The Unleash Mastery power for a Dark Side Force User does little other than change the "effect" of the power to lightning.

The problem is that reducing the Critical Rating of the power by 1 for 1 pip is significantly less useful than simply activating Strength upgrades for one pip, which adds the number of strength upgrades to either Success or Advantage. Although it is not strictly necessary for the Force user to pick up Strength upgrades, they cost significantly less and even one of them is the equivalent of Mastery for the Dark Side Force user.

This is an insignificant effect for 25 points, and easily overshadowed by Strength, starting at 15 points.

Except with a powerful critical injury you can simply kill your target outright, regardless of damage.

There's also the fact that dishing out critical injuries can leave a Nemesis-tier adversary nearly crippled, to say nothing of instantly taking out an additional minion in a group.

By the time a Force user gets to the Mastery Upgrade, I'd suspect they're going to be rolling at least 4 proficiency and an ability die (Willpower 4, Discipline 5) if not 5 proficiency dice, enabling them to pretty much crush that Average difficulty and having a bevy of successes and/or advantages. And if you can drop the Crit Rating down low enough (say 2 or even a 1) and you've got a whole load of Advantages, why not trigger that critical injury several times and really put a hurting on the target, up to quite possibly killing them outright if not leaving them badly crippled. Since the character is rolling at least 3 Force dice by that point, they're likely to have a decent stock of Force points to work with.

I feel that people don't read what I write, they just have a knee-jerk reaction and post the first thing they think of without actually considering what I'm saying. Please note:

If criticals are your thing, just spend your pips in Strength upgrades for advantage. It comes to exactly the same thing, except:

1) Strength upgrade is more versatile , being available to be used as Success (if you're wanting to ensure a hit) or for Advantage (if you want to crit or activate other benefits).

2) If you get 2 or more Strength upgrades, Mastery is obsolete and will not be used. Why? Because I get 2 advantage for my 1 pip to strength upgrade, which is better than reducing the critical rating in any case. Also, due to the arrangement of the tree, if you get 2 Strength upgrades, there's no reason not to get all 3.

Mastery is not as good as Strength . There is no reasonable way you can argue otherwise, it is the simple fact.

If critical is the thing you want the power to do, then change the power to reduce the critical cost to 1, so that it's at least on par with spending a pip on Strength when it's maxed.

Otherwise, I can think of other neat things the power could do, that are arguably more in-line with the power as we see it used:

Let's go through the Qualities list:

Blast could work, a little area-effect lightning.

Concussive (spend 2 advantage to stagger target for a round). Luke certainly seemed staggered.

Knockdown might be a quality Force Lightning should have. It seems to be part of the effect.

Linked 1 for each hand

Pierce could work

Vicious seems viable as well.

So there's a lot to work with, but the current "power" is extremely underpowered and not well thought out. Compare with the Seek power i posted about in another thread to see the pendulum on the other side.

There's also the fact that dishing out critical injuries can leave a Nemesis-tier adversary nearly crippled, to say nothing of instantly taking out an additional minion in a group.

By the time a Force user gets to the Mastery Upgrade, I'd suspect they're going to be rolling at least 4 proficiency and an ability die (Willpower 4, Discipline 5) if not 5 proficiency dice, enabling them to pretty much crush that Average difficulty and having a bevy of successes and/or advantages. And if you can drop the Crit Rating down low enough (say 2 or even a 1) and you've got a whole load of Advantages, why not trigger that critical injury several times and really put a hurting on the target, up to quite possibly killing them outright if not leaving them badly crippled. Since the character is rolling at least 3 Force dice by that point, they're likely to have a decent stock of Force points to work with.

You can't do this. You can't crit more than once, the power doesn't allow that. It only reduces the crit cost, which can be activated multiple times, but you're still only able to crit once.

Except with a powerful critical injury you can simply kill your target outright, regardless of damage.

I really can't believe you wrote this.

It's not Vicious, it doesn't add to the Critical Injury roll.

Mastery only reduces the Critical Rating by 1 per pip .

Note that reducing the Critical Rating by 1 in almost equivalent to adding an Advantage, except that it lacks versatility. Therefore using Strength upgrades to generate Advantage will do the same or better, if you have only one Strength upgrade. If you have all 3 Strength upgrades then that 1 pip can get you three advantage.

