Rethinking Ravagers

As someone fairly new to the game, I try to learn something from every game I play. Especially when it's something new. Jesus there are a lot of Blood Angels players where I live. So this weekend I played against Crimson Fists, and the guy brought some thunderfire cannons. This particular game I fielded like a 20 blob unit of kabalite warriors, just to get to 2000 points. This game taught me something about our army, and our enemies.

First of all, he deepstriked a drop pod behind my wyches. Bolter fire killed 9/10.

Secondly, his thunderfire cannon which I guess is heavy 4 I have no clue, killed 19 of my 20 warriors.

Now I know we're fragile. I didn't learn that. But this reminded me of the time I played a 2v2 against 2 IG players and they did the same thing to my ally.

I then realized we don't have any units that can do that. A venom isn't going to kill 19 models of anything. Ten warriors aren't going to kill 9/10 wyches. I looked through the codex.

So everyone swears Ravagers are where it's at. It's the best unit in our codex. Well, it took three turns for my ravager to destroy a thunderfire cannon and it sure didn't feel like it. (yeah, yeah anecdotal evidence and all that.)

But if you're trying to find units that can actually kill large blobs of enemies, the only place to find them is in the heavy support slot. The're a reason why my cronos always felt like an mvp. A large blast template with AP3 is dirty. Only our two flyers have other large blast template weapons. The talos... has the stinger pod. I never tried it, it looks awful but hey S5 AP5 and two blast templates might be alright.

So. When I look at my ravagers. I see a cheap unit sure. But I see a unit, that other units can replace. Honestly, four blasterborn are much killier than a ravager, they just don't have the range. And 5 wyches with haywire grenades are going to guarantee one broken vehicle, while the ravager often leaves me in disappointment. But we don't have anything in our list that can do what a cronos can do with a spirit vortex. And you're not going to find anything the equivalent of a monoscythe missile anywhere outside of the heavy support slot.

Our poison weapons are great, but they can also be a liability. They don't increase how much we can kill, only WHAT we can kill. I don't feel like doing math, so I could very well be wrong here, but take 30 ork boy shootas. I imagine two monoscythe missiles would do a whole lot more damage than three venoms.

Just a theory though. I could very well be wrong.

Expletive Deleted wrote:

Our poison weapons are great, but they can also be a liability. They don't increase how much we can kill, only WHAT we can kill. I don't feel like doing math, so I could very well be wrong here, but take 30 ork boy shootas. I imagine two monoscythe missiles would do a whole lot more damage than three venoms.

I'm not going to answer all your questions but I will reply to this hypothesis you made, just because I feel like doing some math

For the sake of the discussion, let's assume that the boyz are tightly packed, that you don't deviate and that you manage to hit 6 boyz with each one of your missiles. Still you would only kill 10 boyz on average with the two monoscythe missiles, while 3 venoms will kill 12.
And don't forget that those missiles from your flyer may only arrive as early as T2, and as late as T4. That's if they don't get shot down by interception fire before they get to shoot, while your venoms will be able to start dealing damage from T1 onwards, and they won't even take up an HS slot

I'll let someone else mathcraft why Ravagers are the most solid heavy support option we have

the trick is saturation of fire, especially with venoms. with pre-measure you can now relieably sit at max range and force you opponent to make a bucketfull of armour saves. even 2+ saves can be failed if he's rolling enough dice. Pick a target and hit it with everything you can till it's gone.

Same with the ravagers, sit at max range and do the same NS should negate that pesky small arms fire even from tau fire warriors.
If you want a bit more reliablity from them throw in a farseer and make you ravage's twin linked.

ravagers the move fast, negate range from enemy weapons and can have a 5++ and still fire all 3 weapons

If hes not very heavily mech'd out try ravagers with dissies

I fielded 4 in a 2k points battle, 2 with lances and 2 with 3 dissies and all I can say is wow, termies/power armoured doesn't matter, 9 shots each boat hitting on 3's killing on 3's (I know termies have the 5+ inv unless storm shield) 2 of them focus firing on a unit of marines is pretty much guaranteed a 10 man dead squad.

Also tough 7 thunderfires, splinter cannon them they will drop to 2 cannons on a venom, leaving exposed bolter marines that shouldn't even get close to you. remember bolter fire cant get us to the front with ravagers

Well I'm not sure if your thesis is that the Ravager is weak because it took yours three turns to kill a Thunderfire Cannon or the Ravager is weak because it isn't as good against infantry as the TFC.

