I wonder if it would be possible to update Amon’s Ravens to become the same as in ladder where HSM and PDD are replaced with Anti-Armor Missle and Interference Matrix in a future community patch? And while we’re at it update everything to the latest changes, like flux vanes for void rays and flying locusts for zerg. It would also bring something fresh to play against in COOP.
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I support removing the missiles. As dodge-able as it is, it just isn’t fun to always kite back and forth 2x against every Raven in sight…
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Agreed and it’s one of the things that puts me off from playing Brutal. I think I hate brutal Ravens more than Vipers at this point.
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Isn’t Amon army more based on campaign than ladder?
He was even especially given Vorazun Oracles when he only had the ladder ones in the past.
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funnily amon banshees got the extra attack range when cloaked - i think even his infested banshees get that +2 range bonus.
Raven missiles are so unfun to play against.
Flying locusts already exist. Abathur just needs them to spawn from killing air units (but Swarm Hosts don’t make them. However, Creeper Hosts do.)
I want Vipers nerfed into the floor. :u They are the most oppressive, overbearing unit in the game both for us and against us.
Amon Vipers are so vicious due to being affected by playerVplayer multiplayer balancing, where zerg tier3 armies are utter cr*p and desperately need the crazy Vipers to even the field.
Though TBH zerg amon is by far the easiest amon, several times weaker than Terran mech/air Amon.
Honestly, my major problem with Vipers is that consume is an instant max refill on energy. Nova’s EMPs can drain the energy, but they take 0 damage and just cast Consume and sluuurp instantly back to full. It’s so imba.
I’d be fine with Abathur’s Vipers receiving the same nerf. Vipers as a whole are ridiculous.
Wouldn’t it be better to snipe them by turning off autocast?
Yeah tbf while a couple commanders are semi resilent to viper’s yoinks like marines and heros, they can seem to be a bit punishing to commanders who build expensive yoinkable units for one of the only ladder units that seems to be a the closest to a non heroic hero ability tier unit.
Adding in a couple abathur vipers to his ults with unlimited yoinks and clouded covers and near instant energy replenishment and cds can just do so much on a already strong army.
But for pve for a player vs a bot. I can def see how that could be unfun and punish slower nonheroic commanders like swann and other kidnappable units.
On the other hand like only reavers. Vipers and the occasional wave that drops like 10-20 capital ships or a 40%+ screen covering sea of banelings and zergings can threaten some armies.
I always thought it would be interesting to see a diffculty mutator where amon just played smarter like a harder ai, splitting attack waves, evading intercepting commanders, etc.
Then again, we can kinda see from ravens run bombing that more intelligent ai or maybe even a ai that ignores armies to zip it’s hellions/phoenixes over to attack your workers and harass them could probably just be more aggravating than challenge for some commanders for a pve experience etc.
By the time you’re in range for Snipe, they’re in range for Cloud with Overseers spotting you. Plus, you have to factor in Banes with Bane Speed and Creep bonus. Nova’s range is better, but you usually see 2+ Vipers, depending upon how late into the game you are.
Yeah honestly I just have no problem with this comp as Nova P1 building Tanks and Hellbats. I grab a couple Ghosts too but they are to EMP Dominators rather than Vipers. Nova snipes the Vipers fine. Who cares if they drop clouds they can’t kill the Hellbats and Tanks (and at least a couple of tanks will be able to drop mines).
Can really max out on Hellbat/Siege Tank/Ghost and A-move through Explosive Threats taking no losses under most mutations.
Most of my problem as Nova is losing my Ravens. >> That tilts me so hard. Otherwise, I just drop airstrike/nuke on the wave and clean up.
In general, Vipers are just a major pain in the backside.
Ah yeah just don’t build Ravens vs Explosive Threats. With 2 points of unit health regen your units will heal up fine. Factory first, max Hellbats and Heavy Siege Tanks, scatter in a few Ghosts. Profit.
I think i used to just have a seperate control group always for ravens to use /micro their missles and turrets, whenever scourge came it was a running game but sometimes you could just pull them back and hide them somewhere before engagement, nova’s army would clean up the scourge or shoot a explosive missle at them.
But i mostly just remember moving the raven control group to a back before engaging. TBH im not honestly sure if the scourge make it through but yeah a little bit of army regen is great.
You don’t need to max it but yeah 1.5-3 points of regen is pretty handy, though i think it needs some time out of combat to trigger anyways so 1.5-3 hp/s usually felt enough regen to be 100% between engagements. Feel free to adjust to personal playstyles.
I think i often had marines and goliaths for nova airfights though. Can’t remember if i used liberators or banshees ever as soakers but i think i usually focused on the ravens and didn’t really like to lose units often.
