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I've been looking over the plethora of threads being created for the new GK, and it looks like people are already going over things and establishing a few key units and strong interactions within the Codex. In general, the same holds true for most other Codices-- everybody who does a little reading can easily know about all kinds of armies used by the other Codices in competitive play, both generically (razorspam or dual-LR armies exist in what, five Codices now?) and specifically-- BA has AV13 spam and DoA, SW has TWC/Long Fang lists, SM has Vulkan mech and bikers, IG has "leafblower," Straken mechvets, and foot horde, and so on. All these lists are pretty well-established and it's not too difficult to find examples of these lists with a little effort. You can probably even pull up battle reports for any of these forces and get a good idea of how they play on the table.

However, I've noticed that this doesn't really hold true for Codex: Tyranids and Codex: Dark Eldar. I know there are good Tyranid and Dark Eldar players out there-- I've played against some, in fact-- but for some reason the general Internet knowledge about what is and isn't good doesn't seem to be there for these Codices. Why is that? Do people just use these armies less out there? Are they just worse in competitive play? I highly doubt the latter is true-- Dark Eldar seem extremely competitive, to the point where probably a strict majority of the new and shiny Grey Knights lists I've seen out there don't have any plausible answer to a correctly-run Dark Eldar army-- but that knowledge still seems to be missing. What do you guys think is behind this?

I guess one contributing factor might be marine bashing. As there's so many marine players, there's more people yelling "CHEESE!" over things in marine books than in xeno books. Add the fact that the armies are more common and that some of the builds are mind-numbingly boring and it's not that strange TBH.

I'm not sure either of them are very competitive. It seems every new book that comes out is even better against Tyranids than the last one.

I think you're overrating DE. They have to put tons of points into AV10 open topped vehicles with one Str 8 Heavy 1 gun. Warriors are paper thin and aren't very effective at shooting anything other than Monstrous creatures, and the main reason to take Raiders (assault boats) doesn't work because Wyches just aren't very killy.

The DE codex especially seems to suffer from a lack of synergy within the codex. The Nids have some good combos, but they're really at a disadvantage now.

Game wise nids are a double edged sword.
No matter what type of build you try to run there will allways be a downfall in it. (nothing massive like phase out mind you)

Also, i think alot of units have conflicting interests in thier usage, making it a real problem to support eachother.

All in all though nids arent a massive tournament army, of the more recent dex's released they seem to be the weakest of the lot.


Shame really, ive been playing about with tons of different builds and im yet to find one i really like.

۞ Jack ۞ wrote:Game wise nids are a double edged sword.
No matter what type of build you try to run there will allways be a downfall in it. (nothing massive like phase out mind you)

Also, i think alot of units have conflicting interests in thier usage, making it a real problem to support eachother.

All in all though nids arent a massive tournament army, of the more recent dex's released they seem to be the weakest of the lot.


Shame really, ive been playing about with tons of different builds and im yet to find one i really like.

I just hate what they did to Synapse. Making it an anchor instead of something you could use to create synergy in a list was a big mistake.

Shame really, I love nids, specifically the big old baddy MC's. But Dark Eldar and Grey Knights just crush them and that's what you're going to see a lot of.

theres strong tactics thread on Warseer (=

The loss of EW to all units in synapse was a big killer.
GK will love this even more now, since they will just burn through anything nids can throw at them.
Cant even throw an effective tarpit at them.

GK are a different story though, either way they clense nid hordes or ID TMC's.
Nothing is going thier way anymore.

I want my last dex back
Keep your silly trygons and tervigons, i want my 115 point fex's back, broodlords that can do some damage, and in general more options for what i need on a unit.

That reminds me, if you look up Hulksmash, he had a pretty large 'Nid tactics thread going.

Ive currently got a mild thread going about DE lol
We see all the basic 3 ravs with trueborn venoms, but wanted input on different units.

