Matt Cary continues his thoughts on the summer points change.

The Sequel Faction.

The Prequel Faction.

• Resistance:
  • Fireball probably doesn't have a Tech because it probably doesn't really have advanced avionics and technologies. It's a stripped-down racing ship built from spare parts, kinda. Feels thematically appropriate to lack a Tech, like the Falcon lacks a Tech.
  • T-70: I'd agree that a few of the lower named pilots should probably get a bit of a buff.
    • Better aces can probably wait until the new upgrades are out, to be sure about their effectiveness.
• First Order:
  • SF: I really would dislike shifting more points to the chassis and away from the gunner. I like the gunner probably more than most folks, but I also like the non-gunner versions. Without optics, the basic SF is roughly equivalent to a Turret Y-Wing or Aggressor, with a few advantages and disadvantages, and that's fine. Upping them to 34 for a Zeta to reduce the Gunner to 7... I don't really like that. That essentially kills the Zeta as a non-gunner playable ship.
  • Dormitz should just get hard-errata to be small and medium base only, and lower the prices on him and HSTD. Forward deploy was a problem specifically because of high placement initiative, giant attacks, and an essentially unkillable ship (at least for that one round). Throwing a lot of small fighters forwards probably isn't an issue, since they can't easily be done at high init, the attacks are more modest, and the ships *can* be killed before they shoot.
• Sequel Upgrades:
  • I guess I'd be fine with Advanced Optics going up. It's more of an A-Wing problem than anything. Well, maybe Kylo a bit too. Just about everything else is OK (Optics SFs are a little popular, but they're just worse A-Wings, and Optics on the rest is all fine), but upping just A-Wings would probably be met with rioting.
  • Primed Thrusters could go down at the lower end. I'd love for a few of the Init 1/2 ships to have a better deal on Primed Thrusters than on non-scaling Pattern Analyzer. Seems like that'd just be more fun than status quo.
• Republic:
  • I'll second that about the several unused N-1 pilots. I totally understand FFG's caution, but like the E-Wing, the experiment has shown them to be fairly safe, and they can get some nice drops going forward.
    • How low could Bravos go? I keep thinking about them as roughly equivalent to an A-Wing. Two actions when they limit themselves to subset of their dial, mathematically similar statlines. But I don't think I'd argue for Bravos as cheap as I'd argue for RZ-1s to get. But I could easily see them drop 2-3 points on the generic.
    • Has anyone tried out 5 Passive Sensor Bravos with either Ion or Advanced Proton torpedoes? That'll fit currently, but I doubt it'd be a problem on table.
  • I'm almost baffled that generic Republic Y-Wings are cheaper than Rebel/Scum versions. Worse dial, but that seems compensated-for with better defenses.
  • I'm really happy that R4-P is so cheap now. I think it probably could be pretty handy. A Jedi having a fully-blue dial on the one turn they actually need to clear stress seems pretty good. Likewise, having the option to help an ARC's moves is nice.
• Separatists:
  • Mosquitos.
  • Vultures seem to have been fair these past few months, so I guess they can stay. I still favor shifting points to the ship away from the struts, just to ease bookkeeping (mixed config and nonconfig Vultures is unpleasant). But that's not an easy choice. The config clearly has a lot of value, and I could imagine a Hyperspace cycle where the ships lost it, just as an experiment, and then it'd need to have a separate cost.
    • I also wouldn't hate for Discords/Buzz Droids to go up, since I think those are just really annoying.
  • Mosquitos.
  • Them dang mosquitos.

18 minutes ago, theBitterFig said:

Dormitz should just get hard-errata to be small and medium base only, and lower the prices on him and HSTD. Forward deploy was a problem specifically because of high placement initiative, giant attacks, and an essentially unkillable ship (at least for that one round).

Tripsilon likely would have died out after droid swarms became a thing, but it still would have sucked for anyone else to come across it. As you suggested, there are several simple errata changes that could fix Dormitz. When FFG was errata shy, I understood solely using points, but now that even the harmless Goji got errata'd, they should just change HSTD to limited or, as you say, Dormitz to small and/or medium only.

22 minutes ago, theBitterFig said:

but upping just A-Wings would probably be met with rioting.

lol

22 minutes ago, theBitterFig said:

Primed Thrusters could go down at the lower end. I'd love for a few of the Init 1/2 ships to have a better deal on Primed Thrusters than on non-scaling Pattern Analyzer. Seems like that'd just be more fun than status quo.

I like this idea. If it weren't for Kylo (and maybe Overdrive Poe), we could probably drop all prices on Primed Thrusters.

24 minutes ago, theBitterFig said:

Has anyone tried out 5 Passive Sensor Bravos with either Ion or Advanced Proton torpedoes? That'll fit currently, but I doubt it'd be a problem on table.

