My current situation: I am playing a campaign in which my character is heavily invested into combat. I have a dual-wield gunslinger (5 agility, 5 cunning, paired weapons 7/10 base damage, superior) and basically beelined for a quick +3 Force Ratings and Seek with Control: Pierce skill. I am quickly finding that the last few "challenges" the GM has intended for us to flee from or find other non-combat solutions are pretty much being one shotted by me. With my cunning and perception, I get 7 pierce to each hit, which I can increase to up to 11 fairly easily. I also recently got deadly accuracy to increase my damage further. I can see how this can be hard to work around, especially since others in my group are not as combat oriented, but struggling to find a middle ground for the GM.

More general issue: It's almost like the pierce from seek was never intended to be used for multiple hit attacks. My specific situation is with dual-wielding, but I think the same problem occurs with auto-fire or linked weapons. Pierce on two successful, but low rolls can easily do 14 dmg after soak in total, and that's with basic weapons and 1 success die. The damage quickly gets out of hand, with my character frequently doing 25+ dmg after soak even against nemesis and adversaries. The power on its own may not be broken, but combined with combat oriented talents it can easily be cheesed.

We thought of limiting the # of rounds that the dice could be committed. But keep in mind that it requires an action, so basically a round in combat, to commit the dice for the power. If it was limited to any less than 2 rounds, I feel like I would just opt to shoot right away instead of taking a turn to commit. The power currently gives me a max of 14 dmg per round on paper, but its usually less since most enemies have fewer than 7 soak, so taking an extra round of shooting would be better than using up a round. And it's only as effective due to my build and gear synergy. For character's that aren't built with this in mind, the limit would make the power and the 3 FR required much less desirable.

Has anyone else encountered this in their campaigns? Does anyone have recommendations on how to address it without making the power itself obsolete or inadvertently punishing others in the campaign with absurdly high soak enemies?

You have found the drawback to this system. I love the narrative aspects but it is very easy to break the system by focusing on a single thing like combat. You are right, the issue is probably amplified if you took Autofire weapons. The worst part of it is if the GM tries to counter this with an NPC that is just as skilled and talented, it can be very devastating to the PCs.

You could limit it possibly by having the Seek Pierce upgrade only effect one hit per round. That way it doesn't negate the talent and you will get a pierce 7+ attack on the first shot but secondary hits as result of Duel Weapons don't get the benefit.

My general solution is more stormtroopers. If I throw 5 minion groups of 4 at the party, you can only kill one of these groups per round. Still breezing through? More minions! Have more show up to replace the fallen in waves.

The Nebulon-B tends to be my go-to mid-tier Imperial vessel. A nebulon-B typically carries 72 troopers, which I generally divide into 5-man minion groups led by stormtrooper sergeants. You may win on single target damage, but the empire wins through sheer action economy.

My motto has always been “The Empire always has more stormtroopers” and it has yet to fail me.

Worst case scenario, I airdrop a couple AT-STs on you. I always have ways to escalate an encounter beyond the PCs abilities.

Survivability is rough in FFG Star Wars. GMs have to be extremely careful to maintain balance as characters slide up the XP tree. While it is perfectly rational to say "PC 2 put all their points into Computers, while PC 1 put it into shooting stuff - of course PC 1 is better", there is a limit to things a GM can allow and still let the group be "fun". They can of course, try to roughly equate Computer challenges with Combat challenges in the frequency of content, but that's just papering around the problem and just spreading the misery around: it's no fun when you're useless in a frequently occurring situation.

However, FFG did include a couple of things to help. #1 is the Destiny Pool. It's absolutely within the GM's purview to "discriminate" in their use of dark destiny points ... passing when people are stretching their limits, and using them heavily when people are overpowering the content. I know a lot of GMs actually do something close to the opposite ("this roll isn't appropriately hard given that you have no skill!") but I'd imagine in the 500+ XP range, all things being equal, they'll have issues keeping players engaged.

#2 is the adversary system combined with blast damage. If you can redirect your not-that-combat-capable PCs into other areas where they don't need an attack roll against a target, you can always drop bigger adversary ratings on the NPCs. At least as long as you remember to make the enemy a vibrant, threatening individual, your combat oriented PCs should still feel like they're accomplishing heroic things and that their skill matters.

#3 is minion groups. In a well designed encounter, you can target different enemies at different PC skill levels. The problem, of course, is what to do when the uber-PC doesn't get the hint and starts nuking the minion groups instead of the BBEG, or the other PCs just ignore them to hit (or more accurately, to miss) the BBEG instead. At least in the latter case there's some hope the players will learn by failure.

More generally, the GM in any system - not exclusive to FFG SW - can always have more combat encounters have creative solutions that don't primary rely on attack rolls. Hack those bridge controls to retract it and open a space between the PCs and the enemies. Use Lore to figure out what that weird artifact in the room does ... oh look, it zaps the bad guys! Skulduggery to open an alternate escape route. There's lots of possibilities, but only if the GM goes to the effort of building them into the encounter.

11 hours ago, Raged said:

My current situation: I am playing a campaign in which my character is heavily invested into combat. I have a dual-wield gunslinger (5 agility, 5 cunning, paired weapons 7/10 base damage, superior) and basically beelined for a quick +3 Force Ratings and Seek with Control: Pierce skill. I am quickly finding that the last few "challenges" the GM has intended for us to flee from or find other non-combat solutions are pretty much being one shotted by me. With my cunning and perception, I get 7 pierce to each hit, which I can increase to up to 11 fairly easily. I also recently got deadly accuracy to increase my damage further. I can see how this can be hard to work around, especially since others in my group are not as combat oriented, but struggling to find a middle ground for the GM.

