is it me or are we bad at wounding?

Dear forum readers and fellow archons,

This is not a rant but just a curious question and to see if im just going insane or if we really are how to put this in agreeable terms?  more lackluster then a mandrake in 6 ed,

Last night i stood against my good pal, a blood angel player, i lost the  battle pretty bad and got wiped at turn 2.

sadly enough this has been my druhkar tale since 8 ed, were in 7ed i did pretty well.
most of the time we could  make t a close game  our list havent changed that much.

as far as i can say is that splinter weapons are really crap, as in, easy to hit, reasonable to wound but damn easy to just wipe off.

to give a exemple, i shot with 2 venoms with dubbel splinter cannons, with 2 squads of trueborn both wth splinter cannons at his 7 man assault jumpack marines.

around 30 of the 48 hits passed, around 21 wounded, and i killed a total of : 1 marine.

im really at a mind block at this moment if druhkari are right now a army worth to continue becaus after 2 editions of a uphill battle, now it really starts to irritate me that without blasters or dark lances i cant kill anything with reasonable expectations.

the last battle was just a exemple  know dice can screw up (just as i just had a bad turn 2 and could not destroy his predator, vindicator and rhino who all were on a 3 wounds or less)

but its irritating me that this is the state of my previous 6 battles,  and i only played 7 this edition so far.

so now the question at large, are druhkari actually still a glass hammer or should we pray to what ever we belief in that gdubs does not frak us even harder this edition like in 6 and 7 ed were we really turned into a sad cheap eldar supplement codex?

There is a reason our army is considered "death from a thousand cuts". You don't need a thousand cuts if we could hit our enemies with a huge hammer.

I would also distance myself from the notion of "Glass Hammer" because for a classical glass hammer we simply lack the firepower. I think our forces are best described as a finesse army. You cannot throw models at the enemy and hope to get the job done, you need to utilize speed and positioning for maximum effect.

Anyway, wounding is only part of the story. Number of attacks, AP and special rules need to be put into perspective as well.

I think the structure and the damage output of our army is just fine for the most part. What we lack is specialized wargear (or good special wargear in general) as well as synergies and force multipliers. Things like Splinter Racks on Raiders (re-rolls for Splinter weapons) or a Doom-like Ability for the Archon (re-roll wounds on an enemy unit) would give us a lot of leverage in many situations.

As an Index army, we lack a lot of gimmicks to make things work for us.

But you are right, the "wounding" process is often the most painful for us. We have great BS/WS, we have access to good AP... but we rarely wound on better than 4+ (even our AT is "only" S8).

problem is, that i just cant understand how it is possible, to OUTNUMBER a squad, far away from cover, allies or anything that could save them... causing 10+ wounds... and then time and time again your lucky if you kill a marine or 2.

really getting tired of 8 ed if this is the way it stays to be fair.

hope the codex improve us or gives us atleast ap or anything to bypass armour without being forced to take a blaster army.

but got a game against custodians in half a hour, lets see if we still can beat mega duper elite armies.

ricorongen wrote:

to give a exemple, i shot with 2 venoms with dubbel splinter cannons, with 2 squads of trueborn both wth splinter cannons at his 7 man assault jumpack marines.

around 30 of the 48 hits passed, around 21 wounded, and i killed a total of : 1 marine.

I'm not singing the praises of splinter cannons in 8e, as I think they are decidedly lackluster, but this is just pure bad luck. Your opponent made 20 out of 21 3+ saves and there's really not much you can do about that other than hope that luck swings your way later on.

Just using splinters you will really struggle against power armour in cover.

You need a mix of other weapons in there, whether that is Blasters, Disintegrators, Mandrake Baleblasts, etc to beat most armies. If anything it is the other end of the scale where I think we are lacking - dealing with hordes.

Count Adhemar wrote:

I'm not singing the praises of splinter cannons in 8e, as I think they are decidedly lackluster, but this is just pure bad luck. Your opponent made 20 out of 21 3+ saves and there's really not much you can do about that other than hope that luck swings your way later on.

Probably cover involved. Which is still lucky (20/21 for a 2+), but more acceptable odds.

Count Adhemar wrote:

ricorongen wrote:

to give a exemple, i shot with 2 venoms with dubbel splinter cannons, with 2 squads of trueborn both wth splinter cannons at his 7 man assault jumpack marines.

around 30 of the 48 hits passed, around 21 wounded, and i killed a total of : 1 marine.

I'm not singing the praises of splinter cannons in 8e, as I think they are decidedly lackluster, but this is just pure bad luck. Your opponent made 20 out of 21 3+ saves and there's really not much you can do about that other than hope that luck swings your way later on.

