Apparently, yes I'm still focusing on the wrong thing. Given the context of the discussion, we're talking about a controller that is staying in one place while spending two Orders to send the Xenotech forwards and declare Place Multiscanner. That can be done from nearly halfway back inside the DZ, which is generally much safer from unexpected AROs than anywhere up the table where Hidden Deployment troopers, Hackers etc. are more likely to be present. So what bit am I focusing on that's not the issue? I'm not being sarcastic, I literally don't understand/disagree with your reasoning.
That it is a really crap mechanic. The mechanic is bad, boring, and as an opponent you can't interact with it. All it does for the most part is waste orders, forcing you to build lists with more orders. On table layouts that don't give you a second floor to deploy on or a roof with parapets to prone on, you'll probably be able to deploy a Medium Infantry or something forward deploying to negate the risk of having your controller get killed by a Fiday or Grunt when going second. I have seen tables that doesn't give the player going second reasonable safety for a potential controller, but I haven't seen one where forward deploying miniatures wouldn't fix that. So this is input. I had a really dull experience from this new mechanic and unless they do something more creative or extreme with it (like forcing you to deploy the marker in the opponent's deployment zone or allowing you to shoot the marker (at which point it needs a bit of volume)), they might as well remove this mechanic from the season as the fix to the ARO exploits. That's my input, when taken to the ultimate conclusion.
The other thing that is bad-feeling is rolling "against the game" instead of "against the opponent". You have to roll a 11 (14 if you have the specialist sometimes you do not have even access to, like CoC). I saw a friend who wasted SEVEN orders to do it.
Yeah, I'd rather that placing the mmultiscanner was much easier/auto success. But the tech was vulnerable or the location was harder. The more I think about it, the more I think making the tech vulnerable rather than arbitrarily invulnerable would be a good change. Along with the placing being without roll.
Easiest way to do this would give the Tech a Designated Target profile and make it 8" instead of 4" outside the DZ while making the Multiscanner and auto-success. The job then becomes getting a Xenotech to Move ~3 times without dying. You could account for Hidden Deployment kills by having a null-state Xenotech drop a Multiscanner that can be picked up and placed with WIP rolls. This would mean that a mistep just costs you efficiency rather than automatically costing you OPs. I think that would be interesting, and provides an interesting balance between elite (attach Xenotech to Achilles/Asura/etc and yolo) and high order count lists (with the orders to recover if something goes wrong).
@inane.imp i lik it but I think they're trying to move things back in favor of high order count armies with Counterintelligence and Xenotech.
Possibly with Xenotech, but Counterintelligence has far more impact for low-count lists than it does for high-count lists.
