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Yeah, but looking at those barest bones of numbers shows you that an IH levi dread is nearly unkillable.

I think a lot of us just didn't recognize how having an unkillable model at the front of your army that can't be wrapped, can escape combat before you can try to fully wrap it combined with an army that is impossible to score secondaries off would allow you to basically hide for 4 rounds and then table your opponent in the final 2 rounds of the game.

The numbers let you know that IH model shouldn't be in the game. The stats show you that IH are able to dominate without even using that broken combo.

The same way the numbers show you that Mani Cheemas list should beat that list 7/10 times but because he got unlucky/the IH player got lucky the internet isn't on fire about IF.

The numbers are how the IH list was created and playtesting was how it was refined. I mean you can't just ignore the numbers completely but only relying on them will have you overlooking some outliers.

And Xeno, you did call it for sure.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:

 Nitro Zeus wrote:
before this tournament the stats would have said otherwise though.

Just another reason why blindly following stats are dumb. There is a very real human element even at the tippest top of comp play.

This is why posts that sceam about tournament data and mathshammer frustrate me so much. There are so many other variables to consider beyond the bare bones of numbers.

Like what? Ironhands players are winning 70% of their games and only a few are using leviathans...so IH leviathans are balanced?

Heck - There are other OP marines too like IF and RG turn 1 charge-assault cents. It's pretty easy to see when you read the rules that they are over the top.

Holy hell, every post of yours makes my head hurt, but I might need painkillers after this one.

him:

"hey guys I don't think statistics are reliable because there's so many other factors, like the example just given"

you: "THIS GUY SAYING IRON HANDS ARE BALANCED??"

Have a look at what he wrote. Have a look at your response. See where you went wrong. This sort of strawman bs is so much more transparent than I think you realise
.

But what really did it for me is your last sentence... at the very end of it, you're reason for why we should recognise them to be OP? "READING THE RULES" and nothing to do with stats. Yes, that's exactly what's being said. Ooof.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
SM as a whole are busted. Reading the rules and not blindly following stats like this ridiculous thread is trying to do, makes that unbelievably clear. Iron Hands are just extra busted on top of that.

 Nitro Zeus wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Nitro Zeus wrote:
before this tournament the stats would have said otherwise though.

Just another reason why blindly following stats are dumb. There is a very real human element even at the tippest top of comp play.

If you go look at the Ironhands reveal thread here on dakka. You'd see that this very strategy was theorized and everyone (including me) said it would be broken then.

Yes and you can see the very same people decide it's not very good after the tournament 'stats' said other things were best. And maybe they still are, and something else will come out and top it. This is the folly with following stats blindly. It only shows us what has done well, not what CAN do well in the future.

Your view seems to be the stats are meaningless. The stats tell us something. They tell us the players are making these choices and getting these results. The data doesn't tell us why they made those choices. Probably the real reason he decided to go with this list is the new apoth buff (assuming he made him a chief apoth) Which pretty much ensures your getting your monies worth on those intercessor bodyguards. IDK and I don't care. The IH supplement makes every unit better to a large degree. You could probably win most your games bringing 100 sniper scouts. Even IH land-speeder squadrons are viable. It takes a so so stormhawk and turns it into one of the best flyers in the game. It's just not hard to figure out man. The love tap they got did nothing to make IH win less.

that's just another strawman. My view isn't that the stats are meaningless at all, my view is that you misunderstand their meaning. Their meaning is what has done well in the past. We don't have stats on what can do well in the future, trying to substitute that with stats of the past is a highly flawed approach. That doesn't mean it's never right. It does mean however that stats don't accurately reflect balance, as even today's results demonstrate quite nicely.

 Nitro Zeus wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:

 Nitro Zeus wrote:
before this tournament the stats would have said otherwise though.

Just another reason why blindly following stats are dumb. There is a very real human element even at the tippest top of comp play.

This is why posts that sceam about tournament data and mathshammer frustrate me so much. There are so many other variables to consider beyond the bare bones of numbers.

Like what? Ironhands players are winning 70% of their games and only a few are using leviathans...so IH leviathans are balanced?

