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I posted something up on my blog about what I think is happening to our beloved game, under these new changes. http://thebrownpaintbrush.blogspot.com/

Let me know you thoughts and such on this topic.

yermom wrote:I posted something up on my blog about what I think is happening to our beloved game, under these new changes. http://thebrownpaintbrush.blogspot.com/

Let me know you thoughts and such on this topic.

Disagree on the tiers. Daemons are not that good. They didn't get any better with DA and BT getting a bump up. IMHO all SM chapters are pretty on par with each other. Some armies have less quantity of viable lists (like DA, since they rely on special characters quite a bit), but for the most part they are all about equal now.

My rankings:

Tier 1: SM (all chapters) guard, DE.
tier 2: tau, sisters, orks, nids, eldar
tier 3: chaos (both) daemon hunters, necrons

Tier 1 are armies that have multiple competitive builds.
Tier 2 are armies that have few competitive builds (tau, eldar, and sisters), or have many competitive builds but are slightly underpowered (nids and orks)
tier 3 are armies that are deeply flawed, mostly due to lack of options, but also the fact that the "good" options are too few or aren't actually good. Daemons because they lose to random chance.

You raise good points, we both have a different system of ranking tiers though. I ranked mine based on what I felt to be each armies most competitive build, and ranked them all that way.

I'm probably very biast when it comes to demons as I've been very successful with them. But, as far as chance goes, they are less suceptible to bad luck than most armies. Properly built demons dont give a gak about whether they roll their 3+ or not. Also based on my successes they are top tier, in fact almost every demon player I know does rather well with demons, it;s just there are very few of us left, and in a tournament with 30+ space wolves/guard and 2 demon players, well the odds are heavily against a demon player winning to being with... I'm willing to bet however that even if the ration of wolves/guard to demons was 2:1 demons would bring home a lot more GT's.

As a BT player and a Daemon player, I have to say that ive lost more games with my Daemons due to bad luck rather than playing badly. Sometimes in warhammer, if the dice are against you, they're against you, and this is noticed to a much greater degree in a Daemon army.

I personally love that the BT's got a new FAQ, and although I don't think they are top tier yet, they have the punch to compete with any army on the go at the minute.

Time will tell how the meta game evolves.

yermom wrote:You raise good points, we both have a different system of ranking tiers though. I ranked mine based on what I felt to be each armies most competitive build, and ranked them all that way.

I'm probably very biast when it comes to demons as I've been very successful with them. But, as far as chance goes, they are less suceptible to bad luck than most armies. Properly built demons dont give a gak about whether they roll their 3+ or not. Also based on my successes they are top tier, in fact almost every demon player I know does rather well with demons, it;s just there are very few of us left, and in a tournament with 30+ space wolves/guard and 2 demon players, well the odds are heavily against a demon player winning to being with... I'm willing to bet however that even if the ration of wolves/guard to demons was 2:1 demons would bring home a lot more GT's.

Daemons are one of my current armies, and I win much more games than I lose with them. Doesn't change my opinion of them.

Where they get screwed on luck is in deep strikes, and if they don't have balanced waves, the splitting of the army.

Another one of their problems how little real choice there is in the list. Most FoC have 1-2 choices that are actually good, with the others being obviously bad, or looks like it is good but isn't. It ends up that most good daemon players arrive at just a small handful of builds that are nearly identical. Or they take the easy route and just build fatecrusher (which is a noob stomper, but isn't what I call a great list)

notabot187 wrote:Daemons are one of my current armies, and I win much more games than I lose with them. Doesn't change my opinion of them.

Where they get screwed on luck is in deep strikes, and if they don't have balanced waves, the splitting of the army.

Another one of their problems how little real choice there is in the list. Most FoC have 1-2 choices that are actually good, with the others being obviously bad, or looks like it is good but isn't. It ends up that most good daemon players arrive at just a small handful of builds that are nearly identical. Or they take the easy route and just build fatecrusher (which is a noob stomper, but isn't what I call a great list)

Agreed.

Certain units in the Daemon codex are just so bad it's not even funny, such as furies and Beasts of nurgle. Right away this means that Juggernauts/Flamers are competing for your elite slots (i prefer to run seekers than fiends).
And that's just one example of your army list being shoehorned into something you might not even want.

