Mutation Creation Contest Winner : Injustice League
Description: We are proud to present the winning entry of our first Mutation Creation contest, as designed and submitted by Saito. In this weekly challenge, vile replications of the Koprulu sector's greatest heroes inspire Amon's forces as they lay siege to Augustgrad. Do not back down in the face of their presence, and focus on saving the city.
Map: Rifts to Korhal
Mutations:
Heroes from the Storm [New!] Every attack wave will be led by a random Hero of increasing power. Each Objective point is also guarded by three random Heroes.
Inspiration [New!] Enemy Heroic units increase the attack speed and armor of all enemies within a small range.
Hardened Will [New!] Enemy Heroic units reduce all incoming damage to a maximum of 10 when any non-heroic enemy unit is near them.
Completely bonkers though. I am not even trying brutal, I can't even guarantee that I can pass hard in a systematic fashion with random teammates. The #1 lesson you should have is to clear all the normal units before attacking the heroes. This means "focus the air units", notably the overseers as they tend to get focused last which renders the heroes nigh invulnerable
By far, the death sentence has been given by the Karax + Nova pair with the 3rd wave. The fast nukes + static defense overwhelm you easily
I managed on the first try as Stukov(+Kerri). But I'd imagine it's quite easy to fail if ally can't hold their own, mine did well enough. That ultra/hydra/kerri army late game seemed quite unstoppable. But in general heroes appeared hard to take early game, but waves didn't seem too bad when you reached mid-game. Definitely get detection though, both Zeratul and Nova heroes surprised me few times.
I went 2 for 2 (once as stukov, once as artanis) pretty easily. Vorazun ally both times. I think the timestop and black hole just dominate this mutation.
I tried Alarak at first because I thought he could just mindblast the heroes but what ended up happening was Alarak taking extremely high damage and just burned through my supplicants and eventually my Ascendns. So anyone got any advice for him?
Eventually I switched to kerrigan and she felt much better with just hydras lings and ultras. Judging from the allies I played with stukov and vorazun is really good.
Yeah... this was insanely hard until my partner switched to Vorazun. Time stop + black hole seem like just about the only thing that can make the hero attack waves manageable in the late game.
I played as Alarak going standard ascendant/supplicant spam with havoc sentries for detecting Zeratul. Some key points: - Make sure to use deathfleet any time we were facing heroes and didn't have time stop. - There is a big red shield animation around the heroic units that have the damage reduction buff from nearby units... Do not waste mind blasts on them while you can see the buff on them (it will only deal 10 damage), but spam mind blast as fast as you can whenever you see one without it.
General things to know about the enemy heroes:
First wave is just Raynor... he just attacks and has a lot of health... easy
Second wave is Dahaka and Tychus, they also just attack and have a lot of health... easy
The third wave is where you have to be on point... this will be Nova and Karax... They will go to an expansion, not your front door and as soon as they get in sight of your nexus Nova will nuke it. Karax immediately builds cannons and kaydarin monoliths... these two can scale out of control fast... we found it best to meet them mid map and start using big cooldowns here to kill them before they got out of control. As Alarak I built 3 pylons at the intercept point so I could throw out all 3 of my photon overcharges on them while my Vorazun ally used black hole to CC them.
Fourth wave is Zeratul and Zagara. Zeratul is cloaked, teleports around a lot, and aggressively targets ground based detectors. Zagara uses her roach drop ability continuously while also summoning hydralisks like normal. She will scale out of control quickly if not dealt with fast similar to Karax.
Wave Five is the hardest combo... Artanis and Kerrigan.
Artanis is insane.... He has a constantly regenerating shield you have to burn through, does constant AoE damage, and when he dies he goes invulnerable for 5 seconds, then explodes like a nuke and revives to full health... This ability has a 1 minute cooldown so you have to kill him AGAIN before that resets.
