XCOM 2 Alien Analysis: Faceless

HP: 8/10/10/12
Armor: 0
Defense: 0
Dodge: 0
Aim: 60/65/75/75
Mobility: 12/14/14/14 (8/16 on Rookie, 9/18 otherwise)
Damage: 3-4 (+2)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/15%/15%/15%
Will: 50/50/70/70

Scything Claws
The Faceless' attack is a melee attack that strikes 6 tiles total, up to 3 tiles out from its own position, as well multiple Z-levels up. (Roughly a full story) This strike also destroys all destructible environmental objects in those tiles, including that the Faceless will destroy the floor, relative to its lowest Z-level. This is not a move-and-melee attack.

Faceless will, against single targets, always endeavor to strike from exactly two tiles away. This means that even though they're a melee-only attacker, they're borderline immune to Bladestorm and Retribution, as those cannot retaliate against attacks from more than a tile away, even if mechanically the attack is a melee attack.

They're also unusual in that they ignore the AI's normal reluctance to stack area-of-effect attacks -sensible, given they don't have other options- and make no effort to avoid friendly fire. This latter point usually won't crop up for a few different reasons, but can be useful to keep in mind if, for example, you get a Savage Sitrep really early, early enough for it to be more or less pure Faceless, and by extension early enough your firepower is low enough that it's a struggle to kill more than one Faceless in a turn.

Another point to keep in mind is that the Faceless claw swipe's massive propensity for terrain destruction has the side effect of consistently detonating explosive environmental objects that happen to be caught in the swing. Against other melee units, a unit taking cover against a car is in no particular danger, and in fact is in less danger than when dealing with ranged attackers, whose misses can cause the vehicle to detonate, where most melee attacks have no chance of damaging the environment. Against Faceless, this can take your unit from full to dead instantly, particularly in the early to midgame when your soldiers haven't gotten to Predator Armor: 9-10 damage (6 from the exploding object, 3-4 from the Faceless itself) is a lot, only a little behind a Sectopod's per-shot damage, and able to one-shot even Colonels of your toughest classes if they're still wandering around in Kevlar and have no other protections. So don't leave soldiers nearby objects that can explode if there's Faceless running about. (Among other things, be very wary of explosive Cover in Retaliation missions, period) The Faceless aren't even all that likely to be caught in the blast radius, as most environmental explosives only damage 1 tile out, so this is really just all disadvantage for the player.

Scything Claws is, outside the environmental destruction, a bit less threatening than you might expect from an obligate area-of-effect strike. It's easy to mentally compare Scything Claws to, for example, an Officer tossing a grenade (Which is pretty alarming for a good chunk of the early game -basically up until you have Predator Armor), but the fact that it's a melee attack that lacks move-and-melee while being attached to a unit that's only slightly above-average in speed means Faceless are a lot less likely to be able to take advantage of you carelessly clumping your troops than a grenade-tosser. Sure, you've got three people in a perfect Scything Claws strike zone, but the Faceless can't reach them this turn, or it can only manage to hit one of them. That kind of thing will happen a lot.

War of the Chosen indirectly does a lot to diminish its likely relevance, for two non-obvious reasons. The first non-obvious reason is the introduction of Reapers: in the base game, Retaliation mission mechanics discourage trying to spread your squad out because you're too likely to pull multiple pods, as Retaliation missions have much more wild distributions of enemies than most mission types. A Reaper is free to separate from the squad without risking pulling pods, and indeed makes it much safer to reduce squad clumping in general; if you're diligent about trying to have your Reaper available for Retaliation missions, you're going to be clumping a lot less.

The second non-obvious reason is the introduction of the Chosen. If you're not playing with Lost and Abandoned on, your first Retaliation mission will always be where your first Chosen fight occurs, and by default Chosen replace a pod. So instead of searching for three pods, desperately trying to not pull all three of them at once, your first Retaliation mission of a run will have you only have to worry about two pods, since the Chosen don't play by the usual pod activation rules. This subtly makes it less punishing to spread out, and the Chosen themselves all have at least one way to punish clumping to boot.

Less consistently relevant but still worth noting is that War of the Chosen introduces a new Retaliation mission type, and its mechanics are radically different, such that even when not bringing a Reaper or dealing with Chosen it's much more friendly to spreading the squad out a bit. More on that later in this post, though.

As such, in the base game Scything Claws being area-of-effect is unreliable in its relevance but still a lot more likely to crop up in the direct 'hit multiple of your soldiers' sense than in War of the Chosen. Especially due to another change, though I'll be covering that a bit further down.

An animation point I like: when a Faceless takes a swing, its swinging hand becomes visibly larger, justifying the massive strike zone even though normally a Faceless' arm isn't that large. In most games I'd probably dismiss this as a visual flourish -the Super Smash Bros games are perfectly happy to enlarge body parts during attacks, even on relatively 'serious' fighters- but no other enemy in XCOM 2 does this, and it's obviously supposed to be Faceless leveraging their shapeshifting ability. I actually quite like that, even if the mechanics explanation for how their shapeshifting works seems a poor fit to being able to pull off this trick. It's surprisingly rare for shapeshifters in media to use the capabilities shown to anything remotely approaching their full potential, with low-key uses like this tending to be completely overlooked, even by series that clearly put a lot of thought into the shapeshifting.

Leap
Can travel Z-levels freely as part of normal movement.

This is another icon and ability name lifted from the prior game, as XCOM 2, rather strangely, provides zero signaling of a unit having this capability, which is particularly conspicuous once SPARKs come along and you'll end up discovering their enhanced movement options by virtue of the movement preview, not by an ability explicitly mentioning such a capability.

Anyway, you thought running to a rooftop would protect you from this obviously pure-melee enemy? Surprise! It can jump!

