Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Sacred Coil's Bellus Mar
HP: 10/12/12/12 (+2/+4)
Armor: 1Dodge: 33
Aim: 85/85/90/90 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 12
Damage: 2-4 (+1/+2)
Crit Chance: 20 (Technically)
Will: 80 (+10/+20)
Initiative: 120
The crit chance is a technicality, because as I've mentioned before, Chimera Squad inexplicably classes all melee attacks as a form of reaction fire, and thus forbids them from critting. As Bellus Mar is a dedicated melee attacker, this means his innate crit chance never gets a chance to matter.
Alert Actions: N/A
As always for bosses, Bellus Mar doesn't participate in the Breach Phase at all, including that your squad will simply refuse to target him even if they can see him. He's arguably the most glaring boss about this, since he's often clearly visible and is always one of the closest targets; Violet, by comparison, is far enough back you might legitimately overlook her.
Passive: Immune to Mind Control and Verge's Neural Network abilities.
As Ronin are already rather resistant to mental effects, this isn't as reliable a contrast as Yarvo's immunity to mental effects is with Praetorians, but it does still take away options, particularly if you brought Verge into the mission.
Passive: Bellus Mar automatically dodges the first reaction fire effect he triggers, each and every turn.
I've already gone over how Lightning Reflexes on Ronin essentially boils down to immunity to reaction fire most of the time, and Bellus Mar is really just an upstatted Ronin, so the same applies to him.
This facet is a lot more intrusive in its relevancy with Bellus Mar than with regular Ronin, however, because of the map you always fight Bellus Mar in. Your squad always starts up on a stretch of high ground, which is tall enough that units standing right below actually can't be shot at by units on the high ground, and multiple ladders are spaced along this cliff. The result is that Bellus Mar will slash somebody on the high ground, then duck down into the range shadow right below your squad with his Bending Reed move.
As this is the only high ground in the room, and the room design is such that it's difficult to advance without ending up in a position to be flanked by one or more other enemies, it can seem logical to stay on the high ground and set up Overwatch to catch Bellus Mar as he's going for a slash. After all, a player won't necessarily realize Bellus Mar is just an upstatted Ronin, and even if they do jump to that idea it's actually very plausible to have gotten to this point without discovering that Ronin have Lightning Reflexes and so not have any reason to expect Bellus Mar to have it. A further implication of this is that a player may not be aware of the exact mechanical implications of how Lightning Reflexes intersects with the Timeline system, what with having never had it come up before.
As such, I suspect there's a decent rate of players whose first-time experience with Bellus Mar involves repeatedly trying to catch him with Overwatch, confused as to why it keeps not working. (Certainly, that's what happened in my first run through the game) Which is basically a guaranteed mission failure to run into, as Take Down Sacred Coil is pretty demanding in general; repeatedly wasting agent turns is too big a setback to readily shrug off and go on to win anyway. Especially because Bellus Mar will be landing his hits, basically guaranteed, just like a regular Ronin, and so taking 2-3 wasted agent turns to figure out that Overwatch isn't going to work can easily mean an agent has already gone down -or two agents, if other enemies are managing to get hits in.
Take Down Sacred Coil is a pretty rude mission for a variety of reasons, but this is a particularly unfortunate perfect storm. I'm pretty sure the devs didn't realize everything lines up this way, but... it's still unpleasant for a new player to ram into.
Passive: Each Slash action provides Bellus Mar an action point that can only be spent on movement.
In addition to the above points, the map you always fight Bellus Mar on is actually generally heavy on High Cover. As such, if you are willing to have your agents hop down to the low ground, positioning them so that Bellus Mar hiding up against your starting area is automatically getting flanked, he's still liable to go ducking into some other chunk of High Cover! Relying on regular accuracy checks to hit Bellus Mar is thus generally a dodgy prospect, especially since pursuing him means getting closer to other enemies and so potentially giving them opportunities to flank -or to attack at all, in the case of the Purifiers toward the back of the room.
So that's another layer to how Bellus Mar can be a rude surprise for a new player.

