XCOM 2 Alien Analysis: Berserker Queen

HP: 72/81/90/100
Armor: 3/3/3/4
Defense: 0/0/10/20
Dodge: 0
Aim: 75
Mobility: 14 (9/18)
Damage: 5-7
Shred: 2
Crit Chance: 0
Will: 75

Hardened
Does not use Cover, but is never considered to be in the open.

This is particularly significant in War of the Chosen, where it means setting up an Overwatch ambush on the Berserker Queen is vastly less effective than against the Viper King.

Mind, it's still worth doing. The Berserker Queen and Archon King are pretty unique as a result, in that they're the only enemies in the game that don't use Cover but are still worth trying to Overwatch ambush, since it's a way to bypass Ruler Reactions.

Even so, it means the Berserker Queen's HP increase is effectively much higher than you might expect if you're reliable about setting up an Overwatch ambush, as against the Viper King you'd expect to get a few crits, spiking your initial damage up. So even though the Berserker Queen only has roughly 50% more HP than the Viper King, in War of the Chosen she tends to be closer to twice the effective durability if you have Integrated DLC on and make a point of Overwatch ambushing.

Even without those, it still means she's more of a spike in durability than you might intuitively expect, as it is possible to smash the Viper King's Cover or use eg a Grapple to get a flank on him without triggering a Ruler Reaction, where the Berserker Queen is... not so much. Even if you're a fan of Laser Sights, their range-based bonus is only up to +10 to crit chance, which is far less than the +40 crit chance you get for flanking/in the open shots.

Mental Fortress
The Berserker Queen cannot be Mind Controlled and will never Panic.

Standard for Alien Rulers. No particularly special implications here, either; it's not like Panic is normally a great anti-melee tool or something.

Mighty Blow
The Berserker Queen's basic attack is a move-and-melee action that can randomly inflict Disorientation, Stun, or even Unconsciousness. It also only consumes one action point and doesn't necessarily end her turn if she didn't perform a Dash.

It's a Berserker's melee attack, but the Berserker Queen can do it twice during the enemy turn in the base game, and has 55 Strength instead of a regular Berserker's 50. Though she usually won't punch twice, preferring to mix in her other abilities.

I noted this with the Viper King, but it bears repeating: setting an Alien Ruler on fire will not disable any of their abilities. If you're playing the base game and expecting Dragon Rounds or an Incendiary Grenade to make the Berserker Queen helpless like regular melee enemies, you're in for a nasty surprise. It doesn't stand out so much in War of the Chosen, which is honestly a bit of a relief.

It's also worth emphasizing again that Alien Rulers hate to hit repeat targets and impaired soldiers, as the Berserker Queen would literally rather run futilely toward distant soldiers than slam an adjacent soldier a second time. If you can, you should try to spread your soldiers out when encountering the Berserker Queen, to maximize the odds of her wasting turns on pure movement.

Conversely, I noted with the Viper King that he prefers to alternate moving and attacking and later Alien Rulers don't cleave to this: if you have two soldiers in close-ish proximity to each other, the Berserker Queen is perfectly happy to slam one on one Ruler Reaction and then promptly slam the other on the following Ruler Reaction. This right away makes her a lot more dangerous than the Viper King, since she won't spend only half her Ruler Reactions on offensive actions if you're clumped enough she can readily run from one soldier to the next each time.

On the note of punishing clumping...

Quake
Does 1-3 damage to all units in a 4 tile radius, potentially Stunning, Disorienting, or knocking Unconscious victims. (Unconscious and dead soldiers are additionally knocked back 2 tiles) Only one unit can be knocked Unconscious by a given Quake. Quake is a move-and-attack action, and does not perform an accuracy check. 5 turn cooldown.

... Quake is a big punishment to clumping. The damage per soldier is fairly low, especially given the game is expecting you to have Predator Armor by the time she hits, but this can hit literally your entire squad, and if it's catching more than two soldiers you might as well assume someone is Unconscious.

More important and less obvious is that, bizarrely, Quake's maximum travel distance is much larger than her maximum movement off one action point. I assume it's equivalent to a Dash of movement, but whatever the case this means that the Berserker Queen can be so far out you'd think you have a Ruler Reaction or two of time to do stuff to her, and in actuality the very first Ruler Reaction leads to her dumping herself right in the middle of your squad. I suspect this is the same type of odd behavior as an Archon using Blazing Pinions, as my experience is that Poison doesn't help at all, indicating it's an arbitrary distance instead of derived from her movement distance.

Though at least she isn't taking flight like an Archon...

