Psi Ops still suck?

[trihero]

They are still very strong. Most (all?) of their attacks ignore a lot of combat alien upgrades like defense or dodge so they scale well late game. Yeah, you roll on dice on their powers and it's possible to get a little bit screwed, but we're dealing with crazy psychics here.

Uhhh, but a lot of their moves depends on an enemy stat "will" which is very hard to penetrate, even harder than defense or dodge. Holotargeter doesn't help it...there are very few things that reduce enemy will. I can only think of a hacking post reward off the top of my head.

I don't know if you've actually tried skills like null lance...it has one tile width so it's rare to hit more than one guy with it. Soulfire hits like a wet noodle and doesn't compare to say, hail of bullets. Stasis is the only ok'ish skill but it's hard to even justify that with tools like frost bomb, incendiary bomb, hacking, etc.

Meanwhile other classes get weapons of mass destruction like serial, street sweeper, saturation fire, combat engineer, here the psi ops gets soggy noodles and sometimes you don't even roll the soggy noodles because of the wet mess of weak skills you can roll.

[JulianSkies]

They are still very strong. Most (all?) of their attacks ignore a lot of combat alien upgrades like defense or dodge so they scale well late game. Yeah, you roll on dice on their powers and it's possible to get a little bit screwed, but we're dealing with crazy psychics here.

Uhhh, but a lot of their moves depends on an enemy stat "will" which is very hard to penetrate, even harder than defense or dodge. Holotargeter doesn't help it...there are very few things that reduce enemy will. I can only think of a hacking post reward off the top of my head.

I don't know if you've actually tried skills like null lance...it has one tile width so it's rare to hit more than one guy with it. Soulfire hits like a wet noodle and doesn't compare to say, hail of bullets. Stasis is the only ok'ish skill but it's hard to even justify that with tools like frost bomb, incendiary bomb, hacking, etc.

Meanwhile other classes get weapons of mass destruction like serial, street sweeper, saturation fire, combat engineer, here the psi ops gets soggy noodles and sometimes you don't even roll the soggy noodles because of the wet mess of weak skills you can roll.

For what little it's worth Soulfire has the same function as Combat Protocol.

[Valaska]

They are still very strong. Most (all?) of their attacks ignore a lot of combat alien upgrades like defense or dodge so they scale well late game. Yeah, you roll on dice on their powers and it's possible to get a little bit screwed, but we're dealing with crazy psychics here.

Uhhh, but a lot of their moves depends on an enemy stat "will" which is very hard to penetrate, even harder than defense or dodge. Holotargeter doesn't help it...there are very few things that reduce enemy will. I can only think of a hacking post reward off the top of my head.

I don't know if you've actually tried skills like null lance...it has one tile width so it's rare to hit more than one guy with it. Soulfire hits like a wet noodle and doesn't compare to say, hail of bullets. Stasis is the only ok'ish skill but it's hard to even justify that with tools like frost bomb, incendiary bomb, hacking, etc.

Meanwhile other classes get weapons of mass destruction like serial, street sweeper, saturation fire, combat engineer, here the psi ops gets soggy noodles and sometimes you don't even roll the soggy noodles because of the wet mess of weak skills you can roll.

Don't forget reaper, or 2x blaster bombs, restoration etc.

[The Boz]

Soulfire needs to scale. It really, badly does. Maybe give it a damage bump at Soul Steal or something?

[JulianSkies]

Soulfire needs to scale. It really, badly does. Maybe give it a damage bump at Soul Steal or something?

Psi Op skills scale in damage with their psi amp, mind, but that thing is locked behind gatekeeper autopsy and third tier avatar.

[The Boz]

Thanks! Not far enough to know that yet...
Damn! That *IS* a long way into the game.

[Balor]

Ok I was thinking I was doing something wrong with my Psi Ops. I only have three right now and all with the basic powers because I was stupid to took a very long training on guy and keep putting him in infiltration rotation due to the lack of man power.

I have found insanity at early/mid game to have a very low hit chance. They have been ok as an extra body and feel more a vet rookie than something comparable to another class.

Maybe they are wonderful at let game all tech'd out but from the other posters it does not sound like it.

Maybe Psi can be a focus of 1.3 update with a bit of fine tuning?

[moroniccinamun]

I have extremely limited experience, just barely got psi stuff going, but yea they sure feel underwhelming.