This is a nasty surprise all on its own, but combines in a nasty way with Scything Claws ripping through terrain all the way to the Faceless' standing level; a Faceless attacking someone on elevated, destructible terrain will result in their victim taking fall damage, even if the attack itself misses, and if it does hit that's a shocking amount of damage. Short falls do 2 damage, while typical long falls do 4 damage: a long fall on top of Scything Claws itself expects to do 7-8 damage, which is the kind of damage you normally don't see on enemies until you're approaching the endgame... when Faceless can be doing this to you in the first month. Yikes. Don't thoughtlessly take to high ground near Faceless: it's alarmingly likely to get people killed, even once you've gotten Predator Armor online.

For a player who already knows what Faceless are about and can do, this diminishes significantly in importance. It still matters, especially early in a run where you may be tempted to take to high ground to make up for your low-level, poorly-equipped squad's bad Aim, but much less than with a new player learning the ropes and being caught off guard by Leap. For one thing, XCOM 2 is pretty good about most examples of high ground that can be readily stood upon at all having multiple access points spread about reasonably evenly: a Faceless not needing a climb point to reach you is often barely any different from a Stun Lancer climbing one of several pipes or ladders. For another, Faceless mission distribution means they only rarely show up on the map types where Leap is more significant -the Old World city maps tend to have fewer, more widely-spaced climb points for their abundant high ground, for example, but you could easily play a dozen full runs of War of the Chosen without ever having a Faceless show up in an Old World city map.

There's also the point that Faceless can already attack people who are a full story above them, and you'll usually be positioning soldiers at the edge of high ground, as that's where you need to be to be able to target enemies at a lower elevation. So Leap often isn't adding anything over Scything Claws, demanding you are at least two stories up or arranging to stay relevant from a bit back from the rooftop (eg a Grenadier lobbing grenades away from the roof's edge) for Leap per se to be adding much in an immediate sense. In conjunction with how normal climb points are, it's rare for Leap to even be important in the sense of ensuring an attempt to back away from the roof's edge won't be enough by itself -a hypothetical Faceless that had Scything Claws but no Leap, just the standard ability to use climb points, would usually be able to pursue just fine in such a situation.

So on the whole I have somewhat mixed feelings about Faceless having Leap per se. And it's worth noting that my issues with it are a bit of a recurring issue with Faceless -that their design is first and foremost designed to be a nasty surprise to a first-time player, but they lose a lot of their sting once you have a fairly basic understanding on them as an enemy.

Aesthetically, I like Faceless getting Leap a lot more than with Chryssalids. First and foremost because it's much more visually intuitive that Faceless can leap to a rooftop; it can end up looking ridiculous when they're leaping three or four stories up, but as it happens Faceless deployment rules mean this is an exceedingly rare sight. Most of the time, though, their sheer height makes it feel a bit like a human hopping a wall that's maybe their own height, something actual people can actually do unassisted. An argument can be made that they should weigh too much given their height for that to be terribly believable, but Faceless are shapeshifters that can fool humans in regular interactions: the simplest assumption is that a Faceless has the kind of mass you'd expect someone to have in their disguised state, and just happens to be made of light and strong materials, such that when unfolded to their full size they're actually far lighter than they look. At that point it's not hard to believe they can jump at a scale proportionately similar to humans. (That is, that their jump height relative to their own height is comparable to human jump height relative to human height)

This requires ignoring the audio element of Faceless movement, where they have one of the heavier-sounding footfalls of the game (Only Berserkers are unambiguously heavier-sounding, as curiously ADVENT Mecs and Sectopods don't actually have heavy-sounding footfalls), but I'm perfectly happy to ignore that. Shapeshifters are a fictional concept where people routinely fail to properly think through the full implications: it's a very regular error to depict shapeshifters as effectively gaining mass when taking on a larger form regardless of whether the in-universe framework makes that acceptable, as the most relevant example. This even happens in fiction that explicitly states shapeshifters don't change mass; if people aren't watching themselves very carefully, they pretty much invariably slip up like this at some point, even when they absolutely know better and are trying to not make that type of error.

The other big reason I'm much more okay with Faceless being excellent jumpers than with Chryssalids is that I'm also perfectly willing to accept it as an animation kludge. Faceless are nearly two stories tall. Realistically speaking, they should be able to pretty casually pull themselves up a single story, and even with two stories it would be, what, a short hop up to get a grip on the edge? But it's easier to give them a single animation for jumping up any distance, and a single behavioral rule to manage its mechanical limitations, than it is to give them one animation for climbing one story up, another animation for climbing two stories up, making sure it looks good even if they climb from a slightly elevated point... so even if I felt that jumping per se didn't make a lot of sense, I'd be okay with this for much the same reasons I don't find serious fault with Heavy Weapons aesthetics -because the alternative is a whole lot more animation work to 'correctly' depict mechanics that essentially make sense regardless.

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

Mutons and Muton Elites were already so large they looked kind of ridiculous taking Cover. Even if it might make more realistic sense for Faceless to endeavor to make use of Cover, and to be able to abuse their shapeshifting to do so reasonably competently, I'm perfectly understanding of the game having them not.

... okay, and being a dedicated melee unit is also a pretty obvious reason to not use Cover, I suppose.

There's another reason why this makes design sense, but I'll get to it later, after I've given the context.

Regeneration
Heals 2 HP at the start of its turn, purging Burning and Poisoning before they can do damage.

Note that this does not protect against Acid.

It might seem like a bizarre technicality that Faceless aren't immune to Poison and Burning directly, but it matters for a few different reasons: first of all, Dragon Rounds and Venom Rounds give +1 damage against Faceless, and wouldn't if it was a straight immunity to the effects. Second, if they get Poisoned or Burned during the enemy turn, such as by Venom/Dragon Rounds-backed Overwatch, this can lead to eg a Faceless taking a swing while suffering Poison's Aim penalty, or moving less far than it normally would have because it spent one action on moving, got Poisoned, and then moved again. Third and most bizarre/edge case-y, it only purges Burning and/or Poisoning if the Faceless was already missing HP at the start of its turn. Thus, if events conspire such that a Faceless ends up Burned or Poisoned without taking damage in the process -and there's ways for this to happen, they're just uncommon and difficult to deliberately arrange- they will actually end up taking damage from the Burning and/or Poisoning, as well as suffering stat penalties in the case of Poisoning.

