XCOM 2 Class Analysis: Ranger

The Ranger is the successor to the Assault class, being a class focused on bypassing enemy Cover chiefly by charging into their face. The details of how they go about that are quite different, and much more competently-designed.

They also benefit significantly from XCOM 2 making several contextual changes so that charging out is less consistently punished in the form of activating a new pod. Maps are often designed to be more clearly compartmentalized such that you can clearly say that your Ranger can't activate any new pods by charging ahead because there's solid walls in all relevant directions, plus several other things I'll be covering as they come up. This reduction in the trend toward being punished for advancing does a lot to make the Ranger a better implementation of the idea behind the Assault, since their core dynamic is no longer antithetical to core gameplay with insufficient accommodation for that fact.

Like the Assault, they're also a little more flexible than other classes, able to function as a more stand-offish line troop if you like instead of being stuck closing in. Indeed, an argument can be made that Rangers are generally better off equipping a Rifle over a Shotgun because they've always got an actual close-in weapon, though it's not an argument I'd personally stand by.

Speaking of their other weapon, where the Sharpshooter had the Sniper Rifle as their primary weapon and the Pistol as their secondary, the Ranger can take Rifles or Shotguns for their primary weapon and their secondary weapon is the Sword. The Rifle and Shotgun follow the same basic profile as the prior game: the Rifle is your general-purpose ranged weapon used by Rookies, gaining Aim for getting in close with no particular disadvantage, while the Shotgun is your short range weapon that suffers when trying to fight at a greater distance and is more focused on crits. Notably, in XCOM 2 these weapons share the advantage of having extended ammo compared to the usual maximum: the default for primary weapons is typically 3 ammo, but Rifles and Shotguns get 4 shots before needing a reload.

The Sword, meanwhile, is a dedicated melee weapon, which is all kinds of interesting. Let's hop into that in more detail, as it's actually the basis of the Ranger's Squaddie-level skill.


Squaddie
+3 Aim
+1 HP
+4-13 Will

Slash
The Ranger may perform a move-and-melee attack using their melee weapon.

Slash is the spiritual inheritor of Run & Gun's will.

Yes, I know the Ranger can still get Run And Gun later. I don't care.

The primary purpose of Run & Gun was to allow the Assault to advance extremely far in pursuit of flanks, which is to say in pursuit of bypassing the defensive advantages provided by Cover. Slash works out to basically the same thing (Aside from some finicky details I'll be getting into don't worry), but with no cooldown and no need to worry about ammo, as Slash can be performed as part of a movement action, where melee attackers in the prior game had to move, hope they ended up next to an enemy, and then attack as a whole separate action.

Melee attacks do now have to perform accuracy rolls, though, and don't get any contextual Aim boosts; there's no equivalent to height advantage on shooting for melee attacks, such as gaining Aim for charging from further away, while guns still get bonus Aim for getting close and for being on high ground. This makes Slash slightly less amazing than you might first expect, but it's still an excellent tool for getting at targets in High Cover since it just plain doesn't care about Cover and gets to Dash to get into position where gunfire is normally restricted to a half-move followed by shooting.

Notably, while you can't Slash through High Cover (ie you can't Slash an enemy from the other side of a solid wall), you can Slash directly through Low Cover -and the Cover Defense bonus doesn't apply in that case. Nice!

Slash is excellent as a defining skill, and a lot of fun to boot. It's impressive how it fills the same basic role as Run & Gun on the Assault while being vastly different and more flavorful.

On a different note, if you've got Alien Hunters you can plug the Hunter's Axes into the Ranger's melee weapon slot. Hence why I mostly say 'their melee weapon' instead of 'their Sword'. The game itself normally uses 'sword' in UI elements, but a nice bit of attention to detail is that a Ranger currently equipped with the Hunter's Axes will have the tooltips switch terminology appropriately!

Anyway, one flaw to keep in mind with Slash is that it does pay attention to innate Defense on enemies. It's specifically Cover that it ignores, not any other source of Defense. This is a minor point in most cases, particularly as the single highest-Defense enemy of the entire game is a bad idea to melee for unrelated reasons, but it does mean that Archons are generally a poor target for Slashing. Slash, like all melee attacks, is also never considered to be a flanking attack, getting no crit bonus for flanks and not benefiting from skills that trigger on flanking attacks; as the Guerrilla Training Center lets you buy a flank-boosting skill for Rangers, this is a noticeable flaw, particularly past the early game.

On a completely different note, since Slash is a move-and-attack behavior, the Ranger is your consistent best option for doing things like picking up loot in the middle of combat, performing an objective action in the middle of a fight, etc; it doesn't matter where their first move puts them if you're planning on Slashing something afterward, where other classes need to be sure they're stopping somewhere safe to stop. This is less true if you've got Shen's Last Gift, since SPARKs don't use Cover at all, but SPARKs are also expensive and slow to acquire. They also have ability-based reasons to not necessarily want to burn a move that way, and if they're going to take a regular shot they do care about positioning due to flanking etc. So Rangers are still generally your first choice for 'move somewhere not-safe for some reason, and then attack'.


