Guide to Tackling Specific LREs
I preach a lot in this guide without going too far into details about exactly what you should do, but some examples of how I put my advice into practice might be helpful to see how it all comes together.
My Roster
As of the time of writing here, my current roster is as follows:
As you will be able to just about see, the last character in the photo is at a mere iron 2, and that goes for near enough all my other characters below Ulf in power rating.
This follows my advice that anything below silver 1 in LREs (or most other places) is worthless – as a matter of fact, the only character weaker than Toth that I use in LREs is Incisus.
You have to be brutal with your characters if you want to get in shape for LREs as fast as possible and essentially ignore any of them that won’t be able to contribute.
For the LREs I’ll be discussing, I have had roughly the same characters levelled up to LRE standard (silver 2+), the main difference between now and LREs completed longer ago is the power of my characters rather than their variety.
With that out the way, here are my thoughts on specific LREs:
Khârn
Link to spreadsheet for this event here.
Alpha
No Psychic, Resilient, No Summons
- Rotbone, Maladus, Corrodius
- Just using the power of Rotbone and Maladus to get as far as I can with these tracks together,
- I included Corrodius because I have him, but even a stone 1 Macer will do to round out the team.
- At the end of the day, it’s Rotbone and Maladus that will do the heavy lifting.
Although Corrodius’ passive deals psychic damage to psykers attacking within his aura, rest assured if you have him that he can be used in the No Psychic track.
Ranged, Max 1 Hit
Calandis, Archimatos, Yazaghor, Abraxas, Neurothrope
Both of these restrictions go pretty much hand in hand and the Archimatos/Abraxas/Yazaghor trio can spam out a decent supply of summons.
No need to bother upgrading Yaz at all, he’s just around to hopefully get an additional batch of screamers spawned from Abraxas.
Neurothrope sucks, but I have nothing better.
Sho’syl would be an excellent choice here, but RNG eludes me in his case.
Summary
I think this is the best way to get through the earliest levels efficiently – two tickets to complete all restrictions for each battle whilst not compromising on team quality.
The cracks will start to show in the ranged/max 1 hit team first, at which point I will split it into ranged only and max 1 hit only so I can use Anuphet, Makhotep, Imospekh and Re’vas in ranged for mechanical heals and Corrodius in max 1 hit to maybe push one stage further.
Beta
Flame
Vindicta, Toth, Re’vas, Abraxas
These are pretty much the only good flame units for this track except for Wrask and Thaumachus with their abilities to provide shields to allies.
Use Wrask and/or Thaumachus if you already have them built, but their weakness as characters combined with the limitations of a lack of healing with available characters means that this restriction will be extremely punishing.
Not only this, but the Tyranids make tough enemies, and so the return on investment for characters meeting the Flame restriction will be low despite its high point value.
Don’t focus too hard on building characters for this unless they’re good elsewhere; either in this event or LREs in general, like Toth or Vindicta.
No Terminator, No Big Target, Mechanical, Min 3 Hits
Aleph, Anuphet, Imospekh
The main name here is Aleph, but the mechanical restriction means she’ll be able to heal the other Necrons too.
Scarabs are pretty useless for LREs, especially if you’ve not got a lot of characters and other summons to shield them, so the plan here is to use the scarabs early and let them die to allow Anuphet to summon in a full complement of sturdy Necron warriors as soon as possible.
I don’t expect this team to get particularly far, but it will probably get further than the Flame team, which will allow me to beat a slew of the earlier battles in beta, completing all restrictions in just two tickets each.
Once things really start to heat up, I’ll stop aiming for the Minimum 3 Hits restriction, add Tan and Actus into the mix and replace Imospekh with Makhotep to provide even more heals, a supply of infinite summons and a range 3 character.
Not relevant to me, but if you have Isabella and can make a decent meat wall around her, by all means use her here instead and aim to meet every requirement except Mechanical and Flame.
This could be done with tanky characters like Bellator and Burchard, to name the best options.
Summary
The nids are a tough opponent and can outmatch you very quickly going from one battle to the next, so keep an eye out and if in doubt, use a stronger team that meets fewer restrictions.
I’ll complete each early battle with my second, non-Flame team first to get a feeling for whether my Flame team will be able to handle it or not, as the Flame team is easily the weaker of the two.
Getting a feeling for the difficulty of battles with your strongest team is something worth doing in general.
