Aggression is an ability of the Assault Class in XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
| “ | Confers +10% critical chance per enemy in sight (max +30%). | ” |
– In-Game Description, XCOM: Enemy Unknown | ||
Notes[]
- Aggression's bonus fully stacked is +30%. When combined with a shotgun (+20%) on a flank (+50%), this results in 100% critical hit chance. At 100% the player can plan the turn around having the guaranteed critical, making some risky attacks a sure bet and a decisive victory.
- Aggression's bonus critical chance is always at least 10%, so that, combined with Close and Personal, a rifle will have a guaranteed critical hit in a point-blank flanking shot. Normally, only with a shotgun can you thus plan on a critical. — This no longer works with the reworked Close and Personal in XCOM: Enemy Within.
- Aggression's bonus is potentially extremely valuable for clearing melee packs, where it is often one turn, one volley, kill-or-be-killed.
- Aggression aids in overcoming critical-chance reduction on enemies with the Hardened property, such as Sectopods, Ethereals, and Cyberdiscs.
- Aggression rarely stacks to 30%. Moving up with more than one alien alive and in sight is often risky since as the Assault can potentially activate more aliens as they charge in, resulting in the Assault getting overrun. Also, due to the possibility of front-line fighters missing their targets and leaving the Assault compromised and surrounded, the prudent Assault generally moves up last, after all other shots have been decided; thus, a lot of the aliens providing the Aggression bonuses might be killed. On the other hand, the player can decide to hold back on guaranteed kill actions (such as explosives) until Aggression Assaults have fired to preserve their bonus.
- With Training Roulette, a Sniper with this skill can often guarantee that Headshot will land the critical hit with boosted damage. This is especially important early on with enemies that can survive a regular crit like Chryssalids against a ballistic Sniper Rifle.
- This importance is greater still if Damage Roulette is enabled, as non-critical damage is unreliable and a low critical chance may mean that Headshot is wasted.
- With Absolutely Critical, this ability has less importance, as criticals are guaranteed on flanked/exposed non-Hardened targets.