A more erratic point that's probably a glitch or oversight is that the game is strangely inconsistent when it comes to the order it resolves beginning-of-turn effects. Thus, sometimes a Faceless will take damage and then regenerate and purge its status effects, while other times it will regenerate and purge its status effects before they can do damage. Most of the time Regeneration will resolve first, but not always: I've yet to work out what, exactly, causes the game to resolve these effects in different orders, unfortunately, though admittedly it's also not terribly important overall.

The regeneration itself means you should generally either completely ignore a Faceless or fully commit to attacking it on any given turn. Normally it's okay, if generally a bit sub-optimal, to spread fire around; if you end up hitting a couple of Stun Lancers for less than half of their health each, well, you wouldn't have killed either one if you did stack the damage onto just one of them, and it may actually give you more flexibility in how to approach things on your next turn. Splitting damage with Faceless being one of your victims is potentially wasting shots, and then can create problems in future turns if you're actually spending ammo on the process, or can mean gratuitously endangering a Ranger if you had them go for the Slash, or be a complete waste of limited charges if eg you burned a Combat Protocol use on the Faceless, and so on.

As Faceless are a fairly large sack of HP from an early-game perspective, Regeneration can be pretty nasty, especially if you've let your squad get spread out such that not everyone can attack an active Faceless on that turn. In conjunction with poor luck on accuracy rolls, you can end up doing some damage and then having most or all of it undone immediately, or over the course of a couple of turns if you miss a lot on the following turn. It's really helpful to bring Rangers or a Parry Templar into your first, sometimes also your second Retaliation mission, as Shotguns and Blademaster-backed Swords can achieve perfect accuracy with high damage to do away with the possibility of the RNG screwing you over, while Templar can't miss with Rend and can use Parry to distract the Faceless, as Faceless are one of a few melee-capable enemies that's obsessive about attacking adjacent targets without bothering to move even if they can reach other targets to melee. (Contrasting with eg Stun Lancers, who are perfectly happy to zip off and attack someone other than the soldier they started adjacent to) So a Parry Templar can buy time, ensuring you'll wear down the Faceless without it dishing out damage, even if the rest of the squad is unable to achieve perfect accuracy and the RNG keeps making your 97% and 88% and 92% shots miss.

This is all particularly important on Legendary, as the jump to 12 HP is a small but important increase in Faceless longevity. Among other points, for your stronger Conventional weapons, they average 5 damage a shot, and so on average it takes two hits from Shotguns, Cannons, and Sniper Rifles to kill a Faceless on Commander, whereas on Legendary you can kill them in two non-crit shots, but it requires both of them are high rolls: on Legendary you should just plan around the idea of needing at least 3 attacks to kill a Faceless. Similarly, below Legendary a Shotgun getting a max-damage roll can be followed up by a Rifle and 2/3rds of the time that will be a kill, whereas on Legendary that will never be a kill unless the Rifle gets a crit. There's a bunch of breakpoints I could lay out like that, where making the jump from 10 to 12 HP is a bigger deal than you might expect given it's only a 20% increase in HP.

Regardless of difficulty, Regeneration substantially loses relevancy once you've transitioned to magnetics. This is actually a bit of a disappointing element with the Faceless in general, that once you've hit magnetics they're largely neutered, and you'll normally only get 1-2 Retaliation missions before researching magnetics. (Outside Legendary difficulty) I'll talk a bit more about that later, though.

The Faceless is a weird unit.

Normally, it is exclusively encountered in Retaliation missions, where it always starts out disguised as a civilian. In this form, it's indistinguishable from an actual civilian; it has the same rescue circle, your troops can't target it with aggressive actions, you get friendly fire warnings if you try to lob explosives at it (Though not if you use Remote Start to catch one...), and eg Target Definition doesn't trigger on it. (Somehow, enemies know which civilians are Faceless, and will never target them)

However, if one of your soldiers gets to roughly within the civilian-rescue radius...




Surprise! That civilian is an Alien in disguise!

If you foolishly Dashed to rescue a civilian, uh, yeah, bad plan. Your soldier is now standing adjacent to a melee enemy, out of moves. Don't do that if you can avoid it.

Fortunately, effects that detect hidden units -such as the Specialist's Scan Pulse- will also force Faceless in the radius out of their civilian disguise, and furthermore if all non-Faceless on the map die all still-hidden Faceless will break their disguises, so you don't have to do as much manual hunting for Faceless. (Note that Faceless are always in a 'pod activated' state once their disguise drops: a Faceless that reveals itself in the fog won't have a pod activation cinema when you first spot it, and can in fact round a corner and immediately attack someone) Oh, and area-of-effect attacks that hit their civilian form will cause them to drop the act too. (Note that they actually take damage in such a situation, too, though you won't see a damage pop-up) Additionally, Faceless have a 50% chance per turn to break their disguise if they're visible to your troops.

Also worth clarifying is that Faceless don't care about where your soldier stops for whether they activate or not (Which contrasts with civilians, who are only rescued if your soldier actually stops next to them), they care about the entire movement path. You can take advantage of the waypoint system to check if a civilian standing in the open is a Faceless or not; path someone beside them but ultimately stop in Cover. If the civilian promptly explodes into a fleshy spray and haunting moans, congratulations, it's a Faceless! If they don't, you can ignore them or rescue them at your leisure, confident they're not a Faceless ready to burst out and murder one of your soldiers.

