There is a lot of talk around coordinate on the Sheathipede, but what about the fact that squad leader has been doing coordinate for a long time, with the exception of the PS restriction.

Is there any places where Squad Leader would be better than coordinate?

not really because it takes 2 points, and the elite slot preventing a PS 11 Squad leader... so long story short no.

EDIT: Also nice to see it getting some love tho in the world of Fenns

I’m going to say no on better than. It can work as a substitute for Scum or if you don’t have the points for Upsilon (all outside of Epic play, of course), but that’s about it.

If squad leader had no ps restriction you would see it all the time.
Black squadron pilot escorting soontir and giving him an action? Yes please!

Part of the strength of the Sheathipede is the low base cost of the ship itself. 20 points for Fenn Rau is a great deal. To get a ship working like that with Squad Leader, you'd need an 18 point PS 9 (ish). Serisu is 20 points before titles at PS 8, and kinda wants their own action to stay alive (since they'll be the obvious target). Tomax Bren is 24 points, and it gives up his pilot ability entirely. Howlrunner? Again, needs to stay alive. Omega Leader? She can leverage Juke or A Score to Settle so dang well, though. There's pretty much no one as efficient in points and PS as Fenn Rau. Putting Experimental Interface and Squad Leader on Fenn Rau would be hilarious, although not good.

Oddly, I think Quickdraw would probably not be that bad with it. AdvO/FCS gets a lot of action economy on it's own, and PS 9 handles most friendly ships. Still going to be an expensive ship, like 37 points all together.

The other thing: AP-5 can coordinate anyone. Tossing a focus before someone activates is often quite good. No ship in the game can get Squad Leader for as cheap as 15 points, although Black Squadron Pilots are close, and they can't "coordinate up" on higher PS ships.

That's the biggest problem with Squad Leader: it has to go on your highest PS pilot, or you won't be able to use it on at least one of your ships, but your highest PS pilot probably values their own actions more highly than action on lower PS ships. With a Sheathipede, it's own actions are often lower value than the ship you'd want to coordinate. This is also the problem with an Upsilon. With the 4-dice attack, Upsilons frequently will value their own action highly, making Coordinate a bit less attractive.

3 minutes ago, AngryAlbatross said:

If squad leader had no ps restriction you would see it all the time.
Black squadron pilot escorting soontir and giving him an action? Yes please!

Actually, that would *rarely* happen. Since Fel wants to get a stress token to get the extra focus token, he will want to PTL each turn. And while you could PTL off of your SL action at PS4, he really wants to leave PTL available until PS9 when he has better board information. As such, he will PTL at PS9, and will be stressed when the Black activates at PS4, and will not be able to take a free action via SL.

For as much as people are complaining about coordinate recently, their complaint really isn't truly about coordinate. It really isn't about the ghost boosting at PS11 either. It's that the ship that grants that free action is decent himself. If PS11 coordinate was the best thing in the world, then why don't we see Ysand, EI, EH, and IR on RAC (or you could even put SL instead of EH and IR if you wanted to pass out an action to someone else) providing a start of combat barrel roll (and TL removal). Why don't we see Cracken w/ VI providing a PS10 combat boost to anyone else? Why don't we just see Fat Han w/ VI and EU in the meta again? It's all because the free action at PS11 isn't the most alluring part of Rebel Fenn - it's his ability, and the synergy he can have with HSCP, and the utility he can provide via a utility astro.

Thematically, squad leader makes sense to have the PS limit. Gameplay standpoint, it does not since except for rebel Fenn all the high ps EPT users need their action to do anything, and are way overpriced if theyre being a support.

Had it been named "Tactical Leader" or something else to not make it seem weird the most skill ed pilot isnt the leader and not had a ps restriction, you'd see it a ton. In fact that'd probably help the TIE Shuttle alot, since unless its Tomax the ept is sorta wasted on a tie shuttle, but only Tomax/Rhymer have the PS to even attempt to use squad leader (and too expensive)

It's about cost efficiency. Fenn for 20pts has a natural defensive passive ability that helps everyone and he can coordinate. Its about the value of that extra action. Upsilon is 30pts to coordinate and doesnt seem worth it. If Fenn Rau was 26pt base cost, then 27 with VI and 31 with HSCP, you probably would be seeing a lot less of him if he took 1/3 of your list.

