Which Faction Has The Best MELEE Campaign? | Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires

[@Dome_is_life]

Ghorst is good with zombies. The zombies have ravenous dead top it with poison weapons and %500 regeneration. Chefs kiss. I just love my horde tactics.

[@frankdrebin7086]

While I understand your reasoning behind these restrictions, I still prefer Undivided Chaos Warriors. I just tend to theme my armies as I go. Archaon with a full Aspiring Champion doomstack doesn't get old.

[@Вейн-э5б]

>wood elves are out Drycha: Am I a joke to you? Her walking trees and forest beasts armies are super fun to play. She makes them insanely strong.

[@SGProductions87]

Despite the availability of strong missile units/artillery in their roster, I think Dwarfs have the best melee campaign if you focus on it, particularly Ancestral Throng (20% weapon strength vs Elves, +10 MD MA +35% speed in Grombrindal's army, +10 defence when defending) and Karak Kadrin (10% more speed). I think Dwarfs are generally overlooked for this purpose but they have generally high armour and rune magic provides excellent buffs for melee, particularly the Rune of Speed, especially when overcast and combined with the regular cast. Access to the forge provides superb buffs in melee and their lords and heroes when fully equipped are very difficult to best in melee. There's this perception that Dwarfs are slow and that is mostly true but it's possible to make them faster than Skaven and there's various tactics you can use to mitigate low proximity and low speed anyway. Give Dwarf melee focus a try. I've actually got a pre-5.0 video on my channel that goes into Ancestral Throng for this purpose that remains true if you want to give it a shot. It's also a good candidate to test the theory because you have to constantly deal with Darkshards and Shades at the start. You will be surprised to find that you will perform better without any missile units against them.

[@Monochromatic_Spider]

Dwarfs are okay'ish, but the problem with them is the lack of reasonable damage output. You can't really rely on dwarf melee to murder large amounts of enemies in a reasonable amount of time. You can AR the annoying stuff away, obviously, but that's not quite the same as killing things in melee.

[@DespiteUniform]

Try Ungrim and his slayer armies, your melee soldiers move faster than most infantry and deal lots of damage, they all will hold the line to the end. Slayer pirates have moving fire and short range, use melee mode and chase enemy range units, you will take less casualty then you think.

[@Nobdythere]

Dwarves are not melee. You're handicapping yourself if you don't use the war machines.

[@SGProductions87]

@@Nobdythere Try it.

[@SGProductions87]

@@Monochromatic_Spider You can get a lot of damage done using Master Rune of Spite, Rune of Wrath and Ruin and faster using Rune of Speed. Also by ambushing often battles can be over very quickly and any range disadvantage is mitigated. The tough part is siege attacks, which you can get around by baiting any defending army out and fighting them in the field, then the garrison should be more manageable.

[@benyed1636]

I feel like you can't discount Grimgor for having good non infantry units and then praise the Warriors of Chaos, who have some of the best cavalry is the game. The most egregious part is when you pretty much give the answer, Khorne, with a good explanation and then say "but but but, what about Khorne with magic?" The Valkia guide is great but the first half of the video is incredibly biased and it's obvious that you had your conclusion before you even starting thinking about any other options.

[@bussa15]

I think Gor-Rok is my #1 melee campaign

[@Monochromatic_Spider]

Gor-Rok? Mr Pizza Delivery Guard? I mean, you can do the lizards full melee but it wouldn't be my first choice. Just too much fun using salamanders and camo skinks and stegs and trogs and blowing stuff up with spells. 🙂

[@Ed_d_19]

​@@Monochromatic_Spiderlmao pizza delivery guard?

[@Monochromatic_Spider]

@@Ed_d_19 He starts with Kroak. Kroak's thing is the Deliverance of Itza series of spells. Because of how ridiculous those spells are against infantry, the typical early game of a Gor-Rok campaign is often just keeping Kroak safe so he can do his delivery of 'izza. 🙂

[@shooey-mcmoss]

Pelinal Whitescale

[@FighterPhish]

I played a Taurox campaign recently that was actually a ton of fun. I think their only ranged is ungor archers and cygors?

[@frankdrebin7086]

Taurox is a joy. Going full Minotaur never gets old, plus you can turn Taurox into a one-man doomstack with the Sword of Khaine.

[@GamingForImmersion]

I gave Taurox a long thought, but decided his campaign feels more like a monstrous than a melee. He's in the running for Best Monster campaign.

[@FighterPhish]

@@GamingForImmersion I can totally see why you'd make that distinction. WoC are for sure a better choice if we're talking just infantry sized melee units.

[@gregbowen2477]

They've also got ranged centigors.

[@shawnjohnson4732]

Taurox is in the running. Magic is not what I go to beastmen for. Starting the Bovine Boys on top of the enemy is a very good day.

[@GamingForImmersion]

Love Taurox. I mentioned in another comment, I think of his campaign with all those minotaurs to be more of a monstrous campaign than a melee campaign, so following my (arbitrary) rules I had to rule him out.