A related and somewhat frustrating point is that a Faceless that's activated in this way will automatically break Concealment on the soldier who activated it... even if it was a Reaper who never stepped close enough for the Faceless to reveal them if it had already been activated. Which, okay, on the one hand a Faceless activating in response to a soldier logically knows they're there, but on the other hand I'd really expect a Reaper to be able to walk past a disguised Faceless without triggering it in the first place, so long as they didn't go directly adjacent to the Faceless, given Shadow's generous detection mechanics. You may wish to simply avoid moving your Reaper near civilians, in general.

Also, I noted earlier that there's another reason it makes good design sense for Faceless to not make use of Cover: it's the fact that they disguise themselves as civilians, who are horribly prone to being positioned away from all Cover. It would be pretty design-dumb to make Faceless Cover-dependent with their current transformation behavior: you'd have to give them a pod activation scramble move upon breaking disguise for this to not leave them horribly vulnerable immediately after first breaking their disguise..

Also, while we're on the topic of civilians in Retaliation missions, it's worth pointing out that the game has a hidden +20 accuracy bonus for enemies targeting civilians. The majority of enemies can still miss a civilian standing in the open, as few enemies rise to the 80 base Aim necessary for that to be a guaranteed hit, but it's a lot rarer than when they're shooting at your own forces. You should basically plan around the assumption that enemies never miss civilians -civilians rarely hide in Cover, and if they're not in Cover probably the chance to miss is a mere 5%, and even in the early game it will never be higher than 15%. (On eg Basic Troopers) That's so low that even if you regularly have civilians attacked 5+ times per Retaliation mission it's still quite plausible to not see a single miss across an entire run, especially since pod leaders trend toward being more accurate than secondary troops. (ie you probably won't have a Basic Trooper firing on a civilian in the first place, because it's probably not leading a pod, and instead it will be the Officer heading the pod, the one that has only a 5% chance to miss)

... though it's a bit perverse of me to be mentioning this point in the Faceless post, as Faceless have the very unusual quality of completely ignoring civilians. It's possible for their actions to get a civilian killed, but it's very unlikely -Scything Claws has a small enough radius you'd usually have rescued a civilian who was close enough to be caught incidentally- and they'll never deliberately target a civilian. Indeed, if a Faceless reveals itself in the fog and then is unable to figure out where to go to attack your soldiers, it will stand around and do nothing, even if there are civilians close enough it could move and attack them that turn. In the base-base game, this is more or less unique to them: there's a handful of other enemies that might reliably ignore civilians where they share space with civilians rarely enough I've not gotten the chance to see what they do around civilians (eg Turrets, Avatars), but prior to DLC Faceless were certainly the only enemy this readily cropped up with. Alien Hunters and War of the Chosen make it less unique, as Alien Rulers and the Chosen will more or less never target civilians... but even then, I've seen Chosen attack civilians, it's just an extreme rarity. I've never seen a Faceless do so, even when it was their only sensible option.

Speaking of civilians, while I said earlier civilians are only rarely in Cover, this is slightly misleading. Unlike the prior game, in XCOM 2 civilians don't stand around like ninnies waiting to be shot/impregnated with a Chryssalid baby/otherwise killed horribly. I mean, they do, but less totally. First of all, if another civilian is killed nearby them, they'll scramble to a new location in response, ignoring normal turn order mechanics. Typically, this new location will be in Cover, though whether it's in relevant Cover is a whole other matter: civilians don't try to take useful Cover relative to enemies in the area, they just try to end the move next to Cover of some kind.

Second, if a hostile ends a movement action nearby a civilian -'nearby' being, in this case, more generous a radius than the rescue radius by a noticeable margin- the civilian will immediately scramble away, once again preferring to end its turn next to Cover. It will also consistently endeavor to move somewhere that isn't nearby the hostile that prompted it to run away, though alas this routine is quite simple and they're perfectly willing to end the scramble next to some other hostile. Frustratingly, they can also end the move next to one of your own soldiers, and this won't promptly rescue them; this isn't Chimera Squad. Indeed, even if the soldier takes action, they still won't rescue the civilian unless they took a movement action to a new position that ended with them still inside the civilian rescue radius!

A nice touch is that this 'oh god get the danger away from me' scramble-move is also used by civilians in ADVENT city centers in response to your troops. Indeed, civilians will also 'yell' -though there's no in-game audio- and inactive pods will consider this concerning behavior worthy of investigation. This is usually more a cute detail than anything else, but one variant of VIP Extraction occurs in an ADVENT city and begins your squad without squad Concealment: in that case, civilians fleeing may draw pods to you. Due to the way the game is constructed, this is generally a positive you should pursue in hopes of catching incoming pods with Overwatch fire, which is a bit counter-intuitive... but whatever, it's very much a cute bit of attention to detail rather than a major piece of gameplay, so it's fine that it's a little strange.

Returning to Faceless, though, your very first Retaliation mission always has exactly 1 Faceless... unless you're playing on Legendary difficulty, in which case it has exactly 2 Faceless. By the end of the game, 2 Faceless becomes the norm below Legendary, and 3 on Legendary. It's kind of a strange progression, but regardless it's not randomized like you might expect, and it's unrelated to normal pod generation rules: it's not like Faceless are competing with regular pods for pod 'slots' at mission generation. So it's very predictable. If I bothered to dig into the exact details of Force Level mechanics I could probably identify 99%-reliable rules of thumb for predicting when Faceless counts will go up in a campaign, even.

Returning to an earlier point: in base XCOM 2, the 50% chance for Faceless to drop their disguise if visible to your troops is actually an incredibly obnoxious lose/lose situation for you, as a Faceless that elects to reveal itself in this way will immediately get a full turn. Since the random reveal only occurs when they're visible to your soldiers, in practice this means that even though they're not a move-and-melee attacker they're distressingly likely to start from a position close enough to your forces they can attack someone anyway. This is a lose/lose situation because moving to rescue a civilian who's actually a Faceless isn't any better, except in the very specific case of the move failing to activate any other pods and allowing the rest of your squad to take shots at the Faceless without Overwatch penalties.

