YMMV / Disciples

• Anti-Climax Boss: Lemuan in the fourth Legions of the Damned mission in Reincarnation. Through the entire mission the story keeps hyping him up as a brilliant commander who can easily contest Haarhus, and then you fight him near the end of the mission... and he himself is pretty weak, and his retinue consists of level 2 heroes - the same heroes that are weaker than level 1 troops.
• Breather Level: The sixth scenario of Rise of the Elves, "The Trader War". It is short, on a small map, against a single AI and with relatively simple objective. It is also sandwiched between "The Betrayal" and "Dividing Line", which both pit the player in the middle of three A.I.s (literally, the player is in the center, while the enemies are along the edges) and have long, complicated objectives.
• Demonic Spiders: Some units you just don't want to see in enemy lineup.
  • Any unit with a mass crowd control attack. Undead Shades, Legions' Succubi and Incubi, and neutral Mermaids and Gorgons are all priority targets whenever they appear, because if they live to have their turn, they have a very real chance to throw you into a Cycle of Hurting.
  • Any high-initiative, high-damage shooter unit, especially if there's more than one. If you fight those guys, prepare to say your backline goodbye. The ones that are especially demonic are Onyx Gargoyle (see Game-Breaker below) and Trapper - a barbarian Javelin Thrower that combines high initiative and damage with health way higher than a unit of its type is supposed to have.
  • For that matter, any high-damage, high-health unit that can outlast your assault long enough to hit you and hit you hard. Especially notable are Sea Serpents (notable for having 70 initiative, so they will outspeed you as well), Giant Spiders (lasting Paralyze effect after attacking), neutral Sky Lords (crazy high damage with 50 initiative), and, of course, various dragons.
  • Shamanesses border between this and Goddamned Bats - they are not really dangerous on their own due to low damage, but it only takes one time when their 30% Fear attack hits half the team to start respecting (and dreading) them.
  • In the third game, high level Border Guards are universally a pain to deal with. Imperial guard can summon a Golem to support itself while also having Regenerating Health, Legions' guard hits like a truck while also having area of effect Transformation, Elven guard poisons on hit and can teleport a particularly annoying enemy to the other side of the battlefield, and Undead guard can summon no less than six Reapers at once.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Grand Inquisitor is an impressive comeback from how bad Inquisitors were in the first game. Their Mind immunity is now actually useful to block mass crowd control units like Shades and Succubi, Fire ward is deceptively useful, and the best part is how quickly they can overlevel (taking less than a thousand experience per level), allowing them to easily catch up and surpass level 5 units. Most notably, they are the unit of choice in the final Empire mission due to the Final Boss employing a powerful Fire attack with a secondary Mind-based paralysis.
  • While Grand Inquisitors are great, they have their flaws, especially when you don't have to deal with Mind attackers. In that case, look no further than Protector of Faith. Said unit is pretty much the definition of Lightning Bruiser - very tough, with 250 HP and 30 armor, outspeeds literally every unit outside of capitol guardians and outliers like Doppelganger, all the while hitting like a truck. Protectors of Faith only have one weakness - they are level 5, and thus it takes a good amount of both money and experience to get them, but once you do, watch out!
  • Hermit is one of the most busted units in the game. For all intents and purposes, they are level 4 mages that exchange a little bit of damage for chance to briefly halve the enemy initiative - already strong as it makes dwarves faster than the enemy for a change. Oh, and Hermits also avert being Squishy Wizards hard, being roughly twice as tough as other races level 4 mages, and having health more on par with level 4 melee fighters. As a result, Hermits are a brutal combination of damage and toughness, with the initiative-halving being a cherry on top.
  • The Son of Ymir may very well be the most powerful unit a player faction can produce, despite being level 4 units (150 damage on their attack, plus 30 on Frostbite - they outdamage Legions of the Damned level 5 units). As with all large units, they have a lot of HP, but unlike the rest of the Mountain Clans' units (or large units in general), they are quite fast. Due to a combination of a ton of HP and defense-ignoring Frostbite, they are ideal units for killing a capitol guardian.