Turn ending action: Bellus Mar makes a free melee hit on the first hostile to pass next to him. This is an Overwatch effect, and ends early if Bellus Mar takes damage.
This is actually much less relevant than on regular Ronin. Bellus Mar doesn't get to act in the Breach Phase and so doesn't get a pre-fight opportunity to set it up, always starts within slashing range of your squad, always acts early in the Timeline so there's limited opportunity to make space, and is only ever fought on a rather tiny map. Altogether, it's almost impossible for circumstances to align such that Bellus Mar can't slash someone, so of course he has no reason to burn a turn on Melee Stance.
I wouldn't be surprised if plenty of players assume he doesn't have it, honestly; probably almost nobody has actually seen him use it, as it's so difficult to make happen.
Turn ending action: Bellus Mar performs a melee attack on the target and Roots the victim on a successful hit. Triggers Bending Reed.
On a standard Ronin, Rooting Slash is usually the least concerning possibility for them to break out.
On Bellus Mar, the context of his Encounter is such that Rooting Slash can be what lets extremely powerful reinforcements show up and murder your team. It's absolutely still likely to be a relief to see him use Rooting Slash instead of a different Slash, but... if you have him ruin your attempt by virtue of Rooting exactly the worst person to have Rooted, it's not exactly comforting to say that Rooting Slash is usually the least problematic thing for him to do.
Turn ending action: Bellus Mar performs a melee attack on the target and Ruptures the victim on a successful hit. Triggers Bending Reed.
Just as with a regular Ronin, having Bellus Mar open a Tempo Surge chain with Rending Slash can be extremely lethal, especially if you hit Sacred Coil first. I'm... not a fan of this swingy bit of RNG. It's already frustrating on regular Ronin, but with Bellus Mar it means there's reliably a consideration of 'better play is achieved by getting lucky with random AI decisions' since his Encounter is so consistent in its design.
(Unless you just never let him act, of course, but a first-time player is unlikely to manage that)
As with regular Ronin, your team composition and gear loadout is heavily important for determining how significant this is likely to be; with a team focused on shooting things that has no Auto-Loaders, Disarming Slash has good odds of being a significant problem, while a team that isn't big on shooting things and/or with significant access to free reloads will probably shrug off the ammo drain per se.

Free Action: Bellus Mar adds 2 extra turns, the first placed 2 slots later and the second placed 4 slots later.
I really don't think Tempo Surge should've been given to an actual boss enemy unless the point was that they'd basically be an Encounter unto theirself. Which would've been a pretty interesting thing to do, honestly, like a less wonky version of Ruler Reactions; I'm actually kind of aggravated Chimera Squad didn't experiment with such an idea!
Regardless, Tempo Surge is more reliably threatening on Bellus Mar than on regular Ronin due to his absurd boss Initiative ensuring he's always going to act immediately after your first agent's turn if you don't do something to prevent him from getting a turn. As Bellus Mar is very durable, it's pretty unlikely your first agent can actually kill him on their own with just their first turn; you'll probably need to use Team Up or a Motile Inducer or some such if you want Bellus Mar to not get Tempo Surge off.
Bellus Mar is actually in general more reliable about putting the Ronin kit to dangerously effective use due to the context of his Encounter: I covered the variations on the Take Down Sacred Coil mission within the Gatekeeper post rather than this post in part because the Gatekeeper is a different fight depending on when you hit Sacred Coil, whereas Bellus Mar is always in the third map of the five maps; the Psi Portal room. So he's basically the same no matter when you hit Sacred Coil.
Anyway, the key point here is the room's map design, specifically all the stuff where Bellus Mar can attack agents and then Bending Reed to locations no agent can shoot at. In conjunction with Lightning Reflexes, Bending Reed, and Tempo Surge, it's really easy for a new player to end up taking an outrageous amount of damage from Bellus Mar while they struggle to get good damage in on him, especially since all the other enemies in the Encounter still exist to create problems. (eg positioning an agent to flank Bellus Mar may leave them vulnerable to being flanked by an Andromedon) Ending up blowing a lot of time on Bellus Mar is also really bad since the infinite reinforcements are quite dangerous; spending a couple Rounds on Bellus Mar before you even start working on shutting off the Psi Gate means your squad is probably going to be overwhelmed by all the reinforcements.