War of the Chosen thankfully changes things so that this particular form of revealing theirself does not let them act until a turn later. As such, cautious play is actually consistently safe play, at least as far as your soldiers' lives goes -the sloth of cautious play still obviously means you're risking failing the mission through civilian casualties. I'm okay with that tension, though, as Retaliation missions are built around it, using it as their version of a timer to make it so you can't dally indefinitely.

I do have somewhat mixed feelings about the final result of this change. First of all, it removes the majority of the threat Faceless pose: Faceless in the base game are obnoxious, but they also don't require insanely reckless play or an insanely improbable contrivance of circumstances to end up being a threat, where War of the Chosen Faceless are nearly irrelevant if you're just good about not going near civilians without being ready to kill a Faceless. Second of all, an argument can be made it substantially harms the utility of Scanning Protocol and Battle Scanners: in the base game, if a Faceless is going to randomly reveal itself anyway, then forcibly revealing it is pure advantage, giving you time to shoot at it and/or move soldiers out of its reach. In War of the Chosen, forcibly revealing a Faceless in this way is always worse than letting them reveal theirself, letting them act when they wouldn't have if you'd left them alone. This isn't an argument I agree with, not exactly (Revealing them yourself is better than them revealing themselves, but it's worse than if you get lucky and they don't reveal themselves), but I do feel War of the Chosen needed to do something like make force-reveal tools Stun the Faceless for a turn, or even for just one action point. As-is, it's usually smarter to let them reveal themselves while you stay focused on fighting other threats instead of trying to root them out yourself, which feels a bit... off, thematically and game design-wise.

Anyway, while Faceless are primarily encountered in Retaliation missions, there's also the Alien Infiltrator Dark Event that causes Faceless to show up in any mission that has civilians anyway, operating under the same basic rules as in a Retaliation mission, just minus the motive to have your troops approach civilians. (Which is already enough to make them substantially less threatening, even in the base game) The Dark Event makes it sound like they'll show up in every mission, period, but this isn't correct. Lastly, Faceless can potentially show up in the final mission, in which case they won't show up disguised.

War of the Chosen makes Faceless a bit more widespread, with the Chosen potentially able to summon them and thus able to bring them into any mission type Chosen are allowed in, and with the Savage Sitrep able to generate all the Retaliation-focused Alien types, Faceless included. In both cases, the Faceless won't be in disguise at all, just like in the final mission. Still, even in War of the Chosen you'll primarily encounter Faceless in Retaliation missions, with them always showing up in every Retaliation mission all the way to the end of the game.

This makes sense, as Faceless are designed heavily around the ambush behavior. They're easy to hit, they can't survive that much damage in the context of how the game uses them, they're a melee unit that's not move-and-melee with only slightly above-average Mobility... if you let them get attacks in, they're genuinely alarming, able to catch multiple units at a time while leaving them exposed to follow-up ranged attacks and vaporize the floor a soldier is standing on, causing fall damage, and their extended reach has more esoteric advantages like protection from Bladestorm, but once you know to be wary for Faceless they should basically never get a chance to make an attack in the first place in War of the Chosen. A first-time player might be caught out a few times, since it's not intuitive that they can Leap, it's not an expected behavior for them to purge most damage-over-time effects (And so you might go 'Poisoned with 1 HP? No more shooting at it, it'll die on the enemy turn' and whoops that's incorrect. Well, probably incorrect), it's completely wild that their melee attack can rip the floor right out from under your soldiers... but seriously, once you know all their tricks, they're rarely dangerous.

On Legendary difficulty, their HP is high enough to usually demand at least 3 successful shots to kill them with conventional weapons, and the drawn-out tech advancement means you'll usually end up doing at least two Retaliation missions before you start hitting magnetic weaponry. As such, they can be a problem in the early game just from demanding so much of your squad's attention, particularly in the base game where they may well pop out next to someone and kill them so you don't have as much of a squad to devote to killing them. Even so, once you are transitioning to magnetic weapons they pretty quickly drop out of relevance, which feels like a bit of a waste.

On a completely different note, Faceless are normally pretty detached from the pod system, but when eg Savage causes them to wander around in the open... you just get Faceless leading Faceless. They can't lead or be lead by other enemy types. This can actually be pretty alarming if you get a really early Savage Sitrep: Faceless are, from an early-game perspective, comparable in durability to some entire pods, and then you need to kill three of them at a time? Yikes! They're still hampered by being dedicated melee attackers that can only use half their movement in a turn they attack while having only somewhat above-average Mobility, but that's really the only reason an early Savage Sitrep isn't absolutely terrifying. If they were move-and-melee attackers, a sufficiently early Savage Sitrep would be practically a guaranteed squad wipe! As-is, it's a fun, distinctive challenge.

Returning to an earlier topic, War of the Chosen added a new variation on Retaliation missions. You'll be told at the beginning of the mission that one of the Chosen is leading an assault -the odd thing is there's no guarantee a Chosen will appear- and instead of having scattered civilians needing to be individually rescued while scattered pods hunt for them, the map will be broken up into two stages: the first stage will have four civilians hunkered down together plus two militia who help fight off ADVENT/Alien troops, with two pods set to attack them. Once all the attackers designated for this first group are dead (This is a bit janky, as the game doesn't track newly-created units like baby Chryssalids or Codex clones when deciding whether the attackers are all dead or not), the surviving civilians are automatically and instantly rescued without any need for you to approach them, while the surviving militia will run on ahead to stage two.

