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Heyo,

I've been out of X-Wing for awhile, but I'm finding myself attracted to the Scum fleets. Can anyone give me any pointers on how best to use them? Doesn't need to be tournament tough or anything, but I'd like to know what the real studs and duds of the fleet are.

stud IG-2000 kitted out is one of the best ships.

Scyk interceptors are duds. Every other ship has usable pilots - even the HWKs!

Main thing to know with Scum is that their ships often have relatively low PS and subpar jousting values, but good pilot abilities and exclusive upgrade cards. Win with dirty tricks.

The Most Wanted expansion is the best expansion pack in the game for all the cool stuff you get. It gives you scum dials and pilot cards for the Y-Wing, Z-95 and HWK, which you may already have.

The "duds" are the M3-A Interceptor and the StarViper... However, both of those ships are still serviceable when outfitted properly.

Warthog Y-wings are pretty good and the Scum Firespray pilots are all pretty good. Of course there is also the Brobots which are pretty popular.

Z-95 (Binayre Pirate) w/ Feedback Array. 14 points of "Frell you cloaks and arc dodgers".

Torkil Mix has a pretty great ability, even if the HWK is a somewhat underwhelming ship. "You paid how many points for high pilot skill? lol 0".

The Scyk is generally underwhelming, but fun to fly in a for-laughs game.
The Starviper is also, sadly, underwhelming. The almost-exception is Guri in the Virago. Expensive and fragile but can pack a whallop. (read: Adv. Proton Torpedoes.) very one-and-done, but not terrible without the Torps.

Warthog Y-Wings are great, though I think the upcoming Twin Laser Cannon turret will be a boon for them.

Firesprays are great in general.

Illicit upgrades are pretty much the scum "thing". They range from absolutely amazing (Feedback Arrays) to not bad (Inertial Dampeners) to expensive ace in the hole (deadman's or hot-shot). Glitterstim and cloaking device are on their way and GS at least looks pretty dope. (lolpun)

Z95's and Y wings with ion cannon turrets and the btla4 title are your bread and butter units. Z95's synergize well with feedback array, making them the ultimate blockers, as they can hurt enemy ships theyre still touching and hit highly maneuverable ships like soontir fel or whisper if he's dumb enough to get too close.

HWK's are the perfect embodiment of how Scum works. They live solely off abusing dirty tricks. Mux in particular works well with a swarm of cheap fighters like bugzapper z's (z95 with feedback array)

The Firespray and IG 2000 are excellent ships as well. You'll find they make solid centerpiece units for a squadron. Boba fett in particular is a nasty pilot in a fight, and emon azzamen does some insane stuff with bombs.

Starvipers are kind of tough to use, but Guri is a very solid ship as is Prince Xizor. They just take a lot of skill to use.

The Scyk is the only real dud, and even it can be used fairly well in casual games. Just realize it goes down HARD to focus fire.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
HWK's are the perfect embodiment of how Scum works.

Triple Scum HWKs is a super annoying list to play against. A guy won a local tourney with it a couple of months ago and I was his first victim. I scoffed at the list in my head, but he quickly went to work on me and my Whisper + mini swarm didn't even kill one of his ships.

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
HWK's are the perfect embodiment of how Scum works.

Triple Scum HWKs is a super annoying list to play against. A guy won a local tourney with it a couple of months ago and I was his first victim. I scoffed at the list in my head, but he quickly went to work on me and my Whisper + mini swarm didn't even kill one of his ships.

How in the world does that even work?

 krodarklorr wrote:

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
HWK's are the perfect embodiment of how Scum works.

Triple Scum HWKs is a super annoying list to play against. A guy won a local tourney with it a couple of months ago and I was his first victim. I scoffed at the list in my head, but he quickly went to work on me and my Whisper + mini swarm didn't even kill one of his ships.

How in the world does that even work?

Yeah, it sounds stupid doesn't it? Unfortunately, if you aren't prepared for it, it's quite nasty. I can't remember the exact list, but it was something like this:

Torkil Mux (19)
Ion Cannon Turret (5)

Palob Godalhi (20)
Opportunist (4)
Blaster Turret (4)
Moldy Crow (3)

Dace Bonearm (23)
Predator (3)
Ion Cannon Turret (5)

Binayre Pirate (12)

Total: 98
View in Yet Another Squad Builder
They once you're in range 2, they can cripple your ace (in my case, it was Whisper) by lowering your pilot skill and stealing your tokens. That combined with the control they have with Ion Cannon Turrets can really take the wind out of your sails.

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:

 krodarklorr wrote:

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
HWK's are the perfect embodiment of how Scum works.

