7th edition was glorious and then....GW - thoughts on the Eldar Codex

So the Eldar codex is out and things don't look good. At the end of 6th edition I was starting to consider moving to another game. My club is fast transitioning to Infinity and as much as I hate the pewter models and don't really dig the fluff, I love skirmish games and game balance, so I was this close to moving over. 7th edition stopped me. Formation, detachments, unbound and infinite CAD are heaps lame, but the 7th edition codexes all seem to be written with an eye to powering down the game. The nastiest codexes - Eldar, Marines, Necrons and Tau (though they aren't so nasty since Ob-sec became a thing) were primed for fixes this year. The new Necron dex is very strong, especially with Decurion, but at least Decurion forces people to play a variety of models, and the absence of ob-sec and few ways to ignore cover makes hard counter armies like lictor-shame and scout-shame quite easy to produce. Eldar serpent spam lists on the other hand...ugh, especially at the club level. So I was really excited about the re-doing of the Eldar dex. Unfortunately, it seems the design studio just couldn't resist.

Let's start with what should have been done. First, note the fluff: Eldar are a dying race with the highest technology level in the galaxy. They should be glass cannons. Second, note the traditional design principle behind their play style: an army of fast, dangerous, flimsy specialists. Winning with Eldar should involve a ballet of aggressive and defensive moves. Good Eldar players should be extremely hard to beat. N00bs with the most tooled up list should get buried because of one false move (the Harlequin codex achieves this). The 6th edition codex got this all wrong. The aspect warriors were mostly lacklustre. Dire Avengers were not substantially differentiated from guardians thanks to the 4WS/BS upgrade, and warp spiders and swooping hawks, while strong, competed in the 'kill infantry' slot with wave serpents (which kill everything, including flyers). Similarly, fire dragons, while strong, had their role in anti-tank usurped by Wraith Knights who, mind you, were at least externally balanced. They are maybe a little bit undercosted, but they have counters: misfortune, grav-guns, tar-pitting with Chaos Spawn, Imperial Knights, poison shots etc. They also don't put out monster beats because they only have two guns and a handful of attacks. You can ignore them with some armies. What this all adds up to is that Eldar went from being supposedly a glass cannon of dancing specialists to being a resilient army of point and click generalists, with a smattering of amazing utility units thrown in e.g. jetbikes for capturing objectives and farseers for general shenanigans including daemon summoning. Early lists were jetseer council with 4 wave serpents and two knights. Later lists were less council more serpants.

The new codex presented an opportunity to change this. The wave serpent needed to be down powered so that the shield was either one use only or used a template (I would strongly prefer the latter to the current 2D6 shots mechanic - firing a force field shouldn't be able to hit planes). Jetbikes needed to have a 4+ save rather than a 3+. Nothing that fast can be durable, and this would make it possible to shoot jetbikes off objectives or take a casualty or two as the game progressed. Guardians needed to go back down to 3WS/BS (Kabalite warriors they are not). Wraithknights needed to go from jump infantry to just being fast (e.g. move as beast or even just battle focus). The weak parts of the book, especially assault aspect warriors, needed to be brought up a notch. Banshees needed to have assault grenades and a means of taking on high toughness infantry like nobz, at least on the charge. Striking scorpions needed a means of getting into Cc. Dark reapers needed to get a smidge cheaper. Dire avengers would have become differentiated from guardians by the changes to guardians. Fire dragons would have become useful once Wraithknights became costly. Hawks needed some sort of anti-air function.

So what did we get? Well, the Wraithknight is now 300 points, so that's something. The serpent shield is one use only good. All the aspect shrines got stronger, perhaps too strong in some cases, but fine. Farseers lost the ability to summon daemons. Alright good good. But then it all goes to shit. All the wraith units got D strength weapons, so the Wraithknight makes the Imperial Knight (who is undercosted), look like scrap metal and only costs 300 points! the seer council has been potentially buffed (through formations) back to 6th ed levels, the aspect warriors seem unnecessarily powerful at times (1 fire dragon can be statistically expected to do more damage now than 4 guard veterans with meltas), and, most brutally, you can put an endless number of lasers on jetbikes and the formation for Saim Hann is ridiculous. Dire avengers can conceivably move 6" in a serpent, disembark 6", run guaranteed 6" (formation bonus) then fire 18" assault 2 at BS5 with bladestorm and pseudo-rending. Have fun with that everyone else's infantry. There's actually no need to even use the now amazing fire dragons because you can just deep strike with no scatter a raider (deldar allies) using a web-way portal, disgorge some wraithguard and d-slap literally anything. Warp spiders practically can't be shot now (they jump when targeted, which is super fluffy but unless it makes them way expensive it's a bit broken) and swooping hawk anti-air is better than just about any other form of anti-air (they haywire things when they fly over them) other than Helldrakes, and hawks can score much better than  any plane.

I will have to reserve judgement until the points costs come out. If all of this is very, very expensive then I suppose its going to okay, but it still means that Eldar won't be played like Eldar. I want to see an aspect warrior glass cannon (which could be done if the wraiths weren't in this dex and aspects are expensive) or a slow but resilient and brutal wraith lineup supported by citizen guardians sporting awesome ancient tech. Instead, I will probably see three Wraithknights, 30 jetbikes and a seer council. EVERY SINGLE TIME. That's not going to be fun for anyone.