Tactics with your dregs?

He guys,

Got a good start with my undead in our current campaign. My band consists of: vampire, necromancer, 3 x dreg, 1 x ghoul hero, 4 x ghouls, 2 x zombie, 1 x wolf.

I have equipped my dregs with bows to let them just sit back and fire.

My question is what you guys usually do with your dregs once they can advance? Seeing as they can only choose from strength and combat skills, they are eventually going to have to some close combat. Its only that there stats suck so much...what skill to choose? All three have leveld up. Also what do you guys go for with your ghoul heroes? I was thinking either resilience or mighty blow to make them even more effective in close combat?

All advice is welcome.

Regards,

Rory

Dregs are difficult to get any good use of. I just keep them back for generating money until they've had their first 4 advances/8 experience and after that one of them, two or maybe even all three of them should have gotten some good boosts. By then you can think about giving them some equipment and let it roll from there. In my current campaign I have a dreg who's shaping up pretty well (+1W and +1A) and if he gets another good advance or two soon he'll be rewarded handsomely. My plan is to gear him up with a horse and everything.

Edit: Oh and hey, remember that a low-exp dreg will usually be quite a lot cheaper to replace than a ghoul henchman. Sometimes it might be a better idea to sacrifice a dreg to save a henchman since the enemy will usually go for a vulnerable hero when they can. If you're playing defensively and are trying to rout this could be a good idea instead of just sacrificing ghouls. If you have zombies you should definitely use those for this, though.

For ghoul heroes I used to go with strength and speed skills for mighty blow/resilience + speed/leap but this time around I'm trying out combat + strength instead. Combat skills include some good stuff like strike to injure and step aside, and I've also finally figured something out about the undead or at least how I prefer to play them: the warband only needs to be as quick as your ghoul henchmen. They're the glue that keeps it together and neither your vampire, ghoul heroes or anything else needs to be able to outrun them. Being able to bounce around the table is nice, sure, but when the time comes to actually attack I prefer to send in the horde of ghouls first and then sweep with the hitters.

Personally, I don't bother with bows on Dregs...BS 2 makes it nearly impossible to hit most of the time, since you'll often be over half range, shooting into cover, or moving. It's not useless, but I prefer to save the gold. If you already have them, I'd say keep them unless you need the money from selling.

To start, I've gone one of two ways with dregs. I've either armed them very cheap with maces, or go with double hand weapons. With one attack and WS 2, they won't hit a lot, but they will hit hard. They're also good at taking out knocked down models, which has the nice bonus of more xp.

For skills, Strongman is priority for dhw; I prefer Mighty Blow or Resilient otherwise. If you don't get crappy advances, dregs can become pretty formidable quickly. But then you'll inevitably get one with LD 9 and I 6, but still WS 2. Such is Mordheim.

I like Strength/Speed on ghouls, but Combat/Strength works too. I like to have a model outside  of the vampire who can quickly redeploy or go for objectives, which is why I pick speed. Keep in mind you can pick up Combat later with a lucky exploration roll. You can't count on it, but if you do roll it, you can have combat, strength, and speed.

Resilient is always always always my first choice for a ghoul hero, because it means they can't be crit by strength 3 in melee.

I don't play undead myself (frankly, I loathe the undead) but in my group we allow ghouls to use any Equipment and may use any weapon allowed by Weapons Expert or Weapons Training if they take the relevant skill. We have found that enforcing WYSIWYG keeps any abuse under control and it is an excuse to make some cool and different models. If your group will allow equipment, but not weapons then consider getting him academic skills and a Tome of Magic and making him a caster. For that matter, if you can get an Alchemist's Notebook you can make a Dreg into a pretty sturdy caster.

Really, the equipping restrictions on ghouls are an unnecessary encumbrance to an already tier 3 warband.