@@mcmarkmarkson7115 you aren't wasting resources on them, as they're well placed in the building list, you HAVE to make the giant/manticore building because you WILL want the tier 5 units from them, unlike other races which they have a special building for them
@@BobMcBobJr I know, but they're still something you're going to recruit anyways, and you will get TONS of dread as beastmen to the point in which you can easily field armies of every type of unit just due to them becoming the cheapest dread option available
The other thing that helps save Giants for the Beastmen is that they have a tech that gets them up to about 42-45 speed. Speed was always the Giant's biggest weakness, they just can't close to the enemy in time to not get shot to buggery.
I love beastmen now, their T5 units feel like a T5, giants are not T3, actually fun to use now, centigors went down a lot in tech tree too. It is as if CA really did their homework on balancing the game with beastmen. I really hope new ballance changes to other civs will do the same and make more units viable. Overall, I love this recruit system, I kinda wish that all civs adopt a system where you are encouraged to recruit all unit types.
I’ve been in the middle of a Beastman campaign for a month, and I’ve been waiting for this video. I haven’t spent a single Dread on Minotaurs yet, even though I have two armies fully outfitted with +10%-Minotaur-damage Gorebulls and Beast Wizards, and all the Minotaur red buffs and Training passives.
For each faction or overall? For the most part hero's should either compliment the army you're building or provide something from just existing (like the high elf economy cheese)
Beastmen went from my least favored and never played race to the one I have the most Success and fun with now. Of course the cheese helps with that and Malagor being just OP as crap as well but they are all fun and viable now. LOVE it!
I'll say this for gors: they actually have a really good charge bonus for infantry. Makes up a bit for their average-to-good melee stats. Also: pretty sure that the poison warhounds also have missile resistance.
While I get the need for more difficulty, I feel like playing on very hard battle mode kinda ruins the strategic aspect of the game. It kinda becomes "how long can you protect your ranged for", instead of the rock paper scissors of melee ranged and cav.
It doesn't ruin melee infantry, it's just that enemy infantry units in melee are buffed to the moon. The primary difficulty comes from Legendary and not battles, because if you want a good result of a battle, the solution is usually the same regardless of battle difficulty.
Imo the Ungor Raider shouldn't have unlimited capacity and should be swapped with the Ungor Herd or something. Infinite free archers is just too good even if they're shitty.
It's interesting, for those saying "Manticores are useful" the other day, that with the Beastmen, Legend agrees, once you no longer have to pay to replace them when they die. :)
1. Razorgor herds should be one tier up. They're great units for running around the backline and crushing everything that isn't elite, and the boosts they get from anti large and the wargor means that they're a great mobile reserve for helping your other break the enemy. 2. Giants should also be one tier up. They're great units in the beastmen roster (especially under a great shaman) and unlike the other single entity units they can be recruited from a tier 3 herdstone (Cygors can be recruited from the top level, but that takes a while). Which means they're ideal for new armies without a lot of buildings. 4 giants can bolster an otherwise trash army by quite a bit. 3. Cygors are really good at provoking the enemy into fighting on your terms. Want to lure in enemies into that bestigor ambush? Cygor is your guy. He's not fast, but he's not as slow as artillery and he's got a lot of range.
It warms my heart to see how good the beastmen have finally become. It was a long time coming and look at that a lot of there units are actually viable.
I am loving the tier lists, and explanations for unit choices, it gives a glimpse into the mind of someone who has mastered the game on the hardest difficulties. Though I am sad that the harpies still get the shaft, even with bonuses from the crow-father himself and free recruitment/upkeep. I feel like they get looked down on because they take a lot of damage if they get in extended fights, despite the free recruitment in a beastmen faction. While they may not inflict losses quickly, they have a lot of utility that make them a serious threat to early-mid game armies for the foes that the beastmen will encounter (orks, dwarves, empire, brettonia and wood elves, not so much dark elves and rats for Taurox but he has minotaurs for that). Since beastmen armies are largely going to be "crap stacking" for most of the game with only 1 or 2 truly powerful doomstack armies, it makes sense to have easy access to low tier requirement flyers that can give a decisive edge against armies which rely heavily on their ranged combatants or artillery, even if sometimes that means sacrificing a flyer to do it. Personally I think of them in the same way I think of dryads for the wood elves, they are a response unit that relies on resistance and mobility to avoid damage while reducing enemy morale by rear charging and fear effects. A basic army with 12 or so archers, some harpies and some dogs can do really well in the early and mid game. They actually have a decent amount of Pro's compared to the Con's of recruitment. Pros: + flying at 82 speed they can avoid ground interception and position for rear-charges easily, even just 1 unit can fly over 3 to 4 enemy archers and force the "skirmish" movement to prevent them from firing without even engaging (this can allow ground forces to fight without receiving missile damage) + 22/38 attack and defense makes them more defensive than offensive, so they have a bit more staying power against archers despite not "killing quickly", less losses means more likely victory XP from decisive. + 32/12 damage and AP allows them to inflict a bit more damage to armored opponents (like dwarf quarrelers) than most low level flyer units (like bats), they are on-par with other T2 infantry in the roster for damage per hit, and 20 charge damage helps on their initial dive to break morale. + Tech and Lord bonuses allow for Missile Resistance, Physical Resistance, AP damage, Speed, and Charge bonus, and can increase their melee attack to improve their otherwise lackluster melee attack from 22 to 30, along with Legendary lord bonuses to CAP and either Armor or Weapon strength. (I know armor isn't valued much, but against the archer opponent they are most likely to face, getting upwards of 30 to 45 armor can actually mitigate a reasonable amount of damage, or bonus to damage applying to reasonably good numbers is acceptable) + In a blob they often cause an immediate route on a targeted enemy if ordered to all charge at the same time, good charge bonus, and cause fear all mean that they decimate AI on walls with little effort. (this is kind of the same effect as with bats or griffons, though they do not cause the crowd control knockdowns of griffons) + They share a dread CAP with manticores and increase by 2 per dread level, the manticores are another good "throw-away" flying siege unit that can be used to tie up any annoying enemy unit while the rest of the army wins the fight. + They are the only recruitable early game unit that reliably trivializes the _early game_ siege battles for the non-taurox beastmen factions, by removing the archers on the walls and disabling the towers, it allows less losses on your archers as they approach from vanguard. Late game this is trivialized by spells, heroes and large monsters. (Malagore can fly over and win early siege battles with flock of doom as well, but not every army has Malagore). Cons: - If you don't have Malagore, they don't get as many bonuses from lord options. - They will take losses from extended fights or careless flight paths to engage enemy archers, which may lower battle XP levels, so they have to be micro-managed (but so does cavalry and chariots, these just fly so there is actually a little "less" to worry about). - Their building is mildly inconvenient, since it's likely you will want bray shaman/chariot building before it (But I will offer the counterpoint that they can be recruited from any herdstone at T2 without requiring individual armies to have the building early on)
Minotaurs definitely steamrolled everything in my campaign and they felt like a doomstack - admittedly, the campaign was over too fast to compare it to much of anything else.
