Chimera Squad Agent Analysis: Cherub

Cherub is your introduction to Pistols, being the only member of the initial team in your first run wielding a Pistol. Pistols are not what you might expect, coming from prior games; broadly speaking, they're kind of familiar, having the lowest damage of regular weapons in Chimera Squad and having very generous ammo reserves, though not unlimited like prior games... but the damage is higher than ever, equivalent to a Skirmisher's Bullpup rather than a Sharpshooter's Pistol, let alone the shrimpy Pistols Snipers settled for in Enemy Unknown/Within, and the aim climb behavior is actually identical to an SMG's, as opposed to Pistols in XCOM 2 using the Short range behavior Shotguns are still using in Chimera Squad.

This means Pistols in Chimera Squad aren't actually much of a short-ranged weapon. Yes, they'll perform better up close, but they won't be actively penalized for being too far, and the benefits for being close aren't that significant.

This is more significant to the other Pistol-wielder, mind...

Cherub's name in the files, interestingly, is Warden. I'm a little surprised it isn't Shieldbearer, honestly: Cherub is clearly first and foremost drawing inspiration from the ADVENT Shieldbearers, made especially obvious by Sacred Coil having Guardians be a 1-to-1 repeat of Shieldbearers and carrying exactly the kind of transparent riot shield Cherub carries. I'm a little curious how Warden ended up his label in the code.

Base Stats

8 HP (10 on the lowest difficulty)
65 Aim (75 on the lowest difficulty)
10 Mobility
40 Will (50 on the lowest difficulty)

Additionally, the easiest difficulty provides +15 passive crit chance, raises the crit chance bonus from a flank to +40 instead of +33, and provides a passive +5 Defense.

Cherub is slower than Godmother and not any tougher at base, which feels a bit weird given he's carting around a scifi riot shield. You'd think he'd have innate Armor or something, but nah.

He can pull his weight well enough anyway, but it's still odd.

Possible Scars

Shell-Shocked: -15 Will
Weakened: -3 HP
Hobbled: -3 Mobility

Shell-Shocked is generally ignorable, but the other possible Scars are simply crippling to Cherub. If Cherub goes down in a mission, he's liable to need to be benched immediately until the Scar is fixed.

Which is a little unfortunate given he's part of your forced first squad and has incentives to move into danger; I suspect a lot of players had Cherub be one of their first agents to go down, and struggled for a bit as a result.

Chimera Squad's early game is sufficiently forgiving this isn't a big issue in practice, admittedly.

Base Abilities

Kinetic Shield
1 Action Point: A single ally Cherub has a clean line of fire to is granted a Kinetic Shield. (Cherub may target himself) The Kinetic Shield will prevent all immediate damage of the next attack to affect that agent, at which point it will break. Upon breaking, it will grant Cherub 1 Charge. Cherub cannot target someone already benefiting from a Kinetic Shield. 1 turn cooldown.

Note that Kinetic Shields are lost when transitioning from one Encounter to another, and that they don't generate Charge for Cherub if they are removed by this effect. You really want enemies actually hitting Kinetic Shields.

Also note that Kinetic Shield will be broken by some attacks that don't do immediate damage, in spite of not blocking any of their effects. The Andromedon acid blob attack, for example; it does no immediate damage, just splashing the affected units with Acid, yet it will pop Kinetic Shields and still get to apply Acid to everyone it hit. You at least still get Charge out of such events, but it's still a situation you should try to avoid.

Conversely, complete immunity to an attack will actually prevent the shield will breaking; a Poison Spit will do nothing at all to Torque or someone carrying a Medikit, leaving their shield intact.

Bizarrely, Kinetic Shield does not block Shred going through when absorbing attacks, meaning enemies can remove Armor with grenades. (And certain units can do so with their primary attack) I'm almost certain this is an oversight.

Another bizarre element of Kinetic Shields I have mixed feelings about is that they make accuracy  irrelevant against their beneficiary. That is, if an enemy fires on a Kinetic Shield-benefiting agent, it's not that the enemy rolls for accuracy and either misses or has a successful hit get eaten by the Kinetic Shield. They just automatically hit their target (Which matters if their attack has Shred!) and break the shield.

On the one hand, this makes charging up Cherub more consistent. On the other hand, it heavily cuts into Kinetic Shield's defensive utility, as it will be wasted on shots that would've missed otherwise: if it was only used up on shots that rolled a hit, you would be able to clearly say that the shield breaking meant damage was prevented. (Aside those cases where an attack breaks it in spite of not doing initial damage, anyway)

In practice, this means Kinetic Shield is best off being put on agents who are in vulnerable positions, or who you intend to move into vulnerable positions, rather than eg having a badly-wounded agent hide behind High Cover while shielded. That way the odds are high you actually prevented damage. As one of the ways to manipulate enemy targeting is to present them with an easy target, there's a certain degree of natural synergy here...

