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Here is my issue and I am wondering if I am the only one. I have a friend that plays both the bugs and Daemons neither army are all that bad alone but when he gives the Great Unclean one or the Swarmlord Biomancy they are just wrong. He plays Great daemon of Nurgle as a level 3 psyker and Swarmlord gets 4 rolls on the chart. This has pretty much made sure that his monsterous creatures are just stupid hard to kill as he gets the IRON ARM power more often than not. The Great Daemon of Nurgle will get up to S9 T10, while swarm lord can get up to S9 T9. Now I know what you are going to say it's a random roll and he wont get it every game but he does well 8 out of 10 games with 3 to 4 rolls he can almost bank on it. Some times he will pull off Iron arm and Endurance so it is a super monsterous creature that feels no pain. he has had games were papa Nurgle has taken the charge of Thunder hammer Termies and just laughed at them.

I am just wondering am I alone in this problem or is this a common issue. Personally Biomancies IRON ARM power needs a Nerf bat or needs to cost more power points or something. I would believe +1S &+1T with eternal warrior would have been MORE than enough.

So...in short...you lost to something so nerf it?

 curran12 wrote:
So...in short...you lost to something so nerf it?

so, basically, you've become jaded to this sort of thread.

couldn't you make the more mature response and say that you just need to figure out how to beat it instead of wondering why using the same tactics doesn't work? this thread has poped up a few times already, I haven't read them, tell this guy what he needs to do because I've never had to worry about this personally.

Use poison. Swarmy is slow, too, so avoid him.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Use poison. Swarmy is slow, too, so avoid him.

Poison? so snipers basically. Avoid him? the Space Marines have a job to do and having a big bubble of "avoid" would probably make you end up losing the game if he's herding you around. but yeah, avoid until you can deal with it, like when he fails a psychic test or something. but what would I know?

see now there is a good reason to take sniper scouts in number! Not to mention the fact the models look cool too!

If you can't handle a MC with iron arm, that means that you couldn't seriously handle MCs without iron arm in the first place. If you have enough melta and lascannons and the like in your list, iron arm should just be a nuisance, rather than a game changer.

I play Orks so no poison and no snipers. The terminators was anouther guy who lost to him. But was my best example of brute power if these things. Sorry I angered some with my comment on nerfing the power. The main goal of this post was to get ideas and see if it was just me having this issue.

Orks do have poison. Grot runtherders with Grot-prods


As orks, sheer firepower is pretty much the only way, barring allies. We're currently the oldest codex, and were not designed to take out T10 MCs because none existed when the codex was written

Lootas can still ruin a MC's day, as can Rokkits and Power Klaws.

Biomancy isn't an auto-on either. He has to roll every turn for it, risking Perils. The effect is somewhat random also.

Orks lack a lot of the tools for taking out high toughness MCs and AV 14 that other armies take for granted, but enough bullets will still make a dent.

Another potential solution would be sternguard in a transport of some kind, likely a drop pod, and blast the heck out of the big nasty with hellfire rounds. The poison 2+ should hopefully put at least a dent in said creature, especially from a full squad in double-tap range. Of course, this unit will be a high priority for your opponent, so it may not be the most reliable answer, and we still have to see what the new dex will do to sternguard. All in all, try sternguard, but take this with a bit of salt.

Sorry, just saw your comment on being an ork player, I don't know the dex, so I can't help in that regard :/

Check your friend's dice. With a ML3 psyker he should only get IA 50% of the time. The swarmy will get it 66% of the time. After that the two critter diverge on how to handle them.

The swarmy will start on the board and while semi slow can run so he has at least infantry speed levels. He can still be effectively ignored if you bothered to mechanize or DP your troops to where they are needed.

The GUO has two delivery methods. You can start him on the board in which case he is SnP. He doesn't get to run so you can very effectively out maneuver him with ease. The second way is for the GUO to DS in. If this is done he will not be able to cast any blessings when he comes in. This means you get a turn with no buffs to try killing him. If you use your movement and deployment right you can either keep him from DS anywhere that will affect the game or kill him when he comes on.

The first SM answer to anything should always be combi sternguard DP in next to it. These guys will chew through MCs with their poison rounds or melta or plasma depending on what you took and what you need. Some snipers or mass lascannons will help considerably as well.

Alternatively if you have some IG allies you can use them as a tarpit with a SM character to keep them from getting run over. This is also an effective board control element.

With the new book grav weapons on centurions or bikes are looking like a very decent MC killer. How would you like to wound a 2+ Sv MC on a 2, shoot 5 shots, and ignore the armour save. While your at it you can reduce it to Init 1 so you get all your krak grenade/melta bomb hit in before the MC can kill people.

