Chimera Squad Agent Analysis: Claymore

Claymore is your final Shotgun character, which is a little weird because he's actually very poorly suited to using a Shotgun, with the worst Mobility of any agent, abilities that don't really support closing all that aggressively, and little in the way of alternate abilities to make up for a Shotgun's weaknesses.

This isn't too noticeable if you start with Claymore, as early missions often involve blobs of Surprised enemies that are mostly up close and/or in the open, so he's liable to have easy hits and appreciate the Shotgun's raw damage at that step a lot more, but if you recruit him later in a run it stands out as an actual flaw. As he also starts out a bit underwhelming and takes a few levels to start impressing, I'd tend to recommend avoiding recruiting him later in a run unless, like, the alternatives are Zephyr and Shelter.

Base Stats

9 HP (11 on the lowest difficulty)
65 Aim (75 on the lowest difficulty)
9 Mobility
40 Will (50 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.

As tough as Axiom but where Axiom has particularly high Mobility, Claymore has the worst Mobility of all agents. Before looking at abilities, Claymore is just Worse Axiom.

Fortunately, his abilities are pretty good, so in practice he holds up better than that suggests, but I'm surprised they didn't even give him 5 more Aim or something. He's particularly badly off in this comparison at the very beginning of the game, as he has just the one ability, and it's not an incredible ability. I'd argue it's overall better than Axiom's initial ability set, but I wouldn't try to argue that it's a 'good trade' given the significant Mobility difference -Axiom is 33% faster than Claymore out the box!

Possible Scars

Weakened: -3 HP
Hobbled: -3 Mobility
Jittery: -30 Aim

Claymore also suffers the unusual distinction of having all his possible Scars be devastating; a third his base Mobility, a third his base HP, or almost half his base Aim gone? Yikes! He basically automatically has to be benched if he ends up with a Scar. In fact, if you're worried about your ability to keep agents from getting Scars in the early game, there's a fair argument you shouldn't actually have him as part of your initial crew; if he's one of your options for agent #5 early in the campaign, subbing him in avoids the risk of being forced to be sent out while crippled by a Scar, compared to if he's actually part of your initial four agents.

On the plus side, he's tough enough this doesn't tend to actually come up, but still. Ouch.

Base Abilities

Subdue

Turn-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.

Claymore is the primary agent where it's easy to end up playing as if he doesn't have Subdue; using his abilities optimally tends to result in him not advancing at all, and he's so slow even trying to use Subdue as a 'free' movement action is often not an option at all because no enemy is in his range.

You shouldn't completely forget the option exists, but even if you do forget, it... isn't necessarily an issue, in Claymore's case.

Certainly, you probably shouldn't throw an Impact Frame on him; he's unlikely to put it to good use.

Shrapnel Bomb
1 action point: Lobs an explosive to a designated location within 12 tiles of Claymore. The explosive will detonate for 4 damage and 1-2 Shred within 2 tiles either when attacked, or after its own turn arrives, with its turn being placed three slots after Claymore's current turn. This detonation cannot affect units that are behind cover relative to the Shrapnel Bomb's position. 1 turn cooldown.

I list 1-2 Shred, even though variable Shred is not remotely a standard mechanic, because sometimes Shrapnel Bomb will Shred 2 Armor, and sometimes it will only Shred 1 Armor on an enemy that had 2 Armor. I'm pretty sure this is some manner of bug, but I've no idea what causes it or what the pattern to its behavior is. Fortunately, Shred isn't as important in Chimera Squad as it was in XCOM 2 because Armor is uncommon on enemies and doesn't go as high overall, so this generally isn't a significant issue, but it can be problematic when dealing with the rare situations high enemy Armor does crop up in.

Note that explosives can detonate a Shrapnel Bomb early. ie you can toss Shrapnel Bomb, then toss a Frag Grenade, and now you've done 6-7 damage plus 2+ Shred and Claymore still has an action point leftover. This is one of the subtler ways the game emphasizes Claymore wanting to carry a grenade of some kind.

