A returning players opinions on our units; Warriors

The original troops choice and line infantry of the dark eldar, over the editions they have gotten a fair few buffs lets take a look.

Warriors
The stat line on your basic warrior is nothing to sneeze at they are brave, have 2 attacks, 4+ save and good to hit roles which makes them versatile on the battle field. Their standard (and only) armament is the splinter rifle a strength 2 rapid fire gun with poison 4+, this thing is ok vs infantry but vs as your target's toughness increases it becomes allot better. With the amount of poisoned shots warriors can throw out anything not packing a 2+ save is liable to take a good amount of damage, units like mortarion spring to mind, at T8 usually small arms cant touch him and while it would still take 216ish shots on average to kill him with just splinter weapons they can still add a wound here or there and that's much better than the 648ish bolter rounds you on average need to fire.

Warriors have access to a no unique equipment and bring one of 2 special or 2 heavy weapons to battle. Shredders and blasters are 1 per 5 men, and are both pretty good now, the shredder is a str 6 blast weapon which is good vs things like orks/guard and it's high strength will help it inflict saving throws on tougher stuff. The blaster is a mini dark lance, it's got random damage which makes it a little less consistent but its cheap, an assault weapon and a reasonable source of extra damage, good for finishing off things but I wouldn't rely on it to pop a tank on its own.

Heavy weapons wise we have the dark lance which is just excellent at what it does, nowadays we are only allowed one lance per 10 (in my day it was 2 lances oh how I miss those times) which is fine I guess but I think most people are looking to stay mobile which is why assault weapons are picked and lances are left to the raider. The splinter cannon is the daddy of splitter weapons and is out heavy bolter analog. The thing here is its good but it has heavy competition it kills infantry and MEQ but so does allot of stuff in our army, so while its good and there is nothing wrong with it it's hard to justify.

True Born
Best shots in the book, shame that their weapon options are the same as regular warriors. I will mention here that I thing the upgraded squads are a lazy after thought and could of been so much better with their own data sheet. Most lists I see with trueborn in them are loaded with 2 blasters and a dark lance to make use of their always hit on 2+ rule, then they are loaded into a splinter wrack raider. I think this unit could of filled a niche in the army with regard to splitter weapons, if they had been given a greater focus on using splinter weapons to greater effect they would of been far more interesting for me, they could of achieved this with either a special rule or greater weapon access to the more high end splinter weapons. True born in their current iteration are by no means bad they just don't do anything massive special.

Into the hq's already next time the Haemonculus

toldavf wrote:

True born in their current iteration are by no means bad they just don't do anything massive special.

Nothing special, except always hitting on 2+. Which is kinda massive special. Really.

Zenotaph wrote:

toldavf wrote:

True born in their current iteration are by no means bad they just don't do anything massive special.

Nothing special, except always hitting on 2+. Which is kinda massive special. Really.

I disagree vs tanks their shots are too finite and vs infantry they have so few shots that scourges will out preform them.

But Scourges are much easier to kill. And if they move, they loose precision.

Scourges are not in competition. The smallest unit of scourges is 60 points, and a Fast Attack slot. Trueborn are at most 20 points (35 with Master Archon) and an upgrade to a Troops unit.

I think, its not fair to compare Trueborn and Scourges. Naked, Scourges are sturdier,
thanks to Ghostplate Armor and have more shots. Trueborn are more precise. The difference is 2pts/elf.
But from right here both go in totally different directions. Well, actually Scourges can go two.
Long range fire with either Lances or Splintercannons. Or Hunting with the others.
Trueborn are always stuffed in Transport and are more the Safari guys. Shooting out of the safety of their bus.

I have been playing around with Warriors as a counter to the current meta (AdMech and Ork Flyers, GK Dreadknights, and the mirror Dark Eldar match).

Flayed Skull have a really neat strat to give +1 to hit vs Fly, and +2 to hit vs Aircraft. Both Flyer lists would hate to see a bunch of non-trueborn warriors hitting on 2s with most weapons, DE have a lot of Fly transports, and GK generally dont like Lance equivilents.

After a lot of meditation, IDK if this will actually work. You could have a few warrior squads inside Raiders, and whatever survives the first Aircraft strike would jump out, pop the strat, then Never Stationary back into the Raider (3CP total). The unfortunate thing is that you can only really take down 1 flyer with it.

Currently liking Black Heart for this purpose. Warriors are 120 points for a Lance, 2 Blasters, and a Blast Pistol (remember, we are fast and the Aircraft come to us). 4 shots, hitting on 4s, with 1 reroll generally equates to 3 hits. 2 Wounds. Something around 7 damage, depending on your reroll strat and luck.

By going with standard Warriors, you get to avoid the Master Archon tax (or can just take Draz instead of the Archon). Still costs you 215 points for 5 lances (including the required Raider), but better than 310 points for 6 lances (including Master Archon blast pistol).