... but overall, I wish Kinetic Shield only broke on hits. Cherub doesn't get much out of building Charge, and if you're using Cherub while being diligent about keeping agents in good Cover and so on, Kinetic Shield's actual rate of damage negation will be pretty terrible. (If a shot is fired into a Kinetic Shield and only had a 50% chance to hit, that's only a 50% chance the Kinetic Shield actually helped) Given that Kinetic Shield is very much the main thing Cherub brings to the table, it's a bit frustrating that generally good play results in a high rate of wasted Kinetic Shields -and that's if you never have a shield wasted some other way, like by finishing the Encounter without the recipient being shot at.

The rate of wastage on Kinetic Shield gets so high as personal skill rises that at this point I tend to end up feeling like I could've replaced Cherub with nearly any other agent and my team's performance would probably have gone up.

To be fair, it's less bad than you might expect coming from XCOM 2: enemy Aim trends noticeably higher in Chimera Squad. In XCOM 2 early-game enemies often had 65 Aim (Some of them less than that on lower difficulties!), with endgame enemies largely capping out at... 75 Aim. Andromedons were notable outliers at 80 Aim, and only a bare handful of enemies went higher than that.

Whereas in Chimera Squad, there are basic enemies with as much as 80 base Aim (eg Shrike Troopers), and a decent selection of enemies spike to 85 Aim -and enemies uniformly gain +5 Aim if they're in the third Investigation, so in real play you'll regularly see 90% hit chances if you let enemies take shots in the open. (Even enemies with bad Aim generally bottom out at 70... and only on the lower two difficulties) A really straightforward example of this contrast is that where XCOM 2's ADVENT Turrets were unusually inaccurate in the expectation of being on high ground, Sacred Coil Turrets actually start from 90 Aim, and then always Mark Target and insist on shooting the Marked Target, resulting in a 100% chance to hit if their victim has no relevant Defense boosts.

Chimera Squad also has a decent selection of maps in which High Cover is rare, ill-positioned, or occasionally outright nonexistent. You're noticeably more prone to having to settle for Low Cover, especially since turn order mechanics mean an agent may start out in Low Cover and get shot at before their turn rolls around. (And usually the post-Breach scramble leaves all your agents behind Low Cover: they almost never take High Cover positions initially)

As such, you'll usually be seeing hit chances from enemies above 50% if you let them take a shot.

Still. Kinetic Shield's tendency toward wastage absolutely hurts Cherub's performance, and I feel Kinetic Shield should've worked differently.

Alas.

All that said, one case where Kinetic Shield is just plain great is VIP Extraction missions. In any given Round, only one enemy will deliberately target the VIP, which means slapping a Kinetic Shield onto them is very close to 100% reliable at protecting the VIP. (There's edge cases to keep in mind like area-of-effect attacks, environmental explosives, and turn order manipulation effects) As the game clearly marks at the beginning of a Round which enemy intends to attack the VIP, you can even use this to reliably build charge on Cherub by leaving the designated attacker alive, as the designated enemy will always target the VIP if at all possible.

Cherub's one flaw in VIP Extraction missions is that your squad needs to extract, too, and he can't do all of dropping a shield, moving, and attacking in a given turn unless there's an enemy conveniently in melee range. (There usually isn't) You can make up for this with teammates, potentially, such as Shelter having his Fracture swap with Cherub from near the extraction point, but it's a concern to keep in mind.

Many missions can also have a hostage situation randomly generate, which uses the same 'one clearly-marked enemy per Round tries to kill the target' mechanic; if you have Cherub along anyway when you run into a hostage situation, he's very helpful for getting those bonus objectives accomplished.

It's too bad Cherub can't shield objects. You have multiple missions centered on protecting objects, after all, but Cherub is no help there. It's an unfortunate omission.

Kinetic Shield Charge
Passive: Cherub may store up to 2 Charge.

Note that Cherub does, in fact, carry Charge from one Encounter to the next, though not across missions.

Indeed, Cherub's performance is generally best in longer missions. In 1-Encounter missions, it's very difficult for Cherub to both build and then usefully expend Charge: by the time he has 1-2 Charge in a lot of 1-Encounter missions, odds are good you're down to literally one enemy, or even have cleared the mission. With 2 Encounters, it's reasonably likely you'll get to build charge in the first Encounter and manage to expend it in the second Encounter. And in missions with 3 Encounters, it's virtually guaranteed you'll manage to both build up and then expend Charge.

This is a bit unfortunate, because by default Charge doesn't do anything. Unlike Templar Focus, Cherub doesn't pick up passive Mobility or Dodge boosts, or anything of the sort; building it up does nothing unless you expend it.

This is particularly unfortunate due to the distribution of mission lengths; 'normal' missions are largely 1 or 2 Encounters, and of course make up the majority of the missions in a run. A length of 3 Encounters is reserved primarily for the plot missions that are mandatory to complete, like the initial mission of an Investigation, which are a minority of the missions you do.

