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I am a novice player with 9 games played at most. I threw together this 1500 point list from a 1K core and some misdirected pieces I'd purchased. I've played this army Fri night against a MEQ army fielding LR/5x termie with Pedro, 2 vindicators, 2 rhinos/5x squads and a 6 man something other. (sorry all meqs look alike and can carry every absurb weapon/round so why they even have different models is beyond me, I digress)

Anyhow I got a draw on a kill point game

So this slap together job seemed to do well but I was hoping for comments and suggestions.

Btw the 3x Spear with exarch popped the LR first round.

TOTAL 1498
HQ
Farseer Runes of Warding
Fortune
Mind war

Avatar of Khaine

Troops

Guardians(x10) EML

Guardians(x10) EML

Dire Avengers(x10) Exarch bladestorm

Dire Avengers(x10) Exarch bladestorm

Heavy Support

Wraithlord EML/Wraithsword

Wraithlord EML/BL

Wraithlord EML/BL

Fast Attack

Warp Spiders (x5) Exarch Surprise Assault

Shining Spear(x3) Exarch
withdraw
shuriken cannon
Starlance

This is kind of an unconventional list, but not that bad. The avatar ensures that your lines hold and makes hand to hand a scary prospect. The dreadnaughts provide a good amount of fire power and also make charging you a scary prospect. The dire avengers chew up anything that gets close and I suppose that the farseer is there to fortune which ever squad is in need of it most or to mind war power fists when the start getting close.

A few glaring issues are present though. While you look scary in hand to hand, if a couple of power fists make it into your lines backed with numbers, you are going to have a problem. While all your hand to hand power will squash a few things into paste every round, you don't have the sheer number of attacks necessary to make your lines hold against a dedicated assault army.

Related to this, the shining spears are very out of place in your force. They are a hand to hand unit with small numbers and a lot of mobility where as the rest of your army is dedicated to slow foot slogging advance. This not only seems out of place but is probably eating up points that could be better spent elsewhere. In place of the shining spears, I would recommend taking some harlequins. They are impossible to shoot at from long range and at the same time, they could be running in front of your lead units and providing them with a cover save. Once the enemy starts getting close, you could just have the quins move back behind your lines and wait for the enemy to charge you (or you can charge them if it looks like that's the best way to do things). At that point, you can pile the quins into the combat to finish off whatever unit was foolish enough to get that close to you.

Finally, you have a farseer with 2 psy powers but you didn't give him spirit stones. This means that he can only ever use one power per turn and the other will just be going to waste. You should either buy him spirit stones so he can use both powers every turn or drop one of the powers. Another consideration for your farseer: while picking off incoming powerfists is going to be important for this army, you may want to consider ditching mind war in favor of doom. Since you will be doing a lot of fighting at close quarters and with large numbers of shots/attacks, wounding 50% (or so) more often is a huge bonus...think about it.

Thanks for the feedback. I feel the same way about the Spears myself. Why are Harlies impossible to hit at range? Won't they be the target of pie plate spam when ever possible? Please explain.

Harlequins more or less require that you get them a shadow seer. The shadow seer comes with the power "veil of tears". What this does is it makes it so that any unit that wants to target the quins must roll 2d6x2 for spotting range. If the quins are farther away than the spotting range, the unit that was shooting at them can't shoot. And when I say can't shoot, I not only mean that they can't shoot at the quins, but they can't shoot at all that turn. This is a risk most people are not willing to take unless they are really close or have absolutely nothing else to shoot at. Even then, the max distance that could be rolled is 24" (and there's only a 3% chance of that happening). So all in all, it makes quins immune to long range shooting.

Pie plates and what not are no exception to this. In order to fire a template, you must place the template with the hole over the base of a model. That model is the target of the template weapon. If that model is a harlequin in a squad with a shadow seer, the firing squad has to roll for sight distance just like firing a direct fire weapon. Now what someone could do with a template weapon is shoot a squad that's near the quins and hope that the blast scatters into them. There is nothing that stops this from happening, so just keep the quins 3"-4" away from your other units and you should be fine.