I am hosting a tournament in a couple of weeks. I have decided to do a tournament with original cards only, no fix cards allowed (like driven by hatred etc) but with updated card costs.
If you were to pick a few cards, as many as you like and propose new costs on them, what would they be? You can only tweak costs down, so in essence Spectre cell is probably the baseline so to speak.
Please give me your view(s).
Edited by Ram
Dengar = 4 (maybe even 3).
I would be cautious of having a straight-up point reduction, because the core problem for most of the so-called "overpriced figures" can't really be easily fixed by making them cheaper:
https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/206889-the-costs-of-unique-figures/
I would also be cautious on where to draw the line: we saw a completely new power curve post-Wave 8 so Wave 6's ISB isn't even close compared to Wave 11 Sabine
If you're hosting a casual tournament, I would flat out ban all figures and deployment cards/skirmish upgrade cards that are >= wave 8 and leave the rest as it is. Trying to compare everything to SC could very well mean you could have eStorms costing 4 and still nobody would take them because they'd all just be one-shotted. I remember hearing about how even Terro simply got 1-shotted by a fully-buffed Onar or something
@Ram This is a very cool idea! And it happens to sync up with some "minimally invasive" point cost and skirmish fixes that I've been playing with this week. My goal was to see if, just by Command card and Deployment card price reductions, could more Deployment cards get brought into being considered competitive.
The answer I've found so far is... no, not really.
@ricope 's example with eStormtroopers is right on the money. Also, with price reductions, you're opening up a huge can of worms on the Merc side with Rebel uniques. If Leia cost 4 points or HotR Luke cost 7, then you'd see less Rebel lists and more Merc Temporary Alliance lists that are incredibly strong.
What I'd suggest is a combination of price reductions and increases, along with some adjustments on the list building restrictions:
double post!
Edited by cnemmickAwesome list @cnemmick , thanks! I think you are pretty much spot on on almost all of them that you listed there. I had Dengar at 4, ATST at 10, Weiss at 12, Terro untouched, Inq at 8, Jedi Luke untouched and missed the Tusken Raider and Trandoshan Hunter alltogether.
What would be a good cost for troopers? I have Elite Stormtroopers at 6 and the Elite rebel troopers and Wing guards at 5. Is that too low?
I decided to only lower the cost for deployments to make it very simple and clear. I banned the fix cards because a lot of them add extra attacks, extra complexity and some other wierd things.
1 hour ago, Ram said:What would be a good cost for troopers? I have Elite Stormtroopers at 6 and the Elite rebel troopers and Wing guards at 5. Is that too low?
Wing Guards are the only 3-Figure Trooper deployments that you need to be worried about being too cheap. Forcing a hostile figure to suffer a STRAIN when it attacks one of your non-Guardian figures is pretty legitimate with Under Duress. I wouldn't drop them down below 7.
Elite Rebel Troopers can self-Focus, which lets them have roughly a 25% better chance of doing at least 3 damage than an unfocused Elite Stormtrooper. That's horrible, horrible, horrible for a Focused attack. And Aim is nearly impossible to use. You could put Elite Rebel Troopers at 5 and I still think somebody is just hurting themselves by picking them.
Elite Stormies at 6 seems reasonable, unless you're going to drop the cost of Vader's Finest down to 1. Then I'd keep the Stormies at 7 just to make sure somebody doesn't have 5 or 6 Focused Elite Stormtroopers marching up a map with lots of other things.
1 minute ago, cnemmick said:Wing Guards are the only 3-Figure Trooper deployments that you need to be worried about being too cheap. Forcing a hostile figure to suffer a STRAIN when it attacks one of your non-Guardian figures is pretty legitimate with Under Duress. I wouldn't drop them down below 7.
Elite Rebel Troopers can self-Focus, which lets them have roughly a 25% better chance of doing at least 3 damage than an unfocused Elite Stormtrooper. That's horrible, horrible, horrible for a Focused attack. And Aim is nearly impossible to use. You could put Elite Rebel Troopers at 5 and I still think somebody is just hurting themselves by picking them.
How is aim impossible to use? I have used it nearly every game I play with them. Use leaders to move them into position and use Leia (and other grant attack abilities/cards) to give them attacks. They need to be supported and you need to give your opponent too many targets to choose from and threaten with multiple figures.
28 minutes ago, hosercanadian said:How is aim impossible to use? I have used it nearly every game I play with them. Use leaders to move them into position and use Leia (and other grant attack abilities/cards) to give them attacks. They need to be supported and you need to give your opponent too many targets to choose from and threaten with multiple figures.
