Sacrifice: Stratos Mission 4


For this mission, Stratos provides...


Storm Giant
1000 Mana, 2 Souls

The Storm Giant is Stratos' equivalent to Netherfiends, Firefists, and Taurocks; a durable early-game melee unit that isn't particularly fast. The Storm Giant is actually one of the tougher ones, with 40% resistance to melee damage and 20% resistance to ranged damage, helping offset their Stratos-typical lacking HP. This is good, as they're actually the one exception to the Stratos' statline on speed, and they're specifically slower than they should be. Still faster than their equivalents, but not as much as other Stratos units are to their equivalents.

Their actual gimmick is that lightning effects power them up. This includes Lightning, the Chain Lightning spell we just got in this mission, probably one other we'll get later though I've never tested it per se, and critically it includes their own innate ability of Call Lightning. They still take damage from electrical effects, though the damage is less than it should be by an amount I'm unclear on, which helps a bit. I'm not sure the precise nature of the statistical boosts they get out of being hit with lightning damage -I only know of the more obvious effect that they spend a while sparking with electricity, zapping nearby units. This effect is actually indiscriminate; on the one hand, this can allow a single Storm Giant to be hit with eg Lightning and kick off a chain of lightning activations so your entire mob of Storm Giants is bolstered. On the other hand, it means groups of Storm Giants tend to rapidly kill themselves if you try to take advantage of their central gimmick. In real terms you should generally only use them in small groups, one or two or maybe three at a time, and preferably keeping them separated if you can spare the micro.

I personally consider Storm Giants to be inarguably the worst representative of their class. In a mono-Stratos force they're important, as Stratos desperately needs something to fill the role of 'durable meatshield' and this is his earliest option, but in a rainbow force the only reason I'd consider incorporating them into my force is if I wanted Chain Lightning that desperately.

Speaking of.


Chain Lightning
800 Mana

Chain Lightning is basically Stratos' idea of Dragonfire, and overall it's pretty clearly worse than Dragonfire. It doesn't hit as hard and it doesn't do splash damage; its only advantages are that Chain Lightning's jumps are fast and the cooldown on the spell is also shorter. (35 seconds instead of 45 seconds) Of these, the speed is the main one that matters, as it does mean Chain Lightning can instantly wipe out 6 fragile units where Dragonfire would take longer due to its swooping behavior and slow travel speed. Chain Lightning's jumps are also somewhat more predictable than Dragonfire's retargeting, which is overall a bigger advantage to it, since you don't have to worry so much about it grounding into Manahoars wastefully so long as you bother to get a handle on how its jumping behavior works.

On the other hand, Chain Lightning seems to be prone to wasting itself on the ground -the wiki claims it can do friendly fire if there's inadequate enemies to bounce to, but I've never seen that happen. It just discharges into the ground instead. The actual issue is that sometimes it will do this even though there's perfectly accessible enemies in bounce range.

I find Chain Lightning satisfying to use, but I feel it's one of Stratos' worse spell choices. Dragonfire fills a similar role at the same spell level while being harder-hitting and with less of a tendency toward wastage and all, and it gets paired with Pyromaniacs which are a plenty good unit for various purposes where Storm Giants are iffy.

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The mission is fairly straightforward if irritating if you don't care about getting the Boon. 'Irritating' because Acheron has a lot of souls, is a pain to actually kill with Stratos forces since he's basically immune to spell damage and Stratos units are mostly pretty bad at actually killing things, and Acheron outright has Guardianed units that are higher-level than anything he should be able to field right now, which can make the whole thing slow-going, particularly if you do what I did and tell Shakti to play defensive. The whole thing can thus end up a bit of a slog, even though it's really not that hard.

If you're trying to get the Boon, though, it gets tedious.

First of all, it becomes a lot more important that it's so difficult to peel souls away from Acheron; you need to get 24 souls worth of stuff, preferably more than that so you can also field some Manahoars and maybe even some regular units. Quite frankly it's usually best to murder the Peasants exactly as I did so you can harvest their souls. (Which feels meta-appropriate, honestly, given how we already know Stratos is a tricksy backstabber) Otherwise you'll be here forever.

Second of all... for some ungodly reason the developers thought it was okay to make the process of delivering souls involve you standing in place while 1 soul trickles away at a time every several seconds. Given you need to deliver 24 souls, that means the delivery time is measured in minutes, and the sane thing to do is generally going to be to reach the number you're satisfied with and then just stand there and wait. Given Shakti can fend off Acheron on her own and the AI's preferences for targeting the nearest things first, this isn't even something dangerous; you can quite literally take a bathroom or snack break and leave the game running.

Oh, and then you have to wait even longer for the six Silverbacks to actually show up, which is particularly annoying given that 6 Silverbacks is such complete overkill that the rest of the mission is essentially a formality at that point. Not quite -Stratos is serious about not letting any of the Silverbacks die, you will fail the mission if you let any of them die- but it's really hard to get a Silverback killed if you're not actively trying to get them killed.

It is sort of neat to get a sneak peek at Silverbacks in a framework that makes it more obvious how powerful they are, at least, but ugh, this mission is such a timewaster.

Also note that Surtur is not with us in this mission. He's another weird hero about join mechanics.

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Narratively, Stratos continues to be smug and plot behind people's backs without them realizing it. Yes, Persephone just handed over a territory of hers to Stratos, who we know is a backstabber.

I mean, if you did mono-Stratos first you might not realize Persephone is making a mistake at this point, but honestly I'd be surprised if Stratos didn't rub most players wrong right off the bat. He's an entertaining jerk, just as Charnel is, but he's not really coming across like a tolerable person, and I'm pretty sure that's not just cross-run knowledge at work.

To be fair to Stratos' campaign, where Charnel's campaign didn't really have much of an arc period, Stratos' campaign is, in-character to the god, about setting up plots and plans that pay off down the line. The... previous two missions weren't terribly important narratively, but this one is Stratos doing some actual maneuvering that will pay off down the line, even if it's not super-obvious in doing the mission itself.

See you next Stratos mission.

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