Gamma
No Mechanical, Piercing
Tyrant Guard, Eldryon, Aethana, Calandis, Incisus
Tyrant Guard lets everyone laugh at incoming damage whilst Incisus keeps everyone’s health topped up.
I’d use Sho’syl or Ulf here instead of Aethana if I were in the position to do so.
Minimum 5 Hits
Aleph, Re’vas, Bellator, Ragnar, Winged Prime
The real meat of this team is the trio of Aleph, Re’vas and Bellator.
Ragnar and the Winged Prime are just leftover scraps thrown in for completion and won’t be pivotal.
Tank with Aleph and Re’vas, build up a juicy summon with Bellator and you shouldn’t have many problems at all.
No Flying, Physical
Tan, Makhotep, Gibbascrapz, Snappawrecka, Tyrant Guard
My secret weapon, the only physical damage team that can (sort of) heal itself.
Find a good spot to set up the Guard, tank with Snappa, Makhotep, Tan and the Skitarii, making use of Makhotep’s passive heal and keep Gibba in the back out of harm’s way but ready to repair another unit as necessary.
Deploy his tank as far back as possible too, and only when enemies are in range, to minimize the chances of it getting battle fatigue.
Summary
Gamma is the only track without any obviously good teams to meet all restrictions in just two tickets per battle, but Piercing and No Mechanical go together and my recommended Physical/No Flying team comes together nicely too.
This leaves yet another track where Aleph can really shine to meet the final restriction.
Ragnar
Link to spreadsheet on this event here.
Link to my own YouTube playlist where I play through some of the later battles in the event here:
Alpha
Resilient, Melee, Max 3 Hits
Maladus, Corrodius, Arjac
It feels awkward giving advice on this track because what Resilient characters you have is very dependent on RNG and mostly you’ll just have to work with what you’ve got.
My plan here was to rely on the toughness of Corrodius and Maladus to carry me as far as possible, with poxwalkers potentially changing the tide of a battle. Arjac was just there to be a third body and is pretty useless.
If you have Rotbone, he doesn’t meet the Max 3 Hits requirement but he can carry you very far down both Resilient and Melee requirements if you have the characters for it – sub him in once the going starts getting too tough.
Quite a few people have Yarrick already built and it wouldn’t be the end of the world to use him here to maybe push a little further if you don’t have Rotbone – you’ll just have to devote a token/s to doing Melee separately.
For me, a silver 2 Yarrick on top of a gold 1 Maladus and silver 2 Corrodius carried me to completing battle 7 from battle 5 where I stalled out with just the Death Guard.
Ranged, Bolter
Burchard, Certus, whoever
Another fairly annoying set of requirements due to the RNG involved in unlocking many Ranged Bolter characters such as Vahl, Yarrick, Azrael and Roswitha (and Abaddon, because who farms him?)
For the love of Holy Terra, do not build Certus or Azrael or any of the other wastes of space who may take you up to the 3-man minimum here.
Burchard will be the foundation of this team and he alone will be the deciding factor in how far you get, far more than any other characters that meet these requirements – assuming you don’t have them built already.
Once you reach the limit of how far this team can get, creating Ranged teams that can fulfill the Max 3 Hits requirement will get you a bit further, and doing Bolter alone will allow the use of Bellator, whose summons can carry you very far.
By completing Max 3 Hits this way, you’ll be able to use Rotbone and Maladus for Resilient and Melee if you have them, which is 4 out of 5 requirements met with only 2 tickets per battle.
Summary
I hated this track because of how RNG-dependent it was, and so I feel very stretched to give any concrete advice.
I don’t think just saying what my teams were will be that helpful at all, so I won’t dwell on it too long.
If you have Actus and Tan, they are wonderful for Ranged and Max 3 Hits.
Incisus can put in some good work in Melee alongside Angrax and Maladus if you don’t have Rotbone, doubly so if you have Calgar to boost his heals (a very big if).
Isabella is obviously a dream for Melee, Bolter and Max 3 Hits, and if you have her unlocked – great! Just beware that if you use her, you will not be able to make a team that meets all those requirements simultaneously and this will impinge on your token efficiency.
She’s one to use later on down the line where efficiency is secondary to actually completing battles.
Beta
Minimum 3 Hits, Flying, No Summons
Aleph-null, Bellator, Aethana, Re’vas
If this doesn’t scream Aleph-null to you, you must have very strong abilities to mentally drown out my slavish devotion to my little metal spider.
