You'll at least need plausible bait over here. Should've tried the EVADERS making the Haidao's statline look like amateur hour, or Crane Adil's profile being the most retardedly boring shit since Bipandra without the benefit of even bringing a particularly useful specialist to a link team.
Ohh right I forgot we are YJ. This game is trash! N4 is a lie! Evaders go brrrrrr. CB staff is doing it for money! xD
Then I need to pay attention to nomad shit lol. For me the game has always been alien factions, warband strong and skirmishers. Honestly, now that I look at them, the Evader - Zuyong comparison is making me mad. What the actual fuck is that
So crane Adil is just that: A crane with monofilament? Don't know his presumed profile. The sculpt is great nevertheless. Just needs a helmet and braid.
It's a crane that's lost his Multirifle and x-visor and asked a Zhanying to borrow his Breaker combi, Mono sword, and number 2. Cost pretty much the same as the other Crane profiles. Hopefully the profile is WIP because he's also missing Martial Arts.
A crane without MA would be sad indeed. Normal Adil has MA3. So it wouldn't make any sense if Crane Adil would somehow lose this. So i am pretty sure the profile is WIP. Fingers crossed!
The benefits of cheating the points system without also being saddled with dump stats and garbage skills plus N4 HI discounts.
Also forgets that he's been in combat, drops one Nanopulsar, lost connection to the triangulation system, and gets worse at dodging now that the power armour is helping him, but does find a really good stun baton. Although chronologically it's the other way around, so I guess not having Veteran as power armour is forgivable, but the reduced dodging ability is a bit weird Powered Adil doesn't have Triangulated Fire de-nested, so it's probably an older scheme.
These points can never ever be right. So much stuff got better and significantly cheaper. I will chew on a base for a minute, if Zuyongs come with these costs and no additional skills. Not if a base Asawira now costs 32 points and got better. If Frenzy isnt a huge drawback and discount, that would not make any sense.
Frenzy is and always has been a crutch to make mainly a high CC + BS troop playable, especially in Links. Somewhere along the road one or several of the designers didn't get the memo and started slapping it on troops without the drawback of CC bloat. Then the point formula got a minor revision and then MO got a do over. Now we have yet another major revision for N4 and at time it doesn't look like the left hand has any clue what the right hand does in CB's designer team regarding Frenzy. But we've yet to see what the skill actually does in N4. Problem is some troops desperately need it do be basically nothing but a rebate and others had no business ever getting access to it. And ofc there's those troops who shold have it to be less of a trainwreck and no one ever got the memo. And then there's MI, the guys who really could a deus ex machina Skill to make them cheaper for no reason. CC bloat or not.
I don't think any unit ever needed the Frenzy rebate if they had addressed the inherent problems that necessitated it. The more expensive a unit got, the more of the problems a unit tended to have. So instead of addressing that ARM's cost scaled far too aggressively, that being hackable didn't come with any benefit at all, that CC mainly scales with Marker state and forward deploying, and that exotic ammo for guns were largely quite expensive, they slapped on a band-aid in the form of a discount that only about half the units with these issues received - and largely speaking only if they were chosen in a sectorial. (And then slapped the same discount on a unit that had none of these issues, creating the most played skirmish-type unit in the game, the Libertos)
I will never understand why they didnt revise the points formula now during an edition change, so that all those crutches and cheats to the formula could go away for good and balancing the troop types to each other. But oh well, I already wrote that, when discussing the Tactical Window thing. Anyways, Frenzy must be a more severe a penalty now than in N3 I suppose, considering the N4 Asawira compared to Zuyong. That is another missed opportunity, making Hackable beeing a double edged sword.
