Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Sacred Coil Gatekeeper

HP: 12/12/14/14 (+2/+4)
Armor: 1 (+1/+1)Aim: 70/70/75/75 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 1000
Damage: 5-7 (+0.5/+1.5)
Will: 150
Initiative: 0
Psi: 120 (Pretty sure Gatekeepers still don't actually use this stat)
The .5 in damage is that the Gatekeeper picks up a 50% chance of +1 damage if you fight it later than the first Investigation, which is completely unique to it; no other enemy uses the PlusOne entry specifically as a part of their Act bonus. (Well. Technically Shrike Troopers are also an exception, but only really in a technical sense, not in a game design sense. But that's for a later post)
And yes, the Gatekeeper's Mobility is a thousand. That's not a typo, or if it is a typo, it's on the devs, not me.
I suspect this absurd Mobility is meant chiefly to support the Gatekeeper moving around during cinematic moments, as in regular play it seems to hold itself to a more reasonable movement limit. I've yet to see it actually zip from one end of a large room to another. It's still perfectly happy to cover a lot of ground, mind, but I'd have guesstimated something like 18 or 20 Mobility off just what I've seen it do mid-mission, not 1000.
That said, if you hide your squad in a corner of the map and then the Gatekeeper covers 40 tiles instantly to melee someone, uh, yeah, it has the stats to at least theoretically do that.
Anyway, it should also be pointed out that the Gatekeeper is, much like in XCOM 2, curiously vulnerable to Bluescreen Rounds and Shock Grenades in spite of not being a robot, including that it's not vulnerable to any other comparable effects. (eg it won't take bonus damage from Patchwork zapping it with her Gremlin) This is particularly convenient if you happen to get Bluescreen Rounds early in a run where you hit Sacred Coil first, as the first Encounter is made entirely of robots in that case -Bluescreen Rounds have relevancy beyond the Gatekeeper no matter when you place Sacred Coil in your Investigation order, to be clear. just they're especially great if you hit Sacred Coil first. So that's all reason to consider equipping someone with Bluescreen Rounds when doing Take Down Sacred Coil, if you can.
Alert Action: N/A
As usual with boss enemies, the Gatekeeper doesn't actually do anything in the Breach Phase. You could technically argue that in one version of one map it does a thing that could be thought of as its Breach action, but... no.
This also extends to the usual boss enemy thing of it being completely impossible to target in the Breach Phase, which is particularly visible if you hit Sacred Coil last, since it's outright present for multiple Breach Phases in that scenario.

Passive: Immune to Burning.
I'm actually not sure if the Gatekeeper still inappropriately fears fire; Incendiary Grenades are locked behind completing the Sacred Coil Investigation, so it's really unlikely you'll ever end up with a fire underneath the Gatekeeper. You can occasionally see even Investigation-specific gear from random mission rewards, so it should be possible to come up, but... as yet it hasn't for me.
Regardless, for most runs this really just means a Purifier can't accidentally set the Gatekeeper on fire while trying to hit one of your agents, since you normally won't have Dragon Rounds or Incendiary Grenades and no agent ability provides an 'internal' way to spread fires. I guess it also means you shouldn't Puppeteer any Purifiers in the Encounter on the idea that they'll help against the Gatekeeper?
But mostly this immunity to fire simply doesn't matter, contrasting a fair amount with XCOM 2.
On a different note, the Gatekeeper is unique among boss enemies in that it's not actually immune to all negative mental effects. You can have Verge Stupor it, for example, albeit its Will is so high it's very likely to resist the Stun. (Reminder that Verge adds targets to his Neural Network even if the primary purpose of the action fails; it can be worth using Stupor on the Gatekeeper on the idea of then using Mind Flay to bypass its Armor and Defense) It is, however, immune to Mind Control in particular: the game simply will not let you activate Puppeteer if the Gatekeeper is currently the only conscious enemy in Verge's Neural Network, and Puppeteer will always fail on it if you have other enemies in the Network such that you can activate Puppeteer.
I suspect this weirdly-specific immunity exists primarily to accommodate the scenario in which you hit Sacred Coil last, as in that case the Encounter with the Gatekeeper has infinite reinforcements that only stop once the Gatekeeper is dead. Could just be part of this general 'no controlling bosses' design rule, though.
Passive: The Gatekeeper ignores all forms of Overwatch.
Yes, the Gatekeeper has quietly picked up immunity to Overwatch.
Like the 1000 Mobility, I suspect this is really present primarily in support to the Gatekeeper doing cinematic stuff. There's a couple of Breach modifiers that can cause agents to enter Overwatch once the Breach Phase is over, and if Sacred Coil is your second or third Investigation then you'll have an Encounter or two where the Gatekeeper flees the room after the Breach Phase has ended; I can readily imagine the devs were worried about scripting breaking from your agents taking Overwatch shots at the Gatekeeper as a result. It's easy to imagine the game softlocking, or crashing, or otherwise behaving undesirably as a result, especially if your agents managed to actually kill the Gatekeeper with the Overwatch fire.
