Double post.

I was packing an Ion Pulse Missile alongside the HLC in my 2-Defender list. Now I won't have to, because Ion Cannons and the TIE/D.

Heh, honestly, I gave them the ion cannons too! But the missiles were a great first hit, then you kept swooping back and away, always with 1-2 ion shots on the Huge ship (transports were better for this, obviously). You might take 3 or 4 turns to kill the thing, but you could render it pretty much entirely useless while doing so. They had to take the smallest maneuvers if they wanted even 1 energy, which meant tasty delicious bombing runs to speed the process up. And of course, if one of your attacking Defenders was Rexler...

and a missile slot which nobody ever uses.

Epic Play, Ion Pulse Missiles are amazing. Two Defenders rocking in with those things will absolutely ruin a Huge ship's day. And I imagine Adv. Homing will now be even more dangerous. Vessery for his middling pilot skill and rerolls, Rexler for the potential to re-flip any crits that turn themselves face down afterwards, and Maarek for his cherrypicked effects will all give the missile slot new uses. I'm so looking forward to epic games again it's ridiculous. They were so much fun, we almost always did them 2 v. 2 at our location.

God I soooo wish our local scene hadn't dried up.

I'd rather put that ion missile on a bomber or Advanced, though. I mean: yes! Those are great missiles to nail a Huge ship with. But the Defender is paying a lot for its primary. It should maximize it.

An attack of opportunity to send a large ship into an asteroid (or off the board), or to make large ships paranoid about putting themselves in a risky position is pretty great on any ship.

and a missile slot which nobody ever uses.

Epic Play, Ion Pulse Missiles are amazing. Two Defenders rocking in with those things will absolutely ruin a Huge ship's day. And I imagine Adv. Homing will now be even more dangerous. Vessery for his middling pilot skill and rerolls, Rexler for the potential to re-flip any crits that turn themselves face down afterwards, and Maarek for his cherrypicked effects will all give the missile slot new uses. I'm so looking forward to epic games again it's ridiculous. They were so much fun, we almost always did them 2 v. 2 at our location.

God I soooo wish our local scene hadn't dried up.

I'd rather put that ion missile on a bomber or Advanced, though. I mean: yes! Those are great missiles to nail a Huge ship with. But the Defender is paying a lot for its primary. It should maximize it.

Well I think the LRS is gonna breathe some life into the idea of missile-using Defenders. Especially for the named pilots mentioned by me above. I for one have always wanted to find a way to make Stele work. I was never able to reliably (mostly through bad luck).

Two Defenders was already a blast to play. Now, it's going to be better. Defender players who stuck with the ship through it's dark days will now have their moment!

Long Range Scanners cannot be put on the Defenders, though.

Long Range Scanners cannot be put on the Defenders, though.

Aroo? It's a modification, and you need a missile slot to do it. why can't you put it on there?

Edit: ohhh… you need torpedo AND missile, not "or". My mistake. sigh.

I love the Tie Defender and the E-wing... both pretty powerful ships, in a one on one duel they could be unbeatable. The problem is that they are 1/3 or more of the cost of your squad (the more extras you add on to them it could boost that cost to 1/2 of your squad points). Your opponent is almost guaranteed to run a blitz on them. Everyone guns for them early in the game, because once the big guns are taken out you don't have much left but a few fluff pieces. When your squad is evenly weighted then it's harder to pick out the one ship to target (or it probably doesn't even matter because no one ship is more or less useful than the next, unless her name is Howlrunner )... losing one ship isn't going to make a big dent, when you swarm like the Tie Fighters, loosing 2 or 3 isn't going to make a big dent. T/D and E-W is pretty much putting all your eggs into one basket... a few bad defense rolls and you've just dropped that basket and all your eggs are broken.

Imperial players just can't live without sticking a boost and PTL into EVERY SHIP THEY STUMBLE UPON

Defender requires a COMPLETELY different approach.

it's cost-efficiency is about to get back to normal, after the veterans hit the shelves

Ran this yesterday with the new title on Rexlar. The double tap was beyond sick. First game against tlt swarm was wiped by Rexlar alone. Kath took the hits and Rexlar mopped up. One shot four z95s in two games. Try the title out and you'll see the light.

