Chimera Squad Agent Analysis: Patchwork

Patchwork is the second squad member to equip Rifles, and also the last aside the Androids. This is kind of odd, in that sharing weapon types is synergistic, but Patchwork and Verge are otherwise pretty much antithetical to each other; most obviously, Verge suffers when facing robots and thus is generally a poor choice to use during the Sacred Coil Investigation, while Patchwork excels when robots are present, and thus excels throughout the Sacred Coil Investigation.

This does mean that swapping one out for the other is reasonably smooth, I suppose, but Patchwork doesn't actually use her Rifle very much. Her core skill is a turn-ending attack that can't miss, ignores Armor, has base damage exactly equal to a Rifle's base middle-roll damage, and can chain to other targets for some more damage; even once you're looking at Mastercrafted Rifles backed by an Ammo Item, Patchwork shooting is often still inferior damage output!

It is mildly interesting that even though she's conceptually just an offense-lane Specialist to Terminal's medic-lane Specialist, the two of them carry different weapons, at least.

Base Stats

8 HP (10 on the lowest difficulty)
65 Aim (75 on the lowest difficulty)
10 Mobility
40 Will (50 on the lowest difficulty)
5 Hack

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.

Everybody starts with 5 Hack, actually, but Patchwork is your only agent capable of using her Hack stat, so I haven't bothered to mention the Hack stat on other agents.

She is in fact the definition of average: standard HP, standard Aim, standard Mobility, standard Will, and as I just noted actually standard Hack. Which is actually a bit of an interesting surprise given her robot legs, but I'll get into that whole thing more later on.

Possible Scars

Hobbled: -3 Mobility
Sluggish: -15 Dodge
Shell-Shocked: -15 Will

Sluggish and Shell-Shocked are never high-impact Scars, of course, but surprisingly Hobbled is also actually pretty ignorable. Initially Patchwork doesn't get a lot of value out of movement -she doesn't even care that much about flanking- where so long as the mission itself isn't demanding Patchwork go somewhere she can often do her job just fine sitting completely still. She does have one level-up skill that's dependent on movement, but it's completely optional; if you don't take Voltaic Arc, then Patchwork never innately cares about her Mobility.

As such, Patchwork is probably the most reliably Scar-resistant agent, where you can respond to her picking up a Scar by shrugging and sending her right back out without bothering to fix it and it doesn't necessarily matter at all.

Mind, you still should fix Hobbled when it happens so she's not hampered in missions that demand evacuation or the like, but if for example she picks up Hobbled and then the game railroads you into doing the Take Down (Investigation target) mission the very next day, you can potentially get away with sending her in anyway without it necessarily being a big deal. That's basically unique to Patchwork.

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.

At baseline, Patchwork is another agent for whom Subdue is useful to keep in mind but not particularly notable, and if you're going up against Sacred Coil it's especially unlikely you'll have her Subdue; it'll often be better to just zap a robot, after all.

If you take Voltaic Arc, at that point Subdue actually becomes a powerful part of Patchwork's kit, and you should probably give her an Impact Frame to maximize her effectiveness. But we'll talk more about that when we get to Voltaic Arc, so moving on for now to...

Chaining Jolt
Turn ending action: Patchwork sends her Gremlin to do 4 damage to a single enemy she has a clear line of fire to, or 6-7 damage if the target is a robot, either way ignoring all Armor and with no chance to miss. This attack will chain to any enemy within 2 tiles of the original target, and then from there to any enemy within 2 tiles of the new victim, and so on, with no upper limit. The chain attacks only do 1 damage, except to robots, which take an additional 2-3 damage. (ie 3-4 damage total to robots) 1 turn cooldown.

Note that Chaining Jolt's area of effect actually describes a perfect square, not a square with its corners cut off like some 'within X tiles' effects. Also note that Chaining Jolt always jumps to exactly 1 target per jump, and as a result the highlighted set of enemies may not actually all be hit, depending on how Chaining Jolt elects to order its jumps. Frustratingly, there are times where it could hit every target in reach from the enemy you're targeting if only it ordered its jumps correctly, but then the order it uses will fail to achieve that result, with no indication beforehand that this is so.

