Sacrifice: Persephone Mission 2

For this mission, Persephone starts giving us her better stuff. Specifically...


Scarab
600 Mana, 2 Souls

The Scarab is the most bluntly supportive of the bugs, being the only one that doesn't have any capacity to harm enemies. Instead, its 'attack' is a shot that heals its target. Importantly, they'll still listen to attack orders, which is why you'll see me unselecting them throughout this video and future videos; I don't want them healing my enemies. Left to their own devices, they'll autonomously notice allies are injured and try to heal them. They're not perfect at this -they have the same partially randomized trajectory found on any ranged unit, though their own accuracy score is the best you'll found outside the sniper class- but they're pretty good, particularly as their projectile is reasonably quick. Notably, as unit level/quality goes up, they actually get effectively better at healing, as unit level/quality is fairly strongly correlated to size in Sacrifice, and so you'll see less in the way of managing to just miss at a key moment as you're fielding bigger, meaner things.

I like to have a couple of Scarabs to start with, and add another periodically as my army size grows. Unit quantity rather than soul quantity tends to drive my decision in this regard, though there's several factors involved, most notably the question of how much healing you'll have your wizard outputting. Scarabs can, to an extent, be treated as a soul investment that saves on micro, after all. And there's more Persephone options down the line for healing, further complicating the topic.

I'm not sure the precise amount of healing provided by the Scarab. I'm quite confident it's less than the amount the Healing spell provides overall, but the exact value I'm unclear on. In any event their healing is delivered over time just like with the Heal spell, which makes their hair-trigger desire to heal less wasteful than it might otherwise be.

Scarabs get less useful as army size climbs, though. They don't prioritize targeting more badly wounded units over less badly wounded ones, they don't change targets until they've had a new chance to fire which can lead to situations where a Scarab or even a group of Scarabs keeps healing a unit that's taking some minor damage over time while ignoring your units that actually need healing, and of course their healing projectile is a proper projectile that can be intercepted by other bodies. As army size climbs, they get less and less likely to hit their target in the first place, and in particular get less reliable at helping units in melee. These points aren't too bad if you're trying to build a ranged-focused army, but honestly if you're building a ranged-focused army it's probably more useful to have more shots being fired at enemies than to invest souls into healing. Dead enemies can't hurt your units, after all.

I also have my doubts they're all that great in multiplayer, to be honest. They're a great convenience feature in single-player, but seem more questionable in multiplayer to me.

On a different note, Scarabs can be a cool option to splash into a Charnel-heavy force, making it so you don't have to bother manually healing Charnel units between combats. Of course, Persephone has better options for splashing in later, so... honestly, I'd probably rather take something else. Maybe Vorticks; Charnel is biased to a surprising degree toward ranged attackers anyway, and Air Shield is a fantastic shield of course.

In spite of not being a proper ranged unit, the Scarab is still weak to melee damage, taking triple damage from melee. If you're fighting an enemy whose Scarabs are being a nuisance, melee is the ideal solution. At least until you've got artillery to flatten them incidentally.


Ethereal Form
400 Mana

Ethereal Form is simultaneously amazing and terrible.

On the one hand, it's fifteen seconds of total invulnerability. This includes not only all the damage other shields reduce, but also damage over time effects (Which, as I've harped on repeatedly ignore damage reduction of any other kind) and even Desecration's attack.

On the other hand, it has a cooldown of 30 seconds, which in conjunction with the casting time of 4 seconds means that continuously casting it will leave you in shield mode for less than half your overall time. The next-worst, for reference, is James' Skin of Stone, which lasts 80 seconds with a cooldown of 110 seconds; thus, a Skin of Stone wizard is vulnerable to freezing and so on for about a quarter of their overall time. And 15 seconds is not a long enough duration for Ethereal Form to last an entire combat the way Skin of Stone will.

As such, Ethereal Form is, unlike other shield spells, not something you just blithely throw out at the beginning of a battle and try to remember to put it back up if it fades before the fight is over, but rather is something you need to use with thought and ideally try to use yourself as a meatshield to keep damage off your other units and maximize its benefits -and then be ready to duck back out the line of fire when it runs out.

Note that while Ethereal Form blocks damage, it (mostly) doesn't block secondary effects attached to damage unless they're effects shields already block. (It does block the mana and experience drain of Desecration) ie Ethereal Form will prevent a Yeti or Silverback from freezing you, because any shield would do that, but it won't prevent a Tickferno from wiping out your mana or a Vortick from launching you into the air.

