As for generating the 3 Threat, the battle droids did that any instance in which they hit the target, which was about half the time, while the Journeyman Hunter only generated enough threat in 6 of the 20 rolls, and Fett only 2 twice (which makes sense for someone as capable as he is). I suspect if I were to do a series of test rolls

So maybe the easiest solution regarding Improved Parry/Reflect is simply just to drop the Threat requirement from 3 to 2.

So with the battle droids and the Hunter they were able to get the 3 threat reflect ~25-50% of the time? Is that not good enough? Sounds pretty effective to me.

And even Fett triggered the reflect 21 out of 60 times with his 19 despairs and 2 triple-threat rolls. Slightly above 33% success rate.

JediHamlet,

I think your attempts are trying to add a D&D/Pathfinder-esque level of rules complication to a system that doesn't really warrant or support it, especially for talents that can be snagged by starting characters.

Donovan, I don't know you, so I'm going to assume that your derisive rebuke, is your attempt to keep the system simple and clean, for the enjoyment for everyone.

I explained what my goal was. Agreed that it was over complicating things.

I'm not trying to sway things one way or the other. Just trying to shake out the best solution. One that keeps things clean, simple, and fun for all. Through all that, trying to have interesting discourse with interested individuals without resorting to snide comments to dismiss another's input on how things could work.

The problem I see with the way things are setup, and others have voiced too, is that the ability to reflect a blaster bolt is not something that should be in one talent tree. Your adjustments to the talent trees do address that to some extent, however, I've not seen the talent trees in the two previous betas changed all that much.

Perhaps they will this time.

-- peace

As for generating the 3 Threat, the battle droids did that any instance in which they hit the target, which was about half the time, while the Journeyman Hunter only generated enough threat in 6 of the 20 rolls, and Fett only 2 twice (which makes sense for someone as capable as he is). I suspect if I were to do a series of test rolls

So maybe the easiest solution regarding Improved Parry/Reflect is simply just to drop the Threat requirement from 3 to 2.

So with the battle droids and the Hunter they were able to get the 3 threat reflect ~25-50% of the time? Is that not good enough? Sounds pretty effective to me.

And even Fett triggered the reflect 21 out of 60 times with his 19 despairs and 2 triple-threat rolls. Slightly above 33% success rate.

I did only 20 rolls for each, and Fett didn't trigger nearly that many, as again it was 20 rolls per the three different groups, which is a very small sample to draw any truly viable conclusions from.

In fact, the breakdown of the amount of Despairs generated was:

Battle Droids - 6 (but four of those also had the 3 Threat necessary as well and was a hit) out of 20

Journeyman Hunter - 5 (two of which had the 3 Threat necessary as well and was a hit) out of 20

Boba Fett - 8 (only one of which also had the 3 Threat necessary as well and was a hit) out of 20

If I'd truly had the time, I'd have done about 200 rolls for each set and chart the results, but free time is a pretty rare commodity for me of late.

But at the same time, I've witnessed sessions where not a single Despair came up in 4+ hours of gaming (and with plenty of rolls that included Challenge dice in the mix), and seen sessions where a Despair came up on every roll that included a Challenge die within a 30 minute time frame. That to me says that relying upon a Despair result is far too random.

JediHamlet,

For the EotE Beta, they did do some fairly major reworking of the talent trees, particularly in terms of removing and consolidating talents, so it is possibly they may rework the LS Form trees to account for the initial post suggestions of recalculating the damage mitigation bonus of Parry/Reflect if they choose to adopt that. The AoR Beta got a pretty major change in the form of the Massive quality and changing Know: Galactic Civil War to Knowledge: Warfare, both of which were changes introduced in the AoR Beta forums.

I can see the intent of what you're trying to do, but I think that your method is front-loading Parry and Reflect to the point that they become "must have" talents, particularly Parry which doesn't require the user to have a Force Rating and can be used with any weapon that uses the Melee skill, not just lightsabers.

By including the option for the counterstrike in the base talent, that pushes them from "hey, that'd be neat to take" to "hell yeah I'm taking this!" Especially for characters coming in from the Hired Gun/Marauder or other melee-focused specializations in EotE or AoR, who'd probably all love a chance to negate a part of the damage of an enemy's melee attacks prior to Soak being applied and have a chance at a counterstrike, thus greatly increasing their number of attacks in a given combat round.

Sorry you didn't like the D&D/Pathfinder comparison, but I call it like I see it.

