There was an similar skill in Firxacom if I recall correctly… there it was not that broken.
But also the 50% more dmg Taken skill is Broken as well… if you have 4 Sniper with Quckaim you can land 8 Shots with 50% more dmg… easy per round. Pump WP and you can do this 3-4 rounds in a row if the snipers are skilled that way. Without Multicalls…
There was the Banish/Annihilate Skill of the Reaper in WotC which was balanced because their rifle didnt deal the high amount of a sniperrifle (5-6 dmg at the highest tier) as well as having less ammo than most weapons in PP. also it had a “one use per Mission” Limitation. Sure you could kill some enemies with it. But at least on the higher difficulties even with extended magazins and shredding its armor first you couldnt kill a sectopod. So yeah there was a similar and very useful skill but it wasnt as OP.
You’re crazy. This game is hard even on easy mode. Half the time, my soldiers miss; the other half, I move them close enough to ensure a hit and they get mind controlled from the side by sirens. Then, they start killing each other because of “return fire”… seemingly too stupid to not shoot back at a friendly who is mind controlled.
On top of that, I haven’t even been able to build my first gauss weapon yet and already the Havens are dropping like flies from mutant attacks… too far away for me to get to in time, and I only have two transports with 8 people. I can’t find anymore Phoenix Point havens, even though I’ve been scanning like mad. So, even if I wanted to post a squad on the other side of the planet, they’d never get to heal up at base.
So much wrong with this game right now. I enjoy it, but the early game balance needs to be addressed and some defense to prevent mind control should be made available. Hell, wrap their heads in a faraday cage…I don’t care. It’s better than my team being mind controlled and killing each other.
And techs should be able to remotely deactivate medikits of mind controlled allies so they can’t go healing the damn enemy…
If Snapshot read this thread then i hope they read my post.
This game is definitely easy ONCE YOU KNOW HOW TO PLAY THE GAME i.e. exploit various mechanics e.g. stack 5 training facilities in one base and get 100xp per hour so in 9 hours you get a lvl 7 soldier from lvl 6, rage burst sniper etc.
Solution:
Either
Change nothing on Phoenix side but buff all the aliens halfway through the game so that it STAYS DIFFICULT. This was the biggest problem with Firaxis XCOM, XCOM2, war of the chosen etc. where once you basically reached plasma technology then it got too easy. Then when you had the ‘Banish’ ability you could practically one shot the toughest alien in the game.
As an example, spawn more aliens or tougher aliens because you can’t constantly rage burst sniper everything. It comes at a great price with losing an entire ammo clip, -5 willpower, loss of 3 time units or basically an entire turn etc. Players will be forced to ADAPT. Learning and adapting and seeing or testing what works is what makes a game fun.
OR
Nerf Phoenix abilities like rage burst but I fear this is what is making the game balanced at the moment especially when you do three or more chiron missions which one shot an entire team if they all fire at once on you. Then again it could be possible if we spread everyone out but i haven’t done this yet.
I much prefer a buff to aliens as a solution because we still get that “one-shotting” satisfaction from killing an alien with a rage burst sniper combo but perhaps aliens get something very similar late game, or there are a lot more aliens spawning, as balancing tools so that overall the game STAYS DIFFICULT and CHALLENGING. This is what every player wants , CHALLENGE but also REWARD after figuring things out AND successfully pulling off intricate and elaborate strategies. Having said this, we don’t want to steamroll because we got smarter ONCE. We want ONGOING challenges that push our technology and our thinking FURTHER UNTIL THE END OF THE GAME.
In fact, when i think about, even the original XCOMs got too easy middle to late game. For Terror from the Deep, once you got mind control for all of your soldiers, you could literally stay at your spawn and not step more than one feet away from your ship, and mind control all aliens on the map, and have them kill each other for the entire mission which was just so silly.
Maybe Phoenix Point could be the first true XCOM where it was HARD in the beginning and IT STAYED THAT WAY. That would make reaching the end game and finally finishing phoenix point SO SATISFYING.