As such, Chaining Jolt is ideally targeted at an enemy at one end of a chain, rather than an enemy in the middle of a group. Targeting an enemy sitting in the middle of a group may result in highlighting five enemies, and then only bouncing to one or two other enemies, where targeting an enemy at one end of the group will hit four or maybe even all five enemies.

This isn't super important to be aware of initially, but becomes a lot more relevant a consideration once you've performed Patchwork's final Training, as it becomes possible at that point to have a well-placed Chaining Jolt hit literally every enemy on the battlefield, vs a poorly-placed Chaining Jolt hitting... two enemies. So yeah, learn to keep the bounce mechanics in mind -thankfully, the way the game visualizes the bounce playing out is a very literal depiction of what's going on 'under the hood', so it's pretty easy to learn just playing the game.

Anyway, Chaining Jolt is Patchwork's central ability that sets her apart from your other agents, and succeeds at this task surprisingly well. Even before getting into her later skills that improve it, Chaining Jolt remains surprisingly competitive with Just Shoot Them all the way into you having Mastercrafted Rifles backed by Ammo, simply because Chaining Jolt can't miss, ignores Armor, and its bounce mechanics give it damage efficiency advantages -that is, if an enemy is down to 2 HP, Patchwork's Mastercrafted Rifle backed by Venom Rounds hitting for 6-8+2 damage is 'wasting' more than 2/3rds of the damage. Using Chaining Jolt on this 2 HP enemy will still waste half the initial impact damage, but then any bounces you get out of it are free damage: better to have Patchwork use Chaining Jolt than her Rifle in that case. (Especially since the Rifle has ammo concerns and Chaining Jolt does not)

Indeed, Chaining Jolt is actually so good that Patchwork rarely has reason to bother firing her Rifle outside the Breach Phase. It has a cooldown, but said cooldown just prevents you from gifting her action points aggressively to spam it. Its combination of being unable to miss and ignoring Armor is continuously great, with basically no targets where neither quality matters -dedicated melee enemies, for example, don't use Cover, but several of Chimera Squad's dedicated melee enemies have a non-trivial amount of innate Defense, where it's actually a little difficult to get perfect accuracy against them with a firearm. Chaining Jolt being so widely great also provides subtler advantages, like making it easier for Patchwork to just stick to High Cover where another agent might want to abandon High Cover in pursuit of a flank and/or close-range accuracy bonus.

It's a bit amazing how much Chaining Jolt dominates Patchwork's play when you consider its damage on the primary target is literally just the average damage of a basic Rifle. When I first got to Patchwork, I honestly figured Chaining Jolt would be another example of an ability that falls off in relevance -it doesn't benefit from technology, after all- but no, it stays a key part of Patchwork's kit all the way to the end of the game!

Reprogram
1 action point: Patchwork attempts to reprogram a robot enemy to fight for her team, testing her Hack score against the robot's Hack Defense, with a +100 base modifier to success. If she fails, nothing happens and Reprogram has a 1 turn cooldown. If she succeeds, the robot is under your control for 3 turns, and Reprogram has a 4 turn cooldown.

Note that this will never have a 100% chance to success, as every valid target has at least 30 Hack Defense, and Patchwork maxes out at 125 Hack, meaning there's always at least a 5% chance of failure. Indeed, only Androids and Turrets have low enough Hack Defense for Reprogram to be strongly expected to succeed; every other robot has enough Hack Defense you're looking at something more like a coin flip chance of success or worse, or in the case of one robot boss enemy it's actually guaranteed to fail!

So it's a good thing that, unlike Haywire Protocol in XCOM 2, this isn't a turn-ending action, and indeed has a 1 turn cooldown on failure. You should basically spam Reprogram every time you have the chance; if it fails, it hasn't really cost you anything unless you need Patchwork to move this turn, and if it succeeds you've removed a hostile from the turn order and given other enemies a disposable distraction to focus on.

The one caveat to this is that a 4 turn cooldown is long enough that in many missions you might as well treat a success as 'one use per mission', or at most two uses.

