Basic game knowledge is expected.
BUT if you dont have it yet, here are some nice sources:
(I'm not associated with any of this websites)
https://www.gamepressure.com/wartales/interactive-map/z710bca
https://www.neoseeker.com/wartales/walkthrough
(Probably better to google for searches on this site, like: site:neoseeker *what you need* - its own search is … bad)
https://wartales.fandom.com/wiki/Wartales_Wiki
www.google.com


The following builds have been tested exclusively in extreme difficulty with adaptive exploration on and (unless otherwise stated) work from level one to thirteen.
But do keep in mind that wartales is more about resource management and grinding for “stats” than actual tactics or skill.

I will list gear but do see the gear as more of a “suggestion” to work towards and not a must-have, unless differently stated.
Food buffs, paths, armour layers, oils and traits will play a noticeable role in how you build your characters. Same goes for when you can/want to obtain specific gear.
Armour layers will never be mentioned as you need to decide for yourself which stat is necessary to increase and when.

All shown skills are upgraded.
All shown stat sheets are without any temporary bonuses (like from food) but, obviously, with path bonuses.



If you are using this guide to start a new playthrough, the best tip I can give is to avoid combat altogether for as long as possible and make money, like a ton of money, by simply buying/selling trading goods and pickup all resources on the way.
Level professions, collect resources to craft with, speak with all the traders to purchase non-garbage gear and afterwards start doing contracts.
Naturally still keep an eye out for informants or bring trading good XYZ to town ABC contracts.
It's also worth visiting arenas / bosses as they are, comparatively, easy to normal combat and reward unique weapons that can be upgraded for coins. As damage beats out defence in war tales, having a level appropriate weapon at hand just one brotherhood visit away is amazing.

Though if you are already mid to late game and just look for a build guide, don't worry, you can - and probably should - replace your entire team at some point anyway. Once you get gear going you have more freedom in skilling characters. Innkeeper vacancy notice is very useful for this.

Fighter - Reduce Guard to 0 and have a safe 100% crit against units without guard. Paired with nice damage and the ability to engage means there are no alternatives.

Valours Duel - to generate Valour Points (VP). Making this character almost self-sustainable with VP generation to VP spent

Bulwark - once you engage you get deflection (70% dmg reduction) and when you disengage fury (+50% damage) on the next attack.

Master Opportunist - +50% damage to attacks of opportunities and -50% damage taken from attacks of opportunity.
(Until mid to late game it could be replaced with Hardcore training)

Defensive repost - 50% chance to deal an attack of opportunity instead of taking one.

Class Specialisation - back to lvl 5 and we will pick Counter Attack for riposte and inspiration.
Riposte means if you disengage from combat and the opponent strikes you, you will strike back.
Insspiration doubles your movement, which makes this character extremly mobile.

Due to inspiration and being tanky this character also makes a very good candidate for captain and the galvanise troops skill.


Pick a target, engage it and afterwards disengage. While disengaging, hope to deal an attack of opportunity instead of taking one and rinse-repeat. With all the damage reduction going on you should hardly ever take damage even if you get hit.
With a shield that has a damage skill, destabilising strike, taunt, wrath and the sword attack you can do this up to 5 times and each time you engage you generate one VP. Meaning you can generate up to 5 VP and spend a maximum of 8.
You can take on any kind of enemy with this build, it's all-around good.

You want to get your crit chance as high as possible while also having at least 16 movement (after armour penalty), rest obviously goes into strength.
And, of course, get 15 willpower.


“Mehyt’s Kopis” legendary sword, mainly for it's +2 VP generation on kill (as you can 1 shot squishy targets, especially archers & rangers) and any shield with an active damage skill.
Oil options:
Sharpening oil (+10% crit chance),
Infectious oil* (50% of damage as DoT)
Perforating oil (ignore 50% of guard) if you mainly take on tanks, but remember you can also use destabilising strike to reduce guard to 0 once.
If you fight big health enemies, like bears, for a longer period of time it might be worth to take misty oil (5% damage of max health).
If you struggle with repair, exhausting oil is a option to make attacks of opportunity deal no damage to you, but this also renders parts of this build useless, so handle with care.

Paladins Segmenta and Paladins Galea seem to be the best choice as they increase both crit chance and crit damage. Inquisition "guard" in drombach drop these.
Helmet stamp "Enhanced Visibility" (Captains bycocket helmet from the guard gives this stamp) so that if you get engaged, and riposte is not up anymore, you still strike back. Position yourself near a bunch of enemies and watch them attack you and get hit in the face right after and you even generate VP.
While building dont worry too much about armour value and Guard, with all the skills you already get a massive damage reduction no matter what. A few % here and there won't matter in a meaningful way.