It is a little unfortunate how this hurts the utility of Zephyr's Lockdown and Blueblood's Vigilance abilities, though, and it can be outright obnoxious if you hit Sacred Coil second, as the Gatekeeper's initial position in that case is such that trying to catch it with Overwatch fire is something that looks plausible to be useful, and surprise! It's immune!
But for the other two Encounters you can fight the Gatekeeper in, it's nearly irrelevant; there's basically no way for it to make sense to try to Overwatch the Gatekeeper in a standard sense, where only special Overwatch behaviors can readily give a player cause to stumble into this.
Flight
Passive: Is a flying unit, allowing it to reach locations without regard for intervening terrain.
Massive
Passive: Is a 2x2 unit.
Protective Shell
Passive/Free Action: Has an Open and Closed state. When Closed, it can only move and fire its primary weapon. (It cannot enter Overwatch) When Open, it can use Gateway and Consume. Its Closed state raises its Armor by 3 points and Defense by 25 points. It may freely switch between these two states at no action point cost but with a 1 turn cooldown, but it also immediately returns to its Closed state if damaged while in its Open state.
The cooldown is there entirely to put a stop to the nonsense in XCOM 2 where a Gatekeeper would sometimes open and close repeatedly, accomplishing nothing except wasting the player's time. It's a much-appreciated change.
Anyway, Protective Shell combined with the Gatekeeper's base Armor means the Gatekeeper has 4 Armor if you hit Sacred Coil first, and 5 Armor if you put off Sacred Coil at all, placing it as the most heavily Armored enemy in the game. This is lower than its Armor values in XCOM 2 (Where it ranged from 5 to 7 Armor when Closed), but in practice is either a much steeper cliff of difficulty than in XCOM 2, or much less relevant, depending on your crew and kit and whether you know the Gatekeeper fight is coming and plan appropriately.
Explosive
The Gatekeeper always explodes on death, doing 3 damage with 2 Shred to everything in 3 tiles of it. This also destroys destructible terrain.
Note that this plays out in full even if the Gatekeeper's death ends the Encounter. The Gatekeeper is always fought in the final Encounter, so this isn't too bad, but ideally you don't end up with somebody going down and picking up a Scar at the last second because you were impatient or something.
Consume
Turn-ending action?: A melee attack that ignores Armor and restores the Gatekeeper's HP by 150% of the amount of damage done, that damage being 3-6. Can only be used when Open.
I am genuinely unsure whether Consume is turn-ending or not in Chimera Squad. I've never had the Gatekeeper use it back-to-back even when I dropped Zephyr next to it, but action point costs aren't laid out in config files and you can't control the Gatekeeper in-game, so it's entirely possible the AI can use Consume twice and I've just never successfully contrived the right kind of circumstances for the Gatekeeper to actually choose to do so.
Gateway
Turn-ending action: Strikes an absolutely massive area for 3-5 damage that ignores Armor. 3 turn local cooldown, 1 turn global cooldown.

Passive: Is a flying unit, allowing it to reach locations without regard for intervening terrain.
This is honestly more of an assumption on my part than anything else, as I've never actually seen the Gatekeeper elect to clearly fly anywhere in Chimera Squad, and flight remains an unlisted ability within the game itself. It wouldn't even matter much whether it does or does not have it; in one of the Encounters you can fight it in, there simply isn't high ground to fly to, and in another Encounter there's the top of a train but no real reason for it to actually go up there, leaving only one Encounter where it would make sense for it to leverage its flight.
So it's possible it actually doesn't have this at all; I don't actually know for sure.
This is much, much less noticeable than in XCOM 2, simply because you can only fight the Gatekeeper on three specific maps and as usual for Chimera Squad they're pretty light on destructible Cover.
If you hit Sacred Coil first it's especially irrelevant, as the Gatekeeper won't spawn until you've triggered an explosion that wipes out a bunch of the destructible elements in the area anyway.
That said, you should still keep it in mind, especially if you didn't hit Sacred Coil first.
Hardened
Passive: Does not use Cover, but is never considered to be in the open.

Passive: Does not use Cover, but is never considered to be in the open.
As always, noticeably less relevant than in XCOM 2.

Passive: Is a 2x2 unit.
Just like the Sectopod, the Gatekeeper is a returning 2x2 unit -and these two remain the only 2x2 units that exist. Since both of them are restricted to being bosses when wrapping up an Investigation, this means 2x2 units are drastically less relevant/existent in Chimera Squad than in XCOM 2.
