Sacrifice: Pyro Mission 8

As with the prior gods, Pyro gives us no new units at this level, instead providing...


Volcano
1800 Mana

Pyrodraulic Dynamo in a can!

No, seriously. The Pyrodraulic Dynamo's effect is just the Volcano spell being done by scripting instead of by a wizard.

Volcano is another of my favorite spells in the game on a design level. It's heinously lethal, the single most lethal spell in the entire game in terms of actual damage output, but because of the casting time and terrain distortion opponents can see it coming and react to it, potentially attempting to interrupt it. It also has a long cooldown time at a full six minutes (This is shared with both Bore and Death, though it feels much more deserved in Volcano's case), so you should be careful in how you use it. The AI is dumb and won't try to move units out of an incoming Volcano, so it can potentially do amazing damage to an enemy's army -if I'd managed to get even one solidly-placed Volcano in this mission I could easily have wiped out Jadugarr's entire army.

The actual behavior is that the lava eruption does 1000 damage per second, and additionally balls of fire are launched from above downward. If there are nearby units, the balls of fire will be actively targeted at them, though they don't home nor do they predict their target's trajectory so any unit that's bothering to move will probably not actually be hit, but they do a hefty 1000 damage apiece in a fairly sizable area so the Volcano still dissuades units from trying to pass through a huge area. That's enough to one-shot level 1 units, and it only takes a handful of them placed well to kill most tougher creatures. Against groups, they'll draw multiple balls of fire at once, so that can happen quite suddenly if someone is reckless. While it doesn't crop up in many situations, you can potentially use terrain to hide from the balls of fire -I do that in this video with my Altar, in fact.

The eruption itself lasts for a full minute, so it's quite effective as area denial, overall more effective than the walls are if you ignore that the walls have shorter cooldowns.

It's very much one of Pyro's most stand-out spells.


Blind Rage
1800 Mana

Blind Rage is, uuuuuh. Frankly? It's probably the worst spell at this level, full stop.

Its actual effect, as best as I can tell, is that it hits a unit and that unit and any other units nearby temporarily turn hostile to all nearby units, ignoring orders from their owning wizard. It has a long casting time, making it easy to interrupt, it's of nearly no use for lobbing into close-combat as affected units can still choose to target your units (I don't even know if it can affect your own units; if it can, that just makes it even worse), and in the campaign it's not really that distinct from general AI stupidity. I really have no idea why it's in this spell tier, because it's terrible.

It's sufficiently terrible that even though Volcano is amazing I'm still hesitant to take Pyro for this spell level. Charnel's combination of Death and Intestinal Vaporization tends to be more effective than Blind Rage plus Volcano is.

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The actual mission is hideously-designed.

You start with 5 souls and a couple of Manahoars. In short order Jadugarr will bear down on you with a large army, including two endgame units and a pile of artillery. Additionally, there's a separate attack by even more units that you'll trigger by setting up your initial Manalith, and realistically all the fighting is going to be happening right on top of your Altar. The only way to have things not go utterly terribly is to manage to place a Volcano well, ideally managing to kill off Jadugarr and his toughest units together -and this is not only inherently tricky but is further worsened by by the fact that Jadugarr's forces are heavy on units that can effortlessly interrupt your spellcasting. You might notice me casting Fireform in the video and then staying away from units -I'm trying to avoid the freezing effects interrupting my casting. And it's not great, as two of Jadugarr's unit types can still interrupt spellcasting even with a shield up.

The intention with the design is relatively obvious, and it's dumb. Jadugarr will eventually teleport out, and you switch over to fighting Hachimen's forces, which are less ridiculously large and Hachimen takes long enough to show up you'll have a proper chance to get souls from the Peasants on the island and from the not-wizard-affiliated attack waves, plus maybe some of Jadugarr's souls. So clearly you're meant to fight a furious defense, have Jadugarr eventually vanish, and have managed to wrest away a few souls from him so you can then have a more conventional 1v1 with Hachimen.

This is not fun. This is not interesting. You're spending ten minutes getting kicked around by the game, with Jadugarr only failing to kill you due to blatant AI mercy, with Jadugarr periodically backing off for no real reason and being unusually reluctant to try to steal your souls, and once he arbitrarily vanishes... well, if Jadugarr did manage to steal some of your souls, it's time for a horrendous uphill grind in trying to kill Hachimen, whose AI is not artificially extra-stupid for your benefit. On the other hand, if you pulled off the well-placed Volcano like I described earlier, you'll probably be an alarming number of souls ahead and promptly effortlessly squash Hachimen. It's only if you're in that middle ground where you managed to hold onto your souls and peel away a handful from Jadugarr that the Hachimen fight is fair and balanced, kinda, and it still results in a slog of a mission due to, among other things, sheer size. And Hachimen outright starts with units too high level for him to be able to summon, and too high level for you to be able to summon, as one final bit of miserable obnoxiousness.

