Welcome to another instalment of Metawatch Warhammer 40,000. With the updated FAQs and points values that kicked in earlier this month, Mike Brandt and his guests will be reviewing which units have been most impacted, and how you can adapt to the changes. So, without further ado, over to the man himself.
Mike: This month, we’re taking a deep dive into the new Warhammer 40,000 FAQs with some of the fellas from Goonhammer. Their team has been especially analytical and vocal about the meta since the latest edition released, supporting their analysis with extensive data, debate, and informed opinion. Joining me today are James “One_Wing” Grover and Robert “TheChirugeon” Jones.
James: Warhammer 40,000 was my first gaming love as a kid, and though I drifted away from it for a time, I always kept an eye on the developments. When the 8th edition landed with a focus on improving the fundamentals of the game, I just had to get my Aeldari army out of the shoebox and have a go. I quickly got hooked after some games at the local club, went to my first tournament a few months later, and never looked back.
Three years later, I’m now the strategy editor at Goonhammer, keeping my finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the Warhammer 40,000 meta. I write weekly articles on the best-performing lists from recent tournaments, assessing what makes them tick and helping folks get a good handle on exciting new armies. I’m also heavily involved in writing our strategy guides and codex reviews.
Apart from playing in events, my favourite thing in Warhammer 40,000 is poring over a new book or big rules change to work out how they’ll shake things up and to pick out which units might be sleeper hits that everyone will be talking about a few weeks later.
Robert: I fell in love with Warhammer 40,000 and Chaos while my family lived in Italy. The 2nd edition Chaos codex was brand new, and I was hooked from the moment I first saw the then-new metal chaos space marine range. I’ve been playing the game ever since and took a greater interest in competitive play after the 8th edition came out. The NOVA Open 2018 was a big part of that – my first Warhammer 40,000 tournament in over a decade!
I’m a data scientist and mathematician by trade, and that combines with my passion for Warhammer 40,000 to result in extensive competitive data analysis over at Goonhammer. There’s more data on the game now than ever before, and we had an unprecedented opportunity to start looking at how the meta has been affected by the latest rules changes.
Mike: Welcome, folks! You guys have covered Warhammer 40,000 extensively. What are your favourite elements of the new edition? What things surprised you the most about it six months later compared to your initial impressions?
James: Without question, my favourite thing about the new edition is the diversity of units and strategies showing up in army lists. The combination of changes to the core rules, army construction, and missions means there’s a much broader range of units you can justify putting in your army lists. I loved the previous edition, but competitive play tended to reward skewed list construction built around highly specialised units, cheap troops to act as Command point generators, and strategies aimed to quickly shut the opponent out of the game. I had many great games, but also plenty where my opponent and I could look at the other’s list and instantly know that whoever got to pull off their big combo first was going to win.
The new edition massively shook that up for the better. Your success at scoring Primary Objectives is now heavily dependent on how well you outmanoeuvre your opponent. With fewer turns to earn points than in most competitive missions in the previous edition, it’s vastly more important to apply early pressure and contest multiple objectives out of the gate, and to be able to change your plan on the fly. That rewards two unit types that were often hard to use before – melee threats and all-rounders.
Melee could be powerful in the previous edition, but you had to build your whole list around it, and often needed to exploit Fight phase movement tricks to keep your units alive long enough. Because some of those mechanics have been weakened in the new edition, many worried melee-focussed armies would struggle, but quite the opposite proved true. Charging onto an objective and killing whatever enemy forces were holding it is now so valuable that you’re seeing almost every army packing a strong melee contingent, and plenty where the Fight phase is their main damage-dealing window. Perhaps the biggest surprise on this front is the spectacular rise of Chaos Daemons, with multiple powerful builds rampaging around the top tables with barely a ranged weapon in sight.
Flexible all-rounders are the other big winners. With the previous edition being all about squeezing as many fixed-role units into your army as possible, it was hard to justify taking units like Terminators that paid a points premium for their versatility. But now, packing a few units that can flex between shooting, punching, or securely holding an objective is extremely valuable, and you see units like Terminators, Tyranid Warriors, and Defilers more often. It also makes faction traits that let your regular units punch up in the Fight phase, such as the Bloody Rose Conviction and Novokh Dynastic Code, extremely good.
The final big thing we’ve seen, and I think the one that’s surprised me the most, is much more active planning for how players are going to score secondary objectives. They’re crucial to achieving a respectable score, whereas in independent tournament formats that used them in the last edition, missing out on max points in a winning game was pretty unusual. Many players (including us) went into the new edition with that max-point mindset, but it hasn’t played out that way at all.
