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Colapops posted:My impression of SPARKs so far isn't that great either. Like someone else said, I was sort of expecting MEC trooper levels of usefulness from the SPARKs and well... they're not. I have all the upgrades for mine but he still has less health than most of my human troopers and his attacks aren't as useful since he can't use special ammo or anything. He's decently mobile I suppose but with the lack of cover and relatively mediocre HP pool it's not a whole lot to write home about. I think the thing people are undervaluing about SPARKs is their insane burst potential with Overdrive. Its not consistent, but they can do a huge alpha strike when you need it and pull of some crazy clutch plays. They're also really great filler troops if you're missing one of your other classes (innate explosives, remote hacking, melee attack) make them a jack of all trades that can be really flexible in how they support your squad. Personally I'd let them have PCS and a passive item though. Maybe bump up their gun damage by one point as well since they can't mod it. Its super hosed up you can raise your aim by up to 50 points between SCOPEs, PCS and Tracer rounds and they get none of that. Zore fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Jul 5, 2016 |
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Jul 5, 2016 21:14
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I feel like a good mod would be an ammo-only equipment slot for SPARKs.
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Jul 5, 2016 21:17
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Lurdiak posted:The Tower's not that hard if you have several Specialists with attack modules and other anti-robot options, and also Bluescreen ammo. You're not going to be fighting anything that's not a robot, so go whole hog on the specialization. They're really expensive to be directly compared to SHIVs though. And if you put off the tower mission until you have mag/gauss weapons etc. then you're getting the SPARK when its already behind the power curve. I don't think I'd attempt the that mission much sooner than that on Legend, either. many johnnys posted:My spark has been pretty useful, it's a free-shooty mobile full-cover. It has lots of health, and three armor points already at mid-tier. It can drop a squadsight explosive no matter where it is. Its AIM isn't that great, but it can reach high ground easily, without need of a ladder. And overdrive lets me put it wherever it needs to be and rain down hell. How often are enemies throwing grenades at you when using one for the cover bonus though? In my experience, as soon as you hit Mutons and Advanced Advent troopers (e.g. once the AI has grenades at its disposal), 2 soldiers close enough together to both be hit means you're getting explosives thrown at you. You can mitigate this sometimes by out ranging them, but then you're putting your tanky SPARK at the back of the squad.
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Jul 5, 2016 21:20
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Also, if nothing else, SPARKs get innate shred/free heavy weapon/rocket boots/1 armor/Overdrive from the word go. SPARKS are good, their later perks just don't scale as insanely as the base game classes do.
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Jul 5, 2016 21:22
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I'm just not sure how to feel about SPARKs in general, I guess. You can indeed get them pretty early on, and I can see how they'd be so strong then based on their armor alone but they need some tweaks so that they don't become near-useless in mid-late game. Their skills especially need some work and I guess that's where you'd go to start: the complaints about this game's classes in general applies to sparks as well. They just don't seem focused in either tree, with some weird, out-of-place skills here and there or skills that feel outright worthless. edit: hoping for some more customization mods for SPARKs soon too, I hate the t3 armor on them. It's fine for human troops but I don't like the Vanu-esque SPARKs. Colapops fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Jul 5, 2016 |
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Jul 5, 2016 21:22
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Zore posted:Personally I'd let them have PCS and a passive item though. Maybe bump up their gun damage by one point as well since they can't mod it. Its super hosed up you can raise your aim by up to 50 points between SCOPEs, PCS and Tracer rounds and they get none of that. Disagree on PCS, but they really should be allowed to have weapon mods. They should also get some projects to boost them up as well. It's crazy that you can research better grenade tech, DLC armor, and even goddamn medkits, but there are no augments available for your mechanical monsters. Even MEC troopers had a bunch of them. You'd think Shen would have a field day with it. Emong posted:I feel like a good mod would be an ammo-only equipment slot for SPARKs. Agreed. Frankly they should be able to do this out of the box. wuffles posted:How often are enemies throwing grenades at you when using one for the cover bonus though? In my experience, as soon as you hit Mutons and Advanced Advent troopers (e.g. once the AI has grenades at its disposal), 2 soldiers close enough together to both be hit means you're getting explosives thrown at you. You can mitigate this sometimes by out ranging them, but then you're putting your tanky SPARK at the back of the squad. Hasn't happened yet, but I'm wary about the distance between me and the enemy though, and try to spread out around those types. Gotta be careful to avoid the risk.
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Jul 5, 2016 21:37
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So, a friend of mine is getting redscreen errors, something to do with something screwing with facepaint options, the blank one. Anyone have any thoughts what mod has started having those issues lately? He's on Windows 10, and right now he's trying to figure out which mod is causing it, but he has to re-verify the game cache every time it happens, because disabling mods doesn't fix it - but it doesn't START until he loads up with mods enabled.
