Sacrifice: Stratos Mission 7

For this mission, we get...


Yeti
1300 Mana, 4 Souls

The Yeti is Stratos' most straightforwardly awesome unit, and is arguably the best unit of its class -it's equivalent to the Jabberocky, but where the Jabberocky doesn't really leverage James' god stat modifiers and has no useful secondary qualities, the Yeti doesn't mind shaving off some HP -it's got plenty to spare still- and iactually appreciates the speed boost, what with being a melee unit and all. Furthermore, it actually has a useful secondary quality of freezing units it hits in melee. This functions exactly like the Freeze spell, disabling the target for a variable period of time and/or until it's attacked next and inflicting some spell damage when it's defrosted, which means Yeti are not only able to perpetually stunlock targets, especially in small groups, but that even serious melee resistance -such as is found on melee fliers- does less to slow than down than you might expect.

Furthermore, their lowered HP actually improves the effectiveness of Speed Up on them, which is surprisingly huge. In the next video, you'll see me 'juggling' two Yeti with Speed Up for part of it, a feat I couldn't perform on a Jabberocky or Persephone's equivalent unit.

The Yeti also renders the Storm Giant more or less irrelevant once you have it. The Storm Giant is technically faster than the Yeti, but it's by a very tiny margin thanks to the Storm Giant failing to get the full Stratos stat modifier, and where the Storm Giant has a dubiously useful gimmick that can outright backfire the Yeti's freezing gimmick is outright amazing. It doesn't really matter that the Yeti is three levels higher, uses twice as many souls per head and costs more to summon. The difference in quality is simply that huge.

The Yeti is particularly useful for stunlocking wizards and finishing them off, with little in the way of competition in this role. If they don't have a shield up (It blocks the freezing), they're probably going to die. And even if their shield's cooldown completes, they may well be unable to actually cast it if they're being mobbed.

Curiously, the Yeti takes 125% extra damage from direct spells and 175% extra damage from splash spells. Also curiously it has a mana supply. More usefully, it actually has the same passive lightning resistance Storm Giants have, though not the ability of being supercharged by electricity. Which is fine, since the electric supercharging mechanic has actual disadvantages, whereas being resistant to electricity is pure advantage.

On a different note, one thing I've always found frustrating about the Yeti is that it violates a 'rule' the game otherwise holds itself to -that units that share a model are always equivalent in role, and thus have similar statlines (Aside level difference and god modifiers) and broadly similar capabilities/role in your army. The Yeti sharing its model with the Netherfiend obscures what the Yeti is really meant to be about, making it easy to end up thinking of it as a particularly high-level version of eg the Firefist, which is particularly confusing given the Storm Giant is of that class and so it looks like Stratos has two instances of such. It's particularly strange because simply swapping the Storm Giant and Yeti models -with appropriate size modifications- would neatly solve the problem, since the Storm Giant's model is completely unique -and frankly, it would be nice for the Storm Giant to be more... giant. The only 'loss' involved is that the Storm Giant's model includes a lightning rod effect atop it, and... whatever.


Fence
1500 Mana

Fence is Stratos' idea of a wall, and in practice it's basically just Wall of Fire's bigger, meaner cousin. It doesn't actually prevent units from passing in any way aside damage, but it does 50% more damage than Wall of Fire does while otherwise functioning basically identically, aside a higher cost, higher level slot, and somewhat longer cooldown.

Generally, a rainbow build should avoid having both walls at the same time, since they're obviously a bit redundant.

Outside AI eccentricities, Fence is really more useful a kind of area of effect nuke spell than as a wall spell, honestly. It's tremendously lethal, it can blend into the terrain surprisingly well on Glebe maps, and it comes into being fairly quickly and with little fanfare. Surprise! Your stuff is dead!

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The mission is surprisingly straightforward. It's a 1v1 with Yogo, and the only oddity of note aside the map's standard oddity of that one island to the side -and the fact that this version of the Persephone assault randomly has an extra Manafount for some reason- is that there's a few points where the game will cheat extra souls into Yogo's supply to ensure he remains a meaningful obstacle to you. This is why when I was approaching his Altar he had a giant pile of Mutants even though I'd stripped away so many of his souls.

His obsession with summoning Mutants incidentally helps this map to show off the power of Yeti, though not so much the utility of Fence.

But really, it's a pretty bland map, surprisingly so. And fairly easy since there's so many Peasant souls to gobble up. Mildly annoying at times since Yogo is a giant pain to actually kill, but easy.

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Narratively, we're seeing that Stratos is, once he puts away his mask of politeness, quite awful not just in deed but in thought and word. You could say he's less uncouth than Charnel, but seriously Stratos is a jerk.

I do find it mildly irritating how, where other first-god-kills have Eldred going 'wait, gods can be killed?' in this case instead we have Stratos sniping at Persephone and Eldred not disagreeing. I wouldn't care normally, but... well, keep it in mind for later.

See you next Stratos mission.