Kath is epic. Emon could get pricey, but setting up a field of Proximity Mines certainly sounds like fun and a pain for your opponent. I won't get much use out of him, but I know players that are skilled with deploying mines will have a blast with him. Just afraid that he might fall into the Nera trap. The Mandalorian Mercenary is certainly my favorite card in the set. I love running Dual Firesprays. Now, I'll be running Two Mandalorians, both with Stay on Target and Outlaw Tech. Makes 78 points, enough for cheap support like Serissu with Swarm Tactics. The HWK Pilots will also have little trouble pulling their weight. Dace is vicious, and Palob and Torkil are both dirty. Really hoping fear of Torkil will help alleviate the fear of Phantoms, thereby reducing the prevalence of Falcons.

Not a single disappointing card for Scum so far.

Yeah, from what I've seen there don't seem to be any real stinkers so far with scum. I'm dubious about a few, like accuracy correctors and BTL-A4, but the vast majority seem pretty well-considered and useful. Time will tell, of course. I just hope there isn't anything wildly overpowered in there. So far it looks like a very well-constructed faction.

I have had thoughts about both of those, too. Accuracy Corrector is no doubt quite powerful. The real use of it is defensive, I feel, in that with guaranteed hits, you can save tokens for defense. But, it is a way around several disadvantages in this game, including the random nature of dice rolling, which is what makes it good anyway. I will wait til I see it played a lot, but I think it might be undercosted by a point or two.

The A4 has strengths and weaknesses. You'll either have to take one unmodified attack, or fly away with a stressed Y-wing, or make your Y-wing really expensive to solve both issues. And most of the attack options are fairly weak. But maybe that's what makes it good, two weak attacks is better than one weak attack, but not as good as a single really strong attack.

With each new spoiler on the S&V faction I step to realize that the preference order of FFG or developers is currently:

1 - S & V

2 - Rebels

3 - Empire

The questions I ask myself about the game are:

How to balance things now that S&V came with everything and more ????

As I like to play with the empire, I think the faction that more will suffer until something is done is the empire.

I think the Empire suffers from the curse of Tie swarm. And because of this, by having an exceptional swarm was dropped down.

The Empire has a very large gap:

-Huge ships lack.

-Lack update escort for huge ships. (judged to be the same path that the rebels - Imperial scort be Tie fighter).

-Lack update for bomber tie (y-wing bomb loadout and Andrasta show this) / tie advanced lack/ lambda without auxiliary arc device (do not give me the old story of APL).

-PS Mid lack good pilots.

-Imperial Aces was a bad joke with the habilities of the rebel aces pilot.

Maybe now's the players who like or have a preference for rebels know how to have your faction pushed aside by another, because FFG is putting all the best in S & V.

Another issue:

With the repetition of some ships in the new faction (y-wing / hwk-290 / Firespray 31 / Z-95) and some small buffs that can be used by the rebels and empire:

Can we expect expansions of specific improvements for the same ships in the short time (next year)?

Ex: Y-wing "aces" specific for rebels or Firespray "aces" specific for the empire?

Empire were first to get "aces" Which was a good expansion.

They still have the best swarm.

TIE Phantoms and Defenders.

Don't write them off just yet, the Deci is a gamechanger in itself.

Hmmm one thing I find kind of disappointing is that none of these HWK abilities mesh that great with the new Autoblaster Turret. Dace is obviously better with ion, Palob with Blaster and Torkil doesn't get any real advantage with Autoblaster over any of the other options (vs a Phantom the whole PS0 thing doesn't even matter if you're using an Autoblaster anyway).

Palob would do just as well, or better, with AB turret. He cannot guarentee that the enemy is always going to provide him a focus, in fact if he is packing a blaster turret, I would make sure to do some action other than focus if I were his potential prey. Also, someone like carnor could make an appearance. now, with autoblaster, if he gets a focus, hey, great! but if he does not, he can still fire the thing effectively.

Maybe but he's not gaining anything from the removing their defenses part if Autoblaster is guaranteed to hit anyway.

With each new spoiler on the S&V faction I step to realize that the preference order of FFG or developers is currently:

1 - S & V

2 - Rebels

3 - Empire

The questions I ask myself about the game are:

How to balance things now that S&V came with everything and more ????

As I like to play with the empire, I think the faction that more will suffer until something is done is the empire.

I think the Empire suffers from the curse of Tie swarm. And because of this, by having an exceptional swarm was dropped down.

The Empire has a very large gap:

-Huge ships lack.

-Lack update escort for huge ships. (judged to be the same path that the rebels - Imperial scort be Tie fighter).

-Lack update for bomber tie (y-wing bomb loadout and Andrasta show this) / tie advanced lack/ lambda without auxiliary arc device (do not give me the old story of APL).

