Did you miss Griffin (John)'s first live episode of Legion List Building last night? Go check it out now to learn about building a GAR list focused on fire supporting Fives, and tune in next Friday at 5 PM Central for the next episode!

The game is certainly not fun when huge fire support attack pools can instantly vaporize entire characters/units. Im not really sure how 22 dice fire support attack pools made it past playtesting.

Rather than going to the extreme of banning Fives I think Id rather just see a hard cap on how many dice can be rolled in a fire support attack pool. I think a hard cap of 16 dice would be low enough to prevent consistent instant character deletion but still high enough to make fire support worthwhile.

Banning Fives is kindve silly because the problem isnt unique to Fives. Theres other ways to get massive fire support attack pools without Fives. And if its not Fives itll be something else. The most logical solution is to hard cap fire support instead of banning units completely.

On 11/28/2020 at 10:35 AM, Khobai said:

The game is certainly not fun when huge fire support attack pools can instantly vaporize entire characters/units. Im not really sure how 22 dice fire support attack pools made it past playtesting.

Rather than going to the extreme of banning Fives I think Id rather just see a hard cap on how many dice can be rolled in a fire support attack pool. I think a hard cap of 16 dice would be low enough to prevent consistent instant character deletion but still high enough to make fire support worthwhile.

Banning Fives is kindve silly because the problem isnt unique to Fives. Theres other ways to get massive fire support attack pools without Fives. And if its not Fives itll be something else. The most logical solution is to hard cap fire support instead of banning units completely.

Are you getting 22 from a Z-6 squad with the extra trooper fire supporting a Z-6 squad with the extra trooper, or am I missing another way? I guess that seems like an edge case from my experience, and 12 of those are white.

Losing an entire activation, especially when GAR lists can barely make it to 10 acts in a list now (8-9 more likely), is a pretty significant trade-off. The GAR as a faction is a glass cannon, and this list leans pretty heavily into that. When all your eggs are in one basket, which this list will make pretty obvious to its opponent pretty quick, you can start to position your units so they won't get completely wiped by Fives and his bros. I think where this fundamentally is different from the brokenness and not-funness of standby sharing is that the opponent isn't punished for simply entering into range 3 now (or they have many more ways to deal with it). Obi definitely helps with what this list is going for, but when you're out of activations at 8 (or even 7!), a 12+ activation list is going to have all sorts of tools to deal with this list.

Yeah you may wipe an activation but at the back end the other person is going to get quite a few unanswered activations which can be qiirte an advantage. Edit previously it was possible to have 6 black 12 white with bistan being fire supported by a mk 2 blaster.

3 hours ago, Acrin said:

Are you getting 22 from a Z-6 squad with the extra trooper fire supporting a Z-6 squad with the extra trooper, or am I missing another way? I guess that seems like an edge case from my experience, and 12 of those are white.

Losing an entire activation, especially when GAR lists can barely make it to 10 acts in a list now (8-9 more likely), is a pretty significant trade-off. The GAR as a faction is a glass cannon, and this list leans pretty heavily into that. When all your eggs are in one basket, which this list will make pretty obvious to its opponent pretty quick, you can start to position your units so they won't get completely wiped by Fives and his bros. I think where this fundamentally is different from the brokenness and not-funness of standby sharing is that the opponent isn't punished for simply entering into range 3 now (or they have many more ways to deal with it). Obi definitely helps with what this list is going for, but when you're out of activations at 8 (or even 7!), a 12+ activation list is going to have all sorts of tools to deal with this list.

If GAR deletes an unactivated unit off the board with firesupport then there is no activation disadvantage for GAR. They break even.

Its also not an "edge case", its the average dice result. When you roll 22 dice, even if a lot of them are white dice, the average result is 4-5 wounds to a red save unit in heavy cover. Arc Troopers with Fives also add sharpshooter 1 and a free aim token to this attack pool which increases the average result past 4-5 wounds. It is the expected result to see a 5-6 wound character/unit get instantly deleted.

