What does YJ NEED?

I would agree AHD could win games, but this is not what the internet wisdom was saying the entirety of N3, locally they would either dominate (rarely) or die shortly (usually).

The biggest issue was sixth sense lvl2 and how it interacted with the entire game, and that if thankfully gone.

In my opinion N4 hacking is a better system than N3 and N3 was a good system despite its drawbacks.

 

People complained about them because they were a double edged sword, and if you didn't use them properly i.e. on profiles that were good like pick any camo skirmisher, and to time their usage correctly they'd just be a liability and get your unit killed.

Naturally, many people didn't fuckin get this and would complain about them being useless. They weren't useless, it was user error. AHDs weren't the tip of the spear, that was the KHD's job. You sent the KHDs in to root out the enemy hackers and try to create a safe space for the AHDs to then reveal themselves and operate to control the battle field.

But again, naturally many people didn't fuckin get this and would just get their AHD users killed because they didn't understand how to use them. Both myself and @Tourniquet have spent many conversations here during N3 slamming our heads against the keyboard because of people doing this.

With that in mind as @SpectralOwl said CB definitely shouldered a big part of the blame here because they kept creating fuck awful noobtrap profiles that were terrible AHD carriers and were as much a liability as the LT AD troopers they refused to prune for an entire edition. Put these in the hands of players who didn't quite understand how to play the infowar side of the game and this is where all your complaints stemmed from.

 

So what you say is not design for top competitive players, because average players will not get it and it will be a waste of time that will lead to frustration of the wider player base?

 

The take away is that CB should stop making awful profiles that are destined to under perform, and when they do make a whoopsie like Gao, Bao, or pick one of Pan-O's currently underwhelming HI like the fucking Boyg they should fix them instead of leaving them to rot for years.

If you don't infest your game with garbage profiles your player base can't keep putting them in army lists and shooting themselves in the foot with them. If there wasn't something of a rate like 4 fucking terrible AHD profiles for every 1 good one you wouldn't wind up with nearly the ratio of complaints about AHDs.

 

If the take is that only hyper competitive ultra optimized profiles should exist, I think its a game only a few people would want to play and even they would not do so for a long time.

 

Nobody said anything about hyper optimized profiles, the bar was set at not garbage.

 

I have come to the conclusion that what you generally deem "not garbage" for most people is usually considered optimized with few things, if any, to cut.

 

Hardly at all.

There are a few things that clearly make a unit garbage

• Being unable to effectively perform their role. In this case, the majority of N3 AHDs, they needed to come equipped with some sort of protection the most obvious and common being deployed in a marker state so they couldn't be immediately hunted down by a KHD. Or as mentioned the AD LT units such as the Tiger LT, the only thing that unit did was make an unsuspecting new player start in LoL.

• Being out competed in the same role internally to the faction. See Gao and the Shang Ji, or the continually flip flopping relationship the Shang Ji and Zuyongs have had over the years where one of them has just been a better version of the other one back and forth. What CB should do is take the units that are out performed and find a different role for them to cover.

• Getting hard countered by the metagame. See elite high cost 1W models, the DTW spam is so high it makes them largely unviable as direct attack pieces and relegates them to support roles, often in fireteams for multiwound units. It's not a surprise CB had to cheat the cost of Moiras down by a whopping 7pts plus create a brand new 2W HI to act as template door kicking bait to protect the Moiras to actually make them go from being utter garbage to somewhat functional.

Take the Guilang AHD from N3 which is functionally the Guilang Hacker in N4. It has been a good and viable hacking platform in both editions without being brutally cost efficient. It's not brutally cost efficient like the Zero AHD which shed the extras like MSV, ARM, CC bloat to just focus on doing its infowar job to the best of its ability, but it's good enough to get the job done and has the core requirement of anti hacking protection in the form of a camo state.

 

That would be nice though it did not bother me much, I am used to it from PanO, they got their second (and 3rd) engineer with the svalarheima/ MO update and they are on the expensive MI side of things, still nice to have though.