I bet mine was luckier!
I triggered a muton pack. One of the pack ran up to a civilian and used overwatch. The civilian ran (due to the muton’s proximity) and took reaction fire from the muton. Nine damage!
Then, I watched the civilian transform into a faceless, with 9 damage suffered. I don’t know what kind of whacky programming oversight made the enemy shoot another enemy in overwatch mode, but it saved my perfect 13/13 civilian mission!
I disagree with that last part. Stasis by itself is easily better than anything in the first few tiers of normal soldier abilities, as you can cast it without ending your turn. This is extremely handy for dealing with accidental patrol triggers.
Think of it this way…would you rather have a psychic who trained for 30 days (and therefore has a couple of psi skills), or literally any other class with 30 days of combat experience (and therefore has their first 4 or 5 ranks)? For me, it’s no question. The Psi Operator wins, hands down.
Has anyone else noticed that proximity mines are seriously amazing? They do massive damage, have a very wide range, and don’t break concealment. A grenadier can use two of them per mission, and with Salvo, can kick off an ambush with two explosions plus overwatch for everyone else. Just awesome.
I didn’t know they don’t break stealth. Yeah, they’re almost overpowered as mimic beacons then.
They don’t break when throwing them, but they break concealment when they blow up. Which is pretty funny that my grenadier yelling out “Here comes the boom” doesn’t reveal anyone.
Also, there’s a glitch right now that when you use one in concealment, when it blows up it only hits the pod leader. If it wasn’t for that glitch I would use them all the time. My preferred loadout on my grenadier is two acid grenades and one proximity mine.
Yeah, I love the proximity mines. And they do synergize very nicely with the mimic mines.
Finish my ironman commander run. It wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought. Veteran to commander isn’t a huge jump.
I had a mod that would let me run squads of 7-8, but I didn’t end up using it because I was doing just fine and I didn’t want to make it too easy.
I did use two mods that made it easier though. One was one that let me carry a grenade in utility slots (so double grenades if you wanted) and one gave troops a chance to bleed out instead of die when they took lethal damage. Will - 60 as a percentage. So I had probably 4 guys survive that would otherwise be dead.
The bleed out mechanic in this game is tricky. I like there to be a bleed out mechanic - it’s fun to have to go rescue your guys who are under fire on a limited time table, and an in-between state between wounded and dead as far as recovery. But attaching the revive function to drones makes it too easy - you can revive from pretty much anywhere, you don’t have the danger of running under fire to go save your teammate.
A mod that made it so that you could heal via gremlin, but had to stabalize a bleeding out soldier by being right next to them would be a good compromise here.
I made that run with only one mimic beacon most of the time - I only ever had 3 because I had an unusually low number of retaliation missions and no faceless dark events, so I just never had the faceless corpses. And two of the mimic beacons were lost when guys died. So I ran the whole thing on the one mimic beacon and didn’t have too much trouble.
Is there a specific list of changes in different difficulty levels? I’ve googled around and the descriptions only mention a few things, it’s definitely not comprehensive.
NM
Commander to Legend difficulty:
All strategic cost of basically everything is doubled. Research, wound heal, scanning, Avenger facilities, Avatar countdown, psi-op training, soldier XP to level, basically everything across the board except for alien improvement rate, which is also slower but not by as much. So stuff is more expensive and takes longer to build, a campaign will have more total missions, and you’ll be at a tech disadvantage for more of those missions.
Enemies have slightly improved stats. Everything has crit, so can (and will) crit through cover. Most have a little more aim, and specific enemies have a little more HP or armor, and it’s usually a big deal in somewhat subtle ways. Codex, fr.ex, goes from 12 to 13 HP, which means they’re no longer a guaranteed one-shot by Volatile Mix EMP bombs or Plasma Lance Deadeye.
Enemy quantity is upped. Missions tend to gain one extra pod across the board, and some pods can have four enemies instead of capping out at 3.
It’s not as big of a jump as EW Classic to Impossible was. The strategic changes come out feeling more grindy than difficult, as only like ten (out of 50-60) missions are really affected by the different tech rate. All it really means is that you prioritize stagger your weapons tier upgrades over a month or two instead of getting everything at once.
