Biv is terrible. His ability is garbage, and his deck is full of stuff that you can buy to make it less garbage, so you're spending all this XP just to make him kind of on par with the low end of what other characters get to do. And if you ignore that stuff, you get....more garbage. Seriously, the one time I played Biv, I didn't want to use C&P, and I simply couldn't find enough stuff to spend his XP on because it was all rubbish. He's both underpowered and extremely boring IMO.

Saska, on the other hand, is okay. But people have to understand that she's the classic 'Bard' character - she's okay at a lot of little things, but she's not going to be making 'big' plays. She's not going to be one shotting bosses or taking out squads of Stormtroopers by herself. But she'll help a bit here, she'll help a bit there, and she's got a few tricks of her own, like being able to stack mods on guns that normally can't have them to turn them into murder machines. She's a bad pick for someone who wants point and click power; but she's fine if someone wants to play a decently powerful utility character.

In terms of swapping out, well, my feeling is if people aren't having fun playing those characters, it's not a bad idea to give them the option to change them. The point of the game is to have fun, and it's easy enough to work out XP and stuff to trade out characters. But if that's not an option, I don't think a one time bonus incentive really works as most of their 'issues' will hang around long after any incentive is used. Honestly, I think the only way I'd get someone to play Biv outside of house ruling his cards is by giving them the biggest and best gun at every level so he can at least pretend to be competitive (and then not let them just give it to any other fighter who would use it better than him).

So Let's be Honest. Most of us bought Twin Shadows for one reason, Boba Fett, even when we knew his mini wasn't in the box! It was a fun idea, the mini campaign and when I played it I thought Biv and Saska were a bit, well, underwhelming. I have played with and against Saska and she is OK. Like Abyss said, a bit here, a bit there. One of the things that often gets overlooked is her native speed. She can be a great door open and crate searcher, whilst giving a little bit to others with her device tokens as she runs past. She's a good, character if you are bored with all the mass slayings like with Verna, Fenn or Diala and you fancy a bit of a challenge. And her ability to super mod any gun can be so much fun.

Biv on the other hand, well I used to think he was hopeless, but I played him a bit differently last time and found myself pleasantly surprised. I chose to give him a close quarters pistol (Hand Cannon to be exact) with a Tactical display and found that the extra surges rolled kept his strain levels up to the point where he was able to do Close & Personal a lot more often. Then I purchased him a Bacta injector and he was regularly able to keep the C&P rolling. Then I chose only passive skills and not ones associated with C&P; Advance, Shake it off, Into the fray and Trophy Armour. These let him get into the mix and stay there. I found that despite the history of playing with Biv and lamenting my choice, this time I found his character to be quite fun.

OK so some will say "But you had to do a whole lot to make him even playable!" Sure, but sometimes isn't that what you want as an experienced player? A bit of a challenge? How do I get the most out of a "weak" character. I do enjoy such a challenge and whilst Biv will (probably) never be a AAA character, I found a way to make him fun and able to contribute.

As for swapping out Characters - yes! Do it! I think that having fun with friends trumps sticking with a bad choice for 8 more missions! But maybe you "charge" them 1XP each time they do it, just to keep them from continually swapping and to thematically represent the change out.

I let my two players change one character each after Aftermath in our first campaign. No charge. They only changed Gideon because he felt boring, choosing Diala instead.

I was okay with that at such a early point in the first campaign any of us played. We want it to be fun. But changing at this stage, we are at threat 4, I would charge them 1xp as Marcus said or 500 credits.

Actually to me it definitely depends on how far you come into the campaign. I would not let them change every mission because as the Imperial player I would bit have fun with that I think.

I played Biv. His big advantage is doing lots of damage to single characters. If you're getting swarmed by hired guns and troopers and nexu, he feels very useless. But if you're playing against Nemeses and you know you will be seeing a lot of the likes of Vader, or any other high health high armour enemies, then he's useful. I was doing a huge amount of damage with each attack.

But our Imperial player countered that with the Royal Guard Champion and kept rolling dodges.

