With Close Combat Specialist the drain on ammo becomes even more of a factor. Close & Personal grants an extra shot, but you won’t be able to take that shot and also Rapid Fire twice, without reloading. With Rapid Fire an Assault will be able to exhaust all ammunition in 2 turns. Another problem is that with limited ammunition, extra shot abilities have diminishing returns. Part of the problem is that this skill is harder to put into use than you would expect, given that it cannot be used in tandem with Run & Gun. That someone is the Assault.Ĭlose & Personal will give your Assault a free shot against an enemy within 4 tiles, which is fantastic, but still not as good as Lightning Reflexes. Lightning Reflexes is often the only safe way to deal with overwatches such as when no one has line of sight to the overwatcher, and someone needs to run the overwatch and also get eyes on the target. You can suppress an overwatch, kill/disable the overwatcher, or run it with Lightning Reflexes, and that’s about it.

You don’t have many options for dealing with all these overwatches. They overwatch when they are out of visibility range They overwatch when they drop-in Cyberdiscs and Mechtoids start on overwatch Sectopods automatically overwatch after shooting, and so on. Lightning Reflexes will be used frequently, because the aliens overwatch frequently. It enables the Assault to disable one overwatch per turn, without fail, so that your team isn’t tanking nasty overwatch shots from high aim enemies. This is one of the most important abilities in the game, and only the Assault can provide it for your squad. Thin Men are fast, capable of jumping up to gain elevation, and do a lot of damage. If for example your Assault runs up next to the last Thin Man but fails to kill it, the Thin Man will have a guaranteed hit regardless of TacSense. TacSense is a nice ability that is often made irrelevant by the lack of enemies (only +5 Defense when 1 enemy is visible) and the superior aim of your enemies (Thin Men have 85 aim at Impossible). This ability will change those odds from a coin flip to a solid favorite. There will be several times during the campaign that you will need the Assault to crit to keep your squad safe. Failing to crit means the Assault will do at most 5 points of damage, just short of what is needed to kill a full health Thin Man.

The damage range for a critical hit with a shotgun has a convenient floor, 6 points, which just happens to be the amount of health both Thin Men and Floaters start out with. When the Assault is dashed into a dangerous position, it is usually with the hope that he can kill an enemy by delivering a crit. This is a solid ability that will improve crit chance 10-30%.

Xcom enemy within assault build