#LL4 2-Scene Gilgamesh feedback.

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knotty rover
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This was a 2 scene mission - the first to assault a fortified postion, the second to escort an NPC out while dealing with an Ultra Operator, Elite Hive and Elite Pyro.

I'm going to focus on the second scene as honestly, I don't remeber a lot about the first scene - it was a long game. This was being played in an open-table style campaign, hence the spread of LL's below

We had a LL2 Pegasus, a LL2 Barbarossa, LL3 Drake, a LL2 Tortuga and a LL4 Gilgamesh (me)

I should also note that this is my 3rd? time playing lancer total, so my rules knowledge is not exactly exhaustive.

I'm fairly certain on refelction i made a misplay with the Legion drones - It sounds like you cannot deploy Legion drones and have them act in the same turn. If that's the case, then i was doing it wrong (Deploying and activiting them, i missed the deploy text in the rules), so adjust feedback accordingly. (The placement of the bold text in the pdf actively pulled my eye away from the deployed claused looking back - maybe something that could be adjusted?)

My build was as follows:

[ LICENSES ]
  HA Gilgamesh 3, HORUS Hydra 1
[ CORE BONUSES ]
  Heatfall Coolant System
[ TALENTS ]
  Drone Commander 3, Centimane 3, Grease Monkey 1
[ STATS ]
  HULL:2 AGI:0 SYS:0 ENGI:4
  STRUCTURE:4 HP:16 ARMOR:1
  STRESS:4 HEATCAP:11 REPAIR:5
  TECH ATK:0 LIMITED:+3
  SPD:4 EVA:8 EDEF:8 SENSE:10 SAVE:13
[ WEAPONS ]
  MAIN MOUNT: SUPERHEAVY WEAPON BRACING
  FLEX MOUNT: Nexus (Light) / Nexus (Light)
  HEAVY MOUNT: Legion Nexus
[ SYSTEMS ]
  Utility Drone x5, PUPPETMASTER, Turret Drones x6, Personalizations```

However, quick first scene notes: I used 2x Legion charges, 2 Uitlity drones, and a turret drone during this scene. During this scene they mostly soaked an immense amount of damage, as initially they were the only targets. They were incredibly effective at this, with the Legion drones especially enduring a vey large amount of punishment.
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At the end of the scene, both utitliy drones had died, and the legions were dinged up but holding on, with one down to 1 hp.

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Scene 2 was the escort.

This was a lot of fun, as the Giglamesh felt great to move-and-shoot with. It did, however, take a lot of active time to manage everything - by the end of this scene i had 4 legion drones on the field and a turret drone. The sheer amount of action economy this game me flet incredibly powerful, as i was able to do things like have one team suppress, anotehr team assault postion to get the prone, the remaining two teams light up a target (who may well be prone now), trigger my turret drone, and then let me super heavy.

At one point this lead to me simply brute forcing past the operator's invisibility and structuring him twice in a single round at one point (Albiet, off a crit, but still)

Being able to overcharge constantly thanks to my build and use this to deploy more legion drones a turn felt very powerful, though see first post for the misplay issue. Still, it was strong.

The gilgamesh itself felt pretty tanky, with me only loosing a single structure and never stressing (Though i ended at 11/11 heatcap). The free heal from the passive made it very easy to spend repair cap on refilling my drones, and recover quickly when i did get structured.

I never ended up poppiong my core, as i was saving it for a situation-gone-bad and it just...never happened. Given how strong i felt in general, this did not bother me.

Not sure what else to add, but i'm happy to try and answer any other questions. Hope this is useful!

knotty rover
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...Clarrrifying with El, i apperntly did not misplay - Legion drones can be deployed and act the same turn!

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Oh, also, inever ended up using my Loadout die. I had it charged very fast, but... it never came up to use, there was never a roll i was like "Yep, let's re-roll" (Notably, i didnt see the point in risking turning a hit into a miss for a chance at critting)

remote siren
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This is all very helpful, thanks.

