Squad loadout theory crafting

[malklavious]

After some recent reading here about ranged FC I'm thinking of playing through the Vanilla campaign again with a new loadout.

My last run-through had this loadout:

FC: Melee, power armor.
Tarkus: Ranged starting in power armor upgrading to Termi
Avitus: Ranged, power armor with NHoD.
Teddy: Melee, didn't use him much until Termi armor
Thule: Ranged
Cyrus: Ranged with sniper rifle and explosives

By the end of the campaign I usually deployed FC, Tarkus, Avitus, and Teddy. The FC would run in and mess things up in melee, Tarkus soaked damage, Avitus killed stuff, and Teddy was for Anti-Vehicle with thunder hammers.

My next loadout will be something like this:

FC: Ranged, whatever fun big gun is available
Tarkus: Melee, esp once in Termi armor
Avitus: Ranged, power armor with whatever fun big gun is available
Thule: Probably ranged.
Teddy: ??
Cyrus: Probably ranged w/ sniper rifle again.

Any suggestions on creative ways to use Cyrus or Teddy in this loadout?

[esbe]

I enjoyed going ranged Teddy. I got just enough strength points for merciless, then afterward focused on health and ranged. Any nice weapons with range penalties (flamers, blighted bolter, etc.) I gave to him, since he can get up in anyone's face with the push of a button.

[2marston]

Cyrus is amazing with shotguns and some abilities in the melee tree. Especially smoke bombs, which reduce incoming damage to you and stun all nearby enemies when cloaking and decloaking. You can basically use this to chain stun anything. Shotgun blast is also mega powerful and always a laugh. Teddy will always suck no matter how you use him, except in CR where hes insanely powerful.

[Tarak]

While playing through CR, I found out that giving Melee-Teddy the Ranged-Stance helped a lot to keep him alive. He won’t jet away that often on his own then and rather stays behind as melee-bodyguard.
If you think the enemy is enough suppressed or taunted, you can still release him from his leash by switching to Melee-Stance.

I’m curious to see how he performs with flamer. The 20% passive stun chance at Ranged-3 sounds powerful with the flamer’s AoE.

[konfeta]

Teddy is very good in vanilla as well, and everyone is overpowered in CR anyway. Treat him as a melee Avitus, not as a tank.

[gimrah]

I'm doing a similar role-reversal playthrough at the moment.

Tarkus melee: not bad and gets better with melee tactician (before which it's not great) and veteran squadmates. No point pushing on for power sword aptitude as stimna traits are more important and Tarkus should have termi armour by then. Vet squadmates and their power weapons help against heavier troops/vehicles before that. The two Tarkus forms are essentially the same one you have termi armour. Decent firepower with stormbolter and great melee with the four power gloves.

Thule melee: I think he was more useful with the AC and ability to break lines, massacre attackers at range. However, as melee he's good at crowd control, espcialy against nids.

Ranged FC. Haven't found a form of this I really like. You can use hime defensively witha heavy weapon or more offensively with a medium weapon (i.e. bolter as opposed to HB) and a commander item, which I prefer, since you already have Avitus for sitting back. I found him quite versatile against bosses and vehicles with a good plasma gun. However plasma gun is slow and so wastes his 'chance to instagib' ability. Bolters and flamers are fun for the instagib factor. Blighted bolter was quite good offensively. I'm mainly looking forward to getting another termi suit so I can put him in it with the never-reloading heavy flamer.

Ranged Teddy. Didn't occur to me. With no decent traits to enhance it, I didn't see the attaction. Did I miss something? He's still the kid that gets picked last though.

Cyrus. Never found shotgun to be better than sniper rifle, except maybe against orks. Flamer can be amusing. Bolter only really when there are no other options (i.e. at the start).

I assume no-one has ever tried melee Avitus? Or with bolters or similar? Seems like a non-starter.

[konfeta]

Melee Avitus and Ranged Teddy don't get great traits until CR. Avitus is still going to be ranged no matter what you do, though.

[Tarak]

Yeah, you really have to be a masochist to play Avitus pure melee, but I'm going to give Ranged Ted with flamer a chance on my next trip. The Dreadnought has to sit out this time with its too-powerful barrage.

I lately played through CR the first time with FC and Avitus both using Missile Launchers. Avitus still had his rapid-firing L18 epic ML from the OC and haven’t found anything better to replace it.
The health bar of the traitor in his tank went so quickly dry in less than a half minute, that he spam-bombed artillery strikes on my squads that I had trouble chain-activating Rosarius. Luckily, my Dreadnought was nicely protected against explosive damage and could repair itself during the bombardment, so it was the only one left standing in the clouds and gave the finale burst to bring him down.

