Question about the Death Touch kata - based on the critical severity rules, the enhancement effect simply causes your opponent to suffer a Close Call (or at best) a Flesh Wound critical strike. Outside of an extremely lucky roll to get the burst effect, you’re basically tickling the opponent and giving them damaged armor? Really doesnt feel like a Rank 4 technique does it?

Saying 'Het!" to your opponent's Endurance 16 is a pretty prickish move tho.

It's important to remember that Togashi get Death Touch as a rank 3 privelaged access, if you also make it a Tattoo you're looking at School Rank in bonus successes so you can activate the burst effect every time (which means you can just make minions dead with a tap).

Also note, Flesh Wound is Lightly Wounded, if they're Lightly Wounded again in the same ring, they upgrade to Severely, and if they get Lightly Wounded again while Severely, boom permanent injury. It's slow without the burst effect, but depending on who you're fighting you can very quickly scale up to like, punching people's limbs off or crushing their heart with a punch like it's suddenly Mortal Kombat.

EDIT: Also if you're with others who can also hit a heavily armored target, being able to go "better spend Void Points or I'm gonna literally punch your armor off" is real annoying.

you don't need to be "that" lucky to put someone unconscious though... especially when you are rank 3-4 togashi. so the burst is really really good.

but I agree. the basic effect have almost no point, this is gonna get resisted to a severity 0 so easily, NOBODY in their right mind will stick with that kiho enhancement the turn after they activate it, and will instead use the "breaking blow" from fire or re-activate death touch to try to get the unconscious.

unless you are rank 6 togashi monk and activate 2 kihos... but hopefully they didn't write the kata just taking that into consideration lol.

strange design. but that doesn't really surprise me.... not the slightest actually...

17 minutes ago, UnitOmega said:

Also note, Flesh Wound is Lightly Wounded, if they're Lightly Wounded again in the same ring, they upgrade to Severely, and if they get Lightly Wounded again while Severely, boom permanent injury. It's slow without the burst effect, but depending on who you're fighting you can very quickly scale up to like, punching people's limbs off or crushing their heart with a punch like it's suddenly Mortal Kombat.

how much deadliness punches have ? 2 ? that won't do a light wound most of the time. unless you use fire to attack and get a good bunch of opportunities, maybe. but I feel this is stretching it and probably at this point other kihos would do a much better job.

If you can get both you and your target enraged, it starts getting interesting... but this is the kind of things that make me miss the old advantages, like stone fists.

The burst effect is nifty though.

1 minute ago, Franwax said:

If you can get both you and your target enraged, it starts getting interesting... but this is the kind of things that make me miss the old advantages, like stone fists.

The burst effect is nifty though.

Fire stance. Is the solution to all offense

But this is a Void Kiho right? But yeah, probably easier to go Fire Stance, Flame First and fish for double opportunities...

15 minutes ago, Franwax said:

But this is a Void Kiho right? But yeah, probably easier to go Fire Stance, Flame First and fish for double opportunities...

jeez... heartpiercing strike probably better most of the time then.

well, a togashi monk can add bonus successes.. so the unconscious burst is really what it is about. the base effect is purely trash unless you are rank 6 togashi i guess.

Well the fact that the Togashi monk does not have access to Kata (except for privileged access to open hand style) bars HPS, so playing with Kiho is what they have

I think Frankwax has it right. For the moment, this is mostly a Togashi tattoo thing; when you get it at rank 3, you're getting 3 bonus successes right off the bat. We'll have to see if other monk schools get school techniques that also typically/regularly allow them to hit TN 3 plus 3 bonus successes.

7 hours ago, Avatar111 said:

but I agree. the basic effect have almost no point, this is gonna get resisted to a severity 0 so easily,

Severity 0 still destroys damaged armor or damages undamaged armor, or removes durable from durable armor.

Against armored foes, that's actually still pretty useful. Especially early on in a fight. He's in full 5 point? Not for long! Or, you burn him out of his preciously few void points.

Want to get a real crit? Go enraged. Yeah, most of the time, it won't be a real crit, still, but they need 2 successes to avoid that, instead of automatically doing so.

The burst does dazed and disoriented as well - this can break a channeler's concentration, and whatever they do next turn, is +2 TN; whichever they do is also at +2 TN the following round if they don't do something else to ditch whichever of dazed or disoriented is still around.

To explicate:

Dazed is +2 to Att/Sch actions, until you spend a turn doing neither.
Disoriented is +2 to Move/Support actions, until you spend a turn doing neither.
Any turn you act, you're doing one of the four...
Both Dazed and Disoriented are automatically (no resist) applied to the target if the burst goes off.
The resist is only for the Unconscious condition.

the 'mix and match' stance opportunities is pretty cool.

and given the relatively low damage unarmed attacks cause, busting open plate armour in two blows and then dismissing the kata is a rather nice option.