JediHamlet,

For the EotE Beta, they did do some fairly major reworking of the talent trees, particularly in terms of removing and consolidating talents, so it is possibly they may rework the LS Form trees to account for the initial post suggestions of recalculating the damage mitigation bonus of Parry/Reflect if they choose to adopt that. The AoR Beta got a pretty major change in the form of the Massive quality and changing Know: Galactic Civil War to Knowledge: Warfare, both of which were changes introduced in the AoR Beta forums.

I can see the intent of what you're trying to do, but I think that your method is front-loading Parry and Reflect to the point that they become "must have" talents, particularly Parry which doesn't require the user to have a Force Rating and can be used with any weapon that uses the Melee skill, not just lightsabers.

By including the option for the counterstrike in the base talent, that pushes them from "hey, that'd be neat to take" to "hell yeah I'm taking this!" Especially for characters coming in from the Hired Gun/Marauder or other melee-focused specializations in EotE or AoR, who'd probably all love a chance to negate a part of the damage of an enemy's melee attacks prior to Soak being applied and have a chance at a counterstrike, thus greatly increasing their number of attacks in a given combat round.

Sorry you didn't like the D&D/Pathfinder comparison, but I call it like I see it.

It's cool Dono.

You've already decided that my suggestions don't fit with your own, that's probably why you missed the edits I made, and the attempt I made to continue this discussion to shake out the best possible solution. (If you try, you might even realize I wasn't responding to the D&D/Pathfinder reference.)

I'd restate my purpose (ahem, my goal) but, since you don't read anything after someone else's ideas do not mesh with yours, I doubt you'd read it.

You're free to ignore me from here on out, since interesting discussions, with interested persons, are not what you are interested in.

;-j

The problem I see with the way things are setup, and others have voiced too, is that the ability to reflect a blaster bolt is not something that should be in one talent tree.

My only concern with your variant is that it makes Reflect "better" than Parry, in that Saber swingers will want to be attacked at ranged, will prefer it over being engaged in melee.

My variant to your variant would be to add the "counter-strike" portion of Improved Parry to base Parry and shift Improved Parry in line with your Improved Reflect, allow the Improved Parry to strike any other engaged foe (really only useful when engaged by multiple non-grouped foes or multiple Minion groups).

The problem I see with the way things are setup, and others have voiced too, is that the ability to reflect a blaster bolt is not something that should be in one talent tree.

This is fundamentally true.

My only concern with your variant is that it makes Reflect "better" than Parry, in that Saber swingers will want to be attacked at ranged, will prefer it over being engaged in melee.

My variant to your variant would be to add the "counter-strike" portion of Improved Parry to base Parry and shift Improved Parry in line with your Improved Reflect, allow the Improved Parry to strike any other engaged foe (really only useful when engaged by multiple non-grouped foes or multiple Minion groups).

Yeah -- that's one of the fiddly bits I am wrestling with.

My suggestion does make it a bit more "must have" with Reflect, and if we make Parry pretty much the same, but only with engaged targets, they become pretty powerful.

Maybe it is just a semantic thing:

• Parry stays as is except damage reduction is 1 + 2/rank in Parry.
• Improved Parry becomes Riposte . After taking the Parry incidental, if the roll generated despair or threat x3, hit any one engaged target for base damage of wielded Melee or Lightsaber weapon.
• Reflect becomes Deflect with damage reduction at 1 + 2/rank.
• Improved Reflect becomes Reflect where, after taking the Deflect incidental, if the roll generated despair or threat x3 , hit the any one target within medium range for damage equal to the original hit.

So, ultimately, we follow Dono's changes, just use different names.

By changing the names, it becomes more explicit about what the talents do, and may lead to less expectations of what they should do. However, now the talents will sit on different pages in rule book, and you can not read them all in line with each other.

Ha -- simple

Ha -- simple

However... it still doesn't mitigate that most players who go Saber Swinger will want to be able to pull off Reflects, meaning an arbitrary dive into a few particular Form Trees for no real reason.

Dono's spec tree changes insert a few "Improved Reflects" (now just Reflect) into a couple (or more) of specs.

I'm going to argue against myself for a minute (maybe I'm channeling my inner-Dono):

I don't like the fact that you can hit any engaged target with Parry. Seems too powerful. But, if we nerf that, we should nerf Reflect too...

What if both read as hit the original attacker ? Follow me for a moment...

If the attacker is a minion group, riposting/reflecting back on the original attacker could take out a couple of minions. Narratively that could explain how Jedi reflect at "different" opponents, or in the case of Parry "wade through a group of mooks"

By nerfing (Improved) Reflect to only hit the original target we also reduce the chance of a nemesis level character from being taken out by reflected shots from other minions, or rivals. Something that doesn't seem to happen too much in the media. But, nothing is keeping the nemesis from having one of his "squad" from taking that reflect/riposte.

