Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus – Secutor – Rank Abilities

by Falagar / Articles, Warhammer Guides / 28 Nov 2018

Secutor – Rank Abilities

Rank 1 ability – Servant Protocol. This allows your servo skullto be used on a troop unit to give +1 Damage, +4m movement, and +15% critical chance. In the early game, you’ll generally want to save your Servo Skull for grabbing CP from across the map, but once you’re a few ranks in and have someone else building into Lexmechanic, you can afford to use your servo skull to buff your troops. The +1 damage is forgettable, but +4 movement really helps given that troops can’t spend CP to buy more movement leading them to often be outpaced by TechPriests.

Rank 3 ability – Command Fire. This is the core ability for the Secutor, and the main reason to consider having one at all. When you use this ability, you must have at least one troop unit within 8 metres of you. If you do, you can select an enemy unit anywhere on the map, and if any of your troops have line of sight on it and are within range to attack it, they will. This can result in several of your troops all shooting together, which can stack up damage very quickly to focus a target down. Since they all fire in sequence, it’s possible for one trooper to kill the target, then the next trooper to finish it off, ensuring that it cannot use reanimation protocols. Strangely, the area damage from the Kastelan and Kataphron both has no effect – even though they’re using a flamer and a torsion cannon respectively, the attack will only hit the target designated by Command Fire with no area damage, and no chance of friendly fire. Command Fire has a 3-turn cooldown, so it can be used every 3 turns which may require some forethought to avoid wasting it in suboptimal circumstances.

Rank 5 ability – Command. Similar name to the previous ability, this provides either a +2 bonus to the next attack that all of your troops make, or a +2 bonus to both armour types for all troops until the end of the turn. If you can arrange a gun line where you have several Skitarii Rangers or vanguards all with relatively open lines of sight, you can use this immediately before using Command Fire to really ramp up the damage.

Rank 7 ability – Optimized Optimization. Weird name, but this is another ability that improves a backpack item. In this case, Cognitive Canisters can be used to provide a buff to one trooper unit, giving them a bonus to damage and critical chance. The cooldown is usually 3 turns, but this ability reduces it to 2 turns, allowing you to use them every other turn for bonus damage. Not a bad ability if you’re aiming for a challenge where you rely mostly on troops, but not worth it outside of that as troops are quickly left behind on damage scaling compared to TechPriests.

Rank 9 ability – Reinforcements. This allows you to drop one single troops unit anywhere on the map without waiting for a new round. While this is a useful ability to a pure Secutor, it really isn’t worth being the final ability in the class, and really isn’t useful outside of a troops-centric challenge run. If this ability were given much earlier, then it might be a bit more useful.

Armour Parts:

-Head – +2 HP, +1 Energy Armour

-Torso – +4 HP

-Legs – +3 HP, +1 Movement

-Arms – +2 HP, +20% Critical Chance

The Secutor parts really aren’t all that useful compared to those granted by other classes. The head armour is identical to the Dominus, but you get more from the Dominus’ skills than from the Secutor. The torso armour is identical to the Lexmechanic but you get more from the Lexi’s skills than from the Secutor. The leg armour is 2 movement worse than the Dominus and 1 movement worse than the Explorator but otherwise the same. The only part that really stands to be all that useful on its own is the arm for +20% critical chance, which also gives 1 more HP than the same part on the Tech-Auxilium, but there are other parts already vying for the arms slot (Explorator, Dominus, Lexmechanic) that are usually higher priority. What the Secutor’s armour does have going for it is that it stacks HP higher than any other single class. In a troops-centric challenge run, you’re probably going to be out front, tanking hits to prevent your fragile troops from being killed (which is somewhat the opposite of the theme that Skitarii are supposed to be expendable while TechPriests aren’t), but it does make for a somewhat workable tactic with that particular playstyle. Ultimately, the Secutor doesn’t have much to recommend it outside of wanting to have a specific playstyle that is entertaining for theme and for added difficulty.

Falagar

He is the founder and editor of Magic Game World. He loved gaming from the moment he got a PlayStation 1 with Gran Turismo on his 7th birthday.

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