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Hi Dakka!
After hearing constantly on multiple wargaming websites about "how OP heldrakes are" or how heldrakes 'dominate the game' etc. I thought I would add my 2c in on how I found heldrakes operate in the current edition. Now I realise these tactics are not fool proof and I expect more than a few veterans are going to groan upon reading this, however I thought I would lend my experience and hopefully help those out especially newer players

I'm going to admit it, I'm am TFG, they guy with 3 heldrakes. But you know what, I have found that in my play circle I NEED 3 just to have them do any kind of damage on the table.
Now of course it never used to be like this. When I bought my first heldrake, I watched it dominate my unprepared opponents. When they finally found an answer, I took a second one. When none of them would last beyond turn 3, I decided I needed to increase the target saturation and bring a 3rd.
Now, yes i'll admit, not having an answer to a heldrake SUCKS! But the same goes for any other codex nasty. Whether that be, the riptide, the wraithknight, storm raven, tervigon etc. Dealing with one of these guys in an all comers list is difficult enough. But when they spam them?
OK lets get some facts down, yes I realise the Heldrake is an armour 12 flyer, with a 5+ inv, 3Hp and IWND. which makes it pretty hard to deal with with flakk weaponry and other S7 skyfire. Yeah its really annoying to spend a whole turn of snap firing only to find it ineffective. But its simple. Dont.
There are actually many ways of dealing with the heldrake people never seem to consider. Which is odd because they are actually guidlines to play almost every game with anyway.

1. 2+ armour kills the drake. Sure you can't hit me but I can't hit you.
2. Monstrous creatures take few wounds from a drake, same with other single model squads. They usually aren' t worth the hunt.
3. Terrain, Yes thats right, not the cover save from the terrain but remember a template can only hit a single level of a building / ruin so putting 3 marines on each level means you get the same fire power at my army, but I can only hit 3 with my template
4. Bunker up. Yeah you can still get hurt, but the resulting damage is usually a lot less than if you were out in the open. Plus Bastions come with skyfiring gun options, and the hevay bolters can still pen rear armour (Unlikely but not impossible).
5. Coherency! Guys remember you can be 2" away from each member in your squad and still be in coherency. Spread your dudes out and the template no longer hits everyone of your dudes but 5-6. While this sucks if you are a 25 point grey knight, 6 point boys laugh at the 6 model loss from the 170 point model.
Now granted this last one is not the most effective it is the easiest to accomplish, I mean you should be doing this anyway. Space marines are big boys, they don't need to hold each others hands on battle, they can sit a nice 2" away from each other and still maintain coherency. Also another advantage of this distance is small blast template are now really ineffective at hitting multiple dudes with a single template. And if you can also get some interesting combat resolutions if you aren't in base contact after all the pile in's are made, meaning a large squad can spread out and be out of combat after pile ins are concerned.

now that you have the bulk of your army ready for thanksgiving, lets cook those turkeys. Most armies have answers for them, even 3 of them, without severely compromising your list. Firstly Loyalist marines can, though codex or ally, get a storm raven with MM and TL Las. Combined with the missiles you have and dropping heldrakes shouldn't be a problem. Yes they have 5++ save but you are hitting on 3s' with TL S9 and 3 S8 shots. I have actually lost 2 heldrakes to a single turn of shooting from a single raven thanks to a POtMS multimelta. Once again 5++ is really only there to make you hesitate, as it saves 1 in 3. With that MM if I fail (66,6%) chance, on a 2+ I'm in a lot of trouble, as weapon destroyed kills my baleflamer, locked velocity hinders my ability to pick targets and of course on a 4+ I'm now plummeting to the earth in a molten fireball. The best bit is, even if you only get the one, there is virtually nothing my 2 remaining drakes can do to your storm raven, so its not a trade, its a sound kill which allows you to next turn drop THSS termies in my base. Or if you have the arc, kill a second one of course =P
Guards men can do a similar tactic with vendettas, lascannons tear through armour 12, and Ap2 means +1 to the table. Not to mention next turn you can now snipe out my oblits/tanks/termies. All for little more than 100 points.
Eldar (and dark eldar to some extent) at first seem like a bit of a problem having only S8 weapons. However with vector dancer, you should easily hit rear armour on an over extended drake, or if they have deployed back towards their deployment, you can deploy in range with your guns but out of range of his vector strike.
Tyrannids should have a winged tyrrant. Given the right gun options you can fly right around the drake and hit him in the rear armour with a ton of TL S6 hits into armour 10. Once again if the drake is playing conservatively thats fine because he now probably isn't in range of youre good stuff, and will be next turn unless he hovers.
Chaos Daemons can do the same with a flying slaanesh daemon prince. If you rolled Iron army then even sweeter.
Necrons bring so many of their own fliers it should be pretty self explanatory.
Currently the only army I don't know of a solid way to deal with the drake is the green skins and other CSM. Even with allies it is sketchy as you only get 1 answer and that might not be enough to deal with multiple heldrakes. But as most csm and ork lists are running list which get into combat fast effectively stopping the drake from reaping too much. Alternatively try the original 5 ways to deal with them.

Also on another note remember WH40k is like complex chess. If you go to a game expecting you'll never lose a single piece, youre gonna have a bad time. Like wise if you aren't willing to sacrifice pieces not just for equal points, but also board position, attack opportunities on other models, checkmates =P, Sometimes bait and trap methods cost you more points than the model you kill but it means you end up winning the game from it. But I'll write more about this in another thread.

