XCOM 2 Chosen Analysis: The Hunter

"... but let's be real; I just like to kill things."

As with the Assassin, I'll be covering the traits the Hunter always has that don't vary before getting into individual tiers.

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

Same as the Assassin, of course.

Not a lot to add here; it's not like the Hunter has any mechanics to give this implications he doesn't share with the Assassin. He is admittedly a bit more dependent on his Aim stat than she is, so not being able to Flashbang him is a bit inconvenient?

Tracking Shot
If the Hunter is not within sight of an X-COM soldier but has a clear line of fire on one, he can initiate Tracking Shot on them. This shot creates a cone centered on the target soldier, with an essentially infinite maximum distance (200 tiles) and a maximum width of 40 tiles, and if the soldier is still within that zone when the Hunter's next turn rolls around he will immediately shoot them as a free action. The Hunter does not require an ADVENT/Alien unit act as a spotter to be able to initiate this effect. Briefly reveals the Hunter when initially activated.

No, I don't know why Tracking Shot's icon is depicting a knife in transit. Maybe the Assassin was supposed to throw that secondary blade, an icon got made for it, and then they shuffled it off onto Tracking Shot? Or something?

You might think I'm reading too much into such a small icon, but behold the tutorial's larger rendition:

Bullets don't have crossguards.

Anyway, I say Tracking Shot needs a clear line of fire, but I've had several occasions where the Hunter initiated Tracking Shot under conditions a Sharpshooter couldn't possibly have gotten line of fire. Every once in a while I've had him initiate it through a solid wall, even.

Still, it's mostly accurate, and on most maps the distinction isn't even that important.

Similarly, I've also occasionally had the Hunter initiate Tracking Shot and then move afterward, though this is rarer. (And almost certainly a glitch or oversight) It's something to beware of, though, since Tracking Shot reveals his location but regular movement does not, so you might think you know where he is and then whoops stumble into him because he's somewhere else. You'll usually see him start moving afterward, fortunately, but you won't necessarily see his destination before the fog rolls in, so you will still often end up with more uncertainty about his actual position when this happens.

A related point is that triggering Planewalker, should the Hunter happen to have it, does not affect an ongoing Tracking Shot zone. It won't clear it, and it won't change the area covered. On the plus side, this means a soldier who escapes the zone is very definitely safe from Tracking Shot: triggering Planewalker won't cause the zone to change and potentially cover them even though you moved them out of the zone. On the minus side, it means you can't break the line of fire by triggering Planewalker, as even if his new position demands he visually shoot through solid earth to hit his target... he'll still hit if you haven't moved them out.

A tutorial bit in-game claims that Hunker Down is somehow protective against Tracking Shot, but my own experience does not support this, and neither do the mechanics, as Tracking Shot is a guaranteed hit if you stay in reach, where Hunker Down's mechanics are only protective if missing is allowed. Nor is there evidence of code to make Hunker Down protective against Tracking Shot; this appears to be a mechanic that never got implemented, or possibly got implemented and then cut without the tutorial bit being updated, but regardless, don't listen to that tutorial bit: it's lying to you.

Something to keep in mind about Tracking Shot is that the widening cone behavior means Tracking Shot is more of a threat the further away the Hunter is. (Ignoring the consideration of line-of-fire-blockers for the moment, which do affect the Tracking Shot cone's shape; it's sometimes possible to hide in the shadow of a very large tree, for example) If the Hunter is just out of sight of the target, they can probably trivially escape the cone in one action point. If the Hunter is at the opposite end of the map, the map is quite long, and the terrain relatively clear, the target may be forced to Dash to escape the Tracking Shot zone. As such, Tracking Shot subtly pressures you into hurrying to approach the Hunter, though in practice it's a fairly minor pressure.

Overall, Tracking Shot is... an idea I really, really like, but  the game doesn't really stick the landing. Only Sharpshooters are consistently disrupted by it, and only if you actually care about them using their Sniper Rifle in a given turn. (When I've been over how the Sharpshooter's Pistol skills are largely where their good skills are placed) It can also occasionally be inconvenient for Specialists if you were intending to eg Aid Protocol and then shoot, or Medical Protocol and then shoot, or something of that sort, and similarly a Grenadier may be in a position where you want them to Salvo and then shoot, but usually it just... doesn't matter, even if you're actively in the middle of combat with other enemies. Very, very rarely the stars will align and Tracking Shot will end up contributing to a situation being difficult to disentangle, but it's very rare.

It really needed mechanics with more oomph to them. A delayed Kill Zone effect where he shoots anyone still in the radius on the next turn, for example, so it would could actually disrupt the squad instead of maybe inconveniencing one soldier. Or make it an accumulating lock-on effect, where each application progresses closer to a completely unavoidable shot, and Cover or Defense in general influences the rate at which the lock-on value rises. (eg it could add 60 lock-on when aimed at a human soldier in the open or flanked by the Hunter, with Low Cover lowering that to 40 and High Cover lowering it to 20 and Defense boosters like Hunkering Down and Aid Protocol working the same, not to mention SPARK innate Defense, with 100 lock-on being the trigger for the shot to fire) Something to make it pressure the player some, instead of usually being a wasted action on the Hunter's part.

That said, it should be pointed out that Tracking Shot bypasses Parry. So make sure to have your Templar duck out of range if targeted, not try to Parry the shot. Not that Parrying the shot would be particularly useful if you could, but it would be theoretically possible to drain his ammo to interfere with his performance once he reaches the squad... but whatever, it's all theoretical because Tracking Shot bypasses Parry.

Anyway, Tracking Shot is one of two capabilities the Hunter is allowed to use while 'inactive', though note that he does not lose access to it once he is 'active'; if you get separated from him such that he can't see your squad after moving, he's very likely to initiate Tracking Shot. Mostly you'll only see it before he reaches your squad and gives his first-spotted speech, though, the Hunter trying to harry you from across the map... generally to no real success...

It's a bit disappointing, and a big part of why I generally rate the Hunter as the least problematic Chosen. You can often literally ignore him for several turns in a row in a way that simply isn't true of the Assassin or Warlock.

