Are Flashbangs overpowered

[nightwyrm]

Would people feel that Sting Grenades were more balanced as a perk if they had -1 or -2 radius compared to Flashbangs?

I think that would help. Other issue is that damage focused grenadiers are usurped by Shredders. When you need AOE damage or cover destruction you're better off using a shredder than a grenade, so if those were nerfed that may bring back a totally damage focused grenadier using Tandem Warheads.

If you need cover destruction, you're better off using Gunner's Demolition since grenades without CE is just unreliable. Either Sapper and/or Plasma grenades really wants to be better at dealing environmental damage.

[stefan3iii]

Would people feel that Sting Grenades were more balanced as a perk if they had -1 or -2 radius compared to Flashbangs?

I think that would help. Other issue is that damage focused grenadiers are usurped by Shredders. When you need AOE damage or cover destruction you're better off using a shredder than a grenade, so if those were nerfed that may bring back a totally damage focused grenadier using Tandem Warheads.

If you need cover destruction, you're better off using Gunner's Demolition since grenades without CE is just unreliable. Either Sapper and/or Plasma grenades really wants to be better at dealing environmental damage.

Well, sapper is good at reliably taking out certain kinds of cover, you just have to experiment to figure out what. It's not going to kill trees, but it'll destroy a bench. Need to aim the grenade right on the cover tile you want to blow up.

I also remembered another reason why poison is so weak. It's not guaranteed to last even a single turn. You can poison an enemy, and then on their turn the poison wears off and they can fire with full aim. Learned to never rely on poison.

[nightwyrm]

I think that would help. Other issue is that damage focused grenadiers are usurped by Shredders. When you need AOE damage or cover destruction you're better off using a shredder than a grenade, so if those were nerfed that may bring back a totally damage focused grenadier using Tandem Warheads.

If you need cover destruction, you're better off using Gunner's Demolition since grenades without CE is just unreliable. Either Sapper and/or Plasma grenades really wants to be better at dealing environmental damage.

Well, sapper is good at reliably taking out certain kinds of cover, you just have to experiment to figure out what. It's not going to kill trees, but it'll destroy a bench. Need to aim the grenade right on the cover tile you want to blow up.

I also remembered another reason why poison is so weak. It's not guaranteed to last even a single turn. You can poison an enemy, and then on their turn the poison wears off and they can fire with full aim. Learned to never rely on poison.

If only Advent would prioritize hiding behind trash cans and benches!

[trihero]

If flashbangs are overpowered, is area suppression also overpowered? It's essentially an infinitely available flashbang. Yes yes yes there's slight differences but look at the overall picture here. I.e. in a world without flashbangs, would everyone just bring gunners instead of flashbangs?

[Tuhalu]

I don't rely on Flashbangs overly much, but that's quite the slippery slope you are riding down.

Area Suppression has a much shorter list of abilities it disables, a much smaller radius, more fiddly targetting, can be turned off by hitting the user and doesn't do much against Shadowstep and Lightning Reflexes. It does kill things sometimes and effects every enemy type to some extent without investing in additional abilities, but those two things are its only advantages.

[Arantir]

Flashbangs are strong because crowd control is really strong in general. This things though got huge radius and you also can throw them further than normal grenades. The thing is - flashbangs & smoke nades are literally the strongest grenade types in the game for supportive grenadier and it requires no autopsies, no foundry projects and no supplies & stuff. You may consider taking some acid bombs for Sectopods & Gatekeepers, but damn - those things can also be flashbanged and making them harmless for a turn is genarally a stronger play than shredding armor with little damage and you've got rockets & shredder cannons for that.

I've made it to the lategame (L/I) with 6 active 8-man squads (1 soldier of each class in the squad & all with different builds) and I feel like my 2 strongest squads are crowd-control heavy teams both with sting grenadier, suppression-oriented gunner & flamethrower technical (surprisingly).
One of those teams got specialist-medic officer, crit assault, scout/serial shinobi, OW ranger, holo/gunslinger sharpshooter and plasma/sting grenadier, utilizing mostly heavy armor & muton vests.
The other has arc-thrower assault officer, hack/support specialist, melee/reaper shinobi, crit ranger, crit/serial sharpshooter and sting/dense smoke grenadier, utilizing spider/EXO armor & no vests.

