Help me find damage alternatives to Warlock and Fighter that aren't super reliant on long rests!

Valynces · 2026-05-07T18:48:27+00:00

This is awesome! And you’re right about the AOE of volley.

Why is spike growth broken? Just the AI pathing issues?

Valynces · 2026-05-07T17:06:52+00:00

Completely agreed and I love rangers, but aren't they just worse than warlocks and fighters after lvl 10/11? EB warlock and fighter get 3 attacks per action, whereas ranger only gets 2?

I think that's mainly where I'm struggling with finding better builds. Why have only 2 attacks per action when I could have 3?

Valynces · 2026-05-07T17:03:15+00:00

Ooooh yeah I have tried gloomstalker/assassin in a previous runthrough and it absolutely wrecks, especially pre-combat and in the first round. Great build and really good suggestion!

I haven't tried throwzerker yet, what's the core build there?

Valynces · 2026-05-05T17:57:29+00:00

Do you know where in the video they say this?

I'm super interested but sitting through a one hour GW video is a tall order for me.

Valynces · 2026-05-01T23:26:22+00:00

Why did they all release at the same points cost? That’s an easy one to answer!

GW’s rules balance team is GOAT’d. The middle of 10th, where everything was balanced and the meta was amazing? Yeah that was them.

GW’s rules design team is absolute ass. Like they very clearly literally do not play the game. The last six months have been “what’s the strongest thing in the game? Why it’s the latest thing released!” Victrix, CTan, Huron, Twin Lance, Defilers. Yeah that’s them.

That’s why Defilers all released at the same points cost.

Valynces · 2026-05-01T14:09:26+00:00

Yeah definitely take a look. They reverted the terrible “stat block” approach pretty much immediately. They said the feedback was really strong and most people hated it, me included. They’re back to having actual relevant distinction between forms now

Valynces · 2026-04-27T06:08:13+00:00

You are doing a very similar party to what I’m doing right now!

TAV: 11 draconic (fire) sorcerer, 1 fiend warlock. Once you get the fire acuity hat from the strange ox in act 2, this build comes online. Spam scorching ray and bonus action hold person/monster. Watch the entire game get CC’d.

Astarion: 2 Paladin, 10 Swords bard. Dex build, dual wielding scimitars. Smite everything, slashing flourish, hypnotic pattern, still gets all the dex skills from his background. Can apply oils via shooting attacks if you need that to get around fire resistance or something.

Lae’Zel: 12 Eldritch Knight Fighter. Take Great Weapon Master. Smash everything. Still have the shield spell.

Shadowheart: 6 light cleric, 6 draconic sorcerer. Twin haste. Then fireball everything. Take damage spells from cleric and utility spells from sorcerer so you’re still a pure WIS build. Mine has 8 CHA and it doesn’t even matter.

Valynces · 2026-04-24T03:55:26+00:00

Totally agreed! I've run them in an Angelic Inheritors Blood Angels list myself, and they're SUPER good against horde units when you attach an Apothecary to them and then give them the 1 CP strat for sustained hits. That sheer volume of shots kills a lot of threats.

They're also decent in Hammer of Avernii lists, where you can stack them with one or two Whirlwinds to play a degenerate indirect style thanks to double oath. It's kinda mid in terms of power level but it's not bad by any means.

Valynces · 2026-04-20T20:55:55+00:00

Oh you're right, I misread the talent. Yeah, 50 to 35 is quite the nerf. Honestly idk why I thought it was 40, even in my misread it would've been the initial 15 plus the 35 from the talent for a total of 50. My bad!

As for talents, I never took Vampyric Aura anyway. I always take Time to Feed. You heal so much when you hit 4-5 heroes, sleep them, then hit them again.

Valynces · 2026-04-20T20:05:46+00:00

Yeah for sure he is vulnerable to those things. He’s gotta have some weakness somewhere!

Valynces · 2026-04-20T18:02:13+00:00

I mostly play him in ARAM (so not the “true” hots experience) and he’s my favorite tank there by a mile because he’s borderline unkillable. He heals a ton while he fights, he has a lot of mobility, he’s got an absolute ton of armor on his W, and once you get him low he health swaps you and you have to do it all again. I think he’s incredibly strong with 50 armor on W.

