Chimera Squad Agent Analysis: Blueblood
He's also the agent where it's really relevant that Pistols are no longer operating on the Short range; as we'll be seeing, Blueblood is actually oriented toward taking relatively long-range shots with his Pistol, which would be quite difficult to make work if Pistols still used the Short range profile.
Base Stats
7 HP (9 on the lowest difficulty)
75 Aim (80 on the lowest difficulty)
11 Mobility
40 Will (50 on the lowest difficulty)
10 innate Crit chance (20 on the lowest difficulty)
Additionally, the easiest difficulty provides +15 passive crit chance, raises the crit chance bonus from a flank to +40 instead of +33, and provides a passive +5 Defense.
Blueblood is your most accurate agent out the box, has the unusual distinction of an innate crit chance, and above-average Mobility, but below-average HP. Overall this is quite a nice trade, but the fragility does mean you should be careful with him, especially if he's part of your initial squad and so has to go into a few missions with that low 7 HP. If your entire initial squad is made of the agents with average-to-below-average durability, the early game can go very wrong surprisingly readily, for example.
Possible Scars
Jittery: -30 Aim
Blunted: -15 Crit chance
Sluggish: -15 Dodge
Sluggish is, as always, pretty ignorable, while Jittery is devastating; Blueblood has exactly 1 non-Subdue option for ignoring Aim, and he can't use it often. (Also, it's not very good) Blunted is also surprisingly harmful; Blueblood is the agent who cares most about crits, so while -15 Crit chance is impossible to tell whether it mattered in any given case, it does actually drag down Blueblood's performance by a noticeable amount on average. Certainly, since he has an innate crit chance, you can say with confidence that anytime he did crit and wasn't flanking or otherwise getting a crit boost that Blunted would've taken that crit away from you if he'd had it.
Base Abilities
Subdue
Desperado
Passive: Firing the Pistol spends 1 action point and doesn't necessarily end Blueblood's turn.
Note that Blueblood is barred the Reflex Grip Weapon Attachment, for the obvious reason that it's worthless to him given it's just Desperado in Weapon Attachment form.
Furthermore, -15% Aim is a lot easier to overcome as a penalty, and Blueblood's primary weapon gets an innate Aim boost from closing instead of Aim penalties based on distance. A Sharpshooter required an utterly unreasonable amount of Aim boosting to reach the point of Deadeye being a guaranteed hit on targets in the open that had no innate Defense, let alone a guaranteed hit on anything more challenging. (Specifically, they needed to get to at least 134 base Aim, and had to worry about accuracy penalties for being too close or too far) Blueblood just needs high ground, a clean shot, and a Superior Scope, or to get in the target's face with a clean shot and a Superior Scope, while having some levels under his belt either way. (More precisely, he just needs 118 base Aim; that's 16 less Aim needed than in XCOM 2, and since Blueblood doesn't suffer accuracy penalties for being too close or too far there's no qualifiers to raise the needed number) So even though Blueblood actually has less ability to boost his Aim than a Sharpshooter did (Aim PCSes don't exist or have an equivalent in Chimera Squad, for one), it's much more realistic for him to have things line up so he can guarantee a Deadeye shot will hit.
Also helping is that small amounts of Armor are actually spread around more in Chimera Squad. A fair few enemies have at least 1 point of Armor by the end of the game, and crucially High Cover effectively provides a point of Armor against attacks, ensuring any enemy that uses Cover can potentially be benefiting from Armor. If you're considering taking a chancy shot at 65% accuracy on a target in High Cover, a lot of the time you might as well Deadeye it so that it will actually do respectable damage if it does hit. Since Deadeye modifies damage before Armor gets accounted for, its +50% boost is often effectively more than a 50% increase in final damage; eg if the target has a point of Armor and is in High Cover, and we just ignore damage variance for a moment and call your base damage 4, Deadeye raising that to a 6 is actually raising your final damage from 2 to 4 -twice as much damage, not 50% more. This was true in XCOM 2 as well, but it didn't help much because Shred was extremely easy to come by, there was no source of Armor you couldn't Shred (Where in Chimera Squad you can't Shred High Cover-derived Armor, and for various reasons can't count on being able to smash the Cover), and on top of all that it was a Sniper Rifle skill in a game where Sniper Rifles are underwhelming and attached to a class that would much rather use their Pistols.
And of course thanks to Desperado Blueblood's version doesn't necessarily end the turn, allowing him to do stuff like take a somewhat chancy Deadeye shot and then decide what to do based on whether it hit or not. That's actually fairly significant, making it a lot easier to justify a gamble. Also related is the change in turn mechanics; part of the problem in XCOM 2 is that you want, and can largely consistently arrange, to kill everything without ever giving it a chance to move. You want the sure thing, and if you expect to reliably stomp everything before it moves there's no incentive to gamble for more damage even if you have the wiggle room to accept a miss.
Whereas in Chimera Squad, while the goal is to down enemies so they don't get turns in a given Round, you can't consistently arrange for everything to die before it acts, and furthermore active Items are always completely free to use aside their limited charges. Which is to say that, firstly, taking a gamble to try to kill a target is actually worthwhile because no you can't basically-always for-sure count on someone else following up on a more reliable action to finish the target before it can act, but also secondly if Deadeye misses you can sigh and have Blueblood toss a grenade or the like to resolve the situation, where the point of gambling on Deadeye was to hopefully avoid using a valuable resource that might be appreciated in a later Encounter, which you then promptly use if the gamble fails. That's exactly the kind of situation in which taking gambles makes actual sense, where failure is acceptable because you have a fallback plan that will work but that you'd also rather not have to turn to, and success is also still an improvement because you save limited resources if your gamble pays off.
Bizarrely, while this ignores most Weapon Attachments, if Blueblood is equipped with a Targeting System Lancer Shot will, in fact, apply Holo Targeting.
The Lancer Pistol is Blueblood's not-clearly-explained hidden secondary weapon, which is almost the same thing as him just firing his regular Pistol, but not quite.
Like his regular Pistol, it benefits from upgrading Pistols (Including picking up a point of Shred at Mastercrafted) and has the same base damage as his regular Pistol, and so unlike several Breach actions this does actually roughly keep up as technology improves and whatnot. This may give one the impression that it's just Blueblood firing his regular Pistol in a secondary mode or something, and certainly that would've been the sensible thing for the game to do.
