XCOM 2 Class Analysis: Grenadier

The Grenadier is XCOM 2's equivalent to the Heavy: a soldier weighed down by a heavy primary weapon and a secondary explosive-launcher. Their primary weapon is basically the same as ever, just renamed from LMG to Cannon, while their secondary weapon fills a lot of similar roles as far as terrain destruction and area-of-effect damage, but is fairly different in details. Most notably, the Grenadier has versatility with their secondary weapon's output, instead of being stuck with 'regular' and 'Shredder' as options. Their secondary weapon -the Grenade Launcher- also has a fair bit more of itself tied up in technology than the Heavy's Rocket Launcher ever did, which makes it feel more properly like a piece of equipment rather than an innate magical ability whose visuals happen to pretend it's a piece of equipment.

While the Grenadier is more obviously different from their predecessor than the Sharpshooter, they're comparable in terms of being a refinement instead of a substantial shift in concept. In fact, I'd argue the Grenadier runs closer to 'refinement' on that continuum than the Sharpshooter does, as the Sharpshooter embracing Pistol specialty is a pretty substantial conceptual and practical change. The Grenadier's primary shift is making their explosive-launcher more properly a piece of equipment, instead of an innate ability masquerading as gear; their actual ability set is fairly familiar, where the Sharpshooter throws out basically everything aside Squadsight and sort of In The Zone.

It's a big improvement all-around in any event, and one of the more impressive improvements the game makes.


Squaddie
+2 Aim
+1 HP
+4-13 Will


Launch Grenade
The Grenadier uses their Grenade Launcher when firing grenades of any kind, giving them more launch distance and a wider blast radius. Additionally, the Grenadier has a bonus Item slot above and beyond the regular 1-2 slots; this Item slot only accepts grenade-type items. (Support grenades are allowed)

Note that while normally grenades compete with each other, the grenade-only slot on the Grenadier isn't counted for these purposes. As such, Grenadiers are unique for being able to double up on offensive grenades, and indeed can even double up on specific grenade types. (eg carry two Acid Grenades)

You might expect me to complain about a repeat of the Heavy blowing an ability slot plus their secondary weapon slot on a single capability... but that bothered me because it was anomalous. In XCOM 2, this is actually the norm; the Sharpshooter is the only core class whose Squaddie ability isn't 'I can use my secondary weapon'. (Their Squaddie ability is instead 'my primary weapon actually does the thing it's supposed to do'. Same basic thing, just on their primary weapon instead of secondary) A sub-point of this is that the Heavy was sacrificing standard Pistol access; in XCOM 2, there's no standard secondary weapon, so the Grenadier isn't making an equivalent sacrifice. Furthermore, the Grenadier is outright getting a bonus Item slot out of the Launch Grenade ability; inasmuch as they're sacrificing a gear slot, it's to replace it with a different gear slot, making the trade much more advantageous than the Heavy's.

The Grenadier is also technically missing out on the airburst capability the Heavy's Rockets had, but this rarely matters due to how XCOM 2 has overhauled various things, most obviously flying enemies. The main time you'll actually care is when something is both on high ground and barely at the edge of your Grenadier's range, where airburst capability would let you hit the target anyway. Most of the time, though, it's all upside; grenades are surprisingly versatile in XCOM 2, and the Grenadier doesn't have to worry about a 10% chance for their explosive to randomly go somewhere else.

Also note that Launch Grenade replaces Throw Grenade in a Grenadier's command list. For most purposes this is pure upside, but occasionally you can find yourself in a situation where it would be useful to be able to pick the smaller blast radius of a normally-thrown grenade, and sorry that option isn't available.


Corporal
+2 Aim
+1 HP
+1 Strength
+5 Hack
+4-13 Will

The Grenadier's two lanes are 'Demolitions Expert' and 'Heavy Gunner'. Basically, do you want to specialize in utilizing your Grenade Launcher, or in utilizing your Cannon?

This isn't a 100% accurate way of viewing the lanes, but it's accurate enough. Certainly, it's more accurate than the game's implications: only two 'Demolitions Expert' skills actually unequivocally improve your Grenadier's ability to demolish terrain, and most of the 'Heavy Gunner' skills are oriented toward supporting the squad, not DPS with the cannon.

