You can check out the Dark Elf army roster here. Their knights ride velociraptors, their dragons are black, and their elites are better at killing than tanking. To get an idea of what they’re about, consider the Witch Elves: a powerful sect who go to war in a drug-fuelled frenzy, restore their beauty by bathing in literal cauldrons of blood, and spend one night a year sacrificing some of their own people to Khaine, god of murder. On the tabletop, Dark Elves have many troops that imitate their High kin, but with a more aggressive, nastier twist. He and his followers harass Ulthuan and dream of ways to restore Malekith to the throne, because baby wants his bottle. He lost, was kicked out of Ulthuan, and now sulks in the bleak land of Naggaroth with his equally deranged mother Morathi, earning the derision of all Warhammer fans for being the world’s biggest baby. See what that sense of entitlement gets you?Īnyway, he rejected the verdict of the holy flames and went to war with those who defended their integrity. The fire was built by the corrupting forces of Chaos taking root in Ulthuan, then ignited – literally – when a prince named Malekith was rejected and burned by the flames that he had assumed would confirm him as the Elves’ new king. The Dark Elves are the High Elves’ twisted kin, separated from their brethren in a violent civil war known as the Sundering. Their campaigns should have very different flavours. Tyrion starts in Lothern, the capital of Ulthuan, while Teclis starts far abroad in the Turtle Isles, surrounded by Lizardmen. He and his more martial-minded twin, Prince Tyrion, are the High Elves’ two Legendary Lords. The elven mage in the trailer? That’s no ordinary mage: that’s Teclis, one of the most powerful magic users in Warhammer. Yet another thing they do brilliantly is magic, and it seems they’re bringing their biggest gun right from the start. You can check out the High Elf army roster here.
They’re a little light on artillery, but otherwise have ample choice in every troop type. They have a long-standing alliance with the dragons and some of the best elite infantry in the game, such as the Phoenix Guard – they get a perpetual magical ward that makes them very tanky (by elven standards, at least). Think of that cool bit at the start of the Lord of the Rings, where glittering ranks of elves take an orc charge and chop them up with cool efficiency, and you’ve a sense of their flavour. On the tabletop, the High Elves are a flexible and disciplined army. “ really fun to play if you want to get that flavour of being a master manipulator,” says Hall. You can then spend this influence in the diplomacy menus to manipulate relations between other factions: “You could make two rival High Elf and Dark Elf factions go to war, to weaken them both,” suggests Hall, but you’re not limited to toying with third parties if you want to trade with someone but your relations aren’t quite good enough, you can spend some influence to improve them. High Elf spies enable them to see whatever their trading partners see, and they can earn ‘influence’ by using their agents or resolving events called Intrigue at Court dilemmas. Thousands of years later, this has given their descendents a certain sense of entitlement they look out only for themselves, and yet, because they also consider themselves the rightful rulers of the world, they stick their noses into everyone else’s business anyway. Long ago, the Elves were the favourite (but not the first) creations of the Old Ones, the original gods of the Warhammer World, who also built them an idyllic island called Ulthuan. “The High Elves are quite an insular race,” says game director Ian Roxburgh.