XCOM 2 Alien Analysis: ADVENT Purifier

Basic
HP: 4/5/6/6
Armor: 0
Defense: 0
Dodge: 0
Aim: 65/65/70/70
Mobility: 12 (8/16)
Damage: 0
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/0/10%/10%
Will: 50
Tech: 125

No, I have no idea what the Purifier's Commander/Legendary crit chance is about, given their flamethrower can't do damage and so can't crit. It still has one right there in the files, no idea why.

Spray Flame
Primary weapon does no damage; a successful hit sets the target on fire, if applicable. Strikes a cone-shaped area in front of the Purifier, up to 8 tiles out and ultimately 5 tiles wide.

In this regard, the Purifier is a borderline-non-threat; its primary attack has a chance of setting a unit on fire, and that's its entire effect. No actual direct damage. Effortlessly dealt with by Hunkering Down. Completely useless against any unit that doesn't care about fire, including SPARKs, lucky Templar, Psi Operatives that have picked up Fortress, and literally anyone wearing a Hazmat Vest. Extremely close-range, such that it's not unusual for a Purifier to spend an entire turn on just closing with your forces, their first move not bringing them close enough to bring their flamethrower to bear.

Like, yes, it can hit multiple targets, but its radius is too small for that to crop up very often unless you literally set soldiers adjacent to each other, and while I don't understand the flamethrower's mechanics exactly it uses some weird non-standard accuracy check that makes its chance to hit generally even lower than you'd expect. It's also completely blocked by High Cover, as in a soldier standing right behind High Cover the Purifier's flamethrower sprays at has zero chance of being lit up, even though the Purifier's ostensible base Aim is high enough High Cover shouldn't negate their hit chance.

In practice, they have a lot of the disadvantages of a melee enemy, without having the advantages a move-and-melee enemy gets in terms of strike zone. A comparison can be made to Faceless, who can strike up to 3 tiles out while having 2 more Mobility than Purifier: on paper, this gives the Purifier a better strike distance than a Faceless (8 tiles of movement followed by 8 tiles of strike zone, vs 9 tiles of movement followed by 3 tiles of strike zone: 16 tiles out vs 12 tiles out), but I've already covered how Faceless are heavily dependent on their ambush behavior to actually make an attack, and Purifiers lack an equivalent edge to make it easier to close for the attack. It's very common for a Purifier to end up spending both action points on moving the first turn it's active, unable to get anyone with its flamethrower.

And then they have further flaws, in that they don't play nice with a lot of other enemies: they're unlikely to threaten your own forces with their flamethrower, but the attempt can lead to melee enemies being unwilling to approach the Purifier's intended target, as random ground tiles in their radius will set alight. Purifiers are also surprisingly careless about friendly fire with their flamethrower, and since their allies aren't trying to take Cover from them, they're actually far more likely to actually hit an ally that they end up catching in their radius.

However, Purifiers are still pretty dangerous, due to...

Incendiary Grenade
Carries one Incendiary Grenade, which does 2-3 damage, has 1 Shred, and sets units on fire.

... this.

Purifiers are one of the most terrifying units of the early game if you're at all careless; where most units carrying grenades often completely ignore them even when you offer them a perfect target, Purifiers are extremely reliable about chucking their Incendiary Grenade anytime you have two or more soldiers within the Incendiary Grenade's blast radius. 2-3 damage with Burning stacked atop it can kill low-level soldiers before your turn even begins. Even considering that the +1 chance is only 20% (As the Purifier is literally tossing one of your own Incendiary Grenades), this is nasty if you've got Rookies or Corporals clumped up. Lost and Abandoned can be a particularly rude awakening in this regard due to how early it's placed -Purifiers take a little bit to enter rotation, normally first showing up on your first Supply Raid, which normally occurs in the second month, but Lost and Abandoned has guaranteed Purifiers while happening in the first month, where it's a surprise if you have anybody above Corporal.

Make sure to space out your units and you can largely ignore Purifiers for a turn, maybe even two turns, but yikes are they harsh if you're inattentive on that point. The only good news is that, just like your own Incendiary Grenades, a Purifier chucking a grenade won't immediately smash Cover and so won't leave the hit troops exposed to immediate follow-up fire, unlike when other explosives-carrying enemies lob their grenades.

Also, to be clear, Purifier grenades have the same blast radius as your own versions. I wouldn't bother to specifically note this, but it's actually anomalous: every other enemy with ostensibly an equivalent type of grenade to your own forces gets a larger blast radius than the version you have access to.

Good thing War of the Chosen nerfed Incendiary Grenades, though. If they still had their damage from the base game, Purifiers would be absolutely horrifying for anyone not consistently careful to space out troops... when Bonds encourage a certain amount of clumping. They're still deadly, but that would've been bonkers, doing an alarming amount of damage even into the midgame when you had Predator Armor.

Immunities
Immune to Burning and Poisoning statuses.