This we are slightly lacking a lot of mid str mid ap weapons (which is why dissies are quite popular despite the cost).
But if out of 21 3+ saves you kill only 1 instead of 7 that is mostly bad luck (even when in cover with a 2+ you would on average deal 3 or 4 wounds thus still some bad luck, but more than expected once in a while).

Thing is, this has happend 6 times in a row.

I mean , my dice aint bad, my tactics arent either.

But it just feels u fair that even using the best tactics in my favour aint curting it.

:/ gues its time to rewrite the army list again and only go Baster/darkpance heavy.. until the codex drops

The Strange Dark One wrote:

There is a reason our army is considered "death from a thousand cuts". You don't need a thousand cuts if we could hit our enemies with a huge hammer.

I would also distance myself from the notion of "Glass Hammer" because for a classical glass hammer we simply lack the firepower. I think our forces are best described as a finesse army. You cannot throw models at the enemy and hope to get the job done, you need to utilize speed and positioning for maximum effect.

Anyway, wounding is only part of the story. Number of attacks, AP and special rules need to be put into perspective as well.

I think the structure and the damage output of our army is just fine for the most part. What we lack is specialized wargear (or good special wargear in general) as well as synergies and force multipliers. Things like Splinter Racks on Raiders (re-rolls for Splinter weapons) or a Doom-like Ability for the Archon (re-roll wounds on an enemy unit) would give us a lot of leverage in many situations.

The problem with that is we lack number of attacks, mobility, ect. We are a fineness army without the tools to be effective at that.

In the 'glory' days of 7th edition we could genuinely outmaneuver our enemies. We had mass deep strikes, fast skimmers across the board, the awesomeness of Eldar Jetbikes, and army wide fleet. Oh, and our transports were open topped and could jink better than anyone. These days, we are 1-2" faster than our opponents, everyone can assault out of transports as well as we can, most armies have abilities that let them advance and charge, move twice, or whatever, and most have a lot of deep strike options. Meanwhile, our deep strike abilities have been gutted. We got a bit slower, and everyone else got a lot faster.

Numbers wise, we are very expensive for what we bring to the table while also being incredibly frail for points. A Hellion hits about as hard as an assault marine against most targets, and moves only slightly faster, while being at about the same points cost. The difference is that Hellions are MASSIVELY frailer.

Our basic weapon damage hasn't noticeably increased between the editions, unlike most armies who got a significant boost from the new wounding rules, while a lot of things doubled or even tripled in wounds (which our primary multi-wound models, Grotesques, did not).

Finally. The majority of our options are melee. But they're generally all cramming in to fill the same niche, and none of them fill it very well. As a result we have the paradoxical result of having an army with 2 melee subfactions but several gaping holes in our melee toolbox, which just exacerbates the fact that we have very few cost effective ranged tools, which again compete for the same niche (darklight), are extremely expensive and competing for limited slots (Disintegrator), or are mediocre at their job (splinter weapons).

ricorongen wrote:

Thing is, this has happend 6 times in a row.

I mean , my dice aint bad, my tactics arent either.

But it just  feels u fair that even using the best tactics in my favour aint curting it.

:/ gues its time to rewrite the army list again and only go Baster/darkpance heavy.. until the codex drops

You clearly lacked luck in your example, but yes, playing vs codex with an Index army is frustrating.

A little bit more than one month to wait, since Drukhari looks like it's going out for April. Not that far away

Mppqlmd wrote:

A little bit more than one month to wait, since Drukhari looks like it's going out for April. Not that far away

Wanna bet our codex is the April fools joke?

We lack AP on our anti-infantry ranged weapons, that's the issue. What can we do against marines in cover? If you haven't brought mandrakes then your only option to get through their 2+ is to shoot darklight at them.

It's not great. Even getting -1 on splinter cannons or shredders would help tremendously.

Against Marines, i usually yell "BRING OUT THE OSSEFACTORS" and they run away. The players, not the models

Seriously, though, even if you don't apply the RAW for the exploding mortal wounds, you're firing a range 24", BS 3+, S8 (coz 2+ on T4), AP-3 gun that has 50% of killing 2 people instead of 1... and it's cheaper than a blaster.

If you apply the RAW for exploding mortal wounds... it just gets silly.

FuelDrop wrote:

Wanna bet our codex is the April fools joke?

Loser makes a post where the other forum folks can bash his bad insight as his bad analysing skills from limited data means he has no right to call himself an archon for a month?

@ burnrage
Darklight, dissies, medusea (ossefactors?) as wel as mandrakes for shooting.

Incubi, characters including most unit champions if you gave them an agonizer and do not forget that grotesques, reavers, sslith, clawed fiends all have ap 1, as do the special weapons of our wyches/ bloodbrides  and mortal wounds are dealth by the lahmeans.

We do have the option to deal with them in many ways besides mandrakes and darklight. The only thing is that most of those options are extremely overpayed, or deal multiple wounds and thus are usually regulated to terminator/biker duty.