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Jul 5, 2016 22:49
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Redscreen errors can be suppressed by adding "-noRedScreens" to the steam launch options. They shouldn't be seeing them unless they are launching the game in dev mode...
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Jul 5, 2016 23:05
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I also felt Sparks are underpowered, they're not even very good bullet magnets. Their only star moment is pulling an Overdrive series of action every once in a while, which can be game changing, I'll concede. On the other hand, I absolutely loved the Alien Rulers, oh, they're loving bastards to deal with, but the encounters with them are amongst my most tense XCOM moments and it was loving great. Rest of the game feels routine now. This was on Commander/Ironman, and I did The Nest once I had Magnetic/Plated upgrades, for reference.
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Jul 5, 2016 23:25
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ZearothK posted:I also felt Sparks are underpowered, they're not even very good bullet magnets. Their only star moment is pulling an Overdrive series of action every once in a while, which can be game changing, I'll concede. I find Sparks fun because it's nice to have a unit you don't have to worry about cover with (other than mind-controlled fodder of course  ). But yeah, they could use a bit more. A tiny Aim tweak, a dash of damage, or at least the ability to equip armor/ammo items to give them a bit more punch/strength. They're fun, but they're not the end-all face-wrecker that was the MEC. Then again perhaps I'm downgrading them because I remember poo poo like amputating a Col. Sniper's limbs, shoving him into a robo-suit and suddenly having a point-defense robot on my team.And yeah, if anyone's asking about the Rulers who's picking up the game becuase all the DLCs are out/they just got it on sale I will say this: you WILL hate them the first time you run into one (unless you get a Repeater Execute). They are game-y and bullshit and you really have to treat fighting them differently. But once you get used to them they become a fun challenge that does mix things up.
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Jul 6, 2016 00:14
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They definitely feel a bit less thematically awesome than the Mec soldiers did (I remember having my top guy gravely wounded who would take a shitload of days to get out of the medbay and deciding to make him my first Mec since the op for that was only ten days, felt like exactly what a real jerk bag of a commander would do) but I've been having fun with them, wish the numbers on their abilities were better surfaced though like how much damage Nova will do and that sorta thing.
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Jul 6, 2016 00:33
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Was thinking about really digging into modding and making a change to PsiOps. Specifically, something to bring them a little more in line with the other classes by giving them two classing options: Offensive and Support. Offensive PsiOps get Soulfire, Null Lance, Fuse, and Void Rift, with a passive along the line to give a flat chance of Rupturing with any Psi ability, whereas SupportOps get Inspire, Stasis, Fortress, Telekinetic Field (probably a beefed up Solace) and Domination. The main idea being that the Offensive Ops are just good punchmens, whereas Support Ops are much more flexible and well rounded. The cooldowns would likely be tweaked to encourage the usage of Offensive Psi instead of firearms. Also, I'd bring back PsiArmor cause gently caress you guys.  Now, to look into the SDK and enter a catatonic state. vv: Yeah, the idea was to make 'em mutually exclusive. Bogart fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Jul 6, 2016 |
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Jul 6, 2016 00:34
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Best way to balance Psi would be to make it work exactly as it does now, but make powers on the same row mutually exclusive and move them around a bit. That way you can't get every Psi power and you could make Stasis and Domination a choice. Also you could create good gameplay through the randomness (do I get Void Rift now or do I wait and see if I can roll inspire?). Also, Fuse should be the baseline power.
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Jul 6, 2016 00:46
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THE RULER ARCHON IS BULLSHIT!!!!!!!
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Jul 6, 2016 03:27
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I talked about the viper ruler before, about how he's a neat enemy with some cool moves, but he feels fair. And I talked about the berserker ruler, who is a noodle-armed baby girl. But the archon is a whole different beast. The explosions are bullshit, the bodyslam is bullshit (i actually missed a 91% shot so that's kind of on me), and he gets FOUR bars of health rather than the berserker's three or the viper's two. And his regular shots actually do decent damage! What a rear end!!
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Jul 6, 2016 03:34
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I'm sorta disappointed, as I missed out on pretty much all of the Archon King's bullshit. The first time I saw him, I tricked him into doing nothing while I whittled down half his health. The second time, I spotted him in concealment so I activated him with a blind grenade shot and he ran into a full-squad overwatch trap, which left him with four health.
