Chimera Squad Agent Analysis: Shelter


Shelter is your final SMG user, and he's liable to fire it a fair amount. This... is not due to specializing in gunplay, unfortunately...

Base Stats

7 HP (9 on the lowest difficulty)
65 Aim (75 on the lowest difficulty)
10 Mobility
50 Will (60 on the lowest difficulty)
50 Psi Offense (60 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.

On the face of things, Shelter having Psi Offense seems perfectly natural. He is one of your two psionic agents, after all.

However, unlike Verge, Shelter doesn't actually use his Psi Offense for anything. All his psionic skills always succeed against everything, and none of them scales their damage to his Psi Offense or anything like that. Uh, whoops?

I assume the intent in the design was that he would, in fact, use his Psi Offense stat for at least one action and then it just never quite happened for some reason or another. I suspect Shelter got a bit less attention in general than was really intended -he's not as bad off as Zephyr is, but I'd say he's not far behind her in terms of design wonkiness leaving him fairly poor in his performance. In conjunction with stuff like the 'Psi Offense that isn't actually used' point, it feels like he got noticeably less polish than, say, Verge.

Other than that, he's below-average durability but above-average on Will, which... is a poor trade overall given how very few enemies actually interact with the Will stat. Not a dire issue, but still.

Possible Scars

Weakened: -3 HP
Jittery: -30 Aim
Unfocused: -30 Psi Offense (-49 if Deepened)

Again: Shelter has a Psi Offense stat, but he has no skills that use his Psi Offense stat. If Shelter gets the Unfocused Scar, you can keep fielding him without consequence, no need to have him Train it away.

Weakened and Jittery are actually concerning. Jittery can potentially be ignored for a bit if Shelter is max level and you need all your best agents right now or some such (He does get a decent amount of ability to contribute without using his Aim stat), but Weakened is pretty hard to put up with unless you're just really reliable about preventing enemies from getting turns.

Base Abilities

Subdue
Turn-ending action: A move-and-melee attack that does 2-3 damage to the target, ignoring Armor and with no chance to miss. If the target is reduced to 0 HP by Subdue, they're knocked Unconscious instead of killed. Some targets cannot be Subdued.

Shelter has no particularly unusual or notable incentives in his larger kit to use Subdue and isn't particularly good at leveraging it. Of the agents who have access to Subdue at all, I'd argue he's the agent most likely to end up not having a reason to ever make use of it in a given run.

If you want to give him an Impact Frame anyway, feel free, but don't be surprised if it never sees use.

Relocate
1 action point: Shelter switches places with a unit he has a clean line of fire on. This can be enemies, allies, or even unaffiliated civilians. 1 turn cooldown.

I find it hilarious this is very obviously derived from the Sectopod Stance-adjusting icons.

Anyway, Relocate is of course an obvious evolution of the Templar's Invert and Exchange abilities, stripped of the Focus cost and combined into one skill that can perform either function. This makes it noticeably less unwieldy than Invert and Exchange were, simplifying the question of whether to use it to pretty much purely 'are there are any good swaps available?' rather than having to juggle a resource cost on top of all that. And of course Relocate is simply innate to Shelter, where an additional hurdle for Invert and Exchange was 'are they worth spending Ability Points on?' This might honestly be the more important change; I suspect many players just never gave Invert and Exchange a chance in the first place and wouldn't have even if they weren't burdened by the Focus cost.

This is interesting to me mostly because Shelter has a mixture of abilities clearly pulled from Templar (But without the melee components) and Psi Operatives, suggesting XCOM 3 is liable to be willing to mix and match for any new psionic class design instead of sticking stringently to the division between 'wild psionic power' and however you want to describe Psi Operative abilities.

Anyway, Relocate is Shelter's foundational ability, being his only special ability to start and with multiple later skills that build upon it, and... I like the basic idea of expanding on Invert and Exchange, but in spite of how much less clunkiness is inherent to Relocate as to those Templar abilities, I don't think Relocate works out all that well in execution.

In practice there's four categories of uses for it: swapping with a VIP you're rescuing, swapping with a regular civilian, swapping with a fellow agent, or swapping with an enemy. Only one of these is reliably useful: the other three scenarios all have serious flaws that limit their utility.

Swapping with a civilian you're trying to rescue is the big thing Relocate actually does well. You can use it even on a VIP you haven't made contact with, and in the in-and-out missions your Evac zone is invariably the door your squad burst in on the Breach phase: having Shelter swap with such a VIP often lets you get the VIP out in one Round. If you're okay with exploiting game mechanics and getting a Scar on Shelter, you can even have the rest of the squad immediately evacuate: at that point, if Shelter goes down you'll instantly win the mission, just with Shelter Scarred. No other agent can match Shelter for this, with Torque's Tongue Pull being the only thing that comes close... and it's much shorter-ranged, so she'll still need to get decently close to the VIP, so it's not going to work for that first-Round-evac scenario, making Relocate clearly overall superior at the job anyway.

Swapping with a regular civilian is horribly unreliable. Sometimes a civilian will actually be in a good spot, flanking an enemy while being in Cover, such that Shelter swapping with them is an efficient and safe use of Relocate. More often, every civilian will be in a location that doesn't actually give Shelter a positional advantage to swap to -civilians often don't have Cover adjacent to their starting positions at all! It's hard to stay in the habit of keeping an eye out for such opportunities, too, since the majority of your time spent looking will fail to payoff; how many times in a row can the habit prove useless before you lose the will to persist?

Especially since there's no guarantee a given Encounter has any civilians on its map...

As an additional issue, civilians are honestly easy to overlook. There's no UI elements to call attention to them unless they're attached to a bonus objective (ie they're a hostage you're supposed to prevent the death of), and civilian color schemes often blend into their environment fairly readily. It's surprisingly easy to have a map have 5+ civilians in an Encounter and just overlook all of them.

