9 hours ago, Decorus said:

One of the reasons I enjoy a good laugh at people who ***** about Move is I've done the long drag from starting at FR1 to FR3.

I mean I started as a Consular with Sage and probably for the first ten sessions the only thing I was really useful for was Valueble Fact...

Honestly wish Sage had a rework with Improved and Supreme Valueble Fact...

I fell in love with Padawn I'm playing right now in a Clone Wars Campaign we started the minute one of us got Rise of the Republic.

I'm the 12 year old Padawn the Clone Trooper "Special" Forces won in a Sabaac game.

The Clones often complain that my Jedi Knight Master cheated them...

Yeah it really isnt till you get to around 1000 xp that you can do such a thing. And 1000 xp is where you can actually do such things with any ability or reliability

This whole thing has been interesting me, so I actually sat down and looked over some of the different things you could try and I stumbled on a couple of characters that I would really like to play.

The first character is a Bothan Knight Sentry, with Brawn and Willpower raised to 3, taking the extra 10 xp available to start to have enough to raise FR to 2. There’s good basic synergy with both trees having Saber Throw and Improved Reflect.

Sentry also brings that excellent Impossible Fall talent, as well as some neat utility talents for initiative and sneaking, and the really useful Fear the Shadows for when you just want to scare someone off instead of kill them. Knight has some strain recovery, something sorely missing from Sentry, as well as the more interesting talents that turn the character into a wonderful bodyguard.

The ultimate goal would be of having to Force Rating 4, Brawn 4, Peerless Interception, Misdirect, Influence, Farsight, and Enhance. You are now and excellent spy, a guardian from the shadows, a long ranged Lightsaber user, a Bothan who spends her life rescuing and crime fighting.

The second character is a bit different. Mandalorian, 3 Brawn, 3 Presence, Force Rating 2, starting as a General. They quickly take up the Arbiter specialisation to become an exceptional negotiator and leader whilst also being very handy in a fight with Lightsaber or blaster pistol (Well rounded).

47 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

The ultimate goal would be of having to Force Rating 4, Brawn 4, Peerless Interception, Misdirect, Influence, Farsight, and Enhance. You are now and excellent spy, a guardian from the shadows, a long ranged Lightsaber user, a Bothan who spends her life rescuing and crime fighting.

You know, I did the math's on cranking up your parry/reflect to godly levels and I thought - why bother? It's a huge XP sink. If I am facing someone where they are clearly going to slice me in half, I think you need to think more strategically. Use the Force against them. Use your other party members to chip away their WT/ST. Or use powers like Bind, Levitate them (through Move + committed Force die) to hold them in place while they get blasted, or use Misdirect and go invisible. Trying to go toe-to-toe in the game is a very expensive option and draws away from so much of the other aspects of the character and game development e.g. social and exploration.

In saying that, I still believe the most efficient route to being invincible in melee is through Reinforce Item in the Armourer tree. With high Brawn (or boosted due to Enhance) and good Soak, you're tanking 10+ damage easily. Doing the same through other trees is sooooo XP intensive.

If your game is all about those mega combats, then sure, the above investment makes sense. But otherwise, it's just an XP tax for maybe 10% of the time when it comes up.

It’s not really all about the defence though,l, there’s only 4 ranks of Reflect and 2 of Parry. But it is very mobile, can stealth past or use social manipulation, and most of all can still fight with its Lightsaber in a ranged firefight or whilst running away. Peerless Interception simply makes that protection so much more effective.

The Force Powers make the character a really good social character too

1 minute ago, Richardbuxton said:

It’s not really all about the defence though,l, there’s only 4 ranks of Reflect and 2 of Parry. But it is very mobile, can stealth past or use social manipulation, and most of all can still fight with its Lightsaber in a ranged firefight or whilst running away. Peerless Interception simply makes that protection so much more effective.

