Lothing for the new patch 1.3

[TheCiroth]

So this patch. I feel like you took the comments for the hate of stealth TOO far. You can't even get close anymore. You still pull the whole map after 2 turns and can't even get close to objectives with out breaking stealth. Your choices to rebalance out of what a lot of players enjoyed was the wrong choice. The pods are still too close together so you still end up fighting large pods, you don't have enough time on destroy the relay missions, nor do you have time to fight on get the data from container missions with the fact you have to open fire on turn 2 vice turn 5. You still end up fighting 5-8 man pods because the pods are still too close. When your guys are low rank, it takes 4 turns to kill a single drone if you don't have 6 men (then its 2 or 3 turns) which means you don't have the time to move forward because you can't go forward. You cannot afford to pull another pod until you have the drone dealt with because it will lock you down.

You pull a 2 man pod. Kill one, it rezzes. Then you miss every shot on the sectoid next turn at 85% and above. THEN a pod of 4 walks into you. How to fix Stealth? Give us more detection time. It was that simple. Not what you gave us.

Sorry, I give the game 2/10 now. Its not playable. I loved it before. Was working though a Legend run, doing pretty good. Beat it on Commander. Will wait for next patch then.

[Clibanarius]

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying 1.3 because I didn't enjoy stealthing every mission and bring reasonable squads to every mission I don't intend to stealth through.

[8wayz]

I am really not sure what you are doing in your campaign. I just finished a Smash and Grab mission with Extremely light alien presence.

In 1.2 you would have 2 three-unit pods and 1 two-unit pod.

In 1.3 I had 4 two-unit pods. Even when I activated two of them on the second turn I managed to kill the first pod and flashbanged the second one.

Then the remaining 2 pods came one by one. The mission was extremely easy, the only hairy moment was letting a drone act for 1 turn... and it missed. A big part of it was the lower number of adversaries per pod - sneaking is harder, but fighting is markedly easier.

Stealth is really difficult to pull off in the early game but I get the feeling with a proper setup you can still have a lot of fun with a 2-3 person team.

[TheCiroth]

Mission 1: Blow the relay up. Can't get close because of the number of pods in the way 4 man team failed. Meh fine. Too small
Mission 2: 5 man team. Grab from the container. 7 turns left. Open up on a sectoid and an advent. Kill the advent. Advent rezzes, sectoid panics my guy. Miss 4 shots on the sectoid. Damage the rezzed (not by sectoid) advent. Then a 4 man pod walks into me. Both missions were over 100%. You do not have time with rookies or squaddies to get even close because you can't stealth them. Both missions were extremely light.

Everyone that came into my twitch channel said how much they hate the new patch because 1, they removed steath from the game. 2, the added pods. 3, a general feeling of how bad it is now.

Sorry, not the direction I think this mod should of gone. They should not of catered to the vocal minority and removed stealth from the game. They should just take it all the way out and remove concealment 100% from the game then.

[Frei_Ninjesus]

So, you had 2 missions gone wrong, therefore the game is now unplayable? No chance that, maybe, you screwed up at some point?

I don't know, they had several people play test the game for a while now. Hell, you can even watch xwynns, see how he does. Hell, I even played like 10 missions last night. Doesn't look unplayable to me.

[TheCiroth]

I've played more than just the two. Those were from this morning. They have not changed how pods are stacked on top of each other. They added more pods yes, but then all the pods are still on top of each other so you cant move. In fact they made it worse. Frankly, my whole chat this morning came in bitching about how bad the new patch is.

I am a rather good XCOM player, and for the average player, the game frankly is too much BS. You are still fighting the exact same size pods, they just trickle in now.

[Sporadix]

I'm playing a L/I campaign and so far have no complaints about the mission balance. Haven't noticed anything weird about enemy pod deployment. Certainly I don't think the game is "unplayable." In fact, I'm loving the new patch so far.

[Jacke]

I was starting to worry watching Xwynns YouTube series. This is doubly disturbing.

