Sacrifice: Persephone Mission 6

For this mission, Persephone gives us, uuuuh...


Mutant
1100 Mana, 3 Souls

So having gotten a sneak peak of them two missions ago, now we have Mutants properly!

They're the Persephone artillery, and they're basically worse Abominations: they throw projectiles which dribble blood in their wake, but unlike Abominations this blood is purely aesthetic, disappointingly. The only other difference aside the intrinsic god-based modifications is that Mutants additionally have the supremely bizarre gimmick that when they die they heal all nearby allies by a fairly substantial amount. This... barely matters in practice, as melee counters to Mutants frequently one-shot them regardless, while if it's an artillery war what tends to happen is multiple Mutants die all at once. It's a neat idea, but it's really on the wrong unit; if a melee unit had been given this effect, it would actually help bolster your melee lines. As-is, it matters so little I tend to treat them as being straightforwardly 'Abomination, but worse'.

They're serviceable as artillery, don't get me wrong, but I honestly can't imagine why you'd choose them over Abominations.

The one thing that's particularly interesting about them is that the on-death healing is delivered in full instantly, where almost all healing in Sacrifice is delivered over time.


Healing Aura
1200 Mana

Healing Aura is, uuuuuh, a thing?

You slap it on a unit and for twenty seconds they heal all nearby friendly units by 70 HP a second. That works out to a total of 1400 HP to each unit that remains in the radius for the full duration, which is pretty respectable... but in combat situations, Healing Aura tends to be pretty flatly inferior to spamming Rainbow. It's slow, expensive, forces you to stop moving to cast it, and susceptible to being cut short by the unit being killed. I almost never use it, personally. The wiki notes it can be used to support units that are going to be away from the main of your force, such as a squad of melee fliers, giving them healing for a while even though they're out of your range, but its duration is a biiiit awkward for that in my experience. The main point in its favor is the game's mechanics let you potentially start casting on a unit just before it's going to exit your casting radius, and the spell will still go off just fine.

In conjunction with how Mutants are probably the second-worst artillery option after Flurries, I tend to skip out on this level as far as Persephone options goes. Why take Mutants when I could take Abominations, especially given Wailing Wall is actually very useful while Healing Aura is finicky at best? Or really, any of the non-Stratos options at this tier is better.

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The actual mission is... pretty much the Stratos assault on Dys, but you're three levels lower and so the end blob of defenders isn't something you can trivialize with anything along the lines of Tornado+Cloudkill. Oh, and you can skip out on dealing with that horror show by defecting to Charnel after dealing with Seerix.

The irritating thing is that you can get a Boon on this mission, but only by defecting to Charnel. If you stay true to Persephone, you get nothing. So basically a repeat of the Thestor/Boon thing of the game forcing you to choose between things you shouldn't have to choose between. Why is this a thing the Persephone route does? The other routes don't do it! It doesn't fit into Persephone's thematics, like some kind of 'doing good is hard/its own reward' thing!

(I have suspicions on what the why is, but I'll be getting into that in the final mission post)

That aside, the mission is straightforward enough.

Oh, and we've gotten to see Toldor as a friend. He's a representative of a unit we don't have yet, but he's kinda terrifying. You might notice he outright gibs a Deadeye early in the video. He's tough, he's lethal, and he's got a great special ability that means he basically invalidates his normal unit counterpart but we'll get to that when we get to it. Regardless, he makes this mission much more bearable. His only flaws are that he's slow, he's huge and easily gets caught on things as a result, and that he takes full damage from direct spells, as opposed to 10~% from everything else.

I'm not sure why Zyzyx didn't provide his description of the Mutant this time. It's just 'these mutants are best used attacking at a distance', but I honestly can't tell why it didn't trigger. At least this mission wasn't beset by catastrophic scripting errors...

Also notice that we're still locked into Persephone. We could, of course, have defected to Charnel, so strictly speaking you're only locked into Persephone for half a mission if you don't want to be locked in, but still, keep it in mind.

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Narratively, this mission annoys me for several reasons.

If you pay attention to the map, Golgotha was directly adjacent to an island that's marked on the map as Glebe territory. This right there makes it questionable to buy that Eldred is supposed to be trapped behind enemy lines -but okay, I'm willing to buy that this is an innocent oversight. (Even if it highlights my prior point that James being Persephone's ally without explanation isn't natural; this issue would be sidestepped if they weren't allies!)

Harder to overlook is that the game straight-up tells us 'yeah, Persephone can't send you any help' and promptly has Zyzyx telling us that Persephone sent over Toldor, apparently oblivious to the contradiction. This is particularly mindboggling in conjunction with Toldor's obvious default location of Arborea being practically on the other side of the map. Exactly how is he supposed to have gotten from there to here if travel is sufficiently arduous that being trapped behind enemy lines matters?

Then there's the point that this is one of only two times you can defect from a 'good' god to an 'evil' one. The other one was in James' Pyrodraulic Dynamo mission, and in that mission you had to work to stumble into the possibility of defection. Here, it's automatically forced on you as a possibility. And where the James' Pyrodraulic Dynamo mission had both a Boon for staying faithful and a Boon for defecting, this one only has a Boon for defecting. This ties into stuff we'll be getting to later, but keep it in mind.

Otherwise, it's just... oh look, we've killed Charnel, and afterward Persephone wants us to go kill some Hellmouths. Whatever.

See you next Persephone mission.