Not only that, but you can bring her best friend Re’vas along to fulfil all the same conditions as long as you remember not to use their actives.
Because ⅔ of the common enemy types in this track deal the bulk of their damage through a 2-hit ranged attack, Re’vas and her big target trait can work wonders in reducing the damage taken by Aleph, who can in turn top up their health pools constantly.
My main tactic here was sending in Aethana and Bellator as sacrifices to kill as many Screamers and pink horrors as possible early on, then falling back on turtling with Aleph and Re’vas, who can easily handle the pathetic damage output of Rubric marines. Just remember to bring good crit items or you will spend an eternity clearing through the marines with their annoying trait that reduces your piercing to 1%.
With a newly gold 3 Re’vas and a gold 1 Aleph-null, I managed to beat every battle up to and including battle 11 in this track with a little help from their sacrificial friends, which goes to show how powerful they are in combination with keeping weak enemies alive.
Physical
Tan, Gibbascrapz, Makhotep, Tyrant Guard, Snappawrecka
My favourite Physical damage team that I’ve explained before, despite none of them being above silver 3 (Tan excluded, at gold 1) they still got me through battle 9.
Power
Calgar, Burchard, Yarrick, whoever
Having Calgar was a great help here, but Burchard on his own can make for a decent substitute.
Success will revolve around finding a healing hex to plonk your chosen Gravis boy onto and wearing down the enemy for a lot of battles.
If you can, wipe out as many pink horrors as possible early on, as they are easily the most threatening enemies by virtue of negating the benefits of Gravis armour with their damage type.
Jaeger deserves special mention for meeting the requirement whilst passively being able to kill many enemies per turn under the right conditions.
Summary
Anyone with a decently upgraded Aleph-null can do well here. It’s possible to get all the way to the end of battle 9 with nothing more than a gold 1 Aleph if you get your positioning right.
The Physical damage team can do well without one of either Tan or the Tyrant Guard, but it will struggle without both unless your characters are fairly overlevelled – Makhotep’s damage output is poor and the Orks are in a pretty bad place.
Still, any healing is better than none.
Power is the only restriction that may be hard to complete without some RNG/niche characters, but Burchard is a powerful, easily accessible option here at least.
Get as far as you can with Aleph (and Re’vas, if you have her) as your core and then fill in the gaps with your other teams – assuming Aleph is your strongest option.
Gamma
Piercing
Tyrant Guard, Eldryon, Aethana, Haarken, Calandis
This track is an absolute nightmare with no healers being available, the attrition of flaming hexes being ever-present, the general squishiness of the characters who meet the requirement and, in my case, the lack of Sho’syl to act as a force multiplier both in terms of his drones attacking up to three times independently per round as well as in their ability to draw enemy fire.
It cannot be overstated how useful Sho’syl is in piercing tracks.
Fighting battles following this requirement was an exercise in what I talked about earlier: if you have it, use it. Barring the Tyrant Guard, none of these characters were levelled up specifically for this LRE or any other, they were already built for raids and campaigns.
The main thing here was to avoid Haarken injuring his teammates and to get the Tyrant guard set up with its passive working ASAP. The Templars, especially the ones armed with chainswords and shotguns, can unload a crippling amount of damage in a very short period of time and you cannot hope to move up far into the exact perfect defensive position you want and survive a couple of turns without the Guard’s passive boosting everyone’s tankiness massively.
Pick an easy-to-reach spot, set up for the long haul and remember that unless you move very carefully, you are dead.
If you don’t have the Tyrant Guard, don’t be upset if you can’t get far here. The difficulty is absurd.
Power, No Black Legion, Melee, No Physical
Aun’shi, Maladus, Rotbone
With these three characters alone, you can tackle every other restriction at once. Essentially, it is just the classic Maladus + Rotbone tank and heal strategy.
One thing to note in this track is the maps being very conducive to tanking in this manner even with relatively low-levelled characters due to the Templars lacking any enemies with a range >2 and very handy nooks to hide in.
My bare minimum gold 2 Rotbone and Maladus had no trouble clearing everything up to and including gamma 10 by themselves and could maybe even beat battle 11 by themselves, though I have my doubts.
More realistically, if you don’t have these three characters, you can mix and match some powerful character combos to meet all the requirements just slightly less efficiently.