If you're having troubles killing the TFC, you ought to be using splinter shots because the TFC is a 2 wound marine as far as poison shots are concerned. Shooting lances at it is probably a waste of shots unless you haven't got anything better to shoot at.

If your complaint is that the Ravager doesn't kill infantry as well as the TFC then you're shooting at the wrong thing. The majority of the DE list is very good against infantry and the Ravager is there to shore up our deficiencies against vehicles. Tactical marines are often equipped to deal with vehicles which is why so many vanilla marines have been taking TFCs to help thin out the hordes which are typically the bane of marine players.

Is the Ravager good against vehicles? The math has been done over and over but a naked Ravager has 3 lances at a cost of 35pts/lance with a threat bubble of 48" (12" move + 36" range aerial assault). Blasterborn are 27pts/lance plus the cost of a Venom, but with a threat bubble of 24" (6" move + 18" range). It is not uncommon for Blasterborn to miss out on the first turn of shooting. This also leaves the Blasterborn 18" from the vehicle which doesn't say anything about how far the Venom is from the infantry. It is not uncommon for Blasterborn to expose their Venoms to an assault or to melta fire in order to get the damage done. So basically even if Ravagers aren't the cheapest per lance weapon, dark lances have infinite utility over blasters.

A blob of 20 Warriors is not a common strategy, and I'm surprised the TFC killed 19 of them but that's one reason why 2 units of 10 is better than 1 unit of 20. Did you have your guys really clustered or did you use the 5" blast marker instead of the 3"? Or maybe that was how much damage the TFC did over the course of 3 turns?

The TFC is 100 pts and I would be surpised if it killed 8 models (rule of thumb is 2 models per 3" blast). A Venom with extra cannon is 65 and would kill 12*(2/3)*(1/2) = 4 Warriors which is 4/65*100 = 6.15 DE Warriors killed per 100 pts spent on Venoms. So TFCs are better than Venoms at killing T3 5+ infantry, but I don't think anybody's earned a Nobel Prize for figuring that out.

Lastly 10 Marines without upgrades in a drop pod costs 205pts. 20 Warriors in 2 units, each with a Splinter Cannon costs 200pts. Marines should kill 20*(2/3)*(2/3) = 8.88 Wyches or 9.77 Wyches when you factor in the Storm Bolter on the Drop Pod. 20 Warriors average 2*(9+4)*(2/3)*(1/2) = 8.66 Wyches at max range while moving and 2*(9*2+6)*(2/3)*(1/2) = 16 Wyches at min range while stationary. So in your game, the Marines performed about how you'd expect and if your Warriors were shooting at your Wyches then you would expect them to be doing at least the same but up to twice as well.

Anyways, I hope that isn't an intimidating wall of math but basically you have the ability to outperform your opponent even if it doesn't look like it at first. If you want you could post your army list or a battle report so I can look at the whole scenario instead of unit-to-unit comparisons?

I dont think that Exp. Deleted sad or ment, that ravangers are bad. I just think that he misses weapons that take away a big chunk of models. And there he is right.

Exort1, sure your 6 orks under the templet happens, but my experience is, that if i hit a big unit, it usually goes up to 8-10 hits. In addition, you can shoot your DL/dissis and the Splintercannon, so the output would usually be higher, and it has the potential to be much higher.

Fuhrmaaj, 20 warriors can be an effective objectiv holder, especially with a pain token. But as you sad 2*10 is also not bad. I have to put them into my tryout list.

Sláinte

If you want to deal with large blobs of infantry we have three builds that are far superior to the cronos (lets face it an 18" S3 AP3 large blast that doesn't ignore cover on a slow BS3 unit isn't scaring anyone).

-Razorwing, 4 monoscythe missiles, splinter cannon, flicker field - 165 (multi-role as still has lances)

-Razorwing, 4 monoscythe missiles, 2x disintegrators, flicker field - 155 (dedicated anti infantry)

-9 reavers, arena champion, 3 blasters/heatlances - 249-258 (multi-role)

Both these units will slaughter infantry.

But honestly like fuhrmaaj said it sounds like you were shooting the wrong units with the wrong guns, splinter fire wounds artillery like thunderfire cannons on a 4+, now taking into account the thunderfire cannon is going to be in a fortified ruin (techpriest ability) with a 3+ cover save, it makes no sense to shoot at it with dark lances.