It's also a good thing this is a completely incidental, free part of Haywire's kit, as only the Sacred Coil Investigation and the endgame actually make use of robots you can Reprogram: there are no robots at all in the Progeny Investigation (No, you can't hack Codices or Archons), and only one robot in the Gray Phoenix Investigation, which you're not Reprogramming. (Its Hack Defense is higher than Patchwork's maximum possible Hack score) It would've been pretty janky for this to be a level-up ability, so I'm glad it isn't one.

Reprogram works out surprisingly well given it's conceptually just a return of Haywire Protocol, which was janky and difficult to justify using.

Hack Door
Pre-Breach Special: Patchwork can provide the team access to Breach points that normally require an Auto Key Card. She must be in the first slot for this access to be provided, and so cannot use other pre-Breach actions. Such Breach points generally have few, if any, Alert or Aggressive enemies, and they usually don't have a negative Breach point modifier in play.

Like Terminal, Patchwork is still allowed to equip an Auto Key Card even though she has no use for one, even though the game usually endeavors to not let you do such pointless things.

Patchwork's access to Hack Door is actually a bit less useful than with Terminal, as Patchwork tends to be best in the second slot; she's better at stuff like finishing off weakened enemies than at taking out (non-robots) single-handedly, and she doesn't have anything like Terminal's ability to gift an action point to friendlies that strongly benefits from going early in turn order. She outright picks up a Breach ability that can't be activated from the first slot (Admittedly, so does Terminal), and as a bonus these security door Breach points are often on high ground -which Patchwork doesn't care about if she's spamming her abilities, which she often should be.

It's still nice to have the option for free, but it's just less notable than with Terminal. (Not that it was that notable on Terminal, admittedly)

Gremlin Stabilize
1 Action Point: Instead of moving to Stabilize an ally, Patchwork can Stabilize a Bleeding Out ally she has a clear line of fire to.

This is interesting given that Patchwork doesn't get any other medical specialization mechanics.

In any event, it's a nice little perk for using Patchwork, and arguably a reason to not want to build a team that includes both Terminal and Patchwork. (There's not really any synergy to having two cases of Gremlin Stabilize) Appreciate it if it crops up, but honestly it's not significant enough to be a reason in itself to pick her. (Especially since your first run, where you're at your most inexperienced, doesn't let you make an initial team composition decision anyway, and is the run you're most likely to be seeing people Bleeding Out)

Just remember that its change in behavior can be a disadvantage when dealing with height differences, turning corners, etc, same as with Terminal.

Deputy Agent
+3 Aim
+4 Hack

Combat Scanners
Pre-Breach action: Holo-Targets all enemies visible from Patchwork's Breach point, providing +15 Aim against them. The Holo-Targeting lasts through until each target's first turn. This can be used from any slot except the first in a Breach point. One use per mission.

The impact is pretty low, but the ability to use it from all three non-front slots makes it easy to slip in, more so than eg Axiom's own Deputy Agent skill, and unlike some other Breach skills it doesn't compete with shooting in the Breach phase. Its two main bits of awkwardness are that it doesn't synergize with her innate ability to get you through security doors, and that you're really just guessing whether it'll be high-value in any given Breach, making it difficult to come to a useful rule of thumb for when to use it aside 'no later than your last Encounter'.

Its requirement of not being in the first slot does also mean it'll sometimes be literally unusable, as there are cases -such as when your squad is rappelling in through a skylight or window- where it's not possible to place any in second/third/fourth slots because none exist. If a mission with such a Breach setup also has only one Encounter, well, there you go, no opportunity.

In one-Encounter missions it instead has the point that using it competes with using a Breach Item, which can make for awkward moments where you're not sure whether to use Combat Scanners or her Breach Item. It's one of the clearer examples of it being clunky that the game gives you no information on what the enemy situation inside a given Breach point is.

That said, once you do have a Breach Item on Patchwork, you should probably default to having her do something Breach-wise every Encounter; even in 3-Encounter missions, it's sufficiently common for something to come up that prevents you from having Patchwork use a Breach action (Such as ending up committing her to opening a Secured Entrance) somewhere in there that you'll often just be wasting an opportunity if you have her hold off on performing a pre-Breach action in the first Encounter.