The Purifier is notable for being the only non-robot that has this exact set of immunities. Andromedons are also not robots while being immune to both Burning and Poisoning, but they're also immune to Acid, which Purifiers are not.

The fact that they're immune to Poison is in-universe sensible -they're in sealed hazmat suits- but a little frustrating from a game design standpoint, since they're yet another enemy who relies on getting close to be a threat while being immune to the primary status effect you use to lower enemy Mobility. They're sufficiently bad at getting in reach it's often not necessary, admittedly, but it suggests the devs aren't paying much attention to this type of tactical utility in player tools, which is... not ideal.

Their immunity to fire I'm much more okay with. In the base game, it was an immunity primarily found on enemies that were susceptible to Bluescreen Rounds, which had the strange effect that Bluescreen Rounds+Dragon Rounds was surprisingly reliable a combination up until Andromedons showed up... and even with them, their second stage is susceptible to Bluescreen Rounds. Purifiers being added in makes it less casually optimal to just pair those two Ammo types, particularly in the mid-early portion of the game, especially with the Chosen running around and being enemies you'd much rather point Venom Rounds at.

Plus, it would be comedic in a bad way if Purifiers used a flamethrower and then were actually substantially impaired by the resulting fires.

Regardless, this also makes them one of two enemies in the entire game you can't use Ammo to get a damage boost against. (The other being Andromedons)

Explosive
On death, the Purifier has a 50% chance of exploding for 5-6 damage with 1 Shred; this has a 3-tile blast radius.

This icon isn't actually used anywhere in XCOM 2, and in fact while the narrative elements of the game heavily hint at Purifiers exploding there's no UI elements referring to it. I'm using a modified version of the previous game's 'explodes on death' icon for convenience.

Something worth mentioning is that a Purifier that explodes will have their body vanish, but this is purely cosmetic. A Sectoid or Gatekeeper can still raise them as a Psi Zombie! An invisible Psi Zombie! You'll still be able to properly track the resulting Psi Zombie, though, as the purple glow at a Psi Zombie's head will be visible, in addition to eg their HP meter, so it's not actually a gameplay problem, thankfully, even aside how unlikely it is to actually happen. Still a visual oops, though.

Exception: if they explode while Undying Loyalty is active, and turn into a Psi Zombie via Undying Loyalty, they will not vanish. If this happened as a result of Overwatch fire, the game is likely to hang for several minutes while the game struggles to reconcile the different things it's supposed to be doing with animations.

Anyway, the on-death explosion is another layer of nasty. It's obviously particularly bad for a first-time player who's not expecting it, but even once you know it's a possibility it makes Templars an extremely bad idea to try to use against Purifiers and hurts the Ranger's usual utility at bypassing Cover, as a melee kill is a 50% chance of straight-up losing the melee attacker in the early game. While it's less prominent for them, this issue also makes certain otherwise-useful options on SPARKs and Skirmishers dangerous to deploy against Purifiers in the early game and mid-early game. (eg Strike, Justice, Wrath) There's a few other units that explode on death in XCOM 2, but the others aren't particularly good targets for melee attacks anyway, making their death explosions redundant for dissuading melee action against them. Purifiers actually make use of Cover and are relatively soft targets, exactly the sort of thing melee is normally a great answer to. The only good news is that they only have a 20% chance of rolling the +1 on the explosion, biasing it away from a worst-case scenario.

As Purifiers are the only exploding unit that takes Cover, they're also the only exploding unit whose behavior is prone to setting them alongside detonatables. You know, like cars. So even if you're willing to have your Templar eat the Purifier's explosion for some reason, it's easy to end up with them eating an environmental explosion to boot. Bad idea! (Unless you have Fortress, of course) This means even once you've got decently leveled troops in Predator Armor, going for melee against a Purifier may still be risking instant death!

Note that Skullmining a Purifier actually won't ever trigger an explosion. Feel free to Skullmine Purifiers! Indeed, Purifiers are one of the better arguments for considering performing the Skullmining Project and carting Skulljacks into missions more than strictly necessary.

Also, an amusingly appropriate, though maybe a bit ironic point; Purifiers are fairly good at fighting the Lost, but their presence tends to make Lost missions harder for you. Between the death explosion and the tendency for Lost to end up clumped so they provoke an Incendiary Grenade toss, it's hard to avoid more waves spawning in, and while Lost are willing to fight ADVENT forces they prefer to attack your forces and their spawn routine is designed to get them on your case, not ADVENT's. This is another point in favor of considering Skullmining, so you can reliably sweep a Purifier aside in Lost missions without risking an explosion drawing Lost in faster/at all.

The Purifier is a weird unit all-around.

It's also one that's a little strange to cover, because how deadly a threat it is is unusually dependent on being aware of a specific AI datapoint. If you are already aware that Purifiers are quick to toss their grenades at clumped soldiers, and behave appropriately, they will tend to be only rarely a threat. If, on the other hand, you've become extremely used to the behavior of most other enemies, wherein explosives are to generally be kept on the belt even when presented with a perfect grenade target, and fail to cotton on to how aggressive Purifiers are about grenade-chucking, they are liable to give you a lot of trouble.

