How to use battle priest? (empire campagin)

**joeman_0** · August 01, 2016, 02:41 AM

My battle priests are useless in combat. Also, I don't know whether there is a bug or not but my priest does not seem to increase the population growth of a province when you put the skill point.

Anyways, I hope someone says I am wrong, but they are useless in combat despite the "melee expert" label in the card.

Instead, in my current playthrough with empire, I have been putting points in the blue tree and use them mostly as agents outside of a stack. Putting several warrior priests together in a location seems to counter the effect of corruptions quite well. I don't know how helpful the priests are in reducing the attribution due to corruptions and in hostile territories. My priests are not that high in level yet. The battle priests could be helpful if they can provide healing in places that you cannot heal. However, that is not happening. But if they can effectively reduce the attribution when you go up north, then they can be useful in a stack. However, right now I think they are rather useless.

**Cathal** · August 02, 2016, 08:09 AM

You have to deploy the Battle Priest to get his population growth. I only ever use them as units to increase growth. I have never put them in my army.

**drillmaster** · August 03, 2016, 02:14 PM

They re pretty useless yeah. They only offer population growth to devastated regions and corruption reduction. You need a TON of them though for it to work efficiently. As for combat i guess their orayers can work but you have other better options.

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**surg3on** · August 08, 2016, 01:06 AM

I had one with Karl Franz with the heal army skill from the blue tree. It was dammned amazing how many men that guy could heal up in a turn. He wasn't great at combat but reasonably tanky enough.

**Ichon** · August 20, 2016, 11:05 PM

Better to have mostly replenishment skills... haven't seen the growth skills be super useful but the army replenishment and the anti-attrition is great.

**econ21** · August 22, 2016, 09:17 AM

The basic deployment skill to raise growth is useful for teching up (e.g. getting a witch hunter from a province other than Reikland, if you go for the mage college in Aldorf rather than the cathedral) or for getting to level 3 for walls in newly captured or colonised settlements. The problem is passive deployment gives slow XP, so it can be slow to unlock heal.

The heal skill from the second half of the bottom tech tree is amazing. Your main stack can be dropped to half strength fighting a Chaos stack of doom and next turn, it's projected to be back to full strength if you have an warrior priest in your stack.

I've belatedly come to the conclusion that the warrior priest is the best hero to have in your army stack, just for the heal.

**drillmaster** · August 23, 2016, 08:05 AM

Problem is he takes too long to train because you need a temple for that. And Altdorf has too few precious slots to waste by building a temple. And i think money is too tight in the begining to build a building and then take it down.

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**joeman_0** · August 24, 2016, 01:51 AM

After having more experience, I agree that warrior priest is a really unit. However, like all heroes in this game, they are totally worthless in low levels. A battle priest is a beast during combat if he can use hammer of sigmar spell going into it. I wouldn't have him charge into a melee otherwise. Also, he has a lot of good spells (e.g. soul fire, ) and buffs. The cool down of his spells are reasonable. Also, in the blue tree, the full leadership debuff is very power. It gives your enemy a -9 leadership debuff. It stacks with a -8 debuff from a magical item that I found, and I use it to instantly get the enemies to rout. The -9 leadership debuff in my opinion is more valuable than anything else. I have the temple of Uric from Middenheim and +2 experience thing from technology. So I was able to train a level 12 or 13 warrior priest right out of the gate. I can either spec into the yellow tree or blue tree. They are both very good. The one in the yellow tree provides very good buff and combat support and is not at melee if equipped with good stuff like armor or weapons that you found.

**Marduk1813** · September 17, 2016, 05:45 PM

I realy like the battle priests and their role in battle. I see them as supporting unit and I got one in all of my armies if possible. While you can use the commanders and the captains as tanks at the front, I use the battle priest for stabilizing critical parts of the battlefield. Sending in a low-level battle priest first will get him killed soon. But support a fighting unit with a priest can realy turn the tide. The prayers doesn't use magic-ressources so that's a thing I recommend to use as much as possible. With the skills I focus on the defence abilities and the prayers. With this skills and on mid level they absolutely stand their ground against monsters, high tier units or enemy heros.

And lorewise they are damn cool.

Thatswhy I realy enjoy the arch lector which is a more powerfull battle priest as commander - I enjoy them more then the standard generals.

**loony** · October 06, 2016, 06:18 AM

battle priests have:
Campaign map:
- replenishment effect (the only one i care about)
Battle map:
- morale effect (with aura increase effect they support a large part of the line)
- kick'ass effect as a flanking (as opposed to "tanking") unit

I love them and have them in all armies except the very first (where I level up the lord with replenishment skills)

**COOBelisarius** · October 07, 2016, 11:51 AM

Use priests for replenishment and for battle prayers. It's also important to realize what engagements to through them into (low-mid tier infantry will get slaughtered by him in good numbers and he'll stay alive). Additionally, if you have Volkmar as the starting LL, it's fun to bee-line for Volkmar's +4 training blue skill, the +2 skill research and you are spitting out level 14 priests who have around +30% replenishment, all battle prayers except 1, and some combat buffs.

**drillmaster** · October 08, 2016, 01:24 AM

I find that priests take much more damage than they should.in battle. So im not sure if going for support over combat skills helps. I use a mix of both and although my priests dont die they usually end up half dead when they are on the front line and thats me using them just to hold. The replenishement skills are amazing though.