Aos Metawatch 03/07-01/08

[Ragest]

All data collected from 5-man tournaments around the world.

Source: DKHM Wargames

Nor surprises on top5, maybe DoK is a little worse that I thought. Idoneth falling down and Sylvaneth slowly improving their results. Seraphon still on top, that’s a surprise for me.

Tournaments involved: Lone Star Open, War  Under the Mountain, Saga of flame Cult, The London Open, Mancunian Carnage, The Lost and the Damned, Gamecon 2021.

If you know more 5-man tournaments send me to be added to the table.

[Kadeton]

Interesting! I'm not sure what the purpose of combining the win rate and % meta into "DKHM rate" is, can you give a bit more detail on what that data point is supposed to indicate?

Very surprised that Deepkin seem to be doing so badly (maybe they're still all just spamming eels?), as well as Ironjawz. Kharadrons on par with Blades of Khorne?!

What's the reasoning on splitting Warclans into its three variants, and not any of the other battletomes which have similarly strong divisions? I'd be quite interested to see the split between Beastclaw Raiders and regular Mawtribes, for example. Surprised and delighted to see so many Ogor armies though!

[Christopher Rowe]

I'm not sure what all this means, but it's amazing work! Kind of reinforces what people have been saying about Beasts of Chaos languishing in "Desperately-Needs-Updating-Ville."

I'll be contributing to that loss column for Seraphon once I decide it's safe to return to tournaments!

[BigNStinky]

Kind of surprising to see bonesplitterz outcompeting ironjawz ev en if the number of games played could make this an anomaly.

 

Beasts of Chaos is just abysmal they got hurt by the new edition badly and they weren't really taking top tables before it.

 

Sons near the top tracks with my experiences so far.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

Thank you for this, that's interesting data.

A few datapoints that caught my eye:

Mawtribes looks like they are underperforming. They should have all the tools they need to be successful in AoS 3. But I think their low win rate might be explained by them being a popular new player army (which is reflected in their number of games played as well) and maybe pure Gutbusters lists dragging down the average a bit.

I'm surprised to see Seraphon slumming it with below Cities and Soulblight in terms of win%. Is this due to the loss of battalions or the Kroak rebalancing? Whatever may be the case, it seems like Seraphon are no longer as oppressive as they used to be.

Nurgle is a bit of a surprise at that high of a win rate. The faction seems strong, but not quite 60% win rate strong. But at only 35 games played, that might not really be representative.

Sylvaneth seem to finally have stabilized. It seems like new Allarielle and the Warsong Revenant were enough to get them squarly into the fat middle with all the "fair" factions. A good place to be. Surprisingly, Ossiarch Bonereapers are also found here, despite AoS 3 rules being very unkind to them.

Personally, I don't find the top tier surprising: Tzeentch (who is getting up there into "needs a nerf" territory), DoK, SoB, S2D, Nurgle. Maybe throw Lumineth in there. That all seems reasonable.

The bottom tier also has a lot of the usual suspects: Beasts, Nighthaunt, Khorne, Slaanesh, Gitz, Fyreslayers. Maybe FEC, but at only 10 games played that's not reliable. But there are a few unexpected armies, too, like Idoneth and Kharadron Overlords.

 

[Enoby]

Thanks for putting this together

There are two results that concern me - Beasts of Chaos and Sons of Behemoth. 

Beasts concern me because, despite consistently being the competitively worst army in all of AoS, they haven't ever caught a break despite multiple GHBs and a Broken Realms section about them (especially this one). It's really disappointing as it looks like GW don't care about them; this probably isn't the case, but to have an army be at the bottom consistently without a Tome Celestial or really much attempt to fix it in Kragnos is incredibly disappointing. Yes, an army will always be last, but it shouldn't be the same one or by such a large margin. Even people who don't play BoC should be concerned as you may find your army in their position, and it doesn't look like GW always has an interest in bringing armies up. 

Sons of Behemat concern me for similar reasons but on the opposite end of the scale. It's fine their good, but whereas BoC seemingly had minor attempts to balance them, SoB seem like they would struggle to be balanced at all. Unlike other armies where adding 100 points onto a list means you can't take a support hero or endless spell, if you do that to SoB they would lose a much larger chunk of their army. My question to SoB players is how much can your army increase in points to make a difference to their strength, but not obliterate them? 

