Her ability has a 25% to proc, not counting any re-rolls from crits. If you take Rhymer, you just reduced the number of chances you have to proc her by 2 (because 2 TIE Fighters=Rhymer). With a full 16 swarm of vanilla TIE Fighters, that's an average of 4-5 procs. And nobody is going to take 16 TIE Fighters without any aces. I'm looking to take Howl, Mauler, Valen, Black Squad, and 6x Fighters. I can reasonably expect 3-4 procs in a turn if all my fighters live to shoot ships. That's good, but not game breaking.

All she does is make a TIE swarm more viable. Right now if you take a TIE swarm, they're pretty much useless if your opponent goes minimal squadrons. Sloane makes that swarm useful against ships. That is all. I love her, but let's not get carried away. She's mainly buffing a TIE swarm. They still die to a stiff breeze. Many of my Rebel builds include an Neb-B Escort, Toryn Farr, and Ten Numb. They will laugh at a TIE swarm all the way to the bank.

Forget Sloan....WHERE IS THRAWN!!!!!!!!

Just now, Blail Blerg said:

Ty. Can you go through the battle plan with this? How do you mitigate being out activated? Just punch them in the nose as fast as you can? I know you can do it, but I wanna hear the piloter's thoughts: How do the squadrons move compared to the ships? What range bubbles are relevant etc.

I don't have a lot of experience yet. This fleet is based on an older one (wave 2) with Tarkin updated to the new tools and works a bit different cause the commander. I am trying to get some practice with JJ.

The range of BCC and Boosted Coms are great so ship's speed is not a big problem. Anyway the faster you go to bombing the faster you get all killed so speed 2 would be recommend unless you go against Ackbar. I fly in formation with the 2 VSD in the middle and gozantis next to them but I am not sure if it is the best way. As I said it was a 3 VSD fleet so I am figuring out how to fly 2 VSD with 2 goz and I will probably must learn how to do it with quasar carrier.

The only thing I sure is to fly the bombers behind the main fighter scene. You don't want to waste a single round of black rerollable dice because engagement. But the target the first 2 rounds are enemy fighters and if you need those bomber's anti squadron armament use it. You are paying for them and 2 FC (maybe excessive but you don't go with intel).

But if your purpose is testing Sloane then change 2 defender >> Lambdas and the other one to 2 tie fighters and then boosted Coms out. But I don't want to deep inside this wave yet.

16 minutes ago, Truthiness said:

All she does is make a TIE swarm more viable.

I ran some numbers on Sloanne TIE Phantoms and as a result I'm forced to respectfully disagree with you.

Sloane may end up liking RLBs to help get the TIEs to the target.

What excites me the most is that Imperials are either dedicated anti squadron, or dedicated anti ship, now we can have our scatter aces who are great anti squad but terrible for dealing with ships, actually assist and be useful for dealing with ships.

It gives the Imperials some much needed cross over love, and a way to combat dedicated rebel squad builds, without totally gimping 134pts on nothing but anti squadron.

Being able to field

Mauler
Soontir
Howlrunner
Dengar
Cienna
Valen
And then have a 25% chance to mess with a def token on a ship with a reroll if it comes up Crit, is all kinds of good.

Exactly

Demo

Quaser with flight controllers

Quaser with flight controllers

Raider

Raider

Raider

Spam of tie fighters/tie interceptors/jumpmasters/phantoms plus appropriate aces and Rhymer.

Note phantoms dont need jumpmasters...

Raiders free to fly with no fear of death by squadrons and suddenly extremely potent. Dodging the painful arcs and wrecking everyone.

21 minutes ago, pt106 said:

I ran some numbers on Sloanne TIE Phantoms and as a result I'm forced to respectfully disagree with you.

Oh noes, not the TIE Phantom! Didn't do the numbers, so I'll take your word for it. Sounds like she helps another squad in need

I'm not sure why people are fixated on tie swarms that will magically be flakked to death when scatter acess, defenders and phantoms are all much better options. And screening is practically impossible, which is my biggest issue. If this was a reb general it's a totally different scenario to when it's an imp one because of rhymer.

Comparions to sato are pretty ridiculous because satos damage lasts as long as the squads whilst this damage is permanent. I'll wait and see what the final product looks like but I for one think that the potential damage this can inflict on big ships is nuts. Anything that can't be countered with a strategy from any balanced fleet on the table is an issue to me, just run tagge is not the answer.

