Welcome to a Kill Team review! Here on Path to Glory we love Underworlds, obviously, but we also love other games, and today I’m going to talk about the new Ratling Team that is coming out for Kill Team 2024. This is in the Brutal and Cunning box alongside the Wrecka Crew Ork team, and represents the first Ratling models in a long time. Prior to this we had a couple in Blackstone Fortress, but before that it had been years since these lil guys had a new set of models.
Introduction and Selection
Ratlings, as one of the few Sanctioned Abhumans, are often used by the Imperium as scouts and snipers, and that is definitely represented in this team. You’ll find 11 models (10 Ratlings and a Mutt) that let you live out your little scout sniper dream on the fields of Volkus.
To begin with, this is an 11 Operative team. That’s not a lot for how weak their defensive stats are, but we’ll see the utility available. Your Fixer is the Leader and always taken, then you can take up to one each of your Specialists – Battlemutt, Big Shot, Bomber, Hardbit, Raider, Sneak, Spotter, Stashmaster, and Vox-Thief. Then you can take up to three Ogryns or Bullgryns in any combination, and the Bullgryns have multiple loadouts. Finally, Snipers are your basic Warriors, and boy howdy are they good.
You can also take less fighters but pick a Ploy to be free for the game for each unused slot up to three times, but you never do this. There are some good Ploys, but bodies are better in general.
This is a really solid collection of fighters, and a flexible one that will change based on the teams you’re facing. While the box only comes with the Ratlings and Battlemutt, I will advise you to pick up Ogryns if you want to make the team competitive. This adds quite a bit to the purchase price of the team, which can be a bit hard for people, but that flexibility is second to none. That said, if you just want to play them out of the box, they do make an acceptable one-box team, you simply will have a bit more of a challenge ahead of you.
Also, this team gets Security and Infiltration. Security is great in general at the moment, and Infiltration (specifically Surveillance and Implant) can be really good as well. This is a great selection of Tac Ops!
Faction Ability
Before we dig into the fighters, let’s look at the main Faction Ability, Scarper. This effectively gives you a number of Dashes equal to half the number of your opponent’s Activations (rounding down) that can be done before your Activations. This is extremely flexible, allowing you to move into position with your Heavy weapons, or scooch closer to where you need to be before activating. Since the team has many Stationary profiles and only one source of +1 APL, this is your way to get that extra bit of utility, and it’s great. You not only will find many ways to make use of this, it’s also basically required to make good use of it for the team to function effectively.
How you use Scarper will be different basically at every point in the game. Sometimes, you will be simply moving forward with it to move towards the objectives. Other times, you will be moving away from enemies to get out of Charge range. Still yet, you may use it to get into a better sniping spot to rain fire on your foes. As I said, this is an extremely flexible ability and one you’ll have to master to get the most out of your Ratlings.
This, plus the number of abilities and poor stats on the Operatives, means you need to compensate for weaker Operatives by using your Abilities, including Scarper, to the fullest. The skill ceiling on this faction is quite high, and a good Ratling player will be very easy to spot versus a bad Ratling player.
Operatives
Let’s dive into the Operatives! Starting with our Fixer, we see they’ve got Move 5”, 7 Wounds, APL 2, and a 5+ save. This will be the same for all Ratlings, except the non-leaders will be 6 Wounds instead of 7. So obviously this is a very squishy team and you’ll need to trade very efficiently and hide well so your Operatives don’t get washed off the board.
The Fixer comes with either a Battle Rifle or a Sniper Rifle, and you’ll see that they have the distinction of hitting on 2+! Not even Space Marines hit on 2+ in this version of the game, so immediately we get a feel for the faction being really shooting focused. The Battle Rifle is much more movement focused, as it’s basically a Bolter that hits on 2+, while the Sniper Rifle is our first glimpse at the standard weapon for the team. 3/3 Devastating 3 is a crazy good profile, though without Silent it’s a bit hard to simply stand still and shoot from Engage. Of course, there’s ways around this, and Scarper helps a lot.
