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A month ago I've played a Drukhari player in the store and it got me thinking. Was there ever an major battle or at least mentioned battle between the Dark Eldar/ Drukhari and the Orks? I know Drukhari would tend to avoid Orks due to their tolerance to pain and well, intellect. But was there ever a battle where they were forced to go up against an Ork WAAAGH?

Major? Probably not, largely because the Drukhari don't get involved in large scale conflicts due to their preferred fighting style.

Also, Orks are great entertainment for the Drukhari and the fact they can take so much punishment means they make excellent pit slaves.

Funnily enough, going by art it happens a lot, seeing there are multiple DE vs orks official art pieces and xenos vs xenos art in GW books is a rarity, usually it's xenos vs some human faction or at best xenos vs chaos. So, yeah. Also, it's the other way around, DE like the pain tolerance (quote from Codex DE):

"With their enormous statures and extremely high threshold for pain, Orks are a dangerous yet favoured target of Kabalite raids. Each of the hulking greenskin warriors can endure far more suffering than most species, meaning the Drukhari can unleash the full extent of their violent tendencies and still return to Commorragh with captives."

 Irbis wrote:
Funnily enough, going by art it happens a lot, seeing there are multiple DE vs orks official art pieces and xenos vs xenos art in GW books is a rarity, usually it's xenos vs some human faction or at best xenos vs chaos. So, yeah. Also, it's the other way around, DE like the pain tolerance (quote from Codex DE):

"With their enormous statures and extremely high threshold for pain, Orks are a dangerous yet favoured target of Kabalite raids. Each of the hulking greenskin warriors can endure far more suffering than most species, meaning the Drukhari can unleash the full extent of their violent tendencies and still return to Commorragh with captives."

Huh, never thought of it like that. I mean I could see an Ork boy chained up and they taunt them by refraining them from fighting. That, or they just jab something into an Ork knowing the Ork can take it .

Also desirable for the Wych Arena, were a single precision stroke kill counts for far more against such a resilient species. Possibly offset by the oft described lack of subtlety about Orky combat techniques.

From my 5th edition DE codex:

Slow death of Greagus:

DE get a silly nob from that very troublesome ork colony, inoculate him a spore contamining poison, and shove it one night on a half built gargant. The contamined spores disrupt the ork reproductiove spores and leaves them rip for extermination.

Waaagh! Zoggit:

Waaagh zoggit attacks DE port Blackblood (translating from french sorry), and follow up into the Webway, finally ending up in commoragh were the DE fight back. In the end, although the orks wrecked unexpected havoc, they are beaten, and1000 of them are captured and used in the arenas.

Unexpected allies:

After fighting back hive fleet kraken, Iyaden is exhausted but is compelled to clash with waaagh fistbreaka (again, translating from my native language sorry!). Iyanden is almost beaten, and lasts a bit longer only for the awakening of even more wraith constructs. The DE finally show up when all seemed lost and defeat the orks. When Iyanden concil asks why they came to their aid, the DE answer that they were delighted in seeing Iyanden turning once more to necromancy (which I guess amounts to torturing their incestors).

There you go

Can't recall off the top of my head if this is related to the Greagus thing, but there's a bit of lore from the 5th(?) edition codex where Lady Malys of the Poisoned Tongue Kabal is challenged to poison all of humanity.

She catches word of an STC template being excavated that would allow humanity to create a panacea. Understandably, it's heavily guarded. She has the kabal basically kite an ork fleet towards the planet where the STC is being excavated and uses the orks as a battering ram against the humans so the kabal can slip in and steal the STC.

So it's a major conflict involving the drukhari and the orks, even if the drukhari kept head-on conflicts to a minimum.

I think the fifth edition codex contact ned snippets of drukhari kiting some orks. (With that codex it would not be very hard.) The Dark Eldar seemed to enjoy it.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Can't recall off the top of my head if this is related to the Greagus thing, but there's a bit of lore from the 5th(?) edition codex where Lady Malys of the Poisoned Tongue Kabal is challenged to poison all of humanity.

She catches word of an STC template being excavated that would allow humanity to create a panacea. Understandably, it's heavily guarded. She has the kabal basically kite an ork fleet towards the planet where the STC is being excavated and uses the orks as a battering ram against the humans so the kabal can slip in and steal the STC.

So it's a major conflict involving the drukhari and the orks, even if the drukhari kept head-on conflicts to a minimum.

I think it has to be a different story than greagus but yeah, that tings a bell too!

In the 7th edition Codex, at least one Drukhari Archon captured a bunch of Orks to build a monument for him in conditions so harsh that most other races would die before they could labor.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Can't recall off the top of my head if this is related to the Greagus thing, but there's a bit of lore from the 5th(?) edition codex where Lady Malys of the Poisoned Tongue Kabal is challenged to poison all of humanity.

She catches word of an STC template being excavated that would allow humanity to create a panacea. Understandably, it's heavily guarded. She has the kabal basically kite an ork fleet towards the planet where the STC is being excavated and uses the orks as a battering ram against the humans so the kabal can slip in and steal the STC.

So it's a major conflict involving the drukhari and the orks, even if the drukhari kept head-on conflicts to a minimum.

I recall the same story, but was it not her wanting to keep such a useful device out of The Imperium’s hands, rather than poisoning us all?

Cursory Google shows there’s something about it in the old Haemonculus Covens book. Which I have, or at least had on iBooks.

Let me see what I can find.

from the same codex I quoted above, the endeavour of panacea was to poson the entire imperium, however Vect's reasoning was that nobody amongst the cabal voivods would ever succeed and many die in the attempt. Lady Malys does the tick, by rousing and throwing orks at the world, then following in their track as the orks got there first anyway, and looting the stc on the big mek's corpse after rampaging through their escape column. She comes back with the stc and Vect makes her a particular place within his inner circle. The story as written in the codex does not tell if any desease was actually ever unleashed however.