Classes and perks discussion

[DuskNite]

You know, as a third person, it's really obvious who's ignoring who.

I won't say much about the topic, as I don't play Vanilla LW2 (Grimy's loot mod and stuff gives me drastically different experiences with various classes). But even if it's theory crafting, I can see defensive units to be VERY viable. Especially if you pair him up with a heal bot (Medical Specialist). With the right gear and class, you can bring a tank to 4 armor with near cap dodge. (Warden, Tactical Vest, Formidable gives 4. Even with predator, it gives 3).

Assume you're using an Assault (Most popular class for this build, however there are quite a few others that can work), the perks I would likely build are (leftmost has higher priority)

Lightning Reflexes
Arc Pulser/Close and Personal
Fortify/Stun Gunner
Formidable
Close Encounters/Hit and Run
Untouchable?/CCS (It depends if the enemy will ignore untouchable units)
Chain Lightning

With this build, in addition to being a good tank you can use him to bait ALL overwatches. He can shrug off almost all explosive grenades, and still be useful as a sub-stun gunner.

And obviously, you can do something similar for gunners/rangers. Comapred to Assaults, they even actually get to shoot. And I can assure you a secondary shooter is better than a dead one.

For items
Bring Tactical Vest, or (I am calling you a wimp for being scared of flanks) if you are a wimp, wear a nanoscale, although it's most likely to end up helping less in the long run.

Bring a flashbang, since you dont have anything else useful to bring. Or a smoke, if you REALLY need to avoid flanks.

Bring an overdrive serum, if you can as a 'Fuck this shit' option, pop it when you sense danger (too many enemies) or if you want to get close, or if you want to intentionally get flanked (for example, another unit accidentally popped another pod and got flanked).

Else, bring a battle scanner, or medkit, or something. He's going to be in the front/front-mid of your entire squad (More likely front-mid if you know what you are doing.), so bring items that you can use in that position.

[trihero]

Defensive perks don't need any buffs at all. They just need to be properly mixed with damage-dealing (or other useful) perks. Defensive perks by themselves do not make a good contribution to combat, AI is clever enough to avoid simple abuses of highly defensive units. While elaborate setups with highly defensive untis are possible, they are not any better than setups without defensive units at all.

I've read this quite carefully and it never ceases to amuse me that you think you've made your point clear. Be clear with what changes you want to see.

What specifically is this "proper mixing" you're talking about? This is a poorly defined term that is not self-explanatory and does not give me any idea of the changes you want to see. What changes would you like to see in the shinobi tree that would result in "proper mixing?" Repeat this exercise for all the classes so we can get an actual discussion going rather than this playing hide and go seek. I have no idea what kinds of nerfs you want for grenadiers, is another example, you just give a vague "they could use all around nerfs."

Yeah, I understand you're avoiding committing to changing defensive perks on an individual level, but I'm left wondering what it is you're really getting at and I would like to see a specific, well defined proposal.

I'm pretty much on the same page as joinrbs with respect to class balance at this point. It's a minor effect on the game. The 8 classes are good. Some are better in certain missions or stages of the games than others, and that's totally fine. It's exactly like he said, people used to whine about sharpshooters because they were stuck in the early stages of the game where they aren't great, and then they suddenly start to whine about technicals once they reach the mid game, etc. It's also like his girlfriend says, if you don't like a class it's because you're stubbornly trying hard not to use it properly. I've provided recent L/I footage from xwynns which offers hard evidence that many complaints are just way off the mark about grenadier knives, technicals, etc. [and this is all of course excluding psi who we all know sucks balls]

I've seen completely opposite reactions to the same class - some people think grenadiers are the most OP thing either, while others avoid them like the plague because for legitimate reasons (noise attracts enemies). Some people can't stand the randomness of rockets, while others use them to great effect in both early and mid game. Some people think rangers are complete garbage, while others rely on them to do most of their work. I would pick streetsweeper or chain lightning every time on assault, but joinrbs with 1500 hours of LW2 gameplay prefers lethal on his assaults. Shrug. I think balance is in a pretty good spot if you can choose completely opposite classes or perks and still manage to succeed and not look crazy.

