Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Gray Phoenix Praetorian

HP: 10/10/11/12 (+2/+4)

Armor: 1 (+0/+1)
Aim: 80/80/85/85 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 10
Damage: 4-5 (+1/+2)
Will: 60 (+10/+20)
Initiative: 50

It always weirds me out that one of the most-obviously-armored enemies in the game has... 1 Armor. Their abilities make this misleading, mind, and if fought late enough they rise to a less bizarre 2 Armor, but it still feels viscerally weird.

Alert Actions: Move to a better position, Hunker Down.

In spite of having a lot of interesting abilities, I've never seen a Praetorian use any of them as an Alert action. I'm mostly-certain they just plain can't use them and are genuinely restricted to repositioning and to Hunkering Down. It makes Alert Praetorians surprisingly underwhelming given they're pretty firmly the apex Gray Phoenix unit.

Bolster

Passive: When a Praetorian is damaged, if it is not currently disabled (Being on fire counts as disabled) it immediately gains 1 point of Armor. This effect can stack unlimitedly, but all Armor provided by this effect vanishes at the start of the Praetorian's next turn.

This has no icon in-game, nor a name, nor an explicit pop-up announcement. Just an animation, an Armor pip being added, and there you go. The name is from the SoldierSkills config file, while the icon is me repurposing Holy Warrior from ADVENT Priests.

Bolster itself is an interesting experiment, being more or less the only example of Chimera Squad trying out being freer with enemy Armor than XCOM 2 was. I think Chimera Squad was probably a bit too cautious in its implementation, honestly; if you have Mastercrafted weapons by the time you're fighting Praetorians, the free Shred on Mastercrafted weapons suppresses the Armor growth anyway, in which case Bolster is more like a weird resistance to Shred than anything else.

It admittedly triggers in response to damaging special abilities that don't have Shred, but a lot of those don't respect Armor anyway; a team heavy on such effects is very likely to not care about repeatedly triggering Bolster. Since it also goes away completely at the start of the Praetorian's turn, even significant Bolster stacking can end up not mattering, such as if the Praetorian gets a turn before an agent who reliably cares about Armor turns their attention on the Praetorian. The overall low HP scale in Chimera Squad also keeps its impact low; high numbers of Bolster triggers are unlikely to happen simply because hitting a Praetorian 4+ times without downing it is tricky to arrange.

The introduction of Subdue also contributes here; even with infinite Armor, the player can always force 2-3 damage through per agent turn. Potentially more if Cherub is on the team, or if any agents have Impact Frames. Note that the highest possible HP on a Praetorian is exactly 16, which Impact Frame Subdues take out in 4 hits without regard for Armor.

Notably, since Bolster only triggers in response to taking damage, and Praetorians only have 1 Armor at base (2 if they've got Act 3 bonuses), it's actually fairly difficult to trigger Bolster repeatedly without having done a respectable chunk of damage in the process, which connects to all this Armor-bypassing stuff fairly neatly; if you get a Praetorian down to 4 HP while having an Impact Frame on an agent (Or any number of other offensive tools that bypass Armor and do at least 4 damage, which there's a decent number of), even if they have so much Armor your agents only do damage with their firearms because of pity damage, you can still down the Praetorian in one action rather than four.

To be clear, it is possible to construct a team and take a series of actions that results in a Praetorian shrugging off a shocking amount of firepower. It's even possible for this to occur in a mission where that's an actual problem to be faced with, because of some time limit issue; I imagine there are a few players out there who genuinely had a bad time the first time they encountered a Praetorian.

But overall, Bolster is surprisingly easy to play around, and it's entirely possible to end up bypassing it as a gimmick without actually meaning to. In conjunction with disables shutting it off, it's possible for a player to bypass it without realizing they did so!

So if XCOM 3 brings back Bolster as an idea, I hope it's either a little less cautious with it, or has a design that isn't so heavy on Great Tools That Happen To Bypass Armor As One Of Their Benefits.

AI Pistol

Passive: Primary weapon is buggy and has an inconsistent response to ammo drain effects.

Notably, Praetorians actually have eight shots in their pistol, which is basically the same thing as unlimited ammo in normal conditions, making it particularly stand out the bugginess of ammo drain effects on enemy Pistol-users; ammo drain really ought to be moderately appealing against Praetorians, and... it is, aside the risk that the game misbehaves and lets them shoot without reloading anyway.

