Nufflenomics: How Mighty is your Blow?

I’ve always thought that Mighty Blow is a good skill to take, especially in league play as it will allow you to rack up the SPP from casualties to quickly gain the other skills that your play would want. Then I started to take it a lot (especially on black orcs) and felt like it wasn’t getting used very much. I decided to investigate what the actual impact is on armour rolls made.

The first thing we need it the comparison numbers. These will allow us to see the affect of mighty blow on the rolls made. These can be calculated by looking at how many times armour is broken, and then multiplying that by the likelihood of a stunned, knocked out or casualty result. The table below shows this for players of all armour values.

AV	Break %	Stun %	KO %	Cas %
6+	72%	42%	18%	12%
7+	58%	34%	15%	10%
8+	42%	24%	10%	7%
9+	28%	16%	7%	5%
10+	17%	10%	4%	3%
11+	8%	5%	2%	1%

 

To then see the effect of mighty blow, we need to make 2 adjustments. We need to add the effect of mighty blow (+1) being used to break the armour, and also it not being needed for the armour break but it being used on the injury roll. For example, we need to calculate for a player with 9+ armour the effect of their armour instead being broken on an 8 (and only an 8), and the effect of a 9+ being rolled and therefore the player being more likely to be knocked out or casualtied.

This gives us the below table.

AV	Break %	Stun %	KO %	Cas %
6+	83%	37%	25%	22%
7+	72%	32%	21%	19%
8+	58%	27%	17%	14%
9+	42%	20%	12%	10%
10+	28%	13%	8%	6%
11+	17%	8%	5%	4%

 

We can then look at the difference between the two tables which is below.

AV	Break %	Stun %	KO %	Cas %
6+	11%	-6%	7%	10%
7+	14%	-2%	7%	9%
8+	17%	3%	6%	7%
9+	14%	3%	5%	5%
10+	11%	4%	4%	4%
11+	8%	3%	3%	2%

 

There are negative values in stun for the lower armoured player because the armour break percentage was so high originally that mighty blow will almost always be used to worsen the injury.

If we assume that the majority of players have an armour value of either 8+ or 9+ (this seems likely but I will look at the stats one day I’m sure) then mighty blow will increase the chance of an armour break by around 15.5%, a chance of a knock out by around 5.5% and a chance of a casualty by around 6%.

This is on every single armour roll that player makes during the game, so if they are getting 7 armour rolls in a game, they would expect to use increase the number of armour breaks by 1. They would therefore need to be getting a knockdown roughly every other turn to get 1 additional break each game.

The player would need to get just over 16 armour rolls to get an additional casualty. It is unlikely that they would get that many rolls in 1 game so you would imagine in a league it would be a multiple game payback. Assuming this was your first skill taken for 6 SPP, then you will on average need 48 additional armour breaks to payback the SPP you have spent on the skill. Assuming an armour break every other turn each game (which still seems quite high to me) then it would take 6 full games to gain the SPP spent on the skill.

Obviously, the benefit can also just be in stunning or knocking out the player to give you a numerical advantage on the pitch, especially in tournament play. A removal of an armour 8+ player will happen an additional 13% of the time and an armour 9+ player 10% of the time. So you’d expect to be removing a player about 11.5% more, so roughly 1 in every 9 armour rolls. If you’re making an armour roll every other turn with the player, then you’ll be looking at roughly 1 additional removal every game.

Mighty Blow (+2)

There are a couple of star players who have the Mighty Blow (+2) skill. Generally tournaments will ban or heavily restrict these players due to their impact on the game. Are these bans and restrictions justified?

The below table shows the armour breaks and removals for a player with this skill, applying the same logic as earlier.

AV	Break %	Stun %	KO %	Cas %
6+	92%	31%	27%	33%
7+	83%	31%	24%	28%
8+	72%	29%	20%	22%
9+	58%	26%	16%	17%
10+	42%	19%	11%	11%
11+	28%	14%	7%	7%

 

If we compare it to our original table, we can see the impact.

AV	Break %	Stun %	KO %	Cas %
6+	19%	-11%	9%	21%
7+	25%	-3%	9%	19%
8+	31%	5%	10%	16%
9+	31%	9%	9%	12%
10+	25%	9%	7%	8%
11+	19%	9%	5%	5%

 

Keeping our base of armour 8+ or 9+ players as the average, we can see armour is broken 31% of the time more than without mighty blow. This is a massive impact. One in every 3 armour rolls by the player will cause an injury. Knockouts happen around 9.5% more of the time and casualties occur around 14% more of the time.

If this player gets knockdowns 7 times in the game (which seems likely as you will want to be hitting with them a lot) then you should be expecting your opponent to suffer an additional casualty each game.

The below table shows the impact of Mighty Blow (+2) compared to Mighty Blow (+1) to see how egregious this is.

AV	Break %	Stun %	KO %	Cas %
6+	8%	-5%	2%	11%
7+	11%	-2%	3%	10%
8+	14%	2%	3%	8%
9+	17%	6%	4%	7%
10+	14%	6%	3%	5%
11+	11%	5%	3%	3%

 

Again, keeping our base of AV 8+ and AV 9+, we can see that the additional effect is 15.5% extra armour breaks (1 in just over 6 armour rolls) and 5% extra casualties (1 in every 20 armour rolls) due to having Mighty Blow (+2) compared to Mighty Blow (+1).

This doesn’t seem too bad at first until you consider that the players with this skill are strength 6 and have block – so will likely be trying to get three die blocks on a player without block each turn, meaning a very good chance of a knockdown and therefore an armour roll. Morg N Thorg is obviously a better option in this regard due to his manoeuvrability, with Deeproot Strongbranch being more likely to struggle to find a preferred target.  

Other factors that can affect armour and injury rolls

There are a few other skills that can affect an armour or injury roll (or their after effects) which I will look into another time. These include Thick Skull, Stunty, Claws, Regeneration and Dirty Player – along with the rules that grant teams additional players for when they kill an opposing player.