Dark Eldar: The GT Heat!

Dark Eldar: The GT Heat!

So as I said last week, I went to Brighton GT this week. Below I’m going to list out how I did and things I learned. Having only played 10 games previous there were several mistakes I made against everyone so thanks for everyone’s patience! I also learned more about each army I was facing and what the Meta was looking like now.

So without further ado here was what happened!

The Revelations

Ok several things I was doing wrong and I will list them out here.

Firstly the ignore cover save special rule for divination only effects the psyker and his unit. Great for Tau, rubbish for Dark Eldar!

Secondly I didn’t realise that you could take powers from several different trees. As such Eldrad can take a wide range of powers than I thought with access to Telepathy. The powers in Telepathy are also very good. I won’t go into them as I did divination last time but yes it’s a good tree a bit more aggressive and as such it could be a useful addition. (Especially if I get the reroll armour saves spell and prescience already!)

Lastly (and more importantly), when a vehicle is shot you apply the hull points BEFORE damage rolls. This makes dark eldar tanks much better for transports…… why? Often a dark eldar vehicle is shot by multiple shot high strength weapons, think hydras tesla etc etc. When these weapons shoot and destroy venoms, the venom only needs to take 2 hull points to die…. As such they won’t blow up so often. This means the troops inside don’t take damage and say if this was a wych unit that had boosted in your turn and the was now in assault range there’s little chance now to stop those units. So happy times!

The Meta

The majority of the armies were guard with space wolf allies or Necrons with 2/4 flyers. There were several other interesting lists there, mainly thinking of nid flyer lists (which came second) and ork foot sloggers as well as the Eldrad with Tau/Dark Eldar Lists. I have mixed feelings about guard atm. The guard lists rely on the space wolf characters to buff a big blob of guard and eldrad can stop the casting from the rune priests. However they still have a scary amount of shooting. I didn’t get to test myself against one of these lists but I’m sure to play Ru or Steve at some point and so I’ll play that.

My Performance.

I won 4 games and drew once. Ill briefly mention each game below but I won’t go into amazing detail.

 My loss was my first game and it was just one of those games for dice rolling. I lost every roll before deployment and Ashley’s shooting back at me killed what it shot at. Unfortunately I didn’t really learn much in this game as the dice failed me! Ashley is a great guy though so anyone down Maelstrom and other tournies in London have a look around for him and have a chat!

Game two was a win and I played dark eldar. It wasn’t an overly optimal list to which my opponent mentioned. And as such when I got the dice to go first and killed all but two venoms from the board, things were only going to go one way.

Game three was as close a game as any I’ve played. I got necrons and it was a tight draw that could have easily swung either way. It was this game that I realised the advantage Dark eldar have over flyers. After their first round of shooting, the dark eldar army can jump forward avoiding a turn of fire from the opponent’s flyers. I almost wiped my opponent out before his second turn before his flyers came on as well anther advantage of dark eldar. A mention must go out to the single wych who managed to single handedly kill one unit of warriors, a cryptek (so two scoring units) and, if it wasn’t for a res orbing lord, would have won me the game.

Game 4 was a win and although James had the worst luck I’ve seen in his turns, it did prove the power of dark eldar in night fight. All my dark eldar were in the shrouded range behind a ruin. As such 1 turn of shooting just did nothing which gave myself the alpha strike. I duly dismantled James’s army with a mix of luck and pure firepower.

Game 5 I played Rich Fielder. Yes rich and his beautiful dark mechanicum. I managed to win but only because rich made the fatal error of boosting his night scythes off the table and the game ended handing me 2 vp’s (it was KP) which I duly won 15-14… talk about luck! My army always seem to make the opponents army reel before buckling a bit later in the game. Rich had fewer flyers so more things to kill and it was this game where I turned the beast unit too killy in combat and they found themselves isolated and as such shot to pieces.

Game 6 was against 4…. Yes 4 stormravens! My aim was to go first and wipe off lee’s army before he got to roll for the reserves, unfortunatly I lost the roll going second. As such I barely dented the gunline. Well I say gunline but I doubt you could call ten scouts and a henchman unit with mephiston a gunline. However when the stormravens did arrive they killed 4 tanks but I managed to down a raven and wipe out the majority of lees gunline. As the game went on lee was forced to hover with his ravens to be able to shoot, this left him horribly vulnerable to being charged and the blaster born duly delivered. One incredibly lucky bit in this game was when one unit of scouts (in a storm raven) decided to get out and charge two trueborn. Unfortunately the blast from a nearby ravager killed 5 of them and made them run away. After getting back in the fight they then charge the trueborn with a techmarine. The trueborn managed to shoot down 1 as it came in then killed 2 scouts leaving one scout remaining. The techmarine and scout only managed to kill 1 trueborn and both the scouts and the techmarine fled him! Luck goes around and comes around every so often I guess!

Conclusion

So what did I learn? That dark eldar are back! They are still a very hard army to use though and positioning is critical. But I found going second wasn’t the end of the earth. I’m happy with the list the only thing it misses is maybe a unit for Eldrad to sit in such as dark eldar warriors so he doesn’t slow down the beast unit.

It’s Mayhem next weekend and that’s it for tournaments this year! Next week I’ll tell you about this tournament and tell you how I got on. Until then….. BYE!!!