Corporal
+3 Aim
+1 HP
+5 Hack
+4-13 Will

In the Ranger's case, their two lanes are 'Scout' and 'Assault'. This, uh, doesn't really describe how they actually work out, to be honest; the 'Scout' lane is unfortunately fairly incoherent, though I'll get into that more later, while the 'Assault' lane is only distantly connected to the prior game's Assault. It's really just the melee specialty lane, aside one notable exception.

The whole thing is a bit weird, given that Assaults were the second-most-clearly-defined class in their own game.

Phantom
This soldier starts every mission in Concealment, and the rest of the squad being revealed does not break this soldier's Concealment.

Note that a side effect of taking Phantom is that they will not participate in Overwatch ambushes unless you have them initiate the Overwatch ambush. This makes it one of the only skills in the entire game that has a negative component attached to it.

So hey let's talk about Concealment now that we have a skill directly interacting with it.

Concealment is, first and foremost, an anti-frustration/anti-tedium mechanic. Remember how in the previous game it was technically optimal to inch your squad forward, constantly Overwatching, until you activated your first pod? Remember how boring and time-wasting that was? Yeah, that's not what you do in... most XCOM 2 missions. There's still a handful where that is, strictly speaking, optimal play, but in the vast majority of missions your squad starts in Concealment, and Concealment almost completely eliminates this problem!

Specifically, while your squad is concealed, enemy pods will not activate simply because one of your soldiers saw them for a split second. Instead, they will patrol around more or less exactly as they do when you can't see them (There's a notable exception I'll be getting to much later, but it's not actually important most of the time), until such time as something happens that breaks Concealment, at which point you're back to the previous game's rules about pod activation. What breaks Concealment?

1: Virtually any form of offensive action. Frag Grenade tossed? Concealment lost, even if no enemies were harmed or even around to witness the explosion. They're not deaf, you know. Take a shot with one soldier? Entire squad, bar Phantoms, is revealed. Even most non-damaging offensive actions, such as Flashbang grenades, count.

2: Having a soldier interact with a mission objective object. Set an X4 charge? Concealment broken. KO a VIP? Concealment broken. Successfully hack an ADVENT terminal? Concealment broken. Concealment isn't a signal this game is any kind of 'stealth game'. This isn't Thief, But As A Tactics Game. You're supposed to fight things. That's how your soldiers get experience, this isn't hard to figure out.

3: Failing a hack. We'll get into hacks later, but it doesn't matter what kind of hack you failed. Conversely, succeeding in a hack won't break Concealment, even if you'd expect it to. (Except for hacking actual enemies; that always breaks Concealment)

4: Kicking open doors and smashing through glass windows while moving. Again, your enemies aren't deaf. The only caveat to this is that Gremlins and BITs will sometimes smash through a glass window in the process of following their Specialist/SPARK, and this does not break Concealment. This can occasionally create situations where your squad can break a window and pile through it without breaking Concealment, but not very often, and it's not very practical to deliberately create these situations. Also note that stopping next to a door and opening it will never break Concealment, even if you might expect it to. (Such as because the door opens very loudly)

5: Moving a soldier such that their movement path is at any point inside an enemy's 'detection radius'. (Enemies have a radius of tiles marked with exclamation points that is normally around 2/3rds of normal line of sight, which is their detection radius) This includes moving to stop on a detection tile, passing through a detection tile even if it's just the one while on your way elsewhere, and it also includes leaving a detection tile, even if they're at the very edge of the detection radius and don't move into a new detection tile.

6: Lastly, if an enemy unit's movement causes it to be flanking a soldier that is also inside that enemy's detection radius, Concealment is immediately lost. This particular case is special; in every other case, you're getting your turn before the enemy. (Unless you stupidly have your very last soldier break Concealment, anyway) In this particular case, the pod that performed the flank has each individual have a chance of getting a free shot in on whoever the pod detect-flanked. So don't risk enemies flanking your soldiers, even if they're Concealed! Note, however, that if they're flanking but nobody is in their detection radius, they won't notice your squad. This is more important in War of the Chosen, but even in the base game it means you don't need to be completely paranoid about flanks in general.

All this means you're encouraged to do full half-move advances, and in fact burning both action points on full moves is perfectly good play so long as you don't do it in the form of your first soldier Dashing maximum distance. So long as you're not insanely reckless, you're not wasting an opportunity to catch an activating pod in Overwatch or risking a pod activating while you're still trying to get your Sharpshooter into position or anything like that. This drastically speeds up the initial, incredibly tedious hunt for an enemy pod. Just be careful with troops who have boosted Mobility; the tuning of the game is pretty good about base-Mobility troops never stumbling into a detection tile as part of a half-move, but eg a Ranger in the Serpentsuit and equipped with the Speed PCS can easily walk forward their full half-move distance and whoops break Concealment on a pod you had no idea existed directly ahead.

