Warriors of the North Unit Analysis Part 6: Demons


To save some space, here's the effects of the Demon Ability:

50% Fire resistance, -25% Ice resistance. Fights in volcanic terrain increase Defense by 50%, while fights in snowy terrain decrease Defense by 50%. Assorted spell immunities, but takes 50% more damage from 'holy' attacks.

The only new thing since Armored Princess is the Ice weakness.

I actually appreciate it, because Demons have always leaned toward being a bit of a super-species; having an actual exploitable weakness is nice. It's maybe a little wonky on the level that Demons have flipped from being a bit of a bane for the Mage to being outright super-weak to the Mage -the Soothsayer's primary damage source by the time he reaches Demonis is likely to be Blizzard, an utterly insane source of mass Ice damage- but Armored Princess already undercut their effectiveness in that regard and furthermore made it less design-useful to set up units specifically designed to be an obstacle for the Mage since the Mage was no longer clearly the most powerful class by a wide margin.

Additionally, a new Ability common to Demons is...

Ardent
Critical hits have a 20% chance of Burning the target, finishing off stacks increases Attack by 2 for the rest of the battle, and non-Plant organic troops (Including other Demons) that are slain by this unit will leave behind a Burst of Rage instead of a corpse. Any unit can collect the Burst of Rage for 1 Action Point and to grant 5-10 Rage to the owning Hero, but units with Ardent will also have their 'top' unit's Health fully restored to boot if they collect a Burst of Rage.

... a gimmicky new Ability.

I mean, it's cool they're trying to give Demons a racial mechanic at all, but Ardent is pretty eeeeh. It's thematically appropriate that Demons can generate extra Rage, since The Legend told us that Rage is supposed to be Demon magic, that they use Rage instead of Mana, but most of this only starts applying once you're finishing off stacks (Which generally means as the battle is finishing), while the chance to Burn on a crit is a low chance on a low chance to activate, even considering Warriors of the North has made crits apply to Talents as well. Corpse-clearing can admittedly be useful, sometimes, I guess?

Though do note that, strangely, Ardent will also heal a Demon stack for picking up one of Hilda's Mana/Rage chargers. It feels more like an oversight than an intended mechanic, honestly, but it's a nice little benefit when it crops up... assuming it's not enemy Demons...

It's also worth noting that the Viking has some obvious synergies with Demons, providing generous crits and appreciating bonus Rage, but the implementation is a bit odd in practice. Who cares about having better odds than the other classes of burn-crits when your crits are so stupendously lethal the stack is very possibly dead or near dead? And being able to collect bonus Rage from kills isn't particularly necessary when you're going to get Rage Grasp maxed fairly quickly and have utterly insane maximum Rage about as quickly. It really ends up running more toward Demons being the way to go if you want to make your Skald more Rage-y. (The Soothsayer is too likely to be murdering everything at once with Blizzard to get that many Bursts of Rage generated at all)

Overall, I kind of wish Bursts of Rage had instead fueled Talents on Demons. I think that would've been a lot more interesting and useful.

To be fair, Demons are one of the factions that doesn't particularly need propping up...

Demons still don't care about racial Morale stuff.


Demon
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 666
Leadership: 300
Attack/Defense: 30 / 30
Initiative/Speed: 4 / 3
Health: 240
Damage (Default): 21-27 Physical
Damage (Domination): 28-35 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical, 50% Fire-25% Ice
Talents: Running (Charge: 1. +2 Action Points), Bloody Pentagram (Charge: 1. Creates a 7-tile circle that last for 2 turns, in which all friendly Demons below Level 5 gain +2 to Morale and Initiative. The pentagram vanishes after 2 turns), Summon Demons (Charge: 1. Summons to an adjacent tile a stack of Demon units chosen from any of choices below Level 5. The Leadership of the new stack will be 90 per head in the summoning stack)
Abilities: Demon, Furious (Never 'runs out' of retaliations), Domination (Calls the Domination attack against units that are Levels 1-3), Demon Rage (If currently out of AP, taking damage has a 50% chance of granting 1 AP and immediately providing another turn. Counterattacks from enemies don't count), Ardent

Ice weakness and Ardent, no custom changes. This includes that Bloody Pentagram still claims to affect all friendlies, but only actually affects friendly Demons.

