Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Shrike Hitman

HP: 6/6/7/7 (+1/+3)

Armor: 1
Aim: 80/80/85/85 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 10
Damage: 3-4 (+1/+2)
Will: 60 (+10/+20)
Initiative: 50

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

Yep, that's it for Hitmen.

AI Pistol

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

Strangely, if you Puppeteer a Hitman, the game will inform you that they have Desperado, just like Blueblood... but it doesn't function. They can't shoot twice in a turn. No, I don't mean 'they can't start off with Disabling Shot'. I mean it just plain doesn't work.

I'm curious as to whether Hitmen had Desperado earlier in development and it got disabled somewhat sloppily, or if they're currently supposed to have it and the devs just didn't notice it doesn't work.

Anyway, as for the bugginess of Pistols in AI hands, Hitmen are one of the most glaring examples of weird jank, thanks to...

Triggerhappy

Passive: At the end of every turn, if not disabled, the Hitman automatically enters Overwatch, attacking the first hostile to pass within 3 tiles of itself.

... this effect.

This is actually unnamed. The closest to a name it has is a popup of 'Overwatch' when it triggers, in-game. Internally, it's labeled 'triggerhappy', which is what I'm using here.

Weirdly, it does in fact use Kill Zone's icon in-game, even though Kill Zone is regular Overwatch behavior in Chimera Squad and 'triggerhappy' here is more like the Radial Overwatch Turrets use... which uses the standard Overwatch eye icon... Chimera Squad has some weird (in)consistency issues.

In any event, Triggerhappy behaves wonkily with ammo-drain effects, where draining a Hitman's ammo while they're in Overwatch won't visually clear the Overwatch and won't necessarily prevent them from firing, and similarly draining their ammo may result in them simply walking somewhere, taking a shot, and then having Triggerhappy activate.

Triggerhappy itself can be pretty punishing to melee-focused agents if you're not reliable about denying Hitmen turns. Since reaction fire is fully accurate in Chimera Squad, generally a Hitman will have somewhere from an 80% to a 90% chance to hit whoever walks into their Overwatch zone; it's potentially possible for an agent to be in Cover when they trigger the Overwatch, but it's pretty unlikely due to how the radius of 3 tiles intersects with Chimera Squad's preferred spacing on Cover.

It can be especially punishing on certain maps with tight spaces and High Cover, where a Hitman can end up dug in and difficult to damage before entering the Overwatch zone. In such cases, even a more ranged-focused team can end up struggling to a surprising extent if the Hitman isn't denied turns in the first place. Notably, Hitman damage per shot is actually pretty good; it's identical to your team's own Pistols, but while that's poor damage by your weapon standards, a surprising number of enemies ostensibly wielding heavier weaponry have identical or inferior damage to a Hitman! (eg a Sacred Coil Commando wielding a Rifle has a base damage of 3) And more importantly, 3-4 damage is a worryingly large percentage of the base HP of your agents; an early Hitman who flanks Axiom can potentially roll high, crit, and then roll high again when Axiom walks into the Overwatch zone, and so do the 9 damage necessary to down Axiom!

That's an improbable scenario to actually have play out, mind, but it's a good illustration of how a Hitman is actually pretty deadly, especially thanks to...

Disabling Shot

Turn-ending Action: The Hitman fires at a single target for 1-3 (+1/+2) damage. On a successful hit, the target's primary weapon will be drained of all its ammo.

... their one activated special ability.

Disabling Shot is of course the return of a Sniper ability from the first Firaxis XCOM game. Where the Sniper's version was clunky thanks to being tied to the clunky Sniper Rifle of that game, the Hitman's version is a straightforwardly strong skill, even with reloading not being a turn-ending action in this game. Importantly, as I just implied it's actually synergistic with Triggerhappy; sure, your agent can reload and then fire, but it can easily be the case they'd be able to counterflank and be assured a hit if only they didn't need to reload, where as-is they have good odds of missing if they reload and fire...

... and conveniently, all your agents can solve the problem of Cover by just charging into melee with Subdue for a guaranteed hit, with a bonus of bypassing the Hitman's Armor... at which point Triggerhappy is very relevant, where going for that Subdue means probably taking a bullet to the face. Having by definition already been shot successfully. And sure, Disabling Shot is weaker than a plain shot, but not reliably: a high-roll Disabling Shot hit is the same damage as a low-roll regular shot hit! So it's absolutely possible to take a total of 7 damage from Disabling Shot followed by the Trigger-happy shot, when 7 HP is in fact the base HP of several agents.

This is especially swingy when fighting Hitmen early in the sense that an Act 3 Hitman high-rolling on Disabling Shot is only 100% more damage on that shot compared to a low-roll instead of 200% more damage, but the point remains that you shouldn't really treat Disabling Shot as necessarily a 'mercy' action in terms of damage output.

Disabling Shot is, I suspect, particularly rude to many learning players simply because the prior games were pretty focused on shooting actions and I imagine plenty of players take a bit to adjust to Chimera Squad having ammo-based actions potentially be a rarity to actually employ depending on your team makeup and all. If you don't think of regular shooting as the primary, default method of contribution from most agents (Godmother and Blueblood being the primary exceptions), then Disabling Shot being an ammo-drain is often pretty ignorable, but if you're expecting to have every agent shoot every turn, there's a pretty obvious deleterious impact on your plans.

Overall, Hitmen are also oddly counter-intuitive in terms of aesthetic to gameplay. Compared to a Shrike Trooper, Hitmen look to be carrying a firearm with much lower stopping power and are not clearly more heavily armored than a Trooper, yet Hitmen have a noticeable HP and firepower advantage. The damage point is particularly wonky since the player can't directly check that: a player expecting a Hitman to die relatively easily based on aesthetics can look at the HP and realize their intuition is incorrect in this case, but they can't learn the damage in-game except through the slow and somewhat-opaque method of paying attention to how much their agents get hurt when shot. I suspect I'm not the only person to spend a bit mis-prioritizing because Hitmen look like they should be low-threat and are actually more deadly than most non-elite enemies.

It's not ideal, and I have to wonder if intentions changed at some point, such that this counterintuitiveness slipped through.

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Narratively, Hitmen are one of the most conspicuous examples of Chimera Squad providing names and not actually contextualizing them. Shrike is supposed to be a resistance group that's transitioned into mercenary work often specifically serving as a sort of makeshift police force in areas that haven't stabilized enough to have official law enforcement; what kind of Shrike soldier would either identify as a 'hitman' or be labeled by others as such? I'd expect that to not be a thing at all; even if there were Shrike soldiers who were taking contracts to kill specific people, I'd expect them to position themselves differently, such as calling themselves 'bounty hunters'.

To be fair, I suspect Hitmen in particular are suffering from Shrike's starting concept being clearly rather different from how the game goes about presenting Shrike to the player...

... but I'll be getting into that whole thing in a later post, and the point remains that it's pretty difficult to parse Hitmen in the final product in any more detail than 'Shrike guys who use pistols to fight'.

So that's unfortunate, and I kind of doubt any later game will be returning to this topic in a manner that fixes the issue. Alas.

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Next time, we move on to the last basic Shrike unit, the Bruiser.

See you then.