Fenn Rau is still top dog, guys. He WILL kill his target at Range One...

And still get out alive. Just don't forget to equip fearless... and I guess you could throw Advanced Proton Torpedoes on him if you wanted.

Ranking S, A, B tier etcetera is useful as it attempts to summarise how someone perceives a pilot/ship/upgrade.

Clearly its power and flexibility divided by cost, modified by how likely it can be hard countered/will hard counter something else.

IG-2000s are a top stat line ship with good dial, Countered by Crit dealers/Mux/I4+arc dodger and cost quite a lot. B Tier, B+ if using two or Ig-88D crew as well

Torrents have a rather poor statline with poor dial, hard countered by crit dealers and countered by arc Dodgers, alpha strikers. Most named pilots are C/B tier but gold squadron is A tier filler.

Over time ships will change price, gain/lose upgrade slots, new upgrades will be released that may empower them or counter them and upgrades that can empower or counter them will change price. So a ship and pilots tier status will change too, which is good.

It's useful to be able to say Boba used to be S+ and now is only A tier (the correct place) while Jackie gunnruner used to be A+ Tier and is now B tier, still good in some squads but not always the best filler.

Scum z95s feel C- tier while rebel z95s are C tier.

And people can disagree then explain why they do. So to me a tier system is great to have.

Also I think we want everything to be A or B tier, C is underpowered with something better available S is too strong making A and B tier pilots/ chassis miss out on all the juicy tabletime

It's S-Tier players doing reps that puts lists into the S Tier. Making list tiers essentially nonsense for anyone not S Tier or doing reps.

There's a whole handle with care angle. And different strokes for different folks. Lots of stuff.

Theory. Other factions do certain archetypes fairly interchangeably, Aces vs Beef for eg, so reps with a list transfer over time, into different lists that are basically the same. A new thing adds an angle, it slots in like a jigsaw.

Scum don't archetype terribly well. Takes time to learn all the things. All the time. Which is kinda fun.

But then they change the points and it's all different and nothing fits like it did and you've got to start all over again. Or just throw darts at Imp aces and see which 3 you get.

Also don't have enough 3 hard turns.

Also, don't sleep on Sunny Blaster. Fits in anything.

I think discussion about tier systems are well and good, but not exactly germane to the topic of the Scum faction's weaknesses.

Scum getting a break on points in the next update will help, maybe really help depending on what ships get a lower point cost. One of the main issues with Scum, aside from the Illicit slot being worthless issue, is that our ships/upgrades that improve squad coordination have taken such a massive hit. Drea has been priced high, both the Escape Craft and Tac Officer were pushed higher, and as such Scum doesn't have a lot of ways to buff multiple ships. It is thematic to have quite a few Scum ships be self-reliant, but by upping the cost of our few squad-effecting ships it has led to Scum performing poorly compared to the other factions. In my view, it comes down to this problem- when all factions have an upgrade get points adjusted higher (like Tac Officer), because of Scum's lack of squad-buffs in general means that Scum gets hit harder than other factions.

Tiers are such CoD-sucking EA garbage.

I rate things by jars of mayo.

Fenn Rau is at least 37 jars of mayo. 32 in poor hands.

Guri is 15 jars of mayo, 50 if you know how to... ahem... handle your murder-droid.

But Sum Faq is 3 jars of mayo. He’s just no mayo-enough for my lack of taste!

Can I just mildly leap off topic to query the need for a ranking system that randomly diverges from its logical pattern for no reason!

Like, if you have a logical tiering, gold>silver>bronze, A>B>C>D>...., top>middle>bottom, 1st>2nd>3rd>nth, Millipede>Centipede>Spider>Beetle, Mango>Blackberry>Strawberry>Apple>Pear, etc ad infinitum, what is the purpose of suddenly sticking a Whiffle-bat category on top? Your system already has a top tier, its the first one (or the last one depending on your chosen progression system)! Surely you build around your existing tiers, so if need be downgrading things into lower categories if suddenly you need to add things into the top tier. Moving things between tiers as the tiers and individual items within them change is kind of the point of having tiers... right?

This brought to you by not enough sleep, and 'what even is S-tier and why does it need to exist?!?!'

1 hour ago, PartridgeKing said:

This brought to you by not enough sleep, and 'what even is S-tier and why does it need to exist?!?!'

It's from Japan, came west through video games.

Their top grade in school contexts is 秀, pronounced "shuu", so S.

Well, actually they don't really use that character as a grade all that often. Usually the top grade is 優, "yuu". But sort of the idea of 秀 as a top grade that is used only sometimes exists.

