Sun Liling has at least two ranged attacks. One is an explodey AoE, remember?
Anyway,
@yrsillar I've been thinking about the fight and I have two... and a half main concerns.
The first is the big one, and it's the use of PLR in the fight. Ling Qi kept the whole thing till the very end of the fight, and it doesn't seem to make sense on, well, multiple levels. The plan that won was more or less Mists - > Defenses -> Worms + Buff -> Lunatic Whirl. IPF
is a defensive technique, and since LW requires it to be active in the field, the logical move was to deploy IPF during that second phase, before the worms, so that it would benefit us for most of the fight and Ling Qi would be able to drop the capstone technique of her plan at a moment's notice. Two details of the fight make this especially troublesome: Ji Rong was managing to punch through our defenses even when they were up, and Ling Qi should have been able to estimate what kind of heat he was bringing... to her face, and the only time Ling Qi totally avoided damage was when she did eventually use IPF.
Every viewer of the fight should be wondering why we didn't deploy something useful like that earlier, and when we
did use it, there was zero reason to. PLR is our slowest art, and Ji Rong was so weakened that he passed out once we used it... so we could have just frozen him again and won that way. Ling Qi took longer to do a thing worse for unclear reasons. This is the kind of thing that not being
too explicit in plans was
supposed to prevent, but it looks like it was the direct cause here. No offense, but you made Ling Qi look like an idiot in front of the audience. This
really sucks because this was our best opportunity to really impress while fighting a peer, and especially to showcase PLR. It's an art that will have 0 effect on Sun Liling, to the point that its slowness means we can't even afford to bring it out, so this was the biggest best chance. In all, a serious, though not irrecoverable, blow to Ling Qi's long-term strategic social goals.
Second issue is pacing and sense of time. Contrast the fight with Chu Song with this one and things look really weird. Chu Song took 'minutes' from refusing to concede while already beat to Ling Qi downing her, and we were using our freezing attacks. This whole fight seems to have taken maybe 5 minutes in total. I get that a lot of this is probably conflicts between mechanics and narrative, but it creates a strong sense of dissonance towards Ling Qi's abilities and what she can accomplish in a given period of time. Or it means that she was explicitly and deliberately dragging out the Chu Song fight in order to be deliberately cruel, because even playing things defensively cannot account for the discrepancy in pace. Ling Qi needs to be able to consistently accomplish roughly the same amount of Stuff in a given span of time if we're to make plans, especially in the narrative system we're moving into in the sequel.
The half of an issue is debuffs on Ling Qi were mentioned, but no mention of Sixiang doing anything about them, which is mildly jarring given it's the only thing the moon maiden does, for a not insignificant chunk of our qi reserves. I get how s/he just didn't fit into the narrative though. I get the impression this fight could have used another day of polishing. We're not that impatient, you know? I'd rather wait another couple days while the seems get ironed out.