Fair enough. Peerless Interception is probably a bit expensive for what it does, which is why I was recommending another alternative. Getting that bottom tier 2nd and 4th talent on any of the Jedi career trees is not easy, and for the 200ish XP you'd need to make it work you could probably use it to just buy the parry/reflect ranks anyway . 😜

You really only need 6 or 7 ranls of parry and improve parry and same for reflect and improved reflect. That will pretty much stop 90% of attacks. The only reason to buy more is to get to the next item on your tree. Compine with sense and defensive to help you get those 3 threat so you can nail that nemesis with lots of adversary.

2 hours ago, masterstrider said:

Fair enough. Peerless Interception is probably a bit expensive for what it does, which is why I was recommending another alternative. Getting that bottom tier 2nd and 4th talent on any of the Jedi career trees is not easy, and for the 200ish XP you'd need to make it work you could probably use it to just buy the parry/reflect ranks anyway . 😜

True, the massive benefit though is that you only have to activate Reflect once per turn to reflect every single attack that round, and can activate that Improved Parry or Reflect once without needing those pesky Threat. It’s possible you could use Shien Expert instead of Sentry, to get that Supreme Reflect talent, but Sentry has more utility out of combat.

For a tank I definitely agree with you, Armourer is great. Another option is to take Colossus, with a Brawn 4 character you very quickly have Soak 5 without any armour at all. Play as a Dowutin with silhouette 2 and you are basically an unmovable wall with up to 27 wounds from a single career! With the ability to increase Soak with Indomitable Will, ignore minor Crits with Unstoppable, increase FR with Power from Pain, and not go unconscious from Improved Hard Headed... it’s only Breach that’s a problem compared to Armour Master.

Add Marshal from Edge of the empire and you basically don’t have to worry about Strain anymore (Easy Discipline to stay at 1 below your threshold) , and someone needs to roll a 190 on their Crit injuries roll to kill you!!! Plus you get some nice talents for things other than not dying

Edit: you could use Ebb/Flow as well to recover Strain when you have been knocked out, but you really need a higher Force Rating to make that reliable .

19 hours ago, Richardbuxton said:

True, the massive benefit though is that you only have to activate Reflect once per turn to reflect every single attack that round, and can activate that Improved Parry or Reflect once without needing those pesky Threat.

That's the really awesome part. It basically gives you a number of attacks per round = to the number of parry/reflect you use. That's pretty amazing. But I don't know a GM that would be generous enough to just target you with a whole bunch of different enemies just so that you can waste them all with extra attacks - but it would look pretty cool .

I’m that gm 🤣

If a player has a cool vision for their character, or particular way of being the hero, I make it my job to give them that opportunity.

10 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

I’m that gm 🤣

If a player has a cool vision for their character, or particular way of being the hero, I make it my job to give them that opportunity.

Same

2 hours ago, masterstrider said:

That's the really awesome part. It basically gives you a number of attacks per round = to the number of parry/reflect you use. That's pretty amazing. But I don't know a GM that would be generous enough to just target you with a whole bunch of different enemies just so that you can waste them all with extra attacks - but it would look pretty cool .

order 66

2 hours ago, Richardbuxton said:

I’m that gm 🤣

If a player has a cool vision for their character, or particular way of being the hero, I make it my job to give them that opportunity.

I'm right there with you

Had an extra few minutes, and decided to try building a "Movie Ready" Jedi Knight, using the optional 30xp to purchase an extra FR at creation from CotR.

Nautolan: Br 3 Ag 2 In 2 Cu 2 Wi 1 Pr 2

100 XP, Athletics 1.

Using the starting Morality to add 10 XP for 110, plus 150 for Knight Level:

With starting skills, go for Cool 1, Discipline 1, Lightsaber 2, and Knowledge Lore 1, plus Athletics 1 from Nautolan.

50 XP going to raise Willpower to a 3, 30 to get FR 2, 30 remaining. Buy straight down the Knight Tree so you have one rank in Parry, one in Reflect.

With the remaining 150 XP, spend 35 on Move to get the base, one Strength, one Range, and the Hurl upgrades. Spend 30 on Enhance to be able to leap horizontal or vertical. Spend 20 on Sense to get the Control. Spend 30 to get Improved Parry and Improved Reflect. With the last 25 XP, either get another rank in Reflect/Parry or just focus on picking up some skills. I'm thinking Parry 2, Discipline 2, and maybe pick up another 5XP talent. Grit, probably

Seems like a pretty solid "Movie Ready" Jedi to me. You can do almost everything ESB Luke and TPM Obi-Wan are shown doing on screen.