Instead, however, it's a special secondary weapon he inexplicably refuses to use most of the time, in a game that otherwise doesn't do secondary weapons. And then unlike Sharpshooter Pistols, it doesn't benefit from equipped Ammo, bafflingly. Nor (most) Weapon Attachments. Among other points, if you equip Blueblood with a Superior Scope and an Ammo Item, Lancer Shot is only maybe worth considering on a target in High Cover; against a Low Cover target, a regular shot will be only 5% less accurate, while doing more damage and getting a useful side effect like Poisoning the target.
Phase Lance never completely loses relevance, mind. The ability to force damage through 100% reliably can be a life-saver, and High Cover is generally pretty prolific in Chimera Squad while your ability to boost agent accuracy is a bit limited. In conjunction with the Timeline mechanics, you can't necessarily count on another agent to take out a target before it acts, and you can't default to assuming another agent will blast the target's Cover for Blueblood before he takes the shot the way you could in XCOM 2.
Note that Faceoff can trigger Fond Farewell. You have absolutely no control over Blueblood's targeting order past the initial target so this isn't something you can really plan around, but it does make Fond Farewell's anti-synergy with Warm Welcome slightly less frustrating.
On a more aesthetic note, it's worth pointing out that Faceoff completely skips the charge period of Beam Pistol animations, making it quicker to resolve when equipped with an Epic Pistol than you might intuitively expect. This is actually kind of frustrating, as it shows that the Beam Pistol animation is pretty satisfying if the charge portion of the animation isn't present, yet in XCOM 2 and continuing into Chimera Squad the default remains to keep that awful charge period. I really don't get this decision.
Final Training: Unlock Quick Reload.
Quick Reload
Passive: Reloading no longer costs action points.
This is why Warm Welcome and Fond Farewell are actively anti-synergistic for Blueblood. Reloads are free!
The thing that makes me cringe is that the developers probably thought Quick Reload was a good fit to Fond Farewell. And it is, just not simultaneously to Warm Welcome; being able to fire the last shot in a clip and then just reload without spending action points is a nice synergy, making it so that Blueblood can just spend ammo freely to set up for Fond Farewell without worrying about it interfering with his ability to shoot on a later turn, which is actually relevant in Encounters where you're supposed to hang around fending off a limited number of reinforcement waves.
Base Stats
7 HP (9 on the lowest difficulty)
75 Aim (80 on the lowest difficulty)
11 Mobility
40 Will (50 on the lowest difficulty)
10 innate Crit chance (20 on the lowest difficulty)
Additionally, the easiest difficulty provides +15 passive crit chance, raises the crit chance bonus from a flank to +40 instead of +33, and provides a passive +5 Defense.
Blueblood is your most accurate agent out the box, has the unusual distinction of an innate crit chance, and above-average Mobility, but below-average HP. Overall this is quite a nice trade, but the fragility does mean you should be careful with him, especially if he's part of your initial squad and so has to go into a few missions with that low 7 HP. If your entire initial squad is made of the agents with average-to-below-average durability, the early game can go very wrong surprisingly readily, for example.
Possible Scars
Jittery: -30 Aim
Blunted: -15 Crit chance
Sluggish: -15 Dodge
Sluggish is, as always, pretty ignorable, while Jittery is devastating; Blueblood has exactly 1 non-Subdue option for ignoring Aim, and he can't use it often. (Also, it's not very good) Blunted is also surprisingly harmful; Blueblood is the agent who cares most about crits, so while -15 Crit chance is impossible to tell whether it mattered in any given case, it does actually drag down Blueblood's performance by a noticeable amount on average. Certainly, since he has an innate crit chance, you can say with confidence that anytime he did crit and wasn't flanking or otherwise getting a crit boost that Blunted would've taken that crit away from you if he'd had it.
Base Abilities
SubdueTurn-ending action: A move-and-melee attack that does 2-3 damage to the target, ignoring Armor and with no chance to miss. If the target is reduced to 0 HP by Subdue, they're knocked Unconscious instead of killed. Some targets cannot be Subdued.
At a baseline level, Blueblood's access to Subdue is low-value, especially if you make a point of getting Tranq Rounds as fast as possible, but it can get more relevant later depending on your level-up choices, and even if you don't take the relevant skill Blueblood is sufficiently ammo-hungry that it's worth considering Subduing just to extend his ammo in any Encounter that involves enemy reinforcements. (Well, until late in a run, but we'll get to that)
And of course the fact that it ignores Armor and can't miss means you should never completely forget about it; especially early in the game it can be cleanly better than a Pistol shot just due to an enemy being in High Cover. With some agents I might say 'but if they're in Subdue range, they're probably in range to be flanked', but in Blueblood's case we have to keep in mind...
DesperadoPassive: Firing the Pistol spends 1 action point and doesn't necessarily end Blueblood's turn.
Note that Blueblood is barred the Reflex Grip Weapon Attachment, for the obvious reason that it's worthless to him given it's just Desperado in Weapon Attachment form.
This is, of course, why Blueblood appreciates Pistols no longer being strictly close-quarters weapons: because he's designed to mostly sit still and spam shots. It's also why 'just flank that Subduable target' isn't a strong counterpoint; Blueblood will often want to spend his first action point on taking a shot, not on movement.
This is also a clear example of a broader trend with Blueblood; that he's actually Chimera Squad's idea of a Sniper or Sharpshooter, just embracing the Pistol specialization aspect and ditching the Sniper Rifle. Yeah it's not named Quickdraw, but this is clearly hearkening back to Quickdraw on Sharpshooters, and it gets even more obvious when looking at Blueblood's other abilities -like the next one, for example.
Deadeye
1 action point: Blueblood fires his Pistol as normal, except the final Aim value is reduced by 15% while the damage is raised by 50%, rounding down at each end. No cooldown or other limits.
It's the return of Deadeye, only now it's... actually pretty good? No, really!
Deadeye1 action point: Blueblood fires his Pistol as normal, except the final Aim value is reduced by 15% while the damage is raised by 50%, rounding down at each end. No cooldown or other limits.
It's the return of Deadeye, only now it's... actually pretty good? No, really!
