XCOM 2 Class Analysis: Psi Operative

I labeled psionics as a 'class analysis' in the prior game... and now they're an actual class!

Which for one thing means that psi powers are actually mutually exclusive with eg Ranger abilities. In fact, Psi Operatives are completely excluded from the Advanced Warfare Center, as well as the Training Center in War of the Chosen; they can't get bonus skills, their skills can't be passed out to other classes (With the caveat that Templar include a few Psi Operative skills as possible X-COM skills, but Resistance classes don't follow normal rules in this regard), they can't accrue or spend Ability Points, and they can't be retrained either. So their abilities are extra-mutually exclusive compared to the core four classes.

One implication of all this is that in War of the Chosen you'd optimally only have troops with an Average Combat Intelligence become Psi Operatives. Anyone with a better Combat Intelligence is wasting their potential by becoming a Psi Operative, since Psi Operatives can't spend Ability Points. Unfortunately, Combat Intelligence isn't displayed in the general soldier summary screen you see when picking who to turn into a Psi Operative so it's a bit of a pain to actually hold to this idea without the help of mods... fortunately, there's now a mod that replaces the drop-down behavior with accessing the soldier list, so that's much-appreciated.

Anyway, Psi Operatives are a non-standard class acquired by building a Psi Lab and assigning a Rookie -or a couple of Rookies, if you upgrade the Psi Lab with a second slot- for training. By default this will take 5 days if you have an Engineer staffed to halve the time (It takes 12.5 days on Legendary in that case), and they'll come out the other side with a random Psi Operative skill.

Which brings me to some of the weirder things about Psi Operatives; first of all, they don't gain experience on the battlefield. They get better by spending time training in the Psi Lab. Fortunately, if you send them out on a mission in the middle of training they'll pick up right where they left off when they get back from the mission (Assuming they don't need to recover, anyway), but as far as I'm aware kills don't help them grow.

Second of all, while I'll be presenting their skills by 'rank', the correlation between rank and skills is more tenuous on a Psi Operative. What happens is that when you elect to send a Psi Operative for more training you'll be offered three random skills, and you'll pick one to be what they learn from this training session; no, the Psi Operative doesn't get three skills per rank. This isn't Long War. Yes, this means the game has to be capable of offering skills above the skill's supposed rank. The system is biased toward offering skills that are technically within the Psi Operative's next rank, but it's always possible to be offered something above their current rank. (Well, until their rank is maxed out/they already have all the skills above their current rank)

This gets balanced out by having skills that are above their current rank take longer to train. The higher it is above their current rank, the longer it will take; training a skill within their rank will take 5 days if you've got an Engineer staffed at the Psi Lab. (Except on Legendary; base training time is 25 days, and an Engineer halves this to being displayed as 13 days) Training one of the highest-tier skills as their second skill will take 10 days with an Engineer staffed ie twice as long as an on-rank skill. Everything else is reasonably intuitive, such as skills one rank above their rank taking 6 days, though note that skills below their rank do not get trained faster. 5 days is as good as it gets.

For each skill a Psi Operative learns, they gain one rank, just like a regular X-COM soldier, which gives them stats. Unlike regular X-COM soldiers, hitting maximum rank doesn't mean they're done training; it just means their stats will stop rising. You can absolutely train a Psi Operative to have literally every skill. In fact, it's not even that hard; just stick them in the Psi Lab, don't risk them on missions, and train train train, and you'll have one ready before you're ready to launch the final missions. (Unless you put off building the Psi Lab in the first place, anyway) You've got enough wiggle room that even if you're training inefficiently by taking higher-level skills early (Note: don't do this unless you intend to actually send them into the field before they're maxed) this will still get you at least one Psi Operative in time for the endgame. The only completely fixed caveat to skill order stuff is that there are a handful of skills that require some other skill before they'll be offered. (Because they modify those skills instead of being standalone skills)

In exchange for this tremendous potential, low-level Psi Operatives tend to be kind of terrible. They're stuck with the generic Assault Rifle, just like a Specialist, and their 'secondary weapon' is their Psi Amp ie their ability to use psychic powers, not a distinct secondary weapon that does its own useful thing. They have poor level gains as well, and until they have a few levels under their belt they won't have enough psi skills to be able to use one every single turn, as most of them have notable cooldowns. You generally shouldn't send in low-level Psi Operatives unless the situation is fairly desperate; they're wasting experience and aren't very good.

Unlike the core classes, I'm not going to be making a separate War of the Chosen post for Psi Operatives. It makes no direct modifications to them, and the indirect modifications can be largely summarized as 'a maxed-out Psi Operative is less godly relative to everyone else than in the base game, because now you can max out almost anyone else as well'. I'll note specific implications of relevance as I hit the skills that have been notably impacted, but there's not enough to justify a whole separate post.

Especially since the fundamental mechanics of how Psi Operatives level mean that even with some skills being more relevant or less relevant, your endgame Psi Operatives will look the same regardless; they'll have all the skills, because why not?

One thing worth pointing out in this regard; while Psi Operatives can build up Bonds, it's not a natural fit to stuffing them into the Psi Lab and forgetting about them until they're godly in power. If you want the best possible Psi Operative, they'll actually have to get started on fieldwork early and often, so they have a high-level Bond in time for the endgame. (Without you just stalling) This is a subtle strike against them, though admittedly Bonds are minor enough -and tangential enough to Psi Operative strengths- that it's not actually a huge problem. Just one more way they're less dominating in War of the Chosen's endgame.

Alternatively, you can think of it as an incentive to not just have them sitting in the lab until they're maxed out. That's a nice benefit on a design level, actually. Thankfully, while injuries will interrupt a Psi Operative's training regime, the Fatigue system doesn't interfere at all, so as long as you're good at preventing your Psi Operatives from taking hits it's not too bad. And even injuries merely pause their training; you don't lose the progress so far, even if you assign someone else to use the Psi Lab slot in the meanwhile, and can pick up right where the Psi Operative left off later.

Another thing worth pointing out is that, just like your other soldiers, in the base game Psi Operatives gain a partially randomized amount of Will for each rank past the initial transition from a Rookie (4-13 a level, up to 100 max), while in War of the Chosen they only gain Will from that initial transition. I'll be getting into that whole thing in another post, though.


Initiate
+2 Aim
+1 HP
+50 Psi
+5 Will

Hey, what's this 'Psi' stat? What happened to Will being the Psi stat?

Well, in XCOM 2 Will is still your Psi defense stat, but much like classic X-COM there's now a separate stat for governing the offensive capabilities of psionic units. If a unit doesn't have access to any psionic capabilities, the game doesn't bother to give it a Psi stat.

Among other points, this means manipulating your Psi Operative's Will isn't a way to bolster the likelihood of pulling off their Psi abilities. That Will PCS you excitedly threw onto a Psi Operative? Whoops, that was a waste. Don't do that.

Manipulating enemy Will is still plenty useful, though. You can have other troops toss Flashbangs and Gas Grenades to set up for a Domination, for example.

Anyway, actual skills.

But before that; lanes!

They don't really mean anything in the Psi Operative's case. If I tried to put any kind of label on one or the other based on some pattern that looks like it exists, I'd run into the problem that the pattern gets contradicted. You'd think Telepath would have all the mind-to-mind skills, but nah, Domination is under Resonant. Well, okay, maybe Resonant is the offense lane- no, most of the direct offense skills are actually under Telepath.

Yeah, I dunno why they bothered to give the lanes names in this case, especially since the Psi Operative's process for acquiring skills means lanes don't even really serve the purpose of hinting at what skills are meant to work together. A player may never bother to even open up the skills section to see the lane names, and even if they did a Psi Operative doesn't have skills revealed in that section unless they've already learned the skills, meaning the in-game interface provides no means to use the skill lane names as a guide to what to take next, not until they've got someone with literally everything already.

But I'm still ordering skills in their ostensible lanes: in every case the one I put first in a rank is the 'Telepath' lane skill, and the second one is the 'Resonant' lane skill.

Anyway...

Soulfire
Does 4-6, 5-7, or 6-8 damage to an organic target, based on Psi Amp tier. 3 turn cooldown.

