Heretic Basics for wizard drop outs.
Alright so, you’ve rolled heretic and for some reason can’t read the wiki, never fear Edward is here.
First thing first is understanding all your little magical tools
- Manus Grasp
The old reliable, this is the bread and butter of your heretic games. The manus is a spell you can use whenever, it’s actually one of the only spells you can use while muted. It has three main purposes. The first is to draw and erase runes, when you pull out your manus and use it in your hand it’ll begin drawing a rune, and clicking on a rune with your manus selected will quickly erase it. The second is being a very useful knock down spell with a mute effect, making murdering someone a lot easier. Thirdly is a custom path dependent ability, which I’ll explain more later.
- Codex Citrax
The Codex is what you use to research magic and drain influences. Just use it like a normal book and you’ll be able to access the funny skill tree, hit an untapped influence over the head with it to harvest its power. It’s also a dead give away you’re a heretic, so make sure nobody sees you pull it out.
- Rune
The rune’s what you’ll use for the majority of your heretic business, it’s 3x3 and VERY noisy when used so make sure you draw it in a safe place. The rune allows you to perform rituals which can be found on the wiki, and are essential to your progression
- Living Heart
The living heart is what you use to select and track targets, simply place it on a rune and you’ll be able to choose from three potential sacrifice targets. When you’ve selected a target you can use the heart while it’s held in your hand to roughly track them. If you ever aren’t happy with a list of potential targets you can always make multiple hearts to reroll.
The second step is understanding what the fuck you’re doing. Heretics are a snowball antag, a lot like contractors. As you do more optional objectives you get more and more power, until you become a nigh immortal ascended heretic.
You can gain power through two means: influences and sacrifices. Influences are those floating weird space abortions lying around the hall, only heritics can see influences that haven’t been used. Once you grab an influence everyone will start searching for your ass so you better run. Thankfully they don’t log fingerprints, however any door to a room with an influence will, so you’re still recommended to wear gloves if you’re going stealth. Alternatively if you’re a committed stealth nerd you can use the null rod to remove influences, but that will rarely be useful in any form. Once you grab an influence it will give you one research point to use on magical endeavors.
Sacrifices are the big enchiladas, they give you three points but are also, obviously, much harder to obtain. You get a sacrifice by dragging a target on a rune (with the heart that is tracking them) and pushing the funny button. Sacrifices will disembowel the target and only work when they’re dead.
Once you’ve gotten enough points and speced far down your chosen path you’ll gain access to an ascension ritual. This requires three hummanoid corpses (just use the morgue or some human monkeys) once activated the ritual will give you wizard level abilities that will make you nigh unkillable, and also the greentext that so many of us lust for.
Now the third and final topic is the three paths. Choosing a path will change your entire game, so make sure to choose one that fits your play style or looks fun to you. Heretics come in three flavors: ash, rust, and FLESH.
-ASH
Ash is generally recommended for first timers, as it has the most individual early power, and the most forgiving gameplay. Ash heretics get access to an AMAZING teleport spell that would make a wizard drool with envy. If you’re ever in a bad situation or need to go to some high security place, ash has got you covered. It gives your manus grasp a blinding effect which is insanely good for both the physical and mental effect on your opponent. I’d definitely recommend it to people who like to go loud early and not prepare a lot, since it gives the funnie of having a bunch of magical nonsense without having to wait forty minutes through boring normal gameplay to ascend.
While ash is amazing and one of my personal favorites, it also has very little late game power compared to the other two, and has research opportunities that are completely useless next to three seconds of prep work. So I’d recommend playing ash if you’re new or just want to have a good time.
-RUST
Do you hate anything that isn’t brutal murder and rapid clicking, then rust is for you. Rust is all about individual combat. It gives you amazing free healing and empowers your manus to one shot anything inorganic thats stupid enough to get in your way. Borg mains and that bastard beepsky would rather eat rusty nails than fight you when you’ve chosen this path. Despite how amazing this sounds, you’ll have almost no stealth and will be nigh defenseless at the start of your climb, but as you gain more power you’ll become a king of melee combat, especially if you add on to your already amazing powers with extra shit like augments and chems.
Rust is fun and powerful, but also extremely loud and hard to pull off well unless you do a boring nerd move and get a lot of gamer gear to start. It’s good for mid or high level heretics who love stomping on heads.
-FLESH
Flesh has the funny ascension that makes the entire path worth it, most spacemen would do anything to be the beautiful gigantic worm creature this path allows. Getting there however is a challenge. You’ll have pretty much no individual power outside of your standard heretic stuff and maybeeee an armored cloak if you decide to spec into it. You will have people backing you up though, which is arguably more powerful than the other two combined. No matter how robust you are you’re still going to get in dumb situations from time to time: firelock cbt, vending machine doom, beepsky pain, or just simply slipping on a conniving janitors trap at the wrong time. Flesh heretic’s manus allows you to create ghouls from corpses, which gives you a buddy that’ll (hopefully) save you from all that bullshit. Ghouls are very weak bosting 60ish hp, but they have complete and total stun protection, which makes them very very good at fighting an unaware security officer.
Flesh runs will usually be heavily rng reliant based on who you can pick up as ghouls, or a very lame xenobio infested grind of getting unstoppable gear to secure your ascension. It’s only really good for people very experienced with heretic, although it’s not a bad idea to give it a pick if you see an easy ghoul grab anywhere or the servers on decent pop.
(I only made this guide because crossed said I should to reapply, so I’ll need it when I apply for server owner again, also another guide for more gamer nerds will come out soon, just thought I should release this one when I saw a certain moderater fail at being a heritic.)