I don't know, Lei Gong just doesn't work for me. I don't think they translated his concept art well into either sculpt at all. He should be lithe and elegant with a dynamic, daring pose, but as it stands he looks more like inline skater dad.
It looks like a female Dogface. I guess she would be the other half of the upcoming Double Trouble expansion for Aristeia!.
Now that Leigong has his cards, he seems horribly bland compared to his gimmicky A! persona. The game already has rules for voluntary mechanical profile transitions that is currently unique to the Su Jian. I'm not sure why it was not used here for this character who's supposedly around transformation. I guess the Blitzen is meant to be his lightning gun? Pretty weak, it should probably be 2 blitzens or something wild like that with a stack of buffs when transformed. Likewise, 4 tactics cards around smoke, no smoke, what a joke. After being fixed, his viciously optimized set of gear should probably flow to the Liu Xing, who are bland as sand and should have a visor and should have albedo.
Yes, basically what I commented a few posts ago. After comparing so much all the HIs from all the factions, and after the losses in CC expertise or even command skills being shared so freely (all TAGs with Tac Awar, yeah) I'm of the opinion that YuJing needs a full rework and a redesign of their identity. And the the right place to do that is N4. Now it's the time. If designers miss that opportunity and they don't do an in depth redesign of the YuJing faction then they might as well erase it from the game. Definitively, the redesign of YuJing should be one of the main features of N4. There's no point in having 18 different profiles of HIs when many of them overlap in functions. Just put an example Zuyong, Wuming, Shang Ji and Qiang Gao are the same. Also many HI profiles have become pretty bland. One of the main points decided for YJ in N3 is that as the HI faction their HIs should have a huge selection of options in comparsion with PanO and the other factions. That is no longer true. One of my biggest disappointments with IA profiles was the scarce variety of equipment options for each profile. In comparison all PanO knights got a huge variety of options for their profiles with tons of specialists and the same seems to apply for the latest HI of the other armies. Whenever I look at knight profiles I see what YuJing HIs were meant to be from the beginning of the game: flexible units good at shooting and CC that can accomplish objectives on their own. The problem was always the bloat of CC skills made the units quite expensive. But knights solved this with the frenzy exploit. Despite knights in the beginning were just meant to be bland units overbloated with cc skills for self defense, PanO players complained so much that now they got perfectly self sufficient units that can fight and accomplish objectives. Also one of our identities as HI faction was meant to be the monopoly of remote presence HIs. We had SuJIan and Karakuri. That was a strong identity they could have developed more. With Uprising we lost Karakuri, furthermore Nomads got Hollomen and more recently O12 got the Betatrooper. On the other hand, YuJing doesn't compete at CC anymore, yet the faction continues paying the tax in CC bloat for a supposed expertise they don't hold anymore. We could say we are at the same level tha Nomads below factions like CA, Haqqislam that are better than YJ and far away from the CC monsters of Aleph and JSA. We have Shaolin which is cool but without DA or E/M CCW unlike Morlocks. We have ninja that makes you doubt it's a YJ unit. Then the only CC HIs are Crane, which is expensive, and Hulang which can barely make his work. That's it. Last but not least, the claimed Command faction theory. But given the fact it's not difficult for many factions to get a NCO + TacAwar (using a TAG), many armies can get already 12 orders with a single group. Even Ramah can force 13 orders. And finally the destruction of the conception of HI. Thanks to the recent proliferation of profiles of IL/MI with NWI + Shock/Bio immunity that put to shame the equivalent HIs. And which was previously followed by an increase of anti HI silver bullets (E/M ammo weapons galore) between all armies. Therefore, all these things, for a faction that was initially designed with CC and HI as their strong points and suffers strong restrictions because of that (CC tax, very polarised roster with shitty ILs, good but expensive HIs and nothing in between due to scarcity of MIs and TAGs), it means YJ doesn't stand true to any of them anymore and needs a rework.
That should probably go with in the N4 thread, if it isn't already. I agree with all of it wholeheartedly.
Yay, another redoing of YJ. Not like we had a mini-one from N2 to N3. There's some aspects of YJ that really work like it's jack of all trades nature combining low and high tech. However, there's some dilution there thanks to the toolbox master faction of the Nomads. HI variety with a purpose was something that did set YJ apart for a while. I don't really know any PanO players that have lauded their knight options though beyond the Hospitaller and the occasional Santiago and Montesa. The Sepulchre and the Teutons might not even exist for the most part (so that's a grass is greener on the other side if I ever saw it comment). There's some sameness now (I don't agree that Wu Ming and Zuyong are all that alike but the Shang Ji is a waste of space). IA was a bit of miss in general with some of its additions so that didn't help with bring YJ back to being the top of the HI class. Additional HI across the game being added has diluted that as well. Then there's headscratchers like giving Dashat the Zuyong TA profile. This dilutes (get used to that word) unique options found for YJ. Once it was ported to another faction it degraded that. So while I don't agree with everything Janzerker has presented (and he yells it more then enough around the forums) it does feel like YJ is sitting in limbo of an identity thanks to Uprising, a lackluster IA, and additions being added to other factions. JSA gave YJ that CC edge and that's gone and never coming back and IA tried to fill some holes but came up short in execution and design. For N4 will any of that get fixed? I'm doubtful. Maybe some slight tweaks here and there but a wholesale redesign? I'm not seeing it but I would be happy if something was done.
