@CANNED_F3TUS said:
Dire Avenger once synergized with webways and the right upgrades and grenades right off bat are the most powerful ranged T 1 unit in the game. Space Marines are the second best but only once they get plasmas or flamers or extensive investment in their doctrines and even than THAT STUFF gets expensive. You dont have that problem with Dire avengers. They are eco friendly. Hardly bleed if combined with webway gate and somewhat competent micro and actually hit pretty hard in numbers. Dont know to much about shoota boyz. They are cheap do decent damage with scrap they get grenades but they are slow like Tacs.
Recently met some Asian player with that build. I think I got owned in first 4 minutes or so. Also Scorps can keep your units in constant slow somehow so you don't have a chance to run away. I think I really need to start playing Eldar, too much hassle with SM atm.
Thing that makes no sense to me is game philosophy, I mean how it supposed to be:
SM - Tanky with mediocre damage
Orks - Numbers with occasional high burst damage (like Waaagh!)
Eldar - Glass cannon: high damage and fast moving but fragile.
How it is now:
SM - Squishy with mediocre damage.
Orks - Numbers with extra high burst damage (Zap, Storm-Trukk, Waaagh!).
Eldar - Tankiest with high damage, ubertanky with insane damage on t2.
Wtf?
Yeah. Orks have Weirdboy with this just enormous power potential.
Honestly, I bring other elites but usually dont ever have to field them.. Using Roks + Weirdboy is more effective in most of my games than anything else. Ork burst is ridiculous.
Eldar just feel thematically off with their high shield avengers and wraith guard. Eldar vehicles are squishy but powerful as they should be, but those wraith knights routinely survive Roks and go on to dish out damage. It's tough.
the only counter is to completely outplay your opponent, use multiple stuns to lock eldar players in place before they fof away. there's just no way for any unit to counter eldar at the moment
dires are the best starting unit with the doctrine, permanent fof, great burst damage and great sustain with shields. minimal loss of models and req bleed, minimal loss of dps as well. 3-4 dires mixed in with 1 banshee and SS, there's no way for asm to be able to beat that kind of melee, not to mention able able to take all that fire power from dire avengers.
which leaves to pretty taxing playstyles and advices like avoid combat until critical mass of asm and jonah, trap or block off dire avengers ranged firepower and proceed to wipe them all inside the wall.
t2 is even worse, wraithguard spam, macha stasis and spear + blast combo. all you have are landspeeders and the playstyle remains the same, harrass until mistakes are made.
sigh, eldar really disgusts me right now. no chance for a good pitched fight. everything you do either ends up in a complete steamroll in seconds or doing lame acrobatics to bait the eldar player to commit and wait for him to make mistakes. there's not much to force them into a fight and 1 single slip up, you are going to lose squads on the retreat or just outright lose everything and gg right there.
while for the eldar, simply fof away, drop some nades to cover retreat from asm. or even better, use macha to stasis and fof away. take comparatively minimal losses and still remain in the game for making a mistake.
Personally, I think eldar economy is a bit broken due to low pop of starting units. They just get too big of a headstart early game that they capitalise on. That and possibly bugged cool down on webway gates being too short
Yeah. Orks have Weirdboy with this just enormous power potential.
Honestly, I bring other elites but usually dont ever have to field them.. Using Roks + Weirdboy is more effective in most of my games than anything else. Ork burst is ridiculous.
Eldar just feel thematically off with their high shield avengers and wraith guard. Eldar vehicles are squishy but powerful as they should be, but those wraith knights routinely survive Roks and go on to dish out damage. It's tough.
Eldar aren't tanky. Most stock Eldar units have less health and shield combined than the stock equivalent unit in another race.
The problem comes in when you bring in poorly-thought-out doctrines like "Extra Shield", outright bugs (Improved Webways), poorly-thought-out mechanics (Striking Scorpion crits), and at least one opposing faction with a poor opening. I think I've summed up the most egregious aspects of Eldar in that sentence, although I'm sure with some way to look at the stats we could find a few more. How does the mass-DA strategy in the OP fare when used with an Autarch?
Since you've mentioned Eldar vehicles, shall we discuss their issues and compare them with their opposition? Squishy, yes, but only the Falcon is really powerful.
We could also discuss the implications of Eldar durability upgrades for infantry on late-game infantry combat; Eldar infantry scale better than any other race unlike their skimmers.
I think at this point we need to realise that all three factions have some game-breaking strategies and start experimenting and looking at causes rather than making endless "We have to talk about {FACTION}" threads without any statistical backup.
I'm an eldar player, and I hate this meta around the Dire Avengers. But the problem is that our other options are not viable at the moment. The banshee start is easily to counter against an attentive player. Dark reapers are bad in early, low DPS, no more tanky than their equivalent and their doctrines are totally useless. Let's check some stats:
Eldars :
Dire Avengers - R:330 E:0
Hp: 330
Shield: 492/590 ( Without/With Doctrine )
DPS: 40
Have Plama grenades and Overheat.
Okay, now you can see that tacticals have far more HP than Dire Avengers: 1400 vs 920 (with Doctrine), 41% (35% with Doctrine) lower than Tacticals, but Tacticals have lower DPS: 28 vs 40, 30% lower than Avengers.
For the cost: Avengers are 17% cheaper than the Tacticals.
Have the Shield mechanic, a plasma grenade that brings a small amount of damage (without Doctrine) and overheating time on their weapons.
The stats are fairly balanced and it should not be forgotten that a construction of a Web Gate is mandatory in the beginning of a game, so R: 150/ E: 30 less for Eldars.
The first problem are "Striking Scorpion" which are able to destroy buildings too easily.
Reduction of damage against structures = problem solved.
The second problem is the doctrines, some are essential like the improvement of the Web Gate which allows their teleportation in T1 with a reduced cooldown, it's extremely difficult to win against a good player without it.
Some are just useless, like the one that gives more vision to the Dark Reapers when they are under heavy cover (Seriously, a Doctrine for that?).
Or the Doctrine that allows Dark Reapers to teleport on a previously constructed spot.
The spot is long to build, the cooldown is 70 seconds, and most importantly, is the duration Dark Reapers have for doing something before the spot disappears: 45 Seconds. WTF?
