Gunnery Wight Skills & You – How to Get the Best Out of Your Best Friend
Gunnery Wights are brilliant. These little guys are charming, dapper-dressing blokes with the power to take your Colossi, Noctilus and Queen Bess beyond the point of being really good to just hilariously ridiculous, and that is all thanks to his amazing kit.
While some of the Gunnery Wight’s abilities may seem modest in a vacuum, it’s important to remember that no army’s unit ever functions entirely in a vacuum. Skirmishers rely on your ability to maintain the battlefield advantage to keep them out of trouble, monsters rely on you knocking out their greatest threats first, so on and so forth. With that, let’s get right to it.
Level 2:
First off, get Cackle Fruit. While it has only moderate range, it packs a large AoE explosion and an incredibly potent 48% slow.
This is your best tool in situations where you might not have been able to gun down all the big nasties in the enemy army beforehand, so you simply run your Gunnery Wight up into tossing distance, and have him throw this slow at the desired unit. As an added bonus, in cases where enemy units overlap one another, you may apply it to several enemies at once.
Level 3:
Spend this point in Enchanted Ballistics. I mentioned earlier that some of the Gunnery Wight’s skills may appear weak in a vacuum, this is not one of them. For a whole 25 seconds, all friendly ranged units within range of the effect receive a whopping 60% bonus to accuracy and +20 to reload skill.
This is especially useful for your Colossi, as they can all fire on the move, as well as your Queen Bess, considering its incredibly slow rate of fire.
Level 4:
Get Dead Eyes. While this aura has a fairly short range at a radius of 30 meters, it’s still easily workable and naturally, the Gunnery Wight also benefits from this aura. Park him near Queen Bess and/or your COlossi for a free, always-active +10% missile damage and + 10% armour-piercing missile damage.
Level 5:
Now, you’ll want to get Powder Keg. While the increase to rate of fire that you get with Enchanted Ballistics is very potent, that naturally means that you burn through your ammunition faster.
Generally speaking, you’ll want to use this on Queen Bess, especially in Siege battles, more on that later.
Level 6:
Spend a point in Shark Bait for a straight-forward buff to the Wight’s survivability.
Level 7:
Now, you get yourself Utility Belt. More slows more often, simple as that.
Levels 8 & 9:
Max out Shark Bait.
Level 10:
Your friend deserves a ride to spare the ol’ Wight the walking. Get Rotting Promethean.
There are a few key things to remember about this:
1. This does not make the Gunnery Wight a good close-combat hero. It’ll do all right against low/mid-tier units, without polearms, but that’s about it. Take care to keep the Wight out of melee if at all possible.
2. The Gunnery Wight is now a larger target. While the AI will rarely focus-fire characters, if they choose to do so, they’ll receive accuracy bonuses against him. Be mindful.
3. The increased health pool and the little detail that you multiply your armour by four, going from 30 to 120, will give you some leeway. Don’t be afraid to ignore points 1 and 2 if you have to, if that extra leviathan is enough to turn a fight. Otherwise, just stick to using the shooting and abilities.
Level 11:
Get Tenacity. Now we’re simply trying to keep the Wight alive for Immortality at Level 20.
Level 12:
Always Ready. The bonus ammuniton for the Wight itself doesn’t matter much, but the extra 8% movement speed comes in handy.
While at this point you could choose to spend levels 12, 13, and 14 on Training, I find that my Colossi get so much experience anyway that I leave this for later. Hence, my guide will continue ignoring Training for now. If you choose to go with it, start levelling it at 12.
Levels 13, 14 & 15:
Max out Blunderbuss. This makes the Gunnery Wight’s ranged attacks far more potent as it adds extra projectiles per shot fired (while using only one piece of ammunition so his total shots remain the same), at Rank 1 it comes with a hefty -20% range penalty. Getting Ranks 2 & 3 will reduce this penalty to 10% and finally 0% respectively.
Levels 16, 17, 18:
Max out Gunsight. A greater range means that your Gunnery Wight gets to fight earlier, and due to how distance affects ranged accuracy, it effectively increases his accuracy, which is a small but not useless bonus.
More importantly, as well as the increased range, at Rank 3 it grants a massive +40% armour-piercing missile damage.
Level 19:
Spend a point in Powder Monkey.
Level 20:
Get Immortality to avoid winning the coveted TW:WHII Darwin Award of forgetting to pick it at Level 20 only to then have your Gunnery Wight die a tragic death before you can correct your mistake at Level 21.
Levels 21 & 22:
Finish up Powder Monkey for a sweet 12% reduction to the Wight’s reload times.
Levels 23, 24 & 25:
Max out Blacker Powder for even more ranged damage.
Level 26:
Get Pyromaniac. The reason why we’ve left it this late is that unlike Cackle Fruit, this doesn’t apply any slow or similar crowd-control effect. As your army already churns out terrifying amounts of damage, this is just gravy at this point, and can come in useful in a pinch.
While it claims to replace the same skill that Cackle Fruit does, Pyromaniac and Cackle Fruit are not mutually exclusive, you can learn and use both.
At this point, you have maximised all that you can get out of your Wight on the battlefield itself, so at this point it’s up to you! I personally prefer going with the active campaign map skills such as Wound and Block Army.
