Characters / Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

Player Character Classes

In General

• Admiring the Abomination: Zealots and Veterans tend to do this when a nearby Psyker is being a bit too kill-happy. Their reactions usually range from cautious admiration to being put on edge by the "Witch" or "Freak's" efficiency in mowing down heretics by the dozens.
• Affectionate Nickname: As close as one can get to "affectionate" in the 41st millennium, at any rate. Each class has their own selection of friendly epithets that they will use to refer to their allies of corresponding types.
  • Veterans usually refer to other Veterans as "Soldier"; they fondly refer to Ogryn as "Big Man", Psykers as "Witch" (or occasionally "Freak"), and Zealots as "preacher".
  • Ogryn refer to one another as "Pal", Psykers as "Spark'ead" or "Sparky", Veterans as "Boss" or "Sah", and Zealots as "Shouty".
  • Zealots show a medieval mindset. Other Zealots are "Guardian"; Veterans are "Templars", Psykers are "Witches", and Ogryn are "Slabs", but Fanatics in particular use "kindred" as a catch-all to refer to all of their allies. Conversely, like the Veteran, particularly intolerant Zealots may also refer to Psykers as "Freaks".
  • Psykers are as insular as you would expect from such a persecuted, dangerous class. They refer to other Psykers as "sibling", Veterans as "Roughnecks", Ogryn as "Brutes" ("Sweet Brutes" as a Seer), and Zealots as "Fanatics".
• Arbitrary Equipment Restriction: While the barriers between human, Psyker, and Ogryn equipment generally make sense (only a Pskyer could ever use their staves as anything other than an overwrought pole, Ogryn equipment is too oversized for human beings to handle, and human equipment is either too small for or liable to simply break in the hands of an Ogryn), other distinctions are good bit more arbitrary - for example, all classes pick up and a Standard-issue Munitorum Sapper Shovel^*With the exception of Ogryns, who instead get their own Ogryn-sized latrine shovel in the tutorial level, yet only Veterans may actually bring one with them on a mission afterwards.
• Armor Is Useless: Any form of armor is purely cosmetic for them, and does not affect their health, wounds, or toughness. This is in sharp contrast to their enemies, whose armor does play a big part in protection.
• Chainsaw Good: As expected of soldiers of the Imperium, chainswords and even chainaxes are available weapons to the human rejects. However, chainaxes are only available to the Zealot and Veteran, and only the Zealot has access to an eviscerator.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: Zealots and Veterans typically do this if rescued or revived by a Psyker, due to the widespread discrimination against psychics in the Imperium.
• Death of Personality: Introduced in the Path of Redemption update is the delightfully-named Personality Scourge which, as its name suggests, allows the player to wipe clean their Reject's chosen name and personality, and have a new one beamed into their head, memories and everything. In technical terms, this effectively lets the player create a fresh character of the same class while retaining their current progression.
• Decoy Protagonist: The raggedy conscript squad featured in the Launch Trailer are killed before they can reach their extraction point. Zola replaces them with a team that more closely resembles the default character designs for each class.
• Discard and Draw: Introduced in Patch 13 are entirely redone talent graphs for all four classes, with "keystone" nodes that offer significant modifiers to their Aura, Blitz, and Ability, with at least one option being a further augmentation of their base skill (e.g. the Zealot's Benediction is a 200% upgrade of their The Emperor's Will aura). At each milestone, the player is provided with three different options tied to specific branches of the talent graph, which they can pick one of, while the other two become locked until respecced, thus creating more variety as to how a certain class can be played.
• Determinator: The game's official overview trailer describes Toughness as the players' determination to press on through the pain.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Crossing over into Surprisingly Elite Cannon Fodder, the Rejects might be Boxed Crooks but being a part of an Inquisitor's warband pretty much puts them a few levels above most Penal Legionnaires, conscripts, and even Imperial Guardsmen. The available arsenal reflects this, such as a large selection of lasguns and autoguns originating from many different forgeworlds to weapons reserved for seniors or high-ranking soldiers like power swords, thunder hammers, plasma guns and much more.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Over the course of the game, the player characters go from a lowly convict that a pair of traitor Guardsmen and their boss don't even bother to shoot in the tutorial mission to a well-trained, well-equipped killing machine who has slaughtered legions of Pox-Walkers, hundreds of heretics (probably including those two traitor Guardsmen) and scores of horrific monstrosities. By the time Patch 12 rolled around, they will have likely accomplished enough feats against the forces of Chaos to be promoted to Auric-level operatives of the Inquisition, a stark contrast to where they started from.
• Hand Cannon: The Veteran, Zealot and Psyker can arm themselves with either a stub revolver or a heavy laspistol. While they're not as impressive as say a bolt pistol, they still do a good job putting the hurt on the heretics.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: For a vague definition of hero anyway (especially depending on the personality used), the human rejects have access to various blades with some being shared between all 3 (or at least 2 of them) while others are exclusive to only one of them^note And if you wanna get technical the Ogryn cleavers can be classified as swords due to their size.
  • As is customary for warriors from the Imperium, they can arm themselves with chainswords to take on the Moebian Sixth's troops. All three also share access to the Catachan "Devil's Claw" swords, for the natives of Catachan these are the biggest knives you can earn, for regular soldiers however it's a karkin' sword.
  • Befitting their role as experienced soldiers of the Astra Militarum, the Veterans are given mighty Power Swords to cleave through their enemies like hot buttter with their power fields.
  • Zealots have access two BFSs from the Eviscerator-class Heavy Chainswords to the regular flavor of falchion-like Heavy Swords.
  • Psykers can either have fancy Duelling Swords or use their psyker powers in melee combat with Force Swords.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • One shared weakness among the player classes is flames. Getting caught in the Scab Bomber's, Scab Flamer's or Dreg Tox Flamer's flames will prevent Toughness regeneration entirely, while also dealing damage that gradually ramps up. Up until the release of Traitor Curse part 2, it used to deplete your Toughness meter instantly on contact.
  • In return the Zealot and Veteran can also field fiery weaponry of their own as Zealots can bring out flamers while both can use the incendiary shells of the Kantrael Mk IX Combat Shotgun.
  • Lasguns of all kinds also have access to the Infernus blessing, which applies burn stacks to the enemy upon landing a critical hit that will constantly tick away at their health until either the target dies, or the Damage Over Time expires. Earning higher tiers of the blessing simply raises the cap of burn stacks, and each category of las weapon has its own version of Infernus that's separate from the other two.
• Made of Iron: The Rejects can take attacks enough to kill most humans and still keep trucking. It's justified via their Toughness, which is the determination to press on through the pain that protects them.
  • On top of that, should a player get downed and bleed out, it won't actually kill them : they'll be captured by the enemy, and can later be freed by their teammates, ready to get right back into the fray and kick heretic ass again no worse for wear.
• Mauve Shirt: A rare case where the Mauve Shirts are the protagonists. The most important figures in the fight for Atoma Prime are the crew of the Mourningstar. Until they reach Trust Level 30 and are officially inducted into Grendyl's warband, the player-character is never treated as anything more than cannon fodder. Unusually resilient cannon fodder that actually has a fighting chance at survival, but cannon fodder nonetheless.
• Mildly Military: They don't seem to adhere to any kind of dress code or standardized equipment as part of the Inquisition, even in the cases of the Ogryn and Veteran who came from the Imperial Guard. That the Commodore's Vestures is blatantly allowed to set up shop on the Mourningstar and does business with the Rejects seems to indicate that it's one part of running the show that Grendyl didn't get to enforce, or that the mysterious Inquisitor don't actually mind however their personnel dress themselves, so long as they get the job done.
• More Dakka: All four classes have access to some manner of automatic weapon that trades accuracy and/or raw damage for sheer volume of fire]], such as the Heavy Stubber for the Ogryn and Autoguns for the other three. Further still, there are specific variants and sub-variants of many weapons in this category that provide significantly larger volumes of fire than most, such as the Achlys model of Heavy Stubber, or Columnus Infantry/Braced Autoguns.
• The Musketeer: All classes are fully able to fight and defend themselves up close with their melee weapon or pepper their adversaries from afar with their ranged weapon. Skill trees differ between the classes, but generally all of them have some ability to improve or emphasize either of these weapons (or both!) within their trees.
• Nice Mean And In Between: The available personality archetypes fall into this paradigm.
  • The Professional, Judge, Bodyguard and Savant are the Nice, being the most conventionally heroic, tolerant personalities.
  • The Cutthroat, Agitator, Bully and Loner are the Mean, being the most hostile and cynical, and often belittling or insulting their teammates.
  • The Loose Cannon, Fanatic, Brawler and Seer are the In-Between. They have more noticeable character flaws, but are still usually quite congenial with their teammates.
• Not Worth Killing: Rather than simply shooting the player at the start of the tutorial mission, the traitor Guardsmen who attack the prison ship decide the player isn't worth their time and leave them for the Pox-Walkers to deal with. This turned out to be a terrible mistake for the traitors, as the player becomes a massive thorn in their sides.
• Only One Name: The Rejects' custom names are like this, due to the character creator not allowing spaces in naming.
• The Pig-Pen: If Sire Melk's reaction to their body odor is any indication, the Rejects must stink quite a bit, and their frequent forays into the less hygienic parts of the underhive and combat against minions of the filthiest Chaos God don't help.
  • Loose Cannon Veterans actually do stink, which their teammates (particularly Psykers) can pick up on and complain about.
  • The Ogryns can even talk about their preference for sleeping in filth rather than straw, as they consider filth to be at least warm while straw is just itchy.
• Ragtag Band of Misfits: Even a strike team composed only of Veterans probably be one of very different demeanors that don't entirely gel, let alone all of the other possible combinations of classes together. Nonetheless, they just might get what would seem a hopeless job done.
• Religious Bruiser: All of them are believers in the Imperial Cult, barring the Loner Psyker and possibly the Cutthroat Veteran. Given the setting, this is to be expected.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Veterans, Zealots and Ogryns have shotguns in their arsenals, while the Veteran and Zealot share combat shotguns, Ogryns are armed with their own unique shotguns like the Ripper Gun and the Kickback. They do great in horde-clearing and putting the hurt on enemies (especially the Ogryn's shotguns).
• Shovel Strike: Every class starts off with a shovel as their default melee weapon in the Prologue/Tutorial level after dropping into the sewage system of the ship. The Ogryn stands out by not only carrying a giant shovel but it turns out to be a latrine shovel at that. Beyond this point, shovels are exclusive to the Veteran and Ogryn, while the other two no longer have access to them.
• Spider-Sense: All characters get a sound cue warning whenever an enemy is about to attack them from the side or behind, which differs if it's a melee enemy or ranged enemy. Scab Snipers will also give off an audio cue alert before they fire, regardless of position.
• Surprisingly Elite Cannon Fodder: Basically what the playable "Rejects" will prove themselves to be - they are all prisoners that the Inquisition has saved solely to have them undertake what are pretty much Suicide Missions against the forces assailing Atoma, reasoning that some of them may yet succeed. As they finish leveling up, they'll have proven themselves worthy of being induced into an Inquisitor's warband - and Inquisitors have a reputation to uphold in addition to having a sterling tendency for they and the people in their employ to need to call upon Heroic Willpower. The Raid mission on Mercantile HL-70-04 further portrays this with the Moebian Sixth mistaking the devastation that the four-person strike team has been unleashing on their local forces as being the actions of an entire platoon (which is more in the realm of at least 50 troops according to Imperial Guard organization).
• Technicolor Eyes: Characters can have eyes of a decent array of (mostly natural) colours, including pink or purple irises if they're from Cadia^note distinctly unnatural; this is due to exposure to the Warp, or Prophet Eyes (either for aesthetic purposes or to match eye damage from the various scarring options you can pick). Black sclerae are on the table as well, and Psykers specifically can have Glowing Occult Blue Eyes too.
• Token Evil Teammate: Each class has a personality type/backstory that is much more unpleasant than the others, such as the Loose Cannon Veteran or the Loner Psyker; these arguably belonged in prison, and it's a miracle that they haven't already been culled by some Commissar or the Inquisition instead.
• What the Hell, Player?: If one of the operatives greedily grabs any ammo that can be found rather than save it for someone who needs it the most or uses a medicae station's limited uses to heal minor injuries, the other operatives will call them out on their greedy behavior. Depending on the class and personality, the offender will either apologize or talk back.
• With This Herring: Players start only a single poor-quality melee weapon and gun as well as some grenades, and they'll have to purchase their own from the Mourningstar's armory to get more. This may very well be because none of them are really expected to even survive anyway, though players may yet eventually prove otherwise.

Veteran

Voiced by (Male): Alex Jordan (Professional), Aaron Neil (Loose Cannon), Devon Anderson (Cut Throat)

Voiced by (Female): Seroca Davis (Professional), Emma Ballantine (Loose Cannon), Helen Keely (Cut Throat)

Former members of the Astra Militarum (itself formerly and still commonly known as the Imperial Guard), Veteran Sharpshooters are ranged combat experts. Whilst they can fight up close with melee weapons if they need to (and often will, to conserve precious ammunition) they excel at ranged combat, using their Volley Fire ability to pick out specialist and elite enemies amidst the swarms and take them out before they can threaten the team.

More teamwork-minded Veterans can use Voice of Command to knock back their foes, replenishing their Toughness and possibly even reviving downed teammates. Independent Veterans can Infiltrate the Heretic lines, entering stealth and reemerging at just the right moment to either cause havoc or support a vulnerable teammate.

Their grenade selection is as versatile as the rest of their kit. The humble Fragmentation Grenade efficiently deals with large groups of weaker opponents; the Krak Grenade can crack open armored opponents like eggs, while the Smoke Grenade will block line-of-sight for entire squadrons of ranged foes, forcing them to move out of cover. They alone have the training necessary to wield dangerous and temperamental plasma rifles.

Here is a short story of the Veteran.

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• Absolute Xenophobe: Subverted for the Professional - while they still believe in the Imperial Truth, dialogue shows that they are open to coexisting with peaceful xenos and that trading with them isn't something they find abhorrent, though they are against learning the aliens' language and customs.
  • Each Veteran also voices how they believe abhumans to have souls, and sing praises of both Ogryn strength and Ratling sharpshooting... though they'll also often warn against the Ratlings having notoriously Sticky Fingers.
• Achilles' Heel: Tunnel vision. A Veteran's kit typically encourages them to be on the lookout for distant and/or high-priority targets that the other classes usually can't respond to, such as Snipers or Bombers. As a result, unless they're using a build that caters to short-ranged crowd-control, a lot of a Veteran's combat time will be them aiming down their sights at highlighted enemies while hanging back from the group, which leaves them vulnerable to being snuck up on by Specialists designed to pick off stragglers like Pox Hounds or Mutants.
• And This Is for...: Characters with the Cadian background will occasionally belt out a "This is for Cadia!" as a battlecry. Cadian Cut Throats have their unique "For Creed!" as well when using Voice of Command, in honor of their venerable lord commander.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • After Patch 9, venting the Plasma Gun now only costs Toughness, which can be easily replenished.
  • Their Krak grenades have very generous target magnetism bordering on Homing Boulders-level when thrown near Unyielding enemies, or those with Flak or Carapace armor. It's not uncommon for a Veteran to completely whiff an Executor or Bulwark with their throw, and the grenade will still plant itself squarely onto the target regardless.
• Anti-Armor: Krak Grenades not only home in on armored enemies in close proximity and stick to them, but also deal increased damage against them. A single Krak Grenade can take out an Executor even on higher difficulties.
• Attack Pattern Alpha: With the exception of Voice of Command, which just has the Veteran bellowing out morale boosts, their other abilities are regarded as specific military maneuvers with their own codenames. Volley Fire/Executioner Stance is often called out as "Bastion 2-20", and Infiltrate is referred to as "Creeper 3-12". They also use "Alpha 1-9" when planting shaped breaching charges.
• Aura Vision: Their Volley Fire ability automatically highlights all non-Ogryn Elites and Specials within a wide radius to themselves and all teammates in Cohesion to see. With the right feats equipped, Volley Fire will also highlight most ranged enemies as well as Ogryn Elites when activated.
• Badass Boast: Many of their Voice of Command quotes are them making these to bolster their team's courage to fight harder. Of course, there's always the timeless "Cadia stands!" barked out by Veterans hailing from the former fortress world, with Cut Throats being especially fond of this.
• Bayonet Ya: They can do this when equipped with the Helbore lasguns, which have bayonets affixed to their muzzles that can be utilized by pressing the secondary attack key. Marks I and II of the Helbore actually let the Veteran perform a bayonet charge as well by doing this, though the Mk III is wielded with the weapon like a spear instead.
• Beam Spam: The Veteran is most consistently depicted with a lasgun, which is arguably the one best suited for the class given its nature as a marksman weapon.
• Big Guy, Little Guy: Veterans and Ogryn naturally get along, with the Ogryn seeing them as the natural leader, and the Veterans frequently praising their combat prowess.
• BFG: The Veteran has access to both the Bolter and Plasma Gun. Both have absolutely devastating power and appropriately obstruct a lot of their field of view, but also come with their own flavors of drawbacks.
  • Bolters have a limited but manageable ammo capacity, kick like an angry mule, and are slow to ready because they must have their charging handle pulled every time they're taken out before you can do anything with them unless you're in the middle of the reloading process. Said reload process is at least a solid five seconds with a good Reload stat roll, which can feel like an eternity when a horde is coming down on you.
  • Plasma Guns come with their signature overheating which will cause the gun to explode and down the Veteran if not kept in check. Plasma Guns can be cooled by waiting, reloading, or manual venting, but manual venting above a certain heat threshold will burn and damage Toughness that can be dangerous if caught off-guard. Reloading doesn't damage yourself, and fully vents heat, but the procedure can't be reversed once begun and takes 9.5 seconds from start to finish.
• Blood Knight:
  • The Cut Throat Veterans are all about kill or be killed. Most of their quotes tend to have something to do with killing the enemy and making them scream, and their Voice of Command lines are predominantly them exhorting their teammates to messily slaughter the heretics in Cadia's name. Additionally, upon hearing their allies complaining about their injuries, a Cut Throat may even sneer at them if they wanted a real wound that's worth moaning about.
  • Likewise, Loose Cannons love the thrill of combat, but unlike the Cut Throat's vengeful brutality, these lot just love causing carnage for their own gratification, with them typically reveling in combat to the degree that would put off most Zealots. They especially favor sneak attacks via the use of Infiltrate, as their voice lines demonstrate a level of sadistic giddiness that wouldn't sound too out of place in a Khornate warband.
• Borrowing from the Sister Series: They're the rough equivalent of Markus Kruber from Vermintide in terms of general gameplay and class philosophy. With the exception of the "default" Volley Fire talent branch, the two additional trees added with Patch 13 emulate Kruber's Mercenary and Huntsman careers, respectively, with Voice of Command being the rough analogue to the former's Morale Boost, with it being a shout that bolsters the team's survivability, complete with Auto-Revive as a possible addon, while Infiltrate functions nearly identically to Hunter's Prowl as a short-term cloak that provides a massive damage spike when attacking in this state.
• Boxed Crook: Veterans with the Hive Ganger backstory were this even before they were conscripted by Lex Atoma, being drafted into the ranks of the Astra Militarum in exchange for amnesty.
  • Loose Cannon Vets take the cake for having the most shady past among the other 2 veteran personalities as befitting their title. They can remark on missing some "racketeering" opportunities in the middle of a mission or even talking about filching some items in the battlefield to sell on the black market.
• Busman's Vocabulary: Veterans aren't really in the Guard any more, but they still use a lot of old terminology. The Professional voice set in particular makes reference to the "Bastion-22" firing stance when using their Volley Fire ability, and often uses specific, obscure call-outs for the various enemies that you'll learn to recognize over time; "Traxis-1" refers to Scab Snipers, "Traxis-77" to Scab Trappers, and so on. Amusingly, they may occasionally call out "...I don't have a code for that one!" when tagging something like a Mutant or forget the code word and go with "Something-", with Loose Cannons being especially prone to forgetting their enemy designations.
• Buffy Speak: As with forgetting code words, they may also slip into this at times;
  Veteran: [upon spotting/killing a Flamer] "Deltacron... erm... the flame-y one!"
• Card Sharp: Veterans might complain about being totally cleaned out from playing "Darktown Tarot" against the Valkyrie pilot and suspect her of cheating. Loose Cannon Veterans, however, will complain that they're the Card Sharp around here!
• Critical Hit Class: They benefit the most from high crits next to Zealots, with a slew of talents and keystones that boost their critical chance and damage dealt that skew more towards ranged combat instead of melee.
• Cynicism Catalyst: The fall of Cadia is this for a cutthroat Cadian Veteran, who goes from being blindly loyal to the Imperium to realizing that it's all futile in the end.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Going down the middle skill tree unlocks access to the Focus Target keystone and its upgrades. With this keystone active, marking a taggable enemy puts a stacking incoming damage debuff on it that scales with the Veteran's current Focus, up to 20% more damage taken at 5 stacks, while also resetting one's stack count to 1. The Focused Fire talent further raises the stack cap to 8, which results in a maximum damage intake debuff of 32%.
• Dissonant Serenity: The Professional can occasionally be a little too calm under fire, in a way that makes you wonder if they're as sane as they seem. Noteably, they're eerily nonchalant about killing sprees; most other personality types will at least ham it up a little, but the Professional will either wave it off as "what I'm good at," or jokingly imply they're not really even trying.
• Everyone Has Standards: One of the Vet's conversation starters has them express disapproval about how abhumans are treated.
• Experienced Protagonist: It's in the name "Veteran" - while all of the classes inherently have been through something to make Grendyl to figure they're worth taking a chance on for his strike teams, Veterans in particular are characterized as hardened and experienced soldiers. This actually plays into their increased Toughness, which is a character's determination to press on despite the pain.
• Explosive Overclocking: Their Plasma Guns can either be fired charged or uncharged. A fully-charged shot does significantly more damage, but overheats the weapon in a similar mechanic to the Psyker's Peril — heat percentage increases per use, even more if charged, and should Veteran attempt a charged shot when it's at 100%, the gun explodes and downs them, while also dealing damage equivalent to an uncharged blast to enemies nearby. Heat depletes slowly, but it can be vented manually in increments, possibly costing Toughness or Health to do so depending on the weapon's temperature and the player's status^note Venting from above 37% damages the user, with Toughness being prioritized over Health, by attempting an uncharged shot while at max heat which instantly cools the weapon by ~20% for the same Toughness/Health cost, or fully vented by reloading, which has a long animation period.
• Fighting Irish: Unlike her male counterpart who uses a rather commonplace Yorkshire accent, the female Loose Cannon has a distinctively Northern Irish accent (that occasionally lapses into a middle Scottish dialect given her voice actress is from Edinburgh), and is about as violent and cynical as you can get among the available Veteran personalities.
• Friendly Sniper: Played mostly straight with a Professional Veteran who's equipped with marksman weapons, as they tend to be the most friendly out of the three personalities, though even they can still be prone to bouts of abrasiveness depending on who they're talking to. Loose Cannons can give off vibes of this as well, as their responses to being praised are quite chummy, if arrogant, though this is mostly averted for Cutthroats.
• Gathering Steam: How the Focus Target keystone works. With the keystone active, the Veteran will gain 1 stack of Focus every two seconds up to a cap of 5 (8 with the Focused Target talent), and tagging an enemy applies all of their current stacks to it for a Damage-Increasing Debuff, the potency of which increases with the amount of stacks applied. This encourages the Veteran to be selective with their target marking while holding onto Focus if possible, as tagging enemies willy nilly will result in wasting stacks for little gain.
• Grenade Spam: Their whole class seems to have been built with this express purpose, with a bevy of talents that facilitate the use (and resupplying) of grenades. Not only do they start with one of the biggest default grenade stockpile among the classes that use this model of Blitz at three charges, up to four with Grenadier, they can additionally tack on talents such as Demolition Stockpile, Demolition Team, and Field Improvisation to enable resupplying from passive regeneration, Special and Elite kills, and ammo crates, respectively. Lastly, Twinned Blast also gives them a 20% chance to throw two grenades for the price of one, causing further carnage.
• Good Counterpart: To the Traitor Captain. Like the Captains, Veterans still serve as leaders despite having been dishonorably discharged from the Astra Militarum. Both have a sizable pool of replenishing armor that must be burned through in order to damage their comparatively-squishy health, both direct their allies after nearby targets, and both have an ability that involves shouting loudly, knocking down nearby enemies, and replenishing their armor. To top it off, the Veteran and the Traitor Captain are the only characters - so far - able to wield top-level Astra Militarum gear like Power Swords and Plasma Guns.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Inverted, as they are the only class that's consistently depicted with head protection in promotional materials (see picture to the right), even though the player can choose otherwise during gameplay.
• Irony: Although Veterans of all stripes remark constantly about how much they hate Snipers upon killing one, their class as a whole was designed to be exactly that, even being named Sharpshooter for that matter.
• Item Caddy:
  • Patch 13 turned them into this with at least four different talent nodes that allow them to get maximum mileage out of every grenade pickup by being able to carry and throw more than would normally be possible, and even regenerate them passively over time.
  • Played with in regards to the Field Improvisation talent, where the Veteran doesn't even have to be the one carrying or using supplies. If the team has at least one Veteran with the talent, every ammo crate placed down will refill grenades in addition to ammunition, and first aid kits will heal faster, on top of replenishing Toughness and cleansing Corruption, regardless of who deployed them.
• Jack of All Stats: Unlike their squadmates, Veterans have an all-rounded kit and weapon selection that allow them to fill just about any role, from crowd-controlling with shotguns, automatic weapons, and power swords, to anti-armor damage with boltguns and chainswords, and even focusing down high-priority targets at long ranges with Volley Fire. The drawback to this is that, short of the last position, they don't exactly excel at these jobs as much as the other classes either.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: The Cut Throats come across as this, of all people. Their cynical and bitter personality often manifests as Anger Born of Worry rather than callousness, given that they of all three Veteran personalities are actually the most caring towards their teammates, especially the Savant Psyker, if their revive quotes and party banter are anything to go by, even if they're not particularly good at expressing it. Given their Cynicism Catalyst, they of all people would have the most reasons to not want to lose any more allies.
• The Leader: Nominally at any rate, given the lack of a dedicated hierarchy in the Strike Teams, but Veterans are often looked up to by their peers for tactical advisement, and many of their talents reflect their ability to coordinate their teammates in battle. Their Voice of Command ability basically turns them into lite Commissars and provides the group many survivability benefits. Ogryn in particular defer to Veterans at every opportunity; even the brutish Bully always refers to them as "Boss".
• Long-Range Fighter: The clue is in the name. Veterans are in their element if they are able to hang back and pick off high priority targets with increased damage, while their more melee-inclined teammates act as a buffer for them. Even their group buffs are primarily centered around doing gun damage at range, and their class-exclusive Helbore patterns of lasgun^note Kantrael-patterns do increased damage from range too, but are all-class for humans actually do increased damage at long range versus short range.
• Lovable Rogue: Loose Cannon Veterans have an entertaining way with their words and generally manages to be respectful to the other classes, though they're not shy about how they're in the habit of committing petty crime and may have been jailed for being (at least) an accessory to murder.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Unlike the other two personalities, Professionals who are in bleedout sound more bored and annoyed by their injuries than worried and desperate. If anything, they're more bothered by the fact that their allies took their sweet time getting to them than their looming death.
  Professional: A little help? Useless lot.
• The Musketeer: The Veteran is typically shown wielding a lasgun and chainsword in previews. They lean towards ranged combat.
• Never My Fault: All three personalities run afoul of this every now and then, but the Cut Throat in particular seems to live by this trope, with nearly every grievance aimed at them being reattributed towards someone else instead. Teammate getting hit by friendly fire too much? They were in the way of their aim. Then wasting medicae charges or hogging the ammo that someone else was needing instead? The other person would just be wasting it anyway, or they should have gotten to it first if they needed it so badly.
• Noodle Incident: The Professional Veteran supposedly landed themselves in prison after a nondescript incident involving a Commissar, which resulted in them getting court-martialed for it. There's also an incident of some kind at Relay Obscurus that they will offhandedly mention when reviving an ally, presumably a skirmish gone wrong.
• No-Sell: Their Determined passive gives them complete Suppression immunity. Quite the Nerves of Steel to be completely unbothered by being shot at.
• Only Sane Man: Compared to their erstwhile squadmates, even the Cut-throat and Loose Cannon veterans come off as paragons of sanity and maturity. Much of Darktide's comedy is derived from the personality clash between the Veteran and their more-unhinged companions.
  • The Professional has some of the least enthusiastic voicelines for killing sprees in the game. Zealots will loudly boast about how they embody the Emperor's wrath, Ogryn will hoot, holler, and generally have a grand time, and Psykers will rant and rave about their terrifying Warp powers, but the Professional usually dismisses the compliments of their teammates with a calm "It's what I'm paid for".
• The Paranoiac: The Veteran's mindset of how "The agents. Of the enemy. Are EVERYWHERE" would be worrying outside of the Warhammer 40,000 setting, where it's far more true than the Veteran could imagine. Of all three personalities, the Cut Throat wholly embraces this trope, and they won't hesitate to make their opinion known.
  Cut Throat: Trust no one. Trust nothing. Betrayal is inevitable.
• Plasma Cannon: The Veteran's Plasma Gun is extremely powerful, often turning enemies head, arms and torsos into Ludicrous Gibs and dealing even more damage to armored foes. Its shots can even hit enemies that are behind your original target and punch through light cover, making it ideal for taking down ranged enemies who have gotten to cover, and naturally it will also cut a gruesome swathe through a crowd of enemies lined up. However, it also comes with the drawback of heating itself per shot — try to fire when it's overheating, and it explodes, taking down the Veteran. Heat can be vented but costs either health or toughness, or a long reload.
• Pet the Dog: Surprisingly enough, Cut Throats can sometimes be capable of this.
  • If they hailed from Cadia, a Cut Throat can chime in on a conversation regarding Zola and her possible Atoman upbringing. Given what happened to Cadia, they can express genuine sympathy and respect for the Explicator's efforts to save her own homeworld, perhaps the nicest and most sincere statement coming out of their mouths.
  • They also firmly believe that Abhumans have souls just like anyone else, regardless of what Imperium doctrines and propaganda might tell its subjects.
  • A Cut Throat reviving another can have them encouraging the other to keep fighting and the pain will pass. While they do not respond when their ally ask if the pain will pass because they will survive to fight another day, they also don't coldly shoot it down like they do to similar such sentiments on a regular basis either.
  • They also seem to really get along with the idealistic and altruistic Savant Psyker of all people, due to their similar devotions to their duties and sense of discipline. Group banter can have the Cut Throat offering to teach the Savant how to effectively take down their foes, as well as looking out for themselves and each other, as the Emperor's grace can be fickle. As the cherry on top, one possible talking point can have the Cut Throat asking the Savant to give them a Mercy Kill when it's their time to kick the bucket, with the latter initially doubting their intent before being assured by the former that they only made the offer because they trusted them. Given how bitter and cynical a Cut Throat normally is, it says a lot of how highly they regard the Savant compared to literally everyone else.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Operates under the principle of "sever the head; the body dies" in a metaphorical sense that lionizes precision strikes on important enemy lieutenants and their weak spots as some species in the setting can survive actual headshots and even decapitation.
• Reporting Names: The Veteran has a bunch of them for various threats; most are used by the Professional, but may rarely be heard from the Cutthroat too. Loose Cannons will usually bungle them and use the wrong number (for example, they'll call shotgunners' Traxis-12...when there is no Traxis-12), or devolve into Buffy Speak.
  • Sniper: Traxis-1
  • Gunner & Reaper: Traxis-3
  • Shotgunner/Bomber: Traxis-4
  • Rager/Mauler: Traxis-7
  • Flamers: Traxis-66
  • Trappers: Traxis-77
  • Tox Flamers: Deltacron-8
  • Burster: Gamma-315
  • Hounds: Sigma-Minoris-33
  • Plague Ogryn: Theta-65-Gamma
  • Beast of Nurgle: Omega-Minoris-77
  • Chaos Spawn: Praxis-9-Alpha
  • Daemonhost: Omega Minoris
• Sergeant Rock: The Veteran is a hard-bitten, cynical, seasoned soldier to their marrow, but even Cutthroats still take an active leadership role in the team. If your squadron has one or more Ogryn in it, they will always defer to the Veteran as their direct superior.
• Smoke Out: One of the alternative options for their Blitz gear as of Patch 13 are smoke grenades. Smokescreens act as line of sight denial for ranged enemies, and those standing in one will suffer from reduced accuracy.
• The Sneaky Guy: Or Gal if female. As of Patch 13, Veterans can trade their Volley Fire for Infiltrate, a cloaking ability that renders them invisible to enemies for 6 seconds. While Infiltrating, the Veteran moves faster, and with the right upgrades, can do improved burst damage this way, at the cost of automatically decloaking upon landing an attack.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: While all of the Veteran voicesets naturally have been somewhat affected by the brutality they've witnessed in their service, the Cutthroat Veteran is the one who shows it the most, expressing constant distrust toward his teammates along with a resigned anger toward his enemies as his response to his homeworld's destruction and their objective having failed after many millennia. Tellingly, this personality is specifically earmarked as the "canon" choice for a Cadian Veteran in character creation.
• Shovel Strike: As befitting their association with the Astra Militarum, Veterans can use an entrenching tool as a melee weapon. It's fairly effective, too, though you're not likely to see many people using them at higher levels.
• Situational Sword: Smoke Grenades are liable to completely put a stop to many ranged enemies' attempt to kill any rejects inside them and quite a good number of the Specialists as well - however, they do almost nothing against melee enemies, who will also probably push the strike team out of the smoke when in great numbers as well.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Embodied by all three class personalities.
  • Professionals are highly idealistic and proud of their military tradition and bravery in the face of seemingly insurmountable opposition. Despite no longer being part of the Guard, they still firmly believe in its principles and strive to live up to the high standards of their old regiment.
  • Loose Cannons fill the middle ground, as while they're carefree and boisterous, they're only nominally on the side of the good guys and are mostly Only in It for the Money, or to sate their Blood Knight tendencies.
  • Cut Throats are deeply cynical, and have good reasons to be, given their canonical attachments to Cadia. They didn't take the loss of their home world and countless former comrades well, are extremely depressed and distrustful of others, and wield their outward bitterness as some sort of defense mechanism.
• Sticky Bomb: Their Krak Grenades are magnetic and will stick to armored enemies before blowing up on them for huge damage. They also deal extra damage to armored foes, meaning that tagging an Executor or Bulwark (even their shields) will one-shot them.
• Sticky Fingers: The Loose Cannon Veteran's backstory claims that their imprisonment was due to a stockpile thievery gone wrong, which resulted in the accidental murdering of a guardsman. Their general party banter also occasionally has them telling their allies to keep an eye out for something they can filch and smuggle off later, to which the more idealistic lot among the team will protest.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: The Cutthroat Veteran will occasionally deign to compliment or express something resembling care for his teammates while directly afterward making it clear that he does not actually truly trust or like them, no sirree!
• Survivor Guilt: Implied in the case of the Loose Cannon. If partied up with a Fanatic Zealot, who may proclaim the God Emperor to be their salvation, a Loose Cannon will retort by asking where this alleged "salvation" was when they were neck-deep in their platoon's blood.
• Trauma Button: Do not sass or snark about Cadia to any Veteran with Cadia as their homeworld. They will get extremely upset.
• Tsundere: Despite their usual demeanor, Cutthroats do at least appreciate Sefoni as an agreeable combat trainer, whereas most of their allies tend to badmouth the psyker behind her back if given the chance. As per this trope, they will also immediately tell everyone to keep their mouths shut about it.
  Cut Throat: Don't like her, but she is an acceptable trainer.[Beat]Don't tell her I said so.
• Why Am I Ticking?: They can inflict this on enemies by tagging them with a Krak grenade, which will proceed to beep loudly before reducing anything near it into chunky salsa. It only applies to Armored enemies, though — enemies lacking armor won't have the grenade stick to them.
• X-Ray Vision: The Veteran Sharpshooter's Volley Fire ability highlights special, elite and boss enemies while it's active, helping the player pick them out while they're oncoming or obscured by a horde of other enemies. Of course, given that Veterans may be entirely normal and unaugmented human beings, Volley Fire's highlighting is better explained as finely-tuned Hyper-Awareness of high-priority threats rather than true X-Ray Vision.