Minotaur lord, some Minotaur heroes, and _lots_ of Minotaur infantry. With a few Cygors and Ghorgons for anti-seige and anti-large. Only other stacks you'd want are L.L. gimmick stacks.
I think those poison wolves could go up to recruit one. They don't seem worse that the regular variant, so you might as well use the capacity you start with.
Make a doom stack with half minotaurs with shields and half mentors with great weapons. It's one of the funnest doom stacks I've ever made. You run the ones with the shields in the middle and front to absorb missile fire and the great weapons are on your flanks to deal with cavalry.
If you think of Harpies as disposable then they are extremely useful for distracting missle and artillery units. They fly and can get to the back ranks easily. I would classify them under recruit some. For their ability to take enemy fire off you main units alone is a godsend.
CHaos spawns have incredibly high AR reiting. You can pack full army of them and just AR every encounter. So even if their value on battlefield is not that high, you can utilise it in long campaign pretty decently.
No more unit tier lists? I loved this. If not for the achievements I play on normal/normal to have themed RP-Fun-Armies, but appreciate your inside of the game every time. Well, now I am for spell or lord tier lists. Kepp the good work up!
I also like that the beastmen giants are the only giants that have woodsman. So I stick them in the trees and they do just fine, which is great because herdstone defenses tend to have trees from most of the battles I've come across. Woodsman isn't that great, but it does mean they can fight in trees no prob (as far as I know). Going with that 10% missile resistance is also great.
The comment about Giant missile resistance at Oak of Ages had me wondering if you could do a video on strong unique landmarks for each race across the world map that players may not know about?
Giants, chaos spawn, and manticores finally get their time to shine... sort of... it feels appropriate that beastmen take whatever they can get, and make it work. Thanks for all the faction tier lists, Legend. I enjoyed the series, and look forward to what will come next.
A bit surprised at one unit here as I have personally found Harpies (moreso than Manticores even to be honest, as the Manticores just don't have the AoE to really be effective at fighting full-size regiments) to be basically my go-to counter for archers and artillery as the Beastmen and as such basically never have an army without a few slots dedicated to either or both. It's true the harpies melt against anything that's decent-ish at melee but that's because they're really squishy, they actually do a serious amount of damage very quickly to low-armor units with unimpressive melee defense, which would be most archers and artillery. A unit with 60 entities that does 70+ low-AP weapon damage on the charge will absolutely wreck archers, and being fast fliers they can get at them too, much quicker and easier than Centigors or Razorgor Herds or whatever can.
It's so crazy how strong their horde mechanic is compared to other horde factions and they have a solid roster. It makes playing other horde factions feel like a handicap now.
Adding something like “Thickened Skin/Hide” would be a cool trait for giants, maybe they could get 10% missile resistance every time they go from regular xp to silver to gold. So 30% total then plus the campaign buffs and boom giants become viable.
I started watching your channel years ago from a Medieval Total war 2 "tier list" and you've had me hooked since. Keep up the amazing work M8, looking forward to Warhammer 3 stuff :)
Another faction where I feel like the battle difficulty really changes their powers. Gors, with minimal upgrades, could dominate mid-tier infantry and do serious damage to high tier infantry. Add in the fact that they have vanguard deployment and you could do some crazy things with them. But man it's crazy to see how good bestigors have gotten. A-rank melee infantry that isn't trashstacking is pretty damn impressive.
I hadn't played Beastmen until yesterday with the new patch, and it's like night and day. Went from a really tedious experience to an absolute power trip of a campaign.
I will put poison hounds in recruit once, because even being true that it´s not worth to incresase their number only for poison, chaos warhounds could be upgraded till be very powerfull. Techonlogy gives them armour pierceng and phisical resistance and even more speed, wargor fear and frenzy and khazrak bonus vs infantry, charge bonus and stalk (and if you want even more chargue bonus and mele atack from the generic red line) I find usefull get two or four units of them with khazrak army even in late game, and the two with poison are good choice for this porpouse.
I have a suggestion for new tier lists. AI unit tier list, which units are the most dangerous/useful in the hands of the AI. Rankings could go from easy to fight to avoid if fighting if possible.
In all honesty, I would put giant on recruit one/none. The giant synergizes really poorly with the rest of the roaster. He moves so slow while the rest of the beast men go super fast and can easily run down your opponents. Meanwhile the giant also lacks vanguard deployment so he is always going to be really far behind your troops. In short the giant may be strong, but he works poorly with the rest of the roaster. I say move him to recruit one/none.
i would love a series of videos on how you build doomstacks for each race, which traits to get, wich unit to support them & maybe ranking them all on a tier list
Razorgores and Poison warhounds can both be surprisingly good. In a recent VH/VH campaign, I used them in several armies, and was surprised that the warhounds usually got more kills than the razorgores (probably because the hounds are faster.) I was mostly fighting empire and using them in packs to clean up ranged units after the rest of the army charged in and engaged the melee troops. They have enough speed that they don't have to fight fair, and Wargores, Great Bray Shamans, and Khazrak can all buff them.
