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The notion that you can apply even close to equal damage in return is just hopeful wishing.

The range puts them outside of anything but "Heavy" weapons, effectively. So since you can't move and fire Heavies effectively, except for vehicles, you have to hope they don't jump back out of LOS so that you have anything to shoot at, at all. The only comparison I can draw is Devastator Marines with Heavy Bolters. 5 Devs w/ 4 HB cost 110 points. 4 JB with 4 SL cost 108. I mean, what's the comparison between them? Less shots, less strength, less mobility [not even close], same saves, same T, 1 extra wound.

It's not even the same game. The best that can be hoped for is that PDC [Post Decurion Codices] are all along this same power level. There's no real answer to something that hurts you a lot, from a range you can't effectively return fire at, that can move out of LOS after firing, that brings a decent save [How much IgCo has AP 3 that you could hit something that fast / out of sight with?] and can voluntarily take a good cover save whenever it likes? That can reposition 48" to get away from threats if need be?

I mean, right now the ideal counter is Chaos Marines with Drake Spam. 'Cause that's winning Tournaments right now. They took Eldar, a Tournament contender to begin with without allies or other ridiculous formation deals and made them Better. And then you need to deal with Wraithguard Units / Dragons in Serps for heavy AT... and a Gargantuan Wraith Knight? And a flyer that can peg most any flyer out of the sky?

 Peregrine wrote:

 Toofast wrote:
How many armies with ranged D weapons dominated an ITC event last year?

Weren't D-weapons already banned (or at least only available on the bad LOW options like the Shadowsword)? It's kind of hard to dominate events when you can't use something.

How about invisibility?

Who really cares? Even if invisibility is somehow balanced in theory playing against it isn't even close to fun for most people. Modifying it a bit to keep the basic concept but remove the worst of GW's stupidity is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

All they need to do is change to wording to reduce bs to 1 - then you can use flamers and blast weapons against it. You know - the typical things you'd use to hit something you can't see but know is there.

lustigjh wrote:
If it's this bad, I'm just going to refuse to play against it and be no worse off. I might play a few less games but I might also convince a few people not to bring cheesy units.

But... I have a fluffy Saim-Hann Windrider army with every model converted to be unique, painted to a high standard and with a name and background for every model and unit in the army along with a novella detailing my army's history that I pass out to each opponent before a game.

Okay I really don't, but just a blanket "don't play against it" is going to screw over the fluff players too (although it is likely a fluff player won't suddenly have a ton of scatter lasers if they didn't already).

Because its not like they can take their usual jetbikes and make all twin linke shuriken catapults counts as scaters or cannons.

I've been out of the game a couple of years now, and after reading through this thread, I'm glad I sold all my stuff off.

You've got two groups of people on this thread:

The sky is falling types and

Let's come up with a counter list, types.


Both groups have argued their points quite well,

But if the game had any semblance of balance, then it wouldn't have to come down to this. I've never had this problem with any other games I've played, apart from those made by GW, and I've been wargaming for about 25 years. People should be losing games of Warhammer because their opponent was better than them, not because somebody decided to over-power the latest army book.

Makumba wrote:
Because its not like they can take their usual jetbikes and make all twin linke shuriken catapults counts as scaters or cannons.

Anyone trying to do that is likely to be in for a rude awakening in any non-friendly game.

Has the (relatively) low Leadership of the Eldar Jetbike been explored as a weakness? I've failed plenty of morale checks for my jetbikes, and when I do, they fall back a LONG way.

 greatbigtree wrote:
The notion that you can apply even close to equal damage in return is just hopeful wishing.

The range puts them outside of anything but "Heavy" weapons, effectively. So since you can't move and fire Heavies effectively, except for vehicles, you have to hope they don't jump back out of LOS so that you have anything to shoot at, at all. The only comparison I can draw is Devastator Marines with Heavy Bolters. 5 Devs w/ 4 HB cost 110 points. 4 JB with 4 SL cost 108. I mean, what's the comparison between them? Less shots, less strength, less mobility [not even close], same saves, same T, 1 extra wound.

