Land mines and stealth sniper shot are busted

[Celery]

These things really trivialise the game with how stupidly overpowered they are. In combination you can navigate the entire map without ever triggering a unnecessary battle.

You spam land mines as you progress through the map behind you and at spawn points so you never get caught from behind by random roamers and you use snipe to take out enemies ahead.

Main problems are that when you stealth snipe an enemy group they don't react at all, so you can snipe them all 1 by 1. If you snipe 1 person in a group of 6 the other 5 should aggro the squad.

Land mines should either despawn after 120 seconds, cause aggro on the squad or be capped at 4 or something.

[Celery]

Originally posted by Force_Dragon:

The OP must not be on nightmare, because land mines only slow roamers from catching up to you and unless you have 2-3 snipers in your team to get the right angle you will be spotted. Both mines and silent sniper do have issues but making the game too easy is not one of them at the highest setting.

1. Bad assumption which is an attempt at invalidating my argument based on skill, yikes.

2. Contradiction saying they have issues but don't.

Why even bother to post this garbage?


Land mines and sniper are meta. You can clear entire levels taking only mandatory fights by spamming them. I'm sure this isn't the intended experience.

Not to mention that there are a lot of times in the game where you can pre-load as many mines as you want at a defense point to triviliase it.

[wei270]

mines shouldn't have enough cd especially on the first play though where you don't know where to go. it is powerful yes but it is only of the only way to play the game on nightmare unless you are getting chain waved by the aline

[Raylus]

From that point of view all the skills are "overpowered", they all do a lot of damage and are balanced by the time they take to take effect and the area they occupy.

If you are skilled you can reduce the number of enemies with the Sniper and the mines, but you will not always be able to maintain stealth and the command points do not regenerate fast enough to match the respawn of the enemies.

[Celery]

Originally posted by Raylus:

From that point of view all the skills are "overpowered", they all do a lot of damage and are balanced by the time they take to take effect and the area they occupy.

If you are skilled you can reduce the number of enemies with the Sniper and the mines, but you will not always be able to maintain stealth and the command points do not regenerate fast enough to match the respawn of the enemies.

Have you even played the game? Skills are nowhere NEAR equal in power.

Also don't tell Raylus about Tactical Analysis, Retribution and spamming Sergeants with upgraded radios.

[Mathis]

It's a singleplayer game, not a multiplayer game. Why does it matter if snipers and landmines are OP? You're not being forced to use the loadout anyway so what's there to gripe about? The best perk of playing singleplayer games is the feeling of being OP when fighting the environment so it doesn't really make sense to nerf the fun out of a solo game when these two things are completely optional to bring in your loadout. The command point limit is enough stop the spam anyway especially in the later missions where aliens spawns so fast that you're gonna ran out of command points most of the time. I think you've never done the last half of the missions if you think landmines and snipers needs a nerf.

Besides, your suggestions about the two would just lead it to not being used by anyone especially on higher difficulties. You're not balancing the two, you're pretty much nerfing it into the grave since it's no longer useable. I would rather bring the grenade launcher and rpg if landmines and snipers would just auto aggro anything near it if used.

[Orcling]

In the later missions i run around with 2 Sergeants, sometimes 3 and it's absolutely impossible to make more landmines/sniper shots than the enemy spawns in. Not to mention it's nearly impossible to snipe with the really tight areas- I feel like Celery hasn't played past the first few missions, all of which are really big and open. And to say that the other skills are useless is beyond retarded.
The flamethrower saved my squad so many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ times in a pinch (very situational though) You can also stack firewalls on top of eachother and instakill anything that goes inside.
The grenade launcher IS a weapon skill of your starter weapon, it's very useful at the start, but later on it's just something you use to stun bosses or groups of enemies.
The RPG is your weapon of choice for killing bosses, it.. pretty much kills them instantly, as it should. It's also very good at killing groups of sleeping Aliens though.
The Plasma beam is great for tight corridors, not so useful in big open spaces.