Note that Quake compares the Berserker Queen's Strength against the Will of her victims to determine its outcomes (As is typical of these random outcomes), and absolutely can Stun SPARKs. So, uh, keep SPARKs away from her; they're extremely likely to end up Stunned, and the only reason it isn't Unconsciousness instead is that SPARKs flat-out can't be knocked Unconscious. It also is overall more dangerous to human soldiers in War of the Chosen than in the base game, as usual. Amusingly, Quake will actually hurt the Berserker Queen's allies, which can occasionally help, such as by Stunning key enemies.

Also note that Quake doesn't have an icon in-game: I'm borrowing Extra Conditioning's icon for greater visual clarity.

Interestingly, Quake is treated as an explosion for purposes of Lost wave generation. Not for Fortress, to be clear, just Lost wave generation.

Anyway, between Mighty Blow and Quake, the Berserker Queen really punishes clumping. In some ways this is less bad than the Viper King's access to Frostbite, since the Berserker Queen doesn't instantly disable multiple soldiers for multiple turns with little regard to distance and intervening terrain. With the Viper King, you might have one soldier act, and then immediately have four soldiers Frozen, with it being impossible to do anything once he's in sight. With the Berserker Queen, favorable terrain may keep her away for a turn or three, and even if it doesn't she's (usually) not going to completely disable 2/3rds of your squad with this one action. Furthermore, she tends to first prioritize advancing on the nearest soldier, rather than specifically seeking out clumped soldiers. You can actively exploit this to a certain extent, such as by having a Ranger Slash to productively move closer, hopefully positioned so going for the Ranger will draw her away from the rest of the squad.

In other ways, she's far more punishing of clumping. A mass Freeze is a problem, but once it wears off everybody is fine. The Berserker Queen can easily force the entire squad into needing hospital time, potentially in a single action. This is, in fact, the first example of the Alien Rulers being very contrary to base-game Legendary's design: base-game Legendary difficulty is simply not designed for you to readily shrug off having the entire squad wounded after a mission. Quake is also practically guaranteed to knock somebody Unconscious if it's catching at least 3 soldiers at once, and that's immediately very problematic regardless of difficulty.

As much as possible, you want to keep the Berserker Queen out of reach. Poison her so she takes longer to get in range (And to make Mighty Blow less likely to hit), try to be on high ground when you encounter her if you can, physically block off the nearest climb points if you do manage to fight her from high ground... you should have the Ionic Axe by the time you encounter her (Regardless of exact settings and version of the game), and the only reason to not use Throw Axe right away to fish for a Stun is if you're going to Holo Target or Aftershock-Volt her first to maximize your hit chance.

If map generation favors you and you do all this well enough, she'll retreat or die without ever hurting anyone.

If it doesn't, she can easily be the most lethal of the Alien Rulers.

The good news is that, like Frostbite, the long cooldown in conjunction with Alien Ruler retreat behavior ensures she'll never Quake more than twice in a given mission. (Well, never until the do-or-die confrontation...) The bad news is that Mighty Blow has much the same utility: the Berserker Queen can easily knock half your squad Unconscious if you're unlucky with rolls and didn't manage to spread the squad out, as well as Stunning multiple soldiers, and stacking up hospital times -or even killing people. Mighty Blow's 5-7 damage is perfectly able to two-shot mid-level soldiers in Predator Armor, after all, and the preference to spread around damage is actually overruled by the preference to avoid targeting disabled units. In conjunction with the inability to target Unconscious units, you can disturbingly readily end up with the Berserker Queen Quaking the whole squad, and in short order her AI is directing her to pile damage onto the one soldier 'lucky' enough to not be Disoriented, Stunned, Unconscious, or Panicked.

Why am I mentioning Panic? Well...

Faithbreaker
Attempts to Panic all soldiers that can see the Berserker Queen. The chance of Panic rises for each HP a given soldier is missing. 3 turn cooldown.

... Faithbreaker is why.

Note that it really is specifically soldiers with sight on the Berserker Queen. Being just around a corner, view blocked by a solid wall, is enough to be completely safe from Faithbreaker, even though it's a roar so you'd think hearing it would be the issue, if anything.

Also, it looks like this:

Yeah, the Berserker Queen just does the regular Berserker Enrage animation, but the breath cloud is red. Apparently your soldiers are mortally terrified of red exhalations, but fine with green ones.

This is one of many details contributing to my strong suspicion that Alien Hunters was rushed.

Anyway, Faithbreaker itself is the closest thing to a mercy action the Berserker Queen has, as she doesn't move while using it (Delaying her getting into melee to tear people up, if she happens to have not gotten into melee right away) and it does no damage. You know, unless a soldier Panics and throws a Plasma Grenade at the rest of the squad. Which can happen.

On the plus side, Panic-driven actions do not trigger Ruler Reactions. Faithbreaker would be a complete nightmare if they did...