Squad leader should be zero points, it's already costing your highest PS (probably) ship it's EPT. Normally that's the ship you want to be buffing.

It also can't be used on ships of equal PS, which makes no sense to me.

At zero points, I can see logic in squad leader action being lower PS. Especially as a way of differentiating it from coordinate, and justifying zero point cost

Same with Expose. Predator + focus beats expose almost all the time for less with the added bonus of keeping your agility up and potentially saving the focus for defending.

And predator + reposition is better than expose and no shot or reposition and no mods.

Both cards are overpriced by two points at least imho.

Really drives home how utterly broken the sheathipede is doesn’t it?

4 minutes ago, Blail Blerg said:

Really drives home how utterly broken the sheathipede is doesn’t it?

I think it highlights how PS cost should scale differently depending on the ship, ships with boost, barrel roll or coordinate should pay more to go up to higher PS. A ship with two or more of those actions should pay even more. A recent good example of this is the extra cost to go from blackout PS 7 to Kylo PS 9, 2 points per pilot skill. A recent bad example is ezra to fenn, 3 points to go from PS 5 to PS 9, thats 0.75 points per pilot skill.

4 hours ago, Khyros said:

For as much as people are complaining about coordinate recently, their complaint really isn't truly about coordinate.

It's not exclusively about Coordinate, but it disingenuous to suggest that it is anything other than a significant part of the issue. I mean you could totally have said in the recent past "their complaint really isn't truly about Genius" and while technically you wouldn't be wrong you'd also not be right.

4 hours ago, Khyros said:

It really isn't about the ghost boosting at PS11 either.

Yes it is. Well, technically, it's about the Ghost, boosting, for free, at PS 11. I think if you take any one of those away it's a much less troublesome concept.

4 hours ago, Khyros said:

It's that the ship that grants that free action is decent himself.

This is very true. There aren't many Rebel lists that shouldn't at least consider whether VI HSCP Fenn could fit.

4 hours ago, Khyros said:

If PS11 coordinate was the best thing in the world, then why don't we see Ysand, EI, EH, and IR on RAC (or you could even put SL instead of EH and IR if you wanted to pass out an action to someone else) providing a start of combat barrel roll (and TL removal).

So that's 56 points for a single-tapping 3 die, primary, and can only dial in greens. I think it's obvious that what you've put up there would be great against many things. I also think that it's obvious that its damage output deficit is not going to make up for the cost. I also think there's an important distinction to be made: boost is better than barrel roll for the Ghost because it can more readily be used to turn off Autothrusters. Autothrusters vs the above build might as well be called autowinners, because you will never be caught in its arc and it will not touch you. The Ghost has front and back arcs and can angle them, you will be caught in its arc at some point no matter what you do; just hope you've managed to secure Range 3 when it happens.

4 hours ago, Khyros said:

Why don't we see Cracken w/ VI providing a PS10 combat boost to anyone else?

Have you not seen Cracken on the table? It's not a bad ability and there have been people using it, even recently. But also requires Cracken to get a shot. If Cracken could equip a TLT, or a reloadable missile that can shoot out of arc, I think you'd see him a lot more. Even more crucially, it requires Cracken to be at Range 1 of the beneficiary. So...probably not going to be using it with anywhere near the duty cycle you can get out of Fenn.

Did you forget? You didn't mention it in your post, but the most direct precursor to Ghost Fenn was Kanan Ahsoka, which accomplished the same thing with regards to the ultra-high PS boosting. It never got to be used as widely as Ghost Fenn, probably because it does not have the same kind of denial that Fenn brings to the table (that's fair, you pay a little more for Fenn), but it did see use.

4 hours ago, Khyros said:

Why don't we just see Fat Han w/ VI and EU in the meta again?

See above with regards to the discussion about Autothrusters: but Fat Han can tech against that a little bit better than the above RAC build with Luke crew. Problem is, Fat Han isn't as fat as he used to be. I'm very certain that he loses to the Ghost every single time because it'll put 4 unmitigated damage into him per turn, and on defense it can basically ensure that he lands 1-2 damage per shot.

