Karax’s Mirages need a new ability

From a Reddit post titled “CO-OP’s Top 5 “Worst” Units (as of 5.0)”, written by user “TheTerribleness” (all credit goes to them for this analysis):

I feel like the Mirage’s issues could be fixed if it were given a new ability to replace Graviton Beam, one that synergizes better with Karax’s army and gives the Mirage more utility.

Possible ideas:
– Targeted Stasis. Functions like the Cybros Arbiter’s Stasis, but single target. Targets both air and ground, and lasts for 15 seconds. Cooldown 30 seconds. (Could possibly have a small AoE radius, allowing it to freeze multiple clumped units.)
– Molecular Destabilization. Targets both air and ground. For 15 seconds, the target has 0 armor and takes 35% additional damage from all sources. Cooldown 30 seconds.

A possibility that would improve the Mirage’s damage is that Phoenixes and Mirages could deal 12 flat damage to all targets, rather than 7 +5 vs Light. Mirages could also receive a different upgrade instead of Anion Pulse-Crystals, one which increases their attack speed instead of their range.

I am interested in hearing others’ suggestions to improve the Mirage, and what potential alternate abilities it could receive.

2 Likes

Any improve Mirage idea, I support. Some units just have a very limited role. And I’d love to see it being used more in a fuller-capacity.

3 Likes

Mirages are pretty good with P3

If you can accept using opponent units, simply reclamate those battle cruisers

When Starcraft 2 was announced, the Phoenix originally had an ability called Power Overload which gave it a burst of anti-air damage. You can see a demo of it here: StarCraft II: Protoss Gameplay - YouTube

I was always suprised that the ability never came back for the Mirage in either the campaign or co-op, but it could serve it quite well here, since there’d be some synergy with its Phasing passive. Depending on how it’s tuned (like making it do more damage vs armoured), it could make the Mirage far more interesting in its use.

8 Likes

The Mirage could benefit from a buff, but that’s a terrible write-up of the unit.

9.1 dps assumes that it’s a 3 armour (edit: 2 armour, why is 2 armour difference average…?) unit versus a 0 upgrade Mirage. On upgrade parity it’s 12.7 or 21.8 versus light.

On top, their invincibility shield also causes the enemy to target a different unit when it triggers, meaning damage is spread out over all the Mirage in a fight. They’re much tankier in practice than the ability implies.

The Mirage is all Karax needs for any air that the Energizer and Immortal can’t deal with. There are far worse units in coop, and pitting an anti Air Zerg unit against a Battlecruiser is just absurd. Karax doesn’t need more than anti Air Zerg due to Shadow Cannon, SoA, and Reclamation.


Like I said though, it’s not as good overall as many of Karax’s units so it could use a buff.

4 Likes

What I’d like to see for Mirages is to increase their AntiAir role by having their attack ignore armor

From most to least available, have their attack ignore armor

  1. innately
  2. with +2 range upgrade
  3. with phasing armor upgrade (rename to phasing systems)
    or
  4. while they are invulnerable from phasing armor
3 Likes

Mirages will respawn 60 seconds after dying, but you can only build 5.

Why only five? It’s not enough for a critical mass and their survivability isn’t the big issue here.

Anyway they really should do away with Mirages being weak against armored. It made sense in versus mode but it does not translate well in coop where main objectives and late-game enemy air are mostly armored.

4 Likes

Mirages are a support unit and if you mass them you’re mostly just memeing, getting 5 permanent respawning mirages is cool for a energizer/zealot/immortal build. I’d get mirages every single game if they worked like this.

2 Likes

I won’t waste 450 mineral and 350 gas to build the stargate + fleet beacon for a measly 5 mirages. If those mirage attack 5 times every second then may be i will reconsider.

1 Like

That’s a brilliant idea, make anti synergy units with a ground attack based army to lift all units into the air so they can be tickled, great idea! :yum: Guess wouldn’t be half bad for stargate carrier builds to have some disposable viper bait though

I don’t really think mirages really need splash since there’s SoA, but the change to dmg on both phoenixes and mirages to flat dmg would been cool, the mirage issue is anti-armor and when playing outside P2 it is a very gas expensive unit that is not really usefull vs Protoss and Terran.

1 Like

you’re not seeing the big picture, i’d basically be a karax version of free banelings and it would allow your energizers to always have protection from getting picked off by air units or keep you from ever having to waste 10-20 SoA energy just to kill one or two mutas/pheonix. 5 permanent pheonix is all you’ll ever need, I think anymore than 5 though would start to become very OP.

They could make them spawn freely from the first stargate you build also then after you got 5 it waits until you lose some.

1 Like

allowing ground units to be able to attack units in a gravitational beam wouldnt be too bad or rather maybe make it so the gravitational beam just leaves them on the ground and allow phoenix to attack units in the gravitational beam from air to ground.

2 Likes

It could be like Zeratul’s campaign Void Prison ability, where it just freezes them in place on the ground. Instead of letting the Mirages attack it from the air, the “Void Prison” could just deal a similar rate of damage over time to the affected unit.

Honestly something to automatically reduce Energizer’s tickle beam aggro for a slight Ground to air unit would be nice. Maybe adding a small auto attack air onto Immortals for like a 10 air chip beam or adding on some more hp to karax’s energizers could be nice. (even if it came at the cost of their air attack, or giving them a even better air attack to make them the anti air unit. )

The amount of particle would cause lag when you got enough mirage on the screen.
Kind of like Strettlag but worse.

Blizzard likes cheap simple solutions that are easy to implement.

Reduce cost of all coop phoenixes, increase their attack damage.

Perhaps, but I doubt Mirages would be massed a ton even with this change since they’ll still be exclusively an anti-air unit. Unless it only took like 2 Mirages overloading to cause lag, I don’t see how it would be worse than Stukov or Stetmann. If the effects really do become an issue, the ability could be implemented in another way, with less fireworks.