Chimera Squad Equipment Analysis: Breach Items
Before getting into specific Items, I should note that all Breach Items (And indeed, all effects that interact with the pre-Breach phase at all, including multiple agent abilities) come in one of three slot types: mandatorily in the first slot, mandatorily in the second slot, or where any slot is acceptable so long as it isn't the first slot. The game itself doesn't actually try to communicate this at all, which is particularly unfortunate when it comes to the distinction between 'second slot' and 'any but first slot'; I imagine a number of players have ended up broadly intuiting that a 'first slot' and 'not first slot' distinction exists but ended up thinking that everything that isn't first slot can only be used in the second slot and so gotten much less use out of Medipatches, Terminal's Refresh, and Patchwork's Combat Scanners because they'd rather toss a Cease Fire Bomb or the like and don't realize Medipatches/Refresh/Combat Scanners can be used in a later slot.
A non-obvious wrinkle to all this is that if a given Encounter has its Breach made entirely of 1-slot Breach entrances, it's actually impossible to use any Breach Item or most pre-Breach agent abilities. This is because all the effects that are mandatorily in the first slot are either for accessing a specific type of Breach entrance or are Axiom's Battering Ram, which only works for a narrow selection of Breach entrances that involve kicking in a hinged door. As such, 1-slot entrances like rappelling entries prevent usage of Breach effects.
In theory Torque's Adaptable and the Infiltrator Weave should provide a meaningful exception to this, but in practice if all Breach entrances are a single slot then they are always the same universal type. (ie you will never see 4 rappelling slots plus a Vent slot)
On the off-chance XCOM 3 decides to bring back the Breach Phase concept (Which, if it chooses to hearken back to Apocalypse, would actually make a lot of sense to do!), I do hope this aspect of Breach mechanics is better communicated, not to mention more fully leveraged. In Chimera Squad itself the 'any but first slot' type only has the three representatives, and the 'only first slot' type isn't really any better, and the entire framework has a lot of unrealized potential. (In addition to the learning curve issues)
Anyway, specific Breach Items.
Breaching Charge
Type: Entry slot.
Effect: Enables access to a 'Wall' Breach slot once per mission.
Acquisition: Available from the beginning of the game.
Cost: 50
Note that you always start every run with a Breaching Charge in inventory, presumably because the Tutorial involves you using one.
Breaching Charge's utility is, of course, heavily affected by whether Claymore is part of your core team or not. If he is, it's pretty low value: in any given mission you'll never have more than three opportunities to blow open walls (Indeed, I suspect it's actually impossible for a mission to generate three such opportunities, though it's possible I've just been unlucky so I'm not willing to rule it out entirely), and even two chances is quite rare, meaning just having Claymore along will generally make a Breaching Charge completely redundant unless you specifically want a different agent to act before Claymore in turn order.
There's also no reason to bother bringing a Breaching Charge into most major plot missions; most of the Take Down (Investigation target) missions and the endgame never offer an opportunity to blast down a wall, no matter your Investigation order. Only the Progeny can have it useful, and if you hit them first even they won't.
Breaching Charge is also relatively low in value when you're early in an Investigation, as the primary benefit of blasting open an entrance is that you generally end up with few Alert or Aggressive enemies in sight. Early in an Investigation, most every enemy will be Surprised anyway, making that benefit nonexistent.
Late in an Investigation, though, having your entire team bypass Aggressive enemies with just one Item used can be a very nice deal, and it's not unusual for enemies to start in positions that are in Cover relative to the default entrances but flanked by the explosive entrance. It can also be an incredible help on missions with time pressure, as sometimes the explosive entrance will place your team where the objective is more accessible, occasionally so much so it essentially skips the 'reach the objective' step.
