Feedback on Kerrigan’s Prestige Talents

PTR Feedback
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Original post here: Feedback on Kerrigan's Prestige Talents

After playing many games, here’s my feedback.

Talent 1: Malignant creep

It’s bad. It’s extremely difficult to spread creep such that you always fight on creep. The best map for this is probably Malwarfare. Even with 3 queens devoted to creep spreading, you’re often moving ahead of the creep, so not fighting on creep. One of the main problems is the creep tumor cooldown. The loss of omega worms for creep spread, mobility and detection is huge, as it is the only form of mobility for Kerrigan. The 100% creep bonus is barely noticeable.

Suggestion: Lower the creep tumor cooldown, increase the bonus to like 300%, or change the disadvantage completely (Omega Worm is just too good).

Talent 2: The stun thing

This is also very bad. Having played like 4 games with it, I still can’t really tell how it even works. Is 1 stack of Fury, i.e. 1 attack, enough to trigger it? Sometimes it seems to, other times not. Is the 50 damage affected by the number of stacks? This talent is janky, what will happen doesn’t feel predictable, managing stacks feels like playing D3 not SC2. The 50% loss in damage of abilities is huge, the additional damage feels weak, and definitely doesn’t compensate. The loss in 50% shields is also extremely painful and makes Kerrigan super squishy.

Suggestion: Remove this talent, and make a completely new and different talent. This is so unfun it’s unsalvageable.

Talent 3: Ghost Kerrigan

This talent is extremely good. The stun is great, and it’s low energy cost makes it very spammable. Kinetic blast, especially with maxed out mastery talent for damage fixes Kerrigan’s biggest weakness: air. You can do massive damage to air units from range. The weakness is negligible, you’re replacing 2 spells with 2 arguably better spells. Replacing Primal Queen Kerrigan with Ghost Kerrigan is also super cool, but the portrait isn’t updated.

Suggestion: Maybe add another disadvantage? This is the most powerful talent by far. It’s pretty much all advantage, no disadvantage.

Feedback on Unlocking the Talents

Doing the leveling 4 times (not 3), to unlock all prestige talents and get back to level 15, while playing a gimped version of the commander is not fun. Starting over is not fun. It’s already painful enough on PTR where 1 win takes you to level 15, I can’t imagine the monotony of doing this 4 times on live.

Also, you can equip prestige talents at level 1, which doesn’t make sense. For example, it’s possible to equip Prestige Talent 2, which requires Fury, even though Fury is locked until level 10.

Suggestion: Either tie Prestige Talents to ascension level or make it level 16, 17, 18 of the commander. Regrinding from level 1 multiple times is unbearable.

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Maybe just nerfing the nydus, rather than removing it entirely would be enough. Having it work just as well as a creep spreader, but significantly nerfing every other aspect.
Could perhaps also be a general debuff off creep instead of nerfing or removing nydus. Maybe have all units move at half speed when not on creep?

I agree about the second one, should just be discarded, it’s not something I’m ever gonna use.

Maybe a Prestige that benefited air instead in some way could be interesting since they could use a buff, possibly at the cost of her losing creep bonuses.

Brood Lords feel borderline pointless, except when levelling up Kerrigan, and her mutas are just too squishy with the damage not making up for it, after the revamp where their bonus damage to armor was removed entirely.

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Regarding the third, they should steer sharper into the ghost version, and give her the campaign rifle and disable chain lightning, which will be a dps nerf, though with a longer range, and lower her HP so she becomes squishier.

I believe that is enough to balance things out. Would also fit much better with the skin.

Also keep in mind that her not being able to jump is a bit of a nerf to Immob wave when assaulting since you can’t just jump to the optimal point, not to mention her general mobility.

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Currently, there is 0 reason to use base kerrigan if you have desolate queen available. The small nerf to mobility is noticeable, but a tiny price to pay for anti air spells and a stunlock. Have it completely remove assimilation aura rather than buff it and I think it’s a balanced mastery, since you get this extremely powerful hero at the cost of support (both in your army, and your ally’s)

I agree folly of man is very weak and I’m not sure its current philosophy of “stun super gud” is salvageable.

I would kind of like to see a playstyle that promotes using all branches of the tech tree. Even with “expeditious evolutions” mastery, it feels better to just mass hydra or ultra or muta or raptorling.

Maybe have ground units gain +30% hp and air units gain +20% attack speed, at the cost of -20% damage from ground units and -20% hp from air. The idea being you benefit greatly from making a balance of units, and raptorling armor reduction is even stronger due to lower damage and faster attack speed.

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I agree that the first two are underwhelming. Some prestige suggestions:

Allow air units to enter nydus worms and gain the benefit of creep. Combat units cost 50% more minerals. Currently Kerrigan’s air is much weaker than her ground, because they can’t use nydus worms.

Queens can now fly, have increased speed, and are no longer slower off creep. In addition to creep tumor and transfuse, they also gain consume and fungal growth. Queens cost 100 gas, and Inject Larva is unavailable.

