I had the dark event that adds Lost to every mission for 6 weeks but now, at least 3 months later, Lost still show up in every mission whenever there is an explosion. Any grenade use, sectopod dying etc. is spawning ~8 lost a turn on me.
Yeah. That's a bug. There's a mod on the workshop for that, but IIRC, it won't fix broken campaigns.
I had the dark event that adds Lost to every mission for 6 weeks but now, at least 3 months later, Lost still show up in every mission whenever there is an explosion. Any grenade use, sectopod dying etc. is spawning ~8 lost a turn on me.
Yeah, that dark event is bugged. There's a mod to fix it.
Does increasing Will mean your soldiers can go longer before they get tired? Or does it just mean that as soldiers get tired they will be less likely to panic?
Does increasing Will mean your soldiers can go longer before they get tired? Or does it just mean that as soldiers get tired they will be less likely to panic?
The largest source of fatigue in a mission is spotting enemies. Each enemy your squad spots will penalize each soldier a random amount of will, from 1 to, I dunno, like 5. This loss of will is capped at 1/3 of their maximum will, so they can't cross the Tired threshold from full Will, no matter how many enemies there are in a mission.
Beyond that, you get penalized for various things that, generally, can cause panic: taking a wound, squadmates dying, that sort of thing. It's kind of arbitrary.
Anyway: more Will means your soldiers are more likely to be able to do two consecutive missions without getting Tired, especially on lower difficulties where there are fewer enemies (more likely to hit the 1/3 cap on Legendary). It does reduce the chance of panic if they're Tired but at a lesser effect because you're already talking about a soldier missing at least a third of their will. It also protects against Psionic attacks.
Well, first game of WotC down. I absolutely stomped the final mission holy carp. I don't think any of my guys even got hurt in the final fight (one got shot in the big base area, but I healed that). The first avatar was killed hilariously without even seeing me - Dragunova stuck a mine on him from stealth, and then Mulder deadeye crit'd him.
The third avatar was executed from a random first shot from Dragunova that I was just trying to strip his armor with, too. So that was hilarious. I was all "okay, so now with this I can setup a Ionic storm with the templar and- wait. Oh. He died. Welp. So that's that I guess".
This is the all-star team that did it:
EDIT: As a note and fun fact, by the way: apparently the final mission counts as two for Will purposes. As you can see everyone there was full, and everyone ended well below half Will despite the 1/3 max will loss per mission. So keep that in mind if you don't go with fully fresh troops.
The Warlock wasn't even a challenge. Turns out I wasted my supplies on making a couple of Mindshields, as he never got the chance to attack.
First appearance, I used run & gun and rapid fire with my Ranger, who was armed with the Assassin's gun, and Talon ammo for good measure. 20 and 28 damage in one turn, then take the opportunity to use the free move to go stand where I'm guessing reinforcements will be showing up.
After that, it went even easier.
Then I got a VIP kill/capture mission that could have gone better. No injuries (and the Archon King finally suicided himself by charging my bladestorm ranger), but someone took a shot at my Spark, got intimidated, panicked, and turned around and shot the VIP.
Also, I couldn't get a good after action picture, as no-one wanted to shoo the pigeon away:
Pulling a dude you need to kill out of high cover and into the middle of your team is super useful. Like, it is also one of the Templars best abilities and a Skirmisher can just do it from level one.
And then if you need to kill a pod on the other side of the map, a Skirmisher with a bond and a good grapple spot can do that.
Yeah the only caveat is that the ability can miss, no? I think Skirmishers and the associated scanning ability might have some good early game benefits, but scale worse compared to the other faction units/std units with the right training abilities.
It can miss, but the Skirmisher has a pretty good aim progression, the grapple attacks don't use the Bullpup's range accuracy modifiers, and you almost always have high ground. It's quite reliable! And of course ignores Dodge.
The bigger issue is that it doesn't work on a large number of aliens.
I love it when randomizing stuff gives you the seeds for something great. In this case, pressing random ended up with a camera angle where the doorway was blocking part of the squad... so I worked with it!
People told me that Killzone no longer triggered off a "pod discovered" move, which is basically when it seemed most useful, so honestly I'm not sure I ever actually made use of it in this campaign.
