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I was thinking since the Eldar is supposed to be an army of specialist, each aspect should incredible in their job. I would suggest the following changes in the next codex:

Dire Avengers: Same

Banshees: WS 5 base, WS 6 for Exarch

Fire Dragons: Same

Striking Scorpions: WS 5 base, WS 6 Exarch

Shining Spears: CC weapon (for 2 attacks), WS 5 base, WS 6 Exarch

Swooping Hawks: Las Blaster is assault 3

Warp Spiders: Str 6 AP ~ Template Weapons.

Dark Reapers: BS 5, BS 6 for Exarch

I would also drop the points for Starcannons and Bright Lances by 5 points each because of how common cover is now. I have no idea how to point out the new aspect warriors, but such changes would help the Eldar to retain being soem of the most skilled warriors in the universe.

IMHO, the baseline for the wh40k-stats is the imperial guardsman. This is a professionally trained soldier, often in it for life. And a part of (probably) the most numerous armed force anywhere.

A well trained, well fed guardsman with access to regular gear and a priest to take care of his earthy worries looks like this: 3 3 3 3 1 3 1 7 (5+). His weapon of choice is a lasgun 24" s3 ap- rapid fire. In the same tradition: The common soilders of the Tau have a bit different training, BS2 and I2, but they compensate with better guns 30", S5 and armour (4+). Regular eldar have pretty much a regular statline, with increase to I4 and Ld8, benefits for their great age and unity with the universe I imagine. Your armour is standard but your guns are very good, compared to a lasgun.

Apart from these, who are still significantly better than the sort of untrained rabble you can find among the civilians: 2 2 3 3 1 2 1 5 (-), There are those who through endless training, thousands of generations of precise breeding, strange warpdriven powers or through technomagical means have improved their abilities beyond the humanly possible.

Some of these we know as the eldar aspect warriors. They have given the entire purpose of their life into perfecting the style of fighting with the scorpions grace. Honed their body and their mind into a singlle tool that can percfectly control inexplainably complicated artefacts of war. To reflect this enormous undertaking striking scorpions are alloed to up their WS and BS to 4. And not only thath, they get Ld9 as well as I5. And because they are now equipped to handle the gear, they are given the best mundane armour you can craft! (3+) and weapons that tear at their enemies (+1S). And because they still have time and mental capacity over, while in the middle of a fight, they get some extra headmounted guns... just because they can!

They are hence expected to outperform their brethren that are just ordinary soldiers. I do not think they need stat increases.

The only troops wich have a noticeable edge far above the imp guard/MEQ are tyranids who are designed and utterly alien, all who ar chaos/warp-related. So it keep things "realistic"

All in all, I think there has been an inflation in the stats. I checked some old books today where spacemarines had toughness 3, so there have been some inflation in what toughness is worth. The MEQ-army is played by so many today so most people look at - 44441418 (3+) 24"S4Ap5Rapid - and sets their baseline at that slot. Anything less than spacemarine stats, then you'd better get many cool tanks or monstrous creatures.

High numerical values on stats will sell. A new thing that is cooler than the last thing your opponent got will sell. And if we carefully decrease the points cost for each army, then people will have to buy more models to fill upp their armies. => GW wins

If you have a SM army, check how many points it was worth (in total) before the last codex. Compare to what your army is worth in this codex. I lost about 10% of my points total. Worst rate on jump pack marines. I do believe most codex-upgrades work this way, but I havn't tested.

The biggest issue imho is it's a scale that's effectively between 1 and 6, with 1 being an untrained child and 6 being a living god. Each number has to include a wide array of competence under its banner and it doesn't give a lot of leeway to adjust things up and down. But they chose a base d6 system, and that's one of the issues with it. I think a d10 system would help balance things a lot, but that's not necessarily a good thing. It might make for a better game rules-wise, but a lot of the fun of Warhammer is the hilarious stupidity that can arise at times. Still, I wouldn't mind rolling a bunch of d10's instead if it allowed stats to more easily conform with the logical consistency of the Warhammer universe. It'd at least be worth trying, though that's certainly not a stance a company can easily take.

Mellon wrote:A bunch of stuff.

In short, I agree with what you had to say.

AdeptSister wrote:I was thinking since the Eldar is supposed to be an army of specialist, each aspect should incredible in their job.

Dire Avengers: Same

Banshees: WS 5 base, WS 6 for Exarch

Fire Dragons: Same

Striking Scorpions: WS 5 base, WS 6 Exarch

Shining Spears: CC weapon (for 2 attacks), WS 5 base, WS 6 Exarch

Swooping Hawks: Las Blaster is assault 3

Warp Spiders: Str 6 AP ~ Template Weapons.