Also like the Sectopod, the maps the Gatekeeper is allowed to spawn in minimize the relevancy of this point... mostly. It is worth pointing out that the earliest Encounter for fighting the Gatekeeper has little 1-tile cubbyholes, and the Gatekeeper still has a melee attack, so it's absolutely possible to have the Gatekeeper put an agent into an awkward position by moving to melee them and so pinning them in place because the cubbyholes in question are made in part by High Cover elements -units in the Firaxis XCOM games can move diagonally in most situations, but High Cover elements are an exception where they're forced to path orthogonally around them. So the Gatekeeper can outright trap people in that Encounter!
Outside that specific concern, though, the Gatekeeper's size is largely a curiosity within Chimera Squad itself, an artifact inherited from XCOM 2 and nothing more.

Passive/Free Action: Has an Open and Closed state. When Closed, it can only move and fire its primary weapon. (It cannot enter Overwatch) When Open, it can use Gateway and Consume. Its Closed state raises its Armor by 3 points and Defense by 25 points. It may freely switch between these two states at no action point cost but with a 1 turn cooldown, but it also immediately returns to its Closed state if damaged while in its Open state.
The cooldown is there entirely to put a stop to the nonsense in XCOM 2 where a Gatekeeper would sometimes open and close repeatedly, accomplishing nothing except wasting the player's time. It's a much-appreciated change.
Anyway, Protective Shell combined with the Gatekeeper's base Armor means the Gatekeeper has 4 Armor if you hit Sacred Coil first, and 5 Armor if you put off Sacred Coil at all, placing it as the most heavily Armored enemy in the game. This is lower than its Armor values in XCOM 2 (Where it ranged from 5 to 7 Armor when Closed), but in practice is either a much steeper cliff of difficulty than in XCOM 2, or much less relevant, depending on your crew and kit and whether you know the Gatekeeper fight is coming and plan appropriately.
'Less relevant' is easy to follow if you've been reading these posts: the player has a ton of tools for bypassing Armor (And the Defense from Protective Shell, for that matter), so of course that applies here as well. It's possible to end up fielding a team that largely ignores the Gatekeeper's defenses, potentially basically on accident.
'Much steeper cliff', meanwhile, comes back to two key points: the first consideration is the thing I've pointed out several times previously that damage in Chimera Squad is simply lower than in XCOM 2. An apex Shotgun firing on the toughest possible Gatekeeper does 1-3 damage in both XCOM 2 and Chimera Squad, even though the Gatekeeper's Armor is lower in Chimera Squad... and in Chimera Squad, the Shotgun is the only weapon to hit that hard, where in XCOM 2 the Cannon, Sniper Rifle, and SPARK Miniguns all also hit that hard.
The second consideration is pacing. In XCOM 2, Gatekeepers are the very last regular enemy, and while one makes a special guest appearance in the Psi Gate mission without regard to the normal Force Level mechanics, the overall setup with the Psi Gate makes it almost impossible to hit the mission before you at least have widespread magnetic weapons. In Chimera Squad, the Investigation system means it's very possible for an unaware player to pick Sacred Coil as their first Investigation, and then end up being forced into the Take Down Sacred Coil mission before they've made any weapon upgrades; in that scenario, their attacks will largely be relying on the pity damage mechanic to be allowed to do any damage!
This is, unfortunately, a case where the Tutorial Crew is actually rather cruel. Godmother has no innate ability to bypass Armor, Terminal has no innate ability to bypass Armor, Cherub can only do so with his melee attack, and Verge can only do so via Mind Flay. I suspect most first-time players use the starting agents for essentially the entire run, or swap exactly one person out when the Training system leads to them having to temporarily sub in someone else and they decide they like that person more than one of the initial agents, and while these four agents aren't the worst possible team for taking out the Gatekeeper swiftly when their firearms are basically useless, they're pretty close. (You'd have to swap in Axiom over Cherub or Verge to be producing the actual worst possible team, and also sub in Zephyr but not take Vital Strike: Zephyr with Vital Strike is actually one of the best agents to have for fighting the Gatekeeper if you hit Sacred Coil first)
The game does at least visually order the Investigations so Sacred Coil is the right-most slot; I suspect plenty of players go left-to-right by default, and so hit Sacred Coil last. (Though I do have to wonder if players whose language is read right-to-left default to the opposite, and so possibly get screwed here?) So probably the overall trend was most players didn't actually ram their first run into Sacred Coil first to then struggle enormously with the Gatekeeper. At least, I sure hope so, as that would be a pretty miserable introduction to the game.
Notably, I emphasized earlier that Chimera Squad will eventually force you into the Take Down Sacred Coil mission. I emphasized this because in XCOM 2, if a player did manage to hit the Psi Gate mission with inadequate gear and all, odds are good they have a save from before the mission and can respond to 'the Gatekeeper soloed my squad' by just reloading and not launching the mission until their squad is prepared. (Or, heck, they can write off the squad entirely and just carry on; even an Ironman run can cope with such a disaster) Whereas in Chimera Squad it's entirely possible such a player can only really give up on the run entirely; Chimera Squad makes a fair few autosaves and holds onto them somewhat far back, but it's entirely possible that the oldest surviving autosave will still be too far back to course-correct and properly prepare for the Gatekeeper.
