Support Grenadier the new meta in 1.3?

[trihero]

I have a feeling it will be, these guys are extremely useful in delaying the enemies (rapid deployment into frost grenade one pod, into smoke or flashbang/STING another pod), which might make up for any stealth/evac nerfs. I already use them to guarantee success in those more "difficult" stealth missions like hack the advent vehicle or rescue from the vehicle where you usually get shot at.

[gimrah]

I don't even play with rulers, so no frost grenades, and it's already my meta.

That is, rapid deployment is great while the other two are meh. Sting grenades are also very powerful. Not to say I don't make shouty hybrids and boom hybrids but support is the core.

I agree in 1.3 they should have a core role in small squad missions. Flash and run being key, but also action economy in those key 1 or 2 fighting turns.

[Dwarfling]

What else can you do with granadiers tho? By midgame only the status effects of the grenades matter because the damage doesn't scale with enemy HP (and armor), which ramps super high midgame and onwards. And Sapper only works on half of the stuff the aliens use for cover.

With the omni-present risk of pulling other pods with the noise (and getting reflex-crit'd in the process), seems like clutch Flashbangs are the only thing that can keep you safe, because AoE damage rarely can.

[nightwyrm]

The explosive path of grenadiers is so bad until you get Combat Engineer.

It's a bit of a truism in LW2 that you want to kill or control everything every turn and grenadiers don't really do enough in the kill department after the early game.

[trihero]

What else can you do with granadiers tho? By midgame only the status effects of the grenades matter because the damage doesn't scale with enemy HP (and armor), which ramps super high midgame and onwards. And Sapper only works on half of the stuff the aliens use for cover.

With the omni-present risk of pulling other pods with the noise (and getting reflex-crit'd in the process), seems like clutch Flashbangs are the only thing that can keep you safe, because AoE damage rarely can.

Offensive grenadiers are excellent in the end game. Fire bomb radius is respectable, disabling a lot of enemies and easily doing 1/2-3/4 of trash mob hp. Plasma grenades with combat eng/sap removes 90% of cover in one shot and do 9-10 average damage, which is fine.

It's a bit of a truism in LW2 that you want to kill or control everything every turn and grenadiers don't really do enough in the kill department after the early game.

I kill and control plenty with offensive grenadiers after the early game. Fire grenade is one of the best controls in the game and does very good damage as well. I can kill the rainbow pod (the 8 advent of multicolors) with 2 plasma grenades (command) when they bunch up, in the late game (maybe one or two left but with no cover). I think you guys are wantonly underestimating the strength of offensive grenades.

But anyway, here's to the support grenadier, making small man teams possible/easy in 1.3 I'm pretty darn sure. He'll be the new partner in the shinobi/specialist dynamic duo.

[Clibanarius]

I don't see the problem with them in 1.2 even. Rapid Deployment is fantastic, Sting Grenades are nearly overpowered, and the alternatives are, sadly, lacking. I tweaked Sapper's enviro-destruction upward a point in my game and it's still somewhat underwhelming. Combat Engineer being max depth in the tree doesn't help issues with cover destruction through 90% of the game. That said, I still keep 2 of each, support and sapper Grenadiers, around and leveled due to the incredible versatility of each.

[trihero]

No one said they're a problem in 1.2, I just foresee in 1.3 that they will become the new necessity in doing low man stealth missions. From what I heard, the evac minimum timer will no longer be possible to get down to 1, and there's speculation about guards being near the cell doors, making it more likely that you will have to suffer some shots.

I find that one support grenadier is generally enough for my purposes right now in 1.2. Whenever a "tough" hack or rescue mission shows up I add it to my team.

Rapid deployment -> frost grenade -> flash bang -> command - > dense smoke = da fuq, I don't care of there are 2 pods guarding the objective

[darkerevent]

To be fair, I'm already running a shinobi/specialist/grenadier trio as my typical squad for hacky/jailbreaky guerilla ops that have reasonable infiltration timers available. The grenadier just hugs the specialist's position and rapid deploys a flashbang if need be (and prevents part of the mission xp from being wasted by running with less than three characters). I then have two other stealth shinobi officers and a collection of expendable squaddie/LCPL shinobi who handle safely soloable/duoable things with tiny timers.

I think my biggest gripe about support grenadier in a stealth context -- and it's a gripe that I don't foresee being fixed by 1.3 -- is that there really isn't an actual "stealth ops" build available for them. About 90% of the grenadier's stealth usefulness is obtained at LCPL with Rapid Deployment, so that you can flashbang (or shaped charge) on the run. From the midgame onward, it's just a fact of life that any three-person guerilla op where I need to fire more than one or two flashbangs is already going badly and needs to be aborted before I take too many wounds or deaths, so this one free-action boom is very helpful.