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Squad Leader historically did not see use because it's only ever been a situational prospect when you would want the ability to give one ship's action to another ship. What other ship is so good that you would rather have your action go to making its attack(s) better than keep an action for you to do something? I can think of many scenarios where I would appreciate that possibility-- but I cannot think of encountering that situation in every single game, in just about every round of the game, to where I'd want to put Squad Leader on a ship.

We have had one other situation where we've had a list archetype that was, by design, "ok whatever my opponent brings to the table, I have 73 points on this one ship and he's going to solo everything, the other 27 points can be spent on a ship who exists only to help him do that" and that was Dengaroo. The comparison is super good: Manaroo's focus would turn into infinite focuses via OCR4, so Dengar got both offense and defense focus + reroll (because you're running LW, everyone's running LW) on every single shot from Manaroo's single action. From Fenn's ability and HSCP and Sensor Jammer, plus the boost which may get out of arc or gets you out of range 1, the Ghost gets multiple defensive and offensive benefits from a support ship's single action. Manaroo was built to about 35-40 points.

If you abstract it, though, there have been other similar cases. If you consider Palp Aces to consist of 2 elements, "Palp Shuttle" & "not-Palp Shuttle", then you're willing to spend 29 points on a ship that sometimes does absolutely nothing other than support! (Spoiler alert: Palp Shuttle should be shooting at least once a game, it's a 3 die gun and if you haven't spent Palp that round then it's a 3 die gun with one auto-crit)

Similarly, Rebel lists used to be 2 elements: "Biggs" & "not-Biggs" with the Biggs piece coming in at 26. And he was even more of a pure support piece than the Palp Shuttle, since you'd 100% of the time spend his focus on defense so that maybe he lives a little longer. Him shooting was the least of your concerns.

So what I'm getting at here is that Fenn Rau is a) priced in line with/on the low end of what we're used to paying for a support piece, and b) has his support come in a form that is highly convenient to enable the single most offensively capable ship in the game to be 1) more consistent in leveraging its offense, 2) more defensively reliable, or 3) oftentimes both.

Of course, all of those other support ships got nerfed, so here's hoping the trend holds.

I guess the comparison would be closer if Coordinate was worded such that you could only give an action to a ship on the same size base or smaller.

That way, Huge ships could Coord anything in Epic, the Upsilon could Coord anything in Standard play, but the Sheath could only Coord other Small ships.

- - - - -

In this way, if Fenn wanted to Coord a VCX, he'd have to take SL... and then he's no longer PS11, and has to stay at R1

12 hours ago, Stinger07 said:

There is a lot of talk around coordinate on the Sheathipede, but what about the fact that squad leader has been doing coordinate for a long time, with the exception of the PS restriction.

Is there any places where Squad Leader would be better than coordinate?

It would depend on having a low PS, high value ship which could benefit from free actions.

A heavily tooled out Low-end Decimator (Oicunn, maybe?) springs to mind.

In that case, you could in theory field Youngster with Squad Leader and several Adapatability Black Squadron Pilots, to give you a cadre of action-passing minions.

You can Squad Lead with VI at PS 10. Or put it in. EI Fenn for double coordinate at PS 9

5 hours ago, gjnido said:

You can Squad Lead with VI at PS 10. Or put it in. EI Fenn for double coordinate at PS 9

I've been thinking about this, not the most effective fenn, but good for four/fair ship rebels

the thought of putting squad leader on howlrunner popped up, since shes generally just a buffbot anyway so i thought why not? its only 20pts for a PS8 "coordinate" right? surely theres some PS7 or lower primary weapon user that this could benefit

....

....

cant find one lol. Everything uses secondary weapons so her ability is wasted or has a flight pattern that would make being in R1 of her really difficult (strikers)

Closest i can think of is Oicuun with Daredevil, but at that point why not just put Dauntless on him and Inspiring Recruit anyway lol

2 hours ago, Scum4Life said:

I've been thinking about this, not the most effective fenn, but good for four/fair ship rebels

Or if you want to have a 4 action Corran