Especially since the Gatekeeper is far from the only thing that makes the mission difficult...
Honestly, a Gatekeeper probably shouldn't have been a regular Investigation boss at all, not without changes comparable to how the Gray Phoenix Sectopod is only somewhat Armored. This much Armor being sprung on the player potentially in their first Investigation is quite rude; if the Gatekeeper couldn't show up until the endgame, at least a player would definitely have had time to learn the general framework of the game and recognize that answers to high Armor are liable to be important to have at some point.

The Gatekeeper always explodes on death, doing 3 damage with 2 Shred to everything in 3 tiles of it. This also destroys destructible terrain.
Note that this plays out in full even if the Gatekeeper's death ends the Encounter. The Gatekeeper is always fought in the final Encounter, so this isn't too bad, but ideally you don't end up with somebody going down and picking up a Scar at the last second because you were impatient or something.
I kind of suspect it could also last-second fail the mission by killing a downed agent if you had one in the blast radius, but I haven't actually tested this scenario. But if you do have the game inform you somebody died in response to the Gatekeeper going down, that's why!
Also, I should point out that the Gatekeeper is another Sacred Coil unit you are unable to capture, as it always dies no matter what. Presumably because of the death explosion, hence why I'm noting it here.
Anyway, outside those points, this really isn't that pertinent a lot of the time. The Gatekeeper is always in the last Encounter of the mission, is always the toughest thing in the Encounter by a fairly wide margin, and its actual damage output is actually not that notable relative to several enemies in the room; it's very natural for it to be the last enemy you take out in the entire mission, at which point an on-death explosion isn't going to leave an agent vulnerable to follow-up attacks from other enemies or the like.

Turn-ending action?: A melee attack that ignores Armor and restores the Gatekeeper's HP by 150% of the amount of damage done, that damage being 3-6. Can only be used when Open.
I am genuinely unsure whether Consume is turn-ending or not in Chimera Squad. I've never had the Gatekeeper use it back-to-back even when I dropped Zephyr next to it, but action point costs aren't laid out in config files and you can't control the Gatekeeper in-game, so it's entirely possible the AI can use Consume twice and I've just never successfully contrived the right kind of circumstances for the Gatekeeper to actually choose to do so.
I also don't know if it can raise a Psi Zombie on kill like in XCOM 2. If it even can, this would be a pretty narrow edge case, requiring you Puppeteer an enemy that can become a Psi Zombie and then the Gatekeeper lethally Consume your victim, as I know for a fact it can't raise your agents in this way; my very first run had an agent go down to Consume with no Psi Zombie resulting. Which makes sense, since your agents aren't allowed to die. (Not while having the run continue, anyway)
In any event, Consume is a big contributor to the Gatekeeper being potentially a big hurdle, since it can abruptly gain back up to 9 HP. If you lack ways to bypass Armor, wearing the Gatekeeper down to 2 HP over a Round and a half only for it to bounce back up to 11 HP is possibly mission failure right there!
You might notice I didn't list Act bonuses to Consume's damage. I think this is actually accurate, but ultimately I'm not sure; there's nothing in the config files for boosting Consume's damage, but it is possible that for some reason the bonus exists and is just not in the easily-accessed/edited config files. Normally I work around 'it's not exposed in the config files' through a combination of the F1 mod and Puppeteering units to directly check things in-game, but the F1 mod doesn't 'see' Act bonuses to abilities and the Gatekeeper can't be controlled. So all I've got is 'I've personally never seen Consume do more than 6 damage in Chimera Squad', which is particularly unhelpful given its wide damage range. The usual progression of adding 1 damage per Act would mean minimum damage would still be 5!
So it's possible Consume scales and I just haven't seen the proof.

Turn-ending action: Strikes an absolutely massive area for 3-5 damage that ignores Armor. 3 turn local cooldown, 1 turn global cooldown.
I am genuinely not sure if Gateway is able to raise Psi Zombies in Chimera Squad. I've never seen Gateway result in zombies getting up (Outside the scripted sequence, I mean), but I've never had the Gatekeeper fire Gateway such that it unambiguously should've been raising some dead bodies into zombiedom. Among other points, since your agents can't die without triggering a Game Over, the units the Gatekeeper is trying to aim at pretty obviously can't result in zombies, unlike in XCOM 2.
I kind of suspect it does still work, in part because the Gatekeeper uses it to raise zombies within a sequence that's entirely in-engine using established animations and so on, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's video proof out there of it not working.
Anyway, whether or not Gateway can raise Psi Zombies, it continues to be very threatening for its huge strike zone and Armor-ignoring damage. It's down 2 points of damage relative to XCOM 2, but agent peak HP is lower than in XCOM 2, so it's still about as dangerous overall. That said, since agent base HP is higher than XCOM 2 soldier base HP, hitting Sacred Coil first and bringing in an agent with no levels is a less suicidal idea than bringing a Rookie into the Psi Gate mission was.