Farsight

The Hunter has effectively infinite line of sight, and can fire the Darklance beyond standard line of sight ranges.

This quality has a visible ability if you use eg Yet Another F1 to check the Hunter, but said ability doesn't have its own icon, so I'm borrowing All-Seeing's icon.

Farsight is pretty strange, as until just over a week before putting up this specific post I'd honestly thought it was effectively cut content, as I had never seen the Hunter fire the Darklance beyond standard line of sight outside Tracking Shot. Then he happened to close with my squad much faster than I expected him to, where I had a Sharpshooter not in Cover relative to him, and he 'activated' and promptly shot that Sharpshooter. I didn't think anything of it until I selected the Sharpshooter and discovered the Squadsight targeting icon on the Chosen icon, and checking around with my other soldiers confirmed that the Hunter had fired from a little beyond standard vision!

Turns out there's two reasons why the Hunter usually won't just shoot someone at Squadsight distances: first of all, his AI actually forbids him from doing so until he 'activates'. He's restricted to using Tracking Shot if he wants to shoot someone and hasn't gotten to your squad yet. Second, he actually suffers Squadsight penalties just like your Sharpshooters, so even once he 'activates' he's unlikely to actually shoot at anyone you happen to have far away from the rest of the squad, because probably he'll have better odds of hitting someone within standard line of sight, and the AI overall does actually prioritize highest-accuracy shots.

That said, this is still an important quality to keep in mind. When the Chosen aren't around, it's actually pretty safe, if you know what you're doing, to have people ending their turns in exposed positions once you're done with squad Concealment, because inactive pods can't take shots at exposed soldiers when activating. (It's not a habit I recommend inculcating, personally, but still) Even when the Assassin or Warlock is around, this is still surprisingly safe; the Assassin will usually open proceedings with Parting Silk rather than Rapid Fire even if people are in the open, and even when you provide the Warlock a perfect target to shoot he will still usually turn his nose up at the idea of pulling a trigger and instead use his phenomenal mental powers on someone... which doesn't care about Cover.

When the Hunter is around, it's actually important to consistently keep people in Cover as you advance, because you're risking him Grappling into sight or spending one action on walking into sight and immediately shooting someone and quite possibly critting them... and this is true even if they, personally, are too far away to see him, and would normally be safe.

Notably, a soldier needs to be more than ten tiles beyond standard sight for Squadsight penalties to stack up to greater than Low Cover. It's not unusual for a soldier to be lagging a few tiles behind the rest of the squad, and normally it's pretty safe for such a soldier to not bother with Cover if no pods are active -for example, maybe you had a soldier fall behind due to key duties and decided to have them simply Dash their maximum distance without regard for Cover in an attempt to catch up with the rest of the squad. With the Hunter around, this can very abruptly result in that soldier taking a severe hit you could almost certainly have avoided by keeping them in Cover; if nothing else, the Hunter would likely try shooting someone else.

This quality also means that attempting to back away from the Hunter once you've run into him is less helpful than you might hope. With the Warlock, it can be worth advancing enough to activate him -to stop the mission timer, for example- and then backing up to more favorable terrain. (With the Assassin, this is technically possible to do, but pretty meaningless) With the Hunter, this may result in him sticking to his favorable terrain and activating him has just opened up the option for him to harry your squad with Squadsight shots!

So, uh, don't do that to yourself. Once you've found the Hunter, stick close and try to take him out.

I am curious if Farsight was intended to be more broadly relevant. In the game's current state, I suspect most players have no idea he can fire normally at Squadsight, given how restricted the conditions for him bothering are... and it honestly wouldn't surprise me if originally the Hunter just abused Farsight while 'inactive' instead of having Tracking Shot and then got tweaked because the devs felt that was too oppressive or unfun or something.

Stiletto Rounds
The Hunter's Rifle and Pistol both have a 50% chance of inflicting Bleeding on a successful hit. Bleeding does 2 damage per turn to the target for a few turns, but can be cured with a Medikit. A soldier reduced to 0 HP by Bleeding's damage will always enter Bleeding Out mode instead of immediately dying.

This has no icon in-game, but the Bleeding status does have its own icon, so that's what I'm using.

Note that this applies to any damaging shot made with either the Darklance or Darkclaw, including that Tracking Shot can inflict Bleeding if you let it hit.

Also, the Hunter's Darkclaw uses the Short range profile, just like your Pistols, while the Darklance uses the Long range profile, just like your Sniper Rifles.... for standard shots specifically, keep in mind. (ie Tracking Shot doesn't care about range) As such, the Hunter's firing preferences are influenced to a non-trivial extent by your decisions, in that if you try to keep your distance a lot he will almost never fire the Darkclaw. If you're prone to dropping people close to him he will... usually prefer to back off and fire the Darklance, but he'll be notably more likely to fire the Darkclaw than if you keep your distance.

Difficulty is also a factor here, since his Mobility spikes 3 points on Commander. Down on Regular it's that little bit more likely he won't be able to get enough distance for the Darklance to make more sense. And of course if you Poison him, that hinders his Mobility further, making Darkclaw shots a bit more likely to come out. If you take to high ground a lot, that'll create opportunities for him to Grapple near someone and then decide he likes his current position enough to shoot them from close range, so that's another way you might cause him to fire the Darkclaw.

This also means Watchful is unusually low threat if you trigger it from long range, as the Hunter will be suffering -30 Aim in addition to the Overwatch accuracy penalty; even with his naturally high Aim, that's unlikely to hit, no matter his tier and your difficulty.

As for Bleeding itself, the bit where it won't kill soldiers it reduces to 0 HP is a nice bit of attention to detail, and is likely the entire reason why the Hunter has this exclusive status effect instead of, say, Acid rounds; because this way the Hunter still won't directly kill a soldier, not even via his damaging status effect. Damage over time effects are exactly the kind of mechanic that tends to get overlooked when devs are wanting to do things like have an enemy that never directly kills the player('s forces), so I'm pleasantly surprised War of the Chosen didn't overlook this.