So take Mind Fray, remove its stat debuffs, give it some damage variance... and make it completely impossible to resist.

It ignores Armor, Aim, Defense, Dodge, Will, anything you care to name other than not being valid to target it on machines. This makes it a fantastic panic button when you desperately need to force damage on something. The best example is the Archon King, thanks to Ruler Reaction mechanics and him having a nasty grab attack, but it can also save soldiers from Viper Binds, finish off mostly-dead Gatekeepers for sure, drive off Chosen, finish off an enemy who's gotten behind your team...

The damage is, however, a little poor compared to equivalent-tier weaponry once you're past Conventional, so you should generally reserve it for such emergencies rather than use it whenever its available; your rifle will be generally be better against unarmored targets, and most heavily Armored targets are immune to Soulfire anyway. Andromedons and Gatekeepers are notable exceptions, and since Gatekeepers have high Defense to boot they're very much a good target to consider hitting with Soulfire. Just don't use it first in a turn if you can avoid it, as it won't benefit from their shell being open, but will cause them to close up.

Archons are a less dramatic example, but are still a decent target for Soulfire thanks to their high innate Defense. Even less dramatic but still relevant is enemies with Dodge, such as a Codex, as Soulfire can't Graze them; if you can get perfect accuracy with your Rifle on an enemy with Dodge you should just take the shot, but if you can't then Soulfire is worth considering to avoid their Dodge creating problems.

Also note that Soulfire is one of the skills that can get its damage bolstered by tier Breakthroughs in War of the Chosen. As it only gains 1 damage per Psi Amp tier, a Breakthrough is basically the same as upgrading your Psi Amp for Soulfire's purposes, in fact.

Stasis
Stuns a target enemy, but also makes it immune to all effects until the user's team's next turn. Doesn't necessarily end the user's turn. 2 turn cooldown.

An incredible utility ability for putting an enemy on pause while you deal with other things, and it always works on almost everything 100% of the time. Just remember to save Stasis for after you've done anything that will hurt the target. Also note that Stasis is nearly unique for being a single-target Psi Operative ability that works just fine on robots.

The one exception to saving Stasis until all your other people have done damage to the target is Alien Rulers. Unlike most over-time effects, Stasis doesn't disable a Ruler for one of its Ruler Reactions, it disables it until the beginning of your next turn. As such, against Rulers Stasis is a pause button while you get your team situated or kill other threats without triggering Ruler Reactions, maybe even call in the Skyranger and book it because your team has already been mauled by the Ruler. The potential here is not to be discounted, and Alien Rulers are one of the better reasons to pull a Psi Operative out of the lab, particularly in War of the Chosen with the DLC integration on, since you'll actually get warning on each first-time Ruler appearance.

Really, in general Stasis is one of the Psi Operative's best skills out of the box, enhanced significantly by the ability to slip it in while still doing something else, and a Psi Operative with Stasis can do a surprising amount of work even if that's literally their only skill while they're surrounded by Colonels. Being able to put a serious threat on pause while you clean up lesser threats is a huge aid.

Note that it does block damage over time effects currently on the target. You shouldn't, for example, Stasis a 1 HP Sectopod that's afflicted with Acid unless your goal is to prevent it from exploding just yet. (Such as because one of your soldiers is in range of the explosion)

Also note that the Chosen are immune to Stasis. Don't get comfortable thinking you can put them on pause. This is particularly inconvenient with the Warlock, since Stasis will normally break Mind Control, but sorry, that's not an option with the Warlock.


Acolyte
+2 Aim
+4-13 Psi

Yeah, Psi Operatives gain a random amount of Psi per level past the first. Note that this caps out at a total of 100, not counting the Psi Amp bonus; it's technically possible for a max-level Psi Operative to have less than 100, but you're not going to see it often. (They'll gain a minimum of 24 Psi, for a minimum of 74 Psi total, and the actual average gain is roughly 8 per level, which would put them 2 short of 100 when maxed) This randomization mostly matters if you actually bother to bring Psi Operatives out early, as one Psi Operative with a lucky rank under their belt may perform more consistently than another with three ranks who rolled bad on all three. And even then, the Psi Operative actually uses their Psi stat a lot less than you might expect...

Also notice the Psi Operative is one of the HP-every-other-level classes. Like I said; their stat gains are pretty poor.

Insanity
Attempts to inflict Disorientation, Panic, or Mind Control on the target, with a +50 bonus to success chance. Lasts for one turn if successful. 3 turn cooldown.

I don't know the math exactly, but while which result you get is random there's a bias based on what the user's Psi is vs the target's Will. If you hurl Insanity at a low-Will target and pass the check, it's more biased toward Mind Control. If you hurl Insanity at a high-Will target but still manage to pass the check, it's more biased toward merely Disorienting them. I don't think any result ever becomes impossible, but this is another example of low-level Psi Operatives being a bit underwhelming; a high-level Operative tossing out Insanity is vastly more likely to get a cheap Mind Control out of it, while a low-level one is much more likely to impose the underwhelming Disorientation status if they even get lucky enough to succeed in the first place.

The basic success formula for Insanity -as well as for Domination- is very straightforward: take the attacker's Psi rating, add on the bonus provided by the skill they're using, subtract the target's Will, and the resulting number is the percentage chance of success. (ie a Psi Operative with 50 Psi would have a 50% chance for Insanity to work on an enemy with 50 Will, a 25% chance to succeed on an enemy with 75 Will, a 75% chance to succeed on an enemy with 25 Will, etc) In practice, Insanity is surprisingly reliable: the majority of enemies have somewhere from 50 to 100 Will, with several of the enemies that have 100 or more Will being immune to Insanity such that their actual Will score is irrelevant. A typical max-level Psi Operative with an Alien Psi Amp thus generally has at least a 90% chance of Insanity working on virtually every target that's valid in the first place; the one exception is Gatekeepers, who have 100 to 120 Will depending on difficulty while being fully susceptible to Insanity... which merely knocks Insanity down to a 70% chance on Legendary if assuming an endgame Psi Operative. Hit them with a Flashbang or Gas Grenade, and now it's a 100% chance.

In spite of those favorable numbers, I personally rarely bother to use Insanity. A Psi Operative with a good variety of skills will usually have a better option in any given situation, but even for a low-level Psi Operative it can be difficult to find a situation it makes sense to use it in. Many of the enemies you'd most want to hit it with are outright immune, or have high enough Will that a mid-level Psi Operative has iffy odds of succeeding, and then you're discouraged from fishing for low-odds Insanity because if it does go through it'll probably just Disorient them, which frankly you're better off using a Flashbang at that point.

It can be okay against a Codex, as a successful result will at minimum shut down their teleportation and Psionic Bomb shenanigans while having no chance of triggering cloning (Even if you have Schism, Disorientation will prevent the cloning from triggering), and Shieldbearers are also a decent target to consider since their Will isn't great and it's usually a lot more problematic for them to fire off a shield than to fire their rifle. Though there's better ways of trivializing Shieldbearers, so really it's mostly a Codex that Insanity is all that reliably great against.

Ultimately, Insanity's main problem is that, aside from fishing for the Mind Control, its primary utility is to stall enemies... which Stasis does the same thing, but minus the RNG elements. It's really too bad Insanity isn't an area-of-effect ability of some kind, as that would do a lot to push it into relevance. It's especially unfortunate because the concept of Insanity is really great, so having the execution drag it down to near-irrelevance... yeah. Unfortunate.

An additional, subtle strike against Insanity is that it's actually surprisingly iffy to induce Panic in many enemies. Against pure melee enemies, it's fine -they'll  just stand there, freaking out. Most enemies, though, will respond to Panic by moving somewhere that has Cover relevant to your forces and then taking a shot. They prefer to attack other enemies, but if there's no other enemy for them to target they'll just target your own forces, and taking a shot at their own forces is frequently pointless as shots taken under Panic suffer a significant Aim penalty, so much so that if the target is in Cover it's probably going to be a miss, especially given how Defense because a bit widespread on enemies in the late game. Furthermore, enemies carrying explosives are allowed to respond to Panic by running at your troops and hurling the explosive at your forces. As such, ADVENT Troopers (That aren't Basic), ADVENT Officers, Mutons, and Purifiers are all cases where Insanity can result in them inflicting massive damage on your squad, particularly if you have a tendency to clump your squad while they're Concealed and inflict Insanity before spreading them out.

