Countering Doom Flayers as High Elves

[krodians]

How do you stop those things? Is there anything on the HE roster that is an effective counter?

Playing as Alith Anar, I just lost a full stack of veteran units and a level 15 lord to Tretch, because he had at least 7 or 8 Doomflayers that just cut through all of my spearmen and mowed down all of my archers.

Having lost all of those platinum chevrons, I'm having Alith Anar build another force from scratch. How should my army comp should look like to counter Tretch and his Doomflayers?

[lump0815]

Spearmen and archers.

You rly just have to use them properly; focus missile fire on 1 target at a time instead of letting them pick their own targets. Spearmen have to stand before doomflayers reach them (faces towards the enemy helps i suppose).

[Sutty]

Use high mass units to pin them down like cav or dragons etc

[Angarvin]

kite them with shadow walkers or archer cavalry
kill them with dragons since they don't get staggered
use light wizard's net

[Sn3z]

If you can pin down the doomflayers(you need a better army composition) Eagles on normal will beat doom flayers on very hard I believe they do aswell, I wouldn't see it so much problem because Eagles if recruited early and kept alive gain ranks very fast + you should get the buffs. OFC a odd phoenix wouldn't hurt, dragon would obviously be the best choice but overkill.

The tiers incentivize you to move out of spearman + archer army composition in T2 it becomes redundant, reduce down archers and spearmen for LSG that will free up some slots, LSG make your backline harder to hit, now recruit 3-5 eagles,2-3 lions and 2 missile cavalry these are standard numbers you should use for everything HE army you put out.

[Ashantai]

Light mage with net followed by sisters of avelorn will melt them.

Alternatively, use your own chariots and beasts. They are not good against larger targets for the most part.

[Raymond]

>buy the DLC
>spam Sister of Averlorn
>melt everything so fast they can't be a problem
>profit
you should be able to build at least 3 doomstack of Sister of Averlorn by turn 40 playing as High Elf.

[LORDxLUBU]

In every RTS game, to counter superior Cav, you need Spearmen plus your own version of cavs. ie; Silver helms. In TW:W horseman is a direct counter to chariot units.

[Zane87]

Originally posted by lump0815:

Spearmen and archers.

You rly just have to use them properly; focus missile fire on 1 target at a time instead of letting them pick their own targets. Spearmen have to stand before doomflayers reach them (faces towards the enemy helps i suppose).

Yeah that.... Won't help much frankly.
Doom Flayers in mass are terrible to fight because of their high mass, low hitbox and their attack animations.

Even if you can bog them down, 80% of all arrows fired will miss thanks to the attack animations. And the doomflayers eat your spearmen for breakfast.


OP, you basically have 2 general counters. 1 are Phoenix guards, the other are Cav and monster.
Phoenix guard are tough enough to kill the Flayers 1on1.
Otherwise you can use the combination of a cav unit to catch one Flayer and then a flying charging monster to quickly get rid of one.

Missiles will only help you while the Flayers are not engaging you in melee already.

[eRe4s3r]

Unmodded the optimal elf counter to literally everything is 8+ sisters of avelorn, 2 bolt-throwers 1 spellcaster /depends on your army leader\, 6+ bog standard spearmen or if you have em phoenix guard.

Alith Anar as LL makes this a true doomstack because of his archer boosts. Other lords only if you pick right skills, imo if you aren't boosting archers (aka, sisters) to absurd levels you are playing that faction wrong... but that's just me ;P

Classic mistake is thinking Lothern Seaguard are good archers or good spearmen. They are neither. And one last thing, the unit scale you play one makes a huge difference here, if it's not Huge or Ultra then you might encounter some unit scale related mass charge absorb issues.

Essentially, the lower your unit scale, the stronger high mass monsters become.

[krodians]

Thanks everyone. Seems like my generic spearcher comp just won't cut it against Tretch. I'm gonna have to upgrade some buildings and get some beasts.