Are ravagers the be all end all? No absolutely not. But they are one of the few units that gives us AT that can threaten vehicles turn 1, the short range of blasters just doesn't cut it. Can you make lists without ravager? Definitely, but you need to make sure you get that AT from somewhere else.

Also if you knew drop pods were coming why were your wyches not in area terrain so that they could go to ground for a 3+ cover save against the marine bolter fire? Also the thunder fire ignore cover rounds are S5 AP6 so your warriors will still get their armour save.

Hope that helps.

Three Lance Ravagers is a good starting palce, but its not an ending place. It all depends on just how important T1 AT is in your Meta.
Mine, not so much.
Against a guard list with lots of basilsks, that would change.

how did your ravagers take 3 turns to kill a TFC??? You hit on 3s and wound on 3s... should only take 1 ravager 2 rounds (baring lance curse ofc) Also what marine player takes a TFC in the first place???

We're Dark Eldar.  We don't bring sledgehammers.  We bring knives.  Lots and lots of knives.
 
As a marine player I can tell you that you did yourself no favors in allowing the TFC to live.  Those things are made out of gold plated awesome, and is one of the few ways SMs can take on just about anything xenos.  When I bring 1 it typically survive a round or 2, depending on who went first.  But, don't get down about that.  It is an artillery unit.  We don't have things like that needing to be stationary to fire.  We are mobile and that is the greatest strength over stationary fire, no matter how potent.  See Tau to get an idea.
 
As for the Ravager, depending on the rest of his build it would have been better to target his infantry and drop them below the threshold of CC effective or finish of 1-2 model survivors.  Im guessing his TFC was in cover?  Fortified perhaps?  Yeah, break out the splinter fire and save the Dark Lances for the Tac squads.

Mushkilla wrote:

Also the thunder fire ignore cover rounds are S5 AP6 so your warriors will still get their armour save.

I found that out the last time I played with my nephew. He shot at my reavers with the cannon and rolled to wound, and I was just going to remove them, but he said, 'No, you still get to make an armour save.'

'Armour save?' I asked, puzzled.

'Yes,' he said.

'You mean, like your guys? I actually roll dice and if I get fives then my guys aren't dead?'

'Yes. An armour save.'

I watched him suspiciously. 'I've never rolled an armour save before...'

'Well now you can.'

'No! It's a trap! You're trying to trick me somehow!' I broke down crying and tearing at my hair.

He's a sweet kid, isn't he? He sure puts up with a lot.

Shadows Revenge wrote:

how did your ravagers take 3 turns to kill a TFC??? You hit on 3s and wound on 3s... should only take 1 ravager 2 rounds (baring lance curse ofc) Also what marine player takes a TFC in the first place???

I'm going to agree with False Son, my marine alter-ego always fields one, and sometimes two, TFC's. They are cheap, versatile, have great range (60"), and oh-so-underestimated. More often than not they are the MVPs of my battles. The enemy usually spends the first two rounds trying to shoot the Dread (yes I field that too) and the termies. They tend to ignore the TFC which is often out of range and considered low threat. And that's what I want them to do. A TFC can clear a decent sized unit of fire warriors, pathfinders, nobs, Nyd's, or anything else with T3 or 4 in a round of good shooting. It can also prune a horde of foot advancing Nyds or Boyz back about 6", giving you more time to shoot. It also is quite capable as an anti-light vehicle weapon. It compliments assault troops well because the defense against it is to spread out, but that makes people vulnerable to assault. Do not underestimate it's awesomeness.

Dan

Shadows Revenge wrote:

how did your ravagers take 3 turns to kill a TFC??? You hit on 3s and wound on 3s... should only take 1 ravager 2 rounds (baring lance curse ofc) Also what marine player takes a TFC in the first place???

I would, but that is for troll combos.

When the 5th necron dex came out, I wanted to get C'tan + crypteks for the force difficulty+dangerous test on all enemy on the table. Go really overkill with it. Then the new rulebook got out, I figured you could get allied with thunderfires! Buut those were only dreams and never got realized... Otherwise I'ld even field 3 of em!

This is all a bit much to dissect, but it just sounds like you made a lot of little mistakes at deployment and maybe had some bad dice rolls to boot.

Shadows Revenge wrote:

how did your ravagers take 3 turns to kill a TFC??? You hit on 3s and wound on 3s... should only take 1 ravager 2 rounds (baring lance curse ofc) Also what marine player takes a TFC in the first place???

