Battle Report for local tournament in Pensicola, FL 5/8/15

My build: Scum faction 100pts

Boba Fett - Veteran Instincts, Tactician, Autoblaster, Engine Upgrade, Seismic Charges

Kath Scarlett - Expert Handling, K4 Security Droid, Engine Upgrade

Thoughts on the build:

I really liked the way these two ships and their builds worked together. After tweaking the list as I will mention below I will try it some more but I am happy with this build and how it plays for my upcoming regional.

Boba Fett: This guy was the star of the night for sure. Between tactician, autoblaster, and Fetts pilot ability he made range 1-2 a nightmare for opponents to be in. Engine upgrade as usual was very key when repositioning to control both the ranges and make sure it was very difficult to dodge my arcs. Veteran instincts was to make sure that I moved after and Fels or IGs that had VI or phantoms so I could make sure to get those range 1 shots on them.

The card that was the real gem though was Autoblaster. I was hesitant about committing 5 points to a 3 dice R1 attack and not sure if it would be worth it but in the end decided to use it since I thought Fel would be all over the place and its really funny to one shot him through turtling. What pushed me over the edge was how good Fett is at R1 so since I want to keep R1 as much as I can this gun has the potential to be really powerful on a PS10 body. However what I didnt expect is just HOW relevant Autoblasters would turn out to be over the tournament. A big thing is I thought they would be useful against the dual IGs that are running around but I had not realized just how much 3 uncounterable damage a turn really messes with IGs. I am very happy I decided to take the plunge and spend the 5 points on this instead of gunner. Now I cant imagine taking scum Fett without them!

Kath Scarlett - Kath showed the power of her big booty throughout the game. getting a free HLC when shooting out of the rear arc is nothing to sneeze at. K4 was absolutely wonderful as I was doing green maneuvers with her almost the whole game. EU has already been talked about. Expert Handling was an absolute powerhouse for her. I barrel rolled a good number of times in every game but one and even though she never had a TL to remove, getting to adjust arcs and dodge debris was very good. However the most potent use of this was getting to barrel roll backwards to keep people in her rear arc as well as trying to get R1 rear shots with her.

Kath was good but I preferred Boba in every encounter. Kath also had the issue of usually missing a round of shooting at some point in each game as she would need to turn around and come back into the scuffle.

Seismic was not worth the points. I was thinking that people would want to get behind Fett to avoid the autoblasters and that would make a bomb a bit better on him but in actuality he was so maneuverable he rarely had opportunities to use it and when he did it was usually just for 1 pt of damage that really didnt matter. In the next iteration of this list I am going to replace the bomb with Inertial Dampners on both. There were multiple times for each pilot in each game where I looked and REALLY wished I could just do a 0.

Round 1: Schumacher

IG88 B and C both with Ion cannon, mangler cannon, ID, AT, VI, and advanced sensors, title

In this game I presented Kath as a big target by flying directly at him while Fett came around the side. I flanked with Boba and started tearing into him with my Autoblasters while Kath did a really good job of blocking any sloops and Ks that they could do to prevent them from turning on Boba. They tore into Kath with the manglers and laid on a good number of crits. Eventually the IGs split as B managed to K directly behind where Kath ended up (I was off the block by a barest fraction!) Kath had 2 hp left with an evade token. The mangler rolled hit hit crit and turned a hit to a crit. I rolled one evade and used a token to take one crit. It hit minor explosion!! Luckily for me I rolled an eye and then fired back with the full fury of 5 dice with target lock. with 5 hits and only 2 evades total his IG went down in flames. The last IG flew off the board the next turn. He was heavily damaged and made a very risky move to try and break free and juke me. He was barely off unfortunately. This game my Autoblasters did a total of 11 uncounterable damage to IGs that had evade tokens or focus.

win 100-0

Round 2: Brandon

IG88 C with VI, HLC, FCS, ID, title

IG88 B with PtL, HLC, FCS, ID, title

This game was incredibly fun. I set up Kath across from his B and then Boba in the middle when he set up C next to B. I knew with that build it would be suicide for me to have a R3 confrontation with him but large bases boosting and going 3 would just make R3 of my large base 1 forward. However if I shot forward to get into R1 then it would be likely that his C would adjust and make sure to get the HLC shots on me which I wanted no part of. I set in a 1 forward. Sure enough he boosted, took evade, pushed for focus and then went 3 forward. I moved forward, used K4 to target lock his B, then barrel rolled back to leave R3. The next turn I shot forward and got into R1 with both firesprays of both ships. Unable to use his B ability and unable to dodge bobas shots I tore into him. After that inital turn of firing we both danced around each other and tried to get an edge. Brandon flew very well but the advantage of the Autoblasters against IG build and making sure the R1 skirmish didnt happen swung the game heavily in my favor.

win 100-0

Round 3: Luke? (sorry if I incorrectly remembered your name! D: )