Blast Padding
+1 Armor, and explosives do only 34% of normal damage to soldier.

Hey, remember how the Heavy got Will to Survive lowering damage when they were in Cover? Yeah, Armor is like that, only the damage reduction is a standard mechanic with UI elements to go with it. +1 Armor means that each time your Grenadier gets shot, you remove 1 damage from the attack, simple as that.

Unfortunately, while Blast Padding looks pretty cool at the beginning of the game when you can't get Armor onto your soldiers any other way and -1 to damage is actually a notable fraction of incoming damage, it doesn't age well. The explosives protection is also surprisingly niche, as there's not many enemies that have access to explosives and few of the enemies that have them are all that quick to use them, while +1 Armor is close to worthless once many of your enemies are doing somewhere in the vicinity of 8 damage a shot and some spike to 10+. The phase of the game in which 1 Armor really matters is extremely short-lived. On top of all that, the combination of +1 Armor and explosives protection is a bit perverse, as all explosives effects will be removing Armor if they hit, making the two benefits a bit at odds with each other.

I like the idea of Blast Padding overall, but its tuning needed work, and the pairing of explosives resistance with Armor boosting is strange on the face of it. In practice, you should probably always take...

Shredder
Cannon has Shred equal to weapon's tech level.

So hey let's talk about Shred.

XCOM 2 has Armor, as I just covered under Blast Padding. Shred removes that Armor each time a Shred-capable attack damages the Armored unit, permanently and stackingly. (ie if you have Shred 1, you can shoot a unit with 2 Armor twice and the final result will be it has 0 Armor for the rest of the mission) Note that damage is calculated before Shred is applied. This means Shredder doesn't act as a straight damage boost for the Grenadier against Armored targets, contrary to what you might expect.

Shred is commonly found on grenades, so you don't need the Shredder skill to be able to cope with heavily-Armored targets, but Shredder makes it less important to plan your grenade use perfectly.

So that's what Shredder does. Time for implications and whatnot.

Firstly, the Grenadier tends to be the best core class to have open up Overwatch ambushes. You can't Overwatch-fire grenades, but inactive pods tend to clump up so that they're convenient grenade targets, and Shredder means that even if you want your Grenadier to fire their gun it's a good idea to have them fire first so you can make sure they actually target an Armored enemy and hopefully remove its Armor before the rest of the squad takes their shots, potentially massively increasing everyone else's damage. No other core class has equivalent motive to be the one that opens up an ambush.

This gets a bit more complicated when including Psi Operatives and SPARKs, mind, but when working with just the core classes it's a good rule of thumb to be planning around having your Grenadier open the ambush.

Second, weapons technology is particularly important to the Grenadier; updating to magnetic weaponry bolsters a Grenadier's damage just like any other class, but also bolsters their Shred, which no other core class has an equivalent benefit to. (SPARKs have the same consideration, but are a DLC class and even if you assume access there's factors like SPARKs being expensive to produce that mean you won't necessarily be fielding a SPARK in every given mission)

A more subtle aspect of this is that going for Grenadier weapons technology first makes it less problematic for your other classes to be technologically behind; every base-game primary weapon gains 2 damage per tier of advancement, so removing 2 Armor is exactly equivalent to raising the tier of all your squadmates' primary weapons against that enemy. Pistols and Swords only gain one damage per tier (The third-tier Pistol is a bit weird but the math works out to it being basically +1 damage over the second-tier Pistol on average so close enough), so in those cases it's even more dramatically true that bolstering Shred is more bang for your buck than bolstering those weapons, when facing Armored targets. Given Armored targets become increasingly common, and heavy Armor is disproportionately associated with the most threatening enemies... that's a big deal.

So yeah, it's generally a good idea to prioritize getting Cannons to magnetic over getting other primary weapons to magnetic. Most pertinent is that you should usually upgrade Cannons before Sniper Rifles, but it is possible for a run to perform Gauss Weapons while still having not gotten around to upgrading Shotguns due to resource considerations, in which case Cannons are the higher priority by default. (Bonus skills complicate this) These pressures also technically apply to third-tier weaponry, but for a variety of reasons going from 2 Shred to 3 Shred just isn't as big of a boost as going from 1 Shred to 2 Shred, and beam weapons can often ignore a single point of Armor being left on an enemy in practice simply due to how high their base damage is.


