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Ok so we do not have a codex for Orks yet but looking at what has been done and knowing the core of the army it is not hard to make some speculative guesses at what could be accomplished. We have some rumor and we have some facts from White Dwarf. As the title states Are Orks, the Kings of Snap Fire?

Some Facts

1. Orks, have the lowest BS in the game. By fluff this Orks love to rush head long into battle to get close and feel the wet crunch with their choppa.

2. Orks are an assault army, By fluff see the above.

3. Snap Fire reduces all to hits to a roll of 6 on a d6.

4. if a vehicle moves more than 12 inch that is non fast it is doomed to snap fire.

5. Walking model with heavy weapon moves doomed to snap fire

Now were this is a hindrance to most armies forcing players make important choices about what to move and how far. This has no bearing on the Mighty Ork I mean they have a BS of 2. So on snap fire they go from 2 in 6 chance to 1 in 6 chance to hit with sluggas and the like. Now yes 2 in 6 is better but 20 boyz in the back of a open topped battle wagon hurling across the field with reckless abandon snap firing is still 20 shots or 12 shots if in a Trukk. But the point is only the Dark Eldar can come close to the number of shots off an open topped vehicle. But at BS 4 it seems unlikely the DE player will make that call unless they really need to.

Ok enough fancy talk lets get to the point with some mathHammer

1. 20 Boyz at BS 2 against Marines with Shoota's = 40 shots with a 2.2% chance of a wound

2. 20 Boyz at BS 2 against Marines with Slugga's = 20 shots with a 1.1% chance of a wound

3. 20 Boyz at BS 1 against Marines with Slugga's = 20 shots with a 0.56% chance of a wound

4. 10 Marines at BS 1 against Ork Boyz with Bolter = 10 shots with a 0.27% chance of a wound

So 20 Boyz at snap fire take a 50% blow to would when reduced to BS 1. But not as great of a blow when compared to SM.

So what does this all mean and what am I really trying to get at? Orks are assaulty beasts. If some of the rumors like (6+) FNP, Big Choppa's are real then the Mighty Ork will not have any reason to do anything else but move as fast as possible and get stuck in to hear that wet crunch. Snap Fire works in their favor not against them.

I have done my best to layout this though of mine out and would welcome feed back on the idea. I could just be late to the party but still felt it was worth sharing.

This is certainly an idea that has come up before, and it has other applications as well. For example, Lootas shooting a fliers only lose 1BS, for instance.

Since a lot of ork shooting is preliminary to charging, then in general you shouldn't worry about sacrificing shooting for better charges.

Malikjack wrote:
Ok so we do not have a codex for Orks yet but looking at what has been done and knowing the core of the army it is not hard to make some speculative guesses at what could be accomplished. We have some rumor and we have some facts from White Dwarf. As the title states Are Orks, the Kings of Snap Fire?

Some Facts

1. Orks, have the lowest BS in the game. By fluff this Orks love to rush head long into battle to get close and feel the wet crunch with their choppa.

2. Orks are an assault army, By fluff see the above.

You couldn't be more wrong.

Orks have never been an assult army and orks are very good shots. Go read deff skwadron see how excellent marksmen orks are.
The reason why space marines are bs 4 and orks bs 2 is because sm shoot to kill while orks shoot to shoot. Orks like big guns that make loud sounds and big explosions.
In the forums you can see two kinds of ork (boy) units shoota boyz and slugga boyz. Do those sound like cc units?

Everybody has the same bs when snap firing. The bs "loss" is pointless. Only fire rate matters. Other armies can shoot alot too.

I think you'll find your mathhammer is a bit off mate.

40 shots at BS2 is 13.33 hits, wounding a marine on 4's is 6.66 wounds, they're saving on 3's, giving 2.22 casualties.

That's 5.55% chance of a marine casualty (2.22/40)

10 marines firing at orks at BS 1 is 10 shots, 1.67 hits, wounding on 4's is .833 wounds and orks won't get an armour save, so .833 casualties.

That's an 8.33% chance of an ork casualty (0.833/10) (though the only time a squad of marines is likely to snap fire at orks is when they're overwatching, so double those numbers since they're in rapid fire range, the % remains the same obviously).

If you were just trying to let us know that orks get penalised less for snap firing, then yes, it's been that way since snap fire was introduced and will remain that way forever since the orks will almost always have a lower BS so the exchange will always be favourable to them. That's one of the reasons why -2 BS (to a minimum of 1) for snap fire was so strongly suggested so that models with BS4 or more would show that they had some basic concept of aiming compared to sparay and pray guys like orks. A simple 1-(1/BS) will give you a measure of how badly elite units get penalised on snap shots, though it isn't exactly true on BS6 and above models since they get rerolls and that skews the math a bit.

If you were just trying to let us know that orks were made for fightin', then yes, you are a bit late to the party.

Tesla is also good as snap fire as far as I know.

I have been taking advantage of Snap Fire with Orks for a while now. It roughly boils down to this:

1. Ork weapons are balanced around hitting 1/3 of the time.
2. Space Marine weapons are balanced around hitting 2/3 of the time
3. Space Marines thus pay more than Orks for a weapon of equal power, because it will hit twice as often.
4. On snap shots, Ork accuracy is reduced by 1/2 and SM accuracy is reduced by 3/4.
5. Thus, Orks are twice as good at snap shooting as SM.

Ever since 6th hit, my main Ork list has consisted of Shoota Boyz + Battlewagon + Deffrolla, plowing into things at maximum speed and pulling drive-bys on the survivors. It's hilarious and effective.

Yep, orks are not bad at snapfiring. The problem, we've currently got an old codex that's not great at shooting on the whole when you consider range, mobility and durability of your troops compared to other current codexes.

(Not bad) * (Not great) = Bad

Yep, you could probably kill 4 times more than a space marine while snap-shooting...Yay! You've killed 1 more marine with your 20 snapshoting boyz. Still doesn't matter much. Yay! You can shoot down flyers with snapshooting lootas without loosing too much effectiveness! You still need 18 shots to strip 1 HP from an av12 flyer. And chances of 1-shooting them are 3 times lower than before.