So, bit of a late night brainstorming session in the Discord, and we think we might have cottoned onto Ji Rong's strategy, and hoo boy is it a doozy.
We've noticed that he's conspicuously avoided revealing his Domain Weapon and his Standard Weapon, even at the cost of making his fight against Guangli much harder than it needed to be. It suggests that they're big trump cards. We know that Sun Liling would have armed him as a Ling Qi seeking missile after the dunking on that Guangli gets from Lu Feng and Ji Rong.
So, we look around, and go "Well, how the fuck does he beat her then, an alpha strike build can be effective early on, but it can't keep up with the buff cycle."
Then I realized it, something that we know for sure the Sun Faction has access to.
How hard would it be for Ji Rong to get a set of gauntlets made that include an effect like this? Every time he lands a hit, he dispels our defensive buffs. He opens up with a lot of force, and then prevents us from ramping up to match him. Couple that with arts that keep us from retreating (Or some kind of area that gives us limited mobility anyway), and access to aggravated damage (Either through poisons, arts, or some other consumable--the bad touch blood that Sun Liling has had for ages is a good example for instance), and he'd pound us into dirt in short order, with our publicly known build, and it wouldn't even look too Pay To Win so much as "Did his research and brought the right gear set to win."
It's a rushdown that's frightfully vulnerable to Worm Mosh Pit though. Even if he's brought a Domain Weapon that can deal with our spiritual attacks so he can optimize purely for a beatdown himself, or something else.
