Steland's Horde compendium

A comprehensive and updated guide for new and experienced players on Mordhau's Horde mode, to share experience and tips, understand it and master it.

Greetings reader, i’m Chaplain Steland, Chap for friends.
I have been playing this game since its launch years ago and fell in love with its horde mode, the only gamemode that i play to this day.
I’ve seen all its versions, participated in a great event with players from all around the world and cofounded the amasing Horde community that is to this day Castle Vari, all things for which i'm deeply happy and grateful.

Given that not too long ago the developers released the first successful overhaul of this gamemode, i thought of sharing what I know from hours of playtime and tests in a guide for all the players who might be new to it or might want to just dive deeper looking for info and strategies.
Without further ado, let’s start.

• At the time of writing this guide, the gamemode’s main objective recently went from defeat 21 waves of enemies to protect a “Noble” npc from said waves of enemies, so a player should NOT fight near the Noble.
  Not much changed from the previous version, you just have a Noble to protect on the side, but still, always keep the chaos of battle away from him, make sure you are in the way of the dung covered enemies trying to end everyone’s fun and keep this in mind before anything else.
  I’m sure you knew this already, but I see this often overlooked and made it the first point up here.
  
  
• Have fun; the entire point of playing Horde afterall, i wish you a great time.
  
  
• Ogres, a huge boss enemy taller than the rest and armed with a big club, are the Noble’s enemy number 1, and they should be top priority when spotted.
  If you must choose between letting any amount of other enemy bots to the Noble and letting even a single ogre to him, go for the former because these giants do 10 damage with every strike to the Noble.
  No other threat will even come close to how much damage even one of them can do, not a group of 10 knights, not 2 great maul bosses, not even Seymour, so slay the giants first.
  
  For example, in Camp, fight in front of the Noble’s camp, not in it, and as seen here keep the ogres outside at all costs; see, that’s a great player there in the distance, keep that ogre away from the ramp.
  
  
• As it is now and very differently from how it used to be in the past, the basic way of fighting an ogre boss is by staying a split second in front of him to bait a strike and then quickly move behind him as seen in the image below. They will destroy in 1 hit any unlucky player caught in a 180° arc in front of them, so you are safe and able to do damage if you stay outside of that AoE killzone.
  Also note that you will be damaged even if you hug them while being behind them, so keep at least some distance while striking.
  Good luck out there and develop your own heroic style of fighting them starting from this solid base!
  
  
• Armor never affected your movement speed in Horde and still doesn’t, also players are able to perform dodges with the spacebar while moving backwards or to the sides, but I would advise against using this feature since I always thought of it as a cheap alternative to the great dodges you can learn by controlling your in-game character, also known as the art of matrixing.
  You don’t get this feature in Pvp by default so on top of all that even I, a Horde only player, don’t feel comfortable recommending making this move an habit for your own sake.
  
  
• Just in case it’s not like this by default, you can press “H” to show the teammates nicknames from great distance, and even through obstacles; useful to know which sides of the battlefield are guarded and which ones aren’t.
  May the cursed example image of mine here on the right haunt you in your dreams.
  
  
• Archers can be a threat if you find yourself unarmored in front of 8 of them, but just like the old gamemode, the best defense against enemy archer spam is still diving in melee and slaying them all.
  The incoming damage simply wont match how much you will heal, provided of course that you keep getting kills consistently in the confrontation.
  8 archers behind a group of peasants or even medium armor bots = Stay in melee and leave the archers for last, gotta love that built-in vampirism.
  
  
• You will be outnumbered in this gamemode most of the times, keep in mind the rules of 2v1, such as footwork (Give yourself extra seconds, move away from the enemy that is swinging at you from the left to dodge his attack and strike the one in front of you on the right) and target switching (Parry the attack of the enemy in front of you on the left and riposte the enemy that would have hit you seconds from now from the right).
  
  
• If ogres are public enemy number 1 for the Noble, Yellow knights are your own nemesis.
  They have all the tools to kill isolated players, such as the best armor, high damaging weapons, speed, the surprise factor and the numbers, since they always come in groups of 4.
  Seeing them coming and having a plan is usually the best defense against them, but be prepared for a good fight.
  
  
• The recent Horde overhaul added a skill tree with plenty of perks that modify gameplay to which you can assign from 1 to 5 skill points, increasing that perk's power.
  There are stronger and weaker perks, and there are borderline broken combinations of course, and here is where it gets malicious, lets get into it.

This section will focus on the ultimates of each skill tree, which do indeed succeed in being game changers.
I wont spoil the broken builds that a player can come up with and i wont spend time talking about every single perk in the skill trees since most of them are good, but there are just a few exceptions which will be discussed in the feedback section.
Back to topic, ultimates; perks that in my experience are crucial in 90% of the builds you will play and experiment with.
Putting 5 points in one will never and should never feel like a waste because they will pay you back, lets see how.

