I started this thread to see if my reading on the interaction was right. And four pages later, we're still going around in circles. No, I would not show up to a tournament with a squad that had an interaction that had any ambiguities in its interpretation. I like knowing the rules, whether I'm right or wrong about how I interpret them, I like knowing for sure so that when the situation does come up, I can have a leg to stand on with how FFG has ruled on them.

With this tournament season coming up, I expect to not face the same squad twice, and when I face a Kath with Ion squad, I would like to know for sure how the interaction plays out. I understand that I don't know everything, and I've been wrong about many things. I brought this topic up because I didn't see this interaction defined anywhere else, and we briefly talked about it on my regionals thread. So I wanted to be clear about how this interaction works, and I fully admitted in the original post that I could be wrong, and I may be. I don't think I am, because I don't think the "canceling dice that have been previously removed from the common area" argument holds water, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, gotta get ready for work. Thanks for all of your responses and your civility. Again, I'll post when I hear back from FFG, although I have no idea when that will be.

dbmeboy said:

I dig what you're saying, man, and as I've said numerous times throughout, it's possible that this is the rules devs intent. We'll just have to wait and see how they respond. Both of us are pretty much just repeating ourselves in slightly different ways for the past page and a half, really.

You've lost me in your second paragraph though- how could there be anything othe r than [hits] and [crits] post cancellation? Two Focus results wouldn't trigger the Ion Card text would they? An extra damage for 2 Focus results or something similar would trigger a possibly different card, but I don't see how that could play into the Ion Weapon card text. Or did I miss the point somewhere?

My post was in no way a 'dig' at Hothie, in fact, I was supporting his case.

I respect Hothie's opinion, but it doesn't mean I haven't read the rules thoroughly, played many games and have a thorough understanding of this and many other miniature games.

To me, a logical following of the steps in the rules as written answers the question at hand.

What I was trying to do was show this without any flowery writing.

If you take a RAW approach, then Hothie's supposition is correct and as we have no other rulings, I believe is the way this should be played.

How many of you play the Ion Cannon by rolling your hit dice and then not letting your opponent roll his defence dice before awarding the Ion token and following the writing on the card?

I am hazarding none.

Therefore you cancel potential hits first, then any remaining hits become 1 hit and all other remaing hits of any type are cancelled.

The question of Kath's ability then becomes simpler as well.

If you cancel a crit with your defnce dice, then it triggers. If the Ion Cannon cancels it after defence dice are rolled, it doesn't.

No offense to anyone.

Regards Pete

hothie said:

hothie said:

And I compliment you for doing the stand-up thing by starting the thread rather than doing what my friend suggested- i.e. show up and argue hoping you win the debate. LIke you, I get rules stuff wrong too, and even when I have them right, I usually get bored arguing usually about halfway through the argument when I start thinking about all the imporant stuff in life and realize that the outcome in a game like this kinda doesn't really matter, and I give up and relent, usually to my disadvantage. It's just so much nicer to not have to do that; being able to pull out a FAQ and say, "No, man. Here's the FAQ, it says this. Now let's roll." I was kinda dreading rolling into Regionals with the spectre of Kath + Ion out there unaddressed, and again, it's why I said what I said in my Ion Cannon article on the site- I wasn't going to be the one to unleash this on an unsuspecting world, or even hint at the possibility.

So despite previous denials of ambiguity, I think there definitely is some weirdness going on here. And I'm glad it's being discussed.

Here's hoping we get a concrete answer before Regionals start. It'd suck to have folks get run over by this truck the first couple of weeks only to have it FAQed before the end of Regionals and change things for folks who play later. If Regionals were like the KRT and everyone was going to be playing the same weekend, it'd be one thing, but the ruling on this build really does nullify the effectiveness of really any starfighter, but especially X-Wings, A-Wings, and all of the Imperial fighters. It'd be nice to know if we need to start making and practising with lists that exclusively use 1 Agility ships to try and take away the possibility of being Ionized and Stressed by this build.

