So, most Rebel ships without Biggs are too lacking to stand on their own. So, Biggs will forever warp the Rebel faction.

But what if there was a ship that had, say, the reinforce action and an EPT called selflessness that maybe did the same thing as Bigg's ability. So now you have two Biggs to choose from. And if that Selflessness ability really was Bigg's ability, you could slap it on something cheaper than Biggs (A-Wing? Z-95?) and have a better squad.

I guess what I'm saying is that as a whole the Rebel faction, with a few occasional outliers here and there, NEEDS a meatshield. Banning Biggs would really hurt a lot of the Rebel ships and cause more harm than good. Let's just add other meatshields.

Yay! Yes! Give me that EPT so I can put it on a TIE Defender with x7! Or Quickdraw! Oooohhhh... Quickdraw and that EPT...

And that's assuming you limit it to small ship only. With large ships, there's some REAL nastiness available with Rebel Captive or Dengar...

Oh, wait. You were just talking about the Rebel faction. Thought you had a good idea for a moment there; I mean, there's a first time for everything, right?

But how would it work if you had Biggs AND the Look Out, Sir - AAAUGH! ept in the same list? or if you gave it to Ahsoka with Captured TIE to completely ruin the day of anyone at PS6 or lower?

And why am I taking another Boba Rick idea so seriously?

Sessiru sort of mimics Biggs. Thing is Sessiru isn't as durable to be taking shots like that.

I think the best way to fix Biggs is to make his ability "Once Per turn".

I would have an EPT that works like Intensity (small ship only- limited) for 1 point.

28 minutes ago, heychadwick said:

I think the best way to fix Biggs is to make his ability "Once Per turn".

That would pretty much remove Biggs from the competitive game, and more so from epic play.

Just now, stonestokes said:

That would pretty much remove Biggs from the competitive game, and more so from epic play.

You act like that's a bad thing.

I still say it's powerful as most tournament lists are 2-3 ships. You can pick which attack it would be (before dice thrown). So, you can snag the worst attack to go towards Biggs. I'd even remove the whole TL attacks can hit other ships bit.

Yeah, I think that would be a bad thing for the game as a whole to weaken the Rebel faction, at least at this point in time.

I'd concede that allowing Biggs to prevent torpedo attacks against friendly ships would ease the sting a bit if his ability got nerfed to once per round.

13 minutes ago, heychadwick said:

You act like that's a bad thing.

I still say it's powerful as most tournament lists are 2-3 ships. You can pick which attack it would be (before dice thrown). So, you can snag the worst attack to go towards Biggs. I'd even remove the whole TL attacks can hit other ships bit.

Quote

I think we're hung up on how good Biggs is and not so much on the sad fact that the Rebels NEED him. Nerfing Biggs really hurts the Rebels as an entire faction - they MUST have a meatshield and there's nothing that can change that.

What I'm suggesting is finding other creative ways of meatshielding for the faction, because if you nerf Biggs the whole Rebel Alliance goes down in flames.

10 minutes ago, Boba Rick said:

I think we're hung up on how good Biggs is and not so much on the sad fact that the Rebels NEED him. Nerfing Biggs really hurts the Rebels as an entire faction - they MUST have a meatshield and there's nothing that can change that.

What I'm suggesting is finding other creative ways of meatshielding for the faction, because if you nerf Biggs the whole Rebel Alliance goes down in flames.

^^This

The rebels were designed with Biggs in mind, so any nerf on him kills 90% of the entire rebel faction that relies on him cause the designers gave rebel ships 1 and 2 agility with no hard green turns and/or no hard 1's on most of their fleet.

To nerf biggs, better bring an expansion pack called "Bye Bye Biggs" and have like 8 mod upgrade cards that says:

"Rebel Only: If your agility is 1, add 2 hull: If your agility is 2, add 1 hull to your ship. You may equip another mod of a different name." You gotta make up for XI waves of designing for Biggs. And in this red dice meta, HULL > Agility

Others have gone over this already, but it's most likely Selflessness will be a cheap discardable EPT allowing the bearer to take the uncancelled hits from an ally at R1 (maaaybe 2?), possibly not including crits so Fangs stay under control.

If true, this gives a nice counter to alpha strikes without duplicating Biggs or making him too much of a monster (two meatshields doesn't leave much room in a list), whilst buffing other fragile-but-potent assets (Kestel?) and not activating e.g. Dengar or Kylo. It'd work best for Rebels, but all might benefit from slightly less alpha...

1 hour ago, heychadwick said:

I think the best way to fix Biggs is to make his ability "Once Per turn".

The only problem I see with that change is how it's power decreases as the number of enemy ships increases. A potentially interesting way to change it might be to "activate" the ability once per turn at a PS step during the combat phase. That would make it really powerful against triple ps9 aces or swarms that share PS, and would make it so that it becomes advantageous to take ships with different PS levels. Might fall under "potentially too good" of course, I haven't given it much thought.

Allow me to repeat, what I wrote in another thread:

Quote

The thing with Biggs is, he is not the problem, he is a symptom. The real problem is Rebel design philosophy vs the way offensive has changed in the game in general.

