You can begin a Chaos Rising campaign by importing a completed campaign from the Dawn of War II base game. This is highly recommended; it allows you to start the campaign at level 20 instead of 18, and to bring the best items from the original campaign with you. This section tells you everything you'll need to consider when playing through Dawn of War II original on the way to Chaos Rising.

First and most importantly, once you select your difficulty when creating a save on the original campaign, you will never be able to change it, not even when you import to Chaos Rising. If you want to play Chaos Rising on Primarch and import a saved game from the original campaign, you'll have to complete that on Primarch too. If only there was a guide to beat Dawn of War II's campaign on Primarch.

Second, when you import a save into Chaos Rising, you'll bring your characters' levels, trait selections, and the items they were wearing during the final mission. The original campaign has an effectively endless late game where you can keep playing randomly spawning missions for good quality items as long as you want. Your level and the gear you bring with you on import are entirely up to how long you spend playing this late game and earning as much good loot as you can. Chaos Rising has no such open-ended opportunities; there are far fewer ways to get items and XP, so you want to start from the best possible position. Therefore, keep playing the Dawn of War II campaign's late game until every character is level 20 and has high level items of the kind you want in every slot.

As mentioned already, you do not keep every item that was in your inventory from the original campaign; only the items that your heroes wore into the final mission, as well as whatever item was the reward to the final mission, and any terminator armour you owned whether you were wearing it or not. (There are several additional fixed items that you always start Chaos Rising with, regardless of whether your imported save had them). Obviously, this means you should wear all the best items you have into the final mission of the original campaign, which you were probably going to do anyway. I particularly recommend getting all three pieces of terminator armour from the original campaign and wearing a full set of good quality items with them, including power fists, assault cannons, storm bolters, thunder hammer/storm shields, and so on according to who you like putting in terminator armour. This is important because although Chaos Rising does provide you with several far superior pieces of terminator armour, you tend to get relatively few Terminator accessories since they only start showing up halfway through, the campaign is short, and you're also being given non-terminator gear. Sometimes you need those items from the original campaign to have a fully equipped terminator team.

You do start Chaos Rising with the same traits you ended the original campaign with. However, you get the opportunity to reset everyone's traits after the first mission is over, so it's safe to initially choose traits focused only on helping you beat the original campaign; you can totally redesign your build when you get into Chaos Rising.

The multipliers for difficulties in the Chaos Rising campaign have been changed from the original campaign. The bonuses higher difficulties give to enemy damage are much less extreme, but in exchange enemies also get bonuses to health.

As in the original game, Sergeant difficulty is considered the standard difficulty. The other difficulties are produced by modifying how much damage enemies do and how much health they have. These are the only differences between difficulties; you face the same number of enemies on all occasions.

On Recruit difficulty, enemies do 0.9x the damage done on Sergeant and have 0.75x the health.
On Captain difficulty, enemies do 1.5x the damage done on Sergeant and have 1.5x the health.
On Primarch difficulty, enemies do 2x the damage done on Sergeant and have 2x the health.

This means that tactics for Chaos Rising are very different to the original campaign. In the original, enemy damage was so extreme that your number one priority was always to kill them as soon as possible and keep them stunned and disabled if they had too much health to kill quickly, because no survivability tools in the game would stand up to enemy damage output for very long.

In Chaos Rising, you can't kill enemies as quickly due to the larger health bars, and it's not as important to kill them quickly because they deal much less damage. There are also many more durability and health options in Chaos Rising which you can use to stay alive.

At the same time, Chaos Rising greatly decreases characters' energy regeneration from the original campaign. You can't throw out energy abilities with reckless abandon any more, it takes quite a long time to recover the energy you've spent.

These factors mean that Chaos Rising is much more about building squads to be fundamentally durable and able to fight for a long time with their basic weapons. You want to use abilities (whether energy based or supply based) less frequently, and wait for situations where they'll grant good value.

Chaos Rising is much simpler than the original campaign.

It contains a total of only 15 missions. Most of these missions are required, but 4 are optional. Optional missions are only available for a few days. Because days only advance when you complete a mission, not simply attempt it, you'll only miss an optional mission if you intentionally avoid doing it for too long.

You start by doing the following missions, one after another in order.

• Cold Welcome
  
• A Call for Aid
  
• Uprising at Angel Forge
  
• Ice and Blood

Then two missions unlock, both of which must be completed to proceed

• A Brother's Return
  
• The Rescue

and at the same time, the first optional mission unlocks

• Optional: Legis Uprising (available for three days)

Once you complete one of A Brother's Return or The Rescue, another optional mission unlocks

• Optional: The Bloody Hand (available for three days)

When both A Brother's Return and The Rescue are done, the next mission unlocks.

• Keys to the Past

This mission's completion unlocks two more optional missions and another mission which must be completed to proceed.

• Optional: Relics of Space (available for two days)
  
• Optional: Capital Defense (available for two days)
  
• Lord of Chaos

When you complete Lord of Chaos, the following missions take place one after the other, in order, to the end of the campaign.

• Raid on Calderis
  
• The Wages of Sin
  
• Foul Play at the Chapter Keep / Selenon Assault

The system of campaign days returns from the original Dawn of War II, but with some important changes. The concept of bonus deployments per day is gone, and you don't lose days if you fail a mission or quit. The only way to advance the "day" counter of the campaign is to complete a mission. This means that when you come across the optional missions that are only available for a few days, the only way you can miss these missions is to choose to avoid them and do other missions until they run out. You should do every optional mission in the campaign; it's short and there are few opportunities to get good items anyway, you don't want to make it even shorter.

At the end of each mission you are given a performance rating made up of 15 stars. 5 stars come from Resilience (how many of your squads were incapacitated during the mission), 5 stars come from Fury (what percentage of the map's enemies did you kill), and 5 stars come from Speed (how long did the mission take you).

Note that Resilience is not "how many times did a squad I control get incapacitated?" but "how many of the four squads I control got incapacitated at least once?". If your Force Commander died 15 times but your other squads all stayed alive through the mission, your Resilience result is 3/4. 4/4 Resilience gets 5 stars, 3/4 gets 3 stars, 2/4 gets 2 stars, and so on down to 0 stars if all four of your squads died at some point.

Because there are no bonus deployments in a day, you performance rating barely matters in Chaos Rising. The main effect it has on the game is getting you bonus XP, which allows your heroes to level up and reach the maximum level of 30 sooner. Performance rating stars also make significant contributions to your campaign score, so if you want a high score then performing well on missions is helpful.

Although days are not consumed by failed or aborted missions, you'll keep all the XP, items, and campaign score you get during a mission even if you don't finish it.

In Chaos Rising, as your squads battle the forces of Chaos they may be tempted to turn to Chaotic tactics to achieve victory. Every squad other than Thule has a corruption meter, which can hold between 0 and 24 corruption points. As long as a squad has fewer than 4 corruption points, it has access to a 'Purity' trait which is usually quite strong against Chaos forces. Above that, the purity trait is disabled, but for every 4 corruption points gained a new 'Corruption' trait activates. Purity/Corruption traits are not permanent; you only have each one as long as you currently have the right number of corruption points.

There are many sources in the campaign which affect your corruption points.

• Most missions have a corruption opportunity, a redemption opportunity, or both. These are bonus objectives which increase or decrease the corruption points of every squad currently deployed. Usually staying pure makes the mission harder to complete and becoming corrupt makes it easier. Often these bonus objectives also award powerful wargear, and ironically, redeeming bonuses usually give corrupting wargear.
  
• Every time you capture a Communications Array or Imperial Shrine (but not an Automated Foundry), the squad which did the capturing has their corruption points decreased by 1. On a few rare occasions, capturing a strategic asset instead reduces the whole strike force's corruption by 2.
  
• Several items will add or remove corruption points to a squad for every mission that squad completes with that item equipped. Usually corrupting wargear is stronger than ordinary items, and redeeming items have substantial downsides.
  
• As you gain corruption points, you unlock powerful global abilities which add 1 corruption point to all currently deployed squads with every use.
  
• For most of your squads, there is a mission which that squad leader really wants to go on. If you complete the mission without that squad, they gain 5 corruption points.
  
• Deploying pure squads along with a corrupt Force Commander will corrupt the other squads (+2 per deployment). Each squad has a different threshold for when they start being affected by this. Tarkus receives corruption after the Force Commander reaches 4 corruption points, Thaddeus after 8 points, Jonah after 12 points, Cyrus after 16 points, and Avitus after 20 points.

Unlike items, XP, and campaign score, changes to corruption points (whether from bonus objectives, corrupting or redeeming items, characters wanting to be deployed, characters not trusting the Force Commander, etc) only apply if you finish a mission. You can't gather extra corruption or extra redemption by entering a mission, doing a corrupting/redeeming bonus, aborting, and repeating the process. If deploying to a mission under conditions that will cause corruption if you win it, the game will give you a warning that you have to acknowledge in order to continue. There is one exception to this: I have observed a few instances where Tarkus received corruption from distrusting the Force Commander even when aborting the mission. This is likely a bug.

As a squad's corruption level increases, it becomes harder to gain more corruption points. While a squad has 12 or more corruption points, all future corrupting effects will provide 1 less corruption point than they normally would to that squad. After 20 corruption points, all future corrupting effects provide 2 fewer corruption points than normal. The corruption reduction applies individually to each source of corruption affecting you; if a squad is wearing two pieces of corrupting wargear and has 21 corruption points, the corruption from each item will be reduced by 2. This means that several sources of corruption, such as global abilities and lesser corrupting wargear, cease to affect that squad at all. Between the reducing impact of corruption and the number of squads at your disposal, it's quite difficult to get your whole strikeforce fully corrupted in the course of the campaign.

Once a squad reaches 24 corruption points (the maximum) it becomes impossible to redeem them by any means. They're stuck fully corrupt for the rest of the campaign.


The most obvious reason for choosing purity or corruption for a squad is to gain access to the relevant traits. There are several other outcomes too.

There are a few exceedingly powerful corrupt items in the campaign, which require you to already have achieved certain levels of corruption before you can use them. There are also exceedingly powerful purity items which require you to have less than 4 corruption points (i.e. your purity trait is still active) to equip them. The Blessed Cage is the most notable of these.

Once your Force Commander reaches 24 corruption points, and you deploy to a mission (whether you win, lose, or abort), when you return Thule will have left your strike force. There's no way to get him back.

Corruption determines which of your squad members will be revealed as the traitor in the second last mission of the campaign. The possible traitors are Martellus, Tarkus, Avitus, Cyrus, Thaddeus, and Jonah. Neither the Force Commander nor Thule can be the traitor. If Tarkus, Avitus, Cyrus, Thaddeus, and Jonah all have 3 or fewer corruption points (if they are all 'pure') the traitor will be Martellus in a Chaos Predator (this holds even if your Force Commander is highly corrupted). If one of the possible traitors has 4 or more corruption points, that squad will be the traitor. If multiple squads have 4 or more points, whoever has the highest corruption points will be the traitor (if there's a tie, it's broken by who has the fewest Energy trait points).

Because of the traitor and Thule, a high corruption strikeforce gives you far fewer squads to work with. In my opinion a full purity strikeforce is overall stronger than full corruption. The corruption global abilities are strong, but their cooldowns are long. Cyrus' purity trait is particularly good for keeping your armies alive in very long fights. Also, many corruption traits and abilities give various buffs in exchange for taking damage or losing squad members, but the only restorative improvements usually offered by corruption traits are to regain health and energy with each kill. Because a lot of fights in Chaos Rising are long with only a few high health enemies, this playstyle has serious weaknesses. In any case, a fully corrupted playthrough is likely to result in a lot more deaths among your squads, and therefore in lower campaign score, even if you still kill things quickly.

If you started Chaos Rising by importing a completed campaign from the original game, your heroes will have the same traits in this mission that they ended the original campaign with. However, they are always given the same starting items for the mission regardless of whether this is a new save or an imported one. The Force Commander has a jetpack, Tarkus has Frag Grenades, Avitus has Blind Grenades, and Cyrus has a Sniper Rifle, Remote Detonators, and Demolition Charges.

The start of the mission is mostly a tutorial and simple. Enemies on this mission are all Imperial Guardsmen, who die easily to most things you have. After you find the decoy distress beacon and experience your first artillery bombardment, Guard spotters will periodically show up nearby. These are individual soldiers who will call in an artillery strike on top of you if left alive too long. Cyrus' Snipe is ideal for taking them down. Try to preserve remote detonators; you'll want as many as possible for the end of the mission. Use demolition charges or Tarkus' frag grenades to kill buildings when you need to.

The last part of the mission is a holdout against a huge Guard army for 5 minutes. The countdown timer only keeps going as long as you control the Reinforcement Beacon at which the holdout takes place. It is possible for the Guard to recapture that beacon from you. If they do, your highest priority is to get it back. When the holdout begins, the Guard recapture all the other beacons you've taken on the map, so if your holdout beacon is taken, your nearest retreat point is one of the drop pods from the start of the mission. Don't retreat if that happens; your retreating squad will run halfway across the map and take minutes to get back to the fight. Although, if you accidentally retreat your whole strike force, you can make your way back across the map, retake the beacon, and resume the countdown. It won't lose you the mission.

The Guard army is made challenging by huge numbers and grenadiers, who spend a lot of time knocking over your heroes so that they can't fight properly. Cyrus' snipe is useful against the grenadiers to buy you some time standing up, but it's hard to pick them out from the mass of Guardsmen (they have slightly larger cylindrical weapons). Remote detonators are useful to kill large numbers of Guardsmen, but there are so many of them Cyrus is likely to get detected (and disrupted) as he tries to plant them. Send Cyrus around behind buildings rather than directly along the enemy line of approach to plant charges more safely.

Overall, the holdout isn't too bad as long as you don't lose the beacon. You don't have to kill all the Guardsmen when the timer hits zero, you just have to survive until then.

After mission 1 is over, you have the opportunity to reset the traits of each hero on the inventory screen using the "Reassign Points" button. You only have this option right now; after you complete mission 2 it will go away and you'll never get the chance to reset your whole trait build again. So take the time now to plan how you want to trait your 6 starting characters for playing through Chaos Rising. Because new traits are now available, you probably want to make some changes from your original campaign build.

You're always given an expendable item called "Contemplation of the Codex" which grants bonus experience. I recommend holding on to this for use on Jonah, since he starts out lower level than your other characters. I also recommend not donating any of the items you have at the end of mission 1. Wait until Jonah joins your team so he can benefit from the XP granted by donating items too.

As with mission 1, you don't get to choose your squad. You'll be deploying with the Force Commander, Tarkus, Thaddeus, and Thule, but for most of the mission Thule will be AI-controlled and your fourth member will be Jonah.

Once you finish killing the Eldar in the initial area and take the first beacon, a bunch more Eldar will spawn, including a Falcon tank. As you fight these, a cutscene plays and Jonah arrives. You only gain control of him when all the Eldar are dead, and then he replaces Thule, who stays in the starting area the whole mission. Jonah has very little health. He's best kept in the back spamming Smite.