By a similar token, Patchwork should usually have her Breach Item be a workhorse Item that can be used pretty unconditionally. (As opposed to, say, a Medipatch, which has no use in the first Encounter of a mission and is still without use even in second and third Encounters if nobody on the squad is injured) That way she can maximize pre-Breach actions taken.

Combat Scanners is a little clunky, but overall works out as a useful skill you use a fair amount.

Basic Training: +2 HP.

Patchwork is an easy agent to put off Basic Training for, as she has little motive to put herself in vulnerable positions. (Unless she takes Voltaic Arc, but that requires a couple levels to reach) You should of course get it eventually, but she should usually be your last-ish agent to get Basic Training done, out of your initial set.

Field Agent
+3 Aim
+4 Hack

Voltaic Arc
Passive: If Patchwork is ever within 2 tiles of an enemy at the end of an action, her Gremlin immediately and for free fries them for 1 damage, ignoring all Armor. If there are other enemies within two tiles of the victim, Voltaic Arc will chain to them, and so on until it runs out of enemies. A given enemy can only be the initial target once, resetting when Patchwork starts a real turn.

OR

Threat Recognition
Passive: Combat Scanners gains an extra charge, and now also provides +25 crit against affected enemies. The boost to crit only applies during the Breach phase.

To be clear, when I say 'at the end of an action' in regards to Voltaic Arc, I mean that passing next to an enemy during movement doesn't actually trigger Voltaic Arc. It has to be that at some point during a turn both Patchwork and her victim aren't moving and are within two tiles of each other. And unlike Chaining Jolt, the zap's range is orthogonal, which is just confusing and makes it harder to get a handle on the areas of each skill. It also means that Voltaic Arc will almost never chain past the initial target; you could be forgiven for not realizing it can chain, as it's not like the game itself mentions such.

The weird thing is that Voltaic Arc will nonetheless trigger before a Subdue impacts, effectively making Voltaic Arc double as an upgrade to Subdue's damage aside the finicky point that an enemy at exactly 1 HP will be killed by Voltaic Arc instead of knocked Unconscious by Subdue. An extra layer of weird is that it doesn't get bonus damage against robots, unlike Chaining Jolt.

Also note that Voltaic Arc is considered to be a form of reaction fire. This mostly doesn't matter, but late in your Sacred Coil Investigation it can get incredibly aggravating, as Ronin have Lightning Reflexes and it does, in fact, block Voltaic Arc. The good news is that it can still chain off them to other targets, so it can still be worth trying to get close to a Ronin who is clumped with other enemies.

All that weirdness stated, Voltaic Arc is a surprisingly good skill for something that doesn't scale with technology and has such low base damage. It can be triggered multiple times a Round, enemies behave with no regard to the dangers presented by it, and it's completely free. When robots aren't around, Patchwork has only one skill -acquired next rank- that can be used without ending the turn, and so outside the Sacred Coil Investigation it's basically free to spend movement to trigger it. Furthermore, as we'll get to in a bit, you can actually upgrade it to be even stronger!

Threat Recognition, by contrast, is a bit underwhelming. It's essentially worthless in 1-Encounter missions due to crit boosting being essentially worthless, and even in multi-Encounter missions it can end up worthless; once again, some Breach setups offer no chance to use pre-Breach actions, such as entering from skylights or climbing ladders, and if you have Patchwork hack a door for the team that also gives her no opportunity to use a pre-Breach action. So a 2-Encounter mission that opens with skylight Breach points, or rappelling Breach points, or whatever, has made Threat Recognition essentially worthless, and a 3-Encounter mission that eg opens with skylights followed by you ending up having Patchwork hack a security door for the second Breach point, has also had Threat Recognition essentially worthless.

This isn't even getting into the point that Patchwork can and should be equipped with a Breach Item eventually; say you rappel in on Encounter 1 and so can't do pre-Breach stuff, but then Encounters 2 and 3 are free and clear. At that point Patchwork has three pre-Breach actions she'd like to use and only two opportunities to use them, forcing her to miss out on the value of one of them. Same for a mission in which every Encounter lets her do pre-Breach stuff, but which only has two Encounters in the first place. It's actually very rare for Patchwork to get the opportunity to use all three of her pre-Breach actions, hampering the utility of being able to do pre-Breach stuff in three Encounters.

