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alex0911 wrote:


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GAdvance wrote:
Well then you need to find the problems with your army, i won't say L2P because ravenwing is clearly incredibly strong but if you have NO units at all in your army that can catch a fast unit then it is clearly a list problem

Well im not stupid, i know i could fit some units that could do a bit better but the results always remain the same, plus you dont make a list purely to counter some1, that isnt friendly at all my friend. Moreover, if you play at tournements and you go ahead with a list made for ravenwing and you don't face one, what is gonna happen? You will get reck...

If you are determined to in no way change your list to have say a nemesis dreadknight or two that can both catch and kill bikers then frankly edited by RiTides

You cannot complain that you can't win without at least balancing your list a bit, if all you have are slow nits you'd lose in a tournament setting as well

Grab a dreadknight with a heavy incinerator and keep him behind BLoS cover until you can make a decent charge, then jump out burn some dudes and charge, that's not list tailoring it's trying something new out when you're losing constantly

The dark eldar have a lot going for them against raven wing. Your basic guns hurt them as easily as they do sisters of battle, you have low armor saves so any grav they have is almost useless, your reavers rely on hammer of wrath to get the majority of their damage in melee done, and your scourges will make short work of their support vehicles.

In general, msu the crap out of them. Bikes are on the expensive side, especially when toting around a bunch of plasma and grav. Hold objectives with redundant support, make them waste multiple turns to clear you off of objectives and win the game on points.

Sicaran battle tanks...they don't allow jinks. Thunderfire Cannon is also a great way to deal with them. And if you really wanna troll..... heldrakes!! The counters are out there, your just gonna have to ....pay for them....

Yeah, the Ravenwing has some nice tricks, but they are easy to counter. However if you don't tailor your list towards beating them they can be really nasty.
This thread has some great suggestions though.

Once again the rerollable 2+ ruins the game. Sucks that it's justs something that is probably not going away anytime soon.

So they have a rerollable cover save if they choose to jink - use weapons that don't care about cover saves. They'll fail 3+ armor saves the same as anyone else, and there aren't enough models in a Ravenwing force to really eat that many casualties lightly.

Yeah, with GK ally in some fodder, then counter charge and kill. There's also plenty of ignores cover arty options and the like. Go that route.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh yeah, ditto on the Sicaran. So worth it.

GAdvance wrote:

alex0911 wrote:


Automatically Appended Next Post:

GAdvance wrote:
Well then you need to find the problems with your army, i won't say L2P because ravenwing is clearly incredibly strong but if you have NO units at all in your army that can catch a fast unit then it is clearly a list problem

Well im not stupid, i know i could fit some units that could do a bit better but the results always remain the same, plus you dont make a list purely to counter some1, that isnt friendly at all my friend. Moreover, if you play at tournements and you go ahead with a list made for ravenwing and you don't face one, what is gonna happen? You will get reck...

If you are determined to in no way change your list to have say a nemesis dreadknight or two that can both catch and kill bikers then frankly edited by RiTides

You cannot complain that you can't win without at least balancing your list a bit, if all you have are slow nits you'd lose in a tournament setting as well

Grab a dreadknight with a heavy incinerator and keep him behind BLoS cover until you can make a decent charge, then jump out burn some dudes and charge, that's not list tailoring it's trying something new out when you're losing constantly

My ennemi isnt stupid... He wont jump directly in my DK in cc, he will count his mouvement and with twin-linked plasma F7 ap2 or grav guns, its not even a challenge to take them down. L2P

Edited by RiTides: Rule #1 of Dakka is Be Polite

 ALEXisAWESOME wrote:
How should my Dark Eldar handle them? We don't have much ignore cover at all and none of our combat units are powerful enough to deal with the Bikers due to T5 and our S 3 and their hit'n'run.

The only thing that really jumps out at me is the Medusae, with their S 4 Ap 3 flamers, but they'd only get a single turn after they Webway portal in before they get mobbed.

Anything you can suggest apart from Eldar allies?

Our dark eldar without craftworlder allies struggle a bit against the new books in general, but it occurs to me that we have a few advantages that might help us out. Assuming you don't want to bring craftworlder allies with dark reapers (which hard counter Ravenwing if I'm not mistaken), you might try out our MCs. Some combination of Talos and Cronos units will be reasonably durable in cover and should also win in close combat pretty well. Lhameans in a transport are pretty fast and will wound on a 2+ in melee at which point those bikers are down to regular armor saves. Agonizers, while generally too expensive, also work pretty well as you're ignoring that high toughness and most armor saves. If you're weird like me and like to bring incubi or drazhar, both will have a relatively easy time wounding bikers (compared to many of our non-poison or MC units), and they'll ignore armor. Grotesques will counter grav gun bikes nicely if you can deliver said grotesques into combat.

