Star Wars Zero Company gives you seven authored operators and only four deployment slots per mission, so half of them wait in the Den every time you head out. Unlike the randomized recruits you pull from the Recruitment station, each authored operator carries a fixed signature talent that no class swap can strip away. That single talent is what decides whether a character earns a permanent spot or spends the late campaign benched.
Quick answer: Bring Tel-Rea Vokoss and Jae Mordant to nearly every mission, round out the core with Hawks and Kabb Uppercut, and only field Trick when a mission forces him on you.
Full operator ranking
The table below sorts all seven authored operators from S-tier (best) down to C-tier, with each character’s signature talent and the specialization pairing that gets the most out of it. This reflects the launch build of the game.
| Tier | Operator | Signature talent | Best specializations |
|---|---|---|---|
| S | Tel-Rea Vokoss | Strong with the Force | Padawan / Wayseeker |
| S | Jae Mordant | Final Shot | Scout / Gunslinger |
| A | Hawks | Fearless Leader | Sharpshooter / Scoundrel |
| A | Kabb Uppercut | Uppercut | Assault / Soldier |
| B | Cly Kullervo | Combat Jump | Mandalorian Warrior / Scout |
| B | Luco Bronc | Combat Gas | Sharpshooter / Scoundrel |
| C | Trick CT-3301 | For My Brothers | Soldier / Heavy |
How the ranking works
Action Points cap what a squad can do in a single turn, and Advantage is one shared pool that everyone draws from. Talents that hand you extra actions or free kills beat talents that only stack numbers, and that gap grows on higher difficulties. Four things carry the most weight here.
- Action economy: refunding AP, granting AP, or killing without spending it.
- Exclusive access: specializations no Den recruit can replicate.
- Upgrade scaling: how much stronger a talent gets across its ranks.
- Slot cost: what you give up by bringing that operator over a custom build.
Note: class changes open in the Personnel console starting in Cycle 3. They are free, and Focus you spend on a class tree is refunded. Focus spent on a signature talent stays locked in, so the kit you pick early is not the kit you are stuck with.
S-tier: the near-permanent starters
Tel-Rea Vokoss
Tel-Rea is the only operator with the Padawan and Wayseeker specializations, and no Den recruit can be assigned to either one. That alone makes her the hardest character in the game to replace. Her signature talent, Strong with the Force, begins every turn with 2 stacks of Harmony and climbs to 6 at max rank, feeding both her lightsaber attacks and her Deflection at once.
Her real value is control. Force Push and Force Pull drag enemies out of cover from range, while Lightsaber Throw and Shockwave can hit several targets in a single activation. Push doubles as a setup tool. Place an ally on Overwatch, shove a target through that cone, and one Force ability turns into two attacks. The catch is exposure. She fights on the most dangerous ground on the map, she cannot switch to a standard class, and losing her removes the Jedi trees from that campaign entirely.
Jae Mordant
Jae carries the strongest talent in the game. Final Shot fires automatically once per turn (twice at max level) after an allied attack and executes any enemy left at 4 Health or less, with upgrades raising that threshold to 10. It costs no Action Points and no Advantage, which makes every trigger effectively a free kill.
The one condition to plan around is line of sight. Jae must be able to see the target when it drops into the health range, so you may occasionally spend AP to reposition her. Respec her into Scout and park her mid-map with wide vision, using Combat Recon to fund the squad’s Advantage. Gunslinger is the clean secondary, raising blaster damage so she can soften a group before Final Shot removes the survivor.
A-tier: strong, with one condition
Hawks
Hawks joins every story mission, so his passive is active for most of the campaign. Fearless Leader grants +1 Assist Damage to the whole squad at rank 1 and reaches +4 Assist Damage and +3 Defense at max, all without costing a turn. What actually keeps him in the core four is Pico-5, which spends Advantage to hand another operator +1 AP. That extra point every turn can swing a stalled fight into a kill.
He is fully customizable. A Sharpshooter build in the backline pairs well with a Scoundrel secondary, letting Identify Weakness guarantee a critical while feeding the assists Fearless Leader already boosts. Medic is the safer choice if injuries pile up. His defeat ends the mission outright, so keep him in cover regardless of build.
Kabb Uppercut
Kabb is the most aggressive answer to the AP problem. Uppercut rushes a target, deals melee damage that scales from 8 up to 16 (base climbs to 18 at higher ranks), pushes it backward, and refunds every Action Point spent if the blow kills. Land a knockout Uppercut and you effectively take a full turn for free.
Respec him to Assault and hunt an Uppercut kill every turn. A clean sequence is Bull Rush into range, Uppercut for the kill and the refund, then finish with the AP you got back. The knockback earns its keep even without a kill, since slamming a target into an object adds impact damage and shoving an exposed enemy through an ally’s Overwatch buys a free hit. Soldier is the best secondary, with its Strength passive pushing more targets into kill range.
B-tier: capable but crowded out
Cly Kullervo
Cly’s Combat Jump may have the highest raw power of any talent here. She leaps up to 17.0m (23.0m at max), pushes every nearby enemy out of position, and applies 4 stacks of Burning at the top rank, all without triggering Overwatch or Retaliation. Her Warrior kit backs that up with ElectroWeb Darts, which mark targets, and ElectroWeb Surge, which detonates every dart on the field.
She lands in B-tier on competition, not quality. Her jump, darts, and surge all pull from the same Advantage pool, so she needs a Scout secondary to avoid starving her own kit. And grenades plus Force Push already cover displacement and status damage, so she often spends a slot on effects the squad can produce another way. She is also locked to the Mandalorian Warrior class, which sits below the game’s top specs.
Luco Bronc
Luco is the most reliable sniper on the roster. Combat Gas grants 3 stacks of Sharpened Senses (up to 6), and each stack raises Chance-to-Hit by 5% and ranged damage by +1. One stack burns off with every ranged attack, so the talent rewards a few heavy shots over a spray of weak ones.
That math makes Sharpshooter the correct primary, ideally with a long-range weapon, paired with Scoundrel to guarantee his own crits through Identify Weakness. He is not quite good enough to hold a permanent seat, but he is the ideal promotion when a regular is unavailable for a mission, and he shines as an Overwatch partner when a teammate’s push drives a target across his firing line.
C-tier: the situational reserve
Trick CT-3301
Trick is an effective gunner, especially with a Repeater and the Soldier class AoE ultimate Rocket Strike. The problem is his signature talent. For My Brothers auto-revives him at half health (full at max) the first time he is downed each combat, and upgrades even prevent the injuries that come from going down.
The whole point of the game is keeping your operators from being downed, so his best trait only pays out after something has already gone wrong. You hope never to trigger it, which is the opposite of how the other six talents work. Pairing Soldier with Heavy adds defense, health, and the Retaliation counterattack, but that is a patch on a passive you would rather not use. That leaves him at the bottom, benched unless a mission requires him.
The pattern across the top of this list is simple. Talents that create free actions or exclusive access win out over talents that only add stats, which is why Tel-Rea, Jae, Hawks, and Kabb form the reliable core. Since class trees can be respecced for free from Cycle 3 onward, the safest long-term play is to lean on those four, promote Luco or Cly to fill a gap, and treat Trick as an emergency body rather than a first pick.
