2 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

hat had better not be cheap, because as a permanently active, chargeless abiltiy, that's potentially game-winning given how often a blank roll results in it all going to heck.

Is it?

How many times have you actually rolled complete blanks? An eye and a blank with no focus, sure. A hit and two blanks when they rolled an evade and an eye, yeah.

But even with two dice attacks, I don't remember the last time I rolled double blanks.

Look at the maths @theBitterFig did a little bit up the page. 6.25% chance of rolling double blanks on two attack dice. That's nothing.

It's slightly better on green dice, but I think it still only really makes sense on single agility ships where the chances of blanking are way, way higher.

I see it as way more of a crutch upgrade. I agree with you in the sense it could be amazing to have that one time you blank out at just the wrong moment. I'm thinking even with 2 agility, the T-70s will know how this feels. But where I disagree with you is that any upgrade you're taking 'just in case' should never be expensive.

If Heroic were expensive, it would never see play over talents that trigger more reliably. It's the same reason Determination basically never saw play in 1e, because while it was amazing if you happened to be dealt a pilot crit, you couldn't guarantee that would happen in a game. And Determination was cheap . Heroic has a more reliable trigger than Determination, but a much lesser effect. Any more than 3 points and it just won't see play.

1 hour ago, GuacCousteau said:

It's slightly better on green dice, but I think it still only really makes sense on single agility ships where the chances of blanking are way, way higher. 

Alas, that's probably why it only works if you're rolling at least 2 dice.

16 hours ago, WAC47 said:

Also there's no interaction with Juke (dice can't be modified at all).

I'd been running 1.0 OL with A Score to Settle and the upgrade that lets you hold over a focus (forgot the name completely, it's been so long...) and it was terribly effective in a 2 ship meta, helped me fit out other ships, and saved me a bunch of money on my car insurance. Ran her w/ Tomax and Vessery. It let me make them both super shooty.

If heroic is cheap, it's an auto include. Especially on a 2 dice, 3 agility ship. Imagine an A-wing that just slooped or K-turned. You have no mods. You are throwing naked dice. In just the last 2 weeks I've had probably a dozen times where I would have triggered it. On attacks where you blank and have no mods. When it's life or death and those three green dice you live or die by fail you by blanking it. Just pick them up and re-roll. It's a super "feels good" card. Maybe I have bad dice...but there are A LOT of times that I would have been able to proxy that ability.

23 minutes ago, __underscore__ said:

Alas, that's probably why it only works if you're rolling at least 2 dice.

I'm an idiot.

I was literally reading the card text right before I posted, no idea why that didn't track.

Yeah, in that case it really is an emergency crutch upgrade.

How many people put the vanguard title on a Silencer? It's basically a permanent Vanguard title you never have to discard on defense and insurance against naked attacks on offense. If you area stressed it still works. If you are stressed and a better move is a white one instead of a green one you can still move and have a chance for mods if you blank out.

10 minutes ago, GuacCousteau said:

I'm an idiot.

I was literally reading the card text right before I posted, no idea why that didn't track.

Yeah, in that case it really is an emergency crutch upgrade.

It still synergises well with a 1 agility ship with Finn - it triggers off of two or more blank results, rather than when you roll two or more dice.

2 minutes ago, viedit said:

How many people put the vanguard title on a Silencer? It's basically a permanent Vanguard title you never have to discard on defense and insurance against naked attacks on offense. If you area stressed it still works. If you are stressed and a better move is a white one instead of a green one you can still move and have a chance for mods if you blank out.

It's nothing like Vanguard, though.

Vanguard has no specific trigger condition beyond 'when defending'. Vanguard didn't require you to roll nothing but blanks, it worked if you rolled eyes but had no focus and it worked if you rolled an evade but would die without rolling two.

Literally rolling all blanks is not common, especially as you start adding more dice.

8 minutes ago, viedit said:

If you are stressed and a better move is a white one instead of a green one you can still move and have a chance for mods if you blank out. 

Exactly. A chance for mods if you blank out. That is basically the defintion of a crutch upgrade, and is no different from 1e Determination outright blocking a whole damage with no requirements (action, stress etc.) if you received a pilot crit.

The only distinction then becomes the probability of the trigger condition, and while the likelihood of Heroic triggering is much better than Determination, the chances still aren't that high. And all the while, you're missing out on easier to trigger talents like Elusive, Outmaneuver or Predator. Opportunity cost is enough to make this a difficult card to justify if it's any more than 4 points, IMO. Even then, I think 2 is more appropriate.

2 minutes ago, apoapsis said:

It still synergises well with a 1 agility ship with Finn - it triggers off of two or more blank results, rather than when you roll two or more dice.

Good spot. That's a nice little niche. Should work well on the Falcon, assuming Han and Chewie's Resistance versions are worth taking.

