In our competitive faction focus articles wel talk about each faction, what they have to offer, how they play, and talk about a few list concepts to consider. In this article, we’re covering the World Eaters.

The World Eaters are a faction who started 10th edition off in a rough place, and have been up and down since. They’re a heavily melee-focused army with some interesting tools and army-wide buffs in the form of Blessings of Khorne, which improves their movment and damage output. They’re currently in a pretty good place, following some marginal point drops in the June 2024 balance update.

Changelog

• Update (Latest): 2024-08-16 for the June Balance Update
• Update: 2024-05-06 for the Q2 Points Update
• Update: 2024-04-10 for the Q1 Dataslate and MFM
• Update: 2023-12-13 for the Q3 Balance Dataslate, New Lists
• Published: 2023-08-17

Why Should You Play This Faction?

You’re a straightforward person with simple tastes. And those tastes are basically limited to “killing things in melee,” edition be damned. As 10th edition has become more and more melee-focused, with denser terrain layouts in the Leviathan and Pariah Nexus Tournament Companions, World Eaters have become more viable. This has led to a delicate balancing act where they’ve seesawed up and down with points costs, alternating between too good and not good enough, but they’re currently in a solid space. They’re not nearly the threat they were back in December, but they’re capable of putting up regular top 4 appearances at GTs, including some wins. They’re a fun army to play and it’s always satisfying to just plow into opponents and crush them early.

Army Rule: Blessings of Khorne

If your army faction is World Eaters, then at the start of the battle round you can make a Blessings of Khorne roll. When you do this, roll 8D6. Then you can use these dice – picking out and removing results as you do – to activate up to two Blessings of Khorne – these are chosen from a list, and you can only activate each one once per battle round (though there are ways to get more than two active). Once you activate a blessing, it’s active for your entire army until the end of the battle round. Unused dice are discarded.

Here are your blessing options:

• Rage-Fuelled Invigoration (any double) – Add 2″ to the move characteristic of models in this unit. This one is very solid and useful for setting up turn 1 charges. You are guaranteed to get this every time you roll.
• Wrathful Devotion (any double) – Models in this unit get Feel No Pain 6+. If they already had Feel No Pain, they get +1 to their rolls. This is another great one to have in your back pocket, and you’re guaranteed to get this as well – and most of the time you’ll score a pair of doubles to work with. This is great for your Exalted Eightbound, who become much more durable when they have a 5+ Feel No Pain to work with.
• Martial Excellence (Double 3+) – Melee weapons equipped by models in this unit have the [SUSTAINED HITS 1] ability. This is solid on larger units of Berzerkers and Eightbound where you need to get some extra push off a high volume of attacks, and adding an extra 10-15 hits can really make a difference.
• Total Carnage (Double 4+ or any Triple) – Each time a model in this unit is destroyed by a melee attack, if that model has not fought this phase, roll a D6; on a 4+ they can fight on death before being removed. This is the most situational of the bunch, as it requires some real planning ahead to make this work and also being in a situation where you expect to die in melee. This has its uses but you’re not going to be looking for it very often.
• Warp Blades (Double 5+ or any Triple) – Melee weapons equipped by models in this unit have the [LETHAL HITS] ability. This is harder to get than Martial Excellence but much more useful when you need to punch up against a durable target. While your units can do a ton of damage in melee, they don’t have a ton of Strength, and so being able to bypass the wound roll with Eightbound and Berzerkers is huge.
• Unbridled Bloodlust (Double 6 or Triple 4+) – This unit can declare a charge in a turn in which it Advanced. This is huge, and you’ll typically want this on rounds 1 and/or 2, depending on how the game is going. Making this happen with icons is a big deal, and combining this with Rage-Fuelled Invigoration is the key to making long charges across empty stretches of no man’s land and staging your army for a series of charges through cover.
• Reborn in Blood (Triple 6) – If Angron is dead, you can put him back into reserves with his full wounds remaining. This one is on his Datasheet and not in the army rules, but it’s worth mentioning here. If you’re bringing Angron – and you are – you’ll want to get this up ASAP after he’s killed.

This is a powerful set of rules, and in most games you’ll start early with +2″ Movement and Advance-and-Charge enabled for long bombs, then switch to Wrathful Devotion and Martial Excellence/Warp Blades later on, when you aren’t fishing for Reborn in Blood. Knowing when to use each is pretty key, and if you aren’t planning a bunch of turn 1 charges, then your safest bet is often going to be +2″ Movement and 6+ Feel No Pain for extra protection as you get into position for turn 2 charges.