Oh, and unsurprisingly the Shrapnel Bomb does absolutely no environmental damage, fitting to it being blocked by Cover. It's basically a Needle Grenade from Enemy Within, aside that Armor and Shred didn't exist back then. (And also Needle Grenades had no delay)

Keep in mind that a Shrapnel Bomb can be detonated by manually targeting it. This is one of the reasons Claymore often ends up not moving about much: throwing a Shrapnel Bomb and detonating it immediately eats his entire turn, and can be much more immediately effective than trying to approach enemies and shoot them directly, whether because Claymore can catch 2 (Or sometimes more) enemies with one Shrapnel Bomb or simply because it lets him do things like get damage on an enemy in High Cover that he can't flank. (As he can throw Shrapnel Bombs farther than he can walk with 1 action point, this happens pretty readily)

Also note that other agents can target the bomb, though without turn manipulation this rarely makes sense to do, especially later in a run where it's more normal for 2 enemy turns to be in between agent turns. If Claymore goes first and his Shrapnel Bomb will detonate right after the next agent's turn, why bother having that agent detonate it sooner? But if you're considering Teamwork or have a Motile Inducer on Claymore, it's useful to keep the option in mind.

Shrapnel Bomb itself is a bit clunky because its optimal conditions work at cross-purposes to general good play: maximizing value out of a Shrapnel Bomb by not burning action points or limited resources on detonating it immediately requires setting Shrapnel Bomb so the enemies it will blow up on are placed later in turn order, so they don't get an opportunity to act before it detonates. Meanwhile, the player should generally be endeavoring to down enemies who are early in the Timeline, to prevent enemies from getting turns at all. It's at least powerful enough out the box to one-shot some of the weaker enemies, but even that is itself clunky: one of Claymore's awkward elements as an agent is that he's specialized in explosives, which of course are lethal, and for a good chunk of the game you'll want to be getting at least 5 non-lethal takedowns per mission if possible.

On the plus side, this fades as an issue as a run progresses; by the time you're halfway or so through a run, it's entirely possible Intel is largely done mattering, and it certainly doesn't matter in the endgame. It's also much less of an issue in the Sacred Coil Investigation, as a high proportion of Sacred Coil troops can't be KOed anyway.

The delay on Shrapnel Bomb never stops being clunky, unfortunately, and is one of the main reasons I rate Claymore as a bit of a weak agent. Shrapnel Bomb is also pretty lacking in synergies with other agent abilities, which doesn't help. And like a lot of non-shooting agent abilities, it doesn't scale with technology, though Claymore's leveling at least consistently helps it stay relevant.

Not ideal design, but it could certainly be worse.

Deputy Agent
+3 Aim

Concussive Charge
Pre-Breach special: Once per mission, Claymore may give the squad access to an explosive-based entrance, which will always have the Breach modifier Explosive Entrance, ensuring any enemy that would be Alert is instead Surprised. Additionally, it will Rupture all enemies within 7 tiles of the Breach point, ensuring they will take +1 damage from all following attacks, forever.

This is bizarrely underwhelming. Every other agent that can access a special Breach point without a Breach Item has it as an innate ability and then additionally gets an actual Breach ability at this level, and every Breach-point-accessing ability other agents has can be used multiple times per mission. Concussive Charge includes a Rupture effect, yes, but a 7 tile radius is tiny, with it being exceedingly rare for there to be more than two enemies within reach. Often there will be one, or sometimes none.

You should still prefer to have Claymore open such Breach points over someone with the Breaching Charge Item if he's in the squad, but this is yet another example of Claymore being underwhelming early on; even when a mission has the relevant Breach point type, Claymore opening it vs someone else doing so barely matters, and if you're particularly unlucky may not matter at all. And it's rare that you need more than one Explosive Entrance, and in fact it's far from guaranteed you'll ever have access to one in a given mission: VIP Extraction missions never generate with Explosive Entrances, for example, and there are plenty of map chains that lack Explosive Entrances even in mission types where they're allowed.