Ever since 6th came out and most armies have been taking large amounts of cheap troops, the TFC has become popular. I mean, what else are SM going to field? Tactical Marines? HA! But to be fair, the TFC is pretty beast.

I think you forgot that the TFC comes with a Techmarine who lets the SM fortify a ruin to a 3+ cover save and doesn't take much board space. The average rolls are:

Ravager with 3 lances
3 x (2/3) x (2/3) x (1/3) = 0.44 wounds/turn
2 wounds / 0.44 wounds/turn = 4.55 turns

So he actually got lucky with his Ravager's shooting. As everyone has been saying, the real mistake was shooting lances at the TFC in the first place. Use splinter fire.

2 wounds x (1/3)^-1 save x (1/2)^-1 wound x (2/3)^-1 hit = 18 splinter shots

So he could have taken the TFC out by shooting 2 Venoms at it on the first turn, no problem.

Edit: me grammar so good huehuehue

Instead of TFC, you could go and 10man devs squads and 4 missile launchers or plasma cannons. That's alot of template, more wounds, and bolter fire as well. Though almost double the cost of TFC, I think they would survive better, also they can be combat squadded. Otherwise tactical spam would be better in the end.

facelessabsalom wrote:

Instead of TFC, you could go and 10man devs squads and 4 missile launchers or plasma cannons. That's alot of template, more wounds, and bolter fire as well. Though almost double the cost of TFC, I think they would survive better, also they can be combat squadded. Otherwise tactical spam would be better in the end.

Devastators are also a good option, but they fill a slightly different niche in the army. I think it depends more on what kind of a hole you're filling in your list. I don't really want to discuss the nuances of TFC vs devs in this forum, but I will say they're both viable.

Haha this topic became about tactica versus Thundefire Cannon's, instead of what I intended.

I did make some mistakes, I'm still new. I have fewer than 10 games under my belt I'm sure. I'm going to be honest, I thought the TFC had an AV value and didn't bother to ask. That's why I shot at it with my Ravager rather than my venoms. It looks like a vehicle! It has wheels! Anyway...

I wouldn't usually run a 20 man blob of warriors but I did this to get to a point total, and I packed them as loosely as I could to stay in coherence and cover. And I did it over an objective. Didn't know the TFC ignored cover or I probably would have cared less about that. Still they weren't stacked together too tight.

In all honesty despite my errors it was a close game. He held one more objective than I did. But I had Slay the warlord.

Crazy Irish got where I was coming from, and Mushkilla in some form (though I didn't think about bladevanes) reinforced it some.

My overall statement was: Even if the ravager is our most cost effective, cheapest unit, and thus our best unit. We have units in other slots that can fill it's role. While we have nothing outside of the HS slot with blast and large blast templates. Unless you count plasma grenades and shredders but the range on those things are abysmal.

It wasn't a thought based on one game, because if I did then I'd take back what i said about my cronos, as his sternguard with hellfire rounds made short work of him. I have just never seen ANY unit in our army that would wipe out an entire large squad like the TFC did. Barring an assault and sweeping advance.

I frequently take 20 warriors with dark lances. Usually they get parked on an objective, preferably in cover, and supply some additional AT. I've tries SC but I seem to do better with the DL. So I don't think it was your unit choice per se. But if you were densely packed, you were creating a perfect target for the TFC which may be how it hurt you so much. From using one, 2-3 models is usually the best it does on dispersed targets, so, since it was hitting you for an average of 5+ (assuming it rolled at least a couple ones), you must have been shoulder to shoulder (and the TFC did well on its scatter to boot). Were you using the LARGE blast and not the small one? A TFC uses the small blast.

Anyway, you gave him the perfect target and he seems to have rolled really well too.

But you are right, we do not have a lot of blast weapons. However, most of the time, a blast weapon won't do as well as the TFC did against you. And what we do have has some advantages. We can snap fire, a blast weapon cannot. We can shoot at flyers and I'm not sure a blast weapon can. We have poison. Granted, S6 has a hurt all it's own, but it is not poison. Sometimes S is better - sometimes poison is better. Regardless, they are different.

