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 11th
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…