This obviously needs to be a component in a list, not the whole list. And we still need some tools to deal with other match ups.

But thought I would share the fruits of my relentless thought experiments. Those Flyer lists have become my White Whale.

From Hells Heart I Stab At Thee!

As always @fisheyes a huge thanks for all your insights!
Always useful to add to our bag of tricks!

Has anyone tried using their warriors on foot in squads of ten with the blasters and dark lance without Raiders?Especially with the Obsidian Rose extra ranges?My idea comes from using ranged stuff such as Warriors to supliment vwracks in defending objectives while other units...Reavers,Grots,Helions,Mandrakes,Incubi & Wyches in Venom grab other objectives or intervene where necessary?This leaves your other heavy weapon stuff...Raiders,Reavers,Jets,Talos,Cronos and Reavers to be used as required and your characters free to assultvor buff up defenders?

False Son wrote:

Scourges are not in competition.  The smallest unit of scourges is 60 points, and a Fast Attack slot.  Trueborn are at most 20 points (35 with Master Archon) and an upgrade to a Troops unit.

5 Trueborn are 55 points without weapons and without the Master Archon. And then the Scourges have superior Shard Carbines, plasma grenades, better movement, free deepstrike, and a 5++.
Trueborn are not at most 20 points, they are at most around 150 points not including the Master Archon upgrade.
Trueborn are definitely not bad, but your comparison is just wrong.


Edit: I now see I'm responding to an older post. XD Sorry.

Jebei wrote:

Has anyone tried using their warriors on foot in squads of ten with the blasters and dark lance without Raiders?Especially with the Obsidian Rose extra ranges?My idea comes from using ranged stuff such as Warriors to supliment vwracks in defending objectives while other units...Reavers,Grots,Helions,Mandrakes,Incubi & Wyches in Venom grab other objectives or intervene where necessary?This leaves your other heavy weapon stuff...Raiders,Reavers,Jets,Talos,Cronos and Reavers to be used as required and your characters free to assultvor buff up defenders?

I think the issue is that Warriors just aren't very good, whether in a Raider or on foot.

Their basic guns suck. Badly. But while Wyches and Wracks had their basic attacks supplemented with extra AP, Warriors were left in the cold with 0 improvement to their awful Splinter Rifles. You need 9 Warriors, all in rapid-fire range, to kill a single Marine.

So for every Warrior squad, you're looking at 70-80% of its members being a glorified light show.

Then you have the next problem, which is that Blasters didn't benefit from the general improvements to anti-vehicle weapons (i.e. they're still doing d6 damage, rather than d3+3). So in addition to their standard guns being abysmal, their main anti-vehicle guns are now completely outclassed by other weapons which Warriors get 0 access to except...

Lastly, of course, there's the Dark Lance. It's a good weapon just not for Warriors as they have no way to move and fire it without being penalised.

So at the end of the day you're either spending 100pts for 1 good weapon and 9 useless ones, or 120pts for 1 good weapon, 2 mediocre weapons and 7 useless ones. But if you take the second option then firing the mediocre weapons will often mean moving and thus penalising the one good weapon.

I mean, you're welcome to try this tactic but I suspect you'll be disappointed because taking Warriors out of their transport doesn't fix the core issues with Warriors.

It would be nice if our kabalites did more than just be the shooty troop option and offer different shooting elite choices like a sniper unit, demolition unit, mob control unit

Archon_91 wrote:

It would be nice if our kabalites did more than just be the shooty troop option and offer different shooting elite choices like a sniper unit, demolition unit, mob control unit

I think the distribution of special/heavy weapons on our units would certainly leave players of other factions scratching their heads.

"No, our ranged troops can't take sniper rifles - if you want those you need our melee troops."

"Well our ranged troops specialise in poisoned shooting weapons, except when it comes to special weapons - once again you'll need to take our melee troops for those."



But yeah, it would definitely be nice if Kabalites could specialise or if there was an elite version of them that could do so.

You know, if such an elite choice was ever to exist, I think I even have a name in mind for them . . .

I always did scratch my head at why our only option for sniper rifles was a single upgrade on our worst bs troop unit ... when scourge/truebprn sound like the most obvious platform for it ... and now our craftworld cousins are getting jetbike sniper units ...

Soulless Samurai wrote:

Jebei wrote:

Has anyone tried using their warriors on foot in squads of ten with the blasters and dark lance without Raiders?Especially with the Obsidian Rose extra ranges?My idea comes from using ranged stuff such as Warriors to supliment vwracks in defending objectives while other units...Reavers,Grots,Helions,Mandrakes,Incubi & Wyches in Venom grab other objectives or intervene where necessary?This leaves your other heavy weapon stuff...Raiders,Reavers,Jets,Talos,Cronos and Reavers to be used as required and your characters free to assultvor buff up defenders?

