Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25814498-20150505201606/@comment-26871105-20160618020605

"I am now certain that you do not understand this Hatsu in the slightest. Secondly, it is not a melee attack in the first place. It is based off of Water Divination conducted by enhancers. Did you see Gon touching the glass when he did Water Divination? "

You do realise while ues they didn't actually touch the glass, they may very well be right? That 2 to 3 cetimeters of distance is not what we call a ranged attack.

"it is not just "another melee" attack with no other "additional dynamics". Honestly I'm getting bored of saying it, but I'll keep on going until I can get you to understand; the ability is extremely effective at killing Nen Users and organic matter in general. Because the user is able to expand their opponents water content at an extremely fast rate, they are able to bypass any defences that normal physical attacks, such as the fists you're so fond of, would be unable to. You are literally making someone explode from the inside out. Everything else aside, if you cannot see the difference between making someone explode from within and punching someone with an enhanced fist, I don't know what else to say to you. "

Except we have no evidence pointing towards the notion that it's even an effective attack to begin with, meanwhile I at least have 1 piece of evidence that suggests otherwise. When the Enhancer Palm, who everyone knows is quite a capable Enhancer, that she has violent outbursts and when that happens she does not keep her Nen in check; holds a coffee mug and keeps her hatsu on during the time when she was in a foul mood (which would also strength Nen), the liquid merely flows out of the mug instead of poking/cracking through it. What this suggests is that no matter how strong of an Enhancer you are, it's next to an impossibly to use this property of water expansion consistently as a means of offence in the form of explosion, if at all possible to begin with.

As such it's either better to just rely on your fists, or search for other methods to achieve the exact same feat with siginificantly way less wasted potential and effort on your part, such as Emission, Manipulation and Transmutation, where they all could achieve the same "touch and boom" kind of attack easily.

Why would you think that the Water Divination Baptism-ish attack would simply by-pass the defences to begin with? I call it Baptism-ish because you're literally killing people with Nen Activation Baptism, and there is a reason to why no Nen users in HxH do NOT do that, because while it may be an effective tool to kill unsuspecting Nen-less people, it's utterly useless to be used against Nen users. Nen can be quantised and their interaction works like basic arithmetics, this is brought up and explained by numerous characters in the title. All of the Nen coming into contact with a person has to completely cancel-out the Nen defence on the target in the region of attack before they can reach the body and do stuff. When you attempt to surge Nen into their body, and not even for the purpose of destroying them, but to react to the water inside their body so you can hopefully get an indirect kill, do you realise just how many unnecessary gating you have to pass through to even have a remote chance in damanging someone, let alone killing them outright? Now combine this piece of information with the fact you probably need near master level of Enhancement to even crack a coffee mug. Why would anyone even want this ability?

This is not some condition vs reward thing where with all the tough works you need to do, there is a nugget of gold at the end that gives you some incredible advantage of sort. This is just an extension of something's basic property with no augments, no rules and conditions, no versatility and next to no effectiveness. You might as well just use Enhancement to punch people at this stage, because at the very least, it's damage is guaranteed for the very most part when they hit. This is imho a very misdirected ability that completely wastes the potential of Enhancement, while gaining absolutely nothing in return.

You may say "well ain't everyone in HxH be running with some form of self imposed handicap out of some personal bias?" Hell yes, you're absolutely correct there, personalities shape on bias after all, and not everyone needs to min-max like a power gamer on steroids. However they almost always make sure they get "something" out of that self imposed rule. This ability however, it's just a handicap, pure and simple. There is a difference between cutting off your left arm so you can for whatever reason gain access a gun on the right, and cutting off your left arm so that it looks cool when you defeat someone.