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the_scotsman wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
Orks: Very low bar. Current meta builds for orks are the easiest competitive orks have been in an incredibly long time. They tend to rely on swarming objectives, longrange stationary firepower that really only matters where you deploy. The only technical aspect is the placement and micro of your da jump blob for maximum interference and distraction while you rack up mission points, and timing of your critical stratagems, which for orks are kind of a game of chicken. How low can the boyz blob go before you pop strats to save them and endless green tide them? When do you pull the trigger on Grot Shields? When are you safe to burn CP fishing for a good SUS result?

I wonder where this idea comes from, considering that only long-term players seem to do really well with orks. Even a guy like Nick Nanavati failed to produce decent results with them (not for the lack of trying), while topping tournaments with pretty much everything else.

In my experience, the opposite is much more true. Orks punish mistakes heavily, picking up some inefficient units or just not using efficient units in an optimal way, minor movement errors, using CP at the wrong time, being half an inch short for an arrest or a single mistake in target priority will outright cost you the game. Everything in the current meta builds (which vary wildly between players) is about understanding every single unit you brought and having them perform to their maximum. Orks have lots of potential, but it's by no means easy to unlock.

New ork players tend to lose a lot of games before they start winning, some never get to that point. People running the same lists as me, or even lists I build for them have failed with them because they didn't use it to their full potential.
Even experienced people moving from imperium or chaos to orks fail to pilot them properly, simply because they are not used to playing an army where your opponent gets to pick what remove from your army at will, with grot shield being the only way to influence that.
And before it comes up: KFF and pain boyz don't protect units, they make killing them less efficient, they still die one way or another. Armor and thus cover doesn't do jack and no one can hide 60+ boyz out of LoS and still get a use out of them.

In comparison, playing Death Guard is a joke. I went undefeated with them for a dozen games after starting them, and I didn't know what the feth I was doing. All your stuff just sticks around forever, you still have anti-tank options to kill enemy vehicles by turn 4. That doesn't ever happen with orks.

The reason why orks are so much easier to play in this edition than before is because orks were terrible in 6th and 7th. You had to be an exceptional player to make them perform well even at casual levels.

I'm mostly referring to the current crop of mek gunz spam+Souped Up Shokka+1-2 blobs of jump boyz lists that have been cropping up. A lot of the local competitive players in my area (including Steve Pampreen) tend to regularly play Orks whenever they can get away with them, and they're all super sick of the current point and click gunline iteration of the competitive ork list.

mek gun spam is not even really hard to counter. the SSAG is swingy I have had matches where it removes a kinght and matches where i never get over a 5 for str and its useless. Also I am guessing your meta does not use heavy snipers because often my ssag unless positioned far back with a lot of wasted points on screens gets sniped away because he is made of tissue paper. I am not saying that orks are in a bad place, they are a upper middle tier codex in my opinion but compared to the power soup can bring to tournaments they are mostly played and placing due to counter meta lists more so than being an actual top of the pile codex. it is hard to design a list at 2k that can deal with knights, eldar flier spam, AND somehow handle 180 ork bouyz backed up by mek guns and a ssag. as orks are less prevalent more people in my experience lean toward strong vs eldar fliers and knights than prepare for orks

 Jidmah wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
Orks: Very low bar. Current meta builds for orks are the easiest competitive orks have been in an incredibly long time. They tend to rely on swarming objectives, longrange stationary firepower that really only matters where you deploy. The only technical aspect is the placement and micro of your da jump blob for maximum interference and distraction while you rack up mission points, and timing of your critical stratagems, which for orks are kind of a game of chicken. How low can the boyz blob go before you pop strats to save them and endless green tide them? When do you pull the trigger on Grot Shields? When are you safe to burn CP fishing for a good SUS result?

I wonder where this idea comes from, considering that only long-term players seem to do really well with orks. Even a guy like Nick Nanavati failed to produce decent results with them (not for the lack of trying), while topping tournaments with pretty much everything else.

In my experience, the opposite is much more true. Orks punish mistakes heavily, picking up some inefficient units or just not using efficient units in an optimal way, minor movement errors, using CP at the wrong time, being half an inch short for an arrest or a single mistake in target priority will outright cost you the game. Everything in the current meta builds (which vary wildly between players) is about understanding every single unit you brought and having them perform to their maximum. Orks have lots of potential, but it's by no means easy to unlock.