Sergeant
+2 Aim
+1 HP
+4-13 Will

Demolition
Select an enemy unit in range that is in Cover: Demolition has a base 80% chance of destroying their Cover, but has no chance of harming the unit. If the Grenadier's internal Aim is higher than 80, than Demolition's success chance is raised to their Aim stat. Consumes 2 ammo. 3 turn cooldown.

Demolition is a neat idea with lackluster execution.

Part of the problem is that Demolition isn't guaranteed to actually destroy the target's Cover. If you could 100% count on it, that could be good for letting you clear the way to single tough Cover-using targets without having to burn one of your limited supply of grenades. But you can't, so anytime you need to wipe a target's Cover, you're going to use a grenade since those are reliable.

Another part of the problem is that Demolition is very specifically on the Grenadier. If it was on any other class, it would be a situational but still solid choice. As the Grenadier is so good with grenades, and grenades destroy Cover, dish out damage, Shred Armor, and do all of this in an area? Yeah, Demolition is largely redundant. Their miserable base Aim contributes too; a Colonel Grenadier only has 75 Aim, and so it takes more than 5 added Aim before Demolition starts benefiting from a Perception PCS, and the absolute maximum Aim a Grenadier can get in the base game is 96, ensuring Demolition can always flub.

The third major factor is that the vast majority of missions in XCOM 2 are very, very short. Generally there's 3-4 pods on any given map, and you usually only need to burn one grenade per pod, if that. Just bringing two Grenadiers into a mission is, by itself, making Demolition almost entirely irrelevant. This is ignoring later Grenadier skills, note. I'm literally talking a pair of Squaddie Grenadiers is enough that Demolition is redundant. Just chuck grenades!

As such, Demolition isn't completely worthless, but the primary reason I don't actually consider it a hard skip is because it competes with...

Suppression
A single enemy target in range becomes Suppressed until the start of the user's next turn. A Suppressed target suffers -50 to Aim, and if it moves the Suppressor will immediately take a reaction fire shot at the target for free. Additionally, if the target was on Overwatch, its Overwatch is permanently removed, even if the Suppression ends prematurely. Suppression ends if the reaction shot is triggered or if the Suppressor takes damage. Consumes 2 ammo to initiate. No cooldown.

It's Suppression from the previous game, but with a much bigger Aim penalty on the target.

Unfortunately, Suppression is still pretty close to worthless in the vast majority of situations. Enemies will almost always elect to move before shooting even without being Suppressed, making the increased Aim penalty irrelevant outside a few edge cases (eg Turrets), and the ability to shut down Overwatch is even less useful than it was in the previous game because doing damage is enough to remove Overwatch now. Why have your Grenadier Suppress the Overwatch enemy when you could just lob a grenade or a regular shot? If you have a Stock, a regular shot is guaranteed to remove their Overwatch! Particularly bad is that the enemies most prone to going into Overwatch are low-Defense high-Armor enemies that can't use Cover, which are basically the perfect targets to have a Grenadier fire their Shredder-backed Cannon at as a regular shot.

Worse yet, where the Heavy could make Suppression vaguely decent by stacking on Danger Zone and Mayhem to produce infinite area-of-effect unavoidable damage, for the Grenadier this is as good as Suppression gets. No skill or technology improves it. Ever.

Every once in a while you'll end up in a situation where an enemy is in Overwatch, not feasible to lob an explosive at (If only because you've run out), and is in High Cover while having an innate Defense bonus such that Suppression is maybe actually worth considering, so it's not completely worthless, but... the only reason I don't say Suppression is a hard pass is because Demolition is around as underwhelming.

Note that while Suppression was treated as a miss in the previous game for the purposes of eg Hyper-Reactive Pupils, this doesn't apply to XCOM 2. You can't slap a Stock into a Cannon for some free damage on Suppression, sorry.


Lieutenant
+1 Aim
+1 HP
+5 Hack
+4-13 Will

Heavy Ordnance
Whatever grenade is in the bonus grenade-only slot gains an additional use. This even applies to the Frost Bomb.

