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Heya! I'm fairly new to aos, and I have about 1000points of skaven. I really want some clan pestilens stuff but the current models looks pretty dated. I just don't want to buy current badlooking models or 3rd party stuff if they're going to be updated soon, like what's happening with the seraphon at the moment. Does anyone know (or more accurately have an good guess) if or around what time the skaven could get an update.

Only GW knows and they aren't telling. There's a few hints/rumours that Skaven might be due another update with the next edition of AoS; but honestly only GW really knows for sure and there are many AoS armies that would be due for model updates/replacements; or big additions to their army.

I'd guess you're looking at 1.5 years+ minimum you might see any new skaven.
And that doesn't guarantee it'll be the units you're hoping for - because GW tends to keep kits in production for a looong time (20+ years in some cases) & the Pestilence stuff isn't anywhere near that old.

I'd recommend finding 3rd party sculpts you like to use in the meantime.
Plenty of good stuff outthere.
GW only if Pestilence is key to your plan & your tourney bound for someplace where 3rd party stuff isn't welcome.

ccs wrote:
I'd guess you're looking at 1.5 years+ minimum you might see any new skaven.
And that doesn't guarantee it'll be the units you're hoping for - because GW tends to keep kits in production for a looong time (20+ years in some cases) & the Pestilence stuff isn't anywhere near that old.

Incorrect. The Plague Monk kit and Censer Bearer models literally turned 18 this month.

Aren't the Plague Monks part of the more modern Skaven range like Clanrats and Stormvermin?

Nope, they're ancient bois. I think 6th edition era.

There are some modern-era Plague Monk bodies (in contorted censer-swinging poses, and partly moulded into each other) on the Plague Furnace kit, which could conceivably be converted/re-sculpted into individual monks. I was in the process of doing that with a bunch I grabbed off of ebay when WHFB died, and I never finished them. That kit also has a modern Plague Priest rider which can be used on foot with no conversion required.

Noakin23 wrote:
Heya! I'm fairly new to aos, and I have about 1000points of skaven. I really want some clan pestilens stuff but the current models looks pretty dated. I just don't want to buy current badlooking models or 3rd party stuff if they're going to be updated soon, like what's happening with the seraphon at the moment. Does anyone know (or more accurately have an good guess) if or around what time the skaven could get an update.

Convert, convert, convert!

Those are the three C's

I always find waiting for new stuff to be released is a let down... or by the time it is out I am no longer into it.

p.s. The new pestilens war band thing looks alright. But I'd rather convert!

I like Lubart Miniature's 3rd party skaven. I like the sculpts and look.

Cons;
- Resin. just don't like working with it
- long shipping time, for me. For the Europeans the shipping time is probably fine.

 Gert wrote:
Aren't the Plague Monks part of the more modern Skaven range like Clanrats and Stormvermin?

Monks were a 6th edition release, dramatically lower in quality than the 7th-edition Clanrats & Stormvermin. They have certainly aged better than some of their compatriots though *glares at rat ogres and night runners*.

The Plague Monks and Censor Bearers, which are still available today, came out in 1993.

30 years old.

 Altruizine wrote:

ccs wrote:
I'd guess you're looking at 1.5 years+ minimum you might see any new skaven.
And that doesn't guarantee it'll be the units you're hoping for - because GW tends to keep kits in production for a looong time (20+ years in some cases) & the Pestilence stuff isn't anywhere near that old.

Incorrect. The Plague Monk kit and Censer Bearer models literally turned 18 this month.

No, no that's not right, recheck your math. They came out in 2005, no way that was 18 years ago. I mean I have a bag of them waiting to convert into chaos cultists, I can't have been carrying that bag around for more than 2 or 3 years.

I'm with Kyoto! There's no way those models are 18 years old!

They clearly can't be 18 years old, they definitely aren't big enough to drive a car!

 Overread wrote:
I'm with Kyoto! There's no way those models are 18 years old!

You guys

Skaven will be in the 4th edition starter set and will probably be getting a big update like the Nids just got. So if you are willing to about a year there will be a lot of new Skaven.
By the way this comes from someone on tga who has a 100% accuracy rate.

GW have pretty much ignored Skaven for AoS' entire lifespan. Feels like they don't give a gak about them.

 dan2026 wrote:
GW have pretty much ignored Skaven for AoS' entire lifespan. Feels like they don't give a gak about them.

Lets face it, when AoS started Old World itself wasn't in the best of health. Up till End times a lot of the factions were getting a bit long in the tooth with models, but they'd just not had the attention and resources. When AoS started it was chaos and even some new kits (a chunk of Tomb Kings) were pulled from sale.