2 Likes
Big fan of these suggestions, been thinking the same.
Rage burst could probably just be limited to like ‘shoot 4-6 times’, or something like that. Still hurts, but not broken.
I think a really nice nerf to rage burst would be to make each shot successively more inaccurate i.e. the shooting radius INCREASES per shot
That way you have a trade off where the closer you are to an alien then the more dmg you can do BUT you are clearly putting yourself in danger by getting that close to alien. Also, a sniper can’t one shot a chiron across the map easily.
Of course there is that omnipresent RNG asepct in every XCOM game too e.g. the closer player thinks they will do more dmg but RNG may not work in their favour, and the further player thinks this is a waste of a rage burst but RNG may work for them, and they get lucky.
This sounds like a well balanced and XCOM / RNG themed solution? :3
1 Like
That really won’t work - Heavy/Sniper dual-classed Soldier can get insane accuracy boost just being 10 tiles away from any enemy. Combine that with any armor/mutation or additional Accuracy perk and you can still land the first 5 shots with pinpoint accuracy from the other side of the map. No one will survive that. Also Quick Aim gives you +25% accuracy.
My current master sniper has such a small circle when aiming that he can be shooting needles for all we know and will still hit the desired spot.
1 Like
Haven’t got to Lvl 7 yet - not enough time to play the game - but I really don’t like the idea of buffng the Pandas to deal with an obviously broken OP Squad Ability.
Rage Burst was clearly intended to recreate that filmic moment when the guy with the hand-held Gatling Gun empties his mag into the oncoming hordes and guns them all down.
And that’s the simple and obvious fix - it should only work with HMGs. If you want to make it slightly more powerful, limit it to Automatic Weapons. But being able to Rage Burst with a Sniper Rifle is both obviously stupid and game-breaking.
rage burst is stupid with ALL weapons.
Even the starting heavy weapon is op with rb.
I also use the synedrion tranq rifle and it can one shot a scylla and tranq it…
But the game gets so hard that without it you’d get destroyed.
Try playing it without the op skills in normal and see how far you get late game…
1 Like
I have no objection to something being OP, as long as it has a counterbalancing downside.
The downside of the NJ Gauss Gatling is its incredibly limited range and wide burst spread. So in order for you to one-shot anything, you have to figure out how to get close enough without getting mind-controlled/blown up/shot to sh!t. That works - and it fits with the nature of the Gatling Gun.
But being able to sit on the other side of the map and effectively one-shot the Big Nasty with your Sniper Rifle is both silly and incredibly boring.
The challenge with Chirons & Sirens in BB5 was figuring out how to keep yourself alive long enough to deal with them - but a combo of infinite Dash/Rapid Fire/Rally the Troops coupled with every hit on a minor Crabbie gradually whittling down the Will of all around them ultimately made dealing with them mind-numbingly easy. It sounds like they’e fixed that problem now, and in doing so created the opposite problem - but I’m not going to comment further until I’ve tried it myself. I’ve read enough posts on this forum saying: ‘actually, you can deal with this, you just have to change the way you play,’ to not take all the cries of anguish at face value until I’ve experienced it myself.
So I can’t comment on the endgame as I haven’t got there yet, and won’t have time to for a while.
I don’t use the sniper with rage fire.
So I haven’t used this “trick”. I decided to multi my sniper with infiltrator.
i use rage with the big boom gun. I love it. But yeh, sniper and heavy combo is so powerful.
The game has horrible balancing issues. If you don’t “cheese it” you have no chance.
I can imagine how hard this game is for newer players. If PP is “balanced”, they need to remember that not everyone is as roxxor as us.
Rage Fire should decrease accuracy with each subsequent shots,
it s how theses kind of skills are usually handled to conserve an element of randomness.
1 Like
Yeah, or not give the sniper rifles like 20 round magazines… like, why even?
