What's with Razorback spam?

[Old_Paladin]

I hope you realize their is no universal 'state of competitive play'
The best you can say is 'the metagame in my region'

It's attitudes like that, that still see Orks as a top tier army. People say Orks aren't competitive, but 'competitive' players take almost only las/plas with melta; then get stomped by an average ork army, because they aren't ready to deal with it (then usually treat the ork player with distain, and say his winning army isn't maximinzed for the competitive level).

Personally, i'd rather save 50 points and take an AV13 predator with auto/las; then have full squads in rhino's.
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Actually; I'll average out 2 las/plas razorback teams with dual melta shooting at MEQ in 4+cover; vs. a single serpent with scatter + 10 avengers with bladestorm.

2 'back squads [using the one-shot meltas]:
melta/plas (8) - 2.2 kills
bolts (12) - 1.3 kills
or [saving/already used combi's]
melta/plas (6) - 1.7 kills
bolts (16) - 1.8 kills

1 serpent team
scatter (4) - 0.83
avengers (30) - 3.3

So even against a combat team of marines in a woods, you'll need at least a third razorback team.
This is my problem with MSU (other then people acting like KP's shouldn't be part of the game, because of this); you talk about them being good because they can split their fire and hit lots of different targets. On average though, you have to combine many squads fire into a single target to do anything worth while.

[DarkLink]

Orks are plenty competitive. I've consistantly seen ork players in the top finishers at the tournaments I've gone to, right alongside SW, IG, GKs and the other 'top teir' lists. And, yes, there is a sort of universal meta, though you'll only see it at tournaments big enough to draw a very wide variety of players. Locally you're not likely to have a quality player for every type of competitive build, so you don't have to worry about orks if no one plays them for example.

And again, I'm not saying the wave serpents full of dire avengers are bad. Nor am I saying that they compare poorly in a vaccum one on one against razorspam units, though I will point out that your wave serpent and DA combo are almost pure anti-infantry whereas the razorspam units can kill anything from Land Raiders to Terminators to GEQ.

What I'm saying is that this is a pointless comparison. We could try comparing Fire Dragons to Land Raiders and see which is a better deal there, but two different units that fill two different roles from two different codices with two different sets of supporting units to cover their weaknesses leads us to the same circular arguing.




Incidentally, your last argument, that you have to combine firepower from multiple units, is in no way a disadvantage. In fact, that is exactly how MSU lists gain their shooting advantage. You are operating at almost 100% shooting efficiency, and you have a higher density of 'power' weapons than you would otherwise. You can fit more plasma/melta/lascannon/missile launcher shots into a Marine list going MSU, and you can utilize those shots much more efficiently than you would otherwise. That gives MSU a quantifiable advantage over non-MSU lists, assuming your codex does MSU well (which mostly limits MSU to SW, BA, DE, and GK). All you've done is demonstrate that spamming low quality shooting is better at killing Marines hiding in cover than using expensive heavy weapons to do that. Your example leaves out the fact that those heavy weapons are much, much better at killing certain other things like monstrous creatures, enemy vehicles and nasty units like Paladins. You're cherry-picking an example that favors the one thing that your combo does better than MSU (anti-infantry), when that isn't even the role of razorspam units. As I mentioned above, you're trying to compare two different units that do two different things and have two different sets of supporting units to cover their weaknesses.


I'll also point out that I'm not claiming that MSU is the best type of competitive list out there. It does, however, consistently do well in tournament settings. Space Wolf and Blood Angel MSU armies are quite potent, as are GK armies (though I feel that GKs do better going a different route). I'm not a fan of full MSU DE armies, their units are too fragile to pull it off, though Trueborn in Venoms certainly aren't a bad thing.