XCOM 2 Chosen Analysis: The Assassin

"So many have already fallen, yet my work is never done."

If you have Lost and Abandoned turned on, the Assassin is guaranteed to be your first Chosen encounter in the campaign, and she's also guaranteed to have Shadowstep as one of her Strengths. Conversely, as the Reapers are forced to be your initial Resistance faction, she'll have Adversary: Reaper as her factional Weakness, and all the other stuff that goes with that. Her other Weakness and initial Strength are, surprisingly, still random.

If Lost and Abandoned is off, the Assassin is placed equally to the other Chosen in terms of probability of any given Chosen being your initial Chosen encounter and so on.

Regardless, the Assassin is... a bit of a misleading intro to the Chosen, as the Hunter and Warlock are much more alike to each other in key ways than the Assassin is to either of them, let alone both. I suspect this is primarily another casualty of War of the Chosen having been rushed, as the Assassin's tuning is much better than the Hunter and Warlock, suggesting she got the most focus and polish before the game got kicked out the door. Whatever the reason, though, it's unfortunate how it's liable to guide a learning player to incorrect conclusions about how much pressure the Chosen tend to put the player under, not to mention how the Chosen behave when 'inactive'.

Though on the other hand it's not like she's hugely outnumbered. If there were five Chosen in the game and the Assassin was still the divergent one, it would be more substantial a flaw to have her be both divergent and the player's default intro to Chosen.

Anyway, unlike what I did with other tiered enemies, the Chosen posts will cover all their abilities before I get to covering stat blocks, because the Chosen have a lot of abilities, and most of them are pretty static across tiers. They don't personally gain new abilities from going up a tier (Unlike eg ADVENT Troopers picking up their grenade at Advanced), with the Strength system covering that end of things and being a universal system instead of each Chosen having their own Strength list.

I will note what abilities do change across tiers as we get to them, mind, but I won't reiterate each ability in full in each stat block. It would be heavily redundant, much more so than with other enemies.

As for the Assassin's abilities...

Chosen Mental Strength
The Assassin is immune to Disorientation, Stun, Panic, and Mind Control.

These immunities don't actually have an in-game listed ability, icon, or name, so I'm taking some liberties.

Note in particular the Stun immunity. This is unique to the Chosen, and very important, since it means you can't negate their turns -they're even immune to Stasis, unlike literally every other enemy in the game!

Chosen can still have their turns wasted by eg attacking into a Parrying Templar, of course, but these immunities mean you can't just directly turn off the Chosen for a turn. Makes sense, give they wouldn't be very good boss enemies if you could trivially disable them multiple turns in a row.

Vanishing Wind
The Assassin may enter Concealment as a deliberate action, which costs an action point without necessarily ending her turn and has a 3-turn cooldown. While Concealed by Vanishing Wind, the Chosen Assassin moves 50% faster than normal. The Chosen Assassin will also not break Concealment when performing a melee attack until after the attack has completed, preventing Overwatch fire from catching her before completing her attack.

Note that the Assassin's usual behavior after she first spawns is to use Vanishing Wind for free as part of spawning in, and immediately charge you on her first proper turn. Since she's 50% faster while invisible, she's alarmingly quick to close in on your squad even if you triggered her appearance while on the other end of the map from her spawn location.

Conversely, note that the Assassin only 'sees' non-Concealed X-COM units when planning out her actions, but can be revealed in her own turn by moving to a location visible and flanked, much like Spectres. (Indeed, Vanishing Wind is literally just Vanish with a different name, mechanically) This has the surprisingly appropriate effect of making Reapers -her 'canonical' nemesis faction- particularly prone to breaking Vanishing Wind without you specifically shooting for that effect, but it also means she tends to perform worse in missions with Lost infestations, as she'll make no effort to hide herself from them but is still revealed to your forces if flanked by them. This can even happen in the fog, where you don't have line of sight on her or the Lost!

That said, Vanishing Wind is, as far as I'm aware, unbreakable in motion: where your own soldiers can lose Concealment by passing too close to enemies, smashing through glass windows, etc, the Assassin will remain invisible even as she bashes down doors and even if she paths literally right through your squad -which matters, because she'll sometimes move to attack your squad from behind. She only loses her invisibility if flanked while immobile, hit by an effect that reveals invisible units (Which includes area of effect damage, actually), or if she manually breaks it or uses Parting Silk.

Indeed, if you were hoping to take advantage of damage over time effects to sneakily make the game give away her position, sorry, nope: Vanishing Wind (And Vanish on Spectres, though this is much less relevant due to their immunities) actually suppresses things like damage reaction animations and camera motion in relation to damage over time effects, among other things it negates. As such, Poisoning/setting on fire/afflicting with Acid Burn the Assassin is not a way to cheat and make the game reveal her position. This is a nice surprise; turn-based games that implement a stealth ability often miss that details like camera movement still occurring can give away a unit's position even though the player technically can't see it. War of the Chosen avoiding that particular mistake is nice!

A couple of somewhat-unintuitive wrinkles to Vanishing Wind: the Assassin doesn't 'activate' so long as she remains invisible, even if she stops within range of your squad. Even more unusual is that she doesn't have a Detection radius while invisible -if you have a Concealed soldier close to and flanked by the Assassin while she's invisible, your Concealed soldier will not be revealed unless she breaks her invisibility while still flanking them from close enough for them to be in her Detection radius. This makes regular Concealment surprisingly unlikely to be broken by her -though you shouldn't count on this to protect non-Shadow Concealment. Notably, when making a melee attack, though she animates as breaking invisibility a few tiles out from her victim, the Assassin has no Detection radius until she's standing next to her victim: it's literally possible for her to animate as running right next to a Reaper on the way in... without actually revealing them.

A further non-obvious quality to Vanishing Wind is that the Assassin can choose to spend an action point to manually terminate it, and in fact must do so if she wants to perform an action that isn't Parting Silk and she hasn't been forcibly revealed. As such, she's less able to invisibly pursue flanking shots than you might expect -you have to end a turn with someone already flanked for her to be able to break invisibility and shoot them. By extension, she doesn't get any firing-from-Concealment benefits; she doesn't get to ignore Dodge on your soldiers, for example.

