Space Marines at the Las Vegas Nopen 2021

[Prot]

So I have my own take on this, and since it's perhaps a bit saucy, I kept it on my own blog (https://prot40k.wpcomstaging.com/2021/02/01/the-2021-las-vegas-nopen-ends-and-the-winner-is/ )

and I don't want to repost it all, but I'm curious what you guys think.

 

The weekend came and went and marines... did not do well. 

 

If we took the common wisdom of the internet leading up to this event, marines surely should have won, no? 

 

What do you think went wrong? Should marines have done better than this? Is there too much hype surrounding the new marine units? Do Dark Eldar just play against too well? Are the SIsters that much better than Marines?

 

If anyone kept track during the weekend, I'd be curious to see what you think.

 

Just fair warning that we want this to be a good, fair conversation. Let's break down what happened, and why marines may not have done as well as they should have.

[Daynga-Zone]

I enjoyed the blog, that was a good read and I get the feeling most on this forum will agree with you. I think there’s a few factors that go into the space marine flop at the LVN.

 

First, space marines are a relatively elite and durable army and there seems to be a bit of overconfidence in their survival when playing them. The game is still extremely deadly and most marine units are not particularly fast so in order to start getting up on primary they often have to be the first to expose themselves. From what I saw lists at this level either had the firepower to remove mid board when needed or the speed to get around them.

 

There’s also been a general cycle I’ve noticed for strong SM units. Things like aggressors have a good special rule, they start to get spammed and there’s so many space marine players that the collective cry of the internet rings out much louder than it would for any other faction. The unit gets price hikes, but is still good or competitive so the special rules are removed. The price of the unit however stays the same or has a slight decrease at best. They then end up somewhere between expensive and “ok” such as with aggressors or expensive and nerfed to oblivion with centurions.

 

I’m fully expecting plasma inceptors to receive some kind of nerf that reduces their output (especially with weapons of the dark age back) along with eradicators staying at their same price or similar but losing double shoot. If something is good as SMs there’s just too big of a spotlight on it for it to stick around for long.

 

Finally, most SM armies are relatively slow. The BA with sanguinary guard spam are an exception here, but the Salamanders and Ultramarine lists get punished heavily for mistakes. There’s an assumption that SMs are easy to play, but when most lists are pretty slow, there’s not a lot of room for error against the type of opponents in this tournament where they may have movement to spare to react to something you do, or something not going according plan. I find that the slower an army is the more precise my measurements need to be and the further ahead I have to plan in order to counter my opponent.

[Xenith]

Do you have a link to the actual results? They seem pretty hard to find, even on the official website.

 

Eldar of all stripes have long been and had hard counters to space marines, from multitude of weapons that wound marines on a 2+ and punch through armour (reapers, starcannons, blasters, disintegrators), to stuff that ignores their heaviest armour (lances). They're also much faster and can play objective games better, while being resilient in the "you cant touch me" way. 

 

Marines were top of the table around 5th ed when Xeno codexes were languishing, and marines got the love with Eternal warrior, 3++ saves, drop pod sternguard etc. 

 

Marines tend to get something that's broken, then gets fixed, as everyone has a marine army, so you see these broken armies promenantly. No more Calgar/Lysander Smash Bros with 30 drop pod vets lists. They did great in objectiveless games like 5th and 6th.

 

Conversely, Eldar remained about the same, but got better when objectives take a precedence. I think DE got massivelt reduced and cheap reaver jetbikes. Like 30pts for a unit of 3 ultrafast objective grabbers. Makes me sad when you realise that's cheaper than 3 ripper swarms. 

Edited February 2, 2021 by Xenith

[Prot]

I’m fully expecting plasma inceptors to receive some kind of nerf that reduces their output (especially with weapons of the dark age back) along with eradicators staying at their same price or similar but losing double shoot. If something is good as SMs there’s just too big of a spotlight on it for it to stick around for long.

 

Finally, most SM armies are relatively slow. The BA with sanguinary guard spam are an exception here, but the Salamanders and Ultramarine lists get punished heavily for mistakes. There’s an assumption that SMs are easy to play, but when most lists are pretty slow, there’s not a lot of room for error against the type of opponents in this tournament where they may have movement to spare to react to something you do, or something not going according plan. I find that the slower an army is the more precise my measurements need to be and the further ahead I have to plan in order to counter my opponent.