I suspect most players had their first fight against Bellus Mar go really, really badly!
If you're already aware of all this and have brought the appropriate tools, Bellus Mar is actually probably the easiest faction leader to deal with. He's immediately accessible to your full squad, has absolutely no protection against sustained fire (Where Yarvo has Bolster and Violet has a reactive teleport), is actually totally possible to Stun (Albeit not with Verge's Stupor), and the map offers no special protections to him. (Where Yarvo has 2/3rds of his fights involve him being behind a shield to start, and Violet will reliably be shielded by her Resonance Pylons) If you're prepared, you may well take out Bellus Mar without him ever getting a turn!
I kind of suspect this is precisely why Bellus Mar ended up being so rudely-designed for a new player: because the playtesters knew the game well enough for Bellus Mar to not be a big deal to them.
Anyway, do note that Bellus Mar never has any further mechanics attached to him: his death doesn't trigger anything special, for example. So you don't have to worry about anything of that sort.
Narratively, Bellus Mar is of course the leader of Sacred Coil. Oddly enough, this status of his isn't really explained or contextualized as far as I'm aware; was he a high-ranking ADVENT soldier before the Ethereal regime was ousted? Did he specifically found the Sacred Coil organization? Did he replace some prior leader after they died? We don't really get much of anything, just a vague sense that he's a True Believer of Sacred Coil's mission. (Which is moderately notable given pop culture is very fond of cult leaders not buying into in the cult's beliefs at all)
What does get touched on a bit is the 'ADVENT hybrids that are mass-produced through cloning' thing. This is particularly so if Cherub is on your roster, which of course the Tutorial ensures he is so almost anyone who's beaten Chimera Squad at least once should've seen the relevant bits, but I'm talking about them anyway.
The bit in question is of course that Cherub will talk with Director Kelly about the fact that he and Bellus Mar are genetically identical. The main thrust of the conversation is centered on Cherub worrying that other people will anticipate problems arising from this shared DNA (Cherub seems to think people will expect him to suddenly turn evil like Bellus Mar or something of the sort), and I actually appreciate the handling of this whole thing, as it's yet another example of Chimera Squad successfully cleaving to its Embrace And Accept And Give Second Chances messages in even subtle ways.
Thing is, cloning -and adjacent scifi genetic technology memes- in pop culture tends to function less as actual speculative fiction type stuff and more as thinly-veiled allegories for talking about regular human family stuff, where eg a clone is treated functionally like the child of their 'original'... and a lot of pop culture doing this appears to be trying to sneak in some pretty gross messages that are, by the way, just plain factually untrue.
That is, there's fiction out there that leans heavily into the idea of 'genetic destiny', where if someone is 'evil', then obviously clones of them will behave identically and thus also be 'evil', and when you put this through the lens of 'allegory for family and whatnot' suddenly you're about half a step away from saying 'if you decide one person is Evil, you should just assume their entire family is Evil and punish them too'. Which is a sentiment most people will be repulsed by if you state it baldly like that, but I've seen plenty of people who say 'ethnic genocide is bad' and yet have no issue with 'if you decide Pop Culture Bad Guy is Too Evil To Live, you should just kill all their clones without bothering to look at the clones as individuals' as a logic chain.
And this includes that I've seen pop culture attempting to press messages of acceptance and so on that nonetheless thoughtlessly walk right into 'of course the clone of the evil person is also evil in the same way'; that Chimera Squad's undertone is instead 'being genetically identical doesn't really mean we should assume you're the same, certainly not when you're so obviously behaving completely differently' is genuinely a pleasant surprise.
