That makes more sense, but still includes seveal fail points that makes it more difficult under current circumstances:
1: Sun's giving up her first turn, giving us tie to put up buffs to survive the first few rounds. Not sure whether that'll happen if she says she's taking us seriously.
2: Dhatri's release schedule. You mention in post that we frequently don't see when she gets released, so getting started on whailing on her might not happen for the first several turns. Plus, if she's taking us seriously she might want to avoid releasing her until we've already started running away (as she suspects) in order to get more time hitting us.
3: finding Dhatri, the plan doesn't consider that the fight is currently in a jungle. We've spotted her previously because of the change in biome (hostile jungle flowers) that her attacks appear as. This is not the case this time. Ontop of that there's the more general case of: she's a jungle natureish spirit with specialities in stealth and ambushes in the jungle. I can imagine it being expecially hard to find an hit her, which may mean that on our side only Qi, if anyone, would be able to spot her.
4: Plans are filtered through Qi/Low margin for error. Our plans have never gone exactly as we planned for them to go, and Qi often adds or removes attacks to and from the list as she feels. I'm not sure that there's enough margin for error in this plan, so that if Qi turns around and decides to use a suboptimal attack, or a defence instead of an attack because she dislikes pain, then as I see it at least, Lilling has the time to wipe us out
5, The biggest problem with the whole plan as far as I see it: The plan assumes Lilling is just going to stand there, or at least that her hitting us is immaterial to us attacking Dhatri, Given that yrsillar has mentioned making the system less mechanic based I can imagine her being up in our face causing some pretty nasty spot penalties. Even if it doesn't I'm not sure that we have the time to stand around attacking
Yeah there's lots of problems. 1 is probably the biggest thing about this most recent situation which has me going "Well, shit", is Sun treating us seriously and not conceding the first turn. There's just... nothing we can do about it except get
incredibly lucky on the dice to avoid some chunk of seriously painful damage. No plan, of any stripe, can avoid most of this damage if Liling gets first turn.
With the way the system works we start at some base level, Ling Qi ranging from 27 to 33 dice for defense. And then using her buff stack she adds another
30 dice on top of that, in specific situations. Liling, being a ducal scion with personal White attention has a better pedigree, and we've seen what that looks like in better Passives and Equipment, making her base state more powerful than Ling Qi's. Furthermore because of her pedigree, and by direct visual evidence in the Shen Hu fight, we can see that she has at least three exchanges/rounds worth of buffs and it somewhat seems like more depending on how you parse it. Ling Qi only has two rounds to finish her defensive buffs and get up to 57-59ish.
There's also quality and completion considerations for this. Liling's buff/attack art is her Asura armor art, which she completed and got her successor to. This is something similar to Ling Qi getting FVM complete and then getting FVM+.
For 2, the gank plans generally have some combination of tankiness and perception tests, difficult ones rom IPF, to try to encourage her to come out on schedule. Liling uses a qi intensive style like Ji Rong, and uses Dhartiri as a source of Qi with the flowers, and Dhartiri has always manifested after using them. But it's still a concern, so we have to hope that Liling stays on track with that. It's not really the first hope either, see the ouch in thing 1.
3... we also sadly can't do much about. Ling Qi has pretty bad perception compared both to her own stealth and the rest of her stuff. There's not anything we can really
do that would fully remove the terrain, except perhaps wide area Winter Cadenza's or HC's. And it's also a thing that once she's stuck in, Dhartiri's shown to be pretty much stuck in. Yrsillar has also professed a wariness to using attack from stealth, then being able to re-stealth, repeat attack etc tactics. Ling Qi could theoretically do it, but the mechanics don't work out for it.
4 is part of how Yrsillar writes fights, and there's only been two instances I can call to mind where this affected the fight. Our spar with Meizhen where we opened with FSS, and against Ji Rong, which had everything in the plan that we voted for, it was just jimmied around so it read better. I'm not concerned about the apparent order messing us up since he hits the important notes.
For 5, the mechanics change is coming next thread. And her being up in our face is not really related to that either way, since movement is in the weird position of being kinda useless(ask AbeoLogos about this). And the plan does not assume that she is doing nothing, or is ineffectual. We're going to be nigh dead some time around the 4th or 5th round most likely, but the plan
does assume based on gathered evidence that we will survive the first three or so rounds and still be kinda useful. Or at least my refinements on later pages have been that specific.
5 comes back to the whole "buff stack source of power" thing. Sun is literally weakest in the first turn, and just ramps up from there. All high end cultivators work like this because of how the mechanics work. So any other plan has to work around the fact that giving her more
time is hilariously bad an idea. In part... because it's not just Sun who can buff, and as I laid out previously her base state and buff stack is better than ours by themselves, but Dhartiri can buff too. So another competent Green buffer on Sun's side to Ling Qi's one.
Thus, Gank the Plant plans.