Candidates include the Tyrant Guard, Aleph + Re’vas as well as the aforementioned Rotbone + Maladus.
Summary
The Templars are a tough nut to crack, but falter in that they lack any long ranged units. Find a good nook to hide in and you can seriously reduce incoming damage on a per-turn basis simply due to the fact that most of the enemies won’t be able to reach out and touch you.
Their strength lies in their ability to deal big spikes of damage in short order, due to the chainsword units being able to step aside after attacking to make way for another and the raw power of the shotgun unit’s active ability.
In order to combat this, it can actually be a good idea not to kill too many enemies in one turn.
Consider a situation where you are healing up your Maladus very comfortably from the damage he receives each turn.
Suddenly, your Maladus crits three Templars from the high ground and kills them all simultaneously. The following turn, three shotgun guys who haven’t yet used their actives now move into melee with Maladus and all dump a huge amount of damage on him.
A little more incoming fire and Maladus gets dropped, Rotbone fails to revive and that’s game over.
If Maladus had only cleared one space for one of those shotgun units to move in, this unfortunate situation would never have happened; alas, it is too late now.
Another limiter you can put on incoming damage is to leave Aggressors alive. They are very tanky and deal virtually no damage compared to other Templars, so it is generally preferable to have one of them shooting/punching you than a pyreblaster/chainsword unit respectively.
Mephiston
Alpha
Min 2 Hits, Melee, Power
Rotbone, Maladus, Angrax
Doing well against the Imperial Guard hinges on being able to close down mortars and Lascannons to eliminate their advantage of long range.
Rotbone and Maladus are very, very slow, and Angrax does not hit very hard, so being able to carve through the enemies to reach their spawn points as quickly as possible is a must – this will likely be the difference between failure and success at some point.
Suppression from mortars will only make this issue even worse, which will further emphasise the need to move up quickly.
Putting points into Maladus and Angrax’s actives as a source of high burst damage may not actually be a bad idea here; it may be handy to keep some gold and badges in reserve to level them up at the last minute if you think it might be helpful.
Regardless of all this, these characters combine very well together and there is a good reason to not include ranged Power users. This is:
Flying
Aleph, Re’vas, filler characters
By tackling this requirement by itself, the famous and potent Aleph-null/Re’vas combo can be employed here, and they carry LRE battles so hard that barely anything else here is worthy of mention. Aleph can do okay on her own, but the pair of them together are brilliant. Same principles apply here, rush the spawn points and turtle up as far as possible whilst letting the field get clogged up with summoned guardsmen.
Psychic
Archimatos, Eldryon, Abraxas, Yazaghor, filler character
Ugh, this one’s nasty.
It is worth mentioning that this requirement can be combined with Flying if you have enough Thousand Sons/the Neurothrope. The characters available, however, are so bad for LREs that building to try and combine these two categories beyond what you may already have will almost certainly be wasted effort.
Psychics can’t heal, and without healing even the tankiness of Typhus won’t stand up for long. What you’ll need to endure is overwhelming force (which Eldryon can provide with Doom) and many summons to draw fire.
Archimatos can keep up a good flow of summons and Yazaghor+Abraxas can bring in up to 12 summons in a single turn, so strategy for this requirement will have to revolve around bringing in as many summons as you can as soon as possible and keep them topped up with as many bloodletters per turn as possible to maintain a good numerical advantage.
This won’t last long, unfortunately, because guardsmen hit hard and chaos summons have no armour and so I would seriously not bother trying too hard to build for this requirement. It’s going to be extremely difficult and return on investment will more than likely be poor.
Beta
No Big Target, Min 3 Hits, Mechanical
Aleph, Anuphet, Imospekh (The next paragraph is cribbed from my Khârn piece)
The main name here is Aleph, but the mechanical restriction means she’ll be able to heal the other Necrons too.
Scarabs are pretty useless for LREs, especially if you’ve not got a lot of characters and other summons to shield them, so the plan here is to use the scarabs early and let them die to allow Anuphet to summon in a full complement of sturdy Necron warriors as soon as possible.
The Big Target requirement is worth very few points and will be the first one to drop once the going gets difficult. This will allow bringing in Re’vas and Gulgortz or Snappawrecka to once again make use of the Re’vas/Aleph combo.
Snappawrecka actually does pretty respectable damage, and the lack of pierce against Poxwalkers won’t make a difference due to their lack of armour.