I mean, just making it an innate ability instead of 'pick Deadeye or pick the thing that blows it out of the water' is a big part of that (I've previously noted that Deadeye is actually much more useful on Rangers who get it as a bonus skill than on Sharpshooters, where it escapes exactly this problem), but it also helps a lot that the Aim penalty has been reduced. -25% Aim for +50% damage was, on average, an increase in expected damage of 12.5%, which was honestly pretty sad. -15% Aim for +50% damage is still a gambling action, but is +27.5% average expected damage, which isn't so readily drowned out by things like damage variance.
Furthermore, -15% Aim is a lot easier to overcome as a penalty, and Blueblood's primary weapon gets an innate Aim boost from closing instead of Aim penalties based on distance. A Sharpshooter required an utterly unreasonable amount of Aim boosting to reach the point of Deadeye being a guaranteed hit on targets in the open that had no innate Defense, let alone a guaranteed hit on anything more challenging. (Specifically, they needed to get to at least 134 base Aim, and had to worry about accuracy penalties for being too close or too far) Blueblood just needs high ground, a clean shot, and a Superior Scope, or to get in the target's face with a clean shot and a Superior Scope, while having some levels under his belt either way. (More precisely, he just needs 118 base Aim; that's 16 less Aim needed than in XCOM 2, and since Blueblood doesn't suffer accuracy penalties for being too close or too far there's no qualifiers to raise the needed number) So even though Blueblood actually has less ability to boost his Aim than a Sharpshooter did (Aim PCSes don't exist or have an equivalent in Chimera Squad, for one), it's much more realistic for him to have things line up so he can guarantee a Deadeye shot will hit.
Also helping is that small amounts of Armor are actually spread around more in Chimera Squad. A fair few enemies have at least 1 point of Armor by the end of the game, and crucially High Cover effectively provides a point of Armor against attacks, ensuring any enemy that uses Cover can potentially be benefiting from Armor. If you're considering taking a chancy shot at 65% accuracy on a target in High Cover, a lot of the time you might as well Deadeye it so that it will actually do respectable damage if it does hit. Since Deadeye modifies damage before Armor gets accounted for, its +50% boost is often effectively more than a 50% increase in final damage; eg if the target has a point of Armor and is in High Cover, and we just ignore damage variance for a moment and call your base damage 4, Deadeye raising that to a 6 is actually raising your final damage from 2 to 4 -twice as much damage, not 50% more. This was true in XCOM 2 as well, but it didn't help much because Shred was extremely easy to come by, there was no source of Armor you couldn't Shred (Where in Chimera Squad you can't Shred High Cover-derived Armor, and for various reasons can't count on being able to smash the Cover), and on top of all that it was a Sniper Rifle skill in a game where Sniper Rifles are underwhelming and attached to a class that would much rather use their Pistols.
And of course thanks to Desperado Blueblood's version doesn't necessarily end the turn, allowing him to do stuff like take a somewhat chancy Deadeye shot and then decide what to do based on whether it hit or not. That's actually fairly significant, making it a lot easier to justify a gamble. Also related is the change in turn mechanics; part of the problem in XCOM 2 is that you want, and can largely consistently arrange, to kill everything without ever giving it a chance to move. You want the sure thing, and if you expect to reliably stomp everything before it moves there's no incentive to gamble for more damage even if you have the wiggle room to accept a miss.
Whereas in Chimera Squad, while the goal is to down enemies so they don't get turns in a given Round, you can't consistently arrange for everything to die before it acts, and furthermore active Items are always completely free to use aside their limited charges. Which is to say that, firstly, taking a gamble to try to kill a target is actually worthwhile because no you can't basically-always for-sure count on someone else following up on a more reliable action to finish the target before it can act, but also secondly if Deadeye misses you can sigh and have Blueblood toss a grenade or the like to resolve the situation, where the point of gambling on Deadeye was to hopefully avoid using a valuable resource that might be appreciated in a later Encounter, which you then promptly use if the gamble fails. That's exactly the kind of situation in which taking gambles makes actual sense, where failure is acceptable because you have a fallback plan that will work but that you'd also rather not have to turn to, and success is also still an improvement because you save limited resources if your gamble pays off.
Also helping is that Chimera Squad's tuning is pretty decent about giving Deadeye opportunities to matter. Part of why Deadeye underwhelmed in XCOM 2 was that even if you took it, often the numbers lined up so they didn't change anything -that a regular Sniper Rifle shot and a Deadeye shot would both result in 'and then another soldier follows up and actually finishes the target', at which point why bother on the gamble? Whereas in Chimera Squad I regularly find that Blueblood can potentially be more action-efficient if a Deadeye shot works out; that it will finish a target Blueblood would otherwise have to shoot twice to take out.
Which itself touches on another way in which the context shift helps it; it's not unusual for Blueblood to be in a situation where he can't reliably hit his preferred target with a regular shot anyway. In conjunction with the prior point, as well as the reduction in how severe the accuracy penalty is, it's actually pretty readily the case that taking Deadeye shots is a reduction in risk compared to taking regular shots, unlike in XCOM 2 where it was far more likely a Deadeye shot was adding a miss chance to what would otherwise be a sure thing.
Low-accuracy shots are particularly easy to explain here. Say Blueblood has a 50% chance to hit a target, because you're early in the game and the target is in High Cover and so on, and we'll say that two regular shots will down the target but also one Deadeye shot will down the target. (Which absolutely does happen in real play, to be clear) In that case, Deadeye lowers the chance of success from 50% to 42% (42.5 is 85% of 50, and the game rounds down), which is bad, except actually the odds that both regular shots would hit is 50% of 50%, meaning 25%; a 42% chance to take the target out in one hit is a far sight better than a 25% chance to take them out with two shots!
But even at higher accuracy this still functionally holds true, just in a more roundabout way. Say Blueblood instead has a base 90% chance to hit a target, and once again two regular shots will down the target and one Deadeye shot will down it; both regular shots hitting has an 81% chance of happening, while the one Deadeye shot hitting has a 76% chance of hitting, which is just worse... except wait, if the first Deadeye shot misses, you can just Deadeye again. The odds that at least one Deadeye shot hits is 94.25% in that situation, which is noticeably better than the odds that both non-Deadeye shots hit!
So very often when Deadeye is meaningfully more action-efficient if it succeeds than a regular shot, it's also actually less of a gamble to go for Deadeyes than for regular shots.