Also, a distinction worth noting that's particularly relevant to Phantom is that Concealment comes in two broad forms; squad-wide, and personal. Squad-wide Concealment is the default start-of-mission state, and it has each individual soldier's Concealment state tied up in all the others; ie if one soldier smashes through a glass window, then all your non-Phantoms lose their Concealment. Individual Concealment, however, is individual; if you have two Phantoms running around after the squad-wide Concealment has broken, and Phantom A smashes through a glass window, Phantom A will lose their Concealment but Phantom B will be fine until they personally do something that breaks Concealment. This is particularly important to keep in mind for the second-to-last mission of the game, as it's possible to get your entire squad Concealed without actually giving them squad-wide Concealment, and if you don't recognize the difference this can go very bad places for you, but it can also crop up if eg you're having fun with a gimmick run made entirely of Rangers.

The final wrinkle, which I've alluded to a few times already, is that Concealment allows for 'Overwatch ambushes'. What's an Overwatch ambush? Well, basically, you put people into Overwatch while Concealed, and then you deliberately break Concealment. What happens at that point is everyone in Overwatch starts taking reaction shots at enemies as per normal Overwatch rules insofar as 'enemy moves, enemy gets shot at' but minus the normal Overwatch disadvantages. Specifically, Overwatch ambush shots are operating at full accuracy and are totally allowed to crit.

Since your enemies are invariably out in the open, this is tremendously lethal, same as would happen if you instead took a bunch of regular shots on enemies just sitting around out in the open for no good reason.

A non-obvious wrinkle to all this is a change in the behavior of inactive enemy pods. In the previous game, enemies automatically took advantage of any Cover they happened to be adjacent to, even if their pod was currently inactive. The pod members didn't deliberately move to Cover, but if the pod's movement meant a Muton was adjacent to Full Cover protecting it from your Sniper? They were protected. In XCOM 2, meanwhile, inactive pods do not take Cover. There's an ADVENT Trooper standing right next to a pillar that would normally slash 40 accuracy from your attacks? Don't care, he's inactive and has no protection. (Though note that if you initiate a Concealment ambush without killing the Trooper, they'll be benefiting from the Cover past the initial shot)

Now, when I said most missions start you in Concealment, it's worth clarifying that the vast majority of exceptions... are still missions you're not going to do the slow-and-careful-advancement thing from the previous game. The devs can get away with not giving you Concealment because there's a hard timer that will kill your entire squad if they don't make it to the evac point first, or there's a soft timer in the form of Aliens killing civilians so you need to hurry up and stop them, or something. There's still a handful of missions where you're incentivized to do the painfully slow forward crawl, but they're very rare, and an argument can be made that in these particular cases it actually fits the feel of the mission and so is a worthwhile inconvenience for enhancing the experiential end.

This, incidentally, is the (dubious) value of Phantom forcing the Ranger to start in Concealment even in missions where that's not normally true. Having a Concealed soldier to scout for the rest of the squad allows you to move quickly with minimal risk of pulling more pods than you can cope with, or accidentally pulling a pod once most of your soldiers are out of action points, or whatever. This can be particularly useful in the handful of missions where there's no actual timer and your squad doesn't start in Concealment.

Unfortunately, the Ranger has access to another skill in just a couple of levels that has those benefits without the problem of making them more of a pain to have participate in Overwatch ambushes. This would be fine, but... while there are ways for a soldier to contribute while staying Concealed, the options are limited, oriented to later in the game, and mostly very limited in how often a given soldier can perform them. So just keeping a Ranger in Concealment indefinitely is cutting off around 1/6th of your firepower, and no, a Concealed soldier isn't really worth that sacrifice, sorry.

This also all gets even worse if you have more than one Phantom on your team. With one Phantom, you can just have them open the ambush if you need maximum participation. With two Phantoms, you're just plain out of luck.

As such, I'd generally recommend skipping Phantom in favor of...

Blademaster
Melee attacks have +10 Aim and +2 Damage.

In conjunction with natural Aim gains, Blademaster puts you at an 81% chance to hit at this level... except not really, because Swords and the Hunter's Axe actually have a +20 to Aim that for some reason isn't listed when looking at Swords on the Avenger. As such, acquiring Blademaster instantly makes Slashes fully reliable against enemies that lack innate Defense.

Still, an Aim PCS is worth considering to push that number up, particularly if you play on higher difficulties, where innate Defense is a lot more widespread. A Major will have 90 innate Aim and so be able, with Blademaster, to reliably hit enemies who have 10 Defense, which is the most common value on Legendary, but for lower-level Rangers that Aim PCS will prevent you from being luck-screwed.

Archons and Gatekeepers are the main exceptions worth noting at that point, and they have so much innate Defense that even a Superior Aim PCS on top of all that won't let you hit 100% accuracy, assuming Legendary.