As in the previous campaign, Seer Councils are your biggest Eldar problem. Unload all the damage you've got on them. Thaddeus is particularly useful vs Seer Councils because his jump knocks them over and they output so much damage that he'll have Chapter's Fury off cooldown very often, allowing for repeated disruptions and a lot of invulnerability.

The most difficult fights are at the beacon east of the starting area (about 1/3 the way up the map) and at the far east of the map, when you reach the Webway Assembly. There are two Webway Gates by the assembly. It is strongly recommended that you bring Demolition Charges or Melta Bombs (which do surprisingly high damage) to use on those Webway Gates, otherwise they'll survive to spawn additional enemies for a long time. You won't get much spare time to destroy them with auto attacks since you'll be busy fighting the existing infantry. Melta bombs are probably the better choice since they'll help you against the few vehicles on the map too.

There's a cliff just above the Webway Assembly with 5 supply crates on it. Make sure to grab them.

As the Webway Assembly gets to low health, the Wraithguard around it will unfreeze and attack. Melta bombs also work on them, insta-killing individual models.

On the way back from the Assembly, they imply that Thule is taking damage and will die (again) if you don't reach him quickly. It's a total hoax. Thule has a series of health checkpoints; upon reaching certain amounts of health, he'll simply stop taking damage until you progress past a certain point on the journey to where he is. Effectively, he'll always be on low health but not dead when you reach him, no matter how slow or fast you are.

The hardest fight on the return journey is at that 1/3 distance beacon again. There are a lot of Wraithguard around it and a few Eldar infantry clustered at the beacon itself, including a Warlock who buffs the Wraithguard. Kill the Warlock as soon as possible to make the fight easier. Thaddeus with Jump, Chapter's Fury, and Merciless Strike is great for this.

The final fight against the Eldar who've been attacking Thule is probably going to be fine as long as you have some anti-vehicle for the Wraithlord there. While it's not likely, be aware that Thule can die and this will lose you the mission if it happens, so don't throw grenades in his general direction.

With the mission over, Jonah joins your squad and you can start to choose his traits and gear. You'll also be able to choose the members of your strike force for all the remaining missions of the campaign. Your squads' purity traits will start appearing on the inventory screen (although in fact those traits have been in effect for both campaign missions so far).

Corruption opportunity: destroy Angel Gate (+5 corruption points)
Corruption event: +1 corruption for completing the mission
Strategic Asset: Foundry

For the first half of the mission, you face orks. After you take out all the indicated ork forces, Chaos Space Marines appear inside Angel Gate and you have to make your way in and kill them all. You'll be fighting several ork vehicles, and the mission final boss is a Chaos Dreadnaught, so bring plenty of anti vehicle firepower. The ork phase of the mission also has several orks garrisoned in buildings, so make sure you bring something that can handle buildings. The mission isn't especially complex or difficult beyond that.

To get inside Angel Gate, you have to choose whether to lower the gate using a console or destroy it. Destroying the gate corrupts your squads, but you can only reach the console if you brought someone who can jump or teleport. Thaddeus is the most obvious choice here, but anyone with the right mobility options will work. Whoever jumps up to the console to lower the gate will have to fight a cultist squad, but that should be easy pickings for any one of your squads.

When you win the mission, every deployed squad (except Thule of course) receives 1 corruption point. There's nothing you can do to avoid this, it's just to introduce the corruption mechanic.

With this mission over, the whole corruption trait line will appear on each squad's inventory page.

Corruption opportunity: allow the Imperial Guard bunker to be destroyed (+4 corruption points)
Strategic Asset: Communications Array (-1 corruption to capturer)

After clearing out the initial Chaos horde which consists mostly of cultists, don't follow the Imperial guard north-east up the stairs towards the centre of the map. Instead, head directly north towards the Communications Array immediately. Shortly after you set out a cutscene will play where the Imperial Guard bunker you defended is hit by artillery. You need to capture the Communications Array in the north east to stop the artillery firing on them. All deployed squads are corrupted if the bunker is destroyed first. The bunker is usually destroyed in 4 or 5 artillery volleys, but the damage per volley is somewhat random because each explosive shot may or may not land on the bunker. The volleys aren't individually announced either, you just have to keep an eye on the bonus objective indicator of the bunker's health. The timing on this bonus is pretty tight; you'll almost certainly reach the array just before the last round which would destroy the bunker.

In this mission you have to deal with a lot of Chaos infantry, several Chaos in bunkers and buildings, a couple of Chaos dreadnaughts, and your first encounter with Bloodcrushers. Make sure you're prepared to handle them efficiently.

Even if you want to get your squads corrupted, it's worth capturing the array after the Imperial Guard bunker is destroyed, both for the extra use of your own artillery skill, and because for this mission it grants you a global artillery ability which does a lot of damage in a large area. As you move down the ramp from the array, a cutscene plays with Araghast taunting you, and immediately after the cutscene you have vision of big chunks of the map for a few seconds. This is a great opportunity to throw down an artillery on a densely defended area.

Proceed west to take the power station, then southest towards the centre of the map to destroy the Chaos temple. Using your global artillery ability is a great way to end the mission quickly without having to destroy all the temple's defenders, once you've taken down its energy shield.

With the completion of this mission, Legis Uprising, A Brother's Return, and The Rescue all unlock. You must complete A Brother's Return and The Rescue for the campaign to progress.

Expires in 3 days.
Thaddeus is corrupted if he does not participate in winning this mission (+5 corruption points)
Redemption opportunity: destroy the Black Reliquary (-2 corruption points).
Strategic Asset: Foundry (-1 corruption point to capturer)

The mission requires you to destroy several Chaos structure emplacements, made up of generators, shrines, and in one instance a Chaos Temple. There are several Chaos turrets around the map, which have inordinately large health bars, many dreadnaughts, and a few Chaos predators. Bring plenty of anti-armour weapons for this one. There are also quite a few heavy infantry units: Havocs, Plague Marines, Bloodletters, and some of these are garrisoned in buildings.

Often when you're near the clusters of structures, a big red Chaos star will appear on the ground, followed by lot of meterorites falling out of the sky. Just back up or move ahead when this happens; it should be pretty obvious you don't want to stand in the big red target indicator. There's enough time to get out of the way, so it's not a big threat.

The Black Reliquary for the redemption bonus is in the south east corner of the map. There's nothing really difficult about it, just a few Chaos units defending. Destroying the reliquary drops three items: Aegis of Obliteration (the best corrupting terminator armour in the game), Bloodtide, and Cruelty of Geoffros. It may be worth doing this bonus even if you want your squads fully corrupted, because of the value of the corrupting gear it yields.

Corruption opportunity: discharge the array (+4 corruption points)
Redemption opportunity: collect Martellus' salvaged items (-2 corruption points)

This is a defense mission. Initially you have to make your way to Martellus and revive him, then defend three power generators for a while. You'll be attacked by Chaos from the north and west, orks from the narrow bridge to the east. Eventually there'll be a few vehicles, but a lot of the attacks are infantry. At the end a Plague Marine boss spawns. He's basically just a damage sponge; doesn't do anything particularly special. You're given 4 tarantula turrets as a global ability to deploy wherever your want.

This mission can be utterly trivialised by Cyrus' Melee 4 trait, which makes cluster mines energy based and deploy in bundles. The defense portion of the mission doesn't start until Martellus is revived, so just don't revive him and have Cyrus cover the ground with cluster mines in every direction. Use the Force Commander's Battle Cry with Energy 3 trait to restore Cyrus' energy every time it's off cooldown. Then, after Martellus revives, most enemies will die without getting anywhere near you, including the vehicles. Without the cluster mine strategy, this mission is quite difficult; enemies attack from three directions at the same time and you just can't kill them quickly, so they stack up into big armies that overwhelm you.

The corruption opportunity is activated by capturing the array, which damages and stuns all enemies on the map. It's completely your decision whether to do this.

The redemption opportunity requires you to kill an ork weirdboy and some other orks in a clearing in the south east corner of the map. Once they die, some items drop. The weirdboy has an excessive amount of health. You'll almost certainly need two squads to kill him with a reasonable degree of efficiency. While you're having Cyrus mine up the map, you might want to drop a remote detonator in this clearing; detonate it when the redemption opportunity starts so you won't have to deal with anything other than the weirdboy. The items given by this bonus are the Salvaged Armour, Salvaged Weaponry (see the section on Multi-selection items) and Blessing of Mikelus.




After this mission is completed, the terminator armour you brought from the last campaign is repaired and you can use it again. You also unlock a new kind of grenade, the Orb of the Omnissiah, and get the Cyclone Missile Launcher (the one you mount on terminator armour) returned to you.

Cyrus is corrupted if he does not participate in winning this mission (+5 corruption points).
Corruption opportunity: let all scouts die (+4 corruption points).
Redemption opportunity: destroy the Chaos portal (-2 corruption points).
Strategic Asset: Foundry

The mission requires you to destroy all the Chaos troops threatening three groups of allied scouts, then kill the Sorcerer who leads them. The enemies consist of infantry including several plague marines, and a couple of dreadnaughts and predators.

It's very difficult to avoid the corruption bonus, but is possible. Despite the fact that Cyrus is required on this mission to avoid corruption, he's one of the worst options to bring if you don't want to get corrupted. You need to keep as many scouts as possible alive, but Cyrus' explosives damage the allied scouts. Don't give him remote detonators for this one; stick to ally-friendly tools like cluster mines. Cyrus' Melee 4 is excellent for cluster mines here. Avoid area of effect damaging abilities like artillery and cyclone missiles. Jonah's Health traits are excellent for stunning and blocking enemy attacks, as is Tarkus' Taunt. After you defend the scouts near your spawn point, go to the northeast, defeat all the Chaos there, then the northwest. You need to move forward rapidly and get your squads between the enemy and the scouts to keep them alive. Stims and Rosarius work on the scouts; use them liberally. Cyrus' purity trait and Jonah's Armour of Faith are helpful for this.

The Chaos Portal redemption bonus is well defended with some very durable turrets, and infantry who will summon a Bloodcrusher. Once you kill the defenders though, the portal itself doesn't pose any problem. Completing this bonus objective rewards you with the Book of Lorgar.



You can delay doing the Chaos Portal until after you've finished saving the scouts, but before killing the Sorcerer. This way you can use the portal bonus' redemption effect to offset some of the corruption if you couldn't keep all the scouts alive.

The Chaos Sorcerer shoots doombolts and uses chains of torment, an ability which holds your squads in place and damages them. Melee is effective for making his life difficult. You don't actually have to completely empty the Sorcerer's health bar; once he gets to low health he summons an orb of blood (big red dome) and the mission ends.

Once you've complete both The Rescue and A Brother's Return, the Judgement of Carrion space hulk will become available with the next mission to progress the story.

Expires in 3 days.
This mission unlocks when you complete either The Rescue or A Brother's Return.
Tarkus is corrupted if he does not participate in winning this mission (+5 corruption points).
Corruption opportunity: destroy the tomb in the southeast of the map. (+4 corruption points).
Strategic Asset: Shrine (-1 corruption to capturer).

This mission has you fight everything Eldar; grav platforms, warp spiders, banshees, seer councils, wraithguard, lots of wraithlords, and fire prisms. Cyrus is excellent here because of his ability to painlessly clear out enemy clusters ahead of you using remote detonators.

The corruption bonus tomb is on high ground at the southeast corner of the map. It has very low health; using virtually any area of effect ability nearby will probably destroy it. You don't have to pass the tomb to win the mission though; you can instead advance forward through a narrow pass near the middle of the map and skip going near the tomb entirely. On the other side of the pass are two wraithlords and two fire prisms. The game tries really hard to suggest that you should look for an alternate route to flank them (i.e. go past the tomb and risk destroying it); by passing the tomb you can access a narrow path to the south that lets you skip the fire prisms and wraithlords entirely, but it's not at all needed. They're not that bad to fight if you came with solid anti-vehicle options: Cyrus and some remote detonators are just one effective way to take them down cleanly.

If you destroy the tomb, you will always get the Gauntlet of Ebberos, and may get some other items too.




At the end of the mission are four very high-health warlocks. Once they die, an avatar spawns in. This avatar does largely the same things as the avatar in the original campaign; high melee damage and fire explosion attacks at range, signalled by red markings on the ground. Lots of additional Eldar infantry spawn throughout the fight, all from a gate in the ruins east of the boss area. These include wraithguard, but no vehicles. It's very helpful if Cyrus can repeatedly place remote detonators around that area to instantly kill each group of enemies as it spawns.

Corruption opportunity: take more than 20 minutes to reach the end of the mission (+4 corruption points)
Redemption opportunity: recover 5 gene seed vials (-2 corruption points).

Jump packs, artillery strikes, locator beacons, and orbital bombardment will not work on this mission. (Anything that requires a lot of height above you, or gets deployed from orbit). The abilities just don't exist on your characters if you deploy someone who would otherwise be able to do one of these things. Thaddeus will be fully functional in terminator armour though. Because so many of these abilities don't work on this mission, you have a lot more extra accessory slots to take both Rosarius items (one from importing your original campaign save, one from capturing Shrines in this campaign) and extra purity seals for stat buffs.

Whoever designed this mission was a fan of the Space Hulk board game. And I'm ok with that.

The main mission objective is to collect 10 dataslates and bring them to the door. Behind the door you will face a Hive Tyrant boss fight.

Some of the redemption bonus gene seeds are on the ground and appear as you pass, but most of them and the dataslates for the main objective are both inside normal-looking supply crates. Destroy all the supply crates you find (not that you wouldn't have been doing that anyway). You'll probably need to cover most of the map to find everything. There's one more gene seed behind the door which you use the 10 dataslates to open; you only need to have 4 gene seeds when you enter to still get the redemption.

To avoid the corruption bonus objective you need to begin the Hive Tyrant boss fight within 20 minutes. The timer does not deactivate upon opening the final door; it deactivates when the tyrant spawns. There's enough time to find everything on the map within the time limit as long as you keep moving and your units kill things reasonably quickly. You don't want to backtrack more than you have to.

The north east corner has several Carnifexes in tight spaces. These are vulnerable to your weapon-based vehicle stuns, but melta bombs still don't work on them. Anti-armour weaponry is useful to take them down. The south-western corner also has an area where three Carnifexes will spawn after the initial enemies there are killed and you go up some stairs.

In the far south-east corner (next to the reinforcement beacon) is a supply crate which drops the best piece of terminator armour in the game, the Blessed Cage. Make sure to grab it if you're not going full corruption.

The Hive Tyrant boss summons lots of tyrant guard during the battle. These are durable melee enemies. The Hive Tyrant itself has a ranged weapon though, which hits pretty hard. Tying up the Tyrant in melee is a good idea. Winning this fight mostly consists of having a lot of durability and damage output yourself. Anti armour firepower to clear out the tyrant guard is particularly important.

Completing Keys to the past unlocks two more optional missions and the next progression mission.

Expires in 2 days.
Jonah gains corruption if he does not participate in winning this mission (+5 corruption points).

The same tactical limitations apply to this mission as to the other space hulk one; jump packs, orbital bombardment, artillery strikes, and locator beacons can't be used here.

This mission only lasts 20 minutes. If you don't win in 20 minutes, the mission aborts and you'll have to retry it. This is a very easy time limit to accomplish though.