AoS then floundered, really until 2.0 hit the shelves. Adding Stormcast meant another army needing support, but they also added way more forces; all wanting attention. Even after 2.0 completed its cycle of recombining armies and sorting things out; you still had many factions undersized and/or with old models. Heck Seraphon were in a similar position until very recently.

My impression is that skaven are popular, but also BIG. There is a lot to update in their line and they need basically a "new edition" style launch of their own to really get a huge amount of their range updated in one big go. Much like how Necrons and Tyranids have had big updates. Along the way you've got 4 Chaos Demon armies that needed mortal and additional followers (heck Slaanesh needed a keeper and any sense that it wasn't being removed from sale); new factions like Luminieth, Daughters of Khaine, Idoneth; forces like Flesheaters and still the Fyreslayers (who have at least had a good few leaders over the years).

Someone has to be near the end and it seems Skaven are just unlucky in that. However if they are the big new-edition focus army for 4th edition AoS then that could be huge for them.

I think one of the challenges with Skaven is that for a while they seemed like they wanted to split skaven into like... 4 or 5 separate sub-factions but the sub-factions were too small to be sustainable and GW didn't have the resources to really support expanding and polishing them off. More recently they seemed to figure out a rules construct to support that so its less of an issue now, but I imagine that probably delayed their willingness or ability to really flesh out the Skaven range while they were still figuring out what they were going to do with them.

chaos0xomega wrote:
I think one of the challenges with Skaven is that for a while they seemed like they wanted to split skaven into like... 4 or 5 separate sub-factions but the sub-factions were too small to be sustainable and GW didn't have the resources to really support expanding and polishing them off. More recently they seemed to figure out a rules construct to support that so its less of an issue now, but I imagine that probably delayed their willingness or ability to really flesh out the Skaven range while they were still figuring out what they were going to do with them.

This too! AoS at the start was very much going to have 4 skaven armies then 2.0 cleaned it up to 1. I think they were going to try and make Skaven into what they did with the Demons of Chaos army.
However whilst that worked for Demons, I think for Skaven there were a few issues

1) Most of them relied on the same clanrat model as the core of the army.

2) One of the 4 was basically an "assassin" army which can be a difficult thing to turn from a subset of an army into a whole army unto itself. Mostly because the more you add to the concept of an "assassin army" the more it really stops being an assassin army and just a regular big army with some cloaks and daggers. Plus again gotta have those clanrats.

3) Visually Skaven look very similar. Even though one force is coated in pox and another has machines and another is mutated and such - they are all very similar as their core designs. In contrast Chaos Demons were 4 utterly visually distinct forces.

4) Skaven work fundamentally very similar across all 4 variations. Masses of weak chaff supported by powerful elites. Yes that's a gross simplification and there are other ways to run them; but in general they are functionally quite similar armies. Again Chaos Demons were quite the contrast to this.



So I think just visually, thematically and functionally Skaven didn't split down as easily as some other armies did. Furthermore I think Skaven players themselves also wanted the army back together as one big force. It might also just be budget wise that GW didn't have a budget for 4 books and only 1 at the time; or whoever wrote the book wanted them back into 1 and campaigned hard for it (similar to how Cities of Sigmar survived from the passion of a worker)

Plus you can argue that Vampires split down into 3* very effective armies and whilst Flesheaters have taken longer to get really thematic models to their lore; they have done really well. Even though the whole army originally worked really well as a whole; its split down well. You can still see some oddities - eg the mortis engine for Soulblight stands out because the army no longer has any other ghost units other than that model; the Corpse Cart is also rather rustic and flimsy for a faction that is now at the height of power and not hiding in the backwaters of the world; or living in ruined old castles and such.

*technically 4 as Ossiarchs have some of the shared models, though I'd argue as a design choice they are really quite separate from any of the original vampire concepts

Yep. If you go back to AoS1.0 you can see the vestiges of what seems to be many dropped concepts in terms of the faction/sub-faction breakdown. Ogors are another good example of a faction that was split up into 4 or so different subfactions which were eventually recombined back into one. It seems that the splits were only really successful in the context of the Death factions to be honest, as they broke up Vampire Counts into 3 distinct factions (Nighthaunt, Soulblight, Flesh Eater Courts) which survived to the modern day, but even then there were a handful of additional "concepts" in AoS 1.0 that arose as part of that split that eventually got folded back into the others. Deathrattle for example seemed poised to be a standalone skeleton based army, now its just part of Soulblight.