New ork players tend to lose a lot of games before they start winning, some never get to that point. People running the same lists as me, or even lists I build for them have failed with them because they didn't use it to their full potential.
Even experienced people moving from imperium or chaos to orks fail to pilot them properly, simply because they are not used to playing an army where your opponent gets to pick what remove from your army at will, with grot shield being the only way to influence that.
And before it comes up: KFF and pain boyz don't protect units, they make killing them less efficient, they still die one way or another. Armor and thus cover doesn't do jack and no one can hide 60+ boyz out of LoS and still get a use out of them.

In comparison, playing Death Guard is a joke. I went undefeated with them for a dozen games after starting them, and I didn't know what the feth I was doing. All your stuff just sticks around forever, you still have anti-tank options to kill enemy vehicles by turn 4. That doesn't ever happen with orks.

The reason why orks are so much easier to play in this edition than before is because orks were terrible in 6th and 7th. You had to be an exceptional player to make them perform well even at casual levels.

I just want to agree with this ^^ the easiest part about playing Orkz is probably building a list. Everything else is kinda hard, ESPECIALLY on a timer

the_scotsman wrote:
I'm mostly referring to the current crop of mek gunz spam+Souped Up Shokka+1-2 blobs of jump boyz lists that have been cropping up. A lot of the local competitive players in my area (including Steve Pampreen) tend to regularly play Orks whenever they can get away with them, and they're all super sick of the current point and click gunline iteration of the competitive ork list.

I'm sure that people are sick of getting their point&click gunlines torn apart by orks who are supposed to be target practice.

In any case, in most of his tournament lists Steven is usually running two units of mek guns, worth 192 points each. That's about as much spam as a marine player bringing two leviathans. Most top placing lists aren't even running that much. Mek guns are often replaced by lootas, dakka jets+wazbomm, tank bustas or flash gits, usually because of how much they cost. But people still do well and even win tournaments without them, so they are by no means mandatory.

You're also out of luck because you have one of the best ork players in your meta - Steven shows up in the top 4 of some tournament basically every other week, often beating other big names in the process. With maximum one or two other players running orks to a top 4 finish each week, this is quite a feat. Blaming it on the army being too easy to play is just refusing to acknowledge the skill level of your ork players.

Orks today play little different from how they have played in the past when they were competitive. Instead of smashas, in 5th orks were using kannons, buggies or koptas, pre-codex KMK were used before the codex nerfed them. Instead of tellyporting and jumping orks we had outflanking and/or fast units disturbing enemy lines. Without any defense you MUST rely on destroying and disturbing enemy offense in order to survive - which is exactly the reason why orks are hard to play.

 Nitro Zeus wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
Orks: Very low bar. Current meta builds for orks are the easiest competitive orks have been in an incredibly long time. They tend to rely on swarming objectives, longrange stationary firepower that really only matters where you deploy. The only technical aspect is the placement and micro of your da jump blob for maximum interference and distraction while you rack up mission points, and timing of your critical stratagems, which for orks are kind of a game of chicken. How low can the boyz blob go before you pop strats to save them and endless green tide them? When do you pull the trigger on Grot Shields? When are you safe to burn CP fishing for a good SUS result?

I wonder where this idea comes from, considering that only long-term players seem to do really well with orks. Even a guy like Nick Nanavati failed to produce decent results with them (not for the lack of trying), while topping tournaments with pretty much everything else.

In my experience, the opposite is much more true. Orks punish mistakes heavily, picking up some inefficient units or just not using efficient units in an optimal way, minor movement errors, using CP at the wrong time, being half an inch short for an arrest or a single mistake in target priority will outright cost you the game. Everything in the current meta builds (which vary wildly between players) is about understanding every single unit you brought and having them perform to their maximum. Orks have lots of potential, but it's by no means easy to unlock.

New ork players tend to lose a lot of games before they start winning, some never get to that point. People running the same lists as me, or even lists I build for them have failed with them because they didn't use it to their full potential.
Even experienced people moving from imperium or chaos to orks fail to pilot them properly, simply because they are not used to playing an army where your opponent gets to pick what remove from your army at will, with grot shield being the only way to influence that.
And before it comes up: KFF and pain boyz don't protect units, they make killing them less efficient, they still die one way or another. Armor and thus cover doesn't do jack and no one can hide 60+ boyz out of LoS and still get a use out of them.

In comparison, playing Death Guard is a joke. I went undefeated with them for a dozen games after starting them, and I didn't know what the feth I was doing. All your stuff just sticks around forever, you still have anti-tank options to kill enemy vehicles by turn 4. That doesn't ever happen with orks.