Englishpete said:

I didn't take your post as a dig at Hothie, and my response back certainly wasn't intended as a dig towards Hothie either. My point was- if this is such a simple, follow the rules closely kind of deal, then why'd he ask the question? That's it. There was no subtext, there was no implication of unsportsmanlike conduct or anything other than what I said in the rest of that post; namely that I thought Hothie posted the question because even with a careful reading, and analytical thinking, rules that don't appear to be getting violated produce an uncharacteristically powerful result of which there's no counter for the defender.

I don't know if that was just a deliberate pot-stirring attempt by Buhalin in what has been an otherwise civil discussion of the rules or just a late-night brain fart or what. I don't see how any reasonable person with English as a first language could read either of our posts and draw the conclusion that either of us were implying that Hothie was being unsportsmanlike.

Anyway- again, if this question was a matter of simply following the steps in order, I think dbmeboy would have wrapped it up in one shot just like he's done on countless other rule threads on other topics in this forum. There's something in the way these all rules interact that make people say, "Wait- what?" Even people who normally don't have a tough time following the rules for this game.

I don't roll my hit dice then lot let my opponent roll his defence dice and I don't award the Ion Token before the hit result is satisfied. I do wonder why in the world they wrote "all" on the card if they just meant [hits] and [crits]- the only possible results that can be present at the time the Ion Card takes effect. There's some grey area here that needs to be clarified by FFG. Maybe your take is exactly what they mean and they just put "all" because the guy writing the card didn't have the [hit] and [crit] symbols handy to copy/ paste. Maybe it's like dmeboy said and they put "all" to save space on the card or whatever. That's possible.

Or again, maybe it's worded the way that it is because they didn't want Kath Scarlet to be the only pilot who can single-handedly ionize and stress a ship solely on her own in one round of shooting, at a much higher chance than not, regardless of what maneuvers the target ship has performed or Actions selected.

Here's another way to look at it:

When does Kath's ability trigger? It's worded a little strangely, but the condition is when the defender cancels a Critical Hit. So when that happens, the ship gains a stress.

When the Ion then cancels all results, Kath's ability has already gone off. The Ion Cannon doesn't un-trigger it. It can't. The ability has already triggered and resolved, the ship has a stress, and the Ion does nothing to remove that.

Sorry for the triple post, but I've come up with a couple other ways to look at this problem. I do not believe that either of these cases are true, but they are consistent with trying to apply the Ion Cannon's text at the beginning of the Compare Results step.

1) The Ion Cannon is indeed restricted to only being able to cancel dice at the start of the "Compare Results" step. In this case, at the start of the relevant step the condition for the Ion Cannon's text has not been met and thus it does not cancel any results then. Furthermore, when the condition for the Ion Cannon's text is met (the attack hits), the text tries to take effect but fails because it is no longer the beginning of the Compare Results step. The Ion Cannon can now do up to 4 damage! (One from its text, plus up to 3 from the dice).

2) The Ion Cannon is indeed restricted to only being able to cancel dice at the start of the "Compare Results" step and is also allowed to look into the future and determine if the attack would hit and make that happen even earlier in the Compare Results step than at the start. In this case, you now have 2 effects both trying to resolve at the same time (the game wants to cancel hits/crits from evade results and the Ion Cannon card wants to cancel all results). The attacking player, being smart, chooses to resolve the evade results' canceling before resolving the Ion Cannon's canceling.

"Ah, well, time travel's not really that confusing. You just have to think of it more like this big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff."
-- The Doctor explaining time travel to Doc Brown and Joe, HISHE Looper

I feel like that's the conversation we're having here.

Hothie's original post has it correct, as far as I can tell (as do Buhallin and dbmeboy).

Kath's ability is triggered when the defender cancels a [crit] result. The Ion Cannon card text is explicitly triggered if the target is hit, and that determination cannot be made unless [evade] results are used to cancel [hit] and [crit] results; there's only one definition of "hit" in the rules, and it's in the third paragraph under "6. Compare Results" on page 12 of the rulebook.