Dark Reapers: BS 5, BS 6 for Exarch

IMO, you're overeaching here, unless, those Scorpions & Banshees are WS5 BS3 base / WS6 BS4 Exarch, while Reapers become WS3 BS5 base / WS4 BS6 Exarch. I could see that kind of specialization extending to having 3 different Aspect statlines:

WS3 BS5 Shooting Aspects: Reapers, Hawks
WS4 BS4 Balanced Aspects: Avengers, Dragons, Spiders, Spears
WS5 BS3 Fighting Aspects: Banshees, Scorpions

Exarchs gain +1WS +1BS, +1Ld, of course.

JohnHwangDD wrote:
IMO, you're overeaching here, unless, those Scorpions & Banshees are WS5 BS3 base / WS6 BS4 Exarch, while Reapers become WS3 BS5 base / WS4 BS6 Exarch. I could see that kind of specialization extending to having 3 different Aspect statlines:

WS3 BS5 Shooting Aspects: Reapers, Hawks
WS4 BS4 Balanced Aspects: Avengers, Dragons, Spiders, Spears
WS5 BS3 Fighting Aspects: Banshees, Scorpions

Exarchs gain +1WS +1BS, +1Ld, of course.

Right. It seems that they Should be more specialized. A Banshee should be better trained in HtH (WS) than Reapers or Avengers just like she should be a worse shot than they are. This would show their extreme focus in their art.

I would leave them as is.

As a non eldar player having a BS 6 Exarch is outshooting most other armies HQ's. You have to look at the army as a whole as well just not each unit - Phoenix Lords are BS 7 which basically never misses (so where do they go BS 8?), Autarchs become what WS 7 BS 7? Pushing absurdity for a d6 system imo. Now perhaps if they made all eldar T 2 and lowered the T on other things I could potentailly be swayed.

Sorry if I seem a bit harsh...but Mellon and Neconilis are right.

No, Autarchs would remain the same. They have depth versus an Exarch. An CC Exarch should be as skilled as a Marine Captain in fighting. The Captain also has more wounds, greater leadership, and higher toughness. But it never made sense that an unarmed banshee would be a match for an unarmed dire avenger in close combat. Or a dark reaper has no better aim than a Striking Scorpion.

My view of Eldar is that specialist units should be really good at what they do. Currently. compared to the rest of the 40k Army elites, only Fire Dragons stand out as excelling at their job. My Point is:

Striking Scorpions should be able to beat an equal point amount of hordes.

Banshees should easily beat Good armor save troops.

Dark Reapers should be a long range nightmare against infantry.

Shining spears should be able to dive in a kill a hard target.

The close combat Aspects could really use an extra Attack more then a higher WS (since WS is a defenseive stat for the most part). That would put them in much better stead vs ork and such.

Jack

@Casper: An Autarch would be generalist WS6 BS6 whereas a shooty Exarch would be BS6 WS4 and a fighty Exarch would be WS6 BS4.

@AS: A CC Exarch should own a Marine Captain in CC, while a shooty Exarch should outshoot a Marine Captain. But the specialization trade-off means that Marine Captain would beat a shooty Exarch in HtH.

@Neconilis and Casper: Good to see that more people agrees with me. I was afraid I was turning into a grumpy old man :-)

I would really hate to see spiders go back to a template rather than assault 2. Right now, they are the monstrous creature killers in my army, and if they had templates it would really destroy that role for them. They're also better against rear armor on vehicles with two shots each rather than with one template a piece. The 12" range also synergizes much better with their "jump shoot jump" capability.

Leave them as is but allow them to take a warlock or let the exarch have the ability to "enhance" the squad as he/she leads them into assault.

@AdeptSister- you visited mine so I thought I'd return the favour.

I've always thought that a viable option for changing aspect warriors would be to not change the stat line for any of them, but rather their weapons. It's a stretch, but for the fluff and the unit role during play it just makes more sense to me. All I would do is switch the weapons of Banshee's and Scorpions. Banshee's get the regular CCW's and the Scorpions gain power weapons.
Speaking Fluff terms, it never made sense to me that the Infiltrators carried chainswords (whether they just purr or not) Meanwhile the screaming attention grabbing Banshee's carry silent power weapons? Eh... I dunno about that noise, or rather lack there of.
Now from a game mechanics stand point, I understand that the scorpions rely on their chainswords to receive their desperately needed strength bonus, but if they got it from something else? And Banshee's are now just S3 with mundane weapons. Woo! Well, give them an extra attack to keep their probability to kill the same. As they are now, they're practically the same. banshees don't hit as hard, but they go first, hit softer, and negate armor. Scorpions hit harder, they're slower but they enter the field further ahead, and they're victims still get armor saves. That balance kind of defeats the purpose of calling them specialized assault units since they do basically the same thing. fleet and infiltrate pretty much put them at the same distance by turn two, so I'd rather have my scorpions be better armed due to a lack of backup during the first turn if I go second.
This is what I'd like to see in a nutshell.
Banshee- Massive whirlwind of mundane attacks, speed is key (Furious charge works perfectly with this setup)
Scorpions-Slower moving, stealthy assassin type unit. Never see them coming, and your armor won't save you.
I tried to keep it balanced without uberizing either unit.
This is my first post on any forum, let alone a 40k one, so I'd like to hear what you all think of this.