Cygors can be summoned with an item and with spells. I Never recruit them but spamming 19x2 with items, and another 10 or so with spells is very effective.
Giants and bestigors turned out to be absolutely crucial for me in a few defensive battles against brettonian LL’s at ungarrisoned herdstones. They’re really surprisingly good in the right situation!
I actually quite like harpies even above warhounds because I think harpies can do more damage and have no problem with space on underground maps and can activate archer skirmish mode without having to be in combat and wait until they are alone to kill them. I just feel like it's more difficult with warhounds to move freely and do their job. For this reason I would swap the position of harpies and warhounds in the tierlist, but it is just my opinion from my experience ^^. Nice tierlist, I agree with the rest. NIce job!
I'd argue with the Baconators, I found them to be excelent for poor (beast)man's crapstacks that focus on fast attack to support main armies. They are easy to mix with centigors and help in sieges as you shatterstone an extra opening for them as the main army either goads the AI to one side or hits a side of the map so the fast army on the other side forces the enemies to retreated off walls - easiest siege battle you can imagine in the current climate.
A tier list that follows a trend of tier 5 units towards the top and tier 1/0 units toward the bottom (with the exception of ungor raiders) with everything in between seeming to fall into an appropriate spot. Clearly CA did something right with this beastmen rework.
I did make fun use of harpies with Malagor as he buffs them a bit. In VH/VH they were murder machines vs light infantry. They were very useful vs HE,DE & Empire. But of course that was only under Malagor
The cool thing about the rework is that it actually introduces some kind of "CP"-balance, which should not only be a core part for multiplayer, but also campaign. Cheaper units should have their place, not only for some turn, but ideally throughout the campaign. Sadly campaign is all about exchanging your roster, rather than expanding it. This makes a lot of tactical decisions obsolete and the play style is not as dynamic or divers as you experience in multiplayer. I wish there would be some kind of limitation on how much your army can cost to force players in building balanced armies. I know there are mods for that, but I find that is an integral part of war hammer that should be a core-mechanic. Many players would rage at their power fantasies destroyed, but they would learn to appreciate how good certain cheap units actually perform for their cost and start building better and well thought out armies, rather than trying to macro and stacking power fantasies. This rework actually achieved to go in the right direction.
Make a tier list of your tier lists lol. But for real, I don't play on legendary and have still really enjoyed these vids, even learned a thing or two along the way. Keep up the great work!
"If you make em free, give it missile resistance and let me recruit them in one turn I'll go 'yeah sure I'll give them a go'" Treemen: Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our viability!
I kinda feel like Chaos Spawn are the mid game infantry for the beastmen faction. You get so freakin' many spawn wranglers that you can end up with silly amounts of chaos spawn capacity without actually upgrading it at all. In addition, one of their techs gives regeneration to chaos spawn. While they aren't army destroyers, they commandingly defeat basic infantry from most factions. Also, can we talk about the names on Legend's gorebulls?
granted I play on easy, now normal.. I went from trying beastmen early, died within turn 10 or 20 and didn't touch 'em until rework and it's probably my favourite army, so much fun to play and agree with the list
I would like to add something to those who play on normal dif. You can definitely recruit ungor spearman and its actually fun. Just spam them and zerg swarm everything. In cities go straight for the city center.(you also need mage) But raiders are still better choise
You know you dont need to increase unit caps. You can exploit a full stack of any 1 unit as long as you have a single 1 available. Just recruit, save, and reload the save file. The game will "forget" you are recruiting and reset the unit cap
Okay, but that goes a bit beyond cheesing the game into outright exploiting a bug. At that point you might as well just download a mod that makes your units invincible, if you're going to outright cheat anyway why take half measures?
Legend, I've following your tier lists and none of them work. I'm playing on easy campaign, easy battle difficulty, small unit scale, multiplay and modded. You should redo all these videos, you obviously got all the tiers wrong. Seriously, these have been great videos. In these last few, renaming the tiers to be more precise has been very helpful. Thank you for making them!
Interesting to see how the base game is balanced as someone who likes to primarily play SFO but will be playing vanilla for a while when TWWH 3 comes out!
I have to actually disaggre on one point, being the cygore. IMO you should never recruit them now, as you can now get an item with dread to summon one. This mean you can summon 2 cygores for one mage which is actually a net gain in terms of army size and upkeep, a huge one at that, actually i made one with malagor full harpy army, then slap one of each lore stinky nurgle shaman and that made me have around 8 or so cygores in a matter of seconds, with the best part being that you can do that again. So personally i see no more use anymore in getting cygores.
thought i just had as i was watching, would have been helpful if orgre mercs had been included in all the tierlists to get an idea how good they are in which factions. enjoying the content and hope you're doing well Legend
I basically never use cavalry or chariots. I build all my armies with a super bulky frontline that can smash the enemy melee units, and put a bunch of poison warhounds in my stack to chase down archers and fleeing units.
Loved the series hope to see more tier list for similar stuff like heroes comparison (melee heroes from all factions and magic heroes from all factions
Really does show how insane the melee cheats are in this game on legendary. I play Normal, and the Ungors work fine. They can beat most same-tier melee infantry 1 on 1 in my experience, and if not they can hold the line well enough for my lords or beasts to get in and do the job for them. They get beaten up, but hordes make 'manual replenishment' crazy easy so i never mind.
I just noticed that generally-trashy units are bught together like spawns and giants, hounds and razorgors, manticores and harpies. So you won't pay extra for upgrading trash besides useful cap.
