Wight King \ Mourngul Haunter comparison

[Super Cosmic Space Magnet]

I find this comparison kind of fascinating. I will be focusing on campaign here, since I'm not experienced enough in Multiplayer to know whether the costing there makes sense. In the campaign the Wight King and Mourngul Haunter are both are the combat heroes of undead factions, though the Mourngul unlocks at a slightly lower tier in the campaign. Their costs are identical, but let's look at the Wight King's stats:

On Large unit sizes the Wight King has 3297 health (33% down from Haunter's 4926).
The Wight King has 34 Melee Attack (32% down from Haunter's 50)
It has 48 Melee Defence (26% up from 38)
The Haunter has a very similar weapon strength to the Wight King, but its armour piercing value is 280 compared to the Wight's 150 - additionally it has +25 vs infantry rather than +14.

On top of this, the Wight King has absolutely no innate buffs or abilities to enhance its efficacy in battle save for those gained by levelling. The Haunter on the other hand begins with The Hunger (especially valuable given its large health pool), Terror, Stalk, an aura that slows all enemies near it, and vanguard deployment. Additionally, while the Wight King gains the Heroic Killing Blow ability the Haunter gains four unique special skills with no minimum level requirement that give it further damage bonuses that actually give more overall damage, as well as other bonuses.

Furthermore, the Haunter has large mass and is all but immune to knockdown, has highly disruptive attacks that let it splash through infantry, and is so weighty that it can all but freely move through allied or enemy units - something that, when combined with its regeneration and slowing aura, make it with even the slightest micro functionally immortal.

To put it plainly, there is no comparison. When embedded as a combat hero there is no setting (save for shenanegans with a basic mount, and that's the best a Wight King can get - no fliers here) in which the Wight King can even perform on par with the Haunter.

I'd be curious to hear people's views on the matter - Vampire Coast's campaign is very much like playing with cheat mods on, and that's alright in its own way, but having units be completely redundant is poor design. If the Wight King could even have some situational use then that would certainly help, though with its awful melee attack it fails to even be capable of capitalising on its Heroic Killing Blow steroid. My question then is: What would players like to see from Wight Kings to make them a more attractive prospect for Vampire Counts? Do you think the numbers need a buff, or perhaps just better mount options?

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by Fosil:

the upkeep penalty works very well to slow down player snowballing. much better than the corruption income reduction for each settlement you had in other TW-games (lets tank income by expanding). claiming that you cannot run several chaff stacks instead of a few high-upkeep stacks is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ too, even if you ignore free upkeep skellies. ungor and goblin hordes are perfectly viable on legendary. massed low-tier state troops, basic marauder, archer-spearman elf and warrior-quarreller stacks etc. are the easy way to play legendary.

In Shogun at least, it was very rare for a settlement to tank your income. Really the only way that happened was if you grew on a large number of provinces for a lot of turns, then took a worthless province.

That wasn't the best system either, but honestly I'd argue it was better. You weren't punished for using weak units, so really anything was viable (assuming they were viable stats wise as there were definitely worthless units in that game). I never felt the need to make my army entirely out of 2-3 units, whereas in Warhammer the only faction I feel is worth making cost effective stacks on is Brettonia.

The big issue to me is that it forces you to build walls everywhere. You can't get away with having a mobile force to defend everything, cause the ai just marches garbage 10 stacks past your army and sacks all your stuff. It means if you have a powerful stack and the ai has a trash stack, they can still force you to build walls, or accept city losses by just running past you. Without additional upkeep z you just split your doomstack in 2 and their 20 stack of zombies is the worthless piece of garbage it belongs as. But instead its obnoxious and completely unfun to play against.

And realistically walls should be worthless once you get doomstacks (because any doomstack will easily win siege battles). Late game with my doomstacks I literally just click the walls and fast forward, and I win decisive victories. If the ai was even that smart, at the very least minor settlements would be undefendable. Its really just abusing how stupid the ai is when it comes to sieging. If the ai had half a brain late game would be impossible (they would just run 20 mid tier stacks past all your armies and backcap everything, and siege garrisons first turn, and there would be nothing you could do since even if you could beat their doomstacks with tier 1 armies you could only afford like 6 of them). But without the additional upkeep, you could have 1-2 doomstacks kill their stuff, and 6-8 mid tier stacks that would actually be able to cover all your territory (rather than 3-4 doomstacks that overkill any army but would be stuck running around cleaning up vs a smarter ai).

