So I am planning on running a Space Wolf Scout Pack in my army. I love the fact that you can really trick out the scouts (although they can be a huge points sink). The thought of 10 dudes coming in from the back field with a melta, 2 power weapons and a MoW dude can be quite scary if your opponent leaves someone in the back field. Now what I am considering doing is attaching a Wolf Guard squad leader to come in with them, but I'm not sure what I want to outfit him with. I was thinking of Mark of the Wulfen because the only thing that really seems better than one crazy mother F'er is two! But I got to wondering if there were better options, that lead me to break out the old probability hammer and figure it out.

Now what I am looking at is pure close combat killing ability. I'm not worried about making this Wolf Guard capable of killing vehicles in the back field (with a PF, combi-melta, or meltabomb). This is all just, which weapon is better.

The reason I was leaning towards MoW as the best was the sheer number of rending attacks. The dude's attack characteristic becomes D6+1! Add in the extra attack for two CC weapons (assuming BPistol and CCW), and another attack because of charging, that is 4-9 attacks!

So I was thinking of how to do this, and it quickly became apparent that it was really impractical to see how the five different weapons I am looking at would do against every possible encounter, so I tried to pick some generic "dudes" that this crazy mother F'er might charge.

First out would be s S3, T3 and Sv 5+ guy, more commonly know as the Imperial Guard Guardsman. Attacking the Guardsman I came up with this table for the average number of unsaved sounds created.

Weapon	Wounds
Mow	2.17
Power Weapon	1.78
Power Fist	1.67
Frost Weapon	2.22
Twin Wolf Claws	2.96

Next I moved on to a basic Tac Marine. This gave me S4, T4, and a Sv 3+. This time I got the following.

Weapon	Wounds
Mow	0.90
Power Weapon	1.00
Power Fist	1.25
Frost Weapon	1.33
Twin Wolf Claws	1.50

Lastly, I looked at a Terminator to see what the invulnerable save would do to things.

Weapon	Wounds
Mow	0.54
Power Weapon	0.67
Power Fist	0.83
Frost Weapon	0.89
Twin Wolf Claws	1.00

So the MoW does well against the Guardsmen, but really starts to do poorly against anything "tougher," and it really loses it's punch when you toss in an invulnerable save. I was just about to wrap it up and say that the Wolf Claws were the way to go when I realized that I didn't take cost into account. A Wolf Guard with MoW costs 33 points. A Wolf Guard wtih Twin Wolf Claws costs 48 points. So the last thing I threw into the excel spread sheet was to devide the number of wounds by the cost of the weapon. When I ranked up the weapons I got something that looked like this.

IG	SM	Term
PW	PW	PW
MoW	FB	FB
FB	PF	PF
WC	MoW	MoW
PF	WC	WC

So it looks like, when you bring cost into it, the power weapon is the clear winner. Now with all that said and done, I'm pretty sure I'm going to outfit my scouting Wolf Guard with a power fist and a combi-melta. But I'm a math nerd, so I really don't consider the time I spent calculating this wasted.