So now that stronger death chance Mastery is fixed what Mastery is better? Is it a different argument for each prestige?
P1: stronger death chance Mastery seems obvious here but is there an argument for a 15/15, 10/20 or 20/10 split?
P2: I wonder if this one might be counter intuitive. My experience with P2 was that I’d often build SFPs which made P2 counter productive for most of the mission so perhaps going full stronger death chance Mastery would actually help P2 counter ground without requiring the full compliment of platforms?
P3: God I wish this prestige would get an update/overhaul.
Strike Fighter Area of Effect: up to 30% AOE radius
Stronger Death Chance: up to 60% proc chance
Problem with AOE radius Fighter mastery is that in a lot of cases fighters are sent to attack isolated targets in enemy bases, like bunkers and cannons and siege tanks and thors and immortals… the bigger radius will do nothing there because AI units are all spread out when defending.
So the only chance for that mastery to do anything is when the AI is piled up, which is during attack waves or specifically when you bait the AI into fighting.
And if a Strike Fighter gets killed its cooldown is doubled… which sucks. Do note that Strike Fighters only work vs GROUND targets, meaning that they are near useless versus more than a third of Amon compositions (aerial).
And on the other hand you have what is likely the absolutely strongest mastery in the game.
Each Mira unit that dies will have a 60% chance to do double AOE damage (bombs), stun the enemy in a larger area (hellbat) or give ALL ALLIED UNITS 50% move and 30% attack speed for 15 seconds (hellion).
This hellion death buff affects both armies, and you should make sure its up permanently during combat even if you have to kill hellions yourself (even prebuff before combat). There was a bug (not sure if fixed) where the basic version of Hellion death buff and the stronger version of Hellion death buff STACKED, so if you had this mastery both of your armies would have 15+30=45% faster attack speed permanently.
Imho there should be no split between these masteries.
Put every single point into Stronger Death Chance.
Never even look at the other mastery, not even on the Dead of Night map.
I’d have to check, but doesn’t the AOE radius allow you to better clear buildings on DoN by hitting more with a single strike? I could imagine using this versus certain mutator combos where your army might otherwise get wrecked if it goes out to destroy buildings.
For me that niche use is meaningless.
Generic brutal Dead of Night is still easier to steamroll with stronger death mastery, especially due to limited build space inside the bases and one less gas geyser.
Your mileage may vary whenever you take mutators into account.
Obviously if there is a mutator that says “no armies” then anything for armies is useless.
Yeah I think i realised your point when I reread the masteries and saw its only +30% AOE on 1.5 range. On DoN that might allow hitting 3 buildings in some cases instead of just 2 but that is so niche as to not even be worth mentioning. Against attack waves when you want SFPs (zerglings etc) the napalm is probably more important than the slight extra AOE.
At least on the wiki it says the stronger death Mastery is only up to 45% but I haven’t checked it in game.
Many mastery set in coop is non-competitive with its counter option. This was the case for Death Effect (as it didn’t work at all… not that AoE increase was good to begin with). It’s niche use is so limited but at least it did something.
Now that it is fixed, it is literally pointless to choose AoE. I can think of a few cases it improves in situations (such as DoN, some mutators, etc.) However, that doesn’t compare to the “stronger” death effect proc’s benefit. And I say that with complete disdain for chance mastery to begin with.
It’s just HH’s masteries are generally all so bad lol. We’re just picking the best of the worst.
It varies from map to map. On a map like DoN, 10/20 split in Death/AoE is good, as you can make very good use of your Hellbats + Strike Fighters to clear. PnP, and ME are also good maps for the 10/20 split, but you’ll probably just want all-in on Death Chance regardless.
OE you can use the Strike Fighters to hit the trains and bomb waves, but you’re still better off with Death Chance.
As for Prestige-to-Prestige… On 0, it varies. 1 is 100% Death Chance, no questions asked. 2 is… Iffy, probably the same as 0. 3 is a meme so it’s pointless to really think about it.