Here's TheCiroth's Twitch video page. I'm going to review his Twitch streams on LW2 1.3 and see what happened. Interested in others' actual experience.

https://www.twitch.tv/theciroth/videos/all

EDIT: I'm still watching but others have reported tactical mistakes are more of an issue. Maybe not so alarming. As LordYanaek said, it's still early. JL is even holding off posting 1.3 to Nexus as he wants to see if there's issues that requiring patching first.

[Littlebob86]

http://www.pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB ... 15&t=25866
There you go bud, instructions how to go back to 1.2

[sacho]

edit: doublepost

[Clibanarius]

Fighting 4-unit pods was all you did in 1.2. I've seen far more variety in what I've encountered on ExLight Guerrilla Ops in 1.3 already than I did in 1.2.

[stefan3iii]

Playing L/I ironman, nearly at the end of march, so far new patch is a big improvement over 1.2. The new smaller pods are more interesting to fight and generally makes fighting through a mission easier, while making stealth harder.

On the strategic layer, removing upkeep means I don't just have everything on intel 100% of the time. I actually put 4 guys on supply in March once I hit 11 rebels in a region. Since GOPs are easier to detect, having 6-7 rebels in intel seems sufficient to detect good missions.

[sacho]

Mission 1: Blow the relay up. Can't get close because of the number of pods in the way 4 man team failed. Meh fine. Too small
Mission 2: 5 man team. Grab from the container. 7 turns left. Open up on a sectoid and an advent. Kill the advent. Advent rezzes, sectoid panics my guy. Miss 4 shots on the sectoid. Damage the rezzed (not by sectoid) advent. Then a 4 man pod walks into me. Both missions were over 100%. You do not have time with rookies or squaddies to get even close because you can't stealth them. Both missions were extremely light.

And what happened afterward? Do you have a link to the mission? Fighting 4-man pods was already a thing in 1.2...

EDIT: I watched your video. On turn 1 you find a pod and complain that you have to open fire on it, when you can clearly go around..I thought you wanted more stealth, not less?
On turn 2, the pod gives you a break and moves out of LOS so you can stealth past it, but you decide to shoot a drone BEHIND your squad which you can also ignore! The drone pulls the other pod(I don't know why but this surprises you?) You rage-spam shoot and kill the advent through high cover(could have flanked him instead but you got lucky), then rage-spam a shot at the sectoid in full cover(which also hits, heh).

This is several critical tactical mistakes in just one turn. I don't think you meant to do it, you were just angry for some reason, but don't use this as a justification to say that the game now sucks. This is also the spot when you say "they've completely ruined the game".

The video cuts out between turns 2 and 3, but presumably you miss two flanking shots on the sectoid and hit one on the zombie. It's poor luck, I agree, but nothing that won't happen to you literally every X-COM campaign. You already knew there was a second pod on alert since its sectoid rezzed the advent, but didn't really work to move your troops significantly towards the objective or to evac(this is the spot where you have to make the decision - sitting in a firefight vs one sectoid when you've had such a poor opening is not an option). You also moved your troops next to a zombie which was likely to kill or wound someone next turn. Then the 4-man pod walks in and you quit the game.

I dunno, you didn't even try to finish the mission(it's still possible if you use one of your troops to brute force the objective while the rest stick in the firefight), you opened very poorly and you were already raging. I don't think this is a problem with the game.

[gimrah]

So OP did so many stealth missions in 1.2 he forgot how to fight. Good thing we made some changes then.

[TheCiroth]

Wow. I didn't forget how to fight. How about you listen to the users. Most of us LIKED what you did before. Not this BS you gave us. Wow. Guess what. With that one comment, you just killed this mod for me. And you killed it for a lot of my viewers. There is a lot of things you need to fix but you refuse to listen.

I point out what I think is an issue, the pod placement being unbalanced and yet you tell me to go F myself and its a good thing? No. Have a great day and I'm done with this mod. Peace

[Wardy2005]

OP doesn't seem like a player worth saving. If this is causing you issues Legend for lw2 is probably too difficult to play for you. Hard hit to ego but the fact remains <5% of the player base is going to be successful MOST of the time on legend. Stealth is possible but much more difficult people have done it as well as myself. From what I read here is tactical combat strategies are just lacking.