Glad I'm not the only one thinking they aren't worth the vast costs to reach. Maybe if enough people mention it something will be changed.

[gimrah]

I have found insanity at early/mid game to have a very low hit chance.

I always thought to be worthwhile it needed 100% to hit and then psi/will simply affects the relative likelihood of the different results.

[Sines]

Sounds like Psi Ops have swapped positions with Vanilla SPARKS. Not necessarily bad, but you end up paying a lot more resources for something that's not actually any better than a regular soldier.

[Balor]

Sounds like Psi Ops have swapped positions with Vanilla SPARKS. Not necessarily bad, but you end up paying a lot more resources for something that's not actually any better than a regular soldier.

I think it might be one step beyond that but I have not played with them maxed out yet. It takes a lot to get them but they are easily at the bottom of all the units you can take even before factoring in the time gating and resource dump to get them.

[UraniumOverdose]

I went in and changed the "days per psi rank above yours for training" from 12 to 6.
This makes low level psis get abilities like soulfire after a day, but abilities like null lance or domination still take 30 days. However, it's not the ridiculous 64 days or something like that. I don't think the training times should be ridiculous considering we have to level them up in the field and then we get a random choice of three abilities instead of a standard progression, in addition to the resources needed for the psi lab the begin with.

This makes psi classes useful again. I would say they are A tier whereas gunners would be S tier for a power comparison.

with unedited training times psi classes are probably marginally more useful that mid to late game technicals.

[dundalis]

Not guaranteed to get solace, and in my game mind whips are only -10 will and +10 psi offense. And yes I use them anyways. Woohoo, soulfire goes from 4-6 to 5-7. (and void rift stuck at 2-3)

Just checked, you're right, it's only +10. Well, you wrote you had solace on those psi troopers didn't you?

The psi may have been powerful in vanilla, but the bar has been raised for the other classes in this mod as well. Randomness in skills was not the way to go. And in vanilla, at least on legendary, the training times were so long you could only field 2 psis with the best abilities. That would be an OK limiter in LW2, given that there's the whole infiltration system as well so they can't be used on every mission anyways.

Good point about other classes being improved. I still think learning all the skills is a bad idea not because they would be OP but because every psi trooper would end up being exactly the same as every other one. I have different sharpshooters with different perks so why should my psi troopers all be the same?
However, with a limited selection of skills, it's important that all of them are good. I haven't been particularly impressed by mind merge either. Soulfire does adequate damage but i'm still at laser. I was expecting it would gain damage with psi offense and/or better psi amps. If it only gains 1 point by the end of the game, of course, it's not great.

Something that could help with the random skills would be to have all higher skills depend on one of the initiate skills. Fortress would open all support auras, soulfire would open the direct damage, insanity the mind-control branch culminating with dominate. This way you could predict which skills you'll be able to train later once they finish their initial training. Since it's not very long, if you really don't like their choice of branches, you can put them as advisors in a haven.

Given the training times, I'm curious how you could possibly end up with even 1 or 2 soldiers trained in all skills, much less the entire psi troop before the campaign ends, to make opening up all skills for training such an issue.

They are still very strong. Most (all?) of their attacks ignore a lot of combat alien upgrades like defense or dodge so they scale well late game. Yeah, you roll on dice on their powers and it's possible to get a little bit screwed, but we're dealing with crazy psychics here.

Whether psi are useful or not is irrelevant. The only question that needs to be asked from a game design perspective, is given the high cost involved, is the resulting soldier proportionately more powerful than the cheaper alternative, or at least in the ballpark. If the answer is a resounding no, then there is an issue. It's the exact same issue LW1 had post beta 15 with Mecs. There was zero point in wasting resources on them, because they were no where near close to proportionately better than high level regular soldiers. Whether you ended up building them anyway because you thought mecs were cool or whatever is not relevant when it comes to assessing the opportunity cost attached to making them from a game design perspective.

[regloh70]

Not guaranteed to get solace, and in my game mind whips are only -10 will and +10 psi offense. And yes I use them anyways. Woohoo, soulfire goes from 4-6 to 5-7. (and void rift stuck at 2-3)

Just checked, you're right, it's only +10. Well, you wrote you had solace on those psi troopers didn't you?