@Coyotekins Try a no armor (naked) melee berserker run and get back to me on how easy the game is. xD
Woah. Dude it sounds like you’re not speccing your heavies out properly. If you dual class a heavy as a sniper and give him the Master Marksman trait, then his accuracy with a Hel cannon becomes ridiculously good as long as he’s far enough away from enemies. They also have jet packs that can move them around the battlefield a LOT farther than most other classes.
By default yes, they are big, clunky messes. But you have the ability to literally mold them however you want. Take their armor off, give them some sniper gear, pump points into speed, they can become BEASTS. You’re just not getting creative enough.
If there is but one way to spec your heavies, and otherwise you are screwed then why offer choice at all? Just a waste of time picking something else, and if you are like me playing 2-4 hours a week there’s no way you want to just waste time.
My last play I picked every sniper I found, means I had a total of… 2. When my team was around lvl4 I ran Into the first siren, and the crabs got buffed so I can’t kill then in one turn. (I also went out with a brand new scarab which did not help one bit)
I have no idea how the game levels up the enemy, I don’t want to read a do-exactly-this strat guide, and in the end it seems you are still dependent on the almighty rng.
It doesn’t give you a fair challenge, it just let’s you die if you are unlucky, and it’s apparently easy if you exploit it.
3 Likes
This almost mirrors my experience. 5 soldiers of levels 3-4, but only one sniper because I couldn’t find a second for the first 2 weeks. Not to mention that I found my second base in Europe at the very last place I could check which means I lost a lot of time traveling back to base 1 to heal. This aspect of the game is so tedious.
First Synedrion diplomacy mission and I am greeted by 2 Sirens who mind control 4 soldiers in 2 turns. The 2 Assaults with Return Fire kill the fifth guy who tried to help when he should have just run away, and I spent 2-3 minutes watching the mind controlled soldiers run around the map like chickens with their heads chopped off, in an enemy turn that never ended. That was the first time I stopped playing and took a break. My second rage quit came a few days later when the same squad (counting 6 people now - still only 1 Sniper) was ambushed in a nest by a Siren who mind-controlled the same 2 Assault (you know the guys with Return Fire) and the sniper couldn’t help because he was dealing with another urgent situation.Not that he would be much help because he had no LOS to the Siren anyway and the Siren’s stats had jumped to 540-550HP and 30 armor. Uninstalled the game the same day.
To be honest, I am still watching a YT playthrough series (from ChristopherOdd) and he’s doing quite well (I think he’s playing on max difficulty) but he has been quite lucky with his bases and the enemies he had to face - I don’t think he has met yet the acid bomb Chirons. Still, I think he’s cheesing it a little, using 3-4 Training Facilities on the main base, which imo shouldn’t be possible because it is stupid. Also, Priests are just as broken as Sirens are, if not more.
Overall, I feel the game needed at least an extra 3-6 months of testing before release. More enemies and viable class options/builds are also needed to make PP even remotely interesting.
I’m going to be honest so don’t take anything I state harsh etc.
It’s a bit of a 3 sided mess of balance.
First is you found what is one of a few broken chainlinks. I also took soem data and analyzed how to break the game allot.
First is this, Rage Blast is OP, It shouldn’t deal full damage or needs specific fire rules depending on the weapon used. Or aim penalties for sure.
Another is Rally The Troops, I seen that get to some phenominal cheesery.
That scarab is okay in balance land it’s a good conductive counter to siren mind fuckery, Though taking away a trade of a 3 man.
Anu has too many “good things” in it’s arsonel. They been immune to MC etc. and proven to be a much higher superior group. (I noticed you used the Jericho T1 Sniper Raven so that makes sense)
Heavy class is the T1 along with Berserkers and Priests I been seeing. Syndrion been…a joke and Jericho though okay does still lag behind Anu just a bit due to immunity issues. Or answer lack.
Sirens have been OP, and forcing a certanity of the meta Their “cowardlyness” their MC potency is too upper and now forced a very lock meta, in comparison to MC in XC2 or even XC1 it needs a more solid counter resilience from other groups or in general.
