Why so many Dark Angels Ironstorms?

 It was a bad weekend for Dark Angels, with no DA lists popping up near the top in any of the weekend's events and DAs only scoring a 27% win rate overall. That said, only one player took an Ironstorm out this weekend, and based on his 17% win rate he must have only won one game, which suggests either he didn't play an optimal list, or he took a netlist he wasn't that familiar with to a major event and did poorly due to lack of experience with the army.

Since I don't have any lists to talk about from the weekend, I thought I might take a crack at analyzing why so many Dark Angels Ironstorms keep getting high scores in the meta. For that, I took a bit of a dive into game statistics. If you're interested in looking at raw data, you can go to The Meta Dashboard at Stat-Check.com. It's a fun tool, you can do a lot with it.

For starters, let's look at the stats for Space Marines, as Dark Angels are Space Marines with some unique characters and units. That picture is not too rosy. Space Marines are languishing at the bottom of the meta, with a 42% overall win rate, which makes it surprising that GW didn't hand out more points reductions through the Munitorum Field Manual. Of the 6 detachments available to Space Marine players, the Vanguard is actually the highest performing at 46% (probably because of the synergies some of the Ultramarines characters provide), with the Ironstorm being the next highest performing at 44%. I suspect if it was possible to weed out the Ultramarines lists from the data, the Ironstorm would be the top performing detachment.

It's not to hard to see why the Ironstorm is among the best performing Space Marine detachments. The detachment rule, Armored Wrath, grants every unit the ability to reroll a hit roll, wound roll, or damage roll per turn. That's a pretty significant offensive buff right there, and it benefits units that have low amounts of high power attacks more than high numbers of low power attacks. Those kinds of attacks are going to be found with vehicles more often than infantry. Most of the Enhancements are beneficial enough to be considered must-haves, and two of them can only be bought for Techmarines, who also buff vehicles both offensively and defensively. Then there are good stratagems - one for ignoring modifiers (nice for dealing with those pesky half-damage defensive abilities), one that grants Sustained Hits (popping on 5's for vehicles), one that grants out-of-sequence shooting, and of course there's Armor Of Contempt. So, there are a lot of good strats to spend CP on. 

On top of that. there are a lot of strong vehicle datasheets. The Redemptor Dreadnought stands out because it's solid at shooting and assault, and it's got high toughness, a 2+ save, and a -1 damage ability, so it's going to be difficult to deal with. Most of the high performing lists also include Stormravens, which is a legacy Firstborn kit that has high mobility, a lot of firepower, can transport a Dreadnought (Redemptors were not envisioned when that rule was written), and also has a -1 damage ability. Consequently, it's no surprise that Ironstorms built around those units do well. It's not the only way to build a good Ironstorm though. Repulsor Executioners, Gladiator Lancers, either of the other Redemptor chassis dreads, heck even Predator Destructors would be good units to have in an Ironstorm Spearhead. However, Redemptors and Stormravens are definitely strong taken in isolation and synergize well with each other. 

Where Dark Angels enter the picture is with two of our unique units - Azrael and the Ravenwing Darkshroud. As previously discussed, Ironstorm players are spoiled for choice when it comes to good stratagems. So, it's not much surprise that Azrael's CP generation is valuable to an Ironstorm player. Marneus Calgar also provides CP generation, but he costs 80 points more than Azrael. And then there's the Darkshroud, which adds a layer of defense to the stack that Redemptors and Stormravens already come with, making already-difficult-to-destroy units that extra little bit sturdier, which consequently gives the Techmarines one is going to use anyway more chances to restore wounds and keep those units in the fight. 

In addition to that, those two value-add units are easy to slot into a pre-existing list. I don't want to add fuel to the not-real-Dark-Angels fire, but it would be disingenuous not to point out that these lists only include two actual Dark Angels models, which represents a fairly low investment in money and time. So, there's probably some justice to the idea that competitive Space Marine players are choosing the Ironstorm because it's got the best potential out of the Space Marine detachments, and playing them as Dark Angels because Azrael and the Darkshoud are easy to add and give their lists that extra bit of oomph. If those two units weren't so readily available by playing Dark Angels, I think the players doing well with Ironstorm Spearheads would still be doing well with them, just not as well. Because it's so easy to play Ironstorms as Dark Angels, it artificially deflates the win rate percentage of the Space Marine Ironstorm, because if you're going to bring an Ironstorm to a GT, why not include two more models that make it perform better?

Which leads us to the Dark Angels stats. Over the past three months, Dark Angels have enjoyed a 46% overall win rate, which is not great, but is certainly better than the Space Marine win rate, and is within the Goldilocks zone Games Workshop has stated it's trying to keep everyone's army in. However, if you take the Ironstorm out, the overall Dark Angels win rate drops down to the same 40% win rate that Space Marines have. That said, the data indicates that the Stormlance and the Firestorm detachments are performing well for Dark Angels players - 50% and 45% respectively; and that the Inner Circle Task Force is dragging down the overall score with its 31% win rate. Sorry, brothers, the ICTF is just not good. 

So, to sum it up, the reason we see so many Dark Angels Ironstorms in the meta is that the Ironstorm is currently arguably the best detachment for a Space Marine player to play competitively, playing them as Dark Angels is the best way to play them, and because doing so only requires 2 models, it's fairly inexpensive and easy to add them to a list. We'll see if the latest Munitorum Field Manual changes things, but I suspect it won't by much. If it's a big enough problem to require more correction, GW may address it by changing how the Darkshroud interacts with other units - having it only affect mounted and infantry units maybe. Until then, we'll continue seeing Dark Angels Ironstorms place highly in the competitive meta, and the rest of us will just have to try and get as good as we can with whatever lists we happen to be playing, and hope for some help from GW when the next Balance Dataslate comes around.