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I'm building a picture of the legion nexus based on the play test feedback

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Not just from this but from others, and I have some good ideas of where to focus

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Re: the reroll, that's fine, I don't view it as a cornerstone of the playstyle

knotty rover
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Yeah, it didnt bother me, jsut trying to give as many data points as possible

remote siren
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Yep, good deal

knotty rover
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From a feel pov, i felt very powerful and capable, but also a bit show-stealing - my turns were by far the longest, and they were often some of the showiest turns, simply because of my Legion drones going all Judgement day on the oppostion

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Especially when i was able to do stunts like "Oh, i'm adjacent to this pyro, but i've got net 1 accuracy anyway so uh, get fucked" and superheavy him off the board

remote siren
# knotty rover From a feel pov, i felt very powerful and capable, but also a bit show-stealing ...

So the feedback I've gotten on the legion nexus has been some of the "cleanest" in the sense that it's all been very consistent, and as I said I think I have a picture of what the issue is. It's actually a combination of things, to wit:
1). shooting with multiple deployed drones is very powerful (may seem obvious but I wanted to get a picture of how powerful)
2). but I think more than that, the legion drones being used to shoot guys is kind of comprehensively overshadowing every other part of the weapon in a way that makes it lopsided

knotty rover
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It certainly felt cooler when i was using them for supressing fire and hut-hut-hut hurl someone over

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but theturns where i was able to go "4 legion drones all shoot, then i fire my super heavy* were simply absurd.

remote siren
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all of which is to say that the design I'm looking at right now is going to be attempting to address both of these by, and I'm sure this will be disappointing to some, removing the ability for the nexus to deploy independent shooters while tying the drones a bit more closely to the nexus weapon itself

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Whether this addresses overall action econ/complexity concerns is another matter, but at this point I feel pretty confident that this is the angle I'm going to be approaching because this feedback is pretty similar to that I've gotten elsewhere and the picture it's forming is probably the clearest of anything in the book

knotty rover
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(please note the asthetic vibes of a bunch of sublaterns rushing a mech and then tipping it over are great and i loved that)

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Oh, one thing that came up: It wasnt clear how to handle them getting knocked prone. We ended up just going with "They use their movement to get up, then can contiune on with other movement as normal if they have any otehr movement"

remote siren
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That's a good point and I'll make a note of that

knotty rover
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This mainly happened after a pyro blasted off in the middle of them.

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Any otehr things you'd like me to think about/feedback about offhand?

remote siren
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Other points that have been raised which are similar to those found elsewhere include the action economy issue which I'll be similarly addressing

upbeat salmon
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this mostly lines up with how my own playtest gilgamesh felt, from my understanding

though he was ll2 so no legion nexus yet

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frame is Great

remote siren
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Yeah the Gilgamesh feedback is good to have as well

knotty rover
# upbeat salmon frame is Great

Seconding this, it just felt like a very solid base to build on. I've already got a bunch of other comp-con builds i'd like to test from a Tortgua Shotgun one, a Pegsasus hybrid, there's a bunch of things i'd like to try.

remote siren
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What I'm going to be watching for going forward is, basically, if it feels too resilient

knotty rover
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So full points there, it's a frame that tickles the imagination in a very fun way

remote siren
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idk how easy it'll be to tell from this game because I have a feeling the legion nexus may have distorted things a bit

knotty rover
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Also Drake and Tortuga were doing a lot to keep me up.

remote siren
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"good, general purpose mech" is absolutely the goal so I'm glad I seem to be landing there

knotty rover
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(Just by being massive cover, etc)

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Oh, another thing interms of the action economy being silly was having a turn where i started off running mydrones around the Pyro's shield, then using them to kill the Hive, whcih meant i could then use my action economy elsewhere instead of needing to bother to puppetsystem to move the Razorswarms outta the way

remote siren
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yep

knotty rover
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Very much "That action eceonomy is real good" again as feedback

remote siren
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like I said, I think the picture is becoming very clear what the nexus is facilitating so that's where I'll be focusing on

knotty rover
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Nice! Well i'm happy to have helped 🙂

remote siren
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re: the bold text thing, this is probably something that will be improved upon when things go into actual real layout instead of my shitty "I'm lazy and also dumb" text file layout

knotty rover
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Cool.

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Utility drones didnt feel like they did a lot but i think that's just "this was not the right build for them". And like also they soaked fire, it's kinda hard to argue with that, that alone was very useful.

remote siren
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I'm kind of surprised that your drones got shot as much as they did, my experience is that drones almost never take fire unless it's from AoE stuff as the GM usually wants to shoot other things

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but given the context of the combat being one where legion drones in particular were a menace, again, I'm assuming that was distorting things

knotty rover
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The GM was very new relatively, too

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and in the first combat, they were basically all that was there too shoot.