Both teams perform really good but the armored control team got regular wounds for like 1-2 weeks & sometimes longer and the more control heavy light/EXO team usually comes with no cooldown and only sometimes suffer some random grave wounds from exeptionally unlucky activations. The thing is - if you're standing in dense smoke and the rest of the enemies are at least disoriented - you're 100% safe most of the time. I feel perfectly fine activating 20 enemies in one turn with this team, I can just rapid deployment > dense smoke > chain lightning > sting > supress > snipe whatever is not controlled on the first turn and on the next one begin to spread the damage/destroy cover with shredder cannons and rocket/flamethrower/firestorm then harvest guaranteed kills with ranger/shinobi/sniper while still having means to control whatever remains with suppress, more sting nades & command.

[trihero]

I don't rely on Flashbangs overly much, but that's quite the slippery slope you are riding down.

Area Suppression has a much shorter list of abilities it disables, a much smaller radius, more fiddly targetting, can be turned off by hitting the user and doesn't do much against Shadowstep and Lightning Reflexes. It does kill things sometimes and effects every enemy type to some extent without investing in additional abilities, but those two things are its only advantages.

You missed the infinite charges part. With 2 gunners you can more or less lock everything down every turn.

I discovered the power of area suppression after running out of flashbangs halfway through a 0% supply raid. I'm not calling for a nerf to either, but what I am saying is that if the OP calls for a nerf to flashbang, they also have to ask for a nerf to area suppression. It's not that slippery of a slope whatsoever. As I said they are not exactly the same, but if you look at the overall picture it's pretty much an extension of the flashbang, with infinite reusability.

[Tuhalu]

You missed the infinite charges part. With 2 gunners you can more or less lock everything down every turn.

Except area suppression won't lock down everything every turn. It's less than useful against Vipers or Sectoids. They'll spit poison on you, use their tongue on you and shadowstep all around you. They'll hit you with a mind control or raise zombies in inconvenient places. And that's if you manage to actually suppress all of them, which is doubtful in double large pod activation.

With Flashbangs, you can disorient or stun twice as many enemies as you could suppress. It's a clutch consumable that saves you from the worst case scenario rather than an infinite use ability that helps you a bit when the fight is well under control.

[darkerevent]

Does any viable control option exist outside of Stings? It's becoming rather apparent that past the early game in LW2, everything must be killed or controlled every turn of combat. Area suppression is small and getting nerfed. OW defense and smokes does jack against sneks, rocketeers or MECs. Other control options are mostly single target controls, which is not enough when fighting a large pod.

This is the essence of the problem. Combat-heavy missions achieve difficulty mainly by throwing large numbers of enemy mooks at the player. Most of those mooks have deadly special abilities that will make a standing firefight disadvantageous to XCOM (sectoid psi, viper poison, viper grab, stun lancer BS, drone stunner BS, explosives). Most deadly special abilities cannot be used at all if the mook in question is disoriented, and the aim debuff and mobility penalty serve as good soft control against everything else (melee enemies and normal shooting.

Furthermore, a flashbang's debuff can be applied as a free action (via Rapid Deployment) and is irremovable by the aliens once it is applied (they don't have any character who cures stuns or disorients)... as compared to something like Area Suppression, which ends the user's turn and can be canceled if that one uncontrolled muton happens to be smart and throw a plasma grenade onto the gunner early in the enemy turn.

Lack of immune enemies is also an issue. Only two types of commonly occurring enemies from the early game to the middle-lategame are immune to flashbangs. (Drones and MECs, but neither of those take cover or have unreasonably high defense, usually allowing them to be shot down without needing to be controlled. They also can still be disoriented in a basic way once Bluescreen Bombs is perk'd.)

All of this makes flashbangs the most reliable catchall option that XCOM has for crowd control, and this isn't simply isn't varied up very much much as the game goes on. MSGT zappy assaults and Dominate PsiOps notwithstanding, you mostly control groups of enemies the same way lategame as you did in the early game, and that functionality keeps coming right back to most enemies not being immune to flashbangs.