The time to build the spot, run to a battle, to setup the firing stance, the spot is almost finished, they fire one or two shots and they have to teleport. Are you kidding me ?
Or a Doctrine that gives speed when the Vyper lose their shield ... Useless, it is fast enough like that no need more. While Landspeeders have a doctrine that gives a shield.
Come on, one last for fun, Falcons go faster when they're not in combat. Currently the maps are not big enough to see the usefulness, especially when you can link buildings in T2 to teleport.
Now look at the Heavy Bolter Marines, they have the same HP Dark Reapers (810/804) but far more DPS: 56 vs 32.
Dark reapers have a DPS 43% lower than the Heavy Bolter Marines. (Yeah, Dark Reapers have true damage, but who care in early? Did you try to destroy a shield generator with Dark Reapers? ++heresy redacted++ long and risky)
Let's look at their doctrines, they have a doctrine that increases their range shot under heavy cover, not crazy but always more useful than the vision of Dark Reaper. They have another one that gives a shield when they do not move, mainly useful for playing with friends (2v2 / 3v3). Okay, now the Doctrine that root a target, really cool this one, or even this one that allows to remove the deployment time of heavy bolter, ++heresy redacted++ useful.
Do I really need to explain the Power Swords problem for ASM? The same as the Stricking scorpions.
Let's just take the stats, without power sword: ASM have 1500 HP vs 1050 for Banshees, 30% less than ASM. They have 72 DPS vs 64 for Banshees, 11% less than ASM.
And the cost: R: 500 vs 435 and E: 15 vs 10, so 13% and 33% lower for Banshees.
ASM have a Jump and Banshees a Slow. Again, it seems well balanced. ( Even if the jump is much more useful for Map control, Banshees have Stricking Scorpions buff to compensate )
As for the Elites, some have clearly too much burst for their cost. Like the Weirdboy, Macha or Kommando, while others are particularly expensive for their efficiency, like Warp spiders.
I could go on like that on a lot of units and not just SM.
All this to make aware that if you nerfs all that is strong for Eldars, but leave the rest in the current state, eldars will become unplayable in 1vs1 and very dependent on 2vs2/3vs3.
Please change this current meta only based on Dire Avengers/Stricking Scorpions, but look closely at all those doctrines / units that are useless (Fire Prism?), for all three races. This will give new start and much more variety, thx.
@Coquelicots said:
I'm an eldar player, and I hate this meta around the Dire Avengers. But the problem is that our other options are not viable at the moment. The banshee start is easily to counter against an attentive player. Dark reapers are bad in early, low DPS, no more tanky than their equivalent and their doctrines are totally useless. Let's check some stats:
Eldars :
Dire Avengers - R:330 E:0
Hp: 330
Shield: 492/590 ( Without/With Doctrine )
DPS: 40
Have Plama grenades and Overheat.
Tactical Marines - R:400 E:0
Hp: 1400
DPS : 28
Assault Marines - R:500 E:15
Hp: 1500
DPS : 72
Heavy Bolter Marines - R:450 E:0
Hp: 810
DPS : 56
Okay, now you can see that tacticals have far more HP than Dire Avengers: 1400 vs 920 (with Doctrine), 41% (35% with Doctrine) lower than Tacticals, but Tacticals have lower DPS: 28 vs 40, 30% lower than Avengers.
For the cost: Avengers are 17% cheaper than the Tacticals.
Have the Shield mechanic, a plasma grenade that brings a small amount of damage (without Doctrine) and overheating time on their weapons.
The stats are fairly balanced and it should not be forgotten that a construction of a Web Gate is mandatory in the beginning of a game, so R: 150/ E: 30 less for Eldars.
The first problem are "Striking Scorpion" which are able to destroy buildings too easily.
Reduction of damage against structures = problem solved.
Please change this current meta only based on Dire Avengers/Stricking Scorpions, but look closely at all those doctrines / units that are useless (Fire Prism?), for all three races. This will give new start and much more variety, thx.
Thanks for your really constructive post!
I'm in agreement with you that not only Eldar need to have a magnifying glass. I can tell you as an Ork player, the amount of firepower bought for a 3-point elite Weird Boy rivals the kill counts of 9-cost elites; In fact, I rarely have to field other elites and just stick to Roks in a lot of cases.
It's worth noting that while Dire Avengers have less health and an overheat function, they also are going to be highly maneuverable and their grenades kill off models from other squads that don't benefit from a shield. When a Tactical Marine has one model left, he is no longer doing 28 DPS. I'm more focused specifically on two eldar players using this Dire Avenger set-up. Those grenades, with the doctrine, can occasionally be avoided be being microintensive with something like Ork Boyz. Now, with two players and a total of 6-7 Dire Avenger squads with accelerated speed and 6-7 extra damage grenades, it's no longer possible to effectively engage with them. Should you contest in melee, the DA simply drops a grenade on itself. As a half strength squad, you can either commit and attempt to break their shields with your diminished dps, or you can flee. Fleeing against 6 Dire Avengers with 40 DPS with a speed advantage on you guarantees you'll not survive the encounter.
Using devastators, despite their high dps, needs only one grenade that a set-up squad can't avoid to reduce them to one model, making them effectively useless.
I dislike that Eldar are shoehorned into using this strategy as the ONLY viable strategy, in just the same way that SM are forced into using assault marines with power swords.
My thing is, this dire avenger stratagem is punishing against 2v2 players that /dont/ make a lot of mistakes, and doesn't give you a proper avenue for retaliation.
Let's not forget that a lot of Ork players rush to build a much more costly Waaaaagh tower 75R / 75E (a luxury resource) at a point that is easily destroyed, doesn't teleport, doesn't regenerate, and doesn't have a metric ton of HP early game.
You have options against Waaaagh towers. You can punish players for investing that 75R / 75E. You can not ever punish a Webway gate.
Eldar feel really stacked but Trukks/Wierdboy and ASM are the only thing leveling the playing field and tbh they both feel incredibly over-tuned.
I'm curious how others feel about Wraithguards. I feel like they are incredibly cheap given their stats and range. It feels like they're too easily massed and they appear to easily outperform all other heavy infantry and discourage vehicles.
