Themistocles' General Squad Advice Thread

The leadership for CLS is actually pretty good. Even without C-3PO, there are quite a few debuffs and keep in mind that multiple debuffs each trigger the TM gain independently.

Raid Han – His first special stuns, but so does his shoot first attack. And, if I recall correctly, the removal of TM counts as a debuff. At least I believe it used to. So his basic hits twice and removes TM each time.

CLS – His basic applies two debuffs with each hit. Speed and defense down the first time and then TM removal and stun if the target already have defense and speed down. Then his first special removes TM and applies buff immunity.

Chewie – Applies tenacity down on his basic, but remember he assists allies with Guard, so that’s an extra basic attack each time Han and CLS (presumably) attack. Then his second special stuns

R2 – Stuns on his basic and the AOE burning with his second special.

Old Ben – Evasion down on his basic and then ability block, offense down, and TM removal on his AOE.​

On top of that, the leadership gives them all 50% counter chance so all those basic attacks come into play when anyone gets hit. 5% TM might not seem like much, but it does add up with all the debuffs flying around.

As far as zetas on a CLS team, Han is definitely one you want to do. You can skip Old Ben’s zetas. Going for SEE means you’re not going to be gearing him for some time so sinking zetas into him isn’t too helpful.

For Chewie:

Loyal Friend – It useful, but might not do much in most cases. It kind of depends on how easily you win battles. They could get you a couple banners back. The main problem I see is you probably aren’t getting Guard on CLS, which is a bit of a problem.

Raging Wookiee – You can easily skip. It’s not something that happens all that often, so unless you have extra zetas it’s not worth doing.​

R2’s Combat Analysis is pretty good, too. Even if you plan on putting him with Padme, it not going to hurt it. When they have protection up, they’re not going to get debuffed, so being able to cleanse it or not won’t matter as much. And if you do get debuffs you might not want to wait for Padme to go or if her ability isn’t ready.

If you’re doing only one zeta, then Han all the way. If you’re doing two, then I would probably do the CLS leadership. Loyal Friend and Combat Analysis are tied for your 3rd zeta. Since we’re talking about boosting a CLS team and you want to move R2 to Padme, then I guess Chewie would be more important for the 3rd zeta.

 

I am generally against trying to stock up on energy. You only hold 144 total, so if you just stop using it you’re going to forfeit everything you would have earned passively. The +45 energy daily bumps would add up, but you’d be giving up a lot of passive energy by waiting

Let’s do the math for regular energy. We get 1 energy every 6 minutes. There are 3 +45 energy bumps per day. It’s 2 weeks until the 24th (assuming the update doesn’t get pushed back). So we end up with:

144 + (45 * 3) * 14 = 2,034

So if you do everything right and do nothing but hoard energy, you’ll end up with 2,034 for the change. On the other hand, you’d be giving up that passive 1 energy per 6 minutes. There are 1,440 minutes in a day, so that’s 240 energy per day plus the +45 bumps you’d still get.

(240 * 14) + (45 * 3) * 14 = 5,250

Since the drop rates should remain the same, just the number of shards will change, you end up with more than double the energy by using it normally. That should give you more shards than hoarding the energy.

That being said, crystal refreshes wouldn’t be a good idea. That’s voluntary, so not spending them until later costs you nothing.

Assuming you're just looking at shard drop rates. Gear farming is not affected in any way. Not to mention you only have 5 attempts per node. You can refresh, but it costs crystals and odds are you couldn't spend everything you've saved up by hoarding in a day. So the longer it goes on, the worse and worse it gets compared to using the energy normally.

. . . And as I typed that I just realized you were talking about switching to gear instead of character farming, but I already did the math so I'm just going to leave it up.

I have about 480k AP. Sigh . . .

 

Yeah, I had just edited the other post when I realized what you said.

Switching to gear would work. The only thing you would really lose on is the node refreshes if that’s something you do. Other than that, gear is the better choice.

 

Piett should be the fastest, then Starck, then Veers. The idea being you use Imperial Ambition to give everyone offense up with Piett. This also boosts TM. Then Stark does Scan All Wavelengths and gives everyone crit chance and damage up to everyone. Then, Veers does his mass assist attack and you hit them just about hard as you can hit. Ideally, you want to take someone out that way to get the TM train tolling.

Now the viability for that is going to depend. I had had my Troopers at G12 for so long, I can’t even remember them at G11. And once you get Veers, Piett, and Starck to G13 for SEE it does let you take out a lot more than a full G12 team could.

