why is rebel mission marked "easy"

[Catteus Of Mars]

like its not easy at all :D the priests do 10damage+acid every turn have infiltrator perk so you have to eat atleast one attack before you can kill em and they have 10-15hp with +1-3 armor with added immune to one of your unit for lols. and there is like 8 of the little basterds...

[SL128]

All the Heretek missions are marked easy for some reason. Even though they're much harder than average, and the final boss can shoot a 10+ damage penetrating beam that goes through walls.

[NecromancyBlack]

Yeah it was a nasty shock for sure. Feels like it's not a good idea to do them until you have at least 4 solid tech priests yourself and the same infiltrator gear.

AOE weapons like flamers and lasers that shoot in a line are also very useful as they can still hit them while they are untargable. Cheap servertors can also bait out attacks from them to break thier infiltration.

The advantage of these missions though is that they don't increase the awakening level, so you can take as much time as you want doing them.

[what am i doing]

The difficulty labels are just a measure of how many combat sections a mission has. Harder means there are more combat sections.

That said, if you have a cog occultaris on all your techpriests and choose information warfare in the CYOA-esque pre-mission dialogue, three of the heretek missions can be completed without any combat, as none of your priests can be targeted and the heretek forces won't do anything, while your objectives only require you to scan and then wait.

[WestRider]

Accurately assigning difficulty levels is, in itself, a fairly difficult task. As such, many devs just go for something quick and easy like this system rated on the number of combat nodes, or BattleTech's system based purely on tonnage. It can be so misleading at times that I almost wish they just didn't bother.