1. Xcom2 Critical Hit Only On Flanks
2. Xcom 2 Critical Hitler

A critical hit means that you roll your damage more than once, with all your usual bonuses, and add the rolls together. Unless otherwise specified, the threat range for a critical hit on an attack roll is 20, and the multiplier is ×2.

‘War of the Chosen’ tips

Get hunting

The eponymous chosen are the headline feature of the new expansion, and accordingly you will want to prioritize dealing with them very highly. They will start to show up during random missions early in the game to mess with you, but their harassment quickly extends to the strategic layer as well where they will clamp down on regions you control, steal from you, and eventually hunt you down. The longer they go unaddressed, the more powerful they become, so it’s in your best interest to handle them as early as possible.

You proactively take on the chosen with a series of three covert actions with each of their respective rival resistance factions (which are randomly assigned each game), where completing the final action unlocks a conventional mission to raid their stronghold and destroy the regeneration device that keeps them coming back. In addition to the reward of no longer having such a powerful enemy bothering you, each Chosen also rewards unique and powerful weapons when defeated, which will give you a major leg up for the rest of the game.

Lost and gone forever

A zombie by any other name would smell as putrid. The Lost are another new and interesting threat that can seriously change up how you approach missions. They show up in large groups that, in some missions, will simply spawn endlessly until you leave, making last stands a futile, losing proposition.

Fortunately to deal with them you get the added bonus of any conventional, ranged kill shot giving you a free action, which lets you chain Lost kills for as long as you have targets and/or ammo. Although it’s generally important in any mission, keeping your formation tight and not over-extending is crucial in Lost missions, where it’s possible to get swamped by unexpected pods.

Melee works in a pinch, but note that it will not trigger the headshot free action, so save that for when your ranger has run out of ammo/actions otherwise and won’t be left too exposed. Explosives can be helpful for dealing with large mobs, but keep in mind that they similarly do not trigger the free action, and that the sound will draw more Lost, so use them only as a last resort, if you’re already close to your objective, or if there are also Advent troops to soak up their attention.

When chaining Lost headshots, be sure to take note of their health pools: Regular Lost have 2-4 health, and thus can be one-shot by most of your troops without too much problem, but the Brutes have a larger health pool that often takes two shots, so don’t accidentally end your turn early by failing to finish the job if you don’t have an ally to help mop up. Once your squad is securely at the evac zone, within reason you can stick around an extra round or two to mop up XP from endless Lost waves, but don’t get cocky.

Manage fatigue

In addition to worrying about your soldiers’ physical health and ensuring you always have enough in active rotation, War of the Chosen now adds their mental health to your concerns. Soldiers can be “tired” after missions even if they were not physically injured. As long as they are otherwise in good health you can always bring tired soldiers along on missions, but it gives them a much better chance of developing negative personality quirks that can become a real headache for you down the road. These include phobias of particular aliens, causing them to sometimes panic at the sight of sectoids or mutons, for instance, or compulsions that might cause them to act out of turn, like an obsessive-compulsive need to keep their ammo topped off, or a paranoia that leads them to hunker down sometimes on their second action.

This can be utterly devastating in later game missions where every action counts. You can mitigate this by avoiding bringing tired units along if you can. Sometimes you need to bring a sleepy soldier along for a crucial mission, however, and even fully rested troops can develop neuroses. When that happens it’s worthwhile to stick them in the infirmary for a few days, Darkest Dungeon-style, to purge the negative trait.

Believe in the power of friendship

Xcom2 Critical Hit Only On Flanks

Your soldiers can now form relationships from fighting alongside one another, called Bonds. Every member of your team has a compatibility rating with every other. Sending them out on missions together causes their Cohesion meter to fill, the rate at which it does depending on how compatible the soldiers are.

In addition to just going on missions together, soldiers grow closer for doing things like reviving one another from debilitating mental states, or surviving when the rest of the squad is wiped. Bonds lets them do things like lend their actions to one another once or twice per mission, reduce the time spent on covert actions together, or eventually take simultaneous attack actions. Level one bonds can be established instantly as soon as both soldiers’ cohesion meters are full, but advancing the bond to levels two and three requires both soldiers to spend several days in the Training Center, so you’re going to want to have that up and running by the mid-game.

