I wish they hadn't moved away from what a lightsaber is. It should cut through a point of armor effortlessly. Breach should stay. No way a vibrosword cuts through more than a lightsaber.

I can understand getting rid of deflect as just a base quality because you should have Jedi-like reflexes to be able to do that. They need to add a mechanic that will allow for deflect, though. I can see a lightsaber talent tree. Deflecting and redirecting shots is an iconic use of a lightsaber if there ever was one. Saga had it perfect. It was a reflection of Jedi training and Force ability and training could make it even better. 

Maybe defensive 2 should not be a base quality. They are hard to use so someone could not just pick one up and automatically have 2 melee defense. They would be more of a harm to themselves actually. Maybe making a LS add to melee defense should be a ranked talent in some Force or Jedi tree.

But I really wish they had kept breach. Or give it some other quality to account that it can cut though a few inches of steel like butter.

As far as the Qui Gon action, cutting into the door took only a few seconds. That's what breach reflects.

LS should probably have breach 5 or so. Breach 1 pretty much negates any character-level soak anyway so you may as well make it but though the 5 points of armor that a blast door probably represents.

usgrandprix said:

No, Breach is the ability to penetrate starship-scale armour effortlessly. I think what you're looking for is the Pierce quality. I'm not saying that a few points of Pierce wouldn't be appropriate. Breach was totally overkill for what we ever see lightsabers actually do.

 I was just thinking a blast door is about 5 points of armor.

usgrandprix said:

I just think there's a difference between what you can do just swinging your saber around (like scoring a direct hit on Vader without carving him in two) and what it takes some effort to accomplish (cutting your way through a starship-scale bulkhead). The former is a combat action, the latter is a narrative-style action. We know things exist that can cut through "just about everything". Like fusion cutters and whatnot. Lightsabers should be able to do this as well, but I think there's a big difference between swinging at something in combat, and taking the effort to carve through it. At no point do we see a lightsaber cut through a starship hull like it wasn't there.

You know, the same way that you don't cut down a tree by hitting it with a chainsaw.

I get what you are saying. Maybe another more nuanced quality to reflect what it can cut through over tie is in order.

A couple of thoughts though. I think I read a round in this game can be up to a minute. I read that as an "attack" action is an abstraction of several swings, shots, blows, parries. I might be off base there but there are time-consuming skills that can be preformed in an action. I think a round allows for more time than other games and its length varies.

I'm also thinking of a situation like a Jedi versus an AT-ST. I'm guessing an AT-ST leg has about 3-4 armor. I think a LS should be able to have a chance to cut through that leg and have a chance at a crit to bring it down. That's about the upper end I'm comfortable with.

Lightsabers need the Pierce quality, full stop. 2 at a minimum, 3 is nice, 4 maybe a little much. I'm fine with dropping Breach and having Deflection be a Jedi Talent. But even in untrained hands, sabers should cut through personal armor like butter.

Slaunyeh said:

Actually, no. There's no difference between armor types, except for thickness.

It's like your own example with the chainsaw…..a chainsaw will cut through the tree given enough time or, for an even better example, it'd be like cutting through a few feet of ice cream with a fusion cutter.  The blade of the Lightsaber is a concentration and focused beam of "Force fused energy", it has no equal (unless it's another Force fused item, like another Lightsaber and the Sith blades from the Expanded Universe).

Besides, at no point do we see anybody use the bathroom, but we assume they do.  The Lightsaber (and the bathroom) is implied….I mean, at no time do we ever see something that a Lightsaber CAN'T cut through.

Also, if people keep in mind "Starship Scale" and how 1 point of damage equals 10 points on people then simply reverse that and you see that the Lightsaber would be doing 1 point of damage to Starships.  Besides, Lightsabers had a Breach of 1, which ate through 1 point of ship armor (10 soak)……that is EXACTLY perfect for the Lightsaber.  With a Breach 1, this allows it to easily tear through speeder bikes but somehow I doubt that you'd be tearing a hole through a Star Destroyer's hull anytime soon.

So again, I'm keeping things just the way they were ORIGINALLY.  Hopefully FFG will realize the point I've made and put the Lightsaber back to the way it was and should be…..Breach, all the way!

I personally think the Breach quality should have been left in, as it did a great job of reflecting a lightsaber's long-standing ability to carve through most things like a hot knife thru butter; it's a pretty short list of the things a lightsaber can't cut through (cortosis weave and phrik alloy being the two main ones).  Maybe drop the base damage to 8, so it's much less likely to result in an insta-drop against Henchman or Nemesis opponents.  Don't have the book handy, but unless the Aratech Z-74 speeder bike has 0 Armor, then Luke wouldn't have been able to dispatch that speeder bike on Endor (GM Lucas played it up to have the trooper spiral out of control until he explosively crashed into a tree, but he's been known to do that).

Deflection being removed and Defensive being nerfed to melee-only make sense, as the former is a trademark "Jedi ability" and the the latter change also addresses the oddity of vibro-blades being able to protect you from blaster fire.

While I agree with you on your speeder bike example, I think their reasoning is due to the fact there aren't opposed skill rolls in lightsaber combat.  One hit with Breach 1 will remove almost all of someone's wounds. 

Zar said:

Which would be perfectly in-tune with the setting and what we now about lightsabers.  Pretty much, you get hit with one of these things, it's game over (man!)

It also reflects why they are so outrageously expensive and difficult to acquire one; you could literally buy your own ship for the black market cost of a lightsaber.