Since the beginning of the game, the basic consensuses has always been, that Imperials are hard hit, Rebels are hard to kill. Imps have high agility and maneuverability, but a single good shot can take them out. Meanwhile Rebels are easy to hit, but have the HP and occasionally regen to take it. And for a time it worked. Remember, back in the day, the B-Wing was a solid meta choice, because back then, 8 HP where a lot to chew trough. And back then, Biggs saw very little use, because other Rebel ships could function on there own.

But then offensive started to increase in the game, and suddenly the 2-3 extra HP that Rebels had became less and less relevant and unlike Imperials or scum, Rebels don't have cheap, self-sufficient ships. Due to regen being such a powerful ability, every Rebel ship, that is individually good, cost 40+ points.

So while an Imperial list might be:

-"Best Available Ace A"

-"Best Available Ace B"

-"Best Affordable Ace C" or "Support Piece"

Rebels can't afford such built, so most of there small ships list are:

-"Regen Ace"

-"Control piece"

-"Meat-Shield"

And rebels need that Meat-Shield, because, without it, there Ace, that has to carry the game will be alphaed of the table instantly.

So what should FFG do? Imho they should embrace this dynamic. We should not remove Biggs, so we can give Rebels low cost aces, instead we should give Rebles meaningful alternatives to Biggs in form of other Meatshild ships. FFG has already sort of started down this path, with stuff like Rex and Thanen Kyrell but we are not quite there jet.

I agree entirely with Duskwalker.

But the possible card suggested by wurms might work, as long as you then banned or nerfed Biggs.

Personally, I would have reversed the effect of his green dice: at the moment, not only do enemies have to shoot at him, but he can then dodge those attacks. I would change it so he can intercept an amount of hits equal to the evade results he gets, with the rest going through to the original target (and those could be dodged normally). This way using Biggs guarantees that he takes damage.

Biggs is a pain to work through, but it can be done. My take:

I Can Hold It (EPT, 0 Points, Unique)
X-wing Only . When an enemy ship declares an attack on a friendly ship at range 1 of you, they must instead attack you if able.

Errata biggs to have some kind of mildly defensive ability like ""When defending, you may change one of the attacker's focus results to a blank", and boom, you have a new take on rebel life. I'd also include the EPT droid - R2-D6 so that any X-wing can be a rebel meat shield.

The only exploits I can think of are Luke and Poe as super good tanks, but they're also a very expensive damage sink.

14 hours ago, Boba Rick said:

So, most Rebel ships without Biggs are too lacking to stand on their own. So, Biggs will forever warp the Rebel faction.

But what if there was a ship that had, say, the reinforce action and an EPT called selflessness that maybe did the same thing as Bigg's ability. So now you have two Biggs to choose from. And if that Selflessness ability really was Bigg's ability, you could slap it on something cheaper than Biggs (A-Wing? Z-95?) and have a better squad.

I guess what I'm saying is that as a whole the Rebel faction, with a few occasional outliers here and there, NEEDS a meatshield. Banning Biggs would really hurt a lot of the Rebel ships and cause more harm than good. Let's just add other meatshields.

Because Jess.

Also, why not both? Corran, Biggs, Selflessjess.

13 hours ago, heychadwick said:

I think the best way to fix Biggs is to make his ability "Once Per turn".

"When a friendly ship within range 1 of you is declared the target of an attack, you may spend a focus token to have that ship attack you instead"

Done.

Its one per turn if you just leave Biggs to focus but if you build in focus transfers (Kyle, Garven, etc), it could be more. However, since Biggs is giving up his token to do so, its unmodified so he is more likely to take the hits.

I suspect Selflessness will do what Biggs should probably have done all along: when another friendly ship at range 1 of you is hit by an attack, you may take any damage resulting from the attack instead of it. Or words that actually make that functional in x-wing terms.

I'm not sure how letting other X-wings become another Biggs is an improvement over simply having Biggs...

I can see the argument for the more diverse meatshield approach but it's a very tricky path to follow. Already we're starting to see lists like Kanan + Regen Biggs + Rex (faced the list recently and boy is it annoying). Having your firepower reduced from 3 dice to 1 while shooting at a regenerating fighter hiding behind Tactical Jammer is not much fun. Thankfully they can't suppress all your ships like this, but if you lose even just one ship before taking Biggs out, it becomes a very frustrating experience. Going further in that direction could easily end in a NPE territory.

I suppose that since power creep is one of the main reasons why the bulk of rebel fighters are no long considered competitive, it makes sense to introduce power suppression as an antidote of sorts. The problem is that you can easily lose the fun factor in all of that. Already the thing that I dislike about Biggs the most is that he's not really fun for either player. For the player that uses him, he's necessary but not exactly exciting to play. He's got a very basic dial, painfully average statline, not many choices to make (hint: always focus) and totally random (but usually poor) firepower because he has to keep his focus for defence. Sooner or later he dies and that's about all there is to him. For the other player he's just annoying because you have to get rid of him before you can kill stuff you want to kill. He takes one of the crucial decisions in the game - target priority - out of your hands. In general the fewer decisions you get to make, the less fun the game is.

