Fliers- A Necessity?

[ContemptuousAngel]

Greetings all.
I have not yet played sixth edition. In fact, I only recently picked up my copy and started reading, as I have been busy with school and such for the past year. I had a fairly tournament successful Dark Eldar army during 5th edition that I would have hit or miss success with when using a Razorwing.
Now that every army is getting fliers of some sort, and the new rules for fliers make them immune to assaults (let me tell you how stupid that was) and harder to shoot at from the ground without special rules (Skyfire), will we be seeing them even more than we used too?
I have to say that unless I have too, I'd rather run a three Ravager list than cut out one of my gun boats for the Razorwing. Its a great unit and a sweet model but I had much more success with darklance/disintegrator spam than with bombing runs in 5th.
Can anyone with experience in both editions help me out?

[Sly]

You can fight Flyers very effectively by controlling the center of the board with a large mass of models. If you have your entire army in the center, each Flyer can only do one strafing run at you, then has to go off-board next turn (except for Heldrakes) since it has to overfly the mass, then has no targets. And if it turns away from the mass, and you have all of your models in the mass, then it has nothing to shoot at.

They can also be fought effectively with twin-linked anti-vehicle weaponry. Rifleman Dreads, MM Immolators, Broadsides, Annihilation Barges, etcetera, all do a good job at damaging them. You can also use something that's not normally twin-linked, in an army that can make it twin-linked... 3 Speeders with 2xMM in a Vulkan army can smash Flyers, and a single squad of them in an army with a Librarian who can take the Divination power can also fire twin-linked MMs.

Without twin-linked weapons, and without models to control the center of the table, you probably will have problems. Flyers trading shots with ground units that don't have Skyfire, if the Flyer army can control the center of the board so their movement is less restricted, generally has the Flyers as doing more damage. You may still fight them, but they will be at an advantage. Given that most armies can get twin-linked AT weapons, or large blobs, that's usually not a major problem.

For Dark Eldar, however, you have problems. Single-shot Dark Lances are not that effective, your bodies are too expensive to block off a large area, and your vehicles are going to do poorly when trading shots with any Flyer. Void Ravens are your best AA option, with Razorwing second. If you don't run those... and you do run into an army with a good amount of Flyers... better hope that you can smash their ground forces before the Flyers smash you, because you won't do much damage to the Flyers.

[Wolfshade]

I dislike flyers as the best way to beat them is with your own flyers. I dislike any game mechanic that forces people to choose a particular slot, and while there are ways of dealing with them, e.g. twin-linking they are still hard to hit.

The flip side to these also seems that lists seem to be list X + 100pts Aegis & Quadgun and while the quadgun is great AA it is frustrating to see in some lists, a fully mechanised rapid insertion force + static defence, that sort of thing just jars with me.

Amongst my group of mates consequently we don't take flyers against each other, the majority of the group don't have them (their armies do but they haven't brought it). One of the group tells of a person he plays who takes as many flyers as he can as he knows that my mate doesn't have anything to deal with AA, now that is a little cheesey if you ask me.

[Anggul]

I played a double-Stormraven Blood Angels army with my Tyranids, and although I had a dakkaflyrant, dakkafex and Hive Guard, I didn't actually need to fire at the Stormravens at all. If there are a couple of flyers, even with as much firepower as a Stormraven has, you can just ignore them and carry on about your business, as unlike other units they don't actually impede your progress much due to always moving around and out of your way. In the end they can't usually get all of their firepower to bear on all of the targets they want to fire at unless they've just come on that turn, which they can only do one unless they move off of the table and come back on next turn, which means they aren't firing for a turn. I suppose it's easier with nids though due to the expendable nature of the army.

[eldargal]

Look at it this way, your Razorwing will be less hint and miss now because it is quite useful against enemy flyers. The problem with flyers is that older codices have virtually no AA of their own to deal with them without taking flyers themselves.

[ContemptuousAngel]

Thanks for the insight (especially about controlling the center of the board- when I get my next Marine army up and running that will be doable). I dislike feeling forced to run something, forced to buy anything; but that's the game. I guess the same kind of stuff happened when mech became the focus of the game. So I guess I'll try out a couple of games with the Voidraven/razorwing supporting my ravagers. I just don't really wanna.
Meh. Dark City problems.
Here's hoping the new flier supplement changes DE fliers to fast attack.