Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Tyel wrote:

Breton wrote:

I didn't mention attrition, Nobody mentioned attrition but you. I just questioned why your claims and complaints don't even stand up to your own exemplar math. You complained Marines would have 25% of the spots in the event, and the finals - even though in a 50/50 balance that's exactly how it's supposed to work out. You complained a faction with far fewer spots in the event also had far fewer spots in the finals. That when we pull the factions involved in your opinion out, the numbers make sense, when we leave the Marines in... well your point makes a different kind of sense.

I mean, I don't know if you have Tyran on ignore, but there's a post just above:

 Tyran wrote:
Marines have such a massive play rate that even before the recent changes when they were suffering from something like 35% win rates, they were still getting top placings because of sheer attrition.

I probably hadn't read it yet.

Admittedly, I perhaps emphasised more than Tyran intended. The issue is that if you assume tournament results were a function of luck, you'd expect every faction to be represented to some degree, and this hasn't been the case.

We're not assuming that. We're assuming tournament results are a fuction of 50/50 win rate balance. That was the entire premise. That a faction with 25% of the entries should have 25% of the top spots because half the time they win, half the time they don't so you just forward through the entry %.

I'm not complaining that a faction with far fewer spots got far fewer spots in the finals. Clearly if the game was balanced and there was no bias in pick-rate amongst top players you'd expect them to match.
I'm trying to explain that the game *isn't* balanced and factions *don't* place according to their play rate. So if marines are placing its because they are good - and when they stop placing, its because they have become bad.

Are you sure?

Yes, you are right, in terms of win% harlequins, slaanesh daemons, Sisters were all way above Marines. And more likely to win tournaments.
But tournaments were flooded with Marines - and top 4s were flooded them them in turn.
And this would continue through 2021.

Because that sounds like you're saying that not only were Marines not the best positioned on Rules, they still had a higher population count so to speak and were thus getting some spots in the finals.

I disagree with the idea that Marines were not dominant from 9th's release until at least the DE release, and really probably another 3-6 months in 2021. I believe you can determine that by measuring their tournament results. I.E. lots of placings and wins. In terms of win% they were less good yes than certain factions. You see in 2020 for example a lot of larger tournaments (say 40+ players) have just 2-3 Harlequin players, but one of them gets top 4, if not outright wins it. Its hard to claim however it was a Harlequin meta though - with so few players, odds were low you'd even play one before the final. Sisters had a moment before the new Codex but with the upgraded MM ran rampant in win% - but Marines are still all over the placings.

Flash forward to very late 2021, and especially early 2022, and I don't think all the Marine players just spontaneously decided to quit 40k. So the "they make it through attrition" should have continued to apply. But it seems despite still being the most played faction collectively, they essentially ceased to exist on the top tables. So the safe conclusion is that Marines were becoming a lot worse into the rest of the codexes. An age of "There's 1-2 difficult matchups" had given way to "most factions are better, you will need to ride your luck". (Although the BA list seemed to have reliable legs.)

I'd point out that you're both not:
Providing participation and win % numbers
Allowing for the lead time in Army switches. It takes time to junk one army for another, get the new one painted up and tabletop ready so the changes you see in June are likely the payoff from changes made in January for example.

 Tyran wrote:
Marines have such a massive play rate that even before the recent changes when they were suffering from something like 35% win rates, they were still getting top placings because of sheer attrition.

The sad thing is that they are a special faction, their sheer numbers define meta (hence why everything that is good at killing Marines is spammed) and if we don't want 25%-50% of the top placings being Marines then we need them to be chronically underpowered, but I don't believe that would be fair to Marine players.

Marines do not need to be chronically under-powered. Nor am I against Marines making up a decent percent of tournament wins. The problem is that when you know for a fact that 30-50% of the armies you are likely to face at a GT are going to be a Marine statline or something damn close to it, then you will as a result build into that kind of a list. Why did D2 weapons become all the rage? Why did AP2+ become all the rage? It was because players knew that a vast majority of their opponents at GTs would be bringing Marines and therefore they brought the weapons that worked best against them. So the problem isn't underpower or overpower, the problem is popularity and statistical likelihood and before a Marine player comes in here screaming about fairness I want to make point abundantly clear.