It could be worse, mind. As far as I'm aware Panic will never cause enemies to use uncommon or unique ability types: a Shieldbearer won't put up a shield in response to being Panicked, a Codex won't use a Psi Bomb, etc. I'm... not sure if the Andromedon's Acid Blob attack falls under this banner or is classed by the game as a grenade, though, so they may be another risky target to Panic.


Inspire
Grants an action point to an ally the soldier has line of fire on, potentially granting the ally an additional turn if they're currently out of action points. Cannot be used on machines. 3 turn cooldown.

In the base game, Inspire is a clutch skill, able to let you disentangle tricky situations by having a key soldier do multiple things you need all of done where it outright demands additional turns, or at least additional action points. The only major caveat is that if you're fond of SPARKs, it doesn't work on them, and it's honestly rare you specifically need your SPARK to get an extra action, especially considering they can gift themselves one with Overdrive and Overdrive even lets them take multiple actions that normally each end the turn, which is otherwise one of the more significant benefits of Inspire.

In War of the Chosen, it's still a very good skill, but it's less prominent. Skirmishers can reliably do the same thing, but are more flexible in how they use their equivalent ability and can even use it on SPARKs, and Bondmates can assist each other in the same way from any distance regardless of intervening terrain. Both of these are also able to be used without ending the turn, making them very action-economical, even considering that Skirmishers can already spend action points on offensive actions. If you're consistent about building up Bonds, you may end up never finding a situation that justifies Inspire, especially if you're fond of Skirmishers.


Adept
+2 Aim
+1 HP
+4-13 Psi

Soul Steal
Soulfire now heals the Psi Operative for half the damage it deals.
Requires Soulfire.

Free healing!

Note that Soul Steal's healing is based on actual HP damage dealt; killing a 2 HP target will get you 1 HP, not half your Soulfire's base damage. 

While good play will generally minimize opportunities for enemies to do damage to your troops in the first place, Soul Steal is still excellent to have on hand for when you can't stop damage entirely. Being able to heal without using up limited resources or giving up an opportunity to attack is fantastically economical, particularly in longer, more enemy-dense missions where Medikits are at real risk of running out. The one unfortunate point is that Psi Operatives are one of your less likely troops to end up soaking damage; their ability suite tends to lead to them contributing from afar, not drawing fire the way eg a Ranger does. As such, it should usually be a lower-priority skill to train for.

Either that or you should go out of your way to try to push your Psi Operatives into the thick of things. Give 'em your Serpentsuit and Speed PCSes, I guess.

Stasis Shield
Stasis can now be cast on allies.
Requires Stasis.

Uh, yay?

Stasis Shield has its uses, but most of the time you're probably better off using Stasis on a key enemy, not one of your soldiers. One of the main exceptions is a case where having Stasis Shield doesn't matter -where one of your soldiers has been Mind Controlled, and their controller is out of reach of the rest of the squad, and so you Stasis the Mind Controlled soldier.

If you do Stasis one of your soldiers, make sure to have them take their turn first so you don't waste it.

One consideration to Stasis Shield's credit: it can be targeted on the user! Thus, if your Psi Operative ends up separated and in danger, you can potentially have them Stasis theirself to stall while the rest of the team gets closer or cleans up their own mess.

Minor point: Stasis Shield will actually replace Stasis in your soldier's ability list, including if you look at the soldier's skill list through the Armory. It's a bit interesting to me that Stasis Shield does this, but not Soul Steal. Regardless, it means Psi Operatives actually have one more skill in their tree than the core classes do -probably in part to make up for the fact that they don't have a Guerrilla Tactics School skill to push that number up.

On a different note, a curious thing is that all the soldier lines for using Stasis seem to have been written very specifically under the premise of Stasis Shield. That is, your soldiers talk about 'armor of the mind' and whatnot, like they're protecting their target, when said protection is later access than hard-disabling hostiles. This gets downright comedic in conjunction with how Stasis Shield is rarely worth taking advantage of, but even if it were more useful this would make a lot more sense if Stasis was instead something you could use on allies and then had an advanced skill to allow you to turn it on enemies. It makes me wonder what was going on in the development process, as it's so strange an outcome.


Disciple
+1 Aim
+4-13 Psi

Solace
Negative mental effects on the Psi Operative, as well as all allies within 4 tiles, will be automatically blocked as well as purged if a unit suffering an effect ends up in the radius.

Solace is a bit buggy, unfortunately; I've had Psi Operatives get Mind Controlled even though they had Solace. As such, if you want to be completely confident in your ability to purge Mind Control, you need two Psi Operatives with Solace, and need to keep them together. On the plus side, the one enemy that can explicitly choose to Mind Control a unit has a global cooldown, preventing groups of them from grabbing both Psi Operatives in the same turn.

This won't help you if you get unlucky with multiple Sectoids tossing out Mindspins, though. Fortunately this will almost never crop up, and even more fortunately War of the Chosen seems to have more or less wiped this particular bit of bugginess.

Solace is a hugely important skill for the final mission, where you're dealing with multiple mind controllers amid all the other madness... in the base game. In War of the Chosen, just get an A team full of Bonds and keep the Bondmates close to each other. Solace is nice and all, but not a lifesaver like in the base game.

Conversely, the Chosen being able to inflict mental effects en mass gives you a bit more incentive to send Solace Operatives out into the field before they're more or less maxed out. This is a bit of a recurring trend with War of the Chosen and Psi Operatives; stop keeping them in a closet and actually use them like regular soldiers!

Note that using Solace to clear Stun or Panic isn't necessarily as useful as you'd hope, as Stunned or Panicking units outright have their action points for the turn eaten. If a soldier is going to stay Stunned/Panicked on their next turn as well, using Solace to get them in good condition is worth pursuing, but if you were thinking you'd have your Psi Operative get them back in action this turn... sorry, it doesn't work that way.

Semi-exception: a soldier with Ever Vigilant won't have it trigger if they're currently Stunned or Panicking. If, however, they started a turn Stunned or Panicked and then Solace purged it, then they will go into Overwatch at the end of your turn. Not anything to rely on, but could be useful to know about.

Well, in the base game. In War of the Chosen, curing a Panicked soldier with Solace actually will give them their full turn, making it a bit more widely useful. Though this itself comes with the caveat that Panic has been overhauled to be much rarer and easier to manage in the first place.


Sustain
The first time the soldier should have died in a mission, they instead enter Stasis with 1 HP remaining. This Stasis ends at the start of their team's next turn.

Death? What's that?

Sustain is something you should acquire before sending your 75%-of-the-way-to-everything Psi Operative out into combat. Mitigate the risk of straight-up losing this soldier you've invested weeks of training into. Ideally it'll never trigger, but having it just in case is best.

Note that if they're afflicted with a damage over time effect, the Sustain Stasis ends after it's already been blocked. As such, Sustain ensures you'll be able to use a Medikit on them before they die, assuming the rest of your squad hasn't come apart anyway.

Also note that in the base game a high-level Psi Operative basically gets two guaranteed shots at not dying: one from Sustain triggering, and another from automatically going into Bleeding Out mode if they end up killed again thanks to high Will and Stay With Me. As such, if you play cautiously and don't end up in incredibly bad situations, it's very, very difficult to actually lose a high-level Psi Operative. Though a bit of a converse to that is that Sustain isn't quite as uniquely amazing as it first sounds; most of your Colonels in the endgame are going to be guaranteed to shrug off the first death of a mission, too, just not necessarily bouncing right back into the fight afterward.

In War of the Chosen you can't count on the Bleeding Out chance, so Sustain becomes a lot more significant in its existence, enough so you may actually want to try to go out of your way to put Psi Operatives on the front lines so that if the RNG does decide to knock someone to 0 HP it's more likely to not actually kill anyone.