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Jul 6, 2016 03:37
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many johnnys posted:the bodyslam is bullshit (i actually missed a 91% shot so that's kind of on me), and he gets FOUR bars of health rather than the berserker's three or the viper's two. And his regular shots actually do decent damage! What a rear end!! I was fortunate that the four times this happened to me I had a trooper with stocks equipped to prevent the bodyslam, so I guess my advice is to give your troops stocks when you know the Archon King is coming. Not a bad upgrade either most of the time, but in this game I rolled a billion stocks and almost no Elerium Cores. And yeah, I'd advise people new to the game to disable the Alien Rulers, but if you've beaten the campaign and felt it was easy from midgame onwards you should definitely enable the DLC to give yourself some much needed tension. I do mean disable from the Steam launcher, not from the campaign start, because doing that will only make it worse for you.
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Jul 6, 2016 03:52
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ZearothK posted:I was fortunate that the four times this happened to me I had a trooper with stocks equipped to prevent the bodyslam, so I guess my advice is to give your troops stocks when you know the Archon King is coming. Not a bad upgrade either most of the time, but in this game I rolled a billion stocks and almost no Elerium Cores. You can just enable The Nest and never do it. And as a bonus you get all the cool DLC toys.
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Jul 6, 2016 03:57
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Nah, enable the Nest mission from the campaign start but never do it to get the best of both wolds. If the mission is active the rulers don't appear until after you do it.
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Jul 6, 2016 03:58
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Worth noting: The Alien Rulers DLC weapons cannot be upgraded to magnetic/powered tiers until after the Alien Nest mission has been completed. So they're nice for early game, but it quickly becomes a tradeoff as your weapons upgrade if you delay the nest for a while.
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Jul 6, 2016 04:08
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I finally figured out why I kept seeing the underside of the Avenger after a mission. Turns out if you make any changes to .ini files or a mod or take a mod out etc while a mission is loaded in your save file (like a mission that is on the map and ready to be selected and played) it fucks the mission up and when you beat it the game breaks. But at least I think I'm done tuning the game so this won't happen anymore. I always loved the Gunner class on the workshop. He changed the perk tree around so it gets a skill that causes 4 hits worth of damage to a single enemy. This absolutely trivializes rulers if you're packing T3 weapons
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Jul 6, 2016 05:31
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Well fighting Julian sure was harrowing. Turns out frost bombs only take 1 action point off of sectopods! Luckily I got through with no injuries, though I'm only on Veteran (getting used to the new flow of geoscape with reduced doom timer as well as the rulers).
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Jul 6, 2016 05:37
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MJ12 posted:(more critiques) I took some of the advice for replacing and adjusting both the Heavy and NuGrenadier Classes, and made what will probably be my final ability lists:  I'm a bit leery of letting soldiers mix Mobile Artillery with Salvo since that seems like a nightmare of a interaction debugging, so I'm nixing MA from the Grenadier ability tree entirely. For Heavies, Pinning Fire will only apply to direct hits, which makes it more suited for a lower-level ability. I may have to give penalties to the Will roll if panic triggers too often in enemy units. Light Em' Up takes your Walking Fire suggestion, but increases the %hit bonus to ramp up quicker while going away if not immediately used. This will also make the bonuses more competitive with Holo-Targeting builds. The Support build for Heavy now can also ignore OW penalties at Major level. I think your suggestion of adding access to some low-powered grenades is still a good one, so I'm going to add a tier-3 upgrade for the grenade launcher that gives all Grenadiers one extra "soft-grenade" to use. I'm also going to upgrade Grenadier aim growths to match the Support/Assault class values. Thanks again for the help!
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Jul 6, 2016 05:48
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I'm personally liking the Sparks just fine as a 'jack of all trades, master of none' mish-mash of a Grenadier and a Specialist. They can hack with their bit, but can't use Haywire Protocol or ranged heals. They can use a heavy weapon and their weapon has innate Shred, but no grenades. Sure, a dude of either class can do their job better, but if you've got an empty space on your team they can fill in until your dedicated guy heals up.
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Jul 6, 2016 05:57
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BlazetheInferno posted:Worth noting: The Alien Rulers DLC weapons cannot be upgraded to magnetic/powered tiers until after the Alien Nest mission has been completed. So they're nice for early game, but it quickly becomes a tradeoff as your weapons upgrade if you delay the nest for a while. so i nevevr played with alien rulers. how do you even get the dlc weapons before the nest mission?
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Jul 6, 2016 06:18
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Cat Army 
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The Iron Rose posted:so i nevevr played with alien rulers. how do you even get the dlc weapons before the nest mission? The first "rumor scan" location gives you the weapons themselves - some time after, the second "rumor scan" will become available, and will open the mission itself. The rewards from defeating the Alien Rulers are something else entirely.
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Jul 6, 2016 06:20
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Welp I lost my frost grenade. Mission totally went to poo poo, and I had to carry out 2 dudes & leave one behind. Thats it isn't it? No chance to make another?
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Jul 6, 2016 06:28
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Gone. Kinda sucks, that Frost Grenade is really useful against the leaders.
