The intro…
Hello and welcome to this week’s blog!
Well it’s been a quiet week in the world of X-Wing…..
Ok, fine, not really. Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ll know that there’s been something fairly interesting in the grand scheme of things but I won’t get into it yet because it links in with my main topic today.
The other thing to talk about, since we’re in 2024 now, it the Welsh Open 2024!
Tickets are available from here and we are pulling together ideas for prizes and planning it all out so the earlier you get your ticket, the easier that is to do! Remember that food is included on the Saturday, as is free table time on the Friday night for some practice and hanging out! We are, of course, hoping for a Store Champ kit to be available once AMG announces what the 2024 OP structure is but for now we’ll have to wait and see.
So what are you waiting for, click on the link and get your ticket!!
Since that is just about it for now, I’ll move on!
Patreon update…
It’s the last Patreon update for this quarter. I just wanted to let everyone know that the giveaway draw was made on Friday – congratulations to Kevin Larsen! – and I’ll be putting packages together over the next week or so ready to send out.
I’ve put notice out via Paterson but just in case, I’ll add it here too. If you’re attending STO or Worlds and are happy to wait to get your stuff please let me know!
Again, thanks to all my patreon supports and welcome to the new supporters, you are all incredible people! If you’d like to join to be eligible for future gifts and giveaways then you can do that here.
The pre-amble…
So shall I get to that news I talked about earlier?
Let me just preface this whole thing with this image:
This is a screenshot from my blog with screenshots of AMG’s discord server. Screenshot-ception, if you will.
Do you know how long ago I posted this? Three weeks. THREE. WEEKS.
Just in case you haven’t heard, let me lay this out for you. Last Friday AMG released the updated points document with details of the new ships for Battle Over Endor.
On its own, I have to say this is mostly positive. The pack was initially due for release on the 23rd of Feb and there were questions over when the points would be out. I think that before the release is very definitely a good thing but that 2 weeks before would be fine. Three is a bit much.
Of course, on Asmodee’s website the release date has been pushed back to the 15th of March which in itself caused some concerns over whether it would or wouldn’t be legal for Worlds (or that if it is, can everyone get hold of it in time?).
So points being released potentially SIX weeks ahead of the pack? Feels weird. Really weird.
Then we get to the content. New points for new ships, cool.
But also… changes on existing ships.
Nothing earth shattering I guess. No changes to ship points, only loadouts. But still, changes when they’d stated (and pretty clearly) that none were coming.
I’m pretty big on integrity. Of I say I’m doing something (or not doing something) then 99% of the time, if it’s something in my control, I will stick to it, even if it’s to my detriment.
Now, maybe I feel the way I feel about AMG’s points release on Friday because of my ‘say what you mean and mean what you say’ outlook on life but I have to say that when news broke I was pretty mad.
Looking at what the changes are is also weird. First and foremost, they needed Han. Now in all honesty, I’m ok with this. The Bistan/Perceptive combo when linked with Ham rerolls and being able to take a red focus when bumping was clearly very strong.
There were also nerfs on other Rebel ships though (most notably Fenn and Bodica), meaning that a combo which, while strong, hasn’t outright won a big tournament in a good few months (as far as I know?!) has been nuked from orbit, relatively speaking.
Imperial Bomber got a similar treatment, preventing the Barrage Rockets/Saturation Salvo combo.
Now this is all well and good and something that some people had been asking for.
What’s super interesting is that the Republic ARCs, which is widely accepted as they ‘other’ strong meta list at the moment, escaped untouched. Sure, Padme lost 2 points of loadout meaning she loses Proton Torps but she can still take Plasmas which can be almost as effective.
And without diving down a deep, deep rabbit hole that I’m not ready to explore yet, this is why my biggest issue with X-Wing 2.5 is with points and list building.
By going to a 20 point system and going all-in on standard loadout cards you get to a place where fine tuning card balance can’t be done.