Unfortunately, you can't tell ahead of time how useful it will be in any given Encounter (Caveat: there are several mission types you can be confident it won't be useful, such as the VIP extraction missions; consider swapping it out on those missions) and so have to just blindly gamble, but generally speaking things are designed so it's a good deal. Late in a run, blasting in a wall is usually a good deal, only liable to be worth passing up if another Breach entrance has generated two of the better positive Breach Modifiers. (And either no negative Breach Modifier, or one that's minor or can be ignored; Rooting the first slot agent literally doesn't do anything if you load Zephyr into the first slot, for example)
It also helps that the overall Breach Item design is such that you generally only want to use one of the second-slot Breach Items in a given Encounter (And indeed may not have the ability to use more than one), while having four agents and at most 3 Encounters aside the final mission. You might as well have somebody equipped with a Breaching Charge, Auto Key Card, or Medipatch, or even two people pulling from that group, simply because having eg 4 Cease Fire Bombs equipped is almost impossible to get 'full' value out of; even if you feel Cease Fire Bombs (Or whatever) are The Best Breach Item Type, it doesn't actually make sense to all-in on them.
As there are two different agents that give Auto Key Card functionality, multiple ways of handling agent health, and only one agent who offers Breaching Charge functionality, the Breaching Charge is pretty easy to justify slipping onto a variety of possible teams.
So that all works out okay, honestly, even if it feels less like thoughtful design and more like a happy accident.
Auto Key Card
Type: Entry slot.
Effect: Enables access to Secure Entrance Breach points in missions.
Acquisition: Available from the beginning of the game.
Cost: 50
If you don't have either, at all or as part of your core team, it's probably worth buying and bringing one. More than the explicit Secure Entrance benefits of usually having fewer Alert/Aggressive enemies visible, these alternate entrances frequently offer high ground, or better Cover, or easy flanking opportunities on initial enemy positions, or some mix of these benefits. Sometimes you'll basically short-circuit an Encounter's 'default' design, where eg the objective is to reach a VIP and then evac them and the main door will force you to fight past literally all the enemies while the Secure Entrance will start you basically right on top of the VIP. The game isn't perfect about this, same as with Breaching Charges, but usually Secure Entrances provide such positional advantages, and generally if a Secure Entrance isn't a huge improvement it's at least not particularly worse than the default entrance(s). And unlike a Breaching Charge you don't have to worry about 'wasting' it by using it on a not-actually-great entrance and then being frustrated when you can't use it on a later spot. So there's really no reason to take advantage, most of the time.
Axiom's Battering Ram is a notable exception, of course, encouraging using standard door entrances... but sometimes the Encounter doesn't include a standard door entrance. You probably shouldn't give Axiom an Auto Key Card, just like you probably shouldn't give him a Breaching Charge, but they're still worth passing out to other people even if Axiom is on your team.
Medipatch
Type: Not first.
Effect: Before the Breach, heals everyone at this Breach entrance by 2 HP. The Nanomedikit Assembly Project raises this to 3 HP.
Acquisition: Complete the Breach Tactical Equipment Assembly Project, which requires you complete the Modular Armor Assembly Project.
Cost: 75
Note that this does not provide Poison immunity the way a Medikit does. Vaguely connected to that is that it won't cure status effects on use, if only by virtue of them not carrying forward between Encounters in the first place.
The Medipatch's effect is a bit limited, but it's still a very solid Breach Item simply because it has the distinction of being possible to activate from the third and fourth slots of a Breach point, which as I noted earlier is actually unique to it out of Breach Items. If you've got an agent you prefer to place late in Breach order, giving them a Medipatch will ensure some use of their Breach Item slot without needing to juggle them forward. It also still works from the second slot, so it's not like it's a bad choice for an agent you prefer to have go second, either. It's only actively poor for agents you prefer to assign first, most particularly Axiom. (Since his Breach Phase action only works from the first slot) In general, if you're not sure what to give someone, a Medipatch is a solid enough choice. It also has a clear use-case: once you're on the last Encounter of the mission, you might as well use it if anyone is injured and sharing a Breach point with an agent carrying a Medipatch.
