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It seems to me that flashbangs are among the most powerful items in the game. They can solve almost any and every problem out there. This means that later game grenades, such as the gas grenade, needs to be ridiculous in power in order to compete against them. The same thing applies to psi soldiers, and rockets. In order for those skills to be viable, they have to have a huge power creep in order to be balanced with the flashbang. If we increase other items to match we are not having tactical battles, we will just be slaughtering aliens. I don't think those other items are the problem. It is the flashbang. What I think the flashbang should do is:

- Provide a will save, and not make it absolute. Any aliens in the center of the radius would have a very hard time resisting, but anything towards the edge has a lot easier time resisting. And there can be a partial save that disrupts overwatch ,suppression, mind control and such, but not disorient the alien on their next turn.

- And that ability that grenadiers have that allows flashbangs to effect robots should be a separate ability , that shares the same charges as the flashbang. When used it effects only robots. You shouldn't be able to effect robotics and biological aliens at the same time.

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Now that I think about, disrupting overwatch, mindcontrol, and other active abilities is all a rookie should be able to do with a flashbang. Completely turning off all special abilities of every alien in a wide radius should be only what a psi soldier should do. But if a rookie with a flashbang can do that , then I don't know how psi's can be made worth while without making them into an auto win button.

Flashbangs are powerful coz the aliens are powerful and 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.

Well, they have limited charges, can not effect MEC enemies and can be thrown at a short to medium range.

You really need it as a crowd control tool. The other one you have is Area Suppression, which is also pretty strong with no additional perks taken.

What the Flashbang gives you is more allowance for a direct, aggressive approach with swords and shotguns. Without it you will stay at mid range and spam Suppression and Overwatch.

Sir_Dr_D wrote:What I think the flashbang should do is:

- Provide a will save, and not make it absolute.

So, if you try hard enough you become immune to sensory overwhelming explosions? You don't get blinded by the light, nor deafened by the noise because... will power!

Honestly given how many enemies are on every map and all the penalties you've been given in LW I'd say Flashbangs are one of the few tools we have to overcome the BS.

Flashbangs don't solve every problem out there, they crowd control for one turn. And they have a limited radius and range. And, they're expendable. And they eat into a soldier's mobility.

Support grenadiers are severely overpowered, but flashbangs in itself - no, not really.

Support grenades are in a good spot. Flash and Smoke worth taking over double Frag all day e'rryday.

Support Grenadiers overpowered? Ehhh... I think Airdrop is OP with a Support Grenadier but, the Boomer / Support tree balance is pretty good in my opinion.

nightwyrm wrote: Nerfing flashbangs will require a nerfing of a lot of enemies first.

Game would be insanely hard if flashbangs were nerfed, especially early game when you don't have nearly the amount of other tools and you still have to deal with grenadiers/rocketeers/sneks.

Maybe it is a design issue that acid/poison/EMP can't compete, but if flashes were unreliable then early game success would be super RNG. Flashbang didn't roll a hit on that rocketeer? Back to gatecrasher with you.

I think flashbangs are fine where they are. They're extremely good early game but you can easily get into situations where all you're doing is suppressing them without actually finding a way to kill them (i.e. they just wind up hunkering behind high cover), and you do need to kill them usually to get some kind of objective done. And there's the whole mobility issue too; weighing yourself down can be a big issue on extraction maps.

In the later game I prefer a big 8+ damage plasma grenade that removes their cover entirely to a flashbang's suppression, but of course that requires a lot of perks and researches to get to that point.

I use double frags on all-rookie SMG squads, I ain't relying on dat 60 aim.

I suspect Sir_Dr_D is a faceless infiltrating the forum to make us loose the war. Please send Menace 1-5 on location.

Sir_Dr_D wrote: - Provide a will save, and not make it absolute.

The more you allow random resistance, then less the game is about tactics and the more it's about throwing dices and the last thing we need is unreliable once per mission abilities, it's bad enough that rockets are sooo unreliable. If i wanted to play a pure dice game, i'd be playing "421"

Jeckhyl wrote:I suspect Sir_Dr_D is a faceless infiltrating the forum to make us loose the war. Please send Menace 1-5 on location.

Yep, we need a higher ranking advisor

If anything needs changing about flashbangs, it's their very large radius. Reducing it by 1 and providing an upgraded version for the late game might be the only sensible nerf if really it appeared they are too strong, which i'm not convinced off.

I don't really thing flashbangs are overpowered. They can be with Sting Grenades / Grenadiers, but thats more of the backbone of the support grenadier.

I will say late game grenades feel undertuned though.

I hope flashbangs or support grenadiers not get nerfed just because nothing else can compete with them. Especially in legendary, where you can't always adopt the kill-them-all or suppress-them-all tactic, we need something to crowd control all these dangerous enemies. Even with red fog on, the 1 or 2 hp advent grenadiers and rocketeers tend to launch grenades or rockets even on one people, and the mecs always shoot micromissiles. Since gas bombs don't disable the abilities, fire bombs are short in radius and psi ops' stasis only work on one guy and have cool down, support grenadiers are my only hope when encountered with large scattered pods.

