Visual mods are one of the best skills in the game since they are an important factor in face to face rolls. Such an important skill should have a diverse set of counters an work-arrounds. Loosing one of them has been a negative change for the game. With so many factions, the game needs every trick possible to have unique factions, not slight variations of the same armies and profiles.
I'm gonna add in something here: The burnt state shouldn't have been removed from the game. It could have been simplified as something like: Burnt: this model cannot benefit from the Mimetism, Camouflage, Holoprojector and Holoecho skills. This state may be removed with a sucessful engineer roll.
With all the discounts to units with Mimetism -6 (for example Avatar, Achilles et cetera) it definitely would be reasonable to bring Burnt back. Flamers destroying Mimetism were great. We loved that We need it back. PozdRawiam / Greetings
Yeah, definitely did not like the Burnt removal. I also wish Tohaa would have kept a vulnerability to fire even if it was just "Fire ammunition gains AP against symbiont armor"
And impersonation would also be burnt, no? I'd argue that the Holo skills don't really deserve a spot here. Holomask doesn't really do anything after being removed the first time and Holoprojector isn't a very strong skill outside of triggering deployables not to mention having several burnt Ayyars wouldn't make it easier to spot which one is the real one
Ok, I think a better wording would be: Burn: A weapon with the burn rule causes the Burnt state if it sucessfully hits a model. Regardless if the model passes or not the armor save, it is still affected by the Burnt state. Burnt: this model may not benefit from the Mimetism skill and may not enter any marker state (Camouflage, Holoecho, Impersonation, etc) This state may be removed with a successful engineering roll. That would make the burnt state easy enough to be implemented and understood, and would work as a blanket counter to Mimetism and markers without the need for visors;
As much as I like to get back burn, saying that there are less ways to go around it is false, as there are many more tampleates than ever before-all shotguns.
It wouldn't apply to all templates, but rather be an effect of Continuous Damage - or an effect of a re-introduced Fire ammo (which would allow for non-Fire Continuous Damage)
I must admit that my go to strat for Avatar was using tiger soldier with flamer to burn ODD and then shoot it with something like Hac Tao. Important thing to remember is that Burned didn't remove basic mimetism and for camo it reduced them to mimetism -3. ODD, Holo and impersonation was completely turned off.
We would all be okay with a reduced mimetism too, something like "the burnt state reduces mimetism by 3.
I think the best solution would be to create a 'Burn' ammo type separate from continuous damage. Just like how it works nowadays that every kind of ammo is separate. So Continuous+Burn = Flamer; But you could have just Burn as a quick flash template; Or even stuff like DA+Burn for idk, a flare gun? Could be cool.
A non fire related continuous damage would be acid, viral or nano. I would love for Oniwaban to have continuous damage nano pulsers. JSA is a little light on continuous damage and that way they could have a serious ARO threat. This kind of weapon is also very thematic for the kind of assassin Oniwaban are.
I would be in favor of this change. Mimetism and marker are so, so good they need the maximum amount of soft counters. I disliked old burnt state as it just did not seem impactful enough - fully remove mimetism and I'm all on board.
