Edit: Ling Qi isn't a predator, she's a nightmare. A cautionary tale. She is the story that mother's tell their children to convince them to not run away from home. This is why so many of the other monsters out of horror stories have an affinity for her and she feels comfortable around them: she's fundamentally one of their number.
While many of those monsters feel lonely, to one degree or another, Ling Qi is unusual in that she actually reached out for connection. She is now surrounded by the constant warmth of her family and values that deeply. However that doesn't change her nature, forged in the cold streets of the slums
Our Negative Connections are short lived, because we don't maintain them. They still exist, because others insist on being our enemy. We don't hold grudges, we spend very little time on negative connections, but they're still made. We just move on quickly
as for the cautionary tale, the thing that surprised Ji Rong (and is a great strength of our build) is that we
back up our nightmarish reputation with some real physical bulk. We're not
just the myths and tales we're Connected to. We're also our own individual! With our own stuff going on!
~~~~~~~~~~
Our build depends on change, progress and motion. Even that Motion without Motion. Stagnation is death to us. The build is functionally about whether those around us will be crushed by the uncaring Motion of Progress/Change/Time or whether they'll be spared a moment longer through our Power and Want of Connections.
The negative fields and constructs rend apart our enemies with uncaring, but we've placed a boundary there that spares our allies. Our Domain then takes it a step further than mere sparing, and assists them while they're in our shadow. This sets the stage of the battlefield, and can be seen as "the stone on which the pieces move" that Meizhen likened a General to. We're not
just an attrition build 1v1 or against specific targets. We're an attrition
commander, our presence drains
all of our opponents and if you didn't bring enough protection for
everyone any that are left in the cold
will die. And any allies in our shadow will be more difficult to pin down, corral or otherwise remove from play. This forces the opponent to deploy broad protections to prevent being attrition'd out on a troop-by-troop basis. That severely limits the options some of their cultivators have, while ours are more free to act with our passive assistance available.
Then we get to our active buffs and debuffs. These are things we place on friends and foes that have distinguished themselves as targets. Leaders of enemy buff-chains. Localized holdouts that stem our fields. Friends and allies who we wish remain Alive. By providing active support
and active disruption, as well as somewhere between 4 and 5 mid-Green or higher combatants in the area, various regions are threatened with a defeat-in-detail where the power that had to be spread out to protect all their troops cannot regroup in time to prevent our Massive Super-Spirit-Deathball from rolling specific positions over. We snap a couple of vital supports out of the defensive chains, and suddenly swathes of the enemy are in our attrition-fields and the summons are swarming and the area is choked with a Vine Fortress and it's now Our Hardpoint rather than an enemy position.
Finally our most powerful techniques. These manifest as a persistent suite of powerful buffs for those of deep Connection with us, some soul-crushing stunts that negate finishers and/or prevent assassinations, alongside an incredibly brutal finisher for a stubborn opponent that has distinguished themselves against our build thus far. This would include the Bai we killed, or the Tribe Shaman, or the Bard-barian. Enemies that we haven't kept a lasting negative Connection to, but required personal attentions to remove. The finisher is important for those one-person strongholds that are able to otherwise negate/obstruct/stagnate our build. Like, for example, the Solar Men of the White Sky. We would want a last resort tool that we can dump all the Qi we gather from the fields of death and draining dances into so that we can crack foes that would otherwise not need to react to us. A truly crushing weight of Isolation-Fuelled Ending. Sometimes Winter is a frigid howling outside your walls and snatching only the unguarded. Sometimes Winter is the Avalanche that flattens the whole town into unrecognizable gravel beneath the glacier. Either way, the glacier doesn't care much once the obstacle is removed.
~~~~~~~~~~~
you could then say that the hardpoint-cracking or Isolated-Target-Mauling isn't our job, that that's the job of a dedicated DPS. And I say: yes. But requirements for our Finisher can be severe enough that I think it's efficient for us to be able to do it ourselves. The theme of Endings fueling Beginnings fueling
End really wraps up a fight and prevents the endless conflict of a concept like those of Red Garden, where Sun Liling and others can fight for eternity and still have fuel in the tank so long as they're not out of commission entirely. It's an incredibly useful tool that allows us to approach problems from a direction nobody seems to expect from with build's like ours. Head On. We've got the speed, maneuverability and stealth to apply this sort of damage right where the enemy wants it the least. We've also got the personal durability and mobility to get out after. It's an excellent trick to pull out when the enemy thinks they're truly prepared for us, to crack open a supposed place of safety and send the wind howling through the gap we open.
For conclusion I'll type a bit about Dominions. I typed a bit about Dominions before and I'll do so again here: in Dominions (one of the source inspirations for YRS-verse) you can get a lot of tactical flexibility from very high investment in only one or two paths, even if there are eight paths in total. Just because we've got a diversity of tricks, doesn't necessarily mean we're too spread out so long as the tricks all relate to the same concepts we're empowering. Look at the Ducal builds. They're able to be better-than-good in just about every field, and truly excel in multiple on top of that. I don't think we're Ducal tier, but like. We're pretty far from needing to cut
more of our options just to make sure the ones we have are able to land properly. I think that the odds are good that we'll continue to have good Field, Summon and Finisher effects for damage but lack a strong middle option for damage, rely on our fields for most of our control/damage, and lack dispels. These are problems that our spirits help solve for us, but that Ducal champs would likely be able to do on their own because Ducal champs are strong as heck.
Like. We already sacrificed most of our middle-ground offensive potential, and I'd rather finish sacrificing that then start hacking apart the Finisher that can reallllly abuse all the stats we have to support it (mobility, stealth, bulk, to-hit, penetration, Qi-reserve-advantage). Stronger fields don't solve conceptual obstacles to that portion of our build, which was the issue Ji Rong had facing us. We had a better set of concepts to box with him with, and forced him to play to his finisher. A stronger finisher for Ji Rong there doesn't solve the conceptual issue that he was pinning all his hope on one part of the battle, while we planned to win basically all the rest of it. Trying to win a whole war in one decisive strike isn't good strategy, it's desperation, and we shut it down with properly prepared defenses.
Similarly, relying on our fields "just being strong enough" isn't a good strategy. It's just a hope, not a plan. Defeat in Detail is a plan, and a Finisher that increases in usefulness based on how much Qi we've gathered from the fallen makes that plan better. I could see an argument for a Mid-ground Offense fueled by all that Qi being higher utility, or some sort of wall-breaking debuff, but not additional Field/Construct investment. We want something that makes use of all that excess Qi to break down the Walls that would otherwise stagnate us. We don't need more control or better fields, those are both already effective. Damage or debuff or finisher, but not more of what we're already great at
Basically, our goal is to only pull whatever our Qi-Dumping tool is once we've got our Qi engine thrumming with all the little ends we're inflicting on the enemy forces. Something that makes us a problem that ramps up in danger over time, that you can't just stick a Wall in front of and call it a day. We want to make sure we don't stagnate, and to that end we can grab Damage, Debuffs or Finishers to overcome that obstacle. I'd prefer Finisher, because it sounds the most likely to succeed in cases we're forced to pull it out, but hey. Debuffs sound good to me too now that I've typed all this out.
Either way, not more Field/Summons/Control. Different concept to help prevent our getting stagnated, and hey! Maybe we'll get a debuff Art that leads
into a potential Finisher. That'd be ideal, really.