I have found the new Tyranids to be a very popular army in my local area. There are lots of newer players to the game not bitter over what they lost because they didn't play the old Nids and they are doing well. Dark eldar on the other hand has always even a fringe army and I don't see that changing anytime soon. The funny thing is I find dark eldar to be a great army... They have lots of strong counters versus SW/MEQ in general and I think they can do well enough versus IG in the hands of a good player. I think most people look at fragility of the raiders and are turned off. However if you were to compare a raider to a rhino or razorback I think the former is the better transport by far.

Summed it up pretty well mate.

People see the rhino and for some reason base all judgement from that.
Its a low AV transport with a storm bolter.

A Raider however is a fast unit delivery system (open topped helps for once) That has some nice movement, nice upgrades and a S8 lance weapon as basic.

Yea, if i could take a rhino instead i think i'd leave it.

There is plenty of Nid or DE knowledge, It is just that there are no cool list names for people to learn and know.

Nids are a tough army to play because there are so many options competing for the same FOC slots. Fast attack seems a little empty of good choices, (though gargoyles are nice, Nid troops give you enough anti-infantry, you need anti-tank) while you wish that you had 6 elite slots for all the stuff there. Honestly most of the lists I have seen spam the Tervigon and the hive guard.

We do not need more Nid knowledge, but rather some cool name for the Nid builds.

How about "Tervi-guard"

---------------------

The same is true for the DE but in the other way. the book is well balanced, with a bunch of different options without there being a clear choice for what options are best. Wyches, Wracks, and Warriors all work as troops. Incubi, trueborn, and Bloodbrides work as elites. Any of the Fast attack choices work, and for heavy support you have the Ravager and the Razorwing being the favorties. (Web-way lists are a little different I think, and that is where the Cronos/talos belongs) Both Raiders and Venoms work as transports.

there is no one unit that is by FAR the best, or is so good you want to take it and nothing else. You do not play ____Spam Dark Eldar, you can actually pick almost anything in the book and find a way to make it work pretty well.

Fetterkey wrote:I've been looking over the plethora of threads being created for the new GK, and it looks like people are already going over things and establishing a few key units and strong interactions within the Codex. In general, the same holds true for most other Codices-- everybody who does a little reading can easily know about all kinds of armies used by the other Codices in competitive play, both generically (razorspam or dual-LR armies exist in what, five Codices now?) and specifically-- BA has AV13 spam and DoA, SW has TWC/Long Fang lists, SM has Vulkan mech and bikers, IG has "leafblower," Straken mechvets, and foot horde, and so on. All these lists are pretty well-established and it's not too difficult to find examples of these lists with a little effort. You can probably even pull up battle reports for any of these forces and get a good idea of how they play on the table.

However, I've noticed that this doesn't really hold true for Codex: Tyranids and Codex: Dark Eldar. I know there are good Tyranid and Dark Eldar players out there-- I've played against some, in fact-- but for some reason the general Internet knowledge about what is and isn't good doesn't seem to be there for these Codices. Why is that? Do people just use these armies less out there? Are they just worse in competitive play? I highly doubt the latter is true-- Dark Eldar seem extremely competitive, to the point where probably a strict majority of the new and shiny Grey Knights lists I've seen out there don't have any plausible answer to a correctly-run Dark Eldar army-- but that knowledge still seems to be missing. What do you guys think is behind this?

Because to be perfectly frank, there aren't many competent DE generals out there, and their advice is so drowned out by the waves of mediocre or terrible advice, we just don't bother trying anymore.

Pre-new codex, there was only me and a few others (Clthomps, Thor666, Dash, etc), who actually knew how to play DE well on a competitive level. But that was fine, because requests for that advice were few and far between, and between us, we had pretty much all the different styles of play with the army list down pat.

These days, ever since the new codex came out, any request for help with a DE list is immediately mobbed by a dozen posters, of which probably half of which don't even play the army, three of the remaining six make nonsensical suggestions, and the last three know enough to make a mediocre/vaguely decent contribution, but aren't familiar enough with the playstyle, or listbuilding to be in a position to be attending tournaments, or writing tacticas.

