Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Gray Phoenix Dominator

HP: 6/6/7/8 (+2/+4)

Aim: 75/75/80/80 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 10
Damage: 3-5 (+1/+2. Crit adds +1)
Will: 80 (+10/+20)
Initiative: 50

Psi: 40

Dominators are a rare example of a Chimera Squad enemy that has Psi Offense and does in fact use it in abilities.

Alert Actions: Move to a better position, Hunker Down.

As far as I'm aware this is the entirety of what Alert Dominators can do, which is intuitive enough to me -neither of their special abilities is damaging, but both are aggressive actions and they additionally raise obvious questions about what would happen in connection to the post-Breach scramble.

As such, Alert Dominators are actually a relatively low priority, especially if you've got good tools for bypassing Hunker Down. (Which you probably do; it's actually really hard to construct a team that is reliably hamstrung by Hunker Down)

Psi Disable 

1 action point. Attempts to Stun the target. On success, 50% chance to Stun for 1 action point, 50% chance to Stun for 2 action points. Base chance to succeed is 100, with Psi added and target's Will subtracted to arrive at the final number. 1 turn cooldown.

Since your agents have 40 or 50 Will by default and Dominators have 40 Psi Offense, this works out to a 90-100% chance to succeed if nothing is modifying Will. So basically you should just treat Psi Disable as guaranteed to succeed -it's not like your agents gain Will as they level. Even the lowest difficulty giving your agents another 10 Will isn't very significant; sure, now everybody can resist it, but the odds of any given person resisting are still universally low.

Note that while Dominators can in fact fire off a Psi Disable and then do something else, the AI rarely elects to take advantage. They're far more likely to move and then shoot, or move and then use Psi Disable, or most wasteful of all just hold still and use...

Mind Control

Turn-ending action: Attempts to take control of a single enemy for 2 turns. Base chance to succeed is 100, plus Psi Offense vs Will. 4 turn cooldown.

... Mind Control.

So don't worry too much about their potential to instantly take two agents out of action. Their AI is extraordinarily reluctant to actually do so, possibly completely unwilling -I've actually never seen this chain of actions happen without it being by virtue of me Puppeteering a Dominator.

Anyway, it's worth pointing out that Mind Control uses the exact same formula as Psi Disable, and so you should treat Mind Control as also a guaranteed success if you don't have immunity or something.

Between Psi Disable and Mind Control, Psi Dominators are one of the most important enemies to not let get a turn, which is a bit of a reversal from Mind Control-capable enemies in the prior two games. The crux of the issue is that, surprisingly, Psi Dominators have no AI shackles to prevent them from Mind Controlling whichever agent is about to get a turn. As Chimera Squad also retains the XCOM 2 behaviors for Mind Controlled units, a Dominator taking its turn can result in one agent abandoning Cover and taking a flanking shot at another agent while also pulling themselves out into the open, at which point whatever enemy acts after them gets a free shot at them. While flanking shots are much less devastating in Chimera Squad than XCOM 2 thanks to crits being uniformly weak, that's still a very bad situation to end up in.

Relative to War of the Chosen, the player has also lost some anti-Mind Control tools (eg Stand By Me), and what you retain is more awkward: Solace still exists, but if you're not obsessively picking Shelter as one of your starting agents every run... you can't count on having access to Solace in a given run. (Notably, your first run is forced to not start with Shelter) Even if you grab him every run, you also have to pick Solace instead of Soul Storm every time, which is a more meaningful limitation than a Psi Operative needing spend some time training in the Psi Lab in XCOM 2. Similarly, Mind Shields are no longer an early unlock every run can count on having fairly quickly if they want them, instead being locked behind completing the Progeny Investigation: any run that does Gray Phoenix before the Progeny is extremely unlikely to have any Mind Shields, let alone enough to cover the whole team.

In conjunction with these tools not being as widely useful as in War of the Chosen in the first place, you're a lot less likely to be kind of incidentally neutering this threat; in War of the Chosen, it was entirely possible to sort of accidentally stumble into laughing off Mind Control threats because you happened to be equipping Mind Shields on Tired soldiers and bringing Bondmate pairs and so find yourself with a team that's more or less immune to Mind Control without having been worrying about Mind Control at all. Not so in Chimera Squad.

As Dominators are actually fairly durable by Chimera Squad standards, prioritizing taking out Dominators is often actually pretty harmful to your ability to neuter other threats; spending two full agent turns on taking out a Dominator often means letting 1-4 other enemies act pretty freely!

