The Warhammer 40k Leagues of Votann faction is struggling in competitive games, with a win rate of just 28% across 11 major tournaments, according to the Warhammer 40k 10th Edition Data Dashboard maintained by the site Stat Check.
It’s a major downturn for the Leagues of Votann, which posted a healthy 52% win rate in Stat Check’s final Data Dashboard for ninth edition 40k. When the Votann first launched, they were considered so much more powerful than the other Warhammer 40k factions that some tournaments pre-emptively banned them, prompting GW to issue a day-one nerf. Their recent performance is a marked de-escalation.
At the opposite end of the table, Eldar players have claimed a 70% win rate, with Genestealer Cults following at 66%.
Stat Check aggregates tournament results from digital tools used by tournament organisers to run their events. At time of writing the Meta Data Dashboard contains results from 18 tournaments, played using the updated points costs that GW published on July 5.
While there’s no doubt that a 28% win rate is abject, and 70% is well outside the 45-55% range players expect from a well balanced game, the actual extent of the imbalance is hard to detect from the win-rates alone.
According to the Meta Data Dashboard for the final season of ninth edition 40k, 5% of players took Leagues of Votann, which has dropped to 2% for 10th edition. It’s early in the season, so it’s possible that later tournaments will bring a deluge of Votann entries. It could also be that experienced players have abandoned the faction because they smell weakness.
With a little scraping into the data about player numbers, we found that in the final ninth edition season 20% of Votann players were Newcomers. That has risen to 70% for 10th edition. Whatever the weaknesses of the faction, they’re now being piloted by a considerably less experienced group of players.
In contrast, just 44% of Aeldari players are newcomers. That’s still a big proportion, but the faction has exploded in popularity, making up 10% of all players (up from 6% at the end of ninth), and more than 10% of all Experienced and Veteran players.
Stat Check has a tool that ranks the factions with weightings based on the skill of the players piloting them, but that hasn’t been updated with data from 10th edition.
If you’re a Votann player who’s a bit dismayed by this news, check out Vanguard Tactics ‘How-To-Play’ video about the faction: they focus on the strengths and capacities of the Votann and how to make the most of them. If you’re intrigued by competitive play but don’t know where to start, check out our Vanguard Tactics Warhammer 40k 10th edition Accelerator programme review.
The 10th edition meta has been contentious, to the extent that some tournament organisers who felt the game was “clearly not balanced” at launch implemented their own balance patch before GW made its official points cost update on July 5.