The result being that under such a morass of crud, most of us don't even bother anymore. Thor is barely seen, Dash can't be arsed to compete for the attention, clthomps disappeared as of last year, and I simply can't work up the energy anymore.

I did an initial writeup when the codex first came out, which whilst I now consider it to be wrong on many, many accounts, of decent enough quality in and of itself(which I still get PM's for DE advice and help from). But now I've gained the knowledge with which to go back and write a decent series of tactics articles on the new list, I simply cannot work up the motivation.

In other words, the reason for the lack of decent DE tactics and strategy is simply because pretty much all the quality DE players cannot be bothered to try and shout through the throng of terrible and mediocre players that started playing in the last four months giving their opinions.

Having said that, I've noticed one or two of the newer players beginning to grope their way to the beach of competency out of the pool of general mediocrity, but ultimately what they're lacking is general experience with the playstyle. Give it a year, and I reckon those players will have flourished enough, and the general hubbub over the relatively new codex will have died down enough for the conversation on the codex to become interesting once again though.

I find DE very competitive, I'll admit I havent played them forever, however I am 6-0 with them (3-0 at tournaments), and I know what I am relatively talking about. I think DE has a much more small knit pool of players because many don't fully use the codex, and lose, therefor putting it down. I know there are plenty of good DE players on Dakka if your looking for advice, and from my experience they are more than willing to help.

Ketara - Would have been nice to know you play DE
Ive been bugging dash for info and playstyles on different units. (wanted something other than the straight cut 3 ravs and trueborn)

۞ Jack ۞ wrote:Game wise nids are a double edged sword.
No matter what type of build you try to run there will allways be a downfall in it. (nothing massive like phase out mind you)

Also, i think alot of units have conflicting interests in thier usage, making it a real problem to support eachother.

All in all though nids arent a massive tournament army, of the more recent dex's released they seem to be the weakest of the lot.


Shame really, ive been playing about with tons of different builds and im yet to find one i really like.

very true,

Tyranids can do very well but the almost never get a massive win (20-0). good shooting units are more important then good close combat units and tyranid will always lose to much against these (top) armies. I won 4 out of 5 games with my tyranids at the Dutch GT 2010 but when you got 3 missions with kill-points, I knew I was never going to get a lot of massacres. When your facing 3x5 longfangs with missle launchers and 6 las/plasrazorbacks and their are still enough points left for a Wolf lord with a few TWC.... you can almost always trow in the towl.

in the old days it was possible to consolidate into new unit and keep on fighting. But not anymore...

۞ Jack ۞ wrote:Ketara - Would have been nice to know you play DE
Ive been bugging dash for info and playstyles on different units. (wanted something other than the straight cut 3 ravs and trueborn)

I post occasionally, and I believe I'm in the DCM list of people to consult for advice (as one of the DE guru's), but for the reasons stated above, its not quite as evident as it used to be.

3 reasons of the top off my head

1. Its easier to judge whats good or not in the MEQ armies, there is just more common ground so the units that are above average really stick out. Combine this with the percentage of players that own marines, or played them at one time and it doesn't take long to see the strengths of the different marine armies.

2. Nids - GW pissed off a lot of players.
a) they changed them too much, synaspe changes every codex and thats a bad thing, plus even though I don't think Nidzilla was their best list in 4th it was viable and it had some good matchups but they killed it in the new book. People don't like having their half of their $600 army become useless.
b) the faq they released really neutered some of the more interesting lists and people had spent the money on the models.
In effect listbuilding wise they got stomach punched twice, I don't think nids reallly got a fair shake after that, its seems like a lot of the remaining players stubornly stick with what used to work instead of trying new things. New players seem to have to fun, but its not like pickup games and tournaments really reflect whats said on the internet much anyways.