Also, I've alluded to Chosen 'activating' in quotes repeatedly, and the reason why is that the Chosen do broadly have a distinction between 'encountered your squad and fully activated' vs 'has not encountered your squad and is behaving differently', but the details are radically different from other enemies, and you could be forgiven for not realizing they cleave to this pattern. The Assassin is particularly egregious, as she's the only Chosen to not have an action she specifically reserves for when she's 'inactive'; that she obscures this distinction is particularly unfortunate when you consider that the Assassin is intended to be your default introduction to Chosen.

In the Assassin's case, her inactive state is her staying hidden via Vanishing Wind and charging your squad, and if your squad doesn't break her invisibility she will almost always reveal herself in the form of attacking a squad member with Parting Silk, delivering her initial speech, probably summoning some minions, and then Bending Reed-ing off to somewhere out of your squad's sight. Occasionally she will start by manually terminating Vanishing Wind and then following up by shooting you, very possibly with Rapid Fire, but this is very rare and requires she start her turn in a flanking position on someone.

Once she's revealed herself (Or you uncover her), anything goes. She can Parting Silk without using Vanishing Wind first, and of course becomes free to summon minions, try to Extract Knowledge from or Kidnap Dazed soldiers, etc.

Parting Silk
A move-and-melee attack, which ignores up to 5 points of Armor and always inflicts Daze on the struck unit, if possible. It also cannot miss or Graze, and it always shoves victims back one tile if possible, unless the Assassin was under Vanishing Wind before she made the slice, in which case the chance of knockback is only 66%.

Interestingly, the Assassin has code for Bladestorm, up to and including having recorded dialogue for when she triggers it, as I noted in the Chosen loot post. That's a bit of a terrifying thought, and was probably disabled because the Assassin is already a fairly nasty threat. I'm quite glad this was disabled given melee is one of the more reliable options for getting damage on her when she's run off somewhere out of sight from your squad. It would've been incredibly frustrating to be semi-regularly in situations where meleeing her is a good solution aside the guaranteed hospital time.

The shove component of Parting Silk is a bit strange to talk about. If the victim is protected from mental effects, such as by being equipped with a Mindshield, it often doesn't matter at all: Chosen always go dead-last aside a few Warlock-specific caveats, so the Assassin shoving a soldier into the open can't be immediately followed up on by other enemies, and if they weren't Dazed (eg thanks to a Mindshield) they can just get back into Cover, assuming Parting Silk shoved them out of Cover at all, and attack or otherwise act just fine. The shove is also unable to push your soldiers over edges, so it's not a fall damage risk, and the Assassin doesn't even make a consistent effort to pick a strike direction that can result in an actual shove; if she strikes toward a solid wall or even certain kinds of Low Cover, the soldier won't be moved at all. (Though they will still animate as having been knocked about) On the other hand, Parting Silk will often result in a Dazed soldier sitting in the open who, once revived, is now down to one action point, which often means they can't do anything useful with their turn once cured because they need to scramble to Cover.

As such, Parting Silk's shove component effectively acts as a somewhat erratic turn-eating effect, but one that's less punishing than a straight Stun in that you do get the opportunity to control the soldier's final position. I actually like this a lot!

The fact that Parting Silk is completely unable to miss makes the Assassin uniquely threatening -there are other enemies with attacks guaranteed to hit that do damage, of course, but they're usually limited on charges, or more rarely limited by a cooldown. (Or there's Execute, which is completely reliable but locked behind RNG anyway since it requires the target is currently Stunned, which nothing can inflict reliably) The Assassin is the only enemy in the game that can simply dish out unavoidable damage turn after turn potentially forever; she'll usually spend some time on her non-lethal or at least unreliable abilities, but if her AI decides it really wants people hurting? The RNG can't save you.

Note that while Defense and Armor are no protection against Parting Silk (SPARKs can very easily go down in a couple of turns if the Assassin focuses on them), Parry and Untouchable do block Parting Silk. This itself comes with the qualifier that the Assassin is not trivial to manipulate into targeting a particular soldier -she's willing to melee a soldier standing next to her, but she's also willing to ignore them and run off elsewhere, unlike eg an Andromedon- so you can't exploit these abilities, but it's certainly worth considering bring Templar and/or soldiers with Untouchable into an expected Assassin encounter to give you the possibility of Parting Silk being negated.

Also, it should be pointed out that the Assassin will never use Vanishing Wind followed by Parting Silk in the same turn. This largely just means she doesn't waste time/action points on pointless behavior, so I very much appreciate it, but I'll be coming back to this topic in just a minute.

Bending Reed
Upon completing Parting Silk, the Assassin immediately gains a bonus action point that can only be spent on movement. She moves 50% faster when using this bonus action point, as well.

The Assassin always attempts to flee to somewhere your squad can't see using this action point, which is completely unique behavior: all other enemies either attempt to avoid ending up out of your sight or recklessly advance with no regard to whether their endpoint will be visible or not. (Which usually results in being visible, of course) This can make it really hard to actually get damage in on her if she uses Parting Silk multiple times in a row, especially if you either didn't bring tools for attacking far-away targets or don't realize tools you have on hand can do so.

Furthermore, the Assassin has a strong preference for fleeing to solid walls of line-of-sight breakers; she doesn't simply run to just out of sight, she specifically picks locations that are very hard to get line of sight to for your squad's current positions and so on. She'll settle for just hiding behind a freestanding High Cover element, if no buildings, cliffs, or other stretches of solid High Cover are nearby, but this is a rarity; the vast majority of missions will have buildings or an ADVENT train on the map, and the kinds of maps that are light on buildings are very fond of cliffs. (eg the Psi Gate mission) It can happen, certainly, but... not often.

As the Assassin always opens things by Vanishing on spawn and almost always breaks from it by slicing someone if she isn't revealed beforehand, you're going to see Bending Reed regularly. Even if you're very fond of Battle Scanners and/or Scanning Protocol, it's not realistic to reliably prevent that first strike; the Assassin can simply cover too much ground in a single turn, relative to how much terrain you can scan at once (That is, she can literally start outside your scanning range and attack anyway), and these are both tools with harsh limits anyway. (ie very limited charges)

Fortunately, she's reasonably prone to using her non-melee tools if she's not under Vanish. As such, even if your squad can't successfully chase her down and do serious damage in response to Bending Reed, she'll frequently give you a turn or two of her fighting from closer.