So a number of famous video games chose to use 秀 on their ranking boards as like a cool thing, corresponding with the english letter S, which made it common among Japanese game developers and eventually it spread pretty widely.

This post brought to you by foreign language gang.

10 minutes ago, svelok said:

So a number of famous video games chose to use 秀 on their ranking boards as like a cool thing, corresponding with the english letter S, which made it common among Japanese game developers and eventually it spread pretty widely.

So basically mashing two different and completely functional tiering systems together 'for reasons'! 😩

Thank you foreign language gang! Your help, as ever, is invaluable and much appreciated! Now to add it to the random info database!

2 hours ago, PartridgeKing said:

Mango>Blackberry>Strawberry>Apple>Pear

I take massive offense to the placement of Pears and request Kiwi be the new bottom tier fruit, but agree Mangos are the top dog in the fruit world, a veritable S tier fruit.

I now propose Mango tier for the most OTT builds, and Kiwi tier to encompass the worst of the worse 🤣

24 minutes ago, Scum4Life said:

Kiwi tier to encompass the worst of the worse

That there is fighting talk!

Though I'll admit that scale was only partial, so I'm willing to add kiwis below pears...probably, and with the understanding that dragonfruit go below kiwis. Looks awesome, yet tastes of NOTHING! Perhaps Durian for the bottom (pun-intended) though at the same time I actually quite like it, it's more as an awareness that vast tracts of humanity don't.

Grapes give us wine. Grapes win.

27 minutes ago, PartridgeKing said:

That there is fighting talk!

Though I'll admit that scale was only partial, so I'm willing to add kiwis below pears...probably, and with the understanding that dragonfruit go below kiwis. Looks awesome, yet tastes of NOTHING! Perhaps Durian for the bottom (pun-intended) though at the same time I actually quite like it, it's more as an awareness that vast tracts of humanity don't.

Agreed dragon fruit taste bland but have a horrible seem bitty-ness to them, at least kiwis 🥝 have a decent flavour.

@Cuz05 Have you tried Mango liquer 🍹 its divine!

8 minutes ago, Cuz05 said:

Grapes give us wine.

But apples give us Calvados.

2 minutes ago, Scum4Life said:

@Cuz05 Have you tried Mango liquer 🍹 its divine!

Actually no. Is it possible to drink a litre of it and still believe you're having fun?

19 minutes ago, Cuz05 said:

Actually no. Is it possible to drink a litre of it and still believe you're having fun?

Depends what you mix it with and how fast you drink. #Don't Drink and Fly

6 hours ago, svelok said:

It's from Japan, came west through video games.

Their top grade in school contexts is 秀, pronounced "shuu", so S.

Well, actually they don't really use that character as a grade all that often. Usually the top grade is 優, "yuu". But sort of the idea of 秀 as a top grade that is used only sometimes exists.

So a number of famous video games chose to use 秀 on their ranking boards as like a cool thing, corresponding with the english letter S, which made it common among Japanese game developers and eventually it spread pretty widely.

This post brought to you by foreign language gang.

That’s a really neat backstory of why there’s a dumb S tier. I do honestly appreciate the information, even if I think S-tier, and tiers in general, are dumb.

I still hold to the idea that an extremely vague and loosely-defined rating system based upon jars of mayo is far superior in all ways, and against all other rating systems. Except of course rating things by the number of squirrels you can get to sit calmly in one place for an hour.

S, A, B, C... I mean D is anything else... Who DO I think are S Tier pilots..?

S: Fenn Rau, Poe, Wedge, Anakin, Luke, Boba, Guri,
A: Vader, Obi-Wan, Sinker, Kavil, Stramm, Ten Nunb,

I'm too tired.

2 hours ago, Captain Lackwit said:

A: Vader

🤔

Oh god, I've been sucked in....

I'm not entirely against a tier system. It usually gets a bad name in the hands of chauvinists who want to categorize things as objectively inferior and draw sharp lines of worthiness. As my recent poll shows, the vast majority of players are casual and looking for more in the game than a few viable fleets and hard lines. The black & white view of good and bad that gets pushed with tier systems tends to be narrowly focused on the very best fleets, with condescension pointed at everything else. Everything else is trash, as are players trying it, at least as shouted by such players. I've encountered the attitude here in the forums and elsewhere, and it's not fun dealing with that personality. But that said, that's a flaw of individual humans who need to not be here, not an inherent flaw of a tier system.

