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Vypers have a gunner who can turn his gunners weapon 360. To reflect this ability to do a drive by with this high speed anti grav bike I think they should be able to move shoot move to show how they can use their speed and technology to do accurate drive by type shooting before ducking back into cover. So you would have to reposition to try and shoot back. They don’t have an invuln and die decently fast for as much points as they are.

Just wait. The new codex is along soon.

They can use the 'Fire and Fade' stratagem.

They shouldn’t need to use a strategem. They aren’t a tank. They are high speed vypers

Everything needs to use stratagems these days, for what the units used to have built-in.

Imperial Guard infantry squads need to use one to merge. Specialist grenades are not wargear as they once where, and are now stratagems, like so many other options.

Yes, they should be able to just do it. But, 9th edition stopped that.

warpedpig wrote:
Vypers have a gunner who can turn his gunners weapon 360. To reflect this ability to do a drive by with this high speed anti grav bike I think they should be able to move shoot move to show how they can use their speed and technology to do accurate drive by type shooting before ducking back into cover. So you would have to reposition to try and shoot back. They don’t have an invuln and die decently fast for as much points as they are.

Leman Russes and Baneblades can turn their turrets 360 degrees, should they also have MSM? What about Land Speeder Vengeances? Piranhas?

Wait for the new book and points before you start suggesting unnecessary changes.

Baneblade are not high speed anti gravity vehicles are they? Please use common sense. Eldar are an ancient highly advanced race with superior technology and their rules should reflect that superiority

Fluff-wise, Baneblades are driven and manned by trained IG personnel.
Land Speeders do not get to shoot-move-shoot, yet are also skimmers with trained pilots.
Eldar vehicles are civillians, IIRC. Yet, Eldar usually have better stats that IG vehicles, their BS, etc.

Eldar superior tech shows already. Even Eldar Jetbikes cannot dodge like you suggest, nor can Shining Spears and Autarchs do that without the stratagem.

warpedpig wrote:
Baneblade are not high speed anti gravity vehicles are they? Please use common sense. Eldar are an ancient highly advanced race with superior technology and their rules should reflect that superiority

You want to give Vypers a pretty powerful ability based on the fact that "they're fast and can turn 360 degrees", and you're asking me to use common sense? You also didn't respond to my other examples, which could also include all aircraft units as well.

What they need is a ++ save and a better choice for the underslung else they lose out to Warwalkers nearly every time (and that's a horrid spot to be)

Turnip Jedi wrote:What they need is a ++ save and a better choice for the underslung else they lose out to Warwalkers nearly every time (and that's a horrid spot to be)

Strongly disagree here. Making vypers more like war walkers just causes them to complete more directly. Instead of giving vypers their own niche, you basically just turn them into war walkers.

Skinnereal wrote:Fluff-wise, Baneblades are driven and manned by trained IG personnel.
Land Speeders do not get to shoot-move-shoot, yet are also skimmers with trained pilots.

Honestly, I'd love to see Move-Shoot-Move given out to more units. Especially light skimmers like land speeders and pirahnas. The board is small enough for it to be a counterable tactic, and it really does capture the hit and run feel you picture with such units. They didn't take JSJ away from eldar in 8th edition because it failed to reflect the fluff; they did it because giving the mechanic to some of the faction's heaviest hitters was really frustrating. Giving it to units, like vypers, that are more lightly-armed and armored than some of their competition (war walkers, falcons, etc.) seems like a decent way to go.

Eldar vehicles are civillians, IIRC. Yet, Eldar usually have better stats that IG vehicles, their BS, etc.

Ummmm. Akshoowully, yes and no. Sometimes eldar vehicles are described as being piloted by guardians, but sometimes they're described as being piloted by eagle warriors. And having better BS than IG is consistent with guardians having better BS than guardsmen. Which, granted, I would mind seeing guardians go back to WS/BS 4+.

Eldar superior tech shows already. Even Eldar Jetbikes cannot dodge like you suggest, nor can Shining Spears and Autarchs do that without the stratagem.