I'm willing to discuss specific changes either to specific perks or "remixing" whatever that means, but I see zero from the OP in this thread, who is more interested in looking smug than discussing specific ideas.

[justdont]

This video is a solid showing of quality squad play with assaults as the feature, on a wide range of missions from light to swarming.

This video shows a gameplay where it's demonstrated that high-level Assaults, especially built as much into ranged combat as possible, e.g. with slug shots and so are indeed viable. I stated quite the same in my first post.
Picking several assaults per team doesn't mean that team will engage in close combat all the time - and indeed JoINrbs doesn't particularly engage with his assaults on big missions until it's cleanup time.

2) This statement is largely misleading, the only class that has a distinct stealth or not stealth approach is the shinobi, and a solid middle ground is available with the center part of the perk tree, allowing the shinobi to be a highly effective mid-range flanker, and the melee shinobi is extremely powerful with the right build even in late game.

This statement describes why it's very useful to build stealth Shinobis even though they aren't particularly good for combat. To a lesser extent, it also describes Specialists, stealth missions will likely cause you to make more Specialists (which aren't particularly good for combat as well) than it is needed just for combat-oriented missions.

3) This statement is incorrect as well. The only wounds that have a impact on missions at all, are bleed out which consumes time, and killed with reduces your overall ability to finish the mission. Other wounds only have an impact on the mission if you do not bother to bring countermeasures like medkits.

Wounds have severe impact on a given mission if you play with Red Fog enabled. Bad enough wounds will have an impact on future missions, it's entirely possible (and very detrimental to campaign) to run out of properly trained soldiers for several weeks simply because you were too careless on some missions.

I don't see anything particularly "inaccurate". The statement about close combat is subjective, of course. But I haven't seen (nor I was personally successful in trying it) an LW2 playstyle that's heavily based on advancing and fighting enemies up close. At best, only a few particular missions (large maps, widely spread pods) allow you to do so. So you can't apply such an approach to a campaign as whole.

[shhfiftyfive]

sadly, if you nerf grenadier, you nerf Earth's chance of beating the aliens...

(even vanilla) xcom2 is totally out of whack. alien progress over a campaign is more damage and health. our upgrade tiers for armor, weapons, and "utilities" is purely "do more damage" is the clear path... everything else is subpar and/or rng, leading to alien upper hand. (they can 1 shot you if you give them a turn at all)

xcom2: if you don't kill everything on the screen and eliminate/deny the aliens a turn completely, then you're in for a failed game. this is what made xcom 2 bad/boring/lack replayability.... this all or nothing made the game extremely unappealing, compared to EW/LW1.

LW2: instead of addressing/fixing the "damage is king, let none survive" motto of vanilla xcom2... pavonis decided to leave the damage/health bloat as is (fundamental flaw/mistake), but instead pavonis chose to give the aliens unfair rules to "prevent you from outright preventing them a turn". so they added enemy ability to react on yellow alert and aggressively merge on your location because of sound. but here's the important thing they missed: it doesn't translate into a better game. what it means is after 2 turns all the pods will have merged on your location. not only do the aliens get a turn as a result, but that's always been a recipe for death in xcom on max difficulty.

what i wanted from LW2 was mitigation, instead of raw health. to survive an enemy turn if you didn't "kill them all". but instead we got a bunch of bland classes, less interesting than xcom2, LW1, and EW... i'm total shocked. and as far as mitigation, yeah, mimic beacon of vanilla cheese takes a back seat, and flashbangs are useful now with how crit rolls differ, but things like aoe suppression are unreliable, and many class identities have been erased and replaced with purely non-combat roles...

if grenadier was nerfed, then all of xcom2 aliens would need a nerf, as well as all xcom gear upgrades to counter than massive bloat in health and damage. its an arms race... a race in a "long" war... oxymoronic... and nerf sound and yellow alerts, nerf dark events that are designed to help the aliens survive the grenadier. etc etc etc...

its a cyclical.. undesirable balance based on a foundation of bad design used in vanilla xcom2 that deviated from EW, which was quite good/fun/fair..


tbh, EW had better mechanics. and even though it could be amounted to some cheese and overwatch spam, the IMPORTANT part is that it had more replayability.

now the aliens have a double standard set of rules, and we are gimped into boring class roles and deprived of the fun stuff, because they were deemed to have made LW1 trivial by i/i pros...