A tier system is also potentially very helpful to casuals: If you know what's A and S tier, you can arrange a gentlemen's agreement to not play that stuff (or to only partially dabble in A tier). A tier system that shows Wedge is amazing and Republic Aces is a powerhouse adds justification to the request that you pull out something else at casual night. It also highlights bands of ships that might be great together if you and your opponent are both playing at about the same level. Can we create such a tier system in x-wing? I don't know. In pokemon etc it takes a lot of data and x-wing games are slower than pokemon matches, and the community is probably a lot smaller. But it's not necessarily a problematic talking point when talking about ships and fleets.

In my view of X-Wing tiers, there are three normal tiers and two special ones. A Tier means Great (usually the meta). You expect to see A-Tier stuff at tournaments. B is Good -- it can participate in the meta in certain cases, but not as easily, and might be a nice unexpected counter to the meta. It also has a foot in casual realms. C is just Okay (entirely the realm of casuals). D tier is a pseudo tier that shouldn't exist: it's anything that's so bad even casual players won't touch it (only new players fall into the trap). S tier also shouldn't exist: it means something that's so powerful and meta-dominant, it doesn't belong in the game because it destabilizes everything else. Both D and S tier indicate cards or combos that need correction.

If you imagine a mountain gradually sloping up to a jagged tip, A tier is the jagged top, B tier spans most of the way down, and C tier extends through the foothills. D tier is a death valley situation where it's dropped below sea level somehow. S tier is a thin spike of the mountain uncannily rising above all else, perhaps an ultra-tall radio tower (or space elevator, hah) bolted to the highest point. Ideally the mountain is relatively round at the top, creating a wide and varied meta of A and some B lists. S breaks that. If only the top X% of the mountain's height is reasonably meta, an S-Tier spike can limit the meta to just a few builds. Little else can compete.

That was first edition in a nutshell: its peak was so sharp, so thin and tall, that at any given time there were only a few lists a self-respecting tournament player would dare to consider. A rarefied tip of A-tier stuff could be explored to challenge S. Most of the mountain was B and C, with an unreasonably large D tier brine lake in the valley. That's the result of wild power creep in a game that couldn't be dynamically adjusted.

Second edition generally looks like a much softer mountain: generally rounded at the top for a wide variety of A and B tier stuff, admittedly with some spikiness at the top, but regularly fluctuating so nothing resides there forever. That results in a much healthier game & meta. Almost nothing is really D tier, and the mountain is generally more wide than tall (especially compared to 1E). Some A+ stuff can make the meta tough, but truly S tier stuff is uncommon.

Because this is a fleet game, and individual ships/pilots generally don't carry the team, I think fleets are what we ultimately rate in a tier system. But once you start to rate those, certain pilots/ships will tend to be seen more in specific tiers, informing you on what the pilot/ship's tier really is. Wedge, Anakin, Obi-Wan, Vader, and a few other aces are clearly A tier, and some might be arguably S or A+, but likely fewer than people assume. There's a wide blend between A and B tier, granting lots of options. List composition matters a lot, but so does player practice.

But there are tiers, regardless of what we might want. There's a clear difference between, say, Jedi aces and generic TIE Interceptors. Jedi Aces are clearly A tier, while TIE Interceptor swarms are C tier. You don't see generic TIE Interceptors in the tournament-winning fleets. Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ric Ole are featured prominently. We definitely have tiers, even if it's hard to categorize most stuff. That also creates opportunities for fun challenge fleets... I was really proud to do decently well with my Wullffwarro War Crimes fleet; it's overall B-Tier at best (which is what I was aiming for; I didn't want to fly the meta).

So back to the core subject of the thread: IMO, right now a lot of the scum faction resides in the foothills of C, but with some respectable B-tier stuff, and maybe a couple A-Tier standout ships. Hopefully nothing controversial about that...? But they're not really able to compete with the current meta, which naturally ranges from A to A+ (and maybe some S?). Their A Tier ships don't have much to pair with. Scum lists are stuck in B, B+, and C tier; they have no A-Teams to compete with Jedi, etc, and that shows in tournament results.

Described another way, I see S tier as breaking expectations in problematic ways. And calling something A+ or S tier is also announcing your prediction of what's going to be nerfed soon. I remember a tournament that just had Rebel Beef facing Rebel Beef on a lot of the tables, with a smattering of aces and vulture swarms on other tables; why fly anything else? Well, FFG and most of the community would prefer a much more diverse meta, so we all hope that stuff gets fixed.