Physical
Tyrant Guard, Tan, Makhotep, Snappawrecka, Gibbascrapz
The only physical damage team that can (sort of) heal itself.
Find a good spot to set up the Guard and tank with Snappa, Makhotep, Tan and the Skitarii, making use of Makhotep’s passive heal.
Keep Gibba in the back out of harm’s way but ready to repair another unit as necessary.
Deploy his tank as far back as possible too, and only when enemies are in range, to minimise the chances of it getting battle fatigue from being near to other summons getting killed.
Piercing
Tyrant Guard, Eldryon, Calandis, Sho’syl, Incisus.
The Tyrant Guard can really help cut down on attrition of surrounding characters and Incisus can patch up injuries. The main danger here will be big damage spikes from Poxwalkers getting into melee range with your characters en masse, which is why picking them off from range with Sho’syl and Calandis will be vital.
Sho’syl will be available in this year’s anniversary event, so if you don’t have him and you want to do well in this track, it could be well worth saving up resources and a couple of onslaught tokens to get him levelled up quickly once he’s unlocked, especially when it comes to his passive.
Summary
The main danger in this track will be damage spikes taking out characters before they can be healed, especially from Poxwalkers hitting extremely hard whilst simultaneously reducing armour and chaos terminators teleporting in and attacking a vulnerable character en masse.
The Tyrant Guard’s buff and turtling are often invaluable, but it wouldn’t hurt to be prepared to keep your characters mobile to keep from being swarmed by Poxwalkers. This means moving up your characters early to give yourself space to fall back to.
Range 3 characters will be a great boon as this potentially allows you to snipe Poxwalkers at maximum range without being at risk of having Poxwalkers behind them closing your characters down and attacking them on the next turn.
Gamma
Power, Min 3 Hits, No Mechanical
Burchard, Ulf, filler characters
I predict that Ulf will be extremely powerful in this track, mainly for his passive. Harlequin players really like to use their active ability, so if you can bait them into using it when next to Ulf, he’ll chop them to pieces with his passive.
Burchard is just a natural choice here as an LRE character that everyone should have levelled up, though he will suffer when fighting against warlocks and harlequins thanks to the 100% pierce of the former and both the passive and active of the latter. Gravis armour will have a lot of counters in this track, as Wraithguards can also do direct damage through their passive.
Ulf will just have to deal with the harlequin problem.
I don’t think anyone else who fits in here will be particularly game changing, so just use what you have to meet the requirements.
Worthy of note for the Power requirement is that you can meet both it and the Ranged requirement by using Morvenn Vahl and Vitruvius and this pair are able to heal.
The caveat to this is that Vahl is a pure RNG character, she’s not that great and I’d rather seek Canadian healthcare than upgrade Vitruvius. But it’s an option.
Ranged, Max 2 Hits
Tan, Actus, filler characters (Varro maybe)
It really cannot be overstated how powerful Tan and Actus are together in an LRE and that you should be using them wherever possible if you have them. I know I will be here, and that any other characters I could include for these restrictions would be completely superfluous in comparison, which explains the absence of thought given to them.
I’d even go so far as to say that if you don’t have these characters, you’ll probably want to try and beat the requirements in a completely different way to what I’ve laid out, as anything else that meets these two requirements is pretty lacklustre.
One character that may also be useful here is Varro if he has a high passive, as it will cut down on the threat posed by warlocks massively, though he is quite a bad character and generally not worth a huge amount of investment if you can get away with it.
He’s someone to consider if you’ve already built him to be quite powerful. Also, my condolences if this is the case.
Summary
This track will be quite a novelty as Imperial only has never been a faction restriction before and the Aeldari have never been faced as enemies in an LRE either.
Squaring up against the harlequins with their passive may present some trouble to characters with high hit counts, and lower hit counts in general will be better to not be scuppered by them.
The overwhelming damage of Ulf’s passive combined with its mode of activation will probably be the key to trivialising their threat.
If Warlocks prioritise using their active over attacking as they often do in the campaign, this may be exploitable to give yourself extra time to kill them before they deal unresistable psychic damage. The “Revealed” status they inflict on your characters does linger for a long time and is not removed upon their deaths, so don’t consider this much of a reprieve, if at all.
The maps may also have healing hexes available, so keep an eye out for them and make sure to get your tanky character standing on top of it ASAP if its positioning is decent.