Chirons same issue it’s a feast of famine and we only get to consider the one shot glory type builds to take them down. But if you don’t have that. Then they will hold wreck and devastate the field.
Equally those 2 units (Chiron/Siren) need vamps in their styles and archtype of powers, and heavy needs a small look over in how it does Rage Burst and potency.
Mind Control by sirens needs to be fixed up so if you do get in scenarios of it it’s not a temperamental game of “too easy” or “too hard”. plus I hate overly cowardly AIs on tough units. Chiron don’t feel tough they feel like a coward. Sirens don’t feel tough they feel like a clever jerk that takes over things with complete CC control and the only answer is “gotta 1 turn this with 1 char” sorta scenarios.
The most enforced tech is AP jericho ofc but stressing on equialibriums the game has so much balance issues. I hope this will be changed seeing there is a either 2 runs of this game “The good and the Bad” only and with such drastic costs of unit loss if it’s done, it’ll harm you heavily.
It’s great game but it’s flawed in class balance and Siren/Chiron balances
also it would help if there was 1 more class for syndrion and jericho to even out some distinctions. As Anu has the best typical airship in distance/unit carry, while the Syndrion is…the worst. That’s odd, only thing syndrion seems good at is maybe “some stealth” and their Paralysis weaponry …woo? that group needs some help.
You mean besides the 100% stealth infiltrator that is the strongest thing in the game? xD
Synedrion also have the stun sniper rifle… or the 16 round rage blast sniper rifle…
I mean, on a scale of one to busted, Synedrion is the King of Game Breaking.
Not saying they don’t have power, But looking closer. You just said the broken part. It’s not Syndrion again it’s Rage Blast.
The Stealth mechanic is their only benefit. Other than that mostly they don’t contain enough umph to to armor wars.
Any “Sniper Rifle” with a Rage Blast
Any “Minigun” with a Rage Blast
Cannons are moderately good at Rage Blast
“This is a pattern that RB is Op as hell”
The Synderion class with stealth is “okay” it’s their only fundamentally potent power is a stealth damage attack setup. Now that is supposed to be good and is though it’s not as fundamentally potent without it’s counter parts. They have 2 very good Paralysis weapons that are fine but they don’t hold any candle till you us something like Rage Blast.
Jericho carries the armor counter, Anu carries armor counter and MC immunizes and most potent ship in use, Syndrion carries some paralysis and a stealth strike (Their ship maybe fast but has bad range and crew).
Now what I was saying is Synderion is a “Joke” cause out of it’s granted potent…it’s not 1 shotting or bypassing foes if at all it’s using a stealth + rage blast again to even stand and all 3 groups would use RB anyways.
If you take away rage blast, tell me how potent are those snipers now?
Their stealth is awesome, but their gear lacks at most times. On paper it’s okay but ask yourself if you remove RB right now, what would shift in the meta? that’s the current problem.
Rage Blast and Rally The Troops are both fundamentally broken, You can’t avoid this fact. Both need a small look over and revamp in functions. Stealth is the last thing even keeping synderion up and active. if it didn’t have that then all we prob care for is their paralysis weapons (Pistol or Sniper) as the base neuralizer is a piece of junk that should feel bad.
(Slight Edit)
Sorry if I feel mean about this. I will experiment with stealth a bit more but from what I saw, most of the game has a oddity with stealth. I think it was ment to have stealth sorta able to solo, BUT there is perception on enemy units. We really need to see “Perception lines” of us and potentially enemies along with Enemy STR & SPD stats cause we can clearly see their will etc.
I need way more localized info cause there isn’t much to go off of in how or what is and isn’t being abused. I’m even shocked that only Anu has Melee weapons even…which is a light disappointment that can’t bring a combat knife even. Or the Neuralizer is a junky stun weapon that is kinda weird…IDK why it does not deal only 1 damage with heavy paralysis for it’s Risk trade.