I was looking at my Skinks earlier today & realized that most other armies have at least one kind of archer/ bowman/bowbeast/creature unit. How come we never got Skinks with Bows? I Hate the little dinky clubs Skinks have and the blow pipes look flimsy to me. not alot of choice for weapons for a Skink unit. was just wondering why there isn't an option to arm our beloved Skinks with a bow? it would make sense for them to use bows in a jungle environment to hunt prey/enemies. Alright so they have blow pipes but they kinda suck imo, i would much prefer a bow to arm them, anyone else feel the same way or is it just me being picky? Also while were on the subject, the Chameleon Skinks always looked kinda out dated & derpy to me. a new model would do them the world of good imo! along with Cold ones too.
Look on eBay, Skink Archers are not quite a dime a dozen, but maybe $10 a dozen. Easily 10€ a dozen. Point is they gave us Archer Skinks back in 5th edition, then they promptly squatted them. The corporation known by its initials (GW) is known for doing this over, and over, and over, and over... ...it is a business practice and a business model that is not endearing. It is not just you. ***looks at storage boxes of unpainted bow-skinks***
Not sure what the dollar to pound rate is atm but they seem cheap enough? I wouldn't mind a small bow unit of Skinks,
Meh in fairness, with the blowpipes and javalins for normal skinks and then also the chameleon skinks the options for ranged skinks are kind of covered. Javalins: short ranged, not entirely terrible melee Blowpipes: medium long range, crap melee chameleons: medium long range high-ish damage. The only thing really left would be either long range (as in 24"+) or extreme damage (either high damage, or high rend). Which doesn't fit well with skinks. Skinks are throw-away fodder troops on their own, they really only become competent threats to an enemy when allowed to ride a bigger creature into battle (not even skink heroes are competent fighters, the only one that might actually win a fight is riding a troglodon... freaking skaven are more competent fighters than skinks without resorting to dirty tricks the way things are balanced now...). If we now suddenly get skinks able to outshoot a stegadon with its skystreak crosbow with just a "normal" bow it'd get weird.. or well, even weirder than the game already is. tl;dr: Skinks with bows are either going to be essentially just cosmetic but otherwise function (virtually) the same, or we're going to need to have skinks be nearly completly redone so that we can open up a niche for skinks with bows by allowing skinks to actually be competent combatants without requiring a mount. And that'd probably require half our list to be redone as well, given that if your skinks become actually capable fighters for example our saurus will look even more pathetic than they already do sometimes (damn those guards with their 1 wound...) . Admittadly, having our battleline troops be redone to actually fit with the way the game seems to be going wouldn't in any way be a bad thing
What would be wrong with having Skink shooters with a range of 18" to 24" ? (How short is the range of the Stegadon Bolthrower?!)
"Open up a niche..."? That seems like, apologies in advance, nonsense. From what untrustworthy source did this notion that there must be "a niche" originate? How did it manage to infest your thinking? What steps can you take to cleanse your contemplations?? Do Explain.
The issue is that currently skinks are cannonfodder unless mounted on some bigger dinosaur, and even then the actual skink still isn't impressive. This rather limits the options we have. If you make em better than normal skin weapons there isn't much reason to take those, and making em better than the mounted ones raises the question as to why the mounted skinks don't just use these weapons. Especially on the stegadon seeing as they're on a howdah, they won't be bothered by the mount moving, at least a skink riding a terradon has an excuse for not being able to wield a bow The only remotely decent option would be a new special kind of skink with some special abilities like chameleons do, but that'd still largely have the same issues... For example for bows: If we go past 20" they're starting to outrange solar engines and past 25" they outrange the stegadon. This'd be weird seeing as a puny skink is would now be outranging siege-grade weaponry. Which seems a bit extreme an ability for fodder. If we go for 16" they equal boltspitters in range, so we'l just pick whichever has better stats the other one becoming irrelevant. If they're equal in stats it's purely cosmetic and wouln't serve much of a purpose. This leaves 16.1"-19.9", which in practise just really leaves 18" as an option. However, giving 2" over boltspitters would make em significantly better, and seeing as boltspitters are already 5+/5+/-/1 it's not like we have much room to make a trade-off for the range. Which means they're probably going to end up just being flat out better than boltspitters thanks to the extra range (hell just look at how little javalins are used despite having better stats..) Hence, there's really no niche