The following tests were run with full points in the ultimate.

• Immortality

  - 1 minute cooldown
  - A solid ultimate overall, meant for getting you out of fatal situations alive, such as yellow knights surrounds or multiple bosses that needs to be stopped.
  A great addition to any melee build, expecially for new players given its average cooldown and how much survivability can give to a player when he can become "too angry to die".
  Note that it will not save you from fall damage so you still need to care about gravity.
  
  Excellent for dealing with multiple bosses in a troublesome spot by yourself.
  
  

• Vanish

  - 30 seconds cooldown
  - At first glance it looks weak, but it quickly became my favourite ultimate.
  Upon activation all enemies, bosses included, will ignore you, but this will only happen 2 seconds or so after you activate it, so take that into account.
  It can be used for combat (Combining it with backstab and other damage boosting skills will turn you into a boss killer), but my favourite use of this skill is using it to revive fallen players, thanks to its effect and its short cooldown; given this and the horrible opinion i have of Divine favor, Vanish is easily the one true medic ultimate in my mind.
  
  Time to get this player back in the fight.
  
  

• Shockwave

  - 1 minute and 15 seconds cooldown
  - Average ultimate, great for every melee build; it's good because it's fun and straightforward, but its extremely long cooldown brings it down.
  
  Good riddance.
  
  

• Taunt

  - 30 seconds cooldown
  - Short cooldown and the match saving power to lure all enemies and bosses away from the Noble, its best possible use in my experience, or from a surrounded player; easily one of the best and effective in nearly every build, often used in combination with Recoil.
  Its power makes you wonder why this has a 30 seconds cooldown while for a weaker one like Shockwave you need to wait more than double that amount of time, but more on this in the feedback section.
  
  Saving it for these situations can make the difference.
  
  

• Divine favor

  - 1 minute and 10 seconds cooldown
  - Well we had to come to this one eventually, the worst ultimate in the game.
  A longer than average cooldown on an ultimate that heals everyone to full health upon activation.
  Issue is that this is supposed to be used in a frenetic gamemode where you need continuous healing over a big wave of it that happens once every solar eclipse.
  The long cooldown only adds insult to injury, wouldn't force my worst enemy to play a match with this ultimate, more on this in the feedback section.
  
  Ok, yes, you are about to heal everyone, but that wont save them from what wounded them that much in 3 seconds from now.
  
  

• Volley

  - 30 seconds cooldown
  - Great ultimate, fits with every build because every build, and your fun most of all, will benefit from calling fire support in a location, even after its nerf from 100% damage to 50% it still ensures high damage on the unlucky enemies caught in the circle.
  Its short cooldown makes it even better and brings it up amongst the best.
  
  A viable strategy is to be yourself the bait in the circle since, bosses aside, whatever will be in there with you wont survive long.
  
  

• Advanced reload

  - The only ultimate to which you can assign only 1 skill point and be happy with it; it's still weird to me how game changing being able to move while reloading a crossbow feels, even at 10% speed.
  A solid choice overall, 1 point can be enough, 5 is even better.
  
  

• Fire arrows

  - One of the best, it should be prioritised over Keen sight and Yeoman due to how much more damage it can add to your arrows; to use the words of a friend of mine, Flandrien, it truly turns you into a Total War siege defence tower, nothing survives for long.
  
  Skill points used efficiently.

Moving on, this wouldn't be a proper Horde guide without updated maps of all the items locations, on most maps things are not hard to find, true, but still i was glad to put in the extra work to make these if they can help, for that extra utility.

• Camp

  
  
  

• Castello

  
  
  

• Crossroads

  
  
  

• Feitoria

  
  
  

• Grad

  
  
  

• Mountain peak

  
  
  

• Noria

  
  
  

• Taiga

  
  
  

• The pit

  
  
  

• Arid

  
  
  

• Dungeon

  
  
  

• Totenwald

  

The following section will be aimed to provide constructive feedback (For the developing team hopefully) on some aspects of the gamemode that need to be worked upon; ideas from the players around me and from myself.
Of course an effort is always made to keep in mind that this overhaul turned Horde into something more casual and accessible, but at the same time more deep and more open to future content.

• Shockwave vs the Taunt tiranny

  Going back to the skill trees, the previously mentioned issue with Shockwave's extremely long cooldown for an average ultimate that will kill 5 enemies at best vs Taunt's extremely short cooldown for its tremendous power; the huge difference in value makes you feel like Shockwave's cooldown should definetly be reduced while Taunt's one should be increased.
  A compromise at 45 seconds for both maybe?
  Possible.
  