These rolls can be modified, with icons giving you a re-roll on a single die for each unit you have within range of an objective marker and the Lord of Skulls will let you add or subtract 1 from one die for each enemy unit it destroyed in the prior round. You can also get an additional roll to activate one more blessing with the For the Blood God! Stratagem in the Berzerker Warband Detachment.

Five Things You Need to Know

• You need Angron on the table… but you can’t count on him coming back. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A Chaos faction is dependent on its primarch. Angron is a genuine melee monster and the ability to bring him back during a game makes him a more durable threat that opponents have to continually plan for, while his aura abilities are all very solid ways to boost your army’s effectiveness. He’s a giant threat who moves quickly, hits hard, and just coming back to the table once can shift the game quickly. That said, the changes to the Favoured of Khorne Enhancement greatly reduces your chances of getting him back later in the game, so you need to be a bit more cagey with him and plan around him not coming back. That said, you can count on him coming back if you bring a Lord of Skulls – and those are now much more playable.
• Know when you want to go first, and have a plan for both outcomes. The World Eaters’ biggest advantage is their ability to surge across the board and smash into enemy units with early charges. Knowing when and how to charge – and which targets to attack when you do – is going to be key to taking advantage of going first. And when you’re not going first, you need to make sure you aren’t being shot off the table or depleted before you have a chance to make those charges. Going first isn’t as vital as it was before the changes to Towering and Overwatch, but it’s still usually when you’ll live your best life.
• You need to pick your battles. As with 9th edition, while the main focus of World Eaters is chopping things up in melee, when and how you do that is a fine skill to hone – your units aren’t as deadly or as durable as they used to be and you have fewer of them, so you need to know which targets you can take and which ones you need to stay away from. 
• Build a plan around Blessings of Khorne. Although random, the Blessings of Khorne rule gives you a few relatively certain outcomes to choose from, and the abilities you’ll want early will be different from the ones you want later in games. Early on look for Unbridled Bloodlust to pop off long charges and Rage-Fueled Invigoration for the extra Movement boost. Later in the game Martial Excellence and Total Carnage.
• Learn to Use Terrain. Using terrain to stage your waves of brutality is key to finding success with the faction and with the drops to Eightbound and Exalted Eightbound point costs means you can utilize those units to hit first and then follow up with a second wave of Khorne Berzerkers and friends who rush out Rhinos. You also want to use terrain to stage your charges, setting up behind walls to avoid Overwatch when you declare your charge.

Recent Updates

It’s been an up-and-down seesaw for the World Eaters, bouncing from upper tier to lower tier as they’ve received alternating buffs and nerfs. Point drops in the Q3 dataslate in 2023 were replaced by a series of hikes in the Q1 dataslate along with changes making the Berzerker Glaive and Favoured of Khorne Enhancements less powerful and a nerf to the Daemon Prince’s invulnerable save aura which dropped the faction’s standing considerably and made competitive lists pretty one-note.

Recent point drops to Berzerkers, Jakhals, and Eightbound have helped the faction a bit, making it possible to pack more infantry into the army. That’s good, because the Pariah Nexus Missions pack puts a heavier emphasis on doing actions. This means that Jakhals and Chaos Spawn have even more of a role to play, and your lone Lord on Juggernaut can still serve a role beyond “dying on an objective to make it sticky.” But playing World Eaters is tricky – you don’t really have the units to devote to doing actions, and you’re often going to blow past objectives early to smash into an opponent. This can mean often going down in points early and catching up late, and that can lead to some harrowing games. World Eaters are a simple army tactically but not an easy army to play – you’re going to be punished for your mistakes.

The other big change in the June 2024 update was to the Heroic Intervention core stratagem – this now costs only 1 CP. That’s a double-edged sword for World Eaters. On the one hand it’s great for responding ton an opponent’s charge with one of your own, getting the extra attack and strength on your melee attacks and punishing them for trying to single out a unit. On the other hand, they can use it against you just as easily, using an Intervention charge to block off a bigger charge from your forces and stop you from taking out a key target.

What Are the Must-Have Units to Start This Faction?