-PS Mid lack good pilots.

-Imperial Aces was a bad joke with the habilities of the rebel aces pilot.

Maybe now's the players who like or have a preference for rebels know how to have your faction pushed aside by another, because FFG is putting all the best in S & V.

Another issue:

With the repetition of some ships in the new faction (y-wing / hwk-290 / Firespray 31 / Z-95) and some small buffs that can be used by the rebels and empire:

Can we expect expansions of specific improvements for the same ships in the short time (next year)?

Ex: Y-wing "aces" specific for rebels or Firespray "aces" specific for the empire?

Yeah, no. The Imperials are doing just fine. Sure, the Advanced is lackluster, but everything else seems to be working just fine.

The TIE, still one of the best filler ships in the game, along with the best supporter in Howlrunner.

The Interceptor is still pretty nasty, and you can offset it's glass cannon status a bit.

The Imperial Firespray is still good, and it can use the Andrasta title.

The Bomber is fine. It will get better the more ordnance that comes out, but even then, it is a tough little ship.

The Shuttle is fine as it is. It is a support vessel. It isn't supposed to be flying like the Firespray.

The Phantom, nothing needs to be said.

The Defender is better than most give it credit for. Besides, there are still 3 new canon upgrades coming that we haven't seen yet.

The Decimator is a nasty turreted ship. What more needs to be said.

The Empire is fine.

I think the decimator and the fleet officer and other buffs for the empire have been pretty strong actually. While the scum has some cool stuff for sure, I would not be afraid to field empire against them. Nobody can manuver like the empire, and a lot of this game is about that. I also think the swarm is still viable, but how you fly it might be changing. the rebels on the other hand have action effeciency in their corner with guys like dutch, garvin, Tarn, and others. they fight well together, but this requires some formation flying on their part, and a lot of what we see here might be really hard on formation flying in general, because scum does not fly that way. since they are more "assymetrical" they may come at you with several different attack vectors, making formation flying challenging, not to mention the bombs. I think the empire is better at arc dodging, and the phantom is a powerful ship. Just its existence has caused peoplpe to do all kinds of things to be able to survive against it. I don't feel that the empire is getting the short end of the stick at all. I would second the notion of a bomber and advanced buff though. Or at least some more pilots for the bomber.

Hello TIE swarm with Swarm Tactics, meet Torkil. Go ahead and pass that 0 around.

@salamander junior

By making most of the upgrades from scum being usable for other factions.

Hmmm one thing I find kind of disappointing is that none of these HWK abilities mesh that great with the new Autoblaster Turret. Dace is obviously better with ion, Palob with Blaster and Torkil doesn't get any real advantage with Autoblaster over any of the other options (vs a Phantom the whole PS0 thing doesn't even matter if you're using an Autoblaster anyway).

Palob would do just as well, or better, with AB turret. He cannot guarentee that the enemy is always going to provide him a focus, in fact if he is packing a blaster turret, I would make sure to do some action other than focus if I were his potential prey. Also, someone like carnor could make an appearance. now, with autoblaster, if he gets a focus, hey, great! but if he does not, he can still fire the thing effectively.

Maybe but he's not gaining anything from the removing their defenses part if Autoblaster is guaranteed to hit anyway.

perhaps not offensively, but what hawk pilot would not like another token for defense?

It's not guarenteed to hit anything. It's just that when it does, you cannot use tokens or dice to cancel the hits. it still has to hit in the first place, and a focus is highly useful for that.

So now you can had a mid-range PS HWK that can add recon specialist and blaster turret, have 2 focus for his attack and stil lsteal one for defense, or steal one if he bumps to always eb able to fire his cannon...

Also, the Lambda not having a back arc is not the Empire being shafted. The other points may have some merit to them but a ship not having your personal preferences in it isn't factional unbalance. I find it hard to fathom that they didn't try a rear arc Lambda in playtesting given the big gun on the back though, more likely they tried the idea and threw it out.

As for the other two, the TIE advanced is imminently on the fix list as stated by the designers and I doubt the TIE/sa won't be far behind.

Also, we're forgetting that while the Empire has a few kind of weak ships the rest of its ships are utterly explosive. The TIE phantom is insanely good to the point of needing a soft debuff in the form of new counters, the TIE interceptor is still going strong and if Autothrusters lives up to the hype is staged for a comeback, the TIE fighter is still X-wing's shark, the Empire still has a **** good Firespray, the point-efficiency god known as the Lambda Shuttle, the VT-gaddamn-49, and the TIE defender.

Palob+blaster turret+outlaw tech+moldy crow. Red in the ledger + you can steal evade tokens

Hello TIE swarm with Swarm Tactics, meet Torkil. Go ahead and pass that 0 around.

Swarm Tactics was faqed to a 'may', so no, you can't make an entire tie swarm ps0

But they can't make it PS8 either.