Heck - There are other OP marines too like IF and RG turn 1 charge-assault cents. It's pretty easy to see when you read the rules that they are over the top.

Holy hell, every post of yours makes my head hurt, but I might need painkillers after this one.

him:

"hey guys I don't think statistics are reliable because there's so many other factors, like the example just given"

you: "THIS GUY SAYING IRON HANDS ARE BALANCED??"

Have a look at what he wrote. Have a look at your response. See where you went wrong. This sort of strawman bs is so much more transparent than I think you realise
.

But what really did it for me is your last sentence... at the very end of it, you're reason for why we should recognise them to be OP? "READING THE RULES" and nothing to do with stats. Yes, that's exactly what's being said. Ooof.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
SM as a whole are busted. Reading the rules and not blindly following stats like this ridiculous thread is trying to do, makes that unbelievably clear. Iron Hands are just extra busted on top of that.

Help me out here. Cause in your previous post it seemed to me that you were saying because the Ironhands winner at LVO didn't use the cookie cutter list - that the stats are misleading. Sorry If I misunderstood you but that is what I was getting out of it. Plus I'm not accusing him of saying that ironhands are balanced. I am just calling it out that just because a unit isn't being used often doesn't mean it's not REALLY good. In fact with Ironhands you have multiple broken ways to play. I

I think stats are important to examine the meta and what is being played.

Agree with NZ that they don't tell us what is going to be played but they do give us a jumping off point to try to theorize why things are being played at the rate they are being played and performing at the rate they are.

It helps bring people outside of their small meta bubbles and see what is being played at a birds eye view. And then we can make our baseless logical leaps about why...

@xenomancers At no point was a statement made about Iron Hands being balanced. You absolutely did ask him if he was saying that Iron Hands are balanced, when you specifically asked, "what, so you are saying Iron Hands are balanced??"

The rest of your questions are pretty easily answered by you re-reading through my posts over this page and the prior.

 Nitro Zeus wrote:
that's just another strawman. My view isn't that the stats are meaningless at all, my view is that you misunderstand their meaning. Their meaning is what has done well in the past. We don't have stats on what can do well in the future, trying to substitute that with stats of the past is a highly flawed approach. That doesn't mean it's never right. It does mean however that stats don't accurately reflect balance, as even today's results demonstrate quite nicely.

IMO the stats are pretty good at reflecting balance or imbalance. If an armies WR% is lower or higher - it is a pretty strong indicator of faction power overall. I'm glad I understand what you are saying now. I think you said facetiously that that stats were meaningless earlier in the thread. Now that it's clear. I just don't understand the statistics...maybe...I did predict them though.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Nitro Zeus wrote:
@xenomancers At no point was a statement made about Iron Hands being balanced. You absolutely did ask him if he was saying that Iron Hands are balanced, when you specifically asked, "what, so you are saying Iron Hands are balanced??"

The rest of your questions are pretty easily answered by you re-reading through my posts over this page and the prior.

"Like what? Ironhands players are winning 70% of their games and only a few are using leviathans...so IH leviathans are balanced?"

This was intended to be funny. As I say everyone knows that IH levi and combos is broken. The fact they didn't show up in a lot of tournament lists didn't change that fact. It seemed to me you were suggesting that the stats couldn't have predicted this. The stats didn't need to. The math-hammer was sufficient.

You predicted the strength of Iron Hands dreadnoughts, by reading the rules - the stats didn't even exist then. However, if one was to blindly followed the stats of what units Iron Hands were winning with, as many did after that, they would have come to the conclusion that your prediction was wrong about this being one of the strongest ways to play the army - as many did. My point is that the stats are flawed - not that Iron Hands are balanced they are wildly OP, and both the stats and the amazing power of critical thought agrees on this in almost every example - this doesn't however, exclude the possibility that this isn't even the strongest way to play Iron Hands, or other armies in the game, as we should be able to recognise by the fact that the exact same flaw has shown itself today, and so many times in the past.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Nitro Zeus wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Nitro Zeus wrote:
before this tournament the stats would have said otherwise though.