Woodcutter would be the best job. Angler is also an option if you dont want to skill into willpower.
Tinkerer is also a possibilty, though thats probably better on the archer (see archer build below)
Strong and Bloodthirsty are the best traits.

This build has neither, it's a jack of all trades but master of none. Naturally it is rather RNG dependent as in if you get all the disengage attacks in your favour you can easily wipe half the enemy army, if you get unlucky, well, sucks, but you still can take out 2-3 enemies.



*FYI on Infectious oil which i'm only going to point out here once
This oil, in general, is your early to mid game carry until you get a few builds somewhat complete. Which is also why damage > defence, you can literally hit a target, apply the dot, leave them standing and move to the next one.
After the target's turn, if you calculated correctly, the target will die off.
Sure it reduces your income as you need to repair more armour afterwards but ultimately it's worth it as combat = xp = endgame builds = OP.

Destroyer - An additional attack skill, with good damage and the additional effect of reducing the damage dealt by your opponent. As we need heavy armour this is the only option.

Valours Duel - to generate Valour Points (VP). Making this character almost self-sustainable with VP generation to VP spent

Armour Breaker- +35% damage to armour and if you break a units armour you get brutality (+30% damage for the round) and inspiration (double movement speed)

Guard Breaker - attacks ignore 100% of the unit's guard.

Defensive Repost - 50% chance to deal an attack of opportunity instead of taking one.

Class Specialisation - back to lvl 8 and we will pick Overwhelming Presence - If you got a higher amount of armour than your opponent you get a 100% crit chance. Plus you inflict confused (unit does not receive bonuses - however this does not apply to champions)


Similar to the swordsman:

Pick a target, engage it and afterwards disengage. While disengaging, hope to deal an attack of opportunity instead of taking one and rinse-repeat
With a shield that has a damage skill, weakening blow, taunt, wrath and the mace attack you can do this up to 5 times and each time you engage you generate one VP. Meaning you can generate up to 5 VP and spend a maximum of 8.
However, with this build your main targets should be tanks, for obvious reasons and you also want to minimise the damage you take, so the 100% crit from overwhelming presence stays up.


Aim for around 16 movement (after armour penalty), 15 willpower and the rest goes into strength.
We don't need crit as overwhelming presence will deal with that for us.


Misery - as this weapon massively increases the build's power.
You get this weapon from an assassination mission in the Arthes region. Where you have to kill Meliance the Traitor.

For shield just anything with high armour, guard and an active attack skill.
Oil options:
Exhaustion Oil (attacks of opportunity against you don't deal damage) - is a must as you don't want to lose armour but yet need to engage and disengage several times to make use of this build properly. So the oil concentrate to make this a 100% application is necessary.
Infectious oil (50% of damage as DoT)
If you fight big health enemies, like bears, for a longer period of time it might be worth to take misty oil (5% damage of max health)

FYI: Erkeshet’s mace is only an option if you play on lower difficulty and/or without adaptive exploration. Otherwise you only limit yourself to be able to fight against targets which make use of dexterity, as you will not, ever, even with all the cooking recipes, have more strength than the AI.

Defender's Breastplate and Defenders Helmet are the best choices I believe, slight increase to crit damage and attacks of opportunity. The Guard drops these
Helmet stamp "Enhanced Visibility" so that if you get engaged strike back. Position yourself near a bunch of enemies and watch them attack you and get hit in the face right after and you even generate VP.
While building, focus on a high armour amount and a high guard to keep as much as possible for as long as possible.

Blacksmith, as we want as much strength as possible.
Strong is a must and for the second one I believe thick skinned to be the most viable, but this can vary depending on gear availability.

Obviously the build starts to fall off in strength massively once you lose a bunch of armour and hence lose the 100% crit rate.
But until this happens, similar to the swordsmen, you can pretty much nuke anything though the strengths definitely lies in the ability to delete tanks and should be used as such.
Naturally, due to the 50% chance on disengages to hit or be hit, some RNG is involved but even in worst case scenarios you can easily take out 1 tank and one squishy target.

Until then you should pretty much just go for a straight up tank with this.
Cook would be a good idea as a first job.
For skills keep Destroyer and Valoros Duel but get Opportunism and Temperance until you reach level 10 and acquire the Misery mace and use this as your tank to funnel all enemies into.

Straight away, this build, when finished, can take out 4 - 5 enemies in one turn, even if they are all tanks.
Before level 12 however.. quite weak I’m afraid.



Berserk - decent damage, ignores guard and gets fury (+50% dmg on next attack) if it crits.

