XCOM 2: Alien Hunters DLC

Ruler Reaction is unbalanced as fuck ... Test your games

I have no words to describe how blatantly game breaking the RULER REACTION and this whole DLC is. I'm an XCOM noob. Like many newer players, I bought the full XCOM Franchise in bundle recently. I played trough XCOM Ennemy Within vanilla in about 30 hours and planned to hop onto XCOM2 right after. After about 15 hours of XCOM2, my experience so far is that XCOM Ennemy Within was far more polished and balanced than XCOM2 is. I now understand that the reason I though that way was because of DLC like Alien Hunters, which makes XCOM2 worse. I now understand that this DLC is a noob trap. An additionnal, paid content that makes the game worse. I wish I knew before starting my XCOM2 vanilla playtrough. There are a few reason why this DLC sucks so much. The first is the elephant in the room, the RULER REACTION. In XCOM, you start with 4 agents per mission, which you can upgrade to 6. The whole point of upgrading the number of agents you can field at once is because by having more agents, you can have more action per turn, meaning, more dmg per turn, meaning, more chances of killing your ennemy before you take dmg. Taking dmg is very punishing in XCOM, as you have very low hp pools in early (you can die in a single crit) and very few way of healing. So managing your actions and positionning to eliminate the threats while taking as few dmg as possible is your core skill as an XCOM player. Here comes RULER REACTION. All bosses included in this DLC (so far the 2 I met) are ruler, and they have this reaction. Basicaly, they get to play everytime your agent does anything, INCLUDING OVERWATCH. This sucks terribly because, as you met a ruler, you think "Well sure this reaction is strong, but if I position all my agents in helping range of eachother, put them all in overwatch and then have a single one shoot at the ruler to aggro him, then surely, the ruler will come and trigger overwatch of all my agents, right ? This is the intended way of contering the reaction, right ?" No, it's not. The reaction wasn't meant to be conterplayed. It was meant to bee unfair. Overwatch trigger the ruler reaction. Meaning, everytime you take an action, whatever it is, the ruler also do. But because the ruler is a boss, he has 30 hp and hits way harder than you. So basicaly, everytime you give an order to an agent, the closest agent to the boss dies. Cause yes, the ruler doesn't even focus the last agent that shot him. His reaction is literaly a free turn. All this sounds bad, and it is, but the worst is yet to come. You could think "Well, since thoses bosses are incredibly hard, borderline unfair, I'll just avoid them untill I get stronger, right ?" Nope. Can't do that either. Beside the first ruler, the Snake King, all subsequent ruler appear in random mission. They don't even have specific, unique, bossfight missions with their dedicated arena. Heck, like the Snake King, they don't even have their first mission to trigger them, and then you met them later in normal mission if you fail to kill them. No. Let me tell you the exact moment I knew this DLC was trash. I started a capture and evacuate mission. Where the goal was to find an ennemy VIP, kill or capture him, and extract on a specific location. All was going as planned so far, a few save scumming to save me from newby mistakes that wiped my party once or twice. Then I knock the VIP out, carry him, and then... Yea, Right there Right beetwin the extraction area and the VIP and my agents, The Goliath Queen. A boss I never met before, which have 30 hp and 3 armor at a stage of the game when I still have tier 1 guns and armor, spawned in a mission where I couldn't even call for emergency evac to save my agents by failing the mission. 3 armor is equal than the minimal dmg that the rifle deals btw (3-5). And again, everytime you shoot a gun, it's an action, so the Goliath Queen, a melee unit, will run 20 cases toward your agent and oneshot him in melee. Heck, I couldn't even run to the extraction, cause running is also an action, so the boss would just slaughter my agents one by one while they run, all in a single turn. It was a no win situation. My ONLY (and realy ONLY) option as a player was to load back the autosave before the mission even started. Because as the mission starts, the game choose wheter or not to randomly include the ruler. So this mission was unsavable. Timed mission btw, all that in a limit of 12 turns. I am sincerely confused as to why this DLC still exists in this state, to this day. Because all I just explained is feedback from the 2th of June 2025. This DLC released a whopping 9 YEARS AGO. And it's balance is still non existent. Even in a Bundle, this DLC is not worth buying, at all. It's just a nooby trap, please, I beg you, avoid it like the plague.