How to Create Immortal Zombies in Helman Ghorst's Warhammer III Campaign

This guide will outline the steps you need to take to create almost immortal zombie armies when playing as Helman Ghorst in the Total War: Warhammer III Immortal Empires campaign. 

We actually wrote about this in a news article a while back, but we decided to follow that up with a fully fledged guide on how to make this army for yourself. 

Note that this is very overpowered and might get nerfed at some point in the future by Creative Assembly. 

With that short introduction out of the way, lets start off by finding out what it is about Helman Ghorst that allows him to make zombies so strong. 

At the very beginning of the campaign, Helman Ghorst (and his starting army) already come with some tools that make zombies pretty strong. 

He starts the campaign with the first tier of the Lord of the Scourge trait unlocked already, which increases the battle healing cap in his army by 15%, as well as giving a bit of casualty replenishment rate and reducing the upkeep of Zombies. His trait also gives 30 armour to Zombies and Crypt Ghouls in his army. 

Helman Ghorst also starts the game with several passive abilities that are important to what we are going to do here:

In addition to all of this, Helman Ghorst also has a Corpse Cart (Unholy Lodestone) in his starting army, which does even more passive AOE healing, and a Mortis Engine, which does even more AOE damage per second as long as it is in melee. 

While we haven't yet unlocked Ghorst's really powerful stuff, we do have a pretty strong toolkit already that should easily be able to handle our initial opponents. 

At this early stage of the campaign, you could fill your army with Zombies already, or you could go with Skeleton Warriors instead (temporarily), as at this stage they will probably last for a bit longer. In battles you should pretty much throw all tactics in the bin and blob up your army so that everyone is in a 35 metre radius of the healing effects, letting the Mortis Engine and Ghorst do damage over time to the enemy while Ghorst and the Corpse Cart keeps your army healed. 

You can also use the Invocation of Nehek spell to do some extra healing when needed. 

There are a few technologies that we need to prioritize getting to make the zombies really strong. 

The first column in the Book of Arkhan part of the technology tree contains mostly buffs for Zombies, and you will want to grab all of these technologies early on. The most important ones are Bonds of Flesh (+100% battle healing cap for Zombies), Rotten Gift (+20% Physical Resistance for Zombies) and Risen Standard Bearers (+5 Melee Defence for Zombies and Skeletons). 

Grabbing these technologies will make your zombies last an awful lot longer before they start running out of battle healing capacity, but there's still some more ways we can buff them. 

There is a line in Helman Ghorst's skill tree that starts with a skill called Path to Ruin. This is the skill line that makes this setup so insanely overpowered. The only caveat is that you need to get Helman Ghorst to level 12 before you can unlock it, but you should be about there by the time you have defeated Clan Treecherik (your starting enemy) and the Nurgle faction in the Dragon Isles to your south west. 

I recommend progressing down this skill line as soon as possible. Uncanny Resilience is ridiculous, once you unlock it your Zombies will gain another 500% battle healing capacity, and this isn't just for Helman Ghorst, it's for all of your armies. 

Then we have Unnatural Toughness, which gives 10% Ward Save (resistance to all damage types) to all Zombies in your faction, Unholy Fury which gives all Zombies in your faction +12 Melee Attack, and Ever Onward which gives all Zombies in your faction an extra 50% weapon strength and a passive ability that lets them heal themselves whenever they are in melee. 

Oh, and don't forget that you can buff them even more in the generic red line, available to all Lords in your faction. Unlocking all three ranks of The Unliving Host gives all Zombies in the Lord's army yet another 8 Melee Attack and 8 Melee Defence, and Legions of Dead gives them another 5 Melee Attack, as well as 12% more weapon strength and 20% spell resistance (this last skill only affects Zombies with 7 XP or more - basically any with at least one gold chevron on their unit card). 

If those buffs still aren't enough for you, you can always cast Vanhel's Danse Macabre on the Zombies in battle to give them another 24 Melee Attack. Overcasting the spell turns it into an AOE which can buff all of your Zombies at once if they are blobbed up tightly enough.

The combination of all of these, when unlocked (which you can do in about 15-20 turns or thereabouts) turns what is supposed to be a meat shield cannon fodder unit into probably the most powerful unit in the game. Even with the many melee buffs they got, they still aren't that great at killing things by themselves, but they don't need to be. As long as you keep Helman Ghorst alive, it's practically impossible for a Zombie unit to get destroyed. And even if they do, it costs so little to replace a lost Zombie unit that it barely even matters.

It is very important to keep the army packed together as tightly as possible, which allows them to be easily reached by buffs and healing, and forces the enemy to also pack tightly together when attacking you, making them very vulnerable to the Mortis Engine effects and to other spells like Wind of Death (try overcasting this on a tightly packed enemy formation, it is truly glorious destruction). 

I'm not even joking when I say that if you simply deploy your army in a tightly packed formation and then go AFK, you will still win most battles. 

So does it have any weaknesses at all? Well spreading the army out thinly is a good way to undermine it, but you can quite easily just not do that. Apart from that, the only achilles heel of it is Helman Ghorst himself, and any other sources that you might have, most notably the Corpse Cart (Unholy Lodestone). Sometimes the AI will use archers to try to snipe these, and if they do that you should cast Wind of Death on them quickly to remove the threat. If you lose your ability to heal the Zombies then it actually becomes possible to lose the battle. 

Yup, that's an army of Zombies defeating a full Grimgor Waaagh! with no casualties. 

Certainly true - no matter how strong Ghorst's army is, he cannot be everywhere at once. But don't worry - remember that almost all of his Zombie buffs apply to the entire faction, not just to his own army. 

So once you have unlocked those buffs in his skill tree and the technologies we mentioned earlier, you can make more Zombie armies. Just make sure to put in a Necromancer hero to cast spells, and one or two Corpse Cart (Unholy Lodestone) to give some extra AOE healing. You can also put a Mortis Engine in when you've unlocked them later in the campaign.

These armies are so cheap that you can easily have four or five of them by turn 30, even on Legendary difficulty. 

We hope you enjoyed this Helman Ghorst Immortal Zombie guide for Total War: Warhammer III. 

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