Chimera Squad Equipment Analysis: Miscellaneous
Items in this set all go into the Utility Item slot, and also don't have a broader categorical competition aspect. That is, an agent can't simultaneously equip two different Ammo Items, whereas Medikits only compete with other Utility Item slot Items in the sense that there's only so many slots to plug into.
Interestingly, only 5 Items in the game fit into this miscellaneous category. Quite the contrast with where this series started; Enemy Unknown/Within largely didn't have equipment incompatibility. So this is actually a short post!
Medikit
Renders carrier immune to Poison, and can be used once in a mission to heal 4 HP on a biological ally within 2 tiles, while also removing Poison, Burn, and Acid from them if they're afflicted. The user can target theirself.
Acquisition: Available from the start of the game.
Cost: 40
Also note that Medikits don't have agent-variable behavior: though Terminal can heal people at a distance, she can't use a Medikit at a distance, contrasting with Specialists in XCOM 2 having Medical Protocol affect regular Medikit mechanics. There is in fact a fair argument that Terminal is the worst agent to consider passing a Medikit out to.
Medikits themselves are a bit of a mixed bag.
The big boost to their relevancy is Items always being free actions. You can buy a couple, equip them on your highest-risk agents, and just casually toss down the heal when they end up with 4 or more HP missing without having to worry about action economy. A smaller boost is the increased relevancy of Poison, relative to XCOM 2: instead of Poison being spat by a single uncommon enemy that largely stops being relevant past the early game, Shrike Cobras are a mid-tier Poison spitter you have to worry about throughout the game, if unreliably, and the Gray Phoenix Investigation has Adders as another source of Poison that doesn't cease to be relevant by virtue of falling behind in strength. Thus, immunity to Poison is a little more useful overall than in XCOM 2.
On the other hand, your medical specialist -Terminal- doesn't need Medikits to function and in fact gets very little use out of them herself. When fighting Sacred Coil it's worth considering giving her a Medikit so she can cure herself of Burn in a pinch, but otherwise there's no synergy between Safeguard and Medikits. There's also no way to get additional charges on a Medikit, so the peak healing value is actually considerably behind what it was in the prior two games, where Supports/Specialists had skills for adding charges, so even with the Nanomedikit upgrade the Medikit doesn't really hold up as a healing source as you get deeper into a run. Fortunately, Chimera Squad isn't really designed so you need healing, not if you know what you're doing and have a solid team, but that still means it tends to be hard to justify carrying a Medikit in the late game. An Item to disable or take out an enemy will generally be better for damage management once enemy damage is hovering around 6 damage a shot.
I usually buy a couple somewhere in the first Investigation, end up upgrading them into Nanomedikits by virtue of the Assembly having nothing better to do at some point, and then almost never actually use them even though I regularly have them equipped on at least one person going into missions.
They're more appealing if you have Torque as a squadmate so she can spit Poison clouds without worrying about friendly fire, and if you go for Gray Phoenix first and prioritize Gas Grenades that's a slight bump in Medikit relevancy (But only slight since Gas Grenade impact damage hurts units even if they're immune to Poison), but overall Medikits are surprisingly easy to just skip. Given money is actually a meaningfully limited resource for a good chunk of the game, there's a fair argument to be made you shouldn't bother to buy Medikits at all.
This is of course especially true if you have between-Encounter-healing enabled for your campaign, particularly if it's the full heal setting.
It should be emphasized that Stabilization isn't reliant on having a Medikit equipped, unlike prior games. This is another reason Medikits aren't actually that important; in XCOM 2, you want a couple of Medikits (Or medical Specialists) around so you stop Bleeding Out if somebody goes down, especially in the base game where your soldiers eventually expect to always go into Bleeding Out mode the first time they run out of HP. Chimera Squad simply lacks an equivalent extra motive to carry around Medikits.
Relocation Disc
Once per mission, the carrier can teleport up to 8 tiles as a free action, even while Rooted.
Acquisition: Complete Progeny Investigation, then complete Progeny Equipment Assembly Project.