[gimrah]

Trouble with Teddy with flamer is I like giving him a power glove to help AV. I can see some attractions though: after all you'd rarely use Teddy to jump anything that's actually good at melee. But actually Cyrus would probably do that role better, especially with immolate.

[guardsman lover]

Ranged Teddy's pretty good with that one trait that gives a boost to rate of fire after jumping. I gave him a plasma gun and told him to jump. He then pumped 1 plasma shot every 0.7 second (as fast as the Captain in the Last Stand) and managed to down quite a lot of squads. Add "No Shelter" to the mix and he turns Havoks into pieces of charred meat in no time.

[mehfeh]

I tried some alternative level 6 builds with the (full) point reassign mod on the "Eyes of the Eldar" mission on Captain difficulty. With the full reassign mod you have enough points give the FC the full ranged tree here but nothing else, so no warcry. That mission is good for testing also because the enemy comes to you in waves, so you get some sort of easily repeatable experiments.

With a heavy bolter FC you can't the use a battle standard (unless you mod the heavy weapons), and there's not much use for his energy pool. You can move around using just "to victory!" and avoid having the FC spend the time with tear-up/set-up, but that can wreck your cover badly. Interesting enough however, a heavy bolter seems to get him the most special-effect gibs (the one where their head blows off instead of the normal death animation), which I assume it's due to deadly aim kills. Although the heavy bolter is less accurate than a bolter, its much higher rate of fire appears to compensate for it in that department---the FC seems to hit more often that way. (I suspect the rate of fire indicator in the weapon info is non-linear.) The range on FC's heavy bolter sucks though, compared to Avitus' after ranged-1 skill ("advanced optics").

With just a bolter the FC felt just as useful. He can still stop a wave on his own although he takes more damage, especially from warp spiders' ranged attack. But he can rally-heal himself and is more mobile.

Still, as apart of a team, the FC felt most useful useful as a melee type with explosive specials and warcry because he's the only one knock-down resistant at this level. (There's knock-back immune level-7 armor though, but it's a blue one, so you may not get it.) War cry makes him knock-down immune and everyone else around him dishes more damage. (Does anyone know what the factor is?) Enemy waves seemed to melt much faster under combination of his melee explosive specials and the ranged bonus he provides for the rest of the team that with the other team builds.

When I tried a ranged FC, I complemented him with a melee Tarkus. This doesn't work so well this early in the game. If you mod-reassign all his points, you can even have Tarkus have power swords trait at this point, but that's useless, cause you won't find any at this level. So, just the melee-damage-reducing perk (strengh-2) is enough and you have enough points left for the accessory slot skill (with mod) or taunt skill. Actually the taunt skill isn't needed much if Tarkus is melee because the enemies usually see him first, so they focus on him anyway. The main drawback of a melee Tarkus is the lack knock-down resistance. Those Banshees send him on his butt often enough to be annoying. Even the Ork stikkbombz squads that complement the feral boyz in the earlier levels manage that. It appears that the melee-damage-reducing perk mitigates how often his guys fall down, but I could be wrong.

Thaddeus was only level 4 for me naturally in the beginning of "Eyes of Eldar", so all unusual stuff I could test with him at this point was making him ranged-1 besides his merciless strike an giving him that scoped lvl-4 bolter (Unforgiving Truth?). It did not seem to make much difference in his effectiveness after a jump, but it had the added advantage that I could keep him behind cover and still have him be somewhat useful. You can also walk while gunning up to an entrenched enemy and blow them way his merciless strike, which actually has the advantage that they're dead and won't get up. I always found merciless strike somewhat ineffective after a jump (not that you have enough energy at level 4 to chain combo them) because the enemies are no longer clustered together, but it works well enough on single high value targets and sometimes pairs, e.g. venom cannon warriors much later in the game, especially after you can teleport in (termie armor) which doesn't alter enemy positions. Unfortunately, the perks of a ranged career appear much worse for him down the line than for the other guys, in the original campaign anyway.

If I have time and inclination to do more of these side-by-side mission comparisons, I'll post them.

[Arbit]

In the original campaign I did a primarch run with an all ranged crew. Thaddeus sucked unbearably hard so I left him on the barge. In the end, he lagged probably 8 levels behind everyone else so when I imported them to CR I couldn't beat the second mission (the one with wraithguard).