Our group's been slowly getting the expansions and recently got Twin Shadows.

We were able to apply a couple simple hot-fixes to the heroes to make them viable B+ tier. (strain adjustments for Biv and Saska gets a free token each round in addition to the +1strain'd token, for starters)

...

Heavy Troopers and Tuskens just ... don't seem like they're worth it.

We haven't had a whole lot of use with Tuskens, the couple times we threw them in it felt unremarkable. (your comments on those guys are welcome)

Heavy troopers, tho, just kinda feel like they aren't achieving what they want to do.
- the composite armor passive rarely kicks in, for starters (a lot of heroes are melee or have shorter range weapons, so they'll be within that 4 tile mark). So they don't feel tanky. This is partly because ...
- their range is slightly at odds with their defensive passive. their "safe" accuracy minimum is only 4 tiles. which means on the next turn the hero can close the gap and negate the defensive boost.
- the blue/red dice don't feel significantly more powerful than blue/green
- but they're slow, so you want to think that they're supposed to be tanky (but they kinda aren't).

So what, what are your thoughts on these two grunts? (the tusken and the heavy troopers).
- Is there a strategy element we're overlooking about them that explains why they exist?

More importantly, have you applied simple hot-fixes that worked well? (by that we mean single-aspect changes to make it work, rather than total overhauls).

I don't think I have ever used Tusken Raiders as open groups, they are thematic units.

Heavy Stormtroopers are fairly durable and combo well with trooper agenda cards (Fire At Will) and trooper class deck (Sustained Fire, Endless Ranks), although the lack of reroll makes them swingy. If your heroes take 3 actions to defeat 8 Health, they are great. If they are one-shotted (or even two-shotted), Stormtrooper group is better.

(From where I come from for tweaks: I have played with any and all heroes in the app and all heroes are great to play with with no adjustments. "Viable" for the app means fun to play, which includes some amount of challenge to make the heroes work together and optimize their items, not how powerful each hero is in isolation.)

Edit: If you have a permission to adjust the campaign as a whole, you can use "suboptimal" and thematic open groups and your tier X issue no longer matters.

11 minutes ago, a1bert said:

I don't think I have ever used Tusken Raiders as open groups, they are thematic units.

Heavy Stormtroopers are fairly durable and combo well with trooper agenda cards (Fire At Will) and trooper class deck (Sustained Fire, Endless Ranks), although the lack of reroll makes them swingy. If your heroes take 3 actions to defeat 8 Health, they are great. If they are one-shotted (or even two-shotted), Stormtrooper group is better.

(From where I come from for tweaks: I have played with any and all heroes in the app and all heroes are great to play with with no adjustments. "Viable" for the app means fun to play, which includes some amount of challenge to make the heroes work together and optimize their items, not how powerful each hero is in isolation.)

Edit: If you have a permission to adjust the campaign as a whole, you can use "suboptimal" and thematic open groups and your tier X issue no longer matters.

We wholly ignore campaign restrictions related to thematics. If anything our flim-flam excuses for why there are Tusken Raiders in Cloud City make it 100% worth doing so. lol

We're more interested in making the different types of troops conditionally viable. The main problem is that we're all fairly proficient players in our group. We do our best to just have fun with it, but having cost/benefit fallout with "not different enough" heavy troopers makes it a little harder to enjoy for the current Imperial player. (hopfeully that makes sense)

We'll take a look at those combo aspects for the heavies. (common probe droids with and without the techsuperiority class deck are night and day)

( Jawa Scavenger helps with droids with any class deck and is a great figure in itself.)

I think Tuskens are great, especially elite Tuskans. They hit very hard in melee. Remember that they are melee units - the ranged attack special ability is a nice way to make them useful if they are stunned at a distance and out of melee range, but otherwise should be ignored.

Heavy Stormtroopers have been very disappointing for me, although I'm not sure how much of that is my dice. I choose them as an open group if I want to go easy on my players, so that should tell you something.

In 4+ threat level missions with a starting double threat and deployment event, Heavy Troopers can be a strong opening move if you have reliable access to surges for Blast 2. (Hidden, surge power tokens, Focus)

Unless the Rebels somehow spread out quickly, you can easily stick at least 4 damage on 3 separate heroes.

Paired with their durability they can be quite the pain for Rebels to deal with.

