New 6th Allies Matrix for Dark Eldar

Let's start off with the link:

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp?catId=&categoryId=&section=&pIndex=6&aId=22400024a&start=7&multiPageMode=true

GW Website wrote:

Nearly every army now has the opportunity to choose an allied army to assist them in battle - they range from those you can count as your Battle Brothers, to those who you will only fight with through the direst need. Some races, however, will never be able to form an alliance. Select your army from the list below and find out who you are able to call on for support.

And the list is:

ELDAR, Seems reasonable, lots of fluff to back it up. Expecting to see a lot of Farseers in many lists on here, I'm very much looking at working a Corsair contingent into my Sky Serpents.

BLACK TEMPLARS, Well at least we don't have any psykers for them to get angry at...

CHAOS DAEMONS, I like the potential of doing a Shaa Dom themed army.

CHAOS SPACE MARINES, Not unfeasible.

GREY KNIGHTS, LOL

IMPERIAL GUARD, yay vet squads. :/

ORKS, Going back into reasonable territory.

SISTERS OF BATTLE, nope, back into LOL

SPACE MARINES, LOL

SPACE WOLVES, I can has Long Fangs?

TAU EMPIRE, End back on reasonable, I have a small pipeline plan to do a 'Cultural Exchange' themed army.

Some of these ideas seem a little silly. Vect and Draigo ftw?
You'll also note that Eldar are first and the rest alphabetical, possibly implying that we might have a stronger alliance with them.

So, what's your reaction to this? What do you plan on allying with your Dark Eldar, if at all? And for those who like that kind of thing, what's the most broken combination?

Sky Serpent wrote:

CHAOS DAEMONS, I like the potential of doing a Shaa Dom themed army.
CHAOS SPACE MARINES, Not unfeasible.

Best news I heard all day. Was hoping to see those two since I heard about allies. My Archon can continue to be demonsummoner and I can have rules to support his fluff. Awesome.

I only have three things I am willing to do.

1. DEldar/CWE alliance of the pointy eared duo.
2. DEldar/Night Lords. It just makes sense really.
3. DEldar/Imperial Guard. Of course, the Guardsmen would be mangled slave.

I may end up just keeping my army as full Dark Eldar. If I wanted a Farseer I would have gone for CWE, and I quite like themes. I suppose I could make some fallen CWE, but I want to Kabal to stay free of those cattle races.

I still think allies is cool, though.

It just annoys me. The only reason they're doing this is to sell more models.

Urgh. I've got to be honest and think that this and the scenery are just a pure avenues to sell models and not enhance the game at all. Very disillusioned with 6th so far, but hoping the rules and a few games change that.

I would only ally with what I deemed to be fluffy combinations combinations. But clearly its so open (and absurd) so that every gamer has the max potential to buy a second army. The new slogan should be "There is only Sales!"

The new WD is a pure joke and they have sealed this edition as Marine-hammer. If you look at the Dark Eldar army focus the guy can only talk about the models and a vague comment of the Razorwing being a zooming flyer. While every other army jumps on new rules, like Necrons ability to strip hull points or Blood Angels using the jump pack rule. Overwatch will hurt wyches, specially with FNP getting nerfed. So we will have to ally with the Grey Knights, as its not looking good so far!

I'm looking forward to teaming up with Eldar. I like their models and the fluff works easily...I bought a farseer box today when I was at the game store thinking how I would incorporated him in my list. I'm pumped about the allies although there will be stupid overpowered list but we already have those anyways...

...lol...if you looked in the barter port I was actually trying to trade my High Elves for Eldar for this exact reason!!

Going by the ally matrix posted on BoLS a while ago, Eldar would be trusted allies and the rest an unholy alliance. So I'm quessing there would be some negative effects for taking GKs as allies (or you could only get the minium 1 HQ and 1 troops, or something).

Some of the allies do make sense. Eldar obviously, but also CSM (according to Black Crusade the Dark Eldar deal with Chaos forces pretty often, sometimes raiding them but sometimes trading weapons and services for slaves), Orks (aside from manipulating some Orks to assiting them, you could have freebooter mercenaries hired by the Dark Eldar), Tau (representing the "cultural exchange" story in the codex, and also if the rumours about the next Tau codex end up ebign true, Kroot mercenaries. I love Kroot mercenaries!) and suprisingly GK (they're quite pragmatic, willing to fight with anybody that fights against Chaos). Others, less so. Particularly Black Templars and SoB (both being extremely xenophobic even by Imperial standards, I have a hard time seeing them ally with any alien). To be honest, the worst combination isn't with our allies, but with CSM/Necrons, who can now ally with eachother (whatever happened to Necrons being essentially the anti-Chaos?).

