Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Shrike Bomber

HP: 6/7/7/8 (+1/+4)

Armor: 1 (+0/+1)
Aim: 75/75/80/80 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 10
Damage: 5-6 (+0/+1)
Will: 50 (+10/+20)
Initiative: 30

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

Bombers have an Interesting Action I sort of wish had been made to work with the Alert system, but it is a damaging action and Chimera Squad is pretty clearly philosophically committed to Alert actions never being capable of causing harm to the player's squad.

So Bombers end up bland in the Breach Phase. Alas.

Blast Padding

Passive: Explosives do only 1/3rd base damage to the Bomber.

I like the flavor here, where a familiar Grenadier ability is being found on a sort of Muton Grenadier unit. They even have a point of Armor innately, like Blast Padding provides in XCOM 2!

Unfortunately, it's undermined pretty heavily by Chimera Squad's approach to explosives; there's nothing comparable to the Rocket Launcher or Blaster Launcher, the Plasma Grenade is the only example of a 'second-tier' grenade, and Chimera Squad has broadly kept explosive damage low. In XCOM 2, an enemy shaving off 2/3rds of explosive damage would potentially give it impressive resistance to even endgame squads relying on explosives; in Chimera Squad, explosive damage is largely so low that the Bomber's innate Armor would often already reduce a given explosive attack to 1 point of damage, especially in Act 3 where they pick up a second point.

It does make them meaningfully resistant to sustained explosive use, but if you're not using Claymore this can easily be irrelevant, given how explosive Items aren't a given in Chimera Squad, the small squad size means you can only bring in 4 explosives total if you don't have Claymore, and that the mechanics are such that (outside Claymore) you don't have much cause to stack explosives onto a specific target.

At least Claymore hates fighting them pretty reliably?

Melee Strike

Turn-ending action: A move-and-melee attack that does 4 (+1/+2) damage, using base Aim.

I don't often see Bombers use this, which is good given that their Shotgun always has better damage; Melee Strike is primarily useful for smacking a target that's in Cover they can't just flank, or at least can't flank while also tossing...

Delayed Plasma Grenade

1 action point: Lobs an explosive to a designated location within ? tiles, The explosive will detonate for 3-4 damage and 1 Shred within 2 tiles either when attacked, or after its own turn arrives, with its turn being placed three slots after the Bomber's current turn. 1 charge.

... this.

Like your own explosives, but unlike the vast majority of damage sources in Chimera Squad, Delayed Plasma Grenade doesn't use the default +1 damage roll of 50%, but instead uses the standard explosive damage roll of a 20% chance to add +1 damage.

Also, notice that Bombers can theoretically throw a Delayed Plasma Grenade, then immediately shoot it to do guaranteed damage immediately. I've personally never seen a Bomber do this and suspect they have AI shackles to dissuade them from doing it, but for one thing it makes them surprisingly nice Puppeteer targets. I'm also not willing to declare that they definitely have such an AI shackle; it's entirely possible they don't and I've just been lucky... or that they do, but some edge case I haven't stumbled into can result in them ignoring the shackle and doing it anyway.

All that said, Delayed Plasma Grenade is kind of a mixed bag, in that it can be very, very dangerous for the player, but it can also backfire horribly for the AI. Importantly, the AI isn't very smart about tossing the grenade, nor about maneuvering around it; Bombers will happily toss the grenade at your agent who is about to get their turn and so will trivially escape, and indeed Bombers don't seem to make any particular attempt to avoid having friendlies nearby the grenade at toss. Similarly, other enemies that manage to get a turn before the grenade detonates have no concept that the area around it is dangerous and will blithely roll right into the blast radius -even if the grenade's turn is right after theirs.

So... sometimes a Bomber will toss the grenade at someone who won't naturally get a turn before the grenade, requiring you to spend your Team Up charge or gift the victim action points or otherwise have somebody else do something special to save them, with this translating to unavoidable damage if you don't have any such options at hand, and it's very dangerous!

But other times it will kill one of its buddies for you with zero real threat to anyone in your squad.

Oops.

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Narratively, Bombers are yet another enemy with nothing to really work with...

... but to be fair, they're pretty naturally building on how Mutons have been something of a grenade specialist throughout these games, even all the way back to the original X-COM game. The only weirdness in this regard is the switch to delayed Plasma Grenades over instant-boom versions, and it's pretty obvious this is Chimera Squad experimenting with the potential of its Timeline system; in 'reality', I'd assume the Bombers are tossing exactly the same Plasma Grenades XCOM 2 Mutons use. So it's not like this really requires explanation in real terms.

Aesthetically, the Bomber is a fairly straightforward application of the Shrike aesthetic to a Muton frame. I like it, to be clear, but it doesn't give me a lot in terms of specifics to comment on. The most interesting element to me is the part where their helmet appears to have an integrated rebreather unit; Chimera Squad largely just ignores the fact that Mutons in the prior entries wore rebreathers, as far as I'm aware offering no explanation for why this was so, so it's a bit surprising that the Bomber is an exception.

I'm not sure this is strongly meaningful, mind, as the config file organization suggests Shrike was broadly decided on first; I wouldn't be surprised if the Bomber was simply one of the first designs pinned down, and specifically that decisions like 'slugman-head with cow-teeth' came after the Bomber model was made by the team, or something along those lines. The helmet would work just as well for the XCOM 2 Muton design as for the Chimera Squad design, after all.

But for one thing I'm curious if later entries will return to the topic and make something of interest of this oddity.

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Next time, we wrap up Shrike with significant spoilers.

See you then.