Yu Jing Close Combat

I would argue that makes him one of the least valuable for points. If you can't get into CC reliably it really doesn't matter how good your stats look on paper because you're not going to do anything fucking CC if you can't get there.

 

That's why I plan on using the FO version; a Son-Bae can take out anything the Ninja itself can't and a TO Infiltrator is one of the few units that can easily use Forward Observe. It can also use the Flash Pulse to stun before it attacks.

I'm planning to play with ISS a bit this year, so I've been thinking about this topic. Kanren seem most useful when you have IMM to play with in order to threaten one-sided attacks from their scary weapon, so Mad Traps or to a lesser extent Hacking and E/M appear to be big enablers for them and force the opponent to take them seriously as threats. Cranes, especially in a Core for Sixth Sense, are mostly notable because they'll feed a Fiday or Speculo their own feet on a coin flip, making them one of the better non-Marker LT options for something like Decapitation. They can also travel with a Core that has its own Smoke, allowing them to close in and use gang-up bonuses more effectively than the typical linkable CC schlub. The Hsien won't often make use of its CC at all, but it's just competent enough to live through a fight with a dedicated assassin or Warband once in a while where most big HMG platforms won't and it's a high priority target for such pieces. Pheasants seem hard to use, I'll need to actually play the things to get a concrete idea what I'm doing with them, but they have really nasty penalties to enemies trying to CC them. If their PHY wasn't horrid they might be a decent anti-Warband piece. As is I think they might be best defending rooftops that an opponent has to Climb or Jump to reach, or using their KHD for its Marker State.

 

MA3 puts them at Damage 14, that's a 50/50 for each save an ARM4 model rolls. With DA they're pretty decent at beating up any HI they come across.

Can't really deal with TAGs that effectively but they were kinda ass at fighting TAGs last edition too, it was all crit fishing and it wasn't order efficient at all to actually bring a TAG down.

Still Monks and Ninjas primarily. The rules of CC haven't really changed beyond you also really need Stealth now as well. So you want Smoke or a marker state.

The Kanren KHD actually a decent shot now it can reliably cybermask and has better CC stats than N3. Also it has better targets to holo as now, a Kanren pretending to be Krit might find a CC vulnerable target end its turn closer than it should to it and then give the Kanren the chance to use Cybermask to bypass ARO firelanes and stab the target. The Kanren cybermasking around is the only thing that's changed for me mentally, otherwise everything in this post still stands.

 

Liang Kai is close to being good, but misses in enough extremely important facets that it's entirely irrelevant. He needs either better fireteam options, or at least a profile with smoke access. Make it YJ exclusive, so we get something different from White Company, because fuck them, they've got plenty enough going for themselves with their considerably better fireteam access.

I want Liang Kai to be good, he's got two absolutely gorgeous models and the concept of a Shaolin character alone excites me.

...6-2 would be nice too, but not huge.

 

Can we get an honorable mention for Krit’s heavy pistol gun kata technique? No special abilities and “just” CC19, but B2 dam 14 shock and not reliant on anything that NBW shuts down. He’s also got d-charges, and for that matter if he brings a yaozao he can get up to B3 with that heavy pistol courtesy of his lil’ battle buddy.

 

Krit's kit is pretty fit for capping some of the less melee-inclined troopers in the midfield that might have visual mods that would otherwise be annoying for him to dispose of. Unfortunately, it offers nothing to help protect him against potential assailants, since it only works in the active turn, but if you're wanting to deal with a hard-to-shoot target and don't want to trade with templates, it's a decent trick to have on your side.

 

Burst Mods don't stack unless it's explicitly states otherwise, so you can't stack his heavy pistol +1B and ganging up bonus.

 

Krit has +1B on his pistol, not BS Attack (+1B), so it applies whether you use it as a BS or CC weapon, confirmed by the latest FAQ.

 

She doesn't need Frenzy or Impetuous to be useful. She needs two things:

1. Better fireteam options
2. Shock Immunity

She's very similar to Wolfgang who is a very useful wildcard in various sectorials. He can handle close combat, has a decent shooting toolkit with a Multirifle and can threaten a variety of targets, he adds a non hackable 2W unit to links, and he can break objectives and handle situations that require a tricky dynamic entry (climbing+).

Jing Qo would straight up be a better version of him packing mimetism and and +1BS. Unfortunately she can't link worth a shit and she's borderlining into the territory of high thirties where she costs too much to be vulnerable to shock, a problem the Zencha and alot of old greeks used to have.