That said, it is limited/not particularly great. First and foremost is the consideration that many non-plot missions are only 1 Encounter, and the Medipatch can't do anything until a second Encounter. Strictly speaking, if the forecast says 1 Encounter you really ought to be replacing Medipatches with other gear for the mission. (I generally don't bother, personally, but this is more commentary on how lax even the highest difficulty is) Second is that the healing is pretty minor per target; one Medipatch use isn't particularly likely to keep an agent alive one enemy attack longer, especially later in the game, as firepower rises across Investigations. The total HP healed is a solid 8 HP, but the impact on a given agent may be functionally nothing.
Which brings us to point three, that Chimera Squad is prone to damage stacking up on one or two agents while your other agents go completely untouched. This exacerbates the issue of how low-impact it is per agent, and also means you'll often partially waste a Medipatch's healing value -healing two agents for a total of 4 HP is a bit sad. A Medipatch is certainly appreciated if the squad gets smacked with a bunch of area-of-effect damage... but this is a rare event. Among other points, grenades are rare in Chimera Squad, and furthermore the proper enemy grenades both act on a delay, usually allowing you the opportunity to get at least one agent out of the line of fire in the unlikely event that everybody is in the danger zone.
This is a big part of why I've focused on Medipatches having unique slot behavior. If you're looking to enhance the survivability of the squad per se, you should probably look to other Items, either preventive measures in the Breach set (eg Cease Fire Bombs) or to Items in other slots entirely. (eg regular Medikits, Kinetic Screens, Regen Weave...)
In the long haul the Medipatch holds up a bit better, because the Nanomedikit Assembly Project has a completely unmentioned benefit of boosting the Medipatch's healing as well, bring it up to 3 HP per agent. This can still end up not doing anything in practice, but is notably more likely to actually matter. It's larger than typical damage variance, for one.
Amusingly, unlike a Medikit the Medipatch is perfectly happy to fix up Androids. This is almost certainly an oversight. Not a terribly relevant one given it can't come up unless a mission is more than 2 Encounters long, but whoops.
Smoke Bomb
Type: Second slot.
Effect: All agents at this Breach point benefit from the Shrouded effect until the end of the Breach phase, providing +25 Defense and Dodge. Additionally, all enemies have a chance to downgrade their Alert Level.
Acquisition: Complete the Breach Explosives Assembly Project, which requires you complete the Modular Armor Assembly Project.
Cost: 55
I really wish the game provided actual feedback on Alert level-modifying effects like Smoke Bomb's -there's absolutely no way to tell within normal play whether you knocked a bunch of enemies down to Alert or Surprised or if you just happened to get a low number of Aggressive enemies. The game gives you an idea of how dangerous a Breach point can be, but it's perfectly willing to assert that there's up to 7 Aggressive enemies only for you to walk in and there's 1 Aggressive enemy and 4 Alert enemies, so that's not a reliable feedback tool. It makes it frustratingly difficult to tell how effective effects like this actually are; the only one you can actually see in action is Shelter's Dazzle, where you can do a before and after comparison yourself and say Shelter definitely knocked X, Y, and Z enemies down an Alert Level.
Note that the smoke goes away as soon as the Breach Phase is over. This generally wouldn't matter anyway since your squad immediately runs out to Cover, and so it's rare for even a single agent to end up inside the area Smoke Bomb targets, but I suspect some players intuitively expect the smoke to last into the first Round, and no. If you want the Shrouded status past the Breach Phase, you'll need a Smoke Grenade.
In any event, the Smoke Bomb is a decent enough workhorse item. There's other Breach Items that are flashier in their effectiveness, but the Smoke Bomb has the key edge that its behavior is terrain-agnostic: the Breach Items I'll be covering after the Smoke Bomb are all effects that hit every enemy within a certain radius of the Breach point, and it's entirely possible to lob one of them and have it do literally nothing because no enemy was in range. (Or one or two enemies were in range but immune to the effect)
Mind, the Smoke Bomb is still unreliable, where you can toss it down and have multiple enemies open fire, hit, and not Graze, but you can be confident it actually had the chance to try to do something. That's meaningful.