@KRKappel Hey would you be willing to post your Jedi Council builds? and how you would build them now with the new Jedi Career specs?

Really not sure it'd be entirely appropriate for me to do so. But suffice to say, each PC had somewhere between 1800 and 2400 XP. Those Force powers do not come cheap.

Obviously, if I was going to rebuild them, I'd want to use the new career and some new talent trees from other career books, if I really wanted to go nuts. But how I'd build them as PCs vs how I'd build them as NPCs are very, very different.

Since starting this topic, I used a Mirialan and 300xp after character creation, and I got a good looking padawan. Got the leaping side of Enhance, Move including 2 strength upgrades, control: hurl, control: pull, and the left side of Sense, 2 Force Rating and a few skill ranks in career skills. The spec tree was about half purchased.

I'm thinking a decent Knight that started off as a Padawan would be somewhere around 500-600xp, roughly the amount I have told my players in the past is where a starting Knight would be at.

The funny thing is - so we just kicked off an all new game and I was tasked with doing all the heavy GM lifting (we will often rotate the GM duties to keep the story fresh and give the other GMs some play time) - so I didn't worry about building a character. I didn't even have a concept in mind, figuring that I would worry about it when someone wanted to step up to run the game.

We're playing an Clone Wars era game with a time displaced Sith pureblood, a Mandolorian also from the KotOR era and a native from a modern but primitive world. And when I say Clone Wars era, I dropped them right in the middle of the battle of Geonosis. After the battle and the dust settled, they still needed to get updated star charts to be able to navigate away from Geonosis, so they snuck down to the planet pretending to be "war corespondents". They wound up getting a ronin padawan as an escort to show them around the compound. As she was extremely conflicted about just losing her master and the Jedi role in the war (and teetering on the edge of falling to the dark), they offered her a ride off planet so she had some time to think.

The long story short (too late, I know), what started out as just a little bit of color and a despair on the Sith's "Yes, we're war corespondents!" lie roll turned into a character that'll be sticking around, that I'll be playing. I figured it would be a good time to field test the new tree. I've not played yet, but I did bring her up to parity with the rest of the group (about 65 XP, so close to but not quite Knight Level Play) - but the tree looks good and I'll give you the full report when I get some playing time under my belt this weekend.

Arise from your grave!

Been looking for a thread to post some questions, and this seems like a good one to do it:

So after some time to play with it, what does the community think of the Jedi career as a whole? Does it have enough teeth in combat? Is it truly a Jack-of-all-trades, or outright OP? Is taking the Short Path to Power with Padawan too good, or fair for the XP cost?

Playing a Padawan, right now, looking to go into Knight soon (with my next XP award). I don't know that I would call it OP, because it's not the best at any-one-thing, but it is definitely a very good Career, and allows you to make a very good Jack of All Trades.

Previously, (and with Easy Path to Power set aside, for now) Seer and Sage were at the top of the cheapest/best ways to get to Force Rating 3 (Hermit of course being right up there but not usually in the running for my XP-money, unless I'm gonna throw in Pathfinder too - which is a great and fun character to do, but niche).

Seer has a lot of great Talents, but it generally is gonna leave you with a gaping weakness in combat. Sage is pretty meh, for Talents, IMO, and is also gonna leave you with a gaping weakness in combat.

Conversely, any Lightsaber Spec generally left you with a gaping weakness in the Force. Even Consular was a not great way to mix Force and combat in one Spec, I'd rather go with Consular for it's Wil-based Lightsaber (or some other Spec for it's combat abilities) but just go diving straight to Dedication, and then go to Seer for the Force.

Padawan+Knight can get you to FR3, for just 5XP more than Seer (10 more than Sage, and for the same as Hermit), AND has some of the best of the best (IMO) Talents for Force Users all within arms-reach of those Force Rating boosts. It is by far the best mix of both worlds, IMO, in the game. You can make a Force using power-house, and a more than capable combatant. The Jedi General Spec is an even cheaper way to FR3, and has very solid Talents, if you're making a Presence-based character, loses a bit on combat though.

