Sacrifice: Charnel Mission 2


So for helping Charnel retake the Demon Gate, we've been granted two spells, instead of the mess we got last time. There's not going to be any posts as dense/long as the previous one; I'm only going to need to cover 0-3 spells per post from here on, starting with these two:


Necryl
600 Mana, 2 Souls

The Necryl is a weird unit that requires delving a bit into some of the invisible mechanics of the game to properly explain. The basics of the Necryl is that it's a ranged unit oriented toward support -every god provides such a one at this level, and in fact they all use the same basic model. In the Necryl's case, its ranged attack inflicts a plague effect on enemies it hits, which can spread to other units with a touch.

The plague itself slowly damages afflicted units -very slowly- while blocking their HP regeneration (Not Charnel leeching), blocking their mana regeneration (Not Locust mana leeching), and lowering their resistances to all five of the game's damage types. The regeneration-blocking is fairly straightforward; the HP regeneration blocking isn't important in most situations unless the enemy disengages and eg you manage to catch up to finish them off where normally they'd have gotten some healing done. The mana regeneration blocking will eventually lead to ranged attackers being unable to fire and limits access to special abilities, as well as potentially crippling wizards if they catch the plague when low on mana. The resistance reduction... requires delving into resistances.

Sacrifice's five damage types are not what you're probably expecting. There's melee damage, there's direct ranged damage, there's splash ranged damage, there's direct spell damage, and there's splash spell damage. For a lot of units, these numbers are at the base values; they take 100% of the expected damage and that's it. For most ground ranged units, such as Fallen, they have a severe weakness to melee attacks -this is part of how the game enforces its rock/paper/scissors relationship, with another part being that flying units are not only impractical to melee but some of them are hugely resistant to melee damage to boot so that even if a melee attacker manages to sock them they barely feel it, and on the flipside fliers are often susceptible to ranged attacks, both splash and direct. As you go up in unit quality, resistances become a bit more common, though there's late-game units that have no resistances at all.

The relevance of all this is that while I don't know what the exact amount of modification a Necryl's plague induces is, I know it's a basic subtraction applied to a unit's existing resistances. This is important because it means the Necryl's plague is most useful for softening counters; say, for example, that it's a reduction of 10%. In that case, a Fallen's susceptibility to melee would go from -500% damage to -510%, a change that you don't remotely care about. On the flipside, a unit with a 90% resistance to melee damage would suddenly take twice as much from melee as normal. (Which, mind, would still be pathetic damage)

So like I said; softening counters.

Unfortunately, the Necryl is interesting, but not very useful, particularly when compared to literally all its direct competition, all of which do more dramatically useful things. Softening counters could be a game-breaker, but the Necryl doesn't do it by enough to really matter. Impairing ranged-heavy forces sounds fairly amazing, but it's difficult to consistently arrange for all the members of a group of ranged units to be infected by Necryls and the Necryl's competition can be taking enemies out of the fight faster than the Necryl's 'they run out of ammo, you know, eventually'. Enemies without mana can't fight, but neither can dead ones. Critically, there are multiple other options under Charnel to replicate most or all of the utility of a Necryl's plague, and plague's utility is particularly limited at low levels where nearly nothing has resistances, everything dies fast, etc. (ie plague's utility is at its lowest when the Necryl doesn't have to worry about competing with Charnel's other options for doing the same)

Worst of all, as far as I can tell the Necryl's plague doesn't stack. If this is true, it would be a unique flaw: every other way of inflicting a similar effect can stack. Even if it's not true... the competition still tends to be more useful.