Praetorians are in fact probably the most unfortunate example of the AI Pistol bugginess in terms of how it can randomly make a Cease Fire Grenade worthless and all. They don't have another option for attacking at range (Whereas eg Acolyte and Sorcerers can still do damage at a distance without needing their firearm), and one of the main ways of protecting against regular ranged shots (Stacking Defense boosts and/or Aim penalties) is actually useless against Praetorians due to Duel; if pistol ammo behaved correctly on a consistent basis, draining their ammo would be probably the best form of protection against being shot short of an actual hard-disable. But since pistol ammo is buggy... it's easy to do The Smart Thing amd get randomly punished by janky coding.

Nnnnot ideal.

Bash
Turn ending action: The Praetorian moves-and-melees a single enemy for 3 damage, knocking them Unconscious if this reduces them to 0 HP. This attack cannot miss and ignores Armor.

I have never actually seen the AI perform Bash of their own initiative; if you Puppeteer a Praetorian it is in their action list, but I've only ever seen the AI perform...

Melee Strike

Turn-ending action: The Praetorian move-and-melees a single enemy for 4-5 (+1/+2) damage, using their base Aim for accuracy.

...this.

Yes, Praetorians have two melee attacks. Yes, this is weird and probably not truly intended; I assume some funny development history underlies this where nobody noticed they'd caused this to be true.

Melee Strike itself is technically not strictly superior to Bash, but for AI purposes it functionally basically is because of...

Duel

1 action point: The Praetorian targets a single visible enemy. The Praetorian is unable to miss the Duel target, but the Duel target is also unable to miss the Praetorian. This effect lasts until the Praetorian is downed or disabled, or until their target is downed.

Weirdly, Duel can't be used if the Praetorian is currently Mind Controlled. I'm not sure why.

While Duel is active, both the target and the Praetorian are marked with an effect that's unfortunateley easy to overlook; rippling red circles toward the base of their models. This gets particularly unfortunate if multple Praetorians are about and get turns, as these visuals don't strongly communicate which Praetorian is Dueling which target. (There's an effect of red lines going from each Duel participant toward the other participant, but they're pretty easy to overlook) It's overall not a big deal since you'll be able to see your accuracy before committing to an attack and Duel does in fact alter the displayed accuracy to 100% if Duel is affecting that particular attack's accuracy, but can be unfortunate if you're moving through a turn quickly while having lost track of who Dueled who.

Anyway, Duel functionally renders Melee Strike's possibility of missing moot; this is why Bash is functionally inferior. Bash only comes out ahead against a target that has enough Armor to knock Melee Strike below Bash -which itself doesn't really matter as a scenario, because Melee Strike's base damage is higher and then Bash does not get Act bonuses while Melee Strike does. As such, if you hit Gray Phoenix last to give yourself time to cap out all the Armor bonuses you can stack up and get eg Axiom sitting on 3 Armor, Melee Strike will still do better damage. (3 subtracted from 6-7 damage results in 3-4 damage, which is worse than a flat 3 damage) Even with 4 Armor, Bash is actually only barely behind. (2-3 damage vs 3 damage)

In theory an enemy Praetorian might prefer to break out Bash on a non-Dueled target while Duel is active on a different target, but the AI pretty clearly has Duel define the Praetorian's preferred target; I've literally never seen a Praetorian attack a target other than their Duel target unless I arranged for it to be physically impossible for them to attack their Duel target that turn. It's possible there's some other condition in which their Duel-based prioritization can be overruled I just have never run across, but it's clearly a very high priority for them -they will ignore opportunities to down an agent in favor of focusing on their Dueled target, for example.

Funnily enough, Duel itself is largely disadvangeous for the Praetorian to actually use. Their base Aim is high, they tend to advance aggressively, and they don't prioritize dropping Duel on agents in High Cover; while it does matter that they can't miss their Duel target, it often creates results like 'so now Axiom can fire his Shotgun on the Praetorian from long range through High Cover and be guaranteed to hit anyway'. It's not a big disadvantage on average; as I've pointed out repeatedly, Chimera Squad gives the player a lot of tools that bypass Aim and Defense...

... but it's still funny to me how often a Praetorian Dueling has the math against it, where eg Cherub trading Pistol fire with a Praetorian has Duel bumping up Cherub's chance to hit more than the Praetorian's chance to hit, even if they're in equivalent Cover and all.

Oh, and one caveat of actual significance to the Bash/Melee Strike point is that a Praetorian that is on fire or Disoriented can still Bash but can't use Melee Strike. Mind, as far as I can tell this only matters via Puppeteer; when on fire or disoriented, AI-controlled Praetorians simply don't use melee at all.

Warcry

Free action: All Muton allies gain 1 point of Armor until the Praetorian goes down. 1 turn global cooldown.

