Your post is quite long but I want to pull out a single bit. You raise some good points about balance and I agree that the total cost and army context are more important than the individual breakdowns for single stat points, skills, or weapons. However, when specific items so visibly impact the cost/balance of a trooper it becomes very visible to players, especially when they are unevenly distributed between factions. Units like Riot Grrls and Hollow Men get discussed a lot because as a whole, HI often feel like a poorly optimized category in the game. For something like an HI-themed sectorial, it’s very easy to look at such units and imagine how much stronger, say, IA might feel if key units had Frenzy. It’s not that the rule has no downsides, but people feel like they could compensate for them with the points they would save. Another example would be the new Nox hacker profile with an SMG. Basic hackers frequently are considered too expensive, and here’s one with a big points discount. An SMG has some downsides relative to a Combi, but it also has advantages. And most importantly, it’s on a profile that mostly wants to stay out of gunfights and would only gain marginal utility from the longer range of a Combi anyway. So the obvious question - why are Nox special? Why can’t my Vanguard hacker take an SMG as well? Or a Fusilier? While it’s important to look at the whole army context, CB also needs to think about what signals it sends when some units are really efficiently optimized for a specific task and others are expensive without having a lot to show for it. And please note that I’m not talking about “toolbox” units that pay a lot of points because they are competent at several things. This is mostly a criticism of older units that were designed to fill basic core roles and haven’t been kept up to date with the ongoing design philosophy.
CB has discussed before that they not only stat up a unit and see where it costs out, they also have an idea of how much they want it to cost in relation to the rest of the army. and will adjust skills and equipment to get it to the cost they want. So I'm really confused by Krit, because 39-48pts is far more expensive than IA can afford as an army.
"Toughness" isn't something that an Engineer needs, considering there are already more durable specialists.
Lol. So we're all going to pretend MO didnt spend years asking for a santiago Engineer (still didnt get that FYI) A Tough Combat specialist is always powerful. even more so in a faction/sectorial that leverages the strengths of that specialist in multiple ways, and few lists use an engineer as often as a HI list. A HI Engineer is far superior to a 1W ARM1 LI engineer, should I start listing the ways things like spec fire/AD/Camo/Impersonators trivially remove the squishy unit? relative to the Linked HI?
Only because having an Engineer in a HI fireteam is amazing. If they could have a Machinist in the team nobody would have been asking for that.
So can we stop the complaining about krit now? And no, a 1W squishy trooper in a HI link is not something that would have been asked for. (Especially given the reaction to order sergeants in HI links) But hey, gymnastics are fun
I know because the 3 MO players at my shop would have been over the moon at that. You don't represent all of PanO.
Never said i did. But i get to put up with their complaints Amd complaining order sergeants in a link are bad because they are 1w lynchpins to strip the bonus is something they do. As would some here im sure. But apples and oranges. You said it yourself an engineer in a HI link is amazing.
Let's ignore the fact he is vulnerable to the very same attack you need a Engineer if you play HI links for (I. E. E/M, which is super common now) and the fact he is extra expensive in an already extra expensive Sectorial. So yes, I'd rather link a Gongchen or, hell, the ideal solution would be a MI Engineer. Anyway, all of this started because "Zuyong are undercosted", but the fact is I don't see IA lighting the meta on fire anywhere. IS remains the best Sectorial out of the TWO YJ has (how does PanO having 4 Sectorials feel like? Must be so hard, especially when half of them were reworked and the other one is new and has the busted ultraefficient Kamau link and Helots. I bet we get a Neoterra rework in the next 6 months)
Flahs news, I'm not taking an Engineer to tank HI. Also, point cost, or else we could say the Guijia is great to tank HI, which it is not. Anyway, this is going nowhere. IA Is underwhelming, Krit is even more underwhelming, and many YJ players still have the feeling CB just doesn't give a shit about the faction, if not worse, and they certainly are not addressing that fact with this kind of releases when you compare them to things like Varuna/Shas/Ramah/Dashat
Comrades, this talk is bad for the State Empire! The bigger the adversity, the greater the glory of the win! The Invincible Army is unstoppable, and it has SUPREME AESTHETICS! High quality designs the decadent west lacks! Smash the PanO hegemony!
Give Krit SMG profile. Problem solved. SMG can fix any shitty unit, even if it has Automedikit bloat. Just ask Malignos. Sad shelf dwelling bug is so happy now.
A lot of complains boils down to "X is bad, because the only proper way to create a unit/sectorial/to play is <insert example here>". This is obviously not true, there's more than one way to run an Engineer, Specialist, HI, etc. A lot of it relies on the rest of the sectorial, and to me IA is better at utilizing such expensive units than for example MO (speaking of which, I'm really interested how IA players view MO compared to their own army). On a side note having Automedikit either cheaper or better should fix some problems here. I really like the suggestion of it being really automatic.
Objectively speaking, the only good way to run an Engineer is safely from the back, healing via G: Servant, only making a push on objectives when all other avenues of contesting it are exhausted. That's why Krit's bad, he's paying a premium for stats he will never use, and advanced deployment options that actively bring him closer to danger. It's the same reason people agree that other similar Engineers, like the Caliban and Tomcat, are trash also.
Simply because Krit is too expensive while not providing sufficiently unique toolkit, changing the two Combi profiles to SMG would literally fix everything wrong about them and possibly change peoples opinion about the third profile as well. (Let's brush aside that SMG is basically pure points bloat and not a discount like it is for the Nox since Krit already has double Heavy Pistol) Roughly 33 for the FTO and we're looking at points cost where he starts being a regular feature.