While I agree that warpedig is probably overstating the value of having a turret on a skimmer, I'll play devil's advocate for a moment. Jetbikers of all stripes have forward-mounted weapons (and laser lances which are essentially forward-mounted thanks to how elbows work). Additionally, the guy manning the controls is also the guy trying to aim the guns. So it probably is genuinely easier for a vyper to keep its big gun pointed at the target for longer than a normal jetbike. Imagine you're playing a video game where you can drive a vehicle around and/or man its turret. It's the difference between focusing on just your driving or just your shooting versus trying to do both at once using two different game controllers.

But yeah. JSJ is probably a good mechanic to bring back, even if I don't entirely agree with warpedpig's reasoning. Other things I wouldn't mind seeing for the vyper in the new book:

1.) Just leave it alone. It's currently cheap enough to be a decent gun platform and fast enough to help with scoring. Though admittedly, it's kind of reliant on specific craftworld traits.
2.) Make vypers a heavy weapon platform for jetbike squads. I.e., for every 3 windriders in a unit, you may add a single Vyper model.
3.) Steal a page from the 7th edition corsairs' book, and give eldar vehicles an invul save that gets better the faster they move. Then give vypers a rule to treat heavy weapons as assault weapons. Now you've got vypers who are still less killy than war walkers, but more durable provided they stay mobile.

But really, assuming bright lances become Dd3+3, I think vypers will be pretty okay in the new book. You're talking about a platform with the shooting output of a drukhari raider at about 3/4ths the price. That's not terrible.

A guardian would be superior to a guardsman anyway. Eldar are a superior race. If you read their fluff it explains they function at higher speeds physically and cognitively. They could take shots a normal guardsman could not. They also live much longer so have greater experience and training despite being considered basic infantry for the Craftworld. Then you double that up with advanced technology (targeters and anti grav) then the idea they could be moving and shooting much faster than a human counterpart is not much of a stretch.

I’d also give a 3 Vyper unit the ability to bring a D cannon as a special heavy weapon option but it would be very expensive. High cost high reward.

If you read the fluff for Eldar they have really crazy weaponry compared to the imperium. Warp spiders for example should pretty much auto kill whatever infantry model they manage to blast with their spinner rifles. It hits you with a huge mesh of monomolecular razor wire that chops you into chunks the more you struggle

Harlequins kiss also. Should be if you fail an armor save from it you’re killed instantly on a certain roll. I’d rather Eldar costed more points and actually performed like the lore days they do. With extreme lethality

You see, if we went that route marine players would have a two thousand point army with what, ten marines and a lieutenant? Us IG and Ork players would be struggling to get a five hundred point game started with what was previously a small apoc force .

warpedpig wrote:
A guardian would be superior to a guardsman anyway. Eldar are a superior race. If you read their fluff it explains they function at higher speeds physically and cognitively. They could take shots a normal guardsman could not. They also live much longer so have greater experience and training despite being considered basic infantry for the Craftworld. Then you double that up with advanced technology (targeters and anti grav) then the idea they could be moving and shooting much faster than a human counterpart is not much of a stretch.

This is very much one of those cases where you could go one way or the other. While it's true that guardians have superhuman reflexes and possibly centuries of combat experience, you could also argue that they've potentially spent the last several centuries not fighting thus growing rusty. Plus, there's the whole compartmentalization thing they do to avoid getting consumed with blood lust. Basically, you could argue that superhuman reflexes and half-remembered combat experience might make guardians "only" as good as guardsmen (who are the space equivalent of modern special forces). Putting it in a more eldar-flattering light, it's a little weird that guardians are as good at shooting and sword fighting as aspect warriors, right?

I don't hate guardians hitting on 3s, but it does seem like the skill boost was maybe just a gamey solution to a mechanical problem back in the day; A ~100 point bright lance that literally only hit half the time was a tough sell. Plus, I kind of like the fluffy differentiation between the combat abilities of guardians and dedicated aspect warriors. Making guardians less powerful makes aspects seem more powerful by comparison.

