Source: Top 6 of 8 in Worlds, this year, are Rieekan lists. 3 of the 4 finalists. Overall winner is...Rieekan.

He was not 75% of the lists entered.

So...what to do?

1. Is it enough to just change him so his ability applies to ships, instead of squadrons? Or is that not enough? Or too much?
2. What if, instead, his ability was capped to a certain number of units a turn? IE., "only the first first thing killed in any given turn remains on the table until the end of the turn"? Too much/not enough? (Maybe make that one a player choice? "Once per round, when a friendly ship or friendly unique squadron is destroyed, you may choose to have it remain in the play area and be treated as if it was not destroyed until the end of the Status Phase.")
3. Something else?

Thoughts?

Number 2 could be an interesting idea. I definitely think he should still be able to apply to squadrons, but I could see maybe capping how many things he can apply to. I hesitate to say 1 though, and I think that might not make him worth his cost. It definitely has to be player choice. First allows your opponent to game it. You should always be in control of your own commander.

(1) There is no way to fix Reikaan without flat-out banning him. How would his ability be downgraded and yet preserved? Would raising his cost be enough? You'd have to do something like only let him apply to Large Ships or Large and Medium Ships or something.



(2) PS: What the hell? Demolisher and Rhymer put up very similar showings for the first couple years of the game, always represented in a majority of winning lists at a far greater percentage than they were represented in the overall field. Yet arguments about nerfing them were contentious and ultimately unproductive...neither ever got nerfed. So what makes Riekaan so special that after one major event we should all just hop on the train to nerf town? They were ignored until the meta evolved beyond them.... why shouldn't we just do the same for Reikaan? Is it because he's a Rebel card? Are we wiser now? Will the meta never evolve again? Seriously, I'm curious, after over a year of this board refusing to come to a consensus on the OPness of Demolisher in the game's early waves were it overdefined the meta and Demo never being nerfed, why Riekaan?*


*I say this as someone who hates Reikaan, so don't say I'm just trying to protect "my list" or something. Yes, I've been playing exclusively Reikaan in tournaments since Regionals last year, but nothing is more miserable or pointless than a Reikaan vs Reikaan mirror match, and yes I'd love to see him banned so I'd be at all intrigued by other Rebel admirals.

Rieekan is not OP, he just favors an aggressive play style, that when coupled with a good player, is hard to beat. Every list is weak against something. This year, the field of lists was weak against Rieekan lists.

No Nerf needed. Bring on wave 6, so we can move on to the next op card.

FFG found a way around nerfing Demo by nerfing the thing that made Demo so ubiquitous, i.e. DeMSU. They accomplished this by introducing a way for both sides to cheaply pad activation so that a Demo built around being the first and last activation would be far more taxing and risky. This also "nerfed" other MSU fleets as well ultimately.

It's not even necessarily about making something less powerful, it's about influencing the meta so that it strays away from X vs Counter to X. Too many people successfully predicted the exact final matchup, and the sad thing is, you could have swapped the majority of the top 8 out with the finalists and those predictions would have still been correct. Whether you think a nerf is warranted, you have to at least understand how that's bad for the game as a whole. It's possible wave 6 will introduce new factors that change this meta, without the need for Rieeken to be changed.

More than anything, I want to see 2+3 meta shaken up.

7 minutes ago, cynanbloodbane said:

Rieekan is not OP, he just favors an aggressive play style, that when coupled with a good player, is hard to beat. Every list is weak against something. This year, the field of lists was weak against Rieekan lists.

No Nerf needed. Bring on wave 6, so we can move on to the next op card.

... did you even read what you wrote? What's good against Rieekan? Go ahead, tell me, in fact tell the whole west coast of the US, which has been labouring for months all together to beat Rieekan, we all knew he was going to show up in massive winning proportions beyond his taking. Go ahead. What beats the Rieekan 134 squadron lists and doesn't keel over to everything else Tier1? Really, massive regions, multiple metas of people working on this for 5 months now. Tell us. Since you seem to know the answer.

Rieekan IS the counter to Demo. That was the wave2 response to Demo.

If we're making the argument that there is a hard counter to Rieeken Aces, then why didn't we see that counter effectively at World's. Why, out of the best players in the World, did they all choose to bring Rieeken Aces rather than the counter to Rieeken Aces, when literally everybody knew Rieeken Aces were going to be popular?

I'm not trying to be hostile at all, I think this is a question that needs to be considered and can't just be waved off with "Well it's Armada and everything has a counter."

As I said in other threads, I trust FFG to look at the game and accurately determine whether or not they feel Rieeken will be changed by future releases, or whether or not he needs an errata. I don't have the information they have, so I can't make that decision, but we're past the point of being able to completely write it off as nonsense.

Rieekan wasn't op before.

He may be now.

What's changed?

Flotillas. More unique squadrons.

Right, there's literally nobody that can deny Rieeken has only gotten more powerful, and he was far from a scrub in wave 2 days.

4 minutes ago, Green Knight said:

Rieekan wasn't op before.

He may be now.

What's changed?

Flotillas. More unique squadrons.

Rieekan has been OP for at least 3 months now. If you associate my name with squadrons and frothing, you were warned, you just didn't take me or anyone else from the West Coast meta seriously.

