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I've seen so much focus on chi abilities, in particular the idea that all you need is Body Chi and you can super-charge your PS to deal hundreds or thousands of points of damage but the Atemi category has some seriously wicked options. Withering Flesh on a successful strike (meaning the victim fails to roll with it) cuts ones SDC in HALF, another one and they've only 1 SDC left (so basically relying on nothing but hit points). Which means you could have a huge SDC grade tank character and this attack can have him reduced to nothing but his HP in just two good strikes.

Meanwhile Neural Atemi can completely paralyze a target if you can manage 3 successful attacks inside 2d6 minutes, no matter what their HP or SDC levels are, leaving them helpless. Yet these two abilities (as the most prominent) seem to be completely ignored or otherwise overshadowed by the 'oh yeah get Body Chi and you can have a PS of a 1000 easy' crowd (something that's not that easy to manage actually and not wise to deplete your Chi in such moves anyway, leaves you vulnerable to chi attacks showboating like that). Even though they require no expenditures other than attacks and use up no other resources (and obviously you were going to be using up attacks on something) so can be used as frequently as you have attacks available unlike with Chi.

I thought you could roll with withering flesh to make it pretty ineffective though. Not to mention armor probably negates it, and striking people can be pretty tough with soft chi making for near-perfect parrying.

Also pretty sure that if you do a triple-neural atemi, while it might stop someone from physical movement, they could probably still do chi attacks.

Atemi certainly has lasting power, especially if you're taking on a huge amount of opponents in sequence over prolonged power. Especially if you're in an area that you can't absorb much chi from to replenish your supplies.

It's like how them Aes Sedai always run out of Saidar.