This power does not do the things people appear to think it does. Allow me:

p. 212: "For Unleash, this upgrade represents mastering the ultimate dark side technique, the dreaded Force lightning. If the user is a dark side Force user, he may spend a Force Point to reduce the attack’s critical rating by one . The user may activate this multiple times, reducing the critical rating by one each time (to a minimum of 1)."

This is not good.

Except with a powerful critical injury you can simply kill your target outright, regardless of damage.

I really can't believe you wrote this.

It's not Vicious, it doesn't add to the Critical Injury roll.

Mastery only reduces the Critical Rating by 1 per pip .

Note that reducing the Critical Rating by 1 in almost equivalent to adding an Advantage, except that it lacks versatility. Therefore using Strength upgrades to generate Advantage will do the same or better, if you have only one Strength upgrade. If you have all 3 Strength upgrades then that 1 pip can get you three advantage.

This power does not do the things people appear to think it does. Allow me:

p. 212: "For Unleash, this upgrade represents mastering the ultimate dark side technique, the dreaded Force lightning. If the user is a dark side Force user, he may spend a Force Point to reduce the attack’s critical rating by one . The user may activate this multiple times, reducing the critical rating by one each time (to a minimum of 1)."

This is not good.

You may be forgetting that you can activate a critical multiple times, which adds +10 to the crit. So, for example, with a Lightsaber with a crit of 2, let's say your roll 6 advantage. You spend 2 to activate it, and then you can spend the other 4 to activate it again two more times, this adds +20 to the crit roll.

Increasing a crit rating increases the odds of doing something more severe on the crit table, such as outright killing an opponent. So, basically, a lower crit rating doesn't just ensure that you have a higher chance to activate the critical effect (with extra advantages to spend any other way), but it also allows you to make the critical itself more effective.

That and with Magnitude Upgrades, a lower crit means you can land crits against more people effected by Unleash.

I see what you're saying Scalding, so let's run some numbers. EDIT: again, there is a lot of conditional probability that I am estimating in this. these are not hard numbers, but merely some really rough averages that I'm using to illustrate what could happen. not what will every time.

with FR3, I could get a max of 6 force points to spend. assuming I have all the upgrades, I would spend 2 to activate, and 4 on strength. now, let's say with a nemisis with adversary 2 (and an attack pool of 2 porf and 2 abil) the average attack will succeed with 1.41 successes. So ignoring triumph and despair, the prof dice and challenge dice basically cancel each other out, so you'l also average about 1.25 advantage on a roll. so let's lower bound this, and say that on 1 success hits you get 2 advantage. This is rough, but go with me.

so after the strength upgrades, you'd have 14 advantage which could activate the crit aspect 3 times. but if instead you ahd used the force points, 2 to strength and 2 to mastery, you would have 8 advantage with a crit rating of 2. 3 mastery and one strength would be advantage 5 and crit rating 1. so by using the mastery upgrade, you could really pump that crit up (and god forbid you have lethal blows.

And as you get more and more FR, this combination gets better. At FR 4, on an 8 point activation, you could basically kill almost anything with a crit, as you could spend 2 to activate, 3 to mastery, and 3 to strength, which would be I'm guessing would end up with a crit near +100.

So it has it's place, but it needs a higher FR to really shine. And frankly, that is such a late game ability that I don't even know how long it could take you to get there.

Except with a powerful critical injury you can simply kill your target outright, regardless of damage.

I really can't believe you wrote this.

I can't believe you wrote this .

The mastery scales in a superior fashion as your FR increases. You can also activate crit as many times as you have advantage to do so. Each additional activation adds +10 to the critical injury roll. The change to a crit rating of 1 makes a significant difference as you add Force dice.

Each pip spent reduces the critical rating by 1. The critical rating is the number of advantages required to trigger a critical injury. You can only generate one critical injury roll per hit on a target. However, if the roll generates enough advantage to trigger the critical rating of the weapon multiple times, the character can choose to add +10 to the critical injury roll for each subsequent trigger. (F&D page 119)

And as you get more and more FR, this combination gets better. At FR 4, on an 8 point activation, you could basically kill almost anything with a crit, as you could spend 2 to activate, 3 to mastery, and 3 to strength, which would be I'm guessing would end up with a crit near +100.