Anyway, Faithbreaker is the main reason I do feel SPARKs are very advantageous to have when facing the Berserker Queen in spite of their vulnerability to Quake, as they get the usual advantage of enemies not 'seeing' the (Panic) immunity. The Berserker Queen is perfectly happy to use Faithbreaker when your SPARK is the only unit that can see her, completely wasting a turn. More generally, the SPARK is a safety net who can almost always do something to try to salvage a situation if its turn isn't up yet, instead of being at risk of Panicking and ruining your plans. (Quake and Mighty Blow Stuns are still a concern, mind...)

That said, passing out Mindshields is also perfectly workable. You should have the Sectoid Autopsy done by the time she shows, and will usually have enough corpses to cover at least half the squad, at which point it's just a matter of being willing to spare the Supplies. This is especially effective with Integrated DLC on, of course, since you'll get to know exactly when you first fight her.

On the other hand, committing a Mindshield to everyone will be cutting into your Ammo and/or grenade count, which is a problem given you really want both Ammo and experimental grenades when fighting her... this somewhat wraps back to SPARKs being especially helpful, since they can bring 100% reliable Shred capability (Their Heavy Weapon slot) with zero risk of hurting your squad while Panicking. (Unlike passing out grenades) So one option is to largely not pass out grenades, counting on the SPARK to handle that duty. (You should still bring the Frost Bomb, though)

It's also worth pointing out that a soldier carrying a body is, humorously, barred from actually Panicking. This is generally true, but is particularly pertinent with the Berserker Queen in the base game, where you can potentially trigger a Ruler Reaction and have her perform a completely pointless Faithbreaker because the only soldier with line of sight on her is carting a VIP body.

Also, Faithbreaker's base Panic chance is high enough even if nobody on the squad is injured that if she can see the whole squad you should basically assume somebody is Panicking. The fact that it does scale with HP lost is also another reason clumping is bad: Faithbreaker itself doesn't care about your clumping per se, but letting a Quake catch four people followed by a couple of Mighty Blows landing can easily mean Faithbreaker triggers 3+ Panics. Which is bad.

Faithbreaker is particularly problematic in the base game. You don't have Stand By Me, and more importantly curing Panic doesn't refund unused action points: in War of the Chosen, a Solace Psi Operative can salvage a particularly bad Faithbreaker outcome by moving to cure multiple Panicking soldiers, and in War of the Chosen they'll get their turns back. In the base game, that's probably just making the situation worse unless you specifically Stasised the Berserker Queen first, since the move will give her another turn without letting any of your own soldiers act just yet. So while Mindshields are easier to make use of against her in War of the Chosen, they're actually a lot more significant in the base game.

Also, you might notice I described Faithbreaker as the closest thing to a mercy action the Berserker Queen has, and then promptly laid out how horrible and difficult to properly prepare for/fight against it is. Yeah.

To be honest, in the base game I legitimately consider the Berserker Queen to be the most dangerous of the three Alien Rulers even though she comes second. If the terrain cooperates so you get to harry her from high ground she can end up essentially harmless...

... but even that comes with a major caveat. See, one might assume the Berserker Queen would be followed by regular Berserkers in your later encounters with her, but she's actually followed by regular Mutons. Which means in later encounters, she'll show up with Plasma Grenade-tossing buddies. That rooftop that protected you from the Berserker Queen? A deathtrap if her Muton followers remember their grenades, which they tend to.

This is such a severe danger I will actively target her followers first in such a case!

Another reason she's such a massive threat in the base game is the inverse of the Viper King's predictability: where the Viper King will normally jump you on your first Supply Raid if you have the Nest mission disabled and are playing the base game below Legendary difficulty, in those same circumstances the Berserker Queen will normally jump you on a Resistance mission -that is, one of the missions with a hard timer that will lose you all your soldiers still on the battlefield if the timer runs out, where said timer cannot be disabled or delayed. So on top of all the reasons she's more of a threat stripped of context, you will not be able to take things slow and eg try to catch her with Overwatch. It's possible you'll manage to hit an Avatar Project facility or the Blacksite right on time for her to spawn, but it's pretty unlikely unless you've got things memorized or are using a mod that displays Force Level. (Note that this particular mod requires the community highlander and is exclusive to War of the Chosen) It's also possible to get lucky and have a Retaliation mission as your first encounter with her (They're on a somewhat randomized timetable past the very first one), but you can't count on it or do anything to arrange it.

Another, more subtle, issue is that the Berserker Queen is the only Alien Ruler that has two moves for hitting a large portion of the squad. While Faithbreaker is overall her least threatening action, the fact that she gets it on top of Quake is nasty; it's not unusual for her to disable three or four soldiers with Quake (One Unconscious, 1-3 Stunned) and then Faithbreaker leaves you with just the one soldier ready to do anything. It's pretty unlikely to be whoever you most want fine, too, unless you make a point of carrying Mind Shields on the people you want able to act.