They're the only enemy like this, at that. There are enemies where it's very useful to understand specific elements of their AI that aren't necessarily obvious, of course, such as how I've already noted that a Parry-capable Templar can reliably stall a single Faceless in complete safety, but no other enemy has quite so dramatic and consistent a difference between 'player knows about AI bit' and 'player does not know about AI bit' in threat level.

I have mixed feelings about this aspect of Purifiers, predominately because they are unique in this regard. Your average player -particularly players who started with the base game- is liable to pick up on the game's general rules of thumb, where eg knowing the specifics of AI behavior isn't useless but isn't a high priority (Among other points, most AI behavior is randomized, where you won't necessarily get the same result twice from arranging the situation to be just so twice), and quite possibly end up confused and a bit frustrated by Purifiers, not realizing they need to think about Purifiers differently.

On the other hand, War of the Chosen was clearly very ambitious and got pushed out before it was properly finished. I wouldn't be surprised if, given more time to refine the game, other enemies might have been brought more in line with Purifiers, or vice-versa. So I'm not not sure how representative this decision is. Plus, I'm all for making important abilities less randomized in their usage, overall -most grenade-chuckers are frustrating precisely because they usually won't chuck their grenade (And so you should play basically as if they don't have a grenade) but if they do randomly remember their grenade exists it will be a really high-impact effect, which is just... obnoxious of a dynamic.

On a different note, one of the less obvious design-useful aspects to the Purifier is that they're one of several changes War of the Chosen makes that reduce the dominance of Rangers, particularly of leveraging Slash in the early game. In the base game, Rangers are extremely effective against every early enemy, and just all-around your best, most reliable soldiers: Shotguns are inherently the most overall lethal of the core weapons, and also the only one that can achieve 100% accuracy on enemies in the early game without weird edge cases, and the instant you have a Blademaster you have the ability to Slash for damage comparable to a Magnetic Rifle, without any regard for Cover and with no chance of missing, with this being easy to arrange well before it's feasible to have even researched Magnetic Weapons. Even more extreme is if you have the Alien Hunters DLC, as your Blademaster will be Slashing for damage equal to a Mag Cannon, while still having no chance to miss and laughing at Cover and getting a completely free ranged attack to toss out if you need more action economy. Sure, if any enemies survive you're relatively vulnerable to being flanked after a Slash, but that doesn't really matter if you Slashed or Shotgunned every enemy to death before they could act. Which... is very plausible to do.

As you progress into the midgame enemies start cropping up that Slash is less than ideal against, but in the early game Blademaster Rangers are, to be blunt, completely ridiculous in the base game.

Purifiers, in spite of their difficulties threatening your squad if you don't clump, manage to rather neatly snip this particular issue, and to reduce Ranger dominance as a whole. First and most obvious is the part where they have a 50% chance to explode for damage that is, by the standards of the early game, very lethal. This discourages Slashing them, and it also discourages going for point-blank flanking shots with your Shotgun; you can still potentially get a flank from a few tiles away and hit them that way, but the overall result is that Rangers are unreliable in outperforming other classes against Purifiers. (Among other points, arranging to be in Cover while flanking a Purifier without being point-blank often results in shots with less than 100% accuracy) You're generally better off using other tools to deal with them, like tossing a Frag Grenade to wipe their Cover and follow up with a mid-range shot from a Sharpshooter, Specialist, or Grenadier. Rangers aren't useless against Purifiers, but they're rarely going to be your best choice for handling the problem.

Second, the fact that Purifiers are a close-range threat, one where trying to surgically remove it with a Ranger is risking killing the Ranger, then broadly discourages charging Rangers in among the pod, at least until after you've killed the Purifier. Part of the reason Slash is so effective in the base game's early game is that the only significant punishment for getting in close is risking being flanked, and enemy composition will often render it a largely-irrelevant concern: a pod of an Officer, a Stun Lancer, and a Trooper, where you Slash the Trooper while flanking the Officer? The Stun Lancer wasn't going to shoot at anyone anyway, and the Officer will almost always respond to being flanked by scrambling to safety and then Marking a Target, while the Trooper is now dead. A Purifier's response to being flanked is to usually try to charge and spray flame -or sometimes to remain exactly where they are and spray flame. Thus, a Ranger getting in among the enemy pod is quite likely to end up on fire if you didn't specifically Slash into a High Cover position that protects from the Purifier.

Third, while the Purifier's flamethrower isn't terribly lethal, it does disable Slash access. It disables a lot of capabilities, but my point is that a Ranger who ends up on fire, even if you're willing to ignore the damage and keep fighting without Hunkering Down or using a Medikit, is still a Ranger who can't Slash. That's concretely costing you damage, given a Blademaster Ranger hits harder than anything else available when all your weapons are Conventional. Other classes that fight on through the fire don't have anything clearly equivalent of an issue, certainly not so early in the game.

