Culling the Weak: Fixing The Bad Dark Elf Units Part One

This series might come off badly.  The Dark Elves are undeniably one of the most competitive books in Fantasy and transitioned very well to 8^th Edition.  So complaining about the bad units might seem to some folks like a 40k player complaining about the crappy Grey Knights units. 

Fair enough.

That said, some of the Dark Elves bad units have exceptionally cool models or flavor.  It is hard to describe how badly players want Executioners to be playable models.  They are so cool that people jump through insane hoops just to turn them into a mediocre unit on the tabletop while gimping the rest of their army in the first place.  People are willing to ignore reality in order to maintain a false hope.  Don’t believe me?  How do you think organized religion rakes in so much cash? 

Note I am not a game designer, so I can’t argue that the proposed changes are perfectly balanced, but I’ll do my best.  If something seems amiss, let me know in the comments.

First up, Executioners.

How can you not want to play models this cool?

Why they are bad

They are the worst imaginable version of High Elf Swordmasters.  For 12 points a piece, they are strength 6 with killing blow and hatred.  Sounds great!  But they are toughness 3 with 5+ armor and Always Strike Last.  Sounds fucking awful!  The Swordmasters get uber strikers first, which by eliminates the strikes last, and also gives them Hatred.  Killing Blow, unfortunately, is irrelevant when you are Strength 6.  Nothing that can be killed with Killing Blow is going survive your hits anyway, so it’s a useless ability.  Don’t yell at me, I know that mathhammer-wise, it combos well with Hatred to result in a lot of extra kills.  Irrelevant.

The main reason why they are bad boils down to simply this: they are squishy elves who strike last.  Very lame.  The only way to make up for the fact that they die before they get to strike is to buy more of them.  That is what my friends in finance call “throwing good money after bad.”  When you have a bad hand, you don’t double down on it, especially when your opponent knows you have a bad hand and will call your bluff.  Just dumb.

Design Philosophy

So how do you fix them without making them ridiculous like Swordmasters?  Good question.  Allowing them to take 35 point banners so they can take the ASF banner is the most frequent suggestion.  But that’s dumb, because you shouldn’t have to buy a specific magic banner in order to make your unit do the basic task that it was designed to do.  That would be pretty poor game design, and I’ll immediately dismiss it. 

Another limit to set is that they can’t be better than Swordmasters.  If our goal is to fix them, I’m not going to ‘fix’ them in a way that makes them better or equal to some other broken unit. 

The last limit is that I can’t make them better than Blackguard.  Blackguard are the best infantry unit in the army book on the table top and from a fluff perspective, they ought to be.  So if I make a unit that immediately outclasses them, why would anyone bring Blackguard outside of some theme list? 

Fixing Them

Har Ganeth Executioners 17 points per model

Unit Size

5-20

Equipment

Heavy Armor

Draich (counts as a great weapon)

Special Rules

Eternal Hatred

Khainite

Cold-blooded Killers

Cold-blooded Killers:    Executioners don’t slowly torture their victims like most Dark Elves; they are trained to kill exerting the minimum necessary effort, ideally with a single blow.  A unit of Executioners must decide at the beginning of each round of combat between the following two options: Always Strike Last but gain Killing Blow, or to strike at their normal initiative.

Rationale

I limited their unit size to prevent people from making hordes.  Being able to attack with a third rank is a little too good when you are I5 and Str6.  I wanted to limit the amount of potential casualties they could inflict in a single round of combat to a maximum of 20, assuming they rolled perfectly.

I upgraded their points cost, since they did receive a power boost in order to keep Blackguard competitive.  The changes overall fully distinguish the roles for each unit.  Executioners are designed to put out a small number of accurate high strength attacks.  They are best at cutting down enemy heavy infantry.  Blackguard are designed to output tons of medium strength accurate attacks to mow down medium and light infantry.  Now their roles are more distinguished.
Additionally, I kept them much less powerful than Swordmasters.  You might argue that they are now overpowered.  Compare them with Chaos Warriors armed with Halberds and Mark of Khorne.  They are probably a little worse overall than Khorne Warriors for about the same amount of points, which is fair since Chaos Warriors are supposed to be around the power level of other armies’ elite infantry.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Questions?