In our competitive faction focus articles we 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 movement and damage output. With the release of their tenth edition codex and Codex: Emperor’s Children, their identity has changed quite a bit, going from a fast, throw-everything-at-them-style to one that’s more measured in its approach, but still brutal on the table.

Changelog

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Why Should You Play This Faction?

You’re a straightforward person with simple tastes. And those tastes are basically limited to “murdering things, usually in melee,” edition be damned. The World Eaters still boast a host of strong melee units which combine good speed with a large number of attacks and some nasty army-wide melee bonuses, but since their tenth edition Codex release, have added a host of other options to their arsenals. From interesting, fast melee characters like the Lord on Juggernaut and Slaughterbound to the withering output of Forgefiends to the tricky deployment and movement of Goremongers and Flesh Hounds, the World Eaters now sport a surprising diversity of play styles. You still hit things, but you’re a bit more thoughtful about when and how you do it, and you’ve got a surprising amount of long-ranged support to take care of things like pesky transports before your units arrive on the scene.

World Eaters have two key competitive options, depending on how you want to run them, and those are different enough that players can enjoy a variety of different play styles with the army. So whether you want to run mortals or daemons, the World Eaters have a lot to offer.

Army Rule: Blessings of Khorne

If your army is World Eaters, then at the start of the Battle round you roll 8D6 and use the results you get to get effects that improve your entire army. What you can get depends on what you roll, and when you use results, they’re “spent” and can’t be used to buy another effect. These have changed from the Index quite a bit, with three options getting swapped out:

• Any Double: Unbridled Bloodlust – Re-roll Charges.
• Double 2+: Rage-Fuelled Invigoration – Your units can pile-in and consolidate 6” instead of 3”.
• Double 3+: Total Carnage – Each time one of your models dies, you can fight on Death on a 4+.
• Double 4+ or Any Triple: Martial Excellence – Your units have [SUSTAINED HITS 1] on their Melee attacks.
• Double 5+ or Triple 2+: Warp Blades – Your units have [LETHAL HITS] on their melee attacks.
• Double 6+ or Triple 3+: Decapitating Strikes – When your units make a melee attack against an INFANTRY unit, they gain [DEVASTATING WOUNDS].

You can select two of these each time you make your Blessings roll, and they stay active for your entire army until the end of the battle round. These are some powerful abilities, and affecting your whole army at once means you’re always coming in swinging with two buffs. Of these, you’ll typically want Sustained Hits + Lethal Hits (or Dev Wounds vs. Infantry), though being able to pile-in and consolidate 6” has a ton of value and will help you surprise opponents with your combat movement.

Three key abilities were removed from the Index to make this new list, changing how the army works substantially: +2” to movement (which is now more or less included in the datasheets for the army), the Feel No Pain 6+, and the ability to Advance and Charge. Those last two are huge losses – the former was a solid durability boost the faction needed and the latter was something you were using every game, particularly on the first turn, to help guarantee easy charges and close the gap with opponents. Now the ability only shows up in a single Detachment – Berzerker Warband, fundamentally changing how the army plays.

You don’t really have many ways to modify these rolls any more – gone are the days of re-rolling individual dice with Berzerker Icons, so instead you’ll be focusing more on how to make use of the rolls you get. We’ve done an entire article on these to make predicting those outcomes easier.

Five Things You Need to Know

• You have two major competitive options. While there are some interesting fringe options for the faction, you’ll primarily be choosing between the Berzerker Warband and Khorne Daemonkin when you build for competitive play. Warband lists usually favor multiple units of Berzerkers in Rhinos supported by Eightbound, Forgefiends, and Jakhals, while Daemonkin lists run Bloodcrushers, Flesh Hounds, and Bloodletters who can spawn in via a Stratagem when something is killed.
• Your vehicle options are legit. Especially Forgefiends. Most World Eaters now have BS 4+ on their ranged weapons. Which isn’t great… until you realize that most of the vehicles also gained [RAPID FIRE X] to compensate. This often more than makes up for the shortfall in accuracy, and is most pronounced on Forgefiends, where having RAPID FIRE 1 on their Ectoplasma Cannons gives and the ability to re-roll hits against the closest target within 18″ gives them a huge damage boost. Forgefiends are a staple unit in every World Eaters army but Helbrutes and Maulerfiends have plenty of play as well. The Datasheets for World Eaters vehicles also usually have higher movement and more attacks, and even World Eaters Rhinos can be surprisingly nasty in melee.
• 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. [SUSTAINED HITS 1] is going to be your most common pick for melee, but it’s worth knowing when and how you want to combine that – or replace it with [LETHAL HITS].
• Learn how to use the 6″ Pile-in/Consolidate move. This is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, but actually making good use of it means learning the rules for pile-in and consolidate moves and how to position to use them effectively. A lot of players mess this up, so you should familiarize yourself with the ways you are required to move, and when you have to move to the closest model (and how) to ensure you’re setting up correctly to get those 6″ consolidate moves going in your favor.
• Learn to Use Terrain. Using terrain to stage your waves of brutality is key to finding success with the faction – whether you’re positioning Eightbound or twenty Berzerkers, you need to make sure you’re getting the drop on your opponent and not the other way around.

