Has anyone played with the advanced classes?
I haven't even unlocked any class yet.
In fact I still don't know what I'm supposed to be doing to progress to boss fights / main missions. I assume you're supposed to research further down the seed tree to hit new milestones.
The strategic layer has a bit more to it than reviewers give it credit. Not only do you need to farm missions for requisition, if you keep avoiding the distant missions (as you push to complete 2 missions per bloom) those distant systems will accumulate bloom to the point you might have to issue an Exterminatus - and it looks like you only get 2 of those to deploy. I'm assuming this mechanism is intended to discourage lingering with Grand Master checkpoints to farm better gear / EXP instead of progressing the story.
Re servitors, what I found helped immensely with this is just making sure each bloom I finished 2 missions. That plus RNG resulted with more servitors than I can use up.
Has anyone played with the advanced classes?
There's advanced classes?!
Librarian, Paladin, Chaplain, and Flamer guy
I have a confession to make: I checked saves and it's only on standard difficulty. This game is hard! 
I figured out how to progress the main story - read the darn mission objective and complete the relevant seed research task! Perhaps I simply didn't pay enough attention during the cutscenes.
Also, yes, there's definitely a doom counter - if a sector hits critical bloom level and it isn't lowered on the final bloom warning then you hit one doom counter pip out of a total 5. 5 pips and it's game over.
Be mindful that sometimes rather than seeking to clear 2/3 of missions per bloom, it might make a better decision to de-escalate the bloom level on an afflicted sector; the higher the bloom, the tougher the opponents.
One saving grace however - if you save onboard, the bloom missions appear to be randomised thus you can either min-max the number of missions you can reach and/or avoid a doom counter pip etc. It also helps with the difficult trials (like 3 Knights only or no willpower allowed). 3 Knights is viable on low bloom levels (you only fight cultists and the odd World Eater) but is nigh on impossible at higher bloom levels (every pod is a trio of World Eaters).
So, very mild spoiler, the first big story mission is actually a two-parter, but your squad does replenish between the two at least.
And that's good, because holy hell was I not at all ready for that second part. DAAAAMMMMN. I was on the ragged edge within a couple turns and it just didn't let up. First time I really thought I would have to restart!
Okay, so I cleared the doom timer counter last night on one system. It was hard - every round the enemy spawned a smaller pod (of either 2 plague marines or one big unit) and you had to push up aggressively to get the Inquisitor into position to close the chaos gate.
If you find yourself in this position, a couple of tips:
- as you push up, you can set overwatch over the warp points so you can mow down the plague marines as they teleport in - this let me save a ton of consumables and health on the advance to the chaos gate
- once you are in visual range of the objective, use the teleport stratagem to close in on the daemon and your Inquisitor can use her 100% one-hit banish skill to kill the mini boss. Then your squad can wail away on the bloom plants before securing the perimeter to meet the constant reinforcements
The bloom missions are quite important in that sense - pods are much harder to clear at high bloom levels, yet you cannot reach 3 systems in one round of bloom, forcing you to choose between blitzing 2 missions or beelining to a distant system with higher bloom level.
With this in mind, low bloom level systems are safer to rotate your B team Knights for easier XP gain.
I just cleared that story mission. Definitely worth grinding levels on standard bloom missions before heading in to progress the story.
The MVP in my squad is definitely the Interceptor. Feed them kills and AP and they'll basically clear pods for you. If it weren't for the utility of extra servo skulls to harvest seeds stress free I'd drop the Apothecary for either a second Interceptor or Purgator.
Also don't neglect farming bloom seeds! They have a use beyond basic research consumption - they're consumed to upgrade equipment.
Running two Justicars, an Interceptor, and an Apothecary. For me, it's tempting to remove the Apothecary for another Justicar, but I like the backup healing and Apothecaries are pretty solid combatants and seed harvesters. Purgators seem kind of useless right now.
But, because of the Justicar/Honor the Chapter tactic, the Interceptors are far out leveling everyone else.
You'll get more mileage from Purgators with Honour the Chapter, too. Their Psychic Onslaught charge is really good for AOE wiping out weaker targets and/or peeling off armour so the rest of your team can finish things off. They also get more powerful once you unlock the Supporting Fire perk.
Also, I think recruits come with random perks?! My starting Interceptor is deathless (can never die but starts with -2WP).
Justicars are an interesting class. Strong early on, but later they become buff bots with versatility - basically something the Apocethary should have been.
Oh btw there is a level cap for your Knights - it's level 9 meaning you can fill in about 60% of the total skill tree.
