Karax Prestige Talents - First Impressions

My initial thoughts on Karax’s Prestige Talents:

Architect of War

In one instance on the trains map, the cannons and monoliths, all maxed out with upgrades and buffs except for Chrono Boost, were able to murder train #8 in 12 seconds (game clock). No help needed from my partner at all. In another instance, one Monolith was rocking a weapon speed of only 0.27, with help from all 4 Chrono skills: Boost, Field, Wave and Energizer’s Chrono Beam. This equates to 370 DPS; their base DPS is only 33. These speed buffs are crazy, arguably a little too good.

Talent says Unity Barrier affects defensive structures but I did not see a single example of it working, likely due to a bug.

Templar Apparent

Karax. Cheap Protoss units. Never in the same sentence. Yet here it is. What a time to be alive.

This does make a Karax army build much more viable. It has worked out pretty well so far and for me, the best talent out of the 3.

However, I don’t like the loss of the Photon Cannon, especially so for maps where Ghosts fart out nukes for fun. Disable all other things cannon related, even remove the instant warp in for cannons but don’t remove Photon Cannons completely.

Solarite Celestial

This one I found to be somewhat unreliable. The loss of Chrono Boost, Wave and Field is quite painful and sluggish pace results in a noticeable slowdown in resource collection during the early game and in turn slows down everything else, particularly Solarite energy regeneration.

It was common to be constantly low on Solarite energy despite trying to rush for Level 3 Solar Efficiency.

Being able to use Solar Flare and Purifier Beam more often is nice.

3 Likes

Wait that’s illeg-
Never mind, best talent ever.

For this, the solution is just putting one of your observers in stationary mode where you’d normally put a cannon, and using orbital strike. I kind of like having to rely on something like this rather than cannons

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I agree, just basic cannons without any upgrades would save a lot of frustration, especially since Karax don’t have any mobility powers.
It’s a QoL thing to have a structure for detection and trickling enemies. Not to mention as a mineral dump like the other Protoss commanders have when maxed out.
And it just feels wrong for Karax to not have cannons at all.
I’m not really a fan of having tools removed entirely from your toolkit, would rather just keep a nerfed version.

Observer + SoA is Karax’s mobility

2 Likes

but a bad one compared to having actual mobility. Though if going Phoenix it doesn’t feel as bad, even though I still think Phoenix needs a base damage boost, what feels bad instead is that they are useless against ground hybrid.

They really need to be able to pick them up, perhaps at reduced duration like Stukov’s infested diamondbacks.

Solarite Celestial would be fun to play but the disadvantages are too hefty. It’s a shame. I like the idea of playing an “active defense” as opposed to Architect of War’s more static one.

Maybe make the disadvantage be something like “all of your units and structures lose shields”. That would be hilarious.

I think all of Karax’s Prestige are fine. I do think its funny how many people still want to use cannons during Templar Apparent. As I said in another thread, it’s going to teach people (including myself) to use Observers in Surveillance Mode. I find myself killing cloaked enemies with Orbital Strike all the time either way. Sometimes a ghost will start autoattacking after they cast the nuke, making it easier to spot them.

The only change I’d think about is not taking away Chrono Boost from Solarite Celestial, but that’s mostly because I’ve gone from using Chrono Boost Efficiency Mastery to not having Chrono Boost at all, and I can definitely feel the impact to economy. It might be OK after all though, since I find myself wiping out whole attack waves with Orbital Strike by itself and still having half my energy left instead of none at all.

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