Cherub is probably the Agent hit hardest by this, but this is a recurring design issue with Chimera Squad; much of the design is targeted at missions being 3 Encounters (4 Encounters would probably be okay, alternatively, but that happens only once in the entire game), yet that's a minority of such missions. It's too bad, because in principle I like the design of a lot of quick missions intermittently punctuated by longer, more challenging missions, but the design has several elements designed as if that isn't the game's framework, usually to the game's detriment.

On the plus side, the longest missions are generally the most challenging ones, so Cherub tends to be at his best when you most need everyone to pull their weight. That's a lot better than sniping Sharpshooters in XCOM 2 tending to perform best in the easiest missions.

Charged Bash
Turn ending action: Cherub moves-and-melees a single enemy for 3 damage, knocking them Unconscious if this reduces them to 0 HP. If he has any Charge, the damage is raised by as much Charge as he currently has and a shockwave is generated that, if it hits any other enemies, will clone the damage. This shockwave will also knock enemies Unconscious instead of killing them. All of Cherub's Charge is expended when using Charged Bash. This attack cannot miss and ignores Armor; these aspects also apply to the shockwave.

Charged Bash replaces Subdue on Cherub.

Charged Bash is pretty obviously meant to be Cherub's bread-and-butter offense, with his Pistol access closer to a backup weapon he can use when he can't run up to someone and smash them. How well this works out in practice is a different matter; among other points, he's held back by the inability to equip his Pistol with an Impact Frame. The thematics make sense here, in that Cherub isn't smacking enemies over the head with his Pistol and so making his Pistol punchier wouldn't, logically speaking, improve his melee ability, but from a game design standpoint it hurts him, as his charge mechanic doesn't actually do a great job of making up for this loss.

In theory, Charged Bash is really impressive if Cherub can manage to keep generating Charge. The damage against 1 enemy with 1 Charge is the same as a low-roll Impact Frame Subdue, which is decent given Cherub doesn't spend an equipment slot on achieving this result, and then if you're catching multiple enemies it clones itself in full, potentially doing 8 or 12 damage. (Hitting more than 2 enemies with the shockwave is absurdly unlikely to happen) That's actually pretty high damage!

In practice, a lot of the mechanics hold it back.

First of all, the Arc Wave-esque shockwave is bizarrely precise. If Cherub bashes an enemy, and another enemy is right next to them but standing on very slightly higher ground... the shockwave can't hit that other enemy. It'll usually work if the other enemy is very slightly lower, but Cherub can't necessarily just attack the higher target to hit both of them.

Second of all, Cherub is dependent on his Charge mechanic to get Charged Bash this level of decent, and his default, primary method of generating Charge is Kinetic Shield... and you can't reliably control whether an enemy targets whoever you shielded, and it means Cherub needs to wait until his second turn to generate Charge -when many 1-Encounter missions will be basically over by the time one of your agents has naturally gotten a second turn- meaning he can only really get a chance to shine in longer missions.

Thirdly, Cherub expends all of his Charge on Charged Bash, and this is frustratingly wasteful if he has more than 1 Charge. 1 Charge is enough to trigger the splash damage that actually makes Charged Bash potentially decent. Anything past that just increases the damage by 1 point each; it doesn't give him a larger shockwave so he can more readily catch enemies with it or anything like that. This means his ability to store additional Charge is actually pretty underwhelming; to actually care, at least one of the enemies Cherub is smashing needs to be at an extremely precise HP number. ie if every enemy Cherub catches with Charged Bash has either 4 or less HP or at least 6, the extra point of damage from having 2 Charge is probably completely worthless. Cherub would be a lot better off if he either had the ability to choose how much Charge to expend, or if he only ever expended 1 Charge on a Charged Bash, even if that included not getting additional bonus damage from greater Charge levels.

Fourth, Charged Bash's shockwave doesn't strike a very large area. Just like Godmother's Scattershot ability, it's actually pretty rare for enemies to cluster such that Cherub can catch multiple enemies in the first place. Only unlike Godmother, Cherub is fueling this attack with a resource that's difficult to build, and he can't choose to not expend it except by insisting on using his Pistol instead. (Which, among other points, will usually have a chance to miss) Godmother can just... not Scattershot anytime using it would add nothing, and go for the Scattershot when it's actually relevant. Cherub can end up spending one turn bashing an enemy and using up his Charge, and then the very next turn would be a great opportunity to catch multiple enemies except oh wait he already used up his Charge and didn't manage to generate any more, sorry.

