?? If you’re good enough to micro Herc+Tank, you should also be good enough to micro SV + Def. Matrix.
Swann is fun, and his P1 is pretty good to. It melts air waves that tend to clump up if you have vision or an ally that can provide it.
So yes, there are Swanns around 
It could also be that most people leveled him up first and now are grinding the other commanders.
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You realize that ravens have more than one spell right? Have you ever used auto turrets?
They have pretty nice sustained damage. And all their damage is AoE. So much in fact, that 5 ravens can defend 2 entrances on dead of night.
Until you are maxed, the supply cap has exactly 0 effect. And after you are maxed with Nova you will start to pile up thousands of minerals, at which point you can comfortably get rid of half your SCVs, making your 1/3 argument even less true.
So, next time you play Nova, just watch your replay and figure out when you actually get to 100 supply. Swann is really slow to ramp up too.
That beeing said, Novas ravens are just one example out of many. Alarak and Abathur have the same supply that Swann has, and the arguemnt applies to their units as well.
Science vessels do not have a way to quickly regenerate energy. So if i you have like 5, they quickly run out of energy.
And having 10 or more costs you at least 2000 gas… which is costlier than…
That may sound like much, but - and this is big BUT: for that investment in consumed supplicants you not only level your Ascendants, but regenerated 10 x 5 x 200 = 10 000 energy, worth 100 mind blasts… or 100 destruction orbs. 10 of those enough to wipe an attack wave… meaning you can do than 10 times over.
So while swann pours thousands of GAS into vessels to keep his units alive, Alarak spends mostly MINERALS to outright remove anything the game throws at him.
Zhadoom, watch my replays earlier in this thread. Granted, they’re random ones I picked, but all of them show gameplay from Swann proving that he can pretty much keep up with the best of them, while providing tools and strategies unique to him. Unless you can counter argue the effectiveness of those replays, or the many other YouTube videos showing good Swann gameplay, then you’ll have to settle with the fact that people do play Swann, they play him effectively, and they have fun doing it while contributing to the mission.
Long live the round boi!
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Likewise you have to accept, that my opinion is that Swann is inferior in every way except permanent defense situations like on DoN or mutators that greatly benefit from static defense play.
I never said Swann can’t be fun or effective to play - otherwise i would not play him. However his lack in offensive power - especially early + mid game - does not benefit his game fun.
Just look at how often you get Swann as ally when you play coop - do you REALLY think, people would not play him more, if he was as powerful and as easy to play as the top 5 commanders? I think you are fooling yourself if you think so…
And on the vids on youtoube: yes there may be impressive Swann videos on youtube - but do you REALLY think there are as many as there are for Zeratul? Or Tychus? Or Nova? Or Abathur? Again, I think you are fooling yourself if you think so…
Regarding your replay: as a special favor i will watch them when i get home tonight. In about 6h. I actually hope you are right and i can learn some bettwer way to play Swann - but my guess right now is that your allies were bad players… which >95% of all players are (which is one of the reasons playing Swann can be fun most games) E.g. if your Vorazun ally does not use his Timestop for minute after minute, he’s bad. Or if your Zeratul ally needs extra 60 seconds to find next artifact, he is bad. So don’t be upset if i am not impressed…
So basically you want every CO to be faceroll easy. Got it. Understood everyone here understands what you want.
Here’s the thing. A lot of us DON’T want that. We don’t want faceroll easy CO’s that any idiot can play. We like how Swann plays. He’s more fun for us than the CO’s you’ve listed.
And Blizzard knows it.
You aren’t going to get what you want. Your entire argument is completely selfish and futile. You’ve gone from trying to make an argument that Swann is weak to "I want him to be as easy as Nova and Abathur and ROFL ZERATUL lol.
Nope. Not gonna happen. If you like those CO’s so much go play them. The players that play Swann like him just the way that he is. Stop being such a selfish jerk by wanting to gut how fun he is by making him another brain dead CO like Tychus and Zeratul.
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I understand where Zhadoom is coming from. Swann’s kit is definitely strong, but it doesn’t reflect the amount of effort you have to put in, compared to other commanders.
That doesn’t mean they have to simplify him though. Mengsk is a good example of high skill/high reward gameplay and they can improve Swann with that mindset.
Making development decisions or evaluate commanders for balancing issues is real life 
You either want to know the state of things or just want to say “your opinion” which is ungrounded.
Swann already has that high pay off for effort that’s the thing though it just doesn’t come in the form of a flashy calldown.
Neither do CO’s like Raynor, Artanis, Stukov or Han and Horner. All of those CO’s are harder to play than the 4 I mentioned earlier and yet Zhadoom only seems to be going after Swann.
It just sounds to me like Zhadoom won’t be happy until every CO has an overpowered hero unit that you can just solo the map with. Yea boring. It’s fine that Co Op has some variety some CO’s can be all about their hero management but if you start designing every CO that way the game will get dull real quick.
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No.
The rest of your agument (or childish rant to be more presice) is invalid becuase it stems from an incorrect assumption that you seem to have pulled from your behind.
Swann is hard to play but that is not his main problem. Its his unit cost / build time vs their performance as well. A science vessel for example is too expensive for what it brings to the table.
That is blatantly obvious - it requries a simple comparison of units from other commander with similar costs. Unless you are blind fanboys who cannot accept any legitimate critissism for your favorite commander.
Speak for yourself.