It's still better to try to kit yourself out for dealing with Bending Reed, though. She'll sometimes decide to use Parting Silk turn after turn, and if she does that and you have no answers to Bending Reed... she's going to be killing people, or you're going to have to let her Extract Knowledge or Kidnap someone.

Do keep in mind that, in a pinch, Overwatch can let you catch her on the way in if she's not currently invisible. Since, as noted earlier, she'll never chain Vanishing Wind into Parting Silk in a single turn, you don't have to worry about her doing that to bypass the Overwatch. You do have to worry about Overwatch being horribly unreliable, as well as the possibility of other enemies absorbing the Overwatch fire (Including potentially her summoning meatshields before moving!), and of course the option isn't available at all if she has Shadowstep -such as because you enabled Lost and Abandoned- but it's still something worth keeping in mind if you've gotten her low or your current squad is incredibly poorly-suited for chasing her down.

One of the more unusual implications of Bending Reed is that it makes it really important to be paying attention during the Assassin's turn, even if you're very experienced with the game. Normally, enemy behavior and game mechanics work together to mean that the board's state once your turn arrives is, as far as what matters, fully known even if you didn't actually watch the turn play out. You generally don't need to actually remember which enemy did what to play correctly; with Bending Reed, though, the Assassin often ends up in a position your squad can't see her from, but where if you'd watched her movement you'd know where she actually is. So if you've gotten in the habit, in the base game, of reading a book or looking stuff up on your phone or something during the enemy turn... you'll need to tweak that habit when dealing with the Assassin.

Harbor Wave
An area-of-effect projectile with a maximum range of 25 tiles and a width of 5 tiles, which costs 1 action point without necessarily ending the turn and has a 2-turn cooldown. Units the wave passes through have a 90% chance to become Dazed, and will be shoved 2 tiles if the Daze occurs. Units that are immune to Daze, such as the Lost and SPARKs, will instead take 6 damage unavoidably.

There's an internal cap of 10 units to the Daze infliction... which the game never actually pays attention to in the code, and which wouldn't matter anyway given no mission lets the player have more than 10 Daze-susceptible units on the field anyway. Weird stuff.

Harbor Wave is simultaneously the Assassin's most and least threatening possible action. Most of the time, it's a mercy: instead of doing guaranteed damage with her sword and then Bending Reeding off to somewhere your squad can't readily access, or flanking people and ripping them apart with the Arashi, she's just limiting how much your soldiers can move and whatnot in a turn, with maybe some soldiers unhappy to be losing one of their action points. (eg your Skirmisher)

On the other hand, while the Assassin will usually use Harbor Wave after a movement action, she is perfectly able to mass-Daze your forces and still have an action point remaining. In that case, it's more or less guaranteed she'll promptly Extract Knowledge of Kidnap whoever she feels like, with zero opportunity for you to interfere. The other two Chosen can never Daze a soldier and immediately use a Daze-requiring action: this is unique to the Assassin, making her the most likely reason to end up with someone Kidnapped. Given how unreliable the game is about giving you the opportunity to rescue Kidnapped soldiers, this can effectively be an instant-kill on a soldier, but worse, since Kidnapping also accelerates her Knowledge gain!

The only good news is that Chosen abandon the field after Extracting Knowledge or Kidnapping, so she at least won't Kidnap your entire squad... but it can still be quite frustrating to have her on the ropes and suddenly she decides to Daze and Kidnap someone with no ability for you to respond.

That frustrating detail aside, Harbor Wave is a strange move all-around. It's easy to expect it to be a spreading cone attack like your cone-based Heavy Weapons, but it's really just a projectile 5 tiles wide. It animates initially like it's going to spread into a cone, but then the wave doesn't grow any wider and just slides along, looking very surreal. I'm honestly not sure if it's meant to look this weird -it's some kind of psionic attack, and the game is clearly fine with them looking a bit strange- or if this is yet another example of War of the Chosen suffering from rushing.

It's also the only enemy attack with anything resembling its physical parameters, which gives the Assassin in particular a steeper learning curve than you might intuit, and these parameters are actually pretty punishing to what is otherwise a good plan of tending to have your troops spreading out to the sides but not spreading out front-to-back much. Such a formation is normally pretty solid for minimizing the odds of stumbling into a pod when your squad isn't ready, maximizing Overwatch potential if you're doing that, maximizing the squad's ability to support each other, while still keeping the squad spread out to avoid everybody being caught up in grenades and Micromissile barrages and whatnot... but against the Assassin, such a formation risks her ducking off to one side of the squad and catching literally the entire squad with one Harbor Wave.

So yeah, against the Assassin it tends to be better to make a more ragged formation in general.

On the plus side, she will almost never break her invisibility with the intention of following up with Harbor Wave, far preferring to slice people, and honestly even preferring to shoot them. Usually if she starts her turn invisible and then uses Harbor Wave anyway, it's because she moved to a position flanked by Lost, was thus revealed, and then noticed she happened to be in a good position for Harbor Wave.

Even better, it's very close to impossible for her to be invisible at the end of your turn and yet do the Harbor Wave+Kidnap combo anyway, since breaking her invisibility costs an action point if it's not via Parting Silk and moving to be spotted by Lost of course also eats an action point. There's edge cases like hostiles patrolling into sight of Lost you can see via a Concealed unit, causing Lost to activate and flank the Assassin, but you're really unlikely to have that awful scenario happen to you at all.

Most of the time, what's going to happen is the Assassin catches 2-4 people with one Harbor Wave. This can be a problem if other enemies are running around, as resolving the chain of Dazes can take the form of waking up a soldier who sacrifices their one action point to reach the next soldier to wake them up and so on, resulting in most of the soldiers hit by Harbor Wave not getting to attack or otherwise contribute to the fight, but if the Assassin is alone it's generally a mercy. (Albeit annoying to clean up) Those worst-case scenarios are pretty dire, though...

Also, it should be noted that the Assassin is just as prone as with Parting Silk to picking angles that are poorly-suited to actually knocking soldiers out of position, but in practice Harbor Wave is quite consistent about knocking some soldiers out of Cover. After all, it's really unlikely every member of the squad is all simultaneously blocked from being pushed in a given direction, and she'll normally be catching multiple people.