Fifth, Charged Bash is a melee attack on an agent whose Mobility isn't actually all that great, in a game that doesn't provide significant tools for boosting Mobility (As compared with XCOM 2 letting you raise soldier Mobility via wearing a light armor, slotting in a Speed PCS, and grinding at Covert Ops in War of the Chosen), when said agent really wants to be spending one of their action points on Kinetic Shield and so can't use their full movement range anyway. Cherub often ends up shooting things instead of bashing them because he's too busy keeping people safe to actually move. This is further exacerbated by Chimera Squad giving agents generally lower Mobility than soldier Mobility in XCOM 2 (Cherub has 10 Mobility, where an XCOM 2 soldier had 12 base) and lowering the amount of ground you cover with further action points if you've already spent an action point on pure movement. Where a Ranger in XCOM 2 could often Slash anything your squad could see, Cherub often finds on even small Encounter maps that he can only reach 1 or 2 enemies if he Dashes, or even no enemies at all!

Sixth, Charged Bash doesn't scale. Cherub's Pistol is initially pretty closely comparable to a Charged Bash, doing 3-4 damage with the potential to crit for 1 more damage; that's better than Charged Bash by default, but Charged Bash becomes pretty clearly superior when backed by Charge, with no miss chance and the potential to catch multiple enemies. But as you progress, Cherub's Pistol picks up a free point of damage, then another free point of damage and a point of Shred, and at some point you're going to be able to equip Cherub with an Ammo Item for an additional point of damage with a side effect that adds at least 1 more point of damage. (Or just more up-front damage) Suddenly Charged Bash is having to compete with a ranged attack that does 6-7 damage on impact while inflicting a penalizing side effect that raises the total damage to 7-8, if not more. Great, you can melee to do 4 damage to 2 enemies for a total of 8 damage. So? The Pistol would do comparable damage, and would do so in a manner more likely to actually down someone, making them no longer a problem.

The overall result is that Charged Bash is a cool idea that tends to not impress in real play. You'll still use it, but honestly Godmother with an Impact Frame will generally be better at melee than Cherub in practice.

In the earliest missions where the tech progression stuff isn't an issue for Charged Bash, you instead have the issue that enemies are mostly Surprised, where it's easy for the squad to down most of the enemies before they get any chance to act. (It should be pointed out that there's an Achievement for clearing an Encounter in the Breach Phase) So there's a pretty narrow portion of a campaign where Charged Bash gets a chance to strut its stuff and maybe look decent; the stretch when Alert and Aggressive enemies have become reasonably common and weapons tech hasn't improved or only improved once.

Alas.

Deputy Agent
+4 Aim

Phalanx
Breach action: Cherub selects a specific Aggressive enemy. Assuming that enemy actually attacks during the Breach phase, their attack is canceled and Cherub gains a point of Charge afterward. Additionally, any other enemies that can fire on Cherub are more likely to target Cherub instead of his allies, and if they target Cherub their attacks will also be canceled and provide Cherub an additional Charge per blocked attack. One use per mission.

Initially, this fails to impress.

Early in a run, few enemies will be Aggressive in the first place; this means it's often practical to just gun all Aggressive enemies down before they get to fire, means other Breach actions tend to compare favorably to Phalanx (Verge's Levitation will also prevent anyone from taking damage if there's only one Aggressive enemy, while making it easier for other agents to take out the target and without having to worry about a per-mission usage limit, as an example every player will run into as relevant), and makes the Charge-gain component a bit underwhelming. In really early missions, it's not unusual for no enemy to be Aggressive, such that Phalanx is literally unusable!

Later in the game, Phalanx is actually one of the best Breach actions. In your third Investigation it will rapidly become normal for half or more of the enemies in the room to be Aggressive (Sometimes it will be literally all of them), with the individual enemies durable enough that gunning every Aggressive enemy down to protect your squad isn't going to be possible. Phalanx will often neuter the entire volley while also getting Cherub to maximum Charge.

Crucially, it's not very fiddly. There are Breach Items that can perform better, like the Cease Fire Bomb, but they always have significant caveats: the Cease Fire Bomb can disable every enemy if they're clustered close enough to the Breach point, but most of the time this won't happen and the way the game handles Breaches makes it very difficult to tell whether it will do so or not, and outright impossible to tell whether it did do so after use. Phalanx's only qualifier is that if an enemy can't fire on Cherub in the first place, they can't be redirected, and most of the time this can be resolved by simply piling everyone through the same Breach point. You do have to worry about enemies failing to be redirected, but my experience is that it's fairly reliable -if 6 enemies are Aggressive, I tend to see maybe one actually fire on someone other than Cherub.

It also, once Aggressive enemies are more common, partially compensates for Cherub's difficulties in shorter missions -if the mission only has 1 Encounter, having Cherub use Phalanx will pretty reliably let him get first-turn Charge. This is more awkward in missions with 2 Encounters, as they trend pretty strongly toward the second Encounter having a greater concentration of Aggressive enemies, and so it's usually a bit dubious to blow Phalanx on the first Encounter just to get Cherub started on the Charge situation... and then it's made more awkward by the lack of strong forward scouting, in that actually you may have the second Encounter provide an entry with few or even no Aggressive enemies, at which point you might've saved Phalanx only to find you can't actually use it. Whoops!

