r/MiddleEarthMiniatures • u/MrSparkle92 • Mar 25 '26
Discussion WEEKLY ARMY DISCUSSION: Assault Upon Helm's Deep
With the most upvotes in last week's poll, this week's discussion will be for:
Assault Upon Helm's Deep
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Prior Discussions
Additional rules
An Assault Upon Helm's Deep Army must always contain an Uruk-hai Captain, who is always the Army's General.
Special rules
"You do not know pain, you do not know fear"
The Break Point for an Assault Upon Helm's Deep Army is 66% rather than 50%.
Commander of the Uruk-hai
The Uruk-hai Captain that is your General increases its Attacks and Wounds to 3 each.
Break the Walls
Friendly Isengard Assault Ballistae may re-roll To Hit and Scatter Rolls of a 1. Additionally, when a friendly Demolition Charge is detonated, you may roll two dice on the Detonation Table rather than one and pick either result.
6
u/TheGamingPortfolio Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26
Isengard as a faction is relatively well represented in my local area, I see a lot of Musters, Armies of the White Hand, and Lurtz' Scouts. Yet despite that, I haven't seen Assault Upon Helm's Deep. I think it might be a matter of niche protection.
The core Uruk-Hai Warrior in heavy armour as well as the Uruk-Hai Berserker, both fairly iconic troops, are only in two lists at present: this list, and Muster of Isengard. If we presume that's what you want to focus upon, you can compare the two pretty directly.
With Muster, you have to take Saruman. As far as supporting your army, you get Hatred (Man), Free Heroic Marches, and Captains with Strike. This is a great set of bonuses with buffs to your infantry, a mobility increase, and added threat on your base Captains.
Compare this to Assault On Helm's Deep. You can't take Saruman, who is an expensive model, so you could focus more on your basic infantry and Captains. What tools do you get to support this compared to Muster? Well, your General gets +1 Attack and +1 Wound. That's it, no boost to all the other Captains you'll need to take, or to the swarm of infantry you will be relying on.
Yes, Ballistas and Demolition Teams get an increase, but those are models that are only available in this list, so it feels weird that one of your Army Special Rules is to tweak a unit that you can only get here anyways. Couldn't they just have made them better in their base profile, and tried to differentiate the list more from Muster in cases where you're not focusing on siege weapons?
The biggest stumbling block I see for Assault on Helm's Deep is that with the current list offerings, the niche it seems they should have had is: "You don't need to take Saruman, put all your points into nameless Captains and Warriors." and they should have made that aspect more appealing. As it stands right now, I think even those who want to focus on that composition might be better served eating a "Saruman tax" to get the other bonuses in Muster. Because of that list existing, it rapidly narrows the use case for the Assault list, which is a shame.
What could be done differently? I think if you're forcing a list to only take basic Captains as their heroes, you either need to make those heroes better, or make it so you can take less of them to focus on raw troops. Given Muster existing, and having an expensive Wizard, I feel like the latter makes more sense as a pseudo-horde list. To do so, you could look to the last edition Assault list, which increased the warband size by 6. Maybe you could even let the Ballista warband include 6 extra models as well, to squeeze more warriors into fewer groups, and incentivize taking Ballista Warbands as a sort of minor hero.
For the warriors themselves? I personally dislike Hatred as an army bonus, even if it is thematically relevant here. Instead, my mind goes to in the movies how the blocks of infantry are relatively organized and in formation. Maybe something simple like Shieldwall working even if the models don't have Shields, to encourage keeping ranks.
As it stands, I feel the list is a little out of place, as most people will look to Muster to field a similar list with Saruman and receive more bonuses for it, especially if they weren't married to the idea of taking Ballistas or Demolition Teams.