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So this is a topic that is close to my heart and have rarely if ever seen anyone discuss. The humble dark eldar haemoculus on a jetbike. We hear lots about lelith and her wych retinue of doom and archon + drazzar but not so much about the 3rd and my personal favorite of the DE HQ choices. In my personal opinion I think that they are the bets bang for your buck in the HQ slot. Here is why. I hope people find this helpful and I would gladly take other opinions and comments.


1. Force multiplier
a player may take 3 haemoculi for 1 HQ choice and in large games its easy to be able to afford a grand total of 6. Granted you are taking an extra 6 kill points but lets face it you are playing dark eldar and kill points are the LEAST of your problems. More often than not you will have double the kill points of most armies you are against. That being said 2 of the 3 games are objective based. Furthermore in KP games dark eldar generally have one of two outcomes. Either table the opponent or lose.

2. Killing power/ Toughness/flexibility
Haemoculi get T5 on jetbikes making them one of the toughest models in the army requiring str 8 weapons for ID. Furthermore with the mobility of a jetbike they can be instantly redeployed anywhere on the battlefield to support your army. As for equipment always outfit them with scissorhands and destructers. Destructers are variable AP flamers, I can't get over how amazing this is. you have a 50% chance to ignore MEQ armor and a 33% chance to bust termies. Couple this 2+ wound and with ignoring cover and there isn't a single non AV model or unit that Haemoculi cannot wreck. they can do anything and hurt anyone. I have never not seen them make up their points. Scissorhands, the reason I include these are because just in case you get into combat you can still do some damage. 3 or 4 attacks that wounds on a 2+ that reroll against T4 or lower is nothing to ignore. And you can have 6 of them!


3. Threat/Ignorance
This point depends mostly on the player you are facing. Because there are two types of players facing dark eldar. Those who actually know there rules or less than 10% of players IMO or the vast majority who have no idea what your army does. Both of these mentalities can easily work in your favor. As for the minority who realize what you can do they understand just how dangerous your heamoculi can be and will direct significant amounts of fire in their direction. In my experience the type of fire that you are going to be taking are STR 5, 6 and 7 fire. In other words weapons that have a good chance of wounding as well as volume of fire which is key. Although deadly I'm much rather have my inexpensive haemoculi targeted than my raiders. Statistically its much easier to survive a single lascannon than a a hydra firing at you. They are much frailer and can be taken down much easier. If your opponent chooses instead to ignore them and target your raiders, you have ample opportunity to clear out objectives that are being held by enemy infantry. Thus granting you the advantage.

4. Point costs/basket of goodies
Jetbike haemoculi are incredibly cheap for their killing potential. you can easily get 6 for the same price as an archon + retinue. Furthermore since they are all independent targets you aren't putting all your eggs in one basket allowing for a crippling blow a lucky batttle cannon. You force your opponent to split their fire. Dark eldar are all about forcing your opponent to make the hard choice with whom to target their fire. By giving them a further 6 targets that are each as deadly as the next, it forces your opponent to think even harder.

I hope everyone found this informative and now realize the power of haemoculi on jetbikes.

A couple things to remember:

A jetbike haemoculi is still part of a unit (or else they are easy to kill) and that means that unless you are running at least 50% of the unit as jetbike haemoculi you'll be using T4 unless you are in CC. Also, the haemoculi is still T4(5) meaning that he can be instakilled by a melta gun, krak missile, or demolisher round.

6 killpoints is still 6 killpoints. And if they bikes are in one squad you can bet I'm focusing firepower at them.

If my opponent is using his/her anti tank weaponry on my Haemonculi rather than on my Raiders full of Wyches or my Ravagers, I'll take that trade all day long.

Haha...I agree with the OP about KP missions hurting DE. My regular airforce list sports a lovely 16 KP at 1850. DE units are so relatively cheap that making a list that has a low number of KP results in unwieldy or points inefficient units (Maxed out squads of warriors, for example, or units with lots of unnecessary wargear).

While they are not in my current list, I have used bike Haemies to great success. They make a great complementary unit and are good at softening up a potential charge target, especially hordes (Haemies carry the only template weapons in the army) or fearless units with good resiliency (plague marines, for example).

I love Hamonculi but I do tend to prefer them on Raiders with Warriors (though I still have to try pairing them with Wyches soon as there seems to be some nice possibilities there)

asugradinwa has a good point about using that toughness 5 versus shooting - mixed toughness units do not favor the minority.

It might be worth running them all singly simply because it might force a lot of split fire - is that how you run them? (obviously you're not running 6 RJB squads). Running them singly could definitely bewilder your opponent (you have how many HQs? And they're all on bikes with variable AP flamers? Must kill! Redirect all lascannons from Raiders!)

It just seems that run singly they'd be pretty easy to kill via rapid fire for any squad they zip up to flame.

When I have used them, I ran them singly.

I would either hug a Raider with some Wyches in it to assault the same squad in tandem (hiding behind the Raider since the sizes are complementary for that), or I'd use them as a solo torpedo guy by turbo-boosting behind some terrain to flame/assault something like a dev squad on turn 2.