While the doctrine choices for guardians are nice, I think you'll find the problem stems from the wraithlord doctrine of web way relocate in T1. The makes dire avengers killing machines. The only way you will sucessfully kill them is with insane burst damage. Tacs and shootas wont trade with dire avengers. Your only options are ASM with their equally broken assault leap ( ven dread doctrine ) , lootas , the eqully broken stormboy and truck combo or to equally spam dire avengers of your own and have the same try hard "meta" doctrines chosen. Making for single minded gameplay, over and over... or just lose. If you dont keep constant damage on the avengers their shields wil begin to regenerate extremely fast.
Your next MASSIVE hurdle is striking scorpions. First of all you need detection to have any chance of wiping them, then you need crowd control like stun grenades or ( enter ork variation here, wait there isn't one at 2 elite points timing , oh well )to kill them. Oh and dont both kiting them as their ranged weapons slow you as well. They also move even quicker in battle focus than dire avengers.
This gameplay is obviously broken. My only advice is to join them in the "meta" or use lootas with smartly placed waargh towers with the scrap magnet doctrine untill you have trucks with traktor beam to be more aggresive.
At this point you want to be putting da boyz hut down and getting a 3rd waagh tower and getting nobz out, at the point the eldar will need anti armor putting the ball back in his court. Thats if you survive this long, of course.
And lts say you do survive till mid game and he has kyre chosen.lets not even go there, ok.
Strange that my Dires get eaten up by HB and Lootas. If I read some posts here I tend to believe that you can win entire games just with 4 DAs. I've never came that far with 4 DA's. Always had to put up some other units to win the game
@HohesHaus said:
Strange that my Dires get eaten up by HB and Lootas. If I read some posts here I tend to believe that you can win entire games just with 4 DAs. I've never came that far with 4 DA's. Always had to put up some other units to win the game
Specifically, I'm concerned with 8 DA's from 2 players using specific doctrines, like the tier 1 webway assembly.
eldar are so overpowered its insane! the dire avenger spam is almost impossible to stop even if they are just competent players. just got done playing a game where the guy said it was his first time playing since webgate nerf and beat my ++heresy redacted++ in 6 minutes!
but this is relic at its finest, love your games but at this point I am just going to back out of all eldar matches til they are nerfed
For the first time gave a try to that opener Eldar cheese build with DA Scorps/Macha/WL and did few matches. I've never played pvp as Eldar, I don't have good micro, and most players I meet nowadays (especially in mirror matches) are pretty much equal to me so games are more or less even. This time I couldn't believe how easily I have obliterated SM, took full map control I believe on 7th minute or so. To beat Eldar with any other race you need to have MUCH-MUCH better micro than your opponent, and even than you can mess up. Balance is out of control completely. I'm disgusted tbh and won't play as Eldar on principle. I don't much enjoy that race and using cheap doctrine/elite combos to win matches feels like plain cheating.
Their webway reloc on t1 breaks gameflow apart, plus bonuses are way too good, they need to nerf speed bonus at least on esc/t1, shield regen should come with upgrade from Soulshrine and moved to t2 or it feels like fighting them under constant SM banner which can be captured, but webway you cannot even destroy lol. DA are extremely cheap and have insane damage. Scorp + DA combo guarantees you considerable model loss on enemy side with Plasma Nades (doctrine). You can quickly send Scorp which kills gens basically at the same speed as x2 ASMs with PS thanks to crits. I can't believe 2 point Elite can be so ++heresy redacted++ powerful.
Even if you don't feel like fighting, you can just harass with decaps on multiple points at same time with bonesingers and enemy cannot tear themselves to defend everything and you can keep kiting them till t2 when you get you Wraithguards. I built 2 squads and I don't think there's anything that could stop them at that point in the game.
Proposals are: reduce bonesinger basic movement speed by ~50% and move Wraithguards/lords to t3, it's definitely end game unit. I didn't find Falcons much weaker than Landspeeder but I'd balance them to be equal skimmers and buff Vyper a bit to compensate. Fire Prism also needs some buff because it's lackluster now.
It's just personal experience, but all these point have been aired many times already. Testing it just proved all these points for me. Balance currently is nowhere to be found in this game. Sometimes Orks give me trouble, but if I play smart, I can outplay them. With Eldar it just tad too easy to win vs equal skilled player of any other race.
whats the official counter to wraithguard? once they have any more than 2 squads it becomes very hard to do much about them.
They're vehicles. You can literally melt them with true damage, rockets, lascanons, as similar. also theyre extremely expensive, and you really shouldnt let anyone build too many (175 power EACH).
The shields have got to go or be drastically reduced. Breaks the game when eldar has squads that do full damage even when even when more than half of their total hp is gone. They can take so much punishment before losing a model that they often don't have to pay any cost for their mistakes.
I wish I had taken the time to respond in this thread rather than create my own...sorry for that...but I have to agree. I find Eldar as a faction have far too much in the way of speed, range, and mobility relative to Orkz. They make me dizzy, and the fact that they're also high damage just....I don't know, I feel that thay have too many tools that basically allow them to dictate the terms of any engagement, pretty much from the start of the game all the way to the end. They're just TOO fast and TOO mobile!!!
@Coquelicots said:
Dire Avengers - R:330 E:0
Hp: 330
Shield: 492/590 ( Without/With Doctrine )
DPS: 40
Have Plama grenades and Overheat.
Tactical Marines - R:400 E:0
Hp: 1400
DPS : 28
Okay, now you can see that tacticals have far more HP than Dire Avengers: 1400 vs 920 (with Doctrine), 41% (35% with Doctrine) lower than Tacticals, but Tacticals have >lower DPS: 28 vs 40, 30% lower than Avengers.
For the cost: Avengers are 17% cheaper than the Tacticals.
Have the Shield mechanic, a plasma grenade that brings a small amount of damage (without Doctrine) and overheating time on their weapons.
The stats are fairly balanced and it should not be forgotten that a construction of a Web Gate is mandatory in the beginning of a game, so R: 150/ E: 30 less for Eldars.
This is all well and good and at a glance makes Tacticals look more powerful, but it's rather misleading because it doesn't accurately demonstrate just how strong the Shield Mechanic is, nor emphasize the huge advantage it gives the Eldar squad due to the snowball effect.
Once again, in a squad-on-squad fight, the Shields ability to prevent model losses. You'd think looking at the numbers that the extra total health of the Tactical Marines would make them win, but it doesn't because of the Shield mechanic. Even if the Avengers don't bother to use their Plasma Grenade.
