Rogue Squadron- Panic Attack

Welcome to Rogue Squadron, pilot! In this series we will be looking at different squadrons you can fly in Fantasy Flight Games X-Wing miniatures game. We give you the squad, what expansion pack all of the upgrades come from and then give you the low down on how best to fly it. Strap in and get ready to fly…

All Wings Report In

Y-Wing “Gold Squadron” (Y-wing Expansion) (25 pts)

No Pilot Ability

Title– BTL-A4 (Most Wanted Expansion): You cannot attack ships outside your firing arc. After you perform a primary weapon attack, you may immediately perform an attack with a turret secondary weapon.
Astromech- R3-A2 (Rebel Transport Expansion): When you declare the target of your attack, if the defender is inside your firing arc, you may receive 1 stress token to cause the defender to receive 1 stress token.
Turret- Ion Cannon Turret (Y-wing/HWK-290 Expansion)-Attack (3, Range 1-2): Attack 1 ship (even a ship outside your firing arc). If this attack hits the target ship, the ship suffers 1 damage and receives 1 ion token. Then cancel all dice results.

3x B-Wing “Blue Squadron” (B-wing/Rebel Aces Expansion) (25 pts)

No Pilot Ability

Modification– B-Wing/E2 (Rebel Aces Expansion): Your upgrade bar gains the crew upgrade icon.
Crew– Tactician (TIE Phantom Expansion)- After you perform an attack against a ship inside your firing arc at Range 2, that ship receives 1 stress token.

Lock S-Foils in Attack Position

For our first squadron we’re going to look at a pretty popular Rebel list, the Panic Attack. While four Rebel ship lists are not new, this particular set up came into prominence with the release of the Scum and Villainy faction and the BTL-4A title for Y-wings.

So why is it called “Panic Attack” you might be wondering? It’s all about the stress. B-wings with Tactician dole out stress to anything at range 2. And the juicy bit is R3-A2 on the BTL Y-wing (commonly called a Stresshog). With the title you can fire twice in one round. And because the droid can be triggered with each attack, you can dump two stress a turn onto someone. This is regardless if you hit or not. If you do, you might ion them as well.

Now, the Y-wing will suffer in turn from stacking stress on itself. So beyond the first round, accept that the Y-wing will never again get to take an action and will have trouble turning around as it can’t K-turn. This is okay though. You will be dumping tons of stress on your enemy in turn. You’ll therefore want to pick targets that really won’t like being stressed. A Phantom or any ship with Push the Limits is going to hate having multiple stress piled on.

Aside from giving out stress like it’s candy, this list still has 32 hitpoints for your opponent to chew through. B’s and Y’s will take a lot of punishment with their mere 1 Agility die. But you’ll almost never lose a ship in the first engagement while having good odds of taking one of your opponents down.

The squad’s greatest weakness is swarms and arc dodgers. Swarms don’t care about being stressed and at PS2 your ships might even shoot after them if it’s Tala, Obsidian or Black Sun swarm. Arc Dodgers like Soontir Fel will have no trouble getting behind you unless you’re careful about spreading out your attacks. Fortunately, if your Stresshog can get a shot at him, even if you miss, you’ll really mess up his ability to arc dodge for awhile.

Variations

This list is itself a variation on an older list that was around for quite awhile before the BTL-4A title came out. That variation might have lacked the R3-A2 droid and the Y-wing simply fired a regular ion turret. This had the advantage of giving you some out of arc coverage. This was also before Autothrusters were a thing.

Another variation is to take a fourth B-wing and give it an Ion Cannon instead of a Tactician. This has the advantage of all four ships having the same maneuver dial and you don’t have one ship that can’t K-turn. Also the ion cannon allows that one ship to take up the rear and still get good shots from range 3.