to fill with em currently on normal skinks. This leaves the option of a special units like the chameleons. Now again, these can't really go for 20"+ given that they'd be outranging siege weapons while still being "mere" skink. This means we can't have them significantly outrange chameleon skinks (at most 3") and since chameleon skinks can teleport such a small increase isn't that much of a boon. How about stat-wise then? Chameleons already have 2/3+/4+/-/1, and normal skinks have 1/5+/5+/-/1 going to 1/3+/5+/-/1 in a sufficiently large horde. This doesn't exactly leave room for differentiation in this aspect either. A special rule then? Chameleons already have double damage on a 6+ hit-roll and the ability to teleport and bonus in terrain. There isn't that much room seeing as it's stil only a puny skink with a fairly normal bow, but at least something could be made up here. However, if you make up an actually decent special effect here it raises the question why the various mounted skinks don't use the bows as I pointed out earlier. Especially the javalins on the stegadon and bastillidon have awefull statlines and don't have much of an excuse to not wield better stuff. Hence as a "special" type of skink it doesn't really have its own place either without making things at least a tad weird. All in all, this doesn't really leave any niche for bow skinks to fill without either making other weapons irrelevant or leading to weird situations where a "mere" skink with a bow can outshoot a magical solar engine or where for some inexplicable reason skinks mounted on howdahs choose to use vastly less effective weapons. Admittadly, not like GW always seems to care much about such trivialities as a unit actually filling its own niche or a unit making sense, but still
O, to be honest I'd love for them to start switching things around, make skinks actually a capable fighters (without needing 40 of em in a unit...). But then they have to do it right and also improve our other troops. As capable skinks will make our saurus look even worse than they already do, and it'd give the weird situation of skinks riding a dinosaur suddenly being less capable than those on foot. But by all means, give them some love . Just make sure to give the others some love as well, cuz if you don't you just invalidate a good chunk of our army (or well, more so than they already are currently with how it can feel like it's made for a different game)
I disagree with @Canas a bit on that topic. I love Skinks and use them in every game. Yes they could be stronger but they are far from useless. If you make them considerably better they will be far too powerful IMO. A range increase to 18" and/or +1 on the hit or wound stat would be OK though. Before GHB2017 I always buffed them with a Skink Chief and I had a unit of puny Skinks (240 points back then) kill a Maw-Krusha (450 points or so) back then. The combo of Skink Chief and Astrolith Bearer or Shadowstrike made them hardly ever miss (hit on 2, reroll ones). I would like to see the Stegadon bow and Bastiladon Solar Engine range increased though, to 30" for the Stega and 28" for the Bastiladon. I would even be OK with giving them the artillery keyword then.
To clarify, I don't think they're useless. Thanks to their ranged attacks & wary fighter rule they are amazing fodder troops to slow an enemy down, plus they're excellent at just annoying an enemy and goading him into wasting a turn attacking them just to get rid of the annoying pests instead of hitting something of actual value. However, their base-stats are abysmall, making them overall fairly harmless if they don't have their horde-bonus. A unit of 10 skinks is liable to not actually wound anyone throughout an entire game. Hence they're not a "threat" and they can get a significant buff before becoming too powerfull. Hence I'd say they could use a buff or two to their base-stats. Having said that, a 40 man horde doesn't really need the buff. Personally what I'd want would be for horde-bonusses to work differently so that these units don't have such abysmall base-stats as that'd make 10-man groups actually somewhat capable combatants. It's that skinks have weary fighter in combination with ranged weapons, otherwise anything less than a full horde of em would not be worth fielding... Meh, we have enough restrictions on behemoths as is, adding more to that isn't going to be nice considering they're a large chunk of our army's gimmick/cool factor. The range increase would be usefull though, especially considering that th 20" on the bastillidon in particulair is "short" for a ranged attack and the 25" only average...
Yeah, you could try to balance skink archers by removing for them the option of shield, but I doubt it would be meaningful.
Meh, our shields are fairly underwhelming to begin with and I'd wish they'd recieve a minor buff so they'd actually do something most of the time rend -1 is just not common enough.. And it's doubly underwhelming on skinks with how squishy those are regardless. Having the better weapon would probably win with maybe the exception of certain specific matchups (e.g. those rare moments where an enemy actually has loads of -1 rend)