Wet Work Balance

Ithuriel
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Wet Work Balance

Post by Ithuriel »

So from what I know, kills account for at best ~15% of your soldiers' experience. With that said, how on earth is taking Wet Work ever worthwhile? It's 150 supplies, which for most of the game is not a negligible cost, and gives you about 5% more experience. This seems like a glaring balance issue to me, although I could be mistaken.

Honestly, for that matter, it feels to me like there are a fair few glaring balance issues with perks in the game. There are many ranks- for instance Lance Corporal Gunners- where it is obviously absurd to take any perk other than one (In this case Grazing fire- gunners have high enough damage anyway that +1 damage makes a minimal difference, and Combatatives is infinitely situational; if it gave +10 defense maybe you might take it to avoid Suppression being broken, but as it it's entirely worthless compared to Grazing Fire, which makes the low-aim high-damage Gunner class massively more reliable in dealing damage).

I'm also mystified by how terrible Biggest Booms is; mathematically it's equivalent to +1 damage on an ability the Technical can use once per mission, except worse because it's less reliable. (By the time Technicals can get two rockets it's even less relevant). ...I also might be slightly annoyed that out of 45 soldiers, I've rolled 9 Biggest Boom's in the first rank of two of the AWC, all on soldiers that never use explosives >.<


A disclaimer- while I've done some work on game balance in the past, I'm perfectly aware that I'm by no means a serious game developer; take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt.
trihero
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by trihero »

What do you feel would be a fair number for the experience boost, and why?

Is it possible that no has just really taken the time to abuse infinite reinforcement farming with wet work?
Lance Corporal Gunners- where it is obviously absurd to take any perk other than one (In this case Grazing fire- gunners have high enough damage anyway that +1 damage makes a minimal difference, and Combatatives is infinitely situational; if it gave +10 defense maybe you might take it to avoid Suppression being broken, but as it it's entirely worthless compared to Grazing Fire, which makes the low-aim high-damage Gunner class massively more reliable in dealing damage).

I'm also mystified by how terrible Biggest Booms is; mathematically it's equivalent to +1 damage on an ability the Technical can use once per mission, except worse because it's less reliable. (By the time Technicals can get two rockets it's even less relevant). ...I also might be slightly annoyed that out of 45 soldiers, I've rolled 9 Biggest Boom's in the first rank of two of the AWC, all on soldiers that never use explosives >.<
Lots of people think center mass is an autopick since it's very strong in the early game and combines well with hail of bullets.

Well biggest booms increases rocket damage; if you want more rocket damage there you go. There are some choices I'm mystified by but not the ones you mentioned. Don't forget biggest booms combines well with some AWC perk as well like shadowstrike, giving you a massive increase to your concealment opener.
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NoDebate
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by NoDebate »

You don't get XP off QRF pods.
Last edited by NoDebate on Mon Mar 13, 2017 4:18 am, edited 2 times in total.
fowlJ
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by fowlJ »

NoDebate wrote:You don't get XP off QRF pods.
Yes you do, they just don't contribute to the 'mission' xp that all soldiers get.
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NoDebate
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by NoDebate »

fowlJ wrote:
NoDebate wrote:You don't get XP off QRF pods.
Yes you do, they just don't contribute to the 'mission' xp that all soldiers get.
Do QRFs drop loot? I recall that one or both were disabled for QRFs but, I might be experiencing false memories.
trihero
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by trihero »

RNFs do not drop loot, they do give kill exp.

I haven't taken the time to try to farm RNFs in LW2, but I suspect there's a possibility with wet work it's quite abusive. I just got really bored of the idea after having done things like that in vanilla with avenger defense, shen's lower towers, etc.