Cost: 100
This is an amazingly useful tool for those agents who are heavily biased toward turret-type play, such as Verge, Torque, and Terminal, especially if you're actually leaning into having them use their firearm. (As opposed to having Verge rely on Mind Flay, for example) Being able to eg Stupor somebody, teleport into a flanking position on a different target, and then shoot them with perfect accuracy is a great utility in basically any mission.
Relocation Discs are also very useful for any agent in VIP Extraction missions, which are a mad dash from one side of the map to the other with unlimited enemy reinforcements. Zephyr is basically the only agent who has decent odds of getting zero use out of a Relocation Disc in such missions. And indeed Zephyr is overall the worst agent to consider giving a Relocation Disc to in general; in theory she'd appreciate being able to teleport up a cliff or through a wall or the like given her nature as a dedicated melee combatant, but in practice she's basically always more than mobile enough for all the maps Chimera Squad actually has.
Slightly counterintuitive is that Shelter is actually one of the better users of a Relocation Disc, as it adds a lot more utility to switching with an enemy. Instead of switching with an enemy and then having to give up an opportunity to attack because he needs to move to avoid flanking fire, he can switch with an enemy, use the Relocation Disc to get to a safer position, and still be able to attack. Alternatively, he can potentially teleport into a bad position, swap with an enemy to strand them in that bad position, and promptly shoot them or otherwise do something useful. This is less helpful in longer missions where the single use on the Disc becomes a noticeable limitation, but in short missions it's potentially a lot of bang for your buck, and the Disc is... basically the only tool in the game for making Shelter's Relocate less problematic to actually leverage. So for one thing if you just like the idea of Shelter's kit and want to see it be cool and useful, a Relocation Disc is your best option for trying to help there.
The ability to bypass Roots is... less relevant than I'd prefer. Root is an uncommon status in Chimera Squad, and more importantly the AI isn't actually coded to try to coordinate its actions or otherwise to behave such that Root is liable to be combined with effects you want to escape. (But can't due to the Root) It is possible to have someone equipped with a Relocation Disc, become Rooted, have a delayed effect set upon them, and them get a turn in time to teleport out -I did in fact have that happen in a real run!- but it's not something you should really expect to have happen. It's less 'a reason to consider equipping a Relocation Disc' and more 'a benefit to keep in mind if you equipped one for other reasons'. It makes thematic sense and is a cool idea and all, but the game would've needed to be handled a bit differently for it to be liable to be significant of a benefit.
One weird point is that the in-game description presents the Relocation Disc as a tossed item, like it's a grenade variant, but the actual animation doesn't involve a toss of any kind. Instead, the agent appears to concentrate while energy crackles around them, and then is abruptly at the target location. I'm unsure if the concept changed and the textual reference got missed or if Chimera Squad got rushed a little -it's nowhere near as blatant as War of the Chosen, but there's signs here and there that Chimera Squad intended to have a bit more to itself than what we got. Whatever the reason, the result is odd.
Overdrive Serum
Used as a free action once per mission. Provides the user 50% more Mobility, 3 more Armor, and immunity to mental effects for 2 turns.
Acquisition: Complete Gray Phoenix Equipment Assembly Project.
Cost: 100
It's Stims for the third time, and it's... finally actually kind of good?
Its actual effects are unchanged from XCOM 2, but it no longer consumes itself permanently, and being a free action means it's very easy to justify slipping it in when you're about to have an agent do something risky. I don't make much use of it myself, but it's no longer actively a trap, which is far and away superior to the EU/EW behavior.
Note that the immunity to mental effects is very narrow. As I keep pointing out, Chimera Squad isn't big on enemies inflicting Disorientation, Stun, etc, with only Berserkers, Dominators, and Resonants inflicting any of the relevant status effects. As Berserkers can show up in any Investigation via a district hitting max Unrest, this isn't strictly impossible to matter during the Sacred Coil Investigation, but it's pretty close, and it's still pretty rare even in the other Investigations -all three of these enemies take a bit to start showing up and are uncommon even once they're allowed to appear. You should primarily be thinking in terms of whether the Armor and/or Mobility boosts will matter.
