Thank you to everyone who’s been playtesting and giving us feedback on the new cards for Season 10 which came out earlier this month. It’s time for us to announce the first of two updates to the cards based on the feedback and data we’ve seen so far.
We have updates for 7 cards, which should be reflected soon in an update to both Tabletop Admiral and a Vassal module update.
Edit: The updated Vassal module with 10.1 changes can now be downloaded here, and soon from the Imperial Assaul Vassal wiki page. https://1drv.ms/u/s!AlCd5BRrzxGCiP4nSiuzI95av-u0Sg?e=ioscXW
We also have an update to a card from Season 9, which is Bodhi Rook.
Bodhi Rook
Air Support now only works with non-Focused figures.
Bodhi was intended help out lists that more heavily focused on power tokens over Focus tokens, such as Rogue One, by giving each power token an accuracy boost to match the increase in accuracy provided by Focus that power tokens lacked. However, as is often the case when trying to provide an alternative to whatever is the strongest current option in the game, it was realized by players as the season went on that the best way to use Bodhi was to combine power tokens with Focus to create attacks that were both very powerful and also had an extremely large range bonus to deal large amounts of damage at extremely long ranges. We’ve seen this strategy primarily used with figures like Han Solo, Migs Mayfeld and Drokkatta with powerful attacks whose abilities allow them to also manipulate their Line of Sight to take otherwise difficult shots from extremely long range, along with Ko-Tun to provide not only the power token but a reroll and un-dodgeability as well. But the introduction of Paz, a figure with a powerful but low accuracy dice pool, has further highlighted the problem created by this combination of Bodhi and Focus together in the same attack that provides at minimum a +3 accuracy boost and a combination of +3 damage and surge icons.
That’s why we have realized that it’s important for us to separate Bodhi’s accuracy boost from the Focus mechanic to reduce the power of these single attacks that are boosted by multiple sources at extremely long range. While Ko-Tun + Focus + Wild Attack still remains an extremely potent combo play, it can at least no longer have its accuracy boosted by Bodhi. Bodhi lists will now be more incentivized to separate their Focus from their power tokens when boosting figures in order to benefit from Bodhi’s Air Support.
Moff Gideon
Health lowered to 10, You Have Something I Want decreased to range 4 and 2 damage.
Moff Gideon is serving his villainous role as a disruptive presence to an opponent’s potential strategy. While I Know Everything can feel somewhat violating to the player on the receiving end, it still gives the opponent the final say on what card gets removed and which card stays. Players have noted a powerful synergy between the narrowly targeted card removal of I Know Everything and the higher quantity but more random deck destruction of Thrawn’s Strategize ability and Foresee Command card. However, the bulk of the cards discarded by this duo was certainly from Thrawn compared to the single (powerful, but still single) card removed by the Moff.
In transitioning the Moff from a ranged attack to a melee attack, we had decided to increase all his stats to compensate for the loss of the superior attack type, but as a result of increased playtesting, we have realized that the ability of You Have Something I Want to so forcefully cause enemy figures to lose their offensive boost of Focus or a power token (or suffer 3 damage for no action cost to the Moff), meant that the Moff, and by extension his entire army, became much more durable as offensive tokens were stripped from the opponent. This had the Moff often surviving and even taking little damage from enemy attacks after they had sacrificed their Focus or power token to survive.
We are lowering the Moff’s Health to 10 down from 11, and we are also reducing the range of You Have Something I Want from 6 to 4, to be more in line with other actionless abilities that can deal damage without attacking, such as Drokkatta’s Demolish and Sabine’s Parting Gift. We’ve also decreased the damage from IKE down to 2 damage, again to make the ability feel less punishing and more possible for a figure to keep its Focus without feeling like it’s going to be taking a massive, game altering amount of damage. We aimed to limit the scope of the changes for this updated to be able to test them out first, though we are considering additional options if they are needed for this figure.
Paz Vizsla & Overheated
+2 Accuracy change to surge: +1 Accuracy. Heavy Repeater increased to +3 Accuracy. Templating update to Submit or Fight to prevent damage from strain instead of preventing strain (relevant for suffering strain as a cost).
Replaced with {Special Action} cost for 2 attacks, also applies -1 damage to both attacks.
Paz was intended to be a close-range beater that had some flexibility to attack at medium range if he took a penalty to his damage output by not choosing the +1 damage for Repeater, however with the combination of Focus, Bodhi Rook and the reroll from Ko-Tun in lists using Saska to bring Paz into Rebels (or even lists that used Temporary Alliance to bring Ko-Tun and Bodhi into Scum), Paz was hitting range 6-7 attacks at his full damage output without a problem. We also noticed how little Paz was affected by attacking into white dice when he could ignore Dodges with Ko-Tun’s Dead Precise, due to how little his attacks are impacted by losing surges from evades. This made the already strong combo of Wild Attack and Ko-Tun particularly devastating when used by Paz, as over half of the symbols on the white dice being rolled could be completely ignored.
In addition to the changes made to Bodhi in the above section, Paz’s damage output should now scale much more closely to the range at which he’s attacking. By decreasing and transferring Paz’s innate Accuracy boost over to Heavy Repeater, he will be forced to forgo the extra damage from the ability more often when he’s attacking past range 3. The surge for +1 accuracy ability will give him some chance at being able to use the +1 damage or Blast 2 on Repeater at ranges 1-3 instead of always needing to choose the Accuracy. It also has the effect of creating more chances that an evade or two will affect Paz’s damage output by forcing him to use the +3 Accuracy on Heavy Repeater because he’s not able to spend a surge on +1 Accuracy. We also fixed a templating issue with Submit or Fight that was technically preventing it from being used to prevent strain that needed to be suffered as a cost to use an ability, so that now the ability prevents damage resulting from strain rather than preventing the strain itself.