Flash Bomb
Type: Second slot.
Effect: Disorients all enemies nearby the Breach point for the Breach phase, with enemies at the Breach point having a chance to downgrade their Alert Level.
Acquisition: Complete the Breach Explosives Assembly Project, which requires you complete the Modular Armor Assembly Project.
Cost: 55
Flash Bombs are at their worst in the Sacred Coil Investigation. Sacred Coil forces include multiple units that don't particularly interact with Alert mechanics (eg Chryssalids, where the only thing that actually matters is Surprised giving you +30 Aim against them) or are restricted in their interaction (eg Ronin can't attack in the Breach phase), a large number of robots that are immune to the Disorientation, and also includes Guardians, which you actually prefer to be Aggressive over being Alert; them attacking with their dinky pistol is unpleasant, but for most team setups you're going to struggle a lot more with Guardian shields than with a bit of Pistol-provided damage. There's a very solid argument that you shouldn't bring Flash Bombs against Sacred Coil forces at all, especially once you're deep enough into the Investigation they're using their full range of forces.
Flash Bombs are at their best in the Progeny Investigation. Their forces include no melee pieces, only one late-arsenal unit immune to Disorientation (Sorcerers), and no other weird qualifiers to restrict its effectiveness. It's too bad the Disorientation doesn't last past the Breach Phase; being able to preemptively Disorient Codices would be extremely useful when they showed up, but alas.
Flash Bombs are slightly worse in the Gray Phoenix Investigation, as Berserkers and Faceless are dedicated melee enemies and Faceless can start showing up fairly early. Only slightly, though: it's still a great pick, and Faceless and Berserkers are almost always a minority of Gray Phoenix forces when they show up at all. Nor are there any enemies you'd prefer being Aggressive to being Alert.
I would in fact argue the Flash Bomb is, aside its issues in the Sacred Coil Investigation, probably the overall strongest and most reliable of the Breach Items, in spite of its 'on paper' effects sounding a bit lackluster. This is especially striking given Flashbangs are underwhelming, and conceptually a Flash Bomb is just a Flashbang used in the Breach Phase!
Cease Fire Bomb
Type: Second slot.
Effect: Disables the weapons of all enemies nearby the Breach point, preventing Aggressive enemies from firing during the Breach phase. This drains all ammo from weapons, requiring a reload to fix.
Acquisition: Complete the Breach Explosives Assembly Project, which requires you complete the Modular Armor Assembly Project.
Cost: 70
The in-game description claims this can lower enemy Alert Levels like the Flash Bomb, but from experience I'm pretty sure this is false. It doesn't even make Aggressive enemies who can't shoot switch to a different label/Alert Level, which is frustrating since you usually don't get to clearly see who all got hit by the Cease Fire Bomb and so can't be entirely sure which Aggressive enemies are harmless vs which ones need to be downed right away to protect your squad. I really wish the game had clearly marked enemies as being out of ammo in general; the Cease Fire gear would be so much less janky if you could see at a glance whether an enemy has ammo or not.
Anyway, if the Cease Fire Bomb does lower Alert Level, that's an irritating mixed blessing: you don't want Aggressive enemies downgraded to being Alert if they've been hit by the Cease Fire Bomb! So honestly, I hope the description is wrong on this point just to avoid this jank existing.
In spite of the jank, Cease Fire Bombs are still quite strong, if... unreliable. Like Flash Bombs, their blast radius is not very large and is centered a bit in front of the Breach entry point it's thrown through, so it can only catch the closest enemies. Not every Breach entry even has enemies within reach, and it's always possible to have it be the case that what few enemies are in reach are natively immune and/or are functionally immune. (eg because they're Alert or Surprised and aren't going to be bothered by missing ammo when their first proper turn rolls around, such as because they prefer ability usage anyway) In conjunction with the probability of not getting to see who all was affected or not, there's definitely difficulties in optimizing Cease Fire Bomb usage.