It's not even the same game. The best that can be hoped for is that PDC [Post Decurion Codices] are all along this same power level. There's no real answer to something that hurts you a lot, from a range you can't effectively return fire at, that can move out of LOS after firing, that brings a decent save [How much IgCo has AP 3 that you could hit something that fast / out of sight with?] and can voluntarily take a good cover save whenever it likes? That can reposition 48" to get away from threats if need be?

I mean, right now the ideal counter is Chaos Marines with Drake Spam. 'Cause that's winning Tournaments right now. They took Eldar, a Tournament contender to begin with without allies or other ridiculous formation deals and made them Better. And then you need to deal with Wraithguard Units / Dragons in Serps for heavy AT... and a Gargantuan Wraith Knight? And a flyer that can peg most any flyer out of the sky?

We don't know if the new Codex is going to be strictly better. We know Jetbikes can take some cheap dakka and they are putting destroyer weapons on some Elfdar crap but that's about it. The rest of the Codex could be utter crap. Hell, the Bikes could be the only thing good about new Elfdar. It wouldn't be the first time GW put out an internally imbalanced codex.

DCannon4Life wrote:
Has the (relatively) low Leadership of the Eldar Jetbike been explored as a weakness? I've failed plenty of morale checks for my jetbikes, and when I do, they fall back a LONG way.

Thing is that that requires you to be either close enough to cause enough casualties to cause a morale check or to use wargear or a psychic power that will cause one.

Those are all pretty unlikely,

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

DCannon4Life wrote:
Has the (relatively) low Leadership of the Eldar Jetbike been explored as a weakness? I've failed plenty of morale checks for my jetbikes, and when I do, they fall back a LONG way.

Thing is that that requires you to be either close enough to cause enough casualties to cause a morale check or to use wargear or a psychic power that will cause one.

Those are all pretty unlikely,

I could see it as a possibility if you could pick your psychic powers, and then you could pick ones which cause fear, but hope you have to roll for them. And not every army has access to them anyway. And yeah good luck getting close enough to cause morale checks through casualties.

I mean, I admit I'm not exactly a tactical genius, but I am really struggling to see a reliable way to deal with them, especially factoring in that the rest of their army is still very potent and will probably have things that can easily counter things you'd bring to counter Jetbikes.

 ImAGeek wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

DCannon4Life wrote:
Has the (relatively) low Leadership of the Eldar Jetbike been explored as a weakness? I've failed plenty of morale checks for my jetbikes, and when I do, they fall back a LONG way.

Thing is that that requires you to be either close enough to cause enough casualties to cause a morale check or to use wargear or a psychic power that will cause one.

Those are all pretty unlikely,

I could see it as a possibility if you could pick your psychic powers, and then you could pick ones which cause fear, but hope you have to roll for them. And not every army has access to them anyway. And yeah good luck getting close enough to cause morale checks through casualties.

I mean, I admit I'm not exactly a tactical genius, but I am really struggling to see a reliable way to deal with them, especially factoring in that the rest of their army is still very potent and will probably have things that can easily counter things you'd bring to counter Jetbikes.

I think a powerful ranged outfllanking unit is a possibility, but those will typically be quite expensive and will only be able to shoot at a single unit, so the rest can just kill it on their turn, without it even having made it's points back.

One thought I had was a full stealth team for my Tau, who come in at 90 points cheaper than the jetbikes, but without markerlight support they'll only do 2 to 3 wounds to the unit. So they might cause a morale check but the Eldar player still has an above average chance of passing that check thanks to LD8.

Even if the Bikes do run away, one of the other bike units can kill the entire stealth team if it isn't in cover (~7 unsaved wounds) and if it is in cover then it can get enough casualties (~4 unsaved wounds) to cause a morale check on me, which I have an equal chance of failing that the Eldar player did. Then add in that with only 2 suits left, if they did stick around they're basically useless due to the massive drop in their offensive firepower.

