You know what's not fun a chewie falcon with falcon title and 3PO, it's got zero offense but it is a grind to kill it when it's ignoring two attacks and all your crits.
You'll win but you won't feel happy after.
Chewie is my fav falcon, I add a Gunner and call it the 'wookie cookie'. I suppose if 3p0 were in there too I could spend the game doing my best Anthony Daniels complaining about the hair and dust impression.
What hasn't changed, and makes the example still relevant, is the breathless and credulous response online. The panicked are always with us, spinning anecdotes into narratives that accept no controversion. We can't have a measured conversation about the effect of the Phantom on the metagame and what, if anything, FFG can and should do about it because someone is guaranteed to wander in and start screaming that the game isn't what it used to be and, in fact, is teetering on the brink of ruin.
Let's be a little fair and consider the other side, too. For everyone who screams about brink of ruin, there's someone who'll shout down anyone who expresses a concern, insult them for being incompetent scrubs who just need to L2P, or should just leave the perfection that is X-wing alooooone, no matter how reasoned the concerns may be.
Both sides have elements that do their best to squash any hope for reasonable conversation.
It's true, we need not be facing imminent disaster to be able to recognize a problem exists.
Clearly, when big ships were barrel rolling with the long edge of a 1S they were not unkillable juggernauts, but it was still seen as enough of a problem to warrant a fix. Hi PS advanced cloaking phantoms are absolutely beatable, but a better question is are they a worse problem than an 'long barrel roll'?
In your opinion Wonder, what list(s) present the most unfun scenarios? You've operationally defined this argument as one of different opinions and I was just curious what yours was.
It's my opinion that some lists are more difficult to fly against than others. Flying against those lists isn't unfun it's just I'm a lazy human and would prefer not to work so hard playing a game. But whatever, I guess I'm in the minority of causal/tournament players who think the game is fine and always has been... Sort of.
I'm not a fan of the increased durability and evasion of big ships, things they don't really need any more of to fulfill their battlefield role. It's not insurmountable, but there are few other things I see across the table that make me take a deep breath and think to myself, "really, again?". I might be able to hold out hope if any of those elements were in danger of rotating out, but more options aren't going to make them go away; they'll either improve, or get replaced by something better. Neither proposition makes me optimistic.
Phantoms are less of a problem, but only if I bring the right list to the table. There are few things I enjoy less about competition than when skill is replaced by a guessing game, especially before the match even starts.
Edited by WonderWAAAGH...it's incontrovertible that if your list doesn't address a high-PS Phantom with Advanced Cloaking Device, the Phantom is more likely to win than it is to lose.
To make this statement falsifiable in order to test it, what set of attributes fit the 'addressing Phantoms' criterion?
I can think of several off the top of my head:
There may be others as well. However, the longer this list grows, the less relevant the statement becomes, as fewer and fewer lists will not have some counter-Phantom attributes. Also, there are degrees. A high PS turret will be a better phantom counter than a couple of flechette torpedos.
Also, in general, it seems to me that the statement could be applied to any ship. The difference is the length of the list and the commonness of the items on it. Take, for example, one of the attributes that counters a Y-Wing:
Attack value >0 is fairly common, and so the poor Y-Wing is not considered a rare ship to be able to counter.
But how uncommon are those attributes on the counter-Phantom list?
The point I'm laboring towards is that I do think that the Phantom Menace is a fair bit of hype, which has invited its own response (Fat Han). There's no question that a well-flown Phantom is a beast to kill, but isn't a well-flying opponent generally tough to beat?
The emotion behind a lot of complaints appears to be the feeling that the game tends towards a situation where you have to create a squad that counters certain other squads, rather than the squad a player really likes to play. Players feel it has become more difficult to rely on the strong points of your own squad. Maybe this feeling is justified and maybe it is not, but the resentment is clearly there.