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Looking at competitive Eldar lists, I was a little surprised to see that Fortune-reliant units like jetlocks and jetbikes with Farseer escort are still in vogue.

This is confusing to me, not because Fortune itself is bad, but because there are so many ways for it to fail.

First of all, if you're going 2nd and there are not enough hiding places, your fortune reliant units (especially jetlocks) will get pasted. And in 5th ed, there are very frequently not enough hiding places due to TLoS.

You can't deal with losing 1st turn by going Reserves, either. If you have a farseer, you're limited to only one autarch, which is probably not enough to play the reserves alpha strike game. And even if you do come in when you want to, you enter the board without Fortune, giving you the exact same problem you had if you started on the board and didn't go first. All you can do is turboboost and hope that the enemy can't focus enough fire to break through a 3+ cover save (which is unlikely, especially if we're talking about jetlocks).

And then you have enemy psyker-denial. Enemy Runes of Warding or Shadow in the Warp are not a big deal, because they can be counteracted with Runes of Witnessing and/or Embolden. But what about psychic hoods? Come within 24" of a Marine librarian, and your fortune-reliant unit is boned. And let's not even think about what happens when your enemy brings an old skool WH or DH inquisitor with the unlimited range psychic hood.

So, how is it that fortune-reliant units are not living in fail country on the competitive scene? If you lose first turn, do you hide your bikes behind your grav tanks? If there's a psychic hood, how do you get past it?

Current Psychic Hoods actually only function against psychic powers that target Space Marine units within 24" of a Librarian. So, Fortune can't be countered by Psychic Hoods.

There are just as many non-psyker armies as there are psyker armies.

Tau, Dark Eldar, Orks - and IIRC tyranids don't have anti-psyker powers?


Now, top that off with the fact that nullzone and psychic hoods aren't requirements in competitive lists.


There's a lot more to 40k than space marine librarians.

Dashofpepper wrote:Tau, Dark Eldar, Orks - and IIRC tyranids don't have anti-psyker powers?

Tyranids have Shadow in the Warp. Psychic Tests within 12" of a model with SitW are taken on 3d6.

Dark Eldar have one item that is somewhat anti-psycher...

MinMax wrote:Current Psychic Hoods actually only function against psychic powers that target Space Marine units within 24" of a Librarian. So, Fortune can't be countered by Psychic Hoods.

OMG srsly? Well then false alarm on that one


Another thing I forgot to mention is that even when you're able to hide behind tanks or LoS blocking terrain with jetlocks or bikes, you still have the potential problem of barrage weapons. You can get pie-plated, which is even worse for bikes because they have no invuln save and barrage is likely to ignore any cover. I guess AP3 barrages aren't all that common (you have the basilisk, which is rarely taken these days thanks to the plethora of other IG heavy choices), or barrages at all for that matter thanks to their 2d6 minus nothing scatter. But even so, when you face that one army that brings them, a list build around Fortuned bikes is boned.

They have a few issues but they're still a very solid assault unit. Eldar have some trouble in that regard as your choices basically boil down to scorpions, banshees, harlies, and warlock seer councils (mechanized or jetseers). Of these the jetseers are the only ones that have good mobility without a vehicle prone to getting killed and have the farthest move and charge range. And flamers. And excellent saves on all but the first round where they still have 3+ armor and 4+ invuln. It's a valid deathstar unit. Put them behind something or spread them out and most armies won't be able to marshal an effective way to kill them on round 1.

It's just that Eldar have no alternatief to the all-round abilities of the council. Yes, in a couple of games you will lose that super expensive unit in turn one and you will probably lose the game. But what alternative is there for the Eldar player?

MinMax wrote:Current Psychic Hoods actually only function against psychic powers that target Space Marine units within 24" of a Librarian. So, Fortune can't be countered by Psychic Hoods.

And where do you find this info? In my SM codex, it says that the hood can be used each time an enemy model uses a psychic power within range. It also tells me that the range is 24", and that I measure to the model passing a psychic test.

I does not say that it has to be a specific type of power, the wording revolves around the psychic test itself, which is why I can't stop a warlock power, but I can certainly try to stop fortune as long as I'm within 24".

MinMax wrote:Current Psychic Hoods actually only function against psychic powers that target Space Marine units within 24" of a Librarian. So, Fortune can't be countered by Psychic Hoods.

Uh, no they dont. They work just fine against fortune.

More on the topic, Jetlock councils are the only good HtH unit the eldar have avalible and when deployed far away from the opponent they should not be taking that much flak in the first turn.

And besides, its only SM that has a good (40%) counter to fortune and that only works when within 24" of the psyker.

fortune is great, but riskee. I don't suggest it unless you're sure your gonna go first.

Captain Solon wrote:fortune is great, but riskee. I don't suggest it unless you're sure your gonna go first.

how would you know that you go first??

Captain Solon wrote:fortune is great, but riskee. I don't suggest it unless you're sure your gonna go first.

So basically don't use fortune, as you can never know for sure that you go first?
Unless you're using house rules.

I'm not sure what kind of tables you are playing on, but on the ones I do there is always some form of cover that vehicles can hide behind to grant a cover save to block LOS entirely. Furthermore you could take 2 farseers and 2 councils or eldrad or eldrad + a farseer and two councils. Your opponent can't counter that many castings of fortune or your other powers more than once from more than 24" away unless they are using an allied inquis lord with hood. That option will also likely be gone when the new DH/WH books come out. Also you don't need the autarch to play the reserve game, sure he makes it better but its not required.

You are also forgetting the single greatest advantage of having the seer council, which is that you WANT enemies to target it. If you have to spend 1 or 2 turns shooting at my 400 point unit with your entire army cause you are so scared of it great!, that frees up the rest of my army to take out your key units while your attention is focused elsewhere.

Yeah, if you've never played--or played against--a fully-tooled fortune council, you'll be surprised how much firepower they can soak up and just shrug off. With fortune on, (if my math is right) a bike council has about an 82% armor save and a 75% invulnerable. That's actually comparable to the 84%/66% saves of storm-shield termies--and you know how hard they are to kill.

The problem of not having fortune on in turn one when you go second (or when starting in reserve) has been with Eldar since the beginning. But since you can't use fortune when you turbo-boost anyway, it's not so bad to have to settle for nearly the equivalent of a TH/SS terminator save for a turn until you can fire fortune off.