Feedback on Kerrigan's Prestige Talents

I’d prefer they keep the current crushing grip, maybe switch her weapon, and enhance assimilation aura more (say 50% cooldown)

That way it gets the strong army weak queen idea

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Yeah that could work too. She is already a very hero-centric commander even without any of the prestige.

Assimilation Aura on Prestige 3 is a write off cause you lose her mobility to poisition her in more aggressive positioning to min/max the ability, in the end cause of it I find myself picking up pretty much the same amount of resources.
Prestige 2 would be strong if it didnt reset fury stacks or if they cut the stack count by 2 but still end up at same bonus
prestige one, hot garbo, gotta atleast make tumors untargetable and give Kerrigan another way of detection again with no Omegas

Finally got around to playing with Folly of Man (prestige 2) with Masteries. Currently using:

  • Set 1 - 0/30, no need for energy regen if I have to wait for Fury stacks
  • Set 2 - 11/19, currently a holdover from pre-prestige, haven’t fine-tuned this yet. Immobilization Wave is affected by the half damage penalty.
  • Set 3 - 20/10, had to rework my build order to get a second Evo Chamber, since I sort of need the attack speed for faster Fury generation

This prestige is fun as hell, particularly when assaulting bases. Whereas Desolate Queen (prestige 3) politely knocks on a base’s door and says “Hello, we represent the Coalition of Species against Aliens trying to Delete the Universe, could we have a minute of your time?”, Folly of Man is more like “Where is Megnsk? WHERE IS MENGSK??? WHERE IS THAT MOTHERLOVER??? RAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!”

The major problem is that it sucks against single target, namely Hybrids and pretty much every objective with lots of HP. Not really a problem once your army comes online, though.

I feel like Prestige 1 (don’t even know the name, lol) needs some love. As of right now, it only sounds good on like… Void Thrashing. Maybe Miner Evacuation if you like Lurkers (like me), but Broodlords do just as well. All the other maps have detection all over the place.

Not gonna touch Desolate Queen until something happens with Crushing Grip.

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Agreed with these for the most part.

The First Prestige is like all disadvantage with hardly any advantage at all. It takes way too much effort to gain such a small bonus and Kerrigan loses her most powerful tool that she has in exchange? Not worth it at all. The third prestige is the opposite. It’s basically a net gain trade off that only impacts Kerrigan and not the rest of her army.

Also one final note. Creep is a double edged sword in Co Op because it benefits Amon’s Zerg units as well. Spamming creep all over the map turns Baneling/Scourge from a small threat to a much bigger one, meanwhile you miss out being able to disrupt that same army comp with Nydus Walls.

Yea just in general, that first Prestige sucks. A lot.

Losing the nydus is just too big a drawback for what you get, maybe if the tumors were undetectable like toxic nests and spread even farther, it would work better, so you could over time cover the map using queens.
or better yet, if they had just nerfed the nydus rather than removing it, or decided on another drawback entirely it would be more attractive.
Maybe giving a debuff off creep instead, such as slower movement speed.
As it stands, I would only ever use it if I partied up with a Stukov ally, not when random queuing.

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If Malevolent Matriarch prestige is going for defense oriented gameplay, how do you think its going to play out?
(Making Creep Tumors Untargettable/Undetectable is obligatory).

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I’m not sure that’s the best way to improve it. The biggest problem is that you won’t be on creep during any attack, and attacking is how you win most objectives. When defending you can keep your creep alive where you need it.

Malevolent Matriarch seems decently strong on maps like Oblivion Express and Void Launch. But it’s too limited and not very interesting to play.

Ideally I’d like to see something that makes you want to go for a ground army. Her Zerglings and Hydralisks die so easily in the open field, but many players still want to play them that way. So how about…

New Advantage: Additionally, Malignant Creep’s life regeneration can overheal a unit, granting them up to a X (40–50?) HP shield that decays at 2 HP/sec off creep.

That’s why I don’t like the prestige, the control is too tedious and the loss of Omega Worm is just too stale.

I opted 2 options on the Malignant Matriarch.

  1. Vastly improving it by giving Superior Queens that has several supplementary abilities (Splash Healing etc) and maybe Creep Aura.
  2. Replace the prestige with entirely different one, say a prestige that improves air superiority for Kerrigan (Creep doesn’t affect air units anyways).
    Also, since the default Kerrigan is majored around ground superiority, why not a prestige that focus on Air?

But since I heard a lot of people pointing out that Malevolent Matriarch is helpful in defensive map, I want to ask how it can be better if the prestige is geared on defense.

I was thinking of granting creep shield after unborrowing from the creep, this idea seem similar.

I guess you could creep up close to enemy bases, lure them out, and siege with lurkers.
A bit tedious, and the prestige would definitely need to increase creep spread speed and radius also, don’t think it does currently, unless they changed it from the test version, otherwise it would just be too slow.

Baseline Kerrigan already has a very strong air composition in mass Mutalisk, so I don’t think she’s really in need of a prestige focused on that. 1 is a good idea, and very much want I want to see from an Izsha commander rather than a prestige.

