Chimera Squad Agent Analysis: Zephyr

I'm not sure why Zephyr gets such dramatic lighting in her character art. I always end up thinking the really pale bits are tattoos or something else simply not readily seen on the in-game model, but no, Zephyr just has a particularly intense light source for her hand-drawn art for... some reason.

Anyway, Zephyr is unique among all your characters for using Pangolin Gauntlets, as opposed to one of the four ranged weapons.

This... is handled very problematically, unfortunately.

First is that, bizarrely, there are no Assembly Projects for increasing the damage of the Pangolin Gauntlets. This is particularly concerning given they start with the same damage as Pistols (ie 3-4 damage), and no, Zephyr doesn't reliably make up the loss elsewhere. I don't really get why this is so; weapons in Chimera Squad don't have different models for different upgrade tiers or anything like that, so this can't be 'they ran out of time to make the models and left the tiers out as a result'. (As a contrast point, while I doubt Grenade Launchers having only 2 tiers in XCOM 2 is due to a failure to get a third graphic made in time, if somebody at Firaxis went on record saying that totally is the entire reason I would be only mildly surprised to learn this; XCOM 2 was very insistent on unique art for everything)

Second, the Gauntlets have no slots for Weapon Attachments. Zephyr would have no use for several of the Weapon Attachments anyway, and in fact her default Gauntlet attack is utterly unable to miss, so it's not like she misses Scopes, but this is still a strike against her. Among other points, it means the ability of other agents to equip an Impact Frame to boost their Subdue damage is directly harmful to Zephyr's case -internally to Torque or whoever, equipping an Impact Frame is costing them in that they could've equipped some other Weapon Attachment, but cross-comparing them against Zephyr it's 100% free of a boost; Zephyr is simply behind.

Third, Zephyr is barred from equipping Ammo Items. This effectively leaves her at least 2 more points of damage behind the rest of the squad once you're in the mid-to-late game, since Venom Rounds, Dragon Rounds, and Caustic Rounds all add +1 damage and inflict a status effect that does at least 1 point of damage. You know, on top of the 2 points she's missing from not being able to upgrade her Gauntlets.

Fourth, there is no Epic Weapon version of the Pangolin Gauntlets. Every other weapon has two Epic Weapons, and most of them provide pretty dramatic boosts in power to the wielder via their skills. While this is difficult to quantify because each Epic Weapon's provided ability is unique and how impactful they are is fairly variable, this is still inarguably one more way in which a campaign progressing has Zephyr fall behind her fellow agents.

Fifth, though this is a small thing, it's worth pointing out that this also means Zephyr can't get flanking bonuses. The accuracy part doesn't matter, but it does mean Zephyr can't get flanking crit bonuses. Again, this is a small thing, given crits aren't terribly relevant anyway, but it is one more way in which her real damage output is lower than other agents.

All this together means Zephyr starts out decent if you take her as a first character, but increasingly falls behind as you get to later Investigations. This is further exacerbated by a series of strange decisions regarding her actual abilities, but I'll get to that as we get to it.

Basic Stats

8 HP (10 on the lowest difficulty)
75 Aim (80 on the lowest difficulty)
14 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.

Zephyr is the fastest agent in the game. This helps less than it would if this were XCOM 2 due to Dashing being less effective, but she's still generally fast enough to reach a target every turn. She's also got, surprisingly, higher base Aim, same as Blueblood, though she has no innate ability to use her Aim stat out the box so initially this isn't actually relevant.

Possible Scars

Weakened: -3 HP
Hobbled: -3 Mobility
Sluggish: -15 Dodge

Sluggish is, as usual, pretty ignorable, but Hobbled really hurts Zephyr, and Weakened leaves her dangerously vulnerable when one of her main problems is already being worryingly vulnerable. As such, if Zephyr gets a Scar, especially early in a run, it's decently likely she'll need to be benched for a bit.

Base Abilities

Crippling Blow
Turn ending action: Zephyr performs a move-and-melee attack on a target enemy. This attack cannot miss or be Dodged, and will additionally randomly Disorient, Root, Disarm, or Stun for 2 action points. Triggers Momentum.

Note that even though this is a melee attack, it will not knock enemies Unconscious or ignore Armor the way a Subdue does, and in fact Zephyr still has Subdue. The Armor point isn't so bad initially unless you specifically go after Sacred Coil for your first Investigation, but the fact that Crippling Blow doesn't KO enemies is a notable strike against Zephyr in the early game, where you really ought to be maximizing captures for Intel purposes.

Annoyingly, enemies that are immune to mental effects will never suffer a side effect from Crippling Blow... even though half its effects aren't mental effects. This hampers Zephyr noticeably against every robotic enemy, Progeny Sorcerers, and in every boss fight. Sacred Coil's leader in particular is a great target for Rooting, and sorry, Crippling Blow will never inflict it on him.

There's still more wonky decisions around Zephyr making her weaker than you'd expect her to be to get to, unfortunately...

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.

You should rarely be using Subdue on Zephyr, but you shouldn't completely forget it exists. (Unless you take the skill that makes it stop existing, anyway) More Intel is good until reasonably late in a run, for one, but also against some high-Armor targets it will actually hit harder than Crippling Blow; even once you're done caring about Intel, Subdue may retain relevance.

Momentum
Passive: Some of Zephyr's actions will grant her an additional action point, which by default can only be spent on movement. This bonus movement is a single full blue-move. Additionally, Zephyr is immune to Root at all times.