You need to find and collect all 4 gene seed samples; you collect them by clicking on them. Make sure to click on them all; unlike picking up wargear, they don't count as collected until you click on them, and the mission won't end if you don't. The first 2 gene samples are hidden inside clusters of 3 hive nodes along the path. The 3rd is at a tyrannid hive at the end of the map. Once you destroy the hive, a large swarm of tyrannids arrive to fight you, including a Carnifex. During the fight, a hive tyrant boss spawns, who drops the last gene sample.

Most of the mission is dealing with swarms of relatively weak tyrannids, so area of effect damage that doesn't hurt your allies is helpful. However, you'll want some anti-armour weapons (not melta bombs) for the few carnifexes on the map, as well as the several hive nodes.

The mission itself has no corruption or redemption opportunities, but the item the mission rewards you with reduces all squad corruption by 8 points when donated. You'll also get an item named The Fate of Galan in the course of completing the mission, which adds 5 corruption points to all your squads if used.

Expires in 2 days.
Corruption opportunity: your entire strike force is corrupted if this mission expires (+5 corruption points).
Redemption opportunity: hold both the shrine and communications array (-2 corruption points).
Strategic Asset: Shrine
Strategic Asset: Communications Array

This is a defence mission. As usual for Chaos Rising, defence missions are hard because enemies often spawn faster than you can kill them due to the increased health bars. Expect to face lots of cultists, a few Chaos infantry (marines and havocs; no plague marines), several dreadnaughts and predators, and bloodcrushers.

Bring plenty of anti armour and area of effect weapons, but be careful; your own area of effect damage can damage the palace, and if it dies you lose. Always try to kill enemies as they enter the palace court, not after they start attacking the palace itself. Orbital Bombardment is extremely useful, as are artillery and cyclone missiles.

Tarantula turrets are particularly useful on this mission because they give the enemy something to shoot other than the palace. This is where capturing lots of Foundries pays off; Meridian has more Foundries than any other planet, so you'll have lots of turrets to use if you've made a point of taking them.

The redemption requires you to capture both the shrine and communications array on the low ground next to the narrow bridges down which enemy attack waves come. The objective says to 'hold' the assets, but as soon as you take them allies spawn to keep them safe, so you don't need to devote forces to defending the assets after capturing them. The easiest way to do this is to have two squads with teleport or jump capabilities. Jump both squads down to one asset. Have one squad capture it while the other squad fights the enemies defending it to stall them. You don't need to beat the enemy defenders, just keep them busy until the capture completes, then your allies will drop in to continue the fight against the strategic asset's would-be defenders and you should keep it until the end of the mission. Repeat the same tactic to grab the other asset, then get your teleporting squads back to the palace for the last attack wave. While capturing the assets, it's a great time to use an orbital bombardment to take the pressure off your defenders who stayed back at the palace. When you grab each asset, you also get 2 more globally deployable tarantula turrets.

When Derosa says that the enemy are massing for a final attack on the palace, be prepared for Bloodcrushers to teleport in near your reinforcement beacon (the places are signalled with small red Chaos stars). Get your ranged characters away from those spots and your melee characters in position. Soon after the bloodcrushers spawn you can expect predators to drive in; this is the time to deploy as much anti armour damage as you can muster to take all these units down, otherwise they'll join up with incoming infantry forces and you're quite likely to lose.

Avitus gains corruption if he does not participate in winning this mission (+5 corruption points).
Corruption opportunity: Issue a Fall Back command (+4 corruption points)
Strategic Asset: Shrine (-2 corruption points to all squads). This Shrine functions as a redemption bonus objective.
Strategic Asset: Communications Array

The map will show the communications array in the same position it was during Ice And Blood, uncaptured. This is actually a separate strategic asset which you can capture, although it's difficult to reach. First, move to the centre of the big donut and trigger the first cutscene with Aragast. Win the fight you're presented with, then return to the drop pod you deployed from. Take a squad with jump or teleport capabilities and move them down to the bottom corner of the big iron grid platform which tilts down towards the ocean, north and east of your drop pod. Southeast of that corner is a small ice island with a broken girder sticking straight up out of it. You can jump or teleport onto that island. The valid landing region is pretty small. Then from the island, you can jump or teleport onto the end of the wide broken bridge. Now you're on the same landmass as the array and can make your way over to capture it. To get back to the area the mission takes place in, either reverse the jumps you made to get there or jump back across one of the narrow gaps around the outside of the donut. You can't jump directly from the central donut to the outer landmass with the array because that ground isn't valid a valid teleport/jump destination. This array doesn't seem to give any benefits for capturing it.

If you ever use the Fall Back command in this mission (the button with default hotkey X) your squads will get corrupted. This can be a bit of a problem because you've probably gotten used to pressing that button at the first sign of trouble over the last two campaigns.

The mission itself is quite straightforward; just move in the direction indicated and kill what you find. Near the shrine is a Chaos shrine which can spawn bloodletters indefinitely. There are several Chaos predators, a couple of Chaos dreadnaughts, and quite a few plague marines and plague champions. Bring plenty of anti-armour and be ready to deal with high health infantry.

When you're about halfway through the ice cliffs section of the map and Aragast says "Khorne thanks you for your offerings", expect to get hit with two predators.

Aragast is vulnerable to knockback both times you fight him. Bring anyone who does lots of knockback, like Tarkus or Thaddeus traited for melee combat, and he'll get thrown all over the room and barely have a chance to do anything important.

The final fight with Aragast is initially pretty easy. He's mostly a damage sponge; if your Force Commander is well upgraded in melee combat he'll probably keep Aragast knocked over most of the time. However, when Eliphas betrays Aragast you'll get a cutscene in which Aragast causes black rocks to rise out of the ground in all directions. For the last bit of the fight he'll keep bringing up those black rocks in your direction, and will spawn pairs of bloodcrushers pretty often too. You need the anti armour firepower to kill them quickly.

Corruption opportunity: kill any Blood Ravens (+4 corruption points)
Redemption opportunity: kill Galen and his terminators (-2 corruption points)
Strategic Asset: Shrine

If you care about staying pure, this is a stealth mission where you must make your way to the north centre of the map without killing any Blood Ravens. On Primarch, even one dead Blood Raven will corrupt you. You can win the mission either by damaging the stronghold there, or reducing Diomedes to low health. You don't actually have to kill either of them, just mostly deplete their health bars. The terminators who fight alongside Galan and Diomedes serve Chaos, so killing them doesn't corrupt you.

There are three possible ending cutscenes for this mission.

• The 'good' one: Tarkus explains to Diomedes that the daemon Ulkair is responsible for corrupting the chapter and he allows you to leave.
  
• The 'neutral' one: Avitus and Diomedes yell at each other, then Avitus kills him.
  
• The 'bad' one: Cyrus taunts Diomedes, and Galan offers to help him in his vengeance quest of pursuing you "to the depths of the warp".

If you've done the redemption bonus and not the corruption bonus, you get the good ending.
If you've done the corruption bonus and not the redemption bonus, you get the bad ending.
If you've done both, or neither, you get the neutral ending.
Your group's corruption level has nothing to do with this; for instance, you can still get the good ending if your whole group is fully corrupted before the mission starts.
The ending cutscene is also unaffected by whether you damaged the stronghold or fought Diomedes to finish the mission.
Which of these cutscenes you get affects your campaign ending. Check that section of the guide so you know what to aim for.

Even if you want to get corrupted, it may be faster to follow the stealth design of the mission, since it reduces the number of enemies you need to fight. You probably want to make your way up the western side of the map; there are relatively few enemy bastions you need to break going in that direction, you can kill Galan on the way, there's a reinforcement beacon right before the final area, and the gate into the final area is at the back near the stronghold, so it's much easier to avoid enemy defences.

Cyrus is the undisputed master of this mission. Bring demolition charges and he can infiltrate his way past the enemy defences, destroy the generators, and cause the enemy to retreat so the rest of your strike force can join him. You obviously don't want to bring remote detonators because of their potential for collateral damage. Be careful moving squads around; there is an assault marine squad which keeps jumping around even in areas where you've already destroyed the generator.

Jonah also has the potential to be very good on this mission. Tome of Mist's infiltration lasts longer than its cooldown, and Jonah can cast further spells while infiltrated without being revealed. This means he can keep re-casting Shroud on himself indefinitely to sneak through enemy positions. If you have the Coronet of Ice (dropped by the Avatar on The Bloody Hand) it also allows Jonah to use Shroud on enemies to make them frozen and invulnerable, which is extremely useful on this mission if one enemy squad is in your way and you don't want to kill them. Tome of Quickening provides an alternative method for Jonah to break the mission. While it's active he moves so ludicrously fast that he can run virtually from the start of the mission, past Galan and to the final reinforcement beacon while only taking minimal damage from the Blood Ravens on the way. Jonah's main weakness in this mission is that he doesn't have a good way to destroy buildings because he can't use demolition charges.

The easiest way to damage the stronghold is to drop an orbital bombardment just behind it. This position won't kill any blood ravens in the area of effect, does enough damage to end the mission, and orbital bombardment has enough range that it's easy to cast without getting into danger.

Much as stealth is needed on this mission, make sure you have some squads with good combat capabilities if you want to engage Galan; he summons some corrupted terminators to join in. When he dies, he drops the corrupted chainsword Ravenous.




At the centre, centre east, and south west of the map are drop pods which you can destroy for loot. You'll need jumps or teleports to reach the ones at the edges; the south west one requires you to jump onto a lone rock spire first to get close enough to reach it. The assault marine squad which jumps around the map also jumps to near two of these drop pods, including on top of the rock spire you need to get to, so be careful not to get into fights with them. The items you get are the Axe of the Fearless Crusader, Laraman's Atonement, and Myrmidon Plate.










Which character is the traitor is locked in when you leave Calderis and arrive at Aurelia for the next mission, and the traitor leaves your strike force upon arrival. If you want to do some last-minute corruption point manipulation, do it while you're still on Calderis in the aftermath of the mission.
The traitor leaves all their gear behind in your inventory when they leave.

Time to kill whichever character was the traitor.
There are no redemption or corruption bonus objectives on this mission.

You're back on Argent Glacier, the same map you were on for the first mission of Chaos Rising.
The traitor is inside a big triangular Chaos fortress at the north of the map, and there are two other major Chaos bastions to the southeast and southwest of that fortress. Several squads patrol the southern areas of the map, 2 predators defend the spot you extracted from back in mission 1, and clusters of Chaos forces are placed around the fortress. The front entrance to the fortress is very densely populated and an excellent target for orbital bombardment.
Expect to face the full range of Chaos forces; cultists, marines, plague marines, sorcerers, bloodletters, bloodcrushers, dreadnaughts, and unnecessarily high health turrets. Bring firepower for every kind of problem, infantry, unreasonably high health infantry, and vehicle. Also see the below list of different traitors for what the final boss will be like.

You don't have to destroy the small bastions on the map. The bonus objective claims that destroying the bastions means there will be no Chaos reinforcements during the final battle with the traitor, but it's wrong. Even if you destroy both bases, some Chaos units will fight alongside the traitor. Using something like the Force Commander's teleport, you can just jump past the enemy forces to get to the traitor boss arena quickly. When you reach it and confront the traitor, all your squads will be moved inside the arena. However, destroying the outer Chaos bastions makes the traitor weaker to fight, in addition to the XP and chance for items to drop.

Strangely, there is a communications array strategic asset to the southwest, back at the position you started from in the very first mission (the array wasn't there then). You can capture this array, but to reach it you'll need jump or teleport options. The area around it isn't empty either; there are turrets, marines, cultists, and 2 Chaos dreadnaughts spawn right next to the array as you approach it. If you do want to capture the array, try to bring at least 2 squads with jump or teleport options to fight the way there, or just dodge everything and hide in a corner while you capture it. This array doesn't seem to give any benefits for capturing it.


Every traitor drops a unique item. These items are usually corrupting, but if you donate them you'll be given a different item instead, which usually provides redemption.

The traitor if none of your squads were corrupted.
Martellus fights you in a Chaos predator, except it's a significantly souped-up predator compared to the ones you're used to. In addition to strong ranged firepower, it moves very quickly and he often uses a charge attack that knocks your units back or over and does significant damage.
Martellus is probably the hardest traitor fight.
This is a fight it's worth bringing a lot of Rosariuses for. If you've got two Rosarius accessories from importing an original campaign save, bring both so you'll get double value from every strategic supply. There are lots of supply crates on the map, so you're bound to get some. You'll also probably want lots of good abilities to revive dead squads, such as Thule's Health 3, Cyrus' purity and Health 2 traits, Jonah's healing options, and stimpacks. Ideally you wouldn't suffer any deaths, but Martellus' damage output is so high that you probably will.
Obviously you'll want a lot of anti-armour power against Martellus. Orbital bombardment and artillery are difficult to use to any effect because he moves around so quickly. However, there will be some infantry joining the fight with him at various points, so make sure you've got something that can kill them efficiently too.

When you defeat Martellus, you gain the Gift of the Iron Traitor. None of your squads can use this item.



Donating the Gift of the Iron Traitor yields the Blade of Steel.




Tarkus throws the occasional grenade which does substantial damage to whoever gets hit, but they have fuses so you can move out of the way if you're paying attention. He's really not that scary overall since he doesn't have any significant sources of disruption or hard-to-avoid damage output.

When you defeat Tarkus, you gain the Blighted Bolter he wielded (ironically this is a more powerful weapon than the one you can equip Tarkus with before he leaves your strikeforce).



Donating the Blighted Bolter yields the Holy Bolter of Purification.

Avitus wears terminator armour with cyclone missile launchers. As might be expected though, fighting him is heavily trivialised by strong melee power; keeping him in melee combat with several units prevents him using his ranged damage or his missiles. Tarkus in terminator armour, melee stance, with his taunt skill is an excellent choice. Thaddeus will also do the job fine.

Avitus drops the Lost Honor of the Blood Ravens, a piece of Terminator armour which only he can use, so it's useless to your strikeforce.




Donating the armour gives you the Honor of the Blood Ravens.





Cyrus is impressively annoying to fight, because ... well, imagine how the enemy has felt for the last two campaigns when you controlled him. He throws demolition charges, blind grenades, and uses snipe to insta-kill your squadmates. Every so often, he vanishes and reappears somewhere else. Sometimes, he vanishes and spawns in lots of remote detonators, laid out all over the boss arena, which then go off one by one. Bring lots of tools to revive dead squads or restore lost squadmates. Use Rosarius if you're on top of a newly spawned remote detonator and can't move away in time. Tying Cyrus up in melee doesn't do much because it doesn't block his abilities. Instead, try to bring lots of stunning options, and lots of ranged damage so you can tear through his health quickly and his frequent repositioning won't help him live longer.

Cyrus drops the Pride of Cyrus, a sniper rifle which only he can use, so it's useless to your strikeforce.




Donating the rifle gives you Lessons of the Veteran. +5 to all trait lines is incredible.





