Monday, July 19, 2010

Mathhammer: Wolf Guard with Mark of the Wulfen?

So I am planning on running a Space Wolf Scout Pack in my army. I love the fact that you can really trick out the scouts (although they can be a huge points sink). The thought of 10 dudes coming in from the back field with a melta, 2 power weapons and a MoW dude can be quite scary if your opponent leaves someone in the back field. Now what I am considering doing is attaching a Wolf Guard squad leader to come in with them, but I'm not sure what I want to outfit him with. I was thinking of Mark of the Wulfen because the only thing that really seems better than one crazy mother F'er is two! But I got to wondering if there were better options, that lead me to break out the old probability hammer and figure it out.

Now what I am looking at is pure close combat killing ability. I'm not worried about making this Wolf Guard capable of killing vehicles in the back field (with a PF, combi-melta, or meltabomb). This is all just, which weapon is better.

The reason I was leaning towards MoW as the best was the sheer number of rending attacks. The dude's attack characteristic becomes D6+1! Add in the extra attack for two CC weapons (assuming BPistol and CCW), and another attack because of charging, that is 4-9 attacks!

So I was thinking of how to do this, and it quickly became apparent that it was really impractical to see how the five different weapons I am looking at would do against every possible encounter, so I tried to pick some generic "dudes" that this crazy mother F'er might charge.

First out would be s S3, T3 and Sv 5+ guy, more commonly know as the Imperial Guard Guardsman. Attacking the Guardsman I came up with this table for the average number of unsaved sounds created.





Weapon
Wounds
MoW
2.17
Power Weapon
1.78
Power Fist
1.67
Frost Weapon
2.22
Twin Wolf Claws
2.96





Next I moved on to a basic Tac Marine. This gave me S4, T4, and a Sv 3+. This time I got the following.




Weapon
Wounds
MoW
0.90
Power Weapon
1.00
Power Fist
1.25
Frost Weapon
1.33
Twin Wolf Claws
1.50
Lastly, I looked at a Terminator to see what the invulnerable save would do to things.





Weapon
Wounds
MoW
0.54
Power Weapon
0.67
Power Fist
0.83
Frost Weapon
0.89
Twin Wolf Claws
1.00
So the MoW does well against the Guardsmen, but really starts to do poorly against anything "tougher," and it really loses it's punch when you toss in an invulnerable save. I was just about to wrap it up and say that the Wolf Claws were the way to go when I realized that I didn't take cost into account. A Wolf Guard with MoW costs 33 points. A Wolf Guard wtih Twin Wolf Claws costs 48 points. So the last thing I threw into the excel spread sheet was to devide the number of wounds by the cost of the weapon. When I ranked up the weapons I got something that looked like this.





IG
SM
Term
PW
PW
PW
MoW
FB
FB
FB
PF
PF
WC
MoW
MoW
PF
WC
WC

So it looks like, when you bring cost into it, the power weapon is the clear winner. Now with all that said and done, I'm pretty sure I'm going to outfit my scouting Wolf Guard with a power fist and a combi-melta. But I'm a math nerd, so I really don't consider the time I spent calculating this wasted.

4 comments:

  1. Unfortunately you seem to have missed that Mark of the Wulfen is not affected by additional handweapons etc which would change your results.(pg 62 of the codex)
    Secondly you don't seem to have accounted for the possibility of rending, especially against higher toughness models, which is the entire point of taking MotW

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  2. You know, when I wrote it I was sure I was putting to many attacks in, I even read page 62, but all I saw was the fact that MoW wouldn't get power weapon attacks if the WG was equipped with WPs.

    You are right about the higher toughness models as well, but It really only helps if we are talking T8+ which is pretty much just C'tan. I am mainly used the rending negating armor saves.

    Thanks for the input. You've given me some things to think about.

    ReplyDelete
  3. T8 isn't just for C'tan. A much more common example would be WraithLords.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well not counting other named characters, I don't think there are any other T8 dudes out there.

    ReplyDelete