so i was running Echo + VI + Stygium (yea boo hiss) + Kallus + Collision Detector and Echo was consistently the first to die, first to TLT Kavle then to a Exposing Palpatine in a Deci, the strange part echo was cloaked and had an evade toke the entire time, did i just have bad dice or is rolling 4-5 greens and having an evade not enough to deal with 360 arcs anymore?

Well, the short answer - yes. The long answer - yes, but only for now. Phildo is one of the best Phantom players I've ever seen, though to be fair, he is one of the best players I've ever seen in general, and even he has put away Whisper for the moment. A properly played Phantom won't have to worry about bombs, but there are too many auto damage tricks out there designed to take out Defenders that also take out Phantoms. And since they don't have a gazzillion health, they're more susceptible to a single bad green dice roll. TLTs are a pseudo threat. If you pair her with a Deci, then they're a huge threat, as they can tear through the Deci before you can tear through them, but if you pair the Phantom with anything else, it's a subpar wingman for all other matchups.

PS. FCS is where it's at on a Phantom.

I think the old brand of end game invincible phantoms are mostly dead (though the fact that ps 5-6 is very popular currently gives some hope).

I think there's a possibility that you can run then in a cheaper manner without being awful but maybe they're not even viable then. Something like:

Echo - lightweight frame, rage, inspiring recruits (34)

That isn't a horrible 34 point ship.

Sigma - lightweight frame, fire control system (29)

That's not a horrible 29 point ship.

There are two things about phantoms; they are glass cannons, with an emphasis on both parts of that phrase. They are very fragile if you make a mistake while flying, and they are very dangerous if flown well. A single phantom is capable of solo'ing a whole list, and you can't say that about every ship.

I find phantoms to be best when paired with someone who can get them a token in case of bumping / focused fire. I always like putting a fleet officer in a list with a phantom (or soon General Hux), which lets me have my evade and a focus. That, behind four dice, tends to be durable.

Also, phantoms are just a hell of a lot of fun to fly.

I know you love SPA but I think that it may be part of your problem with Echo. You wrote that Echo was cloaked with an evade token each round. That means that Echo wasn't throwing any red dice which means Echo wasn't doing her main job.

Taking SPA instead of ACD either drops Echo's damage output way down or makes her very predictable.

There's some stuff out there that can make it rough to be a Phantom. Handicapping yourself with SPA isn't going to help. Every turn that your Phantom doesn't shoot because it is cloaked is a turn that you maybe should have just saved some points and brought a Defender instead.

I mean, the name of the ship kinda gives it away

I think operations specialist+snapshot swarm may be a fun trick to stack tokens on whisper once the next wave comes out.

7 minutes ago, nigeltastic said:

I think the old brand of end game invincible phantoms are mostly dead (though the fact that ps 5-6 is very popular currently gives some hope).

I think there's a possibility that you can run then in a cheaper manner without being awful but maybe they're not even viable then. Something like:

Echo - lightweight frame, rage, inspiring recruits (34)

That isn't a horrible 34 point ship.

Sigma - lightweight frame, fire control system (29)

That's not a horrible 29 point ship.

um... Stygium is better in practically every situation and costs the same, evade token > green die

7 minutes ago, MortalPlague said:

There are two things about phantoms; they are glass cannons, with an emphasis on both parts of that phrase. They are very fragile if you make a mistake while flying, and they are very dangerous if flown well. A single phantom is capable of solo'ing a whole list, and you can't say that about every ship.

I find phantoms to be best when paired with someone who can get them a token in case of bumping / focused fire. I always like putting a fleet officer in a list with a phantom (or soon General Hux), which lets me have my evade and a focus. That, behind four dice, tends to be durable.

Also, phantoms are just a hell of a lot of fun to fly.

yes they are fun to fly but dying in 2 turns from a TLT through a rock isn't, right now it seems Vader is the only arc dodger without AT that can survive my local turret meta

I could argue LF over Stygium because Stygium can be stress-canceled, LF cant. I ran a pair of cheapo phantom generics with Stygium and that exact thing kept happening - Braylen Gunner Stressbot kept stressing them both..never did any damage but stopped the evade which led to Poe getting hits through.

Phantoms are one of if not THE hardest ship to fly. They are the definition of a glass cannon: hilariously powerful if flown right, dies to a stink-eye stare if flown wrong. Echo is my favorite ship in the entire game because the insane level of flexibility she has is just...well insane! Unless i face a Dengar i never have her die quickly, and even then i just stay the hell away from Dengar until hes distracted.

1 minute ago, mad mandolorian said:

um... Stygium is better in practically every situation and costs the same, evade token > green die

yes they are fun to fly but dying in 2 turns from a TLT through a rock isn't, right now it seems Vader is the only arc dodger without AT that can survive my local turret meta

I heartily disagree that stygium is constantly (or ever) better. That requires you to manually cloak so you fall into a weird every other turn firing cycle. I would much rather get +1 green die against most attacks and a) be able to take a real action every turn and b) be able to fire every turn.

3 minutes ago, mad mandolorian said:

um... Stygium is better in practically every situation and costs the same, evade token > green die

yes they are fun to fly but dying in 2 turns from a TLT through a rock isn't, right now it seems Vader is the only arc dodger without AT that can survive my local turret meta

Stygium is not better in every situation. As you noted, you get killed by TLTs. The evade token only helps against one TLT attack. After it's gone, you're toast.

Cloaking also takes up your action. Cloak + Stygium gets you 4 dice and an evade token against TLTs. Lightweight Frame gives you 3 dice against most TLT attacks, and you still have your action to either focus or evade.

