Nah the boss pod is from this mod.

I was indeed using the Golden Requiem second wave option, might've been the cause for the requiem death squad.

If you're using Golden Requiem second wave option that could be the cause. If not, yes it's this and they are supposed to be a 'booby trap' because 99% of people wait as long as possible to do the Golden Path missions anyway.

Honestly I recommend dropping this and using the Golden Requiem sword these days as the balance is more as Reshi intends.

Right, so I'm fairly sure its this mod that dropkicks the game balance on the blacksite mission. Full 6 man squad of captain rank soldiers go in. 3 requiem enemies in the blacksite building instantly one shot half the squad, then finish off the rest the next turn. Full health, full cover, high ground, aid protocol and flash-banged enemies. Doesn't matter, insta-killing soldiers, all enemies have, armour, shields and double digit health, wtf are you supposed to do here? Wait until tier 2 armour and weapons? Seems like the balance is completely and utterly outta wack.

Great! Thanks for the extra context.

@ArcticJack they overwrite the same things (as does this and GPR) so only 1 will take effect. Technically this is an incompatibility, but as RL only does some of them GPR would still work for the others. This mod covers the ones RL misses, making GPR irrelevant. The main reason I did this is GPR conflicts with Water World Ethereals, which I run in tandem with Requiem Legion, so I was missing the other changed Encounters.

Does the description of this mod imply that the base 'Requiem Legion' mod conflict with 'Golden Path Missions Revamp'? I couldn't find anything anywhere in either mod description to suggest that, but the Requiem mod does edit the XComEncounters.ini file. It just seems like such an odd thing to leave out of the comparability section of the Requiem mod?

A Better ADVENT by itself is fine but A Better Campaign will not work with this.

If they change the Encounters yes. As it's all config, technically it's just a case of not being able to control which one actually applies without modifying the mod's configs, so it's kinda a case of config roulette, rather than 'hard incompatibility that causes a crash'.

Is this incompatible with anything that changes the Blacksite and Forge Missions? Better Advent, for instance?