A BJ with auto cannon is dead weight and a worse Tank hunter, at least with the T2 sniper they are valuable aro pieces. I mean, it could work but I would never replace the T2 sniper for it. I was expecting the +1 burst for the hmg because of the belt and so on but I guess it defeats the point of the available haris. But at the same time the army needs bufs or a proper redesign without losing the charm and working in tactical window and and and ... and this is such a mes of a sectorial.
The autocannon isn't garbage on a Morat, yet somehow it's "deadweight" on a Blackjack? Real-talk: Blackjacks are a big mess. It all comes down to them not backdating profiles. That HMG profile is a perfect candidate for Full Auto. The actual Blackjack(and I guess the Ratnik but less), in general, has also been a good candidate for Traktor Mul Control Devices or some kind of tech. Not like they didn't just chuck Fireteam Duo and a Deactivator on the dang Ratniks, right?
Looking over USARF, at first I was dismayed, and I think for good reason, the Ohio which desperately needed further differentiation from Grunts and Marauders became even more similar. That said, I think there is a TON of functional difference in the army. B4 Snipers shooting through smoke? That's new. Bikes which bring their own smoke then direct template through them? Also awesome and new. Devil Dog with Heavy Shotgun just became insanely good, and a ton cheaper, and it was already my favorite before. Even though the changes are subtle, I think there are a number in key places that will have a positive effect on USARF as a whole... sadly though not for Ohio.
I think the issue people are seeing is that there was no fix for the tactical window problem. The faction has always been set up as a quantity over quality. There are next to no options that stack strong mods and ARM has always been an overpriced stat. There is little to no presence of new abilities that exist in the game and it just felt like USARF was really out of date compared to armies like TAK. Before the claim was that was the factions weak point, well now the factions strength is out of the game so what now? We were hoping for it in the previous lite update and then didn't get it. We were hoping for it now and still didn't get it. Every faction in the game got some points rebalancing so did our buffs really put us anywhere ahead? Its hard to tell that part, but it is still easy to see that the large glaring holes that have existed in the faction for several years are still there right now. My initial lists have me mostly spamming older units to extreme now while maintain one power link. Characters still seem to dominate and it just feels like poor internal unit design. Then we come back to the MM thing. Like if you are a designer, how could you not know its a problem? How could keep buffing Marauders into space and think anyone would want to bring the biggest dud unit ? The trouble is they actually changed it so someone did apparently think about it. Someone thought lets give them +2 CC, heavy pistols, and AP CC weapons. Adding a sup par CC fighter is exactly what the factions who struggled winning F2F needs. This is where my disappointment stems from. It seems like the company doesn't know where the faction is supposed to go right now. It probably needs new units and a full redesign to bring it up to speed. And that probably means it will be several years before any of that happens.
i suggested that last year but everyone shot it down.... also did anyone notice the minutemen LT lvl 2 option?
Kurgat autocannon is pretty garbage - high swc, BS 11, no visibility mods. It wasn’t until pretty late in N3 before it gained linkability, even, and that was in a Haris that cost yet more SWC. I haven’t verified all this in N4 yet, but I’m not optimistic.
It's +1 command token, not LT lvl 2. Still nice. In other news, Airborne Rangers are still nowhere to be seen. Wonder if they're still tweaking it, or it's just a bug.
They're in Vanilla, and the Sectorial chart, bear in mind it's currently before 9am on a Saturday for CB.
If it is correct, pretty funny. My Marauder Core of UKR AP Spitfire, 2 x HRL, Rosie, and Rifle/HF looks pretty enjoyable.
Lots to quote, but I pretty much disagree, lol. I've been playing USARF since they came out and literally wrote the guide on it. ARM now is far more relevant than before and we're the faction full of it. I've always advocated that their strength isn't in running 16-20 order lists, but it's been that they get low SWC weapons, and plenty of fire ammo, and a good amount of AP as well. The only times I can think of when I ran over 15 orders have been to spam infiltrators, which I never thought was a winning strategy competitively. Minutemen are a disappointment for sure, I really wish they just made them 6-2, that's all it would take to make them interesting enough to use. But oh well, they didn't ask me, haha.