It's Templar Momentum returned, with a bonus of rendering it impossible for Zephyr to be immobilized. (Which is good, since that would often leave her useless for the duration of the Root)

Note that Momentum's movement is not affected by the mechanic of the last action point providing half the normal movement amount. Zephyr's movement potential is thus much greater than you might intuit -where a Templar Momentuming somewhere could travel 50% faster than an equal-Mobility non-Templar, Zephyr is actually going around 66% farther than an equal-Mobility agent. In conjunction with having the highest Mobility of any agent, don't be surprised to see her covering literally twice the ground of other agents in larger maps.

That said, Momentum's movement potential is actually surprisingly low-value. Mission designs where getting from point A to point B in a timely manner is part of victory are a minority in Chimera Squad, contrasting with how they were the default in XCOM 2, enemies that don't use Cover at all are rare (The Progeny Investigation has exactly one rare enemy aside the possibility that you manage to get Unrest maxed in a district, and even then Berserkers aren't guaranteed), and Chimera Squad has much less focus on smashing enemy Cover before attacking (Even Andromedons have bad enough Armor a grenade is unnecessary). Zephyr thus doesn't usually benefit the squad by hurtling to a particular point at high speed, and furthermore is much more prone than a Templar in XCOM 2 to finding herself in a perfectly fine position post-punch, where fleeing to a safer position is unnecessary, due to map design trends.

Thankfully, as we'll be covering in just a bit, she also inherited Parry, so it's not like Momentum is a waste. And there still are missions where going places fast is useful, where Zephyr is unparalleled.

But most of the time, Momentum's movement potential is pretty irrelevant in practice.

Fearless Advance
Breach phase action: Zephyr designates a target. If both the target and Zephyr survive the shooting portion of the Breach phase, she advances to their location and uses Crippling Blow on them, but instead of its normal random side effects it will cancel their Alert action if they were Alert. If the target goes down before Zephyr would attack them, Fearless Advance does nothing. Replaces the standard Breach shooting action.

One of the issues with using Zephyr is you're basically mandated to always place her first in the timeline, because when using Fearless Advance she's strongly prone to ending up in a position that multiple enemies are actively flanking or can spend one action point on movement to get a flank, so you really need her acting as soon as possible so she can get to a defensible position and/or get Parry up... but putting Zephyr first in your turn order is actually antithetical to Fearless Advance's behavior. If Zephyr goes first, it's literally impossible to be completely certain any given target will survive the Breach phase long enough for Fearless Advance to actually get the chance to hit them: you may pick a target, only to find that the other members of your squad ended up with firing lines that mean they have no valid target except whoever you tried to have Zephyr set up to charge! This is only reliably avoidable by having Zephyr last in order, which then maximizes the time she's vulnerable after the Breach Phase is done.

The alternatives are to have Zephyr glued to Terminal on the idea of Terminal using Cooperation on Zephyr first thing, or to commit to the idea of gifting Zephyr action points via a Motile Inducer... which is inefficient given Zephyr can't efficiently use two action points the way most agents can, and is untenable in longer missions, not to mention it can't be done until you get a hold of a Motile Inducer. Either way, these are limiting possibilities as well, just in different ways from 'always place Zephyr first'.

An additional painpoint is that Zephyr selects her Fearless Advance destination automatically, with no input from you. This is technically true of every one of your agents post-Breach, but most maps are carefully designed so there's a solid cluster of decent Cover for your agents to run to. Every once in a while an agent will end up standing in the open, or unnecessarily standing somewhere that has them flanked right out the gate, but this is rare. Zephyr, when using Fearless Advance, is almost guaranteed to pick a bad location; first of all, she heavily prioritizes setting herself against High Cover, without any regard to whether the High Cover is actually relevant: if you select an enemy near a wall at the edge of the map, Zephyr is distressingly likely to go huddle up against the wall even though it's literally impossible for that to help. Second, even when no High Cover is present to distort her selection process, Zephyr still tends to pick Cover options that leave her flanked by multiple enemies, sometimes every enemy, with absolutely no way to know ahead of time outside of long experience with using Zephyr and watching her throw herself into bad situations. This is a big part of why putting her late in turn order is dangerous: because it gives enemies more time to shoot at her while she's standing in the open, if you didn't eg put Torque first and have her gift Zephyr an action point via Tag Team.

The one thing Fearless Advance has going for it is that it's one of your only ways to prevent an Alert action aside downing the target entirely. This itself is... clunky. Early in an Investigation, it doesn't matter, because every enemy is Surprised -and it should be pointed out that Zephyr doesn't benefit from the Surprised state, because Fearless Advance's strike can't miss and Zephyr doesn't get a special-cased replacement benefit. Late in an Investigation, particularly late in a run in general where it's only mildly surprising for literally every enemy to be Aggressive, the utility of negating an Alert action also drops significantly in relevance, as it may have literally no ability to matter, and even when it does matter it often ends up being the case that it's not a utility you want to take advantage of; if the only Alert enemy is a Thrall or something, where their Alert action is a non-threat, you'd honestly rather have a non-Zephyr agent so they can shoot an Aggressive enemy and hopefully prevent them from attacking.

