Dice Tilt

It's always a contentious point for me on spending focus to boost the hit or damage.

My rule of thumb tends to be :

if you HAVE to hit (less attacks, higher power), and it's a 5+ to hit, boost.

If the hit is less important (knockdown, stationary, easy target low Def, many incoming attacks) but there's a high pow involved (dice damage for example), buy more attacks rather than boosting damage.
There's more chance of a swing when you increase the amount of rolls.

There are always going to be instances where the odds screw you though even on the best made plans.

I have two stories for this.

First game of a tourney, amon into abby2. My opponent managed to completely blindside me by killing a protective jack in front of amon,and getting a heavy and a light onto him. However, Amon toughed twice and my opponent missed the rest, leading to me being able to introduce abby2 to one of my friendly crusaders for an assassination win for me. An example of a dice roll completely outside my opponents control ruining his plans.

The last game of the tournament, I was facing a Merc player running McBain. Now, having faced McBain before, I knew he had Dodge, so it was incredibly important that if I was going to commit my caster to him that I do it right. I failed to get my synergy to full (despite planning to, I forgot to assign a focus to a crusader so it charged and missed it's attacks) so I was "only" up to mat9 and pow 16.

It's crucial on a caster with Dodge to get the hit on the initial, as amons special weapon ability is trip - which in this case serves two purposes - prevent the Dodge on a miss, and take out the tough roll because he's knocked down.

I boosted and got the hit, leaving McBain on the floor. From there it should have been a clear out at dice off 1, but a mix of low rolling and remaining focus left McBain on three boxes (no focus) at the end of amons activation. Luckily, Rhoven wandered into Los and absolutely nuked him on a spike, rolling something like 11 on dice off 3.

In this case, perhaps I should have begun boosting damage on macbain once he was out of focus, as he only had three health remaining at the end of amons run, which is the lower end of average on one dice.