Triple Scum HWKs is a super annoying list to play against. A guy won a local tourney with it a couple of months ago and I was his first victim. I scoffed at the list in my head, but he quickly went to work on me and my Whisper + mini swarm didn't even kill one of his ships.

How in the world does that even work?

Yeah, it sounds stupid doesn't it? Unfortunately, if you aren't prepared for it, it's quite nasty. I can't remember the exact list, but it was something like this:

Torkil Mux (19)
Ion Cannon Turret (5)

Palob Godalhi (20)
Opportunist (4)
Blaster Turret (4)
Moldy Crow (3)

Dace Bonearm (23)
Predator (3)
Ion Cannon Turret (5)

Binayre Pirate (12)

Total: 98
View in Yet Another Squad Builder
They once you're in range 2, they can cripple your ace (in my case, it was Whisper) by lowering your pilot skill and stealing your tokens. That combined with the control they have with Ion Cannon Turrets can really take the wind out of your sails.

Huh, yeah I could see the potency to that. Dang, I kinda wanna try that now.

Triple HWKs is a menagerie of strange rules interactions that can really catch people off-guard. It's not a tournament-grade list, but is really slippery in the hands of a player who knows how to take advantage of it.

Mux is a good force multiplier for scum lists that use a lot of low PS pilots. Palob is a good token-denial ship, who can also be a source of a ton of firepower (opportunist + blaster is a 4 dice attack).

It will be interesting to see how the Cloaking Device will affect HWK usage, since passive abilities work just fine while you're cloaked.

The Good

-Headhunters, Firesprays and Wart hogs are very solid ships. With Aggromechs, Illicit, and the Awesome Firespray pilot abilities, these guys are very capable of competing vs the main factions. I suspect that they will be joined by the Khiraxz when it arrives.

-HWKs and Illicit upgrades, as well as some scum-only upgrades such as Bodyguard, make scum the dirty tricks and combos faction. Right now, Feedback array (on Low-PS ships) and Inertial Dampeners (On high PS ships) are the real winners for Illicits, but glitterstims and cloak will add some options soon. Plus, the Suicide Headhunters list is hilarious (I've seen a game go from eight ships to two with one shot)

-Brobots (Double IG-88) is a fun list, even if it ends up isolated from the rest of the scum faction by the fact that you are required to only run two IG's.

The Bad

-Right now, the only faction-specific ship that's all that good is IG-88. The Starviper and Scyk are both meant to be fast ships, but got hamstrung by the Scum-y maneuver dial (no hard 3's), and lack the durability to be up-close brawlers. The Starviper also wants about 2 points more PS on all its pilots, and the Scyk just lacks the shenanigans of the Headhunter (why buy a more fragile ship, when you can get a headhunter with Feedback Array). Note that both these ships lack access to the illicit slots (as was mentioned previously, this is one of Scums strengths). They would probably have been useful if you didn't have to buy their title cards. The next couple waves look like they'll fix this problem.

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:

 krodarklorr wrote:

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
HWK's are the perfect embodiment of how Scum works.

Triple Scum HWKs is a super annoying list to play against. A guy won a local tourney with it a couple of months ago and I was his first victim. I scoffed at the list in my head, but he quickly went to work on me and my Whisper + mini swarm didn't even kill one of his ships.

How in the world does that even work?

Yeah, it sounds stupid doesn't it? Unfortunately, if you aren't prepared for it, it's quite nasty. I can't remember the exact list, but it was something like this:

Torkil Mux (19)
Ion Cannon Turret (5)

Palob Godalhi (20)
Opportunist (4)
Blaster Turret (4)
Moldy Crow (3)

Dace Bonearm (23)
Predator (3)
Ion Cannon Turret (5)

Binayre Pirate (12)

Total: 98
View in Yet Another Squad Builder
They once you're in range 2, they can cripple your ace (in my case, it was Whisper) by lowering your pilot skill and stealing your tokens. That combined with the control they have with Ion Cannon Turrets can really take the wind out of your sails.

Oh my god this is genius. I'd use the last two points for a Feedback Array on the Binayre, but man, it might be time to order another HWK...

Suggestions for that HWK list:
Add a K4 Security Droid on Palob to give him a free target lock when he performs a green maneuver to clear the stress from Opportunist, and remove Predator from Dace in favor of Greedo and Determination, which generates critical hits from Dace's Ion Cannon and also protects against the negative aspects of having Greedo. Dace also benefits from K4 Security Droid, since he'll also be generating stress from his ability that he needs to clear. You could also put Greedo on Mux, to give your opponent more to think about in terms of target priority.