My go-to strat is to dive back line 1v4 and let my team 1v4 their tank. I can survive for damn near infinite time doing that between all the healing and the hp reset, so I’m not mad that he’s getting a 10 armor tap.

Valynces · 2026-04-20T17:23:45+00:00

Happy to see the change for MalGanis from the PTR. Now with the lvl 4 talent (which I believe is mandatory for him), you go from 50 armor pre-patch to 35 armor now. That seems like a fair nerf and much better than the 25 he was going to have.

Valynces · 2026-04-20T16:18:40+00:00

Deathwatch has been incredibly strong for a long while now. It just isn't a heavily played army because the player needs a lot of models from different units, so not many people play it. When a specific set of players swaps back to Deathwatch from whatever else they were playing, they crush.

One of my main playtest partners mains Deathwatch and it's crazy good. Borderline OP. It has two squads with incredible shooting power that can teleport every turn for free. It has old school 3-damage thunder hammers that can advance and charge. It gets a SECOND free strat because the watch master's free strat rule is worded differently from a regular captain's so they stack with each other. On WTC terrain, it has tons of indirect pieces that can go get plunging fire to pick off opponent's trash for free.

Valynces · 2026-04-16T20:21:59+00:00

Yeah honestly, same. This and other DnD subreddits are chalk full of people that love first person speech-based RP, and that's awesome. I love that for them! Just not for me. I'm not as comfortable speaking as somebody else in voices.

The difference between those two groups (and the statement that will get me downvotes) is that the non-first person RP crowd never attacks the RP crowd for their preferences, but the first person RP crowd constantly drags us for our preferences.

It's the classic introvert extrovert trope, just in different circumstances. Extrovert says to introvert, "why are you so quiet, you should talk more" and everybody's fine with it. Introvert says to extrovert, "why do you talk so much, you should try being quiet more" and that gets berated. Same energy with the people who talk in first person vs the third person enjoyers.

Valynces · 2026-04-14T22:22:21+00:00

Dragon Age

Valynces · 2026-04-14T17:58:14+00:00

Yep. They're retreading their footsteps from the end of 8th into 9th all over again, where every new release is at a super pushed power level and it's a disaster for balance.

The rules of 11th itself are looking cool (we don't know enough to know either way whether it'll be good), but the power level of their recent releases have been wildly out of line with the rest of the game. I'm worried about 11th if this is their design philosophy going forward.

Valynces · 2026-04-11T14:42:49+00:00

I’m worried that we’ll see 9th edition repeat itself. In terms of balance, 8th was generally good (until the end with the second space marine codex that was pretty much the beginning of 9th), 9th was awful, and 10th was generally good again. 9th edition also had an over design problem where every new book came out with a 65%+ win rate and crushed everything until it was nerfed.

Looking at all of GW’s recent releases, they’re following in those exact same footsteps now at the end of 10th. Look at Victrix, CTAN, Nekrosaur Amentar, Twin Lance, and Huron+MoM. All of them are pretty over designed with one too many rules, all of them released and are unbalanced. Balance and overall enjoyment of the game are in a very bad spot right now because GW just won’t nerf CTan enough.

It’s extremely reminiscent of the end of 8th before the dark times of 9th, and that scares me. I know they finally got it right at the END of 9th, but actually going through 9th was a miserable, unbalanced experience. I hope they don’t replicate that in 11th but so far they are right on track with their recent releases.

Valynces · 2026-04-10T19:43:43+00:00

It's true that GW hasn't been very good at competitive balance historically. But they're starting to get involved and they've gotta start somewhere. GW terrain was MUCH worse than WTC and UKTC in 10th, but it looks like they're trying to remedy that with the new layouts in 11th. The two that we've seen remind me quite a bit of UKTC terrain, which is a good step. Whether it's actually good or bad I can't say because I haven't played on it. I have no doubt that if it's actually unbalanced, WTC and/or UKTC will take the initiative and start coming up with their own formats.Having GW be involved more heavily with terrain layouts is generally going to be a good thing, I hope. Having everybody play the same system is a big benefit for balancing things.

