2 hours ago, Gupa-nupa said:

Could these be good on an A-wing? Something like Jake, who already fills a support role, could help out the rest of the squad with double mods?

Huh. Using a single XX-23 on Jake in a non-missile list is a pretty neat idea.

I know conventional wisdom is "Tracers for a missile swarm!" but 2e kind of has a lot of nice high-to-medium initiative filler/pocket ace ships, and adding some support to that could be handy. Jake, Tomax Brenn, Oddball, Genesis Red, Jarek Yeager, Tallie. Some of these fouls would be "pure support" but some could go into the late game as solid independent ships. You could give something like a Beef list full of solid 3-red ships a bunch of bonus locks, or maybe Tracers on someone is a "Sloane Replacement" with Imperial 3-red generic spam.

Tracers on Jake kinda makes life easier for S-Foils B-Wings, for example, or he'd be a heck of a backup for Alex Kallus.

Just double-checking some in the dice calc: looks kinda like you'll need three 3-red attacks to be made in order for the loss of a 2-dice attack like Jake's; only getting double-mods on two attacks is a bit weaker.

30 minutes ago, theBitterFig said:

Just double-checking some in the dice calc: looks kinda like you'll need three 3-red attacks to be made in order for the loss of a 2-dice attack like Jake's; only getting double-mods on two attacks is a bit weaker.

Just to clarify, you are saying that if you shoot thread tracers with Jake, you need to take 3, double modded, 3 dice attacks, to make up for Jake’s missed shot?

1 hour ago, theBitterFig said:

Just double-checking some in the dice calc: looks kinda like you'll need three 3-red attacks to be made in order for the loss of a 2-dice attack like Jake's; only getting double-mods on two attacks is a bit weaker.

32 minutes ago, Gupa-nupa said:

Just to clarify, you are saying that if you shoot thread tracers with Jake, you need to take 3, double modded, 3 dice attacks, to make up for Jake’s missed shot?

It depends HEAVILY on target. A 2 dice focused shot is .6 damage on a 3 dice unfocused defender for example, and boosts further damage on them by .5 damage each, so it is worth it after 2 shots there. This seems to be the case vs most defensive values. So while these definitely synergize with missiles or torps, you don't need them to gain value from the lost attack. The question is the price though, as if the price is high it probably only fits with weapons that gain a lot more than .5 damage per attack on most chunky defenders.

The other big limitation of thread tracers on Jake, though this isn't nearly as bad in Rebels, is that it caps your initiative out at 4, and arguably that Dutch already exists in rebels so you need to not just pass to 2 people, but to 3 in order to get a real extra double mod out of the deal, and you can't really run Dutch in the list unless your ship count is unusually high. It also really compares not great to say... coordinate or focus passing tricks unless you can hit 2 teammates on its own. It obviously stacks with them, but any time you can pass a focus actionless it lets you take a lock with your action instead which is as good as the threader.

That isn't to say this is bad at all, it really comes down to price, and its going to shake up 'rebel synergy' lists a lot because it changes a lot of the value of actions for ya. How aggressively its priced will change how good it is to just toss into a list with a missile slot. A big consideration for how good it will be price wise is that miss rate. In scenarios where you miss with the thread tracer you missed with your shot too, so it doesn't matter for damage calculation in terms of the trade off of the attack, but it does matter for damage calculation in determining how much damage you get per-point. For example, vs Boba, your hit rate with the Thread Tracer is about 70%, and you gain .4 damage per allied 3 red at range 2, assuming he has full re-rolls on hand (weird scenario I know, but its just headmath, the evaluation is more a 'fuzzy logic' process in practice!), which means that in reality your only gaining 30% of .4 damage each ally firing, or .28 damage per allied shot. This isn't actually terrible, in your 2 buddy attackers scenario that is an extra 1.2 damage from thread tracers on one of the tankiest ships in the game.

Compare to just slapping a procket on Jake and getting 1.9 extra damage in though, with the relatively minor cost of having to land a bullseye on a ship at least once. So in that scenario where you need more damage the most, if you only are counting on getting two different 3red double mod on average your probably not gaining value on a super-tank (which is probably the best case scenario here, for example on a regular 2 agility Jake is actually losing a 2.2 damage boost from the rocket and your allies are still only getting .5 per shot, meaning over the game you lose .2 damage on the rocket with 2 allies, even before factoring the thread tracer could miss) if thread tracer costed 6. So while a thread tracer on 2 allies is sufficient to make up naked Jake's damage shortfall, you probably want 3 to make up a missile Jake's shortfall.

