Another Dark enemy; the Dark Eldar! To aid Brothers!

Once again my rival has prepared to build a 3rd army; what fun! I am still working on my first army, and there seems to be a pattern. He gets bored quickly, and has the money to make armies rather quickly. I am starting to see a pattern:

Grey Knights vs Chaos: Grey Knights send them back to the warp
Grey Knights vs Eldar: Grey Knights send them to Slaneesh

And now my good friend is planning on building a fearsome 1000-1500 point Dark Eldar list, and from what I can gather its going to have an extremely buffed up Dark Eldar Archon and retinue of warriors! I have not faced the Dark Eldar, as they are rather old and *to be blunt* their models quite fugly. I know they have a vast amount of wargear, are fragile, don't use psyker powers, and love raiders *some sort of land speeder thing*. Brothers, if you could give me any information or advice on how to combat this foe, please do. For the Emperor, these vile slavers must be cut down and sent straight to the deepest hells of the warp!

Thank you all in advance for all the help you have given me in the past as well!

From my limited knowledge of dark eldar, they are at their best when mounted in their raiders, which makes them extremely mobile.
It also sounds like your friend is more interested in buying an army to win, than learning how to play an army!
Anyway DE are pretty good at CC, have lots of darklance weapons, or str 6 weapons similar to a psycannon, but their vehicles are armour 10 I think.
Might be good to have psycannons! They also have terrible saves so a flamer is sweet!

Their vehicles basically do what orc's do - deliver CC to the front in open tops. they do it with fast skimmers though. Best bet is some ranged psycannon/dreadnought action. They can assualt from pretty far away, but are just BAD in the open. They rely on moving around in cover and out of sight until they can jump in and strike.

be aware of the cruicble- it's basically a one shot weapon that has a chance to instakill the closest enemy psyker on a -1 leadership check. so wont usually get you, but hey, it could, and losing a GM to it is never fun.

t's pretty much an army of 5 and 6+ saves, with some pointsy stuff having 3+.

Talos is pretty sick in CC, as most of the codex.

It may seem wise to take vehicles and dreads and pray on the low S of the models, but they ustilise alot of dark lances, making your LR a fancy rhino. and haywire grenades are fantastic. its like 2-5 glance 6 pen i think. just make sure your opponent remembers that they can only be used on dreads IF THEYRE IMMOBILISED (special rule of the grenade).

All in all, keeping the enemy from concentrating on one of your flanks and making sure to shoot them up before even considering letting them get close will win it for you.

Thank you brothers; I shall take that to heart. Indeed Zealadin, he tells me that he enjoyed Chaos, but became bored with them. So he moved to Eldar, enjoying their ability to screw with their foes roll's and re-roll their own stuff. Finally, he wants Dark Eldar, as they seem "evil" enough. He certainly has incentive to destroy the Ghosts of the Inquisition as well, and I can't deny that I hold an amount of pride in my Knights. I get a kick out of defeating evil, but each game I play, win or lose, I typically come away with a lesson. Admittedly more if I lose however

So from what I gather, set up a good base of operations, and take down their skimmers before they get to me, being sure to hose their units *Wyches I hear he wants to have a lot of* before they reach me.



VERY special thanks to the reminder MJS about the grenades vs Dreads, I had completely forgotten!

I shall wisely guide my Knights into battle against these truly evil foes, and give them what they fear most: a quick, clean death that sends them straight to the warp. Thank you once again Brothers!!!

I've heard wyches are the only unit that a GKT REALLY doesn't want to face in CC.

Wyches have gladiatorial equipment that halve their opponets ws. (Don't remember if rounded up or down)

Dark eldar have alot of weapons that force you to take leadership tests and if you fail, you get sad.
As you might have noticed, a slight flaw in the tactic vs gk here is the "take leadership test" part which we don't.

Their lord mostly has an agoniser that wounds on 4+ worst. He can even hurt tanks with it.

I have the codex. Ask questions if you like.

As MJ suggested, if he's gonna be skimmer heavy make sure you take a lot of psycannons. The one time I played against DE I had all his transports destroyed/immobilized within 18" of his board edge by turn 2. Needless to say DE don't footslog well against storm bolters.

Having seen the codex I am going to say that DE are one of the weakest armies to play. Their ranged weapons are pretty average. The majority of their units have 5+ or worse saves (bolter spam anyone?), their amoured units are weak and even in CC their attacks are pretty weak. Even though they have a really high initiative but if you break their transports, its going to be very one sided.

DE do indeed have a very steep learning curve, but this is not to say they cannot be just as effective as other races when played to their strengths. Remember we too play an old codex people laugh at because they are hard to learn properly, yet i dont believe any of us really feel disadvantaged when we play a game, do we?

One trick you might see is some DE will start with transports in reserve if they don't have first turn, just to prevent you shooting at them without their fast save. I believe this can be used in conjuction with one squad running forward and next turn laying down a webway close to your lines, though ill let one more experienced then me get into any details on it.

a psycannon heavy army or one with inducted hydras (we can do that, right? have to check) will destroy their vehicles fairly quickly. but they are a very mobile race anyway and can often dance from cover to cover to make the army more like 4+ saves then anything else

Unfortunately, no hydras for us It would have been sweet though! Hydras are not only awesome w/ TWL autocannons but have a tracking system that negates flat-out cover saves for fast vehicles! Plus they look way cool!

Thank you Brothers; I have researched more the the DE recently and discovered that against a full incubi retinue +Archon with 2+invuln save a Grandmaster and retinue of 10 has a tough time. The retinue of the Archon gets powerweapons, they all go first, the actual Dark Archon himself is armed with an agonizer, etc. etc.

Story short, its ridiculous. Since they strike first and are str 4, we have to make waaay too many invuln saves. If we survive the brunt of the storm, our GKT's will cut them down as if they were nothing. But it's still risky.

Full Wych squads also annoy me; as they get so many attacks its inevitable that a few GKT's will roll 1's and die before they get a chance to fight. Plus, they Wyches get +4 Invuln saves. Feh.

Finally, I hear that they can have squads with all Dark Lances! Str 6 AP2?? And they can just get in transpo and run around? Its ludicrous.

Luckily, it's not all doom and gloom. With our psycannons, we CAN shred an Archon or otherwise squads that rely so heavily on their invuln saves *AP 4, no invulns!* It's satisfying to pick their units apart as such. Plus, their flimsy speeders can actually be dealt with by Storm bolters.