Just now, Jo Jo said:

While very true, alpha strikes eat Tie/Ds for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Exactly. Even other Joust list are better.

sad but true

Tie/D ion wrecks 1 agi and drop on reveal bombs (and people keep crying genius, but if you can't avoid a 1-foward genius that you know is coming that's entirely on you) but they're so squish

they're (slightly) more durable than/equivalent to LWF SF, but also more expensive and at a far lesser PS

Bring BTL-A4 Y's with ICT, and either unhinged or R2 astromech. But if you insist on playing the baddies, maybe a TIE/ag with ICT. Both are cheap ion givers.

2 hours ago, BlodVargarna said:

Nym bumps and drops bombs.

Keep Soontir away from him.

I say: "Git Gud Son!"

"Just don't ever be near this ship that moves after you," isn't a strategy. I really hate it when people are like: "All you have to do to not die instantly is not play the game. Just move Soontir to another table and you'll be fine!"

or you could put something between the squishy ace and the thing that's going to nuke it?

this is a game about tactics, maneuvering and positioning featuring more ships than just soontir v nym, adjust tactics accordingly

unless you fly nothing but squishy aces, but then you're skewing your list and should be prepared for getting curbstomped by bad matchups like all skews are

It's the same conundrum as Soontir versus K Wings - it's certainly possible to outfly them to the point where you can kill them - but it takes you 3 to 5 rounds of good shots on target to do it.

It takes them one action to kill you.

They can afford to make 3 to 5 mistakes before they die.

You can't afford to make even one.

Nym has the same issue, with the added bonus that he moves after you and is likely doing autodamage in two different ways.

well that's why we call it a bad match-up

problem is we're still just having soontir duke it out solo against a SCURRG. Concentrated fire should down the slightly beefier B-wing in 2-3 rounds.

SF are also great compliments to soonts because they're very good at countering Nym's close-range effectiveness by simply turning tail and running. They're also PS 9s to hit soontir's PS and QD even triggers off of bombs (unlike dengar)

Looking at these graphs, I actually thought it was going to be much, much worse.

Don't get me wrong, it's probably correct to at least think about raising the alarm, but the city is not on fire yet. Not by a long shot.

The Krayts said it very well in this last podcast I think.

A bad matchup should be 60/40 or 70/30 because that still means you get a game - it's uphill but you've got a chance. The specialists we see now are often so mismatched that it's more like 90/10. That's a direct outcome of the silver bullet design ethos that FFG prefers.

The more you load up the extremes of game mechanics the more you create imbalances that require even more load on opposite extremes, and the game begins to oscillate out of control. A bad thing is solved by introducing a worse thing which is solved by introducing an even worse thing.

6 minutes ago, DampfGecko said:

Looking at these graphs, I actually thought it was going to be much, much worse.

Don't get me wrong, it's probably correct to at least think about raising the alarm, but the city is not on fire yet. Not by a long shot.

Agreed. There's really only two things that alarm me.

The gap between Tier 1 and Tier 1.5 is very real. The dominance of turrets (and turrets supported by more turrets and more ordnance) is as bad as I've ever seen it and it's not creating a pleasant game experience.

27 minutes ago, ficklegreendice said:

well that's why we call it a bad match-up

problem is we're still just having soontir duke it out solo against a SCURRG. Concentrated fire should down the slightly beefier B-wing in 2-3 rounds.

SF are also great compliments to soonts because they're very good at countering Nym's close-range effectiveness by simply turning tail and running. They're also PS 9s to hit soontir's PS and QD even triggers off of bombs (unlike dengar)

So why even play the game? Just compare lists before the game, decide who's is better (auto damage doesn't require luck anyway), and declare a victor! Why waste time playing the game when the outcome is purely Rock-Paper-Scissors?

9 minutes ago, SOTL said:

The Krayts said it very well in this last podcast I think.

A bad matchup should be 60/40 or 70/30 because that still means you get a game - it's uphill but you've got a chance. The specialists we see now are often so mismatched that it's more like 90/10. That's a direct outcome of the silver bullet design ethos that FFG prefers.

The more you load up the extremes of game mechanics the more you create imbalances that require even more load on opposite extremes, and the game begins to oscillate out of control. A bad thing is solved by introducing a worse thing which is solved by introducing an even worse thing.