I think the issue is that Warriors just aren't very good, whether in a Raider or on foot.

Their basic guns suck. Badly. But while Wyches and Wracks had their basic attacks supplemented with extra AP, Warriors were left in the cold with 0 improvement to their awful Splinter Rifles. You need 9 Warriors, all in rapid-fire range, to kill a single Marine.

So for every Warrior squad, you're looking at 70-80% of its members being a glorified light show.

Then you have the next problem, which is that Blasters didn't benefit from the general improvements to anti-vehicle weapons (i.e. they're still doing d6 damage, rather than d3+3). So in addition to their standard guns being abysmal, their main anti-vehicle guns are now completely outclassed by other weapons which Warriors get 0 access to except...

Lastly, of course, there's the Dark Lance. It's a good weapon just not for Warriors as they have no way to move and fire it without being penalised.

So at the end of the day you're either spending 100pts for 1 good weapon and 9 useless ones, or 120pts for 1 good weapon, 2 mediocre weapons and 7 useless ones. But if you take the second option then firing the mediocre weapons will often mean moving and thus penalising the one good weapon.

I mean, you're welcome to try this tactic but I suspect you'll be disappointed because taking Warriors out of their transport doesn't fix the core issues with Warriors.

But surely Truborn could be a partial answer here...their unmodified  to hit unmodified has potential.Then with Poison Tongue you get the Poison upgrade or the extended range with the Obsidian Rose. You don't have to footslog either..the webway strat can dump a warrior unit (up to 20 if you're not using Trueborn) anywhere in the table f the strat can be played.There are always options if you can find them.Ok Warriors are poor, but they are cheap and can be used to distract in a way your opponnent has to deal with them.

for the same points cost, wouldn't you be better off with a ravager? The 20 man blob does get obsec and can get rerolls from an archon so maybe, but then you lack durability. If you're taking the blob for threatening obsec, i can see the potential, but i'm not confident about the poison shots (though if the goal is really to flood obsec, you're best option is using wracks). If you're just going for more firepower, I'd think a ravager or plane is better value.

Jebei wrote:

But surely Truborn could be a partial answer here...their unmodified  to hit unmodified has potential.Then with Poison Tongue you get the Poison upgrade or the extended range with the Obsidian Rose.

The thing is, Trueborn are currently really expensive for what they bring. Plus, they get no extra protection over normal Warriors (so a unit of them without a transport are just begging to be vaporised).

They also have the exact same problem as Warriors in that 70% of their weapons are trash and another 20% are mediocre. The only thing they do really well is that one Dark Lance.

Jebei wrote:

You don't have to footslog either..the webway strat can dump a warrior unit (up to 20 if you're not using Trueborn) anywhere in the table f the strat can be played.

You can certainly do that but personally I'd rather deep strike a unit with more punch.

For me at least, Deep Strike is basically a way to allow glass-cannons to get a guaranteed volley off
before the opponent can tag them. With Warriors it seems inefficient because their shooting phase isn't especially impressive.

I agree with most things being said here. IMO warriors are some of the worst units in the codex. The only thing they're useful for is being cheap obsec bodies for backfield objectives, but even that they aren't that good at unless you can keep them out of LoS.

I've also stopped running trueborn, because for their price + raider (255) you can just about get 2 ravagers. The 2+ is nice, but with only 1 dark lance, you have to either get within 18" or use Obsidian Rose for them to be effective, and I just don't want to be locked into OR, even though it is a good obsession.

I dunno it feels like warriors are kind of in a weird spot, where you only really take them if you have to (i.e. Realspace Raid) or if you need cheap obsec bodies, but wracks might beat them out on that front. Luckily we have so much other good stuff in our codex, including 2 other solid troop choices, that it doesn't matter that much, but it's unfortunate that they aren't very good

duckduckgoose wrote:

I dunno it feels like warriors are kind of in a weird spot, where you only really take them if you have to (i.e. Realspace Raid) or if you need cheap obsec bodies, but wracks might beat them out on that front. Luckily we have so much other good stuff in our codex, including 2 other solid troop choices, that it doesn't matter that much, but it's unfortunate that they aren't very good

I'm indeed trying to make them work mostly because I kinda need that Kabal troop slot filled. But instead of trying to make it work, maybe I should just give up and use a 5-man squad without upgrades, and count it as tax. At least that will free up some points for the rest of my army.

Take this with a pinch of salt, obviously, but:

Soulless Samurai wrote:

Take this with a pinch of salt, obviously, but:

That would make my day. D:

Huh, only just realised that I somehow manged to post that leak in the wrong thread. I meant to post it in the Craftworld Rumours one.