Thaddeus' fight mostly consists of assault jumps which cause big shockwaves wherever he lands. Suppression isn't very valuable because jumping breaks it, and tying him up in melee doesn't block his jumps either. Having at least some melee power is probably worthwhile so he doesn't tie up your ranged squads, although you'll need something like Taunt to keep him attacking the right squad. You probably want to focus on stuns and bringing squads which are durable and resistant to knockback. Thaddeus' jumps will still do some knockback even to terminators, but they'll have an easier time of it than others will.

Thaddeus drops the Pact of Thaddeus, an accessory which does nothing but corrupt you.




Donating it gives you the Caution of Thaddeus, an accessory which does slightly more than just redeem you.





Jonah zooms all over the place using Quickening, knocks back your squads with a powered-up version of Avenger, and uses the Chaos global ultimate ability from multiplayer, Empyreal Abyss. This begins with a large red Chaos circle and star on the ground, then chains, metal shards, and a warp rift appear, doing heavy damage and pulling in nearby infantry. Make sure you move out of the way whenever it happens. Make sure your characters are mobile enough to dodge the abyss when it happens. Other than that, Jonah really isn't very scary.

Jonah drops the Snare of Jonah Orion, a force staff. Since you no longer have a librarian at this point, your strike force can't use it.




Donating it gives you the Deathmask of Jonah Orion.

The mission's name differs based on whether your strike force is corrupt or pure.
This mission is very long. It has at least 3 major phases.
Unlike the Dawn of War II original final mission, your additional squads won't drop in during this mission. You'll only be playing with the 4 squads you chose when deploying to the mission.

In the first phase you control two predators rather than your usual strike force. You need to destroy a Chaos stronghold so a Blood Ravens army can land and progress the mission, at which point you get to control your chosen squads again.

The predator section of the mission is long, boring, and easy to lose accidentally. Even controlling the predators can be difficult; they can't turn on a point like infantry can. It's easy for them to end up facing the wrong way if you click in slightly the wrong position while moving them around, and remember directional tanks like predators take extra damage if the enemy shoots them from behind. I find the best way to get the right precise movements out of the predators is to always click only a little in front of or behind them. Click a bit to the side at the same time as ahead/behind if you want them to turn as they move forwards or backwards. Don't click directly to either side of a predator; it's likely to get the predator making unpredictable turns.

You'll see supply crates as you fight with the predators, but don't pick supplies up yet. They won't do anything until your strikeforce arrives.

The biggest problem with this section is the cooldowns on abilities. Both predators have a self-heal ability but its cooldown is very long, and you need it often due to the amount of damage enemies do.

The predator annihilator is a bit better against vehicles, having a lascannon. The predator destructor is a bit better against infantry. The predator annihilator has a special ability which allows its lascannon to do one supercharged shot, which is capable of killing any vehicle you meet in this mission even on full health. There are several areas in the mission where you'll need to fight 2 or 3 enemy predators at once; this ability is essentially required for those areas, otherwise you won't be able to kill the enemies before they kill you. The lascannon is also helpful against high-health infantry like plague marines, but don't waste the ability on them. The predator destructor has an ability that improves its anti-infantry autocannon for a while. It's very helpful to pop whenever you deal with infantry. Both these abilities have long cooldowns, but you need them both ready to use every fight because you don't know what you'll be fighting next until the fight starts, and some fights need at least one of these abilities to realistically win.

Both predators have smoke launchers and a speed overcharge ability called Full Speed Ahead!. This speedup ability is more dangerous than useful because you really need to move forward carefully; running forward to squash some infantry might get the attention of tanks or more infantry behind them, and land you in a fight you can't win. Just sit back, be patient, and kill things with ranged weapons. The smoke launchers aren't completely useless, but aren't that good either. You want to target the smoke grenades on your own predators; they reduce the damage enemies deal to them.

If one (or both) of your predators dies, you're given a razorback transport which has the ability to unload a tech marine which has the ability to repair damaged or destroyed vehicles. Use the techmarine to get your dead predator(s) back. You can also use him to repair a still-living predator if necessary. If the techmarine dies or successfully revives a dead predator, the razorback becomes an ally and heads back off the map. If both predators were destroyed, a second razorback will be deployed so you can revive the second predator.
The razorback also has the same Full Speed Ahead! and Smoke Launchers abilities that the predators have, so it can help if you need to fight to reach a dead predator. However, it's really not strong in combat, so if you get into a situation where you need to beat 2 enemy predators to revive one of yours, you're probably going to lose. Full Speed Ahead is nice to get the razorback to where you need it quicker, but shouldn't be used for combat.
Razorbacks will keep spawning indefinitely as necessary to revive your predators. However, since when one predators dies it was probably in the middle of a big cluster of enemies that your surviving predator can't beat alone, you really need to avoid losing a predator if you can at all help it; losing one in a bad position often sentences you to being locked out of progressing.

For this reason I recommend that after every fight you use the predator self-heal ability to heal them up if they're at less than 3/4 health, and wait until all their abilities are off cooldown again. Then, move forward slowly and stop moving when you next engage some enemies. Repeat. It's slow and irritating, but much better than doing this opening section 5 times over because you keep running into enemies you can't beat.

To move past the predator section you need to destroy a Chaos Temple, either in the northwest or southeast of the map. Either one will do, but the northwest is probably closer and definitely has easier terrain, which is important given how temperamental predator movement tends to be. Whichever Chaos Temple you destroy is where the Blood Raven army will drop, and they'll fight their way across the map towards the other one.

A Blood Ravens army drops along with your four chosen squads. The Blood Ravens will head towards the center of the map and then proceed to the Chaos Temple you didn't destroy with your predators. However, an extra Chaos base has also appeared in the middle of the map. Expect to fight a lot of Chaos predators and dreadnaughts, marines and plague marines, and cultists. There aren't very many bloodletters or bloodcrushers on this map (although not none of them).

Initially you'll still have control of the predators in addition to your normal strike force, but as you move forward the predators will be taken by your ally and join the Blood Raven army that's fighting the Chaos forces.

There is a bonus objective worth redemption points to complete the mission before the Blood Ravens have lost 75 units. This is not practically possible, because you can't make the Blood Ravens permanently safe. You can join them in fighting through the Chaos bases, and since stimpacks and Rosarius affect the Blood Raven army as well as you, you can do a lot to keep them alive, especially if you have energy based Rosarius or stimpacks. Artillery, orbital bombardment, and remote detonators should be avoided or used with great care because they will damage your Blood Raven allies. However, Cyrus' Melee 4 trait for cluster mines is extremely valuable here; throwing bundles of cluster mines does a lot of damage in an area to enemies without putting your allies at risk and can often kill Chaos predators in one volley.
The real problem with trying to keep the Blood Ravens alive is that even if you destroy all the Chaos bases and Chaos units in the southwest of the map, more Chaos armies will continue warping in every so often to fight the Blood Ravens, and you can't stop them. You also probably won't beat the mission before the Blood Ravens get up to 75 deaths because the bosses have so much health due to Primarch bonuses. Your best chance to accomplish this bonus would be to leave an energy-stimpack Cyrus with the Blood Raven army to keep them healed while your three other squads proceed to finish the mission, but that tactic seriously reduces your ability to fight the bosses ahead of you.

The good news is that because this is a redemption opportunity, failing the bonus isn't going to affect your corruption level. As long as you came into this mission with corruption points set up the way you want them on your squads, you'll still get the campaign ending you want.

You can fight alongside the Blood Raven allies as much as you want; you can either help them clear the map of Chaos bases or ignore them and try to progress the mission. The latter is probably a good idea if you care about finishing as soon as possible.

Once you're finished fighting alongside the Blood Raven army, head north towards the end of the mission.

The big feature both bosses have in common is seriously large health pools. Both Eliphas and Ulkair have several hundreds of thousands of health points; you simply can't kill them quickly. These fights are likely to take a while, and this is the point where not having energy-based medpacks is going to cause a lot of difficulty if you don't have Cyrus or he's corrupted. Fortunately, there are reinforcement beacons close to both fights, so you can always retreat and heal if necessary.

Orbital bombardments can be useful against these bosses. If you can aim one correctly so that the boss stays in one of the beams for the full duration, it does a huge amount of damage. However, it's very difficult to position the bombardments correctly because all the beams are offset from the spot you target, and also the bosses are likely to move out of the beam even if you hit it in the right place.

Eliphas is the first boss of the mission. Killing him is presented as a bonus objective, but you actually can't advance until he dies. The most interesting feature of fighting Eliphas is that he periodically summons Chaos shrines, which can do a variety of things including healing, knockback, and firing doombolts. These shrines are most easily destroyed by remote detonators as long as you keep your squads out of the blast radius, but they can also be destroyed by demolition charges or even ordinary weapons. Low-accuracy firepower like artillery and cyclone missiles probably won't help much because the shrines are very narrow, so not many shots will hit them. For the most part you just need to stay in the battle and output damage with auto-attacks. Low energy regeneration and limited supplies means you can't spam out abilities in this fight; wait until there's some value to be gotten with them before you spend resources on abilities. Most of your damage on Eliphas will probably come from your basic weapons.

After killing Eliphas there are a few more Chaos units to kill; a couple of vehicles, bloodletters, and marines. It's definitely worth grabbing the reinforcement beacon they're protecting.

The final boss is Ulkair himself. You actually see his health bar from early on in the mission, and his health rises as Blood Ravens die. He spawns lots of additional enemies during the fight, including dreadnaughts, daemons, and marines. It's probably easier to hit Ulkair with orbital bombardment than Eliphas, due to his size and slower movement. He deals sizable melee damage, and has some plague-based abilities. Particularly notable is a bile vomit that hits an area in front of him and does knockback in addition to damage. The same basic concept as Eliphas applies; most of your damage to Ulkair is going to come from auto-attacks because the fight lasts too long, energy regenerates too slowly, and supplies are too limited for you to apply lots of damaging abilities with reckless abandon. Extra damage options are better saved for efficiently killing the additional enemies.

Ulkair stays inside the chapter keep ruins you find him in. This means that if your strikeforce is entirely or predominantly ranged, you can sit just outside the ruins and pelt him with ranged damage, and he'll never get close enough to use his melee attacks on you. It also means spawned in enemies are all coming from one direction, and it's generally easier than trying to fight Ulkair inside the ruined dome.

With Ulkair's defeat, the mission is won and you get your campaign victory cutscene and final score.

There are 5 possible ending cutscenes to the Chaos Rising campaign. Here they are listed in order, with the one requiring the most purity at the top and the one requiring the most corruption at the bottom.

All ending cutscenes begin with Gabriel's words "Blood Ravens! Victory is ours!" but they diverge with which ending you've earned.

This ending is first distinguished when Gabriel says to the commander "you and your brothers shall be our agents of purification within the chapter". He also praises you for opening Diomedes' eyes to the corruption around him. The campaign victory text specifically mentions Gabriel, Diomedes, and you working together.
To get this ending the traitor must be Martellus, you end the campaign with all your squads on less than 4 corruption points (i.e. all "Pure in the eyes of the Emperor"), and you must expose the chapter's corruption to Diomedes in 'Raid on Calderis'. Remember that the end of 'Raid on Calderis' depends on which bonus objectives you do, not just your corruption level, so it's possible for your strike force to be fully pure yet kill Diomedes and miss the perfect campaign ending.

This ending is first distinguished when Gabriel says to the commander "you and your brothers have suffered most under this corruption".
You usually get this ending when one of your squads was the traitor but the rest were pure, although you can also get this ending if your group was fully pure but you got the Raid on Calderis ending where Diomedes dies.

This ending is first distinguished when Gabriel says to the commander "you and your brothers have been caught in the spiral of corruption infecting our chapter". You are sent on a crusade in the Eye of Terror for one hundred years to pay for your Chaotic tactics in achieving victory.

This ending is first distinguished when Gabriel says "We few stand against Kyras and his fiendish masters. We cannot tolerate corruption and sin within our brotherhood." He specifically mentions your Force Commander leaving "a trail of blood among our brothers on Calderis" and leading "the rest of your strike force into the darkness". Then Gabriel executes your Force Commander.

This ending is first distinguished when Gabriel says "We must deal with our other enemies first". Your Force Commander and strike force have become Chaos space marines and joined the Black Legion, and left to hide in the Eye of Terror.

Unlike the original Dawn of War II campaign, one supply crate no longer replenishes all limited-use abilities. Supplies have been divided into four types: Combat Supplies, Explosive Supplies, Medical Supplies, and Strategic Supplies. Any one of the four may be revealed when you destroy a supply crate. It's random which type you get. There are visibly more supply crates on Chaos Rising maps than in the original campaign, to make up for the fact that you need four times the supplies to replenish everything.

Combat supplies replenish grenades and Cyrus' weapon abilities. Explosive supplies replenish cluster mines, remote detonators, demolition charges, and cyclone missiles. Medical supplies replenish the stimulant kit, litanies of vigour, and rites of repair. Strategic supplies replenish the abilities granted by strategic assets: Blessing of Fortitude, Artillery Strike, and Tarantula Turrets (granted by the Rosarius, Signum, and Locator Beacon).

There are a lot more traits in Chaos Rising which allow you to make previously supply-based abilities energy-based instead. However, because energy regeneration is visibly lower in Chaos Rising than the original campaign and these abilities often cost quite a bit of energy, it may actually be more efficient to leave some abilities supply-based so that supplies continue to have value and energy can be used on other things.

When the campaign begins, you will not have the Orbital Bombardment item. You will get it by completing the mission "Keys to the Past" where you investigate the space hulk Judgement of Carrion. You do have the Drop Pod Beacon though.

A new item you gain automatically at the start of the campaign is the Smoke Grenade pack, which only Cyrus can use.

Still extremely valuable to have. Being able to heal your strike force is always very helpful, although there is a tendency to run out of stims in longer fights due to enemies having more health.

There are no master crafted frag grenades in Chaos Rising, only the regular grenades. You'd mainly give these to Tarkus due to his Energy 2 and Energy 4 traits, but only until you start getting terminator armour he can use. Grenades don't do enough damage and can't be used with enough freedom (whether you're limited by supplies or by energy) to play a key role in ending fights quickly. Also, it's much less important for fights to end as soon as possible than in the original campaign.

Useful because there are quite a few instances where you need to destroy garrisoned enemy buildings. Demolition charges also have a special niche of usefulness because there are several missions where you fight alongside allies, and the remote detonator's area of effect would kill them, so the more focused explosion of the demolition charge lets you avoid collateral damage.

Cluster mines are decent initially, good for killing some clusters of strong infantry you don't want to spend a remote detonator on, but with Cyrus' Melee 4 trait they become almost as good as remote detonators for damage output, but without the risk to allies, due to deploying in bundles.

Melta bombs might be better in Chaos Rising than in the original campaign, because there are rather more vehicles. Every mission against Chaos includes predators, dreadnaughts, or both, and most missions vs orks and eldar have vehicles too. Melta bombs are a helpful accessory to killing those vehicles, although they'll never be adequate as the only anti-vehicle damage you bring; you'll need some other weapons along with them.

Remote detonators are pretty much as amazing as they used to be; dealing huge amounts of damage to big clusters of enemies. The tactics from the original campaign of giving Cyrus the ability to plant them without being detected still works to clear out enemy emplacements safely. However, as mentioned above, there are several missions in Chaos Rising where you want to avoid killing certain units, and the large area of effect on remote detonators isn't a good match for those objectives.