Also where are you getting only 8-9 activations? I can run a 10-11 activation GAR list that can do this. Phase 1 clonetroopers are actually cheaper now than they were previously.

Instant deletion of characters/units the moment they come out from behind terrain is not a fun game mechanic. There should definitely be a hard cap on how many dice you can roll with fire support.

8 minutes ago, Khobai said:

If GAR deletes an unactivated unit off the board with firesupport then there is no activation disadvantage for GAR.

If they fail to delete the unit, then they are down an activation. If they could have deleted the unit without Fire Support, then they gave up an activation advantage. Fire Support can be powerful, but let’s not pretend that power doesn’t come with a cost.

19 minutes ago, GooeyChewie said:

If they fail to delete the unit, then they are down an activation. If they could have deleted the unit without Fire Support, then they gave up an activation advantage. Fire Support can be powerful, but let’s not pretend that power doesn’t come with a cost.

The point of the video was that Five+Arctroopers being fire supported makes it more likely to delete a unit than not to delete it. Thats why it talks about banning Fives. Although I dont believe the problem is Fives specifically but rather that fire support allows such huge attack pools to begin with.

Also I think youre forgetting that you can always split fire a unit's weapons. So if you fail to delete a unit earlier in the turn you can always split fire with your next activation to finish off that unit and attack another unit. That gives you a way to recover from bad luck without losing a net activation.

Theres also the additional problem of Fire Support allowing GAR to essentially circumvent suppression/panicking which I cant believe was intentional. I dont think a unit thats about to panic, with suppression twice their courage, should be able to contribute to a Fire Support attack pool. This is the reason why Imperials struggle so much in the matchup with GAR because they rely heavily on suppression which GAR can almost completely circumvent through clever use of fire support.

Fire Support still has some serious game balance issues that sadly werent addressed in the rules update.

36 minutes ago, Khobai said:

If GAR deletes an unactivated unit off the board with firesupport then there is no activation disadvantage for GAR. They break even.

Its also not an "edge case", its the average dice result. When you roll 22 dice, even if a lot of them are white dice, the average result is 4-5 wounds to a red save unit in heavy cover. Arc Troopers with Fives also add sharpshooter 1 and a free aim token to this attack pool which increases the average result past 4-5 wounds. It is the expected result to see a 5-6 wound character/unit get instantly deleted.

Also where are you getting only 8-9 activations? I can run a 10-11 activation GAR list that can do this. Phase 1 clonetroopers are actually cheaper now than they were previously.

Instant deletion of characters/units the moment they come out from behind terrain is not a fun game mechanic. There should definitely be a hard cap on how many dice you can roll with fire support.

"Its the average dice result" What? You can only get 22 dice with two clone trooper units with 2 Z-6s and 2 extra troopers, or one of those units and Fives/Arcs at range 2 (which if that was reliable we'd see a lot more Fleet Troopers) - I'd say those are edge case scenarios.

10 hours ago, Acrin said:

"Its the average dice result" What? You can only get 22 dice with two clone trooper units with 2 Z-6s and 2 extra troopers, or one of those units and Fives/Arcs at range 2 (which if that was reliable we'd see a lot more Fleet Troopers) - I'd say those are edge case scenarios.

try again. theyre not edge cases when GAR players take multiple units of clonetrooper mk1s and fives+arctroopers in every single list they play.

youre acting like its rare for GAR to take clonetrooper MK1s and arc troopers. theyre the two most common units used by GAR. and theyre spammed in multiples! Fives is in just about every list too.

the edge case scenario for GAR would be if they didnt take both of those units and didnt spam them in multiples. Its not uncommon to see 4+ clonetrooper units and 2-3 arc trooper units in any given GAR list. edge case lmao.

Its not edge case at all. In fact its common enough that people are even making videos about it being a problem and how fives needs to be banned. but again fives is not specifically the problem; the fire support rule is the problem. And fixing fire support is preferable to having to implement a ban list IMO.