The reason why orks are so much easier to play in this edition than before is because orks were terrible in 6th and 7th. You had to be an exceptional player to make them perform well even at casual levels.

I just want to agree with this ^^ the easiest part about playing Orkz is probably building a list. Everything else is kinda hard, ESPECIALLY on a timer

Another +1, except I think Orks still need some skill to make a good list too. It's easy to throw together a bunch of boyz, but you need to stretch out to some other non-conventional options in order to start making them tourney-viable. A new player can get a bunch of boys and learn to do okay, but probably won't win tournies.

I also really like the idea of another list where you can talk about how much certain factions punish you for making mistakes. Generally, though, that's just a graph of movement and survivability. Knights and Custodes don't punish you as much, because you can make a mistake and sometimes luck your way through it, and therefore you don't realize it's your luck that brought you through it so you don't learn from the mistake. Orks can be very punishing, since your units that aren't arriving via Da Jump or Tellyportas move so slowly, but also die almost instantly when your opponent gets a good look at them. Dark Eldar can fix your mistakes quickly by bouncing back to wherever they're needed, but are pretty vulnerable. Likewise, Death Guard are tough as nails, even if generally less mobile, so can also absorb some mistakes.

 G00fySmiley wrote:
mek gun spam is not even really hard to counter. the SSAG is swingy I have had matches where it removes a kinght and matches where i never get over a 5 for str and its useless. Also I am guessing your meta does not use heavy snipers because often my ssag unless positioned far back with a lot of wasted points on screens gets sniped away because he is made of tissue paper.

Most snipers are 36" though and a vindicare has to kill the grot oiler first. You can usually outrange them.

I am not saying that orks are in a bad place, they are a upper middle tier codex in my opinion but compared to the power soup can bring to tournaments they are mostly played and placing due to counter meta lists more so than being an actual top of the pile codex. it is hard to design a list at 2k that can deal with knights, eldar flier spam, AND somehow handle 180 ork bouyz backed up by mek guns and a ssag. as orks are less prevalent more people in my experience lean toward strong vs eldar fliers and knights than prepare for orks

Orks are doing better at tournaments than GSC, so I'd say we are top tier. It's just that not anyone can hop from chaos soup to imperial soup to eldar soup to orks and expect to win games with them, since those people lack the experience to do so.

Orks are not my tournament army - my collection of them is way too old and speed freeks besides, my rating them low was just based on the opinion of the various competitive ork players where I'm at, which is that orks have never been easier and there are many more technical builds to play atm.

I usually play eldar soup in events when I do go. And I have never beaten any of the household names that play in the greater Boston area, so their opinion I pretty much just go with when it comes to their army.

 Yarium wrote:
A new player can get a bunch of boys and learn to do okay, but probably won't win tournies.

From what I observed, new players (or veterans with a pile of orks returning to 8th) struggle a lot, since many armies (most notable primaris) can easily down a unit of boyz per turn without even trying, and almost any unit of boyz is dead ofter their initial charge. So just putting three units of boyz into a battalion and running towards the enemy will leave you tabled by turn 3, as the only way to get around this is taking out anti-infantry with your guns while hiding your boyz in the back/the tellyporta, arresting models, fighting twice and drifting around your charge target to tag and switch off as much as possible. Not necessarily something people without a dozen of games of 8th under their belt are aware of.

Likewise, Death Guard are tough as nails, even if generally less mobile, so can also absorb some mistakes.

That's pretty accurate, actually. The best way to really feth up with Death Guard is if you move parts of your army to where they cannot impact the game for a turn or two. I rarely fell into that trap as my original strategy used to be "if I'm in the middle of the board, my bolters can reach everything"


Automatically Appended Next Post:

the_scotsman wrote:
Orks are not my tournament army - my collection of them is way too old and speed freeks besides, my rating them low was just based on the opinion of the various competitive ork players where I'm at, which is that orks have never been easier and there are many more technical builds to play atm.

I actually agree with that - but considering how hard Orks used to have it, that's not much of a surprise. The army still implodes on minor mistakes, which makes it really hard to run, especially if you have to win 6-8 games in a row.

The footslogger archetype from 5th is pretty much the same army as the current ork gunline, except you brought 45 lootas instead of kicking one unit into overdrive with CP
The only ork army that was really stupidly easy to play was the kan wall. A cat could play that army - just push everything forward, keep kanz inside the KFF, shoot all rokkits at vehicles, charge whenever possible. Auto-win pretty much every game.

