This is not the first Tacticus Diary and it will not be the last, you can find the others here.

Last Week’s Hangovers

• Finished the Farsight event with 300 shards on the first round. This is very encouraging for when Lucius comes around next month. I’m already on 125 shards for him so if I can match that sort of pace on the one I’ve been preparing for most, we’ll have him unlocked!

Saturday 3rd January 2026

• Ranked Re’vas to Silver 3 as part of the Lucius Plan – Gold 1 being the target here.

Sunday 4th January 2026

• The new Battle Pass season kicks off, time to grind for Laviscus! He’s not unlockable until the final non-repeatable level of the Battle Pass though, so going to be a bit of a wait before I can use him!

Monday 5th January 2026

• Lots of grinding today but nothing specific to report from it. I did encounter something whilst doing so that I can’t quite understand. In the two screens below, you can see the difference in damage from Eldryon using his melee Piercing attack on a Scarab Occult Terminator or his Psychic Ranged attack. What I can’t get my head around, is why the damage on the Piercing attack is higher – I’d expect the Psychic to be higher as it would bypass the Terminator’s armour… what am I missing?

Tuesday 6th January 2026

• Ranked Rotbone to Silver 3 – another one that’s nearly there, aiming for Gold 1 here.

Wednesday 7th January 2026

• Having lots of fun on Tournament Arena this time around and before it finished I managed to get all the crates unlocked. I had two main teams that I’ve used this season – one is slightly more effective than the other. The more effective one is an all Xenos team with lots of Overwatch and Damage buffs. A little bit of careful placement and timing the overwatch ability for Re’vas means it can be quite effective against the meta teams with Kharn and Ragnar charging in somewhat recklessly!

• This team doesn’t have quite the win-rate as the Xenos one but it’s much more me. Hascule is the real linchpin of the piece as if you can get the positioning right you can trigger his extra attacks a few times through Thrill Seekers and Overkilling adjacent targets with other members of the team.

Thursday 8th January 2026

• Was very briefly top of the Arena in the Lieutenant League – doesn’t often happen this far into the season (often purposely as I’m looking to just hang about in that league for now) but felt like it was worth capturing! The aim will not be to stay there though, so hoping everyone else plows through their tokens and overtakes me!

Friday 9th January 2026

• Back to Re’vas once more and this time we reach Gold 1 – another goal ticked off on the list now!

Highs

• Felt like a week of good progress, either hitting goals or getting very close! Also exciting as that means the Lucius Plan draws closer to completion overall and I’m quite looking forward to a period of less laser-focus on that goal and just working on the Emperor’s Children characters themselves for a little bit! I’m sure it won’t be long until there’s a new goal after that!

Lows

• No 10-drops this week for our “Disappointing 10-Drops” feature. Probably just that it’s been a quieter week, lots of grinding upgrades and the Battle Pass but the nature of where I am with both is that there’s been less stand-out moments this week but we’re building up for the start of February and the Lucius event and unlocking Laviscus sometime prior to that.

Learning

• Struggled with this one this week – hopefully someone can answer my question about the Eldryon damage above so that’ll be the big learning! Otherwise, it’s probably just around starting to try and be more purposeful with my positioning in Tournament Arena, Arena, Onslaught etc. It’s sometimes a little too easy when grinding campaign maps to go into autopilot and not give too much thought to all of the finer points. I feel like the next level is getting to a place where the order of operations and where characters stand becomes a far more conscious element of my play! Lots of work still to do on that front though!

Upgrade Item of the Week

This week’s Upgrade Item is a: Siren Amplifier

Was far too Imperial an upgrade choice last week, so normal service has been resumed and the Siren Amplifier is this week’s choice.

I’m currently using the Tacticus Planner and the Tacticus Codex to help with my event planning and my Raiding plan – you can see a bit more about them in my Getting Started with Tacticus post.