How do the named characters and the Avatar fare as options? The Avatar looks powerful heavily overpriced relative to Dreadnought-type units it generally resembles, and his combat stats don't seem noticeably better than most Phoenix Lords'. With the reduced significance of morale this edition he appears to have one of the weaker auras.
Avatar is a fantastic combatant. He is nothing even remotely like Dreadnought-type unit, because dreads are primarily ranged while Avatar is 95% melee. He is a specialised elites and character killer and he's good at it. His only drawback is that he is, just as before, slow and therefore at his best in infantry lists - which, in my opinion, generally cannot compete against mech.
His combat stats are so much better than any of the Phoenix lord's that they cannot even be compared. The only exception is Asurmen, but he is still substantially weaker. And don't forget that he is also much more durable than any of the PLs.
Really? Fuegan when enraged has more attacks and higher strength, and the Fire Axe seems to be a comparable weapon. He's squishier when attacked back, to be sure, but he also has an essentially identical (but longer-ranged) weapon, the same protection against mortal wounds, and is nearly 100pts cheaper.
The auras for PLs other than Asurmen seem very narrow. As combatants Karandras, Maugan Ra and Fuegan all seem respectable. I'm not sure how to evaluate Baharroth - as a whole Swooping Hawks seem fairly weak these days, and I think they need the numbers of a full squad to make the grenade packs effective, but Baharroth's higher chance to get mortal wounds is appealing. I'm not sure the fly high rule serves any particular purpose in 40k 8 as it's easy enough to reposition with the high movement rates of jump pack units and grenade packs give a further incentive to move normally.
When I look at the current design of our HQ choices, I always get a feeling that GW designers made a point of making Eldar character auras consistently weaker than those of their Imperial equivalents. This looks strange and overall kind of unfair. The only buff we get that is good enough to be comparable to what SM or IG get out of their characters is Doom.[/quote]
To be fair Doom's a bit better than comparable, and Guide is probably comparable since we get to reroll all our misses (albeit only for one unit) but I certainly feel envious when my Chaos or Marine opponents get their rerolls...
The only PL that seems worthwhile is Maugan Ra, for two reasons: first, he buffs one of our best long-range firepower units, and second, he dishes out some serious long-range firepower himself as well. According to my calculations, taking 5 Reapers + Maugan Ra is about as good in terms of damage output as 2 x 5 Reapers.
I really wish Maugan Ra had a better model, because I largely agree. I do like the look of Fuegan, and the unit he buffs is very hard-hitting, but he seems to want to be more an independent character-hunter than a Fire Dragon leader - he doesn't offer substantially more than an FD Exarch as a squad member.
I'm also at least interested by Karandras - he works well infiltrating alongside his unit, and is probably decent as a character-hunter in his own right, and he provides one of the best squad-specific bonuses.
Of course the running theme here is that all three are members of good Aspects. There's also Asurmen: that invulnerable save for Aspects is very tempting - though I wonder where he's best-positioned to use it to best effect. He's a close combatant but can't infiltrate with Scorpions, he's paying a lot to sit back and buff Reapers, and Dire Avengers don't share a range with any other units in the army - so unless you have a lot of them it doesn't seem that worthwhile a buff.