Naturally enough, SPARKs and other robots are immune to Bleeding. What you might be caught off guard by is that Psi Operatives and Templar with Fortress are not immune to Bleeding!

Interestingly, the Bleeding isn't actually implemented as an innate ability on the Hunter, but as an Ammo Item he's invisibly equipped with, like Venom Rounds. This is especially interesting given that, as I alluded to in the Ammo post, the base game has code for unused Ammo that would've caused Bleeding; this is actually recycling unused content!

Not that I mind that at all; I just find it interesting,

Tranq Shot
If in range for a Pistol shot, the Hunter can elect to Tranquilize someone. This Dazes the target, but does no damage. Automatically hits. Has a 1 turn cooldown. Can only target human soldiers.

Curiously, this is coded to have a chance to inflict Unconsciousness, and in fact it's a 100% chance, but the game doesn't actually use this value. All it ever does is inflict Daze.

This also bypasses Parry. Templar do more poorly against the Hunter than you might expect for such a straightforward-seeming enemy!

Also, it technically isn't an automatic hit, but the coding is such that it's always a 99% chance to succeed. I honestly suspect the devs started from a die roll model, then hurriedly tried to kludge it into an automatic hit by manipulating values, and didn't realize it was an almost guaranteed hit now. In any event, you might as well treat it as a guaranteed hit -for one thing, he uses it so rarely that I've honestly not seen him use it at even double-digit counts. So... even if you play the game a ton, you'll probably never see it fail.

Regardless, Tranq Shot is, in practice, basically a mercy action. Burning his entire turn on Dazing a single soldier, not even knocking them out of Cover? This is just sad. He's not even intelligent about leveraging its strengths -it doesn't care about Cover, for example, but he won't specifically pull it out to hit soldiers in High Cover. Nor soldiers that are Hunkering Down, for that matter, let alone both.

You might expect it to only spend one action point given it's a Pistol action, and so open up the possibility of the Hunter tranqing someone and immediately making off with them, like Harbor Wave, but nope. It's a turn-ending action, severely limiting its potential. The fact that it's a cooldown ability instead of operating on a limited number of charges means the Hunter won't even run out of the ability to waste his time!

This isn't as terrible as one might expect in practice since he does use it so very rarely; I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there's players who had no idea Tranq Shot existed, that's how rarely he uses it.

Tranq Shot honestly mystifies me, and I'm honestly a bit surprised the Hunter doesn't have something akin to Parting Silk in the sense of 'standard' attacks inflicting Daze.

Concussion Grenade
The Hunter may toss a Concussion Grenade up to 15 tiles out. This has a blast radius of 4 tiles. Units caught in the blast radius will be Dazed and pushed away from the center point. One charge.

Yes, it has the same icon as a Flashbang Grenade if you use something like Yet Another F1. In fact...

... you can see when the Hunter tosses it that it has a Flashbang graphic, just like Mountain Mist.

The actual blast effect is new visuals and audio, though, and to be fair unlike Mountain Mist the Concussion Grenade clearly overlaps with Flashbangs in concept and functionality, so it makes a bit more sense overall, but when it gets down to it I'm pretty sure this is primarily a consequence of War of the Chosen having been rushed.

Bizarrely, Parry does block this, even though the Hunter's other special abilities bypass Parry.

It should be explicitly noted that while Concussion Grenade only has one charge, that charge is reset each time the Hunter respawns when fighting him in his Stronghold. This is true of all Chosen abilities -charges and cooldowns are not kept across deaths- but this is a case it's particularly pertinent to, as the Hunter is fairly aggressive about using his Concussion Grenade, enough so that it's very easy to get hit by it 2-3 times when assaulting his Stronghold. (Unless you're consistently killing him without giving him a turn to act, of course)

Anyway, Concussion Grenade is on paper comparable to Harbor Wave in the sense of being a knockback-capable area-of-effect Daze-inflictor, but in practice it's very different and much lesser of a threat: the grenade-style blast radius is something you're likely working to minimize the threat of anyway, it furthermore actually makes the knockback a lot less likely to matter (The Hunter tends to toss it behind the squad, which often means shoving them into their own Cover... ie zero actual movement), and of course it ends the turn and has one charge. Furthermore, it has no fallback behavior for units immune to Daze, and the Hunter doesn't 'see' Daze immunity -which is to say he's perfectly happy to toss it at a SPARK to no effect. They'll still be shoved, but it is extremely unlikely you'll care at all; it's not like they're being knocked out of Cover, or anything else relevant.

When he's not wasting it on a SPARK or something similarly cringe-y, Concussion Grenade can easily end up chewing up most of a turn, as soldiers are forced to run about to wake each other up. Among other points, when the shove actually matters, it tends to take away the ability to wake people up in effortless chains; soldiers who started next to each other may well not be. In particular, trying to use Stand By Me to preemptively negate it is prone to the Hunter tossing the grenade such that the Bondmates get separated -not that he specifically is angling to counter that strategy, but he likes to throw directly at clumped soldiers, and the physics will usually end up with the clumped soldiers no longer clumped.

In practice this works out to a similar dynamic as Mountain Mist: if you're confronting the Hunter with no active pods in play, it tends to be a bit of a joke, whereas if active pods are about it can be pretty dangerous. It actually tends to be a little more dangerous than Mountain Mist, since it's eating half a turn to a full turn on each affected squad member, whereas Mountain Mist doesn't necessarily matter at all if a soldier was going to move closer to their target anyway, or started within Blinded-sight in the first place.

Of course, compared to Harbor Wave, Concussion Grenade is a complete joke...

... which is the more relevant comparison, in that Harbor Wave is the Assassin's mass-Daze tool and Concussion Grenade is the Hunter's mass-Daze tool.

Notably, once the Concussion Grenade charge is used up, Tranq Shot is the only Daze option the Hunter has! Given how extraordinarily reluctant he is to use Tranq Shot, this means the Hunter is going to be spending the majority of his time shooting to kill -which is very in-character, honestly. I'm not so sure it's good for the design, but I certainly appreciate the intersection of the Hunter's personality with his gameplay; I'm far too used to dissonant designs in games, where a character is presented in a clear, specific way by the narrative, and meanwhile their gameplay flagrantly contradicts it.

