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Hey guys, me and my friend are getting into Sigmar and I’m wandering hoe Skaven play? What sort of units are good, which ones should we avoid, etc?

Thanks heaps

largely depends on which skaven clan you want to use. Pestilens is probably the easiest to start out with due to the SC boxset containing everything you need provided you are good with green stuff/kitbashing except the verminlord but it has different synergies then clans like eshin or moulder. the general gist of the clans is as follows:

pestilens: Nurgle Lite (less durability but lots of the AOE damage and debuffs, good synergy with nurgle units)

moulder: fast, strong, unarmored monsters (rat ogres etc...)

Eshin: assassins

Skryre: guns and siege weapons

Verminous: bog standard infantry and leaders

MasterClan: thanquol, grey seers, Screaming bell

Thanks for the insights. I think my friend is looking mostly at Pestilins because he also loves the new Nurgle stuff so he’ll probably ally them together

 Tiberius501 wrote:
Thanks for the insights. I think my friend is looking mostly at Pestilins because he also loves the new Nurgle stuff so he’ll probably ally them together

In that case just get 2-4 start collecting boxes and a verminlord. Use green stuff/bits to convert some plague priests out of the grey seers and censor bearers out of extra monks. Potentially make at least 1 screaming bell(very good unit) and you should have around 2500 points after 4 boxes. If you ever need more stuff just get another sc and you'll be golden

Pestilens is basically a horde tar pit army that relies heavily on spells, buffs, debuff, and flat mortal wound auras to make the plague monks very resistant to morale as they bog down enemy armies (and die by the truckload) while the furnace, priests, and verminlord use their abilities to cripple any non Nurgle units regardless of who's side their on. monks can be given respectable attack buffs but they'll never match up to the best attack horde unit buffs like bloodreavers or witch elves. Of course that's where the debuff auras come in...

For mixing nurgle the plague claw catapult can be very good at starting epidemius' tally and nurgle healing spells can come in very handy as your furnaces and heros will be the main target for your opponent as without them the troops are, quite frankly, abysmal.

When playing skaven, your biggest enemy is morale your biggest ally is how cheap it is to get huge numbers of models. There are niche builds that are a bit different but generally speaking that's the deal.

If running pestilens I strongly reccomend allying in a unit of 30 plaguebearers as they will tank for the rest of the army which is squishy.