Warpspiders, the complete edition

From thread; http://www.librarium-online.com/forums/eldar/206018-repairing-our-codex-one-unit-time-part-v.html

Post 1;

How this unit can be improved, so that we'll actually see them fielded more often;
Exchange the exarch powers (yea like this wasn't totally obvious) to powers that grant Stealth and Infiltrate USR. Make their weapons rending (woohoo potential s15 hit on tanks! No armour saves!).

Post 2;

One of their hidden bonuses is the fact they have AP- as this lets them glance transports to death, while surrounding, thus causing everything inside to die for free. Switching their weapons for flamers would be interesting, but I have heard through the grapevine that the second new aspect from forgeworld may or may not be a flamer-jumppack unit.

I don't think rending would be that powerful at all. A full squad with double exarch guns shoots only 22 times, at 17% rending thats only 4 rending hits. Statistically average anyway, there's nothing stopping every shot from rending, just as there's nothing stopping every CQC attack from harlequins from rending either. 12" range guns will make a big difference.

Post 3;

How do you figure a Phoenix Lord doesn't exist? Fundamentally the father of the PL's is Asurmen, who is still around and it's his decision. Moreover, each PL is essentially the first Exarch of the relevant shrine which would suggest that it's possible all shrines have a PL and they only reason we don't see that explicitly said is only because they've not been explicitly said. This is 40k afterall, where both sides of the story are lies and truth and noone's really sure of anything.

Finally, how do you propose to 'make rending good'? I thought a 17% chance to ignore armour and wound automatically was pretty good, considering the kinds of units that have rending generally output -very- large amounts of hits. Harlequins between 10-32 rending hits yes? Assuming iron law average of 17% thats still 6 rending hits.

Post 4;

I'm pretty happy with Warpspiders and don't want anyone messing them up - yes they can't take down a landraider, nor can they take on a hoard of orks in CC - but they're not supposed to, that the point of aspect warriors, they're good at different things.

Now that is very interesting to see someone say. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that every unit in 40k follows a rock-paper-scissors formula. Now I know that's not really what you're talking about, but it's where you're headed. What is this theoretical warpspider unit a hard counter for? Transports? Aren't there enough S6 shots coming from your tanks? What about fast skimmers like DE tanks or squadrons of artillery or landspeeders or warwalkers etc. Anything < or = AV11 all around. Well first you might argue in favour of shuriken cannons etc and that does seem fair except that warpspiders can deepstrike behind enemy lines, something tanks cannot do. They also are effectively an X-wound S6 platform. One solid hit might down a waveserpent/falcon/fireprism, however X many hits are required for a warpspider unit of a given size. Assuming economic equality you're looking at 6-7 warpspiders per tank, so in effect you have a 6-7 wound scatterlaser tank with 3 times as many ablative wounds per shot.

What if you designate warpspiders as being dedicated MC hunters? Once again tanks do it better, as do Fire Dragons. Missiles+melta go a long way to killing MCs. Light infantry killers? They're no good against hordes as you said. Heavy infantry killers? Their shots are just as effective as a guardians under that consideration, except that the guardian/DA is likely to have guide+fortune. Medium infantry killers? 3+ or 4+ armour saves, low model count typically within 5-10 models. You get about 4 dead models from a full shooting phase. Not bad. Zip away from the combat with assault move. That idea totally neglects that medium infantry are typically troops and inside cover/transports.

Now see if you wanted to express that warpspiders were some kind of harassment unit I could almost sympathise, but I can think of far better units to use for harassment than a 22pt model with a sub-par gun. A much better unit for harassment would be storm guardians. Similar weapon ranges, similar physical stats, more useful in direct combat, generate more wounds and to top it off have dedicated transport and are scoring. All at 8-14pts/model. Simply put, there are better and cheaper units to use as harassment.

So now we can deduce that warpspiders are not designed for killing hordes, tanks, heavy infantry, prevalence of FNP renders them moot against most new codeci medium infantry. They can't harass well. They aren't scoring. They have a strong chance of DYING in their own deployment. They kill their own members during their assault phase. Infact the only thing these guys seem to be designed for is killing units of low model count skimmers/artillery. They might be considered worthwhile for killing enemy HQs and in some cases they are but that all depends on a good deployment and overlooks their measly 24" effective single turn lethal range. It also overlooks the fact that getting near your opponents HQ often subjects you to the better part of that armys total firepower as the reacting player aggressively defends his most expensive unit. Also not considering that HQs have FNP out the ass, good armour saves and special weapons in cahoots along with shooting being unable to single-out a particular model for the purposes of wound allocation, something that could be performed by a melee unit.

In most cases a dire avenger unit is just as good as spiders for the purposes of dealing wounds. Anything that spiders could handle that avengers can't is normally dealt with by the units accompanying tank. Even if you claimed that the 24" range was significant, 24" doom, DA move 6", fire at 18". More hits, more wounds gross. Same armour save in most cases. Doom split across a 150pt DA unit is 2pts/unit/turn/152pts-base. The same for a warpspider squad outputting a comparative number of wounds would be 1.2pts/unit(size14)/turn/304pts-base(14models incl 2 exarchs). You increase the price of your game in a single turn by nearly 21% gross just for taking warpspiders instead of direavengers. You better hope those warpspiders are killing 21% more models. That's WITH doom by the way, on both squads.

