Any way to change muton melee AI?

[Swiftless]

So how does the perk work? I always skipped it because it was never worth taking it on a gunner. But then I read about countering Mutons with shinobis placing next to them so I picked it on my newest shinobi. First mission he goes on i got in a hairy situation by making a bad activation and encountering several LOS Bugs (including Covering Fire just not activating). So I place my Shinobi right next to a uncontrolled Muton Centurion and.... it doesnt activate rendering my Shinobi unconcious, losing me the mission and possible squad wiping me there. So I used console to move my entire squad to the evac zone because I thought it another major game breaking bug and was already quite annoyed by all the LoS nonsense that happened in this mission. Then I read the perk description and it says "You MAY parry melee attacks....". So it has a chance to fail?

I've never had it fail yet. I've tanked about 4-5 mutons taking about 2-3 melee attacks from them in the course of combative tanking. So maybe 15 parried melee attacks overall. Not a high enough number to substantiate a % but it may be a really low % chance and you got extremely unlucky. I thought it was 100% just because I haven't had it fail yet.

Did the Shinobi have any debuffs going on? Otherwise the skill works automatically. You just place the character in the square next to the Muton to bait it and unless the AI gets clever they tend to want to melee if you stand next to them. You can't do it with Stun lancers because the AI's a little different for them but Mutons it's pretty reliable. I mean I've had some strangeness too with the aforementioned Centurion being able to parry while being burned, so it may be related to something special about the Centurions themselves.

[LordYanaek]

Yes, from my experience, it has a chance to fail both for our soldiers and the mutons but it's really rare. I'd guess it's something like 90% chance to proc. You got some really rotten RNG. (note this is from in-game observations, not code-digging)

Combative also gives you +10 dodge which is pretty useful for dodge-tanking soldiers. I don't think it's useless on Gunners but it's better on Shinobis for sure.

[RantingRodent]

So how does the perk work? I always skipped it because it was never worth taking it on a gunner. But then I read about countering Mutons with shinobis placing next to them so I picked it on my newest shinobi. First mission he goes on i got in a hairy situation by making a bad activation and encountering several LOS Bugs (including Covering Fire just not activating). So I place my Shinobi right next to a uncontrolled Muton Centurion and.... it doesnt activate rendering my Shinobi unconcious, losing me the mission and possible squad wiping me there. So I used console to move my entire squad to the evac zone because I thought it another major game breaking bug and was already quite annoyed by all the LoS nonsense that happened in this mission. Then I read the perk description and it says "You MAY parry melee attacks....". So it has a chance to fail?

As far as I know, XCOM's version doesn't fail under normal circumstances. Xwynns has certainly been treating it as a guaranteed thing. Here's a few things that may have happened though:

• It will only proc once per enemy turn
• It won't proc if your soldier is disoriented
• It won't proc on AOE melee (Andromedons)
• If your soldier has Bladestorm and the Muton runs past you instead of attacking, Bladestorm will proc instead, then the Muton will counterattack, ending the chain. You get no counterattack

I'm pretty certain the Muton version does only have a chance. I've certainly seen Bladestorms go un-countered by them a few times.

[Izzy]

Well I placed my Shinobi around a corner so the Muton slash was a diagonal one if that has sth to do with it. All other reasons you listed didnt apply to that situation and the Muton Centurion didnt move as well. Sadly I was too shocked to ALT+F4 to get a safe file for debugging so I cannot show you any evidence.

At least I found out why Covering Fire didnt proc: The guy i wanted it to proc on was an Advent Commando and had Shadowstep. Never noticed before that they have that perk.