Just finished the game, some final missions feedback

[aimlessgun]

First off, thanks so much to Pavonis for a great mod. Really enjoyed my playthrough.

I havn't seen much feedback on the final missions so here's some thoughts. Tldr they felt too easy (playing on Legendary, non-ironman but I didn't have to savescum for these missions )

Network Tower
I was pretty surprised that I got to bring 9 guys. Plus everyone gets squadsight on top of that. The liberation network towers are challenging due to the small squad size, but it's pretty hard to challenge 9 MSGTs without special mechanics. Maybe 6(7 with intel spend) is a better number for this mission? There were 31 enemies IIRC but you'll never have to fight like 8 of them because they were in the console building, activation of which instantly ends the mission.

Waterworld
I'll focus on the bossroom because before that you can crawl it and wait for all your big cooldowns every fight and it's pretty hard to balance anything for that.

Avatar HP felt too low. When the player has 12 MSGTs with plasma weapons and the commander, 50 HP and a couple armor is not enough. Not by a long shot. It was very easy to kill the Avatars in a single turn, and my only Sharpshooter was full Holo-support build with a coil weapon. I'd imagine someone who came into the mission with 2 damage sharpshooters and plasma lances would find it trivial.

Reinforcements coming out the gates might also be too few, pods of 3 is kind of weak. My Assault handled 2 spawns singlehandedly and still had Street Sweeper up for a 3rd. If the Avatars could live for more than 1 turn maybe this isn't an issue though, since you'd get more waves and have fewer soldier actions available to use for cleaning them up.

Having 13 soldiers for a mission is kinda unusual and cool so I'd rather not reduce the number of soldiers. You could also allow the reinforcements yellow alert actions but I'd imagine this would surprise people and make them very angry.

This boss fight is super RNG based depending on which gates spawn and where the Avatars teleport vs where your soldiers are, so maybe I got favored by RNG. Still though, the ayys got 1 shot on me the entire encounter. 1 shot. I can't imagine losing even with terrible RNG.

Anyways, I don't know if you even want the final missions to be super challenging. I'd imagine Ironman players would not be pleased at the prospect of losing their campaign right at the end. But even if that is the case, a bit of a difficulty bump could at least add a hint fear and tension

[Ketchup4684]

Just have the player face all 3 Avatars at once and watch the slaughter. Rip sanity.

[aimlessgun]

Just have the player face all 3 Avatars at once and watch the slaughter. Rip sanity.

I've always wanted to know how it would feel to have 3 guys mind controlled at once.

[DuskNite]

You know what. You're right. Fuck the players.

Suggestion
Avatar
Stat changes: 100 aim (from 85), 18 mobility.

Avatars now have 30 hp and 30 shields. Avatars restore all their shields in the beginning of every turn, but do not regenerate hp anymore. (Commander's Avatar has 15 hp and shields, allowing you to go quite reckless as well) (15, 20 and 25 hp for different difficulties. 20 shields for rookie only)

In the beginning of every turn, every unit near the avatar gains 5 free shields for the turn. (Commander's Avatar gives 2 shields)

Avatars start with 5 armor. If their armor is less than 10, they gain 2 armor per turn. (Commander's Avatar gets 2 armor, and 1 per turn when below 5) (1 armor gain for rookie. 4, 6 and 8 armor cap for Rookie, Veteran and Commander)

Avatars are now also immune to fire, poison and acid. (I mean, your 3/4 of your Psi Operatives get that at rank 1! Commander's Avatar gets this as well.)

When an Avatar mind controls a unit, it gains one free action for the turn. (Commander's Avatar does not have this) (Legendary only)

Avatars get free Run and Gun and Hit and Run, allowing them to run to flank you, hit you, then run back into cover. (Commander's Avatar does not have this.) (Has a 2 turn cooldown for Rookie and Veteran)

When the Avatar is revealed, all allied units lose 100 Will, except for Commander's Avatar.

[NephilimNexus]

My e-peen is huuuuge!

FTFY

[aimlessgun]

You know what. You're right. Fuck the players.
Suggestion
Avatar

Some cool ideas, but I worry about making the Avatar offensively too powerful and gaining power over time. Then it leads to very binary "kill it on the turn it spawns or lose" kind of gameplay. I like the idea of duplicating some of the powers to the commander's avatar though.

FTFY

Not at all. There are a couple assumptions I'm making when saying the missions are too easy though, namely that
-you came in with MSGTs in endgame gear
-you played vanilla XCOM2. The bossfight was pretty hard for me on vanilla partly because I didn't know what was going on or what to expect.

I think these are reasonable assumptions for the final boss of the game and for a mod that seems to assume a lot of existing knowledge. Given these assumptions, I think it's a pretty objective assessment to say "50 HP and 2 armor is not enough for the Avatar". I'm not some kind of tactical genius for holotargeting the thing, shooting it with 4 soldiers and then using my other 8 guys to deal with the rest of the room.

EDIT: Holy moly I went back to a vanilla save for a refresher and you only get 6 guys plus the Commander. And you have way weaker weapons (9 damage cannon vs 13!). And the Avatar as 35 HP. So vs Vanilla, LW2 bumped up Avatar HP by 43%, while increasing squad size by 86% and increasing weapon damage by ~40%. No wonder I remember the vanilla fight being so much harder.

[Zaramnor]

I finished my first playthrough on rookie difficulty and for me it's just fine. I would appreciate, if the difficulty stays at what it is, because there are three difficulties left and ironman can do the rest.

If it's not hard enough for you, just take fewer soldiers to this mission - this way you have your personal challenge, doesn't ruin the game for lower skilled players like myself and still can post here, what hero you are.

[Mobtank]

Sorry, but you can't really say "rookie is fine for me therefore higher difficulties should be easier". And I do agree that the avatar's hp is way to low if he can be killed by 4 guys in a squad of that size.

In general I've thought this quite a lot about endgame enemies (in vanilla also), that they just get killed in 1 turn or heavily damaged then controlled so they can't act then killed the next turn. It takes the wind out of what should be epic encounters with sectopods and gatekeepers.

I miss the kind of thing you could see in LW1 where a pod of muton elites walked in, and it takes you multiple turns to kill them because they are just that though. Or 6 heavy floaters with an etherial pod leader being something you seriously concidered retreating from if you didn't have 2 MECs.
The alien's are the world rulers remember? Xcom is suppose to rush to keep up, not be able to pull ahead (in general the alien's could use a few more perks, I miss inspecting the heavy floater leader and counting at least 10 perks in his list. Especially sice Xcom troopers can get so many perks now).

And if you scale up the squad size for the final mission you pretty much need to scale up the size of the pods that come through the gates at the end. That, and perhaps give them some better cover around the gates to work with (that can't be destroyed easily).
It also would fit quite nicely if those reinforcement pods where the elder's elite guard, and therefore stronger. It makes perfect sense to me. What also makes sense, in addition to full immunity to almost every debuff in the game, is for avatars to have stasis. It fits thematically, and it would prevent them from getting killed in 1 turn guarantied (in general it's kinda weird that human psi tropers can get skills the avatars can't, yet the opposite is not true).

[Zaramnor]

Sorry, but you can't really say "rookie is fine for me therefore higher difficulties should be easier". And I do agree that the avatar's hp is way to low if he can be killed by 4 guys in a squad of that size.

Eh... What? I marked it for you...

I finished my first playthrough on rookie difficulty and for me it's just fine. I would appreciate, if the difficulty stays at what it is, because there are three difficulties left and ironman can do the rest.