Tuesday, August 13, 2019

RitR weapon team - Weapons Battery Techs

Rebellion in the Rim gave us one new weapon team, the Weapons Battery Techs, and they've been added to the weapon teams article.

Speaking of weapon teams, I also updated the entry for Jyn Erso in the boarding teams article because RitR more than doubled the number of objectives she works on (those with objective tokens on ships and victory tokens).


Daft Punk got weird later on.
Weapons Battery Techs have a very simple effect: so long as you're attacking a ship, in your Resolve Attack Effects step you can change one die showing an accuracy icon to a side with a critical icon.

Generally, this effect isn't terribly impressive all on its own. Obviously it does nothing with the strongest critical face in the game, the hit+crit side on the black die, because black dice have no accuracy icons. Red accuracy results aren't terribly common on their own (only 1 in 8 faces) so it's unreliable as a method for increasing damage on red dice and red dice don't generally unlock impressive critical effects anyways (sorry, XX-9 Turbolasers). It's best with blue critical effects, but you need to build around it and it's not always going to produce the result you want. Plus you're competing with staple weapon teams like Gunnery Team and Ordnance Experts.

That said, if you're throwing enough blue dice, Weapons Battery Techs are a very reliable way of getting that blue crit. Basically:

Blue dice
Crit success chance
1
50%
2
75%
3
87.5%
4
93.8%
5
96.9%


Once you're at 3+ dice, they get pretty darn reliable. And even over 3 dice, your chances of being able to generate additional crits beyond the first (rendering evades incapable of stopping your blue crit) increases. Neat.

You can even guarantee blue crits if that's your thing. When combined with H9 Turbolasers, the Home One title, or Captain Jonus, you can flip any blue die that rolls an uncooperative hit icon to an accuracy icon and then flip it to a crit icon with Weapons Battery Techs. When you've got a ship that has a good arc for blue dice but only 1-2 blue dice out the other arcs, this kind of combo can make using a blue crit upgrade a lot more appealing than it would be otherwise.

2 comments:

  1. One of the things I'm thinking of is the MC80L - equipped with HIEs or even Overload Pulse. You could go with the SC version, and even fit two of them for 221 points.

    If you really want to get janky and live dangerously, use Sato, add QBTs to the OP MC80 for a side shot with three blues. Han, Tycho, Rogue, 1x A-Wing and 2x Y-Wings to trigger Sato. And that's 381 - maybe add the new Aux Shield Teams for some extra protection.

    I dunno just theory crafting but I am excited to try it out with the MC80L variants.

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    1. John has used an LMC80 configured like that (Mon Karen, HIEs, Weapons Battery Techs, H9s, QBTs) and it chews up shields very quickly if you can't stop that crit with a Damage Control Officer. I'm curious as to how often we'll see that configuration, but it's worth considering.

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