Zealot

Voiced by (Male): Adam Howden (Agitator), Neil McCaul (Fanatic), James Alexander (Judge)

Voiced by (Female): Clare Corbett (Agitator), Sophie Wilkinson (Fanatic), Haruka Kuroda (Judge)

Filled with zeal and faith, the Zealot is the melee counterpart to the Veteran, charging into close quarters to deliver justice and judgement in equal measure that they might redeem themselves in the Emperor's eyes. Starting with a machine pistol, sword, and stun grenades, the Zealot excels at crowd control, close-ranged mayhem, and high-risk, high-reward combat.

Fury of the Faithful grants them a medium-ranged charge that grants boosted attack speed, Toughness, and a guaranteed melee crit. If they pursue the path of teamwork, they can lead their squadron in a Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude, rapidly recovering the Toughness of all nearby allies and stunlocking nearby enemies. Lastly, Shroudfield allows them to take on the role of a silent assassin, moving through the Heretic ranks before emerging with a devastating blow to assassinate targets of opportunity.

Like the Veteran, the Zealot has a versatile arsenal of grenades to choose from. The Stun Grenade does Exactly What It Says on the Tin, shutting down entire hordes for a precious few moments. The Immolation Grenade lets you give the Scab Bomber and his friends a taste of their own medicine, carpeting the map in purifying flames that decimate unarmored opponents. Blades of Faith replaces the Zealot's grenades with deadly throwing knives that can rapidly shred apart single targets.

Those who survive long enough will find themselves authorized to wield mighty Thunder Hammers and devastating Flamethrowers, further enhancing their lethality - though not their range.

Here is a short story of the Zealot.

---

• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Respawned Judges waiting to be rescued may occasionally plead with their nearby compatriots to save them, albeit begrudgingly so, as they admit it's a great shame to be rendered so helpless. They're also not above begging for you to reach their hand to them while they're desperately hanging off a ledge trying to not fall off.
• The Alcoholic: Possibly unsurprisingly given their Scottish accent, there are some indications that Fanatic Zealots may be a bit too fond of the bottle.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Besides giving them significantly increased damage on their next melee attack, their Chastise the Wicked ability also briefly makes their attacks armor-piercing. This even applies to firearms. However, the effect only lasts a couple of seconds.
• Anti-Frustration Features: When using their Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude, should the channel be interrupted within a second of them starting it and before the first pulse came out, whether manually or because the Zealot was knocked out of it by a disabling enemy, the ability charge will not be lost, which is indicated by the icon remaining lit up instead of becoming darkened as is the case for class powers that are spent and in cooldown.
• Back Stab: Patch 13 opens up this avenue to Zealots, with a dedicated talent branch with nodes that offer bonuses to flanking enemies.
• Badass Normal: Compared to their teammates, the Zealot is the most ordinary member of the squad; their only distinguishing trait is their dedication to the Emperor. This being 40,000, their rock-solid belief does grant them genuine powers, but most of the Zealot's kit simply revolves around getting in the enemy's face and making them hurt. This is enough for them to face off with a fanatical cult of Chaos worshippers, a traitorous regiment of the Imperial Guard, and multiple varieties of Daemon.
• Badass Preacher: Their entire job description. Whether by buffing and supporting the entire team or personally cracking skulls with a Thunder Hammer, the Zealot dispenses both Imperial dogma and bombastic, scenery-chewing ham in equal measure.
• BFS: They have access to the two-handed Eviscerator, just in case the regular chainsword wasn't Chainsaw Good enough. For a more standard flavor, there's the Turtolsky heavy sword that's built for crowd cleaving, but also possessing a special slice that deals high single-target damage and staggers any non-monstrosity enemy who survived it, allowing it to be rather versatile in the hands of a crafty Zealot.
• Blood Knight: Appropriate for the class name, Zealots are always raring for a good fight against heretics, and express the most glee in doing so with their booming shouts and battlecries.
• Borrowing from the Sister Series: Being the Darktide equivalent of Victor Saltzpyre notwithstanding, their Shroudfield talent branch turns the Zealot into an analogue of Kerillian's Shade career from Vermintide 2 of all things, with it emulating the class' invisibility mechanic that enables the player to unleash a single, massively powerful attack to an unsuspecting enemy that more often than not significantly maims if not outright kills them.
• Brave Scot: The Fanatic archetype is aggressively Scottish, and you'd have to be pretty brave to charge a Beast of Nurgle with nothing but a Thunder Hammer. Fittingly, they're the least fazed of the three Zealot archetypes by the things they encounter.
• Captain Ersatz: A bit on the nose given the class' name, of Victor Saltzpyre from Vermintide. Like Saltzpyre, the Zealot is a fervent Church Militant who smites the forces of Chaos in the name of the God Emperor, and even inherits several of the Critical Status Buff mechanics of one of his classes in 2 (of the exact same name, to boot). As the cherry on top, the male Zealot showcased in the official class trailer is bald and has a missing eye.
• Church Militant: Albeit disgraced ones. Zealots are literally Badass Preachers who dispense the teaching of the Imperial Cult and kick arse for the God-Emperor via application of gunfire and a good whack of the hammer.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The Zealot is not a professional soldier, a hulking space ogre, or a Psyker. They are nothing more than very pious followers of the Imperial Cult who have decided that the best way to serve the Emperor is to crack some skulls. Their belief is so strong that they're able to defy death, purge Chaos corruption from themself and their squad, and even repel Daemons.
• Close-Range Combatant: While they have access to much of the Veteran's arsenal, up to and including Bolters, they are most in their element when right in the enemy's face. Zealots are heavily geared towards close quarters, thanks to having a generous amount of powerful melee weapons at their disposal, along with skills that encourage a melee-happy frontliner playstyle. Contrasting the Veteran, who has a readily available ranged damage amplifying skill that falls off if the opponent is too close, the Zealot's version sharply drops off if the opponent isn't close enough. Similarly, unlike the other classes, the Zealot lacks a truly ranged-focused category in his skill tree.
• Critical Hit Class: Despite appearances, Zealots benefit considerably from Critical Hits, whether defensively or offensively. Their Chastise the Wicked ability grants them a guaranteed crit, and many of their feats synergize off of landing criticals to deal high Bleed damage and achieving high Toughness damage reduction. This means that the combat knife of all things is absolutely busted on a high-crit Zealot due to its insanely fast Assassin-type attacks that allow them to spam out Bleed damage while taking relatively little in return from enemy swipes.
• Critical Status Buff: The Zealot's Martyrdom stacks give them a sizable damage boost per missing Wound, as well as increasing attack speeds and Toughness damage reduction if the associated talents are chosen. As Martyrdom can stack up to 7 times, making the most of it means significantly partitioning their maximum health into small chunks by using curios that add more Wounds on top of using the Faith's Fortitude talent, meaning that a Zealot at their most powerful would also be an inch away from dying.
• Dash Attack: Chastise the Wicked plays with this trope. On the one hand, it is not an actual attack on its own, so dashing into an enemy does them no damage, and it in fact can be used as an escape move. On the other, it is highly encouraged to be used to facilitate such an attack, since the Zealot is guaranteed a Critical Hit on the next strike after using the ability.
• Delusions of Eloquence: While the Agitators have a love of Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe, some dialogue rather implies that a few others who actually do know High Gothic realize that this is as butchered as the trope says. Judges are particularly miffed about this, due to some harsh (off-screen) criticism courtesy of Sire Melk.
• Eyepatch of Power: The male Zealot from the class trailer is shown wearing one, and the class-exclusive penance cosmetics added in Patch 9 also provide several eyepatch options.
• Expy: With their fanatical devotion to the God-Emperor, flamers being a class-unique weapon and a similar Sci-Fi Bob Haircut. A female Zealot can almost pass as a member of the Adepta Sororitas - all they're missing is the power armor, really. The eviscerator chainsword is also an available weapon if they want to cosplay as the Sisters Repentia.
  • Another example (that was probably unintentional) when it comes to male Zealots : as noted above, eyepatches are part of the class' available cosmetic options. The Fanatic archetype has a noticeable Scottish accent and is implied to be an alcoholic. And the Fury of the Faithful ability, which is the class' default special skill, allows the Zealot to charge towards an enemy to deliver a guaranteed melee crit. As a result, an eyepatch-wearing, sword-wielding, dark-skinned male Fanatic is basically the Demoman IN SPACE, especially if he's wearing a mostly red-colored outfit to top it all off.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: One of their class-exclusive weapons is the Artemia Mk III Purgation flamer, which lets them roast scores of heretics at the frontline with ease. Since fire damage bypasses armor, it's also surprisingly effective against more protected targets like Executors or Maulers.
• Flechette Storm: Specializing into Blades of Faith replaces the Zealot's grenades with consecrated daggers that they can throw at enemies, giving them significant single-target burst damage capabilities, but removing part of their crowd-control kit. Unlike grenades, thrown daggers can be replenished by killing Elites and Special enemies with melee attacks, or from picking up ammo boxes.
• For Great Justice: What drives them, as far as they interpret the concept.
• Functional Alcoholic: There's a few conversations that has others imply that Fanatic Zealots may be verging on being too fond of strong drink. That being said, it doesn't give them any trouble at shooting scabs between the eyes or smashing an ax into a Plague Ogryn's head like everyone else.
• Gentleman Snarker: The Judge is one of the nicer personalities but can still make some good sarcastic comments such as when someone gets greedy with grabbing ammo.
  "Might I petition for some ammunition, if you have anything to spare, that is?"
• Handwraps of Awesome: To a nearly exaggerated degree, the Zealot class have accessories where their entire forearms are covered with enough bandages that it looks like they are straight up wearing gauntlets comprised of bandages.
• Holy Burns Evil: The Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude ability, when augmented with the nigh-mandatory ^*As taking it is the only way to continue down the Zealot's skill tree to the bottom section where his keystones are. Banishing Light talent, gains the ability to ward off beings touched by the powers of Chaos. Enemy faced with the brandished relic will be stunned and repeatedly staggered, causing them to stumble backwards helplessly for the duration. Not even Monstrosities are immune to this effect, although for balance reasons, they're only knocked back on every second pulse, to limit the potential for it to be abused to knock them off one of the maps Bottomless Pits. The stagger animation is still long enough to effectively stunlock them, however.
• I Am the Noun: Not to be outdone by the Savant Psyker, Judge Zealots have their own "I am Judgment!"
• I Need a Freaking Drink: The Scots-accented Zealots may rarely mention that they could do with a drink. Given everything the characters go through, it's hard to blame them. They may also offer the other Rejects a drink.
• Irish Priest: The Fanatic voices are what you get if you swap out Christianity for the Imperial Cult, add a little bit of the Irish Spirit and a whole heap of Imperial Fundamentalism.
• Irony: Zealots have a low and vocal opinion of enemies hiding, with them seeing it as cowardly. They can do this immediately before using Shroudfield to hide themselves.
• Judge, Jury, and Executioner: The Zealot class as a whole takes this stance to heart, but the Judge voices seem to wholeheartedly embody it.
• Kill It with Fire: They can arm themselves with flamers to deliver the mercy of the God-Emperor via cleansing fire. As of Patch 13, they can also trade their stun grenades for incendiaries that deal additional damage to unarmoured targets.
• Large Ham: Every Zealot voiceset makes it very clear why their class is titled that. Agitator Zealots are fond of liberally applying Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe to aid the grandioseness of their speech, while Fanatics' Scottish accent is nearly self-explanatory for this trope. However, the male Judge voiceset takes the hog...er, cake, with a nigh-unrelenting bombastic delivery that would make him at home in the first Dawn of War.
• Last Chance Hit Point: Their Until Death feat allows them to survive and become invulnerable with one point of health left for five seconds upon taking a lethal hit, once every 90 seconds. Combined with Holy Revenant, which replenishes health by doing damage while Until Death is active, this allows a Zealot who got caught in a bad spot to avoid going down and also heal themselves back up by doing what they do best.
• Liquid Courage: Certain personalities may accuse the Fanatics of deriving their courage from alcohol, which they may in turn freely and shamelessly admit before offering to share some.
• Made of Iron: One of the secondary focuses in the Zealot's skill tree is simply refusing to die, even while at single-digit health totals with talents that dampen or even let him occasionally negate health loss and various forms of Toughness damage reduction.
• The Musketeer: The melee-leaning counterpart to the Veteran, the Zealot carries both ranged and melee weapons but is more melee-focused.
• Nice Guy: The Judge Zealot tends to be a lot more empathetic and reasonable than the other two personalities. Although they do have their own biases, Judges are much less about fire and brimstone and more of a voice of reason, with them acknowledging the social injustices Atoma Prime is rife with. They also treat their Psyker allies with noticeably more respect and consideration than the other classes, despite them typically being stigmatized as abominations in the Imperium.
• Noble Bigot: The Fanatic Zealot. All they want to do is kill the Emperor's enemies and are genuine in their desire to save Tertium. Additionally, they are not only quite polite to their teams, but for a fire and brimstone preacher they tend to dote on their teammates when they aren't screaming their lungs out. The Fanatic even have a unique dialogue stating that they believe that even if abhumans aren't born with souls then the Emperor can grant them one, showing that even with their gung-ho attitude they are capable of being quite compassionate. Unlike the Judge however they're still a jerk to the Psyker.
• No-Sell: Their Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude ability basically turns them and nearby allies invulnerable to all damage and stun provided they can maintain the channel. It also has the added benefit of massively healing everybody's Toughness to full, or if it's already full, giving them a bit extra to help them weather more enemy attacks after the channel has ended. If timed right, this can let them and their allies wade through Bomber or Flamer fire patches with no loss to health or Corruption gain, buy precious seconds when fighting a Daemonhost, as well as laughing off Poxbursters exploding in their face, though the latter two case's knockback effect will cause the channel to end prematurely if the Zealot was the target.
• Pain & Gain: The Martyrdom Keystone turns the Zealot into their Sigmarite counterpart, gaining melee damage, as well as potentially attack speed and toughness damage reduction for each wound's worth of health they're missing.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Zealots of the Imperial Cult they may all be, but the Judge voicesets are a good bit more eglitarian than the others with an explicit distaste of injustice while other Zealots would rather extol toeing whatever is the official Imperial line, and come to appreciate the rest of the strike team (even Psykers).
  • Surprisingly enough, the Agitator can be capable of this. Unlike the Knight Templar Fanatic, who revels in the cleansing of heretics and the corrupted alike, Agitators seek to redeem the lost through Mercy Killing. However wicked and twisted an individual has become, the Agitator fully believes that they can be made pure once again in the eyes of the God-Emperor by relieving them of their wretched existence. Considering the setting, he's probably not wrong.
• Religion is Magic: The Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude literally makes the Zealot's allies in coherency completely invincible while channeling its duration. This has precedence with other particularly-extreme devotees of the God-Emperor.
• Screaming Warrior: Even though nobody has an indoor voice in this game, with the possible exception of the Ogryn, the Zealot still takes the cake for being the single loudest character, with every single line being delivered as bombastic and hammy as possible, exactly like the Vermintide character they are the Captain Ersatz of. They are even referred to as "Shouty" by the Ogryn for good reason.
• Stealth Expert: As of Patch 13, Zealots can trade away Chastise the Wicked for Shroudfield, which makes them invisible to enemies and gives themselves movement speed, finesse damage, and critical chance until they attack, dealing increased backstab damage but decloaking them.
• Support Party Member: With the proper setup, a Zealot can be reworked into a support Combat Medic class in lieu of their battlefield presence. Their Beacon of Purity aura passively cleanses Corruption from all nearby allies up to the current Wound, so long as they remain in Cohesion radius, which can be a lifesaver in resource-strapped or grimoire runs, and Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude is a channeled ability that gradually increases the team's overall damage resistance or combat efficiency, depending on how you spend your points.
• Sword Plant: Their "Meditative Kneel" victory pose has them doing this with a chainsword.
• Thunder Hammer: The franchise's signature Thunder Hammer comes in two flavors: the basic Crucis which has slightly higher raw single-target damage, or the more advanced Ironhelm that's a bit weaker stats-wise, but boasts superior cleave and can carve through trash mobs without losing its charge to strike at Elites and Specials hiding among them.
• Token Evil Teammate: The Agitator archetype is second only to the Psyker Loner at being a huge dick to their teammates. They are also the only personality type that explicitly states the crime they were arrested for in their introductory speech; in their case, they burned down an entire Hab Block for heresy. Given that such measures are routine in the Imperium, one can only assume this was such an obvious miscarriage of justice that even the Imperium had to put their foot down.
• Violent Glaswegian: The Fanatic Zealot has a pronounced Scottish accent (very distinctly Glaswegian if male) and even uses vocabulary much similar to Kerillian's in Vermintide, complete with Scottish epithets like "glaikit" and "scunner" to refer to marked enemies.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: All three personalities are guilty of this to varying degrees, but the Agitator in particular takes the cake due to their tendency to be the loudest voice in the room. However, if various bits of banter are any indication, they're not as well-versed in High Gothic as they like to tell themselves.

Ogryn

Voiced by: Toby Longworth (Bodyguard), Greg Jones (Bully), Tom Dussek (Brawler)

Huge, hulking Heavy Worlders, the Ogryn are not very bright, but exceedingly dangerous to their enemies. Their immense physical might is only matched by their dedication to the Emperor and their determination to protect the lil'uns, their smaller squadmates.

The Ogryn's prodigous strength is the key to all of his available playstyles. The Skullbreaker path turns him into a Lightning Bruiser; Indominatible is a Foe-Tossing Charge that can bust apart even the most formidable enemy formations, and his already-powerful heavy melee strikes are boosted even further, inflicting Bleed and sending enemies sprawling. The Bulgryn path turns him into a fully-fledged (ab)human tank, complete with Loyal Protector, a wide-reaching Taunt that forces enemies to focus on the Ogryn and potentially gives the squad a flat 25% damage buff against any affected foes. Lastly, the Gun Lugger path embraces Orkish philosophy to the maximum, boosting the Ogryn's arsenal of BFGs to ferocious effect.

Though their massive fingers lack the precision and dexterity needed to arm man-sized grenades, the Ogryn is surprisingly inventive, and can compromise with the Big Box of Hurt; why settle for just one grenade when you can throw the whole box? Augmenting this with Bombs Away causes the box of grenades to open and detonate upon striking armored foes. The Ogryn may also choose to turn their strength and size into another advantage by simply throwing a Big Friendly Rock at the enemy; Heretic or not, a fifty-pound slab of Plastcrete is bad for anyone's health. Last but not least, the Frag Bomb is what you get when you take the Veteran's Frag Grenade and scale it up to Ogryn size. Anything unfortunate enough to be near this thing when it goes off is going to wish it was never born.

They are the only ones able to wield the likes of the iconic Ripper Gun; those that prove themselves may find themselves authorized to wield lethal grenadier gauntlets, vicious power mauls, titanic riot shields, and heavy stubbers.

Here is a short story of the Ogryn.