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

There aren’t a lot of units in the World Eaters faction, but the list has expanded with the addition of Khorne daemons and the Daemonkin detachment.

This is going to make a lot of you very mad, but the unit you absolutely need in every list regardless of Detachment is the Forgefiend. Successful competitive lists right now tend to run two of these, armed with three Ectoplasma cannons. With the re-rolls at 18″ and 3D3 + 3 [BLAST] shots to work with when you hit that range, they can put out enough volume to more than make up for their lack of accuracy. Just watch out for modifiers to hit – 4+ to hit re-rolling all hits is great, but if you drop that to 5+ you’re going to be disappointed.

Forgefiends have a great mix of speed, durability, and damage, but aren’t so tough you can afford to let them eat shooting, particularly with the number of big knights and Death Guard vehicles out there. So you generally want to hide them early or put them into reserves and walk them onto the table.

After the Forgefiend, what you take depends a lot more on what detachment you are running. There are some units that are likely to show up in both types of lists, however. One of these is the Daemon Prince of Khorne – specifically the on-foot version, who’s a regular melee monster in his own right and comes equipped with Devastating Wounds on the charge and the ability to reduce the CP cost of one Stratagem per round. This is much more important in the Berzerker Warband than Khorne Daemonkin however, as you generally need it to power the Frenzied Resilience Stratagem to give your Berzerkers -1 damage on incoming attacks for 1 CP instead of 2.

Most lists – regardless of whether they run Daemonkin or Warband – tend to pack at least one unit of Khorne Berzerkers, the army’s core troops choice. These guys are decent – if not stellar – melee fighters with OC 2 and can be a real menace with their Blood Surge ability – but the lack of re-rolls to hit or wound means they really need character support and at least Sustained Hits 1 to punch effectively into most targets.

From there you have options. You generally want at least one Rhino for every unit of Berzerkers you’re going to take, so it’s worth picking up one of those. Pretty much every top competitive list right now runs at least one unit of Jakhals, which give you some OK melee output on the cheap plus the ability to sticky objectives on some dirt-cheap bodies. They’re ideal backfield objective holders as a result, but you can afford to play aggressively with them against armies that are weaker in melee.

Most World Eaters lists also run at least one unit of Chaos Spawn, though many will run two or three. World Eaters Chaos Spawn have the army’s only built-in instance of being able to Advance and Charge, and with the extra movement and attacks (D6+4 each), they’re just really efficient, fast melee threats who can move through walls and cause problems. These make excellent harassment units, able to range forward and score secondary missions or threaten opponents who haven’t done enough work screening and keeping their units out of reach. Spawn combine solid durability with just enough punching power to sit around and be annoying and require real firepower to kill.

Helbrutes got a hell of a glow-up in World Eaters, retaining their ability to fight multiple times per turn but gaining more movement, attacks, and the ability to pile-in and consolidate 6″ with Blessings of Khorne. Smart opponents can prevent this by spacing their units more than 7″ apart but even good players may struggle with this on certain deployment maps and with certain armies. The result is that a single Helbrute can easily fight or kill its way through three or more units in one turn if you get the spacing right. It’s real and terrifying when it happens.

The play here is either Hammer + Fist or Fist + Scourge, as hammer + scourge isn’t an option. I personally prefer scourge to hammer because hitting on 4+ with the Hammer is a great way to feel bad, but even with -1 to hit you can get some nasty damage through with the hammer when you’re piling on sustained and lethal buffs.

Goremongers are another solid “both armies” unit in that regard, though they often find themselves on the cutting room floor when lists are getting final edits. They aren’t much for fighting, but their combination of Infiltrate and a reactive move to stay out of harm’s way while accomplishing objectives for you. They’re OK but fragile, and ultimately for the points you generally will more want another unit of Chaos Spawn or something that can do some killing.