The psi may have been powerful in vanilla, but the bar has been raised for the other classes in this mod as well. Randomness in skills was not the way to go. And in vanilla, at least on legendary, the training times were so long you could only field 2 psis with the best abilities. That would be an OK limiter in LW2, given that there's the whole infiltration system as well so they can't be used on every mission anyways.

Good point about other classes being improved. I still think learning all the skills is a bad idea not because they would be OP but because every psi trooper would end up being exactly the same as every other one. I have different sharpshooters with different perks so why should my psi troopers all be the same?
However, with a limited selection of skills, it's important that all of them are good. I haven't been particularly impressed by mind merge either. Soulfire does adequate damage but i'm still at laser. I was expecting it would gain damage with psi offense and/or better psi amps. If it only gains 1 point by the end of the game, of course, it's not great.

Something that could help with the random skills would be to have all higher skills depend on one of the initiate skills. Fortress would open all support auras, soulfire would open the direct damage, insanity the mind-control branch culminating with dominate. This way you could predict which skills you'll be able to train later once they finish their initial training. Since it's not very long, if you really don't like their choice of branches, you can put them as advisors in a haven.

Given the training times, I'm curious how you could possibly end up with even 1 or 2 soldiers trained in all skills, much less the entire psi troop before the campaign ends, to make opening up all skills for training such an issue.

They are still very strong. Most (all?) of their attacks ignore a lot of combat alien upgrades like defense or dodge so they scale well late game. Yeah, you roll on dice on their powers and it's possible to get a little bit screwed, but we're dealing with crazy psychics here.

Whether psi are useful or not is irrelevant. The only question that needs to be asked from a game design perspective, is given the high cost involved, is the resulting soldier proportionately more powerful than the cheaper alternative, or at least in the ballpark. If the answer is a resounding no, then there is an issue. It's the exact same issue LW1 had post beta 15 with Mecs. There was zero point in wasting resources on them, because they were no where near close to proportionately better than high level regular soldiers. Whether you ended up building them anyway because you thought mecs were cool or whatever is not relevant when it comes to assessing the opportunity cost attached to making them from a game design perspective.

They are right now simply not worth it. There are only two skills that are good, domination and stasis and you have no control if your psi ops are able to learn them. High costs, long training times, inferior to every other class that make way more damage and or way better crowd control exept the above mentioned skills. Psi ops where op in vanilla, now they are the exact opposite. As i mentioned earlier, i don't even bother building a psi lab.

[moroniccinamun]

The number of missions isn't really an issue since you can take them out of the tank and resume training when they return, what is an issue is the infiltration time that's basically lost time. I think with the way they now require normal levels to gain xp, the tank time could be reduced. It's probably a simple ini editing.

I also like the idea of easier infiltration thanks to their powers but one could argue that hiding psi powers from advent isn't easy so not sure about this.

EDIT. Looks like the psi training time is in XComGameData.ini

Code: Select all

XComHeadquarters_PsiTrainingDays[0]=5 ;Easy
XComHeadquarters_PsiTrainingDays[1]=6 ;Normal
XComHeadquarters_PsiTrainingDays[2]=6 ;Classic
XComHeadquarters_PsiTrainingDays[3]=6 ;Impossible

; additional days per ability level above current psi level
PsiTrainingRankScalar[0]=10.0f ;Easy
PsiTrainingRankScalar[1]=12.0f ;Normal
PsiTrainingRankScalar[2]=12.0f ;Classic
PsiTrainingRankScalar[3]=12.0f ;Impossible

Not sure how the scalar modifier works. As you can see, base time is not that big. The issue is the multiplier for learning higher level abilities. Unfortunately since the abilities offered for training are random you can very much end up with all high level abilities at your first level up and spend a reeeeeeeally long time in the tank.

I just realized what this meant
Maybe I'll try this too, like someone else suggested.

[Nekojusan]

I have found insanity at early/mid game to have a very low hit chance. They have been ok as an extra body and feel more a vet rookie than something comparable to another class.

Maybe they are wonderful at late game all tech'd out but from the other posters it does not sound like it.

Insanity in lw2 is utter rubbish, it never landed once in my last campaign against even basic advent, at the moment you are just wasting your turn casting the thing, it needs a serious looking at.

Given the costs and time involved psi ops just aren't worth it, other classes are far more efficient, they can deal similar damage and aren't shut down for weeks with every promotion

[Bombadil]

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.