In saying that, a level 9 Knight feels powerful so the level cap, at least to me, is not a major constraint and it encourages build diversity in the rest of your squad.
One dumb thing I only learned from YT is that Justicars in Terminator gear can wield a melee weapon and psycannon - giving far more tactical options for a class that might otherwise be relegated to buff bot status.
This game is fun. Like really fun simply mixing up the different classes and abilities / equipment to get broken levels of damage output.
I finally got around to levelling my Chaplain and a Purifier; and with one weapon for Chaplains, the class (and balance of the game) is utterly broken.
The Chaplain can activate Litanies, basically whole squad buffs which cost 1WP/turn per activation and likewise in upkeep. Most people run with the Litany of Hate (an execution yields up to 3AP per Knight so basically doubling your actions that turn per execution). Due to the Litany upkeep cost, it's usually impractical to activate multiple Litanies at the same time.
But this weapon I found provides ZERO Litany upkeep meaning once activated the Chaplain can run all the Litanies SIMULTANEOUSLY.
To give you an idea of how broken this is:
- Litany of Hate for extra AP
- Litany of Power for extra WP means you can buff to 100% chance to get 1WP each time a psy ability is activated so practically unlimited WP for even more stupid damage
- the other three Litanies for things like +45% ranged crit, +3 DMG per crit, or the weakest buff increasing resistance
Now, a Chaplain cannot possibly get all the Litanies maxed out due to the level cap. That said, running with practically unlimited WP and the AP-Execution buff is stupendously powerful especially paired up with Power Hammer Knights such as the PLD. A round might look like this:
Justicar tosses 3AP to the PLD doubling his AP for that round. PLD promptly charges in, uses two Force Strikes to stun just about any target, then anyone can execute that target and the whole squad gets 3AP all the while maintaining its pool of WP. Then a Purifier, with crit and the auto-load buff and extra ammo perks/wargear can get 4 shots X 18 damage AOE.
I didn't build my Chaplain with "optimal" skills as I didn't realise such a weapon could exist; but with a second Chaplain, I can spec deliberately to run 4-5 Litanies and who cares about everything else when you can break the action/special resource limitations.
This is way more fun than the 3 Justicars and 1 Interceptor build - PLD can tank and AOE attack, and Purifiers by nature are AOE attackers. The clean up much faster than super buffing an Interceptor.
Hmm, since I last posted the above message, it seems they patched the game, and now the Chaplain cannot maintain multiple Litanies simultaneously.
I also have to check more closely, but I think they balanced the AP gain from Executions using the Litany of Hate so that you can't give your whole team multiple turns worth of AP - I think there's a limit because despite having two Executions, a fellow Knight's AP pool for that turn never went above 4/3. Perhaps there's a workaround solution i.e. exhaust the fellow Knights' AP pool, Execute to top them up, rinse and repeat.
Now that I've got a roster of level capped units, I think I'm more than ready to tackle the story missions and finish the game, but it can be really hit and miss trying to get specific classes - I've been looking to build a composition of Justicar / Chaplain / Purifier or Paladin / Librarian to trivalise content with the Chaplain minimising WP consumption > a Librarian teleport for optimum positioning > Justicar feeding 3AP to the DPS > DPS AOE or Execution. But the rewards are just not offering me a Librarian and requisitioning new units is equally frustrating RNG.
Hmm, since I last posted the above message, it seems they patched the game, and now the Chaplain cannot maintain multiple Litanies simultaneously.
Yeah, there was a mysterious line in the patch notes "Closed some exploits that could be used to circumvent game mechanics." that was never further explained.
The patch only weakened the overwhelming power of the Execution-AP strat. I have to test more closely but I think you only get extra Execution-AP per Litany of Hate activation. Not really a major issue even with my nerfed team comp given the Gears Tactics style of refreshing action points on Execution plus buffing your Chaplain with stupendous levels of WP through gear means you can still chain Execution-AP to trivialise encounters. I had a Tier 3 Power Hammer from the start of the game (not sure how I got it, ie if it was one of those loot items they gave to Twitch streamers) with +4 Stun if warp charged. Paired with an Apocethary's Iron Arm biomancy, it yielded +6 stun/AP which stunned most things in 1-2 rounds.
I think they broke perhaps unintentionally though - the Chaplain's WP Litany no longer seems to function by granting a chance to gain 1 WP each time a Force Strike/Force Ability. I'll take a closer look next time I load the game up but it's possible they made it so it only works once/turn, or perhaps once per Chaplain's activation. Again, doesn't render my team comp unviable, just means I'll be more judicious in spending AP or pivot to Tier 3 Incense for +6WP.