Just another reason why blindly following stats are dumb. There is a very real human element even at the tippest top of comp play.

If you go look at the Ironhands reveal thread here on dakka. You'd see that this very strategy was theorized and everyone (including me) said it would be broken then.

Yes and you can see the very same people decide it's not very good after the tournament 'stats' said other things were best. And maybe they still are, and something else will come out and top it. This is the folly with following stats blindly. It only shows us what has done well, not what CAN do well in the future.

Your view seems to be the stats are meaningless. The stats tell us something. They tell us the players are making these choices and getting these results. The data doesn't tell us why they made those choices. Probably the real reason he decided to go with this list is the new apoth buff (assuming he made him a chief apoth) Which pretty much ensures your getting your monies worth on those intercessor bodyguards. IDK and I don't care. The IH supplement makes every unit better to a large degree. You could probably win most your games bringing 100 sniper scouts. Even IH land-speeder squadrons are viable. It takes a so so stormhawk and turns it into one of the best flyers in the game. It's just not hard to figure out man. The love tap they got did nothing to make IH win less.

There's a whole world of meaning between "Stats tell us nothing" and "Stats tell us everything". He's not arguing the stats are worthless. He's arguing that they don't answer every question with 100% certainty.

"Blindly following $thing [is] dumb" =/= "following $thing [is] dumb".

The stats tell us something. They don't tell us everything. That was his point.

Yeah well I get that and I and not claiming that the stats tell us everything. NZ has stated on many occasion that "marines in general are busted - Iron-hands are just more busted" to paraphrase NZ a little bit.

The stats clearly show us that is not true. Unless you can somehow prove that Ultramarine and Salamanders players are just worse players? This is what bothers me. It is my personal opinion that Ultramarines current rules are perfect. They are strong enough to win any match but they can lose a match just as easily. Ironhands would dump on my ultras....it wouldn't even be fair.

Successor step it up a notch ofc but if you removed MOA (another obvious problem)(did they not realize this is just the salamanders old trait?....oh yeah pick another...)...

The stats (the ones you consider conclusive - December's) certainly do not "clearly show us" that Marines are not stronger-than-average. IF and RG are both over 50% if only by a little, and UM and WS are barely under 50%.

With the number of events being so small, if each subfaction were truly independent, you're left with the suggestion that Marines outside IH are decent. But subfactions are not independent. As shown upthread, players tend to swap factions around within macro-faction, hedging to the strongest.

Further, there is massive flocking within specifically Marine subfactions to the perceived strongest (unclear if this applies more or less to other factions; the only subfaction evidence discussed upthread was Marine-specific). Something to the tune of ~25% of all Marine subfactions appeared to shift with the preception of "strongest". So it's been heavily demonstrated that Marine subfactions are *not* independent - when one subfaction gets stronger, people leave the other subfactions.

So we have a roughly 50% winrate for non-Iron Hands Marines, with very little confidence on where the actual expected mean should be. But we also have very strong numbers suggesting that that 50% is artificially skewed substantially lower.

So the stats are either saying nothing, or they're saying Marines are good. A case can be made that the stats say Marines are OP, or that the stats are inconclusive, but there's no case to be made to say Marines are bad.

 Xenomancers wrote:
Yeah well I get that and I and not claiming that the stats tell us everything. NZ has stated on many occasion that "marines in general are busted - Iron-hands are just more busted" to paraphrase NZ a little bit.

The stats clearly show us that is not true. Unless you can somehow prove that Ultramarine and Salamanders players are just worse players? This is what bothers me. It is my personal opinion that Ultramarines current rules are perfect. They are strong enough to win any match but they can lose a match just as easily. Ironhands would dump on my ultras....it wouldn't even be fair...

Not entirely. It's much easier for an Ultramarines player to field their army as an Iron Hands army (all they need to do is not paint anything as a specific First Founding Chapter) than it would be for, say, a Knights player to start running an Eldar army, so it could be that all the Astartes players who would otherwise be playing Salamanders or Ultramarines are running Iron Hands because they're just that bit more busted than the rest of the Marines.