On a different note, if you use something like Extended Information to display hit chances, Harbor Wave will look a bit strange, in that Dazed soldiers will get a Guaranteed Hit announcement, but it can miss, and will announce a 90% chance to hit if it does miss. This is because Harbor Wave's damage component is a guaranteed hit, even though the Daze component is not. Among other points, SPARKs having 15 innate Defense is no protection; if Harbor Wave touches them, they're taking damage. So be especially wary of SPARK positioning; try to not have them where the Assassin can catch them alongside multiple human soldiers with one Harbor Wave, if you can.

And to be completely explicit: no, Cover doesn't help either, nor does Hunkering Down. All you can do to protect the squad from Harbor Wave is make use of mental immunity effects (Mindshields, Solace, Stand By Me) and/or construct formations that minimize how many people can get caught at once.

Overall, Harbor Wave is... usually not terribly bad to deal with, but its worst-case scenarios are pretty miserable, and one of them is essentially completely outside the player's ability to reliably prevent outside the nonsense scenario of just passing out Mindshields to everyone who isn't a SPARK. In most regards, the Assassin is well ahead of the other Chosen in terms of having sensible behavior and good tuning, but in this one case she's actually the worst Chosen: no other Chosen has the ability to Daze and then Kidnap in the same turn with no opportunity for the player to interfere, and the game is really not intended for this to be a possible scenario.

I'm honestly not sure why Harbor Wave isn't a turn-ending action in the first place. I'm basically assuming its current state was an accident that got overlooked, because it's pretty baffling of a thing to do intentionally.

Mountain Mist
A grenade with a toss range of 15 and a blast radius of 5. Mountain Mist Blinds all player units caught in its blast for 1 turn, aside SPARKs which are immune to the effect. Blinded units have severely reduced line of sight and line of fire (Down to 5 tiles, specifically), meaning any abilities that require they can personally see the target are crippled, but effects that can take advantage of squadmate line of sight can continue to function fine. Mountain Mist can also knock units back, relative to its impact point. One charge.

Yes, Mountain Mist just has the generic 'throw grenade' icon if you check with something like Yet Another F1.

And it looks like a Flashbang when she's arming it, though it has unique visuals on impact.

They did make an icon for the Blinded status, though.

Also surprising is that Mountain Mist works on SPARKs. I suspect that's an oversight rather than a deliberate decision, but whatever, it's not an actual problem or anything, just atypical and not acknowledged. (The Assassin won't gloat about the 'inferior optics' on your 'pitiful machine', or something)

Blindness itself is a surprisingly strange status effect, in that usually when video games have a blindness status effect, it lowers chance to hit. Mountain Mist has no effect on accuracy, and instead severely constricts the range the soldier can sight targets out to, preventing the soldier from using unit-targeted actions on enemies outside that radius.

Mechanically, this does nothing to impair usage of area of effect options; you're free to toss a grenade anywhere within normal throw range. I specify mechanically, because Mountain Mist has a cosmetic visual effect when you have afflicted units selected that fogs up everything outside the soldier's Blind-sight radius; this can make it a huge pain to actually target correctly, particularly if you're wanting to use particularly long-range tools like Blaster Launchers or the SPARK's Bombard ability. You can partially work around the issue by selecting an unaffected unit -even one who can't currently act- and waiting for the fog effect to clear up, then going back to the afflicted unit you want to give an order to; the fog takes several seconds to get bad enough you can't really see anything, so if you're quick you can accurately aim grenades and whatnot.

It's a pretty impressive visual effect, honestly, but I honestly wish the game didn't do it, precisely because of the jank with being allowed to issue orders targeted outside the Blind zone but it being hugely unpleasant for the player to actually do so. Or instead of disabling the fog effect, I'd be okay with the game actually enforcing 'no targeting outside this zone at all'.

Anyway, it should be explicitly noted that, rather bizarrely, Blind will prevent a melee-capable soldier from targeting units outside the radius, even though (most) melee effects don't actually require the attacker can personally see the target. This makes Mountain Mist surprisingly hurtful to Templar, and more erratically Skirmishers. Rangers with Run And Gun can often just use that to get in reach of a target... unless you're in the very early game, of course, in which case it's pretty harmful.

Well, sort of?

In practice, Mountain Mist is hampered pretty heavily by the fact that the Assassin actually defaults to aggressive positioning when she's not Bending Reeding off out of sight. Quite often, what she'll do is advance to fairly close to the squad -so close some soldiers can get in range with a flank off one action point of movement- and so if she's the only target of relevance Mountain Mist is often her wasting a turn. (Unless you really have trouble with the visual fog effect -maybe she got your entire squad, for example) There's assorted edge cases like it potentially costing a Quickdraw Sharpshooter one of their shots, or costing a Skirmisher one of their attacks, but it's entirely possible you'll just walk up to her and wipe out all her health without being meaningfully affected by the Blindness, especially since it does only last one turn.

On the other hand, it can be pretty problematic when there's other threats about that you'd really rather prioritize shooting/otherwise targeting in a way Blindness interferes with. At that point Templar and Skirmishers do pretty consistently suffer; if a Blinded Templar can't get close to your desired target in one action point, they won't be able to target it at all, while Skirmishers are heavily reliant on multiple targeted abilities to somehow or another solve range problems. (eg Reckoning, Justice, Wrath) Even Rangers can end up in trouble if Run And Gun is on cooldown (Or you never grabbed it), and for other classes things can line up so eg your Grenadier is the squad's only directed Shredder and whoops they can't soften up that Setopod, or your Fan Fire Bluescreen Rounds Sharpshooter can't get close enough to delete the Sectopod, or some other actually quite serious issue.

So basically you should try to clear out other enemies as quick as you can, avoid activating new pods, and if you end up with folks Blinded and non-Assassin targets active in the area anyway you should try to work through what the Blinded units can do before working out what to have the non-Blind units do.

A minor detail: in Retaliation missions, the Assassin can be distracted by Resistance fighters, and amusingly may even aim Mountain Mist with intent to catch as many civilians as possible with it. (Though there will always be at least one unit in the blast radius that's an actual fighter; she won't toss at just a pack of civilians) Not anything to plan for, but can be helpful if it happens.