Incidentally, Ethereal Form is a big part of what makes Persephone wizards such a pain to properly steal souls from in the campaign, as it can be quite difficult to actually kill them. Yogo in particular, with his abnormally large HP pool and quite fast regeneration backed by him probably spamming Healing on himself can take forever to kill if you don't have some way to stunlock him or something like a well-timed Volcano to kill him nearly instantly. James' wizards consistently take forever to die, but sufficient firepower will kill them even with their shield up, and it stays down long enough in a row that even if you're struggling to overcome their self-healing with Skin of Stone up you should be able to take them out once it fades. Persephone wizards don't necessarily provide that assurance. It can be quite irritating.

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The mission is a fairly straightforward introduction to 1v1 wizard combat, more or less. You've got Lord Surtur letting you skip summoning melee to start with, and Seerix is pretty misleading since she tosses out Wrath while otherwise functioning as a Charnel wizard here, not to mention she has multiple Deadeyes to further distort things. (What is with all these early snipers in Persephone's missions?)

The Boon is a bit of a joke. It's achieved by defeating Seerix quickly, where 'quickly' means in under eighteen minutes. The entire video isn't eighteen minutes, and it includes loading screens, the briefing, etc. In practice it's basically the same thing as a 'you beat the mission, here's a free Boon' scenario. It's not like I was being particularly fast -you'd have to play very slowly, or get badly bogged down to not get it, and honestly you're a lot more likely to get Surtur killed than to run down the Boon timer. Speaking of, you do fail the mission if Surtur dies.

On a different note, this is actually the same map where, over in the Stratos playthrough, we fought Sorcha and Buta, the latter with Abraxus' help. It specifically only makes use of the portion we fought Buta in, but the rest of the map does exist, and oddly enough Abraxus and her Altar exist on the mainland and can be Teleported to if you get line of sight on them, as she's considered to be an ally. This is somewhat surprising, since this mission is clearly meant to be equivalent to the Stratos mission where we were receiving Surtur, and yet that was on a completely different map.

This mission also seems to have fairly severe scripting issues. The first time I recorded this mission, banishing Seerix didn't trigger the cinematic or end the mission or anything. I wandered around, tried delivering Surtur to the endpoint, tried Teleporting Surtur over to Abraxus, etc, and ultimately when I gave up and quit out of the mission Zyzyx spontaneously started up on his Guardian spiel. My suspicion is that the game was, for some reason, hung up on that bit of dialogue -it hadn't played earlier- and that if I'd managed to get it to play in the mission the rest of the scripting would also have fired...

... in part because I had a similar issue in the next mission.

What is with Persephone's missions?

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Narratively... uh... we basically just repeated the Surtur retrieval mission in Stratos' route, but with less drama. We did also learn why Surtur was ever imprisoned in the first place, said point emphasizing that Persephone isn't really all that pleasant a person (Exactly how long has Surtur been imprisoned?), and perhaps more importantly we learned the twin points that returning Surtur was part of the process of re-initiating an alliance with Stratos and going with that the part where it was Persephone's idea to ally with Stratos. That's a bit interesting, I suppose?

It's worth pointing out that the game never really explains what Seerix is doing here, nor why Peasants -ie Persephone civilians- are here to be murdered by her, when it should be Snowmen given this is an Empyrea map. Acheron, in the Stratos counterpart mission, was pretty clearly there to kill Surtur, and it was easy to infer in conjunction with this mission's information that Charnel was trying to sabotage the Stratos/Persephone alliance, but in this mission Seerix appears to have been just randomly murdering the wrong civilian type for giggles, coincidentally blocking the way for delivering Surtur.

This might not stand out to a first-time player, but a contributing factor in why I saved Persephone for last is the sheer oddness of several of her missions, where stuff happens for no obviously sensible reason and it doesn't seem to have crossed the devs' collective mind that these things kinda demand an explanation. In the other routes, generally things made a kind of sense eventually or in the context of information from other routes (eg Charnel mission 3 is where we get an explanation for why Charnel and Pyro are allied at all, a fact not explained in any other route) or at least the lack of sense was something like 'there's no narrative logic to Eldred sticking Stratos out to the end, but this is a choice presented to the player'. Persephone's route is a lot more just... full of weird holes.

See you next Persephone mission, where we get to see another of those weird holes in action.