I’m starting to really enjoy gunslingers. They’re not great early on, but once you upgrade the pistol and get better ammo they’re great.
My standard line up is now:
Ranger - Scout
Grenadier - Demolitions Expert
Psi Op
Specialist - Hacker
Sharpshooter - Sniper
Sharpshooter - Gunslinger
I don’t bother with healers anymore, except on missions with Chrysallids. I’ve had to force evac a few soldiers because of their poison.
Big patch out today:
Lots of updates, but the biggest gameplay changes are this:
Mimic beacon rebalance: Price increased to 75
Mimic beacons can no longer take cover, and are guaranteed to be hit by enemy shots
Wet Work is no longer retroactive
Graze is no longer a chance for 100% shots. Targets being shot by a concealed attacker cannot dodge
I think that’s a pretty good rebalance for the mimic beacon. In the late game it’s only going to be able to soak up a hit or two.
That’s a pretty mild change list. I guess they’ve mostly been working on optimization.
The graze, specifically, sounds like they made an exception to 100% hit. But there’s nothing special about a 100% shot over a 99% shot - they need to redo the way graze and hit interrelate if they’re going to make that change. They should also change it so that excess hit doesn’t eat into crit, but there are mods for that.
They apparently didn’t fix the fact that smoke grenades don’t work, at least as far as I’ve read. I haven’t actually used them since a mimic beacon does the job better.
Started the legendary ironman and it’s tougher than expected. May do bronzeman first instead of ironman. Actually managed to wipe 4 times on the opening mission because my rookies couldn’t hit anything, and the extra pod with the sectoid was triggering every time with the 3 advent pod with the officer. Next 3 missions went off well, but then I failed the terror mission and ran out of troops.
It was interesting to see that the terror mission (on my first territory) failing didn’t lose me the region - the mission still stayed available if I wanted to tackle it again. But everyone was injured and I couldn’t afford recruits, so I just ended the playthrough.
What caused the retaliation mission to stay available? Was it because it was my first region? Usually failing a retaliation mission loses you that sector, right?
You can never lose your HQ’s territory.
I’m finding legendary to be impractical. Some missions are managable, but others simply aren’t. I have a VIP rescue mission where, because of how many enemies it threw at me and the piss poor accuracy of my early troops combined with the slightly tougher enemies, I wasn’t able to even fight to the VIP before the timer ran out, let alone extract him. It wasn’t even a matter of strategy - I couldn’t have moved any faster without getting my guys killed. The only other possibility might’ve been to simply run to the objective and run to the escape zone and hope not everyone died, but the door to the vehicle the VIP was in was red - presumably because I had to finish out the combat before opening the door, and I couldn’t even do that.
Obviously losing your whole squad in this manner is unsustainable, especially since I had to recruit new guys just to tackle that mission because all my other guys are injured with 30-40 day injuries.
VIP missions are the worst, by far, and the evil thing is that the rewards are so huge, they’re still tempting anyway. Just going to the mission is a huge risk, to the point where you should absolutely skip them if you don’t have a strong team available. Soldiers are more valuable than the rewards; even rookies are expensive on Legend.
Even once there, priority #1 is securing a path to the evac, and the VIP is a distant second. As long as you’re between the enemies and the evac, you can always just sprint like mad to escape; only the stun lancer, codex and chrysalid can threaten you at a full sprint.
The vans and prison cell doors are locked, you have to spend an action to hack them first. If you don’t have a specialist, anyone can do it from an adjacent tile, or you can carefully blow open the walls, but the hack comes from the special reward pool, so you really want a specialist to tap it for the increased odds at good stuff and a shot at the permanent +20 hack.
Of course it is about strategy. Here’s Beagle nailing an early VIP legendary mission
The strategy is simply different from the strategy that you're used to at lower difficulty levels. I haven't played XCOM 2, but I played the fuck out of XCOM at impossible/ironman. It seems completely, well, impossible when you start, but you just have to realise that different tactics are needed to succeed, and once you start getting the hang of what they are, the game becomes not impossible, though it remains very tough.Just 2 days until War of the Chosen drops. This looks so good.
My birthday is coming up so I pre-ordered is my gift to me. 
I’m looking forward to playing it! It looks great.