In general xwing revolves around limiting or removing exposure to dice. This is either with action economy, force multipliers, or slamming down enough ships

You seem to have forgotten positioning.

In general xwing revolves around limiting or removing exposure to dice. This is either with action economy, force multipliers, or slamming down enough ships

You seem to have forgotten positioning.

Positioning is by far the most important aspect.

As for the question in the title, the only thing "wrong" with the Defender is the fact Imperial Veterans isn't out yet.

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).

No evade or AT, but you've got 6-7 hit poonts, depending on build. It gives you time for the dice to even out. Getting hit is not the same thing for a Defender as it is for an Interceptor.

The Defender is not a reactive maneuverer, but with the hit points and white K-turn you can make sure there are very few turns where arc dodgers have un-returned shots.

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"

Though, in the original incarnation of the game - the tie fighter got around it's action economy issue with howlrunner and a large amount of ships - The X-wing didn't need to guess right, because it would TL, and if it didn't need it, bank it for the next turn with focus. The 2 actions on the X-wing didn't beg for better action economy. Vader was and is still powerful for it, and that was recognized right away, it's always been part of the DNA of the game. So I don't agree with this Acewing idea, you don't need high p.s. aces to win, and you don't need crazy action economy to win. What does that even mean anyway? Reliance on PTL? Everything is Soontir? Tie X7 Defenders / Soontir / Corran / Han / Poe all play remarkably differently.

The expensive ships needed to be able to replace multiple ships - and often they couldn't. Vessery almost gets there, and I've flown him quite a bit prior to the imperial veterans announcement (and won) - but usually out of position, and list synergy. He was quite dicey though. Competitive play is all about positional options and consistency.

The game has been a positional game from the start - that has never changed, though our understanding of it has. Engine brought that to the front of the game in wave 2. You still need to predict enemy movement and pick the right action. It's much easier to pick an action in a y-wing. The Defender / Ewing have such a high cost that they struggle to match the output of multiple generics in their place. 3 tie fighters can outdamage, out action and provide more HP than Col. Vessery could on his own.

The real issue seems to be in the balance of Aces to Generics - The design philosophy seems to have been fewer aces or more generics - and those options should be equal. In the early waves, they weren't - Generics generally outclassed the Aces - Then there was a shift with the phantom and rebel aces to kick up the power of the Aces - and now generics suddenly started to struggle. There's been injection of upgrades that tries to re balance the generics. I hope FFG can someday score the right balance through the patchwork. Defender Generics are good options now. people are even talking about taking onyx squadron! They're getting there piece meal, but it's a wobbling rock tower - every addition unbalances something else.

Sometimes, I think people make mountains out of molehills - the imbalance in x-wing is fairly small, especially at the casual level. The percent differences in efficiency and point cost seem to come down to 1-2 points, and in rare cases 3-4 points.

I won one in my first tournament I played, and have had it in all my empire builds since. It does cost some points, but it fits my style of play nicely. Now we get some custom upgrades with the new expansion coming out which I'll be trying this weekend. Very stoked about that. And also, doing white 4k's and slapping down a focus or target lock after just warms my heart.

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 think the reason imps rely on actions specifically extra actions is because the rebels from the start have had access to healing abilities. The only way for imps to compete with that was to negate the damage in the first place and that led to the evade/focus stacking or the boost/barrel roll option. The rebels at this point have it even better in that they can run multiple healing abilities in a 100 point list and the inclusion of numerous powerful unique crew like C-3PO, R2-D2 x2, R5-P9, Lando, Katarn and some of the new ghost crew that look to be extremely powerful. The imps have no where near the options for unique crew/mechs that the rebels have, imps have a few very powerful options. Imps have relied on powerful single pilot abilities like Soontir or Vader or the only other real option in Howlrunner though the swarm has been tamed quite a bit. I also find myself when playing imps which is most of the time, looking for ways to arc dodge or token stack. That's probably because I seem to still see R2D2 every time I face the freaking rebels.

