Can Soldier and Pistoleer gain Tactics?

[Keukotis]

Part of the Rifles/Pistols/Blades skills is that they boost critical damage. But most combat builds can't ever score critical hits. Mechanically, this is a bit weird.

Much of the reason for this is that so few combat classes gain the Tactics skill. A great way to improve this would be to make Tactics a tertiary skill on both Soldier and Pistoleer. This way, players - and especially enemies - would actually have a small chance to critical in a much wider range of builds.

[fallen]

Thanks for the feedback! Those jobs operation on a "bring your own" concept for Critical %. Not every Job comes with abilities that are well-positioned unless you push that part of the build forward. If we removed this aspects, then every build is a self-contained package that doesn't give many options.

[Keukotis]

Blade Dancer and Military Officer are currently the only combat classes that gain any Tactics skill at all (and it's not much). No class gains enough Tactics that you could feasibly build for critical hits using the skill. So currently, critical hits can only be expected to happen if you get lucky with traits or use Stealth. I have a crew member with Spy ranks who got Dead Aim from trait mutation. In stealth mode she's got a 38% critical chance. The only other person on my team with any ability to cause critical hits is theoretically the Doctor/Combat Medic, but that's super rare. The Xeno Hunter and Shock Trooper - two classes whom you'd think would know how to hurt things - have zero ability to cause critical damage at all. That aspect of their Rifles skill is just wholly unused.

Again, if that's your intent with the game mechanics, that's fine. That is a choice and as much as it feels like an odd one to me, game design takes a lot of work and it's not my job. You may have intended for critical damage to only be possibly on specific builds.

But I feel that a small Tactics boost on a few more combat classes wouldn't be unreasonable. Pistoleer and Soldier seem like perfect spots for this. The classes already blend well into a variety of other builds and (correct me if I'm wrong) every other class has three or four skills while they currently have two. Adding a small Tactics progression to both classes would mean you would at least see critical hits occasionally, rather than only ever seeing them on very specific builds. And yet that would in no way take away from the current specialization of Stealth, because no one else would still be reliably causing critical hits. It also means combat would be less predictable because Soldier and Pistoleer are super common enemy classes.

My issue isn't that I want all builds to cause lots of criticals. It's that nearly no builds can cause them at all, and that just feels weird.

Alternatively, do you have any plans to create any other classes? If so, would you consider a class whose primary skill is Tactics? Maybe with Stealth on it too. I just feel like criticals are so underused in this game.

[Cory Trese]

Every few releases we find budget to add new Jobs to the game. If you look back over the past 250 or so updates, you'll see a ton of jobs have been added at each phase.

We added new Jobs during Early Access. We've added new Jobs while live on Steam, and we'll add more Jobs in the future.

One of the options for STF Mod Support that I am REALLY excited about is the ability for modders to add new Jobs, or make Combo Jobs -- or release mods that inject Tactics into places the modder thinks it is missing! <3