Axiom is probably the agent that most appreciates Overdrive Serum, simply because his Rage mechanics allow him to be uncontrollably pulled into the open and he appreciates the Mobility boost for both melee purposes and for the purpose of advancing to Shotgun people. Torque, Cherub, and Godmother are notable secondary possibilities, since they all appreciate getting dangerously close while often having a bit of difficulty getting as close as they'd like.
You'd think Zephyr would love Overdrive Serum, but in practice she's already more than fast enough for 99% of situations, and the toughness boost doesn't really help her with the situations she's prone to dying in. Say you have her go last in a Breach, and she ends up picking an awful position flanked by literally every enemy; carrying an Overdrive Serum won't prevent her from dying because she'll go down before she gets a chance to use the Overdrive Serum.
Regardless, I personally don't use Overdrive Serum much, but seriously, it's actually decent in Chimera Squad, which is a pleasant surprise. If XCOM 3 returns to the concept yet again, it might get to be good in a mainline game!
Motile Inducer
Immediately provides 2 action points to a target ally the user has a clear line of fire to. The user cannot target theirself.
Acquisition: Purchase from the Scavenger Market or acquire as a mission reward.
Cost: Varies.
Reminder: this is not a proper turn for the target, which is to say it won't advance the clock for effects on them, whether you're talking positive or negative effects. Ideally, you don't use the Motile Inducer on someone with a negative effect (Unless they'll be curing themselves or the negative affect won't matter to your plans with them), and do use it to extract more value out of turn-limited buffs. By a similar token, don't forget that cooldowns will not advance; if you're not keeping this in mind, it's easy to either throw the Motile Inducer at someone on the idea they'll do (thing that's on cooldown) and whoops that's not possible, or to throw the Motile Inducer at someone, have them use a 1-turn cooldown ability, and then get caught off guard when their proper turns rolls around and they can't use that ability. This usually isn't an issue given how most Encounters rarely last even two full Rounds, but for one thing that makes it easy to get caught off guard when it does come up, whether because you never became aware of it in the first place or because you have learned it but have forgotten because it so rarely comes up.
All that said, there's an argument to be made that the Motile Inducer is the best Item in the game. A sudden injection of 2 action points is not only very powerful, but incredibly flexible since you'll by default have three different agents to choose between. Most Items are made awkward by the fact that they have some relatively specific use-cases, where it's easy to bring an Item on the idea it will help with X problem, and then you get a mission that doesn't have X problem at all and you instead really needed to be able to solve Y problem to get through an Encounter cleanly. A Motile Inducer can flexibly respond to a wide variety of situations simply by picking a different agent to target.
It's also functionally pretty good as a brute-force solution; more action points means more actions means more damage, after all. And unlike, say, grenades, it scales into the late game essentially automatically; tossing a Motile Inducer at Blueblood and having him shoot twice of course inherits the benefits of him leveling, upgrading his weapon, having Ammo equipped, etc. This is a very unusual quality for a regular Item to have; most of them have at least some element of their effectiveness becoming proportionally less as the run progresses.
As such, the Motile Inducer is a great Item in part because it's 'evergreen'; no matter what stage of the game you're in, it's a good purchase that will put in good work immediately and stay relevant no matter how deep into the run you get.
To be honest, it's so good that I'm probably underselling the Motile Inducer here. It's really good, in so many ways for so many reasons it's difficult to remember them all and clearly articulate them.
Conversely, it should be pointed out the Motile Inducer is another subtle strike against Zephyr. Almost every other agent has the ability to efficiently use both the action points provided by a Motile Inducer, at least once they have some levels under their belt, but Zephyr has no innate way to spend her first action point on something other than plain movement, and unlike Godmother (Who is the only other agent unable to efficiently spend multiple action points off her internal kit) she can't equip a Reflex Grip to gain access to such a capability. There's ways to work around this, where for example you could throw the Motile Inducer at Terminal and have her use Cooperation on Zephyr to get the benefit of an extra turn out of Zephyr without wasting any action points, but it's pretty unfortunate that Zephyr is not only understrength but a particularly poor beneficiary for one of the best Items in the game.