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In the second combat they got ignored/dinged by aoe.

remote siren
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Ah okay

knotty rover
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It def felt like it put the GM in a poor postion - either focus fire the drones (players rampage), ignore the drones (Drones rampage). Fun for me as the player to force that sorta thing, but i dont know it was great for the gm. I'll throw them a DM and a link to this thread and see if they've got anythign to add

remote siren
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Sure, if they feel like it I'll be happy to hear their take as well

knotty rover
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Oh, this is a feel thing, buteven thiough i'd read the stuff before, when i went to heal up after getting strucuted, it was a bit of a "huh." at getting to do that for free and not costing mycore power.

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Not huge, just jumped as "oh, that felt odd"

upbeat salmon
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you get that only if you haven't spent the passive; it's basically a sandbagging-preventing measure

if you use it in combat, you get more out of it, but you don't need to delay a fight just to get value out of it

knotty rover
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No, i meant in combat it felt werid i didnt have to pop the core power to heal up

remote siren
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I'm aware it can mean both but I'm curious if you think the free action aspect is something worth noting

knotty rover
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Let's say both.

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the fact i could just heal and shed my impaired and this cost me nothing (Compared to normally needing to stabilize) other than not being able to do it again that scene was pretty big

remote siren
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I've been ruminating over whether having it be a quick action would make a difference in things

crystal musk
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makes it rather redundant with RSU, which Gilgamesh loves

knotty rover
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I'm hoping I will try a chance to try out a Legion/RSU soon. We'll see.

remote siren
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"built in RSU you don't have to pay for and can also repair weapons mid battle" is still pretty potent as a core passive, strictly speaking

knotty rover
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Also that.

remote siren
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it's a valid point and I probably won't be rushing into any changes just yet because my picture on the gilgamesh currently isn't as clear

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the nexus yes, got a good picture of where I'm taking that

crystal musk
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Sure, but RSU lets me reload heavy weapons and such.
For the record, from my own testing on the Gilgamesh, I've seen similar phenomena to this, but my own version of changes was just "cut core passive to one choice, core active no longer regains +1 limited" (and some minor stat adjustments)

knotty rover
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I need find more games so I can both test my grenadier Gilg and the Oops, built a Shotgun Gundam.

solid coyote
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I get that's a big pain point for feedback but surprised at the notion of cutting the independent subalterns, from our group's perspective that's the whole point of the weapon, both in terms of mechanics and fantasy.

remote siren
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What this is suggesting to me is that even if I tweak numbers (like lowering their damage or something) that I'm not actually going to be addressing the right point

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If the only reason people take a superheavy weapon is to never actually use the weapon, then that's an issue

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And this is the point of playtesting, how do ideas work in practice when they hit the table

knotty rover
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Just seconding what Kai said, after playing with the weapon i'm like 90% sure the optimal move with it is "make as many subalterns a turn as possible, then shoot with as many as possible a turn"

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even just having 4 out means that you get 4 1d6+2 attacks using your grit for free, and you can currently do that in 2 turns by overcahrging (and you're a HA frame, you have to be LL3 to get the weapon, just take the Heatfall core bonus)

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At ll6 this only gets worse since now you can slap on Intergrated ammo feeds, and you've got more points to have put in engineering (and hull, to give you repairs, to fuel grease monkey)

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The net upshot is a squishing of the tactical space.

slate ravine
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I wonder how balanced it would be if you could only attack with the drones if you attacked with the weapon that turn. Spending one charge puts you in par with levican damage (-reliable, -talents), which sounds like a lot now that I say it

remote siren
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but I think the way I'm going to approach it might be more that having more drones deployed enhances the weapon's firepower directly

covert widget
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so like the nexus being the targeter for the drones to fire on? instead of firing independently they just auto fire on what the nexus targets?

remote siren
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basically, I want the nexus itself to see more use as a thing than just a vehicle for the drones, right now that's the opposite

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this is a case where I actually don't even necessarily think the results I've been getting are VASTLY overpowered and I could tweak numbers and stuff and it would probably be better balanced, but that dynamic would remain in place, and I'm looking to address the dynamic specifically