But what is fun about thread tracers, and why they are a good design, is they have all sorts of conditional scaling that make mathing them out in reality really hard. You will often get an extra bud off them you didn't expect, or your list may have a missile or torp friend. If you have 'rider effects' like ion they also suddenly get a lot stronger as pushing to 2 damage on any given ship becomes more important rather than the list's entire damage output overall. Hopefully they will be a biiiiit cheaper than you might expect to account for the fact that their value can swing wildly.

That said, I am worried Networked calculations will 'ruin' thread tracers, as a single thread tracer shot from a swarm could easily hit a 1.8 damage boost to the list per-shot even if everything is range 2 and not using missiles of their own.

1 hour ago, Gupa-nupa said:

Just to clarify, you are saying that if you shoot thread tracers with Jake, you need to take 3, double modded, 3 dice attacks, to make up for Jake’s missed shot?

Mostly.

Jake loses his shot, someone else gains a lock. Playing with the dice calc some will show some situations. @dezzmont is right that it'll depend a bunch on the particularities of the defender, but the core is that usually two 3-red and one 2-red attack (all focused) will usually do more damage than two double-mod 3-red attacks.

I'd probably only take Jake-tracer in a 4 or more ship list. But part of that is also that most theoretical 3-ship Jake-tracer lists are going to have a hard time staying at Init 4 and below.

Jake-tracers plus 4X would be a sweet list. Probably not top-tables-large tournament, but might be OK.

58 minutes ago, dezzmont said:

But what is fun about thread tracers, and why they are a good design, is they have all sorts of conditional scaling that make mathing them out in reality really hard.

I don't really think that's a good thing at all. An upgrade where folks are prone to a mistake, because they don't understand the value of the upgrade, is a really bad design. It's like Juke, or Tractor Beams. No one knows if they're good or bad, except in cases where they're truly broken. Tractors are actually probably OK, as Scyks/Fangs has shown, but that obfuscation of value isn't really in anyone's benefit.

It sucks when a player lines up with a list which is secretly bad, because they're trying to go the long way around with cute but hard-to-evaluate upgrades, and just have a really inefficient list without realizing it.

And that's separate from any discussion on whether easy locks are a good thing for the game, given Lock based ordnance.

14 minutes ago, theBitterFig said:

An upgrade where folks are prone to a mistake, because they don't understand the value of the upgrade, is a really bad design.

No, that is uhh... generally considered good design.

You actually want your mechanics to have layers and depth that change how good they are based on board state, the way the list works, and matchup to make every game feel different.

This is actually a very core component of asymmetric games and is how literally every asymmetric game works, especially one where you customize your lists: if the design space is so simple everything is as good as it initially appears to be, list building is a pointless exercise and you might as well release pre-made ship lists every expansion and rotate them around.

A good mechanic to compare this too are Captains from 40k: They take on different meaning and value based on where they are and what weapons they are near that make their positioning, usage, and even purchase highly dynamic. You can't 'solve' for captains, you always play around them 'in the game.'

In game design terms that means that Thread Tracers have a 'negotiated .outcome' AKA gameplay determines how it works out, rather than a non-negotiated outcome where its pre-determined. This is absolutely good design, and its why people really like aces for example, because a lot of the power of aces is also a negotiated outcome: How good is a good dial? Impossible to say concretely, but you know its good and how good it is depends on how well you fly.

14 minutes ago, theBitterFig said:

It's like Juke, or Tractor Beams

Juke is a purely mathmatical ability that is easily solved. It is very easy to understand how good they are. It is actually a fantastic example of why having an ability that is too boardstate indepdentend and math focused be bad: You basically always know how good juke is, and its entire purpose is to muck with the offense-defense calculations in a super predictable way. This is why it is always broken as is: Does Juke increase your TTK more than it increases your opponent's TTK? If Y: Take Juke, if N: Never take Juke. End of story. You can't get 'good' at using juke. You can't 'play around' juke besides how you play around focus which Juke is replacing with an evade. If the evade token is on your ship better than (or stacks with) a focus, juke just makes your ship flat out better, and it does it by making it really hard to hurt your ship and your ship really easy to hurt, which isn't very fun. It is very much a '+1 magic weapon' design.