A related point is that using Team Up on Zephyr is generally undesirable for the exact same reason; that other agents are more efficient at spending 2 action points at a time.
That said, this does at least mean Zephyr is pretty easy to justify equipping the Motile Inducer to, since you can be reasonably confident you're unlikely to want to throw it at her. Conveniently, she's generally best placed early in turn order, and it's overall most optimal to have whoever is carrying a Motile Inducer placed early in turn order, so that's another way she's a pretty good option for equipping one. So her status as a poor recipient of its effects hurts her less than it could've, at least.
Kinetic Screen
Generates a shield on a single target ally the user has a clear line of fire to, including potentially the user, which will completely negate a single hit. 1 charge.
Acquisition: Randomly acquire as a mission reward.
Cost: N/A
Yes, the Kinetic Screen is graphically just a Motile Inducer with the green parts dimmer. It's kind of weird.
In spite of sharing a graphic with the Motile Inducer, the Kinetic Screen is surprisingly underwhelming. It's literally Cherub's Kinetic Shield, which for one thing means the shield always goes away at the end of an Encounter, but unlike Kinetic Shield you only get one use of it. This makes it really easy to completely waste it, and while throwing it is a free action it's still eating an Item slot that could've gone to something easier to get reliable use out of.
It's also buggy; Cherub is barred from dropping Kinetic Shields on people he's already shielded, but the game will let you overlap Kinetic Screen with Kinetic Shield, which I highly doubt is intended behavior. Certainly, the behavior of stacking them is unfavorable: if you stack them onto someone and that person gets attacked, both fields will instantly break, making it completely useless to drop both screens on one person.
Also, note that the Kinetic Screen does not interact with Cherub's Charge mechanic. Even if he personally tossed the Kinetic Screen, it breaking will not give him Charge. So if you were hoping to double up that way: nope.
That said, the Kinetic Screen isn't unusably bad or anything, not even if you've got Cherub on your squad. If nothing else, VIP extraction missions are a good time to bring a Kinetic Screen along for; tossing it on the VIP is a straightforward, obvious way to get decent use out of it.
It does also overall get more useful as a run progresses. It auto-scales with enemy damage for one, since it just arbitrarily blocks a hit without regard to the hit's strength. Enemy damage mostly only goes up a couple of points over the course of a run, so that's not a huge improvement, but it's still a contrast with various other Items that become proportionately less effective as enemy damage and HP goes up.
The other reason it gets better as a run progresses is, perhaps counterintuitively, the part where enemy quantities go up; initially, it's really easy to down every enemy before any of them get a chance to act, and indeed there's actually an Achievement for clearing an Encounter in the Breach Phase, which is to say it's actually possible to do so! (It's worth pointing out that, as of this writing, more people have gotten this Achievement than have gotten the Achievement for beating a campaign on the highest difficulty; almost 4 times as many, in fact!) Whereas later in a run, enemy counts tend to go up enough it's harder to completely reliably prevent every enemy from acting, where 'negate an attack' becomes actually relevant a tool.
Which makes it a little unfortunate it's restricted to being a random mission reward, actually. I suspect a non-trivial fraction of players have looted it somewhere in their first Investigation, found it pretty irrelevant in that portion of their run, phased it out as soon as they could, and never revisited it later in the campaign when it was more likely to be meaningfully relevant. I kind of wish the Kinetic Screen had been unlocked by completing the Sacred Coil Investigation; it would make thematic sense, and would improve the odds that a given player would end up giving it a try in a phase of the game where it has decent odds of putting in okay work.
On a different note, as far as I've been able to determine the Motile Inducer and Kinetic Screen don't have a maximum range on the throw. It's possible they do have a range limit and it's just far enough to not readily matter, though; the game itself unfortunately makes no effort to communicate what the range on these is. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same as regular sight/maximum range on primary weapons, for example; agents rarely have cause to spread that far, for one.
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Next time, we switch to more strategic considerations, talking about Field Teams.
See you then.
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