Personally I think both are solid, but it’s very hard to pass up the pure power of the Sniper Rifle if you’re good at positioning. If you only can build one, I would recommend the Sniper, but if you can build both or magnetize it, you can choose which one is best based on the battlefield.
They also have what is sadly the standard Ratling melee profile of hitting on 5+ with damage 1/2, so you, well, never ever ever want to be fighting if you can help it.
The Fixer also has two extremely good Abilities. Munitorum Contacts gives you an extra Equipment. This is simple but massive, especially as Ratlings have very good Equipment. Much of the Equipment Terrain is also very useful for them, and there’s nothing wrong with Grenades, so this is lovely to have.
Target Designation lets your Leader point out a single enemy in the Strategic Phase and have everyone shoot them with Lethal 5+, and when many of your guns have the Devastating keyword, that’s extremely strong. Getting your Leader into a good position to point at someone (remember, they just have to be Visible, not a Valid Target) is paramount to removing an important enemy each Turning Point. Your opponent either has to accept that fighter as dead, or has to play cagey with them, which you can exploit as well.
So overall, a very, very solid Leader.
Next, we’ll quickly look at the basic Warrior, the Ratling Sniper. Not much to talk about with abilities here, and the stats as I said are the standard across all Ratlings, but it’s notable that your basic Operatives hit on 2+ while Stationary. That’s crazy! 2+ was removed on Leaders in nearly every faction, and these lil’ guys get it on multiple Operatives. Now without Silent, taking that Heavy shot is risky, but there’s ways to deal with that and the effect is insanely good. Nothing special here in terms of utility, but your opponent will come to hate these little shooters.
The Vox-Thief is our first non-Leader specialist Operative. You can see here that most Operatives hit slightly worse than the Snipers, with a 4+ while moving and a 3+ while Stationary. This isn’t necessarily awful, since those Operatives come with a lot of utility on top of those (still fairly good) guns.
The Vox-Thief perhaps unsurprisingly has the standard Comms ability that everyone knows and loves, handing out +1APL to a friendly within 6”. This is good basically all the time, though in Ratlings it can be a bit hard to use since you often are using Heavy profiles and therefore aren’t getting the Move + Shoot + Dash, or Move + Shoot + Action that most teams use their +1APL for. Still, the faction has some fighters that are more open to movement, especially Ogryns and Bullgryns, and you can definitely use Mobile profiles for your guns, so this will still be useful most of the time, as usual.
Stashmasters get the basic profile and weapons, but get two pretty good abilities. Light-fingered lets you do Mission Actions for one less, which is great in general. Effectively being APL3 on certain Missions or with certain TacOps is fantastic.
Well Stocked gives you two Ammo Caches instead of one, which is… ok. I find Ammo Chaches pretty middling in general, since you have to forgo other, more impactful Equipment. The Fixer obviously means you get to pick 5, but even then, there’s likely better options. On the other hand, you are a team with a lot of Heavy guns that want to be sitting still and shooting a lot of the time, so perhaps setting up reroll zones is pretty nice.
Whether you bring the Stashmaster ultimately I think depends on whether you think you will use Ammo Caches or if you think your APL will be a bit limited for the mission.
Then we come to the Raider, who gets an always Silent gun (very good) that unfortunately loses a bit of Devastating for the utility of being able to sneak around on Conceal. I think that’s a fair trade – if you were shooting like an Angels of Death Eliminator, it would feel very silly. I think the Suppressed Sniper Rifle is a perfectly good gun for a harassment piece to use, running around shooting while not being able to shoot back is just strong in general, especially if you can abuse high ground on Volkus for instance.
Speaking of high ground, the Raider comes with two abilities. Grappling Hook lets you treat all Climbs as 2” regardless of height, which is crazy good for getting to the second level of buildings if they exist, and in general is really good for a 5” move model. Sneaking up easily and shooting from Silent will put your opponent on the back foot and give you a lot of breathing room for your squishy fighters.