[@vladromila5091]

In my view, best melee is a long grind where your line of melee feels like a bulwark where tides of enemies break against it. With that in mind I feel best melee is either Nurgle or Vampire Counts. It's so enjoyable to just grind it out with Chosen and Chaos Warriors and just heal them out while the enemy is more and more desperate as the fight goes on. :)

[@Nobdythere]

Vampires are more of a magic army than a melee army. They're very reliant on the Lord's magic.

[@Nobdythere]

Skarbrand is the only acceptable answer for this question. Edit. After finishing the video i approve of the final answer.

[@Monochromatic_Spider]

If your answer to "best melee" is anything other than "SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!!! MILK FOR THE KHORNE FLAKES!!!!", with sufficient volume to justify the all caps and exclamation points, then I would humbly suggest that you're probably an uncultured heretic. Or possibly a Slaanesh worshipper. Joking aside, the best melee campaign is actually kind of hard, assuming we mean "mostly melee infantry", particularly if we also take points away if the faction has "other options". And we dock points for single entities and, I assume, monstrous infantry. I do think we have to allow for melee cavalry but this opens the door for whether cycle charge micro is really the same as "melee" and whether chariots are the same as cavalry. Anyway, I'd be inclined to say WoC, Norsca, Greenies, and then some monogod chaos factions and Beastmen. Warriors of Chaos is just where it's at in the intersection between punching stuff in the face and having a good campaign. They've got all the flavors of face-punchers that one could wish for, they've got plenty of support options, and if what you want is a horde of grunts then they surely deliver. Even more so in a Valkia campaign with her waves of mostly dual wielding infantry and really angry monstrous cav. Norsca is often overlooked but they're almost exclusively melee. Marauders that want to punch enemies in the face, mammoths that want to chest bump, doggo-people looking for a treat, trolls that want to impress with their lack of hygiene and disrespect of personal space, and even the odd chaos dragon that wants someone to scratch it behind the necks. They're a "full speed ahead" kind of faction that win if they can close ground and engage, and lose if they cannot. Greenskin are, canonically, all about boyz running at you in unfathomable numbers while screaming "WAAAAAAAAAAGH!". Some of them might ride on boars. A few might have bows, even. But mostly they want to charge and engage and get into choppa range. That's the canon. In the campaign it pays to play them slightly differently, and they do benefit a lot from various monsters (be it trolls or giants or arachnaroks) and heroes and magic. And squigs. But fundamentally Greenies are a textbook melee faction. Just don't rely exclusively on waves and waves and waves of boyz and big 'unz and blorcs without any support. They're slow, they're vulnerable, and they will blob at the worst possible time and get AOE nuked. The monogod chaos factions, then. Khorne is obviously pretty good at melee but the problem is how Skarbrand's campaign mechanics work. It so easily devolves into a Skarbrand single character campaign with some throw-away AR fodder armies, and it feels like the whole point is to overrun everyone with Skarbrand before they can build up anything. It's a form of melee but it feels a bit limited. Slaanesh, then. Very melee but also very frail. It's not really about "melee", it's about setting up engagements to be over as fast as possible while needling the enemy endlessly with fast movers. Nurgle, then. Very melee, for sure, but it feels to me like the damage is usually done by something other than the melee grunts. And finally Beastmen. So much that fights in melee range. But they're not really a "forward and charge" faction unless you hero spam or monster mash. The gors themselves are kind of mediocre and the lower ranks are really just skavenslaves without a tail. Centigors are fun to play with but then we're sort of getting into cavalry faction territory. Beastmen are a melee faction and their campaigns are pretty good, but "melee" done Beastmen style is more of a tavern brawl than kung fu. Honorable mentions... Ogres, my lord. Very melee, for sure. But it is hard to have a good melee campaign if you're not having a good campaign to begin with. Fix that and they'd shoot right up this list. Lizardmen. Saurus spam is viable. Skink spam is viable. Until it isn't. It's pretty hard, IMO, to not eventually end up with a lot of bigger dinos and magic support and hero support instead of relying on mass infantry. Vampire Counts. The most melee faction in the game, originally. Literally didn't have anything with a ranged attack at release. But the thing that docks points here is, how do you play VCount? With never-ending hordes of zombies and skellies? Or using blobs of those things as tarpits while dealing the real damage with vampire heroes, with mortis engines, with black coaches, with crypt horrors, varghulfs, and so on? And of course magic. Ghorst could do a fine melee campaign a few patches back but his zombies have been nerfed a lot and the AI has picked up on how to cast spells in the middle of that blob. Dwarfs. Specifically slayers with Ungrim. I mean, you can. You probably shouldn't, though. Well, maybe you should with Ungrim's army but my goodness, let the rest do their own thing. And let that thing involve gyrocopters. Lots and lots of gyrocopters. And organ guns. Or at least a thunderbarge.