Plus, the crit boost only applies during the Breach phase! The expected result of fully leveraging Threat Recognition is that it adds 1 damage, twice, across the entire mission. And that's assuming everybody actually shoots, when eg Verge may be Lifting targets instead. That's essentially nothing no matter how you slice it.

This is the other reason Voltaic Arc is easy to take: its competition is awful.

It's really too bad Chimera Squad is so reluctant to play out a full mission that both has three Encounters and lets the player properly engage with pre-Breach mechanics in full on all three Encounters. If that were more normal, Threat Recognition adding another charge would be plenty to make it solid competition, but because it's actually really rare to get the opportunity to actually utilize three pre-Breach actions, going from having two such actions to having three such actions is really low-value, leaving the crit chance boost the primary thing Threat Recognition has going for it a lot of the time, and that's just sad.

It's not like Combat Scanners is clearly superior to using a Breach Item, for that matter; a second charge added would be pretty solid if only Combat Scanners was so clearly great Patchwork would basically always prefer using Combat Scanners to using a Breach Item. It's good, but no, it's not 'blows all Breach Items out of the water' good.

Special Agent
+1 HP
+3 Aim
+4 Hack

Stasis Field
1 action point: Patchwork sends the Gremlin to Stasis a unit until the start of her next turn. This prevents the target from acting, but also ensures it cannot be acted upon by other forces. Both allies and enemies may be targeted. 2 turn cooldown.

I've been complaining about the Stasis icon visual being recycled for Disorienting effects and whatnot, and Stasis Field is why it's a problem; it's not just confusing visual communication for players returning from XCOM 2, it's confusing within Chimera Squad's own visual language!

In any event, Stasis Field is surprisingly useful in spite of the change to turn mechanics. You can't do the XCOM 2 thing of having the entire squad unleash a volley of fire on a tough target, then putting said target on pause, and then on the following turn having the entire squad attack again, but being able to wipe an enemy turn for 1 action point is actually a lot more baseline useful than in XCOM 2. It's much harder to kill everything before it gets a chance to act than in XCOM 2, after all; a full disable that doesn't end the turn is, in the moment, just as good as taking out the target for good.

It also cements Patchwork's place on the team as anti-Sacred Coil, because it basically makes her a Ronin counter; Tempo Surge gifts them two extra free turns, which is very dangerous and most stalling tools (Such as Verge's Stupor) will at most eat one of those turns, but Stasis will eat both of them 100% reliably. This dramatically reduces the threat they present, assuming you make the effort to have Patchwork in the right timeline slot to Stasis Field them before their second turn. (Or gift her action points using whoever is in that slot)

That said, a player coming from XCOM 2 might be a little disappointed, as Stasis Field doesn't get to hit the same peaks as Stasis did in XCOM 2; where XCOM 2 is fond of sprinkling missions with hugely outsized threats that are susceptible to Stasis (eg Andromedons, Sectopods, Gatekeepers, and especially the Alien Rulers), Chimera Squad has a 'flatter' power curve overall. Hard-disabling The Biggest Threat Around in Chimera Squad is thus generally lower-impact than doing so in a late XCOM 2 mission -and since Psi Operatives are literally impossible to field in XCOM 2's early game, XCOM 2's early game being even  flatter than Chimera Squad's doesn't meaningfully change this point.

Also note that Stasis Field has the unusual distinction of being bad to target at an enemy that will go right after Patchwork herself. You ideally will aim it at an enemy where one or two other agents -or even all three other agents- will go first, so that when Patchwork's next turn rolls around you'll get to pile damage onto the target before it acts. Overwatch can be used as a way to get around this, but most agents have their best offensive capabilities incompatible with such.

Also, it should be pointed out that Stasis Field is surprisingly spammable. Since its mechanics demand Patchwork get another turn before you can end the Encounter, it is, as far as I'm aware, actually impossible to enter an Encounter with it on its full cooldown... and its cooldown is already short. This is not a skill you should be holding off on using Just In Case, generally speaking -which is actually a point in its favor over Psi Operative Stasis, which was a skill you didn't want to be too free with, just in case you suddenly found yourself needing it.