Army 1 should be as competitive as Army 2 and army 3 should be just as competitive as armies 1 and 2 etc. But if I know i'm going to play against Army 1 all the time i'm going to list build against them which means I have a better likelihood to win against that army because I have built mine to deal with his specifically. While that might make me weaker against armies 2 and 3, I can make up for that difference in the borderline sure knowledge that they have likely done the same.

At the end of the day, if I list build against Marines I have a significantly better chance to beat that Marine player than he has to beat me because i'll bet you dollars to donuts that he didn't list build with an Ork army in mind who only make up 10% of the playerbase.

The real question I have would be, what is the actual Marine Win rate if you could normalize the armies so that they weren't taking anti-Marine weapons. Id bet its not great but it would probably have been in the low 40s if not higher.

SemperMortis wrote:
Marines do not need to be chronically under-powered. Nor am I against Marines making up a decent percent of tournament wins. The problem is that when you know for a fact that 30-50% of the armies you are likely to face at a GT are going to be a Marine statline or something damn close to it, then you will as a result build into that kind of a list. Why did D2 weapons become all the rage? Why did AP2+ become all the rage? It was because players knew that a vast majority of their opponents at GTs would be bringing Marines and therefore they brought the weapons that worked best against them. So the problem isn't underpower or overpower, the problem is popularity and statistical likelihood and before a Marine player comes in here screaming about fairness I want to make point abundantly clear.

I would add to your reasonings that weapon profiles are not differentiated enough, neither in points nor in efficiency against their preferred target. There is very little incentive to take anti-horde weapons even against horde armies. You usually have enough of that kind of firepower on your non-special weapon dudes and the anti-marine stuff is only marginally more expensive than their counterparts.

a_typical_hero wrote:

SemperMortis wrote:
Marines do not need to be chronically under-powered. Nor am I against Marines making up a decent percent of tournament wins. The problem is that when you know for a fact that 30-50% of the armies you are likely to face at a GT are going to be a Marine statline or something damn close to it, then you will as a result build into that kind of a list. Why did D2 weapons become all the rage? Why did AP2+ become all the rage? It was because players knew that a vast majority of their opponents at GTs would be bringing Marines and therefore they brought the weapons that worked best against them. So the problem isn't underpower or overpower, the problem is popularity and statistical likelihood and before a Marine player comes in here screaming about fairness I want to make point abundantly clear.

I would add to your reasonings that weapon profiles are not differentiated enough, neither in points nor in efficiency against their preferred target. There is very little incentive to take anti-horde weapons even against horde armies. You usually have enough of that kind of firepower on your non-special weapon dudes and the anti-marine stuff is only marginally more expensive than their counterparts.

I'd say its probably an issue of guns being good against marines tend to be good against vehicles because of decent AP and minimum D2, and also they're good against hordes because they tend to give these weapons a medium to high rate of fire.
So marines are a very significant portion of the player base and have a high level of tournament play (to varying degrees of success), so everyone gears up to kill marines and only take a handful of guns to kill the harder or softer targets, if they take any of those weapons at all.

The game has crept back to older editions where you'd just take plasma and autocannons on everything and brute force your way through, and never the flamers or lascannons designed to kill a more specific target.

Breton wrote:

I'd point out that you're both not:
Providing participation and win % numbers
Allowing for the lead time in Army switches. It takes time to junk one army for another, get the new one painted up and tabletop ready so the changes you see in June are likely the payoff from changes made in January for example.

Well, from Blood of Kittens, we get that Marines placed top 3 in 197 major ITC tournaments in 9th edition up to 3rd January 2023.
This puts them second to Aeldari (201) and equal with Tyranids. Perhaps surprisingly, that's 33% more placings (154) than Dark Eldar.
I can't be bothered to go through say Reddit's Meta Monday or other sources of data every week for 2.5 years. From what I can see Marines were placing fine in 2020 and continues into 2021. Their numbers then began to decline.

