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Devil's advocate (or just major cope), but perhaps the Realspace Raider Detachment makes for for it's terrible bonus by having overtuned Enhancements for the characters it encourages you to bring and really power stratagems to abuse.

 bullyboy wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

Tyel wrote:
As Vipoid said its just awful.

I realise being in the "wait and see" for other factions, I should be for my own - but this just looks incredibly boring and I don't see how that can be fixed.

Didn't really want pain tokens back - and certainly didn't want them back like this. Absolutely didn't want a detachment rule which amounted to "you can have up to 3 more pain tokens if you bring along all 3 types of character".

It's clearly how they are referencing the real space raid specifically.

When the codex comes out with more detachment types, you'll see ones that reward only taking a cult, coven or cabal

Sure, but this is it for probably at least a year (they’re not on the map yet), which is pretty weak. That’s one of my early gripes so far. If you don’t really dig the detachment type (doesn’t really fit theme of your army), you’re going to be waiting a long time for choice (for many factions), which really sucks if you’re in the “end of an edition” category.

On the other hand, free, singular online odf detachments are very easy to review - it's not god-given that they need to keep that single detachment for some of the factions for years, if it gets too bad they can easily crank out revised detachments with the regular balance updates or whatever. If they care enough to do so remains to be seen, of course.

 AtoMaki wrote:

Dudeface wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

Tsagualsa wrote:

 Shadow Walker wrote:
Is Strenght 2 on Twin Splinter Rifle a typo or is it meant to be useless against non infantry?

No, the Kabalite splinter weapons have S2 too, expect the Cannons with S3. Obviously their gimmick is low strength, but Anti-Infantry 3+.

Except you could already do that with Poison Tongue. And no one did.

Because even wounding on 3+, spamming weapons with no AP, D1, and no special rules to improve either is a losing prospect.

Why is it? Its basically a better bolter at this point. Or is wonding on 4+/5+ with ap d1 like most troops also a losing prospect?

I thought we already know that it is since the whole "no 2+ cover for MEQ" reveal?

I just don't thinking that a factions core infantry not being radically better at shooting than most oher factions core infantry is really something to complain about.

Tac marines get the shots at 24" as their perk, sisters lose that but get more bodies hence more lethal up close, guardians keep a point of ap but otherwise nothing remarkable, gauss rifles got lethal hits 6+ instead of ap and kabalites will wound most infantry easier than a lot of other factions.

What's the problem exactly? The game needed to be less lethal, its what we all got. It’s not your army specifically, whatever that may be, more than any other that's losing firepower.

 bullyboy wrote:
Power from pain is OK I guess, although I prefer the turn escalation effects personally.
The detachment rule is horribly bad and feels like they missed a second part of the rule out.

The venom got nerfed a little. Still -1 to hit, but only a 6+ invuln (which kabalites also get, so I guess that part of PfP built in.

No wych spotlight but they may get a rule to charge from a transport after it moved, while kabalites go round clearing objectives.

Splinter is actually decent(ish). Monsters don’t care though .

Until I see more of the wych cult I won’t be able to formulate a solid opinion.

Wyches do get an advance and charge strat (in the commentary).... which helps, but isn't great because its the standard stratagem pitfall of 'once-per-turn only one unit can do the thing that all units of that type need to do.'

Not sure about the whole package. The pain tokens are fine, I guess, for metering rerolls (I do like the gain from battleshock, very characterful). But paying in advance for bad luck protection (particularly on attacks, where you can still whiff in the wounds step) just doesn't do much for me.

Detachment ability is boring trash, and since they aren't one of the chosen 9 codexes on the roadmap, they've got a year+ of only that.

Venoms seem squishy. The revamp of toughness and anti-tank weapons seems to have completely passed them by and made them weaker.

Kabalites are... something. 3+ poison is not a surprise. the mix of heavy and assault weapons in the unit isn't a surprise, but still makes me irritated. Phantasm grenade launcher has fallen so far.

Talos haywire gun is extraordinarily reliable, if you can hit. I guess always save a pain token, because this is might well be best in class anti-tank for the faction.


Not great, all told. Not surprising, either. Looks like the start of someone's rock/paper/scissors project against infantry.

Wait, why splinter rifle on Venom has rapid fire, but infantry one isn't? Is that first weapon we saw with different behavior depending on platform?

Also, Lelith spectacle rule looks kind of a waste, you probably want to fire it ASAP as her unit might not live two rounds but then you lose ++ part of it unless opponent manages to wipe her whole squad out or has some precision weapons.