Oh, and taking the second Manafount out from your base arbitrarily spawns a blob of level 1 fliers atop your first Manafount, as one extra insult to injury. And they're high enough some of your ranged units will fail to attack them, which is bizarre since ranged units normally utterly ignore height when factoring in range. Once things aren't hectic, yeah, they're free souls, but in the middle of things that can easily mean you manage to push Jadugarr off for a bit and then get screwed over by a bunch of spell-interrupting fliers getting added to the chaos.

The whole mission is just one long grinding time-waster. It's especially disappointing given this is Volcano's chance to shine.

This isn't even touching on the really baffling decision to have getting close to Hachimen kick you into a cinematic outright. It's literally just talking, but it can still screw you over -in this video, it interrupts me casting a spell, and while the game was nice enough to not push it into a proper cooldown it's still not a good thing. Why not just have Hachimen and Eldred talk while stuff is going on? Why bother with Cinema Mode per se??

Oh, and if you went through the effort of keeping Faestus alive up to this point, it's basically impossible to keep him alive in this mission. Thanks, game. Maybe if you got Animate Dead...

The sad thing is, there's still a mission unequivocally worse than this one.

As an aside, Hachimen technically has bonus spells in this mission, but it's not many by his standards, and the only one he seems to actually use is Erupt from James. The fact that he has Erupt is actually fairly obnoxious, because it's easy to mistake it for Volcano -and yes, Hachimen has Volcano in this mission, and is willing to use it. Occasionally.

And on a totally different note, doing this video quite clearly confirmed to me that Manaliths have variable resistances, and in particular are far less susceptible to spell damage than to melee damage. Otherwise the Volcano would've vaporized the Manalith in no time flat. Similarly, this very clearly confirmed that under-construction Manaliths don't take damage, a point that makes it clear that summoning a Manalith can be a useful stalling tactic, and also means there's no reason to not start summoning a Manalith the instant the previous building is gone, even if ranged fire is still on the way.

Curiously, when I was doing a rainbow run for purposes we'll come back to much later, Jadugarr inexplicably took much longer to show up and was much less effective in general, as well as one of the scripted ambushes failing to fire. Jadugarr was so ineffective I actually managed to advance on his Altar and begin Desecrating it -at which point the 'bye, I'm leaving Hachimen to deal with you' cinematic kicked in. I'm not sure if that was just really weird coincidental timing or if it's actually the case that the mission is scripted to initiate the cinematic and get rid of Jadugarr in response to you initiating a Desecration on him. If it's the latter, that would be potentially exploitable, albeit dangerous to try given that Jadugarr takes all his units with him and so you'll probably end up with fewer souls than if you just fought him and waited for his timer to run out.

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Narratively, we've indulged Pyro's paranoid conviction this is all some trick of Persephone's only to confirm what we already knew: she's dead. Also this mission, and only this mission, makes like Hachimen going to Marduk is particularly significant. It's weird, and it's also one of the only times we'll get to see Hachimen be anything other than a filler wizard not meaningfully acknowledged by the plot.

Most bizarre is that Eldred is talking like he's met Jadugarr before and has reason to hate him. We've spent the last several missions locked into Pyro's route, with none of those missions involving Jadugarr, and there's limited opportunity to meet Jadugarr prior to this lengthy Pyro-locked chain of missions. I'll talk some more about this later, but I have reason to suspect the original intention was that Jadugarr would be the primary villain of the game, in which case probably the thing of mission 4 always having an encounter with Marduk would likely have instead been mission 4 always involving an unpleasant encounter with Jadugarr, which would explain this particular oddness.

Now, I complained at length about the gameplay of this mission, but the most infuriating thing is that there's zero narrative point to putting up with all this crap. Persephone is immediately established as dead, and when you beat the mission there's no dialogue suggesting you persisted so you could confirm it. Banishing Jadugarr and Hachimen is pointless -it's not going to kill them, and the plot has made no attempt to suggest we care about kicking them out of this area. We're fighting them because this is a video game and being a video game we fight everything it puts in front of us. Heck, being banished ourselves wouldn't be a big deal. It just means we'd get kicked back to Pyroborea and get on with whatever is our next business. Realistically, Eldred should either teleport out as AI wizards are perfectly happy to do anytime the plot feels like it, or should just collect his souls and let Jadugarr banish him, not stick out the fight.

Adding insult to injury is Mithras and Eldred's dialogue about how they would've expected Jadugarr to fight harder. Not, say, wondering why he didn't try to finish the job or anything, what could be so urgent that he'd just leave. No, they make it sound like Jadugarr stomping you into the dirt is Jadugarr not trying very hard.

Ugh, I'd forgotten how angry Pyro's route makes me.

See you next Pyro mission.