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monk
United States8476 Posts
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lSmCvFn5ZD5xTHxfIBR_HeGVM5u3bFtCpQmP1pAOQsU/edit#gid=0 The TLDR is: Vorazun > Raynor > Kerrigan/Zagara > Swann/Karax/Abathur/Artanis Vorazun and Raynor taking the top two slots seems absolutely right. Vorazun is just OP and Raynor has Mules + two different styles that are both amazing depending on the map. Note that Vorazun is never outside of the top three on any mutator. | ||
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imJealous
United States1382 Posts
It seems 50% of all the people I get matched with in brutal mutator now are super scrubs playing Karax 'going static d' without ANY CLUE what they are doing... No energizers, no Kaydarin monoliths, never even a tiny army for helping with objectives let alone actually playing any of the perfectly viable army comps available to Karax... Even on the offense maps every other game is some 50 mastery Karax player saying "I'LL GO DEFENSE!" It wouldn't even be that bad if any of them were even any good at defending... but no! These people can't even be bothered to throw down a pylon, shield battery, and cannon for the early waves after they declare "I'VE GOT DEFENSE! GOING STATIC D!!!" And god forbid a unit slip past their terrible sim city and actually make it to their mineral line... They could have turned their one gateway into a warp gate... They could build an instant cannon with one of the probes in their mineral line... They could even orbital strike the units away if they hadn't already wasted all their energy... but no... "TEAM MATE?!??! WHY AREN'T YOU HELPING?!?!?"  I think these must be the people who are so bad they even struggle to win as Vorazun... | ||
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Malhavoc
Italy308 Posts
Only problem with mutators is that it's very very hard to win with a bad ally (unlike brutal), which is a doom sentence when you get a bad player.. | ||
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imJealous
United States1382 Posts
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The Bottle
242 Posts
On June 28 2016 16:26 imJealous wrote: Yeah, its not like its that hard to carry a bad ally on some of these mutators if you really have to, but the only replay value in co-op comes from experimenting and screwing around with different play styles IMO... With all these people who don't even get how to play Karax reasonably I have to do the same try hard unit comps every game and play as if I were trying to solo with just a little bit of help on base defense. Really kills what little motivation there is to replay the mutators, which is a shame because they are the only source of variety each week. You can still experiment with new strats, you're just going to have a bunch of losses while you iterate different ones. I don't think it's that big a deal. When the first mutation started and, for the first time in a long time losses had a reasonable chance again, I stopped worrying too much about my ally. If you try a new strat and fail, but you were able to hold your own for a while and you have 5x your ally's kills, you know that there's promise to the build, so it's not like experimenting was a complete waste of time. If it has enough promise, you could get good enough at that strat that you can carry with it. (Maybe not on the fourth mutation.) When you get really frustrated with your ally, it helps to think of it like campaign. Imagine you're playing one of those missions where you have "help" from your AI allies (like in the second last epilogue mission where you're playing Raynor, and Zagara and Artanis are "helping" you defend). With that mentality, when you start a game with an ally whose opening is to build 8 supply depots, you think "oh boy, challenge accepted!" and then start playing a lot harder. | ||
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AranciataExcess
5 Posts
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Rizare
Canada592 Posts
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Kirena
United States6 Posts
On July 04 2016 20:55 Rizare wrote: Are Abathur's swarm hosts working as intended? You need to manual spawn locusts for them to benefit from biomass, there's the spawn ability being on a 15 seconds cooldown when its weapon speed shows it should decrease. Or would they be overpowered if all those issues be fixed? That bug was reported on the official forums, and a Blue was able to reproduce it and log a report for the devs to fix, so it will eventually be patched. | ||
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monk
United States8476 Posts
Below I'll try to outline the best parts of each commander and rank their overall strength in mutators. 1. Vorazun Most agree that she's the best commander but why is that so?
2/3/4/5. Kerrigan After looking at the commanders, I was surprised to learn that Kerrigan was the third best commander. After all, she has one of the worst maxed armies in the game and is notoriously bad at dealing with air. However, she is the clearly example of versatility trumping straight up Power. Here's what she's got going on:
2/3/4/5. Artanis
2/3/4/5. Swann Swann has a lot of things going for him, but he has a glaring weakness in his early-game compared to most commanders. While he has the ability to gain large amounts of Gas, he really struggles in the mineral department for a large portion of the game.
