Sacrifice: Persephone Mission 9
For this mission, Persephone gives us her ultimate unit, just like the other gods did theirs.
Dragon
1900 Mana, 5 Souls
As usual with ultimate units, the Dragon has 50% spell resistance, 25% ranged resistance, and no melee resistance. It's also a flier, like most of its fellow ultimates. Unlike all the other ultimate units, the Dragon is a dedicated melee flier, with all the problems that entails, only made worse by its sheer size causing flocks of Dragons to tend to outright stop doing damage to ground units because they're so busy shoving each other around. Where every other ultimate unit can be spammed in the endgame, Dragons are something you should only field a few of at a time.
The melee flier issues aside, Dragons are pretty dang amazing. They do extraordinary damage when they hit, and since like all the other flying ultimate units Dragons are insanely fast the fact that they're melee isn't actually that much of a burden as far as their ability to get in and start doing damage. Their damage is so incredibly high you could be forgiven for being unaware that they can inflict Grasping Vines on a successful hit; much of the time when a Dragon bites something, the thing is dead in at most two hits. Even other ultimate units go down in at most seven hits, and only the Rhinok takes that long to die. Furthermore, as was seen back in the Stratos mission in which we assassinated Shakti, Dragons hit so hard they quite consistently cause targets to flinch, which can even interrupt a wizard's spellcasting, even with a shield up! And of course melee attacks, once initiated, will inevitably hit their target unless the actual animation is interrupted, so even though Dragons have a surprisingly long attack animation there's nearly no escape once it's started. You might get away with Freezing the Dragon or the like to interrupt it, but that's about it.
Oh, and Dragons have Breath of Life, which is pretty much Charnel's Animate Dead in unit ability form. Since they have nothing else to spend their Mana on, this means adding Dragons to your forces substantially bolster the survivability of your overall army. Notably, Breath of Life revives a unit at full HP and full mana, so it's not possible to 'wear down' a pair of Dragons even if they're separated from mana sources. You need to kill them both at about the same time or siphon their mana or something.
I personally tend to rate them as the overall worst of the ultimate units just thanks to how much being an enormous melee flier gets in the way of their utility, but they're not actually bad, and I'd certainly rate them as better-designed than eg the brokenness of Rhinoks. The fact that they're melee also gives them the unique quality of effortlessly stomping Guardian forces where the other ultimate units can struggle for a surprisingly long time in quite large numbers to clear out a strong Guardian. This helps make up for Charm being unable to pierce Guardian-ness when talking a mono-Persephone army.
From a campaign perspective, they also let you stop worrying so much about your heroes. Just keep Dragons on hand and breath life back into them anytime they die. This is convenient given how many good heroes Persephone gets -and if we'd dipped into James' second mission, we could also have Sirocco to be even more ridiculous.
Oh, and the wiki seems to indicate they have the same area heal on death as Mutants do. I couldn't say for sure, but they do have the same rainbow sparkle effect Mutants give off on death so I find it plausible. If they do indeed have ir, it's far more useful than on Mutants, being on a heavy melee units exactly as I said would be better than on Mutants, and in fact on one with built-in resurrection; having a pair of Dragons get worn down, one dies and this heals the other so it has time to revive the first? That's actually a really great combination.
Oddly, Dragons are the second and last Persephone unit to deviate from Persephone's god statline, and like the Scarab before they specifically have worse maximum HP. Enough so that it actually has only barely more HP than a Hellmouth (100 more, when they both have over 5000) in spite of Charnel having 90% of base HP values.
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The mission is weird and mildly gimmicky. You start out fighting Hachimen and Abraxus, and partway through Marduk and Jadugarr plot-cheat-teleport in and instantly kill Abraxus using a single Manahoar for Desecration plus a Lightning that arbitrarily one-hit-kills Abraxus, at which point Jadugarr is your new foe instead of Abraxus... and is probably a bit of a joke in spite of having a rather massive army, because for some bizarre reason instead of replacing Abraxus' Prime Altar with his own his Altar is placed much farther forward and with zero defenses.
So, uh, the mission basically gets cut a bit short. Oops.
It's worth pointing out that, uniquely to this mission, Hachimen is using Charnel as his base spell list instead of Pyro. It's easy to think he's using a Pyro list with bonus Charnel spells, as his starting units are more or less all Pyro units, but nope. He's still got his usual gimmick of added-in spells, such as Chain Lightning and Cloudkill and summoning Flurries oddly enough, but the overall result is pretty weird.
I kind of suspect this is an accident, honestly, where someone set his base god type to Charnel and nobody noticed that this had happened.
There's also that arbitrary scripted Cloudkill spawn when you approach the more convenient Manafount, I guess.
But, uuuh, mostly the mission is... not terribly difficult or interesting. Once you've Desecrated Hachimen's Altar, it's probably all over.
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Narratively, this mission is... a mess. We've got plot-teleporting instant-death-while-Abraxus-patiently-watches-and-does-nothing nonsense, we've got the Persephone route springing the 'Stratos is behind everything' reveal earlier than you get it in the Stratos route, and Persephone... seems to be dead. We'll... be coming back to that particular topic in the next post...
On a different note, notice that the timeline here makes no sense. This is clearly meant to be concurrent with James' version of events, but that demands Hachimen are simultaneously in Agothera and Thryring and so is Abraxus and I don't even know how to begin on the wackiness with Jadugarr. You can technically try to argue that it's a butterfly effect thing based on Eldred's choice, but that has the key problem that Marduk and Stratos' forces just plain don't have wizards to spare. All four of them end up showing up here, so who is attacking Agothera? Who is attacking Elysium, since that must've happened for Persephone to die? It doesn't add up, full stop.
Ugh. Persephone's route is so sloppy.
See you next Persephone mission, where we wrap up the main of the campaign.
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