I love the idea of a loku mak team with mhd-19 and talos. how many of you think that would work?

our imp player gave us the option of swiching one out, we rebels are not competitive but the imp is.

i gather hoth is rebel friendly.

what would we need to do to win our next mission with the heroes above, we will probably keep them all.

Yes, Return to Hoth appears very rebel-friendly, especially for good rebel players.

MHD-19 is very good in Hoth, because often the rebels have activation advantage and can also stall by MHD passing out focused (using Adrenaline Stim). Verena's close-combat abilities are a small gamble - the rebels do want to shoot from afar.

Loku is definitely the weak link and if you're having trouble winning then dump him for Fenn or something. However you should be fine if you can keep pulling strain off Verena with MHD-19 and by giving her good surge generating weapons, so you can use her Close Quarters as often as possible. Between Duck and Weave and Improvised Cover she can be practically unkillable if played well. With Combat Momentum, Combat Mastery and Close Quarters she can seriously wreck a lot of Imperials every turn.

Mak with Execute can get those officers off the board (Hoth has a LOT of officers) and his other abilities can make him a good utility character and Decoy can really annoy the Imperials.

If you need to defeat specific figures, there are several of those missions in Return to Hoth, then Loku wins you missions with Combat Spotter totally removing the imperial player's line of sight blocking strategy. Mak can only use Target Acquired once per round, while Combat Spotter can be used for all attacks by any rebel figure. I would say Combat Spotter is one of the most miscosted class card in the game.

33 minutes ago, a1bert said:

If you need to defeat specific figures, there are several of those missions in Return to Hoth, then Loku wins you missions with Combat Spotter totally removing the imperial player's line of sight blocking strategy. Mak can only use Target Acquired once per round, while Combat Spotter can be used for all attacks by any rebel figure. I would say Combat Spotter is one of the most miscosted class card in the game.

Except the "several" missions you mention usually means 0 to 1. Also Imperial line of sight blocking isn't a strategy and Combat Spotter is a worthless over-priced card. The only reason you could POSSIBLY think Combat Spotter is any good is because Loku sucks so much he isn't removing Imperials from the board. Had you picked any other hero there wouldn't be huge masses of Imperials brutally slaughtering you and able to completely surround your target.

1 hour ago, Union said:

Except the "several" missions you mention usually means 0 to 1.

Two of the three compulsory missions in the campaign meet this criteria, along with a 50/50 chance of one of the two other story missions, two of the four threat missions and two of the four hero side missions for this squad. That would be 2 to 7.

2 hours ago, a1bert said:

If you need to defeat specific figures, there are several of those missions in Return to Hoth, then Loku wins you missions with Combat Spotter totally removing the imperial player's line of sight blocking strategy. Mak can only use Target Acquired once per round, while Combat Spotter can be used for all attacks by any rebel figure. I would say Combat Spotter is one of the most miscosted class card in the game.

Loku is brutal in Hoth. We had Loku, Murne, Biv and Davith. No Fenn, no Gideon and it was fun, with Loku's Combat Spotter turing out to be extremely useful.

I would argue that Loku is at best barely useful in any given scenario, certainly not brutal. Yes, I realise that he can make the blocking tactic difficult, but this is a tactic that doesn't work against the top tier heroes anyway as they will simply kill the blocking units instead.

lots of people are talking down loku like they did't give him a better weapon. did you ever change his weapon?

do not forget about the 4 xp card that he has a +evade and + accuracy, with recover 2 strain when a figure with a recon token is killed.

that is like a savings account of strain.

i realize the trandoshen hunters.

Yeah, I don't really know why people aren't into Loku. He's not the best hero, sure, but he can do some pretty good stuff, and he's pretty good at not only dealing large damage to single figures, but at helping other heroes do so as well.

It feels like we've had these Loku discussions a thousand times before, but I'll throw my two cents in again.

In a mission where the objective is "kill this imperial figure", I would say that Loku is the best hero in the game to the point where some of these missions can almost feel tilted in the rebels' favour. This is particularly true if you are playing with 4 heroes, allowing everybody else to rack up the damage after he puts on his recon token. I'd say the only one that could rival him in this situation might be a Mak built up to deal high amounts of single-target damage, but even then that Mak build requires a whole bunch of XP and a good gun, whereas Loku's recon tokens are available right from the start of first mission. I guess Onar's "Don't make me hurt you" ability could put him in the running as well, but again that's a 4XP skill.

