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Message: <blockquote data-quote="comrade raoul" data-source="post: 3583177" data-attributes="member: 554">(Most of this should only make sense for people already familiar with the book.)Shoots First is optimized for dealing lots of ranged damage, fast. She's used four of her five gunslinger talents to completely eliminate any penalties she takes for Rapid Shot and Double Attack, and to reduce her Triple Attack penalty to -4, so she's rather unique among Saga Edition characters for her ability to make multiple attacks at peak accuracy. (And enables her to make Triple Attack useful for anything other than carving through mooks--it's normally a terrible feat.) Her other talents are designed for making sure that each shot takes an opponent a step down the condition track, or (thanks to Dastardly Strike) two steps if the opponent's flat-footed. If Shoots First can get off a full attack against an opponent without his Reflex Defense, she can ensure that that opponent is disabled regardless of his hitpoints--or at least suffers very large penalties to almost everything.One way to further optimize Shoots First might be to trade a couple of scoundrel levels for scout levels, give up Keen Shot (which helps you avoid concealment--important, since Shoots First usually doesn't have time to aim), and pick up Improved Initiative (which would help her make sure that she lives up to her name) and Uncanny Dodge I (which would do a lot to protect her from opponents trying to pull the same stunt). But I think the way I presented her preserves more of her purity as a gunslinger.Note that a dedicated ranged combatant might instead take levels of bounty hunter as well as gunslinger, and focus on doing nasty things with aimed shots: ideally, such a character could knock a target prone and move it two to four steps down the condition track (depending on whether the target was denied its Dexterity bonus to Reflex Defense and whether the attack's damage beat its threshold). Shoots First's approach is probably best for raw damage, though.Dancing Lights, the Jedi, takes a different approach. He gives up on the idea of making multiple attacks entirely, and is instead all about moving around and making single, decisive blows. There are two reasons for this: first, I suspect it's a bad idea for high-level melee characters to focus on making full attack actions--in Saga Edition (and unlike D&D), they prevent you from making swift actions as well as move actions, which means that any round where you swing a lightsaber more than once is a round where you're not using the Force to do anything interesting. Second, because you can't move at all, it's easy for opponents (especially those, like Dancing Lights, with Running Attack) to prevent you from taking your attacks at all. Shoots First (and high-level sample Jedi, like Yoda) demonstrate that making effective full attacks requires a very large investment of character resources, and I think that such an investment is too large for an ability that can be negated so easily.So Dancing Lights turns out to be a much more complicated and versatile character than Shoots First. He's basically more Yoda than Yoda: his fighting style centers on highly effective hit-and-run attacks and critical hits (which give him an extra standard action, thanks to his scoundrel talent, and which he can often guarantee on his first attack of an encounter, thanks to his Jedi Master's serenity ability): he can use Acrobatic Strike, speed bonuses from surge, and impressive tumbling abilities, to make extremely accurate melee attacks (and if he doesn't need all that accuracy, he can transfer a lot of that to his Reflex Defense), potentially enhanced by Force powers. He can use his suite of Force powers to target his opponent's weakest Defense. Dancing Lights is basically capable of using a Force point every round, thanks to his Force Recovery ability, and can use those points to designate an opponent against whom he can reroll attack rolls, quicken his offensive powers, or move quickly back up the condition track. As a bit of general reflection--Ataru (the lightsaber form talent) is huge for Jedi--it lets them treat Strength as a dump stat, and relieve most of their MAD (which is normally terrible). Along with Skill Focus (Use the Force), it's an ability that I predict almost every Jedi taking. Expect a lot of characters with one or two levels of Jedi Master and one level of scoundrel--the synergy between the guaranteed critical hit you can get with Serenity and the extra standard action from Fortune's Favor is just too good to pass up.On the whole--I still think the system--as it stands now, before it's bloated by supplements--is a significant improvement from earlier iterations of d20. Because most characters have largely the same attack bonuses and defenses, and so few abilities improve skill bonuses (so that most skill specialists have broadly the same bonuses), balance becomes much more straightforward--you have a pretty good idea, in general, about how often a high-level attack or skill check is going to succeed, which is something you couldn't really say with D&D. I'm a little concerned about a few factors--I do think lightsaber damage is underwhelming, I'm a bit troubled by the fact that Shoots First doesn't provoke attacks of opportunities if she doesn't aim, and it's clear that certain abilities are way better than others (Dodge, for instance, is--apart from the fact that it's a prerequisite for a pair of so-so feats, straightforwardly worse than two other feats available)--but, again, it's hard to evaluate any of these prior to playtesting, and in general I'm impressed.</blockquote>

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