Rexlar Bounty Hunter Escort Squadron (99/100)

=============================================

Firespray-31: Kath Scarlet (38 + 17)

+ Predator (3)

+ "Mangler" Cannon (4)

+ Rebel captive (3)

+ Slave I (0)

+ Engine Upgrade (4)

+ Plasma Torpedoes (3)

TIE Defender: Rexler Brath (37 + 7)

+ Predator (3)

+ Ion Cannon (3)

+ Twin Ion Engine Mk. II (1)

^ come on, come right out and say it, it's stronger than the tie advanced fix.

Your opponent is almost guaranteed to run a blitz on them. Everyone guns for them early in the game...

I actually don't view this as strictly a bad thing. If anything, I plan for it with squads like my Red Eye Flight. But even beyond that, it's nice to lend a modicum of predictability to your opponent's plans, and you find you can more easily pull them into traps or bad spots, because they think of the turn when they strike your Defender (and still usually don't manage to kill it), but then find themselves in suboptimal positions a turn later. I also tend to be really good at weaving through tight asteroids, and I love pulling my opponents in close to those areas because I can usually eyeball things better than they can, or if they're rebels, they usually just don't have a good enough dial to follow very well.

But regardless of that, if your enemy is gunning for just one of your ships, then it's your job to fly them in a way that mitigates their tactics as much as you can.

I think a lot of the Defender's problem (other than being over costed a bit) was that their ace abilities would have been great on Rebel pilots and that the aces would have worked better together if their PS had been reversed.

Until recently Imperials didn't have a lot of good options for ships to provide target locks for Vessery. The fix to the Advanced, the TIE/fo, and the upcoming TIE Adv. Prototype all give some options for spotters for Vessery. Rexlar could have really used some of the Rebel's action passing to help fuel his ability. MK. II Engines gives him the option of taking PTL to increase his chances of having a focus to spend to flip up damage cards. If the Bomber Shuttle title makes it easier to fit a Fleet Officer in a list with him, that should help as well.

Vessery would have been better at PS 8. The higher his PS, the more ships he can pair with to give him target locks. He also doesn't really need an EPT so taking VI to get to 10 would be easy for him to do. Brath on the other hand wants to shoot later in the round so that he is more likely to be shooting at targets that have already spent their defense tokens and have had some of their shields peeled off. Having a lower PS also means that there are more ships that would be able to grant him actions from Squad Leader.

Rexlar with x7 and juke might be decent now. He has the Evade token to defend with and can use the focus token to flip, and is cancelling one of the opponents defence dice if he's flying against things lower than PS 8 (Or didn't need to spend his evade earlier).

Throw a mk2 on there if you have the points to spare...

Vs 2 point reduction and a free action tied to arguably the strongest maneuver in the game - the white 4k, plus every other maneuver of a minimum speed.

It's not a free action, you can't PtL off of it, but it also can't be blocked, stressed away or stopped by Carnor.

I hadn't given any thought to Carnor, but he couldn't stop the defender getting the evade token, but you still can't spend it if at range 1. If I remember Carnor correctly that is.

The two biggest issues with the defender are the cost + the action economy.

It has barrel, target lock and focus. It wants to barrel for position, it wants focus for defense, and it wants target lock for offense. It can pick one of those things. The dial is actually quite good - the 1 and 2 turns are used sparingly - but it doesn't merge with Push The Limit talent - so you have to find another way to get around the problem.

With 30 points minimum invested - you'd hope for some more consistency. If you got for attack actions - you sacrifice your durability as the green dice are less than reliable without any actions. If you save your focus for defense - your offensive output drops down - you'd be better off with an alpha squadron interceptor + an academy pilot. 35 points for Col. Vessery are just not as good an investment as a 35 point Soontir Fel.

Now, one on one - the defender can leverage it's white k-turn to gain a pretty good advantage, especially on the joust, and the named pilots can be built. The named pilots can also be built to solve their action efficiency issues - Vessery + crack shot with another ship granting target locks gives you the offense you need with some defense - but now you're looking at a bigger investment and reliance on other ships. Brath can be built with Predator.

Both of the new titles work on the defender in different ways - one increases cost efficiency and gives you the defense action, the other increases your offensive output and synergy with some of the non PTL methods. For the competitive environment - these ships just went from being a couple of points behind the curve to tournament viable.

People don't like it because they can't just boost and barrel roll after everyone has moved to get into good position. Also it doesn't have very good token economy, it can not take an evade token (see new titles). In the age of boostwing white 4k isn't anything fancy. I swear everyone is just going to "Corran" the elites by putting on vi and engine upgrade. Congrats you saw what I did then took a boost or barrel roll.

