Sacrifice: Pyro Mission 7

For this mission, Pyro gives us awesomeness.


Warmonger
1300 Mana, 4 Souls

Broadly speaking, the Warmonger is a variant on the Styx; a ranged unit whose actual strike range is fairly low but which hits fairly hard. However, where the Styx had area of effect and had kinda respectable durability thanks to Charnel leeching, the Warmonger instead fires a series of hitscan shots in a burst for massive damage and is painfully fragile. Also, the Warmonger can teleport, a factoid the AI will never use and which makes Warmongers seem like overall inferior Styx if you use Styx before Warmongers. The teleportation range is short -this isn't a minimap-abusing feature- but it substantially reduces the Warmonger's flaws, unlike the Styx being stuck trudging toward enemies. As such, where the Styx is basically limited to doing things like punishing wizard attempts to reach melee souls in front of your line, the Warmonger can instead jump atop the enemy's ranged line and murder the whole thing in short order.

Their damage is seriously ridiculous. They do 20 shots at 120 damage apiece for a total of 2400 damage in a game where, again, the toughest single unit in the game has slightly over 7000. This is offset some by their accuracy being fairly horrid and individual units can be resistant to ranged attacks, but the Warmonger is seriously lethal, far beyond any other unit in the game until you start talking stuff like critical mass of Rhinoks. They're probably Pyro's best unit outright, and there's no other unit that quite competes with their role. They're also one of the best units in the game at unavoidably murdering wizards, in spite of how many of their shots will miss. And, surprisingly, Warmongers don't do friendly fire!

Their weakness to melee and overall fragility does mean they can die fairly suddenly, but seriously, they're amazing. And a lot of fun.

(If obnoxiously loud with their lines)


Rain of Fire
1500 Mana

It's another rain spell. The main thing that's notable about it is that, like Bombardment, where the other rain spells drop their projectile directly from above,  Rain of Fire's projectiles come down at an arc originating from somewhere above the caster. This has minor implications for their actual impact behavior, but the bigger implication is that Rain of Fire is a rain spell where you can work out the caster's direction just off the spell's behavior; most other rain spells can potentially be targeted unseen, such as firing from behind a hill, with the enemy forced to scour the area manually.

It's a good spell, but there's nothing interesting to it beyond 'is a rain spell'. I don't think it even sets targets on fire, strangely enough.

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The mission is not nearly as miserable as it first seems. Yes, it's a 2v1 and Abraxus and Shakti come at you with a huge number of units, and Abraxus is higher level than you, but not only is the game nicer about giving you easy souls to acquire -the early raid of non-Shakti Persephone forces, and the Peasants nearby your Altar- but critically you can just time out the mission. I'm not sure what the time factor is, as the wiki claims Abraxus leaves about 15 minutes in but for me she left less than 10 minutes into the mission, and by a similar token Shaki is said to time out 30 minutes in and it was more like 23 minutes in this run, but regardless you don't actually have to beat either of them. Just stall until the game gives you victory.

(Also Warmongers are awesome)

An odd point is that if you manage to get close to Shakti's Altar, the game triggers the cinema to kill her then and there, not giving you a chance to Desecrate her Altar. This is actually exploitable if you like, allowing you to end the mission by virtue of charging directly for her Altar with your only priority being not dying before you get there. Even though Abraxus will still be around, you'll still win regardless.

As such, while the mission's opening minutes are frantic and may lead to seeming like this is an utterly horrible mission, it's actually one of the easier missions of the entire campaign, and yet also one of the better-designed ones. My only real complaint is that once Abraxus leaves you've basically already won the mission.

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Narratively, we've learned something that's going to be critical to one of my complaints way down the line: wizards die if their god is killed. The game doesn't spell it out to you, but you can see after the mission that Persephone's gate is in its 'dead' state, and it's easy to infer that what's supposed to have happened is that Abraxus ran off to Persephone's Prime Altar and Desecrated it, killing her and in the process killing off Shakti. This is also going to crop up in other missions, and in fact the game flat-out uses 'a wizard dies spontaneously' as a tool for conveying to the player that a god died, that's how strongly-held this concept is; this mission isn't an anomaly when it comes to the notion.

Anyway, I'm personally not clear why Pyro is supposed to be so upset by Shakti spontaneously dying. I get that he's supposed to be engaging in willful disbelief to some extent here with his conviction that Persephone is supposed to be pulling off some kind of trick, but that doesn't clarify why Pyro is so upset by it. Like, if this was before James was killed by Pyro, I'd assume Pyro is supposed to be in disbelief that someone else would-slash-could kill a god. But it's after, so... what's his issue here?

It's... not a big deal, but it does bother me.

See you next Pyro mission.