Rapid Fire
Exactly as per the Ranger's skill: two shots, -15 to Aim on each shot, has a 5 turn cooldown, requires two ammo to actually use.

One quality unique to the Chosen is that they actually use player-type range profiles, instead of the flat range profiles most enemies use. The weird thing is they progress through the Conventional/Magnetic/Beam tiers in their first three tiers, sticking to the tier 3 profile when they hit their fourth tier.

In the Assassin's case this range profile stuff largely isn't very important either way as she's fairly reluctant to actually fire her Shotgun, but in the event you leave someone flanked or in the open and close to her she'll sometimes remember her Shotgun exists and shoot you -and if you're close enough, it will be guaranteed to hit, given the Shotgun accuracy bonuses! So don't be leaving people in such vulnerable positions without at least Parry or Untouchable or some such to protect them.

Not that Parry or Untouchable are perfect defenses given she has Rapid Fire. This is fairly important, as on the whole the Assassin tends, if she breaks out her Shotgun at all, to go for Rapid Fire in particular!

Note that, as I covered in the Chosen Loot post, Chosen don't get Weapon Attachments on their weapons, and thus the Assassin has the usual 4 ammo for a Shotgun. You're extremely unlikely to ever see her reload regardless due to her reluctance to fire her Shotgun, but it can crop up through, for example, triggering Revenge repeatedly, or through her remembering Rapid Fire exists, happening to have Watchful, and combat dragging a bit while you casually trigger Overwatch shots. So her limited ammo can be useful to be aware of if she has Revenge; if you trigger it four times, you can be 100% sure a fifth miss is safe.

Ideally you'll never play such that this has an opportunity to come up, taking her out fast and reliably, but it can crop up through a perfect storm of different kinds of RNG even if you're reliably good at the game.

Leap

The Assassin can freely travel any number of Z-levels without effort as part of a normal move action.

The Assassin tends to avoid high ground, preferring large chunks of High Cover to obscure her exact location, but her ability to hop directly to a rooftop with no climbing aid means clustering atop a rooftop isn't nearly as protective against her as it is against, say, the Berserker Queen, and it also enables her to simply hop over a building or train to break line of fire entirely, which she's plenty fond of doing as part of Bending Reed.

There's also terrain conditions in which the Assassin actually will readily take advantage of high ground when hiding. Old World city maps often lead to the Assassin deciding that hiding upstairs in an apartment is the way to break line of sight to your squad, for example, and some of the Retaliation map setups will have her decide her best hiding spot is up against a second-floor wall on a three-floor building.

Notably, when Vanished the Assassin really prefers to stick to low ground. She'll happily path up and down if it gives her a shorter path -it's not unusual in City Center maps for her to smash through skylights as she advances- but if you reveal her it'll usually be on lower ground. Don't bother searching the tops of buildings: she's probably lurking on the ground floor, if anywhere.

Basic
HP: 12/15/22/27
Armor: 0/0/0/1
Defense: 0/0/5/5
Dodge: 0/0/0/5
Aim: 65/65/75/75
Mobility: 12/12/15/15 (8/16 on Rookie/Regular, 10/20 on Commander/Legendary)
Damage: 3-4 (+2)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/0/10%/10%
Will: 50
Psi: 40

Katana does 3-4 (+2) damage at this tier.

The +2 in parenthesis for Katana damage is the bonus from a crit, as usual, to be clear.

Note that above Regular, Bending Reed's bonus move means the Assassin can move almost as far as a standard speed soldier's Dash. This is true at all her tiers of training; she doesn't gain Mobility as she tiers up. It's really hard to chase her down when she Bending Reeds out of sight without using move-and-melee attacks or Run And Gun!

On the note of the jump to Commander, I've alluded to this before, but the Chosen are one of the more dramatic, obvious examples of the game drawing a line between Regular and Commander. You can see how at this tier, going from Rookie to Regular only adds +3 HP, and going from Commander to Legendary only adds +5 HP, +5 Dodge, and +1 Armor, while going from Regular to Commander adds +3 Mobility, +5 Defense, +10 Aim, and +7 HP!

This kind of contrast continues to higher tiers and with other Chosen; on Rookie and Regular, the Chosen are basically piñatas you beat until the delicious Ability Points come pouring out. On Commander and Legendary, they're actual threats you have to take seriously.

Anyway, the Assassin is by far the most aggressive of the Chosen, always immediately beelining to your squad as fast as she can, where the Hunter and Warlock are able and willing to hang back near their spawn point and harry you from the other end of the map. She'll usually be in your face 2-3 turns after she spawns, depending in part on difficulty, map size, and how quickly you broke squad Concealment -on Regular, it's not entirely unusual for it to take her four turns to reach you on larger maps, for example. She won't necessarily attack quite that fast, sometimes stopping nearby your squad, still invisible, and only actually breaking her invisibility to attack on the following turn, but it's extraordinarily unlikely for it to take more than 4 turns for her to make her first attack.

Once she's revealed herself, she's actually pretty unpredictable. Most often she'll advance toward the squad and toss Mountain Mist, or use Harbor Wave if you give her a good angle, but sometimes she'll immediately use Vanishing Wind on her second turn, and it's not that uncommon for her to just keep slashing people turn after turn. Your ability to manipulate her AI is also pretty limited, in part because she's so fond of moving and has so much Mobility -just leaving one soldier in her view isn't some secret trick to bait her into attacking that soldier in particular, or anything of the sort. Especially since all the Chosen know your soldier positions at all times; the Assassin is perfectly happy to slice someone literally no enemy has line of sight on. (Reminder: Concealment does hide your soldiers from even Chosen awareness)

This unpredictability contributes to the importance of having a squad -not to mention a mentality- that is flexible and responsive. It's not really feasible to build a custom 'Assassin-slaying squad' that can reliably counter her abilities and behaviors, because if you plan for one scenario she may well do something else your strategy isn't prepared for.

