Wave 8, hoping for Wave 9 for next Month's X-Wing...

So, spending a bit of time thinking on the state of the game at the moment…  Honestly I am REALLY hoping to have Wave 9 available to play for the next event on the 11^th of September.  Right now, it’s a bit stale I think.  The Palp Aces are simply too good.  Yes, Joel’s Dash/Miranda build did well but I think it was a bit of an anomaly with it doing pretty well against the Whisper/Decimator builds or the Defenders that some of us were flying.  I’m not entirely sure that a standard Palp Aces build would not be able to simply tear apart Miranda too quickly.  Seeing the Emperor assist Whisper to regularly ignore a 4 hit attack is a bit disheartening, and while Joel’s Miranda build used the Homing Missiles to throw out a 5 Dice Attack usually with Focus and the built in reroll as HM does NOT eat up the required Target Lock on launch.  With the inability to spend Evade tokens, you SHOULD be able to push through a few damage, but that assumes average or better rolls of course.  I suspect now that most of us have seen this now, the bum rush of the PS 8 Miranda might well be what happens.  Getting in close or arc dodging as the Missiles are locked to the Front arc…  Dash is good, but lacking Regen, and seeing the regular dismissal of a single 4 Dice attack these days?  So, I’m thinking that as things stand now, there ARE a few things that are top tier, but that tier is dominated by the Imperials and the Emperor is a BIG part of this.  Without a range restriction, his power is REALLY good.  I’m edging toward it being too good honestly.  Yes, it takes 2 Crew slots and IS 8 points, but…  Just looking over it with say, Soonter Fel or the Inquisitor?  If you use it to save one point of Damage?  That’s the equivalent of ~ 10 points. Probably more as with the Emperor at this point, you are typically looking at a Token Stack meaning that you need only one Dice with ANY paint on it to completely ignore a lot of Attacks…  Usually with 3-5 Agility Dice, you can expect at LEAST 2 results.  With Focus AND an Evade token combined with the Emperor just setting a Dice to Evade, you can very easily ignore an obnoxious number of hits… 

So, on to Wave 9…  This seems to be a VERY anti Ace Wave.  There are things like the Lancer Pursuit craft that can just assign Tractor Tokens and/or Stress?  Black Market Slicer Tools (BMST) to use an Action to convert a Stress to a Damage Card assigned to the Ship?  Yes, please.  So, as a result, E-Wings go even further down the “playable” list as Corran Horn with PTL was about the only one seen…  But Fel and the Inquisitor will be less likely to use their PTL which is at this point the standard upgrade for them?  These I think will become less used.  But in general the Aces that we are seeing now will I think get used a lot less…  The ARC-170 might well see the return of the Stress Hog…  It will be a bit more expensive than the Y-Wing variant, but it will be a LOT more useful in the modern game…  And Stress is one of the things that killed off the Aces in the past…

Small based ships with 2 90-degree Firing Arcs are here now, so Arc Dodging has become a LOT more difficult…  There are also a few more things like mods that give you a Barrel Roll action…  And now there is a Torpedo that REMOVES Terrain during the Action phase and potentially damages everything in Range 1…  This might be fun against Swarms coming through the Asteroids…  But there are now ways to get Damage through outside of the Shooting phase and since they are not things that can be defended against, the current obnoxious Defense that the Palp Aces bring to the table get bypassed… 

Looking at flying my B-Wings again…  But it is going to be difficult currently.  HOPING to have the Wave 9 stuff to get the upgrades I think will push them over the edge into the top tier…  OK, out of the bottom tier at least J  I think they will surprise the heck out of some people…