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We don't need another 50 page thread about how marines were very weak/op in 8th guys.

Top 3 is a bit difficult.
I wouldn't disagree with Harlequins/Marines/Daemons, but Sisters are undoubtedly up there too.

As for worst - as people have said Knights don't really work, but I don't really want them to work, sorry.

So for my money its Tau/Thousands Sons and then probably Guard. I think GSC are down there too if you run a vaguely normal list - but if you play Codex: Acolyte Hybrids, you can perform reasonably well. Or I feel better than those three above anyway. But that might have changed, as Guard should be a major beneficiary of the Bring It Down changes.

Top 3 in tournament games:

- SM
- Harlequins
- Daemons

Plus honorable mention to Custodes and Adepta Sororitas.

In casual games top 3 is:

- SM
- SM
- SM

Other competitive factions are competitive only by playing skew uncommon lists or aren't played by many gamers, it'll be unlikely to face them regularly and even if someone does they'll lose all their anti meta status, which is part of their success in tournaments.

Bottom 3 IMHO are:

- Tau
- GSC
- GK

These are armies that struggle a lot in 9th. Knights aren't definitely in this low-tier bracket. TS, Crafworlds, AM and Tyranids have the tools to avoid being garbage tier.

A.T. wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
8.0 [Space Marines] were actually vying for worst army in the game.

No. Just no.

By what metric do say...no...just no?

Are we talking before or after the nerf to things like Guilliman, stormraven, and razorback gunlines?

And wait, 8th edition space marines? Like Iron Hands space marines?

Ironhands were an 8.5 supplement. Yes - they dominated. As were several other chapters very dominant in 8.5. However - this was all before - harlies/custodes/daemons/tau all got their PA books. Much like 7.5 - 8.5 is a period best forgotten by truly absurd rules.

8.0...was long. Releases were slow. 8.0 marines were dead long before the Gman nerf. They were dead once CWE came on the scene. Anyways this is about 9.0 ranks anyways. Lets stay on subject.

No. No part of 8th edition releases were _slow_.
8th churned through everything twice (indexes then codexes, plus a couple repeats) in three years (which for an edition is entirely too short, the very opposite of long. A long edition would be 8-9 years, not a third of that).

8th was an unacceptably fast process of churn & burn, designed to bilk the customer base as fast as possible and repeat the process.

 Xenomancers wrote:

A.T. wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
8.0 [Space Marines] were actually vying for worst army in the game.

No. Just no.

By what metric do say...no...just no?

Are we talking before or after the nerf to things like Guilliman, stormraven, and razorback gunlines?

And wait, 8th edition space marines? Like Iron Hands space marines?

Ironhands were an 8.5 supplement. Yes - they dominated. As were several other chapters very dominant in 8.5. However - this was all before - harlies/custodes/daemons/tau all got their PA books. Much like 7.5 - 8.5 is a period best forgotten by truly absurd rules.

8.0...was long. Releases were slow. 8.0 marines were dead long before the Gman nerf. They were dead once CWE came on the scene. Anyways this is about 9.0 ranks anyways. Lets stay on subject.

So in summary, during 8th Space Marines were among the top dogs for periods of time, and when they weren't top dogs they were still capable of placing in tourneys.

8th was also not long, nor were releases slow.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
8.0 [Space Marines] were actually vying for worst army in the game.

No. Just no.

its xenomancer lol, he always considers his marines to be bad.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

A.T. wrote:
Are we talking before or after the nerf to things like Guilliman, stormraven, and razorback gunlines?

And wait, 8th edition space marines? Like Iron Hands space marines?

to be fair, there was a period between the guilliman lists nerf and Iron hands where marines were "ok". This period is probably what Xeno means when he says they were bottom tier. To say that it was like that for the whole edition is an exaggeration, and deciding that indexhammer doesnt count for some reason is disingenuous.


As for the topic, i think the rankings vary greatly between competitive and casual scences.

Competitive players (that are on average better than casual ones) can excel with harder to play armies, which is why Harlequins and Demons are doing so good in tournaments. For casual players however, simpler armies that require little thought are better.