A very nice workhorse skill for Patchwork... if a bit eyebrow-raising in its narrative implications. (Time stopping technology in a Gremlin? Holy crap, what?)

Anyway, a couple fiddly notes; firstly, it should be explicitly stated that Patchwork can target herself with Stasis Field, which can be useful in a pinch where Patchwork is low on HP, letting her escape any risk of being downed before her next turn. Secondly, since Stasis Field's duration is tied to Patchwork's turn rather than the target's turn, you should be careful about things like using Teamwork on Patchwork; it's possible to completely waste Stasis Field by targeting an enemy with it, then having another agent use Teamwork on Patchwork before that enemy's turn, and so the Stasis Field ends without eating their turn. Conversely, note that gifting action points does not have this issue. (Which can be inconvenient if you gift Patchwork action points on the idea that it'll end the Stasis Field, and whoops no it doesn't)

Unlock Potential Training: +1 Item slot.

Yeah, she shares this with Terminal, I guess because they're both conceptually Specialists and thus the inheritor of the Support's will and thus Deep Pockets?

In any event, while Patchwork isn't a particularly exceptional user of this effect, she's by no means bad at using it. Since Item usage in Chimera Squad is always a free action, it's not like Items will ever compete with each other in a turn, for one. So this is nice, and is one of the better Special Agent Training options to prioritize.

Senior Agent
+2 Aim
+4 Hack

Shock Therapy
Passive: Chaining Jolt will Disorient every target it catches, including with the chain hits, and has a 50% chance to Stun a given target for 2 action points. (If the Stun occurs on a given target, it replaces the Disorient application on that target)

OR

High Voltage
Passive: Chained hits from Chaining Jolt and Voltaic Arc, as well as the initial hit of Voltaic Arc, do an additional 1-3 damage, which still completely ignores Armor.

I'm not sure why the lanes on these two aren't switched, given that High Voltage explicitly synergizes with Voltaic Arc and Shock Therapy does not. It's not like either of them synergizes with Threat Recognition.

Anyway, note that robots are immune to Disorientation, so Shock Therapy is overall biased toward supporting anti-organic duties. They can still be Stunned, however, so it's a fairly slight bias. It's only worth mentioning at all because High Voltage is itself strongly anti-robot; between High Voltage's damage boost and the innate anti-robot bonus damage on Chaining Jolt, a High Voltage Chaining Jolt can have bounce shots instantly killing Androids and Turrets, as well as doing shockingly severe damage to Mecs, Andromedon Shells, and other robots. Between these two points, High Voltage is probably the thing to grab if eg you hit this level late in your second Investigation, with Sacred Coil being your remaining Investigation, while Shock Therapy is probably the thing to grab if Sacred Coil is behind you. (Though note that the final mission does, in fact, involve a decent number of robotic enemies, so it's not that clearcut)

High Voltage of course synergizes with Voltaic Arc, letting Patchwork do an enormous amount of damage simply by spending an action point walking closer to an enemy. This is quite notable given Patchwork's only alternatives for spending that first action point are Reprogram (Which requires an enemy robot is present, which isn't guaranteed to be true in a given Encounter even during the Sacred Coil Investigation) and Stasis Field. (Which is not a straightforward general-purpose action one can always get great use out of) Indeed, if you don't take Voltaic Arc, you should seriously consider equipping Patchwork with a Reflex Grip, so she can more reliably get use out of that first action point; given how much Chaining Jolt dominates her utility and how it gets zero value out of movement, Patchwork often gets little or no value out of moving if it's not specifically for triggering Voltaic Arc.

High Voltage+Voltaic Arc is also a skill combo that works well when Patchwork is alongside agents who can trigger Voltaic Arc by moving people -such as Shelter and Torque- and agents who can inflict Rupture, such as Claymore, turning many relatively small hits into notably bigger hits. So that's something to keep in mind when considering what kind of team to build for a given run.

