I completely agree. Vanilla Heavies are trash-tier. It took several tweaks I made with mods to bring them up to par with the rest of the OP classes in the game. Assaults who can clear at least half a map on turn one. Snipers who can one-shot practically anything without having to move. But no, Heavies are stuck, ironically, on the back lines, where all of their armor and heavy hitting weaponry doesn’t do them any good. Even after you give them Dash, they still can’t move the same distance everyone else can. Their weapons can’t hit the broad side of a barn. They’re just crap.
Wait, let me get this clear, as I’m sincerely not understanding: Don’t the classes have the bonuses from certain talents that make sense built in?
Like they DON’T have ‘Strong Man’ which is a +20 to Accuracy and -…I forget to Perception, built into the class?
That… Seems like an odd choice to me.
I just realized in my current playthrough that the Strong Man talent sounds more like some kind of cumbersome armor than a natural ability. I mean, the increased damage/accuracy (with heavy weapons) and decreased perception just conjure up scenes like Ripley in a power loader vs. Alien Queen.
It’s a sandbox system, and to keep it as open as possible it follows certain design principles, among them that all skills have to be useful for all classes and that all classes have the same attributes and stats.
This means that a Heavy is not necessarily a tank - unless you actually build it like one, which means pumping it’s strength to get more HPs and wearing a full heavy armor set.
Personally, I find the Heavy the best class in the game for its skillset and that it is good from the very early to the late game. I use them with the full set of Heavy Armor, and usually just as a single class until the very late game.
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Personally heavies confused the hell out of me as well, because they are insanely inaccurate. And even if theyre the closest target without cover I still have enemies ignore them in favour of a sniper way in the back behind partial cover. So getting them to tank isent as straight forward as just putting them in my opponents face.
I guess its BECAUSE of the armor. If you have a low damage weapon and odds of doing damage are almost nihil so they go after different targets??
The penalty to accuracy sure makes using them effectively hard though. Id be in favour of ditching it competly or removing the penalty if the soldier is proficient in heavy armour. (or give them a passive skill that ignores it?) As it is, the higher amount of armour simply does not warrant the huge amount of penalties and jump pack is in my opinion not so usefull that id pick it over say… assault armour which has no penalties, has 2/3 of the armour and even gives a movement bonus rather then a penalty.
I get that they want to make each individual armour set its own and give them pros and cons but with the high AP cost tied to heavy weapons the insane accuracy penalty is just not worth it. The few shots you will get you will miss.
I tried to play my heavies as ppl told. I just jump, warcry and bash. With this play style, yeah you can kill things but funny part is I did not fire my cannon, never. It always better to go melee and finish other targets with assault and snipers. I tried to shoot few times and they always miss if there more then 5 tiles and this is with sniper head and legs.
As people said, even your heavy is at front, enemy shoots others too. As the heavy armor is still weak, it does not save you from many shots.
Heavy weapon effective range is very bad too.
So if a heavy is not using explosives, it’s totally useless compared other classes. Do you want some heavy skills? Just make your assault or sniper soldiers heavy too but heavy alone is very bad and getting a second class is not a solution too.
Just heavy it for grenade launcher and rockets, forget other ways.
A heavy should be just and bash spam class, this is not right.
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What about when dealing with Chirons, or Scyllas? Or a Siren up close?
The problem is, there are hours of plays until those enemies. I saw my first siren when my squad is lvl 6…
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The Hel II is a terrible weapon for ranged combat. I consistently miss targets at two tiles away. But gee golly does it destroy walls.
You should see them quite a bit sooner with the last patch.
TBH, with Cthulhu you could cruise through the game using pretty much anything.
It was different with Danforth and before, when Chirons and Sirens could appear at any time.
Now with Necro evolution is faster, the enemies have been buffed up and there are less SPs per mission on Hero and Legend, so choices become more important.
I believe you are exaggerating for effect, unless you are using it worms 
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I am talking about new patch and DLC at hero difficult. I saw my first Siren at a LoA mission and when I got the info about Sirens and Lair, I already got a squad with 6 soldier all lvl 6. I got 2 heavy, one is artillery and other is minigun user. Yeah I used my heavies but just jump and warcry and as the enemies are tougher they can damage you easily with the left 2 AP because if you want to use your heavy with actual guns, you need to replace your armor with snipers and again when you jump or close to enemy with a ultra slow, ultra bad acc weapon with bad armor, you ask yourself “why?”.
