The Paris Wargame Expo kicked off on October 17, and so began our first major Warhammer 40k tournament weekend since the Space Marines codex dropped on the 3rd. The biggest development is that this new marine-powered meta seems to have an issue with the Deathwatch, specifically with them showing up in Space Marine armies and being just a little busted.
Some Deathwatch players were understandably a bit grumpy that the 1DP detachment with their name on it was actually a detachment for other Space Marine players that let them use all the Deathwatch’s best toys. Now the evidence suggests that the Deathwatch Support detachment, giving other chapters 500 points of DW to play with, is really damn strong.
Throw some Deathwatch Terminators with their extra plasma cannons into, say, an Ultramarine army, and it turns out it does wonders for their win rate. The Deathwatch Support rules let you throw Precision, Sustained Hits or Lethal Hits onto the units, giving them an absurd amount of killiness, even before you load on your other Space Marine buffs and detachments.
While Space Marines as a whole seemed to be in a pretty perfect spot, with a 51% win rate last weekend, Goo- I mean, Tabletop Battles, ran the numbers and concluded that Marines with Deathwatch in tow were winning 69% of their games. Yowza. Deathwatch alone did decently too – but appeared in such low numbers that we can’t really draw conclusions from the available data.
It seems likely that if this pattern continues, Games Workshop will step in and make some tweaks. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out a fix. You could add heavy weapon limitations to the detachment, make it more expensive, stop other detachment rules from working with the Deathwatch units – there’s all sorts of options. In other words, don’t drop everything and buy a bunch of models with the plan to dominate competitive tables with this technique.
Another high-performing Warhammer 40k faction in the past couple of weeks is the World Eaters, using lots of Berzerkers, while the Astra Militarum is doing dismally – win rates below 40%. Auspex Tactics just released a breakdown if you want all the latest data.
Source: Wargamer
