Two notes,
1) It's not even just that you need to be a warrior (though there are spell crit effects, to be fair) for the Half Orc to add value, you need to be a specific flavor of Warrior where dice make up a significant portion of your damage in a game with Sharpshooter, GWM and Tavern Brawler, with Bracers of Archery and Rings of Acid and so forth. Which means specifically a Rogue or a Paladin, really, that or something like a crit fishing warlock with Eldritch Blast, or some other very specific build. That's part of why I personally rate Half Orcs rather low mechanically, despite them being a lot of fun (who doesn't love huge numbers after all, and if you can make bigger numbers, in a lot of people's minds bigger = better). Consistency is less "flashy" than huge numbers once in a while, but often far more impactful.
2) It's exactly that, the broad applicability of full elf proficiency in perception that gave them the edge in my book as well. It's not just Martials, some classes don't have heavy armor proficiency and don't really want it anyways, and in other cases you're looking to multiclass and will get it from the multiclass, and in other cases you need a half feat for stat gain anyways and may as well pick up the armor gain. So while half elf has certain builds where it has a strong edge, it has far more builds where it's suboptimal.
Both of those are also fine examples of why generalized rankings shouldn't ever discourage someone from playing something someone might consider "worse", if the benefits are uniquely applicable to their build. If you are indeed playing a crit fishing Warlock / Champion Fighter with Spell Sniper and other Crit enhancing effects, it makes total sense to consider Half Orcs #1. If your build is one which benefits hugely from the Half Elf proficiencies, of course for you it's better than full Elf. It's cool though that we have some who rank a certain race pretty high others have them pretty low, and vice versa, it makes it clear there's not universal agreement on the "best" race. Once there are 10+ rankings I'll get the average rankings of each, it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out.
It's interesting though that while in general rankings are somewhat all over the place (especially for Gnomes, Halflings, Half Orcs, and Githyanki), I'm not seeing anyone come to the defense of Dragonborns for example, or saying that Dwarves are the best option out there (highest rank they've gotten so far is 7th, and I'm surprised they got that high despite it being below average). It seems clear that those two in particular could use a little extra love, regardless of anything else.