It's one of the many details in War of the Chosen that has me looking forward to XCOM 3, whenever it comes along.

Grapple
The Hunter may instantly ascend to nearby higher ground with a grapple. This has a cooldown, but it only prevents him from using it multiple times within the same turn. Briefly reveals the Hunter if activated in the fog.

Grapple is simultaneously a point of idiot comedy and the single biggest factor in making the Hunter the Chosen that's most prone to killing people with little warning. (Well, sending them into Bleeding Out mode) On the one hand, the Hunter will, if there's anywhere to Grapple to nearby, frequently Grapple as the very first action of his turn... and then promptly hop down and away... and then on his following turn Grapple back to the exact same spot and wander away again... repeat for a half dozen turns while the Hunter fails to engage with you, and possibly fails to even set up Tracking Shots.

On the other hand, once the Hunter is actually engaged with your squad, his access to a Grapple means he can instantly transition into a flanking high ground position and take a shot. Even at his lowest tier of training, he's accurate enough that it'll be a guaranteed hit if no other accuracy modifiers are in play. If he's your first Chosen, in your first encounter? Odds are pretty good that soldier is Bleeding Out, only not dead because Chosen can't directly kill your soldiers.

Later in the game, when your troops are a bit tougher overall and his damage hasn't scaled up fast enough to compensate, this isn't nearly so alarming, but early in a run you're at the mercy of his AI and the vagaries of mission terrain generation for whether he's going to 'fight fair' or unavoidably and instantly take out someone where your ability to avoid the situation is extremely limited. The Hunter's access to his Grapple is honestly the single most maddening Chosen ability, rather than any of the much more dangerous-sounding abilities found on the Chosen. It's especially frustrating since all Chosen can hit high ground effortlessly regardless. If the Chosen were normally forced to climb ladders and whatnot and the Hunter's access to a Grapple made him uniquely qualified to hit high ground, I'd grudgingly tolerate it as a necessary evil. As-is, I really wish they'd just disabled his Grapple entirely, and I'm surprised I haven't run across mods that do so, because the effect on the experience of fighting him is Not Good, with no strong design reason to keep the Grapple.

It's also one of the better examples of what I've noted before that the AI heavily prefers to descend, as even when high ground paths are available the Hunter will virtually always hop down post-Grapple. If he doesn't, it's generally because he took a shot from his post-Grapple position without moving (Because it was flanking someone, for example), or set up a Tracking Shot and didn't glitchily move afterward. He'll occasionally decide he likes his High Cover enough to stick to it, if he Grappled or otherwise moved next to a tree or some such, but High Cover is rarely found at the edges of high ground, so this AI point is extremely unreliable.

Grapple is honestly one of the first bits to start cluing me in to War of the Chosen's rushed state, thanks to how blatantly janky it is, and how trivial it would be to fix the jank with minimal consequences: just turn off the Grapple.

On a different note, as I've already alluded to Grapple is the second ability of the Hunter's that he can use while 'inactive'. This is semi-important, since high ground makes it easier for him to get a line of fire on someone for a Tracking Shot, and as I've already noted he's prone to preferring low ground when just running about. It also ties pretty directly into the glitchiness with starting a Tracking Shot and then moving away, giving it more opportunities to happen.

Also, it should be pointed out that the Hunter heavily prefers to Grapple to the highest ground around. Indeed, this is a big part of what drives his occasional one-man idiot comedy routine, as he prioritizes height over advancing on you. As such, if there's an object that's the highest Grapple point in a screen or so, he can end up Grappling to that highest spot, walking away, and next turn he's still in Grapple range and so repeats, potentially forever. When there's equally-high high ground spaced regularly about the map -such as is common in City Centers- he's much more likely to actually Grapple toward your squad turn after turn.

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

The Hunter is bizarrely prone to abandoning high ground in spite of being the Chosen that most benefits from having high ground. Partly this seems to come down to him prioritizing High Cover heavily, and high ground tends to be light on High Cover, but even on maps where he can reach high ground High Cover he still frequently abandons the high ground. Usually if he doesn't instantly abandon high ground, it's because he ended up in a position to flank one of your soldiers where he elects to immediately shoot them -and even then he'll sometimes hop down and wander off elsewhere, sometimes without ever performing an offensive action of any kind. It's kind of ridiculous how much he values moving, given he's a sniper. You'd think he'd want to find a good sniper nest and sit there.

And as I already complained about some earlier, his access to the Grapple is frustrating in part because it's simply redundant with the ability to hop arbitrary heights.

I really wish they'd disabled his Grapple...


Basic
HP: 12/15/20/25
Armor: 0/0/0/1
Defense: 0
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: 2-5 (+2)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/0/15%/15%
Will: 50
Psi: 40

The Hunter's Darkclaw does 2-3 (+1) damage at this tier.

Compared to the Assassin, the Hunter subs out Defense for Dodge and has vastly higher Aim and a higher crit chance, but less HP... though some of these only apply on lower or higher difficulties.

Notice that the Darkclaw's core parameters are actually identical to a Conventional Pistol. This is a trend that continues: for his next tier, the Darkclaw is equivalent to a Mag Pistol, for the tier after that it's equivalent to a Beam Pistol, and for his final tier it finally has the stats the Darkclaw has in your own troops' hands. Aside not having the Pierce, of course.

Unlike with your Sharpshooters, though, the Hunter doesn't have his Sniper Rifle shots doing roughly double the damage of his Pistol shots. The Darklance consistently has better damage potential than the Darkclaw, but for the first couple of tiers they actually have identical minimum damage! Indeed, at this tier the Darklance is literally worse than a Conventional Rifle, with worse minimum damage and hampered by an inferior range category... though that's not to suggest you shouldn't take his firepower seriously. 2-5 damage with Bleeding attached, when your soldiers are low-level and probably nobody has more than maybe 7 HP? The only reason he won't directly kill people is because of the forced-Bleeding Out behavior of Chosen.