As food for thought: I generally feel like flashbang balance was better in LW1 compared to LW2. For one thing, LW1 flashbangs reduced the ranges of abilities but didn't stop their usage entirely. For another, there were more mechanical enemies (from earlier on in the game) who were totally immune to bangs (seekers, mechtoids, and cyberdiscs to name a few) forcing the player to consider other ways to control them. I seem to remember Sectoid Commanders were entirely immune to them in LW1 as well, despite being organic.

[LordYanaek]

Currently, Flashbangs aren't as overpowered as they are required. This is a different issue.

Balancing isn't done on an item per item basis, we must have the big picture in mind. If flashbangs were nerfed this would mean we loose ways to control alien special abilities, many of them being auto-hits. No matter how much you hide behind full cover with aid protocol on, you'll still eat that rocket! We would get much more wounds (hopefully no death if we are careful as most of those abilities are low damage AoE that won't kill you outright) and this would mean very long infirmary times which could totally break the strategic layer by making it impossible to attempt important missions such as retaliations. This would of course also make stealthing missions even more the dominant strategy than it already is!

I'm not saying the current situation is perfect and i would love to have alternatives to flashbangs but currently you can't just nerf them and think it would solve the issue, it would just create several other issues. If flashbangs were to be nerfed we would need to either

1. Reduce the number of enemies with auto-hit special abilities.
2. Reduce infirmary days for wounded soldiers (at least not critically wounded ones)
3. Increase our options for field healing that short-cuts infirmary (we don't want to have Field Surgeon be an auto-pick for the specialist every squad now have to take)
4. Increase the number of available soldiers in the early game, so we can have more squads and rotate those when we have wounded soldiers. Currently early we can barely get new rookies with the first regions busy running intel or recruiting rebels and once we have a large roster of available rookies to recruit, we don't need them or don't want them because we are too far in the campaign to train new guys up from squadie

Possibly a combination of 2 and 4 would be the best way to make flashbangs as they are less required without dumbing every alien ability.

[nightwyrm]

My prediction for if flashbangs are nerfed is that gunners would be even more prioritized than they are currently. Area suppression isn't as good as flashbangs but there aren't a lot of good long distance crowd control options available.

[3tamatulg]

flashbangs are pretty much the only early game way to turn off alien abilities. Sneks will tongue-grab kill a soldier from full cover if uncontrolled. Stun lancers will race across the map to take out one of your guys if uncontrolled. Advent Rockteers will set fire to half your squad if uncontrolled. Almost any single enemy can cause a cascade leading to a squadwipe if left uncontrolled and flashbangs are pretty much the only way to prevent that in the early game.

Nerfing flashbangs will require a nerfing of a lot of enemies first.

This.

Nothing wrong with flashbangs. We just lack reliable ways of shutting down the aliens. You trigger a pod of 3 Vipers. You miss your shots on them. How do you not get killed by tongue pulls next turn? The only option is flashbangs.

To 'nerf' flashbangs we need other solutions to this situation.

I would suggest:
- A core Psi perk which is an AoE which is basically a flashbang (worse in some way for balance but still shuts down abilities)
- Disabling shot makes a return. It's in Shadow Ops and it's a really useful skill.
- Nerf SNEK PULL
- Seriously though nerf snek pull. Everything else in the game can be countered or played through. Snek pull is one soldier dead every time, and often pops additional pods.
- Standard grenades have a 'concussion' effect too which shuts down abilities for a turn.

[Ithuriel]

If flashbangs were nerfed this would mean we loose ways to control alien special abilities, many of them being auto-hits. No matter how much you hide behind full cover with aid protocol on, you'll still eat that rocket!

Imo this is the major issue. Most enemies can completely screw your squad if they're not CC'd. A single ADVENT Engineer can flashbang half your squad, rendering them virtually useless next turn. Even worse, ADVENT Rocketeers, let along Heavy Rocketeers, will lead to at minimum 20+ days in the medbay for multiple soldiers- and that's assuming they don't destroy your cover and get the soldier killed in the same turn.

[JulianSkies]

- Nerf SNEK PULL
- Seriously though nerf snek pull. Everything else in the game can be countered or played through. Snek pull is one soldier dead every time, and often pops additional pods.

