I mean, my Zhencha and Daofei get along just fine. Give the Hulang a marker state, and I'd probably use all three.
I don't think the hulang will ever have a place in IA unless they rework the entire sectorial. ATM budget's too tight, he has a lower priority than zhenchas who are the only guys capable of hunting jammers/hackers on rooftops and the lack of midfield presence means he usually ends up as a very fancy speedbump. In Vanilla he is mostly outshined by both daofei and kanren, but could probably carve a room for himself if he was slightly cheaper (as much as I hate it, the frenzy discount would be a perfect fit).
He has been good for me on Objective Room missions which he's accounted for himself pretty well as a big threat and Daofei kind of suck at those missions, but other than that it hasn't felt great outside of Looting and Sabotaging in which he's probably the single best option in the faction to do that mission.
It's hard for me to imagine Daofei sucking at anything... ...except having models for the right profiles.
He's 50+ points of struggles to hold the room effectively and he's not particularly effective at managing to bully out a tough link team that may be inhabiting it. Knights for example will basically laugh him off whereas you toss a smoke grenade in there and the Hulang starts running at the room they start shitting themselves. Even something like a Hollowman or Brigada link can take alot of orders to kill even a couple of them fully whereas the Hulang can basically either IMM-2 or chop them all to bits. Daofei is also very susceptible to having smoke thrown at him in there and getting his gun shoved up his ass by your garden variety warbands in CC.
Sure, but how come the Hulang in your example gets support but the Daofei doesn't? The Hulang is better in this situation, but he's not great at it, even landing the EM grenades on his pathetic-for-a-HI PH of 12 is hard, of course his PH is already "high" to be optimized with his overpriced mono CCW.
Because there is relevant support for the Hulang, smoke. You can't really assist the Daofei meaningfully to help it fight the targets in the room better with its gun. Smoke also really doesn't help the Daofei in this regard it only hinders it. They're not a very good investment in Objective Room missions due to the CQB nature of it. Things like Zencha are actually quite good due to mines and they're relatively cheap compared to the Daofei so they're more expendable. At the same time though if you need to kick a bunch of Knights out of the room they're still not super efficient at it, the Hulang is. It's the one thing he is actually pretty good at. I wouldn't call them a great all round profile but there are a couple of missions where they inhabit a decent niche as a solid pick for Vanilla.
Hulang profile was released recently, it has a concrete design (maybe even taking N4 plans into account) and CB is NOT going to change it It is an ITS mandated unit solely in the game so IA players would have a reliable option for Looting & Sabotage, same as Montesa for Varuna, Andromeda for OSS and Hippolyta for O12. You might also find that those profiles are not optimal.
@Azuset To destroy your opponent's antenna in looting and sabotaging you can only use CC attacks with an antimaterial weapon. So a zhencha can do a melee attack with D-charges, but D-charge CC attack are at -3 so you're hitting on 12. Quite unreliable.
I guess its a toss up. Get lucky and go first. Get unlucky and go second and hope your opponent does not gun down your Hulang in hopes that he can melee an antenna. Or have unreliable attacks from a Zencha. Sounds like a bad mission to take IA into.
Nah. You drive Tai Sheng up there with a looted D-charge and at least a Haris. That's reliable in a way neither Zhencha nor Hulang can achieve. Although my usual solution for tournaments with missions like that is to play JSA.