Indeed, the Berserker Queen is actually the main reason I so heavily default to Integrated DLC in War of the Chosen. She's really just that much of a danger, particularly if you don't know for certain she's coming.

The Berserker Queen is uniquely vulnerable, among the Alien Rulers, to Acid Grenades, Incendiary Grenades, and Gas Grenades. All enemies hate moving through hazards, and this includes that if an enemy ends up inside a cloud of a type they're not suffering from they'll often refuse to move. On regular enemies this almost never matters; usually if they end up in a cloud, they're already afflicted with the effect or immune to it, and generally clouds fade before conditions fade, in addition to the tendency for the AI to move out of clouds. (Reinforcements and Chosen summons being the main edge cases it matters to) On Alien Rulers, though, it's possible for Ruler Reactions to lead to them timing out an affliction in the very turn it was inflicted, well before the clouds have a chance to fade.

This doesn't matter much to the Viper King or Archon King because they're primarily ranged attackers; in the event it does happen, they'll just spend their turns shooting or using ranged abilities like Tongue Pull. (There's... other reasons in the Archon King's case, but we'll get to that in his post) With the Berserker Queen, though, if she's not already close to your team... she can end up just standing there, doing nothing until the cloud fades, or she decides to run away via portal (The portal escape movement ignores clouds, note: the Alien Ruler will get afflicted, but it doesn't matter), or you afflict her with the condition associated with that cloud type, or you overwrite the cloud. She can Faithbreaker, of course, but it's got a long cooldown, where this can easily be 4 Ruler Reactions she doesn't do anything if you get lucky.

Notably, if you manage to tag her with a Gas Grenade, Incendiary Grenade, or Acid Grenade without triggering a Ruler Reaction (Or she holds still during the Ruler Reaction, such as because she decides to use Faithbreaker), and she ends up standing inside a cloud/fire... slapping her with a Frost Bomb will purge her other statuses without clearing the cloud on her, and so you'll be free to shoot at her without worrying about Ruler Reactions.

It's... not something you can 100%-reliably arrange, but it's something worth keeping in mind. In particular, if you trigger a Ruler Reaction and she just stands there inside a cloud, you should probably avoid inflicting the ailment that cloud inflicts, so you get more time to wail on her semi-safely.

In general, tossing Gas Grenades, Incendiary Grenades, and Acid Grenades -particularly via Grenadiers- can potentially significantly delay the Berserker Queen from getting into melee depending on your luck, by virtue of her ending up zig-zagging through a maze of clouds or even diverting around the clouds entirely. This is actually a notable factor in my Experimental preferences -I tend to prioritize Experimental Grenades more in the base game than in War of the Chosen, because the cloud grenades are overall more useful against the Berserker Queen than Ammo is, and she shows up early enough that if I don't prioritize them she'll already be dealt with by the time I've built any. (That is, if I insist on getting a couple Experimental Ammo projects done before switching to Experimental Grenades, I generally won't have any cloud grenades in time for her)

Whereas in War of the Chosen, I tend to significantly put off Experimental Grenades. They're still good, but not so important to have up early, because Integrated DLC means it takes longer to encounter her and I have actual warning, where I can switch tracks in response to her showing up if I think I'll be hitting her Facility soon. (Such as because it actually spawned closer than the Viper King's, and I'm not rolling Sabotage Covert Ops and haven't gotten the Sabotage Resistance Order,  and so the safest/quickest way to knock back the Avatar Project is to hit her Facility)

Anyway, the Berserker Queen is unique among Alien Rulers for being a land-bound melee-focused combatant, and this has the non-obvious consequence that she's arguably the most luck-based of the Alien Rulers. Her ground-bound melee focus makes her the only Alien Ruler where spotting her when your forces are on high ground can substantially mitigate the danger of running into her: the Viper King will just keep tossing out his ranged actions, and the Archon King will fly up to your squad, usually immediately negating the value of being on high ground. The Berserker Queen can end up spending most of her turns trying to figure out how to reach your squad, especially if you're quick to block off the nearest climb points: Ruler Reaction movement doesn't really do long-term planning, so she won't spend four Ruler Reactions in a row running for a moderately distant climb point, instead likely running up close to the ground below your squad and then pacing angrily about with intermittent Faithbreakers, some of her movement trying to reach the nearest climb point by moving away from your squad, and other movement immediately turning around to get closer to your squad.

Or you can encounter her in a flat and open field and have her Quake your squad on her first Ruler Reaction. Or maybe there is high ground, but you're just not taking it because your squad doesn't get a lot out of it. (eg Rangers, Templar) Or otherwise you just end up stumbling into her in conditions she can immediately start stacking on the damage.