These are rather less useful than in the original campaign. Bosses are often less scary in Chaos Rising because their damage output is less extreme and there are more tools which allow for healing and increased durability in your strike force. That means it's not as important to blind enemies. Also, you spend about half the campaign with access to terminator armour, so you won't be using grenades nearly as much.

These are virtually worthless in Chaos Rising. Because you start the campaign with Thule already having enough points to get Health 2 for the Ancient Defender self-heal ability, you should never need to repair him with another character. There's also only one mission where you have to defend any generators, and that can be made very easy.

As in the original campaign, there aren't too many targets that cyclone missiles are particularly good against because although they can fire at very long range, they spread out a lot on the way to the target, so they mostly won't hit what you want to hit. They're best used at short or mid range to destroy garrisoned buildings.

Very bad. It only reinforces your squads upon the initial drop, not like a reinforcement beacon, so it actually doesn't provide the kind of long-term sustainability you'd want in long boss fights. It's made worse by the fact that only the Force Commander can equip the drop pods accessory, and he's already holding orbital bombardment, so it restricts your ability to allocate accessories well.

Pretty strong. As in the previous campaign, it drops three lasers from orbit which do damage over time, then explode in an area. The total damage is extreme and will destroy any bastion you target with it, but it's hard to use against anything your squads are already fighting. All three lasers are offset at equal distances from the spot you target, so getting a specific enemy in a beam can be hard.

A new item in Chaos Rising. These don't seem to work properly. The description says that smoke grenades cause enemies to retreat, but I've never seen them do it. They're not worth the accessory slot.

A new item in Chaos Rising. You unlock these early in the campaign. Similar to stimulant kits, they restore energy to all nearby squads. They are replenished by medical supplies. Although energy is relatively slow to regenerate in Chaos Rising, Litanies of Vigour aren't often that useful because they are limited by medical supplies and there are other ways to get extra energy or conserve it. They are most helpful if you're not using any of the Force Commander's energy regeneration traits (Energy 3, 4, and 5). The Litanies of Vigour don't work on Thule.

A new item in Chaos Rising. Stuns vehicles. Potentially useful on missions where you need to keep allies alive and want to disable vehicles to prevent them doing damage until you can kill them. However, because vehicles are pretty durable, the fights will probably take longer than you can reasonably keep the vehicles disabled for with Orbs. Also, the Orbs are targeted on the ground rather than on a specific vehicle as melta bombs are, because they stun in an area, but this also means that between issuing the command to throw an Orb and it actually landing, vehicles might move out of the target area and not get stunned. One substantial advantage Orbs of the Omnissiah have is that, unlike Melta Bombs, they will work on Bloodcrushers and Carnifexes since those units are vulnerable to vehicle stuns.

Strategic Assets still exist in the Chaos Rising campaign on some maps. However, you barely ever return to the same map twice, and when you do it's to a different section of it, so try to grab every strategic asset when you see it; you won't get another chance.

The benefits Foundries, Communications Arrays, and Imperial Shrines used to give on the planet map no longer apply. Planets have no Infestation rating, you can't earn bonus deployments per day, and you can't unlock special mission intelligence. Automated Foundries still provide the benefit of giving you extra uses to the Locator Beacon accessory that it had in the original campaign; the more Foundries you have on a particular planet, the more uses you get of the asset's accessory ability. There are Foundries on Meridian and Calderis. However, Shrines and Arrays don't increase the number of Rosarius and Signum uses you start a mission with; these are always 1 and 3 respectively. Strategic assets are still valuable as reinforcement and healing points, and are sources of redemption for the campaign's corruption system.

A new effect is that strategic asset accessories can also have their abilities replenished by the new strategic supplies that you can find in supply crates. Since there are many crates, especially on large maps, this can result in a lot of uses of strategic asset abilities. There doesn't seem to be a maximum number of uses to strategic asset abilities; you can definitely get up to storing at least 10 uses. This offsets the ineffectiveness capturing strategic assets to build up uses of the abilities.

When you import a save from the original campaign, you'll have the Rosarius, Signum, and Locator Beacon with you if your characters were carrying them in the final mission. However, when you capture a Foundry, Shrine, or Array for the first time in Chaos Rising, you'll still be given a new accessory of the relevant type. This means you can have two of each strategic accessory during the campaign. As long as you give duplicate strategic accessories to different characters, they'll be fully functional. However, if you give both of the same strategic accessory to one character, they'll still only have one copy of the ability it grants and no additional uses; the second instance of the accessory will be completely ignored. If you give duplicate accessories to two different characters on your strike force, every strategic supply you pick up will give an extra use of the ability to both characters. This allows you to multiply the value of strategic supplies.

Usually when you capture a strategic asset on a mission, then fail or abort it, you'll still have the asset when you return to that mission.

The Rosarius' temporary invulnerability for your strikeforce remains amazing. The possibility to get extra uses of it from strategic supplies helps a lot for longer boss fights. Many missions in Chaos Rising have you fight alongside allies, and the Rosarius usually benefits the allies too. In some cases this can help accomplish redemption bonus objectives or avoid corruption ones.

The artillery strike is at least as good as in the original campaign. While it has value early on when you haven't unlocked many extra abilities, you quickly reach a point where it doesn't do enough damage to kill enemies due to their high-scaling health bars. Artilleries still do quite a lot of damage and in a large area, so they're useful against dense clusters of enemies and buildings; they just won't kill high health targets on their own any more. The artillery does pair very well with Avitus' Energy 4 trait though.

Tarantula turrets still aren't that great. They are nice to absorb damage, but deal very little, and dealing significant damage to enemies becomes important as their health bars get larger.

There are several items in the campaign which can be donated to get other wargear, but exactly which wargear they yield depends on which character is selected in the inventory while you donate the item. Here is a list of all the wargear given by each such item.

The First Gift of the Artificer is given by the mission "Ice and Blood".




On the Force Commander, it yields a hammer.



On the Force Commander in terminator armour, it yields a power fist.



On Tarkus, it yields a plasma gun.



On Tarkus in terminator armour, it yields a storm bolter.



On Avitus it yields a missile launcher.



On Avitus in terminator armour, it yields an assault cannon.



On Cyrus it yields a sniper rifle.



On Thaddeus it yields lightning claws.



On Thaddeus in terminator armour it yields a thunder hammer and storm shield.



On Thule it yields a multi melta.



On Jonah it yields a force sword.




The Second Gift of the Artificer is given by the mission "Raid on Calderis".




On the Force Commander, it yields a power axe.



On the Force Commander in terminator armour, it yields terminator lightning claws.



On Tarkus it yields a bolter.



On Tarkus in terminator armour it yields a storm bolter.



On Avitus it yields a heavy bolter.



On Avitus in terminator armour it yields an assault cannon.



On Cyrus it yields a shotgun.



On Thaddeus it yields lightning claws.



On Thaddeus in terminator armour it yields a thunder hammer and storm shield.



On Thule it yields a multi-melta.



On Jonah it yields a force staff.

Salvaged Weaponry and Salvaged Armour are rewards for completing the redemption bonus objective to recover Martellus' cache of items on "A Brother's Return".

Salvaged Weaponry comes from the redemption bonus objective in "A Brother's Return".



On the Force Commander and Thaddeus it yields a power axe.



On the Force Commander in terminator armour it yields a power fist.



On Tarkus it yields a melta gun.



On Tarkus in terminator armour it yields a storm bolter.



On Avitus it yields a lascannon.



On Avitus in terminator armour it yields an assault cannon.



On Thaddeus in terminator armour it yields a thunder hammer and storm shield.



On Cyrus it yields a shotgun.



On Thule it yields a multi-melta.



On Jonah it yields a force sword.



Salvaged Armour comes from the redemption bonus object in "A Brother's Return".




On the Force Commander, Tarkus, Avitus, and Thaddeus without terminator armour it yields power armour.



On the Force Commander in terminator armour it yields a terminator teleporter.



On Tarkus, Avitus, and Thaddeus in terminator armour it yields a redeeming purity seal.



On Cyrus it yields scout armour.



On Thule it yields dreadnaught armour.



On Jonah it yields librarian armour.

Close to the beginning of the Chaos Rising campaign, you'll be given two pieces of wargear: the blighted bolter and the blighted power armour. (These could drop in the original campaign too). Initially, each provides substantial benefits in one area in exchange for substantial drawbacks in another, and in the original campaign this is all they did. However, in Chaos Rising when you donate one of these, you receive an upgraded version. Each upgrade gives the item more corruption, but also makes it more powerful in combat, and only Tarkus can use either once you start upgrading them. Also, each more powerful version of the blighted bolter and blighted power armour requires a higher corruption point total on Tarkus before he'll be able to equip it, and at higher tiers even donating the item causes corruption to your strikeforce. There's no way to know what the upgraded item will look like before donating it, so here's a list of all the stages each item goes through. This will help you to donate each item only once Tarkus has enough corruption to use the next upgraded version, so he never has to take the items off.

Because they provide significant corruption points on every deployment, these items are very helpful in getting Tarkus fully corrupted, whether you're doing a full corruption run or intending Tarkus to be the traitor.

This section lists terminator armours available in Chaos Rising. Most of these armours can be predictably acquired, but some drop randomly and you can't depend on getting them every playthrough. This list is mainly to help in planning your traits. In many cases the extra trait points from terminator armour allow you to unlock more traits than would normally be possible. This is best done with armours that you can rely on getting every time.

The Aegis of Hurios is always given to you at the start of Chaos Rising campaigns whether you import from an original campaign save and whether you are wearing it during the final mission or not.

Crusade Eternal is only accessed by earning it in the original campaign, then importing your save into Chaos Rising. It will be brought over whether your squads are wearing it in the final mission or not.

Armour of Azariah is only accessed by earning it in the original campaign, then importing your save into Chaos Rising. It will be brought over whether your squads are wearing it in the final mission or not.

Daedus' Tomb is awarded for completing the mission The Bloody Hand.

Aegis of Obliteration is given by destroying the Black Reliquary redemption bonus in Legis Uprising. The description claims to give +2 trait points to Health, Ranged, and Energy, but in fact it gives +2 trait points to Health, Melee, and Energy.

The Blessed Cage is found inside a supply crate at the far south east corner of the map in the mission Keys to the Past.

Armour of Brotherhood is usually awarded for completing the mission Wages of Sin (the traitor mission).


Sometimes (although rarely) you'll get Treason Unforgiveable as the reward instead. In this case, Armour of Brotherhood may drop randomly in the last and second last mission.



Awarded by donating the terminator armour which Avitus drops if you fight him as the traitor.

A random drop in the last few missions of the campaign.

The 6 characters you start the campaign with (Force Commander, Tarkus, Avitus, Cyrus, Thaddeus, Thule) all have 5 unmovable trait points that stay allocated even when you use the "Reassign Points" button after mission 1. In addition to those 5 initial points they get 2 trait points per level, for a total of 5 + 29 * 2 = 63 trait points at the maximum level of 30. If you imported your save from the original campaign, they'll start at level 20 (possibly plus 1 level if they gained enough XP during mission 1) so they'll have 43 or 45 trait points (including the fixed 5 points) when you Reassign Points after mission 1. If you create a new save for Chaos Rising rather than importing an existing one, your characters will start at level 18 with 39 trait points each.

Jonah also has a maximum of 63 trait points at level 30, but has 31 points pre-assigned for you, and you never get the chance to reassign those trait points, so you get to choose the allocation of 32 of Jonah's total trait points.

Characters who appeared in the original campaign have the same trait trees they did previously, but most trait lines have had 2 or so new traits added on the end. This, in combination with Chaos Rising substantially reducing energy regeneration rate and scaling difficulties differently, means that the strength of different traits has changed quite a bit. In particular, it is generally less viable to mix and match traits from different trait lines in Chaos Rising because the best traits require many more points to reach than in the original campaign. You mostly pick the two trait lines you want each character specialised in and max them out, then put the remaining points into a third trait line.

I always get Melee 1 for Battle Cry and usually Energy 2 for the extra Orbital Bombardment. I usually max out the Force Commander's Health line, because it makes him extremely durable. Then I'll put the remaining points into either the Melee or Energy lines.

Always nice to have.


Having some cheap and easily available invulnerability is a great tool in many fights.

Very beneficial trait. Although you don't want the Force Commander to die, he sometimes will and this gets him back in the fight much sooner.


Force Commander gains 10 health for each kill he achieves. It doesn't sound like much, but on long missions like 'Wages of Sin' and 'Foul Play at the Chapter Keep', this can add up to hundreds or even thousands of extra health points. A very powerful trait.


If you're going to give the Force Commander heavy weapons, make it a missile launcher. Missile launchers provide you with plenty of anti-vehicle damage which is the main reason for having heavy weapons at all, and they don't require setup like the heavy bolter and plasma cannon. If you need either of those, bring Avitus, who unlike the Force Commander has traits that remove the setup time for those weapons.

While you can't use jump packs, teleporters, or iron haloes with heavy weapons, you can use the commander's helmet that you always start Chaos Rising with. Hold on to this item if you want to use your Force Commander for ranged damage.


Remember also that this trait doesn't affect the Force Commander in terminator armour at all. He can wear storm bolters and assault cannons in terminator armour without any ranged traits. If that's all you want and you don't care about him being well traited for ranged damage, put your points somewhere else.

Due to this trait, and the general damage output increase from Battle Cry, it's a good idea to get Battle Cry for your Force Commander even if you're focusing on ranged power.

This trait works well if you're building a strike force with lots of ranged damage specialists, so that the Force Commander has many allies he can usefully buff.

This trait is particularly powerful when the Force Commander it equipped with slow-firing hard-hitting heavy weapons like the missile launcher.

Battle Cry is both a good skill in itself and the basis for a lot of extra valuable things in other trait lines. You should always get it.

This is a pretty good trait. The Force Commander will be able to kill things noticably quicker in melee combat.

Always good to have extra sources of healing, although in major fights with bosses you'll be fighting fewer high-health units, so there probably won't be enough kills to keep the Force Commander's health up just through this trait. Synergises well with Corruption 1, because you were already going to get health and energy regen from kills, this just gives you more of it.

Also synergises well with Corruption 1 and Melee 3, giving you kills more often to get access to those bonuses.



You always want this, both for the accessory slot and because it's on the way to some other good options.

Nearly always worth getting. Orbital bombardment is very powerful, so a second orbital bombardment is extremely helpful.

The bug from the original campaign where this trait was incompatible with terminator armour is fixed. This trait is the only really consistent and readily available source of energy regeneration for your strike force. Use Battle Cry liberally to keep your squads' energy up.

The energy regeneration aura isn't nearly as noticeable as the instant energy restoration of Energy 3, but it doesn't require attention or special effort.

See the Breaking The Game section of this guide for the implications of the Force Commander's Energy 5 trait.

Tarkus is one of the few squads for whom all four trait lines are pretty good. I generally max out Health, get Melee 2, and put as many points in Energy as possible because Tactical Advance is good and more energy to spend on it helps. Alternatively, I might max out Energy and Melee, then put the rest of the points into Health. Tarkus has some excellent potential as a Melee tank and damage dealer, but needs a lot of health for it.

