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Well then I won't feel bad bringing a Stompa in every list!

What about Ork flyers? They have pretty badass models now, would any of them offset the points sink of the Stompa? What about an all-grot army? Could just do a few blobs of Grots and Kanz... For my HQ I could just stack a few Grots on top of each other to make a 'real Ork'. Wasn't there some sort of Grot Rebellion or something back in the day?

The biggest weakness of the Stompa is BS2. Back in 3rd the designers decided to make the Orkz green Tyranids by reducing BS and increasing WS & A. The big walker is loaded with guns which can´t hit a barn´s door. It is such a pity. How could you solve the problem? Reversing the change perpetrated in 3rd is impossible. Because of this you need either a ridiculous amount of shots per Ork gun or a reasonable point cost attached to each weapon. As long as these flaws exist, giving the Ork player some slack would be the best approach to mitigate the problem.

 darkcloak wrote:
Well then I won't feel bad bringing a Stompa in every list!

What about Ork flyers? They have pretty badass models now, would any of them offset the points sink of the Stompa? What about an all-grot army? Could just do a few blobs of Grots and Kanz... For my HQ I could just stack a few Grots on top of each other to make a 'real Ork'. Wasn't there some sort of Grot Rebellion or something back in the day?

ork flyers aren't good, they aren't bad but they really don't do that much, most opponents will simply ignore them. As for the grot army and kanz and what not? Well basically the only thing competitive in our codex is Mek Gunz (specifically KMK) and boyz. Grotz can be useful as area denial units and screens but not much else....granted, the look on a SM players face when he loses a Terminator to Grots is just amazing.

I think a good way to improve the Stompa would be to give it ramshackle, and a price drop. No need to shove it down to 400, but even 600 would at least put it as a contender against the Lord of Skulls.

 vaklor4 wrote:
I think a good way to improve the Stompa would be to give it ramshackle, and a price drop. No need to shove it down to 400, but even 600 would at least put it as a contender against the Lord of Skulls.

At 600pts it needs a built in 5++ and Ramshackle otherwise its still crap. And by adding that many layers it slows the game down. Or, you could give it a 4+ at 600 and increase its BS to 4+ and I would call that about right.

 vaklor4 wrote:
I think a good way to improve the Stompa would be to give it ramshackle, and a price drop. No need to shove it down to 400, but even 600 would at least put it as a contender against the Lord of Skulls.

The lord of skulls is a different weight class than the stompa.

Stompa is more like a bane blade, knight, Magnus or Mortarion, not like a lord of skulls.

40 Wounds sounds like a lot, until you look at the degradation chart - with less than 20 wounds left a stompa is no longer able to kill a unit of guardsmen in combat and moves at the speed of a space marine. It's worth nothing at that point.

the entire ork walker range needs points reductions by about half.

im of the mind that ork stuff doesn't need to be more tough or stronger, just more cheaper. an ork force should field more models then your opponent even if you do a dreddmob.

maybe a t half price and with some stratagems that can buff them you can have a competitive ork walker force.

also pretty much all ork weapons need at least a drop to 2/3rd pts if not another half drop.

you do all that and maybe orks get some victories, they might not win all the tournaments, but at at least players in local game groups wont feel like squigs for bringing it.

leopard wrote:
GW need to decide what the stompa is meant to be, its currently pointed like a small gargant/titan, but has stats that pre-date the knights with the same "role"

either make it a knight equiv, points, stats and equipment to match (likely slower, but tougher, better at close range, worse at long), likely with a KFF at least as an option

or make it into a true titan class, somewhere below a warhound in terms of effectiveness

I mostly agree with this. I think that in terms of performance a Stompa is closer to a Knight, but it has a points cost more in line with a real titan. I don't think it's bad to have something in between a knight Titan and a real titan, but the Stompa's points and abilities need to match up.

I'm optimistic that GW will improve the Stompa in the new codex. I don't know if it will be competitive in tournaments, but I would guess that it will at least be okay for normal games.

One thing I'm slightly less optimistic about is how viable the Stompa will be in Apocalypse games. The way they've implemented Macro weapons really hurts the Stompa. A 5++ from a KFF isn't very good protection against them, and it has no weapons of its own that perform on anything near that level. If they drop the points considerably on the Stompa to make it more in-line with a Knight or Baneblade that will make the sting of it being one-hitted by Warhounds a lot less painful.

 Jidmah wrote:

 vaklor4 wrote:
I think a good way to improve the Stompa would be to give it ramshackle, and a price drop. No need to shove it down to 400, but even 600 would at least put it as a contender against the Lord of Skulls.

The lord of skulls is a different weight class than the stompa.

Stompa is more like a bane blade, knight, Magnus or Mortarion, not like a lord of skulls.

40 Wounds sounds like a lot, until you look at the degradation chart - with less than 20 wounds left a stompa is no longer able to kill a unit of guardsmen in combat and moves at the speed of a space marine. It's worth nothing at that point.

Good point there. Perhaps a special ramshackle might be better? Instead of just a 6 it could roll on a 4, which would make it FAR harder to kill in one big burst.

I really wouldn't mind it dying at fast as it does if damage output and points would match up. My Mortarion sometime dies turn 1 as well, but he carves his way through an entire army if unchecked - my stompa does not and costs more than twice the points.

This might be a silly idea, but it might be fun to have a rule that if the Stompa is destroyed but does not explode it stays on the battlefield and every turn it gets a chance to be reactivated as the ork crew inside makes frantic repairs.

If a single model is going to take up half the points in the army I think it would be good if it was very difficult to remove from the table. As things are right now such an ability definitely wouldn't be broken because the Stompa is pretty terrible at 19 wounds and less.