It's 7 seconds before the Tactical Marines lose their first model to the Dire Avengers. At this point they'll still need to do 351 damage before they've achieved a model loss on the Avenger squad.
The Tac's lose another model at 14 seconds, and still have another 194 damage to do before they score a model loss on Eldar.
The Tactical Marines will lose there 3rd model at 21 seconds, and at this point they'll still need to have to put out another 118 damage or so before getting a single model loss on the Avengers. This is without the Shield Doctrine mind.
The overheating mechanic might start to come into play at this point, but it doesn't matter, because with 6 models to 2, the Dire Avengers could easily beat the Tacticals in melee.
It's that Shield mechanic see. It makes Eldar way too immune to bleed and makes them way way too cost effective in combat due to lack of model losses. I understand the 'hit and run' design mentality behind, but the Shield mechanic is so efficient it takes it to an unparalleled extreme. At the very least, the health and shield values on Eldar should be flipped.
You know, I think the 'Tacticals being stronger' at a glance is probably the mentality Relic took when designing the units aswell, hence the higher cost, underestimating just how effective the shield mechanic is - so they gave them the Grenade for free to compensate, but the bottom line is, they really don't need that Grenade to balance the score because they outperform the Tactical Marines to an extreme degree anyway due to the incredible effectiveness of the Battle Focus mechanic. It's the Tactical Marines that should have gotten the Grenade for free.
This does highlight what is perhaps a poor game design decision when it comes to Tier 0 in general mind, which isn't exactly faction specific, but I'll save that for a later post.
I've been in games vs orks for example. I've spammed avengers, won the game in ~10 mins, with 80 kills and 5 losses. Many times. If I can do this, its broken.
@BlastaT2 said:
I've been in games vs orks for example. I've spammed avengers, won the game in ~10 mins, with 80 kills and 5 losses. Many times. If I can do this, its broken.
To borrow from QMotion's Thread:
We haven't even touched on how weird Kyre behaves.
@Coquelicots said:
Dire Avengers - R:330 E:0
Hp: 330
Shield: 492/590 ( Without/With Doctrine )
DPS: 40
Have Plama grenades and Overheat.
Tactical Marines - R:400 E:0
Hp: 1400
DPS : 28
Okay, now you can see that tacticals have far more HP than Dire Avengers: 1400 vs 920 (with Doctrine), 41% (35% with Doctrine) lower than Tacticals, but Tacticals have >lower DPS: 28 vs 40, 30% lower than Avengers.
For the cost: Avengers are 17% cheaper than the Tacticals.
Have the Shield mechanic, a plasma grenade that brings a small amount of damage (without Doctrine) and overheating time on their weapons.
The stats are fairly balanced and it should not be forgotten that a construction of a Web Gate is mandatory in the beginning of a game, so R: 150/ E: 30 less for Eldars.
This is all well and good and at a glance makes Tacticals look more powerful, but it's rather misleading because it doesn't accurately demonstrate just how strong the Shield Mechanic is, nor emphasize the huge advantage it gives the Eldar squad due to the snowball effect.
Once again, in a squad-on-squad fight, the Shields ability to prevent model losses. You'd think looking at the numbers that the extra total health of the Tactical Marines would make them win, but it doesn't because of the Shield mechanic. Even if the Avengers don't bother to use their Plasma Grenade.
It's 7 seconds before the Tactical Marines lose their first model to the Dire Avengers. At this point they'll still need to do 351 damage before they've achieved a model loss on the Avenger squad.
The Tac's lose another model at 14 seconds, and still have another 194 damage to do before they score a model loss on Eldar.
The Tactical Marines will lose there 3rd model at 21 seconds, and at this point they'll still need to have to put out another 118 damage or so before getting a single model loss on the Avengers. This is without the Shield Doctrine mind.
The overheating mechanic might start to come into play at this point, but it doesn't matter, because with 6 models to 2, the Dire Avengers could easily beat the Tacticals in melee.
It's that Shield mechanic see. It makes Eldar way too immune to bleed and makes them way way too cost effective in combat due to lack of model losses. I understand the 'hit and run' design mentality behind, but the Shield mechanic is so efficient it takes it to an unparalleled extreme. At the very least, the health and shield values on Eldar should be flipped.
You know, I think the 'Tacticals being stronger' at a glance is probably the mentality Relic took when designing the units aswell, hence the higher cost, underestimating just how effective the shield mechanic is - so they gave them the Grenade for free to compensate, but the bottom line is, they really don't need that Grenade to balance the score because they outperform the Tactical Marines to an extreme degree anyway due to the incredible effectiveness of the Battle Focus mechanic. It's the Tactical Marines that should have gotten the Grenade for free.
This does highlight what is perhaps a poor game design decision when it comes to Tier 0 in general mind, which isn't exactly faction specific, but I'll save that for a later post.
Did I say that the Taticals should not be up?
Did I not mention that I did not approve of this meta around the Dire Avenger / Stricking Scorpions?
Believe me, I'd like to have another viable start for the Eldars.
And last question, did you tryhard the flamethrower on tacticals? (Very underestimated)
I was just pushing people to relativized, because if we listen to all the posts on this forum, soon the eldars will no longer be "playable". I'm sure some people hope this (to can crush Eldars without any Skill/effort) but I do not think it's in the interest of the game.
I realise that, it's just that you said the stats between DA and Tactical Marines are fairly balanced. The stats are misleading, and these two units are not fairly balanced. It'd be one thing if the DA were at least the same price as the Tacticals, but they aren't, they are cheaper (and chances are, even that alone would not be enough).
That being said, I think it's not unfair to say Tacticals (without their weapon upgrades) are probably underpowered anyway, or at the least far too expensive for what they are.
Yes, the Flamer is good, and the Plasma Guns can be decent, but those are expensive upgrades and effectively make it a T1.5 unit rather than a T0 unit. Plus, reinforcing would cause you even more resource bleed then, because the reinforce cost of the Tacticals is increased, as the numbers above show, you are already losing Tacticals at an unbearable trade-off rate against DA.