---

• Achilles' Heel:
  • Their general lack of reliable armor penetration and/or burst damage. Where the other three classes tend to have several ways of dealing a lot of damage very quickly to priority targets that also ignore its armor, the only answer an Ogryn has against Monstrosities or massed Elites is the singular Frag Bomb he's allotted, and without external resupplying from pickups or a Veteran's upgraded ammo box, will deprive him of this burst damage button once used. Many Ogryn weapons also lack properties that would enable them to quickly get rid of an approaching problem if it has any additional protection at all.
  • Their arsenal's low accuracy and need to lead shots. Ogryns as a whole tend to struggle against Snipers and Bombers due to their general inability to immediately fire back with any modicum of accuracy. While they do have weapons that can hit distant enemies like Grenadier Gauntlets or Rumblers, they are often slow to fire and/or inaccurate. Not helping matters is that the Ogryn's cumbersome maneuverability and large hitbox mean that they are both slow to respond to such attacks, and more easily hit in turn compared to their teammates, which can be deadly when they're being swarmed by a horde at the same time.
• Adaptational Intelligence: Unlike most other depictions of Ogryns in 40K media, the Ogryn class of Darktide is remarkably intelligent compared to their traditional appearances. Whereas their tabletop counterparts are often described as being either incredibly stupid to the point of inability to perform basic functions without a human supervisor giving them orders, or having the mental maturity of children, Darktide Ogryns exhibit a surprising level of independence and initiative beyond just blindly following commands, even without considering their nature as player characters.
  • The "Voices of Darktide" devblog and certain dialogue events confirm that the Brawler has received the "Bone'ead"^note Biochemical Ogryn Neural Enhancement implant, which increases his intelligence. The other two Ogryn personalities are still conspicuously smarter than most of their hulking brethren, though. One of their in transit animations even has them counting all five fingers on one of their hands^note Nork Deddog, widely considered to be the smartest Ogryn who ever lived in-universe, could only count up to four.
  • Played for laughs when an Ogryn character tells his non-Ogryn squad mates that he likes Hadron's orders. The other classes incredulously ask how he knows what she's asking when they have no idea.
  • This is even relevant in gameplay. Ogryn Rejects are fully capable of operating Auspexes, deploying Servo Skulls, and attaching Data Interrogators, which while admittedly all thoroughly idiot-proofed by Hadron, still represents a level of technical aptitude generally not seen in Ogryns.
  • Even an Non-Player Character further corroborates the increased intelligence of Ogryns within Darktide - Gurry "Brunt" Cernik, an Ogryn, is the Mourningstar's quartermaster, and he's clever enough to invent several weapon types on his own^*Clubs made out of random junk that proved to be quite effective at savaging the traitor hordes. Well, he's probably not a Corrupt Quartermaster, at least.
  • The fluff text for various Ogryn-exclusive cosmetic sets typically depict their eponymous abhumans as being remarkably cunning and intelligent, such that they're capable of feats or schemes previously unheard of for their kind, with the most standout example being Sime, an Armageddon War veteran-turned-mercenary who is smart enough to attempt to curry some kind of favor with Morrow.
• Armor Is Useless: Even for this game, Ogryns are still remarkably lightly-covered, with most of their unlockable apparel being tanktops and padding, and yet still boast the highest effective Toughness and hitpoints combined out of the four classes. On the flip side, their (much more visually-armored) premium cosmetic items don't provide any more protection than the unlockable rags and bandoliers either, despite one of them being fashioned from the tracks and plating of a Leman Russ tank.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Comes in a few flavors. The Ogryn's Big Box of Hurt deals increased damage on impact if the enemy has Carapace or Flak armor, and can be upgraded to release its grenade payload when tossed at said enemies, while the Ripper Gun's bayonet has an associated Blessing that allows it to ignore the target's protection. If all else fails, there are still a plethora of feats that let the Ogryn do bleed damage, which bypasses armor entirely. An Ogryn's sheer size and might also tends to mean that even their unsuited melee weapons' heavy attacks at the worst will cause more damage against armored enemies than unsuited human melee weapons will.
• Aura Vision: Using Loyal Protector automatically highlights all of the taunted enemies in orange for the Ogryn to see.
• Bayonet Ya: The Ripper Gun has an attached bayonet that makes any enemy that comes close (if they survived the automatic shotgun fire) regret it.
• BFG: As expected of Ogryns their firearms are scaled up appropriately and deal devastating damage. Needless to say, these big guns shred through mobs of enemies like wet paper.
  • Their starting weapon is the Kickback (or Thumper Shotgun) essentially a giant M79 grenade launcher loaded with canister rounds. There's also a variant called "Rumbler" which instead fires the proper grenade shells.
  • Their iconic Ripper Guns also make an appearance and are powerful automatic shotguns that can either fire in bursts or unload their magazines onto their opponents.
  • If More Dakka is needed, they can also field Heavy Stubbers, which are not only huge machineguns intended to be used as emplacements but are also twin-linked as well. If one takes a closer look at the model, it appears they may have been ripped from half of the quad-heavy stubber configuration for the Sabre Weapons Battery◊!
• BFS: Played with. Ogryns don't actually use swords in-game, but their Cleavers are large enough to fit the bill and rival an Ork choppa.
• Big Eater: They frequently make mention of rations, praising other party members' kills by saying they'll earn more rations for it. And if they end up killing a Pox Hound or Plague Ogryn, they may ask if they can eat it.
• Bigger Is Better: Ogryns and Veteran can both use shovels as melee weapons, but as is fairly logical, the Ogryn's version is larger and swung with more force, making it cause more damage, more stagger against enemies, and get hampered less by enemy armor.
• The Big Guy: They fill this role in any Strike Team with their huge guns and melee weapons that allow them to protect the lil' 'uns from the enemy hordes, while their superior physique allows them to cart around heavy objective items with ease. They are so big, in fact, that most pieces of man-sized cover won't properly shield Ogryns from enemy gunfire.
• Bitch Slap: Ogryns can perform an open palm slap as the special function of their Bully Clubs which, while doing negligible damage, can cause tremendous Stagger to the enemy hit if aimed at a weak spot. This allows a crafty Ogryn player to basically stun lock just about anything they can consistently nail weak spot slaps on, up to and including Monstrosities, which render their hapless victim entirely defenseless and taking extra damage from the constant Stagger debuff, all while looking absolutely hilarious.
• Blood Knight: The aptly-named Bully Ogryns only care about fighting (and eating, not necessarily in that order), and are quick to look down on "weaklings" who die easily or can't kick as much ass as they can. The only form of respect they will show to their teammates is if those members managed to slaughter enemies by the dozen in succession.
• Boisterous Bruiser: The Ogryns are all big, strong and loudly rejoice any chance to kill heretics.
• Bond One-Liner: The Bodyguard tries.
  Bodyguard: (After killing a Poxburster) Guess we let him off, heh.
• Boulder Bludgeon: Patch 13 enabled the Ogryn to just pick up chunks of rock or debris to use as makeshift throwing weapons via the Big Friendly Rock talent, similar to how they used to use the unmodified Big Box of Hurt. Thrown rocks are not retrievable, but will automatically regenerate after a solid minute, with the flavor text simply explaining it away as the Ogryn picking up new ones as he goes along. Unlike the Big Box, which does extra damage against armored targets, the Big Friendly Rock does more damage versus unprotected enemies, and struggles against Carapace in particular.
• Carry a Big Stick: Ogryns can carry either a huge club, maul (with a slabshield) or power maul as a melee weapon and they are good for dealing high damage and batting enemies aside.
• Claustrophobia: All Ogryns have a racial pre-disposition of Claustrophobia which is seen in the intro cinematics of a mission with them going through some coping motions while everyone else just sits or lazes in their seat in the Valkyrie.
• Close-Range Combatant: By technicality, since most of his guns are pretty much only good at point-blank range, and the class' feats are largely focused on maintaining pressure on the frontline instead of hanging back and doing damage. The only truly "long"-ranged attacks available to the Ogryn are the Rumbler grenade launcher, the Blastoom Grenadier Gauntlets, Big Box of Hurt, and Big Friendly Rock all four of which are not hitscan and projectile travel time has to be accounted for, have low zoom and require careful trajectory calculation, and thus are clunky to use against distant targets, additionally made worse by their generally small "ammo" pool.
• Damage Over Time: The Skullbreaker tree contains several passives that cause enemies near the Ogryn to bleed, which can stack for more damage over time. In addition, the Gun Lugger's Point-Blank Barrage ability can be augmented with an incendiary upgrade which sets enemies on fire.
• Dare to Be Badass: Given their freakish durability, Ogryn reviving their teammates are less "Easy on that wound" and more "Are you just going to let them get away with that?" They will often prompt their allies to quit sniveling and make the enemy hurt twice as hard.
• Deadly Euphemism: Ogryns typically refer to the act of killing an enemy as "crunching" it.
• Don't Explain the Joke: The Bodyguard Ogryns seem to have a tendency to make lame jokes after killing Elites and Specials and, upon receiving no response from their teammates, will come very close to invoking this trope.
  [Upon killing a Flamer] The Flamer is toast! [Beat] Get it?
• Draw Aggro: Their Loyal Protector ability replaces their usual Dash Attack with a shout that taunts all nearby enemies into attacking only them, thus giving their allies some much-needed reprieve. Depending on the build, the taunt can also cause affected enemies to take extra damage from all sources. The Attention Seeker node further down the branch from Loyal Protector also enables them to taunt enemies by shoving them.
• Dumb Muscle: They play the "muscle" part straight, but zig-zag around "dumb" from time to time. While general Ogryns are appropriately depicted as being simple-minded and brutish, all three personalities do demonstrate a surprising level of insight and capacity for creative thinking on occasion, as indicated by their quotes, which may even startle the other classes who were used to the abhumans' image of huge, buffoonish thugs.
• Expy: The Bodyguard Ogryn can be viewed as a grimdark version of the Heavy Weapons Guy, being a cheerful, chummy, and loyal Gentle Giant to his comrades whose brutish strength often belies his surprising level of intellect, is often the spearhead of any big push due to his durability and large weapons (especially so if his spec is the Gun Lugger), and also sporting a thick Russian accent to boot. Taking this even further is the Bodyguard's particular fondness for the Psyker, who's The Smart Guy with, depending on the player's choice, affectations of a German accent, not unlike a certain medic who lost his medical license.
• Extreme Omnivore: Along with their eagerness for food pretty much all of the time, an unrefined sense of taste further fails to inhibit the Ogryn's dietary habits. They express a keen interest in eating things such as dead enemies or even just their military rations, really. A Professional Veteran complaining about the aftertaste of their combat rations sticking with them even though now they've got a bunch of blood in their mouth will lead to an Ogryn just asking if he can have their Veteran's rations if they don't want them.
• Explosive Punch: The Blastoom Grenadier Gauntlet's alternate fire has the Ogryn punch an enemy and then discharge the weapon's inbuilt grenade launcher as the blow lands.
• Foe-Tossing Charge: Their Bull Rush ability has them perform a charge, only stopping before its distance limit by running into a special, elite or boss enemy. The Unstoppable feat lives up to its name by allowing the Ogryn to dash twice as far and disregard anything that's not a boss or monster regardless of how big it is. Anyone else within the area of an Ogryn charging might as well be a bowling pin (and indeed, the penance for running through a sufficiently big mob is appropriately named "Gone Bowling").
• Gameplay and Story Integration: In missions that require moving heavy objects from one place to the other, the Ogryn can carry them faster than the other classes, befitting his abhuman strength and size.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Chaos Hounds are little more than annoyances to the Ogryn; while other classes will scream for assistance while being mauled, the Ogryn just sounds mildly annoyed, and his enormous pool of Health and Toughness means that being nibbled to death will take a while. For balance reasons, he still can't free himself, even though he could probably swing the dog's entire body around one-handed. In the same vein, the Trapper's net is still able to subdue and wrap around an Ogryn despite being sized for a regular human.
  • Lore-wise, the Brawler is the only Ogryn personality to have been augmented with a BONE (Biochemical Ogryn Neural Enhancement) implant, which justifies his increased intellect compared to his tabletop counterparts, while the other two have not, but are still somehow remarkably intelligent by their racial standards. Additionally, the BONE implant itself is a purchasable headgear, and can be fitted onto a Bodyguard or Bully despite neither having canonically had it put into them.
• Gentle Giant: The Bodyguard and the Brawler are quite chummy with their teammates, and the former never talks back if called out for grabbing too much ammo or healing minor wounds. Even the otherwise-brutish Bully will reassure his teammates and say that he won't hurt them while reviving them.
• Giant's Knife; Human's Greatsword: The various Cleavers an Ogryn can equip are decently large combat knives even by Ogryn standards and oversized two-handed falchions by human ones. Ogryn are also able to equip Power Mauls one-handed, Zealots must wield them two-handed.
• Giving Someone the Pointer Finger: Their "Do not mock Ogryn!" victory pose has them shooting a Death Glare at the screen while angrily pointing with their right index finger.
• Good Counterpart: To the (non-plague) varieties of enemy Ogryn units. Each of the three paths on the Ogryn's skilltree largely correlates to one of the three enemies, the Skullbreaker path to the Executor, the Bulgryn path to the Bulwark, and the Gun Lugger path to the Reaper, the latter two being extra noticable when equipped with the Slab Shield and Heavy Stubbers respectively.
• Good Is Dumb:
  • Ogryns are unshakeably loyal to the Imperium, do not flinch in the face of death, and take their job of protecting the little 'uns very seriously. They are also very dimwitted; the smartest Ogryn to ever live could only count to four, though the player Ogryns already seem outstrip that Ogryn in mental capacity.
  • The Bully is the most conventionally intelligent of the three Ogryn personalities, even though he lacks the Bone'ead implant. Appropriately, he is also the most cynical and mean.
• Grenade Launcher: Ogryns can arm themselves with an Ogryn-sized M79 grenade launcher that either fires 20kg canister shells (basically giant shotgun shells) or ones that fire actual grenade shells. They can also get the fearsome Grenadier Gauntlet which is a bastard child of a battering ram and a grenade launcher turned into a Power Fist.
• Grenade Spam: An Ogryn using Point-Blank Barrage with a Rumbler can fill the room with an amount of grenades only slightly less than the ability's ten-second duration. Combine it with a Celerity stimulant for even more boom.
• The Heart: Be you Psyker, Veteran or Zealot, you can rely on the Ogryn; this is reflected in the squad's banter. They are just about the only class who gets along well with everybody else; Veterans respect and rely on the Ogryn for their immense durability and total loyalty, Psykers see them as fellow outsiders to an uncaring Imperium, and Zealots respect their dedication to the Emperor and fearsome physical prowess, albeit sometimes begrudgingly.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Prior to its removal, the Knife Through Butter feat would grant the Ogryn's heavy melee attacks unlimited cleave, allowing them to carve through entire mobs of enemies no matter how dense they are. Even now, the Ogryn's melee weapons are all well-suited to bashing hordes of incoming enemies around at once.
• Heroes Love Dogs: The Bodyguard show signs of this, as their quotes for killing Pox Hounds tend to be more along the lines of gently scolding one's dog for misbehaving. They may also occasionally bring up the topic of requesting Morrow for a pet dog, to which the other Rejects will either respond with skepticism or downplayed agreement.
• Hidden Depths: All three of them have moments that bely their apparent stupidity and imply a much richer inner life than you would think.
  • The Brawler has moments of surprising lucidity, such as commenting that the ferocious, unshielded solar rays outside of the hive "bring out his delicate complexion". He is also the most prone to pondering spiritual questions, such as whether Abhumans have souls. This is probably thanks to his Bone'ead implant.
  • The Bodyguard is very chummy with his teammates and even goes so far as to say that he considers them family. He also still remembers and feels regret over having failed to save his old commander during an engagement. This level of long-term recall is rare from an Ogryn, especially one who lacks the aforementioned implant.
  • The Bully is outwardly hostile and goonish, making fun of his teammates and physically threatening them if they piss him off, something the other two Ogryn personalities never do. He is also the smartest, most erudite of the Ogryn personalities, becomes childishly gleeful whenever he sees a train, and suddenly becomes very reassuring to his teammates when reviving them.
• Hunter of His Own Kind: The Heavyweight talent readily avaliable at the start of the Ogryn's talent tree turns them into this, with a major 30% damage output and damage resistance bonus against enemy Ogryns.
• Husky Russkie: The Bodyguard voice has a distinct Russian (or Vostroyan/Valhallan if you prefer an in-universe example) accent to it and, well, two-legged individuals rarely get huskier than an Ogryn.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Ogryn are virtually always hungry, and will eat virtually anything. They often express a desire to eat their slain enemies, up to and including Plague Ogryns.
• Immune to Flinching: Or at the very least highly resistant to it. The Ogryn's passives give them reduced flinching when shot at by gun-wielding enemies, and being struck by melee attacks won't interrupt their long actions like they would on the other three classes^note Being hit while carrying heavy objects will still cause you to drop them, however. Likewise, they're largely immune to suppression as a mechanic, and won't suffer accuracy loss from being fired upon.
• Incendiary Exponent: With the Point-Blank Barrage ability unlocked and the Light 'em Up talent chosen, the Ogryn's shots fired during its duration will ignite enemies hit.
• Irony: Despite being the physically largest member of the squad, the Devoted Rejects loyalty pack grants the Ogryn Vermintide-themed cosmetics based on Bardin Goreksson, a dwarf.
  • Ogryns are not only unexpectedly able to fix Data Interrogators, but are even the best class at performing the task, because their durability allows them to continue the task unless actually pushed away from the Data Interrogator somehow or downed, while other classes must immediately stop fixing it if struck by a melee attack or shot while out of toughness.
• I Shall Taunt You: The Loyal Protector ability has the Ogryn taunt enemies around them into attacking them in melee, stopping them from attacking other players (unless perhaps their players stand a bit too close to the taunting Ogryn while these enemies attack them..). This has carries the risk of getting the Ogryn completely surrounded, though an Ogryn's pushing power and inherent stamina pool does mean they're one of the best classes to being able to avoid this even when the area is thick with enemies.
• Jerkass to One: None of the Ogryn personalities like the Zealot. Even the Brawler may say "Best work that grut-ead's done!" when a Zealot goes on a killing spree, a marked contrast to their enthusiasm when any other class does it.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: As befitting it’s name, The Bully is a bloodthirsty brute who respects only strength; he looks down and belittles ‘weaklings’. They are also prone to insult and threaten their allies on a far more frequent basis than the other two Ogryn archetypes. That said, the Bully drops his hostile attitude when reviving other players, and is actually the most reassuring of the lot; even the Brawler may sometimes belittle them as 'Snivelers'.
• Lethal Joke Weapon:
  • His Big Box of Hurt might seem silly at first blush, being merely a metal box that is hurled at enemies like a baseball to bean them in the face with. However, the thing is deceptively strong when thrown at enemy weakpoints, and does additional damage if said enemy is armored, which basically encompasses most of the Elites and Specials and a few bosses, whereupon a solid impact will shear off a significant chunk of their HP meter, if not outright killing the more common types in one hit. Not to mention that it has the ability to release all of it's explosive payload and cause even more damage to the enemy if they somehow survived getting hit by a large metal box thrown by an ogryn^OriginallyThe Level 10 Skullbreaker feat "Bomb's Away" makes them even more deadly if thrown at anything armored (including bosses) which will cause the many grenades in the box to actually explode, chunking huge amounts of health off of Plague Ogryns and Beasts of Nurgle.
  • Big Friendly Rock is even more silly at first glance, but remember not only is it a large piece of rubble but is also being thrown by an Ogryn.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: The Bodyguard and Brawler may occasionally indignantly tell their teammates to never bring up again the fact that they blundered off of a ledge and had to be helped back up.
• Loved by All: All class personalities love Ogryns, regardless of their own demeanor and attitude towards each other or their own peers. Nobody has anything particularly mean or harsh to say to any of the Ogryns in group banter or when they get wasteful with supplies, with the worst of complaints being in line with parents gently scolding their children instead. Even the particularly condescending lot like Hadron and Sefoni tend to be more gentle towards Ogryns overall.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: One of their melee weapon options is the power maul and slabshield, an Ogryn-sized riot shield. When deployed, it completely blocks ranged attacks; it can also be planted to No-Sell absolutely anything short of a pouncing Pox Hound, Trapper net, or charging Mutant.
• Megaton Punch: An Ogryn's uppercut (which is the special action of the Cleaver or Latrine Shovel weapons) will send normal enemies flying backward off their feet, and can even Stun Lock a number of taggable enemies - even some monstrosities!
• Mighty Glacier: As the designated tank class of Darktide, the Ogryn is capable of soaking up ridiculous amounts of damage upfront with his large pool of health and Toughness, along with various damage reduction and rapid toughness recovery options readily avaliable in his skill tree, and for dishing it out, he has nigh-universally high crowd control on his melee weapons, devastating (if imprecise) firearms, and skills that greatly improve the destructive capabilities of both, all in exchange for having a relative lack of speed, both in terms of his melee combat skills being focused primarily on landing single heavy attacks, and due to a distinct lack of mobility boosts and tendency towards lower sprint efficiency on his weapons.
• Morality Pet: Despite being an Abhuman, the other Rejects are rather kind to the Ogryn. They also have a noticeable tendency to bring out the best in the Veteran, who treats them with a level of respect and consideration that they never show to anyone else.
• More Dakka:
  • Their Heavy Stubbers represent this trope in their arsenal, giving Ogryns the ability to lay down suppressive fire with their deep magazines and high fire rates, though their accuracy suffers further out due to their Brace aiming mode and short(-ish) effective ranges. The Achlys variant further ramps this up to eleven, with the highest rate of fire in the class and appropriately huge magazines, though it also does the least amount of damage per shot to balance these out.
  • Ogryns with the Point-Blank Barrage ability immediately reload their ranged weapon and then fire and reload it faster for the next ten seconds. With the aid of the Charmed Reload blessing and enough Elites for them or their allies to kill to benefit from the Bruiser talent, an Ogryn using a Heavy Stubber literally won't need to reload until the amount of Elites dries up.
• My Greatest Second Chance: The Brawler talks about how he failed to protect his commanding officer, and while he's not too broken up about being unable to save him, he's eager to do better as a conscripted agent of the Imperium.
• Noodle Incident: The Bodyguard's backstory alludes to the Ogryn winning a battle against Chaos forces after the rest of the guard retreated, only to be rounded up and imprisoned, explaining how a large batch of them wound up in jail.
• Not the Intended Use: The Ogryn's Blitz provides an In-Universe example of this, which is them throwing a box of grenades. No, not a container full of grenades that's rigged for all of them to go off at once or anything, just a box of grenades that they throw at someone to brutally murder them with sheer blunt force trauma. An unlockable talent makes the box spill out its explosive contents after hitting a particularly hard target.
• One-Handed Shotgun Pump: Played with, since the Ogryn doesn't actually have a pump-action shotgun, in the case of the Blastoom Grenadier Gauntlet due to its wrist-mounted design necessitating this type of animation to chamber a new shot. Unlike actual shotguns, the Grenadier Gauntlet was surely made to withstand doing this, as any weapon designed for an Ogryn is also designed to be able to effectively bludgeon.
• Our Ogres Are Hungrier: As the name suggests, Ogryn are basically Science Fantasy versions of ogres. Many of their lines for killing Specialists will have them muse about whether they can get away with eating their corpse.
• Pardon My Klingon: Similarly to the Veteran's "kark" and "frag", Ogryns of all kinds tend to use "grutt" and "grog" as catch-all curse words.
• Porky Pig Pronunciation: Ogryn tend to struggle with big, complicated words and phrases, such as "Astra Militarum", and will generally fall back to "Imperial Guard" instead. A prime example is in the Skullbreaker Class Trailer.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: Barring the Rumbler and Grenadier Gauntlets (and even those are borderline cases, given the travel time of their projectiles and the former's fuse after impact), the Ogryn's firearms selection are largely this.
  • The Kickback, being a shotgun, has predictably pitiful range, where most of its pellets simply poof out of existence when shot at an enemy twenty paces away from the player, but it makes up for this by having one of the highest per-shot damage ratings in the game, where one with good stat rolls can hit for at least 1,500 at point-blank range.
  • The Ripper Gun is a step up from the Kickback, doing high damage at short-to-mid range that can decimate mobs and high-health enemies, but can't hit distant targets like Gunners and Snipers, either.
  • The Heavy Stubber gives the Ogryn substantially More Dakka and actually can hit enemies far back from the horde, but its braced aiming mode basically renders it unable to fire with any modicum of accuracy beyond spitting distance.
• Power Fist: The fearsome Grenadier Gauntlet is not an actual Power Fist, but the Ogryn makes it work as one. The alt-fire has the Ogryn slug his target and fire the grenade launcher on impact, resulting in an Explosive Punch.
• Punched Across the Room: The vast majority of the Ogryn's melee weapons can fling enemies about with ease, especially the Power Maul. After Patch 14, their Blastoom gauntlet has gained the ability to send most human-sized enemies flying a good few feet off the floor with a vicious uppercut.
• Primitive Clubs: Fitting for an individual with simplistic mind, the Ogryn's Bully Club is quite literally just a piece of salvage festooned with numerous bits of spikes and used as a mace. Fittingly, instead of mentioning any Forge World it could come from, they're just described as things Brunt, the Warband's Ogryn quartermaster, made in his spare time.
• Properly Paranoid: The Brawler is convinced that Hadron is watching him for some unknown reason. One random squad conversation has him raise his concerns to the Veteran, whereupon Hadron will hijack the nearest speaker - *in the map*, mind you - and insist she isn't. Rather hilariously, the Veteran they're talking to can sarcastically reassure the Brawler that they didn't hear Hadron's Suspiciously Specific Denial just now, and the Ogryn will take their word for it.
• Ridiculously Potent Explosive: The Ogryn's Frag Bomb resembles an Mk 2 "pineapple" grenade, except about four times as big, befitting of the size difference from an Ogryn to a human being. It explodes with such a tremendous explosion (about 16 meters wide and even higher) that it's doubtful its lethality within its blast radius could really be attributed to fragmentation.
• Rock Beats Laser: Snipers of a hardened traitor guard unit, bombers armed with incendiary grenades or gunners using fully-automatic laser guns - they can all be ended in a moment by an oversized humanoid hurling a piece of a street at them.
• Shield Bash: While using the Slab Shield, he can naturally use it this way while blocking, replacing the weapon's push. He can also use the shield itself as a weapon; all of the Slab Shield's heavy melee attacks involve the Ogryn using it to set about his enemies instead of bothering with his club.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Their Kickbacks are immensely-powerful buckshot throwers that can instantly vaporize small mobs of enemies in a single click of the trigger. Whereas the typical damage per shot of high-level weapons tend to fall within the 300-500 range, Kickbacks can hit well above the thousand mark. However, their destructive power is offset by their pathetically short range, whereupon the pellets will do negligible damage if not none at all just a fair bit past point-blank range. Downplayed with the Ripper Guns, the Mk V version is actually pretty accurate when fired unbraced - but one will have to manage its enormous recoil to successfully use it from a significant range, and the Mk VI fire quite accurately in two-round bursts when unbraced.
• Shovel Strike: Like his fellow ex-Astra Militarum colleague, the Ogryn is also capable of wielding a shovel as his melee weapon, though unlike the Veteran's combat spade, his is specifically a latrine shovel, meaning it would normally be used to dig toilet holes.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Ogryn gear is designed to be as simple as possible, as powerful as possible, and as durable as possible, since it's almost guaranteed to see impromptu service as a makeshift club when the Ogryn runs out of ammo. Forget advanced energy weapons, chainswords, or Magitek staves. The Ogryn gets BFGs that would make the Doomguy blush.
• Smart Bomb: The Frag Bomb option for the Ogryn's grenades have a massive 16m radius and deal incredible damage to anything caught within the blast, essentially clearing out masses of elites, specialists, and poxwalkers. The catch is that you can only hold one at a time.
• Sticky Bomb: Their Rumbler grenade launcher has access to the unique Adhesive Charge blessing, which causes fired explosives to stick to enemy Ogryns and Monstrosities instead of falling to the ground. This lets crafty Ogryn players turn their Evil Counterparts into walking Action Bombs by sticking a valid target who's hiding behind a screen of Poxwalkers (Bulwarks are particularly good targets for this, who will gladly march into hordes with a grenade stuck to their shields), and let the explosives take care of the rest.
• Support Party Member: His Bulgryn path turns him into an offensive tank, trading some of his killing power for a powerful Draw Aggro ability that can buff the whole squad's damage. This forces enemies into choosing between the unenviable task of trying to focus down his ridiculous pool of Health and Toughness or targeting the Ogryn's little'uns.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: In its original incarnation, their Big Box of Hurt can qualify if the Bombs Away feat was equipped, whereupon the container will burst open after hitting a hard target and spill all of its payload out for considerable damage. Patch 13 rolled this into a modifier keystone of the basic ability, with the caveat of the grenades inside spilling out and exploding regardless of what you hit, meaning that it's an unavoidable function should one desire to keep using the Big Box as their Blitz. Also introduced in the same update are more conventional frag grenades that take up the same slot, albeit "Ogryn-sized".
• Took a Level in Cynic: More weathered than the usual childlike Ogryn, these conscripts are prone to grousing over their lot in life and back-talking their handlers.
• Tsundere: The Bully personality is outwardly harsh and verbally abusive, but nearly drops the attitude whenever his team is in danger, only to loudly reassert it whenever one of them calls him nice.
• Uncertain Doom: The Ogryn's short story has the Ogryn "Tig" sent off by his strike team's leader to attack the enemy as a distraction and his leader is certain he's sending Tig off on a Suicide Mission. Unlike the other short stories, which has the titular subjects survive to end up in Inquisitor Grendyl's employ, this one is set at a timeframe which seems present to the events of Darktide with the strike team's leader attempting to re-establish contact with the Mourningstar, removing the Foregone Conclusion aspect of the other short stories' subjects' background that they would inevitably survive prior to getting hired by Grendyl.
• Quick Melee: All Ogryn ranged weapons have some variety of melee attack as their special (or in the case of the grenadier gauntlet, primary) attack, which while typically less effective than outright swapping to their melee weapon, is usually lethal enough to quickly dispatch lesser enemies on it's own, as opposed to the primarily space-creating shoves of the guns of their compatriots.
• Wardrobe Malfunction: The flavor text of the purchasable Brute's Brilliant Armour leggings describes how the Ogryn in question had his pants scorched off by an enemy flamethrower in a previous engagement, thus forcing him to fight the rest of the battle half-naked, much to the dismay of his squadmates.
• Worthy Opponent: All three of the Ogryn's personalities are surprisingly respectful of the Rager, albeit for different reasons; they may comment on this after killing one.
  Bodyguard: Tough little man! Not as tough as Ogryn!
  Brawler: Poor little Sniveller. Looked 'ungry..
  Bully: Liked him! He was dead angry, just like me!
• You Fight Like a Cow: Using Loyal Protector may have the Ogryns belt out several petty insults of this kind towards nearby enemies to goad them into attacking.
  Bodyguard: You hit like a child!
• You No Take Candle: In-game Ogryn dialogue is usually presented as a mix of this and Hulk Speak, due to their low intelligence. Funnily enough, they actually greatly appreciate Hadron giving them orders in this manner despite the demeaning nature of her snarking, with them viewing it as her being thoughtful and considerate of their limited intellect instead of her talking down to them.