Legend blink 4 times at 4:45 if you are being kept hostage by giants. In all seriousness though the fact that they are in a decent spot for the beastmen given they are tier 3 and can be buffed up a decent amount is nice.
I think you've really underestimated the chariot units, I used them in a Khazrak campaign, and they are INCREDIBLY powerful. The Wargors are broken when using the mount, but the chariots themselves are actually broken too, they deal insane damage. Another thing is that since they're a low tier dread reward, cost relatively little, and aren't a high tier unit, you can get a full stack of these with just 9 dread upgrades, which is insane.
Honestly the Gors are even worse than the Ungors a lot of the time in early game, because they don't stalk. In late game when you are mixing with other non-stalking troops, the Gors are better, but in early game when you are relying on stalk, they are really bad.
I'd argue that harpies do have a very specific dual use as a disposable unit. When the majority of your army has stalk and the enemy has decent artillery you can approach the army with your hidden units and fuck around with the enemy AI using the harpies. When you're ready to pounce on their army with the stalked units you drop all the harpies on their artillery to prevent damage to the stalking units when revealed. This strategy can easily go wrong and you can argue that it can be done with warhounds but I'd argue harpies flight makes it easier to do for most people. You only do with with a trash stack and you only mix in a few harpies so that you never have to increase their unit cap and you only add the harpies when preparing to fight an enemy with artillery then replace them with raiders after. This strategy can be especially useful during sieges. Poison warhounds are also a straight improvement to warhounds so whilst I get why you put them in never recruit, if you're using warhounds anyway you do recruit the poison ones you start with access too instead. That leaves only 1 unit that's truly useless which is why I think beastmen campaigns are so much fun, they provide really good battle variety! Great tier list overall, I only really disagreed with the harpies being never recruit but even then that's just my preference for a particular strategy that's highly situational so you were probably right to put it where you did with your playstyle and much better micro than me (hence why I think warhounds work better for you).
From my experience Harpies are shot too easily. Even inaccurate arty like Grudge Throwers or Rock Lobbers will take a quarter of a Harpies unit on approach. Cannons simply annihilate them even when micro'ing harpies.
Yes, the rework was spectacularly useful. Beasties have sat sulking in a corner for years due to their initial, appallingly bad mechanics. Now I think they're great AND great fun. Not sure about spending to increase cap on Cygors when you can raise a few in every battle (can get to 3 from memory) easily enough with the right Shaman or of course Malagor.
And then 2 more with an item that you can just buy for a total of 5 per shaman. Looking forward to Legend rating a memestack of 20 shamans each with 5 cygor spawns.
>recruit some Manticores, Giants and Chaos Spawns
Who are you and what have you done to Legend?
Seeing Legend rate Manticores and Giants that high legitimately blew my mind.
Horses for courses i suppose. If it's viable...
Those units have good synergy with the rest of the roster in the beastmen armies, but the same can't be said for other factions.
Quick recruitment that costs nothing helps an awful lot.
Giants? Tier 3, they definitely are much more convenient than the tier 5
Manticores? They fill a mobility hole in the roster
The Beastmen redesign was so crazy that they even made Giants and Manticores viable for Legend.
@@mcmarkmarkson7115 you aren't wasting resources on them, as they're well placed in the building list, you HAVE to make the giant/manticore building because you WILL want the tier 5 units from them, unlike other races which they have a special building for them
@@Adierit He's talking about the dread spent on capacity.
@@BobMcBobJr I know, but they're still something you're going to recruit anyways, and you will get TONS of dread as beastmen to the point in which you can easily field armies of every type of unit just due to them becoming the cheapest dread option available
And chaos spawn as well.
@@Adierit Or races that have better units in these buildings, for example Greenskins have them in troll building
Saving the best for last I see?
Imagine saying that a year ago about the Beastmen.
They are the BESTmen
Perhaps the most balanced roster now. Used to be that almost everything was crap except cygors
Minotaurs have always been awesome.
Gors are one of the best mid game infantry units
The entire BM roster was strong; it was their campaign mechanics that were weak
@@Qatrebew Indeed. When i played beastman yeras ago, i struggled with money. I won the campaign, but money always was to be considered.
The campaign aspect of Beastmen was the problem not the units
What’s funny is that the units haven’t really changed much at all. It was the standard horde mechanics that were just god-awful.
The other thing that helps save Giants for the Beastmen is that they have a tech that gets them up to about 42-45 speed. Speed was always the Giant's biggest weakness, they just can't close to the enemy in time to not get shot to buggery.
Also tretch is closeby and you can get his 10% army speed. Not much but a small boost.
@@jacobburch7555 close by ? He’s only really close to taurox
@@deathshealer9102 sorry i meant to say with taurox.
With SFO, Khazrak has a +30% speed, +20% ward save for giants skill
@@InahaFrost With mods you can just give all your units 90% ward save so I'm not sure why they're relevant?
I love beastmen now, their T5 units feel like a T5, giants are not T3, actually fun to use now, centigors went down a lot in tech tree too. It is as if CA really did their homework on balancing the game with beastmen. I really hope new ballance changes to other civs will do the same and make more units viable.
Overall, I love this recruit system, I kinda wish that all civs adopt a system where you are encouraged to recruit all unit types.
I was waiting for this video to start a beastmen campaign. Thank you
Same lol
Same xD
yeah why use ur own brain lol.
Because my brain played 100 hours not 12k 🤣
I’ve been in the middle of a Beastman campaign for a month, and I’ve been waiting for this video. I haven’t spent a single Dread on Minotaurs yet, even though I have two armies fully outfitted with +10%-Minotaur-damage Gorebulls and Beast Wizards, and all the Minotaur red buffs and Training passives.
