Just For Fun: Resistance SPARKs

The last couple weeks of my life have been a mess that has left me with little energy for working on the site, and partially as a result the next FTL post needs far too much work to have any chance of being completed today. So instead we bounce back to XCOM 2 with another Just For Fun post.

Also, I've finally settled on a solution to these Just For Fun posts, giving them their own dedicated index separate from the main XCOM 2 analysis. I'll probably keep breaking them out as 'filler' posts like this, but they won't just get lost in the abyss of the archives with no obvious way to easily find them.

But on with the post itself.

As is standard with my Just For Fun testing runs, this was done on Commander difficulty with Aim Assist manually disabled via ini editing.

This run did two things: first of all, it was focused on SPARKs as much as possible, and secondly to act as filler while I waited for my all-SPARK team to come properly online I gave a mod that rebalances the Resistance classes a whirl.

Said mod additionally demanded the Community Highlander to function, and will be focused on first.

The mod itself claims that Reapers are 'one gigantic cheesefest', Skirmishers aren't worth using over normal soldiers, and Templar have nothing of relevance in their skill tree aside Reaper and Bladestorm, and that its goal is to change these facts.

The actual design decisions made are intensely baffling in the context of these claims.

First of all, the Reapers: the only element of Reapers that could be considered 'cheese' is Silent Killer allowing them to freely kill enemies without any danger to themselves. In the base game, this is held back by Silent Killer being a mid-level skill, Vektor Rifles having poor regular damage and difficulty achieving a 100% crit rate, and Reapers having limited tools to soften up enemies from Shadow without risking revealing themselves.

So naturally the mod makes Silent Killer Squaddie-level, makes higher-tier Vektor Rifles more powerful, gives them more crit-boosting, partial Dodge negation, and makes it so their chance of breaking Shadow grows more slowly and caps at a 50% chance instead of at an 80% chance, meaning that a Reaper can actually semi-reliably make non-lethal shots without having to essentially assume this will break Shadow.

Huh?

In practice, the only reason I didn't find a Reaper able to literally solo maps due to these changes was that Silent Killer's code was broken in this run and never, ever worked.

The mod seems to instead have taken issue with the Reaper's explosives access, making Remote Start not double the radius (Thus taking it from situational but powerful to ludicrously niche, demanding enemies actually take Cover against the explosive, while still making it kill the vast majority of enemies into the endgame should they conveniently lean up against an explosive), and breaking up Shrapnel into two different Claymore improvements. I personally rarely use Claymore in my runs, and making it weaker didn't exactly encourage me to experiment with if this new Claymore was a better and more interesting dynamic.

Additionally the mod made Reapers have less severely reduced detection radii from enemies, and inexplicably modified the Vektor Rifle into a weapon with a minor range penalty up close and a modest range advantage at a distance. Also notable is that the mod makes Squadsight an intrinsic skill instead of a bonus skill -but still makes it cost 25 points. Clearly, the modder wanted you to snipe with your Reapers instead of flanking, but these changes don't actually encourage doing so, they just sort of randomly punish you for playing the smart way because you can't hit 100% accuracy on flanking shots as readily. I ended up equipping a Scope on my Reaper early and still played the Reaper basically as I always did, just with slightly less aggressive of flanks -the real change to the way I used them was, I must reiterate, Silent Killer not working.

I honestly have no idea why the modder thought any of this would make Reapers less 'cheesy', and in practice it comes across like their issue isn't so much that Reapers are overpowered as it is that they're not the snipers the game presents them as. I can't really recommend this set of changes.

The one thing I do unambiguously like is that Target Definition was replaced with Tracking, which is a skill that makes it so the Reaper can detect enemies through solid walls and even detects them a little past normal vision range. This is actually much better at cementing the Reaper's role as a scout than Target Definition is, not to mention less conceptually ridiculous (I can buy that the Reaper is detecting enemies through walls by, for example, listening for them, whereas Target Definition is just kind of... magical) and resolves the single biggest problem with increasing detection radii against the Reaper -that the 1-tile detection radius is, in unmodded War of the Chosen, what lets the Reaper scout around corners and over cliffs without being guaranteed to be detected if something is mildly nearby. Indeed, Tracking is actually a better solution to this issue, since you don't have to worry about your Reaper climbing a ladder only to discover an enemy is in that exact place where they'll immediately detect a Reaper but aren't visible from below.