So there's a relatively narrow portion of each Investigation in which negating an Alert action reliably has the opportunity to be relevant. This is made still worse by how many enemies can be in the Alert state but won't actually do anything, like all the dedicated melee enemies; if there's 2 Alert Faceless in this encounter, 'canceling their Alert action' results in the same thing as not doing so: they stand around and do nothing. And even when an enemy can use its Alert action... honestly, the majority of enemies are not worth caring about. Many enemies with Alert actions can only reposition or Hunker Down, which the former doesn't really matter and the latter is often possible to substantially bypass -Zephyr herself certainly doesn't care about Hunker Down! I would, in fact, seriously argue that it's basically only Sacred Coil's Guardians that have a sufficiently significant Alert action you care about being able to negate it reliably.

As such, Fearless Advance is largely hugely disadvantageous compared to having access to the standard Breach Phase shooting action, only rarely having an upside at all and when the upside is meaningfully true it's usually low-impact.

This is one case where Chimera Squad is letting flavor or 'realism' harm its gameplay, in that it's pretty clear Fearless Advance's timing is a product of what the Breach Phase is meant to represent: your squad bursting into the room and doing off-the-cuff actions in moments. It makes a kind of realistic sense that Zephyr won't reach any adequately prepared enemies before they pull the trigger on their firearm. Unfortunately, in terms of gameplay, this really should've just acted immediately, before the target got to fire.

That said, one unreliable bit of utility to Fearless Advance is... kind of a physics exploit... in that certain free actions can be performed anytime one of your units has a turn, not just the turn of the unit you want to perform the action. You can do this with evacuation, for example, like having a healthy agent walk to the evac point and stand there to draw fire away from injured agents, and then evacuating the agent that's standing in the open when they're dangerously low on health even though their turn is multiple Timeline slots away. More relevantly to Fearless Advance, you can do this with opening up crates, which is to say it's entirely possible for Zephyr to Fearless Advance to a target nearby a crate and end up standing next to the crate, allowing you to instantly grab its contents even if Zephyr was actually dead last in turn order.

Since you have no control over where Zephyr chooses to set herself this is really unreliable, and you aren't told of crate presence until after the Breach phase is over with... but they have a distinctive graphic. You can keep an eye out for them and try to send Zephyr after whichever enemy is closest, if any. This can end up completely trivializing some missions, in fact, as some missions have the final Encounter be 'grab chest's content, then evac squad', where you may be able to have Zephyr open the chest and then everybody leave before the first Round has even ended, completely bypassing points like that such missions have enemy reinforcements that are intended to harry your squad as they're running to the exit.

This isn't enough to justify slotting Zephyr in, honestly, but if you're playing with her anyway it's something to keep in mind.

Deputy Agent
+2 Aim

Yes, Zephyr gains Aim as she levels, even though none of her initial kit uses Aim. This can actually matter, albeit not yet.

Though it's not guaranteed to matter, and the low value of Aim boosting to Zephyr is another way she falls behind; other agents get more reliable as they level, and Zephyr has no equivalent benefit from leveling.

Parry
Special Action: Momentum's action point may be spent on a Parry. When Parrying, the next damaging attack on Zephyr will do no damage to Zephyr, assuming it's not an attack that bypasses Parry. (Such attacks will still use up the Parry) Parry also ends the next time Zephyr's turn comes around, or if she's gifted an action point.

Yeah, normally this rank provides a Breach-related action, but Zephyr just keeps leaning into that Templar thing.

Parry was, of course, amazing on Templar back in XCOM 2, and you might expect it to still be amazing in Chimera Squad, but it's... not. It's more like necessary minimum functionality to keep Zephyr from being completely awful. This fundamentally comes back to the difference in turn mechanics; in XCOM 2, you expected to nuke most enemies before they acted, and generally if an enemy was acting, it was one enemy, maybe two. Canceling a single offensive action was often wasting literally the entire enemy turn.

Chimera Squad's system of bouncing between individual units, trying to alternate between player and enemy units, makes Parry dramatically weaker. Unless you have overwhelming force such that you're able to reliably wipe out almost every enemy before their turn comes around, this will often lead to Zephyr throwing a punch, putting up Parry, blocking a hit from an immediately following enemy, then one of your agents goes, and then the next enemy gets to try to do real damage to Zephyr. And as you get deeper into individual Investigations and get to later Investigations, enemy counts go up; in the late game, it's not unusual for you to be outnumbered by 2-to-1 or more, with individual enemy durability high enough that outright removing enemies during the Breach phase is difficult to do. So Zephyr may throw a punch, Parry, and then two enemies immediately take shots at her before any of your other agents can act.

So this is another example of Zephyr being okay early in a run, but not holding up later; early on, she may well be able to take out whoever was going to go next (Such as if they took fire in the Breach Phase), and probably her squadmates will mostly be preventing other enemies from acting, so only maybe one enemy gets to attack her before her next turn. While in the late game, she's very possibly being shot at three or four times in a Round, a point exacerbated by her failure to keep up in damage growth; swapping Zephyr out for someone whose damage output reliably goes up as the game progresses is liable to lead to fewer enemies surviving long enough to make attacks, and thus be more meaningfully useful than Parry is.

