The Gorger Mawpack in Warcry: Just Eat It!

Here is my complete guide to The Gorger Mawpack for Warcry. See below for the YouTube version but if reading is more your thing then welcome and lets go!

Reaction

We've seen this reaction before; It's very similar to Ossiarch Bonereaper's. To be honest, they don't get that much use out of it, and I'm not entirely sure that the Gorgers are going to get much use out of it either. Generally their basic attack actions will be doing more than six damage to their opponents. Because you're going to be running a smaller warband, you want to use those actions to get a lot of damage onto your opponent and kill them outright, and six damage isn't enough if you wanted to kill an eight wound fighter.

Clawback

The Clawback is your leader. It's got a very good damage profile for it's 235 points with Movement 5 and a lot of wounds to help it get into the fight, and more importantly, stay there for longer then it's toughness 3 would otherwise allow.

Bounding Leaps

Bounding Leaps is one of the common Gorger abilities and it's probably their most important being on a double, and being a full free move against a visible enemy fighter within 6". Your basic Gorgers all have M5 so in effect, it allows them to get into combat with any fighter if they find themselves in range. Again, with the Gorger warband being quite small, this will be one of your key abilities allowing them to quickly close the distance with opposing fighters and use their full actions to kill those fighters in order to keep on-top of the activation wars.

Starving Rampage

Something to note about the beast runemark is that it only affects treasure (with the fighter not being able to hold it) and doors (because beasts can't use door handles). It doesn't affect objectives, so you're still able to contest objectives when you have that rune mark. We're going to see that as a common theme throughout this warband, that treasure is going to be a problem. So we're going to have to try and find some ways to mitigate that whilst we're doing our list building. 

Starving Rampage gives the fighter a bonus attack action for each visible enemy fighter within one inch, and each of these attack actions must target a different fighter. So potentially this can do a fair amount of damage. It's not entirely impossible to get in range of 3 or more enemy fighters, especially when playing against larger warbands so you'll be able to do your extra attack, and hopefully get a whole bunch of damage on, and then use your normal attack actions to finish off things. I think that it's situationally better then a normal rampage, depending on your opponent.

Looking at the damage profile of the Clawback; it's doing a 9.5 weighted average damage, which has the potential to almost kill 10 wound chaff models with your bonus attacks.

Unnatural Force

Unnatural Force is the Clawback's own ability; Until the end of the activation,  you add one damage to each hit and critical hit made by the fighter, pushing the Clawback to a very respectable 4/7 damage profule.

Comparing Unnatural Force to Onslaught; They're both doubles. They both last until the end of the round. If you're wounding on threes, generally you want to go with unnatural force to get more damage. But if you're going to be wounding on fours or fives, you might want to consider using onslaught because those extra attacks trump the bonus damage.

Cave Howler

The Cave Howler is 220 points with a very good damage profile. Gorgers do all have toughness 3, but with those wounds, hopefully they should be able to stick around for a while but just be aware that some of the bigger, more damaging fighters are going to be able to chew through those wounds eventually, so you'll have to be careful with your positioning and careful who you're going to be running into with your gorges.

The Cave Howler, it's looking at 10 average weighted damage, which is very good but something to be aware of is that you are going to be using that wounds on a 4+ damage profile more often then your Clawback due to the S4. We do however now have access to Divine Blessings, so maybe putting Strength 5 would be a good idea.

Agonising Roar

On the face of it, no disengages for fighters within 6" might be pretty useful in some niche situations. The idea is you run in, you use your Cave Howler to pin enemies in place, stop them moving around and you use that good damage profile to kill them over multiple turns.

Glimmer of Conciousness

Aside from the Clawback; being all beasts, the Gorgers have this ability to even out that disadvantage. The beast rune mark is the points equalizer in the case of this warband. It's what allows the Gorgers to be around about or just below 200 points, as you get a discount for not being able to pick up treasure. Something to note however, is that treasure missions in the core rulebook actually don't score your points until the end of the game. game. So what that allows you to do is on turn four, use your glimmer of consciousness, pick up the treasure after hopefully killing the bearer, and then be able to score your treasure missions that way.

Gorgers

Next up we've got our three different kinds of Gorgers. We've got the naked Gorger with no weapons, Gorger with club and Gorger with Great-Club.

Normal and Gorgers with club have the same runemarks and abilities but the Great-Club has it's own Triple Maddened Blows which allows him to score critical hits on a five when he's attacking. The only problem I have with that is that he's only got two attacks, so it limits what you can do with him. Again, if you wanted to use Divine Blessings, the obvious answer is to pay your points for an extra attack and then the Great-Club becomes a far more damaging prospect. He's got a very good damage profile by himself and will be wounding most things on threes. Generally I would be using Onslaught every turn to make your Great-Club a 4/6/4/8 heavy-hitter.

When we're doing a comparison between the three Gorgers, we can see that the regular Gorger and the Club are around the same in terms of their points per wound and their damage efficiency. They do around about the same damage as well, so it really depends on what it is that you're going to be coming up against, and that will dictate if you need the extra attacks (vs alot of t3) or the strength.

If I had to choose between the three, I'd probably be leaving the Great Club at home as despite its potential with Divine Blessings, once you start putting extra points into your base Gorgers, you're really cutting into the amount of fighters that you can take in terms of allies. Their damage potential is also high enough that putting an extra attack or point of strength on a Naked Gorger might be better off in the long run.

Allies

Talking about allies and Bladeborn, ideally what you'd want to do is to look at different options that will enable you to run six fighters, and for that we're going to have to be looking at Bladeborn warbands.

Hrothgorn's Mantrappers has fairly good synergy with your beasts. His Lead the Skal double enables them to get bonus attack actions, and his very cheap Gnoblar options can help push the warband up to 6 fighters by dropping 2 Gorgers themselves. Mantrapper himself is real strong, with his 40 wounds and solid ranged attack which will be wounding on a 3+ most of the time for a minimum of 4 damage. Quiv can also give him more shots on triples and at that damage profile, he is essentially the same as a Gorger with Great-Club but at range.

Secondly, I've been looking at Mannok da Kunnin from Da Kunnin' Crew. They are able to use the Krull Boy's reaction, Cunnin' Trap, again to get some more bonus actions in (similar to Hrothgorn); We're looking at free attack actions or free movement actions from our allies to close that gap in activations. Da Kunnin' Crew have a number of fighters with nets which can be very good in an otherwise net-less warband which also help bridge that activation gap that you have with your opponents. You can again, drop two ogres, take Mannok and his goblins and round out at six fighters which I think is the sweet spot for the warband.

Finally, I've been looking at Zarbag's Gitz. They've got Prog the Netter as a 50 point net, and Drizgit the Squig Herder who can give your beasts a bonus move action. It's at the speed of whoever is being moved so in this case your Gorgers, with their M5 can get a free move from Drizgit, a free move from themselves, and then attack/attack which is very efficient from an economy point of view.

Other options of-course are the Destruction staples of a Boggleye and Brewgit which you can fit in by dropping just one Gorger for the two fighters.

Listbuilding

How do we put this together in a list? We're going to take the Clawback because he's your hero. We're going to take Hrothgorn, Mantrapper at 300 points and he is going to come with Quiv and Bushwakka. Finally two normal Gorgers bring the total to 980 for a six fighter warband with some good range projection, speed and ALOT of high damage melee attacks. You have some options with Divine Blessings; either +1 Crit on both of your normal Gorgers or +1 Strength on one of them are both viable options.

I think this list will do fine in the core book missions and probably the White Dwarf missions. those missions really favor smaller elite war bands so the Gorgers should be able to perform admirably.