Honestly that is a common misconception with demons. Out of the 14 HQ's we have 9 have a place in competitive armies, out of the 4 elites, 3 have a place in competitive armies, 4 out of 5 troops are competitive, 3 out of 4 fast attacks are competitive, and both our heavy support options are competitive as well. That means 72% of our army choices are competitive.

In fact most demon builds dont look alike when you;ve actually gotten the practice in. Many lists opt to get power weapons and such from blood crushers, I opt for bloodletters instead. Many armies have a few min size squads of plaugebearers for troops, mine has 42 bloodletters. Some armies use seekers for fast attack as you do liam0404, I prefer screamers myself. Some choose princes, others choose grinders. Don't even get me started on the different routes you can go with HQ's like 3 heralds of khorne and skull taker riding juggys joined to a crusher unit, 4 heralds of tzeentch or even 2 great unclean ones.

There is a multitude of good choices from the demon book. I'm willing to bet that my current demon list looks nothing like yours, and is still, just as, if not, more competitive.

As far as deep striking issues, you can mitigate that by spreading out your units more and deploying further from the enemy, using unit choices to mitigate the disadvantage such as taking more slaneesh to compensate for the distance gap. If the dice gods go against you the dice gods go against you, there's nothing you can do, but demons built properly are not more vulnerable than other armies.

notabot187 wrote:Disagree on the tiers. Daemons are not that good. They didn't get any better with DA and BT getting a bump up. IMHO all SM chapters are pretty on par with each other. Some armies have less quantity of viable lists (like DA, since they rely on special characters quite a bit), but for the most part they are all about equal now.

My rankings:

Tier 1: SM (all chapters) guard, DE.
tier 2: tau, sisters, orks, nids, eldar
tier 3: chaos (both) daemon hunters, necrons

Tier 1 are armies that have multiple competitive builds.
Tier 2 are armies that have few competitive builds (tau, eldar, and sisters), or have many competitive builds but are slightly underpowered (nids and orks)
tier 3 are armies that are deeply flawed, mostly due to lack of options, but also the fact that the "good" options are too few or aren't actually good. Daemons because they lose to random chance.

Damn, hope you don't think I am stalking you, but this is pretty good.

My thought? You shouldn't base your entire understanding of the meta of all of 40k based on just one tournament event. Games day is not your god.

Obviously because I'm some guy who went to a Games day, placed top 3 and thinks he's hot stuff.

I mean if you're going to take the time to make such pointless, foolish, uneducated remarks at least do a little research to make yourself not seem like a total ignorant fool. I mean I have a record starring you right in the face if you just take a look at my signature. Now, I'm not one to just point out my accomplishments to validate everything I do as law, but you can't be ignorant to their existance.

I have no problems with people disagreeing with me, actually if no one disagreed with me I'd probably die of boredom. But, I'm really not appreciative of people trying to win (or start for that matter) internet tough guy fights over somebody's thoughts on a game.

Sorry if I don't bend over backwards for an Argument from Authority fallacy. You've played some games, congrats.

A few tiny tweaks to a couple army rules are not going to turn the 40k universe on its head. Settle down.

notabot187 wrote:

yermom wrote:I posted something up on my blog about what I think is happening to our beloved game, under these new changes. http://thebrownpaintbrush.blogspot.com/

Let me know you thoughts and such on this topic.

Disagree on the tiers. Daemons are not that good. They didn't get any better with DA and BT getting a bump up. IMHO all SM chapters are pretty on par with each other. Some armies have less quantity of viable lists (like DA, since they rely on special characters quite a bit), but for the most part they are all about equal now.

My rankings:

Tier 1: SM (all chapters) guard, DE.
tier 2: tau, sisters, orks, nids, eldar
tier 3: chaos (both) daemon hunters, necrons

Tier 1 are armies that have multiple competitive builds.
Tier 2 are armies that have few competitive builds (tau, eldar, and sisters), or have many competitive builds but are slightly underpowered (nids and orks)
tier 3 are armies that are deeply flawed, mostly due to lack of options, but also the fact that the "good" options are too few or aren't actually good. Daemons because they lose to random chance.

There are 2 ways you can tier armies.