A local tried something like that, except Ric took the place of one of the Bravos. It didn't do well, but he's also not the best player either, so I cannot give a true account of it's effectiveness.

37 minutes ago, theBitterFig said:

• Mosquitos.
• Them dang mosquitos.

1 hour ago, 5050Saint said:

I like this idea. If it weren't for Kylo (and maybe Overdrive Poe), we could probably drop all prices on Primed Thrusters.

Primed can just scale aggressively. 3 points up to I3, 6 points at I4, 9 points at I 5-6. For those low-init ships where it doesn't matter much, it'd just be more fun than Pattern Analyzer. Low-Init ships generally are going to care more about dice mods than mobility.

1 hour ago, 5050Saint said:

Tripsilon likely would have died out after droid swarms became a thing, but it still would have sucked for anyone else to come across it. As you suggested, there are several simple errata changes that could fix Dormitz. When FFG was errata shy, I understood solely using points, but now that even the harmless Goji got errata'd, they should just change HSTD to limited or, as you say, Dormitz to small and/or medium only.

Yep.

Upsilon is just unfun, even if it's an outdated and not-super-effective list.

Goji was pretty harmless, but he could get extreme. Played a strange tournament (150 + 75 point lists, where the 75 points was a single ship from another faction, and could randomly swap with the opponent's 75-pointer at start of game) where Goji had Ys and Nym rolling 6 dice hardcapped on defense a bunch. I can understand not really wanting him to get that out-of-hand.

Realistically, dude should have just been 1 die, no matter how many devices, but work with any device.

1 hour ago, theBitterFig said:

• Republic:
• • I'll second that about the several unused N-1 pilots. I totally understand FFG's caution, but like the E-Wing, the experiment has shown them to be fairly safe, and they can get some nice drops going forward.
    • How low could Bravos go? I keep thinking about them as roughly equivalent to an A-Wing. Two actions when they limit themselves to subset of their dial, mathematically similar statlines. But I don't think I'd argue for Bravos as cheap as I'd argue for RZ-1s to get. But I could easily see them drop 2-3 points on the generic.
    • Has anyone tried out 5 Passive Sensor Bravos with either Ion or Advanced Proton torpedoes? That'll fit currently, but I doubt it'd be a problem on table.

Resident pure N-1 list expert here. *Flashes shiny toy badge*

I haven't gotten to try specifically all 5 with AP yet, but I'm pretty confident in having spent a lot of time with lists extremely close to that, sometimes thanks to Epic extension to get even closer, that it would still be a C tier or lower list on a good day. That ship is straight garbo. It's ship ability is hardly a factor being only 2agi, while also not working alongside most upgrades that could even attempt to capitalize on it, let alone within it's own native stats.

I think it's unfair to the N-1 to even try to compare them to A's. Seeing as how that is my other chassis of choice, I feel confident in that statement also.

Let's get this straight, when they made the N-1 box they didn't design a ship. They made Ric and Lil'Ani as pocket aces pilot cards. Everything else in the box was an after thought wearing a bit of flashy makeup. And considering the precipitously falling price of the Bravo, and it's still failing to make much of a showing outside of the two pilots above, it should be pretty obvious that they had no idea what they were doing with the chassis itself when they made it.

At this point I'm hoping that it gets some support down the line with some sort of other product. There's a Naboo bomber (2 different sources for it too), and all the Royal ships. And if that fails, 2.5 in a couple years.

15 hours ago, ForceSensitive said:

Resident pure N-1 list expert here. *Flashes shiny toy badge*

I haven't gotten to try specifically all 5 with AP yet, but I'm pretty confident in having spent a lot of time with lists extremely close to that, sometimes thanks to Epic extension to get even closer, that it would still be a C tier or lower list on a good day. That ship is straight garbo. It's ship ability is hardly a factor being only 2agi, while also not working alongside most upgrades that could even attempt to capitalize on it, let alone within it's own native stats.

I think it's unfair to the N-1 to even try to compare them to A's. Seeing as how that is my other chassis of choice, I feel confident in that statement also.

Let's get this straight, when they made the N-1 box they didn't design a ship. They made Ric and Lil'Ani as pocket aces pilot cards. Everything else in the box was an after thought wearing a bit of flashy makeup. And considering the precipitously falling price of the Bravo, and it's still failing to make much of a showing outside of the two pilots above, it should be pretty obvious that they had no idea what they were doing with the chassis itself when they made it.

At this point I'm hoping that it gets some support down the line with some sort of other product. There's a Naboo bomber (2 different sources for it too), and all the Royal ships. And if that fails, 2.5 in a couple years.

I'd like to see the main characters from the two TPM-era video games ('Battle for Naboo' and 'Starfighter) Gavyn Sykes and Rhys Dallows make appearances for the N-1, but I agree with your assessment that there's little point without the chassis receiving some attention first. It's fun to go fast in, but it lacks both the teeth and raw survivability required to be a real threat.