She's also effectively more accurate than just looking at the numbers would suggest, because not only does Quake not perform an accuracy check, but she doesn't care about your Cover with Mighty Blow. Her base Aim is actually identical to the Viper King and Archon King, but when those two use their generic (ranged) attack it will frequently be on a target in Cover, especially with the Viper King, and so their actual chance to hit will be somewhere from 65% (If they're getting maximum Aiming Angles) to 35%. (If firing on a target in High Cover) This is one of the more subtle contributors to her being a big jump in danger over the Viper King: she tends to land more hits if she isn't completely stymied by terrain considerations. Nor does she need to reload, unlike the Viper King: the only reason she'll never just spam Mighty Blow is because Quake and Faithbreaker both have higher priority.

In conjunction with her essentially ignoring the 'alternate moving and performing offensive actions' AI rule, she can easily output a lot of damage, even though her base damage is actually only 1 point higher than the Viper King's and she doesn't have Pierce like he does. Mind, she does have Shred... so it's not like points of Armor help that much against her.

Her innate Defense on the higher difficulties also makes it surprisingly difficult to achieve perfect accuracy against her. The Bolt Caster's +15 Accuracy, as fired by a Captain Specialist, only works out to base 93 Accuracy before her Defense; on Commander, this unfortunate Specialist has to have the Berserker Queen more or less directly on top of them for the Bolt Caster to be an assured hit without assistance, or have high ground. On Legendary, even being point-blank or having high ground still leaves this Specialist with a distressing 7% chance to miss. If we replace the Bolt Caster with a Superior Scope-backed Assault Rifle, that 5 extra Aim (From the Berserker Queen probably not benefiting from Cover) helps, but up on Legendary you'd still have a 3% chance to miss at point-blank.

Similarly, it makes Ranger melee distressingly unreliable. A Blademaster-backed Slash will still have a chance to miss unless the Ranger is a Colonel in particular, or some external factor like Holo Targeting or a Perception PCS is in play... on Commander. On Legendary, a Colonel Blademaster will still have a 10% chance to miss! Also, how do you have a Colonel fighting her on Legendary without shenanigans? There's a surprisingly large number of 'magic numbers' like this, where eg a Colonel Skirmisher can normally get Whiplash to be perfectly accurate by faring from high ground on a target in the open and whoops not in the Berserker Queen's case.

Indeed, in the base game I'm pretty religious about grabbing Holo Targeting with my first Grenadier who levels up enough to be able to grab it. It does a lot to help against the Berserker Queen to be able to Holo Target her, preferably with a Hail of Bullets, all of this of course backed by Shredder so I can take off 2 points of her Armor. The Berserker Queen is also actually the main Alien Ruler I will sometimes toss the Frost Bomb at specifically to take advantage of the negative Defense it provides, though there's other factors going into that, some of which I'll get into in the Archon King's post.

In War of the Chosen, I don't so much prioritize that specific Grenadier skill chain, as while it's a perfectly synergistic set of skills Integrated DLC usually means I get to face her later, with more preparations. Such as blanketing her with six Proximity Mines and a Claymore so I have a full squad turn to follow up on her weakened state, or getting a Reaper ready to Banish her with Shred and Holo Targeting attached. The Training Center overhaul in particular means I might even be able to get the Hail of Bullets+Shredder+Holo Targeting combo on a completely different class, and bring that individual instead, which can be useful if eg I have Plasma Rifles but not Beam Cannons when I'm prepping to fight her.

The converse to why I don't prioritize that Grenadier skill chain so much in War of the Chosen is that if circumstances conspire to push me into fighting her early, Fatigue means I'm a lot less likely to have a Grenadier high enough level to have that skill chain unless I've specifically leveraged promotion bonuses from Covert Ops to fast-track a Grenadier. Mind, that's in part a playstyle thing -I honestly tend to leave Grenadiers in the lurch in general in War of the Chosen, with runs sometimes failing to get even a single Captain-level Grenadier by the time I'm doing the final missions. If you're a bigger fan of Grenadiers, you're liable to have a different experience here.

She's also where Psi Operatives helping a lot against Alien Rulers starts really coming to the fore, especially since it's actually plausible even in the base game to have a Psi Operative with some levels under their belt in time for her first appearance. (Where this is basically impossible for the Viper King if you don't turn on the Nest and delay hitting it or turn on Integrated DLC) Stasis to take the pressure off for a minute, Solace to make Faithbreaker a little less of a concern, multiple tools for dishing out damage without worrying about her Defense or Armor, the potential to apply Rupture via a Schism-backed Void Rift... Insanity and Domination are useless (Well, in a direct sense), and Fuse usually won't contribute, but most of the Psi Operative's skills can be quite helpful.