In the end, the Gunnery Wight will become a fairly potent ranged units, but it takes a lot of levels to get it there. Their primary purpose in your army should be supplying your more powerful units with buffs and ammunition.
Queen Bess – Why Alcohol is Good for You
Good ol’ Queen Bess. Queen Bess is perhaps not the most verastile artillery in the world, but it is very, very powerful. Being a unit and thusly not having skills, I will give some advice as to how to use this beautiful piece of entirely safe engineering to its fullest.
1. Keep your Gunnery Wight nearby. While Bess is pretty good, her rate of fire… well…
To put it kindly, her rate of fire is absolutely atrocious. Use Enchanted Ballistics to fix this.
2. Bess has a very low ammunition capacity, meaning that each use of More Powder! gives her fewer shots than the ability would give to a Colossus. Generally speaking, you want to feed ammo to Bess in sieges, both offensive and defensive, and to your Colossi in open battle as the enemy is less likely to sit and politely wait for your Bess shots to land.
3. While Bess has a gigantic crew (for a siege weapon), it is a feeble, weak, and sorry crew. Be sure to keep an eye on her and not to leave her as unattended as one might dare to do with more expendable artillery. To get the most out of your Wight’s Enchanted Ballistics, you’ll want to keep a few Colossi nearby anyway. I personally like to keep Noctilus closeby so that you can use the Invocation of Nehek to help keep the crew alive if need be.
4. While gigantic, Bess is quite fragile. Be sure to counter any enemy artillery with your Colossi if at all possible or bess herself of course, and in sieges, use your COlossi to rapidly destroy any towers that might shoot her.
5. On the subject of sieges, Bess enables you to play it slow and steady, allowing you to take on garrisons far larger than you have any right to. Why?
Her fire arc, of course!
Once you’ve destroyed any threatening towers, simply sit back, feed Bess ammuntion with your Wight, and hammer any units that are a credible threat to your Colossi into paste. As I mentioned in a previous guide, this army is both great and terrible at sieges, simply because of the fact that the Colossi can destroy towers and walls very quickly indeed, but they have no effective way of killing units on and behind the walls. By taking your time and using up every shot that Bess has to offer, you will have a much easier time when it comes to actually assaulting through the breaches, as the enemy units that would normally put up a dangerous fight have been mauled to the point that they simply can’t hold up aggainst 18 Colossi in close combat, or even a “mere” 17 if you haven’t unlocked Noctilus’ mount.
6. While this is highly optional, try to keep Bess over 80% of her total ammunition for as long as possible, with efficient uses of More Powder!. The reason is that, as with Vampire Coast at large, Queen Bess benefits from Extra Powder. Succeeding in this grants Bess +30% armour-piercing missile damage, + 30% missile damage, +30% armour-piercing explosion, and 30% explosion. While you may lose a shot or two out of your totalc apacity through More Powder! this monstrous buff is worth it.
7. Lastly, remember that even if the gun itself is destroyed, it is the crew’s survival that determines if Bess survives the battle or not. In other words, even if Bess herself is smashed to bits, be sure to try and keep the crew alive so that she’ll replenish once the battle ends.
And that is all that you need to know in order to use the premiere keg delivery system to the best of its ability!
Captain Roth’s Moondial – A Detailed, Exhaustive Walkthrough on Useage, Methodoly & Symbolism
Captain Roth’s Moondial, in addition to the rather handy passive effects, comes with the ability to summon a mob of Zombie Deckhands, the ability having two charges. As Zombie Deckhands are almost utterly worthless, you shouldn’t use it to attack the enemy, with few exceptions. Only use the Moondial in the following situations:
1. Something is about to attack your Queen Bess and you forgot to defend it properly. Summon the Deckhands between Bess and the incoming enemy.
2. Use it to lock dangerous ranged units, preferrably armour-piercing ones, in close combat, preventing them from shooting. Remember that Deckhands are really, really bad and most ranged units will beat them rather quickly, so only do this if condition 1 isn’t applicable now or in the near future. This naturally applies against enemy artillery crews too.
3. While Colossi summons mobs when they drop low on health, there are cases where you will want to pull a Colossus back, in order to then heal it with Invocation of Nehek. If a dangerous enemy unit is closing in on your wounded Colossus, it may be useful to summon a mob just as you would to defend Queen Bess. However, this happens rather rarely and if the battle is indeed that close-fought, you will often get more value out of condition 2.
As you may have noticed, the title is somewhat hyperbolic. These three conditions will help make sure that you don’t waste your 120-second cooldown two-use-only ability only to then watch Queen Bess get itself ruined by a bunch of sneaky goblins.
Some General Tricks of the Trade
1. Once the battle is over, don’t end it immediately. Use this bonus time to spam Invocation of Nehek as much as you possibly can in order to heal up any wounded units you might have. Remember that even if you are in friendly territory, your units only replenish at the start of your turn.
2. Don’t put Queen Bess too closely behind a Colossus, or one Colossus behind the other. They run a high risk of shooting the one in front, on account of the Colossi being tall and rather wide.
3. Don’t be afraid of putting Count Noctilus in close combat if it means you can keep your other units disengaged. This still applies when he’s on his own Necrofex, especially once you have unlocked his regeneration ability. While he won’t kill much in melee, he won’t die fast either!