Edit: Thought you were SM. Orks get fearless packs of boyz and more fearless packs of boyz. If you have thrown boyz at it and it is still alive you haven't sent in enough boyz.

 Ascalam wrote:
Orks do have poison. Grot runtherders with Grot-prods

and Zogwort, who can do more than poison his extremely high toughness enemies.

Hit em with a def rolla. While he will probably immediately kill your vehicle, it will be funny as hell. Isnt that the point of orks anyways? =P

 Lotet wrote:

 Ascalam wrote:
Orks do have poison. Grot runtherders with Grot-prods

and Zogwort, who can do more than poison his extremely high toughness enemies.

Only if they are ICs. His poison is nice though.

ansacs wrote:Check your friend's dice. With a ML3 psyker he should only get IA 50% of the time.

Except you get to reroll powers you already got. That means with three tries you get iron arm 61% of the time, and the swarm lord should get it 95% of the time. That said, they're still not guaranteed to get it.

Anyways, I do agree that the worst MCs tend to have delivery problems, and that there are tabletop solutions. If the OP wants list solutions, I'd say go tankbustas in a 4x rokkit battlewagon. Rokkits are pretty much the ork answer to everything hot in the meta right now, only having 50% less accuracy against fliers, and having big, ork fistfuls of S8 to throw at high-toughness targets. Best of all, if you can nab an MC in close combat, you get to go to town with tank hammers or meltabombs. Either way, you're doing some damage.

Orkhead wrote:
I play Orks...

So throw a unit of 30 against the MC and tank the MC, it kills one unit in 4 or 5 rounds of combat (So 2 to 2.5 game turns) and deal with his other things whist the MC is locked in combat.

Or lots of S4 shots!

S4 can't hurt T8, which is plenty achievable with iron arm.

 Ailaros wrote:

ansacs wrote:Check your friend's dice. With a ML3 psyker he should only get IA 50% of the time.

Except you get to reroll powers you already got. That means with three tries you get iron arm 61% of the time, and the swarm lord should get it 95% of the time. That said, they're still not guaranteed to get it.

Except that it is 1-(5/6*4/5*3/4) = 0.5, you only reroll powers you already got. If you have to reroll your remaining power generation attempt it is always (5-n)/(6-n) chance to get any single result of the remaining powers no matter if you reroll a thousand times or none. This is assuming you don't take a primaris if you do then it worsens the result.

Oh, it's a difference in the methodology. The chance to get it is 1/6+1/5+1/4, which comes out to 37/60ths, or .616 in the world of standard deviation.

Put another way, the most expected result is that it should get iron arm about two in three games, not one in two.

I'm sure you'll get TONS of new toys when the new codex drops, but until then Lootas and things with Rokkits are probably best for now.

The alternative is to, as DeathReaper said, throw a huge mob at it and just tarpit the sucker for as long as possible. No, it's not ideal, but if you sacrifice one unit to slow down his MC HQ, it could be worth it, since he'll lose any force multiplication he might have from it.

Allies with some sort of poison could help. SM aren't exactly ideal, but if you can manage to get Sternguard into your list, their hellfire rounds wound on 2+ and will force enough saves that he should lose a wound or two.

In addition, GW might just do what you're hoping and nerf the Swarmlord when Tyranids drops in a bit. Maybe they won't but it's possible he won't get so many powers so easily.

Nurgle buddy is here to stay though.

 Ailaros wrote:
Oh, it's a difference in the methodology. The chance to get it is 1/6+1/5+1/4, which comes out to 37/60ths, or .616 in the world of standard deviation.

Put another way, the most expected result is that it should get iron arm about two in three games, not one in two.

No. That's not a relevant probability at all. I can't even work out what that's the probability of getting. The probability of getting Iron Arm specifically is 1 - (probability of not getting Iron Arm), or as stated above 1 - (5/6 * 4/5 * 3/4) = 1 - (60 / 120) = 1 - 1/2 = 1/2.

A 50% chance that you get Iron Arm in a given game, assuming you don't swap out for the primaris at any point and roll 3 powers on the table. For a ML 4 model the probability is 1 - (1/2 *2/3) = 1 - (2/6) = 1 - 1/3 = 2/3. So 66.6666666~% for a ML4 Psyker.

 Ailaros wrote:
Oh, it's a difference in the methodology. The chance to get it is 1/6+1/5+1/4, which comes out to 37/60ths, or .616 in the world of standard deviation.

Put another way, the most expected result is that it should get iron arm about two in three games, not one in two.