Feels like they didnt ask anyone about what to do with the Minuteman. Not you, us, or even anyone internally. They feel like a elementary school students homework assignment, that they put off until 10 minutes before class started, and they panicked and scribbled down someone elses assignment and just tweaked it enough to attempt to make it look different. But we all noticed it really wasn't. F-
I have read all you books. (Including the Ogre kingdoms ones) and I know all your secrets! :P I would suggest USARF in N3 worked best around 18 orders. This is mainly because the 3 best units in the sectorial were sub 13 points. That being the 2 AP Desperado, the LSG Hardcase, and the basic point grunt. The first two models, could do more work than anything in the roster for their cost. The desperado especially. If your opponent lets you get in close he will rip units in the 80-90 point range to shreds. The hard case is an amazing soft ARO. The grunt meanwhile is the most optimized unit in the army for his task (cheap cheerleader/link) and one of the best uses of ARM in the game. Arm is still looking over costed. All I see different is the crit spot but that wasn't the problem. Leveraging skewed math is the secret to this game and arm does it the worst. During your active turn 9/10 times you want to be ensuring you are weighting your chances to win before taking risks. Avoiding fights where there is too high a chance to lose until you absolutely have to. The blackjack is a great example here of how arm fails. He is decently priced at 36 points, but if you take away all his arm and trade it for basic mimetism his chance to kill a Q-drone goes from 38%v26% to 51%v21%. As cool as a Blackjack is, he struggles to win against the F2F. This brings me to the other reason for 18 orders. Its is because most of the expensive units in the N3 list really kind of sucked. Excluding Van Zant anything over 30 points was a subpar choice. Why? Because they failed stack mods to win fights. You end up paying a ton of points for something that struggles to do its job. The math backs it up. The % difference for taking elite guys isn't there for what you pay for. The best elite unit in the army is the Marauder all of which perform well for their sub 30 cost and can link to punch above their weight. In almost every other case the right choice used to be bring another desperado vs limiting your order pool.
Agree 100% that the desperado and hardcase are the best things in this sectorial. I normally sat at around the 18-19 model count. The 15 model cap makes these units harder to justify bc it limits your regular orders that much more and you have to fill your list with expensive stuff to get to 300 points. I keep making lists at around 270 points and 15 slots. Hiding AD is also going to be impossible in this sectorial bc no one will believe that your list has 14 models (makes VZ not just probable, but obvious)
I want to believe that a Minuteman rework is part of USARF 2.0 whenever it's time to refresh them, but I don't actually expect that now... unless you build to 14, then watch your opponent split their AROs covering the back feild...
Haha, we'll you're clearly a person of distinction and character! :) I used to play some 16-18 order lists, but always found myself lacking the firepower I wanted. Having the board control was definitely nice though, you really won't be able to take more than a few of the bargain units. I ended up gravitating towards 14/15 order lists pretty quickly with dual links, backed up by a couple powerful attack pieces. Now, another travesty we can get on board with is Targeted not switching Speculative Fire from -6 to +3, lol. Looks like I'll be putting the Urugan guns back on my Katyusha. Neither are Guided anymore either. It's probably overall a good thing, but I used to love my speculative fire spam, haha. I get your math on ARM, but I don't think it's quiet that simple. It's not about winning the F2F and killing the opponent, it's about wasting their order so they have to do it again. Winning the F2F is better than passing the ARM save sure, but I think that armor is not as expensive of a stat as mimetism. Having ARM3 on a cheap ARO can be the difference between the enemy needing to spend an extra order or two performing a task, which is why I love Grunt Snipers so much, though I can't possibly tell you why they got BS Attack (Shock), other than someone not paying attention, lol. I believe in the leaked test army app they were +3 BS, which was incredible, but I'm guessing it was a last minute change to make it less OP, while not remembering that sniper rifles already were shock ammo. If we had my way, we'd have Minutemen with 6-2 Movement and Regeneration... But I rarely get what I want.