Kerrigan seems straight forward but at one point she will use some ability from the WoL campaign where she summons a giant sphere of death that kills everything in it almost instantly... similar to Nova's nuke it seems like she will prioritize using this on your expansion/worker line if she sees it.
After wave 5, it cycles through the last 3 combos until you finish... Nova/Karax, Zeratul/Zagara, and Artanis/Kerrigan
Finished with a friend of mine around Gold level in Brutal difficulty, we did Zagara + Artanis, was insanely fun and difficult , holy crap @ Artanis and quick nova nuke.
Won the game at the end by ignoring defense and going full warp ins on the last 3 shards with scourge bombs (which survived thanks to guardian shell :D) Insanely fun and tight finish at the end. Great mutation but damn hard.
Did it with Vorazun and a good Raynor ally. We lost once to Kerrigan using Apocalypse (or how is it called..) which destoyed our army in a blink. Next time I just time stopped/black holed her to death.
This one was pretty fun I thought. Went into it the first time without really knowing what to expect and got my expo annihilated by nova and karax lol. beat it with raynor + alarak on my second try. Kerrigan tore the shit out of my bio but my alarak partner just spammed that aoe orb shit and built some buildings mid map to overcharge and we took it pretty easy
Having Vorazun sure helps a lot to control the wave with black holes and timestop. I went the immobilization wave dmg mastery to make sure Kerrigan killed most units so only a few were left to take down hardened will/old immortal shield from heroes. I think the hardest part is the early game where you don't have big armies yet to just overwhelm through sheer numbers once the enemy aoe abilities are down.
I'm wondering about the viability of a Raynor/Swann combo where Swann turtles while Raynor spams OC's, then you can perma-scan incoming waves while Swann drill-snipes the hereos.
On March 14 2017 20:23 Ganseng wrote: this one too hard for me just like the last one don't you feel they should downgrade the difficulty a little bit?
If easy is still too hard, then yes, they should make easy easier^^. Otherwise, I did this with a level 11 artanis to level him on hard with a very mediocre ally(less than one fourth of the units killed). Just focus the supporting units until the shieldbuff around the heros disappears and intercept the nova/karax combo early.
On March 14 2017 20:23 Ganseng wrote: this one too hard for me just like the last one don't you feel they should downgrade the difficulty a little bit?
If easy is still too hard, then yes, they should make easy easier^^. Otherwise, I did this with a level 11 artanis to level him on hard with a very mediocre ally(less than one fourth of the units killed). Just focus the supporting units until the shieldbuff around the heros disappears and intercept the nova/karax combo early.
well a brutal mission is trivial, and this mutation is almost impossible for me on brutal
it feels right to narrow the gap both by increasing the mission difficulty and by decreasing the mutation difficulty
I can see why they should increase the difficulty of brutal for vanilla co-op, but why should they decrease it for the mutation? If brutal is too hard, just play hard. You're not entitled to be able to finish every single mutation on brutal
Well, I think it's fair that mutations should be quite challenging for very good players too, in order to give them a reasonable fun. Others could just lower the difficult a notch or two, in case, since you have the whole range of difficulties for mutators too, as you have for plain coops.
For example, I'm just a simple gold/platinum player, and yet until today there were only 3 mutations I could not do on brutal, and had to do on hard (the previous "Grave Danger" being one of them). I won most mutators at first try, with a few requiring 2 or 3 at most. If a low level player like me can do that, I think the mutations are far from being too hard, actually... except for some specific ones ("Transmutation" being probably the most dangerous mutator seen so far).
I am high diamond/ low masters and I gave so far been able to finish all mutations on brutal. For most of them, I have done it with random partners, but a couple have required me to play with friends who I know are decent. Indeed, the most challenging part about mutations is that my ally usually don't contribute as much as I do (which can't be expected, since most players who play co-op are in the lower leagues). I would find it really disappointing if they made mutations easier to cater to weaker players who could just as easily play on hard