Anyway, whether or not Gateway can raise Psi Zombies, it continues to be very threatening for its huge strike zone and Armor-ignoring damage. It's down 2 points of damage relative to XCOM 2, but agent peak HP is lower than in XCOM 2, so it's still about as dangerous overall. That said, since agent base HP is higher than XCOM 2 soldier base HP, hitting Sacred Coil first and bringing in an agent with no levels is a less suicidal idea than bringing a Rookie into the Psi Gate mission was.
Its huge area of effect is especially striking in that it often amounts to 'hits the entire squad'; agent Mobility is low, the maps you fight the Gatekeeper on are all very small and specifically have their Breach entrances clustered close together (Aside a single Vent entry in one Encounter), and in 2 out of 3 versions of Take Down Sacred Coil you'll have less than a full Round of actions to use on scattering the squad before the Gatekeeper gets a turn. This is a pretty big contrast with XCOM 2, where maps were much larger and the game endeavored to place Gatekeeper fights late in missions; while Gateway's area was so massive it was impractical to ensure only one soldier would be hit by a given Gateway, it wasn't too difficult to at least get the squad spread out enough it wouldn't hit everyone, and you'd get to start on that process long before you actually encountered a given Gatekeeper.
Like Consume, I've not listed Act bonuses for Gateway. Also like Consume, I think it does in fact not gain damage in later Acts, but am not completely certain about this fact. I'm more certain than with Consume as I have a much larger sample size of Gateway damage numbers and it has a tighter range, but I could be wrong.
If I am correct about Consume and Gateway, then that's yet more examples of Sacred Coil being easier if hit later in a way other Investigation targets are not! (Why is this so common with Sacred Coil?)
Anyway, regardless of whether Gateway can still make Psi Zombies in Chimera Squad or not, the game certainly presents it as still functioning that way, as in one Encounter the Gatekeeper reliably raises a bunch of...
Gatekeeper Psi Zombies (Inexplicably labeled Spectral Zombie in-game and uses the Spectral Zombie headshot, but uses Psi Zombie visuals, audio, and mechanics otherwise)
HP: 3
Defense: 10Aim: 75/75/80/80
Mobility: 10
Damage: 2-3
Will: 50
Initiative: 30
... these guys.
Yes, doing the Takedown later doesn't give Psi Zombies Aim or HP boosts, unusually, making this yet another way Sacred Coil is overall easier if fought later. Mind, you shouldn't be seeing Gatekeeper Psi Zombies if you hit Sacred Coil first, so that's a bit misleading, but it's still worth emphasizing how widespread this phenomenon is with Sacred Coil in specific.
Alert Actions: N/A
Like the Gatekeeper itself, the Gatekeeper's zombies don't actually do anything in the Breach Phase, and in fact don't exist until the Breach Phase has finished; the Gatekeeper raising a bunch of Psi Zombies plays out in-engine once the Breach Phase is finished.
As always with Chimera Squad, this isn't that important.

Passive: The Psi Zombie cannot be Poisoned, and will not take damage from certain Poison-based attacks. It also is immune to all mental effects.
Psi Zombies are sufficiently easy targets this isn't terribly likely to matter. Verge almost certainly has much better targets for Stupor and Battle Madness, Torque probably has better targets for Poison Spit, Psi Zombie HP is so low Venom Rounds-backed attacks will always kill them anyway... I'm sure there's at least a few players out there who had this actually come up as meaningfully relevant in a run, but it's probably a pretty rare event.

Turn-ending Action: The Psi Zombie's primary attack is a move-and-melee action.
Unlike in XCOM 2, I've never seen one of these Psi Zombies walk up to an agent and then inexplicably refuse to throw a punch. I'm not certain Chimera Squad has corrected that odd behavior, but it seems likely.
That aside, the Psi Zombies start out far enough away that being dedicated melee fighters means they're generally only notable as a distraction; if you're bothering to burn agent effort on taking them out, they should never get a chance to attack an agent. Of course, spending agent effort on killing a Psi Zombie can be taking away from dealing with more serious threats, so the Psi Zombies still usually matter in their existence, especially if the Gatekeeper is still around.
Of course, this brings us back to the consideration of how Take Down Sacred Coil works based on when you actually go after Sacred Coil. So let's get into that.
----------------------------------------------------------
Well, first I should explicitly note that the Gatekeeper is not the faction leader of Sacred Coil. I'll be covering that fellow next post. I'm covering the Take Down Sacred Coil variations in the Gatekeeper post because the Gatekeeper is different across all versions; like Violet on The Progeny, the Gatekeeper is always fought in the last Encounter of the mission. As such, it can be fought on three different maps -and it has pretty different behavior in all three possible maps!
Anyway, the Encounter chain goes...