I feel the idea tournament players are taking months to paint up tournament lists is a bit unrealistic. We'd have never seen a Voidweaver shoot in anger.

 Afrodactyl wrote:

The game has crept back to older editions where you'd just take plasma and autocannons on everything and brute force your way through, and never the flamers or lascannons designed to kill a more specific target.

Exactly my point on why Heavy Bolters didn't need to go to D2.

If you wanted to fix that representation and ensure you have to REALLY go into a TAC list, make it so you submit the list when entering the tournament, and reject players when a faction has hit a particular number of entries.

a_typical_hero 808330 11481243 wrote:

I would add to your reasonings that weapon profiles are not differentiated enough, neither in points nor in efficiency against their preferred target. There is very little incentive to take anti-horde weapons even against horde armies. You usually have enough of that kind of firepower on your non-special weapon dudes and the anti-marine stuff is only marginally more expensive than their counterparts.

I don't think the problem is there being not enough targets for flamers or lascanons, as comparing to the plasma gun. The problem is that a flamer doing d6 hits and a lascanon doing d6 wound is a horrible weapon. Both are bad weapons, even if they were free and other options exist, they would still be bad.

Now we could invent stuff to make flamers or lascanon useful, maybe even without making them a lot better. Although flamers doing 3+d3 hits and lascanons doing 3+d3 wounds wouldn't break the game. Maybe flamers could be used to create impassible walls of flame. Maybe a hit from a lascanon would do more, then just do wound. Maybe it has some EMP effect making a vehicle hit worse, or the damage it does is so extensive that it makes other weapons hurt the target easier. It could differentiate the guns from weapons which just flat high damage to targets and no special rules. But it would be really hard to control in a game of 2000pts and potentialy 10-20+ of such weapon per side. Suddenly taking 3 units of sternguard with combi flamers and heavy flamers could make the turn of a marine player last 20 extra minutes. So who knows maybe the problem are the left over skirmish rule in a system, which stopped being a skirmish system editions ago. Maybe we should just have long range anti tank weapon, short range anti tank weapon, same for anti personal, and then some sort of "flamer" type weapon. And the differentiation of how units and armies used, should be based on the units and armies special rules and not what ever GW blessed them with the correct weapon load out.

 Afrodactyl wrote:
The game has crept back to older editions where you'd just take plasma and autocannons on everything and brute force your way through, and never the flamers or lascannons designed to kill a more specific target.

Multi-meltas are way more efficient than plasma or heavy bolters against monsters/vehicles. Having flamers is pretty good against melee hordes because of Overwatch, unfortunately you need more than one flamer for that to really matter, maybe flamers should just get free Overwatch since they don't represent the same stupid time sink that firing your whole army in the enemy charge phase does.

SemperMortis wrote:

Why did D2 weapons become all the rage?

Because the upcharge for D2 is next to Nil - in fact they gave it to the Heavy Bolter and other places for free. Not just for Marines, but also (Mega)Nobz, DeffCoptas, Tyranid Warriors, (Assorted) Swarms, Bikes, Wraithbone elites, Necron Wraiths, Destroyers, etc.

Why did AP2+ become all the rage?

Again because they gave it out like candy and its also useful on so many non-marine units? I mean, are you really trying to imply people wouldn't take highly efficient AP-2 D2 weapons for all those units and more because the event was the First Annual Xenos Only Invitational?
On a related note, have you thought of hosting such an event as a better way of exorcising your bias instead of pretending so many armies don't have something or many somethings in the same stat band that are auto-take or nearly so to the point we've created the term MEQ to refer to them collectively?

It was because players knew that a vast majority of their opponents at GTs would be bringing Marines and therefore they brought the weapons that worked best against them.

On a related note, have you thought of hosting such an event as a better way of exorcising your bias instead of pretending so many armies don't have something or many somethings in the same stat band that are auto-take or nearly so to the point we've created the term MEQ to refer to them collectively?



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Tyel wrote:

Breton wrote:

I'd point out that you're both not:
Providing participation and win % numbers
Allowing for the lead time in Army switches. It takes time to junk one army for another, get the new one painted up and tabletop ready so the changes you see in June are likely the payoff from changes made in January for example.