I really wish this was a weaker effect that Cherub could use every Encounter. A guaranteed block of one attack and no more, but reusable, would dodge these issues. It would still fail to impress initially, but it would more reliably prop up Cherub's utility in the late game.

Still, this is decent enough; it's one of the better Breach phase skills, honestly.

One oddity: every once in a while where more than one enemy remained Aggressive, I've had the target Cherub marked ignore him while a different enemy fired on him ineffectually. I've yet to see a similar redirection fail when only one enemy got to fire in the Breach Phase. This mostly isn't too big a deal, as enemies aren't generally that far apart in damage, but it can be an unpleasant surprise if you wanted Cherub to absorb a Shredding enemy's attack and he blocked a non-Shredding attack instead.

Basic Training: +2 HP.

If you're successfully having Cherub advance aggressively, he'll tend to draw fire and so be a pretty good priority for getting his HP up. If you're not, though, it's easy to end up with him in back, firing his Pistol from good Cover and not getting attacked, at which point this isn't a priority.

I personally tend to have Cherub be one of my later agents to get this HP boost; among other points, he can obsessively Kinetic Shield himself if you're worried about his HP. Furthermore, Cherub Training means Cherub not being present to shield his buddies; I'm pretty hard on Kinetic Shield, but it does broadly extend your squad's durability. It's thus better, early in a run, to have the rest of the squad cycling out for HP first, so they can better hold up while Cherub is off Training.

Field Agent
+4 Aim

Generator
Passive: At the end of a given Encounter, Cherub generates 1 Charge for free.

OR

Guard
Passive: At the end of each of Cherub's turns, he automatically Guards. This grants him a point of Armor, ensures he has a Low Cover bonus even if flanked or standing in the open, and causes him to function as a Low Cover object. These effects end the first time Cherub takes damage.

Guard's in-game description claims Cherub only acts as Low Cover (Excuse me, 'half cover'; somebody on the dev team forgot what the terminology of this game is, which is weird given it's literally just XCOM 2's terminology) for allies, but no. Enemies can and will use Cherub for cover, including that we're still operating on Alloy SHIV/Bulwark SPARK rules where this somehow gives them protection against Cherub himself.

On the plus side, Cherub isn't wholly dependent on his Pistol for offense, and can potentially just bash them with no miss chance, so this is less egregious than it was with SPARKs and especially Alloy SHIVs.

Regardless, you're basically either choosing between a general survivability boost, or making Cherub better at building Charge on longer missions. Since Generator triggers at the end of an Encounter, Cherub gets no benefit from it if the mission is a single Encounter, and only benefits from it once if the mission is two Encounters; it's only really impressive in missions with 3 Encounters, where it gets to trigger twice.

Personally, I still far prefer Generator. Guard makes it easier to advance Cherub aggressively, but he can already do this by self-shielding, and against most enemies bashing them in melee will readily result in Cherub being in Cover; the theoretical utility in terms of advancing without Cover is fairly low, especially since Chimera Squad's maps rarely have major gaps in their Cover, tend to have limited destructibility of Cover, and have very few enemies actually try to smash Cover. In practice the point of Armor is the main benefit, and you can't stack Armor hard enough in Chimera Squad to strongly leverage this, and it going away after one hit limits the potential of such a plan regardless.

Generator, meanwhile, gives Charged Bash much greater consistency; in conjunction with Phalanx (In your first Encounter), you can mostly-reliably have Cherub performing Charged Bashes that are actually, you know, charged. Admittedly in the long haul Cherub is generally best off shooting things, so there's a decent argument that Guard is ultimately more relevant... it's not an argument I agree with, but I wouldn't try to argue it's just obviously false.

Generator, oddly, consistently generates 2 Charge if any Kinetic Shields are up at the end of an Encounter. I'm not sure if this is a bug or an undocumented feature. The game has a few of both of these. Whatever the case, this is a contributing factor to me preferring Generator.

I kind of wish Guard had been a baseline behavior on Cherub, honestly. It would be a nice little representation of the riot shield doing something, and it's simply not a strong enough effect to be liable to be a good level choice.

Also note that Cherub has to take an actual turn for Guard to trigger. It doesn't trigger at the beginning of an Encounter post-Breach, and gifting him action points won't trigger it either. If you prefer to place Cherub late in the Timeline, Guard is liable to be almost entirely irrelevant.

Special Agent
+1 HP
+3 Aim

Overload
Passive: Cherub's Charge max is now 3. Anytime Cherub is at 3 Charge, he gains +3 Mobility.

This sounds cool and all, but it's surprisingly difficult for Cherub to actually hit 3 Charge, and it will all go away the instant he uses a Charged Bash. So even though this should help address his Mobility difficulties, it usually doesn't. Among other points, the best way to build Charge is going to be to basically just turtle, dropping Kinetic Shields and shooting people until Cherub hits full Charge, and that's not a tactic that helps ensure he's in position to then bash someone successfully.

