Fairy Dust will be your friend. We don't have the whole picture yet. I remain cautiously realistic that we will have some countermeasures to make up for it. That's why most tournaments allow you to bring more than one list. One's going to have to have more hacking protection for those Nomads and CA matchups. I was actually talking about the AD with Boarding Shotgun, but the Infiltrator does have D-Charges so it's not a total wash.
I really freaking hope so, because my old Samurai 7 lists (DoTanko Link, O-Yoroi, Yojimbo, Keisotsu Hacker, Doc, and Engineer) have been mauled pretty bad by AHDs before.
It's two profiles that aren't exactly the maineline units. Still have Zuyongs, Shang Ji, Yan Huo, Hac Tao. Now, if the rest of them are this pseudo HI then there will be a problem. We have a sniper with mines (potentially a visit), an engineer/support HI, and another heavy S5. I will be very surprised if all of those are 1.5 W HI. Plus we have this other new unit that hasn't been revealed yet.
I'm worried about the Daoying, but the other ones not so much. Considering the increased AVA on Gongcheng, I am beginning to doubt Haidao would be Engineers, probably focusing more on the special part of "special support". I'm thinking this is the main source of sectorial's Killer Hackers. And you know... the whole "pirate/corsair" part of the translation doesn't really fit with a unit that helps people up and patches them up again...
Sure, the new profiles aren't the only thing. Shang Ji, as they currently are, are super expensive for little benefit; Hac Tao/Yan Huo are very expensive, but at least they're good; Zuyong are good for their cost, but they quickly ramp up the cost of a list. The Shang Ji desperately needs a rework, and given the profiles they just displayed, I'm not confident in CB's ability to make them worthwhile, but we'll see. I agree that I wouldn't expect all of the other unknown profiles to be 1.5W HI, although now it wouldn't surprise me if the Haidao, at least (possibly also Tai Sheng, although that's supposedly a Zuyong Character), is 1.5W. And then if they do rework the Shang Ji, how expensive is it going to be? This is supposed to be a HI sectorial, with the capability to go full HI - is that simply a tagline when it's literally possible to go all HI, but that means you only get 6-8 models in a list? Honestly, I'm not holding my breath for IA to be good. There might be some good stuff for Vanilla, but as it stands my expectations for IA are pretty much at rock bottom.
ooof, tbh I agree with the OP and hold out hope you guys get something useful. From where I stand, Yu-Jing is taking PanO's place as Bostria's whipping boy/torture doll...
Also funny that the faction that was supposed to have the most Heavy Infantry had the same amount as PanO. Maybe I'll proxy my whole army using PanO MO rules. At least their HI have Martial Arts! BTW, as far as I can as of now, not a single IA has Martial Arts! And if the Hulang does, that means only 1! Meanwhile the “Police” ISS have Crane and Hsien. Bring all of Yu Jing to a grand total of 2 or 3. PanO has 8 heavy infantry with Marital Arts!!!!! JSA currently stands at 5.
MO were always meant to be an HI sectorial and personally I'm not married to the idea that HI should have superior close combat ability. I would be much happier if CB worked with the medium instead of the half-measure that is Zhencha that took the worst parts of MI and the worst parts of HI. It's funny how Zhencha has been the single miniature that Bostria hyped hardest about and is the one release that is worse received than Uprising (if we look at the number of people disliking it, rather than how vocal people are)
Zhencha is very disappointing, they just drop the HI and make it SK and it becomes a much better unit. Though hacking gets mentioned a lot all the EM ammo is also big HI hate. Particularly the EM grenade rain which NA2 has been making more popular.
I want Martial Arts because it's a Faction/Country steeped in martial art as a culture. Granted, the cultural revolution really hurt that, but it's still there! I got into this game in the first place because of the very first Shaolin! So it pains me to see PanO with more HI with good close combat than YJ. Even if i this is a shooting game! BTW that's not just the Martial Arts. They also have better CCW weapons!