This kind of reminds me of another poster trying to argue defensive perks are underpowered, when in fact they are probably overpowered. Maybe wetwork is this way as well, no one has really looked into it extensively.
Ithuriel
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Ithuriel »

Mathematically, the amount of killing you'd have to do to get Wet Work to be efficient is... astronomical. In order to replicate the effects of your average stealth mission- 2 man, with Extremely Light resistance- you'd have to have that one soldier kill 128 enemies... (calculated by (6+9)/2 * 5.7 * 3)
marceror
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by marceror »

NoDebate wrote:You don't get XP off QRF pods.
I've had soldiers gain promotions from killing reinforcements, so they definitely give XP. As has already been pointed out, they simply don't contribute to "mission xp" that all soldiers receive and share for completing a mission together -- and which accounts for the vast majority of experience received on a mission.

A very small amount of kill xp is still awarded to individual soldiers for every kill they make, seemingly whether those are reinforcements or not.
Clibanarius
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Clibanarius »

Sadly, your conclusions are the same as my own and that of those who've come before us: Wet Work is simply not worth taking, at this point, mathematically. If it doubled kill experience, it'd be a decent use of 75 supplies early in the game, but as it is, it's just a trap.
Sir_Dr_D
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Sir_Dr_D »

The xp percentage should be on all XP earned and not just kill XP.
Ithuriel
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Ithuriel »

Sir_Dr_D wrote:The xp percentage should be on all XP earned and not just kill XP.
I'm pretty much certain you're wrong here. According to the ini file:

Code: Select all

NumKillsBonus = 0.33f	; WetWork
KillXpBonusMult = 0.33f
So I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way? I mean if it did hell yes, +33% experience to my soldiers any day! ...but sadly I don't think it works like that >.< If I'm mistaken, please let me know!
trihero
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by trihero »

Clibanarius wrote:Sadly, your conclusions are the same as my own and that of those who've come before us: Wet Work is simply not worth taking, at this point, mathematically. If it doubled kill experience, it'd be a decent use of 75 supplies early in the game, but as it is, it's just a trap.
But what if you farm reinforcements? I don't think "those who have gone before" have actually investigated this seriously.
bountygiver
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by bountygiver »

trihero wrote:
Clibanarius wrote:Sadly, your conclusions are the same as my own and that of those who've come before us: Wet Work is simply not worth taking, at this point, mathematically. If it doubled kill experience, it'd be a decent use of 75 supplies early in the game, but as it is, it's just a trap.
But what if you farm reinforcements? I don't think "those who have gone before" have actually investigated this seriously.
going to the msgt from gsgt takes 80+ kills, with wet work it is reduced to 60+ kills, have fun farming reinforcements with that, 8 pods strong will spawn way before you get to 60th kill, don't forget you need to feed all the kills to one single soldier.

If you stealth a mission with 3 soldiers they ALL get 1.66 * base number of aliens in mission, which outpaces the kill exp so hard.
Sir_Dr_D
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Sir_Dr_D »

Ithuriel wrote:
Sir_Dr_D wrote:The xp percentage should be on all XP earned and not just kill XP.
I'm pretty much certain you're wrong here. According to the ini file:

Code: Select all

NumKillsBonus = 0.33f	; WetWork
KillXpBonusMult = 0.33f
So I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way? I mean if it did hell yes, +33% experience to my soldiers any day! ...but sadly I don't think it works like that >.< If I'm mistaken, please let me know!

I meant, that it is what the perk should do. Not what it actually does. Kill experience is such a small part of a soldiers experience , that wet work just boosting it is irrelevant. If it does boost just kill experience it would need to at least double it (+100% kill experience.)
Nibelung44
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Nibelung44 »

Agreed, it should boost all experience sources, but much less than +33% in this case, because it should not be a no brainer pick. Probably +15-20% XP for 150 supplies is a good balance in most games. Pricey, but significant interest.

As for reinforcements, yes they give XP and they should definitively not, to shut down all exploits in mowing down reinforcements to rack up some xp.
Alketi
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Alketi »

Nibelung44 wrote:Agreed, it should boost all experience sources, but much less than +33% in this case, because it should not be a no brainer pick. Probably +15-20% XP for 150 supplies is a good balance in most games. Pricey, but significant interest.