On the note of classes, it should be pointed out that, rather bizarrely, a Templar spending Momentum on Parry will trigger a Ruler Reaction. This is something to keep in mind with all the Alien Rulers, but it's particularly pertinent with the Berserker Queen, since it's easy to think you should be able to eat one of her Ruler Reactions via Parry fairly reliably, and... well, technically kind of yes, but unless your specific goal is to stall in hopes of her timing out and leaving, it's a bad idea and should only be done if the Templar is currently not visible to the Berserker Queen, as you're just giving her another opportunity to attack otherwise. A Templar can still be fairly useful against the Berserker Queen, to be clear, considering eg (Templar) Bladestorm and Aftershock are very useful against her, but you shouldn't mindlessly order your Templar to immediately Parry.

The Berserker Queen is probably the worst ratio of danger to payout. The R.A.G.E. Suit is quite good, don't get me wrong, and in particular when upgraded is basically flatly superior to the W.A.R. Suit (Nobody cares about Shieldwall) where the Serpentsuit has actual disadvantages of note compared to the Wraith Suit, but unupgraded it doesn't even completely displace E.X.O. Suits! The Rage Strike can be used to do some pretty ridiculous things once you have a thorough understanding of its mechanics, but it can also be something you just never have a good opportunity to make use of in part due to it having unexpected, non-obvious mechanics I suspect your average player never really works out.

Meanwhile, the Berserker Queen is very dangerous, and in the base game in particular you have less time to prepare than for the Archon King. (Who I don't even consider as dangerous in the first place, but that's for next post) She can absorb a lot of punishment relative to your expected firepower (Magnetics), which in turn means it's difficult to make her retreat in a timely manner. She doesn't care about your Cover, so you can't really do a lot to reduce the odds of things going wrong beyond trying to pour firepower into her as fast as possible. She doesn't have any actions whose consequences are minor or can be canceled out entirely the way the other Rulers do. (This is less true if you have Shen's Last Gift, and less true in War of the Chosen, but Faithbreaker is still alarmingly problematic unless you have literally everybody immune to Panic)

So: poor payout for the danger.


Narratively, the Autopsy is a bit limited, and also is a particularly good example of the DLC likely having been rushed, in that Vahlen talks about arming the Berserker Queen with weapons, and Tygan focuses on the gear hooked into the Berserker Queen's circulatory system and all, yet the stuff hooked into her has no mechanical representation at all. The dialogue makes it clear they're supposed to be part of her danger, not, say, stuff she's incapable of using because she's too berserk to understand them.

Vahlen's voice-over focuses mostly her worrying she might be crossing some kind of ethical line by arming a powerful alien as part of an experiment. I don't think it's as well-handled as how, in the Nest, Vahlen is going 'whoops I crossed a line I wish I still had someone who saw these lines before I blithely cross them', but sure, okay, this is part of walking back the prior game's treatment of Vahlen. Still trying to keep her sympathetic, but at least recognizing that she doesn't act like a morally-aware person. That said, I find it both interesting and funny that she starts the Autopsy by saying the Berserker Queen is 'the most dangerous' of her test subjects. (ie the Alien Rulers) Funny because it lines up with my opinion of in-game considerations, and that's probably a coincidence; I doubt the developers deliberately made the Berserker Queen the overall roughest Alien Ruler. Interesting because it's yet another low-key element of XCOM 2 having an unusual amount of what I'm going to keep calling 'female-friendly' elements for the kind of game it is: I'm having trouble thinking of another game with similar tone and all that was willing to explicitly characterize a female-pronouns entity as the most dangerous member of its mixed-gender group.

As for Tygan's report, it's kind of a weird thing, in that it starts out with Tygan basically commenting that he finds the rig Vahlen made an elegant solution, and then rants at length about how there was no reason to actually bring this particular theory to reality. I get that part of what XCOM 2 is trying to do is illustrate that Vahlen and Tygan are different people -which is a good idea, as base-game Tygan overlaps a bit much with Vahlen in characterization- but I don't really get what this is supposed to be illustrating. Part of the problem is that while Vahlen worries about maybe crossing a line, it's not really clear why she went ahead and did it anyway, in the rather fundamental sense of 'what goal could this possibly serve?' Was Vahlen hoping to point the Berserker Queen at ADVENT as a living weapon? Did she think this experiment might give her insight into an important aspect of Ethereal organic engineering? Did she literally just wake up from a dream of the rig and decide it was so cool she had to make it a reality, never mind whether there's any practical reason to be doing this?

No explanation is suggested, which in turn makes it murky what the contrast with Tygan is really supposed to be. Like yeah, he wouldn't enhance an alien for no clear purpose, but... duh? This just emphasizes how confusing it is that Vahlen did do it, rather than telling the audience anything about Tygan.

Ultimately, the main reason I'm not terribly bothered is because it's pretty obvious Alien Hunters was rushed. I doubt this unclear set of Autopsy bits really represents what the devs would have gone with if they'd been operating at a more reasonable pace. Probably these two Autopsy bits were primarily a kludged-in attempt to explain the Berserker Queen's gear. Not that 'Vahlen did it for no clear reason' makes any sense, but that's rather my point: that they probably didn't have the time to figure out an actually coherent explanation that fit with the final kludged storyline.