Stage two is a much larger group of civilians hunkered down in three-ish clusters, with another four militia ready to fight, and four more pods designated to attack them. The pods are polite and will wait a couple of turns for you to hopefully catch up before they start attacking, which is probably for the best as this form of Retaliation mission has a lot more pods than the normal kind of Retaliation mission, working out to twice as many when talking the very first Retaliation mission. (These are below-Legendary pod counts, to be clear) The militia code is also a bit broken in your favor here, as it's pretty clear the second group of militia are supposed to also politely wait for you to catch up and then start furiously fighting the attacking pods, but in actuality it's not unusual for them to take potshots ahead of time -sometimes while you're still fighting the first stage attackers! This is favorable to you because the militia attacking enemies doesn't activate their pods, and the pods are of course generally standing out in the open while waiting for the signal to attack, with no Cover protecting them. As such, while militia weaponry is weak (Their version of a conventional/magnetic/beam progression is 2/4/6 damage, though their weapon graphic never changes to reflect damage improvements) they'll often do a lot of the work of killing enemies for you.

The actual reason I'm talking about this on the Faceless page, though, is because in this variation on Retaliation missions Faceless are always in that second group of civilians. The whole thing is a bit weird since you generally don't have any motive to get one of your troops close enough to activate a hidden Faceless, and no the militia can't activate Faceless in this way. In practice Faceless in this variation will usually only reveal themselves once every other enemy is dead. Mind, that can be a bit nasty if your very last action is the one that finishes off an enemy...

... but mostly it reduces the relevancy of Faceless, above and beyond War of the Chosen having already changed the timing of their next actual turn if they revealed theirself at random. This isn't even touching on the fact that their timing on revealing themselves will inevitably lead to the militia forces taking potshots at the Faceless before you get a chance to kill them!

Also, it's worth mentioning that civilians hold completely still in this new Retaliation mission type, instead of fleeing when danger is near, making them that bit more prone to dying, since they'll never run for Cover. Especially because this Retaliation mission type also lifts the cap of 'one inactive pod per turn' for inactive pods attacking civilians: you can potentially be losing four civilians per turn in the second phase of the mission, even with no pod activated!

Anyway, ultimately Faceless are designed so heavily around their gimmick that it's a bit disappointing. The key issue is that they show up early enough that it doesn't take long for them to become trivial all-around, where even if you do accidentally activate a Faceless in a sub-optimal way it doesn't necessarily end up mattering because you kill it before it can act. I'm not sure what would've been a good solution -having Faceless tier up like ADVENT forces would be a possibility, but I don't feel it would be a good one- but this definitely feels like a bit of a waste. They don't even rise in quantity enough to really make up for the failure of their stats to keep up with the late game: it's not like a late-game Retaliation mission will have individual civilians explode into trios of Faceless, or something.

I like the idea of them as a gameplay piece, and think they're pretty solid in the first, sometimes second Retaliation mission, but past that they're... usually basically free experience. Even in the base game this is basically true, even if they're a bit more likely to get a hit in before dying.

On a somewhat related point, Faceless are... not a particularly great target for Domination. Their primary merit in this regard is that they act as a decent damage sponge: their melee attack not being move-and-melee makes it really difficult to get them in reach to attack enemies, and of course they don't benefit from the disguise mechanics; you don't have the ability to order a Faceless to re-disguise itself, or anything of that sort. It can potentially make sense to Dominate a Faceless as a kludge when you've accidentally activated a Faceless with most of your squad unable to move or the like, I suppose?...

If for some reason you Dominate one early in a mission, Regeneration can make them a disproportionately effective damage sponge, but that's... really about all they have going for them as a Domination target.

The Autopsy for Faceless provides the Mimic Beacon. It's much more clearly useful than the Enemy Within Item of the same name, but it's not like it's an essential Item, so if you want to put off the Faceless Autopsy, feel free. You're not missing out on something particularly important, and you'll generally hit the Instant threshold eventually regardless due to their consistent appearance in Retaliation missions all the way to the end of the game. It'll generally take a while, mind, but it'll happen.

I personally find myself using the Mimic Beacon surprisingly rarely. Early on, I'm not willing to spare the lab time on the Autopsy, and I'm not willing to spare the Supplies on building the Beacon -the latter is particularly unfortunate, as in War of the Chosen a very early Savage Sitrep will virtually always cause you to immediately hit the Instant threshold on the Faceless Autopsy, making the 'is this worth my lab time?' issue moot, but then the Supply cost is still a bit much to be shouldering. Later on, where the Supply cost is easier to cope with, the Mimic Beacon is often a bit underwhelming in practice, being too readily destroyed to be a very useful distraction now that enemies have their firepower way up. War of the Chosen being fond of longer, more enemy-dense missions tends to be a strike against it as well. Getting only one toss is an okay limitation on a short mission with three or four pods. On something like an Avenger Assault, where you can deal with over a dozen pods, the Item slot would probably be better spent on something that's either never used up (eg Ammo) or has a better-scaling impact. (eg a Flashbang, which has a massive enough radius to easily affect three full pods spread over a surprisingly wide area)

Admittedly, I'd probably use it more if I didn't have the Alien Hunters DLC, as the Frost Bomb overlaps with its utility in a lot of ways, but there's enemies like Sectopods where the Frost Bomb is borderline-useless so that's not the whole story for why I rarely find myself wanting to bother.

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Narratively/conceptually, the Faceless is a wasted concept, or perhaps more accurately is overkill for its gameplay purpose.

It's really easy to see the logic behind it: "Let's make Dashing to rescue civilians a risky behavior!" Alright, cool, that's a nice concept that makes Terror Retaliation missions that bit more interesting.

But then the devs went with a perfect shapeshifter to justify approaching a civilian getting you an unexpected hostile instead. That's a nightmarish concept that should be getting used to have the player worrying about infiltrators in their ranks; is that new Engineer a Faceless? Is my favorite Specialist a Faceless who will reveal their true form at a key moment? When Bradford wanders out of my sight and comes back, how can I be sure that he wasn't replaced by a Faceless? How can I be sure he wasn't initially a Faceless?