The whole issue is compounded by timing/context. Resistance-lowering isn't very useful right now because nothing has meaningful resistances at this low a level. Crippling mana regeneration isn't very useful because low-level combat is glass cannons killing other glass cannons, with 'my mana ran out' being nearly impossible to occur. The one exception is enemy wizards, and not only is it rather unlikely the Necryl will manage to catch an enemy wizard with plague (Necryls are horribly inaccurate and wizards are difficult to catch with ranged attacks if played even halfway-competently) but this is also the worst point in the game for trying to hurt a wizard's utility by targeting mana regeneration; as level goes up spell cost tends to rise much faster than mana reserves do, but here and now a wizard can cast 3-4 spells off their maximum mana so long as Teleport and Summon Manalith aren't a part of the list, neither of which is terribly relevant to this point. So at this point, plague doesn't last long enough to hurt a wizard unless you get really good timing with it, which is difficult to deliberately arrange given you can't actually see enemy mana supplies!

By the time the game reaches the point where plague's effects do become quite noticeable, you've got access to the overall superior competition. So even though the Necryl is earlier than all it's competition, this isn't really a point in its favor in real terms. There's... one enemy unit it can be useful against that shows up early enough to matter, but that's a matchup thing.

The Necryl is disappointing, unfortunately, which is sad because I quite like its concept.


Protective Swarm
400 Mana

Every god provides a 'shield' spell at the second level, and Protective Swarm is Charnel's version.

One thing about shield spells is that they all provide immunity to a number of hostile effects. Unfortunately, none of these effects are properly standardized, which makes it a bit awkward to talk about when I'm trying to avoid explicitly alluding to units and spells we haven't been personally given. That said, generally if it's a single-target effect that attempts to slow down, immobilize, or disable a target through some kind of lingering effect attaching itself to the unit, shield spells will probably block it. Effects that physically knock units down or fling them into the air or the like to disrupt them, on the other hand, will not be blocked, and just because an effect is negative and attaches itself to a unit doesn't mean shield spells will block it: the Necryl's plague, for example, is not blocked by shield spells.

Protective Swarm is... possibly the worst of the bunch. It reduces the damage you take by 25%, does damage to nearby enemies, and it heals you for 50% of the damage it's dealing... but every other shield spell is either much better at protecting you or much better at hurting enemies. Protective Swarm can perform fairly impressively if you're getting mobbed, but most of the time it's kinda eeeeh. You should try to keep it up during fights just for the passive protection from negative effects, but I'd usually rather have one of the other shield spells.

On a different note, Protective Swarm does not reduce the damage from Desecrate. This is true of all but one shield spell, too. Putting up your shield in a desperate attempt to stave off Desecration-induced death is a waste of suddenly-precious mana and whatnot -you should be healing yourself and/or Teleporting to your Altar.

Now, neither Protective Swarm nor the Necryl is useless, but together they're bad enough that I'm generally of the opinion you should never take Charnel for your second level slot if we're talking a multiplayer-oriented build. That is, I wouldn't necessarily consider either of the Necryl or the Protective Swarm the worst of their options, but the collective package is pretty clearly inferior to all four other collective packages.

And I say this while considering Charnel the best, coolest, most interesting god, keep in mind.

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The actual mission itself has a gimmick where you can get a Nether Fiend to join you by giving it a soul, but the scripting broke so that the game failed to offer me the opportunity until suddenly once I'd beaten the mission some of the relevant dialogue started to fire. The only reason I care at all, aside LP Thoroughness Reasons, is that recruiting the Nether Fiend also opens up the opportunity to get a Boon from Charnel by using the Nether Fiend's special ability.

Boons are another campaign-exclusive mechanic; you do a thing, a god decides to reward you for the thing, and you're given a choice between two options for permanently improving yourself. In this case, Charnel would have offered either an increase in HP of 10%, or a 10% increase in 'physical resistance'. (ie resistance to melee, direct ranged, and splash ranged damage) Note that due to how percentages work the 10% increase to physical damage is slightly better than the HP boost anytime you're not being hit by a spell. It's also worth noting that multiple boons for physical resistances will stack more favorably than multiple boons for maximum HP -gaining +10% to HP twice makes you 20% more durable. Gaining +10% physical resistance twice means you take 80% damage, which means you'll take 25% more damage to be put down. (So long as it's physical damage, of course) Wizards innately have 50% resistance to spell damage; I personally prefer to reduce the vulnerability to units bashing me as a result, and so would tend to argue the physical resistance is directly superior to the HP boost. In particular, resistances effectively extend healing; if you have 20% physical resistance, healing yourself for 1000 HP effectively increases the amount of damage the enemy has to do to you with units by 1250 HP, whereas a 25% increase in HP won't effect your healing's effectiveness at all unless the healing amount would've been overkill.