With that in mind, i'd say :

Comp
1-Quins
2-Demons
3-SM

Casual
1-SM
2-Custodes
3-SM

Did you really place space marines twice in casual? Why? IS that all people play around you?

 Xenomancers wrote:
Did you really place space marines twice in casual? Why? IS that all people play around you?

Right now theyre dominating in casual for two reason : They have high firepower and they have resilience. And no, in my group there is only 2 SM player, the thing is that even when the rest of the group outplays them, a single mistake costs us the game while the marines can make multiple mistakes and still manage to win.

Quins, Marines and Sisters or Daemons for top 3, the bottom three could be a fair chunk of the factions right now, but Tau, GSC and Craftworlds are all good candidates for the wooden spoon.

Craftworlds come up a bit if they're souped to Quins, but really, why weaken Quins with Craftworlds?

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Did you really place space marines twice in casual? Why? IS that all people play around you?

Right now theyre dominating in casual for two reason : They have high firepower and they have resilience. And no, in my group there is only 2 SM player, the thing is that even when the rest of the group outplays them, a single mistake costs us the game while the marines can make multiple mistakes and still manage to win.

Marines are only resilient if you don't bring powerful weapons.

I tabled a full primaris wolf list with my Crons 2 weekends ago.
DDA/DS/Silent King/Tomb blades/ and warriors killed about 600 points on the first turn. Marines are not resilient. They have a lot of wounds in some cases but it is fairly easy to give them no save or a 5+ max. Marines are basically glass cannons.

If you are struggling to kill marines...how exactly do you kill custodes? or Necrons for that matter? I am not trying to be rude...It is simply just not the case that marines are resilient. Are they spamming bladgaurd? Spam big guns and just blast them.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Did you really place space marines twice in casual? Why? IS that all people play around you?

Right now theyre dominating in casual for two reason : They have high firepower and they have resilience. And no, in my group there is only 2 SM player, the thing is that even when the rest of the group outplays them, a single mistake costs us the game while the marines can make multiple mistakes and still manage to win.

Marines are only resilient if you don't bring powerful weapons.

I tabled a full primaris wolf list with my Crons 2 weekends ago.
DDA/DS/Silent King/Tomb blades/ and warriors killed about 600 points on the first turn. Marines are not resilient. They have a lot of wounds in some cases but it is fairly easy to give them no save or a 5+ max. Marines are basically glass cannons.

If you are struggling to kill marines...how exactly do you kill custodes?

the fact that you are on dakkadakka, engaging on 40k content means that you are already more competitive than the majority of players. Your personal experience in-games don't apply to the majority of players.

If a casual player brings a biel tan aspect list or most fluffy list, good luck chewing through a generic SM list.
The difference between SM and Custodes is that custodes don't have the bodies to be on every corner of the map and the lists casuals will bring will usually not have much long range firepower (since it required FW).

And notice how i ranked both SM and Custodes as the top armies on casual tables?

I am not trying to be rude...It is simply just not the case that marines are resilient. Are they spamming bladgaurd? Spam big guns and just blast them.

Not every army has access to spamabble big guns, and not every casual players will necessarily spam a certain unit to tailor against their opponent/metagame. I might see someone bring 2-3 brightlances and mostly shuriken in a casual eldar list, i'll rarely see a casual player show up with the 20+ starcannon EC list that is actually decent against marines.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Did you really place space marines twice in casual? Why? IS that all people play around you?

Right now theyre dominating in casual for two reason : They have high firepower and they have resilience. And no, in my group there is only 2 SM player, the thing is that even when the rest of the group outplays them, a single mistake costs us the game while the marines can make multiple mistakes and still manage to win.

Marines are only resilient if you don't bring powerful weapons.

I tabled a full primaris wolf list with my Crons 2 weekends ago.
DDA/DS/Silent King/Tomb blades/ and warriors killed about 600 points on the first turn. Marines are not resilient. They have a lot of wounds in some cases but it is fairly easy to give them no save or a 5+ max. Marines are basically glass cannons.

If you are struggling to kill marines...how exactly do you kill custodes? or Necrons for that matter? I am not trying to be rude...It is simply just not the case that marines are resilient. Are they spamming bladgaurd? Spam big guns and just blast them.