Three explosives per mission, not counting the possibility of a Heavy Weapon. This is particularly obviously huge with the Frost Bomb, but it's also very useful with all the Experimental Grenades since you can't just build a second copy on demand. As several of these are very powerful and useful, that's quite significant.

Heavy Ordnance actually tends to be my default at this level because of how incredibly useful the effect is, and how there's some utility overlap between 'wreck Cover' and 'provide Aim bonus to allies'. Against enemies like Gatekeepers and Sectopods, that component doesn't apply, but being able to lob an Acid Bomb at both a Gatekeeper and a Sectopod in the same mission is excellent for removing their Armor, which is even better than some Aim. Still, having it on literally every Grenadier is probably a bit of a waste of potential.

Holo Targeting
Firing your cannon at an enemy marks it until the start of the soldier's next turn, adding +15 Aim to all following attacks at that target.

It's Holo-Targeting from the previous game, but now it's competing with something that isn't a godly skill and it provides more Aim.

Which is to say Holo Targeting is actually decent in XCOM 2! Again, I tend to take Heavy Ordnance preferentially, but Holo Targeting is a big help against Archons and to a lesser extent Gatekeepers, who have high Defense you can't remove and don't use Cover, and is also a good pick if you're fond of having your Grenadier open Overwatch ambushes by Shredding a tough target; having all follow-up attacks even more likely to hit that tough target is a very nice bonus, especially if it's a Gatekeeper.

Furthermore, Holo-Targeting is applied by Overwatch shots, as it always should have been. It still goes away at the start of your own turn if it gets applied during the enemy turn, so don't get too excited, but bolstering Aim against an initial pod activation where your soldiers are suffering from Overwatch accuracy penalties is pretty nice! In that scenario, it also doesn't have to worry about 'but grenades', since you can't launch grenades in Overwatch anyway.

Holo Targeting is especially worth considering bringing for some of the longer, more enemy-dense missions, where explosives are going to outright run out, making Heavy Ordnance not so great of a pick relatively. The final mission being the most stand-out example, but Avenger Defense missions are also generally fairly enemy-dense.


Captain
+1 Aim
+1 Strength
+4-13 Will

Volatile Mix
Grenades do +2 damage to units.

Note that Volatile Mix does cause grenades that do no damage, such as the Frost Bomb, to do 2 damage.

In any event, Volatile Mix is very much the default skill to take. Much like how Blademaster is where half of a Sword's normal damage progression is placed, Grenadier grenades get their three steps of progression in part via Volatile Mix; Plasma Grenade/Advanced Explosives is only one damage boost, and both those upgrades only add +1 damage. Mind, grenades are area-of-effect and clearly tuned to account for that...

Also note that Volatile Mix... well, it's inconsistent about it, but it will sometimes cause the damage over time inflicted by Incendiary Grenades, Gas Grenades, or Acid Grenades to also get +2 damage per tick. I honestly suspect this is a glitch, but when it applies that makes Volatile Mix +4 damage for those grenades. That's the difference between a Conventional-tier weapon and a Beam-tier weapon!

As you should largely endeavor to switch over to Experimental Grenades over Frag/Plasma Grenades, this contributes to Volatile Mix being the default pick here.

Curiously, the config files have a line for Volatile Mix to expand the blast radius, but it's set to 0 by default. My guess is that at one point in time this was in use and got patched out, a possibility supported by the fact that the wider internet consistently insists that Volatile Mix adds +1 to grenade blast radius. That's a bit surprising, if so; in the prior game the dev team was extremely reluctant to make modifications to skill balance except in the transition to Enemy Within, and even there they were largely pretty conservative in how much change they were willing to make.

Chain Shot
Fires a shot at -15 Aim. If that shot hits, immediately follows-up with another shot at -15 Aim. 3 turn cooldown.

... hooray?

I originally took Chain Shot as irritatingly gamble-y, but an okay enough skill. This was because I believed the game meant that if the first shot hit, the follow-up shot would automatically hit too. That would be a gamble, but good.

The actual mechanics, though, are that it's Rapid Fire But Worse. Particularly frustrating is that it's on the class with the worst Aim growth, when it's behavior is more punishing the worse your Aim is. That's just... terrible. If you're going to use Chain Shot, it's vitally important to get a good Scope on your Grenadier's cannon, maybe even get an Aim PCS on them too.

