I too was very confused by the argument that the TIE Phantom should be 4-dice again; I actually like the idea of dropping the attacks of the YT2400 & Ghost thanks mainly to the phantom's example.
Part of the TIE Phantom's massive success story in 2.0 has been thanks to reducing its attack dice to 3, which greatly opened up the design space. It was so successful, it had to be nerfed twice later. FFG didn't quite realize how strong 4 juking phantoms would be when cheap enough (to be fair, it took the community some time to notice too), and shipping Vader + Whisper ended up being quite the power couple. All this from making the ship weaker .
I had fun with 1.0's generic phantoms with lightweight frame (never cloaking, just flying them as frail doom cannons). They weren't great and they didn't belong in the meta, ever , but they were entertaining little nuke launchers to pair with an ace or decimator and set traps. But 1.0's phantoms were doomed to always be too pricey for what you get, relegated to casual curiosities, save for Whisper occasionally being good depending on what the meta was up to. When 2.0 came around with its new, very subdued meta, phantoms being 4-dice attackers certainly made balancing them very difficult; removing that problem allowed FFG to finally fix the TIE Phantom and restore it to the glory it deserved. Now they could lean into the ship's core feature: its cloaking. And the ship is not just better for it, it's interesting and distinct in its design, and fascinating to fly. Guys, how much fun are Phantoms? FFG frick'n pulled the rabbit out of the hat with that one.
And granted, at times it
was
too powerful in 2.0, and then the crew slot changed and Juke was nerfed, and now we don't see TIE Phantoms all the time anymore. That's how FFG
do
.
But it's also expected in a game this complex.
So when people in this thread suggest dropping the attack power of the ghost or yt2400, they do so because we've seen it work. A ship that was flagging in 1.0 and constrained by its stats became interesting and quite powerful in 2.0 by making it weaker . That sounds paradoxical, but clearly it works and we watched it play out. If FFG dropped the yt2400 and ghost to 3 dice tomorrow and adjusted their points, perhaps even errata'd their titles to give them some interesting options to go along with it, I think we'd recover from the no-four-dice shellshock pretty quickly. Especially when Dash, Outer Rims, and Ghosts started haunting the table again, but this time hopefully not as a NPE for either player. Dropping their attack power would allow FFG to lean into other aspects of those ships that could make them very interesting. And also allow them to see a lot more play, thanks to a lowered price or greater utility.
Not to oversell the solution... I'm not actually sure if dropping the attack dice is the right solution (there may be other options), but I can certainly see it being a viable step to revitalize the ship. As with the phantoms, Dash doesn't need 4 attack dice to be Dash; his ability and ship ability are probably sufficient. Dash would be a 3-dice attacker (2 at range 1) with crazy mobility who can finally afford proper allies. Is this good for the meta, or is his ability auto-NPE? I'm not sure; he may need other adjustments. But I'm kinda optimistic that the ship is very fixable, and this is a path that imo could work.
FFG may even considering fixes like this, but if so, I assume they're taking it slow and playtesting. Not only do they not want to make the errata'd ships too weak, but they also don't want to make them too strong. The TIE Phantom fix worked really forking well, after all.