IG88 B and C both with title, PtL, FCS, HLC, AT

This game was very rough for me. He outflew me for the first half of the game with several turns where I was either blocked or didnt have a good arc so he received little to no return fire while hitting me hard. boba went down to 1 hp but between some good green dice and making sure he bumped one IG I managed to live long enough to through uncounterable damage and kill one IG. We ended up in a VERY odd situation where his IG was close to a corner and could only 1 hard or he would fly off. This bumped Fett and with the new rules of how to resolve bumping forced him to stay exactly where he was with our corners touching at an angle. I did a 1 soft which forced me to stay in the exact same positon and Kath came around. I did this for 3 turns while Kath unleashed rear hell on the IG and killed him. I felt a little bit dirty for using that tactic but the way he was outflying me I had a feeling that was my smartest move. He took it in stride and told me not to feel sorry as it was the smartest thing to do and he would have done the same if the roles were reversed. Thank you for being such a great sport! I was worried that tactic would make my opponent very upset.

win 100-0

Round 4 Jonathan

Soontir with PtL

Kath Scarlett with Mangler, Gunner

Omicron Group Pilot with Vader

(no one realized until the next day that this is indeed 101 points. Easy mistake to make and I would bet my reputation that this was an honest mistake and no ill intent on his part!)

This game I edged Kath forward while boba came in from the opposite side making a beeline for Fel. In the first round of combat I had R1 on Fell with Boba with a focus on the Fett man. 2 hits and a blank. Reroll the blank due to ability and just as its about to land eye it hits a debris token and rocks back onto blank!! ugh the luck! Fel then gets to shoot at kath and puts 3 damage on her. Enemy Kath and the Lambda both roll very hot and I roll very poorly on evades putting kath dangerously low. I consider doing a 3 hard with Kath but expect the enemy to go straight and bump me which means my 2 forward will clear and get me a target lock to hit kath out of my rear arc. Unfortunately he chose to bump me with a bank which meant I couldnt pass him so I took the lock on the lambda instead. Fett sticks to Fel and finishes him off with another Autoblaster shot. Kath dies to a lambda volley followed by vader for the last hit point. the next turn has me putting the lambda on 2 which hits me for one then decides to kamikaze vader my last shield away (smart move as his next move was very poor for him. Kath and boba played cat and mouse a bit but I made a fatal error when I tried to be cute with a maneuver I thought would be unexpected and give me the edge. However he moved differently than I anticipated which left him with a shot and boba without one. This gave him the edge as boba was very low with Kath still in shields. I got kath low but then ate the bullet the next turn.

loss 54-100

It was around 12:30 and some people had an hour drive home so we decided to cut to standings and split top for instead of playing it out. This put me in second place with Jonathan being in first as the only undefeated! Congrats to Jonathan (it was also his first tournament!!)

I walked away with a promo soontir, promo PtL, and a nice Hwk so I can finally try Palob!

Thanks for a Nice report and congrats to a nice tournament.

I'm looking at similar builds - Which one would you choose of you would only take one of EU or EH?

Nicely done - double firespray is a tough team!

Thanks for a Nice report and congrats to a nice tournament.

I'm looking at similar builds - Which one would you choose of you would only take one of EU or EH?

Against a lower PS mostly meta I may give the edge to EU though. While it doesn't control range as well it does allow you to adjust your arcs quite a bit as well as maneuver through rocks and dodge arcs while keeping shots.

If you are going in dark I would hedge with the EH personally. That will also free up 4 points for whatever you may want.

Edit : thank you! Yea double firespray is a lot of fun and I really am loving Fett with autoblasters. I know I can clean house against the deci/Fel lists but what I really need to test against now are the dash lists and falcon lists. I think double falcon will be my worst matchup since they are so tanky and with their upgrades likely mitigate more damage than I can.

Autoblaster is a funny upgrade. Players seem to either swear by it or at it.

Personally, I'm in the latter category. You get better damage out of it than you would your primary attack against highly agile targets, but those highly agile targets are also the ones that are the most likely to be able to avoid your arc at Range 1. But it's also 5 points, which takes up a lot of your extra room in a list with two named Firesprays.

On the other hand, it seems like you're aiming to counter a couple of specific metagame threats with it, and that's a smart thing to do.

Basically, if your build is working for you then I wouldn't make a lot of changes. Like you said, the Seismics don't seem to be pulling their weight, but it would be easy to fix that by building in a couple of Inertial Dampeners or something.

But if you wanted to experiment, I think it could be interesting to swap VI and Expert Handling. At PS8 Fett will still be outmaneuvering most ships, and as you say it's going to be tough for opponents to avoid both Autoblaster and Tactician unless they dodge his arc entirely (which is rough if he has the option of boost and barrel roll). He's still death on IG-88, although he loses some (not all) of his utility against Fel. And in the mean time (with an initiative bid) Kath's bonus die gets a btter workout because now she can outmaneuver those dodgy PS9 opponents.