The strike fighters themselves need fixes/improvements.
They need to hit/track air units, they need to be immune to damage/death, they need a much better Prestige 3 etc etc.
Only after those improvements can it be sensible to discuss what buffs to Strike Fighter mastery can be made so that it can be a “competitive” choice compared to the Improved Death Bonus mastery (extremely unlikely).
Perhaps you only read the first sentence. I called it out for a specific niche that has nothing to do with “generic brutal DoN”. I’m totally not saying it’s a good or even general-use mastery choice, just that it’s not totally useless/meaningless.
I think it needs to be a lot bigger, so 100% might be a start.
Interestingly, we can observe this on Nova’s P3 sabotage drone. When the area is increased, how much more utility it has compared to its normal size.
I think something similar would make this very competitive. Precision strike also has the lingering fire. So it has quite a bit more utility than sabotage drone in that same comparison.
Many masteries to “be competitive” is a simple tweak. A fact, those of us have mentioned long before prestige (heck even before Vorazun nerf, predating this new forum format lmao) was around. It’s a shame they don’t do it… or anything to address them.
I’ve posted the non-competitive nature of many (namely Chrono). Honestly, all it takes is tweaking the number to a slightly higher value then it’s solved. Meanwhile, endless “what about this case”, “what about upgrades”, etc. riddle the topic lol. Meanwhile, bliz does nothing to address the core point… as always. This even spills to mutators (which is exactly why even those enjoy playing it agree, the values of many needs to be rebalanced). Just another day of “Do nothing. Take credit.”
have the mastery either be +100% AoE range OR -30 seconds cooldown
Allow the P3 to damage air
I’d agree that P2 gets a big benefit from the Death Mastery, you always have some mineral excess and usually want a ground unit blocker, so massive AoE ground (and air) damage+boosts to your large fleet are really useful.
I think people underestimate the H&H hellions.
Those things do immortal levels of damage vs armored targets.
And apply the “tar” slowing+damaging ability.
For 2 population and 100 minerals, plus can switch into Hellbats which gives them 2.5 times the HP and anti light AOE attack.
Guides talk about them as if they do no damage but i found them a lot more reliable than Reapers who just love to get wrecked by AOE (especially while flying).
To be fair, their damage was been buffed repeatedly, with the last one right near the end of the patches (5.0? It’s always 5.0). So older guides, or people who haven’t played around with them more recently would consider them weaker than they are now.
Don’t forget that you get 2 reapers for 1 hellion and the Raven boost increases the damage for both attacks, so reapers essentially get +6 dmg. This means that reapers are actually only 10-15% less damage vs armoured, and a lot more vs non-armoured. Reapers while flying can also all be in range of the enemy, whereas only about 5-10 hellions can be in range of armoured usually. I’m absolutely not saying to not use them, in fact you should pretty much always have some, but don’t set your expectations for hellions too high.
Edit: Storm, fungal, etc. wreck flying reapers so be sure to avoid or snipe with strike fighters.
Non-armoured, absolutely, but armoured is a different story.
With +3 attack plus Raven, against a 3 armour unit Reapers have ~11.5 dps. Against that same unit, if armour tagged, a Hellion will do ~34.5 dps. Those two Reapers will do a little over 2/3 the damage overall.
Plus most armoured units have base armour, so the difference will increase.
Granted, this is ignoring the various bombs and stim, so I suppose who really knows the actual values here…
Ah, yes, I forgot to account for the enemy armour. That actually makes a big difference with more lower damage shots. Looking just at damage output, reapers are definitely worse vs armoured units. But, the worst enemy armoured ground comps are also very hard hitting vs ground units, so hellions will get wiped out. Plus, the reapers death ability is to throw grenades, so that results in damage for each unit lost, whereas hellions death bonus to attack speed doesn’t stack.
So, overall I’d still say that a few hellions and mainly reapers is the best basic army comp.
Edit: I can imagine vs immortal/colossus or similar that I’d have a much, much larger army if the core Han units are reapers.
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