Ardent would actually be pretty cool on Demons if you could get them early, but so far as I've seen it's not possible to get them early enough for a heal on them to be all that significant. Maybe in Ice and Fire in specific you'd be able to beeline to the Ice Gardens and get lucky -there's a druid who has narrative connections to demons, and his shop reflects this- but I'm not 100% sure about that and even if so you'd still be at the point in the game where 240 Health is moderately bulky, not 'hurl them into the fray confident they'll survive'. It's another case where I'd like to see Warriors of the North's basic system ported into a new scenario, alas.

In practice, overall Demons are that bit less threatening now that you can pick on an Ice weakness. The Soothersayer in particular is, as previously covered, likely to be murdering Demons-the-faction en mass with Blizzard. For the player Demons are probably overall buffed -with the exception of Ghosts and Cursed Ghosts showing up regularly in battlegroups, it's fairly rare to encounter a battlegroup that incorporates Ice damage at all. The main exception is the surface of the Ice Gardens has Ice damage quite regularly, but you get access to the Ice Gardens before Demonis, and while you're not likely to have completely cleared out the surface of the Ice Gardens prior to accessing Demonis, you may well be most of the way done by that point, depending on priorities and a bit of luck.

So their newly-added Ice weakness only occasionally crops up from your perspective, whereas Ardent is overall a buff, if a small, erratic one.

Unfortunately, they mostly play the same. The one circumstance Demons-the-race collectively play very differently is when it comes to fighting summon spam, where the dead summons leads to Bursts of Rage leads to covering more ground at a time and healing some damage and so on.

Minor, frustrating mechanics interaction: divine retribution effects can trigger Demon Rage. As you absolutely have to get a point in the Skill that causes such to be able to reach Oratory, in practice at some point this is virtually guaranteed to be a frustrating issue where sometimes a Demon -or Executioner- will hit one of your units and immediately get another turn because it got punished by your Skill. It also means that performing a standard melee attack on a Demon is that bit more likely to give them a bonus turn, and even more obnoxious is that it's possible for this whole sequence to chain, where a Demon attacks one of your units, gets a bonus turn from Demon Rage triggering off the punishment, attacks again, and gets another bonus turn out of new divine punishment triggering Demon Rage again. Thankfully, the odds of divine punishment triggering are low enough it won't happen terribly often, but it's still a frustrating oversight, and can potentially take a fight you had pretty firmly under control and turn it into 'and suddenly one of your units is half-dead'.


Cerberus
Level: 3
Hiring Cost: 210
Leadership: 90
Attack/Defense: 18 / 18
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 4
Health: 90
Damage: 9-11 Physical
Resistances: 50% Fire, -25% Ice
Talents: Leap! (Charge: 1. Charges an infinite distance in a straight line to do 12 Physical damage to a single enemy. Three-headed does not trigger)
Abilities: Demon, Three-headed (In addition to the primary target, melee attacks strike at the tiles to the side. Still no friendly fire risk), Ardent

Aside from Ardent being added and Demon now providing an Ice weakness, no change from Armored Princess. Ouch. They still needed something to separate them from Demons, and they didn't get it. In fact, now there isn't even a Skill for increasing counterattack count, so they're actually worse off than in Orcs on the March!

Demoness
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 500
Leadership: 160
Attack/Defense: 26 / 24
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 2
Health: 100
Damage: 10-18 Physical
Resistances: 50% Fire-25% Ice
Talents: Whip Attack (Reload: 1. Attacks an enemy 1 tile apart through a free space for 10-18 Physical damage, with no retaliation), Charm (Reload: 2. Attempts to take control of an enemy humanoid troop, which can be adjacent or one tile away. If the target stack is 128 Leadership per Demoness or less, the attempt will succeed, lasting for 2 turns. If they're above that but otherwise valid, the Demoness instead does 10-18 Physical damage to the target with no chance for retaliation), Infernal Exchange (Reload: 3. Swaps the positions of any two units)
Abilities: Demon, Beauty (30% chance to evade attacks from male humanoids), Ardent

Just the standard Demon stuff of an Ice weakness and Ardent.

Infernal Exchange is actually a bit less significant than in prior games, overall, as unit mobility in Warriors of the North is higher on average, particularly when you're looking at the mid-late game of Ice and Fire where units gaining Speed from level-ups is fairly widespread. By a similar token, using Whip Attack and Charm to harass enemies while backing away is a less viable strategy overall. The main point in their favor is that they're clearly the best Demon unit to bring to bear against Dwarves thanks to Drunkenness. As Demonis shows up before Dwarves do, this overall works to the player's advantage -you're unlikely to bring a Dwarf-heavy army into fights involving Demons, whereas it's entirely possible you'll have picked up a pile of Demonesses and happen to be running them when you get to the Dwarf-heavy part of the game.

