6 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

I like the fact that a single FO conversion kit seems to be 'all the TIE/fo you could ever need', unlike the rebel/imperial/scum versions.

And yes....according to the article:

• "Scorch"/Zeta Leader - Male
• "Longshot"/Zeta Ace - ???
• "Midnight"/Omega Leader - Male
• "Static"/Omega Ace - Female
• "Muse"/Epsilon Leader - Female
• Lieutenant Rivas - Male
• TN-3465 - Female
• Commander Malarus - Female

With Epsilon Squadron now badged as "cadets", it wouldn't surprise me if Epsilon Ace is no longer a thing (Cadet + 'Ace' seems an unlikely combination), especially since we have two more confirmed unique pilots than we previously did even without Epsilon Ace, and certainly more unique pilots than you can possibly fit in a squad.

Oh - Malarus is also from the comics.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Malarus

I gotta say, the First Order is coming off as quite progressive! Seriously though, I am very much enjoying the level of representation they are doing in the new canon, you can't expect only the boys fighting in the intergalactic war!

Also the Canon explanation for Commander Malarus being as tough as she is was because of a naturally occurring narcotic that "promoted body mass and intelligence".....so basically she is hopped up on glitterstim.

1 hour ago, ScummyRebel said:

She is the worst character of the First Order. By far. She’s tolerable only because of how little screen time she gets, unlike Rose.

Yes. Rose is really great. Needs a movie all about her.

6 hours ago, player2072913 said:

I swear, TLJ is like this forum's version of Godwin's Law .

Pretty much, mention it or stuff from it and there will be a debate about it one way or the other.

3 hours ago, Magnus Grendel said:

I think largely because there are only so many First Order characters to go at. Like her or not she's instantly recognisable.

I also agree that the amount of marketing focusing on her was a bit annoying given her input into the film, and especially given Gwendolyn Christie's abilities as an actress - compare her most famous other role as Brienne of Tarth, who comes across every bit as awesome as Phasma was made out to be and wasn't.

I do actually find her more interesting in the comics and books - because it develops the 'screw you lot, survive at all costs' mentality which doesn't really come across in the film; I find it quite annoying that one of the best scenes with her ended up on the cutting room floor (Finn tells a squad of stormtroopers who really shut down starkiller's shields, she responds by shooting the lot of them the moment he finishes talking).

She also is one of the three big FO characters, so it was always odd that she wasn't in the game. And it is a shame that they didn't show that scene in the film, since in the film she just comes across as some sort of generic trooper commander who was quick to lower the shields of Starkiller Base. I wonder if Resistance will show that part of her character to any real extent or if it will be something only really touched on in books and comics.

50 minutes ago, generalchaos34 said:

I gotta say, the First Order is coming off as quite progressive! Seriously though, I am very much enjoying the level of representation they are doing in the new canon, you can't expect only the boys fighting in the intergalactic war!

Also the Canon explanation for Commander Malarus being as tough as she is was because of a naturally occurring narcotic that "promoted body mass and intelligence".....so basically she is hopped up on glitterstim.

I don't care so much about the representation, outside of the fact that we are actually getting characters from the canon. It will be nice if any of the pilots take off like Howlrunner who was a nobody character til X-Wing and is now fairly well known at least for those who play the game. It would also be actually kind of really cool if LFL ever used the callsigns of the pilots FFG makes up in comics, books or the like.

9 hours ago, Okapi said:

as well as Rey's secret mother.

Nah, that's probably reserved for Qi'ra

10 minutes ago, Animewarsdude said:

Pretty much, mention it or stuff from it and there will be a debate about it one way or the other.

She also is one of the three big FO characters, so it was always odd that she wasn't in the game. And it is a shame that they didn't show that scene in the film, since in the film she just comes across as some sort of generic trooper commander who was quick to lower the shields of Starkiller Base. I wonder if Resistance will show that part of her character to any real extent or if it will be something only really touched on in books and comics.

I don't care so much about the representation, outside of the fact that we are actually getting characters from the canon. It will be nice if any of the pilots take off like Howlrunner who was a nobody character til X-Wing and is now fairly well known at least for those who play the game. It would also be actually kind of really cool if LFL ever used the callsigns of the pilots FFG makes up in comics, books or the like.

Considering that this new canon is all monitored and officially sanctioned there stands a pretty good chance of it happening! I mean Sloane and Ciena Ree were both from the Aftermath and Lost Stars books so its a decent chance that these new names might actually have some official background coming and FFG got them early. Im hoping that the new Resistance show will delve deep into the FFG lore (or vice versa).

19 minutes ago, Animewarsdude said:

And it is a shame that they didn't show that scene in the film, since in the film she just comes across as some sort of generic trooper commander who was quick to lower the shields of Starkiller Base.