Lastly youve also completely neglected to mention the AT-RT and Barc Speeder. Fire supporting an AT-RT or Barc Speeder produces an attack pool with similarly devastating firepower. Since it adds surge to hit to ALL the dice in the attack pool. Its not just limited to clonetrooper units with Z6s or arctroopers at range 2. Both of the aforementioned vehicles can be fire supported to create similarly devastating attack pools as well. And the number of units that can produce huge attack pool is going to increase over time not decrease.

Besides nobody thinks having entire units/characters deleted off the board in one shot is fun. Its not a fun game mechanic and that alone should be reason to address it.

16 hours ago, Khobai said:

If GAR deletes an unactivated unit off the board with firesupport then there is no activation disadvantage for GAR. They break even.

Its also not an "edge case", its the average dice result. When you roll 22 dice, even if a lot of them are white dice, the average result is 4-5 wounds to a red save unit in heavy cover. Arc Troopers with Fives also add sharpshooter 1 and a free aim token to this attack pool which increases the average result past 4-5 wounds. It is the expected result to see a 5-6 wound character/unit get instantly deleted.

Also where are you getting only 8-9 activations? I can run a 10-11 activation GAR list that can do this. Phase 1 clonetroopers are actually cheaper now than they were previously.

Instant deletion of characters/units the moment they come out from behind terrain is not a fun game mechanic. There should definitely be a hard cap on how many dice you can roll with fire support.

12 hours ago, Khobai said:

try again. theyre not edge cases when GAR players take multiple units of clonetrooper mk1s and fives+arctroopers in every single list they play.

youre acting like its rare for GAR to take clonetrooper MK1s and arc troopers. theyre the two most common units used by GAR. and theyre spammed in multiples! Fives is in just about every list too.

the edge case scenario for GAR would be if they didnt take both of those units and didnt spam them in multiples. Its not uncommon to see 4+ clonetrooper units and 2-3 arc trooper units in any given GAR list. edge case lmao.

Its not edge case at all. In fact its common enough that people are even making videos about it being a problem and how fives needs to be banned. but again fives is not specifically the problem; the fire support rule is the problem. And fixing fire support is preferable to having to implement a ban list IMO.

Lastly youve also completely neglected to mention the AT-RT and Barc Speeder. Fire supporting an AT-RT or Barc Speeder produces an attack pool with similarly devastating firepower. Since it adds surge to hit to ALL the dice in the attack pool. Its not just limited to clonetrooper units with Z6s or arctroopers at range 2. Both of the aforementioned vehicles can be fire supported to create similarly devastating attack pools as well. And the number of units that can produce huge attack pool is going to increase over time not decrease.

Besides nobody thinks having entire units/characters deleted off the board in one shot is fun. Its not a fun game mechanic and that alone should be reason to address it.

First off, how does deleting a unit when you are 8 to 11 down on activations make you even on activations? Even if the unit that dies had not yet activated the opponent will still have 3 activations left after the GAR player has used all of their activations, that is a massive advantage still.

all you have to do is keep the units that you need to stay alive later in the game out of LOS until the Fives squad has gone, then you can use the remaining activations to shoot them back. once the fives squad has lost 2 or more of its guys then it is going to be far less powerful and would need to be fire supported to even have a good dice pool let alone the great one that he is on about.

second, Phase 1's and ARCs equal a quarter of the units available to the faction at the moment and the ARC are the only special forces units, also 5/12 of the units in the Faction are clonetroopers (5/9 of the troopers in the faction) of course they are going to be common in lists. Thinking that it is going to be anything different is asinine.

third, that 22 dice pool with fives is only when firing at units at range 2 (unless you have clankers) and then it is only 4.98 wounds (against red saves) AFTER the sharpshoter and Aim not before. It also assumes that you have taken the extra guy in the firesupporting squad, most squads dont so take a black die off as well. If you are going to quote the stats given in the video we are commenting on then try and do it properly.

fourth, if you are so against units being wiped off the board in one activation why are you not commenting about Vader, or Dooku, or Grevious, or the AAT, or Tauntauns, or Luke, or any of the other units that wipe other units out in one? Why do you only seem to comment on GAR and how they should be nerfed?

fifth, please give an example of an 11 activation GAR list that is viable at the moment, you seem to think that every one is running one, most lists that i have seen are 7-9 activations with a few 10 activation lists.

sixth, the naked phase 1 squad is the same price it has always been, how exactly is it cheaper?

