5d agoedited 2d ago
One of the worst feelings in X-Wing is when a Range 0 attack randomly deals a ton of damage, or even a crit, into your defending ship. And even being the attacker in such a situation feels bad, because it never feels earned due to the attack being purely reliant on an unmodified roll. Those times that Range 0 attacks result in devastating damage feel unfair to both sides, and nobody seems to have fun when it happens. A portion of this feeling likely stems from many players being familiar with older rules when Range 0 attacks didn't exist, but even newer players who never played in those older versions dislike when a Range 0 attack suddenly bursts a ton of damage from a random lucky roll.
Obviously we cannot change too much about Range 0 attacks without widespread ramifications that would alter the entire ruleset, but I believe there is an elegant solution that would be simple to understand and implement, efficient to enact in games, and would balance out the outlier moments of highest variance without requiring other drastic changes.
My suggestion is to add this sentence to the Rules Reference section regarding range 0 primary attacks:
- "If a primary attack at attack range 0 hits, the defender suffers 1 [HIT] damage. Then cancel all [HIT]/[CRIT] results."
This is the same wording that Mag-Pulse Warhead uses and is similar in functionality to Ion weapons, so it would be easy for players to understand and adapt into their games. This wouldn't impact the frequency of Range 0 attacks dealing damage, it would only reign in how much damage can be dealt at a time. It isn't terribly common for a Range 0 attack to deal more than 1 damage in most situations anyway, so this change would simply get rid of those outlier moments that are the most egregious and feel the worst to experience when playing.
Math Examples:
To put this into perspective with a bit of dice calculations, let's take a common example of a 3-attack ship shooting at range 0 into a 2-agility defender, and let's say the defender has a focus for defense. With the current rules, there would be a 60% chance the attack misses, 27% to deal 1 damage, 11% to deal 2 damage, and 2% chance to deal 3 damage, with roughly a 16% chance of at least 1 crit being dealt. Now with my suggested change, there would still be a 60% chance the attack misses, but now there is a 40% chance it deals 1 damage. This only reduces the expected damage output of this example attack from 0.55 average damage per shot down to 0.4 average damage per shot. It would simply condense down the outlier situations to be part of the odds of dealing just 1 damage.
Now, for full transparency of the implications this change would bring, it is only fair that I point out the primary flaw that I predict would come with it. High health, low agility ships would gain to benefit the most from this change, as by forcing bumps they would be able to mitigate potential damage coming into them even more than before, possibly making them survive even longer. Using some dice math again, let's say there is a 3-attack ship shooting at range 0 into a 0-agility defender. With the current rules, there would be a 12.5% chance the attack misses, 37.5% to deal 1 damage, 37.5% to deal 2 damage, and 12.5% to deal 3 damage, with roughly a 22% chance of at least 1 crit being dealt. Now with my suggested change, there would still be a 12.5% chance the attack misses, but now there is a 87.5% chance it deals 1 damage. This reduces the expected damage output of this example attack from 1.5 average damage per shot down to 0.875 average damage per shot. This is a noticeable reduction of damage output for this example situation, so there may need to be considerations for balance adjustments to ensure high health, low agility ships don't become outrageously tanky for their cost with this change. But overall, I am personally of the opinion that reducing the bad feelings every player experiences from high-variance range 0 attacks in every single game is worth the short-term issue of shaking up the balance of ships a bit.
TL;DR
It feels awful for both players when a range 0 attack suddenly deals a ton of damage/crits. To mitigate that high variance, I think that it should be changed so that if a range 0 attack hits then it only deals 1 damage, then cancels the results (like Mag-Pulse or Ion weapons). This would make all outlier situations just deal 1 damage at most, which doesn't change expected damage all that much except for if a 3-attack ship shoots range 0 into a low-agility ship. But I think rebalancing to account for some of those examples is worth it if it means all range 0 attacks feel less bad.