Tuesday 10 March 2015

Considering the Harlequins...

Okay, so the rules have been out and about for several weeks now and I've had a bit of time this past few days to leaf through the codex and see what they can offer my Dark Eldar.

The conclusion....

Well...

'Not a lot'.

Okay, so that's not strictly true, there are definitely some units in there that I can see uses for...


I like the look of the phantasmancy Shadowseer. There are some solid defensive buffs and some quite powerful attacking powers in that arsenal. I could see him being a good addition to a few different Dark Eldar units.

The solitaire seems very sound and quite unique (fitting!).

The Starweaver (or Venom2.0, which conceptually does seem rather baffling, considering the venom was originally introduced as a Harlequin vehicle) packing 2, 3 shot, strength 6 cannons gives a very viable alternative to the venom as a floating gunboat. Which can threaten more targets (albeit with a lower rate of fire and less range)

The Skyweaver bikes are another way of getting some of that hard to come by S6, on a platform that can move 12", shoot, then assault move 2D6" back into cover. Although T4, 4+ save and 50 points a dude seems slightly steep, even considering the 2 wounds.

Where the book falls down however is trying to fit these units in to my Dark Eldar list without having to spend loads more points on other units I dont really want.

The Shadowseer is only available in the main detachment (which is 3 troops, 2 fast attack and 1 heavy support MINIMUM), the heroes path detachment (which means he cant join a unit to make use of those sweet blessings, or in one of the other larger formations (which again, invovles spending points on stuff i dont want).

This is pretty much repeated across the board for everything i want to test out.

In a way its kinda cool to think this may be the way they clamp down on ally abuse going forward. Placing too many unit-tax obstacles in the way of just being able to pick and choose all the wheat from multiple books and ignoring the chaff.
But how many times have we seen that sort of approach fall by the wayside a year or two down the line? Codex Chaos Marines and Codex Dark Angels both being fairly sedate side-by-side seemed to indicate a toning down way back at the start of 6th. Then we had Daemons, Tau and Eldar.

I dont think the 'Quins book is BAD per se, but from the point of view of a Dark Eldar player looking from the perspective of adding some allies to add some volume shooting with an actual strength value and some cool psychic powers, i'm pretty sure theres probably somewhere else you could look to accomplish that much more efficiently....

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