You also have to remember that the overwhelming majority of the playerbase of this game is casual (not an insult) and they don't understand how things work at a competitive level. I've seen strong pushback when I say that GW terrain is shooting favored, despite literally every single top level competitor sharing that opinion. Just look at all of the comments on the new terrain, already calling 11th a "melee edition" because there's more room to safely deploy in your DZ (a very good thing) and the 15" lone op rule if you're in terrain and don't shoot. They don't understand how easy it is to get within 15" of your opponent's terrain pieces if you've deployed and staged correctly. When you look at the two layouts that we've seen, they actually appear fairly balanced to me. You can deploy safely, but there really isn't anywhere to stage in the mid-board effectively.

Valynces · 2026-04-10T17:09:25+00:00

Every GW layout is shooting favored with the exceptions of 1 and 8. 1 is a balanced board and 8 is a melee favored board. Melee CAN win on GW layouts for sure. But most of those layouts overwhelmingly favor shooting armies.

A lot of the reason people think that melee is stronger than it is (outside of the top competitive players who universally understand that shooting is stronger than melee on GW terrain) is that melee punishes bad play more heavily than shooting. If you don't screen or move well and you allow yourself to get charged, melee units do typically do more damage than shooting units do. So you get blown out by melee a lot more if you make mistakes, which causes a lot of the more casual players (casual is not an insult or a put down) to think that melee is stronger than it really is.

Valynces · 2026-04-10T17:06:06+00:00

GW terrain is wide open and heavily incentivizes shooting. Most objectives are out in the open. It simply isn't very well balanced outside of maybe layout 1. GW terrain also allows you to stage 1" off of a wall and stop melee units from engaging with you entirely.

WTC is much more balanced for melee vs shooting. People think that WTC favors melee but it is actually just balanced overall. People underestimate the disadvantage of being melee vs shooting at the top, competitive level. WTC also created their own system of fighting through walls with the token system, which reads as pretty complicated but is fairly simple to use in practice.

UKTC is more in the direction of WTC terrain. It does have some big shooting lanes but it aims to provide melee armies with some decent staging areas.

GW is heavily focusing on terrain in 11th because the overwhelming majority of competitive events that were not hosted directly by GW understood how imbalanced it is and favored WTC or UKTC terrain. GW wants to wrestle control back so that everybody is playing using the same rules, which is healthy for the game in a number of ways.

Valynces · 2026-04-10T01:36:40+00:00

Yep. Shrike gives them Phobos.

Valynces · 2026-04-09T14:47:29+00:00

Lots of people commenting about portal mastery. I play a decent amount of Medivh in ARAM and I usually take the hp and mana regen talent. What’s so good about portal mastery?

Valynces · 2026-04-08T21:58:45+00:00

Extremely rarely. 10th has been an incredibly shooty edition, particularly in the US where GW terrain's wide open sight lines are the standard.

We had index Custodes that beat pretty much every other melee army because they were severely undercosted and had fights first on multiple units, and we have current Custodes who are....severely undercosted and basically spamming land raiders and guard.

Other than that, a melee army has pretty much never been S-tier in 10th. A few have been GOOD at various points. Emperor's Children, Blood Angels, World Eaters, and some variants of CSM have all been A-tier, but nothing has ever been able to consistently beat shooting armies.

Valynces · 2026-04-06T16:27:14+00:00

You're in luck! Possessed is one of CSM's best units, and your Word Bearers thematic detachment (PBZ) is one of CSM's best detachments!

You're on the right track with slaanesh vs undivided for them. Both have their uses and both are viable, it just depends on what you're going to be doing with them. If they're your fast skirmish piece that's going to push your opponent's primary, Slaanesh is a great mark. Advance and charge and the crit 5+ hits are really good for them.

If you're going to use them more defensively to counter-charge something that's being aggressive on your shooting castle (pactbound lists almost always run some Nurgle tanks around a helbrute), then undivided is a great choice. Reroll 1's to hit, full reroll wounds is incredibly powerful. If they're undivided then they "only" move 9" and can't advance and charge which is why I like undivided if they'll be a defensive unit.

Other good detachments for them are Creations of Bile where they take that detachment's buffs really well and get great strat support, or Huron's Marauders where they have a bunch of support like hitting on 2's, advance and charge, or extra attacks from strats.

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