While I haven't played Rex yet, looking at him from the other side of the table I suppose he's largely the same story. He's annoying to the other player but not really very fun for the player using him either, because he hardly ever gets to hit anything. Since for balance reasons we can't have meatshields with good firepower, I suppose every time FFG creates another one we get one step closer to making Rebels the faction that is the least fun to play AND the least fun to play against.

1 hour ago, thespaceinvader said:

I suspect Selflessness will do what Biggs should probably have done all along: when another friendly ship at range 1 of you is hit by an attack, you may take any damage resulting from the attack instead of it. Or words that actually make that functional in x-wing terms.

I think your on to something.

1 hour ago, thespaceinvader said:

I suspect Selflessness will do what Biggs should probably have done all along: when another friendly ship at range 1 of you is hit by an attack, you may take any damage resulting from the attack instead of it. Or words that actually make that functional in x-wing terms.

Isn't that just a Super Draw their Fire?

Also, if it was like that:

Regen Poe
Biggs with R4-D6 droid

Biggs tanks an entire proton Torp, uses droid to take two stress and cancel down to two hits. Poe uses Selflessness and absorbs the hit. End of the round, Poe regens it resulting in one damage to Biggs from a four dice attack and blanks on defense.

Add in Wedge with R2D2/Selflessness and you can cancel out all four damage.

I would not look forward to playing against that.

Selflessness, i think it is more like:
Small Ship Only
When a friendly ship within range 1 of you would suffer damage, you may discard this card to suffer any uncancelled hits and crits instead.

Its one time use. Likely 1 point or even 0 and will never be used as its an EPT and there are far better options.

15 minutes ago, Viktus106 said:

Isn't that just a Super Draw their Fire?

Also, if it was like that:

Regen Poe
Biggs with R4-D6 droid

Biggs tanks an entire proton Torp, uses droid to take two stress and cancel down to two hits. Poe uses Selflessness and absorbs the hit. End of the round, Poe regens it resulting in one damage to Biggs from a four dice attack and blanks on defense.

Add in Wedge with R2D2/Selflessness and you can cancel out all four damage.

I would not look forward to playing against that.

Selflessness, i think it is more like:
Small Ship Only
When a friendly ship within range 1 of you would suffer damage, you may discard this card to suffer any uncancelled hits and crits instead.

Its one time use. Likely 1 point or even 0 and will never be used as its an EPT and there are far better options.

Oh, it will absolutely be used. Extra turn of life for Biggs, protecting Howlrunner/Serissu and probably some hilarious Tomax build are my guesses.

14 minutes ago, Viktus106 said:

Its one time use. Likely 1 point or even 0 and will never be used as its an EPT and there are far better options.

Sooo... we expect FFG to deliver cards that never get used because there are better options. An optimist, aren't you?

1 minute ago, Lightrock said:

Sooo... we expect FFG to deliver cards that never get used because there are better options. An optimist, aren't you?

Well the track record is there, i mean, in no specific order and off the top of my head:

Draw Their Fire
Marksmenship
Elusiveness
Expert Handling
Squad Leader
Expose
Adrenaline Rush
Intimidation
Bodyguard
Stay on Target
Wired

Great ideas, used so little that when you mention them you either get "Oh yeah! I remember that card, what does it do again?" or "Why do you keep trying to make Marksmenship happen?! Let it die man!"

I mean, if I am right, you may see Serissu do it with Pulse Ray Shielding or maybe even Quickdraw but beyond that, I see no practical use for it.

I hope i'm wrong and that it is something else of course.

1 hour ago, Viktus106 said:

Well the track record is there, i mean, in no specific order and off the top of my head:

Draw Their Fire
Marksm a nship
Elusiveness
Expert Handling
Squad Leader
Expose
Adrenaline Rush
Intimidation
Bodyguard
Stay on Target
Wired

Great ideas, used so little that when you mention them you either get "Oh yeah! I remember that card, what does it do again?" or "Why do you keep trying to make Marksmenship happen?! Let it die man!"

I mean, if I am right, you may see Serissu do it with Pulse Ray Shielding or maybe even Quickdraw but beyond that, I see no practical use for it.

I hope i'm wrong and that it is something else of course.

I highlighted the cards that were introduced in Wave II or earlier. It's actually astounding that many cards from that age are still playable- Biggs, R2-D2, Black Squadron Pilot, Academy Pilot, Proton Torps are examples from just the original starter set.

Draw Their Fire is actually somewhat popular on Quickdraw and Commonwealth Defenders with DTF did win a store championship or regional (don't remember which one) last year.

Intimidation was sometimes used on Bumpmasters in the deadeye era.

Adrenaline Rush is a Wave III introduction, and yeah, it is kinda bad.

Bodyguard was a flop, I'll give you that.

Stay on Target was designed by Paul Heaver, so not much to blame FFG for. It's not terrible on Nien with BB8 (reveal 3 forward, roll, change to any speed 3 maneuver, shed stress).

Wired is currently pretty much a dedicated Zeta Leader upgrade. Who, by the way, won a store champ this year equipped with it (and nothing else).

If you want to bash on FFG for upgrades, I'd point at things such as shipping stealth device with agi 2 ships