See, the vanilla game was aware of that, so it had an innate AI-based nerf to Tongue Pull. If someone was bound, then nobody would attack it.
Of course LW2 removed that behaviour. A lot of strange AI behaviour was in place exactly because... They wanted to put in bullshit abilities, without actually making them lead to bullshit.

[JoINrbs]

Does any viable control option exist outside of Stings? It's becoming rather apparent that past the early game in LW2, everything must be killed or controlled every turn of combat. Area suppression is small and getting nerfed. OW defense and smokes does jack against sneks, rocketeers or MECs. Other control options are mostly single target controls, which is not enough when fighting a large pod.

there are lots of mitigation tools you might be missing. bastion, hazmat, (dense) smoke, combat stims, officer dodge/defense, defense/dodge manipulation, LoS manipulation. apparently there are people who don't take formidable every time they can, which sort of blows my mind. there are lots of defensive AWCs too. and of course the AI trees are pretty derpy sometimes and with experience you can just avoid them using most of their AoEs, or trick them into using them in ways which aren't actually good (did i mention bastion?)

i basically stop losing soldiers around june in my campaigns when my mitigation comes online and advent starts shooting at 3 armor 18hp soldiers with 80 defense. there are very real stacking problems with the options available at the moment.

so, i would not agree at all that everything must be killed or controlled in this game. i regularly leave 5+ uncontrolled enemies active and take ~5 damage from them.

[LordYanaek]

Unfortunately Bastion requires Solace which while being a good ability, apparently causes lags for a number of player. I'm not sure whether it's true or not but my soldiers seem to move more slowly when i have a Psi with Solace.

i basically stop losing soldiers around june in my campaigns when my mitigation comes online and advent starts shooting at 3 armor 18hp soldiers with 80 defense. there are very real stacking problems with the options available at the moment.

How do you manage to have them actually shoot at those 80 defense soldiers wouldn't they rather choose other targets or do all your soldiers have 80 defense thanks to dense smoke (in this case AoE is the danger unless you also have Bastion).

so, i would not agree at all that everything must be killed or controlled in this game. i regularly leave 5+ uncontrolled enemies active and take ~5 damage from them.

A lot of the discussion on flashbangs being required involve the early game. Later of course we have more tools but early we really don't have many options which is why they are so important and can't be easily nerfed.

Still, not being hit is better than being hit for 5 damage and having some time out of operations.

Wound times is probably an issue because many players don't have enough soldiers and if you have 3+ wounded soldiers in a mission it really weakens you for some time. This is partly caused by old vanilla behavior but also by too few soldiers available early. With only 3 recruits available at the start and none coming for some time as you need to start running Recruit job to have a chance to get some recruits which you probably won't do in your first region and then you need to actually get rookies rather than rebels and you probably have faceless messing with your operations. It will be several months before you have a large roster of recruits. At that point you might wonder whether or not you'll have time to level them up and whether or not a squaddie out of the GTS can contribute a mission apart from those suicide missions). If you think either of those conditions won't be met, you'll try to play with whatever you have at this point. In this case you don't want to take wounds and controlling everything becomes a must.

I really think the initial pool of recruits should be bigger so we can get more soldiers when we have supplies and play with more or larger squads. This could also help reduce the importance of stealth missions as we could deploy a couple of 5-6 men squads instead of 2 men "squads". I mean, 3 recruits is really low, in LW1 i had a very large roster and didn't have to keep a sizeable part of it in havens. Early is when you want to get recruits and early is when you can't.

[Tuhalu]

Unfortunately Bastion requires Solace which while being a good ability, apparently causes lags for a number of player. I'm not sure whether it's true or not but my soldiers seem to move more slowly when i have a Psi with Solace.

Sounds like you are confusing Fortress with Solace. Bastion requires Fortress.

[Jadiel]

A lot of the discussion on flashbangs being required involve the early game. Later of course we have more tools but early we really don't have many options which is why they are so important and can't be easily nerfed.

But early game, the aliens don't have many abilities either, and they don't do much damage. In my experience, Flashbangs are least useful at the start of the game (although they still get taken because there's less competition for utility slots). The only reason I'd really miss FBs in the early game (assuming they were deleted entirely) is that it would make Sectoid mind control a pain to deal with. Why do you think they are so important in the early game that they shouldn't be nerfed at all?

