After playing several mutation games with the new patch I noticed that I now need to make a choice early game. Whether to produce cannons early on and have guaranteed effective utility or rush an army and risk losing it. Loosing an army is too costly for Zeratul. You cannot recover quickly from such a loss. Unlike Nova who also has costly units, there is no way for Zeratul to repair his robo units quickly and reliably. It can happen that you where not paying attention and you just loose everything and that’s it, you’re a burden to your ally. Heck, even loosing part of your army will set you back drastically. There is a great level of synergy between Zeratul units, which is great, but if take away some of it, it drastically lowers its power.
With cannons you have that safety net. If you lose your cannons shades, they still did their job by providing damage, space and time for you to react. If one does not set up cannons early game, they are playing risky and with low rewards because if you lose your army you have nothing reliable to fall back.
Pre patch one could build up cannons and play with Zeratul until they had that perfect death ball comp. The cannons although expensive, were priced just right because they still allowed players to spend money on defense/ offence and detection while saving up to build units. There was little risk using cannons. Cannons are cost prohibitive early game, but there was no adjustment to the price of robo or gateway units. Removing cannon play has a large ripple effect to his playstyle. Cannons where designed to provide protection, detection and offence, if you remove that or diminish its utility without compensating other aspects of his kit, you end up damaging his efficiency, survivability and utility to his coop ally…
If you lose your whole army as anyone, it’s really bad, except maybe Zagara or bio Stukov. Dying is usually a bad thing. Zeratul’s units are very tanky, and his stalkers even auto cast blink for you; he’s still one of the most forgiving commanders in the game.
It’s frankly a good thing if messing up with an army has real consequences, and Zeratul’s micro isn’t very demanding while his macro is almost nonexistent aside setting up teleporters everywhere.
Welcome to the world of every other commander, Zeratul. It’s not normal that it didn’t matter whether you lose half of the “army” you deploy or none of it since they aren’t real units anyway. Cannons are still okay as a mineral dump for support, they just cannot win every game alone without having real units.
Also funny how you bring up Nova who is even more punishing to lose units with, since her units have a cooldown unlike Zera’s.
My guess is that the nerf will relegate cannons to a support role in efficient play.
Increased cost will make it take far longer to get a decent number of them, this is compounded by having a weaker economy after the void ray-expand nerf.
The cooldown change will reduce your map presence and force you to choose where you want to be active, it will be much more difficult to do two things (e.g. defend a wave, push an objective) back to back.
And that right there is the problem. Cannons do EVERYTHING just as you point out in your post, but they did all of that without any risk whatsoever. Now, they’re expensive enough that if you’re gonna spam them you’re gonna trade away something.
That’s how it’s supposed to work an RTS. You shouldn’t just be able to have everything you want with a specific build and have no drawbacks.
As far as Zera’s army goes. That is working the way its supposed to.
You are wrong, cannons cannot do everything. As mentioned in previous posts of mine, they provide crucial space needed for Zeratul to “army up”.
Other commander can build similar structures at lesser cost with no real risk, should they be nerfed to the ground? Your logic makes no sense. Just because something is good at what it is supposed to do does not make it op VS AI.
What authority do you have to tell me or others what an RTS should or should not be? This is a Co-Op “commander” game VS AI. Zeratul has several builds to choose from and now the dev team just made it less optimal to play certain styles. Players can still mass cannons and win mutations with it, it just takes longer to do it. I found ways to get around certain nerfs which I wont post here. Players will always find ways to get around things they don’t want. That applies to any game.
So what exactly is the problem then? If they are STILL viable in mutations after that big of a nerf doesn’t that say to you that they were clearly too cheap before?
I’m just trying to help you understand why the devs felt that the cannons were a problem. If you don’t want to hear why then why are you even posting about it on the forums? Did you just want an echo chamber response? Sorry, but that’s not gonna happen.
The Devs were right to nerf the cannon build as hard as they did.
I “blinked heavily” one time, and I ended up losing Kerrigan and Zagara (obviously, not in the same game ). Another game, I wasn’t aware that as Nova, I was on top of an attack wave, so a bunch of Banalings and Lings took out most of my army. Alarak accidently got separated from his Supplicants and Slayers, so he died.
It sucks, but that’s just how it is.
Tychus’ Auto-Turrets are cheaper, but are rather lousy
Dehaka’s Primal Wurms are powerful, but take up 2 supply each
Stukov’s Bunkerlisks are nice, but cost 350/0/6
Karax’ Cannons only cost 150, but they can’t project like Zeratul’s Tesseract Cannons.
The problem has been stated many times over in several posts. The dev team tried to suppress a playstyle, but players found ways around it. Currently there are two methods of circumventing this nerf; I won’t post it here. It just pissed off Zeratul players that like to mass cannons for fun and diminished his earliest detection ability.
Zeratul’s cannons did not and do not do the most damage per hit for static defence. They do not have the longest cannon range. They cost more minerals than any other cannons in the game. Their trade off was that it was costly to make them.
What are you talking about? If you lose your entire army, don’t have a reserve of money to rebuild it and/or need to fend off an attack or complete an objective immediately, you’re screwed while playing as:
-Tychus (You need to revive all of your heroes, and that doesn’t cost much, but it’ll take too long if there’s an objective or an attack wave happening)
-Raynor
-Swann
-Artanis (You can build units fast, but you need to have a huge reserve of money to rebuild your whole army)
-Kerrigan
-Vorazun
-Karax (You can build static defense quickly, but your army build slowly, and you need money to rebuild your defenses)
-Alarak
-Nova (Fast build times, but limited charges and high costs)
-Fenix
-Dehaka (You can revive Dehaka quickly, but rebuilding the rest of his army takes time and money)
-H&H (Fast build times, but limited charges and requires money)
-Mengsk (Army builds relatively quickly, but not instantly and requires money)
You can have a complete wipe with Dehaka and shrug it off like nothing. He can do most Brutations with only his instant reviving hero and the pack leaders.
Kerrigan can accomplish a lot too with just the hero unit and omega worms.
My suggestion - leave the cannon cost 200 min BUT projections themselves cost minerals. Also projection cooldown stays long. This way you will have cannons for defense pretty cheap but using them offensively will drain your money.
Though I didn’t encounter any problems with new balance. Zeratul is still SO OP that didn’t even bother about cannons. Also his legions became even stronger.
Everyone will continue to use his void rays, except now they cost 300 more minerals. No one in their right mind will use zealots, even if you get more of them they are still ground only and worthless from midgame on. And Dark Archons are questionable too. It’s a nerf.
). Another game, I wasn’t aware that as Nova, I was on top of an attack wave, so a bunch of Banalings and Lings took out most of my army. Alarak accidently got separated from his Supplicants and Slayers, so he died.