# Skaven Assassins



## NoPoet (Apr 18, 2011)

Hi, does anyone ever use Skaven Assassins? 

For the same points as a basic Assassin, you can have 35 Slaves and 10 Giant Rats with 2 Packmasters, or a slightly tooled-up Warlord, or two slightly tooled-up Chieftains. 

The Assassin also counts against your Heroes entitlement, so less Plague Priests and Chieftains, therefore less characters to boost the Clanrats' poor Ld.

While an Assassin can also be used independently and has decent Ld (for a Skaven), they seem like a huge points sink which is better at scaring or denting the enemy rather than outright killing them. It seems their (admittedly excellent) 4+ ward save is what makes them so expensive.

Has anyone ever got an excellent result from using one, like fighting off a Griffon or something?


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## Mr. Black Orc (Feb 9, 2013)

I'm not a skaven player myself but my friend who plays skaven used his assassin versus a high elf player and assassinated both his mages with throwing stars. That was a very smart move if I have to say so myself.


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## Barnster (Feb 11, 2010)

They are very situational and tend to only be of use versus low toughness low save armies. Elves and empire spring to mind. Against armies like chaos, vampires or even O&Gs their effectiveness drops considerably.

The other issue is they are a unit that whole battlefield effectiveness is based on deployment rather than any game turn, deploy poorly and they are out of the game 

Personally I'd prefer a unit of gutter runners to an assassin, not as 1v1 killy but still shooty enough to deal with WMcs, and skulking wizards. I'll let Skyre weapons deal with blocks of infantry led by a character so I can win on SCR by the time lines meet


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