Sunday, December 19, 2010

First match against the new DE

I played against the new DE today at one of my rare local RTTs with my foot Eldar.

Thoughts:
DE can dish out the shots.
Repeat the mantra over and over again: 3s to hit, 4s to wound.
Practice your dice counting skills, because it takes a long time to play the games when you are always counting out handfuls of dice (My foot eldar have prepared me well for quick counting, but not my opponent).
The DE army moves so fast that on turn #2 it seemed like a lot later in the game.
That move, disembark, fleet, and assault is brutal if you are not careful.
Lack of grenades hurts a high Initiative, but fragile army.
If you are playing DE, bring lots of craters to make your own terrain because your raiders are going down, and you need a place to hide.
I liked Blasters. They increased their range to 18" in this edition (up from 12") making them a lot more effective.
We only did get to about turn #3 though because all that shooting slows down the game if you are not practiced with it.
I liked Venoms: 12 shots at 36" and moving 12"
Foot Eldar are a bad match-up for DE. Strength 6 let me ignore all of their FNP, and whenever a Shadow Field dropped, their HQs were goners. I also think all eldar builds might give them trouble.
He did not take any night shields, and he sure could have used them. I was on the fence about them after reading Stelek's article saying why they suck, but I am becoming a convert with the speed of the DE vehicles I think it will greatly help them refuse-flank.

It seems like the army struggles against a few things:
MEQs
Anything with high saves.

For an example they did a number on one if my Wraithlords and killed one quickly, then after that I cast fortune on my other Wraithlord and my Avatar, and it really slowed down the damage. He also had trouble killing my Warp Spiders. Their 3+ save kept them around for a long time, and here is something else I noticed...he wounded me only on a 4+ so toughness 3 was not such a liability as it normally is. He was wounding my guardians on a 4+ and I was wounding him on a 3+. That stalled his killing a lot more than I thought it would.

I am trying to build an army for tournament play, (I got a couple of boxes with my RTT winnings) and I have a few old DE Raider hulls that I am going to add to some Vypers to make some Venoms. I like the idea of having Trueborn in Venoms and I want to see how they will play out.

3 comments:

  1. You knows Wyches come stock with plasma grenades, right? Many of the DE characters can take the phantasm grenade launcher. It shouldn't be a problem equipping your assault squads with offensive grenades.

    Poisoned weapons wounding T3 on 4+... who cares? This is great versus high toughness units like your Avatar and Wraithlords.

    G

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  2. Wytches do have grenades, but not your rank-and-file warriors. I do not know if everyone is going to spend all of the points that is necessary to give all of their squads PGL.

    Sure the dedicated assault units will have them, and the Incubi have to have an Archion babysitting them. I was just cautioning people not to jump into assault into cover if you do not have grenades, because you will not like the results, or if you are playing against them, then if they do not have a lot of phantasm grenade launchers, then you can do the anti-tyranid trick of staying in cover if you have rather weak units (Tau, IG, Eldar).

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