XCOM Class Analysis: Sniper


The Sniper's job is to sit back and shoot things from safety. When they can't do that, they're handicapped.


Squaddie

Headshot
Fires a shot that has +30% chance to crit and does bonus damage if it gets a crit based on the 'tech level' of the rifle. 2 turn cooldown. (In Enemy Within: the shot can get a crit even on Squadsight targets)

I haven't actually been able to find what the damage bonus is. I'd guess it's +1/+2/+3 for Conventional/Laser/Plasma, but I don't actually know.

I dislike Headshot. Not so much the part that it's in the Sniper's skill list at all as the part where it's their Squaddie-level skill. That really should've been Squadsight, as the entire notion of the Sniper class falls completely apart without Squadsight. Headshot isn't a particularly defining skill, either, being used infrequently and having a wholly unreliable benefit. Even with a Plasma Sniper Rifle, a Headshot is only a 65% chance of a critical hit. You'll probably have the Sniper carrying a S.C.O.P.E. admittedly, but 75%, while it'll usually work out, is still not actually 100%, nor is it close enough to be worth planning around. Even if it was, Headshot is still, at it's core, a simple damage increase skill, one with unnecessarily complicated mechanics that aren't all that meaningful.

Further, with a name like Headshot I'd really expect the skill to be... well, lethal. Something more like "If the shot crits, the target instantly dies unless it's a robot." Which, incidentally: it's vaguely annoying that we have a skill called "Headshot" that somehow works effectively even against enemies with no discernible head, such as Cyberdisks. I get that it readily calls to mind the idea of a Sniper lining up a precise, lethal shot, but that just comes back to my gripe that it's not nearly as lethal as I'd expect from a skill with this name. That it's a Squaddie-level skill and so presumably they don't want it too impressive just brings me back to my gripe that Squaddie-level really ought to be Squadsight. Also, I personally would've been all for Headshot being a one-use-per-mission skill that just flat-out auto-kills a single target. That would be a really interesting skill to work with, one with tremendous utility without necessarily breaking missions. (At least on Impossible difficulty, where the artificial limitations the game places on things like how many Sectopods can spawn into a given mission don't apply)


Sergeant

Snap Shot OR Squadsight
The Sniper Rifle can be fired or Overwatched after a move, but at a -20 Aim penalty when doing so (-10 in Enemy Within) OR the Sniper Rifle can be fired at any target seen by any member of the squad, not just targets the Sniper can personally see. (Enemy Within: When firing on a Squadsight target, no critical hits are possible unless using Headshot)

It's pretty telling that they simultaneously bolstered Snap Shot and weakened Squadsight for Enemy Within.

For those who don't already know, players pretty quickly determined that Squadsight Snipers basically just broke the game in Enemy Unknown. Two Squadsight Snipers tended to be considered a minimum in any mission in sensible play, and it was completely possible to run five of them with only one soldier acting as a spotter -or run six of them and rely entirely on Battle Scanners to provide spotters, though that was more gimmicky. The fact that "six Snipers" was viable is worrying all on its own, though. Thankfully, Enemy Within takes steps to reduce how overwhelmingly good Squadsight is, not only weakening Squadsight per se but also giving incentives to move more aggressively (Meld Canisters timing out) and adding in an enemy type that can and will punish you leaving your Snipers unattended. (Seekers)

Unfortunately, Squadsight is still the infinitely superior pick, even with Snap Shot made less terrible. Again, Squadsight really should've been the Squaddie-level pick. To Firaxis' credit, when they made XCOM 2, Snipers made a return and did so with Squadsight as their basic skill at last. Even so, I just don't get why this wasn't true in the first place, or corrected in Enemy Within. A Sniper isn't a Sniper if they can't snipe. They can't snipe without Squadsight. What logic led to Headshot being the Squaddie skill in the first place?

Anyway, Snap Shot is garbage. It is still garbage in Enemy Within, where the Aim penalty is less bad. Part of the problem is that the developers, strangely, don't seem to have taken into account that this is a third layer of Aim punishment on a Snap Shot Sniper -other soldiers get Aim bonuses for getting closer, which the Sniper lacks. (Layer 1) The Sniper suffers Aim penalties for getting closer to the target. (Layer 2) Then Snap Shot has an additional Aim penalty. (Layer 3) Even considering that Snipers have the highest Aim of the classes normally, it doesn't make much sense to me that they tacked on the Aim penalty to Snap Shot, even before you consider that it has to compete with Squadsight and there's almost no skills in the game that could successfully compete with Squadsight. Bullet Swarm is one of a handful. Snap Shot is no Bullet Swarm.

