Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Gray Phoenix Berserker

HP: 9 (+3/+5)

Defense: 10
Aim: 75/75/80/80 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 12
Damage: 5-6 (+1/+3)
Will: 60 (+10/+20)
Initiative: 50

Alert Actions: None. Also, can never be Aggressive.

Berserkers are another non-Cover using enemy where they can be Alert but all this does is take away the Aim bonus you get against Surprised targets. I'm honestly curious as to why so many of these enemies weren't made to spend their Alert action on advancing; it seems the obvious thing to do.

Hardened
Passive: Does not make use of Cover, but does not suffer penalties from being in the open.

Once again, this is much less significant than in XCOM 2 because crits are so weak.

It's also much less visually intuitive, as the Berserker model has been significantly downscaled, such that it no longer looks substantially larger than other Mutons. I imagine most players of Chimera Squad are XCOM 2 vets and don't think about this at all, but I do have to wonder if any players not familiar with XCOM 2 had a bit of a learning curve issue in part due to this.

On that note, I should explicitly point out that Berserkers are not part of the Muton animation set (Or any other core animation set) and so for example are immune to Tongue Pull and Bind, in spite of being Mutons and broadly looking humanoid enough. I do have to wonder how many players got tripped up by this; I imagine it's not intuitive to people who don't realize the underlying technical reasons for what is and is not immune to such animations, and I honestly have no idea how obvious that aspect is to other people.

Rage
Passive: Each time the Berserker takes damage, there is a 50% chance it will become Enraged. This permanently increases its damage by +2. This effect can only trigger once.

I'm a little surprised they didn't hearken back to Enemy Unknown 'damage equals free out-of-turn movement' or the like (Alternatively, what I suggested for Battle Frenzy of 'damage moves them up one slot in the Timeline'), given Chimera Squad is broadly playing around with turn mechanics in a similar sort of way. I'm not bothered or anything, mind, but a bit surprised.

And yes, it's just the damage, no Mobility bonus. Rage is actually often pretty ignorable in practice because if a Berserker can't reach any agents before you down it then Rage triggering hasn't done anything.

Curiously, the camera end of things has also been changed. A Berserker in XCOM 2 becoming enraged triggered a brief Action Camera Moment where we saw the Berserker from ground level (And usually from the front) as they roared, with all UI elements disabled. A Berserker in Chimera Squad doing the same will have the camera slide over to show the roar happening, but remain in the top-down view and leave the UI elements active. Chimera Squad is generally lighter than XCOM 2 on Action Camera Moments, but this is mostly attributable to it only rarely making new Action Camera Moments while having created a bunch of new enemies and all; returning enemies that already had one or more Action Camera Moments normally keep those intact, only losing them if they're tied to abilities that didn't return. I'm not sure why the Berserker got their Action Camera Moment changed; did it bug out because of their model getting shrunk? Did it work fine, but the devs didn't like how it looked with the smaller Berserker model? Did they intend to replace it with a new effect and whoops it was time to ship before that actually happened?

Mighty Blow
Turn-ending action: The Berserker's attack is a move-and-melee action that can randomly inflict Disorientation or Stun.

Mighty Blow's side effects are still a Strength-on-Will test. Not that you can really interact with that as a player... Mighty Blow itself is much less concerning given it's no longer allowed to inflict Unconsciousness and so no longer acts as a one-hit-kill (From a tactical perspective) at random. Mind, Berserkers are actually one of the harder-hitting enemies in the game, especially once Rage has been triggered; the experiential difference between 'my soldier got taken out unexpectedly by RNG nonsense' and 'my agent got taken out unexpectedly because I didn't think this enemy hit that hard' is a bit minor. I wouldn't be surprised if there's players who are convinced RNG-one-shots are still a part of the Berserker toolkit, honestly.

It does matter, mind, as for example Torque and Axiom can both be built to be pretty solid tanks, and they will in fact be pretty reliable at tanking Berserkers. (Especially Torque, as it's more or less impossible for a Berserker to achieve 100% accuracy to bypass her Dodge, where Shrug It Off is never perfectly reliable) Just less broadly than you might first expect.

Berserkers are also functionally pretty random-feeling because they still have the oddity from XCOM 2 where they'll sometimes spend an action point on pure movement, pause, then spend their other action point on pure movement... even if this results in them standing directly adjacent to a target, where they unambiguously could've punched something that turn. I suspect in Chimera Squad's case the devs were unaware of this oddity, but I remain curious if the XCOM 2 implementation was a bug or oversight or was actually completely intentional.