Taunt is useful for manipulating enemy behaviour. How much you want to use it depends largely on what role you're putting Tarkus into. If he's a ranged damage dealer, you probably won't be taunting much, but if you trait him for lots of melee combat taunt is very helpful for disrupting enemies as they charge into melee with him.


Veteran squadmates is useful for giving Tarkus' squadmates some decent power/plasma weapons, even when he himself only has a chainsword or bolter.

Always a great trait, especially when Tarkus is one of your designated squads for absorbing enemy damage.

This skill is extremely useful. It's like a targeted Rosarius, allowing squads in extra danger to survive and some enemy damage to be wasted.


Tarkus can be a very competent ranged damage dealer, but be aware that if you commit to traiting him for that you'll probably be giving up some of his potential for damage absorption and support to the rest of your strike force.



It was already probably a good idea to give Tarkus a plasma gun or flamer with ranged traits, since bolters never do that much damage, but this trait makes it even more so.

This trait gives you access to three Tarkus-specific accessories. You can only equip one at a time, but each gives a different bonus to Tarkus' ranged attacks. Consider that in order to benefit from them, Tarkus needs to spend an accessory slot on the special ammunition. They can be used both in power armour and terminator armour.








Tactical Advance is already one of Tarkus's key skills. This trait just rounds it out so that it becomes useful in virtually every fight.

Pretty worthless trait in itself; just give Tarkus terminator armour and a power fist if you want him in melee with powerful enemies. But you'll get this on the way to more useful things.

Potentially very disruptive to the enemy. Not only do you control who they're trying to kill, but you force them into melee combat. which for a lot of enemies is not where they deal their best damage. Tarkus himself probably won't be able to kill all these enemies efficiently, but his allies can.

Synergises extremely well with Melee 4.


Nice to have early on, but grenades aren't as valuable in Chaos Rising because finishing fights as soon as possible isn't as important, and enemies often have enough health to survive them.

One of Tarkus' best traits. Tactical Advance already provides good damage mitigation; extending it to the rest of the strike force is excellent. Helps greatly in keeping everyone alive. This obviously synergises very well with Melee 2, so you can extend protection against both ranged and melee attacks to all your squads.

This isn't a very good trait. Three grenades doesn't kill enemies significantly faster than one grenade. You're better off investing in more powerful sources of damage output.

Avitus' role remains that of immense ranged damage, and usually not much durability. Not all of his ranged damage traits are that powerful, but it's usually worth putting the points in to increase his raw damage. You'll then usually be deciding whether to max out Health or Energy trait lines, and putting remaining points into the other one. I think Health is probably more useful for a corrupted Avitus because several of his corrupting traits damage him, and Energy is better for purity because it'll facilitate more damage output and Avitus doesn't need as much durability.

Useful skill to have. Helps Avitus reposition if enemies get on top of him.

You always want this trait. Terminator armour helps Avitus greatly with more durability and a lot more anti-infantry damage output from assault cannons. He also becomes less vulnerable to dying in melee due to higher health and having a terminator power fist. One detail that's important to remember is that in terminator armour Avitus doesn't have very good anti-vehicle firepower; the assault cannon is specifically anti-infantry. So make sure you've got other squads that can cover high-armour enemies.

This trait very rarely matters because it comes after unlocking terminator armour, and you can't take cover when wearing terminator armour.

Pretty decent trait. Synergises well with Avitus's Corruption 1 trait because it adds more health restore to each kill.

Probably takes more points to get here than it's worth, especially since Avitus isn't supposed to be absorbing lots of damage anyway.

Always great.

Always great.


This is pretty helpful if Avitus isn't using terminator armour and you're giving him heavy bolters or plasma cannons. But it's probably better to just give him a missile launcher, which does decent damage against both infantry and vehicles, and doesn't require setup or teardown.

Very good to have. Of course, it requires you to position Avitus correctly, but he often doesn't move around that much and extra damage is always nice.

Extra kills on enemy infantry is very strong, but the enemies you're most in need of early kills against are likely to be the high health heavy infantry and bosses that the trait doesn't allow you to instant kill.




Strangely enough, Melee Avitus in terminator armour is kind of viable in Chaos Rising, even on Primarch, mainly because of this trait. If you max out Energy and Melee he can still use unlimited artilleries at the same time as running into people and punching them. However, 'viable' doesn't mean 'strong'; melee Avitus may be able to survive and dish out some damage in terminator armour, but you'll have a far easier time and get things done more efficiently if you build him for range.


Synergises well with Avitus's Corruption 1 trait because it adds more energy restore to each kill. But it's also always useful to have more energy restore even if you're playing full purity, since it lets Avitus keep Focus Fire going longer.

Good to have. The damage buff to allies helps to keep Avitus valuable to the team, even as enemies have enough health that he might take time to get kills.

One of Avitus' best traits. With Force Commander Energy 5 it's amazingly overpowered to be able to use unlimited artilleries for free, but even without that trait energy-based artillery is still very good. You can join Jonah's Empower ability with this to drop about 5 artilleries in quick succession, deleting virtually any enemy position. The artilleries do cost a lot of energy though, so if you're using this trait you probably won't be able to use Avitus' Focus Fire very often.

As in the original campaign, Cyrus' value comes from his accessories, not his weapon damage. My preferred trait setup is to get Health 3, Ranged 1, Melee 4, Energy 3, and either Health 4 or Energy 4.

Always a highly valuable trait to have. Massively improves his ability to operate while infiltrated.

Potentially quite useful, particularly for long fights where you want squad members back up and participating as soon as possible.

This trait is probably even more valuable than in the original campaign, because it allows Cyrus to stay in fights, especially long boss fights, without ever having to retreat to a beacon to get his squadmates back.

Immunity to suppression while infiltrated isn't very helpful because Cyrus' problems mostly happen once he gets detected. The extra movement speed is always nice though.

It's not really clear what you'd use this for. In almost every case you want your strike force fighting as one group; teleporting people around rarely has more than minor convenience value.

Good to have; the additional weapon-based abilities have a lot of useful applications. High-powered shot from the sniper rifle is less useful than the original campaign because there are fewer zoanthropes and most high-health enemies are durable enough that a single sniper shot won't kill them. But it still helps with damage output vs bosses, and it is often valuable for clearing out garrisoned buildings from a distance. The shotgun's explosive shot is nice vs durable squads, and the grenade launcher can shoot volleys of blind grenades, which functions as if you brought blind grenades without consuming an accessory slot.



The big problem with this trait is that Cyrus' value doesn't come from basic weapon damage, and if he's alone he certainly won't be able to take on any enemy which is powerful enough to need your attention. It's fundamentally not a good idea to split up your strike force in this game; smaller groups just can't complete objectives as quickly and safely.

This is a pretty nice bonus to have, and might be particularly good for a corrupted strike force, where energy and health regeneration are hard to come by, but it does take a lot of trait points to get here and there are other things to spend them on.

You'll always want this.

Smoke grenades remain pretty helpful as a back pocket stun for enemies if you happen to need one.

Completely worthless; Cyrus should never be in melee. But you'll get it on the way to the next one, which is absolutely worth all the points.

Probably Cyrus' most powerful trait in Chaos Rising. Unlimited energy-based remote detonators are incredibly powerful, although because you'll always be cloaked while placing them you'll end up going through energy very rapidly, so you can't place as many detonators as often. This is balanced out by the fact that you'll always have more detonators in the long run, which makes a big difference on long missions.
This trait also significantly improves cluster mines. Now Cyrus throws several mines at a time in the direction you target, rather than having to specifically place each one, and they are of course also energy-based. Cluster mines with the Melee 4 trait are in many ways better than remote detonators; they cost less energy, do similar amounts of damage per target, don't require Cyrus to get as close to enemies to place them, don't damage allies (and there are a lot of allies in Chaos Rising), and because Cyrus deploys several at a time they can hit many enemies in an area just as remote detonators would.
You will virtually always want this trait.



As always this remains one of Cyrus' best traits, allowing for agressive use of remote detonators and cluster mines without putting him at risk.

This trait is rather better in Chaos Rising because of the lower energy regeneration rate, and because Melee 4 allows Cyrus to spend energy to lay down remote detonators and cluster mines. This puts Cyrus' energy at a premium, so spending less of it on infiltration is excellent. You probably won't need this trait if you've got Force Commander's Energy 5 though.

I don't understand what you'd use this trait for. Almost everything in the game is built around fighting enemies, with the exception of the Raid On Calderis mission. Infiltrating your allies doesn't help you kill enemies more effectively, and it's very rare for your goal to be just sneaking past them without attacking.

This trait is weirdly designed. Attacking while infiltrated gets you revealed; you want to do one or the other, not both. But as I've been saying, Cyrus gets his damage output from his accessories and abilities more than from his primary weapon, so why would you focus on improving his primary weapon?

In Chaos Rising, Thaddeus is a lot more useful in terminator armour than he was in the original campaign. You'll almost always be maxing out his Health and Melee traits; the Energy line isn't that good. Ranged Thaddeus can work, but you'll have to give up his best melee tools for it.

Good to have, although you get less use out of it since it doesn't apply to terminator armour, which Thaddeus will be in for about half the game.

Still one of Thaddeus' best traits. Invulnerability on an already good ability will never be bad.


Increasing range of the movement abilities is always good. The trait doesn't mention stunning enemies on terminator teleport because Thaddeus does that by default in terminator armour.

A very powerful trait. Stronger squad mates are great to start with, but healing allies with teleports/jumps is excellent, particularly since longevity becomes important with some drawn-out fights in Chaos Rising.

A ranged specialist Thaddeus can work, but you play him very differently. You'd keep him in the back with your other ranged units, and only jump strategically to disrupt the enemy then get him out of the thick of battle as soon as possible. Remember that Thaddeus can never equip any ranged weapons in terminator armour; he can only use thunder hammer/storm shield and none of his ranged damage traits unlock any other terminator weapons. If you want to build a ranged Thaddeus, he won't be using terminator armour, which means there's no need to get Melee 3.

If you're going to give Thaddeus ranged weapons, bolters alone probably don't do enough damage to justify it. Give him plasma guns or flamers so he can hit enemy infantry hard, which means you'll need this trait. It may be wise to bring a strong ranged weapon for him from the previous campaign, since decent ones are pretty rare in Chaos Rising.


You almost certainly won't have Thaddeus with maximum ranged traits and also Chapter's Fury, but it's still worth jumping him when the skill is off cooldown to disrupt enemies, to get the invulnerability from Health 2, and for the damage bonus from this trait.




Thaddeus' terminator armour has been changed for Chaos Rising. Now, when he teleports, it stuns nearby enemies at the destination, so it's less of downgrade compared to Assault Jump than it was in the original campaign.

Remains Thaddeus' best trait in the game. As long as he's built for melee at all, you'll always want this for a lot of damage or disruption in quick succession. It's still great to have even if he's ranged traited, you just probably won't have enough points.

This trait is the major reason that Thaddeus in terminator armour is powerful. It changes how Merciless Strike works. In power armour, Merciless Strike will cause Thaddeus and his squadmates to jump a short distance to the target, then each do a small explosive attack in front of them (like the old merciless strike ability). In terminator armour, Thaddeus will charge up for a few seconds, then he and his squadmates will teleport to the target location, each of them doing a big explosion in a long line in front of them. The area covered and damage dealt by the explosive attack in terminator armour is much greater than in power armour. Note also that with this trait every squad member, not just Thaddeus himself, does an attack, so you'll get more damage output covering more territory if you have a full squad than a depleted one. Also, Merciless Strike gains a minimum range; you can't do it directly in front of Thaddeus' current position, there has to be a bit of space in the way for him to jump or teleport over. This makes it harder to spam Merciless Strike using Chapter's Fury; you have to Merciless Strike towards the target, teleport away, then Merciless Strike towards the target again.

Good to have, but not nearly as noticeable as the change wrought by Melee 5.

You'll always want this so Thaddeus can carry a reasonable number of accessories.


A fine trait to have, but the effect often isn't very visible. The problem with Energy 3 and 4 is that they'd be nice to have, but you don't have enough trait points to max out Thaddeus' Health, Melee, and Energy lines, and Health and Melee are far more valuable in most cases.


This trait's pretty inconsequential really. Using jump packs to move around doesn't give Thaddeus the ability to ignore cliffs in normal movement as you might have thought. It just means he occasionally blasts off towards his target instead of walks. It does make him reach destinations a little faster, but the movement is very jumpy, not smooth, so you can't use it to stay away from melee enemies while using ranged weapons against them. The Supremacy bonuses might be nice, but while there's often good reason to invest a lot into Energy on Tarkus, Avitus, and the Force Commander, there isn't good reason to do so on Thaddeus, so you won't get to this trait without giving up something else that would have probably been more helpful.

Thule has a lot more options than he did in the previous campaign, because you get to reallocate almost every trait point he has. It's pretty viable to build him either for ranged combat or for melee. Be warned however, that Chaos Rising gives you very few opportunities to get powerful dreadnaught claws. The Thule weapons you'll see will be almost exclusively multi-meltas. So if you really want good claws for a melee Thule build, you should bring some from the original campaign. He can fight in melee pretty effectively with a multi-melta or assault cannon though.


This trait is absolutely non-negotiable for Thule. The ability to self-heal him on the spot is the only way he'll be useful and usable in the campaign. There are a couple of dreadnaught armour items that give Thule natural health regeneration, but you can't rely on getting them and on them fulfilling your needs to keep him alive.

A decent ability. It takes quite a long time when activated for nearby incapacitated squads to actually revive, but it will still happen even if Thule himself dies in the meantime. This is nice if you need to get multiple squads up, if there are enemies around so you can't walk right next to the fallen squad, or if Thule himself is your last unit standing. However, the ability doesn't reinforce, so it's not a complete solution to long battles where everyone gets killed.

An incredibly powerful trait. Thule being able to continue fighting while self-repairing is amazing. The only disadvantage is that getting here requires spending a lot of points.


Still great to have. More ranged damage is never going to be bad.

Having extra effects of the assault cannon barrage is helpful because in Chaos Rising there are quite a lot of enemies with enough health to survive it. This means that the barrage still helps out with those enemies even when it doesn't kill them.

Thule's multi-meltas are decent anti-vehicle weapons, and the melta sweep ability he gets from them already does significant damage to enemies, both vehicle and infantry. Upgrading that is a pretty good idea. The destructive potential is comparable to what you could do with Thule's assault cannon barrage in the original game.




Definitely the best of Thule's melee traits. It makes his charge much more powerful than it originally was. The charge will now outright kill a lot of infantry, and knockback and damage others. Thule becomes able wipe away big enemy groups just by charging at them.

Great to have. Thule gets a lot more abilities in Chaos Rising, and increasing his access to them is good.

Buffing allies on kill is very helpful, particularly since Thule has so many ways to get lots of kills quickly.

Ideally you don't want Thule to die. But if he does, extra damage from it is helpful. However, it's only a once-off burst each time he dies, which hopefully will be rare. You're probably better off investing in him doing more while he's alive.

