One of the most misleading things about faction win rates is how convincing they look when two armies sit next to each other on the chart.

Cities of Sigmar and Gloomspite Gitz are a good example. Across the September Battlescroll both faction finished with almost identical headline win rates of 53%. To many players that reads as balance. Two factions that are equal in strength.

They are not the same, and this article is about why similar win rates can hide very different player experiences, and why relying on that one number can lead players to the wrong conclusions about what a faction is like when being used at a tournament.

The Illusion of Equality

If you only looked at win rates, then Cities and Gitz would be interchangeable. Both win roughly half their games and neither sits at the extremes. Neither faction looks like it is broken.

But win rates, as we’ve mentioned earlier in our series, answers only one question: How often the faction won. It won’t tell you how those wins were achieved, who’s achieving them and how often players walk away from events feeling like they had a decent weekend.

Once you start looking beyond that percentage, the picture changes.

Who is Actually Playing the Faction?

The first difference between the factions is who is taking them to events.

Cities of Sigmar has a relatively high average Elo but lower player numbers. A larger proportion of its games are played by experienced players, though it still has representation across the middle of the skill curve. It has slightly more appeal to competitive players and rewards strong fundamentals.

Gloomspite Gitz’ player base, while still high, is lower rated than Cities overall, with a much larger player base. It’s a faction that would appear to be chosen for its aesthetic and playstyle over being competitive.

That matters because a faction achieving a 53% win rate with a less experienced player base tells us something important. Gitz can generate wins without requiring tight, highly optimised play in every game.

Already we’re describing two different populations producing the same headline percentage.

What Does Success Look Like?

This is where faction win rate really starts to fall apart as player advice.

Cities of Sigmar shows a higher proportion of players finishing events with positive results. Almost 40% of players finished the weekend with 3-2 results, which reflects both consistency and the faction’s experienced player base.  Cities doesn’t spike events often, but many players walk away having felt competitive through the weekend.

While Gloomspite Gitz looks different. While its players are more likely than Cities to achieve three wins in the first three rounds of an event, there is a noticeable drop-off in later rounds. The 2-3 bracket is much larger, and far few players convert early success into strong final results.

What this suggests is a a faction that is tactically forgiving (players can win games even without perfect execution), but strategically volatile across a full tournament. As the event progresses Gitz struggle more at the top tables than Cities does.

Tactically Forgiving vs Strategically Forgiving

There is a difference. Gloomspite Gitz are tactically forgiving. Its mechanics and swing potential allow players to win games without flawless play or list optimisation. This helps explain why a lower Elo player base can still produce a strong overall win rate.

Cities of Sigmar is  less forgiving on a turn by turn bases. Mistakes can be punished more consistently and clean play matters.

But over the length of a weekend the roles reverse.

Cities is strategically forgiving. It recovers better across five rounds and produces steadier outcomes. Gitz by contrast are prone to late tournament collapse.

Both paths lead to the same win rate and the experience of getting there is very different.

How Fragile is Success?

Another difference lies in how dependent each faction is on certain choices.

Cities of Sigmar has reasonably large roster but would appear to have only a few viable builds. Its performance is spread across a smaller number of warscrolls with a vast amount of its roster being either ignored or experiencing very little play. Warscrolls like the Fusil-Major on Warhulk, Freeguild Cavaliers and Ironweld Great Cannon appear in the majority of lists.

This often happens when a smaller player bases identifies an optimised build and others follow. Success becomes concentrated, which can make the faction feel oppressive at times and fragile at others. Small rules or points changes may dramatically alter the performance even if the headline win rate barely moves.

Gitz shows broader warscroll usage. While not all choices are equally successful, far more of the roster sees meaningful pay. With a larger player base and lower average Elo, success is spread across different list types rather than being driven by a narrow core.

This contributes to both Gitz’ volatility and accessibility.

The Role of the Tournament Organiser and Battleplan Selections

Battleplans matter for each faction, but they matter unevenly.

