Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I agree, give Kabalites the option of pistol/ccw.

Also, bring back 20 man units. I have fond memories of playing warrior spam. 100+ guys on the field, tons of infantry Dark Lances ripping up vehicles.

As for the splinter rifles themselves: yes, make them like Kroot rifles. +1 attack. Would assault 3 make them too OP?

I would like my Talos/Cronos units to be restored to units of 1-3.

cuda1179 wrote:I agree, give Kabalites the option of pistol/ccw.

Also, bring back 20 man units. I have fond memories of playing warrior spam. 100+ guys on the field, tons of infantry Dark Lances ripping up vehicles.

Hrm. I want to support both of these ideas, but I do wonder if we'd be better off splitting them up into different datasheets at that point. Give the melee kabalites their own rules to help them be something other than just a sidegrade/downgrade from wyches/wracks/incubi (melee build) or a rule to help explain what a 20-strong blob of warriors is doing on foot rather than riding in raiders in squads of 5-10.

On the note of melee kabalites, I'll point out that craftworlders have storm guardians (10 bodies, mostly melee+pistol loadouts with a handful of special weapons mixed in, sticky objective rule), and they'd drop their bad melee weapons in a heartbeat if they could take catapults instead.

I like the idea of being able to take the squad in different configurations, but they might need a bit more to help them find a niche.

As for the splinter rifles themselves: yes, make them like Kroot rifles. +1 attack. Would assault 3 make them too OP?

Probably not (scourges can take shardcarbines), but it might require they be a bit more expensive, which in turn means they'd be "worse" (point for point) at their current jobs because they're more of a special weapon + action monkey unit than a rifle unit. So you'd have to strike a good balance. I'd also worry that 20 shardcarbines in a single unit might be begging for some kind of wombo combo sillyness. Also also, trueborn used to have access to shardcarbines. This makes me feel even more like maybe we should just bring back trueborn in some form.

ccs wrote:I would like my Talos/Cronos units to be restored to units of 1-3.

Seconded.

Dudeface wrote:
This is a painfully reductive take though, maybe it should be possible for a kabalite force to be offensively useful? Maybe the bolter shouldn't be pillow fisted?

Any argument rooted in "why does it need to be viable because it isn't/wasn't previously", can immediately be thrown out imo.

Is it though? I mean complaining bolter weapons aren't good into targets X and Y when you have many other tools seems reductive.
Should an army composed purely of Intercessors be able to gun everything down? Or should you need some melta, some power fists, some whatever?

If splinter was bad into everything then sure - but anti-infantry 3+ is relatively good into infantry.

Vipoid's list looks extensive - but really Hellions are a melee unit (and a good one) while Reavers are an objective scoring unit with a special weapon and some token splinter fire.
Hand of the Archon is just "Kabalites+1" - so fair, but in practice you are probably taking all the special weapons over basic splinter rifles (same for Kabs).
Splinter Scourge are relevant I guess, but this version is arguably the best they've ever been. Does it really matter if they aren't good into certain targets?

"My characters's splinter pistols wound bikers on 6s - this is an outrage" feels like a reach. Its really not an issue with playing Dark Eldar.

As I understand the argument, the issue isn’t that Splinter Rifles are bad, so much that the wider rules create situation where Splinter Rifles struggle.

Against Infantry they remain pretty competent as side arms go. But there are things such as Bikes and Battlesuits where they just don’t get their perk.

And that extends to other toys that rely on Poison to do their jobs.

That leads to odd situations where against say, Marines, your Splinter weapons and other poisons work as intended. But against say, Tau? There are significant parts of your opponent’s army you just struggle against.

Yes, other toys like Blasters, Shredders, Blast Pistols will more than lend a hand. But there are so many of those to an army, and they don’t really balance it out when by dint of external rules anything normally reliant on Poison type rules are heavily neutered.

Hopefully it’s not too hyperbolic to draw some comparison with fighting against an Imperial Knight army in 7th Edition, where the vast majority of weapons just Did Sod All. That problem of course applied to most if not all armies other than Knight on Knight action. But even then, it felt bad.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
As I understand the argument, the issue isn’t that Splinter Rifles are bad, so much that the wider rules create situation where Splinter Rifles struggle.

Against Infantry they remain pretty competent as side arms go. But there are things such as Bikes and Battlesuits where they just don’t get their perk.

And that extends to other toys that rely on Poison to do their jobs.

That leads to odd situations where against say, Marines, your Splinter weapons and other poisons work as intended. But against say, Tau? There are significant parts of your opponent’s army you just struggle against.

Yes, other toys like Blasters, Shredders, Blast Pistols will more than lend a hand. But there are so many of those to an army, and they don’t really balance it out when by dint of external rules anything normally reliant on Poison type rules are heavily neutered.

Hopefully it’s not too hyperbolic to draw some comparison with fighting against an Imperial Knight army in 7th Edition, where the vast majority of weapons just Did Sod All. That problem of course applied to most if not all armies other than Knight on Knight action. But even then, it felt bad.

The other element discussed was the fact that even into infantry targets an intercessor is sometimes just as good, if not better per point, then continues to be better into other targets too.

What if they went back to the formula of 2 heavies, two specials per 10 Kabalites? Duplicates allowed. That, with the leader's blast pistol, really does help against the heavier stuff.