  • Gargoyles are another unit that deserves the Lightning Bruiser spot - they got absurdly high armor (from 40 at level 1 to 65 at level 3), enough health so that getting through that armor becomes a pain, very high initiative, so they outspeed everyone but shooters, high damage to get rid of most backline units in one shot and immunity to poison, which is one way their armor could be bypassed. Gargoyles are some of the strongest units in the game relative to their level, and encountering them (especially in towns) is never pleasant. They get even better in Rise of the Elves, which changes their attack source from Weapon to Earth, allowing them to bypass Weapon-immune undead units.
  • The Incubus is pretty much the best crowd control unit in the game, hands down. They are quite accurate, hit everyone at the same time, plus their Petrification effect is Earth based, and Earth wards/immunities are very, very rare.
  • Fiends look unassuming at first, but they level up blazingly fast due to only requiring 475 Experience per level, and leveling up increases damage of both their basic attacks and poison. And since Level-Up Fill-Up is in full effect in this game, Fiends can take a beating and be right as rain right after battle due to having leveled up. Another bonus is that they are surprisingly cheap, with only 1050 gold between the prerequisite structure and the unit hiring cost.
  • The Werewolf, who is immune to Weapons and can be bought pretty much right from the start, money premitting. The one thing keeping them in check is that they cost an arm and a leg to train (you have to build a level 2 Doomdrake structure for 300 gold, which unlocks the structure to actually buy Werewolves, said structure costing 750 gold, with werewolves themself costing 1000 gold each), and that their stats are quite low. But if you can afford them early, they can trivialize everything that would normally crush earlygame groups.
  • The top level Undead melee fighter, the Phantom Warrior. They don't have absurd tankiness of Dwarf Kings or absurd initative of Protectors of Faith or double attacks of Holy Avengers and Runemasters. Instead they got 50% chance to paralyze an enemy on attack, and said paralysis can last several turns without wearing off. It's telling that a group of fresh Phantom Warriors can take on a capital guardian without any kind of preparation and win if they get lucky.
  • The Undead mage line in its entirety, barring maybe Liches/Archliches (and even those have their niche). Vampires are tough, both because of their high health and their Life Drain attacks, and Elder Vampires can even heal other units if their own health is full. Wraiths and their upgrades, Deaths and Wights, are both Weapon immune and can stand in the front line without fearing retaliation (barring Giants and their non-Weapon attacks), hit hard, have high initiative and have additional effects (Deaths have Poison, while Wights have Level Drain). In fact, Deaths were so good that they got a heavy nerf in Rise of the Elves, dropping their initiative to that of other mages.
  • The Empire and the Mountain Clans have some of the best booster and healing spells available. Unlike damage and debuff spells, which can't target units in towns and capitols (and the stronger units have wards and immunities anyway), boosters and healing are always useful. The Empire and Mountain Clans also have spells that increase mobility (the Empire's spell restores half a party's movement points, and the Mountain Clan's removes the steep movement penalty of sea-travel). If the player chooses to be a Mage Lord, these spells can be researched for half the cost and cast twice a day.
  • The third game turns Titans into this. Sure, they are still not great in the main army, and they cost a ton of money (almost five thousand!), but their sheer stats straight out of the gate makes them a very useful Crutch Characters for secondary heroes, or as town garrison, or as a support for a Border Guard in a crucial location.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Massively popular among Russians, to the point where a russian company ultimately stepped up to develop the third game after Strategy First went bankrupt, although the result is debatable.
• Jerkass Woobie: Bethrezen, really. He was imprisoned for something that was entirely not his fault.
  • Mortis as well; sacrifices herself to try and save her lover's remains, ploughs her way through practically every other race in the world to take her revenge, fights a second world war in order to bring him back, and when she finally succeeds, he decides he doesn't like what she's become and rejects her (causing her to go on another Roaring Rampage of Revenge, this time against the elves).