Your sinking so many resources into making Aim work -- Leader cards for movement, Gideon for movement and not Focusing other figures, Leia granting that Focused Rebel Trooper a shot instead of Han or Drokkatta, etc. After you do all that, your Focused, Aim-ing, Elite Rebel Trooper has 68% chance vs. 1 black die and a 59% chance vs. 1 white die of doing at least 4 DMG. It's not bad!
Meanwhile, a regular Alliance Ranger takes a Focus, performs a move, attacks and can spend movement points to get back behind cover. For its Focused attack, the regular Alliance Ranger has a 63% chance vs. 1 black and 60% chance vs. 1 white of doing at least 4 DMG...
..then another Focused Alliance Ranger performs a move, attacks and moves back around cover. Or Focused Han/Drok/Sabine takes a shot (with the potential help of Leia). There's just more potential damage output without the built-in cost of moving Rebel Troopers into position and hoping somebody is there for them to shoot when they activate or have Leia shoot. And if you're pushing so many resources into making your Focused Rebel Troopers work, your opponent is either going to wipe them from afar or have them forcibly shoot somebody who just really doesn't care about getting shot by Focused Rebel Troopers. (Hi, Vader!)
FWIW, I want Rebel Troopers to be good. For several iterations of my Skirmish Fixes, Rebel Troopers is one of the baseline deployments I try to make playable again. Here's what the current fix looks like:
I like that fix for Rebel Troopers, but isn't Going Down Fighting just Parting Shot? I think the normal practice is to name abilities with the same effect the same name. But there may be exceptions to this that I haven't noticed.
3 minutes ago, Stompburger said:I like that fix for Rebel Troopers, but isn't Going Down Fighting just Parting Shot? I think the normal practice is to name abilities with the same effect the same name. But there may be exceptions to this that I haven't noticed.
Eeeh, when FFG takes my ideas, they can call it Parting Shot.
4 hours ago, cnemmick said:Eeeh, when FFG takes my ideas, they can call it Parting Shot.
Haha true, if it's not official it doesn't really matter 😁 . It does make some sense to distinguish Rebel Troopers from Hired Guns too.
Tidbit: There's
Targeting Computer
for ranged attacks
and
Professional
for melee
doing the same thing.
my personal preference for re-costing is a 25% cut (rounded up to nearest whole number) for everything Hoth and before, with the only exception is to exclude Greedo. It knocks a point or two off of most things while not impacting lower cost figures like Gideon/3PO/R2
That would provide a decent base to start recosting figures through testing.
Edited by Fightwookies
57 minutes ago, a1bert said:Tidbit: There's Targeting Computer for ranged attacks and Professional for melee doing the same thing.
Ko-Tun has Professional for her Ranged attacks. Since she's not a Droid, I guess.
I had a vague feeling I was forgetting something...
So one argument for keeping some of those broken command cards at a cost of zero is if you raise the cost, they're no longer impacted by negation.
29 minutes ago, Jaric256 said:So one argument for keeping some of those broken command cards at a cost of zero is if you raise the cost, they're no longer impacted by negation.
That's understandable. But honestly, I'm a bit worn out of the current Command card deck structure: Your deck starts with Element of Surprise, Celebration, Take Initiative and Negation, then you pick the OTHER must-have cards and then you're left with 2 or 3 cards to flavor your deck.
With Take Initiative at 3, EoS and Celebration at 2, there's now a real cost in deck building. You won't have room for all the list-specific must-have cards (especially with Smuggler and Hunter cards getting increased).
If at 3 points, everybody still thinks TI is must-take, then do they feel the same way with it being 4 points? Or 5 points? If TI is still so important at 5 points, then that player is risking drawing a whole bunch of 0-cost cards that aren't going to amplify the effectiveness of TI like the other more expensive cards do.
And once TI, EoS and Celebration are no longer Negate-able, the importance of Negate drops. Now its nice to have but you can spend that point into something nicer.
The last time I suggested balance changes like this to TI/EoS/Negation, there was a lot of grumping. That's fine. But what X-wing 2.0 is doing with it's dynamic pricing of ships and upgrades is really working. X-Wing has much finer price adjustments available to it since ships and upgrade cards exist on a 200-point scale (instead of 40/15 for IA). But their changes have made their game much better: Overpowered lists get specific components priced higher so that different & fairer builds are used.
Edited by cnemmickThis is great! Not much to say but I do wish FFG would do something like this and make it official.