Just realizing that if you want to run those hwks all at once or double firesprays you need multiples of this expansion... but there are 2 y wing dials?

Somebody said that Dace is not that good.

I don't know if he is worth the points, but by himself, he is an ion cannon that does 2 damage. That's not too bad on itself, but i don't know if it will be cost efficient or worth it with some synergies.

Dace is going to be extremely good. His ability works on his own attacks, so he just became a 2-damage Ion Cannon Turret. Off-the-cuff math, his jousting efficiency should be somewhere between 85% to 90%. But he has a turret. For reference a Gold Squadron Pilot + Turret has a jousting efficiency of 62.6%. The only problem is shedding that stress. Thankfully the HWK has a better dial for shedding stress than the Y-wing.

Yeah, from what I've seen there don't seem to be any real stinkers so far with scum. I'm dubious about a few, like accuracy correctors and BTL-A4, but the vast majority seem pretty well-considered and useful. Time will tell, of course. I just hope there isn't anything wildly overpowered in there. So far it looks like a very well-constructed faction.

BTL-A4 + Ion Cannon Turret is going to be very very good. See this post of mine here:

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/125265-btl-a4/?p=1307274

TL;DR summary: if you always get a shot with your Ion (no range 3 restriction) then you almost double your damage (+92%). If you can't shoot 25% of the time (range 3 limitation) then it still increases damage by about 70%. That puts you on par with the damage output of a 3-attack ship.... but you get to put Ion tokens on your target. The resulting jousting efficiency of the BTL Y-wing is somewhere between 87% to 94% depending on how often you get a shot off. And again, you get to put Ions on your target, which obviously isn't considered in the jousting numbers. I would take a BTL+Ion Y-wing over a Rookie X-wing any day of the week.

Edit: P.S. Owning 4 HWK's doesn't seem quite so ridiculous now...

But does it fill your turretless Y-wing itch?

BTL-A4 + Ion Cannon Turret is going to be very very good.

But does it fill your turretless Y-wing itch?

No, because there is still value in having a low attack / low agility filler ship to expand the design space and meta.

Yeah i didn't have the time to check the maths (when i said in my first post that i was going to get a HWK, i actually went to the store to buy a HWK just in case), but an ion cannon that just by one hit, can do two damage couldn't be bad. And this is not taking into consideration that he can also use his pilot ability from other ion cannons, so his ability is way more usable even if you miss the shot. Or if people tries to use skills that ionize themselves.

Oh, and we forget that there is no limit per phase!!! You can play a 4 Ion cannon list and just stress the crap out of Dace for crazy damage if needed.

Lol, that dude is gonna rock the casbah. Time to start list building a total control list.

No, because there is still value in having a low attack / low agility filler ship to expand the design space and meta.

And moving one letter down or 25 letters up doesn't do the trick?

Did anyone else notice they didn't spoil the K4 Security Droid card from the product spread image? Or did they do that elsewhere, and I missed it?

Yeah i didn't have the time to check the maths (when i said in my first post that i was going to get a HWK, i actually went to the store to buy a HWK just in case), but an ion cannon that just by one hit, can do two damage couldn't be bad. And this is not taking into consideration that he can also use his pilot ability from other ion cannons, so his ability is way more usable even if you miss the shot. Or if people tries to use skills that ionize themselves.

Oh, and we forget that there is no limit per phase!!! You can play a 4 Ion cannon list and just stress the crap out of Dace for crazy damage if needed.

Lol, that dude is gonna rock the casbah. Time to start list building a total control list.

Didn't it say if you aren't stressed? That would be once he can do it.

Oh, and we forget that there is no limit per phase!!! You can play a 4 Ion cannon list and just stress the crap out of Dace for crazy damage if needed.

Lol, that dude is gonna rock the casbah. Time to start list building a total control list.

Unfortunately it does say if you are not stressed so unless there's a way to clear his stress between shots, then unfortunately this is effectively a max of 1 time per round.

Also, the Lambda not having a back arc is not the Empire being shafted. The other points may have some merit to them but a ship not having your personal preferences in it isn't factional unbalance. I find it hard to fathom that they didn't try a rear arc Lambda in playtesting given the big gun on the back though, more likely they tried the idea and threw it out.

As for the other two, the TIE advanced is imminently on the fix list as stated by the designers and I doubt the TIE/sa won't be far behind.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/x-wing/news/scum-and-villainy/k4-security-droid.png

Did anyone else notice they didn't spoil the K4 Security Droid card from the product spread image? Or did they do that elsewhere, and I missed it?

I think everyone missed it.

Which preview had that?

It makes a possible alternative for Recon Specialist on a Blaster Turret HWK.

It could also lend more action diversity to Palob, and pairs great with opportunist on him.