That is not how probability works. According to your method a ML5 psyker has a 145% chance to get any single power... 1/6+1/5+1/4+1/3+1/2=1.45
A ML 4 (which there are several of in the game) would according to your method have a 95% chance to get any single power... 1/6+1/5+1/4+1/3=0.95
Do you see how this doesn't work? I wish it worked like that as eldrad would always get Fortune.

Ninja'd

Chill man, MCs are supposed to be brute powerhouses. 20 foot tall legendary killing machines are bound to be a tad brutal . . .

Easy was to deal with either Nurgle or SL as Orks.
Tarpit.
Seriously, 20-30 Orks will tie up a SL for an entire game. You will neutralize much more points than the cost of the tarpitting unit. You don't have to kill a unit to defeat it

You could also ally in some DE and watch him sob...

DE are mediocre at best as a whole, but when it comes to putting down high toughness MC they are brutal.

As said, it's a difference in methodology. If you got 5 chances to roll iron arm, you would likely roll it 1.5 times, or, to put it another way, that the most expected result is a tie between successfully rolling biomancy once, and rolling it twice. Not that that second result would mean anything in this particular case.

Anyways, it's a difference between percentage and standard deviation, both of which are a way of doing statistics. The latter tends to be a better way of calculating things in 40k, as "How many 1's will you roll on the biomancy chart?" tends to be a more useful question than "What is the chance that you will roll a 1 on the biomancy chart?"

This tends to be true because of the way percentages skew results due to the limit they have (namely, 1). For an unrelated example, take a bunch of lascannons shooting at a vehicle. With percentages, you're stuck asking the question "what's the chance of causing a vehicle destroyed result?" which can climb up into the 90th percentile with ease, but you're missing the fact that you're not, in practice, limited to a single vehicle destroyed result. You can, in fact, get several, or now glance a vehicle to death as well. Standard deviation irons out all the complex system problems that percentages require calculus to unravel to get a meaningful answer.

 60mm wrote:
You don't have to kill a unit to defeat it

^This guy wins the thread.

 Ailaros wrote:
As said, it's a difference in methodology. If you got 5 chances to roll iron arm, you would likely roll it 1.5 times, or, to put it another way, that the most expected result is a tie between successfully rolling biomancy once, and rolling it twice. Not that that second result would mean anything in this particular case.

Anyways, it's a difference between percentage and standard deviation, both of which are a way of doing statistics. The latter tends to be a better way of calculating things in 40k, as "How many 1's will you roll on the biomancy chart?" tends to be a more useful question than "What is the chance that you will roll a 1 on the biomancy chart?"

This tends to be true because of the way percentages skew results due to the limit they have (namely, 1). For an unrelated example, take a bunch of lascannons shooting at a vehicle. With percentages, you're stuck asking the question "what's the chance of causing a vehicle destroyed result?" which can climb up into the 90th percentile with ease, but you're missing the fact that you're not, in practice, limited to a single vehicle destroyed result. You can, in fact, get several, or now glance a vehicle to death as well. Standard deviation irons out all the complex system problems that percentages require calculus to unravel to get a meaningful answer.

Except this doesn't address the fact your wrong and getting 5 out of 6 results on a table can never give you above a 100% chance to get something. Your trying to give reasoning for a result that cannot exist. If you don't believe it you can try it. According to you if you, you will always roll any one of six powers on five rolls every time. Just try it.

BTW if statistics worked like you think it does then casinos would always loose money as people could have a >100% of winning...you can NEVER reach 100% chance to do anything.

The probability of each roll after the first one is equal to probability of a successful roll time the probability of all previous rolls failing. If you already have iron arm, you must reroll the result and thus can't get it again.

Chance to get one specific power out of six on the first roll:
1/6 = .1666
Second roll:
5/6 * 1/5 = .1666
Third roll:
(5/6*4/5) * 1/4 = .1666
Fourth roll
(5/6*4/5*3/4) * 1/3 = .1666

So a mastery level 3 psyker has a 50% chance of rolling any given power, a mastery 4 psyker has a 66% chance, a hypothetical lvl 6 psyker has a 100% chance to roll any given power, which shouldn't be much of a surprise. So while you're right Ailaros, you still did a math error (ignoring the possibility of not being able to roll iron arm if you already got it, since you have to reroll it), which results in your result differing from ansacs'. If you do a standard deviation calculation for a simple problem (getting exactly one result exactly once) you should get the same value as someone just calculating averages.

 Ailaros wrote:
As said, it's a difference in methodology.

2+2=5 is just a difference in methodology too

Why not just ally space wolfs in to your ork army, +4 rune stuff to cancle his powers and jaws ignores his T , but hurts his GUOs low I.