Starck is a little squishy, though that gets to be less of an issue at high gear levels. If you plan on using Shore in that team, then it’s not as big of a deal because you’d have a tank to protect him.

But I would advise against gearing up anyone outside of Veers, Piett, and Starck for the time being. If Moff Gideon ends up being an Imperial Trooper, he could very possibly be a core member of the team. Right now, I like Shore and Range, but it could end up with Gideon and Death Trooper as the ideal Trooper team.

 

Imperial Troopers are a bit weird because depending on which Troopers you’re using, you get side bonuses. Death Trooper and Snowtrooper give you more damage, which does let you take someone easier. Personally, I’ve been using Shoretrooper and Range Trooper. My reasoning comes down to TM gain.

Veers’ leadership gives Troopers +10% TM for each buff they get. Range Trooper gives Troopers a 50% chance to call in an assist when they use any ability during their turn when they are buffed. So buffs help two-fold. The assists help mitigate the lower damage you’re doing without Death Trooper or Snowtrooper. You don’t hit as hard, but you hit more often. Assists use their basic, and Piett’s basic calls a random Empire ally to assist, so you can get two asissts from that. Veers’ basic gives speed up to a random Trooper that doesn’t have it, so they go faster and get the extra TM from his leadership on top.

The other main draw for Range Trooper is his special, which gives Troopers retribution and protection up. Both are buffs, so more TM and they’re going to counter when they get hit. That’s a lot of buffs flying around and each one is 10% TM from the leadership.

Shoretrooper has two main functions. First, he taunts, which helps protect your other Troopers. He pre-taunts, so that makes it harder to take someone out before the Trooper get the ball rolling and he will keep taunting. Each time Shore loses a buff, the cool down of his taunt (4 turns max) will go down by 1. All those buffs mean that he will be able to taunt more often if the other team is removing the buffs. And when Shore taunts, he heals his team and give crit immunity, so everyone takes less damage and if you combine that with retribution they’ll hit back on top.

The second function for Shore is more TM. Giving everyone crit immunity is a buff, so that’s 10% more TM every time. And when Shore is taunting and another Empire unit uses a special, they get +15% TM.

The whole idea is a blitz team that’s all about hitting often and getting a ton of TM. That plays in to Piett’s Emperor’s Trap, which gives you +6% potency and offense per stack and get 1 stack for each time an Empire ally begins a turn or attacks out of turn (retribution). Whenever an enemy takes a turn, you lose the stacks and have to start over. So if you can just keep getting a bunch of TM you also increase your damage. The potency comes into play with Stack being able to apply stagger with his AOE. Done right, you can do more damage because you’re taking all those consecutive turns.

Snowtrooper has a high base damage, so if you’re using him you’re having him hit hard right away. His main gimmick is the AOE. It has a 4-turn cool down, but it gets reduced for each critical hit you get with it. So you can just keep using it over and over as long as you keep getting critical hits. That’s really good for fighting teams where you have to deal with tanks because the AOE gets around it. The downside is crit immunity can stop that in its tracks.

Death Trooper is probably the most versatile Trooper because his kit is just generally good in a non-trooper Empire team. He does hit pretty hard, but his main focus is control. His AOE removes buffs, which can help you get around taunts. And if they had no buffs, you increase their cool downs. His basic applies Daze, which helps against any enemies that can counterattack. And if they were already dazed, he stuns them. He’ll attack twice against Rebels, but if he gets paired up with Range Trooper, he’ll be hitting quite a bit with assists. Terminate comes into play after someone is dead and is mostly a nail-in-the-coffin move.

Snowtrooper got hurt the most from Piett because Emperor’s Trap makes it so you don’t need the initial damage as much. And any team that has crit immunity neuters Snowtrooper’s utility. I still really like Death Trooper. I could easily see gearing up Shore, Death, and Range for your trooper/empire purposes. Range would always be with Troopers, but the other two can easily be switched off depending on if you want a more defensive Trooper team (Shore) or offensive one (Death). The other one can just be absorbed with another Empire team.

That also gets you the TIE Reaper with both Death Trooper and Shoretrooper, which helps boost your Empire fleet.

