Aside from yet another game where volley after volley of lance fire failed to do anything bar kill a single dreadnaught in the four turns of failure I could stomach.
Here’s some stats to prove how pants lances are. Over to you Sons of Twilight and a very interesting article called:
How many Missiles to the Center of a Razorback?
Now factor in cover/flat out and GK immunity to stun/shake stupidity ? yeah about as much ‘fun’ as being beaten in the man treasure over and over and over with a nine iron.
I feel your pain bro
That’s what that kid gets for having that ‘straight edge’ symbol on his hand….
It’s dangerous in a pit…
this kid learned that the hard way.
Don’t feel too bad, dude…I fail with Railguns all the time.
RAILGUNS, dude….
You’ve gotta HIT before you can roll on that fancy damage table.
Being that I rarely roll a 3 or 4up (Broadsides are BS3, twin linked, Hammerhead BS4), I generally fail coming out of the gate.
Stupid….dice Gods…they’re stupid…
Advice here:
Kill the Long-range Heavy Support with the suicide melta units, and if they are GK….well, you outrange him except on the S7 Heavy Bolters that you can still get cover saves.
Sorry, can’t see the big deal. If it’s sucky dice…..well, can’t do much about that.
You need to plan for poor dice rolling. There are several ways. One is to keep your units out of reach by coming in from reserves if not going first. If your opponent decides to castle you can move away and play a range game. Redundancy is critical, have back up plans so your units don’t get caught out in the open with nothing to do. Overwhelm your opponents in HtH when possible, especially in linked assaults. These kind of things are very difficult to become good. Positioning and maneuvering units is the most important aspect of the game. It can take years but if you keep thinking and trying new things you will find it is well worth it.
Even if you are a master though I still wouldn’t play Mech DE in a tournament while GK are popular. It will makes things much more difficult.
Err psyflemen outrange you , and to bring a enough AT to bear to actually acheive aything you will end up in psycannon range . the end
and you can outrange them for what. maybe a turn ? then what in that time you have struggle d to kill maybe one vehicle with your glances ?
Its a combination of sucky dice and the fact they are a Sh1te AT option , the stats do see mt o follow through into my games, it’s an uphill struggle to kill anything vehicle like, most of my games see the mwith all their squishy stuff dead , but a buncj of tanks/hulls in the table I just can’t be rid of.
I think if Void Lances were S8AP1 instead of S9AP2 we would see whole lot more Void Ravens running a muck.
uhm why cant they be as strong as a lascannon , where does this idea that ‘advanced’ xeno wepons must suck come from ? normal lance needs to be ap1 (no really) run the damn stats, you will see it justifies their inflated cost /availability issues, the void lance just needs ap 1 and the poxy mine is just a big bird poo at present
AbusePuppy and I were discussing S9 AP1 Lances w/ regard to my proposed Firepike stats.
In the end, I was forced to concede that he was right – auto-Pens on most Transports, followed by a 50% kill rate [obviously better at BS5, but still] was simply too much.
So, no, the Void Lance CANNOT be S9 AP1, without AP1 getting nerfed.
As a result, the Dark Lance (and Bright Lance) can’t really either.
The Starcannon, now… 😉
Ap one void lance would not be broken at all , Heard of the rail gun ?, its only two shots , the void is made of toilet paper, it’s a fair bet it’s only going to shoot once per game, it wont, aut pen transports either , AV11 requires a three for a pene ?and av 12 needs a 4, so far less effective than multi meltas that can be bought in quantity, if everyone is ap 1 against de all the time with everything with even basic guns being able to pop transports, I do not see how its anything but ‘fair’ things like psyflemen atc , pretty much auto delete a DE vehicle every time it fires, I can assure you cover is almost pointless, people with smoke or cover have a very good chance of survival vs an AP1 void lance.
I just won best DE general at Tos, in one game I shot 22 lances into a dred in the open, my net result was a shake and a wep dest…… it’s not like that is a freak occurrence either.
I dont see how a starcannon should be any better/different to disintegrators now, admittedly dissies are crap
Oh, yeah. There’s again my opinion of Dark Lances > Blasters, forgot to say that, my bad.
Honestly, besides my half-time DE army, the local DE player started to win more games by stacking Dark Lances and realizing that everything that gets in Blaster range is going to die. Plan accordingly.
The problem is that DE will generally die anyway. The cost of 2 lances = 4 blasters, now when 2 lances may do very little, 4 blasters do twice the very little, and since you need to be close may be avoiding cover (for your opponent), so maybe 4 times the very little!
