Explosiver? That really doesn't seem high-priority to any of the strategies we're persuing. Can you explain why you're prioritising it?
If the TN for Remote Explosives were a wee bit higher they would pretty reliably drain combat resources for Jounin and Essies to dodge (even on a slight miss) without necessitating breaking the seal on more WMD tier stuff.
Looking at it, Remote Explosives is basically 60% of what we wanted out of the Solar Death Ray idea pile. Making the kaboom deadlier, have a bigger range, etc. would make it very viable as an aerial bombardment tactic.
As an aside...
It's still up in the air whether the best route forward for us is "Obliterate everyone at the rift site, yoink the rift, hide or destroy any runes, skeddadle", and this would greatly facilitate us doing that without involving Leaf.
Personally, I don't really trust Orochimaru to not act maximally in his own self interest when engaging with this plotline. What maximizes his self interest could change at any point, and probably includes "Close the Rift" or "Steal the Rift" or "Maintain unilateral control over the Rift", and its not clear to me he wouldn't immediately pivot to one of these plans if the threat landscape changes (I assume he will be preparing for all of them).
The most Marked for Death cliffhanger at the end of this whole Riftwar shebang would be Orochimaru strolling out of the rubble at the eleventh hour to fuck up the whole thing (from our perspective) in some way that makes him an element of the setting we would be
forced to neutralize or engage with if we wanted to advance any necromancy goals.
Personally, I've sat through enough of those cliffhangers the last 700 or so chapters for one story. I'm fine with axing that potential plotline and derailing the Akatsuki stuff in one fell swoop. I think blasting the site to kingdom come, yoinking the Rift to some random location only we know about, and sprinting off into the distance with a shit eating grin plastered on our face would be a fine ending to this mega-arc indeed. We'll need to properly run the CBA there on the success odds and what needs to be done to raise them, but it seems to neatly solve all of our problems without some giant dramatic combat nonsense that relies post-facto on several of the most unreasonably unpleasant human beings I've ever seen acting rationally and reasonably about some random twerp's plans to raise the dead.
What's the temperature check on that one, playerbase?