Ranking by the greatest number of competitive builds per codex: This method is seriously flawed for tournament play because some army books only have 1 top tier codex. DA for example only have 1 high end competitive build=deathwing. By the logic of method #1 DA are a 3rd tier army like CSM which only have 1 competitive build. Space wolves would be a tier 2 army because they really only have 2 competitive builds Loganwing & TWC. The logic behind placing army books into tiers is way is deeply flawed when talking about tournament play, but it's ok if you want to advise someone on a good army to start at the FLGS

Ranking by how competitive the most competitive builds the army has. Now we're talking about a far more detailed ranking system, but if you're talking tournament play all players will see are the most competitive builds. We're also talking about ranking 30 or so builds rather than a dozen books.

Tiers should really be 5 tier rather than 3 as 3 tiers only signify top tier, bottom tier, and average.

Tier 1 Top tier: No hard counters, and not overly reliant on luck
Tier 2 Competitive armies: We're talking good solid armies here than can take on tier 1, but might have an uncommon hard counter or a notable weakness.
Tier 3 Average armies: Tier 3 can either signify an army has no serious strengths or weaknesses, or the army has tier 1 power and a common hard counter as a weakness.
Tier 4 Uncompetitive armies: The codex is either underpowered or has weaknesses that the average tournament player can easily exploit.
Tier 5 Garbage: Garbage, nothing more needs to be said.

I'll do DOA as an example. Before the DA/BT FAQ came out they had tier 1 strength with the only real weakness being heavy terminator armies making them a Tier 2 army because they have an uncommon hard counter. Now that the DA/BT FAQ is going to make heavy terminator armies common DOA has fallen to a tier 3 army. DOA is still just as powerful as they were before, but their hard counter has gone from an uncommon sight to a common one.

DE are another good example because they are a deeply flawed glass cannon of a codex. They can defiantly win, but they have serious hard counters. They also have serious issues when the other side steals the initiative, are far less resolute to recovering from a stolen initiative, which basically translates to a 1/6 chance of getting stomped anytime the get to deploy first. Because DE are so fragile and a game game can go down the crapper so damn fast for DE they are Tier 2 at best.

A large number of guard armies went from tier 1 to tier 2, mostly because they can't rely on a tripple manticore spam anymore as a terminator heavy list will give manticores problems, but a lot of Guard builds can still be tier 1.

CSM duel lash along with fatecrusher &/or 24 bloodcrusher spam would actually be a tier 2 competitive build.

Sorry but Tau are tier 4. Every good tournament players knows how to exploit the many weaknesses of a Tau army like the palm of their hand. The difficulty of play Tau means only really good or really bad players tend to start a Tau army. A really good player can absolutely stomp above average players with Tau. What it comes down to is skill + tactics are more important than army building, but when playing an an opponent who is close to your level of skill army building is the real tiebreaker. So when Tau enter tournaments and face opponent after opponent that are close to them in skill their performance is far different than that at the FLGS.

The only army I would actually rank at tier 5 right now is necrons. People are so geared to kill MEQ that necrons just don't do well in the meta game, every tournament player knows to take out the res orb asap, and if the game starts to go downhill for the necrons any good tournament player will smell blood and go for the phase out.

onestly that is a common misconception with demons. Out of the 14 HQ's we have 9 have a place in competitive armies, out of the 4 elites, 3 have a place in competitive armies, 4 out of 5 troops are competitive, 3 out of 4 fast attacks are competitive, and both our heavy support options are competitive as well. That means 72% of our army choices are competitive.

In fact most demon builds dont look alike when you;ve actually gotten the practice in. Many lists opt to get power weapons and such from blood crushers, I opt for bloodletters instead. Many armies have a few min size squads of plaugebearers for troops, mine has 42 bloodletters. Some armies use seekers for fast attack as you do liam0404, I prefer screamers myself. Some choose princes, others choose grinders. Don't even get me started on the different routes you can go with HQ's like 3 heralds of khorne and skull taker riding juggys joined to a crusher unit, 4 heralds of tzeentch or even 2 great unclean ones.

There is a multitude of good choices from the demon book. I'm willing to bet that my current demon list looks nothing like yours, and is still, just as, if not, more competitive.

As far as deep striking issues, you can mitigate that by spreading out your units more and deploying further from the enemy, using unit choices to mitigate the disadvantage such as taking more slaneesh to compensate for the distance gap. If the dice gods go against you the dice gods go against you, there's nothing you can do, but demons built properly are not more vulnerable than other armies.