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The Berserker is unusual in that, even though it's a Gray Phoenix unit, it can actually be encountered in any Investigation: if a District ends up at 5 full Unrest, this can generate an 'Outbreak' mission, which is basically Chimera Squad's idea of a Terror/Retaliation mission: there's civilians, and you need to rescue them. (Specifically, you fail the mission if 3 civilians die, which is surprisingly unforgiving relative to prior games) Such missions can always have Berserkers mixed in regardless of what your current Investigation is. (Alternatively, at 5 Unrest you can get an Anarchy! mission, which is instead a 3-Encounter mission where enemies are trying to flee the map and you need to stop them; I'm not entirely sure what these are meant to actually represent. They don't get Berserkers, though, so a bit tangential to this post)

I'm curious what, if any, narrative logic underlies this decision. I kind of suspect it really is just 'they wanted Berserkers showing up in this game's equivalent to Retaliation missions', but I do have to wonder if maybe the thought process is that any random (female?) Muton citizen can go Berserker if sufficiently stressed or the like.

Regardless, Outbreak missions can actually easily be where a run sees the majority of its Berserkers, as they're shockingly rare to appear in regular Gray Phoenix missions; most Gray Phoenix missions won't have any Berserkers at all, and when Berserkers do show up in a regular mission it's generally 1 per Encounter at most, with it being completely unsurprising for a 3-Encounter mission to only have 1 Encounter include a Berserker.  By contrast, Outbreak missions regularly have 3-ish Berserkers; just a couple of Outbreak missions occurring in your campaign is actually pretty likely to have more Berserkers show up across those two missions than across the entirety of your regular Gray Phoenix missions.

Within Outbreak missions, Berserkers tend to focus on smashing civilians; my experience is they generally only attack your forces if no civilian is within reach. This contrasts with the non-Berserker units, which largely ignore civilians, sometimes even if they can't attack an agent but could absolutely target a civilian. I actually like this as a dynamic, where the player can choose between 'protect my people' and 'protect civilians' and make a judgment call about which is more important to them right now...

... but unfortunately, the game itself doesn't communicate it at all (Unlike Extract VIP missions and whatnot, the game doesn't clearly mark specific enemies as Going For Your Objective at any point), and Outbreak missions being attached to Anarchy reaching 5 in a District means you can easily go entire runs without ever seeing an Outbreak mission type (Especially since an Anarchy! mission can always generate instead), so it's not particularly learnable. There are probably players with multiple successful runs under their belt who have never considered the possibility that such a dynamic might be a thing, because it's just that easy to miss. Also, it's not fully consistent anyway: it's a strong enough trend I'm 99% certain it is a real thing and not blind chance in my runs, but non-Berserkers do occasionally target civilians in Outbreak missions, and Berserkers sometimes target an agent even when they could've killed a civilian instead.

Altogether, I hope XCOM 3 actually has a comparable dynamic ("Kill this enemy to protect civilians, kill this other enemy to protect your units instead!"), but if so I really hope it makes more of an effort to communicate that it's a thing that goes on in its Terror/Retaliation/Outbreak equivalent. (That almost certainly will exist) This is a good dynamic, but only if the player actually knows it's a thing to account for!

Oh, and a note that should only matter to people reading these posts more or less as they went up: in several prior posts, I originally erroneously used the 'Anarchy!' name to refer to Outbreak missions, as I hadn't realized when I started this series that this particular pair of labels was in fact referring to two very different mission types. Apologies for any resulting confusion. I corrected the prior posts not long before this post went up, so for anybody finding this series later, this shouldn't matter.

For reference, Anarchy! missions are instead 3-Encounter missions in which enemy units flee from one Encounter map to the next, with them escaping the mission outright if they manage an escape on the third Encounter, and you fail the mission if too many enemies escape entirely. I kind of wish they were a regular mission, honestly; they use the Encounter framework in an interesting way, the decisions they create are unusual ("Maybe I should let this guy escape and focus on a different target? I can get them in the next Encounter..."), and in general are one of the more unusual and enjoyable mission types of the game. As they don't really connect in any clear way to 'there's riots in the street', it's not like there's strong narrative reasons to specifically tie them to a District's Anarchy reaching 5 points.

Anyway, normally I'd talk about the aesthetic and narrative aspects to Berserkers at this point, but there's not much to say I didn't say about them in XCOM 2; the model is smaller than in XCOM 2 but otherwise unchanged, while narratively Berserkers are yet another enemy the game doesn't actually directly address, and the extent to which Berserkers are implicitly touched on is something I've ended up covering elsewhere. (eg in Axiom's post) So...

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Next time, we move on to the last regular Gray Phoenix enemy: Praetorians.

See you then.