The lightsabers have breach 1 as a quality. The rulebook says, that often heavy and starship weapons have that quality, and that they would ignore 10 soak. Does that mean a lightsaber ignores 10 soak or is that related to bigger weapons, and that a lightsaber on personal scale would ignore 1 soak? Ignoring 10 seems rather strong.. On the other hand..it's a lightsaber

Nope, you're right: Breach 1 means the lightsaber ignores 10 soak at personal scale. They are powerful!

Ok, but if I give my force user a lightsaber with 6 damage, she will not be much more powerful than the guys with ther 9 damage blaster rifles (with the standard opponent having 3-4 soak)

Yes.

Correct. Though the crystal can be modded for more damage (but so can the rifle to be fair.)

The big sexy of sabers is the meeting of the breach and the crit 2. Landing crits with sabers is pretty easy. And since breach also ignores armor 1, critting armor 1 and even 2 on a hot roll is very possible.

14 minutes ago, MasterZelgadis said:

Ok, but if I give my force user a lightsaber with 6 damage, she will not be much more powerful than the guys with ther 9 damage blaster rifles (with the standard opponent having 3-4 soak)

That's correct, and it's fully intentional on the part of the designers as a means of keeping the Force user crowd, especially the Jedi wannabes, from completely dominating the game as they've had an annoying habit of doing in just about every prior Star Wars RPGs but at the same time not being so excessively nerfed that they're underpowered compared to the muggles.

Lightsabers don't start out super-potent (though they're certainly more impressive than they were in prior Star Wars RPGs), but as Ghostofman noted, they can be fairly easily modified to be a lot more impressive. A standard Ilum crystal can, over time and a fair bit of luck, be modded to have Damage 10, Crit 1, Vicious 2, meaning that when your PC hits, it's gonna hurt and has a very good chance of dealing a very painful critical injury. Even just getting an Ilum crystal to Damage 8, Crit 1, Vicious 1 makes for a very impressive weapon.

Longer story is: I am planning to include the Jewel of Yavin adventure into my campaign. So my force user will be able to get the Jewel and make a saber crystal out of it (getting the stats of a normal unmodded saber). A bit later I will "unlock" a modification, and somewhere at knight level she will get her krayt dragon pearl (after a tough side quest of course...)

Also, if you're concerned about the power of Lightsabers, consider that depending on when your game is set, another "restriction" on Lightsaber use/power is: that often, Lightsaber = Jedi (to everyone, even if you're not) = Enemy of the State #1.

Any time my Soresu pops the 'saber, generally it's a situation where it's "ok" if no one lives to tell the tale.

Not to mention, ppl/groups who have someone charging at them with a Lightsaber tend to want to kill that Lightsaber with fire. Quickly. It's like holding a sign that says; "Shoot me please."

Two of my lightsaber toting Jedi almost met their demise at the hands of an Acklay. When you knock someone down and hamstring them it puts a serious damper on a Jedi's ability to mitigate damage.

In my game I have two Jedi characters. I ended up handing them very nice lightsaber crystals (Krayt Dragon). One of them also has an Extended Hilt.

They do NOT keep up in terms of damage output compared to the Hired Gun/Heavy/Bodyguard PC with a nice (but purchasable at character creation with Obligation) blaster rifle (without Autofire) who has also purchased and modded an Augmented Spin Barrel. The Jedi can get nastier crits but the Hired Gun just blows them away.

I wouldn't worry about a lightsaber upsetting the game balance.

You never seen someone Jury rig a weapon down to a crit 1 before?

10 minutes ago, Decorus said:

You never seen someone Jury rig a weapon down to a crit 1 before?

No need to jury rig, some crystals allow crit 1. And some lightsaber talents too.

No I'm talking Blasters why would you jury rig a lightsaber...

Auto fire lightsaber!!!

1 hour ago, Decorus said:

No I'm talking Blasters why would you jury rig a lightsaber...

Sorry, this was a lightsaber thread. Didn't comprehend your full question.

But there are some crit 2 blasters + disrupters. Jury rig those.

2 hours ago, TheShard said:

Auto fire lightsaber!!!

You monster...

Lightsabers are not the scary big bad people make them out to be. Terrifying is watching someone shoot a Rancor with a blaster and have it explode into gooey bits of flesh.

3 hours ago, Decorus said:

No I'm talking Blasters why would you jury rig a lightsaber...

Why wouldn't you jury rig a lightsaber?

Because the Jury rig equivalent talent is absolute trash and I've never understood the idea of picking up an outside spec that limits your force rating for a single talent.

8 hours ago, Decorus said:

Because the Jury rig equivalent talent is absolute trash and I've never understood the idea of picking up an outside spec that limits your force rating for a single talent.

I think there is an issue with both Jury Rig and Imbue Item, in that the bonuses you can get are not internally balanced. Reducing activation cost for Crit or Autofire is by far the most bang for the buck. I'm not sure the balance between them is that bad in theory, as Jury Rig is fixed, whereas Imbue Item can choose where and when to use it. However, because you pretty much always want to reduce Crit or Autofire depending on weapon, that is why it doesn't balance.

The biggest techie imbalance is between Tinkerer (add one HP to one item once), and Intuitive Improvements (add one or two HP to any number of items).

Imbue is really useful on items that you wouldn't necessarily jury rig for a super long time. Grenades are a common Jury Rig option to reduce the blast down to 1 advantage. Unless your using a crystal that has has a crit of 3 or greater, jury rigging a lightsaber will probably only net one extra damage or reduce it's size. Jury rig is more useful for personal items you intend to use a lot; armour and the like.

Being a Gadgetter that graduated into artisan after a really long time, I very rarely use tinker, but Intuitive Improvements literally allows for endless weapon combinations. If I actually charged the party for my services I would be a trillionare*! XD

Imbue has the problem of Costing strain per round and requiring you to commit a force die.

You are being penalized twice for the same talent. If it was one or the other it would not be a trash talent, but the flexibility is simply not worth it.

Imbue is awesome, because it basically is a flexible jurry rigging. Reducing cost from autofire from 2 advantages to 1 one is worth the little strain and force dice. And if you are a good shot, maybe even a sharpshooter you actually might regenerate strain thanks to the saved advantage costs for autofire / critical hits.

On 18.7.2017 at 3:36 PM, MasterZelgadis said:

Longer story is: I am planning to include the Jewel of Yavin adventure into my campaign. So my force user will be able to get the Jewel and make a saber crystal out of it (getting the stats of a normal unmodded saber). A bit later I will "unlock" a modification, and somewhere at knight level she will get her krayt dragon pearl (after a tough side quest of course...)

Sounds like a plan.

IIRC the Jewel of Yavin crystal seems to be a cracked kyber-crystal one from the deathstar, stats for those are in disciples of harmony on page 52. As I don't want to be just a tease here are the stats:

Damage 7, Crit 3, Breach 2, Sunder, Vicious 1, Rarity 10, requires two hardpoints.

Special rules:
If the user rolls a despair on a combat check with his lightsaber, the GM may shatter the crystal and the lightsaber reverts back to its old stats and loses the boni from using this scattered crystal.
Furthermore the lightsaber needs to be adjusted to actually fit one of the remains from the death star crystal. They don't hand out rules for that, but I would assume some sort of a mechanic check.

The Corusca gem in JoY has no relation with the Death Star. It's a type of rare jewel that is created in the gas giants like Yavin. Also we have no stats whatsoever so those must be invented, or you can use a normal ilum crysta as that seems to be the basic type of kyber crystal.

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