Cities of Sigmars performs very well on five of the most popular battleplans, where it exceeds a 55% win rates, but struggles significantly on two others where their win rate is well below 45%.

Gits is more consistent across the battleplans with only one proving to be a significant advantage and one a clear problem.

As a result, Cities is more sensitive to the Battleplan selection than Gitz. Identical lists can feel dominant one weekend and underwhelming the next, depending entirely on which Battleplans the Tournament Organiser has chosen.

Again, this is invisible in the headline win rate.

Same Percentage, Different Questions

At this point the headline percentage of 53% becomes almost irrelevant.

Cities and Gitz may win their games at similar rates, but they ask very different things of their players.

Cities rewards experience, precision, and consistency. It performs better into top factions but pays for that with sensitivity to battleplans and narrower competitive cores.

Gloomspite Gitz is more accessible and tactically forgiving, allowing players to win games early and often, but struggles to convert that momentum into consistent late tournament success against top tier opposition.

Choosing between these factions based on the win rate alone, they are choosing blind.

What Players Should Take Away

This is the core of why I wrote the Data Literacy series.

Win rates aren’t lying to you, but they are summaries, and Summaries are dangerous when they’re treated as advice.

Two factions can sit on the same percentage and offer entirely different tournament experiences. One may feel consistent across battleplans but struggle into the top tier of factions. One may feel consistent but constrained. The other may feel explosive but unreliable.

Understanding which experience suits you matters more than the number reading 53%.

Final Thoughts

In our first article we talked about patience. In our second, interpretation. Now we’re talking above perspective.

Statistics don’t tell you what to play but they tell you what questions to ask.

Cities and Gitz look balanced at first glance. In practice, they are telling different stories and that gap is why win rates, taken alone, are such poor guides for players trying to understand their own results.

Same, same… but different.

Previous: Why Faction Win Rates Alone Are Bad

One of the most common statements after attending a tournament is often:

“My army is bad”

It’s understandable sometimes. You’ve just played five games over a long weekend and walked away with one win. Maybe none. You check the win rates and see your faction sitting at 47%. You feel like the answer is staring back at you in one simple percentage.

But this is where win rates are not helpful.

Faction win rates are not useless, but taken on their own, they’re one of the worst tools a player can use to understand their own experience of the game. It compresses too much and hides too much. It doesn’t answer the question that you’re actually asking.

This article isn’t about telling you to ignore win rates. Far from it, it’s about explaining why win rates are only meaningful when read alongside other data.

What a Faction Win Rate Actually Tells You

All a win rate can answer is “Across all games played, how often did this faction win?”. That’s it.

It won’t tell you:

• How hard the faction is to play
• Whether mistakes are punished severely
• Whether most players go 3-2 or 0-5
• Whether success is driven by a few elite players
• Whether the faction is forgiving or swingy

A win rate doesn’t know the difference between winning a game by only one victory point on turn five or tabling an opponent on turn three. Losing narrowly to an elite player will look the same as having your army rolled up by a newcomer. All of that is flattened into a percentage.

For GW and balancing the games they produce, that flattening is perhaps acceptable. But for individual players trying to decide what to play, what to stick with, and what factions they need to look out for, it’s terrible advice.

The Compression Problem

Win rates take a lot of variables and then compresses it into a single number. Player skill, list construction, internal balance of warscrolls, matchup spread, battleplans, learning curves is all compressed, and that is the source of most bad takes in competitive Warhammer.

A 52% faction can be brutally unforgiving and hard to learn. But that faction could be being carried by elite players who know how to get the most out of playing them. A 48% faction could be easily accessible, consistent, and easy to learn. The win rate chart won’t tell you which is which.

Why We Publish More Than Win Rates

This is the part that can get missed. We publish the faction win rates, but we try to also provide context around them. While win rates are often the headline, they won’t tell you the whole story. This is why we’ve deliberately expanded what we publish over time.

Here are some of the other views that you should be using.

Average Elo by Faction: Who’s Actually Winning?