Note that I'm essentially making up terms for each Chosen tier, as in-game the tiers being distinct entities is obscured from the player, and in engine terms they're just labeled M1/M2/M3/M4. (M# being XCOM 2's standard internal terminology for enemy tiers -the Spectre is M1 and the Elite Spectre M2, for example)


Trained
HP: 18/20/32/37
Armor: 0/0/1/2
Defense: 0/0/5/10
Dodge: 0/0/5/5
Aim: 75/75/75/75
Mobility: 12/12/15/15 (8/16 on Rookie/Regular, 10/20 on Commander/Legendary)
Damage: 4-5 (+2)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/0/10%/10%
Will: 50
Psi: 40

Katana does 4-7 damage (+2) at this tier.

Something worth pointing out; Chosen transition to their second tier quite quickly, with your first Chosen normally starting Training at the start of the second month. (And thus hitting tier 2 at the start of the third month, having only started being meaningfully active in the tail end of the first month) It's actually pretty unlikely you'll see all three tier 1 versions of the Chosen in a given run, especially if you do the natural thing and prioritize contacting the Blacksite; generally by the time you make contact with your third Chosen, they've long since transitioned to tier 2, and if you're slow to contact outside the Blacksite even your second Chosen may be at tier 2 when you first make contact! So it's entirely possible to end up seeing only one Chosen at tier 1 in a run -this can be a bit of a flaw with the learning curve, in fact, as a learning player won't necessarily figure out that Strength count correlates directly to a Chosen's tier, and so may end up with the belief that their second Chosen is simply stronger in the early game than their first Chosen. (eg "I guess the Warlock just has nearly twice the HP of the Assassin to start?")

Anyway, at this tier the Katana is starting to overall pull ahead of the Arashi, though pretty inconsistently and not enough to overwhelm the effect of Rapid Fire if she decides to use it.

She also picks up Armor here if you're playing above Regular, so Shred is more important to plan on using. 1 point of Armor isn't a lot -even 2 up on Legendary isn't huge- but the reduction adds up when trying to cut through more than 30 HP. Better to toss a Frag Grenade as your opening move or something, if possible.

The HP spike isn't really that notable if you've prioritized getting magnetic weaponry online, though; you can reliably have magnetics online before she's at this tier, and the jump to magnetics spikes your damage by a somewhat lower proportion than her HP spikes. In conjunction with skills from levels and possibly having gotten to a maxed squad size, you might not really notice that her HP went up, in terms of how many shots it takes to down her.

Elite
HP: 25/30/42/47
Armor: 0/0/2/3
Defense: 0/5/10/15
Dodge: 0/0/5/10
Aim: 75/75/80/80
Mobility: 12/12/15/15 (8/16 on Rookie/Regular, 10/20 on Commander/Legendary)
Damage: 5-6 (+3)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/0/10%/10%
Will: 50
Psi: 40

Katana does 7-8 (+3) at this tier.

The Katana experiences a fairly big damage spike at this point, while the Arashi is only slightly stronger than at the previous tier: the Assassin will still do more damage with a Rapid Fire, but not by much.

As such, you might actually consider deliberately leaving someone open to a flanking shot in a pinch when dealing with this tier. Maybe. Okay, not really given crits...

Anyway, if you're above Regular she's picked up more Armor, her HP has spiked yet again, her Defense is starting to get high enough to actually create noticeable problems (Especially if she has eg Low Profile), and it's actually pretty unlikely you've started making the jump to beam-tier weaponry when she first makes this jump. A run that's repeatedly trounced the Assassin in one turn every prior encounter is very unlikely to maintain that streak at this point; settle in for a longer battle, even if her Strengths have shaken out to be pretty irrelevant.

If you're down on Rookie or Regular, she's still an Ability Point piñata, and this will never change. This is true of every Chosen: below Commander, they're trivial to stomp at every tier.

On a different note: yes, the Assassin has 40 Psi. No, she doesn't use it. I'm kind of curious if, like, there was ever thoughts of making a Strength that ran off the Psi stat, as she shares this quality with the Hunter. It makes narrative sense for them to have Psi scores -Harbor Wave is clearly meant to be the Assassin doing something psionic, and every Chosen has Extract Knowledge, which is bluntly psionic- but gameplay-wise, her Psi stat is irrelevant. It's not even used in Harbor Wave.


Ready For Anything
HP: 30/35/52/62
Armor: 2/2/3/4
Defense: 5/10/15/20
Dodge: 0/5/10/15
Aim: 80/80/85/85
Mobility: 12/12/15/15 (8/16 on Rookie/Regular, 10/20 on Commander/Legendary)
Damage: 7-8 (+4)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/0/10%/10%
Will: 50
Psi: 40

Katana does 8-9 damage (+3) at this tier.

Amusingly, while the looted Katana is identical to this tier's Katana, the looted Arashi (Shotgun) is actually stronger than this tier's Arashi.

Indeed, a further amusing component is that internally the Katana's first three tiers only have the standard Sword Aim boost of +20, not the +100 the Katana has in player hands. This is irrelevant in normal play, as Parting Silk overrules the weapon accuracy to force a hit, but can crop up if eg you use the Bladestorm mod I've linked before; in that case she'll actually miss Bladestorm strikes a decent amount of the time up until her maximum level of Training, at which point she'll suddenly be perfectly accurate with Bladestorm strikes. You'll need a different mod if you want her Bladestorm to always be as accurate in her hands as Katana Bladestorms are in yours.

In any event, the Katana has only gained 1 point of damage, while the Arashi has gained two points, bringing the two pretty close together once again. Still slightly weaker, and you may well have third-tier armors online so the Katana's Pierce is liable to be consistently relevant, but on the other hand flanking shots have pretty good odds of being crits, which will certainly pull the total damage ahead.

I'm curious what the logic behind the Assassin picking up a rebreather-looking thing at this tier is. It's not like it has a mechanical impact; she doesn't pick up immunity to Poison clouds or something. I find it mildly interesting, in any event, as the Assassin is the only Chosen to ever substantially conceal their face. Pop culture usually runs the other direction, of being willing to obscure male faces but forcing female faces to be visible even when it's horrible nonsense.