Well, from Blood of Kittens, we get that Marines placed top 3 in 197 major ITC tournaments in 9th edition up to 3rd January 2023.
This puts them second to Aeldari (201) and equal with Tyranids. Perhaps surprisingly, that's 33% more placings (154) than Dark Eldar.
I can't be bothered to go through say Reddit's Meta Monday or other sources of data every week for 2.5 years. From what I can see Marines were placing fine in 2020 and continues into 2021. Their numbers then began to decline.

And you're still missing Particiation numbers. How many chances (i.e. how many entries were a Placing Army out of how many total entries per faction?)

I feel the idea tournament players are taking months to paint up tournament lists is a bit unrealistic. We'd have never seen a Voidweaver shoot in anger.

To which I'd point out a single model is (usually)not an entire army, and low model availability/count armies like Harlequinns or Custodes where assembly line painting fewer unique models may not be the most honest exception proving the rule you could have chosen.

Wasn't one of the early changes of 9th them making power weapons flat damage? Power swords went to flat 2, and hammers flat 3?

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
Wasn't one of the early changes of 9th them making power weapons flat damage? Power swords went to flat 2, and hammers flat 3?

Not really.

A lot of weapons with random damage got a fixed D2 instead of Dd3. Hammers were always D3, but were knocked down a peg to AP-2. Then Power Fists were one of those Dd3 weapons that became D2.

So, here is a top 8 listing from an AoO GT with 228 players(Courtesy of r/warhammercompetitive).

So far, good variety of factions at Adelaide Uprising Top 8 after 6 games:

Adeptus Custodes

T'au Empire

Dark Angels

Adeptus Mechanicus

Chaos Demons

Knights Renegades

Adeptus Custodes

Astra Militarum

That's one Space Marine faction. I get the feeling OP is forgetting that losing Armor of Contempt is a huge blow to Marines and makes everything else deadlier.

Losing AoC definitely hurt my Death Guard. The points drop alone wasn't enough imo.

Mark of Nurgle rules from CSM coming over to DG would be a nice sustain boost as a starting point.

To add to this there were 4 loyalist Marines in the top 24, 2 dark angels and 2 space wolves.

Is it better to have loved, then lost, than to never have loved at all?

Replace love with "having Armor of Contempt"

It always felt like a bandaid, and now that it's been ripped off, GW might actually have to... find another way to balance their game.

drbored wrote:
Is it better to have loved, then lost, than to never have loved at all?

Replace love with "having Armor of Contempt"

It always felt like a bandaid, and now that it's been ripped off, GW might actually have to... find another way to balance their game.

The game wasn't balanced with AoC, it wasn't a bandaid it was a wrong turn.

 Eldarsif wrote:
So, here is a top 8 listing from an AoO GT with 228 players(Courtesy of r/warhammercompetitive).

So far, good variety of factions at Adelaide Uprising Top 8 after 6 games:

Adeptus Custodes

T'au Empire

Dark Angels

Adeptus Mechanicus

Chaos Demons

Knights Renegades

Adeptus Custodes

Astra Militarum

That's one Space Marine faction. I get the feeling OP is forgetting that losing Armor of Contempt is a huge blow to Marines and makes everything else deadlier.

Possibly, but we should be careful about drawing conclusions from a single event. I think a lot of the new changes will require SM players to make big changes to their armies which may take a little while to filter through the meta. I'm equally sure there are a bunch of non-SM lists that are now very powerful and we may have seen some of them here.

Slipspace wrote:
Possibly, but we should be careful about drawing conclusions from a single event. I think a lot of the new changes will require SM players to make big changes to their armies which may take a little while to filter through the meta. I'm equally sure there are a bunch of non-SM lists that are now very powerful and we may have seen some of them here.

You've got the secondary changes as well.

As an edit, looks like Dark Angels had the highest win rate of the weekend at 65% - but clearly a tiny number of players.

 vict0988 wrote:

drbored wrote:
Is it better to have loved, then lost, than to never have loved at all?