Mystic
+1 Aim
+1 HP
+4-13 Psi

Schism
Insanity now does 2-4 damage when successful and inflicts the target with Rupture, causing it to take 2 damage from all following attacks indefinitely.
Requires Insanity.

Bonus damage!

Note that while you might expect Void Rift to be a valid way of unlocking Schism, it doesn't actually work that way. This is easy to test by simply avoiding grabbing Insanity until you're down to 1 or 2 options being offered (Where neither of them is Void Rift), seeing that Schism isn't in the list, and then grabbing Insanity and seeing Schism popping into the list.

Also note that in War of the Chosen a tier Breakthrough will actually bolster Schism's damage if the Psi Operative is equipped with the appropriate tier of Psi Amp, just like with Soulfire. As Schism's damage is otherwise unaffected by Psi Amp tier, this can mean that moving onto a better Psi Amp leads to Schism doing worse damage. You should generally still use higher-tier Psi Amps, as a failed Insanity will do no damage and higher-tier Psi Amps boost the damage on all the other damaging Psi skills by at least enough to make up for not getting the +1 from a Breakthrough... but if you're fielding a partially trained Psi Operative who doesn't have other damage options, it may be genuinely worth considering using a lower-tier Psi Amp due to a Breakthrough. This is a bizarre bit, and if War of the Chosen was going to have Schism affected by Breakthroughs it really ought to have at least made Psi Amp tiers add a point of damage per tier to avoid that wonkiness.

Anyway, Schism makes Insanity a little more worth considering using in the field, obviously. The Rupture part is less significant than one might hope, since of the four toughest enemies of the base game two are immune to Insanity, one has high enough Will Insanity is only semi-reliable even with an Alien Psi Amp and maxed Psi stat, and the final enemy is still not fully reliable to hit under the same conditions, but the immediate damage allows Insanity to be used to pick off weakened enemies, and if you're fond of Pistol Sharpshooters the +2 damage to follow-up attacks can easily end up relevant anyway.

On the downside, it can lead to you getting Mind Control out of Insanity only for it to kill them. This can happen pretty readily when using Void Rift, since it will soften them up beforehand, and is particularly disconcerting in War of the Chosen where there's dramatic popups about units of your dying that may leave you wondering if you're costing your soldiers Will or something this way. (The answer is no; they don't care when a mindslave dies)

Fortress
The Psi Operative is immune to damage over time effects and explosive damage.

Fortress is one of the more blatant examples of XCOM 2 embracing psionics being straight-up magic. Why is my Psi Operative fireproof, impossible to envenom, unaffected by acid sliding down their face, and a Sectopod detonating inches away equivalent to a sudden breeze for them? Magic! That's why!

The game doesn't even try to pretend this is some specialized form of telekinesis or anything. This is a pleasant surprise.

Anyway, mechanically Fortress is a nice-to-have, but not as amazing as it first sounds. Most enemies with access to explosives are reluctant to actually use them, no enemies can deliberately set you on fire in the base game, the only enemy that can normally inflict (regular) Poison is generally already being phased out around the time you're getting access to Psi Operatives at all, and the one enemy that can inflict Acid doesn't try very often and is a massive priority target so good play will almost never allow it the opportunity to get Acid on anyone anyway. On top of all that, the nature of Psi Operative abilities means they have a tendency to be in the back of the group; where most soldiers are incentivized to get closer due to aim climb and flanking, the Psi Operative's abilities uniformly ignore Cover and have their chance of success unaffected by distance. In conjunction with most of the Psi Operative's abilities working out to at least normal line of sight, there's really no reason for them to get close to enemies; they're better off staying just far enough out to use their abilities and no closer, hanging out in High Cover to minimize the odds of anything hurting them. As most explosives have a limited launch range while Purifiers have extremely limited range on their flamethrower and Incendiary Grenade, it's fairly rare for a Psi Operative to ever be in a position to care about Fortress' benefits.

The primary caveat to all this is that Heavy Mecs love to use their Micromissiles, and Micromissiles are not short-ranged. Fortress is thus reasonably nice to have when fighting Heavy Mecs, particularly if you want to prioritize other targets.

A secondary caveat is that a Psi Operative with Fortress can much more readily get away with using a vehicle as Cover, since it exploding on them won't cause any harm to them. I specify vehicles in particular because most of them will continue to function as Cover even after exploding, where other explosive terrain elements will generally vanish on detonation and probably take any nearby Cover with them. As such, placing a Psi Operative near a non-vehicle explosive on the idea that the explosion can't kill them is still unnecessarily risky; if the explosive goes off, they're not in Cover anymore, and are liable to be shot now that they're unprotected.

Also note that in War of the Chosen Purifiers literally can't do anything to a Fortress soldier, but don't recognize the futility of trying. As they tend to spray whoever happens to be closest, in a tricky situation you can potentially have a Fortress Psi Operative use their body as a shield, getting close to the Purifier so they'll waste their turn trying to set alight a unit that doesn't burn.

Fortress is still less amazing than it sounds in War of the Chosen, but the addition of Purifiers does a lot to make it more consistently relevant. If you got comfortable putting it off in the base game, consider prioritizing it more when transitioning to War of the Chosen.



Warlock
+1 Aim
+4-13 Psi

Fuse
Instantly detonates an unused explosive on an enemy. Can even be targeted on corpses. No cooldown.

This works on ADVENT Mecs, every ADVENT soldier carrying a grenade (Including Purifiers in War of the Chosen), and Mutons. It does not work on enemies that explode when killed. The explosion produced will always behave exactly as if the unit had targeted the explosive at its own feet, including radius, damage, Shred, and in fact it will take away their ability to use the explosive!

Note that in the case of Heavy Mecs, they have two charges of Micromissiles and Fuse will only remove one of them. As such, if you want to use Fuse to get rid of a Heavy Mec's Micromissile access, you'll actually need to arrange to hit it with Fuse twice. It's usually easier to just kill them, but if you happen to be fond of running multiple Psi Operatives anyway double Fuse is functional in the role, if inefficient.

Fuse is a really cool concept, but a bit lackluster in execution. Unlike the prior game, explosives access isn't something that hugely proliferates in the endgame on enemies, and Psi Operatives often have better things to be doing with their turns. If it at least wasn't a turn-ending action, it would be be easier to justify slipping it into a Psi Operative's turn, but it does end the turn so no you can't do that.

Part of the problem is that enemy explosives tend to be weak. Advanced ADVENT Troopers have Frag Grenades, but they're weaker than your own Frag Grenades. Elite ADVENT Troopers have Frag Grenades actually as strong as your own... but by the time they've shown up you're probably using Rockets and Plasma Grenades, not even getting into the Experimental Grenades. Why use Fuse when your own explosives will do more damage in a larger radius? Mutons are the only real exception to this in the base game, and they get largely phased out by the endgame. So they may well have largely stopped appearing by the time you have Fuse available.

War of the Chosen makes it a bit more relevant since Elite Purifiers are actually pretty common into the late game and getting to detonate an Incendiary Bomb on an enemy group without using any of your own grenades is actually a pretty good deal, assuming the Purifier is standing close to flammable enemies whose abilities you'd prefer be disabled. There's still the issue that the Psi Operative would often be better off using Domination, Psi Lance, Void Rift, or Stasis, but it's still a lot more likely you'll end up in a situation where you have Fuse and it makes sense to actually use it. Furthermore, Purifiers using their flamethrower is vastly less concerning than them tossing their grenade, so denying them access to the grenade can be worth it all on its own if you're not confident in your ability to actually kill everything, letting you focus firepower on other threats. Fuse is also indirectly boosted by Reapers existing, as the best way to set off a Claymore is to catch it in the blast radius of some kind of explosive so you get to hit an entire pod with two strong explosives -Null Lance and Void Rift are powerful area-of-effect attacks that ignore Armor, but they can't be used to detonate a Claymore. Fuse can.

Domination
Permanently Mind Control a target with a +50 chance to success. Only one enemy can be Dominated per mission, but if Domination fails it goes on a 4 turn cooldown, allowing endless attempts until successful. If the Psi Operative dies, is Stasised (Including via Sustain triggering) or Evacuates, their Dominated unit will instantly revert to enemy control.