When I come up against fire support, I fully expect that unit to be deleted: no exception in my mind. Does it suck? You bet your *****. But.... being able to exploit an entire flank being activated as we close to range 2 sets up for a massive next turn to hopefully steal priority and possibly turn the tide.

In the games I play, I want them to fire support. That's why I take Droidekas

If fire support were to see a nerf, it should be to take suppression in to account. Maybe something that says a unit with enough suppression to panic (not using the commanders Courage), can not fire support 🤷‍♂️

13 minutes ago, *player4189079 said:

When I come up against fire support, I fully expect that unit to be deleted: no exception in my mind. Does it suck? You bet your *****. But.... being able to exploit an entire flank being activated as we close to range 2 sets up for a massive next turn to hopefully steal priority and possibly turn the tide.

In the games I play, I want them to fire support. That's why I take Droidekas

If fire support were to see a nerf, it should be to take suppression in to account. Maybe something that says a unit with enough suppression to panic (not using the commanders Courage), can not fire support 🤷‍♂️

yeah, there's pros and cons with everything. I hate it when I roll blanks on literarily every red die I own for the first 3 turns and lose most of my GAR or Imperial units, That makes for an uphill battle as well.

This game is designed to have units wiped out. The Designers made it that way. They don't want the game to last 4 hours. They've spoken to this many times before. I don't see an issue. If you lost a stormtrooper unit on that side, push hard with the rest of the units there and make them pay. GAR units lose a lot of efficiency as soon as they take casualties. Make them take casualties. I thought that was the point of having snipers, is you could almost always get damage through on their units.

I wish some of us would get to play more games instead of just talking about playing games.

19 hours ago, Khobai said:

Besides nobody thinks having entire units/characters deleted off the board in one shot is fun. Its not a fun game mechanic and that alone should be reason to address it.

Yeah I can see where you're coming from here.

I ran a demo game for some new players where on a Round One "Take that Clankers" a unit of phase IIs with Echo was able to fire support in on a range 3 (upgraded from2) Arc trooper shot for a total of 4 white, 9 black, 3 red with Sharpshooter 1, critical 2, Lethal 2, and a stack of like 4 aims to TKO General Grievous early in the game.


Personally, I'm not a fan of the mechanic either, when compounded with the clutch keywords available on ARCs and some of the support units, and/or a heap of tokens, it's pretty un fun for the people playing against it. Especially newer players that stumble into clones without realizing they can throw shots with power akin to that of a fully kitted AT-ST with just standard infantry units.

I know the group tends to nit pick your arguments but I agree with the core of your statement. Fire support creates NPEs. I've seen first hand that it can be a negative player experience to have the tiniest misstep in a unit placement be instantly punished by swift and deadly power shots.

Maybe AMG will figure out how to tone down the insta-death clone shenanigans without ruining the faction.

Something quickly mentioned in the video was the Fives+ARC+Phase 2 w/ Z6 build for the dice stats was 221 points. Committing +25% of your points and 25% of your activations to 1 turn should net high results.

11 hours ago, 5particus said:

First off, how does deleting a unit when you are 8 to 11 down on activations make you even on activations? Even if the unit that dies had not yet activated the opponent will still have 3 activations left after the GAR player has used all of their activations, that is a massive advantage still.

Where are you getting 8 activations from?

The GAR list I run has 10 activations.

No seriously competitive GAR list is gonna have less than 9-10 activations. For the exact reason you pointed out.