[justdont]

What specifically is this "proper mixing" you're talking about?

If we're looking at Shinobi:
1) Ranged Shinobi has access to 1.5 offense buffs, 4.5 defense buffs (lone wolf being 1/2 of both), and a multi-shot perk. Technically, Shadowstrike is offensive, but its functionality is extremely limited. This is skewed towards defense and results in offensively-weak soldier if you try such a build (whether with all defensive perks or not).
2) Furthermore, stacking both dodge and defense is not particularly productive - while it makes your soldier vastly more tough, it also makes enemies ignore him. It's often sufficient to pursue either defense or dodge, and as such, perk trees that allow stacking of both aren't very useful. Remodeling the tree so that dodge and defense buffs are tied on same levels for "either-or" choices will likely make it more interesting. Free levels could have offensive buffs placed in a similar fashion.

I'm pretty much on the same page as joinrbs with respect to class balance at this point. It's a minor effect on the game. The 8 classes are good.

I wouldn't call it "good". They're "usable". There's at least one very practical build for each class (usually more) that stays relevant through the most of the game. But ideally I'd want to see classes that can be useful in all situations, preferably through "mixed" builds rather than "all or nothing" builds - like, you can currently make a combat-oriented Specialist via OW build, but that'll leave him mostly useless as a support, or you can pick big support skills like Medical Protocol/Revival Protocol, but it'll make OW much weaker (looking back at LW1 Medics, a lot of mixing was possible, resulting in strong builds that weren't full OW and neither full medic).

LW1 had it in a sweet spot where you could easily have a place for every soldier class on every mission (and even more extreme approaches that excluded some classes completely were also possible). In LW2, we got differently-styled missions that require different soldiers (this is quite a good thing in itself), and a very limited campaign duration that heavily incentivizes you to employ a "rush" rather than "grind" approach, resulting in all kinds of corner-cutting, such as "stealth shinobis are just enough to handle all full stealth missions". These corner-cutting strategies, coupled with the fact that player feels it's necessary to employ such strategies to win - result in skewed classes and builds usefulness. Some soldiers will inevitably be more useful because they're absolutely necessary to properly rush through campaign. Some will be less useful, because they aren't strictly required. And so on.

I think we already agreed in some other thread that currently the biggest problem isn't about classes at all - once the campaign and mission flow improves, it will be easier to discuss class balance.

Assume you're using an Assault (Most popular class for this build, however there are quite a few others that can work), the perks I would likely build are (leftmost has higher priority)

Lightning Reflexes
Arc Pulser/Close and Personal
Fortify/Stun Gunner
Formidable
Close Encounters/Hit and Run
Untouchable?/CCS (It depends if the enemy will ignore untouchable units)
Chain Lightning

I don't see anything "tank" about a soldier who just has 1 more armor point and one 1-turn defense buff. Most of other front-line soldiers are "tanky" about as much, either through their own perks or AWC skills.

A "tank" we're dicussed here is a soldier with stacked 100 dodge (though it starts working in 80-90 area) and decent armor (preferably 2 more points over your tech level through armor-giving perks). Such a soldier can attract a lot of fire from enemies with minimal danger to himself - even though such build will make him offensively useless and "tanking shots" tactic has quite a lot of limitations, and I'm not a fan of it due to that.

Untouchable was decent in vanilla, but since LW2 goes much longer way about spamming you with many enemies, it's considerably less effective here (it can be useful, but I won't even dream about picking it over CCS, which is one of the best skills for shotgun soldier in the entire game).