According to our data, there’s only a single secondary objective that players are scoring maximum points on more than 50% of the time, and only one (Priority Targets) where the average points scored in a game is more than 10. Even then, on both of those metrics, many of the highest-scoring options are very situational or codex-specific. There are also clear tradeoffs between average and maximum scores. Engage on all Fronts has the worst rate of maximisation of any non-codex secondary (4%), but a very strong average score (7.61 VPs) puts it near the front of the pack. Players have clearly recognised that this is a worthwhile gamble, as it’s the most commonly picked choice in our data.
Those dynamics put the focus on one secondary objective in particular that looked pretty innocuous when we first went through the mission pack – Deploy Scramblers. While capped at only 10VP, provided you plan for it, it’s relatively easy to score. Indeed, this is the one secondary where we’ve seen a maximisation rate higher than 50%, with players successfully scrambling 69% of the time, and the corresponding average of 6.9 VPs being the best in the Shadow Operations category. This means you’re heavily incentivised to make sure your list can pick this as a fallback option. Similarly, non-Character units that are fast, can deep strike, or are cheap to deploy via Strategic Reserves are awesome. Lictors, Kommandos, and Furies are just some of the many units seeing increased play as a result. Overall, I really like the strategic dimension and unit variety brought to the game by the need to plan for secondary objectives.
Mike: Great observations! On the secondary front, it’s really interesting to see the sort of data used here. James is right that in many independent events using the “selectable secondary objective” concept in previous editions, most of them were very easy to score maximum points. The game then boiled down to whether you chose poorly and failed to max them, which could make some games a bit predictable. In the Eternal War and Grand Tournament Missions, it’s much more difficult to max secondaries, which creates exciting scoring tension throughout the game. Some of the changes in the recent FAQ help drive this point home even further.
Speaking of which, with the new updates released for Warhammer 40,000, what changes do you think will be the most impactful to the meta?
James: For me, the points updates and revision to the Bring it Down (BID) and Abhor the Witch (Abhor) secondaries.
For the metagame, fielding a list that easily yielded maximum BID or Abhor points to your opponent put you at a substantial disadvantage. This was a major problem for several factions that were hovering near the bottom of competitive rankings. Notable examples are Astra Militarum and Craftworlds (who want to field cost-efficient tanks), Tyranids (whose iconic leaders have the Monster, Psyker, and Character keywords), Chaos Space Marines (Daemon Engines are some of their best units), and Grey Knights/Thousand Sons (where nearly every unit is a psyker). These armies suddenly find themselves with more breathing room to try new builds. The impact is especially pronounced on multi-model units of smaller vehicles/monsters that qualify for the secondary, with previously popular options like the Talos being frozen out by how much of a liability they were on scoring. Expect to see light vehicles and mid-tier monsters out in force!As for the tweaks to points values, it’s great to see well-targeted adjustments that give previously underperforming factions more ways to attack the missions. Astra Militarum received discounts on their Chimeras and Bullgryns, giving them access to units that can push forward while Manticores and Tank Commanders get to work. Craftworld and Drukhari Troops went down in price, letting you bring enough of them to still have some objective holders when the first wave disintegrates under bolter fire. Knights now benefit from less expensive Armigers/War Dogs, so they have enough models to contest the board. Genestealer Cults got cheaper transports, all the better for moving onto objectives before their main force arrives. It’s clear these haven’t just been picked at random – some serious thought went into what each faction was struggling with, and changes were made to improve them, even if that meant making some already decent units even stronger.
The T’au Empire, with their limited melee capabilities, also got significant help – discounts on Broadsides, Crisis Suits, and Devilfish let them field a nastier combined-arms force that can cause severe damage, then move to capitalise.
Some units that were a little too efficient against a wide range of targets, such as Inceptors and Retributors, also went up in price. Overall, by opening up the options of some weaker factions and taking the meta’s top predators down a peg, I expect we’re about to enter a period of heavy experimentation in the meta (especially with the next few books arriving soon). I can’t wait to see what players come up with.
Robert Jones: On the whole, these are great changes, and I think James hit the nail on the head with how they boost T’au Empire, Adeptus Mechanicus, Astra Militarum, Adeptus Custodes, Tyranids, and Aeldari. I do wonder about some knock-on effects – they definitely also boost Chaos Daemons, so it will be interesting to see if it makes some already-strong armies a bit too powerful. But as the Goonhammer Chaos Guy, I’m especially happy about the adjustments to Terminators, Raptors, and Warp Talons.
Mike: Thanks, guys! As a renowned mission fanatic, I have to ask – the Grand Tournament missions saw some subtle, but impactful updates to a couple of key mechanics. What do you think will be the impact of these changes, and what do you think players should do to adjust?
James: We’re very happy to see the changes that have been made to the missions, and while they appear small on paper, we agree they should be impactful.