That’s your big focus here – even when you’re getting clever, it’s going to often be in the context of killing. For the Warband, that will mean crashing into the opponent will well-placed units of Berzerkers and Eightbound supported by Forgefiends and characters, and for the Daemonkin, using surprise Bloodletters to steal objectives and cause problems.

Eightbound are one of the big question marks here – you run them in Warband where they can use the Advance and Charge and -1 damage Stratagems, and generally buff other nearby units with +1 to hit, but they’re a bit expensive as a unit for what they do and successful lists tend to run them as three units of three models.

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. And in Daemonkin, Flesh Hounds make good forward objective holders and action doers while Bloodletters dropping in near a destroyed unit make it easy to just steal objectives away from an opponent who didn’t realize just how close you could get with a unit of ten of those things.

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 up some primary VP early to focus on tabling your opponent, and that’s an area where Challenger cards can help you out and play to your style.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Hordes?

By chopping them up in melee. Each Khorne Berzerker gives you 4 attacks at AP-1 and in the Berzerker Warband those will up to five attacks at S6 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. The big challenge you’re going to run into is going to be the lack of re-rolls; you really need SUSTAINED HITS 1 or LETHAL HITS to enable Berzerkers to take down tougher targets, and you’ll generally want the support of a character to get more 2-damage attacks.

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. In Khorne Daemonkin your Bloodletters and Bloodcrushers are great at scything through enemy hordes.

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.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Tanks and Monsters?

Bigger targets are a different story. Exalted Eightbound are theoretically a good option for this, but they’re wildly too expensive for their output. Your best option here is Forgefiends, whose 3-damage shooting can take out bigger targets or at least weaken them to where your other units can finish them off in melee. Helbrutes can also be solid for this, especially if you’ve given them Thunder Hammers.

In Khorne Daemonkin you can throw Skarbrand at bigger threats, and the Daemon Prince can also serve in a pinch, though you’ll typically want LETHAL HITS on anything you’re throwing at bigger targets – most of your melee options run lower in their strength values and need to roll 5+ to punch up into bigger threats. The Master of Executions is a go-to here against knights, where his ability to re-roll hit and wound rolls against characters means he can put in some work against TITANIC knights, which also all happen to be characters. That’s where you want him to be the model sporting the increased damage characteristic enhancement for your army.

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.

Enhanced Weapons

A number of the enhancements in your various Detachments – such as the Berzerker Glaive in Berzerker Warband and the Blade of Endless Bloodshed in Khorne Daemonkin – buff your damage output on a character. You pretty much always want to take these, and while they’ll do their best work on a Daemon Prince, taking him to 4 damage on his strike attacks, they’re plenty good on a Lord on Juggernaut or Master of Executions as well. One of your biggest challenges is going to be a lack of good multi-damage output, and so any edge you can get to up your output is a big help.

Khorne Berzerkers

The current top lists for Berzerker Warband right now run two units of Berzerkers, both of which are likely to go in Rhinos:

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

Kharn’s unit is just a blender with a ton of pretty consistent attacks – he gives them hit and wound re-rolls of 1, while the other unit acts a conveyance for the Master of Executions with the Berzerker Glaive. Both benefit from being near a unit of Eightbound to give them +1 to hit.

Eightbound

Eightbound are a key part of the Berzerker Warband strategy, acting as both capable melee threats and buffing nearby units of Berzerkers to stop them from being so anemic. Top Berzerker Warband armies bring multiple units of Eightbound, typically keeping them minimum size. You can also bring a Slaughterbound, but it will often make less sense to attach him to a unit – he often works better as a solo melee missile to act as a distraction while the rest of your army gets into position.

Sample Lists

World Eaters have seen a good share competitive success since the release of their Codex, both in the singles format and on the teams stage, where they’re a major part of team builds. We’ll cover lists in more detail in our Detachment Focus articles but here we’re including a single list – check those for more.

Brian Daugherty’s List

The more things change, the more they stay the same – Brian’s list is still the current World Eaters competitive hotness if you want to run Berzerker Warband. It runs the tricks we mentioned above, making good use of Berzerkers, Chaos Spawn, Eightbound, and Forgefiend to control the table and take out key threats. Bryan took this list to a 5-0 win at the Battle for the Capital GT in late June, 2025.

Brian's List - Click to Expand

The Jakhals hang back and protect your home objective (and sticky it), while the Forgefiends act as your ranged support and everything else is geared toward killing things in melee.

Final Thoughts

Playing World Eaters can be 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 have a lot more complexity than they used to, and you aren’t rewarded for just mindlessly rushing forward. While that’s not what some players were looking for, the result is an army with more depth and variety – but that still punches things very hard.

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