Third, Stygium only works if you cloak a lot. If you're cloaked, you're not shooting. LWF allows you to be a lot more offensive with your maneuvers and will defend you better over several rounds than the Stygium would.

Phantoms aren't easy to fly and can pop at a moments notice with either a mistake or a single bad green die roll. They're not dead dead as there are highly skilled players out there with them. But you do have to fly them almost better than perfect nowadays to be highly competitive with them.

SPG is one of the worst upgrades in the game. Should have a negative cosy

SPA is always going to hold back a named phantom. It forces you into a weird every-other-turn play style which is okay with 30ish point blocker that has 4 dice, but is less Okay when the ship costs you 40+.

For my own purposes I'm calling them dead for chances to win a major tournament. It's not impossible but it's going to take a bunch of luck along with all the skill, Matchups will need to be lucky, the meta has lower average PS but there are 9+ PS out there in a lot of lists and some of them are 360 turreted like Dengar, Rey (VI), Han. To add to that there is still a bunch of stress handouts which ruin whispers effectiveness greatly & 5+ dice attacks that make Whispers 4 die defence seem less than adequate all of the sudden. I do think you can be competitive at a tourney but it's high risk gambling to hope to win one.

30 minutes ago, Stay On The Leader said:

SPG is one of the worst upgrades in the game. Should have a negative cosy

It has some use on cloak-Palob. I know it sounds ridiculous to have 5 points flare on a bad roll instead of 2, but he tends to be the priority target anyways. I played him a few times because the build placed well on an SOS tournament (flying with Mindlink Scycks, crazy times) and was suprised just how well it works. Vectored Thrusters kind of killed that build, though, they tend to be better.

I think the main problem with Phantoms of all types is they are over costed by a few points. They were originally costed with the pre-nerf maneuverability. Post-nerf they are to risky. And I'm not trying to say they shouldn't have been nerfed. I think they work way better now (except, I still think you shouldn't be able to TL them when they are cloaked, but whatever) than pre nerf, but they are way harder to use, and pop even easier, especially in today's "red dice overload" meta. I think the Phantom's other problem is that you almost have to use VI and ACD and FCS, or your not going to make your points back. Even then you may not. I love Whisperer and have always used the standard build to good success, but recently I tried to run him with LF and Swarm Leader(along with 2 academy pilots) and while super fun, it wasn't really competitive against meta lists. I think that just like Interceptors, the generics don't work, and the only truly viable builds feel kind of stagnant and not even very good anymore.

If you're using Echo without ACD, you may also want to reconsider your EPT choice. VI will allow you to shoot earlier in the cycle against most targets, but other options may have more value. For example, you can combine PTL with the Stygium Cloak. If you have a green maneuver dialed in, you can decloak, take your evade, take a free barrel roll, do your green maneuver, and then take a focus. You can also evade and focus, or PTL to focus and cloak at the same time.

If there aren't too many turrets around, they have a chance. The key is to have something to take a bit of heat off the Phantom, like a Deci. But, it has some really bad matchups. Also, flying is even more key than usual.

The cloak nerf was very brutal, It made way for Soontir to come in but did nothing to stop the surplus of Fat Han in the meta. It took TLTs for that.

Phantoms don't need a nerf after Ints got Autothrusters. They're really not good in meta anymore. Too many ps9+ things around and red dice overload.

Unnerf Phantoms.
Also echo as also not very competitive. And before you get anecdotal on me, afaik, the stats really say that phantoms don't do very well or show up in high prevalence.

Primarily because theyre not faceroll easy to fly, not because theyre bad.

Even someone like me who probably has Echo in about 60% of his games (and plays a LOT ) still fudges up once in awhile and it costs me the phantom. High level tourny players dont use it because of that risk, regardless of how potent the reward is.

Phantoms are a novelty mostly because of the absurd 4 die attack. I love ffg for this, as they would be pretty bad otherwise, but now we live in a game of consistent red die. Back in my day (Wave 4), we only really had to worry about han for turrets. although autothrusters has helped the arcdodger come back to some degree, phantoms don't have boost. Lwf is actually somewhat saddening as it cuts down on the need to cloak, the point of this ship. I think that it is a good time to run some phantoms with a tie d tractor beam defender. That way evade die are taken out early in the round and the phantoms can saw through whats left. I tried this and was able to kill chewbacca (the original version) with lando on him in two turns. Now that we are in a meta of a sea of red die, go ahead and slam the front lines with low ps phantoms and see how people will try to deal with these strong jousters. Note: any attempt to fly this against swarms will immediately get you killed.

I've played phantoms a fair bit and in the competitive meta they are not in a good place right now. There is too much PS9 that counters Whisper as well as some stress generation that also makes things a pain as ACD no longer works (Asajj, R3A2, etc) so even moving and shooting first is no protection.

I played a Phantom at two recent store tourneys as I like Whisper and got crushed in the later rounds by stuff like Dengar, Paratanni and so on because of these shortcomings.

Just now, John Rainbow said:

I've played phantoms a fair bit and in the competitive meta they are not in a good place right now. There is too much PS9 that counters Whisper as well as some stress generation that also makes things a pain as ACD no longer works (Asajj, R3A2, etc) so even moving and shooting first is no protection.

I played a Phantom at two recent store tourneys as I like Whisper and got crushed in the later rounds by stuff like Dengar, Paratanni and so on because of these shortcomings.

my point in giving up arcdoging and just throwing a ton of attack die at a target with the lower costed phantoms with less upgrades. I use to love whisper, Fat han and TLT's were difficult to beat but not impossible, but the jump master killed my desire to fly that way anymore. Snap shot is brutal on anything with a higher ps than whisper.