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?