Now if only it wasn't attached to all these other, much worse changes.

The Skirmisher is somehow worse off. They have several unambiguous buffs, such as Manual Override being moved earlier and reducing cooldowns by 2 turns instead of 1 turn, Reflex being allowed to trigger multiple times per battle, and Battlelord having a cooldown instead of a charge, but they also inexplicably lose access to Waylay, have Whiplash pushed until later in the skill tree, and have replaced Total Combat -which is niche but not complete garbage- with two different skills that are somehow both worse than it, among other baffling, problematic changes.

Particularly frustrating is how the mod provides them with multiple crit boosters. Yes, a skill that provides more crit for getting in the target's face might seem a natural choice for a class that excels at getting in close, but Bullpups get very little damage out of crits and the mod hasn't changed that. The mod also replaces Lightning Reflexes access with 'Moving Target', which is +30 Defense and +50 Dodge against reaction fire -ie 100% inferior to Lightning Reflexes unless there's more than one Overwatching enemy, which there almost never is.

The one thing I kind of like out of these changes is the introduction of 'Fury', an upgrade to Wrath that makes a successful Wrath grant an additional action point that can only be spent on movement. That's actually pretty great for pushing the Skirmisher toward their ostensible niche of hit and run play, and also makes it a bit more even with Reckoning, as well as making it possible to Wrath a target that will leave you out of Cover and then duck into safety without specifically needing the Grapple at the ready or the like. Even then, I think it would've been better for this to be a built-in modification to Wrath itself, rather than a boost you have to burn AP on.

The mod's goal was to make the Skirmisher worth using over a regular soldier, and my own experience was it succeeded in the opposite: making it so I'd rather just use a regular soldier instead, because they'll be more useful.

The Templar changes are... almost right. The mod removes most of the incentives to hold on to your Focus, removing the Mobility and Rend damage boosts, and in principle this means you have more incentive to turn to Volt and whatnot, especially since the mod also makes it so that Rend always generates Focus, no need to focus on kills. Unfortunately, the mod also kept Parry and even made it innate and kept Deflect and Reflect, which means the safe thing to do by far remains to Rend and then Parry in most situations and also higher-level Templar are still incentivized to hold onto their Focus if they think there's any possibility of being shot at in the future.

I really don't get why the mod didn't get rid of Parry, since it's a huge anchor point in why Rend is very much the thing to do every turn unless you just can't. Getting rid of most incentives to hold onto Focus is certainly the right direction, but the only extent to which I think the mod could be said to succeed in its goals is that Reaper and Bladestorm are just straight-up not available to Templar.

Still, it's at least in the right direction overall, which is better than the other two classes...


Anyway, SPARKs.

First of all, I used Starting SPARK to get a starting SPARK, giving me a jumpstart on SPARK access without having to go to the Lost Towers or the like so this SPARK-heavy run can actually run SPARKs from the beginning and also be consistent with other runs. (ie other runs have Integrated DLC on, and this is more consistent with that)

I actually tried to arrange for all-SPARKs from the get-go, but while there's a mod for controlling your Gatecrasher squad the result when I input SPARKs for everyone's class was to give me hideous cyborg monstrosities that used a mixture of actual SPARK behavior -such as being equipped with the SPARK starting weapon- and normal human soldier behavior, such as using Cover. Using Starting SPARK and then beelining for the Proving Grounds and building SPARKs first thing was the best I could come up with using existing mods, and my current computer doesn't have the space for me to be messing around with modding the game myself.

Anyway, I also used Trainable SPARKs, because honestly the way SPARKs got left out of so many mechanics in War of the Chosen is just confusing. Additionally, I tried out Pugilist SPARKs, which required Custom SPARK class support; to my disappointment, Trainable SPARKs didn't affect the Pugilists. Oh well, it worked out.

A couple of technical notes: first of all, Starting SPARKs does work with Custom SPARKs, but custom SPARKs makes the basic SPARK 'class' have no abilities whatsoever. Thus, if you boot up a run with Custom SPARKs and Starting SPARK, you'll get a weird SPARK that doesn't even have Overdrive or Poison immunity or the like. You'll be able to promote it into a proper class after the mission, though. Alternatively, you can just start the run without Custom SPARK support turned on, get through Gatecrasher, save, and restart XCOM 2 with Custom SPARK on.