I would say his primary ability with the right weapons, is pretty awesome in how much damage he can deal. But he's a one trick pony that gets taken down quickly by cheap units.

As for Saska, she has some great support abilities. I'm Imperial player in a Hoth campaign and my players are effectively using Saska, Diala and Loku to support Verena who just runs circles around my troops and kills them all. Between Saska's gadgets and Loku's sights and getting focused and rerolls from Diala, Verena easily takes down most figures and just chains her attacks.

They are both underpowered but you can also maximize their strength under the right conditions. I have recently played 2 separate campaigns with the goal of maximizing their strengths.

Saska

She is better than most people give her credit for. She hits quite hard with proper use of the extra mod slot , Adrenaline Injector is also quite good, and Toolbox is amazing on certain missions. It is important to play her as a hybrid, not as full support. Give her a good gun, use the tokens on herself just as much if not more than giving her out. Saska w Disruptor Pistol, Tac Display, & Plasma Cell competes with Gunslinger Jyn and Point Blank Shot Vereena. Her main problem is she doesnt generally get "good" until the late stages of campaign, and competition with other ranged heroes for the good ranged mods. I played her in a campaign with 2 melee and she shined.

Biv

Biv's ability, once you upgrade it with skills is very strong for single target dmg and strain management is the key to leveraging his strength. Bacta Pump is very good on him and I also highly recommend pairing him with MHD-19. MHD can fetch the strain reducing medical cards and also Painkillers, which is amazing on Biv.

Unfortunately, Bacta Pump and MHD only take him so far and is still hurt by a lack of a good 4xp skill. I houserule errata'd both 4xp skills and he perfomed MUCH better, not on the level of Mak but still good.

Playing Jabba's Realm with the finale still to go, Rebs are Shyla, Onar, Davith and Saska, Imp is playing Hutt Mercs. I picked Saska to help Onar (and she has) but it turns out vs. that Imp deck she really frustrates the Imp player.

Shyla has had the last Bounty Token for the past one and a half missions and is getting almost every device/shield token from Saska. The Imp player has been concentrating on Shyla but with a static Evade and the ability to use any number of device tokens for a block or evade, she just won't flip. The rest of us kill imps or go for the mission while the Imp player gets soooo close to flipping Shyla - and comes up short.

Biv is very strain heavy, if you can't deal with it, he's terrible. If you can, he is good. He's single target high damage. Proper weapon choices and an outside source of strain removal are required. Don't group him with other strain heavy characters or other single target damage characters.

Saska is definitely on the weak side, but can be okay if you spend the credits and pick the right abilities. You pretty much have to take her ability to give out 2 tokens and use an extra mod, then sink credits into that extra mod in order to make her worthwhile, but there is an ever increasing list of characters that is better than her... She could definitely benefit from a tweaking of her abilities, especially now that there are power tokens.

It'll be interesting to see how the new guy Ko-Tun compares to Saska.

1 hour ago, juice man said:

It'll be interesting to see how the new guy Ko-Tun compares to Saska.

Ko-Tun Feralo is a gal but yes it will be neat to see.

From what has been spoiled so far regarding her abilities, she looks to be pretty strong - one of the big advantages I see is she essentially has the top part of Saska's Gadgeteer (3xp) and the bottom part of Remote Distribution (4xp) built into her starting ability Arms Distribution all for one strain and 0xp. Granted Saska's device tokens are not exactly the same as power tokens but some of Ko-Tun's abilities such as Squad Cohesion make the power tokens extremely versatile.

One of the greatest challenges of playing Saska is that the adjacency requirement of distributing device tokens makes her difficult to use until you pick up Remote Distribution .

I think Biv is strong against Burst Damage Decks like Military Might and Hutt Mercenaries. On top on having a lot of HP himself, Final Stand can be used in a round where the Imperial Player puts a lot on the table. Contrary to the name, in many cases using it at the beginning of the game is a sometimes a good option. It doesn't seem fancy and having to deplete a 4xp cards seems weak, but as an Imperial Player, it's hard to recover if Biv takes two expensive units out.

