Abathur P1 in B+1

Co-op Missions Discussion
1

I struggle to like Abathur honestly. P0 feels like a waste of prestige grinding and P2 feels a bit shoe-horned when sometimes air would be a better option and I won’t even mention P3 (though I think it can be good for Single base if its better to not expand or your ally can triple base).

P1 meanwhile is in a tough spot. Its incredibly powerful against some otherwise difficult mutators (Double Edge and Black Death) but gives up so much early game power that it rarely feels worth it even if the late game power is incredible.

Any players out there have any luck with P1 in B+1 random queue? What builds do you do? Roach → any tech unit is okay but it’s so slow to build damage output that some early objectives can be hard to kill. Do you still do lures or focus on macro? Do you put extra Mastery points into Toxic Nest cooldown reduction beyond the recommended 10 for other prestiges?

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I’d go P2 and double down on Ravagers or SH even if they’re at disadvantage for current mutators. Having your ability to go mass air nerfed that hard sucks, but buidling up critical mass of air sometimes hard for me even at regular Brutal and when you have no Leviafan to tank and mutators biting you it’s orders of magnitude harder.

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i really enjoy playing abathur. i mostly play p1, sometomies p0 or p2.
although i consider p0 the strongest. reason for that is the nice army mixture of 6 ultimate evoulutions, roach/queen and ,the most important, vipers. well controlled vipers can shut down most of emey armys without breaking into sweat.

playing p1 i make up my mind about my army compisition as soon as i know about the enemy. playing mass muta vs iridate or parasitic bomb is often times not fun.
generally i start with some roaches and queens (get the heal upgrade fast) and then tech into mass ravager or muta.
you mention the problem of slow ramp up but i think there is not a lot you can do about it. when it comes down to objective kills, early abath p1 sucks :wink:

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Agreed! Brutas are essential to a powerful early game, hence I rarely use P1.

Edit: Since roach is only bonus vs light try more queens or mutas vs objectives. Although I think 1 fully biomassed swarm host is probably the most efficient early-ish objective killer.

5

Yeah, Abathur is just played so much for his early brutalisks and ultimate evolutions.

I remember on the test server, p1 abathur was mostly used just mostly as a more biomass/loss friendly 2 base version of abathur.

You can get near like 100% biomass recovery on death with it, maybe 125% life leech on black death if even make it to the 125% and maybe level a bit before ultimates are evolved. I don’t know if it’s better though.

Abathur is one of those commanders that sees/saw extensive pre prestige play, as commonly mentioned before prestiege, pretty much every single speedrun solo record was ran by abathur sequence breaking like 3-6 minute brutalisks (or earlier) and then reverse clearing and soloing a map with 15 s teleports.

He’s mostly biomass limited to the point a lot of common p0 play alternated between abathurs who spread it wide (weaker units but more army), and concentrated biomass heavy units ( More concentrated ultimate evolutions, more concentrated biomass, smaller armies, etc.)

P0 Abathur has always been simultaneously quite powerful in the right hands but post prestiege. Yeah, he definitely kinda got few things to shine over p0 since he was in a odd spot.

P3 is almost a pure meme with abathur’s lategame so ridicolously powerful with unlimited viper kidnaps, and his early game his main struggle, and the double biomass requirement weakening and slowing him down so much while stopping his snowball it’s almost a pure meme mostly handicapper build that makes him weaker where he struggles and… Okayer where he already excels. (lategame, except he can die before reaching there much easier on p3 and is much more easily more ally dependent. )

Even in areas where you have like a ally going out of their way to booster abathur p3, like very aggressive tychus healing or biomass feeding. He’ll maybe get like 5-8 anyways at half the speed.

Not much over the 6 he already has. Even then Coop is a game mostly about like 6-10 minute sweaty speedruns, brutations, or 20-30 minute hard capped long games.

There’s just not really any place for a prestige that takes like 20 minutes and ally support to shine at the same spot it was before.

If it was just like 125-150 biomass it might be justifable but even when extensively healed it pretty much is just doubling down on abathur’s weaknesses (pre brutalisk early game), and already strong lategame.

He can already spam near infinite kidnaps off lategame vipers, dmg shuffle symboites off 6 ults, and do the lategame fine off 6 ults and vipers, maybe some queens for healing or ravagers for aoe or swarm hosts for swarm hosts.