8 is way too low for a serious list. thats definitely not an optimized GAR list.

3 hours ago, Darth Sanguis said:

Yeah I can see where you're coming from here.

I ran a demo game for some new players where on a Round One "Take that Clankers" a unit of phase IIs with Echo was able to fire support in on a range 3 (upgraded from2) Arc trooper shot for a total of 4 white, 9 black, 3 red with Sharpshooter 1, critical 2, Lethal 2, and a stack of like 4 aims to TKO General Grievous early in the game.


Personally, I'm not a fan of the mechanic either, when compounded with the clutch keywords available on ARCs and some of the support units, and/or a heap of tokens, it's pretty un fun for the people playing against it. Especially newer players that stumble into clones without realizing they can throw shots with power akin to that of a fully kitted AT-ST with just standard infantry units.

I know the group tends to nit pick your arguments but I agree with the core of your statement. Fire support creates NPEs. I've seen first hand that it can be a negative player experience to have the tiniest misstep in a unit placement be instantly punished by swift and deadly power shots.

Maybe AMG will figure out how to tone down the insta-death clone shenanigans without ruining the faction.

I played a game as clonetroopers where I killed Iden Versio first turn.

I felt really bad about it too. Because the second unit barely even had LoS to Iden Versio.

Theres so many things that are abusive about fire support IMO. The huge attack pools that no other faction can match. The fact it can ignore panick/suppression. And then theres the LoS shenanigans where if the attacker can see all of the unit its attacking but the fire supporting unit can only barely see one model, you can still fire support to full effect. Even though the fire supporting unit would only be able to attack one model if they attacked on their own. It basically allows the fire supporting unit to fire around corners lmao.

I definitely dont think a lot of these things were intended but the rules allow it.

2 hours ago, Khobai said:

Where are you getting 8 activations from?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the video in the original post, which shows a list of Obi-Wan, R2-D2, ARC Troopers, ARC Trooper Strike Team, 2 Phase I Clone Troopers and 2 Phase II Clone Troopers.

2 hours ago, GooeyChewie said:

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the video in the original post, which shows a list of Obi-Wan, R2-D2, ARC Troopers, ARC Trooper Strike Team, 2 Phase I Clone Troopers and 2 Phase II Clone Troopers.

Yep and I dont think that list is particular good. But I do think the video raises good points regarding fire support.

6 hours ago, Khobai said:

Yep and I dont think that list is particular good. But I do think the video raises good points regarding fire support.

In that case, can I get a copy of your list that has 10 activations and creates Fire Support pools like the one in the video? I'd like to give it a try.

11 minutes ago, GooeyChewie said:

In that case, can I get a copy of your list that has 10 activations and creates Fire Support pools like the one in the video? I'd like to give it a try.

he never responds to list requests, he knows that he is talking out of his butt and can't back it up so will ignore the request

So now we want to take away fire support from the game and from GAR? What will GAR have left? token sharing and red dice for defense black on offense?

I think there should be some more games before we turn GAR into something that is identical or worse than the Empire.

Some of this may have to do with type of gameplay. If you wait until the last 2-3 activations, GAR has all of the tokens built-up. If you hit them early, they don't get all the tokens everywhere. If they are all balled up, play a scenario where the objectives are far away and collect points. Maybe your board doesn't have enough terrain (I still see way too many boards without LOS blocking terrain or all the terrain is in the corners)

14 hours ago, Khobai said:

I definitely dont think a lot of these things were intended but the rules allow it.

I'm on the other side of this.

I think they were intentional inclusions. I think the power mechanics of the clones were a measured decision to make sure clones weren't DoA. I think they knew with the limited number of available units for the first year the new factions would need a significant power boost or they'd be unable to compete.

Where I think they failed was a timely way to maintain balance as the faction expanded. Rex, R2, Padme, Phase 2s, ARCs, etc.… every unit the clones have received since release have increased the functional ability of the faction on whole. That isn't inherently bad, but the synergy of these units compounded with their inherent power mechanics are creating some NPEs. Firesupport is one of them. (Though I think token sharing is creating more of an issue in the big picture.)