In theory you might want to take Snap Shot so you can get use out of your Snipers even in enclosed spaces where Squadsight is useless. In practice In The Zone and maybe Disabling Shot (To help capture Aliens in close-quarters situations) are the only reasons my response to that isn't "Just run an Assault in place of your Sniper in those missions." (Or take Gunslinger, so they can contribute via Squadsight before you reach the UFO, and then switch to using their Pistol in the UFO) Even then, In The Zone is extremely difficult to take advantage of with Snap Shot -it's much more effective with Squadsight- and Disabling Shot is... fairly niche. Preventing an Alien from firing its main weapon tends to either force it to do something else, where that something else is more dangerous than its main weapon, or not work at all (Melee aliens, Ethereals), with only extremely specific enemies actually being reasonably good targets for the effect. So Snap Shot is awful.

This whole dynamic is strange to me; Squadsight is inspired in no small part by players "sniping" Aliens in the original XCOM, where it's an incredibly powerful tactic. If anything, I'd have expected them to weight Squadsight down with such severe penalties it was rendered useless -sniping actually kind of breaks the original XCOM too, so replicating its functionality would obviously call for substantial counter-balancing to make it available without it being too good.

I think it would've made a lot more sense for Snap Shot to be competing with Double Tap, and with no Aim penalty at all, or even an Aim bonus of some kind, while Squadsight was, again, the Squaddie-level skill. That way the skill choice would be between "specialize in sitting around sniping" (Double Tap) vs "be able to contribute outside of just sniping." (Snap Shot) It would probably still slant toward not taking Snap Shot, but it wouldn't be nearly so one-sided a choice.


Corporal

Gunslinger OR Damn Good Ground
+2 damage to Pistols OR +10 Aim and +10 Defense in cases where the Sniper has the height advantage over their target or their attacker, respectively.

Gunslinger or Damn Good Ground is a fairly interesting choice for a Squadsight Sniper. Gunslinger goes a long way to helping the Sniper protect themselves when enemies stumble upon their sniper nest and letting the Sniper contribute effectively even in situations like breaching a UFO where Squadsight is useless. Notably, a Gunslinger Plasma Pistol actually hits just as hard as a Laser Sniper Rifle, and in fact will hit harder if you've made the Pistol III Foundry Project -which, incidentally, is directly unlocked by the Plasma Pistol research. It's not until you've gotten around to unlocking and building Plasma Sniper Rifles that Gunslinger Pistols are really a step down in your damage output, and it takes a long time to make that happen, especially in Enemy Within. Just one more reason why Snap Shot isn't worth it, incidentally -Gunslinger will usually cover the job better, and it's only one level later. Damn Good Ground's benefits are sufficiently small that it's not a big deal to sacrifice it for Gunslinger, either.

Damn Good Ground instead makes the Squadsight Sniper better at what they do -get to high ground and snipe everything to death- without doing much to help protect them when you, whoops, let a Cyberdisc flank them while the rest of your squad is on the other side of the map. It's an interesting pair of choices.

If for some ungodly reason you're running a Snap Shot Sniper, you take Damn Good Ground. Or you take Gunslinger and then cry when you realize your Snap Shot Sniper is literally better off using their Pistol over their Sniper Rifle because Snap Shot is godawful and any situation you might use Snap Shot in is one in which the Pistol will perform better, what with actually getting Aim bonuses for being in close-quarters and not having an Aim penalty from a skill on top of an Aim penalty for being too close. And in fact Pistols have an Aim bonus from a Foundry Project.

... Snap Shot is awful, if you didn't get that.



Lieutenant

Disabling Shot OR Battle Scanner
Fires a shot that disables the target's main gun, which is fixed by reloading it. 2 turn cooldown. OR lets the Sniper throw a device that acts as a source of (Squadsight) line of sight for two turns. Limit 2 uses per mission.

This is largely an academic choice. Disabling Shot has potential utility for captures, but the majority of enemies are cases where being forced to use their psychic powers or lob an Alien Grenade or use some other special ability is more dangerous to you than what you're disabling, or they are immune to the effect outright. If an enemy has already used up its Alien Grenade etc etc etc and you want to capture it, Disabling Shot starts being more appealing, but that's basically planning for taking advantage of things going badly wrong, where Battle Scanner is about preventing things from going wrong. The latter is generally going to be better than the former.