Then we get Slingshot, which is a cool semi-teleport. Swinging around like Spider-Man and getting into good Silent positions is great. This can also let you effectively teleport between Buildings to get into position for good shots or even just to do Surveillance for quick and reliable Tac Op scoring. There’s a bit of a question about whether you can use this to go up and down terrain or if it needs to land on the same vertical distance that you started with, but even if you can’t “climb” as part of it, the ability is still very, very good.
The Raider also gets a Knife, which is slightly better than Ratling Fists, but still sucks, so don’t really rely on it outside of very specific moments in the game.
I think you often use the Raider for the utility and Silent profile, though it loses some utility on Gallowdark boards where the most you can do is zip around corners. Though still, Silent on Gallowdark is good, so I think the Raider makes the cut a lot of the time.
The Sneak is the other Operative with a Suppressed Sniper Rifle, meaning the Ratlings can potentially run two permanent Silent guns at the same time! This is very, very good, and I don’t think is something any other team in the game can do. Again, it’s a smidge weaker than your regular Sniper Rifles, and doesn’t hit as good as the regular Snipers you can take, but the positional advantage of Silent is top tier.
Sneaks also have two abilities. First, Optics is an active ability that lets you ignore Obscuring for 1AP. Smoke Grenades are relatively common on some teams, and on the Heavy boards of Volkus and Gallowdark, Obscuring comes up fairly regularly. Combining this with the Stationary profile can really punish people who think they’re safe in their Smoke Grenade cloud or lock down a doorway on Gallowdark that seemed relatively safe. Very strong.
Then we get Evade. Notably, the Sneak cannot be selected for Scarper like other Ratlings, but instead once per Turning Point can use this ability. It’s like Scarper, but you can do it in-between the Actions of an opponent’s Activation instead of after the whole Activation is done. This means if someone runs up to 2” away from your Sneak to try and negate Conceal, you can just Dash away and stay safe. You can Dash around corners to get away from bad angles. You can Dash away from other friendly operatives to avoid Blast and Torrent. This is extremely good and probably enough to justify the Sneak by itself.
Sneak? Good. Probably end up taking it and the Raider for double Silent shenanigans anyways, and then add these great Abilities on top of that.
On the other hand, the Big Shot has no abilities, but boy howdy is that gun good. Tankstopper is an appropriate name. Even the mobile profile (which amazingly hits on 3+) will put the fear of the Emperor into enemies that it targets, but you’re here for the Stationary profile. Hitting on 2+, Damage 4/2, Devastating 4, Piercing 1, Severe is insane. This thing will put holes in anything that even dares to step into vision. Even things that ignore Piercing are scared, since this bad boy has Severe to guarantee at least one Crit and can benefit from Target Designation on the Fixer to put out more on 5+.
Absolutely crazy good, though your opponent will do everything in their power to mitigate it either by positioning or firing everything to try and murderize it once it is on an Engage order. I absolutely love the Big Shot and their Tankstopper.
Ratling Bombers are an interesting one. Explosive Arsenal is potentially very scary: 5 dice attacks that hit on 3+ are good, especially with good damage and Piercing 1. Blast 1” is difficult to set up, but nice. Limited 1 is expected for big special grenades, but it’s the 3” range and the Heavy(Reposition Only) that makes it hard to use. You can use Scarper to somewhat get around this, which is nice, but ultimately I think you’ll not have a massive amount of times to use what amounts to a slightly better Krak Grenade.
They also come with two nifty abilities. Tripwire are really cool interrupt tokens that can mess up enemy movement and disrupt APL, especially on tight movement maps like Bheta-Decima or Gallowdark. The boost to Mines is nice, especially the part that prevents them from hurting your own operatives, but honestly I still find taking Mines a bit iffy as one of your few Equipment choices. They’re very telegraphed, and while you can sometimes use it as a massive deterrent to an enemy coming to your objectives, other Equipment is generally more impactful on the game.
They also have a slightly better melee profile, which again, doesn’t really matter. Ultimately I think this is a harder operative to use efficiently, though I think their stock goes up a lot on Gallowdark where you can more thoroughly lock down specific rooms or corridors.