The Shang Ji does need a rework, I remain optimistic that it will be done properly. Not every profile or unit is going to be crazy good. The Hulang could be the most OP HI ever released. PanO bois are complaining about the Zulus already. I'm hoping Tactical Sense, NCO, and Lt. L2 (not sure if it was mentioned that we got Lt. L2 or not) will make up for the fact that you are bringing a 7 Order list. 4 of your models granting an order to the pool and having 1 to each themselves is a big deal. NCO allowing the Lt. order to be given to the pool will help. Still holding out until we get the whole picture until I start worrying about it.
I have to admit that I am particularly bitter about Bostria's hyping of the zencha in light of what it turned out to be.
I would also love to see more positivity here in the forums as well. But I understand why it's a tough sell, cause here's the thing: CB has set themselves up to be in about the worst position to release IA that I can think of. Consider these factors IA has been on the lips of the community since I started in N2. It's always been this mythic unicorn of a sectorial that people have been looking forward to for years. That hope has gone through a lot of changes as well as an edition evolution, but you're still going to have a lot of folks building up in their minds what they'd like it to be and that's going to carry some influence in their opinions. Nothing overpowering, and certainly not a big deal on it's own, but there are other factors compounding it. There is the timing. If it had come out close to Uprising it'd be on the leading edge of the new sectorial wave. Instead it's coming on the tail end so now, whether it's fair or not, it's going to be compared to JSA, StarCo, Ikari, TJC, TAK, OSS, and Varuna. Folks are going to say "look at how these sectorials were launched. Look at what they did right. Look at what they added to their factions." And I think it's safe to say all of those releases have showed us something new or flavorful or identity defining in the form of a profile or a rule, even if some of them are gimmicky or if some of them made vanilla more appealing than the sectorial itself. Say what you will, they had weight; they had something to catch and hold interest. IA needs to do that as well, and it's going to be held to a higher standard because of the next point. The final piece of course is Uprising. It left a lot of people unhappy, to say the least, and it's created a void that IA is forced to fill. If IA had come out first it would have been a different story, but now it needs to reinforce or redefine faction identity while adding strategic flexibility and boosting roster versatility. At this point I don't know if it was catalyzed by CB or the players, but IA has been put on the pedestal of "This release will make up for Uprising. It will fix all the problems. Uprising may have sucked bu IA will make it all worthwhile." And that statement may be somewhat exaggerated when applied to individuals, but at the level of the mob? I don't think it's as far off as we'd like. That's a lot of pressure to be put on a new org chart and 5-6 new profiles. So you combine all of this and CB is releasing this army at a time when its community is inclined to be the most cautious, the most sensitive, and the most critical. Unfortunately, that means forgiveness and acceptance are going to be in short supply. I don't like that that's the case, but it's silly to ignore it. Into this environment, the teaser they release is for two units that received a lot of hype, the shooting star especially, considering it was the first IA unit to be leaked iirc, and that in and of itself only compounds the bad footing they're already on. The profiles themselves are serviceable, but uninspiring,and in this environment that's going to lead to poor reception and salt, because 'adequate' is not the salve the community is looking for. Neither provides new identity or much in the way of strategic versatility, in fact they compete with other profiles in vanilla. Furthermore, with everyone primed to be so critical, showing us two pseudo HI is going to come off like a bad faith cop out of the "it's gonna be an HI faction you guys, we promise" because we're not really getting that identity definition we're looking for. In that sense, they were a terrible choice to show us as a means of generating excitement, because as a first impression, it's not what anyone was looking for. If this had dropped 6 or 7 months ago, I think people would be much more receptive to it. At the end of the day I will hold back my own final judgement until I can see the whole picture, but I'll admit that my initial reaction was to be underwhelmed by something I've spent six years looking forward to and I understand why it's hard to come at things in a positive light. I get why people are upset. I get why they're reacting the way they are. I want the community to be positive and healthy. I don't want it to scare away new players or embitter veterans.I don't know how to change it though. I guess in a few weeks time we'll know if our trust was misplaced or not. For me,despite this perfect storm of bad moves, I do remain hopeful.