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.

not with my dice

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.

It's an interesting aspect of this discussion, but I actually think that action economy, or at least "psuedo-action economy" (predator, autothrusters, regen, etc...things that ships can a add on that have benefits similar to actions but don't always require them) is more important than ever and I think that double attacks of TLTs (and the upcoming defender) are a big reason for it. It's a reason a lot of generics have gone almost extinct. Since attack dice are better than defense straight up, ships require more defensive actions against the cheap offensive efficiency of those ships.

a lot of generics have gone extinct long before TLTs, back in the dark ages of the 2-ship build

hell, some fossils even predate the phantom! (see x-wing)

TLT and the M.O.V nerf are the only reasons we get to see a good amount of variety in the competitive circuit, including the generics

even with generics, the fact that a generic can struggle to get an ace in arc only to bounce off of their defensive mods with some sh*tty dice makes it really hard to justify something like a naked X-wing anymore. So, everyone moved to TLs and crackshot Black Squadron + Howlie

Dice mods were always important, and the defender not having them despite paying premium was kind of an issue especially given stupid **** that you couldn't dodge no matter how skillful you were (PWTs)

this is why the fixes are so cool. Free Evade; free Jukes or double-taps (double the attacks functioning as a good failsafe for unmodded dice) resolve this issue very effectively

a lot of generics have gone extinct long before TLTs, back in the dark ages of the 2-ship build

It's true, and the phantom was a big factor in that, too, but TLTs were the nail in the coffin for them, including the most efficient ones like the B-wing, which is seen a lot less now. In fact, with the combination of the point system change and the phantom nerf, I think we'd have seen a resurgence of some if it weren't for TLT thanks to the adjustment in the point system and the phantom nerf. Any ship in that point range is going to have to be very good to push them out of rebel/scum lists or to fight them. I'd bet that we're not going to see IA have a big impact on generic X-wings either since they're fighting for the same spot.

For better or worse, they have tied themselves to a cycle of fixing ships and piling on upgrades. I say that agreeing that some are cool and while I still love the game and the new stuff, I think we can make the case that Wave 7 started a meta-wide power creep for the first time in this game.

We're also not going to see IA xs because the B is still slightly more efficient

...and the B can b-roll

On the bright side, it's a lovely time to be an elite tie pilot

Unless I'm running swarm, I need dice modification in my list. Ideally focus & TL for my main offensive weapon.

In lists with a small number of ships, spiky dice results are just too risky for me.

While I don't think this mentality is unique, I think my playstyle comes from years of 40K Eldar where every shot counts... so buff the hell out of it.

I'm still new to the game even though I bought the core set when it first came out.lol Well I've noticed that when people here talk about the tie defender it sounds like it's not a good ship to run. As a rookie pilot I'd like to know what's wrong with it.

It's a bit too expensive for what it does.

By the time you loaded one out decent, you could have just picked your standard 44 point Whisper and had a much better ship. This was especially apparent before the Phantom was nerfed. The Defender was released in the same wave as the Phantom.

Then the Turretwing meta that started soon after wave 5 came out made their weaknesses very apparent. Rear Admiral Chiraneau with Predator would just take one down to half health every time it fired. So you paid a lot of points for a ship that ended up lasting only a turn or two more than your average TIE Fighter because of dumb overpowered bull.

The dial is real weird. Hard turns giving you stress wasn't really the issue, it was the fact that you couldn't ditch that stress without going straight. So what would happen is that you'd get stress and simply couldn't find an opportune time to get rid of it for multiple turns.

Yeah, that is probably the number one issue people have with learning the Defender. You don't NEED to shed your stress immediately. And their ability to turn around while stressed is going to be their biggest strength in a stressing meta.

Yeah, that is probably the number one issue people have with learning the Defender. You don't NEED to shed your stress immediately. And their ability to turn around while stressed is going to be their biggest strength in a stressing meta.

