List Tinkering Before the Tournament: Wyverns, Tauruses and Too Many Good Options
We had one of those very Wiatry Magii hobby-chat mornings where a “small list tweak” immediately turned into a proper theoryhammer session.
This time it was all about Warhammer: The Old World tournament prep: Stas polishing his Orc & Goblin list, Michał wrestling with Chaos Dwarfs choices, and somewhere in the middle a fresh calculator feature appeared because obviously that is a normal thing to happen in our group chat.
Stas updates the greenskin list
Stas started by posting his updated tournament list, with a few meaningful changes rather than a full rebuild.
The biggest shift was simple: wolves are out, and the points went into 10 more Night Goblins plus one extra Fanatic. That gives the goblin block a bit more body and a bit more nonsense, which in an Orc & Goblin army is usually exactly where we want to be.
He also fixed an item choice on the Black Orc Warboss. Trollhide Trousers were dropped after realizing they don’t give the expected 2+ save in this setup, and in came Talisman of Protection instead. A straight 5+ ward felt like the more reliable defensive option.
Here’s the list as shared:
301 - Black Orc Warboss, Great Weapon, Shield, General, Wyvern, Talisman Of Protection
132 - Night Goblin Bigboss, Great Weapon, Light Armour, Battle Standard Bearer, Giant Cave Squig, Enchanted Shield, Ruby Ring of Ruin
100 - Orc Weirdboy, Wizard Level 2, Battle Magic, Earthing Rod
220 - 15 Black Orc Mobs
• 1x Black Orc, Great Weapon, Boss
• 1x Black Orc, Shield, Standard Bearer
• 1x Black Orc, Shield, Musician
• 6x Black Orc, Shield
• 6x Black Orc, Great Weapon
182 - 30 Night Goblin Mobs
• 30x Night Goblin, Shield
• 3x Fanatic, Boss, Standard Bearer, Musician
210 - 8 Orc Boar Boy Mobs, Cavalry Spear, Heavy Armour, Shield, Big Un's, Boss, Standard Bearer, Banner Of Swirling Wind, Musician
105 - Doom Diver Catapults
• 1x Orc Bully
Honestly, we really like this kind of adjustment. Not flashy, not a total rewrite — just tightening the screws where the army actually needs it.
Michał’s Chaos Dwarfs problem: train, Skullcracker, or beefier defenses?
Then the conversation swerved hard into Chaos Dwarfs.
Michał started wondering whether to drop the shooting train and replace it with a Skullcracker instead.
From there, the real dilemma emerged: whether to switch from a Bale Taurus to a Great Taurus in order to free up points for Talisman of Protection on the Castellan.
That trade is awkward in exactly the way good list-building decisions usually are. You lose a bit of raw profile power — less Toughness, one fewer Attack, slightly worse stomps — but gain a 5+ ward, which is never trivial.
At the same time, Michał was also looking at his Hobgoblins and thinking that maybe bows just weren’t pulling their weight. If Volley doesn’t help after moving or on Stand & Shoot, then maybe shields are simply better value. Suddenly the unit starts looking surprisingly respectable: decent save, acceptable Weapon Skill, and leadership that stays solid while ranks are intact.
That also spills over onto the Castellan himself, because with shields and the right setup he gets noticeably sturdier too.
The maths rabbit hole, naturally
This is the point where Stas did what Stas does and started turning gut feeling into numbers.
The quick rule of thumb he proposed was this: a 5+ ward is roughly like increasing your wound pool by 50%. Not because it literally adds wounds, obviously, but because one third of incoming unsaved wounds are ignored. It’s a handy way to think about durability when comparing defensive options.
But Toughness is trickier.
As we all know, Toughness changes depending on the opponent’s Strength. Against S4, going from T5 to T6 changes wounding from 5+ to 6+, which is massive. Against S5, it changes from 4+ to 5+, which is still very good and starts to look a lot like the value of a 5+ ward. Against S3, though, the difference may matter much less — and in those cases the ward starts looking much better.
So the answer was not “ward always wins” or “higher Toughness always wins”. It was the much more annoying but much more correct answer: it depends who you expect to fight.
Simulacrum enters the chat
Because discussing probabilities is one thing, but actually seeing them side by side is much nicer, Stas added a new feature to his calculator and built direct comparisons for Michał.
First, the Taurus durability comparison:
The neat takeaway here was that the Bale Taurus actually performs worse into low-Strength chaff and rank-and-file than the warded Great Taurus setup, because the extra Toughness doesn’t always matter there.
Later, the conversation moved on to another fun question: Darkforged weapon with Hatred(all) versus simply going for a heavier-hitting profile.
And because no theoryhammer discussion is complete without a graph screenshot dropped into chat:
The funny part is that this wasn’t even a clean “one option is obviously better” conclusion. Darkforged had already produced at least one memorable Hatred(all) moment, which is exactly the sort of thing that keeps us coming back to weird magic gear even when the spreadsheet brain says “hmm, maybe not”.
The list-building pain: being 10 points short of happiness
One of the most relatable moments in the whole exchange was Michał realizing that the perfect version of the build was almost there… but not quite.
If he could just find 30 more points, then Mantle of Stone would patch up the Toughness issue and make the whole Great Taurus + defensive gear plan much more comfortable.
Except of course that would put the Castellan at 322 points, which is 10 too many.
That is such a classic Old World list-building experience that we almost want it framed.
Tournament packet and the usual pre-event panic
At the end, Stas noticed that a lot of the event restrictions were basically tied to Grand Melee.
And, in an equally important logistical development, he also announced that he now needs to figure out something for the baggage train.
Which feels like a perfect summary of pre-tournament prep in The Old World: half serious probability analysis, half “wait, I still need to model that thing”.
A few more screenshots from the discussion
Because this whole conversation was gloriously chaotic in the best possible way, here are the remaining screenshots that accompanied the debate:
That second one captures the mood especially well: it’s this week already. At some point the math has to stop and the dice have to roll.
Where we landed
So where did we end up after all this?
- Stas tightened his Orc & Goblin list by trading out wolves for more Night Goblins and another Fanatic, and by replacing Trollhide Trousers with Talisman of Protection on the Wyvern Warboss.
- Michał kept circling around the big Chaos Dwarfs question: Bale Taurus raw stats versus Great Taurus + 5+ ward efficiency.
- We got a nice reminder that defensive math in The Old World is always contextual.
- And, perhaps most importantly, we got another example of our group solving list anxiety by immediately building tools, sharing graphs, and overthinking everything together.
Which, honestly, is a huge part of the fun.
If we had to guess right now, we’d say this is not the last round of changes before the event. But at least now the changes are happening with a bit more math behind them — and with the proper amount of panic.