To reiterate, because it's important: you perform the canceling operation, using up all available [evade] results, and only after completing that operation can you determine whether the attack hit.

If an attack with the Ion Cannon card hits, it causes three things to happen:

1. The defender suffers 1 damage.
2. The defender takes an ion token from supply and places it near his or her ship.
3. Cancel all die results.

The last part is what seems to be causing confusion, but it's actually explicit about what it does, and worded intelligently. It doesn't say "cancel all remaining die results" because that actually risks more ambiguity. It says "cancel all die results" so that, when you move to the "Deal Damage" step, there cannot be uncanceled results of any kind--that is, so that there's no question whether or not a ship hit by an ion cannon takes any damage after the 1 point dictated by the card. Essentially, the statement unambiguously pre-empts the "Deal Damage" step, reminding players that the 1 damage from the Ion Cannon replaces any other result of a successful attack.

Paradox23 mentioned the statement that "All abilities that allow players to cancel dice must be resolved at the start of the 'Compare Results' step", but as dbmeboy has fairly clearly outlined, that can't possibly apply here. First, the Ion Cannon card is dictating a specific timing (" If this attack hits… Then cancel…"), and specific card text takes precedence over general rules text.

But in case that's not enough, there's dbmeboy's point about "time travel": executing the rules text for the Ion Cannon card at the start of the Compare Results step would make it impossible for an Ion Cannon to ever hit a target. Canceling all dice results at the start of the step means that you can't possibly hit a target (since hitting is defined by the existence of uncanceled [hit] and [crit] results). Hitting with the Ion Cannon is what triggers its rules text; allowing that text to apply at the start of the step means you actually missed with the Ion Cannon.

The proposition that the phrase "cancel all dice results " leaves no opportunity for Kath's ability to apply leads to a direct contradiction (that is, hitting implies not hitting), which means the proposition is false. Either the Ion Cannon is completely nonfunctional as written, or Kath gets a chance to give her target a stress token.

***

As Cid discusses, this gives Kath + Ion Cannon fairly powerful control, particularly in conjunction with a Mercenary Copilot and Marksmanship. As long as she generates at least one [crit] result on her dice, the resolution of the attack has to include a stress token or an ion token (and possibly both)--and she'll do so on 95% of attacks.

On the other hand, it's an attack that costs 46 points to bring to the table and causes a maximum of 1 damage per round; with that budget you could have bought Krassis Trelix + Heavy Laser Cannon, or Boba Fett + Gunner, or Howlrunner + Stealth Device and Black Squadron + Draw Their Fire. It's powerful, but not broken.

Vorpal Sword said:

Unless I'm misreading, Cid's argument about the power of the combo is about Kath BOTH stressing and ionizing a ship, not one or the other. Since this requires 2+ crits on the attack and at least one of those crits to survive the defense roll, it seems a pretty limited potential even if you include something like Marksmanship. I haven't run the numbers, but I doubt it rises to the level of "a much higher chance than not" that Cid is claiming.

dbmeboy said:

At Range 3, Kath can trigger both the Mercenary Copilot and Marksmanship. Here's the distribution of crits in that case:

At Range 1-2, she gets only Marksmanship.

You can only end up with stress and an ion token if Kath rolls multiple crits and at least one remains uncanceled, so the exact frequency with which a target ends up with both tokens depends on what target she's shooting at. But the number of times she rolls multiple crits is the absolute upper bound, so if you're at Range 3 it can only happen 62% of the time, and at Range 1-2 that drops to 18%.

So it's not just an expensive combo that leaves your ship with no defensive actions, it's also one that's substantially less effective if you close with her. That doesn't make it bad--keep in mind that 75% of the time or more, you're still taking stress or an ion token from her--but it's not game-breakingly likely that she'll manage to deliver both.