That said, I am most concerned about BoC. Mostly for what this says about the rest of the game - or rather that the rules team are willing to let or unable to stop a faction being so far behind. Either way, I think it adds to the trepidation when someone's new book comes out as if it's poor competitively, there's no guarantee it'll be fixed.  

Edited August 9, 2021 by Enoby

[PrimeElectrid]

Sons could be reigned in by removing any 3-objective battleplan from the tournament pack (and *especially* the vice). These aren’t auto-wins, but not all armies can shift a mega gargant a turn for 3 turns to stop them racking up the score, let alone something like Apex Predator (Don’t have a god character that can kill a 35 wound gargant in melee? Oops).

I suspect Nurgle are doing well due to a similar principle: move onto objectives and don’t die, top it off with late game summoning.

 

[Skreech Verminking]

18 minutes ago, Enoby said:

Thanks for putting this together

There are two results that concern me - Beasts of Chaos and Sons of Behemoth. 

Beasts concern me because, despite consistently being the competitively worst army in all of AoS, they haven't ever caught a break despite multiple GHBs and a Broken Realms section about them (especially this one). It's really disappointing as it looks like GW don't care about them; this probably isn't the case, but to have an army be at the bottom consistently without a Tome Celestial or really much attempt to fix it in Kragnos is incredibly disappointing. Yes, an army will always be last, but it shouldn't be the same one or by such a large margin. Even people who don't play BoC should be concerned as you may find your army in their position, and it doesn't look like GW always has an interest in bringing armies up. 

Sons of Behemat concern me for similar reasons but on the opposite end of the scale. It's fine their good, but whereas BoC seemingly had minor attempts to balance them, SoB seem like they would struggle to be balanced at all. Unlike other armies where adding 100 points onto a list means you can't take a support hero or endless spell, if you do that to SoB they would lose a much larger chunk of their army. My question to SoB players is how much can your army increase in points to make a difference to their strength, but not obliterate them? 

That said, I am most concerned about BoC. Mostly for what this says about the rest of the game - or rather that the rules team are willing to let or unable to stop a faction being so far behind. Either way, I think it adds to the trepidation when someone's new book comes out as if it's poor competitively, there's no guarantee it'll be fixed.  

As a beast Player, I am very concerned, yet, they are an amazing Fun army to play with against friends.

And then there has  been recently  a rumour of an update for the beasts of chaos, which came from a pretty reliant source (although it could be false) Which kinda reliefs me of the concerning stress a bit.

So currently I’m just waiting to see what will happen.

 

[Dejnar]

Very interesting. 

We had a tournament with about 35 people a few weeks back. The final was DoK vs DoK.

So, first DoK went 6-0 and the second went 5-1 if you want to add that.

[Chikout]

I wonder how many of those winning tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaves lists had Archaon. I suspect it is a lot. 

[Kadeton]

The Beasts of Chaos should collectively defect and flock to the banner of Kragnos - a far more fitting leader for their faction. They could be the Beasts of Destruction instead.

I think the thing that makes me saddest about them is that they were designed to be played centrally around their Herdstone. Now any monster in the game can stroll up and kick it over like a sandcastle.

[Liquidsteel]

3 hours ago, Chikout said:

I wonder how many of those winning tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaves lists had Archaon. I suspect it is a lot. 

I don't think Nurgle will take Archaon, well they might but they don't need him to still be strong.

Nurgle is powerful because of it's resilience right now, and the tricks they can do with Farts. Sit on objectives, take the hits, remove models to within 3" and stand still. Opponent can't pile in so will need to waste a turn retreating, unless they have ways around it.

 

Edited August 9, 2021 by Liquidsteel

[Beliman]

4 hours ago, Enoby said:

Beasts concern me because, despite consistently being the competitively worst army in all of AoS, they haven't ever caught a break despite multiple GHBs and a Broken Realms section about them (especially this one). It's really disappointing as it looks like GW don't care about them; this probably isn't the case, but to have an army be at the bottom consistently without a Tome Celestial or really much attempt to fix it in Kragnos is incredibly disappointing. Yes, an army will always be last, but it shouldn't be the same one or by such a large margin. Even people who don't play BoC should be concerned as you may find your army in their position, and it doesn't look like GW always has an interest in bringing armies up. 

Completely agree. BoC seems cursed on the table, they were handicapped in Fantasy too. And, Imho, they are one of the best armies with a really unique design (anyone remember all that short stories about people disappearing near Drakwald forest? Goosebumps!!!).

