Bombadil wrote:Just for comparison (I didn't get that far in my campaign yet): Has anyone found out how much the Psi abilities scale up with better psi amps? For example, the soulfire damage? I mean, I know the upgrades from one GREMLIN tier to another are pretty significant. UFOpedia doesn't say anything about this yet.
Localization for the Mag-tier Amp implies that it increases
on top of the Psi Offense bonus it grants, but it doesn't say how much by exactly.
I'm definitely inclined to agree with the general thought that psiops are significantly more challenging and expensive to get in to. Between the long cooldowns (most are 3 turns
minimum, usually 4 or higher) psiops are typically stuck using their gun most of the time - which they're going to be crap with due to lack of experience/levels - or grenades.
Tying Mag-tier amps to Gatekeepers is also kind of ridiculous. The number of opportunities you get to salvage gatekeepers is extremely low, which places an extremely arbitrary cap on the number of mag-amps you can have. Conversely you can have as many cool guns as you can make since alloys and elerium are much easier to come by relatively speaking.
I'm going to throw out that Mag-tier amps should require Sectoid corpses - either two of them, or a Sectoid Commander corpse. Lock Beam-tier amps to the much rarer Gatekeepers and everything should be golden.
For cooldowns, I'm wondering if a Burn system couldn't be implemented. Essentially, your psion can cast powers that are still 'on cooldown' but to do so they need to take direct health damage (ignores armour+ablative+shield). As a hypothetical example, this could be 1 point per turn of cooldown left with a PlusOne of 100 minus the Psion's Will. This throws in a more solid drawback for using mindwhips- you get that upfront damage, but you up the risk of taking more burn damage too.
Continuing the example; if you cast Soulfire and it has a three turn cooldown, then next turn you can cast it again but take 2-3 damage in the process. In turn this makes Soulsteal make Soulfire self-sustaining which is a nice boost to the perk's effectiveness; a psion who gets mediocre rolls for their other powers or manages to snag soulfire+soulsteal early may never possess the raw power of a voidlancer or riftbomber, but they can soulfire away merrily. Given the relatively low damage of soulfire compared to coil/plasma tier weaponry and its inability to target mech units, this shouldn't break anything
too badly.
If you're in a shit spot, your psions can basically burn themselves out to give you the edge you need on the battlefield, at the risk of wounding (healing time) or even the chance of knocking them unconcious if you really go all-out.