Hero tier ranking next please :)
For each faction or overall? For the most part hero's should either compliment the army you're building or provide something from just existing (like the high elf economy cheese)
He made a Magic Tier list thats Basicly a Hero Ranking
May be both compare inside faction and compare between factions of the same role. There are not many hero types in each faction anyway.
@@darklyslord9960
No, clearly not
Heros are pretty self explanatory and if you need a tier list for them you may wanna get some more experience in campaigns.
Beastmen went from my least favored and never played race to the one I have the most Success and fun with now. Of course the cheese helps with that and Malagor being just OP as crap as well but they are all fun and viable now. LOVE it!
I'll say this for gors: they actually have a really good charge bonus for infantry. Makes up a bit for their average-to-good melee stats.
Also: pretty sure that the poison warhounds also have missile resistance.
While I get the need for more difficulty, I feel like playing on very hard battle mode kinda ruins the strategic aspect of the game. It kinda becomes "how long can you protect your ranged for", instead of the rock paper scissors of melee ranged and cav.
It doesn't ruin melee infantry, it's just that enemy infantry units in melee are buffed to the moon. The primary difficulty comes from Legendary and not battles, because if you want a good result of a battle, the solution is usually the same regardless of battle difficulty.
Imo the Ungor Raider shouldn't have unlimited capacity and should be swapped with the Ungor Herd or something. Infinite free archers is just too good even if they're shitty.
That would make the ungor spearman superfluous
@@edwin5145 Isn't that already the case?
@@kommentier9884 it is more in the sense of "they are already dead! There is no need to kill them harder!"
the last one
my heart is broken😭
He saved the BEAST for last
@@jonathaneastman3d BOO THIS MAN!
@@chriswhinery925 moo this man*
shouldn't all the beastmen be considered as monsters?
Only if you consider cows to be "monsters" 🤭
@@henryviiifake8244 there's a "yo mama" joke in there that's too obvious to make
Cows kill more people every year than sharks do.
This is because we interact with them far more often than sharks, but is still technically accurate.
It's interesting, for those saying "Manticores are useful" the other day, that with the Beastmen, Legend agrees, once you no longer have to pay to replace them when they die. :)
Beastmen now feel like what Chaos was supposed to be like.
1. Razorgor herds should be one tier up. They're great units for running around the backline and crushing everything that isn't elite, and the boosts they get from anti large and the wargor means that they're a great mobile reserve for helping your other break the enemy. 2. Giants should also be one tier up. They're great units in the beastmen roster (especially under a great shaman) and unlike the other single entity units they can be recruited from a tier 3 herdstone (Cygors can be recruited from the top level, but that takes a while). Which means they're ideal for new armies without a lot of buildings. 4 giants can bolster an otherwise trash army by quite a bit. 3. Cygors are really good at provoking the enemy into fighting on your terms. Want to lure in enemies into that bestigor ambush? Cygor is your guy. He's not fast, but he's not as slow as artillery and he's got a lot of range.
It warms my heart to see how good the beastmen have finally become. It was a long time coming and look at that a lot of there units are actually viable.
Beastmen are actually fun to play now ever since the update.
I am loving the tier lists, and explanations for unit choices, it gives a glimpse into the mind of someone who has mastered the game on the hardest difficulties. Though I am sad that the harpies still get the shaft, even with bonuses from the crow-father himself and free recruitment/upkeep.
I feel like they get looked down on because they take a lot of damage if they get in extended fights, despite the free recruitment in a beastmen faction. While they may not inflict losses quickly, they have a lot of utility that make them a serious threat to early-mid game armies for the foes that the beastmen will encounter (orks, dwarves, empire, brettonia and wood elves, not so much dark elves and rats for Taurox but he has minotaurs for that). Since beastmen armies are largely going to be "crap stacking" for most of the game with only 1 or 2 truly powerful doomstack armies, it makes sense to have easy access to low tier requirement flyers that can give a decisive edge against armies which rely heavily on their ranged combatants or artillery, even if sometimes that means sacrificing a flyer to do it.
Personally I think of them in the same way I think of dryads for the wood elves, they are a response unit that relies on resistance and mobility to avoid damage while reducing enemy morale by rear charging and fear effects. A basic army with 12 or so archers, some harpies and some dogs can do really well in the early and mid game.
They actually have a decent amount of Pro's compared to the Con's of recruitment.
Pros:
+ flying at 82 speed they can avoid ground interception and position for rear-charges easily, even just 1 unit can fly over 3 to 4 enemy archers and force the "skirmish" movement to prevent them from firing without even engaging (this can allow ground forces to fight without receiving missile damage)
+ 22/38 attack and defense makes them more defensive than offensive, so they have a bit more staying power against archers despite not "killing quickly", less losses means more likely victory XP from decisive.
+ 32/12 damage and AP allows them to inflict a bit more damage to armored opponents (like dwarf quarrelers) than most low level flyer units (like bats), they are on-par with other T2 infantry in the roster for damage per hit, and 20 charge damage helps on their initial dive to break morale.
+ Tech and Lord bonuses allow for Missile Resistance, Physical Resistance, AP damage, Speed, and Charge bonus, and can increase their melee attack to improve their otherwise lackluster melee attack from 22 to 30, along with Legendary lord bonuses to CAP and either Armor or Weapon strength. (I know armor isn't valued much, but against the archer opponent they are most likely to face, getting upwards of 30 to 45 armor can actually mitigate a reasonable amount of damage, or bonus to damage applying to reasonably good numbers is acceptable)
+ In a blob they often cause an immediate route on a targeted enemy if ordered to all charge at the same time, good charge bonus, and cause fear all mean that they decimate AI on walls with little effort. (this is kind of the same effect as with bats or griffons, though they do not cause the crowd control knockdowns of griffons)
+ They share a dread CAP with manticores and increase by 2 per dread level, the manticores are another good "throw-away" flying siege unit that can be used to tie up any annoying enemy unit while the rest of the army wins the fight.
