7 hours ago, thecactusman17 said:

A month before Worlds is a great time to introduce a new FAQ, beaten out only by "a month before Regionals." There are opportunities to study the data from several months of competition play in multiple regions, which helps identify when a particular issue is the result of a lucky break or a single player outperforming the average list archetype as opposed to an actual widespread issue. It also identifies when a particular dominant fleet archetype is under-performing in a given region.

In actual "serious" competition, I expect that we'll see Raddus explode at World just because at the moment he doesn't have a particularly prominent counter outside of himself. If that is fixed, we'll see him drop off a bit.

I hear Raddus is hard countered by punching your opponent on the jaw and knocking all his ships on the floor.

The scene looks really well-balanced currently. So much more than before the faq

16 hours ago, Snipafist said:

Assuming a Sloane fleet, I'm not confident in your chances against MSU overall. Still quite workable against other fleets with expensive ships, though.

General Rebel MSU remark:

overall, and maybe thats way too premature a statement, MC75s are much more difficult to approach with CRs than previous big ships. Especially if you add Raddus and / or Profundity. Depending on upgrades and stuff, but I definitely have that feeling.

Needs time to get it right.

20 hours ago, svelok said:

I am curious how many players wholly binned their intended fleet after the FAQ (either because it wouldn't/couldn't work as intended anymore or just as a meta call) versus how many felt comfortable with whatever they'd been planning.

Me. I was running a raddus yav gh+ 3 and literally every ship in my fleet got nerfed?

20 hours ago, svelok said:

I am curious how many players wholly binned their intended fleet after the FAQ (either because it wouldn't/couldn't work as intended anymore or just as a meta call) versus how many felt comfortable with whatever they'd been planning.

Me. I was running a raddus yav gh+ 3 and literally every ship in my fleet got nerfed?

1 hour ago, Vipcard3 said:

Me. I was running a raddus yav gh+ 3 and literally every ship in my fleet got nerfed?

Won't find a ton of people that feel bad for you

That fleet needed to be removed from the game. And I dont say that lightly because I believe more options is better.

That said, yavaris is still super powerful and moving to a mc80c with fct and sad instead of the frigate gives you much the same fleet minus the hanky shuffle and double mechanic that never should have worked in the first place.

Of for Pete's sake, Get real guys. The meta won't be 'diverse'. The meta is: that there isn't a meta. The Rubik's cube just got scrambled. Oh, you have a month to test and study results? Ha. Haha. Cute. There won't be a meta until AFTER the event, and that's only thanks to the huge chunk of data it will give us.

FFG has done this for a few years now. And they aren't the only ones. Many video games like Mobas do critical updates just before their big events. And it's all for marketing, that's all it is. Not easy to market a game when your most publicized event has a solved meta. Turns out people don't like looking at the same couple a heros/ships/cards/whatever out of dozens available for hours on end. It's a strategy that works for the designer to satisfy the marketing department. And by jove it works and players fall for it.

This event will hinge on Raddus, and if you have a way to deal with Raddus or not. My estimation is top eight spread will be Rebel dominated, mostly with Raddus, with old standbys like Motti from the empire filling it out if at all. I don't see any imperial admiral choice that gets you a chance consistently against some of the hardest matches when your now hampered by the table rule. Empire barely had a squad fleet before, they have even less now. If there's a counter meta fleet that makes it it will have some weird double interdiction thing going on for sheer resilience and some shenanigans, and I hope to see one make it. I'm also hoping someone tries triple ISD and gets somewhere so that the post works meta is at least cool to look at. But I'm not holding my breath.

Easiest way to deal with Raddus is to deploy all of your ships facing your own board edge, and fly off turn 1. Because he's broken as heck.

5 hours ago, emsgoof said:

Easiest way to deal with Raddus is to deploy all of your ships facing your own board edge, and fly off turn 1. Because he's broken as heck.

Let the record show, this is the most accurate and sensible thing I've ever read in this forum.

Next we'll be discussing how to Nerf him. Calling it now: restriction on how close to another game object he can deploy. "At range one of a friendly ship and beyond range X of an enemy squad or ship." And it would still see high end play.

7 hours ago, ForceSensitive said:

Of for Pete's sake, Get real guys. The meta won't be 'diverse'. The meta is: that there isn't a meta. The Rubik's cube just got scrambled. Oh, you have a month to test and study results? Ha. Haha. Cute. There won't be a meta until AFTER the event, and that's only thanks to the huge chunk of data it will give us.

FFG has done this for a few years now. And they aren't the only ones. Many video games like Mobas do critical updates just before their big events. And it's all for marketing, that's all it is. Not easy to market a game when your most publicized event has a solved meta. Turns out people don't like looking at the same couple a heros/ships/cards/whatever out of dozens available for hours on end. It's a strategy that works for the designer to satisfy the marketing department. And by jove it works and players fall for it.

This event will hinge on Raddus, and if you have a way to deal with Raddus or not. My estimation is top eight spread will be Rebel dominated, mostly with Raddus, with old standbys like Motti from the empire filling it out if at all. I don't see any imperial admiral choice that gets you a chance consistently against some of the hardest matches when your now hampered by the table rule. Empire barely had a squad fleet before, they have even less now. If there's a counter meta fleet that makes it it will have some weird double interdiction thing going on for sheer resilience and some shenanigans, and I hope to see one make it. I'm also hoping someone tries triple ISD and gets somewhere so that the post works meta is at least cool to look at. But I'm not holding my breath.

The 3+2 meta shut down a lot of design options for fleets because of the way the firepower was generated and distributed, and the extraordinary resilience of the overlapping defensive upgrades involved. It essentially dictated specific hard counters to have any chance of defeating it, and those hard counters drastically limited your options (ESPECIALLY on the Imperial side). If those counters were not in your fleet, you had little to no chance of moving forward in a competition format. Many of the key features of that archetype have been reduced in power, and many of the obvious outstanding powerful options to combat them have likewise been somewhat reduced. I'm not seeing, as of yet, any options that quite match the level of power those options entailed except possibly for Raddus. The reason is that there are far fewer options now with no counter-play responses.

This means that every fleet now has to worry about significant counter-play opportunities, and that's why we will see far more diverse fleets as everyone tries to counter increasingly diverse options.