Cultist Acolyte

The Cultist Acolyte is a Human enemy that can be encountered in any area, usually with Cultist Brawlers and always in the third and fourth ranks. While unable to inflict the same physical damage as their counterparts, the Acolyte assaults the mind instead, dealing high stress damage with their unholy incantations, which also mark targets from Veteran Level onward to enhance the damage of the Brawler's Rend for the Old Gods. They can also sow confusion by altering the party's formation with Eldritch Push and Eldritch Pull.

Behavior
Cultist Acolytes have 3 abilities, Stressful Incantation, Eldritch Pull, and Eldritch Push. All of their abilities deal stress on Veteran level onward, and Stressful Incantation marks heroes to synergize with the Cultist Brawlers' Rend for the Old Gods. Overall it has a 2x chance to use Stressful Incantation over Eldritch Pull and Push, except on the Acolyte's first turn, where it has a 7x chance. Interestingly, Acolytes will never use Stressful Incantation if all 4 heroes have a Virtue.

In terms of target priority, it will tend to use Stressful Incantation to focus heroes who are already stressed, with an effective 2x/3x/4x chance depending on difficulty.

Strategy
Cultist Acolytes are the prototypical stress dealer—fast, high dodge, but otherwise weak in survivability. Like most stress dealers, they should be focused as a priority target, especially with fast heroes who can take them out before they deal stress damage, as stress typically is harder to deal with than health damage. However, their abilities are not influenced at all by position, and they have no frontline attack like the Bone Courtier's Knife in the Dark, so the only reason to move them is to get them into range of damage dealers.

Abilities
Apprentice =

Veteran =

Champion =