[Shirome Artiste]

To be fair, against flayers you generally can do just fine with light mage + all the seaguards/a bunch of sisters and some spear chaff. Simply netting them one by one while using your spearmen as disposable roadblocks allows you to pick them off at your leisure. Without net however they're too small a hitbox to reliably hit with arrows while they're moving.

Another option is to basically cheese PG spam with life mage and some artillery + archers(Again, swap archers for sisters if you have the gold for it). Without massed artillery there's not much AI skaven will be able to do to you if you just sit in a corner, snipe their artillery with your eagleclaws and sit behind a PG wall.

Final option is just tarpitting them for a bit with your spearmen, then immediately countercharging with silver helms/dragon princes/monsters/nobles. The AI isn't really that good at disengaging once caught and high-end cav and monsters(Or highlevel nobles on horseback) will dumpster them quickly enough.

[Inardesco]

Originally posted by SunGodxApollo:

In every RTS game, to counter superior Cav, you need Spearmen plus your own version of cavs. ie; Silver helms. In TW:W horseman is a direct counter to chariot units.

Silver Helms are useless. Only Dragon Princes are worthwile

[Palumtra]

Sisters of Avelorn are your go to as High Elves, everything else is there to support/protect them. Dragons/Phoenixes are a surplus. (They are powerful but not a must have, also certain high elven Lords can get Dragon mounts) They literally melt everything, have absurd range and bypass most damage reductions.
Spearmen early on, and Phoenix Guards later (they have charge defence vs all, among other things) to protect against cavalry and infantry, a Light Mage to pin down high value targets, and the Sisiters of Avelorn will take care of the rest.

[play midnight suns]

A stack of 7 or 8 doom flayers!? That's some Surtha Ek levels of garbage right there.

You have to be careful with the AI, if they happen to have a building anywhere which allows for a high tier unit, you're getting entire stacks of those units coming at you. :/

[SeriousCCIE]

It also helps to remember that it boils down to rock, paper, scissors, with some unique elements befitting the warhammer universe and the wildcards known as magic and special use abilities.

Generally speaking, if it charges, you can stab it. If it beats on you up close, you can shoot it. If it can shoot you (and it's on the ground) you can charge into them provided you survive the trip.

If it charges and you are in a forest, it will theoretically be inconvenienced by all of the trees and not be so good at charging. If it shoots and is in a forest, it will be harder to hit them back from afar than it will be for them to hit you until you're in melee range.

If they are casting spells at you and the spells are reaching you, someone got too close and needs to be distracted, perhaps by someone that flies, charges, or shoots before they get close enough next time to do whatever they did. If they have high leadership, try to break them/get them worried so that the nearby armies may falter. May your enemies be sown with confusion as you pelt them with your arrows!

And never forget the utility of siege defense layouts; read the army approaching, and man the towers; put some units to defend the victory areas and don't have them chasing some meat shield off the side of the map letting the cavalary trot in and do a victory prance where no one was left guarding the place.

It can be hopeless in some cases, but it's still good to manually defend an overwhelming siege--if you can send reinforcements late (perhaps to act as the primary army at that point due to there being nothign to reinforce anymore... happens to the best of us and me too), then... at least you softened things up a bit better than the auto-resolve would usually do.

Last night I had a traumatic experience with vampires, skaven and a waaagh! going on as I defended as the lizard men. I was able to beat off the 20 unit legendary lord led vampire army and a 16 unit regular lord skaven army, only to have the orcs wipe up what was left of my primary army soon there after. I tried to retreat but they just walked back over.

When it takes 90 minutes of combat just to get defeated like that, it is disheartening, but ultimately it paved the way for another lord of mine to waltz in and re-affirm control over an area that had been mostly emptied of enemies due to having already weakened them allow form easier clean up. I still had to do disaster response and public order control, money was a mess, and everything bad that could happen seemed to play out that way, but in the end I was able to tenuously retain control of that area--but it did require much effort and strategizing based on what was left. Skirmishers do not really weaken advancing brutes/orcs too much..