Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Progeny Sorcerer

HP: 7/8/9/9 (+1/+4)
Aim: 80/80/85/85 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 10
Damage: 3-4 (+1/+2)
Will: 150

Initiative: 30

Psi: 100 (As far as I'm aware they don't use this)

Alert actions: Move, Hunker Down.

Yes, Sorcerers don't have a custom Alert action. It's a bit surprising given they have two non-offensive actions they could plausibly use.

Mental Fortress
Passive: Immune to all mental effects.

Note that this includes that Verge cannot target Sorcerers with any effects that can add them to his Neural Network, including that he can't use Lift on them during the Breach phase because of the consideration of Slam.

To be honest, I'm not sure why Sorcerers in particular are immune to mental effects. From a gameplay standpoint it's pretty anomalous -the only other enemes with such immunity are bosses and robots- and thematically it's actually pretty tenuous. Yes, Sorcerers are apex Progeny psi units, but similar to Psi Operatives in XCOM 2 in practice Sorcerers are pretty purely scifi wizards, only more so; Sorcerers don't have any mind-to-mind powers! (Bar maybe Tyranny)

They do admittedly have 150 Will, but most mental effects in Chimera Squad actually don't test Will at all, so this is largely a curiosity.

This all makes me wonder if Mental Fortress on Sorcerers is some artifact of developer intentions that fell through or were pivoted away from or whatever, like maybe at some point the devs were thinking every faction would have an elite and powerful unit they wouldn't want players able to mind control and then the Sorcerer ended up the only manifestation of this thought process.

Bizarrely, Mental Fortress does not include immunity to Panic, unlike XCOM 2. I'm honestly not sure whether that's an intentional change or some manner of bug or accident or whatever.

In any event, while it can be unpleasant to run into this immunity when using Verge, where a player might set up a plan hinging on Verge using Stupor on a Sorcerer and whoops that's not an option and so now things are going to go wrong, outside that point it's... not really terribly important? The player doesn't have very many tools that constitute mental effects in the first place, and a number of them would be a bit mediocre if used on a Sorcerer anyway, like Berserking them would result in them using their relatively dinky pistol if they weren't immune. Similarly, it means Zephyr can't Root them because of the bizarre thing where mental immunity blocks all her punch-based side effects, not just the mental ones, but losing that option isn't exactly significant; Sorcerers don't get much benefit out of moving about in the first place, and have a teleport so Rooting them wouldn't even stop them moving about.

AI Pistol

Passive: Primary weapon is buggy and has an inconsistent response to ammo drain effects.

As with Acolytes, I've already covered this point but will be including it in every relevant enemy's post.

Tyranny

Turn-ending action: Target ally's turn is moved to immediately after the user's. 3 turn cooldown, 2 turn global cooldown.

Yes, this has its own custom icon, even though you'll never see it in-game since you can't control Sorcerers and it doesn't actually pop up its icon when used. Whoops!

Tyranny itself confuses me, chiefly because it's a turn-ending action and the Sorcerer is basically always the most dangerous thing in the room. If it were a 1-action-point ability, it would make Sorcerer presence threatening via action economy boosting, where letting a Sorcerer act is adding in a free turn on another unit on top of whatever the Sorcerer does. As-is though, a Sorcerer giving another unit a turn is basically always inferior to the Sorcerer zapping one of your agents herself. Among other points, this has the janky implication that it's generally making a Sorcerer more dangerous to take out their buddies before they can act, because you're taking away their ability to waste their turn on Tyranny.

I'm curious why the Progeny in particular has this type of issue. This is pretty similar of a situation to Subservience, where a player is liable to intuitively expect the mechanics to work in a manner very different from the reality and in turn is liable to run into trouble from this incorrect intuition, where once a proper understanding is arrived at the mechanic in question is largely just making the enemy less threatening.

Tyranny is especially weird in this regard because it has two cooldowns, both local and global, implying the devs thought it was a powerful enough ability to require especially severe constraints. I'd get that if it was 1 action point, but as-is... huh?