Remove bladestorm from the DA and the figures adjust slightly. 2pts/model/turn/137pts-base vs 2pts/model/turn/237pts-base. Oooops. That makes warpspiders nearly 43% more expensive than DA for a comparative number of potential wounds on a 4+ or better target.

I'm pretty happy with Warpspiders and don't want anyone messing them up - yes they can't take down a landraider, nor can they take on a hoard of orks in CC - but they're not supposed to, that the point of aspect warriors, they're good at different things.

So I'm finding this particularly interesting to see. Spiders look good on paper but unfortunately everything they do is done better by either an elites or HS option or for cheaper by a troops choice.

Post 5;

Personally I see Warp Spiders as horde-killers, at least that's how I perceive their current role. Sadly they are outperformed in this area by cheaper units like DA's. Today most people who field them use them as a way to take out light vehicles like Land Speeders, and that's fine in itself but isn't really their job, it's just a byproduct of having a high strength weapon.

I think we pretty much agree here. Also any enemy commander that allows his skimmers to get targeted by warpspiders is probably not very good.

So, I propose they get poisoned weapons instead of high strength weapons. This would remove the duality of the unit (no more hunting vehicles) and let them focus on one thing. Now, what that one thing should be I'm not certain of as of yet, but I still think they are a unit that's made for putting a lot of wounds on tough enemy models (e.g. Thunder Wolf Cavalry, Carnifex Broods). The problem is, even with a lot of wounds most models like that have a pretty good Armour Save, so Rending is not entirely inappropriate for their weapons.

They could also be focused more on horde type units, like Hormagaunts, Ork Boyz and similar, but how many lists like that do we face today; not a lot as you all know so I prefer them as Elite hunters. However, if one would make them anti horde they would need more shots, or possibly we could change their weapons to be template weapons, but we wouldn't really need Rending.

I think rending is the superior option to poisoned weapons for the following reason; S6 guns wound almost 80% of models reliably on at least 4+. The issue that spiders have is that once those wounds are dealt, they're no more effective than a lasgun against the target. Literally everything can roll a save against them (except kroot). So in effect, you might as well take a squad of dire avengers because they share the same threat radius and are much cheaper. Rending by contrast would be the best upgrade to warpspiders as it would allow them to reliably down between 3-5 models in a shooting phase, which would make them a much more credible threat to retinues or high-value infantry.

If the role of warpspiders is harassment (and it's currently very poor at that job) then allowing them to actually damage a target is necessary. Harassment only works if the harasser is credible threat, designed to occupy and divide a portion of the opponents army.

For a unit with a 6+ save against warpspiders you're looking at about 9 wounds per round of 20 shots with no exarch. Against a T3 unit with 4+ you get 5-6 wounds. 3-4 against generic space marines. 1-2 against terminators. Unsaved wounds btw.

220 points shooting generates on average about 90 points in return deaths.

Upgrade to rending?
T3 6+; 9.6
T3 5+; 8
T3 4+; 6.6
T4 3+; 5
T4 2+; 3.7

From the above calculations we can deduce that rending would improve performance against Terminators by nearly 50%, but against hordes would have negligable impact. Against Spacemarine units in general you gain 1 extra model killed. On the wider game scale it's probably not significant. Rending against vehicles places them at an 11% chance to wreck a landraider for 20 shots. AV11 has a 31% chance to be wrecked.

In brief, poison wouldn't help them that much.

The Exarch should get a purchasable ability to re-roll the dice for the second jump. His second ability I'm less sure of, possibly something along the lines of any unit he wounds moves as if in Difficult Terrain (not Dangerous Terrain though) on the following turn.

Finally, I think they should have a 2+ Save to further differentiate them from Jetbikes.

As for Exarch Wargear I'm still at a loss for what to do.

That's what these threads are for. 2+ armour seems kinda silly since it doesn't address the core issues of warpspiders lack of killyness and bad special rules. Exarch wargear could do with some modification. Give the exarch a doomweaver-style flamer template and I'm good.

Post 6;

About the only other thing I'd do is make their weapons 18" range. 12" just puts them way too close to their targets for little benefit (as you said, doom wouldn't really help). A flamer template is like 7" long, what's to stop a tank of any kind just driving 6-11" then blasting you with a heavy flamer?

Post 7;

I agree that they don't need poison, the reason behind my suggesting it is to remove their ability to hunt vehicles. It isn't their job to do so, and with Rending and S6 a lot more people will be using them that way, thus I think giving them a Poisoned weapon is the better option. Also, this lets them put the hurt on Thunderwolf Cavalry and similar units more reliably, if we want them to be elite hunters that is.