2/3/4/5. Karax
6. Abathur
7. Zagara
8. Raynor It's much harder to rank Raynor since we haven't been able to play with nerfed Raynor much on the earlier mutations.
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fezvez
France3021 Posts
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GamerJatt
63 Posts
I can post a build order if any1 is interested. | ||
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fezvez
France3021 Posts
Then, I think I mostly agree. I would make some small adjustments here and there (Abathur up,Artanis down). However, I agree that Swann is bottom tier. Abathur is exactly like Swann, except that he has normally one Brutalisk early game which makes an incredible difference overall. Still, what is your B.O GamerJatt? I am interested! | ||
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monk
United States8476 Posts
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MrTic
60 Posts
Raynor seems like something between Artanis-Zegara, just with limitless resources... Kerrigan, I can't judge, she's too difficult for me to utilize correctly; on one hand she deserves 3rd place, but to live up to it in-game, the player must strain himself harder than with the previous two commanders. I'd put Swan as #6 and Artanis #7; I find Swan's drones and Guardian Shell of same value, but Swan seems to have more powerful armies and can actually teleport units around at will unlike just warping and leaving them there. Although Artanis is my favorite commander and I'm playing him most of the time, kinda like his gameplay. That said, he's dreadfuly average at everything and probably only exists to provide guardian shell and some reinforcements for the ally lol  Karax might be on bottom of the list, but should at least be more exciting to play :p | ||
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dchaudh
58 Posts
On July 06 2016 02:50 monk wrote: 2. Raynor Before I begin with Raynor, I'd like to say that I think almost everyone is playing him incorrectly. With a level 15 Raynor, there is frankly no reason not to open something along the lines of the following build:
and good macro, Raynor essentially has access to an unlimited army.
I respectfully disagree with a lot of this. Raynor's double mule gives him access to the most explosive mineral economy in the game. So why would we want to leverage his strong mineral economy to just build an even stronger mineral economy (i.e., instead of using his strong economy to go for fast army or fast tech)? In fact, it is because Raynor can accumulate minerals very quickly in the early game that I opt to go for fast tech & upgrades (while still being able to get up to 5-6 orbitals by the early/mid-game). I think it is incredibly inefficient to be using the Banshees and Hyperion to defend the first and second waves given just how strongly the two call-downs synergize when used together at enemy bases / objectives (because banshees benefit from Hyperion's PDD, damage buff as well as just having something to tank for them). Let's take Void Thrashers as an example: I always call down both the Banshee and Hyperion as soon as the latter becomes available. I call them down at the mini-base separating the first and second objectives. First comes the Hyperion - you can drop a PDD and yamato key units that your bio doesn't want to deal with (namely, tanks, templar and infestors). When one PDD is down, you can call down the Banshees which will last MUCH longer than if you were to simply have sent them separately. It's possible to clear 90% of the units between the first and second objective with the Hyperion and Banshee alone. For the first wave on all missions except Rifts (where the first wave comes extraordinarily early), I have ready 8 marines, 2 firebats (with the HP/armor upgrade researched) and 2 medics (off of one rax opener). If you just position the Firebats at the front, with the marines in a concave behind them, you can hold any wave from any AI race losing 0-1 units and with zero help from your ally. (I put up a bunker on rifts.) It's notable that after the tech-lab upgrade, firebats have a whopping 200hp, 3 base armor, it is armored-unit type (i.e., it won't get shredded by a first wave consisting of hellions/adepts/reapers) and it has an AOE attack. My point is not that I think this is the "definitive Raynor opener" but rather just to show that a coop commander guide should be more about the possible playstyles with that commander and less so with specific builds like this, because experimenting with openers/units is a huge part of the fun of coop. I found the following comment a bit bizarre: "I find that 6 OCs is about the number needed to fully mine out both your bases by around 30 minutes. Often times I go up to about 8 in order to start mining from my allies' minerals." Taking a step back, our overarching goal is to use Raynor's explosive economy to execute one of two general styles of play: high-turnover / low tech (e.g., spamming marines until kingdom come and replenishing them in bursts from large numbers of barracks) OR low turnover / higher tech (e.g., using the higher tech rax units and taking minimal losses in every fight, leveraging the vulture's spider mine to deal massive DPS in a totally separate place from your main army, using the Viking's long-range AoE attack to dismantle enemy air waves while taking minimal losses, etc.). Both styles are perfectly valid and it's really up to personal preference. But at no point is the goal simply to mine for the sake of mining... (Also, 30 minutes is quite a lengthy coop game. Off the top of my head, Rifts/Chains/L&L can be comfortably done in just under or around 20 minutes, Vermillion Problem in 23-25 minutes and Thrashers in 16-17 minutes). I agree 100% that vultures' spider mines are insanely cost efficient. When facing ground-based attack waves, 4-5 vultures laying down a few rounds of mines (i.e., a few rounds of replenishment) will clear ANY ground wave (including the ones with 10 3/3 Thors or Colossi). This basically lets Raynor push with his bioball at one front while staying completely safe against AI attack waves without relying on call-downs. Anyways, this post is longer than I'd planned but I wanted to elaborate on my disagreements in detail given the authoritative tone of the section on Raynor as well as the fact that it's going to be included as guide in the title post. | ||
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Tuczniak
1561 Posts
At mutations, well it really depends on the particular mutations. I wouldn't rate him very high because Blizzard like splash and danger zones. He will be better than Zagara depending on map. But I can see him hitting the "brick wall" the same way Zagara does. With enough splash damage and certain enemy composition he will run out of minerals. At last mutation I managed to lose some units to splash, the enemy composition was nasty and I knew that if we don't win in 5 minutes we lost. | ||
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monk
United States8476 Posts
Raynor's double mule gives him access to the most explosive mineral economy in the game. So why would we want to leverage his strong mineral economy to just build an even stronger mineral economy (i.e., instead of using his strong economy to go for fast army or fast tech)? In fact, it is because Raynor can accumulate minerals very quickly in the early game that I opt to go for fast tech & upgrades (while still being able to get up to 5-6 orbitals by the early/mid-game). I think it is incredibly inefficient to be using the Banshees and Hyperion to defend the first and second waves given just how strongly the two call-downs synergize when used together at enemy bases / objectives (because banshees benefit from Hyperion's PDD, damage buff as well as just having something to tank for them). Let's take Void Thrashers as an example: I always call down both the Banshee and Hyperion as soon as the latter becomes available. I call them down at the mini-base separating the first and second objectives. First comes the Hyperion - you can drop a PDD and yamato key units that your bio doesn't want to deal with (namely, tanks, templar and infestors). When one PDD is down, you can call down the Banshees which will last MUCH longer than if you were to simply have sent them separately. It's possible to clear 90% of the units between the first and second objective with the Hyperion and Banshee alone. For the first wave on all missions except Rifts (where the first wave comes extraordinarily early), I have ready 8 marines, 2 firebats (with the HP/armor upgrade researched) and 2 medics (off of one rax opener). If you just position the Firebats at the front, with the marines in a concave behind them, you can hold any wave from any AI race losing 0-1 units and with zero help from your ally. (I put up a bunker on rifts.) It's notable that after the tech-lab upgrade, firebats have a whopping 200hp, 3 base armor, it is armored-unit type (i.e., it won't get shredded by a first wave consisting of hellions/adepts/reapers) and it has an AOE attack. My point is not that I think this is the "definitive Raynor opener" but rather just to show that a coop commander guide should be more about the possible playstyles with that commander and less so with specific builds like this, because experimenting with openers/units is a huge part of the fun of coop. I fail to see the benefit of the opening you describe over a 3CC opening. Pushing an early-game objective earlier isn't really important at all. I found the following comment a bit bizarre: "I find that 6 OCs is about the number needed to fully mine out both your bases by around 30 minutes. Often times I go up to about 8 in order to start mining from my allies' minerals." I'm stating this as a fact, not as a recommendation. I'm not saying to make 6 OCs or 8OCs in any given game. Rather, this is mostly directly to some people in this thread who are making 10-12 OCs per game, expecting it to be better than 6-8. Both styles are perfectly valid and it's really up to personal preference. But at no point is the goal simply to mine for the sake of mining... (Also, 30 minutes is quite a lengthy coop game. Off the top of my head, Rifts/Chains/L&L can be comfortably done in just under or around 20 minutes, Vermillion Problem in 23-25 minutes and Thrashers in 16-17 minutes). Again, my comments are mostly geared towards mutators, which generally tend to be longer and require more resources. In the past two mutators especially, I've been consistently mining out all my bases and using all those minerals. | ||
