Wardancer skill question

[Warhammer]

I am having a bit of a dilemma. I just had a really good levelling game in which my 2 WDs both acquired their second skill. I am debating what skill to give them.

My league is:
Wood Elf (me)
Dark Elf (newbie)
Amazon (newbie)
Orcs (newbie)
Ogres (experienced player, enjoys fouling my tree)
Undead (experienced player who does not like to foul)
Dwarf (experienced player, will foul if necessary)

The experienced players are probably in this order:
Dwarf player, myself, Undead player, then the Ogre player.

My dilemma is this. Both WDs have strip ball. With the additional skill, I was thinking of taking tackle for both. With the Amazons all having dodge, the DEs probably taking dodge, and half the Ogre team with dodge, and a couple of Dwarves and Undead with dodge it seems to make sense. However, would I be better off with giving one of the WDs sidestep?

Part of me says stick with the tackle and take sidestep at 31 SPPs, but there is a little voice that keeps calling sidestep...sidestep!

My team for what it is worth:
2 WDs with strip ball + 1 skill
1 rookie tree
1 Catcher with block
8 lineelfs, 1 with blodge, 2 with dodge, 2 with block, and 1 with guard

[Mootaz]

Tackle makes them better players, sidestep makes them live longer

Depends on the length of the league and how close your blodging lineelfs are to their next skill.
If the league is still a good length to go, take sidestep. If your league is rather short, take Tackle to make the WDs more effective NOW.

[Emi78]

I would choose side step for one of them for sure, i love that skill, and it will be very useful when you play versus teams with frenzy like DE and Dwarfs ...

[Duke Jan]

I develop my war dancers along 2 different lines.

Path 1 - Ball stealer
Strip Ball, Side-Step, Sure Hands
Doubles
Nerves of steel / Jump up

Path 2 - Catcher killer
Tackle, Side-Step, Shadowing
Doubles
Frenzy / Mighty Blow


Combining tackle and strip ball in one player is not effective since with strip ball a push back is enough and not all ball carriers have dodge. If the opponent doesn't go down it's still only a 3+ to pick up the ball from his tackle zone.

[Warhammer]

I like the strip ball/tackle combo because then you have a guy that can knock the ball out either way. If your opponent does not have block or S. Hands, then you have a 5/6 chance of knocking the ball out on a one die block. If he has S. Hands, those odds go down to 1/2. If he has dodge, but you don't have tackle, it is down to 1/3. If he has block, you are down to 1/6.

Granted, chances are he won't have all those skills, but with someone that has both strip ball and tackle, at worst you are looking at a 1/2 chance of knocking the ball out. I like having that flexibility, because chances are a ball handler will have at least one of those skills.

[Duke Jan]

This would be true if you could easily get 4 or five skills on one player. But getting four skills on a single war dancer takes a good amount of matches. So my opinion is: get the four skills on two different players. The tackle/shadowing combination is very powerful and so is strip ball/surehands. You only need 32 SPP in total for four skills on 2 players, on one player you would have just 3 skills for that amount of SPP. You could of course get your war dancers to do all the work and let them gain SPP fast, but the rest of your team would just be a pathetic bunch of toothless wimps, all your opponent would need to do is succesfully beat/foul the war dancers off the pitch.

War dancers can get anywhere, so it doesn't matter if one has strip ball and the other tackle, you just blitz with the one that is best at doing what has to be done.

[Warhammer]

I'm a little confused by that last post.

For what it is worth, I have a lineman that has two skills, and I have two other players that are close to getting their next skill. In the last game played, the only SPPs the WDs got were 2 passes each to other players who scored. I do not rely on my WDs for anything other than ball extraction, catcher/floater tackling, and ball protection (when moving the ball downfield).

My team has scored 6 TDs and 7 have been scored by the WDs. In most cases this was because my opponent had prevented me from scoring an easy TD with a lineelf. I use a lineelf to catch the ball, pass it to a catcher with blodge or a WD who runs to a cage towards one of the sidelines. I send a few lineelves to go behind the opposing teams front line for two reasons, it enables me to get a two turn score by reversing direction if they are not covered, or it diverts my opponent from massing all his guys against my main thrust. As I get in range for the score, I pass to one of the lineelves to run in for the score. If the situation is particularly dire (I need to make 3+ dodge rolls, or most of the elves have been knocked down, etc.), I will use the WD or catcher to take the ball in himself. However, this normally only happens in a game against another fast team, like Dark Elves (I think out of my 6 touchdowns against Dark Elves, I had to use my WDs for 4 of them).

As the rest of my team advances, my WDs become used mainly as the Angels of Death in my backfield. I guess I made up my mind in talking all this out, I'll stick with tackle and take sidestep as the next skill, MB or Dauntless if I roll doubles.

[Gorbad]

I am confused,

Wood Elf (me)
Dark Elf (newbie)
Amazon (newbie)
Orcs (newbie)
Ogres (experienced player, enjoys fouling my tree)
Undead (experienced player who does not like to foul)
Dwarf (experienced player, will foul if necessary)

Why are these people not fouling your wardancers? Are they mad?