To add to that, the Tacticals in theory should never be able to get close enough to the DA's to use their Flamer, as the DA have FoF, and the Plasma Grenade. Unless you Stun them with Scouts first, or you could also summon your Banner, or maybe the Tactical Squad also has a shield because it landed in a Drop-pod...but then all these things adds another element, which in turn can add another element, and so on and so forth, which just ends up complicating things and you can't make any reasonable like-for-like comparison.
So you end up going back to the basics. Two Tier 0 units facing off against one another, and the Tacticals are grossly outclassed. Which brings me onto the point I mentioned at the end of my last post.
Tier 0 is badly designed. Because each race only gets one combat unit and one builder, the only real room for variety is "is this unit melee or is this unit ranged?". Boyz are melee, and currently the only melee-orientated T0 combat unit, so they get to be their own thing and you don't have anything to compare them too at that basic level, really, so most people just accept them for what they are.
Whereas for Eldar and SM, you're T0 unit is a ranged unit in both cases. Really, Relic could have avoided this by making Tacticals a bit of a mix of the two, like in previous games, but they decided to make it a clear-cut ranged unit this time around. So Tactical Marines are going to be compared to Dire Avengers always, and as a result, and as these are the only two races with ranged T0 combat units, one or the other is always going to be considered overpowered or over-performing in comparison to the other.
What Relic can try and do, is shrink this gap (or introduce an alternative T0 combat unit for each side, but that probably isn't going to happen) by making the combat effectiveness a bit more comparable between the two, rather the current balance were the DA totally stomps the Tactical Marines and for less cost.
What this really should equate too with the current design decisions for the units, is that the Tactical Marine squad is the one that should win in a straight-up fight (rather than losing horribly like it does now), whereas the Dire Avenger squads value should instead be on it's superior mobility and utility (due to the free Grenade). Maybe rebalance the Health and Shield values of the Dire Avenger and Tactical Squad so the Tactical Squad is the first one to lose one member, but the Dire Avenger squad is the first one to lose two members, and would end up rolling out in a victory for the Tacticals (with further losses on the Tactical Marine side but pulling out a victory). This emphasises that hit and run aspect of the Eldar, while still displaying the stoic-nature of the Marines. Eldar still would have their teleporting Bonesingers to tie-up Tacticals if a Marine player tried to push too early, or to safely get behind enemy lines to prevent the first-engagement result steamrolling into a win for the Marines.
Oh, and people don't notice so much, but Dire Avengers appear to have superior weapon range to Tactical Marines. That needs to go. Granted, a player can't utilise it without a spotter (A.I. is a different story, but nonetheless), having a unit with superior speed, firepower, range, damage mitigation and availability is a poorly designed unit and a balancing nightmare. I'm looking at you C&C1 Recon Bikes.
TLDR; Seems as this ended up being so long. The concept of just a single combat unit for each side in Tier 0 is poorly thought out. However, assuming that that isn't going to change, the gap in effectiveness between Tier 0 units needs to be drastically closed, without relying on doctrines or army gimmicks.
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Comments
Sigmatus
Yeah. Orks have Weirdboy with this just enormous power potential.
Honestly, I bring other elites but usually dont ever have to field them.. Using Roks + Weirdboy is more effective in most of my games than anything else. Ork burst is ridiculous.
Eldar just feel thematically off with their high shield avengers and wraith guard. Eldar vehicles are squishy but powerful as they should be, but those wraith knights routinely survive Roks and go on to dish out damage. It's tough.
wongtp
huh, there's no counter to eldar.
the only counter is to completely outplay your opponent, use multiple stuns to lock eldar players in place before they fof away. there's just no way for any unit to counter eldar at the moment
dires are the best starting unit with the doctrine, permanent fof, great burst damage and great sustain with shields. minimal loss of models and req bleed, minimal loss of dps as well. 3-4 dires mixed in with 1 banshee and SS, there's no way for asm to be able to beat that kind of melee, not to mention able able to take all that fire power from dire avengers.
which leaves to pretty taxing playstyles and advices like avoid combat until critical mass of asm and jonah, trap or block off dire avengers ranged firepower and proceed to wipe them all inside the wall.
t2 is even worse, wraithguard spam, macha stasis and spear + blast combo. all you have are landspeeders and the playstyle remains the same, harrass until mistakes are made.
sigh, eldar really disgusts me right now. no chance for a good pitched fight. everything you do either ends up in a complete steamroll in seconds or doing lame acrobatics to bait the eldar player to commit and wait for him to make mistakes. there's not much to force them into a fight and 1 single slip up, you are going to lose squads on the retreat or just outright lose everything and gg right there.
while for the eldar, simply fof away, drop some nades to cover retreat from asm. or even better, use macha to stasis and fof away. take comparatively minimal losses and still remain in the game for making a mistake.
KanKrusha
Personally, I think eldar economy is a bit broken due to low pop of starting units. They just get too big of a headstart early game that they capitalise on. That and possibly bugged cool down on webway gates being too short
Svanh
Eldar aren't tanky. Most stock Eldar units have less health and shield combined than the stock equivalent unit in another race.
The problem comes in when you bring in poorly-thought-out doctrines like "Extra Shield", outright bugs (Improved Webways), poorly-thought-out mechanics (Striking Scorpion crits), and at least one opposing faction with a poor opening. I think I've summed up the most egregious aspects of Eldar in that sentence, although I'm sure with some way to look at the stats we could find a few more. How does the mass-DA strategy in the OP fare when used with an Autarch?
Since you've mentioned Eldar vehicles, shall we discuss their issues and compare them with their opposition? Squishy, yes, but only the Falcon is really powerful.
We could also discuss the implications of Eldar durability upgrades for infantry on late-game infantry combat; Eldar infantry scale better than any other race unlike their skimmers.
I think at this point we need to realise that all three factions have some game-breaking strategies and start experimenting and looking at causes rather than making endless "We have to talk about {FACTION}" threads without any statistical backup.
leinad
Eldars are OP¡¡¡
ESL Championship final, SM vs Orks.
Eats a cookie...
Coquelicots
I'm an eldar player, and I hate this meta around the Dire Avengers. But the problem is that our other options are not viable at the moment. The banshee start is easily to counter against an attentive player. Dark reapers are bad in early, low DPS, no more tanky than their equivalent and their doctrines are totally useless. Let's check some stats:
Eldars :
Dire Avengers - R:330 E:0
Hp: 330
Shield: 492/590 ( Without/With Doctrine )
DPS: 40
Have Plama grenades and Overheat.