(I don't know if that's true, but it does seem to me that the data could support either conclusion.)

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Yeah well I get that and I and not claiming that the stats tell us everything. NZ has stated on many occasion that "marines in general are busted - Iron-hands are just more busted" to paraphrase NZ a little bit.

The stats clearly show us that is not true. Unless you can somehow prove that Ultramarine and Salamanders players are just worse players? This is what bothers me. It is my personal opinion that Ultramarines current rules are perfect. They are strong enough to win any match but they can lose a match just as easily. Ironhands would dump on my ultras....it wouldn't even be fair...

Not entirely. It's much easier for an Ultramarines player to field their army as an Iron Hands army (all they need to do is not paint anything as a specific First Founding Chapter) than it would be for, say, a Knights player to start running an Eldar army, so it could be that all the Astartes players who would otherwise be playing Salamanders or Ultramarines are running Iron Hands because they're just that bit more busted than the rest of the Marines.

(I don't know if that's true, but it does seem to me that the data could support either conclusion.)

Feb:
UltraMarine lists: 31
Iron Hands lists: 0

Feb-Sept:
UltraMarine lists: 295
Iron Hands lists: 15

Dec:
UltraMarine lists: 15
Iron Hands lists: 45

It is *very* clear that the subfaction skew was *heavily* in UM's favor when they were top dog, and is now heavily in IH's favor now that they are top dog.

Bharring wrote:
The stats (the ones you consider conclusive - December's) certainly do not "clearly show us" that Marines are not stronger-than-average. IF and RG are both over 50% if only by a little, and UM and WS are barely under 50%.

With the number of events being so small, if each subfaction were truly independent, you're left with the suggestion that Marines outside IH are decent. But subfactions are not independent. As shown upthread, players tend to swap factions around within macro-faction, hedging to the strongest.

Further, there is massive flocking within specifically Marine subfactions to the perceived strongest (unclear if this applies more or less to other factions; the only subfaction evidence discussed upthread was Marine-specific). Something to the tune of ~25% of all Marine subfactions appeared to shift with the preception of "strongest". So it's been heavily demonstrated that Marine subfactions are *not* independent - when one subfaction gets stronger, people leave the other subfactions.

So we have a roughly 50% winrate for non-Iron Hands Marines, with very little confidence on where the actual expected mean should be. But we also have very strong numbers suggesting that that 50% is artificially skewed substantially lower.

So the stats are either saying nothing, or they're saying Marines are good. A case can be made that the stats say Marines are OP, or that the stats are inconclusive, but there's no case to be made to say Marines are bad.

There is a case that you can say portions of marines are bad. Salamanders are 42% when IH are 66%. UM are 50% while CF are 45%. IF are "only" 55%.

Would IF take more wins if the other players used them instead of IH or are they objectively worse? Does the large number of mirror matches have a chilling effect on Sallies and CF and others?

And similarly, with IH centralising the meta, would the way non-Marine factions build their list change if Iron Hands were no longer the list to beat, promoting or demoting other Chapters?

 Xenomancers wrote:
Yeah well I get that and I and not claiming that the stats tell us everything.

Oh good! That's great news t-

 Xenomancers wrote:
The stats clearly show us that is not true. Unless you can somehow prove that Ultramarine and Salamanders players are just worse players? This is what bothers me.

Nevermind. Sigh.


You don't understand stats. You don't understand balance. You don't understand what's being said on this very page. The stats don't clearly show you this at at all.

 Xenomancers wrote:
It is my personal opinion that Ultramarines current rules are perfect. They are strong enough to win any match but they can lose a match just as easily. Ironhands would dump on my ultras....it wouldn't even be fair.

Yeah I don't really think anyone was under illusions that this was anything but a thread to downtalk your personal faction.

Oh jeez this thread is still going huh?

LVO top lists were dominated by marines of different stripes. It doesn't matter if you're a blue, silver, black or yellow marine, you were well represented.

Nerfing IH would not "fix" the marine issue. Marines need a global nerf of some of their most egregious units and a potential reworking/removing of their Doctrines. That'd be a good start.