It's also worth pointing out that a Deadeye shot starts out hitting exactly as hard as a Shotgun, and will actually pull ahead as your technology improves. And since Shotguns suffer Aim penalties at long ranges, Deadeye shots really are just better than Shotgun shots at a distance!
It's also worth pointing out that a Deadeye shot starts out hitting exactly as hard as a Shotgun, and will actually pull ahead as your technology improves. And since Shotguns suffer Aim penalties at long ranges, Deadeye shots really are just better than Shotgun shots at a distance!
This also has the odd implication that Blueblood is actually one of your better Agents at beating high Armor, especially in conjunction with Mastercrafted weapons always providing 1 Shred per shot, making Blueblood's shot-spam one of your better tools for removing Armor. In practice this isn't hugely significant, as enemies only rarely stray above 2 Armor, even when you're late in a run that's on the highest difficulty, but it's still a bit of a surprise given Blueblood is pretty much a Pistol Sharpshooter made into its own class and they were quite bad against Armored targets.
You shouldn't literally mindlessly spam Deadeye -for one thing, if a successful regular shot will always down your target anyway you're just increasing your chance of missing for no benefit- but it's very much a useful tool in Blueblood's arsenal, to a rather surprising extent given it's the return of one of XCOM 2's least useful skills. It's a pleasant surprise!
Deputy Agent
+2 Aim
Yes, Blueblood has depressed Aim growth. His innate Aim advantage is significant enough he'll still always have more Aim at a given level than other agents, but it's still a bit surprising given Blueblood is clearly a continuation of the Sniper-Sharpshooter line and both those classes had the highest base Aim of their games and the highest Aim growth.
It's also slightly janky if you're playing on the lowest difficulty, where everybody else gets +10 Aim and Blueblood only gets +5, allowing eg Godmother to actually pull ahead of him in Aim. Oops.
Lancer Shot
Breach action: Blueblood fires his Lancer Pistol at a target, which ignores Cover bonuses but does not benefit from Ammo Items or (most) Weapon Attachments.
Deputy Agent
+2 Aim
Yes, Blueblood has depressed Aim growth. His innate Aim advantage is significant enough he'll still always have more Aim at a given level than other agents, but it's still a bit surprising given Blueblood is clearly a continuation of the Sniper-Sharpshooter line and both those classes had the highest base Aim of their games and the highest Aim growth.
It's also slightly janky if you're playing on the lowest difficulty, where everybody else gets +10 Aim and Blueblood only gets +5, allowing eg Godmother to actually pull ahead of him in Aim. Oops.
Lancer ShotBreach action: Blueblood fires his Lancer Pistol at a target, which ignores Cover bonuses but does not benefit from Ammo Items or (most) Weapon Attachments.
Bizarrely, while this ignores most Weapon Attachments, if Blueblood is equipped with a Targeting System Lancer Shot will, in fact, apply Holo Targeting.
The Lancer Pistol is Blueblood's not-clearly-explained hidden secondary weapon, which is almost the same thing as him just firing his regular Pistol, but not quite.
Like his regular Pistol, it benefits from upgrading Pistols (Including picking up a point of Shred at Mastercrafted) and has the same base damage as his regular Pistol, and so unlike several Breach actions this does actually roughly keep up as technology improves and whatnot. This may give one the impression that it's just Blueblood firing his regular Pistol in a secondary mode or something, and certainly that would've been the sensible thing for the game to do.
Instead, however, it's a special secondary weapon he inexplicably refuses to use most of the time, in a game that otherwise doesn't do secondary weapons. And then unlike Sharpshooter Pistols, it doesn't benefit from equipped Ammo, bafflingly. Nor (most) Weapon Attachments. Among other points, if you equip Blueblood with a Superior Scope and an Ammo Item, Lancer Shot is only maybe worth considering on a target in High Cover; against a Low Cover target, a regular shot will be only 5% less accurate, while doing more damage and getting a useful side effect like Poisoning the target.
And even against a target in High Cover, Lancer Shot doesn't ignore the Armor units get from High Cover...
So actually Lancer Shot is merely less bad about falling behind in the late game than eg Toxic Greeting. It still does so, just less dramatically. And in some ways it's worse of a dropoff in practice, since it doesn't have special behaviors to give it clear niches; Toxic Greeting can justify itself in a given situation by applying Poison and/or by ignoring Armor. Lancer Shot is more accurate against targets in Cover, but is otherwise just 'a regular Breach shot, but worse'.
Seriously, why isn't this just a special shot from Blueblood's regular Pistol? (It should be pointed out the icon isn't even depicting his Lancer Pistol, but rather is depicting a regular Pistol, for extra weird) And why can he only do this in the Breach phase, anyway? Why isn't this a generic ability I can use anytime, just with a cooldown or high ammo cost or limited charges or whatever?
I mean, Breach actions are inherently somewhat arbitrary, but Lancer Shot stands out as particularly bizarre to have been put in this framework.
So actually Lancer Shot is merely less bad about falling behind in the late game than eg Toxic Greeting. It still does so, just less dramatically. And in some ways it's worse of a dropoff in practice, since it doesn't have special behaviors to give it clear niches; Toxic Greeting can justify itself in a given situation by applying Poison and/or by ignoring Armor. Lancer Shot is more accurate against targets in Cover, but is otherwise just 'a regular Breach shot, but worse'.
Seriously, why isn't this just a special shot from Blueblood's regular Pistol? (It should be pointed out the icon isn't even depicting his Lancer Pistol, but rather is depicting a regular Pistol, for extra weird) And why can he only do this in the Breach phase, anyway? Why isn't this a generic ability I can use anytime, just with a cooldown or high ammo cost or limited charges or whatever?
I mean, Breach actions are inherently somewhat arbitrary, but Lancer Shot stands out as particularly bizarre to have been put in this framework.
Ultimately Blueblood is sufficiently powerful overall this isn't a severe detriment to him, honestly, but Lancer Shot is one of Chimera Squad's more poorly-designed skills, and it's pretty confusing the nature of its problems. I can follow the logic chain in how, for example, Chimera Squad has a bunch of skills not conceptually tied to the primary weapon that tend to fall off as the game progresses, but I really don't understand what kind of thought process would seem sensible in the moment to arrive at Lancer Shot's problems.
Basic Training: +2 HP.
