Afrodactyl wrote:I agree, we're way too swingy a faction to start relying on maths and averages
I've had a foot beastboss tank a full round of shooting from a Drukhari list and then the next game he and his unit got mulched in a single round by a bunch of wyches.
I couldn't disagree more. Since we roll a ton of dice and have bad saves, orks are probably one of the least swingy factions out there.
I guess if you play and watch a lot of games, you can learn which units are good into which enemy units just from observation or you might be talented and just do it right by gut feeling.
But in the end, the truth is that there is math behind it, and understanding and applying that math will make you win more games.
One of the biggest mistake in the
40k community is always looking at averages to figure out how much damage a unit will deal. Averages are good to compare similar units to each other, but not to figure out whether your weapon is good at killing another unit. Variance is just as important, but it's a fairly difficult concept to understand, calculate or even eyeball for most people.
For example, let's take a kill rig. Is it worth firing a kill rig at death shroud terminators (4W,T7, 2+/4++)?
Eavy lobba
d6 attacks
BS 5+ S6
AP 0 2dmg => average 0.13
dmg
Stikka kannon 1 attack
BS 5+ S12
AP-2 3dmg => average 0.33
dmg
Wurrtower d3 attacks torrent, S12
AP-3
d6 dmg => average 2.33
dmg
So on average, you should deal 3 damage to a deathshroud, leaving it a 1 life. Going by average, it looks like a bad deal, but you might get lucky and kill that one terminator if you shoot everything at it, right?
Wrong. The heavy lobba isn't a terrible gun, but it has no
AP and less strength than the deathshroud's toughness. Even if you do hit, wounding on fives and hoping for your opponent to roll a 1 is so unlikely that you might as well assume it doesn't. You are much better off shooting it at plague marines which give you much better odds at 4+ to wound and 3+ saves, plus every failed save will remove a body. You can also try to shoot a unit of poxwalkers and make use of blast. If somehow none of that is within 48", a demon engine with 3+ armor is still twice as likely to take damage than a
DG terminator.
So how about the stikka? From pure averages, it might feel like being just as bad as the lobba. It's a single shot BS5+ gun, so it's most likely going to miss anyways. Always move and play as if it misses, don't let snagged lure you into bad situations. Despite anti-big fing 2+, it's still a good gun to shoot at other things, especially 3 wound models. Against deathshrouds, if it hits, it's going to wound on 3+ and damage 50% of the time which isn't bad odds at all. You are also unlikely to lose damage to overkill, so taking 2-3 wounds out of a death shroud isn't a bad deal at all. The only to not shoot it at the deathshrouds for me would be if there is drone or
MBH nearby - more than half the hits will damage them, and you get to charge those high threat targets a bonus. Though, to be fair, if you have a kill rig within 12" of a
MBH unit and it's not dead, Gork and Mork are already smiling at you.
PBC on the flip side have 2+ armor, more wounds and not as much damage as it might seem, so in most cases, I would rather take 3 wounds out of terminator and finish it off with tank shock than to inconvenience a super durrable artillery piece.
The last, and most interesting one, is the
Deff Ray Wurrtower. It looks like a decent weapon to fire into terminators, but is in reality not as good as average claim. d3 shots, auto-hitting, 3+ to wound, 50% chance to fail saves all are decent numbers.
D6 damage averages to 3.5 and looks good on paper. However, the actual chance a shot to damage a deathshroud is 33.33%. Two out of 3 times, it will do nothing. One out of three times, this will be your only shot.
On top of that, deathshroud have 4 wounds, so if you deal damage once, you are not that likely to lose damage to overkill if you remember to shoot this before the stikka. The issue is that if the terminators fail two saves, the most likely outcome is still killing 0-1 terminators. Even at three shots, the most likely outcome is just one dead terminator.
So is worth firing the Wurrtower at deathshrouds? Probably not. It will take a huge chunk out most demon engines, including in
PBC, so those should be its priority targets. It's not terrible at killing terminators, but not great either.
Another example would be nobz. During the Waaagh! you get an impressive 49 attacks from a unit lead by a warboss, causing an impressive ~14 unsaved wounds and most likely killing terminators, maybe 2, but very likely not the attached character. Typhus or
LOC will then take a heavy toll on your unit before dying in the next round of combat.
Don't try this against Virulent Vectorium(sticky objective detachment) if they have 2CP open. They will half your damage and then murder your unit.
In general S8+
AP-2 2dmg weapons are a good choice against death shrouds. Sadly, orks don't have those in sufficient numbers outside of
PKs.
I hope it somewhat makes sense, but these kind of decisions are exactly the reason why people lose against my
DG, even when playing armies that should play well into them. People will just point big guns and scary looking melee units at those terminators and assume that this is enough to make them go away. Then their big guns bounce off, their expensive units are exposed without weakening my army in a meaningful way. All I need to do then is to blow up those exposed scary units before they can harm units they are actually good against.
TL;DR: Math is never irrelevant, and I feel like it's more important than ever before. Dice will always do dice things, but you need a proper plan for when things just go normal.
