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How do you fight Dark Eldar with Gun line type armies using either Marines or Eldar. How do you make them viable.

Deploy as far back as possible and shoot down thier raiders first. DE are disabled once they lose thier raiders. IMO orks are going to be the rock to thier scissors in this years tournaments. (Hordes in general)

Gun line eldar tend to chew up dark eldar fairly well. The abundance of strength 6 multi shot weapons (scatter lasers mostly) will shred both raiders and dark eldar foot units. Guardians can soak up the charge from most dark eldar units (getting killed in the process most of the time, but they are guardians so no one really cares) and allow counter charge units of scorpions or harlequins to move in and mop up.

Units to consider using.

War walkers. One unit with 6 scatter lasers will wipe out a squad a turn. What’s even better is that dark eldar usually don't have weapons that are very good at dealing with the walkers. Dark lances are over kill and other weapons don't have the strength or range to hurt them reliably.

Dark reapers. They tend to be a bit of overkill but multi shot heavy weapons that can still hurt raiders are not a bad idea. A tempest launcher + crack shot exarch can force lot of pin checks as well as kill off a lot of squad members in the normally tight packed dark eldar units.

Vypers. These things are fast enough to zoom around the dark eldar all day long. Give them scatter lasers and shuriken cannons and they will be able to tear up squads. The strength 3 splinter rifles of the standard warriors can't hurt them either so lance fire will be needed to take them down.

Dire Avengers. If you can get into range with a warrior squad, you can wipe the whole squad out. Just try your best to stay out of hand to hand.

Striking Scorpions. 3+ armor and lost of attacks means lots of dead dark eldar. Just try to be the one charging rather than being charged. This usually means being used as a counter charge unit after the dark eldar have hit your lines.

Harlequins. The high initiative on these guys means they will usually go first. That combined with the high number of attacks should see lots of dark eldar dead. Point of note, you may want to leave the kisses at home and just bring more quins (not entirely sure...haven't run math on it or anything).

Guardians. Yah, go ahead and laugh. But seriously, these guys are cheap and pack scatter lasers. Use them to threaten raiders and start shooting up warrior squads. If you can get into range for a round of catapult fire, so much the better. You can also use guardians as a buffer between the enemy and the rest of your army since it's no big loss if they get charged and killed. Just make sure they stick to cover...don't want them dieing too fast.

With Marines, personally i think dealing with Dark Eldar shouldn't be that hard. Stay back, stay put, stay together, and most of all, get lots of HB squads. Once his raiders are down, eat him alive with an assault squad or two. Dark Eldar are disturbingly fragile, and once their Raiders are down it is just a matter of time before the poor footsloggers go the same way. HB's over Las in a dev squad. With DE Las is overkill, although a Pred Annihilator could be a reasonable idea just to be sure nothing gets past. My reasoning for taking HB over Las is that once his tanks are down the Lascannons become redundant and expensive, while the HB's can be used to knock off his Wyches and Warp Beast Packs.

Hilarious advice.

We should retitle this thread to 'fighting dark eldar run by noobs'.

Then what would you suggest? Unless i'm blind, deaf, mentally disabled and much more, this is the only approach i have seen work besides swamping.

Hilarious advice.

We should retitle this thread to 'fighting dark eldar run by noobs'.

Hilarious quote. One noob calling another person a noob on the boards. It's easier to just say you suck rather than giving constructive feed back btw. 600 posts a month doesn't make you a Dakka veteren it makes you a spammer. I have seen many come and go over the years.

I think that Stelek's criticism is that most of the advice given so far boils down to "stand back and shoot at them because shooting kills them real good" when the real problem is that an experienced DE player rarely gives you the opportunity to shoot them. The most dangerous DE build flys its raiders out of 1 or 2 Webway portals, runs across the board and gets into assault before you can respond.

The best way to handle that is to kill the portal carrying models before they open the portal, which means mulching through 15+ T3 models in 5+ or better cover in one round. Well placed infiltrators can be very useful in this role. Once the portals are opened all you can do is try to isolate the combats so the DE can't consolidate from one unit to the next, at least as long as he wins the combats during his own turns. It's a tough fight for MEQ, who don't have enough units to recover from their losses from the intial DE assaults, and it's tough for armies optimized for fighting MEQ that paid alot for high S and low AP weapons.

Something no one has added to the discussion that I think should be added is army composition. The average DE list I see spends between 200 and 400 points on dark lance sniper units. If your amy doesn't have any really big expensive targets that's several hundred points pulled out from under them that only get to zap a couple of infantry guys.

If your playing a game to be decided by victory points an army composed of a greater number of less expensive threats is gonna give DE trouble. Foot slogging orc armies absolutely destroy my DE because there are just far to many threats for me to deal with in a 6 turn game. Sure my assault units do well in HTH but I'm not going to have enough of them to deal with horde armies.

While the DE have mobility, once their assault units get out of their raiders it's going to be hard for them to get mobile again. Especially considering that your average three year old could throw a half empty juice box at a raider and make it crash.

Prepare for the fact that the DE are going to assault something and have your counter charge units ready to go, while at the same time making sure to disable the raiders they will usually have to expose in order to get into assault. Position your units correctly and the DE player will be come out of a slaughter of an assault and be mowed down by gunfire.

Also... flamers. Since DE armor is made up of polyester and tinfoil, flamers bake them particularly well.

Dr Phibes wrote:Also... flamers. Since DE armor is made up of polyester and tinfoil, flamers bake them particularly well.

True enough. The thing to keep in mind is that you need mobile flamers since your targets are most likely to be entangled squads that got out of downed raiders. Marines can take small tac squads in rhinos or land speeders with heavy flamers. The only option eldar have for mobile flamers is with warlocks on jetbikes. Just be careful that your flame units don't get swamped by other dark eldar units though.