The main point here is that you shouldn't be treating him firing the Darkclaw as a massive decrease in danger, the way you would if his weaponry was tuned more like your Sharpshooters.

Also, notice that above Regular a flanking high ground shot is a guaranteed hit. (Unless he's close enough to suffer Aim penalties, or far enough to suffer Squadsight penalties...) This is one reason his Grapple access is aggravating and surprisingly dangerous; where the vast majority of enemies pretty much always have a miss chance in any realistic circumstance, the Hunter can readily achieve 100% accuracy on a moment's notice if terrain allows. Simply obsessively Grapple, notice he's flanking someone, and fire. Notably, tier 1 at Rookie or Regular is the only time he can't casually hit 100% accuracy on targets in the open; going up in tier and going up in difficulty both close that 5-point gap, and his Aim gets to climb even higher!

Anyway, the Hunter is, in one way, something of a middle ground between the Assassin and the Warlock: where the Assassin aggressively charges you no matter what, the Warlock is prone to hanging out where he first spawned, hanging back and waiting for you to come to him. The Hunter is in between these behaviors; when he's not derping out, Grappling to a point over and over, he tends to advance to your squad, but at a somewhat leisurely pace between not having access to Vanishing Wind's raw Mobility boost and tending to move only half his max movement because he spends the second action point on Tracking Shot.

I'd give you a timetable like I did with the Assassin, but his speed is too sensitive to terrain. Sometimes you get one of those Retaliation layouts with widely-spaced towers rising above everything, and he'll make zero progress toward your squad for roughly infinity turns. Other times the map contrives to give him few opportunities for Tracking Shots while not having Grapple opportunities, and he'll advance to your squad at roughly 2/3rds the speed of the Assassin. Still other times, he'll actually arrive faster than the Assassin, because everything happens to line up so that he Grapples significant distances forward more or less every turn and never burns action points on Tracking Shot!

I will note that in plot missions in particular he actually is strongly prone to stalking the area near your objective instead of advancing. He'll sometimes actually advance on you in a plot mission, but it's very rare -most of the time he'll linger near the back of the map spamming Tracking Shot. He even Grapples less often than usual, oddly, which is striking as all three plot missions have Grapple targets right on top of the initial Chosen spawn point. You'd think the plot missions would virtually guarantee Grapple spam.

Threat-wise, the Hunter is both the least threatening and most threatening of the Chosen, both of them for basically the same reason;

He's the most conventional combatant of the Chosen.

On the one hand, this leaves the Hunter unusually susceptible to a lot of standard tools: he's pretty consistently impaired by Poison, Cover is generally protective against him, Hunkering Down tilts the odds of a soldier being okay pretty significantly, and so on and so forth. He's a lot like an ADVENT Trooper with a ton of HP, basically.

On the other hand, the Hunter, once he reaches your squad, spends by far the least amount of time on non-standard not-immediately-injurious actions. He rarely uses Tranq Shot and only has the one Concussion Grenade, so if he acts even twice after 'activating' he probably tried to kill someone, and the more such turns he has the greater the proportion of potentially-lethal attacks he'll be making, on average. The Assassin, by contrast, generally opens with Parting Silk for completely unavoidable damage, but after that quite often gets distracted with Mountain Mist, Harbor Wave, and wasting turns on Vanishing Wind; the longer a fight with the Assassin goes on, generally the lower the proportion of turns were spent trying to inflict damage. And as we'll see when we get to him, the Warlock basically never deigns to try to do direct and immediate damage.

As such, if the metaphorical dice are against you -whether his actual accuracy rolls or unfortunate terrain placement leading to Grapple-based flanking shots- and the fight drags on, the Hunter is by far the most likely Chosen to be putting multiple people in the hospital or the morgue... but if you're prepared for him and not unlucky, he's the most prone to accomplishing literally nothing, because he fired a regular shot and it missed.

Notably, he's the Chosen least prone to Extracting Knowledge or Kidnapping, due to his horribly limited Daze tools he doesn't even like using. When things go very horribly wrong when fighting the Assassin or Warlock, what tends to happen is they make off with Knowledge and possibly a soldier, leaving the rest of your squad reasonably healthy, because things going really wrong usually means at least one Dazed soldier you can't cure. The Hunter's realistic worst-case scenario is him wiping your entire squad.

This is particularly pronounced early in a run, when you don't necessarily have a squad capable of wiping him out it a single turn more-or-less reliably, but the dynamic never stops being true.

As with so many things about War of the Chosen, this rather striking hit/miss dichotomy where he's terrifying lethal or a joke pretty literally at random is almost certainly a product of War of the Chosen being quite blatantly rushed...

Trained
HP: 18/20/30/35
Armor: 0/0/1/2
Defense: 0/0/0/5
Dodge: 5/5/10/15
Aim: 80/80/85/85
Mobility: 12/12/15/15 (8/16 on Rookie/Regular, 10/20 on Commander/Legendary)
Damage: 3-6 (+3)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/0/15%/15%
Will: 50
Psi: 40

The Hunter's Darkclaw does 3-4 (+1) damage at this tier.

On the lower two difficulties, you could be forgiven for not noticing he went up a tier.

Up on Commander and Legendary, his offensive profile has barely changed, but his HP has spiked a solid 10 points and his Armor has gone up a point, making him noticeably more difficult to quickly kill. If you just barely took him down in one turn in your last encounter with him, odds are good he'll survive long enough to actually shoot someone this time.

He's still pretty frail, but still.

