Sacrifice: Charnel Mission 4


Two more Charnel spells -and these ones actually work nicely together!


Netherfiend
1000 Mana, 2 Souls

The Netherfiend is the next step in melee, and it's also the latest example of a Charnel unit that breaks from its stock statline -only where the Scythe had exceptionally poor HP, the Netherfiend has unusually good HP. (Though only by a little) However, the Netherfiend is also tied for last of what the Sacrifice wiki calls 'brawlers' to show up, and it has less melee resistance than all of its counterparts and outright takes doubled damage from spells, where the other 'brawlers' take normal damage from spells, so it's not pure good. Furthermore, it's actually unusually slow for a 'brawler'. Not dramatically so, but even a little loss in speed can make the difference -the Netherfiend can potentially be kited by a unit we'll be seeing down the line that most of the other 'brawlers' couldn't be, for example.

Nonetheless, the Netherfiend really is a very solid melee unit that can stay useful all the way to the end of the game. It's slower than a Scythe, but it's tough and hard-hitting, so much so that from now on it'll usually be better at dealing with ranged attackers simply because Scythes are more likely to die on the way in. I tend to phase out Scythes in this mission or the next one in favor of Netherfiends, especially since the campaign starts escalating total soul counts, leading to the range dominance that discourages having more than a handful of melee units.

Netherfiends also have a new, nifty ability; Devour Soul. You pick a blue soul or souls, the Netherfiend walks up to it and eats it, and now the Netherfiend hits harder and has improved damage resistance. This scales up for every single soul added, though my experience is that it has diminishing returns. There's technically also a glitch where it wraps if you eat more than 61 souls total, suddenly turning into a huge stat penalty instead of a big stat bonus, but unless you're doing weird stuff in some of the campaign missions with particularly massive soul counts, you'll probably never see it in action.

Devour Soul makes the Netherfiend one of the better possible targets for Speed Up. A Netherfiend swollen on souls will get to have the durability of a much higher-HP unit while still getting the Speed Up to last a decent length of time, making it a great choice for eg charging a Guardian group.

Note, however, that the souls are lost for good. If your Netherfiend dies and you pick up its souls, you do not get back the ones it devoured, and same if someone else successfully Converts the Netherfiend. The devoured souls are lost to the ether forever. Fortunately, that's what...


Animate Dead
300 Mana

... is for.

Animate Dead targets a single dead unit of yours -you target the soul(s), but it has to be associated with a corpse- and brings them back to life at full health and full mana, as if you'd summoned them.

This is amazing, and only gets better as you get access to bigger, nastier, more expensive units. Even with level 1 units it's always better to animate them than to collect their soul and re-summon them, as no unit costs less than Animate Dead and Animate Dead leaves you free to keep moving about where summoning units immobilizes you. (Exception: Manahoars, which cost 1 Mana. It can still be worth reanimating them rather than recollecting the soul and directly summoning them, though)

It also plays nicely with Devour Soul; a reanimated unit will keep its full Devour Soul bonuses no matter how many times it dies and gets resurrected. This makes it extremely convenient that it's paired with Netherfiends!

Animate Dead is also a spell whose cooldown is exactly equal to the universal cooldown. There's really no disadvantage to spamming it. Seriously, none at all. Get it hotkeyed! Spam it! It's one of the best spells in the game!

Though it's worth mentioning that it's campaign performance is slightly misleading, since you don't have to worry about experience mechanics in the campaign. Ending up in a situation where you let the enemy kill your forces four times over before you finally beat back their own army is tedious, but perfectly acceptable in campaign play. In multiplayer the other player will have pulled several levels ahead of you in the process -and so you probably won't successfully grind them down with such an Animate Dead-based strategy and instead end up losing outright. But on the other hand that's not really any different from running around, scooping up souls and re-summoning them -and Animate Dead is faster, cheaper, and safer than doing that. So it's not really a flaw with Animate Dead, it's just that in the campaign Animate Dead is basically broken whereas in multiplayer it's merely one of the best spells in the game.

Netherfiend and Animate Dead together is where Charnel starts coming into his own. For a custom wizard, it's probably preferable to fill the prior three levels with non-Charnel stuff, honestly, but this level is amazing, and while Charnel's even higher level stuff isn't so ridiculously fantastic it's still good.

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The mission itself is... odd. I quite appreciate it being set up to show off Animate Dead, including even providing a sneak peek at a later Charnel unit (Which is actually the one that can potentially kite a Netherfiend...), but the mission being a 2v1 where there's two paths to your opponent's Altar makes it really easy. (Though it is possible for Jadugarr to solo Sorcha if you let him, at which point you might have trouble) I felt like I was making agonizingly slow progress thanks to Jadugarr constantly managing to snatch up the majority of Guardianed souls when I would push forward, and in fact I was wondering if he was going to manage to turn things around thanks to that... and then it turned out Sorcha had already made it to his Altar and started Desecrating it, with my constant fighting with Jadugarr being a big part of what let Sorcha pull that off.

Contrast this overly-easy experience with the prior Charnel mission, which though not hard was also not easy. It's especially funny since the plot is trying to act like Jadugarr did a very solid defense and all.