Adding insult to injury is the existence of the Ronin enemy type on Sacred Coil, which is pretty much what Zephyr should have been; they're also a melee-only Momentum enemy, but they gift themselves multiple extra turns on a cooldown, choose what status effect to inflict instead of getting a random one that may or may not help, and have built-in access to a melee Overwatch effect and Lightning Reflexes. At max level Zephyr isn't just a blatantly worse Ronin, but even with the advantages she picks up I'd honestly probably still prefer having a Ronin on my team to having Zephyr on my team. Even though multiple other agents have clear enemy equivalents as well, no other agent leaves me wishing I had their equivalent, instead of the agent; the closest to an exception is Cherub to Guardians, where Guardians get area-of-effect protection vs Cherub protecting one person per turn. And in that case, Cherub still clearly has multiple advantages, like being able to put up protection without ending his turn, his protection blocking any single attack no matter how powerful, and being able to translate his protection into boosted offense in a manner Guardians lack any equivalent to. The only reason I even thought to draw that comparison was because I was mentally searching for if anyone else is even marginally comparable to Zephyr in terms of 'this enemy is clearly equivalent to them, but is actually much better than them'.

Frankly, Parry probably should've been innate. This is a recurring issue with Zephyr; things that really should've been innate or acquired through equipment are acquired through level skills, resulting in her overall power curve starting and especially ending lower than your other agents.

By a similar token, it's frustrating Zephyr doesn't pick up a proper Breach Phase action here -or at any other level- as it means her initial poor showing in the Breach Phase never gets less bad.

A lesser issue is that Parry doesn't stack with Kinetic Shield: if Zephyr is attacked while Parry is up and a Kinetic Shield is on her, the Kinetic Shield will break while the Parry charge is invisibly wasted. Parry has also been outright nerfed relative to Templar; where Templar could Parry area-of-effect attacks like Micromissiles, Zephyr cannot! (She at least keeps her Parry up in such a case, so that's something)

Basic Training: +2 HP.

Zephyr is going to get shot at a lot, and hit a lot, basically unavoidably. If you're going to use her, you should get her HP up as soon as possible; I'd say she's probably the number one priority for receiving this Training in any run that starts with her on the squad.

Field Agent
+1 Aim

Lockdown
Passive: When an enemy moves or attacks within 1 tile of Zephyr, she automatically makes a free melee attack on them. This melee attack can miss, using Zephyr's innate Aim stat, and does not inflict side effects. It also can't trigger on a given enemy again until Zephyr has gotten a real turn.

OR

Pressure Point
Passive: Crippling Blow does +1 damage and will knock enemies Unconscious instead of killing them. Subdue is removed from Zephyr's action list.

Frankly, I don't understand why Pressure Point isn't default behavior for Crippling Blow. If you're going to make melee attacks non-lethal, and then make a melee specialist who has crippled damage and all, you might as well at least have their melee specialty lead to more consistent Intel payoff and better synergy with Verge. Especially frustrating is that Zephyr doesn't have a Subdue-specific animation set -she just uses the exact same animations as with Crippling Blow, highlighting how absurd it is for Crippling Blow to not already be designed as Subdue+.

Also note that it removing Subdue is actually not a good thing at this step, as Subdue ignores Armor and Crippling Blow does not. Some enemies can, in fact, have high enough Armor that Subdue will hit harder than a Pressure Point Crippling Blow, such that you can actually be unhappy at losing Subdue. This is just obviously bad design, to have Pressure Point have a hidden disadvantage that's almost certainly not even supposed to be a deliberate tradeoff.

Lockdown, meanwhile, is the one and only reason Zephyr's Aim stat matters, and it's frustrating that it does. Zephyr is blatantly 'let's take a Templar, then remove all those elements players barely touched anyway because Rending all day is all they really need', so why doesn't her Bladestorm equivalent automatically hit just like theirs did? It's especially frustrating because if Lockdown was 100% reliable, that would genuinely help justify Zephyr having such low base damage; a guaranteed Lockdown hit would mean punching an enemy and then Parrying is a guaranteed 6-8 damage, which is literally exactly what Mastercrafted Shotguns do, aside that they also Shred Armor but that'd be okay because Crippling Blow inflicts status effects.

It's especially obnoxious that Zephyr has 85 Aim at max level, and so very much expects to hit with Lockdown. But you still have to account for the low-odds possibility of it missing, because... the devs want Zephyr to be terrible?

Seriously, why was Lockdown designed this way? I genuinely cannot see a logic to it.

Regardless, Lockdown is by far Zephyr's most notable skill, and it's worth pointing out that enemies moving and attacking both trigger it regardless of when or why they're happening: Zephyr can potentially get free hits on Alert enemies moving about post-Breach, strike an enemy that Shelter switched with, and even kick enemies who are Berserking. (Such as because of Verge's Battle Madness) Do note that reloads do not trigger Lockdown, so draining an enemy of their ammo and then inducing Berserk won't work.

Unfortunately, even aside the potential to miss, I don't think Lockdown is as good as the devs imagined/intended it to be. In XCOM 2, a Bladestormer could charge into an inactive pod to get a free hit on every enemy in the pod, stand inside a reinforcement flare to get a free hit on every enemy in that pod, stand next to doorways between combats in hopes of catching a pod patrolling through the door, melee-only pods like Chryssalid pods pretty consistently clumped up when they first activated so the Bladestormer could set up to Bladestorm the full pod during the enemy's turn, Burrowed Chryssalids had few good responses aside leading with a Bladestormer, the Chosen summoning reinforcements could easily have a Bladestormer getting free hits on those...