Banshee - R:435 E:10
HP: 420
Shield: 630
DPS: 64 ( 128 with Stricking Scorpions buff )
Dark Reapers - R:440 E:0
HP: 300
Shield: 504
DPS: 32 ( True damage )
Web Gate - R:150 E:30
SM :
Tactical Marines - R:400 E:0
Hp: 1400
DPS : 28
Assault Marines - R:500 E:15
Hp: 1500
DPS : 72
Heavy Bolter Marines - R:450 E:0
Hp: 810
DPS : 56
Okay, now you can see that tacticals have far more HP than Dire Avengers: 1400 vs 920 (with Doctrine), 41% (35% with Doctrine) lower than Tacticals, but Tacticals have lower DPS: 28 vs 40, 30% lower than Avengers.
For the cost: Avengers are 17% cheaper than the Tacticals.
Have the Shield mechanic, a plasma grenade that brings a small amount of damage (without Doctrine) and overheating time on their weapons.
The stats are fairly balanced and it should not be forgotten that a construction of a Web Gate is mandatory in the beginning of a game, so R: 150/ E: 30 less for Eldars.
The first problem are "Striking Scorpion" which are able to destroy buildings too easily.
Reduction of damage against structures = problem solved.
The second problem is the doctrines, some are essential like the improvement of the Web Gate which allows their teleportation in T1 with a reduced cooldown, it's extremely difficult to win against a good player without it.
Some are just useless, like the one that gives more vision to the Dark Reapers when they are under heavy cover (Seriously, a Doctrine for that?).
Or the Doctrine that allows Dark Reapers to teleport on a previously constructed spot.
The spot is long to build, the cooldown is 70 seconds, and most importantly, is the duration Dark Reapers have for doing something before the spot disappears: 45 Seconds. WTF?
The time to build the spot, run to a battle, to setup the firing stance, the spot is almost finished, they fire one or two shots and they have to teleport. Are you kidding me ?
Or a Doctrine that gives speed when the Vyper lose their shield ... Useless, it is fast enough like that no need more. While Landspeeders have a doctrine that gives a shield.
Come on, one last for fun, Falcons go faster when they're not in combat. Currently the maps are not big enough to see the usefulness, especially when you can link buildings in T2 to teleport.
Now look at the Heavy Bolter Marines, they have the same HP Dark Reapers (810/804) but far more DPS: 56 vs 32.
Dark reapers have a DPS 43% lower than the Heavy Bolter Marines. (Yeah, Dark Reapers have true damage, but who care in early? Did you try to destroy a shield generator with Dark Reapers? ++heresy redacted++ long and risky)
Let's look at their doctrines, they have a doctrine that increases their range shot under heavy cover, not crazy but always more useful than the vision of Dark Reaper. They have another one that gives a shield when they do not move, mainly useful for playing with friends (2v2 / 3v3). Okay, now the Doctrine that root a target, really cool this one, or even this one that allows to remove the deployment time of heavy bolter, ++heresy redacted++ useful.
Do I really need to explain the Power Swords problem for ASM? The same as the Stricking scorpions.
Let's just take the stats, without power sword: ASM have 1500 HP vs 1050 for Banshees, 30% less than ASM. They have 72 DPS vs 64 for Banshees, 11% less than ASM.
And the cost: R: 500 vs 435 and E: 15 vs 10, so 13% and 33% lower for Banshees.
ASM have a Jump and Banshees a Slow. Again, it seems well balanced. ( Even if the jump is much more useful for Map control, Banshees have Stricking Scorpions buff to compensate )
As for the Elites, some have clearly too much burst for their cost. Like the Weirdboy, Macha or Kommando, while others are particularly expensive for their efficiency, like Warp spiders.
I could go on like that on a lot of units and not just SM.
All this to make aware that if you nerfs all that is strong for Eldars, but leave the rest in the current state, eldars will become unplayable in 1vs1 and very dependent on 2vs2/3vs3.
Please change this current meta only based on Dire Avengers/Stricking Scorpions, but look closely at all those doctrines / units that are useless (Fire Prism?), for all three races. This will give new start and much more variety, thx.
Stoner
Many times have been mentioned: it's old one when broken stuff haven't been discovered yet to its fullest. Check new ones on twitch.
Sigmatus
Thanks for your really constructive post!
I'm in agreement with you that not only Eldar need to have a magnifying glass. I can tell you as an Ork player, the amount of firepower bought for a 3-point elite Weird Boy rivals the kill counts of 9-cost elites; In fact, I rarely have to field other elites and just stick to Roks in a lot of cases.
It's worth noting that while Dire Avengers have less health and an overheat function, they also are going to be highly maneuverable and their grenades kill off models from other squads that don't benefit from a shield. When a Tactical Marine has one model left, he is no longer doing 28 DPS. I'm more focused specifically on two eldar players using this Dire Avenger set-up. Those grenades, with the doctrine, can occasionally be avoided be being microintensive with something like Ork Boyz. Now, with two players and a total of 6-7 Dire Avenger squads with accelerated speed and 6-7 extra damage grenades, it's no longer possible to effectively engage with them. Should you contest in melee, the DA simply drops a grenade on itself. As a half strength squad, you can either commit and attempt to break their shields with your diminished dps, or you can flee. Fleeing against 6 Dire Avengers with 40 DPS with a speed advantage on you guarantees you'll not survive the encounter.
Using devastators, despite their high dps, needs only one grenade that a set-up squad can't avoid to reduce them to one model, making them effectively useless.
I dislike that Eldar are shoehorned into using this strategy as the ONLY viable strategy, in just the same way that SM are forced into using assault marines with power swords.
My thing is, this dire avenger stratagem is punishing against 2v2 players that /dont/ make a lot of mistakes, and doesn't give you a proper avenue for retaliation.
Let's not forget that a lot of Ork players rush to build a much more costly Waaaaagh tower 75R / 75E (a luxury resource) at a point that is easily destroyed, doesn't teleport, doesn't regenerate, and doesn't have a metric ton of HP early game.
You have options against Waaaagh towers. You can punish players for investing that 75R / 75E. You can not ever punish a Webway gate.
