Special weapon and common ability tier list

[happyscrub]

S - Tier: Flame thrower. Not only good damage, but you can use it to manipulate the Alien A.I.

Motion Tracker: OP. Can make every alien across an entire map move to a point. Can stack a ton of them and then just blitz the map while all the aliens stay away.

A - Tier: Rocket destroys boss and it can be almost used like the grenade in hitting things at range. Especially against humans in cover.

Shotgun because it's the only thing you can practically do in close range

Suppressive fire: A must have in defensive situations. And often better to do this than anything else if you know more than 1 alien is coming and you can keep them in the cone. The most cost effective ability, potentially

B - Sniper. It's good at helping you stealth, but sometimes too many aliens running around that you don't want to eat up your command points just stealthing then not have them when a fight starts. Sometimes it's better to just trigger a hunt to cull the map. Not much worth it in a fight.

Plasma beam. Can do a lot of damage to bosses. Can kill a lot of aliens lined up. But tricky to get the most out of it.

C - Grenade. So many better options to hit something from range. Useful for staggering bosses, but better to just rocket launch them to death.

Mines: Good for wasting command points if you are at the max, but so are motion trackers. Can kill an alien that MAY give you issues on the map, but sniper WILL kill an alien that is giving you an issue on the map.

Edit - D tier - Flares, because I completely forgot about them!! LOL

[Narrowmind]

The grenade can be upgraded to slow a wave, too, like the suppressive fire. It should be A tier as well. It's way more valuable than the shotgun, because it's easier to time, in my opinion.

[happyscrub]

Originally posted by Ratlegion:

The grenade can be upgraded to slow a wave, too, like the suppressive fire. It should be A tier as well. It's way more valuable than the shotgun, because it's easier to time, in my opinion.

But it's instant and small radius. Surpressive fire is forever until you turn it off

[LukanGamer]

Shotgun imo is overall worse then Suppressive, except in emergency or when hordes are massive. I mean aliens absolutely love dodging it, but if you got like 5 directly on your team meleeing you then shotgun can certainly save your life or help you get too 1 them aliens dragging 1 your marines.

[happyscrub]

Originally posted by LukanGamer:

Shotgun imo is overall worse then Suppressive, except in emergency or when hordes are massive. I mean aliens absolutely love dodging it, but if you got like 5 directly on your team meleeing you then shotgun can certainly save your life or help you get too 1 them aliens dragging 1 your marines.

I put shotgun so high because you can't do anything else. There's a minimum range on just about all the other attacks. I'm not sure if you can even lay a mine while being attacked. You can't grenade or rocket launch.

[Narrowmind]

You definitely can grenade if you know the door they're coming from. You just need a direction. Rocket is more strict, but is more powerful. Shotgun doesn't even come close, really.

[happyscrub]

Originally posted by Ratlegion:

You definitely can grenade if you know the door they're coming from. You just need a direction. Rocket is more strict, but is more powerful. Shotgun doesn't even come close, really.

You can do anything if you plan ahead and everything falls in place. But if you do not have a shotgun and some aliens somehow are able to get on top of you, unexpectingly, you can't do anything but tank the hits.

[Narrowmind]

The range of the shotgun is also horribad. The shotgun is what you save for close encounters. Yeah, a machete is a better weapon than your fist, but if they get that close, you're often already dead.

[happyscrub]

Originally posted by Ratlegion:

The range of the shotgun is also horribad. The shotgun is what you save for close encounters. Yeah, a machete is a better weapon than your fist, but if they get that close, you're often already dead.

But if I had a choice between M16 + AK-47 vs M16 + machete. I'll take the combo with the machete. If you won't pick that also, you missing the point

[Narrowmind]

Also, the shotgun is a special weapon. You're far more likely to have grenade launchers than you are to have a shotgun. That basically means more than one person has access to the grenades. You already put the rocket and flamethrower up there. I doubt you'll skip the sniper to have another shotgun. How many shotguns are you trying to bring on a mission, anyway?

[happyscrub]

I played without the sniper until I got a 5th man.

[SoulHunterWirriam]

I did nightmare a while ago and I disagree with some parts of your list.

Grenade with slow upgrade is imo S tier. Used it all game long because it can stack with suppressive fire to slow the aliens to a crawl, it's instant and denies the xenos the ability to deal damage to your marines.

Suppressive fire should be S tier because not only is it a good CC tool but also a good DPS tool because it doubles your fire rate. You need to use flares to mitigate the acc debuff though.

Mine is high B or low A tier because it's excellent in CQC maps. You can set traps with the motion tracker, you can kill off patrols, weld a door and set a mine to eliminate a hive onslaught. The problem is that you need knowledge about the enemies on the particular map to make good use of it. Oh and ideally 2 sergeants for fast point recovery.

Sniper is valuable but it's very limited in usage. If you could change the formation of your squad it would be A tier.

[Sifer2]

Mine should be higher cause enemies killed by it doesn't trigger alert if your not in vision range. So it's quite good for helping stealth.

Sniper shot with silencer upgrade is the same deal. It's the only way to silently kill Aliens in stasis I think.

[BlueStinger]

Mines are less useful on nightmare as they are won't one shot xenos.

[LukanGamer]

Originally posted by BlueStinger:

Mines are less useful on nightmare as they are won't one shot xenos.

even before nightmare they have tiny chance too just cripple them (just fyi) unless that was changed

[happyscrub]

Originally posted by SoulHunterWirriam:

weld a door and set a mine to eliminate a hive onslaught.

OMG!!!! I want to see a video of this!! LOL That's cool