The Hunter's rifle is amazing for a variety of things, among them the ability to shoot as a single action. Honestly, after I got it, my entire strategy started to revolve around my two high level sharpshooters.
People told me that Killzone no longer triggered off a "pod discovered" move, which is basically when it seemed most useful, so honestly I'm not sure I ever actually made use of it in this campaign.
Really? I've used it to ambush pods all the time. Spot while in stealth, set up killzone, then hit them with whatever I've got, and killzone shoots them as they scramble for cover. It feels like it's worked the same as it always has.
People told me that Killzone no longer triggered off a "pod discovered" move, which is basically when it seemed most useful, so honestly I'm not sure I ever actually made use of it in this campaign.
Really? I've used it to ambush pods all the time. Spot while in stealth, set up killzone, then hit them with whatever I've got, and killzone shoots them as they scramble for cover. It feels like it's worked the same as it always has.
That's how it works now, how it used to work was set everyone up concealed in overwatch, lay killzone on the pod in front of you, they move, trigger killzone, reveal the team, get overwatched and then you get your turn. Great fun, but not super balanced. In open combat it's unchanged, just how it functions in concealment.
Huh. I must have just never used killzone while staying in concealment. I guess I figured it always worked like overwatch, so wouldn't have triggered anyway.
People told me that Killzone no longer triggered off a "pod discovered" move, which is basically when it seemed most useful, so honestly I'm not sure I ever actually made use of it in this campaign.
The Hunter's rifle is amazing for a variety of things, among them the ability to shoot as a single action. Honestly, after I got it, my entire strategy started to revolve around my two high level sharpshooters.
It still does. You can definitely use it to ambush pods on their turn.
It used to be the case that killzone did not respect the concealment status of the shooter such you could use killzone with a concealed sharp on an entire squad on their turn with little to no setup.
It now does. So in order to killzone pull an enemy pod on their turn the sharp must be revealed and the pod must be visibile in squad sight.
Pulling a dude you need to kill out of high cover and into the middle of your team is super useful. Like, it is also one of the Templars best abilities and a Skirmisher can just do it from level one.
And then if you need to kill a pod on the other side of the map, a Skirmisher with a bond and a good grapple spot can do that.
Yeah the only caveat is that the ability can miss, no? I think Skirmishers and the associated scanning ability might have some good early game benefits, but scale worse compared to the other faction units/std units with the right training abilities.
It can miss, but the Skirmisher has a pretty good aim progression, the grapple attacks don't use the Bullpup's range accuracy modifiers, and you almost always have high ground. It's quite reliable! And of course ignores Dodge.
The bigger issue is that it doesn't work on a large number of aliens.
No. They do not. Skirmisher has the same aim progression as rangers and specialists and templars. Behind sharps and reapers
It's worth noting that Justice and Wrath appear to have an inbuilt +25% aim, which is part of the reason they're so damn reliable (Especially once you stick an aim PCS on the skirmisher).
Honestly, for me Templars are one i have trouble using - They can be real wrecking balls, but they can also end up kinda dead in the water. Very feast or famine. Maybe i'm just missing something?
Edit: How to do dirty dirty things with a skirmisher.
Sitrep: Surgical. take my Skirimisher, a grenadier and a specialist. It's a wipe out the general mission.
Eventually locate the first set of enemies - a viper and sectoid pair. Skirmisher uses wrath from stealth to zip straight to the sectoid, and one-shots it. Reveal squad. Viper starts to move... and promptly gets punched unconscious by the Skirmisher. Turns out this revealed a second pod, an a stun lancer, and another sectoid. Use justice to pull the stun lancer and punch that unconscious as well.
Rest of my doods weren't able to do anything about the sectoid, but all it did was try and mind control my Skirmisher. She shrugged that off as well. (Later on, she proceeded to one shot an ADVENT mec for free with whiplash, before ensuring the general had a really bad day with saturdation fire).
Templars need Bladestorm. If you activate a three-enemy pod, kill one, melee the other, and activate Parry while leaving your Templar in the open and closer to the enemy than anyone else, they get a second attack with Bladestorm to kill the one enemy and parry the attack from the second enemy.
