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Ive recently convinced a few of my friends to start warhammer 40k and i am happy to see that they are into it, as i havent been playing long at all and I have lost contact with the old gang I used to do it with. However i noticed one of them is buying up a few venoms and raiders as well as plenty of kabalite warriors. Ive thought a little about it and as a daemon player i cannot come up with a way to counter this many poisoned shots. The best ive come up with is just stacking horrors and trying to outshoot them. Is there any real way to combat DE with deamons?

uh, maybe lots of MC to tear apart their vehicles and then lots of shooting to destroy their infantry

But poisened shots are kinda anti mc arent they?

Like Nids Daemons have an uphill battle against Dark Eldar due to their high mobility and the prevalence of Poison and Darklight weaponry. Like with most mech armies (i.e most armies in general) the key for Daemons is actually getting into combat, at which point they can generally handle themselves (certainly against a shooty DE army). This means taking as many ranged anti tank shots as you can to drop the Venoms, and then quickly following up with fast combat units like Fiends.

Against Dark Eldar, look to your Tzeentch & Slaaneshii units;
- Herealds of Tzeentch & Slaanesh in chariots will demolish his rides; Tzheralds through shooting with their S8/ap1 bolts, Slaheralds by virtue of being calvary and able to move between 19-24"/turn with 7 S5 rending attacks on the charge! (because you are taking unholy might here, yes?!)
Take 2 of each herald and you also deny him the biggest advantage of his poisoned guns since both options are only T4, unlike the T5+ of other mounted heralds/greaters.

- Units of 5-6 Horrors per squad as Troops w/Bolt in each squad will down his rides pretty effectively.
a larger unit of 9-12 pinkies is a pain to remove due to their 4++ save and have enough shots to kill almost any dark eldar unit.

- Units of 12-15 Daemonettes can weather a round or two of shooting and are more than killy enough to take out anything short of wyches. (those need to be shot!)

- Fiends & Flamers make the better Elites options. 'Curshers are too slow in terms of movement while the raiders/venoms are flitting about and DE have more than enough wieght of fire to bring them down before they can catch units. Plus, why do you need hellblades against dark eldar?!!
Fiends are super fast being cavalry and have boatloads of attacks. They'll even down raiders/venoms through wieght of dice!
Flamers have template weapons which cause auto-glances on a set roll, so suicide squads of 3 are still viable to glance stuff to death. (remember, templates inflict 2x hits against open-topped vehicles and ignore cover!) Plus, you've still got the multi-shot S4 warpfire if you scatter badly, and being jump infantry you can keep up with the boats.

- Flesh hounds like all cavalry are solid.

- Screamers are flying melta bombs!



Just avoid loading up on your greater daemons, princes & soul grinders since DE weaponry is ment to specifically counter those targets. Unlike every other army, we have no reason to fear darklight weaponry and things like ap1/2 or power toys means crap-all to us since every model in our army is an eternal warrior with invuln saves!

We can actually rock dark eldar pretty hard

Thanks for the input guys. Much appreciated. So what im hearing is spam bolt and fiends. I shall need me moar pink horrors and fiends

Fateweaver would help to mitigate the poison shots with the save RR. A venom will get 4 wounds on average every shot. Crushers could be useful if you can box the DE in with your DS strategy but the fiends will make a mess of the vehicles.

One thing is how do i avoid witches? If my understanding of a raider is right, and it may not be, raiders canmove 12" and run 1d6 and assault 6. Which means my almost universall 18-24 inch range is pretty fragile

Martymunster wrote:One thing is how do i avoid witches? If my understanding of a raider is right, and it may not be, raiders canmove 12" and run 1d6 and assault 6. Which means my almost universall 18-24 inch range is pretty fragile

Really close, don't forget about the disembarking it'll get them an additional 2" roughly.

Oh yeh. Holy crap. I suppose il just have to hope for my 1st wave of 5 units of horros with bolt and target the crap outta the wytch transports

Experiment 626 wrote:
Flamers have template weapons which cause auto-glances on a set roll, so suicide squads of 3 are still viable to glance stuff to death. (remember, templates inflict 2x hits against open-topped vehicles and ignore cover!) Plus, you've still got the multi-shot S4 warpfire if you scatter badly, and being jump infantry you can keep up with the boats.

I have never heard of this x2 hit on open topped vehicles before, is that a real rule? I dont have my book handy to check, I run trip flamers and frequently end up flaming open toped vehicles.

No, it's not a real rule.

Dark Eldar are, imo, the worst martchup for Daemons. The key is to play to the mission objectives (isn't this always the case!) and to bring enough shooting to take down the boxes.

The sad thing about Dark Eldar is that venoms/raiders are only slightly less difficult to kill in assault than a Rhino. Coupled with the disgusting number of poison shots means your T5 does not really help much.

My advice is similar to those here in that you need fast units. Seekers, and Fiends work the best. I also think Troops should be predominantly Horrors (Wyches beat Daemonettes in CC, sorry 4++ and 4+ FNP versus 5++ Rending hurts) . Add in a good combat drug (+1s, +1 A, +1 WS, +1 Pain Token) and things can get bad very quickly.

I would not bring Slaanesh Heralds in this matchup over Tzeetch, the S5 shots and the S8 shot are critical since you need to slow them down and disable vehicles fast.

I try to knock down Venoms first, they are the scariest to me and once one cannot shoot I move on to the next. Otherwise, hope for the best and try to pin them down in a table quarter is possible. They can flat out away from you but if you keep an 15" distance between you (they can catch you anyway and shoot you anyway so there is no benefit to being further) you can pressure them and take away some mobility.

Heh, best drug is reroll to wound

Ok so far i have 5x5 units of pinks horrors and 8 fiends with three heralds of tzeentch, a DP of tzeentch and about 10 fiends. Assuming a 1000point game means im gunna have to choose between more fiends or moar horrors, although i could leave out the dp. Which way is dakka leading?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also changling

It all depends on if they are a shooty or CC. CC, take horrors. shooting (wych (see what i did there?) irrc, is what your against) take fiends.

A DP with Wings and an armor save will help you catch his vehicles if you are having problems with that. Of course, that's a lot of points, so perhaps just more horrors. Remember, str4 will glance av 10...you just need more dakka.