As for reinforcements, yes they give XP and they should definitively not, to shut down all exploits in mowing down reinforcements to rack up some xp.
No XP from reinforcements? So when they rain down on you as a penalty for breaking stealth early (already enough punishment and part of the reason people are small-squad/stealthing missions) you also get 0 XP for dealing with them? Pass. If the concern is that people will stick around for another 20 turns to farm reinforcements this is already handled by the super-pod mechanic which begins dropping 8-man pods.

However, I like the idea that Wetwork could boost all XP by some amount. Alternatively, it could boost kill XP by a much more useful percentage. In any event, it really needs a solid look as it's fairly worthless in its current implementation.
Fizpez
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Fizpez »

I agree - its definitely not worth it - I'm basically playing a cheese game at Rookie difficulty because I lost my first campaign so badly because I didnt understand important mechanics of the mod. I wanted to work my way through everything until the end. My supply drop is 800+ and I still havent bothered with it.
nightwyrm
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by nightwyrm »

Thinking about it, in order to farm kill XP successfully from RNFs, you have to bring at least a mid-size team (5+) on a stealth mission where completing the objective turns off the timer (ie. not extraction missions). Then you need to clear the map, deal with ever growing pods of RNF, including continuous 8-men pods at the end. After all that work, your already insane team of badasses will gain one level (and presumably more in subsequent missions if they killed enough for more than 1 level gain).

Seems like a lot of work and risk for not much gain.
Jacke
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Jacke »

Once a soldier gets to Sgt, promotions get farther apart, taking many missions for each rank. Upping the experience on every mission helps get those next promotions sooner. A 5+ squad should have no problem clearing out the first round of reinforcements with overwatch fire and followup shots. Wet Work will help up the experience from those RNF kills, as they don't provide mission experience.
marceror
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by marceror »

Over the course of a campaign, and dozens of soldiers (or more) going on hundreds of missions, I'm sure the cumulative benefit to XP is large. But in practice, it's not likely anything you're really going to notice all that much. I'd say only take Wet Work when you can spare the supplies.
Ithuriel
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Ithuriel »

Alketi wrote:
Nibelung44 wrote:Agreed, it should boost all experience sources, but much less than +33% in this case, because it should not be a no brainer pick. Probably +15-20% XP for 150 supplies is a good balance in most games. Pricey, but significant interest.

As for reinforcements, yes they give XP and they should definitively not, to shut down all exploits in mowing down reinforcements to rack up some xp.
No XP from reinforcements? So when they rain down on you as a penalty for breaking stealth early (already enough punishment and part of the reason people are small-squad/stealthing missions) you also get 0 XP for dealing with them? Pass. If the concern is that people will stick around for another 20 turns to farm reinforcements this is already handled by the super-pod mechanic which begins dropping 8-man pods.

However, I like the idea that Wetwork could boost all XP by some amount. Alternatively, it could boost kill XP by a much more useful percentage. In any event, it really needs a solid look as it's fairly worthless in its current implementation.
As vague idea- how about say 200 supplies, boosts kill experience by 100%, and unlocking at say Staff Sergeant rank? This works out to be around +15% experience in the optimal scenario, if you kill everything on the map. Given that it's not retroactive, I think I could definitely see myself taking the upgrade, but it's not massively overpowered. It also only gives significant boosts on missions where you have to kill everything, so it wouldn't impact the main way of farming experience- stealth missions. (This change would also necessitate removing reinforcement exp).
nightwyrm wrote:Thinking about it, in order to farm kill XP successfully from RNFs, you have to bring at least a mid-size team (5+) on a stealth mission where completing the objective turns off the timer (ie. not extraction missions). Then you need to clear the map, deal with ever growing pods of RNF, including continuous 8-men pods at the end. After all that work, your already insane team of badasses will gain one level (and presumably more in subsequent missions if they killed enough for more than 1 level gain).