Map 1 is an abandoned subway station that is occupied solely by Androids, Mecs, and Turrets -apparently the outer layer of defenses for Sacred Coil's base isn't manned by living soldiers. This map is itself very straightforward; you just take out all the enemies and move on to the next map, with no scripting occurring or the like. You pretty cleanly hold the high ground, and the room is large enough the Turrets in it tend to be pretty much irrelevant. Not much strategy needed. Of course, Patchwork is very strong here, while Verge and Torque are underperformers here.
Map 2 is a Sacred Coil cathedral thing. The aesthetic is clearly derived in its style from the teleporter room of Chosen Strongholds, though the room itself is shaped pretty differently, with your agents starting down low and having to work their way up. The initial phase is a straightforward fight against organic Sacred Coil forces, including most notably Andromedons, but conspicuously lacking any Ronin. Once every enemy in the room is down, you get a warning about reinforcements coming in from two doors in the back; the reinforcements in question are three Ronin, one from one door, the other two from the other door. This is followed by a second wave of the same on the following Round; it honestly might not be worth trying to set up Overwatch on the doors if your team isn't suited to overwhelming the Lightning Reflexes protection, or at least only setting up Overwatch on one door. In any event, once all the Ronin have spawned and then been taken down, it's on to...
Map 3 is a room with two main door Breach entrances where you come in with the high ground again. The center of the room is dominated by a Psi Gate, as per the Psi Gate mission in XCOM 2, and this is mechanically significant; reinforcements spawn in from the portal every Round, forever. (Even the very first Round has reinforcements show up!) These are quite nasty reinforcements, too, being consistently Chryssalids (Both kinds) and Andromedons! However, there are two consoles on the side of the room, which can be interacted with (as a free action) or destroyed with explosives, and once both consoles have been dealt with the portal shuts down explosively. As in, it literally explodes, vaporizing a good chunk of Cover around it and doing about 3 damage to every unit within about 3 tiles of any of the portal's tiles. Don't have people sitting on the portal's platform until you've shut it off!
This is the first map where you can see differences within the Encounter itself based on when you're hitting Sacred Coil. If Sacred Coil was not your first faction target, as soon as the Breach Phase is over the Gatekeeper spawns in -and then immediately books it through the door on the far side of the room from your team, to be seen in the next Encounter. If Sacred Coil was your first Investigation target, instead the Gatekeeper spawns in response to dealing with your first console; in this case it sticks around and fights your agents. Either way, the Encounter ends as soon as all enemies are down and the portal is inactive.
Map 4 another subway map, this time with actual subway train presence. It has one main door Breach entrance plus a Vent entrance that will place the agent in a nice flanking High Cover position. (I wish Vent entrances resulted in that kind of outcome on regular maps instead of generally leaving your agent surrounded with poor Cover) After the Breach Phase ends you get to watch the Gatekeeper glance over a room with ADVENT Tubes (The type we see hybrids being stored or grown in back in XCOM 2) that are occupied by Commando bodies. Then it blasts the bodies with Gateway, raising them as Psi Zombies. (I assume they were supposed to already be dead, though I have wondered if maybe these were supposed to be new hybrids being grown and the Gatekeeper is actually killing them)
At that point things depend on whether Sacred Coil is your second Investigation target or your third target. If you're hitting them second, the Gatekeeper remains where it is, the Encounter starts, and you have one of the game's roughest fights on your hands. (Note that the Psi Zombies the Gatekeeper raised will not die from killing the Gatekeeper; you have to manually kill the Psi Zombies yourself) If you're hitting them third, the Gatekeeper rams through a door in the back (again), to be seen in the next Encounter.
Either way, from there the map is just a straightforward 'take down every enemy in the room' Encounter. Once every enemy is down, the Encounter is done.
Map 5 is of course the apex if you saved Sacred Coil for last, and is a room with three more portals, very reminiscent of the final battle of XCOM 2. Like map 3, reinforcements will pour in from these portals forever, but this time you shut off the portals by killing the Gatekeeper. Aside that wrinkle, this Encounter is very straightforward; take out every enemy, and there you go, you've won.
It's fairly tough as far as its force composition and all, but... straightforwardly so. Just make sure you prioritize the Gatekeeper, both because it's the most dangerous thing in the room and to stop the reinforcements.
-------------------------------------
The narrative around the Gatekeeper is kind of odd.
Broadly, the concept is straightforward enough to describe: Sacred Coil got a hold of an Ethereal portal somehow, appears to have secretly transported it into this subway area under City 31, and hooked it up with the intent of bringing this Gatekeeper through. It's easy enough to infer that Sacred Coil was intending to then use the Gatekeeper to somehow advance their agendas -if nothing else, a Gatekeeper is self-evidently a useful combatant.
