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Operation Parallels - The Doom Slayer Mod

"Commander, we're getting a transmission from the Templars, it concerns an informant of theirs who says he has an extremely high priority mission for us..."

Operation Parallels is basically two mini mods combined into one.

First: the actual Operation itself. Started via Covert Action with the Templars exclusively (don't worry, I added a cheat to give you the slayer if you have Rising Tides installed and you destroyed the Templars as a faction: it's AddDoomSlayer), this leads to a two part mission where you both destroy the main facility involved in the project, along with investigating the convoy carrying the project's field equipment. You will be assisted by a reclusive but trusted informant of the Templars, Verge, who has the opportunity to take a more direct approach in assisting field operations due to Project Parallel's activities inhibiting the standard psi network tracking that ADVENT utilizes.

Second, and the part you are almost certainly here for, is the recruit you end up getting as a result of the Elders trying to mess around with the fabric of the multiverse.

The Slayer gets several base benefits from the get go:

Rip and Tear - the ability to use melee attacks using just their hands and feet, and deliver significant amounts of damage with them regardless. It also grants them a bladestorm equivalent with those attacks.

Jump Boots - enables them to well, jump up to higher elevations without needing a ladder. Simple, really.

Slayer of Doom -

• First, this enables the Rage System for the Slayer. It works very simple: as long as you keep making normal attacks on the Slayer's turn (and reaction attacks with Rip and Tear), the Slayer's rage will grow. The basic bonuses are Defence and Dodge. At max rage, the Slayer is both incredibly hard to hit and very likely to minimize incoming damage that does manage to touch them. However, special attacks , along with the basic action of reloading costs rage to use, and rage decreases with every turn that goes by.
  
  
• Second, this enables the Weapon Swapping system. That's right, the Slayer breaks a pretty big rule by XCOM standards: while you can choose what gun they start a mission with, they always have access to the basic four primary weapon types of XCOM. Early on, this just gives you a way to avoid needing to reload, but as you level up the Slayer and pick abilities, you will get special abilities that only work for a specific gun type. In addition, Rage grants specific weapon bonuses as it grows: Assault Rifles will have a chance of converting misses into grazes, shotguns get better crit chance, cannons can pierce armour, etc.
  
  
• Third, this also grants some basic immunities: the Slayer will not panic or be knocked out, and will always bleed out when possible.
  
  
• Fourth, almost forgot: the Slayer starts with 4 AP per turn as a result of this ability. In addition, like the Skirmisher, shooting their primary weapon will not end their turn.
  
  
• Fifth, yep they can glory kill enemies. The effect is akin to the new effects I added to the MEC Trooper's Brutalize Protocol, but Glory Kill has different requirements. Some enemy types you can always glory kill (e.g the Lost), some enemy types you cannot (the Chosen, Alien Rulers, etc). Otherwise, an enemy must be around 25% HP or less, or otherwise must be stunned before the Slayer can glory kill them. Doing so will heal the Slayer for 25% of their max HP.

Oh, yeah, this isn't tied to their abilities directly, but the Slayer's choice of secondary weapon is carrying a scavenged ripjack alongside a personalized rocket launcher. How personalized you may ask?

You can reload the rocket launcher freely as though it was a primary weapon. The one catch is that due to rocket launchers in XCOM still working by classic 21st century rules, it costs 4 AP for the Slayer to reload the launcher. Be mindful of this catch if you plan on relying on multiple rocket launcher blasts.

After this, we get into a bunch of custom abilities that run into the text limit, so go over here to read more about them: https://steamproxy.net/workshop/filedetails/discussion/2064234140/4747300038103162780/

The primary weapons are upgraded by the same schematics you would use to upgrade those weapons for XCOM in general. e.g upgrade your ARs if you want the Slayer to have a better AR.

The Slayer's secondary weapon sets are upgraded by armour upgrades. This is to just keep the experience a bit simplified because it took me way too long to get this mod working.

The Slayer can bond with other XCOM soldiers, if you choose to do so.

If I had to sum up the major weaknesses of the Slayer, it is that:

• One, the Slayer can't hack objectives. This was originally a bug and then I thought it was pretty funny, so the Slayer always retains a hack score of 0. You can fix this if you want, I believe a covert action granting hack should be enough to let this interaction quirk be fixed.
  
• Two, the Slayer isn't immune to psionics. Yes the Slayer has an unusually large amount of will due to fighting things that kinda make XCOM's whole problem look like a sunday walk in the park (so early game sectoids won't ruin you day, + he gains will with every rank up in contrast to soldiers in WOTC), but a new universe means working with new rules, and for the purposes of "ok so it's not 100% a cakewalk, giving you a reason to play around with the various mechanics instead of universally applying buckshot to face", one of those rules is that alien psionics is too dissimiliar to still have immunity, even if the end effects is much lesser (e.g psi zombies still being basic shamblers vs demonic possessed being able to utilize weaponry up to chianguns)
  
  
• Three....well this is more ADVENT's problem, but the Slayer's presence on missions will cause ADVENT to call for new reinforcements to attempt to slow them down once they've been spotted.
  
  Keyword is attempt. (You can choose to disable this in the .ini files of the mod)

Can I customize my Slayer?
While the torso/leg/arms/helmet options are locked to the armour set, you can choose to go helmetless and utilize whatever cosmetic mods you have installed, along with utilizing base game options such as changing race, gender, facial hair, etc.

Wait, Verge?
Yep. Wanted to add in a little cameo.

Can I kill him?
I mean, I guess I can't stop you from doing so?

I have a bug with the weapon swap system
To make sure I can debug this as well as possible, I need you to mention the following things when making bug reports about this specific ability:
1) Slayer's starting weapon
2) The weapon they were trying to change to (e.g were you trying to switch to the cannon?)

And I'm going ask one more thing: reliably repeat the crash before submitting a bug report about it. I know it can randomly crash when swapping and then work fine when you reload the game, unfortunately I think that kind of crash is just an issue with the visualizer system when something gets inited (so the Slayer mod basically rolls the dice a bit more on this).

Mission didn't spawn properly due to an older versiion
Use FixSlayerMission to remove the improper mission and add in a newer, fixed one.
Praetor Armor done by Sacred Soul69 and ObelixDk
Rocket Launchers mod this mod depends on is by iridar
Unarmed Combat animations this mod utilizes also done by iridar
Also thanks to iridar for helping me talk through my mod issues when I was working on this mod at like 3AM in the morning
shiremct for being able to look at an implementation of a custom Focus-style system for a class
Splash Damage and The Coalition for making Gears Tactics, which happened to be the game that gave me the base ideas for the mod