Machine Duel is an interesting skill. It sounds really cool, but how it actually works is pretty unclear. You can certainly get walkers to charge into combat with Thule, which means you probably want to pair it with high Melee traits. But it's not apparent what buffs your squads get if the vehicles dies. It definitely doesn't buff their maximum health, for instance.

Jonah is perhaps the most versatile character you deploy in Chaos Rising. He has a lot of tomes granting different abilities that you can switch out each mission; usually your biggest challenge is to decide on only three accessories for him to use. Health, Ranged, and Melee lines are all viable, though with different purposes and playstyles of course. Because there are so many tomes and artifacts given by Jonah's traits, this section is restricted to discussing the value of traits. Describing tomes and artifacts granted by traits is left to the other sections on Jonah in this guide.

Jonah's tomes will usually appear in your inventory before you actually reach the trait that grants use of them. This is probably intended to allow you to see what's coming and decide whether it's worth getting, but a tome's description of its ability is so vague that this doesn't help much.

As pictured here, Jonah begins with the first two traits of all four trait lines unlocked, and you don't get a chance to reset these traits points, so the first two traits aren't discussed here. Typically you get enough trait points on Jonah to max out 2 trait lines, and possibly get a few traits from a third line, but no more.

My usual approach is to get Ranged 5, Melee 5, and Energy 3. That gives access to Ignite Soul, Vortex, Split the Earth, and automatic uses of Ignite Soul and Smite, giving Jonah most of his good ranged damage options.

Be aware that Jonah will often deploy to missions in melee stance regardless of what weapon he has equipped. You usually want him in ranged stance so he won't run into the thick of things and die.



Jonah is never very durable, even when you trait him all the way down his health line. You get his health traits for the defensive spells and artifacts they grant, not to give him a larger health bar. This trait is pretty nice, since it gives Jonah a little extra healing without having to spend more energy or time on extra ability uses.

The item given is Sigil of the Watchman. This trait is decent, but requires more points to reach. You probably can't get this if you're not specialising in Health.

Tome of Barriers is probably Jonah's best item from the Health trait line because it keeps enemies knocked over and stunned.
The healing aura isn't very noticeable; remember all infantry you control regenerate health pretty fast when out of combat anyway.

The relic granted is Diadem of the Untouched. Doubling all Jonah's healing effects doesn't do that much, since his healing isn't particularly powerful anyway. You're better off using his tomes to prevent damage in the first place.



This trait is good. The Tome of Fire complements Smite well in ranged damage output.

The relic granted is Tigerian Halo.

This is one of Jonah's best traits. Smite and Ignite Soul are both respectable ranged damage dealers; having them fire at enemies automatically makes them much better. This helps to circumvent the difficulty of casting Ignite Soul correctly, and the automatic uses of Ignite Soul can target enemies you wouldn't be able to manually cast it at like vehicles.

The relic granted is Circlet of Storms.



Extra uses of Avenger are pretty nice to keep enemies off Jonah so he'll live longer.

The relic granted is Halo of Fury.

Damage based on energy reserves isn't very helpful; Jonah will almost always have low energy because his whole value is predicated on casting lots of spells.

The relic granted is Sword of Volcanic Rage. Making Jonah immune to knockdown is nice, since it interrupts his spell casting, but it's probably not worth putting this many points into the Melee trait line just for that.



Jonah's Energy line is probably his least useful set of traits. This is because the Energy line is all about supporting him to be able to use abilities more often, not about giving him more abilities which have value in themselves. Since he only has enough trait points to max out two trait lines, if you fill the Energy line you're only getting one trait line's worth of actually valuable abilities.

This particular trait, Energy 3, is the only one that's often really worth getting because it requires few enough trait points to reach that it won't take away much from the other trait lines you want to invest heavily into, and reducing the energy cost of abilities is really good.


The ability to teleport at will is nice, and it's even better that it doesn't require an accessory slot to have the ability. But remember that with the Tome of Displacement, Jonah already has the capacity to teleport (provided there are enemies nearby to teleport into) from the moment you get him without spending any trait points. There aren't that many situations where teleporting is really needed. You mostly just want Jonah to stay with your strike force and cast spells.

The relic granted is Martyr's Fervor.
Halving all ability cooldowns is an amazing upgrade; the problem is that you have to invest too many trait points into things that aren't very good in order to get here. Also, with 4 squads to control of which Jonah is only one, you probably won't have enough spare actions to use his abilities as often as this trait would allow you to, and he definitely won't regenerate energy fast enough to keep up with using abilities at that rate.

Each of Jonah's tomes grant him one ability. Tomes cannot be donated; whether you want to use them or not, they're stuck in your inventory's accessory area. This is a bit much to keep organised; Jonah really should have had a separate section of the inventory for his items. I recommend keeping all of Jonah's tomes (and accessory enhancement items) at the top of the accessory area so you can easily distinguish at a glance between the accessories for Jonah and the accessories for everyone else.

Granted by default when you first get Jonah.
Creates a small area around Jonah in which allies move faster. Costs energy over time to keep the time field up, and Jonah can move while it's active (the time field moves with him). This isn't particularly useful; there aren't many situations in the campaign where moving your squad a few percent quicker is important. It might be good to improve Thule's poor mobility or help beat time limits on missions like Keys to the Past and Relics of Space, but you generally have no trouble finishing those in time anyway.

Granted by default when you first get Jonah.
Turns a targeted squad invisible for a while. The invisibility can be put on any infantry squad you control (not Thule), including Jonah himself. The invisibility actually lasts longer than the skill's cooldown, and Jonah can cast spells while invisible without revealing himself. This gives you a lot of stealth options when combined with powerful abilities like Split the Earth; you can get Jonah into good attack positions without putting him in danger.

Granted by default when you first get Jonah.
Target an enemy infantry unit; Jonah will teleport into the position that unit occupies, killing it instantly. This obviously doesn't work on bosses, but does work on virtually all ordinary infantry, which is a helpful way to kill high health infantry like plague marines. Be aware that plague marines do area of effect damage when they die, and Jonah will suffer that damage if he kills one with Temporal Displacement, so make sure he's on high health first. Of course, using Temporal Displacement to kill an enemy will likely leave Jonah in the middle of the enemy forces. Make sure you've got a plan to keep him safe.

Granted by default when you first get Jonah.
The Smite ability shoots a volley of lightning bolts around the position you target (not precisely at that position, but in random places around it). Smite does decent damage (even against vehicles) and knocks back infantry it hits. You don't have to target it on an enemy unit either; it can be targeted on the ground, and has very respectable range. This makes it really easy to use, it's freely available without spending any trait points, and it's versatile. Smite is one of Jonah's best damaging abilities.

Granted by Jonah's Health 3 trait.
Force Dome is a blue hemisphere within which your allies take less damage. Maintaining it costs Jonah energy over time and requires him to stay still; once you order Jonah to move, the dome vanishes. He can use abilities that don't require movement while keeping the dome up though. You'd cast it on top of your own units while a fight is taking place to keep them alive longer under enemy fire. The dome's size is a bit smaller than the area hit by a remote detonator, so you'll often have your squads spread out further than the dome will cover. Overall, it's not that great.

Granted by Jonah's Health 5 trait.
This ability is pretty fun. First you click to select where Jonah will start the barriers from, then you click to set the direction the in which the barriers will expand. Jonah walks over to the indicated location, and summons barriers. This means you want to select a spot that's already close to Jonah as the starting point so he won't get interrupted or blocked by something on the way there. The skill can be difficult to command Jonah to use; if the targeted location is too close to Jonah's current position, he might ignore the order. Each barrier is shaped like part (about 1/6th) of a circle centred on Jonah. Each barrier fades away as he summons the next. The first barriers are close to him, and each subsequent barrier is further away. He'll keep summoning barriers to a surprisingly far distance away, although he won't keep doing it indefinitely. While summoning barriers, you won't be able to order Jonah to move at all.
Barriers prevent enemy ranged attacks from hitting you. Each time a barrier hits an enemy unit, that unit is thrown back away from the expanding barriers and stunned. Enemies who can't be knocked back, such as bosses, will be stunned several times as several barriers will hit them.
Tome of Barriers is very good for disabling and neutralising enemy damage. The range of the furthest barriers means you'll probably knock back and stun ranged enemies who are hitting you as well as melee ones. As long as you cast in the right direction, most of the enemies currently attacking you will be knocked over and stunned for a while.

Granted by Jonah's Ranged 3 trait.
Ingite Soul is a nice spell to do some heavier damage to an enemy infantry unit at range. Be aware that it's relatively difficult to execute this spell, since you have to click on a specific enemy infantry unit and sometimes the command doesn't trigger properly. This makes Smite easier to use in general for damage, but Ignite Soul complements it well. One good application of Ignite Soul is to target it on buildings; it'll damage the infantry inside like a grenade and can help to clear garrisons out easily.

Granted by Jonah's Ranged 5 trait.
After spending a few seconds charging up, Jonah summons a Vortex. Vortex behaves like the Eldar multiplayer global ability Singularity; infantry units nearby are lifted up and thrown through the vortex, taking heavy damage. Infantry which aren't killed the first time they pass through the vortex will be lifted and thrown again repeatedly. It costs Jonah energy to maintain the vortex, but if he has the energy he can keep it up as long as he wants. Vortex deals a lot of damage to clustered infantry, but it costs a lot of energy to do so. It's rarely worth keeping it up for more than 2 passes through the vortex; that will kill most of the affected infantry, and you should use other tools to kill the higher health ones who survive. Cancel the vortex by moving Jonah.

Granted by Jonah's Melee 3 trait.
Buffs allied melee damage. You can't really feel the affects of this ability. It's not flashy and the damage increase isn't very visible.

Granted by Jonah's Melee 5 trait.
Like the Tome of Barriers, you need to target both a starting position for Jonah and a direction in which the Split the Earth spell will fire. Jonah has to walk to the starting position for the spell to trigger, and sometimes he just doesn't follow the order properly and the spell doesn't happen. When you do cast Split the Earth, it raises up rocks in a line, starting close to Jonah and moving further away from him, which damage and knockback enemies they hit. The range is quite reasonable, and it's good for hitting hard when enemies come to you along predictable pathways. Although this tome is granted by Jonah's Melee trait line, it's really more of a ranged attack.

Granted by Jonah's Energy 3 trait.
When Jonah uses Empower, for about 15 seconds all nearby allies can use abilities with significantly shortened cooldowns and no energy costs. Supply-based abilities can also be used at faster rates, but their uses are still limited. Empower has a few problems though; Jonah can't move with it active, and it doesn't have much range, so your strike force needs to be close together and not advancing forward to get the full value. There aren't too many abilities that are expensive in terms of energy and useful in that kind of situation. The best use of it I've found is to get Avitus' Energy 4 and use Empower to drop lots of artilleries on enemy emplacements in quick succession. Using it for Cyrus to throw a lot of cluster mines at one spot would also be good.

Mission reward for Legis Uprising.
This spell makes Jonah move absurdly quickly while active, but costs energy the further he moves. It's hilarious and a lot of fun; he can often run from one end of an uncleared map to the other without the enemies doing meaningful damage to him. But there aren't many circumstances where it's much use, since you usually need to beat some enemies when you reach the other end of the map and Jonah probably can't solo everything.

Granted by Jonah's Corruption 3 trait.
A fine spell. Coruscating flames is decent to cast on the Force Commander or Jonah himself to make them a bit tankier, or on anyone who's going to be in the middle of enemy forces.

Granted by Jonah's Corruption 4 trait.
To cast Subjugation, Jonah has to first charge up for a few seconds, then you gain control of the targeted enemy infantry squad. It doesn't work on vehicles, carnifexes, or tyrant guard; basically all the units you actually want to take control of. The subjugated squad can't move too far away from Jonah or he'll lose control of it, and it takes damage over time while under your control, but it'd probably be faster to just kill the unit normally. If Jonah himself moves while subjugation is active, the spell will be cancelled and the enemy becomes an enemy again. I don't like this spell; the charge up time means it's not that effective at preventing enemy damage output, you can't keep subjugated units for future fights because of the movement limitations, Jonah is useless while it's active so you're actually trading one squad for another, and it doesn't work on the most interesting targets.

Granted by Jonah's Corruption 5 trait.
The spell chains up all targets (enemies and allies) in an area for a while. At the centre of that area is placed the Chains of Torment object. If that object is destroyed, the chains end early. This is the same spell the Chaos Sorcerer uses in The Rescue. Decent for keeping enemy melee units under control.

Granted by Jonah's Corruption 6 trait.
The Blood Sacrifice spell targets an enemy infantry squad, kills that squad, and summons some independent bloodletter daemons who attack anything they see. The bloodletters don't last very long and probably won't kill a whole other squad. You also don't want to be near them so they'll attack the enemy first instead of you. I think the main value in this spell is that it guarantees the death of an enemy squad when summoning the bloodletters; target whatever has the highest health or will cause you the most problems to rapidly get rid of it.

This is not an exhaustive list of every weapon and accessory Jonah can equip; it's restricted to only the items which are granted by traits and/or improve Jonah's abilities in specific ways. Most of these items cannot be donated, but some of them can.

Always granted immediately when you unlock Jonah. It just provides a few extra energy recovery options, and doesn't buff a specific ability. You'll usually stop using the Obsidian Raven once you have a wider selection of powerful tomes and relics for Jonah to choose from.

Always granted immediately when you unlock Jonah.
This is a really nice weapon. Smite is a very useful and widely applicable Jonah ability, so making it better is good. This is also the first force staff Jonah gets. Force staffs are nice weapons for Jonah because they work well at range, and you really need to keep him at range to keep him alive.

Granted by Jonah's Health 4 trait.
It's not listed, but this item also gives Jonah +35 armour.
Normally you'd cast Force Dome on top of your own units to keep them safe from enemies, but this artifact allows you to cast Force Dome on top of powerful enemies to keep them under control. However because this is equipped as an accessory, it takes a slot which would go to giving Jonah another ability.

Granted by Jonah's Health 6 trait.
A pretty good improvement to Jonah's durability, making it much harder for enemies to get on top of him.

Granted by Jonah's Ranged 4 trait.
Very good piece of armour. Ignite Soul is one of Jonah's better damage dealing options, and this makes it do more damage.

Granted by Jonah's Ranged 6 trait.
The problem with Vortex is that it consumes a lot of energy to maintain, so you usually can't keep it up long enough for moving the Vortex around to really matter.

Granted by Jonah's Melee 4 trait.

Granted by Jonah's Melee 6 trait.
Increasing Jonah's melee damage isn't that valuable because if you allow him to fight in melee he'll usually die really fast. But this relic has another feature that the description doesn't tell you; it changes the shape of Split the Earth. Normally Split the Earth raises rocks in a line in one direction. With this relic equipped, rocks come up in three rows in front of Jonah, not reaching as far ahead of him but hitting a much wider space. This may be useful if you want to hit a lot of enemies at once.

Granted by Jonah's Energy 4 trait.