My laser assaults can snipe enemies with mixed sniper class with “laser rifles” but whatever I do to my heavy, it’s aim sucks. Because the heavy weapon effective range are so bad. As enemy uses gas so much and for God sake, half of the map can be gassed by 2 mobs in 1 turn, your heavy needs to jump into darkness or worse trapped there and goes panic chain.
At early and mid game, until your heavy is lvl 7, It totally very bad design. A heavy gunner who can’t use his weapons at ranged.
As I always say there is many ways to buff the class and it’s gear but for a reason, devs don’t want it.
I play on Legend and I use single class Heavies, with their Heavy Armor and their Heavy weapons all the time. Also for the occasional artillery but not that much, tbh.
Because there are trade offs. Using light armor to get high speed/accuracy is fine, until you get shot to pieces, or hit by something.
Heavy Armor prevents some attacks from doing any damage at all - such as from shotguns, the Redeemer (the viral AR), poison worms and fire, and blunts the rest to the point where they are manageable. NJ Heavy Armor is the only armor capable of preventing a 95 dmg Pincer attack from disabling a body part with one hit. With high enough Strength and full Heavy Armor kit a Heavy can take a lot of punishment.
The Heavy does get the most accurate weapons in the game later on, the Destiny III and the Archangel.
By the way, the Heavy weapons work really well for OW against melee enemies.
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I got 2 situations recently.
First when siren jumped me out of nowhere slashing my assault. I got heavy standing just few steps away. A choice appeared: should I shot siren for 180 damage or run up close and bash her for 400? Choice was obvious.
Second situation was when I was saving independent soldiers from the Pure. There was a 3th level heavy that was benny hilling around the map with 2 Pure on his tail ( he couldnt harm them with his MG). When I got to him all it took to dispatch baddies was to bash them twice.
Heavy has a niche in the team thanks to warcry and explosives but his direct damage capabilities are terrible. In order to help him in this department I’d remove accuracy penalties from his armor and add heavy baseline skill “Setup”: usable on direct fire heavy weapons only. Spend 3AP to setup a weapon. Gain +30% accuracy and -1AP cost to attack untill you move
This way heavy would have more impact on the battlefield( outside of explosives) if you position him properly.
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I don’t want be be mean or anything. But you talk about late game. If I play a game for 15 hours and something is useless at this time period, I don’t call this a good mechanic.
I played xcoms and many game like that. As I can give you best example with gears tactic heavy class. It’s perfect. It has purposes, it does make its jop. It has not ridiculous aim or range penalties. It’s slow to go but fast to fire as it anchors to position.
So after I saw good implementations of the class at other Games, sry but this heavy is very bad. Even fraxis xcom got better heavy. Because he fires as fast as another classes, got enough range and acc with the damage. Are those heavy classes break xcom or gears? A big no. Then why do you fear so badly to normalize heavy class?
As I said, maybe after 30 hours my heavy can have good weapons which I can use. But sry, I don’t want to wait for it. Then make it unique class which comes later.
This game is range based mostly. So you need to fight as far as possible. A heavy with explosives are very nice for it. But not other way. I need them at least usable at midrange. I should use warcry if they get near in time. Heavy is a class for attacking from a point, not to dash forward because we got assault for that or melee ones. I should use bash when something not going well for defensive reasons.
But here we use a heavy slow class to jump battlefield, use debuff and melee them… I ask you with full honesty.
Do you think that logical?
Addition to that, I saw a pincher enemy killed a heavy NY in one turn with 3 strikes. One enemy, one turn, this is your heaviest armor…
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You are correct, stating that heavy armor has some perks but lets not get overboard.
Fire damage is indeed where heavy armor shine, though it is rare and avoidable.
Thing with shotguns and rifles is that theyre not that common in the enemy arsenal. Secondly they will simply not engage heavy, but shoot his friend, who’s standing few squares away.
95 pincer attack does just 10 more damage on assault than on a heavy. Once you get some strength it stops being relevant.
So while 30+ armor is great, in practice people are not swapping assault and sniper armor in favour of heavy. Its the other way around.
Thats because the penalties are way too big and also due to the fact that armor can easily be replaced by health (and you can pump up health with XP but you cant do it with accuracy)
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The point I don’t get that why do you fear that heavy class will break the balance? An assault can kill 30 enemy in one turn, dash map in one turn. A sniper can double shot per turn and harm enemies badly just where he is standing. But when we ask to able to use our big guns properly, you are against it. I just can’t find the reason here. If you want to jump and melee just give jump to melee class.
Heavy weapon bashing with huge damage is absurd. You can’t just hit someone with a huge thing like that for more damage. If it was logical, people would use huge woods rather then swords or axes. Even anime characters don’t do that.