12 minutes ago, beefcake4000 said:

I'm not sure why people are fixated on tie swarms that will magically be flakked to death when scatter acess, defenders and phantoms are all much better options. And screening is practically impossible, which is my biggest issue. If this was a reb general it's a totally different scenario to when it's an imp one because of rhymer.

Comparions to sato are pretty ridiculous because satos damage lasts as long as the squads whilst this damage is permanent. I'll wait and see what the final product looks like but I for one think that the potential damage this can inflict on big ships is nuts. Anything that can't be countered with a strategy from any balanced fleet on the table is an issue to me, just run tagge is not the answer.

Scatter Aces have the same chance to proc as a TIE Fighter, but less dice to roll. Rhymer is nothing but dead weight with Sloane. That's 16 points not giving you a chance to proc.

11 minutes ago, Truthiness said:

Scatter Aces have the same chance to proc as a TIE Fighter, but less dice to roll. Rhymer is nothing but dead weight with Sloane. That's 16 points not giving you a chance to proc.

In all fairness Rhymer does increase the chance to proc other attacks by increasing the range (Not that I like Rhymer in this type of build)

8 minutes ago, pt106 said:

In all fairness Rhymer does increase the chance to proc other attacks by increasing the range (Not that I like Rhymer in this type of build)

Fair enough. I see the best method for using Sloane as winning the squad fight and then using her ability on ships. Rhymer is 16 points not helping that, but I see how you could go another method.

With a single blue anti-ship dice and the crit reroll, you have a 31% chance of scoring an accuracy. Thus you need ~3 fighters to exhaust a defence token and ~6 to discard one.

Meanwhile if your fighters are preoccupied doing that and had to get right up into the enemy's face, if the enemy have any meaningful fighter screen and flak, they will quickly get the upper hand in the fighter battle.

What I don't like about Sloan is that she is very luck dependent. As little as 2 ties can cripple a big ship, or a whole swarm may fail. I don't like building a whole strategy around these numbers. I'd rather a more mild ability (such as either exhausting defence tokens only, or letting the defender choose the token) thus you won't be as tempted to 'all in' to get the game changing effect.

Meh- its a powerful ability. Its not any more powerful than say Screed however. You still need to spend points on making it work- the right squadrons and squadron supports.

Some combos will be better than others. Again like Screed.

The most expensive Admirals are those like Tarkin, Leia, Vader, etc where with almost any fleet composition they can be plugged in for a solid benefit.

Sloane is good. Shes not broken. Squadrons have alot of counters, with more coming every day. They are strong, and they should be, but this just gives an extra permutation to the strong squadron game, it doesnt turn it up to 11.

And I for one am really bummed about the nerf to her ship.

2 hours ago, ShadowFox1138 said:

Forget Sloan....WHERE IS THRAWN!!!!!!!!

In his ISD-I Chimaera, waiting to release alongside the MC75 and the Lothal Campaign kit.

I'm usually one of those who refuse to panic about any new stuff coming... certainly I never bothered about Sato.

But I think Sloane may be the thing that finally brings in an Errata for Major Rhymer.

There is nothing that says Exhaust here. And its attacker chooses. So you are completely at the mercy of the other guys dice. A tie fighter is going to roll an acc approximately 30% of the time (rerolling off the crit result). So a 4 x Tie activation is usually going to spend your brace, and has a decent chance of burning it, all else not withstanding.

As it is - first tie fighter gets an Acc - spend target ships brace

Second tie fighter to get an Acc - BURN target ships brace.

Or:

Target is a flotilla.

First Tie fighter acc = spend scatter. No, they can't scatter away the acc because its spent while attacking

Second tie fighter acc = BURN scatter.

8 hours ago, beefcake4000 said:

Can someone tell me what I'm missing with commander Sloan who to me seems insanely powerful. When I first read that card my brain interpreted the token stripping ability to be used anti squad then someone pointed out that it works against ships too. So basically a tie fighter or 3 can take away a star destroyers brace or a transports scatter in seconds with no obvious defence. You won't be able to screen against it because rhymer allows it to happen from medium range which makes protecting almost impossible and if you care to come out far enough to potentially defend you would expect your swuads to be wiped out by a massive alpha strike by the no doubt maxed out enemy squadrons....

So what am I missing? To me this commander has pure good on a stick with no downside or obvious way to counter it? Not to mention at such a low cost

Don't forget she can reroll those crits, making hits or accs more likely. Not a single wasted face on that (initial) blue die (reds no all bad either).