Psyker

Voiced by (Male): Greg Jones (Loner), Dan Starkey (Seer), Tashinga Bepete (Savant)

Voiced by (Female): Zehra Jane (Loner), Rachel Atkins (Seer), Jess Nesling (Savant)

Distrusted as much by their allies as they are feared by their enemies, Psykers wield the unnatural powers of the Warp to great effect, shattering the minds (sometimes, quite literally) of their foes. Their sheer versatility allows them to excel at a number of different roles, and their terrifying psychic might will soon remind you why they are so feared.

Their basic ability is Brainburst, upgradable to Brain Rupture, dealing formidable single-target damage that bypasses armor. For a more wide-reaching attack, they may select Smite, a torrent of Palpatinian lightning that can stunlock entire hordes of enemies. Lastly, they may choose Assail, a swarm of foe-seeking crystalline blades that search out and devastate enemies, no matter where they hide.

Unlike the other classes, the Psyker does not dirty their hands with grenades; instead, they have a selection of psychic powers that fill in niche tactical roles. Their basic ability is Psykinetic's Wrath, a blast of kinetic force that staggers enemies and can be upgraded to quell Peril with Venting Shriek. Their second ability is Telekine Shield, a psionic, bullet-absorbing forcefield that can be upgraded to either block enemies from entering completely, or form a dome-shaped barrier around the Psyker and their allies. Lastly, Scrier's Gaze allows the Psyker to gain bonus damage and critical chance over time, at the cost of steadily-mounting Peril.

Here is a short story of the Psyker.

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• Adaptation Distillation: On the tabletop, Perils of the Warp are a catch-all term to refer to potentially disastrous consequences of a Psyker drawing from the Warp to cast spells, which are determined by rolling the dice on the table of the same name, with the negative effects happening upon a Critical Failure roll. Darktide simply depicts it as Psykers blowing up due to Power Incontinence, which roughly corresponds to the Psychic Concussion effect, though there is actually a rather long list of possible Perils that can happen on the tabletop, not all of which are fatal or even very dangerous.
• Always Accurate Attack: Their Brain Burst/Rupture attacks have a defined target lock and will never miss. Their Assail shards generally follow the same principle and will home in on the target's weakspots if applicable, but only within their effective ranges depending on their throwing mode.
• Ambiguous Situation: Seer Psykers seem to be totally convinced that they have a direct mental link to the Emperor himself. Whether or not there's any truth to this is debatable, given the bizarre, unknowable nature of the Warp. On the one hand, they are clearly a Psyker of rare power, and their 'Beloved' knows things that only the Emperor realistically should, such as the fact that he didn't build the Golden Throne, and that he never wanted the Imperium to be a theocracy. On the other, it wouldn't be impossible for certain Warp entities, especially those affiliated with Tzeentch, to have this information, and Tzeentch despises Nurgle. One line has them describe seeing what is very obviously the Impossible Fortress in their dreams, while a voice almost identical to that of their 'Beloved' calls to them - but they also state they can tell the voice is an imitator, leaving the matter vague.
• Anti-Armor: The Surge Staff's lightning not only pierces armor, but actually deals more damage the more heavily armored the target is.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Depending on the source of Peril, most Psyker abilities and basic staff attacks cannot cause them to overload and explode with Perils of the Warp. As long as their Peril meter is at below 97%, casting any non-channeled ability (i.e. anything except staff charged attacks) with the exception of Smite (which will end prematurely) that would otherwise make them go over 100% will just cause the gauge to top out instead of immediately making the Psyker go critical and explode. Knowing and mastering the use of this safe threshold lets the Psyker go absolutely ham with their more dangerous abilities, but failing to do so will just cause them to down (or even kill) themselves instead, therefore creating more headache for their team.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Brain Burst ignores most forms of armor by exploding a target's head for 1000 base damage, although Carapace armor slightly mitigates it to 825.
• Attack Reflector: The aptly-named "Deflector" blessing available to their force swords allows a Psyker to additionally block gunfire and las bolts as they would normal melee attacks.
• Aura Vision: With the Disrupt Destiny keystone active, a random enemy in proximity to the Psyker will be marked with a white aura that persists through walls and other obstructions, allowing them to keep tabs on their target at all times as long as they remain within range, until it is killed.
• Ax-Crazy: The Seer has the strongest shades of this as they think everything except for themselves and their Beloved are figments of their imagination and anyone who tries to convince them otherwise tend to "disappear from their dream". They even admit to having intentionally "disappeared" a psychiatrist who tried treating them.
• Barrier Warrior: With the Telekine Shield ability, Psykers can project large psi barriers in front of them to provide their allies some cover. Telekine Shields are one-way, meaning that allies behind the barrier can still shoot through it to hit enemies, but return fire will be blocked. With specific upgrade nodes, the shield can either stun Specials trying to sneak up on your group, or turned into a dome shape for better coverage.
• Beware the Silly Ones: The Seer is usually rather amusing to listen to, what with their off-the-wall observations and rambling about their Beloved. Every so often, however, they will remind you that they are terrifyingly insane. One statement carries the implication that they may have murdered a psychiatrist who attempted to treat them.
  Seer: I was offering to change your thoughts! I could make you much more positive! Or I could make you quack like a Sprinx Mallard. It'd be no bother!
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The male Loner voice will occasionally argue with the subtitles of his grandiose speeches.
  "I'm seeing rage, fear and foreshortened lifespans... No not- foreshortened lifespans, I said four shortened lifespans! Why are you not paying attention! Look at me, not them!"
  • The female Seer Psyker may ask an Ogryn if he hears music, further elaborating that she hears the music get louder as the strike team comes under attack.
• By-the-Book Cop: The Savant Psyker was this during their tenure with the Enforcers. As the Enforcers are mostly Dirty Cops who took bribes from Atoman nobles and the criminal elements of the Hive to turn a blind eye to their shady dealings, the Savant's idealism and sense of justice put them at odds with their former colleagues, who presumably set them up to be arrested by the Inquisition to get them out of the picture. They still seem to be this even after being recruited into the Inquisition, with them speaking almost obsessively about the importance of following proper protocols instead of the more flexible methods of their peers.
• Chain Lightning:
  • The Surge Staff deals high damage and chains to another enemy for lesser damage, but it stuns both targets.
  • The Smite Blitz deals weak but constant damage and chains to several enemies and stuns them, allowing the Psyker to keep hordes locked down.
• Cloudcuckoolander: All Psykers are all but confirmed to be clinically insane, but the Seer is perhaps the most mentally unhinged of all three personalities due to Warp exposure, with them frequently ranting to themselves, to their unknown Beloved, or just drifting off topic into incomprehensible rambling for seemingly no reason.
• Containment Clothing: Their Psykana tunics are less of mage robes, and more like portable containment units shackled to each of them to prevent the risk of Power Incontinence. Their elaborate headgear and raised collars also serve as psychic dampeners in addition to their main purpose, so as to slightly Nerf a given Psyker's latent powers to prevent accidental leakages that would endanger friendly troops around them.
• Cooldown Manipulation: Their Psykinetic's Wrath ability allows them to decrease their Peril gauge by 50%, and their team aura also reduces the cooldown of their allies' special abilities whenever they kill an Elite enemy.
• Critical Hit Class: They have the highest base critical chance among the four at 7.5%, as well as numerous talents that buff their crit output. Patch 13 also gave them more potential to be this, with a Super Mode in the form of Scrier's Gaze that boosts their critical chance while active, the Prescience aura that buffs the crit chance of their allies in Cohesion, the True Aim talent that guarantees a critical every five weakspot hits, as well as the Disrupt Destiny keystone that offers a critical bonus as long as they can keep generating Precision stacks. These were introduced to further accommodate a Mage Marksman playstyle in addition to the usual staff-wielding casters, though both benefit immensely from criticals regardless.
• Crutch Character: In this case, Crutch Moves:
  • Pre-class rework, Brain Burst annihilated most specialists and Elites in 1-2 hits on lower difficulty levels. However, the same enemies on higher difficulties gain more health to the point where they can survive more Brain Bursts, there wasn't anything that affected Brain Burst's unbuffed base damage, and the players' leveled weaponry will quickly overtake the damage it deals, making it much less useful against Elites/Specialists than a few quick shots to the head by the Veteran. This is in contrast to the various staves that the Psyker gets, which allow them to specialize in a different role from dedicated elite/specialist killer.
  • The Assail Blitz can practically obliterate the group faces everything short of the occasional boss in lower difficulties by itself, with minimal aim and scarce more peril management, but falls off... somewhat on higher difficulties, where the sheer number of enemies, combined with the greater presence of carapace-armored Maulers, bulky traitor Ogryns, and bulky, carapace-armored Ogryn Executors help dull their effectiveness and demand the Psyker player make use of more of their kit and work with their team if they are to prevail.
• Deflector Shields: Their Psykinetic's Wrath can be replaced with Telekine Shield, which spawns a wall of psionic energy that blocks enemy shots but not their own team's attacks. Enemies can still move through it. It can be upgraded to allow 2 shields to be placed down and cause Elites/Specialists that run into it to become stunned, or into a dome shield that protects allies from almost all directions and also heals their Toughness while they're within.
• Discard and Draw: The Surge Staff's ability to chain and stagger several enemies for relatively weak damage got reworked into the Smite Blitz. As a result, the Surge Staff got its ability changed to dealing high armor-piercing damage and stagger to one target, and chaining off to one other target for lesser damage and stagger.
• Doomed Hometown: Irrespective of the home world chosen during character creation, the Savant Psyker's dialogue strongly implies that they grew up in Tertium itself, or at the very least have lived on Atoma Prime for a while. Party banter may sometimes has the Savant reflecting fondly upon Atoman culture and holidays, while lamenting the destruction brought upon Tertium by the forces of Chaos. Furthermore, they frequently mention being part of the Enforcers, a law enforcement group operating on Atoma Prime, and they seem to be as knowledgeable of the underhabs' seedy reputation as the Atoman native Zola, whereas neither of the other two personalities have anything similar to comment on.
• Energy Ball: The Voidstrike Staves allow the Psyker to charge and launch balls of psionic energy that cleave through enemies, dealing Area of Effect when they finally hit a wall and knocking away enemies on their path. It is essentially psychic cannonball, with all that implies when fired down a corridor of enemies.
• Expy: Of Sienna from Vermintide - They're the Token Wizard, most of their psychic staves work identically to Sienna's magical staves, and they have the same "overheat" mechanic when using their abilities.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Due to the stigma surrounding Psykers in-setting, they are shunned by Veterans and Zealots, who often respond with disgust and shame upon aiding or being aided by one of them in combat. Only the Ogryns don't seem to mind their company due to them being too dim and naive to have an opinion on such a matter.
• Fragile Speedster: As the Squishy Wizard of the four classes, Psykers have the lowest combination of health, Toughness, and Stamina, which makes enemy attacks extra punishing to an unattentive player. To compensate for this innate squishiness, Psykers have the shortest stamina regeneration of the four classes, allowing them to make better use of their sprinting and sliding to avoid enemy attacks, and their talent tree have numerous nodes that encourage a dodge-happy play style that synergizes with their nature as a Critical Hit Class, allowing a deft player to weave in and out of the fray while swiftly hacking the enemy to pieces, but also requiring a decent level of experience and game sense to play effectively.
• Freudian Excuse: It's pretty obvious that the Loner's had a hard life even on top of the discrimination toward to psykers that they've had to be careful around to help explain the rampant misanthropy that they exhibit.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: One conversation has the Seer offering to do this in order to help the Cadian Veteran with their depression and cynicism. The Veteran is not enthusiastic about the offer.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Psykers are the only class that can pick glowing blue eyes in their customization options.
• A God Am I: The Loner voice has a serious case of megalomania, telling enemies to cower before them and boasting about the power of their INCOMPARABLE MIND.
• God Was My Co-Pilot: From the tidbits of infomation the Seer Psyker says comes from their "Beloved", it's heavily implied they are in fact in contact with the Emperor himself, or at least, one of his fragments.
• Handicapped Badass: Equipping the Arriestus Solemni cosmetic set gives the Psyker a pegleg. This doesn't hinder their ability to slaughter heretics in the least.
• Hearing Voices: The Seer voice sets seems to believe that they're hearing the God-Emperor of Mankind himself talking to them, usually referred to as "(My) Beloved".
• Heroic RRoD: The Psyker has a near one-to-one copy of Sienna's 'heat gauge' and it operates much the same way with slight differences. Using too many psychic powers still builds up the gauge as normal and if the Psyker exceeds the maximum they will explode, though speed doesn't seem to be reduced in this case. The gauge slowly drains by itself and the Psyker can quickly drain their gauge by meditating, or using their ultimate, but they won't have to sacrifice health to do so. The only other difference between the two is the name, here it's called "Peril(s)" instead of "Overcharge".
• High-Voltage Death: They're capable of dispensing this in two flavors: the Smite Blitz and the Surge staff. Smite deals low damage overall, but is best utilized against whole crowds of enemies who it can stunlock until they die, while Surge staves have an innate bonus against armor (likely due to all of that conductive metal plating) and also auto-target weakspots.
• I Am the Noun:
  • Quoth the Savant: "I am Justice!"
  • Then there's the Loner's "I am Death!"
• In the Hood: As shown in the picture to the right, the Psyker class can wear a hood as an unlockable head cosmetic option, obtained by completing various Penances.
• Insanity Immunity: Being already insane in one way or another, the Loner and Seer Psykers sound perfectly at home when activating their Scrier's Gaze. Contrast this to how starkly different the mostly-sane Savant sound when they're in this state, with their calm and methodical demeanor being altered to something in between their normal selves and a snarling monster.
• Insufferable Genius: The Loners are incredibly haughty for what they are, with them having severe trust issues on top of believing that they of all people know best, due to a lifetime being on the run from various authorities and other horrors of the 41st millennium. For the most part, their teammates either don't take them seriously at best, or find them suffocating to be around at worst.
• Jerkass: The Loner is the most cynical, caustic personality in the game; the only Rejects they spare a kind word for are fellow Psykers.
• Just a Stupid Accent: Despite the Loner and Savant voices using stereotypical German and West Indies accents; neither use anything from the German or French vocabulary.
• Kneel Before Zod: One of the Loner's ability voice lines has them commanding the enemy to kneel before them. Not that the heretics actually can, anyhow.
• Laughing Mad: Amazingly enough, they seem to do this with even greater regularity than the Zealot, typically when racking up large amounts of kills in a short window of time, or when quelling critical levels of Peril. Given the horrible things the Warp can do to your mind, they're probably actually laughing mad from overexposure.
• Large Ham: Oh, yeah. The Psyker carries enough quality pork to feed a Hive City for a fortnight. The Savant is fond of proclaiming judgement upon the heretics; the Loner boasts about the power of their INCOMPARABLE MIND, and the Seer often breaks out into chilling rants about how much fun they're having torturing heretics.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Seer has a few salient observations on the setting they find themselves in. They will also occasionally ask if anyone's hearing the fight music getting louder while a Zerg Rush is approaching.
  Seer: There is only endless war! It cannot be escaped! I have dreamed it! (beat) ..Sorry!
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: Despite their otherwise kooky demeanor, Seer Psykers seem to really get a kick out of the agonized cries of their enemies.
  Seer: Scream! Scream! It sounds nice!
• Ludicrous Gibs: With the exception of Monstrosities, any enemy killed by their Smite Blitz gets turned into chunky salsa. If Smiting a large group of trash mobs, the resulting gore explosions can actually cause moderate framerate drops.
• Mage Marksman: They're capable of using guns in place of a Force Staff, although to less variety than the Veteran and Zealot. Their Scrier's Gaze Combat Ability even focuses on this, putting them into a Super Mode that gives a critical chance boost and stacking damage boost, but causes Peril to constantly increase. It's therefore used best with guns, which don't increase peril.
• Magic Knight: Another Force weapon available to them is the Force Sword, allowing them to slice and dice through enemies with a sword imbued with Psyker powers.
• Magic Missile Storm: Their Assail blitz lets them fire bolts of psi energy at enemies, but runs on replenishing charges instead of being usable at any time. While the psi bolts do hideous damage to unarmored targets, they suffer considerable penalties against Carapace armour, and if spammed will also considerably raise the Psyker's Peril gauge, which limits their use unless complemented by a suitable weapon.
• Magic Staff: With a Force Staff in the Psyker's hands, they're able to hurl balls of psychic energy at their enemies with devastating results. Both to their enemies AND themselves. They even come in multiple flavours, whether you want to chuck explosive orbs, unleash a torrent of blue warpfire, or fry your foes with arcing chains of warp lightning.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: In several ways, owing to their direct inspiration from Vermintide.
  • The Psyker is the only class that can't use grenades at all, meaning that the grenade box pickup is totally useless to them. In place of explosives, they have a set of special "spells" that act more like a second, specialized ranged weapon that can be used infinitely, but runs on a Peril meter that acts as a temporary limiter to how much of it they can continuously fire in a given moment. As a knock-on to this, they're also the only class that has modifier nodes for their Blitz, whereas the other three's grenades or equivalent can't be altered beyond the one major keystone required to progress down the skill trees.
  • Their staves are the only weapons with effectively unlimited ammo, meaning that ammo boxes are also completely useless to this type of Psyker.
• Mighty Glacier: Their Voidstrike staves hit with the rough power of a point-blank cannonball to the face that also ignores enemy armor and Bulwark shields, allowing it to decimate Elites and Specials in just one or two shots, as well as mince hordes with just as many. However, to reach that level of damage, the projectile needs several seconds to charge, and it flies with the velocity of a leisure stroll, meaning that landing hits on distant enemies who are already aware of your presence and/or moving to evade your shots takes significant learning to master, and Lead the Target is often a must to ensure the orb connects where it should.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The World Intro and Rejects Will Rise trailers depict the Psyker with a Munitorum power sword, a weapon that's exclusive to Veterans in the actual game.
• No Eye in Magic: Played with. For Brain Burst to work, the Psyker needs to be able to see their target — but once a target has been established, they no longer need to focus their sight on the enemy when charging and unleashing the attack, allowing the Psyker to pop someone's head from behind cover. If the intended target gets killed before Brain Burst can activate, the Psyker can switch to a new target, but must again get a clear view of them to do so. On a more literal level, the Witchshroud series of head cosmetics also replaces the Psyker's hood with a thick metal face shield that entirely obscures their vision, which for gameplay reasons has no bearing on whether or not the player(s) in question can actually see.
• Noodle Incident: Seer Psykers aren't allowed weapons or sharp implements on the Mourningstar, for unspecified reasons.
• Obfuscating Insanity: Seers act like they're completely convinced that everything around them is a dream, and that they and their 'Beloved' are the only ones who are real. That being said, they make a few waspish jabs at some of their squadmates that imply they're more grounded than their behavior would let on, and just as sick of the Imperium's self-defeating behavior as their Beloved. For instance, they may respond to the Zealot's hostility by saying that the Emperor never wanted a Theocracy, and that their Beloved thinks that the Imperial Cult would get a lot more done if it embraced Psykers instead of rejecting them.
• The Paralyzer: The Smite Blitz is a Chain Lightning attack that doesn't deal much damage at all, but can keep several enemies stunned as long as the attack is being channeled.
• Pet the Dog: Being outcasts and branded as monsters by their very race, Psykers have come to adopt a sympathetic attitude towards abhumans and other mutants, due to them all being "different". A group of Psykers and Ogryns is the only team composition where nobody has anything harsh to say of the other party, due to their shared status as minorities.
  • The Loner, of all people, gets a few moments. The Bully Ogryn may occasionally commiserate with them about how much the world sucks. The Bully Ogryn misinterprets the Loner's surprise at agreeing with him as anger and apologizes, only for the Loner to brush it off and tell the Bully that it isn't his fault. While the Loner has absolutely no love lost for the Imperium, they aren't any more fond of the forces of Chaos, and the only empathy they ever show is for the victims who are caught in the middle of the fighting.
  • The Seer will tell a Cadian veteran that their Beloved says what happened to Cadia wasn't their fault.
• Playing with Fire:
  • Certain Skills allow the Psyker to inflict Soulblaze on enemies, causing them to take Damage Over Time that ignores armor.
  • The Purgatus Force Staves allow the Psyker to use a flamer-like attack on enemies in front of them, dealing constant damage to groups of foes in a medium range and inflicting them with Soulblaze.
• Police Psychic: The Savant used their powers to solve crimes as a law enforcer for the protection of Imperial citizens, despite knowing that he'd be eventually caught no matter how well he tried to hide his abilities.
• Sadist: The Loner and Seer voices both express this in different ways, especially when using the Assail Blitz. Loners revel in what they see as revenge against a cruel galaxy while Seers think that everyone they kill is just a figment of their imagination that they dreamed up specifically to torment. Both have lines where they abandon all pretense and revel in the slaughter they're causing, usually while using their most powerful abilities.
• Sanity Slippage: The gifts granted by the Warp always chip away significant portions of a Psyker's fragile mind. Not even the Savant, the most mentally stable of the Psyker archetypes, is immune to this.
• Seers: It's a given seeing as how there's two voices simply called "Seer".
• Shock and Awe:
  • The Surge Force Staff allows the Psyker to use a lightning attack that hits hard, stuns, deals more damage the more heavily armored an enemy is, and bounces to one other target for weaker damage.
  • The Smite blitz allows the Psyker to fire a constant stream of electricity to stun enemies. Unlike the Surge Staff, this is much weaker but it can chain up to several enemies, keeping them all locked down.
• Shoot the Mage First: Their Brain Burst will try to automatically target Specials and Elites in the line of sight first, making the Psyker excellent at taking down said threats.
• Skill Gate Characters: A combination of an extremely lenient Perils mechanic, practically impossible to mess up Toughness generation skills, ranged weapons and blitzes that require no ammo and very little aim make the Psyker extremely easy to play as either a horde clearer, special killer, or even both, especially on lower difficulties. However, those same abilities (For the most part.) tend to pale in comparison to the damage output the other classes can reach with dedicated builds and gear, and have little to no way to be played better beyond basic positioning and game sense.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Embodied in a single class via the different personalities. The Savant is wholly idealistic. The Loner is deeply cynical. The Seer is...off in their own world.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: The Seer has some positively bloodthirsty lines, usually delivered in a chillingly calm, quiet tone of voice. Their lines for using Assail especially stand out.
  Seer: Find them, for my Beloved.. / I can see yo-o-u!
• Sour Supporter: The Loner voice is easily the most cynical and heretical of the rejects, openly speaking about the Imperium's atrocities, the social decay of the hives, and that the God-Emperor is a corpse.
• Squishy Wizard: Out of the playable classes, they have unique, rule-breaking abilities that significantly alter the flow of the battlefield, and can exclusively use staves that don't use ammo and powerful area hitting effects. However, they have the lowest base health and toughness combination of the classes, making them slightly less durable, and have limited toughness regeneration in melee, relying on Warp-based abilities for almost all of their methods to do so.
• Superpower Meltdown: The Warp is not a toy! Excessive use of Warp powers will quickly increase their Peril level, and unless frequently vented, either manually or through the class ability, they will eventually overload and explode just like their Vermintide counterpart.
• Super Mode: Introduced in Patch 13, Scrier's Gaze replaces the Psyker's class ability with a personal buff that, depending on the talent choice, provides incredible survivability, movement speed, and a damage buff that rapidly ramps up in magnitude the longer they maintain that mode. While in Scrier's Gaze, the Psyker passively generates Peril, which will automatically knock them out of this state if it hits 100%, though kills made while buffed will slow down the meter gain, and there's an upgrade that also considerably reduces the rate at which Peril is accumulated in this state.
• Token Evil Teammate: The Loner is the most unpleasant personality type in the game. They rarely have anything even remotely positive to say about their squadmates, and when they do, it's almost always a Backhanded Compliment of some kind. Some of their comments on the Imperial Cult and the Emperor border on outright heretical, and it's clear that the sort of dangerous megalomania unchecked Psykers tend to develop has set in deep.
• Token Wizard: They are as close as one can get to a "wizard" both in-game and in-setting (for a human, anyhow), with the bulk of their power being drawn from the Warp.
• Voice of the Legion: Activating Scrier's Gaze applies a very noticeable reverberation to the Psyker's voice lines. Considering how it's them channeling something from the Warp to give them an edge in combat, it's more than likely that there are actually several voices speaking in unison.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity:
  • The Loner and the Seer, in differing ways. The Loner is a deeply misanthropic megalomaniac who only seems happy when they're killing heretics. The Seer is convinced that everything around them is a dream they've made up, believe that they've dreamed the enemy up exclusively to torture them, and very casually offers to "help" their teammates with their problems by quite-literally changing their minds for them.
  • Using Scrier's Gaze seems to put even more strain on their already fragmented psyche, with all three personalities belting out threats of death and suffering that's about to befall their enemies. And yes, that includes the normally calm and genial Savant, who seem to get it the worst out of all of them.
• Your Head Asplode: Instead of a grenade, the Psyker gets a special move, the default one being "Brain Burst" which pops the head of most enemies at long range and also ignores the carapace armor of many big targets, thus making the class a premiere specialist killer.

Allies

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As a whole

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• Badass Crew: They have all been hand-picked and assembled by Inquisitor Grendyl to help carry out top secret missions for the Inquisition.
• Mission Control: Surprisingly, there isn't a single character who serves as constant Mission Control; instead, several of them take turns. You're usually overseen by Morrow or Zola, but you might occasionally have Hadron or Masozi as your handler. One mission type even has Hallowette serve as this. And sometimes you get one or more of them at once, which can lead to situations like Zola being forced to play the straight woman to Hallowette's gadfly tendencies, whilst Melk is waffling around in the background to boot.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: Subtle, but there. Inquisitor Grendyl outranks Brahms and her ship and her crew work for him and his warband, but there's a notable division between the two. No one on the warband's side cares much for Alice, the only member of Brahm's crew to regularly interact with them, while Brahms herself shows a general disdain for the direct and heavy-handed warband and fondness for her subordinate.
• Sink or Swim Mentor: The only Mourningstar personnel to even remotely have the vaguest sense of trust when the player steps on board is Zola, and even that takes the player saving her life and submitting to her custody. Morrow doesn't think you're smart enough to use the gear provided for you, Masozi can't be bothered to remember your name, and Hadron straight-up expresses disappointment she wasn't allowed to just kill you the moment you boarded (since you're 30 to 40 seconds late to your meeting with her). That said, each of these verbal beatdowns also takes the time to say, in one way or another, "Prove me wrong". And by max level you'll do just that.