I am a Swann player. And i do not want him to stay the way he is. Your argument is therefore wrong.
And even if you disregard my opinion as invalid - what gives you the right to speak for all Swann players, most of which you have never exchaned a word or played a game with?
Edit: post was getting too much wall-of-text.
But here is the essential part: post a replay odler than today, where you play zeratul and find at least 3 artifacts in less than 30s and i will apologize and never post on these forums again.
I cant post links on the forums, Blizzard won’t let me. Otherwise I’d be happy to. I’d show you the replay I played last night on Oblivion Express on Brutal + where I carried this AWFUL Nova who just sat it one spot of the map while I warped all around the map taking care of attack waves and trains that he didn’t bother to deal with.
What I do have that you don’t is an account with a profile that you can view on battle.net. You can see my achievement history, ladder history and probably even Ascension level if you tried hard enough.
Here’s my challenge to you. Post on your account that you actually play the game on so we can see if any of your “I’m a swann player” has any validity to it.
I dont need a link, i am happy with an uploaded replay on any file hoster.
Yes please.
That is my account. You just have to go to EU-bnet. I think i did play some games on US, but is too much lag. I’ll find a link to it…
There i found it:
It’s on drop.sc Vindicare and Angelabraxas on Oblivion Express. Wasn’t even my cleanest game of Swann ever, but just the latest example of how with Swann you can carry a map and it wasn’t a “static D” situation.
I though it was about knowing how to play Zeratul “not brain dead”.
Anyway i got your replay. Give me a few hours and i’ll provide my opinion… and an apology if i truely misjudged you.
What if all of this is some kind of conspiracy from Zhadoom to get all our replays, plug it into some kind of supercomputer, and make the ultimate Swann player AI.
Actually, since Swann is…VERY close to his machines, would he be spared during a robot uprising?
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Current AI algorithms need thousands of replays to be able to do that.
But they also outperform the best human players with a big margin.
We have to artificially gimp the AI so they are limited in APM and viewport so we even have a chance to compete. And that was state of the art years ago. And even limiting their actions per minute was not enough, since the AI would just play with <10 apm until a fight happened and then output 95% of its available actions within couple of seconds where deciding fights would happen… they had to limit its actions PER SECOND in order to bring it down to human levels.
And the AI beats humand with a multitude of weird strategies like mass disruptors or mass blink stalkers.
Google “Alphastar vs Mana” or “vs TLO” if you want to know more. I think it played 10 wins vs 1 loss… and the 1 loss was only because the AI bugged out against void prism drops, where it could have easily won by building 1 pheonix.
Hahahaahah 
love it!
Yeah, so true on this side point. That’s why in the other topic about “making A.I. scarier”, I’m like you think you want this but no you don’t lololol.
HercThor + Self-Irradiate, but Kerri + Worms + Ultras = drowning in gas on Malwarfare.
Not sure why I thought of this topic, but ok.
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So i watched your replay - and i think we misunderstand each other. I was expecting some excellent play, which that replay is not.
Here are some of the important points i noticed… now don’t take this personally - i have bad games too. This list is what i expect from myself when playing Swann:
-
Build first depot with 2 SCVs to not stall production
-
When fast expanding, prioritizing building refineries (even if I do not put SCVs in just yet)… I pick vespene drone cost mastery so i can get the bonus ASAP.
-
Sometimes i delay armory as well to prioritize units or upgrades, but NOT by that much. Not starting laser upgrade until 10 minutes is really bad even with P3… that’s 5 minutes delay… that means you miss out on at least one pulse cannon and one concentrated beam calldown… Warbots can deal with first train AND second attack wave just fine.
-
2 base income cannot support continuous production from 3 tech-reactored factories.
-
At 20 minutes you still have 0/0 upgrades… i think i never played this way. This partly due to #3 but mostly because you just don’t seem to value upgrades much. They are important…
… then i basically fast forward to the end …
- Your units lost was 16k in ressources… against broodlord/muta/corruptor/zergling. There were some banelings, but not many. You played mutation, but there was no dangerous mutator - blizzard and broodlings you can easily micro against. I would probably be so annoyed to loose that much, i would rage quit at that point. A few hellbats, some armor ugprades, a second hercules and getting your laser drill upgraded sooner would have gone a long way to prevent losses, even if you don’t micro.
There is probably more, but honestly i think it’s enough to analyze this far.
All this is just stuff to learn… there is no mechanics or micro needed.
Now I commend your courage to post a replay - but you did it for the wrong reasons. I never said Swann cannot carry a stupid ally that hasn’t reached max mastery yet, builds double engineering bay AND double armory before his first unit and before getting his undefended expansion, snipes zerglings multiple times, looses units without using defensive drones, etc.
You are right… you were basically carrying his behind. Swann can carry. Swann can even solo some mutations.
That is NOT what i mean when i say “Swann is bad”.
What i mean is: even on games where I do most of the things right, there are those occasional allies playing commanders like Nova - from what i see, not much better than what i can do with her - who make me feel inferior in more ways than one. This does not happen the other way around. THAT is what i mean when i say “Swann is bad”.
So, to make things fair, here is my first game i played as Swann after getting his P3:
ht tps://drop.sc/replay/16504115
Now i have only played a hand full of games with his P3. I have not yet the experience to say how much its potential is. But one thing is sure for me - it requires a lot of practice. Much more than anything I need to do playing Nova.
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