+ They are the only recruitable early game unit that reliably trivializes the _early game_ siege battles for the non-taurox beastmen factions, by removing the archers on the walls and disabling the towers, it allows less losses on your archers as they approach from vanguard. Late game this is trivialized by spells, heroes and large monsters. (Malagore can fly over and win early siege battles with flock of doom as well, but not every army has Malagore).
Cons:
- If you don't have Malagore, they don't get as many bonuses from lord options.
- They will take losses from extended fights or careless flight paths to engage enemy archers, which may lower battle XP levels, so they have to be micro-managed (but so does cavalry and chariots, these just fly so there is actually a little "less" to worry about).
- Their building is mildly inconvenient, since it's likely you will want bray shaman/chariot building before it (But I will offer the counterpoint that they can be recruited from any herdstone at T2 without requiring individual armies to have the building early on)
Minotaurs definitely steamrolled everything in my campaign and they felt like a doomstack - admittedly, the campaign was over too fast to compare it to much of anything else.
Minotaur lord, some Minotaur heroes, and _lots_ of Minotaur infantry. With a few Cygors and Ghorgons for anti-seige and anti-large.
Only other stacks you'd want are L.L. gimmick stacks.
I was literally just looking for this in the playlist! My thanks
I think those poison wolves could go up to recruit one. They don't seem worse that the regular variant, so you might as well use the capacity you start with.
Make a doom stack with half minotaurs with shields and half mentors with great weapons. It's one of the funnest doom stacks I've ever made. You run the ones with the shields in the middle and front to absorb missile fire and the great weapons are on your flanks to deal with cavalry.
Always have one or two Cygors. They can open a hole for seiges and provoke the enemy into leaving their high ground.
If you think of Harpies as disposable then they are extremely useful for distracting missle and artillery units. They fly and can get to the back ranks easily. I would classify them under recruit some. For their ability to take enemy fire off you main units alone is a godsend.
Legend is infamous for putting viable units into trash.
Absolutely love these tier lists they help me out a lot in my campaigns
CHaos spawns have incredibly high AR reiting. You can pack full army of them and just AR every encounter. So even if their value on battlefield is not that high, you can utilise it in long campaign pretty decently.
I'm Morghur and I'm mutating you as we speak!
I must say, thanks for these awesome tier lists!
With your explanation with the reason behind all your choices does help a lot!
This is why I love Legend! Despite his natural bias against Giants he has to acknowledge that Beastmen are awesome now
No more unit tier lists? I loved this. If not for the achievements I play on normal/normal to have themed RP-Fun-Armies, but appreciate your inside of the game every time.
Well, now I am for spell or lord tier lists. Kepp the good work up!
I also like that the beastmen giants are the only giants that have woodsman. So I stick them in the trees and they do just fine, which is great because herdstone defenses tend to have trees from most of the battles I've come across. Woodsman isn't that great, but it does mean they can fight in trees no prob (as far as I know). Going with that 10% missile resistance is also great.
I agree. Being able to put the giants in the forest helps quite a bit with enemy missiles, plus it gives them an edge against most large units.
The comment about Giant missile resistance at Oak of Ages had me wondering if you could do a video on strong unique landmarks for each race across the world map that players may not know about?
Loved this series. Hoping to see a hero tier list (I know that’s a hell of a lot of work, but this has proven quite helpful).
My old tabletop army. Still feels weird to see all the love that they've been given recently.
Unironically went from my least favorite to most played faction after the overhaul. So much fun now, never get enough of Taurox.
Giants, chaos spawn, and manticores finally get their time to shine... sort of... it feels appropriate that beastmen take whatever they can get, and make it work. Thanks for all the faction tier lists, Legend. I enjoyed the series, and look forward to what will come next.
These are always so entertaining. Love the explanations for each unit
A bit surprised at one unit here as I have personally found Harpies (moreso than Manticores even to be honest, as the Manticores just don't have the AoE to really be effective at fighting full-size regiments) to be basically my go-to counter for archers and artillery as the Beastmen and as such basically never have an army without a few slots dedicated to either or both. It's true the harpies melt against anything that's decent-ish at melee but that's because they're really squishy, they actually do a serious amount of damage very quickly to low-armor units with unimpressive melee defense, which would be most archers and artillery. A unit with 60 entities that does 70+ low-AP weapon damage on the charge will absolutely wreck archers, and being fast fliers they can get at them too, much quicker and easier than Centigors or Razorgor Herds or whatever can.
It's so crazy how strong their horde mechanic is compared to other horde factions and they have a solid roster. It makes playing other horde factions feel like a handicap now.
Adding something like “Thickened Skin/Hide” would be a cool trait for giants, maybe they could get 10% missile resistance every time they go from regular xp to silver to gold. So 30% total then plus the campaign buffs and boom giants become viable.
So similar to sfo ,where they are VERY durable
I started watching your channel years ago from a Medieval Total war 2 "tier list" and you've had me hooked since. Keep up the amazing work M8, looking forward to Warhammer 3 stuff :)
One other thing with the cap for spawn/giants is that you can get a dread discount from the blood moon events.
Another faction where I feel like the battle difficulty really changes their powers. Gors, with minimal upgrades, could dominate mid-tier infantry and do serious damage to high tier infantry. Add in the fact that they have vanguard deployment and you could do some crazy things with them. But man it's crazy to see how good bestigors have gotten. A-rank melee infantry that isn't trashstacking is pretty damn impressive.
Gors themselves aren't the best unbuffed but with their high charge bonus they even it out by just punching the enemy hard and fast.
I hadn't played Beastmen until yesterday with the new patch, and it's like night and day. Went from a really tedious experience to an absolute power trip of a campaign.
