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Okay......so. The Haemonculus Covens get a very restricted army list.
On the plus side, they get all the formations to help balance out what they've got.

The new ossefactor means you've sort of got a shooty squad - two ossefactors are similar to plasma guns at 12-24" range, and the extra hits from calcific spears is kind of equivalent to the bolters that the rest of the wrack unit doesn't have. Add a hexrifle on the squad leader, and you've got a half-decent backfield objective holder that's going to swiftly pick up fearless and is actually capable of fending off enemy assault units quite efficiently.

The biggest weakness of the army is obviously armour. The sum total of antitank available is (1) dark lance upgrades to raiders, (2), haywire blasters or heat lances on talos and (c) talos or grotesques punching things.

Now I'm broadly speaking a fan of punching things, but a Talos is only S7 and a Grotesque only S5, and - unlike 'normal' Dark Eldar with a Power From Pain table unashamedly tailored for Wych Cult units, there's no way to get Furious Charge, so that's the strength you're stuck at unless you want to start using smash. Much like Guard power fists, Talos and Grotesques will swiftly disassemble any non-land-raider tank they lay their misshapen hands on, but stopping a Land Raider, or worse yet a walker (especially one with a power fist!) is going to be somewhat problematic to say the least.

Even a corpsethief claw with haywire weapons seems a little unwieldy - you're investing nearly seven hundred points (closing on half your army) for 5 haywire shots. Granted, talos provide a lot more than that in terms of sheer 'why won't you bloody die!' amusement and WS5 infantry-shredding, but I can't see a way around tank-heavy armies.

Thoughts?

I think Talos will be the all-stars of the Coven book for what they can do

Personally I feel the best use of the Coven book is to compliment the Real Space Raiders detachment (or Battle Forged if you really want a Revenent) - I think the Fast Attack of the Dark Eldar is its best FOC slot

Realspace Raiders is still Battle-forged.

I know you can easily patch weaknesses by allied forces, but I'm trying to figure out how (if) one can make a primarily/pure coven force work.

Possibly a combined arms detachment with a haemonculus and a squad or two of mercenary kabalites with lances might be an idea? I like the idea of a footslogging coven force, but if so, they probably need a dug-in firebase to throw some darklight up the table as they advance.

locarno24 wrote:

The biggest weakness of the army is obviously armour. The sum total of antitank available is (1) dark lance upgrades to raiders, (2), haywire blasters or heat lances on talos and (c) talos or grotesques punching things.

Wouldn't five twin-linked, scouting heat-lances on Taloi solve most of the problems with armour?

Depends. It should fry a vehicle fairly efficiently, but the problem is one of flexibility - the corpsethief claw is a single unit, so it can only engage one opponent at a time.

If it's a question of stopping a single tank, fine - but if it's an army with (say) two or three seperate walker units, I'm concerned you'll massively overkill That One Guy whilst the rest of them pile into your lines with those Grotesque-exploding S10 power fists.


Edit: one other nice thing about the ossefactor is the 'calcific spears' hits have ignores cover - so theoretically if a unit is partially in cover, you can focus fire on the guy out of cover, hit him with some modified black dragon ossmodula darts, and then laugh as ignore cover hits rip apart the guys behind the aegis line.

Do Haemonculus in the coven have access to Portals?

It uses the Haemonculus unit datasheet from the 'core codex', so yes.

It's one of the things which makes the 'Dark Artisan' formation so tempting - it's the only way to shove Pain Engines in through a portal.

A talos with a twin-linked liquifier, a haemonculus with a liquifier gun and a cronos with a full set of spirit kit suddenly materialising on your back line can rip a squad to bits with AP3 blasts and templates, and is really, really hard to bring down thanks to 4+ feel no pain and getting It Will Not Die on the first turn it matters - or even improved It Will Not Die if you make that haemonculus your warlord.

Ally with crimson slaughter and stack leadership - debuffs everywhere. In places enemies are going to be ld7 at best or ld3 at worst, your going to steamroll anything that isn't native ld10 on the worst days thanks to every csm having fear.

How many leadership debuffs actually are there in Crimson Slaughter, though?

The Crimson Slaughter have access to a warlord trait - which you can't garuantee getting - and a telepathy power - which you also can't garuantee getting.

Everything in a coven force has Fear by turn 3 (turn 2 if you've got a haemonculus in tow), so there's a limit to what the coven needs from the chaos marines.

Also, And They Shall Know No ********** Fear, as usual, makes a cool rule not work against 60-70% of armies.