... point is, Bladestorm in XCOM 2 was a very good skill that had numerous contexts in which the player could reliably arrange to get free hits on multiple enemies. That it was free damage meant it didn't even really matter that in the base game there was no fixing its miss chance; if you stuck a Ranger in a reinforcement flare and they missed every hit, that was unlucky, but it generally didn't cost you anything to set up the opportunity, so whatever.

Chimera Squad removes or reworks a lot of the relevant situations in ways that mean Lockdown gets much fewer opportunities to shine. Zephyr has no opportunities equivalent to a Ranger Slashing from Concealment into an inactive pod, for example. Chimera Squad still uses reinforcements, but where XCOM 2's use of reinforcements almost always showed exactly where they'd arrive at, in Chimera Squad most reinforcement situations are a shell game where multiple locations are marked as 'reinforcements can come from here' but then it's random which locations actually get used, meaning Zephyr has to correctly guess which entrance a given reinforcement wave is going to use for Lockdown to even have a chance to toss out free hits. The only exception I'm aware of is one Encounter in the Take Down Sacred Coil mission, where two entrances are marked and both are used... and the reinforcements are Ronin, meaning they have Lightning Reflexes, meaning Lockdown can't hit them unless it's one of multiple reaction fire effects trying to catch them.

It's clear the devs imagined the player would get more use out of Lockdown through agent synergies -one of the game's trailers specifically showcases Lockdown as an example of such- but there aren't actually that many tools in the player's arsenal for manipulating enemy position (Or agent position, for that matter), and they all have significant qualifiers that make it difficult to organically arrange an opportunity for a 'free' Lockdown trigger at all. Claymore sticking a bomb to a target, for example, can get them moving past Zephyr and triggering Lockdown, but the bomb in question has only 1 charge, the enemy movement is unpredictable, and there's the risk that they end up exploding on Zephyr, making it a dubious synergy to actually pursue.

In practice, the two main ways you can reliably get use out of Lockdown are to Momentum up next to a target, or to Crippling Blow a target that survives and then Parry in hopes that Lockdown finishes them. Either way, the expectation is Zephyr is probably only adding one punch per turn at best via Lockdown, which is underwhelming given how weak her punches are -and taking Lockdown means skipping an opportunity to mitigate said weakness!

On the plus side, her 85 base Aim at max level is at least high enough Holo Targeting will turn Lockdown into a reliable hit. If you're fond of the Holo Targeting tools anyway, Lockdown's reliability issues will be noticeably less relevant of an issue. They'll still matter, mind, but it won't be as constant an issue.

In any event, Pressure Point is the thing to grab if you're intending to go for Vital Strike in a couple levels, however inconvenient Pressure Point's own design is.

Special Agent
+1 HP
+2 Aim

Crowd Control
Turn ending action: Zephyr moves to a location and uses Crippling Blow on every enemy within 3 tiles of that location, but with 1 less damage to each target compared to her current base damage. (ie it has a base damage of 2-3) Cannot Stun, but can Disorient, Root, or Disarm. 2 turn cooldown.

This does not trigger Momentum. It can, however, apply (most of) Crippling Blow's side effects, which is probably a bug as I'll get into later. Also note that Zephyr can hit enemies right through walls with Crowd Control; if they're within 3 tiles, they're hit, even if it seems like that should be physically impossible.

Also, the in-game description is extremely misleading, making Crowd Control sound like Faceoff-but-punches (As in, it sounds like 'Zephyr punches every enemy in the room once'), which would honestly be sufficiently amazing Zephyr would probably be the second-best agent in the game even with all her severe flaws. Unfortunately, in actuality it's Ionic Storm, just divorced from Focus and flavored as basic melee attacks. I mean, that honestly makes it a lot more consistently worth using than Ionic Storm was, but the point is the description sounds borderline-broken and the reality is merely an okay move, and not enough to really make up for Zephyr's other flaws, in part because it's only semi-common for enemies to be clumped up enough for Crowd Control to apply. Like, it technically has a cooldown, but it virtually never matters because you basically never have enemies clumped such that Zephyr would be able to Crowd Control twice in a row if its cooldown was removed. It basically just means using Teamwork or a Motile Enhancer immediately after she just used Crowd Control won't let you Crowd Control the exact same group.

And yes this benefits from Pressure Point and Vital Strike, meaning it can be 4-5 damage in an area that ignores Armor and knocks enemies Unconscious.

Unfortunately, like a lot of area-of-effect tools, Crowd Control is hampered by Chimera Squad's shift in context making area-of-effect overall less reliable about getting opportunities to matter and especially of almost never getting to reach the peak potential that sometimes happened in XCOM 2. If Crowd Control had existed in XCOM 2, it would've pretty reliably been, if nothing else, a solid opener when breaking Concealment, and War of the Chosen adding Reapers would've made it quite plausible to keep using it as an opener on inactive pods, and of course melee-only pods like Chryssalids reliably clump up after activation in a manner Crowd Control would get to punish. In Chimera Squad itself, though, the Encounter system means none of that applies, and enemy initial positions tend to be spread out so even the relatively generous radius of 3 tiles on Crowd Control struggles to catch more than 2 enemies at a time.

Furthermore, since it doesn't trigger Momentum by default, using Crowd Control is more dangerous to Zephyr; no Parry, no running off to a better defensive position. This is a problem given that usually catching multiple enemies with Crowd Control requires Zephyr to stand in the open outright, and even when she gets to be in Cover it's usually not exactly ideal Cover. In practice this is often far more of a limiting factor than its actual cooldown.