Here's the thing about Heroic: I doubt all my instincts. Data is useless if you can't draw meaningful conclusions from it.

A 1/16 chance to trigger on an A-Wing's attack? That's nothing. But. Predator has that narrow line, and may be kinda too hard to line up. So while Heroic is a lot less effective, it always works. And it tosses in a weak defensive benefit. If Heroic and Predator are the same, I kinda think I take Heroic.

On a T-70 defending or a Finn 1-agility ship, this can go a long way. Not as good as Elusive against a single attack, but it doesn't take charges so it works on multiple attacks, and doesn't require various movements or anything to recharge. Just a permanent benefit. So at 3 points, maybe this is better than Elusive. I mean, get attacked 3 times per red move you take, and it kinda adds up. But ships have limited hit points, so the long-run average might not really be worth considering. I mean, it'll trigger one out of every 7 attacks on a T-70. Does a T-70 live through 7 attacks? Online dice calcs I see only go up to 6 attacks, where there's a 75% chance it'd be dead. A 3-red focus attack against 2-green focus defense does about 1 damage. So 7 attacks kinda should kill you. But let's say it does. Let's say Heroic procs once and gets you an extra evade and effectively adds an extra HP on average over the course of the game. That'd be worth about 5 points, per the 2-agility cost of a Hull Upgrade.

If the variance is high enough--Heroic is certainly high variance!!--maybe it's not good. Or maybe the high variance makes it better. Consider: Predator without a focus has a 50% chance to convert a single die from a miss to a hit. There's going to be a lot of times when that's going to be kind of irrelevant. Say you're range 1, on a low health ship, and getting more hits is just overkill. Or you roll blank blank focus and it doesn't matter if you can pick up a hit. By it's nature, Heroic will rarely lead to irrelevant results. Blank-out to double evade or triple hit might be game swinging. Rare events with large impacts are hard to evaluate.

I keep forgetting about new Lone Wolf. That works on potentially any roll, once per turn. That might be a good comparison. If I'm drawing the right conclusions from my data, an A-Wing gets something like 1/5th the benefit of Lone Wolf, but on every attack and defense and without regard to positioning and it's not unique. Attack once, defend twice, and then you're kinda at 3/5ths of Lone Wolf, but you don't have to worry about being near a friendly ship, so you're more flexible in squad design. Does that seem worth about equal points? Maybe.

I really have no idea what this should cost. It's of such wildly different values on different ships and in different combinations, and is so high variance. It seems almost busted on Finn Falcon, where you'll have a 37% chance to reroll 2 green dice. That's almost 1e C-3PO levels, but it works multiple times per turn, but that's only one one ship with a gunner likely to be expensive.

I dunno. A project for the people at home: Do a little low sample size simulation. Grab 3 red dice, 2 green. Presume both have focus. How many attacks can you receive before you die, and how often would Heroic extend that?

//

TL,DR: Why did FFG have to disrespect MajorJuggler, since I can't deal.

And not that I think Jam is going to be as abusing in 2.0 as it was in the dying days of 1.0, but Heroism is also a jam proof talent. Lost your evade or target lock? There's hope!

24 minutes ago, theBitterFig said:

Here's the thing about Heroic: I doubt all my instincts. Data is useless if you can't draw meaningful conclusions from it.

A 1/16 chance to trigger on an A-Wing's attack? That's nothing. But. Predator has that narrow line, and may be kinda too hard to line up. So while Heroic is a lot less effective, it always works. And it tosses in a weak defensive benefit. If Heroic and Predator are the same, I kinda think I take Heroic.

On a T-70 defending or a Finn 1-agility ship, this can go a long way. Not as good as Elusive against a single attack, but it doesn't take charges so it works on multiple attacks, and doesn't require various movements or anything to recharge. Just a permanent benefit. So at 3 points, maybe this is better than Elusive. I mean, get attacked 3 times per red move you take, and it kinda adds up. But ships have limited hit points, so the long-run average might not really be worth considering. I mean, it'll trigger one out of every 7 attacks on a T-70. Does a T-70 live through 7 attacks? Online dice calcs I see only go up to 6 attacks, where there's a 75% chance it'd be dead. A 3-red focus attack against 2-green focus defense does about 1 damage. So 7 attacks kinda should kill you. But let's say it does. Let's say Heroic procs once and gets you an extra evade and effectively adds an extra HP on average over the course of the game. That'd be worth about 5 points, per the 2-agility cost of a Hull Upgrade.

If the variance is high enough--Heroic is certainly high variance!!--maybe it's not good. Or maybe the high variance makes it better. Consider: Predator without a focus has a 50% chance to convert a single die from a miss to a hit. There's going to be a lot of times when that's going to be kind of irrelevant. Say you're range 1, on a low health ship, and getting more hits is just overkill. Or you roll blank blank focus and it doesn't matter if you can pick up a hit. By it's nature, Heroic will rarely lead to irrelevant results. Blank-out to double evade or triple hit might be game swinging. Rare events with large impacts are hard to evaluate.