Scenery I am looking forward too, if they finally make some decent Xenos stuff. But I will only ever consider CWE as a potential ally, and will mostly be sticking with mono-race armies for all of mine.

hmm, let's see.

two units of kabalite warriors with two units of tau firewarriors. Duke with his trueborn buddies flanked by two groups of plasma/missile pod crisis suits. Lots of beastmasters and hellions. A razorwing jetfighter with two hammerhead gunships. And for the last HQ I suppose will either be the baron or a regular archon.

or I could go almost full tau and use one elite slot full of Incubi, seeing as they are mercenaries... and two troops slots for firewarriors

another way I could set it up is with almost full DE, but two troops slots full of firewarriors and the other two, kabalite warriors.

yeah.

Until i see the actual rules - i am assuming that the allies thing is for multiple detachments exactly as per WHFB... so most games it will have zero impact

The new Allies rules are godsent. I see them as a way to get new and awesome conversions into the game, with the bonus of giving us units that fill needed spots in our armies.

Of course being allies with CSM, Orks, Tau etc is nice, but what is most interesting for me are the Craftworld Eldar, Daemons and Imperial guard, as they can be explained as Dark Eldar units and therefore practically give us many, many new units!

- Think about all the Aspect Warriors (minus Dire Avengers) as specialized Trueborn - the stats even fit. I can already picture Dark Reaper conversions using the Incubi bodies...
- We can now have the Avatar of Khaine! How amazing is that. A converted Dark Eldar Avatar that can legally be used as itself instead of a Talos. Speaking of which, we can also use the stats of the Avatar and come up with a crazy Coven super unit!
- Same for the Wraithlord!
- Farseers are either fallen Eldar (possible?) or an Archon that has been playing with forbidden things too much (and is therefore banned from Commorragh, of course, as psychic activity lures Slaanesh). But I think captured IG psykers are more likely.
EDIT: Maybe Corsair Psykers? Hmm...
- Autarchs are the Dracons of old, as they have almost the same stats as Sliscus/Sathonyx! Think about the possibilities! We can have Dracons on Jetbikes again...
And MASTER STRATEGIST. Say hello to my Webway Portal, thank you.
- Yriel! Yriel! Yriel! EHRMEHRGEHRD Yriel!
-Rangers could be our sniper Trueborn, although I don't know how to explain the weaker stats. But Pathfinders! They're going to be so great with the new sniper rules.
- Hornets! If we can take them, I'll never play Ravagers again. They're that awesome.

- Conscripts as slaves and meatshields. Imagine the beautiful scene, where our armies fully deploy behind a screen of beaten and tortured Mon-Keighs. The story from 6th Edition Fantasy Dark Elves comes to mind, where they send their slaves to attack the Bretons, only to shoot them all in the back themselves, so their corpses block the path for the enemy cavalry... classic.
- Battle Psykers and Primaris Psykers (without Chimera of course) could be captured Psyker slaves! This might be even more realistic than the Farseer things.
- Ratlings as degenerated sniper slaves?

- Daemons. The dream of all Coven players. 'nuff said.
EDIT: Or even Mandrake subtypes? We could have amazing shadow creatures, popping out of the shadows (Deep Strike) and being awesome. Geez, I love it.

I suspect the Allies list is pretty much identical to what they've been doing in the doubles tournaments. Have a look at the table at the back of the latest event pack.

GW are only interested in selling more stuff, it is important to realise that.
6th brings us rules for flyers and guess what flyers are what GW are pushing right now.
6th brings rules for terrain, and guess what prices went through the roof recently.
6th brings allies which means we can all go buy new models with which to complement our current armies.


Allies will in my opinion be a disaster. GW are notorious for being unable to spot overpowered combos in individual codexes, never mind across a whole new ruleset and combinations of codexes. Some people have been saying that this ed takes back to their roots with fluff based narrative battles. Show me any fluff which suggests DE would ally with half those armies and I'll concede that point.
I suspect there will be some ungodly powerful combos discovered within a week of the BRB release which will have the capability of finishing games in a couple of turns.

