Talk:Director Krennic/@comment-87.196.72.173-20180710075500/@comment-454133-20180710201512

While removing the shield happens during the attack, this effect is not itself an attack. You can lose shields (Optimized Prototype), take damage (bombs), suffer crits (Selflessness), be assigned damage cards (Black Market Slicer Tools), etc without ever being hit by an attack. All these effects can damage or otherwise affect your ship without triggering "on hit" effects, or even "on miss" effects, because they have nothing to do with hitting or missing with an attack.

You are only ever counted as hit by an attack if you are targeted by an attack, the attacker rolls or modifies dice to get one or more hits/crits on their attack dice, and after the Cancel Results step, there are hits/crits remaining. That's what removes Stealth Device, for example. The only exception to this rule is Lieutenant Blount, who explicitly says you're hit by the attack no matter what's rolled.

Consider this: You could roll miss-miss-miss-hit with Whisper and choose to cancel the hit with Optimized Prototype to remove a shield. The attack now counts as a miss even if the target rolls all blanks. Let Whisper gain a target lock with FCS, and give a target lock to the ally ship holding Krennic. Now use Gunner to attack again, with a more heavily-modified attack, against a target that's now missing a shield token. Against the right targets it's really strong. ^_^

BTW Whisper will almost always be wiped off the table by higher-PS ships that hit hard, or that don't buckle in an attack or two. That's why you don't see Whisper builds much anymore -- they're a huge points investment in a very skill-heavy ship that snaps like a dry twig in the wrong matchup. It doesn't take a huge amount of skill to hit like a truck with RAC, and he easily out-survives Whisper (he's more afraid of swarms; ship-on-ship matchups are great for him). Same deal with Quickdraw. Harpoons are also a problem -- they're very good at wiping out single targets. The TIE Phantom is such a delicate frame that loading close to half your squad's points into it is just too risky.

Whisper works well in more casual games where the matchups aren't so intensely PS-focused, but at that point the casual players may be wondering why you're bringing something as powerful as Whisper to their friendly game. ;)  The cheap generics also work well as glass cannons (LWF + optional Intel Agent & FCS).  IMO I prefer the generics because they're fun in casual, not too powerful but not weak either.  Let's hope 2nd edition revitalizes the ship.