I think they could get the same sort of result without killing use of all weak units. Army costs increases with army value. Now 10 mid tier stacks would cost the same as 5 doomstacks we get now. Late game still wouldn't snowball. And we wouldn't get situations where expanding lowers income.

[Super Cosmic Space Magnet]

Originally posted by Angarvin:

there are some nuances like mournguls not being able to fight on walls and providing a bigger target for ranged even when compared to mounted WK, but all in all i agree that there is a power creep going on. i think devs know that and that's why they keep slowly (painfully slowly) updating the old factions.
also i think WK comparison to vamps is very wrong. vamps are much squishier and have no way to regen stamina - they are a burst tool, while WKs are a plug.
i think WK could benefit from smth like a handmaiden passive with physical res for lords/heroes nearby or a general unit aoe buff like +4 melee attack or defence

That's a pretty neat idea, and presumably wouldn't be hard to implement via modding. Would really give that bodyguard vibe that I feel some of the bloodlines would benefit from (looking at you Necrarchs!).

[harleyquinrazer]

I like Wight Kings personally. Easy to get 70+ defence and use them to tie up infantry with low attack and armour piercing. People here don't like training, but combined with the Vlad skill and bloodline bonus and it's a reasonably quick way of getting an army of raise dead up a few ranks.

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by harleyquinrazer:

I like Wight Kings personally. Easy to get 70+ defence and use them to tie up infantry with low attack and armour piercing. People here don't like training, but combined with the Vlad skill and bloodline bonus and it's a reasonably quick way of getting an army of raise dead up a few ranks.

The problem is you don't need training there. I think training is 50 xp at rank 10. So its like a 20 percent increase in xp, not counting the xp you're already getting from battles.

To be perfectly fair, casualty replenishment from vampire heros is weak for a similar reason (vamps already get 20 percent from von carsteins and have a ton of green territory), and banshees kind of just feel like weak heros even if increase mobility is good.

[harleyquinrazer]

It's actually +55 more XP.

I'm not using Wight kings just for the training alone. As I'd said earlier, I like a hero who can stall an infantry stack and get kills doing so.

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by harleyquinrazer:

It's actually +55 more XP.

I'm not using Wight kings just for the training alone. As I'd said earlier, I like a hero who can stall an infantry stack and get kills doing so.

Yeah they do a good job at that because the ai isn't very smart. Even in Isabellas stack they're tankier than vampires, because vampires for some reason think nearby swordsmen are faster and stronger enemies.

[harleyquinrazer]

Originally posted by Cacomistle:

Yeah they do a good job at that because the ai isn't very smart. Even in Isabellas stack they're tankier than vampires, because vampires for some reason think nearby swordsmen are faster and stronger enemies.

Vampire base leadership isn't as good as the Wight King, plus they're geared towards offence rather than defence so the morale penalty from damage inflicted is almost certainly going to be higher in a prolonged fight. Vampires fighting together with Isabelle are somewhat better at surviving, but will still fall to concentrated enemy attack because the base HP is not much higher than a pure caster hero.

[JODEGAFUN]

Originally posted by harleyquinrazer:

It's actually +55 more XP.

I'm not using Wight kings just for the training alone. As I'd said earlier, I like a hero who can stall an infantry stack and get kills doing so.

You do not need a wight king if you have Vlad, really they are useless. Banshess at least buff movement speed and are extrem tanky aigans non magic attack with the right gear. The wight king is useless and fill no role a vampire could not do better.

[harleyquinrazer]

Originally posted by JODEGAFUN:

You do not need a wight king if you have Vlad, really they are useless. Banshess at least buff movement speed and are extrem tanky aigans non magic attack with the right gear. The wight king is useless and fill no role a vampire could not do better.

Lost count of the number of opponents I've faced who have magic weapons.
Don't really need the movement bonus and consistently get plenty of kills with the Wight King (on foot or on a horse) once he's stuck in against the right unit. Having to baby the banshee the instant an enemy army has magic attacks isn't fun, especially with the banshee's low HP pool.

It's a matter of personal preference. I always use Banshees as campaign agents and only invest points in their combat line after I've maxed out everything else to do with the campaign.