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Well I'm excited to share that I'll soon be returning home after a year overseas and I have a lot of brushing up to do. I've played a handful of 6th edition games over the past year, but I've yet to encounter any flyers and none of these "terrifying" super-heavies.

With all of that in mind I come to all of you with the following...

My wife and I have been discussing introducing flyers into our matches once I'm home. My primary army is Chaos Space Marines and my wife loves her Dark Eldar. That being the case I plan on getting a Heldrake, but I need to know what I should get her to "counter" it. I've read about the ADL (though I'm uncertain as to how it should be used and if it will be worth it for her), and I haven't seen anything about the effectiveness of the Dark Eldar Flyers. I've been glancing through a DE codex in my free time and I've been drawn to the Voidraven Bomber. The two void lances sound pretty scary, and the bomb just seems like a neat little bonus. The Razorwing also seems cool, but a little squishier and the dark lances are weaker than the void lances.

I'm just going to list what she owns real quick in case that helps any of you that are looking at total army synergy/tactics. Also on a side note, she doesn't want to ally with anyone. We don't play in tournaments, but we're competitive with our friends.

HQ: Lelith, Drazhar, Archon

Elites: Incubi, Harlequins

Troops: Warriors, Wyches

Fast: Scourge, Hellions

Heavy: Ravagers, Talos

Transports: Raiders, Venoms

Thanks for the help everyone, I really appreciate your time.

IMO, unhindered by DE experience:

Like you said, you could go for a Voidraven or Razorwing to counter the Helldrake.
But if you both adjust your lists with these options, the Helldrake player will gain more. Sure the DE flyer could take out a Helldrake eventually, but in the meantime that Helldrake will wreck a lot of DE stuff on the ground. 2 units / turn is not unheard of for a Helldrake, I'd say this will happen fairly often.
A quadgun suffers from the same, it will take multiple turns of fire to disable the Helldrake.

If CSM already fields FMCs, a Voidraven/Razorwing/Quadgun becomes more attractive as there will be more targets for it.

I don't think a DE only list has a good answer to Helldrakes by trying to destroy it.


YMMV

If your group allows Stronghold Assault, you can get a pair of Vengeance Weapons Batteries. That's about a Vendetta worth of lascannon firepower. It's not great, but it's something.

I'd go with an Icarious Lascannon on the ADL and then two void raven bombers for your own flyer. Since we are talking about a heldrake I'd go for the kill instead of hull point attrition. When you hit, you need a 4 to pen (instead of 5s) and you get +1 to the kill roll. The bombers have two void lances each S9 ap 2 and the lascannon is also S9. At BS 4 your looking at an outright kill with only two turns of shooting (by math). The numbers improve if the guy shooting the lascannon has a better BS than 4.

Then when the drake is dead the bombers concentrate on other high T or av vehicles. Because of this, I'd have the lone ravager left kitted out with dissentigrators instead of dark lances. Most things really don't like getting shot at by 9 S5 AP2 shots.

Id say firestorm or some other fort is the answer, the de fliers may be able to drop it but not consistently. A hell drake against de will be flattening a paper boat and burning a foot unit each turn

Corollax mentioned Stronghold Assault. I haven't seen it yet, but I assume that is where the rules for the firestorm are located?

Since I haven't seen the rules for it I'm not sure how balanced it is, but I also don't want to just melt her entire army because she can't retaliate against one of my units.

Thank you all for the replies, I'll show this thread to the princess and see what she thinks.

I don't think she has to worry much about a helldrake.

Assuming she has most of her force mounted up, as a good DE player should, your drake can vector strike a transport per turn, then maybe flame the contents.

Against Eldar, Str 6 and Ap 3 of the Baleflamer is wasted. A Heavy flamer does the same job.

She's got the mobility to get her units out of the drakes way, and it means there's ~170 points less on the table to begin with.

So yeah, she can ignore them and play the objective. Short of getting her own flyer, she can ally in a farseer, and twin-link those ravagers/any other dark lances.

Well I looked into what I could about the Firestorm, but I'm somewhat confused by it. Since it has the automated special rule that prevents anyone from controlling it, does that mean that it will have to fire at BS2 for all 4 shots?

To Belly:

I agree that the Baleflamer won't make a lot of points, but I hope to position myself in such a way that she will have to opt between getting raked by the Heldrake or moving into a weaker position against my other units. If I manage to position my other units smartly, than I can foresee her getting a little upset that she'll have to suffer through the annoyance of the Heldrake and have no real response to it.

I do like the advice of the Farseer, I've tried to get her to use one a few times. She hates the "Eldar" though, but that's a long rant of hers that I won't spend the next 30 minutes typing out. Suffice to say, she only likes DE units (and Harlies).

