Tactical changes Pt. 1 – Assault, the returning contenders

Tactics article all set to post, GW releases new FAQs, I've tried to edit this real quick.  If something doesn't make sense it may be because of edits, or FAQs.  It was going to be longer, but I decided to break this into a series of articles.



Tactically, the game has changed in extreme ways for my army.  Running a hybrid webway army in 5th edition, relying heavily on the alpha strike type of assaults that it allowed for made my glass cannon a thing to be feared, death by a thousand cuts as I liked to call it.  But 6th edition came, and karma thought it would be fitting to disassemble my list in the very same way, death by a thousand nerfs.  A lot of the changes aren't that big by themselves, add overwatch, random charge distance, no run and assault, no fast moving vehicle assault, nerfs to feel no pain, nerfs to furious charge . . plus others that don't come to mind right now.  None of them seemed overly big changes by themselves, I enjoyed most of them, but coming together, they were the perfect storm of destruction for my webway list.

So as many Dark Eldar players learned, assault is much harder, and more dangerous, to get into.  Wyches take this the hardest, arguably one of the best assault troops in the game in 5th, they were the perfect dichotomy; gods in assault, wet blankets when they were shot.  The bounce back though is their access to haywire grenades.  Wyches are no longer the tarpit unit that they were, now they are used to run up to a vehicle and hit it a few times with haywire and watch the hull points melt away.  It's an odd change for a unit that doesn't want to be shot, and preferred to hide in an assault last edition.


In a similar vein, the wracks were a powerful short range torrent type squad.  10 strong with a Haemonculus out of a webway portal usually saw 3 flamer templates, followed by an assault where they leveraged 30+ attacks at initiative 5, re-rolling to wound in most cases.  They were easily the workhorse to a beautifully themed Coven army.  Now, unfortunately, wracks often loose as many models as they kill between the loss of the initiative boost and nerf to feel no pain, they could do short range fire fighting with the liquifiers, but that turns the rest of the squad into a delivery system.  With wounds coming from the front and random charge distance, they are self defeating, leaving themselves out of range for a followup assault if the liquifiers do cause any damage.  For all the struggles I've had in getting a decent set of them together, there is a good chance they are going to be sitting on the shelf mostly.

But it is about balance, and other armies are having similar issues.  So some units came through perfectly fine, or in some cases even better.

The plus side is the beasts seem to be just as good as they were before, in fact I'd almost say they are slightly better.  You loose a little average charge distance, and the wound allocation shenanigans, but that's not a big deal.  Ideally, you want the Khymera out front now anyhow, the benefit here is the differing initiative values.  When you move into combat, Khymera and Beastmasters are out front and make it into base to base with the rank and file guys.  Once they kill a few at initiative 6, the Razorwings now get to pile in at initiative 5, hopefully into holes created at I6 that lets them into base to base with the important guys like special weapon troopers and character upgrades.  Since wounds have to be taken from base to base with the razorwings who go on initiative 5, there is a good chance we can burn off those characters/special weapons.  Tactially, I'm looking at adding the Baron as my second HQ, just to make these guys so much better.  They will get Stealth, Hit and Run, and someone with a shadowfield to soak up wounds; oh, and thanks to a FAQ clarification that indicates that they still go at I1 even though they ignore terrain, he also gives them grenades.  With the Beastmasters being characters, it will take quite a bit to have the Baron locked in a challenge, so it should be quite effective.

Come here Mr. Terminator, tell us about your 2+ save again?

Incubi are another squad that is still pretty effective.  Up until a few hours ago, I was going to comment on how these guys would be great for challenges, and continue to fulfill most of the roles they had before.  What a difference a few hours makes.  AP 2 Glaives according to the FAQ, this means that they should still peel through terminators the same as they did before, which is one thing we were maybe going to have to worry about.  Again because of the differing initiative between the Klaivex and the squad, we can use the Klaivex to pick out characters/upgrades.  Because of their 3+ save, these guys are much more likely to survive overwatch and make it into combat with full effectiveness.

I've already touched on the Talos in a previous post, but he had mostly been on the fringes of the list, so I'll review and start with him in part 2 of the series, Assault, the new challengers.