@FuelDrop
You have my full agreement on this issue. I was just limiting myself to the weapon department to keep the post concise.

The problems with these anecdotal observations is that you don't think of it when it doesn't happened. You should have killed 6-7 there and if you had done so we'd never hear of it.
Sure, sometimes lucks gets you, but try to think of when it didn't.
Ex, I had a Heamie suvive the shooting of 2 Dune Crawlers(DC) (heavy D3 S10, min dmg 3)in the following turn the 2 DC only managed to deal 3 wounds to my Talos unit. During the game that guy claimed that they're bad. But he never mentioned that they also oneshot my 2 raiders turn one that game aswell. And it doesn't mean the Heamie is the best unit in the world.

Basicly, it's a game of chance with the ability to kindof hedge you bets. If the statistics are off for the points cost (And here and there that's a problem for DE), then I'll support it. If the marines were in cover you brought the wrong weaponds to the fight. You wouldn't try to mow down cultitst with Las Canons and claim the las canon is bad.

That's the bias of confirmation. We notice prejudice more than we notice advantage.

A lot of people are suffering from this in the 40k community.

I've enjoyed playing against Marines. I find them a much easier proposition than Tyranids, IG etc. They aren't too tricky to isolate and destroy. Marines in cover are hard to kill, but we have the ability to kite away from them and focus fire on more vulnerable targets, and force them to follow us out into the open. As others have said, that set of rolls really sucks for you and is way in favour for the marine player compared to expected odds. Annoying but it happens.

Average for 48 poison shots going into marines out of cover in power armour:
48 shots, hits on 3s = 28 hits
28 hits, wounding on 4s = 14 wounds
14 wounds, saves on 3s = 4.6 deaths
Sounds like some bad dice to me...
However, 5ish marines killed from what I'm assuming is 2 dual splinter venoms, and 1 splinter cannon per trueborn unit, plus rifles from trueborn is still poor. That's us firing 300+ points of kabalite killing under 100 on average of assult marines (decked out vets and death company will be far more points lost on wargear however). Despite this, we still did this exact damage last edition and that wasn't too bad.. go figure.
I still do think though that we are a weak army, and that we should have all units competitively viable. Here's to hoping the codex fixes that

Actually the exemple of last night was to give the glaring problem a face if you understand what i try to say.

The units i used were : 2 venoms woth dubbel splinter, 2 trueborn in it with 2 splinter cannons, no other upgrades.

They were out of cover, and yet i still had to use my scourges with blasters 2 groups of 5.

To actually take em out.

The fsct of the matter is : it should be a crying shame if you need bloody 6 units in total not withstanding even good dice or not.

And this have happend for 7 games in a row.

Therefore i dare ti say tgat it is not just *bad* dice, but a glaring problem that our supposed mighty guns cant reliable take down a frak troop choice of one if not THE most populair army ( t4 armour save 3+)

Its a crying shame that we need to ise our most expensivecl cc units and anti tank weapons to reliable kill a if not the most average of troop choices.

Knowing gdubs, i think our coming codex wont adres this saying : with poison you can easily kill a mc therefore nothing have to be done.

this argument is always brought up with our friend group for why this army got scary guns, untill i point out that : everything we got is niche, and we aint having the true scary options like our former index brothers : the craftworld eldar.

Just what i think but either they need to rework poison or they need to gve druhkari more hammer then a thousand cuts boost becaus so far, in my experiance our cuts aint actually wpund em, they only scrap the armour of our enemies.

Dwarfepic wrote:

\That's us firing 300+ points of kabalite killing under 100 on average of assult marines (decked out vets and death company will be far more points lost on warframe however). Despite this, we still did this exact damage last edition and that wasn't too bad.. go figure.

Last edition was fine because monsters with the saves of marines had like 4 or 5 wounds, not like 9 or 12. So things that poison were great against before got more survivable, while our poison got nerfed. And then many units got killier making most of our stuff pretty lackluster. Just the way of life of a kabalite. It ain't easy being a dark eldar

Dwarfepic wrote:

\That's us firing 300+ points of kabalite killing under 100 on average of assult marines (decked out vets and death company will be far more points lost on warframe however). Despite this, we still did this exact damage last edition and that wasn't too bad.. go figure.

Last edition was fine because monsters with the saves of marines had like 4 or 5 wounds, not like 9 or 12. So things that poison were great against before got more survivable, while our poison got nerfed. And then many units got killier making most of our stuff pretty lackluster. Just the way of life of a kabalite. It ain't easy being a dark eldar

I have a feeling that GW has taken a more literal interpretation of what "Splinter Weaponry" means.

For the use I usually get out of them, I might as well be throwing actual twigs at the enemy

The main problem is you're using splinter weaponry. You can totally field a pure darklight army, and it is worth it.