I don't think flying S-Tier stuff in X-Wing is cheating (at least, the player isn't cheating; the devs handed them the option). But true S Tier stuff can be deeply problematic to the health of the game, especially if a less competent player can easily beat a more competent player by riding a faceroll fleet. That changes the grading curve to something that other players can't compete with without switching to the winning strategy, which feels cheap and unfair to anyone not willing to play ball. All the options and the fun of list building cease to exist: the meta is so narrow, there's now a correct way to play. A narrow meta is bad for the player base too, potentially driving players out of the game if it's bad enough (btw scum players please stay), which is a strong incentive for FFG to intervene.

Again, first edition comes to mind. If anyone wonders why I'm saddened by my success with triple Auzitucks, it was from realizing I was flying a faceroll fleet, and coming to understand how negative a play experience it was for opponents. I'm a FFC (Filthy F****** Casual) at heart, and I like breadth of B tier better than A and S. I picked the fleet because it was quirky. But during the regionals game it turned out Triple Tucks was clearly S tier; while I'm a decent player, I did really well mainly thanks to my fleet. Against that, all other players had to either play a hard counter, play the same fleet, or expect to lose in a painful and frustrating way. Whatever peoples' cynicism, and the unfortunate state of scum right now, I'm impressed by 2E's relative lack of Miranda-Nyms, Triple Tucks, and Harpoon Missiles. 1E was massively ruled by its S Tier. Yes the 2E top meta is tough to beat, but IMO, it's nothing compared to 1E's. Its meta was a space elevator on coastal foothills, not so in 2E. And in 2E the tips of the mountains can always be clipped.

Whether or not we like how FFG does the clipping is another matter... Scum's other problem is it keeps losing fingers when the meta gets a haircut.

2 hours ago, Cuz05 said:

🤔

Oh god, I've been sucked in....

Look, he's good but he isn't Anakin good.

4 hours ago, Captain Lackwit said:

Look, he's good but he isn't Anakin good.

But he is, by definition.

22 hours ago, Cuz05 said:

Grapes give us wine. Grapes win.

wine is traditionally made by crushing grapes with childrens unwashed feet then putting it in barrels to rot until it becomes poisonous. Wine loses and grapes loses.

Barley cuts out the kids toe cheese and wins

52 minutes ago, Vontoothskie said:

Barley cuts out the kids toe cheese and wins

Well, if we're opening it up to include any crop, hops are in a league of their own. Definite S Tier.

On 9/23/2019 at 8:54 PM, It’s One Of Ours said:

It’s easy to say the Bounty Hunter Firespray is too expensive at 64pts, compared to the 104th Battalion ARC-170. But do we REALLY want to see it dropped to the point where you could run 4, like with the 104th? Even if it’s knocked down to just a bit more than 50pts, keeping the maximum at 3 in a list, the Bounty Hunter would be almost absurdly inexpensive. In that comparison, and based upon the Rebel ARCs, it’s probably more accurate to say the Republic 104th Battalion ARC is probably a bit too cheap at 42pts.

I think the bounty hunter needs to get knocked down under 60 to see play, I'd at least consider it at 58 or so.

Many other things in scum could do with a 2 or 3 point decrease, especially M-3A and the Quadrijet(doubly so after the tractor nerf), not to mention poor old Jumpmaster.

In an attempt to bring this thread back on the rails...

I think there's a lot of sleeper potential in mid-range Scum fleets; that is, Initiative 4 or 5 pilots with really quirky abilities. Keep one "pocket ace" on the table, but build a squad that allows some of the generics to become more considerable threats. For example, I recently took inspiration from @Oldpara's comment on generic Z-95s and Deadman's Switch, which is the way I've typically used them in 2.0, and made a more meaty list with three of them and Dalan Oberos (StarViper). It used three Pirates, but if I want to go a little leaner on Dalan or on the Zs, I can upgrade them to Black Sun Soldiers with Intimidation and Deadman's Switch, as below:

Z-95-AF4 Headhunter - Black Sun Soldier - 32
Black Sun Soldier - (27)
Intimidation (3)
Deadman’s Switch (2)

Z-95-AF4 Headhunter - Black Sun Soldier - 39
Black Sun Soldier - (27)
Intimidation (3)
Proton Rockets (7)
Deadman’s Switch (2)

Z-95-AF4 Headhunter - Black Sun Soldier - 39
Black Sun Soldier - (27)
Intimidation (3)
Proton Rockets (7)
Deadman’s Switch (2)

StarViper-class Attack Platform - •Dalan Oberos - 90
•Dalan Oberos - Elite Bounty Hunter (54)
Outmaneuver (6)
Advanced Sensors (10)
Electronic Baffle (2)
•Virago (10)
Shield Upgrade (8)

Total: 200/200