I’ve noticed that Parry and Reflect are mechanically just soak enhancers with a lot of requirements. When compared to Enduring (soak +1 with no strings attached) it just doesn’t make sense. The first rank is fine and the improved versions are fine, but additional ranks in Parry and Reflect seem like a waste waste.

The additional talents offer only soak +1 with each purchase but are less effective than Enduring during due to cost and requirements (gear, strain, activation). I think if they offered soak +2 per rank then they make more sense.

Has anybody else thought along these lines?

8 minutes ago, Haleron said:

I’ve noticed that Parry and Reflect are mechanically just soak enhancers with a lot of requirements. When compared to Enduring (soak +1 with no strings attached) it just doesn’t make sense. The first rank is fine and the improved versions are fine, but additional ranks in Parry and Reflect seem like a waste waste.

The additional talents offer only soak +1 with each purchase but are less effective than Enduring during due to cost and requirements (gear, strain, activation). I think if they offered soak +2 per rank then they make more sense.

Has anybody else thought along these lines?

Most of the time I'd rather have a rank of Enduring than a rank of Parry or Reflect, sure. That's part of why Enduring is a talent that only shows up once, or maybe twice, in a tree, usually with a higher cost than Parry/Reflect. Some talents are better than others, and so they are doled out less often by specs. Enduring in turn is worse than Dedication (Brawn).

That said, with the rise of Ebb/Flow, Force users are so good at recovering strain that the strain cost of Parry and Reflect is really not that harsh. Plus, they work against attacks with Pierce and Breach.

The Pierce and breach had not occured to me. That actually makes more sense.

1 minute ago, Haleron said:

The Pierce and breach had not occured to me. That actually makes more sense.

Yeah, Parry is the only way to stop another lightsaber. Unless you have cortosis armor.

In our games the moment people have lightsabers, cortosis isn't far behind. Only way to make NPCs keep up in a LS fight. However I might try Jeeping more ranks of parry/reflect

3 minutes ago, Haleron said:

In our games the moment people have lightsabers, cortosis isn't far behind. Only way to make NPCs keep up in a LS fight. However I might try Jeeping more ranks of parry/reflect

I like to keep cortosis armor rare, but there are several other ways to help NPC survivability against lightsabers:

--High WT and Stimpack Specialization talent

--Talents and armor that increase melee defense

--Coordination Dodge talent (this is great if you want an NPC to be tough to kill)

--More ranks of Adversary, Dodge, Defensive Stance

--A rank or two of Durable

With the Parry and Refect talents, the thing to bear in mind is that while at only one or two ranks they're not awe-inspiring, when you start getting to 4 or 5 ranks (which can in a few cases be done in a single spec), they start getting a lot more impressive.

As DaverWattra noted, Parry and Reflect don't just simply increase your Soak Value, but work to outright reduce the damage taken, and thus can circumvent the Pierce and especially the Breach quality. If the attack relies extensively on Pierce or Breach to inflict damage by effectively undercutting the target's Soak Value, then those two talents can be life-savers; who cares if that assassin's vibroblade has Pierce 5, can crit on 1 advantage with a +50 kicker to the crit result if he only does 6 points of damage on an attack and you've got 4 ranks in Parry? Via Parry, you've just reduce the assassin's attack to zero damage, which means no critical injury for you.

Also, another point to bear in mind is that FFG designed this game so that combat will always be dangerous to the PCs, and that rarely should a combat encounter take more than five rounds to conclude (average seems to be about three rounds unless the opposition is really formidable or the PCs are rolling really badly). Parry and Reflect were designed to give Jedi-types an added edge defense-wise without undercutting that core design tenet of "combat = dangerous."