Jadugarr always has noticeably more health and mana than wizard base values in any mission he shows up in. In conjunction with having one of the better shield spells, Jadugarr can be a pain to kill off and so in turn a pain to actually peel souls away from. He's kind of a boring wizard, honestly, especially considering just about all the campaign wizards are better than baseline...

Sorcha, on the other hand, has increased mana reserves and increased spell resistance. 25% for the latter, specifically, which doesn't sound like much except wait it's being stacked onto the 50% wizards uniformly have -Sorcha thus only takes 25% of what a spell is supposed to do, or half of what other wizards take. When you're fighting her, don't be thinking you can nuke her down with spells

Not that I was fighting her in this mission...

Though while we're on that point, it's worth mentioning that while shield spells don't reduce the damage from Desecrate, wizard spell resistance does. When you're fighting Sorcha, it's pretty unlikely she'll succumb to a Desecrate all by itself, and there's another wizard that's even more resistant to spells who you really just need to get units attacking to finish off during a Desecrate.

Something I didn't show off is the Boon in this mission. There's some Persephone units in a village I never went near. If they're all dead at the end of the mission, Charnel gives you a boon. By 'dead' I mean 'have corpses lying around'. If you Convert them, you don't get the Boon. So it's a Boon you basically outright need to read a guide to have any chance of figuring out, let alone even running into it by accident. Apparently you can also potentially have the Persephone units join you, oddly enough, in which case you'll still need to kill them and then not collect their souls if you want the Boon. It's bizarre.

Also note that even James is no longer willing to put up with me.

There was also that choice about 'do nothing' or 'dedicate yourself to justice'. If you choose to 'dedicate yourself to justice', things basically flip to as if you'd been following James and/or Persephone the whole time. It's a choice that kind of irritates me in its existence, in that it's basically just... obviating the meaning of choice. It's not like choosing to 'dedicate yourself to justice' kicks you into a version of events where Eldred is trying to atone for his sins, which would be kind of an interesting plotline with Eldred having fallen into old habits but this time going 'wait, no, this is what led to Marduk last time, let's not do that this time'. No, you just get to go straight to same-as-having-run-with-Team-Good-the-whole-time land, you just happen to be running around with Bad Guy spells for your more basic stuff with nobody objecting or anything. It's undermining the idea that your choices matter. In most games, this would be a minor irritant. In Sacrifice's case, a big part of its appeal is that it mostly does make your choices matter to a decent extent, so when it does stuff like this it stands out a lot more as unpleasant.

And the thing is, there's not an equivalent choice over on Route Good. If there was, I'd assume it was a game design thing, letting players scoop up the basic options from one set of paths or another before jumping ship to the other set of paths. Or maybe I'd assume the devs were wanting to clearly signal that after this point your choices definitely start mattering so here's your one and only take-back. No, this is just a 'Eldred kinda randomly wonders to himself if maybe he doesn't want to stick with the evil gods', which... why? It's redundant! The player can already go 'man, Charnel and/or Pyro are jerks, I think I want to go over to one of the other gods'.

So why have this sequence?

I'll be showing off the 'dedicate yourself to justice' dialogue in a later video, if you care, but that's a ways yet.

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Narratively, this mission is most significant for us meeting Marduk/Asher, and in the process getting the proper context of what's going on with Eldred. He used to serve a good ruler, the ruler died young, Eldred was unpopular and said lack of popularity was probably justified, and he decided to summon a demon to fight off all these people who didn't like him and ended up literally destroying his world instead. And now Marduk is here to kick off the apocalypse here, too.

This is pretty interesting about Eldred, and it's honestly one of the stronger reasons why I chose to go with Charnel first. Of the possible monogod narratives, Eldred serving Charnel makes the most sense. Others might be more appealing on a self-indulgent fantasy level, but as far as being an extension of Eldred's existing character and choices, Charnel is the most believable. Eldred's history is consistently that of a man who makes unsavory choices (Sometimes in service of a grander good, sometimes just out of his own personal interests), and while his motives include noble elements we also see there's a certain amount pride or ego to him. It would be a hard sell to tell a story of Eldred turning around and taking this opportunity to become a better person, especially when you look at stuff like how he talks about becoming the vagrant in the prophecy -his intention to capitalize on the prophecy to his own ends happens no matter which god you decide to go to first. Eldred just plain is like that, and it doesn't matter which route you pick as far as this goes.

And it's worth pointing out that the second Charnel mission has a bit of foreshadowing about this whole thing with Eldred's comment about having experience with summoning demons.

Now, of course, Eldred is committed to trying to defeat Marduk this time, and an argument can be made that this is meant to be a clear redemption arc... but... Marduk is a multiversal existential threat that appears to be following Eldred. You don't need to invoke a redemption arc to explain Eldred deciding to stand and fight instead of fleeing to another world. You just need to assume Eldred isn't an idiot, and recognizes that running away will just result in him constantly being on the run until such point as Marduk kills him, which will likely be in the near future given Marduk is a world-destroying demon. Especially since Eldred's dialogue implies he believes Marduk gets stronger with each world he destroys -if that is indeed true, running away is just making the problem worse.

We'll be touching on this point a bit more later.

See you next Charnel mission.

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