Maybe Mak should even be 2. Saska like 4? Dengar 4? Diala 4 or 5? Gaarkhan 5? Fenn 4 or 5? Big price drops but compare them to Hera for 4. I'd love to see a major shake up like that with ALL the core set stuff (except for Gideon) get a price drop.
Thanks! I feel that re-cost is exactly the way to go as well. Its simple, just relase a text file with new costs and all other params on the cards stay exactly the same. And ta-da-a, instant new meta. After X-wing, I am suprised that this is not done by FFG for IA. I dont even need an app. But no-o, they are changing maps...
What about Wampa? He never gets to surf the tables.
16 hours ago, NeverBetTheFett said:What about Wampa? He never gets to surf the tables.
Oh yes! I put the Wampa at a very agressive 5, but it may change to 6 in the final version. My reasoning is that I want the Wampa as something that you splash into your squad. Large and speed 3 with melee attack makes it so hard to use but if cheap and cost efficient enough it may be a late addition to squads as a high risk high reward piece.
Oh, BTW, I am currently only updating the cost of Elite deployments. My gut tells me that I want to keep clear of huge floods of low cost deployments as the games may end up being too few rounds in 1hr10mins that I plan for.
I reckon if you're not sure about a re-cost, go with the lower price! (Like make eWampa's five if you are not sure about 5 or 6... the new stuff is just SO good).
Another possible idea is keep the costs the same for everything except for the top 10 or 15 figs (Vader, Han, Gideon, whatever...) and then just RAISE their cost. Or outlaw them altogether if you want to see only rarely used figs... Just an idea. Or maybe limit their number... only allow ONE in every army, so if you want Han, you can't have Gideon or Sabine or whatever... Only one "Super" per team.
On 3/11/2019 at 5:29 PM, cnemmick said:That's understandable. But honestly, I'm a bit worn out of the current Command card deck structure: Your deck starts with Element of Surprise, Celebration, Take Initiative and Negation, then you pick the OTHER must-have cards and then you're left with 2 or 3 cards to flavor your deck.
*Snipped for space*
It's hard to know how I feel about this without having played around with the deployment re-costing. I don't think you can do one without the other.
I will say that raising the cost of higher powered command cards actually buffs Spectre because Spectre lists aren't dependant on command cards. Sure they help, but Spectre isn't dependant on CC like a hunter list is.
I will say, I love everything about your deployment card reductions. It sucks that like 2/3rds of the available options aren't remotely competitive anymore. Lowering point costs won't fix all the issues, but it certainly makes a lot of things playable
Here is my current plan for the rebels (current cost name new cost, if there is no new cost that means that it is not changed):
15▪ Chewbacca ► 10
12▪ Han Solo ► 9
12Alliance Ranger ►
12▪ Luke Skywalker (Jedi) ►
11Wookie Warrior ►8
10▪ Luke Skywalker (HotR) ► 8
9Rebel Trooper ► 6
9Alliance Ranger ►
9▪ Fenn Signis ►7 (candidate for 6)
9▪ Biv Bodhrik ► 6
9▪ Drokkatta ►
8▪ Gaarkhan ►6
8Echo Base Trooper ► 6
8▪ Leia Organa ►7 (candidate for 6)
8▪ Verena Talos ► 6
8Wookie Warrior ►
8▪ Ahsoka Tano ► 7
8▪ Zeb Orrelios ►
8▪ Kanan Jarrus ►
7Rebel Saboteur ► 6
7▪ Diala Passil ► 5
7▪ Obi-Wan Kenobi ► 6
7▪ Ko-Tun Feralo ► 6
7▪ CT-1701 ► 6
7▪ Ezra Bridger ►
7▪ Sabine Wren ►
6Echo Base Trooper ►
6▪ Lando Calrissian ► 5 (candidate for 4)
6Rebel Trooper ►
6▪ Davith Elso ► 5
6▪ Saska Teft ► 3
5▪ Jyn Odan ►4
5Rebel Saboteur ►
5▪ MHD-19 ►
5▪ Jarrod Kelvin ► 4
5▪ Tress Hacnua ► 4
4Alliance Smuggler ► 2
4▪ Loku Kanoloa ► 3
4▪ Murne Rin ► 3
4▪ Hera Syndulla ►
3▪ Gideon Argus ►
3▪ Mak Eshkarey ► 2
3▪ R2-D2 ►
3▪ C1-10P ►
2Alliance Smuggler ►
2▪ C-3P0 ►