Blood for the blood god!

I got my first taste of DoW2: Chaos Rising on Tuesday night with the release of the new patch that updates vanilla DoW2 with new units for all the original races in preparation for the release of the new expansion. I gimped myself in the only game I managed to play by forgetting to update my gridkeys mod an having all my hotkeys bound to random junk as a result, but I still got a bit of a feel for some of the cool new stuff. In particular, the new librarian unit for SM is rad. Veil of time, which lets your devastator weapons teams attack without having to set up, is just as good as it sounds. When used on heavy bolters it’s kind of like having barbed strangler warriors, only the fire a hell of a lot quicker and do much more damage. I’m keen to try it out on heavy plasma devastators and see how imba it is.

Yesterday I bought the expansion pack itself and had the opportunity to play through the first few missions. The difficulty was a little too low, so I found it pretty trivial, and gridkeys messes up some of the hotkeys in the campaign, but in general the experience was great. When I played the original campaign I went for a super-shooty army that sat back and mowed everything down, mostly because I never leveled up Thaddeus to a point where he didn’t just die horribly to everything. This time round I’m going for a melee heavy build and it’s working really well. The key thing is getting Thaddeus the ability to heal himself when he combat jumps, which is very often. With my force commander also jumping around and Davian Thule the dreadnought smashing things with his power claws my strike force is pretty ridiculous in a scrap. I’m not 100% sure about what the right choice for my 4th squad is though. I’ve been going to Avitus armed with a missile launcher, just because taking out buildings is a pain without explosives, but I might switch to Cyrus with shotguns, and use detpacks to take out buildings instead to stick with the close combat theme.

So far the plot itself is awesomely cheesy and over the top in that wonderful Warhammer 40k way, and the incidental dialogue from your squad leaders between missions works particularly well to bring out their personalities and advance the plot. In all, the single player seems strictly better than the original DoW2 and I can’t wait to get back to it over the weekend.