Pavonis Interactive Forums

The whole prerequisites is a terrible idea. Look at this: Fortres goes against Soul steal. Now at its base its already a bit of a difficult choice as it gives immunities vs healing/ablative. BUT if you choose Soul Steal you cant get: Bastion (which makes sense), Fuse or Stasis shield. And seeing ho...

Oh, XCOM 1 and Long War 1 definitely had innate height defence. Floaters were really scary just because when flying they got some 20 to 30 additional defence (some of them had DGG as well). That wasn't actually 'height' defence, it was flying defence, which they got even if they were lower than you...

Height advantage gives you +10 aim and that's all without perks. You only get a defence boost with DGG. In fact I don't think any version of EU, EW, X2, LW1 or LW2 has had a defence bonus for height. But it is a common misconception because of the way DGG was worded in EU vanilla. LW2 actually reduc...

I've found they can be tough fights because you don't have concealment and the pods are close together. I send 6 good soldiers, or 5 of my absolute best at a pinch. Sometimes I can pull the pods very carefully one at a time but more often than not it turns into one big fight against everything (or a...

Yes but not a great deal. I've spent a couple of missions on my latest campaign lingering at evac to murder rnfs. (Mainly as closure for them kicking my ass last campaign; it's not particularly fun otherwise.) In killing maybe 30 enemies this way with low level soldiers I've seen one in-mission prom...

OK, so I thought I was lightly joshing, but I will apologise if you took offence. I should also say that I am not from Pavonis; just one of the testers. But I've been playing 1.3 on Commander and find early game very manageable, as well as enjoyable. I've also been talking to Legend players througho...

So OP did so many stealth missions in 1.2 he forgot how to fight. Good thing we made some changes then.

You could think about semi-stealth approaches. Get to the objective but expect to fight at least one pod between going loud and evaccing. There's hardly any difference between 2 and 4 soldiers so you may as well take at least 4. I did a hack with 4 soldiers but ended up killing everything in the end...

You shouldn't be squadwiping really as most missions shouldn't be that binary. Especially an all - A Team as they will tend to be the bigger squad missions (8 guys). Xwynns wiped a very low ranked team early on in his stream. I had a bad mission mid game with 3 of 6 dead (and equipment left on the f...

So this will be something of a compromise in 1.3. But it's hard to get away from the fact that you'll probably need to hire/rescue new rookies and see who you get.

More damage is overall better than the 5 aim. However mag weapons are twice the price of lasers at a time when you are short on supplies and lasers offer aim at precisely the time when your soldiers are low level and need it most. I can't imagine skipping a weapon tier quite honestly. However there ...

Personally I think the fact there's such heated debate over the usefulness of so many perks and/or which playstyles are best shows that Pavonis is doing something right with regard to their class/perk balance. There are definitely multiple valid playstyles, involving different class/perk selections...

Pretty sure that's a vanilla bug. Think I've seen that before and not just on Hatekeepers.

Great post with many well made points. I have a few counters though. Lightning reflexes is great because you can clear OW without losing an action. This is very important for small squad missions like Jailbreaks, where pods activate and go into OW as you're trying to evac. If 1.3 achieves its object...

I've played with the original non-LW versions of these.

They were good and played quite differently to vanilla or LW classes. Perhaps not as balanced as LW2 is (or at least will be) but lots of fun.

They are good but the game is balanced around them. You may argue about grenadier abilities or relative weakness of alternatives, but flashbacks themselves are fine and frankly necessary given number of enemies vs xcom killing power.

I don't even play with rulers, so no frost grenades, and it's already my meta. That is, rapid deployment is great while the other two are meh. Sting grenades are also very powerful. Not to say I don't make shouty hybrids and boom hybrids but support is the core. I agree in 1.3 they should have a cor...

I like the feature in theory but in practice I don't use it. Between different mission types, infiltration levels and wounds, it just doesn't work more than it works for me. Also creating a squad seems to be a guaranteed way of signing an officer's death warrant.

I certainly hope so. I have literally never had a supply raid on a do-able timer. Which means I'm always starved for resources, can't build armour and then lose in the mid game.

@Johnnylump Thanks for that. I guess I'll shut up about infiltration then. I agree it should be entirely possible to balance psi mostly by adjusting inputs: on the perks themselves it's damage, cooldowns, hit chance, effect radii/width, duration, and then there's training times and pre-requisites (w...

Arguably that's not desirable if you unwittingly go over the threshold to trigger a retaliation.

Has anyone had success with a snapshot build? It struck me they'd be good on guerrilla ops if 1.3 rebalance to small squads is successful and would therefore be easier to level than other builds.

I was thinking snapshot, DGG, hunters instinct, low profile, serial and be a glass cannon.

Soo... that's another mission type that need balancing. Especially after seeing xwynns do exactly that (not that I could). Should be very very hard/risky to stealth but more viable to fight through - maybe keep the reinforcements but tone down the troops on the ground, so you are incentivised to fig...

On psi, I agree it would be good to have the option very early. If not 1st building, then 2nd. It would be a big opportunity cost to delay AWC, plus you have the research time, so wouldn't necessarily be unbalanced (indeed psi would have to be tuned up quite a lot before it was even). To make that v...

Great tip, although not sure if it might be an exploit, since the description says "take an action after dashing". I also like assaults on stealth / small squad missions. You tend to get overwatched if stuff gets activated as it seems like ayys can enter OW even on green alert. So lightnin...