Are we 100% certain that creature is female?

I can't believe Blooded hasn't been brought up yet.

So niche and bad that the AoR update PDF took several ranks of it out of a Spec and replaced it with something actually useful.

Yup, Blooded, pretty poopay indeed.

Any talent that eliminates a single black die on a small subset of skills and costs more than 15XP. Solution: make them cheaper.

While those talents do come up it's not like it's even every other session and a talent that costs 20XP+ better be booyah or widely applicable.

I wish there was a cap for how many times you can take a talent. I hate when I'm taking the third or fourth of the same talent, especially for those black die removal talents. A cap would suck for the good talents, like the WT ST and Soak improvement ones, but might be needed for balance. Or maybe rule the cap that a talent is optional to take after you've already taken it so many times.

More of them could be like Improved Defensive Slicing. Stop adding Setbacks and start upgrading difficulty. Though I don't think there's a great consensus on which is better (and a lot of it really depends - versus a non-Adversary, multiple Setbacks may be better but Setbacks are also nullified by Codebreaker, so).

How about Bacta Specialist? Does anyone here really make in between sessions Wound recovery a big deal? I suppose you could have a compressed time frame between sessions, but it seems like that would be more about justifying this talent than narrative need.

The utility of Bacta Specialist is very GM-dependent. It's great if your downtime between jobs is carefully tracked or you have a very limited time to, say, beat someone to the next system before they get away with your McGuffin or whatever (say, measured in hours). If downtime is not concrete or usually long (i.e. weeks) the Talent is trash. I can see some great plots that call for limited timeframes but if every single one is like that, it gets old.

The utility of Bacta Specialist is very GM-dependent. It's great if your downtime between jobs is carefully tracked or you have a very limited time to, say, beat someone to the next system before they get away with your McGuffin or whatever (say, measured in hours). If downtime is not concrete or usually long (i.e. weeks) the Talent is trash. I can see some great plots that call for limited timeframes but if every single one is like that, it gets old.

I just think if you can pop 5 Stimpaks a day Bacta Specialist seems kinda pointless.

Probably so. I think the intent is for Bacta Specialist to help in long-term healing from crits. Which still only matters in concrete-time or limited-time situations; if your GM says "okay a month later after making a milk run you head to Nar Shaada" then you've had ample time to heal even awful crits without much help.

The Talent doesn't talk about crits though, but I would agree it should be altered to do that. I also think crits in general should be enhanced and made more of a pain in the @$$ for medical people to deal with. It would increase the utility of this Talent for sure, it would motivate the medics to put more effort than they currently need to into the Medicine skill, and it would encourage players to shop around for equipment to address crits imo.

Quickest way to make someone spend alot of points in medicine is to say: 'It's not a video game. No stimpacks'

Makes people alot more careful. Dosent help with Bacta Specialist tho. Like Kshatriya said, very situationally dependent.

Quickest way to make someone spend alot of points in medicine is to say: 'It's not a video game. No stimpacks.'

That'd be a little hard on the Medic spec, wouldn't it?

The Talent doesn't talk about crits though, but I would agree it should be altered to do that. I also think crits in general should be enhanced and made more of a pain in the @$$ for medical people to deal with. It would increase the utility of this Talent for sure, it would motivate the medics to put more effort than they currently need to into the Medicine skill, and it would encourage players to shop around for equipment to address crits imo.

It seems that crits are a bit wonky in game design. Pretty easy for a medical character to remove the result on the first die roll. However, if the roll is flubbed then you're waiting a week, hoping for a Triumph on every Medical check to heal WT during the week, or take a dip in a bacta tank. This design makes crits a pain to just down right nasty in a party without much in the way of medical training, but the instant you have a trained or smart character then crits almost become meaningless. It's a weird ballance.

Another thing I've found to be odd is that once a crit is healed there are no more ill effects. Which is fine for the easy ones which go away after a round or after combat, but it seems weird for the hard ones that stick around. Bleeding Out is one that jumps to mind. I find it weird that there is no way to stop the bleeding other than curing the crit. A character goes from near death bleeding everywhere to back on their feet charging into battle with a single decent medical check and a few stim packs. I think it would be interesting to require two rolls to remove a crit, or at least the hard nasty ones. The first to remove the ill effects and the second to actually remove the crit off the character. Or maybe reduce the difficulty of the crit by a step each time you heal it. Succeed at a hard check and it turns into an average and can spend triumphs to heal more steps.

It seems like bacta has some poor game design as it is which means any talents used to improve bacta are poor by default. I'll agree that Bacta Specialist should be aimed more at recovering crits. At least in the Doctor tree it's pretty easy to not take, unless you wanted to jump straight to dedication.

To truly make this post in line with the topic, how about Precise Aim for a bad talent. There was a recent debate on its usefulness fairly recently. The results of that conversation was that spending your manuever to aim for a boost die was just as good, if not better, than spending a manuever and a strain to remove a setback die. I can see an argument on using Precise Aim if you have several ranks, but the second rank in Assassin is 25xp and the strain expenditure can get costly.