Blueblood can often get away with being the last agent to get this, assuming your squad includes people like Axiom or Godmother who tend to draw more attention, but his poor base durability means this is, as always, pretty important to get online reasonably quickly.
Field Agent
+2 Aim
Warm Welcome
Passive: The first shot in each clip Disorients the target for 1 turn, even if it misses.
OR
Ever Vigilant
Passive: Blueblood automatically enters Overwatch if his last action point was spent on an action that involved movement.
Basic Training: +2 HP.
Blueblood can often get away with being the last agent to get this, assuming your squad includes people like Axiom or Godmother who tend to draw more attention, but his poor base durability means this is, as always, pretty important to get online reasonably quickly.
Field Agent
+2 Aim
Warm WelcomePassive: The first shot in each clip Disorients the target for 1 turn, even if it misses.
OR
Ever VigilantPassive: Blueblood automatically enters Overwatch if his last action point was spent on an action that involved movement.
It's poor visual communication that Warm Welcome's icon is basically Combat Protocol's visual format using Stasis' icon instead of a Gremlin, when Warm Welcome is not guaranteed damage, doesn't help you ignore Armor, isn't anti-robot, and most certainly isn't inflicting Stasis. One of Chimera Squad's stranger missteps.
Anyway, it's easy to get confused and think Warm Welcome is the first shot in a turn or something, but no, it's the first shot in a clip. Among other points, it, somewhat frustratingly, won't trigger in the Breach phase because that doesn't use ammo, and it means that unless you have Blueblood reload he's not going to get to trigger it more than once in a given Encounter.
Worse, Caustic Rounds and Bluescreen Rounds will make Blueblood glitchy about ammo expenditure, failing to visualize ammo usage initially, and if this glitch occurs it actually prevents Warm Welcome from triggering!
Anyway, it's easy to get confused and think Warm Welcome is the first shot in a turn or something, but no, it's the first shot in a clip. Among other points, it, somewhat frustratingly, won't trigger in the Breach phase because that doesn't use ammo, and it means that unless you have Blueblood reload he's not going to get to trigger it more than once in a given Encounter.
Worse, Caustic Rounds and Bluescreen Rounds will make Blueblood glitchy about ammo expenditure, failing to visualize ammo usage initially, and if this glitch occurs it actually prevents Warm Welcome from triggering!
As such, Warm Welcome is noticeably worse than it first looks, and I personally have difficulty justifying taking it for any reason except varying my runs.
If you are going to take it, keep in mind Auto-Loaders can let you trigger it more consistently, particularly if you've got a Superior Auto-Loader and are in a short mission where 3 reloads is severe overkill.
Warm Welcome does hold up a bit better later in the game thanks to Blueblood's ultimate Training skill, but this comes with the qualifier that Blueblood is, later in the game, extraordinarily good at just making enemies dead, at which point inflicting Disorientation isn't doing anything.
Ever Vigilant, meanwhile, is amazing, since it triggers even on Subdue, letting you achieve incredible action efficiency with Blueblood. And remember: in Chimera Squad, there is no accuracy penalty on Overwatch shots, so having Blueblood take a shot and then move is, if he has Ever Vigilant, potentially basically superior to just shooting twice. (eg if the move gets Blueblood flanking an enemy who is about to act) Especially because Ever Vigilant's Overwatch behaves more like Overwatch did in the prior games; it's not a cone you target, or even a small area of effect centered on Blueblood like you see on enemy Gunslingers, it's just 'if an enemy moves while Blueblood can see them, he shoots at them'.
Ever Vigilant, meanwhile, is amazing, since it triggers even on Subdue, letting you achieve incredible action efficiency with Blueblood. And remember: in Chimera Squad, there is no accuracy penalty on Overwatch shots, so having Blueblood take a shot and then move is, if he has Ever Vigilant, potentially basically superior to just shooting twice. (eg if the move gets Blueblood flanking an enemy who is about to act) Especially because Ever Vigilant's Overwatch behaves more like Overwatch did in the prior games; it's not a cone you target, or even a small area of effect centered on Blueblood like you see on enemy Gunslingers, it's just 'if an enemy moves while Blueblood can see them, he shoots at them'.
I like the idea of Warm Welcome, given for one thing it triggers completely reliably if we ignore the Caustic Rounds/Bluescreen Rounds bug, but in practice Ever Vigilant is probably just plain the better choice. Ever Vigilant provides an incredibly versatile amount of utility, can be benefitted from turn after turn, and never stops being relevant. Warm Welcome's only point of significance is that some enemies are both tough to down and have significant abilities you'd like to be able to disable, like Sacred Coil's Guardians, and that's... not really enough to prop it up, honestly.
I mean, if you personally really hate Guardians, it's your life?...
Special Agent
+1 HP
+2 Aim
Phase Lance
Turn ending action: Blueblood fires his Lancer Pistol in a 17-tile-long line, hitting everything in the line for 4-6 damage. Can go through walls and other objects that block line of fire. 3 turn cooldown.
Like Lancer Shot, this is not being fired from Blueblood's regular Pistol and so doesn't benefit from equipped Ammo or much of anything. Indeed, unlike Lancer Shot, it doesn't even scale with your Pistol technology; that 4-6 is as good as it gets. At least it also means it doesn't eat ammo from Blueblood's Pistol...
Also, this is pretty literally Null Lance, up to and including its icon being a somewhat modified version of Null Lance's icon, and I'm not sure why it got attached to a special Pistol instead of given to one of your two psionically active agents. Or make Blueblood also psionically active and have this be literally Null Lance; it'd be cool and logical to actually see someone who has some psionic ability where that isn't literally the entire definition of their ability set/character. (Okay, unlike Null Lance it's actually affected by Armor. Not High Cover Armor mind, but innate Armor hurts it)
Note that Phase Lance can't crit and even if it could it has no crit damage. As Blueblood has a natural focus on crits, this is genuinely a bit irritating, making it a little bit harder to justify using Phase Lance over just taking a shot, even considering how weak crits are in Chimera Squad.