Its generous radius also means it's a little less synergistic with Lockdown than you might expect. In theory, Zephyr can potentially be doing something like hitting 3 enemies with Crowd Control and then hitting them all again with Lockdown, meaning at least 6-8 damage per target and a total of 18-24 damage, all for free. That's actually genuinely an impressive potential number...

... but in actuality, it's likely that catching 3 enemies with Crowd Control means catching 0-1 enemies with Lockdown, at which point you're talking a total of 9-12 damage from Crowd Control and 0, 3, or 4 damage from Lockdown. Reminder that a Mastercrafted Shotgun equipped with an Ammo Item does 7-9 damage up-front followed by 1 or 2 damage afterward if assuming Venom Rounds, Dragon Rounds, or Caustic Rounds, which is a similar total to Crowd Control by itself. Further reminder that it's basically always better to focus damage on a target so it's taken out of the fight, rather than spreading a given amount of damage around so a bunch of enemies are lightly injured but can still act. Since Crowd Control can't apply Stun, you're not even gambling on it taking them out of action that way.

Indeed, in general Crowd Control's situation is sufficiently poor when it comes to the tuning and all that it can be a struggle to find an opportunity to justify using it over a regular Crippling Blow!

Also clunky is... well, we need to get to the next rank to contextualize this next point, so let's move on.

Unlock Potential Training: +2 Mobility.

Chimera Squad's small maps and Zephyr relying on a move-and-melee attack with Momentum mean her above-average Mobility is often more than enough. Bumping her up to 16 Mobility only occasionally actually matters.

This really should've been something else, such as a damage boost. She really needed to get damage, and not 'well, if you pick the right level-up skills', but reliably.

Alas.

Senior Agent
+2 Aim

Moving Target

Passive: Subdue and Crowd Control now trigger Momentum, and Zephyr will never trigger reaction fire of any kind.

OR

Vital strike
Passive: Zephyr ignores Armor with her attacks, and gains +1 damage.

Just as with Pressure Point, I don't understand why Vital Strike isn't default behavior. Part of Zephyr's problem is that literally everyone has access to melee attacks that never miss and ignore Armor, and at base Crippling Blow is just 1 point of damage stronger than a Subdue. Which means against anything with even a single point of armor, Crippling Blow has the same damage as a Subdue if you don't have Vital Strike or Pressure Point. And then Cherub is another melee-focused agent, but his melee ignores Armor naturally and he has a backup pistol and the ability to put up Kinetic Shields, making him much less of a one-trick pony than Zephyr.  This whole issue gets particularly painful once you're in your third Investigation, as at that point several previously unarmored enemies pick up a point of Armor. The only good news is that difficulty mostly doesn't affect Armor, unlike XCOM 2 where Armor going up on higher difficulties was moderately widespread, and so going up in difficulty doesn't hurt Zephyr too much, nor bias this particular choice more toward Vital Strike.

Part of the problem is that Vital Strike isn't even that great a utility. Yes, Armor shows up on a decent array of enemies, particularly late in the game, but it only rarely strays above 2 points, and indeed even having more than 1 point is uncommon. Zephyr would usually be better off if Vital Strike was literally 2 points of damage added. Having it be an anti-Armor skill would need to be something more significant, like that she also Shreds all Armor on impact, or that Armor is actually reversed for her, so that she does extra damage for each point of Armor the target has. Something like that would be a pretty decent skill. Vital Strike as-is, though... it would've been appreciated on a Templar back in War of the Chosen, but for Zephyr, in Chimera Squad? It's frustratingly limited.

Moving Target, meanwhile is a game-changer skill that dramatically improves Zephyr's effectiveness. It removes her otherwise-unique-and-problematic weakness to reaction fire, removes the primary flaw with Crowd Control, and if you took Lockdown instead of Pressure Point earlier it lets Zephyr toss out Subdues when you want Unconscious enemies or want to penetrate serious Armor without having to worry about it costing Momentum compared to a Crippling Blow.

Let me repeat that: Moving Target makes it easier for Zephyr to ignore Armor, while competing with a skill that does nothing but ignore Armor. (And adds 1 more point of damage, but shhh, I'm going somewhere with this)

There are exactly two enemies that can have very serious Armor in Chimera Squad, one of which is a one-time boss enemy. Unless you're building Zephyr in a targeted manner, intending to stop using her once you've handled a specific Investigation, you should really just take Moving Target here. The only point in Vital Strike's favor is that Pressure Point is actually decent and gets rid of Subdue, which is not so much a positive for Vital Strike as it is a reminder that Pressure Point shouldn't be removing Subdue, not unless the game were to make Vital Strike's effect default behavior so you actually don't miss Subdue at all.

In practice, Lockdown+Moving Target is simply, far and away, the superior 'build' for Zephyr, while still being pretty bad performance.

Also, returning to Crowd Control, this is the context I was talking about; that this level has both choices provide something important to trying to make Crowd Control more relevant, and so you have to choose between them.

If Crowd Control could simultaneously benefit from all of Pressure Point, Vital Strike, and Moving Target, the majority of its issues would clear up. It would end up with a base damage of 5-6 per target, ignore Armor, knock targets Unconscious, and then Zephyr would get Momentum out of it to keep moving or put up a Parry; the only reason to use a regular Crippling Blow over it at that point would be to avoid putting Crowd Control on cooldown. (Or if you wanted to fish for a Stun, I guess) This would result in a very respectable peak potential, where Zephyr could suddenly burst out 15-18 total damage. It wouldn't happen all the time, but it would at least be cool and useful when the opportunity arrived.