I keep forgetting about new Lone Wolf. That works on potentially any roll, once per turn. That might be a good comparison. If I'm drawing the right conclusions from my data, an A-Wing gets something like 1/5th the benefit of Lone Wolf, but on every attack and defense and without regard to positioning and it's not unique. Attack once, defend twice, and then you're kinda at 3/5ths of Lone Wolf, but you don't have to worry about being near a friendly ship, so you're more flexible in squad design. Does that seem worth about equal points? Maybe.

I really have no idea what this should cost. It's of such wildly different values on different ships and in different combinations, and is so high variance. It seems almost busted on Finn Falcon, where you'll have a 37% chance to reroll 2 green dice. That's almost 1e C-3PO levels, but it works multiple times per turn, but that's only one one ship with a gunner likely to be expensive.

I dunno. A project for the people at home: Do a little low sample size simulation. Grab 3 red dice, 2 green. Presume both have focus. How many attacks can you receive before you die, and how often would Heroic extend that?

//

TL,DR: Why did FFG have to disrespect MajorJuggler, since I can't deal.

I wouldn't overthink it too much.

Nothing wrong with the maths in your earlier post. It demonstrates that this is not an easy card to trigger. The results are very good when it does trigger, but I think it's worth pointing out the lifespan of 1e was an arms race to minimise variance. Guaranteed triggers and passive mods dominated, random chance cards like R5-K6 never saw play.

2e uses the same dice and the same fundamental interactions. It too will be an arms race to minimise variance. The hope this time is that FFG hold back on giving us tools to do that, and ensure that there is a cost associated with every effect, with the magnitude of each balanced against each other. But competitive list building will still be looking to guarantee effects where they can, or build around overlapping triggers (eg. Predator on Fel)

My point is that even in the higher overall variance world of 2e, the lower variance cards will always be favoured over high variance regardless of the scale of the effect, within limits. If people look at Heroic as a means to protect low HP ships like the RZ-2 from being one shot after whiffing, Hull Upgrade would arguably be a more reliable way to do this, and so Heroic should be cheaper on them.

What makes this interesting is that, for now, Heroic doesn't actually have that much competition. The talent slot, I would argue, has received the biggest nerf of any element of the game. Where once it was a slot that absolutely had to be filled, if you had it (even just with a 0 point Adaptability boost to PS), now there are lot of pilots and ships out there I genuinely struggle to match a talent with. There's so much reliance on either bullseye arcs or action availability (eg. Juke, Expert Handling) that some ships simply don't like any of the trigger conditions.

Heroic may well start out strong on Resistance pilots. But as the game slowly adds talents with less variance, I imagine its use will drop.

I'm curious to see if there's a point cost trend over time to reflect that. Will Heroic start at 5, get bumped to 6 to prevent abuse in a four RZ-2 list that springs up then get knocked down to 3 when something more reliable comes along and dominates Resistance lists?

OK. I just rolled out a bunch of 3-red, 2-green dice sets. Convert all focus results. Will Heroic trigger and add results before the defender suffers a grand total of 7 damage?

Out of 12 chains of rolls, 4 times I was able to add evades with Heroic, once whiffed on the Heroic reroll into a second double blank, and once blanked on attack into 2 hits. So Heroic triggers in half the "games" and is effective in 5/12.

Very small sample size. But so are X-Wing tournaments. If I flew a heroic ship in three 4-game tournaments, and had it trigger 6 times, with 4 times getting a defensive benefit, once gaining an offensive benefit, do I think that's worth it? It only helped in about half the games. That's probably not too great.

But here's what sticks in my craw. Finn just breaks it. Rey broke Finn in 1e, where he'd have been a cool and interesting upgrade in a lot of situations, but wasn't going to be worth nearly as many points on most ships. Ibtisam Finn? That'd have been neat. Is it worth the minimum 34 points? Oh **** no. Would it even be worth 30 points (shaving off the 3-points overpriced based on 1e/2e B-Wing prices, and the point from E/2)? I'm not sure. Might have been fun to try with like Advanced Sensors. But because of the massive strength of the Rey/Finn combination, Finn had to be priced up near Gunner levels. Maybe I'm underestimating how good a Finn Ghost was, but still. I think my general point of Finn being so incredibly good in some rare number of situations really necessitated a higher point cost on ships where he'd have been resonable.

Heroism at a normal point cost might be balanced with ships other than Finn Falcons. But Finn Falcon is going to gain such a huge defensive benefit from this it probably can't be sensibly priced for A-Wings and X-Wings.

