By contrast, their Suppression build is merely strong. Especially with the rather justified nerf to Danger Zone’s radius bonus (which is fair nerf, imo). The shooty build, meanwhile, just doesn’t compete with the cooldown build. I’d argue it’s even a bit weaker than the Suppression build, but not to such a degree that it’s a no-brainer. After all, someone has to actually kill the bad guys.
Now... first of all, I can confirm through my current campaign that the Hail of Bullets nerf has had almost no impact on Gunners. As I outlined in another thread, they aren’t hampered by the ammo change as they aren’t reliant on mobility. They just reload and use one of their cooldowns. And, as a side-effect, the ammo nerf bleeds over into AWC classes with lesser base damage/ammo.
Making more of their cooldown abilities compete with one another is the the best way to address the issue, I think. Nerfing the perks directly has a lot of nasty side effects. Most of these perks are not themselves overpowered; rather the problem lies in the Gunner’s ability to select a half-dozen of them and always have one available during a turn.
Now, as to the suggestion of reworking their perk tree to have more of their high-quality perks compete with one another, here’s the perk tree I would have:
LCPL: Center Mass|Combatives|Lockdown
CPL: Shredder|Formidable|Grazing Fire
SGT: Flush|Iron Curtain|Mayhem
SSGT: Chain Shot|Hail of Bullets|Demolition
TSGT: Cyclic Fire|Danger Zone|Cool Under Pressure
GSGT: Saturation Fire|Rapid Fire|Traverse Fire
MSGT: Rupture|Combat Fitness|Kill Zone
The result here results in a weaker “cooldown” Gunner with, I feel, minimal impact on shooty Gunners or Suppression Gunners.
LCPL:
-I’d choose to move Grazing Fire because it is a very potent perk, while Lockdown/Combatives are more niche and fairly balanced against each other. Center Mass will probably win out for general purpose, but tank Gunners might still take combatives, and Suppression Gunners might prefer the added chance to hit, especially early-game.
CPL:
-Shredder/Formidable/Grazing is fairly balanced, I feel. You choose between utility, tankiness, and damage reliability. Moving Hail to a higher rank also feels appropriate given that perk’s power.
SGT:
-Flush and Iron Curtain are relatively weak, as far as cooldown shots go. They have their uses, but they have no business competing with Demolition, which is virtually an auto-pick in that lineup. Besides which, I found it rather odd that Gunners were my best class for cover destruction in the early-mid game, as Grenadiers are unreliable until Combat Engineer kicks in all the way at max rank (and many of mine were support grenadiers, anyway). So I swapped Demolition with Mayhem. Mayhem is very strong, but is also rather niche to Suppression builds. I feel there’s a healthy choice matching the three against each other, as different breeds of niche utility (as opposed to nuking cover, which is always useful).
SSGT:
-Here is the rank where the real nerf hits. Matching Hail of Bullets, Demolition, and Chain Shot pairs up three cooldown abilities against each other. My experience early-mid game was, against enemies in full cover, I would either use use Demo and kill it with other soldiers, or HoB and kill it directly. If combat was lasting too much longer than two turns in a row, something was seriously fubar. And even then, I could area suppress and try and stall. Chain shot is probably the weakest of the three, here. Even in current 1.2, it’s more of a filler cooldown... But it’s still viable as a double-shot ability that stacks with Traverse Fire. And for shooty Gunners, it works very well with Grazing Fire. Hell, you might even remove the -5 aim penalty. It's like Rapid Reaction. If you miss, it craps out. Enough of a downside, imo. Especially with the higher dodge/defense of late-game enemies.
-As a side note, with this change.... PLEASE revert the ammo nerf to Hail of Bullets. It has not affected Gunners much in my 1.2 campaign, but has made the perk a pain in the ass to micromanage expanded mags on for other classes that roll it up in the AWC.
GSGT/MSGT: Unchanged. Those ranks actually feel quite balanced.
Thoughts? Here's the suggested perk tree as an image. I prolly spent more time than was really needed in MSPaint, making sure everything was lining up properly... but eh.
PS: I might also suggest removing Rapid Reaction from Gunner's AWC pool. Since they have Grazing Fire and Cool Under Pressure... that one perk turns them into an Overwatch pwnmobile that puts Rangers to absolute shame. It's one thing to win the AWC lottery and get a strong soldier, but getting just that one perk basically makes them better than Rangers at the only job they're truly worth a damn on, atm (another issue, mind you).