Gonna drop this in real quicklike. Been playing with @Hyperiön from the lovely Church of Mengsk and been enjoying the living animal out of myself. I usually play with friends or the missus and none of them play Karax. Swarax been one of my favorite duos but I always wondered how it feels to be the Swann in it and not everybody’s favorite bearded Protoss. So now I know it. Anyhoo, here’s a couple of ideas that I had in previous threads or seen other people propose in said threads. By no means do I claim that all these upgrades should be applied at the same time, these are just discussion points.
Remove the Building HP & Shield Mastery and replace it with Research Cost & Time Reduction Mastery, while buffing his buildings’ (alternatively combat buildings only) health and shields by 30%. Reason: The building mastery seems to be less used by the majority of the players outside certain Brutations.
Make the Khaydarin Monolith target the highest HP target in its range. Reason: This mostly applies to the infested maps but is relevant elsewhere as well, Monoliths tend to do a lot of overkill. This is just a small quality of life change, I believe.
Allow Karax’s Photon Cannons to splash for 33-50% of its damage in a small area. Reason: A little bit less reliance on the SoA for aoe damage would be appreciated - at least by me. Karax not having any basic splash is apparent on DoN the most.
Have Karax’s combat buildings benefit from Forge upgrades such as armor and damage. Reason: Trying to make them buildings more appealing as much as I can.
Give Nexus the Nexus Overcharge ability from campaign. Reason: Honestly, no idea.
Allow Karax to ‘suck up’ Pylons, Shield Batteries, Photon Cannons and Khaydarin Monoliths into the Spear of Adun and deploy them wherever on the map with vision (and unless we are talking about Pylons, within power fields). Reason: More dynamic, flexible and aggressive turrets would allow them to compete against armies.
Can’t remember if I had anything else. Will edit or add in later replies if the topic picks up.
If my boi Alarak can’t benefit from Forge upgrades, neither should the cannons. (Minus Shields, as that affects all Protoss structures.) I don’t think they really need this.
25% at most. No need to go overboard.
Still wouldn’t make his Nexi any better. Unlike Swann’s Command Centers, Nexi can’t really be mass repaired, and Nexus Overcharge doesn’t really splash. I’d rather see him get access to a Mothership Core that has Pylon Overcharge.
Sooooo Zeratul 2.0, only your structures die while out in the field. Gotta learn to cannon hop.
That’s a weird parallel to draw but whatever. I wouldn’t mind if hero units like Nova or Alarak were benefitting from standard research like that.
That would be 5 damage. I guess that’s alright, since you can build quite a few of them.
Edit: Forgot the rest.
It’s a whatever, that one. Figured we might as well lump it on the commander who is supposed to do turrety stuff. Or not. I don’t know if the reason part of that point shows how very adamant I am about it.
There’s been many ideas about this from moving Pylons with them defensive buildings in their range, through Probe cast range increase to this. Optimizing a subpar build is fine but Karax has too much of his kit invested in his static for it to be this level of uncool.
How about we nerf zeratul so karax can have a niche again? So many of these suggestions I feel like trying to make him compete with zeratul. No. We don’t need karax to have mobile towers. We also don’t need zeratul to have mobile towers, but that is a conversation for another thread
I might be one of the only few people on this forum who don’t give two figs about Zeratul. I feel like Karax has a lot of his “power” invested in his static which is not as viable as building an army because of a bunch of shortcomings. In the meantime his army is gated behind a metric ton of upgrades and a mastery.
For #2… give karax army upgrades for Free (ie no minerals+gas… still take the build time)… does not apply to building and Spear upgrades
For #1, i don’t think they should be mobile, instead
Probes can build at range, start with 6 (so they can build without getting too near enemy/wandering around) and let them upgrade to 500 (so they only need vision…letting his towers feel more like his spear)
Because static can’t move forward, cut the cost of his static by 30-50%
That should be enough (besides boosting the Chronowave Mastery)
As neat as that would be, it still doesn’t justify the unit tax, which is his biggest issue for army. He needs stronger units to justify the extra cost, or he shouldn’t have the extra cost.
The extra cost is to push him into using his cannons. So its justified by his cannons being good… but they are not good enough to justify the tax, ranged/global build and cheaper cannons to allow pushing would make them good enough to justify the tax. (because his units are support for his cannons…free upgrades means its easier to have a diverse set of units supporting the cannons)
Sounds not unlike Nova’s elite units… Hers are typically x2 the cost at 3x the hp and 1.5x the damage. Karax has free healing though, while Nova relies on Defense Drones at 200m apiece. I think it could work with karax, since Nova uses the paradigm of “cheap upgrades for pricy units”.
I may be biased since Nova doesn’t have towers to spam, nor SoA strikes, but I’d still prefer Nova’s units :\
Not sure how I feel about this one, tbh.
I get that a lot of people don’t use his building mastery but I personally like it if I know I am going to play maps like DoN or something. Even with random maps having that 60% tankier buildings I know I can build a couple cannons/batteries/monoliths and just leave them to defend with little to no trooper support.
I’d rather they just make that whole mastery choice better like adding on dmg onto the life/shield mastery. Maybe not 60% for all 3 at max mastery but somewhere between 40-50% damage, shields, life if you’re 30/30.
Tanky buildings is his thing and I don’t want to see that fall away from hit kit is all.
This I can get behind if they’re going to change his building mastery at all. Although it kind of feels like this one would just be compensating for nerfing his tanky building mastery.
I like this.
Be it tied into his mastery or a forge upgrade or something.
The point is his units are more expensive because he needs less of them (and the non robos are good at surviving) They could use some more benefits [like free upgrades], and making it so you really do need less of them (ie get his cannons to actually push well)
Maybe Swap the masteries… Units get a +30% hp and shields, Combat Buildings get 20% reduction in cost,
and he starts with 30% more expensive combat units (with free upgrades) and 30% cheaper+tankier combat buildings.
That’s fine. As I wrote it somewhere above there have been many ideas to solve the same problem. I imagined my solution similar to how Artanis can warp in units within his power field calldown. You call down a Pylon and your defenses into its range. Once those cannons are not useful anymore you can just pick them back up (let’s say once they haven’t taken damage in ten seconds and/or have full shields) and wait for the next time you need them. You can have a max amount of charges on each building type, etc.
Honestly, if he could salvage his turrets that would already be a pretty nice change.
Maybe to an already existing one or one of them SoA energy upgrades.
Some ideas are tied together more than others. The Nexus Overcharge idea is totally random and on its own for example. I’d generally like his units to be better and his buildings to be better so one could forgo going all in with one mastery and still utilize said units and/or buildings.
Apparently not. From my anecdotal experience the majority of good players recommended the unit cost reduction mastery and most people I’ve seen used said mastery. I play random missions and there the unit cost mastery easily outshines the building health one because buildings are not flexible enough.
That’s also an option. I believe @Tangor uses it in his mod thingy, so if anybody ever tried that, your experience would be welcome. I would like Karax to get salvage for his combat structures with that though.
I don’t like the idea of this, but I will acknowledge that it tackles the problem I want the Salvage mechanic for.
Right, that could be a bit more competitive by adding X% extra speed to the Chrono Field as well (his passive). Good call, didn’t think of that mastery.
Agreed. Personally I would go with stronger units and keep the tax.
I don’t know. Personally I think Zeratul has the elite expensive mech niche covered better than Karax could expect to, even with buffs.
I think a better option would be to remove the tax so Karax can move into a cheap mass mech niche that isn’t really covered yet. (Talandar doesn’t count, his shtick is massing everything at once.)
