Hi Testers,

Here's this week's update, the eighth in our playtesting process. As you can see on the news post, we'll be slowing down on the frequency of weekly updates, to give you all more chances to test and evaluate all the changes that have been made.

Thanks again! 

Yeah, I'm cool with the updates slowing down.

Frankly, I've been very pleasantly surprised at the number of updates we've gotten so far.

Kinda interesting at the talent changes.  Good update on Linked, but was there also supposed to be a change to Autofire as well in this week's update?

First, I don't see how these changes require much time to play test.

Second, I'm glad you increased the price of activating the Link quality, and simultaneously baffled as to why you failed to make the same change to Auto-fire.

Finally, you really REALLY need to release new documents representing changes to the Talent and force trees so we can more easily make sense of what you've done.

Otherwise this seems like a pretty major 'nothing important' update.

-WJL

What Donovan said, seconded! Thanks for keeping these updates coming, guys. It's been great to see that our feedback has really made a difference, and thanks for being open to making so many changes.

You still haven't fixed the error regarding the Surveillance change to the Survivalist and not the Scout specialization.

Ratfink said:

Aye, this is kinda important for players wishing to play this type of character since they are missing one skill choice.  Would someone from FFG mind making a quick reply on this forum just to let us know what the replacment skill is?

Pretty pretty please!!

LethalDose said:

I second this, it`s one of the major recurring grips when skimming through the forums.

I have no problem with concussion missiles and photon torpedos being very effective in combat. Adding Slow Firing rule for them makes sense. However, I do find the prices for the individual missiles and torpedos ridicously low. The price of a single concussion missile is about one percent of a lightsaber. Anyone willing to trade a lightsaber for 100 concussion missiles?

Okay, got a chance to really read through the changes.

I'm not overly thrilled with what some classes had to sacrifice to get defensive talents, with the biggest offenders being Assassin loosing Deadly Accuracy (which is a near-perfect talent for them), when frankly they could have removed Stalker (which they get twice already) and the Outlaw Tech loosing Inventor and Point Blank to gain Side Step and Defensive Stance. I can appreciate wanting to add some defensive ability to these specializations, but I seriously think they chose the wrong talents to replace.

Other talent tree changes that have left me cold are Scholar loosing Researcher in their first Row (again, a talent is near perfect for them), when they easily could have dropped the 2nd Row Researcher instead, and Fringer pretty much loosing Let's Ride, when the original set-up was fine, as it gave the Fringer some decent piloting chops. I think for my games, it's safe to say that I'll be ignoring the changes made to these two particular specializations, especially Fringer.

Aside from those, the rest of the talent tree updates are fine, with Slicer at least not being quite as screwy, though I think a connecter between Rows 1 and 2 at a lower column would have been better; perhaps at Column 3 instead of Column 4?

I guess I'm okay with the reduction to the some of the starship weapons, as turbolasers aren't quite as vicious now.

Donovan Morningfire said:

I really feel that starship combat will flow nicely now, especially thanks to the fact that linked was nerfed. Now all I can hope for is an Autofire nerf to help personal combat be less broken.

Some interesting choices in this weeks update.  My gut reaction is that the concept of adding defensive talents is good, but the implementation seems a bit haphazard - like the wrong talents were replaced.  The assassin's deadly accuracy is a great example.

I appreciate the hard work the dev team has been putting in, but I feel like we missed some of the "major gripes" in this week's update, such as the aforementioned autofire, the dice mechanics, scaling, droids… The list is out there somewhere, and I hope that we can start addressing the community's collective big issues in the next update.

I'm also not at all thrilled about waiting two weeks for another update; this one really wasn't substantial enough to hold me over for that long…

Not trying to be a negative nancy, but just want to give honest feedback.

Yeah, a bit of a "nothing" update really, and disheartening to see none of the big issues have been addressed yet. Linked was a nice start, so I'll hold out hope that the dev team is just putting more effort into the big issues, hence moving to a 2 weekly cycle…

:)

I really feel that the career skills (and now talents) need to be re-thought a bit though… as DM points out, some of the changes are as baffling as the Doctor not getting Xenology…

As well as the missing Scout specialisation skill (which I always assumed was the Survivalist), there is still no mention of the additional type of specialisation (I forget what it was supposed to be called) for Force Sensitive Exile that Sam mentioned should have been in last weeks update…

gribble said:

This certainly is in this week's update.  Chapter VIII: The Force under Becoming force sensitive (Pg 176) on page 10 of the update.  Its not highlighted in red presumably because it was added last week.

-WJL

Exalted5 said:

LethalDose said:

Thanks. Missed it because it wasn't red and I assumed it's be under the specialisations section… silly me.

:)

Regarding Autofire and the lack of change in this week's update, Cyril brought up an interesting point over on the d20 Radio Forums.

What if the change to Linked (2 Advantage per extra hit) is a test bed to see if the same update would work for Autofire?  If so, the devs may simply want to see if that works, and if so will proceed to update Autofire with that change in the next update.

As for the spacing out of updates… it could very well be that from the devs' perspective, there may not be that much more that needs updating.  Also, maybe it's less "more time to test this week's updates," but "more time to test all the various updates in general." After all, it'll likely take more than a week to do more than just eyeball the cost changes to specializations and skills from the prior update.

*soap box time, so feel free to skip*
Dice math is a ship that has largely sailed, as the orders for the Beginner's Box dice sets have in all likelyhood been sent and production begun.  The most they can probably do is tweak it a bit, but again it could simply be that unlike a few of the more vocal posters here, FFG simply doesn't see it as an issue; again, paradigm shift away from what 40+ years of tabletop gaming has reinforced, with more of an emphasis on "group dynamics" than "solitary spotlight" when it comes to the results of one's roll. 

Frankly there are aspects of the game and updates that I'm not all that thrilled about (the low defautl starting credits, which almost requires a PC to take additional Obligation, the costs of some of the Upgrades for Force Powers and the revision of the Sense power tree in the Week 2 Update in regards to the Duration talent), but at the end of the day, it's FFG's call as to what needs to get fixed and what is working exactly as intended when the game was written.  If we don't like what they're doing, we as the consumers have the rather easy option to simply not buy the final product when it comes out, and instead pursue other venues for our Star Wars gaming pleasure, of which there are many.
*steps off the soap box*