Particularly painful is that every run starts with a Breaching Charge. (Presumably because the Tutorial forces you to use one) So where having Terminal on your squad at the start of a run means you can access security doors even if you haven't been able to justify the expense of purchasing a Keycard, Claymore is only adding anything if either the Rupture kicks in or if you do in fact get a mission with two wall entrances.

Once you have enough Breach Items to fill up everyone it's less bad off, as then you can replace the Breaching Charge with a different Breach Item while still being able to blast in a wall if the option come up, but this is liable to take a while. As in, possibly more than an entire Investigation. And it's still suffering from the weirdness of 'every other comparable ability is innate, not locked behind a level-up'.

This is another reason why I consider Claymore to be a weak agent overall, and especially early in his growth.

Basic Training: +2 HP.

Claymore should generally be a low priority for getting this Training. He's already quite tough, and he's not liable to charge into the fray and draw fire; his initial 9 HP is generally plenty to start, and more vulnerable agents should get priority, or agents like Axiom who are more likely to put themselves into dangerous positions.

Field Agent
+3 Aim

Fortitude
Passive: Claymore is completely immune to grenades and environmental hazards.

OR

Improvised Explosives
Passive: At the end of each Encounter, Claymore will restore one charge on whatever grenade he is carrying, assuming he is carrying a grenade and has used up a charge.

Fortitude is basically a variation on the Psi Operative's Fortress ability, one that's a bit less powerful and general. Claymore can still be Poisoned, set on fire, or afflicted with Acid, it's just it won't happen if he walks through a cloud, nor as a result of tossing a Gas Grenade or Incendiary Grenade onto him.

Fortitude is... um... okay? Like, conceptually it's pretty bizarre, but I've already been over how Chimera Squad does a good job of making it clear that making realistic sense is a pretty low priority and so I'm not too bothered by that. More important is that it's honestly pretty mechanically underwhelming. Not very many enemies even use explosive attacks, and multiple of the ones that do make use of delayed explosives your squad can potentially scramble out of the blast radius of. Nor are environmental hazards all that common an issue. And, crucially, Claymore himself is terrible at getting into the thick of things, when the things Fortitude protects against are most relevant to frontliner agents.

It's not like Fortitude will never be relevant if you grab it, not necessarily, but it's shockingly niche. Indeed, my first run to start with Claymore used him heavily throughout the campaign, grabbed Fortitude, and literally never had it do anything. It really is that rare for it to be relevant. I'd personally recommend just... skipping it in favor of Improvised Explosives.

Speaking of!

First of all, note that Improvised Explosives does not regenerate Breach Items, not even the ones that are literally a grenade Item in Breach form. ie a Cease-Fire Grenade will be regenerated, but not a Cease-Fire Bomb. It only adds charges to grenades that go into the Utility Item slot.

Second, keep in mind that Improvised Explosives is completely useless if a mission is exactly 1 Encounter long, and is still not exactly amazing in 2-Encounter missions. It only really shines in 3-Encounter missions plus the one 4-Encounter mission the game has. Fortunately, these are the hardest missions as a general rule of thumb, but if for some reason you don't intend to bring Claymore into such missions (Maybe you're using him as your 'filler' agent who subs in when one of your core agents is Training), you should probably just take Fortitude in spite of its narrowness.

Third, note the requirement to actually use the grenade to be eligible for adding a charge to it. If you do take Improvised Explosives, you should be fairly aggressive about actually using a grenade per Encounter; you won't be able to stockpile charges for later in the mission. I actually like this aspect of Improvised Explosives! It's too bad so many regular missions are 1-2 Encounters long; Improvised Explosives is one of the clearer examples of elements of the game suffering from 3 Encounters not actually being the standard or minimum. (That is, if missions were 3-5 Encounters long instead of 1-3 Encounters, stuff like Improvised Explosives would always matter)

Fourth, do keep in mind that unlike the prior two games, you do not have an unlimited supply of Frag Grenades to start, and in fact cannot reliably purchase them. They usually show up at the Scavenger Market a few times early in a run, but you can end up waiting a few weeks to get the opportunity, especially if you're being aggressive about spending Intel; you might have the Scavenger Market open and have a Frag Grenade for sale... and be unable to purchase it because you don't have enough Intel.

