Thursday, November 11, 2010

Dark Eldar Wracks

Why is the internet abuzz with the new Wracks rules? I'll do a little breakdown:

1) Wracks are cheap.
Wracks weigh in at 10 points a piece. What do you get for your points? Marine WS, T, I and 2 attacks base. The caveat of course is that their attacks are poison (4+) which means their str 3 means very little. (for now)

2) Wracks start with a Pain Token.
What does this mean? It means these buggers now have a 6+ save and a 4+ shrug, and unlike other Dark Kin it is not negated by str 6 or 7. That raises their survivability by a factor of 4!

3) Wracks are troops with a Haemonculus in the army.
Wracks become the most survivable troop choice in the DE army when a Haemonculus is present. Put these guys in some cover late game and people will hate trying to get them off an objective.

4) Wracks can take 1 Liquifier per 5 models.
What's a liquifier you ask? Probably the best thing your army can use to deal with hordes or Marine Equivalent armor (MEQ) in cover. Why? Because it is a str 4 flamer whose AP is D6, which means half the time MEQ get no save or cover save...and you can have 2 in a 10 man squad! Wowsa!

5) Wracks synergize with Haemonculus.
Big surprise there right? I mean Haemonculi BUILD Wracks, why wouldn't they work well together? Well consider this: the DE rule "Share the Pain" says that if an IC joins a unit it gets to share it's pain toke with the unit. Haemonculi start the game with a Pain token, Wracks start the game with a pain token...seems like I have an idea here....that's right, when they join the squad gains Feel No Pain and Furious Charge for benefiting from 2 pain tokens...Remember that Strength 3 comment earlier? Turns out that when Wracks charge now they will be I 5 and S 4...meaning against T 4 or less they re-roll wounds! Which means 75% of the attacks that get thru vs marines will wound!

Still not convinced that Wracks are any good? Consider the fact that all Dark Eldar vehicles are open-topped and fast skimmers. This means your raider full of Wracks can fly up 12 inches + 2 inch Disembark + 6 inch assault, means those Wracks can charge an astounding 20 inches, on top of that the Raider can still fire it's Dark Lance!

I believe 1-2 units of Wracks will find their way into most Dark Eldar lists in the future, with benefits like this how could they not?

8 comments:

  1. Nice Blog Wiley......

    But will they be competitive?

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  2. I like the blog. I am not really sold on the effectivness of the liquifier. It seems to be too random and might not come through for you when you need it to.

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  3. Will they be competitive? Of course they will, I expect, as Willie does, that many competitve lists will have 1-2 units of these guys in it. Now whether its a 9 man unit with a haemonculus, 10 man unit with 2 liquifier guns, or a 6 man unit on a Venom for that late game objective grab is what remains to be seen.

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  4. Yeah I have played them all three ways. So far I like the 10 man with champ 2 liquifiers and an agonizer. the flamer may be random, but even if it doesn't roll ap 3- its still a flamer and usually used by DE means you have piled out of a vehicle after it wrecked or exploded, so it will cause a lot of wounds.

    Al-I think they will be competitive, but probably not if you try spammy with them, you still need wyches or warriors for sure

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  5. i have to agree and on top of the modeling joy of coming up with conversions and the theme of an all haemonculus army makes me want to do a ton of them.

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  6. Just got to use a unit of 10 of these guys in two games, and pretty impressed so far. x2 liquifiers can be devestating (took out a 10 man unit of BA assault marines in one go in my 2nd game).

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  7. Awesome! That's pretty funny because the first time I used the 10 man setup with 2 liqufiers I did the same thing! Silly BA, when will they learn who the true masters of the sky are?

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  8. I think wracks work great if you use the minimum squads just to get the free token. You are also left with a unit that can camp the home objective. You can see my post on my site (http://army-builder.com/) if you want a few tips on how to use wracks.
    Mark

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