I think p2 is the most popular abathur prestiege for people who already liked small big army, as abathur is one of those few commanders who can actually benefit from a well fed, smaller army.

So if they float gas, to build a tighter army they don’t care. But yeah, at the same time. Abathur seems like one of those commanders where most people either go p0 or p2.

P1 isn’t unviable but it just passes on a lot of the strengths of abathur (ultimate evos), for a meh newbie friendly 100% biomass recovery on death p1 army imo.

But take the ultimate evolutions out of abathur, and you mostly just have a abathur without cooldowns like other commanders, strong early game or hero units like a tychus, and okay fed units with 100% recovery.

It’s okay for leveling pre ultimate evolution unlocks and it’s still decent enough to beat brutal but it’s pretty much a prestiege that just kinda turns abathur into a f2a move army with somewhat mobility problems. like p1 raynor without… topbar cooldowns or 15s brutalisk teles…

You can technically still get like a 125% life leech army with 100% biomass recovery and switch some mastery points into biomass drops.

It’s definitely not the worst prestiege, but it’s just like fenix. Decent, but not a lot of driving player appeal to play a generic f2a move commander who isn’t strongest nor weakest and doesn’t really bring a lot to a ally or gameplay variety.

Some people still like to use it to mess with p1 ravager or non p2 swarm host builds just to dip into biomass or gameplay variety.

(With/out viper micro, it can be quite fun to see how many fireballs he can shoot out on whim in a army). But yeah.

I think abathur is definitely one of those commanders where his p0 or p2 is considered strongest. He doesn’t get as much strength/variety from prestieging over p0 as a p3 stukov or p3 alarak.

I would probably skip the p3 abathur grind entirely or low priority unless someone loves the grind for sake of grind.

It just seems to me like mostly a meme build that’s kinda lackluster with huge potential kryptonite level weaknesses (Hey, need 200 biomass against air terran bunker vikings?

Have fun with partner roulette!), and even with healing like tychus’s 4% hp/s revitalizers and early game coverage… it’s definitely usable lategame with all the healing but the payoff seems to still be lacking since they still have to be so careful on losing pre 200 biomass units (losing 170 on a early killed roach/queen/muta can just sink the build).

As with all sc2 coop builds, there are rarely times a build is kept unviable from being unable to win. But there’s not a lot of situations where p3 abathur seems to be a competitive powerhouse for random que.

It DOES kinda work with a tychus ally’s strong 4% hp/s healing on early game coverage… But so does 6 ultimate evolutions with 15s brutalisk teleports being able to spawncamp the map while teleporting into revitalizers to heal on demand and unlimited viper kidnaps and area disables.

Abathur’s main weakness is his pre evo early game imo, his lategame has always been pretty absurd as long as you can feed him there and avoid bunkered airterran or people messing up lures or someone dying earlygame with him.

Like lvl 2 karax + abathur + bunkered air terran on that one map that can just flat out autofail unless you clear the first shard by a few minutes in. He just needs that early 100 biomass so much to get going and without ultimate evos he’s just one of the only top barless/ ‘heroless p1/ early p3’ commanders out there.

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So after playing a bunch of P1 (for the stronger Mutalisks) abd P0 for the cheaper Mutalisks (compared to P2) I think I’ve come full circle back to P2 for the occasionally useful buffs as the cost matters so little on a Biomass focused army

One thing I have settled on is a full 30 Mastery points in Toxic Nest charges/cooldown.

This makes Toxic Nests more viable against many mutators especially environmental ones. I noticed in one game against Going Nuclear that with Max mastery I could reliably mine spawn points even if 50% of the Toxic Nests would occasionally get wiped out by a Nuke. Incidentally, spreading Toxic Nests around the map will actually decrease the amount of Nukes dropping on your army due to the formula (remember that Nukes drop within 50 range of one of your units which is the unupgraded range of an ESO so imagine wanting to have 1 uuESO covering every corner of the map and now replace those with Toxic Nests and now you should have significantly less Nukes ruining your day).

The final nail in the coffin for me was a Brutal+4 map I just played with Polarity, Aggressive Deployment and Short-Sighted against Machines of War on Vermillion Problem with a Stettman P1 ally. My team mate said at the start “this is going to be rough” and I was already imagining a **** show.

However it was anything but and we steamrolled the map. My ally never had to fear a deployment spawn or responding to one as there were always toxic nests to kite into and my Brutalisks were never far behind.