Let’s tackle the secondary objectives first. In games where they’re a sensible choice (i.e. your opponent has a lot of vehicles or psykers), the best-performing secondaries are Abhor, which had the highest average score in games where it was picked (9.63 VPs), while BID had the third highest (9.17 VPs). They’re very much in a clear top tier along with Titan Hunters and the best mission/codex secondaries, as there’s a big dropoff in the score for the fourth-best generic choice (Engage on All Fronts at 7.61 VPs).
Just on that basis, there would be an argument for tuning them down, but the further challenge with these is they also bypass much of the risk/reward of other choices. Abhor had the second-highest rate of maximisation of any secondary, behind only Deploy Scramblers, meaning it was essentially a no-brainer in games where it was viable. Bring it Down’s max rate is lower, but what boosts its average score is a very high “floor” – essentially, if your opponent is packing enough tanks for you to max this, you’re going to walk away with at least some points in anything other than a total blowout.
Compare that to the significantly higher counterplay potential of almost any other secondary, and it was clear why a change was needed. Having to weigh the option of one of these where you can only reach 8-12pts now against options like Deploy Scramblers and some mission secondaries should definitely help test players' ability to weigh risks in pre-game planning. The only mild concern I have is it does increase the extent to which codex secondaries provide advantages to factions that have access to them, so I’m hoping we see more books rolled out soon.
The other changes are to mechanics around the first turn and how it interacts with scoring primary objectives. These are aimed, of course, at addressing the imbalance that exists in win rates for players going first and second. While initial concerns about how skewed these might be proved to be a little overblown, our ongoing tracking of the data shows a statistically significant effect here, with the average win ratio for the player going first at around 58%.
Now, that number doesn’t mean players going second aren’t winning games, nor does it mean some factions can’t put together armies that perform exceptionally well when going second. Harlequins and Chaos Daemons, for example, have very similar win rates whether they go first or second, but in terms of making the game fun for everyone, that’s arguably more of a problem. It means some factions are seeing worse than a 58% differential, such as the T’au Empire. The rates also differ between missions, so how bad losing the roll-off is for you can be uneven based on a number of factors that aren’t fully in your control.
The effect was sustained enough that we went deep on the datasets available to us to try and work out what was causing it, examining how scores differed between players who won having gone first or second. The headline discrepancy we found in the scoring was that a player who lost the game having gone first tended to score about five more points than a player who lost having gone second. That’s big, because it means that when you go second, your target score to overcome the average number of VPs your opponent will score is that much higher, naturally making it tougher for you to win the game.
Thanks to the granularity of the data out there, we were able to track down where that effect was being introduced. It turned out the majority of this discrepancy was arising from the primary objective in battle round 2 – the first scoring opportunity of the game. In this battle round, if we split out players into the same four categories as above, we see that players who end the game with a given result do much better at achieving higher scoring categories at this point if they went first than if they went second.
Especially notable is the high rate of 15 VP turns for players who go first and go on to win, and the high rate of 0 VP turns for players who lose after going second. Because of the limited number of scoring opportunities in the game, this can create an early swing that’s very difficult to come back from, leading to the win rates observed.
As to why this happens mechanically, it appears to be because the player going first has a lot more control over the scoring in the second battle round than their opponent. They have two turns to move and attack the opponent’s positions before they get to score, and can even bring in reinforcements to help out with this. Conversely, for armies relying on ranged threats or slower melee units, it’s extremely difficult to stop an opponent who goes first from racking up at least a respectable score because you simply don’t have time to push them off the objectives. This being the driving effect has been hammered home for us by Retrieval Mission having one of the most balanced go-first/go-second win rates, and that appears to be a result of its objective map putting players on a far more even footing for early scoring.
So, to summarise, this is where we were before the FAQ:
There was, on average, an advantage to going first.
That advantage manifested in players going second needing to score about 5 VP more on average to beat their opponent.
The mechanical cause seemed to be the increased control the player going first had over the scoring in battle round 2.
With all that in mind, we can look at the key change here, which is that the player going second now scores their primary objective VPs for the final battle round at the end of their turn rather than in their Command phase. This means they can use their final turn’s movement to zoom onto as many unoccupied objectives as possible, or launch some final defiant charges to try and take fortified positions from the opponent – in both cases, aiming to maximise their score. This gives them something unique in the Grand Tournament missions in the form of an opportunity to take primary objectives without the other player getting to react before points are scored.
Here, we think that’s going to be a good thing! If one player’s increased control over the scoring in an early turn is providing them with a significant advantage, then a mechanic that provides their opponent with greater control over the scoring in one of their turns could go a long way towards balancing that out. How well it works will depend on whether the average VPs scored are roughly equal. We certainly think it could be, and the change that’s been made here should also disproportionately help more shooting-focused lists that pack some mobile options like Craftworlds, Astra Militarum, and T’au Empire.