Exactly. The more it oscillates, the less and less incentive we have to actually put ships on the table and play. I've actually witnessed two interactions where local players actually declined playing a game because they knew their list couldn't beat the other player's due to hard counters. Hard to argue with a triple Interceptor player declining to play a game with Nym. You just look at the lists, and say, "Yep, you have Nym, you win. GG"

3 minutes ago, Johen Dood said:

So why even play the game? Just compare lists before the game, decide who's is better (auto damage doesn't require luck anyway), and declare a victor! Why waste time playing the game when the outcome is purely Rock-Paper-Scissors?

because you can build lists that aren't hard countered by a single matchup? it really isn't that difficult

soontir just doesn't lend himself to not getting ****** by bad matchups. He needs bid to arcdodge other 9s, he needs to avoid getting blocked by int agent bumpmasters, and he needs to avoid all forms of auto damage, not just bombs, because he's a low health high agility ship

He's a very needy little bastard, and you need to compensate using the other 2/3rds of the list

2 minutes ago, ficklegreendice said:

because you can build lists that aren't hard countered by a single matchup? it really isn't that difficult

You mean a single ship. Nym basically invalidates all fragile ships in one fell swoop- his presence in the game makes ALL fragile less than PS10 ships obsolete.

43 minutes ago, ficklegreendice said:

or you could put something between the squishy ace and the thing that's going to nuke it?

this is a game about tactics, maneuvering and positioning featuring more ships than just soontir v nym, adjust tactics accordingly

unless you fly nothing but squishy aces, but then you're skewing your list and should be prepared for getting curbstomped by bad matchups like all skews are

Define "Squishy," because plenty of tough ships will melt to Nym + wingman before enough damage goes through on Nym. 10hp/1agi is plenty when you only have to fight against 2/3 of a list with the full strength of yours.

The ace can't contribute meaningfully to the fight, because if he gets too close, he's just off the board. Nym has respectable offensive output, and his wingman/men DEFINITELY do. It isn't just about surviving Nym. It's about burning him down while you still have enough ships left to compete with whatever's left. He hard-counters aces outright. He hard-counters anything that can't shrug off a loss of 2-5 health. That obviously leaves a large pool of ships, but it's definitely "not aces"

It's a hard enough counter that you can't outfly it-- I've had games of flawless execution with a couple aces plus a tank that I didn't even come close to winning against Dengar/Nym. It's one thing for a bad matchup to be an uphill battle, but borderline unwinnable matchups are bad for the game. "Just bring 'x' if you want to deal with 'y'" might be a solution, but if all of 'z' ships have to stay on the shelf due to one common unwinnable matchup, it's obnoxious.

It's not the end of the world, but it lowers the diversity and fun of the game for sure

nym's damage output for 40 points is only respectable at extreme close range, and is horrendously overcosted at every other range. His defensive capabilities for his cost are always utter ****. He is a ship with easily identifiable and appreciable weaknesses.

Dengar, however, is ****** and his track record (and that of the jump's in general) quite clearly indicates this. As I said, cutting him down to size makes it easier to see how Nym's capabilities are incredibly overblown on the forums.

Nym is a good ship, which is kinda something we want unless we're fans of FFG releasing useless expansions. He is not the harbinger of the x-wing apocalypse just because he further pushes out an archetype that hasn't been terribly relevant since the palp nerf (or since the initial x7 drop from what I've seen, those guys were everywhere)

Soontir has been all but gone ever since Imp Veterans and there's certainly more than just Nym keeping him down right now. But it's also true that Nym is keeping more than just Soontir down.

I'm not overly interested in getting into the specifics of a Nym vs Soontir discussion. More widely I think it highlights yet another case where secondary weapons are theoretically great for diverse game experience but that finding the sweet spot for where they're 'good enough' and not 'too good' is extremely challenging and FFG maybe hasn't hit that sweet spot yet. IMHO secondary weapons that either hugely over-modify big attacks or ignore defense dice are a problem, mechanically, because of how they selectively punish certain ship chassis types over others. I think the game is probably better off when secondary weapons are mostly bad than when they're mostly good - I'd prefer to see a list that splashes a torpedo or bomb into the list than those which rely so heavily on them.

Bombs dealing unpreventable damage is a bit naff because you're at danger of removing player agency from the opponent in being able to repel the attacks. Having too much control over where those bombs are then dropped exacerbates that by also removing player agency from whether you can avoid the attack given that you can't repel it. That's why lies behind the Advanced SLAM issues, and it's why Advanced Sensors Nym with Genius is also a problem.

Removing player agency is the hallmark of an NPE.

Honestly they just need to change bomb rules to: "When you take damage from a bomb, roll 1 green dice for each damage taken, up to your Agility score. Each <evasion> cancels one damage, and focus tokens can be used as normal to change <focus> rolls to <evasion>."

So as a for example, an Interceptor would get to roll 2 green dice against a bomblet that rolled hit+crit.

Or heck, go whole hog against all auto-damage:

"When you take damage from a bomb or automatic damage source, roll 1 green dice for each damage taken, up to your Agility score. Each <evasion> cancels one damage, and focus tokens can be used as normal to change <focus> rolls to <evasion>."