Last time we wrote this, we made a comment that “no one had really solved the faction.” This time around, that appears to no longer be the case, and most top competitive players have coalesced down to a single list, which clocks in at 1,975 points. Let’s talk about what goes into the top lists.

You need Angron. The big guy just gives you incredible value for his cost, even at 415 points. Great movement, solid durability, good damage output, and good force multiplier abilities all give you reason to take him even before his ability to come back from the dead sweetens the pot. If there’s a downside to Angron, it’s that the army tends to lack other big threats to take some of the heat off him, and that can make it a bit more difficult to keep him on the table when you need him – coming back is a neat trick, but it’s not as good as never getting killed in the first place. Still, coming back even once can completely shift a game and almost every successful list runs him.

After Angron, you’ll want to include Lord Invocatus. His ability to give two units the Scout 6″ ability is massive for preparing your early-game movement and getting into position for your first wave of charges, and he’s more valuable now that Eightbound and Exalted Eightbound are playable. He’s a fun melee threat on his own but durable enough to withstand small amounts of firepower and he can often act as a distraction to the opponent, pressing forward onto an objective and daring an opponent to kill him off it and letting you sticky it in the process with Blood Offering. 

From there you have options. For a while Khorne Berzerkers had fallen out of lists in favor of Jakhals, but with the points drops to both – Berzerkers now clock in at 90 points for 5 models, a pretty great deal – the possibilities of a horde approach are more viable. You generally want to attach Kharn the Betrayer and the Master of Executions to Berzerkers, and you don’t need unattached squads nearly as much any more. You’ll also want Rhinos to transport and protect them, and once they’ve gotten out the Rhinos become wonderful 2 OC harassment units with a surprising amount of firepower – remember that they can take a combi-bolter, combi-weapon, and havoc launcher. That said, the competitive lists since the Q1 dataslate release have primarily relied on Jakhals and Chaos Spawn for holding objectives. Spawn are priced pretty cheap in World Eaters, are reasonably fast, and can be tough to kill while still being small enough to hide. They tend to make great action units for Deploying Teleport Homers and Cleanse secondary missions.

Since the Q3 2023 point changes Eightbound have become a must-have unit in the army, able to move quickly and punch well above their weight. Having two to three units of Scouting Eightbound with two smaller units of Exalted who gain Scout from Lord Invocatus means you could have 5-6 units moving 6″ before the game and then coming in hot into your opponent’s army on the first turn. There isn’t a lot that can survive that much damage coming in and while it might not kill everything, it will keep the pressure on as you move your other units in and ready them to secure more skulls for that Skull Throne.

Also in the “playing in the margins” side of things is the World Eaters Daemon Prince. This guy tends to fill a similar role to the Master of Executions as a large melee threat with Devastating Wounds, though his other major benefit is his Infernal Fortitude Aura, which gives friendly Infantry units within 6″ a 5+ invulnerable save (or a 4+ if they already had a 5+), and that’s great for helping keep your Jakhals and Berzerkers on the table.

The final unit worth mentioning is The Lord of Skulls. Since the Q1 dataslate, the Lord of Skulls is suddenly a much better play as it gives you both a second big threat to flank Angron and draw attention and also give you a very good chance of bringing him back late game. Having a pair of massive bodies really changes the dynamics for opponents, who may spend an entire turn pouring everything into Angron only to find there’s still a massive melee and shooting monster on the table staring them down. And then Angron comes back.

How Does This Faction Secure Objectives?

With a mix of Jakhals, Chaos Spawn, and Rhinos. The Jakhals’ Objective Ravaged ability lets them sticky objectives in your Command phase, allowing you to capture them and keep moving away from them as you charge toward the opponent. Likewise, the Blood Offering Stratagem is one of the most useful in the game, allowing you to spend 1 CP to retain an objective after you’re shot off it, forcing an opponent to actually walk over and retake it.

In an ideal world you can sticky some objectives early and then just make sure an opponent can’t physically move onto objectives – yours or otherwise – because they’ve had their legs sheared clean off by chainaxes. That said, good opponents are not going to let you scout freely out of your deployment zone on turn 1 and get the drop on them – they’ll block your movement with their own infiltrating units, like Nurglings, deploy defensively, and generally use terrain to prevent a turn 1 charge. You can still use this to your advantage, however – play aggressively early and apply pressure and force them to regret it. It’s OK to give your opponent 5 VP on primary every turn if you’re scoring 10s and 15s. Even if you get tabled, you can use this strategy to score an early lead large enough that an opponent can’t recover.