[trihero]

1) Ranged Shinobi has access to 1.5 offense buffs, 4.5 defense buffs (lone wolf being 1/2 of both), and a multi-shot perk. Technically, Shadowstrike is offensive, but its functionality is extremely limited. This is skewed towards defense and results in offensively-weak soldier if you try such a build (whether with all defensive perks or not).

I almost hate to say this because I know you're inclined to blindly argue, but just the number of buffs alone doesn't mean anything, it's how strong they are. I think this entirely fair to say and totally common sense so avoid trying to argue this. What I'm saying is it's unclear your inference is a valid one, even if we agreed on the way you "counted" offensive/defensive perks, count alone doesn't imply balance.

And I don't even agree with your count, I see lone wolf/instincts/shadowstrike/rapid fire = 4 offensive perks that help ranged shinobis kill things better, it's unclear why you have a separate category for "multi-shot" perk). So your 1.5 to 4.5 looks very misleading, and not something I trust on the surface. (I would count lone wolf as a full 1 for both categories, but it doesn't particularly matter if you choose 0.5 as the equal weighting)

And I know we're just going to open a massive can of worms here, but just because YOU think shadowstrike is "extremely limited" doesn't mean it's ineffective or doesn't count as much as a "real" offensive perk would. The combination with concealment makes it harder to count than it looks on the surface (possibly with ghost grenade as well), and maybe no one's really popularized (although I know it's been done) a faceoff/shadowstrike = murder everything build. Yeah limited to number of times you can conceal, but I completely believe that it does ridiculous damage to a ridiculous number of targets, like better than rocket damage without the noise. Just saying it's "extremely limited" is truly a meaningless statement on its own, I don't know if you mean it's less useful than it ought to be? If indeed you think shadowstrike is a poor offensive pick, what do you think should replace it or what numbers would make it less unappealing to you?

2) Furthermore, stacking both dodge and defense is not particularly productive - while it makes your soldier vastly more tough, it also makes enemies ignore him. It's often sufficient to pursue either defense or dodge, and as such, perk trees that allow stacking of both aren't very useful. Remodeling the tree so that dodge and defense buffs are tied on same levels for "either-or" choices will likely make it more interesting. Free levels could have offensive buffs placed in a similar fashion.

Let's get specific here - lone wolf (defense) and infighter (dodge) are already on the same line. The only other skill that gives +defense in the tree is tactical sense. So if we go on your premise that dodge should be on the same tier as defense for a meaningful choice, there's only one thing that we have to remodel - do you think tactical sense should be set against hard target, or evasive, and why? How would the specific rearrangement look when you have to swap out the other skill on that tier like bladestorm for instance.

This is a better discussion at least, but I would like to see more specifics, and with respect to more classes than shinobi. You wrote a lot in your original posts but we've only just begun to actually see specifics until just now.

[justdont]

And I don't even agree with your count, I see lone wolf/instincts/shadowstrike/rapid fire = 4 offensive perks that help ranged shinobis kill things better, it's unclear why you have a separate category for "multi-shot" perk). So your 1.5 to 4.5 looks very misleading, and not something I trust on the surface. (I would count lone wolf as a full 1 for both categories, but it doesn't particularly matter if you choose 0.5 as the equal weighting)

I mentioned Shadowstrike separately.
"Multi-shot perk" is a baseline necessity for any damage-dealing soldier right now - if you look through the classes, any damage-dealing class or build gets at least one. So I'm excluding it from comparison.

Let's get specific here - lone wolf (defense) and infighter (dodge) are already on the same line. The only other skill that gives +defense in the tree is tactical sense.

Low profile is a +defense skill as well.

This is a better discussion at least, but I would like to see more specifics, and with respect to more classes than shinobi. You wrote a lot in your original posts but we've only just begun to actually see specifics until just now.