I would stop short of saying the Ravager is de facto the best unit. It's good no doubt, but many of our units are good, and 'best' is very situational. A DL Ravager is not the best, IMO, against hordes or MSU opponents. In fact, most of our units are situational. I really like Taloses and Incubi because, for whatever reason, they always seem to perform well for me, often doing more to forward the raid than the Ravager. I do agree with you that we sort of have other units to fill the Ravager's role albeit imperfectly. Foot Lanceborn can throw some lances at things, but lack a Ravager's mobility (or night shields). A Voidraven can lance things and has mobility, but is not on the field on T1. We can get AT from blasters or wyches, of course, but not at long range. And NOTHING else I can think of mounts 3 dissies for those light vehicles.

Expletive Deleted wrote:

I wouldn't usually run a 20 man blob of warriors but I did this to get to a point total, and I packed them as loosely as I could to stay in coherence and cover. And I did it over an objective. Didn't know the TFC ignored cover or I probably would have cared less about that. Still they weren't stacked together too tight.

I would suggest 2 units of 10 instead of 1 of 20. Also I'm almost certain you did something wrong because I don't think the TFC can even hit 19 in one turn, let alone kill them. You also get your saves if you're in cover because the cover ignoring shot is AP6.

Expletive Deleted wrote:

My overall statement was: Even if the ravager is our most cost effective, cheapest unit, and thus our best unit. We have units in other slots that can fill it's role. While we have nothing outside of the HS slot with blast and large blast templates. Unless you count plasma grenades and shredders but the range on those things are abysmal.

I would counter that DE don't need blast templates when they have enough cheap AI fire at decent range to make blast templates redundant. I would say it's rare that a DE list doesn't include at least 1 Ravager and that's because nothing can honestly do exactly what a Ravager does. The Ravager is a perfect harmony of threat, range and cost which means it needs to be dealt with, it's hard to deal with, and you need to divert more points to killing it than it costs to put on the field.

Quote :

It wasn't a thought based on one game, because if I did then I'd take back what i said about my cronos, as his sternguard with hellfire rounds made short work of him. I have just never seen ANY unit in our army that would wipe out an entire large squad like the TFC did. Barring an assault and sweeping advance.

I discussed this earlier in the thread. SM is generally not good at dealing with infantry with anything near cost-effectiveness so they have greater need of AI in their Heavy Support slot. That being said, Venoms do roughly the same amount of damage as TFCs do on a point-for-point basis and they don't even occupy a slot. Really the Marines got the raw end of the deal here and what DE has to figure out is how they're going to kill vehicles.

I recall when I started playing back in 3rd edition I would always want to get units like the Chosen Retinue for my Chaos Lord or lots of Dark Reapers. After you've played the game for a while you begin to understand that you pay a lot of points for units which wipe out a lot of models in one turn and not all of these units are created equally. If you can do with 100 points a little less than what your opponent does with 200 points, then you're going to come out on top.

After reading a lot of general warhammer forums, mainly because I don't want to ask silly questions here, I'd rather stick to the badassery that is dark eldar, I see that I've just been the victim to some lucky scatter rolls. He actually managed to scatter onto more bases than he could get with a direct hit. And my ally in IG was new to the game so he probably clumped his dudes together too much.

The Ravager supplies a consistent probability. Those large blast templates can do serious damage with a lot of luck. And I just couldn't think of any DE units that had the potential to do that much damage even if it was pure luck.

But, Dark Eldar have their own forms of overkill. And I just have to learn to use their tools.

If I want to emulate what that TFC did to me, I don't need blast weapons. Two spliterborn in a venom will give me roughly the same results.

I still do think our heavy support options offer some very different and useful things in comparison to a ravager however. It offers turn 1 AT, but the Talos offers stronger AT, toughness, and AI. The Cronos can make our armies more resillient, the razorwing offers a jack of all trades unit with skyfire, and the voidraven. Well. S9 lances?

Ive recently started using a cronus engine with 2 ravagers as my heavy support, its quite amazing the amount of fire power the engine attracts all because of its blast weapons potential threat, killed 7 banshees in 1 shot with it (yes they were hiding by the corner of a building but they were all clumped) Also I find it distracts a lot of Imperial guard heavy fire as their lasguns cant wound it making it fun to hover around their lines and annoy while throwing pain tokens out like they were sweets

Also while I like jets (I have 6 of them) I find them almost useless in smaller games if taken as a solo, I tend to find for 2 turns of what could be a 5 turn game they are facing the wrong way/ have no target to choose in arc of fire, This could just be me not mastering the flyers movement and would love vector dancer rule on them. But I do like the implosion missiles a lot just so expensive