Personally, I far prefer High Voltage, as a dead enemy is superior to a Disoriented or Stunned enemy, especially once you're far enough in the game that you're running out of things to spend Intel on. The fact that it works on Voltaic Arc drags Patchwork's damage potential up enormously, if a bit unreliably; if she walks up to an enemy and then zaps them with Chaining Jolt, High Voltage takes her from 5 damage to 6-9 damage on just that initial target! Even on the highest difficulty in your final Investigation, you'll regularly see enemies that are guaranteed to survive 5 damage but can potentially be taken out by 6-9 damage, and the damage contrast is much starker if you manage to get bounces, since those are normally forced to exactly 1 damage and High Voltage thus doubles the damage at bare minimum. Patchwork almost never has reason to fire her Rifle if she has this combo online.

The fact that Patchwork particularly excels against robots contributes, especially since multiple other agents have their performance go down against robots: unless Sacred Coil was your first Investigation and is behind you by the time this choice crops up (You didn't pick her first, for example), it tends to make more sense to have Patchwork focus on propping up the team's anti-robot performance, such as if you benched someone who is poor against robots in favor of Patchwork.

It's a bit unfortunate Patchwork is so biased toward a single specific build...

On a different note, Shock Therapy's icon is interesting to me because it seems to suggest that at some point Chaining Jolt didn't naturally chain, and was instead intended to be upgraded with chaining via a skill. I'm glad they didn't go that route, if so; Chain Jolt would've been merely okay if it lacked the chaining, and a level-up to unlock the chaining would've probably been wonky one way or another.

Principal Agent
+2 Aim
+5 Hack

Final Stats
11 HP (Counting Training, but not other bonuses)
78 Aim
25 Hack

Capacitor Discharge
Turn ending action: Patchwork sends the Gremlin to do damage in an area up to 3 tiles out from the center, inflicting 3-6 damage enemies caught in the area, with all affected targets potentially becoming Disoriented or even Stunned. 1 use per mission.

The range on Capacitor Discharge is finite, but long enough that if you can't target a location the most likely explanation is that something is blocking the targeting, not that Patchwork needs to get closer.

Bizarrely, while the in-game description claims Capacitor Discharge does additional damage to robots, and that would be consistent with how it worked in XCOM 2, in Chimera Squad its damage doesn't vary by target at all... except that it's still affected by Armor. Don't bother using it on groups of robots; regardless of whether you took Shock Therapy or High Voltage, a Chaining Jolt is likely to do comparable or better damage, and if you took Shock Therapy it will even carry a chance to Stun, no need to blow Capacitor Discharge's charge on the situation.

Really, in general Capacitor Discharge is bizarrely underwhelming. You should certainly consider using it when there's overwhelming numbers of enemies and at least three are clumped such that you can catch them with Capacitor Discharge, but for being Patchwork's ultimate level-up skill it has a hard time justifying itself the majority of the time, even aside it being one use per mission. It's just too undertuned compared to Chaining Jolt, in damage and targeting mechanics. If it was consistently a mass-Stun, that would give you a clear reason to use it over Chaining Jolt, but most of the time there's no reason to use it.

This should've had better damage or more consistent and strong side effects, honestly. Just being a guaranteed mass-Stun would instantly justify it all its own, and it having just the one charge and a limited strike zone would mean it would only rarely trivialize a mission. (Indeed, it would only rarely trivialize an Encounter)

It's at least not so bad you should ignore its existence entirely, mind, but it really is undertuned, and is another skill hampered by not being tied to equipment and not really designed to account for that fact.

Final Training: Unlock Storm Generator.

Storm Generator
Passive: Chaining Jolt now jumps to targets up to 5 tiles out from each victim. Voltaic Arc's jump range also expands to 5 tiles, but not its initial activation range.

It might actually be just 4 tiles. It's not laid out in the config files, and it's a bit of a pain to arrange clear testing conditions in-game. I do know it's large enough it's quite common for Chaining Jolt to mark every enemy in the Encounter when previewing it. (Though it's rare it will actually hit every enemy, given the oddities of its chaining behavior)

In any event, Storm Generator has a dramatic effect on the chaining capacity of Chaining Jolt, giving High Voltage incredible damage potential and turning Shock Therapy into a potential battlefield-wide crippling of the enemy. (Too bad you can't have both of them at the same time)

It also, as noted earlier, makes it a lot more important to understand the chaining behavior so you can maximize its effectiveness.