I used to include Seer in the plan for basically any Force User PC I made. Now I can't see myself doing it without Padawan/the Jedi Career, if appropriate to the campaign. I like to play JoATs though, too... YMMV

Easy Path to Power is just an adder to that reckoning. I personally don't like it as an option, and don't allow it in games I GM. But if I was playing a character in a game that allowed it, I would probably take it, just about no matter the type of character I wanted to play. I don't go for starting-5s in Characteristics anymore (and limit starting Characteristics to 4 in games I GM), and Force Rating, for Force Users, is arguably the most important Characteristic in the game (for me anyway, I don't play a Force User PC unless I'm taking full advantage of the Force, which means I'm either going for Commit-heavy and utility Powers, like Sense and Enhance and Seek/Foresee, or I'm going for Powers to use against enemies - Influence, Move, also Sense, etc. where I want to roll as many Force Die as I can), so it is exactly what it says it is - an easy path to power.

First quick path to power to start in knight then looping back around to padawan for a cheap fr is cheese in my book, if you start quick path to power you don't get to take padawan (I made that mistake once) otherwise I allow quick path to power. By the numbers starting padawan results in a more powerful character, quick path to power can get you a character who is competent in both the force and lightsaber slightly faster but they will be less powerful overall. As a 2 spec combo I like jedi:knight/niman-disciple with peerless interception... it's a candidate for the best 2 spec lightsaber duelist in the game as peerless interception is the only counter to saberswarm. Jedi:knight:ataru striker is another candidate (it supplants the seeker:ataru striker/ 2 fr talent combos) or Warrior:steelhand adapt is another candidate but ranks below jedi:knight/ niman-disciple or ataru striker in my book.

The Force Rating Talent is expensive to get to in Niman. Granted it's got some good stuff on the way, but on a purely XP-spent per FR-basis, it's not a good way to do it.

2 hours ago, EliasWindrider said:

Jedi:knight:ataru striker is another candidate (it supplants the seeker:ataru striker/ 2 fr talent combos)

Our GM is giving us one free talent tree, so I picked up Striker for my Padawan, but is the only tree outside of the Jedi career I'm interested in. These only reason I was considering the Short Path was to compensate for the Striker's lack of FR.

2 hours ago, emsquared said:

The Force Rating Talent is expensive to get to in Niman. Granted it's got some good stuff on the way, but on a purely XP-spent per FR-basis, it's not a good way to do it.

I've played 2 or 3 niman-disciple PCs, I've never used center of being... one rank of it wasn't worthwhile, pair it with master (another 2 ranks and a cheaper improved) and it would be worthwhile, but I don't think that I've ever put master in a build.... there's more flavorful stuff I wanted more for the xp. But yeah I view center of being and improved as an xp tax so I'm paying 70 xp for a force rating on top of other stuff that I want in the tree which isn't horrible... even if you were to pick up padawan as a second (out of career spec) you'd be spending 70 xp for a FR.

8 hours ago, EliasWindrider said:

quick path to power to start in knight then looping back around to padawan for a cheap fr is cheese in my book, if you start quick path to power you don't get to take padawan (I made that mistake once) otherwise I allow quick path to power.

I just fail to see why it's "wrong" to spend 30xp to raise my Force rating from 1-2 instead of raising my Wisdom from 2-3, aside from the seeming intent of the devs that its purpose is to allow Jedi PCs to start as a Knight or General.

9 minutes ago, StriderZessei said:

I just fail to see why it's "wrong" to spend 30xp to raise my Force rating from 1-2 instead of raising my Wisdom from 2-3, aside from the seeming intent of the devs that its purpose is to allow Jedi PCs to start as a Knight or General.

The deal is looping back into Padawan for the cheap FR. Thematically, it wouldn't make a ton of sense.

My two cents, just make it so the FR talent in Padawan doesn't give any benefit when the player used QPtP.