Coping with Dark Eldar as a White Scars/bikers player?

[ShinyRhino]

I'm an Ultramarine painter, but White Scars combat doctrine player. Bikes are my bread and butter. I'm going against my own rules here, and wondering how a force of almost all bikers, back up with Assault Marines and Landspeeders is going to cope with the upcoming Dark Eldar.

I know most of the Dark Eldar stuff out now is rumours and hearsay, with few confirmed facts, but I'm trying to wrap my head around how to face these crazy Space Drow.

I know a lot of folks like bikers because you can spam melta out the wazoo with them. Works a treat against traditional mechanized forces. However, Dark Eldar seem liek the sort who can take the killing of a Raider, and then stab your face off in melee after they've dumped out of the exploded Raider. It feels like you're going to want to pop Raiders from distances of greater than 6-12". Yes?

If so, how will it happen? Paired Typhoons? Heavy bolter and/or multimelta attack bikes? Plsamaguns on your squads, instead of meltaguns? Good old twin-linked bolters?

[Gearhead]

Raiders are very close to the easiest thing in the world to pop if they kept their old statline. Just shoot anything at them really; Plasma Works, Melta Works, Heavy Bolters work, the list goes on. I'd honestly be more worried about what's inside. That's why I'd suggest people start taking a single flamer in their bikes squads; DE are scary in combat, but are not scary when they are on fire. Flamers will kill lightly armored T3 squads like the DE have pretty much by themselves. I'd think you'd have an advantage against them with bikers, since your shooting is better (Lance Spam Excepted). Even with the lances, as a biker player you have less to loose. Loosing a Pred hurts; loosing a single biker does not (as much).

[minigun762]

I see squads of Heavy Bolter Attack Bikes being really useful.

 

T5 should make you fairly durable against their S3. S5 is enough to penetrate or stun their armor and punch through most of their infantry.

 

Something tells me that you're really going to have to rely on multi-shot weapons against them, as single big shots just won't mean nearly as much.

 

Plus don't discount the free TL Bolter.

[ShinyRhino]

Well, we can't discount Poison from the Dark Eldar. Not sure if it's only their melee attacks or not, but wounding on 4+ helps them a lot against biker T5.

[Magnus the red]

All depends on what kind of list they're running. I'll be using a variant that basically revolves around 2 large units of Hellions, 3 Wyche units in raiders, Bombers, 9 Bikes, the SC that gives you rerolls for Combat drugs and the SC that let's you go first. The list runs along the principle of duality, in that every unit can deal with 2 threats effectively. Hellions and Wyches are effective against both light and heavy infantry, the bikes can deal with both standard infantry and fire support units, Raiders and Bombers can nail heavy armour and expensive units. Elite units are generally outmaneuvered, hammered by the remaining heavy/special weapons then ripped to shreds in CC by heavily boosted units.

 

Against that kind of force you need to hit units and hit them fast. Trying to play a war of attrition is going to get you pulverised as the pain counters rack up on the DE units. Atleast half of them will be starting with FNP as well as boosts from their respective transports and from there they're just a destroyed unit away from becoming FNP, Furious charging madmen with incredible mobility. As a biker heavy army, you lack the long range firepower to blunt their offensive so what you need to do is one of the following:

 

.Encircle them with you bikes and use lots of small units so they are frequently left out in the open following an assault. This works far better against the inexperienced DE player as they generally panic when you start scything into their fragile units and cover their escapes so they can't blitz->retreat->blitz-> ad infinitum. An experienced player however, is probably going to react to you tactic by preying on the isolation of your smaller units, allowing him to generate pain counters and choose his time to launch the second offensive. It would roughly go like this: Glasscannon strikes, does serious damage to a number of your units->you counter attack causing largescale damage to 2/3 main units, you try and exploit his focussed unit spread to put the potential for pressure on other bits of the board to hamper his escape-> he groups his survivors into two prongs and takes out your outlying units-> You are forced to either give chase, focus a bulkhead near the objective or try and regain control of your side of the board-> he flanks from both sides and does enough damage to minimise your counter attack to the point where you're not going to be able to kill those units before they eat you alive.