Not what I got from her portrayal in the film at all. Sadistic ***** who had ended up in a fairly high ranking position, had her subordinates terrified of her and ended up doing something to keep from being crushed to death yes. Generic? Not by a long shot. Hux came off as canned and generic in the first film, not Phasma.

44 minutes ago, Hiemfire said:

Not what I got from her portrayal in the film at all. Sadistic ***** who had ended up in a fairly high ranking position, had her subordinates terrified of her and ended up doing something to keep from being crushed to death yes. Generic? Not by a long shot. Hux came off as canned and generic in the first film, not Phasma.

Considering her amazing background Phasma is playing to her character. Its all in the comics but she grew up on a mad max style world where she super murdered and betrayed all the way up to the top until the first order stopped by and gave her a job. I really wish cool stuff like this came out in the film, not to mention SHE should have been the one fighting Finn in the first movie and not TR-8R.

2 hours ago, player3010587 said:

When I asked (in a response to an overly optimistic post) if 4 ships was a swarm, I was 1: making a rhetorical point because 2: you can't fly a unique FO swarm. 6 ships is a swarm and you barely squeeze that in with the empire's uniques. This forum has no art in subtlety.

4 ships: either pocket aces or mini swarm to be paired with ship 5

5: almost a swarm, but definitely a mini swarm

6: most certainly a swarm

7: that's a swarm going for pure efficiency and not necessarily a bunch of fancy abilities (although you can fit this many gunrunners if you don't want the hard hitter of fenn or Boba that makes a gunrunner good).

8: the guy who flies it is delusional in his assertion that the Empire's fall actually is a heroic tragedy in star wars

Look that's the Star Wars fandom in general.

I've been screaming about how good Primed Thrusters was in 1st edition, especially in the apocalypse of thermal detonators, R3-A2 (in a degenerate version that buffed defense with usage???!!!), and highly-mobile things that Quickdraw would like to S-loop/1 or 3 turn and dodge/chase. With Panicked Pilot and Sloane being annoying things that can be worked around but preferably not dealt with in the first place, primed thrusters look really good on Lady Glitterstim. I'm still looking forward to Trick Shot/Fanatical with some Advanced Optics (old weapons guidance) on the guys who can throw extra dice. Omega Ace looks rather good in this toned-down version of the game, but that is entirely dependent on the effectivity of the Upsilon as a coordinate platform. With only Outrider as the consistent ditcher of target locks, (ironic, since Black One was the panicked response to Omega Leader when they did not anticipate his power) Omega Leader will get his ability off more often, but I feel that it will not be as good as the virtue of being I6 in itself. Meanwhile, Quickdraw retains her I6 and the relevance of her ability (albeit various nerfs due to rules and no lightweight).

3 hours ago, ScummyRebel said:

Except that Maul and Boba are both integral to the plot of their primary movies (TPM and ESB respectively). You couldn’t tell the story told without them.

Phasma could have easily been deleted from the script and nothing plot wise changes.

She is the worst character of the First Order. By far. She’s tolerable only because of how little screen time she gets, unlike Rose.

Completely disagree. In Finn's arc, Phasma was the physical manifestation of everything he feared about about the First Order. In TFA, he and Han took her hostage, and dumped her in a garbage chute, but he never really confronted his fears. Even his fight with Kylo was more self-preservation and trying to protect Rey than actually fighting FOR something.

When he fights and overcomes Phasma in hand-to-hand combat, he also overcomes those fears. That moment was where he finally went from "Guy who just wants to save himself and Rey" to "Guy willing to sacrifice his life for a cause."

8 hours ago, Captain Lackwit said:

1: I always wonder how, and this isn't aimed at you specifically, frail one's love for something is when one perceived gaff is all it takes to destroy it.
2: But uh, yeah that's mostly true, MG-100 and Upsilon aside. At least those are actually brand new concepts.

1. Eh, I'll still go see the next movie, but I'm not going to a midnight release this time around. Expectations have been lowered.

2. Yeah, those are okay. I just seriously question what use Leia would have for slow moving carpet bombers that require established air superiority before they can be deployed. Those craft are only really useful for bombing defenseless targets. Maybe the republic kicked her out for a reason...

1 hour ago, HolySorcerer said:

1. Eh, I'll still go see the next movie, but I'm not going to a midnight release this time around. Expectations have been lowered.

2. Yeah, those are okay. I just seriously question what use Leia would have for slow moving carpet bombers that require established air superiority before they can be deployed. Those craft are only really useful for bombing defenseless targets. Maybe the republic kicked her out for a reason...