There is a reason alot of people consider the old codex more competitive…
Its also a matter of stacking the dice in your favour, 30 DL weapons will probably do something (at say 1500-1750), the problem is your whole army then revolves around these choices, and is rather boring. Plus DE would probably benefit more from being able to take 2 super reliable melta weapons that you can deliver as a scalpel and then kill the contents of the box or two that you took out. Instead you often rely on a huge portion of your army with lances to open the boxes and end up with nothing left to do the other half of the job.
Against min/max it can be less of an issue if you play really well, but then your army sucks versus other armies.
Plus DL spam can’t be optimised, the entire codex is built to stop people spamming DL’s. The cost of lances on most units attests to this even if you can ignore the limited numbers you can take.
Its a finesse army for sure, the downside is that bad dice rape a finesse armies face. The redundancy just isn’t built into the army like it is for say marines or guard, and the brick wall of dice fail is pretty unavoidable.
Its why harlequin armies are cool but not super competitive. Sure you could get lucky and have perfect movement and the opponents spotting distance rolls all fail so you can never be touched, or you could get unlucky eat a round of bolter fire and lose the game.
The real problem is, that DLs are maxed out at 1.500pts. Almost no improvement in AT from there. Unless you abandon Venoms, and take warriors for scoring units. (Wich you shouldn’t. With a Blaster they won’t do squat, cost double of what wracks cost, AND you need them in closerange to even fire. Save the points, get wracks.)
Jetbikes and Harpys are the only real way to improve AT -but they don’t work too excellently (though they do work). Above 1.500, DE fall apart. And they fall apart faster with every point you get over 1.500.
@Sorrowshard, when we ran the math at my house and put it down on paper it showed they were less affective at multiple ranges, and over various scenarios. Do you want me to get the old stats software out at some point and we can go through the various army books and math and graph the hell out of it all to prove a point? I don’t play with DE, but I look at their tools and the cost of them in point and scratch my head.
Well, the problem are not “bad dice”. The problem is threefold and falls fairly on both the shoulders of the ed5 core rules writers and P.Kelly. At least as long as there are not any changes to lance weapons in ed6 already written “in stone” we don’t know about yet.
So what are the problems for DE AT right now with that huge influx of guys jumping on the GK bandwagon or staying with their trusty IG/SW/BA “light vehicle” spam.
1. We pay “extra” for ap2 and the “your LR is now a chimera” rules. The problem is that Av14 vehicles are not the main asset of your typical ed5 mech army. Av11-12 are and against those the lance rule is useless, same goes for having a good AP that isn’t AP1. Against 9 out of 10 targets DL/Blasters are only overpriced missile launchers.
2. Anything that doesn’t modify the damage chart isn’t that great for such a high point costs. And I’m not only talking about those stupid GK vehicles (what a great idea for a power that can’t be nullified by 8 out of 16 40k armies (with a even worse ratio for non-Marine armies). While shaking a predator keeps it from firing for a turn, most mech armies tend to spam cheap transports. Which either draw their firepower from embarked troop, who don’t care about their vehicle being shaken, or are so dirt cheap that the manage to out-spam DE-AT.
3. All other choices of AT for DE are either not capable to break the damage chart (haywire stuff, we all know that glances are useless against GK and most transports) or bound to somehow costly units. The “bargain” AT from codex IG comes with a 155points price tags and fields 3 melta guns along with a cheap transport that isn’t that bad against av10-11 vehicles itself. That’s roughly the price you pay for 2 heat lances on scourges/reavers. And you not only have one weapon less (not to mention the chimeras guns), but against anything with Av12 or less you also have the weaker weapon system (and can’t ID t4 stuff like meltas can).
Sure, the idea behind the (heat) lance is a nice one and fits well with how the (Dark) Eldar are described in the background of the game. In terms of game mechanics all DE weapons right now are geared against high-armor vehicles, who either care about stun/shaken results or can’t “shake” them off. Say predators, Russ or Raider tanks. But those tanks are NOT the backbone of your typical competitive mech army.
Which means that DE At will be lackluster as long as GW doesn’t launches ed6 and changes the “lance” weapon rules from one that ignores Av13-14 into one that simply degrades all armor values by a certain margin. Or comes up with a whole other mechanism that ensures that a Russ isn’t easier to neutralize than a chimera filled with melta/plasma vets.
Sounds fun, is not something I have tried before, Ill try anything once, especially to prove a point :o)
The problem I see with lance isn’t just weapon effectiveness.
It really needs a dual shooting mode, one in which you get a single shot with the lance rule, and perhaps a second where you get an additional shot, but it drops to AP 3/4 and/or loses lance armour reduction.