It does synergize with Phalanx in the late game, when Cherub may actually block 3 shots and so immediately have 3 Charge, and Generator providing 2 Charge if a shield was still up at the end of an Encounter makes it more realistic in multi-Encounter missions, but it's still a frustratingly rare event to hit 3 Charge, sharply limiting Overload; if Cherub never hits 3 Charge in a given mission, Overload has done literally nothing.

At least it doesn't compete with something else?

Incidentally, this is another reason I prefer Generator; so Overload is more likely to actually matter!

Unlock Potential Training: +2 Mobility.

This is really important if you want Cherub actually leveraging his melee ability, and of course is important in any mission that emphasizes movement more generally. It should be a fairly high priority unless you're intending to phase out Cherub, basically.

Also notice this brings him merely to Godmother's base, when her own Unlock Potential Training also adds Mobility. Ouch.

Senior Agent
+2 Aim

Recharge
Passive: Cherub gains 1 Charge for every enemy downed by Charged Bash, including if they were downed by the shockwave.

OR

Resonance Field
Passive: Kinetic Shield provides +15 Aim to the recipient for as long as their shield remains intact.

I don't really understand why Recharge wasn't Cherub's Special Agent ability. It comes pretty close to taking Cherub's clearly-intended focus on meleeing things and causing it to actually function correctly.

It's already the case that Charged Bash should basically always be used to finish off targets (Among other points, to get KO-derived Intel), not to soften up targets. Recharge simply takes that already-correct behavior and makes it even more tactically rewarding, ensuring Cherub basically always has Charge if you're engaging in reasonable play, and thus ensuring Charged Bash much more regularly gets opportunities to catch an enemy with the shockwave. Since having Charge at all is far more important than having more than 1 Charge, Recharge being a tool for perpetually sitting on 1 Charge is essentially perfect. And then Cherub can still pick up additional Charge from Kinetic Shield, and it's only mildly irritating if you do end up wasting it on an attack it didn't matter to.

Resonance Field, meanwhile is... eeeh. If you have it, the obvious thing to do is to slap Kinetic Shield down on Cherub himself and then promptly take a shot, and if you're confident someone else won't get attacked before their turn rolls around you can slap a Kinetic Shield on them for an Aim boost, and that's all acceptable I suppose, but Resonance Field is really out of place with Cherub's design. He's designed where you're supposed to want to slap down a Kinetic Shield and have it eat an attack as fast as possible so he can get more Charge and then use that Charge for other things. Resonance Field is instead providing incentives to slap Kinetic Shield on people you don't expect to be shot at who will appreciate the Aim bonus, which is just janky in context.

The frustrating thing is this issue wouldn't be an issue in XCOM 2's turn mechanics. You'd instead slap a Kinetic Shield on someone, have them immediately attack with the bonus Aim, and then if an enemy promptly shoots them Resonance Field still boosted Aim for a turn. It's very specifically Chimera Squad's Timeline mechanics that make Resonance Field so contrary to default ideal Kinetic Shield usage.

This isn't to say it's unusably bad, but it is pretty dubious that it's competing with the much-better-fitting Recharge. You should default to Recharge if you're not sure which to take, basically.

That said, Resonance Field does have some specific agent synergies. It can be used to help Axiom consistently land hits with his melee attacks, and then goes naturally with Axiom's tendency to draw fire and ability to be built as something of a party tank. Blueblood is sufficiently incentivized to spam shots from a fixed location like a turret he basically always appreciates more Aim, especially since he has Deadeye and so even breaching 100% base accuracy isn't enough to not appreciate more Aim. Godmother and Claymore both appreciate more Aim pretty consistently too, if less dramatically, and Godmother is already a good choice for charging into the front.

Conversely, some agents synergize extremely poorly with Resonance Field. Zephyr can only use her Aim stat if you take a specific skill, Verge's rifle is pretty vestigial to his effectiveness and his skills all ignore Aim, Patchwork won't necessarily be firing her rifle at all, same for Shelter...

Torque is in a bit of a middle ground, as Tongue Pull appreciates the Aim boost and so does Vicious Bite, and it's entirely possible to have her firing her gun pretty regularly... but if you use Tongue Pull for Tag Team instead, Aim is irrelevant to it, and Poison Spit and Bind ignore accuracy checks. So basically it's a bit of a playstyle thing.

So if you build a team like Blueblood/Cherub/Axiom/Godmother, maybe give Resonance Field a try.

Principal Agent
+2 Aim

Final Stats
11 HP (Counting Training, but not other boosts)
80 Aim
12 Mobility (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)

Cherub is slightly more accurate than Godmother, but slower, lacking the Dodge, and having an emphasis on attacking with a move that doesn't actually use his superior Aim. Ouch.

Supercharge
1 action point: Cherub expends all his Charge to Holo Target every enemy and raise the damage of ally weapons by 2. Both these effects last for a number of turns equal to the Charge expended. 1 use per mission.

