My experience has been that it doesn't much matter which one you take, as you'll always wish you had taken the other one. If you Focus, you'll end up with lots of blank dice. If you Target Lock, you'll see a bunch of eyeballs that reroll into eyes or blanks. It's just one of life's great mysteries.

Can't argue with results.

I'm an incessant focus-er, and should probably Lock more in fairly safe game states. However, I'm kind of irked by the blanket-statement feel I'm getting from this.

Focus and Lock are statistically identical.* This shouldn't be remotely controversial. But X-Wing isn't a game of just statistics, but also situations . Situationally, Lock is better than Focus, and vice versa. I think there's a pretty solid case that situations when focuses are better than locks are more common than situations where locks are better than focuses. I'm really comfortable with the phrase "Focus is usually better than Lock," but without that qualifier, something about it just feels wrong to me. It's just one word, why bother posting about it, but it's late and my mind just works this way sometimes.

Here's another situation where locks are better than focuses. By making one ship more vulnerable than another, your opponent might be jebaited into attacking the wrong ship. It's like, you can sort of turn one ship into a semi-Biggs by leaving it exposed and without focus, while focusing on the key piece. If it works, you've protected the ship you care about more, the one which will help you more towards your win. If it fails, and your opponent attacks the more-valuable ship, then you've also gained by having a Lock, since it can be saved, where the focus can't.

I'll also support the "locks can be saved" argument the idea that the choice to save a lock is more complicated than rolling all hits or not. Opponent has 4 HP left, and I've rolled 2 hits and an eye? I might just keep the lock. I can't get the kill this turn, and I'll have a better chance to push lethal damage next round. I dunno. Maybe that's not the best decision. I'm sure one thing which will separate many of the best players from the average ones is a sense of when to push damage, versus when to save locks for the next round. But consider: the marginal value of adding a focus to a Locked ship is 2.8125 - 2.25 = 0.5625 hits rolled. When you're in a situation with a lock and only one non-hit, the value is 0.5 hits rolled to spend that lock now. Or perhaps a saved lock means a reposition action or a red move next turn, in which case saving the lock adds 2.25 - 1.5 = 0.75 hits rolled on average, which is also higher than the value generated by spending a lock on a single blank/eye result. It'll also depend on the opponent's defenses.

One last thought: the agility of the ship making the choice matters. A focus on a B-Wing and a focus on a TIE Defender are not of equal value. A TIE Defender almost surely should focus, unless trying to bait out a foolish attack. With those three green dice, you've got a much better chance to not only roll an eye, but also roll multiple eyes on the same roll. On a B-Wing, you'll almost never get more than one evade result from the focus token, and with a decent chance of not rolling any green eyes anyhow. Meanwhile, B-Wings have massive amounts of red on their dial, and potentially unspent locks can leverage those red moves a lot more than focus tokens. Meanwhile, the TIE Defender has a white rather than red K-Turn, and consequently doesn't gain as much of a benefit from saved locks, since they can turn around and still take actions.

So most of the time, focus is probably the best pick. But above all, pay attention to the game state.

*Crit chance, yada yada. Might be worth reconsidering the value of crit chance these days, however. With as nasty crits can feel in 2e, maybe the minor fishing effect of a Lock matters more. Or perhaps that's an argument for Focus, since having defensive rolls to protect against enemy crits.

A lock potentially also influences your opponent's choices.

Does the opponent move the ship you have locked fearlessly into the spree, or moves it more carefully because you declared it as your aim?

Well, that was a massive wall of text that completely missed the point...

Taking TL actions is a key 2.0 skill that players who only played late 1.0 won't have, precisely because they think about the game like the OP did in his post.

11 hours ago, defkhan1 said:

wat? Lock doesn't have lower variance. Focus and lock have the same variance.

3 die focus: http://xwing.gateofstorms.net/2/multi/?d=AAAAAAAAAAA&a1=MQgAAAAAAAA

3 die lock: http://xwing.gateofstorms.net/2/multi/?d=AAAAAAAAAAA&a1=MwAAAAAAAAA

yeah this post is a little misleading.

I mean if you roll all focus and spend a target lock and roll blanks or focus again it does seem like the target lock is a waste of an action when statistically they have the same percentage to hit. Target lock just has a higher chance of crits as there is a possibility of a focus/blank being rerolled into a critical hit.

Again this is merely the fallacy of perception is deception. As I like to point out and @ficklegreendice will attest to this, is the only time you roll focus results, is when you don't have a focus token, and if you took the target lock action instead of focus, then it is likely you don't have one. If you did it will be nothing but a few hits/evades and the rest are blanks.