Hi all,
I’m a Fenix P2 fan who tried his hand making an explainer video. Hope you enjoy! Comments and advice welcome. Hope you enjoy!
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I’m not really in agreement with your video. You don’t just blindly stack Kaldalis out the gate, depending upon the map and the enemy composition. If you’re going against something like Sky Terran (namely Viking/Banshee), then Kaldalis is next to useless.
Slow teching to the next Champion is also pretty lackluster. I prefer to just focus on getting all 6 out as is possible. Once you have the resources and/or your expansion going, then I’ll start stacking up each Champion in order of which is the most important vs the enemy composition and the map.
When Fast Expanding, depending upon the map, Taldarin will be usually superior to Kaldalis. His anti-armor shots are perfect for melting the rocks, and his range is good for clearing on maps like Malwarfare and Chain of Ascension.
Personally, I don’t go full Champion speed. I think I invest 10 into HP (20% total) and 20 into Attack Speed (20% total) for that extra bit of survivability vs really annoying compositions like Bane/Scourge, Shadow Tech, and anything with Reavers in it.
For my third Mastery set, I prefer to invest my points so that I get some extra supply, but most are in Chrono to get my gear out faster. If you’re properly on top of your supply count, then the minor extra supply is only there to reliably and swiftly pump out your first Kaldalis or Taldarin.
These are my takes on the Prestige, and how I enjoy playing it. I’ve had such high success with this that I’ve even carried games with either learning players, lackluster players, or AFK/abandoned players.
I skip the 2nd gas but get 2 gates. It maxes out the 7 zealots (20TDW) faster. While it may sounds pretty useless to have >600DPS versus 300DPS, there is an applicable difference in pushing Kaldalis early with more DPS. (An example would be on ME, Kaldalis can destroy the Eradicators before 1st ship finishes.)
That works better only if you’re focused on Kaldalis. If you prefer more champions, then I think the video or any alternative works just fine too. Usually, Kaldalis and Taldarin benefit the most in P2, so openers that are not Kaldalis-solo involves either him or Talis (for some AA focus) rolling out at close to the same time.
Having 6 champions is fine but in my experience 2-3 is plenty, with 99% of my game getting away from just Kaldalis anyway.
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Sorry, only skimmed your video as I’m doing other stuff right now, but I wanted to jump in to say something quickly. Skimming through, it’s clear you’ve put a lot of work into the video and that you’re a good Fenix player, and there’s a lot of good stuff you say about P2 that would be useful to many players considering it. Not everything you wrote is what I’d do, but it’s a good video and I don’t want you to absorb too much negativity about it. People will always home in on what they disagree with / would do differently.
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Thanks for your thoughts! FWIW:
(1) I agree with Fearr and think skipping or delaying 2nd gas for a 2nd gate is totally legit.
Re: Sprite
(1) By slow-teching, I mean don’t get all your buildings out at once at expense of making units. It’s tempting for new players since there are no building prereqs, but you can only get out champs as fast as you can research them. So perhaps we’re in agreement here.
(2) I strongly disagree opening Taldarin is faster than Kaldalis for expansion, factually for the rock expansion maps and I suspect for the others as well. He’s also just low single-target dps against the objective towers in Malwarfare and against the big hybrid in Chain of Ascension.
(3) Taldarin is also a risky openner in case you get an air comp. When you start gate, you can naturally pump and boost Talis. When you start Robo, your options are immortals or Warbringer and your ability to respond to air will be greatly slowed. Also, Mojo is great, but he hardly benefits at all from TDW so going robo → stargate will be weak mid-game vs air, esp compared to gate → stargate.
(4) I respectfully disagree that going 15/15 to get champion life is optimal for Fenix P2. Attack speed makes Kaldalis (and also Taldarin) exponentially more powerful with TDW, both from attack speed and avenger. For P0/P1 I think splitting points is more about playstyle.
(5) I’m on the fence about chrono vs supply boost. Ultimately I switched to supply boost to save on minerals-- someone on a Reddit thread convinced me of that.
Regarding how you enjoy playing and it’s works for you, great! =) For me, this playstyle gets to me to about 75% win rate on random b+4/5/6 (with an equally good friend) and 95% on b+1 random, according to Maguro’s sc2overlay (542 wins, 93 losses on b+, about half are b+4/5/6, and many of those losses are retrying after losing at hard ones =P). I also play the easier weekly brutations solo in the arcade with MaguroMaps.
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Thanks for the encouragement! I posted because I want to have a conversation about a less-played and quirky commander!
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Actually Taldarin is quite good at rock busting, he has higher natural DPS against armoured targets than Kaldalis so its not all that far off (a matter of a few seconds at most). Big reason being Taldarin benefits immensely from AP, Kaldalis gets little benefits; so while Kaldalis gets to the rocks sooner, Taldarin breaks them much faster.
Against air builds, everyone is ignoring Fenix himself for some reason here, there’s nothing in early attack waves that Fenix can’t handle himself.
But please don’t take it as criticism, just another’s way to play. Like you said, Fenix just isn’t talked about, and hardly played.
They both get +50% attack speed from AP, right? So AP’s effect on base damage is the same, AP’s bonus only boosts Kaldalis’s DPS because it boosts empowering blades for each strike. Taldarin just spreads dmg that he dealt after the unit is destroyed (which doesn’t help for the rocks).
Kaldalis without any TDW or empowered blades is 58 DPS, vs 51 armored DPS for Taldarin. Kaldalis takes 20 seconds less to build, and gateway costs 25 less minerals, so about 25 seconds difference.
