Anytwopoints

Great podcast- really enjoyed it. I'd have to take a small issue with one thing though- Rob mentions a couple of times that he felt the classes in vanilla XCOM 2 lacked flexibility and in many cases really only had one viable build for the most part, and in particular mentioned the pistol abilities of the Sharpshooter class as not being particularly useful. I've just finished my first Ironman Commander run of vanilla XCOM 2 so this is fresh in my mind- personally I found that with the possible exception of the Blademaster Ranger skills pretty much every class has multiple viable builds with different strengths in different portions of the game or different situations. The Sharpshooter pistol abilities in particular I found absolutely invaluable and for the last third of the game ended up taking a gunslinger in preference to a sniper on most missions- a Gunslinger with Bluescreen rounds (+5 damage vs mech enemies) is capable of pretty much taking out a Sectopod or Gatekeeper solo in one turn on Commander (or at the very least reducing it to almost no health) if you use Quickdraw (Fire your pistol without ending your turn), Lightning Hands (free pistol shot) and then Fan Fire (3 consecutive pistol shots) for a total of 5 consecutive hits with +5 damage each (and with 100% hit chance most of the time). That's pretty much the highest per-round damage output in the game. Additionally there are quite a lot of situations where you're faced with multiple enemies which you can reduce to a small amount of health but not quite kill, and the ability to fire the pistol at each visible enemy is invaluable sometimes- the most extreme example was on the final mission I was faced with I believe 4 Codexes and 2 Archons, who then split into 8 Codexes once I'd fired an AoE psychic ability at them. My gunslinger was able to move into a position with line of sight to all of them and take out all 10 enemies with one move. Saved my bacon!