Even so, there are very few enemies in Chimera Squad that entirely ignore ammo (Well, if we discount the unreliable bugginess with Pistol-wielding enemies, at least), particularly while being able to fire when Aggressive in the Breach Phase. As Aggressive enemies uniformly either use their primary weapon or do nothing, this makes Cease Fire Bombs very widespread in their effectiveness when most or all enemies are Aggressive, which happens pretty reliably late in an Investigation, especially in your last Investigation. If you're experienced enough with the game to recognize at a glance what map a given Breach entry area is tied to, you can also prioritize using Cease Fire Bombs in the cases where the room is small; on the smallest rooms, a Cease Fire Bomb can actually disable nearly every enemy in the room.
Even in the larger rooms there's usually some enemies in range, and you can prioritize targeting enemies toward the back of the room during the Breach Phase to maximize the odds that the Cease Fire Bomb is meaningfully useful. Even with the odd visual filter that the Breach Phase applies, you can usually accurately tell which enemies are closer or farther, even if precisely mapping it to tiles and whatnot is hard.
Holo Scanner
Type: Second slot.
Effect: Holo Targets all nearby enemies during the Breach Phase, granting +15 Aim against them until the Breach Phase is over.
Acquisition: Complete the Breach Tactical Equipment Assembly Project, which requires you complete the Modular Armor Assembly Project.
Cost: 60
The Holo Scanner is also basically agnostic about what kinds of enemies you're fighting. It's slightly less useful when dealing with enemies that don't use Cover, since your squad is more likely to be hitting 100% accuracy against them anyway, but there aren't any enemy types immune to Holo Targeting, nor any enemy types that somehow punish it. So it really is very widespread in its effectiveness.
It is impacted by your own team makeup: Zephyr gets literally zero use out of it, and some agents have options for contributing to the initial Breach without bothering with accuracy checks. Torque can do this every Encounter with Toxic Greeting (Though you're less likely to use it as the game wears on and especially when fighting Sacred Coil), Verge can use Levitation every Encounter as well, and Cherub and Shelter can each be useful without performing an accuracy check once a mission. So a team of Verge/Torque/Zephyr plus Cherub or Shelter may actually toss a Holo Scanner and then end up getting no benefit out of it because you decide Verge, Torque, and Cherub or Shelter should all use their Breach specials instead of shooting.
But that's not really an expected result, and of course other team compositions can tilt things the other way; Blueblood's Breach special is still a shooting action that benefits from Aim modifiers, for example.
Just keep in mind that the Holo Scanner's benefits do in fact wear off as soon as the Breach Phase is over, unlike Patchwork's Combat Scanners. Among other points, you should prefer to use Combat Scanners over Holo Scanner when eg doing the last Encounter of a mission, but also this means you can't use a Holo Scanner to do things like set up for perfectly accurate Smashes. (Which is a little unfortunate, honestly...)
The Target Analyzer is abysmal.
Target Analyzer
Type: Second slot.
Effect: Increases crit chance by +50 against all nearby enemies during the Breach phase.
Acquisition: Complete the Breach Tactical Equipment Assembly Project, which requires you complete the Modular Armor Assembly Project.
Cost: 60
Cost: 60
As I've noted repeatedly, crits only ever provide +1 damage unless Talon Rounds get involved. Thus, this is only slightly bolstering your average expected damage; if every agent hits a target, the expected result is that you gained... 2 damage. That's it. Furthermore, there's no guarantee it does anything of real meaning; say two agents both fire on a target, and one of them crits, and the target goes down. Unless the damage the target took is exactly equal to their HP, the Target Analyzer didn't actually do anything; the target would've gone down in two hits regardless. And since it's gated behind randomness, you can't actually keep an eye out for 'magic number' moments to leverage it; that is, if the Target Analyzer let the player assign 2 points of damage at the end of the Breach Phase, they could end up with an enemy on 2 HP from shooting actions and use the Target Analyzer damage to efficiently finish that target instead of burning an agent's action on it. But with the randomness... no, you can't do anything of the sort.