Chain Shot is tolerably decent as a means to open up an Overwatch ambush, particularly for doubling up on Shredding a heavy target like Sectopods or Andromedons before the rest of the squad gets their shots in, but mostly it's pretty underwhelming. It is at least the case that the follow-up shot benefits from Holo Targeting, but this is somewhat cold comfort given that ideally you arrange for the first shot to be guaranteed to hit anyway, since it missing makes the following shot's accuracy moot.


Major
+1 Aim
+1 HP
+5 Hack
+4-13 Will

Salvo
Firing a grenade or using a Heavy Weapon as the first action doesn't end the soldier's turn.

Bullet Swarm, but for explosives! Which just like with Quickdraw Salvo isn't a ridiculously, brokenly good choice like Bullet Swarm was. Though unlike Quickdraw, Salvo tends to be more pure gain, so it's much more clearly a very good skill, albeit in longer missions it suffers from the fact that you can benefit from Salvo at most 4 times in a mission.

I actually tend to treat/level my Grenadiers as a mix of explosives-focused and shooting-focused, and Salvo is part of why. After all, it lets me launch a grenade and still fire in a turn. As it's unusual to want to launch more than one grenade in a turn, and grenades are a limited resource you shouldn't use too aggressively anyway... Salvo tends to work out as 'fire a grenade or Heavy Weapon, then fire the cannon' by default. So might as well assume my Grenadier is going to be doing a decent amount of shooting, just as a lesser priority than lobbing explosives.

Even for more cannon-focused builds, I still tend to prefer to take Salvo at this level simply because you're going to be carrying a grenade regardless (If only the one in the grenade-only slot) and Salvo turns certain hard decision situations into easy decisions. Where I might normally be torn as to whether to launch my Acid Bomb at a Sectopod or shoot at it because I want it Holo Targeted in addition to Shredded... Salvo lets me do both, even if I have only the one Grenadier for some reason. Problem solved.

Hail of Bullets
Expends 3 ammo, but is guaranteed to hit the target. Cannot crit. 5 turn cooldown.

Note that attacks that are guaranteed to hit are also impossible for a Graze to apply to. Against enemies with Dodge, that makes Hail of Bullets that little bit better.

Hail of Bullets is an excellent clutch skill, letting you force a kill on a target you might otherwise be forced to leave its death to the RNG, or use up one of your limited supply of explosives to ensure the kill on, either of which is less than ideal.

A shooty Grenadier is always ammo-hungry, but Hail of Bullets in particular makes it a necessity to have an Expanded Magazine and/or Autoloader attached to their cannon, since Hail of Bullets is something you break out at unexpected moments; it's not something you open an Overwatch ambush with or the like.

XCOM 2 isn't very aggressive about enemy Defense, so Hail of Bullets isn't quite as useful as you might expect if you're coming from the previous game. In particular, there's no enemy equivalent to the Muton Elite in terms of high innate Defense while still being able to use Cover. Hail of Bullets can absolutely justify using it, particularly since the Grenadier is your default source of gun-based Shred and so you can easily be in a situation where you need to have your Grenadier hit the target to Shred it or else you won't be able to kill it that turn... but I tend to struggle to justify actually selecting Hail of Bullets over Salvo, as Hail of Bullets is surprisingly niche. You really only want to be using it when either it's essential the Grenadier's attack lands or when you can't get a decent hit chance on anything, and that latter part is harmed by how explosives-focused the Grenadier is: if you can't hit anything with your cannon, you should probably be lobbing a grenade or firing your Heavy Weapon. And with Salvo, you can do that and immediately follow up with a shot, very possibly having given yourself a decent hit chance on something. (Because the explosive vaporized its Cover)

It's unfortunate, because I really like the idea of Hail of Bullets, but it's positioned to be difficult to justify taking it.

The inability to crit is, fortunately, not terribly important, since Grenadiers have little incentive to use Laser Sights or Talon Rounds. Usually crit chance is only being derived from flanking, and if you have a flank you usually don't want to use Hail of Bullets anyway!