A 10-man unit (or 11--is the Warlock separate or an upgrade?) only needs to take 3 casualties before needing a morale check. The Warlock adds nothing in terms of his LD.

I already appreciate how much firepower Eldar will have if going first, and how much they will have on the bottom of turn one. Leadership is a relative weakness. If I were playing against bike spam, it's what I would be looking at. Well, that and as much AP3 Ignores Cover as I could get my hands on.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Great White wrote:
I mean the only way to counter the jet bikes is armor, or drop pods with some shooty units in them

There are a few other options. Tau with their ability to ignore cover should be able to kill them reasonably well, and IG artillery can hurt them if the table has enough LOS-blocking terrain to hide the big guns behind. Conventional tanks are probably the worst counter because D-weapon spam is the other half of the Eldar army and that turns AV 13-14 into a spectacular waste of points.

Problem is, those Jetbikes can outrange our markerlights thanks to that 12" move and JSJ and all that S6 will shred pathfinders and marker drones without some sort of tanking character to protect them, which can just be avoided thanks to the jetbikes manoeuvrability.

They can also outrange all of our crisis suit weapons. Max range is 36" (Missile Pod)+6" move, a full 6" less than the Jetbikes. Then a Crisis with dual missile pods puts out the same amount of shots as a single scatter laser but comes in at least at 52 points, almost twice that of a Windrider. So you can field ~twice as many windriders as crisis suits for the same points, put out double the shots and be way more manoeuvrable to boot.

So that leaves us with:
Fire Warriors - 30+6" range, they'll never hit them.
Railhead - has the range but only puts out a single large blast at AP4, not that reliable.
Ionhead - Again has the range and this time with a S8 AP3 large blast but gets hot.
Broadsides - HYMP suffer the same problem as crisis suits, but with the added problem of snapshots, Railguns get one shot so are basically useless.
Kroot - outflanking kroot might actually help, even if just to create danger zones around the board edges and limit the movement of the jetbikes.
Riptide - Has the range but is only BS3 and gets hot on its blast. So without markerlight support could fail to fire or scatter off target.

To be fair, it doesn't matter if they out range you by 6" at that distance. Setting up at your deploy line in Hammer and Anvil means you only have 48" worth of board in front of you. If the bikes want to sit in their deployment zone to stay out of range, they've limited themselves to 12" + whatever they feel comfortable risking for the assault move (we'll say 19" total). That's slightly more than a quarter of the board they're avoiding just to deny return fire. Finding LoS blocking terrain shouldn't be too tricky. Anything else that wants to move up will take your whole army's fire at that point.

Vanguard and Dawn of War will essentially force them to either accept being within range of centrally deployed units or huddle in the corner for blast markers.

If you ask me, every Eldar is a part of this crime. If one ever asks me for help, I will spit in his face. If ever face one on the table, I will destroy him, be it on or off the table.

Immersturm wrote:
If you ask me, every Eldar is a part of this crime. If one ever asks me for help, I will spit in his face. If ever face one on the table, I will destroy him, be it on or off the table.

Uhh... no... this is really Phil Kelly's fault who is a bigger fanboy about his Space Elves than Matt Ward ever was about his golden boys.

Immersturm wrote:
If you ask me, every Eldar is a part of this crime. If one ever asks me for help, I will spit in his face. If ever face one on the table, I will destroy him, be it on or off the table.

Right yeah it's the players fault, not at all the awful rules writers at GW.

WayneTheGame wrote:

lustigjh wrote:
If it's this bad, I'm just going to refuse to play against it and be no worse off. I might play a few less games but I might also convince a few people not to bring cheesy units.