In any case, I might have to practice with Autoblaster a little bit over the next couple of weeks; maybe it's a nasty landmine that's just been waiting for a metagame full of Barons Fel and Brobots to go off.

Thank you for the reply Vorpal!

Yea autoblaster worked exactly how I expected in nuking the turtled Fel but what I didn't really expect is how much it hurts IGs (although in hindsight I should have!) so I think it's more than worth the 5 points (again this is a smallish game pool so it could be less so in the long run)

I actually grappled with whether to use VI or EH on Fett. Back when I was using 88B and Fett together IG had VI and Fett had EH so I could move them in whatever order suited me and the barrel rolling on Fett was SO fun! In the end I went with VI simply because I wanted to all but guarantee the autoblaster shots on Fel or whispers I find. If the PS9 glass turtles die down in popularity though I would be more than happy to do that exact change.

That's a fair point about the bidding with kath but she would need VI as well to make it worthwhile. I just find the range control with the barrel roll to be so good with her (I averaged around 4-5 rolls per game) and the stress doesn't matter as much since with K4 I'm wanting to do greens as much as possible anyway. I'll have to give it a try though. For sure if I switch Fett down to 8 I would be more inclined to make her 9 to keep up the pressure on those slippery phantoms and interceptors.

Yeah--I meant swap the EPTs so that Kath has Veteran Instincts and Fett has Expert Handling. Not a recommendation, just something I'd be curious to see.

Nice writeup! I've test-flown the new Boba Fett a few times with tactician as well as K4, and always with VI and EU, but found that generally he suffers from a lack of defensive actions when he wants to get to R1 and is highly likely to bump. Personally I think that the tailor-made solution for this will come in wave 7 with the glitterstim illicit upgrade (for one turn you don't have to worry about rerolling eyeballs with Boba's ability!) but obviously that's not an option right now. I like the droid because it can give you a free offensive action even when you want to boost or evade, but having two firing arcs to shoot out at R2 is pretty nice too. As for the autoblaster, I can personally attest to its destructive firepower when it got my evade+3PO Lando at range 1 and ignored my defenses... but it's one of those upgrades that doesn't work against all lists (say hello to BBBBZ!) but is obviously very effective against Soontir, Whisper and the IGs. I've tried pairing Boba with tactician and a flechette canon and managed to double-stress a Soontir Fel before getting close and finishing him off, but I don't think that that's the best option either. I suppose that it depends on your goal, play style and local meta. At regionals I faced off 3 Soontirs, 2 Whispers, 2 Corrans and a fat Chewie (in 5 separate lists) and a fat Han/Corran list made it to the finals so in my meta that canon would probably be highly successful when placed on a PS10 ship that can boost.

While I haven't flown Kath yet, I would think that you're overspending on her maneuverability as you can either BR or boost but not both, and as you said, the BR opens tons of options for keeping that rear HLC on target so maybe that's the better option but if you're taking the EU I would consider adding PtL and the K4 droid so you can have a tremendous action economy, but again I have yet to try it.

As for the bombs, I'm not really sure about them. While I've used them to take off the last health of a ship more than once (a turtled-up Etahn, an Echo with RS, etc.), there are also games, particularly against large ships, where that single hit just doesn't really do much, though keep in mind that it can change the way your opponent flies when wanting to avoid the hit. However, there are always turns when you'd rather just stay put and I feel that putting inertial dampeners on both Boba and Kath is a sound decision (at least until glitterstim comes out).

Yea Darth I am REALLYTHAT looking forward to glitterstim. I tried play testing it on him a few times and it always makes me feel like a god for one turn. It's honestly the only upgrade I would take over ID on Fett (not saying there aren't reasons to take others just personally those are my jam ;p )

Good point on perhaps not needing both boost AND barrel roll. It's so so nice to have the options but perhaps the points would serve better elsewhere. I would love to try her with PtL since she wants to green mostly anyway with K4 but I'm not sure its worth losing the adjusting ranges for her rear arc. Plus I would lose ID on her as well if I went that route. I dunno though it does sound fun. I may try it when I play a friend tomorrow.

As for the bombs they never felt worth the points and maybe it's just the players in my area but most of the people (other than the Fel) didn't give one **** about the bomb and would rather take the 1 one time than 3 every turn from staying in front of Fett.

Lurker if I were to remove EU what do you think would be worth more than that to my Kath? Ion maybe? That way I could ensure a R1 rear against some lists.

Oh yea Vorpal I understood it's an interesting thought and I'll give it a try if I get time. I do seriously love BRing on Fett and there were times I missed it. More than likely I'll stick with those two though since Fett at 10 always goes after whisper and every Fel I've ever seen and EH on Kath helps with the rear arc issues.