For non-weapon skills, my favourite would be Reprimand, it becomes essential to keep stress manageable in later missions where stealth isn't much of an option.
The little drone of the Tecker is great for waking up sleepers and luring them into landmines.


If there is ONE thing i consider overpowered it's the motion sensor. Just sit in a corner at the start of a mission and fill a room with motion sensors, and you can keep the entire enemy scout force in a corner of the map for the whole mission.

[sin2099]

well, if you're complaining it's "easy" on "easy" then that's an odd complaint,no? And like the others said if you spam mines and sniper on the harder difficulties/nightmare they do little to help? So what's the issue? also, it's a single player game. So who's got a gun to your head that forced you to use snipers and landmines to begin with? It simply opens a matter of preference to the individual gamer. Feel it's too easy cause you're spamming mines? then don't? Want to spam but more of a challenge? Then try spamming in nightmare and see if you feel the same?

[StoriesBonesTell]

You dont even need those lol. Sentry guns + MOtion tracker ping does the same thing

[Mr Furious]

Stop your whining about trivial balance issues

[Celery]

Originally posted by sin2099:

well, if you're complaining it's "easy" on "easy" then that's an odd complaint,no? And like the others said if you spam mines and sniper on the harder difficulties/nightmare they do little to help? So what's the issue? also, it's a single player game. So who's got a gun to your head that forced you to use snipers and landmines to begin with? It simply opens a matter of preference to the individual gamer. Feel it's too easy cause you're spamming mines? then don't? Want to spam but more of a challenge? Then try spamming in nightmare and see if you feel the same?

Read the thread before replying, this has already been addressed.

[MassImpact124]

If you think its OP, then play at a harder difficulty. End of discussion.

[Brad]

I think the land mine and silenced sniper are good but not quite a "cheese" level exploit. Mines can be handy at keeping a few critters at bay but they spawn faster than your command points recover. And the sniping is great in many encounters but there are so many close range encounters that he's almost useless in alot of areas, not to mention that race to position your squad so that the sniper can line up his shot is a pain sometimes.

I went through a run laying mines and sniping everything and it worked well but I spent a ton of time waiting around for my command points to regenerate, which was not so good for when I did get into trouble and had to spend tools to generate more command points.

It feels a little overpowered on normal difficulty, So I have a feeling it probably feels pretty balanced on harder difficulties

[Celery]

Originally posted by Orcling:

In the later missions i run around with 2 Sergeants, sometimes 3 and it's absolutely impossible to make more landmines/sniper shots than the enemy spawns in. Not to mention it's nearly impossible to snipe with the really tight areas- I feel like Celery hasn't played past the first few missions, all of which are really big and open. And to say that the other skills are useless is beyond retarded.
The flamethrower saved my squad so many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ times in a pinch (very situational though) You can also stack firewalls on top of eachother and instakill anything that goes inside.
The grenade launcher IS a weapon skill of your starter weapon, it's very useful at the start, but later on it's just something you use to stun bosses or groups of enemies.
The RPG is your weapon of choice for killing bosses, it.. pretty much kills them instantly, as it should. It's also very good at killing groups of sleeping Aliens though.
The Plasma beam is great for tight corridors, not so useful in big open spaces.

For non-weapon skills, my favourite would be Reprimand, it becomes essential to keep stress manageable in later missions where stealth isn't much of an option.
The little drone of the Tecker is great for waking up sleepers and luring them into landmines.


If there is ONE thing i consider overpowered it's the motion sensor. Just sit in a corner at the start of a mission and fill a room with motion sensors, and you can keep the entire enemy scout force in a corner of the map for the whole mission.

I've beaten the game whereas you haven't even cleared mission 7 after the doom clock starts. Bit of a weird response.

Also a spoiler for you, because you know you're only half way through, but several later missions are considerably easier than ones before it.

Lastly the amount of random patrols is determined by infestation level, for you to be THAT overwhelmed by mission 6 you must be absolutely thrashing that "next day" button.