That doesn't mean firesupport should be removed. It's a neat mechanic and I'd like to see it in the game, but I think there's a number of things that could help balance it.

I think the best option to fix the mechanic is to incorporate suppression. (which is considered one of the biggest annoyances of FS).

Change the rules for the Fire Support keyword to include the following: "Before a unit with the Fire Support keyword applies it's weapons to an attack pool it must roll it's rally check. After the rally check if the unit is suppressed but not panicked the unit may add half it's dice (rounded up) to the pool, if the unit is panicked it cannot add dice to the pool, instead the unit gains a panic token and must make a move towards the nearest edge of the battlefield."

I frankly don't think there's a problem yet. There are some really powerful combos. If you were a new player, the first thing I would tell you is - "Hey, watch out for these guys, they've got double dice on their weapons and with this one card, I can reach out and tap you at range 3. You may want to play around them til you get the hang of it"

Who tries to demolish a new player in their first 3 games anyway? We all know the answer to this, but that's not the designer's fault, that's the individual players.

If you strip everything the designers put into the GAR development, then they become even more bland (clones that already look and feel the same are already boring enough)

The designers stated at the beginning of the game that the feel of the game would be determined by the characters and heroes of the universe, not necessarily the faceless troopers. I don't know if that will continue to hold true, but buff the characters (like they've been doing) but don't strip the faction completely, its already the least interesting faction in many ways.

1 hour ago, Darth Sanguis said:

Where I think they failed was a timely way to maintain balance as the faction expanded. Rex, R2, Padme, Phase 2s, ARCs, etc.… every unit the clones have received since release have increased the functional ability of the faction on whole.

Everyone keeps over reacting like the game is complete. In every package it's printed on the packaging "this is not a complete game"

The exact same thing happened when they released the core set. "This unit is too powerful...This unit sucks!.."

These newer factions aren't even caught up to the Rebel and Imperial factions in pure numbers of types of units or commanders, etc.

Everyone will complain even more when the Scum and Mercenary faction is released. "Grogu single handed destroyed my army by launching marbles at them ! !"

Marble launching is broken!

1 hour ago, buckero0 said:

Everyone keeps over reacting like the game is complete. In every package it's printed on the packaging "this is not a complete game"

The exact same thing happened when they released the core set. "This unit is too powerful...This unit sucks!.."

These newer factions aren't even caught up to the Rebel and Imperial factions in pure numbers of types of units or commanders, etc.

Everyone will complain even more when the Scum and Mercenary faction is released. "Grogu single handed destroyed my army by launching marbles at them ! !"

Marble launching is broken!

I don't think I'm reacting as if the game were complete. Nor am I over reacting to the perceived strength of the subject topic of the Fire Support keyword. Merely sharing experiences and input based on what I've seen over the last year with Fire Support being a major component to clone lists.


I think I've been very clear that I see this as part of the faction growth that's inherent with expanding a game. I also make it clear, if not in this thread then in several others since clones became a subject of discussion, that there should be a method in place to balance these releases more often. If there is going to be rapid growth and compounding synergies the game needs to be balanced more often. Once a year leaves a long period of NPEs if units released early in that cycle are stronger than intended.


All that said, I don't disagree. People, by large, paint their perspective based on the anecdotes of their own experience, however, I don't think that you can consider the whole without looking at those experiences and asking, "is this good for the game?"

If players are having a bad time playing against clones due to various components they should be inspected and discussed. Even if those instances are small data points or anecdotal in nature.

12 minutes ago, buckero0 said:

Everyone keeps over reacting like the game is complete. In every package it's printed on the packaging "this is not a complete game"

Not sure if that is intended as a joke - if it was, well played - but I believe that references the unit expansion itself as "not a complete game" meaning you need to get the core game to have all the components required to play. But I digress.