As such, where in the base game Blademaster Rangers are able to spend a good chunk of the early game trivializing a lot of problems, with little variation to keep the player engaged with circumstances, in War of the Chosen you'll often have to come up with a different plan of action if you want to avoid damage and all because here's a Purifier.

That's on top of the Lost reducing Ranger dominance, as a reminder. And there's one more early game enemy that helps reduce Ranger dominance... though not as much. Purifiers are honestly the single biggest impact on Ranger early-game performance, out of War of the Chosen's additions.

This is all very appreciated. A lot of games would've reacted to 'Blademaster Rangers are really dominant' by nerfing Swords, nerfing Blademaster, or replacing Blademaster with some ability that doesn't boost Swords at all, and the most likely scenarios would be either

A: Slashing Blademasters are still absurdly dominant, just slightly less so

or B: Swords would be rendered so bad that Rangers have no reason to bother with this component of their kit outside niche situations.

Both of these would be undesirable; the former wouldn't be a fix at all, while the latter would be taking the Ranger's primary defining class quality and gutting it, likely without giving them a new, just as interesting point of distinction. Introducing new enemies that discourage Slash spam, and making them show up early reasonably often, allows Rangers to still have a useful place on the battlefield (They remain more or less just as great when none of the new enemies problematic to them are around) while preventing them from being a one-note way to dominate everything in the early game: you'll need alternate answers when Purifiers are running around, and so on. This is fantastic design of the sort I'm used to virtually never seeing from projects of XCOM 2's scale.


Advanced
HP: 6/8/9/9
Armor: 0/1/1/2
Defense: 0
Dodge: 0
Aim: 70/70/75/75
Mobility: 12 (8/16)
Damage: 0
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/0/10%/10%
Will: 50
Tech: 125

Spray Flame
Primary weapon does no damage; a successful hit sets the target on fire, if applicable. Strikes a cone-shaped area in front of the Purifier, up to 8 tiles out and ultimately 5 tiles wide.

Literally identical to the Basic Purifier's flamethrower. It's not like troops set on fire take more damage if it was an Advanced Purifier that started it, or anything.

I'm genuinely confused as to why Purifiers don't do damage on the initial hit, in part because of the weird effect it has on Purifier progression. As an extra layer of confusion, in multiplayer they do inflict immediate damage. So... why don't they in single player?

Incendiary Grenade
Carries one Incendiary Grenade, which does 2-3 damage, has 1 Shred, and sets units on fire.

By the time Advanced Purifiers show up, your soldiers should have enough experience under their belt, not to mention very possibly Predator Armor, that an Incendiary Grenade is bad to be hit by, but not 'whoops there goes half your squad, have fun with the rest of the mission'.

You should still avoid clumping, mind, but it's less dramatically bad of an idea by the time Advanced Purifiers show up, generally.

On a different note, it's worth pointing out that Fuse works on Purifiers of any tier, but is generally low in value compared to using Fuse on other explosive-carrying enemies. The damage is low, they're immune to the fire, it can't immediately wipe Cover to open up clear shots, the blast radius is small... the Shred can be appreciated if your squad has poor Shred and poor ability to ignore Armor, and if an enemy that's particularly great to set on fire happens to be nearby the Purifier (Maybe you're considering using Fuse to kick off your Overwatch ambush, and one of its podmates is a Stun Lancer) then it can be pretty good, but usually if you're going to use Fuse on a Purifier the actual purpose will be to deny them the ability to toss the grenade theirself. That's sufficiently useful in its own right you should absolutely keep it in mind, but if your squad is spread out and all it's probably better to do something else.

Immunities
Immune to Burning and Poisoning statuses.

Same basic implications as at Basic, but made slightly more significant now that they have Armor and so you might actually toss an Incendiary or Gas Grenade to Shred their Armor and be unhappy with how they don't care about the side effects. Toss Acid Grenades at them instead, if you can.

One new implication I quite like is a product of these immunities intersecting with Purifier Armor. In the base game, AP Rounds are lackluster because the vast majority of enemies that have more than 1 point of Armor are susceptible to Bluescreen Rounds, which will always provide as much or more damage advantage than AP Rounds if the target is susceptible to Bluescreen Rounds, and for enemies that have only 1 Armor -such as Stun Lancers above Basic- Dragon Rounds and/Venom Rounds is directly superior, as either way you get +1 damage on hit but AP Rounds doesn't inflict a status condition. The only meaningful caveat there prior to Andromedons is that AP Rounds affect Stock damage... which itself requires you miss with a Stock that does more than 1 damage, so in the early game it's virtually never relevant, and even into the midgame there's no guarantee you got AP Rounds at the same time as an Advanced/Superior Stock.

In War of the Chosen, AP Rounds are still a bit low-value, but they're the only Ammo type that directly boosts damage against Advanced Purifiers, making it a lot more likely you'll bother to equip them in the midgame, particularly on Legendary where they jump to 2 Armor. 2 points is enough to matter fairly regularly.