One thing I do have to check is whether they broke my Interceptor - he has the melee crit +1AP passive/auto from talent and from gear, which resulted in AP GAIN merely from generating crits. He was mopping the floor as usual with Honour the Chapter but in a slightly constrained manner post-patch.
I am about 4 hours in and the game is beginning to open up.
Seeking some advice on research/strategems and what to focus on early on.
I have researched the first seed--I believe--and strategems are now available for research. Recommendations welcome! Does the research choices on the right advance the story and, if so, is that where I should initially focus?
Initial ship upgrade suggestions welcome too!
One bummer is not being able to change the difficulty of the game once started. I went with merciful and so far the game is indeed merciful.
Thank you,
Chad
I haven't booted it up in a while so my thoughts might be outdated if they patched it significantly.
Research does drive the story missions forward. I can't remember whether the UI marks it out but initially the research focuses on seed extraction and purification.
As for stratagems - on base difficulty I only used 2 - teleport the squad and the extra turn for 1 Knight.
Other things you'll want to do:
- earn lots of Requisition
- save before a Bloom spawn (a bit cheesy on the strategic layer but will help you while you learn the difficulty curve - try to beat 2 Bloom missions per Bloom spawn)
Thank you for the advice!
I think I missed something in the tutorial missions. Regarding seed carriers in a mission, am I supposed to extract seeds from them rather than kill them from afar?
I think I missed something in the tutorial missions. Regarding seed carriers in a mission, am I supposed to extract seeds from them rather than kill them from afar?
Yeah, there's 3 ways to extract seeds - (1) maps sometimes spawn with bloom seeds that can be extracted by any Knight (they'll look like an environmental object that can be interacted with); (2) critical hit with melee attack (hard to pull off unless your Knights have the corresponding skill that has 100% crit chance); (3) research the Apothecary's servo skull that has 100% chance to extract seeds and equip it on your Apothecary.
Just finished my Legendary run. Man, what an incredible game. Great pacing, never got boring, and every time I thought I had it figured out the game threw a new wrinkle at me. And the final fight ... oh man the final fight was so insanely epic. I was literally dancing around the room and throwing the horns.
I need to get back to this sometime. I got to the big demon boss encounter where the platforms are getting stomped/destroyed out from under you and that fight was just too darn frustrating to be fun.
Yeah, that one took me a couple of tries. It was clearly a gimmick fight, but it wasn't clear what I was supposed to do. The first time I checked to see if I could disrupt him, it wouldn't let me - the servo skull just wouldn't activate, and my first few shots from my Purgator didn't succeed. It wasn't until the 3rd try that I realized I actually could disrupt him, and it was easy going from there.
Good news is that you can skip that one if you want.
Nah, I'm stubborn: boss is there, I have to beat boss. The end. 
I was having trouble trying to disrupt him too and finally set it aside for a while, but it's one of my favorite games this year and I will definitely be going back to it.
Yeah the first challenging battle for me was facing off against one of the seed reaper bosses. Big fleshy dude that sprouted blooms.
Haven't gotten back to this yet to finish the playthrough but still feel like I'd gotten my bang for buck 30 or so hours in.
tl;dr Dreadnought 5th party member for specific missions (not generally) and new Techmarine class to spawn servitors or repair the Dreadnought. Not that exciting but the DLC offers a second ship to allow you to slow down the Seed blooms by sending auto-resolve squads, effectively slowing down the doom counter at a strategic level.
The game is really good for its price point so I may get the DLC to support the studio.
I snagged the DLC yesterday and started a new campaign with it. The dreadnought is definitely fun ( though I've only gotten to use it once) and the techmarine class is definitely interesting. The play style of it is *very* different from the others; those servitors are squishy, but they do really useful things. I'm thinking once I get the "advanced" classes, I'll probably run with a justicar, techmarine, librarian, and either apothecary or chaplain in the fourth slot.
So far the only servitor type you have to pay resources for that I've tried with my techmarine is the heavy bolter one, and that's just absurd. It's the ultimate overwatch unit, and has pounded several enemy units into a stun state allowing my melee knights to get a bunch of executions, which is a rhythm you almost seem to need now; maps seem to be much more heavily-populated with bad guys, making executions, AoE attacks, and chain attacks like the interceptor's teleport strike very important.
Probably my favorite piece of DLC since War of the Chosen for XCOM 2.
If you're playing at Ruthless and above, be aware that Provoke was nerfed (they mentioned it in the patch notes but called it Taunt). I'm playing through now to see if there is anything to replace it - most likely it's going to complicate the combat sequence significantly.
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