Saska doesn't feel powerful, because her ability is a trickle down effect, but she got a boost with some weapons in Jabbas Realm. You won't feel great if Valera uses your device token to get that Surge to enable her chain combo. I didn't try it, but her Energy Shield might be fantastic against the broken Guild Hunters 4XP card from Hutt Mercenaries. She is also not bound to a specific weapon and can fulfill every role you want her to have.

17 hours ago, machfalcon said:

Ko-Tun Feralo is a gal but yes it will be neat to see.

Oops! Not paying close enough attention. Can't wait to get HotE. (BUT I HAVE TO. My FLGS had some ordering issues.)

53 minutes ago, juice man said:

Oops! Not paying close enough attention. Can't wait to get HotE. (BUT I HAVE TO. My FLGS had some ordering issues.)

We haven't even heard a peep about it coming into the country... And we don't even need a translation! I think I read about guys in Australia getting, so whichever distributor is responsible for South Africa is seriously dropping the ball (the last several FFG shipments have been delayed past the dates the distributor promised...)

Biv is easily one of the Top DPS 3 characters in the game, and he does that while being around the Top 3 Tank characters in the game.

Yea, he is a little strain heavy. Tho you can easily get around that by spending Surge to recover Strain.

I laugh at the guy who posted saying that Biv is garbage because he personally doesn't use C&P... Lol, That's like saying Gaarkhan is garbage because he is bad at long range.

1 hour ago, Talamare said:

Biv is easily one of the Top DPS 3 characters in the game, and he does that while being around the Top 3 Tank characters in the game.

Yea, he is a little strain heavy. Tho you can easily get around that by spending Surge to recover Strain.

I laugh at the guy who posted saying that Biv is garbage because he personally doesn't use C&P... Lol, That's like saying Gaarkhan is garbage because he is bad at long range.

I didn't use C&P because it's kind of awful. I'm not sure how he's anywhere near the top DPS outside of pretty specific targets. By itself, for 2 strain, C&P is often doing 1-2 damage. Yes, you might do more, but vs black dice it's also a realistic possibility that you do *absolutely nothing*. You don't get any surge abilities, so Yellow is often not overly useful except maybe getting one strain back. There's fewer targets that it's really worth using on - soft targets would probably die from the ranged damage anyway assuming you've got a decent gun, while 'boss' enemies will often have auto blocks/evades that vastly increases the likelihood of you doing nothing. And of course, you've got to be in melee range with a ranged weapon to be doing this, which means you've got to spend time/strain moving because his 'free' movement options are mostly garbage compared to someone like Gaarkhan or Fenn or...actually, just about everyone.

So, you can pay five XP and get Vibrobayonet and Crushing Blow. Vibrobayonet is actually pretty decent, as it'll usually get you two extra damage and a bleed. Except it costs a mod slot, so you probably could have just taken a proper gun mod and used that instead, which works for every attack you make, and come out not far behind anyway? And of course, it forces Biv to use a gun with a mod slot, which can cause it's own issues. Crushing Blow does give two pretty good surges, so it actually makes the Yellow dice pretty useful. It's definitely the most attractive thing about C&P, but even then it'll become less useful in comparison as the campaign progresses when you can start buying guns with similar surges. Now, assuming you've taken both of these, you've used up a little under half your usual XP in a campaign to make C&P actually worth using. For the same cost, many other fighters can buy abilities that make their already good stuff better. Oh, I didn't mention Stay Down. Heh. Look at that, then look at Mak's No Escape. Yeah.