  

• The Divine favor issue

  An instantaneous healing ultimate with an extremely long cooldown, not rly suited for a gamemode where few players fight an overwhelming horde of enemies.
  A much better ultimate i can think of for an healing skill tree would have been a version of it with 5 healing charges that you would get back with time, and you could spend one to fully heal the ally you were looking at.
  It would be a more flexible skill that can be used more often, it's effects would be more noticeable and it would introduce a new mechanic to the game for future content, skills with charges.
  
  

• Leech, Guardian, Discipline, Padding, Fletcher

  The skill trees have overall good perks, which is why it's quicker to talk about the perks that are subpar or problematic.
  The first 4 skills share the same problem, extremely low percentages and obscure niche bonuses; Leech giving you a 5% vampirism based on the damage you inflict, which is abysmal compared to the heal on kills players get by default, and the other 3 that give you very small damage resistances.
  Moving from subpar to a skill that encourages bad behaviours, Fletcher; a perk that gives you a chance of recoverying the arrows you loose on the enemies, with a 100% chance at max level.
  Useless because archers are never far away from their ammo shops in this new gamemode and on top of that this kind of perk encourages camping, a bad practice that should remain in the past.
  The common theme here is that these skill are a waste of slots and skill points and every player i've seen giving them a chance remained disappointed, no doubt they need to be reworked or replaced.
  
  

• A vanishing deception

  A fancy title for a trivial mistake; as it is at the time of writing, the description of the Vanish ultimate states that "bosses are immune" while in reality it's not true.
  They will be affected like every other enemy upon activation.
  
  

• About this new direction

  Something many players have noticed, including myself, is how easy a match can get when a group of experienced players find themselves together in a lobby.
  It gets to the point where only 4 players, or even half of the lobby, is truly needed to win the match which i believe is a consequence of the casual direction this gamemode took and of how powerful players can get with the right skills, which is all great in my opinion, but it would be even greater if the mode could be made harder, a sort of callback to how the old Horde was and a compromise between the two.
  
  

• Unused areas

  Another common complaint is that on some maps such as Mountain Peak, Noria, Castello or Feitoria 80% of the map will never be seen given where the Noble and the enemy spawns have been placed.
  It might be something worth to consider for the future to move the spawns.
  In the case of Feitoria for example, the Noble could be moved to the inner castle and the enemy spawns could be moved to the docks; the fighting would then happen throught the beautiful town instead of only near and outside the gates.
  
  Many of these beautiful locations are not seen anymore.
  
  

• Dungeon of horror

  Out of all the maps Dungeon is close to unplayable in horde mode due to the size of the map and the fact that enemies come from all directions, which would normally be manageable, but also rain literally on top of the noble in the middle.
  As of now this map spells doom for a lobby and it would be better to probably move the noble to a different location in the map.

And now it ends.
I'm open for feedback and comments and of course there will be some things i overlooked about this new rewamped Horde, i still have endless hours of playtime ahead of me and it doesn't look like i will get tired of this anytime soon.

Thank you for your attention, i truly hope this was both helpful and interesting.
That said, do have a nice day and have a good one.

[Lukito]

Grazie, maestro, per questa stupenda guida

[Chaplain Steland]

Now updated with the item map for Totenwald, have a good one.

[Chaplain Steland]

@SUSTAINANCE I did not realise that perk's interaction, thank you very much; i still believe it could be replaced with something else given how niche it is and yes it's definetly better to get other more viable perks in my experience.

[gr3mlin]

padding is pretty good but only with other defence skills, it's flat damage reduction works after percentage, so for example 1 damage becomes 0, and mauler can't deal chip damage to you anymore, though maybe it's better to get more damaging perks

[Chaplain Steland]

@Swadian Knight I believe you are mentioning the last part of the ultimates chapter intro, but regarding non-ultimate skills, yes, definetly worth stopping at 2 points, expecially for skills like Berserk, as you mentioned, or Marathon, Overpower, Toughness, Bodkin tip and Scattershot.

[Swadian Knight]

Also, some skill should be spent for 2 skill points rather than just 1 skill point or the whole 5 skill points there for bonus effect (Like adding blunt damage for shield penetration, berserk for increase damage when loss health,...) so that you can spare skill points for other skills of your "meta" and still have a decent bonus effect (Not as good as maximum it out, but the effect is as double as having 1 point in there)

[Swadian Knight]

Sadly, most of the time i play horde with my ping up to 300, dodge is now a part of my life

[Chaplain Steland]

Now updated with item maps for The pit, Arid and Dungeon.

[Varinathras]

Amaazing!

[Ninokaah]

I love horde. I love this guide. I love Steland