8th Ed. The Ultimate Skaven Thread

I dread to think what response I’ll get from this on a Lizardman forum, but here it is - given we have such a vibrant community, other communities like the Under-Empire have become silent and we have a brand-Harry-spanking new section for other armies, why not set up a permanent Skaven presence here? *Turns to look warily behind him in case there are lizard-things about*

Anyone else here play our favourite rat boys? (@Y'ttar Scaletail can definitely post a contribution here at the very least) What sorts of builds and strategies do you use?

I look-watch forward to hearing your response-squeakings!

 

I've never played with or against Skaven, but they are definitely one of the strongest armies out there. I'd rank them as either the 4th, 5th, or 6th best army, likely #4.

 

Wow. Really? I didn't get that from reading their army book. They didn't get an update in 8th edition right?

 

You are correct, they are still running their 7th edition book. I believe their army book was the last one released under 7th edition. They have some really great tools at their disposal. Awesome shooting, Hellpits and Doomwheels, solid magic lore, the best tarpit unit in the game, surprisingly high leadership, etc.

We had a fun poll and discussion on the topic over at EEFL:

 

@Charlemagne anything to contribute here as you’ve also confessed to being a secret agent of the Council of Thirteen?

 

@Lord Agragax of Lunaxoatl Yes-yes I of course have the ear of the council of thirteen. I run a clan moulder army and unfortunately haven't played a huge amount of games. I kinda built my army around a centerpiece of the hell-pit abomination honestly because it looks cool.

Skaven have some great spells and the dreaded 13th will ruin someone's day real quick.

I use rat ogres fairly heavily but my main army is Ogre kingdoms so they feel familiar.

I do admit though it is quite fun to have 10-15 models die and not really matter.

 

Skaven is the ultimate cannon fodder army. Rivalling that of the Imperial Guard.

(Hmmmm....... Imperial Guard is 40K Skaven?!?)

 

I’d say Goblin armies are even more of a cannon-fodder Force, as with Skaven their chaff units can become considerably more formidable with Strength in Numbers, while Goblins and Night Goblins always have the same awful Leadership stats

 

The Imperium are futuristic Goblins?!?!?

 

I've been playing Skaven since around 3rd edition of WHFB, and could probably contribute something here.
Never been a super competitive or tournament player though, more like friendly games over a few pints of beer.

I've accumulated enough models over the years to field quite a variety of army compositions, so I've been able to try quite different lists. Here's some random thoughts on units and their use from this skaven general:

- Slaves are the backbone of any and all skaven armies. No matter what your fluff, game plan or army roster is, slaves, slaves, slaves will save the day. Or at least die valiantly for a good cause. I have at times even managed to get them into combat when playing against someone who knows how worthless it is to waste ammo or power dice at a slave block, and it's surprising how much they can do with a well-timed flank charge or just with a few above-average die rolls against smaller units.

When building an army list, I usually start with at least 2-3 blocks of 20 slaves with no command or equipment before I even start to think what kind of army am I building. That's a ridiculously low amount of points for something for the enemy to shoot at while the rest of your army marches or attempts to recover of all the wonderful tools of war exploding on their faces. Also gives advantage in deployment, as you're probably fielding more units than most opponents anyway, you can use these cheap throwaway slave blocks before committing your more relevant units. (although for this I usually use minimium-size 1 packmaster+giant rats or 1 rat ogre units because they go to cover my flanks regardless of what my opponent deploys and where).

- Skaven traditionally have no artillery, and for some reason I'm personally not a huge fan of warp-lightning cannons (and even less of the plagueclaw catapult). Must be because I'm an oldbeard and these are fancy new additions in the later armybooks. However skaven have these wonderful things called warlock engineers which function as your shooting units, artillery and comic relief, depending on how you choose to roll the dice. I usually just take the signature warplightning spell for them and some cheap one-off magic item (dispel scroll, doom rocket) and plop them into some big clanrat unit for protection. I don't intend to bring clanrats into melee anyway unless it's a "guaranteed" victory after one combat round.

- Rat ogres. Awesome fluff, awesome models, cute as hell, but... mostly worthless on the field of battle compared to their points cost. Low toughness with no armor save make them die in droves to just about any kind of missile fire (or probably even heavy snow falling from the sky) before they get in to melee, and to accommodate this you would need to have a big unit of them. And that is expensive, risky and clumsy. In an army which already has hordes of models getting in each other's way. I sooo much would want to like and play rat ogres more, but every time I've tried more than one or two as a distraction-flanking blip, it has ended in disaster.

- Grey seers and screaming bells. A bit the same problem as with rat ogres above. Cool units, way too expensive and vulnerable to field, at least in a 2000-2500pt range which I most of the time play. On the other hand, the two skaven magic lores are mostly awesome in the amount of wanton destruction and hilarious potential for backfiring. Still, I'd go with lvl 2 warlock engineers instead of a grey seer most of the time, because skaven have a tendency of blowing up due to friendly warmachines, getting shot, maimed or burned easily by enemies, or just plain running away at the first impact of things not going just as planned.

