".

We really are missing out in the stratagem department, no argument there, but its a temporary setback and we are doing surprisingly well without them. I won't argue on some of the options, because I really would like to have a richer options in some units. But I do stand by my opinion, that as an index army we are fine, that our melee is not a joke and that we can win or tie against anything that is not a broken unit spam or hard counter. I am always surprised that people wonder that broken unit spams or hard counters are next to impossible to beat with anything remotely TAC.

Well, let's be very abstract :

- A unit is capable of an array of things (in that array, you find mobility, resistance, special rules, offense, pretty much everything).

- A unit has a price.

- You can compare the arrays of possibilities 2 units have. You can also compare their prices.

-> If unit A and unit B have the same price, but unit A is capable of [T, U, V] and unit B is capable of [T, U, V, X, Y], then unit B is objectively better than unit A.

-> If this scenario can be repeated a lot (if unit A has less capacities than most units of the same price and role), then unit A is objectively bad.
-> If unit B has more capacities than other units of the same cost, or if unit B is cheaper than other units with similar capacities, unit B is objectively good.


The problem with Dark Eldar is that you can (almost) always find, in another army, a unit of same price and role that does your job better.

aurynn - allow me to go on a complete tangent to answer your question!

As a hockey fan, there is a lot more data being collected on statistical events, and in the last few years there have been a lot of performance based analytics being carried out to provide an assessment of how good a player or team is in a variety of areas. These cover all kinds of things, and new measures are occasionally dreamed up too. There is a clash of ideology between some fans and even teams around whether the old school eye-test way of assessing play is better, or whether the analytics provide a better assessment of player quality. Strangely enough, this leads to disagreements like:

Stats Nerd: "I can't believe the team just re-signed Smith, because he is a turnover machine. See how bad his CorsiRel% is and his Controlled Possession Zone Exit %."
Old School Knuckledragger: "Smith is awesome, you need to actually watch the game."

The reality of course is both methods are valuable, as you can't see everything for all players, and people are subject to confirmation bias from their observations. The analytics aren't perfect and don't cover every aspect of performance. However, both have value, and can help cover the shortcomings of the other.

Coming back to 40k, with a points system, it is absolutely possible for a unit to be objectively good or bad value. Razorwing Flocks on release at 7 points were amazingly good, to the point a correction was needed. Few units are as extreme as that, but there are some units that are fairly clearly over or under costed. I think of the mathhammer as being like the hockey analytics and your view as being the eye-test method.

I can objectively assess whether a unit is a good choice for dealing damage to a particular target in ideal conditions, or whether a unit is good at resisting damage in the same way with relevant numbercrunching. With that type of analysis I can make conclusions like "Mandrakes are good offensively, but fragile" and "Reavers are bad offensively, and also fragile".

Of course the numbers aren't the whole story, and there are cases where you might be able to get good use out of units that aren't scoring well on the offensive or defensive numbers, the mobility of the Reavers might let you get to an objective that otherwise you couldn't reach for example, or allow you concentrate more of your force than the enemy.

However, if someone has an army made up of Reavers, Talos and Grotesques in Raiders (all great value in 7th, but not so much in 8th), I would suggest they should change their list rather than just think they might just be playing the units wrong.

Overall, I do agree with you about the value of playing the game. I agree as an Index Drukhari was OK, and our melee options aren't all terrible. However, I would rather give a new player advice that leads them to a solid chance of winning, rather than needing to outplay their opponent because they have a list of less efficient options, which they might do if you handwave away what you are describing as irrelevant data!