The Chosen skin color is interesting to me as well, as they all have a blue/grey skin tone that's quite striking. I suspect a lot of players think their skin is purple, as the prerendered cinematics with Chosen are heavily biased toward purple light sources, and the Chosen themselves use enough purple light sources in-game that even in-engine close-ups can involve purple lighting, but no, it's a blue/grey color I can't recall seeing used in other pop culture except as a zombie skin tone. I suspect it's meant to be derived from the Ethereal skin tone, actually, as the Angelus Ethereal talks as if the Chosen were modified to be more Ethereal-like, and while the lighting obscures it, the Enemy Unknown Ethereal Autopsy video makes it clear the Ethereal skin is some kind of grey.

Anyway, gameplay-wise, if you've somehow failed to kill her before she reaches this point down on Rookie or Regular it's a weirdly high spike in durability thanks to the sudden 2 points of Armor, finally pressuring you to Shred her.

If you're playing above those difficulties, she's at her toughest, but it's a bit less dramatic a jump. Legendary difficulty in particular still has a pretty significant fight on its hands; 20 Defense is a lot for an enemy that uses Cover, let alone one that has a habit of seeking High Cover, and 4 Armor is difficult to completely Shred in one action. In conjunction with having a pile of Strengths, you're in for a rough fight!

Indeed, overall this tier is a bit difficult to talk about since the Strengths system gets an increasing influence on performance as Chosen Train up; a run where the Assassin got a collage of dud Strengths like General, All-Seeing, (late) Regeneration, etc, will find her an easier fight at tier 4 than a run where she stacked on relevant and synergistic Strengths will find her at tier 3. Strengths always matter, of course, but the first tier doesn't have too wide a range of possible difficulty, whereas the fourth tier can range from almost a speedbump to an absolute terror, based primarily on Strengths. (And, to a lesser extent, Weaknesses)

Still, at any difficulty, this tends to be a pretty noticeable jump in threat. Note, however, that it's entirely realistic on every difficulty to permanently take out a Chosen -indeed, to take out every Chosen- before they reach their fourth tiers. As such, if for any reason you're not confident in your ability to handle a fourth-tier Chosen... it's very much an avoidable problem.

On a completely trivial note, I'm always amused by how upset the Assassin gets when you use grenades -you don't even have to be hitting her for her to get upset! It's doubly funny since she, herself, has a grenade... a non-damaging one, admittedly, but still.

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One interesting, subtle characterization touch is that the Assassin is the only Chosen that's consistently serene when she transports in during a cinematic. When we see the three Chosen first called up by the Angelus Ethereal, the Assassin shows up in the lotus position, calm and at peace, while the Warlock is on hands and knees, visibly shaking as if the transportation was a strain, and the Hunter isn't much better off. There's not a ton of opportunities for the game to show this off and it's not clearly reflected in their in-game spawning-in animations, but the pre-rendered cinematics are very consistent on this point, and it runs contrary to what one might intuitively expect: the Warlock is supposed to be the master of psionic powers, after all, so he'd be the most intuitive to assume would excel at this psionic teleportation business.

I'm not entirely sure what it's meant to signify, but it's an interesting touch.

Anyway, I've been alluding to the Chosen being used to illustrate how awful of people the Ethereals are, and here we are at the first Chosen for most players.

First of all, I should actually note that probably a lot of what I'm going to be talking about goes unnoticed by players. One of War of the Chosen's more unfortunate decisions is that it does have reasonably detailed backstories for each Chosen, but they're hidden in the 'X-COM Archives', which is to say they're in a part of the Avenger sub-menus reserved primarily for tutorials. Most players probably never looked at the Archives at all, or popped in just long enough to determine that they're tutorials and then left never to look again, and probably the majority of players to look at the Archives in detail did so in the base game, and never thought to check again in War of the Chosen. The Assassin's characterization is completely consistent with what the Archives tell us, but her dialogue -and your support staff's dialogue relating to Chosen- doesn't reiterate this info, so most players probably don't have the necessary info to properly contextualize her character.

Put another way, this may well sound like I'm making up stuff, where you have a perfectly natural and completely different interpretation of the Assassin's character thanks to never finding the rather critical Archives entry detailing the Assassin's backstory.

Given all that, here's the gist of that Archives entry: first, the Ethereals made the Hunter and Warlock. Then they decided the Hunter and Warlock were failed Chosen because their human feelings were, in the Ethereal view, human failings (And isn't that alarming all by itself), so they made the Assassin from scratch, raised her in isolation while inculcating her to be their idealized image of a Chosen, and there you go that's how we got the Assassin.

Notably, this connects to a detail of the alien fortress that existed in base XCOM 2 but was pretty inexplicable in it: that toward the back of the fortress, the alien architecture is incongruously interrupted by what appears to be an attempt to recreate a Perfectly Normal Human House. You know, aside being inside an alien fortress underwater, and also ignoring the alien houseplants decorating it, and all the other ways it's not actually normal. As of War of the Chosen, this seems likely to be the Assassin's childhood home.

Anyway, this backstory explains a lot of the Assassin's dialogue. For example, a recurring element of the Assassin's dialogue is that she'll talk about how distasteful her actions are, but her masters command it so she does it: she doesn't like Retaliation missions because it's an attack on unarmed civilians. She doesn't like Ambushing Covert Ops because she'd really rather do honorable open combat, like some kind of stereotypical samurai, and really hates all the cloak-and-dagger stuff that Covert Ops are meant to represent. She doesn't like performing Retributions (The income-lowering action, if you've forgotten), because that's also a reprisal against defenseless civilians. She doesn't like performing Sabotage, because that's more skullduggery. She's really insistent on these points.

Without the context of her backstory, it's easy to dismiss this as a stock Villain Hypocrisy/Lies bit, a Methinks The Lady Doth Protest Too Much behavior, or a Suspiciously Specific Denial, especially since it's dissonant with her in-game fighting style: of the Chosen, the Assassin is the least about Honorable Open Combat, striking from invisibility, ducking out of sight so you can't readily fight back, Blinding your soldiers...

... but with the backstory, it becomes obvious the dissonance is another example of how awful the Ethereals are. The Assassin is telling the truth: she is someone who, at a baseline, prefers to be fair and open and to not gratuitously harm civilians. She was however, molded by the Ethereals into someone who is 'dead inside', robotically doing as ordered because it was ordered regardless of what she might wish to do herself.

