All the ion weapons (missile, torpedo, cannon, turret) share a feature: Spend one hit/crit result to deal a damage, and the rest (if any) deal ion tokens. This makes ion weapons a bit hard to use against evasive targets, since you can get chip damage in but not the ion because you need 2+ results to get past defenses.

But what if you can't spend results because dice modification is banned? Midnight or Blinded Pilot would be great for an ion user: now they don't convert anything to damage, they deal pure ion tokens.

Am I getting this right? I know a lot of abilities are all or nothing: if you can't do one half of the ability, you don't do any of it (exemplified by Dalan Kimogila's ruling). But the spend to damage is not elective; I doubt you skip dealing ion tokens and instead deal pure damage if you can't spend the result... though I've been very surprised before.

It seems to me like Blinded Pilot or a lock from Midnight would be a godsend for an ion user trying to tag an ace. You can't spend a focus or lock (only force), but any chip damage will work. You go blind and suddenly it's easier.

Am I correct about this? And has it been actually useful or is it not all that important in the end? (or maybe this edge case flies under the radar for most players, even though the opportunity comes up)

This was brought up recently and the consensus was, as weird as it sounds, the answer is yes: if you can't modify your dice, you cannot spend the dice to deal that first point of damage, so all of your dice deal ion tokens.

Fortunately the Ion Weapons are worded such as it doesn't matter if that first dice is actually spent or not. Since all remaining hits/crits deal ion tokens instead, the unspent dice just gets added to that group. Thus there's no danger of having ion weapons dealing full damage here.

Remember that the lock from Midnight only matters when shooting at Midnight ; if the locked ion carrier shoots at, say, Kylo, it modifies its dice as normal.

Cool, that's about what I expected.

It's so niche it probably doesn't matter. It's hard to plan for or min-max -- there's no great way to put Blinded Pilot on your own Luke in order to use Ion Torpedoes more effectively. But maybe occasionally it'll matter when your y-wing rolls natties against that ace and they block all but one, and you can interrupt their celebration by pointing out you're blinded, so they're ionized.

There's also the global dice mods of Palpatine, but empire doesn't use ion all that much, and this edge case isn't enough to save the TIE Aggressor from obscurity. Still too hard to get your own dice mods banned -- Dinee and Midnight are rare, and there's no elective option that blocks your own dice mods (other than snap shot).

But if FFG ever releases a card that lets you get some benefit in exchange for no dice mods, then we'll have an opportunity to start exploring.

Just for completeness' sake, note that the Hardpoint upgrade card, Ion Cannon Battery, has a slightly different wording. In this case, if the attack hits, the defender suffers damage WITHOUT cancelling any results. Then, all remaining results become ion tokens.

it annoys me somewhat that these images are different sizes. anyways...

clearly, spending results is a form of modification - and dice modification happens during the appropriate dice modification step, unless otherwise stated. i believe this is such a case and it seems unintentional. "if this attack hits" is determined at the end of the neutralize results step, so it could be argued that this spending is not a dice modification since it doesn't happen during the modify attack dice step. it's still a modification, though. just happens to be stated to happen sometime other than when dice modification normally happens.

the recent ion cannon battery is worded differently. this is either intentional and makes it work like ion weapons should, or just changed because they want the heavier gun to inflict a crit only - and they just happened to fix the issue at the same time. i don't think FFG will errata these cards, since it's such an edge case. it could be that they bring it up in an FAQ if enough people send them questions about it, but honestly, that would probably get a bit messy.

2 minutes ago, meffo said:

the recent ion cannon battery is worded differently. this is either intentional and makes it work like ion weapons should, or just changed because they want the heavier gun to inflict a crit only - and they just happened to fix the issue at the same time. i don't think FFG will errata these cards, since it's such an edge case. it could be that they bring it up in an FAQ if enough people send them questions about it, but honestly, that would probably get a bit messy.

Alternately, having seen the loophole created by the previous Ion weapons, they decided to make Ion Cannon Battery a much more potent version of the weapon... which seems logical, since it's specifically designed for epic ships, with more attack dice and longer range (which also means more defense dice against it).

3 hours ago, emeraldbeacon said:

Alternately, having seen the loophole created by the previous Ion weapons, they decided to make Ion Cannon Battery a much more potent version of the weapon... which seems logical, since it's specifically designed for epic ships, with more attack dice and longer range (which also means more defense dice against it).

Note, Epic is a format that supports 3+ players in one match and specific scenarios. The ships are called Huge ships, not Epic ships. Provided you're playing a casual game and your opponent agrees, you could pull out a Huge ship in a 200 point game

19 hours ago, Faerie1979 said:

Note, Epic is a format that supports 3+ players in one match and specific scenarios. The ships are called Huge ships, not Epic ships. Provided you're playing a casual game and your opponent agrees, you could pull out a Huge ship in a 200 point game

If you're playing a casual game you can do a lot of things, including 3+ players, totally custom game formats, etc. Epic Ship and Huge Ship are pretty interchangeable terms and nobody's going to be confused. Not really a hair that needs splitting, IMO. 😕

23 hours ago, emeraldbeacon said:

Alternately, having seen the loophole created by the previous Ion weapons, they decided to make Ion Cannon Battery a much more potent version of the weapon... which seems logical, since it's specifically designed for epic ships, with more attack dice and longer range (which also means more defense dice against it).

The Ion Cannon Battery looks right to me: it's a powerful, expensive-to-fire weapon that says you're guaranteed to get both a damage and at least one ion token onto the target on a hit. It makes sense to me that it'd be more effective than anything you can tape to a small ship. Though god help me, I can guarantee some scyk pilot has tried it. The intrepid little bastards do not understand "no" and I kinda respect that.

I also love Turbolaser Battery, just the way it works. Epic overall has a neat feel to it. Also I totally plan to load dice mods onto that ship and fly Jan Ors behind it, because who wouldn't?!

Not many other repeatable ion sources... conner nets, electro-nobody-uses-this bomb, a smattering of crew and other upgrades that ionize yourself or pass one along. Sabine crew. I'm wondering if ion bombs will come back. But for now, the main way to ionize a victim is the cannon or turret, and very rarely (in casual games) the torp or missile. It's been fun exploring ways to make those more effective with something like blinded pilot, but for now there's not much to do with this edge case.

On 11/17/2019 at 9:46 PM, DR4CO said:

This was brought up recently and the consensus was, as weird as it sounds, the answer is yes: if you can't modify your dice, you cannot spend the dice to deal that first point of damage, so all of your dice deal ion tokens.

But when you can modify your dice you "must" spend the result for the damage right? (Language being "Spend" not "may spend.")

I've been using the ion turrets a bit lately and several times I'd rather put the ion token on the target than the damage but I've only got the one result.

Yes. Unless may is specified, must is assumed.