An awesome bit of attention to detail is that Axiom will benefit from Warcry if either he ends up Mind Controlled and an enemy Praetorian uses Warcry, or you use Puppeteer on a Praetorian and then have it use Warcry. This is even mechanically useful, given Axiom is a good choice for Armor-stacking!

Conversely, there's a bit of an oopsy in that Crew Chief Yarvo (Who is a Praetorian, but as a named character/boss) doesn't benefit from Warcry. Whoops!

It's... also a bit buggy, where its Armor isn't always taken away when the Praetorian that put it up goes down. Mind Control is especially prone to breaking its logic, but the Armor will sometimes stick around for no clear reason; don't make knife's-edge plans that assume a Praetorian going down will take away the Warcry Armor if you can avoid it, because you might get screwed by this bit of bugginess.

Given how I've previously complained about Blood Call specifically boosting Mutons not making sense, you might expect me to complain about Warcry in a similar fashion.

Nope!

The key difference is positioning and presentation: Blood Call was part of a broader pattern of that game wanting to retain pretensions of realism, where you were broadly intended to take gameplay as a reasonably literal representation of in-universe reality aside that it was a turn-based game and reality of course is not turn-based. Chimera Squad is much more obviously and heavily game-ified, with many mechanics deliberately designed to flout or at least skirt realism, such as how your agents never straight-up die when shot. Warcry being Muton-specific is fine in that context -it's not like 'a verbal exhortation clads allies in a layer of steel' is even trying to make realistic sense in the first place, for one.

Anyway, Warcry itself has no limitations that I'm aware of; no range limit, perfectly able to affect allies even through solid walls, etc. So don't think positional shenanigans with Shelter will let you prevent it from being applied to a specific enemy, or anything of that sort.

Much like I noted with Bolster earlier, Warcry is lower-impact than you might expect, simply because Chimera Squad is so heavy on effects that bypass Armor, and has a low enough HP scale it's easy for a point of damage shaved per hit to not have a chance to matter; if you 2-shot a Legionnaire after Warcry, it's entirely possible you'd still need 2 shots without Warcry, at which point it didn't actually do anything.

That said, it's worth pointing out that Warcry can give Bolster more of a chance to matter; a Praetorian acting early has noticeably better odds of ending up with a problematically high amount of Armor. So while Warcry's effect on other Mutons tends to be kind of whatever, it can be pretty impactful on the Praetorian.

It's also worth noting that Warcry is allowed to stack. Praetorians are often alone and almost never have more than two on the field, and furthermore are unreliable about remembering they have Warcry so even having two Praetorians get turns won't necessarily result in two Warcries going off, but it can happen, and 2 more points of Armor is much more likely to result in your squad needing another shot or having to burn up a grenade or otherwise make your squad slower and/or less resource-efficient at downing the enemies. Furthermore, it makes Bolster a lot more relevant -a 16 HP Praetorian that's sitting on 4 Armor no matter how many times you shoot it with Mastercrafted weapons is something you can see happen on the highest difficulty if you hit Gray Phoenix last, and is generally doubling or more the firepower required to take them down if you're not simply ignoring the Armor.

In conjunction with it sometimes buggily persisting even once the Praetorian that generated the Armor goes down, simply ignoring the Praetorians if there's more than one on the field can have a situation turn surprisingly rough!

But usually Warcry is pretty minor, even if you're not specifically making an effort to minimize its consequences.

So like Bolster, I do hope that if XCOM 3 comes back to the idea that it will either be a little more aggressive in its impact (eg providing more Armor), or exist in a design that isn't so cavalier about passing out ways to ignore Armor. (And that it fixes the bugginess regardless, of course)

Riot Guard

1 action point: The Praetorian gains 1 point of Armor, is considered to be in Low Cover even when flanked, and acts as Low Cover to adjacent allies. Effect ends the first time damage is sustained.

I have literally never seen a Praetorian actually use Riot Guard, even though it's their only special ability that isn't blocked by being on fire or Disoriented outside Bash.

That said, it's possible Praetorians are willing to use Riot Guard in some circumstance I've just never managed to trip into. I went a really long time without seeing a Shrike Bruiser use Riot Guard, after all; it would be very natural for this to be the same situation, what with it being literally the same ability.

I do like the idea of Riot Guard as far as a Praetorian acting as mobile Cover for their allies, but even aside the AI's reluctance to use the ability Chimera Squad isn't particularly well-suited to getting to play out that dynamic. The Timeline system creates difficulties for such multi-unit coordination, and Chimera Squad puts sufficiently little focus on actions that run off standard shooting logic that mobile Cover wouldn't be that useful to the AI anyway; if you're going to have Torque spit Poison and then Subdue someone, she literally doesn't care about Low Cover on enemies in that turn, for example. It'd potentially be neat for XCOM 3 to return to the idea of some enemies acting as Cover for other enemies, assuming XCOM 3 doesn't itself end up with shooting-type actions a minority of what the player does (Or any other dynamic that would undermine the utility of mobile Cover), but Chimera Squad itself didn't end up being the game this had the potential to strut its stuff in.