[Clibanarius]

OP doesn't seem like a player worth saving.

Took the words out of my mouth. Enjoy playing 1.2 or something else, buddy. But take the whiny attitude about balance changes A DAY AFTER THE PATCH RELEASED, BEFORE YOU'VE EVEN ADAPTED TO THEM, elsewhere. People were bitching YESTERDAY, even, about these changes. How the fuck can you honestly claim to have a grasp of all the intricacies of the changes in under 24 hours?

[LordYanaek]

Interesting as my very first 1.3 mission was an almost perfect stealth run to recover items. One wound in the end caused by a weird situation where one of my guys fired an OW shot on a just mind controlled soldier who didn't even move. Otherwise really fun stealth op with 4 men.

Kill the advent. Advent rezzes, sectoid panics my guy. Miss 4 shots on the sectoid. Damage the rezzed (not by sectoid) advent. Then a 4 man pod walks into me. Both missions were over 100%. You do not have time with rookies or squaddies to get even close because you can't stealth them. Both missions were extremely light.

So you're playing with additional mods changing pod composition. Did you consider the fact that you might have oversized or overpowered pods because of those mods rather than 1.3?

I'm too early to be able to judge the current state of the mod but people complaining are probably also too early to judge it. Let's play a few more missions before complaining.

[TheCiroth]

So you're playing with additional mods changing pod composition. Did you consider the fact that you might have oversized or overpowered pods because of those mods rather than 1.3?

I play with no mods that changes the pod composition. LW2 has had advent that self rez from 1.0 So how about no. I change almost nothing about the mod itself.

Took the words out of my mouth. Enjoy playing 1.2 or something else, buddy. But take the whiny attitude about balance changes A DAY AFTER THE PATCH RELEASED, BEFORE YOU'VE EVEN ADAPTED TO THEM, elsewhere. People were bitching YESTERDAY, even, about these changes. How the fuck can you honestly claim to have a grasp of all the intricacies of the changes in under 24 hours?

Effectively they reverted it back to vanilla by making it so you can't stealth. (They should remove it 100% then since they broke it so bad) My issue and I guess I wasn't clear enough is the pods are too close together.

If this is causing you issues Legend for lw2 is probably too difficult to play for you.

Then It is a good thing I wasn't playing Legend. I was on commander. Which I have beat in LW2. my issues with this is the fact that NOTHING changed. Sure the pods are "smaller" but they are still on top of each other. Thus you have to fight the same size pods with out being able to get close enough to the objectives. But hey, why not listen to the group. Wait they did listen to a small but loud group that resulted in loosing stealth.

They added time to the timers for some missions. They needed to add more time across the board. Another 2 turns would be enough to get things but nope.

I fully accept losses. I fully expected a learning curve but they brought things too far over the other way. But when player start pointing it out, lets insult anyone who doesn't think the mod is perfect.

Hard hit to ego but the fact remains <5% of the player base is going to be successful MOST of the time on legend.

Probably not, and I don't expect to win Legend with out a few hundred hours of play time on it.

I am pissed now at the LW2 staff for 100% dismissing the comment and making me feel insulted by them. What they should of said was NOTHING or asked why I felt that way. I don't care if the rest of you insult me. Hell that's all you guys have been doing because I dared to disagree with your thoughts about the mod. The LW2 staff member? You know what, that's what is what made me remove the mod from my computer and I know I have a lot of my viewers refuse to update to 1.3 or they have removed the mod now themselves. He added nothing to the thread aside from insulting me.

[gimrah]

OK, so I thought I was lightly joshing, but I will apologise if you took offence. I should also say that I am not from Pavonis; just one of the testers.

But I've been playing 1.3 on Commander and find early game very manageable, as well as enjoyable. I've also been talking to Legend players throughout the process who have had a similar experience on Legend, albeit using a higher skill level to meet a harder challenge. They also report that stealth still works, but you need perks and tech to make it feasible (like you need perks and tech to make fighting feasible).

And watching your last twitch vod, in the 5 minutes I watched there were some questionable decisions. Some may be characterised as playstyle but you did do things like offer an undebuffed enemy a flank and leave injured soldiers in low cover against undebuffed enemies, just to name a couple. If you play like that on higher difficulties, you are going to have issues quite quickly.

