When to go after the First Blacksite?

[A Bat From Wuhan]

So I'm relatively new to Xcom2 (But played EU, a bit of the original, and Xenonauts) .

I haven't gotten very far at all in my Commander Ironman Playthrough, due to me wiping on the first blacksite mission.

The very first playthrough, I thought I was just suppoed to do it right away, "Oh game gave me a mission, Ill go do that with my 4 man squad with basic tech!"....

2nd Time, waited till the GTS gave me 5 men squads, but still had basic tech (no magnetic weapons, no armor, etc). Went quite well actually, made it to the building with the objective, fought a robot (wounded 2 soliders), and had one last pod to clear.... or so I thought, apparently I had passed one up without encountering it and they came up behind my squad and.... it went badly.


So whats a good point to hit the Blacksite? Is there some sort of milestone to hit before doing it (have Mag Weapons and Real Armor before heading in?)

[Mavkiel]

Mag weapons are a must. It also helps if you haven't skull jacked an officer yet. Because codexs can be annoying to kill before blue-screen ammo.

[Kaerius]

If you're playing with war of the chosen you can safely leave it for the lategame. There's a lot of research to do before you need to go down the golden path. It's a little trickier to just leave it in vanilla since it keeps progressing the avatar meter and vanilla has fewer ways to reduce that.

[Explodium]

I didn't go after it until the avatar project was a single day from completion, because completing it will lower avatar progress, I had tier 2 equipment by then.

[Hannibal Barca]

I did it with basic weapons , with 4 mans squad ,within days after it popped up and with no kills and no deaths. I only fire one shot to explode a wall to get to evac, REAPER IS OP

[Hasefrexx]

I'm pretty sure that ennemy composition depends on how long you wait... So... There's little point waiting. I always do it with basic weapons/armor, but make sure to have my best 5 men rested and ranked up a bit (3rd promotion at least). Having a good healing specialist helps a lot.

Only once did it prove very painful and had to run after entering the facility without clearing the map so remember you don't need to kill everyone, not even chosen.