Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Warp spiders could be overcome with discipline; the discipline not to shoot at them, but rather move fast yourself and assault. The problem being that anything that could threaten them got hosed down by both scat bikes and the spiders themselves. So, yes, Jancoran is correct in that the original sin was the firepower granted by scatbikes.

 Jancoran wrote:

 Vankraken wrote:

 Jancoran wrote:

 Nykolo wrote:
I am a new player to 40k. I decided for my first army that I would play Eldar.

However, after looking at YouTube comments and a few forums, I noticed that Eldar are quite hated by many people.

So, noob question, what made the Eldar so hated in the 40k community?

The WraithKnight singlehandedly turned what was a very competitive army into a hated one. The Scatterlaser Jetbikes was really too much in most peoples opinions as well and when you combined it with making them troops choices (so that they got the Objective Secured rule) the shenanigans were easy to imagine.

Those two units, but especially the WraithKnight, made Eldar a serious pain in the ass. Frankly some Eldar players I know looked positively bored during their games. That's never a good sign for the opponent.

Don't forget Aspect Host Warp Spiders, those things where seriously broken to deal with and their combination of pseudo fearless, jump shoot jump and then jump again when being shot at, nearly always wounding on 2s with their guns, and the aspect host making them even more effective with basically no tax. Also their super reliable psychic powers and access to lots of S weapons didn't help either.

I understand why you would say that but Warp Spiders were only "crazy" in the context of an opponent that put no effort into pushing the field or assault. I know the conventional wisdom in 6E and 7E said it was guns or bust but I did famously and never had an enormous problem withthe Warp spider piece of the puzzle. That was strictly a matter of matchups. the Scatterbikes and Wtraithknight on the other hand were simply unfair advantages that no force could "overcome" with matchups.

But i do get why people might not have liked Warp Spiders.

I once apologised for using them..... Poor Tyranid player

The basic problem of the Eldar is that their internal balance has been nigh-constantly shot all to hell by poor writing. Instead of making any of the basics of the army function in any way GW has always handed the Eldar a couple of absurdly mis-designed units that enable a couple of cookie-cutter crutch builds and then waltzed off leaving the giant chunks of the Codex they can't be arsed to do anything with behind and the hate gathering behind the short list of stupid units that make up 90-95% of the Eldar most people ever see on the table.

In 4e-5e it was holofield Falcons. In 6e it was Serpent-spam. In 7e it was Wraithknights and Scatterbikes. Now it's Wraithguard and Hemlocks. And the root of the problem is that GW doesn't know how to make the army actually work (or doesn't want to for some reason), so they shortcut off a couple of crutches to prop them up and go home. And the shortcuts inevitably produce an irritating top-tier tournament army made of the most powerful three to four units in the book copy-pasted until you hit the points limit.

(I may be venting. In trying to write a functional Corsair book for 8th to use until the joke that is the IA Xenos index gets overwritten I've come to the conclusion that GW's basic assumptions behind how the Eldar should operate haven't been updated since 3e and the current ruleset is a barely-functional mess held together by spit and distortion weapons.)

Eldar have always been a typically decent army, but from what I gathered from friends who played 5th to 7th was the sheer abundance of rules that broke the internal Eldar balance and some units being extremely powerful.

I think the major point of Eldar criticism is the former - internal balance has been awful since 4th edition. Several out and out must haves that mitigate the need for diversity in an army is a sign of very poor rules writing and/or lack of playtesting. Scatter Laser spam, Wraithknights and Warp spiders were the outlier units of 7th. Taking anything else was simply a tax. However, several issues of the Eldar ware born of particular bad rules in 7th anyway. Instant death put pressure on everyone to use as much S6/8 guns as possible to simply delete units. Add in vehicles being outclassed badly by monstrous creatures and you had a recipe for disaster.

Warp spider rules in 7th are regarded (in my FLGS anyway) as the litmus test for appalling rules that not only make a unit extremely effective but incredibly annoying to fight as well.