Altogether, this means swapping with civilians is an option, but one of limited relevance to Relocate's utility.

Swapping with a fellow agent is actually arguably more limited. There's rarely any point to swapping with an agent in the initial post-Breach positions; you basically need to have Shelter placed later in the turn order and then swap with someone who advanced aggressively for there to be any point in the first Round. Many Encounters end before the second Round is even done, leaving little room for this to be useful -exacerbated by the fact that Shelter's later abilities are heavily weighted toward being more or less position-agnostic, so Shelter doesn't necessarily care that much about getting into a flanking position or the like. Since it is a swap, it's also not a solution to issues like 'Zephyr ended the Breach in a horrible position' -sure, Zephyr will be out of that bad position, but now Shelter is in it instead, and Subdue is his only other form of productive movement. Shelter bailing someone out with Relocate and then spending his final action point moving to better Cover is a terrible way to use Relocate; in practice Torque's Tongue Pull has much higher innate utility for being used on friendlies, and that's before it picks up the very powerful Tag Team effect!

This piece gets less limited much later, once Shelter picks up Fracture, but that doesn't really help with the utility of having Shelter in particular use Relocate; the Fracture being disposable means it can pull people to safety and then you shrug if it dies as a result, but Shelter himself still has limited use for swapping with allies.

Swapping with enemies is more consistently useful than swapping with allies, but still very flawed. The fundamental problem is the game is anchored in directional Cover: enemies are of course picking their positions to have Cover against your squad and not each other, which means many of your swap options will immediately leave Shelter flanked. There'll usually be an enemy or three who are way in back, or off to the side, or otherwise in a position where swapping with them leaves Shelter flanking someone without being flanked himself, but this still leaves Relocate's realistic options here very limited -and it's absolutely possible to see formations where no swap leaves Shelter safe from flanks.

This then gets exacerbated by the pressures of Chimera Squad's turn mechanics. Optimal play in Chimera squad is for each agent to down, disable, or delay the enemies that are going to go after their turn is done and before the next agent to act. Done properly, it's entirely possible to complete many Encounters with no enemies getting to act, or at least none of them getting to attack.

Swapping with an enemy fits poorly into this approach. Pretty much by definition, Shelter isn't flanking whoever he swapped with (Because he was almost certainly in Cover relative to him before the swap), and in any event Shelter's offensive potential is pretty poor in general. To be able to down the target Shelter swapped with before it can act, you generally have to be contriving to swap with an enemy that will go after some other agent, with confidence that this other agent will be able to take the enemy out of action... and this has to be balanced against trying to make sure Shelter deals with the enemies going right after him, and it also has to be balanced against the 'don't leave Shelter flanked' issue.

Taken altogether, there's rarely an adequately excellent swap to really justify using Relocate on an enemy.

These issues with finding a good time to use Relocate are a pretty big flaw, given Relocate is Shelter's only draw to start!

Godmother has a similar issue, where Scattershot only rarely gets a chance to be of use and is her only starting ability, but wielding a Shotgun immediately gives her a damage advantage over Shelter, and she has better HP and better Mobility, so her out-the-box performance is overall superior to his. More importantly, Godmother rapidly picks up amazing abilities, where Shelter's level-up options are... not so great.

In theory, Relocate has potential for combining with teammates, a point the devs themselves emphasized in the leadup to release, as Relocate counts as movement for Overwatch-type purposes, meaning that for example Zephyr's Lockdown will take a free swing at someone who is swapped in next to her...

... but there's actually very few abilities in Chimera Squad that work that way, and none of them is actually strongly synergistic with Shelter. Why, exactly, are Shelter and Zephyr standing close enough for a Relocate to drop an enemy in her Lockdown zone? Did you spend Momentum on this? If you did, why didn't you just run up to an enemy directly, which I assure you that Zephyr could do? Godmother's Close Combat Specialist and Patchwork's Voltaic Arc are less anti-synergistic, among other points having slightly larger ranges, but Godmother excels at advancing aggressively and Patchwork's Voltaic Arc has pretty weak damage. I guess if you have those three together on one team, having Shelter in the first slot and immediately Relocating might be a worthwhile thing? Maybe?

Remember: you don't get control over where your agents run to post-Breach, and the squad only rarely ends up strongly clustered post-Breach. It's entirely possible to try to set up this combo and have it completely unable to work in a given Encounter.

So no, agent synergies don't really drag Relocate's expected performance up.

Part of the problem is that Chimera Squad inherits the relatively large scale of the series, relative to a lot of tactics games. That is, in, say, the Fire Emblem games, units fight from literally adjacent to each other by default (And even the standard 'long' range attacks only go out 1 more tile), the 'standard' top speed for a unit in a turn is 6 tiles, and map size is similarly proportionate, where Chimera Squad -in spite of being of a smaller scale than its predecessors- still has units fighting out to up to 18 tiles away from each other, where every player unit and every enemy unit can all be simultaneously ready to attack every one of their enemies while absolutely nobody needs to sit next to each other. If you transplanted Relocate into Fire Emblem -or any number of other tactics games with a scale more skin to Fire Emblem- suddenly it could be used to do things like add additional attacks on a unit that's so crowded nobody should be able to reach it, or shuffle a wounded ally behind your lines and out of reach of all enemies. In Chimera Squad itself, though, such uses simply don't exist.

It's too bad, because I do genuinely like the idea of it, particularly the theoretical potential to combine it with other agent abilities to produce interesting combinations of actions, but the game it got put in is fundamentally an iffy fit to it and then insufficient efforts were made to accommodate that fact. Relocate would honestly probably be a lot more useful if it was, say, 'teleport a chosen target to a chosen tile within a certain range of the target' -even if that range was fairly low, like only 3 tiles. Suddenly you'd be able to rip enemies out of Cover, push allies back into Cover if theirs was destroyed, more reliably move enemies so they trigger reaction fire effect, etc.