Beyond that they have to deal with JotWW, and the lack of cover in most tournament games. Those boards that are ten percent cover with a hill to shoot from are great for guard, and long fangs but its a huge handicap for Nids.

3) With dark eldar it seems that learning how to use the army is the most important factor, and thats tough to describe on a forum. The other problem for posting a tactics resouce for dark eldar is that there are no easy button units. Long fangs are cheap, easy to deploy, and point click DE have nothing like that.

Fetterkey wrote:However, I've noticed that this doesn't really hold true for Codex: Tyranids and Codex: Dark Eldar. I know there are good Tyranid and Dark Eldar players out there-- I've played against some, in fact-- but for some reason the general Internet knowledge about what is and isn't good doesn't seem to be there for these Codices. Why is that? Do people just use these armies less out there? Are they just worse in competitive play? I highly doubt the latter is true-- Dark Eldar seem extremely competitive, to the point where probably a strict majority of the new and shiny Grey Knights lists I've seen out there don't have any plausible answer to a correctly-run Dark Eldar army-- but that knowledge still seems to be missing. What do you guys think is behind this?

I can speak to Tyranids. One thing at work was the change of focus with each Tyranid codex, and what that did to the player base.

Tyranids were a niche army for a long time. I can remember going to the big GW GTs in the 3rd ed. days and usually being one of only a handful of Tyranid players. Partly because of that, the conventional wisdom about Tyranids -- especially among non-Tyranid players -- was mostly wrong. The 3rd ed. codex was very underrated, if complicated and weird. If you played/powergamed it right -- a huge steamrolling horde of scythegaunts, rending mutants, etc. -- it was quite competitive, if demanding from a time standpoint. But again, you're talking about a small niche group of players who really knew their stuff.

Then along came the 4th ed. codex, an evolution out of v3. And suddenly everyone hopped on board the Nidzilla train. It was a strong build if you didn't know what you were doing, and a very strong build if you did. The player base expanded dramatically with a lot of new players who didn't really know how to manage synapse, termagant broods, etc. It didn't matter, because they didn't need to.

The 5th ed. codex managed to irritate a lot of players. It put the kibosh on old-style Nidzilla and made a lot of new demands on the 4th ed. bandwagoners, which sent them scurrying away. And because it was like a completely new army instead of another evolution of Andy C's 3rd ed. codex, some of the diehard vets from the niche days freaked and never really gave it a chance.

So now Tyranids are back to being more of a niche army with a lot of bad conventional wisdom. It's a challenging codex, no doubt. I'm still learning things as I try different approaches. But I don't bother much trying to help players anymore. I don't have the energy to talk over people who claim this unit or that one is garbage when I know they work perfectly well in a particular type of build. The Tyranid codex operates nothing like SW and some others -- you can't just throw down a build of "army list all-stars" and expect it to function well together. Context is hugely important. But 14 months after release, I think it's fair to say that much of the player base isn't going to embrace that fact.

Seems to me that Nids work best as a horde army in 5th ed, and they operate at their best by using cheap upgrades and the special abilities of certain units to buff the ground troops (eg, Old Adversary to reroll your hits, adrenal glands to increase your strength and initiative, toxin sacs so you can reroll your hits, etc). This can be really effective, but it's hard to coordinate, and if you lose one of the cogs in the machine then your combat ability is going to be severely limited.

Also, their anti-tank abilities are expensive, or harder to pull off than most other armies' methods.

Ketara wrote:
Because to be perfectly frank, there aren't many competent DE generals out there, and their advice is so drowned out by the waves of mediocre or terrible advice, we just don't bother trying anymore.

+1 QFT.

You get a thread like this to discuss DE, and boom. Griever posts about DE. Griever, do you even PLAY DE? As a competent DE general myself, I pretty much disagree with everything he said. Vehemently disagree. I'd like to say how much I disagree, and where his opinions come from, but I'd get suspended from Dakka. Over in battle reports, we've got a thread "45 Games of DE" where the OP uses an extremely eclectic smattering of units against a variety of uncompetitive opponents, and as often as not cheats in his own games - then screams at the top of his lungs when anyone points it out until they leave the thread. And this is what counts for TACTICS around here these days. Self-same author flits around spewing out bad advice in thread after thread.