I didn't. I argued at length against "tanks are great" viewpoint, and only for toning it down to "tanks are acceptable, but not great" and mentioned that Shinobi perk tree is too defense-heavy for no good reason (even if you accept the greatness of tanky builds, it's still not particularly good for that due to unneeded defense/dodge stacks).
You're again trying to apply your own ideas to me, and sadly those aren't really conforming to reality. If you want to defend defensive perks from some person who think they're terrible - I recommend that first you should go find that person.

[trihero]

"Multi-shot perk" is a baseline necessity for any damage-dealing soldier right now - if you look through the classes, any damage-dealing class or build gets at least one. So I'm excluding it from comparison.

Yeah, you're not making any sense at all.

Should we say something like "any potentially tanking class or build gets at least one damage reduction skill, so we should exclude that from comparison?"

What am I missing here? Why not just count a perk as offensive if it's offensive, defensive if it's defensive, and try not to create separate categories based on what you think are "extremely limiting?" This is a more sensible starting point, even if it's not perfect since it's hard to categorize some skills especially in conjunction with others.

Low profile is a +defense skill as well.

Yes I missed that, but I'm still awaiting specifics. How would you arrange what dodge skills to match tac sense/low profile, why, and how would the other necessary arrangements look?

You're again trying to apply your own ideas to me, and sadly those aren't really conforming to reality. If you want to defend defensive perks from some person who think they're terrible - I recommend that first you should go find that person.

I don't want to defend defensive perks, I just want to see what specific changes you have in mind. It's more productive if I try to discuss what you have in mind, so I'm asking you for specifics. It really seems I have to pull your teeth for specifics which is very puzzling.

I highly recommend you cut out the sass, ad hominem baseless accusations, putting words in my mouth, etc, and instead focus on specific perk changes/rearrangements, logic, content of argument, and more details.

So where are your details on other classes, and what grenadier nerfs do you propose? I have nothing to defend here, I'm awaiting to discuss what you have in mind.

[justdont]

So where are your details on other classes, and what grenadier nerfs do you propose? I have nothing to defend here, I'm awaiting to discuss what you have in mind.

I see extremely little value in discussing specific perk arrangements right now. First off, it's one of the few things that's always skewed by personal playstyle and preferences, and as such, a developer should know it better (especially given that LW1 history showed us - player suggestions on perks and perk trees were considerably less balanced than the careful adjustments done by devs).
Secondly, it's not even the hottest topic right now. Campaign flow-related problems should be improved first.

As such, I consider it valuable to write broad feedback, but pointless to suggest specific perk arrangements or argue over them. And it's too early in the development to discuss precise balance of particular single perks (apart from noting those that are vastly overpowered/underpowered).

[shhfiftyfive]

i agree campaign flow needs fixing first. at present, the campaign is rushed and certain missions are not winnable, and too many missions are just annoying filler.


but yes. classes are extremely subpar compared to LW1. the class identity has been kinda shattered, which kinda shatters LW1's identity. classes perk options can just look back and LW1 for examples of good balance. LW2 suffers in class balance because it adopted every silly mechanic added into vanilla xcom2. that was entirely unnecessary and makes Pavonis' job much harder.

it was clear to me that Firaxis had no clue how to replicate the appeal and balance of LW1 into xcom2, and instead just threw together some things to drastically change the "meta" of the game, but it was proven that those changes were pathetic and made for a joke of a strategy game (sorry to be harsh but xcom2 is a really terrible game).

so it makes NO SENSE to me for Pavonis to use xcom2's broken meta as a foundation for LW2. go back to what works. don't let the failures of vanilla xcom2 tie you down...

[trihero]

Well I can agree that specific changes are heavily influenced by personal tastes, but broad feedback also suffers from the same issues. Your counting of shinobi ranged offense is a ripe example of how personal bias easily leads one to undercount/overcount whatever you want to on a general scale.