I honestly hope XCOM 3 doesn't make a second go at trying to get Relocate to be centrally useful; it's unlikely to work unless XCOM 3 is way more different from its predecessors than it seems likely to be.

Deputy Agent
+3 Aim
+8 Psi Offense

Again: Shelter has Psi Offense, it grows just like with Verge, but unlike Verge it has no relevance.

Dazzle
Breach action: Shelter selects a target, and Disorients a number of targets visible to his Breach point for the Breach phase, with affected targets having a chance of lowering their Alert state. The selected target is Disoriented for their first turn, as well. 1 charge per mission.

Note that the game doesn't preview what will be hit by Dazzle's splash. I think it's a splash effect centered on the primary target, but it's difficult to be entirely sure given the lack of a preview and so on. This is awkward and both makes it harder to discuss and harder to make optimal use of it.

Dazzle itself is another Breach Phase action that starts out essentially useless and gets a bit better as a run progresses; when every enemy is Surprised, literally the only benefit of Dazzle is Disorienting exactly one enemy for one turn, which is... pretty much impossible to be worth doing in place of just shooting someone. As Alert enemies start becoming a thing, it gains more relevance, both because it might downgrade some Alert enemies to Surprised and because Disorientation prevents a number of Alert actions -including the widely-available Hunker Down on enemies. And of course once Aggressive starts coming up, the -20 Aim from Disorientation becomes protective within the Breach Phase itself.

Indeed, once you're in the portion of the game where it's not unusual for literally every enemy to be either Aggressive or Alert, Dazzle is arguably the strongest Breach action in the game. It's not reliable about helping, as you can in fact fire off Dazzle and have every Aggressive enemy remain Aggressive and land their shots in spite of the Aim penalty, so I'm still not really a fan of it, but on average it does tilt the odds quite a bit in your favor, and the closest competition to its utility here is Cherub's Phalanx, which is itself also not perfectly reliable and notably has no chance of helping against Alert enemies; if Dazzle knocks an Alert Guardian into Surprised in addition to hurting the Aim of multiple Aggressive enemies, it can absolutely be a better outcome than Phalanx would provide.

One unfortunate issue here is that Dazzle is completely useless against robots. This is unfortunate for two reasons: firstly, Sacred Coil's Investigation is overall the hardest of the three Investigations, so it's the Investigation you most want to bring your A-game to, and it's also the Investigation heaviest on robots. Second, Sacred Coil's Guardians are the one enemy whose Alert action is so high-impact you honestly would rather they be Aggressive than Alert, further dragging down Dazzle's expected performance in the Sacred Coil Investigation. The endgame at least reliably provides moments of fighting Guardians where they're not surrounded by robots (So you're more likely to get to Dazzle an Alert Guardian and a bunch of Aggressive enemies), so this is less awkward than it could be, but it's not ideal.

A more subtle extension of the above is that dedicated melee enemies are technically susceptible to Dazzle, but the utility is extremely minor. They can't actually do anything when Alert or Aggressive anyway, so the only values in hitting them with Dazzle is that it might downgrade them to Surprised and that if they're the primary target the Disorientation might matter when their first turn comes around. This is relevant to Sacred Coil, but also drags Dazzle down a little bit against Gray Phoenix (And in Outbreak missions, actually) because Faceless and Berserkers are dedicated melee.

Anyway, returning to broader performance, the fact that Dazzle is initially basically useless is also... awkward. In the long haul, I'd quite firmly say Zephyr is a weaker agent than Shelter, but in the early portion of a run? Between Relocate being limited in its utility and Dazzle being initially pretty much useless, Shelter is the weakest agent out the box, where Zephyr will pretty cleanly outperform him in the early game because she's got actually relevant and useful advantages right away.

Furthermore it's worth pointing out that Dazzle's functional improvement is more granular than, say, Verge's Levitation. That is, Levitation is also basically useless initially, but if any enemy in an Encounter is Alert or Aggressive, suddenly Levitation is actually notably useful. (There's a qualifier there in that you really need 2 such enemies for Levitation to become truly significant, as typically if it's just one you can just shoot them to prevent them from acting, but this only mildly changes the point I'm driving at) Dazzle is impressive when literally every enemy is Alert or Aggressive, yes, but when it's just a couple enemies that aren't Surprised, it's difficult to justify throwing out Dazzle over shooting people. The point can be made worse by contextual factors, too; say you looted Venom Rounds early in a run, which is unlikely but absolutely possible, and you've got them on Shelter. In that case, against a single Aggressive enemy shooting them will also impose an Aim penalty (Albeit a slightly weaker one), while doing a bunch of damage and very possibly setting them up to die of Poison when their first Timeline turn comes about, wasting their slot. Unless you're worried about missing, Dazzle is largely inferior at that point.

I especially don't get why Dazzle is just one charge per mission. All the clunkiness above would still be relevant if Dazzle could be thrown out every Encounter, but in the current state Dazzle additionally suffers from the 'maybe I should save it for later?' problem, where it's easy to have a modestly decent opportunity for Dazzle (A couple Aggressive enemies and a couple Alert enemies, for example), but end up not taking it because there's still at least one Encounter to go, and then whoops the later Encounter(s) don't really make any sense to use Dazzle in and so you go through a mission never actually using Dazzle at all.

Basic Training: +2 HP.

You'll want it eventually.

Field Agent
+2 Aim
+8 Psi Offense

Temporal Shift
Passive: When using Relocate to switch places with an enemy, that enemy's turn is delayed by 3 slots.

