First Game w/ Dark Eldar (thoughts, not battle report)

Hey there folks!  Last night I played my first game with my Dark Eldar.  It was fun, there was a lot of stuff I learned, lots of new thoughts about the army.  I'll share a couple with you today. 

First, here's the list I used:


 Baron Sathonyx
1x Haemonculus

7x Incubi w/ Raider w/ Flickerfield, Aethersails, Grizly Trophies

19x Hellions w/ Squad Leader
3x Wracks w/ Venom w/ 2x Splinter Cannons
5x Warriors w/ Blaster, Venom w/ 2x Splinter Cannons
5x Warriors w/ Blaster, Venom w/ 2x Splinter Cannons
5x Warriors w/ Blaster, Venom w/ 2x Splinter Cannons

3x Beastmasters, 5x Khymerae (dudes w/ 4+ invuln), 4x Razorwing Flocks (dudes w/ 5A, 5W, and Rending)
6x Reavers w/ 2x Heat Lances, Squad Leader
6x Reavers w/ 2x Heat Lances, Squad Leader

Ravager w/ Flickerfield
Ravager w/ Flickerfield
Ravager w/ Flickerfield

So, I played against a Grey Knights army, with two storm ravens and a land raider, with lots of paladins, terminators, psyflemen, and acolytes.

The first thing that struck me was that my army was huge.  I have a TON of models, and it's going to be a challenge to place them all where I need them to be.  8 vehicles + 34 bigish flying models + the beast squad is a lot more than I'm personally used to, heh.

The second thing I noticed is that I'm going to have trouble with Storm Ravens.  I can't assault them to death because they're AV2 in the back, and my limited number of Lance Weapons (13) should bring down 1 if it hasn't turbo-boosted.  My dice were pretty bad- I only killed one all game.

I really liked my huge squad of Hellions.  Definitely worth their points in that game- they ended up with an obscene number of pain tokens by the end.  When they were stuck in a combat with some paladins at the end (and the paladins made a ridiculous number of saves), they took their fearless saves, hit and ran, and claimed an objective right before the game ended, with one of them plus the Baron left.  I even used them poorly, not giving them enough cover, bunching them up, etc.  Pretty awesome though :)

Everything in the army dies easily to Psyflemen dreads, as is pretty obvious.  They had their picks on what to kill.  I was happy to kill one fairly quickly with a squad of Reavers, but the other one shot every single turn.

Everything dies SO EASY.  Flickerfields don't help at all when you have 3 pens and a glance on your open-topped vehicle.  It's hard to get cover saves for everything, though I've since thought of some good tactics to help in that regard.

Reavers in that size of squad really made me happy.  6-man with a couple lances are really versatile.  They killed a guardsman squad with their turbo-boosting ability one turn, and turned around and killed a Psyfleman Dread the next turn.  For 150ish points, they do work.

My one and only shot with a Dark Lance killed his Land Raider.  Lol.

Incubi and beastmasters suffer mightily against I6 Paladins.  I think they caused a combined 2 wounds before they were all wiped off the table.  Terrible rolling on my part, but still... not good at all.

Think that's about it.  Just wanted to give my first impressions.  I liked my list a lot.  I just need to get better with it- lots of really bad positioning of things that I'll get better at with time.  Overall, very cool, very pleased.  Only like 13 'groups' of guys I gotta paint now.  Lol.

As a side note, I won at objectives, but if the game had been kill points, he would have won by 1.  I probably would have played it differently, but still- Kill Points are going to be a rough one for me.  Then again, in the Nova format, I would have still won, since he had to win by more than 2 in that format, and the next tiebreaker would have been objectives :-p