Paincakes
Eldar feel really stacked but Trukks/Wierdboy and ASM are the only thing leveling the playing field and tbh they both feel incredibly over-tuned.
I'm curious how others feel about Wraithguards. I feel like they are incredibly cheap given their stats and range. It feels like they're too easily massed and they appear to easily outperform all other heavy infantry and discourage vehicles.
Elkantar1981
sadly wraith is the only true lategame unit which comes in t2 and that's the main problem.
Blackmore
T1 webway doctrine just been done as a hotfix
no more 10second cooldown!
Sigmatus
Just saw the update pop up on Steam. That's good news!
10 seconds was a little too low.
PhantomRevenger
What's the non-bugged cooldown for them, out of interest?
BlastaT2
While the doctrine choices for guardians are nice, I think you'll find the problem stems from the wraithlord doctrine of web way relocate in T1. The makes dire avengers killing machines. The only way you will sucessfully kill them is with insane burst damage. Tacs and shootas wont trade with dire avengers. Your only options are ASM with their equally broken assault leap ( ven dread doctrine ) , lootas , the eqully broken stormboy and truck combo or to equally spam dire avengers of your own and have the same try hard "meta" doctrines chosen. Making for single minded gameplay, over and over... or just lose. If you dont keep constant damage on the avengers their shields wil begin to regenerate extremely fast.
Your next MASSIVE hurdle is striking scorpions. First of all you need detection to have any chance of wiping them, then you need crowd control like stun grenades or ( enter ork variation here, wait there isn't one at 2 elite points timing , oh well )to kill them. Oh and dont both kiting them as their ranged weapons slow you as well. They also move even quicker in battle focus than dire avengers.
This gameplay is obviously broken. My only advice is to join them in the "meta" or use lootas with smartly placed waargh towers with the scrap magnet doctrine untill you have trucks with traktor beam to be more aggresive.
At this point you want to be putting da boyz hut down and getting a 3rd waagh tower and getting nobz out, at the point the eldar will need anti armor putting the ball back in his court. Thats if you survive this long, of course.
And lts say you do survive till mid game and he has kyre chosen.lets not even go there, ok.
Koof
webway gate doctrine needs a 30 sec cd and no invulnerability if its gonna be how it is now. Or they make it so it stays in t2, but has 20 sec CD
HohesHaus
Strange that my Dires get eaten up by HB and Lootas. If I read some posts here I tend to believe that you can win entire games just with 4 DAs. I've never came that far with 4 DA's. Always had to put up some other units to win the game
Sigmatus
Specifically, I'm concerned with 8 DA's from 2 players using specific doctrines, like the tier 1 webway assembly.
BeaverSqueezer
eldar are so overpowered its insane! the dire avenger spam is almost impossible to stop even if they are just competent players. just got done playing a game where the guy said it was his first time playing since webgate nerf and beat my ++heresy redacted++ in 6 minutes!
but this is relic at its finest, love your games but at this point I am just going to back out of all eldar matches til they are nerfed
BeaverSqueezer
And don't even get me started on team games where everyone you are facing is eldar. might as well just count it as a loss!
Krupp
50 seconds, with a 5 or 6 second cast time.
Stoner
For the first time gave a try to that opener Eldar cheese build with DA Scorps/Macha/WL and did few matches. I've never played pvp as Eldar, I don't have good micro, and most players I meet nowadays (especially in mirror matches) are pretty much equal to me so games are more or less even. This time I couldn't believe how easily I have obliterated SM, took full map control I believe on 7th minute or so. To beat Eldar with any other race you need to have MUCH-MUCH better micro than your opponent, and even than you can mess up. Balance is out of control completely. I'm disgusted tbh and won't play as Eldar on principle. I don't much enjoy that race and using cheap doctrine/elite combos to win matches feels like plain cheating.
Their webway reloc on t1 breaks gameflow apart, plus bonuses are way too good, they need to nerf speed bonus at least on esc/t1, shield regen should come with upgrade from Soulshrine and moved to t2 or it feels like fighting them under constant SM banner which can be captured, but webway you cannot even destroy lol. DA are extremely cheap and have insane damage. Scorp + DA combo guarantees you considerable model loss on enemy side with Plasma Nades (doctrine). You can quickly send Scorp which kills gens basically at the same speed as x2 ASMs with PS thanks to crits. I can't believe 2 point Elite can be so ++heresy redacted++ powerful.
Even if you don't feel like fighting, you can just harass with decaps on multiple points at same time with bonesingers and enemy cannot tear themselves to defend everything and you can keep kiting them till t2 when you get you Wraithguards. I built 2 squads and I don't think there's anything that could stop them at that point in the game.
Proposals are: reduce bonesinger basic movement speed by ~50% and move Wraithguards/lords to t3, it's definitely end game unit. I didn't find Falcons much weaker than Landspeeder but I'd balance them to be equal skimmers and buff Vyper a bit to compensate. Fire Prism also needs some buff because it's lackluster now.
It's just personal experience, but all these point have been aired many times already. Testing it just proved all these points for me. Balance currently is nowhere to be found in this game. Sometimes Orks give me trouble, but if I play smart, I can outplay them. With Eldar it just tad too easy to win vs equal skilled player of any other race.
nerva2940
They're vehicles. You can literally melt them with true damage, rockets, lascanons, as similar. also theyre extremely expensive, and you really shouldnt let anyone build too many (175 power EACH).
frumpylumps
The shields have got to go or be drastically reduced. Breaks the game when eldar has squads that do full damage even when even when more than half of their total hp is gone. They can take so much punishment before losing a model that they often don't have to pay any cost for their mistakes.
BakedMarsupial
I wish I had taken the time to respond in this thread rather than create my own...sorry for that...but I have to agree. I find Eldar as a faction have far too much in the way of speed, range, and mobility relative to Orkz. They make me dizzy, and the fact that they're also high damage just....I don't know, I feel that thay have too many tools that basically allow them to dictate the terms of any engagement, pretty much from the start of the game all the way to the end. They're just TOO fast and TOO mobile!!!
KotCR
This is all well and good and at a glance makes Tacticals look more powerful, but it's rather misleading because it doesn't accurately demonstrate just how strong the Shield Mechanic is, nor emphasize the huge advantage it gives the Eldar squad due to the snowball effect.