OR

Distortion Field
Passive: Relocate provides +50 Defense to Shelter until the start of his next turn. If used on an ally, they also gain +50 Defense, until the start of their own turn.

I like how Distortion Field is something of a callback to one of the psionic abilities you could get in Enemy Unknown.

Anyway, Temporal Shift's primary problem is that it gets worse the harder the situation is. When there are a ton of enemies, delaying an enemy three slots may do exactly nothing at all, and even when there's only something like six enemies it still tends to be less useful than if there's four. This is exacerbated by the usual problems with using Relocate on enemies, in terms of it tending to drop an enemy into a flank on your other teammates if you use it as a first action; it makes that piece less bad (You can target the very next enemy to act and still have a chance for another agent to do stuff to them), and when combined with certain teammates -like Torque, who can Bind the victim- Temporal Shift can help make that more viable, but it still won't help with problems like 'but Shelter will be flanked by enemies in his new position'. This last point is particularly concerning in that Distortion Field also makes it more viable for Shelter to swap with enemies, as +50 Defense is such a bonkers amount Shelter will expect to be regularly missed even by enemies firing on him from a flanking position... while Distortion Field has a lot of other utility besides, like letting you protect VIPs very reliably, or protect a vulnerable teammate.

Temporal Shift gets a little bit better one level later, as it can be combined with Soulfire to shove an enemy back 6 slots in one turn, which is much more helpful, and gets even better once Shelter is maxed out and has proper team support, in that the Fracture gives you another source of turn delaying; Temporal Shift-backed Relocate followed by summoning the Fracture and then being gifted action points or using Teamwork to pull Shelter's turn back forward so he can hit the target with two more Soulfires can result in an impressive level of delay to key targets.

I say 'a little better', though, because Chimera Squad doesn't really go for elite big nasties like XCOM 2 did. The final mission of a given Investigation will have 0-2 elite supercombatants this tactic is useful against, and one of the bosses in question is immune to Soulfire.

Alternatively, you can spread around the turn delays, but it's really just better to be downing enemies, and there's only a handful of enemies that are really all that worth delaying by virtue of being tough and having threatening attacks you can't neuter with Defense boosting/Aim penalizing... one of which is a robot and so immune to Soulfire, by the way...

... Temporal Shift is fun to play around with, but it's just not very good in practice. Again, the fact that tougher encounters weaken it is a huge part of the problem. Enemy summoners are also a problem, since they can add turn slots that interfere with the utility of turn delaying. They can't disrupt your plans in an immediate sense, since their summons get added to the end of the turn chain, but it's still a contributing issue, where a relatively small group of enemies that included a Necromancer can still end up interfering with the effectiveness of turn delaying.

I won't say you should go for Distortion Field every time, but certainly it should be your default if you don't have a clear reason you want Temporal Shift.

Notably, Distortion Field resolves the issue that swapping with a teammate is initially extremely low-value: now Shelter doesn't need positional utility to justify swapping with a fellow agent, as the swap itself is significantly protective, especially if you remember to prioritize swapping with whoever is currently last in the turn order. (So Distortion Field will last as long as possible on them) This makes it actually plausibly to be usefully using Relocate every turn all by itself, which is important given that Shelter has only one other action that doesn't necessarily end the turn. (And which is much harder to use without it ending the turn...)

It's worth pointing out here that Shelter is the agent I consistently see the biggest boost from giving a Reflex Grip, due precisely to his difficulties with spending action points efficiently. (Mind, Zephyr is even worse about this problem, but she can't equip a Reflex Grip...) Even with Temporal Shift or Distortion Field, it's depressingly common for 'shoot twice' to be a better use of Shelter's time than using his distinctive, innate ability.

Yeah. That's not ideal.

Special Agent
+1 HP
+2 Aim
+8 Psi Offense

Soulfire
Turn ending action: Does 4 damage to a target organic enemy Shelter has a line of fire on, ignoring Armor and with no chance to miss, while also delaying their turn by 3 slots. 2 turn cooldown.

A somewhat annoying point is that Soulfire can crit, such as when used on a flankable enemy who's standing in the open, but it has no crit damage and so all that happens is you get the crit visual effects. Also annoying is that the damage preview will display as if it's affected by Armor, including Cover Armor; ignore it, it's wrong.

Thematically, Soulfire is weird: Shelter's whole thing is that he hates how he was made to use his psionic abilities as a weapon, and then one of his early mandatory abilities is... to use his psionic abilities as a weapon? And not even an innate one, where I could write it off as being meant to be one of the tricks he was made to learn by ADVENT and he's grudgingly willingly to keep using it, but an ability he learns. I've already said I'm largely willing to gloss over 'things not making realistic sense', but this is a slightly different issue; I'll be coming back to this later.

Gameplay-wise, Soulfire is the first thing Shelter picks up that really justifies his presence on your team. Its cooldown is short enough you don't have to be particularly cautious about throwing it out, its damage is high enough that, in conjunction with ignoring Armor, it remains a solid option in at least some situations all the way to the end of the game, the fact that it can't miss or otherwise fail makes it a nice tool for helping deal with enemies in High Cover, and the turn-delaying effect means it can be used to strategically delay a key enemy so another agent can finish them off or disable them or whatever.

Taken altogether, it's a staple tool that is better than the sum of its parts: even when shooting a target will have better damage, the other elements can justify using Soulfire anyway. And of course it's great for picking off weakened enemies reliably.

The inability to use it on robots does make its Armor penetration slightly awkward since robots uniformly have at least one point of Armor in Chimera Squad, but robots are almost exclusive to the Sacred Coil Investigation, so it's not a problem that constantly hangs over Shelter. There's an argument for benching him when you do the Sacred Coil Investigation, honestly, especially in conjunction with the Dazzle's issues in said Investigation, but it's not like this concern is unique to Shelter.