Anyway, Blademaster itself is a nice general pick that makes meleeing things a lot more effective. +2 damage is literally equivalent to going up a weapon tier on a primary weapon; a Conventional Sword backed by Blademaster hits as hard as a Mag Rifle!

This is particularly important if you're going to take Reaper at Colonel, but even if you aren't... well, Phantom is terrible. Take Blademaster. You won't regret it.


Sergeant
+3 Aim
+1 HP
+4-13 Will

Shadowstrike
If the soldier's position is unknown to the enemy before initiating an attack, their attacks have +25 to Aim and crit chance.

The in-game description talks about Concealment in specific, and it is true that Shadowstrike will always function when attacking from Concealment, but even when not Concealed Shadowstrike will trigger if the Ranger starts the attack not visible to the enemy. As they don't have access to Squadsight, this means it will basically never apply to a ranged attack outside Concealment, since XCOM 2's line of sight rules actually function in a consistent manner so that I've personally never seen unequal line-of-sight/fire situations happening, but melee attacks can be initiated from unseen positions just fine. In fact, if you start the turn in sight of enemies, burn a move to lose sight on all of them, and then initiate a melee attack from that new position? It triggers Shadowstrike.

As such, I actually very much consider Shadowstrike the default pick for melee Rangers, due to how broad of a boost it is, in spite of being placed under the Scout lane, where every explicitly-melee-supporting skill is under the Assault lane.

Indeed, an issue with using Shadowstrike to support shooting is that it does not apply to Overwatch shots in an Overwatch ambush. Thus, two or more Shadowstrike Rangers can only get one Shadowstrike shot in if you aren't using Phantom or Conceal to support Shadowstrike.

Incidentally, Shadowstrike's boost is enough that a Colonel Blademaster Ranger can 100% reliably land a melee hit on an Archon. Nice!

Shadowstep
Reaction fire does not activate against this soldier.

This is a fairly obvious melee specialty effect, since melee attacks need movement to get attacks in, but I tend to prefer Shadowstrike for melee Rangers. It's pretty uncommon for enemies to enter Overwatch, and it's almost always a better solution to have someone do damage to them (Which ends Overwatch instantly in XCOM 2) than to rely on Shadowstep for protection. You want all your enemies dead as fast as possible anyway, so you'd generally be attacking them regardless, and the two most common enemies in the game to enter Overwatch (ADVENT Heavy Mecs, ADVENT Turrets of all tiers) aren't particularly good melee targets so it's not like Shadowstep is something you take to let your Ranger break their Overwatch with a melee attack.

In conjunction with how Shadowstrike can be activated by melee over and over throughout a mission, vs only up to twice with gunplay, I really feel like the Ranger's Sergeant skills are flat-out in the wrong lanes. If I'm building a gunplay Ranger, Shadowstrike makes no sense whereas Shadowstep still makes sense for a Shotgun Ranger since they have a strong preference for keeping moving in battle. It's a bit less so than with melee Rangers, but not by much.


Lieutenant
+2 Aim
+1 HP
+1 Strength
+4-13 Will

Conceal
Once per mission, the soldier may enter Concealment at will. This does not cost an action.

I get the idea behind Conceal, but it's pretty difficult to actually care. Using a Ranger as a forward scout after your initial Overwatch ambush has passed sounds like a neat niche, but it's fairly impractical for anything other than Squadsight shenanigans, due to the previously-mentioned 'you're sacrificing at least a sixth of your firepower' issue. And even with trying to abuse Squadsight it's entirely possible for an enemy's blind flailing to end up breaking your Ranger's Concealment, possibly getting them killed that very turn, even if you're fairly cautious.

The main point in Conceal's favor is that it gives a lot of the utility of Phantom but without having to play around 'refuses to participate in Overwatch ambushes'. For melee Rangers, Conceal has the further advantage that it does not compete with a melee-boosting skill, where Phantom does. As such, if you're wanting to use a Ranger as a forward scout, particularly if you want to specifically build them as a melee Ranger, it's generally smarter to take Blademaster over Phantom and then grab Conceal here.

Also worth pointing out is that this is the last 'Scout' lane skill that in any way connects up to the, you know, scout concept. I feel like the developers ran out of ideas for scouting skills and gave up without bothering to abandon the concept entirely, which is a bit disappointing.

On the plus side, War of the Chosen has another go at the concept of a forward scouting class, and does it quite competently. On the minus side, the Ranger doesn't get re-tooled to accommodate the fact that one of their ostensible niches has been taken away from them. It's a bit frustrating. Ah well. Still better than the previous game's class design.

While we're on the topic of Concealment, a bit of UI design that the game never explains and is easily overlooked -as in, it took me over 800 hours of play to notice it- is that if a soldier is Concealed and you're considering using an action that will break Concealment, part of the UI will include a red icon indicating the action will break Concealment. It takes a moment to actually pop in, which is part of why it's not obvious.

Unfortunately, it clearly didn't get much attention, as while the icon being present always correlates to 'this action will break Concealment', the icon not being present is no guarantee that the action won't break Concealment. It's thus less useful for learning the rules of Concealment-breaking than one might hope.