Replace love with "having Armor of Contempt"

It always felt like a bandaid, and now that it's been ripped off, GW might actually have to... find another way to balance their game.

The game wasn't balanced with AoC, it wasn't a bandaid it was a wrong turn.

wasn't it? Did marines of all flavor not get a leg up that they sorely needed?

 Eldarsif wrote:
So, here is a top 8 listing from an AoO GT with 228 players(Courtesy of r/warhammercompetitive).

So far, good variety of factions at Adelaide Uprising Top 8 after 6 games:

Adeptus Custodes

T'au Empire

Dark Angels

Adeptus Mechanicus

Chaos Demons

Knights Renegades

Adeptus Custodes

Astra Militarum

That's one Space Marine faction. I get the feeling OP is forgetting that losing Armor of Contempt is a huge blow to Marines and makes everything else deadlier.

Certainly the marine meta hasn't arisen, but this is also a small dataset and people will take time to get their hands around the changes.

Here's the Meta Monday visualized from most players to least. The two most notable things, in my opinion, are how crushed Nids are and how DA might be the ones to beat. The quantities are still small and DA won no tournaments, so a more granular look is needed at what they took and who they faced.

Also Harlies managed to hang on to 50% even with just a 5++. Only time will tell if that's a middling 50% or not.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

drbored wrote:
Is it better to have loved, then lost, than to never have loved at all?

Replace love with "having Armor of Contempt"

It always felt like a bandaid, and now that it's been ripped off, GW might actually have to... find another way to balance their game.

The game wasn't balanced with AoC, it wasn't a bandaid it was a wrong turn.

wasn't it? Did marines of all flavor not get a leg up that they sorely needed?

SM were below 45% WR with AoC I think. They might as well have given them free wargear and sticky objectives if they are just going to throw pasta at the wall until it sticks.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Eldarsif wrote:
So, here is a top 8 listing from an AoO GT with 228 players(Courtesy of r/warhammercompetitive).

So far, good variety of factions at Adelaide Uprising Top 8 after 6 games:

Adeptus Custodes

T'au Empire

Dark Angels

Adeptus Mechanicus

Chaos Demons

Knights Renegades

Adeptus Custodes

Astra Militarum

That's one Space Marine faction. I get the feeling OP is forgetting that losing Armor of Contempt is a huge blow to Marines and makes everything else deadlier.

Certainly the marine meta hasn't arisen, but this is also a small dataset and people will take time to get their hands around the changes.

Here's the Meta Monday visualized from most players to least. The two most notable things, in my opinion, are how crushed Nids are and how DA might be the ones to beat. The quantities are still small and DA won no tournaments, so a more granular look is needed at what they took and who they faced.

Also Harlies managed to hang on to 50% even with just a 5++. Only time will tell if that's a middling 50% or not.

My read of it is that the Marine Factions that benefited from it the most were those that had a lot of special wargear (DA, SW, BT) that allowed them to take a lot of their more unique gear for free now, especially if they had some really good stuff held in check by how expensive they were. Blood Angles being the exception, and I don't know if that's because they just don't have as much unique wargear or Wargear Synergies to hand out, or if they're just undertuned compared to the three mentioned above.

Blood Angels have the issue that they are an assault subfaction and assault units didn't really got a lot of free wargear and the doctrine changes inherently benefit shooting subfactions (which is why it is a dumb change).

Also they seriously needed AoC to survive enough to get into melee.

 Tyran wrote:
Blood Angels have the issue that they are an assault subfaction and assault units didn't really got a lot of free wargear and the doctrine changes inherently benefit shooting subfactions (which is why it is a dumb change).

Also they seriously needed AoC to survive enough to get into melee.

How do 1W models with a 4+ Sv survive enough to get into melee?

 ProfSrlojohn wrote:

My read of it is that the Marine Factions that benefited from it the most were those that had a lot of special wargear (DA, SW, BT) that allowed them to take a lot of their more unique gear for free now, especially if they had some really good stuff held in check by how expensive they were. Blood Angles being the exception, and I don't know if that's because they just don't have as much unique wargear or Wargear Synergies to hand out, or if they're just undertuned compared to the three mentioned above.

