Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Shrike Necromancer

HP: 8/8/10/10 (+0/+2)

Aim: 80/80/85/85 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 10
Damage: 3-6 (+1/+2)
Will: 80
Initiative: 70

Psi: 40 (Not that they use it)

Yes, Necromancers don't get Will from being later in the game, unlike basically every other non-robot enemy. I suspect this is an oversight.

On a different note, I'm really curious as to why Chimera Squad has so many entities that have Psi Offense but don't actually use the stat at all.

Alert Actions: Move to a better position, Hunker Down, Psi Reanimation. (Psi Reanimation requires a valid target dies during the Breach phase)

I've yet to see a Necromancer use Spectral Zombie as their Alert action, but they're rare enough enemies in general that could just be luck. So be aware that it might actually be a valid action even though I'm not listing it.

Psi Reanimation being an Alert action is really unique; Subservience on Thralls and Resonants is the only other example I'm aware of an Alert action that's dependent on a specific condition to be possible. I kind of wish there were more of these: it would make the Breach Phase more interactive and interesting. Too bad we probably won't get a sequel exploring such possibilities.

But we need to talk about Psi Reanimation to contextualize it as an Alert action, so here we go;

Psi Reanimation

1 action point: Reanimates a single human or hybrid body as a Psi Zombie, whose turn is placed at the end of the Timeline. The Psi Zombie will immediately die if the Necromancer is disrupted in any significant way. 1 turn cooldown?

To be clear, unlike most 'humanoid'-targeting effects, this does not work on Sectoid, Viper, or Muton bodies. Only human and hybrid corpses count; the devs did not spend development time on Sectoid, Muton, or Viper zombie animation rigs. Alas; a Viper Zombie in particular seems likely to have looked pretty cool.

Also note that the body must in fact be dead. Unconscious bodies are invalid targets: as such, you can selectively choose to KO to deny Necromancers access to Psi Reanimation, or selectively choose to kill to try to bait them into using it.

A pleasant surprise is that if you Puppeteer a Necromancer, the process of it changing sides will kill its Psi Zombies, whether they're switching to your team or from your team. I'd honestly expected the devs to have not considered this scenario; XCOM 2 didn't, after all!

Much like in XCOM 2, Psi Reanimation tends to be a 'dud' action that basically wastes the user's turn since you can just take out (or disable) the user to kill the Psi Zombie as a freebie side effect. (Slightly less so if it's used in the Breach Phase: it's not like Hunkering Down or repositioning is a clearly superior choice, after all)

An edge case worth pointing out is that if a Necromancer raises a Psi Zombie in a mission where enemy forces can flee to the next Encounter, and then the Necromancer successfully flees, the Psi Zombie will actually persist and so you will in fact have to kill it manually. This is noteworthy given that in XCOM 2 Psi Zombies basically never made sense to kill directly; this is still usually true in Chimera Squad, mind, but this edge case is a notable exception!

Outside that edge case, though, Psi Reanimation really is usually no issue: among other points, the Psi Zombie is always placed at the end of the Timeline, and so generally every agent will get a chance to act before the Psi Zombie can do anything.

Contributing to the point is Necromancers themselves; where in XCOM 2 Sectoids were one of the most basic enemies of the game and very durable for such an early enemy, Necromancers are an elite Shrike unit you'll see only rarely, and never very early in a given Investigation. They've at least lost the weakness to melee damage, and their peak HP is slightly higher (12 if in Act 3 and in the upper two difficulties, where Sectoids capped at 10 HP on Legendary difficulty), but overall they tend to not actually soak as much squad attention as Sectoids did in XOM 2's early game... when they bother to show up at all.

Seriously, Necromancers are rare. I'm pretty sure some of my runs never had a Necromancer randomly generate at all!

Spectral Zombie
1 action point: The Necromancer summons two Spectral Zombies adjacent to it. Their turns are placed at the end of the timeline. If the Necromancer dies or is rendered Unconscious, the Spectral Zombies also die.

Yes, the in-game name for this ability is singular even though it summons multiple Spectral Zombies. The devs clearly didn't scrutinize enemy descriptions and whatnot very closely, presumably since Chimera Squad lacks multiplayer and you have exactly one very constrained way of getting to see non-robot enemy abilities. (Verge's Puppeteer)

One thing I'm very grateful for is that while Chimera Squad recycles the sound effect the Warlock used when summoning Spectral Zombies, it's been substantially muffled so as to not be ear-piercing when you have the game at an otherwise-reasonable volume.

