This talent seems to be completely useless.

So essentially you are spending a maneuver to take a black dice out of the pool. This looks good at first glance but then you realize that every character in the game has access to the Aim maneuver which allows you to add a blue dice to the pool. Blue dice are statistically better than black dice so it is always better to aim than to use a talent you spent xp on. Having two maneuvers it is still better to spend both of them aiming for double blue dice than to add one blue and remove one black.

When you get improved Precise Aim then it becomes feasible to use the talent, but it is only useful on enemies with more than one defense, which none of them have. So the wording needs to be changed to affect disadvantage dice for it to even work at all and even then it will only work if your enemy has a defense and added disadvantage to your pool or added two disadvantage to your pool making it extremely situational. So this talent needs a lot of work for both its forms.

I agree its not a very amazing talent, and pretty **** overprised in the assassin tree … however its not completely useless as it does allow a character to make a more accurate sniper style attack (and thus fits nicely from a thematic point of view) remember nothing prevents the assassin from BOTH spending 2 maneuvers in roudn 1 to aim …then spending another maneuver to do precise aim in round 2 to remove any black dice …thus in effect allowing him a double-aim for that vital one shot one kill sniper shot from extreme range against a target in cover …

Boehm said:

Doesn't aim only work if you don't take any other maneuvers or actions between the aim and the attack?

Aim only affects your NEXT combat check it does not carry over from round to round. Since each character is capped at two maneuvers per turn the optimal decision is always to aim twice every turn, never using precise aim.

The only situation where this talent would ever come up is if you were in danger of going over your strain threshold, something that rarely happens with the ease of spending advantage to remove strain.

In our 5 sessions our Assassin has never once used this skill.

With the week 11 changes to Precise Aim it is now slightly better. If you only have one rank in it you are still better off aiming, and if you do manage to have two ranks in it then it would be worthwhile, but only against enemies with at least two defense. A lot of times enemies will have two setback die in the pool, one from defense and one from cover but it is VERY rare that enmies will have more than one defense.

For the talent to be usefull it should specify setback die rather than defense or it should be changed to be similar to how the new Bodyguard works, you suffer a bit of strain to downgrade the difficulty of the check.

As it stands now it is still a talent that does nothing most of the time, and if you manage to get it ranked then it will be useful once in a blue moon.

AFrede said:

According to one of the previous updates, cover does increase your ranged defence, so precise aim will benefit if your opponent has particularly good cover or armor that adds defence, so it's a bit more useful; though I would like to see it act like the True Aim manuever, giving the benefits of aiming and reducing the defence.

3WhiteFox3 said:

ahh ok, i must have missed that, so a rank 2 Precice Aim is at least useful, although the fact that the base talent still does nothing since the Aim manuever is still mathematically better, is still problematic.

a blue die is better than removing a black in general, but removing the black pulls the edge-cases in… as worst case is black fail or threat coupled with blank blue. For the skilled guy, killing a black may be more useful, especially if he has several yellow already.

Also, normal aim caps at 2d… dropping a precise aim first can add removal of a black as well.

aramis said:

aramis said:

aramis said:

3WhiteFox3 said:

Yep, I agree… but it's not that big a deal. It's a stepping stone, as well, on the talent trees. I think the solution is to make it a free action, rather than a maneuver… so you can get your 2 aims AND Precise Aim, rather than to make it more of a bonus on the to hit.

It is, after all, 10 points. It should be worth as much as the second level of a skill…

Or it could be a modification of Aim: spend a maneuver on Aiming - gain 1 Boost and negate 1 Setback Die. Or even negate 2 Setback dice if you have 2 ranks, still gaining the Boost die as Aim normally does.

jordiver2 said:

Elegant… but…

The problem I see with binding it to the aim action is that one can aim twice… and if it's bound to aiming, then it can reasonably be done twice as well, which means an assassin being able to, with Pr.Aim 2, knock 4 black dice off and get two blue… making it a rather massive shift in probabilities…

Wording it as free if the attack has been aimed reduces it to the -1 black die per level maximum.

aramis said:

Not entirely true. The way I read the rules, you can only aim once, but you can spend two consequetive maneuvers do it… (if that makes sense)

In that way this suggestion would work - "when aiming… <add text about Precise Aim applying>"

AFrede said:

Actually aim can be done over as many rounds as you wish as long as you don't do any actions or conflicting manuvers in between, you can shoot then aim then on the next round aim and fire with two boost die. I think you can also precise aim, then strain to aim, then next round aim and shoot. I still don't think it's a great talent given it's spot on the skill tree, I think it should be a base five, but it could be worse.