If for some reason you happen to be running Talon Rounds on all your agents, I guess it might be worth considering buying a Target Analyzer. +2 damage is still underwhelming, but in those conditions it'll happen 70% of the time, and +2 damage is at least greater than damage variance for your Pistol-wielders. So that's... a scenario it's vaguely worth bothering, I guess. (Why are you running Talon Rounds on everyone, though?)
If you happen to loot it in the early game you might as well use it to fill out someone's Breach slot, but I have difficulty imagining actually buying a copy.
The only particularly notable point in the Target Analyzer's favor I can think of is that it's effectively the only Breach Item that reliably helps when every enemy is Surprised. That's... not much of a point in its favor given such missions are by definition much easier than missions with Alert and Aggressive enemies. Like yeah it reinforces the 'if you loot it you might as well equip it' aspect, but it's very much not an argument for blowing money on it.
Oh, and I should emphasize explicitly that, like the Holo Scanner, the Target Analyzer's effect ends as soon as the Breach Phase is over. If it lasted through the start of the enemy turns it would honestly still be really lackluster, but at least then you could frontload a bunch of actions and have okay odds that the Target Analyzer actually mattered. But it doesn't, so it really is flatly stuck with the 'at best expects to be +2 damage in total, with no guarantee the damage in question actually did anything of use'.
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One of the more obviously clunky bits of the Breach Phase and everything tied to it I keep touching on is how the standard Investigation progression interacts in a strange way with most Breach effects; since the majority of Breach Phase abilities and Items are designed to be of no (Or at least substantially reduced) relevance against Surprised enemies, most Breach Phase abilities and Items take a while to start being at all useful. Among other points, this makes the learning curve around the Breach Phase clunky, where a player is going to spend a while being unsure why they're supposed to care about Levitation, Cease Fire Bombs, etc, and only start getting an idea of what these are for when the game's difficulty is picking up overall. I suspect a lot of players have ended up with the latter portion of their first Investigation being one of the biggest difficulty spikes of their entire Chimera Squad play experience, in no small part due to this particular awkwardness.
While I don't actually expect XCOM 3 to bring back the Breach Phase, as it seems likely to all-around pull its design cues primarily from XCOM 2, in the event that it does bring back something recognizably like the Breach Phase I do hope this aspect gets handled more smoothly. The basic idea of average Alert Level going up later in an Investigation as one of the ways difficulty goes up makes sense, but I feel like the 'every enemy is Surprised very reliably for multiple missions in a row' dynamic takes the idea a little too far; it probably should've been the case that the game eased you in with only one Alert or Aggressive enemy per Encounter initially, with everybody being Surprised being restricted to special cases like the Breaching Charge and Auto Key Card entrances.
That way, stuff like Verge's Levitation would be much more clearly useful early on, not to mention the player would get the chance to learn things like 'what even is this enemy's Alert action range?' one or two enemies at a time more consistently. As-is, part of why the late game of an Investigation for a new player is liable to go wrong a lot is that they'll repeatedly have 2+ enemies who are Alert where the player has no idea what (If anything) that enemy can do of note while Alert, and so seriously stumbling because multiple enemies did very unexpected things, or because they overreacted to some enemy being Alert that can't actually do anything of note but that they worried could, or whatever.
On a different topic, I should explicitly point out that all Breach equipment is either unlocked by default or unlocked very early from one of two Assembly Projects. No Investigation provides further Breach gear, and no Breach gear is exclusive to the Scavenger Market and/or mission rewards. Its a bit weird, and a bit unfortunate; Breach Items would've benefited a lot from having a few things that are stronger and unlock later, in part due to the aforementioned 'lots of Breach stuff gets more useful later in the game'. Having Cease Fire Bombs take a bit longer to get a hold of so you're not able to purchase them before Aggressive enemies are a thing, for example, would smooth out the learning curve a bit, among other possible benefits.
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Next time, we wrap up all this Item talk by covering the miscellaneous Items.
See you then.
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