So from my gameplay of every campaign so far (excluding Covert Ops), on Brutal, I’ve come to a somewhat decent conclusion of which one is the easiest and which one is the hardest.
Starting with hands down the easiest campaign is Heart of the Swarm.
Access of a permanent Hero unit that can solo clear entire base camps is pretty insane if you ask me, and that’s not counting the fact that you get some really ridiculous unit buffs thrown in the mix too.
Next on my list is Wings of Liberty. I had a lot of struggles during my first playthrough on Brutal but that’s probably because I’m not good at Terran. Anyway, this is probably the second hardest/easiest campaign although considering the fact you get such powerful upgrades that the Terran needed to be a perfect race can make the playthrough a lot easier. However, this is intertwined in an interesting way as access to those upgrades is limited through a credit system that allows you to purchases up to 2 upgrades per certain units as well as Research which is only unlocked on certain missions assuming you take the time and resources to get them.
Finally Legacy of the Void is probably the one with the biggest difficulty spikes IMO. The final mission is definitely a huge contributor on that regard, being probably hands down the hardest mission in all 3 campaigns (not including Covert Ops or the Epilogue). Aside from that, on higher difficulties the game straight up says “screw you” to the player and strips them from things that would otherwise give you an advantage. You’re left with practically nothing except enhanced units and a handful of upgrades depending on how much you’re ready to risk going for Sollarite bonus objectives.
This is a personal topic I just felt like creating so if anyone has their own ideas of which campaign is the hardest/easiest, I wouldn’t mind letting them be shared here. This is what the forums are for after all
Brutal Mode for the most part is a joke. The enemy should be throwing everything possible in their arsenal at the player, yet so much stuff gets left out. You end up in situations like fighting Terran AI that don’t even use something as basic as their Wraith and Banshee cloaking devices. It’s just sad how much wasted potential there was.
I assume the reason for this is because they werent able to come up with a consistent way of giving the player detection due to the branching mission choices. HotS in particular gets hit with this hard, with there being no missions at all separating the first and second halves of the campaign and therefore no assumptions that could be made about what levels of tech would be available when.
LoV is better in that they could have added observers on Ulnar (in fact, they would have been very useful on the first mission) but between the Spear of Adun and the sheer killing power of all the offensive spellcasters you unlock at the same time, it really isn’t actually all that necessary. Storms or Ascendant Orbs will just kill everything anyway.
You’re probably right that it would have been hard to pinpoint when exactly detection would have been introduced in the campaigns. It still sucks. I could go on forever complaining about the stuff that the campaigns chinsed out on or left out, but the lack of enemy units using their cloaking fields is easily the most obvious and blatant disregard for higher difficulty.
Another one that instantly comes to mind is the lack of island hopping. Unit transportation being non-existent after WoL is such a weird choice.
As much as I enjoy both of those mechanics, I do kind of see why they in particular were cut. Cloaking is a very binary and uninteresting gameplay element in the campaigns, you either have detection and it doesn’t matter, or you don’t and you lose.
Island hopping, meanwhile, really requires longer missions with a slower pace, and for whatever reason, they wanted to keep the missions faster paced. I don’t necessarily agree with that call, but within that context I can totally see how transports and high ground control were seen as totally unnecessary elements.
I do think cutting the warp prism in particular was a poor choice though. Having a dedicated mobile pylon is useful enough that energizers really become the only good choice of the three robotic support units, just for that. If we had another unit to fill that role, the other options would become more appealing.
Agreed. The lack of island hopping is more a symptom of the fact that Blizzard did away with longer macro missions that go further than just building up the main base, and then taking that one obvious expansion that’s right near the base. It really just leaves me missing the days when there was like 3 or 4 extra expansions around the map that the player had to slow crawl across the enemy until they reached the objective (ex: “To Slay the Beast”)
WoL has what tvtropes calls Schizophrenic Difficulty. One moment, you got a pretty tough mission (Welcome to the Jungle, Engine of Destruction, Supernova). The next moment, you’re playing a really easy breather level (Cutthroat, Media Blitz, Breakout). I tend to agree this.
HotS only has one mission that I would genuinely classify as “hard,” and that’s the Zerus all-in mission to hatch Primal Kerrigan. I’ve seen people say that the final mission is a tough one due to Mengsk’s army being all elite mercenaries, but Kerrigan’s abilities are just too op. I just Wild Mutationed every fight. Change MY mind that Wild Mutation isn’t the most broken as f#$k ability that SC2 had to offer.
As for LotV and NCO, I can’t judge those since I never played them.
As someone who’s inching toward 100% completion across all campaigns, HotS is by far the easiest. About the only thing challenging about it are a couple of the masteries (The third mission is the only one I had to replay multiple times to get) and the Crucible. Kerrigan just completely breaks the game on every mission, even in the early game.
In a general sense, I think LotV and NCO are tied for next easiest, but they both are a steep jump from HotS. LotV is probably the easier from a gameplay perspective and achievement perspective, due to the SoA and some of the units. Granted, I am a little biased in this regard, as I haven’t done Salvation on brutal yet. Anvil of Will (on the Shakuras hold-out mission) is pretty tough as well.
NCO is, like I said, about the same as LotV. The second Taldarim mission can be brutal if you don’t cover your allies well, and some of the achievements can be a little more mechanically challenging than LotV. The only two achievements I have yet to get are One Woman Army (get a bunch of kills with Nova on the 2nd Taldarim mission) and Friendly Competition (Don’t kill any Taldarim on Welcome to the Jungle 2). The NCO achievements are a bit more interesting since they’re open to creative solutions (much like WoL’s), and Nova is much less broken than Kerrigan.
As for probably the hardest… On my brutal run, I mistakenly took the Psi Disruptor instead of the Hive Mind Emulator in preparation for All-In, expecting it to be a good defensive choice. Did not work well (although bunkers filled with marines and backed with enough siege tanks to level a city helped). Like Ret said, WoL suffers from schizophrenic difficulty. Engine of Destruction took me forever, because the Odin will just march straight to its death, and the achievement to keep it above a certain amount of health was worse. All-In was a couple hours worth of saving/reloading just to get everything right (Dying at around 91% was a massive pain). I have yet to beat In Utter Darkness (but I’ve also been taking a break from it anyway).
Also, many of WoL’s achievements sound more difficult than they are in practice. Ace’s High on All In is child’s play if you use Hive Mind Emulators. Hurry Up, It’s Raid Night is actually pretty easy if you do it on normal after a brutal run. My Precious on Safe Haven is a lot easier if you remember that there’s 5 colonies, one of them being your base.
I forgot about the Epilogue missions. #1 and #3 are fine I think (I might even have Triple Tap on the last one) but I foresee mission 2 on brutal being a fair bit troubling, especially the mastery.
The last epilogue mission is rather cheaply difficult. Once you remember how it work, it’s more tedious than complicated. The first one is pretty tough. You need to macro a lot to get a good standing in early game, but then you need to go out and expand to keep up. You can take your sweet time, either. The constant pressure will eventually starve you. To this day, I still have no idea how did I beat the second one.
Actually, come to think of it; in term of mechanics the Epilogue is rather fun.