Sacrifice: Persephone Mission 7

For this mission, Persephone gives us stuff we don't actually want.


Ent
1300 Mana, 4 Souls

The Ent is the unit type Toldor is, and it's also a unit type that contributes to me not being a fan of Druids and to a lesser extent Shrikes.

The Ent's primary thing is being a slow-moving, highly durable tank of a melee unit, just like the Jabberocky and Yeti. In this role it's okay, but probably outperformed by the Yeti just because of the Yeti's freezing effect. Like the Jabberocky and Yeti, it's resistant to physical attacks (25%) but weak to spells, particularly splash spells. (Doubled damage from direct spells, +150% damage from splash spells) Its distinguishing gimmick compared to the Jabberocky and Yeti is that it has an activatable ability that slaps Life Shield on all nearby allies (Aside the wizard) including the Ent itself, without any regard to the unit's god type and so on.

This Life Shield does not stack with the Life Shields Shrikes and Druids can generate. It also does not stack if multiple Ents are around. The first point means Shrikes become almost directly inferior to Braniacs once you have Ents around to gift Life Shield while Druids become laughable as an option compared to literally every other basic melee unit (Even aside that Druids don't have qualities that keep them relevant by the time Ents are a thing, where eg Cogs do), while the second point means Ents are generally not a good idea to field in groups. An Ent and two Trolls is usually more useful than two Ents.

This is a big part of why Toldor's timing is rather irritating. With Toldor around, you probably shouldn't bother summoning Ents at all, especially since Toldor is faster, even more resistant to physical attacks, and not actively weak to spells. In fact, he's outright severely resistant to splash spell damage, only taking normal damage from direct spells.

I personally don't like Ents from a multiplayer wizard-building perspective, but to an extent this is more because they're paired with Vinewall than anything else. I find them more consistently useful than Jabberockies, it's just Bombardment is generally more useful than Vinewall. Yeti, similarly, are overall a bit more useful in my experience than Ents are, but the big thing is that Fence is better than Vinewall too. The ability to give your entire army a defensive boost is genuinely a pretty big deal in its own right, though, and the Ent's balance of speed and durability compared to the alternatives is surprisingly useful in its own right.


Vinewall
1500 Mana

Vinewall, as I deliberately demonstrate in the video, doesn't actually work.

What it's supposed to do is automatically hit anything that walks through it with the Entangling Vines effect, and according to the wiki at some point it did do exactly that... and then a patch hit and broke it. Oops.

It's still usable as a wall, even in multiplayer, since unit AI hates passing through walls regardless of whether the walls do anything, but player wizards can and will freely ignore it, and units that are coerced into it won't suffer any penalties.

To be fair, 'hits trespassers with Entangling Vines' wouldn't have been that great an effect regardless, not when compared against James' 'do damage on top of temporarily immobilizing the victim'...

So yeah. In the campaign, this level is irritating thanks to Toldor rendering Ents redundant, and even in multiplayer I'm not sure it's worth taking.

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The mission itself is... kinda baffling.

On paper, it's a straightforward 1v1 with a secondary gimmick where the mission doesn't actually end until you've killed the Hellmouths. You can actually ignore Sorcha and just focus on the Hellmouths, but given she's running around with Warmongers that's risking her blindsiding you and killing your forces when you're in the middle of a fight so it's not my preferred way of doing things.

In practice, it just feels fairly pointless. Sorcha herself is strangely unthreatening, Warmongers or no, and has utterly inadequate Guardians. Defeating her is not an interesting challenge in its own right. Even more irritatingly, there's not a lot of point to the game not simply handing over the victory once Sorcha is banished; you can't possibly lose at that point, with the only way the rest of the mission matters aside how much of your time as a human being it wastes being the possibility you have heroes along and get them killed. It's actually pretty hard to get any such heroes killed, though, particularly since the Persephone and James heroes are especially prone to being ridiculously broken. If you had Sirocco along -which is totally possible, you just need to have swung by James' second mission- she could handle the Hellmouths by herself.

One minor oddity worth mentioning is that if you attempt to Convert a Hellmouth, that actually revives it until it's successfully Converted. This can add even more wasted time if, for example, you were to banish Sorcha, then go kill the first Hellmouth and initiate a Conversion, and then go over to the other two Hellmouths and kill them and out of habit start Converting them too, with one of them reviving before the first Hellmouth's Conversion finished. This is completely plausible to have happen, and in fact is exactly what happened to me the first time I ever played this mission.

At least it doesn't have broken scripting?

Honestly, I'd rather be banging my head against one of the overly-hard-but-actually-interesting missions than wasting twenty minutes on this mission.

Also notice that the next mission is still Persephone-locked. Yes, that means that, aside the possibility of defecting to Charnel, if you do Persephone 5 you get locked in for four full missions! There is no other route in the campaign that where you spend that many missions unable to actually make choices.

I really want to know why the Persephone route is so full of problems.

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Narratively... the story is doing a weird, kinda creepy thing that's somewhat subtle with Eldred. Specifically, ever since we committed to Persephone over Charnel, Eldred has started talking a bit like Persephone does, with blather about justice and a higher ratio of archaic phrases than he already has. It's jarringly out of character for Eldred and it doesn't feel natural; sure, okay, Eldred made an explicit decision to stick with Persephone when offered an alternative, but the alternative is Torture And Murder For Funzies God.

It's not like Sacrifice is playing it as Eldred being seriously tempted by Charnel's offer when you refuse, and even if it tried it would feel off given that in every other route Eldred is both fundamentally mercenary and treated as basically a good or even noble person, just one who can lose sight of things important to him in pursuing a goal. It feels like the writer intended that Eldred has more properly embraced Persephone's ideology and cause as part and parcel of rejecting Charnel's, but Charnel is really the wrong god to be suggesting that a rejection of them would involve doubling down on Eldred's current path. Maybe if this transition occurred after assaulting Pyro's capitol, assuming a similar 'betray Persephone' option was provided, I could buy it, but as-is it's honestly just out of place.

I suppose this inexplicable personality shift is less inane then Eldred arbitrarily going along with Stratos without proper commentary, at least?

Oh, and we had the narrative actually acknowledge Hellmouths exist but not tell us anything we didn't already basically know. They're demons, they're big and nasty, whatever.

The mission feels pretty pointless, honestly. This is exacerbated by how routine it is for the player to end up fielding hordes of Hellmouths and their equivalents on other gods in the late game, such that 'oh no 3 Hellmouths might join up with Marduk or Pyro or Stratos we must stop that' feels like a pretty bizarre response, but even if the gameplay weren't undermining this... it feels pointless regardless. Why are we supposed to care about this mission? Sorcha not playing nice is supposed to tell us what, exactly, beyond that this is a video game about wizards fighting other wizards?

It wouldn't have been that hard to slip in a bit of dialogue suggesting these Hellmouths are demonic leadership. Sprinkle in a few Netherfiends that share their faction with the Hellmouths, maybe get creative and make the three Hellmouths outright three different team colors with their associated minions. Suddenly it feels like we're actually doing something!

Alas, no.

See you next Persephone mission.