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I've been testing and rethinking my Corsair rules over the past few weeks and I've come to the conclusion that too many of the problems I've been having with them are just basic problems with being Eldar.

The Craftworld book makes a number of assumptions about what units or weapons are based on 3rd edition, and hasn't really gotten a proper update since; the "Heavy" weapon type on every single gun comes from an age when 95% of the things those weapons could be equipped to (Bikes, Vehicles, Wraithlords...) ignored the move-and-fire penalty, the T3/5+ infantry that cost 8pts+ come from an age when bolters couldn't fire twice after moving and indirect-fire weapons were both expensive and could miss, the arsenal of powerful single-shot anti-armour weapons and quick-firing no-AP weapons comes from an age where vehicles didn't have saves, Monstrous Creatures were just Tyranid vehicles instead of appearing nigh-constantly everywhere, and multi-wound infantry with good saves didn't exist, and the piss-poor melee arsenal comes from an age where grenades were usable in melee against vehicles and you could rely on having T3-T4 targets you wanted to charge in most games.

So in short I've been trying to use the Craftworld, Harlequin, and Dark Eldar as benchmarks with which to figure out what Corsairs should do, and I'm becoming increasingly convinced that's a fundamental mistake. The arsenal of possible weapons has entirely too many holes in it, I'm benchmarking prices against units that are already absurdly overpriced, and I'm benchmarking functionality against units that aren't actually that effective.

A more concrete list of the issues and what to do about them:

1. Speed is not relevant. Having enough mobility to get to weapons range is relevant, but if you've got a 48" range gun the ability to move is kind of pointless, and the points values we've been given seem to massively overvalue speed. My thoughts on the subject are to give the Corsairs access to more Deep Strike and pseudo-Deep Strike (Outflank, Infiltrate) mechanics, thereby clearing away the inevitable turn of moving into range with anything threatening in which everything dies, and to dramatically expand the options and rewards for fighting at close range. We need a reason to move.

2. T3/1W/5+ is so bad it overshadows everything else about an infantry unit. It doesn't matter how much stuff you give them, a T3/1W/5+ unit is just going to die. If you give it enough guns that it can make its points back in one turn of shooting it's going to die if you don't get first turn, otherwise it has to be basically nonthreatening. And an Eldar unit can't be nonthreatening. In my experience of trying to use Scourges I found that 4+/6++ with a 6+ FNP didn't make a lot of difference, but it made the unit live long enough to have an impact on the game as opposed to vanishing if sneezed on, so I've brought 4+ back for Corsair infantry and 3+ back for the bikes.

3. Guns. Right now between them Craftworlders and Dark Eldar can cough up rough analogues for a lot of the Imperial infantry weapon arsenal, but there are no analogues to the plasma gun, the autocannon, the grenade launcher, the midrange/generalist guns. No multi-shot/multi-damage weapons. And the vehicles have taken a pounding from the Imperial arsenal packing more and more barrels onto the same vehicles, leaving the poor old Falcon looking dejected with its three guns while the Repulsor wanders around shooting off seven or eight guns. I can't fix the models, and I don't want to slash prices/durability to give the Eldar multiple squadrons, but I am going to try raising the rate of fire for a lot of the vehicle-specific guns (in the way that the Predator autocannon is now distinct from the ordinary one) and see if I can't address problems that way. As for the infantry I've made a start at breaking open that gap with the dissonance cannon, but I think I'm going to need an ordinary-scale plasma weapon or rapid-fire darklight weapon if I'm going to finish it off.

4. Crap melee. GW seems to have priced basic melee weapons based on WS alone and ignored the huge importance Strength has, which leaves the Eldar utterly irrelevant in melee most of the time; I tried to get a start at cracking that with "void-" as a prefix meaning "power weapon but with +1S", but after trying to fight a battlesuit army and coming away sort of stumped I'm left thinking a generic powerfist-analogue is really kind of necessary. As a stopgap I'm bringing the dissonance breach charges in for the Corsairs as a melee weapon that lets them threaten vehicles, and I'm thinking for a longer-term solution a fixed to-wound (along the lines of an Agonizer or a Witchblade) is a more Eldar-y solution than taking the Imperial road and throwing S8 or S10 into the mix.

I expect synergy bubbles, relics, warlord traits, and stratagems to get addressed when Codexes start happening; I've got my ideas for Corsairs but I'm trying to get the basics whipped into shape before I go that direction. In the meantime a few wackier ideas:

Psychic powers. I like Maze (put target enemy unit into Reserves); it's characterful, amusing, and lets you screw with the battlefield in a major way without up and deleting things. Not sure if I want to use it, but I might. The other powers from the 7e Aethermancy discipline that I haven't worked in are Webway Breach (put a friendly unit into Reserves), Webway Rift (an ineffectual blast attack), and Warp Blink (teleport a unit 2d6").

Kinetic Shroud. At the moment I've got it giving a 5+ Invulnerable save that improves to a 4+ if the unit Advances; I'm not sure it helps enough. I've got a half-baked idea wherein moving at speed gives "momentum" that can be expended to do things, but the best idea I've got so far is that "momentum"-buildup overcharges your shields such that you can spend them to discard hits, and at that point it has the upsides of having Drones as a Tau player but the other guy can't shoot the Drones. I will keep poking at the idea but would appreciate thoughts if anyone's got them.

So that's where I'm at with the problems/solutions. Cheaper/tougher units, more weapons, more Deep Strike.

