Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Gray Phoenix Sectopod

HP: 12/14/14/16 (+2/+4)

Armor: 2
Aim: 75/75/80/80 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 16
Damage: 4-7 (+1/+1)
Shred: 1
Will: 150
Initiative: 0

Tech: 125

A point of note: there's no in-game way to get control of a Sectopod and it only shows up once per campaign, so more than usual it's possible I've missed or misinterpreted something about their mechanics. So this post in particular should be taken with caution; I may well be very wrong about several aspects and just never managed to finagle tests that show how wrong my guesses/inferences/assumptions are.

So if, while fighting the Sectopod, you have something happen that makes no sense in the context of the information I'm providing: sorry!

Alert Actions: N/A

The Sectopod doesn't even start the Encounter existing, regardless of when you hit Gray Phoenix, and so it's entirely intuitive that it doesn't participate in the Breach Phase. (Unlike some of these boss enemies, who do/can exist during the Breach Phase but still don't do anything in it)

Mechanical Chassis
Passive: Immune to Poison and Fire, but susceptible to anti-robot effects. Cannot be rendered Unconscious.

As Bluescreen Rounds isn't guaranteed to generate in a run at all, the weakness here is much less reliably relevant than it was in XCOM 2. If you have Patchwork, she's got anti-robot effects she can reliably bring to bear, but the difference is nowhere near as dramatic as slapping Bluescreen Rounds on a Sharpshooter (Among other possibilities) in XCOM 2, so even if you do bring Patchwork the Sectopod being a robot is generally low-impact relative to XCOM 2.

As the Poison-inflicting gear is locked behind completing the Gray Phoenix Investigation, the immunity to Poison is unlikely to be relevant unless you're using Torque -and honestly, due to how the Sectopod's presence is handled, you'd be unlikely to want to use Poison Spit on it if it was susceptible. It's not like her poisonous bite move would be particularly desirable to use, either... so in practice the Poison immunity rarely matters; you have to luck into a Gas Grenade or Venom Rounds as a mission reward for it to be particularly pertinent.

The immunity to Fire of course depends on whether you hit Sacred Coil before Gray Phoenix or not; if you did, it's probably actually pretty pertinent, as Dragon Rounds and Incendiary Grenades are pretty desirable in the Gray Phoenix Investigation overall and you really should be able to squeeze in purchasing some by the time you're hitting your second Take Down (Investigation target) mission. If you didn't hit Sacred Coil first, though, the immunity probably doesn't matter, because you probably don't have any way to do fire-based stuff; it's not like any of the agents specializes in fire.

It's interesting, if a bit unfortunate, how 'being a robot' is overall much less pertinent than in XCOM 2. The Sectopod in particular is used in a manner that minimizes the interestingness -that for example the inability to render it Unconscious is pretty whatever because it's just one enemy in a long mission, so it's pretty easy to easily clear the 5 Unconscious enemies needed to get the 20 Intel for captured enemies by a wide margin; sure, you could've had 12 captured enemies instead of 11, but it wouldn't have given any benefit. Similarly, since the Sectopod is a boss enemy, they gave it enough Tech Defense that Patchwork can't successfully Hack it, so that implication of being a robot simply isn't present in real terms, even though you can in fact target it with a Hack action.

Hardened
Passive: Does not use Cover, but is never considered to be in the open.

It's worth pointing out explicitly here that where XCOM 2 Sectopods had 10 Defense, the Chimera Squad Sectopod does not; it's thus a very easy target since it still can't use Cover.

Otherwise this isn't a big thing, for the same reasons I've pointed out with other enemies that don't use Cover. (Weak crit damage etc) Nothing particular to add here.

Bullet Swarm
Passive: Firing the primary weapon costs 1 action point instead of automatically ending the turn.

Note that unlike in XCOM 2, the Gray Phoenix Sectopod only has 2 action points. In some sense this isn't a huge change, since in XCOM 2 Sectopods had AI shackles that tried to prevent them from spending all three action points on attacks... but those AI shackles weren't entirely reliable, so actually this is pretty meaningful by virtue of reducing the peak damage output of the Sectopod; where an XCOM 2 Sectopod wasn't supposed to shoot three times in a row but could choose to do so (This did in fact happen to me), the Gray Phoenix Sectopod genuinely can't shoot more than twice in a turn.

Also, I assume reloading is a turn-ending action for the Sectopod just like in XCOM 2, but I have no way to readily test for that and it's never come up organically in playing the game, so it's possible Chimera Squad quietly fixed that oddity.