+1

Daemons are interesting because they have so many ways to be competitive. There are many ways to tackle the issues they face. Not only that, but they throw people off because they shrug off many of the advantages of melta and missile spam. My Daemons list has no armor, 1 MC, and only 10 kill points at 1500 points. Eat that meta game

To those who are complaining about luck beating them with Daemons, I have two questions. 1. What kind of board has that much impassable terrain that you cannot effectively deepstrike without mishap-ping? 2. Are you making balanced waves? If you load up one wave and expect the 66% chance then I can see where you are having problems.

Ailaros wrote:My thought? You shouldn't base your entire understanding of the meta of all of 40k based on just one tournament event. Games day is not your god.

Yermom is a solid, respected and known GT player. So attacking him in this way just makes you look ignorant.

I don't think I agree completely with his conclusions, but the tweaks to DA & BT are far from minor, and will shake up the tournament metagame a bit.

There are only two main tiers imo or at least only two which matter from a competitive/tournament standard, Codices which can compete and those that can't. Only Necrons (because of Phase out mostly, otherwise they would be usable) and pure Daemonhunters (spamming Land Raiders is the best they can do) really fall into the latter category, everyone else has at least one build which can compete at the top level. You can of course rank codices, specific builds from a codex (and indeed the number of builds a codex can do which is fairly important) and the easy at which a competitive army can be made within this category, but at the end of the day none of the fully tuned competitive lists are far enough ahead of the pack that they can't be beaten by any of the others. Player skill is still one of the biggest factors in 40k and because of its non tangible its something which is widely overlooked or ignored in these kinds of discussions as its next to impossible to account for.

Well, if everyone is packing Termies, bring it. I've been running plasma squads since day one.

I personally don't like tier lists much - they generally revolve around one build (i.e., 3x ML LF Space Wolves).

I disagree with almost your entire article, with the exception of the following quote:

Now here comes guard just a few months later with 3 hydras 2 manticores 3 vendettas and melta vets out the wazoo and sweeps a few GT's and people wonder how? Really if that sister list used to be GT winning imagine what current guard builds would have done.

Now if we look at what a lot of armies can field now, we see lists with 20+ missels and 15+ melt guns and shrug as its just another "top" list. Almost every competitive event you go to will feature multiples of these types of armies. It's no shock to anyone anymore.

Yes, the reason "Leafblower" lists did so well is because no one ever expected to see that kind of thing on the tabletop. But I disagree with pretty much the rest of your article.

First off, your analysis of Daemons is exactly the reason why "tiers" don't work. Daemons can easily be top tier if they get their preferred wave, don't scatter, and get lucky with their anti-tank rolls on the first 2 turns. If the dice go against them, well, they're fighting the table even more than they're fighting their opponent. Daemons as a whole are probably overcosted for what they typically do, but undercosted for what they can do. The potential for Daemons is so huge that they can destroy just about any other army in the first 2 turns. If you get lucky. If you're unlucky, you won't just lose, you'll lose horribly. Scattering your Fiends into impassible terrain and rolling a 1. Fateweaver running off after the first bolter that looks his way. Missing every Bolt of Tzeentch shot on turns 1 and 2. You lose.

This is why tiers don't work. Because they don't take into account the potential that an army has, and the effects of both luck and generalship on the army.

I would call Orks the top of tier 1 if they can bust your transports and get the charge off. If they can't get the charge off, they're more like tier 3. Once again, this almost always comes down to luck and generalship.

Leafblower IG is tier 1 if their first 2 shooting phases go well. If not, well...

Bottom line is this: tiers are only a stupidy simply way of representing what a codex will do "on average" if the player makes cautious moves that don't actively try to create victory. Tiers are simply what happens if you put models down and roll dice. If you use tactics, keep your victory conditions in mind, and take the right amount of calculated risks, well, the concept of tiers breaks down.

Leafblower IG did so well because people were playing 4th ed still. It still does well for the same reasons. That and the IG book is deep enough that the "official" build can be tweaked to the evolving game.

Just look at that sisters build, flying nun, 3 rhinos, daemonhunters allies, triple exorcists... Nearly the exact list I was running for 4th ed. Worked for 5th until people starting building their lists better.

Even back then that was a dated list. The guy who won with it probably had a bunch of practice with it, and it was probably really good against what people actually brought, but I'm betting not good against what people could have brought.