Bharring wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Yeah well I get that and I and not claiming that the stats tell us everything. NZ has stated on many occasion that "marines in general are busted - Iron-hands are just more busted" to paraphrase NZ a little bit.

The stats clearly show us that is not true. Unless you can somehow prove that Ultramarine and Salamanders players are just worse players? This is what bothers me. It is my personal opinion that Ultramarines current rules are perfect. They are strong enough to win any match but they can lose a match just as easily. Ironhands would dump on my ultras....it wouldn't even be fair...

Not entirely. It's much easier for an Ultramarines player to field their army as an Iron Hands army (all they need to do is not paint anything as a specific First Founding Chapter) than it would be for, say, a Knights player to start running an Eldar army, so it could be that all the Astartes players who would otherwise be playing Salamanders or Ultramarines are running Iron Hands because they're just that bit more busted than the rest of the Marines.

(I don't know if that's true, but it does seem to me that the data could support either conclusion.)

Feb:
UltraMarine lists: 31
Iron Hands lists: 0

Feb-Sept:
UltraMarine lists: 295
Iron Hands lists: 15

Dec:
UltraMarine lists: 15
Iron Hands lists: 45

It is *very* clear that the subfaction skew was *heavily* in UM's favor when they were top dog, and is now heavily in IH's favor now that they are top dog.

I am sure there are some floppers. Or some people that even have both armies. Overall how much did marine representation go up though? Plus ultimately I chose not to go to LVO this year because the army I want to play is going to get Spanked by any of the OP marine factions...IF or IH....Like seriously...how does +1 LD hold up against ignore cover and exploding bolt weapons? Or 6+ FNP and 5+ overwatch and ignoring degrading profiles by half. It doesn't.

Pretty sure there's more to the Ultras tactic than just +1 LD...

Marine representation went up substantially: 55 in Feb, 132 in Dec. But the increase is nowhere close to explaining the subfaction swaps:
-UltraMarines went from 31/55 (56%) lists in Feb to 15/132 (11%) in Dec.. The pool of Marine lists more than *doubled*, but the UM actually *halved*. Down to roughly a fifth of it's previous percentage, even.
-Iron Hands went from 0/55 in Feb (0%) to 45/132 (34%). While an observed 0/55 suggests we don't have confidence in their expected frequency, it *does* strongly suggest there nowhere close to a 1/3 ratio.
There is plenty of data to suggest the growing field was not a meaningful factor in the subfaction swaps.

I'd argue that there are many different types of players, and that you see much of the inelasticity in subfaction selections from players who want to play their specific subfaction and/or those who just want to throw dice, and most of the elasticity either in those who will only show up if they're OP (like you say) and those who see subfaction selection as part of the game and challenge (as we hear from many of the top contenders).

This would track quite closely with what we're seeing in the numbers:
-Some macro-faction swaps, but not as many (Eldar vs IoM vs Chaos, etc)
-More intra-macro-faction swaps than macro-faction swaps (IG to Marines or CWE to DE)
-More subfaction swaps than faction swaps (UM to IH)
-But a fairly stable base of representation even of the "trash tier" books

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
Oh jeez this thread is still going huh?

LVO top lists were dominated by marines of different stripes. It doesn't matter if you're a blue, silver, black or yellow marine, you were well represented.

Nerfing IH would not "fix" the marine issue. Marines need a global nerf of some of their most egregious units and a potential reworking/removing of their Doctrines. That'd be a good start.

So in the top 8 lists which I just looked at. 3 of them have ironhands/successors. 1 had blood angels (and admech+ironhands so they aren't even getting doctrines), 2 have RG/successors, 1 Ork, 1 Eldar soup. Havn't seen the other data yet. Half the top 8 lists are Ironhands. It's no surprise.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
Oh jeez this thread is still going huh?

LVO top lists were dominated by marines of different stripes. It doesn't matter if you're a blue, silver, black or yellow marine, you were well represented.

Nerfing IH would not "fix" the marine issue. Marines need a global nerf of some of their most egregious units and a potential reworking/removing of their Doctrines. That'd be a good start.