 Yarium wrote:
Okay, I wrote a whole post about how you can't really do this, because 40k is a very skill based game, and most of the skills for 1 army apply to all armies. In my opinion, BCB is wrong, and that the game is very skilled.


But that doesn't answer your question.

So, instead, let me list for you a numerical scale on how easy it is to build a competitive list for each faction. 1 will be "omg, so hard!" and 10 will be "oops, my casual list wins tournaments". The main idea here is to ignore player skill. The best player in the game will lose with a terrible list against a good player with an insane list (even if they're just told what the stats of the weapon are and nothing else). NOTE, this doesn't mean these are the tourney-winning lists, just how easy it could be to make a list for a tourney with them.

Spoiler:

10's:
- Imperial Knights
- Chaos Knights

9's:
- Thousand Sons

8's:
- Craftworld Eldar
- Dark Eldar
- Ynnari

7's:
- Astra Militarum
- Adeptus Custodes
- Space Marines (codex-adherent)
- Chaos Daemons
- Chaos Space Marines
- Death Guard
- Orks

6's:
- Tyranids
- Genestealer Cult
- Blood Angels

5's:
- Deathwatch

4's:
- Grey Knights
- Harlequins
- Space Wolves

3's:
- Dark Angels

2's:
- Sisters of Battle

1's:
- Assassins

While technically you can make a list that has a majority faction assassins, I think it's really generous to identify them as a faction that's hard to play. They're an auxiliary that you take 85 points and 2CP of in your list that's a pretty easy add for an Imperial player.

Anyway my rankings [assuming all players are equal, because unlike what some angry people say, player skill does make the difference between victory and defeat] would be:
10:
Imperial Knights
Chaos Knights
It doesn't get much easier to play than Knights; though you'll really have to soup for CP to really hit your peak.

9:
Craftworld Eldar
Imperial Guard
IG and Eldar have the threats, have the answers, have the buffs, and have the CP. IG are especially good for souping because our troops are cheap, our good units aren't stratagem dependent, and our stratagems kind of suck, so all the CP you get for being Guard can go toward supporting another faction's CP hungry units [like Knights or BA].

8:
Adeptus Custodes
Death Guard
Thousand Sons
Codex 2.0 Space Marines
Fairly tough, fairly lethal, and fairly versatile. Will generally be very fault tolerant due to their inherent beefyness and inherent lethality

7:
Chaos Daemons
Orks
Tyranids
Tau
Your army is pretty solid at what it does, but it's got one big weakness that mitigating will form a major part of your strategy

6:
Genestealer Cults
Deathwatch
Blood Angels
You have one trick, an you do it well and count on it to win. Considering bringing in the soup for CP support to make your one trick go.

5:
Chaos Space Marines
Dark Eldar
Your army has a lot of moving parts. You should keep careful track of what you're doing and what you plan to do, but if you do you'll be rewarded when a plan comes together.

4:
Necrons
Space Wolves
Dark Angels
Your army isn't actually very complex, but it doesn't really have anything stand out to make it really go. Just a lot of average, mostly mediocre, and expensive stuff. You'll spend most of the time fighting an uphill battle against your own lack of efficiency, without anything to really make you stand out.

3:
Sisters of Battle
Harlequins
You're very limited on options, but some of those options are at least quite good. Consider souping heavily to bring the key capabilities you're missing.

2:
Grey Knights
You neither have a lot of options, nor are any of them good. Also, every successive FAQ is dead set on invalidating whatever your "thing" is, and you're worse at your specialties than the generalists are.

1:
Inquisition
Sisters of Silence
Assassins
Just because they can be a primary faction, doesn't mean they should. If you've somehow decided to make a full army out of a small pool of auxilia units that are generously an army on the best of days, and in some cases physically lack enough choices to make 2000 points, good luck.

Weak doesn’t equal high skill

The core problem is that you're asking the wrong question to the wrong population to get a clear answer that would make any kind of sense along the lines that you're after:

First up your population answering has no means of grading themselves let alone the armies they play. Some are going to be highly experienced players, some total newbs and some might not even have played ever or not in years. You'll have no real way to tell.

Furthermore there's no way to sift out who has played enough armies to actually know the various balances between them. Most people only play a handful or even one army and thus have a limited range of direct experiences. Whilst their experience of other armies is shaped not just by the stats in the book, but by the local players they play against.

Which is another key part. An average player at the national level might feel that they are very highly skilled because at the local level they win most of the games they play. This might make them think their army is easier to use; when in actuality its a hard army to use; but they are going up against less skilled players resulting in them under estimating the skill required.


