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How are people finding the usefulness of prisms in a mech list. I'm trying to learn V5 and modify my old eldar list, and am wondering how people are viewing them. I've not had much success to date, and was wondering if thats an abberation.

Well, I had bad luck with a pair of Prisms; permanent scattering was annoying. So I replaced them by 2 FD units in Falcons.

I had good luck with them in two rounds of hard boys, but I was running them fully loaded and only lost one or two. At that point level you can take prisms and fire dragons in serpents. In 1850 I'm thinking of switching back to falcons with dragons.

All in all, they simply don't accomplish much with their shooting. They're durable if fully loaded, and dirt cheap if kept naked. If you're going to run any, I'd run the full three to maximize twinned shots.

...I Love my two prisms ... but i only give them a spirt stone and most of the time sit them in reserves (way to easy to get rid of them turn one) they're a good all rounder ...

... with out going to much into all the pros and cons they work well against armys with large clusters of targets ... they don't work great against armys wth lots of 3+ Sv's (unless you TL in which case you're not going to kill enough units)... against tanks they still work but most people are put off by the scatter

... if you're going to get a prism take a good look at your army and make sure that you've got units to complement it ... i like to use a screen of jetbikes to gain a coversave ... just move them infront in the assualt phase (4+ is great) and move them out the way next turn ^_^ (you don't want to give them a cover save)

I like Prisms, but Falcons tend to outperform them in my experience.

Eric

Fire Prisms are useful to thin out hordes. But they don't cut it against MEQ armies. That's my experience after several test games.

I have found in my experience that twins are great against hordes and tau. against marines not so good

I've had good experiences with running two Prisms, one with hols and the other without. Keep the holo Prism closer than the other one, or use the second for contributing.

I really don't think a single Falconful of Dragons will outdo 2 Prisms against infantry other than MEQ, but Dragons would be much better if you're light on anti-tank. They're apples and oranges.

Plus it's nice to have them soak fire from the transports on turns one and two. Anything that's not shooting Serpents full of Banshees I am very happy about.

Haven't had much time to play because of school but from the few games I played Eldar in 5th, Fire Prisms sort of suck with the new scatter rules. They miss most tanks more often then not because of scatter off the hull especially with smaller tanks like Rhinos. They can be good against horde orks and linked ap3 shots can be good. Holofields still make them harder to kill but more likely to lose their gun. I was running 3 in an Ardboys test list but I decided to run nids instead.

I think they might have a place for anti horde but don't rely on them for anti tank.

I like Prims well enough. They are good against hoard and good against Marines as long as you run more than one. Personally I will always put holofields on them if only so at the end they are still alive to contest an objective. I ran 3 for ardboyz and only had bad luck with them on my final game in baltimore. I have run 2 in the past with smaller tourney lists. At that point I can see it being a personal choice. Though I really like droping that template on all those oblits every chaos army has these days.

Falcons- I have just never understood the logic of running a tank up to drop its cargo and getting closer to the enemy. Yeah the holofields make it tough to drop but IMO a waveserpent is still better.

I have run 2 in the past with smaller tourney lists. At that point I can see it being a personal choice. Though I really like droping that template on all those oblits every chaos army has these days.

Small templates tend to scatter these days. My experience tells me that Obliterators should not worry too much about those templates.