Hardbits are arguably the “melee” specialist for Ratlings, though Ogryns and Bullgryns are better (more on that later). Coming in with the same Battle Rifle as the Fixer, which again is just a Space Marine bolter and therefore good, there’s also an actually somewhat decent melee weapon, the ability to Charge from Conceal (and also turn the Knife into a solid melee weapon), and strike first in melee while near cover. Those are all actually very good melee Operative abilities, unfortunately, it’s on a 6 wound Operative that can and will get out-fought by anything bigger than a guardsman. The main use of the Hardbit is charging in to finish off a wounded enemy that has been cut down by your superior shooting, but ultimately I find this Operative pretty skippable compared to others.
The Spotter comes in with a very standard profile and loadout, but here it’s the Spot ability that’s the winner. This is the same one that Death Korps get, and it’s fantastic all around. Handing out Seek Light and ignoring Obscuring to a nearby friend is massive, changing large swathes of the battlefield from safe to unsafe for 1 AP. Pairing this with your Big Shot will make the center of boards a terrifying place for your opponent to stand, but even just getting that free shot with a Ratling Sniper will make your opponent think twice about setting up Light Barricades and relying on them. This ability is a tad harder to use on Gallowdark, though ignoring Obscuring is nice.
The Spotter is our last actual Ratling, but the team comes with three more operatives.
First, we have our trusty Battlemutt. Not only is this a very good boy, yes he is, he’s also great! Well, his stats aren’t great, his melee is pretty mid, and he can’t do Mission actions, which for an 11 model squishy team is a bit hard. But Early Warning is absolutely game shaking. While initially reading like another Scarper-esque ability, the impact of this cannot be understated. As this interrupts the Activation and lets you do a Fall Back, this is an ability that can straight up negate a Charge action.
It feels kinda crazy to write that down. I don’t actually know any other abilities in the game that have that level of impact. Once per turn, as long as this fighter is alive and nearby, an enemy melee operative just doesn’t get to do the thing in the game it is designed to do. And much like the Sneak’s ability, you can also use it to negate 2” shooting over cover, making this little beast worth his weight in gold. Or at least, plastic, I guess.
While he has basically no use against slow shooting teams like Hearthkyn, and medium use against faster shooting teams like Aeldari, I think you auto-take the Battlemutt against any melee or mixed team as long as the map isn’t too bad for it. Gallowdark and Bheta-Decima may prove problematic to use Early Warning on, but on Volkus it is almost invaluable.
And then we get to our Ogyrn. First, we’ll look at the basic Ogryn, who is a melee machine. This sexy slab of meat hits nearly as well as a Chainsword-toting Space Marine, has more wounds than one, though on a worse Save. 16 Wounds is just… a lot. And while they can’t use Light Terrain to hide in Conceal (though still gets a save bonus), chewing through 16 wounds is not something a lot of teams can do. Impact damage on the Charge with the Bayonet is crazy good, if you roll average you can kill most things short of a Space Marine with a couple hits.
The big negative here is the +1 AP cost on any Mission actions or Pick Ups, which honestly does kind of suck since these guys will be on the points that your Ratlings don’t want to get close to, but isn’t all bad because you’d rather use that APL on just killing stuff instead. I think it’s not a massive downside, but on missions that require constant Mission Actions, Ogryn can sometimes prove a liability.
And honestly the gun’s not bad either! It’s only Pistol range, sure, but hitting on 3+ with 4/5 and Punishing is truly very solid. Ogryns are a great piece to act as the frontline for your Ratlings, giving you the much-needed melee and short range teeth to compliment the main force’s extremely good, but very squishy, long range prowess.
Bullgryns, on comparison, are very similar, though they trade some of the auto-damage on Charge power for being more durable. 4+ save on 16 Wounds is already crazy enough, and then you get to choose between the Brute Shield and Slabshield. The Slabshield gives you that extremely strong 3+ Save, making these guys harder than ferrocrete nails, and the Brute Shield lets you parry twice with one dice. Both of those are extremely good options, though obviously the Brute is better against melee and the Slab is better against Shooting.
