Welcome to the sixth of our faction catch-ups, this time looking at those lovable, murderous scamps, the Orks. Let’s dive straight in:
Attacks
As befits tabletop Warhammer 40,000, the Orks have a high attack ratio and choose to attack over Readying 80% of the time. This reflects their Warlord special rules triggering on card deaths (more on Warlords later).
We see a split of Ork decks dealing 44% of their damage with melee attacks and 53% from ranged (with just 3% from psychic attacks, which we can’t do much about because there’s only one Ork Weirdboy miniature available for us to use). While the high amount of ranged damage neatly reflects that Ork armies are surprisingly shooty on the tabletop, the popularity of the Warlord Badrukk is likely to be what’s causing it in our game.
Cards
Orks have a large selection of cards (28), covering:
- 16 Commons
- 7 Rares
- 2 Epics
- 3 Legendaries (giving them the equal most Legendary cards).
The average points cost of Ork cards is 25.4, which is pretty middle of the road. They have a reasonable spread of point costs, but this includes the most expensive card in the game (Da Mad Mangler at 99 points).
Like the Necrons, there aren’t huge amount of Ork miniatures waiting for us to add to the game, so expect future releases to include the missing Ork vehicles / units and more Ork Boyz (which will at least mean players can fill up their deck with cheap Boyz and one of the big, expensive cards).
Balance
So let’s talk about the hot topic with Orks – that they’re struggling in the current climate. Ork Warlords have a low pick rate of 8%, putting them on the bottom tier, and this is related to their low win-rate of 46%.
Obviously all balance discussions are complicated and need to take into account many factors (such as the example possibility of the problem not being the Orks as much as other factions being overpowered), but there are two areas we’re looking at:
First, when we run the next round of bodyguard point balances we’re more likely to consider lowering the cost of Ork cards over the top performing factions. This is because point changes have to reflect two aspects, A) whether an individual card’s stats are too low / high for its current cost, and B) how the faction as a whole is doing in the current meta.
This doesn’t mean that we’ll just artificially boost factions to bring them up, but if we only want to adjust the cost of X many cards in one go we’re going to tend towards helping factions that need it first.
Second, next time we make Warlord balance changes we need to boost the effectiveness of the Ork Warlord special rules. However, because their rule requires an enemy card to die to be triggered we need to make changes here in conjunction with the above point balancing, as increasing the rule potency won’t help if it never triggers.
Conclusion
It will be interesting to compare how Orks are getting on next time I run these faction catch-ups and once we’ve made the balance changes above (hopefully we’ll have run several rounds of changes by then!). I’d like to see if card cost and Warlord rule tweaks can bring a struggling faction up or if more drastic adjustments are needed.
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Thanks,
Stu
I think the main impact over picking Orks is down to Warlords.
Badrukk is the best choice and also the cheapest. His damage multiplier with his ranged damage is incredible potent, combined with a large number of powerful ranged cards its hard not to see why he is successful.
Ghazghul is potentially amazing. His attack build is very potent, however he is held back by something you can’t control which is the size of your opponents deck. If you are facing a small elite deck as your opponent Ghazghul will be preforming below his quite high cost, although he has the potential to be unstoppable if facing a full opposing deck. I think this element out of player control makes his win rate so variable and stops him from being meta.
Zagstrukk suffers from low health and being a single attack card, and doesn’t have the benefit of being the cheapest warlord as an incentive to take him. While his attack is strong, being a single attack and low health means he can get cancelled out quite quickly. While his warlord ability has improved, its certainly not better than the other two, so if you have the weakest card, with the weakest ability also not being the cheapest it’s very hard to justify picking him.
Overall Ork bodyguards aren’t in to bad a place, they’re big hitters are well priced and effective. It’s mainly their lower end cards that are the issue as you identified. For a horde faction you don’t get that feeling of a large deck and having a number of the lower cards in the 18 cost or less group come down a bit would make a huge difference. As I say their top cards are in a really good place so making them cheaper wouldn’t help, balance wise, as making the weaker cards a bit more viable to bulk out the deck.
Thanks for the input – we’ll definitely be having a look at Zagstrukk in the next round of Warlord balancing, and look for the average cost of Ork cards to come down as we add more varieties of Boyz.
Considering that Badrukk is such a great warlord, I am surprised Orks lose so much.
Their typical lineup is Badrukk with 3 or 4 vehicles. With the Sheild trait on one and the Taunt trait on the other, its actually quite difficult to contend with.
I can’t even imagine lowering the points of those vehicles or making Badrukk better than he already is.
Thank you for the article!
P.S. – There is no way they have as many legendaries as Space Marines 🙂
Yeah, this is exactly why we’re quite slow with balance changes – because we need to be careful in understanding why the Orks have a low win rate. It might be caused by the other Ork Warlords or only affect them at certain Ranks, etc. Basically, we need more data!
As a Ork main in my experience we mainly lose to:
Moderately tough super hard hitters (battlesuit Tau come to mind, especially with their “final stand” heal and buff)
Psyker bombs (usually hit hard, have solid heath and allow no counter-attack)
and Avatar of Khaine (we literally make him stronger the better we do until he can tank 2-3 hit all the while deleting a unit per turn until we are literally forced to put badrukk directly in front of him).
Other Warlords just don’t work as well, our deadliest units are ranged so no reason to use Zagstruk over Badrukk (especially as he’s entirely random) and Ghazghull does nothing until he deploys.
So show statistic from terra last season, because I dare say that 8% is joke when my experience was totally different. There was 340 players so not so much work just show what was chosen most, which cards and then start balancing. Since you like using basic statistics it would be fun to see that data
A look at the first ranked season and the changes we’ve made to the second does sound interesting. Let me chat to our analyst staff and see what I can do!
Seconded, Casual mode is influenced by people mixing armies and playing for objectives, while Ranked, especially at the top levels, reflects the faction power much more accurately.
Something HHL does – monthly meta report – would be very welcomed!
Interesting to see the numbers, I’m enjoying using the Orks 🙂
Please let the Badrukk’s trait trigger when enemy cards are destroyed regardless.
Not just when you attack/defend and destroy one but when you can destroy one when a card is deployed (or change the wording to clarify when “destroying” isn’t actually “destroying” 😉 )
“3 Legendaries (giving them the equal most Legendary cards).”
Err, looking through my card collection, SM have six and both Chaos and Orks have five.
One thing I noticed about Orks is that the way their Warlord’s rule acts puts them at a bigger disadvantage at the start of a game.
When facing stronger cards, most factions can make use of their Warlord’s rules to get some benefits : they gain bonuses from losing cards (Eldars, SoE), their powers is already active and working (SM, Tyranids), or they have some tactics to work around it (Necron’s Ready, Tau last stand).
Orks, on the other hand, will only get whatever the card has done, without any quirk or bonus. On that aspect, they really are “all-or-nothing”.
I don’t think Orks are bad, I feel like they are more of an “advanced” kind of faction, one that requires higher upgraded cards than most to really be effective. The low winrate would be the result of low-level, unoptimized decks losing harder than other factions.
Thanks for the interesting insight. Next time we run a round of these catch-ups I’ll see if we can include data on the average upgrade level of the cards in each faction (though that’s complicated by rarity).
Stop this Madness!