Having the actual Dark Eldar Codex makes it much easier to read than the...
...er, um...
other option.
The... er, um... 'other option' I've had access to for weeks now. Which I unwittingly failed to share with the locals, assuming in one case that I'd sent it and in others that they had it already.
I faced an icy reception at the FLGS on Friday!
I figured it out when I asked Gauthic, the resident Dark Eldar player, why he was acting like he'd never read the rules before. Well, because he hadn't.
Uh, oh. In my defense, I'm thoughtless, not mean.
Anyway, getting a good read-through today allowed me to solidify the build I'm planning - a Urien Rakarth Wrack and Grotesque build, if you're curious - but it also clued me in to some dirty tricks we should expect to see.
For example, the Share the Pain rule. Basically, an IC joins a unit and they pool the pain tokens. If both have one, then the combined unit has two.
Feel No Pain and Furious Charge are nothing to sniff at.
If the IC leaves, the pain tokens are split as evenly as possible, with the odd tokens going to the unit the Dark Eldar player chooses. Obviously, this has it's uses.
An IC can steal Pain Tokens outright.
You're smart: you see the potential, don't you?
A Warrior Unit has a Token; the IC joins in one round and takes off in another, with the Token.
A Warrior Unit has two Tokens; the IC joins in one round and takes of with one Token in the next. It has to be split evenly.
A Warrior Unit has two Tokens; an IC with one joins the unit in one round and takes the extra Token in the next, leaving the Warrior Unit with one token but making off with two to Join a group of Incubi.
It goes on and on. Why would you make use of this? Two reasons I can think of.
1) The unit with the extra Token can't make best use of it. For example, it's a dedicated shooting unit so the 2nd 'Furious Charge' Pain Token is wasted.
2) The unit is almost destroyed, so the Dark Eldar plays the double-knuckle shuffle (heh) to safeguard the valuable Pain Token.
Advanced Uses
An IC with a Token joins a unit with none, leaving it behind in the next round to 'borrow' the Pain Token of another unit. The reasoning here is the IC divests himself of the Pain Token first, freeing himself to steal the second unit's Token... otherwise he'd leave with an equal split.
A unit with an IC has 3 Pain Tokens. The IC leaves with one prior to a suicidal, softening-up combat, so the unit won't be Fearless. If the unit does well, it will probably stick around; if not, fleeing combat might preserve it for use later.
In Closing
There are only so many rounds in a game and there are only so many Independent Characters available to utilize these tricks. They are tactics, not strategies. Even accomplishing this tactic once or twice in a game could prove useful.
I see this happening more often in Haemonculus-lead armies, simply because of the number of IC's.
I'm planning on building that... coincidence?
Lastly, I haven't seen Sharing the Pain discussed elsewhere in this fashion, but there are a lot of sharp talking-heads out there, so it may well have been. I say this because I rarely choose to write Tactics articles since inevitably someone has done it before, or because most people pay lip service to improving their game but rarely do so.
And no, the pictures aren't Dark Eldar, but I hate posting without giving you something to look at!
The Master Manipulator (every store needs one) is the first in our area to embrace the wet palette; in fact, he's gone through several variations until he's arrived at the custom model he now uses.
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