I’d also give a 3 Vyper unit the ability to bring a D cannon as a special heavy weapon option but it would be very expensive. High cost high reward.

Eh. Not my jam, personally. The existence of the warp hunter suggests that something like a d-cannon needs something tank-sized to equip and transport it. Giving it to vypers kind of steps on the warp hunters toes the same way that giving them a prism cannon would step on the fire prism's. (Which is probably why the harlequin voidweaver's prism weapon is scaled down compared to the fire prism.) I guess you could give them a regular wraithgun or something, but I'm not sure you want your high-speed pilots being distracted by the screams of the damned and the sudden chill of Slaanesh's fingers across their soul every time the gunner fires a shot.

If you read the fluff for Eldar they have really crazy weaponry compared to the imperium. Warp spiders for example should pretty much auto kill whatever infantry model they manage to blast with their spinner rifles. It hits you with a huge mesh of monomolecular razor wire that chops you into chunks the more you struggle

As Tim says, considering over-adherance to lore takes game design to some undesirable places. Eldar weapons should feel weird and powerful, but we shouldn't just yell, "Advanced technology!" and expect people to want to play against our Assault 100 Damage 3 AP-4 shuriken catapults.

Harlequins kiss also. Should be if you fail an armor save from it you’re killed instantly on a certain roll. I’d rather Eldar costed more points and actually performed like the lore days they do. With extreme lethality

There's wiggle room for that sort of thing. You could potentially make a perfectly balanced eldar codex where every dire avenger is priced like a custodes. However, you have to leave room for other armies to also feel cool/powerful and to feel properly different from your own army. So if we assume a howling banshee should be so powerful that she costs as much as a custodes, how should she look compared to a custodes? Surely she should still be less durable than the custodes. So if she's less durable but the same cost, she's probably a lot more lethal. And at that point, you're talking about an extreme glass cannon army with a low body count meaning it's that much harder to balance them against hordes, mortal wounds, etc.

It can be done, but it's work.

Also, I actually kind of like where the harlequin's kiss is right now. At Damage d3, it can potentially one-shot most mortals (look at all the IG, GSC, eldar, and ork characters with 3 wounds or less), and you can give hardier targets like marines and monsters a rough time, but you're not just insta-gibbing marine captains and carnifexes with a single lucky attack. Which I like. It kind of felt bad for my opponents back in the day when the kiss was instant death on 6s.

That said, harlies are kind of in this weird place where, like custodes, their lore makes them sort of a bad fit for the scale of 40k. In the lore, 5 harlequins should be a serious problem for an imperial force of any size, but having 5 super clowns charging into a 2,000 point gunline on the tabletop is a bit of a stretch. I've kind of come around to wishing harlequins were treated more like imperial assassins: a handful of expensive, powerful models that you want to splash into a larger force but which would look rather odd on their own.

I always enjoy the “but my army is super special and should get better rules”. It’s always a flawless line of logic. Why don’t we just write a rule to cover how superior the Eldar are that just states that you win when you select Eldar as your army lol.

You guys make stupid arguments. I say certain weapons should be very powerful and balanced with points to be that

So you say “duuurrrrr Eldar should auto win. My gun has assault 1000 durrrr”

Totally stupid

So how many points should something like a Death Spinner be? Since it can one-shot everything from a Gretchin to a Gravis Captain.

How many points should a Harlequin's Kiss be, if it can one-shot a Carnifex, or a Hive Tyrant, just by rolling well?

warpedpig wrote:
You guys make stupid arguments. I say certain weapons should be very powerful and balanced with points to be that

So you say “duuurrrrr Eldar should auto win. My gun has assault 1000 durrrr”

Totally stupid

At least in my case, I said that making eldar more expensive and more powerful was viable, but that you had to be careful not to steal the thunder of other armies by powering eldar up too much. The Assault 100 shuriken catapult was hyperbole to illustrate the point that, while eldar tech is advanced, it still has to fit within the game without ruining the experience for your opponent.