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Jul 6, 2016 06:31
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Zore posted:Best way to balance Psi would be to make it work exactly as it does now, but make powers on the same row mutually exclusive and move them around a bit. My ideas for balancing psi were shared cool downs, longer for big abilities, and/or a "mana bar" all the powers would draw from.
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Jul 6, 2016 06:41
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Got this off the steam sale. I just got a mission to extract a VIP from an Advent truck and bring him to an extraction point. Problem is the truck appears to be bugged. It's got a locked (red) hacking door on the back, but whenever I interact with it my tech guy's drone freaks out, zooming around the map. The hacking interface still comes up, but there's no rewards listed and an "IMG" missing message. I can initiate the hack, and get a success over and over, but the door remains locked. Should I assume this mission is a write off? I loved EU but this is kind of a souring first impression.
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Jul 6, 2016 07:13
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many johnnys posted:I talked about the viper ruler before, about how he's a neat enemy with some cool moves, but he feels fair. And I talked about the berserker ruler, who is a noodle-armed baby girl. But the archon is a whole different beast. The explosions are bullshit, the bodyslam is bullshit (i actually missed a 91% shot so that's kind of on me), and he gets FOUR bars of health rather than the berserker's three or the viper's two. And his regular shots actually do decent damage! What a rear end!! I found that you can Stasis the Archon Ruler mid-suplex and the soldier he grabbed appears back on the ground without taking damage, if that helps.
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Jul 6, 2016 07:15
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Fuligin posted:Got this off the steam sale. I just got a mission to extract a VIP from an Advent truck and bring him to an extraction point. Problem is the truck appears to be bugged. It's got a locked (red) hacking door on the back, but whenever I interact with it my tech guy's drone freaks out, zooming around the map. The hacking interface still comes up, but there's no rewards listed and an "IMG" missing message. I can initiate the hack, and get a success over and over, but the door remains locked. Should I assume this mission is a write off? I loved EU but this is kind of a souring first impression. I'd load an earlier save if I were you. I'm midway through an iron man run right now with no less than 3 completely horseshit LoS bugs including aforementioned SPARK with bulwark standing next to an enemy and somehow granting them high cover.
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Jul 6, 2016 08:15
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So I think I need to download that mod with the expanded list of trooper nicknames. I just got the gently caress confused out of me by two different Grenadiers who looked similar to each other both getting the nickname Swamp Thing.
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Jul 6, 2016 09:18
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Which one is that
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Jul 6, 2016 09:48
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It really is utter nonsense that the ruler archon can trigger his missiles to come down on reaction.
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Jul 6, 2016 10:22
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NTT posted:Which one is that This looks to be the one more highly ranked and has been updated more recently, so I'll give this one a go.
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Jul 6, 2016 11:13
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My best grenadier in this game looks exactly like Chris Redfield. If only he could suplex. 
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Jul 6, 2016 13:15
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RBA Starblade posted:My best grenadier in this game looks exactly like Chris Redfield. If only he could suplex. Mod in the Archon King slam.
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Jul 6, 2016 13:17
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ZearothK posted:I was fortunate that the four times this happened to me I had a trooper with stocks equipped to prevent the bodyslam, so I guess my advice is to give your troops stocks when you know the Archon King is coming. Not a bad upgrade either most of the time, but in this game I rolled a billion stocks and almost no Elerium Cores. Yeah it's pretty much my fault - I used my frost grenade on something else earlier in the mission, and my hail of bullets grenadier died in that same mission (heartbreaking), and my psi troops are still cooking. I've got some guaranteed damage options, just didn't have any at that moment, so my trooper had to eat the dirt a little. I'm glad the guy who got slammed was wearing his WAR suit, otherwise it would have been worse (plus he got to use his shredstorm cannon before he got hit, so that's good). It really is bullshit how the rulers are unfair unless you have frost grenades, really I think frost grenades in general are a bad mechanic. I am very happy that the Spark unit can carry powered weapons, because I want to see what Rainmaker does to the blaster launcher 
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Jul 6, 2016 14:16
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I played through the game at launch and hacking was bullshit. I then waited until all of the first wave of DLC was released for another go, and hacking is still bullshit. I'd have thought 6 months was more than enough time to unfuck it, but I guess not. It just really pisses me off that to have any hope of being good at hacking, you have to ignore one of the central tenets of XCOM and focus on a special snowflake soldier that soaks up all the +20 boosts you can find. Edit:^^^^ I found the frost bomb to be particularly useless on rulers since it only stops one ruler action rather than freezing them for a whole turn. Stasis is way better because, while you can't damage the ruler, it does take them out of play for an entire turn so you can position your guys. That's particularly important if the Archon ruler surprises you and you have a bunch of guys grouped up. Ornamented Death fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Jul 6, 2016 |
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Jul 6, 2016 15:14
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