The situation is a bit better for Disabling Shot in Enemy Within -Mechtoids are incredibly lethal with their main gun, have no secondary attack, can be hit with Disabling Shot, and are tough enough that you can't actually count on killing them even with something like a Plasma Sniper Rifle crit Headshot. Taking them completely out of action for a turn is legitimately useful. So it might be worth considering having a Disabling Shot Sniper in Enemy Within, actually.



Captain

Executioner OR Opportunist
+10 Aim against targets with less than 50% health OR reaction fire's Aim penalty is removed and reaction fire can now crit.

Executioner is terrible and I don't know why it exists.

Opportunist isn't an amazing ability, but it's decent enough, and there are enough situations where you're going to be Overwatching as the only sensible action that you'll get benefit out of it. Executioner is a small bonus in the limited scenario of a target being within a fairly specific health range.

Take Opportunist. Full stop.



Major

Low Profile
Treats Partial Cover as Full Cover.

This is true in every way possible. The Partial Cover you get from flying? Full Cover. Mimetic Skin's requirement that you move into Full Cover to trigger it? Triggers on moving to any form of cover now.

I have no particular feelings on Low Profile, beyond that I dislike how it further exaggerates that Snipers should use Archangel Armor and further exaggerates how insanely powerful Mimetic Skin is. It's not actually a particularly interesting or defining skill, and good play tends to involve your Snipers not getting shot at anyway, so its benefits rarely matter. It really feels like it should've been a skill on the Support or Heavy; both of them are your primary classes for hanging out in cover at the front lines. Or possibly the Assault to make it easier for them to move for flanking shots because they no longer care whether a chunk of cover is Partial or Full and so can focus on other concerns. On the other hand, it's not like it's a bad or meaningless skill. +20 Defense on a reasonably consistent basis isn't bad.

Mostly I wish something more defining was here. This would be a good place for Snap Shot, for instance -having your high-end Snipers consistently escape their biggest flaw would be a very notable gain, and the lack of competition would go a long way to compensate for how the skill itself is fairly bad. (That is, you wouldn't refuse to take it because you'd rather have a different skill, which is the current situation)



Colonel

In The Zone OR Double Tap
Lethal flanking shots cost no action (This only applies once per turn to Pistol kills) OR allows the Sniper to fire their Rifle twice in one turn if they don't move. (1 turn cooldown)

This is one of the best-designed skill choice pairs in the game, as far as the immediate comparison goes. Double Tap is better peak damage against individual targets, since it lets you fire twice on a target, and is a bit more reliable/general in that, for a properly used Squadsight Sniper, its minimum conditions are easily met. In The Zone is more difficult to set up, but its potential is tremendous, and it actually directly addresses one of the flaws with a Squadsight Sniper -that if they need to move to a new sniper nest that's one or more turns they flat-out can't contribute in normally. With In The Zone, it's entirely possible for a Sniper to land Squadsight kills and then dash to a new position once everything is dead and so they have no combat use for their remaining actions anyway. Furthermore, enemies that are incapable of using Cover in the first place are automatic In The Zone triggers -so your In The Zone Sniper can wipe the Drones that come with Cyberdiscs and Sectopods for basically free and then take at least one more shot beyond that, or can clear out multiple Chryssalids in a single turn if they're using a Plasma Sniper Rifle and still be ready to contribute against more dire threats.

The choice is sufficiently difficult that some people feel that developing two Snipers, one with In The Zone and one with Double Tap, is the optimal way to handle things, and I basically agree. They each bring significant things to the table, with different exact advantages.

An odd design point is that I'm pretty sure the intention of the designers is that In The Zone is meant to combine with Snap Shot and Double Tap with Squadsight, in specific. I suspect the thought process with In The Zone is that an In The Zone Sniper will function as a kind of pseudo-Assault, busting into a room to achieve a flank and then killing everything in the room in one turn, or performing a hit and run of killing one or more targets and then retreating back out of the room, contrasted against an Assault tending to pour tremendous damage on a single target with no ability to back out once they've committed to their Run & Gun attack. It doesn't seem to have crossed the developers' minds that it's a lot easier to set up for Squadsight In The Zone kills, especially since the AI, as far as I can tell, does not recognize when they are flanked by Squadsight units. Contributing to my suspicion is that the Sniper is not the only class that does this kind of butting into other class's roles; the Heavy has shades of trying to be a Support, as the bluntest other example.

I don't really get the point of defining classes like this and then having them overlap in this sort of way. If they're meant to be distinct and different, why deliberately make them more alike?