Hopefully XCOM 3 won't be perpetually plagued by being rushed, basically.

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The Berserker Queen is probably the most blatant of the Alien Rulers about Alien Hunters having been rushed. She has a new model, but her animations are largely that of a regular Berserker, with little or no change, such as Faithbreaker just being the Enrage animation but with the breath cloud red instead of green. She doesn't have any animations for using the Venom-knockoff rig, for example.

Probably most conspicuous is her attack animations. I've described regular Berserkers as 'punching' your soldiers, but the actual animations consistently take the form of putting both hands together and slamming them down from above, and the Berserker Queen uses this exact same animation for her regular attack, no accommodation for the bits on her wrists.

Less egregious but still notable is that Quake actually has a unique animation involving the devices on her wrists punching out into the ground... which ends up looking enough like a regular Berserker stop-at-the-end-of-movement animation that it's pretty easy to overlook it's a distinct animation at all. Furthermore, Bradford will react to Quake being used by warning you to 'keep clear of that knockback', and if you view the in-game description of Quake (Such as via Yet Another F1), the description will claim that Quake can knock back victims -when in actuality it (largely) can't, instead inflicting Disorientation/Stun/Unconsciousness. This is actually a coding oversight, as it happens -Quake is coded with knockback, but the game defaults to only applying knockback to dead or Unconscious units, requiring a specific flag be set to apply it to live-and-conscious units, and only the Andromedon punch actually has this flag set!

All this is some of the strongest pieces of evidence that the Alien Hunters DLC was rushed; the Quake animation would likely have been made more obvious, and the disconnect between dialogue and what the move actually does is pretty conspicuous; with less rushing, I imagine Alien Hunters would've had the lack of knockback noticed and corrected.

It's too bad, because if the Alien Rulers were basically intended to be more Chosen-like the way I suspect, likely the Assassin is in the vicinity of what the Berserker Queen would've been as a personality. Which would suggest the Berserker Queen was originally imagined as a brawn-and-brains sort of character, playing against expectations about Berserkers. (And, interestingly enough, consistent with how Bane started out as a brawn-and-brains villain in the Batman comics) That would've been pretty neat to see, especially if the Assassin's relatively serene attitude was part of this original concept. A Zenzerker could've been quite nifty.

Furthermore, if the Alien Rulers were originally meant to be actual rulers of their respective species, it's really intriguing a choice to have the Muton leader be a Berserker Queen, rather than using the generic Muton as the base for a Muton leader. Berserkers are presented as, essentially, living weapons by the game, and the fact that they lead pods is never acknowledged by the narrative; you wouldn't expect the overall Muton leader to be a Berserker variant, even with the indications that Mutons have something of a tribal warrior culture thing going on still. It makes me wonder if the Berserker Queen would've been used to explicitly say regular Berserkers leading pods of Mutons was an in-universe thing, not just a gameplay thing...

... and it's worth bringing up Chimera Squad here, as Axiom -the game's resident Muton character- has a conversation where he tells another (male) agent that they 'fight like a woman', and ends up clarifying that he means 'you inspire others and lead from the front'. That's pretty clearly directly alluding to Berserkers (Even if they don't have an 'inspire others' mechanic), which certainly suggests that the devs think of Berserkers as Muton leader figures, consistent with this theorizing.

Getting into very speculative stuff... the Bolt Caster and Frost Bomb are both obvious as derivatives from the Viper King, where he wields the first and the second is his bottled 'venom'. The Hunter's Axes are fairly easy to imagine as having been originally conceptualized as gear used by the Berserker Queen. (And it's easy to guess her Venom setup would've been the foundation of some super-stim Item) The Shadowkeeper, however, can't be correlated readily to any of the three Alien Rulers we did get...

... but here's some interesting points to consider. First of all, the Alien Rulers are each a representative of a species that was definitely sentient in the prior game (Thin Men, Mutons, and Floaters, which it's worth noting XCOM 2 Archons are the inheritor of Floater thematics yet are implied to be a separate species from Mutons in this game, unlike Floaters), with the only non-Ethereal sentient going unrepresented being Sectoids... who are the only species that wielded Pistol-class weaponry in the prior game.

So one must wonder if at some point the Shadowkeeper was supposed to be a Sectoid Ruler's distinctive weapon, completing this circle of sentient Alien leadership.