I used to live in the Army list forum. Critiquing armies is what I did, helping people learn how to find synergy, balance units, and get better at their game. More often than not, I had to fight through people calling me morons because either they wrote the list and were looking for applause and not feedback, or people came into the thread to give bad advice and point out how dumb my advice is. So then - I started writing battle reports and recording my major event standings JUST TO QUALIFY MYSELF AS SOMEONE WHO CAN GIVE ADVICE. You believe that bulls**t? My signature isn't there to toot my horn, but in a desperate plea to noobies looking to improve themselves to value my opinions over the garbage getting thrown around in here these days. Please, take the advice of the proven general over the guy who disagrees with him and doesn't even have the army.

And when it comes down to it, exactly when is it worth joining a thread to try making yourself heard when doing so is going to basically call most of the people in the thread useless wastes of space, whether you say so or not. So there's going to be offended pride because only one side can be right. So what's the point of getting entangled in the messes and trying to convince people to listen to you when its more work than its worth?
------------------------------------------

Now on that note.....I get a *ton* of PMs. They seem to be picking up, even worse. Mostly about DE, sometimes about Orks, occassionally about Eldar or GK, or some other army that I don't play. If its one of the armies that I play, I either ask them to post a thread and send me a link to it in a day or two so I can give it a read and see if anyone has already posted what I would have advised, or I'll just comment on my own. If it is the latter, I'll apologize to the author for not being able to help them because I don't feel like I should be giving advice to someone on an army I don't play. Sometimes I'll tell them what units scare me the most or something, but I don't critique lists and stuff for armies I don't play.

That.....would help Dakka a lot if everyone shared that principle. If you don't fething play DE, don't fething give DE advice. Apply across all codexes. There's NOTHING WRONG with saying, "Man, wish I could help but I don't know enough to be useful." But it doesn't happen.

So I end up coaching people in private, unwillingly, but there's nothing I can do about it except go into hermitude because the ratio of stupid on Dakka is floating around 50:1 or worse - especially if you include OT.

That being said, a lot of my advice goes unsaid because it's not fully developed. It's a new codex for me, and unlike something like Grey Knights where I can tell what is good within 30 seconds of reading the codex, Dark Eldar aren't like that at all.

Most of the units are generalistic in nature, but have fundamental flaws that you have to cover. This isn't so true in typical net lists.

The general style of a net list is to have one major tactic that it does to the extreme (e.g. leafblower mech ig).

You cannot do this with Dark Eldar...this makes list building, strat crunching, and playmaking a big gigantic headache.

I more or less don't post tactical advice on DE because of the Rawr Of the Tide. That and it's a damn 'hard' army to play, the number of times I see 'I can't blow stuff up with my DL' and 'Well stun it then' just being washed away and tactics built around filling every FoC with wyches But at the end of the day I feel they are one of the most depedent codecs on the state of the board. And this is the main difficulty in giving advice for them.

For me the problem is spam.

The vast majority of netlists are built by the simple expedient of looking at a codex, finding an obviously good unit and taking as many as you can.

This leads to codices being branded as competetive if they can produce at least one powerful spam list, and *grimace* well written if they can produce two or more powerful spam lists!

The problem is that this 'lowest common denominator' kind of list building actively discourages people from fully understanding their codex (and hence getting the very best from their army).

The effect of this is that when people ask for advice on army X, most seasoned dakkanauts don't need to read the replies - you already know what's going to be the majority opinion(s). For a better constructed codex like DE (where the vast majority of units have appropriate power levels and cost) its much less easy to provide a quick-fire answer.