Oh, and yes, where Cherub's version of Riot Guard triggers passively, the enemy version is an action point-spending thing. I suspect Cherub's version was identical originally, got (understandably) buffed, and the devs outright forgot enemies even have Riot Guard and so didn't align the mechanics.

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The Praetorian's aesthetic is one of my favorite ones in Chimera Squad, in part because the game never spells out what's up with them but it's easy to guess from the broader context of the game info that Praetorians are really just wearing a space-age engineering outfit. That makes perfect sense as a way for a grassroots movement of space engineers to kit themselves for battle, and nicely ties together the older Muton concepts of 'bred for battle' with Chimera Squad's new info of 'served as the engineering teams for Ethereal ships' -which itself is a subtle callback to classic X-COM, where Mutons lacked most of the non-Soldier classes but did have the Engineer class!

On that note, I enjoy how Chimera Squad broadens the scope of Muton duties. The prior two games were narrowly insistent on Mutons being a dedicated soldier species in the Ethereal regime, where with other aliens the topic was either not clearly addressed or there were clear indications there was supposed to be more to them. (eg Thin Men being presented as 'infiltrators', in addition to enemy combatants) It would've been so easy for Chimera Squad to unthinkingly carry this pattern forward, and it would've been very problematic on a number of levels; it would've pretty much inevitably resulted in Mutons ending up stereotyped by the game, it would've made it much harder to buy that Mutons were managing to integrate into the new largely-peaceful society, and the pop culture meme of 'a society made only of dedicated warriors' is fundamentally stupid and non-functional to boot. You have to have people making food, clothes, homes, weapons, armor, etc to even have people who can be dedicated warriors; there is no such thing as a society made solely of full-time soldiers.

To be fair, it would be possible for all Mutons under the Ethereal regime to be purely soldiers, as other species could be covering other duties. But a Chimera Squad that thoughtlessly carried forward the 'Mutons are a dedicated soldier species' thing likely would've just as thoughtlessly claimed this was always so rather than being imposed by the Ethereals or otherwise only become true after the Mutons were conquered, going by general pop culture memes. Also, 'possible' isn't the same thing as 'sensible' or 'believable'; if I were an evil Ethereal overlord spending years or decades at a time crossing the stars with no enemies to fight, I'd want my soldiers to be busy with day-to-day work like keeping the ships working, rather than boredly waiting for an opportunity to fight or worse yet using the downtime to plot a coup of my evil regime. 

So that's another layer to me appreciating the Muton engineering culture; something to have historically kept the Mutons busy back when they were laboring under Ethereal control!

On a different note, I'm curious if Praetorians are meant to be female-by-default. I'd sort of assumed male-by-default because the one Praetorian character is consistently referred to with masculine pronouns and Praetorians are one of Chimera Squad's many units that as far as I'm aware has no random chatter to signal gender with, but Axiom has a conversation where he describes 'fighting like a woman' as meaning 'inspiring others and leading from the front' -which very much describes Praetorian mechanics, and conspicuously fits to absolutely no other Muton unit type in the game. This is really the only point that could be taken as an indication of such, so it's completely ambiguous, alas. Perhaps XCOM 3 will build on things in a manner that clarifies this point.

Narratively, something fitting-but-funny to me about Praetorians is that a notable fraction of the Mutons wanting to go back to Planet Muton and live out their lives on that ball of dirt are apparently people who consider spaceships religiously significant and have much of their 'job identity' tied up in being ship engineers. Gray Phoenix would really need a good number of experts on ship maintenance and so on for their plan to have any chance of getting off the ground (So to speak), so it certainly makes sense on that layer, and there almost certainly would be people who'd want to Go Back Home without necessarily fully thinking out the implications of actually getting what they want. And to be fair, given the Ethereal regime, there'd probably be a non-trivial fraction of people who'd have the expertise where it was kind of foisted upon them rather than an interest they pursued, so I'd also expect there to be spaceship engineering experts that would be genuinely happy to put that life behind them.

Overall, Praetorians are one of the most solid enemies in the game on basically every level. (Ignoring the bugs and oddly underused abilities, anyway) I like them!

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Next time, we move on to the first Gray Phoenix boss enemy -the Progeny are actually the only faction to have just the one boss enemy.

See you then.