Valours Duel - to generate Valour Points (VP), though as this build will onehit pretty much anything this will hardly ever happen but it's the only valid choice here.

First Blood- +35% damage to enemies with full health and applies Fragility (+30% damage taken for 2 rounds

Limit Breaker - +50% crit damage

Lone Wolf - +10% damage and 10% damage reduction if 5 meters away from an ally.

Dare Devil - You get frenzy for 3 rounds, meaning ALL attacks crit for the time being and you get more damage the lower your health goes.



Activate Dare Devil, pick a target, go there, kill it.
Pick another target, go there, kill it..

Keep in mind that rampage gives you fury, so +50% damage for the next attack and itself ignores guard. So taking out a tank first for fury and then taking out a second tank with fury and a basic attack is a possibility.
The “Trophy of legends” belt accessory (available through the Power & Glory path) lets us use our main attack skill twice, meaning we can attack two targets with regular attacks, one with rampage and potentially one with wrath. Every time we use a skill we get a free throw of the Faithless offhand weapon (Alazar Arena reward), which all apply fragility due to the First Blood skill and can, in itself, help us kill targets off or just take out archers/rogues by itself.
Or enable a wrath kill.
With enough practice on this mechanic you can, as aforementioned, easily take out 4 - 5 targets in one turn.

If you end up on round 2 in a combat, which should hardly ever happen, the main weapon (available from the Ludern boss) will give you a massive damage boost with basically +20% per dealt attack due to 4 fury stacks. So you can delete pretty much everything.
The mechanics sound complicated on paper, but they are really easy after you have given them a few tries.



Aim for around 18 movement (after armour penalty), 15 willpower and the rest goes into strength.
We don't need crit or anything else, just pure strength.


Devotion - not a “must” but it makes this build massively stronger
(Drops from Ludern boss)


Faithless - must have, makes this build easily twice as strong
(Alazar Arena reward)


Trophy of legends - effectively makes you kill one more target
(available through the Power & Glory path)


Oil options:
Perforating Oil - ignore 50% of guard
Misty Oil - deal 5% of health as damage
Infectious Oil - 50% damage as DoT (if, for some magical reason, whatever you hit does not die, I guess)

The best Medium armour I could find so far is the Criminal Layered Armour and Criminals Barbute. There is nothing much special about it, other than that it seems to be the only proper medium armour that you can find. Helmet gives +6% crit damage but the rest is meh.
For the Helmet stamp we use "Enhanced Visibility", that if something is stupid enough to hit you, it will die in return.


Blacksmith, as we want as much strength as possible.
Strong is a must and for the second one get whatever you can find or makes sense.

Without the use of daredevil this build is mediocre at best. Even with all the gear in place. Meaning you have to use your lvl 12 skill on this character to make it viable, well maybe not viable but rather dead on overpowered. So it's worth it to build around this class.

You are better off not bothering to recruit this class until you can find them on a very high level and then making use of the training dummy and buffs to level it up asap.


FYI:
Don't be overconfident by the 44% crit chance in my screenshot. 20% of that is from a nearly maxed out thiefs path with 5* wanted level. So a crit build, without the use of the lvl 12 skill, is not exactly an option until the late-late-late game.

Valorous Victory - 1 VP per kill, which is nice.

Cutthroat - Nice damage skill and if you kill something with frenzy it can be used again, making it possible to chain quite a few kills.

Instinctive Throw - deals a bit of damage and resets movement after using a skill, making this unit very mobile and also, if used properly, you can take out squishy targets for free with this.
Taunt, Sprint, throwing knife and similar will also trigger this.

Cold Blooded - +35% damage from attacks from behind, which is the majority of what this unit will do.

Unstoppable - to be even more mobile.
(or anticipation, if you really wanna be living on the edge with this glass cannon)

Decisive Manoeuvre - if, in rare cases, we get to combat round #2 this is our backup. Move first, and move again last. Having a heavily damage dealing unit move twice in one round is quite nice and perfect for round #2 as combat is already ongoing.



Due to the high amount of movement we can roam around freely and pick targets carefully. As this is a glass-cannon melee unit we should naturally only engage targets which we can kill in one attack or already engaged targets from behind, so that we can put a safe distance between us and the enemy afterwards.
Effectively this unit is the hammer in the most basic hammer and anvil tactic and will be the primary damage dealer until the late game when it will be outclassed by the warrior.
With use of offhand weapons and the instinctiv throw skill we can even deal damage from afar. And yes, those can crit too.

