Hey guys, some of you might know the good old MSV2 + ZOC trick, that is perfectly legal. Well turns out the funny addition of the Xenotech allows for a much stronger version. A trooper owned by the Reactive Player can declare an ARO if any of the following is true: It has Line of Fire (LoF) to a trooper being activated by the Active Player. An enemy trooper activates within its Zone of Control (ZC). It has a Special Skill or piece of Equipment allowing reaction to enemy actions without LoF. This means a neutral Civilian is capable to trigger LOF AROs (but not ZOC AROs) while synced to a trooper with MSV inside a Smoke. Everyone who can see that Civillian has to declare an ARO. Most likely a Dodge although there has been some debate whether Dodge is a legal ARO against a Civillian. There are however legal Skills with ARO label requiring nothing but LOF to declare. So any MSV2 trooper synced to the Xenotech could abuse this to shoot unopposed or vs a Dodge, both of which are outright insane. This pretty much means MSV2s linked to a Xenotech can stay out of cover in their Smoke without fear of Retaliation, While synched Civilians are Neutral Troops and unable to declare Attacks, they still provide free extra Discover rolls and can cancel Templates (MLs, Mines, Chainrifles....) by moving into them to protect the synced trooper. Now this isn't exactly new as you already could do it with HVTs or in Rescue, so it might very well exist to abuse the shit out of it. However it was never that easy to set up straight from your DZ without spending a single Order. But I'd humbly request an Errata to fix it anyway.
It is being already discussed. Fun times for Marut Multi-HMG to kill everything from own DZ while denying linked ARO pieces from shooting him ^^
A Civilian in CivEvac state cannot perform any Attack, nor the Activate, Discover and Cautious Movement Common Skills. jup my bad
I just asked my Warcor (who is also a Tester for the game...) and yeah. RAW this works like that. So all MSV2 troops can do that messy thing...
I dont want to sound inpolite, but where were testers when this thing was being added to ITS ?;/ (inb4, I know testers also do make mistakes)
Oh boy, it's like that godawful Saheeli + Felidar Guardian combo in MTG. Oh, wait, it's actually even worse than that. You could at least Shock Saheeli after a single use of her -1 ability to stop the infinite combo from kicking in, but here you can literally do nothing to prevent the combo once the Smoke has landed.
I can tell you it was not the Testers fault for what I heard... Suffice it to say that Xenotech (as an "extra") was just sketched in the Interplanetario, and the Warcors got the ITS booklet before the Testers, who had time just for some errata. As I always say: it's useless to have Testers if a) they are internal people who are testers as an extra to their job, and b) you pay no attention to the testers/listen only to the ones you say what you want to hear. And I don't say it because I am wise, I just crammed it from the ISTQB materials, freely available to all, I needed to pass the test (that one costs money).
Albedo and White Noise. Now, if we are really cold-headed here, the only part of the game suffering here is SS2 (thus all the Link Teams of 4+), since those guys could return fire freely with B2 and now are forced to dodge with 1 dice.
TR drones too. Not that they could shoot (-12 mods) but it's even easier to deal with them (or single Overdrone or similar units). It's hilariously good if someone dared to leave a TAG on overwatch ^^
No, it's effects everyone. You can always shoot back on -6 through the smoke. An TR/HMG or SF had chances too.
We all are. That's why I made it clear that I don't want to bash anyone (personally) just ask about "the process" and fact that something rather bad went through testing/QA (and it was (lucikly) almost immediately picked up by community). @xagroth made a quite compact and nice explaination, which I wholly agree with. There's a slight difference between copy&paste errors and "rules breakdown" .... ... like Seraph's superjump....
felidar guardian was insanely easy and braindead 2-card autowin combo, here you need still targets to shoot, which would be difficult to find when enemy expects Intruder or Hsien already technically, you can prevent it by going first and killing smoke generators and msv2 troopers! or by not leaving anything in the open but thats not good gameplay experience obviously There is already a version of this in ISS, where you can use madtraps in a Hsien haris to do this, except: 1) Madtraps can be shot and are expendable 2) That haris costs 2.5/116 or so 3) It is unique to ISS, but the xenotech combo is avaliable to any MSV2/3 hmg in the game, and Intruder would happily exchange marker state for a chance against fireteams
That is, if you can actually see the smoke generators. You can hide them behind Total Cover or just Prone next to the MSV2 dude on some moderately high building, and be safe. Oh, and this existed even before Xenotech. You could always pull this off with any Civilian you synchronized.
Yes but you had to first get to the Civlians, who were on the other side of table (and actually pass WIP to synchronise them). Now the Xenotech conventaly start in your DZ already sync'd with you target of choice (which could be a guy with MSV2 and biggest gun accessible). It's "no order tax" tactic (heck, if you are lucky you can even advance Xenotech into position to drop scanner).
It's janky rules interaction before. Sure it may have existed but was it really good and was it something the community wants to see more of? Just because a rule exists doesn't mean it's perfect and rules should often be revisted when new things come out. I like what the Xeontech does. The scanner being placed is an interesting mechanic. Are the further interactions of having a starting Gsync thing that can provoke ARO's something we actually want or is needed in the game??