While I don't really recommend this route, we also have enough poison and disintegrator shots to potentially kill a few bikes with weight of dice.

 ALEXisAWESOME wrote:
How should my Dark Eldar handle them? We don't have much ignore cover at all and none of our combat units are powerful enough to deal with the Bikers due to T5 and our S 3 and their hit'n'run.

The only thing that really jumps out at me is the Medusae, with their S 4 Ap 3 flamers, but they'd only get a single turn after they Webway portal in before they get mobbed.

Anything you can suggest apart from Eldar allies?

Corpsetheif Claw? Its hard to argue with that many MCs

 Jayden63 wrote:
Once again the rerollable 2+ ruins the game. Sucks that it's justs something that is probably not going away anytime soon.

I really like the ITC's rule of 2+ rerollables being 2+/4+ so it makes it a lot less ridiculous to play against.

The speeders are AV 10 open-topped right? So duel heavy flamer dreadnought drop podded in can kill it.

There goes the 2+ rerollable and you actually made your points back for once with a dreadnought.

Win win

Take a calidus assassin an make him snap fire at you then light him up with ap2 poison flamer

 DoomShakaLaka wrote:
The speeders are AV 10 open-topped right? So duel heavy flamer dreadnought drop podded in can kill it.

There goes the 2+ rerollable and you actually made your points back for once with a dreadnought.

Win win

Except someone said the reroll on the jink is an army trait (probably a formation bonus) so killing the speeder is a bit of a depends on what else is being played solution.

 Jayden63 wrote:

 DoomShakaLaka wrote:
The speeders are AV 10 open-topped right? So duel heavy flamer dreadnought drop podded in can kill it.

There goes the 2+ rerollable and you actually made your points back for once with a dreadnought.

Win win

Except someone said the reroll on the jink is an army trait (probably a formation bonus) so killing the speeder is a bit of a depends on what else is being played solution.

Yes they can reroll it, but a 4+ rerollable is WAY worse than a 2+ ( darkshroud grants shrouded right?)

They might actually have to make a choice between just taking the armor save or jinking.

OP if you actually are interested in advice on how to deal with ravenwing and not just here to vent then here is my advice.

For GK there are a few options. The biggest answer however is strategy. The strategy against ravenwing is to shoot the units within range of the stuff you need to keep alive. Put enough shots into it to cause the opponent to jink. If the opponent jinks they will need 6's to hit which means they will kill very little. Additionally against GK melee will be a very poor answer as you are better per point in melee than black knights. The most important units to protect are the following.
*Libbies. The biggest answer to high cover saves in the GK army is to take as many libbies as possible. Each libby should then take telepathy for the primaris. You should easily be able to get off a psychic shriek with each libby. This will means an average of 3 deaths per libby with no cover or armour saves allowed. This will also help keep you alive as shrouding and invisibility are both excellent buffs against RW and the other powers will mess up their ability to retaliate.
*Dreadknight. Lots of people have said this but they have been somewhat shut down with reasons which are valid in theory but preventable with strategy. Grav/plasma talons will kill them is easy countered if you deploy smart and shoot the units when they are in range to shoot the dreadknight. Additionally when combined with some libbies using invisibility and shrouding the dreadknight will become very hard to kill (keep a toe in cover and it has a 3+ cover save). The dreadknight is just as fast as the RW and if they want to shoot it they have to get within easy charge range to do so (ie 18" range on the guns) thus it is actually more likely the dreadknight gets to charge something every turn assuming you keep it alive, which with the above tactics is entirely doable. After you charge you just need to intelligently smash to get out of combat on the opponent's assault phase rather than yours. This means smashing turn 1 against units of 3 or less (or 4 or less is you charge regular bikers).

Ad Mech is also largely a strategy game. It will largely depend on what type of army you field but the basic strategy is to use the shroudpsalm until you can get your kastellans on the forward objectives and your destroyers on the rear objectives. Keep shooting the highest damage output units so they will have to keep jinking (with phosphor blasters and grav they will definitely need to jink). Then just wait on the objectives until the enemy has to get in charge range of the kastellans to claim objectives. It should be essentially a stalemate until then due to the opponent continuously having to jink and the turn 1/2 turbo boost being negated by the high cover saves. Honestly if you play skitarii + admech then you don't have to do all this as you have a bunch of -1 cover save gear and fast melee options to help out.