Inquisitor Grendyl

Inquisitor Grendyl

Your mysterious boss. Almost nothing is known about them at this time.

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• Ambiguous Gender: Due to Grendyl's mysterious identity, few actually know if they're a man or woman. Cut Throat Veterans would occasionally refer to them as male before hastily including the other gender out of confusion. That said, the Spanish subtitles of the game seem to imply that the Inquisitor is female, as Rannick would refer to them in the Trust 30 cinematic as "la Inquisidora" instead of the gender-neutral "Inquisidor", though this is likely an oversight.
• The Faceless: Grendyl's first appearance, inducting several convicts into Inquisitorial service, is conducted via a Servitor with a hologram-projected head that switches between voices and appearances - nobody knows what they actually look like.

Interrogator Iven Rannick

Interrogator Iven Rannick

"Did you think you could hide your true nature from me?"

Voiced by: Paul Lichtfield

Inquisitor Grendyl's right-hand man, Interrogator Rannick is responsible for, well, interrogating most of the 'high value' heretics that are brought in alive.

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• The Apprentice: As per his rank, Rannick is Inquisitor Grendyl's direct subordinate and apprentice. Explicator Zola in turn serves as this to him.
• Benevolent Boss: Despite his reputation as The Dreaded, Masozi's casual sassing implies that Rannick actually has a fairly generous sense of humor and tolerates a fair amount of talking back from his underlings. Indeed, his interaction with the player character during the Trust 30 cinematic shows that he can be surprisingly affable if an individual has proven themselves to be loyal to the cause, making him perhaps the nicest out of Grendyl's entire warband thus far.
• Bling of War: As shown during the Trust 30 cutscene, Rannick possesses a customized, ornate Zarona Stub revolver with golden accents and ivory grips.
• Blofeld Ploy: When he summons the player and another acolyte, he declares that one of them will accepted as an agent of the Inquisition, and the other will be executed as a traitor. He pulls out his pistol and levels it at the player, only to then target the other acolyte instead and shoots them dead when they attempt to flee.
• Death Glare: If the Cut Throat Veteran is to be believed, Rannick has a particularly unnerving stare that causes even the most hardened of soldiers to shiver in fear when he gazes in their direction.
• Did You Actually Believe...?: He sounds almost amused when he turns his pistol from you to the traitor when you reach max level, taking a moment to mock them for thinking they'd get away with sabotage on an Imperial ship with Inquisition personnel aboard.
• Excellent Judge of Character: He manages to out the traitor within the Mourningstar's midst. Immediately after he states that he has zero doubts about the player's loyalty before welcoming them to the warband as an official member of the Inquisition.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: He's either this or The Dreaded by reputation, to such an extent that even Morrow seems unnerved by him. As the person responsible for rooting out internal disloyalty, Rannick's not making any friends on the crew. Your teammates seem leery of him, though they don't complain about him as openly as they do about Hadron, Sefoni, or Alice, most likely because doing so would be a pretty good way to fast-track yourself for interrogation and execution.
• Mission Control:
  • He serves as this alongside Morrow in one variant of the Warren 6-19 mission, though his presence seems to be more of a performance audit than to provide any tactical advisement. Morrow is not at all pleased to have an Interrogator breathing down his neck, and will make this displeasure obvious.
  • He also takes over this role from Zola during the latter half of the Orthus Offensive, after temporarily relieving the Explicator of her duties due to the unsanctioned mission she has sent the Strike Team into.
• Number Two: To Grendyl. By extension, this makes him the closest thing you have to a boss on the Mourningstar higher in the chain of command than Zola, Morrow, and Hadron.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Despite his reputation, Rannick is actually quite lenient and forgiving of his underlings' missteps and misbehavior, and certainly not above praising the Rejects for a job well done and giving credit where it is due.
  • Even though Explicator Zola most likely had her personal agenda for launching the unsanctioned Orthus Offensive, Rannick didn't see this as a gross overstepping of her boundaries. Indeed, unlike many of his contemporaries, who would have the Explicator immediately removed from her station and interrogated for treason or possible heresy, he instead let her off rather lightly, all things considered, given that the operation turned out to be a sizable tactical advantage in favor of the Inquisition, even if he still had his doubts regarding her motives.
• Shout-Out: His visual design is almost a dead ringer for Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg of all people. Just look at that hair!

Sergeant Major Morrow

Sergeant Major Morrow

"Never you mind. It ain't good to be askin' questions like that."

Voiced by: Harry Myers

A no-nonsense 'By The Book' soldier, tasked with coordinating many of the counter-cultist operations.

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• Berserk Button: Orks, given his irritation whenever the topic is brought up. Hallowette may bring them up as part of their occasional jabs at each other, which audibly gets under the Sarge's skin. Given the rumors of him being a veteran of the Second War of Armageddon, he would have very good reasons to be leery of the greenskin xenos.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Something that he mentions in one of his opening mission briefings. He encourages the squad to get drunk after they survive their missions. Considering the horrors the players face, it's not exactly a bad idea.
• I'm Not Afraid of You: One of the conversations aboard the Mourningstar has Hallowette threaten Morrow with assassination but he dismisses her as being all bark and no bite who's out of her depth against someone who fought in the Second War for Armageddon.
• Older Than He Looks: Sergeant Morrow might look about a well-kept forty-to-fifty years of age, but a conversation has the squad discuss that he actually fought in the Second War of Armageddon. The Third War of Armageddon started fifty-five years after the second one ended and is still going, so the characters naturally assume there has to be some explanation (such as rejuvenat treatments, or his ship being lost in the Warp) for why he doesn't look around-seventy as he should. Of course, access to things like rejuvenat treatments is one of the upsides of being associated with an Inquisitor who values your skills. A claim can also be occasionally heard that he fought "xenos" on Macragge, likely referring to the First Tyrannic War, which would place him at being over two hundred years old by this point if not for (likely) Warp Travel troubles explaining such an oddity.
• Sergeant Rock: Gives off this kind of energy.
• Shrouded in Myth: There are numerous rumors about Morrow of this nature flying about the Mourningstar's crew, each one more outlandish than the last. While the most common versions of the legend describe Morrow as an Armageddon War veteran (either of the most recent ones), others claim he's fought in the Badab War against Huron Blackheart's Chaos legions, or having battled Tyrannids on Macragge two hundred years ago, among other things. The man himself has neither confirmed nor denied any of these allegations, though the bit about his involvement in the Second War of Armageddon seemed to hold some water, given his reaction to hearing about orks.
• Sole Survivor: One of the (many) rumours floating around Morrow is that he was the sole survivor of a troopship that got stuck in a warpstorm. How accurate any of it is is anyone's guess, and Morrow doesn't seem inclined to settle the matter himself.

Explicator Zola

Explicator Orgustine Zola

Voiced by: Rebecca Perfect

Seemingly an Atoman native, Explicator Zola serves as the executive officer of Inquisitor Grendyl's warband.

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• The Apprentice: As her rank suggests, Zola is Grendyl's appointed protégé, and the third-in-command after the Inquisitor themselves and Interrogator Rannick.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: If the Reject hadn't stumbled across her and pulled that knife out of her shoulder, Zola probably would've been lunch for the poxwalkers or a pox hound. Even after you help her to the Storm Raptor, she makes it very clear that you should not let word get out that a convict saved her life.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Zola is an Atoman native by the sounds of things, or at least has a long history with the planet. She claims she did what she had to do in order to stay in the Water Cartel's good graces, and that if the Water Cartel ever resurfaces then Zola might have an extra side-job for the squad.
• Easily Forgiven: Despite sending the Rejects on what could have potentially ended up as a Suicide Mission, Zola's unsanctioned Orthus Offensive turned out well enough that Rannick absolved her of all transgressions, noting that although her motives remain questionable, she still landed a decisive blow in favor of the Inquisition and should not be punished for it.
• Foil: To the Karnak Twins, based on her provided lore. Both Zola and the Twins are Atoman natives who grew up in Tertium, though the Explicator was of low born and eked out an existence the underhives as a career criminal, while the Twins are strongly implied to have descended from the city's nobles. Both were inducted into a greater fighting force as high-ranking officers, where they would become top lieutenants of their faction leader. Where Zola was recruited by the Inquisition to liberate Tertium, the Twins are tasked with enslaving and corrupting its populace instead. In fact, it was because of these numerous similarities and contrasts between them that sparked such a personal hatred for the Twins within Zola, as she saw a twisted version of herself in them.
• Guest-Star Party Member: In the prologue, she serves as a temporary party member.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Quotes the trope by name in one of her personal diaries as justification for launching the Orthus Offensive behind the Inquisition's back.
• It's Personal:
  • She's implied to have some sort of personal animosity towards Wolfer, given the whole premise of the Orthus Offensive was Zola sending the Strike Teams into the Torrent on intel of the Karnak Twins being present in the area, with orders to kill one and capture the other for interrogation for intel on him. Based on her responses when challenged by Rannick on this, it's quite apparent that Zola despises Wolfer enough to jump at any chance she can get to eliminate him.
  • Her burning hatred of the Karnak Twins stemmed from how much they are both different and alike. Where the Twins descended from the upper classes, Zola was a lowborn Street Urchin, who always had a deep loathing for the privileged lot living above her. Making this worse is their devotion to ideologically-opposite masters with clashing designs for Tertium. Where Zola grew up in and held Tertium near and dear to her heart as her home, the Twins are tasked by the Sixth to enslave and bring it under the heretics' thumb instead, something she's quite desperately fighting to prevent.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Downplayed. She is a hardass with no mercy towards heretics, yet when the player (a prisoner condemned to death) goes out of their way to save her, she does offer them a chance to fight out of gratitude.
• Made of Iron: When you catch up with her again in the prologue, she's had a large knife rammed through her shoulder with enough force to pin her to a crate. Despite having it ripped out and entirely untended, she fights well enough to make it to the Storm Raptor and makes a (seemingly) full recovery in fairly short order.
• Mercy Kill: In the Psyker's short story, we see her deliver the euphemistically named Emperor's Mercy to a broken 'wyrdvane' psyker.
• Reformed Criminal: Prior to joining Inquisitor Grendyl's warband, Zola used to be a seasoned ganger in the Atoman Underhive.
• Revenge Before Reason: The Orthus Offensive was launched as a means for Zola to get at Wolfer personally. The problem is thus twofold, as it's both an unsanctioned operation that puts her entire standing in the Inquisition at risk, and a trap set by the Sixth because they knew of this tendency of hers. It's only through Interrogator Rannick's intervention and the Rejects' own ingenuity and refusal to die that saved them from dying pointlessly.
• Self-Made Woman: In-mission dialogue suggests that Zola dragged herself out of the Atoman Underhive through grit, determination, and doing whatever else she needed to do even if that meant cooperating with the Water Cartel.

Hadron Omega 7- 7

Hadron Omega 7-7

"I have complete confidence in you... (Beat) Was that convincing? I can never tell."

Voiced by: Zigi Ellison

A taciturn and brusque techpriestess, Hadron handles most of the more 'data oriented' assistance, such as overseeing the work of your data-interrogators. She also helps maintain and upgrade your wargear between missions, improving its effectiveness or rerolling its various bonuses.

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• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Seer Psykers may claim that there's a space in their dream where Hadron should be but that they can't see her, implying this might be the case.
• Clock King: Downplayed, but Hadron is a Tech Priest and is therefore obsessed with efficency. She'll even request your execution when you are less than a minute late to her meeting, even noting the exact amount of seconds you are late by.
• Deadpan Snarker: Hadron's tone almost never wavers save for the faintest hints of tetchiness or annoyance, so it's hard to tell if she's being snarky or genuine. She sure comes across as pretty snarky at least.
  Hadron: "Auspex reads unusual contaminant levels in ventilation system... (Beat) Oh, that's you."
• Distinction Without a Difference: For some reason she quite insistently refers to the player squad as "varlets", an antiquated term for both a servant and a rogue or scoundrel.
• Enraged by Idiocy: Expect to get an earful from her if you don't perform to her extremely exacting standards. Nevermind that you're knee deep in Poxwalkers, keep up with that Servo Skull you lazy varlets!
• Equipment Upgrade: Her workstation is where players take their equipment and any materials they've gathered during missions in order to upgrade said equipment. She can increase the quality of an item, extract a perk (destroying the item in the process), replace one of its perks with one you've gathered, and reroll minor blessings (such as the "+X% critical hit chance" effects).
• The Eeyore: Hadron's usual mood can be charitably described as "annoyed and upset", with her main outlet for venting this frustration being snarking at the low intellect of the "varlets" she has to deal with. According to herself, she has been alive and immensely pissed off for almost 400 standard Terran years. However, she does have genuine Pet the Dog moments where her more relaxed side pokes through, usually after doing business with the Rejects at her Shrine.
  Hadron: Existence seems so much more agreeable after our discussions.
• Everyone Has Standards: She's no stranger to annoying people with Techno Babble, but even she finds Enginseer Kayex's cryptic ways of speaking unhelpful at times.
• Insufferable Genius: Techpriests tend to look down on common citizens as-is, nevermind that your squad is made up of former criminals, so she acts like she's Surrounded by Idiots. She can be extremely condescending, and Veterans will sometimes complain that she keeps looking at them as if they're a pile of spare parts awaiting reassignment.
• Older Than They Look: Well, it's hard to tell given she's a techpriest, but her organic components seem to be faring well considering;
  Hadron: [sigh] "So be it. I have been operative for 392.1736 Terran cycles. I have been angry for most of them."
• Pet the Dog: In stark contrast to her usual condescending tone, doing business with Hadron at the Shrine of the Omnissiah will have her treat your characters with a surprising degree of politeness and kindness, even offering the occasional word of encouragement, much like a strict but caring parent doting over their child. She may even praise the Rejects for a job well-done in the instances where she serves as their Mission Control, with the tone of her voice sounding almost proud of their success.
  Hadron: Go. Kill some heretics. Good varlet.
• Shout-Out: One of her random quips is a nod to the "ACCESS DENIED" skit of If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device.
• Suddenly Shouting: In Investigation missions she may experience an unexpected outburst;
  Hadron: "Unleash the power of the servo-skull! (Beat) Apologies. I'm not sure where that came from."
• Techno Babble: She's part of the Mechanicus, it comes with the job. Certain character personalities may even explicitly ask her to spare them the technobabble.
• Translator Buddy: Fulfills this role for Kayex when he's part of the Mission Control, summarizing his technotheology in Layman's Terms for the strike team's benefit.
• Troll: Despite her cold, machine-like demeanor, she is surprisingly sassy. She's also second only to Masozi when it comes to screwing with the squad while they're out on duty. For instance, she may hijack a speaker in the actual level and insist she isn't watching the Brawler Ogryn, right after he tells his squadmates that he thinks she's watching him. She is also prone to breaking down fairly-simple instructions into insultingly stupid You No Take Candle form.
• Wrench Wench: Again, as a techpriestess, being handy with a wrench is part of her job.
• You No Take Candle: Many of her orders are given like this, since Hadron doesn't have a very high opinion of the Strike Team's capacity for problem solving. Amusingly enough, the slow-witted Ogryns actually find her thoughtful and accommodating for giving them orders in this exact manner, as it's in simple enough terms for them to understand.
  Hadron: Take magic box from pocket. Point it at things until it goes green.

Enginseer "Kayex" KX- 8

Enginseer "Kayex" KX-8

A solemn and devout Enginseer of the Adeptus Mechanicus, KX-8 - aka Kayex - was first encountered by the Strike Team in Warren 6-19 Habzone HL-70-04, called upon by Hadron and consulted for his knowledge of power systems, particularly Tertium's. Through his observation, knowledge, and data-gathering, the Strike Team is able to locate a hidden drug lab and shut it down.

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• Cryptic Conversation: Par for the course with the AdMech, KX-8's dialogue is a general mix of Techno Babble and cryptic lamentations about the state of Tertium's machinery. While everything he says technically make sense in context, it frequently becomes too cryptic to be helpful, sometimes to Hadron's annoyance.
  Kayex: With every step, a-closer you tread.
  Hadron: You are certain?
  Kayex: The fusion grid screams at the abused of tech-scuttle and heretic hands. It is in agony.
  Hadron: I am not surprised, given what I have witnessed elsewhere.
• Mission Control: He assumes this role alongside Hadron in one variant of the Warren 6-19 mission, being her technical consultant on the mechanisms of the ward they're operating in and the inner workings of the Moebian Sixth's plague factory.
• Techno Babble: Like Hadron, it comes with being part of the Mechanicus.

Flight Lieutenant Masozi

Flight Lieutenant Gillia Masozi

Voiced by: Liyah Summers

Pilot of the Valkyrie Storm Raptor, Flight Lieutenant Masozi serves as your way of arriving and departing the various mission zones.

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• Card Sharp: Veterans may occasionally protest that Masozi appears to have uncannily good luck when it comes to cards. Loose Cannons in particular may imply that Masozi cheats, though given their Sore Loser attitude, how credible this is is still debatable.
• Getaway Driver: Fulfills this role at the end of certain missions like Olesya did in Vermintide, piloting the team's getaway vehicle that must be boarded to end the level.
• Gunship Rescue: During the prologue, and during certain missions, she'll make use of the Storm Raptor's weapons to clear up some of the heretics for you. Turns out the blessings of Grandfather Nurgle only go so far in the face of vehicle-mounted rocket pods.
• Sassy Black Woman: As seen in the Trust 18 story cutscene, Masozi is revealed to be a dark-skinned young woman. If her dialogue is any indication, Masozi has a very no-nonsense attitude and frequently gives the Rejects the business until they accomplish enough to be worth her time. To put things into perspective, she has enough gall to sass at Rannick of all people, usually during the finale of many missions.
• Signature Team Transport: The Storm Raptor deploys and extracts the team safely from Chaos-infested mission sites, from or back to the Mourningstar.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Similar to Olesya's stagecoach in the first Vermintide, none of the enemies ever seem to acknowledge Masozi's Storm Raptor whatsoever. While there are several instance of the Raptor being parked on an inaccessible platform separated from the rest of the map by a drawbridge, numerous missions will simply have it landing right out in the open and well within reach of the enemy, who will still be trying to kill the Rejects instead. Whereas Olesya's coach can be handwaved as it being rendered invisible to enemy forces via Grey Magic, no such explanation was provided for the Storm Raptor.

Sire Melk

Sir Darius Melk

"Do remember to duck when they start shooting."

Voiced by: David Rintoul

A mysterious individual who doles out challenges to the misfits, which - if completed - reward them with special currency which can in turn be exchanged for items of exceptional quality. Alternately you can pay a smaller sum to receive a randomly chosen ranged or melee weapon.

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• Blue Blood: He has an inherited title (unsurprising, given the Imperium) which certain Rejects (particularly Savant Psykers) tend to be leery of. Certainly, Melk doesn't seem to do a whole lot on the Mourningstar, but the first Tertium Vox Intercept suggests he's got a fair bit of authority over operations.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Sire Melk's storefront sells only items of purple rarity or greater, aside from the 'random' options.
• Insufferable Genius: The Rejects respect Melk for his intellect and loyalty, but for the most part agree that he's got a very big head that makes him insufferable at times. Reflective of this, Melk will usually talk down to your operators when approached, with him being quite scathing towards those he deems Dumb Muscle, though he does show appreciation to the Professional Veteran, the Brawler Ogryn, and the Agitator Zealots for their loyalty to the Imperium. Only the Savant Psyker is considered a fellow intellectual worthy of respect, though ironically they themselves are actually the most leery of him out of all three class personalities.
• Not So Above It All:
  • Melk isn't above cheering the team on from time to time, much to Hallowette's amusement.
  • Although Melk spends the majority of the Ascension Riser 31 mission acting high and mighty to contrast Hallowette's entirely materialistic objectives, he does acquiesce right before the finale to be just as interested in the prismata crystals' monetary value as she is, with him being willing to take a 20-80 cut in her favor after being called out.
• Play Every Day: Challenges expire regularly, with a bonus reward for completing a certain amount within a week, encouraging players to play regularly.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: He has this dynamic with Hallowette, whom he's most usually (begrudgingly) paired with as part of a level's Mission Control, where they will bicker constantly. Typically, Hallowette would get the last laugh, as she knows just the right buttons to press to get under Melk's skin and dismantle his veneer of a high-class noble.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Melk has a very high opinion of himself, but according to a conversation between him and Alice aboard the Mourningstar, Shipmistress Brahms won't give him the time of the day, with Alice claiming her exact words are that she doesn't have time for social climbers.
• The Spymaster: As implied by party banter and eventually confirmed by the new cinematics added in Patch 13, Melk is in charge of coordinating reconnaissance movements in Tertium for the Inquisition, with the Wyrmwood operators being under his command.
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card: Sir Darius Melk, Thrice Decorated for Bravery by Lord Dolmar Martialis, Holder of the Endless March, and Warden of the Crux Mortem.

Sister Prine

Sister Hestia Prine

Voiced by: Yasemin Özdemir

A cleric of the Imperial Ecclesiarchy who oversees the records of Penances aboard the Mourningstar.

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Sefoni

Sefoni

Voiced by: Shelley Longworth

A potent psyker who oversees the Psykhanium, a psychic training arena where the Rejects are sent first to undergo basic training on gameplay mechanics, and may later revisit to practice with their weapons and equipment as well as test out how they perform against certain enemies.

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• Creepy Good: Sefoni has a reputation for freaking out many of the Rejects due to the outrageous things she often says in the Psykhanium, though she's still firmly on the side of the Inquisition. About the only Rejects that seem to like her are Psykers (and sometimes not even then), and the occasional Ogryn (who are too dumb to understand most of her scathing commentary, most likely).
• Justified Tutorial: Whilst the prologue serves as a basic guide to melee and ranged combat by itself, you are also sent to Sefoni to receive additional training shortly after arriving on the Mourningstar. It's in these tutorials that you learn more about suppression, melee chains/combos, dodging, and so on. How justified the tutorial is really depends on class and backstory; a Veteran who grew up in the trenches of Cadia probably doesn't need any guidance on how to use a gun or when to take cover under fire, but a psyker who was dredged out of the slums for sooth-saying a little too accurately probably needs all the help they can get.
• People Jars: If you head into the Psykhanium, you can see her floating in the elevated central tank, rigged up with wires and pipes.
• Smug Super: Like many powerful psykers, Sefoni looks down on non-psykers, or "blunts" as she calls them. She has a very condescending attitude towards the Rejects, with none of the sass or snark that makes Hadron endearing to some/most.
  Sefoni: "I will take care to speak slowly, so that you might understand every other word."
• Training Stage: The Meatgrinder simulation that she provides via the Psykhanium allows the rejects to test their weapons, skills and builds against different enemies to show how much damage they deal as well as what armor/flesh types mitigated the attack, and on the various difficulties as well.
• Virtual Training Simulation: She provides the training simulation for new rejects via the Psykhanium, letting the player learn the basics of the game.

Shipmistress Brahms

Shipmistress Emora Brahms

Voiced by: Katharine Schlessinger

A Rogue Trader and shipmistress of the Mourningstar, which is currently in service of the Inquisition and is likely one of Inquisitor Grendyl's closest and most trusted allies as a result. Little else is known about her, for now. Narrator of the World Intro trailer.

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• Bad Boss: According to Sefoni, House Brahms was never known for its appreciation of servitude, and the Shipmistress is not entirely different. That said, her preferrential treatment of Alice Hallowette (and to an extent, Oska Krall) implies that Brahms can be a Benevolent Boss to those she likes.
  Sefoni: The Brahms family has never much cared for servitude. Lady Emora is no different.
• Bling of War: Her uniform includes a fur trim, gold accessories, and a dramatic updo reminiscent of Mom from Futurama.
• Merchant Prince: Being a Rogue Trader means Brahms is essentially royalty who commands a vast dynasty of untold wealth, and typically possesses enough autonomy to operate independently of the Imperium or its subsidiaries like the Inquisition. According to her own character lore, House Brahms is one of the most prominent and wealthy Rogue Trader dynasties in the sector. Such high esteem is one of several reasons why Sire Melk is so desperate to curry favors with her.
• Mission Control: She fills this role alongside Hadron in one variant of the Mercantile HL-70-04 mission, with the techpriest being in charge of everything, well, technical, and the shipmistress being responsible for relaying operation info to and from her crew to assist the Strike Teams.
• Sour Supporter: Is very vocally not a fan of how Grendyl and his warband operates, considering them inefficient, violent brutes at best, not to mention dragging her ship and her crew into the uprising in the first place.
• Space Pirates: One Ogryn voiceset will comment that she used to be a pirate, but given that it's an Ogryn it's hard to say if this is the truth or if it's just the closest thing to a Rogue Trader that the Ogryn understands. Of course, Rogue Traders and pirates are the same thing half the time anyway.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: With Inquisitor Grendyl's warband. As a Rogue Trader, Brahms is technically not beholden to the Inquisition's demands, and is in fact the ultimate voice of authority aboard the Mourningstar, but the manner in which the Inquisitor is running the show and the brewing heresy going on down in Atoma Prime mean that the Shipmistress' hands are tied whether she enjoys it or not.

Quartermaster Brunt

Gurry "Brunt" Cernik

The Inquisition's chief quartermaster and occasional inventor of Ogryn-sized weapons.

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• The Big Guy: Heavily implied to be the Inquisition's top muscle as well, given how he's present during Rannick's investigation of possible heretics aboard the Mourningstar.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Rather downplayed, but Brunt's various models of the Bully Club does demonstrate a surprising level of inventiveness for an Ogryn. He's also noted to be the one in charge of refurbishing salvaged weaponry for the Rejects' use, including the considerably more complex human-sized equipment and Psyker staves, which implies a level of technical know-how far outstripping that of most Ogryns in-universe.
• The Ghost: He's the one core member of the Inquisition who has the least screen time thus far, with his scant appearance being briefly during the introductory cutscene for the Armoury introduced in Update 13, and kicking in the door for Zola and Rannick in the Trust 14 cinematic.
• Odd Name Out: His name stands out among most Ogryns due to him having an actual first and last name that sounds vaguely human instead of coming across as various crude noises, as well as an alias sandwiched in between them. This was the holdover from the earlier design of Darktide, where Brunt was originally intended to be a human hailing from Catachan, where such naming convention is the norm.

"Commodore" Alice Hallowette

Alice Hallowette

Voiced by: Lowenna Melrose

The ship's purser and overseer of the cosmetics store.

