All the hoverbikes are Hackable! Even the Nomads will have to respect flash bots and midfield Camo; even though the Go-Pod is stupidly cheap for what it does I'd have to expose a Swiss Guard to trade down when it comes to Hacking, and like hell they're getting an Engineer where a hoverbike wants to be unless they've set up something crazy with a Tomcat. Not to mention, I have my secret weapon... LOCUSTS! They finally got a Marker! Nothing can stop me now! Mwahahaha!
For those points it also gained a second order for the controller (replacing the one lost on Impetuous) and those orders are now Regular. You may not want that on this particular model, but it is what it is. No cover sucks, not going to lie, but let's be honest here - it's not like the impetuous bearpode was hurt by it much previously anyway. Everyone lost the +3 range on vision-blocking grenades, and at least dogs and bears are hurt less by it than others - not every smoke carrier gets PH 16 you know? On TI: compared to N4, you got vulnerability to Breaker and E/M, also - to Flashpulse, but that would be true even with new TI version. Save maybe for an occasional e/m mine, not much of these damage types in ARO. You are more vulnerable in reactive turn, though. All in all - despite being "dead", I still expect to see the Bears up to their AVA in every Ariadna list I'll see in N5. Vehicles are kinda sorta broken, yeah. They are also sharply overtuned towards active turn aggression, I guess designers intended them to be vulnerable in reactive due to No Cover and huge silhouette - I would compare them in that regard to N4 Bearpode, actually.
I really fail to see how one can make such a claim whithout having played/faced the profile, or even played a single proper N5 game yet... I think we should all go easy on such peremptory statements (also valid for the other ones we constantly hear these days "this unit is now useless", "this is broken", "my faction is dead", etc...) and wait. We need to assimilate the ruleset, play a lot of games with different lists and matchups, see what kind of meta will emerge, etc... We should also keep in mind that this N5 is a newborn and definitely not the final N5. A lot of fixes and modifications (rules, profiles, etc...) will occur in the coming months and will draw a different picture. P.S: Bearpode was an abomination. Was it overnerfed? I don't know, possibly, but I'm glad its previous form doesn't exist anymore.
The bear was a monster, overpowered no doubt about it, but the profile was over nerfed, you dont have to be a rocket scientist to see it. Bording is not worth running now, chain rifle is still useable.
I would prefer to remove the Bearpode of the game rather than MRRF, Caledonia or USARF. Or just remove kosmoflot instead and remake it down the line with actual astonauts.
Thank you for illustrating my previous message with a good example of peremptory statement to be avoided for now...
My poor Kerail now throws smoke grenades at 11's on it's good profile and 10's on the bad one, so basically a coin toss. It's true that some profiles were too good throwing grenades (for example, linked warbands), but others now need a rebalance pass.
Yeah, it feels a bit too random now... And I hate situations (like pushing buttons or now throwing smoke) when you have to spend one order, two orders, three orders, etc... just to move on with your plan. It can mess up you entire turn. I'd say that rule changes that are making this situations more frequent are bad. They could've nerfed Smoke in a different fashion. Actually, it was already nerfed with the FT changes, probably it was enough.
I don't agree on Ariadna. I think it depends on who they are going against. The rest of Ariadna has plenty to offer. No they can't just use the bear crutch. Like I said before Bears are still going to be difficult for me with Starmada. Not to bad with my YJ. Starmada has very little that can just power through his ARM. As I said, other than nanopulsars, nothing that can cause damage on BTS. Also very little E/M weapons. I have tons of PARA weapons but with PH16 he either can just make the save or gets out of it soon after.