In this scenario you end up with a critical injury with +80 to the roll. 3 mastery to bring crit rating to 1, 3 strength activations giving you 3 advantage each for a total of 9 advantages. Activating 9 crits spends 1 for the critical injury roll, the other 8 go to +10s, adding up to +80.

In this first scenario, if you roll a 51 or better on the critical injury roll and add the 80, your target is bleeding out and will probably die without immediate successful serious medical attention. If you roll a 61 or better on the critical injury roll and add the 80, your target dies at the end of the following round. If you roll a 71 or better on the critical injury roll and add the 80, your target dies immediately.

In that same scenario if you had cut out the mastery and spent the 6 pips on strength: Crit rating of 4. 6 strength activations giving you 3 advantage each for a total of 18 advantage. Costing 4 advantage per crit that allows you to activate 4 crits, giving you 1 critical injury with +30 to the roll.

In this second scenario, even if you roll a 100 on the critical injury roll and add the 30, you end up with a gruesome injury on the chart. You cannot kill your target via critical injury in this scenario.

Ah... 9 advantage for the strength, 2 base from the roll. which is of course, just an average, and we're playing with max FP on the force dice. so there is a significant amount of fudge room here.

I think the lesson here is that mastery is actually something for masters. not the piddly user who wants all the upgrades. prevents characters from punching outside their weight class.

I did think of one other nice aspect, and I'm not sure how the rules would interact.

So if you use magnitude to affect multiple targets, do you need to activate crits on them each? because that would make mastery AWESOM for clearing out minion groups.

Actually Scalding, per the Gear and Equipment Chapter, you can trigger the critical rating on an attack multiple times. Give page 119 a read under Critical Rating, and you'll probably be surprised at what you read.

Since Unleash doesn't say that the attack's Critical Rating can't be triggered more than once, that means it follows the same rules for any other attack, namely that it adds a +10 to the critical injury roll per activation. So if a Force user can drop that Crit Rating down to a 1 and generates 7 Advantage on their Discipline check, that means they could inflict a critical injury with a +60 bonus to the roll. Do that a couple of times, with each critical injury adding another +10 to future critical injury, and you could easily hit that 141+ mark which means the target is not long for this world.

Edit: Huh, didn't see that Demigonis had posted pretty much the same thing until well after I'd made my post.

Well I see someone has Demigonis on ignore.

Apologies, I did not realize you could trigger the critical rating multiple times to add +10 to your Critical Injury roll. TIL.

I really try to be as clear as possible and spell everything out, and often feel that I'm shut down without anyone even actually looking at what I have written to see if it has merit. This forum almost always makes me very angry, because I see that sort of thing here all the time - even before I started posting I had seen other posts handled that way. I was extremely angry the last time I posted on this thread.

I took a few days to cool off before coming back.

Since that time it has occurred to me that you can use the power to target multiple enemies, and therefore you could potentially score multiple hits, and now you have taught me that Critical can be triggered multiple times.

Let's run some numbers.

Let's assume a Dark Side character with 3 Force Rating (although I suspect such a character will have more than FR3 by the time they reach Mastery, they could make a beeline toward it). Furthermore let's assume that the character has 1 Strength upgrade and Mastery, as the argument slews as Strength upgrades are purchased. At the very least he will roll 3 pips, and at the most 6 (assuming there is a Destiny point to spend. The only time such a character would not spend Destiny points was if there weren't any or they wanted to horde them for later).

If he rolled 3, he might spend 2 to activate Unleash and 1 for either Strength or Mastery. If he wants to crit then either a pip from Strength spent as Advantage or a pip in Mastery to lower crit rating is equal. We can assume he'll roll well enough to make the Average Discipline check, so it's not likely he'd spend a pip in Strength for Success, but he could. This means that Strength gives more options in this scenario, but they are otherwise equal. (As Strength Upgrades increase, the bonus from Strength is multiplied, so Strength becomes an increasingly dominating factor.)