As an aside, the contrast between the Hunter and the Assassin's defensive stat profile highlights something I've never really gotten about XCOM 2 -that the devs seem to rate the Dodge stat notably higher than it deserves. The Hunter does consistently have more Dodge than the Assassin has Defense, but not by much -on Legendary difficulty with both of them fully trained, the Assassin has 20 Defense vs the Hunter having 25 Dodge. This is just bizarre given that Defense reduces the odds of hitting at all, negating damage entirely and preventing side effects, where Dodge is just a chance to roughly halve the damage; I'd think they'd rate Dodge as no more than half the value of Defense. (That is, I'd expect the Hunter's Dodge stat to be at least twice the Assassin's Defense at any given step of training+difficulty)

There's no real qualifiers here: there's no case where Dodge applies and Defense doesn't. Indeed, if you have 100% hit chance, you thus have no chance of a Graze, regardless of the target's Dodge, and firing from Concealment also negates Dodge! (And not Defense)

I'm bringing this up with the Hunter in particular for two reasons: first of all, each Chosen has a clear defensive stat they specialize in, where their overall profiles are fairly similar but the Assassin focuses on Defense, the Hunter on Dodge, and the Warlock on Armor, making it pretty clear what the devs think of the respective stats. (Where comparing a Viper's Dodge to a Shieldbearers Armor+Defense has the problem that they're very different enemies, outright tiered differently) Second, this overestimation of Dodge's value pretty directly contributes to the Hunter tending to be the least problematic Chosen, as Dodge is inherently a dubious thing to specialize in at all but he also doesn't even have enough of it to really expect Grazes to happen regularly enough. This is particularly problematic since he consistently has the worst HP of the Chosen, clearly relying on Dodge triggers to theoretically keep him more on the level of the other Chosen in terms of expected durability.

It honestly has me wanting to know what the devs think Dodge does. Is this one of those cases where a game's devs are making decisions in ignorance of a mechanic's actual details? Or did they just not really understand how many auto-hit effects the player has at their disposal, and/or fail to consider the implications of eg point-blank Shotguns getting to generally ignore Dodge from the accuracy boost?

Seriously, why do they rate Dodge so highly?

Elite
HP: 25/30/40/45
Armor: 0/0/2/3
Defense: 0/0/5/5
Dodge: 5/10/15/20
Aim: 85/85/90/90
Mobility: 12/12/15/15 (8/16 on Rookie/Regular, 10/20 on Commander/Legendary)
Damage: 5-8 (+3)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/0/15%/15%
Will: 50
Psi: 40

The Hunter's Darkclaw does 3-6 (+2) damage at this tier.

A particularly blatant example of how durability jumps up more going from Regular to Commander than otherwise, with this Hunter tier consistently gaining +5 HP per difficulty except that particular jump is +10.

This tier his offensive presence goes up pretty noticeably, and above Regular his defenses have once again gone up non-trivially. Mind, you should certainly have Predator Armor by now...

On that note, one of the odder, probably-accidental qualities of the Hunter is that he's the most front-loaded of the Chosen in overall danger. The Assassin is fairly flat due to having no unique mechanics that scale (Or significantly fail to scale) with your progression, while as we'll be seeing the Warlock is fairly back-loaded due to massively scaling up multiple abilities. The Hunter, meanwhile, has a similar 'flatness' as the Assassin except for the topic of Bleeding -after all, Bleeding's per-turn damage is fixed, and its duration is disconnected from his tier.

As such, if the Hunter is your first Chosen, him shooting someone has pretty good odds of unavoidably downing them; even if he fires his Darkclaw or rolls low on damage with his Darklance, if the Bleeding triggers that can, by itself, do enough damage to take an early-game soldier from full HP to Bleeding Out!

Whereas by this tier you're almost certainly fighting him with people in at least Predator Armor and a few levels under their belts, maybe even some bonus HP from Covert Ops; even a crit that triggers Bleeding might leave the soldier standing without need for a Medikit.

Less dramatic but still relevant is the consideration of crowd control: getting the Guerrilla Tactics School online and expanding your squad count to 5 and later 6 makes the Hunter a lot less threatening overall, because he has one tool that affects multiple soldiers, and he can only use it the one time outside his Stronghold. Taking out one of your soldiers in your first fight with him, where you might actually have a squad of only 4 people, is hurting your squad's effectiveness notably more than if he were to instantly take someone down when you've got six people running around.

The Assassin, meanwhile, never loses access to Harbor Wave except temporarily through its cooldown, and as we'll be seeing when we get to him the Warlock has splash damage he spams and abilities that get to hit more targets at once at his higher tiers -and none of his abilities has a charge limit. Your squad getting bigger still helps against both of them, of course, but not quite so dramatically and consistently as with the Hunter.

As such, a run that has the Hunter as its first Chosen has decent odds of him terrorizing the squad two or three times, whereas a run that has him as its third Chosen encountered is a lot more likely to always find him the least threatening Chosen by a wide margin.


Ready For Anything
HP: 30/35/50/60
Armor: 2/2/3/4
Defense: 0/0/5/10
Dodge: 10/15/20/25
Aim: 90/90/95/95
Mobility: 12/12/15/15 (8/16 on Rookie/Regular, 10/20 on Commander/Legendary)
Damage: 6-9 (+3)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 0/0/15%/15%
Will: 50
Psi: 40

The Hunter's Darkclaw does 4-7 (+2) damage at this tier.

Even more blatant about how the higher difficulties are a big jump in Chosen durability.+5/+15/+10? Yikes.

Also note that this tier's Darkclaw is almost identical to the version you loot. The key difference is your version ignores 5 points of Armor, while his gets to inflict Bleeding.

A minor 'magic number' point is that, on Commander and Legendary, this tier has high enough base Aim that a high ground shot on a SPARK will always hit if there's no compounding factors.

Indeed, the Hunter is actually the Chosen most likely to kill a SPARK, assuming you're diligent about Cover usage, as the other Chosen tend to disdain shooting in favor of their special abilities, with SPARKs being immune or at least not clearly desirable targets. The Hunter will spend a lot of his active turns shooting to kill, and if all your soldiers are in relevant Cover the Hunter will frequently end up firing on a SPARK since their 15 Defense is less than even Low Cover's bonus. If you do the expected thing of only having one SPARK, and end up in a protracted fight with the Hunter, it's entirely possible to outright lose your SPARK from his tendency to pick on them, especially if the terrain doesn't lend itself to Grapple-flanks.

It's also worth pointing out that at this tier the Hunter has a high enough combination of HP and Dodge it's actually expected you'll get at least one Graze in any given fight with him, assuming you don't pretty continuously employ guaranteed hits.

Which you very possibly can do by now, mind.