Which touches on an aspect of Chimera Squad's design that I think works extremely well in abstract and... not as well in execution, but still surprisingly well.

Thing is, a common difficulty with game design is that a player achieving ever greater system mastery often 'flattens' the experience as they reach the higher end of the skill curve. If a skilled player can defeat every enemy before it gets to do anything, then differences based on 'what they'll do once provoked/once they get a turn/whatever' don't matter to players who have reached the point of being able to defeat every enemy without letting it act, reliably. More egregiously obvious is of course when a single strategy is widely a 'winning strategy', where the player solves all problems in the game with a single plan, never even bothering to break out alternatives -which, to be clear, is still a variation on the principle of 'system mastery flattening the game experience', just one where system mastery is overly-simplistic. ("Have you found the I Win Button Y/N?")

Either way, system mastery can result in not having any experiential difference between two enemies that are, on paper, completely different enemies. You encounter them, you kill them in one turn with The Correct Answer, there you go.

A common dev response to these issues is to simply inflate enemy stats in an attempt to prevent players from instantly annihilating everything; if everything has ten times as much HP as normal, than surely players won't be able to instantly kill them anymore? At that point differences relying on getting a chance to act will get to actually matter, right? But this rarely is a good solution; plenty of games end up with players still finding ways to reach a point of instantly killing these outrageously durable enemies, and if it does produce the desired result it usually leads to an unfun, uninteresting experience, where players regularly find themselves having to play out 10 minutes of combat while knowing 1 minute in that they're going to win, making the remaining 9 minutes a time-wasting formality.

Understandably, players tend to not like this, and in turn individual devs often try looking to different answers in future games after running headfirst into this scenario personally.

Notably, XCOM 2 itself has shades of this problem, where skilled play can pretty reliably arrange to pull pods one at a time and then kill the pod's members before they actually do anything. The game holds up pretty well even with this, as enemies have assorted differences that apply even if they never act (high Armor on some enemies, high Defense on others, reactive teleports, uses Cover vs not using Cover...), but it is a flaw with the game that's worth trying to minimize in successor games.

Which is what Chimera Squad does, in part through the Timeline system; what an enemy can do often remains meaningfully a factor in the player experience end even if the player specifically keeps preventing such enemies from getting a chance to act, because juggling all the threat profiles alongside the consideration of turn order and cooldowns and limited-use capabilities leads to the player having to make judgment calls based on said information. That is, if a player decides a specific enemy getting a turn is so unacceptable that they're willing to use up Items, blow their Team Up charge, put long-cooldown abilities on cooldown, and even let other enemies get turns that they could potentially easily stop, all to make sure The Most Problematic Enemy never gets to act, then the 'weight' of its capabilities and stats is very much impacting the player's experience and choices.

Technically, you can say much the same about, say, XCOM 2, but part of the difference is that the Timeline spacing things out allows the consequences of each individual enemy to loom closer in relevance. In XCOM 2, if I pull a pod and start taking it out, it's often somewhat immaterial what 2 of the 3 members of the pod are because I trivially take them out with multiple soldier actions to spare, where I'm not having to make judgment calls about how to respond to them specifically, not in a way that cares about their particular capabilities. In Chimera Squad, though, I'm always having to think at least a little bit ahead to consider whether the current agent should burn limited resources or make use of powerful abilities with long cooldowns, and so really think about what the next few enemies can do and what's called for in context.

Now, I said I think this all works better in abstract than in execution, and I do mean that; Chimera Squad's default tendencies lean toward things being easy enough that there is a very large extent to which you can be pretty lazy and thoughtless in how you solve Encounters and still get through pretty cleanly. The game also struggles a bit with being Interestingly Difficult without catapulting straight to Unreasonably Difficult; early in a run, when you largely don't have powerful-but-limited tools to use to solve more difficult Encounters, it's easy for Encounters to swing wildly between 'no threat whatsoever' and 'two agents are Bleeding Out and the other two are nearly out of HP in the successful attempt that was reasonably lucky'. (Hitting Sacred Coil as your first Investigation is particularly prone to this issue) The game probably should've actually had something akin to how Frag Grenades are available unlimitedly immediately in the prior two games; the design relies heavily on the assumption that the player has powerful limited-use tools that they're meant to strategically burn on tougher situations, and the player can't actually do that really early in a run.