So here's what you said you wanted for warp spiders:

Warp spiders for example should pretty much auto kill whatever infantry model they manage to blast with their spinner rifles. It hits you with a huge mesh of monomolecular razor wire that chops you into chunks the more you struggle

Currently, the death spinner wounds human-like infantry on a 2+, superhumans on a 3+, and has a chance to completely ignore power armor. So if you want to make death spinners even more powerful than that, it's going to be tricky to make them balanced.
* If you make a death spinner so strong that a spider has to have a huge price tag, then you risk making the eldar too few in number to be effective.
* If you make eldar so few in number (due to high points costs) that they're fielding fewer bodies than custodes, you're creating fluff-crunch dissonance by making custodes feel less elite by comparison.

So what exactly do you think a death spinner should look like, and as JNA asks, how much should it cost? Again, it's valid to want eldar to be more powerful and expensive than they current are, but you have to walk a rather fine line.

You could make death spinner. 6” range. Assault 1 or maybe 2

Strength 4 ( always wounds infantry on 2+). Ignores armor saves (only invuln saves work)

6 on a wound = instant death for targets 5 wounds or less

Damage 3. (So you aren’t instant killing huge monsters.

Probably something to this effect. They have limited shots but potential to erase elite infantry but not vehicles or monsters. This combined with teleporting around they could strike high value infantry class targets. This is just a starting point. I know everyone will be eager to bash it. But it would have a specific thing it is great at. And if you misplayed them they would just do limited damage and die.

Like using them against normal infantry and killing a few basic troops then getting shot ip and charged would be a big waste. Like shadow specters have incredible weapons but garbage survivability.

I feel like that approach would maybe make them too specialized. You'd be nerfing them against everything except multi-wound (preferably heavy-armored) infantry, giving up their ability to attack out of deepstrike, and simultaneously making them really powerful against multi-wound infantry.

So if you're playing against marines, they're very powerful, and if you're playing against anything else, they're kind of weak. So what pricetag do you give them? And does that pricetag mean they're really underpriced against marines or really underpriced against not-marines? And from your marine opponent's point of view, how much fun will they have getting hit by these guys?

You can see the sorts of challenges you run into when you try to make weapons more killy. Balancing lethality increases is hard and likely to lead to frustrated opponents (see: all the discussion around the hammerhead buffs that got teased). If you want to power up eldar, it's probably easier to give them more utility rather than more raw power.

Would be better to just equip the vypers with large spinner cannons that would blast entire squads with monofilament webs of death. That would be even cooler.

To each their own, but I feel like that would be redundant with night spinners. See above about the existence of the warp hunter making a d-cannon vyper feel weird.

warpedpig wrote:
You guys make stupid arguments. I say certain weapons should be very powerful and balanced with points to be that

So you say “duuurrrrr Eldar should auto win. My gun has assault 1000 durrrr”

Totally stupid

Perhaps stupid ideas illicit stupid responses? You say you want powerful but balanced units? Well then where should we price a unit of warp spiders that can have a reasonable chance of wiping a 200+ point unit of heavy infantry?

Probably around 130 for 5 of them. You want a perfect answer? It’s something that would need to be play tested obviously.

God forbid we have units that perform close to what their fluff describes them as. Then we might have a game with armies that play like they are supposed to play

Giving Vypers MSM would be ok unless shuriken cannons get damage 2, at least you're not suggesting it for the entire faction.

warpedpig wrote:
Probably around 130 for 5 of them. You want a perfect answer? It’s something that would need to be play tested obviously.

God forbid we have units that perform close to what their fluff describes them as. Then we might have a game with armies that play like they are supposed to play

You are totally right, you'd have to test for enjoyment as well. The 8th ed Monolith rules were really boring.

How they are supposed to play is only according to you and your headcanon.