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The Bottle
242 Posts
I found him to be the (close) second best in the train mission to Kerrigan, the absolute best in the void shard mission (which I think everyone agrees is the hardest one so far), the second best in the second lock & load mission (I know you disagree), and very manageable in most of the other mutators. (He struggles in the laser drill one, and whiteout.) I still think his herc-tanks are the best anti-ground in the game, which you didn't mention in your description of him. Dropping an army of them in hostile territory can make everything disappear. And with herc micro and points in the immortality protocol mastery, they're on the same level of resilience as Vorazun's DTs IMO, with some disadvantages (it costs to revive them, their corpse can be killed, not cloaked) and some advantages (easier to get cover, revives in a second with full health and doesn't have to come back from base, has really high range). It may be that I'm just not using the other commanders to their potential. Though I like to think that I'm always using the strong underrated things. (I always have multiple nyduses with Kerrigan in the missions where you need mobility/army cover, for example, I use vultures a lot, and can easily get to a point of constantly remaxing my bio army, etc.) I also slightly disagree with you on Abathur's place. I think he's consistently strong in every mutation except the void shard one (which shuts him down pretty hard... maybe he should lose a lot of points considering that it's the hardest one). Our starkest disagreement here is probably the laser drill mission, where you put him in the bottom and I actually put him on the top. A burrow-move roach is amazing for keeping a unit safely with the objective, some burrow micro early on can prevent you from ever losing any unit to the laser drill (and lots of queens later), and a solid army of roach/ravager/queen/viper still rolls over everything. I think you put him in the bottom because of his lack of ability to cheese the laser, but I've finished many missions with him without ever touching the laser. | ||
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29 fps
United States5723 Posts
Note: I know that F2+A isn't the best way to play, but some people do that anyway. I'm just writing this for those who do use it. It's annoying when your army keeps moving around while you're trying to claim the locks, so here are some ways you can continue claiming the locks while still moving your army with F2. Easiest with zerg. For terran and protoss, you can just bring a worker with you, but you might forget. Zagara, Kerrigan, Abathur: Burrow a unit at the lock. Artanis: Warp in an observer, press E to turn on its observer (?) mode (this makes it stay in one spot but with better vision) Karax: Turn an energizer into a stationary pylon by pressing E or use an observer and press E. Vorazun: Turn on the oracle's observer (?) mode by pressing E Swann: Put a tank in seige mode Raynor: Drop a mule or put a tank in seige mode. If you drop a mule, you might need to drop another before the lock is fully claimed. You can also rally your units there, but if you're moving your army around, you'll probably walk off the lock. | ||
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MrTic
60 Posts
On July 07 2016 02:06 29 fps wrote: Lock and Load tip for the F2+A player. Note: I know that F2+A isn't the best way to play, but some people do that anyway. I'm just writing this for those who do use it. It's annoying when your army keeps moving around while you're trying to claim the locks, so here are some ways you can continue claiming the locks while still moving your army with F2. Easiest with zerg. For terran and protoss, you can just bring a worker with you, but you might forget. Zagara, Kerrigan, Abathur: Burrow a unit at the lock. Artanis: Warp in an observer, press E to turn on its observer (?) mode (this makes it stay in one spot but with better vision) Karax: Turn an energizer into a stationary pylon by pressing E or use an observer and press E. Vorazun: Turn on the oracle's observer (?) mode by pressing E Swann: Put a tank in seige mode Raynor: Drop a mule or put a tank in seige mode. If you drop a mule, you might need to drop another before the lock is fully claimed. You can also rally your units there, but if you're moving your army around, you'll probably walk off the lock. People just need to get a habit of using control groups. F2 just messes things up for me, and I usualy don't even use more than 2 groups. Detectors can just follow a unit | ||
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