(It would be completely overshadowed by Faceoff on Blueblood, but that's more a commentary on how overpowered Faceoff is than anything else)

As-is, if you go for a Crowd Control build, you're having to either accept that it will be a bit weaker, particularly against Armored targets, or accept that using it means giving up Momentum, leaving Zephyr more vulnerable after using it and sometimes costing her the ability to get mission objectives done in a timely manner. Either way, the peak performance isn't very good, and Zephyr's moment-to-moment performance averages... not great.

And to be explicit, I've done runs for all possible Zephyr builds; they really are just poor all-around, and Lockdown+Moving Target is just the least bad.

It's also worth pointing out that Moving Target helps reduce the anti-synergy between Crowd Control and Lockdown; with Moving Target, you can have Zephyr Crowd Control for maximum targets, then Momentum elsewhere to maximize how many enemies will be hit with Lockdown. No more having a nigh-universal conflict between 'maximize Crowd Control targets' and 'maximize Lockdown targets'!

Of course, the next level is another factor in Moving Target being so centralizing, so let's get to it.

Principal Agent
+3 Aim

Final Stats
10 HP (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)
85 Aim
16 Mobility (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)

Reaper
Free action: Once activated, each time Zephyr downs an enemy with a melee attack she is refunded an action point but her damage is lowered by 1 point for the rest of the turn, stacking for each downed enemy. Prevents Momentum from triggering on Crippling Blow for the duration. 4 turn cooldown.

Reaper is something you'd intuitively expect to be really good, and in actuality is very limited.

First of all, there's the issue of the poor base damage on the Pangolin Gauntlets, and the low damage in Chimera Squad in general. Zephyr can't maintain a Reaper chain for very long; it's frustratingly rare for her to be able to do more than down one enemy and then end hitting one other, and if they were close enough to each other you should've just used Crowd Control, especially if you took Moving Target earlier and so will get Momentum out of Crowd Control.

Second of all is the change to turn mechanics. In XCOM 2, you could initiate Reaper, and have other soldiers soften up targets in between Reaper finishing blows, or do a bunch of damage to a crowd, notice it left them all low enough for a Reaper chain, and either way kill a half dozen enemies this way. In Chimera Squad, Zephyr's turn needs to roll around when it happens to be the case that multiple enemies are injured enough for a Reaper chain to be possible... in a game where area of effect damage is uncommon, generally doesn't scale well, and the turn mechanics heavily encourage trying to focus down individual targets to buy time for other agents to freely focus down enemies, and so on.

Third is the issue of enemy positioning. In XCOM 2, a pod that activated would scramble, but usually they were all in easy reach of each other post-scramble, and frequently if you chose to activate multiple pods at once it was because they were on top of each other such that you could catch them with splash damage. The net result was that you would organically end up with a bunch of enemies all in easy reach of each other who you'd already hit with at least one splash attack, ripe for a Reaper chain.

Whereas in Chimera Squad, enemies are distributed in random spreads, no guarantee any of them are close to any others. Yes, maps are generally small, some of them extremely small, but it's still pretty rare for enemies to create a convenient daisy chain for you to Reaper through. And to set up for Reaper, you have to be doing something like Teamwork+Motile Inducer to get multiple attacks in followed by Reaper without just giving enemies free chances to attack you; this means that even though Reaper itself is a pure cooldown ability, you're pretty unlikely to manage to use it more than once in a given mission, if that.

And of course it still has the issue of overruling Momentum. This can be worked around if you took Moving Target, as Reaper being active does not prevent Crowd Control from triggering Momentum...

... but you might notice this contributes to Moving Target being kind of ridiculously central to Zephyr's effectiveness, while being positioned as an optional skill.

Seriously, even if they couldn't think of a Breach skill per se for Zephyr, Parry should've been innate behavior and Moving Target one of her one-skill level-ups.

Note that Reaper doesn't lower Crowd Control's damage, further encouraging using Crowd Control to end the chain. This is another reason Moving Target is heavily favored as a result of Reaper's existence; so you can end the chain with a reasonably strong, Momentum-triggering attack.

In theory Pressure Point+Vital Hit ought to be desirable to get Reaper superior ability to chain, but in practice you still can't chain that well because none of the other issues goes away, and Zephyr's damage remains sub-par, so... yeah, Lockdown+Moving Target is really just Zephyr's strongest, most reliable build.

Final Training: Unlock High Impact.

High Impact
Passive: Does nothing.

This claims to give Crowd Control the ability to inflict side effects on hit enemies, but Crowd Control does that even if you don't have High Impact, so in actuality this does nothing.

Oops.

This why I'm pretty sure Crowd Control inflicting side effects at base is an error.

Don't waste time Training for this, it's literally worthless.

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I don't really get why Zephyr's design is so undertuned, in no small part because Axiom and Cherub both exist.

If you want a melee-focused agent who can block 1 attack per turn, can intermittently do a melee splash damage attack, and has higher than average melee damage, Cherub has your back. And then unlike Zephyr he can still take potshots if nothing is in melee reach, or if you don't want to melee for any number of reasons, and his melee specialty naturally bypasses Armor and KOs (rather than kills) targets without needing to burn level-ups on these benefits, and he properly participates in Breaches and has a pretty powerful unique Breach action.

