I keep hearing that marksmanship is so great, but it seems to but a little better than focus, but only useful when attacking. Ships can focus for free, why pay the points

Sounds expensive at a cost of 3, however the almost guaranteed crit is nothing to scoff at. The shorter the range, the better "Expert Marksmanship" becomes statistically.

For 1 point more you can get photon torpedoes…

Who says Expert Marksmanship is really good? Why?

Oops, the card is titled "marksmanship"… no expert

Marksmanship is amazing because of the crit ability. A normal focus is good, turning a focus into a crit and all others into hits is even better. When it gets really good is when you do this with Vader who has 2 actions so you get close for extra dice, then barrel roll out of your opponents arc of fire, then go marksman… or use marksman with a target lock and fire missiles with marksman, or even use marksman with focus or evade for the defense after attacking yourself. Its just amazing with Vader… getting crits are really important, they can force the opponent into burning future actions to get rid of negative effects, or they could get stuck permanently with a negative effect, or, the card that is most often found in the damage deck is the card that deals out 2 damge points…. so ya, crits are great, especially if you roll a crit naturally with a focus or two, then your opponent is in serious trouble unless they roll something awesome, if even one hit gets through, by rule it has to be the crit, and that could mean 2 damage points per crit.

I have found Marksman an excellent ability to deal damage. usually use it on vader and Wedge. It is something that I only arm those with more shots so vader with cluster missiles and Wedge at close range. That way, the chance a crit remains after evades is much higher.

I don't know if anyone else forgot this too, but when I was versing my brother he kept adding on marksmanship and using it wrong. It's an action, and What he was doing was using target lock, and in combat use marksmanship, and it totally destroyed me everytime. But since it really is only a focus with a crit, I would say It's definitely not worth it in larger games. It is definitely worth it in small games, where positioning is not as much of a factor, and where it's more about who can hit who first with how much, but in larger games, using it to destroy one ship, while exposing your ship to a swarm, not really worth it.

For my games as the imp player, I have not found it very useful. Its been more important for me to use my actions for evades and barrel rolls to either get into position to attack or survive the scrum long enough to get the shot off than spending the action to potentially get a free critical.

I think giving it to someone and using Vader with Squad Leader might be the better way to use it… the marksman uses his action to get into position and Vader gives him a free action he can then use to activate marksman.

Another idea is to simply give it to a high skill pilot like Vader or Wedge so that they will know exactly how much of a risk using it will be.

I think it's less of a hardship for a Rebel to use it as they really don't have actions that they can use to get into firing position like TIE's do (Barrel Roll) nor do they have evade which is a very powerful action for TIEs to avoid damage. An X-Wing isn't having to deal with those trade offs.

-DavicusPrime