It's also weird and inconsistent when it comes to environmental objects. On the one hand, it can set off cars and other objects that explode. On the other hand, objective objects that you're supposed to destroy are arbitrarily immune. This combination of facts further contributes to Phase Lance being a bit niche; among other points, if Blueblood is in cover against a car or the like, you shouldn't use it because you can be blowing him up! (And the game won't warn you)
Special Agent
+1 HP
+2 Aim
Phase LanceTurn ending action: Blueblood fires his Lancer Pistol in a 17-tile-long line, hitting everything in the line for 4-6 damage. Can go through walls and other objects that block line of fire. 3 turn cooldown.
Like Lancer Shot, this is not being fired from Blueblood's regular Pistol and so doesn't benefit from equipped Ammo or much of anything. Indeed, unlike Lancer Shot, it doesn't even scale with your Pistol technology; that 4-6 is as good as it gets. At least it also means it doesn't eat ammo from Blueblood's Pistol...
Also, this is pretty literally Null Lance, up to and including its icon being a somewhat modified version of Null Lance's icon, and I'm not sure why it got attached to a special Pistol instead of given to one of your two psionically active agents. Or make Blueblood also psionically active and have this be literally Null Lance; it'd be cool and logical to actually see someone who has some psionic ability where that isn't literally the entire definition of their ability set/character. (Okay, unlike Null Lance it's actually affected by Armor. Not High Cover Armor mind, but innate Armor hurts it)
Note that Phase Lance can't crit and even if it could it has no crit damage. As Blueblood has a natural focus on crits, this is genuinely a bit irritating, making it a little bit harder to justify using Phase Lance over just taking a shot, even considering how weak crits are in Chimera Squad.
It's also weird and inconsistent when it comes to environmental objects. On the one hand, it can set off cars and other objects that explode. On the other hand, objective objects that you're supposed to destroy are arbitrarily immune. This combination of facts further contributes to Phase Lance being a bit niche; among other points, if Blueblood is in cover against a car or the like, you shouldn't use it because you can be blowing him up! (And the game won't warn you)
Phase Lance never completely loses relevance, mind. The ability to force damage through 100% reliably can be a life-saver, and High Cover is generally pretty prolific in Chimera Squad while your ability to boost agent accuracy is a bit limited. In conjunction with the Timeline mechanics, you can't necessarily count on another agent to take out a target before it acts, and you can't default to assuming another agent will blast the target's Cover for Blueblood before he takes the shot the way you could in XCOM 2.
The ability to just shoot right through line-of-fire blocking elements doesn't come up constantly, but is also an important benefit to keep in mind. Firstly, because Chimera Squad is a lot more prone than XCOM 2 to making line of fire blockers non-trivial to bypass, and secondly because Blueblood doesn't tend to move a ton thanks to his ability to shot-spam. Being able to shoot at one target with the Pistol and then Phase Lance another target through a wall or blocked by verticality is very much appreciated when you end up in a situation it matters in.
Unlock Potential Training: +15 crit chance.
As I noted with Verge, crit chance is virtually worthless in Chimera Squad, since every primary weapon only gets +1 damage out of a crit. And no, Talon Rounds haven't gotten any better in Chimera Squad to make up for this.
That said, Blueblood is by far the character who most appreciates crit chance since he defaults to shooting twice in a turn with a weak weapon. It's still only +1 damage per shot, but if he crits twice he gets +2 damage total, and with Deadeye shots it can be up to +4 total depending on exact numbers. (The game rolls together crit damage with non-crit damage and then applies Deadeye: if a crit brings a shot from 5 damage to 6, that raises Deadeye from +2 damage to +3 damage) So you should probably have Blueblood perform this Training at some point, albeit it's perfectly justified to put it off if eg the next plot mission will force you to hit it before he can finish his Training.
Senior Agent
+2 Aim
Fond Farewell
Passive: The last shot in each clip does double damage.
OR
Cascade Lance
Passive: Phase Lance now ramps up on later targets in the row for each target it hit prior, adding +2 damage on each following target.
This is one of the most disappointing agent levels in the game, possibly the most disappointing.
Fond Farewell, when you first get a hold of it, isn't terrible, as Blueblood can burn through his 6 shots fairly quickly, especially if you've got one of the Epic Pistols -both of which provide an ability for burning through ammo even faster- and/or if you like to gift him extra action points/turns. Intermittently getting an additional chunk of damage is nice, especially in the toughest fights, where individual characters can end up taking quite a few turns. It's deeply flawed since most Encounters don't last long enough to burn through a full clip even once, but still, it's occasionally doing something...
... until you perform Blueblood's final-level Training, at which point Fond Farewell becomes much more strained, and, crucially, becomes actively contradictory with Warm Welcome. With his final Training, Blueblood can fire, reload, and fire again to spread Disorientation about, and if you're doing that Fond Farewell is never going to happen. This is frustrating design given that, just as with the prior two games, Chimera Squad clearly and consistently operates on the idea that the 'lanes' are functionally advice for a new player, that generally both left-lane skills will synergize with each other, and both right-lane skills will also synergize with each other. There shouldn't ever be a case of them being anti-synergistic!
Cascade Lance, meanwhile, is inherently bad, though in practice it's probably slightly less bad than Fond Farewell simply because nothing happens that makes Cascade Lance retroactively not worth taking advantage of. Even so, Cascade Lance is bad; enemies are rarely lined up in a relatively convenient manner, and Blueblood doesn't like to move to boot; if Blueblood happens to start a turn lined up, he can take a shot at someone and then use Phase Lance and get Cascade Lance's benefits for roughly free. Less ideal is the possibility Blueblood needed to move anyway, and you're able to move him somewhere that lines up multiple enemies. Much of the time, though, Blueblood is going to be better off standing where he is and shooting twice, or shooting once and Subduing someone with his second action point. (Which still leaves no room for Phase Lance)
Since Phase Lance doesn't scale with Pistol technology, nor benefit from Weapon Attachments, nor benefit from Ammo, this problem only grows worse as you progress. Early in a run, before you have all that, catching a couple enemies with Phase Lance is clearly superior to firing a couple of Pistol shots, and in fact will usually be better than even a couple of Deadeye shots even aside the fact that Deadeye shots are more likely to miss than regular shots. Once you have Mastercrafted Pistols backed by an Ammo Item and supported by eg a Superior Scope, Blueblood is alarmingly likely to be able to very reliably Deadeye twice for 10~ damage per target while also inflicting a side effect that adds further damage when the target's turn rolls around. At that point Phase Lance basically needs Cascade Lance and at least three targets lined up to remotely justify itself. And there are no examples of enemies that are specifically prone to lining up in a convenient manner for a Phase Lance. (Contrasting with how, in the prior games, melee pods tended to clump in a manner convenient to grenades and so on)
It doesn't help this level's case that Chimera Squad doesn't have retraining: you can't grab Fond Farewell, then retrain Blueblood once you've got his final Training done. You're stuck with whatever you first grabbed forever.