[mattprice516]

There are no advent which self-rez in LW2. Sectoid who are in yellow alert can rez bodies before they're activated though, which might be what you're mistaking for advent self-rezzing.

Re: pods being "too close together", this is your own anecdotal experience. I did an extract mission a few days ago where I never ran into a single pod, snuck around them all and got out clean. Sometimes pods will be close together. Sometimes they will be further apart. Stealth is not impossible in 1.3, but it's no longer the absolute best way to do most missions (which was basically the case in 1.2). If you want all missions attempted as stealth to be auto-win, 1.3 will not deliver the experience you're looking for.

[Jacke]

Ciroth, I like your cat and I like the Cat Cam.

However, I don't like how in your stream (was just watching the videos) you're already very harsh in your words about the changes in LW2 1.3, especially to stealth. It made it hard for me to watch. And I say that as someone who is a bit concerned at what the changes could bring but who realises I need to wait and watch and play and see what 1.3 is actually like. Especially as there can be patches from Pavonis if there are issues. And which we can all metamod. I am happy we finally have 1.3 as there are a lot of fixes and changes in there that are excellent. The rest can be addressed in one way or another.

I didn't get to the scenes or perhaps even the missions you referred to. I had to give up after about 30 minutes while still in the Gatecrasher mission, just after the first pod of 4 was finished off and you accidentally activated another pod of 4. Show, don't just tell. Show us what LW2 1.3 is like, don't keep telling us over and over again.

And dude, I'm no XCOM tactical genius, but I think you need to polish your tactical skills. Gatecrasher has no RNF and no timers. I didn't see you take advantage of scouting out all the enemy pods and track them before ambushing (although that could be a concession to speed for your streaming audience). I didn't see you survey the ground and buildings around you, nor take upper floor positions.

I also suggest you try out the Option Red Fog. I turn it on for both XCOM and ADVENT. It usually benefits XCOM as they will often shoot first and can adjust play to avoid wounds, while a seriously wounded enemy becomes less of a threat.

[Sporadix]

With how much he's complaining about the pod density, I have to wonder if he's mistakenly playing Long War 1.

Kappa

[8wayz]

Now I have not watched the Twitch stream, but there are a few points on which you seem to be off the mark TheCiroth :

- Only Psionic aliens can resurrect others, most notably Sectoids and Gatekeepers.

- That said, if you throw a flashbang on the Sectoid, it will automatically cut any Psionic abilities, including Mind Control and Resurrect. This will kill on the spot the zombie. A good tactic in both 1.2 and 1.3 seems to be not to try and 1-turn kill a sectoid, but to disable it with a flashbang and set up the kill for the next turn.

In my humble opinion it was a very risky decision to rely on rookies to hit 2 out of 4 shots on the Sectoid. A better proposition is to just throw a flashbang, kill the zombie and possibly wound with one shot the Sectoid and with the rest go on overwatch.

- Regarding the 4-unit pod a flashbang grenade is again a rookie's best friend. Do not expect to kill them all on the very first turn, pick your targets and disable the rest. The fact that pods are smaller makes it a lot easier to flank them as well. In 1.2 the bigger pods could cover a lot of ground and managed to guard their flanks.

To sum it up, you seem to be taking a lot of uncalled risks and playing cocky. Especially considering that you are using rookies, you should have more respect for Advent and the Aliens, they can still take advantage of your mistakes.

[hermescostell]

I am pissed now at the LW2 staff for 100% dismissing the comment and making me feel insulted by them. What they should of said was NOTHING or asked why I felt that way. I don't care if the rest of you insult me. Hell that's all you guys have been doing because I dared to disagree with your thoughts about the mod. The LW2 staff member? You know what, that's what is what made me remove the mod from my computer and I know I have a lot of my viewers refuse to update to 1.3 or they have removed the mod now themselves. He added nothing to the thread aside from insulting me.

Your opinions which deviate from anything other than "this mod is amazing, I love it" will be buried on this forum.

See: http://pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB3/vi ... 15&t=25750