At 5 points Battle of Yavin Luke is pretty much a shoe-in for most Rebel lists and, according to Metawing right now, the most used Rebel ship and 7th most used out of all 289 pilots. It’s probably worth mentioning that even before any events have happened to affect change in that list, the three Siege of Coruscant ARCS are 1st, 2nd and 4th in that list.
At 5 points he’s a bargain. At 6 points he’s unusable. Ok, maybe not unusable but if he was 6 points he’d disappear.
The same would apply for the SoC ARCs. At 4 points they are AMAZING. At 5? Nah, dead.
Now the popular Han has had his loadout dropped so you can’t have Bistan AND Perceptive Copilot but at least he can be tweaked. If you look at the BoY TIEs that were dominating a year ago, Backstabber going to 4 points killed them both.
I don’t know that I have a helpful conclusion to draw here. The points are what they are and I still love playing the same so I guess it is what it is. As a general thing though I can’t say that I think that Standard Loadout cards are a good idea. The intricacies of the game are so delicately balanced that I feel cranking ships up or down by a whole point feels really clunky. If you make a direct comparison to 2.0 points it’s like putting a ship up or down by 10 points in each adjustment and that was unheard of.
Anyway, I hadn’t intended to make a rant out of that, sorry! I just needed to make sure everyone knew where we were before I hit the main ktopic.
Speaking of which….
The main bit…
Yes, I’ve arrived at the main bit!
So, I don’t know if you know but Worlds is swiftly approaching.
In the South West(ish) of the UK there’s a bunch of us in a group chat which we’ve been using for a few months to coordinate room sharing and flight info and all that sort of stuff.
A few weeks back the illustrious Mr Steve Boulton floated an idea: his wife was away for a weekend and how would we feel about getting together to do some prep for Worlds?
Clearly this was a great idea and since there were no tournaments happening any time soon and my Wednesday casual evenings would be a bit hit and miss for while I was definitely in.
Clearly this struck a chord with everyone else too as in the end there were 10 of us attending.
We compiled some of the current meta lists and would take some turns to fly them into whatever people wanted to try out in order to discuss how to go against it and what weaknesses we could exploit.
Then of course, the points change hit.
Now obviously, despite my reaction earlier, none of the changes were actually all that bad. Three pilots in my list had been hit (Jess, Lulo and Zorii) but for two of them it was fairly trivial. What this day would give us all was an opportunity to look at tweaks to our lists as well as sharing our common wisdom into certain lists.
I still had both my invite winning Resistance list and the Imperial list I’ve been flying the past few weeks packed and ready (well, minus 1 TIE Bomber dial…) so was available to fly both but with this points change I now needed to revise my Resistance list (the Imperial one wasn’t affected).
So the two remaining unchanged were:
Temmin Wexley (4)
Heroic (2)
Ferrosphere Paint (3)
R6-D8 (4)
Integrated S-Foils (0)
Ship Cost: 4 Loadout: (9/9) Half Points: 2 Damage Threshold: 3
Ello Asty (4)
Swarm Tactics (5)
Heroic (2)
Integrated S-Foils (0)
Jamming Beam (1)
Ship Cost: 4 Loadout: (8/8) Half Points: 2 Damage Threshold: 3
No problem.
Next up was Zorii. She lost 2 loadout, basically meaning a choice between losing R4 Astromech or Dorsal Turret.
For me, this is fairly cut and dried. Zorii picks up stress really quickly with the ability so not having R4 limits the dial significantly. Goodbye Dorsal.
Now we get to the real choices.
Jess – R2-D2 or M9-G8 plus Jamming Beam?
With M9-G8 being my way of getting passive mods onto Ello it was very tempting to keep it but it was strongly recommended I give R2-D2 a go to be able to give Jess the option to use her ability multiple times in one turn. Since I’d used M9-G8 plenty, I figured R2-D2 was worth a try.