... not that there's any part that's all that heavy on Dwarves in Warriors of the North... there's two places they show up a decent amount, one island and a brief run through the Creiston Mines. But still.

Though it is worth noting that Demoness average damage output is functionally higher since Whip Attack and Charm can now potentially crit.

Archdemon
Level: 5
Hiring Cost: 6000
Leadership: 1600
Attack/Defense: 66 / 66
Initiative/Speed: 8 / 9
Health: 766
Damage: 88-99 Physical
Resistances: 20% Physical, 10% Magic, 80% Fire-25% Ice
Talents: Boiling Lava (Reload: 4. All enemies take 33 Fire damage)
Abilities: Demon, Teleportation (Movement bypasses intervening units and terrain), Power Over Fire (80% Fire resistance and cannot be Burned), Restoration (Purges all negative status effects at the start of their turn), Sunder (50% chance for melee attacks to kill half the enemy stack in place of normal damage, assuming the target's Leadership is lower than the Archdemon stack's), Ardent

They've picked up the usual Demon traits... and Boiling Lava, making them noticeably more appealing for the player, since they're now able to contribute without having to get into the thick of things!

They're also one of the more notable beneficiaries of Ardent, as their high Health and high Defense (Not to mention some of their important resistances) means even quite late into the game it's possible to finagle things so they're dodging casualties and then picking up Bursts of Rage to keep fighting in melee while still putting off the casualties.

On the flipside, this is probably the least annoying iteration of Archdemons to fight. While dropping a Boiling Lava to hit all your troops can be annoying, it reduces their tendency to pick on your most vulnerable troop and mess up your formations, and more importantly their weakness to Ice finally gives a way to kill them very quickly. It's particularly worth noting that your ultimate attacking Rage move (Well, not technically, it's complicated) does potentially thousands of Ice damage, meaning no matter your class you have a solid way of outputting Ice damage.

It's little things, but the overall result is nice. This is my favorite version of Archdemons, full stop.

Note that Sunder is just a re-named Halve, and so won't trigger if the damage would be lower than their regular hit, in addition to not working on stacks that out-Leadership the Archdemon stack. Given how lethal combat is in Warriors of the North, with Berserker-the-Skill triggers and all, player Archdemons aren't particularly likely to trigger Sunder in real play.

Imp
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 80
Leadership: 40
Attack/Defense: 16 / 12
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 4
Health: 32
Damage: 3-6 Physical
Resistances: 50% Fire-25% Ice
Talents: Fireball (Charges: 2. Throws a fireball at an enemy target in the distance, doing 3-6 Fire damage to the target and 30% of that to all adjacent units. Like normal ranged attacks, cannot be activated if an enemy is adjacent to the Imp)
Abilities: Demon, Strike and Return (Returns to its original position after performing a melee attack), No retaliation, Ardent

Just Ice vulnerability and Ardent.

That's overall a poor trade for Imps, as they already have an innate Burn chance on Fireball hurling and don't like to be in the thick of things to be able to grab Bursts of Rage. +2 Attack per kill is essentially ignorable, as well.

On the other hand, they benefit pretty decently from the newly-gained potential for Fireball to crit. Since each target rolls separately for an attempted crit, you'll actually get Fireball crits on a pretty regular basis. So while Warriors of the North's modifications to Imps per se are probably overall a hit to their performance, particularly as enemies where you'll just Lord of the North them for massive damage, the actual overall result is that Imps are more glass cannon-y than any prior game.

The bigger strike to their appeal is Archdemons having gained Boiling Lava, as a Demon attacker who can hit enemies at range to a limited extent is better filled by the Archdemon.

