DPA

Let’s start of what the DPA actually is – Damage Per Activation is avarage damage of single attack multiplayed by number of attacks. Usually it takes form of DPAX, where X is the attack target Tougness. When X is not mentioned it is often assumed it is 4, because 4 is the most common Toughness value across all factions and a lot of people, including some content creators, only use DPA4 in their analysis. The problem with avarage value is that it is heavily influenced by critical hits especially when critical hits results in over twice the damage of normal hits (1/5 damage profiles of some Mortek Guards, Plague Monks or even ranged attack of Horn’s of Hashut Demolisher with Flamehurler are the biggest offenders here).

In some cases expecting attack rolls to result in damage at least equal to DPA in half of the rolls is a bit naive. For example already mentioned Plague Monk with Woe-Staff has DPA4 equal 3, but his actual chance of dealing 3+ damage is only 42,59%. The biggest problem however is when different weapon profiles have similar or the same DPA value, like for example all 3 Ardboyz profiles. If no other values are checked the subtle differences between weapons are judged only by intuition and this leads to incorrect assumptions (if you trust your intuition I have a riddle for you – which OBR Necropolis Stalker profile has higher chance of killing Skeleton Warrior’s 8 wounds with Toughness 4 in one action without any abilities. The answer is in last paragraph).

Ardboyz

Analysis based on DPA4 stops working when 2 profiles has equal DPA value. Also comparing fighters with difference not only in offensive but also defensive stats require way more than simply comparing their “stats”. So let’s start analyzing Ardboyz from their profiles:

As we can see DPA4 doesn’t show us a lot, so lets add DPA3 and DPA5 to the comparison:

	DPA3	DPA4	DPA5
Shield	3,5	3	2,5
Big Choppa	5	4	3
2 Choppas	4,(6)	4	3,(3)

This helps us see that 2 choppas are slightly better than big choppa against high Toughness opponents and slightly worse vs low Toughness opponents. In both cases the average damage difference is 0,3. The shield version is around 1 point below 2 other options but it also has higher Toughness. Based on DPA alone the difference between 2 offensive versions is extremely small and equals up to 1 point of total damage after 3 attack actions. It also doesn’t help deciding whether the shield is worth it or no, so how to decide which one to chose?

Picking any fighter for your warband (from purely competitive perspective) should be like picking a tool for a task you want to achieve. To identify the role of the fighter you must examine it from 3 contexts: its faction, your warband and opposing warband.

Let’s start with opposing warband – if you know you will be playing vs Ogre Gutlords enthusiast with 3 Gutlords, Brewgit and 2 Gnoblars (this list is only for example sake) you know that +1 Toughness from the shield won’t change anything as your opponent will only have access to Strength 6 and 2, additionally to win such game you will have to deal with T5 Gutlords in which case 2x choppas are the best choice. For most cases you will not have the luxury to know your opponent ahead and the knowledge of your local meta or your read on battlepack meta will be the only things you can refer here.

The other context you should consider is the faction you play. As we are talking about Ardboyz let’s take a closer look at Ironjawz. The Ardboyz are this faction’s cheapest fighters with next cheapest costing 135 points, which forces this faction lists to be more on elite side, especially that mobility is super expensive in the whole Grand Alliance Destruction with 245 points Bounder Boss being the cheapest from the most popular mobile units in use. Ironjawz have access to great doubles that are among the best force multipliers in the game and most of them (outside Brewgit’s ability) doesn’t require ally slot.

All of the abilities above work great and make powerful heroes from Grand Alliance Destruction even stronger, but I think the strongest ability of the faction is certainly You messin’ as it completely changes the dynamic between elite warband and hordes in objective missions.

Access to extremely powerful heroes, great triples that cover the faction weaknesses (I didn’t even mentioned Waaagh! yet) and doubles to improve your Titan heroes makes the chance that there would be some spare ability dice for your Ardboyz very low. This analysis shows that your Ardboyz will most likely be surrounded by very elite and slow force. As Ardboyz can’t help with the speed problem that their faction have their role will be participating in the numbers game – they can’t die due to relatively low model count of Ironjawz warbands and they must be able to trim enemy forces to mitigate numbers disadvantage and do that without investing ability dice. Fortunately all Ardboy profiles can successfully play mentioned roles.