But... I have a fluffy Saim-Hann Windrider army with every model converted to be unique, painted to a high standard and with a name and background for every model and unit in the army along with a novella detailing my army's history that I pass out to each opponent before a game.

Okay I really don't, but just a blanket "don't play against it" is going to screw over the fluff players too (although it is likely a fluff player won't suddenly have a ton of scatter lasers if they didn't already).

The point of a blanket "no thank you" is to give myself a chance to have fun. Fluffy or not, a JB list as bad as this seems is not going to be remotely fun.

I could make some fluffy unbound list which consists of an invisible Screamerstar, Belakor, and Heldrakes but I still wouldn't expect anyone to want to play against it.

lustigjh wrote:

WayneTheGame wrote:

lustigjh wrote:
If it's this bad, I'm just going to refuse to play against it and be no worse off. I might play a few less games but I might also convince a few people not to bring cheesy units.

But... I have a fluffy Saim-Hann Windrider army with every model converted to be unique, painted to a high standard and with a name and background for every model and unit in the army along with a novella detailing my army's history that I pass out to each opponent before a game.

Okay I really don't, but just a blanket "don't play against it" is going to screw over the fluff players too (although it is likely a fluff player won't suddenly have a ton of scatter lasers if they didn't already).

The point of a blanket "no thank you" is to give myself a chance to have fun. Fluffy or not, a JB list as bad as this seems is not going to be remotely fun.

I could make some fluffy unbound list which consists of an invisible Screamerstar, Belakor, and Heldrakes but I still wouldn't expect anyone to want to play against it.

This is exactly why a well balanced ruleset would benifit the fluffy players as much as, if not more, than competitive players. As it is now, depending on which theme you like for your army, you could end up with a bonkers army (Saim-Hann Eldar) or an awful army (Termie SM for example). You either lose most of your games because you happen to like a certain theme, or no one wants to play you because you happen to like a different theme. It's unacceptable really, especially at the price you pay to play the bloody game.

I agree with you, you're well within your rights to refuse a game, it's perfectly reasonable to not want to play a super broken army even if they made it with fluff in mind. It's just sad that you even have to do so.

I mean, I understand that there is the leaked video of the White Dwarf pages for the new Eldar codex. This is pretty reliable information.

But is everyone already prepared for 'the sky is falling' rhetoric before the actual codex comes out? I'm personally going to be saving my gripes for when the codex actually is in effect, and we've had a chance to see it in action. Math-hammering stats is a good foothold on their power, but there is liable to be some aspects missed without having the armies on the tabletop.

No one WANTS to refuse a game, feels gakky all around, and its already hard enough to find a game for people in some areas.

The thing is, its the difference between a farce for hour or two on who will win and saving one party time and the dismay of seeing their army lose.

lustigjh wrote:

WayneTheGame wrote:

lustigjh wrote:
If it's this bad, I'm just going to refuse to play against it and be no worse off. I might play a few less games but I might also convince a few people not to bring cheesy units.

But... I have a fluffy Saim-Hann Windrider army with every model converted to be unique, painted to a high standard and with a name and background for every model and unit in the army along with a novella detailing my army's history that I pass out to each opponent before a game.

Okay I really don't, but just a blanket "don't play against it" is going to screw over the fluff players too (although it is likely a fluff player won't suddenly have a ton of scatter lasers if they didn't already).

The point of a blanket "no thank you" is to give myself a chance to have fun. Fluffy or not, a JB list as bad as this seems is not going to be remotely fun.

I could make some fluffy unbound list which consists of an invisible Screamerstar, Belakor, and Heldrakes but I still wouldn't expect anyone to want to play against it.

Right, and I agree. My point was to basically illustrate how a lack of balance hurts the fluff player more because they're lumped into the WAAC category when the game is "supposed" to be about fluffy lists, but not all fluffy lists are created equal.

 clamclaw wrote:
I mean, I understand that there is the leaked video of the White Dwarf pages for the new Eldar codex. This is pretty reliable information.