Is the templars psi push move any good? Does it stun?
I tried it. It did not seem good. It disorients, not stuns, and it's in this awkward state of, using it early hurts your mobility too bad losing the blue move, and using it late often just makes it just shitty invert. Might as well just Flashbang.
It also has a shitty hit rate. And then its chance to disorient is low. So, basically, it does like seven things, and does them all half-assed. With how many points Templars want to spend on cool abilities, hard to justify the investment.
The most absurd Templar skill you can get is Reaper
If they get that, they become a destroyer of worlds
Can you expand on that? I find late game Templars are incapable of one shotting anything, so I don't see how they would benefit from Reaper.
The damage doesn't go down for Templars as far as I can tell, and they always have 100% to hit.
So long as every enemy is either at their minimum focus-enhanced damage of like 10-ish, or can be brought there by the Arc Wave thing they can do, you can chain the entire pod.
The damage definitely seems to go down for me. After some reapering my Templar has hit for 7 and 6. Still incredibly useful for the final mission. Just removing an entire pod of mecs or advents or vipers from the fight without wasting actions is super useful. Reaper is one of the several reasons my entire team took all of one shot in the entirety of the final mission sequence.
The only problem is it seems that if you don't kill, you don't get your Momentum off the last hit. So you gotta be careful with that.
think I have to ditch this legendary game. the chosen sabotaged the avenger and gave most of the squad a fear of the chosen. yiiiiiiikes that is brutal.
I've mostly thrown them straight into therapy when they picked up a fear, but do they activate once a mission when you encounter the enemy, or for each one of them they see?
Like, if they're afraid of the Lost, will they have a chance to freak out for each of the six guys in that pod, then each of the six guys in the next pod, and so on, or is it just once?
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Yeah. That's a bug. There's a mod on the workshop for that, but IIRC, it won't fix broken campaigns.
Yeah, that dark event is bugged. There's a mod to fix it.
Some people on reddit are also saying that doing another mission with the lost sitrep will fix the problem, so hopefully I can try that out soon.
Then again I've killed all the rulers and Chosen, and I'm just waiting on plasma research to do the endgame.
The largest source of fatigue in a mission is spotting enemies. Each enemy your squad spots will penalize each soldier a random amount of will, from 1 to, I dunno, like 5. This loss of will is capped at 1/3 of their maximum will, so they can't cross the Tired threshold from full Will, no matter how many enemies there are in a mission.
Beyond that, you get penalized for various things that, generally, can cause panic: taking a wound, squadmates dying, that sort of thing. It's kind of arbitrary.
Anyway: more Will means your soldiers are more likely to be able to do two consecutive missions without getting Tired, especially on lower difficulties where there are fewer enemies (more likely to hit the 1/3 cap on Legendary). It does reduce the chance of panic if they're Tired but at a lesser effect because you're already talking about a soldier missing at least a third of their will. It also protects against Psionic attacks.
The third avatar was executed from a random first shot from Dragunova that I was just trying to strip his armor with, too. So that was hilarious. I was all "okay, so now with this I can setup a Ionic storm with the templar and- wait. Oh. He died. Welp. So that's that I guess".
This is the all-star team that did it:
EDIT: As a note and fun fact, by the way: apparently the final mission counts as two for Will purposes. As you can see everyone there was full, and everyone ended well below half Will despite the 1/3 max will loss per mission. So keep that in mind if you don't go with fully fresh troops.
The Warlock wasn't even a challenge. Turns out I wasted my supplies on making a couple of Mindshields, as he never got the chance to attack.
First appearance, I used run & gun and rapid fire with my Ranger, who was armed with the Assassin's gun, and Talon ammo for good measure. 20 and 28 damage in one turn, then take the opportunity to use the free move to go stand where I'm guessing reinforcements will be showing up.
After that, it went even easier.
Then I got a VIP kill/capture mission that could have gone better. No injuries (and the Archon King finally suicided himself by charging my bladestorm ranger), but someone took a shot at my Spark, got intimidated, panicked, and turned around and shot the VIP.
Also, I couldn't get a good after action picture, as no-one wanted to shoo the pigeon away:
Steam: CavilatRest
My photobooth is borked. It doesn't save anything for longer than a few minutes.
that's great
...and in the process you made a kick ass album cover!