Scoffer Imp
Level: 2
Hiring Cost: 120
Leadership: 60
Attack/Defense: 16 / 16
Initiative/Speed: 6 / 3
Health: 52
Damage: 4-7 Physical
Resistances: 50% Fire-25% Ice
Talents: Fireball (Charges: 2. Throws a fireball at an enemy target in the distance, doing 4-7 Fire damage to the target and 30% of that to all adjacent units. Like normal ranged attacks, cannot be activated if an enemy is adjacent to the Scoffer Imp), Sneer (Reload: 4. Targets a single enemy below Level 5 which hasn't moved yet. The unit attempts to target the Scoffer Imp with a basic attack, ignoring all other units)
Abilities: Demon, Strike and Return (Returns to its original position after performing a melee attack), No retaliation, Ardent

Weak to Ice and has Ardent now, like so many Demons.

Same basic story as Imps: easier to kill, Ardent isn't very useful, pushed aside some by Archdemons (Though Scoffer Imps having Sneer gives them a bit more of a place), Fireball crits help their damage output.


Executioner
Level: 4
Hiring Cost: 1600
Leadership: 360
Attack/Defense: 40 / 30
Initiative/Speed: 5 / 2
Health: 280
Damage (Default): 24-26 Physical
Damage (Domination): 32-34 Physical
Resistances: 10% Physical, 50% Fire-25% Ice
Talents: Running Charge: 1. (+2 Action Points), Execution (Reload: 1. Melee attack that does 36-39 Physical damage to a single target. If the target stack is finished off by Execution, all enemies suffer -1 Initiative for this turn and the next, and furthermore enemies below Level 5 have a 50% chance of becoming Afraid)
Abilities: Demon, Furious (Never 'runs out' of retaliations), Domination (Calls the Domination attack against units that are Levels 1-3), Demon Rage (If currently out of AP, taking damage has a 50% chance of granting 1 AP and immediately providing another turn. Counterattacks from enemies don't count), Terrify (Enemies attacking have a 30% chance of suffering Fear, unless the attacker is Level 5, immune to Mind effects, a Demon, Undead, Undead Lizardman, or Snow Elf), Ardent

Just the usual Ice weakness and acquisition of Ardent... except Terrify actually works on Lizardmen now!... but not Snow Elves, strangely.

Like Demons, if you could manage to get Executioners reasonable early, Ardent would actually be really cool on them, and as-is it's a minor little bonus. Executioners having Execution makes them a favored target for landing finishing blows already, so they're still probably one of the main Demons -after Archdemons- that gets good mileage out of Ardent.

The potential for Execution to crit makes it a bit trickier of a decision for timing its usage. Even if it can't kill a target stack with its regular max roll, it's still worth considering going for an Execution if the target stack would come pretty close to death, just in case you roll a crit. This can be contrasted with Armored Princess, where Talents couldn't crit and a crit from a regular attack would do pretty much exactly the same damage as a high roll on Execution.

But overall they still play largely the same.

-----------------------------

Demons in Warriors of the North are probably at their easiest to fight in the series, purely because they've gained a noticeable Ice weakness and what's generally your ultimate attacking Rage move does significant Ice damage and isn't that hard to get launched by the time you're actually fighting Demons. This is a bit of a surprise, but not an unpleasant one. Your Mage-equivalent in particular has a much easier time since Blizzard has been added and is basically the ultimate attacking Spell in most situations, and picks on their Ice weakness, contrasting with eg The Legend where Rain of Fire was your staple ultimate attacking Spell and heavily resisted by Demons.

Next time, we cover how the Undead have changed.

Comments

  1. I actually didn't see them as a bane to mage in vanilla wotn because how super op blizzard is with 40ish int which isn't hard to get. I've had fights vs very strong demon armies end at turn 1

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    1. That's what the post is saying: that Demons WERE the Mage's bane in The Legend and to a lesser extent Armored Princess, but are hideously vulnerable to the Mage in Warriors of the North.

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  2. I don't see how demons were a mage's bane in Legend. Geyser is a guaranteed scroll you get as soon as you enter the dwarf lands, magic shackles is probably guaranteed too (I've had 7 scrolls of it by the time I got to the demons) and both of the spells are in the same spell school which is probably the best school and isn't hard for a mage to max out. Meanwhile, in my game the only two Fire Rain scrolls were available in the demon castle you can't enter for a while and in the labyrinth. There's also the scroll from giving the map to a magic academy, but, uh, whatever, I'd rather get the 30 runes instead and the scroll a bit later. Anyway, if Fire Rain was as amazing as you keep painting it out to be, the mere 50% resistance wouldn't have stood in its way.