On point 2, I could have seen the Resistance being given these by the Republic without them actually requesting them. Republic might have seen them as useless boats with high maintenance costs and wanted to find a way to dumnp them. Somehow, probably through bureaucracy, it was decided they couldn't just send them to the scrapyard so found a way out of owning them by sending them to the Resistance. I can only assume that the Resistance saw them as valuable but perhaps not in the form they appeared in. Maybe they had just received them and hadn't yet figured out how to strip them down to make them more useful, like the Rebels did with the y-wings. Maybe stripping them down wasn't realistic at all for whatever reason. As they are, I have to agree that they make little sense to be a ship that the Resistance actually wanted to use.

4 hours ago, generalchaos34 said:

I gotta say, the First Order is coming off as quite progressive! Seriously though, I am very much enjoying the level of representation they are doing in the new canon, you can't expect only the boys fighting in the intergalactic war!

Also the Canon explanation for Commander Malarus being as tough as she is was because of a naturally occurring narcotic that "promoted body mass and intelligence".....so basically she is hopped up on glitterstim.

Most of the female pilots are no-named mooks from the films given names and "character" by the EU. They're throwaway characters, and in X-Wing, their pilot abilities are far more important. They could be amoeba monsters for all I care.

13 hours ago, Forgottenlore said:

She’s the Boba Fett and Darth Maul of the sequels. A character with a distinctive look that never really does anything but fans latch onto anyway.

At this point it wouldn’t be Star Wars without a character like that.

Fans latched onto Boba Fett and Darth Maul. I rarely hear anyone mention Phasma, or even know that she's a thing, outside the fans who have focused their hate for the prequels on certain characters, instead of the poor storytelling.

31 minutes ago, CaptainIxidor said:

hadn't yet figured out how to strip them down to make them more useful, like the Rebels did with the y-wings.

Or to refit the mags to carry proton torps. There is plenty of space for a boatload of them.

32 minutes ago, Koing907 said:

Most of the female pilots are no-named mooks from the films given names and "character" by the EU. They're throwaway characters, and in X-Wing, their pilot abilities are far more important. They could be amoeba monsters for all I care.    

Its better than just being a boys club thats for sure. I just like the fact they are at least trying

6 minutes ago, generalchaos34 said:

Its better than just being a boys club thats for sure. I just like the fact they are at least trying

There have been female pilots since wave 1. To insinuate that FFG weren't trying before now is disingenuous.

1 minute ago, Koing907 said:

There have been female pilots since wave 1. To insinuate that FFG weren't trying before now is disingenuous.

Star Wars in general (and a lot of media for many many years), I'm not blaming FFG they have been doing a great job.

1 minute ago, Koing907 said:

There have been female pilots since wave 1. To insinuate that FFG weren't trying before now is disingenuous.

Pick another hill to die on man. This one ain't worth it.

9 minutes ago, generalchaos34 said:

Its better than just being a boys club thats for sure. I just like the fact they are at least trying

Honestly we really don't know the sex/gender of most of the pilots the characters encounter in Star Wars outside of the ones who's faces we see. Any auto assumption of "he" is a slowly dying artifact of a dead age.

9 minutes ago, Hiemfire said:

Pick another hill to die on man. This one ain't worth it.

Who made you the forum den mother?

I do agree, it's a dumb tangent, and I'm not so smart for falling into it.

4 hours ago, generalchaos34 said:

I really wish cool stuff like this came out in the film, not to mention SHE should have been the one fighting Finn in the first movie and not TR-8R.

I disagree. There's not really any way Finn could have fought her in TFA without either making her appear laughably weak/incompetent or making Finn seem so good that he has nowhere to grow in the following movies. Better to have Finn fight some random grunt first, then Phasma in the second movie (winning only because of fortuitous circumstances), and then fight her again in the third movie, finally defeating her completely.

3 hours ago, HolySorcerer said:

2. Yeah, those are okay. I just seriously question what use Leia would have for slow moving carpet bombers that require established air superiority before they can be deployed. Those craft are only really useful for bombing defenseless targets. Maybe the republic kicked her out for a reason...

They would have made very effective minelayers, something which they didn't have time to do while evacuating D'Qar with the First Order fleet already overhead.

For that matter, with proper escorts, and under the right circumstances, they could be used to take out capital ships. If they were facing a smaller force (say, only 1-3 capital ships instead of, what, a few dozen?), then the fighters could have protected them on their way in to take out the bigger targets.

Finally, they would have been quite useful against planet-side First Order bunkers and fortresses. Again, with proper escort.

In this case, they were fleeing, rather than attacking, and they were doing so with effectively no warning, so they were making due with what they had, as they were vastly outnumbered and outgunned. You generally don't try to defend yourself with bombers, but in that case, they didn't really have anything else with the firepower to take out the Fulminatrix before it took out the entire Resistance fleet.

Just now, JJ48 said:

I disagree. There's not really any way Finn could have fought her in TFA without either making her appear laughably weak/incompetent or making Finn seem so good that he has nowhere to grow in the following movies. Better to have Finn fight some random grunt first, then Phasma in the second movie (winning only because of fortuitous circumstances), and then fight her again in the third movie, finally defeating her completely.