Note that the damage-boosting component only applies to attacks tied to a weapon. ie it won't increase the damage of Subdue or Charged Bash, or the damage on other special abilities more obviously disconnected from weapon strength, such as Verge's Mind Flay. Surprisingly, it does improve Zephyr's melee damage, I assume by virtue of being tied to an actual weapon even though you can't interact with said weapon at all.

Also note that the duration is specifically tied to Cherub's turns, and not the Round system. As such, using Teamwork to pull his turn forward can end it prematurely -and conversely, gifting someone additional turns/actions can let them get more out of the damage boost than they're 'supposed' to be getting, turns-wise. So be aware of all that when considering manipulating turns and all.

Supercharge is another reason the Mobility boost from sitting at 3 Charge is difficult to care about. Late in a run, you may well Supercharge and then shoot if you do reach 3 Charge; it's a pretty dramatic shift in your squad's performance, and three turns of it can let you power through a tough Encounter packed with enemies.

It's also a low-key factor in why I'm not fond of Resonance Field, since Holo Targeting is the same Aim boost provided by Resonance Field, but Supercharge will provide it to everyone while also providing a damage boost. Yeah, you can only Supercharge once per mission, but most missions are short enough this is barely an issue. You could stack the two, I guess, but Chimera Squad's accuracy tuning is such that this would tend to be overkill -and most agents in Chimera Squad have a lot of their tools not pay attention to Aim in the first place.

So Supercharge itself works pretty nicely as an 'ultimate' skill, but the knockoff consequences on Cherub's other skills are... not ideal.

Final Training: Unlock Return Fire.

Return Fire
Passive: If attacked, Cherub automatically fires back with his Pistol. Once triggered, Return Fire cannot trigger again until Cherub gets a real turn.

This does spend ammo, keep in mind. Cherub isn't very ammo-hungry by default, but once you have either Epic Pistol it's easy for him to burn through his ammo alarmingly quickly, potentially putting you in an awkward spot. Maybe consider an Autoloader for Cherub if you find yourself running into such difficulty.

Anyway, Return Fire remains an awkward skill hampered by your inability to reliably manipulate enemies into targeting a specific individual. It's overall a bit less awkward now, as Kinetic Shields and the overhauled turn mechanics mean it's possible to try to safely bait out a single attack at a time; have Cherub slap a Kinetic Shield on himself, then step into the open or a position flanked by whichever enemy is going to take its next turn. (Which can be done 'for free' using Charged Bash) Odds are decent that enemy will take a shot at Cherub, and if they do he'll be completely safe. It's also helped by the fact that reaction fire doesn't suffer accuracy penalties in Chimera Squad.

Even so, many other issues remain in place. Cover-using enemies will almost certainly be in Cover relative to Cherub, hurting the odds to hit and even the damage if they're in High Cover. Chimera Squad still builds itself around a strong expectation the player will tend to limit the opportunities for enemies to get turns, such that good play will limit Return Fire's opportunities to come up at all. There's limits to how heavily you can leverage the skill, because if a lot of shots are going Cherub's way, he's going to die -a Kinetic Shield is a once-a-turn save, nothing more.

Furthermore, Return Fire itself is only once per turn! This isn't a way for Cherub to do a whole bunch of damage by getting shot at a bunch. It's not strictly a once-per-Round limit since its Cherub's own personal turn that advances the clock, but it's not like you can use Teamwork on him three times in a Round.

As far as I'm aware, it also isn't allowed to trigger in the Breach phase, so no, you can't use Phalanx to turn this into additional damage at the start of an Encounter.

To be honest, I'm pretty baffled at this being attached to the Training system as the top-level skill. Most of these Training-derived skills are pretty obviously pretty powerful gamechangers, where the vibe seems to be that they're meant to be an agent's 'ultimate skill'. Return Fire is... nowhere near that range. I'd expect it to be down at Field Agent, or Deputy Agent if we ignore that Deputy Agent usually provides a Breach phase skill.

I'd rather Resonance Field had been here, honestly. Free Aim is free Aim, even with its awkward incentive structure situation.

Amusingly, Return Fire can actually trigger on Psionic Suplex. I'm pretty sure this is a glitch or oversight given it doesn't animate at all, but in any event it makes Return Fire slightly better than you might expect. (In one Investigation, against a specific enemy...)

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Interestingly, Chimera Squad's launch icon -the game's icon, I mean- is actually visible at the top of Cherub's shield. That's a surprise, given the only other time it's used is for the Teamwork skill icon; Chimera Squad-the-in-game-squad has an icon, but it doesn't look anything like this. (I'm talking about the loading screen image, to be clear) It makes me wonder if this was the in-universe icon for the squad at some point in development and its presence on Cherub's shield got missed -certainly, it's nearly invisible in actual play, partially because the shield is heavily transparent.