As for him being the 'tanky'....This is what I found to be his main advantage, but he's not so amazingly good at it compared to other characters that it makes him worthwhile (mainly because you can't actually 'draw aggro' in any real way). Other characters with better healing abilities (e.g. Gaarkhan/Fenn) or defensive abilities (e.g. Verena) can be equally tanky, especially if you buy them armour. Whether being able to buy Biv's with XP is an advantage probably comes down to how you value it vs credits....But even if Biv is hard to kill, is it relevant? Yes, I found that Biv was often very hard to kill, but his deficiencies in other areas meant he was mainly a distraction rather than a threat to the Imperials. Which leads into his final issue - Biv basically doesn't do anything except single target damage and soaking up hits. No team support, no utility/mission abilities, no Blast/Cleave etc. Due to that, he really needs to be top tier in both of the areas he does cover, and I really don't think he is at all.

2 hours ago, Abyss said:

I didn't use C&P because it's kind of awful. I'm not sure how he's anywhere near the top DPS outside of pretty specific targets. By itself, for 2 strain, C&P is often doing 1-2 damage. Yes, you might do more, but vs black dice it's also a realistic possibility that you do *absolutely nothing*. You don't get any surge abilities, so Yellow is often not overly useful except maybe getting one strain back. There's fewer targets that it's really worth using on - soft targets would probably die from the ranged damage anyway assuming you've got a decent gun, while 'boss' enemies will often have auto blocks/evades that vastly increases the likelihood of you doing nothing. And of course, you've got to be in melee range with a ranged weapon to be doing this, which means you've got to spend time/strain moving because his 'free' movement options are mostly garbage compared to someone like Gaarkhan or Fenn or...actually, just about everyone.

So, you can pay five XP and get Vibrobayonet and Crushing Blow. Vibrobayonet is actually pretty decent, as it'll usually get you two extra damage and a bleed. Except it costs a mod slot, so you probably could have just taken a proper gun mod and used that instead, which works for every attack you make, and come out not far behind anyway? And of course, it forces Biv to use a gun with a mod slot, which can cause it's own issues. Crushing Blow does give two pretty good surges, so it actually makes the Yellow dice pretty useful. It's definitely the most attractive thing about C&P, but even then it'll become less useful in comparison as the campaign progresses when you can start buying guns with similar surges. Now, assuming you've taken both of these, you've used up a little under half your usual XP in a campaign to make C&P actually worth using. For the same cost, many other fighters can buy abilities that make their already good stuff better. Oh, I didn't mention Stay Down. Heh. Look at that, then look at Mak's No Escape. Yeah.

As for him being the 'tanky'....This is what I found to be his main advantage, but he's not so amazingly good at it compared to other characters that it makes him worthwhile (mainly because you can't actually 'draw aggro' in any real way). Other characters with better healing abilities (e.g. Gaarkhan/Fenn) or defensive abilities (e.g. Verena) can be equally tanky, especially if you buy them armour. Whether being able to buy Biv's with XP is an advantage probably comes down to how you value it vs credits....But even if Biv is hard to kill, is it relevant? Yes, I found that Biv was often very hard to kill, but his deficiencies in other areas meant he was mainly a distraction rather than a threat to the Imperials. Which leads into his final issue - Biv basically doesn't do anything except single target damage and soaking up hits. No team support, no utility/mission abilities, no Blast/Cleave etc. Due to that, he really needs to be top tier in both of the areas he does cover, and I really don't think he is at all.

C&P does literally about the exact same amount of damage as Fenn's and many other's starting weapon even without Surges. The fact it lacks surge abilities means you're basically given an incredibly high chance of recovering 1 of the 2 Strains used by the ability. By the 3rd mission you should have bought Vibro to have it's damage EXPLODE, making it deal damage equal to T3 weapons. That's right, you're still in T1 missions dealing damage as if you're waving a T3 Weapon. There aren't any T1 Mods that can do that, besides even if it existed the fact you don't need it is even better for the team. Biv's starting gun is second only in damage to Gaarkhan's Weapon.

Biv's "support" is based on the idea of Shock and Awe. You crash into the enemy lines, make yourself a target, kill the most dangerous one in the bunch, have your team clean up the scraps. That's why Final Stand exists, and it works considering how the Threat system works. If the Imperial Player spends a chunk of threat to bring out something powerful and Biv wrecks it before it gets a chance to screw the team, then he has accomplished his goal.

