Hi, Today i was tabled by a dark elf player.....who fielded 4 characters on pegasus. And i really did not know how to tackle it with my lizards. His list was: Dreadlord on pegasus, with the ward against shooting and dawnstone. LVL 4 mage on steed (in warlock unit) BSB on pegasus....talisman of protection and charmed shield Hero on pegasus...1+/4++ Hero on pegasus.. 1+/5++ 2 units of 8 (?) dark riders 1 unit of 8 (?) warlocks 2 units of 5 harpys 1 big unit of repeater xbow men 4 bolt throwers. The problem was that he could just run circles around me. And i must admit I probably made it easy for him as i was a bit unsure on what to do in the beginning, so i moved too reluctantly. My list (stolen from Hinge who had good results with it, but he is a 1000times more experienced player than i am) Slann High magic loremaster, channerling staff and becalming cog. Oldblood on coldone, 4+ward GW OTS Scarvet, coldone dawnstone, I10 sword, ironcurse icon Scarvet, coldone BSB GW 4+ward Skink priest lvl 1 dispel Skink chief, terradon, egg of quanco, charmed shield. 25 Saurus hw shield FC 12 skinks + 1korx, muso, banner 10 skink cohort, muso banner 3x 10 skink skrimisher javelin, shield 2x 5 chamo skinks 6 Cold one riders, spear, muso banner 3 Terradons 2x Salamander
It's a crappy list to vs. The sea dragon cloak shouldn't exist. or atleast give +1 not +2 as. You need to field sit back and 6 dice vaal's unforging every turn. watch his gameplan change when no longer has his heavy armour, or the twilight cloak goes away. Egg also has a really decent chance of killing one(not the twilight cloak one , or wounded it enough. Most of them i'm guessing had lance? which means it's huge for you to get the charge with your characters. Hard as hell because his charge range is bigger. But you can hand of glory your scarvets to give them much better and bigger charge ranges. So vaals, egg and more luck then you should expect in a game. Don't feel bad for breaking the DE nose for fielding the list either.
That's a lot of 1+ armor saves. I would swap a High magic spell for Searing Doom as soon as lizardly possible.
Since Killing Blow doesn't work against them, probably quite well. Or does being on a pegasus really not make them immune to that?
I like that idea N810. You will only lose 1 model at most, so you will get 2 lots of attacks back. 6 attacks, hitting on 4's, 3 hits. gives you a 42% chance of killing it. Unless it has a ward save. Then they have most likely a 50%chance of negating the KB. Still it is a great way of dealing with this high mobility character spam. If you lose the first round it's pretty much over. If you don't break you lose frenzy and then it's all kinda bad. P.s. I don't have the DE book, but i'm pretty sure peg just makes them cav which you can KB
I his defense, he let me pick which army he should use (brets, skaven or DE), but said he prefered the dark elves as he wanted to practice with a nasty list he wanted to take to a tourny. So i gave him the practice. About the killing blow, not sure if he is cavalry or monstreous cavalry. Will ask him and check the rules. But i doubt the rippers will make it into combat. Dont forget he has like 30is crossbow men, 2x 8 dark riders and 4 bolt throwers. And the pegasus heroes have ASF. And yeah i was a bit stupid in my first magic phase, cause i casted arcane unforging (knocked of the talisman from bsb) and fiery convocation (scrolled) on the archer block. But did not really want to change either of them, so still no searing doom in turn two. And in turn three it was too late, as these guys are so fast they will be in combat or are allready in such a position you cant target them easily. And he steered clear of my cowboys while he rolled up my skinks, shot the terradons. Against this list the skinks were totally useless, as all his units were faster and stronger. In hind sight i should have put all three cowboys in the coldone unit, and should have charged straight across the field into his 4 bolt throwers, because they were the biggest threat to them if they were on their own or in infantry units. His pegasus heroes would have serious trouble to stop that unit, although he could double flee/redirect them. He also managed to deploy in such a way i could not really threaten his warmachines with my chamo skinks. And the amount of shooting he has was so high that the terradons would also not stand a chance to harm them.
