Games Workshop’s next model reveal for Age of Sigmar 4th Edition is a brand new Skaven Warlock Engineer – a keen-eyed rat with a magic crystal-infused sniper rifle – and its rules let it pick off your enemy’s high value characters, even if they’re hiding in a crowd.
The Age of Sigmar Skaven army has traditionally been an unstable cocktail, supporting its hordes of weakling Clanrats infantry with higher value war machines and specialists who can dish out more damage using powerful (if hazardous) magical technology.
The new Warlock Engineer character model, revealed by GW’s Warhammer Community site on Monday, is firmly in the second category (rategory?), armed with a Warplock Musket that boasts good accuracy, good damage, and the ability to shoot at enemy heroes that’d normally be hidden and untargetable.
It’s the second new Skaven unit GW has so far teased in the runup to launching Age of Sigmar 4th Edition, and – while the firm hasn’t confirmed it – we’d expect the Warlock Engineer to be among the ratmen miniatures in the new edition’s launch set, facing off against the Stormcast Eternals and their gnarly, axe-wielding Reclusians.
Monday’s preview shows off the Engineer’s entire warscroll of rules and stats, confirming that this rodent marksman will continue the proud Skaven tradition of being deadly – but poorly armored, fairly killable, and perfectly capable of harming itself instead of the enemy.
Its sniper shots hit on a roll of 3+ with a 24-inch range (already good shootin’ for Age of Sigmar) and, in true Skaven fashion, as long as it hasn’t moved this turn, it can overcharge the shot for a 5/6 chance of doing better damage – or a 1/6 chance of blowing itself up. Lovely stuff.
What jumps out at us most is the Sniper-Master ability, though. For starters, it introduces us to a new Age of Sigmar 4th edition rule called Guarded Heroes, which makes heroes harder to hit with ranged attacks, and prevents them being shot at until you’re within 12 inches. Sniper-Master means our Warlock Engineer gets to ignore that completely, leaving it free to blow away sneaky enemy generals from up to twice the usual distance.
Better still, it grants the same sniping buff to all friendly Warplock Jezzails (another classic Skaven shooting unit) within 13 inches of the Engineer. That’s potentially a devastating battlefield tactic, allowing you to marshal a whole heap of long-range shots at a single, normally unhittable enemy VIP.
If their starring role in the dazzling 4th edition animated trailer hadn’t already heavily hinted we were getting new Warplock Jezzails models, this news has us more or less convinced.
AoS fans everywhere will be preparing for the Skaven shooting meta on the horizon – although, with loads of the new models still unrevealed, we probably shouldn’t start bowing to our scraggly, long-tailed overlords just yet.
In the meantime, keep up with the 4th edition latest by bookmarking our Age of Sigmar news homepage, or following Wargamer on Google News. If you’ve missed the last week or so of updates, we can catch you up with GW’s recent previews on the new rules for Age of Sigmar spells and how Age of Sigmar command points are going to work.
Alternatively, for a real ground-up refresher on what’s what in the Mortal Realms, read our full guide to all the Age of Sigmar armies.