So in the top 8 lists which I just looked at. 3 of them have ironhands/successors. 1 had blood angels (and admech+ironhands so they aren't even getting doctrines), 2 have RG/successors, 1 Ork, 1 Eldar soup. Havn't seen the other data yet. Half the top 8 lists are Ironhands. It's no surprise.

Conversely, drop all the IH lists from consideration, and you're left with 2 Marine lists 1 Ork list and 1 Eldar list. In a Marine-skewed meta. Being 50% of the top lists even after IH are ignored is statistical suggestion that maybe Marines are better than others even without IH.

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
Oh jeez this thread is still going huh?

LVO top lists were dominated by marines of different stripes. It doesn't matter if you're a blue, silver, black or yellow marine, you were well represented.

Nerfing IH would not "fix" the marine issue. Marines need a global nerf of some of their most egregious units and a potential reworking/removing of their Doctrines. That'd be a good start.

I see no sign of WS (first @ 62nd), UM (55th), BT (can't find so far), or Sallies (163) for quite some distance. Any mention of BA is attached to some soup.

IH is smothering the gak out of everything. Sallies might be really good, but can't compete in a mirror match. We just can't determine anything with certainty if IH is warping the stats so much.

If stats don't give the whole picture (and I agree they don't), what metric are you using to declare SM "as a whole" broken? You've demonstrated the possibility that this is the case, but that isn't the same as proving that it is the case.

Before anyone accuses me of bias (as usual), yes I'm going to use Black Templars as an example. Feel free to substitute in Salamanders if that makes you feel better.

First stop, the stats: there's not enough people playing Black Templars to get a decent sample. The stats are, in this case, useless other than to indicate that very few people are playing Black Templars competitively. Whether this is due to weak rules, strong-but-overshadowed by IH rules, synergies with units that aren't the typical ones in other Marine lists, a hypothetical higher skill floor, or any of a myriad other reasons is not discernable from the stats alone.

Second stop, differences in unique rule power. The big elephant in the room. Take the unkillable Leviathan dreadnought combo as an example. You cannot pull that off as a Black Templars player. Same with a bunch of the other top combos. What pushes the top units over the top is their interaction with Chapter-specific special rules. Imagine being a World Eaters player and having your Lord Discordant nerfed because it's too strong in GWs eyes when played as Alpha Legion, or having Hellwrought Leviathans nerfed because Iron Hands push them over the top. Same deal here: remove the rules interactions that make a unit top-tier and it's no longer top-tier unless you add new, equally strong rules.

Third stop, quantity of rules. Doctrines and super doctrines are not inherently broken any more than any rule is, what matters is what they do. As an absurd example, consider "all friendly Black Templates infantry are T8 while in the tactical doctrine" compared to "all friendly Black Templars unit may add 1 to their hit rolls when firing Pistol weapons while within 1" of enemy models while in the assault doctrine". One is ridiculously busted, while the other is so niche as to be nearly useless. In both cases it is the content of the rules that are bad, not the form the rule itself takes. All having more rules does is increase the likelihood of having strong rules combinations, but the actual content of the rules matter.

Thus, by what metric so we judge Black Templars, or Salamanders, "busted"? We can't use the stats, because the sample sizes are too small. What rules specifically make these two broken? After all, if we cannot find that each Chapter is broken, the statement that the entire Codex is busted cannot be said to be supported. That is not the same thing as it being false; it is entirely possible that it is, but I'd like to see some proof beyond "it's obvious" or the like.

As a final note, please don't strawman this as me somehow saying anything in the Codex is fine.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
Oh jeez this thread is still going huh?

LVO top lists were dominated by marines of different stripes. It doesn't matter if you're a blue, silver, black or yellow marine, you were well represented.

Nerfing IH would not "fix" the marine issue. Marines need a global nerf of some of their most egregious units and a potential reworking/removing of their Doctrines. That'd be a good start.

I see no sign of WS (first @ 62nd), UM (55th), BT (can't find so far), or Sallies (163) for quite some distance. Any mention of BA is attached to some soup.

IH is smothering the gak out of everything. Sallies might be really good, but can't compete in a mirror match. We just can't determine anything with certainty if IH is warping the stats so much.