And then you blaze away with unmodified shots and unmodified greens, hoping to make it through. There are ships that don't need actions, but they're not defenders.

That being said, the good thing about the defender fixes is that they didn't make defenders an HLC super-ace(e.g. a brobot but worse), but made them different from that archetype with double-tapping and a bit more defensive/points efficiency. They aren't going to edge out Soontir, but they might work now.

Yeah, that is probably the number one issue people have with learning the Defender. You don't NEED to shed your stress immediately. And their ability to turn around while stressed is going to be their biggest strength in a stressing meta.

And then you blaze away with unmodified shots and unmodified greens, hoping to make it through. There are ships that don't need actions, but they're not defenders.

That being said, the good thing about the defender fixes is that they didn't make defenders an HLC super-ace(e.g. a brobot but worse), but made them different from that archetype with double-tapping and a bit more defensive/points efficiency. They aren't going to edge out Soontir, but they might work now.

The fixes don't do anything for the HLC version of the defender.

Yeah, that is probably the number one issue people have with learning the Defender. You don't NEED to shed your stress immediately. And their ability to turn around while stressed is going to be their biggest strength in a stressing meta.

And then you blaze away with unmodified shots and unmodified greens, hoping to make it through. There are ships that don't need actions, but they're not defenders.

That being said, the good thing about the defender fixes is that they didn't make defenders an HLC super-ace(e.g. a brobot but worse), but made them different from that archetype with double-tapping and a bit more defensive/points efficiency. They aren't going to edge out Soontir, but they might work now.

The fixes don't do anything for the HLC version of the defender.

That was my point. Everyone before was trying to use HLC defenders, but the fixes pretty much sidestepped that.

The fixes don't do anything for the HLC version of the defender.

So don't use the HLC.

I'm still new to the game even though I bought the core set when it first came out.lol Well I've noticed that when people here talk about the tie defender it sounds like it's not a good ship to run. As a rookie pilot I'd like to know what's wrong with it.

If you're new to the game and just playing with friends, nothing is wrong with the Defender. It's has a clumsy maneuver dial and will eat a lot of points from your list, but it should do fine in a friendly setting.

Competitively, it has too many drawbacks piled on top of it in order to buy that precious white K-turn:

- It is too expensive. Vessery, easily the best of the Defender pilots, costs 35 points naked; he can't arc dodge, he can't regenerate shields / hull, he can't equip autothrusters. He has to rely on 3 green dice without any tricks to protect 6 hit points (half of that being hull, vulnerable to crits), with one of the most predictable & stress vulnerable dials in the game. A small list consisting of only Defenders has a poor match-up against a big swarm hammer, and an even match-up against another Ace list; meanwhile, a Defender taken as a Ace with an accompanying Tie Academy escort is just not as consistent as that same list with a Phantom (cloak is still much better than a white k-turn, even post-nerf) or even someone like Fel.

- The dial is just too awful. You can either fly it in a very predictable pattern, making it trivial for your opponent to block & light-up, or you can fly less predictably at the cost of taking actions (and thus relying on unmodified dice for most of the game). Veteran players will be able to consistently shut down the one thing you paid all of the points for by using the filler ships on their list to block your 4-K, which effectively leaves you with an even worse classic X-wing. Maybe if the Defender had more than one K-turn option, or if one of it's hard turn options wasn't red, or if it had something it could do other than a forward move to relieve stress...

For the record, I took a pair of Defenders to a Regional tournament this year. I won 7 straight games before losing in the semifinals, beating lists with Corran, Chewie, Dash, Han, AKA the usual suspects at competitive events. I beat a Howlrunner swarm that went 5-1 in Swiss.

Im not saying this to brag. I'm pretty good, but I'm not some kind of savant or anything. Other than that tournament, all my play is small local stuff, where my win record with 1 or 2 Defenders is also pretty solid. I'm saying this because I want people to understand that the Defender, while not an efficiency powerhouse, is plenty capable given that one takes the time to learn how it works. It might not be good enough in present form to win a world championship, but it doesn't have broadly stated weaknesses that many accuse it of.