I'm shocked that yermom ranked the DE codex @ tier 3. You didn't really explain that one in your post, could you elaborate? Schadenfreude put forth an excellent point that if they have the initiative stolen from them, they have a hard/impossible time recovering. I don't think that is enough to make them tier 3.

Why did you rank them so low yermom?

notabot187 wrote:Leafblower IG did so well because people were playing 4th ed still. It still does well for the same reasons. That and the IG book is deep enough that the "official" build can be tweaked to the evolving game.

Just look at that sisters build, flying nun, 3 rhinos, daemonhunters allies, triple exorcists... Nearly the exact list I was running for 4th ed. Worked for 5th until people starting building their lists better.

Even back then that was a dated list. The guy who won with it probably had a bunch of practice with it, and it was probably really good against what people actually brought, but I'm betting not good against what people could have brought.

Thanks for the compliment since it was my sisters list. : )

In that event I played against...

Rd 1) codex marines, Bob from Battle for salvation. He had a mixed marine list (i think?!)
Rd 2) I can't remember :(
Rd 3) Greg Sabino's Raven guard, Marine with shrike/landraider termies
Rd 4) Justin Cook's Big Bugs
Rd 5) a 5th ed Vulcan list.

As far as I am concerned you nailed it on the head. I am VERY good with this list and the reason I won was the fact I played 2-3 times a week with it vs very good opponents. I no longer play that much... and the list suffers greatly from being out shot. I can still beat leaf blower lists by out playing the player running the IG... but thats a very tight game

The change I think yermom is talking about goes beyond the teiring of lists which kinda cheapens the meaning, but rather that a shooting list used to be able to put out about 12-17 shots at str 6 or higher a few years ago.

NOW... 17 is a low number that most armies can match.

Competitive lists are putting out 22+ heavy shots if they are trying to win in the shooting phase. A typical Leaf blower will have 8 str 7 shots, 4 lascannon shots, 9 twinlinked lascannon shots, manticore shots, 15 multilaser shots and then a bunch of plasma and meltas after that.

Shooty marines will have 6 lascannon shots, 18 autocannon shots, and 2-10 missile launcher shots on top of that in addition to cheap meltaguns.

Can assault based armies be made to weather that storm of fire over the course of 2 turns to reach the opponent? Yes, but a significant portion of your points are put into transports now.

So a significant portion of shots coming out of these armies are str 6-8. Does this mean people will start pushing for more armor 13 and 14? meaning that vs IG they only have to worry about the vendettas and the slow melta squads? Can a list with out outflankers compete anymore?

The shift from this point I think will be towards limiting the effectiveness of str 6 and 7 shots coming from the opponent as opposed to putting out more shots. Guard will have more Russ's, Marines more raiders and 2+ saves... Should be interesting to find out.

Evidence for my theory shows up now as the resurection of MSU... MSU means any loses from shooting are minimized.

MSU units also means you can fire at more targets, in case you have good round of shooting. This allows squads to do a good job picking off leftovers from effectively destroyed units (you know, all the good parts shot out, 1-2 guys standing their hoping to get ignored so they might pull of a surprise score)

Big units with all the guns in one place means you have more wasted firepower if you shoot well. You also don't really want to spend your entire units turn picking off 1 lone guy or a weaponless transport (you know, that could come back around for a last turn tank shock)

Agreed.

The balancing factor for MSU however is Kill points.

5th edition is about controled decisivness. You need to completely kill a target without wasting firepower or turns.

Ailaros- Half the people in this thread stated that they disagreed with me. That's cool, it happens. Maybe I'm wrong, who knows. Point is, no one attacked me personally, I don't see why you had to.

Schadenfreude- Very good analysis. You put into words what I left to be assumed, which is always good, and I'm very appreciative. Only thing I have an issue with in your ranking system (which admitedly is better than mine) is that by your definition of tier one, there is no tier one. Every army has a hard counter, be it null zone, ork hords, whatever. Every possible army has a counter. Other than that very good. I might have to adopt your ranking system to update the validity of my opinion.

J Grand- I like you

Mannahanin- Thanks for stepping up and defending me man, it means a lot. Anyway you don't have to agree with all the conclusions I've come up with, but I'd like to see a nice counter arguement somewhere.