Destructive grenades that Improvised Explosives can apply to are guaranteed to be available eventually, as Incendiary Grenades and Gas Grenades are both unlocked as regular purchases by Assembly Projects, but you can spend quite a while with Improvised Explosives not doing much.

On the plus side, Improvised Explosives tends to improve as a run goes on. While Chimera Squad doesn't have an equivalent to Advanced Explosives from XCOM 2, you're still liable to more-or-less progress 'upward', where Claymore late in a run is using a Plasma Grenade vs the Frag Grenade he was using early on. So it's a level-up choice that doesn't fall behind particularly strongly as enemies progress, and in fact given Armor becomes overall more common later in a run this in turn means Shred becomes overall more consistently useful, raising the value of being able to repeatedly toss a Plasma Grenade or the like.

Special Agent
+1 HP
+2 Aim

Sticky Grenade
Turn ending action: Claymore attaches an explosive to a target enemy, who immediately freaks out and runs in a random direction. Eventually they stop moving and the sticky grenade explodes, doing 5 damage and 2 Shred to the victim and everyone within one tile of the victim, as well as causing significant environmental damage in that area. One use per mission.

Naturally, the icon is a recycled Homing Mine icon, since the ability itself is a morbid comedy version of Homing Mine, as opposed to Homing Mine's stealth-comedy self. It even has the same damage and Shred as a Homing Mine that's not backed by Shrapnel!

Sticky Grenade is one of Claymore's iffier abilities in practice. Not only is the direction enemies flee fairly random, but the distance they flee before detonating is also unpredictable. If you get lucky, the victim may flee right into the midst of multiple other enemies, vaporizing their Cover and doing a whole lot of damage. If you're unlucky, they'll dash amid your own squad and blow up on a couple of agents, vaporizing their Cover. It's particularly bad in Outbreak missions, as these are Chimera Squad's idea of Terror/Retaliation missions, by which I mean there are civilians littering the area that you need to rescue as a primary objective and so it's distressingly likely civilians will get killed by using Sticky Grenade, whether by the Sticky Grenade explosion per se or by it causing a vehicle to cook off and explode, taking one or more civilians with it. But even outside Outbreak missions, civilians are present in a variety of missions, and their deaths are bad; if 5 civilians die in a mission, its District gains 1 Unrest! (This works like Intel from KOed enemies: +20% chance per dead civilian, capping at 100%)

As such, you should generally only use it in missions where nothing you need to protect is present, and preferably on enemies that are far back from the squad; the distance enemies run before detonating is random, but if you're planting it on an enemy far from the squad you can be confident they won't run into one of your agents before detonating.

This usage does, at least, help compensate for how bad Claymore is at fighting enemies at a distance with his Shotgun. Only once a mission, mind, but it does help.

Also note that if the target is currently unable to move, the Sticky Grenade will simply detonate exactly where they're standing. Notably, even an enemy Stunned for 1 action point will still be unable to flee. This can be useful in missions where collateral damage is bad, especially if you've given Claymore one of the grenades that will prevent enemies from running, such as a Shock Grenade, or have paired him with one or more agents that can set up a disable. (eg Verge) It's especially convenient if they're also in Shrapnel Bomb range; use your immobilizing grenade, toss the Shrapnel Bomb, and then toss the Sticky Grenade to detonate the Shrapnel Bomb. That's a lot of area-of-effect damage Claymore can suddenly dump on the enemy.

