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Hi all,

Been playing Dark Eldar for a while now but I am always looking to expand my collection. This brings me to the corpsethief claw.

How good is this formation? I dont have the models or people close to me to practice this formation but wonder what your experience is either playing with or against this the 5 talos.

My biggest worry is the limited movement.

My other option is to replace it with eldar allies.

the Corpsethief claw is excellent. There are definite counters like Poison and its str disallows it from getting Instant Death most of the time which really kind of is a big deal. But I find them to be excellent regardless. I arm mine with TL Haywire and Just let them move up and then if necessary move back to keep blowing up armor. They will annoy the enemy with their extreme anti-armor efficacy and of course they are serious customers in melee no matter who you are. Just make sure you watch out for Force Weapons.

Also this will be information you might want/find useful: linkety link link

Corpsethief Claw

Pros:
Extremely durable
Haywire makes them great anti-tank platforms
Will kill most non-knights in a fight
+1 VP for each unit killed in CC
large footprint

Cons:
Slow
Expensive
can't take on knights
Can be tarpited.

These guys are the inevitable doom that is slowly lurching up the board ready to cause havoc. They can be great, especially against other other melee options. But they are slow. Against some enemies they may only be able to get off two charges which really makes them a huge point sink. But if they get to fight they are well worth it, especially with extra vp. Try it out, proxy up the models or borrow from a friend and find if you like it.

My main problem with the unit is that I want too many other things from DE so I don't want to sink 650+ into a unit, I would rather take two razorwings, reavers, scourges and have some left over for another venom.

Corpsethief Claw is basically a death-star, and like any death-star it requires support to protect it from hard-counters, the three biggest hard-counters being force weapons, grav and AV13+ (though mass haywire can mitigate the thread of high AV).

It's the rest of your armies duty to keep those specific threats away from the Corpsethief Claw. Beyond that, it should do most of the heavy lifting for you. It's incredibly durable, and will eat the majority of units in the game in CC. It also gives you board control by virtue of taking up like half the board by itself and being a scary thing that no one wants to be near.

The formation also has the scout USR, giving you a 6'' boost. That means you could feasibly be in assault range by turn 2, and easily within the opponents' half of the board by turn 3.

Don't forget you still have the option to Smash - yes, it's only 1 attack per model, but where you have a small unit of monsters, you still get several attacks, which are perfectly capable of going through even a land raider.

It's a brutal if not especially sophisticated unit. As noted, haywire blasters cover one of its main weaknesses - and a weakness of coven forces in general. Liquifier guns are...I dunno. Potentially lethal but that strength 3 always leaves me wishing I'd brought something nastier.

Also - consider supporting with one or more Chronos or a Dark Artisan. If you thought feel no pain was irritating before, wait and see what it's like now.

And yes, Instant Death, in any flavour, is the bane of coven armies. There isn't really any way around that - even using haemonculus to rush to eternal warrior doesn't stop you losing feel no pain. Make sure a decent proportion of your fighting power rests in raiders and venoms is all I can suggest.

Pair with Claw with death jesters. It is really good fun!
The death jesters ability to force the direction of fallback allows you to feed the Corpse Thief Claw. You can wrack up a lot of bonus VP with easy combo charges thanks to the Death Jesters special rule, and the -1 Ld bubble from all coven units makes them more likely to fail the break test.

It's a very powerful unit. I think that scout and a squadron of 5 was enough to make it good. +1 VP for killing something is what makes it situationally OP.

 koooaei wrote:
It's a very powerful unit. I think that scout and a squadron of 5 was enough to make it good. +1 VP for killing something is what makes it situationally OP.

Yup. The solution of feeding throw away units to the death star to slow it down doesn't work, as throw away units get churned into VP's.

I havent run the formation yet..Just need to buy 1 more talos(2 more to run it with the formation that has a cronos and talos). It seems fun

I might as well ask this here.

I decided to slowly build up a Carnival of Pain, and am wondering how viable this thing is. I don't mean in some kind of tournament setting, but in general play. Does its total lack of AA screw it over?

No, as there are very few flyers that can do anything meaningful to it.

Alcibiades wrote:
I might as well ask this here.

I decided to slowly build up a Carnival of Pain, and am wondering how viable this thing is. I don't mean in some kind of tournament setting, but in general play. Does its total lack of AA screw it over?

The Carnival of Pain is like 2K without any upgrades basically so its probably MORE screwed because the points necessary to play those units as intended just aren't there. Probably have to play it over 2K to actually use it.

Corpsethief is great and, for a lot of opponents, a terrifying unit that serves as an awesome distraction Carnifex for your army. I find that for best results, a Corpsethief should be run in conjunction with a Dark Artisan for the FNP bonus, possibly re-rolling ones if the Haemie is your WL. All in all a great unit, but as other have already pointed out, it does have a few hard counters in the form of grav weaponry, ID/Force, and poison. As to the original question, I'd say it's very good and properly rated as long as you realize it's not a unit of Decurion Wraiths, in that it can be killed by its hard counters fairly easily if you're not careful with its movement and target priority.