But CPL rank and onwards? Protector is marginally useful, but it basically equates to "+1 mobility" in its net effect and offers no additional tools for helping to get the job done. Bluescreen Bombs is a great perk for drawn-out battles, but it requires breaking concealment to take advantage of it, and my specialist usually is too busy hacking the objective (and then running away) to make much use of it once concealment is broken, so I would prefer to have something that doesn't require for another character in my tiny squad to spend an action in order to make use of it. At SSGT, Sting Grenades is good, but you can't count on it stunning the right people (and most of what is truly necessary about flashbanging a group of enemies -- i.e., stopping them from using special abilities and reducing their aim and mobility a little -- is already achieved by a normal 'bang anyway).

So what effect does that have on my grenadier strategy for guerilla ops?

I'll reserve judgment until I play it, but my suspicion is that my 1.3 playthrough is going to involve me training a collection of "redshirt" support grenadiers from my poorly statted excess rookies, and not care too much if they die on an op. Get them to LCPL early and leave them as expendable guerilla ops fodder for later. If they don't die and manage to gain a few levels, then they will get promoted out of guerilla ops and into being crowd control or smokers for a smash and grab team or a real combat squad.

Not that that's anything new, inherently. This game of "redshirt sink or swim" is what I have already begun to do in my current campaign by turning excess rookies into shinobis to throw into risky hack ops that don't require successfully carrying the item out in order to win. I think that with 1.3, my focus will shift more toward always having an actually good shinobi officer and specialist hacker whose survivals are prioritized at the expense of the grenadier.

In any case, I still don't see myself risking a highly experienced support grenadier -- one who's high enough of a level to have the option of having taken Ghost Grenade, for instance -- on a guerilla op, since it's way too easy to lose a high level non-Phantom character to sheer bad luck in that context. Ghost Grenade itself is also so strictly limited that I still doubt that I'll ever take it over the alternatives.

About the only thing I can think of that would convince me to use a leveled up grenadier in a three-person guerilla op would be the addition of CPL to TSGT level perks that gave the Grenadier some options that are more directly valuable to stealthing: a free battlescanner, a free use of some kind of "distraction mine" that could be placed early and then detonated later to divert enemy pods (without requiring me to resort to the short-range risk that is Shaped Charge), and so on. Stuff that expands the character's toolbox instead of mostly adding incremental improvements to the flashbang.

Also, if there are consistent objective-guarding pods in 1.3 for jailbreaks, then I'll probably be spamming shotgun assaults and technicals for those missions instead, but I'm not sure. I do look forward to testing that out.

[Ithuriel]

And Sapper only works on half of the stuff the aliens use for cover.

Wait, what? Are that many structures unaffected by Sapper? To be honest, that would explain some things I've seen, like this: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =881147906

I shot a plasma grenade at that officer, from a grenadier with Sapper, and the building took literally no damage whatsoever; I also shot another plasma at the Trooper on the first floor, detonating on top of him, that also dealt no damage whatsoever to the building/cover.... the entire quadrant of the building was scorched black but it was still structurally perfect.

A thought occurred to me- does grenade environment damage change with frags -> plasmas? I had expected so, but never technically checked.

[trihero]

A thought occurred to me- does grenade environment damage change with frags -> plasmas? I had expected so, but never technically checked.

Frag and plasma grenades have the same environmental damage. You can learn this in game by looking at the tooltip of plasma grenades when you finish researching them. It explicitly states same environmental damage.

A short explanation cover destruction: environmental objects in xcom 2 do not "remember" damage they have taken. You have to reach a threshold amount of damage or they won't break no matter how many times you try.

Frags/plasma do 9 base environmental damage, with a +/- variance of 20%. Most objects in the game have 10 environmental damage, although of course there are many exceptions above and below this. This is why it's very difficult to break objects with just frags/plasma without any perks. Also, environmental damage falls off the further you get from the center of the radius, so you can only expect to reliably destroy the center object.

Sapper adds 3 environmental damage, so it helps you break most objects in the game reliably as long as you center the grenade. Certain objects like trees are tough so require more damage. Combat engineer is +8. For reference, the plasma grenades you were used to in vanilla were 20 environmental damage. It shows you how strong environmental damage you get super early in the base game compared to here where we have to be beyond "colonel" rank to do so in LW2.

[Saph7]

I've tried both full support and full damage grenadiers, and both are strong but inflexible. Support is stronger earlier because it really doesn't need any special gear apart from flashbangs and smokes, both of which are free, and it's obviously much better when you just want to buy time, but they're useless when you just want to deal damage.

Damage grenadiers are obviously better at cover destruction and really come into their own once they get Incendiaries: being able to shut down a nasty enemy with 100% certainty (as well as dealing a ton of damage) is just so useful. They also scale better than support grenadiers since you can't upgrade flashbangs the way you can frags. They're weaker in the early game, though, since they don't have the burst disable potential of Rapid Deployment.

