Having played them a few times, I think the normal Goliath in this book does feel excessively squishy and generally low-impact. They do not feel as threatening or impactful as most of the other NPCs here.
But it's not that big a deal for me in the end -- I just make all my goliaths veterans or commanders or both so they can take more punishment.
The other side to this is the same thing I talked about in regards with the Operator which is that no NPC (aside from ones intended to serve as boss or miniboss type roles) should be an island. Templates are a good way to bulk a Goliath up, but also just giving them support works too. A Latch Drone, Dispersal Shield, you could probably do some nasty stuff by having a Mirage donate its Dataveil to one, etc.
My take on the Goliath, which I could/should have gone into more detail on in the notes, is sort of bound up in some broader thoughts on defense in Lancer being very "all or nothing." Shredded and "paracausal" damage simply turns off most everything but flat Immunity outright, which means that fighting Goliaths or other similarly "broad Resistance" units is very swingy depending on if you brought the right gear check to the party like a Swallowtail or FABI Munitions or a Paracausal Mod gun, and so a non-zero number of Goliath after-action reports I've seen have been "we just melted them anyway."
So that was partly what influenced my decision to trade it out for other things like increased baseline mobility, additional function at range, etc, a sense that in many respects people were already generally bursting them down through various means, and partly it's the stuff I talked about in the notes, but partly it's also that I think this makes Goliaths something that works better with some teamcomp synergy behind them.
I've been working on another project which is basically a big book of premade comps, several of which use Goliaths in various capacities, and I talk about this more in there. I'm hoping to have it done sometime before the year is out, we'll see how things line up.
That sounds like a cool project! I'm very much looking forward to it.
Re: Goliaths tactical role, resistance mechanics, backing it up with supports, etc:
I should confess up front that I probably have an aesthetic preference coloring my assessment of the tactical balance.
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I said that goliaths felt weaker than other NPC classes, to me, and they did feel that way -- but unconsciously, I probably feel they ought to be *more* powerful, or at least have more of their power indexed into durability. It just feels strange to me when a towering size 3 mech gets bursted down immediately, even if that Size 3 mech didn't represent a greater investment of the notional "encounter design budget" or "army points limit" for the NPC side than a random size 1 Sentinel ... okay, rebaked Sentinels are size 2, I guess all the defenders are size 2 now. But still, it just feels like a size 3 defender should be more durable than a size 2 defender.
If the classes are meant to be balanced against each other, though, it's probably actually correct for a Goliath to be easier to kill than most of those other defenders because it's so outrageously good at gumming up the middle of the map and preventing the PCs from going where they want to go.
The first time I busted out the goliaths, the PCs were on a mission all about assassinating an Elite Commander Veteran Witch who hid way in the back behind a stack of Goliaths who kept diving in suicidally to keep the PCs away from her, and it actually played just fine as a tactical combat, I just found it comical to watch them blowing away so many big boys so fast.
(Also my PC team had both a 3-tac-knife-hunter-nelson and a Centimane-Autostab-Gunslinger-Scylla Gorgon, so they were extremely good at deleting big piles of HP as long as armor = 0)
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That said, it's a little counter-intuitive to me to be throwing support on a defender like the Goliath; at least, it feels like double-counting in a sense. I actually put the goliath in my Greek-themed "monsters and witchcraft" army which was built around scourers, rainmakers, and specters for dps, mirages, priests, and hives for support/control, and demolishers for point defense. The way I see it, a Goliath is supposed to be there to protect my Scourer, but the Priest is also there to protect my Scourer. If I'm having the Priest shield the Goliath, I've now committed 2 units toward giving the Scourer the same amount of indirect defense 1 Goliath already gives (only the Goliath doesn't die as fast), and it's not clear that I wouldn't do better to just have my priest shield my scourer. (Scourers in particular are a good case for that because unlike the new Goliath, they DO have both armor and damage resistance, so they can stretch that Overshield MUCH further)
