So I was looking through my 3rd(i think) edition rulebook, and I stumbled upon the eldar army list (it had a simplified version of all the armies), and an alternate army list for saim han craftworld. However, it said that you COULD NOT take swooping hawks or shining spears. This makes no sense to me--they go perfectly with an all jetbike army that needs to move fast. Is there some lore in there that im missing?
Simply because with the Craftworlds rules and abilities it would have been to OP to field and therefore not allowed. Very silly just pretend it never happened
Agaith is right, but they had to make it make sense in the Fluff. Shining Spears are actually a very rare, nearly extinct, Aspect Warrior type during its day & therefore, due to all the civil unrest and constant battling that Sam Haan went through, made them all pretty much extinct. Swooping Hawks were subsequently ignored because of the direct nature of the warrior cast of Sam-haan. They didn't believe in tricky fighting, but instead preferred the direct approach, so viewed Swooping Hawks with disdain. Shining Spears were never OP in previous editions. In fact they were completely ignored. There points were too high, they had too small of a unit capacity, no weapon options, and basically -point for point- were lousy. The only thing they could do well was take an objective last turn or hem it up, or could reliably deal with very lightly armored tanks (rinos) and/or walkers without much effort.
The old Craft worlds codex for Eldar had a lot of fluff that has since been tossed out the window. But ya it was more story based back then and one of the reasons I use an Exodite world to avoid some of the craft world story conflicts in my 40k army.