Explosive
On death, the Purifier has a 50% chance of exploding for 5-6 damage with 1 Shred; this has a 3-tile blast radius.

Just like the Incendiary Grenade, Advanced Purifiers potentially exploding on death, while bad to ram into, is much less concerning than with Basic Purifiers because your troops should be tough enough it's not risking instant death to be hit by it. (Well, by itself: still a horrible idea to attack them when they're adjacent to environmental explosives) It's still a big enough hit you should endeavor to avoid it, but eg having a Ranger Slash a Basic Purifier is generally risking getting that soldier instantly killed, whereas doing so with an Advanced Purifier is bad, but getting a Ranger maimed is possibly worth doing in context.

In practice, Advanced Purifiers are functionally the low point of the Purifier series. Their primary attack and Incendiary Grenade are unchanged from the Basic version, their death explosion is no stronger, etc, with the only substantial increase to their performance being that they pick up Armor. (Outside Rookie difficulty...) 1 point of Armor is enough to sometimes be a nuisance on low-per-hit-damage weapons, like Pistols and Bullpups, but by the time Advanced Purifiers are around you generally should have widespread magnetic weaponry, and often won't have to do anything about the Armor.

On Legendary difficulty, this is a more significant jump in performance, and represents a uniquely problematic threat. Going from 0 Armor at Basic to 2 Armor at Advanced is enough to pretty consistently demand at least one additional hit or that you incorporate Shred into your plan to dish out damage to the Purifier, unlike 1 Armor, and the threat profile has no equivalents until the endgame, when Andromedons are running about. ADVENT Mecs at first glance seem to be basically the same profile -immune to Poison and Fire, 2 Armor, shows up in a similar timeframe- and then having a real weapon in its hands, but Mecs have two key differences: they don't take Cover, and they're robots.

The relevancy of the robot point is low initially -even if you beelined for the Proving Ground, you have to fight Mecs at least once before you can perform the Bluescreen Protocol Project- but even before you have Bluescreen Rounds and EMP Grenades to really pick on Mecs it's already possible to have Combat Protocol, which does high Armor-ignoring damage to Mecs and much lower damage to Purifiers. And once you do have Bluescreen Protocol bearing fruit, Mecs become a much more manageable problem than Legendary Advanced Purifiers.

The Cover point is much more immediately relevant, if a little inconsistently. A Mec is easy to get accurate shots on: it has no Defense, it can't benefit from Cover, and it always uses its entire pod activation move to charge your forces. You expect to be regularly getting 90+% accuracy on shots against Mecs. An Advanced Purifier that ran into High Cover, conversely, is probably further away and definitely getting +40 Defense from Cover, where you can be struggling to reach a 50% chance to hit. And then it's dangerous to get in its face, since it can explode on death, making it probably a bad idea to go for melee or Run And Gun someone for a point-blank flank.

In conjunction with their innate immunities to Poison and fire, a Legendary Advanced Purifier in High Cover can be a huge pain to kill, enough so you may be better off trying to keep a bit back, focus on other targets, and wait for it to charge forward. Depending on what its podmates  are, this can be genuinely problematic, such as if getting closer to the pod is important to be able to efficiently kill its podmates.

Mind, the Advanced Purifier still has sad ability to do damage to your squad, enough so you might be fine with charging into flamethrower range, even aside SPARKs and Fortress soldiers laughing at it, but it's still a unique threat profile, and I appreciate War of the Chosen being more willing to get Armor showing up early for precisely this kind of reason.

Elite
HP: 10/10/12/14
Armor: 1/2/2/3
Defense: 0
Dodge: 0
Aim: 80
Mobility: 12 (8/16)
Damage: 0
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/0/10%/10%
Will: 50
Tech: 125

Spray Flame
Primary weapon does no damage; a successful hit sets the target on fire, if applicable. Strikes a cone-shaped area in front of the Purifier, up to 8 tiles out and ultimately 5 tiles wide.

Yeah, even Elite Purifiers still do no immediate damage. By the time you're fighting them, it's often easy to ignore them for a turn if you aren't clumping, even leaving people in easy reach of them, like standing in the open, because taking a turn or two of fire damage is just not concerning when you've got Majors running around in Predator Armor at minimum and possibly Warden Armor outright. The primary thing to keep in mind is that fire shuts off most abilities: don't leave a Ranger in the open around a Purifier if you need to Slash, Rapid Fire, Run And Gun, etc. If you just need them to shotgun someone, though? Yeah, accepting a flamethrower blast is stupidly safe to do, quite often.

I like the impact Purifiers have on the experience overall, but this is the most confusing, frustrating element of their design, and multiplayer Purifiers doing immediate damage shows it's not some esoteric engine limitation. They just... chose to not have Purifiers ever do immediate damage. It's not like your own Flamethrower has no immediate damage...

Incendiary Bomb
Carries one Incendiary Bomb, which does 5-6 damage, has 2 Shred, and sets units on fire.

