Yes, I would. My first comment on this very thread was that I expected the Zhencha to be a Zuyong with Camo, probably Forward Deploy L2 instead of infiltrate, and hopefully with Engineer profiles. Instead it's not even Shock Immune, let alone 2W. It has all the disadvantages of HI and barely one of the 'advantages' (Fairy Dust protects it). At no point did CB come out and say, "Hey, 2W makes camo and infiltration really fricking expensive, so we may not be getting traditional HI statlines." That alone would have helped greatly.
It doesn't help, but it's not like the Daofei is in the sectorial... (grumble, cuss, etc for those reasons) Like I said, I was expecting the Zhencha to be less than a Daofei, because it's hard to put two Daofei into a list. I just wasn't expecting it to be this much less, that's for sure. But it's not significantly better than a Guilang, either. I was expecting the Zhencha to be between Daofei and Guilang!
I think its different from the guilang and dao fei. And truely think thats better than a unit with plain stats + camo. Its just as durable, and often more than most infiltrating specialists. It has climbing+ with camo, which only one other profile in the entire game has, and thats a character (Bran). It has high mov and arm without suffering movement penalties. It comes with weapons neither the guilang or dao fei does. Its a specialist with BSG (not as common as you think). Sure, it could have been a true 2W HI or come with shock imm, but if that would have cost it skills like climbing+ or some of the weapons, then no thanks. I'll take the current zhencha!
In some senses, he's able to soak up a wound which is not a Shock ammo. C+ does good button pusher IMO. Aside from that, You seems to be VERY disappointed from IA til now. I know that feel, It does stink. But you're now a little bit over-sharp at this moment; I cant find the wits in your comments which you shows a lot in other comments. Chill out, bro. Show us 'Normal' Section9 quotes. I think disappointments are making you quite edgy and aggressive.
I actually find dao fei pretty no frills as it is. Its basically a standard HI profile with camo and infiltration. Giving that a cheap specialist profile and an SMG would still leave it sitting in the mid to low 40s. I dunno about you, but I don't value tanking a mine at 10 extra points. Especially as it would likely cost us climbing+ too. The zhencha sits at around the upper limit of what you want to pay for a button pushing specialist. Anymore and you're really needing it to start pulling the gun-fighting. As it is right now, I expect IA to bring some more than competent gun fighters to the party to do that heavy lifting while zhencha climb over walls, kill the scraps and push the buttons.
I expect I will. I do wonder how they will differentiate it from our current stock of baller gunfighters though.
Another random thought about the Zhencha; they might be good for throwing over the middle line to counter-deploy against enemy skirmishers. Don't have to worry about silly mine games if the minelayers get blammed with a shotgun the first time they try to move. Even Dart probably wouldn't be happy about an enemy camo marker on the same roof from Order 1, denying cover and range band exploitation, and attempting to actually place a mine will inevitably result in being shot.
Or not. Like, you know, all the rest of "just wait, YJ players, everything is gonna be awesome" that we'd been fed this year.
Well the feuerbach is supposed to be a PanO manufactored weapon as far as i know and PanO didn't get that very early either. Fluff and gameplay do not always mesh very well.
By all means, shoot Dart while she deploys a mine. Maybe she'll take a wound, but then she SMGs the shit out of you while the mine blows out in your face and she goes on her merry way having already made her points back (or more, if you took BSG Zencha) and deprived you of your probably only skirmisher. Because, you know, she has Bioimmunity to go along her NWI.
...And after a short trip to Army, it seems you are 100% correct. Now I actually am upset. Which idiot thought that profile up? The only thing Zhencha has on that is Specialist status-worth 1 point- and full Infiltration. Which means that it is paying 5 points or so just to be hackable, EM vulnerable, and has less weapons and utility. And a damn Skirmisher with unavoidable two-wounds-to-Null? Unit classifications really are meaningless. On the positive side at least, I did think of a different way to deal with that, Engaging. And Dart is still an edge case. A very upsetting edge case, but hey, at least it does help differentiate factions. On a non-whiny note, anyone know how the AHD compares to other HI AHDs? Having one right by the enemy Deployment Zone to hack TAGs or heavy HI could be fun, but I'd be worried about losing against Swiss Hackers and other high-end types. Still trying to think up new scenarios so we can get a good picture of situations the Zhencha can succeed in, anyone else have good ideas? Another small note: given the Hackable status, and the unit logo, this unit would have been a decent platform for the tactical bow. Silent would finally see the light of day!
I'd say that it might work with some EVO support. I see EVO as almost mandatory in my future MO lists, and IA might be in the same place. I really hope we'll see silenced versions of some weapons one day. SMG, Marksman Rifles... say, Silent, -1 DAM.
You're right, I have been really down about IA. In 3rd Offensive, PanO got stuff sufficiently awesome that I want to play PanO. A complete change from not even a month before, when we all 'joked' that PanO did not get nice things. #PanOCanHazNiceThings! The selected poster children for IA are uninspiring, to be most polite about it. And uninspiring is the last thing you want for your poster children! It's WIP13 BTS3, plus marker state. In PanO, it loses to De Fersen, Father Knights, and ties with Santiagos (but the Santiago will win because of the KHD>AHD relationship). A Swiss is just barely better (WIP13, BTS6, marker state). In YJ, it ties with Daofei, loses to Hac Tao and Crane. A Shang Ji has better BTS but lacks marker state. Big threat in YJ would definitely be a Hac Tao's WIP14 BTS6 KHD. In Nomads, it ties with a Mobile Brigada, but that's not the threat you need to worry about (it's a normal HD). You need to worry about the Killer Hacker(s). There are no Haqq HI AHDs You don't want to get within hacking range of the Combined Army, anyway, but there are no HI AHDs. An Asura will eat your brain with Redrum, don't even try it. NA2 is more of a pain than I want to dig through.