More general issue: It's almost like the pierce from seek was never intended to be used for multiple hit attacks. My specific situation is with dual-wielding, but I think the same problem occurs with auto-fire or linked weapons. Pierce on two successful, but low rolls can easily do 14 dmg after soak in total, and that's with basic weapons and 1 success die. The damage quickly gets out of hand, with my character frequently doing 25+ dmg after soak even against nemesis and adversaries. The power on its own may not be broken, but combined with combat oriented talents it can easily be cheesed.

We thought of limiting the # of rounds that the dice could be committed. But keep in mind that it requires an action, so basically a round in combat, to commit the dice for the power. If it was limited to any less than 2 rounds, I feel like I would just opt to shoot right away instead of taking a turn to commit. The power currently gives me a max of 14 dmg per round on paper, but its usually less since most enemies have fewer than 7 soak, so taking an extra round of shooting would be better than using up a round. And it's only as effective due to my build and gear synergy. For character's that aren't built with this in mind, the limit would make the power and the 3 FR required much less desirable.

Has anyone else encountered this in their campaigns? Does anyone have recommendations on how to address it without making the power itself obsolete or inadvertently punishing others in the campaign with absurdly high soak enemies?

My first thought: Don't make a walking gun turret in a campaign where the rest of the party isn't combat oriented.

My second thought: tell your GM not to hand out gear and attachments like candy.

HOWEVER. Looking at your stats, it's clear you're quite aways along in your campaign. You have at least 3 dedications, 3 FR, and that's at least 3 trees, even with a beelines, that's a hefty amount of xp. So it makes sense that you're doing powerful damage. Heck, you're hovering at Jedi levels of Force power, there are far more destructive ways to wreck people with 3-4 Force dice than shooting them with pistols.

I don't think that the power needs a nerf (seems appropriate for the power level you're at). But if it's messing with encounters for the party, maybe you can talk to the GM about letting you respec? Maybe it's character retirement time? (Even if your goal was "be the gunslingiest gunslinger that ever lived" it looks like you're approaching that goal)

****, you're the player. If you think it's OP don't use it. Maybe you can feel the Dark Side as you use the Force to continually shoot people in the eyes. Maybe your character a pacifist (or John wick) and learn martial arts. Get a pet ysalamari, whatever.

As far as encounter design, it seems like you may be best served in a split party or with "you shall not pass" moments. But honestly I see that getting old pretty quick and you'd probably be better off rerolling to something more versatile and a bit less one dimensional.

PS since this is in the F&D forum, are you the only FS in the group? Because once people break out the glow sticks of death, soak becomes a non factor (on enemies). So the solution just might be "hold on until the rest of the party gets glow sticks"

So here's a thing that I've observed and come to accept over the years... and that's this system really works for the best at the lower XP levels.

As the PCs accrue more and more XP, the potential to put together some very devastating combinations of talents and skills becomes increasingly likely. One such combo is the semi-infamous combo of 5 ranks in Ranged (Heavy), Deadly Accuracy in Ranged (Heavy), a heavy blaster rifle, and the Jury-Rigged talent to reduce the advantage needed to trigger autofire down to one; you can sprinkle in True Aim to really boost the nastiness to the dice pool.

So for the OP, the game is working as designed given he (quite frankly) went about min-maxing his character to do a specific thing and do it frighteningly well. As has been noted, getting to Force Rating 3 is no small achievement as you're generally looking at least two different specs (character doesn't sound the type to delve into Seer, Sage, or Hermit), and even then beelining for Force Rating isn't cheap, so that's a few hundred XP right there. Add on the costs for Seek to get that specific upgrade (also not cheap), as well as the gunslinger spec, and you've got a Frankenstein's Combat Monster.

Now, now really knowing the rest of the composition of the party, just how much of a problem this is can vary. But it sounds like the OP is the primary combat character of the group, and that anything the GM creates to properly challenge this particular PC is going to rip the other PCs a new one. And that's something that can be tough to account for as a GM, as you never know when the dice will turn fickle (especially with how swingy results can get in this system).

Though do remember that committing the Force dice for the upgrade is an action (this is noted in section about activating Force powers), so the OP's gunslinger is more often than not going to have to spend their first action each round committing the dice. And if the player tries to say "well, I've got those dice committed all the time," the book even states that the GM is free to start having that character suffer strain equal to the number of dice committed to the effect, as being "on edge" and "combat ready" for such protracted lengths of time can do a number of the character's mental state.

Thanks for the replies everyone. I welcome more thoughts, but for now I think that I may talk to the GM about either limiting the power to one hit, or respeccing a bit. The John Wick approach is an interesting idea, but is too drastic of personality change right now. May try to gradually work that in though.

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My first thought: Don't make a walking gun turret in a campaign where the rest of the party isn't combat oriented.

I agree that I may have dug myself into a hole with this character direction. A few in our group are pretty new to tabletop RPGs , myself certainly included, and I tend towards min-maxing in other kinds of games and I didn't consider the repercussions here. With that said, to be fair, even though I am the only one completely combat oriented, there are two other PC that have decent combat spec. Unfortunately, both lightsabers we had were completely destroyed in nearly back to back sessions with double despairs against the Big Bad. This was right before my build came online (went gunslinger first, then force ratings, so there was a huge gap where my character didn't really improve up until I was able to get the final FR and the seek power). So for now I pretty much outclass them.