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Odd question as I’ve never played Warhammer

Are the insanely powerful characters like gods etc actually used in game play?

Some of them yes - especially in Age of Sigmar.

Mider2009 wrote:
Odd question as I’ve never played Warhammer

Are the insanely powerful characters like gods etc actually used in game play?

Specify character? Archaon, Teclis, Nagash, Alarielle are such characters and are usable in game. Usability varies from "sucks" to "can be okay to good if built around and avoid bad matchups".

They see some use at the tables I play on.
The exception is the big undead guys - Nagash & whatever the Bone Reaper guy is called. (I don't think anyone in the group even owns these two)

My goal is to kill Archaon, Kairos, & Teclis by either petrifying them with cocktrice gazes or turning them to gold via that one CoS spell. I've almost succeeded several times. One of these days...
I petrified Skarbrand a while back. I then bought the kit & painted him up as a stone statue & use it as terrain.
I'd love to add Archaon, Kairos, & Teclis "statues" to the collection.

Mider2009 wrote:
Odd question as I’ve never played Warhammer

Are the insanely powerful characters like gods etc actually used in game play?

Yes. They are a heap of points, so you need to build your list around them, but they are powerful. Nagash and Katakros are both very powerful in Bonereapers armies, for example.

Yes they do appear in games and they can be very powerful, but this is balanced out by objectives and by the fact that they cost a lot of points.


Place a super powerful character down and secure and objective with them, great, your opponent meanwhile ignores them and whilst 1/4 to 1/3 of your points are in that character on that one objective 100% of your opponents army is engaging the rest of yours contesting and securing the others.

Or you can tangle them up with a meat shield of lots of weak models that might well die and not do much harm, but will tie them up for several turns. That 600 or 700 point model isn't going to do much if its tied up for 2-3 turns against a 300 point unit.


Avoidance, tarpitting, focused fire. There are ways to deal with the powerful models in AoS which ultimately balances them out well.



This is on top of learning their tricks. Eg Gotrek is very powerful at one-on-one monster and hero killing. He's built for it so charging him with bloodthirsters and such is a total mistake. Tangle him up with a mass of clan rats through and he'll cut through them, but he won't get far. Plus his movement is low and his base size small so once he's been tied up for a few turns he can't react and move away from where he was very quickly.

That's just one example of a very powreful close combat character that costs a heap of points.

Hello, it is I, the one who likes using big models on the board. My favorites so far being Katakros, Alarielle and Teclis.

Back when I played Alarielle and Sylvaneth, before I stopped enjoying the army, I played her in most of my lists. At that time, it felt like people didn't know how to handle her to an extent, but this was also when Sylvaneth was still a pretty good army. Eventually as players got better, they figured out how to play against her style.

I've only played Teclis once, and it was alright, I just wish I wasn't playing against Ironjawz, as I've grown tired of the sort of games they force when the army is well built. Won the match, but all I really did with teclis was blast offensive magic everywhere, no real cool tricks or using his full stat block.

I use Katakros frequently in my OBR list, alongside Arkhan the black. The two of them paired up feels really good. Haven't lost with him yet, but my local group was getting closer to figuring out how to handle that sort of army, before covid shut everything down. One day they'll learn that they don't NEED to charge in to my unbreakable wall of bone men

To me, it seems mostly like learning how to play against them, since they alter the typical gameplay of an army a lot. On top of learning what a new or unfamiliar army is capable of, maybe it can seem like it's impossible to play against? But once they're figured out, and you get in to actual statistics and what not, they tend to be not worth it compared to the optimal army builds.

In terms of Gods on the tabletop? You’ve got....

Nagash, Alarielle and Teclis so far. Tyrion seems likely at some point too.

Oh, and Morathi now. A decent chance we’ll also see Malerion (aka Malekith) in the future.

I haven’t seen them used in YouTube so was wondering

Thank you guys

Mider2009 wrote:
Odd question as I’ve never played Warhammer

Are the insanely powerful characters like gods etc actually used in game play?

I don't play competitive, but I do enjoy brining the big named characters for my factions. They're fun and look amazing on the battlefield.

Mider2009 wrote:
Odd question as I’ve never played Warhammer

Are the insanely powerful characters like gods etc actually used in game play?

Depends on the character. Some of the faction leader type models can have a budget version made from their unnamed counterparts with the right gear/traits. And if you have an almost as good model for half the points a lotta the time you'll take it unless you want the bigger named person for fluff reason. Gordrakk comes to mind for Ironjawz.

Mider2009 wrote:
I haven’t seen them used in YouTube so was wondering

Thank you guys

No offence meant but you likely haven't looked that many battle reports then Teclis is seen fairly often as so far lumineth has had basically 3 builds. 70-80 archer spam which is very one dimensional so not interesting to paint and often leads to boring on/off games so not generally good idea for youtube battle reports(you want exciting games for those). Then the big cow list or Teclis included list. Teclis is also excelent in terms of money/points. Expensive model money wise but 660 points...Pikes and archers for example you spend more money to get 660 pts. So unsurprisingly Teclis is seen quite a lot. Nagash is bit trickier to find(especially as searching nagash battle report lists legions of nagash battle reports but all of those don't include nagash...) but seen several on those as well. Archaon is fairly common(indeed I started him seeing BR of him and his sub factions command ability to see who goes first next round). And Alarielle is also reasonably common include in sylvaneth armies.

All are good center piece models so stand out when painted well so unsurprisingly appear often enough in battle reports on youtube. More than strictly would be useful in terms of pure power maybe.

Myself I'm often thinking "less of those special characters please!" when watching battle reports Alas GW makes that rather hard sometimes...

I built my tempest keep dwarves army with gotrek in mind, used properly he's lethal.

He's slow but if you rush him to an objective he'll sit there mincing anything stupid enough to get in combat.

Current record for scoring wounds on him is 3 in a game, that ward save really comes in handy.