Note that bonds are monogamous and “’til death do us part,” so don’t lock in those level one bonds if you are hoping to pair them off differently.

Maximize your AP

Rather than unlocking new abilities once per level, your soldiers now purchase them with a system of earned ability points. In practice this works out the same in that you still pick one of several potential skills at each new tier, but now you can also go back and spend points on abilities from previous tiers as well, fundamentally changing the need to specialize your soldiers. Furthermore, where building the advanced warfare center in the base game gave you a chance for each unit to pick up one random off-class ability, now you have a selection at random levels available for buying with points, opening up even more customization options.

Every soldier has an individual AP count earned through experience, which scales to a new stat called “Combat Intelligence,” but there is now also a shared XCOM pool that can be spent on any character. These shared points are earned through several in-mission actions. Your soldiers taking shots from high ground, from a flanking position, or from concealment all have a chance to grant a single point to the shared pool, which increases in likelihood with higher combat intelligence.

Taking out the chosen during a mission will also net you five points for the organization. We recommend holding onto these for a little bit until you have a stand-out squad in which you are ready to start investing.

A Priest, a Purifier, and a Spectre walk into bar

Beyond the chosen, Advent has also introduced a few new types of minions to complicate your missions. The priest is primarily a support class, similar to sectoids in that they like to hang back and manipulate the battle with psychic powers such as mind controlling, freezing your troops, and buffing their allies. Prioritize taking out priests early to make it easier for you to take down their allies — they’re not too tough, so it shouldn’t be hard if you get the drop on them.

Purifiers wield flamethrowers to blast out arcs of flame that seem particularly well suited for taking on hordes of Lost. The most important thing to note is that they explode on death, so don’t finish them off with melee attacks unless your rangers are expendable.

Spectres are a highly mobile pain in your butt that look like lithe humanoids but are actually an amorphous cloud of nanobots. Their most obnoxious ability is called “shadowbound,” which instantly knocks out one of your soldiers at melee range and then creates a shadow clone of them for you to fight. You can revive them either by killing the clone or the Spectre itself, which will also take the clone down with it. You can also bring them back while both Spectre and clone are still up if you have a Specialist who can Revive.

Resistance Faction Classes

Countering the new threats of the Chosen are your three new resistance faction allies: the Reapers, Skirmishers, and Templars. All three of them are extremely powerful, so you will want to make sure that they are all recruited as early as possible. During your first playthrough of the expansion with its narrative missions that introduce the new content, you will get hooked up with the Reapers early on, have to rescue Skirmisher Mox, and then locate the Templars in order to recruit them. During subsequent plays you can start with any of the special faction soldiers in your ranks. Covert actions in the resistance ring will let you contact the other two factions, which will give you one of their powerful soldiers.

While it’s possible to recruit additional faction soldiers later in the game through covert actions, but these are rare and require very high influence with the faction in question. Accordingly you will want to treat these soldiers like precious resources, breaking them out to tip the scales on crucial missions, especially when their rival Chosen is likely to be involved, but don’t throw them around like any regular recruit, since they are highly useful and hard to replace.

As with all XCOM soldiers, there is no one correct way to build these special classes. The wealth of new abilities added in War of the Chosen makes it more viable than ever to explore vastly different (but still viable) soldier builds and squad compositions, so take these pointers as inspiration for your own experiments rather than hard and fast rules, since we ourselves have still only scratched the surface of what’s possible.

Reaper

Step aside, rangers, because the reaper is the best stealth unit in the game, bar none. In addition to being faster and being able to get substantially closer to oblivious enemies, taking actions that would normally break stealth now only provoke a chance to do so, allowing your reapers to scout and flank from the shadows for potentially the entire mission if you build them for it, which can give you a huge leg up. Pairing this aggressive mobility with a sniper rifle makes them a great counterpoint to the sharpshooter, who tends to hang back from the squad, providing a lot of coverage if you use both. Although their damage output isn’t ever quite as high as a comparably leveled ranger or sharpshooter, the added versatility of their stealth, plus their ability to take sniper shots on the second action, more than make up for it.