This is honestly one of the best Final Training skills in the game, and cements Patchwork as having little reason to fire her rifle in combat. Just zap things. Don't bother equipping her with Ammo, she won't need it. Similarly, you're better off giving her an Impact Frame than any other Weapon Attachment -she actually has reason to use Subdue, unlike the trigger on her rifle.

It's a pretty silly outcome, but it's very fun and distinctive, so I'm pretty positive on it overall.

Not a lot to add to that, honestly; Storm Generator is distinctive and cool, but there's not a ton of added nuance to it. Indeed, part of its strength is reducing the nuance in maximizing Chaining Jolt's effectiveness; there are situations where Storm Generator will let Chaining Jolt catch every enemy in a group where base Chaining Jolt will mark every enemy but not hit them, because Storm Generator's added range lets Chaining Jolt jump past an already-hit enemy to a new target. So even if you're not working to maximize targets, Storm Generator will often invisibly add more damage anyway!

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As a character, Patchwork is possibly the closest to a stereotype out of the core cast; she's not just one of your Gremlin users, but is presented as more broadly someone who's fond of technology and works on robots and whatnot as a hobby, where her being a Gremlin user isn't just a thing she does in combat but a direct outgrowth of her broader personality, with little evidence of elements to her that don't tie back to this point.

She's still less of a stereotype than I'm used to seeing from a video game character, honestly, but it is a little bit of a disappointment compared to the rest of the cast.

Even then, how it connects to her background is a bit interesting, in that, while the game itself doesn't make a big thing of it, Patchwork has robot legs. More specifically, one of the game's trailers plus some other bits like the website collectively inform us that Patchwork's robot legs were part of ADVENT trying to propagandize at people, where Patchwork was wheelchair-bound (I don't recall whether we're given specifics on the topic, as far as 'did she have legs, but she couldn't stand with them, or did she not have legs?') until ADVENT gave her robot legs, with this being shown on television and whatnot to sell people on the benefits of the alien occupation.

(I have mixed feelings about the low-key detail that it's specifically Tygan being shown in the trailer having apparently installed Patchwork's robot legs; on the one hand, it's nice to have something concrete for Tygan to have participated in and potentially be part of his decision to go rogue, where I can imagine Tygan started out going 'yeah, robot legs to help people is good!' and ended up having a growing realization that the people he was working with cared more about the propaganda value rather than the real human benefits... but on the other hand it meshes poorly with Tygan specifically treating robotics as an area of weakness of his. I appreciate the apparent impulse, but the execution is wonky)

So Patchwork pretty specifically got her robot legs from the brutal regime of the past and probably many of the people involved in this decision very much did not have her best interests at heart. That's the kind of plotpoint that is often used to generate angst, where a character is deeply unhappy with these benefits they got from unpleasant people, often to the point of outright rejecting the benefits; it's interesting to me that Patchwork doesn't do that, and is in fact taking advantage of having robot legs to participate in a context she'd be unlikely to take to if she was using a wheelchair instead.

It's also interesting how it's, counterintuitively enough, an example of the XCOM games continuing to step away from the transhumanist elements of Enemy Unknown/Within. Like yes Patchwork has robot legs, but this is treated as just the future version of mundane prosthetics; Patchwork notably does not get any gameplay advantages out of having robot legs, and as far as I'm aware the more purely narrative components never attempt to suggest her robot legs are superior to fleshy human legs. (ie there is no dialogue suggesting she can run faster than any fully organic human, or jump higher, or anything like that) It's worth pointing out here that PCSes also do not return in Chimera Squad, which were a notable exception to XCOM 2's overall trend of walking back the transhumanism, and furthermore that Chimera Squad does not sub in some replacement bit of transhumanism. Instead it expands on the equipment list with things like a dedicated Vest slot, a dedicated Breach Item slot, etc; gear your agents carry or wear, not gear they install into themselves.

So even though in a direct character sense Patchwork doesn't stand out from the crowd of her fellow agents, I'm still pleasantly surprised at the overall handling of her more narrative bits.

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Next time, we wrap up agent talk with something a bit different: Androids.

See you then.