Helping point in this direction is a later cinema: that when you permanently eliminate your first Chosen, the Angelus Ethereal calls in the surviving two Chosen, claims to feel such loss over a Chosen dying... and then comments that the surviving Chosen feel rather different things. In the Assassin's case, we get told that what she feels is 'emptiness' -that is, the Angelus Ethereal expects the Chosen to feel sad when one of their fellow Chosen dies, and the Assassin feels literally nothing. Not sad, or angry. Not even happy at a rival being removed from the table. The Ethereals have, in fact, produced a puppet who does what it's told because it was told to do it, with little passion of its own...

... and when the Assassin hears this, she hangs her head in shame. The Ethereals really have imbued in her an obsessive need to fulfill their wishes, to the point that even when the 'failing' in question is that she's exactly what they wanted her to be she still feels bad instead of resenting being blamed.

This is all very striking and a good glimpse into how awful the Ethereals are -what kind of monster would do this to people they characterize as their favored children?- but really sealing the deal is how the Angelus Ethereal reacts to seeing that their Chosen don't feel the exact right feelings:

They get angry, put on a demon voice, and inflict excruciating agony upon the surviving Chosen.

Yeah, that's right. The Assassin is exactly what the Ethereals set out to make her into being, and that merits punishment.

Even more telling is how the Chosen themselves react to this: they just sit there and take it. This is something they're used to (Implying it's a regular event -again, it should be emphasized that this is how the Angelus Ethereal treats its most favored servants. How much worse must others be treated?), and it seems quite likely that any attempt to evade the punishment would lead to even more punishment. (Though I'll be getting into that more next post)

So yeah. The Ethereals are awful, awful people.

And this is only one of the Chosen being used to illustrate their awfulness. We've still got two to go!

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So you can see what I'm talking about more readily, here's the Assassin's Archive entry, reproduced in full:

INTEL BRIEF:

"The third and final Chosen created by the Elders, the Assassin was their final attempt at creating a warrior capable of fulfilling their vision in battle. Trained in the sword, she is a deadly melee combatant who relies heavily on stealth and shadow to neutralize her targets. Initially tasked with hunting the Skirmishers who escaped from ADVENT's control, somehow their leader Betos and her right hand Mox slipped through the Assassin's grasp. Having failed her masters, the Assassin is driven to reconcile for her mistake through XCOM's defeat and the return of their Commander."

ADVANCED INTEL SEQUENCED FOR ADVENT CHOSEN "ASSASSIN"

FILE 215903: DATA RECONSTRUCTION FROM ADVENT NETWORK INCURSION 2029.04.15

"Although the accelerated growth rate exhibited by subject "F" is on par with expectations for cloned individuals using current methodology, expectations for the readiness of her final form may be optimistic to say the least. While all efforts have been made under the current doctrine to avoid the intrinsic issues found in past subjects "O" and "T", the additional care required is inherently more time consuming than the previous developments. If our highest priority is to instill an utmost respect for the Elders' authority, then we must put that before all other concerns."

FILE 215907-PHYSICAL: DATAPAD RECOVERED DURING FACILITY RAID 2029.06.06

"...she has so far performed beyond expectations in terms of the current doctrine's goal of respect and focus before all else. She has shown no sign of deviation from her intended tasks or targets, and when required her judgement has proven both sound and fair in carrying out the Elders' will. Should her development continue along these lines, I'm confident she will quickly grow to become the favored child of the Elders."

COMM 478-A: THETA LEVEL SECURITY DISPATCH TO ALL ADVENT FORCES INTERCEPTED 2029.09.06

"THETA PRIORITY ALERT: BY MEANS UNKNOWN MULTIPLE ADVENT UNITS OF VARYING DESIGNATION HAVE BROKEN THEIR LINK TO THE ELDERS AND BETRAYED OUR FORCES. ANY ADVENT UNIT FOUND TO BE SEPARATED SHOULD BE IMMEDIATELY TERMINATED WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE. FAILURE TO REPORT MISSING OR NONCOMPLIANT UNITS WILL BE CONSIDERED COLLABERATION."

COMM 478A: ADVENT NETWORK TRAFFIC INTERRUPT FRAGMENT DETECTED 2029.09.07

"ADVENT SPEAKER: Her failure has left the Elders questioning. Such promise, now exposed as weakness. To have allowed our public face, members of our own peacekeeping force, to abandon their posts and escape into the wilds. It is all but inexcusable. And now, she is nearly as lost to the Elders as her siblings, as her once incorruptible focus has now turned towards redemption at all costs. She will require more careful scrutiny now, just as the others, and our masters will be forced to expend even more of their energy to keep these children in check."

COMM-P310-BETOS-B-SECURE-LINK REF: "BUTCHER" 2030.00.00

"The one you speak of is known by many names among my kind, the Butcher of Freed ADVENT, the Unrelenting One, the Elders' Assassin. From the beginning, from my earliest memories free of the Elders' grasp, the Assassin was there in pursuit. The fact that I still live today bring her endless shame, a small gift of knowledge that has come to bring me satisfaction I had not known before. Unfortunately many of my kind were not so lucky. Most who have seen her face in battle have not lived to speak of it. I will gladly share what we know. -BETOS"

FILE 37810-KLJS RECONCILED SKIRMISHER SIGHTINGS OF CHOSEN ASSASSIN 2028..2030.00

"She stepped forth from the shadows and struck a single blow, killing our ally before any had time to move. She is unwavering in her resolve to see us destroyed. There will be no offer of return."

"When she spoke to us, she spoke of treachery and deception. She has no understanding of our freedom, of our past. In her eyes, she is loyal, and we are not. That is the only distinction required."

"I heard their cries, "Vox Tala For Ten!"...but by the time I was close enough to join the battle, it was already over. She was gone just as quickly as she arrived."

"She has taken from us so many that were freed, she alone is the plague to our kind. We must seek her out and end this before she is the end of us all."

Yeah, there's some dubious grammar and whatnot, and COMM 478A having a dash before the A the second time is in-game. That's not my errors.

But yeah. She was made to bow to Ethereal authority first and foremost, and then the Ethereals are unhappy with her being what they molded her into being... and you can see in-game they basically blame her for this, when she's literally exactly what they asked for.

Terrible parenting, truly atrocious.

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On that note, next time we cover the Chosen Hunter.

See you then.