Player skill, opponent skill, variety of play locations and opponents, armies played and experience are all big components that you've got no honest way to sift through.

For that reason what you're after isn't really easily possible, at least not in a simplistic grading system.



And we've not even touched on variations of objective or context of actual games VS maths theory on armies.


I think in the end the best you can get is a general idea of which armies are simpler to master at a basic level. Which require generally simpler combos or more practical ones or those which are generally easier to run VS those that might be more of a glass cannon. Almost everything else and any strict variation is going to be too varied in the pool of users to give you any real meaningful data to work with.



Now some might argue that you look at the major competitions and which armies win at those for an idea. However whilst it is true that many competitive events will weed out the stronger army combos to use; its also true that player skill will come into it. There will be some armies that appear to be super unpopular and are thus assumed weaker until they win a match. Meanwhile some gamers at the competitive level might well use armies which are not statistically the best, but they use them because its their army and that's what they own.



Also what's the objective reason you want to work out such a ranking? Are you aiming to build an army yourself and want to make a choice of easy vs hard or are you using it as one criteria etc.... Your overall intent might reveal that the question you are asking might not give the answer you are looking for.

 Overread wrote:

What this man said, 40kstats.com is where you'd want to look for more objective stats, but I think you'd need to reach out to the hosts at the 40kstats podcast and ask them how they'd use stats to answer your question OP. If we take out all the top finishing players from each faction you can rank them in the following order in terms of faction win%:

Impossible tier: Adeptus Titanicus.

Hard tier: SM, DA, SW, GK, GSC and Tyranids.

Easy tier: The rest.

Now is this actually the right way to rank which army is the hardest? Probably not, but are we talking about learning to not lose all the time or are we talking about learning to play the faction perfectly? DA seem pretty easy to learn and master relative to other factions, they're probably just bad. The top4 page is a great resource for competitive ITC lists.

40k stats unfortunately is a quite lacking source of info.
It only gathers data from non standard mission tournaments.
If you look at the source data, they have:

ITC, ETC, Nova, Non standard (Adepticon and a few others), NOVA (mostly ITC) and Warzone. A grand total of ZERO 40k canonic games have been registered in 2019 so... use it at your own risk.

Spoletta wrote:
40k stats unfortunately is a quite lacking source of info.
It only gathers data from non standard mission tournaments.
If you look at the source data, they have:

ITC, ETC, Nova, Non standard (Adepticon and a few others), NOVA (mostly ITC) and Warzone. A grand total of ZERO 40k canonic games have been registered in 2019 so... use it at your own risk.

This^ there is still a large amounts of players using the rule book missions. And those formats (ITC, ETC, etc..) are a completely different game and meta compare to GW missions.

Fw indexes, hard Tier.

Stats for 40k in general will always be an extremely flawed measure that should be taken with an extreme game of salt.

 vict0988 wrote:

 Overread wrote:

What this man said, 40kstats.com is where you'd want to look for more objective stats, but I think you'd need to reach out to the hosts at the 40kstats podcast and ask them how they'd use stats to answer your question OP. If we take out all the top finishing players from each faction you can rank them in the following order in terms of faction win%:

Impossible tier: Adeptus Titanicus.

Hard tier: SM, DA, SW, GK, GSC and Tyranids.

Easy tier: The rest.

Now is this actually the right way to rank which army is the hardest? Probably not, but are we talking about learning to not lose all the time or are we talking about learning to play the faction perfectly? DA seem pretty easy to learn and master relative to other factions, they're probably just bad. The top4 page is a great resource for competitive ITC lists.

I would say it is fair to say the old Space Marine codex is on the hard list. The new Space marine codex needs to be given time before it is called hard tier as well as more faction books coming out.

Not Online!!! wrote:
Fw indexes, hard Tier.

16 venoms with 16 5mans with 14 blasters out of corsairs isnt really all that hard, they are not that bad honestly, only against full mech does it do very bad. Extremely boring tho. Sure you are rolling 300 dice + a turn, but you are only doing 3 weapon profiles, poison, blaster, and odd fake flamer pseudo shuriken.

Edit: fix

 Amishprn86 wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
Fw indexes, hard Tier.

16 venoms with 16 5mans with 14 blasters out of corsairs isnt really all that hard, they are not that bad honestly, only against full mech does it do very bad. Extremely boring tho. Sure you are rolling 300 dice + a turn, but you are only doing 3 weapon profiles, poison, blaster, and odd fake flamer pseudo shuriken.

Edit: fix

I am not talking about the knife ears though.