 

 

. Form a main push and keep tight coherency. Keep your heavy hitters protected with small units and bait the DE player onto you. Once he commits, put everything you can into annihilating his units. He can retreat but hopefully you should have reduced his potential damage output to the point where he has to try and pick off your units because a fullscale attack would result in his fragile units getting creamed.

 

Key points:

.It's going to be extremely hard to take the initiative (which is a novel problem for you) so don't try; he will inevitably beat you and pick off you units whilst they are divided for easy pain counters.

. Be very careful with bait units. Though they're normally expendable, a wandering bait unit is a gift wrapped trip to furious charge for the wily DE player. Keep them close to the main body of the force so that if/when they are wiped out, you can swam the unit that just killed them in fire, hoefully mitigating the bonus they just got from chewing on your squad.

. If they attack in two prongs from either direction, focus on one side. Destroying half a force is better than hurting all of it considering that even a handful of DE can be deadly and they will invariably swoop off and concentrate their remaining force on one side to minimise the number of weapons that can be brought to bear on them following their assault. In a choice between the opponent having 2 squads of 10 or 4 squads of 5, the latter is almost always worse as 4 squads can easily bait you into comprimising positions whilst maintaining a serious threat. Think about it; a layer can afford to throw away 5 hellions to secure that game winning push but when that unit of 10 hellions is half their force then they have to try and expose your vulnerabilities purely through speed.

.Tarpits are both great and terrible. They're great in that if you can catch one of his assault units, he will be stuck in CC where the fragile nature of DE is going to get the unit wiped out. The problem is the the DE are so fast that they can simply zip by your tarpit and kill the rest of your force. The best way to use them effectively is if you have a concentrated force in which case they make good perimeter guards as the enemy must either engage them or fly over them, either way you're going to be able to spring your trap. Tight cohesion is the key to this as gaps in your force are just what the DE player looks for in order to hit you then get the hell out of dodge before your tarpits/big CC brawlers can reach them.

 

 

Hope that helps a little.

[Hellios]

Wellt his new codex will have greater list diversity than the old one... so again it depends on what people take... your melta should go in the bin take plasma and flamers, heavy bolters on attack bikes... typhoons are always win.

 

Don't spread out stay together... DE like elite armies because you have only a few feet on the ground spread out and they will munch through you a unit at a time and you cannot afford this.

 

With the traditional raider lists you want to take out all his vehicles first... you now have "slow" DE, you then want to use your speed to your advantage as normal and what you do... gnaw away at his army doing as much damage while minimising your own loses. When your ready go in for the kill.

 

However it is early days... I hear a lot of talk about special characters so it is likely (I know what these guys do) we will get a number of lists revolving around one or more special characters, but depending on what characters they take these lists may be very different... 10 raiders is different than 40 jump pack infantry with FNP and a 3+ cover save which is different than 4 raiders and some pain engines and incubi :D

 

Speed is the key to the DE army, they also havea nasty amount of fire power but if you restrict mobillity it should reduce what they can throw at you... avoid combat with combat units... simple :) (unless you can take them).

[Magnus the red]

[...] if you restrict mobillity it should reduce what they can throw at you [...]

 

How would you go about doing this though? There's not much you can do apart from keeping tight cohesion and having sufficiently strong units to provide area denial.

[Resv]

I've gotten in three games this week against the new codex using my bike army. For reference my best friend has run a Dark Eldar army since the previous edition came out so he knows how to play his army. I have also played his previous DE codex list extensively with my standard bike marines so I kinda knew what I was in for (about a 3 to 1 win ratio against the old codex). HOWEVER, I was completely shocked when he pulled out his new list using the new codex. I didn't get completely slaughtered but it was NOTHING like our previous games for really one reason more than any other, poison weapons. Power armor always helps but with such a huge volume of fire that is wounding on a 4+ (or 3+ because of a Special Character) the added toughness that I had come to rely on was useless. These poison weapons are act as the anti-infantry weapons of the new codex, while not as powerful as a plasma rifle, the shear volume of effective fire makes up for the low AP. The other side to this coin is that a good portion of the special weapon in the codex are geared toward vehicle killing which increases the efficiency of the average squads.