Agility is currently a HORRIBLY over-costed stat considering how many things bypass it entirely. On the other hand high hull/shields have very few counters- so they are a much better investment of points.

Agility is also just a bad mechanic in general that swings WAY too hard given how much of an impact canceling even just one damage has on the game

Forcing more green dice rolls is the opposite of a good idea. For some reason people equate getting to roll dice to player agency, which couldn't be further from the truth because you're not in control of the dice at all (unless you're cheating)

Spending an evade token to guarantee a damage mitigation from any source makes infinetly more sense

17 hours ago, SOTL said:

I thought this was the case until they set all those expansions onto reprint recently. Until then I was seeing all the signs of what happened in WoWTCG before that was culled.

That was a bit different though, they had stopped giving Spectral Tigers and had to turn to Plan B which was huge power creep to sustain business.

16 hours ago, ficklegreendice said:

Nym is a good ship, which is kinda something we want unless we're fans of FFG releasing useless expansions. He is not the harbinger of the x-wing apocalypse just because he further pushes out an archetype that hasn't been terribly relevant since the palp nerf (or since the initial x7 drop from what I've seen, those guys were everywhere)

But that is exactly what makes him such a problem. And the advanced slam nerf hints that FFG recognizes the problem. But being at PS10 and with the option of infinite bombs just made the problem so much worse. You can't dodge 4 bombs anymore and then go on the offense after. You can't dodge anything anyways because he moves after you. Before the aces were pushed out because it was so hard. But Nym outright bans them because he's an unsolvable problem.

You said the other 2/3 of the list can be built to handle Nym, but I don't think that's fair. Of course technically it's true for every ship. The question IMO is how many ressources you have to dedicate against certain builds, and how horribly the rest fares. As SOTL and the Krayts said, 60/40 or 70/30 is fine, and that's usually the case. So you don't need too many specifically dedicated ressources to balance that out.

But Nym requires more to compensate an ace than any other opponent ship before, precisely because he's now PS10 and has infinite bombs and autodamage at range 1. He would require so much compensation that he does not simply push an archetype "further out", but over the edge for good.

It's very bad policy to sacrifice one of the main archetypes of the game just for some short term gains.

On 8/9/2017 at 7:17 AM, Johen Dood said:

We're you like, asleep as of February of this year? Palp + Interceptors was competitive and rocking tables right up until the FAQageddon in March. But with OP shite like Nym, you will never see fragile ships like Ints ever again. I saw a game with Soontir + Nym recently- it was pretty hilarious. PS10 rolled right up to Soontir, bumped him, dropped a bomblet rolled hit + crit, direct hit. Instant death for one of the most canonically skilled pilots in the game- with no possible defense, no agility roll, nothing. That is absolute, straight up bull- and terrible for the game.

I'm OK with an Interceptor blanking it's agility rolls and dying on fire- that sometimes just happens, so be it. But to just get deleted by a bull 10HP, PS10 small ship that can drop a maneuver bomb on you with perfect knowledge of the game state, not take any damage from said bomb, and get to reroll the results, AND ON TOP OF THAT THE DEFENDER GETS NO DEFENSE, NO ROLL, NO POSSIBLE WAY TO AVOID THE DAMAGE? Absolute, unadulterated, mind-blowing bull.

I'm sorry but this wave was a huge mistake, in every possible way. This wave did nothing positive for the state of X-Wing, and the devs should be ashamed.

I haven't even got to the rest of this thread, just wanted to reply to this:

Palp + Interceptors were clearly not "competitive and rocking tables right up until the FAQageddon" - Meta Wing tells me you're wrong.

Especially considering that K wings (which are even worse for interceptors than Nym) were in the meta.

15 hours ago, ficklegreendice said:

Agility is also just a bad mechanic in general that swings WAY too hard given how much of an impact canceling even just one damage has on the game

Forcing more green dice rolls is the opposite of a good idea. For some reason people equate getting to roll dice to player agency, which couldn't be further from the truth because you're not in control of the dice at all (unless you're cheating)

Spending an evade token to guarantee a damage mitigation from any source makes infinetly more sense

Firstly the value of a damage is just as true on red dice as green dice. Secondly there is player agency in green dice because you can decide how important it is to you to be able to modify them.

Excellent use of statistics.

What program do you use?

6 hours ago, spacelion said:

That was a bit different though, they had stopped giving Spectral Tigers and had to turn to Plan B which was huge power creep to sustain business.

When Cryptozoic took the reins both they and Blizzard knew the license was a temporary thing while Hearthstone was built. Cryptozoic deliberately and aggressively power crept the game then released broken cards at insane rarities in expensive packs. It was a pure cash grab from a community there knew was going to be of no importance to them.

6 minutes ago, Porkchop Express said:

Excellent use of statistics.

What program do you use?

It looks a lot like excel to me.