...hmmm...

I don't like the fact that you can hit any engaged target with Parry. Seems too powerful. But, if we nerf that, we should nerf Reflect too...

Leave the "reflect/riposte" into a different foe in the Narrative of what one does with those Advantages and Triumphs.

Note: I am 100& behind the renaming, and that's what I'll be doing in my home game.

I'm going to argue against myself for a minute (maybe I'm channeling my inner-Dono):

I don't like the fact that you can hit any engaged target with Parry. Seems too powerful. But, if we nerf that, we should nerf Reflect too...

What if both read as hit the original attacker ? Follow me for a moment...

If the attacker is a minion group, riposting/reflecting back on the original attacker could take out a couple of minions. Narratively that could explain how Jedi reflect at "different" opponents, or in the case of Parry "wade through a group of mooks"

By nerfing (Improved) Reflect to only hit the original target we also reduce the chance of a nemesis level character from being taken out by reflected shots from other minions, or rivals. Something that doesn't seem to happen too much in the media. But, nothing is keeping the nemesis from having one of his "squad" from taking that reflect/riposte.

...hmmm...

Thinking about it this way, I'm inclined to agree that Improved Parry and Improved Reflect should target the original attacker.

I don't think the upgraded version need to be renamed, nor should they. They are clearly upgrades to Parry and Reflect, respectively, and as such should be found in the same place when you go look for them in the Talents chapter. Generally, if one talent relies upon another in some direct fashion, it simply receives the word "Improved" or "Supreme" appended to it, and I see no reason to deviate from that trend here.

If anything, I'd probably rename Reflect to Deflect, since that reflects what the base talent is doing (thus, we'd have Improved Deflect, and Supreme Deflect).

That works too.

With Improved Reflect at least, it makes sense that you'd be able to rebound the shot to hit somebody other than the original shooter. I believe we actually see this in the films and The Clone Wars TV series on several occasions, with the Jedi using a deflected blaster shot from one enemy to take down a different enemy.

Improved Parry allows the user to make use of any talents that would affect their attack, which is very handy for combatants using a Melee weapon in conjunction with talents like Feral Strength, but you've also only got a brief opening with which to make your counter-attack. The trade-off is that where Improved Reflect allows for a choice of targets, Improved Parry allows for the character to make more use of assorted other resources they may have acquired. Plus, Parry can be used by a character that's not Force-sensitive, which is another factor to consider in terms who can struck by the counter-strike.

From an organizational standpoint and in keeping with how talents that build upon earlier talents follow the Improved/Supreme naming convention, I think we're better off sticking with Parry (Improved) and Reflect (Improved). There's already a number of talents whose names are seemingly at odds with what they do, so Reflect really isn't different in that regard.

I liked Yeti's suggestion to go with the names Deflect, Improved Deflect, and Supreme Deflect -- cuts down on the ambiguity, and makes sense in the natural progression of the talents, and keeps things organized.

So it sounds like we're back to the original suggestion Dono made, except now we can start quibbling over whether it is going to be a ('D' || 'R')-eflect.

cool

;-j

Me personally, I don't have an issue with using Deflect as the name of the talent series, but FFG might as that was the name that WotC used in Saga Edition for the Jedi class talent to negate a ranged attack.

Since OggDude's got the Force and Destiny material loaded into his program, I'm going to play around a little with the LS Form talent trees, to see how they'd look if the various suggestions to re-arrange them that I made were implemented.

And a third option for calculating the bonus that I got from talking with the GM of one of the games I'm in was that to keep the +1 per rank aspect, but just double the starting value from 2 to 4. His reasoning was that it makes the talents very useful when they're first taken, but keeping the +1 per rank accumulation prevents the potential power creep issue once you've got a PC that starts stacking the LS Form trees and has several ranks of Parry and/or Reflect.

2 to 4 seems extreme. 2 to 3 is more in line with a reasonable bump.

Well, if we're looking at cutting back on instances of Parry/Reflect in the trees from 3 to 2, or 4 to 3, we're looking at:

1 tree: 2+1+1+1 = 5 vs. 1+2+2 = 5

2 trees: 2+1+1+1+1+1+1 = 8 vs. 1+2+2+2+2 = 9

3 trees: 2+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1 = 11 vs. 1+2+2+2+2+2+2 = 13

That's progressing faster, but not significantly so. I think it's hard to judge to cost of these talents, because we only have Enduring to compare them to, yet the differences between Parry/Reflect and Enduring are many, and varied.