• Low-Tier Letdown: Some units are just not made equal:
  • Sacred Lands
    • The Empire's Witch Hunters and Inquisitors. For units intended to stand in the front line, these guys just don't keep up, with their awesome 125 (Witch Hunter)/150 (Inquisitor) HP. For the record, 150 HP is how much a level 2 Knight has, is less than what level 2 units of Undead Hordes and Legions of the Damned, and the same as Mountain Clans' level 1 Dwarf. And their main selling point, the Mind immunity? Is worthless, as Ghosts/Witches are generally gonna target frontliners last, and the only mass Mind attacker is a neutral Mermaid.
    • Archers and Marksmen, due to lack of overleveling making them incapable of leveling beyond level 2.
    • Mountain Clans' Crossbowmen, due to having barely higher attack compared to Axe Throwers they leveled from. Their further level up into Flame Casters doesn't give them any attack either.
    • Mountaineers, due to having terrible damage for their level (even less than Flame Casters above).
    • Dwarf Kings, due to a combination of sub-par damage, sub-par HP and very low initiative - the lowest of all Mountain Clans units. It doesn't help that despite all their armor, they are barely tougher than the alternative choice, the Venerable Warrior. The final nail in Dwarf Kings' coffin is that, for whatever reason, their upgrade building costs almost double that of Venerable Warriors' (2500 gold vs. 1500 gold).
    • Undead Hordes' Wyvern line in its entirety, simply due to having 65% accuracy. It doesn't matter how good their damage is (and the answer is, not really), when every attack is a coinflip whether they can hit or not.
    • Legions' Witch and Succubus units, simply because they utilize Fear as their attack. Also, because taking a Witch means giving up your only source of mass damage outside of Archdevil hero and level 4 Beast unit.
  • While Dark Prophecy introduced overleveling and made most of above units viable (whether through buffs, or making them a case of Magikarp Power), it has its share of bad units.
    • Poor, poor Elementalist. They require an empty slot (or someone dead) to summon, their summoned Air Elementals are weak, you have to give up your sole source of non-Weapon damage to get them (which means you are in trouble if you encounter a Weapon immune unit like Werewolf), and worst of all, they are prone to crashing the game when a summon disappears. Don't bother using those.
    • Most of Mountain Clans' units are fine. Except Wolf Lord that is. Wolf Lords are casters, except they are bad at it (having almost a third less damage than the alternative, the Hermit), while their gimmick of being able to transform into Spirit of Fenrir is not that great, since they spend a turn doing so, and even then, they don't quite measure up to other melee fighters on their level (and due to the way said transformation works, their Spirit of Fenrir form doesn't scale with overlevels). End result, Wolf Lords crash right into Master of None, being bad casters and sub-par melee fighters.
    • Undead Hordes' Lich/Archlich. They are not even bad - it's just that the alternatives are Deaths (who have crazy high damage and Weapon immunity), Wights (same as Deaths, except they exchange some of the power for a Level Drain attack) and Elder Vampires (whose Life Drain attack can heal other units if Elder Vampires themselves have full HP). Comparing to that, Archliches are kind of bland.
    • Legions' Overlords, before Rise of the Elves at least. Sure, they hit like a runaway train, but Abyssal Devils' Petrification is too good to pass up, and when looking at other factions, Sons of Ymir are both faster and more damaging (due to Frostbite) despite having lower level. Rise of the Elves buffed their initiative and gave them a secondary Blister attack, allowing Overlords to become a viable option in their own right.
    • Due to the way Transformation works (specifically, transformed units have a chance to turn back to their original form before they take their turn), the Witch, Hag and Succubus are very unreliable when it comes to crowd control. Incubus' Petrification attack is much more reliable.
  • Reincarnation has its own share of bad units.
    • Elven Alliance's Warden is pretty much the worst of Elven Alliance's four archers. Warden's problem is that its only ability is all but useless (non-stacking -1 speed on a crit), it doesn't have the stats to compensate for it, and all three other variants bring more (Marauder obviously brings stats due to being T5, Sentry brings higher damage and movement reduction on a crit, and Stinger brings higher accuracy and initiative, stacking poison, and an ability that doubles accuracy at the cost of halving initiative for a turn afterwards).