While the original added costs of playing his command card seemed sufficiently gratuitous at first, it became clear that 4 strain and losing the ability to attack at range was a welcome cost to be able to perform such a powerful extra attack. The absence of any action requirement also meant that rather than needing to be used as a plodding double-attack like we had imagined, Paz could rocked up the battlefield 8 spaces over any terrain and unleash a devastating attack on any target on demand with this card when he wasn’t using 2 attacks in an activation to completely obliterate something.
Now that it requires a special action to perform 2 attacks, Paz must dedicate one of his actions to performing an attack to use the card. The 4 strain also has to be suffered before using the attacks in cases where that’s relevant, and the attacks themselves have a -1 damage penalty to both attacks, which we hope will help with tempering the overall damage output. We went back and forth with a lot of options for how to design a card that permanently changes a figure’s attack profile once played, including options that didn’t involve granting an extra attack, and we will continue to take feedback and monitor gameplay to see how the new Overheated is performing.
Dengar
+1 damage changed to +1 surge. Need for Pain removed and replaced with Green die added to dice pool. Punishment replaced with Spread the Pain ability.
Dengar is now a powerful source of generating Harmful conditions against the opponent’s army with his attack, spreading a variety of conditions among harmful figures in a way that has not really been done before in Imperial Assault outside of various flamethrower abilities. However, without a hard ceiling on how many conditions he could deal out with each attack, players were reporting that he was literally flooding his opponent’s figures with more Harmful conditions than they could handle, even with the opponent being able to choose which conditions were gained, that didn’t matter much if multiple figures were being forced to suffer all of the conditions on each attack. This was exacerbated by his command card, which not only gave him an extra attack with which to trigger Punishment, but supercharged the amount of tokens suffered with the +2 surge.
While we liked that Dengar is able to spread conditions outside of just the figure he’s dealing damage to with his attack, we’ve gone back and looked at the original design for Dengar from FFG as inspiration for an overhaul, especially since it seems that players really want his Command card and the +2 surges it gives to remain relevant to the figure and synergize with his abilities.
First, we’re removing the auto-focus ability. It was a decision made many years ago while IACP was still young as a way to curb the power of Hunters, which were dominant in the game at the time. It wasn’t part of his original design, and it needlessly takes up much needed space in his text box. The extra green die will now just be in his attack pool, meaning he can now be Focused to attack with 4 dice like a normal 7 point figure. This removes the need for the innate +1 damage and +2 Accuracy, which is being replaced with a +1 surge, similar to his original Contempt ability, which will help facilitate the final change. We also removed the Blast ability, another change added by IACP in Season 3 that wasn’t part of his original design, and is something that ultimately distracts from what we want the core of his new design to be, and can also create situations where it feels like Dengar is generating too much value in terms of damage and condition token output.
Finally, we’ve replaced Punishment with Spread the Pain. Again going back to the original FFG design for inspiration, we went back to it being a surge ability you can use multiple times per attack to apply a harmful condition of your choice instead of the opponent’s choice, but for each subsequent use of the ability, you have to choose a different harmful condition, and it can still spread the conditions to figures near the target. This was a way for us to limit how many total conditions can be spread around per attack while still maintaining the usefulness of the bonus surges generated by Payback.
Tauntaun Rider
Range restriction removed from Useful Hide
The Tauntaun Riders were doing fine in testing, but we noticed in playtest games that the ability that truly makes them stand out from similar creatures like Dewback Riders, their useful hide, was proving to not be triggering very often due to the range 3 restriction and their need to get in close to the opponent’s figures to use their more active abilities like Headbutt, which often put them a good number of spaces away from other friendly figures. Thus we’ve decided to remove the range restriction from the Useful Hide ability, since it is effectively restricted to once per mission per Tauntaun Rider in your list.
Take Position
Changed to Non-Massive figures only
Take Position has been getting a lot of testing with already durable figures like Boba Fett with Extra Armor, but we realized that after what we had gone through with the Rancors and their double black defense dice combined with Survival Instincts, we didn’t really want to knowingly create another situation like that with AT-STs, which can also combine this card with Fuel Upgrade. As a result, we added Non-massive to the trait bar to prevent double-black dice vehicles like the AT-ST and General Weiss from being able to stack this effect on top of their double black defense.
Capitalize
Cost decreased to 1 point. New effect to reroll any player’s die while attacking. Secondary effect to re-draw the card when a hostile figure with a harmful condition suffers an additional harmful condition.
What was originally going to be a discard effect centered around harmful conditions ended up becoming a Comms Disruption Variant late in the internal testing cycle, but what was revealed during the public playtest period was how much list-building overlap there was between hamrful conditions and spies through Scout Troopers, which made it easy to run two Comms Disruption cards in one list, which felt particularly oppressive in combination with effects that also discarded cards from the opponent’s deck, both of which were effects that got around the safeguard of Smuggling Compartment. So we realized we needed to go with a different effect and a different way to reward dealing out lots of harmful conditions.
We ended up deciding that being able to re-draw the card whenever you stacked more than one harmful condition on a hostile figure was a great way to reward those strategies while also allowing us to create a card with an evergreen effect that any list could use but only harmful condition lists could re-draw consistently. Being able to tamper with the opponent’s defense die and disrupt high rolls on the opponent’s defense dice was something that had previously only been available to certain traits in the game, but was something that we thought every list would be interested in having access to. While we acknowledge that the Dodge on the white die plays in important roll in what makes Imperial Assault such a fun and exciting game every time you play, we also know that it’s something that many players deeply dislike and we like giving players more options to deal with the things they don’t like, rather than taking those things out of the game.
That’s it for this first batch of changes to Season 10. The next and final update will be releasing on August 19th, after which we’ll be holding the community vote to finalize all these changes.