I will put poison hounds in recruit once, because even being true that it´s not worth to incresase their number only for poison, chaos warhounds could be upgraded till be very powerfull. Techonlogy gives them armour pierceng and phisical resistance and even more speed, wargor fear and frenzy and khazrak bonus vs infantry, charge bonus and stalk (and if you want even more chargue bonus and mele atack from the generic red line) I find usefull get two or four units of them with khazrak army even in late game, and the two with poison are good choice for this porpouse.
I have a suggestion for new tier lists. AI unit tier list, which units are the most dangerous/useful in the hands of the AI.
Rankings could go from easy to fight to avoid if fighting if possible.
The Beastmen almost have a bell-shaped curve for their unit distribution, you love to see it
Rank Heros from different factions, put them in tiers like you did with magic, that would be cool.
In all honesty, I would put giant on recruit one/none. The giant synergizes really poorly with the rest of the roaster. He moves so slow while the rest of the beast men go super fast and can easily run down your opponents. Meanwhile the giant also lacks vanguard deployment so he is always going to be really far behind your troops. In short the giant may be strong, but he works poorly with the rest of the roaster. I say move him to recruit one/none.
Watched this video while waiting for Legend for GBOG+ Loremaster of Sotek's podcast. :D
i would love a series of videos on how you build doomstacks for each race, which traits to get, wich unit to support them & maybe ranking them all on a tier list
A Hero tier list would be great, knowing which hero is better in battles or on campaigns etc, and the best trait for the best situations
Beastmen can honestly make decent use of their manticores and I love that.
Razorgores and Poison warhounds can both be surprisingly good. In a recent VH/VH campaign, I used them in several armies, and was surprised that the warhounds usually got more kills than the razorgores (probably because the hounds are faster.) I was mostly fighting empire and using them in packs to clean up ranged units after the rest of the army charged in and engaged the melee troops. They have enough speed that they don't have to fight fair, and Wargores, Great Bray Shamans, and Khazrak can all buff them.
Cygors can be summoned with an item and with spells. I Never recruit them but spamming 19x2 with items, and another 10 or so with spells is very effective.
Giants and bestigors turned out to be absolutely crucial for me in a few defensive battles against brettonian LL’s at ungarrisoned herdstones. They’re really surprisingly good in the right situation!
I actually quite like harpies even above warhounds because I think harpies can do more damage and have no problem with space on underground maps and can activate archer skirmish mode without having to be in combat and wait until they are alone to kill them. I just feel like it's more difficult with warhounds to move freely and do their job.
For this reason I would swap the position of harpies and warhounds in the tierlist, but it is just my opinion from my experience ^^. Nice tierlist, I agree with the rest. NIce job!
I'd argue with the Baconators, I found them to be excelent for poor (beast)man's crapstacks that focus on fast attack to support main armies. They are easy to mix with centigors and help in sieges as you shatterstone an extra opening for them as the main army either goads the AI to one side or hits a side of the map so the fast army on the other side forces the enemies to retreated off walls - easiest siege battle you can imagine in the current climate.
A tier list that follows a trend of tier 5 units towards the top and tier 1/0 units toward the bottom (with the exception of ungor raiders) with everything in between seeming to fall into an appropriate spot. Clearly CA did something right with this beastmen rework.
I did make fun use of harpies with Malagor as he buffs them a bit. In VH/VH they were murder machines vs light infantry. They were very useful vs HE,DE & Empire.
But of course that was only under Malagor
I'm beginning to learn that LLs want custom stacks to maximize their utility.
The cool thing about the rework is that it actually introduces some kind of "CP"-balance, which should not only be a core part for multiplayer, but also campaign. Cheaper units should have their place, not only for some turn, but ideally throughout the campaign. Sadly campaign is all about exchanging your roster, rather than expanding it. This makes a lot of tactical decisions obsolete and the play style is not as dynamic or divers as you experience in multiplayer. I wish there would be some kind of limitation on how much your army can cost to force players in building balanced armies. I know there are mods for that, but I find that is an integral part of war hammer that should be a core-mechanic. Many players would rage at their power fantasies destroyed, but they would learn to appreciate how good certain cheap units actually perform for their cost and start building better and well thought out armies, rather than trying to macro and stacking power fantasies. This rework actually achieved to go in the right direction.
Make a tier list of your tier lists lol. But for real, I don't play on legendary and have still really enjoyed these vids, even learned a thing or two along the way. Keep up the great work!
Harpies are good to occupy archers while you advance your army, or for artillery
Morghur can give one giant the stalk trait, which really helps it out.
I like using 2 cygors in my main armies just bc I think their additional damage helps break apart armies while I run in with my infantry.
Also good against seiges and artillery factions hiding on a hill.
Come down into the forest, stunties. Nothing here but a Cygor and some trees...
A year back it wouldn't have been "save the Best for last" and more like "save the beast for least"
"If you make em free, give it missile resistance and let me recruit them in one turn I'll go 'yeah sure I'll give them a go'"
Treemen: Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our viability!
I kinda feel like Chaos Spawn are the mid game infantry for the beastmen faction. You get so freakin' many spawn wranglers that you can end up with silly amounts of chaos spawn capacity without actually upgrading it at all. In addition, one of their techs gives regeneration to chaos spawn. While they aren't army destroyers, they commandingly defeat basic infantry from most factions.
Also, can we talk about the names on Legend's gorebulls?
granted I play on easy, now normal.. I went from trying beastmen early, died within turn 10 or 20 and didn't touch 'em until rework and it's probably my favourite army, so much fun to play and agree with the list
I would like to add something to those who play on normal dif.
You can definitely recruit ungor spearman and its actually fun. Just spam them and zerg swarm everything. In cities go straight for the city center.(you also need mage)
But raiders are still better choise
I realy love those Tier lists. Realy glad to hear that there is still more to cover ;>
You know you dont need to increase unit caps. You can exploit a full stack of any 1 unit as long as you have a single 1 available. Just recruit, save, and reload the save file. The game will "forget" you are recruiting and reset the unit cap
Okay, but that goes a bit beyond cheesing the game into outright exploiting a bug. At that point you might as well just download a mod that makes your units invincible, if you're going to outright cheat anyway why take half measures?