• Stealth skills do what you would expect, enhancing the reaper’s ability to maintain and go back into concealment while being increasingly aggressive the more you invest here. “Target definition” is their most useful support ability, giving you permanent vision on anyone the reaper sees, which can be most or all of your enemies if you focus on your reaper as a stealth scout.
• Saboteur skills enhance the reaper’s destructive capability as a stealthy grenadier-lite, buffing their claymore mine and letting them carry an extra. “Remote start” can be a particularly brutal weapon of mass destruction on levels with a lot of cars, but be mindful of civilians.
• Marksman enhances the reaper’s sniping capabilities, substantially increasing the amount of damage they can put out. “Soul harvest” is especially devastating on maps that feature both the Lost and Advent, since you can charge up your chance for a critical hit to the max on Lost in a turn or two, making you a much bigger threat to the more dangerous Advent enemies.
• Let reapers lead the charge and scout ahead whenever they’re on a mission, since they are least likely to kick up trouble from an unexpected Advent pod. Within reason you should be aggressively positioning your reaper to get maximum information and provide flanking cover that other classes couldn’t.

SkirmisherCharles murray are too many going to college citation.

Once the genetically engineered puppets of Advent, the Skirmishers have thrown off their shackles and accordingly have a lot of anger to work out with Advent. Highly mobile and able to take as many shots as they have actions, skirmisher units excel at flanking and adapting to unexpected situations. Their grapple lets them zip around the level, particularly to high ground, without using an action, making them perfect for swooping behind a troublesome enemy and chewing them up quickly. Their individual shots are not quite as damaging as those of comparably leveled standard soldiers, but that doesn’t matter when they can take 2+ shots in a turn, let alone the added utility of their ability to traverse and control the battlefield. It’s often a good idea to hold back your Skirmisher’s actions until later in the turn, because their flexibility is great for responding to new, complicating threats (which come up a lot more frequently in WotC). More than the other two, skirmishers benefit from picking complementary abilities across different trees, rather than just honing in on one, so assess your options thoroughly.

• Hussar skills are the core of why skirmishers can do so much on a single turn. Extra actions can be extremely powerful in the right circumstance, so both “reflex” and “combat presence” are clutch skills. “Manual override” is always useful for your “grapple” and “justice” starting abilities, but it really sings if you take additional cooldown powers like “wraith.”
• Judge primarily enhances your “ripjack” melee attacks. Wraith and “retribution” pair nicely, pulling your skirmisher into the middle of a pod for a melee attack, then retaliating with melee strikes as they attack you. Justice can also be a great way to open engagements, pulling enemies from out of cover into the waiting fire of the squad. “Whiplash” does substantial extra damage against robotic foes, so take that if you don’t otherwise have combat hacker specialists handy to deal with powerful mechs. “Battlelord” is particularly powerful, granting extra actions in response to enemy moves like the elite units of the Alien Hunters DLC.
• Tactician offers a grab bag of skills to complement both reactive and damage-focused builds. “Interrupt” is particularly potent, granting an off-turn action like battlelord, which can turn the tide of battle.
• Because firing their bullpup rifle does not end their turn, skirmishers are particularly good at taking advantage of additional actions, which can come from their own abilities (such as reflex) or from other squadmates, through combat presence, soldier bonds, etc. The “zero in” ability and weapon upgrades that expand the bullpup’s magazine or provide free reloads are particularly useful if you want to focus on maximizing their multi-shot capabilities.