As with hacked robots, you can actually target Dominated units manually with your troops to kill them. Unlike with hacked robots, this isn't something you're liable to actually do, since Domination never times out. Just use the Dominated unit in a reckless manner that draws enemy fire, and keep your Psi Operative back from the fighting. It's not like it's hard to do so.

Also note that a Dominated unit isn't counted against you for missions that don't end until you've killed everything on the map. So don't ever go 'hey, I thought those were the last enemies, do I need to kill my Dominated unit to end the mission?' Strictly speaking, you should actually endeavor to kill your Dominated unit to maximize experience, but a single kill of experience isn't terribly important so whatever.

As Domination has the same odds of success as Insanity, it's also shockingly reliable, with an endgame Psi Operative having a 90% or greater chance of success against the vast majority of enemies. Its primary limitations are how many high-end units are immune to it, and the fact that you can only use it once per mission. The latter is only really an issue on longer missions, like the final mission, as instantly removing an enemy as a threat by adding them to your own ranks is very useful even if used on a low-end enemy and most missions are fairly short. Just don't blow it on the initial Overwatch ambush unless things go very badly wrong, since Domination doesn't benefit at all from those conditions the way shooting and area-of-effect attacks do.

It's also worth keeping in mind what the Shadow Chamber told you was in the mission when considering what to Dominate. A mission with Chryssalids makes Poison-immune units more appealing, so they can be used to bait out Chryssalid attacks without ending up a new source of Chryssalids, for example. Units with innate Defense are particularly useful for baiting out melee attacks, since their Defense means they'll frequently cause those attacks to be wasted. An Elite Purifier hits both those notes, but Codices are also a good option, being immune to Chryssalid Poison and with a good enough Dodge they'll probably tank several Chryssalid hits before going down.

Overall, Domination is straightforwardly good. I especially appreciate how it's actually less abusable than Mind Control was in the prior game while also being more convenient for a player; among other points, you don't need to keep track of how many turns it's been since you took control of a unit to plan for them turning on you.

Do note that Mind Controlled units, rather bizarrely, do not drop anything when killed. This means you won't get timed loot if they were carrying any, but it also means you don't get their corpse! If you prefer to Dominate low-hanging fruit, not getting the corpse isn't really a big deal, as most of the easier Domination targets are enemies you'll have plenty of corpses from long before you get a Domination-capable soldier up and running, let alone with a good Psi rating. So basically a slight loss in Black Market-derived Supplies. Whatever.

However, if you like to go for more powerful enemies, such as attempting to Dominate Archons when they first enter rotation or Dominate Gatekeepers, period, this can be a strategic issue. You need a Gatekeeper Shell to perform their Autopsy, and then you need more Shells to be able to benefit from that Autopsy -to purchase Alien Psi Amps for your Psi Operatives. Dominating Gatekeepers may be denying you access to Alien Psi Amps!

As Domination never ends on its own, if you want to Dominate such a target and still loot it, you'll need to do something to break the connection, such as tossing the Frost Bomb at the Dominator. The easiest option is to Evac the Dominator, but that's not always a desirable option, and sometimes it's outright impossible. Stasis on either the Dominator or their victim will also break the connection, and since Stasis Shield can be directed at the user you can minimize disruption to your force by having the Dominator Stasis theirself.

Note that Insanity has this same Mind Control issue, as does any other form of controlling enemies -such as Haywire Protocol or a couple specific Hack rewards you'll occasionally see. If you throw an Insanity at a Gatekeeper and luck into Mind Controlling it, you'll ideally let the Mind Control time out on its own before killing them. Remember that units get to act the very turn their Mind Control ends, so this is dangerous if you don't have some manner of reliable trap set up, such as a Proximity Mine or Stock-equipped soldiers in Overwatch.


Magus
+1 Aim
+1 HP
+4-13 Psi

Final stats
Aim: 75
HP: 8
Hack: 5
Psi: 74-100

Yeah, Psi Operatives are your worst hackers. They're also tied with Sharpshooters for fragility and Grenadiers for miserably bad Aim -fortunately, they have many very powerful abilities that don't care about their Aim, so this isn't too big a problem. Still, you might want to equip their Rifle with a Scope, or give them the Bolt Caster if you have Alien Hunters, so that if they do take a shot it's not guaranteed a miss chance.

Void Rift
Does 2-3, 4-5, or 3-7 damage based on Psi Amp tier to all enemies in a 5 tile square, with a 50% chance to attempt to inflict Insanity on each given enemy in its radius that is susceptible to Insanity. 5 turn cooldown.

Void Rift's damage is funky. With a basic Psi Amp, you've got a 90% chance of +1. With a mid-tier Psi Amp, it's suddenly a 25% chance of +1; your average damage gain looks like it's in the vicinity of doubling, but it's really around a 33% increase in your average damage. Lastly, with an Alien Psi Amp the +1 jumps up to a 75% chance but now there's Spread involved so you'll usually roll higher than with the lesser Psi Amp, but every once in a while you'll roll lower than is possible with the lesser Psi Amp.

Note that while Schism requires Insanity, Void Rift does not, in spite of attempting to inflict Insanity.


Anyway, Void Rift itself ignores Armor, always hits, works on literally any enemy, and has generous targeting behavior; among other points, it can be fired right through solid walls so long as someone else has line of sight to the center point. It's a good option for opening an Overwatch ambush -to take advantage of enemies being clustered, since they tend to scatter once activated- and is also a generally decent attack for hitting groups of enemies. Its damage is actually a little lackluster -with an Alien Psi Amp its damage is comparable to and worse than a Rocket Launcher's, which is available much sooner- but it's also reusable, and when used on organic targets the Insanity inflictions can easily justify it. This is particularly true if you have Schism, making its lackluster immediate damage more tech-comparable (Though still unreliable) and the Rupture effect can make harder targets like Andromedons go down much more easily.

Void Rift will never be something you use to single-handedly wipe out pods, but it's a fairly versatile attacking tool. It's best against Psi-susceptible organics, but most Insanity-immune units are Armored, and doing damage right through Armor is useful in its own right, especially if you have other squad members able to do damage without having to pay attention to Armor. (Such as via AP Rounds)

Note that while it might intuitively seem like Void Rift should wreck the environment (What with being an indiscriminate attack that works on robots in spite of being a psychic attack), in actuality it will never damage any environmental element whatsoever. If you need area of effect damage that wipes Cover, you'll want to use a grenade/Rocket/Blaster Launcher/etc, not Void Rift.

Void Rift is another one of the Psi Operative's skills that can have its damage boosted by a Breakthrough, though it seems to be applied oddly: an Alien Psi Amp backed by the Enhanced Beam Weapons Breakthrough has led to 4-7 damage on Void Rift for me, which is only an increase to the minimum damage. Still, it's nice to leverage.

Null Lance
Does 6-9, 7-12, or 9-14 damage based on Psi Amp tier to everything in a one-tile wide line, as well as potentially destroying environmental elements. The target Z-level can be adjusted, but the attack is even tighter vertically than horizontally. 5 turn cooldown.

Null Lance's damage is weird. It employs +1 mechanics, with a 53%/51%/68% chance of rolling the +1 damage, which means that while the third tier has a wider range of possibilities than the first tier it's biased upward a bit.

Null Lance itself is a finicky, situational attack. It's the single hardest-hitting option the Psi Operative has, which in conjunction with its area-of-effect gives it staggering-seeming potential, but it's rarely practical to line up even two enemies at once. If you're playing on Regular, it also has a tendency to be gross overkill/inefficient against 'line' enemies (ie the ones where you actually care about its Cover destruction), but not powerful enough to be a one-shot-one-kill answer against the biggest threats. On higher difficulties enemy HP ramps enough to make it easier to justify using, but it's still finicky. There's a decent argument for putting a Psi Operative into Icarus Armor so you can re-position super-precisely and actually line up 2-3 targets in a nasty situation.

