The Potency/Tenacity Problem
The uselessness of raw tenacity has long been known, but the return of Palpatine to the meta is a perfect example of how unbalanced potency vs tenacity is.
I’ve been theory crafting some counters to the new Sith teams I expect to see, and naturally I looked at tenacity leads. Sith rely heavily on debuffs, so it makes sense that preventing them would be a winning strategy. Rolo looks like she would be perfect. She gives Rebels a tenacity boost and TM when they resist/suffer a debuff.
But it’s imbalanced. Her lead gives +20% tenacity while Pap gives +35% potency. Palp starts with 47% potency, so unmodded he is at 85% under his lead. R2 has the highest base tenacity in the game at 56%. Under Rolo lead that’s 76%. Factoring in 15% min resist chance R2 needs tenacity modded at 25% higher than Palp has potency modded just to see any impact at all. So a full tenacity primary mod under the rebel tenacity lead on the highest tenacity character on the game only gets us to the break even point against a Palp lead. It literally isn’t enough to have any impact, and R2 would have the same resist chance as someone with 0 tenacity.
Now, Rolo still might be a great counter because of the TM gain alone, but this highlights how awful tenacity is. We need a few fixes to change this:
1) Characters need more base tenacity. The average tenacity should be a minimum 15% higher than the average potency, since this is the break even point at which extra potency/tenacity become useful. Right now potency numbers are higher than tenacity, and it needs reversed.
2) Give us the ability to use potency/tenacity primary mods on the circle mod slot. This gives us more opportunity to stack tenacity/potency where it can actually have an impact.
I’ve been theory crafting some counters to the new Sith teams I expect to see, and naturally I looked at tenacity leads. Sith rely heavily on debuffs, so it makes sense that preventing them would be a winning strategy. Rolo looks like she would be perfect. She gives Rebels a tenacity boost and TM when they resist/suffer a debuff.
But it’s imbalanced. Her lead gives +20% tenacity while Pap gives +35% potency. Palp starts with 47% potency, so unmodded he is at 85% under his lead. R2 has the highest base tenacity in the game at 56%. Under Rolo lead that’s 76%. Factoring in 15% min resist chance R2 needs tenacity modded at 25% higher than Palp has potency modded just to see any impact at all. So a full tenacity primary mod under the rebel tenacity lead on the highest tenacity character on the game only gets us to the break even point against a Palp lead. It literally isn’t enough to have any impact, and R2 would have the same resist chance as someone with 0 tenacity.
Now, Rolo still might be a great counter because of the TM gain alone, but this highlights how awful tenacity is. We need a few fixes to change this:
1) Characters need more base tenacity. The average tenacity should be a minimum 15% higher than the average potency, since this is the break even point at which extra potency/tenacity become useful. Right now potency numbers are higher than tenacity, and it needs reversed.
2) Give us the ability to use potency/tenacity primary mods on the circle mod slot. This gives us more opportunity to stack tenacity/potency where it can actually have an impact.
