Army List Clinic - Eldar Help

Nick speaking,

Thank you to everyone who has submitted their army lists to our Clinic, we hope that our responses have given you some pointers and have been useful. In today's post we will have a look at a list submitted by an IDICBeer YouTube subscriber and his Eldar...

Email in:

Hello IDICBeer,

thank you for a great job you do with all those videos. It made me write you this message to ask you for a help with Eldar, if you wouldn't mind.

I play GK in a very small, friendly, but competitive group against SM, CSM, Necron and Tau (maybe an Ork player will join us). With GK, I do very well, however I expect Eldar to be much more difficult to play.

Right now we're around 1250 pts. (because of Planetary Empire bonuses, armies are usually bigger, like up to 1650 pts or so). Our meta game favours heavy firepower (Dreadnought, Doomsday Arch, Annihilation Barge, Forgefiends, Broadsuits, Land Riders etc.) and the battles are mostly shooty.

I can't decide what to try with Eldar in order to not be utterly crushed -- I don't expect as powerful army as my GK feels, but I'd like to stay on par with others.

What list(s) for 1250 pts would you recommend? Why to pick certain units? How to play the army? How to sneak past the heavy firepower of my opponents with kinda low-T low-AV units Eldar have?

Thank you very much for any suggestions and your time.

Best wishes

Lockear

Hi Lockear

Thanks very much for your email, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to see if I can come up with something that may help you. You don’t mention any limitations with regards to the models you have, so I will run with that...

First, smaller games are even more of a challenge for such an old, unforgiving Codex, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take your Eldar into the game without a good fighting chance. I would like to be able to give you several options, but as I see it, the best way to go is to just run with the best units in the Codex that the points will allow for.

So, first up will be two Fire Prisms, take them bare boned to keep the points down. They will give you some nice long range variable stat firepower. Running with them would be two small bare boned units of Fire Dragons in Wave Serpents. I would run with Scatter Lasers myself, as the twin linked side of them will probably be your best AA on the table as well.  That is your firepower sorted out to deal with all the high AV you will be facing.

Now we need to sort the troops and HQ out, and again this is a tough one if we want to take all the goodies as well. First we need the troops to work in line with the rest of the army, so I would forget ground troops like Guardians and Rangers, they are good, but won’t fit the type of army we need to go for to compete with your meta. I would opt for a strong core of Dire Avengers in a Wave Serpent with a Farseer, You could stick a Bright lance on this Serpent if you wanted some long range anti AV13/14, but they are expensive. The Farseer should have Fortune and Runes of warding for the anti pysker ability. I would then run along side that two units of jetbikes, these will be your fast moving troop choices. The army should look something like this…

1x Farseer/Fortune/RoW (100)

10x Dire Avengers/PW-Shield/Bladestorm/Wave Serpent/Scatter Lasers ( 277)

5x Jetbikes/1x Cannon (120)

5x Jetbikes/1x Cannon (120)

5x Fire Dragons/Wave Serpent/Scatter Lasers (195)

5x Fire Dragons/Wave Serpent/Scatter Lasers (195)

1x Fire Prism (115)

1x Fire Prism/Cannon (125)

1247 pts

In the end we had a few points left over so I stuck a Cannon on a Prism, quite useful if you use that Prism to combine beams, as you can also shoot the Cannon at another unit as well, as per the Eldar FAQ.

So that’s the list, but how to run it? First up, you will have to use the army as a whole, try to keep the army together and use the entire force of your warhost against your enemy. Ideally, you will want to go first if you can, get your Farseer tank fortuned up and the warhost into position to attack. Going second does have some advantages though, especially if you want to grab those objectives with your jetbikes turn five.

One thing to bear in mind for Eldar at the moment is how important secondary objectives are, in reality you need to treat them as Primary objectives. ALWAYS think about taking First Blood (the best one as it cannot be shared) and Linebreaker (which should be doable with your fast army). Slay the Warlord is going to be subject to what is on the table, but the key thing to remember is, if you have more Secondary objectives than your opponent and you can contest/draw on Primary objectives, then you win, and Eldar at the moment find it much easier to tie Primary then win them.

Taking the list up in points, and I would start by increasing the Jetbike units to six strong with an extra Cannon and then a Warlock with Embolden in each, the re-roll leadership is invaluable in keeping them around longer. From then on, a nice distraction unit of Swooping Hawks jumping up and down works well, including getting Linebreaker for you, or maybe some Warp Spiders. Then you could just start adding units you like and see how it goes.

Hope that helps, let me know how you get on.

If any of our Readers would like to offer any suggestions, please feel free to comment below, and if you would like to submit one of your army lists to us to have a look at, you can do so here: listclinic.idicbeer@gmail.com