Unfortunately, Sticky Grenade also has just plain buggy logic; for example, you can end up with the victim sharing their tile with someone else once they're done running. Unsurprisingly, this extends to the animations being janky, where an enemy can run past the point the game decides they explode and then snap back to the correct point a second later. Sometimes they don't visually snap back at that point at all! The primary reason you can almost always tell where the blast actually occurred is that the explosion invariably ends up wrecking Cover and leaving scorch marks on the ground wherever the engine decided the explosion occurred, instead of basing it off what the animations decided to do.

All of this contributes to it being hard to learn how to use Sticky Grenade safely, since what the game shows you of the panicked pathing often doesn't actually reflect in-engine reality!

Mildly amusing point: even robots can panic and run in response to the Sticky Grenade. This is pretty easy to organically run into, too, since one of the more obvious uses of Sticky Grenade is to Shred a tough target, which describes multiple robots.

It's also worth pointing out that Sticky Grenade will almost always result in the victim being in the open (Both because they flee randomly, and because even if they stop adjacent to Cover it's liable to be gone anyway if it can be destroyed at all), and so is actually very useful against tough Cover-using enemies. This gets a bit more relevant when Claymore is max level, but even right away it can be leveraged well with Teamwork and effects that gift action points, where Claymore exposes a tough target and someone else follows up immediately.

Unlock Potential Training: +1 Armor.

This is nice and all, but honestly the degree to which Claymore is durable is... not very useful, since he has no incentives to put himself in danger and is too slow to be liable to end up flanked outside of, like, reinforcement waves. You might as well grab it at some point, but it's rarely going to matter.

Senior Agent
+2 Aim

Heavy Shrapnel
Passive: Shrapnel Bombs now do damage and apply Shred through Cover.

OR

Impending Doom
Passive: Shrapnel Bomb now immediately Ruptures all targets in its incoming blast radius upon being launched, causing the afflicted to take +2 damage from all following attacks, forever.

Heavy Shrapnel makes Shrapnel Bombs noticeably more prone to getting opportunities to catch multiple enemies. Their radius is still small enough it's not strongly expected, but base Shrapnel Bombs can only rarely catch multiple targets unless there's enemies who don't use Cover about. Heavy Shrapnel is also, against enemies that use Cover, functionally something of a stealth buff to the range of Shrapnel Bomb, in that an enemy who is in Cover and at the edge of Shrapnel Bomb's range will be impossible for Shrapnel Bombs to hit by default but with Heavy Shrapnel Claymore can catch them with a Shrapnel Bomb even if they're behind High Cover.

Do note that Heavy Shrapnel does not add anti-terrain damage to Shrapnel Bombs. You can't use them to smash Cover, just to bypass it.

Impending Doom, meanwhile, makes Shrapnel Bomb a way to immediately enhance damage, both in the sense that you can toss a Shrapnel Bomb and then follow up on affected enemies with other attacks (eg tossing a Frag Grenade) and in the sense that Impending Doom often effectively adds 2 damage to Shrapnel Bomb itself.

Bizarrely, Impending Doom's Rupture effect does not care about Cover; if an enemy is within the radius of a Shrapnel Bomb, they're Ruptured, even if the Shrapnel Bomb's explosion is unable to hurt them in current conditions. So be aware of that.

Overall, I personally prefer Impending Doom out of these two. Claymore has some of the most significant ability to blow up Cover of any agent in the game, for one, making another option for bypassing Cover a bit difficult to care about. For two, Heavy Shrapnel isn't necessarily adding value; if Claymore can't catch multiple targets even with Heavy Shrapnel, and his preferred Shrapnel Bomb target is close enough he doesn't need the Cover-penetration, then Heavy Shrapnel isn't helping. For three, as something of an extension of the prior, Sacred Coil's Investigation especially is really heavy on durable units that don't use Cover, and Sacred Coil's Investigation is overall the hardest of the three Investigations; Impending Doom tends to have a bigger impact in the Sacred Coil Investigation than Heavy Shrapnel, which being the hardest Investigation means it's the one most worth specifically prepping for.