I think maybe giving psi ops some special aoe control abilities or giving gas grenades some special effects will help balance out the so-called 'overpowered' flashbangs and support grenadiers. Just don't nerf them, please...

Hyzersurface wrote:I hope flashbangs or support grenadiers not get nerfed just because nothing else can compete with them.

Well, things need to be rebalanced in some way. At the moment, a simple SSGT class with no researchable equipment provides you a huge amount of AoE crowd control, with the only caveat of not doing any damage by itself. And two such SSGT soldiers will provide enough crowd control to last through any mission no matter how many enemies are there (provided you have good enough other soldiers to actually do damage).

All other crowd-control options can't compete with sting grenades. Things like area suppression or OW defense are several times more weak. "Gimmicky" things like concussion rocket doesn't even compare, concussion rocket (SGT perk) is completely laughable, while sting grenades (SSGT perk) are practically gamebreaking.

Flashbangs by themselves are powerful enough, but limited in many ways, it's support grenadier that makes them severely overpowered: first you'll get bonuses just by launching them via GL, then you get a free-action launch, then you can apply it to robots as well, and then you can also stun about half of all affected targets! And that's not even counting less important perks, such as "more grenades", "more AoE or range", and so on.

I think sting grenades need to be actually moved into equipment & proving grounds project, rather than being infinite flashbangs powered up with a perk.

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.

justdont wrote:

Hyzersurface wrote:I hope flashbangs or support grenadiers not get nerfed just because nothing else can compete with them.

Well, things need to be rebalanced in some way. At the moment, a simple SSGT class with no researchable equipment provides you a huge amount of AoE crowd control, with the only caveat of not doing any damage by itself. And two such SSGT soldiers will provide enough crowd control to last through any mission no matter how many enemies are there (provided you have good enough other soldiers to actually do damage).

All other crowd-control options can't compete with sting grenades. Things like area suppression or OW defense are several times more weak. "Gimmicky" things like concussion rocket doesn't even compare, concussion rocket (SGT perk) is completely laughable, while sting grenades (SSGT perk) are practically gamebreaking.

Flashbangs by themselves are powerful enough, but limited in many ways, it's support grenadier that makes them severely overpowered: first you'll get bonuses just by launching them via GL, then you get a free-action launch, then you can apply it to robots as well, and then you can also stun about half of all affected targets! And that's not even counting less important perks, such as "more grenades", "more AoE or range", and so on.

I think sting grenades need to be actually moved into equipment & proving grounds project, rather than being infinite flashbangs powered up with a perk.

Sting grenades are not really the issue IMO. It's the passive bonuses and area that flashbangs impact, and specifically grenadiers area, just like danger zone currently for gunners.

The same issue right now is occuring with incendiary grenades and grenadiers, invalidateing technicals flamethrower to an extent.

Reduce the base area of impact, as well as AGL impact bonuses, and flashbangs, frost grenade, and incendiary grenades lose the OP status.

I think a lot of peoples replies on here sort of prove my point. Flashbangs are so necessary for everything, and there isn't anything else to help compensate. And I wasn't suggesting just debuffing flashbangs. I was suggesting buffing a few other abilities as well to keep a balanced spread.

Flashbangs and grenades in general were just better balanced in longwar1. There you had Exalt rocketeers who were dangerous. Throwing a flashbang at them did not turn off their rockets though. It just shortened the range that they could shoot. As did poisoning them. As did mindfraying them. Or supressing them. Or just damaging them when red fog is on. And all of this stacked. Any aim debuf would make their ability worse. And you could manage them that way. Later grenades like the gas/acid grenade were generally better but did not replace the flashbang. It felt balanced.

In lw2 the flashbang does feel like some sort of super powered weapon, that outplays almost all other grenades in the game. If they are used as a baseline for power, then a whole bunch of other things need to be increased too match. And if they increase we aren't having tactical battles. We are just slaughtering aliens.

The system in longwar1 that just decreases aim, and ability range was better, and synergized well with other effects. I think it is only psi attacks that should really shut down abilities completely.

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And as an aside regular damage grenades need a buff. Soldiers with flashbangs in lw2 far outperform those with HE grenades. It wouldn't hurt if damage grenades gave an aim/range/movement penalty to units hit as well (just half of the penalty a flashbang does.) After all getting hit with a grenade would stun a person. In real life it wouldn't be that flashbangs debilitate, and damage grenades don't. It would be that flashbangs debilitate without being lethal and without doing property damage.
If we really wanted to be closer to real life accuracy in this game, HE greandes should do everything fllashbang's do, and more. We would just take flashbangs so that we don't get damaged loot. And since we would not want to increase the damage of HE grenades in the game, we do need them to do other things.

aedn wrote:The same issue right now is occuring with incendiary grenades and grenadiers, invalidateing technicals flamethrower to an extent.