It's worth noting that it's very risky to use Insanity and by extension Void Rift on a Purifier. They will pretty much always respond to Panic by charging your forces and then chucking their Incendiary Bomb at the largest cluster of your forces they can reach. This isn't a problem if your team is heavy on Fortress for some reason, but usually it means Panicking them is worse than letting them take their own turn.

I mention it here because basic Purifiers will normally be phased out before you even have Psi Operatives, where for Advanced Purifiers odds are good you have medium armor and such a mistake probably isn't horrifyingly lethal. Elite Purifiers upgrading to Incendiary Bombs, meanwhile, is potentially taking off a good third of an endgame soldier's HP, and I mean on the initial hit, and you may still be sitting on Plated Armor, not to mention still leveling your soldiers. It's a really, really bad idea to Panic an Elite Purifier.

Anyway, Elite Purifiers are an actually meaningful jump in danger, because Incendiary Bombs are a big jump in power over Incendiary Grenades and they remain extremely consistent about using them if presented with clumped targets. It's still only a 20% chance to roll +1, but 5 damage alongside setting multiple victims on fire is bad. Even if your soldiers survive, they'll often end up with a Fear of Fire after the mission, requiring Infirmary time if you want the usually-minor problems presented by fire to not be a showstopper on key troops.

Also, to be clear, it has the same blast radius as your own Incendiary Bombs, just as the Incendiary Grenades of prior tiers are genuinely identical to your Incendiary Grenades. As a reminder, this means they have a slightly larger blast radius than prior tiers of Purifier, making it that little bit harder to avoid clumping enough to trigger a toss. If you find yourself regularly getting Incendiary Bombs tossed at you by Elite Purifiers, and can't get a handle on scattering enough to avoid it without causing yourself other problems, you may wish to prioritize killing or disabling Elite Purifiers in particular, even if you do fine at avoiding prior tiers tossing their grenades at you. Or use Fuse on Elite Purifiers. That handily defangs them.

Immunities
Immune to Burning and Poisoning statuses.

Like with Advanced Purifiers, even more significant due to Armor having gone up. Though in the case of Elite Purifiers it's no longer so unique, since they can and will coexist with Andromedons. Still helps bump up the average utility of AP Rounds, mind, but isn't so important an aid to AP Rounds as it is with Advanced Purifiers.

Explosive
On death, the Purifier has a 50% chance of exploding for 5-6 damage with 1 Shred; this has a 3-tile blast radius.

By the time Elite Purifiers are running around, their death explosion has fallen far enough behind your durability that it's much more worth keeping in mind the possibility of risking being hit by it in pursuit of gaining tactical advantage, such as if they'll catch Armored enemies in the blast and you have little or no Shred left on your current team. You should still avoid the hit -6 damage is a third of the maximum HP you can get if we ignore Covert Op grinding- but it's at a level where a modest emergency might call for taking the risk, instead of demanding things are at the level where outright sacrificing a soldier is a sensible plan.

Elite Purifiers are still probably less threatening than Basic Purifiers in real terms, but updating to an Incendiary Bomb at least means they're not just purely behind on the damage curve. They're also tough enough it's often better to ignore them for a turn while you focus on other, more immediate threats, especially since they're a very low threat if you don't clump enough to provoke an Incendiary Bomb being tossed.

Among other points, Elite Purifiers take long enough to show up you're a lot more likely to have gotten one or more important tools for trivializing them than with prior tiers: Fortress, Fuse to deny them their grenade toss, AP Rounds to shrug off their solid Armor, Armor-bypassing special abilities or Chosen gear, etc. This is a point that applies to all the Elite ADVENT units to some extent, but Purifiers are one of the harder-hit cases of such, possibly the single hardest hit. Among other points, Purifiers are literally the only unit in the game that can be rendered 100% helpless by the right squad setup -a team where everyone is a Psi Operative or Templar with Fortress can't be affected by Purifiers at all. Every other unit has a generic ranged attack or a melee attack, even if it's a fallback option they don't like to use, which can't be passively neutralized, ensuring they can do some damage.

Don't get careless and provoke an Incendiary Bomb toss, though.

As a Domination target, Purifiers of any tier are fun to play around with, but not particularly useful. They can be okay in Lost-including missions, since setting Lost on fire en mass is a decent way to deal with them, at least to the extent of buying your squad time to focus on other problems, but in most situations all they do particularly well is act as a decent distraction. Their primary attack is particularly glaring an issue here, since so many enemies are immune to it, it still does no direct damage to the ones that are susceptible, and some susceptible enemies you'd probably rather not set on fire. (eg Sectoids)

If the mission includes Chryssalids, they're a bit more appealing, particularly if Burrowing Chryssalids are about. Most enemies susceptible to Domination are also susceptible to Chryssalid poison, making it less than ideal to have them hit by Chryssalids successfully, with Purifiers being one of the handful of exceptions. Furthermore, a Purifier dying has a chance to explode, which will inevitably do some damage to whatever Chryssalid finished them off. And of course Chryssalids tend to cluster in the open, making them quite susceptible to the flamethrower and to being hit by an Incendiary Grenade/Bomb. Lucking into Dominating a Purifier early in such a mission can make it much less painful to scout for burrowed Chryssalids, easier to Shred them, and so on.