 

Something to point out about Raiders and really all of the vehicles in the new Codex, is while they are VERY fragile, the vehicle upgrades can really up their survivability. Night Shields in particularly are very powerful, they take the maximum distance of any weapon and decreases it by six inches. So your 12 inch melta is now 6 inches, rapid fire bolters are now 6 inches, and so on. Then there is the 5+ invulnerable save which is just annoying. Taking out Raiders and Venoms is key to winning against DE as others have said, but to do that you need to get in close to do that which can put your units at risk. I found that my speeders with typhoon launchers to be really worth it. Heavy Bolters didn't work as well as I had hopped due to needing to roll a 5 or 6 to really put the hurt AV10. For now I am going to stick with my Multi-Meltas as I know on a roll of a 2+ I can at least guarantee that the raider isn't going to speed away on their turn, allowing me a chance to get up close and personal.

 

The troops are pretty cheap for BS and WS 4 though their save is paper thin. A good round of shooting should easily take out a typical squad. What ever the case may be with the shooting, only a few options in the codex have poison attacks in CC. They also don't have grenades as standard so they have to pay for what we have as standard. Should you find your bikes being assaulted though, and you aren't in cover, DE will always go first. This doesn't mean you are dead though as quite a few of the attacks you will take will bounce off of your t5 and the quite a bit of the rest you can stop with your armor save.

 

Finally, WATCH OUT FOR INDEPENDENT CHARACTERS! The basic HQ, the Archon, has BS/WS7 and 4 attacks (5 on the charge) hitting at initiative 7 as standard. They also can take an option that gives them a 2+ Invulnerable save which is cheap. They can take the Power Weapon that always wounds on a 4+, Agonizer, or the weapon that causes instant death on any unsaved wound. I try to always avoid combat with these guys if I can, they are powerhouses of pain. That doesn't mean they don't go down, but it might take a while.

[Hellios]

[...] if you restrict mobillity it should reduce what they can throw at you [...]

 

How would you go about doing this though? There's not much you can do apart from keeping tight cohesion and having sufficiently strong units to provide area denial.

 

Shoot the transports where they have them... If I was playing space wolves I would use some rune priests to put a crap on hellions & reavers although living lightning should make a mess of raiders... I never said it was easy but I would go for a transport with a unit in it over a unit that is stranded although I might get more kills against the stranded DE.

[Resv]

Watch out though, the DE codex has a nasty anti-psyker option in the form of a 3d6 Area of Effect weapon that forces all Psykers to make a leadership check or be removed from play with no saves allowed one use only. Along with some options to lower your opponent's Leadership this thing is kinda overpowered. Last night I watched an entire Pysker Battle Squad get vaporized while they were inside their Chimera. What makes this thing so nasty though, is that it is cheap and you can put it in a squad with the a special character that is immune to psykic powers and also makes any unit she joins immune. I'm not saying this will always work but from what I have seen it is pretty potent.

[Jackelope King]

So far, everyone is worried about a lot of little tricks. The psyker bomb here, the ability to yank ICs out of close combat at my local shop... Okay, sure, they're tricky. Cute. I for one want to see what kind of armies you can build from the Codex before I start worrying.

 

As for a general approach, no matter what, DE are going to be blindingly fast. That means faster than a Biker list. Accept it. I think one good DE list is going to be Raider-heavy still, because those things can load up on Anti-Tank weapons while you load up the warriors aboard it with anti-infantry weapons and have a unit with scary duality (the unit can cheerfully engage infantry on foot or transports or even heavies). Both of which will be rather effective against bikers. So your Bikers should swap around to be the support for the rest of your force (for a pure Biker army, this is obviously much tougher). You absolutely need to keep your whole force together. I absolutely don't think that the right approach in an all-comers list is to swap out the multi-meltas for heavy bolters on attack bikes. They're just not enough against most lists to justify their inclusion.

