Pavonis Interactive Forums

I did some analysis of the AWC perks and here are some of the results with some commentary on different parts. I would rank order of priority for training in the AWC to go Defense > Pistol > Offense for most classes. TLDR - Bring back Tac Rigging, make the Offense perks more varied and more exclusiv...

currently perks are already "auto-balanced" by random soldier stats, random soldier awcs, and different conditions as the campaign progresses. I pick a hugely more varied set of perks for each roster in my campaigns than I ever did in LW1. I agree with this, but the main issue to picking ...

The second method is the SuperEmergencyOffworldReinforcements activity. This only happens every 21 days, and only then if global Vigilance is 20 points higher than global strength. It's a catch-up mechanic. It creates 2 legions in the area that it lands in, and another legion in two adjacent region...

Wait a moment... Explosives always destroy loots? What I try to do is to use explosives to remove health/cover and then finish aliens with firearms/abilities. I thought that what matters is only the last hit. Maybe is because i give up my first campaign on early/mid so maybe in late aliens drop mor...

Is Will to Survive good? None of the classes have this perk. The only way to get Will to Survivein is from AWC. Reducing 1 damage from gun while taking cover sound not that useful for me. Its certainly a decent perk. Not the best. It's better to get it on frontline soldiers. As long as you are in c...

Assaults: hit and run. CE does everything hit and run does +90% of the time only it does it 100x better. It just is really really REALLY lack luster. It is a shame they nerfed this perk, it used to be really good for rifle assaults and scouts. Your first standard shot of each turn against an uncove...

In a new region, unless I have something else to do, I will run the Avenger + Full Intel + Scientist for about 5 days, then bounce them all to recruit with a high ranking soldier. The initial burst of intel is all that is needed to fish for the jailbreaks. Any more than 5 days is sort of wasted as t...

I'm still confused about how all this works. Is it right that dark events occur in contacted regions and regions adjacent to them? If so I don't get the argument that they encourage expansion, as there's always regions you haven't contacted (at least til very late game). So by expanding, don't you ...

failsafe is very very bad. i have no idea why people like that perk. the relevant consequence of failing a hack in any situation where you care about the hack is always that you didn't get the hack success reward, not that you have to suffer the hack failure punishment. I think your missing the poi...

Vulture is a pretty important pick. But it doesn't really need to be rushed. It's your primary source of Elerium Cores. In the early game your likely just blowing things up anyway, so Vulture feels kind of wasted. Better to spend what little resources you have on better weapons/armor. I'm typically ...

My current campaign I've started trying out a new squad comp. I've always been interested in class stacking. I've done previous campaigns where I'll run something like all gunners or all assaults. It's fun to try out on Veteran but not so much on higher difficulties. You really start to learn about ...

Failsafe does something quite unique and potentially powerful. Consider the situation where you're racing against the AVATAR timer and have to beat a few lategame missions with your best soldiers, but they're taking wounds in the process. Reducing wound time for them can greatly increase of the squ...

Oh yeah, one thing I've been realizing recently is how good exo suits are. If you watch people like xwynns or joinrbs you just get sucked into "build predator/warden" all the time but exos are a little cray cray, allowing you to outright win situations you otherwise wouldn't be able to. I...

Healing in general is pretty useless in the game. Though I'm off the opinion that medics were pretty useless in LW1 as well :) Best way to heal your soldiers is to kill the enemies before they shoot you. With LW1 I felt at least that medics had a place on the squad that didn't make you feel like yo...

Other perks I would pick on.

Concussion Rocket - Really, a smoke grenade for the ayys? Is this a joke?
Field Surgeon - This wasn't good in LW1 and isn't any better here. Especailly up against Failsafe.

Cutthroat is a bit lackluster. But that could really be said for almost the whole right side of the Shinobi tree. If it didn't have the check on mec then it might be somewhat more useful. Also it's position should really be swapped with Blademaster at least. If your going to build a sword shinobi, B...

Thats basically right ya. Infiltrating to 200% can reduce the alien count by around 5-6 down to the minimum of 7-9. As for stealthing at < 100%, especially as low as 50%, your almost guaranteed to be spotted. The detection radius gets rather large, even with SMG + Covert, and you can only Ghostwalke...

Something similar was done with certain classes in LW1. For example both the Scout and Engineer class could pick up Holo-Target. But the Engineer would get +1 Aim if they took the perk, where as the Scout wouldn't. There were a few other cases that perks would give aim or will bonus, but it wasn't u...

Soldier XP is based on a combination of the number of aliens on the map and the number of aliens killed. Killing an alien gives you 1 xp. This can be increased to 1.33xp with the Wet Work GTS Tactic. If the mission is a failure this will be cut in half. This xp is awarded to the soldier who gets the...

Save and reload fixes a few issues. If some ability appears not to be working right a quick refresh can fix many things up. F5/F9 are helpful here.

Easiest way to rebalance wet work is change the ratio of free xp to kill xp. With 85% of the xp being given to you for free, there's not much left for wet work to. Even if you made wet work 100% more kill xp it would hardly be noticable when free xp is already over 500% of kill xp.

The reason it's good to stealth missions is that beyond the early game, there are too many missions for full squads to do. You simply don't have enough experienced soldiers with good equipment to be sending 5-6 soldiers out. Stealth missions can be done by cheap rookies and squaddies using zero ite...

I think one aspect that currently unbalances stealth missions is the fact that you are getting most of the XP whether you kill the aliens or not. On most missions there are only 2 reasons to kill aliens, loot drops and xp. Otherwise you want to avoid conflict at all costs, which is very odd to be sa...

That's a pretty standard Grenadier for me outside of Supports. I like them especially when I have Gunners and Techs that can generally take care of cover. I like Volatile Mix for them as well, especially if they have decent mobility, 2 tiles extra range is useful sometimes, but not as often if they ...

You can also customize who is able to get what in terms of perks, or even add your own. The settings are in the AWCPack ini. If you want to add/remove perks globally you can add them to the AWCAbilityTree_xxx lists for each of the 3 levels. To remove a perk you can simply add a semi-colon to the beg...