Granted by Jonah's Energy 6 trait.
When Jonah gets hit by enemy attacks while using this staff, any abilities he has that are currently on cooldown will cooldown faster, and the energy costs of his abilities will fall. If he's hit with enough enemy attacks this can reduce his ability costs to zero energy, but the effects only last a few seconds.
It's not obvious from the description, but the ability cooldown and cost reduction effects of this staff only apply if Jonah is also wearing the Tome of Power; otherwise they just don't happen.
This isn't that great an enhancement; Jonah doesn't have the healthbar to sustain lots of enemy hits, and he doesn't get the ability benefits of the staff if he's not getting hit. Having the tome of power equipped also means Jonah doesn't have as many useful abilities available for the benefits to apply to; tome of power doesn't benefit Jonah himself.

Dropped by the Avatar boss in The Bloody Hand.
Frozen enemies are invulnerable, so this is mainly useful to deactivate some enemies while you kill others. It's particularly useful on Raid on Calderis where you might want to avoid killing enemies; freezing them lets you move past them safely. You might also be able to use it to keep allies alive longer on missions like The Rescue. But overall, it's not that good; it'll only hit one unit or at most one squad due to small area of effect, and there are usually too many things you want to keep alive.

Granted by donating the First Gift of the Artificer for Jonah.
This really isn't the best option that comes out of the First Gift of the Artificer, and it buffs Quickening, which is an ability that doesn't become useful very often. Also, the default version of Quickening is usually enough to get Jonah past whatever you want. The main value of this item is that with it Jonah can use Quickening to debuff enemies while the rest of the squad kills them.

Granted by donating the Second Gift of the Artificer for Jonah.
The extra energy regeneration may be nice for keeping Veil of Time up longer, but the spell doesn't have that much value in the first place, so getting an artifact to improve it doesn't make too much sense.

A random drop.
If you've traited up Jonah's Health line for his healing abilities rather than for his defensive barriers, this armour is nice to enhance those further. However, since Jonah only has one healing ability, it's usually not viable to design his whole build around it.

A random drop. This armour makes Rosarius energy-based for Jonah. That's already very strong, but just as powerful is that although the description doesn't tell you this, the armour grants Jonah the Rosarius ability regardless of whether he's wearing the Rosarius accessory, so he can still devote all three accessory slots to other items. As long as he's using this armour, he'll have the energy-based Rosarius ability when he deploys regardless of what accessories he's using, even though it doesn't show you this on the inventory panel. Being able to use Rosarius again and again throughout missions is incredibly good. Unlike the Rosarius ability which comes from the accessory, the armour's version has a cooldown (because otherwise you'd effectively have unlimited invulnerability), but it still massively improves your group's durability to not have to worry about limited uses.

A rare random drop.

Every squad has a trait with this effect, although where in their corruption trait line the trait is positioned differs. This trait means that corrupted squads need to prioritise weapons and strategies that help them get kills quickly in combat; you can't regenerate much without killing enemies.


This is by far the strongest of the corruption global abilities, and the only thing that really helps to mitigate the tendency of corrupting traits to kill your own squads faster than normal. It does have a very long cooldown though, which means it's not a total solution.



This honestly feels like a big downgrade to Battle Cry. Although it will make your squads immune to enemy damage, the damage it deals to them is so high and happens so fast that there are very few situations where enemies would have been able to kill you that quickly. It usually makes your strike force die much sooner, the health regeneration from getting kills on enemies doesn't make up the difference, and the damage done by Call For Blood is capable of outright killing your own squads. You basically have to retrain yourself not to use the skill when you unlock this trait.

This is a strong ability. On some occasions in fights it becomes clear that a particular one of your squads is getting most of the enemy's attention. At those times, this global both keeps them alive and deals a bunch of extra damage to enemies. This of course pairs well with Tarkus' Taunt, which is good because Taunt is further improved by later corruption traits.



This is obviously also an extremely powerful ability. Tarkus becomes incredibly good at preventing or absorbing enemy damage when you put together all his corruption traits.

Not the greatest trait. You may as well just keep using Tarkus' other corruption traits to taunt, confuse, and reflect damage on enemies. The healing from corrupted Tactical Advance doesn't particularly outdo enemy damage output.

A decent global. There aren't too many opportunities where you can anticipate some serious ranged damage coming in advance and use this skill to block it, but at least when you're under attack, ranged damage is often the main threat, so it's usually worth popping the ability. Note it works on your whole strike force, so you don't need to target it.

Thanks to this and corruption 5, I think that Avitus' corruption traits are almost better suited to a melee build than a ranged damage build. I guess the idea was that he'll be able to get away from enemies who've gotten on top of him, but you wouldn't even have Clear Out if you were investing in Avitus' ranged damage.


This is a bad skill, don't use it. The idea is that when enemies are all around Avitus - at the very moment you need as much health as you can muster - you lose some health in order to give them a damage over time effect, but because it's over time, they'll actually take longer to die than you will?

This trait is almost more of a nerf than a buff. The main takeaway is that you have to remember to turn Avitus' focus fire off manually or he'll kill himself with it. There are very few if any situations where enough enemies with small enough health bars present themselves that his energy and health restored from kills will outdo the cost of keeping focus fire going.

This is probably the best purity trait in the game. Reviving squad leaders at full health and energy based medpacks are both amazing, and turn Cyrus into an excellent medic to support your strike force in long fights.



This is probably most useful if Cyrus accidentally gets detected while trying to place an explosive. Just use the Cloud Minds global ability to buy a few more seconds to get the thing ready.


The main use I can think of for this is to detonate a remote detonator without having to move Cyrus away first, provided he's still infiltrated. Being immune to damage while infiltrated means the detonator won't hurt him. However, this trait isn't really solving a problem; usually Cyrus' problems happen when he's revealed, not while he's fully infiltrated, so the trait is just making bad situations worse.

This skill is functionally a remote detonator that you place on an ally rather than on the ground. It has a smaller radius than normal remote detonators, but doesn't cost energy to use and Cyrus doesn't have to get close to the enemy. Pairs very well with a Force Commander who can teleport to the exact spot you want the detonation. Particularly good if you haven't opted to give Cyrus energy-based remote detonators since this provides an alternative supply of unlimited explosives.

Fine, but not amazing as a global ability. Most of the time the big threats coming for you are ranged damage ones, not melee ones, so there aren't too many cases where this ability is a big help. It does hit your whole strike force, so you don't have to target it.



This trait actually makes Chapter's Fury worse, because now Thaddeus' jumps and teleports require charging up, so he can't get as many done in a short space of time. If you've also got Melee 5 so that Merciless Strike requires charging up, then you'll only get two or three abilities in before Chapter's Fury runs out again. The damage done to enemies is decent though; it just means Thaddeus is far less mobile in exchange for harder hitting.

Similar to Jonah's Tome of Daemons, except you sacrifice one of Thaddeus' squadmates for a bloodletter instead of of an enemy. This is a bit of problem because you'll need to reinforce at some point. You can't just keep using this ability in long fights. Also, many of Thaddeus' other good damage dealing abilities do more damage if he has more surviving squadmates.

Purify is Jonah's only healing skill. If you want Jonah to function as a healer in the group (and probably if you want to use his Health line traits) you'll want to keep him pure.

A very good global ability. It's a lot simpler than most of the others, but has a shorter cooldown and means you very rarely need to worry about running low on energy. You may find yourself bringing Jonah with your strike force, not for his spells, but so your other squads never run out of energy.





Obviously due to the increased damage vulnerability from Corruption 4 and the reduced health from this trait, you're not going to be putting a corrupt Jonah on the front lines. Keep him in the back and use his abilities to manipulate the battlefield. The Ranged damage line is probably still the best trait line to pair with Jonah's corruption traits.

Only noteworthy Chaos enemies are discussed here; the campaign has only 2 missions vs each of orks, eldar, and tyrannids, so important tactics for those races are discussed in the relevant missions.

Small humanoid daemons with fiery swords. They do good melee damage and have reasonable amounts of health, but really aren't that scary as long as you have the ability to fight them in melee or keep them stunned or otherwise incapacitated. The interesting feature of bloodletters is that they can teleport short distances. This is marked by bursts of warpfire at the origin and destination of the teleport, but you can see it coming early if you watch closely because small red Chaos circle and star symbols appear on the ground at the position the bloodletters are teleporting to for a few seconds before they actually do. When bloodletters teleport, it's almost always on top of your squads.
They can be summoned by cultists worshipping at a Chaos shrine. In these cases, bloodletters will continue to spawn indefinitely until you push forward and destroy the shrine and cultists.

A bloodletter riding on a big angry quadruped daemon that looks like a cross between a pig and a dog. You can't use vehicle-specific abilities such as melta bombs against bloodcrushers, but they are basically vehicles. Anti-armour weapons like missile launchers, thunder hammers, and power fists will do well against them, and they are vulnerable to the vehicle stun effect of weapons that have it.
Bloodcrushers can't teleport like their smaller cousins, but on occasion they are summoned onto the battlefield. This is either through a mission event, or sometimes a circle of worshipping cultists are all sacrificed to spawn a bloodcrusher. You get a cutscene showing it off the first time this happens, in the mission "Ice and Blood".

These aren't so much difficult as very common in missions vs Chaos. These are the generic vehicle used to compel you to bring anti armour weapons into most missions vs Chaos. They don't move too fast and usually are best in melee combat. Thule is often a good match for them, either traited for range damage and carrying a multi-melta, or traited for melee damage with the Machine Duel skill. If Thule's not around, vehicle stunning weapons such as thunder hammer/storm shield or power fist are nice to have.

Much rarer than the dreadnaught, predators move faster and usually have more firepower at range. However, predators can suffer extra damage if you attack them from behind. Vehicle stunning weapons are often more helpful against predators than dreadnaughts, because their higher speed makes disabling them more important.

The biggest problem these guys present is a gigantic health pool for individual soldiers. They also cause an area of effect damage explosion when they die. Cyrus' snipe isn't nearly enough to kill one, so don't waste your combat supplies. Remote detonators may kill them, and Jonah's Temporal Displacement ability is very effective because it kills infantry regardless of health pool. However, using Temporal Displacement means Jonah will take damage from the explosion after the plague marine dies, so make sure he's on high health before doing it.

These tips are mostly the same as in the original campaign.

Use hotkeys for abilities
Use hotkeys for squad selection.
Hotkeys massively increase the speed of issuing commands, which makes a big difference when fights can change very quickly. Your mouse should never go near the bottom right of the screen.
If you double tap a squad's hotkey, your camera centers on them.

Although Reinforcement Beacons allow you to reinforce lost members of your infantry squads, the beacons do not cause or increase health regeneration on the squad members who are still living. Your squad members and leaders will regenerate health passively whenever there are no enemies nearby. If enemies are nearby, they won't regenerate at all. This means it's often a good idea to pause for a few seconds after winning a fight before moving on to the next group of enemies; give your squads time to regenerate back up to full health.
Being near Strategic Assets, unlike Reinforcement Beacons, will restore some health to your squads every few seconds whether there are enemies nearby or not. This also applies to Thule. This means it can be worth taking a Strategic Asset mid-fight for the extra regeneration and reinforcement.

The squad panel on the right hand side of the screen during missions represents the health bar of the squad leader, and whether or not they have all their squadmates. You can't see the health of the additional squadmates on this panel. If you select a squad in game, the hit point number shown under their portrait and the green bar over their head is the cumulative health of all squad members. If the squad is missing a member, this number will be capped below maximum because of the missing health belonging to the member you don't have. The health value for a squad shown on the equipment screen from the planet map is the health only of the squad leader, not of all squad members put together. Most of the benefits granted by equipped wargear only benefit the squad leader, not all members of the squad.

You always get all wargear that drops during missions, whether you click on it or not. It's perfectly fine to never click on any wargear that drops in a mission; it'll still be in your inventory after the mission ends. This also goes for wargear dropped by bosses during cutscenes. You also keep wargear from missions you failed or quit.

Thule does not passively regenerate health at all under normal circumstances. He does regenerate health when next to a Strategic Asset (but not a Reinforcement Beacon). Use Thule's own Ancient Defender ability to heal him. There are also a few special dreadnaught armours that give Thule regeneration, but these are random drops and can't be relied on.

A hero cannot be damaged by any area of effect ability they themselves cast, even if that ability would kill their allies and squadmates. This goes for grenades, artillery, remote detonators, and orbital strike.

Remember you can rotate the camera with near total freedom by holding down the Alt key. Sometimes the default camera angle is awkward for seeing what you're doing in certain parts of the map. Rotating the camera can help you see and control your squads better.

You can sometimes press Esc to cancel any dialogue that is playing, but in many cases it's unskippable. Although this doesn't skip cutscenes directly, some cutscenes contain events which trigger based on when certain lines of dialogue are said, so cancelling dialogue can cause cutscenes to finish faster if you're impatient. Missions also usually won't end until dialogue is finished or cancelled.

With Energy 5 active on the Force Commander, every time you use the Battle Cry skill it will reduce the energy cost of activating abilities for all nearby allies (but not the Force Commander himself). The (almost certainly unintended) part of this trait which makes it bugged is that the energy cost reduction is permanent and stacks with itself. Therefore, if at the beginning of every mission you sit at your spawn point and use Battle Cry four times in a row before moving your squad out, no skills used by any characters other than the Force Commander will cost energy for the rest of the mission.

This bug is very important because it make Chaos Rising significantly easier to play, does not require particularly skilful play to exploit it, and still keeps the game functioning just fine. This bug makes such a big difference that it's probably worth deciding at the beginning of your Chaos Rising campaign whether you'll make use of it or not.

This significantly changes how you play Chaos Rising. Energy regeneration rate is much slower than in the original Dawn of War II campaign, ordinarily forcing you to be very disciplined with your uses of energy-based abilities since it'll be a long time before you restore the energy you spent. With zero energy costs, the only limiter on them now is cooldown. Making this buff even more extreme is that fact that Chaos Rising gives you the option for many limited-use abilities to be energy based instead, with the right items or traits. For instance, Cyrus can spend energy to use Remote Detonators, Demolition Charges, and Cluster Mines with Melee 4, Avitus can pay for Missile Barrage and Artillery with energy if he has Energy 4, and with the right armour Jonah can activate Rosarius using energy, when all these things would normally be limited by the supplies you collect on the map. If you plan your build right, the absence of energy costs can make almost every ability in your squad infinitely reusable on a cooldown. Channelled abilities such as Tarkus' Tactical Advance, Avitus' Focus Fire, and Cyrus' Infiltration will still consume energy to maintain, although not to activate, but because you're not using energy for anything else (and the Force Commander's Battle Cry restores energy in an area due to the Energy 3 trait) it barely matters.

Because low energy regeneration rate forces abilities to be used infrequently, I actually think that in some ways this bug makes the game more fun. At least you get to use all these cool things you've unlocked in every fight. Also, because a fully levelled and geared squad in Chaos Rising can easily have 6 abilities per member, you might get a decent challenge just from trying to use all your abilities at every opportunity. However, there's no doubt that this bug makes the game easier overall, since you have so much more access to powerful tools. If you want to experience Chaos Rising on Primarch with all the difficulty the developers intended, you should probably avoid Energy 5 on the Force Commander completely. If however, you're struggling to complete it and want a significant boost, get the trait, and at the beginning of every mission sit still until you've used Battle Cry four times. Victories will come a lot easier.