Depa Billaba

If you spend a little time on the Wizards of the Coast message boards, from time to time you'll run into someone talking about the notion that the Jedi Weapon Master made all other low-to-mid-cost Jedi obsolete. While this is mostly true, even the JWM's harshest critics tend to make one unanimous exception in the form of Depa Billaba.

While Depa has roughly similar statistics to a Weapon Master, costs three points more, and is missing most of the Lightsaber-related powers that the JWM sports, she's widely considered an auto-include in Republic squads for the simple beauty of Force Sense. Any power that can take an otherwise competitively viable squad type (the Nom Bomb) and neuter it across the entire map for an entire round is a power that you have to consider carefully. There is more than one type of Stealth squad, of course, and Depa is effective against all of them. I singled out the Nom Bomb because, alone among Stealth builds, Jedi always care about it. If you build a squad specifically around Jedi and their melee strength, you are officially licensed not to care about Commander Bacara's squad of well-hidden ninja nancy-boys. You still have to get across the board under a withering hail of blaster fire, but if they're all stealthy when you get there, boo-hoo. A lightsaber doesn't need to target you from a distance, and congratulations to you for making your opponent waste a bunch of points on Stealth. On the other hand, a Nom Bomb squad relies on not only being hidden, but being personally explosive as well. This makes Depa's Force-powered visual acuity doubly important, as an exposed Nom Bomb is a mostly helpless one as well.

Besides her one power that's unique in the game, Depa is a perfectly reasonable fighter, sporting Lightsaber Deflect (the discerning Jedi's favorite way to make it across the field to cut up the shooter) and Vaapad-style Fighting. Depa is the only piece in the game so far who can get so many criticals and doesn't have "Windu" in her name somewhere (and she costs less than half what the cheapest version of Mace does).

To recap, Depa is a fine choice if you're planning to make an all-Jedi squad, even if all she does is standard fighting. She's a must-have if you're making a squad around shooters (or one very powerful shooter), because super-stealth is a major factor against such squads.

Overall rating in 100: 4
Overall rating in 200: 4.5