Well, there's quite some difference in this case: you need to build inc. grenades, and before that you need to research them, and before that - build infrastructure for all that. Furthermore, they aren't infinite and thus may not be present on every mission unless you throw enough supplies at it to create enough copies. While on the other hand, technical's flamethrower was accidentally nerfed by 1 tile distance (I added 1 extra tile of range for Incinerator perk to compensate before v1.2 fixes this, and it does make quite a difference!). But otherwise is free, globally infinite, and limited only by charges per mission.

Whereas with sting grenades you're already having the best and the number one of all LW2 world, at no cost and no research cost.

I don't think flashbangs are overpowered. Disorient does not completely shut them down. I've had plenty of soldiers wounded and a few (mostly rookies) killed by disoriented ADVENT.

If any changes were made perhaps a 80 or 90% effectiveness, maybe weighted by will but not explicitly based on will.

If other routes are desired for variety, perhaps have the capability that a few soldiers could start with innate, low-rated psi something like XCOM Apocalypse did. Low-level abilities like "Mind Shout" that would act like a mental Flashbang or something. After all, ADVENT has been tinkering with humans' DNA for two decades.

While I agree with people saying that FBs are vital early game, I also think that they are quite OP. Because they are Jack of all trades in crowd control. They not only lower Aim and Mobility but disable use of any special abilities on almost every enemy. After that you got a bunch of dummies with different stats to fight. And Xcom has such tool in unlimited numbers at a very start of the game.

Remember FBs from LW1? They were pretty well balanced, cause Disoriented Thin Man could actually do something(poison spit), without trying to land a 0% shot.

I suggest to change disorientation FB effect that it does not disable abilities but applies Aim and Mobility debuff to targets and decreases ranges of most special abilities exept psionic. And make a debuff that lowers Psi offence score.
In order to balance things, I also suggest to change EMP grenades:
- Disable Advent Clones special abilities exept throwing grenades, and supression. Because, you know, it's future and everybody uses electronic devices to launch rockets, pinpoint targets, project shields, electrify their batons etc.
- Lower damage to robots (For balance reasons).
- Lower Hack debuff or remove and make availble for advanced versions.
- Make them avalible from start.
- Also it could disable such Dark Event buffs like: Advanced Exoskeletons, Scopes, Laser Sights etc.

RapidFire wrote:I don't think flashbangs are overpowered. Disorient does not completely shut them down. I've had plenty of soldiers wounded and a few (mostly rookies) killed by disoriented ADVENT.

If any changes were made perhaps a 80 or 90% effectiveness, maybe weighted by will but not explicitly based on will.

If Pavonis reduces wound downtime by 80 or 90% then I'm fine with 80 or 90% effective flash bangs.

Bring all flashbangs on the Shen special mission, tell me how that works out.

/joke

Short answer: no

Medium answer: they're not even the best free support grenade.

Longer answer:

Flashbangs provide -25 aim and shut off abilities of a limited number of enemy troops. It also breaks active overwatch (if the unit was not disoriented before). That can be really valuable, especially against sectoids and snakes and mutons...

But suppression provides -30 aim and shuts off all non-Psionic abilities in a similar duration... And it only requires a replenishable resource.

And smoke grenades provide -25 (to 45) defense (same as minus aim) and negate the flanked/exposed penalty... And last for two full advent turns.

At the end of the day flashbangs won't cut it alone. They don't provide enough defense naturally and shutting off abilities can often force lower % actions that are technically more dangerous.

The supporting logic is basically that in any large fight you're primarily going to get shot at, due to the large numbers of units making it hard to move up (on both sides, enemies that maneuver towards you you can get cut off/cut down). Because of this, aside from specific units that have explosives/suppression(which you can suppress or use other control on... or simply kill first) the best value will be smoke grenades. They prevent you from getting flanked, they last twice as long, they work against every alien on the map. The standard high contact strategy is (besides shredder cannons) a) get high cover on multiple gunners b) area suppress the entire map c) smoke the gunners as much as possible d) clear cover with rockets and kill with snipers.

My support grenadier for my A team runs 2 flash and 2 smoke. And I bring like 3+ other sources of smoke... And he still runs out of smoke fastest.

Goumindong wrote:But suppression provides -30 aim and shuts off all non-Psionic abilities in a similar duration... And it only requires a replenishable resource.

Can't be spread on as much enemies as possible, and is entirely dependent on your gunner not getting hurt or otherwise disabled or simply running out of ammo. Once it happens, suppression is gone entirely and enemies may act freely.

Goumindong wrote:And smoke grenades provide -25 (to 45) defense (same as minus aim) and negate the flanked/exposed penalty... And last for two full advent turns.

And doesn't prevent you from getting AoE damage, which typically happens in exactly the same AoE as smoke size. Hope you're having fun being grenaded and rocketed in the smoke.


Flashbangs are still much better. Yes, flashbangs alone won't save you from injuries. But any other crowd control method alone won't save you either.

They really aren't though. Just kill the rocketeer/grenadier. Or stand at the edge of the smoke so you're not clumped.

Literally I have never been attacked with an advent rocket in probably 10+ 0% supply raids.

I have flashed them sometimes... But that doesn't make the flashbang better than smoke or suppression... It makes it more situational.