Run And Gun
Immediately provides an additional action point, which cannot be spent on movement. 3 turn cooldown.

Note that Run And Gun's inability to be spent on movement includes that you can't spend it on melee attacks.

As such, even though I consider the 'Assault' lane to be the melee specialty lane, Run And Gun is the big exception.

Mind, I still tend to take Run And Run on my melee Rangers simply because it's got a lot of versatile utility; you can Run And Gun to use an Item, hack an objective, or any number of things. It's vastly more versatile than Run & Gun from the previous game being restricted to shooting, Rapid Firing, or Overwatching. Conceal is also worth considering, but I don't find it very useful to try to use Concealed Rangers as forward scouts personally, so... Run And Gun.

There is one caveat to the 'can't melee with Run And Gun' point: you can Slash a target if it happens to be adjacent to you. This is a largely-irrelevant bit of minutia since it makes no sense to Run And Gun and then Slash given you could've just Slashed without the Run And Gun, but it does have one edge case use: that a Ranger with the Hunter's Axe might want to move adjacent to one target for a Slash and Throw Axe at another target that position gives a flank on. Run And Gun makes that possible.


Captain
+2 Aim
+5 Hack
+4-13 Will

Implacable
Once per turn, landing a kill during your turn provides a single action point. This action point can only be spent on movement.

Inverse Run And Gun, kinda!

No, this does not mean Implacable's action point can be spent on a melee attack. It's just movement, no abilities of any kind, not even if they could be argued as movement abilities. You're not even allowed to use a Grapple if your armor has one, even though it's an action that doesn't use an action point in the first place.

Nonetheless, Implacable is an excellent choice for melee builds. It won't let you chain attacks, but it will let you hit targets in the open without being trapped in the open, strike down enemies who aren't adjacent to High Cover and then retreat to High Cover anyway, duck around a corner where no enemy can see you to set up for Shadowstrike triggering, advance toward your objective with greater-than-Dash speed while still actually contributing damage, and just generally open up your Ranger's ability to be where you need them, when you need them.

It's not quite as dramatic in the hands of a Ranger who's designed to shoot things, but a free move is still very useful, allowing you to do things that should be somewhat risky (eg aggressively moving to flank a target) and make them not risky. (Kill target, retreat to safer ground) The charge-the-objective utility is also arguably greater on a shooting Ranger than a melee Ranger, since a shooting Ranger is roughly doubling their movement speed with an Implacable trigger (Ignoring Run And Gun, but it's a cooldown ability) where a melee Ranger is only increasing it by roughly 50%.

Also, a mechanical wrinkle that may surprise you is that Implacable can actually trigger on Overwatch kills, so long as they occur during your own turn. For a variety of reasons you won't see this happen very often, but it can be an unexpected benefit in an Overwatch ambush.

Bladestorm
Enemies moving adjacent to the Ranger provoke melee 'reaction fire', as do enemies that perform any kind of action adjacent to the Ranger. Bladestorm can only activate once per turn on a given enemy, however.

I say 'reaction fire' because Bladestorm strikes function exactly as regular Overwatch attacks: they have a reduced chance to hit (This is easy to see in action by getting a Ranger to have over 100% accurate melee attacks and then letting Bladestorm trigger repeatedly on enemies with no Defense; it'll miss periodically anyway) and no possibility of a crit. This also extends to anti-Overwatch effects protecting against it, though in the base game the primary way this is liable to crop is if one of your Rangers gets Mind Controlled and you have another Ranger, so Shadowstep can end up preventing Bladestorm from triggering. Similarly, a Ranger will not Bladestorm targets that pass adjacent to them if they're still Concealed. (Which admittedly is an extreme edge case that will almost never crop up since enemies passing directly adjacent almost always means they reveal the unit they're next to)

The game itself only alludes to movement and melee attacks provoking Bladestorm, but as far as I'm aware it functions on, essentially, Covering Fire Overwatch rules, just as a melee attack instead of gunfire, as I've seen it activate on a huge variety of 'enemy attempted to use a special ability' cases. The only thing I know off the top of my head does bypass it is teleportation, which, you know, bypasses even Covering Fire Overwatch, consistent with what I'm saying.

This extremely generous behavior means that Slashing a target that will go down to two Slashes will quite frequently lead to the target's death even if no one else follows up. The Overwatch accuracy penalty means you shouldn't count on it in do-or-die situations (That is, where the target being allowed to do anything is unacceptably dangerous), but it does mean you can drop a Ranger on a low-priority target and be reasonably confident the target will end up dead with no further effort on your part.

Anyway, one of the stronger uses of Bladestorm is catching enemy reinforcements. Just drop your Ranger on top of the flare, and watch as probably every enemy catches a Slash. Even if you miss... whatever, it's not like any risk was involved. Speaking of risk, even though there are enemies that explode on death... none of them are valid airdrop reinforcements, so this is 100% safe anyway. Also, this is notably stronger than using Overwatch to try to catch reinforcements, since Overwatch only fires once, where Bladestorm will trigger once per enemy.