    • Archons as well. They don't do much damage and they abilities are situational (+1 movement to an ally for a turn, and a single-use enemy teleport). Compare to Theurgists, who deal even less damage, but compensate with their only ability being a passive Damage-Increasing Debuff that allows other Elven units to hit harder.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Fear. What Fear does is force the enemy to retreat when their turn next comes up, or paralyzes them for a turn if they can't. This is terrible when fighting something you can otherwise kill, as you then have to spend additional movement points to start the fight again just to kill off the retreated units. Fighting units with Fear is just as annoying, as enemies generally don't have to worry about experience.
  • Inability to overlevel units in the first game, which makes units like archers or gargoyles much less practical than they otherwise would be.
  • In the sequel, Transformation. Transformed enemies are essentially neutered offensively and lose whatever wards and immunities they had, but transformation has a nasty habit of reversing itself when transformed unit's turn comes up (before the turn, mind you) - and does so randomly, so you can't even predict it.
• Sequel Displacement: When people speak of Disciples, they usually speak of the second game. The first was rough, with graphics that were already somewhat dated when the game came out, simplistic combat and several Scrappy Mechanics, and the third was an Obvious Beta.
• That One Boss:
  • Emperor Ferre and their guards at the end of Act VII of Reincarnation. Normally the response to this sort of thing is to buff up the wazoo, using every potion and spell at the player's disposal to strengthen the player and weaken their enemy, and savvy players will indeed to that just before the fight... and then Salaar returns to his true form as Myzrael, losing all buffs and then immediately has to fight Ferre and his retinue solo. The resulting fight is borderline unwinnable unless you abuse a certain A.I. Breaker that requires lots, lots, lots of Save Scumming - and even then you can still lose if you get unlucky. It almost makes Act VIII (where you get to take Myzrael out for a ride and curb-stomp everything in your way) feel like a reward for winning a challenge like that.
• That One Level:
  • Every single level where Undead has to fight other Undead. The problem is that over half of undead units have Death attack type, which 90% of Undead units are immune to. At least you can still use melee fighters... until you run into Wraiths and their upgrades, who are immune to both Weapon and Death. The only ways to contest those is 1) Few non-Death damaging spells that undead have, which don't work on enemies in towns or ruins; 2) Lich Queen hero (who deals fire damage), which you might not even have as your main hero. And if you run into a required town/ruins containing Wraiths, you are pretty much forced to suicide bomb one Lich Queen after another until you can finally kill the offending units.
  • Sacred Lands Undead Scenario 3, "The Desperate Stand". You have to fight two factions that are allied (the only time in the entire Sacred Lands campaign), the enemies start with several squads right at your doorstep, and you have to dislodge them and retake the captured towns as soon as possible, otherwise they will harass you into oblivion and buy enough tome for enemies main armies to arrive. Just when it looks like you have the situation under control, the enemy starts spamming magic (up to level 4), at which point spending any time outside of a town or a zone of Fog of War created by Shadow spell is just inviting a 100 damage Vengeance of Ymir spell, which will kill your backline outside of (possibly) the hero, while heavily damaging everyone else. And the enemy can follow with a 60 damage Tempest spell or a Valkyrie summon, just to be sure you either die or spend lost of resources/time on healing. Even inside towns you are not safe, as both Empire and Mountain Clans will just use summons (Golem and Valkyrie respectively) instead. All the while sending one squad of units after another. And while enemy mana and gold reserves are not infinite, they are so massive, so they might as well be infinite.
  • The first part of Reincarnation Legions of the Damned Act 5 "The Bitter Truth". This is due to said part being And Now for Someone Completely Different, with the leader the player is controlling being underpowered due to lack of equipment, the units said leader is packing are not quite up to the task ahead, overall lack of healing, unavoidable areas where the player has to take damage to proceed, and no opportunities to grind. This part even has its own optional boss with high level undead that requires a lot of luck regarding node placement to win. And your reward for slugging through all this? Haarhus fails and is forcibly "reborn" as a demon by the Avatar of Bethrezen, and later kills his sister without even caring who it is. Thankfully the second part is much more normal, even if it does mark the first time in the Legions campaign where Inoel is not present.

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