What about the other, more standard missions? When you're not taking down a "big bad" I still think that Loku can be very useful, but just not to the level of some of the other heroes. He fills a similar role to Vinto, adding +1 damage here and there to everyone's attacks, but the difference is that Loku must commit his +1 damage before the rolls are made whereas Vinto can wait and see the results before pinging them for that last hit point. This means that sometimes with Loku you end up overkilling the enemy and wasting the token.

Finally, don't underestimate Loku's 1XP ability to put a token on a crate to allow someone to pick up the crate without using an action. A lucky crate item draw can save a mission, and the extra ~200 credits per mission are incredibly useful over the course of a long campaign. The fact that you can get all this without wasting one of your actions is just huge.

TL;DR

Loku is a fine hero overall, he's just stuck in his niche and is not a versatile jack-of-all-trades kind of guy. In a mission where you need to focus down a single enemy he is amazing, in most other missions he's still good but there are stronger choices.

18 hours ago, Norgrath said:

Two of the three compulsory missions in the campaign meet this criteria, along with a 50/50 chance of one of the two other story missions, two of the four threat missions and two of the four hero side missions for this squad. That would be 2 to 7.

No. Anything adjacent acts as a guard in Homefront, Loku is useless. Our Last Hope Imperials can screen terminals which Loku can't target, requiring Rebels to clear the Imperials, so again, Loku is useless. Those are the only 2 missions that will come up as required meaning... ZERO missions Loku is useful in.

I'm not even going to bother looking at the optional missions, because even if you can "screen" someone, again, had you just taken a decent hero like Fenn, he'd just kill the screen rather than leave them on the board to wound out your heroes.

You can't justify buying a card that is useful in ZERO missions.

As an addendum to my last post, for those of you who aren't worried about people blocking line of sight to the imperial boss I'll just point out that you don't even need "combat spotter" to make Loku super useful in those situations.

So you're up against a boss character with a whole bunch of health and you've only got one round left to take him out. Activate Loku first - let's consider this the worst-case scenario where Loku doesn't have line-of-sight, so he takes his turn doing whatever and adds a recon token to the boss at the end. Now the other three heroes go and they all use their actions to attack the boss (assuming strain moves or whatever to get into position). That's 6 extra damage to the boss. Even if all the other heroes can't get two attacks in, you're still talking 4-5 extra damage (and more if Loku was able to put the token down at the beginning and attack on his turn).

And that's only one round - that token remains on the enemy unit and the damage keeps building the next turn as well (although you won't find much that can survive against this for very long).

So basically in this situation Loku's got an ability that effectively says "for two strain (and no actions), deal 4-8 unblockable damage per round to a single enemy unit." Tell me that you wouldn't be excited to see an ability like that, and then tell me that Loku's not the top hero in the game for single-target damage.

6 minutes ago, ManateeX said:

It feels like we've had these Loku discussions a thousand times before, but I'll throw my two cents in again.

In a mission where the objective is "kill this imperial figure", I would say that Loku is the best hero in the game to the point where some of these missions can almost feel tilted in the rebels' favour. This is particularly true if you are playing with 4 heroes, allowing everybody else to rack up the damage after he puts on his recon token. I'd say the only one that could rival him in this situation might be a Mak built up to deal high amounts of single-target damage, but even then that Mak build requires a whole bunch of XP and a good gun, whereas Loku's recon tokens are available right from the start of first mission. I guess Onar's "Don't make me hurt you" ability could put him in the running as well, but again that's a 4XP skill.

What about the other, more standard missions? When you're not taking down a "big bad" I still think that Loku can be very useful, but just not to the level of some of the other heroes. He fills a similar role to Vinto, adding +1 damage here and there to everyone's attacks, but the difference is that Loku must commit his +1 damage before the rolls are made whereas Vinto can wait and see the results before pinging them for that last hit point. This means that sometimes with Loku you end up overkilling the enemy and wasting the token.

Finally, don't underestimate Loku's 1XP ability to put a token on a crate to allow someone to pick up the crate without using an action. A lucky crate item draw can save a mission, and the extra ~200 credits per mission are incredibly useful over the course of a long campaign. The fact that you can get all this without wasting one of your actions is just huge.