I really wish this was a basic part of Shelter's kit, both for the thematic reasons and to give him a stronger start. As-is, having Shelter on the squad is pretty painful before he gets to this level, and even once he has Soulfire he's still one of the lower-performing agents in the game.

Unlock Potential Training: +2 Mobility.

... yay?

This isn't terrible or anything (+2 Mobility is a nice stat increase), but it's confusing. Relocate is Shelter's central ability that is his only initial definition and can be used turn in and turn out, and if Shelter spends every turn Relocating and then performing an offensive action then he's not going to be using his Mobility stat at all. (Unless the offensive action is Subdue, admittedly) Such a pattern certainly looks to have been the intent for how to use Shelter. So... why a Mobility boost?

This is in fact another reason why Shelter takes until late in the game to be okay, as his Unlock Potential Training is probably the least useful of the bunch in practice. This probably should've been a point of Armor or something.

Senior Agent
+2 Aim
+8 Psi Offense

Solace
Passive: Shelter is immune to all negative mental effects, and allies within 4 tiles are also immune, including purging existing conditions if they are newly inside his radius. This includes Mind Control.

OR

Soul Storm
Passive: Shelter is healed for 2 HP when using Soulfire.

You might expect Solace to be amazing, given what a big deal it in in XCOM 2, but... well, not really. Agents in Chimera Squad will never Panic unless an enemy ability explicitly attempts to inflict it, which is itself rare, Mind Control is found on exactly one enemy type -not even a Shrike one, so it's never going to be seen in two of the Investigations- and the other mental effects like Disorientation and Stun are also quite rare. This means Solace is actually completely irrelevant the vast majority of the time. Also not helping is that the one source of Mind Control from enemies can have it broken in several ways aside killing them; Verge Stunning the Mind Controller will break Mind Control, for example.

In practice Solace is basically an auto-skip; just take Soul Storm.

Note that while the game makes it sound like Soul Storm's heal is a percentage of the damage done by Soulfire, it's just the flat 2 HP. Finishing a 1 HP target still produces 2 HP of healing, and similarly using Rupture to increase Soulfire's damage doesn't result in more healing. It's a very strange error given XCOM 2 also did Soulfire-derived healing and its version was an actual leech effect.

In any event, Soul Storm is solid simply because Soulfire is solid and free healing is always appreciated. It's not going to make Shelter into a party tank or anything, but a bit of healing to himself here and there can be what keeps him from going down in a mission, or make it easier to decide where Terminal should focus her efforts, or whatever.

(Unless you've got full-heal-between-Encounter enabled, anyway, but it's not Soul Storm's fault there's an option for making the game easier that specifically makes all healing less valuable)

Not a lot to add to that, honestly.

Soul Storm's icon and name does make me wonder if it was originally supposed to be a multi-target attack that got dumped for technical reasons or something, because they fit much more to the idea of a barrage of Soulfires than to 'Soulfire now heals Shelter'. I could readily see either of such an option giving the team difficult coding the logic correctly and/or proving more powerful than they expected -if it was literally 'Soulfire on every enemy' that would often make it really easy to have the entire squad go before the entire enemy team, when combined with downing early-turn enemies and Stunning people and so on.

Principal Agent
+2 Aim
+8 Psi Offense


Final Stats
10 HP (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)
76 Aim
12 Mobility (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)
90 Psi Offense

Fracture
Turn ending action: Shelter creates a psionic clone in an adjacent tile. The clone has 60% of Shelter's max HP for its own max HP, and does not have access to any of Shelter's equipment, but it can use Relocate and Soulfire, as well as Writhe once he's learned Writhe. It also inherits skills that modify those skills, such as Soul Storm's effect on Soulfire. Its own Soulfire has a 1 turn cooldown, allowing it to be used every turn. The Fracture can immediately act and shares its turn with Shelter, and thus gifting Shelter a proper turn, such as via Teamwork, will also cause the Fracture to get an additional turn as well, but gifting action points will not do the same.

If you're in the last Encounter of a mission and considering using Soulfire while not having used Fracture yet, you should always use Fracture. It gets to immediately act, and its Soulfire can be spammed without worrying about the cooldown. The only caveat here is that if you have Soul Storm you might be considering using Soulfire to heal Shelter, and the Fracture using Soulfire heals it, not Shelter. This isn't much of a caveat, though, given being in the last Encounter means you're less likely to need to keep agent HP up.

Also, the Fracture actually inherits Solace if you took that. I'm pretty sure that's not intended behavior, as it doesn't display at all except for the pop-ups when clearing effects.

Also also, the Fracture is immune to all damage over time effects and Rupture, making it more prone to surviving punishment than you'd expect given it only gets 60% of Shelter's max HP. It's basically one of the Warlock's Spectral summons, including sharing the same visual effects. (Aside that I don't think Spectral Zombies and Spectral Lancers have immunity to Rupture? It's possible I've just never tried to apply it to them, though)

Regardless, Fracture is the point at which Shelter rises from distressingly poor at contributing to being okay. Having an additional disposable body on the field is helpful for a variety of reasons in a variety of ways, the Fracture is a lot more able to swap around usefully because you don't care as much where it ends up in the process, and gaining an additional source of Soulfire gives you a lot more breathing room where you can keep key targets from ever getting a chance to act for an extended period of time. (Especially in conjunction with a well-timed Teamwork on Shelter) It is, in the context of a single Encounter, honestly one of the stronger skills in the game -in Encounter types with reinforcements, I'd argue it's actually better than Faceoff, which is otherwise pretty clearly the best single action in the game.

It's unfortunately awkward for multi-Encounter missions. The first, most obvious issue is that it doesn't carry through into later Encounters; you don't even get the charge refunded if the Fracture is still alive at the end of an Encounter, or anything like that. In 3-Encounter missions (Or even 2-Encounter missions), this once again puts Shelter in the position of potentially skipping using a skill in the Encounter it would be best in because you were worried it would be needed later. It's less bad about this than Dazzle, but it's still an issue.