In Pariah Nexus there’s a new, heavier emphasis on performing actions – this makes Jackhals a much more important unit in the army and you’ll typically want at least one to both sticky your home objective and move forward and perform actions as you need. Single Lords on Juggernaut are also solid for this, and if you’re running Berzekers then their Rhinos will also end up being ideal action doers, as well as sources of Blood Offering while they sit on an objective.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Hordes?

By chopping them up in melee. Each Khorne Berzerker gives you 5 attacks at S6 and AP-1 on the charge, so even a 5-model unit can easily wipe ten guard-equivalent models off the board with average rolls and no help, and can also take out just as many Ork Boyz. Eighbtound will also just turn most things into a pink mist and a pile of gristle. There’s not a ton which can survive it – though sometimes you’ll need to double and triple up to ensure you take care of things in one go, as may be the case for large units of Accursed Cultists. In those cases it may be helpful to use the Master of Executions or Kharn to try and take out the character early. 

Jakhals are also pretty good at this, giving you a lot of cheap attacks for taking out weaker infantry, and can act as a good trading piece for heavier infantry. 

Where you’re going to struggle more are against more elite melee armies – Sisters of Battle can be a problem with good Overwatch and the support of indirect fire, and likewise Death Guard can be a very big challenge for World Eaters with their mix of Fights First, anti-infantry Overwatch guns, and indirect fire. And Astra Militarum armies can be a nightmare with the amount of screens they can put between you and their basilisks.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Tanks and Monsters?

Bigger targets are a different story. Your best options here are going to be Angron, any other big units you’ve brought (Daemon Prince, Lord of Skulls), and throwing a big unit of Berzerkers at it and using For the Skull Throne to give yourself +1 to wound and Warp Blades to try and cut it down through sheer volume. The Master of Executions with a Berzerker Glaive enhancement is a big help here as well in a pinch, though ideally your big targets are also CHARACTERS in that case.

Otherwise, the army doesn’t have a lot of shooting unless you’re bringing the Lord of Skulls – though he is a more common option these days – and your multi-damage output is limited to a few D2 melee weapons on your infantry and the weapons on your bigger characters. Fortunately Angron is more than capable of smashing larger targets and likewise can benefit from blessings and stratagems to help make that more certain – the challenge will be making sure you get him into combat to begin with.

What Combos Should You Build Around?

World Eaters are pretty simple – there aren’t a ton of combos you have to build around, because most of your combos are pretty obvious, and just involve “a unit that is extra good at killing things in melee.” Still, let’s go through a few notable rules combinations.

Long Charges

Let’s start with the most important trick in your arsenal: Pulling off early charges by flying across the table with melee units and crashing into your opponent’s lines. If executed well you both remove key threats from your opponent’s army and jam them in their deployment zone, forcing them to fight their way out. You won’t always want to do these on turn 1 as sometimes you’ll want to spend your first turn setting up for a series of turn 2 charges, especially if your opponent deployed far back into their deployment zone to avoid being charged.

• Lord Invocatus
• Angron
• Eightbound, Exalted Eightbound, or Berzerkers

There are a bunch of different rules and tricks you can use to get across the table quickly and it’s worth cataloging them. Lord Invocatus comes with a 6” Scout move and the ability Road of Eight Bloody Steps, which lets him give up to two friendly Infantry units within 6” the Scouts 6” ability if they don’t already have it. That gives you a 6” move after the game starts, before the first round begins. 

Next up are the Blessings of Khorne. Two effects here – Rage-Fuelled Invigoration gives units in your army +2” to their move characteristics for a turn. Unbridled Bloodlust lets units Advance and Charge in the same turn. The Lord of Juggernaut alternatively offers Aggressive Advance, which lets you re-roll advance, charge, and Blood surge rolls for the unit he joins.

After that we’ve got Apoplectic Frenzy, a 1 CP Stratagem which gives you an automatic 6” when you advance – no roll required.

Angron can also chip in here, giving friendly units within 6” +1 to their Charge rolls with his Glorious Bloodletting Aura ability. 

Why catalog these? Because you’ll want to use more than one of these on the first turn in order to get more than one of your units into melee – while pushing a single unit into melee is pretty easy, that’s also a good way to hang that unit out to dry, leaving a valuable piece of your army isolated and unsupported. You want to avoid feeding your army to the opponent’s piecemeal.