Both Shields come with their own very mediocre melee profiles, but the Power Maul is very nice weapon. It’s a Power Weapon that trades Lethal 5+ for Shock, which isn’t a great trade but does lean into the durability of the Bullgryn by giving more parrying opportunities. I think you take it for the damage, however…
You can also choose to kit this big’un out with the Grenadier Gauntlet instead of the Power Maul, giving a weapon that is effectively a better, full range Frag Grenade. While hitting on 4+ isn’t great, every horde team in the game has to respect a Blast 2” weapon with 3/5, lest they lose four Operatives in the first turning point.
I think Bullgryn are great, though I would implore you to try magnetizing the kit because all four different loadouts offer something great: Slab + Maul lets you wade up safely and beat things apart in melee, Slab + Gauntlet is a surprisingly effective shooting brick, Maul + Brute is a melee brickhouse, and Gauntlet + Brute is a nice all-arounder piece that can brawl and shoot equally nicely. I can never see myself running a Ratling team without at least one Bullgryn selected in at least some capacity.
Operative Overview
Phew, that’s a lot of Operatives, but we’re done! Almost everything noted is worth taking, though as noted perhaps the Hardbit is a more difficult sell when the Ogryn and Bullgryn exist. Still, you have a lot of choices and picking what to field into which team is extremely important.
Personally I think you always take the following: Fixer (no choice), Big Shot, Raider, Sneak, Stashmaster, and Vox-Thief. Then you always take at least 2 Ogryns and/or Bullgryns, going 3 if you don’t think the Mission Action negatrait will impact the mission or not (also considering the Stashmaster for better Mission). Consider the Bomber and Spotter based on map, and the Battlemutt based on enemy gameplan. Snipers are great, and you can do worse than taking multiple if a more specialized Operative isn’t great for the mission.
While you can build this team out of one box, I do unfortunately think you’d be better off getting two boxes or kitbashing some more Snipers, plus at least one box of Ogryns/Bullgryns (and probably 2-3 depending on how good you can do with magnets). But if you’re going to be playing the team a lot and being competitive with them, I think it’s worthwhile.
Ploys
So our Operatives are good, what about our Ploys? Let’s start with Strategic Ploys, beginning with Sniper Positions. When an Operative has Heavy Terrain in its control range, stationary shooting has Silent. Amazing. Big Shot? Snipers? Fixer? Beautiful. Your opponent will learn to despise this ability because a good Ratling player will set up well and just shoot with no reciprocation with most of the team. Amazing, maybe not something you pop literally every turn, but I imagine around 3 times per game on average.
Crack Shots is another one I can see being used a lot, though it diminishes in power as the game goes on. Balanced across the board is nice, though not if you move or are too close. As more aggressive teams close, or as you get onto Objectives, this will be less useful, but I think this happens on Turning Point 2 a lot of the time, especially if you can set up some good shots. It also combos nicely with the Stationary profiles of Sniper Positions!
Shifty gives your Ratlings what is commonly called Super Conceal, basically allowing you to ignore Seek and Vantage when they try to remove your Conceal order. That’s nice a lot of the time, but Volkus and Gallowdark are chock full of Heavy terrain, which is extremely hard to negate, so I think it’s not amazing in the current season, but it does make your Barricades very good staging points, especially when combined again with Sniper Positions. This is a bit of a situational use at the moment, but when it’s good, it’s so good.
And lastly, Frontline Assault is great. Give your Bullgryns and Ogryns even more accuracy for a turn. Obviously this gets better the more of them you have, so when you select 3 for a game you’ll probably pop this on the turn they all get in range. Much like the ‘Gryns themselves, this is straightforward and strong.
Then let’s check out the Firefight Ploys. First we have Shoot and Hide. For 1CP and a very generous positional requirement, you basically make any gun on your team Silent for a turn. While this may seem redundant with Sniper Positions, it does let you swap the mobile profiles, and it lets you be flexible with your CP if you’re not sure if you’ll use Sniper Positions for the turn. It’s great, though again, a tad redundant, but a Silent Mobile profile is still good.