Really? "Marines are only resilient if you don't bring powerful weapons"? The same can be said for Land Raiders, knights, Baneblades, etc, etc. The fact that you need powerful weapons to efficiently kill them is what makes them resilient.

And for a measly 1CP they can make those "big guns" redundant. Transhuman Physiology makes a squad of intercessors harder to wound with a Volcano Cannon than any of the aforementioned vehicles.

 Xenomancers wrote:


Marines are only resilient if you don't bring powerful weapons.

I tabled a full primaris wolf list with my Crons 2 weekends ago.
DDA/DS/Silent King/Tomb blades/ and warriors killed about 600 points on the first turn. Marines are not resilient. They have a lot of wounds in some cases but it is fairly easy to give them no save or a 5+ max. Marines are basically glass cannons.

If you are struggling to kill marines...how exactly do you kill custodes? or Necrons for that matter? I am not trying to be rude...It is simply just not the case that marines are resilient. Are they spamming bladgaurd? Spam big guns and just blast them.

Without tailoring against them, SM are extremely resilient. But if you tailor you're kinda screwed if you face a skew list with opposite profiles. In tournaments SM are likely to show up is numbers, and there's the rock-paper-scissor attitude that competitive players have (I bring Rock hoping to face only Scissor) that kicks in, so it makes sense to tailor against them.

Casual gamers tend to bring more TAC oriented lists instead. Which can still be decent against armies like Harlequins or Orks even if those are skew oriented, but can also be not enough to deal with something like Custodes or SM.

Was that Necrons list tailored against SM? I guess so. No wonder you have so much trouble against the clowns. Which are only resilient if you just bring powerful weapons .

I only play with friends so my list wouldnt be representative in any way shape or form, but I just wanted to say I think it's rather cool that demons are apparently among the top dogs right now. As far as I understood it, they struggled through 8th.

 Blackie wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:


Marines are only resilient if you don't bring powerful weapons.

I tabled a full primaris wolf list with my Crons 2 weekends ago.
DDA/DS/Silent King/Tomb blades/ and warriors killed about 600 points on the first turn. Marines are not resilient. They have a lot of wounds in some cases but it is fairly easy to give them no save or a 5+ max. Marines are basically glass cannons.

If you are struggling to kill marines...how exactly do you kill custodes? or Necrons for that matter? I am not trying to be rude...It is simply just not the case that marines are resilient. Are they spamming bladgaurd? Spam big guns and just blast them.

Without tailoring against them, SM are extremely resilient. But if you tailor you're kinda screwed if you face a skew list with opposite profiles. In tournaments SM are likely to show up is numbers, and there's the rock-paper-scissor attitude that competitive players have (I bring Rock hoping to face only Scissor) that kicks in, so it makes sense to tailor against them.

Casual gamers tend to bring more TAC oriented lists instead. Which can still be decent against armies like Harlequins or Orks even if those are skew oriented, but can also be not enough to deal with something like Custodes or SM.

Was that Necrons list tailored against SM? I guess so. No wonder you have so much trouble against the clowns. Which are only resilient if you just bring powerful weapons .

You should be building your list to be able to take on any list. Which means you have to be able to deal with an army that has all 3+ and 2+ saves as standard in a TAC list. It also means you need to be able to fight in melee and range and have mobility. Hyper efficient weapons that are good against everything...like...str 5 ap-2 which crons are loaded with but pretty much every army can rig their army selection to these criteria.

Weapons to never or sparingly include - AP-0 str 3 or single shot all in 1 basket weapons. Essentially a strong TAC list - is a space marine counter first and as a result you can take on every army. This is regardless of meta too. This is just common sense. A good portion of armies field a standard 3+ save. So you aren't actually a TAC list if you can take on those armies.

Also in my experience. Low quality firepower isn't any better than quality firepower at dealing with hordes ether especially if you can back it up with suitable melee elite units who are tough.

Basically - just use good units (units good vs lots of units) - not bad units (units that are situationally good).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Did you really place space marines twice in casual? Why? IS that all people play around you?