But is everyone already prepared for 'the sky is falling' rhetoric before the actual codex comes out? I'm personally going to be saving my gripes for when the codex actually is in effect, and we've had a chance to see it in action. Math-hammering stats is a good foothold on their power, but there is liable to be some aspects missed without having the armies on the tabletop.

In what way can a 12" move which ignores terrain unless it lands in it, 36" range S6 gun and then 2D6" thrust move to get back out of range or LOS in a 27 point troop choice not be as broken as it sounds?

It is basically a Crisis Suit which is more manoeuvrable (extra 6" in movement plus turbo boost), puts out double the shots at half the points than a similarly fitted XV8 (and so negates the extra wound that Crisis suits have) and can be spammed in the troop slot and so has Objective Secured (admittedly XV8s can have ObSec if you take a Farsight detachment but that comes with its own downsides).

You don't need to see it in action to tell that it's gonna be bad.

I for one am glad that GW is simplifying the game. It's all coming down to:
1. Put models on table.
2. Roll to see who goes first.
3. Roll to shoot
4. On a 4+ remove what you shot at.
5. Next player's turn.

See? Simpler is better.

 agnosto wrote:
I for one am glad that GW is simplifying the game. It's all coming down to:
1. Put models on table.
2. Roll to see who goes first.
3. Roll to shoot
4. On a 4+ remove what you shot at.
5. Next player's turn.

See? Simpler is better.

This new format allows for much more time to be spent taking part in our favourite part of the HHHobby, buying GWs miniatures

If you see a grenade, with the pin in it, you don't need to wait till the pin is pulled to know that some serious gak would happen.

You can look at these bikes, and say that you can take 6 units of 5, at 1500 points, and only eat up 810 points of a list. That's 120 S6 Shots, that you can't retaliate against in the "typical" fashion of dumping shots into them. I mean, you can't even compete at volume of fire using GUARDSMEN at that range. Even if you were within 24", which you shouldn't be, Guardsmen can only output 162 S3 shots. In both cases, roughly 80 hits land.

So you could have 80 S:6 shots hit, or you could have 80 S:3 shots hit. Guardsmen, all 162 of them, are somehow magically on the board and able to shoot back. Uhhh.... these are the same points? Bikes can move 48" per turn? Bring a Jink save with them? Have MEQ armour? Get to move out of LOS in the Assault phase? AND they have the volume of firepower that pure grunt IG can do, but at longer range, and double the strength?

It's a joke!

Yes, 162 Guardsmen will be tough to table. Yes, they might make it across the board and completely swamp the objectives. Yes, these things are hypothetically possible. Why is the viable solution to a single unit to instead spam as close to 300 models as possible?

Even spamming 300 models won't work as those 810pts will still be killing 67 guardsmen a turn on average. 30 troops models that can gut a full blob squad and more at 36" range in one round of shooting... just crazy.

And 810pts leaves you with 1040pts to buy plenty of serpents, firedragons, artillery, warpspiders and a wraithknight with.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And as to the rest of the codex maybe being gak - what are they going to do? Nerf fragons melta down to st4, make warpspiders snp with a 6" move, make serps 10 all round with no shields and make war walkers auto explode on a to-hit roll of 6? Yeh I'm overegging the nerfing but most eldar units needed nerfing anyway without also getting the best 40k unit ever created by a country mile that can also not only be spammed - but take up the troop slots!

A 10-man unit (or 11--is the Warlock separate or an upgrade?) only needs to take 3 casualties before needing a morale check. The Warlock adds nothing in terms of his LD.

If the Warlock has embolden, the unit can reroll the LD check.

I'll stick to 30k games, I guess.

why do people blame Phil Kelly for this codex, wasn't he fired from the designed studio.

Makumba wrote:
why do people blame Phil Kelly for this codex, wasn't he fired from the designed studio.

No? Are you thinking of Mat Ward, or have I missed something?