Null Lance

Turn-ending action: The Sorcerer attacks all units in a line, even piercing through solid walls, for 4-5 (+1/+2) damage, potentially damaging or destroying environmental objects in the path. Can't miss. 3 turn cooldown.

Null Lance is of course the primary reason Sorcerers are threatening, being a decently strong attack that can't fail and can potentially catch multiple agents. This latter point is, unexpectedly, much more reliably relevant in enemy hands than player hands; though the enemy outnumbers the player's forces, I've noted repeatedly that enemies tend to be spread out so splash and line damage effects struggle to catch multiple targets, whereas the player's agents are much less reliable about spreading out once the Breach phase ends. It depends on the map and how the player elects to distribute agents among available Breach entrances, but there are plenty of maps that have at least one entrance where piling all the agents through will result in them being in a pretty tight cluster, or arrayed in a line of 3-4 agents, where splash and line effects can easily catch 2-4 agents if the agents don't scatter with their proper turns before relevant enemies can act.

The AI generally doesn't optimally abuse this fact; I've never seen a Sorcerer teleport to line up to catch all my agents, even when it would be completely possible and a human opponent would find the opportunity obvious. That said, I absolutely have had a Sorcerer catch two agents where it probably was deliberately targeting just one of them but the other was in the line of fire anyway; the potential for them to catch multiple agents is very much relevant, especially if you've got a turret-y selection of agents and tend to play them in a turret-y way. Even without that, though, Timeline-wrapping can result in a Sorcerer going before your second agent, where your squad has no time to scatter unless you're gifting action points/turns.

Sorcerers don't use Null Lance nearly as aggressively as they should, mind, tending to prioritize Tyranny and depressingly often firing their pistol for no clear reason, but you should generally behave as if a given Sorcerer will bust out Null Lance first time every time, because even though they generally won't do so the consequences when they do can easily be catastrophic for you. Among other points, Null Lance is one of those effects that can instantly kill an Unconscious agent; it's not likely to happen, but I did in fact, in my very first run of the game, have a Sorcerer zap an agent into Bleeding Out mode, and then a different Sorcerer promptly kill them as a side effect of trying to zap one of my still-standing agents.

As the Progeny forces are overall bad at actually being threatening, there's not really a significant opportunity cost to perpetually treating Sorcerers as priority targets. That is, you're unlikely to be choosing between downing an enemy who is reliably moderately problematic to leave able to act vs downing a Sorcerer to then be tempted to ignore the Sorcerer on the idea that they'll probably spend their turn poorly. It's far more likely to be 'I'd kind of like to down this Codex before it acts, but it's not really that big a deal if it does, so I'd rather prioritize the Sorcerer anyway'.

I kind of wish Sorcerers were more reliable about using Null Lance, honestly... there's basically never a time a different action is actually going to be a smarter choice for them, and it just ends up feeling like a janky, weird way of making Sorcerers less reliably threatening to have them prone to doing other stuff first. I doubt that's why in this particular case, but still.

Writhe
1 action point: The Sorcerer attacks an adjacent enemy for 3-4 (+1/+2) damage, and heals herself for up to 4 HP. Cannot be used unless the Sorcerer is missing at least 1 HP. 2 turn cooldown.

Yep, just like Shelter, Sorcerers have Writhe.

Also like Shelter, it's mostly kind of pointless. I'm completely sure the overwhelming majority of players have never seen a Sorcerer use Writhe; the need for a target to be adjacent and the Sorcerer be missing HP already means it can easily just never have an opportunity to be used, and the Sorcerer's AI further works against it; Sorcerers do not attempt to close to melee, and will in fact usually respond to a hostile unit being adjacent by either walking away or teleporting away before turning to some other action, even if they're missing HP to be able to use Writhe. Among other points, they clearly don't assess 'kill potential'; that is, if you drop an agent next to a Sorcerer where the agent has 8 or less HP, the Sorcerer won't notice that Writhe+Void Lance will 100% reliably take the agent down and then do that. They might happen to RNG their way into that sequence of events, but it's not something they're coded to try to do.

