If you think Grey Knights are broken

[DarkLink]

Then read this [URL="http://www.3plusplus.net/2012/02/3-con-statistics-deeper-look-at-dark.html"]article[/URL] from 3++. Some of the language could have been improved, unless you're familiar with statistics you might get a bit lost, but Kirby makes a very good point about Grey Knights. And while he only uses the results of a single tournament, from what I've seen his results stand up pretty well in a lot of the other tournaments I've been too.


Basically, Grey Knights are the noob-stomping army. They are not actually overpowered in any discernible way, and in fact may be a bit weaker than the other top tier armies, but are really good at killing players who don't know what they're doing.


To summarize the article, they looked at GKs and DE, and how the winning and losing players fared against opponents who had been winning or losing. They found that DE's performance was based on player skill rather than opponent. A DE player who frequently won, won regardless of whom he was facing. If the DE player lost frequently, he lost to other losers as much as he lost to winners.

GKs didn't show this behavior. GKs won an abnormally large number of games against opponents who lost frequently, but did poorly against players who won frequently. The success of the GKs was based heavily on the competence of the opponent. Poor players lost to GKs, while skilled players had very good odds. While on paper GKs seem OP, there are subtle weaknesses that a competent player can take advantage of to win even with an army that seems outmatched by the GKs.






This isn't to say that GKs are a poor army. They still show up pretty frequently in the top ranks a tournaments. This does provide a compelling argument that GKs are not broken, cheesy, or unbeatable. So if you're in a position to complain about how you think GKs are broken, cheesy and unbeatable, it's almost certainly because you're a poor player and not the other way around.

Or the GK player you face happens to be the rock to your scissors. Some of the less competitive armies just can't stand up to, say, Driagowing effectively. Then again, playing handi-capped isn't the best way to win, so if you are playing a weaker army list you need to keep that in mind.




On another note, the exact opposite case is true with Orks. Everyone seems to think that orks suck, yet I've seen 2-4 ork players in the top 10 in literally every single major tournament I've looked up the results for. Orks may look weak on paper, but there's something about them that makes them a top tier army, no matter what the internet says.

[lattd]

Surely this just proves that certain armies require skill and some don't and the fact that Grey Knights are pretty top tier but can be used by a noob to get that result shows they are broken more than anything else.

[wittdooley]

Surely this just proves that certain armies require skill and some don't and the fact that Grey Knights are pretty top tier but can be used by a noob to get that result shows they are broken more than anything else.

I think it also comes down to the fact that if your army is lacking a ton of 1-2 AP weaponry, it can be hard to bring down a Paladin squad. Additionally, if you're a low I army, and you let the Paladins with hammer hand and might of titan get a charge on you, you're in dire straights.

[WYSIWYG]

This is data from a single tournament with less than 100 participants, so it needs to be looked at with some sense of scale. These numbers are not the end all be all, but do show certain facts to be true. The thing I really take away from these numbers is that new or less skilled players can simply pick up the GK codex and they are instantly better, simply by virtue of playing with GKs. The second thing this data tells me is that their were some bad players who brought down their factions overall numbers, GK being one of those. The third thing this tells me is that my suspicion about tournaments is turning out to be true. For awhile now I have been thinking that the reason that so called net lists and other killer army builds don't actually dominate every tourney is simply because they are too good. Killer builds start off strong in the first few rounds but as they go further up the bracket the really powerful armies and generals start to battle each other in the middle brackets (thus bringing each other down in points), while sub-par armies and generals coast along on mediocrity. This isn't always the case but it happens quite a lot I bet, and I have seen it happen at our Local Tourneys a good amount as well.

P.S. GK is OP and broken as hell.

[scrap square]

Why do people still try to claim 40k takes skill and generalship, it obviously doesnt.
Its a horribly designed un balanced game and this shows it.

[MaltonNecromancer]

Why do people still try to claim 40k takes skill and generalship, it obviously doesnt.

Citation needed.

Its a horribly designed un balanced game and this shows it.

Umm... One sentence comments full of vitriolic opinions are as useful as a garden swing is to a 600 pound shut in. Any chance you could perhaps elaborate on why you think this?

Because yeah, 40K isn't the most balanced game, but... you're on a 40K fan forum, so either you're

a.) a 40K fan.
b.) a troll.
c.) mildly confused about how this whole "internets" thing works.
d.) perhaps better off doing something more enjoyable with your time. (Unless, you know, you actually are a troll, in which case, keep doing what you're doing. Maybe try posting a few "first!" comments instead, and statements about how Matt Ward isn't such a terrible codex writer; you know, help ease yourself into the role? )

Mild joking aside, seriously: what empirical evidence do you base your opinion on - I'm genuinely intrigued.

[DarkLink]

I think you all have missed the point.

Nothing here says that noobs can pick up GKs and start winning tournaments. What it says, is that the opponent's level of skill made a huge difference. The armylist matchups didn't matter as much you might think (strike one against the idea that GKs are overpowered), and against skilled opponents GKs fared no better than any other army (strike two).

If Grey Knights were an auto-win army, overpowered or broken, then they would have an abnormally high win ratio against everyone. This is not the case. Against noobs and crappy players (players who lost most of their games), they had a high win percentage. But, against other top tier armies and players, they didn't have an unusually high win percentage.