Heya Lawlz, welcome aboard.

I think your swaps would be fine if we didn't have several editions codifying Eldar Aspect weaponry the way that it is today.

But given the weight of history, I think it's safe to say that Scorps will have massed S4 basic attacks and Banshees will have the S3 PW attacks.

More importantly, I don't want to have to convert 40+ metal CC Aspects...

Yeah, I was thinking about the way I phrased things in my post. The changes I proposed would take a stupid about of conversions for an established eldar player. And really the only difference would be an aesthetic one to satisfy my OCD-ish requirement for everything to fit my own logic. For an unrelated example in DoW: Why do SM bolters sound and visually fire like today's modern assault rifles? (Ratatatatata) Aren't they more like semi auto mini rockets? Haha.

Anywho, don't respond to the bolter comments please (At least not here anyways) And thanks for the welcome!

As others have said, I don't see the need for this. Eldar CC units already decimate space marine units pretty easily, and for roughly the same points. Why do they need to be buffed, they're already outfighting superhumans?


The problem with Eldar now is that glass hammers don't really work in 5e. Sure, your banshees can maul something, but then they're left in the open and die like anything T3/4+ dies, quickly. And, with combat squads, the thing they're destroying is generally not worth as much as they are, so it's a losing proposition.

This is why I started a "How would you change the eldar for 5th ed?" thread.

The Eldar may not need as much improving as opposed to tweeking and refining for 5th ed. I just hope that with all of the 2nd ed goodness showing up for the humans that it will result in a little "buffing up"for the Eldar codex. It'd be nice, after so many nerfings from the last codexex the 5th ed BRB and some of the recent faqs, to see a few older of the older options return in a balanced for 5th ed way.

Redbeard wrote:As others have said, I don't see the need for this. Eldar CC units already decimate space marine units pretty easily, and for roughly the same points. Why do they need to be buffed, they're already outfighting superhumans?

The problem with Eldar now is that glass hammers don't really work in 5e. Sure, your banshees can maul something, but then they're left in the open and die like anything T3/4+ dies, quickly. And, with combat squads, the thing they're destroying is generally not worth as much as they are, so it's a losing proposition.

Maybe thats what fast light CC units need as a special rule, the ability to sweep into further combats again...that is something that could make banshees and gaunts more palatable again.

Jack

Jackmojo wrote:
Maybe thats what fast light CC units need as a special rule, the ability to sweep into further combats again...that is something that could make banshees and gaunts more palatable again.

I find it really challenging to support my charging units, time and plan my assaults etc, to avoid using them as one-shot-wonders. It adds a very interesting dimension beyond the mathhammer.

The big problem with Banshees is that they can't disembark and assault.

Care to bet anything on whether the wave serps get the same deployment type rules as the new valks?

That would make things a little more interesting.

Sure, I'll put a buck on that. Eldar don't jump out of planes.

Good thing that Wave Serpents aren't planes.

The funny thing is I've been thinking about this a lot lately. With the new IG codex rumors (which are getting pretty solid it seems) I almost feel like I could make a more Eldar-y army from the IG list.

If I could change the Eldar List into my own dream of a 5th edition list this is what I'd do.

Dan's top 10 things to change the Eldar.

1.) ALL eldar units would get fleet. Now that terminators can fleet there's no reason scorpions should not be able to.

2.) Farseer powers should be able to be used like the IG orders. Any squad within 12" of the seer or any squad with a warlock. This would allow buffs to the units that need them (guardians).

3.)The list should have a couple more powers. Marines have what like 9 psychic powers now? Ours should be just as numerous, with a couple damaging ones thrown in too.

4.) Eldar skimmers should deepstrike. If the imperium could figure it out whay can't we? At the very least Vypers need it.