Mind, if their AI wasn't so averse to using Writhe it would actually be overall more reliably meaningful than Shelter's access to the same, as it would quite punishing to players blithely hurling an agent into melee with a Sorcerer without making sure it will down them. Alas, they really are very reluctant to use it; I made sure to actively try to bait out Writhes to make sure their AI was even allowed to call it, and it took somewhere over 10 attempts (As in, walk somebody next to an injured Sorcerer and let the Sorcerer take their turn) to get a Sorcerer to use it at all. But they really are very averse to using it, so... it largely doesn't matter.

I don't really get why it has a noticeable cooldown on top of everything. This isn't as striking as with Tyranny, but it's the same thing of it appearing that the devs figured it would be a powerful enough ability to justify yet further restrictions. Was there a point in development where they were oppressive abilities for one or more reasons that don't apply to the release state?

Sorcerer Teleport

1 action point: The Sorcerer moves to an arbitrary location without crossing the intervening terrain, bypassing all forms of Overwatch.

This is literally the Codex teleport from XCOM 2 -including that Sorcerers use the same animation- aside that it's spending an action point properly instead of doing the weird thing of setting the user's action points to 1 post-teleport. (Thank goodness)

Where Codices being able to teleport in XCOM 2 was a reliably significant ability that noticeably contributed to their threat profile, Sorcerers being able to teleport in Chimera Squad is usually a curiosity that doesn't really matter. Chimera Squad's maps are mostly small enough that every unit is in range of every other unit by default, said maps rarely have significant obstacles to navigating on foot where teleporting bypassing them is meaningful, flanking is not strongly important to Sorcerers, they're not coded to try to teleport to get in Writhe range nor for optimal Void Lance usage...

... Sorcerers being able to teleport isn't precisely irrelevant, but I'm not sure it would particularly impact their threat profile if it was removed, which is a big contrast with XCOM 2 Codices where taking away Teleport would drastically reduce their capacity to threaten your squad. The context is simply too unfriendly to teleportation as a mechanic of substance. (Which feels a bit weird in the context of the Breach phase being a core mechanic; you'd think teleportation would be a gamechanger in this kind of burst-into-a-room urban combat)

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Aesthetically, the Sorcerer is one of the better examples of Chimera Squad employing a retrofuturepunk aesthetic, where the gangs of the future resemble the sort of thing that used to be put forth earnestly as a Depiction Of The Future. The really silly stuff that was literally the aesthetic of the time, but stylized and 'future-fied', and which has pretty consistently failed to particularly resemble The Future by the time it's The Present.

Which... actually makes a kind of sense in context? The Earth of Chimera Squad was taken over by an alien imperial power that attempted to eradicate existing cultural values/systems and replace them with one imposed by the alien imperial power, and then said imperial power was overthrown and control returned to the native population. There's a fair few real-world examples of that kind of progression, and there's a fairly notable tendency for this to result in the once-conquered peoples hearkening back to older aesthetics -including potentially aesthetics that were no longer in vogue by the time the imperialist power showed up- and it's also pretty common for newer advances and elements to make their way into these hearkening-back movements anyway for various reasons. Or put another way, it's not unusual for this to result in an unusual amalgation of the old and the new, much like how retrofuturepunk is 'our current punk aesthetic but with futuristic modifications'.

So I could actually see XCOM's Earth ending up with parts of the population (eg City 31 in particular) organically walking into something resembling exactly this aesthetic because some people are trying to hearken back to aesthetics from before the initial invasion and latching onto elements from the 80s or whatever, never mind that the invasion arrived decades after those fell out of fashion.

I would be very surprised if anyone on the development team was thinking in such terms rather than something more like 'we think the aesthetic is cool and we think we can get away with using it in this game', but it's neat that the aesthetic actually makes sense in-universe, regardless of what process led the developers to pick it.