Right now theyre dominating in casual for two reason : They have high firepower and they have resilience. And no, in my group there is only 2 SM player, the thing is that even when the rest of the group outplays them, a single mistake costs us the game while the marines can make multiple mistakes and still manage to win.

Marines are only resilient if you don't bring powerful weapons.

I tabled a full primaris wolf list with my Crons 2 weekends ago.
DDA/DS/Silent King/Tomb blades/ and warriors killed about 600 points on the first turn. Marines are not resilient. They have a lot of wounds in some cases but it is fairly easy to give them no save or a 5+ max. Marines are basically glass cannons.

If you are struggling to kill marines...how exactly do you kill custodes? or Necrons for that matter? I am not trying to be rude...It is simply just not the case that marines are resilient. Are they spamming bladgaurd? Spam big guns and just blast them.

Really? "Marines are only resilient if you don't bring powerful weapons"? The same can be said for Land Raiders, knights, Baneblades, etc, etc. The fact that you need powerful weapons to efficiently kill them is what makes them resilient.

And for a measly 1CP they can make those "big guns" redundant. Transhuman Physiology makes a squad of intercessors harder to wound with a Volcano Cannon than any of the aforementioned vehicles.

The ability to buff one units defense at a time doesn't make a army resilient. What makes armies resilient? #1 is invune saves/ #2 is ignore damage abilities #3 is to hit and wound modifiers.

Marines are really low on all of these abilities. Very few of their units have a natural invune save. This is one of the biggest weakness an army can have. An army with this weakness is not resilient compared to armies that do.

High toughness, good armor saves, and multiple wounds can also contribute to making armies resilient, although I notice those got left off your list for some reason.

 CommunistNapkin wrote:
High toughness, good armor saves, and multiple wounds can also contribute to making armies resilient, although I notice those got left off your list for some reason.

It's also about per point durability.

A Baneblade, for isntance, at 26 T8 3+ Wounds, is hard to take down... But for its points cost, it can easily not be durable enough.

So a model that's 25 PPW is generally gonna be less durable than one that's 10 PPW.

 CommunistNapkin wrote:
High toughness, good armor saves, and multiple wounds can also contribute to making armies resilient, although I notice those got left off your list for some reason.

Oh I could have gone down the list more and more. The farther you get down it the less it matters though. At some point down the list you start paying points for abilities like high toughness or more wounds and you open yourself up for hard counters like - ap-4 and flat 3/4 weapons.

The key to being durable is always being durable. Not situationally.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 CommunistNapkin wrote:
High toughness, good armor saves, and multiple wounds can also contribute to making armies resilient, although I notice those got left off your list for some reason.

Oh I could have gone down the list more and more. The farther you get down it the less it matters though. At some point down the list you start paying points for abilities like high toughness or more wounds and you open yourself up for hard counters like - ap-4 and flat 3/4 weapons.

The key to being durable is always being durable. Not situationally.

Because there's NOTHING IN THE GAME that bypasses a hit mods, wound mods, and invuln saves.

Nope. Certainly not a named game mechanic that cares solely about wound count and possible FNPs. Nuh-uh, such a thing would be ridiculous!

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 CommunistNapkin wrote:
High toughness, good armor saves, and multiple wounds can also contribute to making armies resilient, although I notice those got left off your list for some reason.

Oh I could have gone down the list more and more. The farther you get down it the less it matters though. At some point down the list you start paying points for abilities like high toughness or more wounds and you open yourself up for hard counters like - ap-4 and flat 3/4 weapons.

The key to being durable is always being durable. Not situationally.

Because there's NOTHING IN THE GAME that bypasses a hit mods, wound mods, and invuln saves.

Nope. Certainly not a named game mechanic that cares solely about wound count and possible FNPs. Nuh-uh, such a thing would be ridiculous!

We are talking about rarity. FNP is also very powerful as it is another practically unignorable save. It is in the same category as invunerable saves - it is basically another kind of invune save.

 Xenomancers wrote:

You should be building your list to be able to take on any list.

Only if you play pick-up games against strangers in casual to semi competitive levels. And even then you'll shape your lists with your actual meta in mind.