At the end of the day weight of fire is just better than ‘quality’ these days.
Archont made a good point however, there are no force multipliers, and FoC restrictions and squad setup mean the higher you get points wise the more and more forced into choices you become.
Realistically there are a very limited number of effective choices you can take when your meta game is really vehicle heavy. Once they are taken you are stuck adding more and more sub-par choices.
Looking at troops for instance the comment above about wracks is a good example, yes they are a tough troop choices, but all they add is something hard to kill, no additional anti tank and limited combat ability. As a squad of 3 you can spam more tanks, but you could also just get 10 man squads of warriors in raiders and get a similar amount of lances.
Min/max gives your opponent more targets to spread fire across, but at the same time the armies you’ll struggle most with are those with lots of transports anyway, which probably means they can split fire pretty effectively. Your transports die easier (than theirs), so they pick your army apart.
I honestly look at the codex and always feel like I’m missing some design intent that makes the army work better, or properly.
@Kriswithak:
I wholeheartly agree on the “I miss something” part of your posting.
Dunno, I can’t understand both the price increases for lance weapons and the strange point costs for the two flyers from the HS section.
I mean i don’t mind that a chimera blows a raider out of the sky if it his and you don’t pass your cover/f-field save. That’s perfectly fine. What irks me is that the math in return is so bad. A APC armed with mainly bigger anti-infantry weapons stand a far better chance to kill a skimmer armored with paper tissues, compared to the chances that skimmer has to crack a APC with one of the heaviest AT weapons of the game (at least according to fluff).
The only reason that makes sense to me for both the price increases on raiders and lance weapons, combined with the new rarity of those AT weapons, are changes to how ed6 may work out.
Skimmer, esp. fast skimmer transports took such a huge hit when GW changed from ed4 to ed5. Not that I want the ridiculous indestructible holo-falcons filled with quins back. But just look on how the game changed and skip over the 6-12″=just glances rule that turned falcons into beats from hell:
Back in ed4 a raider filled with warriors that could move would only be hit in cc a t a roll of 6+. On top of that the raider that moved 12″, could fire his main weapon and let his passengers shoot on a target too.
Now a raider must need more than 6″ to get that 6+ bonus in cc. And if it moves that distance all his passengers can#t fire unless they disembark. Which makes the splinter rack upgrade a waste of points. Not to mention that in terms of threat range ground vehicles now beat skimmers hands down thanks to that ridiculous FAQ answer for vehicles on roads. Sure, most tables don’t have a road but the fact that a roads enables a first turn charge with a LR or an open transport like the pick-up is just a bad joke and doesn’t gives much credit to the brainpower of the guy(s) behind the FAQ.
So let’s assume for a moment that lances get better in ed6 on a general basis, maybe turning into the second best weapon after railguns. A bit better than a LC but definitely. worse than a tau railgun.
That would be worth both the price increase on the raider, all the other models and the reduced number of available lance weapons. If raiders could move and contribute their passengers firepower to the battle w/o disembarking first, we would also see a move away from stuff like 4-6x min-sized wrack squads with venoms or those 5 warriors+blaster squad that popped up in some of the DE netlists when people tried to max out the amount of lance weapons.
Once more I find myself in complete agreement, It just seems a bit short of breath to me, I have sucked with lnces from day one, and ultimately there is not much you can do to improve it.
I have to admit the splinter racks is probably the most hilarious thing in the book. Limited to moving 6″ for passengers to shoot on a fast skimmer, made of paper, when you need to be in rapid fire range to really be effective….
I mean it looks great on paper, in a vaccume if you don’t know how to play, unless you actually have read the rulebook… which either the author of C:DE didn’t do, or was expecting major changes.
Also worth noting is the fact people thought the DE book had been completed back in fourth, so its actually possible that its designed for 4th, not 6th and they did minor changes to make sure it would be semi viable when released, as opposed to building around 6th edition design.
If anything I’d take the cynical and depressing perspective that the DE codex was actually designed to be released alongside the current CWE codex, since there are alot of parallels between the codexes, lance cost, infantry costs, MC costs/stats/effectiveness, not much acknowledgement of huge changes to the game more recently, and no design around many of the most dangerous armies that currently dominate.
I’d just love someone at GWS to explain WWP’s, I mean vehicles can’t enter (despite the fluff in the book saying they can use them), expensive, limited to crappy HQ choices, not on mobile squads, basically throw away units….
Plus the necron rumours aren’t exactly hope-filling, it sounds like their basic troop are being majorly nerfed to continue the trend of ‘only marines have troop worth their points/taking’. Even sisters got majorly nerfed (hilarious in a sad way).
