Talk:TIE Silencer Expansion Pack/@comment-32612507-20170910064032/@comment-454133-20170910160350

Fredx7, relax. It's not so bad, even if it seems terrible on paper right now.

You never know how powerful a ship is until you play it on the actual table. That's the difference between philosophy and reality: testing your prediction. Do Protectorate Starfighters, U-Wings, and TIE Aggressors dominate every game? Because they were the center of a lot of chatter about being clearly overpowered... before they were released. Then people got them on the table, playing with or against them, and they figured out the real limits on them.

That difference between theory and reality killed the U-Wing, which just doesn't see play these days despite its great stat line. There are unfortunately not enough great rebel crew members (of the right type) to turn it into a good support boat, and it's a bit too awkward to serve other roles.

TIE Aggressor had people all worked up because it was going to unleash TLTs swarms on every game again, and be an efficient monster that makes the Y-Wing obsolete. Except it didn't.

And people were terrified of the Protectorate Starfighter, and for a while after release we got a lot of people lamenting how overpowered it was because they didn't know how to beat it. But once you learn its tricks, you realize how fragile it is and how to counter it. At that point it stops being this overwhelming threat, and it's back to being an alarming but not overpowered ace.

(though the Protectorate Starfighter was a sharp kick in the nuts for Kihraxz fans; it was on curve, and by being so close in design and one pilot ability to the K-Fighter, it clearly showed how off curve the K-Fighter had always been.  That's only now being addressed with Guns for Hire)

Things that end up being overpowered also unfortunately take playtime to tease out, and the combined cleverness of the community to figure out. No one saw Parattanni coming (Attanni Mindlink was underused for a while before people realized it was absurd overpowered amazeisauce), and the TIE/x7's dominance took FFG by surprise (everyone was more worried about TIE/D at the time). Zuckuss was surprisingly abuseable. And we all should have seen the problems with the Jumpmaster, but it was way worse than anyone predicted. ;)

And oh gods, Fair Ship Rebels... FFG has some real work to do on that one. They didn't predict that a swarm of lightly equipped, relatively beefy rebel ships would be so cripplingly hard to take down (and unfun to fight).

So chill, Overpowered/Underpowered is not something we can know until we see the full picture and get these things on the table. My hope is we don't have any new meta threats or dogs, but that everything is nicely on curve. But you never know.