Once a squad clears the early campaign, most long-term investment goes into two repeating modes: Guild Raid, a co-op boss damage race, and Onslaught, a solo PvE horde gauntlet. Both reward a properly-built roster over a wide shallow one.
Guild Raid: how a season works
Guild Raid runs in 13-day seasons. Your whole guild fights a shared pool of bosses and is ranked on cumulative damage — there's no per-player squad restriction beyond the per-boss Faction lock-out below.
You get up to 3 battle tokens, regenerating one every 12 hours (2 a day), and deploy up to 5 Characters per attempt. On top of your own attempts, guild members can also throw a bomb directly at a boss for guaranteed chip damage, on an 18-hour cooldown — useful for squeezing in damage between token refreshes.
The boss roster and Faction lock-outs
Bosses scale through the same 6 rarity tiers as Characters (Common through Mythic) and fall into 3 categories by how tough they are, roughly in this order: Major Threats, Lords of War, and Primarchs/Demigods.
The mechanic that catches new players out: you cannot deploy Characters from a boss's own Faction against that boss (and its supporting battles). Plan your Guild Raid roster around a couple of different Factions so you're never locked out of a boss week.
| Category | Boss | Locked-out Faction |
|---|---|---|
| Major Threats | Hive Tyrant | Tyranids |
| Major Threats | Screamer-Killer | Tyranids |
| Major Threats | Tervigon | Tyranids |
| Major Threats | Riptide | Tau Empire |
| Major Threats | Rogal Dorn | Astra Militarum |
| Lords of War | Ghazghkull | Orks |
| Lords of War | Avatar of Khaine | Aeldari |
| Lords of War | Belisarius Cawl | Adeptus Mechanicus |
| Primarchs/Demigods | Mortarion | Death Guard |
| Primarchs/Demigods | Lion El'Jonson | Dark Angels |
| Primarchs/Demigods | Magnus | Thousand Sons |
| Primarchs/Demigods | Szarekh | Necrons |
Fighting a boss well
Guild Raid bosses carry the Immune trait, which blocks a chunk of the debuffs/control effects that work fine against normal enemies — check a boss's own info screen for exactly what it resists before building a squad specifically to counter it, rather than assuming your usual disable-heavy comp will work unchanged.
The bigger bosses (Ghazghkull, Mortarion, and other Lords of War/Primarch-tier fights) come with 2 supporting battles that must be weakened first — clearing those knocks the main boss's health down before you engage it directly, so budget tokens across all 3 fights rather than dumping everything into the headline boss.
3 of the 12 bosses — Mortarion, Avatar of Khaine, and Magnus, all in the toughest Primarchs/Demigods bracket — carry the Daemon trait specifically (confirmed on each boss's own info screen), so any Character whose kit calls out bonus damage against Daemons (Roswitha, for one) is worth building around for those 3 fights specifically. See the dedicated Guild Raid: Daemon Primarchs & Avatar comp on the Best Teams page.
Onslaught: structure
Onslaught is a solo PvE horde mode that unlocks at Power Level 4. It's split into 3 separate tracks, one per Grand Alliance (Imperial, Xenos, Chaos), each further divided into Sectors by rarity and upgrade rank — you climb a track by clearing its Sectors in order.
Every battle deploys the same 6-Wave structure, with new enemy waves arriving at rounds 0, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8. The enemies throughout are Tyranids and Genestealer Cults regardless of which Alliance track you're running.
Squad rule: you must deploy at least 5 eligible Characters sharing that track's Alliance — the same shared-Alliance, mixed-Faction rule as Salvage Run. Characters who fall in a wave can be reinforced from your wider roster; the battle only ends in defeat once your deployed squad and all reinforcements are gone.
Onslaught rewards
Clearing a wave grants Tyranid Skulls, ability Badges (rarity scales with the Sector's difficulty), and XP for every Character you deployed.
"Honour Your Warriors" is a post-battle bonus: pick one deployed Character to receive extra shards, Badges, and Orbs, scaled to the Sector's difficulty — usually worth pointing at whichever Character you're actively ascending.
Tyranid Skulls accumulate toward Eradication Tiers, which unlock crates containing Coins, Badges, Forge Badges, and Blackstone — Onslaught is one of the more reliable sources of Forge Badges for keeping Equipment ascension moving.
Salvage Run
Salvage Run is a solo PvE mode that unlocks at Power Level 8 — collect Coins, Blackstone, Equipment, and Forge Badges by fighting through Ork-held Salvage Zones before a per-map turn limit runs out. Like Onslaught, it's split into 3 Alliance tracks (Imperial, Xenos, Chaos) and deploys the same shared-Alliance, mixed-Faction squad rule — 3 to 5 Characters, no power-score requirement to deploy one.
Each Zone has its own damage bar; once it's drained the Zone is spent and can't be replayed. Salvage drops onto the map turn by turn as you fight, mostly toward the far side from your deployment edge, so positioning to reach it before the turn limit matters as much as the fighting itself.
Every run features one Strongbox with the Impervious trait — it only opens to a critical hit, so bring at least one Character with a reliable Crit Item rather than a pure Block/Defensive-item lineup if you want a shot at it. It tends to land with only a couple of turns left on the clock.
Rewards run in a deliberate cross-Alliance loop, the opposite direction from Onslaught's: the Imperial track drops Xenos Components/Equipment, the Xenos track drops Chaos, and the Chaos track drops Imperial. Forge Badges also drop here — Rare badges start appearing around Sector VI, Epic around Sector XI, and Mythic around Sector XXXV.