Unlock Potential Training: +15 crit chance.
As I noted with Verge, crit chance is virtually worthless in Chimera Squad, since every primary weapon only gets +1 damage out of a crit. And no, Talon Rounds haven't gotten any better in Chimera Squad to make up for this.
That said, Blueblood is by far the character who most appreciates crit chance since he defaults to shooting twice in a turn with a weak weapon. It's still only +1 damage per shot, but if he crits twice he gets +2 damage total, and with Deadeye shots it can be up to +4 total depending on exact numbers. (The game rolls together crit damage with non-crit damage and then applies Deadeye: if a crit brings a shot from 5 damage to 6, that raises Deadeye from +2 damage to +3 damage) So you should probably have Blueblood perform this Training at some point, albeit it's perfectly justified to put it off if eg the next plot mission will force you to hit it before he can finish his Training.
Senior Agent
+2 Aim
Fond FarewellPassive: The last shot in each clip does double damage.
OR
Cascade LancePassive: Phase Lance now ramps up on later targets in the row for each target it hit prior, adding +2 damage on each following target.
This is one of the most disappointing agent levels in the game, possibly the most disappointing.
Fond Farewell, when you first get a hold of it, isn't terrible, as Blueblood can burn through his 6 shots fairly quickly, especially if you've got one of the Epic Pistols -both of which provide an ability for burning through ammo even faster- and/or if you like to gift him extra action points/turns. Intermittently getting an additional chunk of damage is nice, especially in the toughest fights, where individual characters can end up taking quite a few turns. It's deeply flawed since most Encounters don't last long enough to burn through a full clip even once, but still, it's occasionally doing something...
... until you perform Blueblood's final-level Training, at which point Fond Farewell becomes much more strained, and, crucially, becomes actively contradictory with Warm Welcome. With his final Training, Blueblood can fire, reload, and fire again to spread Disorientation about, and if you're doing that Fond Farewell is never going to happen. This is frustrating design given that, just as with the prior two games, Chimera Squad clearly and consistently operates on the idea that the 'lanes' are functionally advice for a new player, that generally both left-lane skills will synergize with each other, and both right-lane skills will also synergize with each other. There shouldn't ever be a case of them being anti-synergistic!
Cascade Lance, meanwhile, is inherently bad, though in practice it's probably slightly less bad than Fond Farewell simply because nothing happens that makes Cascade Lance retroactively not worth taking advantage of. Even so, Cascade Lance is bad; enemies are rarely lined up in a relatively convenient manner, and Blueblood doesn't like to move to boot; if Blueblood happens to start a turn lined up, he can take a shot at someone and then use Phase Lance and get Cascade Lance's benefits for roughly free. Less ideal is the possibility Blueblood needed to move anyway, and you're able to move him somewhere that lines up multiple enemies. Much of the time, though, Blueblood is going to be better off standing where he is and shooting twice, or shooting once and Subduing someone with his second action point. (Which still leaves no room for Phase Lance)
Since Phase Lance doesn't scale with Pistol technology, nor benefit from Weapon Attachments, nor benefit from Ammo, this problem only grows worse as you progress. Early in a run, before you have all that, catching a couple enemies with Phase Lance is clearly superior to firing a couple of Pistol shots, and in fact will usually be better than even a couple of Deadeye shots even aside the fact that Deadeye shots are more likely to miss than regular shots. Once you have Mastercrafted Pistols backed by an Ammo Item and supported by eg a Superior Scope, Blueblood is alarmingly likely to be able to very reliably Deadeye twice for 10~ damage per target while also inflicting a side effect that adds further damage when the target's turn rolls around. At that point Phase Lance basically needs Cascade Lance and at least three targets lined up to remotely justify itself. And there are no examples of enemies that are specifically prone to lining up in a convenient manner for a Phase Lance. (Contrasting with how, in the prior games, melee pods tended to clump in a manner convenient to grenades and so on)
It doesn't help this level's case that Chimera Squad doesn't have retraining: you can't grab Fond Farewell, then retrain Blueblood once you've got his final Training done. You're stuck with whatever you first grabbed forever.
I really don't get why Cascade Lance is so undertuned. If it added damage to all targets per target rather than only adding damage to later targets, its best-case scenario would still struggle to happen, but eg spotting a line of 3 enemies and zapping them would result in +18 damage total and usually all three targets dying, and that would be genuinely worth keeping an eye out for. The current mechanics result in +6 damage in total, and with no guarantee the enemies are lined up lowest-to-highest; if Blueblood ends up with the +4 hitting a low-HP enemy, it may be substantially or entirely wasted of an effect, where Cascade Lance technically added 6 damage total but functionally only added 2.
So yeah, this tends to be a dead level, no matter your choice. Ouch.
Principal Agent
+2 Aim
Final Stats
10 HP (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)
85 Aim
25 crit chance (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)
Faceoff
Turn ending action: Blueblood fires his Pistol at each enemy he has line of fire on, until he runs out of new targets or runs out of ammo. 1 use per mission.
Faceoff is glitchy and will sometimes consume 3 ammo while having hit far more enemies than that, including sometimes hitting every enemy even though Blueblood didn't have enough ammo to fire on every enemy. It also retains a glitch from XCOM 2 -that Ammo and Weapon Attachments are only applied to the shot aimed at your initial target, making it slightly less powerful and reliable than one might intuitively expect.
Even so, Faceoff is honestly straight-up broken in Chimera Squad, due largely to the change in context. In XCOM 2, while Faceoff was absolutely a good skill, it was primarily something of a safety net; it was at its best when you pulled 2 or 3 pods, which is to say primarily when you'd made an error and pulled more pods than you meant to. It was a really good safety net, but among other points as your personal skill at the game improved you'd tend to use it less due to more consistently avoiding running into the kind of disastrous situations it performed best in.