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I would love to see an air focused Prestige, and just getting rid of the second one to make room is probably a good idea, I can’t imagine any circumstance where I would want to use it.

Not sure decreasing air unit HP is a good idea, Kerrigan’s mutas are already way too squishy.
Instead of attack speed, what about using the prestige to bring back extra damage against armored that her mutas once had, but have it also benefit brood lords, and have ground units lose creep bonus as a drawback, or at least the attack speed part of it?
Another option could be to invert creep so it only affects air units, but in actual use I think that would become annoying.

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I’ve now played several games with all prestige talents so this is my feedback:
#1: This is far more powerful than people here say it is. 60% more dps and 2hp/s is really strong not only for Kerrigan but also for many allies. On shorter/smaller maps you don’t really need worms anyway if you know the timers. You do have to constantly micro queens and tumors however which will make this seem like a nerf for many players who lack the micro skills. One thing that does seem odd though, is that the creep spread range and speed doesn’t seem to be affected. Not sure if this is a bug or i just didn’t notice it but 100% bonus should lead to very rapid creep spread…
#2: The trade off in ability damage and survivabilty is not really worth the somewhat clunky damage+stun lightning effect atm. You constantly have to attack your own Worms before every engagement to build up fury otherwise the damage simply ist not high enough. Fury stacks also decay way too fast so by the time you change position your stacks are down to zero again. I would suggest to keep the disadvantages as they are but to increase the duration of fury stacks, increase the maximum stacks of fury from 5 to 8 and have Kerrigan build up 2 fury per attack. The animation of Immowave also seems to be bugged with this one active. Lastly the description of this talent (and so many other prestige talents) is really vague. Blizzard should definitely rework their tooltips before they release the patch.
#3: As many others have said the changed abilities are really good although Kerrigans mobilty is significantly worse. Double resources from the aura is a neat bonus. The only real disadvantage i noticed is that Kerrigan can be bodyblocked by units like zerglings, zealots etc. while they are gripped which can be annoying. I personally think it would be interesting if they would apply the campaign effect of switching between leaping strike and kinetic blast so that Kerrigan loses 10 damage but has double attack range (6 up from 3) when prestige #3 is active.

Overall it doesn’t really matter which of those you pick on regular brutal missions since you can solo most of them with Kerrigan alone. For mutations #1 and #3 will certainly work depending on the map/mutators. #2 needs some minor buff imo.

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One thing I’ve noticed on PTR is that leveling Kerrigan will be a sheer torture. She relies havily on her masteries which are not available while leveling. Her talent progression is pretty bad too. Most old commanders have this problem unlike the newer ones which have a much higher base level of strength and somewhat weaker progression.

2 Likes
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i would suggest changing set1 to disadvange:nydus cooldown x300%.
for set2, just dont make the immo wave dmg 50% and it will work somehow.
for set3, maybe redesign it, or add cooldown on basic spells.

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Kit 1 is more situational but not weak by any means. You would be better off not using it on maps like SoA where mobility is key but in wave maps like DoN or VL, the boost is simply massive as it applies to your ally as well. A Raynor bio ball or stimmed siege tanks on super creep is a dps monster. The HP regen effectively counters black death for units with <100hp.

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Kerrigan in human form looks so weird. The size of the Kerrigan unit itself is so big. Would look better with the campaign size.

And I agree with giving her the ghost rifle and removing the chain damage. Also, would be nice giving her the original 6 range. It was leaping strike in the campaign that caused -3 range.

The second thing with that overcharge stun thing is unclear how it works, for me as well.

The first talent seems very useful. Sometimes it seems however that there is no vision on some parts of the extended creep. Malignant creep’s effects could be extended on structures as well (this is not a prestige thing, but generally when you reach the certain level).

2 Likes
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#1 I don’t agree - 60% more DPS that you won’t get because you are not fighting on creep (unless you play against Zerg or with Stukov) is worse, than 30% that I always get because I always pop Omega next to Kerri when fighting (once I get enough networks), and unload my army from there.
Now, this depends on the playstyle, but in my games Kerrigan herself does more then 50% of my total damage (unless the enemy is mostly air), and I think most of that comes from her spells - which are unaffected by the creep bonus. And Omega worms provide means of quick transportation, obstacle for enemies and safety when she gets overwhelmed (and of course detection), minimizing her downtime.
Without this network, Kerrigan is probably the only commander with no calldowns, topbar abilities nor means of instant transportation of at least parts of the army.

#2 I haven’t really tried that, and I am not sure I even want to :smiley:

#3 many people say it’s great, I didn’t get the feeling. Kinetic Blast is powerful and without doubt stronger than the leap, but I never liked crushing grip even in the campaign. Still, it’s better than I expected to be, because she gets to keep the speed buff from Psionic shift (and range reduction from Leaping Strike), but I kept getting blocked by the gripped units.
But at least I agree that is not “bad” like the other 2.

The vision is 11 and the spread from creep tumor with Malignant creep (even without the Prestige) is 13 (hatcheries keep the regular 10 range)