Tractor beams exist more in the nebulous zone where your evaluation of how good the reposition is and defense penalty changes dramatically based on board state and matchup. Tractors are in a bad spot right now to be sure, but tractors are actually low key good design, or at least both sides of tractors are. The big problem I see with tractors is that its two entirely unrelated but extremely powerful effects (forced reposition and a defense penalty) bolted together, more than them being fundamentally broken. If I were to steal a wish from the 3 wishes thread, I would take the -1 agility effect of the tractor token and shove it onto the jam token. These are also a negotiated outcome, they just have this weird issue where both sides of the effect are super-good but not necessarily synergistic so you actually have this weird thing where its super easy to underprice or over-price tractor tokens. If Jam was made the dedicated' your worse at defending vs future attacks' orange token then it would be much easier to balance tractors around forced movement, but the fact you don't know how exactly good forced movement will be isn't a problem because its A: Always a little good to force movement, and B: changes based on how well you fly it, which is important as it creates a relationship between the person flying it and the list. It now becomes possible to be a 'tractor specialist' and to get more out of a list by being better with it and planning around it better. That is a highly desirable quality of a design in a list building game.

Thread Tracers don't behave like either of these upgrades. Well it behaves like the tractor beam a bit for the 'focus on this target' effect, but it lacks the reposition effect, so in a way it is a 'fair' tractor beam: its always easy to evaluate what you need to get out of it for it to be worth it, but how much you actually get out of it changes based on gamestate and how well you fly. How badly failing to get what you want out of it hurts you is also highly variable: if this is I-killable in your list and your using it to get locks for Y-wing torps its a nightmare. If your double modding basic attacks its much more mellow.

13 hours ago, dezzmont said:

No, that is uhh... generally considered good design.

Forgive me for not wanting trap cards to be traps for the players who use them. Such a silly thought.

There's a huge reason why Hearthstone gates their stranger card effects behind the Epic rarity.

13 hours ago, dezzmont said:

Juke is a purely mathmatical ability that is easily solved. It is very easy to understand how good they are. It is actually a fantastic example of why having an ability that is too boardstate indepdentend and math focused be bad: You basically always know how good juke is, and its entire purpose is to muck with the offense-defense calculations in a super predictable way.

This is just entirely wrong.

Whether Juke is good or not depends just as much on an opponent's green dice, their tokens and passive mods, how many other friendly ships will also be attacking that opponent, how many of those friendlies have Juke, and how reliably everyone can get Evade tokens. If it's "just math," then so is Thread Tracers. A lot of the math can be worked out with patience, with a dice calc. Once you get to the engagement phase, it's always all numbers. Not numbers a player can do in their head, however.

Hence the trap. More experienced players might have evaluated these things before hand. Newer players won't even know how. And they'll bring upgrades and use them in situations where they've got no clue whether or not they're actually useful. It can exacerbate the problem of casual squads get curbstomped, and the netlist meta.

Another example of this is probably Ruthless. That's a card with really subtle tradeoffs, about how valuable health is on your ships, about how impactful a hit-turn will be against a given ship at a particular time. It's a big trap, since it encourages players to make a lot of mistakes that they don't necessarily know they're making.

Contrast Fearless/Concordia Faceoff. That's a card where you can make mistakes, but you'll see it more clearly, because it's based on dial and position. The kinds of decisions that are actually useful for an X-Wing player to understand.

Or, better version, don't take thread traces in standard since your not likely to get value out of it in some cases without taking too much, a pretty big risk for consistent tourney play, and realize it's the Epic card that comes in this box.

Wing closes, focuses, wing lead fires traces, rest of wing fires double mod ordnance, profit.

It depends on its cost. It isn't a 'trap' for things to be better or worse based on in game context. A big problem with X-wing's design is a lot of 'sure things' like chasis and passive modding are extremely undercosted while the things that require you to work for them are over-costed.

It seems like an overt goal of the current wave is to fix that problem by introducing a lot of weird effects that can't be linearly evaluated and making them well priced so your encouraged to use them. So I suspect thread tracers will be very generous in price, which is what actually will determine if they are good or not in the hands of a good player.

On 10/21/2020 at 2:00 PM, 5050Saint said:

It can, but I feel it will help other ships more until the RZ1's drop in price.

This is basically the summary of everything proposed in this thread.

For the last time:

Phoenix Squadron Pilot -> 27

Green Squadron Pilot -> 29

That's enough to make them usable, and maybe even good.

I'm not against more pilots or toys, but even with those, the A-Wing will be a trash platform unless it's affordable. Fix that first; the tools are there and everything.