X-Wing: Down With the Pre-FAQ Blues
There’s more agony than ecstasy in waiting for a FAQ to drop. Commiserate with ChahDresh a bit.The waiting is the worst part.
You know there’s going to be a FAQ drop soon. I know there’s going to be a FAQ drop soon. My wife knows there’s going to be a FAQ drop soon and she knows about the game only vicariously and vaguely.
But every day we look to Fantasy Flight’s site and… no FAQ.
Argh.
How did we get here? Well, part of it is unresolved rules issues. The most compelling right now is the Minefield Mapper/ Extra Munitions dilemma. (The question is: Since Minefield Mapper says “any number”, do you get to ditch an Extra Munitions and the bomb card both, or is this a ‘once-per-opportunity’ case? I can see both arguments.) Tournament organizers have been left to their own devices for too long on this one.
And part of it is unresolved balance issues. A new wave drops, and what happens? Scum’s top two lists are Dengar+[x] and triple Jumpmasters with Mindlink. This is my shocked face. If anything, the increased power of bombs has helped Jumpmasters: the most prevalent bomb lists are two-ship low-agi lists (vulnerable to Jumpmaster alpha strikes); the arc-dodging aces with Autothrusters that feast on Jumpmasters get crowded out of the meta when bombs are ascendant; and Jumpmasters themselves, with their 9 HP, just aren’t much perturbed by bombs.
There are other things that could be tweaked from a balance perspective, to be sure, and the point of this article isn’t to rehash the… ahem… aggressive pricing of the Jumpmaster. We already did that. Rather, knowing the state of the game, and seeing FFG’s increasing assertiveness in pruning the tournament scene, means that an FAQ is coming. Which we knew.
But every day we look to Fantasy Flight’s site and… no FAQ.
It puts the community into a state of suspended animation, not unlike being frozen in carbonite. Store championships have wrapped up, it’s high time to start practicing for Regionals… except that the meta will be overturned like so many apple carts once the FAQ hits, and anyway they haven’t even announced the Regionals schedule yet. We could analyze the meta, as some have done in splendid detail and breadth… but that helps us only so much when, again, we expect the top performers to get hit with the nerf bat.
So what do we do in the meantime? Well, we can speculate on what form the balance changes will take (maybe you’ll have to roll for Sabine’s effect?!?). We can lust over the *next* wave we’ve only seen dimly thus far. (Does TIE Interceptor 2.0 really need *six* HP? In a bomb meta, maybe so…) We can celebrate the old EU, parts of which are coming into the game and other parts of which should. We can salivate over the pics of the new A-Wing from this year’s Star Wars movie.
And we’re doing all of those things.
Because that’s how we keep from endlessly reloading Fantasy Flight’s homepage. Because we know… we know in advance.
We know that every day we look to Fantasy Flight’s site and… no FAQ.
~The waiting is the worst part. What questions do you think most need answering?