Also note that Bladestorm goes before enemy actions, not after. An enemy adjacent to your Ranger tries to attack the Ranger? Very possibly the enemy dies before actually taking their action!

Overall, this level is genuinely a tough one for melee builds. Bladestorm is amazing all-around, providing defensive utility against (most) melee enemies, opening up (Somewhat risky) plays for Slashing enemies that you don't expect to be killed during your turn, providing a way to punish reinforcements, etc, but Implacable is a tremendous boon to the Ranger's offensive game, letting them strike targets in the open (eg enemy melee) without being trapped in the open afterward, drop into High Cover even though there is none adjacent to their target, vanish around corners to set up for the Shadowstrike bonus, and of course turn a killstrike into insane ground-covering ability in missions that's important. Neither one is clearly better than the other, and they're both fantastic skills.

For gunning-oriented Rangers, Implacable is the obvious choice. Much simpler.


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

Deep Cover
If the soldier did not attack in a turn, they automatically Hunker Down when their team's turn ends.

Weird mechanical caveat: going into Overwatch does not count as attacking for the purposes of Deep Cover. This means that when participating in an Overwatch ambush, a Deep Cover Ranger is quite safe...

... and this mechanical interaction means you're actually mildly punished for taking the game's implicit advice and just taking every Scout lane skill on your not-a-melee-specialist Ranger. After all, Deep Cover conflicts with Phantom. A non-Phantom Deep Cover Ranger is extra-good in an Overwatch ambush! A Phantom Deep Cover Ranger is unable to actually perform a Deep Cover Overwatch ambush action.

This is one reason why I don't like taking Phantom. If I'm going to go heavy into the Scout lane, Phantom doesn't do anything useful Conceal doesn't except in missions where the squad doesn't normally start out in Concealment and it weakens Deep Cover.  That's just a terrible deal.

That said, I rarely take Deep Cover, primarily because it competes with...

Untouchable
If the soldier lands a kill, during the next enemy turn the first time the soldier should have taken damage from enemy action they won't, even if it's an action that is normally incapable of missing such as a grenade.

Note that Untouchable very specifically protects your soldier during the enemy's turn. This isn't an important distinction in most situations, but when it comes to exploding enemies? Yeah, don't think Untouchable is license to Slash them to death.

Also note that while Untouchable will protect a Ranger from the direct damage of an explosion, that doesn't necessarily mean they don't end up injured. If it wrecks the terrain underneath them and they fall, they're taking fall damage. This can crop up fairly readily since Rangers are a good choice for slapping Spider/Wraith/Serpent Suits on and those all have a built-in Grapple, encouraging sending them up high.

And yes, XCOM 2 actually has floors destructible. It's fantastic.

Regardless, Untouchable is pretty great. It strictly applies regardless of whether the Ranger is a melee build or more gunplay-oriented, but melee Rangers appreciate the ability to eg fearlessly end their turn in the open because there's one enemy left after their target dies and Untouchable ensures they'll survive. It also synergizes naturally with the Colonel-tier melee choice of Reaper, since that heavily encourages having the Ranger land kill strikes.

It's so great, Deep Cover is almost impossible to justify taking.

Oops.


Colonel
+1 Aim
+1 HP
+1 Strength
+5 Hack
+4-13 Will

Final stats
Aim: 80
HP: 10
Hack: 20

Rapid Fire
Fires two shots with the soldier's primary weapon, both of which occur at -15 to Aim.

Weird, unintuitive mechanics point: if you break squad-wide Concealment with Rapid Fire, and the target is adjacent to Cover that is between them and the attacking Ranger, the first shot from Rapid Fire won't have to worry about that Cover but the second shot will. As such, if you're considering breaking Concealment with Rapid Fire you should actually pay attention to whether your target is adjacent to Cover or not. (Assuming they use Cover, of course)

I don't really get Rapid Fire. It feels very much like it got thrown in purely because Rapid Fire was an Assault skill in the previous game, rather than because it fits to the Ranger in any meaningful way. It's not like it's a bad skill exactly, but it doesn't mesh well with the rest of the Scout lane or anything.

I'd be more okay with it if the Scout lane had been coherently constructed as a gunplay lane, contrasting with the Assault lane being the melee specialist lane, but as-is it's just... huh?

The fact that it competes with Reaper is what really kills it for me, though, as Reaper is a really interesting and uniquely useful skill, whereas Rapid Fire... all four core classes have at least one way to fire their gun multiple times in a turn. Rapid Fire isn't the most underwhelming of the bunch, in fact it's probably the best of the bunch by a small amount, but my point is Rapid Fire doesn't offer unique utility to justify taking it in particular. If you want multiple-shooting from a single soldier, there's a bunch of options. If you want Reaper's ability to clean up a bunch of weakened enemies... the Sharpshooter's Faceoff is basically the only other (good) option, and it doesn't bypass Cover, and distributes damage differently, so Faceoff can't actually displace Reaper.

