That would be the other way to do it, yes. However, I would argue that it’s easier to adjust 5 commanders than 10. Can’t speak for DnD or Diablo, since I don’t play those, but there is a history of nerfing commanders in Co-op: Vorazun, Artanis, Abathur, Raynor have all seen pretty big nerfs.
Given the kind of abilities available in Co-op, it’s very hard to raise the difficulty level any further. I mean, look at the “Just die” mutator: with some commanders, you hardly notice it’s there. Making the enemy smarter would also be very frustrating: do you want a cloaked enemy ghost to sneak up and EMP all your nicely clumped Ascendants, for example?
The problem is that some commanders have game-breaking abilities that they simply don’t need. We don’t need more Immortals that hard counter Battlecruisers, we just need to tone down Zeratul’s, which at the moment make enemy air a joke. Does Abathur need invincible units? Does Dehaka need such powerful calldowns? Does Tychus (who really belongs in a MOBA) need a nuke twice as big as a normal one? Well, I’m sure he thinks so, but indulging the whims of narcissistic psychopaths won’t make Co-op better.
Awesome!!! Love this change. Can’t wait!
No way. This only works in diablo, because there are no fixed difficulty levels. If you buff everything every few months, then the hardest grs are still impossibly hard. Here, power creep very quickly results in brutal being trivial, and then we have nothing challenging to play.
Awesome. I hope we’ll see even more such changes down the line but these sound good already!
One thing though:
Yeah. Good idea in principle and I like your design thinking but… pretty much every commander has a cookie cutter build which works every game and makes counter play / enemy unit choice irrelevant. Even when said build is not the perfect counter you can just power through with calldowns.
Mass infestors, mass carrier, mass marines, hydra / omega, etc… it doesn’t really matter what you face with these comps. And commanders like Alarak or Zagara don’t even have much besides their one cookie cutter comps.
So… whom exactly is this going to help?
Can we expect coop to become that much more difficult and demanding in future by any chance?
Why must you bring back those horrible me-ma-ries?
Cries in corner
Yeah one concern I have so far is this may inadvertently destroy all the revamp work to make “other builds” viable. Again, I am skeptical but I will wait and see before putting down too much details and speculation.
Well dunno about all commanders right now, but with my favourite Stukov comp, (inf diamondbacks) they just laugh at this, it’s one of the easiest to counter and melt 
Every single hero unit counters swarmy / vipers because all of them have at least a weak area damage ability which is enough to wipe entire waves of zerglings in one use.
Meanwhile, hero units by themselves don’t qualify as a target for viper spell (according to the AI). Vipers simple ignore them… and even if they wouldn’t, many hero units don’t use energy so they’re not affected by disabling cloud or abduct.
So there is no real counter… except that half the roster starts the game with a fully delevoped hardcounter for free.
The hope with this is that just maybe people might shift from “one true comp” to “comps that are actually more “hard counter” to what you’re about to face”.
To wit, Swann might decide to go Hellbat-ion/Cyclone and Karax might look to upgraded Collossi a little more often vs. “classic” Zerg with lots of speedlings etc. than “one true Goliath/Siege on Herc” or “tons of static defenses only” builds.
There are already dragoons in Amon’s army. You can find them on Scythe of Amon or if you devolve enemies with Avatar of essence they can turn into them.
“all the revamp work” was for the most part wasted. Certain units are still better than the other. Now if there were enough enemy comps that require different strategies to counter (like AoE vs single target damage, marine/marauder vs ultras or immortal heavy comps for example; frontloaded damage vs dps, ground vs air etc.) or else you lose then you could give underperformers a role to fill instead of ascendants still being the go to build for Alarak, or marines for Raynor, or hydras for Kerrigan, you got the idea.
There is existential dragoon in Amon’s army but not a composition.
Agreed, bonus objectives are so… not important
I hoped they’d somehow involved Mutators, as in have only 1 or 2 Mutators, as they generally make the game more interesting than simple +X% HP etc. but this solution with new attack waves and upgrades sounds interesting, too
One thing I miss on Brutal is the late endgame, basically you both are maxed out at 200 running around smashing things, but then the game ends already and/or atk waves simply aren’t strong enough usually (except a few like maybe temple defense becomes interesting for a second with the last wave)
Really happy to see anything from the team especially something as cool as this! Though, I don’t know if I like the composition callouts. I think it’s kind of nice that against some zerg or protoss comps you can’t tell exactly what you’ll be fighting based on the first wave.
One Hundred and Fifty-seven SCV’s!
First of all, disabling cloud removes regular attacks and slows move speed. So it affects all ground heroes in that sense.
Secondly, let’s list all the heroes that don’t use energy:
Alarak
Tychus & outlaws
Zeratul
Gary (but he’s an air unit so he’s completely unaffected)
Whereas kerrigan, zagara, nova and fenix use energy
I don’t think 1/2 and 1/2 counts as “many”
Abduct cannot target heroic units
Honestly they’re not that op tbh. With practice every player can say for certain their commander is the best. Because it is PvE, we’re all op, and we all have different approaches to tackling anything, mutations included.
Kerrigan’s mutas used to be hands down the op-most strat in existence for the longest time until it was toned down. Just with a dozen of them you could clear entire brutal maps with that “damage increases for each hop, 6 times over”.
Also tbh if they toned those commanders down, they would loose half their player base. Lol. People are already irky over the Stukov bunker conundrum.
This is what I was thinking as well…they’re upping the difficulty soon and now on top of that people want those commanders to be nerfed? I’m going to have to say how about no.
Agreed. Unless they are secretly making co-op competitive, which I obviously doubt. There is no reason to nerf down what’s already keeping most of their players going and returning. At least statistically.
Thankfully it’s just a couple of obnoxious elitists as usual.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for balancing some MASSIVELY overperforming strats but non-Cannon Zeratul isn’t actually that busted, if anything most of his army honestly kinda sucks aside from the immortals and even they aren’t anything special AT ALL compared to marine spam or everything Kerrigan can do at this point, and as strong as Tychus is, against some comps (especially Hard/Brutal Reavers) you can lose your entire army pretty much instantly. Like yeah, I’m tired of seeing mass infestor and mass cannon projection too but there are some real halfwits out there that want any commander that doesn’t play EXACTLY like a versus race to be nerfed into the ground.