Regular Heavies are okay as alternative to stormtroopers if your heroes have a lot of blast or cleave, and they give you a total of 12 health compared to regular stormtroopers 9, so they are all around tankier but less offensive. The elite Heavies are especially good for putting attachments onto, especially that gives a surge for that +2. Accuracy buffs are also good on them for the reasoning you gave that they would rather hang back. On their own they are lackluster.

Elite Tuskens are alright, they can hit pretty hard as melee and at least have the option to attack at range, and they have good health. Weaken is quite good against heroes too. I'm never sad to get them as a reserved/initial group in a mission. But costing 7 just kind of makes them awkward to use as an open group, and they will always be outclassed by elite Jet Troopers now. The regular Tuskens are pretty bad, I'd almost never take them over an elite Probe Droid or Dewback Rider unless I really wanted a multi-figure melee group for some reason.

13 minutes ago, Tvboy said:

unless I really wanted a multi-figure melee group for some reason.

there were frequent times where I did wanted a multi-figure melee group, but really there are much better options: eGamo, rRiot, eRiot are all better than rTusken or eTusken imo

and rRiot costs the same as rTusken but is better in every way

Might have to try heavy stormtrooper in the ToL campaign. CT with the ggy weapon that stuns is making a mess out of riots. Current imperial deck is overwhelming oppression and current hero line up is tress, Drokatta, CT, Verena. Having riots seems a little bit of a Liability since they get stunned and between Verena and tress, I want to space myself out.

7 hours ago, LordDraigo1 said:

Might have to try heavy stormtrooper in the ToL campaign. CT with the ggy weapon that stuns is making a mess out of riots. Current imperial deck is overwhelming oppression and current hero line up is tress, Drokatta, CT, Verena. Having riots seems a little bit of a Liability since they get stunned and between Verena and tress, I want to space myself out.

You could also try eNexu or eLoth Cats. Their pounce ability is helpful for getting around stun. Each eLoth Cat figure hits as hard as an eNexu does, just without the Bleed and Cleave, but the Nexu can reach further with its pounce and can block hallways and such and has a little more variance in its survivability with Cunning and the Dodge.

3 hours ago, Tvboy said:

You could also try eNexu or eLoth Cats. Their pounce ability is helpful for getting around stun. Each eLoth Cat figure hits as hard as an eNexu does, just without the Bleed and Cleave, but the Nexu can reach further with its pounce and can block hallways and such and has a little more variance in its survivability with Cunning and the Dodge.

I'm trying to play a bit more thematically at the moment. I can justify Imperials hiring Trandoshian Hunters, or Clawdites being hidden shapeshifters in an Imperial Detachment, but I have no idea how to explain how nexu's are the Imperials primary shock units. Shame, cuz with the Loth cats being around I really want to pop evade tokens on them.

Currently I'm also running Limitless Arsenal with a self imposed rule that I will only take units that I intend to deploy on the field as well. So no AT-ST parked on the Star Destroyer providing cover fire.

On 11/12/2018 at 12:43 PM, LordDraigo1 said:

Currently I'm also running Limitless Arsenal with a self imposed rule that I will only take units that I intend to deploy on the field as well. So no AT-ST parked on the Star Destroyer providing cover fire.

I feel like I might be missing something: Limitless Arsenal from the latest Imperial class deck is a 4xp card that's an exhaust and allows you to swap attack dice, with the restriction/limit of once per round and taking up one of the open groups slot

isn't the 4xp Adaptive Weapon from Technological Superiority strictly better since you can swap dice every attack and with none of the drawbacks? AW is currently one of my favorite card

best case scenario for LA might look something like letting rOfficer (Blue Yellow) to shoot with AT-ST dice (Blue Red Red) or Vader dice (Yellow Red Red)

AW let everyone to swap out 1 of their dice: rOfficer I'll shoot with Blue Yellow->Red but I also got eStorm on board and I'll shoot with Blue->Green Red and eProbe shoot with Blue Yellow Yellow->Red

1 hour ago, ricope said:

I feel like I might be missing something: Limitless Arsenal from the latest Imperial class deck is a 4xp card that's an exhaust and allows you to swap attack dice, with the restriction/limit of once per round and taking up one of the open groups slot

isn't the 4xp Adaptive Weapon from Technological Superiority strictly better since you can swap dice every attack and with none of the drawbacks? AW is currently one of my favorite card

best case scenario for LA might look something like letting rOfficer (Blue Yellow) to shoot with AT-ST dice (Blue Red Red) or Vader dice (Yellow Red Red)

AW let everyone to swap out 1 of their dice: rOfficer I'll shoot with Blue Yellow->Red but I also got eStorm on board and I'll shoot with Blue->Green Red and eProbe shoot with Blue Yellow Yellow->Red

I suppose there are some corner case scenarios that swapping out the attack pool of a figure is better than adaptive weapons. However it does seem that adaptive weapons is a better 4xp card overall.

