Third round of Reviews

For this article I will be talking about the three light jacks that have been previewed. The Chimera, the Gorgon and the Griffon. One thing to note before we begin is that these jacks only have 6 boxes on their force field and a smaller damage grid as all light jacks have.

Chimera

The Chimera continues the high mobility theme with its ability to be placed anywhere withing 2" during the control phase. Now normally this would just be an interesting ability, but couple this with the fact that the Chimera has an arc node, we now have a jack that opens up a whole range of assassination vectors. It also forces your opponent to think differently when engaging as it can just pop out of combat at the start of your turn.

The Generator also adds some extra protection by adding the number of focus on the jack to it's DEF against ranged and magic attacks, so full on focus it's going to be a DEF 15 jack which puts it up there with the Cryx jacks.

The Chimera does have combo strike and 2 P+S12 open fists. It's not going to be doing a lot of damage but the fact that it has 2 open fists means that you can 2 hand throw whatever is engaging you to disengage and free up that node.

Along with the Phoenix we have some very, very threatening arc nodes, that are going to be able to get places most armies can only dream of.

Gorgon

The Gorgon is an interesting denial jack. The Force lock allows it to keep whatever is in melee with it in melee, but it doesn't have reach, most likely to limit any potential abuses for this ability. I'm still trying to think of uses for this aside for the obvious keep something still while my heavy beats it into its component parts.

It's ranged attack is a RNG 10 ROF 1 POW 10 wraith bane shot that prevents the model hit from charging the Gorgon. It only prevents the model from charging the Gorgon, the model will still be free to charge anything else. I can see it being useful to prevent a heavy from scraping the jack, or to use the jack as a screen for your caster as a medium base isn't the easiest to charge around.

Just like the Chimera, the Gorgon has 2 P+S12 open fists with Combo strike.

I feel like this is a defensive jack, meant to hang around and screen your caster, but I'm not to sure how well it's going to do in that role. It's missing an extended control area to truly be a flanking jack. This is just going to be a jack that I'm not going to figure out until I get some play time in.

Griffon

P+S13 spear with powerful charge and reach. So take a SPD 6 jack, add another 3" for the charge, add another 2" for reach. That'll give us an 11" threat range, awesome. Now add another 2" for a focus (once per turn) due to its ability from the generator. Now we're up to 13". Now we can add either movement hi-jinks from witch hound from Kaelyssa or the extra 1" (2" in MkII) from Vyros' mobility and we have a first strike jack that can go very, very deep into your enemies territory. Oh, and I forgot to mention that it has pathfinder. Now do you want to throw your light all the way out there like that? Depends, never underestimate the power of throwing your opponent off guard. And lets not forget that this is all on an ARM 18 light jack.

What has been impressing me the most about the rules is just how fast our army is. We can play the hit and fade game as well, if not better, than both legion and circle. Let me know what your thoughts are and stay tuned for round four when I look at the units and NARN.