That’s what it sounded like it was supposed to be, yeah. Just a resource machine. What would be the point of both prestiges being highly offensive? Wouldn’t really change vanilla play style at all.

It’s very possible to stay on creep for the majority of attacks. Before the fight, get the creep as close to the enemy base as possible (this will likely cover the biggest engagement anyway). Just like you throw down omega worms mid-fight, you start your attack by planting tumors. They take only 3 seconds to morph and expand to max radius in about 4 sec after that. As long as you have your army drawing aggro, you can comfortably keep the creep spreading mid-fight.

1-2 dedicated creep spreading queens is enough. Use them to bypass the starting cooldown of creep tumor’s duplicate. I use 2 additional queens for larva injects, but spend the first 25 energy on a tumor to kickstart creep spread.

After playing a lot with folly of man, I like it. It makes structures a pain in the butt to kill, but otherwise it’s great. Once you have a few omega networks, you should attack your own omega worms to charge up 5 stacks of fury right before engagements. I forget who came up with this advice, but when you’re fighting, your goal is to shoot out as many max-stacked fury abilities as possible. wait until max stacks of fury to use abilities, and use abilities as soon as you hit max stacks.

My thoughts:

Prestige 1:

The idea is interesting and I actually think it’s somewhat fun to play, though it’s too weak. I feel that the biggest weakness is that creep tumors are too easily wiped out by the AI as later waves have tons of detectors. I think a reasonable upgrade for this mastery would be for it to have a kind of super creep tumor that becomes invincible after burrowing. This way, you could easily creep into enemy-controlled areas as long as you made sure there was a distraction (ie, your army). Alternatively, giving Kerrigan detection might be at least something of a consolation prize.

Prestige 2:

I agree that this one sucks. The problem is that stuns simply aren’t strong in this game, as any unit you would want to stun is immune to stun (Kerrigan one shots virtually all stunnable units already so this has little value). I feel like this one should probably just be redesigned, as allowing her to stun heroic units is probably too busted. At the very least, drop the decreased shields penalty.

Prestige 3:

I think this is interesting but I’m very iffy on double resource gains from assimilation aura, this feels like overkill.

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I’ve been playing with Prestige 1 lately, and I like the idea on paper, as the extra attack speed buff can be very powerful with the right ground based army (and an ally able and willing to go ground army as well). But I agree with the feedback that right now it’s a bit too weak to be worth the huge downside of completely losing one of Kerrigan’s best traits (Omega Worms).

I’d really love to see Prestige 1 get a different disadvantage, maybe something like just doubling the cost of Omega Networks and Combat Air Units? Perhaps more importantly keeping creep tumors alive is a bit too hard on many maps against AI with detection in every wave, so having Prestige 1 also make tumors untargetable once burrowed like Toxic Nests would go a long way towards making it more appealing and competitive with other Prestiges.

The idea about having Prestige 1 lower creep tumor cooldown is also a good one (maybe by 50% or so) and would help a lot with being able to push creep far enough to keep it relevant when attacking objectives on bigger maps. Having the 100% bonus also apply to the extra creep spread speed and range from Malignant Creep would also be nice (I expected that from the Prestige 1 description, but it seems to currently only increase the damage and healing, though I can’t 100% confirm that.)

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Really? I’ve been in a trance of VT runs for the past few days. I never usually creep spread, but I was bored so I got to doing it. And I did get to doing exactly as you describe on the final VT base. But I was still never actually fighting actual base defenders on creep, just in sight of it.

No pressure, but don’t s’pose you have a replay showing this? Am interested in how close to being true this can actually be.

Drop sc is down because of the new update I think. Uploading youtube video.

Edit: ok here https://youtu.be/eVPEtzvA8IY
Forgot ovie speed and 2nd thrasher set was sloppy, otherwise pretty good game.

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Prestige 3 highlighted how dumb the original idea of “commanders with weaknesses” (heavy air comps in this case) truly is. Forced co-operation is just bad design and plain irritating. What if your ally is not up for the task? Returning to Kerrigan, not being bad against air for no apperant reason suddenly makes your hydras survive longer saving you gas in the process, a problem that had to be addressed with not one but two resource saving masteries.

I wish prestige 3 abilities were rolled into the main kit and you had to pick your abilities with some opportunity cost involved and then come up with the new prestige. Not having to pull your hair out when a bunch of banshees outnumber whatever amount of hydras you can field in the early-mid game It’s just better design.

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So many people dissing the creep prestige. I think the attack speed provided is incredible! Are they only using one creep tumor or queen to spread creep? Solely Relying on the tumor ability to spread is dumb. The creep fills the radius super fast, so just have a queen plop another down. 3 queens can fill the unoccupied map space in a jiffy, and the creep spreads quickly into the enemy base once you engage it.

Since it is “matriarch” perhaps

Queens can plant tumors off of creep

Queens gain +100% energy and detection when on creep

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