Legend, I've following your tier lists and none of them work. I'm playing on easy campaign, easy battle difficulty, small unit scale, multiplay and modded. You should redo all these videos, you obviously got all the tiers wrong.
Seriously, these have been great videos. In these last few, renaming the tiers to be more precise has been very helpful. Thank you for making them!
Evil Legend be like: recruit giants and bestigores
Interesting to see how the base game is balanced as someone who likes to primarily play SFO but will be playing vanilla for a while when TWWH 3 comes out!
Thanks for these great tier lists I hope you do them for warhammer 3!
I have to actually disaggre on one point, being the cygore.
IMO you should never recruit them now, as you can now get an item with dread to summon one.
This mean you can summon 2 cygores for one mage which is actually a net gain in terms of army size and upkeep, a huge one at that, actually i made one with malagor full harpy army, then slap one of each lore stinky nurgle shaman and that made me have around 8 or so cygores in a matter of seconds, with the best part being that you can do that again.
So personally i see no more use anymore in getting cygores.
thought i just had as i was watching, would have been helpful if orgre mercs had been included in all the tierlists to get an idea how good they are in which factions. enjoying the content and hope you're doing well Legend
I basically never use cavalry or chariots. I build all my armies with a super bulky frontline that can smash the enemy melee units, and put a bunch of poison warhounds in my stack to chase down archers and fleeing units.
The Beastmen rework has been so awesome! Hopefully Norsca gets something similar in scale to help their economy.
Loved the series hope to see more tier list for similar stuff like heroes comparison (melee heroes from all factions and magic heroes from all factions
You could also do one for hero mounts
Shielded minatours are the best in auto resolve as well 🙃
I always recruit at least one Chaos Warhound with poison simply to slow the enemy and reduce their stat's for the Razorgors or normal Warhounds.
The one we have been waiting for
Really does show how insane the melee cheats are in this game on legendary. I play Normal, and the Ungors work fine. They can beat most same-tier melee infantry 1 on 1 in my experience, and if not they can hold the line well enough for my lords or beasts to get in and do the job for them. They get beaten up, but hordes make 'manual replenishment' crazy easy so i never mind.
I just noticed that generally-trashy units are bught together like spawns and giants, hounds and razorgors, manticores and harpies. So you won't pay extra for upgrading trash besides useful cap.
Legend, you are our bestigor
Please consider making a doomstack tier list!
Legend blink 4 times at 4:45 if you are being kept hostage by giants.
In all seriousness though the fact that they are in a decent spot for the beastmen given they are tier 3 and can be buffed up a decent amount is nice.
I think you've really underestimated the chariot units, I used them in a Khazrak campaign, and they are INCREDIBLY powerful. The Wargors are broken when using the mount, but the chariots themselves are actually broken too, they deal insane damage. Another thing is that since they're a low tier dread reward, cost relatively little, and aren't a high tier unit, you can get a full stack of these with just 9 dread upgrades, which is insane.
If you're playing Mixu's mod for Ghorros he can at least give Gors Regeneration and other buffs, but he gives it to Bestigors too, so, yeah.
I generally give doomstack to each LL for them and fill all other armies with Great Bray Shaman, siege attacker and a lot of riders.
Honestly the Gors are even worse than the Ungors a lot of the time in early game, because they don't stalk. In late game when you are mixing with other non-stalking troops, the Gors are better, but in early game when you are relying on stalk, they are really bad.
I'd argue that harpies do have a very specific dual use as a disposable unit.
When the majority of your army has stalk and the enemy has decent artillery you can approach the army with your hidden units and fuck around with the enemy AI using the harpies. When you're ready to pounce on their army with the stalked units you drop all the harpies on their artillery to prevent damage to the stalking units when revealed.
This strategy can easily go wrong and you can argue that it can be done with warhounds but I'd argue harpies flight makes it easier to do for most people. You only do with with a trash stack and you only mix in a few harpies so that you never have to increase their unit cap and you only add the harpies when preparing to fight an enemy with artillery then replace them with raiders after. This strategy can be especially useful during sieges.
Poison warhounds are also a straight improvement to warhounds so whilst I get why you put them in never recruit, if you're using warhounds anyway you do recruit the poison ones you start with access too instead.
That leaves only 1 unit that's truly useless which is why I think beastmen campaigns are so much fun, they provide really good battle variety!
Great tier list overall, I only really disagreed with the harpies being never recruit but even then that's just my preference for a particular strategy that's highly situational so you were probably right to put it where you did with your playstyle and much better micro than me (hence why I think warhounds work better for you).
From my experience Harpies are shot too easily. Even inaccurate arty like Grudge Throwers or Rock Lobbers will take a quarter of a Harpies unit on approach. Cannons simply annihilate them even when micro'ing harpies.
These videos are really really helpful thank you very much.
Man the beastmen overhaul was really the best overhaul any race ever had in this game.
Tier list
Yes, the rework was spectacularly useful. Beasties have sat sulking in a corner for years due to their initial, appallingly bad mechanics. Now I think they're great AND great fun.
Not sure about spending to increase cap on Cygors when you can raise a few in every battle (can get to 3 from memory) easily enough with the right Shaman or of course Malagor.
And then 2 more with an item that you can just buy for a total of 5 per shaman. Looking forward to Legend rating a memestack of 20 shamans each with 5 cygor spawns.
@@lucyferthehellish7794De(e)ar God, that sounds horrifying
Best roster in the game in terms of me actually *wanting* to recruit balanced armies mostly, then having a couple of doomstacks for fun
Will you do the tier list for heroes? I would love to hear your thoughts.