On a different topic, one of the things where I have to wonder how many people are aware of it that's impressive about the Chosen is the tremendous variety in contextual dialogue they have. I suspect a lot of people overlook a fair amount of the contextual dialogue being contextual -for example, I alluded to the Assassin getting upset by grenade usage, and she doesn't actually clearly state that she's complaining about your usage of grenades, simply declaring "There is no honor in this!"

A lot of their contextual dialogue is like this, where they say a thing in response to something quite specific but don't clearly state that's what they're reacting to, which gets further muddled by ambiguities in wording and repetition in concepts. For example, the Chosen all have contextual dialogue for complaining about SPARK usage, and contextual dialogue for building the Shadow Chamber, and in both cases they talk about about 'a machine'; I wouldn't be surprised if there are players who think the dialogue responding to building a Shadow Chamber is just (slightly strange) ongoing complaints about you daring to use robots in your forces. 

Furthermore, when I say there's a tremendous variety, part of what I mean is that there's quite a lot of kinds of triggers, some of which aren't entirely intuitive and get further obscured by the Chosen not necessarily immediately speaking up. They all three have mean things to say about the Resistance classes, for example, but they respond to you selecting such a soldier mid-mission (Which is all kinds of bizarre), and there's a notable delay before they actually speak up, which can make it look like they're responding to attacking with that class or some such.

Contextual dialogue isn't exactly unprecedented in games, but I don't think I've seen a game manage the breadth and depth of fairly spontaneous chatter the Chosen have. In particular, the Chosen actually adjust their squad-sighted speeches based on recent history: if you successfully drove off the Hunter last time you fought him, he'll acknowledge that you won the last clash, whereas if he Extracted Knowledge he'll gloat about how he's going to do it again, or something in that range. This does a surprising amount to make them seem more like people rather than video game punching bags; one of the most common failings of video game entities is a failure to remember what came before, and the usual developer solution is to lean hard into the railroading school of video game design. That's functional enough (usually) if a player only goes through the game the one time, but even a second attempt at playing the game will rapidly cause the illusion to crumble.

It sounds like a little thing, but this aspect of Chosen contextual dialogue does a lot to make them feel like people.

(Albeit people who are awful and you want them dead as soon as possible)

-----------------------------------

I didn't really get into it in the Assassin's post, just briefly alluding to the Ethereals being atrocious parents, but a big part of how War of the Chosen better sells 'the Ethereals are bad people' is by using their relationship to the Chosen to depict... well, normally I'd call it a metaphor for abusive parent-child dynamics, but a metaphor is usually meant to be a few steps at removal from the thing being represented. Is it really a metaphor when the Angelus Ethereal literally refers to the Chosen as being her children, the Chosen were literally raised from childhood to adulthood by Ethereal influence, and the Chosen literally have Ethereal genes ie their parent's genes? Nor is the abuse somehow metaphorical; fantastical, yes, with glowy torture beams, but this is still fundamentally a depiction of a parent using violence on their child.

Whatever would be the appropriate terminology here, it's a very effective way of showing the Ethereal awfulness, in part because, as I've said before, it's so easy to look at what the Ethereals do to their ostensible favorites and extrapolate from there to guess that how they treat the rest of the world is likely much the same, or far worse.

Anyway, returning to the Chosen; where the Assassin is exactly the child the Ethereals asked for and then were unhappy with getting exactly what they asked for, the Hunter is the sullen teenager who's figured out his parents are hypocritical liars. He points out them holding whatever position is convenient in the moment (And gets punished for daring to speak an unpleasant truth), and makes no bones when talking to the player about how awful the Ethereals are; just because he has to pay lip service in front of them doesn't mean he's going to pretend to believe the propaganda when they're not right there to punish him for not doing so.

The Stronghold assault monologues are some of the better illustrations of this: the Assassin, when you hit her Stronghold, earnestly attempts to convince you that the Ethereals are trying to make the world a better place (In spite of how distasteful she finds many of their orders), and attempts to convince you and yours to stand down and submit to the authority of the Ethereals for the good of humanity. (Even as she affirms that 'humanity's sacrifice will be great'...) When you attack the Warlock's Stronghold, he's affronted that you'd dare to attack a 'sacred temple', talks up the 'compassion' of the Ethereals (His interpretation of compassion being 'kill them quickly, instead of slowly and painfully', but we'll get into that when we get to his post), and otherwise speechifies at you in a manner that makes it clear he basically buys into the Ethereal regime's inherent rightness.

The Hunter, meanwhile, talks about how he 'should probably' be giving you a speech about killing you 'for the glory of the Elders' et al, in a manner that makes it very clear he doesn't believe in any of that at all but is aware the Chosen are expected to express such sentiments. Other parts of his Stronghold dialogue involve wondering if you -the player, the Commander- have shared any of what you saw while in the stasis suit, ultimately concluding you couldn't have because surely your people would have run home screaming if they knew what the Ethereals had planned. He can't be bothered to parrot the party line, and he's implicitly admitting he thinks the Ethereal intentions are reprehensible beyond measure, in short.

Indeed, one valid interpretation of the Hunter is that he feels trapped, unable to actually escape Ethereal authority (And where would he go? They rule the whole planet!), and limits himself to passive-aggressively messing with them to whatever extent will avoid punishment. He refers to stuff like hunting alien minions for sport, which probably was meant to build on his big game hunter thing in a way that makes him personally look awful, but isn't terribly difficult to fit into this framework; sabotaging the Ethereals, presenting it as something he did out of boredom rather than deliberately undermining them? Given how atrociously we see the Ethereals treat their favored minions, it's far too easy to imagine the Ethereals taking that explanation at face value (Admittedly depending in part on how effective their mindscanning is) and basically metaphorically frowning but not seriously punishing him over it. Notably, the Assassin and the Warlock talk about ADVENT and alien forces as having been made to die for the Ethereals; this rather suggests they really wouldn't care about minions being killed so long as they didn't feel it was an attempt to disrespect or undermine them.

