Dark Eldar discussed on the Heroic 28s podcast

Hello there my fellow archons,

As I am always interested in what other people think about units an tactics, I like to listen to 40k podcasts.
It is pretty interesting to see the different kind of playstyles and metas from different countries.
Anyway, one of these podcasts is The Heroic 28s an the last two shows where about the true kind.

I really enjoy listening to them and can only advice you to try it out. Good to listen while you are painting stuff up.

So why am i telling you this?
Well I wanted to know what you thought of their review. Do you share their views on the units, on the good and bad?

I will not comment it just now, as I don't want to set an opinion :-)

link to part one

link to part two

Sláinte

WARNING: These podcasts are long (DE review starts about 85 minutes in on the first one 21 minutes in on the second one).

Other then that Psycheer did a good job at trying to point out the more subtle nuances to DE, in what was otherwise a traditional internet style theory hammer review (OMG VECT HELLIONS! ).

Also this is how DE deal with drop pods.

Best piece of advice was about knowing your list inside out and sticking to a list and playing it for 15+ games before changing it too radically. Knowing the rules, knowing your opponents army and knowing everything else.

Insightful cast for sure.

Mushkilla wrote:

Also this is how DE deal with drop pods.

I just went over that thread again, and I just realized that SM drop pod armies with Chapter Masters or any hq w/ Orbital Bombs WANTS you to castle. So 2 - 0 to SM

troops w/flamer + mult melta all in drop pods = DE: "Aha! I castle!"

DE castle in the corner = Chapter master on table: "Aha! Fire from orbit!"

Well, unless DE goes first and decides not to move out of the castle.

facelessabsalom wrote:

I just went over that thread again, and I just realized that SM drop pod armies with Chapter Masters or any hq w/ Orbital Bombs WANTS you to castle. So 2 - 0 to SM

A castle doesn't mean cram everything into the smallest possible space, so that your vehicle set up so that multiple can be hit by one blast.

You just need to set up 4" apart so that pods can't fit between your units. meaning they have to land outside your castle and can't get their flamers into decent positions to threaten your softer units.

Also I don't have my space marine codex, but can a chapter master move and shoot his orbital bombardment? And isn't it one shot?

I don't have the dex on me, but I believe it is one shot, can move to fire, no need for LOS and don't use range, just places the stuff out.

True, perhaps several mini castles would work.

...

"Aha! I make two castles, you can only hit one!"

*Second chapter master steps forth*
"Fire the main guns!"

As far as I know the orbital bombardment is heavy and always scatters 2d6.

Mushkilla wrote:

WARNING: These podcasts are long (DE review starts about 85 minutes in on the first one 21 minutes in on the second one).

Other then that Psycheer did a good job at trying to point out the more subtle nuances to DE, in what was otherwise a traditional internet style theory hammer review (OMG VECT HELLIONS! ).

Also this is how DE deal with drop pods.

Best piece of advice was about knowing your list inside out and sticking to a list and playing it for 15+ games before changing it too radically. Knowing the rules, knowing your opponents army and knowing everything else.

Insightful cast for sure.

Good so you had the same impression. One other thing I had notice where that if they didn't like the unit, they sometimes mixed up the warfare. Especially scourges and the cronos come to mind.

They wanted to have the scourges to be jet pack infantry, cause all of their heavy weapon choices. As the dark land is the only heavy weapon choice, that's hard to justify that way.
Also the cronos was supposed to have an id weapon. I guessed they mixed it up with the Talos.

I just feel, especially because they repeatedly mentioned how quick they where, that they didn't give the review the time it needed. Lack of knowledge (not on psycheers part) could have been the reason.

Crazy_Irish wrote:

They wanted to have the scourges to be jet pack infantry, cause all of their heavy weapon choices. As the dark land is the only heavy weapon choice, that's hard to justify that way.

I'ld love scourges to be jet pack infants, would be so much more useful!

Hey guys,

I tried to cover things as well as I could during part 2, unfortunately with the time constraint before we started that part and the phone call of summoning during the episode we had to rush it quite a bit. That being said we really didn't go into quite a few of the options for some of the units.

oddly enough James Lascannon's actually testing out his monkey list with Vect.

The space marine Orbital bombardment rolls it's scatter like a normal blast weapon. The IG one always scatters.

They seemed to miss a lot of things (I havent listened everything, but). I didnt hear them mentioning anything about the Duke's ability to upgrade poison to +3. Not that it is an "amazing" ability, but they just missed it. Also, I feel like they should have pointed out that not only wyches have combat drugs. They didn't really go through everything you can do with a haemmie, mainly tell that it is a "cheap HQ that you can put with cheap wracks and keep on the back just because they have to be somewhere".

