Talk:Havoc/@comment-31354887-20170319054548/@comment-454133-20170420221139

Swarm Leader is primary weapon only, so no stacking onto APTs. A phantom or upsilon could start with 5 dice at range 1 though, and easily jump to 7 with the help of swarm leader and a couple feeder TIEs (who also act as blockers, to make the target even more vulnerable). But that's getting off-topic.

I'd say the "Empire is hurting because so many ships are two dice!" argument is very misleading. Not only does it not pan out in real play (rebels haven't been dominating the meta, after all), but there's lots of 3+ dice empire ships that rebels fear because they work so well. TIE Advanced (with title) and TIE Defenders are seen often, as are TIE Strikers. For a support ship, the Upsilon is mean. As RedShield pointed out, the bomber and punisher are munitions platforms, so their primary weapon isn't their core focus (otherwise the HWK would win the tragedy contest for rebels).

I see TIE Bombers often, and IMO Targeting Synchronizer combos have breathed new life into them (as will the coming rockets). Recently I got to have my rear handed to me by a very synergistic fleet with two TIE Bombers with Proton Torpedoes and Guidance Chips, escorted by Major Stridan with TS and Systems Officer. That player who was thinking of taking that fleet to Worlds, and I believe it. It hit like a truck and was hard to disassemble effectively before it crippled my fleet. So who cares if it's only 2 attack dice on its primary? That's not why you field bombers.

If you want to talk about munitions ships that don't see much use, A-Wings are way harder to justify fielding that TIE Bombers. But I don't think it's useful to get into a spitting contest over who's suffering more... it doesn't lead us anywhere useful.

I think it's silly to list a few ships that have high or low red dice (out of the entire faction) and claim that the faction is "hurting" because of them. Even at the fleet level, an effective fleet is so much more than that; blocking, arc dodging, and outmaneuvering matter. And I'm not seeing Empire suffer at the table... if anything, Empire and Scum are still preferred overall in tournaments. Maybe that meta is starting to shift and I'm not sensing it in my area yet, but it's such an exaggeration to claim the Empire is weak and hurting for power, particularly because a few TIE variants have only 2 dice. That's just... wildly missing the point of those ships.