Also, most Henchman and Nemesis level threats as well as PCs have a Wound Threshold greater than 10, so barring an extraordinary degree of success (requiring a skill that either doesn't exist or is generally going to be expensive if it does), a single hit isn't going to drop anything but a minion, who should be dropped with ease anyway.  Most of the combat-capable NPCs have at least a 13 for a Wound Threshold, so you'd need to roll at least 4 successes (1 to hit, 3 extra for increased damage) to be able to take them down in one strike.

Breach and Pierce feel good to see in a lightsaber's stat block.  But there has to be some simplification of the "and" addiction people have with lightsabers.  Breach, and sunder, and deflection, and defensive, and vicious, and low crit rating, and high damage.  It's easy to narrow our gaze on "but why take off breach!?"  But there is a lot of mechanical "and" left on the lightsaber that makes it rock.

I'm not saying that the new version of the lightsaber is perfect or anything.  I think Sam n the gang are using the community here to playtest and react to their choices so they get it as rightish as they can (no one is going to be entirely happy accross the board as the last 15 pages of this thread can attest to).  So first off we had the "and" lightsaber.  And now we have the "but" lightsaber.  The lightsaber needs a couple buts imo.  Which ones?  That's what the playtest is for.

The lightsaber as it stands now can chop through darn near anything by way of sundering, and leaving vicious critical hits through its bonkers low crit rating.  But that doesn't "pop" in the weapon description since people have to actually read through how criticals work, what vicious does, sundering, advantage, etc.  I don't mean to say that people haven't read the rules so please don't take offense at that.  But from the standpoint of just browsing through the equipment chapter people are immediately drawn to the "specials" column and they see that vibro weapons have pierce and more exciting sounding "bells and whistles" than a lightsaber.  So even though the design isn't flawed from a dice and numbers standpoint, the lightsaber is being seen as flawed from a window-shopping standpoint.  That matters.  Even though players might never get to use a lightsaber in Edge of the Empire, they want to walk by the window display at christmas time and drool over the shiny lightsaber.

I like that deflection was scratched off for the same reasons other people like that it was removed.  Same goes for the change to defensive affecting melee only so that vibro…yeah no sense retreading it.

Breach just has that "it" factor when you read it.  That counts for more than mechanics because…people like things that sound cool.  If the mechanics for breaching vehicle scale levels of armor was spread over several other loosely related mechanics…it would get the "BORED" treatment and people would be less than happy.  But, it's one easy weapon quality entry that immediately fills hopeful little imaginations with dreams of slicing through AT-AT grating, blast doors and speeder bikes.  Breach also lets players look at Pierce when they compare a lightsaber to vibro weapons and go "ha, enjoy your piddly Pierce 2 nerds…I'm cutting through the adventure to the next adventure via short-cut  *sticks out tongue*"  That's important as well.  If a player manages to get their hands on a lightsaber they should feel like they got to the top of the mountain and all others are number 2 or lower.  The thing costs as much as a freighter or 10.  But Breach only affects soak, which is going to come up a lot in combat and other discussions about "can I cut through that", but there are other aspects of the light-saber that need to be maintained.

Sunder is important because someone needs to chop the end of Boba Fett's gun off in a fight.  It's one of my current favorite specials that the lightsaber has.

Vicious 2 might look less impressive than Vicious 3 at first glance but comparing Crit ratings…the lightsaber friggin owns the universe at 1.  The Crit rating + Vicious 2 means that lightsabers are going to have a good shot at maiming nemeses, murdering henchmen, and outright dusting a couple minions.  That fits.

So we get to high base damage.  The lightsaber doesn't benefit from a wielder being stronger since…it's a femto scale blade of energy.  So naturally you can't just have it do 1 or 2 damage.  Sure there might be future plans for +this and +more in later rulebooks, but you can't let the lightsaber hit the streets like a wet noodle.  BUT…a lot of what the lightsaber is good at is handled in the special abilities.  You can chop up gear with sunder and that is separate from damage, you can do horrendous critical hits and that is separate from damage, you can bypass the physical soak of darn near any personal scale noun in the galaxy and that is also separate from damage dealt.

To me…the best candidate for a "but" in the lightsaber…take the damage down and leave the specials like Breach in…if for no other reason than the impression players and other readers will get.  So if the lightsaber is going to be fiddled with from how it was originally presented I'd like to see something like:

Damage: 6 

Crit Rating: 1

Specials: Breach, Defensive 2, Sunder, Vicious 2

You will be dealing six wounds to almost anyone in the galaxy per hit  AND chopping off their hands with vicious crits, and destroying their gear and carving up their air speeder taxi…potentially in a single round.  Plus it gives us a lot of room to boost lightsaber damage with <future game stuff> whilst maintaining the "Danger: Lightsaber.  Aim away from face"  warning label.

They are getting rid of Defensive 2 and adding back Breach 1. Sounds like you'll have to take talents to make sabers defensive and I'm fine with that. The weapon requires superior training/experience.

usgrandprix said:

The only problem I have with Lightsabers losing Defensive is that Vibro-Swords get to keep that same quality.

As I suggested in the Week 3 update thread, how about keeping Defensive and Deflection, but adding a requirement to be able to use those talents, such as either having at least one rank in the Lightsaber skill and/or a Force Rating of 1 or better.

Yeah I agree that (only) with training and strength in the Force sabers should add to defense and deflect. I'm not so particular on how they accomplish it. Skill level or talents are fine either way. Force rating should count for qualities like deflect too. 

One thing I liked about Saga is you knew when you blocked an attack and you could even dig for the rules on saber locks. With defense you don't know if it missed or you blocked. But some kind of opposed block roll would be cumbersome I think.