You've got a couple good points. I think the things that are most spot on are:

(1) T3/W1/5+ is so bad it's not worth talking about. This is a really important thing to say. Especially b/c with other armies getting piles of T3/W1/5+ the meta will include lots of anti-horde weapons, which means paying 8pts for a guardian is a total joke. Did i mention that the 3pt conscript is immune to morale?

(2) Eldar units have not kept pace with the power inflation of Imperial Units. I'm not sure if GW really intends to favor the Imperium as heavily as their rule writing would suggest - I just think that with composition rules favoring soup, all it takes are a few badly written units and you'll see the same ones in every list (Conscripts w/ SE, Celestine, Piles of Mortars and of course cheap smite spam, which FW was kind enough to let Chaos in on.)

Falcons are a good unit to single out in this regard. A falcon with a bright lance and cannon is 206pts - It's probably worth 2/3 that.

I've been playing (mostly proxying) corsairs since their 5th edition incarnation. My two cents:

1. Totally agree.
2. I've actually found T3 with a 5+ save to be better than any other edition I've p played now that we actually get a save against bolters and are only wounded on 3s by strength 5. However, this is only true of cheap T3 with a 5+. Guardians aren't awful in my book; I can get a decent number of bodies for cheap, and I don't expect them to survive whatever goes after them. If I put them in a serpent, I can actually bring their firepower to bare. The issue with T3 and a 5+ save is when you give them any kind of gun to make them expensive. So I think giving more things deepstrike or whatever is a good way to address this.

It's worth mentioning however, that past incarnations of corsairs (at least since 5th) have always been big on either shooting out of vehicles or doing move-shoot-move. I think this is the biggest issue they face right now in the official rules (other than the part where most of their rules are missing entirely). They remained about as fragile as ever, but they lost the ability to hide after shooting.

3. Personally, I don't particularly want an analogue to most of the weapons you mention. My personal preference is to have weapons that are really good at busting tanks, weapons that are really good at clearing hordes, and maybe something like the missile launcher to do a little of both. I'm not fond of strength 7 that does 2 damage. That's basically a worse blaster in my eyes. Options are great, but I wouldn't stress about mimicking imperial guns. That said, you're right about eldar in general being hampered by the "Heavy" rule to an unprecedented degree. Something to address that, even just slapping the word "corsair" in front of a weapon name and making it assault, would be very helpful.

4. I agree with all this. I'd also like to toss out the idea of weapons that auto-wound on to-hit rolls of 6. Between our superhuman abilities and our advanced weaponry, I get the impression that eldar are supposed to be so good at finesse that we don't care about raw power.

*Bubbles and warlord traits:
Thoughts on attaching some move-shoot-move potential to these? "Models within 6" of a Baron at the start of the Charge phase may immediately Move or Advance instead of Charging." Something like that? It forces you to group up and/or pay a character tax to make it a prevalent part of the army, but it gives us the option back.

*Maze: would that be walk on from the back edge reserves or deepstrike reserves? The former seems too good even with a high-ish WC. The latter is interesting but almost makes the enemy even harder to deal with by giving them the ability to re-deepstrike or deepstrike for the first time.

* Kinetic Shroud. A 5+ invul that gets better when you advance seems solid to me. Shrugging off hits might get messy. I could see opponents firing bolters first, for instance, to get rid of the shroud benefits, then hit you with a lascannon anyway.

Wyldhunt wrote:
...3. Personally, I don't particularly want an analogue to most of the weapons you mention. My personal preference is to have weapons that are really good at busting tanks, weapons that are really good at clearing hordes, and maybe something like the missile launcher to do a little of both. I'm not fond of strength 7 that does 2 damage. That's basically a worse blaster in my eyes. Options are great, but I wouldn't stress about mimicking imperial guns. That said, you're right about eldar in general being hampered by the "Heavy" rule to an unprecedented degree. Something to address that, even just slapping the word "corsair" in front of a weapon name and making it assault, would be very helpful.

Some clarification: My worry isn't specifically about mimicking Imperial guns, my worry is that one high-power shot (Bright Lance, Missile Launcher, Blaster, Fusion Gun, Haywire Blaster, Heat Lance, Dark Lance...) was good at handling vehicles back in 3rd and really isn't anymore (especially at 15+pts/gun), with the loss of easy rerolls (one Guide per army per turn, no twin-linked rerolls) and the advent of saves on just about everything, and the increased wound count on everything you aren't trying to get two or three shots through, you've got to get seven or eight through to have middling odds of actually killing a heavy tank; and when we're dealing with one-shot multi-damage weapons or multi-shot weapons with no AP there's a big selection of targets (armoured multi-wound in even middling quantity; Terminators, Primaris, etc.) that we're just not equipped to deal with. The only gun we've got that's any good at it is the Starcannon, weighing in at 30pts/gun, Heavy, coming on only vehicle-sized platforms, and made sort of irrelevant by Invulnerable saves (since you're paying for -4 AP that all too frequently just doesn't do more than -1 or -2 would).

I've found the Lynx almost too unreliable to use against armour, because even with the best intentions and the best targets you've got a 30% chance of whiffing entirely (failing to hit and wound with both shots) unless you park a 100+pt Farseer behind it with nothing to do but Guide it, and if you're dumping 350pts into one tank two shots, no matter how powerful, just aren't enough. And you need perfect rolls to one-round a Leman Russ. A 350pt Pulsar needs perfect rolls to one-round a Leman Russ.