 

For Bikers, the scary list will have lots of those Raiders to shoot down, which will honestly be difficult for a short-range list like a pure Bikers list. Being relentless is our only real saving grace, which gives us 24" of shooting after 12" of movement, meaning our whole army has an effective threat radius of 36". Sure, it's a big pile of glancing hits at best, but think of it like playing MechDar: glancing hits are all we really need anyway, to keep the Raiders (or their passengers) from shooting. Let's take a given full-sized Biker squad, with 9 Bolter shots and a multi-melta shot. That stands a pretty good shot of landing us at least one glancing hit against the Raider. I don't remember the cost of Night Shields offhand from my brief read of the codex in the store, so I don't know if they'll be prohibitively costly or not for a modern Raider-spam list. If they do become costly, and more Raiders are forced to go without them, pinging away with Bolter rounds isn't a bad approach for pure Bikers. It's a bad matchup, in my eyes, but not a hopeless one. Both sides will need to fly all-out / turbo-boost regularly to stay within optimum range-bands. I think the smarter general on either side will be the victor. If you can plan ahead and set traps (a weakness of mine, unfortunately), you can force one side or the other into a corner and then disassemble them.

 

I think my Biker list will only be getting minor tweaks anyway, though. I'm already working on phasing out my Command Squad for another squad of Bikers and a Librarian Biker anyway, and the whole mess is supported by long-ranged firepower in the form of Rifleman Dreads and Dakka Predators. Maybe I'll kick myself for swapping the Typhoons for HF/MM speeders, but I think they'll have an important place in dealing with the DE I force to dismount. I can literally circle the wagons and screen my Bikers with my vehicles until it's time to run out and deal with the dismounted DE wearing tissue paper armor.

[Hellios]

Watch out though, the DE codex has a nasty anti-psyker option in the form of a 3d6 Area of Effect weapon that forces all Psykers to make a leadership check or be removed from play with no saves allowed one use only. Along with some options to lower your opponent's Leadership this thing is kinda overpowered. Last night I watched an entire Pysker Battle Squad get vaporized while they were inside their Chimera. What makes this thing so nasty though, is that it is cheap and you can put it in a squad with the a special character that is immune to psykic powers and also makes any unit she joins immune. I'm not saying this will always work but from what I have seen it is pretty potent.

 

Oh I know :) I've read the codex from one side to the other. thats why I take 3! rune priests and spread them out :P J/K

[ShinyRhino]

So, with all the talk of Raider spam, psyker bombs, and Hellions...does the Webway Portal still exist?

[Jackelope King]

So, with all the talk of Raider spam, psyker bombs, and Hellions...does the Webway Portal still exist?

Yup. I'm not sure how people will build lists around it later, but I think I'll get a better idea when I get my own copy of the Codex instead of just fighting for the store copy :)

[Fetterkey]

Why are Hellions supposed to be effective against tanks?

[Iron Father Ferrum]

I believe they can mount heat lances on their boards, heat lances being short-ranged melta & lance weapons. But that's from memory and I can't find where I read that. . .

[Resv]

Hellons can't take special weapons. I'm not sold on them as troops at all, seems like there are better options. I'm with Jack on most everything he has said, I don't expect people to really adjust their Bike Lists at all. Poison weapons are really the biggest danger for Bikers. The fire is accurate and deadly against infantry, even high toughness infantry like Bikers or TWC.

[Fetterkey]

Hellions have no special weapons. I don't see them as effective against vehicles at all-- they're probably worse than Tactical Marines at that role.

[Vilicate]

I think the "trick" with helions against vehicles is to have two haemonculi join them, give them two pain tokens so they have furious charge, and potentially also have another +1S from combat drugs. That way they're S6 on the charge with three attacks, and feel no pain. It seems pretty gimmicky, but I'll have to play against it to get any idea of how effective it actually is. I guess we'll all see.

 

I think the trick to beating this army with all/mostly bikers is to try and have one "alpha strike" turn, where you blow up as much stuff as possible to cripple their mobility...assaulting the troops that come out. The things that are nasty in assault against bikers are pretty much limited to harlies, incubi and wracks, as pretty much everything else wounds on 6's. Plus, as nasty as the Archon is, he's not going to ID you without rolling a 6 to wound and then you fail your SS save. All you have to get is one wound through the 2+ inv and he's squished (assuming relic blade, cause I always do).

[Hellios]

So, with all the talk of Raider spam, psyker bombs, and Hellions...does the Webway Portal still exist?

 

I don't have my codex on me but If I remember correctly the webway portal itself has been lightly tapped with the nerf stick... but you can take a few the question will be how well it works with the list... maybe a list thats 50/50 mounted/reserve rush into your face drop portals and then run out next turn... but with a biker list this wouldn't be my biggest fear.