5.) Aspects need a little buff in 5th. As indicated earlier the "glass hammer" theory doesn't work anymore. It just makes them expensive targets. I'd suggest something that allows aspects to each "break" one rule in the game. The marine special abilities all revolve around making rulle exceptions. As an example, I'd let Banshees (as an exarch ability -call it a revision to acrobatic) make either a LD or I test to be able to consolidate from a victorious assault into a new combat. If you do similar things with the other aspects (give reapers range finders again to ignore the "moving fast" saves of skimmers and bikes?) I think it would go a long way to helping.

6.) Fix the starcannon. either cheaper and the same or 3 shots and the same price.

7.) Allow guardian squads to take 1 heavy per 10 models like many of the other armies have gone to. It would make a reason for big units. (something GW approves of).

8.)Actually make models that are still missing from the codex (bike mounted primarily).

9.) Decide what guardians are supposed to do. Currently they don't have enough firepower for a support unit, and can't get close enough to anything to shoot it. Bring the costs of guardians down a point or 2 or give them shuricats equal to the Dire Avengers. Getting outshot by 6 pts orks is embarrassing. Give at least the storm guardians grenades.

10.) Give the Eldar a couple more cover ignoring weapons (they seem to be a trend in 5th edition). My prime candidate would be having warp spiders go back to having a template (though I know at least one person in this thread doesn't like it).

Those are 10 I came up with fairly quick. I like the trend of the new codexes in adding cool stuff to armies, but I feel like the Eldar have lost their niche as the fast raiders. IG can make an all deepstiking army, so can marines, and a couple others. Why not Eldar?

And as an honorable mention since it isn't an adjustment to an existing unit, add a couple of new units. My first candidates would be the Venom (transport Vyper) and the two Forgeworld Falcon variants.

Just my $.02 and I am sure this would all need playtesting to find any unforseen imbalances (not that GW ever worries about those.

1. All units can 'Run'. Not the same as Fleet. The only unit that really would want Fleet are the Scorpions, who have other options to offset that loss of battlefield mobility.

2. That would be nice, although that would turn the beneficial abilities into powerhouses and the offensive abilities into paltry piles of crud in comparison. Again, it'd be nice.

3. An equivalent number of powers, although to be fair, an Eldar list can field a helluva lot more Psykers than C:SM could ever hope to.

4. Deep Strike? Maybe. I'd feel better if you could choose to Outflank with a grav tank or two, but that's just me.

5. I see most of the aspects as being pretty good in their stated area of expertise under the current army book, with the exception of Swooping Hawks.

6. I would miss that extra shot, although moving and shooting ain't too shabby... or it would if we weren't talking BS3.

7. This... I like.

8. Bug Citadel. Or get used to making conversions. =)

9. We'll probably see grenades on all Eldar units much like we see in the current C:SM, and likely keep the price what it is now. They are great supporting units to the Aspects, and really only do a whole lot on their own when there's a TON of them.

10. Likely we'll see that, probably on their weapon batteries if/when a new book comes out. Likely coinciding with new plastics for that and more. Although I did, briefly, have fun with Storm Guardians with dual Flamers back before I took a hiatus from 40k a while back.

cmagee79 wrote:1. All units can 'Run'. Not the same as Fleet.

Really? I thought everything in 5th edition had fleet.

And a 4+ invulnerable save, all the time.

Orkeosaurus wrote:

cmagee79 wrote:1. All units can 'Run'. Not the same as Fleet.

Really? I thought everything in 5th edition had fleet.

And a 4+ invulnerable save, all the time.

And enjoy Assault 3, AP 1, Str 8 weapons with unlimited range.

cmagee79 wrote:
4. Deep Strike? Maybe. I'd feel better if you could choose to Outflank with a grav tank or two, but that's just me.

Striking scorpions, exarch with Shadowstrike power and mount in wave serpent. Voila, outflanking grav tank. An outflanking fire prism might be more useful, but still :-)

I like your suggestions btw. Reasonable and interesting.

Redbeard wrote:As others have said, I don't see the need for this. Eldar CC units already decimate space marine units pretty easily, and for roughly the same points. Why do they need to be buffed, they're already outfighting superhumans?


The problem with Eldar now is that glass hammers don't really work in 5e. Sure, your banshees can maul something, but then they're left in the open and die like anything T3/4+ dies, quickly. And, with combat squads, the thing they're destroying is generally not worth as much as they are, so it's a losing proposition.

I did not read the entire thread, to be honest. But just my 2c if you increase their WS and BS you are increasing the cost, which is probably not what you want. The second consideration is that Space Marines are WS4 BS4 and Guardians are WS3 BS3. They are good but they are not that good. The WS5 Exarch is already a pretty cool bonus. Nobz and MANz are only WS4, for example.

So my answer: No. Although Shining Spears and Warp Spiders could maybe use a boost but they are still viable units points costed effectively.