It is almost inevitable that the new Wraithguard units from Saim-Hann mirror elite will start making appearances in the later battles of this LRE and they are shaping up to be quite nasty for any attempts at turtling due to their ability to deal direct damage to units behind targets that they attack at range.
Aside from sallying out and prioritising kills on these guys, I will say that the standard Guardian troops have very weak offensive capabilities and it might be advantageous to leave them alive and occupying hopefully all positions two hexes from your defensive line.
Though they move away from their target after attacking, with enough enemies on the field this won’t be possible and their presence at their preferred range will force any Wraithguards arriving later on into melee, negating their powerful passive ability.
Vitruvius
Let’s face it, Vitruvius is a trash character and I really wouldn’t recommend building too hard toward his event. However, if you are a completionist like me or you simply must have him like me, then strap yourself into the masochism chair and I’ll tell you what I make of this event.
Alpha
Ranged, Max 1 Hit, No Resilient
Calandis, Tan Gi’da, Sho’syl, Archimatos, Abraxas (Vitruvius)
Max 1 Hit when facing scarab swarms, what joy. Still, it’s worth a lot of points and I think you’ll have the least buyer’s remorse with this setup even if it may not be the most effective.
If you want to build a more effective team specific to this event, you’ve gotta ask yourself one question: “Do I want to build Pestillian?”
Well do ya, punk? I doubt it.
Regardless, I think I had my Tan at around the low end of gold 2 for the latest stage of this event with his passive around level 40 and I beat every battle up to and including 11 with this requirement. I’d build Tan a million times before building Pestillian given a choice between the two.
If you really must build Pestillian a bit, maybe because you have him but not Tan, you only need him to be able to survive as long as everyone else and you can artificially inflate his stats with a defensive item as well as heal him with Incisus, so don’t worry about going too crazy pumping resources into him.
But enough about Pestillian, he’s not even on the team. This team is predicated on putting as many bodies onto the field providing as many hits as possible to you and as many distractions for the enemy as possible.
The summons of Tan and Abraxas are particularly potent thanks to the number of hits that they can deal and these two are the most important characters here.
Sho’syl’s drones are hampered by only being able to deal a single hit per attack just like him, and he and Archimatos are liable to be overrun without support.
Once the going gets really tough, you can forsake the Ranged requirement and bring in Incisus to heal your fleshy characters and even your summons too. Be wary that you will not be able to heal Tan and he is the most important character here, so be very careful about keeping his health up. You could bring in Vitruvius to heal him, but this is the Vitruvius event and so this won’t be of much help unless you’re really pushing to max out every track. As stated earlier, I’d rather seek Canadian healthcare than upgrade Vitruvius (see Figure 1), and doing so for the sake of maybe unlocking Vitruvius at a higher star rating is a joke squared.
Figure 1: My Vitruvius
No Psychic, Power
Rotbone, Maladus, Calgar, Burchard, Ulf
Combining these two requirements is easy as only Typhus meets Power but not No Psychic.
Ulf makes quick work of summons, which is very handy for dealing with scarab swarms.
Rotbone is always a no-brainer choice as he can heal all of the rest, Calgar boosts Rotbone’s healing and everyone’s damage against those pesky Ophydian destroyers, Maladus is a tank that can deliver a sound beating and Burchard is extremely proficient at dealing with multiple enemies, especially scarabs, at range.
In the likely event that you don’t have Calgar, Angrax is a perfectly decent option with a high hit count that is also able to benefit from Rotbone’s abilities.
Toth is another; in fact this restriction has a lot of good options to where you’ll almost certainly have some built already.
Summary
The upside of this track is that there are plenty of great characters available to use, with Aleph-null being a sad exception.
The Max 1 Hit condition is pretty nasty and you’ll have to rely on Incisus for healing and summons or Pestillian to carry the day for you.
In other words, you’ll have to rely on summons to carry the day for you.
Just kidding, Incisus isn’t that bad. I wasn’t about Pestillian though.
Don’t, however, get so wrapped up in keeping a lid on scarab swarms that you neglect to defend yourself against Ophydian destroyers, as they can also ruin your day pretty fast. Try and put some squishy summons between your characters and the Ophydians to give them something else to sink their teeth into.