--Mark Twain
Because despite being in cover based on where ADVENT used to be, they got a free shot when they engaged and flanked (thanks beaglerush!)
At least it was a rookie, right after I got squad size +1, and after been rewarded a bunch of free soldiers
It can miss, but the Skirmisher has a pretty good aim progression, the grapple attacks don't use the Bullpup's range accuracy modifiers, and you almost always have high ground. It's quite reliable! And of course ignores Dodge.
The bigger issue is that it doesn't work on a large number of aliens.
I love it when randomizing stuff gives you the seeds for something great. In this case, pressing random ended up with a camera angle where the doorway was blocking part of the squad... so I worked with it!
Yay a bunch of free weapon mods and all, but not having an expanded clip kinda cripples killzone.
The Hunter's rifle is amazing for a variety of things, among them the ability to shoot as a single action. Honestly, after I got it, my entire strategy started to revolve around my two high level sharpshooters.
That's how it works now, how it used to work was set everyone up concealed in overwatch, lay killzone on the pod in front of you, they move, trigger killzone, reveal the team, get overwatched and then you get your turn. Great fun, but not super balanced. In open combat it's unchanged, just how it functions in concealment.
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It still does. You can definitely use it to ambush pods on their turn.
It used to be the case that killzone did not respect the concealment status of the shooter such you could use killzone with a concealed sharp on an entire squad on their turn with little to no setup.
It now does. So in order to killzone pull an enemy pod on their turn the sharp must be revealed and the pod must be visibile in squad sight.
No. They do not. Skirmisher has the same aim progression as rangers and specialists and templars. Behind sharps and reapers
Honestly, for me Templars are one i have trouble using - They can be real wrecking balls, but they can also end up kinda dead in the water. Very feast or famine. Maybe i'm just missing something?
Edit: How to do dirty dirty things with a skirmisher.
Sitrep: Surgical. take my Skirimisher, a grenadier and a specialist. It's a wipe out the general mission.
Eventually locate the first set of enemies - a viper and sectoid pair. Skirmisher uses wrath from stealth to zip straight to the sectoid, and one-shots it. Reveal squad. Viper starts to move... and promptly gets punched unconscious by the Skirmisher. Turns out this revealed a second pod, an a stun lancer, and another sectoid. Use justice to pull the stun lancer and punch that unconscious as well.
Rest of my doods weren't able to do anything about the sectoid, but all it did was try and mind control my Skirmisher. She shrugged that off as well. (Later on, she proceeded to one shot an ADVENT mec for free with whiplash, before ensuring the general had a really bad day with saturdation fire).
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Fortress is a really good pickup as well.
I tried it. It did not seem good. It disorients, not stuns, and it's in this awkward state of, using it early hurts your mobility too bad losing the blue move, and using it late often just makes it just shitty invert. Might as well just Flashbang.
It also has a shitty hit rate. And then its chance to disorient is low. So, basically, it does like seven things, and does them all half-assed. With how many points Templars want to spend on cool abilities, hard to justify the investment.
Immunity to explosions. So good.
If they get that, they become a destroyer of worlds
I got a Templar with Fortress, Fast Hands, Bladestorm, and Reaper. She died
Then my next Templar had Fortress, Faceoff, Bladestorm, and Reaper. So I wasn't too broken up about it tbh.
Can you expand on that? I find late game Templars are incapable of one shotting anything, so I don't see how they would benefit from Reaper.
The damage doesn't go down for Templars as far as I can tell, and they always have 100% to hit.
So long as every enemy is either at their minimum focus-enhanced damage of like 10-ish, or can be brought there by the Arc Wave thing they can do, you can chain the entire pod.
The only problem is it seems that if you don't kill, you don't get your Momentum off the last hit. So you gotta be careful with that.
I revealed Assassin weak to Reapers hidden in a car.
I don't know if I should even use Remote Star, it will just feel like cheating at this point.
Oh, whom am I kidding, on 90 % I will use it anyway.
Like, if they're afraid of the Lost, will they have a chance to freak out for each of the six guys in that pod, then each of the six guys in the next pod, and so on, or is it just once?