In practice, though, Null Lance is primarily what you use to output burst damage on tough targets like Sectopods, Andromedons, and Gatekeepers, with the potential to catch multiple targets being more hypothetical than anything else. It serves just fine in this utility in most cases, and indeed its tight not-actually-a-cone makes it easier to snipe targets from the back lines without hitting your own troops than if it had a more generous targeting behavior. It's also very useful in maps with heavy sight-blocking environmental objects, providing the Psi Operative another way to strike enemies through solid walls with more or less no risk of being attacked on the enemy turn.

On the topic of its environmental damage, you should treat it as a nice bonus when it happens to occur. I'm not sure what the actual rules are, but Null Lance rarely does environmental damage at all, and often when it does damage the environment it's just a little bit of damage, such as degrading a single tile from High Cover to Low Cover. Don't be thinking of it as a Cover-clearing attack, because plans hinging on that idea will usually get in trouble.

Null Lance is also the final Psi Operative ability to gain damage from Breakthroughs, though its damage is high enough that +1 damage will rarely be noticeable. Nice to have, but not liable to affect your plans.

-----------------------------------------------

Aesthetically/narratively/conceptually/mechanically, Psi Operatives are a massive improvement over psychic abilities from the previous game.

The big thing is that Psi Operatives are not 'you were born lucky and are effortlessly better than everyone else at no cost', as psi potential was handled in the previous game. While obviously the class mechanics aren't meant to be a literal representation of in-universe reality, nonetheless making access to psychic power its own class with its own level progression, separate from other classes, sends a clear signal that psychic powers are something you have to work to earn, like any other skill. Particularly helpful is that the game leans away from psychic powers directly overlapping with regular class capabilities; there is not, for example, a Psi Operative ability to remotely heal someone on a cooldown. This is a pleasant surprise in its own right, given that one of the common failings of systems that have mages (Or mage-equivalents) vs everyone else is that mages are all too often given a suite of capabilities that make everyone else obsolete, often so much so that it's difficult to come up with a believable explanation for why anybody bothers to be anything other than a wizard, in-universe.

There's some overlap, yes, such as how Schism gives access to a (Slightly weakened) version of the Grenadier's Rupture effect, and Soulfire could be broadly considered equivalent to Hail of Bullets as far as '100% guaranteed damage on a single target', but the game doesn't make Psi Operatives good at hacking and have innate Shred and a powerful, freely spammable melee attack and multiple Squadsight attacks, or anything of that sort.

Anyway, then there's the combination of the Psi Amp being a thing and that Psi Operatives by default have their hair go white and their eyes glow purple. (The game lets you customize soldiers to remove these effects, but whatever) There's several reasons this is important and beneficial, but one of the big ones is that it escapes the trust issues of the prior game; psychic powers proliferating doesn't mean literally anyone can do things like mind control people with no tools and no warning it was even possible for them to do that, because unlocking your psychic potential permanently marks you and just taking away your Psi Amp would be fairly limiting. (It is, admittedly, a bit ambiguous how necessary the Psi Amp is, but as I'll be getting into more much later the in-game visuals heavily imply the Psi Amp is really important)

This furthermore is an added layer of undermining the prior game dynamic of unlocking your psychic potential being a 100% good thing that makes you better than everyone else. There's social elements, for one; if being psychic ever becomes an object of suspicion and hostility, you can't blend in among regular people readily and use your abilities on the sly. For another, since you need a technological toy to put your skills to use, this puts such people on a much more even footing with, say, a Sharpshooter who is really precise with a gun.

Oh, and of course unlocking your psychic potential isn't a one-time test to determine whether you were born lucky. Anyone can be psychic in XCOM 2, they just need the right technological support to get there. No more of this crap with some people being born special and better than everyone else for no real reason at no real cost.

More purely mechanically, it's fantastic to actually have a variety of nifty psychic abilities to mess around with, instead of having five-and-a-half and looking longingly at the handful of Alien-exclusive capabilities and wondering why your troops can't do these Interesting Things.

Now, there are some wonky elements of Psi Operatives. As far as pure gameplay goes, in the base game in particular they're... not very well balanced. Your other soldiers need to be put into danger and groomed for the endgame. Psi Operatives you can stick two in a closet for a couple months and let them out to hit the final mission with zero combat experience and yet vastly more power than your hardened veterans. I like the idea of Psi Operatives getting to approach things from a different angle, but the execution could've been better, and while War of the Chosen makes them less powerful by comparison it only indirectly mitigates the wonkiness.

As for narrative wonkiness... uh, why can X-COM 100% reliably unlock human psychic potential?

In the prior game, you had the backing of multiple major governments, global resources, cutting-edge technology, and you still couldn't unlock psychic ability reliably even while studying psychic Aliens to provide a grounding. In XCOM 2, you're a ragtag band of resistance fighters with limited resources and a limited pool of people to study things using hand-me-down technology. Shouldn't this be hard?


There's disconnects beyond that. You unlock the Psionics Research by Autopsying a Sectoid, but Sectoids only have two psychic skills, one of which is basically one of the Psi Operatives most basic skills. Meanwhile, your Psi Operatives have more than 14 psychic skills. Exactly how did studying the Sectoid's limited range of capabilities lead you to unlock such diversity so readily?

Then there's how a major part of the plot of XCOM 2 is the Ethereals attempting to construct strongly psychic human bodies and this being a colossal endeavor. It's jarring how they have to go incredibly far to make this happen, and then you can just stick someone in a closet for a couple of months and achieve something similar to their endeavors at a much lesser cost and in much less time. Not strictly impossible to justify, but jarring, and the game never attempts to address this seeming inconsistency.

The whole thing also feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity, in that a lot of the narrative jankiness would go away entirely if unlocking human psychic potential was one of the things ADVENT did on a regular basis. Then X-COM would just be stealing established technology and principles that ultimately came from the Ethereals -and it would have the incidental benefit of providing another reason why it would make sense for many of the people of Earth to embrace the Alien occupation. It could even be fed back into the difficulties of building bodies that are sufficiently psychic for the Ethereal's purposes, such as by revealing that they're unlocking human psychic potential because this somehow makes these people more efficient for producing the goo necessary to build a sufficiently psychic body. At that point instead of being dissonance ("Why is it so easy to make a psychic human, if the Ethereals are having so much trouble with basically the same thing?") it would be a natural narrative synergy. ("Even a strongly psychic human isn't psychic enough for Ethereal purposes, and only worth bothering with to speed up the creation of an actually adequate body")

Still, this is a big improvement over the prior game, which was just cringe-y all-around.

-------------------------------------------

Next time, we wrap up the base game class stuff with the SPARK.

Well, 'base game' in the sense that it's not War of the Chosen content.

See you then.

Comments

  1. Addressing the point made in your last two paragraphs, I always thought it was pretty clear in XCOM 2 that humans had psionic potential, and we could unlock it with some help, but that a fully completed Avatar would be on such a different scale that it was literally game-breaking. The Avatars in game are supposed to be unfinished beta-versions, and even then they are pretty powerful. Keep in mind that the ethereal in XCOM 2 are essentially treated as near-godlike already, as their power wanes. I always thought most of these ideas were pretty clear.

    I think the way the story is told (such as it is) in XCOM 2 is pretty sharp. They let people make up their own theories, which is an intrinsic part of both modern-XCOM and Friaxis's philosophy. Your XCOM squads are supposed to be YOUR guys, making YOUR stories. Hence, the huge emphasis on customization. As it is, I think most of the story is done through showing through environment/gameplay than needlessly spouting exposition. Why do people sign up for Avent? Uh, look at the cities as opposed to the resistance camps. Why do the Ethereal's go through such a resource intensive process? I mean, frankly, it's not even that clear its "that" resource intensive for them. They've clearly subjugated several species, a few of which likely had their own worlds, and have technology that is really more akin to cybermagic than actual tech. And they're doing this to essentially create their own life-sustaining elixir of human-bio-sludge so they can be 1) even more powerful 2) stay alive at all.

    More to the point, regardless of anyone's particular head-canon, I think part of the appeal is the lack of real knowledge of the aliens complete intent and purpose. It makes them, well, alien. The unknown is way scarier than the known.