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• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Savant Psykers will note that Alice's prices stop just short of being so high as to be illegal. A little self-aware lampshading of predatory Revenue-Enhancing Devices pricing, perhaps.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: It's not even clear if she's an actual commodore under Lex Atoma or not, and her supposed rank is almost always referred to in quotations, but in any case her business M.O. is described as being closer to a merchant at best and pirate at worst.
• Friend in the Black Market: Being a Rogue Trader's purser means she has contacts in just about every market and can acquire almost anything for the right price. This not only justifies her maintaining the cash shop full of exclusive goods but is frequently exploited by members of the Inquisitorial warband.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Shipmistress Brahms is the only person of note on the Mourningstar that actually likes her, with everyone else treating her with something between indifference and annoyance. It's implied that Masozi is at least cordial with her as well, as random banter between the two can have the Flight Lieutenant agreeing to share a rare exotic brandy that the purser managed to procure for her.
• The Gadfly: She has this energy about her, asking you to not tell Rannick about the business she does - and in the same breath saying she doesn't care if you do tell him, probably because it'll annoy him. Likely Rannick can't do anything about her since she answers to Shipmistress Brahms, not him.
• Merchant Prince: Hallowette is implied to be nobility of some sort, or at the very least extremely wealthy and influential. She's typically referred to as "Lady Hallowette" by the Mourningstar's commanding staff in the same vein as they would Melk and his own title, and she's got enough clout to earn the ear of Shipmistress Brahms, something her esteemed counterpart could only dream of. Moreover, Hallowette seems to possess a level of tacit authority over the Inquisition such that she can just insert herself into any operation she likes or outright requisition Reject strike teams for her own ends (seen in some variants of the Ascension Riser 31 mission), while the Mourningstar's officers can only begrudgingly tolerate her antics instead of pulling rank to have her removed from the war table.
• Money Fetish: Rather appropriately for a character whose presence is predominantly meant to facilitate the game's microtransactions, Hallowette speaks excessively about money, from fleecing the Rejects of their Aquilas for cosmetics, to butting into the running of sanctioned operations if there is but a hint of profit being made. If she's your Mission Control, chances are high that she will express more concern about getting her hands on whatever valuable item it was the Strike Team was sent to retrieve, than the operation or the safety of the Rejects themselves. Her fellow mission coordinator (usually Melk) will almost always call her out on this.
• Missing Steps Plan: She seems to think about how valuable something could be before the logistics of actually acquiring or selling it. She needs help coming up with a way for the Rejects to bypass the trains in the Ascension Riser Raid mission, expresses her intentions to steal an abandoned Leman Russ tank in the same mission despite the only buyer for lightyears being an inquisitor (who is also the only person with the manpower to reclaim it or have it crewed), and even calls dibs on any of the uncontaminated party drugs being used to spread The Virus in the Carnival Raid much to the consternation of the other mission coordinators. What she is shown selling is presumably from her schemes that did pan out and is typically a lot less unreasonable to acquire.
• Mission Control: Not in any official capacity as far as the Inquisition is concerned. Due to her Money Fetish, Hallowette can appear as your mission coordinator (alongside Melk) during certain operations, where she would be more concerned about the valuable items the Strike Team is sent to investigate, rather than the actual operation itself.
• Revenue-Enhancing Devices: She oversees the premium cosmetic cash store, just across from the in-game currency cosmetic store, using the premium currency that is Moebian Aquilas - though she pronounces it more like "A-quill-ers".
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: According to the Rejects Alice is Shipmistress Brahms's purser, or head of finance, logistics, and administration. This puts her on roughly the same level as Rannick in terms of shipboard authority, so everyone except Grendyl and possibly Rannick is forced to just put up with her antics.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Of Melk, with whom she usually shares the role of Mission Control with. Their bickering usually involves Melk trying to assert his authority over her and the Strike Team, while the Commodore would fire back with snarky remarks that fluster and annoy him into Stunned Silence.

Oska Krall

Oska Krall

"I sculpt in blood and bone. Peeling back fleshy illusion to reveal shining truth hidden within. "

Voiced by: Lars Knudsen

The ship's barber-chirurgeon, Oska can help Rejects switch their appearance up, whether it's as simple as a fresh haircut and some dye or some complex facial reconstruction. He's quite pleasant and cheery, if... slightly worrying, at times.

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• Human Resources: He may occasionally ask how attached you are to your arms.
• Mad Doctor: Crosses with Mad Artist as well, as he views his macabre business as more of a creative expression than a medical procedure, with his introductory cutscene has him spouting artistic flair while going to town on a hapless Zealot, presumably without any anesthetic involved given the agonized reaction of his "client".
• Mission Control: He serves as Zola's expert on the local hive gangers in one version of the Warren 6-19 Disruption mission.

Mara Vinci

Mara Vinci

Voiced by: Lauren O'Neill

The Reject assigned to the Commissary, Mara will trade Ordo Dockets for new Operative and Weapon Cosmetics. She also happens to be the traitor aboard the ship, and upon reaching Level 30 she will be executed and pressed back into service as Atonement Unit MV 1.

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• And I Must Scream: Subverted. She's made into a servitor for betraying the Inquisition, meaning she's lucky enough to be lobotimized... after being shot in the head.
• Blofeld Ploy: Victim of an Inversion of this.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: See And I Must Scream. Although given that she was executed before becoming a Servitor, this is debatable.
• Klingon Promotion: May be how she got to be in the Inquisition's eyes in the first place, besides the transmissions she sent.
• Meaningful Background Event: She doesn't keep showing up in every cutscene for a reason. She's the traitor aboard the Mourningstar. Her irreverence of the Emperor in one of her shop exit lines also hint at this too.
• Reforged into a Minion: After she's shot as the Traitor by Rannick, she'll still be in the Commissary... but rebuilt as a servitor forever loyal to the Imperium.
• Remember the New Guy?: Players who picked up the game prior to Update 11 won't be given much context into who she is, as the merchant stall she operates didn't exist back then and their only interaction with her was via the game's disjointed Trust cinematics. Even after the Commissary was implemented in its current state, it was originally manned by Peddler 138/143 before being replaced with a generic female Servitor, with Atonement Unit MV 1 being yet another replacement installed as of Update 11.
• Walking Spoiler: She's the traitor aboard the Mourningstar.

The Medicae Servitors

Medicae Servitors

Voiced by: David Shaw Parker (Male) / Nicolette McKenzie (Female)

Due to the current Ban on A.I. in the 40th Millennium, and as per the Treaty of Mars, no true self-improving machine intelligence is allowed to exist in the Imperium. However, they have circumvented the lack of robots by taking certain "unwanted" personnel and "converting" them into cybernetic automatons. Some of these servitors work the Medicae stations found throughout the Hive City of Tertium.

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• And I Must Scream: Unlike the usual servitor that is lobotomized into a mindless husk^note mainly because they used to be criminals and convicts just like you. Some of the dialogue from these poor bastards implies that they may still have vestiges of their previous consciousness trapped within.
  Medicae Servitor: "Pieces of my mind are floating away. Please help. Please".
• Auto Doc: They function as these for the player characters, allowing them to heal up to full health and cleanse any corruption as long as they have charges remaining.
• Body Horror: Reduced to nothing but a head and torso stuffed in a metal box and connected to many metal pipes and wires.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Subverted. Even though fluff material claims that all humans made into servitors are lobotomized and their brains reprogrammed to turn them into mindless menial drones, whatever process done on these lot apparently didn't hold, as they retain enough of their consciousness to be aware of the state they're in, and are utterly horrified by their inability to do anything about it other than hopelessly wailing and begging to anyone who may listen in-between their programmed lines.

Moebian 21st Regiment

Moebian 21st Regiment

An Imperial Guard regiment specializing in amphibious operations which is reflected by their pale blue fatigues and rebreathers, they were on a rare supply stop in Atoma when the traitor regiment Moebian Sixth and the Admonition cult began their uprising. The regiment find themselves being directed by Rannick as Inquisitor Grendyl's additional muscle in the battle for Tertium. The rejects encounter them often in the start of specific missions and the less fortunate members along the way.

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• Badass Preacher: Like many other fighting forces of the Astra Militarum, the 21st do possess numerous chaplains in their ranks who dispense spiritual guidance and comfort for their fellows, in addition to fighting on the frontlines alongside their brethren. Unlike the playable Zealots, however, these chaplains are garbed in standard infantry flak armor instead of clerical robes.
• Blue Is Heroic: Their standard equipment is predominantly blue due to their nature as marines and amphibious units, and they're loyal to the Imperium as far as the game is concerned.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Rebreathers are a part of the regiment's culture, stemming from long years of fighting in the oceanic hive world of Incron.
• Tank Goodness: They make use of the Leman Russ "Demolisher" variant in holding several chokepoints across the Hive.
• The Cavalry: They arrive in the end of specific missions where they establish a foothold after the Rejects clear the area.
• Red Shirt: Ironically enough for a faction that almost exclusively wears blue. If they're not simply holding the line in many maps, members of the 21st are frequently seen lying deceased further in, with their deaths being used to further the narrative that the heretics are brutal and even the best of the best could fall. Also applies to the four unnamed Guardsmen featured in the game's pre-release trailers, who were sent into the deep hives under Rannick's orders to investigate signs of heresy, only to be killed by a Chaos Spawn before they could extract.

Enemies

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As a whole

The corruption and heresy that has spread throughout Hive Tertium is insidious and takes the form of a Nurgle cult, consisting of plague-infested Moebian Sixth 'scab' renegades and the 'dreg' militia members of the Admonition cult that the Moebians have been training to bolster their ranks. The following section serves to document tropes shared by the enemy as a whole, with several subsections for the various enemy types below.

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In General

• Adaptational Wimp: Canonically, most, if not all of Nurgle's forces are incredibly resilient, with a single Plague Zombie being a tough-to-kill foe on its own accord. Here, Plague Zombies drop like flies to standard Imperial weaponry like Lasguns and even Daemonhosts and Beasts of Nurgle can be reasonably taken out by gunfire.
• Armored But Frail: Applies to the Scabs, but only relatively, most of whom possess slightly lower raw hitpoints compared to their direct Dreg counterparts, but make up for this shortcoming by being more covered in Flak armor.
• Badass Army: In contrast to most Lost and the Damned units the Moebian Sixth is a terrifyingly organized and sophisticated fighting force with many different elite soldiers backed by their cannon fodder and terrifying beasts of battle; their fall to Chaos has cost them none of their tactical acumen as a fallen Imperial Guard regiment, they operate with strict unit cohesion and effective tactics against their former comrades, and have seized massive portions of Hive Tertium thanks to their skill at arms and rapid mobilization. They also aren't just torching and looting, they are specifically trying to avoid damage to major infrastructure (such as the Leman Russ factories) so they can later restart production of weapons and materiel should they manage to conquer the planet entirely.
• Bald of Evil: A side effect of plague exposure seems to be hair loss, given how most Poxwalkers seem to only have a few strands remaining at best, and the Dregs are largely bald to a man, while those who still have hair don't have a lot left.
• Beam Spam: Scabs as a whole tend to favor lasguns over standard ballistic weapons, with the most notable examples being the Stalkers, Shooters and Gunner units. Those equipped with ballistic firearms do exist, such as the Shotgunner, but are less common.
• Body Horror: Given their worship of Nurgle, the heretic forces are all basically rotting alive, with most units brandishing huge, bleeding sores, or gaping wounds that often result in missing appendages or facial features, with only the unholy blessing of the Grandfather keeping their bodies from completely disintegrating. The less covered-up Dregs tend to feature diseased skin and boils around their arms and legs, while the few Scabs that don't wear full helmets are usually skeletal of visage, with most of their lips and noses having rotten away. And that's not even getting to the Poxwalkers and other corrupted monstrosities they employ in their ranks.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Gunmetal gray with green accents and lighting for Scab units, and Dregs wear yellow. Unaffiliated Chaos units tend to be represented as various shades of green.
• Composite Character: The appearance of the Moebian 6th is based upon the more recent design for traitor guardsmen from Blackstone Fortress, but also incorporates elements of the older Vraksian traitor militia from Siege of Vraks (gas masks, Nurgle worship and "poxhounds" that strongly resemble the Hounds of Xaphan).
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Part of the Moebian Sixth's motivation in going rogue to serve Chaos, because after serving the Imperium in a grueling amount of tours that resulted in a lot of trauma, physical and psychological, they find their efforts ignored and unknown by the Imperial populace at the Hive due to the Imperial Administratum keeping the details of the conflict they participated in silent so as to not generate public alarm.
• Elite Mooks: In similar fashion to Vermintide, they field specialists that can harass the party in different ways. The Scabs are also this among the traitor forces in-universe, as they used to be a professional fighting force of the Astra Militarum, while the Dregs are former hive citizens conscripted as militia to bolster their ranks, and thus have very little training, if any at all.
• Evil Smells Bad: Of course, given the Chaos God they're in service to. Party banter in combat can have some of the Rejects complaining of the rankness of their enemies, which actually says something considering how they themselves aren't particularly paragons of personal hygiene.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Gunners, Shotgunners, and a few others have noticeably lower, more gravelly voices than the common infantry. The Bulwark, Reaper, and Executor in particularly sound noticeably deeper than their Inquisitorial counterparts.
• Evil Sounds Raspy: The Elites and Specialists that don't fall under the above tend to fall into this instead; Flamers and Trappers in particular.
• Expy: As a Chaos Regiment of soldiers who follow Imperial Guard Doctrines, fight with surprisingly discipline and efficiency, conquer rather then destroy wholesale, they are very similar to the Blood Pact, except Nurgle-aligned. They were even created by the same person.
• Facial Horror: More than a few enemies have some manner of facial disfigurement due to Nurgle's gifts, with the loss of noses and lips being very common. You can make this even worse if you attack their heads without killing them, blowing/slicing off bits of their faces and scalp.
• Fallen Hero: Before their fall to Chaos, the Sixth used to be one of the elite, the bravest and most loyal regiments of the Moebian regiments, with countless men and women giving their lives in bloody conflicts of the Fringe War to protect the Domain and the Imperium at large. That their heroism and sacrifice were largely snubbed by the Adeptus Administratum and replaced with sterilized propaganda, combined with their Warp exposure, eventually swayed them into the arms of Nurgle, and now they have returned home to Atoma Prime to claim it in honor of their patron.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Most of the renegade Moebians wear these, and it even forms the symbol of Nurgle with the goggles and mouthpiece if viewed from a correct angle. Gunners have three glowing green lenses on their helmets, also somewhat resembling the symbol of Nurgle whilst also being appropriately-coloured.
• Mini-Boss: The "Monstrosity" enemy category is filled with powerful, durable foes that require the whole team working together in order to defeat. Their arrival is even accompanied by a health meter displaying their name.
• Power Born of Madness: Enemies with the "Maniac" armor type (Dreg Ragers, Scab Trappers, Scab Flamers, Dreg Tox Flamers, Mutants) are insane and rush into the fray with disregard to their own safety. This particular armor type does have resistance to certain weapons, which means their insanity allows them to mitigate incoming damage.
• Pragmatic Evil: Unlike most heretical hordes, they're actively avoiding destroying important infrastructure, such as factories for Leman Russ tanks, under the reasoning that after they've secured their hold on Hive Tertium, they'll be able to make use of those for themselves.
• Renegade Splinter Faction: They are a former Imperial guardsmen regiment who turned to worshipping Nurgle.
• Spikes of Villainy: Par for the course given their worship of Chaos. Most enemy types above the common Poxwalkers and Groaners will be sporting at least some spiky elements to their garb, and those bearing armour excessively so. Such is their fondness for pointy implements that Hadron and some Ogryns may refer to them as "spiky people".
• Trojan Horse: How they managed to take over much of Tertium's crucial systems. The Sixth regiment was originally reassigned under orders of Lord Margrave, who was entirely unaware of their fall to Chaos, to quell the uprising of the Admonition cult, whereupon they rapidly mobilized and spread their forces to all of Tertium's subsystems before revealing themselves to be traitors, effectively putting most of the Hive under their control in one fell swoop.
• Villain Decay: Almost literally. While the Moebian Sixth remains a very dangerous and well-organized fighting force, the Cult of Admonition simply isn't, and proximity to the more fanatical cult and the further corruption that results has been gradually gnawing away at the competence and sanity of the Sixth, much to Wolfer's dismay.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: According to Dan Abnett, the Sixth are a collective of Tragic Monsters who genuinely believe what they're doing is for the good of all, that the "truth" they've been exposed to that precipitated their fall to Chaos is the best outcome for humanity instead of a stagnant Imperium that's built upon lies and tyranny, and they will not let anyone stand in their way of spreading it, no matter how many lives they'll need to damn to eternal torment in so doing.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Like many Astra Militarum regiments, the Moebian Sixth also possessed a sizable rank of psykers, the loyalist wargear of whom is introduced in the Path of Redemption update, though the actual units themselves are conspicuously missing from the game without any explanation.
• Where I Was Born and Razed: According to their lore written by Dan Abnett, most of the Sixth were born and raised on Atoma Prime, some of whom are natives of Tertium itself like the Karnak Twins. After their fall to Chaos, their primary goal would be to conquer it in Nurgle's name, before expanding to the entirety of the Moebian Domain.

Antagonists

Captain Wolfer

"Join us and cast off the falsehoods of the Imperium!"

Voiced by: Harry Myers

The traitorous captain of the Moebian Sixth Regiment and so far the game's Big Bad. Wolfer's first encounter with the player character is in the game's prologue, where the both of them are being held in a prison ship under inquisitorial control^note His capture possibly being shown in the Rejects Will Rise Trailer, when his fellow Moebian Sixth traitor guardsmen come to his rescue, it also ends up accidentally freeing the player character as well when the two Guarsmen ask about what will they do to the reject, the Captain chooses to leave them be as Poxwalker chow. Unfortunately for him, it bites him in the ass.

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• Bald of Evil: He is first seen as a prisoner of the Inquisition, and he has no hair on his head. This is likely a sign of his Chaos corruption.
• Big Bad: As head of the Sixth, he's the main antagonist of the game.
• Facial Horror: The one time we get to see his face unhelmeted during the prologue, Wolfer's head is basically a skull wrapped in black, leathery skin, with no discernible eyes (or indeed, any facial extremities whatsoever).
• I Shall Taunt You: As of the first part of the Traitor Curse update, Wolfer may sometimes hijack the comms channel of the Strike Team to jeer at them. The team's Mission Control will generally mention communication interference shortly before this happens.
• Mildly Military: He's explicitly mentioned to be the leader of the Sixth, both in-game and in the provided lore. Astra Militarum regiments are led by Colonels, not Captains. While it's entirely possible that Wolfer usurped control of the regiment from its Colonel, it remains unclear why he's still sticking to his company-level Captain rank instead of promoting himself to the top of the command chain.
• Not Worth Killing: After being freed by his comrades, one of the traitor guardsmen points to the player character to the cell next him and asks what to do with them. Wolfer just leaves them be, if only to leave them at the mercy of the Poxwalkers. That would eventually prove to be his one biggest mistake, as the player's character would go on to becoming an Auric-level operative for the Inquisition, who would dismantle every single scheme brewed up by the Moebian Sixth, and turning into a massive thorn in Wolfer's side.
• Spikes of Villainy: As expected of a servant of Chaos his armor is adorned with several spikey bits.
• Surrounded by Idiots: Clearly doesn't think too highly of his subordinates, especially when they continuously fail to eliminate the Inquisitorial agents. One of his possible lines during the Carnival Raid mission;
  Captain Wolfer: "How are they still breathing? Do I need to come down there myself?!"
• We Can Rule Together: If Wolfer hijacks the comms during the opening of the Chasm Station Logistratum Assassination mission, he may offer the Rejects to abandon the Inquisition and join him instead.
  Captain Wolfer: "Once you're inside, there is no escape. Turn back now. Better still, pledge allegiance to the Sixth."
• You Have Failed Me: Threatens severe punishment to his minions should they fail to kill the loyalist agents, and even mentions that if he can't get the skulls of the loyalists, then he'll settle for the skulls of his incompetent lackeys for failing him.

The Karnak Twins

Voiced by: Jack Myers (Rodin) / Emma Stannard (Rinda)

Rodin and Rinda Karnak are Captain Wolfer's closest lieutenants. Introduced in the Traitor Curse update, they are recurring mini-bosses where one of the twins will attack the Inquisitorial Agents at certain points of the missions.

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• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Rinda Karnak's whole shtick is to always be in your face with her melee spam and shockwave attacks. Due to the aggressiveness of her AI, it's very easy to be knocked into a corner where she will keep wailing on you and zoning you out entirely until either you went down, your teammates managed to beat on her enough to buy you time to get out of the rut, or she decided to change targets.
• Blood Knight: Rinda Karnak's ferocity and love for bloody slaughter easily make the other traitors and cultists look like tame puppies by comparison. As an obvious Sadist, she favors a high-speed melee combat style that leaves little room for her prey to escape or fight back, and she audibly revels in her carnage; her brother commenting on how she would always "play with her food" implies that she's been like that to begin with, with her fall to Chaos only making her even more crazy. As the cherry on top, should the significantly saner Rodin fall before she does, Rinda will scoff at him for his weakness.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: During the fight against both of them at once, they will occasionally disappear and fill the room with gas while siccing poxwalkers onto the Strike Team. This would surely kill the Strike Team in short order... if not for how one of the room's large ventilation fans going off will sanitize an area in the room for the Strike Team to stand at until the gas dispersal ends.
• Brother–Sister Team: Rodin and Rinda are twins, Captain Wolfer's trusted lieutenants and are fight together against the rejects.
• Co-Dragons: They are Wolfer's top lieutenants and are often put in charge of operations in his stead.
• Cool Sword: Rinda is the melee expert of the twins, wielding a sword that notably has a skull on the guard.
• Danger with a Deadline: Outside of the scripted encounters during the Orthus Offensive, the Twins' ambushes are timed, and they will eventually retreat if the Strike Team failed to reduce their health enough to force them to do so prematurely.
• Dash Attack: One of Rinda's signature moves, where she will dash at a random player, dealing minor damage on impact but knocking them back significantly, even if they're Ogryns. This has the potential to massively disrupt any attempt at reviving or rescuing downed allies, especially when there are other Elites and Rodin running distractions as well.
• Dual Boss: They are fought together as bosses during the Orthus Offensive mission, initially as part of scripted encounters, and eventually as the Final Bosses of the operation.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Should the players manage to kill Rinda first during their final stand in the Orthus Offensive, Rodin will scream bloody murder as he tries to avenge his fallen sibling. The same cannot be said about Rinda, who will usually scoff at her brother for "always being the weak one" should he dies first.
• Evil Laugh: Both the twins make their entrances known by laughing evilly.
• Flunky Boss: Their encounters play out like this during the Orthus Offensive, with each of their scripted encounters usually being accompanied by scores of lesser mobs as well as many Elites, and their final boss fight has several phases during which the Twins will disappear off stage, while trash mobs are sent in to harass the players, the survivors of which will aid them when they return to battle.
• Gemini Destruction Law: In order to damage them, you need both their shields to be down. When Rodin or Rinda's shield goes down, they're still considered to be shielded and the other twin will try to regenerate the first's. If the other Twin's shield isn't taken down in time, both their shields reset. Thus, it's best to get both their shields low, then break both.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Inverted. Rinda is the melee specialist of the two, while Rodin uses a Plasma Gun as his primary weapon.
• Moveset Clone: They fight like the usual Traitor Captains, complete with using the same weapon loadout.
• Plasma Cannon: Rodin wields a Plasma Pistol as his weapon of choice.
• Proactive Boss: Both of them will attack the Strike Team during certain points of the mission, before being properly fought at the end.
• Not Quite Dead: During the Strike Team's "walk away" cutscene after completing the mission, Rinda Karnak's right hand can be seen briefly twitching as the camera pans down onto the Twins on the floor, implying that she's not entirely done for yet.
• Sadist: Heavily implied to be the case for at least Rinda, who declared aloud in the Traitor Curse part II trailer to be "looking forward to hearing you scream".
• Samus Is a Girl: Rinda Karnak is actually a Dark Action Girl underneath all of that armor plating and has a female voice actor, though one wouldn't be likely to notice given her similar bulk to that of her brother.
• Shielded Core Boss: Similar to Traitor Captains before them, both Twins feature a semi-regenerating shield bar that reduces ranged damage and needs to be broken to access their health directly. During their final stand in the Orthus Offensive, depleting one Twin's share of shields will cause them to tether to their sibling, who needs to have their meter depleted as well, otherwise both of them will regain their full defenses and attack the party once more.
• Shoot the Mage First: During the final fight against the two, players should take out Rodin first as his pox gas grenades deny sizeable areas by causing heavy corruption damage.
• Smoke Out: When down to a third of their health bar, or if their encounter timer runs out, the Twins will throw down some green plague smokescreen to retreat from the map. Standing in this smokescreen also deals heavy Corruption damage, so greedy players may be caught off-guard. Rodin Karnak also uses this as a form of area denial, where he will chuck out several pox gas grenades to achieve the same effect in several, smaller zones around him.
• Superboss: An extra hard version of their encounter can be triggered by hitting the profane bells hung at specific spots around the map. After triggering the fight, the Twins will receive a huge boost to health, hit significantly harder while taking barely anything in return, and to make matters worse, Elites will also spawn in much greater numbers. Dead players will also respawn behind cages to deny rescues, effectively making the encounter a lite Final Death Mode. May the God Emperor protect you if your party decides to do this on Damnation.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Each Twin's shield receives more damage from the opposite of their attack type. Rinda favors melee combat, and takes more ranged damage to her shields, while Rodin is the gunner of the two and takes more melee damage instead.

Hordes

Poxwalkers and Groaners

Poxwalkers (left) and Groaners (right)

Zombies by any other name are still, really, zombies. These ones are just slightly more intelligent than average, and can use basic melee weapons. Groaners are victims that haven't been fully mutated by the Walking-Pox, and are weaker than the fully-infected Poxwalkers.

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• Adaptational Wimp: In canon lore, the Poxwalkers' mere groans are contagious enough to infect a victim with the Walking Pox. Here, they have no such ability, and their groans do not increase a nearby player's Corruption by even a smidgen. Justified considering if they were to be really able of doing such a thing here, it would make them outright impossible to even deal with by the player.
• And I Must Scream: Poxwalkers are not entirely mindless, as their human consciousness remains intact and aware, trapped within their rotting and mutated body. You can occasionally hear Poxwalkers crying when out of combat, indicating that their consciousness can occasionally break through, weeping at their cruel fate. The few whose minds aren't completely gone yet may also scream for help, as their bodies are driven against their will to attack Loyalist forces.
• Axe-Crazy: Utterly fearless, they charge into battle with no regard for injuries or casualties sustained on their side, only ceasing their attacks when slain.
• Body Horror: The effects of Nurgle's plagues are never pretty for anyone to look at and these are no exception. Rotting flesh covered in pustules, growths of spikes, and maggots that spill out whenever they're hit are some of the symptoms they're infested with.
• Cannon Fodder: They serve this purpose for the Moebians, with their massive swarm attacks distracting and wasting the ammo of players so that more dangerous adversaries go unchecked.
• Expy: Of the Skavenslaves and Cultists from Vermintide and the horde attack from Left 4 Dead, being very weak enemies that are dangerous in numbers and will attack en masse from time to time. Additionally the greenish Poxwalkers are generally tougher and a bit harder to bring down than the skavenlike flesh-hued groaners.
• Glowing Eyelights of Undeath: It's easy to miss in most missions, but during a full blackout one of the main ways you can see Poxwalkers is by their eyes.
• The Goomba: The weakest enemies in the game and are very easy to dispatch individually. They make up for this in sheer numbers. The tutorial level eases you into combat by making you face off a single Poxwalker in the first enemy encounter. Groaners are even weaker, having 2/3 the health of a Poxwalker.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Though minor, Poxwalker attacks can deal Corruption on hit, reducing your max health.
• Messy Maggots: Some of them have maggots literally fly off of them when struck hard enough, revealing that their bodies are decaying even as they are still animate.
• The Plague: Groaners and Poxwalkers are former civilians and soldiers infected by the Walking Pox, a cruel disease concocted by Nurgle that turns its victims into bloodthirsty zombies, trapped within their own bodies.
• Plague Zombie: Although not technically dead, they are extremely zombie-like in behavior and fulfill the role of plague spreaders on behalf of Nurgle. Groaners, who haven't fully turned yet, are still clothed in civilian garb.
• Slasher Smile: Like many followers of Nurgle, their faces are locked into perpetual grins. When chasing down prey, you can often hear them laughing and making other excited noises.
• The Swarm: Although they are individually extremely weak, they become a dangerous threat due to their propensity to attack in massive waves.
• Zerg Rush: When roused, Poxwalkers attack in a seemingly unending tide of bodies, spilling out from every possible entry point and swarming the nearest target.

Dreg and Scab Bruisers

Dreg Bruiser (left) and Scab Bruiser (right)

Melee combatants that are a step up from the Poxwalkers. Dregs are mostly-unarmored cultists that wear yellow cloth and helmets, compared to the metal-armored Scabs that used to be Guards.

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• Attack Its Weak Point: Scab Bruisers have Flak armor on their arms and bodies but have unarmored heads. Inverted with Dreg Bruisers, whose heads have Flak Armor but their bodies are unarmored.
• Cannon Fodder: They're relatively weak enemies that are easy to take down, making them this to a lesser extent than Poxwalkers thanks to having weak armor in certain spots.
• Expy: Of the basic Clanrats and Marauders from Vermintide, being melee enemies that aren't as weak and numerous as the Zerg Rush units, but still easy to take down.
• Facial Horror: Scabs have rather scarred heads that, while nowhere near as unsightly as a Poxwalker's, are still unpleasant to look at.
• Spikes of Villainy: Scab Bruisers wear metal armor that have one too many spikes attached to them.

