Skip to content

đŸșSlayers Breakdown. Which ones are playable?

Dwarf Slayers Warhammer The Old World
The competitive Breakdown

Dwarf Slayers are among the most iconic and ridiculous units in the Old World: from guys with impossible mohawks to heroes who die without giving away victory points.

In this edition, we have many types of slayers: big, small, useful, and useless. I think what they all have in common is Movement 3 and orange hair. Let’s see what we can do with these guys from a competitive perspective. Can they be worth it?


Slayers: Troll Slayers and Giant Slayers

I’m going to analyze them from the smallest to the biggest. So let’s start with the unit of Troll Slayers and Giant Slayers.

They’re Unbreakable, like all slayers, which makes them tempting as an anvil unit. But the truth is, at the end of the day, they’re very slow.

This is a general issue with infantry in the game (even Chaos Warriors suffer from it a lot), but this is the most extreme case (they can’t take a unit champion as such and therefore can’t include the rune of moving through terrain that I mention in the post about dwarf infantry).

On paper, it seems like a unit you’d want to send against a dragon. You can include any number of Giant Slayer unit champions and keep issuing challenges to the dragon, feeding it one model per combat phase with no chance of fleeing and being wiped out in a pursuit. But you really think a dragon’s going to charge them?

Its movement is much, much higher than yours. So it gets to choose which combat to engage in.

Let’s say you’re a brilliant strategist and manage to tie up the dragon with the slayers. After the first round of combat, you’ll give ground and become unengaged (Unbreakable works that way now). Then the dragon will turn around — it’s a Large Target and it flies — so it will charge somewhere else on its next turn. All you’ve done is lose one model.

So what options do we have for a Dwarf Slayer unit in TOW? Either build a large unit or a small one.

  • If you go big, it’s just redirecting fodder. It shouldn’t even touch combat if your opponent plays decently.
  • You could also go small (5 models). It’s not too expensive and could work as flank support for another anvil unit. But the problem is that five slayers still only give you five Wounds at Toughness 4 with no save whatsoever. So any light shooting or spells — like a Ruby Ring of Ruin — will take them out.

Because of all that, I don’t like Slayer units. And so, from a very poor option we move on to what’s probably the best — or among the best — Slayer options. And that’s…


Doomseekers

You can’t add more than three per army as allies, unless you’re playing a Slayer King army, in which case you can include more.

They’re single models, operating solo. They have 2 Wounds and Toughness 4, which can be increased to 5 — but honestly, for what they’re meant to do, I wouldn’t raise their toughness.

They have a rule I absolutely love — I already talked about it in the post about the best dwarf rune combos (If you haven’t read it yet, scroll down for my breakdown of the best dwarf rune combos — there’s gold in there, literally). That rule is: if they die, they don’t give any points to the enemy. They only give points if they survive.

They’re a big nuisance. They’re infantry (360Âș line of sight) and enemies get -1 to hit them with shooting. They have Vanguard and charge an extra D3 inches, which is interesting even though they’re still dwarfs and therefore slow. But where you place one, it can really block enemy movement. Plus, it will mess with enemy shooting lines (it gives cover to any unit behind it, even if it barely covers anything), and secondly:

Note that even though they’re 50 points, you can add runes. One combo I really like is giving them three Initiative Runes, each for five points. So that’s 65 points for a model with Initiative 6. That way, even if they get charged — which is common, especially by light troops — and the enemy has Initiative 3 (very common among light units), you’ll strike simultaneously. So it’s likely they’ll kill each other. The enemy gets no points for the dwarf, and you eliminate or severely cripple a unit.

Also, you can deploy them one behind the other, so that when the enemy kills one and tries to overrun, it runs straight into the next one.

That wraps up my favorite Slayer picks. Let’s move on to the next one in the points scale…


Dragon Slayer

Dragonslayer is what used to be the hero choice. And honestly, I think it’s probably the worst option — even worse than the regular unit. It just falls short across the board. It’s not as cheap as Doomseekers, and it doesn’t hit as hard as the next one we’ll talk about because it doesn’t have access to enough runes and has weaker stats.

So it ends up feeling like a pointless filler. For the points it costs, pretty much any unit in the book will serve you better (Thunderers, Crossbowmen, Irondrakes, Gyrocopter
). The Dwarf book has so many strong options that this one just makes no sense.

Now for something serious:

Daemon Slayer

I love this guy. I already described my favorite rune combo in the previous post (linked below). Anyway, even if you prefer another setup, I’d always include the rune that makes him give no points if he dies. Because not only does he hit like a truck, but it also means you can throw him into anything with zero risk for you.

Pretty much everything I said about Doomseekers applies here too.


Ungrim Ironfist, The Slayer King

For the points he costs, he’s just another wannabe. He’s super fun if you want to build a Slayer army and play a casual list with friends, but not for competitive play.

Sure, he hits hard, but not hard enough. The Daemon Slayer I just described hits harder. And he doesn’t tank as well as a dwarf king either. So again, he ends up in this weird, underwhelming middle ground.

That said, the model is absolutely worth it. If I were going to play a Daemon Slayer, I’d 100% buy Ungrim Ironfist’s mini. Speaking of cool minis…

Malakai Makaisson’s Goblin-Hewer

Just to wrap this up with a laugh (and because technically it’s a slayer unit), let’s talk about the Goblin-Hewer.

Obligatory mention.

Like when you invited your cousins to your birthday when you were 12.

It’s like an organ gun, but with longer range and less strength, and it deals more damage depending on how many ranks the enemy unit has. In the current meta, it really makes no sense.

As a dwarf, light troops aren’t what you’re afraid of.

Anyway, if you want more details about this wild contraption, how it works and how to use it, check out the post below where I go in depth on all Dwarf War Machines.



If you think there’s an error in the post, feel free to reach out at theoldwarrior@theoldwarrior.com, and I’ll review it. Hope you enjoy ToW!


privacy policy            cookies policy

Cookies