I don't even know what to think or discuss at this point since few specifics are offered and the broad feedback is totally opinion and a lot of it honestly feels like "but I don't want to try to make that work, I just want it to fit into what I call a normal strategy." (this comment is not aimed specifically at the OP but just any complaint really about balance I've seen) Like I've said before, I've seen completely opposite opinions on classes and I've also offered a video link of legendary play that counters "common wisdom" common complaints.

Shrugarooni. Not sure what you really started here in this thread, but hopefully it becomes something someday.

Campaign flow changes can easily, easily make a big change on perk balance so maybe indeed this is all moot for now. For instance, if they heavily change the usefulness/rewarding nature of stealth, we could easily see the stealth shinobi fall out of favor and suddenly taking the various range or blade abilities or a mix of those with defense becomes more appealing.

[justdont]

it was clear to me that Firaxis had no clue how to replicate the appeal and balance of LW1 into xcom2, and instead just threw together some things to drastically change the "meta" of the game, but it was proven that those changes were pathetic and made for a joke of a strategy game (sorry to be harsh but xcom2 is a really terrible game).

I'd say that "replicating appeal and balance of LW1" wasn't likely their target in the first place. And regarding comparison of vanilla XCOM2 to LW2, it's interesting to look at it and see why vanilla XCOM2 implements some things exactly in that particular way as it does. For example, I'd say that vanilla's approach to stealth is considerably better than LW2's - it works well when missions require combat even if they start as stealth. It works less well in LW2, which allowed full-stealth missions - and because of that made missions shallow gameplay-wise, as they are essentially "hot floor" game where you must first avoid stepping on "!"s then avoid being seen - aaaand that's all their complexity. Not to mention it promotes a lot of gamey reasons to pick very low amount of soldiers for them.

[shhfiftyfive]

if you say so... but the core xcom 2 game was not a good strategy game... this is going to be really harsh, but true is true. the design/mechanics/balance/meta were just very amateur.

they (Firaxis) add a doom timer, and allow you to cheese it to make it trivial. they don't patch it. seems like a passionate and talented dev team to you?

they add 3 tiers of gear, where 1st tier is hardest because you lack crowd control tools and low health, 2nd tier feels the best balance but you know you're cheesing with mimic because its the only tool in the toolbox, because Firaxis made it so... but tier 2 doesn't last but a minute, so you get tier 3 before you're even 40% complete with the game, and the game is faceroll. we're talking faceroll damage. enemies get zero turns. everything dies. damage is king. proximity salvo acid bombs = dead pod while the rest of your squad eats popcorn. or maybe serial sniper takes a turn. or the assault and specialists get to have a turn playing with their heavy guns on their war suits..

its as if the devs decided to make xcom 2 purely for the casual who just want to blow stuff up and enjoys that instant gratification for pressing a button... and not have a hard time, don't want depth, just shallow killing of alien scum at the press of a button, make something awesome happen, and make you feel awesome... THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE A STRATEGY GAME!!

they made a game that had no strategy, no depth. flashbangs didn't work in your favor, because there was no independent crit roll, so if you got shot by someone who was flashed it was going to crit you... because crit % was higher than the flashed hit %. that's a bonehead mechanic. (and sadly, right now LW2 has something very similarly awful, which is area suppression failures)

Firaxis added loot/weapon attachments and mission timers, instead of meld to combat overwatch spam. this was their version of "risk vs reward"... okay. but i've already explained that the game is faceroll so how did that work out???

and i guess instead of mechs and meld, we had to wait 5 months for summer dlc to get a shallow version of that back into the game (EW was far better than shin's last gift...) but at least we got a really cool character pool feature, right?! (this reminds me of how Fallout 4 sucked as a franchise RPG game, except it had a really deep settlement system built into it, but still... a bad rpg)

instead of exalt missions... nothing.

instead of ufo's... nothing.

instead of satellites, we got regions/resistance comms. okay. massively underused in terms of story. just your 3 man crew on avenger. nothing else. the game lacked character. blacksites? as i said, the doom timer was cheesed and unpatched.

they added a few big missions on main story that were completely out of character compared to the rest of the game design (3 hour overwatch-fest mission vs typical 20 minute missions with timers) left field stuff there.

there was no replay value to xcom2. and i wonder how much firaxis paid pavonis to come back and make LW2... because they had no plans of making it last year. and after release, having played the game, and being disgusted with these mechanical changes, i'm not sure what would have compelled them to make LW2 tbh. the core game that is xcom2 is such a dumpster fire, that no workshop mods could truly fix it. i hear "a better advent" was good, but i never played it, because i uninstalled the game before it was ever born.