This is even more speculative, but in turn I have to wonder if the Spectre in War of the Chosen is a recycling of this cut Alien Ruler concept; the Shadowkeeper lets the user enter Concealment, Spectres can enter Concealment and have a shadowy theme (Like the Shadowkeeper's name), and most compelling is how Shadowbind fits in from a game design perspective. Imagine an Alien Ruler that had regular Mind Control; this would be infuriating, since the game is tuned under the assumption your default strategy is to kill the Mind Controller to get back your soldier, and that's obviously not something you can readily do when the Mind Controller has dozens of hit points, not to mention Ruler Reacts constantly. Now imagine if instead our shadowy Sectoid Commander had Shadowbind; this has a lot of the practical consequences of Mind Control (Taking a soldier out of action while adding to the enemy ranks, with the new threat being more dangerous the more powerful the missing soldier is), but lets you shoot at the new threat without killing one of your own people in the process.

That would be a lot better-designed for an Alien Ruler than regular Mind Control, and it would make a lot of sense if the devs partially completed this cut Alien Ruler's abilities, and then shrugged and fully completed them for War of the Chosen, just on a regular enemy instead of the original plan. It's particularly worth pointing out here that Shadowbind's 'final' pose bears a notable resemblance to a particular Sectoid bit of fist-clenching, where this general pose is not found in any other entity's animations. This could just be a coincidence, of course, but... it's further worth pointing out that the Sectoid animation in question is used by Verge in Chimera Squad, and no other agent, suggesting the devs themselves view it as distinctively a Sectoid animation/pose. It's easy to imagine the Shadowbind animation got more-or-less finished with a Sectoid base, deliberately designed to resemble that Sectoid fist-clenching animation, and then when Alien Hunters got rushed and this hypothetical Alien Ruler got cut the devs made a new alien in War of the Chosen with a sufficiently Sectoid-y build the animation could be re-used with minimal changes.

If this theory is remotely on the mark, it's too bad how things worked out, because some cowboy-looking Sectoid sounds like the kind of absurd and corny concept that would actually be amazing to see in action. It's not like the devs are afraid to have Earthly inspiration for your enemies: the Assassin wields a weapon called a 'katana' (Even if it doesn't look like one), has a Shotgun with another Japanese name, and in general talks like she read up on the concept of Bushido and desperately wants to be a samurai instead of the ninja her masters insist she be. I can readily believe a Wild West-themed Alien Ruler was intended at some point, never mind how ridiculous it might sound on the face of it.

It probably doesn't hurt that the Hunter is my favorite of the Chosen and it's so easy to imagine a Hunter-esque personality for this hypothetical Shadow Sectoid Alien Ruler. I'd probably enjoy the dialogue even if I thought it was corny and dumb a concept: I like Julian's dialogue, even though he's pretty unlikely a concept for the setting.

If we did miss out on this Hunter-esque Shadow Sectoid Alien Ruler, that legitimately makes me sad.

Anyway, wrapping back to the Berserker Queen...

... narratively, she's also one of the better examples of the final 'escaped Vahlen science experiments' explanation not fitting to the rest of what we got. Why did Vahlen hook up a Muton of some sort to a Venom knock-off? How did she do so, as in why does she even have a Venom knock-off to install into a Muton? How and why did she build and install the wrist-weapons?

These are all rhetorical questions: the point isn't 'I want an explanation', the point is 'the Vahlen scenario really obviously got tacked on after they came up with the Berserker Queen's design, and applied even though it didn't fit'. You can come up with excuses, but they just raise further questions that can't be answered without raising still further, problematic questions.

Indeed, the final result isn't just nonsensical, it's boring. Berserkers already look to be Mutons amped up on drugs, pushing their body into an overmuscled state and all. Vahlen somehow doing mad science to produce a version with dozens of HP and some new gameplay abilities (That have no narrative acknowledgment or justification) isn't anything different in a narrative capacity.

By a similar token, I'm reluctant to really comment on the visual design in a more qualitative way since it's so obvious this isn't remotely a complete representation of the devs' intentions. Yes, 'green Berserker wearing some gear of limited relevance' is boring and disappointing, but it's also obviously not what was supposed to be what we got. Even her gameplay mechanics are probably a bit of a last-minute kludge, given she was almost certainly intended to have mechanics connecting to her Venom knockoff equipment!

The one thing I will note here is that her helmet is legitimately problematic, in that I noted before with regular Berserkers that the row of depressions on their face-plate probably isn't meant to be eyes, but the Berserker Queen has a row of colored bits on each side of her helmet that look to be meant to be for seeing out the helmet, leading a player to then look at regular Berserkers and guess the depressions are eyes...

... but even there, I have to wonder what we would've gotten if the Berserker Queen had been properly completed. Maybe this issue would've been avoided somehow.

In general, the Berserker Queen is where the disconnect between 'the Alien Hunters that we got' and 'the Alien Hunters that looks to have been the intention' disappoints.

Alas.

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Next time, we cover the final Alien Ruler, the Archon King.

See you then.