VS
Okay so it took me an extra week to get this post up, vacations are a funny thing, they tend to take up a little bit of your time. Ok, now on to my post. Recently I have been contemplating the jet fighter and the ravager for the Dark Eldar army; which is the better unit? Let me start by giving a little background on this thought process. I have been part of a great team of gamers that like to play slightly competitive games in various tournaments. We as a team have decided to play Dark Eldar in the team tournament at Adepticon in 2012. All of us have played various armies and have a fairly good competitive army we use on a regular basis. Dark Eldar have been a real challenge for us as a team, trying to decide what units work best and what we should use. Each member has their own opinions and we really don’t have any concrete data yet. So, we have been play testing lots of combinations and units. My thought is that the Dark Eldar jet fighter might be a better unit than the ravager overall.
Over the last few test games the team has become painfully aware that the Dark Eldar can be very strained on antitank units from range. Enter the Ravager, a unit that can move twelve inches and fire three Dark Lances at a decent range. The Ravager is a cheap unit, coming in at 105 points; add a flicker field for 10 point and you have a very effective and points effective antitank unit. My thought is however, what if there is no armor left, or on the table at all? The ravager really loses its punch. Hence my thought process, the jet fighter.
The Dark Eldar fighter is a higher points cost unit, coming in at 145 points, and after looking at some basic upgrades you are really talking about a unit that is close two 200 points. But, I think you get an overall more rounded unit. The fighter gives up a dark lance, but you gain a splinter cannon to up its anti infantry killing power, the jet fighter also has four missiles that can be tricked out in a variety of ways, to include pseudo tank hunter version, the Shatter filed missile. The Shatter field is a str 7 missile, that rerolls wounds, uses a large blast template, and you can have four of them. Shatter field missile give you many options, such as tank hunting as well infantry hunting, and you also have the option to fire all the missiles at once which could be a massive volley to deal with a unit. The shatter field missiles could make this the better choice unit between the two units, giving you the tank hunting option, but still able to deal with infantry if needed. But I’m not sure, there are some cons. The Jet fighter is only has an armor of 10, making is susceptible to bolter fire, it costs a lot of points to name to big ones.
So, to help me decide what the better unit is I am going to pit two ravagers against one jet fighter and track the outcome of their success or failure in future test games. I will track a couple of things to give me a picture of their performance. First I will track the total amount of points the units destroy from an enemy army before the unit is destroyed. Second I will track the objectives they manage to contest or deprive the enemy from. Finally I will track how long the unit lasted before its destruction. I plan on a game a week and will post the outcome and results after each game. Let’s see where this will go.
