Good morning gamers,
If you haven't read Centaur's article on Rebel Veterans yet, you should - check it out and then keep reading. Prior to the release of Legion 2.6 (or Legion 2.0, depending on who you talk to), the common advice was that "Rebel Veterans are good and Rebel Troopers are bad." This always felt like a shame to me, since Rebel Troopers are the OG and actually had a rather interesting place in Legion. With the updated Rebel Trooper profile, Rebel Troopers have emerged into a realm of their own - still very squishy, but not as bad as they used to be.
So what we're going to do today is look at the new Rebel Trooper profile first in the light of their competition, and then after we've aired all the dirty laundry, we'll take another look and see what's to like about these units. Let's start off with their profile . . .
Rebel Troopers: The Profile
Rebel Troopers have a pretty average profile - Speed 2, 1 Wound, Courage 1, 1 black die in both melee and at range 1-3, 4 Trooper models to start with . . . nothing to write home about. Their white defense save with defensive surges is better than B1 Battle Droids and Wookiees, but is still pretty garbage, especially if you're coming to the Rebel faction after playing with the Empire or the Republic (like I am) where basically everyone has red defense saves.
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| Four perfectly valid Rebel Trooper builds (47-106pts) Photo Credit: Tabletop Admiral |
These guys used to have only one keyword: Nimble. Nimble allows you to get bonus saves from each of your dodge tokens (since you get one back each time you spend at least one), but unless you START with dodge tokens on your guys, Nimble isn't going to do anything for you (and since that usually required taking a dodge action, Rebel Troopers were in a much worse spot than Rebel Veterans who got a dodge token that didn't come back when issued an order - they've changed that, by the way). With the Legion 2.6 update, Rebel Troopers picked up Agile 1 as well, which gives them a dodge token each time they move - perfect! I was hoping these guys would get some way of getting dodge tokens automatically and I hoped it wouldn't involve giving them Defend 1 (which would undoubtedly be good, since they wouldn't have to activate to get their dodge token) - I'll take Agile 1 instead.
While 40 points for a Corps squad looks good (especially if you're coming from the Republic where all your guys cost a lot more - and the excellent nature of the Heavy Weapon/Squad Leader choices makes you want to invest a LOT in those units), once you consider the other Rebel Corps units, you realize that 40pts is pretty standard and basically everyone lives in that band.