Also, you might notice I've significantly reworded this compared to the XCOM 2 post; this is because Lightning Field has turned into a turn-ending action. I'm not really sure why, honestly.

In any event, the potential for the Gray Phoenix Sectopod to shoot twice is concerning but not relevant very often; it prefers to move and shoot, or shoot and initiate Wrath Cannon, or shoot and then move. You should prefer to act as if it will pick an agent and shoot them twice for maximum damage, because that can happen and will generally result in losing the agent instantly if the worst case scenario does actually play out, but if you feel you just have to prioritize other threats it's reasonably unlikely the Sectopod will actually delete an agent.

In practice the double-shooting really isn't a concern for most runs because it's so easy to prevent the Sectopod from getting a turn even if you haven't made any particular preparations for it, but still. It's a pretty notable contrast with XCOM 2, where Sectopods getting turns at all was really likely to end pretty badly.

Massive
Passive: Is a 2x2 tile unit.

I'm pretty sure the Sectopod's model has been shrunk a bit, but its mechanical size hasn't changed any.

Its size doesn't really get much opportunity to be interestingly relevant, mind; it's basically just a legacy curiosity.

Wall Smash
Passive: Can freely walk through destructible terrain, destroying it.

This is also largely a legacy curiosity, and in fact its own low relevance is a big part of why the Sectopod being a 2x2 unit isn't terribly relevant. The two maps the Sectopod is allowed to show up on simply don't offer solid walls to walk through; in XCOM 2, the Sectopod's sheer size was noticeably relevant anytime it was walking through a building or the like, because it meant it always smashed open 2-tile-wide segments where an Andromedon would only smash open a 1-tile-wide entrance.

Whereas in Chimera Squad, the Sectopod will never bash open a bigger entrance than an Andromedon because it never shows up on a map where that's at all possible.

To be clear, both Encounters the Sectopod can show up in do have terrain it can in fact walk through and destroy. It's just the maps are designed so it can easily not crop up at all and isn't particularly notable or interesting in its implications if it does manage to happen.

High Stance
Free action: Can switch freely (At no action point cost and with no cooldown) between Low Stance and High Stance: Low Stance is normal behavior. High Stance raises the Sectopod's firing position 3 Z-levels for purposes of calculating whether it gets height advantage or not and also causes its 'pass through and destroy terrain' effect to extend upward appropriately. (Your own troops still use the location of its feet to calculate height advantage, even though their firing animations target its 'head')

As the Sectopod shows up on exactly 2 possible maps, neither of which does much in the way of height variance, this is kind of pointless in Chimera Squad, amounting to the Sectopod having 20 more Aim than its base stats would suggest and little else; where in XCOM 2 a High Stance Sectopod smashes through upper portions of buildings, in Chimera Squad no such thing has an opportunity to come up.

That said, I should point out that High Stance brings the Sectopod's effective base Aim to 95 at the absolute lowest; if you're playing on one of the upper two difficulties (Where its base Aim is 80), and it fires on an agent who has no Defense boosters of any kind, the Sectopod hits. And even if you are playing on one of the lower two difficulties, it's still a guaranteed hit if you go after Gray Phoenix last. That's a bit of a contrast from XCOM 2, where the Sectopod's base Aim was exactly 70 and so even when firing on a completely defenseless target it still had a 10% chance to miss.

Lightning Field
Turn-ending action: 4-7 damage, ignoring up to 3 points of Armor, to all units within 2.5 tiles of the outer edge of its feet. 2 turn cooldown.

Now ends the Sectopod's turn, which I don't really get, and has had its damage nerfed (But maximum HP is lower in Chimera Squad, so it's still pretty dangerous) and its cooldown has been bumped up a turn so you're basically never going to see it use Lightning Field twice in a run.

Note that this completely bypasses Parry, and the Sectopod will in fact usually respond to an agent being at melee range by using Lightning Field. As such, it's a terrible idea to try to have Zephyr punch the Sectopod and soak a shot with Parry; it'll probably just get her zapped for her trouble. In conjunction with the Sectopod still exploding when destroyed, Zephyr is a problematic agent to bring along; you may be better off leaving her behind. It might be worth putting up with this issue because her mobility is pretty useful in most of the Encounters in Take Down Gray Phoenix, so it's not clearcut, but you should certainly keep it in mind as far as how you have Zephyr act when you're specifically fighting the Sectopod. (And same for other close-quarters agents, like Axiom)

Wrath Cannon
Turn-ending action: Ends the turn to no immediate effect having visibly targeted an area. If the Sectopod is still alive on the following turn, it immediately hits everything currently in the previously targeted area for 5-8 damage, as well as destroying all destructible terrain elements in the area. It then gets its full turn of 2 action points: the Wrath Cannon firing costs it nothing. Initiating Wrath Cannon has a 3 turn cooldown.