The 2+ save isn't required and doesn't do a whole lot, but it would aid in making them less like Jetbikes and more like their own unit type; it would also make them slightly more survivable for their points, especially when casting Fortune on them forcing the opponent to properly deal with this harassment rather than just sending some stray bullets in their way and gnawing them to death.

And yet I still must disagree. Thematically it doesn't fit. CWE don't use poison. The only 2 weapon types we have that wound on a set value are witchblades and d-cannon tech. Witchblades already function like CQC poison weapons and as people can attest they're far from brilliant. D-cannons are 12" on wraithguard but those already have special rules that differentiate them from spiders and jetbikes in quite a significant way.

Thematically eldar weaponry is all over the place. You get powerweapons and pseudo-forceweapons on a number of S3 models which aren't really meant to see CQC. You get shooting weapons with really unusual characteristics, like deathspinners but also d-cannons and prism cannons. There are no prevailing factors for this army and it leaves kind of wallowing in the muck in 5th edition because there's no one thing we're really good at. Take necrons for example; their most basic weapon can glance even a landraider to death. It's unreliable but it's still there as an option for dealing with surprise deepstriking/outflanking skimmers or tanks. Tau have a couple of really cool toys that can be combined with other units to dramatically increase their effectiveness. CSM are like angry, emo SpaceMarines who have an extra attack for free and can take a variety of cheap squad-level permanent upgrades. Eldar don't have any of this. Our shit (and at this point it really is 'shit') is transient or limited to one model per squad. You can't depend on anything but firedragons, dire avengers or waveserpents to do their job without babysitting or in needing to be in large groups. And this is the prevalent shortcoming.

The Eldar army needs "a theme".

Space Yiffs get lots of mixed units/HWTs and some ludicrously good psyker powers. Their theme is that they run in, f*ck with your shit and laugh at you as you bleed to death in the snow.
IG are TANKS ALL DAY ERRY DAY, or, SO MANY INFANTRY. IG's theme is WW2 Russia. And by that I mean mediocre performance done by massive numbers.
DEldar are "poison, poison everywhere, your toughness means nothing to me".
Vanilla marines are "we are whatever you want us to be" in reference to their ease of play and how noob friendly they are. Their theme truly is jack of all trades, master of none.
Tyranids are "pop goes the weasel!". I'll leave you to work that one out.

That's 5th ed codices. Orks don't count. They're blatantly 4th edition and nothing will convince me otherwise.

So yeah. Eldar need a theme. Let's try... "drop powerweapons from everything but banshees, and make all other special melee weapons rending! Make all web-thrower weapons rending too! To top it off, let's make eldar better at disruption of movement and psykers!"

That sounds pretty good to me. No other army has that overall theme either. Obviously storm guardians wouldn't have rending CQC weapons, but scorpions would. Which, for the sake of argument, would mean only 1 in 2 scorpions will land a rending hit, average. Hardly a huge improvement. Rending makes Doom better, makes guide worthwhile, reduces our reliance on fortune. It makes our underperforming elites better, our fast attack better and the relevant heavy support choices better too. Adding rending to shuriken cannons would be largely unnecessary but quite cool. How about rending krak EML? Your S8 missile is now a S17 missile. Finally! Reliable long distance AV14 breakers!

If a unit is unable to reliable hurt in any way (by principal weapons or by special weapons or by decent cheap transport option) armour value targets that believe me in 5`th ed competitive environment is almost useless. Spiders without any At capability will not see the light of day because now you need to open the can before killing the little plastic men inside. And specialization as we think at it is bad due to the fact we have an elite army. Compare with tyranids which really is a specialized army. But they are pretty cheap and that allow them to have this kind of specialization.

Exactly. Eldar need to be 1.5x as capable as any comparative unit. We have bugger all model count and high costs. Bad weaponry is just icing on the cake.

Firedragons are designed to kill tanks but they'll do just fine against MEQs in a pinch. Dire Avengers are meant to kill hordes but they'll kill terminators too. Harlequins were meant to be a specialist assault squad for snipers and stuff, but they got pinned with MEQ duty anyway. Waveserpents were meant to be our primary transport but now they're our MBT too. Seer councils on bikes? Doesn't matter what the target, you better BELIEVE they'll ruin your day.

So what you find is you have about 8 reasonably good units that do one job very well and another job sort-of-average vs about 20 other units that are ineffective against their primary targets or due to the meta-strategy of the game, no longer have a target to attack because their opponent is much more likely to field a particular other kind of unit.

You don't want eldar to have rending? On what basis? A 3.5% chance that a full squad of spiders might get a penetrating hit against an AV14 vehicle? How does rending change ANYTHING on the macro-scale? It barely makes an impact against the specialised/super units of other races. What it does do, is make them a bigger threat because the chance of them being a threat goes up in all catagories.

Post 8;

Not to be an ass but how does your first version of events differ from the second version? In regards to hard counters then there's a hard counter available for that. The whole concept of hard counters depends on something being extremely good at one function only. So infact... Eldar are a rock-paper-scissors army. The couple of units we have that can multi-task are overshadowed by the large number of hard-counter units we possess that see no screen time due to my argument in an above post.