In ever growing collection of suspension of disbelief shattering gak that is orkstodes/squatstodes/otherinflatedstodes, I like how huge scythes on jet tank are less threatening than punches of a single orkstode, while said jet tank is easier to bring down than a couple of runt boyz. Bravo! Not to mention the fact DE join the ranks of races whose infantry (and TBH tanks kind of too) looks like a joke next to x-stode races that kept overinflated stats, despite being considerably more elite in the fluff. I guess the Old One making them took a lot of breaks that day, eh?

 vipoid wrote:
Especially since their firepower is still laughably bad

Except seeing embarked infantry weapons are part of vehicle now for all purposes, a single pain token turns rerolls for both the vehicle and embarked shooty squad on, which is pretty efficient. People while about Oath but DE look much better in alpha strike department (and each unit they kill or break means more rerolls which can snowball pretty fast if enemy isn't careful or brought lots of MSU)...

 Irbis wrote:
Except seeing embarked infantry weapons are part of vehicle now for all purposes, a single pain token turns rerolls for both the vehicle and embarked shooty squad on, which is pretty efficient. People while about Oath but DE look much better in alpha strike department (and each unit they kill or break means more rerolls which can snowball pretty fast if enemy isn't careful or brought lots of MSU)...

It's something. However, I'd argue that the efficiency gained here is immediately lost by the fact we basically don't get a detachment rule.

I'd initially misread it and thought our HQs provided pain tokens each turn (doing something useful for the first time in 3 editions).

But no, they each give a single extra token at the start of the game and then that's it. That's the entirety of our detachment rule.

Dudeface wrote:

I just don't thinking that a factions core infantry not being radically better at shooting than most oher factions core infantry is really something to complain about.

You're right. It's completely reasonable that half the weapons in the DE codex are absolute trash. They're only an NPC faction after all, and thus the shooting of their infantry, elite/specialist infantry, jump units, assault units, jetbikes, vehicles, monsters should just be abysmal as standard.

Voss wrote:

Talos haywire gun is extraordinarily reliable, if you can hit. I guess always save a pain token, because this is might well be best in class anti-tank for the faction.

By what possible measure?

I assume that Wyches and Succubui will get some form of ‘assault from vehicles’ in their own Datacards.

I’m guessing they don’t want bulky units like Kabalites or Coven doing that.

The pain tokens seem a bit ‘win more’ to me.

Glad the Warriors kept decent armour. The rifle is okay but I’m getting flashbacks to the early Dark Eldar days where an eighteen man unit would lean entirely on its embedded Darklight weapons.

 vipoid wrote:

Dudeface wrote:

I just don't thinking that a factions core infantry not being radically better at shooting than most oher factions core infantry is really something to complain about.

You're right. It's completely reasonable that half the weapons in the DE codex are absolute trash. They're only an NPC faction after all, and thus the shooting of their infantry, elite/specialist infantry, jump units, assault units, jetbikes, vehicles, monsters should just be abysmal as standard.

Compared to... what? Kabalites are more effective into t4+ infantry than anything most of the game manages on their own core infantry. How good do you need them to be exactly?

Lelith only being Damage 1 is very underwhelming. Makes me wonder if combat drugs can help her with that.

 vipoid wrote:

Except you could already do that with Poison Tongue. And no one did.

Because even wounding on 3+, spamming weapons with no AP, D1, and no special rules to improve either is a losing prospect.

yeah and now we don't need to play poisoned tongue specifically to have that now

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:
Lelith only being Damage 1 is very underwhelming. Makes me wonder if combat drugs can help her with that.

It puzzles me that she got Sustained Hits rather than Devastating Wounds. I would have thought deft, precise attacks at the enemy weak spots fits her fluff more than super-frenzy.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
yeah and now we don't need to play poisoned tongue specifically to have that now

True.

Just a shame they had to sacrifice everything else for it.

None of these changes really surprise me and are what we've come to expect.

I am kind of surprised that people are surprised/angry that splinter rifle et al lost their AP. This edition has been mostly about scaling back the AP creep of 9th and giving the game a little survivability back. The Drukhari reveal does exactly that. I like that Splinter is now more focused on getting rid of infantry and doesn't automatically hard counter monsters.

Regarding the escalating rules being gone. As someone who has played Drukhari, Daughters of Khaine, and Idoneth Deepkin in the past few editions of AoS/40k I am actually glad that it is gone. Something very dependent on what current round is is really hard to balance and all those armies have gone from one extreme of the spectrum to another. Hopefully this will balance the scales a bit.