7 minutes ago, Green Knight said:

Rieekan wasn't op before.

He may be now.

What's changed?

Flotillas. More unique squadrons.

Corellian Conflict did make a BIG difference, here. Before, there was only one unique per fighter type (two for the core set fighters).

CC added a lot of new pilots for Rieekan to take advantage of - and some wickedly good ones, too.

11 minutes ago, xanderf said:

Corellian Conflict did make a BIG difference, here. Before, there was only one unique per fighter type (two for the core set fighters).

CC added a lot of new pilots for Rieekan to take advantage of - and some wickedly good ones, too.

don't forget that we also got 4 new uniques in wave 5 too. we went from 9 unique squadrons to 21 unique squadrons.

The difference between the old school OPs (Demo and Rhymer) and Rieekan is that over time we have more ways to counter Demo and Rhymer. Imperials had very few options back then to use, which is why they were so prominent. Rieekan on the other hand has had more tools to use with Corellian Conflict and various upgrades. That is why I think Rieekan needs to be relooked at. The most fair choice I would say is a point increase.

18 minutes ago, Blail Blerg said:

Rieekan has been OP for at least 3 months now. If you associate my name with squadrons and frothing, you were warned, you just didn't take me or anyone else from the West Coast meta seriously.

Huh? Not taking you seriously? What are you frothing about?

Squadrons? If you do recognize my name and think squadrons. I've been saying for months that the exact Yavaris Pelta 3 transports Rieekan 134 bomber squadrons was an OP list.

Come on guys, how is this different to previis Words? There is always a few players who can find a list that is yet to be countered effectively. It happened every WC so far.

7 minutes ago, Norell said:

Come on guys, how is this different to previis Words? There is always a few players who can find a list that is yet to be countered effectively. It happened every WC so far.

I am sorry but I just can't think of a non Rieekan build that can counter a Gallant Haven/Yavaris build fielded by a good player. It. is. HARD. Extremely hard. If you approach the squadrons, you will get torn apart. And if you don't alpha strike, you will still get torn apart as well.

imho the problem is the biggs/rieekan/bomberfleet combo.

1. Biggs: a powerful squadron tool, raises the survivability of your squads dramaticaly.

2. Rieekan:Rieekan turns a Biggsball into nigh unstoppable; you must find a way to SEPERATE them. then you can beat them. just spread out, threaten to attack ships, force them to spread. done

3. Bomberfleet: thats all fine and well when Biggsball is there as fighter cover. but what happens if you have biggs and 2 unique pilots protecting norra wexley and massed bombers? You can't separate them. they KNOW they win any damage race vs ships. they have no reason not to stick together, if you wanna spread out and hurt their ships, np, they'll stick together, attack your ships and outdamage you.

by adding 1, 2 and 3 together, we are now in this conundrum.

5 minutes ago, Blail Blerg said:

Squadrons? If you do recognize my name and think squadrons. I've been saying for months that the exact Yavaris Pelta 3 transports Rieekan 134 bomber squadrons was an OP list.

I don't quite remember seeing a Pelta on the stream?

In all seriousness though, I don't think the problem is Rieekan. Or with Rebel Fighters being too tanky / strong. Or with flotillas inflating activation counts / pushing squadrons for cheap. Or Yavaris double taps. The "problem" is that someone can put these things together to make a list that right now we don't have a particularly good answer for.

We have a big blob of fighters and some carriers pushing them. What do we do? One of three options: kill the fighters (carriers are less effective), kill the carriers (fighters are less effective), avoid the whole thing.

Well, if we go to kill the fighters, we find that with Biggs, Jan, named fighters / Rieekan, Gallant Haven, there's not a good way to kill them quickly. So scratch that plan. On to Plan B!

Trying to kill the carriers, we run into other trouble, and that is Rieekan removes one of our favorite ways of killing carriers without retaliation (alpha strikes). We think to ourselves, that's okay, we still should be able to out-activate the carriers because they are expensive relative to actual combat ships... oh wait flotillas. Well, we can tank a round of shooting and still get the carriers, right? Yavaris double taps.

And all this leaves us with a big thorny brier patch and no particularly good way to pop it.

I am going to be a minority here, but I hope I see a lot of this kind of list in Store Championship season so I have plenty of time to analyze and develop tactics against it that can also work in non-Fighter Blob engagements.

Currently playing around in my head with ideas related to Second Player Objective Shenanigans and MORE FLAK THAN IS PROPER AND RIGHT.

1 minute ago, BiggsIRL said:

Currently playing around in my head with ideas related to Second Player Objective Shenanigans and MORE FLAK THAN IS PROPER AND RIGHT.

Agent Kallus is your man

To triple post here: Top 4 at Worlds is Top 4 at Worlds. Unless one of those 4 players is in your meta, go out and beat your meta at your own store. We can complain more when Nationals roll around.

3 minutes ago, GiledPallaeon said:

Agent Kallus is your man

If only Fulcrum would join the rebellion already.

1 minute ago, BiggsIRL said:

If only Fulcrum would join the rebellion already.

Ashoka is in the game and pretty useful....

1 minute ago, shmitty said:

Ashoka is in the game and pretty useful....

You got me there.