A Disclaimer - These rankings reflect my personal experience with these enemies not only in general but in 4Man/Legend/Ironman runs as well

My first encounter with the Chosen Hunter was him bragging about his perfect aim, proceeding to miss a point-blank shot, and effectively saying "Shit" before he grappled as far away as he possibly could.
He didn't kill anyone in my entire run, but he almost killed me irl by making me choke on my drink. He is the most dangerous enemy, for sure.

Seems like a pretty good tier list, the only one I disagree with is the Avatar. Yes, it may not be dangerous on turn 1, but that's because you invested up to 6 item slots specifically into nullifying it. I don't think that an enemy that makes you gear up your entire team specifically against it can be anything lower than A tier.

Viper tongue makes a soldier act unwise

Tier lists in xcom are extremely subjective depending on where you are on the power curve. If youre behind you'll care less about beeing scratched and more about surviving the mission. If you're ahead, you'll look at avoiding even the small scratches and managing will/maxing resource gain, etc. And this will make some enemies move between tiers imo. And there's also the time when you compute.. a sectoid late game is a nuisence, a sectoid early game can do a squad wipe (as example).

That being said.. there's no scenario where an archon is an A-tier unless you mess something up really bad. They give you a free turn to kill them as their 1st action will (almost) always be blazing pinions.

I feel like with the Chryssalids the devs did the opposite of enemy unknown.
EU - introduced too early, high health (early on), hard to deal with (especially on first encounter)
Xcom2 - Introduced too late, low health, easy to deal with (they all die before they even get to attack you)

If the RNG isnt number 1 then this list is fickle 😂

Fun note when there's only 1 active archon: if you dont attack it, it's guaranteed to waste its first turn on blazing pinions. If there's more than 1 active, only 1 of them will cast blazing pinions and the other will attack normally.

One way to deal with andromedon is to get it low health on it's first form and then overwatch it. On it's turn in my experience it will always move before firing and if killed it will end the turn of the 2nd form without it acting. This will effectively give you 2 turns to kill it instead of 1.

You're absolutely right about sectopods. When I first encountered one, I was terrified and couldn't believe how many actions it got to take. But by the time they start showing up you have blue screen and emps which easily take care of it. Andromedons on the hand, are a fucking pain in the ass.

Yeah the chryssalids in enemy unknown are waaaaay worse. They show up around month 2, so way earlier, and they show up on pretty much every civilian rescue mission and can run around with their crazy mobility converting a shitload of them into zombies before you have a chance to do much, which can get out of hand if your civilians happen to spawn clustered together

Priests-they aren't particularly dangerous, but they are exceptionally annoying, especially if they trigger their stupid stasis thing to slow you down and be a pest. They're definitely one of the most obnoxious enemies that aren't extremely lethal

andromedons-they definitely feel like one of the top threats of the game, and one of the hardest to take down. Even with 5-6 units, taking it down can take all of them, and that possibly prevents you from taking down anything else that was in the pod with it.

sectopods-they can be super, super dangerous, but blue screen rounds really shut them down. But if you don't have bluescreen rounds, or they show up after your bluescreen round unit has moved, they can probably cause heavy damage, if not a few casualties. Also high tier annoyance for them being really, really irritating with frequently just ruining mission objectives because they just walk over it and destroy the thing

4:20 i actually love that dark event because that means I'm getting more mimic beacons. And as we all know, those things are OP

Chrysalids and Sectopods were so much worse in Enemy Unknown. How the mighty have fallen.

I feel that list, some good insight. For me the faceless are totally D though, because honestly I never focus on saving civilians mostly on retaliation, but the enemys, so they usually just pop out, after everyone's dead, and given they don't scale, are big, and can't take cover, they usually just immidietly die. So yeah, they fall out of that ranking pretty fast, especially when one gets magnetics

The Andromedans always made me happy to see. I would mind control them every time

Sectopod is fr only difficult when you accidentally activate it early

The lost always popping enemy overwatch 🙏

I'd actually put the mutton in s tier because of how dangerous they are early to mid game and how they can still be dangerous later. 2 things to note you haven't talked about 1. They have a pretty strong grenade that has a tendency to shred cover really hard and the counter strike has a significant chance to instantly knock the soldier unconscious. This is also something i've noticed with ADVENT lancer they have a surprisingly high chance to just KO your guy in one hit and there's nothing you can do about it. A bending reed lancer is absolutely terrifying because he'll just beat up one of your guy and run off to cover.

with the white and red mechs you can think about it kind of like when the military makes a new tank or something in war, they don't just recall all the old ones but start putting out new ones alongside them, maybe the intended idea at the last mission was you hurt advent so bad that they have to use white mechs for the final mission.