War! Gear & Rules, What's good, iffy, needs fixing or a complete revamp? Options

[Daishi]

There are a few topics on War!, but for this thread, let's focus on making that last chapter hum. Sorry, Bogota, but you will remain ignored.

What new rules or gear added by War! is solid as stands and you're eager or willing to see incorporated into your campaigns (assuming it fits the power level)? What reservations do you have? What do you think needs a bit of tweaking to fit right? What is totally broken? If something is broken, how should we fix it? Please be specific and provide your reasoning.

To start with, the one item that's probably gotten the most razzing is the Slow spell. Sounds great in concept, but in practice the nearly immediate deceleration to 1 m/s neutralizes every ballistic and explosive weapon in the game at a trivial force, and also splats the HALO team it was supposed to help insert. Whoops. Off the top of my head, I think it might work better if Slow applied a deceleration based on Force. Say Accel rating equal to 10 x Force with a max load of 200 kg per net hit. Guns still work, but it can be used for parachuting. Drop the Drain code by 1 to account for the restricted effect. Alternatively, just use a Mass Levitate variation. Add +2 to the drain on Levitate and make it Area effect.

As has been colorfully noted elsewhere, whoever added Ballast Tanks to the naval vessels may have meant well but didn't read Arsenal all that carefully since that particular modification only applies to submersibles. It's an easy fix to just ignore that Standard Modification on all but the submarines.

On the other hand, I think the new Milspec Matrix Gear is largely solid. I like having the rules for everything over 6, and the costs/availability seem to scale appropriately to keep them in only high-end campaigns. My big gripe is that the ratings on the commlinks look backwards. I would expect that higher Signal matters more than higher Response to all military grunts but the hackers. I'd be happier to flip those values.

Thoughts on this or anything else in that chapter?