I could have replayed the mission to get this boon, but since I have zero clue what broke the scripting in this case and the campaign isn't tuned to be particularly hard... whatever. It's not like the dialogue being missed is particularly amazing or something; each god outright has a stock boon dialogue, and they often deliver the boon with little or no warning or explanation of what you did to earn the boon.

Boons themselves often, though not always, function as a form of secondary objective, which is kind of nice for adding a bit of nuance to the campaign experience.

Anyway, the actual mission is, aside the Boon Nether Fiend, just your basic introduction to the idea of battling enemy wizards: Desecrate their Altar to win, try to take Manafounts for yourself, try to steal their souls if you can. Lady Abraxus is made to be fairly easy here, and the only reason you might have trouble with it is because Sacrifice's core gameplay is so different from vaguely equivalent games it can take a while to wrap your mind around it.

Like the first mission, the game does a somewhat poor job of conveying what your objective is. The intuitive thing is to expect to need to do something in terms of actually summoning something from the Demon Gate of Golgotha. No, just Desecrate Abraxus' Altar. There you go, that's the mission.

Though it's worth noting that enemy wizards in the campaign have somewhat variable stats. In this mission -and indeed in almost all the missions she shows up in- Abraxus is fleeter of foot than the default wizard movement speed. A nice touch is that these changes often correlate to the Boons the god prefers to give -Abraxus serves Stratos, and his Boon options are movement speed or maximum mana.

This makes Abraxus a bit misleading about how difficult it can be to actually successfully take souls away from enemies, since she's much more able to zip out and grab souls than most wizards. This is further compounded by her shield spell's special effect, but we'll get to that when we get to it...

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Narratively, the mission drops a notable point about Eldred; he's got prior experience with summoning demons. Though... we don't have much context on what summoning demons means in the world of Sacrifice, and in fact we never will. We just know they're evil bad things from one or more other worlds. And by 'they're evil bad things' I mean 'Charnel likes them, Persephone hates them'.

Admittedly, that looks pretty damning right now, but it's still not very informative.

We also get a bit about how Charnel in particular is forbidden from approaching the Demon Gate, which I've always found a bit interesting. It fits with Charnel being the only god who has any units we're told are demons, but it's still interesting that the game doesn't try to lump in any other gods as 'untrustworthy bad guy gods who cannot be let near the Demon Gate', especially considering some stuff we'll see down the line.

The plot is still moving slowly at this point, though. Aside the prophecy reaffirming that bad things are on the way and explaining why Eldred is at all important (Answer: a prophecy convinced everyone he's important), we're just seeing Eldred act as Charnel's errand boy so far, and 'freeing the Ragman' and 'retaking Golgotha' are things we don't have enough context on their implications to meaningfully appreciate them. Exactly how much recruitment power is Charnel gaining by taking Golgotha back, for example? Dunno. What's the Ragman actually doing?... dunno.

And the prophecy was actually in the last video, so this video is even slower plot-wise than I'm making it sound.

We also still don't know what Present Day Eldred is going through, nor why; it's not just that the mission themselves are light on story. We just know that he thinks it's bad and is ambiguously blaming himself for some reason.

That said, the god conversations continue to be pretty enjoyable to listen to. This video doesn't have anything on the order of Persephone and Charnel's fantastic 'yes, torture has its merits' exchange, but Sacrifice's campaign voice acting, particularly its god voice acting, is pretty consistently one of the more enjoyable bits of it.

See you next Charnel mission.

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