What's the point of the Support's Covering Fire?

[Fire and Glory]

Overwatch triggered by an enemy attempting any action...

Why wouldn't I just shoot them on my turn instead? Considering overwatch is typically for shooting the enemy when they're not actually in cover.

EDIT:Yes I know what regular Overwatch is for, I am talking about Covering Fire.

[Future]

if a enemy try to shoot you, your support will shoot first and with luck, you kill him before he shoots you...its a good skill

[Fire and Glory]

Shooting him on my turn instead of using Covering Fire also counts as shooting first and doesn't have the risk of some undesirable target taking the shot instead.

[grapplehoeker]

Providing covering fire is to protect and provide cover for units that are moving and may move into a concealed hostile position.
Shooting on your turn would be too late.
Here's an example...
You provide covering fire.
Meanwhile you move a unit and that unit either triggers a hostile unit into action or is revealed by a concealed hostile unit.
Your cover can take a covering shot on this hostile's reaction and does not have to wait until it is their turn to shoot.
A specialist's covering fire ability coupled with the guardian ability is priceless.

[talemore]

It's not even pvp friendly because you give the opponent the free choice who will take the bullet. All it does is to give you the opportunity to shoot when you use another perk named Flush, it's no longer used in xcom2 and the new timelimited battles makes you able to conserve your use of grenades to last until the end of the mission. Before walls were made out of paper an enemy flushed would simply run from high cover to another high cover.

Blame overwatch, it's overwatch fault for being such a bad ability with -30% aim.

[Fire and Glory]

Originally posted by grapplehoeker:

Providing covering fire is to protect and provide cover for units that are moving and may move into a concealed hostile position.
Shooting on your turn would be too late.
Here's an example...
You provide covering fire.
Meanwhile you move a unit and that unit either triggers a hostile unit into action or is revealed by a concealed hostile unit.
Your cover can take a covering shot on this hostile and does not have to wait until it is their turn too shoot.

See, that's what Overwatch does, and it's good for that, but Covering Fire (a perk that replaces a Support's Overwatch) does that and also triggers just before an enemy shoots, throws a grenade, sneezes, etc.

Which seems kind of useless to me? If I was worried about an enemy shooting me and couldn't do anything else, I'd just shoot him instead of using Covering Fire, considering both actions would achieve the same effect of shooting at a target who is in cover before they do something, but Covering Fire also has the chance of hitting someone who I'm not worried about instead.

Originally posted by talemore:

Blame overwatch, it's overwatch fault for being such a bad ability with -30% aim.

Eh, overwatch can be useful, but that's another discussion.

[Tamiore]

Long story short:
There are, indeed, things in XCOM 2 that are either near-useless or actively detrimental once you start considering them in the broader context.
Covering fire just happens to be one of them. It has only a very niche applications: i. e. if your specialist is overwatching anyway (due to “ever vigilant” or in hopes of triggering “guardian”).

[Fire and Glory]

Originally posted by Tamiore:

Long story short:
There are, indeed, things in XCOM 2 that are either near-useless or actively detrimental once you start considering them in the broader context.
Covering fire just happens to be one of them.

Evidently so, oh well.

[KRON]

Originally posted by Tamiore:

Long story short:
There are, indeed, things in XCOM 2 that are either near-useless or actively detrimental once you start considering them in the broader context.
Covering fire just happens to be one of them. It has only a very niche applications: i. e. if your specialist is overwatching anyway (due to “ever vigilant” or in hopes of triggering “guardian”).

Specialist with ever vigilant, guardian, and covering fire with buffed aim, equipped with suprerior scope and mag can be pretty lethal in overwatch.

[Tamiore]

Originally posted by KRON:

Originally posted by Tamiore:

Long story short:
There are, indeed, things in XCOM 2 that are either near-useless or actively detrimental once you start considering them in the broader context.
Covering fire just happens to be one of them. It has only a very niche applications: i. e. if your specialist is overwatching anyway (due to “ever vigilant” or in hopes of triggering “guardian”).

Specialist with ever vigilant, guardian, and covering fire with buffed aim, equipped with suprerior scope and mag can be pretty lethal in overwatch.

True, but that's still a niche of "using overwatch over normal shots".
And that's very questionable practice because even buffed this way overwatch STILL has a huge disadvantage of being random as to who exactly is getting shot.
That, and guardian has a 50/50 to never proc at all, giving you just ONE glorified overwatch shot that all the other abilities just bring BACK to the level of a normal attack.
Also, covering fire does not proc on some attack abilities (i.e. mec using missles).

[JaegerBane]

Originally posted by KRON:

Originally posted by Tamiore:

Long story short:
There are, indeed, things in XCOM 2 that are either near-useless or actively detrimental once you start considering them in the broader context.
Covering fire just happens to be one of them. It has only a very niche applications: i. e. if your specialist is overwatching anyway (due to “ever vigilant” or in hopes of triggering “guardian”).

Specialist with ever vigilant, guardian, and covering fire with buffed aim, equipped with suprerior scope and mag can be pretty lethal in overwatch.

You could remove Covering Fire from that selection and it wouldn't really affect the lethality of Specialist. All it does is allow you to use Overwatch shots in the precise circumstances that you never want to. It's not even worth the AP in the expansion.

[Tamiore]

Also, it's Covering Fire OR Threat Assessment in the main spec tree.
And Threat Assessment is a hell of a lot more usefull and kind of INCLUDES covering fire within itself.

[Gamefever]

The usefullness of using Overwatch is best seen in the module "Long War"
I'm speaking of the first Long War mod,
Overwatch is known to have a -30 Aim adjustment...
However firing on a unit in High Cover provides -50 Aim adjustment and 1 Armor rating.
In Long War the cover has 2x to 4x more health so removal of terrian is not a simple thing either...

So Overwatch means more in situations of entrenched Warfare which in the base game almost never happens.
The AI itself is actually programmed to respect and react to Overwatch situations and this is actually best seen when playing Long War mod. Basically you will see the AI behave differrently in situations where there are soldiers making use of Overwatch and you'll see it more often in Long War simply due to Overwatch being made a better option due to substantially better cover and classes that are far superior at using Overwatch than in the base game.

Long War 2 is a differrent story as your missions are often timed this means that the player can ill-afford lengthy entrenchment warfare and must often rush the objectives or lose.

In Xcom base game Overwatch is less usefull.
Bear in mind that Overwatch penalties dont apply during the player turn,
Ambush pull
Covering fire pull
Specialist Overwatch while making standard pull...

[Fire and Glory]

Originally posted by Gamefever:

...Bear in mind that Overwatch penalties dont apply during the player turn,
Ambush pull
Covering fire pull
Specialist Overwatch while making standard pull...

I don't quite understand what this means. Regardless, I know the merits of regular Overwatch, that's not the question. I also know it applies without penalties to ambushes.

Considering that as you described in Long War, Overwatching so that you can shoot enemies who're not in cover is useful, but if a Support was using Covering Fire, he's just as likely to shoot at someone in high cover who is shooting at someone else who is in high cover, which seems significantly worse.

[red255]

don't they step out of cover to shoot? I mean I'd have to see the accuracies cuz the animations imply the step out of cover.

but yeah threat assesment is just more useful because you can charge your assault up, then aid protocol him so he has a shotgun flank and +30 defense.

[Fire and Glory]

Originally posted by red255:

don't they step out of cover to shoot? I mean I'd have to see the accuracies cuz the animations imply the step out of cover.

I'd say the animations lie, but I suppose it could be possible.