The Sorcerer's name and gender are also mildly interesting to me. It's pretty obvious that Sorcerers are meant to be what Acolytes aspire to become within the ranks of the Progeny, but where Acolytes are quite firmly young men Sorcerers are quite firmly women. In some sense this isn't terribly meaningful as it's obvious they're both meant to be archetypical examples of a broader and more diverse array of individuals; presumably from an in-universe standpoint both Acolytes and Sorcerers are meant to each have men and women at a decent rate and the devs only made the one model apiece because time/budget/whatever. You're certainly not meant to assume that male Acolytes become female Sorcerers, and I suspect Sorcerers are female chiefly because of one or both of 'recycling Codex animations, which are feminine' and 'the Progeny's boss is a woman and they just tweaked her model for Sorcerers'.

Even so, this is a rather unusual conjunction of decisions for a video game, where even when individual representations are clearly meant to be symbolic simplifications in this manner normally a game will insist on aligning the gender of closely-related classes of being. ie the usual thing would be for Acolytes and Sorcerers to both be depicted as male, or both be depicted as female, or to both get male and female versions. (And presumably pick at random for individual Acolytes/Sorcerers) That Chimera Squad was comfortable with male Acolytes and female Sorcerers is striking; I don't think I've ever seen another game make a comparable decision.

As for the name, I brought it up because it fits with the symbolic simplification, once again in a non-standard way; people will use 'sorcerer' both as masculine ("This is a sorcerer, meaning a male practitioner") and as neutral/gender-inclusive ("This is a group of sorcerers, where we mean a mixture of male and female practitioners"), which fits with the fact that we're almost certainly meant to assume Sorcerers include male and female examples, but usually when a term has a clear feminine form (Sorceress, in this case) games will insist on using it for a female depiction, even in cases where it's clear the depiction is meant to be a symbolic simplification where male examples are explicitly supposed to exist. ie in this case the usual practice would be for Progeny Sorcerers to be Progeny Sorceresses, not as a signal that they're all female but just because the standard model used by the game happens to be female.

This is all an interesting surprise, and one I personally find pleasant. The terminological rules I just laid out that games often hold themselves to are subtly problematic, quietly causing various options to be closed off or shot down not because they're actually bad options in context but because some honestly-unrelated decision 'set a precedent'. A game has a low-level gumbie enemy get a male model, and has a series of more elite forms of that basic enemy type, and even if they're actually completely new graphics (As opposed to reskins/recolors/sharing a skeleton/otherwise recycling assets) these more elite forms all get depicted as male to 'maintain consistency' with the basic one even though that doesn't really make sense. Maybe the devs on some level wanted a more gender-even cast of enemies, but this kind of thought process sabotaged the possibility the second they committed to some decisions that they probably didn't actually think of as having such import for the project's overall direction. It's just one enemy type, after all. Right?

Narratively, Sorcerers are part of the ongoing trend with the Progeny of there being some info that seems relatively clear but the overall picture remaining murky. Presumably Sorcerers are what Acolytes aspire to be, members of the Progeny further along in their mastery of their psychic abilities, but as far as things like 'what is the goal in achieving such mastery' or 'what a Sorcerer is really expected to do as part of the Progeny' the game doesn't really fill those spaces in at all. We get a final goal for the Progeny in their Take Down mission, but said final goal is something of an anti-answer, in that if the goal worked out as intended then one of the Progeny's main apparent functions -helping humans unlock their psychic abilities- would actually be completely obviated.

The only specific 'duty' we see attributed to Sorcerers is that of somehow or another managing control of the Codex the Progeny somehow got a hold of, but while that broadly makes sense it doesn't really clarify any of the points I'm bringing up.

I'm curious why the Progeny in particular are so vague in this way. It's really just the Progeny that suffer this so thoroughly.

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Next time, we move on to Codices.

See you then.