I believe most of the issues with them would be solved if the hosts were more obvious. They are easy to deal with at range or with a heavy shout close up. They serve as a gotcha for forgetting to check the monster stats. Even so painstakingly checking leads to a tiresome play pattern and games should not encourage you do to tedious things to do better (see also trading and swapping armour sets by teleporter.)
Losing a guy to the first one you encounter is fine - very annoying but still fine.
This is addressed for the next patch:
https://feedback.phoenixpoint.info/feedback/p/umbra-icon
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I thought I had seen it somewhere. I am really saying I don’t think it needs more nerf than that. I stand to be proved wrong though.
I have to respectfully disagree. I’m playing on legend difficulty and am encountering tons of umbra arthons in the early game—before I’ve got the flame tech. I have, however, unlocked the grenade launcher and have the ability to dish out a bit more than basic hand grenade explosive damage.
The main problem with umbra is that, as a game mechanic, it isn’t fun. It is like playing a board game with friends and spinning “miss a turn” on your turn—except that Phoenix Point is a single player game and they’re no friends sitting around the kitchen table having a laugh at that bad luck.
Umbras pop up in a campaign long before a player can get the tools to deal with them effectively. In the early game, that means either blowing them up with grenades or disabling their arms and head so they just flee the field or laying down six to eight overwatch cones over the spawning umbra and praying and hoping that enough hits land to take it out. In one battle, an umbra ran six overwatch shots—and all six shots missed. Then again, that’s XCom baby!
The last strategy, spamming overwatch, is the most reliable nonetheless, but is also means “miss a turn.” So what Umbras effectively does do is make the battles against heavily armoured bullet sponge enemies even more tedious.
If umbras are showing up and I’m not equipping flame grenades on my squad, that’s on me. But if they are showing up before that tech is even available, that’s on Snapshot.
While the new purple graphic that makes umbras much easier to spot has solved some of the problems with this enemy, umbras still needs some work.
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From a gameplay and lore-friendly perspective, the appearance of Umbras should be triggered when the player excavates an ancient site that contains either the mutane gas or the mutane refinery.
That will solve the issue of umbras appearing too early in a campaign.
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Also, there umbral tar shadow needs to be more than just a text field on the unit card and some purple smoke or breath on the unit model.
The tar shadow needs to be something like a second carapace, a bulge on one side that contains it. If it had 80 armour and, say, 150 hit points, it would be an enticing albeit difficult target—unless you had the Ancient’s Scorpion sniper rifle.
Disabling the tar shadow carapace should also cause a catastrophic explosion.
That mechanic would mean that sniping tar shadow carapaces would become a tactic players could also use to deal with them.
2 Likes
Kill it with fire. No umbra spawns. Simples.
Oops, that doesn’t look good! 
I meant to kill it with fire before it became an umbra, it didn’t seem to trigger the umbra preparing when I killed it using an incendiary grenade while it had tar shadow.
I usually take the “don’t die on me” approach whenever I see an Umbra host.
Paralyze it, virus, mind control, tear off limbs… but don’t let it die 
5 Likes
Fire is the solution before Umbra even shows, effective when host die. But sometimes you can kill host not seeing that there is Umbra trait.
Most of mentioned solutions are good when Umbra is already spawned and running. But I suppose that some search for a solution when host already died and Umbra is not out there yet. 
So yes, any area effect or mind effect work on Umbra before it spawns. Most simple for me is Mind Control. When it spawns then it is already under your control. 
But also War Cry helps to minimize losses.