Phobos Balance Tweaks & Quality of Life Changes
With a consistent 50% win rate, Phobos are a well balanced team. Still, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t use some tweaks. Vanguard, in particular, is often criticized for having too many features for one strategic ploy. Not only that, but the Voxbreaker and Commsman operatives often sit on the bench.
Kill Team factions are so finely tuned that minor changes can make or break a team. Let’s see if we can suggest a basket of tweaks that preserves the sneaky Phobos flavor but improves the quality of life — both for Phobos players and their opponents.
It’s time to Trust-Bust Vanguard
Vanguard does as much work as any Strat Ploy in the game. This is great — if you’re playing Phobos. But it can leave newer opponents feeling left out of the game as they watch your sneaky marines race across the board and grab every objective they can reach. Since Incursors ignore obscuring an experienced player can take Bolter Discipline against a newer player and effectively end the game by the first 2–3 activations.
On the flip side, when you encounter an opponent like Inquisitorial Agents with Absolute Authority to deny your strat ploy, you can understand just how overloaded Vanguard is.
What Vanguard does today:
- Your operative can ignore the first 2" of distance it travels for a climb, drop, or traverse. “Or” is doing the work in that sentence: you must pick one and only one of those features to ignore.
- Your operative automatically passes jump tests.
- Your operative adds 1" to its Movement characteristic.
- Your operative can perform a mission action or the Pick Up action for 1 less AP (to a minimum of 0).
Thematically, Vanguard helps you get your critical operatives to key positions in the field, and helps them fulfill the special ops role that Phobos have in the lore. But these don’t need to be tied together thematically or mechanically. So let’s break Vanguard into two strat ploys, each one preserving a single theme.
Strat Ploy: First in the Field
This new strat ploy keeps the first three bullets of Vanguard, and tweaks one of them:
- Your operative can ignore the first 2" of distance it travels for EACH climb, drop, AND traverse.
This means, for example, that you could traverse a barricade for free, and ignore the first 2" of a climb — all in the same activation.
Strat Ploy: Special Forces
This new strat ploy keeps the fourth bullet of Vanguard as is.
Breaking Vanguard into two strat ploys means that you’ll be sneaking, shooting, and looting — but not all three in the same turning point. At least not if you want to conserve CP.
Wait, I hate making Special Forces a Strat Ploy
Fine, make it an ability like multi-spectrum array. Since it’s always on, it needs a limitation. Something like this:
- Any Phobos Strike Team operative with a conceal order can perform mission actions or the pick up action for 1 less AP (to a minimum of 0).
(Credit to Chris Bacchi for this idea).
Bringing in the Back Benchers
Infiltrator Voxbreaker
When was the last time you took the Voxbreaker? And why the heck do Infiltrators have so many specialists anyway?
The Voxbreaker wants to be — needs to be — in close contact with the enemy. But piff piff! all he’s got is fists. You don’t want to send him into a Torment, even if he can turn off re-rolls.
Let’s look at three potential changes for the Voxbreaker:
- Change him from an Infiltrator to an Incursor. This evens the number of Infiltrator and Incursor specialists to four each. And since each Incursor has a combat blade, the Voxbreaker won’t mind closing even with nastier opponents.
This might be too big a change since hundreds of players have already glued Infiltrator backpacks on their models. If that’s the case, here are two tweaks that are almost as good:
- Give Phobos a combat blade as equipment for 1EP, just like Intercession. While anyone can take it, the natural recipient is the Voxbreaker. Jumping from 3/4 to 3/5 gives this operative better damage breakpoints.
- While the ability to flip an enemy operative to Engage is powerful, the Auspex Scan is too restrictive — especially if you intend to have another friendly operative treat the enemy as engaged. Extending the range from 3" to 6" will make this ability more useful, without making it overpowered.
Infiltrator Commsman
You’re an elite, highly trained, deadly force of Marines — with the quirkiest Comms in the game. Phobos Comms doesn’t hand out an extra AP like most teams, which makes sense: Phobos is already 3AP, and Reivers are pseudo-5AP, so an extra AP would break the team. But the current options are too restrictive. Let’s make one change to the Comms Array:
- Strike the phrase “or an action in which it moves.”
Imagine how much more flexible Comms would be if it could tell an operative to reposition. And if a full move is too much, perhaps the Comms Array could be restricted to handing out a dash.
How will it play?
Taken together, here’s how these changes are likely to play:
- Phobos will spend TP1 getting into position and looting / capturing objectives. No more feels-bad alpha strikes on noobs.
- TP2 will be dedicated to shooting and fading back into the shadows via guerilla tactics.
- Players will leave the Veteran at home and take the Voxbreaker against Chaos Cult or Vet Guard, to shut down re-rolls against Torments or to flush out a Spotter.
- Comms can shout “get into position” to a Marksman with Track Target — and the Marksman can move to cover a different portion of the board than the opponent expected. Or the Comms can reposition another operative just prior to Overwatch to fire from an unexpected angle.
These changes shouldn’t change the Phobos win rate by much, but they’ll make Phobos more fun to play, and more fun to play against — all while keeping the theme of sneaky, action-oriented Marines.
What do you think?
