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While we were getting seated we discussed what tier to play and it emerged we were going to do high tier. So I pulled out Section 0x29A, while a player opposite to me pulled out Void Eater. Both of them Death-Touched theme Vanguards. Void Eater has some trauma from being previously eaten during Truth of the Seeker. I've recounted my play with 29A in King Xeros in the other topic. 29A is excited to be sleeved into a new body for another mission of wreaking havoc. After all, the Society only lets him out to play in "the end is nigh" situations.
The rest of the party included a level 7 mystic and solarian, level 6 technomancer, and level 8 Quig (mechanic pregen).
We go through the mission briefing and dock at the alien station. We talk about doing this as a stealth mission, open the first door, and run into enemies with nothing to hide our approach. The vanguards quickly take the vanguard and the solarian follows, and we start trashing them. They don't even scratch Void Eater who's built as a maximally tanky defensive fighting vanguard. I take some scuffmarks but due to Enhanced Resistance I take 12 damage over the whole fight, on 104 stamina. Nothing to be worried about.
We examine what they're working on. Or rather, the mechanic and technomancer do. Because the vanguards have no Engineering or Computers skills. Then we move on to the corridor. After first inspecting all the doors for traps (vanguards with Boundary do okay on Perception), we force our way into the weapons storage. We study the room, open the fridge, and trigger the hazard and trap. The other vanguard got locked out, I got locked in. But I easily make the save. The technomancer, mystic and mechanic wilt a bit but the nerds disable the trap before we dissolve the door with acid. Some lesser restoration from the mystic and we move on.
We have a fight with some robots that are easily dispatched by the two vanguards and solarian and some magic missile killstealing from the gallery. The casters have the feeling they can just hang back and watch us handle things. When the screaming stops the tech geeks "do the room". We get to participate a bit in a "press the buttons at the same time" skill check but it's clear that this is a mission with some skill components that only the tech geeks can do for us. Fine, everyone's contributing.
We do another couple of smaller rooms.
We get to the reactor room. We've comitted a fair bit of violence so far, opened up some biohazard cases and such, but haven't been bothered by security troops until this point. Very unresponsive base. Well, the boss is waiting for us. Now we get to the cool room.
This room is clearly intended to be a bit of platform hell, with the bad guys standing on a higher platform on the other side of the room. But we're playing high tier and in Starfinder ranged enemies are something you're ready for. We happen to win initiative, so I jetpack across the room while the other vanguard and solarian begin to move across the platforms in the middle and the rest hangs back to try ranged attacks. All of this happening on platforms 50-65ft above the floor. We got to use our Aspect-given Bull Rush feat and push the minions off. This is something I've been waiting for for soooo long. Bull Rush has the potential to be really good but it depends on the scenario writer to put in a map where you can actually shove enemies off something or into someting bad. Well, I got my wish :)
The boss threw some fireballs explosive blasts at the main group of PCs but I quickly closed in on him. He used his flash teleport to try to escape, but that's only 30ft and I could keep up with him with the jetpack. He used his spider climb to teleport to the side of the wall, and I followed. Then the solarian flew up from the other side. This is the sort of epic sci fi 3D battles that I've been yearning for. I also got lucky on the Mirror Images repeatedly and every hit connected to his face. Then he failed a save against the mystic's Mind Thrust 3 and got a bad headache. Then I hit him again and it was done. We planted the bomb and got out. Cue 29A with his face pressed to the window as we watched the base blow up.
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Takeaways
I'm really enjoying playing a vanguard, the way I enjoy playing melee in Starfinder. Vanguards let me play dexterity-based melee instead of strength-based, and it's nice. The enormous amount of stamina makes you feel cocky ("Oh, I'm bleeding 5 per round, well I'll do something about that in a couple of rounds, I'm still busy with the boss"). That's something you could do with other melee classes too, and I think I will, it's great.
I didn't use any disciplines this time (I had Shimmer Guard but I was usually too far forward to have adjacent allies; same for Intervene). Evasion could have come into play if the boss had tried to fireball me and the mystic instead of the other part of the party. Entropy points didn't do much except give +1 AC that caused one hit to fail. Meh, I have stamina anyway. Aspects came into play because if I'm this good at bullrush, then pushing the mook of a ledge is a quicker way to be rid of him than using 3-4 hits to kill him. Entropic Strike was MVP, allowing dex-based melee against EAC with maximal to hit for level, so confident full attacks.
I'm still a bit sore about the vanguard's skills. Although in this case we had a happy distribution of skills with the mechanic and technomancer picking up engineering and computers, that won't always work. Vanguards don't have any starship skill as a class skill and that's bad. They have a weirdly theoretical set of life and physical science, but no engineering. Diplomacy but no stealth (on a dex-inclined class).