Speaking of Reaper...

Reaper
An activated skill which consumes no action points. After activation, the Ranger's very next Slash in the turn is guaranteed to hit. Furthermore, if that Slash kills its target, the Ranger is granted an action point. From there, Slash's accuracy behavior returns to normal, but each Slash in the turn that kills its target will still grant the Ranger an action point. Conversely, each such successful kill (Including the first one) lowers the Ranger's Slash damage by 1 for the rest of that turn. 4 turn cooldown.

Worth pointing out that the first Slash being unable to miss also means it's unable to Graze. This makes it good to use the first strike against targets with Dodge and some innate Defense, such as higher-difficulty ADVENT Officers and Stun Lancers. High-Defense targets are obviously the next-best target, which in practice mostly just means Archons because no you don't want to be kill-Slashing a Gatekeeper since it'll explode in your face.

Note also that the action point provided by a Reaper kill has no weird limitations to it. Slashes that are kill-strikes are obviously the best way to use it, but it's generally best to have the final action in a turn be firing the Ranger's gun, or possibly using an Item, rather than making a final, heavily-weakened Slash. This somewhat ironically means Reaper makes it more important to get your Ranger's gun quality up; prior to this point, a melee-oriented Ranger may genuinely spend most battles never firing a shot. A Reaper Ranger is virtually guaranteed to actually use their gun.

Reaper is a fun, fantastic skill. Notably, it can be a lifesaver in situations where you accidentally pulled two pods at once and your squad shouldn't have the firepower to wipe them all out; soften them up, and then have your Ranger go to town with Reaper. Problem solved! It can also be a huge lifesaver in missions with timers by having your Ranger reap people so your squad isn't slowed down by the need to finish off a pod.

Once you get a handle on what it's best used for it can be a little disappointing, particularly if you have the Alien Hunters DLC, as the Nest goes out of its way to create a situation where you'll use Reaper to kill a whole lot of enemies in a turn and this will basically never happen in regular play. Reaper is, after all, best used as a safety net, something you never use unless things go badly wrong and you need to pull your squad out of a situation they shouldn't be able to cleanly handle. That's a bit more boring of a use than what you likely imagined when first looking at it.

Still, it's a great skill, very fun and distinctive and well-balanced, so I'm fine with it.

On a different note, one concern you might have is that Reaper encourages having a guaranteed Colonel stealing all the kills and thus denying all the experience to your other troops. This was, after all, a notable problem with In The Zone Snipers in the previous game.

Fortunately, experience in XCOM 2 has a very elegant solution to the many, many experience problems of the prior game. In short: kill experience 'leaks' to all your soldiers in a mission. It's a partial leak, mind, so one soldier hogging the kills does slow down experience gain on your other soldiers, but it's not nearly as harshly true as in the previous game.

The specific mechanics are a bit less straightforward if you look 'under the hood'.

Let's start by laying out 'base' experience requirements:

Squaddie: 1 on every difficulty
Corporal: 5/6/6/8
Sergeant: 12/12/12/18
Lieutenant: 24/24/24/40
Captain: 38/38/42/70
Major: 57/57/60/110
Colonel: 81/81/85/175

The numbers being for Rookie/Regular/Commander/Legendary difficulty. Notice that Regular barely changes things compared to Rookie, while Commander only mildly slows down access to the last three ranks, while Legendary delays access to all non-Squaddie ranks by an increasing amount the higher the rank is -even proportionately, to be clear. Specifically, when comparing against Commander: 25% longer to reach Corporal, 50% longer to reach Sergeant, about 66% longer to reach Lieutenant, about 70% longer to reach Captain, almost 90% longer to reach Major, and more than 100% longer to reach Colonel.

Anyway, these numbers are, with a few caveats, the number of kills the soldier would have to personally perform to reach that rank if they were soloing maps for some reason. ie 1 kill takes anyone to Squaddie, but your Squaddie then needs 5, 6, or 8 kills to reach Corporal depending on your difficulty, and so on up to a breathtaking 175 kills for Legendary Colonels.

Behind the scenes, though, each class has an invisible multiplier -which can be found in the config files labeled as 'killassist'- and which effects two things;

1: It multiplies how much experience the soldier needs to reach a given rank.

2: It multiplies how much experience a kill they personally made is worth.

Before explaining that further, here's the multipliers for each class:

Ranger: 4

Sharpshooter: 5

Grenadier: 5

Specialist: 3

SPARK: 4

Reaper: 4

Skirmisher: 4

Templar: 4

Psi Operative: N/A, though they have a 'psi credit' value that doesn't do anything

So, for example, a Ranger fresh out of the Guerrilla Tactics School will, on Commander difficulty, not be 5 experience points away from Corporal, but rather will be 20 experience points away from reaching Corporal, just with each kill they personally land advancing them 4 points at a time.

