Hot damn, Tychus got changes in the most recent patch. Let’s take a look at them and see what they do to the Review scores.
Well, this addresses one of my complaints - the duration isn’t awkwardly short anymore. However, it does not address the other two (much more important) complaints about how the talent fits into Tychus’s playstyle:
The buff is enough to bump its grade up from a C- to a C, but that’s about it.
what
For the sake of context, this is what Dash was:
The original Dash made sense compared against Press the Advantage and Combat Tactician because, even though it was the most flexible of the three, the Quest component required additional commitment to obtain the significantly greater value.
Now we’re just… getting it for free! And arguably an improved version at that - even though the Movement Speed bonus is being reduced from (up to) 25% to 20%, the bonus duration has been extended from 2 seconds to 2.5 seconds.
Dash’s grade has gone from a healthy A to an even healthier A+. It would be S, but then this happened:
jeepers.
The standard Tychus Combo goes Minigun > Overkill > Frag Grenade. Run and Gun is used at any step of the combo as necessary, but usually after Minigun’s duration has ended. Combat Tactician adds an extra element to the combo by potentially allowing Minigun to be used a second time in the span of the standard Combo.
Considering how powerful Minigun is, this is pretty good.
Combat Tactician also happens to directly synergize with everyone’s favorite Assassin-shredding talent, The Bigger They Are… and its 2 second reduction of Minigun’s Cooldown. Pairing the two cooldown reductions boosts Combat Tactician’s 66% total reduction to 80%, practically guaranteeing that you’ll be able to use a The Bigger They Are… empowered Minigun twice in one fight.
This is also what you could call pretty good.
And since I love the Rule of Threes, let’s talk about another benefit: That’s The Stuff. Use Combat Tactician properly and your healing throughput doubles, making Tychus even harder to put down than he currently is.
For those of you following along at home, we have ventured even deeper into pretty good territory.
But we’re not done yet. Amazingly, Combat Tactician and its synergies have reached all the way to Level 20 and made Bob and Weave into a hideous machine that can allow Tychus to cast Minigun four times in a row. Alternately, it could guarantee that he’ll always have Minigun available regardless of the situation.
The new Combat Tactician is leaps and bounds better than the original version, simultaneously replacing its own grade of D with a solid A+ and upgrading Bob and Weave’s grade to a solid B with synergizing talents.
In conclusion? Absolutely amazing patch for Tychus. Everything that got touched was buffed on multiple levels and the new Combat Tactician is so good it created a new build. However, it wasn’t what Tychus needed:
- Unit control is still very clunky due to the double whammy of decreased range and huge attack speed
- Match performance still heavily relies on massive advantages and disadvantages in equal measure
- Multiple trap talents still lurk among the tiers
- Deleting squishy characters at full health is still way too easy for an “anti-tank” character, and
- Tychus still firmly inhabits the “sharp role” that HOTS’s hero design is supposed to be moving away from
I’ll give the changes a B+ for what they are - positive, but not enough.