Part of the struggle for these factions, when they go second, is that they’re less able to flip objectives directly into their control via melee, which means that it takes them longer to seize positions than melee-focused armies. If they go first, that’s okay – they can move onto nearby objectives and focus on holding the enemy back – but if they go second, they often have to spend a Shooting phase clearing a path to an objective, then move onto it in their next turn. This puts them a turn behind on the scoring in a way that can be a challenge to come back from, even if they wipe out most of the opponent’s army over the course of the game. Opening up a final turn where they can take advantage of the damage they’ve dealt to move onto scoring positions without worrying about the counter-attack is therefore a crucial change.
The change will also make things more fun. The second player’s last turn could often prove to be an underwhelming affair due to the limited ability they had to score the primary objective in battle round 5. Games that go down to the wire are often the most enjoyable, so anything that makes those final turns go out with a bang rather than a whimper is a win in my book. It will also mean that fewer games will hit a forgone conclusion earlier in the battle, too.
Taken together, I’m very pleased with the changes that have been made and can’t wait to see them start to have an impact on games out in the world. I only hope my country gets the pandemic sufficiently under control that I can start meeting people for games again soon!
Mike: I couldn’t have said it much better myself! In fact, James’ answer does a really good job articulating the value in the change to turn-5 scoring, and why the rules team chose a careful, measured change instead of a dramatic shift to the primary objective scoring. Since well-documented data showed a minor first-turn advantage over a margin of error, and also showed the difference between going first and second mainly came from an advantage the first player gained in scoring their “first” primary opportunity (top of battle round 2), this change both ensures a more exciting and relevant turn 5, and a careful delivery of the same minor advantage to the player going second. We’ll stay in touch with Goonhammer, the data, and the meta to see how things pan out as a result of these changes.
When widespread Grand Tournament play resumes sometime in the future, what armies will each of you be fielding? Share your lists!
James: Right now, I’m on a big Necron kick. I picked up the army last edition, but they never really got there competitively – at least, not with the kind of lists I wanted to play. Their new codex has changed that completely, giving the faction a huge boost and providing players with a massive range of exciting new toys to try out. I’ve been particularly enjoying the melee-focused Novokh faction, and this is the core I’ve been tinkering with.
This list gives you a nice mix of durability and melee power, and is happiest when it’s brawling for objectives and grinding foolish galactic usurpers into the dust. It also shows off some of the trends we’ve been seeing in army lists, with some units dedicated to scoring secondary objectives in the Cryptothralls, and flexible units like the Triarch Stalker and Catacomb Command Barge able to switch up roles as needed. It’s also really refreshing to be able to bring lots of different units together in a list and still have it feel powerful, rather than just spamming a few standouts. I’ve been having a blast whenever I’ve been able to get games in with it, and I’m still tinkering with things like Character loadouts as I go.
Fun as androids are, however, my first love has always been Craftworld Aeldari, and the buffs they’ve picked up with the new FAQ has got me tinkering with lists again. This is one I’m keen to try out as soon as possible:
I’ve always been a huge Dire Avengers fan, and their new price tag has got me excited to get them back on the table. Combining them with Asurmen and the Ulthwé Craftworld trait makes them surprisingly durable, and you can back them up with some powerful ranged and melee threats from the second Detachment. The lower cost of the Guardians and Dire Avengers frees up enough points to buy you a squad of Striking Scorpions for focusing on secondary objectives, and half of the second Warlock to make sure you’ve got all the powers you need. This list also no longer gives up maximum points on Abhor the Witch, making it a bit less disastrous if your opponent manages to take your Warlocks out. I’m obviously very excited to see what a new codex will have in store for the Craftworlds down the line, but the FAQs have definitely renewed my interest in trying to make the Asuryani work right now.
Robert: Night Lords were my first love, and I’m excited to get back to barely making them work. I had a list I thought was pretty fun but not super competitive before the updates, and with the point drops on Raptors and Warp Talons, I think it could be much better. The ability to passively stack Leadership modifiers up to -3 or -4 can make dealing with the loss of 1-2 models a real chore. I’ll probably look at something like this as a tweaked version, trying to trade on the points drops for Terminators and Raptors to get more power out of the same units.
I don’t expect this to tear things up at a Grand Tournament, but it has a lot of mobility and the ability to reliably score Engage on All Fronts or Linebreaker – depending on the table and match-up – and Deploy Scramblers. I expect it can surprise people at smaller events and rattle off three wins in a row, which is more the level of competitive play I’m at.
Thanks for your insights, gents. Mike will be back next month with another instalment of Metawatch and more fascinating observations from his guest experts. Based on what you’ve just read, what army lists are you looking forward to trying out? Download Warhammer 40,000: The App, subscribe, design your army list on Battle Forge, and send it to us before the 31st of January 2021 and you could even win it!