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So me and my friends on campus are running a campaign where we capture planets and whatnot I'm obviously playing eldar. We have one game per week, we choose a planet and attack that player and if you win you can grab thier planet. There are some special rules we made: for every planet under your control you get 1 point to spend each week on a bonus to help give you an advantage such as dropping a st5 pie plate anywhere on the field or adding an orbital platform to your planet so that your opponent has to go through a 1k point game before getting at your actual planet, things like that. We have been going for like 5 weeks now an I have 2 planets total, the 1 extra I have I got from invadeing an unoccupied planet. In otherwords I have lost every game thusfar in this campaign. I would like your opinions on my list I just made recently and am hoping to play it this week when attacking another planet. ANY CRITIQUE AND ADVICE IS APPRECIATED.

HQ-
Farseer
Bike, Stones, Fortune, Guide

8x Warlocks
On bikes
6x destructors
1x enhance
1x embolden

ELITES-
TROOPS-
10x Dire Avengers
Dual cats+bladestorm

10x Dire Avengers
Dual cats+bladestorm

10x Dire Avengers
Dual cats+bladestorm


HEAVY-
3x War walkers
Dual EML’s
2x prisms

You've got a lot of good units. A seer Council, War Walkers, and Fire Prisms. The weakest link of your list, however, is also unfortunately one of the most important aspects of 5th edition games- your troops choices.

Dire Avengers, in a wave serpent, are easily one of Eldar's strongest troops choice- but on footslogging things are turned on their head. Dire Avengers and Storm Guardians are just not good on foot.

Dire Avengers on foot, can at best hope to tarpit an enemy with fortune support, and a shimmer shield and defend. Your avengers however lack these defensive upgrades and your fortune needs to be spent on the council. As a result you are left with 3 soft units with an 18 inch range and low movement capabilities.

If you don't have the points to mount your dire avengers in wave serpents- then here is a run down of other alternatives you may be interested in. Ranked IMHO in their order of effectiveness on the table.

Guardian Jetbikes are a solid non mech troop choice. They give you a superior armor save, a superior movement, and 2 heavy weapons. 6 bikes w/ 2 cannons is 152 points- add in an embolden lock with a singing spear and its 205 points. In a usual game you'll find Guardian Jetbikes easily out perform Dire Avengers on foot.
- high cost
+ high mobility
+ multiple heavy weapons (albeit only shuri cannons, and in some ways the singing spear)
+ t4, 3+ armor, 3+ turbo boost cover

Guardian Defenders, are actually better on foot then Dire Avengers. This is entirely because of the heavy weapon and the fact that they will never leave cover. While DA are restricted to an 18 inch range, defenders can actually reach out and touch things with an Eldar Missile Launcher or scatter laser. And cost less points- even with an embolden warlock. If heavy (non fire) shooting comes their way they can go to ground for a 3+ cover save, not bad!
+ low cost
+ heavy weapon
- low speed
- low ballistic skill

Finally Pathfinders are superior to Avengers because they are the best at parking in cover, and they each have a 36 inch range gun. I like them less then defenders though, as they cost too much to actually field them in the numbers necessary to kill things. But a squad or 2 are undeniably solid at holding an objective, and knocking off a wound or 2 on MCs or elite infantry.
+ good range
- high cost
- low damage output
- low speed

Of these non mechanized troop choices, Dire Avengers are clearly on the bottom of the barrel.
- moderate cost
- low range
- low speed

Either give those avengers serpents, or swap em out for Guardian Jetbikes.

Here is the updated no avenger list. thoughts?

HQ-
Farseer
Bike, Stones, Fortune, Guide

8x Warlocks
On bikes
6x destructors 3x spears
1x enhance
1x embolden

ELITES-
TROOPS-
7x pathfinders
6x pathfinders
6x pathfinders


HEAVY-
3x War walkers
Dual EML’s
2x prisms

Pathfinders and competitive don't go hand in hand *wanders off*

EDIT: So yeah guess I should explain that. Pathfinders, are deceptively bad and are a fantastic example of "looks good on paper".

2+ cover is AMAZING, till something assaults you or flamers you or hits you with a cover ignoring weapon. At which point you fall over like a sack of potatoes. Be lets rewind back to when they were still living.

You have 2 packs of 6 mans and a 7 man, so for giggles I will clump them all up and say you were firing them at an MC with not invul save and not it cover. This is your absolute best case scenario.