Templar

If you always wanted to mod Protoss Zealots from Starcraftinto XCOM, templars are for you. They wield two wrist-mounted blades of psionic energy and cause havoc up close. The templar might be the most nuanced of the three new classes to use because of their unique “focus” mechanic. Killing enemies with their primary “rend” attack gains them one point of focus, up to a maximum of two (or three if you choose the “deep focus” ability when reach Captain rank). Focus increases the Templar’s stats and damage, but can also be spent on powerful abilities. When to spend your focus vs. hold on to it is situational, and also depends on how you’ve built your Templar’s abilities, so it can be tricky to feel like you’re getting the most out of them. “Momentum” gives them an additional move action after a rend kill, making Templars great for rushing in to deal with high-priority targets with a guaranteed hit that doesn’t leave them exposed.

• Psiblade skills enhance the Templar’s melee powerful capabilities, and taking these skills straight down the line is a solid, straight-forward build. “Reflect,” “deflect,” and “arc wave” are all good reasons to hold onto your focus, saving it for a well-placed ionic storm (another Starcraft nod to the Protoss High Templar’s Psionic Storm?) that will hopefully refund its own focus cost if you catch a group that’s already been softened up by the squad.
• The Dynamotree makes the Templar the closest XCOM has to a straight-up spellcaster, giving him or her support abilities that let you spend focus to manipulate the battlefield. Because positioning is so important in XCOM, “invert” and “exchange” are very flexible and tactically interesting abilities. You can use them to aggressively position your templar for an attack, bring an enemy into the open for their teammates to mow down, or save an ailing ally.
• Sage is another support and focus ability tree. “Amplify” is a great ability in concert with the rest of the squad, letting them mow down targets with large health pools quickly. It works nicely with the “aftershock” ability from the dynamo tree. “Deep focus,” which increases your focus maximum to three, is useful no matter how you build your templar.
• Templar are great in a lot of situations, but are not especially well-suited to dealing with the Lost, as their primary rend attack does not trigger the headshot free action benefit that most units get. The templar’s secondary autopistol can be used to chain Lost kills, but like the sharpshooter’s pistol, using it is risky as it’s low damage makes it hard to one-shot the tougher Lost. The general low health of Lost makes them good for farming Focus, but be careful not to let your Templar be overwhelmed, since they’re not as well-equipped as the other classes to handle an encroaching mob.

New facilities

Xcom 2 Critical Hitler

Resistance Ring

The most crucial new facility, which you will want to build as soon as possible, lets you coordinate covert actions with the three resistance factions. Send your soldiers away for several days in exchange for a whole plethora of rewards like equipment, intel, and recruits (eventually including the more special resistance class soldiers), in addition to experience for the soldiers involved. Most importantly, this is how you track down the Chosen in a series of three missions with each faction to track down their respective rival’s lair, unlocking the mission to kill them once and for all. This also nets you influence with the faction, unlocking new resistance orders and slots for you on subsequent months.

Infirmary

This adopts half of the functionality of the advanced warfare center, since staffing it with an engineer doubles the recovery speed of your wounded soldiers. You can also put soldiers here for a few days to remove any negative traits they have acquired, much like the Sanitarium in Darkest Dungeon.Adding the Hypervital Module lets you bring wounded soldiers up to full health just for a single mission, returning to their previous state afterwards, though you can only do this once per game, per soldier. This is a medium priority to build, but becomes more important in Ironman mode, or if you’re focusing on cultivating a smaller, more elite squadron instead of a wide, rotating cast.

Training Center

Expanding upon the advanced warfare center’s ability to give your soldiers bonus skills from other classes, the training center utilizes War of the Chosen‘s new system of individual and shared ability points to buy upgrades from any level in the class, including a random selection of a few out-of-class powers.

You can also take soldiers out of commission for a few days to retrain their abilities instead of learning new ones, which will refund their personal AP (but not any XCOM AP) you spent on them. This is also where you train soldiers to upgrade their bonds past the first level. Since it takes a while before your soldiers reach level two bonds, and it’s not necessarily worth investing a lot of points in additional abilities until you have a more developed squad, this is a lower priority build, but you will definitely want it by the mid-game.

Updated on September 5, 2017, by Will Fulton: Added War of the Chosen tips