[nightwyrm]

Maybe we have different definitions of early game, but I consider sneks and stun lancers to be early game enemies. Everything you can meet before you can get lasers, I consider early game.

[Jadiel]

Maybe we have different definitions of early game, but I consider sneks and stun lancers to be early game enemies. Everything you can meet before you can get lasers, I consider early game.

I agree that snakes and stunlancers are early game. But I don't see why either of those enemies makes Flashbangs indispensable. They are useful, sure, but I don't think they are a compelling case for "We can't nerf FBs because if we do, XYZ enemies are completely unmanageable". I don't think they are you-must-control-or-kill-this-or-terrible-things-happen either.

[LordYanaek]

Sounds like you are confusing Fortress with Solace. Bastion requires Fortress.

Bastion requires both Solace and Fortress.

But early game, the aliens don't have many abilities either, and they don't do much damage. In my experience, Flashbangs are least useful at the start of the game (although they still get taken because there's less competition for utility slots). The only reason I'd really miss FBs in the early game (assuming they were deleted entirely) is that it would make Sectoid mind control a pain to deal with. Why do you think they are so important in the early game that they shouldn't be nerfed at all?

Maybe we have different definitions of early game, but I consider sneks and stun lancers to be early game enemies. Everything you can meet before you can get lasers, I consider early game.

As nightwyrm says. I consider April to be early game and you already see Vipers, Stun Lancers and slightly later Rocketeers appear in April. Gunners (available from day 1) can area suppress you which is also quite bad. Even the basic Engineers are annoying as they will flashbang you if you don't flashbang (or kill) them

I agree that snakes and stunlancers are early game. But I don't see why either of those enemies makes Flashbangs indispensable. They are useful, sure, but I don't think they are a compelling case for "We can't nerf FBs because if we do, XYZ enemies are completely unmanageable". I don't think they are you-must-control-or-kill-this-or-terrible-things-happen either.

Well an uncontrolled snek early is easily equal to a dead soldier as they will tongue pull - grab you and their friends will kill you while you are grabbed out of cover. Stun lancers are slightly less annoying if you have revival protocol (which you probably have) but still an issue as they can deal serious damage and ignore your cover.
None of them would make the game impossible if flashbangs were removed but each of them would make it much harder and (that's the really important part) way too RNG reliant in the early game.

[nightwyrm]

Maybe we have different definitions of early game, but I consider sneks and stun lancers to be early game enemies. Everything you can meet before you can get lasers, I consider early game.

I agree that snakes and stunlancers are early game. But I don't see why either of those enemies makes Flashbangs indispensable. They are useful, sure, but I don't think they are a compelling case for "We can't nerf FBs because if we do, XYZ enemies are completely unmanageable". I don't think they are you-must-control-or-kill-this-or-terrible-things-happen either.

You don't consider an enemy who can pull your dude out of full cover from half way across the map, allowing all the other enemies to shoot him dead, and possibly activating additional pods, to be an enemy you must control? Ok....

[Jadiel]

You don't consider an enemy who can pull your dude out of full cover from half way across the map, allowing all the other enemies to shoot him dead, and possibly activating additional pods, to be an enemy you must control? Ok....

Well, if you're going to look at extreme cases, they're all bad. Pretty much any enemy can one-hit crit my soldier in full cover, so by that rational, I just have to kill all the enemies every turn. They can even one-hit kill me while disoriented... However, in reality, the probability of that happening is pretty low. Likewise, a snake needs to roll to hit my soldier with a tongue-grab which in high cover is pretty unlikely. With smoke, even more so. Even if it hits, it does 1 damage, which is less than most other enemies rolling to hit me. Yes, it's possible that it will pull additional pods, and if there are a bunch of other enemies they get free shots at my guy, but if I didn't kill the snake, presumably I did kill some of the other stuff, so hopefully that's not too much of a problem. In any case, a lot of the time, an uncontrolled snake doesn't tongue grab, it moves up and auto-hit binds my guy. Which means he takes 1 damage, and then I kill said snake easily next turn, because it's left itself exposed.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like snakes, and they're pretty high up my "kill this first" list. But I think to say "The game becomes impossible if I don't have a free early game tool which can cc everything in a huge area" is not an accurate reflection of the tactical layer...