But otherwise there's... virtually always going to be better targets for Domination.

Autopsy-wise, Purifiers are unique, in that their Autopsy doesn't unlock anything. Instead, it provides a passive and permanent boost to all Vest Items, causing them to grant 1 more HP than they normally would. If you're using Vests, do the Autopsy! The only cost is a brief Research period! (Or you can wait for it to hit Instant, I guess)

Note that the in-game interface will indicate the Autopsy provides boosts to other parameters on Vests, such as indicating Plated Vest is getting +1 to its Armor. This is an error: the Purifier Autopsy only boosts the actual HP boost. This includes that it does not boost the HP restoration from a Stasis Vest.

Of course, the Vest boost it provides is sufficiently small that it doesn't really encourage using Vests if you weren't already using them, so if you're not using Vests, you can ignore it indefinitely.

It's too bad Experimental Armor is so bad...

I do wish more Autopsies had this kind of benefit. Especially if the Instant mechanic was removed, it would provide a progression a little like Breakthroughs, where you spend lab time for permanent improvements. Or even retaining the Instant framework would let the game do a certain amount of 'leveling' of early gear, where some gear that currently falls away in relevance fairly heavily as the game progresses could get a bump or two from Autopsies providing permanent, free boosts to them, or re-tuned other gear -maybe have Bluescreen Rounds start with a smaller damage boost, and a later Autopsy upgrades them to their current +5 damage? There's possibilities here that would've been cool.

On a different note, one thing that's a little strange about the Purifier Autopsy is Tygan revealing that the Purifier's hazmat suit is only part of why they don't suffer when exposed to flames, where Purifiers are apparently much more heavily modified than most ADVENT troops. Partly because this gets a little weird with Skirmishers being a thing -wouldn't a Purifier gone rogue look very different from other rogue ADVENT troops?- but mostly because it feels like a clunky attempt to explain why the Hazmat Vest hasn't been moved to being the payoff from the Purifier Autopsy. ("No, Shen can't just reverse-engineer Purifier suits, because we're unable and possibly unwilling to make the modifications to our troops that would be necessary for the suit to actually provide those protections. Go perform Experimental Armor and hope Shen stumbles upon a vest-based solution.") I get why, in terms of the game design -Experimental Armor would be basically worthless if you took Hazmat Vests out of its pool, so you'd need a bigger overhaul to make this okay- but it's still... clunky.

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Narratively, Purifiers are a bit weird. The game asserts Purifiers are kept secret from the general public, which seems completely counter to what I'd expect; shouldn't ADVENT's PR-conscious position demand they make sure people know something is being done about the zombie plague? It feels like an awkward attempt to allow greater 'canonicity' to base-game runs by making Purifiers a secret X-COM could plausibly fail to interact with, alongside Lost, so Elena and Mox can explain both of them to the X-COM team, but it really doesn't make much sense.

Then there's the bit in the Autopsy indicating they're ritually scarred. If War of the Chosen were embracing the notion of ADVENT troops being their own little culture within ADVENT, instead of literal mindslaves with no will of their own as long as their chips are functioning, this would be a mildly interesting suggestion of what said ADVENT trooper culture was like; it would be a bit of a disappointment in terms of being a repeat of Mutons having tribal tattoos and whatnot, but sure, okay. As-is... uh... why?

Seriously, why? It's not like Purifiers need to be marked out for their duty for the convenience of their superiors or something; Tygan explicitly spells out that Purifiers are very distinct from other ADVENT troops, with it being implied they don't look at all plausibly human under their armor as a result of having been modified to be extremely heat-resistant.

But coming back to their role as Lost-purgers; part of the weirdness of Purifiers is the narrative can't seem to make up its mind about the Alien approach to administrating Earth, with a disappointing tendency to assert whatever makes them seem most evil in the moment instead of having a consistent overall plan. (Of evil) A large chunk of the narrative heavily implies that the Ethereals really don't care about Earth's final state, taking an extractive approach where they grind us up into medicinal slushies and then will move on once they've gotten what they wanted out of us, humanity extinct and the planet's condition of no interest to them. Other bits indicate they're approaching this as an actual conquest, possibly deliberately terraforming the planet and certainly trying to make sure it's usable for their own purposes in the future. Some of the specific bits even seem to indicate humanity is expected to be a part of the future of the planet, particularly a lot of the Chosen dialogue relating to their expectations of ruling the planet in the future.