 

- Plasmaceptors already got hit a bit. I'm not sure if they will take more. Sometimes it feels like GW will react to the public more than anything else, and I anticipate Plasmaceptors will get less hate now (I am just guessing because of new releases grabbing more attention.)

 

We saw Eradicators / Outriders get hit too.

 

- Speed is definitely an issue and I think in part that's why BA are a good choice (including that fantastic super doctrine- the ability to field traditional SM units while retaining cool special BA rules.) This is why White Scars were a popular choice too.... however Death Guard inherently undo their super doctrine almost (but not) completely.

 

And you're right, once we get there how resilient are we? In the face of xenos, and newer codexes, I'm going to guess it's not enough perhaps. The Apothecary is not going to hold it all together.

 

Perhaps near army wide Transhuman, ala Dark Angels? I dunno.

 

 

 

Do you have a link to the actual results?

 

Well, I don't know if anything better has been posted than this, but I found a bracket page for you to check out:

https://www.lasvegasnopen.net/the-bracket

 

Marines did poorly. There's no other way to put it. I'm trying to put my finger on 'why'. 

Edited February 1, 2021 by Prot

[SkimaskMohawk]

So the whole "common wisdom of the internet" part is the key. A lot of people got traumatized by marines 8.5, and fairly so because that book was beyond broken. Even in 9th with the changes away from kill-hammer, marines did very, very well due to the strength of 8.5.

 

But.

 

The 9th ed book is objectively weaker than its predecessor. Im not saying that as a bad thing; it's far more balanced and while strong, doesn't propel units to the heights of 8.5. You can't make an omni-combo and win, you can't castle and win; you need to have a flexible list that is piloted properly.

 

So while I've been hearing "marines still the best" since October, looking at the stats on 40k stats and reading stuff like goonhammer makes it clear that there's stronger factions. Sororitas are ranked higher than even the top-most marine chapter, and look who won.

 

I'll also add that tuning down Bring it Down allows other weaker factions to now play without that handicap, showing in the results of dark eldar.

[Jorin Helm-splitter]

I think part of why marines struggled is that in a small tournament you could take fractions that are good against marines without having to worry about your bad matchups.

[SkimaskMohawk]

Well theres also the fact that marines just weren't even winning in-person GTs post release. You can see on 40kstats how the matchup went. I also think that sororitas are just way better killing in melee, which is why the blood angels lost all their matchups to them.

[Alcyon]

Skimask nailed it. Marines are not the best army in the game by any means. There is plenty of statistical data by 40kStats and written up by Goonhammer to show this, and people's impressions on the internet are woefully wrong. It's crazy to me how slow people are to catch on to the real meta in 40k vs. other games these days, but I guess that's just a result of a lot of the player base being older or less into MTG or other games with intensive meta-analysis.

[BLACK BLΠFLY]

It’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions due to the format of the event... while each player created one list it was piloted by various players. This in turn means that certain things an army could do may have been neglected which might have a huge impact on winning. For example the person who played the smash bro list in the quarter finals totally flubbed it hard. It would seem battle sisters are strong right now though.

[SkimaskMohawk]

It’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions due to the format of the event... while each player created one list it was piloted by various players. This in turn means that certain things an army could do may have been neglected which might have a huge impact on winning. For example the person who played the smash bro list in the quarter finals totally flubbed it hard. It would seem battle sisters are strong right now though.

That's a very good point, but imo it underlines how forgiving sororitas are as an army. Miracle dice guarantee the desired result and replenish rather fast, unlike CP which tend not to stick around. Add that to units that can stand alone without much character support or any combos other than *be bloody rose and use tear them down* and you have a a very low skill floor. Iirc there were 4 marine lists (not counting grey knights) and the 2 blood angels got knocked out by the sororitas lists because they're just easier to pilot and have even higher melee damage than the blood angels.

[Prot]

I agree it is a very good point but it is worth pointing out that all but 1 marine army was defeated in round one. This means the lists creators lost those games. There no doubt the smash brothers list would have a higher difficulty rating but ironically the most successful marine based army was Grey Knights! Which needs a new codex and is also arguably a bit more difficult to play correctly. 

[Vermintide]

I don't know which round it was, but I caught one game over the weekend where I was horrified seeing the BA so totally mis-played. Sanguinary Guard left out in the open, about a fifth of the army evaporating just like that. I didn't really care for that list though, spamming more Sanguinary Guard than are even supposed to exist in the fluff shouldn't be representative of an army. Perhaps they were on loan from a successor chapter? But alas, for competitive lists that's all we seem to have. 