The toughest choice was on Lulo. Shield Upgrade, Predator and Marksmanship was a really nice combo. With a 2 point loadout loss I was looking at 2 options: Shield & Heroic OR Heroic, Predator and Advanced Optics.
I’ll be honest, losing the Shield was the actual tough decision. I don’t purposely put Lulo in compromising positions but it does happen and that extra health has made the difference many times.
Since this day was all about testing and prep, I went for the Optics option.
So this was the list I printed on Infinite Arenas to try out.
L’ulo L’ampar (4)
Heroic (2)
Predator (3)
Advanced Optics (5)
Ship Cost: 4 Loadout: (10/10) Half Points: 2 Damage Threshold: 2
Jessika Pava (4)
R2-D2 (Resistance) (6)
Integrated S-Foils (0)
Ship Cost: 4 Loadout: (6/6) Half Points: 2 Damage Threshold: 3
Temmin Wexley (4)
Heroic (2)
Ferrosphere Paint (3)
R6-D8 (4)
Integrated S-Foils (0)
Ship Cost: 4 Loadout: (9/9) Half Points: 2 Damage Threshold: 3
Ello Asty (4)
Heroic (2)
Swarm Tactics (5)
Integrated S-Foils (0)
Jamming Beam (1)
Ship Cost: 4 Loadout: (8/8) Half Points: 2 Damage Threshold: 3
Zorii Bliss (4)
R4 Astromech (2)
Wartime Loadout (2)
Plasma Torpedoes (5)
Ship Cost: 4 Loadout: (9/9) Half Points: 2 Damage Threshold: 4
Total: 20
When I arrived Richard Greenaway was already there taking in boards and Steve was setting up mats. We had space for 5 games to happen simultaneously and over the next hour or so everyone else turned up.
The kettle was on and teas and coffees passed around as we started to discuss the points changes, whether meta lists would still be as popular and eventually gathered around one board and looked at turn 0 options for placing rocks and objectives that we though would give certain advantages against certain lists.
I’ll be honest, out of the whole day I think this was my favourite part. Nobody was bothered about giving away secrets for their own lists or how they might be affected on the day with this knowledge being shared out.
This was about the collective good. Making sure we were all armed with as much information as possible so when we get to Adepticon we can all do as well as possible.
After some great discussions (I even made notes! Actual written notes!) Steve drew pairings on a Longshanks event he’d prepared and we got to playing some games.
Game 1 – ‘Mandalor’-Ian Wardle (aka X-Wing Jesus)
First of all, this was great because Ian and I had never played each other before! To be able to do so in a super friendly, casual event was a bonus.
I offered Ian a choice of Resistance or Imperials and Ian wanted to try against the Resistance. No problem, I could do with blowing the cobwebs off the section of my brain where I had how to fly this stored and also get my head around the list changes.
As per usual when I’ve got a few games to cover, I’ll keep each one fairly brief.
I unpacked my stuff and looked across the table to see what Ian was flying.
Double. Ghost.
Eesh.
Pre-Flight checks:
Scenario – Salvage Mission
Target/Objective Priority – I’ve got to kill a VCX. Got to.
Obstacles – Clustered ideally to make it hard to navigate the VCX’s down
Deployment – In a block with Lulo flanking.
Now, I don’t know why but clearly the rust had fully set in for this game. I made a LOT of mistakes. I also panicked, overthought and made possibly the worst mistake it’s possible to make.
Let me show you…
Now, let me explain. I believe that my list can out-joust the majority of what’s out there at the moment. On more than one occasion I’ve actually initiative killed a VCX in the first engagement. Based on that, I totally didn’t mind jousting down that very clear and obvious diagonal lane since the VCX’s couldn’t be side by side.
But. I screwed myself. I placed my ships too far left, meaning that once they’d banked, the left side of my block wouldn’t fit without clipping the gas clouds. They were also probably not far left enough to get into the right position with barrel rolls.