I'm actually a little sad further XCOM games are liable to never come back to the Hunter. Not only is he just very entertaining, he is, to my surprise, the Chosen that seems most receptive to jumping ship due to ethical objections to Ethereal rule; in spite of how often he endeavors to present himself as killing for fun and not caring about much of anything except his personal entertainment, he actually seems to be the only Chosen with both a conscience and an interest in actually acting on said conscience. I have difficulty imagining the Assassin or Warlock ever being turned against the Ethereals, but can actually readily see a Good Guy Hunter if only he could be convinced that the Ethereals are going to lose and so he can escape them.

But it probably never will be.

-----------------------------------

As with the Assassin, here's the Hunter's Archive entry reproduced in full:

INTEL BRIEF:

"The second of the Chosen created by the Elders, the Hunter was designed to be an unequaled military tactician, one able to predict and defeat the increasing number of guerrilla attacks conducted against ADVENT by the Resistance. He has long pursued the Reaper faction, his arrival coinciding with the disappearance of one of their greatest operatives. The Hunter has an uncanny familiarity with the Reapers and their methods, leading some among the group to believe that he is in fact their long-missing operative. However, most among their people will insist it's only a trick of the Elders intended to demoralize the Resistance."

ADVANCED INTEL SEQUENCED FOR ADVENT CHOSEN "HUNTER"

FILE: 213546 RECONSTRUCTED TRANSLATION FROM ADVENT OFFICER SKULLJACK DATA 2028.02.14

"Assignment: Stationary guard posting; City Center 47, Gene Therapy Clinic A-2, Theta-B Secure Lab. Block hours: 168, all activity within designated program as expected. Block-B, Hour 76: Recorded suspicious verbal communication between human civilian designated 0083 and 7689 as follows: "0083: You realize what they're doing to him, right? The data he's receiving... it's not just... 7689: Why are you even talking about that? Don't ask questions, you'll live longer. 0083: Think about what it must be doing to his psyche; he's a man, not a machine... it's an endless war in there. 7689: I'm telling you, you're asking for trouble. Drop it." 0083 and 7689 secured for reeducation per Theta-B access doctrine."

COMM: REF-9121 SUBJECT "T" STATUS INQUIRY INTERCEPTED BY WIDEBAND 2028.08.11

"As requested, my formal update on subject "T" is to follow, but for now I can briefly speak as to his progress as identified by doctrine guidelines. Now approaching the end of his second conditioning pass, including full access to the ADVENT tactical archive, our subject has shown an overall retention rate well above accepted returns. Although initially scheduled for five complete passes before field trials, I believe it may be an unnecessary delay in his progress. Worth noting, his personality has begun to exhibit changes that can only be attributed to the wealth of newly acquired information that now...END OF FILE FOUND."

FILE: 213890 RECOVERED DATA FROM ADVENT SURVEILLANCE SECTOR 07 REC. DATA UNKNOWN

"OFFICER-K341: KRACSAD! ... UNKNOWN: Why did you even waste my time calling me out here? I didn't need to see this to tell you how it would play out. UNINTELLIGIBLE: ... UNKNOWN: I suppose I could have told you, you were only a few seconds from eating a bullet. But where's the fun in that? The Elders can just make more of you anyway."

COMM: REF-VOLK-A SECURE TRANSMISSION RE: "THE HUNTER" RECEIVED 2030.03.16

"I figured it was only a matter of time before you asked about him. For a while I tried to suppress the rumors, figured all this talk of a "Hunter" rivaling one of our own people had to be bad for morale. But even I underestimate my people sometimes, 'cause now they're all looking to get a piece of this prophetic stalker who seems to know all of our moves before we make them. I'll send you the scraps of intel we've pieced together so far. -VOLK"

COMM: REF-VOLK-A SECURE TRANSMISSION FOR-REF: SCOUTED RECEIVED 2030.03.16

"Volk... signal lock is struggling... you need to get this... we actually saw the... thing! Hold on - there - Volk, I think it's him! He took a shot at us from what must have been a mile off, and when we turned around, there he was right in front of us. We had already wiped out a whole squad of ADVENT by then, and he didn't even move to stop us. I don't even know why he let us live... do you think it could actually be you know who...?"

FILE: 213895 REAPER FACTION REF: HUNTER SIGHTING ACCOUNTS MISC SOURCED 2028.2030.00

"From that distance, he had to have taken the shot before I even started moving. Do you know what that means? He shot where I was going. He KNEW where I was going... before I had even decided to make a run for it. How can that be?"

"If that thing wasn't dead set on killing us, I'd have said he'd make a great recruit. From the way he talks, you'd think he was already one of us. You think he's been watching us all this time?"

"I didn't think anything serving the Elders was capable of insubordination, until I heard that thing rambling on in the woods one day. I honestly think it's just in this for the fight itself."

I'm curious about the 'endless war' bit in particular. It really sounds like it's referring to the Commander's start-of-game situation of being trapped in endless wargames, but if that is the intent why would it be getting put into the Hunter's archive file? If it's instead just indicating that the Hunter went through something similar, that makes it pretty weird to include from a different angle -that if you take it that way, it sounds an awful lot like the Commander should've had his personality warped in a similar way to the Hunter. Either way, it's a confusing paragraph to have included.

I'm also not sure how to feel about the heavy hinting that the Hunter was a Reaper before he got grabbed and converted. War of the Chosen itself doesn't really do anything with it -it gives some extra texture to some of his Reaper-related lines, but not much more- and it seems pretty unlikely any further XCOM media will build on it. It broadly makes sense for something of the sort to exist, in that Chosen are supposed to be modified and only the Assassin was expressly made for Chosen-hood and likely converted at a very young age, and so I actually would expect the Hunter and/or Warlock to have personal connections to other people... but if nothing is going to be done with it, it's a bit of a waste.

It's also a bit unfortunate how much his shooting skills are played up by these files, given his mechanical reality falls well short of the hype. The mechanical version of what's being described here would be that he'd initiate Tracking Shot, and the soldier would automatically be hit if they moved.

Which makes me wonder if maybe originally Tracking Shot worked something like that...

-----------------------------------

Next time, we wrap up the Chosen with the Warlock.

See you then.