I could push like 11-12 minute soft carry void thrashers often if i want to level on my main commander if i wished, and the odd 7-9 minutes with a great ally like a strong dehaka/fed and healed ally abathur.
But most of the time if i did a 11-13 minute void thrasher and my ally was a pug karax/pug swann trying to get a army out by minutes 14-23 and the mission ended 11-13. They’d just complain they never got to do anything the entire game. Most of the 6-9 minute odd dehaka pug pair games were just mostly mute though. nobody was focusing on talking, just zipping objectives and keeping eachother healed up for constant aggression with mobility abilities on my main commander with the odd vision scv.
Different commanders definitely have different weaknesses and different strengths for sure. Nova has a pretty prime army and she’s pretty versatile and her buildings have ridiculous hp.
Zeratul and tychus kinda outshone her for spammable/uber elites as well as properly microed and split abathurs with dmg splitting the symboites and viper micro for near unlimited kidnaps and visions disables.
And zeratul has like near endless projectile reflects and theoretically unlimited prepped mobility + infinite reuse teleporting cannon detectors as a mineral dump/detector., but i haven’t met people that seem to enjoy the endless safari hunts + void array setups vs a fire and forget medivac or deep tunnel.
Some people do joke in coop about pve being a tryhard pve mode and others do just want to smoke playing it lol and have fun and get units for their allies to kill lol.
So i guess there’s always a balance between ultra tryhard speedrun mode and giving a ally something to do but i just like killfarming for fun as mine. My last 5 Brutal matches K:K ratios are like 1250:250, 880:880 in a kerrigan split second whackamole contest, 450:150 and 600:50 and 400:250.
Everyone knows there’s someone out there soloing weekly brutations on 1 sets of workers and solo carrying over 12 commanders for 7-27s youtube views. But i do feel kinda chill just lounging around and usually i try to heal up my allies to 100% and try to defend as many points as possible while letting them keep their attack groups to avoid killstealing or robbing too much fun from them though haha. But i do try to level up more, but it seems to be a double standard.
People don’t want “boring games”, but the moment you play a non traditional powerhouse they leave on some commanders just on karax/abathur/ non p3 stukovs on sights or just leveling a prestiege on the odd time even if you’d be fine.
There are clearly some extremely good and talented people at coop, but it feels like a weird double standard people have where they want it ‘hard’, but the moment anything is slightly suboptimal or leveling they want to quit, even if you have a comp planned and 1000++ coop games anyways in it.
I think i messed around and did a lvl 8 raynor 700:400 on malwarefare to someone on their lvl 700 Zeratul. I got a “p1 raynor suxs” and “u should be p0”, for using like a cd to defend the first wave, open my base. (he used his legion calldown to open his base… and then… just had it afk and time out and then sat often with zeratul static).
I built up 2 army control groups, about a main force with 60% of troops in ctrl 3, another 40% in ctrl 4, Medics, marines and marauders in each. Both 3+4 pushed into the main base, while main group 3 then went to push ahead for fun, 4 stayed to defend as well as banshee call downs. #5 was ebays, #6 was vulture group and #7 was factory.
It was just casual coop but i saw the lvl 700 zeratul just afking, not pushing, not setting up void arrays, f2a moving their hero and going afk while i stimmed the tower #4 marines, attacked bases with the #3 marines, used cooldowns to supplement #4 and intercept attack waves as needed.
By the end it was still a 700:400 gap piloting and stimming/microing each group at a time camping 2 towers at once as well as defence and for fun attack while he mostly a moved spun in spots. I maybe went down 200/200 to 194/200 lowest attacking bases and shuffling damaged units back.
Yet the dude was still just silent, silent game of coop. So i figured i’d play p0 raynor lvl 9 for the hell of it since he was a old main anyways before i started spending $ on coop.
The first 2 people just instantly left at the sight of a leveling p0 lvl 9 raynor. I can’t say i blame em, i’ve judged too.
But when it’s a max abathur or p2 karax it really gets old. People say ‘I want a challenge, and i hate it when my ally does it all, and leaves me with nothing to do!/shows off’. But it really feels like a double standard when they don’t want the ‘disadvantage of a lvl 9’, but stick around every max prestiege strong commander game.
At the same time, i kinda wonder, people also complain about every amon comp being “too easy”, yet i’ve yet to see anyone express tears of joy at being exploded to death by scourge, have single units kidnapped by vipers, time out and die on IDEF 1:20 hour long DoN (well, maybe the IDEF people quing it 37x 0:37-1:20 hr long DoNs enjoy it lol. )
I kinda wonder if there’s a slight paradox. People want content to challenge them, but at the same time the most dangerous comps are the ones that mostly kill your units with “UNINTERACTIVE BS!!!” when you see your ally’s units get vipered, ally novas get mass scourged, limitless abathurs killed before critical mass, swanns getting vipered, (lower apm) p0 raynors/low Level stukovs getting mass stormed / siege tanked / etc.