Tournament players definitely tailor their lists a lot (no-one would bring anti horde tools if out of 30 players 2 maybe 3 of them will play hordes, and 20 other dudes are SM), and there's no point not to tailor if you already know who's gonna play against you, which is how many casual players do their 40k. Of course they won't know the exact list and with many armies that means that they should still be somehow TAC but still not really universally TAC.

I don't see any point in creating and playing a full TAC list when in reality I'm not going to face some of the factions, including few very skew oriented lists.

Instead of creating real TAC lists players usually create their lists in order to face what they mostly expect to play against and that is true for every level of competitiveness. Of course if you play an army that is so OP that can fairly deal against anyone anyway that's a whole different story .

It's tough to say because there's a difference between strong lists and strong codexes.

Daemons are a weird one because 90% of the book isn't very good, it's just after Engine War and 9th points changes a very specific build has become obscenely strong. You could say the metric is for a certain percentage of a book to be viable, but even if you were to say (for example) only 30% of the Marine book is good/viable, that's still 30 units which is more than a lot of armies even have in total. So even then I'm not sure how exactly to scientifically quantify it (probably because it's impossible to do that)

I'd say just in terms of overall book strength, including numbers of viable builds and units then Loyalist Marines and Sisters are unquestionably the big 2 (or 9, because apparently each Marine chapter is its own individual army).

Daemons are very limited in their actual good units and someone who hears that "Daemons OP!!!" and then goes out and buys Khorne models is going to be in for a rude awakening. This is all basically to say I think Daemons have one or two strong lists, but the army overall doesn't feel very strong.

Harlequins are also super weird because they are absolutely the best anti-Marine army in the game. They crush Loyalist Space Marines super hard. But their winrates vs some of the other top placing tournament armies? Not so hot, not so hot at all. How's an army that has 40% winrates vs Slaanesh Daemons, Admech and Orks supposed to be a top 3 army? The prevalence of Marines in tournaments and everybody building to counter Marines leaves an army like Harlequins in an incredible spot, similar to Daemons and Orks really. Nobody builds to counter these armies, so their strengths right now are very meta dependent (even though there are obviously incredibly powerful elements to their books, Harlies especially)

I basically look at it from the perspective of the armies I play (CWE, Necrons and Orks) and consider what would give me the most trouble with all of them. In all 3 cases, Marines and Sisters have elements that leave me with no real answers for some of the stuff they bring to the table, or the answers I do have are just brutalized in pure cost-efficiency trade-offs. Marines especially because a lot of their stuff is so straightforward and easy to execute while being very low-risk. Sisters still have some glaring weaknesses to exploit and a lot more moving parts at least.

In all honesty, how are Chaos Knights NOT the worst army in the game right now? All the problems of the Knights in 9th, with none of the benefits of Chaos.

Nope, bottom 3 have to be: in no order Chaos knights, GSC, and IG (Pure).

Because at least Chaos Knights can summon bodies.

It’s not enough to make them approach good, but it puts them above the absolute bottom.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
In all honesty, how are Chaos Knights NOT the worst army in the game right now? All the problems of the Knights in 9th, with none of the benefits of Chaos.

Nope, bottom 3 have to be: in no order Chaos knights, GSC, and IG (Pure).

arent chaos knights actually pulling in wins right now?

weakest i've ever seen SM yet was midway through 8th. And even then at their worst Ultramarines could make top tables, they were just lower mid. And for the rest of the edition, both preceeding it and following it, they were extremely OP. If Marines were ANY other army these kinda statements would get laughed outta every discussion, it's just that so many of you play them and so many of you are SO bad and SO biased. Knights spent a longer window of 8th in a worse position than Marines, can you imagine someone saying Knights were a weak army in 8th? just absurd. These armies were some of the strongest bs we saw, and stayed that way for an extremely long period.

 Da-Rock wrote:

 Crafter91 wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

Space Marines have a bazillion special rules.
Harlequins and Daemons are both fast and have invulnerable saves, making them able to snatch objectives and maneuver around the board while enduring the absolute HURRICANE of high-AP fire that comes out of - you guessed it - space marines.