TL;DR

Loku is a fine hero overall, he's just stuck in his niche and is not a versatile jack-of-all-trades kind of guy. In a mission where you need to focus down a single enemy he is amazing, in most other missions he's still good but there are stronger choices.

The "kill x figure" are overall very rare and almost none of them is screening even an option for the Imperials. Even if it were an option a decent hero would just kill the screen anyway. I've played almost every mission now at least once and many several times and I can't think of a single mission this helps in. There are almost, what, around 100 missions now and his ability is actually useful in a couple at best. That is a worthless ability.

You're saying his bonus damage is good, but it's not. It's 2 strain to apply it and if you compare what 2 strain buys any other hero it's very clearly a bad ability that will not get it's value. To make matters worse, it requires using one of his tokens, which are required to power ALL of his abilities, making him uniquely the hero that can't even use all his abilities at once, which really makes him the Universal Champion Of Being A *** Hero.

Comparing him to Vinto adding +1 to everyone's attacks is silly. For 2 strain he can add +1 to attacks against 1 character IF Loku goes first. Vinto for 1 strain can do 1 damage to every enemy within 3 which often means 3 or more wounds. These abilities aren't even in the same class, Vinto is major league and Loku is a pee wee with his helmet on backwards.

As for Loku's crate ability, yup, it's good. That is the 1 good thing about him, at least in a full campaign... It's not so hot in the short campaigns.

3 minutes ago, Union said:

The "kill x figure" are overall very rare and almost none of them is screening even an option for the Imperials. Even if it were an option a decent hero would just kill the screen anyway. I've played almost every mission now at least once and many several times and I can't think of a single mission this helps in. There are almost, what, around 100 missions now and his ability is actually useful in a couple at best. That is a worthless ability.

You're saying his bonus damage is good, but it's not. It's 2 strain to apply it and if you compare what 2 strain buys any other hero it's very clearly a bad ability that will not get it's value. To make matters worse, it requires using one of his tokens, which are required to power ALL of his abilities, making him uniquely the hero that can't even use all his abilities at once, which really makes him the Universal Champion Of Being A *** Hero.

Comparing him to Vinto adding +1 to everyone's attacks is silly. For 2 strain he can add +1 to attacks against 1 character IF Loku goes first. Vinto for 1 strain can do 1 damage to every enemy within 3 which often means 3 or more wounds. These abilities aren't even in the same class, Vinto is major league and Loku is a pee wee with his helmet on backwards.

As for Loku's crate ability, yup, it's good. That is the 1 good thing about him, at least in a full campaign... It's not so hot in the short campaigns.

But you're talking about it like that two strain gets you +1 damage, when it's getting you +1 damage for every single attack until that character is dead.

As IP, I thought the Verena/Loku combo was pretty tough. I couldn't play swarms of troops because Verena would mow them down but I couldn't play big strong figures because Loku would wreck them, or allow everyone else to wreck them. Plus, if Verena was adjacent to my boss/tank when it went down, she'd be standing there with a big gun in her hand and an extra attack to use it.

In my Hoth campaign:

Imps - Precision class deck
Rebels - Shyla, Onar, Loku, MHD

In our campaign, MHD really isn't very valuable. If the Imps focus-fire, most of the Rebels can get bursted down to being wounded in 1 round. His healing is too late most of the time. The guy playing MHD regrets choosing him.

Loku is okay. He almost made me lose my Jabba villian mission because there was no Line of Sight blocked! I was 1 damage away from losing. Thankfully I rolled a 3-block haha.
Shyla is amazing. 2nd to Diala (whom we use in another campaign).
Onar is really good. With his Hand Cannon, and being focused, and with Don't Make Me Hurt You, he took out my whole deployment of Elite Jet Troopers in one turn BOOM BOOM! Dead dead.

MHD being able to pick up Adrenal Stims and giving focused to other heroes is very powerful in the early game, specially in the first side mission when the rebels are possibly still in their starter weapons. And on top of that he gets focused himself for giving out focused (for not attacking).

On a lot of Hoth missions rebels can start with MHD because the imperial troops are too far away to do any damage. Either the imperial troops come closer to be wiped out by the second hero activating or they waste an activation anyway.

I think the Loku and Mak dynamic is an interesting one if only for the interaction between Scouting Report and Expertise. Loku tokens a crate and by picking it up Mak gets three actions for the round.