We’ve now gathered a database of thousands of players across hundreds of tournaments across both third and fourth editions. We’ve also calculated the Elo of each player. An average Elo can tell you who is succeeding with an army and not just whether it wins.

When a faction has a high win rate and a high average Elo that’s often a sign the faction is being carried by experienced players. The success is real, but it comes with a skill tax (the faction rewards experience and punishes mistakes).

But you may also have factions with a very average win rate and an average or lower than average Elo. These factions are often easier to learn. They may not spike, but players can have decent weekends with them and not feel bad afterwards.

This difference matters far more than the raw percentage.

Popularity and Representation: Who’s Actually Playing the Army?

Popularity doesn’t mean power, but it can shape the outcomes.

High popularity factions are usually the ones that attract new players into the game. These are factions like Stormcast Eternals in Age of Sigmar, or Space Marines in 40k. High popularity factions will often have lists shared more frequently, get faced by more practiced opponents and generate more mirror matches. As a result, these factions often get “solved” quicker. Lists are either honed quickly, or counters are quickly found.

Rare factions benefit from unfamiliarity and are often played by specialists. They can appear stronger than they really are.

A 53% faction played by 250 people is different from a 53% faction played by 40.

This is why we include mirror matches within our data. Mirror matches are not just noise; they’re a direct result of faction popularity and part of the tournament experience players have.

Our previous approach before 2025 was to remove them to isolate the pure faction strength. Which is fine, but it answers a different question. Now we’re being deliberate, “What does it feel like to bring this army to events right now?”

Consistency: How Do Players Actually Perform?

Some of the most player relevant charts we publish barely get discussed. Charts like the percentage of players with positive results, the split between 4+ wins, 3-2, 2-3 finishes, and consecutive wins at events. These will help you shape your opinion a lot more than just the win rate alone.

A faction with lots of 3-2 finishes and very few highs or lows is often a better choice for most players than a spike army that occasionally wins events but collapses for the majority.

Most people don’t need to go 5-0 to enjoy a tournament, but they competitive games and a sense they were in the fight.

Battleplans and Battle Tactics

Another reason win rate is a poor advice on its own is that it ignores the situations that armies are playing in. Battleplan frequency, Battle Tactics pairing and faction performance by Battleplan all should be taken into account.

These charts show that some Battleplans favour certain playstyles and some Battle Tactic combinations are easier to score for some factions.

Results can be shaped by what Tournament Organiser’s decide is in the player pack, not just what you bring to the table. When an army feels strong one weekend and bland the next it can be the player pack talking and not the faction.

Transparency and the Database

One thing I think is important to say is that Woehammer doesn’t treat its charts as the final answers. For our Patreons we make the full Excel database available as a download. The database includes every list from every event we’ve recorded, the warcroll win rates (both included and excluded), Battle Tactic win rates by faction and breakdowns we don’t regularly publish on the site.

The point isn’t to overwhelm people with data. It’s to make the data we use and how we construct our charts visible. Anyone can see how the numbers are assembled, question our assumptions or explore the data themselves.

We’re trying really hard not to tell you what to think but to give you the tools to think more clearly.

What Should Players Do?

Look at the win rates, just don’t stop there.

If you’re choosing or judging an army ask a few questions:

• Who is succeeding with it?
• How many players are having decent weekends?
• Is the success consistent or does it have spikes?
• How popular is the faction?
• How does it perform across the Battleplans?
• How much data is there?

Win rate is the starting point, but to draw context you need to look at everything.

Final Thoughts

Faction win rates aren’t lying to you, they’re just summaries and summaries are dangerous when they’re treated as the be all and end all.

If our first article was about patience, then this one is about interpretation. We and others like us publish a lot of data because no single chart can explain what is a complex and evolving game. The aim is to give you some clarity not certainty. Statistics are just a tool in a toolbox.

In our next article we’ll compare two factions with similar win rates and look at just how differently they are when you take everything else into account.

Previous Article: Woehammer Data Literacy: Early Win Rates

Next Article: Same Win Rate, Different Story