I can see that, but you could have had him barely make it out alive (using a lightsaber without the force is incredibly reckless!) and still have the same outcome with Phasma getting blasted with Chewie's bowcaster and getting knocked out thus setting up the revenge/duel concept beyond Phasma just hating him for being a traitor, NOW its personal.

But your set up sounds just as good and I really hope she returns for another go and she is revealed for being the true traitor. Having her fall into a pit and dying ingloriously seems like a perfectly good waste of a good villain and the acting talents of Gwendoline Christie (aka the only decent person in Game of Thrones).

Now back to the matter at hand! Any idea of cool tech slot items they may want to try out? Theres always the comms relay or the pattern analyzer but those may be a bit more powerful than 2.0 will allow. Personally I would like to see something that handles stress on OTHER ships, ala preventing stress from being cleared or handing it out. I very much get a vibe that First Order will be the "Debuff" army that hands out stress and other debilitating tokens and gets some sort of synergy from it. none of these would be cheap but it would be very cool to have lets say an upgrade that hands out stress if you bump or maybe even a cannon/missile that could (on a very hard chance!) dish out a disarm token.

8 hours ago, HolySorcerer said:

1. Eh, I'll still go see the next movie, but I'm not going to a midnight release this time around. Expectations have been lowered.

2. Yeah, those are okay. I just seriously question what use Leia would have for slow moving carpet bombers that require established air superiority before they can be deployed. Those craft are only really useful for bombing defenseless targets. Maybe the republic kicked her out for a reason...

MG-100s are actually extremely useful craft. Those massive bays can hold cargo, probes for recon, you name it. On top of that... They aren't exactly space superiority vehicles either! They're designed to hit land bases. Read a couple articles about them, they're actually very very useful things to have around.

And they could provide excellent fighter screening for something like the Ninka, if necessary.

16 hours ago, Animewarsdude said:

She also is one of the three big FO characters, so it was always odd that she wasn't in the game. And it is a shame that they didn't show that scene in the film, since in the film she just comes across as some sort of generic trooper commander who was quick to lower the shields of Starkiller Base. I wonder if Resistance will show that part of her character to any real extent or if it will be something only really touched on in books and comics.

Maybe, but it looks - at least for the moment - like the main 'first order' bad guys for Resistance is Major Vonreg (the totally-not-the-red-baron-honest) and Pyre, the gold stormtrooper commander. We might see more of Phasma, but I suspect it'll be more like Tarkin in resistance; she's there in cameos but that's about it.

17 hours ago, generalchaos34 said:

Also the Canon explanation for Commander Malarus being as tough as she is was because of a naturally occurring narcotic that "promoted body mass and intelligence".....so basically she is hopped up on glitterstim.

A very appropriate ability, then.

16 hours ago, Animewarsdude said:

I don't care so much about the representation, outside of the fact that we are actually getting characters from the canon. It will be nice if any of the pilots take off like Howlrunner who was a nobody character til X-Wing and is now fairly well known at least for those who play the game. It would also be actually kind of really cool if LFL ever used the callsigns of the pilots FFG makes up in comics, books or the like.

Things have been cross-referenced before (like the Raider being used as a spec-ops gunship in Battlefront II), but the issue is that:

~ Any 'new' show/book/game tends to want to create its own named 'stars'

~ There are already more than enough resistance pilots (via the films and Black Squadron), and - at least at the moment - there's been little indication we'll see anything following 'generic' First Order pilots.

~ To be honest, even just namechecking the squadron names would be good. I can see Filoni picking things up because he likes using random easter eggs or reworking in older or more obscure bits of the background. The only really iconic First Order pilots (that X-wing players would be asking for - 'iconic' is a relative term because there aren't that many of us) are Omega Leader (which has the whole male/female "Midnight"/"Lockdown" thing) and Quickdraw.

Putting "Quickdraw" in as a special forces pilot would be very cool, though.

12 hours ago, JJ48 said:

I disagree. There's not really any way Finn could have fought her in TFA without either making her appear laughably weak/incompetent.

How so? If "TR-8R" at Takodana is replaced with phasma, she yells at him, he turns, she takes out shock maul (makes a degree more sense why an officer is armed with that not a rifle), he charges at her, and she proceeds to dump his electrified backside in the dirt.

She's then either wounded by a shot from Han with the bowcaster ( bloody heck, stormtrooper armour did something !), or (to avoid Kylo and Phasma both surviving a shot from what's supposed to be an incredibly powerful rifle) dives for cover from it - possibly throwing a trooper into the way because " screw you, I'm surviving, you're disposable " and they lose track of her because we cut to Kylo/Rey.