New Jujaks and Korean character

@Rejnhard Or it could just be that nobody in the design team gives a shit about them since JSA left. We know that Gutier likes Corregidor and HB, and those factions get loads of good stuff, in terms of power, usefulness, and fun. In that sense, YJ is kinda like the Skorne of Infinity.

 

Back on topic: the only use I really see for So-Ra is in a compact hacking-haris designed to push into your opponent's face, like this:


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3
SO-RA KWON Shock Marksman Rifle, E/M Mines ( | TinBot: Firewall [-6]) / Breaker Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 34)
JUJAK (Engineer, Deactivator) Boarding Shotgun, Panzerfaust, D-Charges ( | GizmoKit) / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 30)
SHÀNG JÍ (Hacker, Hacking Device) MULTI Rifle, Chain-colt ( ) / Pistol, Shock CC Weapon. (0.5 | 41)

0.5 SWC | 105 Points

Open in Infinity Army

She solves some fireteam composition issues you can also solve with shang-jisus (IE: the haris needs a some decent gun + tinbot + hacker + engie), but her gun is more adapted to the range-band she'll operate at and she's a lot cheaper (15pts and 1.5SWC goes a long way in white banner). And she also packs E/M mine, so the haris can be pretty good at hunting down TAG hiding in cover because our messiah is still in our backlane with his zhanshi pals.

I could see something like that being somewhat capable in missions like looting and sabotaging. It's still really, really hard to justify any list composition revolving around jujiaks when shang-jis are SO much better, and unlike zuyongs don't even pack the things you're looking for in shang-jis but cheaper, like tac aware orders or HI paramedics.

 

Since my first experience with Infinity was via Operation Kaldstrom, I got funneled into WB and Sval as my starter factions (for better or worse). My first self-selected army is TAK, but I play and collect all three sectorials in N4 at this point.

I'm playing in an incredibly small meta, which means there's plenty of freedom to play unique or sub-optimal lists without worrying about getting stomped (so it's not like I'm losing a bunch of games when I play WB), and I do like the idea of YJ in general, love the orange color scheme, and am a big fan of even some of their un-loved units such as Jing Qo. That said, even with my limited experience in the game thus far, it does feel a bit off to play YJ or WB lists compared to my other options. I could tell something was missing before I even discovered the "YJ players are salty" meme, so I feel like there must be some truth to it. I'm frequently dogshit with TAK but I love playing them because of all the fun stuff I get to do with them and the build options. In the meantime, I keep buying YJ units to add to my army but it never feels like its working quite right - I'm not a long-time YJ fanboi though so I don't have any incentive to be overly invested in them or be able to win tournaments or something. I just want them to be fun.

My take is not so much that Yu-Jing motivates angry tears as it does resigned collective "mehs" from players who just want it to be more interesting.

 

That would be cool, if it wasn't a game. Especially a game that has missions with very specific needs. Sure great story but sucks if you are playing them.

 

Mind you I didn't say they are weak. Just that they are not the best at anything. They are (to my knowledge) neither bad at anything. They don't have a strength, they don't have a real weakness either (unlike PanO lack of smoke/limited tricks, Nomads' command structure, Ariadna's "hacking" and limited access to high end stuff, Haqq's dearth of solid long range shooters). They are just plain. Which in the context of a competitive game does not actually have to be a problem. Was Yu-Jing throughout Infinity history consistently a bottom tier faction? Maybe, but I do not recall. From what I can tell they seem to be competitive enough. Just... not very exciting - base line, the true vanilla. To play a plain faction is understandably less exciting than one would hope, but doesn't have to mean that they are not competitive.

 

I've been playing from the start. I can't remember if they were top tier back then but they certainly went down after loosing JSA. IA helped them to bounce back but not nearly to the level they were.

 

It is also worth noting that Vanilla Yu-Jing was very competitive in ITS 2019:

But it could be difficult to pilot.

 

I dunno. Losing JSA basically railroaded YJ into playing Kuang Shi for orders due to the huge discrepancy between Zhanshi and Kuang Shi in terms of game state effect. It also removed YJ as one of the, at the time, premier assassination run factions and killed off YJ as a strong CC faction (though CB still tries to sell us that) by removing Shinobu and Oniwaban from the line up. Losing the Raiden and Tokusetsu wasn't a big deal, but it was annoying.
The rest of JSA were janky as shit in YJ and while O-Yoroi was definitely the better TAG, neither TAG was all that great due to having no way to mitigate crits.

Just to underline this, the big loss was Oniwaban, the rest are more half completely unused and half minor annoyances losing.

They shifted gear with Uprising for YJ. Except for railroading hard into a specific style of handling orders, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it feels like they don't fully realise that this is what they've done.

I do miss the days when Pan-O were the resident forum whiners, though...

 

I legitimately don't think that these changes were thought about too deeply.

 

Uprising had a pretty big community effect too. I remember YJ was actually extremely popular among some big, positive forum voices before the Uprising split everyone down YJ, JSA and "no consumer confidence, I'm leaving" lines.

I still wish they'd pick a solid direction for the faction and work at reinventing the faction as a whole rather than trying to push quick-fix Characters like Lei Gong, who keep the faction technically feature-complete and competitive but strongly restrict variety in serious lists. I don't even think Sora was a sculpt error, I genuinely think that she was made to generate some interest in a bland WB release that wouldn't otherwise make it onto players' radars because Jujaks don't work well.

 

YJ's kind of been all over the place in the past. I'm not sure of specifics, as I only started a bit with JSA, but I recall hearing about NJ YJ being quite bad without having to rely on Ko Dali as a crutch.

