We had a bit of discussion yesterday when going through XP after the mission. Our Officer has taken “Mission First” ability, which is great from story-telling point of view, but seems to be a bit underpowered:
Mission First: Add the following to “at the end of mission” xp triggers: If anyone died under your command.
At first, we’ve interpreted it as max 1XP no matter how many people died. But paying 8XP for a possibility of getting it back after 8 missions (in which this specialist took part AND in which someone died) - it doesn’t seem like a fair deal.
After some delibration we came up with the following:
Mission First: Add the following to “at the end of mission” xp triggers:
If anyone died under your command.
If Lorekeeper tells another tale (4 legionaries died)
You’re right that if you describe it like that, it sounds like a bad deal.
But I would say that the special abilities are not designed to be all of the same power, individually.
Rather, they are designed so that :
each playbook has a global set of abilities of approximately the same power ; so this ability balances the fact that the Officer has other very powerful abilities.
and some abilities are here more to provide “flavour” than “efficiency”.
Fictionaly, it would seem quite strange if an Officer would get xp when people die not under his command (your other suggested xp trigger) .
That being said, it is true that i don’t find this ability very interesting, and I’ve never seen it taken by anybody.
Hint: It works on secondary missions. And it combos well with other secondary mission affecting officer abilities (like Strategist).
There are definitely long term and short term builds. You could make similar arguments about Annointed for Chosen (hint you should read Udanchik’s writeup on their campaign). If you think it’s not worth it … don’t take it. I assure you it’s fine (it was one of our more popular builds in playtests actually).
There’s a ton of other abilities. Adding more “free xp” to it isn’t necessarily the right fix (if you were to change I would suggest adding an orthogonal ability, not just more of the same).
Thanks guys for quick replies - both on point. The reason our Officer took it was the “plot flavor” which is fine in itself - I just didn’t want them to feel they got the short straw just for going for the choice that felt good story-wise.
At the same time, Stras’ suggestion about secondary mission and combos makes perfect sense!