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    1. Oh, and, it's not like Paladin or Warrior are better than mage in any respect in Legend. You can literally just put on some +Attack and unit boost items and be a Warrior with Higher Magic. Int level ups would go into reaching 15 int to extend buffs on troops. There's so much excess money I bought every item I came across anyway.

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    2. Geyser is really, really weak in The Legend (Even with it hitting five enemies, it'll usually do less damage than Fire Rain does total from hitting 3.), and it's pricey as heck. (Note that if you assume max damage rolls on both spells, in the standard situation of 3 targets being hit by Fire Rain and 5 by Geyser, at Level 3 Fire Rain is doing 1200 damage for 20 Mana while Geyser is doing 1500 Mana... for 40 Mana) If you're playing on Impossible, you're going to run out of Mana before you've wiped out the battle groups. Fire Rain isn't just powerful, it's economical, doing good damage for the Mana, allowing you to double-cast it for the full three Higher Magic turns and still have the ability to keep casting. Fire Rain is, full stop, the Mage's best attacking Spell in The Legend.

      Geyser has its uses, to be sure, but it's only consistently impressive when you get into big fights with more than 5 stacks. (Assuming max-level Geyser so you actually get to hit 8 targets) Otherwise it's surprisingly underwhelming.

      Nor is 50% Fire resistance 'mere'. It's halving the damage on your best attacking Spell, and the alternatives are all sufficiently dubious it's often STILL your best Spell to be casting against them! For example, if you manage to catch 4 out of 5 Demons, even a half-damage-assuming-max-rolls comparison (Which is REALLY generous to Geyser, since the gap between its high roll and low roll is so much wider than Fire Rain's is) between Fire Rain and Geyser gives 750 damage for 20 Mana vs 1200 damage for 40 Mana -or put another way, 1500 damage for 40 Mana vs 1200 damage for 40 Mana.

      Ice Snake helps, but even generously assuming max damage rolls and consistently hitting 3 targets (Which is less likely due to its inferior targeting behavior), it only does 875 damage per cast. That's better than Fire Rain, but not by a lot.

      Lightning, depressingly, isn't even really in the running. If you assume max damage rolls (Again: this is REALLY generous to Lightning), and assume it always hits all five enemies without catching any of your own, it does 1420 damage total for 35 Mana at max level. This overly-generous comparison makes it look ALMOST competitive with Fire Rain against Demons, and in actuality its painfully low minimums will consistently drag it down.

      Seriously, it's not disputable that Fire Rain is the Mage's best attacking Spell in The Legend.

      Lastly, I have no idea why you're asserting the Paladin and Warrior are inferior like you're disputing something I said. I've been pretty blunt on this site that in The Legend the Warrior and to a lesser extent the Paladin just can't compete.

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    3. I've brought up the other classes in case you meant that demons are a Mage's bane specifically.
      By the time I got to the demon realm I've had 170 mana, with regen that's shackles + at least 3 Geysers, enough to trivialize generic encounters. And that's all that matters, because in tougher fights you can't afford expensive damage spells anyway. I mean, in the Karador battle there's no fire resistance and yet I couldn't even just cast Fire Arrow whenever I wanted, all the mana went into manipulating the battlefield.

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    4. On my Impossible run I rarely bothered to spend Mana on battlefield manipulation. Even difficult fights could usually be taken out with Fire Rain spam just fine. Demons are one of the few sets of units that made that impractical, with dragons being the main other case. (And dragons are rarer, plus one of them is immune to Spells anyway) The Karrador fight is one of the few fights I got decent use out of Geyser, in fact, since there's so many units, he keeps resurrecting more, and there was no way I was preventing the Ancient Vampires or Bone Dragons from getting into my army's face where I wouldn't want to Fire Rain them.

      I think you're also missing the thrust of my position in the first place, which is that Demons seem to have been DESIGNED in The Legend to be a difficult hurdle for the Mage in particular. If you feel the Mage doesn't struggle with them in practice, that can just mean you're of the opinion failed in that goal. That's my point about the class thing: Demons aren't designed to specifically cripple Rage and thus the Warrior (And in fact in The Legend no Rage skill does Fire damage at all), and the Paladin outright has an anti-Demon class-exclusive Skill so on a conceptual level the Paladin 'counters' Demons outright.