Powerguy- I have to disagree about the 2 tier thing. If a variable is impossible to account for (player skill), then you need to makke it a constant to make up for its unpredictability. If given even player skill, and average dice rolls (another factor which you can not factor in) then th better list will always win. If the better list wins, then we should take the best list each codex can put out, as nothing else matters (all in theory of course) and see which of thses bests list is the best. From there we can rank each list. And, by claiming each army is only as strong as its most powerful list we have ranked every army in 40k.

Gavo- I think the real winner of the day is going to be null zone marines. Both DA and BT lack good psychic defence (DA libbys are ld 9) so it will really ruin those armies.

Shaelyr- If my army mishaps and blows itself up and fails to hit with everything every turn and I never make a save I wil lose. It's just as true for demons as space wolves or guard. If the whole mechanised company immobilizes itself on some rocks then proceeds to miss every turn with everything it will lose. In that respect no army is better than another. So are you telling me that blood angels is equally as competitive as necrons? Luck and play as you've said are impossible to account for. So to mitigate this by making them constants. As far as theoryhammer goes (which is this entire discussion) dice whould be average player skill should be even. It is the only way to ever reach any conclusions about this game.

notabot187- That sister list is one of a good friend of mine. Frgsnwntr on here. He and I play regularily and have a 50 50 record against each other. The sister list did so well because it was a strong list for the meta game at that time. Just as guard was a strong list a year ago. The sisters army is still not bad but can't compete with the real competitors, just as guard is still a great army, it just can't compete with the new best of the best.

Dracos- Dark eldar are too vulnerable as an army to be on the same tier as guard. And, if I put guard at tier 2 then by logic dark eldar would be tier 3. Granted, I got lazy at the end and probably made a 4 tier system, where dark eldar would still be tier 3.

Anyway dark eldar are tier 3 because the "good armies" (barring demons) have long range power to make dark eldar cry. If they go frist against a good army, they lose 1/6 of the time to seizing, as has already been covered (r more depending if the opponent reserves). If they go 2nd they are almost forced to reserve, in which case they lose 50% of the time due to coming on piecemeal and having no reserve modifiers. So in theory dark eldar lose 58% of theirgames against top tier armies. That's not good... I know that's a very limited way of looking at things, but honestly there is no real other way to put it. They are too unbalanced in the fact that have next to n survivability to really compete.

schadenfreude wrote:There are 2 ways you can tier armies.

Ranking by the greatest number of competitive builds per codex: This method is seriously flawed for tournament play because some army books only have 1 top tier codex. DA for example only have 1 high end competitive build=deathwing. By the logic of method #1 DA are a 3rd tier army like CSM which only have 1 competitive build. Space wolves would be a tier 2 army because they really only have 2 competitive builds Loganwing & TWC. The logic behind placing army books into tiers is way is deeply flawed when talking about tournament play, but it's ok if you want to advise someone on a good army to start at the FLGS

Great post. Very insightful.

notabot187 wrote:

yermom wrote:I posted something up on my blog about what I think is happening to our beloved game, under these new changes. http://thebrownpaintbrush.blogspot.com/

Let me know you thoughts and such on this topic.

Disagree on the tiers. Daemons are not that good. They didn't get any better with DA and BT getting a bump up. IMHO all SM chapters are pretty on par with each other. Some armies have less quantity of viable lists (like DA, since they rely on special characters quite a bit), but for the most part they are all about equal now.

My rankings:

Tier 1: SM (all chapters) guard, DE.
tier 2: tau, sisters, orks, nids, eldar
tier 3: chaos (both) daemon hunters, necrons

Tier 1 are armies that have multiple competitive builds.
Tier 2 are armies that have few competitive builds (tau, eldar, and sisters), or have many competitive builds but are slightly underpowered (nids and orks)
tier 3 are armies that are deeply flawed, mostly due to lack of options, but also the fact that the "good" options are too few or aren't actually good. Daemons because they lose to random chance.

Wait, did you just rank Tau above CSM? CSM actually works, they definitely are a T2 army.

I might be a bit harsh on chaos marines, though I still rate tau higher.

Chaos marines may have more builds than tau, but most of those builds are pretty awful. They have quite a bit of similarity to regular marines, but more expensive and fewer good options. Probably should be tier 2 under my system anyways, since you can make them work regardless.