And Purifiers don't really fit into any of those possibilities. If it's an extractive approach where Earth's final state is irrelevant to the Ethereals, then aggressively burning out the Lost is a dubious expenditure of resources that could be spent on more relevant issues, such as hunting down X-COM or moving the Avatar Project forward. If humanity is going to be a part of the Ethereal's future beyond the body harvest, keeping Purifiers secret is just confusing. If humanity isn't going to be part of the future but the Ethereals care about Earth's future... uh, why hide the Purifiers in particular? What purpose does that serve, beyond adding a new secret to keep on top of all the rest? They could be presented as, for example, firefighters, ready to run in and pull people out of burning buildings, and potentially stopping fires from spreading too far by burning ahead of them to produce a break. (This is a real technique sometimes broken out when a large fire cannot be realistically put out conventionally) This could even be a real part of their duties, to sell the illusion. Like sure, fine, in this scenario Ethereals don't care about human opinions long-term, and lies that won't hold up long-term is plausible, but this particular lie/secret is just confusing from an in-universe standpoint.

An argument could be made that the Purifier is being kept secret because the Lost are being kept secret and therefore you can't talk about what the Purifier is doing without revealing that secret, but that's a hard sell, even if we ignore the point I just raised that Purifiers could be explained as firefighters and even have that as part of their real duties. While the ADVENT propaganda does things like allude to ADVENT strike forces assaulting Havens as 'outreach forces', where the audience knows that there's a certain amount of blatant lies to make themselves look good, there's got to be a grain of truth to ADVENT's claims. There have to be people who really do come to the ADVENT city centers, fleeing the cold and hunger and insane killer zombies, or else the average citizen isn't going to be able to even superficially buy the notion that refugees are being helped, because where are these supposed refugees that are being helped? And if refugees do actually come in from beyond the city centers, the Lost are a very difficult secret to contain; I won't go quite so far as to say impossible, but certainly difficult enough I can't imagine why the Ethereals would bother to try when they could just spin the whole thing for good PR; 'look, we're cleaning up the insane killer zombie horde problem for you! (Just don't think too hard about the fact that the killer zombies are our fault, I'm sure we can spin it as being an unfortunate accident or somehow the fault of Earth's prior political leaders)'

It's all very strange, and unlike some of the other problems with War of the Chosen's narrative it doesn't look to me like it's a product of the dev team shifting their concept of the story and then missing some things that aren't in line with the new concept. It feels instead like they wanted to have all stuff new to War of the Chosen be plausibly unknown to X-COM and at least theoretically possible to never run across, so base-game runs are in some sense just as canonical as War of the Chosen runs...

... but then they do stuff like provide a new, Reaper-based explanation for X-COM identifying where the Commander was being kept, clearly out of line with that approach. And the Chosen themselves are handled in ways both large and small as only making sense if base-game runs are no longer canonical, because it's utterly unbelievable that the Chosen could exist and just fail to show up at any point to allow for a base-game run to be canonical.

So, uh, which is it? Is War of the Chosen overwriting XCOM 2 canon, or are they both equally canonical?

This inconsistency is part of why it's frustrating that Purifiers and Lost being complete secrets doesn't really add up. I'd have an easier time waving it off if there was a 100% consistent pattern of the devs prioritizing 'War of the Chosen's additions don't mandate the base game is no longer canonical' over coherent worldbuilding. It wouldn't make sense, but I'd at least be clear as to why they made this particular decision, and be broadly sympathetic to the motive behind the decision. As-is, it's just... confusing.

On the plus side, Chimera Squad seems to indicate later games are committing to War of the Chosen being canon. The Chosen themselves are never acknowledged in it -at least, not that I've ever been made aware- but Lost, Reapers, Templar, and Skirmishers are all explicitly affirmed as canonical (Even though none of them has gameplay representation), and ADVENT Purifiers aren't explicitly confirmed but seem extremely likely, given a flamethrower-equipped ADVENT-connected unit called the Purifier shows up in it and, again, the Lost are definitely canonical. It's still a bit frustrating that War of the Chosen itself seems undecided on which it wanted to be, but at least this lack of clarity seems unlikely to carry forward into later games, harming them in similar ways.

Aesthetically, Purifiers are fine. In fact, they're probably the best ADVENT soldier design as far as cleaving to the setting's demands of PR-consciousness being balanced against the whole 'ADVENT aren't what they appear to be' secret. Of course a flamethrower-wielding soldier whose primary duty involves working in an environment that's possibly a biohazard is going to be operating in a sealed suit. Any resulting sinister qualities to their appearance are a natural product of their in-universe role, rather than gratuitously added in to make sure the player understands it's okay to murder the bad guys en mass because they're bad. Similarly, no one in-universe has any reason to question the sealed suit; one of the low-key issues with most ADVENT designs is that the helmet design is honestly pretty confusing if you don't know about the 'designed to hide their not-fully-human faces' plotpoint, wherein you'd think there'd be people in-universe questioning such an odd helmet design and wondering what it's meant to hide. Purifiers get to neatly sidestep that particular issue.

I question the flamethrower's exact design, but I also understand it's probably made the way it is to save animation effort more than anything else, so whatever.

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Next time, we cover another bit of War of the Chosen content, the Priest, as War of the Chosen is actually biased toward the early game for new content and these posts are proceeding roughly in the order you encounter enemies in-game.

See you then.