Sorry for the click-bait. I doubt I'm the first person to think of this, but here's a fairly simple rule change that could rebalance some of the cards that have garnered the most complaints recently:

• When stressed, your ship cannot be assigned a target lock, focus, or evade token.

With this rule change:

• Attani squads are still good, but much more vulnerable to stress.
• Dengaroo's Dengar doesn't get the free focus anymore when stressed.
• Zuckuss is generally less effective.
• X7 defenders are still powerful, but more vulnerable to stress/control
• FCS is a more reasonable card

The one arguably problematic card this rule change would not directly affect is Palp. But even palp might be affected indirectly -- i.e., by bringing stress control back into the game, this rule change would create a nice counter to palp squads in the meta.

Anyway, still thinking through this one but thought it was worth a discussion.

Yeah, Soontir really needs debuffing.

"Netlisters HATE him!"

I think that this would cause more collateral damage to underplayed pilots than you might have initially considered, along with narrowing design space for future abilities.

Soontir would literally have a blank pilot card. Whisper would have a blank card any round she did a K-turn (on top of already having to live with Advanced Cloak being turned off). Tycho's sweet ability would essentially be replaced with a PS8 A-Wing with Primed Thrusters taped on.

Rey crew would lose a lot of utility, Kyle Katarn pilot would have even less reason to see play, and Targeting Astromech would be a 2 point blank (poor Hobbie!). And poor, poor Guri - better not ever sloop. The Upsilon platform in general would hurt a lot without FCS, and this would really nerf Imperial supports like Systems Officer, Fleet Officer, and Hux.

Esege's ability gets around it - slight positive?

Anyways, I'm sure that there are plenty of additional examples of casual pilots getting blasted by a rules change like this. And mindlink doesn't even get hurt as badly as you'd think - it only prevents Manaroo from passing tokens at combat. The order of operations just has to change for the mindlinkers; activate all the stressed people first, have them do their greens then TL/evade/BR/boost, and then the last one in the chain gives focus to everyone.

I think the solution is to target problem cards (zuckuss, x7, mindlink, ect), otherwise there is just too much collateral damage.

Sorry Tycho, all you can do now is boost.

Valid points @firstorderproblems. Though: As I understand it card abilities can override rules, so I don't think Soontir/Tycho etc. would be affected -- but maybe I'm wrong about that.

4 minutes ago, jep said:

Valid points @firstorderproblems. Though: As I understand it card abilities can override rules, so I don't think Soontir/Tycho etc. would be affected -- but maybe I'm wrong about that.

As I recall it, the word "cannot" in a rule always overrides "can" or "may" in text.

So the "cannot be assigned target lock, focus, or evade tokens" in your suggested rule change would override all pilot abilities that say "can" or "may" take actions when stressed or while stressed.

and then rebel stress would be OP.

Or just assign a range limit on all abilities unless otherwise stated.

Done.

Silver bullet fix right there. Hits Palpy and Manaroo like Patsy's bullet.

Targeting astromech seems to be pretty useless with this change.

NOPE.

It's easier to just fix the few cards with problems.

Manaroo and Zuckuss can be errata to "You cannot use this ability if you have any stress."

FCS and x7 can be a free action. Boom. Good to go. Is FCS a problem?

1 hour ago, wurms said:

It's easier to just fix the few cards with problems.

Manaroo and Zuckuss can be errata to "You cannot use this ability if you have any stress."

FCS and x7 can be a free action. Boom. Good to go. Is FCS a problem?

FCS is only a problem in that it is WAY better than any other system upgrade and still cheaper than most.

"Show me on the X wing plushie where Dengaroo shot you..."

18 minutes ago, MenaceNsobriety said:

FCS is only a problem in that it is WAY better than any other system upgrade and still cheaper than most.

I think Advanced Targeting Computer is more powerful given the right context; a random 3 attack ship with FCS is probably not going to get as much mileage out of their system slot as Vader or Juno with ATC. On big hitter aces like Corran, Phantoms, and Quickdraw FCS is definitely absurd though.

Advanced Sensors is nuts on Brobots and (sometimes) Corran, and Sensor Jammer is randomly insanely good. I think the systems slot forces some hard choices for the more middle of the road pilots.

There's only a couple of cards and ships that need adjustment due to counting stress as a cost even though it sometimes doesn't need to be. On the other hand, there is a huge teetering mountain of ships and cards that become much less interesting if you add extra rules (that is, global rule changes, as opposed to specific cards) to penalize stress.

FFG just needs to do something specifically about Manaroo and Zuckuss, and then needs to be very, very careful in future about assuming that stress is a problem for people in all circumstances. Stress can't be used to balance really powerful abilities because that doesn't work. I assume that they've learned this lesson from Zuckuss, but I guess we'll see.

Also: Sensor Jammer is criminally underrated.