Anyway, Spectral Zombie is generally a relief to see a Necromancer use. The Spectral Zombies are always placed at the end of the timeline, die if the Necromancer is killed, and while they can arm themselves and blow up on you in one turn (Unlike the Warlock's Spectral Zombies in XCOM 2, who needed two turns to be able to detonate at their discretion), they're not particularly fast; if the Necromancer is a decent distance away, the Spectral Zombies can be ignored entirely while you focus on more urgent threats.

Do note they're not quite so easy to trivialize as a Psi Zombie, in that it's very specifically the Necromancer's going down that will kill them as a bonus, and not other effects like Stun or Berserk. You need to be specifically confident in your ability to kill/KO the Necromancer quickly to wipe out the Spectral Zombies 'for free'.

Also, I've personally never seen a Necromancer use Psi Reanimation and Spectral Zombie in the same turn, and suspect they do in fact have AI shackles to prevent them from doing so... but Necromancers show up very rarely, so it's entirely possible it's pure luck I've never had this scenario come about. It would be a particularly extreme waste of their turn, mind; that is part of why I'm pretty sure it's an intended limitation. But they might actually be willing to do it in some circumstance anyway.

Anyway, got to cover the units Necromancers can create, so here we go:

Psi Zombie

HP: 8 (+0/+2)

Defense: 10
Aim: 75/75/80/80 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 10
Damage: 2-3 (+1)
Will: 50
Initiative: 30

Alert Actions: N/A

Psi Zombies have no Alert actions, unsurprisingly. Yes, even if a Necromancer animates them during the Breach Phase.

Hardened
Passive: Does not make use of Cover, but does not suffer penalties from being in the open.

Still low-impact within Chimera Squad.

I've actually never managed to test if Necromancer Psi Zombies have immunity to Poison and mental effects like XCOM 2 Psi Zombies. I'd be surprised if they lack those, but I'm not willing to assume they don't, so for the moment I'm not explicitly listing those as abilities on them.

Melee Attack

Turn-ending Action: The Psi Zombie's primary attack is a move-and-melee action.

As with the Gatekeeper's Psi Zombies, I've never seen a Necromancer Psi Zombie do the XCOM 2 derp thing of walking next to someone without bothering to make an attack.

Aside the (unlikely) possibility that Poison immunity and mental immunity didn't carry forward, Psi Zombies largely exist in the same space as they did in XCOM 2: a non-threat you normally ignore, and which isn't much of a problem to deal with even if you do turn explicit attention on it.

Notably, they scale very poorly with Investigation advancement. Act bonuses are largely mild, mind, but Psi Zombies are still at the lower end of the scale, so they won't even become more notable if encountered later.

More distinct from its XCOM 2 counterpart is...

Spectral Zombie

HP: 5 (+0/+2)

Armor: 0
Defense: 10
Dodge: 0
Aim: N/A (Technically identical to Psi Zombies, but they can't use their Aim)
Mobility: 14
Damage: Special
Shred: Special
Will: 50
Initiative: 0

It's interesting to me that Spectral Zombies have 0 Initiative. There's other enemies that never use their Initiative score (Such as the Psi Zombie), but Spectral Zombies are, I'm pretty sure, the only enemy that actually has the entry be a zero per se. I'm kind of curious what the story there is.

Alert Actions: N/A

Just like Psi Zombies, Spectral Zombies never do anything in the Breach Phase, and indeed can never exist in the Breach Phase.

Hardened
Passive: Does not make use of Cover, but does not suffer penalties from being in the open.

This continues to be very mild within Chimera Squad.

Immunities
Passive: Cannot be Poisoned, Burned, or afflicted with Acid.

Just like in XCOM 2, Spectral Zombies can't suffer from damage over time of any sort. The implications are a little different, though, as the Warlock's Spectral Zombies always had one arm itself after it finished shuffling forward post-summoning. As such, in XCOM 2 there was a tiny bit of mercy to these immunities; you weren't going to shoot a Spectral Zombie, leave it on 1 HP, it arm itself, and then unavoidably die where it was on its next turn, potentially killing a civilian or VIP or whatever.

In Chimera Squad, Spectral Zombies don't do anything when first summoned: they don't move, they don't arm themselves. So it's much more difficult to end up in a situation where you'd appreciate them being immune to damage over time effects.

On the other hand, you basically never have cause to shoot Spectral Zombies in Chimera Squad in the first place, since they die when their summoner dies and you can almost always attack the summoner if you can attack any of the Spectral Zombies. So it's largely moot.