Will be interesting to see how dependent on HQ the detachment is. I kind of miss the old days when you could just mix and match Drukhari units instead of this 3-minicodexes-in-1-codex thing we had in 9th.

When did Venoms stop being able to transport Wracks? Not a DEldar player so I missed that unfortunate development.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
When did Venoms stop being able to transport Wracks? Not a DEldar player so I missed that unfortunate development.

Never. There's nothing stopping them from doing so, they just can't Combat Squad. The only unit restriction mentioned is No Grotesques and no unit with Fly.

 Eldarsif wrote:
None of these changes really surprise me and are what we've come to expect.

I am kind of surprised that people are surprised/angry that splinter rifle et al lost their AP. This edition has been mostly about scaling back the AP creep of 9th and giving the game a little survivability back. The Drukhari reveal does exactly that. I like that Splinter is now more focused on getting rid of infantry and doesn't automatically hard counter monsters.

When did Splinter weapons have AP?

Dudeface wrote:
Compared to... what? Kabalites are more effective into t4+ infantry than anything most of the game manages on their own core infantry. How good do you need them to be exactly?

I don't think DE necessarily need them to be good - but the reaction is more to people going "this is going to be the hammer".
It won't be.

Mathematically new (nerfed) Shuriken catapults are better into Guardsmen and Marines - and the same into Terminators. Kabalites are however going to be better into say Orks and Plague Marines (assuming they are just going to be T5 3+ 2 wounds). Shuriken is however better into say Venoms (and just about any non-infantry) as a trade off.
If someone said on the back of the Eldar release "Guardian carpet is the way to go" then I think people would have looked at them funny.

We have at least seen Shuriken spam (not Guardians though) - whereas mass splinter rifle with Poisoned Tongue is not a thing and has never even hinted at being a thing.

My main criticism on power from pain is that its "boring". 10 Kabalites in a Raider all rerolling to hit with 1 pain token is probably "efficient" (points depending). Units of 3 Talos with the Haywire could be quite efficient too (expects to be about 10 mortal wounds due to the critical wound and twin linked interaction). (It can't ever actually be 10 mortal wounds - but that's the average.)

For a lot of other units? Well, maybe I'm kidding myself - but I hope things like Incubi and characters are going to be hitting on 2s. So getting rerolls is nice (because you can always skew into 1s) - but its not obviously a massive boost. I guess if you are allowed to fish for 6s with say Lelith it might add up to something? Because baseline she's killing 2 Marines, or a whole terminator. Which you know, seems fair going for a melee special character... (tbf she could have additional rules that they've decided not to talk about because DE).

As far as I can see the stratagem is likely a sidegrade on just using the CP reroll.

@Eldarsif: I think folks were expecting Drukhari to be glass cannons, and as they are pretty lightly armoured (less Toughness bumps, a drop in INV save) they perhaps expected them to get an AP on their rifles. I’m just speculating.

The issue with Poison being strictly anti-infantry is that it might fall flat against bikes, swarms, cavalry, Jump/Fly troops if those keywords are popular. At that point they’re only wounding T4 modes on a 6+.

For example, if my Tyranid Raveners become Cavalry there’s a bit of an oddity in them compared to Tyranid Warriors which are pretty similar barring the whole tail vs legs thing.

Maybe Coven will get different ‘Anti’ weapons. As I am sure folks have pointed, these brief previews miss out a lot of details.

But then…Wyches have lost their native Advance and Charge…so I really don’t know.

 Souleater wrote:
they perhaps expected them to retain the AP on their rifles.

Splinter Rifles are currently AP0.

Yeah, corrected. I meant that folks were possibly expecting to get that, rather than a three up poison.

Not sure why they would be when most AP adjustments have been a decrease to "reduce lethality".

 vipoid wrote:

Voss wrote:

Talos haywire gun is extraordinarily reliable, if you can hit. I guess always save a pain token, because this is might well be best in class anti-tank for the faction.

By what possible measure?

By the measure of the damage is puts out? I wasn't claiming it was exemplary, just best the DE are likely to have access to.
A dark lance is a single shot, hits on 4+ (unless you want to have your mobile guys stand still) and wounds a fair few battle tanks on 4+, lesser vehicles on 3+, and may or may not have to deal with invulnerable saves.
The haywire gun critically wounds tanks on 4+, gets to reroll that, and any crits turn into mortal wounds. With a pain token rerolling hits and two shots, you're looking at reasonable odds of 3 or 6 mortal wounds.