Unfortunately, we never actually find out what Sacred Coil's intended plan was. The Gatekeeper pretty explicitly runs around doing its own thing instead of what Sacred Coil wants it to do no matter when you hit Sacred Coil, and it zipping off will in fact interrupt a Triumphant Villain Speech that might've clarified what the plan was supposed to be. The mission structure seems to imply the goal was to use the Gatekeeper to gate in still more reinforcements...
,,, but this brings us to a bunch of things that might make sense later, depending on what XCOM 3 does, but which right now are opaque and/or unintuitive in their handling.
The big one is: where are these reinforcements coming from?
It's easy to just not really think about this. Video games are very fond of teleportation being a justification for shipping in as many enemies as the gameplay needs, where the gameplay needs them, without having to commit a lot of design space and art labor and so on to making everything visually intuitive and realistically feasible in-universe. Video games are also often plenty competent about setting up the opposition so that huge numbers of enemies can be teleported in without the narrative needing to explicitly provide space for them to exist in before they were teleported in. In particular, XCOM 2 hit both these notes; it's easy to in turn not really question these elements when they return in Chimera Squad.
But the XCOM 2 answers don't really parse within Chimera Squad itself; in XCOM 2, the Ethereal/ADVENT regime was the omnipresent world government who could ship assets from anywhere in the world to wherever they felt more troops were needed. (Such as where an X-COM squad was currently trashing a critical facility) Sacred Coil is instead an unpopular movement with no clear outside resources to be drawing on; they're not in a position to mobilize hordes of loyal minions/allies from metaphorically just around a corner.
Now, I started out by talking about how this might make sense later. While the old answers don't make sense to be recycled here, there's contextual evidence Chimera Squad might have a different answer in mind that it just never explicitly spells out.
For starters, I should point out that exactly three enemy types will come through the portals; the Gatekeeper, Andromedons, and Chryssalids. Conspicuously, two of these enemies didn't exist prior to XCOM 2, while Chryssalids are uniquely dangerous and difficult to contain. It's also worth pointing out that some of War of the Chosen's dialogue could be read as suggesting it's standard modus operandi for the Ethereals to leave behind a functional civilization on worlds they've conquered. You put all this together, and it's entirely possible that the idea is that Sacred Coil is using these Psi Gates to connect to another world (The Andromedon homeworld seems most sensible to me, personally) that is still broadly loyal to the Ethereal regime and that Sacred Coil has access to whatever signals 'we're also Ethereal minions you should fight alongside instead of against' (Or at least Sacred Coil thinks they have such) so as to get easy cooperation from the arrivals.
This is a scenario that neatly explains notable questions in relation to these enemy types ("Why didn't we see Andromedons and Gatekeepers in the first game?" would be answered by "The Ethereals hadn't built local Psi Gates" or by "The Ethereals didn't want to gate them in initially for whatever reason" while Chryssalids have always been haunted a bit by "Where do the Ethereals safely store these things when not actively using them?" to which the answer would now be "On another planet entirely") while also explaining why Sacred Coil can meaningfully bring in reinforcements via Psi Gate. It'd also be useful for later games in the series -having other worlds still loyal to the Ethereals opens up options to bring back hostile Andromedons or the like without simply undoing the defeat of the Ethereals.
This also starts suggesting possible (in-universe) reasons for why Gatekeepers are continuing to be associated with Psi Gates, especially in conjunction with XCOM 2's ending involving the notion that the Psi Gates in the Ethereals' underwater fortress required continuous psychic intervention on their part to sustain. In the scenario I just laid out, presumably Gatekeepers are stationed on conquered worlds for the purpose of powering the Psi Gates when they're needed. This would also justify the Gatekeeper name in-universe!
Notably, Chimera Squad itself informs us that Gatekeepers are, if interacted with psychically, actually 'gentle'. (The game specifically compares them to elephants, actually) While I imagine plenty of players just think of this in terms of Chimera Squad's general tendency to embrace once-enemy aliens as friends, it would actually make some degree of sense for Gatekeepers to be relatively non-combative if the Ethereals were predominately using them as a psi-battery for running Psi Gates, since that would presumably mean they're largely expected to not get into combat.
Also worth discussing is the oddity of this particular Gatekeeper's appearance: where Gatekeepers in XCOM 2 had a shiny white shell, this Gatekeeper's shell is grey and looks weathered. There's also dialogue about it having been 'in transit this entire time'. The idea seems to be that this Gatekeeper entered a portal months or years ago and its shell suffered significant weathering in this time, and that its erratic behavior upon arrival is a side effect of its long period of travel.
We don't get details here so it's all very ambiguous. From context, I personally suspect the Chimera Squad devs were thinking of this as 'the Gatekeeper entered a Psi Gate expecting to arrive on Earth seconds or minutes later, but the Ethereals were defeated right after and the Psi Gate system collapsed and the Gatekeeper was left in some limbo state until Sacred Coil brought a Psi Gate online for it to enter through'. If so, that's an interestingly non-standard model of gate-to-gate teleportation; usually pop culture takes it as a given no interruption is possible, or if the concept is raised the idea is that a failed teleport just 'rebounds' back to the origin portal immediately. This would be a model more like Psi Gates hurling passengers to a point in another dimension parallel to conventional reality and then requiring a nearby Psi Gate 'grab' them and pull them back out to their destination.