[justdont]

if you say so... but the core xcom 2 game was not a good strategy game... this is going to be really harsh, but true is true. the design/mechanics/balance/meta were just very amateur.

It's not a difficult game, but that doesn't turn it into "not good". Even so, vanilla XCOM2 Legendary tries to be difficult much more that EU/EW ever does on max difficulty. Yes, you can "cheese through" some important bits, but EU/EW allowed you to faceroll everything much easier once you go through mildly dangerous early game (very 1st mission in vanilla EU/EW is still the toughest one, and that says a lot).

Furthermore, with modding support, you can adjust vanilla difficulty in quite a radical way, and can make it into hellish survival experience just by going into workshop and downloading assorted mods that fix "cheesing" and add difficulty.

I don't see a problem with Firaxis not making vanilla into an especially hardcode game fit only for XCOM nerds (such as we are). They did a good job making a game that appeals just enough to both casuals and hardcore gamers, and that's quite nice. They even fixed bugs faster this time than they did with EU/EW (hopefully they'll fix more, though).

PS: As for amount of content - hopefully, we're still going to get a major expansion pack similar to EW for the previous game.

[sacho]

Two pages and no concrete suggestions, meh!

I don't like how poorly the technical scales late game. I think they could use:

- increased damage for both rocket and flamethrower on tier 2/3 - missions get longer, so soldiers with reusable damage naturally get better than alpha strikes. Double the current progression would probably be fine.
- the alleged reason concussion rocket was introduced was that shock and awe was too powerful. IMO, this is easily fixable - replace salvo with shock and awe. This gives technicals a significant boost lategame. It would also boost all the rocket-related perks(booms, warheads, javelin..) which right now are too underwhelming.

There are some perks which I just don't think are placed well into tree:

- biggest booms is not worth taking for a technical - damage grenades don't have enough radius without a launcher. I think it'd be tough to balance biggest booms for both technical and grenadier, so I'd remove it and bump all rocket-related perks one up.
- quickburn is not worth being on the gsgt tier.
- suppression should compete with cc perks, e.g. napalm-x and concussion rocket.

Here's how I would change the rocketeer tier:

FiTH, Concussion, Tandem, Javelin, Buster, Shock and Awe, Salvo.

[Hobbes]

My first issue with the classes is with the names of the Shinobi and Ranger.

The original concept of Shinobi/Ninja doesn't really fit with modern militaries since they'd normally act solo and they'd be more akin to spies/assassins. I imagine this was one of the reasons why the name was picked, since you can go solo in certain missions (which actually have certain disadvantages like the XP waste plus the additional risk of something going wrong with one 1 unit), together with the sword skills. But if you want to add a Ninja, why don't you call it a Ninja instead of an equivalent term (Shinobi) that non-Ninja fans will not recognize?

So OK, let's accept for a moment the Ninja, and let's go to the "Ranger". Rangers traditionally are elite light infantry that is used for roles like recon, rescue, raids on high value targets, etc., which correspond in general to their role in XCOM 2. Even if you wince at the sword, US Rangers have used tomahawks in Iraq, so hand-to-hand weapons aren't obsolete, they have a niche in modern battlefields. Now, the LW2's Ranger is designed all around the rifle, and you already have the Shinobi/Ninja for recon/etc., so why don't you call the unit a 'Rifleman' instead of having 2 units (Shinobi/Ranger) that by definition have almost identical roles? I suspect one reason would be that it would mean dropping the 'Ranger' class name from LW2 (but replacing it with Shinobi) and that change might not fit well with some players. So instead the rifleman unit of LW2 was named Ranger, or X2's Ranger was turned into a rifleman. Why? The answer to me is that it required in order to add a Ninja to LW2, but without removing one of the original X2 classes.