Personally, I think when it comes to Skaven GW have not entirely abandoned the idea of splitting it up into factions down the line. The current rules for the faction still heavily incentivize a certain degree of "segregation" within the army. I think ultimately it will end up split into Skryre, Pestilens, and Verminus forces, with Eshin and Masterclan being folded into Verminus and Moulder being folded into Skryre. Thats my conjecture anyway.

I think with Death they had two advantages when splitting them up.

1) Death as a Grand Alliance basically just had Vampires. With Tombkings gone, there weren't any other "death" factions left in the game to really fill the Death Grand Alliance with. At least not without investing more money into developing entirely new armies and concepts.

2) Vampires as a faction did split down well into themes GW has been able to explore and make very distinct. Nighthaunt, Soulblight and now Flesheaters - each one is very distinct from the other even if they share a few units between them.

In contrast if you look at Chaos you already had Slaves to Darkness and 4 God armies. That's 5 very diverse very distinct forces already before you then add Skaven. So Skaven getting split into 4 or even 3 would be a huge amount of resources added to the Grand Alliance as a block

Meanwhile if we look at Destruction, splitting there was more tricky. Orruks, whilst having 3 themed forces at the start, were basically the same army 3X. They had the same compositions of troops, ranged, warlocks and such; they had the same lore; same core themes and ideas. You just had wild ones; not so wild ones and heavily armoured ones.

It was no surprise to me that GW cut one of them even when they recombined into one force. There just wasn't enough distinction going on


Honestly it surprised me that the Grimkin were put into the greater Orruk army when you consider how almost alien they are. Orruks are very much 40K orks in design, casual lore and everything. Meanwhile Grimkin are visually distinct and even lore wise are much different and honestly closer ot their Old World counterparts. It would not surprise me if they splinter out of Orruks fully at some point in the future if they get more models.

Grimkin? Do you mean Kruleboyz or whatever they are called?

The Skaven range is so old that 95% of it would have to be completely redone.

Weirdly they have done new Plague Monks and Gutter Runners in their other game systems.
So they have designs and moulds for them already done.

So its like Skaven are getting new models but they are little squads for other game systems.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Grimkin? Do you mean Kruleboyz or whatever they are called?

Yeah, I keep miss-remembering their name!

 Overread wrote:


Meanwhile if we look at Destruction, splitting there was more tricky. Orruks, whilst having 3 themed forces at the start, were basically the same army 3X. They had the same compositions of troops, ranged, warlocks and such; they had the same lore; same core themes and ideas. You just had wild ones; not so wild ones and heavily armoured ones.

It was no surprise to me that GW cut one of them even when they recombined into one force. There just wasn't enough distinction going on

Except the orruks has 3 armies that play differently. One is aggressive melee punch. One is defensive slow ranged. And third is fast board control over damage output.

tneva82 wrote:

 Overread wrote:


Meanwhile if we look at Destruction, splitting there was more tricky. Orruks, whilst having 3 themed forces at the start, were basically the same army 3X. They had the same compositions of troops, ranged, warlocks and such; they had the same lore; same core themes and ideas. You just had wild ones; not so wild ones and heavily armoured ones.

It was no surprise to me that GW cut one of them even when they recombined into one force. There just wasn't enough distinction going on

Except the orruks has 3 armies that play differently. One is aggressive melee punch. One is defensive slow ranged. And third is fast board control over damage output.

Yes but visually and creatively they were the same.

boyz - arrow boyz - boyz on boars - warleader - dancing warlock

The Ard-boyz were somewhat different in that their style was very distinctly changed with the thick armour; but the other two were very similar. Yes GW could have changed around the stats, but for a time they were almost like Space Marines in copycatting the same structure within the army.
As they are now they've got 3 very distinct styles of model within the army for its core variations.

For alternative sculpts in the 3D world, Titan Forge did some vermin swarm a while back. Not supper extensive but they do tend to do follow up releases down the line. And there is also OnePageRules who have a pretty neat good guy ratmen range that is very fleshed out

AoS 4th edition will drop next year. And we have very very strong rumours supported by the best leaker we ever had (Whitefang on the TGA forum) that Skavens are gonna be the "big bad" of 4th. They will be in the launch box and get a refresh of their models.

TL;DR : wait for 4th to drop.

 Overread wrote:


Someone has to be near the end and it seems Skaven are just unlucky in that.

The list atm off top of my head for factions that are almost entirely ToW ranges:
Skaven
Ogres
Savage orcs (unless they're not a faction any more)
Beastie bois

In terms of known to exist but not represented in game:
Shadow elves

Sigmar ranges that need fleshing out/more stuff (imo):
Naked dwarfs
Floaty dwarves
Fish elves
Nearly naked elves
I'll throw a bone to maggotkin
Maybe Bonereapers

Wanderers can join the second category now, lol.