There is an attack speed limitation on P2 Kaldalis more so than Taldarin. However, it is mostly not applicable for the purpose of rock breaking. At this time, it is far too early to benefit from multiple stacks of AP (short of needlessly killing your own champions). Therefore, the limitation doesn’t really apply, thus both do technically gain that 1st AP equally.
For rock breaking, with consideration of build order, it is possible to have both Kaldalis and Taldarin out fairly closely. I can confirm that the rock breaking timing is nevertheless still faster with Kaldalis alone. Alone being an asterisk with extra shells boosting Empowered Blade TDW damage.
That said, both 2-champion versus Kaldalis rock breaking functionally are the same. The barrier remains to be “not enough for 400min banked to make Nexus” because both will break them early enough to make this insignificant.
So to that end, neither is wrong or right. What’s important remains how a player chooses to play past the early game. If you are going for more than Kaldalis then perhaps having Taldarin out isn’t a bad idea to fill 2/(3-6) of those champions. On the other hand, if you’re intoxicated like me (or lazy like me) with Kaldalis, then having that Taldarin is entirely a waste of time.
Nah, it’s 45 versus ~52 in favour of Taldarin, plus the player really should be boosting out the unit in question so the building time difference in total is going to be around 10-15 seconds depending on boost mastery. All in all, as Faerr said, it’s well within the margin of the time it takes to get the Nexus cash. They’re both good 
Personally I always thought that it speed up Kaldalis’ AS less because it was affecting less of his attack animation timing. I guess it just depends on whether it’s cooldown - total attack time * reduction% or cooldown - cooldown * reduction% not that looking into it is worth much these days.
Kinda yeah, it does limit Kaldalis due to animation but for P2 (if I recall correctly when I did the analysis topic) doesn’t occur until ~0.375sec cooldown. And we don’t reach that with 1 stack.
The math was something like (18+99)x2/0.375 = 624DPS (max with limitation and full TDW). Kaldalis’s initial attack speed is something like 0.62 with mastery but with 1 AP stack doesn’t obviously reach the 0.375 threshold. So both Taldarin and Kaldalis gain full benefit for that 1st stack.
I guess I’m a dork and this mathy stuff was exactly what I was interested in =).
Rick-- Yes, I was mistaken as I was comparing Kaldalis with attack mastery and Taldarin without. Taldarin does slightly more armored dps, so I suspect your estimate of 10-15 secs with boost and the extra resource costs will be about right. But the difference will be small as you can only make 1 pylon, 1 gate, 2 assimilators, kaldalis research, and 2 zealots if you want 400 minerals to replace rocks with a nexus. I think you could argue that rushing nexus comes at the cost of precious starting-game minerals.
I think the bigger liability of a robo opening is discovering you’re up against an air comp when all you have is a robo bay, robo facility, and taldarin =). That, and I find the power curve and dps increase is steeper for gateway. Robo suffers less attrition (or no attrition) vs ground, so if you’re into slow and steady you maybe with robo more powerful at some point mid-game.
Fearr-- Yes, 0.62 attack speed at full mastery. And thanks for that attack animation analysis you did earlier. I bet that animation constraint really hurts P3.
Which would be the more generous of the two, kinda interesting since they tend towards the other side for most things.
And Fenix!
But yeah to be fair, plus the fact that P2 is slower to tech than the other prestige, since you generally need the champ to make an impact with the units, Kaldalis openers are likely the more all round choice. Especially in B+ and brutation situations.
I… Have a tendency to turn conversations that way around here, I’m sure at least someone found it a relief that there were less numbers thrown out while I was lurking the last while. (Though maybe not, SC2 definitely attracts the number nerd crowd, heh)
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I did some math out of interest on this discussion, regarding Taldarin and Kaldalis.
Some premise:
- Attack speed mastery
- 1 stack AP upon initial transfer
- No additional shell boosting TWD
For Kaldalis the damage is as follows:
- (18 + 9) x 2 / 0.41 = 132DPS
For Taldarin the damage is as follows:
- (30 + 45 (armor dmg)) / 0.74 = 101DPS
So it is fairly obvious in comparison how much less damage Taldarin. Other factors to consider:
- Kaldalis will likely have more than 0 shell, thus boosting DPS higher.
- Assuming both champion produce at the same time is not likely.
- There is a point of economic progress with saved money.
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Actually the odd ball thing here is Taldarin is cheaper that Kaldalis if you include his TDW ability in the breaking. Since it doesn’t affect Taldarin’s rock breaking there’s no reason to rush it, so you save a decent amount on minerals there.
You’d break them sooner with Kaldalis, but would Taldarin have it building sooner I wonder.
RickRumble, is assuming no empowered blades yet, so instead of (18+9) in the numerator it’s just (18). That, and the fact the blades are multiplied again by avenger in the denominator boosts Kally’s DPS. Also, Taldarin is 75 armored dmg (30+45 for armored), so he makes it to 100 DPS with avenging protocol. I think it’s fair not to include empowered blade just for rockclearing because on rock maps, it won’t be finished by the time Kally’s done without it (even boosted).
But I think that goes to the other key point: that beside the initial rockclearing, Kaldalis will ramp up much faster with TDW.
That’s definitely the big point for P2, yeah, for something like ME or DoN I’d go Taldarin, probably not much else. Now if I break off topic and say not P2 then I always go Taldarin personally.
This was a really nice guide, I specially liked the section at the end (after the game finished)
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Taldarin’s production building costs 25 more minerals, immortal costs 20 more minerals, and taldarin research costs 50 extra gas. 400 minerals isn’t a constraint for the Kaldalis opening if you make 1 gate, 1 pylon, 1 templar archives, and 2 vesp refineries
True, I was comparing Kaldalis and TDW against Taldarin without when I was thinking about that. So it’s no tech or research on it.
I’m just enjoying debating numbers at this point…