I'm only playing on Veteran atm to get used to all the new mechanics, and so far (early midgame) my Psi Ops are at least pulling their weight. But of course this is partly because there are still some Mk I enemies around at this time / on this difficulty with like 45 will and 6 hp, which makes soulfire damage at least partly relevant and gives Insanity ~95% chance of succes with the Neurowhip. But I also kinda rushed them because I wanted to try them out.

From a design point of view, I always wondered what the purpose of Soul Steal and Sustain was. Like mentioned many times before, Psi Ops need a lot of time investment to not completely fall behind, even more so now when they have to go on missions between training. Which means, I plan to actually never get them badly hurt. Grats, sustain just saved your psionic's life. Now he is wounded for 20+ days, after which chances are he has to train another couple of days to train his next ability. If Soulsteal would at least reduce wound time on kills or improve Soulfire in any other significant way before I get to disect a Gatekeeper...

Also, I don't think Mind Merge would be too strong if it last for 2 complete turns instead of one and/or did not end the turn on use like Aid Protocol.

[trihero]

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.

Soulfire's damage goes up with psi offense; like for me it's base 4-6 and when I put on a neurowhip (+10 psi) it goes up to 5-7. So yes, the psi amp should boost it though I don't know by how much since the tech is locked way at the end behind all the shadow chamber researches.

[GavinRuneblade]

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.

Soulfire's damage goes up with psi offense; like for me it's base 4-6 and when I put on a neurowhip (+10 psi) it goes up to 5-7. So yes, the psi amp should boost it though I don't know by how much since the tech is locked way at the end behind all the shadow chamber researches.

This reminds of the big WTF in all MMO games where the best gear only drops from the toughest boss in the game. In other words the only way to get the gear is prove you don't need it, because you can already overcome the hardest challenge without it.

It seems from what a lot of people are saying that maybe the tools that make psi functional come too late in the game.

Would it be too much if the tier 3 amp came from gatekeepers, and tier 2 came right after getting a psi operative with his first trained power? Kind of how some other unlocks require non psi soldiers of certain ranks?

[trihero]

It seems from what a lot of people are saying that maybe the tools that make psi functional come too late in the game.

No, the real issue is you get a random selection of the psi skills, and it's easy to miss the good abilities. It doesn't matter if you have good psi score if you never get domination or other skills that rely on it.

Also skills like null lance are just...meh. One tile width? Is no one else frustrated with this? (in before you say something like it's reusable, because so is saturation fire, trench gun, street sweeper, etc.)

[Tuhalu]

Given the costs and time involved psi ops just aren't worth it, other classes are far more efficient, they can deal similar damage and aren't shut down for weeks with every promotion

Psi Ops are not shut down while training. Just like the vanilla game, you can send them into the field while they are training.

[moroniccinamun]

On the chance that any mods are reading this, maybe a solution would be to have 3 "columns' like other skills.

When training, first one would be a "low level" ability, 2nd a mid, and 3rd a high. Replaced by another (random?) level power if that "pool" is empty. This way you are (technically) more likely to have that domination show up for example, but will never have a situation where you are forced to have them in the tube for months due to it all being high level stuff after your first mission.

[Devon_v]

I've always felt that Soul Steal should bypass wound timers. If you're literally healing yourself by sucking the life out of people, why do you need a hospital afterwards?

Psis might be interesting as is if they just healed themselves and never missed a battle. I never bothered with the hassle of psis even in vanilla where they were OP because grenadiers just owned everything on their own. Gunners and Rangers seem to do a good enough job of ruling the battlefield to not need any expensive randomly powered help.

[Bill]

It looks like this thread had an effect. Check out the change log for 1.2.

Worked on Psi Tree to 1) add more pre-reqs, with the effect of reducing the number of high-level perks that take an eternity to train appearing so early 2) ensure at least one perk from the top two levels can be trained if pre-reqs are fulfilled and 3) reduce training time overall. This is an issue we'll continue gathering feedback on and may make further changes for 1.3.
- PsiAmp_MG costs reduced, requires Codex research and Codex corpse, provides +10 to psi offense instead of +15, updated all locs
- PsiAmp_BM costs reduced, requires Gatekeeper research / Gatekeepr corpse, provides +20 to psi offense instead of +30, updated all locs

Personally I would prefer it if you could select any of the skills to train from the start, hopefully this is enough

[Arcalane]

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.