That said, I wouldn't try to argue that Impending Doom is clearly the superior choice. Its advantage against Sacred Coil is much less relevant if you hit Sacred Coil first due to how much easier the first Investigation is than later ones, if you're a big fan of actually using Claymore's Concussive Charge it's slightly worse off on average as Ruptures don't stack, and overall I'd say the game's most threatening enemies are concentrated in the Cover-using portion, unlike in XCOM 2 where most of the nastiest enemies didn't use Cover. Among other points, more than half of the game's boss enemies are Cover-using!

Heavy Shrapnel is also probably the friendlier choice to a learning player, too, taking away a lot of the guesswork of 'well, the target is visually in the blast radius, but I'm not sure whether the game will consider this blocked by terrain or not'. Given the game's rules on Cover blocking stuff are, just as in the prior 2 games, still not entirely intuitive, logical, or consistent, this is a non-trivial benefit.

Principal Agent
+2 Aim

Final Stats
12 HP (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)
77 Aim
1 Armor (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)

Barrage
Passive: Shrapnel Bomb and Sticky Grenade now do +1 damage. Additionally, Sticky Grenade only costs 1 action point, instead of always ending the turn, while Shrapnel Bomb has no cooldown.

The in-game description makes it sound like Shrapnel Bomb only now gains the ability to be used for just 1 action point, bizarrely. I'm not sure if that's just sloppy wording or a sign that plans changed and this description got missed.

In any event, this helps keep Shrapnel Bomb and Sticky Grenade relevant later into the game, both by increasing their raw damage and by letting you slip them in more often, which is a pleasant surprise given how many agents have abilities that fall behind as technology improves.

Sticky Grenade no longer automatically ending the turn opens up the possibility of trying to remove a target from Cover and immediately shoot with Claymore himself, of course. This is appreciated against some of the game's very durable Cover-using enemies, though it remains a bit awkward -you won't know which direction the enemy will run, including the admittedly low-odds scenario that they might end up in Cover at the end, and Claymore using a Shotgun means that maximizing the odds of landing such a follow-up shot requires you target Sticky Grenade on closer enemies... which increases the risk that they'll run up to Claymore and blow up on him. Yes, this can actually happen; if there's any code intended to ward against it, it's not terribly effective.

In practice, I tend to not take advantage of this benefit to Sticky Bomb; it's simply too unreliable in multiple senses. The idea is sound, but Sticky Bomb itself would've needed more predictable or controllable behavior for this to be particularly nice.

Shrapnel Bomb having no more cooldown is a lot more useful, thankfully. Throwing 2 Shrapnel Bombs at a target that won't move before they detonate is 10 damage (14 if you took Impending Doom) with no chance of failure, which is a lot of damage; there's a good number of enemies that will die to that, even in the final Investigation on the highest difficulty. Especially since Shrapnel Bombs Shred, and so Armored targets shave off less of it. Indeed, this quality of Barrage is so effective I honestly rarely have Claymore fire his Shotgun once he reaches this level; I mostly end up breaking out the Shotgun if there's an enemy that will act before the Shrapnel Bombs detonate that I would like dealt with immediately for some reason. And even that requires that Claymore is in position to act on it with high confidence he'll actually hit, which is a surprisingly tall order given his poor Mobility and all; it's very normal for Claymore to be just short of flanking a target, for example.

Barrage's effect on Shrapnel Bombs also simplifies working out whether to gift Claymore action points with intent to toss Shrapnel Bombs; you don't need to remember things like 'cooldowns advance when the turn ends' for planning out the turn if Shrapnel Bombs are always available to be thrown, after all. This is both convenient and also means it can be easier to untangle a tricky situation in general, even if you have such rules memorized; you won't run into a situation where Claymore can't untangle a situation because it requires he throw Shrapnel Bombs with both a gifted action point and then a regular turn right after, or the like.

Overall, Barrage is one of the better 'ultimate' agent skills at being interesting and impactful enough to feel deserving of the wait and all.

Final Training: Unlock Heavy Ordnance.

