When players talk about Volatility, what they usually mean is visibility. A faction appears at the top of the results tables, dominates discussions for a few weeks, and is immediately declared “the problem”.
But genuine volatility isn’t about where a faction sits at a single point in time. It’s about the sustained rises or falls that persist for that faction.
Once you start looking at it that way, a large part of the perceived instability soon disappears.
For example, take Lumineth Realm-lords. They are often talked about, spells, builds and interactions. And yet their win rate barely moves. Across the last three battlescrolls, December 2024, April, June and September they sit stubbornly in the mid 50s. (April: 54%, June: 55%, September: 55%). They exist, reliably, near the top of the pack, but importantly, within the healthy range. Flesh-eater Courts show a similar pattern (April: 52%, June: 51%, September: 54%). Minor drift, but nothing resembling real instability.
These factions aren’t volatile, they’re stable but with very loud community conversations around them.
True volatility does exist, but it’s far rarer and much more informative when it does appear. Blades of Khorne are a textbook example. In April they sat comfortably around the 50% mark. But with the release of their new battletome, specific builds, particularly the much discussed Gorechosen Champions, were posting extraordinary results, pushing the faction well beyond what most players would consider healthy. But GW soon corrected this and the faction dropped sharply, landing well below its peak.
Kruleboyz (April: 50%, June: 58%, September: 44%) followed a similar arc. A moment of success and then a clear fall. Short-term dominance was identified and brought back into line. When players point to these swings to prove instability, they’re actually pointing at one of the healthiest signs a competitive game can show, that outliers are temporary.
More interesting than the spikes, are the factions that never leave. Disciples of Tzeentch (April: 51%, June: 50%, September: 57%) barely register in community panic circles, yet quietly climb from average performance to sitting firmly among the top factions.
The most dangerous armies in any meta aren’t the ones that spike and attract attention, they’re the ones that survive corrections. They are harder to tech against and show more reliable tournament success.
What the data shows is a meta that is elastic. Strong factions often remain strong without becoming oppressive. Weak factions don’t magically solve themselves. Most of the movement happens in the middle, where small advantages are increased by player behaviour and the local metas. What players interpret as instability is usually just reaction time and social media moving faster than the data.
The lesson is simple. Chasing hot lists and sudden spikes may reward the short term, but will leave players with redundant models in the long term. How many players now have a ton of Pyregheist?
The AoS Meta favours armies with depth and resilience. The game isn’t unstable, players just panic quicker than the numbers can change.
The next time someone says the meta is broken, it may be worth asking how many battlescrolls they checked before deciding that.