For that matter, I should also be having to worry about ADVENT troops revealing themselves to be Faceless at an inopportune moment. Surprise! You thought you were flanking a Trooper, but now it's a melee monster that's going to tear into you! Surprise! You thought that Trooper would die after doing 4 HP of damage, but it was a Faceless and burst out of its armor with another 6 HP to get through!

But nah, it's just civilians, and almost exclusively in Retaliation missions. I can get why Faceless don't pretend to be Alien troops -Faceless don't seem to be intended to be able to replicate psionic abilities or stuff like venom glands, limiting the range of Aliens they could convincingly imitate- but ADVENT troops are basically just humans in military gear. Why wouldn't there be Faceless mixed in among them?

I really feel like the role Faceless fill should've been filled by a Chryssalid variant instead. Have some civilians be stealthily implanted, and out bursts a Chryssalid when a player unit gets too close. This would neatly fit to the gameplay role of Faceless (Surprise! Civilians aren't safe to Dash to!), without all these other implications that should logically apply to Faceless, and completes the circle of Chryssalids drawing inspiration from the Aliens series. Have Tygan make a Speculating Scientist remark about how the Chryssalid embryo must've reacted to the chemical makeup of the civilian's surge of relief, and you've even got a perfectly acceptable in-universe excuse for the mechanics.

This wasted/overkill concept is one of XCOM 2's more stand-out missteps.

I do actually like the Faceless visual design, to be clear. It makes intuitive sense for a humanoid shapeshifter to look kind of like a melty human, and it's pretty unsettling looking. About the only thing I don't like about it is the hugely exaggerated butt-crack. Like... did we really need this?... but aside from that, it's a really good design, and I'd probably have nothing but good things to say about the Faceless design if they weren't such overkill for their purpose.

Alas, they do have a clear, specific purpose that they are overkill for.

I do wonder if Faceless were originally imagined as some kind of Chryssalid variation or relative. They actually have a lot of similarities, with even the faces being pretty similar aside the Faceless having a melty face, and the game does in fact explicitly acknowledge Chryssalids having changed a bit. It's more likely that the similarities are an unthinking accident -that the creature concept artist just came back to similar visuals because of having similar emotional goals, not really thinking how that comes across when they're set beside each other, or something of the sort- but it's an interesting thought. The Faceless transformation animation having the civilian look like they're in pain would even kind of fit with that scenario, like maybe Faceless were originally conceptualized as a Chryssalid variant bursting out of people, or something.

Whereas Faceless transformation involving looking like they're in pain is... not completely ludicrous in the shapeshifter scenario we got, but pretty strange. I wouldn't have intuitively expected the animation team to settle on 'shapeshifter, so let's make it look like it's in agony as it transforms'. In the context of how War of the Chosen characterizes Ethereals, I can work with the idea that Faceless actually are in pain when they transform, and that this is a product of Ethereals having made Faceless what they are and not caring how miserable it is to be a Faceless, but... not what I would've expected the animation team to go with.

Anyway, part of the reason the Faceless overkill issue stands out so strongly is that the entire notion of a perfect shapeshifter infiltrator has... zero impact on the story and setting. Faceless being mixed into Retaliation mission civilians serves a clear gameplay purpose, but narratively it's just confusing. Presumably the Faceless are supposed to have been pretending to be actual civilians for some weeks beforehand, living in the resistance camp that ends up attacked, but, uh, why? It's not like the narrative suggests that resistance camps are successfully-kept secrets up until a Faceless manages to infiltrate it and report its location to ADVENT. That would be a pretty unbelievable scenario anyway, mind, but my point is that the game offers zero justification for why Faceless infiltrating resistance camps is a thing. That leaves the player to fill in with whatever makes sense... and I've never been able to come up with any possible theories for what could make sense in context.

Meanwhile, narratively speaking Faceless would make far more sense if they were randomly lurking in ADVENT cities. The Ethereals having Faceless mixed in among regular civilians would readily fill a wide range of useful duties from the Ethereal perspective, including...

-Giving the Ethereals eyes and ears at the ground level, providing more or less unfiltered reports on what the average citizen thinks, with little to no risk of discontented citizens editing what they say to avoid offending government authorities. After all, if you're complaining about the ADVENT government in the privacy of your home to your good friend Bob (The Faceless), Plumber Extraordinaire, there's no concern that Bob is going to report you to the government for thought-crimes and get you disappeared, right? Bob is a working-class stiff just like you, after all, not working for the government you're complaining about. (Except actually he is, sorry, time to die)

Part and parcel of this would be rooting out serious resistance movement before they got any traction. Okay, Bob The (Faceless) Plumber is too obviously happy with the way things currently are for anybody thinking of starting a serious resistance movement to have any chance of considering approaching him, but what about Alice, the extremely nice (Faceless) department store employee who is widely known to be very good about keeping people's secrets and have some complaints about the current state of the world? "Yeah," thinks our unfortunate would-be resistance leader. "I can sound out how Alice feels about ADVENT, she's trustworthy and possibly the right kind of unhappy." Reasonable, but wrong. Or maybe our would-be resistance leader is thinking they can just kill Alice if they don't like how Alice reacts to probing? Sorry, luckless would-be resistance leader, if you end up not liking her reaction and try to break her neck, she's going to grow two stories tall and tear you in half!

-On the flipside, Faceless would provide the Ethereals a voice at the ground level, one that your average citizen would have every reason to take at face value as the honest opinions of fellow human citizens, rather than suspecting propaganda. Working Stiff Bob The (Faceless) Plumber talking up how great things currently are (Without ever explicitly saying 'ADVENT is wonderful and I love them') when hanging out with friends at a bar or something is unlikely to be taken as government-endorsed propaganda. People who are already suspicious and hostile toward ADVENT might assume Bob has bought into the propaganda, but for undecided citizens who are trying to use their fellow citizens as a barometer for how things are, every (Faceless) voice asserting that things are totally awesome is a tick toward deciding things are, in fact, alright, which carries with it an implicit assumption ADVENT is handling things well.