Fairy dust doesn't fix shit about taking hacking attacks on normal rolls when you're trying to do anything that isn't move. They need some kind of order efficient KHD to physically remove the assholes hacking at them or at least attempt to punish an opponent for spamming repeaters up the table. No, most tournaments let you bring more than one list so you can make sure you can actually do all the mission objective spreads over 5 games, not to cover for bad lists. Oh right, that makes more sense. Basically it's going to come down to how good explode is. If explode has a reliable effect, they're definitely plausible to the point of possibly being really really strong. But this means basically being "undodgeable" jank tactics that read more like somewhat exploiting the rules than being intended so don't get your hopes up there. If it functions more or less like a regular impact template then they're not going to be very good, kinda shit actually. You can't attack deployment zones with this model, there's too many goddamn repeaters up there and something as simple as a Keisotsu hacker will cause more trouble than it's worth in order inefficiency drain spamming Gotcha AROs at your model. An effective 8" range is not your friend. Because of IA's nature you can't really hold them back either as a late game gotcha piece like you can in Vanilla or ISS because unlike those you're badly order starved, you need your AD trooper in there straight away doing shit and causing trouble or you're gonna get run over. Long story short he's paying alot of points for an unknown skill, so it's hard to judge exactly how effective the model is going to be yet we just have an idea of the possible spectrum. What rankles people is that he's both underwhelming, fights with existing models who are arguably stronger on paper, isn't really HI as advertised, is in fact a worse FAKE AD HI than existing ones like Tarsos and Fraacta. On top of all of this he doesn't really provide a faction defining identity or strategy to make up for the JSA identity loss. CB and @Bostria as per usual are pretty tone deaf and do a poor job of brand management, don't really know how to properly build hype or market shit, as others have pointed out this was probably one of the worst profiles to release to try and tease things after the disingenuous "play all HI" hype.
PanO once again trying to prove that Yu Jing is NOT the Heavy Infantry faction! MO has 8 Heavy Infantry, 2 HI characters, 2 TAGs! IA has 9-10 (maybe), 1 character, 1 TAG. Not much of a difference to say they are the Heavy Infantry faction.
They also make use of the CC stats they pay points for and their HI actually has stealth to protect against hacking. Meanwhile, we're paying for CC15 and plain jane CCWs with no stealth... just keep getting kicked while you're down boy do I love paying points for pointless bloat! @Mahtamori didn't you say HI don't get points discount for being hackable? Because if I understand rightly the Hospitallars just got a slight points reduction and the only justification I can think of is that they got that to overcome the drawbacks of being HI. Someone do the math because I don't think we're getting that treatment.
1) atm MO are a much more appealing HI force than Invincible are, while still having PanO TAG supremacy 2) I don't know if Bostria just likes to troll customers or he genuinely doesn't have a clue about the game, because the Zencha hype is just another example to add to a long list of ignorant comments he has done 3) gotta love that Marital Arts typo 4) what's YJ niche now? They are not the HI faction, they are not the CC faction, they are not the CQC faction... I suppose it's the ISS faction and that's it 5) a Santiago-like KHD HI with Tinbot would help a lot vs hacking problems, but alas, it seems PanO beat us to it 6) it worries me that CB decided the best thing they could do to build hype for IA was releasing that pseudo HI profiles, then the next day release MO rework with multiple HI links 7) what's the reason Montesa can have 2 real wounds and HI stats while riding a bike but they can't seem to release a real AD HI?
Gotta remember, Martial Arts comes with Courage, and Stealth! My Elite Heavy infantry can, and will, fail courage tests and run to cover. They just laugh and keep shooting. They also can sneak up on someone and stab them in the back!
I don't know where Hospitaller's new price comes from, but this is a trend I've been seeing with all HI and TAG profiles that CB has been touching up lately. Raicho also got a points reduction by about 3 points iirc