Yeah, some things never change. SM have always been the front runners. Interesting points about the ++saves though. I'm looking forward to more objective based games so that's certainly worth bearing in mind.

Huh? Space Marines have always been front runners? Have you been playing long? If you have then you would know Space Marines became "average in 7th Edition, good at the beginning of 8th and powerful from the end of 8th to 9th edition. "Some things never change".......lol! (I guess you're right since players retroactively place OPness on all armies as soon as they read someone else's post claiming something is too powerful).

this man just called Gladius "average" and is tryna act like a competitive historian lol.

Xenomancer at the very least has been perfectly consistent throughout his career.

Whatever army Xenomancer is currently playing is the worst, super hard done by, absolutely awful.

Whatever army Xenomancer most recently played is the most OP broken cheese.

Yeah, it was quite entertaining watching Necron's go from OP to worthless the more Xenomancers committed to them as his current army.

A.T. wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Was there ever a time where Marines didn't have some top placing lists?

Top placed marine list at the 2014 Nova tournament was a mixed wolf/marine list taking 13th.
Top places were eldar, eldar, chaos, crons(miscosted), tau(triptides), eldar, eldar, eldar, eldar, chaos, chaos, and chaos.

And in 2014, the top army at LVO was 2nd place. And that is rather important since the Space Marines had yet to get their Decurion formation in 7th edition yet. Imagine that. Without the Gladius formation a SM player finished 2nd. 7th edition was almost completely dominated by Eldar, Tau and Space Marines.

 Xenomancers wrote:


Middle tier is space marines/ eldar/ CSM/Orks/ Necrons. These armies have what it takes to win games but they have much less busted rules.

Ah, good old Xeno, "my army is so bad, they never are better than mid tier :( " The Per aspera GT Space Marines finished 1st, 6th, 7th and 9th. In 40kstats (which is woefully outdated for some reason) SM's have 12 top 4 finishes in the last 10 GTs. Generally speaking, a faction which has more top 4 placings than the # of tournaments is not "Middle Tier". Harlies only have 5 in that same time frame.

 Da-Rock wrote:


Huh? Space Marines have always been front runners? Have you been playing long? If you have then you would know Space Marines became "average in 7th Edition, good at the beginning of 8th and powerful from the end of 8th to 9th edition. "Some things never change".......lol! (I guess you're right since players retroactively place OPness on all armies as soon as they read someone else's post claiming something is too powerful).

Power wise? yeah, I can't remember how long its been since SM's weren't top 5. As mentioned, in 7th when you said they were "average" they were literally one of the top 3 and it was a toss up for who won between Tau Triptide, Eldar Shenanigans and SM Gladius. In 8th SM started out as literally the best faction, dropped once Knights became OP but were still placing and being used as allies in top placing lists and finished the edition as the most broken army in the entire game bar none. I've broken down the statistics for SM defenders before (like Xenos) but basically all those claims are patently false. Middle tier factions don't consistently place highly in major events like LVO, adepticon etc.

Finally, on topic.

Top 3 most powerful armies in the game right now are
Space Marines
Necrons
and a toss up for 3rd between Custodes, SoB and Harlies.

Space Marines because they have a tool for every job and that tool for some reason is better than basically every other factions similar tool and more points efficient as well.

Necrons, honestly they have a strong codex with a lot of good options to build with.

And the toss up: Custodes are placing really well, they have a lot of hard counters to SM lists which allow them to sometimes dominate (Invuln saves and good dmg output) but struggle against horde forces or similarly elite forces (Harlies or other custodes)

SoB: I don't understand how they are doing so well but SoB are doing wonderful right now and I for one love it. They also rely a bit on heavy bolters which are at least decent for whittling down hordes as well as killing elite infantry.

Harlies: They are just simply put the hard counter to SM. They also tend to bring a lot of dakka and can deal with hordes better than a lot of top lists right now.

3 worst factions? Tau (They can't hold centerfield objectives)
Knights Imperial/Chaos flavors: They can't hold objectives in general and no board control because they have like 3 models.
and finally Thousand Sons. They just don't have the staying power right now, maybe when Chaos gets their buff they will turn it around.