So let’s talk about movement. Without Stratagem help, you can give your units +2” move from Rage-Fuelled Invigoration, then tack on an Advance on top of that (average result: 3.5”), plus a 6” Scout move from Lord Invocatus, and +1 to your charge distance (average result: 7”) to give your units an average threat range of Movement + 19.5”. For Berzerkers, this is 24.5 and for Eightbound it’s more like 27.5. Use Apoplectic Frenzy for a guaranteed 6” Advance and that can take you to 30.5 if you need. Likewise, Angron with average rolls can go 27.5” in a turn. In an ideal game, you are landing 3 or more of these threats in combat with your opponent’s units at the same time.

As you do this, be sure to pay attention to the order of Movement – you need Angron to be the last charger in the set so he can lend his +1 to charge aura to as many units as possible, which means either deploying or moving the units close at the end of their Movement.

Khorne Berzerkers

The current top list right now runs two units of Berzerkers, both of which are likely to go in Rhinos:

• A ten-model unit which pairs with Kharn the Betrayer
• A five-model unit which pairs with a Master of Executions

Kharn’s big unit is just a blender with a ton of pretty consistent attacks, while the smaller unit is more a conveyance for the Master of Executions with the Berzerker Glaive. 

One Key Thing to Remember: Berzerkers can use their Blood Surge ability to make a Blood Surge move when they lose a model to Overwatch or while they are already within Engagement Range of an enemy unit. They still have to move closer to an enemy unit, but this can be used to plow through screens and pile into other nearby units if you place carefully. This can be great for shortening a charge or teaching your opponent a valuable lesson about the perils of trying to get off an extra pistol shot against your unit.

Scouting Eightbound

Lord Invocatus gives two Infantry units the Scout 6″ ability at the start of the battle. Standard Eightbound already have this, but for Exalted Eightbound it’s a huge boost, and basically a big part of why you’re taking two units of Exalted Eightbound in the list. With Invocatus running unattached to a unit, that will give you four Scouting units in the army in the current top list, and while an opponent can usually stop one or two of those from getting a good pregame move, stopping four is a different matter entirely. With Invocatus between them, you can stretch your unit of Exalted Eightbound more than 12″ from each other, letting you cover a pretty wide swath of the table. Just keep in mind whether you’ll need them together early to take down a big threat.

Sample Lists

The World Eaters have been a different beast in 2024, seeing a reduction in competitive success but still managing to pull some high-profile event wins. They’ve had a number of recent event wins to bolster their numbers, and the small tweaks in the June 2024 balance update along with nerfs to other melee armies have helped them reclaim some of the competitive foothold they lost back in late 2023.

Harry Mayo’s List

Harry’s list is a pretty typical modern World Eaters list – and that’s a good thing. He took this list to a 5-0, first-place finish at the Club Seal Cup Part II GT event in August, beating Daemons twice, Grey Knights, Astra Militarum, and Imperial Knights on the way.

Harry's List - Click to Expand

Harry’s list runs two units of Berzerkers supported by two big units of Exalted Eightbound. The notable stand-out here is the Daemon Prince, who provides additional melee punch and durability for the units around them – and Exalted Eightbound on a 4+ invulnerable save with a 5+ feel no pain are some real trouble to tear through.

Ranchen Li’s Lord of Skulls List

This list won a 76-player GT in China in early August, going 5-0 against Black Templars, Necrons, Astra Militarum, and two Tyranids armies. The list features a Lord of Skulls to keep Angron company and give him some added return insurance.

Ranchen’s list - click to expand

We’ve previously seen World Eaters lists running a Lord of Skulls perform well, but it’s good to see that it’s still an option. Here the list opts to go Berzerker-free in order to run more Eightbound and Exalted Eightbound, using only Jakhals for objective holding and actions while the Eightbound scream forward across the table.

Final Thoughts

Playing World Eaters has gone from being a challenge to being a ton of fun back to being a fun challenge. The army has some nasty tricks it can pull, and when the dice and mission align you can pull off some insane early game charges that leave an opponent just unable to respond effectively. World Eaters don’t have a lot of complexity as an army, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t complex to play – learning when and how to make your charges takes a lot of time and skill, and when the blows don’t land things can be rough. But when it does go well it’s brutal to see.

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