Colonel
+1 Aim
+1 HP
+1 Strength
+4-13 Will

Final stats
Aim: 75
HP: 10
Hack: 20

Note that Aim score. The maximum Aim bonus you can get from being in a target's face with a Cannon is +20. That means a Grenadier can only get a fully reliable shot by either taking high ground while getting somewhat close to a 0-Defense target standing in the open, or with assistance from Scopes, a Perception PCS, etc. This is one reason why it's generally better to rely on their explosives specialization, as explosives are always fully reliable, unlike firing the Cannon.

If you're a big fan of Chain Shot, you basically should either assume Holo Targeting assistance and/or make a point of boosting your Grenadier's Aim, whether through Scopes or a Perception PCS. A Colonel firing on a target in the open needs +40 Aim to hit 100% accuracy with Chain Shot; if you don't want to be terrain-dependent, that means a Superior Scope plus a Superior Perception PCS that rolled high on its Aim boost and is boosted by Integrated Warfare, just to reliably hit targets standing in the open that have no innate Defense.

If you're fine with giving them light armor for the Grapple and planning on using Chain Shot from high ground, just a Superior Scope handles the job if you're firing on a target in the open, one with no innate Defense. Still might want to plan around Holo Targeting, though, so you have more leeway.

Saturation Fire
Fires at every unit, friend or foe alike, in a cone-shaped radius. Terrain objects within the cone also have a 33% chance apiece of being destroyed. Uses 3 ammo. 5 turn cooldown.

Yes, this is a way to apply Holo Targeting en mass. And potentially Shred en mass, which can be nice late in the game when enemies having at least 1 Armor is very common.

Note that Saturation Fire, unlike Kill Zone, doesn't actually burn ammo on individual targets. If ten targets are in Saturation Fire's radius, all ten of them get shot at and the Grenadier still only burns three ammo.

Aside from that and the terrain destruction effect, Saturation Fire is essentially a series of standard shots. This is important because it means Saturation Fire is in the somewhat awkward position of being a skill that on the one hand is theoretically useful for clearing away Cover for other soldiers' benefit, but on the other hand is much more reliable as a mass-damage dealer if the Cover is already gone. (Among other points, Saturation Fire does not roll for terrain destruction before rolling for hit chance: getting lucky and wiping out a target's High Cover doesn't give the Saturation Fire shot against that target +40 to accuracy)

I personally tend to treat it primarily as a mass damage-dealer (Plus Shred and potentially Holo Targeting), in part because I usually have taken Salvo and so can wipe some Cover with an explosive before opening up with Saturation Fire. The other reason is that the terrain destruction chance is so low it's a really unreliable effect. For it to be reliably doing something useful, you need to be targeting on the order of 9 enemies who are all using Cover, which is insane when most missions only have 9-11 enemies on the entire map!

To be honest, Saturation Fire is a skill I really like the concept of, but whose mechanical details needed some work. Personally, I don't really get why it doesn't just force damage on every target: the cone behavior already restricts its ability to maximize its number of targets, it has friendly fire to make 'always hits' have a disadvantageous element, XCOM 2 is designed to keep its battles small enough that hitting multiple targets is inherently less amazing than it would be in some other tactics games I could name, and it's ammo-costly with a long cooldown so you can't just constantly abuse it. Nor would it displace Hail of Bullets. And conceptually, the justification for Hail of Bullets being an always-hit effect should logically make Saturation Fire also an always-hit effect. This would then have the side benefit of removing the somewhat contradictory aspect of the skill being ostensibly a Cover-demolishing skill that's discouraged from actually being used to demolish Cover.

Still, it's not actually garbage, just designed less-than-optimally. And it can be a decent opener for an Overwatch ambush, since a lot of its flaws die off in that situation, particularly if you skipped Salvo or are under intense time pressure and so can't justify waiting a turn to take advantage of Salvo. Or, of course, if you have two Grenadiers so the other one can handle Salvo duties.

Rupture
Expends 3 ammo, but is guaranteed to crit on a successful hit and the target permanently suffers from the Rupture status, which causes all following attacks to do an additional 3 damage per hit. 3 turn cooldown.

