Tactica: Why orks in 6th Ed take your lunch money

The Orks.

Cunning but brutal, or brutal but cunning. Depends on if you love Gork or Mork more.

I'm going to lay it out flatly, Orks in 6th are still a top tier codex. If you disagree, I'm going to propose to you that either your current ork opponents have yet to master the edition, or you have not played any orks recently!

Here's what changed for orks in 6th for the worse

- Random charge distances
- Disordered Charge
- Not being able to hop out of or get into a vehicle which has performed, or is going to perform a tank shock
- Cover Saves on Deffrollas for models in area terrain (yes this was an FAQ thing, it's retarded)
- Snikrot getting nerfed hard
- no assault from reserves
- No more moving 12 inches, hopping out 3, then assaulting 6 (essentially guaranteed distances for charging)
- No more shooting flame templates out of vehicles that moved 12 inches
- S4 booms in vehicles instead of S3

Here is what's changed for the better for orks in 6th

- Much larger potential charge ranges on any given turn without the waaugh fleet, with the waaugh, similar charge range to previous editions waaugh charge
- Battlewagons keep moving more often without glances stopping them cold
- Flat out moving for vehicles
- Power weapons no longer eat through SV2
- Not being able to assault out of vehicles which do not have the assault vehicle rule
- Snap Fire
- being able to rally even if enemies are within 6"
- no more fearless wounds
- range of fire from guns (big shootas) means shootas can have a better kill range than some opponents (storm bolters)
- Leadership tests at full LD for rally unless below 25%.


Some of these "better" items, don't necessarily have anything to do with orks as an army per se, but they do affect how well your opponent can react to things you do.

Example: If you deff-rolla a rhino full of guys forcing them to get out, you now know that squad can't turn around and assault you in their next turn. They have to stand there, hoping their shooting is going to do something meaningful.

Grey Hunters, which are the bane of any self respecting boyz, are no longer able to shelter in their rhino's safe from gunfire. To get into assault to mutilate they boyz, they need to start on foot or be out of their rhino's for at least a turn (don't forget this if it boomed too!). That means plenty of opportunity to soften them up with some gunfire.


So why orks in this edition? In the coming days I am going to post a unit by unit breakdown of the goods and bad's of the ork codex to explain just that.

To give you the short answer now, Orks still have all the tools to handle any threat which comes at them. Boyz are cheap and plentiful, giving you lots of bodies on the board, with fearlessness or re-rolling leadership if you equip them properly, they tend to stick around. Meganobz are back with a vengeance, their 2+'s now make a mockery of most armies, and power klaws are as good as ever.

Battlewagons provide cheap armor walls that can stop the massive levels of anti-infantry torrent we see these days. They also move very fast, there are very few armies that can avoid turn 2 charges from Bwagon spam lists now.

Dakkajets and lootas provide great fire support for both ground and flier targets.