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  4. Ardent doesn't create Bursts of Rage (Clots of Rage in the original) on killing plants, and this is mentioned in description (original atleast). Unless you consider Plants to be inorganic...
    A Burst gives 5-10 rage, not 6.
    Original description is clear on that Demons heal from any kind of rage-balls (so one can use Energetics to heal Archdemons, for example). I mean, sentence about it even written as separate paragraph to ensure that no one will misconnect it to rageball-on-kill.
    Some trivia: Ardent's internal name is demon_rage. A racial ability with such name in a (semi-)strategy game instantly makes one think about some count or ranks and indeed, this ability originally had levels. In fact, it still technically has, with current version being locked at level 1. Attack bonus on kill still uses levels in it's calculations - the bonus is actually 2*demonrage level.

    Demon's Domination attack once again deals 28-35 damage.
    Is every single game has this Bloody Pentagram description mistake in English version? It's really strange as Russian description is impossible to misunderstand.

    Your description of Archdemon's Halve (that is now named differently for some reason) is pretty inaccurate, unlike in-game one. It kills half of the stack instead of normal damage, not in addition. It works only on stacks of lesser leadership.
    Once again, it won't trigger if normal attack will deal more damage.
    Power Over Fire originally was supposed to have another effect - when Archdemon receives fire damage, he get fire shield effect for 1 turn (melee attackers get Burned). Weird idea, if you ask me.

    Imps do not have innate chance of Burn on Fireball.

    Executioner's Domination attack deals 32-34 damage.
    WotN version of Terrify affects Lizardmen (so description doesn't mention them, unlike AP version). It doesn't affect Snow Elves and Necrolizards.

    After horrifing mess that is Adrenaline code, going through demons feels soooo nice and smooth.

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    1. Gotten to most of this, going to retest Burst of Rage, uh, Rage gain before updating that part.

      Bloody Pentagram's description is, hilariously, actually correct in English Dark Side.

      And it's interesting and makes sense that originally Ardent was intended to have levels. I wonder why that got dropped?

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    2. Demons healing from Rage-balls that are not created be Ardent still described as unintended. It really is. Creating rage-balls by Ardent and healing from them are 2 unrelated mechanics.

      Once again, Executioner's Domination attack deals 32-34 damage. You wrote it dealing the same damage as Demon-the-unit's version.

      No idea. I don't even know how said level would be increased (or maybe lost?). It would have been nice for Ardent to be more interesting through.

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    3. Whoops, corrected the Executioner bit, and tweaked the commentary about healing from Rage.

      I figured higher Ardent levels would boost the Attack and Defense boosts more, personally, but I suppose the Burn chance might've been higher as well. Mostly I was thinking in terms of it being common for games to have mechanics like this give bigger boosts to higher-tier units to try to keep it more proportionate -it is a little odd that Archdemons get just as much Attack and Defense from finishing a stack as Imps do.

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    4. Hm, to me your Ardent description still sounds as if Demons 'should' heal only from Ardent-created rageballs. Demons heal (and indeed supposed to) from any kind of rageballs. Ardent-created? Hilda's? Spell Energetics? They all work. If one, say, decide mod Peasants and give them abiliy to create rageballs, Demons will heal from those too, without requiring any addtional coding.
      Or maybe I misunderstood you. My brain is far from being bright today. This sentence is propably sounds wrong but eh.

      Um, by "how level would increased" I meant what would a Demon need to do to get Ardent level increase.
      Higher levels increasing attack atleast is given - like I said earlier, even in the final game attack bonus is actually 2*Ardent level, not just fixed 2.
      ... I didn't even thought about Ardent level being dependant on unit tier. I mean, it's not impossible, but from the look of it my first thought was that it was a changing number, like Adrenaline level but with number somehow changing directly (unlike Adrenaline level being dependant of Adrenaline count.

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    5. I'm aware that other Rage balls work, but it just feels unintuitive of a mechanic (Even though I can see the logic from an in-universe standpoint), and the English description really does make it sound like it's specifically their own Rage balls. And from a design standpoint it creates some random-feeling synergies, like Warrior Maidens working well alongside Demons. So regardless of whether it's intended or not, it feels like an accident.

      Well, Dark Side gives Demons their Frenzy mechanic. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Frenzy was supposed to be in Ice And Fire, got cut, then Dark Side came back to it. An 'Ardent Level' like Adrenaline Levels is an easy jump to make. (Indeed, my recollection is that Frenzy's internal names make it obvious it's just tweaked Adrenaline code) But yeah, I was assuming something like an Archdemon getting a higher-level Ardent from your description.

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