(A nice touch: Cherub's voice actor is, in fact, also Bellus Mar's voice actor. He plays them differently enough I imagine a lot of players don't realize this, but honestly I kind of like that it's easy to not realize; it supports the 'they're different people, even if they start from the same DNA' notion)
And I appreciate this not only for the philosophical coherency of Chimera Squad as a whole, but also because in real life identical twins (and identical triplets and so on) are less identical than pop culture clones tend to be imagined as, while having far more cause to be alike. That is, pop culture clones have identical genes, but often that's the only overlap; identical twins will typically be in the same home at the same time, go to the same school at the same time, etc, where a pop culture clone is often springing out of a vat or tube or whatever as a fully grown adult vs the 'original' having... y'know, grown up from childhood conventionally. Yet such pop culture clones are somehow more identical than real-life identical twins!
Which brings us to the world-building aspect of all this, actually, as Chimera Squad itself pretty directly touches on the idea that a person is not defined solely by their genes. Cherub was an ADVENT clone-soldier, but found in a tube before any ADVENT indoctrination could be applied, where Bellus Mar was presumably put through the standard ADVENT education program (Which probably involves a lot of psychic influence, too), and so Cherub's different experiences have shaped him into a very different person from Bellus Mar. Naturally, this would obviously generalize, where all the other clone-soldiers of this line are also shaped differently by having different experiences. I appreciate this on a number of levels, starting from it directly addressing a criticism I had of base XCOM 2 particularly, where the info we were given realistically placed ADVENT troops as basically brainwashed child soldiers and the game didn't seem to recognize this implication; Cherub is exactly my criticism manifested as a character, an ADVENT clone with a somewhat child-like mentality because he is in fact quite young in terms of years lived!
I also appreciate that the wording in-game heavily implies that ADVENT clones come in a variety of strains. Pop culture 'we have an army of clones' defaults pretty heavily to exactly one genetic code existing for the army, or perhaps more accurately to what I'll call 'the bare minimum number of possible DNA variants'; that is, in XCOM 2 we do get the notion that different ADVENT unit types can be a different gene set (eg Stun Lancers, Purifiers), but within XCOM 2 itself the only other variation indicated by the game was male/female. I didn't comment on this in any XCOM 2 post because XCOM 2 doesn't clearly indicate it was operating on such a model, but I do kind of suspect this is what the devs were thinking when developing XCOM 2, and if so it would've been pretty janky an intention; for one thing, near-zero genetic variation means if anyone is particularly susceptible to a given disease, then everyone is susceptible to the disease, which is the kind of problem the Ethereals would necessarily know about and want to not be dealing with. For another, XCOM 2 broadly painted a picture of the Ehereals being willing to tinker and fine-tune their minions, so it'd be pretty weird if in this one case they didn't produce significant variety, if only through iterating through New Improved Models of ADVENT troops. For a third, the whole 'ADVENT clone army is a secret' thing would be even more unbelievable if ADVENT troops were in fact supposed to be universally identical; people would notice their 'peacekeepers' all sounding overly-alike, and even their concealing uniforms wouldn't necessarily adequately obscure how overly-alike they'd be. Real humans have things like different stride lengths, where even when you have dozens of soldiers marching in practiced lockstep they don't actually move exactly alike to each other, and people notice these kinds of things! Not necessarily in a way they could explicitly explain, sure, but there's a reason the 'uncanny valley' term exists, where not-quite-realistic-enough CGI actually unsettles people because they can tell it's not right even if they can't necessarily tell you what's specifically wrong with what they're looking at. Greater clone variety would be necessary to avoid the uncanny valley effect applying in-universe to how people responded to ADVENT troops.
(This is another layer to why I appreciate Chimera Squad saying some portion of the hybrids aren't clones at all, but instead are humans converted into being hybrids: it helps move away from the 'ADVENT would trigger the uncanny valley response in-universe' problem)
So all told, even though Bellus Mar himself isn't properly contextualized as far as his status as Sacred Coil's leader, I'm actually pretty positive on how the game utilizes him as a character. I do hope a later game explores more thoroughly the topic of Sacred Coil and other ADVENT loyalist groups, but otherwise? This is quite nice.
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Next time, we move at last to Shrike, starting with an intro post.
See you then.
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