Any tactics forum will be full of bad advice, spam advice and good advice. Finding that good advice is looking for a nugget of pure gaming gold under a mountain of bovine excrement.

Calvin, dunno about you but I like wyches - and my wyches do NOT go into battle next to shambling zombie-like things.

Dashofpepper wrote:

Ketara wrote:
Because to be perfectly frank, there aren't many competent DE generals out there, and their advice is so drowned out by the waves of mediocre or terrible advice, we just don't bother trying anymore.

+1 QFT.

You get a thread like this to discuss DE, and boom. Griever posts about DE. Griever, do you even PLAY DE? As a competent DE general myself, I pretty much disagree with everything he said. Vehemently disagree. I'd like to say how much I disagree, and where his opinions come from, but I'd get suspended from Dakka. Over in battle reports, we've got a thread "45 Games of DE" where the OP uses an extremely eclectic smattering of units against a variety of uncompetitive opponents, and as often as not cheats in his own games - then screams at the top of his lungs when anyone points it out until they leave the thread. And this is what counts for TACTICS around here these days. Self-same author flits around spewing out bad advice in thread after thread.

I used to live in the Army list forum. Critiquing armies is what I did, helping people learn how to find synergy, balance units, and get better at their game. More often than not, I had to fight through people calling me morons because either they wrote the list and were looking for applause and not feedback, or people came into the thread to give bad advice and point out how dumb my advice is. So then - I started writing battle reports and recording my major event standings JUST TO QUALIFY MYSELF AS SOMEONE WHO CAN GIVE ADVICE. You believe that bulls**t? My signature isn't there to toot my horn, but in a desperate plea to noobies looking to improve themselves to value my opinions over the garbage getting thrown around in here these days. Please, take the advice of the proven general over the guy who disagrees with him and doesn't even have the army.

And when it comes down to it, exactly when is it worth joining a thread to try making yourself heard when doing so is going to basically call most of the people in the thread useless wastes of space, whether you say so or not. So there's going to be offended pride because only one side can be right. So what's the point of getting entangled in the messes and trying to convince people to listen to you when its more work than its worth?
------------------------------------------

Now on that note.....I get a *ton* of PMs. They seem to be picking up, even worse. Mostly about DE, sometimes about Orks, occassionally about Eldar or GK, or some other army that I don't play. If its one of the armies that I play, I either ask them to post a thread and send me a link to it in a day or two so I can give it a read and see if anyone has already posted what I would have advised, or I'll just comment on my own. If it is the latter, I'll apologize to the author for not being able to help them because I don't feel like I should be giving advice to someone on an army I don't play. Sometimes I'll tell them what units scare me the most or something, but I don't critique lists and stuff for armies I don't play.

That.....would help Dakka a lot if everyone shared that principle. If you don't fething play DE, don't fething give DE advice. Apply across all codexes. There's NOTHING WRONG with saying, "Man, wish I could help but I don't know enough to be useful." But it doesn't happen.

So I end up coaching people in private, unwillingly, but there's nothing I can do about it except go into hermitude because the ratio of stupid on Dakka is floating around 50:1 or worse - especially if you include OT.

+1 for agreement.

I am not the greatest DE General in the world, but I do pride myself on the fact that I rarely lose, and that I can build a useful list out of any unit in my codex, even if its not useful against anything.

I am never above taking advice, as noone is perfect and everyone makes mistakes(see my multiple misreadings of rules that I have been corrected on for clarification of that! ). However, I feel that anyone can give good advice if they have played that army for a long time and know what works and what doesn't. Hence why for all my real advice on lists since I joined Dakka, I have been one of those guys that have PMed Dash and then sent him a link to the list a day or two after it was put up.

However, this is where I feel that myself and alot of the others differ. It seems that everyone that puts up a list wants advice, but when someone gives it to them, they simply say, "Oh no, I can't possibly take that out of my list, it would destroy what I'm trying to build!!" or "You don't know what your talking about, Kheradruakh is the best HQ choice ever made!!!!". In other words, they don't want the advice they supposedly asked for, they want people to tell them that their list is the ultimate awesomeness and noone will ever be able to beat it.

