How does defense work in xcom

HP is always useful. Even later the difference between a 3 or 6 starting HP soldier is significant and can mean surviving a shot or not, or at least reduce infirmary downtime. Glass cannon soldiers are very powerful but you have to be careful with them. Dodge, as 8wayz told you plays with the Graze band but will also work if you turn it off. It's not terribly useful if you have just a few points but becomes very strong if you can have a lot Shinobis gain dodge as they level up.

Note that negative dodge actually turns into more crit chance and can be pretty bad. Defense is useful on anyone you don't want to be shot. Again, 8wayz is correct that if you have a lot, Aliens will search for someone else to shoot.

They can be used to create soldiers with specific roles if they get the right class or you chose the right class with GTS training.

A soldier with High Dodge and low Defense especially if he also have lots of HP who becomes a Shinobi can be a great tank.

Try to get low cover so you're easier to hit than the more vulnerable squadmates and Aliens will usually shoot you. A soldier with high defense can only act as a tank if noone else is visible, otherwise aliens will ignore him. This usually means you have several sharpshooters in the squad to kill from squadsight.

A high def gunner with Combat Awareness PCS who area suppresses an enemy pod is almost impossible to hit and can lock them in place so they don't come in vision range of your more vulnerable soldiers.

High defense also directly helps soldiers you expect to be exposed such as Assault or offensive Shinobis. It also helps Assaults if they have to run several OW shots. If a soldier has low of everything, he's extremely vulnerable and is better left in a safe position where aliens can't see him.

He probable have high aim making him an excellent sniper. LW2 mission detection simulator. Rest is uber 20 PSI. Somehow I have ended with 21 grenadiers. My only advantage is willpower. Just lost 6 soldiers. They can't survive to get life saving perk at least not on Legendary. Point is - now i have lost the game because of bad roll.

Slow moving 55 Aim soldiers with 40 will and 30 PSI are dead. I had no choice to avoid that because I can't wait for GTS. Skipping first three missions is not option Granted soldiers in my opinion should be more balanced toward something useful and rest should obey rule of not created equally. Like soldiers from black market. I really need average soldiers in the begging of Legendary. Crit role is to high and i have no means of countering that.

Then I have panic 40 will and they panic. Loosing 2 soldiers per mission is big hit. Showing 1 - 8 of 8 comments. Defense stat is deducted from aliens hit-chance. If it is negative say -3 it is actually a buff to aliens' "To Hit" vs the soldier e. Negative defense is what you want on your tanking soldiers. Timbermaw View Profile View Posts.

It's mostly negligible except that one time it wasn't and you trooper gets hit twice in a row and dies. Fadeway View Profile View Posts. To expand on what szmind hinted at, defense's main effect is aggro manipulation. If an ayy has two soldiers in view and one is easier to hit, that's the one that's gonna get shot at most of the time there are exceptions if the high-def target is easier to kill or doing something threatening.

This means that high-defense soldiers are not that valuable since they lose a lot of stats for it and it just leads to their teammates getting shot instead. Perhaps you've noticed that reinforced armor gives -7 defense.

It's a tanking item that gives DR, and the negative defense is meant as a buff - you can keep your tank in high cover and still have low defense and draw fire with him. I think defense is overall unimportant. It can have an effect if all soldiers in a squad have similar defense, but there are far more important factors that go into that decision.

Another way to use it is to give it to soldiers that want to avoid enemy fire, but you can't really abuse this because the ayys will prioritize targets with low health even if they are hard to hit.

Just how well does the "low defense" work on tanks to gain aggro.? High cover has the advantage of breaking Line of Sight for all units on the same plane of elevation. This can allow XCOM operatives to close in on pods that have yet to be activated without provoking them. This can also lead to frustrating scenarios where a random tree can block a sniper from getting a shot on a flying target. Elevation can effect line of sight: higher elevations can negate the sight-blocking properties of high cover, and lower elevations can make even low cover block line of sight.

The latter is most commonly seen in forest maps; in general, two elevations of low cover is equivalent to high cover for line of sight blocking. Units standing in cover can "peak" around it or "step out" to perform shots or throw items.

Generally speaking, any unit in cover who is ordered to attack a target or use an item will automatically "step out" and temporarily move to an adjacent square before firing, if doing so is necessary to gain line of sight on a target.

A step out can only be performed if the destination square is unobstructed, with some exceptions, and the step out shot doesn't count as actual movement and so won't provoke suppression or overwatch.

For the purposes of line of sight, then, a unit is treated as occupying any square it can get a step out shot on, but this additional square doesn't grant additional attack range. It's important to remember that while step out shots affect line of sight, they don't change a units sight distance until the unit actually performs the step out shot.