Statistically the only combo with Precise Aim that made sense for the dice was 2 ranks so that you could take away 2 Setback dice and still use a second Maneuver for Strain to add a Boost die for Aiming. 1 rank of it is pointless and it's better to Aim x 2 than use 1 rank of Precise Aim, because a Boost die is a Setback's equal in Success/Failure ratio, but a Boost die is 50% better at generating Advantages.

The conversation then turns to xp expenditure buying it, whether or not there are even Setbacks present to remove, etc. It's situational and by default requires 2 ranks to be worth bothering, but there are other talents like that, for instance Smooth Talker. One rank of it is pointless, as you already count a Triumph as a success, it's at 2 ranks Smooth Talker begins to take off.

So I'm not sure I would say 'bad Talent' for Precise Aim, but I wouldn't bother wasting the xp to get it.

The conversation then turns to xp expenditure buying it, whether or not there are even Setbacks present to remove, etc. It's situational and by default requires 2 ranks to be worth bothering, but there are other talents like that, for instance Smooth Talker. One rank of it is pointless, as you already count a Triumph as a success, it's at 2 ranks Smooth Talker begins to take off.

I don't think one rank in Smooth Talker is pointless. To my understanding, rolling a Triumph has two effects:

1. It generates a Triumph, which you can spend to power talents, activate qualities, or affect the story; and
2. It provides one success. This happens regardless of what you use the Triumph portion for.

Smooth Talker allows you to spend the Triumph portion for extra successes, so with one rank, rolling a Triumph could give you two successes instead of one, which might turn a failure into a success. That might not happen often, but since the two careers with Smooth Talker get their first rank at 5 experience, I'd say one rank is worth the cost.

Quickest way to make someone spend alot of points in medicine is to say: 'It's not a video game. No stimpacks'

Makes people alot more careful. Dosent help with Bacta Specialist tho. Like Kshatriya said, very situationally dependent.

I'm fine with stimpacks, actually. They heal up wounds that really don't affect the player too badly except to push them towards unconsciousness. They're not breaking a death spiral of wound penalties or anything. They're finite and not free and won't save you if the heat is really on (or they may save you but waste your action economy in the process since you can't do much in a turn except run and stim yourself). So I don't feel like they're unbalanced, or take away from the epic space opera feel of Star Wars.

And there is the hard cap of 5 per day with dwindling returns(without bonuses)

If you have multiple encounters and you get beat up pretty bad multiple times you could go through the usable stimpacks pretty quickly.

Id say many abilities tend toward being situational based on what you are doing. Some of my Bounty Hunter's Survivalist skills could be pretty useless if we never fought outdoors or at night/in the dark.

If your GM never puts you in a situation where a skill is useful of course it will be useless.

Id say many abilities tend toward being situational based on what you are doing. Some of my Bounty Hunter's Survivalist skills could be pretty useless if we never fought outdoors or at night/in the dark.

If your GM never puts you in a situation where a skill is useful of course it will be useless.

The problem is how some talents aren't just kind of situational, they're above and beyond that, being very niche (and thus rarely with the cost even if the cost is 5, since the likelihood of applicability is generally quite low).

Knockdown talent...

dubious value for what it does (essentially gives you the Knockdown quality to your melee attacks but costing 1+ Triumph to trigger).

In the Marauder Spec it appears early and can be entirely ignored without consequence.

In the Fringer Spec, it is a 20XP roadblock to both ranks of Dodge on a spec that doesn't even favor melee combat.

One of the few things I actually houseruled. I changed it to count the character's melee attacks as having the Knockdown quality (i.e. may now spend Advantages for the effects). Still doesn't help the Fringer, but it makes the talent not completely awful relative to other talents.

Statistically the only combo with Precise Aim that made sense for the dice was 2 ranks so that you could take away 2 Setback dice.

2 very specific Setback dice - Melee and Ranged Defence dice. Though my own character has 2 Defence (Improved Armour Master), I don't think I've ever faced an enemy with 2...

Smooth Talker allows you to spend the Triumph portion for extra successes, so with one rank, rolling a Triumph could give you two successes instead of one, which might turn a failure into a success. That might not happen often, but since the two careers with Smooth Talker get their first rank at 5 experience, I'd say one rank is worth the cost.

That's a big part of how I determine whether a talent is "bad" or not.

Utility ("How often will I get use out of this?" x "How powerful is its effect?") vs. Cost.

Blooded sounds like a cool talent by itself (the Boost die is nice but not overpowering (modest power)), but it won't see a lot of use (I don't see people getting poisoned a lot... except by themselves in bars (low frequency)). So in my head it's a maybe 10 xp talent being sold for 20 (edit: 15 in AoR Commando).

The only time I've ever seen a character with Blooded was a house rules version of Devaronians where a free rank was given as part of the species pack to explain their high resistance to toxins. I believe it came up all of twice in six months of regular play.

I would also say Blooded is inaptly named. It doesn't make me think "Toxin resistance"