Scab Shooters, Scab Stalkers and Dreg Stalkers

Dreg Stalker (left), Scab Stalker (center), and Scab Shooter (right)

The rank and file of the Moebian Guards are now these Scabs. Many civilians who turned to the Great Enemy's forces are now Dregs armed with autoguns, trained semi-professionally, and have something approaching standardized equipment.

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• Adaptational Name Change: More of a clerical issue than anything, but the regional equivalent of a lasgun-wielding guardsman is "lasman", which is something of an Insistent Terminology within the Moebian Regiments, according to the provided lore by Dan Abnett. This is conspicuously not used within the game itself.
• Attack Pattern Alpha: Befitting their status as former soldiers of the Astra Militarum, Scab callouts are done in standard military fashion, with cries of "Taurox Engagement Protocol" or "Gamma-1 Taurox" being particularly frequent examples.
• Bayonet Ya: The standard Scab guardsmen units have bayonets affixed to their lasguns, which they can and will use against the player if forced into melee range. Dreg Stalkers lack such an attack due to their autoguns not having bayonets, with them pulling out machetes for meleeing instead.
• Beam Spam: Scab Shooters and Stalkers are equipped with Lasguns that produce a distinct red laser when fired.
• Dangerous Deserter: Scab Shooters and Stalkers were once soldiers of the Imperial Guard, turned to Chaos after being neglected and forgotten by the Imperium, with their home world's proximity to the Warp playing a key factor in their downfall as well. They've also started to train a militia of civilian converts, outfitting them with autoguns.
• Enemy Chatter: They are quite vocal compared to Poxwalkers and will often taunt their opponents or shout commands to their allies.
• Long-Range Fighter: While all of them are ranged enemies, Scab Shooters especially fit this, having less health but tending to stick at the back line rather than advancing to a closer (but still ranged) distance like the Stalkers.
• More Dakka: Dreg Stalkers with autoguns tend to blaze away with less discipline and accuracy than Scab Stalkers and Shooters.
• Never Bring a Gun to a Knife Fight: At long range, they're capable of taking cover and can fire at you with better precision. If they're forced into close range, they take a longer time to aim and can be staggered with melee, while they'll usually attempt to use a weaker melee attack.
• Patrolling Mook: They can often be found patrolling together in fireteams of about 4-6, often led by one of their Elite Mook counterparts. More rarely you can run into an entire squad of around twice that size.
• Sniper Scope Glint: All of them project a distinct visual flash before they fire a burst of lasgun bolts or autogun rounds at you.
• Stealthy Mook: Scab Stalkers used to be this by design, where they wouldn't be highlighted by the Veteran's Volley Fire, meaning that a huge mob of them can potentially get the drop on the Strike Team if the players are not observant. Patch 14 did away with their sneakiness entirely, and as a result they will show up during Volley Fire and Executioner's Stance as all other shooters.
• Take Cover!: Distinct from Poxwalkers and other mutants, they retain most of their intelligence from their conversion to Chaos and will actively take cover during combat.

Elites

Scab Maulers

Hulking humans in plate armour and armed with a two-handed chainaxe, Maulers are slow but deadly Elite enemies, and often spawn in pairs.

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• Boom, Headshot!: Inverted. Without an armor-piercing weapon, attacking their heads is even more ineffective as their helmets have much tougher Carapace armor compared to their bodies' Flak Armor. The game even lampshades this inversion with the Hard Labour penance, which tasks the player with killing ten of these guys without resorting to headshots.
• Elite Mook: They're classified as Elite enemies and can dish out much more punishment than the basic melee Dregs and Scabs.
• Expy: Of the same enemy type from the Vermintide series, with the only difference being that Moebian Sixth Maulers are fully armored, not just at the head. That said, their head is still classified as Carapace Armor, while the rest of their body only counts as the much more vulnerable Flak Armor.
• Heavily Armored Mook: They wear heavy armor that protects them all over, making them difficult to take down without armor-piercing abilities. Their head is especially armored compared to their body armor, taking much less damage there.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Thoroughly averted. Their helmet is Carapace grade, making it significantly stronger than any of their other armour.
• Improvised Armor: They've taken their standard-issue armor and attached a lot of extra metal to be as tanky as possible.
• Made of Iron: Can take a surprisingly high amount of damage for a human-sized enemy (they have nearly double the health of most other specials/elites other than Ogryn or Mutants), which is compounded even further by being fully armored. They're the only human-sized mooks that can survive a single Brain Burst on the lowest difficulties.
• Mighty Glacier: Slow due to their heavy plate armour, but armed with a powerful two-handed chainaxe.
• Smash Mook: They carry massive two-handed weapons which are slow and unwieldy, but deal devastating damage if they connect.

Dreg and Scab Ragers

Dreg Rager (left) and Scab Rager (right)

Armed with dual melee weapons, the unhinged Ragers are Elites who intend to get up close and personal with the squad at all costs, preferring speed and fury over the protection of the Maulers. Dreg Ragers sport Maniac-type armor, while Scab Ragers are covered in Flak Armor.

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• Armored But Frail: The Scab Ragers play with this. While they have the exact same health values as their Dreg counterparts, their full Flak armor coverage provides them with considerably higher resistance to headshots and melee attacks. This also means they will die significantly faster than Dreg Ragers if a team member has the good sense to bring an Anti-Armor weapon, or a firearm with high fire rate (Flak-countering blessings optional but welcomed) to circumvent their Flak modifiers.
• The Berserker: Fueled by rage, these guys charge into close distance with their axes, caring little for their own well-being.
• Blade Spam: Their attacks are a savage and unrelenting string of melee swipes with their makeshift axes, and if you can't interrupt them then they'll rapidly tear you apart even on the lower difficulties.
• Dual Wielding: Dreg Ragers wield a pair of makeshift axe-like weapons.
• Elite Mook: Classified as an Elite enemy, these often blend in with other Dreg Bruisers or Scab Bruisers, but have much more health and hit harder and faster.
• Expy: Of the Plague Monks and Marauder Savages from the Vermintide series, melee foes that attack quickly and relentlessly and are hard to stagger but usually lack armor. They even sport dual axes like the latter.
• Glass Cannon: Relatively speaking, as they still boast a decent amount of health plus armor modifiers, but both types of Ragers tend to take just as much damage as they can dish out, and typically don't survive very long if dealt with properly. Dreg Ragers take tripled melee damage to anywhere on their bodies, making them the squishier but also riskier type to engage due to their devastating attacks, while Scab Ragers lack the body damage multipliers and have Flak armor, making them more vulnerable to conventional firearms instead. Both types of Ragers are also vulnerable to headshots and Brain Bursts, armored or not.
• Lightning Bruiser: They move rather quickly, hit hard and fast, and can take a good bit of damage before going down.
• Mutagenic Goo: Dreg Ragers have small glass pods full of green fluid on their back and shoulders, presumably a potent cocktail of combat stims and Nurgle's influence that explains how they became so tough, strong, and furious.
• Unstoppable Rage: Like their name suggests, these guys attack in a rapid frenzy of fury and shouting. Most player characters will often comment about a Rager's unbridled rage (and how it didn't help them survive) upon killing one.

Scab and Dreg Gunners

Dreg Gunner (left) and Scab Gunner (right)

Armed with a rapid-fire squad support weapon and with better quality gear in general, Gunners are Elite enemies that lay down deadly suppressing fire from a distance. Whilst not as accurate and lethal as the Ratling Gunners of Vermintide, suppression is a far more significant mechanic in Darktide, and Gunners are a touch more common. In certain regions/missions, Gunners may instead be more lightly armoured and carry stubbers rather than hellguns.

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• Attack Its Weak Point: Dreg Gunners are unarmored in the head, arms and legs, with Flak Armor on their bodies. Scab Gunners in contrast have Flak Armor on all parts except their upper legs, but their head still counts as a weakspot.
• Ammunition Backpack: Both types can be easily identified in the field by their bulky backpacks. The Scab variant uses a heavy duty charge pack that connects to their Hellguns, and seems to also double as a radio of some kind, given the antennae sticking out of it, while the Dreg Gunners simply wear large ammo crates with a visible belt feeding into their Stub machineguns.
• Elite Mook: Compared to the masses of Traitor Guard, Scab Gunners are much more threatening in both appearance and combat. They're armed with a hellgun that can lay down powerful and deadly suppressing fire.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Dreg Gunners have Flak armor on all parts except, oddly enough, their upper legs.
• Immune to Flinching: Inverted - Gunners are still vulnerable to flinching from being hit but instead may turn out to be a lot less susceptible to switching to their far-less-lethal close-combat attacks than other ranged enemies when you advance close enough to them. Running past a corner to one currently firing at you can get you killed embarrassingly fast if you don't hit them with an attack that staggers it out of its shooting.
• More Dakka: Their Hellguns and Stubbers have a much higher rate of fire than other enemies. Say goodbye to a large chunk of your health if you can't find cover in time.
• Shouting Shooter: Some overlap with Calling Your Attacks, but you can sometimes hear the Scab Gunners shout "hear me roar!" or something similar right before they open fire. Of course it's immediately drowned out by the sound of gunfire, but it's there.

Scab and Dreg Shotgunners

Dreg Shotgunner (left) and Scab Shotgunner (right)

Straightforward traitors armed with an assault shotgun, these Elite enemies are dangerous at close range but weak at a distance.

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• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Unlike other ranged enemies, Shotgunners aren't really into the concept of taking cover and instead relentless advance into range of the strike team before advancing past their cover while also firing.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Dreg Shotgunners are unarmored in the head, arms and legs, with Flak Armor on their bodies. Scab Shotgunners have Flak armor on their head, torso and lower legs, although their faces are unarmored.
• Bayonet Ya: In complete reversal of their faction's rank-and-file troops, the Dreg Shotgunners have bayonets mounted on their guns that they will happily stick a player with if they managed to get close, while their Scab counterparts have a machete for this purpose instead.
• Elite Mook: Compared to the masses of Traitor Guard, Scab Shotgunners are much more threatening in both appearance and combat.
• Glass Cannon: Both types of Shotgunners are actually on the fragile end of enemy health, not helped by their sparse Flak armor coverage, but their disturbingly high burst damage output at point-blank range means that they can dish out as much hurt as they take if one lets them get close.
• Knockback: Their shotguns inflict a pretty substantial knockback at close ranges. Pray they don't catch you close to a ledge.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Even shorter than the ones you can get your hands on that's for sure. Their engagement range was originally an impressive 15 meters (almost 50 feet), though this was shortened to a more FPS-typical 8 meters as being sniped by a shotgun-wielding enemy with huge damage and knockback seemed unbalanced.
• Spikes of Villainy: Among a faction of spike enthusiasts, these guys stand out the most as both types of Shotgunners can be visually identified by the three barbs sticking out of their backpacks. The Dreg variant also has several skulls mounted on the spikes for intimidation factor.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: The Scab Shotgunners will occasionally execute a forward rolling maneuver in order to get into shotgun range if they're too far away. Dreg Shotgunners lack the military training of their counterparts and instead settle for an Unflinching Walk instead.

Executor

Not much subtlety about these Elite enemy Ogryns, clad in Carapace armor and wielding massive two-handed weapons larger than the average human.

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• Attack Its Weak Point: Although slightly obscured by the model of their headgear, Executors are actually unarmored around their necks, allowing the player to deal full damage when targeting this particular area.
• Elite Mook: They're essentially souped-up Maulers which deal massive damage with their attacks, have even higher health, and have carapace armor on every part of their bodies.
• Expy: They're hardly much different in practice from Vermintide II's Chaos Warriors.
• Heavily Armored Mook: They have Carapace armor on every spot of their heads and bodies. This makes them extremely resistant to damage, compounded further with their massive health pool — second only to the Reapers in terms of non-boss enemies, but much more durable (Reapers lack armor on their heads and torsos), and the only ones that can potentially survive a full mag dump from a Bolter.
• The Juggernaut: One of the most resilient and dangerous enemies in the game due to their massive health pool, even tougher to get through because of their armor. Armor-bypassing attacks such as Psyker's brain burst attack or the Templar's Chastise the Wicked are highly recommended.
• Mighty Glacier: They are among the slowest of enemy units, but they make up for this by their massive heath pool, a truck's worth of Carapace armor that can No-Sell most kinds of low-to-medium power attacks that aren't bolstered by Rending effects, and an extremely damaging overhead swing that can shave off at least half a health bar's worth of hitpoints in a single blow from full Toughness, if not downing a player altogether. Said overhead swing takes about three seconds to land, making it quite possible for nervous players to accidentally waste their dodges from trying to dodge an Executor's overhead attack long before it lands.
• Mythology Gag: Thanks to the Moebian Sixth taking cues from the Vraksian Traitor Militia. Executors are armed with a massive improvised hammer similar to one of the Vraksian Ogryn Berserker models from Forgeworld.
• Smash Mook: Their only attacks are to go up to a character and hit them very hard with either a punch/kick, a sweep, or a devastating overhead blow.
• Stealthy Colossus: Despite being fully-armored giants that tower over any human, they are infamous for not really making a lot of noise that can easily be drowned out by the din of battle - players should ping one that's positioned behind their allies lest they unfortunately find they cannot dodge backwards from where they were facing just before an Executor's overhead attack lands on them.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: They're much more vulnerable to attacks that specifically deal more damage to heavier-armored enemies. A single Krak Grenade from the Veteran will One-Hit Kill an Executor from full health on even the highest difficulty.
• Telephone Polearm: Their weapon of choice is an improvised hammer consisting of a piece of rebar or pipe as a handle that seems to have been freshly-ripped out of a structure, judging by the huge chunk of concrete that serves as the "hammerhead".

Bulwark

Bulwarks are hulking Elite enemy Ogryns that carry massive shields to protect themselves and sport carapace armor on their arms and legs, but are otherwise relatively lightly armoured.

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• Elite Mook: Classified as an Elite enemy, and provides a great amount of protection to mooks behind it while also taking a great amount of damage.
• Evil Counterpart: They are pretty much Chaos-ified Bullgryns and considering the Moebian Sixth's origins, it is likely that they were Bullgryns.
• Hitbox Dissonance: The Bulwark's shield is infamous for protecting for more of him than it looks like it should - the rule of thumb is that is that you won't be damaging him from his front half unless he's staggered or actively attacking.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Giant mooks armed with giant riot shields; the shield is a slab of solid metal several inches thick and is, unsurprisingly, entirely immune to conventional small arms or any kind of melee weapon.
• Shield-Bearing Mook: Large enemies with shields that protect them from most small arms and melee weapons, requiring you to either stagger them or hit them from an unprotected side. They otherwise lack armor on their heads and bodies, but have a huge amount of HP to compensate. Their shield also has a disproportionately large hitbox such that you can't easily get them from the sides even if you have a clear shot; you need to stagger them or get them from behind.

Reaper

An Elite enemy Ogryn armed with a massive twin-linked heavy stubber, which they use to lay down heavy fire.

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• BFG: The Reaper is an Ogryn armed with twin-linked heavy stubbers similar to the ones player Ogryn can acquire.
• Elite Mook: Classified as an Elite enemy, and can lay down even more firepower than the Scab Gunner while also boasting much more health.
• Expy: A much bigger, tougher take on Vermintide's Ratling Gunners, with similar clanking noises signalling their presence, devastating damage output, and occasional need to unjam or reload their gun providing a crucial opening for players to either get to better positions or take the Reaper out.
• Hell Is That Noise: There are few noises as distinctly worrying as the clanking of a Reaper shifting into their firing stance.
• Immune to Flinching: Inverted - Like gunners, they can still flinching from being hit but are a lot less susceptible to switching to their far-less-lethal close-combat attacks than other ranged enemies when you get close enough to them. Running past a corner to one currently firing at you can get you killed embarrassingly fast if you don't hit it with an attack that staggers it out of its shooting, and being an Ogryn, there's a fair big less attacks that can quickly achieve that.
• Knock Back: Their bullets cause a substantial amount of knockback on hit, on top of the actual damage they inflict.
• Made of Iron: While they lack the Executor's carapace armor or the Bulwark's invincible shield, Reapers still have flak armor on their torso and outer limbs and the highest health of any regular enemy, having more than three times the hit points of most other elites/specials and almost twice that of a Mauler. On the default middle difficulty it takes two to three dozen assault rifle rounds to the torso to bring one down.

Specialists

Poxburster

Living bombs, full of good ol' Grandpa Nurgle's gifts. These Specialist foes are so very eager to share with the squad that they're about to burst with excitement!

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• Action Bomb: Enemies that attempt to run up to players and explode in a large radius for very huge damage.
• The Croc Is Ticking: They make a very distinctive noise that is reminiscent of a ticking clock of sorts.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: The Poxburster shown during the prologue has a significantly more destructive explosion than its gameplay counterparts, having a much larger blast that punched a hole cleanly through the metal catwalk it died on, while also cracking open the cell the player's character was being held in. Normal Poxbursters encountered during gameplay are fortunately capable of no such feat, and their suicidal rupturing can in fact be easily dealt with by hiding behind even thin solid objects.
• Face Plant: Poxbursters are not very elegant when maneuvering, but this shouldn't be too surprising given they have their arms wrapped around some kind of explosive device slash pathogen canister (as seen in the prologue). Upon descending from a ledge or similar, they'll almost always land prone and face-down. This gives you a few precious moments to shoot at them before they manage to scramble back to their feet, thankfully.
• Hell Is That Noise: Poxbursters have a very distinctive beeping time-bomb like noise that will be heard as long as one is around, getting faster the closer they are to their target. This is joined by the rapid clicking of a geiger counter when they're extra close, just to really drive home how much trouble you're in.
• Instakill Mook: Their explosion knockback is capable of launching players near the edge of a Bottomless Pit far enough to the point where they instantly die with no hope of saving them.
• Knockback: Their explosion inflicts pretty significant knockback to anyone too close - all the more reason to pick them off from a distance. Knockback effects are also their weakness however, as poxbursters are very vulnerable to being shoved with melee weapons and shoves can actually launch them far enough that you'll be out of their detonation range, especially if you do a quick dodge backwards for good measure.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Should a player get caught in their explosion and survive, it'll deal a high amount of Corruption damage to reduce their max health.
• Suicide Attack: Their only form of offense involves throwing themselves at enemies before detonating in a dangerous explosion.
• Team Killer: Their explosions will damage both ally and enemy alike. Notable, mission modifiers that spawn a huge group of Poxbursters can actually make them less effective than usual, as they tend to be packed up closely enough where killing a single one can trigger a domino effect that destroys the rest of them. This was changed from originally, where their explosion was totally Friendly Fireproof.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Poxbursters generally can't climb anything more than about waist high, if that, given their arms are occupied. If they're confronted with such an impassable barricade (perhaps due to being spawned in a bad position), they'll simply explode upon reaching the barrier, presumably out of despair or anger at being bested by such a foe.

Scab Sniper

Fast and fragile snipers, these Specialist Scabs can inflict serious damage if left unchecked. Their shots also stun/disorient their targets and inflict significant Knockback.

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• Anti-Armor: Their Long Las attacks deal 10x damage to Toughness and its normal damage to your health. This means that a single hit is practically guaranteed to take our all your Toughness and a huge chunk out from your health.
• Arbitrary Gun Power: As is tradition with sniper weapons, their long-las does massively more damage than any shot from another Scab's lasguns, although for once, this isn't reflected on their effects on a blocking Ogryn with a slab shield, where the drain on their stamina is largely negligible.
• Fragile Speedster: Scab Snipers are amongst the least durable specialist type enemies, and will quickly flee if you get too close.
• Glass Cannon: They're one of the least durable specialist enemies, having no armor to protect them from damage and will die if one simply looks at them funny. In fact, they have so little health that an Ogryn's Kickback with decent stats can one-shot them on Heresy+ from ranges where it would otherwise deal Scratch Damage. As a trade-off, their Long Las hits very hard and can easily blow half of your health off from full health and toughness even on lower difficulties.
• Hell Is That Noise: Unlike other ranged enemy attack tells, Scab Snipers give a distinct, synthetic sound right before their Long Las fires. Most players will equate this to "dodge, hide, or take a massive amount of damage".
• Knockback: Their shots inflict massive knockback, and can easily send people flying to their doom in certain areas. If you get too close without somehow killing them, they'll also unleash a pretty potent kick attack to briefly stun you and push you away so they have time to flee.
• Laser Sight: Scab Snipers project a distinctive red laser beam to show where they're pointing their Long Las.
• Long-Range Fighter: They're a menace from a distance, but are lacking in close-quarters combat with their only means of self defense being a pathetically weak kick, and will attempt to flee if approached in close range.
• Screen Shake: Getting hit (or near-missed) will generally jar the camera a bit, but getting sniped by one of these guys will really throw it around.
• Sniper Scope Glint: If you're seeing this, that means somebody is about to lose a lot of health very quickly. Along with their telltale laser sight, this is one of the few visual cues that can help players locate a Sniper squatting somewhere in the distance.
• Stealthy Mook: They're the only Specialist enemy that makes no sound cues until they attack, often making it hard to detect until their Laser Sight appears. They do have some voice lines and some very overly-dramatic death screeches, but you generally won't hear them most of the time.

Scab Bomber

Strapped with bandoliers of incendiary explosives, Scab Bombers are Specialists that chuck firebombs into the fray from afar, forcing the squad to relocate and potentially split up lest they get burned to a crisp.

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• Action Bomb: Scab Bombers may sometimes explode on death, or at least seem to if they had a live grenade in their hand; they'll drop it as they go down, rather than it simply vanishing into thin air.
• Anti-Armor: Getting caught in the flames will instantly reduce Toughness to 0 on the first hit.
• Anti-Frustration Feature: On certain maps, there are elevators that the players need to enter and stay inside for a while until it gets to the end. If a Bomber throws a grenade into that elevator, the flames won't stick on the elevator floor, averting fiery doom in an enclosed space.
• Attack Pattern Alpha: Listen to their callouts and you can hear them saying what sounds like "Readying Omicron Bombardment!"
• Badass Bandolier: Easily identified at a distance by their bandoliers covered in bright red grenades, and probably one of the most distinctive elites/specialists.
• Cowardly Mooks: Will attempt to run away if they see you approaching, making them annoying to chase down into melee or visible range. They'll also make every effort to throw grenades over walls or through windows, giving them even more time to run away.
• Do Not Drop Your Weapon: Averted. Bombers will drop their primed grenade if they take sufficient knockback but aren't killed, and it will blow up anyway.
• Expy: Of the Poison Wind Globadiers from the Vermintide series, being enemies that throw bombs which temporarily turn sizeable areas into hazardous space. By extension this makes them the latest -tide equivalent to Left 4 Dead's Spitter.
• Divided We Fall: Whilst their fire is moderately damaging (especially thanks to mostly ignoring Toughness) the main purpose of the Scab Bomber is really to break up the squad's Cohesion so that they lose their various shared benefits such as the Veteran's "killing an elite gives you and everyone in Cohesion with you a small amount of ammo" passive ability.
• Hell Is That Noise: Bombers have one of the most distinctive cues, and you'll quickly learn to recognize the distinctive grenade pin drop DING! of a Bomber priming a grenade followed by a doppler effected electronic beeping as the grenade approaches.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Bombers aren't immune to their own bombs. If they take knockback from damage but aren't killed by it, they'll drop their bomb at their own feet.
• Long-Range Fighter: Like the Sniper, the bulk of the Bomber's damage is dealt at range, and he will try to run away if approached. Should the Bomber be forced into melee, the only measure of resistance he can put up is a light kick that's more of a mild nuisance than an actual threat, though if his grenade is already primed when he dies it will be dropped at his feet and potentially maim or kill the player who did him in.
• No Indoor Voice: Bombers are possibly the loudest Specialist/Elite besides Pox Hounds, somehow always managing to be heard loud and clear over the noise of combat. Their "Bomber reporting!" line as they spawn is very hard to miss, and is followed by "I'll flush 'em out!" and similar lines as they move into position.
• Power Glows: A Bomber's grenades are lit up as long as they're alive; if they're dead, the grenades stop glowing.
• Scary Teeth: Being one of the few Scab units to not wear any kind of headgear, the Bomber's jagged and animal-like teeth can be clearly seen when approached up close.
• Taking You with Me: If they're killed after they prime a grenade but before they can throw it, they'll drop it on the ground near them and it'll still explode, so make sure to avoid staying too near.
• Team Killer: The flames from their bombs don't discriminate between ally and enemy, meaning that if thrown in the right spot, they can deal more damage to their own side than the players, especially if a horde of Poxwalkers gets caught in it.
• Throw Down the Bomblet: Hope you like incendiary grenade spam, because Bombers are going to throw a lot of them. More annoyingly they can do so with amazing accuracy without having line of sight.

Dreg Tox Bomber

Introduced in the Path of Redemption update, the Dreg Tox Bomber represents the Cult of Admonition and takes to the field with their grisly Blight grenades.

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• Expy: Compared to the Scab Bomber, they represent a more accurate analogue of the Poison Wind Globadiers from Vermintide.
• Mythology Gag: Their Blight grenades are a nod to the weapons of the same name used by the traitorous Death Guard chapter, being made out of the severed heads of their enemies that are then filled up with noxious cocktails of toxins and viruses to be thrown at potential victims.

Scab Trapper

Maniacally-giggling evil minions armed with electric net guns, Trappers are Specialists that can quickly disable isolated teammates and leave them vulnerable.

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• The Collector: Based on their dialogue, Trappers specifically target the players who seem interesting enough to add to their "collection". That said, they never do anything to their quarry beyond throwing a net on them, nor will they pay any mind to the netted player(s) being killed by other enemies.
• Combat Pragmatist: Due to being rather fragile and having a close-range ability, a Trapper is most dangerous when they're this trope. A Scab Trapper out in the open or attacking head-on often dies in seconds without doing anything. Players often get netted whenever they're ambushed by one out of sight, or when they're busy fighting a horde or boss enemy and not paying attention.
• Expy: Of the Packmaster rats from Vermintide. Trappers don't drag you away from the party nearly as much, but they still immobilize and damage anyone they manage to trap. Worse, the fact they spend less time dragging someone away means they can reload and go after someone else that much faster, so those who run off to rescue a netted ally should be extremely careful.
• Giggling Villain: Not much for mad laughter, more insane giggling and talking about their 'collection'.
• Hell Is That Noise: The sound of a netgun mechanism getting ready to fire is often a cue to dodge, or get caught and rendered helpless.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: After shooting a net, they'll run away regardless of whether they caught anyone, only to attempt getting back up close for another go once their weapon reloads.
• Inescapable Net: Anyone caught by a Trapper's Net Gun will immediately become incapacitated and helpless, unable to get out on their own and requiring a teammate to remove the net. It's justified in this case, as the nets are electrified and the shocks numb the character into helplessness.
• Interface Screw: When a player gets caught by their net, they're treated to a scene where the electrified net covers their first person view as the character's arms futilely resist, before the screen cuts to a third-person view of their helplessness on the ground. Can double as a Jump Scare if the net got the player from behind.
• Net Gun: Armed with an electrified net gun that incapacitates anyone caught in it. The net itself doesn't deal any damage, but allows other enemies to attack the helpless victim. Fortunately, their range with it is mediocre and it always makes a distinct sound before firing.
• Never Split the Party: Enforced. Alongside the Mutant and the Pox Hound, Trappers are part of the "disabler" class of Specialists that are spawned to punish lone players. While they can and will approach groups head-on, the game's Conflict Director will prioritize stragglers above them.
• No Ontological Inertia: Assuming a Trapper hasn't successfully disabled anyone yet, killing her will cause her net to instantly vanish, even if it's just an inch away from landing on your character.
• Scratch Damage: The Trapper's net does deal a very miniscule amount of health damage that bypasses Toughness directly, but it's highly unlikely for one to ever die from this source alone unless they're within an inch of their life on their last wound and not helped up in time. What's far more dangerous is being mauled by any poxwalkers, groaners, or other melee mooks that happen to be around.
• The Smurfette Principle: The only female Special/Elite enemy of the lot next to Tox Flamers, having a female voice. One of the Veteran's voice lines will also state "I want her dead".
• Static Stun Gun: Their Net Gun also functions as this, with the nets being electrified to numb the victim into submission and therefore requiring an ally to save them.
• Support Party Member: The only Specialist enemy that lacks a properly-damaging attack, they instead utilize a Net Gun to completely incapacitate players for other enemies to wail on.