I'd love to see people tier army archetypes, not codexes.

SW aren't Tier1 or Tier3. SW is a codex. That codex can make a craptacular list of bloodclaws and swiftclaws, or it can make a head-stomping TWC+Longfangs monstrosity.

TWC might be tier1. Bloodclaw rush is probably tier3, though we'll never know until someone runs it.


My understanding of the whole tier concept is that it originates from metagame discussions of M:tG. But they're not saying Red is tier 1 and Blue is Tier 2, they refer to specific archetypes.

Isn't it time that we look a little deeper than what book an armylist comes from when we evaluate what's actually going on in our metagame?

I don't think its worthwhile putting armies into tiers. Unless you want to get more complex at point limits. Guard perform best at higher limits as do Necrons. The more points, the more dangerous they become when compared to other armies. It's also got everything to do with the commander. I've seen a few tournamant lists and played against a few. The UK ones tend to be all-comer lists but i've found it only takes one person to decide they're going a different way to turn everything upside down. Going all infantry for example. You make a chunk of the opponents anti-tank guns near useless and with guard, get more infantry based heavy weapons in return for scrapping the tanks. That can throw a battle in your favour quite easily and has worked for me in the past in friendly gaming but with tourny style lists.

The main reason I avoid tier systems for the armies is because while some of the 'tier 1' armies I can take on without much problem, I can still struggle with 'tier 3' ones like Necrons. I know my way around them but my opponent knows his army better than I do. My Cousin is a serious Necron player and even though I know what I need to aim at, avoid lith's ect it can still be a hard fight.

Instead of army tiers I tend to sum up an army by the point limit and therefore what the enemy will probably take (infantry and transports mainly at smaller limits and heavy tanks or elites at higher limits). The opposing commander. What do I know about them? Do they have a prefered list or play style? Have they shown to be competant at beating my army in the past or with other players? Lastly I look at the game during deployment. Where are the choke points on the board? Killzones? Fall back points? Spots for ambushing? Routes I can travel in cover? Where should I place this unit? Will this unit make the use of it's range there? Does this position give me the best LOS?

Summing up I don't feel you can rank an opponant by their army alone. I know you'll say you don't and it's just a generalisation but still the tier system doesn't work that well since a good player can overcome weaknesses and flaws in their list. They've been playing it a while to learn and make adjustments after-all.

yermom wrote:
As far as deep striking issues, you can mitigate that by spreading out your units more and deploying further from the enemy, using unit choices to mitigate the disadvantage such as taking more slaneesh to compensate for the distance gap. If the dice gods go against you the dice gods go against you, there's nothing you can do, but demons built properly are not more vulnerable than other armies.

Yes actually they are, more then other armies. The simple fact that you have to roll waves, then roll for deepstrike constantly means your alreayd more vulnerable.

You can have great units, and great deployment and the proper waves, but your still vulnverable to the dice more then any other army. Thats just a fact of life. Bad rolls on DS are still bad rolls.

Yes actually they are, more then other armies. The simple fact that you have to roll waves, then roll for deepstrike constantly means your alreayd more vulnerable.

You can have great units, and great deployment and the proper waves, but your still vulnverable to the dice more then any other army. Thats just a fact of life. Bad rolls on DS are still bad rolls.

I still disagree. You can easily balance your waves. My 1500 point Daemons list has 10 kill points. I have 4 Bolt of Tzeentch carriers and put 2 in each wave. The only difference is whether I want 2 Fiends and 1 Daemonettes or 2 Daemonettes and 1 Fiends. This weakness is mitigated by balanced waves and solid list building.

As for deepstriking, it isn't as risky as its made out to be. My army is Slannesh and Tzeentch so neither needs to be incredibly close. Striking into area terrain is also something I do frequently. Sure, you CAN take some wounds, but they are unlikely and you get an invulnerable save against them. I'd say the tradeoff is worth the cover.

Daemons can be vulnerable to bad rolling but from all I've seen so is every army. Bad rolling against tanks will usually destroy any army in 5th edition. That's the name of the game. Daemons do have less ranged anti tank, but really all I NEED to be able to do is pop light transports. I don't particularly fear the tri lascannon predators and exorcists of the world. Overall, yes Daemons are hard to play, maybe the hardest. That doesn't mean the LUCK is the deciding factor in whether or not they are viable.