By a similar token, if Alice The (Faceless) Department Store Employee starts ranting about those damn X-COM terrorists blowing up her place of work hours before the official ADVENT propaganda engine starts telling people something similar, the people hearing this are liable to take it as Fellow Human Alice's Honest Opinion, and in turn be more hostile and suspicious of those damn X-COM terrorists. This would help reduce the rate at which people question the official story, increasing buy-in and helping ensure most human citizens genuinely believe that some sizable fraction of their fellow human citizens are more or less happy with the ADVENT government.

-Then there's the security advantages when it comes to protecting assets the Ethereals want protected but also don't want people thinking the Ethereals care especially strongly about. As a concrete example, in XCOM 2 the Commander being kept in a random gene therapy clinic was supposed to be a secret, but equally the Ethereals didn't want to rely on just secrecy to keep this asset secured. It would've been very natural to have some, or even all, of the staff working at that particular gene therapy clinic be Faceless, ready to explode into combat form if eg X-COM attempted to raid the place in the middle of the night, when only a skeleton crew is around. This principle applies to any asset the Ethereals might want to have decent military protection for but don't want to visibly assign troops to protecting: it would've made a lot of sense for some Neutralize VIP missions to either involve the VIP being a Faceless, or for the VIP to be guarded by Faceless, as another illustrative example.

-Then there's how Faceless existing dovetails with the Ethereals vanishing people to make their medical slushies. Why visibly vanish people when you can take them into a back room to (supposedly) cure them, and then have a Faceless that looks more or less just like them walk back out and live out their life? With how total a cure gene therapy is supposed to be, people almost certainly come out the other side looking different enough to seem off, such that any visual inconsistencies between the Faceless pretending to be them would probably be waved off as just a side effect of going through gene therapy. And with all the psionic technology we actually see in XCOM 2, such as the plotpoint of tapping the Commander's military acumen to improve ADVENT effectiveness via the psionic network, it seems disturbingly plausible the Ethereals have the ability to do something along the lines of 'downloading' memories from one individual to another, so that the Faceless would be able to convincingly pretend to be the person now being converted into a medical slushy, even to close friends and family.

A sub-implication of these two prior points would be the ability for the Ethereals to secretly construct things your average citizen would think couldn't possibly be constructed in secret. If an entire apartment block just so happens to be populated exclusively by Faceless, the Ethereals can plant any surreptitious device they want in the area, and so long as it doesn't require a fairly steady stream of bulky material resources it's going to be alarmingly easy to hide that it exists and was ever constructed, even if it's actually large enough to be pretty difficult to hide in a closet or the like. As yet another concrete example, the psionic network seems to be intended to be dependent on repeater nodes, and it's pretty obvious the psionic network is supposed to be a secret: a Faceless-occupied apartment block with a psionic network repeater node would be perfect for hiding in plain sight, even from the likes of X-COM that know about the psionic network and have a vested interest in attacking its components.

These are just some of the most major, obvious benefits/implications that leap out to me after having not even really thought about the topic. Faceless living among regular citizens would be really useful to the Ethereal regime... whereas Faceless living among the resistance camps is just confusing.

So narratively, it would make a lot more sense if Faceless spawn routines were reversed: only show up on Retaliation missions if the Alien Infiltrator Dark Event is active, and always be willing to spawn into any other mission type that has civilians present.

This is why I call Faceless overkill and/or a wasted concept: because they're ridiculously over-engineered for the extremely narrow gameplay purpose they were designed to fill, and then all their narrative potential in other realms their design is vastly more relevant to goes completely unrecognized. When War of the Chosen revisits the topic of the Commander's gene therapy clinic, Elena doesn't have her helmet reporting that every single scientist is a Faceless. Instead, we get Shen remarking that there really is way too many ADVENT troops patrolling this random gene therapy clinic, indicating it's disproportionately important.

I don't precisely take issue with the new opening cinematic -well, I do, but it's for reasons like 'calling attention to how absurd it is that Reapers are extremely sneaky'- but it's one of the strongest examples of the devs completely failing to recognize how Faceless should be getting used, in-universe, given their capabilities. It's only when we get to the Tactical Legacy Pack mini-campaigns that the devs finally show any sign of recognizing some of the implications of the Faceless concept... and even then, it's only in the form of having them pretend to be sharks on hooks. This is a cute callback to the Enemy Within mission with Chryssalids bursting out of the bodies of sharks hanging from hooks, but it's still not showing any recognition of what a nightmare perfect shapeshifters are in a social context.

It seems unlikely XCOM 3 will come back to this topic successfully, as well. Chimera Squad has Faceless around, but Faceless never pretend to be something else in that game. Perhaps more importantly, Chimera Squad indicates Faceless have integrated with the human population like most other alien species -I would be only slightly surprised (In an impressed, pleased sort of way) if XCOM 3 brings back Faceless in the form of having them as part of your forces. I can see some cool potential for having Faceless able to switch between a human mode and a true Faceless form mode, where the former plays much like your human forces while the latter loses access to most of their equipment and Cover but picks up Leap, Regeneration, and Scything Claws.

... which would be very cool, but would probably still not be exploring the terrifying potential presented by shapeshifters in a social context.

So... unless the series explores the XCOM 2 timeframe through some other lens, like, I dunno, a The Bureau-esque shooter where you're playing some Reapers doing stuff off to the side of the XCOM 2 plot... the true potential of the Faceless concept will likely never be realized by the series.

It's one of XCOM 2's stranger decisions.

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Next time, we jump back to War of the Chosen content, covering the Purifier.

See you then.