The one from Uprising was as follows:

Lazarus
Talonmaster
Sammael

2x5 Infiltrators
DW Ancient
2x DW Command
2x10 DW Termie TH&SS

RW Apoth

3x3 ABs w/ MM

They saved 200 points on the terminators and 90 on the attack bikes. Probably 400 in total with the character drops.

Honestly it's just saying go ahead and try to kill these transhuman terminators with storm shields who act as if they still have AoC, basically. They probably dump the attack bikes on to anything they think can threaten a block with ranged since almost nothing can shift that one on one in melee.

Also an item of note is that the terrain at this tournament was very heavy, which lends to immovable terminators doing well.





Automatically Appended Next Post:
At the Toronto Winter Open it was :

Azrael
Ezekiel
DW Champ
5x DW Knights Mace & SS
3x10 DW Termies ( half bolter & chainfist / half TH & SS )
RW Apoth
10 Relic Termies Bolter & LC

So again nothing very killy outside of melee ( cyclones help a little ). Just a lot of hard to remove units.


And at Fantasianorth it was :

Azrael
Libby w/ JP
2x Talonmaster
6 Infiltrators
2x10 Termies w/ PF & SB
5 Termies w/ PF

Apoth

3 Outriders
3 Cent Devs w/ LC

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 ProfSrlojohn wrote:

My read of it is that the Marine Factions that benefited from it the most were those that had a lot of special wargear (DA, SW, BT) that allowed them to take a lot of their more unique gear for free now, especially if they had some really good stuff held in check by how expensive they were. Blood Angles being the exception, and I don't know if that's because they just don't have as much unique wargear or Wargear Synergies to hand out, or if they're just undertuned compared to the three mentioned above.

The one from Uprising was as follows:

Lazarus
Talonmaster
Sammael

2x5 Infiltrators
DW Ancient
2x DW Command
2x10 DW Termie TH&SS

RW Apoth

3x3 ABs w/ MM

They saved 200 points on the terminators and 90 on the attack bikes. Probably 400 in total with the character drops.

Honestly it's just saying go ahead and try to kill these transhuman terminators with storm shields who act as if they still have AoC, basically. They probably dump the attack bikes on to anything they think can threaten a block with ranged since almost nothing can shift that one on one in melee.

Also an item of note is that the terrain at this tournament was very heavy, which lends to immovable terminators doing well.

Goodness. Yeah that's about what I expected. Terminators in general I expect will be very good in the upcoming meta since all their wargear is free. Yeah the "thunderhammers on everything" list is absurd, but it becomes terrifyingly real when those free thunder hammers and shields are on Termies, and lots of them. Vanguard vets will probably be in a similar boat for those that want fast attack. For vanguard vets you might as well just take regular company vets for the price unless you really want the Special Issue boltguns,since the Company vets get stormshields and their special weapons are all the same price now.

TH&SS terminators are now extremely good, but even more terrifying in a Deathwing platform with free transhuman for everyone.

But as long as their win rate sits in that magical 45%-55% Goldilocks zone, everything is A-Ok, right?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
But as long as their win rate sits in that magical 45%-55% Goldilocks zone, everything is A-Ok, right?

Exactly! So what if you go 0-10, some random player on the other side of the world went 10-0 spamming TH/SS terminators and the two of you combined were a perfect 50%. It's the faction as a whole* that matters, not your individual experiences**.

*At least in tournaments. Non-tournament games don't count because collecting that data would be hard.

**Unless you're a playtester, in which case you are encouraged to lobby GW to make your personal army win more as long as you make up for it by nerfing some of the units you don't use.

There are only two ways two players can go 10-0 and 0-10 with the same Faction playing the same Tournament Rules:
[spoiler]One Player has a crap list while the other has a fantastic list

One player is a crap player and the other is a fantastic player[list]
So, yes. It is fine to call that a 50% win rate. Depending on which of the above is true and as more players join in, a more true win-rate will arise. That is why you don't decide anything off of such a low sample size.