Here’s the thing. I used farseers, in particular Eldrad, for years. Probably over a decade. Almost all of that was non-competitive play.
As I began to play more and more capable opponents and more competitive lists, I found that farseers in general became less and less effective.
The first thing that limits their effectiveness is when you move from “one or two” squads of dragons to the full triple threat. Most players do this eventually, generally as they get ‘serious’ about playing Eldar. There really is no compromise, triple dragon is, in my opinion, head and shoulders above any other alternative for any force except footdar....well I guess I’ll get to my thoughts on footdar at another time.
Why does the swap to triple dragon decrease apparent value of farseer? Because you can’t fotune all three. Previous to the switch, you can play with Eldrad (or double seer) and be able to cover all of your primary threats with two casts of fortune, wierd as that sounds.
I ran a double falcon list with Eldrad in one and a seer in the other. It was a reasonably good list at 1500 points in that the two falcons were nigh on impossible to kill, but once you ran it up against genuinely good lists with a decent general it suddenly didn’t seem anywhere near as good (funny how that works)
So eventually I migrated to triple dragons in serpents. From that point on I struggled to find ‘good’ (read worth the effort) targets to fortune. Yes, sometimes one dragon tank is more important early than the others...but more often than not your opponent is equally happy to down the one or two that aren’t fortuned (and your heavy support) while ignoring the fortuned one. If you instead fortune the heavy support (be it falcon/prism or walker) then they down your fire dragons.
However doom is still handy right? Well, yes it is....but do you need it? When is it most helpful?
-Hand to hand combat
-Shooting with a chance to wound of 4+ or worse
Well, my army has.....zero hand to hand potential. It also has.......very little below S6, and the bits that are below S6 shouldn’t be firing since it means they are out of their tank. So it’s primary use was making certain (read article on certainty and chance later) that things would die, which is very helpful, but not essential. In fact if you can get enough firepower available to hit a target (see post entitled Firing order) you often don’t end up using all of it and the odds seem to even themselves out for you.
It’s true that occasionally I really need to kill a target (generally a squad of tac marines it seems, normally about 8 of them) and I miss having doom around for the surety it provides. But on the flipside, my army performs the same way every game or near enough for my satisfaction.
The psychic defence is the biggest loss, as I’m sure most Eldar players would instantly guess. That said, when playing a full mech Eldar list, what does the loss of psychic defence REALLY expose you to?
Well, it exposes you to a whole bunch of shenanigans from Space Wolves, that’s for sure. That said, how often do you really WANT to be driving your tanks around next to his rune priest? Often enough for it to annoy you when he has the storm up, but not as often as perhaps you’d think if you are trying to avoid the storm.
It makes it a lot harder to keep Grey Knight vehicles stunned/suppressed. That’s a genuine pain. Their other powers aren’t generally as troublesome given that if they are using hammerhand in an effective manner against you it indicates something more critical has already gone wrong.
Vanilla marines don’t have many powers that bother you, the gate can be annoying, but to be honest, a disembarked squad with a librarian attached.....well that’s just asking for a torrent of S6 isnt it?
Blood angels have several powers that are troubling and not having psychic defence against mephiston is a real pain, particularly since he is an absolute bastard to put down using S6 AP5 weaponry. But outside of him, the shield of sang is their primary power you’d be countering and....you don’t care. Seriously. A 5+ cover save that they aren’t going to use against any guns you’ve got? Who cares?
Tyranids are an issue, you lose the ability to counter/deny FNP. Which, combined with the type of shooting your army has, hurts Eldar more than it hurts a lot of other armies. I work by the “kill whatever doesn’t have FNP” maxim. Generally they protect hive guard, so you kill tervigons with your S6 (or little things) and try to drop fire dragons on the hive guard if they are a massive problem (which depends on where they are). If they FNP their tervigon, then you torrent the hive guard and fire dragon the tervi’s. Of course its not that simple....but it never is.
Dark Eldar, Imperial Guard, Orks, Necrons, Tau.....None of them have psychic powers of consequence to a Mech Eldar force.
Chaos marines have powers.....that you don’t care about. Nurgle demon princes with wings and warptime are scary.....but they die to torrent at least as well as anything else in the game.
So, what are we really taking this defence for? Grey Knights, tyranids and that’s all?
So I stopped using farseers. Which lead to the discovery that they weren’t actually doing anywhere near as much for me as I thought they were.
So what can you replace them with?
Well, you have a couple of options, but I’d already realised that what I wanted was the ability to reliably start off-table and deliver a decent hit in turn two.
So double autarchs is where I ended up.
So from the whole migration I’ve come to the following opinions:
1. Fortune is simply not that useful for a force with multiple redundancy, you can’t fortune all of them and since they are all identical the opponent doesn’t mind targeting a different one.
2. Doom is not necessary as anything but a reliability tool (which is in itself quite valuable) to ensure that you are not subject to those freak incidents where you hit six times with your cannons and only wound 3 times on a 2+. You can’t cover for the loss of that reliability BUT the double autarch does ensure that you get more sources of firepower on the board at the same time, allowing for more things shooting that target.
3. Psychic defence, while seemingly handy, is actually only really handy in a comparatively small number of matchups. It is VERY handy in some of them (GK obviously and it really hurts psyker battle squads) but generally it’s not needed, it’s a nice to have.
4. Double autarch allows you, when getting the option to go second, to completely remove one full shooting phase from your opponent without having a corresponding phase where you are at half strength.
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