To my mind, it makes perfect sense for Saito not to be a specialist in JSA. Isn't the background as to why he became a mercenary in the first place that he royally screwed up an important protection job, got his client killed, and ran away, thus gaining outlaw status and a death sentence from his own ninja clan? If I were on JSA high command, I certainly wouldn't trust him with the responsibility to do anything other than killing things. At least, that's what my head-cannon says, because, yes, losing an infiltrating specialist with smoke and TO Camo stings a bit. But, we still do have specialist ninjas, which are only slightly worse than Saito, stat-wise (though totally lacking smoke), but they have the added bonus of being able to accomplish actual classified objectives, in addition to mission objectives, and that's a big plus, and they're all cheaper than Saito, at least by a few points. And if you were taking Saito just to kill things (other than AC2 units, because why on earth isn't monofilament Anti-Materiel?), why would you not take an Oniwaban instead, which is better in pretty much every way? So, thematically, not having specialist Saito makes sense to me, but, I've been a RPG nerd for most of my life, and generally, story trumps rules, as far as I'm concerned. We'll just have to harness the fighting spirit of the samurai and find some way around this loss. And Saito and his smoke are still in the faction, so maybe just team him up with a specialist ninja buddy to do the button pushing for him, in some sort of Lone Wolf and Cub type of scenario.
Game balance nerds to be a priority, however, above fluff. JSA's gimmick should not be "they are bad at the game." You don't want this to be like GW where they made overpowered forces and then were like "Duh, Daemons should be overpowered, they're daemons."
I really don't think the loss of one specialist operative profile, of one super squishy and easily killable dude, renders the entire faction unplayable, or even bad. There are other things that can take his place, or work with him, as I stated in my post. The loss of that profile isn't really going to impact my love of the faction, or enjoyment of the game, is all I was trying to say.
The sectorial has pretty serious problems, but Saito was one of the best pieces in it. JSA is actually fairly reliant on smoke, but it only has 3 ava 1 pieces with smoke.
So...make a list and a plan that doesn't rely on smoke? With only three, relatively expensive, models in the faction with smoke, it seems like maybe the idea is that shouldn't be something the faction counts on.
I think the answer for the thread was given several times by me and officially so it has served its purpose.
