Dark Eldar vs Blood Angels

By TheGravemind

I had my first games after a couple weeks of sitting out, and man was it great to be back. My first game went kill points 9-4 in my favor, and we started early enough I was able to pick up a second game afterward. Game two was vs Dark Eldar, and it was 5 objectives with pitched battle deployment. I roll a 2 to go first and thinking "great, I'm going second against DE," but he rolls a 1, and is not running Vect. So I deploy my toys and am ready to grab some objectives.


I combat squad my first assault marines, two meltas in a group, the other half with sergeant and priest in the storm raven. Of course when I roll for my Red Thirst, the squad in the stormraven is the only one that gets it. The Vanguard and other assault squad with lib stay in reserves.

 Surprisingly, he deploys all of his stuff on the board. He hides his ravager behind the rocks, he has 4 squads of warriors with splinter cannon and blaster in raiders. He has 9 trueborn with splinter cannons and carbines and duke riding along. He also has two groups of 4 reavers with caltrips upgrades.

I decided to move my typhoons up so I can use my heavy bolters and missiles. well much to my disappointment, I miss judged my distances and was 37 inches away, so only 4 krak missiles. 3 hit, 2 pens, and one is flicker-fielded away. So only one pen, and it rolls a shaken. My storm raven flies up, and again poor rolls and amazing flicker fields prevent anything.

Finally by the end of my second turn, I had blown up my first raider. Depressing I know, I also lost a speeder and the other was shaken. I had disembarked the Dread, shot my melta, and assaulted a raider, even shot my assault cannon at it. All I got was a Immobilized and a stunned. My assault squad and priest ate through the warriors that were exposed.

 My vanguard come in and assault the bikes, and then fail for the rest of the game by taking three turns to to kill 4 reavers. Later they'll fail to damage the ravager, and even die to the spiked upgrade. My deep strike continues to be horrible for the day, scattering 6 inches away from the eldar, making my assault squad and lib useless for a turn.

 By turn three and after losing 12 of my 20 assault marines, I finally popped dukes ride and assaulted in with librarian, priest, 4 assault marines, and two more melta marines. Duke's stats don't seem that bad, 3 attacks, and only a power weapon on a 5+ to wound. I seemed to have forgotten my opponent was rolling those 5+ like crazy. He would proceed to kill the priest denying my furious charge, then my Lib, then slowly killing all the assault marines.

 By the end of the game, he had the warriors in the far left raider move up to an objective, while I had two assault marines that huddled on an objective before dying to dark lances.

So that ends the game, I had it at a draw, but couldn't stay alive long enough before the game ended. Yet another loss against dark eldar. On good news, my storm raven ran through its paces without a hitch for its first two games. Both times it survived till around 3 or so. I can't resist firing all weapons, but I need to learn to keep turbo boosting, for that 4+ cover. Well it is lessons learned. Time to keep trying out the list.