I dunno ...

[infidel901]

Commander difficulty. First few weeks. Kill/capture vip mission. 112% infil, extremely light. There are the expected 13 aliens, distributed in 4 pods, fine. But there are also 6 (so far) faceless randomly popping up. Also, in spite of watching youtube casters playing legend, making 40% shots all the time, my guys ROUTINELY miss 75+% shots!
wtf?
And the stun lancers? they can actually make you go fully unconscious? not just stun for two turns? this is a timer mission. Why not just give them insta-kill button?
edit: And now 10 faceless. Not even done yet.

[TempuSFatumA]

X Gon' Give It To Ya!

[dodger]

Sounds like you have a dark event adding faceless to missions. Did you invest heavily in intel gathering to try and catch the missions to counter the dark events?

[Merkle]

Or its a trap mission.

[infidel901]

Everyone set to intel yes, but have no idea which missions counter DE's...but even if it were a DE, .....TEN faceless???

There are trap missions???

[Thrair]

Yeah. They're like the ambush UFO landings you'd get in Long War 1. You know, a small/medium UFO landing with forces on par with a large UFO. The gameplay intent is to catch you off guard with a mission that's much stronger than it would initially appear, so you commit to the mission instead of aborting/ignoring it.

Long War 2's way of doing this tends to be "easy" looking missions that start dropping a metric crapton of reinforcements all over the damn place. If you get reinforcements dropping pretty much the moment your squad's revealed, call the Skyranger and be prepared to get the hell out of dodge the moment it arrives.

[Arcalane]

And the stun lancers? they can actually make you go fully unconscious? not just stun for two turns? this is a timer mission. Why not just give them insta-kill button?

That's been in since vanilla! Very first time I did the blacksite in my first ever campaign after the game had just come out, I had to carry my Ranger out over someone's shoulder because they were busy taking a dirtnap.

Can't blame that on the LW2/PI crew, sorry.

[infidel901]

I just don't remember the stunlancers actually doing anything in vanilla...certainly not unconsciousness.

[Arcalane]

I remember a lot of post-release reddit threads being "OMG, Stun Lancers OP!" and several of the earliest mods released onto the workshop were to nerf the Stun Lancer. They were an absolute menace if you didn't know how to handle them properly.

[Narcissistic_Martyr]

It's rare, but stun lancers can knock you unconscious. It's most common with shaken and other low will soldiers but it can happen to anyone.

I restarted for 1.1, was doing a bit of corpse famring (basically doing those supply raids you have like 3 hours to prepare for which end up with 50 troopers early on. And stun lancer knocked my healer out of the fight. Basically chucked the flare out right then but ended up recovering the mission since everyone had a med kit since I knew there'd be lots of huddling in high cover with vipers spitting at the troops. Still, that was definitely an xcom moment.

[Manifest]

That's been in since vanilla! Very first time I did the blacksite in my first ever campaign after the game had just come out, I had to carry my Ranger out over someone's shoulder because they were busy taking a dirtnap.

Can't blame that on the LW2/PI crew, sorry.

Stun Lancers seem to do more damage though, though I've only gotten hit by one once in LW2.