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    1. There's nothing anywhere in the game that suggests that the Avatars we're seeing are unfinished beta versions aside the extremely ambiguous, unhelpful point that the Avatar Project finishing is a game over. And then, even on Legendary, it's not clear whether a fully-trained Psi Operative is actually less potent a psion than an Avatar; Avatar Mind Control is essentially impossible to resist aside Mind Shields and Solace, and DImensional Rift certainly comes across like a substantially up-statted Void Rift in concept, but their Null Lance doesn't stand out and those plus teleportation is their entire kit. You CAN assume that the Ethereals will soon have even more powerful Avatars, but this has literally zero basis in anything in-game; it's merely a theory not flagrantly contradicted by the game.

      I'm aware there's this notion of 'your game is your story' going on with the Firaxis X-COM games, but it's so utterly lacking a notion that I always forget about it until I randomly run across a reference to Firaxis thinking this is an essential part of the experience. These are not not and never have been games designed to let players create their own organic stories. They are Hollywood movie plots, on rails and everything, that happen to be getting told through a video game engine. Very light ones, particularly in XCOM 2 where the devs step back a bit from the rails and actually give you SOME ability to make meaningful choices, but fundamentally these are not games designed to let you fill in your story, and the notion they are is a bizarre joke. Great, you have the ability to play dress-up with dolls. That's not, in any capacity, an essential element to letting a player develop their own story, or even a particularly helpful one; much more important is not being on blatant rails that force you to play out a particular story a particular way... which, again, you're on rails in these games.

      Also, I didn't raise any questions about why the Ethereals go through all this effort at all, and am mystified as to why you're acting like I did. That part is answered. My point is that the Avatar Project BEING a tremendous endeavor, while X-COM can produce elite psions in a couple of months by shoving someone in a broom closet, is dissonant and needs to be addressed; the Avatar Project is about making powerful psionic human bodies, and Psi Operatives are powerful psionic human bodies, so why is one a worldwide endeavor that takes god only knows how many researchers months of collaboration to achieve while being backed by the foremost authority on psychic powers and genetic manipulation, while the other can be figured out by literally just Tygan and Shen and go from 'literally nothing' to 'fully unlocked psionic potential' in less than three months after ripping open a Sectoid corpse? This isn't necessarily a plothole, but it's sufficiently counter-intuitive it really merited an explanation, or at least someone acknowledging that this is strange.

      Aliens being unknown to be scary is, in addition to being a dubious notion on its own merits, also completely irrelevant to the points I'm raising in this post. The aliens are free to be mysterious, so long as the world seems to make sense with the information available to the player. The issues I'm raising are issues with the world not making sense, not issues with wanting answers about the aliens.

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  2. *First comment* Really loving your work I have to say. Been soaking hours into listening to a text to speech in the background. One thing I'd like to point out though. I recall some lore files from EU saying that xcom as it was, was a shell of what it was when it was first established in the mid 20th century. Basically being kept on "stand-by" with minimal cash flow and skeleton crew with a few dossiers of potential recruits on the books "just in case." The initial invasion, as we see it in EU, is actually small scale and is more a collection of isolated incidents with the worlds governments not realizing the scope of the problem until its too late. Xcom was supported by the worlds governments but was not necessarily given top priority (even though xcom had the best chance of stopping the aliens and uncovering their plans). The doom clock from that game represented the governments faith in xcom and their willingness to contribute funding.

    Also, on a side note, in xcom 2 psi ops are objectively weaker than avatars even if they may have a few more tricks in the bag (mind you your final assault is done before the avatar project is complete) and there is dialogue after your first avatar encounter stating it is in an unfinished state (the first avatar you down that is).

    If you'd like some more indirect justification for the way psi ops are handled, you can remember it takes months to reach full potential and your team encounters countless psionic enemies so I'm sure they could gain some insights into how it is done and how to mimic it in humans. It'd be nice to have more direct explanations but plenty of things are possible in the background. Maybe the resistance is raiding advent bookstores when we're not looking? Its entirely plausible xcom is piggybacking years of advent research and its just not explicitly stated. As top tier commander you don't need to be informed of the minute details. Just some thought.

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    1. Enemy Unknown's lore about X-COM-the-organization is... confused, though for understandable reasons. It's pretty obvious the intent is that The Bureau happened, then the US covered everything up including destroying their stolen plasma weapons and whatnot for no sensible in-universe reason (The real reason being to be consistent with Enemy Unknown having you start with conventional weaponry), and X-COM the international organization funded by the Council is somehow a reactivated version of the US-specific weird black ops organization. All of which doesn't make a lot of sense, but The Bureau started its development as a very, very different X-COM FPS concept, so it's not terribly surprising the games struggle to line up properly.

      Whatever the case, the interpretation you're laying out is... nice in theory, but not well-supported by the game at any step. The intro cinema makes it clear that in Enemy Unknown the alien abductions aren't even slightly secretive -pods drop from the sky as flaming meteors, then spray green goo all over anyone in the area, and going by gameplay the aliens show up a few minutes later to grab the people and presumably haul them back to their UFO. That Enemy Unknown has news ticker results treating the alien invasion as even marginally secret is fairly absurd, and only gets more absurd once the first Terror attack hits in the first month, as Terror attacks are explicitly open attacks on major metropolitan areas. I could pretend Abductions are aimed at small towns and the governments cover them up for some reason, but Chryssalids murdering civilians in New York City or Paris or wherever has zero possibility of being kept a secret. So there's really no room for a 'the world governments don't realize how big a problem things are until way too late' is a very difficult-to-believe scenario.

      Strength-wise, fully-trained and equipped Psi Operatives aren't really weaker than Avatars. The Avatar Null Lance is literally as strong as a Psi Operative's Null Lance -when using BASIC Psi Amps. Avatar Mind Control is backed by 200 Psi, where Psi Operatives max out at 140 if you include their Alien Psi Amp, and that certainly makes Avatars more reliable at pulling off Mind Control but Domination is permanent and the difference is surprisingly close to academic -140 Psi plus 50 from Domination's innate chance bonus is already a base chance of 190%, and most enemies have less than 100 Will. ADVENT Generals get up to 150 Will, but this doesn't matter because they're straight-up immune to mental effects anyway. It's only Archons, Andromedons, and Gatekeepers that have enough Will for a perfect Psi Operative to have a failure chance on Domination while being susceptible in the first place, and in the case of Archons and Gatekeepers it's a mere 10% chance of failing.

      The only psionic ability that's directly comparable and relatively cleanly favors the Avatar is Dimensional Rift, which is pretty clearly the Avatar's version of Void Rift and has better base damage than even an Alien Psi Amp-backed Void Rift, hits in a larger area, and then has a follow-up effect that hits for even more damage while vaporizing terrain. And even then the Psi Operative attempts to inflict Insanity with Void Rift, and with Rupture this will even actually pull ahead of Dimensional Rift's initial damage! In addition to applying Rupture and Disorient, Panic, or Mind Control, all things Dimensional Rift can't do.

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    2. Similarly, though it's buggy in the base game Psi Operatives have Solace. Avatars are immune to mental effects: Psi Operatives are immune to mental effects and make all nearby allies immune as well. The only psionic abilities Avatars have that Psi Operatives don't have a clear, direct equivalent to are their innate regeneration (Which is clearly superior to Soul Steal if you want to draw that comparison, admittedly) and Teleportation. Meanwhile, Psi Operatives get Fortress making them immune to environmental hazards and explosions, the utter insanity that is Stasis, the utter insanity that is Sustain, and also Fuse, Insanity, and Inspire. Short-range teleportation and passive regeneration are noteworthy, but I'd look askance upon any attempt to argue they're clear proof of greater psionic acuity than the ability to stop time in select areas, or the ability to literally ignore a rocket to the face using your mental powers.

      The only qualifier of any note here is that Alien Psi Amps requiring two Gatekeeper corpses to build is sufficiently burdensome that it's arguably not entirely fair of me to include them in particular in the assessment, since in real play you're very likely to beat the game without ever getting them online. But that's actually pretty irrelevant to the point I'm making: I'm not saying 'Psi Operatives are better combat pieces in this video game than Avatars' (Though they are, honestly), I'm saying 'the game design sets things up so that the evidence is X-COM can, in a matter of months, go from no psychic program whatsoever to better-than-Avatar psionic ability when supposedly Ethereals are powerful and experienced psionics who have been working on the Avatar Project for somewhere close to two decades'. Which is pretty ludicrous and also runs contrary to the secondary signaling that the Ethereals are supposed to be really, REALLY powerful and competent psionics.