A thousand times this, its not the dial, that can be worked around, and the white 4K is brutal when you are free to use it.

However, the ship has really bad action economy and had previously no good way to get it (even PTL and MK II Engine is subpar, and is even more points sunk into an already pricy ship).

You're often stuck holding on to a focus token you'd much rather use for defense than offense and you can basically forget about barrel rolling on anything other than VI Brath, which again would give you an unmodified attack...

The only Defender that breaks the trend slightly is Vessery, but, only for offense. He is (soon to be was) fragile for the points.

I don't get the fixation with action economy. Does the ship get the job done, or doesn't it? Lots of things go into making a ship good, number of effective actions is just one. Extra actions are particularly important on ships with maneuver actions at high PS, but lots of ships can do fine with their standard 1 action.

The two biggest issues with the defender are the cost + the action economy.

It has barrel, target lock and focus. It wants to barrel for position, it wants focus for defense, and it wants target lock for offense. It can pick one of those things.

That was the original idea of the game.

Predict the enemy, move into position, choose THE right action, ONE action!

and then roll dice

And then the Acewing begun.

boost\barrel\Barrelboost for not predicting maneuvers, tons of actions to not think about "the" one maneuver

and tons of extra dice manipulations to mess up the Dice part.

ACEWING, WHEN BREAKING THE RULES

became normal, and ships that still follow them are "sub-par useless and require tweaking"

I don't get the fixation with action economy. Does the ship get the job done, or doesn't it? Lots of things go into making a ship good, number of effective actions is just one. Extra actions are particularly important on ships with maneuver actions at high PS, but lots of ships can do fine with their standard 1 action.

I'm with you here. It seems that there is more and more players that can't play without or versus a high PS ship with repositionning ability so will dismiss all the ship without one of those or whine about those who can. I have a feeling that most of those players didn't get the practice the pre-nerf Phantom gave us to deal with arc dodger.

The Defender is already a good ship, Vessery at least, and now with the title just got much better. And if you are really worried about the lack of boost, just take Engine Upgrade. With X7, it's like it costed you 2 pts and now you can have an Evade Boost or Barrel Roll, plus the TL with Vessery. Looks like a good action economy to me.

'kay

I don't get the fixation with action economy. Does the ship get the job done, or doesn't it? Lots of things go into making a ship good, number of effective actions is just one. Extra actions are particularly important on ships with maneuver actions at high PS, but lots of ships can do fine with their standard 1 action.

Extra actions are typically more important for imperial lists with low ship count. Flying a defender can feel not great when the green dice to rogue and there's no evade token or thrusters to back you up. In general xwing revolves around limiting or removing exposure to dice. This is either with action economy, force multipliers, or slamming down enough ships that you don't care about a few bad rolls. When an awesome ship like the defender costs 30 points base, you tend to move out of the slamming down ships area and want a force multiplier (/D title) or action economy (×7 title).

I'll say that while the generics never really made the cut for me, I think one of biggest reasons you didn't see the named pilots more was Wave 4 came with the Phantom and the number of high PS boosting big ships, though the latter was more manageable. These were my two toughest fights with the named pilots for their points and I used them in a variety of combinations.

So, at some point after Wave 4 I put Vess and Brath (who I had played more of) on the shelf for the most part and pretty much put them out of my mind in terms of competitive play. I still took Brath to some store tournaments here and there and did well, but I never thought of those lists as ones I was going to work at for larger tournaments. I think a lot of people did the same but I wonder if they became a bit of a forgotten ship and now that I've re-examined them (just a couple of weeks ago) I wish I would have gotten them back out more often after the phantom nerf instead of only recently.

I guess my point is that I think the named pilots were always more competitive ships than they got credit for, especially after the "big ship half points" (especially because they keep their own points), but had a couple of bad match-ups that have since, gotten better.

Vs 2 point reduction and a free action tied to arguably the strongest maneuver in the game - the white 4k, plus every other maneuver of a minimum speed.

It's not a free action, you can't PtL off of it, but it also can't be blocked, stressed away or stopped by Carnor.

I hadn't given any thought to Carnor, but he couldn't stop the defender getting the evade token, but you still can't spend it if at range 1. If I remember Carnor correctly that is.

You don't need to spend it with Juke to cancel a target's evade result.