As you can imagine, my solution for this class name issue was simple: I just renamed the Shinobi as Ranger, and the Ranger as a Rifleman, and now IMHO they reflect better their roles. Even though 'Ninja' still has a certain ring to it...

[justdont]

I don't like how poorly the technical scales late game.

This is a rather bad moment, I agree. But as to solutions - there may be different approaches. For example, I'm pretty fine with AoE damage attacks falling off in efficiency by the late game, if they could be used for cover destruction instead. Grenadier handles this due to having Combat Engineer. Technical doesn't. While mk2/mk3 rockets do more environmental damage (due to dealing more damage in the first place), their cover destruction capabilities remain underwhelming compared to what Grenadier can do. And Tandem Warheads explicitly can't improve this.

This gets even worse when one of your Technicals lucks out a Sapper in AWC, and suddenly becomes much better for the late game, even though Sapper is just "poor man's" version of Combat Engineer.

Perhaps a simple "home-made" way to improve this - would be to actually replace Biggest Booms with Sapper in the tree. But I'm not sure if it won't make early-game Technicals way too powerful than they should be.

Flamethrower scales very poorly damage-wise as well. It's not that bad since you do have access to Firestorm (while gimmicky, it's quite damaging due to +50% dmg bonus) and status debuffs, but I think it could use some plain damage buffs to higher tier gauntlets.

[shhfiftyfive]

sadly, since xcom2 and LW2 are heavily plagued by mission timers (not that they're difficult)

this absolutely destroys the creativity in the class department. it severely limits everything. in LW2 there were all kinds of viable class builds. you could use a mobile or stationary sniper/gunner, etc. now that's just completely off the table...

the core design of xcom2 is in serious/severe conflict with our desires/vision of what makes the game good, and the reason why LW1 was so good....

this is why i do not understand why Pavonis adopted every garbage xcom2 mechanic. all that baggage makes for a garbage game. no way around it. you can't provide good classes if the core games is hindering gameplay so much. there's just no room for those class adjustments we'd like to see...

i'd much rather go back to the old days of overwatch spam and risk vs reward (meld) instead of being 100% bound to xcom2's ambush mode (designed to speed up the initial contact which was overwatch spam in EU/EW/LW1) if it meant we could get back some of the good gameplay from EW/LW1.

the gameplay in xcom2/LW2 gets old SOOO quick. in xcom2 its setting up ambushes and steamroling the aliens because game is horribly casual. for LW2 the ambush mechanic has morphed into a full on stealth game. and while it was kinda cute doing full stealth success the 1st several times. the novelty of it wore off quick. i want a real longwar, and that shouldn't be entirely tethered to stealth runs.

micromanaging insane infiltration times to avoid insane number of enemy pods on small maps, where pods yellow alert and merge on your spawn, surround you.... it has also become a bore.

xcom2 was "we've added mission timers, but to compensate we've also given you the ability to quickly ambush a pod and then carry on..." a pure "ambush" to avoid taking forever to set up the opening attack on the 1st alien pod. okay. kinda casual. kinda imbalanced. not very strategic. certain classes were very strong for this. made the game trivial...

xcom2 just isn't as good as EW/LW1, yet xcom2 doesn't try to be a stealth game. it just had that easy mode ambush part.... LW2 took that to a different level and its kind of perverted the whole mod. Pavonis put way too many eggs in the stealth basket. its just not interesting or a good core loop for replay value. if you get spotted by garbage AI that has new rules (sound, yellow alerts, reinforcements land on top of you, etc) , its just mediocre core loop and game design. flawed.

nothing we can really do to the classes to resolve this. fundamentally, the core game needs revision, else the class system is going to remain undesirably gimp and narrow in scope.