Sharpshot lets you shoot into combat, which is something that few teams can do. It’s definitely worth keeping in your back pocket, even if it’s not useful every game. Plenty of times, though, shooting whatever your Ogyrn is currently bludgeoning is a very solid tool, and it prevents enemy melee Operatives from hiding in combat during the turn.
Larcenous is even more situational, allowing you to sneak steal Objectives when you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Sometimes this wins games. Sometimes you won’t use it. The threat of it is good as well, just making your opponent second guess their activation order or the general safety of certain Objectives. It’s a strong toolbox, even if sometimes that particular hammer stays in the box.
The last one is Survival Instincts, a solid defensive tool. This lets you use a regular Save to block a Crit Hit, or a Crit Save to block two Hits. That’s very good when your fighters are only 6 Wounds, and since you’ll often be hugging Cover as best you can, you’ll basically always be able to use this at least once per turn. Do make sure you’re not running out of CP, however, since this ability can run you low pretty quickly if you’re relying on it to survive.
Wow, this is a real solid selection of Ploys! Even if many are situational, none of them are bad or useless. Like Scarper and the various Operative abilities, knowing how and when to use these will really modify the power level of your team and separate good players from mediocre ones.
Equipment
Finally, we go through Equipment. Remember, you get an extra option baseline from your Leader, and a lot of the Universal Equipment is really, really good for the team.
Purloined Rations is good. Almost too good not to take. Any of those Operatives that don’t have the 2+ Stationary profile can just get it, or at least one per turn. Any of your Mobile profiles on the more accurate Operatives can be on a 2+, or a 3+ for everyone else. All of those are good, as long as you remember to use it. I think this makes the cut almost every time.
Lucky Round is, in my opinion, just as good. You can’t use it together with Rations, but getting Severe on guns that often are Devastating is, well, devastating. And it’s after you roll dice, so it’s never “wasted”. That’s extremely good and makes this shooting team even more crazy scary to play against.
Next, Stolen Goods is an… odd one. It’s risky, though the potential payoff of having a CP advantage is huge. 66%+ of the time you get a leg up on the opponent, but 33%+ of the time you go into the game at a deficit. Personally I feel like that’s a tad too risky, since I like to play very reliably, as losing a CP when the Ploys are so good is potentially crippling, but it’s probably still good, and over the course of a tournament should (statistically) do more good than bad.
Improvised Armor is another banger of an Equipment though. Crit Defending on 5+ is great, doing it on Operatives that are beefier than the vast majority of every other Operative in the game is awesome. Your big boys will shrug off a lot of stuff while wading up across the board, and dominate most things in melee. If you have 3 ‘Gryns, I think this is a required take, but if you’re only running 1 or 2, perhaps it’s less interesting.
It might be relevant to talk about Universal Equipment briefly. All 3 Barricade types have their uses – Lights and Portable are great with Shifty or when Vantage is minimal, and Heavy is good if you can set it up in a good fire lane. I would not blame anyone for taking two slots worth of Barricades.
Grenades are obviously still good, though with the low speed and Heavy Stationary profiles, you may get less use out of them, and generally the Rifles are better. They can be good on your Ogryns, however, and better than most Mobile profiles, so Kraks are still killer into Elites. Everything else was either talked about in relevant Operative section (Mines and Ammo), or Ladders are just generally good.
I think it’s hard to say what’s “best” for the Ratlings – three of their four Faction options are extremely good, they like terrain, they like Ladders for getting good vantage, they like grenades for regular grenade stuff, so it’ll really depend on how things are going.
Summary
Overall I think Ratlings are an extremely strong team in the right hands. It’ll require a good amount of practice to learn the ins and outs – what Operatives to pick, what Equipment to take, how to move efficiently, when to use Ploys, etc. But I truly think a good player will be absolutely terrifying with the team, as these guys are complete bullies when set up properly. They will suffer into fast melee teams that can close and negate their shenanigans, but Ogryns will make their days real rough and the Battlemutt can cause serious frustration if not dealt with.
I’m very excited to try the team out and see it played on the table! Let us know how you feel about it as well!