The last context I will describe is the most important one – the exact list the fighters exist in. I will start with an easy example. Let’s assume that the Gutlord enthusiast I mentioned before is you and the list you want to play is:

2x Gutlord

Brute Boss with Boss Choppa

3x Ardboyz

(Btw it is the real list mentioned in public Warcry discord, so if you are not there I strongly advice checking it out, also this list seams like a lot of fun) In this list chosing the correct version of Ardboyz is easy – due to how durable your heroes are its quite obvious that Ardboyz would be heavily targeted, also because for objective play, with or without you messin’ they will impact the scoring in the same way as your titans. The other factor is that whenever possible Ardboyz actions will be translated to your heroes movement with the usage of faction reaction or they will use wait action in “activation war” which will not leave them with many actions left to use for attacking, thats why shield is the obvious answer here.

Lets combine all I mentioned above in real life example – the list that finished second in Warkraj 2023, the 25 players tournament that happened in Poland. The battlepack chosen by TO was slightly modified Rumble Pack (Reaper instead of Burning objectives battleplan) with randomly picked battleplans and if you are interested you can read about my preparation for it in my previous article: How to overprepare for slightly modified rumble pack tournament

Brute Boss with Boss Klaw and Brute Smasha

Brute Boss with Boss Choppa

2x Brute with pair of Brute Choppas

Brute with Gore-Choppa

2x Ardboy

It is tempting to make the whole warband T5 by equipping Ardboyz with Shields, but the battlepack is the key here and as at least half of the games will have 4+ objectives (4/6 battleplans have objectives and there were 4 rounds) You messin’ may not be enough against more numerous opponents. Thats why killing enemies on objectives is the way to go and because of Rumble Pack it is a good idea to expect a lot of weaker “chaff” models. From simple DPA comparison we know that Big Choppa has slight edge against low Toughness and indeed it’s the correct answer for this list (assuming no over-representation of Cities of Sigmar Dwarves and OBR) and the decision that Bartosz, the pilot of this list has made and sadly defeated me with. But what exactly is the difference between 2 Choppas and Big Choppa, if according to DPA it’s 0,(3) damage per action considering the title of this article

Mathhammer

The decision between offensive and defensive variants is way easier than between both offensive ones, so let’s measure them precisely against their intended purpose – dealing damage and killing chaff. As far as damage is concerned it isn’t hard to get better stats than DPA, but the problem is with drawing conclusions from them, lets see stats for single attack action:

As I mentioned this kind of “raw data” isn’t very pleasant to work with nor is it easy to draw any meaningful conclusions from it, but still it shows you way more than DPA, as you can see for example in 4+ and 6+ parts of damage charts the Big Choppa is more consistent in finishing wounded enemies across or Toughness values and the other observation you can make is that also no matter the Toughness of your opponent the damage of 2 Choppas draps way less for damage threshold of 9 and higher, so if you desperatly need to spike damage it is way more likely with 2 choppas.

Let’s move to statistics that are strictly connected with the role of the fighter, in this case – chance for killing chaff units with 2 attack actions:

Chaff	Big Choppa	2 Choppas
T3 6W	93,59%	80,21%
T4 6W	78,65%	72,00%
T3 8W	81,24%	61,63%
T4 8W	58,97%	50,33%
T3 10W	61,05%	46,04%
T4 10W	37,85%	34,16%
T3 12W	37,83%	28,05%
T4 12W	20,41%	18,15%

The table above may hold an answer to what is the most efficient way of dealing with Grave Guards, it also shows how deadly Ardboyz with Big Choppa are in dealing with opposing Chaff and it explains why I really like running them in pairs. It also shows that difference between profiles is much bigger than DPA suggests

TLDR and Stalker Question

Long story Short – if you need to do damage against T5+ opponents (or your dice set may get you killed in casino) 2 Choppas are for you, if you need to kill lower Toughness enemies – Big Choppa will get you there and if you play 6 or less fighters or the Ardboy role is just to survive to count as +1 body for objective influenced by You Messin’ – you pick shields.

Also expecting the DPA value of damage will most likely make you hate your dice over time.

Regarding the Stalkers question:

Necropolis Stalker with Spirit Blades chance to kill Skeleton – 44,21%

Necropolis Stalker with Dread Falchions chance to kill Skeleton – 49,07%

If your intuition was right here then congratulations – you are better at intuitive calculations than me (or you saw this mentioned on Discord) either way thanks for sticking with me through this wall of text and I hope it will help you in any way or at least that you enjoyed reading this. Bye