Balls.
For some reason, this sent me down a decision rabbit hole which turned reasonably disastrous fairly quickly.
From teh above position I sent the back two ships straight while the front then banked LEFT, intending to zoom up past the gas cloud and then turn in on the Ghost.
I know, stupid.
Jess then moved and boosted and the Temmin bumped into her, meaning he couldn’t reach the crate to pick up when then led my to pick it up with Lulo which I KNOW is ALWAYS a terrible idea. ALWAYS.
The result was losing Jess in exchange for half of Chopper. Balls.
I finished him off the following turn but I was bleeding health on multiple ships.
A few turns later and a botched bank from Lulo into K-turning (JARGON ALERT!!) Temmin landed the A-Wing at range 1 of Kannan with no mods and promtly exploded.
From here I picked up a few boxes and in the end nothing else died (though I got Kannan down to 3 or 4 hull) before time was called.
Despite feeling like all was lost after turn 3, I clawed it back to 15 – 17 and could have got a draw if I’d been first player in the last turn and picked up a box with Zorii.
Mini conclusion…
Oh boy. Lessons learned for sure. Had I jousted in the block as normal and NOT picked up with Lulo, chances are that I might have killed both VCX’s. Overthinking wrecked me.
In terms of list changes, I didn’t notice any change in Zorii, didn’t get the chance to notice a change in Lulo and while I did use all the R2-D2 charges on Jess for re-rolls, my green dice simply decided that re-rolls didn’t matter here. Not feeling it so far.
Ian was a great opponent and we openly discussed some decisions and rued our mistakes as we worked through the game.
Game 2 – Josh Hall
After some group discussions about list alterations and strategic changes we drew another pairing and I was playing Josh.
Josh has been playing his Republic list for a LONG time now (8 months or so I’d say?) and so I have a slight advantage in that I know what he wants to do with it AND what it can do (and it’s REALLY annoying to shoot at!).
Pre-Flight checks:
Scenario – Chance Engagement
Target/Objective Priority – There’s no single good target in Josh’s list. I’d like to kill Padme as she negates my attacks but any target I can initiative kill is also fine.
Obstacles – I want to make staying in formation as difficult as possible for Josh’s ships. As many on his side as possible.
Deployment – In a block. And stay there.
We placed obstacles and ended up with a sort of pyramid pointing to Josh’s right hand corner.
I placed first and put Jess near the rocks. Josh started placing directly across from her and so, despite EVERYTHING I’ve just said, I placed everything else in the other corner.
This time though, I had a plan.
Jess clearly isn’t jousting Josh’s block so she turns out towards the rest of my ships who advance slowly in order to draw Josh through the rocks.
There are TWO important things I need to do here. First is to get to the middle while Josh is navigating rocks. Second is to bring Jess back into formation at the right time to engage.
Josh starts clipping rocks as we get to the middle and Boost has overstepped and gets wiped out before shooting.
Lulo then dives around the back of the top right rock and Josh totally calls it, turning all in on the A-Wing.
Lulo dies. Obviously. But actually, that’s….ok? I’m not overly worried about Slider pootling around in the middle but about to go fully in on a joust and try to nuke some stuff as the Republic ships’ position isn’t great.
Josh disengages but I’ve come in faster than expected and can still shoot with ALL my remaining ships. Padme dies while one of the V-Wings escapes on 1 hull.
Josh can’t get focused fire onto any of my ships while I can chip away at his and as time is called we squeeze in one more turn where a V-Wing finally dies and I take the game 19 – 11
Mini conclusion…
This was better. More co-ordinated and better thought out. Lulo dying wasn’t ideal as I didn’t get to test out the Predator/Optics combo but while losing the ship wasn’t what I’d wanted, the positioning it gave me is what got me the win here.
Ello does miss the M9-G8 re-roll but Jess was a bit more of a beast in this game with the re-rolls.