The problem is that your pricing shouldn't hinge on your ideal performance conditions. It should hinge on your expected performance. Realistically something like a Crane sees close combat every 3rd-5th game. And even then it might not be a massive increase in effectiveness over just shooting instead. The value of a Crane should not be determined mostly by his CC potential while he's expected to use mostly shooting to get things done. Having one guy in a link that has good CC provides it for the whole Link, even though it's situational. Especially for troops that are expected to bring several buddies of their type along for the ride you can't afford to pay for higher PH and CC on 5 guys. Hence Frenzy is a must if that kind of Link is supposed to exist on Myrmidions, Knights etc. The other factor here are troops that aren't expected to appear in multiples or form their own links, like Cranes, Daiyokai or KoJ's. No Frenzy here. Then come the fuckups who had no business getting Frenzy, like Achilles, Riot Grrls and Libertos. All of these make sense as Frenzy troops according to their fluff and got access to a point saver that, likely on accident, optimized them beyond intended capacity. Similarly you run into problems when you stack gear and skills sky high on a troop that stays very vulnerable to threats that don't care at all about these aspects of the troop. The Avatar isn't much different to a Gecko for Shinobu or a E/M DTW. He has slightly higher defenses for more than twice the pricetag. How to figure out an accurate pricetag for something that still dies do a single hit from its dedicated countermeasure? For the Asawira vs Zuyong you're better off forgetting the Asawira is better in CC and has Frenzy altogether. There's no value whatsoever in comparing a N3 Zuyong with a N4 Asawire either. The only thing you can compare is the N3 Asawira with the N3 Zuyong. To get a base cost to compare we assume a Combi or BSG+1 point as the 0 Mark. N3 Asawira 35 N3 Zuyong 27 the Zuyong is 77% of the Asawira's base cost. For N4 that relative statement is likely gonna stay. The Zuyong is not going to get a linear amount of points cheaper compared to the Asawira. But he is going to be around 77% of what the N4 Asawira costs. For 4 points cheaper Asawira, you're looking at 3 points cheaper Zuyong. Unfortunately for the Zuyong N4 also looks like it makes CC, ARM, BTS and PH cheaper on the higher ends. Zuyong are at the bare minimum for HI for all of those. So Zuyong likely end up with a rather minor decrease of around 2-3 points.
Well the argument is that Frenzy shouldn't exist as a rule simply to fuck up the points system, because thematically it makes sense on throwaway and warbandish units. A Jaguar is a profile that's a perfect example of the good application of Frenzy. In the case of Knights and Myrmidons if they're actually just underperforming because they cost too damn much when grouped in a traditional HI link don't throw a janked rule like Frenzy onto them, just give them a fucking discount on something like they already do with other units in N3. They didn't bump the Guijia cost when they swapped its CC gear out. Sun Tze doesn't pay for Total Immunity, and Daoying don't pay for LT2 until N4. CB are clearly already willing to do this, there's no need to shit profiles up with Frenzy. I don't have an issue with making these units cheaper, if they need it then just give them their MA and CCWs for free or whatever to bring the cost down. I have an issue with misusing a rule that otherwise has a place in the game for the sole purpose of cheating the points system while also effectively fucking the unit choice for any Vanilla player that was interested in running it.
Assuming truths and inventing facts doesn't help. If you have a copy of the end of N3 spreadsheet to determine costs I'd take a copy. Best I can come up with is an educated guess on why something ends up where it does. Not that is helps most of the time, calling both N3 and N4 point results "far from perfect" is a massive understatement. So to correct you on more or less all points: Jaguars can Link, have CC and decent BS - but also perfect loadouts. Their Profiles are way to good in a Link for what they do pretty much everything in their price category. In a vaccum they're 100% not okay and weren't for the entirety of N3. Why were they not batshit insane then? Because they can't Link with everything and their mom in N3. Now they can in N4, RIP Corregidor Alguaciles. Perfect example where Frenzy, Mixed Links and got Wildcard messed up about every way possible. Knights are mostly held back by being in MO, where whoever gets to go with Magisters and makes them better wins the race. Worth of note that Magisters do not have Frenzy, they're Ex Imp, which for them is an improvement, because you can turn it on and off with a Link for free Orders. Instead of a downside, I found they benefit overall. Their Links being stuck in MO is the only thing that ever held them back. But continues doing so pretty effectively. Gee I don't know why the Guija and Sun didn't get changed despite being vastly too costly for what they do. CB might have attempted to fix things somehow, but I'm not clairvoyant and it didn't go far enough in the context of N3. LT2 is a fairly easy N3 if condition. If cheapass Lt then LT L2 free of charge. If LT expensive rambo like Asura then cost X. Maybe there's a cutoff at 35, maybe it scales. Who knows, N3 is over. N4 maybe has it different, maybe not we'll know for sure next Friday not today. Yes I do assume the leaks were something like 80% done for the stuff that was in there. But 80% and a whole chunk missing isn't enough to get your panties in a pinch over for me. Corregidor Wildcard crap throwing all pretense of design out of the window would be the offender there. The one troop who needed it, Wildcats, funny enough didn't get it. And one of their main redeeming factors, Number 2, looks like it ended up on a Jazz, who with her bot costs about as much as the cheapest Wildcat. Fun. Both Sombras and Evaders are okay in the context of N4. Evaders die like flies and Sombras are just more expensive Dart, good but not groundbreaking. If you weren't mostly concerned with your "me first, me YJ" policy for the last 3 years I could maybe be bothered to more than half ass this, but what's the point. You kept claiming the best performing tournament Faction in the game (*with the restriction of only looking at the top 1/3) didn't get you to stop complaining about YJ needing buffs. The Su Jian was out a week when you went on to ramble about Nomads getting nice things. Guess I just don't get exited about those "Triumph quoted your post" notifications showing up any more. Has become a bit stale over the last 3 years. May I suggest starting a new Faction to mix it up a bit?