Otherwise, the conversation was nice, and they got some good points out there. I still got a little bored after a while. They got stuck about talking of initiative-stealing HQs, and silly theories on them.
There were also some weird periods of silence.

I would like to hear what psycheer has to comment about this, I had forgot the whole thing!
EDIT: And you did comment, just before I managed to post.

Yea, they have a mancrush on vect.

I remember hitting on the +3 poison thing, but i gave it only a sentence of my time (i have a real loathing of that HQ, can you tell?) They did go off on their own on a few things during part 1, i probably should have reeled them back in a little bit. At the time i noticed it was far far too late.

I do see Wracks as deck chairs, yet i have been 'talked to' about how they are good for more than camping objectives.

I put the podcast on while doing other things so I'm tuning in and out, but I kinda like it. Is Lascannon James' real last name? That's a pretty handy name to have.

Mushkilla wrote:

You just need to set up 4" apart so that pods can't fit between your units. meaning they have to land outside your castle and can't get their flamers into decent positions to threaten your softer units.

Also I don't have my space marine codex, but can a chapter master move and shoot his orbital bombardment? And isn't it one shot?

The Orbital Bombardment is an Ordnance weapon (so no moving, shooting or assaulting when it is used) and specifies that it scatters the full 2d6" regardless of BS and even if a hit is rolled - move it 2d6" in the direction of the arrow.

Anyhow, DE handle drop pods well. You can call it castling or whatever you want but the best way to do it is to spread every unit to 2" coherency and put 4-5" between units so that the pods can't drop in the middle of your army as mush says. This isn't two mini-castles, it's covering the most board space possible to minimize the amount of targets available to the drop pod units so that you only present vehicles to flamers and allow your squishy warriors to splinter down the pod contents. DE are better than many armies because they can have their army in one location on one turn then spread out the next while destroying half the pods leaving the other half isolated.

As far as what blast templates does to this type of deployment - well it probably does less than what it would do to a normal deployment. This is because you don't have units clustered in cover and behind buildings, instead you have everything at max coherency because you have all the time in the world to deploy well and not much to shoot at. If a pie plate comes, it will probably hit something but if it's only likely to hit 1 vehicle or a maximum of 7 infantry. Drop pods are good against gunlines but just aren't that great against DE which doesn't tend to field a static gunline.

Thank you for the insight on the site, psycheer, good to know that you have tried your best ;-)

Also I do think that the Vect/Cortez combination is a pretty good one in a tournament, as a first turn can be pretty important to dark Eldar.

What I didn't understand was the hate for PfP. A second pain token can be huge for some units. Wounding on 4+ is so much better for an archon or wyches. Also incubi get better but the one that benefit most of the second pain token are wracks. With S4 they reroll to wound against marines and that makes them really good against T4.

Comparatively which would you rather have? FNP, Furious Charge, or Fearless.

We were saying that on the goodness chart the getting the first one helps a TON more than the 2nd or even the 3rd. Then again, it's all about what you run. The hosts were all about 'assault is dead' i'm sure thats where most of the hate for Furious Charge came from.

Because it is one of those things where it is situationally effective, but the assumed price is already paid in the unit cost whether or not it takes effect.  And let's not forget that for Furious Charge 2 Pain Tokens are needed.  You can pay for that up front with a Haemonuculous, earn it by killing enemy units, and/or hoping for a 6 on the Combat Drugs roll.
 
And it sort of encourages the building of larger units to make bigger use of the limited pool of Pain Tokens.  The last 2 Wyches in your squad of 5 having Furious Charge is not as intimidating as 7 left from a squad of 10.  And there are people who would debate the merits of taking 1 squad of 10 over 2 squads of 5 in the first place.

And this idea that assault is dead is total nonsense. If anything, being good (and fast) at assault is at a premium now, thanks to all the reactionaries dropping their chainswords for bolters.

I did not say that i thought assault is dead (though it IS the general view at the moment) during the podcast i elaborated that the most important phase was actually the movement phase since we blow the other two phases out of the water.

I will say (for my play style) that Furious charge is great when i'm assaulting vehicles with haywire grenades!  

I also said and do maintain that a player should not build a list solely around having/getting a buff from one of our two mechanics.

psycheer wrote:

I will say (for my play style) that Furious charge is great when i'm assaulting vehicles with haywire grenades!  

Furious charge is useless if you're using haywire grenades...

Deamon wrote:

psycheer wrote:

I will say (for my play style) that Furious charge is great when i'm assaulting vehicles with haywire grenades!  

Furious charge is useless if you're using haywire grenades...

Indeed. And I'm at a loss to understand how anyone could even get the impression that there was some benefit involved.

Sarcasm?

Thor665 wrote:

Sarcasm?

loads of it.