The ritual armament of the Warp Spider is the death spinner, an exotic and highly advanced weapon that extrudes a cloud of razor- sharp monofilament wire. The spinner’s magnetic containment field then spools the wire together and hurls it toward the enemy. The wire’s tension causes it to writhe and lash in the air, and where it touches flesh or soft tissue, the wire slices through with horrible ease, severing limbs and dicing flesh.

In battle, they show themselves to be the true experts in monofilament weaponry, able to slice their victims into a thousand slivers with a twitch of their trigger fingers

warpedpig wrote:
Probably around 130 for 5 of them. You want a perfect answer? It’s something that would need to be play tested obviously.

There isn't any point in playtesting that (with the weapon rules you proposed). Its broken on first principles.

How is it broken. Shadow specters do flat 3 damage with a shooting weapon. You roll bad on a save and you lose a terminator to a single shot. Very similar. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. “First principles”. Oh please spare me.

The more you post, the more you make it clear that you're in way over your head. Let's compare the Shadow Specter and proposed War Spider.

Shadow Specters wound T4 and T5 infantry on a 3+. The proposed Warp Spider weapons wound them on a 2+. Against vehicles T7 vehicles they both wound on a 5+ but the ignore armor save ability means that the warp spiders are ironically better against most vehicles.

Shadow Specters move 12". Warp Spiders can move 7+4D6" (so an average of 21").

Shadow Specters cannot natively fallback and shoot. Warp Spiders can.

Both units can apply a -1 to hit. Admittedly the Warp Spiders have a 1/36 chance of losing a model but can move out of further shooting.

The only area the shadow specter outshines is in targeting T3 infantry with a 5+ or worse save. Shadow Specters kill about 6.5 models to the Warp Spider's 3.

By your proposal both come out to 130 points for 5. We can see though that the Warp Spiders are clearly better in 3/5 ways they differ. The 4th way has some debate over which option is better. The only clear win for the shadow specter comes from a very small selection of targets.

Surely you can see why people are urging a little caution before we just pile buffs on?

The only point I am pushing is that the warp spider weapon should be very distinctive and their use be specialized. Leave it to the math geniuses to figure out how to properly present that on the table top. As their weapon stands now it’s like being shot with any other strength six gun with some BS on a 6 that gives -4 AP.

Hardly that devastating a weapon considering it is supposed to immerse you in a web of monofilament razor sharp crap that shreds your armor and bones every time you move or breathe.

I too think one should be very cautious with argueing based on the lore. For example one could by this line of reasoning well argument that lasguns should autohit (they are lasers, not affected by wind, gravity etc. You point them at a target, they hit that target) and should ignore evasion based invulnerability saves (you can't evade a lasbolt traveling at the speed of light). That doesn't mean I propose that rule, it's just an example.

For the sake of the argument: if the warp spider should be that good against infantry based on the lore of the monofilament, it should meanwhile be really bad against vehicles (as you implied, a very distinctive and specialized weapon).
Therefore I would say if it wounds infantry on a 2+ it should wound vehicles on a 6+ (see the rules for the Chemcannon on the Hellhound)
6 on a wound = instant dead for targets with 5 wounds or less: this should be incredibly expensive. Note that this comes before any inv saves. The ability to kill any W5 or less infantry 1/6 of the time regardless of Sv, InvSv, FnP is no joke
Damage 3: if at all, then only against infantry to keep with the "highly specialized" motto.

But generally: are you aware how much points this iteration of the Warp spiders could easily kill?
Take for example Bullgryns with slabshields (35 points). They are T5 (doesn't matter against your weapon profile), W3 (doesn't matter), 2+ (doesn't matter either). It takes 1 hit of your weapon profile to kill one, so 1.5 shots of a Warp spider.


EDIT: by the way: if one argues the deathspinner could instakill infantry look at the rules for the IG Chemcannon. Seems like drowning someone in acid wounds on 2+, has AP -3 and 1 damage... whohooo

 vict0988 wrote:
Giving Vypers MSM would be ok unless shuriken cannons get damage 2, at least you're not suggesting it for the entire faction.

Keep an eye on the leaks for the new codex. Shuriken Cannons are probably going to D2.