Against crappy players, GKs provide an easy win because the crappy players aren't skilled enough to counter the GK's hard advantages. Skilled players, however, are capable of exploting the soft weaknesses of the GKs to win.

What that means is that GKs are easy to use fairly well, but just as difficult as any other army to master. Broken implies a degree of unbeatability, yet this shows that competent players can reliably beat GKs. Doesn't sound very broken to me.


And yes, this is a small sample size. It might not be statistically significant, but it demonstrates something I've seen pretty regularly at tournaments. Go on Rankings HQ and browse around, and I'd bet if you added it up you'd see more orks in the top 10 at tournaments than GKs, and Space Wolves seem to win more tournaments than most anyone else. And all in all, the top tier of armies is much larger and more balanced than most people think, based purely on results.

Why do people still try to claim 40k takes skill and generalship, it obviously doesnt.
Its a horribly designed un balanced game and this shows it.

I'm trying to think of a nice way of saying that, on top of missing the point of the article, you don't really know what you're talking about here. I think this is about the best I can do, so I'll cut it short here. At least you didn't include something about how fantasy or some other system is so much better.

I will mention, though, that if you go online and look at what armies have won how many major events, the game seems surprisingly balanced in actuality. Excluding Tau, Eldar and Sisters (whom very few play anyways), pretty much every army has a decent number of wins under its belt. The fact that, for example, vanilla Marines have plenty of wins generally indicates that the game is more balanced and based on player skill than most of the internet seems to think.


Edit: Actually Matt Ward is a pretty good codex writer. So long as you only look at the rules. Compared to Ward, Phil Kelly doesn't know any restraint and Cruddance can't figure out how much anything is worth. All the codices have at least a few things wrong with them, but in general Ward's codices have fewer broken items and better internal balance.

[MaltonNecromancer]

The fact that, for example, vanilla Marines have plenty of wins generally indicates that the game is more balanced and based on player skill than most of the internet seems to think.

Agreed. There's no way you could say "You can't win with [insert army here]" for any of the 5th edition codexes. They're all perfectly viable. Some seem generally stronger (GK perhaps), but GK seem in no way unbeatable. Enough splinter rifle shots and they go down; enough Autocannon shots and they drop, etc...

The only armies that are really suffering at the moment are Eldar and Tau. SoB have been sorely mistreated, but it's not a huge issue because eventually there will be a shiny new codex with plastic minis, and if you really need to, you could run them as GK Inquisition forces anyway.

Actually, Repentia as Death Cult assassins is a bloody good idea. Why haven't I thought of it before...?

*wanders off to eBay to look for Sisters Repentia*

[WYSIWYG]

If Grey Knights were an auto-win army, overpowered or broken, then they would have an abnormally high win ratio against everyone.

This statement is simply untrue, as a number of things can affect an armies overall performance. For starters lets imagine that you are going to a local 3 round tournament. When you arrive you find out that you are the only Blood Angels player in a 20 man event. The other 19 players are comprised of 10 codex marines and 9 Tau. You beat your first Tau opponent into the dirt, then face off against a Space marine player who you best, then in the last round you fight a Tau player, but every thing goes horribly wrong for you, reserves don't come in when you need them and your saves are just garbage, you lose. Now if someone looks at the tournament results and knows nothing of the circumstances, they would see the results and say "Wow, BA is no where near as good as SM and Tau. Look how bad their numbers are compared to the other two armies."

Second, you are not taking into account the built in bias that TOs have toward "broken codexs". I have personally seen TOs decide pairings based on codex alone. "Well he is playing SW, so we need to pair him up against something really hard or he will run rough shot over everyone." I was standing their when this was said. The person this was said about was a brand new player at his first Tourney, running a sub-par list, it was not fair. TOs, whether you will admit it our not, have a built in bias. If you bring GK to a GT, be prepared for "pound you in the A#$ matches" all day long. I remember when I first started playing 40k, my first army was IG, their 5th ed codex had been out for a little while. People gave me dirty looks every where I went, called me WAAC. Every TO would try and find the hardest pairing for me every round, they would try and find the rock for my scissors so to speak. Even though I was brand new, the simple fact that I played IG caused TOs to throw me into lopsided and harsh match ups regardless of my skill level or points standing.

[Bean]

While I generally agree with WYSIWYG that a statement of the type,

"If Grey Knights were an auto-win army, overpowered or broken, then they would have an abnormally high win ratio against everyone."

is fundamentally flawed, and I would stress again that this is a very limited data sample and may not be properly indicative of the matter on the whole, I would acknowledge that the article seems to treat what data it has well, that (within the scope of that data) its conclusion seems warranted, and that it is a reasonable start on a compelling demonstration of the conclusion at large.

edit:
It's important, though, to keep a reasonable and fairly limited definition on "broken" or "overpowered." It can't be taken to mean that an army will always win, or is effectively unbeatable--no army will ever meet those criteria, and such a term would be meaningless.

Rather, we have to take it to mean that it shows a significant statistical advantage, across, the board, against a very wide range of other armies and players in a very wide range of settings. This example doesn't demonstrate broken-ness at all, but it is indicative of the type of analysis you'd have to do on that very large data set were you wanting to make that demonstration--and the results it produces can be taken as a sort of small-scale proof of concept for the endeavor.