- Doomwheels. hands down my favorite unit in the armybook, and not just because of the awesome (old) minis and fluff. Wildly random in its effectiveness and almost as hazardous to your own army as to the enemy, this unit is pretty much the reason I started (and kept on) playing skaven in the first place. Vulnerable to massed light missile fire, which may make for entertaining out of control rolls during the first few turns of the game.

- Hellpit Abominations are awesome, but a bit boring in my opinion. Still, they do give a much needed oomph to the otherwise melee-pathetic ratmen.

- Except for the plague censer bearers. These are the hammer of many of the lists I play, just because they do hit anything they manage to charge like a... hammer. Sure, they're expensive-ish and die in droves to magic missiles or templates and any kind of concentrated conventional missile fire. But that's why you have all those Doomwheels and abominations and whatnot to distract your opponent from firing at these sneaky religious warpstone fume-addicted religious nuts. Work best in units of max 10 models strong, or even less if you're confident your opponent will not be fielding much missile troops (or that you'll be able to protect this unit from them), due to having the tendency of getting in each other's way and killing themselves with the fog of death. Add a plague priest (which is overpriced in my opinion though), to grant the unit even further maiming capacity.
Pure murder against most elf and human armies due to wounds on failed T-tests with no armor save, in addition to actually being fairly decent in melee. Low initiative (for a skaven) is a bit problematic against elves though.

- Things I've tried to get to work but which I find horribly bad in what they do compared to their points cost:

• Assassins (too pricey, seems to me like it's supposed to be some kind of hero-killer, but in my experience gets beaten up by most other armies' heroes)
• Night runners (can't see the point with these really, except with a warp-grinder weapon team. Which makes them random, expensive, and still doing rear-sneaky-attacking worse than a pack of 5 gutter runners)
• Warplock jezzails (costly, have trouble hitting anything smaller than a great dragon, and has a distinct lack of causing multiple wounds. Also difficult (and expensive) to protect against fast cavalry / flyers / ambushers coming to hunt them down).
• Poisoned wind globadiers (expensive, super short range, very situational, only usable really if you are 8" from a heavily armored target like a knight unit, which usually sounds like a bad place to be for most skaven units anyway)
• Doom-flayer weapon teams (Never got these to work. And besides, with options like the ratling gun on the poisoned wind mortar, why would you ever take this instead?)

Naturally, I in no mean to say the above is the ultimate truth of anything. Just observations from personal experience.

What do you think? As playing as or against skaven? Do you have different opinions?
Would we get some sort of conversation up and running from this wall of random text I apparently spawned?

Edit: typos and stuff

 

Thread is dead-mouldering yes-yes! Must pump-force warp energy-magic into it to revive-animate!

Despite not having played Fantasy in years, and having dubious forecasts of having anyone to play with any time soon, I finally got myself a second hand Skaven army. In fact I shamefully admit I ordered a bunch more stuff from an online discount retailer in a moment of weakness recently.... In any case, hopefully my kid is interested in learning the game in the future! It'd be great to smash them against my 3000 odd points of lizards!

I've just finished priming some Stormfiends, it was an absolute delight to have square bases fall out of the box when I opened it. I assumed they were strictly an AoS model but wow no they were End Times! In any case I've given them all mixed weapons for the cool factor, so I'm left with the spare special weapons. Has anyone seen then converted into clanrat special weapon teams? If I can work it out there's a free war grinder, ratling cannon, warpfire thrower and poison mortar to be built!

 

Stormfiends are cool, and the models are awesome. Sadly in my opinion they suffer from the same main issue that normal rat ogres do: high points cost, T4 and poor armor.

Given that the stormfiends get a respectable 4+ save at least to some models, and and extra wound compared to their less stormy cousins, they are still pretty juicy targets to even basic S3 missile fire. Not to mention the usual S3-S4 with armor piercing which many armies are able to regularly field.

With their Ld7 they are also very prone to panicking as soon as one of them falls to magic or missile fire, which is just plain painful with their high point cost.

I'll admit I haven't played these more than a few times, but in the rare category where they are competing with doomwheels, hell pit abominations and the warp lightning cannon, I'm having trouble finding the strategy which would make me bring stormfiends to the table. Maybe if you could just take a unit of one or two of them, they might have a use as random nuissance, but the minimum unit size makes them quite an investment.

 

Yes-yes, the swarm grows, under the Lizard-things' noses, yes-yes!

Yes indeed, they along with the new Thanquol and Boneripper and plastic Verminlord were released during the End Times, probably the only decent thing to come out of it as they collectively act as an 8th update for Skaven - indeed I wonder if these were always going to be the planned new models for the Skaven book, and GW decided to write an End Times book to go with them?