In my current campaign I'm using hybrid grenadiers with Rapid Deployment -> Heavy Ordnance -> Boosted Cores -> Sting Grenades, and I'm finding it gives you most of the best of both worlds. You can carry 2 flashbangs plus an Incendiary in your grenade slot, and combined with Airdrop that's usually enough to last you through anything except a HQ mission.

[nightwyrm]

I've tried both full support and full damage grenadiers, and both are strong but inflexible. Support is stronger earlier because it really doesn't need any special gear apart from flashbangs and smokes, both of which are free, and it's obviously much better when you just want to buy time, but they're useless when you just want to deal damage.

Damage grenadiers are obviously better at cover destruction and really come into their own once they get Incendiaries: being able to shut down a nasty enemy with 100% certainty (as well as dealing a ton of damage) is just so useful. They also scale better than support grenadiers since you can't upgrade flashbangs the way you can frags. They're weaker in the early game, though, since they don't have the burst disable potential of Rapid Deployment.

In my current campaign I'm using hybrid grenadiers with Rapid Deployment -> Heavy Ordnance -> Boosted Cores -> Sting Grenades, and I'm finding it gives you most of the best of both worlds. You can carry 2 flashbangs plus an Incendiary in your grenade slot, and combined with Airdrop that's usually enough to last you through anything except a HQ mission.

Interesting build. Do you plan to take Combat Engineer or Full Kit for your top perk?

[Saph7]

Interesting build. Do you plan to take Combat Engineer or Full Kit for your top perk?

Probably either could work. I like Full Kit, though, just because I don't really rely on grenades for cover destruction by that point.

[nightwyrm]

Interesting build. Do you plan to take Combat Engineer or Full Kit for your top perk?

Probably either could work. I like Full Kit, though, just because I don't really rely on grenades for cover destruction by that point.

Ah I see, so it's more of a late game Support build that takes advantage of fire grenades for crowd control instead of relying solely on flashbangs. I can dig that.

[stefan3iii]

+Vote for hybrid grenadiers. I now build every grenadier this way.
Rapid Deployment, Heavy Ordinance, Boosted Cores, Sting Grenades.

Basically, the build works because sting and incendiary grenades are incredibly strong, and being able to launch two of them in a single turn when things are looking really bad is the best "oh shit" button. Sapper would be nice and is a good perk, but EXO suits and rockets are better at clearing cover.

So, most missions I bring a hybrid grenadier with an Incendiary and 3 flashbangs. Each combat encounter follow a decision tree like:
1) Can I kill every thing this turn?
2) If No, launch a sting grenade.
3) Can I kill everything that is not stunned?
4) If No, launch another sting grenade or incendiary.

I also think hybrid grenadiers make good officers, because they often don't need to move, so it's pretty easy to sneak in half actions. They're good on every team so bringing one is never a problem.

[trihero]

I suppose if one were lucky enough to find a grenadier with flashbanger, then you could just build down the offensive line and be happy with both worlds?

[nightwyrm]

Does Sting grenades work on robots even without Bluescreen Bomb? If not, wouldn't BB be better than Boosted Core?

[stefan3iii]

Does Sting grenades work on robots even without Bluescreen Bomb? If not, wouldn't BB be better than Boosted Core?

Yes they do stun robots, even without bluescreen bomb. That should really be fixed.

That said, there aren't many mechanical units in general, and they're usually easy to kill because they're easy to hit. If sting grenades needed bluescreen in order to stun mechanicals, I'd at least consider taking it over boosted core.

An interesting nerf to sting grenades would be to give them fall-off stun % chance, so enemies at the center have a 50% chance to stun, and the enemies at the edge would be something like 25%.

[nightwyrm]

Yes they do stun robots, even without bluescreen bomb. That should really be fixed.

That said, there aren't many mechanical units in general, and they're usually easy to kill because they're easy to hit. That said, if sting grenades needed bluescreen in order to stun mechanicals, I'd at least consider taking it over boosted core.

Learned something new today. I've always took both coz that made more sense to me.

50% chance to stun a Sectopod is still higher than a lot of Specialist's Haywire, especially at lower tech levels.

[Ithuriel]

A thought occurred to me- does grenade environment damage change with frags -> plasmas? I had expected so, but never technically checked.

Frag and plasma grenades have the same environmental damage. You can learn this in game by looking at the tooltip of plasma grenades when you finish researching them. It explicitly states same environmental damage.