The main problem is Gideon. If he is a Trooper, his kit could easily make one of the other Troopers the best choice. He uses Death Troopers on the show, so it would make sense if he has a special synergy with them (though Thrawn doesn’t and he used them in Rebels). Gideon’s forces use E-Web blaster cannons on Nevarro, and that’s what Snowtrooper’s AOE is modeled after. That could make everything I wrote before moot. Or he could be a general Empire character. It wouldn’t be a bad thing, since there’s not really a great 3rd Empire team outside of Troopers and Palpatine/Vader. Gideon could make that possible. He’s likely to have a leadership of some kind.

 

I never really did benchmarks like that, but the amount of damage your Marauder did would one-shot a R7 Malak. That’s one of the nice things about Marauder. You can do some incredibly high damage hits.

Veers’ zeta is pretty much required for Imperial Troopers.

As far as Tarkin, that’s a little more subjective. I think Tarkin is an underrated character. He’s very useful under a Palpatine lead because he can throw out a bunch of debuffs with his second special and his first special removes TM. The nice thing about Tarkin is, kind of like Sidious, you get bonuses for giving him a lot of potency.

First, the more potency he has, the easier it is to apply the debuffs he puts out. That helps feed Palpatine’s TM train. The second benefit of potency is his AOE gets bonus offense for his potency, so that increases your damage. Third, Tarkin gains defense equal to his potency, which makes him tanky. Tarkin can take some surprisingly tough hits and keep rolling with a lot of potency.

The zeta gives him +20% potency per debuffed enemy. On a Palpatine team, odds are the other team will all have debuffs, so that’s +100% potency, which also means +100% more offense for his AOE and +100% defense all the time. It won’t be game changing, but it does make him better. As a side bonus, it also improves his capital ship. The leadership isn’t really worth it. The only reason I did it on mine was for his ship and because I have more zetas than I can spend. But I had the unique zeta from before SEE came out.

Thrawn’s zetas are useful, but still what I’d call luxury zetas. For the most part, you don’t need them to use him. Thrawn is one of the top 3 Empire leaders with Vader and Palpatine. Unlike the other two, though, the AI cannot properly use his leadership. And seeing as you will usually use Thrawn under another leader, you can skip his pretty easily.

Ebb and Flow has two aspects. The first is he has 100% counter chance and tenacity when he’s fracturing someone. This lets him do some damage and mostly prevent him from being debuffed during that time. The second aspect is Empire-specific. On an Empire team, being able to remove TM from Thrawn and his target lets you lock down the target for as long as possible. Neither of which is really needed for GL counters.

All that being said, you’re likely going to get up giving one or both of them zetas eventually for their capital ship. The Sith/Empire fleet you end up with by doing SEE is going to be used under the Executrix or Chimaera. I personally tend to lean Chimaera, but both are good ships with their own strengths.

 

I can’t really say for Royal Guard. I don’t actually use mine for anything. Krennic can use speed and potency. Crit chance if you use him as your leader.

Yeah, it was mostly for the speed. I pretty much decided to make him very fast. The crit damage was just because he does damage at the end. The potency set really doesn’t do all that much for SEE, since the only debuff he applies is shock at the end. But I wanted to use that protection primary arrow, so I finished the set.

I do have a decent amount of protection on my SEE, but he actually gains protection during the battle. His Sow Discord unique is the key. Linked enemies lose 20% protection each time they take a turn and SEE gains 25% of the amount lost. That 20% becomes 80% when they’re Jedi. That means against non-Jedi, SEE steals 5% of their protection each turn they take and that goes up to 20% for Jedi. And since SEE always links two enemies, you can see how that quickly adds up.

On top of that, SEE is all about recovering protection. Each time a deceived enemy uses an ability, SEE recovers 2% protection. His mass assist special recovers 50% protection for all DS characters on your team. That’s how he solos teams.

As far as the mods, it’s mostly RNG. But also keep in mind that I have upgrades all of SEE’s mods beyond MK 6 E. Each secondary can roll up to 5 times, so I was just upgrading them until I got 5 rolls on speed. Bonus points for the mods that have offense secondaries.

Does SEE really need all that speed? Not really. I don’t think there’s any real guidance for how to mod him. He’s pretty flexible. I would say offense, speed, or protection would all work. He’s got 65% health steal, so you could also boost his health, if you wanted. Potency is not all that important, like I said. Tenacity is probably not that useful. His whole gimmick is not being targeted, so he shouldn’t get a bunch of debuffs. He’s got a pretty high base tenacity and potency anyway (over 100% each)