Now allow me to reiterate these tactics are far from solid fool proof methods which make heldrakes useless, they are tactics I have seen my playgroup use against me. Which is good, because in a way it stops people from screaming "oh lets not let him play" and instead "Well I was going to bring these anyway, thanks for supplying a good target."

Feel free to comment I would love to hear back on what others think (both new players to pros) especially because if you find a weakness in these tactics it makes my life all that easier

Hyperios missile platforms are a really nice deal. 35 points for a twin-linked skyfire interceptor krak missile. Sure, it's 3+ armor just like a marine, but you're getting T6 and W2 for less than you'd pay for a flakk missile devastator.

Thats true, but I was thinking outside of forgeworld, as most players don't have access / choose not too / aren't allowed Forgeworld.
Also can it can be manned, or is it BS2 like all the other automated guns? Which is still 2x as good as a devastator snapfiring, but devs can shoot ground things.

Dalton Alkaos wrote:
3. Terrain, Yes thats right, not the cover save from the terrain but remember a template can only hit a single level of a building / ruin so putting 3 marines on each level means you get the same fire power at my army, but I can only hit 3 with my template

actually, according to the rules, your not allowed to hit models on the third level of a ruin whatsoever. Not unless you're using a template carried by a jump/jet unit

Grot manned big guns with ammo runts and extra bodies, two batteries sitting behind and ADL (to get a quad gun).

T7, quad gun and S8 cannons beats heldrakes.

Dalton Alkaos wrote:
Thats true, but I was thinking outside of forgeworld, as most players don't have access / choose not too / aren't allowed Forgeworld.
Also can it can be manned, or is it BS2 like all the other automated guns? Which is still 2x as good as a devastator snapfiring, but devs can shoot ground things.

It's unmanned (so you have to kill the guns in assault and they aren't locked in combat), but is BS3, not BS2. Twin-linked BS3 compares pretty favorably to the devastators I just mentioned, so you're not really losing much. And since they are both skyfire and interceptor, they can shoot at ground targets without snapfiring, too.

I've played against a helldrake 3 times, the first time my opponent brought it with a Hades Autocannon, so I just got to ignore it the whole time since it never did anything relevant. The next two times were the real deal. I just tempted my opponent with a juicy target he couldn't resist taking out with his first turn with the drake, making sure to either feed him a unit basically of my choice by making it a priority, keeping it away from what I really needed to win. Playing with lots of scoring units has been the answer for me, ultimately, I also played Grey Knights against the CSM player, with 15 terminators both times as half my troop choices.

Ideally orks would use lootas for a cheap abundant source of s7 snap shots. Typical squad of 9 fire 9 to 27 shots averaging 1hp a turn on front armor before saves.

Koptas should be able to get rear with TL rockets.

Bikes should be able to get rear with 3 TL shots.

Orks should be cheap and numerous enough to leave you hard pressed for making your points back. Maybe also mobile enough to get small arms fire on rear if it's important.

My LR termie DA/BT buddy curses helldrakes and the only opponent he played that had two only killed two deck chair scout units with them I just don't know the reason for fearing them.

my wave serpents have made short work of drakes. of course, that was only vs 1. and all of my stuff wasnt an easy kill for him ,as alot of it was in serpents.

Non-Eldar players need counters, too.

Martel732 wrote:
Non-Eldar players need counters, too.

True, it is very hard for blood angels to assault fliers.

To the OP, I am assuming you are skipping Tau on the grounds that everything they have skyfires? Also, what size table do you generally play on? I could imagine strategies are different between 4x4 and 4x8.

for my DE 1 or 2 heldrakes is a problem, 3 heldrakes i dont mind. The reasoning is that its a lot of points for 3 guys which wont show till at least turn 2. It really allows me to pick apart to rest of the army quite quickly.

if your playing line em up and shoot the heldrakes will be a problem but if your playing a mission taking 3 seriously compromises the armys ability to win missions even if they kill lots of stuff.

The problem isnt that the helldrake kills everything, its that the helldrake kills TROOPS. It kills almost every viable troop choice in the game and is very good at popping transports also. It also deals with many devistator-equivalent firepower that many armies rely on. 5/6 of the missions in this game are troop based and the other one still values units that can wipe squads. This is why helldrakes win, not because of their overwhelming firepower (its actually only mediocre) but because they kill what needs to be killed in almost every game type. Combined with the impressive durability and they end up at the top of most tourneys.

Finding a "solution" is pretty much a worthless endevor. The only solution is land raiders, reserved troops, or MSU troops. There isnt a weapon in the game thats correctly priced to deal with a helldrake, so take what you can against fliers and built the rest of your list to take on everything else. Only way to beat helldrakes consistantly is through reserve manipulation and MSU faster troops (bikes, jetbikes, deepstrikers, jump inf, ect).

Instanced examples of a person dealing with a helldrake is also pretty darn useless. Sure, wave serpents can deal with 1, but how about 3+? Not a chance.


For those who can take them, 3 man eldar jetbike squad allies are a viable counter to helldrakes. Reserve them and try to remain in blind zones of helldrakes as you come on. Even if he does flame you, you have a 50% chance of one jetbike surviving.