Less obvious is how this intersects with the game's broader approach to mission design; with the majority of the mission pool, the game roughly endeavors to make it so more Encounters means shorter individual Encounters. As such, when taking Shelter into a multi-Encounter mission, it's a lot more likely that summoning the Fracture won't actually be a particularly productive action; if a 3-Encounter mission has every Encounter end in less than 2 full Rounds, there's no point where the Fracture will get to really put in a lot of work. Like yeah, as I said earlier, you might as well use Fracture if it's the last Encounter and you're intending to use Soulfire, but if summoning the Fracture is the last action Shelter takes before the mission ends then the Fracture didn't really add anything.

As such, while Fracture is quite good in most 1-Encounter missions (Particularly the VIP Extraction missions, where it can help extract less mobile agents and/or the VIP) and some of the 2-Encounter missions that are effectively a 3-Encounter mission because the third phase is reinforcements pouring in upon completing an objective rather than a literal third Encounter, in most multi-Encounter missions it doesn't really get an opportunity to add much value. Which is... awkward, given those are the majority of the game's missions.

It does at least get more of an opportunity to play out in the Take Down (Investigation target) missions, as while those are 3-Encounter missions the individual Encounters are generally designed to be multi-Round affairs. It's still held back by the issue of only getting to be used in one Encounter, though, just less badly than in most missions.

I really wish the charge was refunded if the Fracture was alive at the end of an Encounter. It wouldn't be a perfect solution, but it would substantially ease the issues here while still retaining most of the important current implications. (eg 'you can't have more than one Fracture at a time')

It's too bad, because broadly the Fracture is clearly a return to the Templar Ghost ability, but minus the flaws that held back Ghost, like the need for a humanoid corpse and the need to spend Focus on generating the Ghost... and then it's still held back substantially by the change in context. In XCOM 2, where multi-part missions were the exception instead of the rule, Fracture would simply not have these flaws the overwhelming majority of the time, and would be a reliably great skill as a result.

Alas.

Final Training: Unlock Writhe.

Writhe
1 action point: Shelter attacks an adjacent enemy for 3-4 damage, ignoring Armor and with no chance to miss, and heals himself for half of the damage done, rounding down. Cannot be used unless Shelter is injured. No cooldown.

I really don't get why they recycled Soulfire's graphic... on a character who has an ability called Soulfire that is pretty similar to Soulfire from the previous game... on an ability that isn't Soulfire. It's a really strange decision.

In any event, Writhe being a melee attack, but not a move-and-melee attack, severely limits it, and the need to already be injured further limits it. I think the idea is that you're meant to have Shelter Relocate himself adjacent to enemies and then use Writhe on them, but this will rarely happen. I guess you could have the Fracture run off next to an enemy to swap with it?...

The fact that it's a 1-action-point action is neat, but only occasionally helpful. Few other agents can manipulate enemy or ally positions in a controlled and predictable manner conducive to planting them next to a specific other agent, so it's rare that you'll have Shelter start a turn adjacent to an enemy. Especially since one of the dedicated melee enemies of the game has Bending Reed and so won't be stopping next to Shelter. And another dedicated melee enemy (Faceless) can and does prefer to attack from 2 tiles out, ie too far out to hit them with Writhe. Only Berserkers and the two Chryssalid types are dedicated melee enemies that reliably stop next to their target. So... Writhe being possible to use and then still act is largely a technicality.

The fact that the damage is actually worse than Soulfire is insult to injury. Soulfire also ignores Armor, automatically hits, and with Soul Storm even heals Shelter, while being usable at range and knocking the target's turn back. The only things Writhe has going for it are that it doesn't necessarily end the turn (But I just covered how that's basically a technicality) and that it lacks a cooldown. That's not nothing, but it's pretty close.

You can do shenanigans to get some use out of Writhe, but the examples just kind of highlight its problems. For example, you could summon the Fracture, have it immediately swap with an enemy so there's now an enemy next to Shelter, and then use Teamwork to get him acting before that enemy, at which point he can Writhe twice... except you're unlikely to want to Writhe twice. Probably you'd rather Writhe once and then shoot the target, since SMGs start from superior damage to Writhe and you've probably upgraded them at least once by the time you actually have Writhe, with this only getting more true as technology advances; a Mastercrafted SMG backed by a relevant Ammo Item is 6-8 damage immediately, where it would take a target having 4 Armor for Writhe to actually do better damage. There is exactly one enemy in the entirety of Chimera Squad that innately has more than 3 Armor (A boss, specifically, so you only fight it once in an entire run), and only one other enemy type that can plausibly reach such heights even temporarily. And if you've equipped Shelter with a Reflex Grip -which, again, he's one of the best recipients for a Reflex Grip!- then actually the only reason to consider Writhing instead of shooting with both action points is ammo management considerations.

The fact that you're literally forbidden from using it unless Shelter is currently injured is especially killer to it. Even if you're willing to do all the shenanigans necessary to get some use out of Writhe, you can't get started on them unless Shelter is injured or you're willing to injure him yourself (eg having him chuck a grenade at his own feet before initiating the double-Writhe), and the former can be stymied by enemies happening to decide to focus on other agents -or even deciding to target Shelter and missing. I cannot imagine what the thought process for having this particular limitation on Writhe might've been, honestly.

In general, I really don't get why Writhe is so bad. It's very straightforwardly designed to be almost completely inferior to Soulfire, while taking longer to unlock! What happened in development that this seemed plausibly useful?

