Dark Eldar: Psykers

Dark Eldar: Psykers

Well now the tourney season is over for me and I’ve had a good 18 tournament style games I’ll air a few of my thoughts on Eldrad’s psychic powers. Now I went through Divination powers before the Brighton GT but now it’s time for me to waltz onto the telepathy powers.

Telepathy/Divination

So let’s get into these telepathy powers then shall we?

(Prim) Psychic Shriek – This gives the psyker an ability the same as the doom of malantai at 1 unit. Pretty useful especially if Eldrad's being dragged around by the beast unit.

(1) Dominate – Unit must take a leadership test for every action they make (move, shoot, run, charge) or they cannot perform any action that phase. Very useful on say guard but against ld 10 units this is just a waste of a cast really. Very situational and not reliable.

(2) Mental Fortitude – Unit immediately rallies and is fearless. The auto rally isn’t that important for me really but the fearless one is. The beast unit can sometimes be vulnerable to loosing combat if the razor wings are attacked by strength 6. By being fearless this eliminates that worry.

(3) Puppet Master – Focused witch fire. Target fire a weapon as it was your own in the shooting phase. This is very funny making a unit that has just jumped out of there unit melta their own vehicle. Or a model uses their own interceptor auto cannon on a flyer. What this is especially good at however is targeting a vehicle. Imagine controlling a manticore and shooting the guard blob unit behind a barricade?

(4) Terrify – Removes opponents fearless and forces them to take a morale check. This is alright. Problem is most fearless units are also leadership 10. I’d love to do this to a daemon unit then run them down after winning combat though! Situational.

(5) Invisibility – this is the second power house spell of the tree. Target unit gets stealth and shrouded. Charged units cant counter attack and models attacking this unit count as ws 1 in combat. This spell makes the beast unit silly. 4+ cover in the open and 2 up if they are in area terrain, then mix that together with if there charged being 5+ to hit and no bonus attack due to the baron. No one will want to charge them.

(6) Paranoia – Target unit either is pinned, can’t do anything except move or hits its own unit at its modified strength using any bonus to strength and ap with weapons they have. I tell you what this spell is silly. We’re talking ork meganobz just wiping themselves out or a guard blob unit smashing itself apart. Or even something as simple as a wraith unit not being able to charge in a turn. No doubt about it this is a very powerful spell.

Rankings

So now I’ve gone through this I think I’ll rank all the spells in order of usefulness

14. Perfect Timing (Divination) probably the best spell possible for Tau. Rubbish for The beast unit.

13. Scrier’s Gaze (Divination) Even if this did actually work I have one unit in reserve so a bit over the top for them.

12. Forewarning (Divination) A 4+ invulnerable isn’t anything to shout about really especially when the beast unit has many with that save anyway.

11. Dominate (Telepathy) this is okay but its use is relatively limited.

10. Terrify (Telepathy) again this is okay but its use is situational.

9. Psychic Shriek (Telepathy) the range of this limits this spell too much for the way I’d use it.

8. Foreboding (Divination) I found this relatively useful counter attack boosting the already high damage output of the beast unit. Amazing combination with Invisibility

7. Mental Fortitude (Telepathy) Making the beast unit fearless for 2 player turns really helps them out in long messy combats.

6. Precognition (Divination) Making Eldrad a god kinda allows him to chomp through units on his own allowing him to split off.

5. Prescience (Divination) The king of spells atm. Lower down only because dark eldar hit on 3’s anyway. The ability to spam this spell with Eldrad tho makes it a very strong contender.

4. Hallucination (Telepathy) A powerful spell. Unfortunately the random element makes this too unpredictable to get to first place but the ability to cripple a unit for a turn makes this great.

3. Puppet Master (Telepathy) Excellent spell the ability to shoot a vindicator into packed ranks of marines makes me chuckle.

2. Invisibility (Telepathy) Makes the main unit of the army incredibly resilient in combat as well as shooting.

1. Misfortune (Divination) The best spell out there at the moment in my opinion. Forcing to reroll successful saves is too brilliant to pass up. At mayhem I had a situation where I had this up on a grey hunter unit with wolf banner up. This meant any roll other than a 2 had to be rerolled! This spell mixed with venom fire is devastating!

So Telepathy or Divination?

Depends on who you’re playing. However I’ve developed a system. Noted in the diagram below (check out my paint skillz!

The theory behind that is this. There are 3 powerful spells per spell list (the top 6 in the list above) Maybe 4 that I wouldn’t mind getting and 4 that frankly I’d never use unless there was nothing else to cast. 3 Of those useless spells are unfortunately Divination. Fortunately divination primaris power is one of there more powerful spells (Prescience)

Therefore if I roll on Divination I’m always going to get a useful spell. With Psychic Shriek being alright it’s better to roll on divination first to clock up that first useful spell regardless of what I roll.

If I roll precognition or misfortune tho I’m still 100% guaranteed a good spell with divination so I roll again. If I’m lucky and roll the second good spell the next spell I’ll get is prescience as this is guaranteed meaning ill definatly have 3 very useful spells in hand. I’ll then roll on telepathy as that’s the only deck with ‘power’ spells left

However if I don’t roll misfortune or precognition  on divination I grab prescience then move onto telepathy as there’s a better chance to choose one of the ‘power spells’ with 3 being in telepathy and 2 in divination. If I roll a useless spell now I won’t replace it with psychic shriek as this will reduce my chances of getting the good spell. I’ll keep rolling on telepathy until I get one of the big three. At this point I have a decision to make. If there are more or equal good spells left in divination ill roll there. Otherwise ill roll on telepathy.

This process will hopefully maximise the usefulness of the spells I get and as a result give Eldrad the advantage.

Please don’t follow this if you using Eldrad with Tau or Eldar. Each spells usefulness is different dependant on the army you’re using. As such the ‘Power spells’ will be much different in those armies.

I hoped you found this useful! Next time I’ll talk about the infantry revolution until then... TA TA!