A nice quality-of-life improvement is that Wrath Cannon's strike zone is now displayed as dangerous tiles you don't want to enter while it's being prepped, like Psionic Bomb on the Codex now does, instead of having to guess based solely on the laser visuals.

It's a bit buggy and I don't entirely trust it as the warning zone is restricted to an exact Z-level and I'm pretty sure Wrath Cannon still targets a 3-dimensional space, but it does seem to be accurate enough as far as width and length go.

In any event, Wrath Cannon is, even more so than in XCOM 2, often effectively the Sectopod giving up its turn. Not only is it possible to simply move out of the strike zone, but the Sectopod's AI will sometimes go straight to Wrath Cannon where in XCOM 2 it was very consistent about only using it once down to a single action point, and Chimera Squad doesn't use a lot of the mechanics that could give a player cause to want to walk into the strike zone in XCOM 2. (Or more accurately, none of the mechanics are present in the Encounters you can fight the Sectopod in) For example, in XCOM 2 it was possible to have timed loot drop, then a Sectopod happen to aim Wrath Cannon such that the timed loot was covered; if this happened such that the timed loot had 1 turn left on its timer, a player could find themself only able to get the timed loot if they're willing to let someone be hit by Wrath Cannon. Nothing like that can come up in Chimera Squad, not with the Sectopod.

On the plus side, it escapes a bit of wonkiness from XCOM 2; that it was really easy to end up with a Sectopod targeting an area, and then its podmates immediately run into the targeted zone so they're guaranteed to be blasted if it doesn't go down first. Chimera Squad's radically different context means this basically can't happen, even though the AI remains oblivious to the fact that Wrath Cannon will kill its own units. 'Skipping a turn uselessly' as the worst possible result is actually a modest improvement over 'actively teamkilling and potentially saving the player as a result'!

Not ideal, but honestly, given how the Sectopod was clearly used largely as-is, I'm a bit surprised it isn't jankier.

Explosive
Passive: The Sectopod explodes on death, doing 5 damage and 2 Shred to all units within two tiles.

Note that this explosion does in fact go off even if taking out the Sectopod ends the Encounter; you should almost never finish the Sectopod with melee. Notably, the Sectopod is actually in the final Encounter in exactly 1 permutation of Take Down Gray Phoenix; for the other two variations, the death explosion can potentially cost you access to an agent for the remainder of the mission! Or multiple agents if you're clustering the squad on the Sectopod...

On the plus side, Kinetic Shield does block the explosion, so that's a notable exception. Cherub being on the team thus makes it more okay to try to melee the Sectopod.

It's worth pointing out that this is completely unmodified from XCOM 2, but since agent peak HP has been dragged down this is actually a proportionately larger hit.

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Narratively, the Sectopod is a non-entity. You get Whisper reacting with disbelief that Gray Phoenix managed to 'get one of those' and absolutely no explanation offered for how this happened or why Gray Phoenix decided to bring a Sectopod along at all. It's pretty obvious it's here entirely to use this established, iconic XCOM 2 enemy somewhere.

It would probably make more sense to attach the Sectopod to Sacred Coil, narratively speaking, but Sacred Coil has a strongly developed narrative that gives them a Gatekeeper in their Take Down mission and there's obvious game design reasons to not want to lopsidedly drop both of the most elite enemies from XCOM 2 into one mission. Out of the Progeny and Gray Phoenix, Gray Phoenix is certainly the less strange group to have somehow gotten a hold of a Sectopod, and further has a mission chain that's more plausible for the Sectopod to be physically present. (If the Progeny had a Sectopod, how on Earth would they get it to the upper floors of their building?)

So while the whole thing is clunky and I hope no future materials try particularly hard to 'canonize' the Gray Phoenix Sectopod, I totally get how we got this odd result.

It does leave me with little to say on this point, though.

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Next time, we wrap up Gray Phoenix with Crew Chief Yarvo.

See you then.