I assume Spectral Zombies would persist if their summoner successfully flees the room, just like Psi Zombies, but Spectral Zombies are so frail they'd generally go down in one hit regardless. So seriously, the immunities are actually largely irrelevant.

Nanomedikit Heal

Free Action: The Spectral Zombie may heal a single adjacent organic ally for 6 HP one time, clearing all damage over time effects in the process.

No, I have no idea why Spectral Zombies get built-in Medikits. I assume it's not intentional. It's not as if they use the ability when under AI control, for one. In the event you Puppeteer a Necromancer, it means you can potentially heal somebody for free, I guess...

I'm very curious how this particular oddity occurred. It looks so random from where I stand; I can't really come up with an even halfway-decent theory as to what happened.

Spectral Rupture

Free Action: The Spectral Zombie 'arms' itself. It will now explode for 2-3 damage and 2 Shred up to two tiles out from its position when killed. Additionally, it can choose to detonate itself anywhere in its movement range for the same result, killing itself.

Where the Warlock's Spectral Zombies gave you a grace period of one turn to respond to them before they started blowing up on your guys, a Necromancer's Spectral Zombies will immediately detonate on someone if they get a turn while in charging range. And since Spectral Rupture doesn't even cost an action point to activate and Spectral Zombies have an unexpectedly high Mobility of 14, their charge range is a lot larger than you're liable to intuit!

That said, on larger maps it's still entirely possible for them to need a turn -or two!- to get in range, and it usually doesn't matter at all because you just kill their animating Necromancer and they go away without a chance to act.

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Aesthetically, Necromancers are a bit clunky because the general Shrike style by default heavily hides the ways Sectoids differ from humans (or hybrids, for that matter), and so understandably Chimera Squad has Necromancers probably the least Shrike-y of the Shrike units; exposed arms, fingerless gloves, and the helmet is the only evidence of serious armor on their frame, with the helmet itself clearly conforming pretty tightly to the Sectoid skull shape. In conjunction with the game never pointing out things like the factional icons being used in-game for different unit types, it's easy to not realize Necromancers are Shrike units -I spent my first three or so runs thinking they were Grey Phoenix units!

The game probably should've had more confidence in the animation and audio elements: a first-time player might look at a Necromancer and spend part of a Round thinking it's another human/hybrid unit, but such a misunderstanding isn't liable to last long, as Necromancers use all the Sectoid animations and audio. Shooting a Necromancer and having them do the Sectoid hiss at their tormenter will communicate their species pretty clearly, for example, and even their idle animations are recognizably Sectoid animations. It's the faction stuff that is easy to overlook, not the species stuff.

Narratively, Necromancers are interesting to me mostly for the part where they swap out Mindspin for the ability to summon Spectral Zombies. I'd honestly assumed the Warlock's kit was going to stay proprietary to him for the rest of the series even if narrative elements came along that would make it natural for other people to use the Warlock's abilities: Video Game Boss Characters tend to have their unique abilities stay unique to them even when it doesn't make narrative sense and also even when they have at least one capability that could be very interesting in the hands of a regular enemy.

It actually has me wondering if the devs are thinking at all in the direction of an XCOM 3 playable Sectoid ability set borrowing from the Warlock a bit more generally. (eg getting a derivation of Mind Scorch) I'd certainly hope XCOM 3 would try to make Sectoids have their own cool kit distinct from human psi characters (even though the narrative elements seem to point in the direction of 'all psi-capable species have at least theoretical access to the same capabilities'), and it would make a kind of sense to recycle some of the Warlock's kit given he presumably won't come back and it would pull double-duty by helping start up possible ideas for a Sectoid kit. (That is, XCOM 3 could look at stuff like Spectral Zombies/Lancers and Mind Scorch, and come up with new abilities that feel 'related' to these: other Spectral summons, maybe, or new mental assault abilities, or whatever)

I'm wondering this in part because it seems unlikely the Void beings the Ethereals fear will be a natural base for such recycling, to be clear.

Regardless, it's certainly clear evidence of the devs considering it appropriate to pass out other psionic abilities to Sectoids, whatever the exact details of a future game execution might look like. I'd wondered, before playing Chimera Squad, if later games were going to stick stringently to Sectoids being bad at psionic abilities the way their XCOM 2 animations suggested, and it's noteworthy to see evidence to the contrary.

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Next time, we cover Shrike's Viper unit, the Cobra.

See you then.