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Shelter isn't the worst character -it's hard to push Zephyr out of that position- but I'd say he's pretty clearly wearing the silver medal here. (As in, he's the second-worst character, if that's insufficiently clear) Relocate doesn't work well as a core skill in Chimera Squad and Shelter's improvement from his baseline is overall fairly marginal, with his only really impressive skill being Fracture. Which is a good skill, mind, but he can only use it once per mission, and it doesn't follow you into later Encounters if used earlier. In 1-Encounter missions Fracture brings Shelter up to 'okay' (Certainly better than Zephyr), but in multi-Encounter missions you really feel how limited he is.

He's also another agent who doesn't scale well into the endgame, which is a bit surprising given Relocate's utility isn't affected by scaling factors, but since Relocate itself is only intermittently useful that fact doesn't help much. A lot of the time his best and most unique quality is Soulfire, for its strong combination of damage that cannot be avoided or reduced and doubling as a turn-delaying action, a combination no other agent can pull off with one action, and its damage falls behind as you progress through Investigation, increasingly relegating it to finishing off weakened targets in High Cover or delaying key targets, where the damage isn't very significant, and may in fact literally not matter depending on how the numbers line up. (That is, if Shelter Soulfires a target, and then they're left with just enough HP two more agent actions are required to finish them, but the two agent actions in question would've been enough to finish them from full HP, then Soulfire's damage didn't matter; this is quite plausible to have happen with Mastercrafted weapons backed by Ammo Items)

Part of the problem is that Torque exists, has similar strengths and weaknesses (Both of them perform poorly against robots, for example), but is overall stronger and more relevant as technology improves. Poisoning targets still impairs them, even if the ability to kill enemies in a manner that eats enemy turn slots becomes less commonly achievable later in the game. Bind is a full lockdown on key enemies, so even though its damage falls a bit behind it stays very relevant anyway. Tongue Pull picks up the trick of outright gifting allies additional action points, and while Torque's innate immunity to Poison and access to Adaptable don't matter very often she's getting them for free. She's also got better innate Mobility and identical post-Training Mobility, while having much greater effective durability due to her excellent inherent access to Dodge; among other points, Dodge is effectively a multiplier on HP, and so Torque's durability relative to other characters actually rises. Even better, Dodge damage modification is calculated before Armor, so Mastercrafted Armor including a point of Armor favors her!

The main thing Shelter has over Torque is his ability to delay enemy turns, between Soulfire and potentially Temporal Shift. That's useful, but Temporal Shift often involves putting Shelter in danger to use it on the enemies you most want delayed, while Soulfire can't be used every turn except via Fracture, and only affects a single target... where Torque could Bind a target to skip their turn entirely. Some of the more notable enemies Torque can't Bind are also enemies Shelter can't use Soulfire on, too, so that consideration doesn't help him much.

It also doesn't help that they both wield SMGs, so even once you're getting a hold of Epic Weapons there is no 'but what if I want to use X Epic Weapon' consideration. This isn't like how Verge and Patchwork are your only Rifle users while being completely different from each other, so that even if you feel that they each overlap with some other character's utility Epic Rifle access can help give them a clear edge over a similar agent.

You can certainly win with a run that insists on using Shelter from start to finish, but most of the time you're handicapping yourself and if your squad doesn't already include Torque you probably would've been better off just grabbing Torque instead.

It's... not ideal.

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


As a narrative character, I find Shelter outright disappointing.

When Chimera Squad was first revealed, I was looking forward to seeing more of an exploration of the personal, day-to-day-life aspect of being psionic; Enemy Unknown/Within largely engaged with psychic powers as a catchall plot device, base XCOM 2 was less bad about this but still didn't really engage with 'what is being a psychic person in this setting actually like?', and War of the Chosen's primary lens for exploring the topic is the Warlock, where it seems unlikely we should take him as particularly representative of what regular human psychics experience. There were the Templar as well, but while there's plenty of evidence of interesting thought going into things like 'how do Templar Gauntlets work?' the more personal or human layer of the Templar was primarily engaged with in the form of external observations; things like other characters talking about the Templar as being wild or out of control. (Which then didn't really mesh with how any of the Templar talk, for one)

So Shelter is actually one of the agents I was most looking forward to seeing in action...

... but the execution is not there.

For one thing, Chimera Squad does engage with these topics some, but primarily through Verge and some of the radio dialogue with generic civilian Sectoids. Shelter is, as far as I'm aware, not used as a vector for this stuff at all, and indeed even though the Progeny are a faction of human psychics, there's a conspicuous absence of exploration on the topic of human psychics all across the game.

For another, what does get focused on with Shelter is... an awkward fit to the game he's in.

I've already touched on this a bit, but the basic backstory of Shelter is that he's a psychic guy that ADVENT was trying to weaponize, and he's someone who finds hurting others deeply unpleasant, so for Shelter this was particularly traumatic. In turn his dialogue throughout Chimera Squad broadly reflects this, where he gets more upset in combat than other agents overall, and has lines where he's clearly upset at having to hurt people.

Okay, but... like, why is he on this squad, then? The Chimera Squad isn't some non-combat unit that happens to get sucked into a combat context unexpectedly. Fighting people is one of their explicit primary duties. So why is Shelter even here?

In a different game, such as an RPG sort of game with a fixed cast who engage with a central plot and so on, this question could be tied into character development. It could've been Shelter coming to realize he was really more upset at working for ADVENT than at the basic process of using his psychic powers to inflict harm, where he's actually fine with doing such harm if he feels it's in service to a noble goal, or something of that sort; instead of 'why is Shelter on the Chimera Squad?' being a plot hole, it would be a plotpoint.

In Chimera Squad, though, agents don't get character arcs or the like, because the basic framework of the game doesn't really have room for it. (At least not at the relatively low level of ambition the game shot for) So we're left with a character who whines a lot about doing his job, when he wasn't coerced into said job or anything, so his whining is just grating.