In before N4 Frenzy is exactly the same than N3. Addendum 1: EVAders die like Zuyongs. Addendum 2: remember that one time Hospitalers got a 5 points drop just because?
I'm not sure how you think we're inventing facts here. We can very clearly see through the profile changes that have happened that everything I've said is true. The Guijia didn't jump costs for AP to DA, we know that because there are various profiles that show DA costs +1 over AP. Sun Tze didn't change costs when every other model got more expensive during the TI rework, that's a fact, and we can very clearly see that Yu Jing don't pay for LT2 when Haqq and Aleph do on their profiles that get the LT2 upgrades. The point is that CB are willing to do hand adjustments, we already see them doing it. So why they insist on applying cheats that can have unintended buggery and rules consequences doesn't make alot of sense. Like Benkei reminds us CB has already applied an extra discount on Hospis once already this cycle. If they're still too expensive they can be dropped again. Hell if they're worried about going too low and it impacting Vanilla they've already proven they're happy to do FTO profiles, they can just make the extra hard discounted ones MO FTO profiles. I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here. I said they're a good application of Frenzy to a unit.... and you agreed but also think I'm wrong? Gao is the same. It just looks like it's a factional quirk. Dude what hash have you been smoking? The only period where I've found (Vanilla) Yu Jing to be utterly in the shitter was after Uprising, but you know what did any of us expect when you had like 15 profiles nuked from the army including your only decent TAG, faction defining assassins, and one of the only decent ARO pieces in the faction that wasn't a TR bot. For all its disappointments that IA brought upon itself it also had several units that fixed Vanilla. The Zencha freed up the Guilangs to do other roles than just be specialists, the MSR Haidao returned more ARO opportunities, and the Daoying and the NCO profiles just added even further order efficiency and removed any need for CoC. I complain about CB being lazy about fixing things, like fixing dud profiles. You seem to think me bitching about the Liu Xing being awful, the Shang Ji needing a rework, or fucking complaining about the Guijia needing any change as small as swapping out the shitty AP CCW for anything anti material so it can do a mission equates to the faction being underpowered. I don't like dud profiles in any faction, if I stopped playing Yu Jing and started playing Pan-O I'd just be on a crusade about Teutons not Shang Ji. If I bitch about Bao Troopers it's not me bitching that Yu Jing desperately needs a buff, I just don't like the Bao Troopers being a fucking embarrassment of a profile. I don't crusade on other factions not because I don't think they don't have units that need a buff, because they do and I will point this out, I leave it to other people to handle who play those factions because my knowledge of them isn't 100%. I don't play them and they're not constantly fresh in my mind as to what, why, and how adjustments should be made. I can pretty happily point to a shit unit and tell you it's fuckin shit, but I can't tell you with absolute 100% confidence exactly how to remedy it.
Looking only at YJ is precisely the problem. Jaguars having Frenzy and ending up at 10 points as Link fillers for Brigada (well or whoever they want now) are not okay in an environment that has Gulams as the cheapest possible choice for Links in Haqq. Your demands summed up would generally just end up with a boring YJ that facerolls everything so you can feel good about it. If buffing YJ was your main concern why are there about 2 pages of your ramblings in every Nomad thread about their new units, complaining about Nomad having cool stuff? But sure, you tell yourself this is for the greater good of the game.
