Goatboy 40k Thoughts – Dark Eldar – Bad Touch Masters
Goatboy here again chatting about 40k nonsense as usual. I got to spend some quality time with the Dark Eldar book. We had some wine, talked about politics, and finished the night with some [The following words have been censored by the Imperium – don’t think or imagine what happened just know they remain friends] and a donkey. Now of course the question is do I think the sky is falling and the game is dead?
I don’t think so. I do think it adds a nice new, strange army to the mix that can be fun and mostly competitive. I know a lot of people are talking about the book, saying it is too expensive, too fragile, or too elfy. I just don’t know really yet as mathhammer, no matter how strong the numbers add up doesn’t always work. So instead of theorizing what might be awesome I just want to talk about what interests me in the book.
The first thing that got me excited was there was another way to “activate” a new army. Now what do I mean by this? Well you have HQ choices that move units into a troop slot. I like it when armies do this as it lets you create something different then the normal list. There are two options that do this – both SC HQ’s that either activate Hellions as scoring or Wracks as scoring. I am definitely more interested in the Hellions as I think there might be a good choice in that unit instead of the Wracks. Something about flying Back to the Future Skateboards just gets me excited. I think it might also be due to the Hellions being plastic models. So with that in mind and the fact the activator Special Character is extremely cheap, I think I might have my army and my wallet breaker. As a side note, I hope they come 5 to a box. If they come 3 I will be a very sad panda.
So we have cool options at the troop choice I now look at the HQ slot. The Archon is a monster. There is no doubt about it, we now have the deathstar killer. There isn’t much that can survive from an onslaught of creepy space elf goodness. I don’t know about you, but having the option to create your own super killer is pretty sweet. You mix that with a cool retinue to create a pseudo Super Villain team that can rival any other “Avengers” Wolf Lord squad I come up with. The best thing is that his overall build lay out is pretty cheap and you can get some serious mileage out of the character too. The other HQ slots are all neat too with the Haemonculi being a 1-3 HQ choice option too.
The other thing that looks neat to me is that there is a new rule of Power through Pain. Now what this does is when the unit kills another non vehicle unit they gain a pain token. It maxes out at 3 with the first being FNP, the second being Furious Charge, and the last getting Fearless. The cool thing is a lot of units start with Pain tokens and other units have Pain tokens they can give out. In fact I think this army benefits from larger squads that can easily boost with just one Pain token on them. That 20 man Hellion squad is really starting to make my wallet cry. I got a funny feeling that properly using the “share the pain” rule will go a long way.
I also like some of the new weapons they have. The good ole Dark Lance is still strong and the new Blaster and Heat Lance is another neat tool. I plan on using some Jet Bikes as Heat Lance deliverers so my Hellions can get into the business of busting some heads. It looks like almost all the choices in the army have anti mech options which make for an interesting army. If you look at the strong armies out there all have options across the Force Org that can deal with boxes of doom.
The question right now is will the DE flip around the dreaded “metagame”? I don’t know. Only time will tell. I do think the army is going to be a difficult one to play and master. I want to play it, but I have a feeling it is going to take me a few months to get the ins and outs of the army and feel confident when I throw down some extremely difficult to feel-pain models on the field.
Until next time – seize that initiative by yelling out “For the Great Goat!!!” It works, I promise.