Overall, an ideal blend of Burst Damage + Tankiness with just a sprinkle of range.

but if you're going to play him, and not use C&P... Then I go back to my original quote... It's like you're trying to play Sniper Gaarkhan and wondering why it's failing...

Long term lurker on these forums but this thread and similar annoy me.

This drivel that Biv is not so good because he has no other abilities other than being good at killing stuff is just that drivel.

Biv is as Talamare states above is indeed one of the best DPS characters and of course is also very tanky.

He also fills a DPS slot while requiring much less in the way of gear than almost any other DPS hero meaning you can spend your credits on other characters that need the gear more. The credit thing can not be underestimated
a standard campaign you simply do not have the credits to equip even 3 heroes as you would like never mind 4 and this is particularly important if you pick heroes that start off weak. You want Fenn to have that best gun and armour your next DPS to have the next best gun etc. frankly unless your winning every mission and getting every crate you cannot afford it.

I know that we have large numbers on the board that have Biv down as one of the worst heroes but for me in a balanced group he is one of the best.

For the record my strongest group would be Gideon, Fenn, Dahlia and Biv and even in that group Dahlias place is a gamble on getting and winning a couple of side missions.

I wonder if Biv will be better now with access to Power Tokens? If you have 2 +1 damage power tokens, you can unload them all in one action with C&P.

I think Biv is pretty decent, though as others have said you need to support him pretty heavily with Strain relief. One thing I think he could use is an ability that lets him take advantage of buffing the melee attack of C&P more. If you attack anything small with C&P after buying some buffs for it, there's a pretty good chance you kill it with just the melee attack. What if he had an ability that said: "Exhaust this card after you defeat a figure with the melee attack of C&P. You may perform the ranged attack of C&P targeting another figure in your line of sight."

5 hours ago, Stompburger said:

I wonder if Biv will be better now with access to Power Tokens? If you have 2 +1 damage power tokens, you can unload them all in one action with C&P.

Damage tokens are fairly universal. They wont help Biv any more than any other hero.

Now, if Biv could get his hand on surge tokens, he could probably make good use of them.

5 hours ago, Deadwolf said:

Damage tokens are fairly universal. They wont help Biv any more than any other hero.

Now, if Biv could get his hand on surge tokens, he could probably make good use of them.

Well if you have Ko-Tun in your squad you can do that totally.

15 hours ago, Stompburger said:

What if he had an ability that said: "Exhaust this card after you defeat a figure with the melee attack of C&P. You may perform the ranged attack of C&P targeting another figure in your line of sight."

I like this *very* much. This might be the cleanest "upgrade" to Biv I've seen - apart from changing most of his other abilities a lot or a little. I might try this change the next time someone considers Biv as their hero.

On 10/14/2017 at 6:44 AM, Abyss said:

So, you can pay five XP and get Vibrobayonet and Crushing Blow. Vibrobayonet is actually pretty decent, as it'll usually get you two extra damage and a bleed. Except it costs a mod slot, so you probably could have just taken a proper gun mod and used that instead, which works for every attack you make, and come out not far behind anyway? And of course, it forces Biv to use a gun with a mod slot, which can cause it's own issues. Crushing Blow does give two pretty good surges, so it actually makes the Yellow dice pretty useful. It's definitely the most attractive thing about C&P, but even then it'll become less useful in comparison as the campaign progresses when you can start buying guns with similar surges.

Just as an aside, it might be a bit rules-lawyery but the Vibrobayonet doesn't actually have to be on the gun that you use for the second part of the C&P attack. So if you keep your starter gun and attach the Vibrobayonet to that, you can still upgrade your main gun as usual using all of its attachment slots.

In one word? Rubbish

If you listen to this interview:

with one of the designers, he talks about how Biv and Saska ended up being undertuned because they were worried about power creep and didn't have time to learn from the core set feedback yet. So they are definitively weaker than other heroes; it's not just that we haven't figured out what the designers intended for them yet