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The Sniper is, as I understand it, inspired less by real snipers and more by a classic XCOM way of playing the game -get a bunch of soldiers with high Firing Accuracy, set them up somewhere where they have firing lanes on most of the map, and then have a handful of high Time Unit soldiers act as spotters for your "snipers". The Sniper class reads to me like it's trying to do two main things -fill the role of those Snipers, and in the process make it less ridiculously effective of a strategy. In the original XCOM, any unit could do what Squadsight lets you do in the remaquel -lob fire from anywhere on the map to anywhere else on the map, so long as nothing was in the way of the shot. With the remaquel restricting it to only one class of soldier, and placing limitations on said soldier -the inability to move and shoot normally, for one- this theoretically vastly reduces the effectiveness of the strategy of having most of the team act as snipers while a minority spots.

In practice, the remaquel seems to have made the strategy stronger than ever. To be fair, this is primarily a product of the "pods" system for the Aliens, and in particular the way "activation" of a pod works. The thing is, Aliens are spawned in "pods" of 1-3 Aliens, which move about as an inseparable group until the first time they enter the player's line of sight. In this mode, they behave by radically different rules from what you might expect, and in fact a lot of their off-screen movement is literally them teleporting from one point to another. This is the basis of one of the game's more infamous glitches, where it's not at all unusual for a pod to simply appear right in the middle of your forces, when they're supposed to enter from the edge of your line of sight. Enemy Within has corrected this particular glitch, or at least made it less common, but it's still the case that inactive pods and active pods behave very differently from each other.

When an inactive pod is first spotted by the player's forces, the activated Aliens immediately take a turn. Normally this involves moving to cover and entering Overwatch, but melee Aliens will simply do their best to advance on the player's forces, and those Aliens that can't use Cover but still have a ranged attack will usually just move a bit closer and then enter Overwatch. This will happen regardless of whether the pod is activated on the player's turn of the Alien's turn, but critically, even though it's essentially a "free" turn for the pod, if it happens during their turn they won't get to take other actions.

In other words, your sniper nest? It will always have a minimum of one turn warning. It's not possible for an inactive pod to come lurching out of the shadows and then promptly pour fire into a Sniper and kill them, and it's also not possible for an inactive pod to simply kill your Snipers without ever entering your line of sight. This is a stark contrast to the original XCOM, where the Aliens could and would turn corners and kill people, had better line of sight than your soldiers in the dark and so absolutely could stumble upon your soldiers with you unaware that your troops are in danger prior to being shot and killed, and could take advantage of "squadsight" themselves to have one unit spot you and then a torrent of plasma fire comes spitting out of the darkness, even if reaction fire immediately killed the Alien that first spotted your soldiers. (As line of sight isn't lost on a tile until the turn ends in the original game) In the remaquel, your sniper nest will probably simply turn its guns on any pod that stumbles upon them, killing them before they have the chance to do anything to the Snipers. The only time your sniper nest might be in real danger is if you've managed to activate a pod and then lose sight of it -pods that leave your line of sight don't return to the inactivated behavior, and so once a pod is activated its Aliens absolutely can spend a move entering line of sight of your sniper nest and then promptly open fire before it's your turn.

Enemy Within took a few steps to address the effectiveness of the sniper nest strategy, but they're a bit limp-wristed. The bluntest one is the direct weakening of Squadsight -since you can't get a critical hit if the target is outside your normal range without using Headshot, Squadsight Snipers are a bit less lethal overall. Notably, this particularly impacts In The Zone Squadsight Snipers -a Sniper with Plasma Sniper Rifle and upgraded S.C.O.P.E. firing on an open target has an 85% chance to crit, so in the base game In The Zone Squadsight Snipers could mostly-reliably chain-kill targets of 13 health or less. Below Classic difficulty, that's lethal against most enemies who are at full health! However, outside of reducing the effectiveness of In The Zone chain-kills, this particular restriction doesn't really address the points that make Squadsight Sniper spam so effective.

The second limiter on Squadsight Snipers is actually the introduction of Meld Canisters, or more precisely their time limit until they self-destruct. In the base game, it was all too possible to take an entire map very, very slowly so long as it wasn't a Bomb Disposal Council Mission. (Taking things slow has flaws on Terror Missions, but it is a workable strategy even in that case) This made it trivial to get your Snipers to their nests and then take the rest of the map patiently, focusing on always being in a position for the Snipers to, well, snipe whatever you activate whenever you activate it. With Meld Canisters pushing you to hurry a bit on most every mission, Squadsight Snipers can actually be a minor handicap, as you can't necessarily wait for them to be in position before you start moving and activating Aliens, at least not if you actually want Meld. On the other hand, Meld Canisters often have fairly generous timers, if you kill everything on the map before a Canister's timer runs out you auto-collect the Meld, and Enemy Within hasn't actually done much to make the game harder, so Meld isn't vitally necessary just to be able to keep up with the game's difficulty curve.