Bah. I just want to know how much it costs.

5 minutes ago, GuacCousteau said:

What makes this interesting is that, for now, Heroic doesn't actually have that much competition. The talent slot, I would argue, has received the biggest nerf of any element of the game. Where once it was a slot that absolutely had to be filled, if you had it (even just with a 0 point Adaptability boost to PS), now there are lot of pilots and ships out there I genuinely struggle to match a talent with. There's so much reliance on either bullseye arcs or action availability (eg. Juke, Expert Handling) that some ships simply don't like any of the trigger conditions.

This reminds me of a particular style of original trilogy tournament my FLGS had about a year ago. Only upgrades from the expansions containing original trilogy ships were legal. Lone Wolf? Outrider and Hound's Tooth. Predator? Only in TIE Defender and Ghost, so no go. Push the Limit was allowed, but without Autothrusters, the ships most able to take advantage of it were a lot weaker. It really kinda felt like there just weren't Elite upgrades worth using.

Yeah I swear some people just have better dice, or roll their dice better than me

I easily have 3-4 times a game where I totally blank on dice. This is totally a "feels good" card that instead of watching your ship go splat and ******* about "MUH DICE!" you at least can pick them back up and try again. While it could be very frustrating to your opponent, it definitely will help keep actual player moral up a bit when their dice go cold. It is a game of variance for sure. This is just a way to flatten the variance a bit and maybe keep your attitude a bit more cheery in the process.

You guys are saying heroism triggers multiple times? I don’t think it can. I don’t have the page in front of me but I know early in the RRG it says you can’t mod dice more than once. Later it says rerolling is modding. I’m pretty sure this is one and done.

Re: Heroic point cost:

Most likely (if they’re smart) this will be one of the cards with variable point costs- cheaper on high agility ships that are going to have a hard time triggering it, more expensive on low agility ships that will prob it more often.

1 minute ago, LordFajubi said:

You guys are saying heroism triggers multiple times? I don’t think it can. I don’t have the page in front of me but I know early in the RRG it says you can’t mod dice more than once. Later it says rerolling is modding. I’m pretty sure this is one and done.

Pretty sure they mean multiple times during the game, not multiple times on a single roll. In other words, it’s not a use once and discard (or burn a charge) type of card.

7 minutes ago, Herowannabe said:

Pretty sure they mean multiple times during the game, not multiple times on a single roll. In other words, it’s not a use once and discard (or burn a charge) type of card.

No I think it specifically says per attack. So you can do this every attack but not more than once an attack.

Where are folks seeing the price of the wave two conversion kits? are we sure they are $29?

1 minute ago, LordFajubi said:

So you can do this every attack but not more than once an attack.

Literally nobody is saying you can do it more than once an attack.

What are you on about?

17 minutes ago, GuacCousteau said:

Literally nobody is saying you can do it more than once an attack.

What are you on about?

Guy up top was talking about double blanking in his test rolls.

Just now, LordFajubi said:

Guy up top was talking about double blanking in his test rolls.

As in, rolling dice normally and blanking

Then triggering Heroic to roll again, and blanking again.

That's two instances of rolling all blanks.

Double = 2

Double blanking.

Just now, GuacCousteau said:

As in, rolling dice normally and blanking

Then triggering Heroic to roll again, and blanking again.

That's two instances of rolling all blanks.

Double = 2

Double blanking.

Right the second blank is blank period you can’t roll or mod again. Those dice have been modded this attack.

1 minute ago, LordFajubi said:

Right the second blank is blank period you can’t roll or mod again. Those dice have been modded this attack.

Okay. I was actually wrong in my previous explanation. I take that back, it may have confused the issue.

Let's go back to the original thing you seem confused about:

7 minutes ago, LordFajubi said:

Guy up top was talking about double blanking in his test rolls.

@theBitterFig 's actual quote:

46 minutes ago, theBitterFig said:

Out of 12 chains of rolls, 4 times I was able to add evades with Heroic, once whiffed on the Heroic reroll into a second double blank , and once blanked on attack into 2 hits. So Heroic triggers in half the "games" and is effective in 5/12.

He means that he rolled two green dice and 'double blanked'. I.e, both results on the green dice were blank.

This is the trigger condition for Heroic, which lets you reroll. Fig is saying that on one such reroll, he rolled a second 'double blank', i.e two blank dice results.

The first double blank was the normal defensive roll, the second double blank was the re-roll from Heroic.

Again, nobody is saying you can trigger Heroic a second time even if you happen to roll all blanks on the Heroic re-roll.

2 minutes ago, GuacCousteau said:

We agree on how it works must have misread.

48 minutes ago, PanchoX1 said:

Where are folks seeing the price of the wave two conversion kits? are we sure they are $29?

Nevermind, I found it.