Even so, when it works well, it works quite well, and even when it works poorly it's still better than XCOM 2 about making me reliably care about and think about a given enemy's abilities, overall.

I doubt XCOM 3 will bring back the Timeline, but I am curious if it will try some other experiment to try to recapture these types of benefits.

Returning to Dominators more specifically, though...

A mechanic where I'm not entirely sure whether it's intentional or some manner of bug is that sometimes freeing an agent from Mind Control will result in the agent immediately getting an out-of-turn pair of action points, thus letting them take basically a full turn out of regular turn order. I think it's basically meant to be a 'refund', where it triggers if the agent spent their proper turn Mind Controlled and so lessens the impact of them being Mind Controlled by at least giving back the turn's worth of actions you'd have gotten, but I'm genuinely not sure it's an intended mechanic at all.

Notably, I've inconsistently seen the same thing with Verge's Puppeteer, where sometimes an enemy has Puppeteer end and then immediately takes action under enemy control even though they're not displayed as having a proper turn on the Timeline right then.

The fact that it is inconsistent on both ends at least indicates it's buggy, whether it's a bug that it happens at all or it's meant to happen but is buggily not happening consistently.

Regardless, that's something to keep in mind, both when fighting Dominators and when using Puppeteer.

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Aesthetically, Dominators hit a similar note to Paladins in terms of looking to be a civilian using household materials to prep for combat. Unlike Paladins, they don't look to be prepped in expectation of rubber bullets and tear gas -or perhaps they're just not as well-prepared for combat in general. Dominators have a lot of bits that might be intended first and foremost to assist in carrying loot, and their core clothing looks to be everyday wear with an expectation that the footing will be dangerous. (The full boots, when I've previously pointed out that Sectoids seem to largely prefer to be barefoot or something close to it) Notably, Gray Phoenix is presented as being first and foremost a group that's been scavenging tech from the war and occupation; it's easy to imagine Dominators are essentially just Sectoids who have historically been exploring abandoned ADVENT outposts and whatnot in search of stuff that got left behind (And hasn't been scavenged by someone else yet), where they've historically been expecting to not be getting into combat and are perhaps slow to adapt to the new Gray Phoenix agenda.

Interestingly, it even actually makes a kind of sense for Sectoids who have been scavenging to have a psionic stun and mind control. Scavenging for tech in a post-Ethereal Earth would logically involve risking running into ADVENT loyalists who haven't been caught, as well as Chryssalids; if I were a Sectoid in such conditions, I'd want to be able to defend myself in a pinch from these psi-susceptible threats, and wouldn't be worried that using mind control might go over poorly with the authorities; who's going to object to using mind control in self-defense to buy time while fleeing? Who's going to complain if I make one Chryssalid attack another as part of this? I'd honestly expect this to be less likely to get me in trouble than carrying a plasma weapon around, especially given Reclamation exists and has an explicit government-mandated agenda to get advanced weaponry off the street.

Of course, you can wave off the exact ability differences between Paladins and Dominators as pure gameplay, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that's really all the devs were thinking in this case, but it's neat that this is intuitively sensible in-universe regardless of whether it was consciously intended or not. It'd be pretty great if later materials ran with something like this -XCOM 2 already experimented with giving your soldiers variable backgrounds (Though I've never commented on it before because it had zero mechanical impact), and it could be neat if this was returned to in XCOM 3 and such bits showed up in such.

Narratively, Dominators are yet another unit that's never directly addressed. I could comment on how there's radio dialogue alluding to psi dampers that at least some Sectoids are apparently required to wear, but said dialogue is actually tied exclusively to the Progeny Investigation; it won't trigger during the Gray Phoenix Investigation. So that's probably not the devs making roundabout commentary on Dominators in particular.

To be fair, they don't really need much direct addressment. Dominators literally just do 2 of the 3 things Mindspin could do in XCOM 2, just as deliberately chosen actions now rather than it occurring randomly off one action. It'd be nice to get some idea as to whether this gameplay point is meant to be in any way narratively meaningful, but ultimately it's not terribly important, and as I've noted before Chimera Squad clearly prioritized leaving possibilities open for future games; if we get any real context, it's liable to come from XCOM 3 committing to specifics for its own reasons.

So the Dominator works well enough overall. Not as excellently as the Paladin, but fine enough.

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Next time, we cover one of the murkiest enemies in Chimera Squad: Berserkers.

See you then.