Edited August 9, 2021 by Beliman

[MitGas]

4 hours ago, Chikout said:

I wonder how many of those winning tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaves lists had Archaon. I suspect it is a lot. 

Hmmm, interesting - didn't even think of that. I was hoping Tzeentch would be at a better/fairer spot now but it might just be without using broken combos (Archaon)...

[MitGas]

2 hours ago, Beliman said:

Completely agree. BoC seems cursed on the table, they were handicapped in Fantasy too. And, Imho, they are one of the best armies with a really unique design (anyone remember all that short stories about people disappearing near Drakwald forest? Goosebumps!!!).

Hell yeah, BoC were the "scary" and dark version of the ever-present threat Orks usually were portrayed as. They definitely deserve lots of love (much like many other factions.... Seraphon, Skaven, CoS, Malerion, now Chaos Dwarves - the list is long and full of really cool armies).😎

[Ragest]

23 hours ago, Kadeton said:

Interesting! I'm not sure what the purpose of combining the win rate and % meta into "DKHM rate" is, can you give a bit more detail on what that data point is supposed to indicate?

Very surprised that Deepkin seem to be doing so badly (maybe they're still all just spamming eels?), as well as Ironjawz. Kharadrons on par with Blades of Khorne?!

What's the reasoning on splitting Warclans into its three variants, and not any of the other battletomes which have similarly strong divisions? I'd be quite interested to see the split between Beastclaw Raiders and regular Mawtribes, for example. Surprised and delighted to see so many Ogor armies though!

The purpose is that just taking the winrate aside is hard to know where the army is really at. Imagine having one guy that wins the next 5-man tournament with chorfs, and chorfs are never played again, so they will be at top1 for 3 years.

 

5 hours ago, Dejnar said:

Very interesting. 

We had a tournament with about 35 people a few weeks back. The final was DoK vs DoK.

So, first DoK went 6-0 and the second went 5-1 if you want to add that.

Send me that tournament so i can put it on the table

[Kadeton]

10 minutes ago, Ragest said:

The purpose is that just taking the winrate aside is hard to know where the army is really at. Imagine having one guy that wins the next 5-man tournament with chorfs, and chorfs are never played again, so they will be at top1 for 3 years.

Ah, okay. Yeah, I get that the sample sizes are so small that outliers can heavily skew the data. Not sure that's the best way to account for it - with your rating, if army A is played 50 times and army B is played 100 times, A's winrate would have to be more than twice that of B in order to appear higher on the table, which seems kind of weird. I'd prefer to see some form of normalisation of results. Cool project though!

[greg19190]

5 hours ago, Chikout said:

I wonder how many of those winning tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaves lists had Archaon. I suspect it is a lot. 

the Tzeentch list that won the London open didn't have Archaon. used 3 lots of moving screamers screen and summoned 6 as well turn 1, used 2 lost of buffed chosen who were buffed up to the hilt and can fly, one got sent at a time to kill everything it touched. blue scribe was key to getting cast rerolls so was massive and kyross used to be a massive pain with the spell bridge and the 6 mortal wound stuff... add summoning through out the game and it could not be shifted and had punch. high drop though...

[Lord Krungharr]

I was a BoC player, but they have been shelved now, awaiting new oracular visions of greatness from Morghur, or whomever can unleash the full potential of Bullgors.

Now I'm an Ogor and SoB player, and had SoB come out a couple months earlier I wouldn't even have the Ogors, but they are always fun, even Gutbusters.  But SoBs, while not an autowin, is more powerful in 3.0.  Yes we got the points increases but the addition of the battleline role to the megagargants was very key in making that army tick.  Once 'next season' in some other Realm starts they won't be quite as potent because they won't score those extra monster-points for tactics.  

What might be fair is have the megas have to choose which battlefield role to fill.  Not all counting as heroes would limit their CA overdrive.  I think the points are pretty fair though.  The Kraken Eater and Warstomper really don't do much damage.  They just have a bunch of wounds.

[grimgold]

It's still early in the cycle of 3.0 once we start getting some battle tomes things should get a bit more balanced, but until then I sure hope they don't mega nerf StD.

[Honk]

20 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

Maybe FEC, but at only 10 games played that's not reliable.