Still I'm looking forward to it, my pre-order is in.

I would hope that, regardless of what the rulebook says, allies are in practice the kind of thing that one only uses with opponent's permission (like special characters used to be, back in the day).

As someone with reasonable amounts of 'nids, CSM, orks, etc but who has rarely managed to complete a decent sized army, I like the fact that I'll be able to throw together what I have and make a legal army of sorts out of it. There are plenty of cases of unusual alliances in the fluff.

It's not necessarily that DE would ally with those armies, but rather, that those armies would come to the DE asking help, like the Tau did. There are also stories of the Imperium doing the same thing. Certain Orks will trade with non-orks, and that could include trading for a good fight. SoB and BT dont really make sense, but if chaos reared its ugly head, you show me a GK that wouldn't accept the help of a space elf if they thought it could turn the tide in their favor... sure they would probably try and kill the DE afterwards, but in the meantime... I would say the ally chart makes a lot of sense, with 1 or 2 exceptions... maybe even the BT could be convinced to ally with DE if they thought they were going up against CWE and DE anti-psyker weaponry would help them.

I think that allies will be just as balanced as the rulebooks they come from (so yes, some not at all). Also, from some of the stuff I read, it made it sound like you had a separate pool of points on side, and that from those points you can either pull allies OR terrain (maybe a mix of both). So the people who were saying that theres not anything that would really be "DE Terrain", well, thats because the DE would not use terrain, they would just use the troops on the ground already tricking them to do what they wanted... XD

Allies scare me.

My fear is if I do not want to run an ally will I be un-competitive when playing someone who does?

Here is to hoping that there is a permission based option to say, "NO WAY JOSE!" to my opponent (they already know my ability to say no to IA options).

My fear in particular is that the new psychic abilities will be powerful and, as a race with no psykers, we will be almost required to take allies to compensate for this. Effectively, we would be forced to run allies. Hopefully I'm wrong.

Woot, Eldar 'trusted allies'? With us being directly responsible for the death of their empire and perhaps 99% of the race, just because we wanted to keep on indulging in vice, creating a chaos god in the process which eats the Eldar souls whenever they die?

If I were an Eldar commander, I would shoot any Dark Eldar on sight whenever and wherever I sighted them...

Count Adhemar wrote:

My fear in particular is that the new psychic abilities will be powerful and, as a race with no psykers, we will be almost required to take allies to compensate for this. Effectively, we would be forced to run allies. Hopefully I'm wrong.

This is what worries me, too. If psykers become almost essential for victory then you will never see any true Dark Eldar forces, which would be dissapointing.

Personally I don't think allies is going to be a go to thing to be competitive with Dark Eldar, even with crazy powers being potentially thrown about. Most armies will only have 1 or 2 models with psychic powers and will probably only be able to use 1 a turn.
That and I feel that any army cherry picking units to fill holes in their own army is just going to water down the overall power of the original army.

Though I would like to use a Farseer as a lone Shadowseer.

dominus nox wrote:

Though I would like to use a Farseer as a lone Shadowseer.

Yeah me too. Or a banished eldar / dark eldar psycher gone corrupt.

I was thinking about using my Corsairs as counts-as Craftworld Eldar allies (or just use the Corsair rule,s but not everybody allows FW stuff). Void Dreamer as a Farseer, some rangers as troops. If Swooping Hawks didn't suck so badly, I could play my jetpack Corsairs as them. Shadowseer as a Farseer is a good idea as well. In the 40k RPGs they're actually as powerful psykers, so it would make sense fluff-vise, and give me a reason to use my Shadowseer model.

Cavash wrote:

Count Adhemar wrote:

My fear in particular is that the new psychic abilities will be powerful and, as a race with no psykers, we will be almost required to take allies to compensate for this. Effectively, we would be forced to run allies. Hopefully I'm wrong.

This is what worries me, too. If psykers become almost essential for victory then you will never see any true Dark Eldar forces, which would be dissapointing.

Me three.

Its like GW is oblivious to the part of the community that like to min-max and push the power plays. Allies is a godsend to those that like to break the game.

Levitas wrote:

[Allies is a godsend to those that like to break the game.

It's not breaking the game, it's playing the game. There is a big difference.