Depending on what weapon you are using you either max out crit at 70% (in case of broken dagger and an ambush attack only) or get it as high as possible.
Other than that the usual, 15 willpower and rest goes into dexterity. Aim for around 14-18 movement aswell, depending how far you want to be able to run - but do remember to make use of Instinctive Throw.

“Kruppe’s Saex” is a valid choice of dagger, but use whatever fits your playstyle and is available. Don't bother with the AOE daggers though, they are, at most, useful for rat nests and that's it.
Offhand Throwing knife or a torch.

Oil options:
Sharpening oil (+10% crit chance)
Perforating oil (ignore 50% of guard) - attacks from behind still don't fully ignore guard, so even if you exclusively do that, you can still further increase your damage a bit with this oil and also open up direct attacks.
Infectious oil (50% of damage as DoT)
Misty Oil (5% max health as damage)


I find Ring Leaders Tabart & Ring Leaders Coif the most useful ones as they increase crit % chance. These drop from outlaws.
As a Helmet Stamp you should get “Aura of Power”, which you can extract from one of the last Power & Glory path rewards, as there aren't really any good alternatives for the Ranger class.

Up until you can acquire this stamp just use whatever you have available. I haven't seen anything yet that would do anything major on the ranger class.


Thief, Tinkerer, Angler or Alchemist. Whatever you need to round up the stats.
Nimble and Bloodthirsty are the best traits.


Effectively you can see this as the “carry”, who swoops in after your team sets up the field and starts taking enemies off the board.
So the strengths are, obviously, pure, raw, damage. While the weakness is near zero survivability.

Valorous Victory - 1 VP for each kill

Infantrymen - Upgraded this allows 4 attacks in a zone of control, which will be the main job

Reinforced Arrows - +35% crit damage and inflict bleeding on crit

Easy Prey - +30% damage if the target is not adjacent to any unit. All around great.

Lone Wolf - +10% damage dealt and -10% damage taken if 5+ metres away from an ally. Easily doable with an archer.

Class Specialisation - we move back to level 8 and take Thrill of the Hunt which gives 3 rage (so +15% damage total) for each attack from more than 6 metres away. Easily doable, especially if you set up properly with Barrage. If all goes well you can, with this build, get 6 attacks per turn in and hence reach +90% damage.




With the War Bow you get a second attack if you crit, so this alone can give you +30% damage after your first attack and also take out pretty much any target.
Afterwards position yourself properly to get both Lone Wolf as well as Thrill of the Hunt for each attack and setup for Barrage. If a unit is within its field of effect, and moves or gets shoved, this will also trigger an attack of opportunity. If the crits are in your favour you should be able to kill any target passing the Barrages zone of effect.
Be mindful of enemy units, especially archers, which can use knockback as this cancels barrage and renders this unit therefore basically useless.

Crit, crit, crit. You want 100% crit.
Aim for 15 willpower, as usual, 12-14 movement and rest goes into dexterity.


War Bow as weapon, period, no contest.

I honestly can't remember where I found mine, according to google you get it from the guard archer captains and/or assassination missions.
Oil options:
Perforating oil (ignore 50% of guard) - this is a must have.
Sharpening oil (+10% crit chance)
Infectious oil (50% of damage as DoT)

Similar to our Ranger: Ringleaders Tabart & Coif are the best I could find so far due to crit chance.
For Helmet stamps you can pretty much use whatever. Personally I also run Enhanced Visibility, just in case the unit does get attacked outside of barrage so it's a free kill at least.


Thief, Tinkerer, Angler or Alchemist. Whatever you need to round up the stats.
Nimble and Bloodthirsty are the best traits.

This build is somewhat reliant on the area you fight in, if there is somewhere the enemy will surely funnel through you can take out 5 targets in a turn.
If the enemy is split or has a wide area to move around in it's hard to make proper use of this character however.

Simple: Nevermind all animals but bears.

You don't need to control them either as bears usually start the combat last, at which point they can't really f* anything up, even if they are AI controlled.
Plus if they are AI controlled, they can use VP skills for free.

If things go south they have a massive HP pool and can serve as tanks while also dealing an okay-ish amount of damage.
Skill them up to 15 willpower and then just all in constitution to make them nearly unkillable.
Strength is also an option, but if you follow this guide you will hardly ever see a bear attack to begin with, so having them tank up to 12 hits is probably a better option than to leave targets at 1/3 instead of 2/3 of health.

Cosy pelt skill gives +1 VP on rests and tamed +50 carry capacity, so they are not only a great combat aid but also provide great passives to your party.
Sure, you have to feed them but at some point a cook should be present and cook high level meals, which usually overshoot your food requirement anyhow and yet you consume them because the buffs alone make it worth it.