The third limiter is actually the introduction of the Seeker. In theory, Seekers discourage abusing sniper nests, because Seekers can potentially go in and strangle your Snipers. In practice, not so much. The biggest problem is that the game also introduces strangulation immunity gear and introduces Tactical Rigging as an early Foundry Project. In the base game, there's only really one item your Squadsight Snipers should ever carry -a S.C.O.P.E. Nothing else actually contributes anything when they're making Squadsight shots. In Enemy Within, you suddenly want a Respirator Implant/Chitin Plating/dump Archangel Armor for Titan Armor to protect your Snipers from strangulation -but you also suddenly have two item slots thanks to Tactical Rigging, and so you just run what you always ran in Enemy Unknown, but with a Respirator Implant or Chitin Plating taking your second item slot.

However, even if these points were not true, Seekers are just too hampered in too many other ways. The "pods" mechanic I've already described means you always have a minimum of one turn of warning -you'll never have a Sniper sitting in their nest, alone and unsafe, suddenly be strangled from out of nowhere and die before any of your other troops on the other side of the map can reach the Sniper. The worst-case scenario is that the Sniper starts running to join the rest of the squad when a Seeker pod activates on top of the Sniper. Worse, Seekers are also given artificial limitations on their spawns -they're supposed to only spawn in groups of 1-2 in a pod, rather than the usual 1-3, and if you're not playing on Impossible only 1 Seeker pod is even allowed to spawn in any given mission. As such, a trio of Snipers making up your sniper nest is completely safe if you're not playing on Impossible, and would be even if all the prior considerations didn't apply, as only two Snipers could be strangled, leaving the remaining one to shoot the others free. Lastly, Seeker AI is "shackled" -within a given turn, only one Seeker is allowed to initiate a strangulation, and this particular limitation isn't lifted by playing on Impossible. So even if every other problem with Seekers threatening sniper nests was removed as a problem and we just assume you start a mission surrounded by 20 active Seekers, it still wouldn't be possible to have your six soldiers promptly all strangled!

The fourth limiter on Squadsight Snipers in Enemy Within is, oddly enough, a product of fans complaining about how so many UFO maps were open and outdoors, no matter where the UFO (crash)landed. Enemy Within has a lot more maps that are broken up by walls and buildings and so on, such that it's a lot harder to arrange for a single sniper nest to cover the entire map. This obviously does nothing to restrict the effectiveness of Snipers on the old maps, but it does mean that it's a less universal strategy, increasing the need for players to at least have other plans at all. Strangely, and somewhat sadly, I feel this is actually the most effective of Enemy WIthin's additions at reducing how absurd Squadsight Snipers are, and it's basically a happy accident.

Looking at the 'big picture', the Sniper's skill tree broadly seems to be divided into a "Snap Shot" lane and a "Squadsight" lane. I've already covered the inherent absurdity of acting like these two are remotely equivalent choices, but somehow it manages to get worse than that. For some bizarre reason Gunslinger is on the left side, indicating it's intended to be a Snap Shot skill, when the two skills are redundant. You should only ever have one or the other, as they serve the same purpose -to let your Sniper contribute more effectively even when they're being forced to move, such as inside UFOs.


Worse, Gunslinger is largely actually better than Snap Shot anyway, and not just because it isn't competing with Squadsight. A Foundry-upgraded Plasma Pistol backed by Gunslinger has a base damage of 6, which puts it even with a Laser Sniper Rifle and 3 points behind a Plasma Sniper Rifle, albeit with a much lesser crit chance, so it's not until quite late in the game that Snap Shot will have a noticeable damage advantage, and even then it will suffer from the fact that Pistols are Medium range while Sniper Rifles are Long range and Snap Shot imposes an Aim penalty when taking advantage of it, so the Pistol will often be 100% accurate in situations where the Snap Shot Rifle is hovering more in the vicinity of 50% or less. It's not very helpful to hit 50% harder if you can't actually land the shot. (The fact that the Snap Shotter can have Damn Good Ground is essentially irrelevant -you cannot remotely count on having the high ground to trigger it without abusing Archangel Armor, and not even then when operating in indoors environments)

I respect the attempt behind the Sniper class, but the final result is flawed. To its credit, it has the best Colonel-tier skill choice balance, but still.

Next time we cover the Heavy.

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