Once again, in a squad-on-squad fight, the Shields ability to prevent model losses. You'd think looking at the numbers that the extra total health of the Tactical Marines would make them win, but it doesn't because of the Shield mechanic. Even if the Avengers don't bother to use their Plasma Grenade.
It's 7 seconds before the Tactical Marines lose their first model to the Dire Avengers. At this point they'll still need to do 351 damage before they've achieved a model loss on the Avenger squad.
The Tac's lose another model at 14 seconds, and still have another 194 damage to do before they score a model loss on Eldar.
The Tactical Marines will lose there 3rd model at 21 seconds, and at this point they'll still need to have to put out another 118 damage or so before getting a single model loss on the Avengers. This is without the Shield Doctrine mind.
The overheating mechanic might start to come into play at this point, but it doesn't matter, because with 6 models to 2, the Dire Avengers could easily beat the Tacticals in melee.
It's that Shield mechanic see. It makes Eldar way too immune to bleed and makes them way way too cost effective in combat due to lack of model losses. I understand the 'hit and run' design mentality behind, but the Shield mechanic is so efficient it takes it to an unparalleled extreme. At the very least, the health and shield values on Eldar should be flipped.
You know, I think the 'Tacticals being stronger' at a glance is probably the mentality Relic took when designing the units aswell, hence the higher cost, underestimating just how effective the shield mechanic is - so they gave them the Grenade for free to compensate, but the bottom line is, they really don't need that Grenade to balance the score because they outperform the Tactical Marines to an extreme degree anyway due to the incredible effectiveness of the Battle Focus mechanic. It's the Tactical Marines that should have gotten the Grenade for free.
This does highlight what is perhaps a poor game design decision when it comes to Tier 0 in general mind, which isn't exactly faction specific, but I'll save that for a later post.
BlastaT2
I've been in games vs orks for example. I've spammed avengers, won the game in ~10 mins, with 80 kills and 5 losses. Many times. If I can do this, its broken.
Sigmatus
To borrow from QMotion's Thread:
We haven't even touched on how weird Kyre behaves.
Coquelicots
Did I say that the Taticals should not be up?
Did I not mention that I did not approve of this meta around the Dire Avenger / Stricking Scorpions?
Believe me, I'd like to have another viable start for the Eldars.
And last question, did you tryhard the flamethrower on tacticals? (Very underestimated)
I was just pushing people to relativized, because if we listen to all the posts on this forum, soon the eldars will no longer be "playable". I'm sure some people hope this (to can crush Eldars without any Skill/effort) but I do not think it's in the interest of the game.
KotCR
I realise that, it's just that you said the stats between DA and Tactical Marines are fairly balanced. The stats are misleading, and these two units are not fairly balanced. It'd be one thing if the DA were at least the same price as the Tacticals, but they aren't, they are cheaper (and chances are, even that alone would not be enough).
That being said, I think it's not unfair to say Tacticals (without their weapon upgrades) are probably underpowered anyway, or at the least far too expensive for what they are.
Yes, the Flamer is good, and the Plasma Guns can be decent, but those are expensive upgrades and effectively make it a T1.5 unit rather than a T0 unit. Plus, reinforcing would cause you even more resource bleed then, because the reinforce cost of the Tacticals is increased, as the numbers above show, you are already losing Tacticals at an unbearable trade-off rate against DA.
To add to that, the Tacticals in theory should never be able to get close enough to the DA's to use their Flamer, as the DA have FoF, and the Plasma Grenade. Unless you Stun them with Scouts first, or you could also summon your Banner, or maybe the Tactical Squad also has a shield because it landed in a Drop-pod...but then all these things adds another element, which in turn can add another element, and so on and so forth, which just ends up complicating things and you can't make any reasonable like-for-like comparison.
So you end up going back to the basics. Two Tier 0 units facing off against one another, and the Tacticals are grossly outclassed. Which brings me onto the point I mentioned at the end of my last post.
Tier 0 is badly designed. Because each race only gets one combat unit and one builder, the only real room for variety is "is this unit melee or is this unit ranged?". Boyz are melee, and currently the only melee-orientated T0 combat unit, so they get to be their own thing and you don't have anything to compare them too at that basic level, really, so most people just accept them for what they are.
Whereas for Eldar and SM, you're T0 unit is a ranged unit in both cases. Really, Relic could have avoided this by making Tacticals a bit of a mix of the two, like in previous games, but they decided to make it a clear-cut ranged unit this time around. So Tactical Marines are going to be compared to Dire Avengers always, and as a result, and as these are the only two races with ranged T0 combat units, one or the other is always going to be considered overpowered or over-performing in comparison to the other.
What Relic can try and do, is shrink this gap (or introduce an alternative T0 combat unit for each side, but that probably isn't going to happen) by making the combat effectiveness a bit more comparable between the two, rather the current balance were the DA totally stomps the Tactical Marines and for less cost.
What this really should equate too with the current design decisions for the units, is that the Tactical Marine squad is the one that should win in a straight-up fight (rather than losing horribly like it does now), whereas the Dire Avenger squads value should instead be on it's superior mobility and utility (due to the free Grenade). Maybe rebalance the Health and Shield values of the Dire Avenger and Tactical Squad so the Tactical Squad is the first one to lose one member, but the Dire Avenger squad is the first one to lose two members, and would end up rolling out in a victory for the Tacticals (with further losses on the Tactical Marine side but pulling out a victory). This emphasises that hit and run aspect of the Eldar, while still displaying the stoic-nature of the Marines. Eldar still would have their teleporting Bonesingers to tie-up Tacticals if a Marine player tried to push too early, or to safely get behind enemy lines to prevent the first-engagement result steamrolling into a win for the Marines.
Oh, and people don't notice so much, but Dire Avengers appear to have superior weapon range to Tactical Marines. That needs to go. Granted, a player can't utilise it without a spotter (A.I. is a different story, but nonetheless), having a unit with superior speed, firepower, range, damage mitigation and availability is a poorly designed unit and a balancing nightmare. I'm looking at you C&C1 Recon Bikes.
TLDR; Seems as this ended up being so long. The concept of just a single combat unit for each side in Tier 0 is poorly thought out. However, assuming that that isn't going to change, the gap in effectiveness between Tier 0 units needs to be drastically closed, without relying on doctrines or army gimmicks.