Union, I don't necessarily agree or disagree with you because I haven't been involved in a campaign that used Loku, but there are holes in your arguments.

2 hours ago, Union said:

You're saying his bonus damage is good, but it's not. It's 2 strain to apply it and if you compare what 2 strain buys any other hero it's very clearly a bad ability that will not get it's value. To make matters worse, it requires using one of his tokens, which are required to power ALL of his abilities, making him uniquely the hero that can't even use all his abilities at once, which really makes him the Universal Champion Of Being A *** Hero.

I don't know about this, five of his eight cards involve a token assigned to any enemy so I don't think this is the place to complain that "it requires one of his tokens." Two of those five let you put a token on another enemy for free, and another let's you recover 2 strain when one is killed. He's built around this. If you want to complain about putting tokens on a card or an ally so they might be useful later then this would be a better point.

2 hours ago, Union said:

Comparing him to Vinto adding +1 to everyone's attacks is silly. For 2 strain he can add +1 to attacks against 1 character IF Loku goes first. Vinto for 1 strain can do 1 damage to every enemy within 3 which often means 3 or more wounds.

You're comparing a 4 XP card to a starting ability. I think ManateeX was comparing the two starting abilities, +1 damage to all attacks against 1 target vs +1 to another target. Which is better is purely situational and I agree with you regarding which situation is more common, but I don't think the comparison is silly. Now, if you want to compare the 4XP cards of the two characters: 2 strain and exhaust to add an attack die vs exhaust for +3 damage?

3 hours ago, Union said:

No. Anything adjacent acts as a guard in Homefront, Loku is useless. Our Last Hope Imperials can screen terminals which Loku can't target, requiring Rebels to clear the Imperials, so again, Loku is useless. Those are the only 2 missions that will come up as required meaning... ZERO missions Loku is useful in.

I'm not even going to bother looking at the optional missions, because even if you can "screen" someone, again, had you just taken a decent hero like Fenn, he'd just kill the screen rather than leave them on the board to wound out your heroes.

You can't justify buying a card that is useful in ZERO missions.

Firstly, I wasn't talking about combat spotter and how useful it is subjectively I was talking about facts: It is fact that in at least 2 missions in any RTH campaign and potentially 5 (or probably 6, I haven't looked at side missions other than the hero ones and threat missions) more given the heroes we're dealing with the rebel player has to kill specific figures (in particular they have to kill Sorin in Our Last Hope, twice). If you want to make it entirely about screening that rules out 3 of the missions but you're still looking at 1-4 missions.

Being subjective, your argument of "just kill the screen" is imbecilic given that often killing the figure ends the mission (okay sometimes not immediately but killing the figure will progress you towards winning the mission whereas killing the screen will progress you towards killing the figure) . Not having to kill a screen will speed up a kill on a specific figure in nearly any situation (especially when the IP can often replace the screen).

It's interesting that ATM2100 asked about Loku and MHD-19, in connection with the Hoth campaign and some, from actually playing Loku in Hoth, have given great reviews of him.

Others have pointed out that he is not the best hero (he isn't - especially compared to Fenn) but he is great in Hoth. His Combat Spotter won four games in our campaign. It would be interesting to see how he does in the Core

How often do you see this massive screen of Imperial units that prevents everyone from seeing the big, bad guy?

I have tried giving Loku a better weapon and he does indeed do damage, entirely because of the weapon. So does Gideon if you give him a proper weapon. Loku has no skills apart from his starting skill that gives extra damage. Yes, his crate skill is good and Mon Cala is good, the rest I see as mediocre at best.

11 hours ago, caseycheesecake said:

Rebels - Shyla, Onar, Loku, MHD

In our campaign, MHD really isn't very valuable. If the Imps focus-fire, most of the Rebels can get bursted down to being wounded in 1 round. His healing is too late most of the time. The guy playing MHD regrets choosing him.

You have a team that is very hard to burst down in 1 round, at least once Onar gets his armor and Shyla gets her free evade. MHD-19 can take his bonus movement and his card to prevent a hero from being wounded if you're having this problem. But I'd suggest the real problem is you have Loku and you're simply not taking stuff off the board fast enough...