Dark Eldar are ill-equipped to handle enemy flyers without allies or fortifications (which ruins the army's aesthetic imho). I usually try to ignore enemy fliers and table an opponent, but that is really difficult. Even with careful movement and target selection a single flier can lose a Dark Eldar force the game. They need their movement to win, but a flier is too fast to outrun. Especially one that can kill two units a turn, go into hover mode, has an invulnerable save, and regenerates hullpoints. It is the definition of frustrating.

Now flying monstrous creatures on the other hand is an entirely different story. Our anti-infantry firepower can make them wish they were never born (assuming they do not have a rerollable 2++).

Apart from the hell drake, simply moving close to a flyer inhibits their target options due to weapon elevations as well as blocking viable points to stop while still maintaining a target to fire on.

The main issue with the drake is vector strike combined with a weapon on a 360' turret... Getting up close still works to a degree and with some luck a 3hp vehicle should survive a vector strike with flicker fields....

But my advice is to just kill everything else

Sorry for the late reply, you are correct about the automation on the firestorm (cant remember the second word for name) but if I rememebr correctly off the top of my head it has interseptor and skyfire. Too bad the vengance weapon battery doesnt work for that roll because that heavy 20 gattling gun would hurt bad even only being S6. The rules for each are both in the boxes for the model but I'm sure you can find them on here.

also dont forget that on top of the above mention of 360 degrees and turret it is also a torrent weapon so can be shot 12 inches out from the model also, pretty legit.

The 20 shot gatling would be very intense if it had skyfire. It reminds me of the anti-missile/aircraft weapons on the sides of naval vessels. When in doubt, blanket the sky in shrapnel!

I've only read about the Heldrake so far (mine is wrapped up under a tree right now), I recall reading the FAQ about its' flame weapon being able to flame things behind it. I assume this is the reason you can pull off a vector strike on a transport and then roast the occupants.

As I said before, I want to have fun with the model, but more importantly I want to have fun with her.

Thanks Exalbaru for getting back to me about the firestorm, I'm considering picking it up since it can be used with any army (she also plays BA). Ultimately it's her decision though, I just ask you experienced folks for the intel and then let her sift through it all until she's decided what sounds the nicest to her.

Thanks again everyone

What I do or would do is get an adl with a quad-gun, it's not the best against a helldrake or other high av flyers, but it's better than nothing, and it's pretty good against other flyers in case you guys venture off into other army's flyers. Next your gonna want a squad of wyches with haywire grenades. They don't have to be that big, five of them in a venom is enough to suffice. To use them effectively you must use de's high mobility to your advantage, which means positioning your army to force the turkey to switch into hover mode, and as soon as it does, charge the wyches in. A small squad of them is more than enough you'll need to strip the turkeys hull points. Obviously this is easier said than done, but with some practice it should be pretty effective. It would also be wise to probably have a second squad of them to ensure a better chance of one of them surviving. Hope this helped

About the only DE-only counter(s) and, they aren't great counters at that, I can think of for Heldrakes are:

Deep Striking Venoms with Blasterborn shooting up it's tailpipe.
+ Easier to 1-shot
+ <EDIT> it's a common unit anyway so no major list changing needed </EDIT>
- If you can hit but, that's the game with flyers so this isn't really a minus per se
(honestly I found this to be the most reliable, but kind of relies on the Heldrake coming exactly one turn before you do)

Razorwing Jetfighter with Dark Lances.
+ Easier to hit
- Dark Lance? More like Dark Glance...

Voidraven Bomber's Void Lances.
+ Easier to hit, slightly better chance to pen
- Voidraven...

A lot of Ravagers and Raiders with Dark Lances.
+ It's their best Heavy Support so you'll probably have 2 or 3 of these anyway
+ You should have a few Raiders anyway
- Still hitting only on 6s and pen on 5s so you're looking at 32% OF 16% (roughly)
- If he has other AV targets you're wasting many of your already few shots

some great advice on the blasterborn, just a lot of hope on it happening at the right time. Yep, it can shoot 360 from anywhere on it, the way a lot of people justify it is the dragon head of the model craning down behind it as flying. One bit of advice I have for it is if you are big into painting your stuff at least lay down good primer and base coats on the drake before assembling because I got excited on assembly of mine and it is amazingly frustrating trying to get into those small cracks and areas of the wings without using an airbrush.

Thanks for the painting advice. I'm actually looking into picking up an airbrush, but I've never used one before so I'll have to play around with some of my other models first.

Wife picked up Stronghold Assault and she's leaning towards a Bastion or Firestorm. We've never used structures before, so it appears that we'll be adding in a lot of new variables the next time we get to play.