Come N3, YJ was actually fairly strong. ISS was an absolute beast, and vanilla had a fairly broad toolkit with the aforementioned Onibawan to keep people scared.
Come Uprising, and things get a bit messy. I remember coming back to Infinity after a long absense around this time, and being a bit confused about not being able to use my old JSA with the Red Veil box I had just bought (oh well, my JSA stuff was old as shit and painted ugly as sin, so I'll live. I ended up doing some new JSA stuff later anyway). At the time, vanilla didn't necessarily feel weak, but there were definitely some gaps in the roster that were felt.

To make up for the losses of the Uprising, we got the Invincible Army about a year (?) too late, and it still felt like it was released a year too early. It provided a few tools that helped to enrich and fill in some of those holes in vanilla (at this point, vanilla YJ could have been considered to be quite strong), but as a faction itself, IA felt so limited and boring. To add insult to injury, the book that came out immediately after gave Dashat many of the same perks as IA with better order economy, better link options, and a whole host of tools kept locked away from IA proper. This didn't really sit well, it made IA feel like a mediocre prototype for factions that CB was actually interested in designing for.
Thankfully, IA ended up receiving a significant reworking in N4, and is in a much better place than it was in N3. Its design is now much tighter, with its identity much better represented and distinct from Dashat. The Shang Ji rework alone did so much to help with that (and also did a fantastic job of representing actual fluff development between the timeskip, so that's cool), but there's so much else that was done to help with that. CB really did a good job in giving IA and its elements a much needed glow up.

White Banner, unfortunately, did not get as extensive an adjustment. When it came out right on the tail end of N3, it definitely looked blatantly unfinished and not at all a good representation of the background it was meant to represent. I originally wrote most of it off as WB being left in an incomplete state as a stop-gap between then and the beginning of N4. No need to waste time polishing something you'll be getting rid of in a few months anyway.
But then N4 comes, and outside of sharing the Shang Ji rework that IA saw, very little is actually done to complete the faction to a satisfactory level. And here we are now, a year later, CB can't be bothered to even complete the basic dossiers for the faction (or its PanO counterpart, even) while clearly being more invested in more recent projects. It doesn't help that when WB does get attention, it feels half-hearted because even with genuinely amazing sculpting work, they manage to shit the bed marketing it, like this most recent incident.

On the vanilla side, things have never been better. Vanilla YJ is very strong. And that's really the best takeaway for a YJ player coming out of the state of things with WB. WB itself isn't even necessarily weak, it's just lacking in identity and a little bit narrow in its design.

Combined with the current disappointing condition that ISS is, the truly depressing thing about the state of YJ is just how uninterested CB seems to be in actually dealing with them. That's the consistent reoccurring theme, regardless of YJ's and its subsidiaries' positions on the power curve. IA and WB at the times of their release (and the rest of WB's life so far) just felt like obligations at times.

I'm mostly rambling at this point, but that's my two cents on the issue.

 

There is one thing YJ shines like no one. Command.
The sheer amount of Lt options, of Lt (+1 order) / +1 Command Token) options, Tactical Awarness and NCO has no pair.

And in a game where the first and most important resource is ORDERS, it is a great strenght.

 

As long as we're looking back, it's worth noting that ISS was absolutely terrible for a good part of N3. Like a very strong contender for the worst sectorial level bad, until HSN3, with all of 5 specialist load outs for specialists while missions that heavily required specialists, incredibly costly units (I think the 5 specialists were 140 points), Kuang Shi that couldn't link, and Su-Jian that basically had all stats reduced by 1 for the same price as now.
The strength shift was wild, but even so ISS, as we can see above, wasn't a sectorial that compensated for you the way that arguably OSS did (to give only one low-hanging fruit of an example)

 

Maybe it's just WB that's the problem, then... Don't all the NCO options come only from IA? I feel like one of the hopes for So-Ra was that it might have been WB's chance to get an NCO. And I think the only LT+1 order that WB has access to is Qiang Gao, who's a Defiance exclusive..

 

Yup. ISS is very light on command abilities, being mostly propped up by cheap orders, and white banner is missing them almost entirely. It's all IA, which is a really really good sectorial with a bunch of strengths and weaknesses for you and your opponent to exploit.

 

Yesterday i bought my Jujaki box.
On the side of the box where units inside are listed with their weapons So Ra has: combi rifle + HFT. Is it too optimistic to hope that both sculpt and box are right and it's just a mistake with profile?

 

I stumbled across the same info on the infinityuniverse blog with the October releases. Sculptwise she is clearly toting a HFT and not a light one. The MMR loadout should've gotten a HFT too. I mean otherwise she is as plain as a zuyong...
When I think about it:
NCO profiles for Daofei and jujak would be great. TA or albedo for Jujak, either would make them viable. lt +1 for jujak lt and Daofei lt. Give jujak fire team Haris and core and get rid of the troopers loaned from another sectorial. And you have fixed a lot of issues with white banner.
Maybe give daofei sectorial specific loadouts with AP/mono mines, or an AP spitfire probably not both things on one profile.
Make Liang Kai or at least quo wildcard and give us regular linkable monks (fireteam Haris probably, core would be too much to ask for I guess... But there are daturazi...)
Zhanshi with ava total...
Ye Mao get the APHMG option or k1 marksmanrifle they are meant to fight jotums after all...
Qo gets eclipse and an additional unlikable profile with proper camo and infiltration.
Everything is thematically better not crutching on Shang Jesus.

 

Hmm, points sort of still makes sense if she's got a HFT