13 hours ago, ManateeX said:

But you're talking about it like that two strain gets you +1 damage, when it's getting you +1 damage for every single attack until that character is dead.

We're just finishing up another JR campaign and even using Indomitable on Bossk he's dying in a couple hits. That is the absolute best case scenario for that ability. The AVERAGE case for Loku's +1 damage is that it does 0 because it was overkill on a trooper. It doesn't trigger on cleaves, on blasts or on Vinto's bonus damage and you can't apply it to objectives. It's a horrible ability. I've played Loku through core, TS and Hoth and he's garbage.

10 hours ago, Uninvited Guest said:

You're comparing a 4 XP card to a starting ability. I think ManateeX was comparing the two starting abilities, +1 damage to all attacks against 1 target vs +1 to another target. Which is better is purely situational and I agree with you regarding which situation is more common, but I don't think the comparison is silly. Now, if you want to compare the 4XP cards of the two characters: 2 strain and exhaust to add an attack die vs exhaust for +3 damage?

I compared it to more than just that one ability. You're welcome to compare it to whatever you want, use Jynn's bonus attack, it's 2 strain... for an entire attack which you can get a surge to turn it into 1 strain and can trigger all her abilities off of and will do far more than a stupid +1 damage.

Compare it to Verena, 2 strain... get 1 back from surge... triggers all her combat abilities, does way more than 1 damage.

Biv 1 strain, reroll 1 die, average will be better than Loku's ability.

Saska 1 strain, give an on demand surge, better than Loku's ability, costs half as much. Has 8 tokens, not 2.

Diala 2 strain, remove that white die because no you can't dodge, better than Loku's ability.

Fenn 1 strain blast 1... FAR better than Loku's and the fact that you can make it blast 2 makes him busted.

Mak 1 strain pierce 2... half the cost of Loku's ability, often doing twice the damage.

7 hours ago, Dark Reaper said:

How often do you see this massive screen of Imperial units that prevents everyone from seeing the big, bad guy?

It doesn't necessarily have to be a massive screen of units. If some heros are off accomplishing tasks just a few well placed and/or beefy imperials can block line of sight. One Hoth mission requires terminal use and officer killing. Loku shone in that one.

Bottom line ATM, go with a fun for you hero.

9 hours ago, Union said:

I compared it to more than just that one ability. You're welcome to compare it to whatever you want, use Jynn's bonus attack, it's 2 strain... for an entire attack which you can get a surge to turn it into 1 strain and can trigger all her abilities off of and will do far more than a stupid +1 damage.

Compare it to Verena, 2 strain... get 1 back from surge... triggers all her combat abilities, does way more than 1 damage.

Biv 1 strain, reroll 1 die, average will be better than Loku's ability.

Saska 1 strain, give an on demand surge, better than Loku's ability, costs half as much. Has 8 tokens, not 2.

Diala 2 strain, remove that white die because no you can't dodge, better than Loku's ability.

Fenn 1 strain blast 1... FAR better than Loku's and the fact that you can make it blast 2 makes him busted.

Mak 1 strain pierce 2... half the cost of Loku's ability, often doing twice the damage.

Union, I don't want to belabour this discussion any more since I know I'm never going to change your mind, so we'll just have to agree to disagree. But for the OP and anybody else who is reading this, consider the fact that there are plenty of people in this thread and others who have successfully used Loku in all sorts of campaigns and have had a good time with him. He's not an excels-in-every-situation hero like Gideon, Diala and Fenn, but he's good at what he does, his recon tokens add a fun layer of strategy and he's certainly not anywhere close to as bad as Union suggests here.

As far as these specific abilities, the key is that they're all better or worse in different situations. Jynn's attack is great - unless the imperial player positions their units so that you can't trigger it (or at least you can't trigger it against the figure you really want to kill). Saska's tokens give a surge which with some weapons is almost as likely to be wasted as it is to be used, and only applies to one attack (where Loku's token stays in place until the figure dies). Mak, Diala and Biv's abilities are going to result in more than 1 damage in many situations, but not always, and again only for a single attack. Again, sometimes these abilities are better, sometimes they are worse, it's all situational.

So ATM, if you're interested in a Loku/Mak team than by all means bring them both along, since with Loku setting the big targets up and Mak knocking them down they compliment each other well. Add in Verena to get in close and take care of low-health enemies like stormtroopers and I think you guys will have a good time.