I have a friend that plays a similar list. I hate flyers... I don't have anything to suggest really. They are just horrible and generally destroy anything that they charge. About the only thing that might kill them is an Old Blood Cowboy. As once the charge bonus from the lance has been blown, they are pretty bogus. Just hope the one riding the cloak doesn't get the charge! The Pegasus is a Monstrous Beast, thus riding it makes the hero Monstrous Cavalry. So no killing blow.
So I thought I'd chime in here as someone who plays Lizards a lot but has moved to a Dark Elf Flying Circus list for competitive play. The short answer is you deal with the Dark Elf list by trying to mitigate your loss. Assuming your opponent and yourself are of roughly equal skill this should be a loss for you everytime and there's not much that can be done about it. The reason for this is twofold. 1. He can outshoot you from range. If you stand off he will steadily pick off points with Xbows, RBT, Magic etc. If you close to within shooting range your entire army is going to be sent packing by his flyers herding you off the board. Even if you cross the gauntlet with a mini-bus you might well get several of the Bolt Throwers, but it means that your only unit that can deal with his characters is facing the wrong direction and the pegs are massacring your army. I plan on losing my bolt throwers to the opponent making a desperate charge every game and it brings a smile to my face each time. 2. Mobility. He is simply to fast to double flee and redirect effectively. With 4 flyers and cav that can declare out to 20" everything will be fleeing ASAP and by turn 4 nothing will be left on the board. Pretty much you just need to try and hold points by using the following: 1. Get your Slann and Saurus into a building, all the shooting he has and combat can't be brought to bear and it gives your Slann a 360 LoS and makes his leadership bubble bigger. This will also stop the purple suns from demolishing you. 2. Try to lure his pegs into charging skinks in forests or water, he might roll a 1 for DT and you will be stubborn meaning you can slow them down a bit. 3. I'd get off of high magic and onto wandering deliberations. You need damage output to try and pick up points and High Magic is only going to give that to you with Soul Quench. Unmaking is cool, but he's got dice too and he's not a moron. 4. Cowboy placement is crucial as he doesn't want to fight the cowboys. Use this to your advantage by positioning them to block off areas while staying out of LoS of RBTs. This should help stop him herding you willy nilly. Letting them hang out in cohorts is a good idea. They can't get shot by a RBT, they make the cohort ITP and it can give them 2 static CRES. Peg heroes won't want anything to do with that . 5. Tettoeko - Every lizard army should have tettoeko. Comets help to deny areas of the board to the DE player as his cav and infantry will get munched by even an early comet and a late comet will kill his characters. He will help you Slann dominate the magic phase and Chain Lightning is also a massive threat. Chuck him in a building with your Slann and keep him safe.
Before I begin: I've never played against a pegasus spam, but I still feel that my opinion should hold some value. People should feel free to correct me of course if I'm off with some things. The dark pegasus heroes are a good value for their points. For 50pts they gain fly, +1 armour save and +1W. It works because for whatever unknown reason GW decided that 6pts to gain scaly skin, on every single combat character was fitting. WoC pays 20pts and it's only for 1 model so yeah... This means that they can have a lance, shield and heavy armour on a pegasus all for 150pts. Not bad. However you should also recognize their weaknesses. S4 after charge and only 3 attacks. That's not super exciting. It basically means that they'll have to kill whatever they touch otherwise they're fvcked or stuck. I think it's very important to remember because even with a lance they'll still only ever wound us on a 3+ and won't modifiy our armour by more than 3. Comparably we have more attacks, will have 64% chance to generate a 5th attack (which we should eventually do in prolonged combats) and hits home at S7. Not only does this mean that we'll wound on 2+, but we'll modify their armoru save by 4. The last bit is important because against us their S6 will mean that a dawnstone will act as a 4+ ward in close combat. For them it'll mean that they get to reroll their 5+ armour save. Now consider this for 1 second: A dreadlord with dawnstone will be just as easily to take down for our scar vets as if it was just a hero (master I believe). His superior initiative, WS and wound doesn't have an effect compared to the hero characters. We can't compete in those aspects to begin with and both the hero and the lord have an equal amount of wounds. What you should be worried about, I suppose, is a dread lord with the +2S sword instead of a lance and this is the biggest difference between the lord and the heroes (he can afford something else than defensive equipment). Oh and the extra attack lol ... Not accounting for the rerolling 1s in the To Wound phase a dread lord will do 0,58 wounds against a scar vet with a 1+/4+ save. Our scar vet against the dawnstone lord will do 0,84 wounds. Bam. Now do remember that in every round following actually getting charged by a dread lord he'll be hitting you with his S4. S4 will do 0,093 wounds to the SV. Even less against a dawstone scar vet. Now personally I think the I10 sword is a trap. You give up +2S every round of combat just to remove their reroll to hit. But what's the point really? S5 vs 1+ armour save won't be enough so you can't compete against his heroes in that regard and regardless you'll just have to survive first round of combat and then you can laugh at his rerolling to hit S4 attacks. There's no need to remove that and not get +2S. IMO at least. If you were to have those 3 combat characters I would've done the following: - 1+ armour save on all. - GW on all (unless etheral units). - Extra defence on all (+4 ward/dawnstone). Our lord can afford some extra equipment so if you feel like it you can also give him the glittering scales light armour. OTS isn't a bad choice, just aim the lord at a character (ward). My personal favorite is the dawnstone + armour of destiny lord with GW. Yeah just force that fvcker down the throat of your opoonent because they cannot possibly hope to take him down in CC. Now uhm.. I don't know about you, but I feel much more confident in using my own list if I'm not too sure on the list borrowed. The list you have is.. ugh dunno what to say. Some of it seems random and I think it's very important for you to know what each unit should do and against what. My take on a list? Core full of skinks. Special with templeguards (with armour piercing banner) and terradons, no CORs. Salamanders are fine. Dunno if cameleons can still fit into the list. Remove skink chief as needed. You have to remembet that a 1 big unit of crossbow elfs isn't good against what I just presented. He can remove a few skinks models on long range or try his luck against our templeguards. None of which will be terribly bothered by it TBH. This obviously changes once we reach close range. My strategy would be to remove the Dark Riders with skinks/terradons (terradons can also take out bolt throwers - only 2 crew members). Aim the salamanders at his Xbow unit. Aim a SV at same unit (will singelhandedly take care of it). Keep your lord and the BSB SV around the templeguard bunker. Think of it this way: At 2500pts you can have 9 units of skink skirmishers. He can't remove all of that just like that. Screen your bunker and push forward. He'll probably try and get around you with his fast units, but your main goal is to remove the following: All core units, all bolt throwers, the harpies. Should you be lucky enough to catch a unit of Warlocks you can probably remove the unit by running it down. If you remove his bolt throwers you he can't hurt your mounted characters on range which means that if he wants to get points from you it's by killing skinks. Now should you get into CC with one of his characters and your skinks just pray that he won't remove more than 5 models. If he doesn't you can stick by being stubborn. With a good bunch of skinks he can't quite as easily run around you. We have a 12" march + 12" range and relies on poison anyway so you should be able to do a number on his units. Concerning the slann I'm more a fan of wandering deliberation. Some people will swear by high magic and that's fine. With WD you have 4 damage spells and 4 hex/augment spells. Obviously you can get those with high magic, but it's easier with WD. So yeah, I like it more, but that's just me All of this is obviously just my opinion so take it only as suggestions and not how to beat the DE player the next time around. He did have a fairly strong list (although it could be worse) than yours, so keep that in mind.