Once you get to the point of needing Incisus in Max 1 Hit, you’ll also have to do Ranged by itself. With Actus, Tan, Re’vas and Burchard available to me, beating every battle in this track was a cakewalk.
Beta
Bolter
Calgar, Bellator, Burchard, Yarrick, Certus
It’s very easy to combine the non-bolter requirements together, so Bolter is simply done by itself.
The No Infiltrate requirement can also be done alongside Bolter by excluding Certus, but it’ll also be covered by my other team so it doesn’t really matter either way.
Quite a simple track this, if you have Isabella then not much more needs to be said (and also, I hate you). If not, the bloodletters will give you a tough time regardless of Gravis armour.
Much as I despise Certus, his overwatch can allow him to eliminate bloodletters without putting himself in harm’s way, but I still wouldn’t spend a single coin on him.
Summons will be important for keeping this team going, especially Bellator’s Inceptors, which is why I haven’t included the No Summons requirement.
If you have Isabella, you swine, then you could also go for that fairly easily.
The great thing about No Summons is that you’re not really locked out of using any particular characters at the start of a battle (excluding ones like Creed, Celestine or Sho’syl) and so you can use or not use summoning abilities at your discretion.
Piercing, Max 2 Hits, No Summons, No Infiltrate
Tyrant Guard, Incisus, Calandis, Eldryon
An unfortunate team in that Sho’syl can’t be used because his drones count as summons. However, because it includes the Tyrant Guard and a healer I’d say the lack of summons here is less of a loss than it is for the Bolter team that I use.
Usual Tyrant Guard business, hold still in a defensible position, kill those bloodletters, heal everyone up nicely with Incisus and you should be fine.
Summary
What’s interesting about this track is that the only really dangerous enemies are bloodletters as the rest are all low-piercing, low-damage and can safely be ignored for the most part.
Bloodletters are individually weak and die easily, so taking them out at range, killing as many in one turn as possible and being able to resist and heal from their damage should be top priorities for survival.
There will come a point where my team suggestions will break down without being levelled quite high due to the sheer number of bloodletters being thrown at you, so I will also give ideas for teams that cover fewer restrictions but can push further:
Max 2 Hits, No Infiltrate
Tan Gi’da, Actus, Tyrant Guard, Incisus, Sho’syl.
This team combines range, damage reduction, healing for all and summon spam.
A similar team got me through battle 12 without a hitch.
For Admech enjoyers, Rho can be included here if you just want to complete Max 2 Hits.
Piercing
Tyrant Guard, Jain Zar, Calandis, Sho’syl, Incisus
Jain’s passive cuts the number of hits a bloodletter moving into melee deals by half and then further reduces its damage on top.
The damage that bloodletters do is fairly low and is deadly due to its high pierce ratio, so reducing its value in absolute rather than percentage terms is highly effective for surviving.
If you really want to neuter the damage output of the most dangerous enemy type, look no further.
Gamma
Power, No Flying, No Psyker
Maladus, Rotbone, Angrax, Aun’shi, Toth
As usual with the Imperial guard, closing down their artillery ASAP is the way to go and this team is slow. Aun’shi is a good one to include for me even though his level is low, purely because in the second round he provides a movement boost that can make the difference between reaching the spawn points or getting bogged down out in the open.
No Death Guard, Max 2 Hits
Tyrant Guard, Archimatos, Eldryon, Sho’syl, Abraxas
Lots of summon spam to help draw fire whilst you move the Tyrant Guard up into position.
Abraxas and Eldryon provide nice buffs for Archimatos and improve his chances of summoning more bloodletters per turn.
Sho’syl’s steady stream of summons on top of this should hopefully help this team fare alright.
Although No Death Guard is a low-scoring requirement, you can combine it with No Psyker to make use of Aleph + Re’vas to push far if you have them built strong.
Summary
Aside from the Max 2 Hits requirement, you’ll be able to use healers for most of the track if you so desire, though I’ll push as far as possible with the teams I suggested before caving and using Aleph-Null and Re’vas, who don’t score particularly highly but will likely be able to get further than any other characters.
Rotbone and friends are a potent group of characters to use together, but you should be wary that with their slow movement and suppression from mortars, they can very easily be pinned down by mortars and caught out in the open before being able to shut down the enemy spawns.
More than anything else, you should be focusing on rushing the spawns with them early in a match; prioritise kills once they are relatively safe, as the difference between being hammered by field artillery and not is night and day.
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