33% of this shots will outright miss
Of the ones that hit 50% won't wound
Of the ones that hit 33% are AP1, the other 33% are regular
That breaks down to approx 66% failure rate, 25.5% ignoring armor, 8.5% regular wounds.
A large portion of MCs are 3+ armor, so that brings your regular wounds down to approx 3%
So in that absolute best case scenario you have a 29% to wound with 19 guys giving you about 5 wounds.

Now, think about how many times you are going to be firing at an MC, and remember that this math doesn't change for infantry so if you don't have MCs our high tough targets you are killing 5 infantry for 456pts. That is once again, assuming they aren't in cover.

Just rippin me today dagger. I'm not trying to bulldoze people I don't want a super competative list I'm not "that guy" we are playing for fun I just don't want to lose all my games.

Bluedagger is right you know, the hierarchy for non mech troops is:

Gjb>defenders>rangers>avengers>storms

And even then, the only one of those that can be considered semi competitive are the bikes.

Were I you, I'd scale back your walkers to shuri cannons, and run 2 avenger squads in serpents as troops. 3 if you davu

reason I'm not doing the bikes is because I just recently got reaver jetbikes to proxy as my seercouncil. I don't have enough models for jetbikes but I have rangers and ranger proxies. I have run scatterwalkers before and have always had bad luck, in the last game I played I use EML's and got 6 direct hits in a row almost 40 hits. The EML's have served me far better than the scatterlasers. If I had the bikes I would definitely do the Gjbs.

Punisher91090 wrote:Just rippin me today dagger. I'm not trying to bulldoze people I don't want a super competative list I'm not "that guy" we are playing for fun I just don't want to lose all my games.

Yeah sorry, caught me on a bad day lol. I as least went back through and justified it for ya. If you wanna have any glimmer of competitive ya gotta fork out for serpents as the cheapest route possible. Without them and even with just jetbikes your walkers will get hammered into dust and even a Seercouncil all by it's self will fall eventually.

Fair enough, Guardian Jetbikes can be quite expensive. And its perfectly reasonable to not have them.

I used to run rangers back when I first started playing, I was like these guys are so awesome, they've got SUPER sniper rifles, and a 2+ cover save . But then I put my squad of 5 on the table and was sorely disappointed every time I used em.

the very best they've ever done is NOT DIE. Sure they've put a wound on an MC or two, even knocked out a couple of wraithguard models on occasion. But at the end of the day they just don't have much killing power. Often they'd get wiped out by a flamer, or caught in an assault because they are slow and just can't get away like jetbikes can.

Then I thought, maybe I'm just not running enough of them... but that was a silly thought, as if 5 do so little bang for buck, it would be crazy to sink over 400 points into units with very little killing potential.

I posted this spreadsheet before, and I'll post it up again



This shows the unsaved wounds of a 120 point 5 pathfinder squad shooting at the same (chaos) target as a 120 point 10 man Avenger squad. Across the board, doom or not, the Avengers do more damage then pathfinders. This does assume that the Avengers are mechanized for delivery. But the point remains, Pathfinders just don't perform.

These days, if I need to field a troop thats not in a wave serpent I put down one or 2 of my 3 gjb and warlock squads. If for some reason I'm not running those, I'll put down 10 Defenders with a missile launcher, park em in an objective bunker or something.

Guardian Defenders for all of their problems are actually better than pathfinders when it comes down to it. They have more bodies, and can still go to ground for a 3+, and if something wanders within 12 inches of them they actually have a chance to hurt it.

Speaking of Doom... I really don't see guide doing much for your seer council. Destructors don't roll to hit, so you're pretty much rolling with Guide to improve your walkers if they're close, which they shouldn't be, or buff up your twin linked... nevermind.

6 Destructors is overkill in the council. Drop it to 4 and save some points. You can take warlocks without powers. Spears in a council don't work very well from experience - you have to assault what you shoot, and if you shoot a vehicle and blow it up, you can't assault the squad next to it. Just multi assault everything, it works far better.

If you have 4 Destructors, add Doom. If you're up against something tough like Nobz, you can doom them, drop 4 templates and a bucket load of shuriken weaponry, then assault them if they don't lose fearless and run off the table.

The whole army is focused around the jetbike council, and this isn't a bad thing. You just need to play to its strengths, and GJBs as your troops will let you do that. You can say that bikes are expensive (cash and points), you can say you have pathfinder models handy, but at the end of the day, you're going to need to bring bikes or wave serpents to have a slimmer of hope of holding your planets.

Eldar are not a cheap army, its been said time and time again, you can't afford to run a bad list. With new codeces like guard, you don't need a min maxed list to have a chance because most of the units are well rounded and balanced, and suit their role. Eldar are not, we have very clear tiers of good through terrible, and you can't just throw something together and hope it performs.