While I do appreciate the other information on environment destruction- I've heard misleading info elsewhere, I thought Sapper tripled environment damage- this is definitely incorrect, both for the tooltip of the grenades themselves as well as the project. The project makes no mention of the environment, and the description of the Plasma Grenade simply says "the Plasma Grenade does more damage than the standard Frag Grenade, and is equally effective at shredding armor." (Which is also misleading, as they shred 2 points of armor instead of 1). The description of the grenade item itself simply says "Plasma grenades improve on the frag grenade's damage capabilities." Both of these could be interpreted as having improved damage of all kinds- both to cover and to enemies. They have the same description as frags in regards to environmental damage: "Frag grenades will only sometimes do significant damage to the environment absent additional soldier expertise," which is kinda amusing b/c nobody updated the description to change Frag -> Plasma. So it's possible I missed something, but I can't seem to see plasmas every explicitly stating the same environmental damage....

[trihero]

I don't have a save to check the tooltips, but I didn't make it up, and it's also true if you look at the weapon file environmental damage. Maybe it's from the tooltip when you first receive the plasma grenade from completing the proving grounds project (like when a picture pops up of the item); I clearly remember a tooltip in game saying as such and then after this I looked in the ini files to see that it was true in terms of environmental damage.

You're not the first to have been fooled by plasma grenades, there were so many other people wantonly claiming plasma have more environmental damage but this is false. Plasma has the same envinromental damage as regular frags.

There's a lot of other bad tooltips like icharus armor saying it gives 2 inventory slots.

[Tuhalu]

Maybe it's from the tooltip when you first receive the plasma grenade from completing the proving grounds project (like when a picture pops up of the item); I clearly remember a tooltip in game saying as such and then after this I looked in the ini files to see that it was true in terms of environmental damage.

It's not there. You can check the phrasing for that by looking under Completed Projects in your avenger menus. I saw no ingame indication that Plasma Grenades had the same environmental damage as Frag Grenades. Only checking the ini files told me anything different.

[trihero]

Well I don't know how the idea came into my head then besides an angel, because I can trace the idea in my head before actually looking at the ini files. Maybe it's because they have the same description for environmental damage that I automatically assumed they had the same environmental damage.

[LordYanaek]

Support Grenadiers might effectively become even more important if stealth efficiency is reduced because everything must be either controlled or killed and AoE control is even more important the fewer guys you have.

I think my biggest gripe about support grenadier in a stealth context -- and it's a gripe that I don't foresee being fixed by 1.3 -- is that there really isn't an actual "stealth ops" build available for them. About 90% of the grenadier's stealth usefulness is obtained at LCPL with Rapid Deployment, so that you can flashbang (or shaped charge) on the run.

I tend to disagree with this. At Sgt Bluescreen Bombs will make sure those annoying drones won't stun your guys which almost always means a lost soldier in fast stealth missions. At TSgt you get Dense Smoke which is a very strong survivability boost. In one of my latest stealth missions in my (now finished) campaign my specialist was spotted (through the door i closed previously) by a triple archon pod while waiting for the evac timer (something that will probably happen more often). I used Fortify (thanks AWC) and threw a smoke grenade then waited. 2 archons came to melee and missed, the 3rd one was too far away so came closer and didn't even bother firering but rather overwatched (he probably had such a low chance to hit it wasn't even worth the troubles). You can't rely on specialists having fortify but a dense smoke gives the same defense boost to several guys for 2 full turns, i think it can be invaluable.

[darkerevent]

I tend to disagree with this. At Sgt Bluescreen Bombs will make sure those annoying drones won't stun your guys which almost always means a lost soldier in fast stealth missions. At TSgt you get Dense Smoke which is a very strong survivability boost. In one of my latest stealth missions in my (now finished) campaign my specialist was spotted (through the door i closed previously) by a triple archon pod while waiting for the evac timer (something that will probably happen more often). I used Fortify (thanks AWC) and threw a smoke grenade then waited. 2 archons came to melee and missed, the 3rd one was too far away so came closer and didn't even bother firering but rather overwatched (he probably had such a low chance to hit it wasn't even worth the troubles). You can't rely on specialists having fortify but a dense smoke gives the same defense boost to several guys for 2 full turns, i think it can be invaluable.

Granted, Bluescreen Bombs isn't useless for guerilla ops, but it's not a big enough difference for me to feel incentivized to use leveled-up grenadiers on such ops, if that makes sense.

Dense Smoke is a good case in point. It's always great to have, and it would be nice for that extra security when executing a jailbreak. However, when I'm honestmanning in 1.3, I don't anticipate wanting to risk TSGT or higher support grenadiers on guerilla ops like that once enemies such as archons are actually present... unless I just have that many support grenadiers leveled up. They're too useful in my combat teams for me to want to put the best that I've got onto risky jobs. Though, I guess there's the consideration that it creates the option of just sitting in smoke and hunkering while waiting for evac if the mission goes awry. Still, I'm not sure how much I'd want to rely on that when there's so much more guaranteed damage available to the enemies than there was in LW1. (The ADVENT Officer grenade still catches me by surprise every time, and it seriously shouldn't at this point.)