But Chimera Squad gives so little info this isn't necessarily the only way XCOM 3 could decide to model Psi Gates while staying consistent with Chimera Squad. Among other points, there's plenty of room for later games to suggest that longer-range Psi Gate travel involves more meaningful transit times; maybe this Gatekeeper didn't enter a Psi Gate moments before the Ethereals were defeated. Maybe it actually entered a Psi Gate a couple weeks beforehand, and left from so far away it would've taken two weeks to arrive if the Earth Psi Gate system hadn't collapsed and delayed its arrival.
Regardless, what info we do have is consistent in an interesting way with how XCOM 2 seemed to be suggesting the 'psi dimension' (probably not what the series will call it, but work with me) was a mechanically caustic place populated heavily by psionically predatory beings. It's easy to imagine this Gatekeeper is so weathered and behaving so erratically because it spent some number of months trapped in the psi dimension, its shell being worn away by the psi dimension's atmosphere, and its mental state being eroded by a combination of being completely alone and being harried by whatever natural psi-predators still roam that space... or maybe even harried by whatever great enemy the Ethereals were hinting at in XCOM 2's endgame.
Incidentally, this scenario would pretty neatly reconcile the Gatekeeper's physical design and significant combat abilities with 'gentle non-combatant Gatekeepers': perhaps one of the key duties of Gatekeepers is to go through Psi Gates before everybody else and cut a path through the landscape and/or through local hostiles. In that case, they wouldn't be soldiers of the Ethereals in a conventional sense, but they'd still need to be armed and heavily armored to do their duty as a Psi Gate trailblazer. This would dovetail nicely with points like 'Gatekeepers weren't seen in the first game' (Neither were Psi Gates, and in this model you wouldn't expect to see Gatekeepers about until Psi Gates were being activated) and XCOM 2 and Chimera Squad both having a Gatekeeper encountered specifically in the form of arriving through a Psi Gate.
If later games do indeed align with the model I've just laid out -or something similar- then Sacred Coil's plot here becomes straightforward and sensible: they were trying to contact far-distant Ethereal loyalists to be gated in as reinforcements. This would even be plausibly a real threat to Earth's status as 'not an Ethereal-controlled world'! (Depending on how many such worlds are out there and also on how heavily-populated they are)
But if no such notion manifests and later games continue to treat the Ethereal regime as having been wholly contained aboard the Temple Ship and its attendant fleet prior to conquering Earth, then Sacred Coil's plot here turns extremely confusing on numerous levels.
Here's hoping it's the first scenario: above and beyond 'something like it is necessary for Sacred Coil's finale to make sense', it's honestly much more interesting of a scenario than what was previously implied, and better supports the series continuing forward with this setting without having to constantly invent new bad guys or blatantly retcon things so the old bad guys are still around as bad guys even though they've been killed or redeemed or whatever a bunch of times. (Which are bad solutions that various other video game series have ended up falling back on when they shortsightedly say that the player winning the game means Everything Is Fixed And No Bad Guys Exist Anymore... multiple games in a row, even)
----------------------------------------------
Next time, we cover Sacred Coil's leader.
See you then.
Your hypothesis makes it sound like Gray Phoenix and Sacred Coil should have teamed up.
ReplyDeleteOnce the gates are open both ways,whoever wants to leave can just start hopping backwards through the string of portals,eventually each species could end up where they started,or something close to it.
Also,having not played the game yet,all three scenarios the Gatekeeper can be fought in sound like real ball breakers,especially the second one. In XCOM2 you'd be able to detach two members of a six person squad and have them grapple/Run and Gun to the consoles on the first turn,but that's not the option here.
Really emphasizes Sacred Coil as the biggest challenge and makes one wonder why the investigation order is even a choice. Other than so that you can actually use the Grey Phoenix and Sacred Coil rewards.
Sacred Coil seems unlikely to be willing to help Grey Phoenix with their goals, but that detail aside that is a funny/valid point.
DeleteHaving scrutinized the game so closely to make these posts, it's become very obvious to me that Sacred Coil got less polish than the other two factions and the game clearly was not properly finished at release -it probably needed another month or so of development to hit its targets.
Point being: Take Down Sacred Coil is as hard as it is on accident, not because the devs intended it that way. Notably, the game's one and only patch actually made it less difficult!
But it is unfortunate that it's very impractical to hit Sacred Coil first. Hitting them second is actually easier than hitting them third if you have the strategic layer mastered -I can reliably have my agents at max level, with most Training done, and equipped with the best armor and best weapons in time for finishing Act 2- but hitting them first really is brutal.