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.
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