Point is, most DE Generals don't give advice because noone wants to listen to it. If Dash or any of the others with a proven record of stomping around all the other codicies with Dark Eldar tells you that you might want to try changing this for this, do it. The worst that happens is you change it and it doesn't help much, or not at all, and after a few games of testing, you change it back. But the thing they suggest could take your list from a semi-competitive list to a very competitive list. (See this thread for my list... http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/352193.page) In this, you see that Dash posted along with MC, and both made very relevant suggestions. I explained why I did something, but I also did one important thing: I took their advice and I tested it!!! And turns out, when you listen to someone with more experience, usually their advice works!!!! The Haemy's with the wyches were much better than the other flail, and I now run a list with 3 Haemys, one an Ancient because that Mindphase is working out nicely, and 2 9 man wych squads. It has yet to lose, and honestly, has yet to lose even half of my units before my opponent is either tabled or conceding cause I have effectively neutralized his army and its down to just slowly eliminating what is left.

Plain and simple, most decent to stellar DE Generals don't give detailed advice because noone listens, or they don't want to give up their "theme". In short, if you don't wanna change what you posted, dont ask for advice, dont ask for C&C, just post it and say this is what I'm running and I'm not changing anything even though its worthless. But on the other end, don't get mad, or offended, or whatever if you do ask for advice and someone like Dash rips your list apart, because he obviously has the record to back up his abilities at competitive list making.

(I know this sounds like an I Love Dashofpepper thread, but its not, he is just the only competitive DE General I have gotten tactics from, so usuing him in all examples )

Fetterkey wrote:
However, I've noticed that this doesn't really hold true for Codex: Tyranids and Codex: Dark Eldar. I know there are good Tyranid and Dark Eldar players out there-- I've played against some, in fact-- but for some reason the general Internet knowledge about what is and isn't good doesn't seem to be there for these Codices. Why is that?

Pretty simply, you can't spam your way out of those two codexes so there are no "internet experts" that need the ego boost advocating as such.
There was a semi-decent giant tyranid thread but its extremely long and poorly moderated.

@Dash - I'm confused where did I talk about wyches and zombies???

@Galador - It is true that far too many people who ask for advice don't actually want it (and even more who don't ask the right questions to begin with...)

Dashofpepper wrote:
That.....would help Dakka a lot if everyone shared that principle. If you don't fething play DE, don't fething give DE advice. Apply across all codexes. There's NOTHING WRONG with saying, "Man, wish I could help but I don't know enough to be useful." But it doesn't happen.

On the internet, everyone has an opinion!

It is easy to give advice when the codex in question can only give you one or two possible power gaming builds to win. When you come across a codex that is either underpowered or actually balanced, the advice becomes harder to give because the situations that you find the army in question become wider.

How do I improve anti-tank for my space wolves? long fangs and melta based units in razorbacks. Done. that it is.

How do I improve anti-tank for dark Eldar? Get triple Ravagers stock. Then you can either go with Trueborn Spam, or Wych spam with Haywire grenades. Or, your meta has Eldar in it? Then you need haywire blasters or more kabalite warriors with lances and blasters instead of wyches. Wait, you have some friends who run tyranids and orks? well, make sure to stick your trueborn in a venom for anti-infantry. Now you don't have enough dark light weaponry for the MEQ/MECH in your area. Oh, your opponent's run MECH IG? Give a WWP army a try to deny them shooting.

The correct answer for a question about dark eldar needs to start with "What is your meta game like? Who are your opponent's armies and what do they run usually?" This makes it harder to give advice only for an army that is highly specialized in its role if you are not telling the DE experts what the meta game is.

Same holds true for Tyranids, but they are an even harder case. For my, the Tyranids are the Ogre Kingdoms of 40k. GOod in theory, but bad practice on the table top.