Well, they took a hit in AoS 3.0…

smash bat battalion got lost, giving two units feeding frenzy, superbuffing of units got harder.

trouble with those statistics is, that they don’t really count in player skill. I guess, that the WaaC-Players will buy into the new hotness and max cheese, while the BoC players play their beloved army. They might do that very competently, but the crazy guys lay the crazy armies 🤔

 

[Kadeton]

22 minutes ago, Honk said:

trouble with those statistics is, that they don’t really count in player skill. I guess, that the WaaC-Players will buy into the new hotness and max cheese, while the BoC players play their beloved army. They might do that very competently, but the crazy guys lay the crazy armies 🤔

 

Short of implementing and maintaining an Elo-style rating system for players globally, it's basically impossible to quantify player skill in any form. Even in an Elo system, the player's choice of army would inherently be a factor in their "skill" rating, since the rating is determined solely by game outcomes. Maybe with enough data points you could start correcting for that and approach some kind of objective "army strength" measurement, but I doubt we'll ever get to the stage where the data is good enough to do that with any decent confidence.

[Honk]

3 minutes ago, Kadeton said:

I doubt we'll ever get to the stage where the data is good enough to do that with any decent confidence.

True words and all the fuzz is not needed to address some of the major issues the game has. On the competitive level as well as on the casual tables…

Especially the big break of 3. Edition really shook up the game and if your synergies or plans don’t fit into 3.0, you probably have to pray for 4.0 🙄

[stratigo]

On 8/8/2021 at 10:34 AM, Kadeton said:

Interesting! I'm not sure what the purpose of combining the win rate and % meta into "DKHM rate" is, can you give a bit more detail on what that data point is supposed to indicate?

Very surprised that Deepkin seem to be doing so badly (maybe they're still all just spamming eels?), as well as Ironjawz. Kharadrons on par with Blades of Khorne?!

What's the reasoning on splitting Warclans into its three variants, and not any of the other battletomes which have similarly strong divisions? I'd be quite interested to see the split between Beastclaw Raiders and regular Mawtribes, for example. Surprised and delighted to see so many Ogor armies though!

KO is not as good as it used to be and a lot of the top KO players are busy in testing mode to try and find the new thing

 

On 8/9/2021 at 3:19 AM, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

Thank you for this, that's interesting data.

A few datapoints that caught my eye:

Mawtribes looks like they are underperforming. They should have all the tools they need to be successful in AoS 3. But I think their low win rate might be explained by them being a popular new player army (which is reflected in their number of games played as well) and maybe pure Gutbusters lists dragging down the average a bit.

I'm surprised to see Seraphon slumming it with below Cities and Soulblight in terms of win%. Is this due to the loss of battalions or the Kroak rebalancing? Whatever may be the case, it seems like Seraphon are no longer as oppressive as they used to be.

Nurgle is a bit of a surprise at that high of a win rate. The faction seems strong, but not quite 60% win rate strong. But at only 35 games played, that might not really be representative.

Sylvaneth seem to finally have stabilized. It seems like new Allarielle and the Warsong Revenant were enough to get them squarly into the fat middle with all the "fair" factions. A good place to be. Surprisingly, Ossiarch Bonereapers are also found here, despite AoS 3 rules being very unkind to them.

Personally, I don't find the top tier surprising: Tzeentch (who is getting up there into "needs a nerf" territory), DoK, SoB, S2D, Nurgle. Maybe throw Lumineth in there. That all seems reasonable.

The bottom tier also has a lot of the usual suspects: Beasts, Nighthaunt, Khorne, Slaanesh, Gitz, Fyreslayers. Maybe FEC, but at only 10 games played that's not reliable. But there are a few unexpected armies, too, like Idoneth and Kharadron Overlords.

 

A lot of seraphon players likely haven't adapted into the new seraphon meta and away from skink spam

 

But you're looking too much at winrate and not the twip.

 

 

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

1 minute ago, stratigo said:

A lot of seraphon players likely haven't adapted into the new seraphon meta and away from skink spam

 

But you're looking too much at winrate and not the twip.

Let's just assume that we are all competent at reading statistics

I think in the data we have in this thread, win percentage seems to be the most interesting stat. Of course ideally, we would like extra info on a variety of other metrics, but even if we want to argue that the win% for Seraphon is not representative of their real strength or potential on the table, it's an interesting stat to be explained in it's own right.

For what it's worth, Seraphon have a high meta%, so that tells me many of the players who were previously playing them and getting results are probably still playing them, but failing to put up the same numbers. It might just be a case of the faction needing to shift to a new strategy. They certainly have enough tools to stay relevant. But it seems like something has definitely happened that made their previous play style less effective.