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So island of blood i picked up last year, i wasnt new to wargames i play almost a dozen different wargames and island of blood was my intro to warhammer, and just started collecting and playing 40k.
i read lots about the box set and had mixed feelings, the minis were awsome! and i wanted both factions not just one, i was told would be best to start with one faction an start another later but i was starting small and dreaming big,
i was also told the box set wasnt balanced, high elves dwarfing the skaven especialy with the griffon on there side, so i also bought the pretty prince althran on foot to balance things out abit and have afew games.

well to my surpirse the skaven ended up winning half of the time! and me and my freinds swapped sides just to see.
the high elves definatly are strong, but often bad dice rolls and incorrect placing can lose you the battle, the griffon causing terrer is a bane to the skaven, and the swordmasters can wreck a unit of clanrats,
the elves are definatly a cool faction, the skaven on the other hand are hideous and a tough match for the elves,
though the griffon can cause terror, half the time the skaven passed their Ld test and went on the kill a bunch of elves, the griffon often went down with warp lightning and the mage would be taken out before he could do some real damage, and the weapons teams were often pretty nasty when they werent exploding ( i love that about the skaven)

all in all i found the box to be lots of fun, pretty balanced even though the points didnt match up and the set to be totally worthwhile, though the starter booklet is poor with no real introductory scenarios
but its easy to write your own that will cater for this.

so if you want to start before the "dreaded 9th" edition starts this is a book start, and ive only fleshed my armies out to like 1000 pts since and im happy with that, though im very excited for 9th and keen to see what new things are coming

If you want to play rats or elves, this is the box to get before the new edition.

As someone who plays Skaven as his main active army and high elves as a second army, my view on the box set is sort of biased. I think the Skaven set is absolutely fantastic. You can literally get multiple sets of the Skaven side of Island of Blood and still build a competitive/fun to play list.

However, and this is entirely based on my playstyle, I don't particularly enjoy the high elf side of things. I really only use the mage model occasionally (I could never use swordmasters over my precious phoenix guard, or seaguard over my silver helms).

That's from a competitive point of view, however. If you're just looking for models, this box set is absolutely fantastic. I would just hate for anyone else to end up like me when I obtained the box set (Where I used both sides)

For the skaven: Wooo! Love these models!
For the high elves: I will never use most of these models in a game.. Nice mage model though.