I think there’s kinda seems to be a pug paradox in words vs actions. People announce they want more challenge and for some fourm posters here i can see it, but lots of mostly pug people just seem to ‘want’ challenge but instantly pass on gambling on a ascension leveling commander that could provide less of the ‘overpoweredness’ of a masteried/maxed commander.
I’ve seen plenty a fourm poster carry just for the fun of it and i do believe most on fourms are higher than most due to sc2 being a strategy game and sharing some really solid strats vs the pugs struggling on hard/normal in pug que.
But i really do kinda wonder. What could amon add to a brutal that people would enjoy, yet not be frusterating? In a hypothetical still developed coop?
Some chess Ai’s / l4d2 do feature dynamic scaling, where if you do really well and continue doing well it’ll scale harder (smarter grandmaster ai / upgrade and spawn more elite infected/hunters and tanks/witches), meanwhile all it seems like sc2 knows how to do is spawn more units.
And that can either leave into curbstomps (one sided battles) where
A: Your side has more firepower/critical mass/cds and stomps anyways, taking (some, neglible losses).
(Etc: 100 Raynor marines vs 100 amon marines. But raynor has stimpacks/upgrades/medics and stims and banshees and kills all 100 amon marines with some micro and 5 marines lost. )
B: The fight is just mechanically greatly disadvantaged. (etc: 20 raynor marines at minute 5 vs 97 Amon Marines at minute 5. Whatever micro raynor does, just gets 5 amon marines with identical upgrades to fire at him. Player just dies or resorts to extreme cheese <ex: 5 ebays meat shields siege tanks/cd stalling/black hole/Heros from the storm mutators, etc. )
In my opinion. i think L4d2’s adaptive scaling does the job very well. In l4d2 the game is able to spawn near unlimited zombies if a group is mowing it down to the 130-160s kills per player point, but it can also scale it down to the 25-50 zone or despawn them if a player dies or is downed.
Yet easy/medium/hard still influence the strengths yet each can rubberband into some unique challenges. Hard can instantly end a game with too many tanks, and then reset. Medium can offer a challenge, but only spawn maybe 1-3. Easy can be a zombie head mowing contest that spawns nonstop half health easy tanks, but then use like 4-6 of them. In practice this can make it so even if a friend used to hard plays with a friend only confident on easy, both can have a great time and have the game scale to where they need.
On the other hand, if rubber banding is done too STRONGLY to the point intentionally sucking can become a viable strategy, it can make it easily feel like you’re punished for doing TOO well like a Mario kart where if you get too much of a early lead you could have the ai’s zoom too fast to be physically beatable early in the game.
if sc2 or the stormgate coop could have added a adaptive scaling, (like etc: all of amon’s bases are completely cleared), it could be interesting to add rewards like a Amon’s reserve troop mechanic or a player Reserve guard to balance it. Say you could clear his base, but it triggers backup forces where instead it’d be a empty map. You could get bonus exp (say, up from +5-75% more xp a map) depending on how much you could handle.
By doing this, you could make the rubberband potentially rewarding for coop while having it so if you got overran, the ai could stealth delete/retreat units off the map like l4d2’s director’s despawn, or give the player a emergency calldown to save their butts/armies by having some powerful units save them. (But give a small +5-10% exp bonus at the end if not used, etc. )
I think that could be really fun. A coop with the endless scaling of l4d2’s soft rubber banding with rewards that could let you always have something to kill. It can really suck if it’s done awfully, but if you do it well,
It can add a lot of continous challenge to the game to keep even experienced multi year vet mvps on their toes who headshot deadstop hunters on spawn and smokers on choke.
And considering stormgate or whatever is still in development, it might be interesting to watch what they might do with the difficulty settings to keep people happy.
It seems like most people enjoy a comfortable challenge vs a painfully agonizingly punishing and merciless one. (except dark soul masochists lol). I’m kinda curious what they’ll do. But it might be interesting to see what another company could do with the rts coop genre. Innovate, 3v3, stranger but viable support commanders?
(Ex: a stettman who only deploys anti army glue zones, mine zones, mugging and wallet extraction zones. A support who just makes clones and mind controls the enemy army, moba style whackjob heros, heck, you could even possibly make a lightning mcqueen styled racecar commander who just runs over the enemies and has a pit stop base if you wanted to and had too many beers the night before.
I wonder what you could do with the genre, given unlimited/sustainable development $ and ingenunity to make what they want for a rts style coop game if they could re invent the wheel using the lessons they’ve learned or been taught from sc2 or what a sc3 could have been. )