 

Similarly, Sisters do seem to be strong, but beyond Repentia spam, are they really? Or is this that situation where there's one strong unit/faction, and beyond that one build the rest of it is pretty average? 

[SanguinaryGuardsman]

These results do not surprise me all that much.  Marines have great units but it is hard to build up badass bladeguard death stars, defend against smite spam, deal with invuln saves, have enough models for actions/objectives, and still be able to shoot/fight.   Marines have a lot of points of failure.

 

I recently faced the new Death Guard with my White Scars and I was tabled on the top of 3.  I fell behind quickly and was never in the game and had no answers for anything I was facing.  My shooting was bouncing off of invulns and t5, my close combat was hard countered and my speed did not amount to much!  It was a nice wake up call for me.    

[Alcyon]

 

Similarly, Sisters do seem to be strong, but beyond Repentia spam, are they really? Or is this that situation where there's one strong unit/faction, and beyond that one build the rest of it is pretty average? 

 

They are quite strong - not only are Repentia good, but their whole army benefitted from the upgrades to Heavy Bolters and Meltas on top of everything else. Goonhammer/40kStats meta analysis shows their current win percentage at 61% which is the highest of any army, only Slannesh is close at 60%. BA is down around midpack at 51%. 

[SkimaskMohawk]

 

 

 

Similarly, Sisters do seem to be strong, but beyond Repentia spam, are they really? Or is this that situation where there's one strong unit/faction, and beyond that one build the rest of it is pretty average?

They are quite strong - not only are Repentia good, but their whole army benefitted from the upgrades to Heavy Bolters and Meltas on top of everything else. Goonhammer/40kStats meta analysis shows their current win percentage at 61% which is the highest of any army, only Slannesh is close at 60%. BA is down around midpack at 51%.

Yea retributors are insanely strong due to armoury cherubs, storm of retribution and of course, miracle dice.

 

Repentia are obviously strong, but are about to run into -1 damage from death guard and dark angels. But guess what? Zepherym are in position to drown a target in attacks. A unit of 10 with the exploding 6s sacred rite averages 13 -4 wounds...against toughness 8. Granted that's bloody rose and on-strat, but that's really the only time you see these melee units used.

 

Beyond that there's still the mortifier; another unit able to drown things in attacks and shots, the immolator for when they finally nerf retributors and seraphim for backfield disruption and scrambler use.

 

Even going outside of bloody rose, OoML has seen play due to the nature of +1 to hit being great, and Valourous Heart is extremely frustrating with a swarmier style as you ignore -2 AP and then rock a 4++.

 

All backed up by fixing your rolls with miracle dice. Spiking a melta roll, auto-charge from reserves, clutching armour or morale. You can force a huge overcommitment on units by making them just live that much longer in important situations.

 

Edit: screwed up the math on the zepherym.

Edited February 2, 2021 by SkimaskMohawk

[Umbros]

Skimask nailed it. Marines are not the best army in the game by any means. There is plenty of statistical data by 40kStats and written up by Goonhammer to show this, and people's impressions on the internet are woefully wrong. It's crazy to me how slow people are to catch on to the real meta in 40k vs. other games these days, but I guess that's just a result of a lot of the player base being older or less into MTG or other games with intensive meta-analysis.

 

Beyond that I'm convinced that many whiners don't actually play the game. (In normal times)

 

Although I will say that Marines are very strong in casual play because the amount of intrinsic rules and raw power of basic units give them good fundamentals against other armies who have to work harder for more power. This distorts perceptions.

[Hantheman]

Space marines are actually really well balanced. They’re good and you can win any game with them. But it’s not automatic and they can no longer do too much obscenely broken stuff.

 

They’re a good A tier army which suffer from being very popular and also everyone geared up to kill them for the last 18 months so most lists automatically have a way of killing them

[Uberlord Gendo]

There may also be something of an MMR effect. Not sure what you call it, but if you look at stats for a game like Dota, you see that the win rate of different heroes is not constant in different MMR (skill) brackets. Someone like Pudge, Riki, BB, PA, or PL may crush it in low mmr while Io and Batrider are much better in high mmr because they require understanding of different aspects of the game.

Some of what we may be seeing is that some armies may require more skill to play well, but also the features that allow one army to dominate in a casual setting amongst less skilled players are exactly the same as the ones that lead them to loose in higher tier gameplay.