The gameplay end of things similarly ends up dissonant, as I've already touched on; Shelter being upset by ADVENT forcing him to use his powers to hurt people doesn't really resonate when Shelter's basic kit can't hurt people psychically, and the implication that he'd rather use his powers some other way is dissonant with how one of his mandatory (But not foundational) powers is all about hurting people. From this perspective, it would be better if Soulfire had been a basic part of his kit and Relocate had been his first non-Breach mandatory level-up skill. (Or he could've also had Relocate foundationally, either way)

Again, in something like an RPG with a fixed cast and a central plot, these elements could've been made integral instead of contradictory. Shelter could've had a character arc engaging with this stuff, dialogue where he gets upset at how Soulfire comes to him relatively readily and he can't figure out how to just heal people with his powers, or whatever he'd prefer to be doing.

(Or, more grimly, he could come to realize he actually likes hurting people and that's why his powers are manifesting in such ways, but this is the sort of possibility more mainstream pop culture tends to avoid unless it's used for a Clearly Signaled Villain Character so this hypothetical Chimera Squad With More Of A Plot probably wouldn't handle Shelter in such a way)

As-is though, it's another layer of Shelter's complaining being dissonant, where he verbally expresses 'I don't like hurting people' but then his mechanics have him automatically and unavoidably get better at hurting people, which is the sort of thing that tends to feel like a decision the character is making. That is, if the player can opt to have a character do something in a game, it doesn't necessarily feel like it's a decision the character made in-universe (Games often let players impose decisions on characters where it's very implausible the character would make that choice theirself), whereas if such control is taken out of the player's hands it feels more like the decision was made by the character; Shelter automatically picking up Soulfire and whatnot comes across like Shelter choosing such abilities.

It's too bad; Shelter could've been used as an opportunity to explore topics like 'what do psychic powers get used for in this new society?' or 'what kinds of laws and other cultural mores have developed around psychic powers?' which are interesting topics that would've fit just fine into the game design.

Instead we got a character who's meant to be sympathetic that is difficult to be sympathetic toward and feels very out of place to be on-screen at all, let alone a part of the Chimera Squad in particular.

Alas.

On a different note, an aspect of Shelter I'm not sure how to feel about is this device that appears to be partially embedded into the back of his head. The game itself, as far as I'm aware, never actually addresses what it is, but it seems likely to be meant to be something along the lines of a Psi Amp, in the sense of being technological assistance for Shelter's use of psychic abilities.

I talked previously about how the visual handling of Psi Operatives in XCOM 2 helps a lot with the trust issues and so on inherent to psychic powers; I'm honestly disappointed in general that Chimera Squad seems to be dropping the visual markers, where Shelter has a regular dark hair color and his eyes don't glow purple and all.

But since this isn't actually addressed at all, I'm not entirely sure whether or not this is a switch to a more problematic model. Shelter's setup is easier to conceal, where he could walk around in a hoodie or with a big hat or whatever and you wouldn't necessarily realize he has whatever this thing is if you passed by him, but it also actually looks like he's got technological bits straight-up embedded into his skull. It's possible this device is just meant to be sitting on his skin, though, where the model making it look embedded isn't really how you're intended to interpret his model. Either possibility has very different connotations, and there's further questions as to where the device came from and why Shelter has it.

That is, if this is something ADVENT surgically installed into Shelter to make him a stronger psychic, and the larger XCOM setting is going to treat such a process as invasive/destructive/dehumanizing, where the device isn't going to be a new norm going forward, then functionally this is more like a relatively non-gruesome way of marking Shelter as metaphorically and literally scarred by what ADVENT did to him, and the society-level trust concerns and so on are largely not relevant.

Or if it's basically just a Psi Amp that sits on the skin, sticking to the skin but not that hard to safely remove, and this is going to be the series standard for psychic powers going forward, then all those trust issues and whatnot catapult back into prominence and that's... not great.

But then again, it could be something else entirely. It's not even guaranteed this is meant to have anything to do with psychic powers... or it could actually be a psychic inhibitor, something to put a lid on Shelter's powers, pretty much the opposite of the obvious read. It being totally unaddressed makes it impossible to be sure.

Hopefully XCOM 3, if it comes back to this topic, will be clearer on what it is.

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

Next time, we move on to our final regular agent; Patchwork.

See you then.

Comments

  1. One oddity with Shelter is that if you give him tranquiliser rounds, he still reacts as if he had shot the enemies dead. I assume the developers didn't have time or money to add some more dialogue lines, but tranquiliser rounds are so incredibly useful that it stands out.

    He does tend to avoid using the words "killed" or "dead" ("that's one less to worry about", "I stopped the hostile", "I won't let you hurt my friends", that kind of thing) but he does so in a way that implies he actually is killing people, he just doesn't like to admit it.

    My first reaction to the character was that he seemed to be modelled on Mark Ruffalo's version of Bruce Banner. I assumed that his later skills would be unusually lethal, but as you point out he isn't even particularly good at killing people, so his angst feels misplaced.

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    1. I do wonder why they didn't apply the Subdue lines to tranq rounds hits. More or less every agent has at least one 'lethal' line that's jarring with tranq rounds ("Splattered a hostile" on Torque always stands out to me), and then the Subdue lines more or less never directly reference the 'smacking the target in melee' aspect of Subdue: more or less all of them would work fine for tranq round 'kills'.

      Shelter is certainly the most stand-out example for this, since he's clearly bothered by killing people but not by KOing them; other agents are generally blandly professional either way, enough so it took me a while to notice that 'Subdue' and 'kill' are separate line sets. In retrospect, this probably contributed to my disinterest in Shelter's angst: "I'm upset I killed this guy!" is difficult to take seriously when he very explicitly did not kill that guy.

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