Donner's Tactics Strategy Guides #5: Beacon

Beacon's a tough one for me.  I find it hard to really categorize her anywhere.  See below:

Beacon

                Beacon doesn’t really excel in any particular role, but she also isn’t bad in any role.  She has one of the strongest support abilities in the game.

Builds:  DPS, Support, Tank (minor, Fortitude)

                Best Power Cards:  Bolstering Team-Up, Focused Blast

                Worst Power Card:  Piercing Eye-Beams

 

                Strengths:  Getting slow starting allies up and running faster, lots of attack options

                Weaknesses:  Attacks are extreme.  Either they totally miss in the mid range or they totally miss in the extreme ranges, making her an all-or-nothing attacker.

                Works well against:  Absolute Zero, Ra, Legacy

                Weak against:  Proletariat, Omnitron-V, Wraith

                DPS Build:

                                Next Evolution or Piercing Eye Beams

                                Focused Blast or KREE-OWW!!!

                Support Build:

                                Bolstering Team-Up

                                Fortitude or Head-On Collision

                Commentary:

                Beacon is an okay damage dealer and a strong support character.  She has some great options for dealing with cover or being surrounded.  She doesn’t have any really massive attacks and no natural way to build up tokens for those attacks.  She also can’t hold on to Attack + 1 tokens if she makes any attacks.   Her real strengths are in Bolstering Team-Up, aimed KREE-OWW!!! and aimed Focused Blast.  Head-On Collision is potentially the strongest push in the game, especially if aimed.  Piercing Eye-Beams helps her base power (Atomic Glare) but only marginally helps Focused Blast and does nothing for KREE-OWW!!!.  Her defense is not as strong as Legacy’s, but it still leaves her tankier than most other characters.  Focused Blast is amazing at dealing with characters with low defense die pools but with Dodge, as it can overwhelm their defense dice.  Beacon's miss dice are usually either 3 and 4 or 1 and 6.  This gives her a lot of room for avoiding particular values from things like Adaptive Subroutine.

                Tricks:

                Next Evolution into Focused Blast can wreck two enemies in melee with Beacon.

                KREE-OWW!!! and Next Evolution can draw 2 lines of destruction across the map.

                Aim Focused Blast at Range 1 for maximum damage (watch for elevation changes!).  All auto-misses are removed before Aim makes them the highest value.  Then Focused Blast makes each hit into 2 1’s.  If all 4 dice succeed, that's an 8 die attack coming at someone.  Even thought they pretty much auto-block their defense value, that's 4 to 5 damage getting through.  And each successful attack + 1 die actually gives 2 more hits.

                Bunker, Legacy, and Proletariat love having an extra action with Bolstering Team-Up.  Bunker can use it for more Expert Tactician uses, Legacy can do extra Motivational Charges, and Proletariat can create more clones or use an Overwhelm action.  Or, if you really want to go crazy on the movement, use it on Citizen Dawn with Brisk Effulgence to make everyone sprint on both Dawn's and Beacon's turns.  Healing Light is another great power card to bolster.

                Beacon must spend all Attack + 1 dice whenever she attacks.  If you start building up Attack + 1 tokens on her, you'll have to avoid extra attacks if you want to save them up.  Fortitude and Bolstering Team-Up are a great power set for this.  Just watch out for Baron Blade's Devious Disruptor.

                Countering Tips:

                Beacon only has 2 actions, making her vulnerable to aim.

                KREE-OWW!!! requires line of sight and must follow one of the 6 straight paths of hexes.  To avoid it, don't line up and find cover.  Beacon's power that lets her ignore line of sight doesn't work on KREE-OWW!!!.

                Beacon’s attacks are very extreme, either auto-missing on 3 and 4, or on 1 and 6.  Stick to long range attacks to take her out or use a very strong aimed attack like Omni-Cannon.

                If Beacon is relying in Bolstering Team-Up, take advantage of that to drop area attacks on her and her adjacent ally(ies).

I was surprised to not see Focused Blast come up much that I saw when Beacon was played.   If she does get into melee range that Head-On Collsion could be brutal. 

Bolstering/Head on is so good when it works well.  Use bolster to let beacon knock someone into perfect position to get crushed by your ally.

Citizen Spring+Beacon can give you 3 healing each round, 4 if you have Dawn heal as well.  As long as you can win a draw by health that strategy is wicked.

Could you please specify how does Bolstering Team-Up card actually work? Bought the used game with this card missing(

Here's the text of Bolstering Team-Up for you:

Action:  Choose an adjacent ally.  Beacon and that ally each take an action now, in any order.

Let me know if that requires any more explanation.

That's more than enough, many thanks for helping!

Also, Bolstering Team-Up came from the promo pack of Tactics abilities.  It didn't come with Flames of Freedom.

So if you’re missing Bolstering Team-Up, you’re probably missing all the cards from the promo pack…  :confused:

(That’s one for each character.)