 DoomShakaLaka wrote:
The speeders are AV 10 open-topped right? So duel heavy flamer dreadnought drop podded in can kill it.

There goes the 2+ rerollable and you actually made your points back for once with a dreadnought.

Win win

As I have to say nearly every week, speeder are not open topped!

That off my chest, ravenwing got a big boost but as soon as we are jinking our damage output drops massively.

Example from todays game;
First turn- RW support squad take out a wraith lord with one round of shooting involving 4 assault cannons.
Second turn- squad have jinked and manage to do no damage to a squad of wraith guard. that's 16 AC shots and 9 HB shots.

yes we can survive a lot longer but so can our enemies plus we may be fast but no OS troops.

To get the dark shroud bonus on other squads we have to stick together so a few large blasts can cause havoc (remember only the squad initially targeted can opt to jink).

Failing that use weight of fire.

 ionusx wrote:
i am happy that ravenwing are good to be honest the dark angels have NEVER had a good book up till this point, since 2nd edition our army has at best been middle of the road at times and dreadful to poor every other moment. this would be the equivalent to orks getting a highly competitive book right about now its been a long time coming and you should be happy its here.

The 3.5 'revised' book was brutally good. Maybe the second best 3rd Edition book, after Chaos 3.5. It's just that the original 3rd edition book was so unbelievably bad that people gave the revised edition a pass out of laziness, pity, or stupidity.

For all the people saying "just use ignores cover weapons", this isn't really a viable option all the time. To properly use such weapons its often necessary to put yourself right where the Ravenwing army will want you most, and even then often such weapons just are not capable of generating the number of wounds on T5 bikers to cause an appreciable number of casualties through a 3+ save.

There is very much a problem with 2+ rerollable saves. Likewise, while JInk may harm their shooting, most of the Ravenwing units weapons will be twin linked, and in many cases they'll be wanting to get stuck into assaults anyway so won't care too much.

There are some armies that won't care about the 2+ jink save. Tau can laugh at it. Other armies however will effectively have to tailor a list, and that's not something that's always possible or accepted, and doesn't work equally well for all armies either. Rerollable 2+ saves are a failure of game design, and that really should be acknowledged.

Welcome to Rock Papers Scissorshammer. You're trying to beat them at their own game. Think outside the box - try charging them.

I play a Chaos Space Marines Spawn rush list and fething roflstomped a Ravenwing player last week. Jink doesn't mean much when you're charging them with T6 dudes who don't have guns and laugh at Bolters and even Plasma Guns, because they're getting cover saves. Axe of Blind Fury lord is swinging a bucket of S6 AP2 attacks on the charge. Goodbye, squad.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
Welcome to Rock Papers Scissorshammer. You're trying to beat them at their own game. Think outside the box - try charging them.

I play a Chaos Space Marines Spawn rush list and fething roflstomped a Ravenwing player last week. Jink doesn't mean much when you're charging them with T6 dudes who don't have guns and laugh at Bolters and even Plasma Guns, because they're getting cover saves. Axe of Blind Fury lord is swinging a bucket of S6 AP2 attacks on the charge. Goodbye, squad.

Exactly! I have played loads of games with my ravenwing since the codex dropped and though they are much better they are far from unstoppable.

Eldar beat me with rate of fire, orks swarmed me with numbers and necrons just kept getting back up!

Sounds like your friend has a top tier configurated army and you don't, and that's the main issue.

Get Nemesis Dreadknights if you're playing GK, give them Heavy Incinerators + Psycannons + Sword + Shunt. You can also get Draigo with some Purifiers/Terminators to bash the bikers face in if they get close and personal and Gate around the board for objectives. The Purifiers psychic Nova power doesn't allow Jink saves. If he is going first then put your NDK's into normal reserves and Shunt when you come to the able. You can get basically anywhere you want without the risk of a mishap.

Don't spread your fire, focus on killing one unit completely at a time, it will shut down his power. Killing a few bikes from here and there won't get you far.

If you're playing CSM get 2-3 Heldrakes. They can basically autodelete the bikers.

You can also get a Nurgle Biker Lord with Burning Brand + Powerfist and slap him into a squad of 5-6 Nurgle Spawn. The Spawn don't care about Grav much. Tank with the Lord in front as their armoursave is nonexistent. Get Sicaran Battle Tanks that ignore Jink -saves.