Thanks for the advise Ha...yeah, i iactually totally agree with you on using own lists instead of stealing them. The reason why i tried this list is that when hinge posted the list, i totally did not understand it, and had some discussion with him about it. I was kinda intrigued that the list performed so wel for him. So, i tried this list against an orc player, and had a blast and a huge learning experience. So decided to play around with it some more. And yeah, i do realize that our charcters are better. But so did he....and he avoided them like a plague. And he also perfectly managed to cover his bolt throwers from my chamo skinks and terradons. I realize (allready during the game) that i made life too easy for him by not having a real plan, and i allready have some ideas on how to do it better next time. However....when he manages to avoid your characters and manages to cover his bolt throwers...your cowboys will die sooner or later to a bolt thrower shot. And then you are toast. Yeah, I actually wanted to ASF sword but took the I10 one out of point considerations. I figured having one high I cowboy would open some tactical oppurtunities cause there are quite a few high I glass cannons around where you wanna hits first against. And i allready had two GW guys. Against Elves the I10 is just as good as the ASF list (cause you wont strike first anyway). But yeah on avarage +2 str is better.
Skink cohorts of 30 with music and champion. optional: Skink cohorts with 3 kroxigors big Temple guard w/ Death Slann. Some magic & combat support. Generate at least 2 Character snipe spell #0#2#5. Move forward and see his shooting just biting more that they could chew. Your combat hero always in unit with champion, so the Twilight Cloak pegasus will be wasted against the champion (if i remember well is the first round only?) The skinks with M 6 should march the first turn, the second if the enemy is close for shooting, Swift reform wide to get between 20 & 30 shoots (the máximum you can) Move forward and shoot the hell out. Just move the whole battlefield to shoot his standing troops. Snipe in magic phase his characters. That will force him to engage. Where your Scarvets will do his job fine. just spend a champion in Challenge if you think the twilight cloak is in combat. Scarvets in unit and big Skrox will tear through pegasus. Death magic will put pressure and may be kill one or two. You should have enough shooting so if he tries to redirect you, Swift reform and deliver a big volley of javelins.
It seems like the Lore Attribute of Lore of Heavens would come in handy vs Pegasus spam. Getting a free drop rocks effect on them every time you debuff or magic missile would add up, I imagine, and we have multiple good options for bringing Lore of Heavens. Tetto'eko (if your meta likes named characters) or multiple Skink Priests would be the preferred delivery mechanism, I think, as that removes the need for running a bunch of slow moving pseudo-core in Special (Temple Guard) with no ranged attacks.
My best tip would be to ignore the pegasi, mostly. He's got some juicy targets that are waaaay easier to kill. And I think the cowboys will win a challenge, especially if a champion can take the first round of combat or if you manage to set up a countercharge. If you think he will dance around you, why not reform the saurus 25 wide? At least the fast-cav can't fly over you. If the skinks hide behind the saurus, he probably can't charge the skinks. And they don't want to charge the saurus, at least not if there's a cowboy in there who can make room or challenge. And don't forget, if there's no room for the pegasus to land he can't complete charges, and can't land. Don't forget the 1"rule.
Thanks for the reply. I allready figured i should have done more with that 1 inch rule. Especially with my own flyers. Still with that many pegasi around it will be quite hard to prevent a charge. really like your 25 wide idea
aren't saurus bases 1 inch? You can never move further in a reform that 2your movement, so you might be able to reform to 14, maybe 18, but i'm pretty sure 25 is more than 8 inches of movement per saurus.