      The first Avatar, meanwhile, is NOT incomplete. There is no dialogue suggesting this. What IS incomplete is the Avatar you find in the Stasis Suit, and you complete it by killing the first Avatar and shoving Ethereal DNA from it into the Stasis Suit Avatar, which somehow 'completes' it such that the Commander can connect to it and control it. I understand the confusion here -I had originally figured the Avatar you use in the final battle was the Avatar you killed, just refurbished, as the game never clearly depicts an Avatar body being pulled out of the Stasis Suit, among other things making the intent less obvious than it could be- but the prior comment got me to pay extremely close attention to these bits on future runs, and the only time Avatar incompleteness is EVER referenced is very specifically in regard to the Stasis Suit Avatar, which is Tygan avoiding spoilers while saying 'there's no Ethereal in this Avatar body'.

      As for indirect justifications, this comes back to the core issue that XCOM 2 is quite blunt that X-COM has zero psionics until you Autopsy your first Sectoid and unlock the ability to then separately start a project to figure out psionics. There's no narrative room for piggybacking off of ADVENT's existing psionic knowledge base, because until Priests came along in War of the Chosen the only sensible assumption was no such knowledge base existed. And then Priests being in War of the Chosen just raises a lot of further questions that go entirely unanswered.

      Chimera Squad, at least, seems to have decided to quietly retcon things so ADVENT had its own psionics program above and beyond the Avatar Project, and I would be perfectly happy if future XCOM games build on that retcon, but within XCOM 2 itself Psi Operative handling makes very, very little sense.

      Regardless, glad you've been enjoying my work, and intrigued at the idea of someone using text-to-speech to listen to it.

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  3. Hope this isn't an (entirely) unwanted resurrection.

    You've put together an incredibly informative & entertaining breakdown of both the gameplay mechanics & narrative in XCOM across these analyses - thank you. I've only read through a handful of the class breakdowns so far, and it's impressive.

    My current playthroughs are on the relatively recent XCOM2 port to Nintendo Switch. I never played WOTC on PC but everything in the base game seems to be consistent through the port.

    I have just two real points to add:

    1) Void Rift does (at least on the Switch) detonate the Reaper's claymore. I'm not sure about Null Lance.

    2) I also recall Tygan discussing the first defeated Avatar (summoned from the skull-jacked Codex) as being unfinished.

    As I think about watching for this in my current playthrough, I specifically remember that he mentions it 'could be the only reason our soldiers were able to bring it down.' This may be in the post-shadow project writeup, without voice-over dialogue stating the same, but if you go through those segments again, you'll see that the point is explicitly made.

    That first Avatar, at least in my last base game normal playthrough, also spawns with an already-somewhat-depleted health bar.

    It takes no far stretch of imagination, then, knowing that the Avatar project itself is unfinished, to understand that the Avatars encountered in the final mission (and your own cobbled-together version) are themselves
    also unfinished (if, perhaps, less so than the first Avatar).

    The incomplete project idea, while explaining away some of the issue, doesn't fully cover the supreme psionic beings' relatively lackluster ultimate (if unfinished) psionic body, though, which seems to me more a result of developer laziness & not wanting to cram too much new stuff into the very end of the game.

    Recalling, also, after XCOM2's initial release, the final mission was buggy as all get out, that's further indication of a rush-job at the end to get the game out the door (a poor excuse, but one I'd further venture as to why the Avatar has but a few, powerful abilities). This also seems to be a particular methodology for Firaxis as a developer (particular even among the current trend of developers demanding more money for DLC that often feels necessary to fully enjoy a game), noting that the last two Civ games were effectively incomplete until the various expansions were released (Civ6 being blatantly designed that way). I guess I'd argue that Firaxis' now decades-long success using this release strategy, with multiple games, has been a specific driving force for others to adopt the trend.

    Back to XCOM. Even in EU it is implied in the end that the Ethereals' goal was to use humanity to create a more powerful psionic. Their final voice-over is something along the lines of "wow you're better than we expected, but you also did our work for us & delivered the final product into our hands" at the end of the final mission, referring to your final psion.

    With that, the general progression of EU made it feel like more of an achievement to max out a psionic soldier, whereas XCOM2 does leave a bit of dissonance between the aliens' virtually unlimited resources/ultimate goal/supposed psionic mastery, and your ease of fielding better-than-their-current-best psionic soldiers from a (s)crappy mobile HQ (after nothing more than cutting open the arguably weakest psionic enemy in the game, and telling some rookies to think about that for a while). Totally with you there.

    As an aside, I haven't played or read much about the original XCOM games, so maybe it's not as exciting for vets of the series, but, I'm super curious to see what greater threat the Ethereals & their Chose imply they were working to fend off (as trope-y of a 'wait there's a bigger bad' hook as that might be; it felt fairly tactful in XCOM2, and I enjoy these games enough for it to work on me).

    Thanks again for putting this content out.

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    1. I think I ran into the Void Rift thing myself and just forgot I asserted it didn't work on Claymores. Should probably retest that...

      Releasing an apparently-incomplete game has long been basically industry standard, for reasons both logistical ("Our game isn't really complete, but we need to release it to avoid going bankrupt") and cultural ('Scope creep' is insidious and common, where a game starts from a relatively compact premise and the devs just... keep adding in stuff, where the only reason they stop and actually release the thing is because something external *makes* them release it), going back well before DLC and whatnot came along -The Cutting Room Floor is a wiki that digs into cut or otherwise unused content in games, and even games that don't feel incomplete still usually have a non-trivial amount of content sitting in the files, not actually possible for the player to encounter without hacking. The advent of DLC (And, even earlier, patches released online) just makes it easier for audiences to see it in action, where a game gets shoved out the door in an obviously janky state and then polished up over the course of DLC releases. 'It releases when it's done' is a luxury only available to hobbyists making a game in their spare time and unreasonably successful companies... and in the latter case, you can end up with Duke Nukem Forever, where the piles of cash cause the developer to spin their wheels indefinitely, possibly until bankrupt.

      All that said, it is certainly the case that there are trends, where some companies release games in an obviously incomplete state habitually, while others... don't. I'm not familiar enough with Firaxis' larger catalogue to know if they're an example of the former (Alpha Centauri was a poor first impression, and what I've heard of their later 4x games has not been heartening on average), but I wouldn't be surprised, and some of what I've heard around their XCOM games suggests there's internal pressures to Just Release Already in at least that portion of the company. So... I do have reason to believe culture is a component here, myself.

      That said, I don't think the Avatar is lazily-handled so much as... thing is, XCOM 2 has the striking quality that it has very clear Design Rules that drive various elements of it, where the aesthetics and whatnot are *made* to conform to a 3-tier system for weapon and armor technology because someone clearly mandated there would be a 3-tier system. When push comes to shove, XCOM 2 will clearly let the narrative be a casualty in pursuit of good gameplay, across many realms. In this case, it looks to me like the Psi Operative was made to be an interesting and full class in its own right for game design reasons, the Avatar was made to be a simple and not-too-overwhelming boss enemy for game design reasons, and ensuring they gelled with each other narratively was an extremely low priority, possibly not given attention at all. This is one case where I think a bit more attention should've been paid attention to the narrative, but broadly? I really wish more big budget games were this willing to focus on gameplay instead of verisimilitude and whatnot.

      As far as The Threat On The Horizon, while it's being heavily hinted to be a parallel to Apocalypse's Micronoids, I'd be quite surprised if XCOM 3 stayed particularly close to them. Whenever XCOM 3 comes along, it seems likely to be a pretty fresh idea -at least from the perspective of the X-COM over-series. So this is one case where a veteran of the series might be more excited than someone who only got into X-COM with the Firaxis games.

      And always glad to see comments on posts, no matter how old, as well as glad to hear they're appreciated! (First time I've heard 'entertaining' to describe these posts... interesting to hear)

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