Mobile Brigada for Starco. That's it. No other HI Hackers in NA2 yet. Druze and Ikari are going to be choke full of Pitchers and KHD/AHD Druze who are a wound away from HI stats, though.
Partly expectations, partly that the profiles just simply aren't much different from what we have already (and that the whole "lose JSA troops = new design space" thing is, so far, a total joke). The new skills/combinations on the Liu Xing and Zhencha aren't particularly great. Liu Xing appears to be resting its laurels on Explode LX and the better part of 2W; Zhencha's selling point seems to be C+. Those profiles aren't particularly interesting, to say nothing of their power level (which may be ok). For a 'first look' at a long awaited and much desired Sectorial, especially when we also see an MO rework at basically the same time, these units are just but...meh. That's something of a conflation. The nebulous 'We' don't want them to create imbalance; but 'We' did want them to be more interesting than, "This one has AD and a one use ability!" and, "It's a cheaper, slightly deflated Daofei with Climbing Plus." There are good things about these units, but they're an excitement-puncturing first look for some of us.
While I fully agree when it comes to Zhencha, I fail to see the problem with Liu Xing. It's a durable AD trooper, with ability to severely punish poor deployment, fairly standard weapon options, and another specialist choice aside from the usual AHD. I don't understand what else it should be doing to be more interesting. When compared to Tiger, Akal, Crusader, Ragik, Hellcat, etc - it definitely has its own flavour and niche.
This is probably its best trait. I mean, all AD troops do this. Liu Xing has ELX, which might be good (hopefully) but that's an unknown at this point. Sure, SO is nice, but they come with the innate HI Hacking vulnerability, which is not to be dismissed lightly. AHD definitely increases cost by a significant amount, but it brings some possible counters to enemy Hackers that hang around in deployment, as opposed to being nigh helpless vs them. I don't think the Liu Xing is necessarily bad, but I think it lives on a knife edge for viability; a very black-and-white unit: it'll either fuck shit up hard, or get its shit shoved in even harder. I don't know either, to be honest! But to me it doesn't feel particularly flavourful - it's a slightly uptanked Tiger.
I would like to say something positive about the zencha because the first rumours about it were something to get quite excited over. The reveal punctured that expectation savagely and the more I've looked at it the harder it has been for me to see what there is to be excited about for it. It's ARM 3/BTS3, NWI with climbing plus and multi-terrain on a camo-trooper that infiltrates. On top of that all profiles are specialists of some kind. That's not bad and probably why some people can see some play in it. At 34-41pts it's about where you might expect a half-way house between the guilang and the daofei to be. It can get about better than either of those two plus shotguns and SMGs are pretty solid armaments for a camo trooper. That might sound good and to be honest, on the surface of it you could be forgiven for doing so. The "However" comes in part from the expectation for this unit. It's HI, which means it's hackable in all forms, E/M ammo not only isolates it but immobilises it as well. Up until now (with the exception of Ariadna) HI meant 2 wounds, often BS 13 as well. This has neither of those benchmarks and the rest of its stat-line is mediocre to average at best. The only stand-out quality of this unit is climbing plus. For a unit trumpeted in quite enthusiastic style by Bostria it's really lacking because what is there to love about fielding this unit? Of the most talked about problems others also have with this unit are mines. I've faced a lot of mine-networks and camo spam and the zencha hates them. It's unimpressive at discovering other markers and even supposing you always manage to only trigger 1 ARO at a time, a 25% chance of death isn't what I want for a 34+ pt model. Mines massively limit where the zencha can go, in some ways making the advantages it has from climbing plus irrelevant. Similar are koalas and madtraps. The zencha wants no part of that experience. It is really quite poor when it comes to dealing with other camo troops and mid-field units. All of the zencha's weapon options (save the D.E.P) only give a bonus mod to hit within 8" making it also not very accurate if you can't get close because of mines and perimeter weapons. Not to mention hacking! With a very average Wip of 13 even though forward observing isn't something you see often it's likely to be the best option a zencha has to win a mid-range shoot-out. Flash pulse is kind of cute as well I guess but (and this is perhaps the unfair bit) pretty much all of this can be done as well or better by pre-existing models that have been left out of IA. The zencha whatever profile you take doesn't feel like it can easily contribute directly to the game. Climb down an inaccessible ledge and push a button isn't amazing and not something you particularly want to spend 30+ points on. I have tried a game with it, the results were pretty uninspiring because as said earlier mines really limit where this model can go and it had a miserable time trying to engage. I am also, really struggling to make lists with this model. For what seems to be a late game piece that really wants others to clear out the problems first, it is sucking up quite a lot of points making it that much harder to solve those problems. This is especially true of IA where most of the models are going to be in the 25-40pt bracket. It's one of the only mid-field units we know about for IA and it's pretty vulnerable when going second. Doesn't have to get killed, a sensor bot can discover it and proceed to let a hacker deal with it. (Isolated, immobilised or killed the zencha is likely not contributing afterwards in any meaningful way.) I'm just too disappointed about it to give it benefit of the doubt any more.