I'm still new to the game even though I bought the core set when it first came out.lol Well I've noticed that when people here talk about the tie defender it sounds like it's not a good ship to run. As a rookie pilot I'd like to know what's wrong with it.

If you're new to the game and just playing with friends, nothing is wrong with the Defender. It's has a clumsy maneuver dial and will eat a lot of points from your list, but it should do fine in a friendly setting.

Competitively, it has too many drawbacks piled on top of it in order to buy that precious white K-turn:

- It is too expensive. Vessery, easily the best of the Defender pilots, costs 35 points naked; he can't arc dodge, he can't regenerate shields / hull, he can't equip autothrusters. He has to rely on 3 green dice without any tricks to protect 6 hit points (half of that being hull, vulnerable to crits), with one of the most predictable & stress vulnerable dials in the game. A small list consisting of only Defenders has a poor match-up against a big swarm hammer, and an even match-up against another Ace list; meanwhile, a Defender taken as a Ace with an accompanying Tie Academy escort is just not as consistent as that same list with a Phantom (cloak is still much better than a white k-turn, even post-nerf) or even someone like Fel.

So, what you're saying is the Defender flies without crutches, what's bad about that.

- The dial is just too awful. You can either fly it in a very predictable pattern, making it trivial for your opponent to block & light-up, or you can fly less predictably at the cost of taking actions (and thus relying on unmodified dice for most of the game). Veteran players will be able to consistently shut down the one thing you paid all of the points for by using the filler ships on their list to block your 4-K, which effectively leaves you with an even worse classic X-wing. Maybe if the Defender had more than one K-turn option, or if one of it's hard turn options wasn't red, or if it had something it could do other than a forward move to relieve stress...

The hard 3 is, and always has been, white.

Take a single point upgrade and you've got a ship with more green maneuvers than any other in the game.

The fixes don't do anything for the HLC version of the defender.

So don't use the HLC.

Yeah, that is probably the number one issue people have with learning the Defender. You don't NEED to shed your stress immediately. And their ability to turn around while stressed is going to be their biggest strength in a stressing meta.

And then you blaze away with unmodified shots and unmodified greens, hoping to make it through. There are ships that don't need actions, but they're not defenders.

That being said, the good thing about the defender fixes is that they didn't make defenders an HLC super-ace(e.g. a brobot but worse), but made them different from that archetype with double-tapping and a bit more defensive/points efficiency. They aren't going to edge out Soontir, but they might work now.

The fixes don't do anything for the HLC version of the defender.

That was my point. Everyone before was trying to use HLC defenders, but the fixes pretty much sidestepped that.

Gotcha, sorry for the misreading.

The fixes don't do anything for the HLC version of the defender.

So don't use the HLC.

You took me out of context. I was responding to another poster whose didn't I misread as "did." For the record, I think the HLC named defender is fine and probably should have gotten more playtime after the phantom nerf than it did (as I pointed on the last page).

So, what you're saying is the Defender flies without crutches, what's bad about that.

It flies without the defensive advantages that most high cost aces use in order to be viable in competitive play, which makes it a less consistent choice.

The hard 3 is, and always has been, white.

Take a single point upgrade and you've got a ship with more green maneuvers than any other in the game.

...Okay? So take that upgrade, use it in competitive play and lose in top 8 like Biophysical did.

I'm not trying to tell people how to play; there's nothing wrong with using the Defender. But when a new player wants to know why a ship isn't used very often in competitive play, I think we owe it to them to give an honest appraisal of the situation (albeit the situation may improve when the Defender can shoot twice on the joust. Time will tell).

I didn't take that upgrade actually, I had Hull Upgrade on Rex and Stealth Device on Vessery.

And I lost in top 4.