Thoroughly approve of giving them the mixed weapons, not only does it look better but it also balances the unit to stop it from being too overly shooty with Ratling Cannons, for example. Any pictures in a blog?

I personally haven't seen the spare weapons being converted into teams, but they certainly provide an excellent resource for that purpose. The only conversion I can think of is my own Warp-Grinder team, but that uses a Dwarf drill from the Miners kit rather than a Stormfiend weapon

I'm surprised you're so dismissive of Rat Ogres and Stormfiends - both I think are pretty darn competitive Monstrous Infantry choices. Rat Ogres are one of the more competitive MI units with 4 Strength 5 attacks each at Initiative 4, and are particularly cheap (for Monstrous Infantry anyway) at 40 points per model, meaning if you have to take a large unit, it's pretty easy to do with Rat Ogres (which I thought were a Special choice?). Stormfiends are of course more expensive but have an extra wound and have some brutal weapon options, Ratling Cannons being the obvious one but Grinderfists and Doom-flayer Gauntlets are also particularly good ones, allowing your unit to tunnel and giving them +2 Strength and D3 Impact Hits respectively.

Actually Beastmen were the last to get a book, in February 2010, Skaven got theirs a couple of months earlier in December 2009. Close though, they were definitely the last two to get 7th Edition books.

 

Yeah, rat ogres are special, storm fiends are rare.

My main source of berating rat ogres, and somewhat storm fiends, might be of course just my subjective bias. Maybe I just haven't learned to play them in the 7th and 8th WHFB editions, maybe my usual opposing armies just happen to be tailored to make these choices ineffective. Maybe the dice has just kept on rolling badly every time I've fielded either unit.

I agree that rat ogres do hit quite hard for their points. But that doesn't help much if they never get into melee due to massed missile fire, be it cannons, repeating-whatever-warmachine, or plain troop blocks with bows and arrows. It's not like you can really hide them with TLOS. Even a S3 blast from magic or whatnot has an ugly chance of causing enough wounds to drop a model and cause a panic test - with their rather mediocre leadership. This is even more true when there are multiple packmasters in the unit (as the panic is triggered for losing 25% of models, not wounds, the unit has).

As monstrous infantry I compare them with what I can field with my daemons army, or what I see on my usual opponents' armies (empire / wood elves / lizardmen). Besides the Empire (which I think doesn't even have a monstrous infantry option?) the other lists bring to table better monstrous options, I'd say.
As you can see from my usual opponents, they also have easy and cheap ways of bringing massed missile fire to the field with pretty much any list, so this might skew my perspective about rat ogre prowess heavily too.

More than that, the Skaven list doesn't have very good support for a main block of rat ogres, because, well, the valorous rats don't generally want to be where monstrous infantry wants to be.
No reliable protection or healing from magic items, characters or the spell lores either (except maybe from panic via death frenzy, but that's a different can of worms to open). This, in my eyes makes rat ogres kind of an outcast in the skaven battle line, and too expensive and fragile in points to build an army entirely around of.

Or, this has been my experience pretty much every time I've fielded a (larger than minimum size) unit of rat ogres.

I do admit the storm fiends are more "up to date" of the other armies' options in the 8th edition, but suffer of the same weaknesses which an opponent who knows how glassy rat ogres and their hi-tech counterparts are, will easily attack on. And yeah, the tunneling trick is awesome, specially compared to the army book's warp grinders. My biggest beef with the storm fiends is really that they're eating a chunk of the other awesome rare choices. Maybe I should just play around with them more.

If any of you have actual tips for tactics, or lists which support larger rat ogre (or heck, why not storm fiend) block(s), I'm all ears.

 

Currently I don't have any full-on lists, but I have pixellated evidence to back my claim to Rat Ogres' prowess in combat - a turn-by-turn fight to the death from my 'Best Monstrous Infantry' tournament that proves, point for point, Rat Ogres thrash Kroxigors:

True, it's unlikely that you'd encounter an opponent that would pit exactly six Kroxigors against exactly seven Rat Ogres in your army, but it's clear that the higher Initiative of the Rat Ogres shines through and allows them to knock Kroxigors for six a lot of the time.

I haven't pitted Rat Ogres against Tree Kin in the tournament yet, but from pre-battle analysis the Rat Ogres would still have an advantage due to having more attacks and striking first. We'll have to see if I ever get round to resolving the match.

 

I find it hard to see in any full game of warhammer where the rat ogres would not be be dodged, blocked and shot at before getting to their target though.

Don't take me wrong, I have enjoyed that monstrous infantry mortal kombat thread, but it really compares only a few select aspects of the troops pitted against each other.
And my reasoning for not playing more rat ogres (=they get shot to smithereens before they get to any meaningful melee) is one of the aspects that thread's comparison totally ignores, right?

As I said in my previous post, I do agree that rat ogres hit hard for their points - if they ever get to hitting range.

 

I'm always excited to see some matchups!