[War of the Eagle]

I mean its kinda obvious isent it? Marines have always been "jack of all trades, masters of none". Sure broken combos and units have made them winners, but their forgiving game play is what makes them idea for beginners and casual games. Pros on the other hand dont need forgiving units, they need specialized units.

[BLACK BLΠFLY]

Marines are still top tier but they don’t need anymore nerfs or points increase. Haters gonna hate. Edited February 3, 2021 by Black Blow Fly

[SkimaskMohawk]

@uberlord gendo it's not quite like that, but also kind of is. The hardest to use armies use speed and maneuver to get optimal results. Just think of deployment; in the DZ you have certain choices that are the most correct and some that are not, limited by the space of the zone. A unit with infiltrate has far more options, and thus far more opportunities to be placed incorrectly. So armies that need to be have a bit of finesse will have better results played by someone who can leverage their abilities properly. Even smash bros needs good decision making on priorities and threats due to the damage output being so concentrated.

[MegaVolt87]

Honestly, its not really a SM issue its more of an overall 40k design and balance issue. in 8h-9th, armies have devolved from being an actual army and more of a collection of hot button/ honey-pot amalgamation of individual units if you still want to play past turn 3. You should never have to not buy/ use something thats an option, everything should have a place/ viability or be a side grade at worst. There is only a handful of best in slot units which cuts out most of the mid tier units in a faction, GW nerfs them and the wheel of madness continues to turn on itself. When X has peaked, Y will be buffed its just the GW way of doing things and won't change The only way out is to have two or more of everything so when it flips you will always have a competitive list. People who only main 1-2 factions for this reason will always be ahead of those who bandwagon, even if the army is only mid tier. 

Edited February 3, 2021 by MegaVolt87

[Jorin Helm-splitter]

Skimask nailed it. Marines are not the best army in the game by any means. There is plenty of statistical data by 40kStats and written up by Goonhammer to show this, and people's impressions on the internet are woefully wrong. It's crazy to me how slow people are to catch on to the real meta in 40k vs. other games these days, but I guess that's just a result of a lot of the player base being older or less into MTG or other games with intensive meta-analysis.

 

One of the biggest differences between 40k and a lot of the other games with "intensive meta-analysis" is a smaller player base. With MTG your going to be exposed to the top tier stuff (especially in arena), same for any online video game. I live in a fairly big city, and I know one sisters of battle player in the area. I can tell there are more sisters players, but I haven't met any because of Nurgles gift. Harlequin/Custodes are similiar in that they're rarer armies to play against and they also get absolutely punished if you make a mistake with them. Daemons are more popular than the other 3 choices but again aren't easy to pilot. Crons really suffered before their recent codex, and the people that started them with the new edition don't have full armies yet.

 

Marines though are that fraction that just about everyone can find game against, and if your not playing against the above armies with a good player they are the top tier for your meta. This is going to influence the perception of their power level a lot.

 

Marines are still top tier but they don’t need anymore nerfs or points increase. Haters gonna hate.

 

I agree the fact of the matter is that we've had 3 codex released so far this edition. Deathguard seem to be strong, and Crons look to be good so far. I think as more books gets released marines will feel more in line with everything. 

[MegaVolt87]

I mean its kinda obvious isent it? Marines have always been "jack of all trades, masters of none". Sure broken combos and units have made them winners, but their forgiving game play is what makes them idea for beginners and casual games. Pros on the other hand dont need forgiving units, they need specialized units.

 

This is a good point, though I am finding it hard to defend the point of SM keeping that " jack of all trades, masters of none" handicap as time goes on. Primaris are adding in one dimensional specialist units that are filling in a lot of gaps the army once had as being exclusively firstborn. The issue is SM now is fast approaching an army that has forgiving units AND specialist units. Untangling primaris and firstborn from being able to be taken together would add back the old jack of all trades handicap to SM in a fashion. However, even such a separation is no guarantee the traditional SM handicap will be maintained as we are likely far from finished with new primaris units being added to the faction, such an untangling would be but a temporary limiter. Maybe GW is trying to copy privateer press, if everything is busted cheese, then nothing is broken but balanced instead. Problem is, its a race to the bottom for every army that doesn't get a new codex fast enough. 

[BLACK BLΠFLY]

Most any SM infantry or biker unit is decent in melee versus lots of other factions’ basic units and in this regard they are still a jack of all trades and on top of that SM factions have always had highly specialized units.