9 hours ago, beefcake4000 said:

Can someone tell me what I'm missing with commander Sloan who to me seems insanely powerful. When I first read that card my brain interpreted the token stripping ability to be used anti squad then someone pointed out that it works against ships too. So basically a tie fighter or 3 can take away a star destroyers brace or a transports scatter in seconds with no obvious defence. You won't be able to screen against it because rhymer allows it to happen from medium range which makes protecting almost impossible and if you care to come out far enough to potentially defend you would expect your swuads to be wiped out by a massive alpha strike by the no doubt maxed out enemy squadrons....

So what am I missing? To me this commander has pure good on a stick with no downside or obvious way to counter it? Not to mention at such a low cost

I think you're missing the fact that the best you can do is a blue die against ships, which has a 1/4 chance for accuracy. This means you need to roll 4 ties (32 points) to get one, on average, just to exhaust a token. This means you are squadroning with your star destroyer instead of engineering or NAV.

would you pay 56 points for a turbo laser that said "once per round, when attacking if the defender has no intelligently placed squadrons, spend one of your target's defense tokens"? That's a whole gladiator.

The way you counter this? Bring squads to lock down or kill rhymer.

OK so you sit here discussing new commander but none of you actually posted the card or link. No one even quoted the card.

OP, please put a nice large card image into your top post. I'll help you. Use this:

Please guys, let this be a standard. The world will be a better place.

Since I'm compulsive calculator:

Phantoms avg. damage vs ships goes from 1 to 1.22 with Sloane's reroll.

Chance of getting an acc. goes from 0.234 to 0.281

Chance of having a roll with no effect: 0.39 to 0.156 !!!

For comparison: TieF damage goes from 0.5 to 0.625, so about half the benefit but about half the points.

TieF chance of acc. goes from 0.25 to 0.31

TieF chance of useless roll: 0.5 to 0.125 !!!

58 minutes ago, Xeletor said:

TieF chance of useless roll: 0.5 to 0.125 !!!

That's not quite right... it should be half of that (2/8 chance of crit x 2/8 chance of crit)

The chance of a Sloane TIE Fighter to do something is ~93% (31% token, 62% damage)

On average:

• 3 regular TIE Fighters result in 1.5 damage (typical outcome: 1-2 damage)
• 3 Sloane TIE Fighters result in ~2 damage and 1 spent token (or 3 damage, or 1 damage and 1 discarded token - all great outcomes if you ask me!)

That's a huge boost!

10 hours ago, Blail Blerg said:

Can someone give me some really nasty wave5 imp bomber fleets?

And then also, some Sloane wave6 fleets? Gonna do some table testing.

Just a real quick thing 3 tie Defenders 3 tie bombers marek stele major Rhymer and one tie fighter and black squadron comes out to 129 pts

[/img]

My current Wave 5 Squadron List:
Colonel Jendon
Maarek Stele
Valen Rudor
Major Rhymer
Saber Squadron
Gamma Squadron
Lambda Shuttle
3x Tie Bomber
134 Points, with 2-3 Bomber Command Center. This is really a nice damage against ships, and a decent one against squadrons.

But with Soloane you can go total insane. Your blue dice will always do something with bombers, and even non bombers have a good chance for a hit or accuracy with the reroll.
So my idea of wave 6 squadrons:
Colonel Jendon
Maarek Stele
Valen Rudor
Major Rhymer
Cienna Ree
Howlrunner
Sontir Fel
Saber Squadron
133 points. And down to 8 squadrons. Not as deadly against ships as the bomber were, but you dont need the Bomber Command Centers anymore. And the Fighters, with the blue dice, will still spend the defense tokens from the enemy ships. And Stele will do the damage without any problems.
But the big boost is the anti fighter damage. With these Squads there is not much that will stand in the way. Combined with 2 Flight Controllers it will rip enemy squad list really fast.

30 minutes ago, DiabloAzul said:

That's not quite right... it should be half of that (2/8 chance of crit x 2/8 chance of crit)

The chance of a Sloane TIE Fighter to do something is ~93% (31% token, 62% damage)

On average:

• 3 regular TIE Fighters result in 1.5 damage (typical outcome: 1-2 damage)
• 3 Sloane TIE Fighters result in ~2 damage and 1 spent token (or 3 damage, or 1 damage and 1 discarded token - all great outcomes if you ask me!)

That's a huge boost!

Quite right you are. The chance for a useless roll from Sloane tie fighter against ships is actually 0.0625 or 6.25% chance (probability to crit then crit again on the reroll).

(chance for useless roll from Sloane phantom against ships is actually 0.140625 (probability to blank, plus crit then crit/blank on reroll, and then square this total because of two red dice)