...am I forgetting about good AT weapons in the Dark elf arsenal? haywire and lances were basically it last time I checked.

Tyel wrote:

My main criticism on power from pain is that its "boring". 10 Kabalites in a Raider all rerolling to hit with 1 pain token is probably "efficient" (points depending). Units of 3 Talos with the Haywire could be quite efficient too (expects to be about 10 mortal wounds due to the critical wound and twin linked interaction). (It can't ever actually be 10 mortal wounds - but that's the average.)

I think it's just disappointing that there are so few ways to actually spend pain tokens.

You might have thought there would be some more options in the pot. e.g. giving a unit FNP or improving its 6+ invulnerable to 5+ would make sense. As would the ability to advance and charge, rather than just rerolling advance/charge rolls.

What about something like giving a unit strikes first? Or letting a unit recover some lost wounds?

I don't know, it just seems like there's far more they could have done with the ability. Especially if it's also going to completely swallow our detachment ability.

Tyel wrote:

For a lot of other units? Well, maybe I'm kidding myself - but I hope things like Incubi and characters are going to be hitting on 2s. So getting rerolls is nice (because you can always skew into 1s) - but its not obviously a massive boost. I guess if you are allowed to fish for 6s with say Lelith it might add up to something? Because baseline she's killing 2 Marines, or a whole terminator. Which you know, seems fair going for a melee special character... (tbf she could have additional rules that they've decided not to talk about because DE).

Maybe someday DE will be allowed to reroll wounds, rather than hits.

 Souleater wrote:
Yeah, corrected. I meant that folks were possibly expecting to get that, rather than a three up poison.

So in edition where point been reduce ap you expected increase?

Especially when 3+ save doesn't go to 2+ in cover vs ap0.

Tyel wrote:
I guess if you are allowed to fish for 6s with say Lelith it might add up to something? Because baseline she's killing 2 Marines, or a whole terminator. Which you know, seems fair going for a melee special character... (tbf she could have additional rules that they've decided not to talk about because DE).

Pop a pain token on her and use the thrilling spectacle and she's killing 2 terminators comfortably, or 4 marines.

I wasn’t personally, no, but trying to explain why I think other folks might have expected it.

Athletic Aerialists just being a feature of vehicles now is pretty good. Death to stratagems!

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:
Lelith only being Damage 1 is very underwhelming. Makes me wonder if combat drugs can help her with that.

I would hope not - she famously does not use them!

 Souleater wrote:
@Eldarsif: I think folks were expecting Drukhari to be glass cannons, and as they are pretty lightly armoured (less Toughness bumps, a drop in INV save) they perhaps expected them to get an AP on their rifles. I’m just speculating.

The issue with Poison being strictly anti-infantry is that it might fall flat against bikes, swarms, cavalry, Jump/Fly troops if those keywords are popular. At that point they’re only wounding T4 modes on a 6+.

For example, if my Tyranid Raveners become Cavalry there’s a bit of an oddity in them compared to Tyranid Warriors which are pretty similar barring the whole tail vs legs thing.

Maybe Coven will get different ‘Anti’ weapons. As I am sure folks have pointed, these brief previews miss out a lot of details.

But then…Wyches have lost their native Advance and Charge…so I really don’t know.

I feel the idea of a glass cannon is a few editions old at this point. At some point even people argued that Craftworlds were glass cannon, but they have a lot of armor to protect them if you are playing a full force. Wave Serpents have been almost impossible to crack in older editions.

Drukhari retained their BS(which is imo good) and now get assault 2 shots at 24" range instead of Rapid Fire. Also wounding on 3+ instead of 4+ is a good change.

That is also ignoring the fact that they are essentially troop choices. They are boots on the ground and cost under 10 points in the current version so I don't expect them to be autotake en masse(like Wracks and Wyches when the 9th codex came out).

Ultimately I feel like they got a glow up and essentially didn't lose anything(except maybe easily wounding high toughness monsters), making them heavier hitters than in 9th. What remains to be seen is how cavalry is dealt with. Have we seen any proper cavalry reveals in the past few weeks? I have gone over the past few reveals and it is all Big heroes, tanks, and basic infantry that is being revealed. Could very well be that cavalry gets the keyword Infantry and Cavalry so these weapons could still affect them. I guess only time will tell.

Full core rulebook has leaked now, and out in the wild.