The second technical note is that Custom SPARK class support does not play nice with new promotion screen by default. If you have both on, attempting to promote your SPARK into a proper class will just result in the game kicking you back to the soldier screen. It's just fine once they're a proper class, so you can feel free to enable new promotion screen by default once you've built all the SPARKs you want to build in such a run, though.

The initial portion of the run wasn't particularly important or memorable, beyond establishing right away some of the issues with the Resistance class design/technical issues with them just plain not working. Having a starting SPARK was cool and all, but to my surprise they didn't actually stand out that much; maybe if enemies had gotten more of a chance to attack it would've mattered, but as was... well, there was no Armor to Shred, for one. Having a super-early Rocket Launcher was slightly overpowered since it could wipe out pods entirely, but only if I was okay with risking destroying loot -which I largely wasn't, since I wanted as many Elerium Cores as possible to get SPARKs up as fast as possible.

Once I got the Proving Ground up -which was weird all by itself, as at the time I did this run my default build order was Resistance Ring->Guerrilla Tactics School->Training Center, putting off the Proving Ground until I have expanded power reserves somehow or another- I made my first SPARK Pugilist. Once I saw the damage they could do on a continuous basis, I had some concerns, but...

... to my surprise, the SPARK Pugilist is actually really well-tuned.

They're genuinely overpowered if you get them early in the game where seven damage on demand is a straight-up kill on most things on Commander difficulty, but once I was transitioning into magnetics/Plated Armor having their then-nine damage was good, but didn't actually stand out as much as you might expect, particularly since the Pugilist punches couldn't crit. Among other points, the inability to Overdrive meant they weren't as able to pull me out of a bad situation as well -they were a strong, stable contributor in general play, but didn't excel when things were going badly the way a regular SPARK does. They were instead primarily fun and distinctive, and not even particularly risking pushing Rangers out of their niche; if you want to try out a balanced variant mod class and have Shen's Last Gift, the Pugilist is distinctive, fun, and around the general power level of an unmodded SPARK without having a pile of dud skills.

My regular SPARKs having access to the Training Center and benefiting from Cannon Breakthroughs, as well as having an Ammo slot, did a surprising amount to bring them roughly on par or even a little ahead of regular soldiers in War of the Chosen. At one point I was using Helix Rail-Cannons and musing to myself that they felt weirdly powerful, and then it abruptly occurred to me that I had a Cannon Breakthrough and +1 damage from Ammo, and therefore my Helix Rail-Cannons were hitting exactly as hard as beam-tier weapons from unmodded SPARKs. Similarly, Overdrive was actually a really good fit to Dragon Rounds and Venom Rounds, letting me spread around ailments in a bad situation to try to get it more under control. It was also really nice when I also got Modular Cannons and it also applied to SPARK guns, finally letting me diversify my SPARK Weapon Attachment setups a bit.

Also surprising as I transitioned increasingly heavily to SPARKs was how little trouble I was having as a result. I've said before that SPARKs aren't designed to encourage using them en mass, in part by virtue of only being able to repair one of them at a time, but in practice it was so rare for enemies to even get a chance to fire on my SPARKs that it wasn't a big deal -admittedly helped in part by one of them getting Untouchable as a bonus skill, and the Pugilists just plain having it as an option at Paladin.

... and then I went to hit the Archon King's facility and it highlighted how SPARKs are, weirdly enough, really antithetical to Alien Ruler design. Only one SPARK got knocked to the brink of death, the rest of them only lightly wounded by Devastate, but that one fight meant I suddenly had nearly two months of repairs. Indeed, even though my SPARKs took nearly no damage in following missions (When HP was lost, it was stuff like 'literally 1 HP, which then adds 4 days of repairs'), I still ended up going into the final mission with two SPARKs roughly half-dead; I worked around it by burning piles of Ability Points on my three regular SPARKs, among other points buying Repair on all three of them, but yikes.

This also made it a lot more long-term stressful to risk my troops taking injuries. I think that could actually be interesting if a mod embraced it as a mechanic and built around it, or something, but in context it made the latter portion of the campaign stressful in an unfun way.

Still, it was overall enjoyable and informative. Seeing how SPARKs could be much more competitive with relatively minor tweaks, in particular, was good to know.