DE Peg spam/avoidance/shooty is one of the best lists in the game and one I have struggled with. Generally it is about minimizing the loss and my goal is doing better then a 6-14 in 20-nil. In W/L/D I am more likely to lose more badly since I will take more chances. When I play conservatively in this match, I do not lose the characters or Suarus block but expect to lose most of the skinks and likely the CO. How close the game is depends on what I pick up. Terrain can also play a large role. Unless a building is close by, he should be able to keep you from getting into it. If you can get to it, do so as has been suggested. Loads of forest means stubborn and soft cover for a good portion of the LM troops. Other pieces should provide hiding spots, take advantage of them. To go for a win, I would try and put lots of pressure and close with my skinks. The goal would be to dictate the movement phase. He can not realistically engage the Saurus block even with multiple masters until he can peel a number of ranks off. The BSB should be parked here for protection and the ability to kill the peg masters. The other cowboys are setting up no landing zone areas while staying in units. They may need to pop back and forth as some of these units get depleted. Terradons should stay hidden until they can jump out and drop rocks. There are plenty of tasty targets and he will try and work around you with the fast cav. Be patient. Chameleons should do the same but with the aim of pushing any fleeing units back to you, unless you have an opportunity to jump out and take down an RBT. As far as the list in the match up. The CO and Suarus are sub-optimal but are my best painted units, so they stay. I have been able to get lots of mileage out of both in games however. I generally prefer the Biting Blade to keep armor penetration up. I do believe that you should be prepared on multiple fronts to deal with ethereal units. If not you will be screwed. I disagree that Wandering Deliberations is a superior choice to High Magic in this match. I suspect that 2 of the Masters are packing DB items, making Searing Doom and boosted Shem’s much less useful. With 3 fast cav units, he can bounce the unprotected one from fast cav unit to fast cav unit to provide some protection as well. I also contend that you will have your pick of sig spells very rapidly. You will cast Tempest on the first turn and he will likely let it go so he can stop Soul Quench and Arcane. This is far from a wasted spell as it should knock off some of the shots coming at you and provide his large repeater xbow unit an additional -1 to hit. Hand of Glory will be useful if he has P Sun to keep Int up. Finally a timely Walk between worlds is golden. And yes, if you are playing SC, always take Tetto. Sooo good. Hinge
I have a DE army. Played with a Peg list a few times but got bored since it's so cheesy. Here's my take on how you beat it. Challenge: when the DE on Peg charges by himself, he HAS to accept any challenge made. This is where you arm an OB with blade of realities, or a SV with Obsidian blade. Yes you have an average AS and no WS, but most of the DE points are in defensive items (granting 1+ AS and WS), so offense is weak. Often they charge with a lance. Challenge with your champion first and waste the DE's lance charge, then challenge with your OB or SV. Very rare that DE should be able to kill your OB or SV, since they are rarely built for offense. Another nice tool to have is a character with the Other Trickster's Shard in base contact. Chakax: If there is an anti-DE on Peg character out there, it just might be Chakax. I know what you're thinking... he's only a hero with 2 wounds and 3+ AS, and always strikes last. Yes.... but.... in a challenge he has a 5+ WS and his opponent has ASL as well. That takes care of the DE's ASF re-rolls. Furthermore all that Chakax needs is a single hit against the DE, and one of his cheesy magic items is destroyed on a 5+. Even if the DE is able to kill Chakax, eliminating crown of command, ward saves or magic weapons this way becomes priceless. (oh, and strength 7 isn't too shabby either, that 1+ AS is a 5+ now). Chakax is expensive at a whopping 270 points, but in my experience he's been worth it, especially with models that have to issue or accept challenges (WoC). Character Charges: don't charge DEs on Pegs with units. Have your characters charge out of a unit assuming that the charge distance is safe. This way the DE on Peg won't tie down your entire unit, and your warriors can hunt down other targets. This is especially important if the DE charges one of your monsters; get your character over there ASAP and you might be able to save your monster. "Bolt Throwers": Multi-wound no AS weapons are effective. Yes, the giant bow on the Steg usually misses, but Hand of Glory is useful here. The Amber Spear does not require a to-hit-roll and can be boosted for D6 wounds. You can't rely on this strategy to succeed, but it's a good one to add. Magic: This is an overrated method to deal with DEs on pegs. This is because they will usually be dispelled. Swapping for searing doom or having Wandering Deliberations is still a useful strategy to have. Diversify: There is NO single anti-DE on Peg tactic! Don't rely on using one single strategy for dealing with DEs on pegs. The more tools you have in your toolbox, the more likely you will be able to deal with them. When I played DEs I wasn't worried about the opponent who had one single powerful strategy against me, but the one who had multiple smaller, but effective ones.
A WD Slann did well for me the one time I had to deal with multiple dark pegasi (till he miscast on three dice and went into a vortex). You have Searing Doom and Spirit Leech to kill them outright. Iceshard Blizzard can soften them up, both with a chance for damage, but mostly to penalize their charge round.