Personally, I'd rather see a greater variety of talents, and I'd like to get a little more bang for my buck when purchasing new ranks of existing talents. Of course, that makes the 5 XP ones quite a bit better...

With Improved Reflect at least, it makes sense that you'd be able to rebound the shot to hit somebody other than the original shooter. I believe we actually see this in the films and The Clone Wars TV series on several occasions, with the Jedi using a deflected blaster shot from one enemy to take down a different enemy.

I guess the question to ask is this: Do we ever see/read about someone Reflecting shots from mooks at BBEGs and hitting them?

I don't believe we do, so it may make sense to just view this as Reflecting blaster bolts from one guy in a minion group and hitting a different guy in a minion group.

And a third option for calculating the bonus that I got from talking with the GM of one of the games I'm in was that to keep the +1 per rank aspect, but just double the starting value from 2 to 4. His reasoning was that it makes the talents very useful when they're first taken, but keeping the +1 per rank accumulation prevents the potential power creep issue once you've got a PC that starts stacking the LS Form trees and has several ranks of Parry and/or Reflect.

At the risk of skirting the power-creep/fiddly edge, what about adding a characteristic in there, or Force Rating?

i.e: Parry: reduce damage by 1 + brawn (half brawn, 3/4 brawn?) + ranks in Parry

Deflect: reduce damage by 1 + current Force Rating + ranks in Deflect

or,

Parry: reduce damage by 1 + lightsaber characteristic + ranks in Parry

Deflect: reduce damage by 1 + lightsaber characteristic + ranks in Deflect

Where lightsaber characteristic is any characteristic the character can apply to Lightsaber skill.

+0.02

;-j

force rating is probably a poor choice.

I could get behind half ranks in LS rounded up (so at LS 5, the talents would be at that 4+ ranks level). this would make the talents less of a focus, while rewarding actual LS skill. Downside of this is two fold:

1. Math is slightly more complicated. Not hard, but given the FFG streamlined and relatively uncomplicated nature, that math may be too much.

2. It places more emphasis for duelist to only pump their LS skills, while non-LS focused characters suffer.

Do the downside's out weight the ups? I dunno. But that is a kind of fallout. Personally I want to keep the LS and Dscipline skills from creeping into everyother skill and use at the barest minimum possible. But that's my hang up.

Looking at it again, and trying to simplify the math, just drop the leading one?

e.g.: For Parry: reduce damage by 1/2 brawn (rounded up) + ranks in Parry

I liked adding the Force Rating in there for (D|R)eflect as it represents those more attuned to the Force being better at it...

To clarify: I didn't mean the lightsaber skill -- just the characteristic that could be used for the skill -- Ataru Technique would allow one to use Agility, Shien Cunning, etc...

Me personally, I don't have an issue with using Deflect as the name of the talent series, but FFG might as that was the name that WotC used in Saga Edition for the Jedi class talent to negate a ranged attack.

i.e: Parry: reduce damage by 1 + brawn (half brawn, 3/4 brawn?) + ranks in Parry

Deflect: reduce damage by 1 + current Force Rating + ranks in Deflect

Parry: reduce damage by 1 + lightsaber characteristic + ranks in Parry

Deflect: reduce damage by 1 + lightsaber characteristic + ranks in Deflect

Where lightsaber characteristic is any characteristic the character can apply to Lightsaber skill.

and that's where it get's complicated. I see this billowing paragraph for a talent that used to be so small and succinct. ;D

Maybe it is just a semantic thing:

• Parry stays as is except damage reduction is 1 + 2/rank in Parry.
• Improved Parry becomes Riposte . After taking the Parry incidental, if the roll generated despair or threat x3, hit any one engaged target for base damage of wielded Melee or Lightsaber weapon.
• Reflect becomes Deflect with damage reduction at 1 + 2/rank.
• Improved Reflect becomes Reflect where, after taking the Deflect incidental, if the roll generated despair or threat x3 , hit the any one target within medium range for damage equal to the original hit.

So, ultimately, we follow Dono's changes, just use different names.

By changing the names, it becomes more explicit about what the talents do, and may lead to less expectations of what they should do. However, now the talents will sit on different pages in rule book, and you can not read them all in line with each other.

Ha -- simple

Yes, this. Can we do this? Something like this? We already have words that describe what these things do, and those are the words presented above. I really don't want to see a progression like "Parry", "Improved Parry" and "Supreme Nachos Bell Grande Parry" on the menu -- too cryptic.