The Great Rebooting continues! Above you can see the Archon of my Kabalite contingent, Ophidia Zeras, Archon of the Hidden Fang. As you can see she's got some friends with her, three Sslyth made primarily from Daughters of Khaine Melusai. More detail on how these models were made can be found on my DA here.
The Hidden Fang are a former Commorite street gang who managed to steal a large number of combat skimmers, which is reflected in my current army by three Ravagers (which are undergoing replacement at the moment). Since these form a Spearhead, there are only five Warriors at the moment!
I've also finished the Scourges for the army:
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| 'Standing on a Book' photography style borrowed from someone else's blog.. |
As you can see they're based on Khinerai and all carry Blasters except the leader, who has a Blast Pistol and a Power Lance. (DA link here for more details.)
I got a bit of a surprise last weekend when I realised that our FLGS was running a 2k tournament. Despite these models being finished the night before, I already had them written into a list that was suitable, so I gave them a try.
It did Not Go Well.
Some clarification- though I recorded two losses and a draw, I didn't think the games went too badly. We were on a fairly tight time limit and in all three games I was starting to turn the situation around before time caught up with us. I was particularly pleased with my first game, in which I took on a pure Knights list and was able to destroy several despite my 30 Wyches really not having the tools to hurt them much. (One did finish off a Knight with her Hydra Gauntlets though, which was amusing.)
The new models also did quite well, with the Scourges making pests of themselves and the Archon and her Sslyth making an impact, even if she single-handedly lost me the last game when her Raider blew up and took no less than five Warriors and a Sslyth with it before dumping the survivors in front of an Eldar gun-line. Shadow Fields can only take so much!
The biggest problem I'm finding with this edition's version of Dark Eldar is that you get very little protection from bad dice. Since Archons can't hand out their re-roll of 1s to hit whilst standing in a Raider or Venom, it's very hard to deal with those days when you can't seem to roll well- in my last game, for example, I fired no less than six Dark Lance shots before I scored a hit- and this was needing flat 3+. That's the sort of thing you have re-roll bubbles for, only Drukhari really don't. Something like a Command Vehicle rule or even Stratagem to allow an Archon to lead from his Raider/ Venom would help a lot.
I've said it before, but Drukhari also really, really miss the Lance rule. The lack of it (the short version is that Dark Lances and other Darklight weapons used to damage Vehicles on 4+ at worst) means that outside of the S9 Void Lances on the Voidraven it's very hard to reliably damage tough targets. Thermal Lances, at S6, are almost worthless for anti-vehicle work and Haywire Blasters are really, really weak. This issue is compounded by the fact that unless you go with Haemonculus Covens, Drukhari have barely any melee weapons that can damage vehicles. There's no close combat weapon available to either Wyches or Kabalites above S6 (7 with combat drugs). There's also no Stratagem to give +1 to Wound in either the fight or shoot phases, which for an army with such low Strength on most of its attacks is a real pain.
Probably the best symptom of how 8th Edition and Drukhari aren't quite meshing right now is the fact that many players are taking Disintegrators over Dark Lances, especially on Ravagers. In the first blush, this seems daft- Disintegrators are anti-infantry weapons, something that Drukhari armies with all their access to Poison and massed splinter fire shouldn't need too much more of. But because of the odd way Toughness works in 8th, once a vehicle passes T8 Disintegrators are better against it than Dark Lances are, and even on lower Toughness targets the volume of dice makes them almost as good against Vehicles (and of course a lot better against Infantry).
I'm an old traditionalist who still remembers the days when the fact that Raiders had Dark Lances meant each of my transports could potentially one-shot a Land Raider, so I'm persevering with the 'bigger' gun for now, but believe me, I'm eyeing the performance of my Disintegrator Ravager very carefully....
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| WIP shot! Help. |
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