For ships like Corran and Quickdraw, the boost for FCS mostly seems to be because they can get multiple attacks in a turn (is there anything with a system slot people are crazy enough to Snap Shot?). This isn't really a problem with FCS, it just means FCS synergizes well with those sorts of abilities - that should just be taken into account with the core ship/pilot costs. It still has the issue that, while TLs are a dice mod, and for offense I've heard are better than focus, they still rely on RNG on their own.

The issue with overbuffing stress is that Stress is REALLY easy to do now in the game in a lot of ways. You may want to carefully pick to fix certain cards which ignore stress (Probably just Zuckuss then, make him once per round so you can fix him for Epic ships too) but not make stress such a huge deal. Because Braylen "stressmule", Asajj, Snap Shot+Tactician TIE Shuttles, Flechette Torps... There's a lot of ways a faction can **** you with stress. You make stress the best, netlist will make stress lists and anti-stress lists top dog.

37 minutes ago, FirstOrderProblems said:

I think Advanced Targeting Computer is more powerful given the right context; a random 3 attack ship with FCS is probably not going to get as much mileage out of their system slot as Vader or Juno with ATC. On big hitter aces like Corran, Phantoms, and Quickdraw FCS is definitely absurd though.

Advanced Sensors is nuts on Brobots and (sometimes) Corran, and Sensor Jammer is randomly insanely good. I think the systems slot forces some hard choices for the more middle of the road pilots.

I don't really include ATC as a standard system because it can only go on one ship. It is a fix card so it better be good as well. AS is underrated for a select few pilots but for the large majority of ships FCS is just to good to turn down for the points. I have always found Sensor Jammer to be a bit over costed but I'm sure it could be good in the right matchups.

26 minutes ago, MenaceNsobriety said:

I don't really include ATC as a standard system because it can only go on one ship. It is a fix card so it better be good as well. AS is underrated for a select few pilots but for the large majority of ships FCS is just to good to turn down for the points. I have always found Sensor Jammer to be a bit over costed but I'm sure it could be good in the right matchups.

I think you're right that FCS is the go-to system, I just wanted to raise the point that some of the others are conditionally really strong.

I've had the best success with Jammer when I have other components that also tax enemy focus tokens. Jax, a couple Juke users, and aggressive action denying bumps are all good at taking Jammers over the top. I think Hotshot Copilot would also work really well with it, but I haven't tried it yet.

This really doesn't do that much to Parattani (rarely gets self-stressed, and as long as Manaroo gets a token, and everyone else does a green and an action, they all still get tokens and mana retains hers), but it wildly screws over other interesting mindlink squads - I've been running 2 fangs and 2 ion scyks, and it's great fun, but the fun bit is 'one ship k turns, everyone else follows up with greens' and this would mean that mindlink would basically not work for that strategy any more, which would be lame as heck.

This punishes interesting options without actually helping much against the stuff that's OP so it seems like a bad plan to me...

And FCS really isn't problematic at all.

Yet another "Dengaroo hurt me so much, lets nerf EVERYTHING!" topic... we surely need more of them!

57 minutes ago, Voitek said:

Yey another "Dengaroo hurt me so much, lets nerf EVERYTHING!" topic... we surely need more of them!

Exacly what i was going to write - all i read lately is "lets fix the game by nerfing everything". And each one of them is more stupid then another.

FFS people either play as given or play home with mililon house rules. Don't try to fix what is not broken.

3 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

This really doesn't do that much to Parattani (rarely gets self-stressed, and as long as Manaroo gets a token, and everyone else does a green and an action, they all still get tokens and mana retains hers), but it wildly screws over other interesting mindlink squads - I've been running 2 fangs and 2 ion scyks, and it's great fun, but the fun bit is 'one ship k turns, everyone else follows up with greens' and this would mean that mindlink would basically not work for that strategy any more, which would be lame as heck.

This punishes interesting options without actually helping much against the stuff that's OP so it seems like a bad plan to me...

And FCS really isn't problematic at all.

Excately. I'm pretty sure players who demand attani nerf have very limited experience of it. Attani mindlink squads do not equal Parattani!

I enjoy playing my Scyks and currently only way to effectively to do it is via mindlink. Scum has very few options to have action economy in their faction, please don't take it away if you had a bad experience against one power build!

This by the by is why my preferred solution to Mindlink is to limit users of it to one focus and one stress token. Then it does its job - focus-only PTL on all ships equipped with it - and provides added stress protection, without giving the added benefit of big token stacks.

I really hope that's what they go for, but I'm worried it's not.

I don't see a problem with mindlink now, even with Dengaroo and Patarrani. Both are strong builds, but playables against. And the mindlink also made playables other subpar (otherwise) list. And definitely give some kind of "personality of his own" to the scum faction.

But I think that mindlink could be changed somehow in the next FAQ, not because a problem now, but for the problems it could produce in the long term, in the future, for the designers.

The kind of interactions a synergys that mindlink provides, gives a very very narrow space for future scum ships. Just think in the incredible ways mindlink would be broken in the other two factions...
There are too many kind of skills that the designers will not be able to put in a scum future ship because of the interaction it would cause with mindlink.