Heavy Ordnance
Passive: Whatever grenade Claymore is carrying gains an additional charge, assuming he is carrying one. This even affects support grenades.

I wish Claymore had a grenade-only Item slot like XCOM 2 Grenadiers. Grenades are sufficiently high-value overall, especially for Claymore, that this isn't a serious problem with Heavy Ordnance on him, in the sense that you're liable to want him carrying a grenade anyway rather than really having to choose between leveraging Heavy Ordnance vs choosing to have Claymore equipped the way you want him equipped, but it's still a bit awkward that a player has the option of skipping a grenade on Claymore and so having no chance to benefit from Heavy Ordnance. It's also entirely possible to get Claymore max level without having gotten around to getting a hold of any relevant grenades, where it can make sense to have Claymore put off Training because it won't do anything for him yet, which is another bit of clunkiness.

On the plus side, when you are taking advantage of Heavy Ordnance, it's much more strongly an upgrade than it was in XCOM 2, since Items in Chimera Squad don't spend action points; a Heavy Ordnance Grenadier in XCOM 2 was to some extent sacrificing other possible actions to fully take advantage of Heavy Ordnance, and so it was possible to have a mission play out where they never actually use the bonus grenade because they had other things they had to prioritize and so Heavy Ordnance never ended up actually benefiting them. With Claymore, if you never use the extra grenade, it's because you forgot he had it, or you were holding onto it Just In Case, or because the mission was easy enough you never saw the need, or something along those lines, not because there was never an opportunity to fit in using it.

That said, it is held back a little by Claymore's incentives toward turret-like play, making it particularly awkward that by definition Claymore has Barrage, which really cements the 'Claymore should largely hold still' point. Since Claymore doesn't have an XCOM 2-style Grenade Launcher, he has just the standard throwing range; on smaller maps this doesn't necessarily matter (Some Encounter maps are small enough that, in conjunction with what the valid initial placements of agents and enemies are, every enemy is in throwing range of every agent with no need for movement), but most maps are large enough and willing to place enemies far enough away Claymore can't reach every enemy from his initial position with a grenade toss. Sometimes he can't reach any enemies!

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As a character, Claymore continues the trend of Chimera Squad having a fairly international team, where Claymore is from India. Surprisingly, he also stays away from the usual Video Game Explosives-Focused Character Memes; he's not an explosions-oriented nutcase who just loves to blow things up for the sake of blowing things up. I appreciate this both because that's so widespread it honestly gets a bit tiresome, but more importantly because it would've been a pretty concerning angle to take with Chimera Squad, where you're supposed to be playing a law enforcement unit. (Albeit a very non-standard one)

It's especially surprising because he's still written as a broadly jovial figure, just not one that gets specifically excited by explosions or the like. Usually when I see video games do an explosives expert character and not make them scarily enthusiastic about explosions, they instead endeavor to maximize the seriousness or professionalism, where the character in question is unceasingly careful and diligent and doesn't do things like crack jokes, at least not on the job.

I actually have a bit of a hard time coming up with a good summary of Claymore's character, actually, as he's well-rounded and doesn't have any of his traits exaggerated for effect or marred by weird out-of-place stereotypes or anything. He has a variety of different conversations with different characters about a variety of topics, like a real human being might have with their coworkers, and there's no attempt by the writing to force him into a particular 'box' or anything. This is, mind, broadly descriptive of most of Chimera Squad's characters, but most agents have something that crops up notably more often, like Muton culture and so on coming up through Axiom, or Verge talking about telepathic stuff, where there's some obvious 'hooks' to focus on. Claymore doesn't have any of that, and is really the only agent this applies to.

I kind of suspect a lot of players thus find Claymore unmemorable or 'boring', honestly, but I like that Chimera Squad defaults to reasonably well-rounded and realistic people for its characters. There's contexts where every character being a walking talking meme is fine or even good, but I think Chimera Squad would've suffered on a lot of levels if it had taken that kind of angle with your agents.

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Next time, we move on to Torque.

See you then.