So why do hate or fear from heavy when you are OK with other unbalanced classes?
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I wish I was. I sincerely do. I was just playing it tonight, and seven times, with a Hel II the Heavy MISSED the Triton class mobs, and they were between two to three tiles away. I made sure of it, with the Jump pack.
Seriously, 3 action points for a mobility option that restricts your chance to attack? What’s the point of it again?
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Warcry and proper/logical melee attack should be at a melee and fast class.
At this heavy, designer though that heavy class should have melee option as a brute and bombardier option as long range. Yeah the idea is not bad. But at execution, he did a great and powerful ( i dont say unbalanced because the damage from explosives are funny as you need to throw 5 to kill a weak enemy) grenadier which can shoot 1 rocket+2 grenade at one turn from far but at melee, designer did not want heavy use melee weapons but for a reason, it’s weapon and swing it like an inhuman titan to hit the enemy more then a cannon. To balance it’s safety, he game warcry to class.
BUT here, designer guy totally forgot the normal weapons of heavy. When they tested that, people ask him about those weapon sucks so bad and they looked each other. Whoops… Whoopsy…
Even a guy can swing his heavy weapon and hit like truck or burst explosives in one turn like a ww2 bomber plane, those are totally fine but when we ask a better “heavy weapon” which can shoot before late game, we get a reaction of “OMG! Do you wanna break even destroy the game balance??”
Guys, there are tons of topics about how to make most unbalanced things in game and how people avoid them with their own rules. And balance left the building already. So we want our heavy weapons and heavy classes which can shoot enemies from a bit far away. If you think this will break your balanced game play, please add one more rule to your game play and don’t use those game breaking heavy weapons and continue to bash enemies. Because you are defending something really weird way.
If someone thinks that heavy can work with it’s own weapons at mid and early game weapons via cannon/NY minigun, show me a video which they use those effectively as much as an assault or sniper…or just no… I tried everything and just no… yes, maybe I could not figure out the tricks maybe but I am not alone and math is out there.
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As I worked on Xenonauts X-Division mod (as creator) and openxcom modding. There are always very simple mechanic to balance heavy gear.
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Heavy weapons could be used without penalty when the user got heavy armor/enough strength.
This is one of the most logical one. Heavy weapons are powerful weapons and they don’t have debufs like bad acc, slow firing. Miniguns are fast firing weapons and they got good acc at least at a assault rifle level. They got good range too as they got huge barrels so they can be effective at longer then assault rifles. So heavy armors are special to able to handle this heavy weapons. Heavy armors are slow even the carrier got enough str because heavy is heavy. But it’s not about their weapon or how to use them. So when balancing, heavy could not escape from a bad situation and need to get position to fire. So enemy can nuke him easier if they can catch it open. But when a heavy starts firing, you should not be in line of fire. So, DO NOT nerf any weapon based stats if a heavy is using a heavy gun. -
Wait for getting position for firing
Another balancing is making heavy lose time at preparing. So heavy should wait for time before starts firing. Here again we talk about the time for the heavy soldier, not the gun. Soldier can be slow but not the weapon. Gears Tactic made it with anchor. This is the perfection. You go somewhere, anchor there and shoot firing fast and very accurate. End of story.
At PP, we just have penalties… They gave so much penalty to heavy, it’s like they try to balance whole game over this class. It’s skills are useless for normal weapons, his armor is weak, slow, somehow huge acc pen without a logical reason (that helm is not from ww1 you know), his weapons got no range, no acc, ultra slow… his “must have” skills are not his own and random (strongman and the acc bonus one)…
There is not a single good thing about those… yeah you can use cannon even end game because you want to use it… you don’t need it… even you got many more ways to use… maybe with lvl 7 rage burst skill… but alone… nop… got good weapons at late game… if you get that tech… if you got enough resources, if if if…when you got terminator assaults and one shot snipers…
My assault sniper got strong man. I am thinking to give this skill to him and give my minigun. I am use that he will able to use that much better then my heavy/sniper… why do i do that? because I want to use that gun!
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The slow and inaccurate heavy weapons are justified, when youre using them in close combat, room clearing duty. Shotguns, rifles, or smgs are much better in such agile enviromnemnt and they should dominate there. In real life we dont see 0.5 cal Browning MG armed soldiers doing room clearing. Thats too cumbersome.
So Id say the class foundation is good.
However out in the field, when a heavy sets up in a good position he should be a mid range (meaning long is for snipers) dps king. This is what we are lacking.
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