Scab Flamer / Dreg Tox Flamer

Dreg Tox Flamer (left) and Scab Flamer (right)

Toting a (sometimes Chaos-touched) flame weapon, these nasty mid-range Specialists disorient, debuff, and damage the team. Tox Flamers are the slightly more common variant, but the two enemy types work largely the same way.

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• Anti-Armor: Their flames will instantly reduce your Toughness to zero on a single hit.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Their flames instantly reduce Toughness to zero and in the case of Tox Flamers, also directly reduce your max health.
• Expy: Of the Warpfire Throwers from Vermintide. While there isn't as much pushback from their flames and the Warpfire Throwers didn't reduce your max HP, they have the same M.O.: green-coloured fire that shreds the lifebar of anyone caught in it.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: Both of them wield a flamethrower that covers a medium-distance line on the ground in flames, which shatter your Toughness immediately. The Tox Flamers' weapons are also Chaos-touched, allowing them to deal Corruption Damage too.
• Hell Is That Noise: Their distinct audio cue is much more subtle than other special enemies; when they are winding up to fire, you can hear what sounds like the clicking sound of a gas stove being ignited right before they unleash a gout of (green) flame.
• Hollywood Tactics: The usual application of a flamethrower in battle is making use of its capacity to indiscriminately hose down a close-quarters area from behind its outer layer's own cover so that a single operator can clear out the area without directly putting themselves at risk to enemy combatants within - which is even reflected in the Warhammer 40,000's own rules, with flamers always automatically hitting targets, regardless of cover. Not so in Darktide, quite certainly because this wouldn't be very fun to play against, as the Flamer specials can only fire upon the players if they have direct line-of-sight to them. Indeed, with the Flamers' short range, this makes backing into cover and forcing them to get into range of your melee weapon is an extremely reliable countermeasure to them.
• Madness Mantra: One of the other main ways to tell a Flamer's around and trying to get an angle on the squad is their constant chanting;
  Flamer: "Fire! Death! Renewal! Fire! Death! Renewal! Fire! Death! Renewal!"
• Maximum HP Reduction: Tox Flamers' flames directly reduce the maximum health on anyone caught in it by inflicting Corruption.
• The Smurfette Principle: The Tox Flamer is the only other female Special enemy next to the Scab Trapper.
• Spam Attack: Do not let them get close and then ignore them, as they will lay down absolutely obnoxious amounts of fire if left unattended.
• Technicolour Fire: Tox Flamers have delicious and lurid toxic green flames to reduce your health and inflict Corruption to reduce your max health.

Mutant

Hulking abhuman Specialists that are surprisingly fast and can temporarily take a trooper out of the fight.

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• Anti-Frustration Feature: If they do manage to grab a player near a Bottomless Pit, they'll often throw the player back towards the ground instead of right off into the pit for a One-Hit Kill. Likewise, they skip to the throwing part if there isn't enough space for them to thrash the player, so as to avoid cheap damage in a narrow area where it's nearly impossible to dodge them.
• Bullfight Boss: Mook version. They can't turn very well while charging (though they assuredly still can adjust, as their entire time spent moving is spent in their charging state) and will temporarily leave themselves open if they miss. Dodging their charge is thus a vital tactic against them. This works best if they immediately impact a wall upon missing. Timing the dodge is essential, as too late won't be far enough and too early will result in them having time to angle into you again.
• Expy:
  • Of Left 4 Dead Chargers, to a degree. Unlike Chargers, the Mutants won't constantly pummel their victim; after a couple of strikes they'll instead fling their target several meters away and seek another victim. This ability is particularly dangerous near ledges, as they can send teammates far out of position from the rest of their team or leave them hanging for dear life until rescued.
  • 40K-wise, they're quite similar to the Ogryn Berserkers, though Mutants are unarmed and created from humans. Both are surgically-altered from their common brethren, horrifically mutated, and spliced up with all manners of combat stims and other psychoactive drugs that whip them up into a maddened bloodlust while also dulling them from pain, before being sent at their enemies as a form of shocktroop. They even dress similarly, with both sporting a face-covering hood and bulky back-mounted contraptions that constantly feed them with drugs. Given the heretics' numerous homages to the Vraksian Traitor militia, who canonically employed Ogryn Berserkers, the resemblances are most likely intentional.
• Friend or Foe?: Mutants will happily knock over any enemy standing between them and their target, regardless of if it's a lowly Poxwalker or a mighty Executor, which can sometimes be used to the player's advantage.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Dodging a Mutant's charge can be rather unreliable depending on who it's running at. If the Mutant is running at an ally behind you, then standing even slightly to the side in its path will make it skirt by you harmlessly, but if it's gunning after you instead, then doing a full dodge sideways may still allow it to successfully connect, especially in narrow areas, likely due to the game overcompensating for latency.
• Immune to Flinching: Downplayed. A charging Mutant is immune to most forms of stun, such as a Psyker's Smite Blitz. One of the very few things that can stun them while charging is an Ogryn's charge. However, a Mutant that isn't charging can be stunned by a number of methods (such as the aforementioned Smite Blitz) and will likely drop any victims if this happens.
• Lightning Bruiser: Despite their immense bulk, they are extremely fast and very dangerous. Their main weaknesses are their lack of armor, the inability to turn themselves while charging, and becoming a temporary sitting duck if they miss a charge.
• Made of Iron: They have sizeable health pools that make them quite durable despite their lack of armor. They can survive roughly three times as much damage as most Elites or Specials, and are almost as hardy as an Ogryn Reaper or Bulwark. Also, unlike Pox Hounds, damaging them doesn't interrupt their charge.
• Mutagenic Goo: Mutants have multiple glass pods full of green fluid on their back and shoulders, presumably a potent cocktail of combat stims and Nurgle's influence that explains how they become so tough, strong, and furious, in a similar manner to the Ragers.
• Mutant: Their name says it all. These are humans mutated by chemicals and Nurgle's influence into hulking monstrosities with abnormal strength and speed.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Despite their roided-out mutations, they're still noticeably smaller than Ogryn (while they're a huge slab of muscles, Mutants aren't actually much taller than a regular human). They're still strong enough to grab and slam Ogryn, who are quite a bit larger than they are. That said, they're still no match for one of the playable Ogryns in a head-on collision- a Skullbreaker answering their charge in kind will come out on top, there's even an achievement for doing so.
• Roar Before Beating: A loud roar can be heard when they charge at a character and attempt to grab them for a pummeling.
• Screaming Warrior: Mutants never stop roaring whenever they're around, alerting the entire team to their presence.
• Tiny-Headed Behemoth: Their mutations have caused the rest of their bodies to become grotesquely muscular, but their head is still the size of a human's.

Pox Hound

Regular Pox Hound (left) and Hunting Grounds variant (right)

Heavily-mutated canid creatures that are surprisingly fast and agile Specialists, and always let out a distinctive howl before engaging.

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• Anti-Frustration Feature: Despite them coming in significantly higher numbers after the rework, the special Pox Hounds spawned by the Hunting Grounds condition are accordingly adjusted to be much weaker than their standard counterparts, both in terms of damage dealt and overall hitpoints, allowing them to be intercepted or shot off of a pinned ally much more easily than a normal one would. Additionally, the condition-spawned Pox Hounds will also let go of their victims after a few seconds in order to seek new ones, meaning that it's not the end of the world even if your entire team was pinned by them, since you will eventually be able to fight them off should nothing else comes to finish the job first.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Their bites deal Corruption damage which bypasses Toughness and directly reduces your max health.
• Artificial Stupidity: Pox Hounds have no idea how to deal with staircases. If a player is standing on a lower step than them and attacking upwards, most of the time the Hounds will not be able to parse a trajectory to pounce onto them, causing them to just stand around growling as they're picked to death. This is most easily observable with the Hunting Grounds condition active, where small packs of Hounds can be "trapped" on staircases this way.
• Beast of Battle: Infected dog-like creatures sent to attack, incapacitate, and kill your squad.
• Expy: Of the Gutter Runner from Vermintide and by extension, the Hunter from Left 4 Dead. They move extremely quickly and can pounce on players, dealing damage and leaving them helpless until removed.
• Fragile Speedster: They are one of the fastest and most agile enemies in the game, can incapacitate a character while dealing constant Corruption damage, and despite their size have more health than most other Specialists. They however lack armor and their in-your-face approach makes them susceptible to being shoved, which interrupts their attacks and makes them vulnerable. Sufficient gunfire will also stagger them and interrupt their charge. The special variants spawned by the Hunting Grounds condition are much more fragile and die very easily, in exchange to being sent out in huge numbers.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: If they fail to connect with their lunge or get shot off their victim, they'll attempt to run away before returning for another go.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Pox Hounds are rather unique in that their main gimmick doesn't actually deal standard health damage, but being pounced by them will steadily increase your Corruption meter, which reduces your max health. As a quirk of this design, Pox Hounds used to be insidiously dangerous during the beta phase, since their lack of real damage means that one who has pounced upon a player will not cause them to go into bleedout, but instead kill them outright once their entire health meter has been blotted out by Corruption.
• Never Split the Party: Enforced. They are one of two Specials that can incapacitate a player until they are freed by another player, which makes it vital for the team to stick together.
• Personal Space Invader: They pin down any player they pounce on and never let go until another player shoots them off. Not even a muscular Ogryn is capable of shaking off these things.
• Punny Name: Its name is a play on Pox and Foxhound.
• Raising the Steaks: Even dogs are susceptible to Nurgle's gifts, which transforms them into these creatures.
• Scratch Damage: Leaping Pox Hounds deal a tiny amount of health damage to anything around their targets that bypasses Toughness entirely, meaning that those dangerously low on health may be downed or even killed if they happen to be standing close to their intended victims. Also, Hounds themselves don't actually deal all that much direct damage or corruption by themselves (particularly on lower difficulties), but they do make their target extremely vulnerable to attacks from any other mooks around.
• Sound-Coded for Your Convenience: There'll always be a distinctive loud howl to warn the players whenever they make their entrance. The special Hounds spawned by Hunting Grounds condition also have a unique howl to help differentiating them from their regular counterparts.
• Zerg Rush: The Hunting Grounds mission condition periodically spawns large packs of Pox Hounds at random intervals to assail the players. In its original incarnation, Hunting Grounds spawned a small group of otherwise normal Hounds that proved more annoying than they were challenging, since due to the game's design, unreliable netcode, and wonky hitboxes, it's very easy for all four players to get jumped by the dogs at once and ending their run. Patch #4 reworked this condition to spawn even more Hounds per trigger, but to balance this out, the mutation-specific dogs were made much weaker and will jump off of the pinned victims on their own after a short while.

Monstrosities

Corruptor (Daemonic Growth)

Daemonic growths that corrupt the area around them with diseased flesh, and often need to be cleansed in certain mission objectives.

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• Gemini Destruction Law: In order to expose the main eye, you need to kill all three ends of its tentacles. Killing a tentacle causes it to retreat but it will respawn fallen tentacles in short order, meaning that they must be killed within a short duration of each other.
• Go for the Eye: Its weakspots are the three eyes at the ends of each tentacle, followed by the huge eye on the main body.
• Guide Dang It!: They're called Daemonic Growths in-game, making certain Achievements that require killing Corruptors confusing at first.
• Flunky Boss: They have no attacks other than the slow corruption effect, but are almost always encountered with hordes.
• Knock Back: When the main eye pops up after the tentacles have been destroyed, it'll knock back players near it without doing damage.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Standing around them causes your corruption to increase, lowering your maximum health.
• Rule of Three: Three is a sacred number to Nurgle, his icon being three circles arranged in a small triangular formation. This is reflected in the structure of the Corrupter, growing three tentacles from a single armored eye, and each tentacle terminating in another cluster of three eyes.
• Shows Damage: The number of eyes remaining on a tentacle shows you how much health it has left.

Plague Ogryn

A huge, Nurgle-corrupted Ogryn that serves as a Mini-Boss, usually appearing around half way through a mission on higher difficulties.

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• Adaptational Wimp: In canon lore, Plague Ogryns are said to be so virulent that a slight touch from one will bring about a horrible death to the victim. Here, getting hit by them inflicts a good amount of Corruption, but doesn't drop your entire health bar or increase over time. Arguably justified to keep things balanced.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Like most humanoids, it takes increased damage from headshots. Squad dialogue will emphasize this, since they have so much health that attacking their weak spot is key to defeating them.
• Body Horror: The effects of Nurgle's corruption are not pretty on them, with lots of rotting open wounds and innards spilling out.
• Bullfight Boss: The Plague Ogryn's most dangerous attack is a Foe-Tossing Charge that deals very high damage on top of knocking the victim backwards, sometimes into Bottomless Pits if there are some nearby. It's ideally avoided if possible, though the Plague Ogryn's target tracking and large hitbox can make this endeavor difficult in tight spaces. Thankfully, it's equally vulnerable to being charged by your own Ogryn(s) as well, which stumbles the creature and stuns it for a few moments, even more so if it's interrupted mid-dash.
• Composite Character: Seemingly of the Rat Ogre and Minotaur from Vermintide 2 mechanics-wise, with it inheriting the semi-persistent target lock and knockback properties of both, and the mad dashes that do a ton of damage plus knockback of the latter.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Plague Ogryns can take a massive beating before going down, but they lack special capabilities aside from hitting really hard and applying Corruption.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Any attacks from them that connect will not only deal large amounts of damage, but also add a significant amount of Corruption as well, reducing maximum HP.
• Mini-Boss: Has a ton of health and can dish out a lot of damage alongside Corruption, and a boss health bar shows up whenever they appear.
• Shockwave Stomp: Can stomp the ground to hit an area around it.

Chaos Spawn

A writhing, ravening blob of mutated flesh and teeth that Was Once a Man, the Chaos Spawn is what happens when Grandfather Nurgle got a bit too generous with his "gifts". Chaos Spawns are kept and used by the heretics against the Strike Teams as one would a very large dog.

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• Borrowing from the Sister Series: It's the exact same tentacle-armed and lamprey-mouthed monstrosity it was in Vermintide with a largely consistent moveset, just recolored to fit Darktide's grittier aesthetic.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The Chaos Spawn made its first appearance in the World Intro trailer, at least half a year before it was introduced to the game proper as part of the Rejects Unite content update.
• Fragile Speedster: For a given value of "fragile", anyway. According to the update notes, the Chaos Spawn is meant to represent a much more aggressive threat than the Beast of Nurgle and Plague Ogryn before it, with a slew of fast attacks and gap closers that let it scatter groups of players and go ham on stragglers, but will melt quickly to concentrated fire.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: The Chaos Spawn can snag a player up with its tentacle and thrash them around like a club to smack their allies.
• Maximum HP Reduction: As with all Monstrosities, Chaos Spawn also boasts several attacks that significantly increases the player's Corruption level. The most noteworthy attack of the bunch is one that's carried over from its Vermintide incarnation, where the Spawn will snatch up a player in its vicinity and munch on them for a few seconds, which heals the creature and causes a massive spike in the victim's Corruption should they survive.
• Rush Boss: The Chaos Spawn has less health than the Beast of Nurgle and Plague Ogryn, but is much faster than either of the two in both movement speed and attacks. This allows it to pile on damage much faster, but also means it goes down faster.
• You Will Not Evade Me: Unlike its Vermintide counterpart, the Moebian Chaos Spawn has a leap ability that lets it hop towards its victims.

Beast of Nurgle

Massive, slithering masses of monstrous flesh that vomit sprays of corruption and can temporarily take players out of the fight.

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• Attack Its Weak Point: It has a large, glowing fleshy spot on its back that takes extra damage from attacks.
• Achilles' Heel: Players must be covered in its bile before it can attempt to devour them, so avoiding its vomit and goo trail can prevent this. Beasts of Nurgle will also focus a single target at a time, allowing savvy players to keep it distracted while their teammates damage it.
• Knock Back: Most of its melee attacks cause knockback, be it a Tail Slap or a Shockwave Stomp with their hands. The thing also explodes shortly after death, which flings anyone nearby away, so better hope you're not standing next to a Bottomless Pit.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Much of their attacks revolve around this, with their melee attacks being not overly damaging and really more of a Knock Back tool. Their slime trails, their player swallowing, and especially their vomit attack can however pile on huge amounts of Corruption to reduce your maximum health.
• Mini-Boss: Has a ton of health and can dish out a lot of Corruption damage, and a boss health bar shows up whenever they appear.
• Nested Mouths: They have a Xenomorph-esque mouth inside of their larger, toothy maw, that juts out whenever they roar.
• Obliviously Evil: Beasts of Nurgle are essentially oversized, excited puppies in demeanor... that vomit corrosive slime and exude horrifically-lethal diseases which will inevitably kill off any humanoids around it as it attempts to thoroughly explore and examine the new beings around it that it dwarfs. Their Darktide incarnation suits this with their potential actions being not intentional attacks upon the strike team - they vomit around, try to swallow a player, and very occasionally Tail Slap behind them or do a Shockwave Stomp in front of them with their hands, but they don't directly strike at a player.
• Swallowed Whole: It's capable of picking up a player and swallowing them whole after vomiting on them, taking them out of the fight for a while to deal corruption damage.
• Taking You with Me: Upon death, it explodes, dealing no health damage or corruption but causing significant Knock Back, meaning that it can kill players who are standing too near it and a Bottomless Pit.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: It's capable of vomiting a trail of festering substance similar to the trail it leaves behind, which also adds corruption and causes an Interface Screw on players it hits.
• Walking Wasteland: Leaves a trail of foul corruption on the ground behind it, which festers for a while, slowing and slowly adding corruption on players who unwisely step on it.

Daemonhost

Clockwise from bottom right: Passive, Alerted, and Hostile

Formless daemons from the Warp bound into human vessels, daemonhosts lie dormant until disturbed, whereupon they single out whichever player angered them and attack aggressively.

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• A.I. Breaker: While Daemonhosts normally can teleport over to players even if they take efforts to keep away from them, being targeted by a Daemonhost while atop some parts of the environment that the Daemonhost cannot go over (such as a high and thin bar coming out of the wall) will cause them to fruitlessly attempt to path over to their target while everyone in the strike team can otherwise shoot it freely.
• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • Daemonhosts are scripted to flee as soon as its intended victim is dead on all difficulties. While having a member down can be detrimental to a team push, it also prevents the scenario of a Total Party Kill should the group be unable to eliminate a daemonhost that got triggered by accident, while also preventing malicious players from Griefing their group by intentionally provoking one into attacking. That being said, if a daemonhost is provoked after your squad is already down to the last man, it will fight to the last breath without fleeing.
  • Assuming a daemonhost is still in its passive state (i.e. not floating and emitting a green glow), the first shot that hits it will not set it off and only cause it to enter its caution phase. This means that firing errantly towards a sitting daemonhost will not be the end of the world should the shooter quickly correct their aim elsewhere.
  • As of the Traitor Curse part 2, Daemonhosts cannot spawn naturally on Sedition and Uprising difficulties without the Power Supply Interruption modifier.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Daemonhosts once provoked will teleport over to a target and attack it relentlessly until either it or the target is dead, and then perform its Finishing Move on it before escaping.
• Blackout Basement: While they can be encountered in any mission, they're much more likely to be encountered in those with the Power Supply Interruption condition, which plunges the mission map into near-total darkness. This makes it all the easier to accidentally trigger an unseen Daemonhost in the shadows and get ripped to shreds.
• Brown Note: It's implied that the Daemonhost's chattering wears on one's sanity, even if it causes no real tangible effect during gameplay. Ogryns may complain that the whispering hurts to listen to, while Psykers are psychically-assaulted just by being near one and hearing its thoughts.
• Danger with a Deadline: While a Daemonhost attacking them is generally a very difficult situation to deal with for a strike team, a Daemonhost can only kill one member of a strike team at once before disappearing.
• Demonic Possession: Well, duh. The daemonhost's whispering implies that its possession was an unwilling one, the individual having to endlessly resist the daemon's influences to prevent the entity from taking over their body entirely, with the thing finally dominating them and assuming complete control of the body when provoked. Some voice lines even have the daemonhost pleading with the Emperor for deliverance, suggesting that the human host was likely a loyalist citizen (and probably a psyker) being forced into their current circumstance as a weapon for Chaos.
• Expy: Of the Witch from Left 4 Dead.
  • Like the Witch, the Daemonhost is a powerful enemy that rests until someone disturbs it (and given how it often spawn in missions with the Power Supply Interruption condition, typically by shining your flashlight upon it), whereupon it seeks to destroy that specific player before turning against the rest of the team. The daemonhost's idle whispering serves as a similar audio cue to the Witch's heartbroken weeping, and it even sports oversized claws like the Witch.
  • Unlike the Witch, however, a Daemonhost doesn't return to its passive state after some time if alerted, and doesn't make audio-visual warning cues like a Witch who's becoming progressively closer to enraging, making it much more of a hazard if players aren't careful. As well, prior to Patch #17, Daemonhosts can kill up to two players per trigger on Heresy and Damnation before fleeing, thus doubling its lethality on top of the ambient Corruption it already projects.
• Flaw Exploitation: Daemonhosts only attack the first target that initially provoked it relentlessly. This allows an Ogryn with a Slab Shield to initially attack it and then set down the shield to avoid losing stamina from blocking its attacks (or a human class using one of the games' more mobile melee weapons to very carefully dodge its attacks), with the Daemonhost only causing some corruption to players nearby it as the rest of the strike team freely burns down the Daemonhost without too much trouble... well, unless some other significant presence of enemies enters the scene.
• Finishing Move: If its target has one wound remaining or is downed, it can finish them off with a telekinetic Neck Lift and then devours their soul. This is an instant kill regardless of health, but the attack has a noticeably long animation that leaves it open to damage.
• Glass Cannon: For a given value of "glass" anyway, given that it's still a Monstrosity with appropriately high health. The Daemonhost has the lowest effective health of all Monstrosity types, topping out at 40,000 (tied with Traitor Captains) on Damnation difficulty vs. the Plague Ogryn's 60,000, the Beast of Nurgle's 52,500, and the Chaos Spawn's 47,250, which it compensates for with its significantly higher damage output and ability to instantly kill a player who's on their last Wound.
• Ghostly Chill: A visual cue for a daemonhost's presence is the edges of the screen frosting over as a telltale sign of the Warp, which intensifies the closer you get to it. Psykers also sense this on a psychological level, as some of them will complain of their mind feeling like it's frosting over while in proximity of a Daemonhost.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Not only do its attacks add Corruption to lower your maximum health, but simply standing near it is enough to cause your Corruption to rise, even if it isn't attacking you.
• Neck Lift: Should its target be brought down to one wound remaining or get downed, whether by loss of health or Corruption blotting out their health bar, the daemonhost will telekinetically lift them up by the neck and consume their soul for an instant kill, should it not be slain before it can do so.
• Power Floats: Once it's triggered, it'll constantly float in combat. Despite this, it's still vulnerable to being pushed off platforms and ledges.
• Rush Boss: The daemonhost is decidedly more fragile than either the Plague Ogryn and Beast of Nurgle when directly fought, but it makes up for this with its significantly higher damage output and unique mechanic that allows it to outright kill some of your teammates if not eliminated quickly enough, thus enforcing a soft time limit to each encounter if the group doesn't have a dedicated tank to Draw Aggro and block all of its attacks.
• Savage Setpiece: Daemonhosts are stationary and do not attack nor harm the squad when idle. When disturbed by either gunfire, shining a flashlight on them, or by getting too close, they become active and turn into a Mini-Boss battle.
• Sickly Green Glow: Active daemonhosts are wreathed in Hellfire, bathing their surroundings in green light.
• Skippable Boss: Since daemonhosts are entirely stationary until disturbed, the Strike Team can bypass one altogether should they manage to find a way around it. To compensate for this, if the level you're playing on has the Power Supply Interruption condition, daemonhosts can appear more than once, even on the lower difficulties, irrespective of any of the standard monsters that the AI Director might decide to throw at you.
• Sound-Coded for Your Convenience: Idle daemonhosts emit a creepy whispering, a vital warning to players that might stumble into them in the dark.
• Transformation of the Possessed: Sleeping daemonhosts appear to be normal humans bound in chains, only to sprout horns and claws and erupt into green balefire when they awaken. When the daemon is defeated, it abandons its host and the physical changes are reversed.
• True Sight: By definition, as the Daemonhost's aggro mechanic is proximity-based, therefore a Zealot using Shroudfield or an Infiltrating Veteran will still tick it off as if they're uncloaked. Patch 14 also updated the Daemonhost's targeting to fixate on the cloaked player who rattled it, rather than causing it to attack a random player when aggro'd.
• Voice of the Legion: Daemonhosts speak with a reverberating mix of several male and female voices^note It has a female voice actor, with modulation being used to create the other voices, the former is much more noticeable in its passive state, while the latter becomes more dominant once it has been enraged.
• You Will Not Evade Me: If you shoot it from afar or otherwise manage to make distance from it while it's in its killing mood, it will simply teleport over to its target to finish the job.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: Daemonhosts sometimes invoke this word for word when they're about to finish off their trapped quarry, implying that their Finishing Move is them consuming the souls of their victims, who just seemingly drop dead without any signs of physical trauma.

Traitor Captains

Officers of the Moebian Sixth and other high-ranking cultists, these "arch-heretics" are targeted for assassination by high command to disrupt their operations in Tertium.

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• Boss Battle: Unlike other Monstrosities, Traitor Captains exclusively serve as end-of-level bosses in Assassination missions.
• Casting Gag: Their "Spiritual" voice profile was provided by Tim Bentinck, who's very well known among the community for voicing Victor Saltzpyre in Vermintide.
• Decapitated Army: Averted. Defeating a Captain does not remove any of the mooks in the area, and the mooks will keep coming in for a few seconds after the Captain goes down. If a Total Party Kill occurs before the game fades out to the mission complete cutscene, it's considered a mission failure.
• Deflector Shield: Also doubles as a Break Meter, where the shield will block all damage to their health until it is gone. Breaking the shield stuns them for a moment, allowing the team to go to town on them.
• Flunky Boss: They're aided by Poxwalkers, Scabs, Dregs, and even Specialists and Elites that come in as the fight progresses.
• I'm a Humanitarian: They will sometimes boast about feasting upon the flesh of dead Strike Team members. They usually don't live long enough to do so.
• King Mook: Traitor captains seem to be beefed-up versions of the Scab Shotgunner, sporting similar armor adornments and movesets, albeit with their weapon being a Plasma Gun instead.
• Knock Back: The vast majority of their attacks inflict fairly serious knockback, whether it's their ranged attacks, their melee attacks, or their shield breaking.
• Large and in Charge: Being field commanders, these guys are appropriately towering, being almost the size of a Mutant to help players tell them apart from the swarm of mooks that will also spawn in to defend them. In fact, Traitor Captains are so much larger than a normal human that they can wield and fire Plasma Guns one-handed, as if it were they were mere Plasma Pistols.
• Madness Mantra: When close to dying, a Traitor Captain may repeatedly invoke Nurgle's holy number of seven.
• The Musketeer: An enemy example. Traitor Captains wield either a shotgun or plasma gun, and either a power sword or other melee weapon, which they switch between intermittently.
• Shielded Core Boss: They come with a Deflector Shield that blocks all damage until it's depleted. When it goes down, they're vulnerable to damage for a set period of time, or until they take a third of their max health in damage.
• This Cannot Be!: Their death quotes tend to be something along the same line, with them expressing utter disbelief at being defeated by "weaklings" despite carrying Nurgle's blessings.
• Turns Red: Quite literally. After their shield has taken enough damage to turn red, the Captains will unleash a wide shockwave that knocks all nearby players back and depleting their Toughness instantly. Draining their shield fully before this happens will not cancel the knockback, but the blast will not cause any Toughness loss.
• Worthy Opponent: Slain captains may occasionally praise the team for putting up a good fight just before dying.