Anyway, Cherub is our first hybrid agent, a fact that is mostly of interest when connected to the other hybrid agent of Zephyr, in that Chimera Squad performs a nice little retcon to reconcile some of the jank around XCOM 2's handling of hybrids. Cherub is an example of what I'm going to call a 'Forge hybrid': he's one of many ADVENT clones grown from a specific DNA sequence. Zephyr, meanwhile, is what I'm going to call a 'converted hybrid' -that there was a regular human from somewhere in Australia who presumably signed up to be an ADVENT soldier, and then got her memories wiped and her body changed so now she's a hybrid.

This is appreciated: XCOM 2 gave us the rather odd setup that all ADVENT soldiers are hybrids and all hybrids are grown in tubes, yet ADVENT successfully insists to the wider public that their soldiers are regular humans who enlisted. This retcon helps reconcile the two, where one can assume that many humans who enlisted did in fact become hybrid soldiers -probably some of them consenting to the procedure, in fact- and the Forge hybrids are merely a majority rather than the only form hybrids take.

It doesn't escape all the problems I laid out before, as Zephyr being memory-wiped goes right back to 'you sign up to be an ADVENT peacekeeper, and then as far as your friends and family know you drop off the face of the planet' if you assume it's meant to be a default, and I suspect that is exactly the intent, but it does partially smooth out/reconcile some of the inconsistencies between base XCOM 2 and War of the Chosen. Nor does Chimera Squad actually directly confirm this is a default, and in fact it's never confirmed Zephyr was non-consenting. For all we know, it's possible the non-hybrid human woman who became Zephyr wanted her memories wiped for some reason! So for one thing it's entirely possible XCOM 3 might elect to clearly indicate memory-wiping was merely an option for recruited humans rather than mandatory, thus substantially reducing a lot of these problems.

In any event, Cherub himself is surprisingly well-done on the writing point. I've pointed out him being an exception to the 'blood on their hands' approach to most of your agents, and given how I've talked about that stuff you might think I'd be critical of this point, but the thing is Cherub's writing shows a pretty clear recognition of everything I've touched on before of ADVENT vat-grown hybrids being basically children in terms of experience with the world and all. On the one hand, he's written as having a fully functional adult body he has full control over, no linguistic difficulties, no signs of a failure to understand the dangers of the weapons he's using... and on the other hand, he has moments of emotional or social insecurities or ignorance no other agent gets, that often resemble the kinds of anxieties more typically seen in children.

Which is both broadly the kind of thing I'd expect from vat-grown soldiers tailored for the purpose of unthinkingly fighting for distant masters and more specifically is consistent with points like how War of the Chosen characterizes the Ethereals and the implications of their mechanical capabilities. It's very believable that ADVENT hybrids have a lot of body control and foundational military knowledge (eg 'this end will kill you if you look down it and pull the trigger, so don't do that') and language functionality simply psionically uploaded into their brain, while things like social savviness get left out as unimportant. (Or as actively undesirable, given the Angelus Ethereal responds to the Hunter making a pointed-and-accurate remark by torturing him; slave-soldiers who can notice that what the Ethereals say is very far removed from what they do are probably the opposite of what the Ethereals want)

Importantly, this all makes it clear the game is engaging with the topic of Cherub being a vat-grown clone relatively holistically. That is, the creators didn't decide Cherub is a flash-created clone purely as a way to make him an Ex-Bad Guy who nonetheless never did anything wrong and then ignore all the in-universe implications of such a decision; even if that is the motive (Which seems unlikely, but I'm making a point), they're still exploring several of the other implications and potential questions attached to that decision. This is depressingly rare; lots of pop culture makes assorted storytelling decisions where a given decision was very obviously made to serve an extremely shallow single purpose, where the decisions in question unavoidably should have numerous other implications but ultimately the creator(s) only cared about accomplishing exactly one goal with any given decision so they have the story pretend like that one goal being achieved is the only consequence of that decision, even though that's absurd. (And often is contrary to whatever their clear goal is...)

I'll be coming back to this topic in connection to Cherub a bit more much later, though, for reasons that will make sense when we get there.

So I like Cherub as a character overall, which is a bit of a surprise; I started the game expecting to dislike his writing, precisely due to the above trends.

In terms of his aesthetic, I find Cherub a bit hard to read; he looks very different from hybrids in base XCOM 2 and War of the Chosen, but Chimera Squad has a more stylized representation of the world, including people, making it difficult to tell what the intention is with a given difference. For example, the 2D art of Cherub has particularly prominent lips, but this is actually a general thing with Chimera Squad's 2D art; humans, hybrids, and Mutons all get very visible, large-looking lips. So while some divergences seem straightforward enough -Cherub lacking the metal bits Skirmishers get is very possibly 'they would've been installed later, if Cherub had gone through the normal ADVENT procedure'- overall it's difficult to get a handle on what's going on with Cherub's appearance.

He's functional enough within Chimera Squad itself, anyway, but a bit murky when looking across games.

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Next time, we move on to the final agent forced into your first run's team: Terminal.

See you then.