6th Edition could well be called WarMarine 40,000K.
I agree, Splinter Racks are WOEFUL.
Hey, don’t hate on me, I’m just pointing on what I’ve seen to work:
*Stack Dark Lances.
*Fill the FOC with Vehicles, specially Raiders/Ravagers with few Venoms.
*Rely on said vehicles + the FA to do the heavy lifting.
*Have some slamm amount of backup anti-infantry/anti-tank weapons on your infantry for when your vehicles die.
That is boring, etc. is subjective. And even if it’s true, it isn’t my fault. GW said: “With 5th edition we will sell vehicles”, so everybody has to adapt to that.
*Have some small amount of….
Damn typos.
Definitely not hating on you, but stacking lances isn’t optimal list building, I mean its one of the few choices DE have, but your really seeing diminishing returns on investment the more lances you try to cram in.
I definitely think maximising those available and using your FA to full effect is they way to go, but you are in a way building the your army and the codex into a bad version of what the old codex was 🙁
Venoms are amazing at what they do, which is why you see people trying to cram in like 6+ of them, but unless you only face nids/orks isn’t too competitive.
I just have a cynical view of how GWS operate, and am not holding out much hope that things will improve in the next edition. Generally speaking GWS design around marines and everyone else makes do.
Lol, Kris Having you around is like having a second me, result !
GX I respect your opinion, you are always welcome here and someone does need to play devils advocate, I actually agree with you both, stacking lances is the only way to improve things in terms of AT, yes you sell the rest of the list short, I completely empathize with Kris’ frustrations.
Some games my lances honestly do jack shit – and the reavers do some good lifting to ease the pain, If you can keep them alive….
I have a big rant on the codex in the pipe, I just need to get it out on a page, even if everyone thinks I’m wrong I’ll feel better.
And I agree, the only way it starts to make sense is if another edition was in mind when they wrote it, if 4th were fucked and if 6th we might be ok….
Thanks for the intelligent & civil debate chaps 🙂
“Venoms are amazing at what they do”
Yes, they are. I still say : Go for 3-5 Venoms, stack the Raiders/Ravagers
I have come to greatly resent the FoC.
It just hurts Xenos – it’s not that we shouldn’t be written to function differently, it’s just that the balance hasn’t been found – and when it is, our books lack longevity.
I totally agree, that The venom is, not overrated but over used. 72 shots at 48″ a great, but just maybe to much. And thats “only” from 5 venoms.
And i have to jump in for the splinter racks, i really love them, and they are feared by my enemies XD sure you have to be under 12″ to your enemy and are only able to move 6″, but i get anong with it. Granted, first Round they mainly don’t shoot, just if a vehicle is in blaster Range, then i’ll only move 6″ to shoot it, otherwise i’ll Advance with The Rest of my forces 12″ and fire all my mounted DL. Next Round, the splinter rack warriors Support my CC troops, as then you should have targets.
I’m looking forward to your meantioned rant and if its ok, i would like to request a full battle report on one of your games. I would just like to read how bad you dice are, As they seem to bring you quite some pain? Sure they are Not some gift from one of our kin? XD
Slainte
5 venoms kill 6.5 (ish) marines a shooting phase (60 shots = 5 venoms, 6 venoms = 72 shots).
Should kill about 10 4+ cover save models.
Thats 325 points JUST for venoms however, which generally almost doubles with contents (warriors), or has a 50% premium for 3 wracks, which means its practically useless except as a objective holding paper plane with good AI dakka.
So you pay anything from 475 points to 625 points for those venoms, to kill a dev squad a turn.
Meanwhile other armies can get special units (VV, drop pod stuff, Assassins) that can probably do the same job cheaper (sometimes massively so) using a single slot.
Its still good, horribly so against some non marine armies, but not game breaking when you consider the AI available to DE.
The chances of not taking massive damage at 18″ the turn before you use splinter racks against a well built opponents list… not something I would care to bet on even with friends I play against casually.
Tke, I saw your comment in the other DL post, currently at throne so no time to rwally form an appropriate respose, I’ll get back to you….
How did i come to think it was 5 venoms XD guess i’ll blame The late hour 😉
Yeah, and that really is The point, venoms come in too high a price for just that, so there are less points for more needed stuff.
Regarding the splinter rack warriors. When i feeld them, they are Not allone on the road. I usually go all in on one Side so usually there are bigger threads out there, then the warriors and through my ff saves, i’ll mess up the plan, so that there often is not enough there to take down all of my paper plane airplane. But then again my dice let me roll a sucessfull ff or dl 😉