Spoiler:

IH
RG
IH
IH
BA / Admech / IH
RG
IH
IF
RG
IF
IF
IH
IH
IH
IH
RG
IH
IF
RG
IH
IH
IH
BA / RG

We can't be conclusive, but there are some hints. For instance, if the faction still places top 8 more than any other faction *after* ignoring all IH lists, it suggests that the faction is strong even without IH. It is not conclusive, but is suggestive.

That said, RG placing twice in the top 8 doesn't mean WS, UM, etc are any good. Only that there are Marine builds that don't use IH that are doing well, not that every subfaction is fine.

Although orcs in the top 8...

After so many whines about how orcs can't compete and tau are OP turns out that orcs are more powerful than Chaos and are the second most OP Xeno faction outside of eldar!!! (I feel gross writing this).

Outliers going to outlie but orks are pretty strong and if they get too much in PA who knows where we will end up.

GW screwed up the game and until they finish with PA we won't know how badly. Even if everything comes up to marine levels being able to table 2k points in 2 turns GW has effectively broken 8th. I don't think there is any way to balance our way out of that.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
Oh jeez this thread is still going huh?

LVO top lists were dominated by marines of different stripes. It doesn't matter if you're a blue, silver, black or yellow marine, you were well represented.

Nerfing IH would not "fix" the marine issue. Marines need a global nerf of some of their most egregious units and a potential reworking/removing of their Doctrines. That'd be a good start.

I see no sign of WS (first @ 62nd), UM (55th), BT (can't find so far), or Sallies (163) for quite some distance. Any mention of BA is attached to some soup.

IH is smothering the gak out of everything. Sallies might be really good, but can't compete in a mirror match. We just can't determine anything with certainty if IH is warping the stats so much.

Spoiler:

IH
RG
IH
IH
BA / Admech / IH
RG
IH
IF
RG
IF
IF
IH
IH
IH
IH
RG
IH
IF
RG
IH
IH
IH
BA / RG

IH are only hiding how OP other marine sub factions are, that is all. There seem to be quite a few IF and RG lists at the top. WS made up only 5% of the meta, arguably their best player (Nanavati) lost early and stopped playing (round 2). Sallies were something like 7% of the meta. Not sure on the BT numbers. I am only discussing Codex Marines.

As Xeno has stated above - Marines even manage to compete at the top level when they make no use of their super doctrine. That's how bad it is. Some units are so wildly under-priced it's no wonder they are so prevalent.


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bananathug wrote:
Although orcs in the top 8...

After so many whines about how orcs can't compete and tau are OP turns out that orcs are more powerful than Chaos and are the second most OP Xeno faction outside of eldar!!! (I feel gross writing this).

Outliers going to outlie but orks are pretty strong and if they get too much in PA who knows where we will end up.

GW screwed up the game and until they finish with PA we won't know how badly. Even if everything comes up to marine levels being able to table 2k points in 2 turns GW has effectively broken 8th. I don't think there is any way to balance our way out of that.

Not sure if this is a joke?

Orks had 3 players in the top 50 and 5 in the top 100.....how can you call this OP?

Chaos had 8 players in the top 50, including a mono RK list for comparison.

why are you comparing top 50 to top 8 lmao? orcs got top 8, chaos didn't even make it once. Top 8 is a common metric for evaluating the top cut at larger events, top 4 at smaller ones. Anything can make top 50, Orcs placing top 8 at least shows they are capable of keeping up with most the game. I wouldn't call them OP or draw that conclusion at all from just a statistic, but to the people complaining they can't win games at their local with Orcs while Orcs are out here top 8'ing LVO... well, thats a problem with the player, not the army.


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https://fieldoffiregaming.com/best-armies-of-the-las-vegas-open-2020/

here's another example of why stats are a stupid measure to use definitively

Unless of course you believe Khornate soup, Slaanesh soup, and Tyranid soup are the top 3 factions in the game right now.

Accidentally edited post - Nitro simultaneously claiming stats cannot be used to measure something definitely while using stats to measure something definitively.