Seems like a lot of work and risk for not much gain.
This is pretty accurate, but here's the thing- you know how you referred to your insane team of badasses gaining one level? If you had a 5-man team, you could kill 200 enemies and Wet Work might not even give you a level... if the kills were equally spread around, with 40 kills per man, they would each get experience equivalent to running 1 2-man stealth mission. IIRC the doom reinforcements timer on Veteren is ~12 turns after completing the objective, so you get maybe 6 pods dropping before the doom reinforcements start, and frankly I'm not sure any squad can indefinitely hold the doom pods off. Optimistically that's 36 reinforcements before doom reinforcements- and again, you'd need over 200 for Wet Work to give you one Extremely Light stealth mission worth of exp.

Math:
Spoiler: show
The math for the above is (6+9)/2*5.7/3*3; calculate average enemies on an Extremely Light mission, multiply by the 5.7 mission exp multiplier, divide by three to account for split experience, multiply by 3 b/c Wet Work gives you 1 kill of exp per 3 kills.
Jacke wrote:Once a soldier gets to Sgt, promotions get farther apart, taking many missions for each rank. Upping the experience on every mission helps get those next promotions sooner. A 5+ squad should have no problem clearing out the first round of reinforcements with overwatch fire and followup shots. Wet Work will help up the experience from those RNF kills, as they don't provide mission experience.
See my earlier comments. Also, a note- per one round of reinforcements you clear, Wet Work will give you about 2.4% of the experience of a standard stealth mission... the math is a lot more extreme than you realize.
Ithuriel
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Ithuriel »

marceror wrote:Over the course of a campaign, and dozens of soldiers (or more) going on hundreds of missions, I'm sure the cumulative benefit to XP is large. But in practice, it's not likely anything you're really going to notice all that much. I'd say only take Wet Work when you can spare the supplies.
Honestly I'm not even sure this is true. If you assume that you kill literally every single enemy on every single mission, the whole game, Wet Work works out to 5% additional experience... and this scenario is totally unrealistic anyway.
Alketi
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Alketi »

Ithuriel wrote: As vague idea- how about say 200 supplies, boosts kill experience by 100%, and unlocking at say Staff Sergeant rank? This works out to be around +15% experience in the optimal scenario, if you kill everything on the map. Given that it's not retroactive, I think I could definitely see myself taking the upgrade, but it's not massively overpowered. It also only gives significant boosts on missions where you have to kill everything, so it wouldn't impact the main way of farming experience- stealth missions. (This change would also necessitate removing reinforcement exp).
The proper way to cut off reinforcement XP would be to end the XP gain AFTER the mission objective is completed. That way, you'd still get reinforcement XP while suffering through the reinforcement spam that greets you when you've broken stealth, but would no longer benefit from deliberately farming the reinforcements after the objective is completed. Then boost Wet Work. All problems solved.

But, that's probably dreaming as I doubt Wet Work re-balancing has any real priority in the grand scheme of things.
Dlareh
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by Dlareh »

Oh come on, it's obviously unbalanced and improving it to just about anything more sensible would be wise and require little effort.

I like the suggestion of just having it apply +15-20% to *all* XP. It should be retroactive like in vanilla.
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marceror
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Re: Wet Work Balance

Post by marceror »

Ithuriel wrote:
marceror wrote:Over the course of a campaign, and dozens of soldiers (or more) going on hundreds of missions, I'm sure the cumulative benefit to XP is large. But in practice, it's not likely anything you're really going to notice all that much. I'd say only take Wet Work when you can spare the supplies.
Honestly I'm not even sure this is true. If you assume that you kill literally every single enemy on every single mission, the whole game, Wet Work works out to 5% additional experience... and this scenario is totally unrealistic anyway.
My point is, 5% of experience (not sure if that's the right number, just rolling with the number you share) over several thousand advent/aliens killed over the course of a campaign is going to be a large amount of *cumulative* experience. But, my counterpoint is that in practice it's not going to matter much, or make a noticeable difference, as it's such a small impact on a per soldier, per mission basis.
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