New Dark Elf Player - No Idea what I'm doing

Hello everyone,

New to the forums and the army. Long story short, I play in a group and I want to bring a new and unique army to the table to mix things up (both for myself and my friends).

That being said, I've never even theorized about Dark Eldar tactics. My main concerns/questions came up pretty quick while looking at the codex:

Do all units within a detachment need to be from only a specific kabal, cult or coven? i.e could I have a unit of Reavers in a Kabal of the Flayed skull detachment?

How is the problem of transportation solved for characters? I plan on having one or two CC characters but what is a common strategy for transporting them up the table? I cannot fit them in a venom alongside a MSU and if i give them a unique venom a smart opponent will shoot them down first turn.

I'll have more questions as I develop my army list which I hope to be posting in the near future. For any help, appreciate it!

Yeah, everything that isn't a mercenary, e.g. Mandrakes, scourges etc needs to be in the right detachment. If you mix wych cult into a detachment with kabal you don't get your obsessions. Or at least I think that's how it is.

Transportation wise, there are three options.
1. Have them with a venom or raider, have supporting stuff with them, maybe court of the archon if it is an archon.

2. Run them up the battlefield with some troop/court support that stops people from shooting them.

3. Don't, some people have their archon's hang back to just buff shooting units, especially popular with the CP gaining warlord trait and the black heart relic.

Yeah Sacro got it right, if you want say to run your kabalites as <Flayed Skull>, you cannot have any coven cult units at all in that detachment. If you say throw a talos into your flayed skull detachment, you lose all the obsession traits, artifacts and stratagems. The solution for that is running multiple detachments, say a kabal battalion, a cult outrider and a coven spearhead. I pretty much never run just as Kabal, cult, or coven army, I usually mix kabal with one of the other two, or all three together, but you can run things pretty much any way you want.


As for running characters, yeah it's kinda an annoyance that we don't have say a twelve capacity transport, but no way around that. My most common practice is running a small character escort in a raider, say 5 incubi, some archon's court models or a few wyches, and then throw in an archon and succubus there. The venom option isn't also as bad as you think, I've done it a few times, just an archon and a court model or two in a venom and my opponent rarely focuses it down because he's too busy dealing with more pressing threats like ravagers and reavers.

I think it's also worth mentioning that not all characters need to be in transports. Heamonculus in particular is usually good on foot because he will go the same speed as taloses (or talosi?), and give them his nice buff. I also usually run my second archon from my battalion on foot with my ravagers, one archon as a melee beatstick up close in the fight is enough.

For the question of mixing, if you put a cult unit in the same detachment, say reavers in a battalion detachment that is mainly Kabal unit then no, none in that detachment would receive obsession rules, however, if you would like to have a couple units of reavers accompany your main force of Kabal the best way to do that is take an outsider detachment of reavers and a succubus to run along side you battalion detachment of Kabal units, both detachments gain obsessions this way (I would recommend cult of red grief for the reavers). As for the Archon ... Basically what Sarcron said ... Though a lot of people consider them to be useless outside of the relic and warlord trait for Kabal of the Black Heart , but I like taking Kabal of the poisoned tongue with a blast pistol and venom blade and running them head first into my opponents standard troops. And it really isn't worth it to try and squeeze them I to a vehicle because as you have seen it doesn't mesh well with troop capacity or minimum squad sizes, so just let them go on foot.

I really dislike that they went 10 and 5 transport for Raiders and Venoms. I have resorted to:

9 man Kabalite Warriors in a Raider with an Buzzsaw Archon - they still get lots of shooting and once out of the Raider they are solid meatshields that allow my Archon to get into Charge range.

You can also use a 5 man warriors and two Archons, but the Tournament players would have a heart attack.

Venoms are really nice for an Archon or two with Sslyth.

Would love to help! Welcome to the dark kin.

Thank you guys for the input really appreciate it. I'm gonna try to go for one detachment of Kabal and another of Cult. Will see how it comes out.

As for transports I'm thinking just using a MSU and an archon in a raider...we'll see!

Kabalited and Wyches are quite good! Basically took that style MSU list to a tournament today and did well with it!