Principal Agent
+2 Aim
Final Stats
10 HP (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)
85 Aim
25 crit chance (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)
FaceoffTurn ending action: Blueblood fires his Pistol at each enemy he has line of fire on, until he runs out of new targets or runs out of ammo. 1 use per mission.
Faceoff is glitchy and will sometimes consume 3 ammo while having hit far more enemies than that, including sometimes hitting every enemy even though Blueblood didn't have enough ammo to fire on every enemy. It also retains a glitch from XCOM 2 -that Ammo and Weapon Attachments are only applied to the shot aimed at your initial target, making it slightly less powerful and reliable than one might intuitively expect.
Even so, Faceoff is honestly straight-up broken in Chimera Squad, due largely to the change in context. In XCOM 2, while Faceoff was absolutely a good skill, it was primarily something of a safety net; it was at its best when you pulled 2 or 3 pods, which is to say primarily when you'd made an error and pulled more pods than you meant to. It was a really good safety net, but among other points as your personal skill at the game improved you'd tend to use it less due to more consistently avoiding running into the kind of disastrous situations it performed best in.
Whereas in Chimera Squad... Faceoff allows Blueblood to clear an entire Encounter by himself in one turn. Most missions are only 1 or 2 Encounters; in such cases, the fact that Blueblood's Faceoff has only one charge instead of operating on a cooldown is a bit of a joke. The ammo glitches contribute to the problem, but even just giving Blueblood a Superior Expanded Magazine is enough to have him able to clear out quite a few Encounters with one Faceoff; even if an enemy tough enough to reliably survive is in the Encounter and early in the Timeline, Blueblood can often just shoot them before he initiates Faceoff and then they die during Faceoff. (And since Faceoff ends his turn, he should spend his first action point on something beforehand) Enemies in Chimera Squad run fragile, compared to XCOM 2; there simply isn't anything comparable to XCOM 2 Sectopods in terms of ability to soak punishment, with two shots being adequate to take out almost any given non-boss enemy.
It's funny how much more powerful Faceoff is in Chimera Squad than in XCOM 2 given that in a direct sense it's been nerfed, between having ammo as a relevant concern and switching from a cooldown to one charge...
Fortunately, while Faceoff is disproportionately powerful, it doesn't singlehandedly solve the game for the player. The major plot missions are uniformly 3 Encounters (Except for the final mission being 4 Encounters), with their individual Encounters being as tough or tougher than what you'll encounter in most 1-Encounter missions; Faceoff might trivialize one of those Encounters, but you'll still need to actually engage with the other Encounters.
It'll still let you trivialize a depressingly large fraction of your missions, mind, but it could be more egregious.
Note that Faceoff can trigger Fond Farewell. You have absolutely no control over Blueblood's targeting order past the initial target so this isn't something you can really plan around, but it does make Fond Farewell's anti-synergy with Warm Welcome slightly less frustrating.
For that matter, it can trigger Warm Welcome, which you can control. This isn't super-important given Faceoff's tendency to delete Encounters, but you might as well have the initial target be something you'd appreciate being Disoriented, like a Codex.
Overall, Faceoff probably shouldn't have been a skill in Chimera Squad. The context shift is simply too favorable to it, and in a manner where it's not only overly-good, its good in a boring way; click button, have good odds of instantly winning, with little regard to context. It is, in fact, a substantial portion of why I rate Blueblood as simply the most effective agent in the game; no other agent has anything remotely approaching the absurd power of Faceoff, and Blueblood is otherwise a solid enough agent, even with jank like Senior Agent being a dud level.
Reminder that it's bugged and actually weaker than it's supposed to be, too! If it actually applied stuff like Caustic Rounds and an equipped Superior Scope to every shot instead of just the first one, it would be even more grotesquely powerful.
On a more aesthetic note, it's worth pointing out that Faceoff completely skips the charge period of Beam Pistol animations, making it quicker to resolve when equipped with an Epic Pistol than you might intuitively expect. This is actually kind of frustrating, as it shows that the Beam Pistol animation is pretty satisfying if the charge portion of the animation isn't present, yet in XCOM 2 and continuing into Chimera Squad the default remains to keep that awful charge period. I really don't get this decision.
Final Training: Unlock Quick Reload.
Quick ReloadPassive: Reloading no longer costs action points.
This is why Warm Welcome and Fond Farewell are actively anti-synergistic for Blueblood. Reloads are free!
The thing that makes me cringe is that the developers probably thought Quick Reload was a good fit to Fond Farewell. And it is, just not simultaneously to Warm Welcome; being able to fire the last shot in a clip and then just reload without spending action points is a nice synergy, making it so that Blueblood can just spend ammo freely to set up for Fond Farewell without worrying about it interfering with his ability to shoot on a later turn, which is actually relevant in Encounters where you're supposed to hang around fending off a limited number of reinforcement waves.
Quick Reload also contributes to Faceoff being so good; it lets you fire, reload, Faceoff, and then on Blueblood's following turn reload and continue fighting without Action Points being lost, minimizing the ability for ammo considerations to limit Faceoff -and by definition having Faceoff means Blueblood can Train up Quick Reload.
Y'know, assuming anything survived Faceoff.
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Blueblood is the one agent where I'm not really sure what to say about them as a character. He's an ex-police officer, for example, but while my impression is that this is meant to tie into his Pistol specialty the narrative doesn't really do anything with it that I'm aware. Blueblood won't speak up when conversations with City 31's chief of police are happening, for example, and I've never seen him make remarks touching on City 31's crime landscape or... anything like that. Being a police officer is just a background fact you can read somewhere, not something that seems to have particularly shaped his outlook or the like.
As a contrast point, Axiom, if he's on your squad, will speak up during the Gray Phoenix Investigation, changing a mandatory plot scene's exact dialogue. There's a few different examples of this type of thing scattered about the game, where a scene has a default flow of events and conversation, but if you have the right agent around (Or, inside missions, specifically deployed on the mission) that agent's presence will change exactly how things go down because of something relevant about them. I don't think Blueblood has such a moment anywhere in the game.
He does at least avoid being a walking meme of some kind, and I do continue to appreciate that aspect of Chimera Squad's writing, but I've already been over that more completely with other agents, and Blueblood is probably the least surprising agent for this to have been successfully cleaved to.
So I'm left feeling like I should have something of substance to say here, but unable to think of anything in particular.
Ah well.
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Next time, we move on to Zephyr.
See you then.
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