In the normal fashion by which these kinds of updates now become public, the Warhammer 40k app updated earlier today with several changes to the More Dakka! detachment for Codex: Orks, which was released a couple of weeks ago as part of the balance dataslate updates. In our Detachment Focus article, we said “This detachment is very, very good at what it sets out to do, and looks set to make a big splash in the metagame.” We were very, very right about that, though it didn’t exactly take an oracle to prophesy it. Our Hammer of Math article shortly afterwards (https://www.goonhammer.com/hammer-of-math-mo-dakka-mo-problems/) explored exactly how good it was, and the ridiculous boost in power output available to an Ork player, and it’s worth revisiting the stats from that article to understand just how big of a deal the detachment has been over the last few weeks.
“Over the past weekend, 57 players picked up Orks for events with 28+ players and 5+ rounds, and if you remove mirror matches, they won 62.5% of their games. About half of the players going into round 4 with Orks were 3-0 in those events, hence the 3.0 Average First Loss score, which is insanely high. If you restrict that to just More Dakka! Players, it jumps to 3.4, and if you take out the lists which ran Gorka/Morkanauts, their win rate jumps to 71.5%. At the South Coast Super-Major, three of the top four players were running More Dakka!, and the same was true for the Rocky Mountain Open. More Dakka! lists won four events this past weekend – though it’s worth noting that adoption rate for the new updates was not yet at 100%. A Taktikal Brigade list was still among the weekends’ TiWP lists, for example.”
Within days of its release it was clear that More Dakka! was a mistake. The main thing we could hope for was that with this detachment existing in purely online form, it would be relatively easy for Games Workshop to change it at pace instead of spending 3 months in a metagame filled with Orks yelling and shooting at each other. That has now happened, with several key changes in place.
The first is that the Detachment Rule, Dakka! Dakka! Dakka!, has been completely altered. The old version gave your INFANTRY and WALKER units SUSTAINED 2 on their guns, and in addition, during a WAAAGH! INFANTRY and WALKER units got ASSAULT. Once per game your army could now Advance, shoot, and charge, while also being more durable, and thanks to the Get Stuck in, Ladz Stratagem a key unit could also do this every turn.
Both of those things have now been changed. The Detachment Rule now gives your units ASSAULT, instead of SUSTAINED HITS, which is now only in the Waagh. In addition, you get SUSTAINED HITS 1 instead of 2, seriously lowering the output of the army even on your go-turn, and Get Stuck in, Ladz now costs 2CP instead of 1, so you can’t just spam it every turn and you’ll have to plan ahead to be able to combine it with Orks is Still Orks to boost your melee output with re-roll wounds. It also can no longer target GRETCHIN units, so you can’t send Zodgrod and his 20 speedy little mates out to jail your opponent in their deployment zone while your Orks laugh and blast away at them with deffguns without blowing your once per game full-blooded Waaagh on it.
There is also a nerf to Long, Uncontrolled Bursts, which previously let you pick a unit that was visible to a CHARACTER model and give anything that shot at it IGNORES COVER for the duration of your Shooting phase. This was an enormously powerful boost to your otherwise mediocre AP. Now you just pick one ORKS unit which has not been selected to shoot this phase, and that unit gets IGNORES COVER. It’s still a nice increase for a unit of Lootas, but it doesn’t now allow your entire army to blast away at a unit and grind it down with high volumes of low AP shots like it did before.
The question now is: does this do enough? With the supplementary question of: does it do too much? It’s hard to immediately evaluate, and the detachment still has plenty to offer. You still get several boosts to shooting power along with a very powerful melee strat, so it’s not like it doesn’t do anything any more. It should make Orks much less oppressive to play against, and also give more reasons to use the army’s other detachments, which are also pretty good! Prior to the release of Taktikal Brigade and then More Dakka!, there was a reasonable variety of Ork detachments showing up competitively, and War Horde has still had a few good finishes even since then. If these adjustments (and the ones to Taktikal Brigade in March which have largely been overlooked because everyone just switched to this) have landed in the right place, then hopefully they will continue on that path, with a number of viable ways to build an Ork army that are both competitive and fun to play.
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