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I just got off the phone with an old friend of mine who is also a 40k player. In fact he's the guy who got me into this silly game all those years ago. We were discussing my next painting project, which will probably be to flesh out a large number of old Eldar figures I have had forever and possible army builds. During this conversation I mentioned the fact that Fire Dragons are among the more popular Eldar units today and that people stuff those annoyingly unkillable Eldar vehicles full of them and whisk them around the batlefield on tank and MEQ killing sprees. No, I have no problem with that and will probably do it myself.

But it has not always been like that. Today's Eldar player would be horrified at what they used to be.

The first incanation of a matured Eldar army list apeared in WD and a bit later in the 40k Compilation way back circa 1990 or so and the fire dragon troop type was armed with a plain old melta gun. Sounds fine, right? Wrongo. You see the melta gun as originally written in the RT rulebook, while having undeniably nasty strength and armour save modifiers, was a twelve inch move or shoot weapon. Yes you heard that right...a gun with a range shorter than most pistols of the time that was move OR shoot. This made the Fire Dragon just about the most useless troop type in the whole Eldar army.

One of my regular opponents of the time was an Eldar player with a wonderfully painted army that had all the aspects represented. In a dozen or so games I don't ever remember those Dragons firing a single shot in the game....ever. He would run up and try to set up a shot (which would have no doubt been deadly given the weapn stats) but would be frustrated when my Orks, Nurgle Renegades, or Squats would shoot him to pieces before he could fire, charge him, or worse of all just step out of range! This irriated him and to be honest was depressing for me as I had alwas found the Jes Goodwin Fire Dragons to be amongst my favorite figures of the whole range and it pained me to see them be so useless.

This was a short lived state of afairs. The release of the 40k Battle Manual changed up many of the existing weapon rules in preperation for what would be the eventual release of 2nd edition. One of the changes was to make the melta gun an effective weapon by removing the "move or shoot" restriction and the rest is history.

As the title says: Fire Dragons..my how they have changed! Thgey went from being a horribly broken and useless troop type to being a mainstay of the Eldar army.

TR

Fire Dragons - a great example of how GW power-swings a model.

So far, in their infancy, they were totally useless.

In 2nd edition, they were pretty good, but you would still seldom see the humble Fire Dragon, as Warp Spiders and Swooping Hawks were by far the best aspect warriors, as they combined extremely high mobility with great killing power. Both aspects were nerfed incredibly with the advent of 3rd edition, and neither have managed to achieve the status they once held in 2nd.

Getting back on topic...

When 3rd rolled around, the humble fire dragon now had a ride in the Waveserpent. With 50% troops able to fire out of vehicles, the Fire Dragon boat was a ubiquitious sight on battlefields.

GW soon released the V3 eldar codex which dropped the strength of their guns to S6. This meant that even at 6", they were pretty much impotent against AV14 and utterly feeble against most armor at maximum range, which changed their role from tank hunting and heavy infantry killing to only the latter. This didn't stop the proliferation of the super gun boats however...

So GW made all eldar vehicles have no fire points, and forced everyone to exit out the back. This immediately eliminated the fast moving fire dragon gunboats and changed their role once again to ONE SHOT heavy infantry killers, since with their SV4+, they were almost certain to die after their initial volley of shots - unless you did something tricky, like put them in combat or supported them with a CC squad.

GW eliminated the latter tactic when 4th edition rolled around with the rules that squads couldn't charge targets different than they shot, and they couldn't charge after disembarking from a moving transport. This cemented the Firedragon's role as a one shot heavy infantry killer.

The V4 codex gave them back S8 meltaguns instead of those rubbish fusion guns. This let them hunt tanks in addition to heavy infantry - albiet, still in a one-shot fashion. They also became more common, as most of the CC aspect warriors became much harder to use due to the changes to the transport rules - and the V4 ruleset swung the game towards firefights as opposed to HTH.

Now that V5 has rolled around, with the new damage charts, Firedragons are now super-tank-killers, and sometimes infantry killers, as the new cover rules have somewhat reduced their efficiency in the latter role. They still die horribly to counterattacks due to T3 Sv4+. Due to their effectiveness in their chosen role, they are a common sight on battlefields of V5, but as the new "run" rules have given their CC brethern a much needed boost, they are not quite as ubiquitous sight as in recent memory.