This is obviously a bit convoluted, but makes a bit more sense in the context of the 'kill assist' mechanic, which as I summarized earlier is an experience 'leak' mechanic. More precisely, anytime any enemy dies anywhere on the map, this is credited to all your soldiers as a single experience point. Thus, a Ranger who lands one kill in a mission where 8 enemies die will gain a total of 12 experience -4 from their personal kill, 8 from the 'kill assist' experience leak mechanic.

The final result is that Specialists get more value out of the 'kill assist' mechanic (Because they require less experience to level, and the 'leak' mechanic is 'flat'), while Sharpshooters and Grenadiers get less. This is pretty clearly premised under an expectation that Specialists will get fewer kills on average -which is reasonable and usually accurate- while Sharpshooters and Grenadiers will hog kills more than Rangers, which is... stranger.

Some implications;

First, 'kill assist' experience are completely internal to the game's own tracking, and are not reflected in a soldier's displayed kill count. Your Specialist who has never hurt a soul won't mysteriously have their listed kill-count rise in lockstep with their current rank. (This incidentally makes it a pain for your average player to identify how many kills it takes to get to a given level...)

Second, note that kills are the only thing that matters for experience in XCOM 2. The previous game had a 'mission participation' chunk of experience passed out to everyone as a bonus on top of kill-derived experience and furthermore had Covert Operatives get an additional amount of bonus experience just for having been a Covert Operative, but XCOM 2 has no such thing, with 'leaked' experience being its (much more elegant) replacement. If you can easily grab some 'free' kills, such as by taking potshots at enemies before evacuating in hopes that an enemy dies, you always should, because kills is the entirety of how your soldiers get better. (Aside Covert Ops in War of the Chosen, but that's for another time)

Third, kill value is flat. In the previous game, not every enemy was worth the same amount of experience, or indeed was worth the same amount of experience to a given soldier. (Higher-end enemies tended to pass out bonus experience when killed by lower-ranking soldiers) In XCOM 2, a Sectopod isn't worth any more experience than a Sectoid. Note that this means that in missions where killing every enemy on the map isn't necessary it's worth considering not getting into fights with higher-end enemies. Especially since such maps are generally cases where you don't loot corpses. Why risk getting soldiers hurt or even killed trying to kill a Sectopod if you can just sneak around it?

Final point on experience: the funny thing is that there's an entire massive config file filled with an even more complicated experience system... which has one line basically saying 'ignore all this'. It's pretty trivial to turn it on if you want to give it a try, but personally I think the system they went with is much better.

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As with the Sharpshooter, the Ranger has a Guerrilla Tactics School skill.


Hunter's Instincts
Ranger flanking shots gain +3 damage, while Slash gains +15 to crit chance.

Reminder that melee attacks are not considered to be flanking attacks, ever. Also note that enemies that do not take Cover can never be flanked, making Hunter's Instincts worthless against them, as far as shooting goes.

While most of the Ranger's mechanics heavily encourage meleeing, Hunter's Instincts is a fairly ridiculous bias toward shooting things. +3 damage is more than you get out of a new weapon tier. In conjunction with the fact that Shotguns get massive damage boosts out of crits, which flanks make liable to happen (Including the Shotgun crit bonus, you're going to have at least a 50% chance to crit anytime you flank, and you can easily raise this by eg attaching a Laser Sight), Rangers tend to be drastically more lethal taking flanking shots than meleeing.

This is a big point in favor of Run And Gun. Without Run And Gun, you'll still tend to end up Slashing a fair amount just because of not being able to get a flank. With Run And Gun, basically anytime you can Slash something you can pull off a Run And Gun flank, with its cooldown being the only meaningfully limiting factor.

To be honest, Hunter's Instincts is kind of a terribly-designed, overly-powerful skill. I'm really glad War of the Chosen makes it a lot weaker, as while the basic idea is a cool one that's in line with the general Ranger thing of bypassing Cover the sheer amount of damage it adds warps the game badly. (I'll get to War of the Chosen affecting the Ranger more in a later post, though)

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The Ranger still has design problems, such as how awkward it is that they have an only halfway-complete 'I specialize in Concealment' lane, or how Hunter's Instincts is so gun-biased that the obvious intent for Rangers to lean heavy on melee capability to stand out doesn't work out so well in practice, but overall they're much more coherently put together than the Assault ever was.

I personally also have a soft spot for the fact that XCOM 2 gave the player proper melee, which was something I'd never really expected to happen, certainly not as a strongly standard capability. Mecs can melee things in Enemy Within, but they're a special super-class that's weird all-around. Rangers are arguably your most normal human soldier in XCOM 2, and yet they have standard access to good melee!

The curious thing is that the Ranger is probably the most poorly put-together of the core classes, even though the Assault was the least broken of the previous game's core classes. This is partly a commentary on how much better-designed the other classes are, but only partly. It's an odd reversal.

Anyway, next time we move on to the Heavy's spiritual successor: the Grenadier.

See you then.