 

Taowu is kinda low key terrifying. CC Attack -6, Burst 2 viral pistols in the active, and NBW make up for his relatively low CC, with holomask hiding the fact that he's lurking in your DZ. The downside, as ever, is delivery.

 

Taowu would actually not be shelf garbage if he could link. Same deal for him in Druze, fucking pointless because he can't link.

 

The real problem with Taowu is that everything in ISS wants to link up with something else. I think he works okay in vanilla where you could potentially have a random nub sitting somewhere so that Taowu can ambush them when they try to assassinate them, but in ISS there's nothing that you'll credibly put standing around without a Duo or better and I suppose that's the same deal in Druze. I just wouldn't use him actively very much.

I don't think Jing Qo even needs shock immunity, but she doesn't behave like a trooper that wants to stand around in a deployment zone for any reason what so ever. Her gear is relatively decent for a solo character and most fireteams that she could join would just hamper her. The nod towards the Emperor Huang Dee's assassination attempt is funny but ultimately harmful for the experience given how poor Duos are, particularly Duos with Irregular troops. I would rather see her with forward deployment or infiltration as specifically an assassin capable of getting up walls is missing and drop this Wolfy McWolf Face charade. (Let Liang Kai link with the Meow Cats for melee linkable option in White Banner, his skills meshes well with them)

Real talk: the number of models with shock immunity that shouldn't have it is ridiculous. The hand-holding and cuddling of people who can't recognise an increased threat to their high-value assets and the backwards reduction of Shock weapons is getting real harmful. I'd much rather see NWI without shock immunity go down in price and have a large number of those units go there.
IMO, Zhencha lacking shock immunity was a problem because of the specific role Zhencha occupies for IA together with the fact that the Zhencha is hackable which stacks vulnerabilities on top of each other. For units like Wolfgang, Odalisque, Wild Bill, and even Evaders this shouldn't be the same problem and with shock generally being much less valuable as a tactical tool because of it.
The fact that NWI+SI is only about 1 point cheaper than 2 wounds also means CB is missing the opportunity to have a budget alternative between 1 wound and 2 wounds and, of course, the flip side of the coin is that shock ammo still is more common than is healthy as well.

Anyway, mini rant over.

 

He doesn't work in Vanilla, he's too expensive. Being Counter Intel isn't good enough when you cost 25pts. Every other counter intel model has other reasons to be in a list. You're paying 25pts for a rule that doesn't do jack shit in over 50% of games (you need your opponent to go second AND choose to strip orders over either limiting command tokens or starting a model in SF mode otherwise the rule has 0 effect), on top of being a model with practically no aggressive usefulness and is designed around an opponent maybe having a unit stumble into them in your DZ.

That's alot of fucking maybes for nearly 10% of your army. Shukras are CoC, Puppetmasters enable puppets/minelayer/hacking, Tagma do a fuckload of different things. This isn't like hiding a Lu Duan in your DZ, the Lu Duan if nothing is going to run into it can say "hey, I'm gonna go fuck that guy with my effective BS15 big shooty gun now" as a decent backup shooter.

Taowu is a useless potato in more than half your games and he's an expensive potato at that. You're paying a massive amount of points to effectively gain +1 order in fewer than half your games, which if you think about it is worth less than 5pts if you equate it to an extra tactical awareness for turn one only.

That's trash in my opinion, he needs to actually be leveraged as a reliable combat threat at that cost or have some kind of useful secondary effect. The simplest way for him to be a reliable combat threat is to tag along in a link that can deliver him to places that his CC prowess or his Nanopulser spam is actually able to do something.

I would agree if there was less shock in the game. Being extremely vulnerable to something is less of a concern if the counter in question is rarer. The more common the the counter is, the harder it is to be an expensive unit that gets hard countered.

While CB reduced shock in some ways in N4, they also increased the amount of shock in the game because MultiRifles both got cheaper and are now a staple on alot of mid tier MI/HI stuff like Ye Mao, Evader, Sombra unit entries as well as characters that are designed to be close range or backup gunfighters (such as Jing Qo or Wolfgang ironically enough). Overall I find there's as much or more shock running around the table these days as people are valuing AP more over things like spitfire carriers, which has a side effect of their multi weapon tends to also have shock ammo attached.

It's very similar to the way we have to be hyper vigilant about isolation now because Oblivion is super fucking common compared to N3, now Oblivion is common being immune or having a countermeasure (like tinbots) is in far higher demand compared to last edition.