Get a Callidus Assassin ( easy to proxy ) and slap her next to his bikes at start, it will almost certainly mess up his battle plan especially if you are going first, because you can possibly delete a whole unit instantly.

There are numerous options to destroying the Ravenwing.

If you don't want to/can't get the models that can deal with your threat then you're kinda out of luck.

Aspect Host, 2 squads of Reapers and one Squad of Swooping Hawks.

Swooping Hawks are there to kill the Darkshroud and vehicules with Haywire grenades.

Once the Darkshroud is dead, the Reapers will murder the hell out of everything else thanks to their "ignore jink" capability.

A squad of Reapers will kill an average of 4 bikes/turn so 8 bikes per turn if you field two squads.

DA are trivial for Eldar. Just as all opponents are.

 CrownAxe wrote:
If they're jinking they're snap firing so do very little damage shooting wise

Also worth bearing in mind that if they are running the special Ravenwing strike force detachment then they can zoom and jink on their first turn and still fire at full BS (just for that one time though).

As a hard counter to this, (and if you can afford it) the main autocannon battery weapon for the Sicaran Battle Tank from Forgeworld has a special rule where jink saves cannot be taken against shots received from it. Another option is if you have any walkers with AV13 or above that you can assault them with. You'd need to use some cunning tactics to catch them that way, but S7 plasma shots won't be as effective against the high armoured walkers. An ironclad dreadnought or furioso dread would laugh at S7 and then would wipe out a large proportion of the charged bike unit in combat before the remainder of them zoom away on their bikes. You might need a few distraction units to entice them to the area of the table you need them to be at for your heavily armoured walker to assault them.

Thinking about it most super heavies will be pretty invincible against Black Knights and Ravenwing bikers. Another strategy is to instead of thinking about what to do to destroy those RW bikers, think about what units are all but impervious to them. That way, they can whiz around the table and shoot all they want, but they aren't going to be able to do anything to any of your stuff. Think about what plasma can do nothing against and you have neutralised those plasma talons. If they use standard ravenwing bikers with grav or melta then use units with precision shots to concentrate fire on those special weapon carriers buried within the unit. Weight of shots should eventually get through that re-rollable jink save, especially since the grav and melta guns won't be carried by characters that can be saved by look out sir.

Purifiers dude. That cleansing flame spell is nasty on dark shrouds.

I feel your pain, just finished a tourney where my undefeated ravenwing played.... Another ravenwing list. I struggled very hard in that match! Things to remember to keep your opponent honest and help you out:
-he can't shoot turn one if he uses the turbo boost and jink rule.
-He has to declare jink when you declare shots. BEFORE you roll your dice.
-if he jinked he snap fires.
-plasma talon are only 18" range. If he's hitting you, a dread knight or fast unit can catch him.
-only black knights get the 2+ save, and only if there's a dark shroud within 6". Take out the shroud and they're back to a 3+

Things that I fear:
-Psychic powers like psychic shriek. With grey knights I would load up on the mastery levels and psykers for your next game.
-blasts. If the blast scatters and hits someone else, it's too late to Jink.
-assault. This is how I pulled out the win. No cover in assault. Yes he can hit and run, so assault him again. The dark shroud super fears assault.
-flamers.
-flyers.

Ravenwing are tough, and become almost invincible if you don't keep your opponent honest. Not saying he's cheating, but it's hard to tell from your posts if you both understand all the loopholes.

Super heavies aren't immune, a black knight gets like 4 to 6 rending attacks on the charge.

 piping_piper wrote:

-he can't shoot turn one if he uses the turbo boost and jink rule.

He can if he uses the Ravenwing Strike Force detachment. That formation says in the codex that they can turbo boost, jink AND fire at full BS on that first turn if they start on the table.

 Slaphead wrote:

 piping_piper wrote:

-he can't shoot turn one if he uses the turbo boost and jink rule.

He can if he uses the Ravenwing Strike Force detachment. That formation says in the codex that they can turbo boost, jink AND fire at full BS on that first turn if they start on the table.

INCORRECT. Speed of the raven allows you to turbo boost in turn 1 (or two if you used strike as one), count as jinking, and then fire full BS turn 2 (or 3 if you used strike as one). It DOES NOT allow you to turbo boost and shoot in the same turn.

Deathwing strike force can run and shoot the turn they deep strike however.