Apply the same formula if they brought back 20 man squads. Blast pistol, 4 blasters, 4 Dark Lances. That could do damage to Terminators or vehicles.

Dudeface wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
As I understand the argument, the issue isn’t that Splinter Rifles are bad, so much that the wider rules create situation where Splinter Rifles struggle.

Against Infantry they remain pretty competent as side arms go. But there are things such as Bikes and Battlesuits where they just don’t get their perk.

And that extends to other toys that rely on Poison to do their jobs.

That leads to odd situations where against say, Marines, your Splinter weapons and other poisons work as intended. But against say, Tau? There are significant parts of your opponent’s army you just struggle against.

Yes, other toys like Blasters, Shredders, Blast Pistols will more than lend a hand. But there are so many of those to an army, and they don’t really balance it out when by dint of external rules anything normally reliant on Poison type rules are heavily neutered.

Hopefully it’s not too hyperbolic to draw some comparison with fighting against an Imperial Knight army in 7th Edition, where the vast majority of weapons just Did Sod All. That problem of course applied to most if not all armies other than Knight on Knight action. But even then, it felt bad.

The other element discussed was the fact that even into infantry targets an intercessor is sometimes just as good, if not better per point, then continues to be better into other targets too.

Good summary from Mad Doc and good point from DudeFace.

Personally, my *main* issue with poison is just the weird interations with certain armies. Not being able to poison fenrisian wolves or necron scarabs, for instance.

Somewhat related to that is the way our offense has been broken up into tiers moreso than in previous editions (things like blasters now being more of an anti-heavy infantry/light vehicle weapon than an actual tank buster) means that each tier of weapon has to do more work on its own and is less able to pitch in against secondary targets. So for instance, my splinter weapons can no longer reliably whittle down enemy bikers the way they used to which means I need to call in more help bigger guns like lances. But my blasters can't help my lances finish tank busting as reliably as before, so it's harder to spare lances to shoot the bikers. Basically, it's harder for us to nickel and dime our way through enemies because we need relatively specific weapons shooting into relatively specific places. For comparison, craftworlders are supposed to be a faction with lots of specialized shooting, but they have enough forms of shooting that are good into a variety of targets (shuriken cannons, lethal hit hawk lasblasters, dark reapers, etc.) that they don't really have this same issue.

And then somewhat related to that last paragraph, as Dudeface reminded us, is the point that despite our shooting being more specialized, it's not necessarily more effective against our preferred targets. And personally, I don't really want it to be. I want it to simply be a bit more flexible instead. When I saw our weapon profiles being teased with Anti-Infantry 3+ instead of Poison 4+, I immediately went, "Oh no. They think they're buffing us, but they aren't." Poison weapons were pretty neat when they could trade efficiently into higher toughness infantry and bikes and could also be counted on to deal with swarms, etc. It was *weird* when they wounded T3 and lower targets less well than bolters, but poison weapons in general were more comfortable because you didn't have to worry about a unit *technically* not being specific infantry to be effective. You could toss a sybarite or hekatrix with an agonizer at a squad of bikes and give them decent odds of dragging one of the bikes down on their own. You could count on your splinters to help thin out anything that wasn't a vehicle. Whereas now you face necrons, see a bunch of wraiths and scarabs and realize your basic guns basically don't get to contribute in this game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 cuda1179 wrote:
What if they went back to the formula of 2 heavies, two specials per 10 Kabalites? Duplicates allowed. That, with the leader's blast pistol, really does help against the heavier stuff.

Apply the same formula if they brought back 20 man squads. Blast pistol, 4 blasters, 4 Dark Lances. That could do damage to Terminators or vehicles.

I don't think GW would like it because it goes against their newer paradigm of mainly letting you field what comes in the box (although they've applied that inconsistently.)

If you applied that pattern to the single default kabalite datasheet, you'd basically make it so that no one ever took splinter cannon kabalites again because lances are too much more valuable. If you made that it's own datasheet, you could probably balance it as needed, but I get nervous when the "point" of a proposed unit is just to create an even more points efficient version of an existing unit (because of the more concentrated anti-tank firepower).

As someone who has used 20-man warrior blobs as part of a webway bomb in the past, I find them slightly hard to justify in terms of fluff. They're pretty much the same as just taking 2x10 warriors except that there's more potential to wombo-combo a bunch of buffs in one place. And I don't particularly like wombo combo design. Nor do I particularly want kabalites to be an actual "horde" unit where the point is to spam 120 of them in a list. So if we're not wombo-comboing and we're not trying to turn them into a horde unit, what's the point of the extra large squad?

(If anything, I'd like the option to go back to taking them in 5-man squads so I can use them as scoring pieces/action monkeys without having to invest in an extra venom.)

What I love about 20 man units is that they just might have enough volume of fire to get something done. A lone 10-man unit is barely a threat to anything that's not Guard/ork boys. Look at us, we killed a single marine! With 20 ,and all the heavies/specials, you might be able to cripple a vehicle while also slightly annoying an infantry unit of convenience.

Yes, this unit is prime target for the Wombo Combo, but it's somewhat balanced by not being able to mount a Raider. So mobility is lower, no deepatrike.