I am enjoying Overwhelming Oppression as a class deck though. The deck with ToL has actually helped Heavy Storm troopers a lot. Between the token dumping from the class cards, the surge tokens from the 3xp cars tactical mastery, and death troopers.

So we did the 4th mission in ToL mini campaign (expanded campaign) and I ran elite heavy stormtrooper. I have fire at will agenda and running limitless arsenal. Heroes are CT Verena tress and Drokatta.

Honestly, the best thing about the eheavies is the 8 health. The amount of times they took 7 damage and I had to remind myself that they aren't dead was impressive.

They had one impressive turn, then became irrelevant after they got a he blast off. I don't think I'm going to run them.

so, we're in the process of testing some home-brew. We got some fine-tuning to do, but this is showing potential.

Tuskens: we haven't gotten major field testing. We're either going to make their resupply costs stupid cheap (i.e. 1 for regular and 2 for elites) or improve their ranged rifle (allow surges and change dice pools). Testing still pending.

Heavies: we gave them +1block result passive.
- We're still testing for balance, but this change totally makes them feel unique and actually fun to toss into the mix.
- Burst-damage for imperial troops is usually better, since the goal is slamming rebels to wounded. Which heavies sadly aren't good at. And their slow speed is also a liability. ... but having troops that just won't die and deploying them at key points is wonderful for imperials, and presents a legitimate threat.
- For balance, we may increase their threat cost 1 or two points. Still pending.
- any rate, main perk is that the change is SIMPLE. +1block, potentially increase threat = troops you actually want to use.

On 11/19/2018 at 1:58 AM, thinkbomb said:

- For balance, we may increase their threat cost 1 or two points. Still pending.
- any rate, main perk is that the change is SIMPLE. +1block, potentially increase threat  = troops you actually want to use.

Good idea, but I don't think you should increase threat cost.

20 minutes ago, NagyLaci said:

Good idea, but I don't think you should increase threat cost.

Yeah, the play testing we did - they were a solid viable choice with that +1 block. Yay.

Tuskens - we modified their gun attack to be 2 blue dice, +1 accuracy, still no benefits. Basically they're snipers with a big stick, but mid range is awkward. Pending further testing.

We also looked at jet troopers. +1 evade, +1 block v melee, all else the same. Basically just playing anti melee as a special case contingency

Tbh - that's it. Everything else has its role and function.

I heard from someone else the snow troopers were also lack luster, but we don't have hoth quite yet

The problem with snowtroopers is they oversurge badly and the variance on their damage output is too high. Against a black dice they have a 1/5 chance of dealing zero damage because they can't reroll like regular stormtroopers and because they have that chance of rolling the double surge no damage roll. I think if you added a +1 damage to their weaken surge and made recovery gear not require an action and only affect 1 figure, they'd be a rock solid choice at the awkward 7 threat slot.

12 minutes ago, Tvboy said:

The problem with snowtroopers is they oversurge badly and the variance on their damage output is too high. Against a black dice they have a 1/5 chance of dealing zero damage because they can't reroll like regular stormtroopers and because they have that chance of rolling the double surge no damage roll. I think if you added a +1 damage to their weaken surge and made recovery gear not require an action and only affect 1 figure, they'd be a rock solid choice at the awkward 7 threat slot.

awesome, thanks for the heads up on that one.

@thinkbomb if you're going in that direction @cnemmick already has done some amazing work in that area, I think slapping the unofficial fixes would be sufficient

I had it bookmarked: https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/238836-skirmish-fixes-for-older-deployments/

45 minutes ago, ricope said:

@thinkbomb if you're going in that direction @cnemmick already has done some amazing work in that area, I think slapping the unofficial fixes would be sufficient

I had it bookmarked: https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/238836-skirmish-fixes-for-older-deployments/

There's some good stuff in there. In our group we're really trying to keep it to 1 change per unit to make it easier to remember. Definitely good ideas in there