Game 3 – Ben Saunders
Strangely, despite running in similar geographical circles in the X-Wing circuit, Ben and I have never played before!
Ben was rather glad that he’s recently jumped off the Rebel train since three of the ships had lost loadout points whereas his experimental CIS list had come through unscathed.
Pre-Flight checks:
Scenario – Scramble the Transmission
Target/Objective Priority – I have NO idea. Part of the appeal of the list for Ben, apparently. Nobody faces these ships so nobody knows what to do against them. Interesting.
Obstacles – I think that placing rocks along Ben’s edge means that his vultures have to either stay back or zoom all the way over to my side to sit on rocks and turret.
Deployment – In a block, obviously. Lulo close by this time.
Ben spreads his ships out along his board edge. His Tri-Fighter and Sun Fac are the ones I’m concerned about.
I come forwards fairly quickly, not wanting to allow Ben the time to land his vulture on the rightmost rock and claim the objective without being punished.
Now, despite allowing the Tri-Fighter a free shot into my flank, I got this first engagement pretty much perfect.
As I Swarm Jess up to i5, I drop the HMP with three shots and the right hand Vulture with the other two. Brutal.
The Vulture did manage to drop a Buzz Droid onto Temmin though and it takes its toll. I push him at a rock to push it to the back, planning to boost away from it but took it too close and the boost won’t fit.
Ben puts some hits on and Temmin’s on 1 hull and staring down a rock. Oops.
I start claiming some objectives (which we’d both ignored until now) and converge to focus fire on the Tri-Fighter who, annoyingly, lives on 1 hull.
I make a positional mistake with Jess which allows the Tri-Fighter to escape and bear down on Zorii.
Durge kills Ello but nobody else dies despite Sun Fac and the Tri-Fighter being very close.
My early lead made it feel like I was in control but we realised quite late on that we’d forgotten to count Temmin’s points, meaning the final score was a 12 – 11 win.
Mini conclusion…
A great first engage but a bit of a shambles afterwards. Heroic is the only upgrade I’ve managed to trigger on Lulo in this game. At least he lived this time!
It was great to fly against Ben, he’s a very good player and I suspect that if he’d rolled more than a single evade in the first 12 or so green dice he threw that the result would have been quite different.
The conclusion…
First off, it was a GREAT day. X-Wing aside, it was lovely to spend the day with a great bunch of people who are passionate for the game, open to learn from each other and awesome to spend time with.
I got a huge amount of value from the time we spent chatting before playing and will definitely be taking that information to apply to future games.
As for the list changes? Let’s see…
Zorii – losing Dorsal was, as I expected, not a huge deal. R4 gives much better value for the same points. She’s there to throw 2 Plasma torps and then claim objectives and not die.
Jess – the R2-D2 is growing on me. Did Ello miss the M9-G8 reroll? Yes, for sure. But keeping Jess around for longer (since she’s often a priority target) is, I think, more important. R2 stays, for a few more games at least.
Lulo – this one’s tricky. Losing the A-Wing relatively early in two of three games maybe suggests that I miss the Shield Upgrade rather badly. Heroic triggered a handful of times but didn’t make a massive impact. Predator didn’t trigger at all, neither did Optics. Of course, that’s down to me and how I’m flying. I’m thinking that, given how I normally fly, Lone Wolf might be better for those 3 points since it’s not restricted to bullseye and could be used defensively as well. Definitely something to test out. Depending on how that goes, Shield and Heroic might still be better?
One thing’s for sure, now that I’ve had ships painted and alt arts ordered, my pilots aren’t changing, no matter what!
I want to thank Steve for arranging and hosting the day. Steve, you’re a superstar! Thanks to the other guys as well for coming along and all the discussions and stories and general hanging out. I can’t wait to do it all over again 4000 miles away!
That’s it from me for today, I’ll be back next week. See you then!
The outro…
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