If he rolled 6, he spends 2 to activate Unleash and has 4 left over. If he just wants to crit on one target, those 4 could be used in Strength (even with just 1 Strength upgrade) as Advantage to crit outright. He could use three to reduce the crit rating to 1, and use 1 for Advantage, and hope to gain more Advantage to increase the critical damage (which I had not known until today). Of course, that is not a foregone conclusion, but a distinct possibility. He might have a Magnitude upgrade (though it is unlikely he'd have both of them in the scenario outlined), so he might spend 1 to activate that instead of either of the other options, in which case multiple crits can be against multiple enemies, and reducing the crit cost is more immediately valuable.

So I want to say "thank you," since I now have a better understanding. I still feel the upgrade is weak next to e.g. Seek Mastery, but not as bad.

Again, apologies for my anger.

You can't do this. You can't crit more than once, the power doesn't allow that. It only reduces the crit cost, which can be activated multiple times, but you're still only able to crit once.

The rule is "one crit per hit", according to Sam Stewart — see http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/108101-ffg-developer-answered-questions/#entry1119529 .

If you can hit multiple times and you have enough Advantage, then you can crit multiple times, but it’s still a max of one crit per hit.

You can't do this. You can't crit more than once, the power doesn't allow that. It only reduces the crit cost, which can be activated multiple times, but you're still only able to crit once.

The rule is "one crit per hit", according to Sam Stewart — see http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/108101-ffg-developer-answered-questions/#entry1119529 .

If you can hit multiple times and you have enough Advantage, then you can crit multiple times, but it’s still a max of one crit per hit.

Yes, I think we've established that the key point comes when you can hit multiple times (different targets) or, as was recently explained to me, add +10 to the critical rating per additional critical triggered to the base critical.

The turning point for Unleash Mastery comes right about the time the character can generate 6 pips reliably. Assuming 3 Strength Upgrades, Mastery, and 6 pips you can reliably get a Critical +20, and any more pips beyond that essentially add +10 to the Critical Injury roll. Of course, while FR 3 can generate 6 pips, it's pretty rare, while FR 5 can generate 6 pips much more reliably if Destiny points are available.

One of the interesting things is the interaction with the Control Upgrade that allows Burn if no Light pips were spent. At FR3, if mastery can't or won't be triggered, it's not terribly unlikely to roll all black pips. But once you start rolling 6 or more pips, this character really wants to convert any Light pips to Force Points because +10 Critical Injury can be a real killer. Therefore, as the number of dice increases, the likelihood that the character will convert light pips increases (to a point: if sufficient Dark pips are rolled, there may not be reason to convert Light pips). Anyway, this means that initially it's fairly likely that a character using Unleash will trigger burn, and then there's a period where it's increasingly unlikely. By the time it could become likely that Burn might be triggered again, it won't matter because the target will simply be killed outright most of the time.

I think the mastery upgrade is weak, but weak in a way that I'm ok with. These combo powers (with the exception of heal/harm) make the dark side applications worse. subtly worse, but I think that's the point. So yes, the upgrade is weak, unless you had FR 6+. But that is a little how the cookie crumbles.

It's just rather bizarre to see the most iconic Dark Side Force Power (the Mastery Upgrade text refers to it as "Force Lightning") as being very weak compared to other Mastery abilities.

I feel the upgrade should also give the attack Concussive 1 and Knockdown qualities, because that makes the upgrade more useful when you don't roll 6 pips, and it evokes lightning as a power that takes people down, and whose effect prevents immediate response.

After quite a lot of statistics, 6 pips is the break-even point where Mastery is equivalent to Strength (assuming 3 upgrades). As a result, Mastery is not worthwhile until FR 5, when 6 pips becomes a likely average (assuming Destiny Points are available to be spent). The above addendum would make it useful, and give it a "lightning" flavor, at FR 3-4. Of course, once a character is rolling those 6 pips, the concussive and knockdown qualities are not as powerful as other effects, but might be used for roleplay purposes.

I disagree with the attitude, "that's how the cookie crumbles." Complacency is not a good idea; we're in this forum specifically to report what we find inconsistent, broken, or otherwise lacking about the rules.

While I'm unsure if that should be in the mastery, I would love to see concussive/knockdown being added to the power. I think that knockdown could be integrated into the same control upgrade that adds ensnare, possibly for a 5 xp bump in cost.

Often times palpatine's lightning does send the target flying, so it would be good to see that replicated in the power.