But okay, he doesn't have Zephyr's raw melee damage potential, requires time to ramp up, and hey Crippling Blow's side effects are pretty cool, right?... if you care about all that, though, you use Axiom. Smash hits hard, can be upgraded with natural splash behavior, can be used at any time without ramp up (Unlike Cherub's splash melee), can Stun or even instantly KO the target (Both of which are equal to or better than everything Crippling Blow can do), can be used multiple times within a turn intermittently if you want Reaper-esque functionality, and Axiom's access to a Shotgun lets him properly participate in Breaches, stay relevant as technology improves, etc.

Zephyr is uniquely useful in missions where you need to grab a thing and then get out, between her incredible innate Mobility, Fearless Advance letting her get deep into a map before the Encounter has properly started, and Momentum letting her go even farther if she has an enemy to bounce off of.

But most of the time Cherub or Axiom will do whatever you want her for, and they'll do it better than she does.

Part of the problem is the inexplicable decision to both deny you the ability to upgrade her Gauntlets and make it so her damage boosting skills are optional. If Parry was innate, Pressure Point was her Deputy Agent skill, and Vital Strike her Special Agent skill, with Crowd Control being the alternative to Lockdown and some new skill being your alternate to Moving Target, she'd instantly be a lot better-designed simply because she wouldn't be choosing between utility skills and the ability to actually keep up in damage as the game progresses. And that's even though she'd still be behind in practice, due to poor base damage and lack of access to Ammo Items!

Most of the problem, though, is the even more inexplicable decision to make melee innate to everyone, with said melee attacks always hitting, ignoring all Armor, and knocking the target Unconscious... and then making a dedicated melee specialist who has to burn level-ups on making her 'superior' melee actually have two of those advantages, while acting like her melee having the third advantage is unique or something even though it's not. It's just baffling that Crippling Blow and Crowd Control don't start from the assumption of ignoring Armor and KOing instead of killing. If those were innate qualities for Zephyr and the level-up options that currently provide them were completely replaced, that would also make it much more understandable if she still ended up bad.

On top of all that is the issue that the Impact Frame exists. +2 Subdue damage means anyone can be doing 4-5 melee damage that ignores Armor and never misses and knocks the target Unconscious. Zephyr has to spend two level-ups on getting that kind of functionality, and only ends up 1 point of damage ahead of eg Godmother with an Impact Frame. So any run that gets a hold of an Impact Frame instantly finds Zephyr much harder to justify using, especially if you find the Impact Frame before you recruit Zephyr. Which is easily possible if you didn't get Zephyr in your starting lineup, such as in your first run where your initial lineup is fixed and doesn't include her.

It's not like Impact Frames are rare!

I'm really curious what happened in development that Zephyr ended up in such a bad place, given all this. The final result is just baffling.

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It's too bad Zephyr's mechanics are so mis-designed, because I like her writing a fair amount. She's got interesting interactions with more or less every other agent, there's the previously-covered point that her existence helps smooth out some of the world-building centered on hybrids that was so janky in XCOM 2, and I like how the story approaches the memory-wiping aspect on a more personal level -specifically, that the story doesn't make a huge thing of it.

To be fair, probably most of that is down to the framework the game has put itself into; Zephyr isn't a party member in a linear RPG with a main plot that advances a predictable way, or otherwise existing in a game that can strongly engage with the usual memory loss plot progression of 'character ultimately recovers their memories, and responds to this fact in character-appropriate ways'. Chimera Squad is happy to have agents chime in when they have pertinent knowledge and whatnot, but the characters themselves don't have plots that move forward and given the hugely variable nature of the player's possible cast and who they bring into missions and all, it would be a fool's errand for the game to have shot for that degree of engagement.

Even so, it's still a pleasant surprise that the game doesn't treat Zephyr's memory having been wiped as a central issue consuming Zephyr's life. Zephyr herself does make it clear she's not happy with the fact that this was done to her, but broadly she seems to have shrugged and moved on with her life, rather than obsessing over 'what connections have I left behind?' or the like. I'm usually not a fan of memory loss in pop culture, but ultimately a big part of why is that it's used for a pretty narrow set of purposes, where characters have a limited range of possible progressions that have little connection to their broader personality. I've absolutely seen a number of cases where a character is perpetually talking about how tortured by their memory loss they are, where it came across pretty strangely because the character didn't really seem to have any reason to feel that way and their general personality was otherwise much more easygoing or otherwise contrary to such behavior, where it came across like the creator(s) had the character doing so purely because that's a Pop Culture Memory Loss Meme and not because they had any reason in mind for this character to behave that way.

And in this case, it makes a lot of sense that Zephyr would be broadly angry about the memory loss having been inflicted but not necessarily all that invested in digging into what might've been taken from her. The ADVENT administration took over after an alien invasion substantially reduced the human population, and then the ADVENT administration was itself converting some uncertain-but-very-large number of humans into smoothies for Ethereal consumption, with constant 'arrests' under dubious pretenses and so on; if I were Zephyr in this context, I'd probably assume any friends or family I might've had before the memory wipe are probably dead anyway, at which point why bother trying to find out what was lost? It's not going to mean anything to me given my memories have been wiped, and if they're all dead it can't give them comfort to have a chance to reconnect with someone they thought lost forever.

So Zephyr's characterization on this point is a pleasant surprise.

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Next time, we move on to Shelter.

See you then.