Interestingly, the config files refer to Rupture as 'bulletshred'. As I'll be talking about elsewhere, I have reason to suspect Shred was, at some point in development, not nearly so common a capability, and I suspect in turn that Rupture originally just removed Armor, with the current effect being a replacement introduced once its original effect was made redundant.

In any event, Rupture is ideally used against particularly hard targets. By which I primarily mean Sectopods, Gatekeepers, and Avatars, though Andromedons and Heavy Mecs can also be decent targets, particularly on the higher difficulties. Against softer targets, you're just wasting the Rupture bonus.

Note that Rupture's bonus damage doesn't care about the base damage of whatever it's benefiting. This means that, for example, having a Sharpshooter Quickdraw and then Fan Fire is dramatically more effective post-Rupture than having them fire their Sniper Rifle one whole time. (Armor can complicate this equation, mind, but you should be Shredding Armor as much as possible so it usually isn't important)

The forced-crit aspect of Rupture is a neat little bonus, but it's worth pointing out that crits in XCOM 2 aren't very strong. In the previous game, getting a crit with a Conventional weapon could be doubling your damage. In XCOM 2, the majority of weapons get 1 or 2 damage from a crit at low tech levels, and 3 or occasionally 4 at high tech levels, with a tiny handful of weapons getting 5 from a crit at the highest tech level. (Cannons, by the way, are not one of the weapons with high crit damage) This tends to work out to a 25-40% boost in damage, where in the prior game a 40% boost from a crit was at the low end of crit strength. As such, you shouldn't be eyeballing Rupture as a way to push an attack into being lethal unless you're just below killing the target. In conjunction with how damage is randomized, Rupture's forced crit is more a way to ensure a kill on an attack that could kill than a way to turn an attack into a kill that wouldn't normally be one.

It's worth pointing out that Rupture is unique, in that normally Grazes and crits are mutually exclusive: if you roll a crit, and then the target rolls its Dodge successfully, the crit will be overruled. Rupture's forced-crit doesn't get hit by this, allowing you to see a Grazed crit.

So, uh, don't think of Rupture as a reliable way to force a kill on a Dodge-capable enemy, because it isn't.

------------------------------------

As for the Guerrilla Tactics School skill...


Biggest Booms
Grenades launched by the Grenadier can now get critical hits. The specific numbers are a 20% chance of +2 damage.

A bizarre, unexpected point is that Biggest Booms allows Frost Bombs to crit and do 2 damage in spite of having no damage at all normally. I haven't specifically seen this apply to Smoke Grenades or Flashbangs, but it's possible it applies to them too. Or it's possible it's just an example of the DLC gear being less rigorously coded, which I know for a fact is true.

Regardless, Biggest Booms is a bit irritatingly unreliable but as it's a GTS skill this isn't terribly harmful to it. If it was a regular skill that was directly competing with some other skill, that would be terrible, and the other skill would have to be quite bad to justify taking Biggest Booms. Since there's really no reason to not drop some Supplies on Biggest Booms at some point, in actuality it's just one of the lower-priority GTS purchases. Buy it, and be pleasantly surprised when occasionally your grenades do a little bit more damage than expected.

Simple.

I'd personally have preferred something a bit more meaningful -maybe additional Shred on grenades?- as currently Biggest Booms is not only unreliable but tends to drop off in relevancy fairly rapidly. Since you have to get a Grenadier to Captain to even be able to buy Biggest Booms, this drop-off issue is particularly frustrating, as by the time you can get it it's already starting to suffer from this.

------------------------------------

The Grenadier is a massive design-level improvement over the Heavy, which is particularly surprising given it hasn't abandoned the core reason the Heavy was a bit incoherent -that the Heavy was patterned after the outcomes of a system that its own system didn't actually emulate. For that matter, it hasn't abandoned the thing where the Heavy was also trying to be a support piece -in fact, the Grenadier embraces that aspect, being much more about support by destroying terrain and whatnot than the Heavy ever was. Of course, that's the key difference, really: the Heavy wanted to be Big Guns and vaguely support, without really grasping how much blowing up Cover was supporting. The Grenadier is defined first and foremost by supporting with its explosives, and so sets itself apart from the Support-equivalent.

Speaking of, next time we wrap up the core classes with the Support-replacement.

See you then.