Many prestiges suck and need either tuning or rework

I’m just gonna cut it to the chase.

Raynor

P1 is surprisingly fine. There’s a significant tradeoff and it keeps P0 still relevant especially for better players.

P2 is… eh. My problem with Raynor is that his mech comp is kind of awful as it is. Only thing that makes mech comps actually good are vultures and abuse of map knowledge - and this sort of style actually has zero benefit from P2. The increased gas cost hits really hard when you try to max out on stuff like Banshees and Vikings and you’re prone to lose them to AoE - just like marines - except remaxing becomes a whole other issue. For BC’s, this obviously sucks in every regard.

P3 is fine in my books.

Kerrigan

P1 sucks. Why? Because Omega Worms are imba. Unless you plan on nerfing omega worms to be (not imba), P1 is going to be always bad. Even against Zerg, even with Stukov, it’s just bad in general. When anyone thinks about P1, they should note that P1 just makes an existing bonus into double. You already have the benefits of malignant creep at half. The only way to make sense of this is if wormless Kerrigan was P0. Everyone would be excited for sudden introduction of game breaking worms and they would probably be nerfed too.

With the way it is now though, this just flat out sucks. I know not everyone agrees with this and they can suck it, because anyone who is good with Kerrigan, anyone who knows how to play with her properly, understands that the mobility provided by worms makes them vastly superior - especially if you play suboptimally.

Kerrigans P2 and P3 (once fixed) are fine on my books, no complaints.

Artanis

Let’s face it, P1 is not good. Increased costs become a huge burden for Artanis because of how long it takes for Artanis to get units that benefit the most out of this. Less Zealots, less Archons etc. For immortals its actually direct nerf in the sense that more immortals will always beat less immortals - less immortals might last long, but more immortals last also longer by the virtue of taking care of business quicker.

It’s not a good prestige.

P2 is perfect prestige, so perfect in fact that P2 should have been always part of Artanis standard toolkit. It gives a reason to consume energy actively and the way it synergizes with warp in speed mastery is amazing. I really think this should be part of his standard toolkit and P2 needs to be something else. The problem with P2 as it is right now is simply that there’s never any good argument to pick any configuration over P2. Nope, not even when going archons - you’ll want that mobility no matter what and massing things means more autoattack damage until you’re maxed out with P1.

P3 is awful but I think everyone knows that, to be quite honest. It has no gimmick uses, it has nothing. It’s just painfully bad.

Swann

P1 is extremely awful, you don’t want that ever. The only time I’ve ever seen it to be remotely useful is with a mengsk.

P2 is gimmicky, I don’t like it but arguably it has its uses - if you’re good enough with hercdropping SCV’s and turret creepin’, this is probably a fun prestige. It should be noted that something like Kerrigan P1 could also be considered “gimmicky but fun”, but it’s not really - it doesn’t change fundamentally anything about Kerrigan except remove the ability of making omega worms. Pushing without them is about as painful (or easy with Kerris immo wave) with P1 or without P1. In case of immo wave, easier without P1.

P3 is absolutely awful. Swanns early to mid sucks even harder due to how much worse Swann becomes early to midgame with slower cooldowns on everything, especially bots. It’s really bad. But the real insult here is that all you get are hercs with double capacity and lower teleport cooldown. I call this a “luxury”, it’s not a significant benefit in any way but the tradeoffs are anything but annoyances.

Zagara

P1 is kinda, “ehh”. What really hurts is the lack of frenzy - it really hurts because you lose a lot of units simply to all the aoe. Max supply cap isn’t really a huge deal for someone like Zagara. To really make P1 shine and be a reasonable playstyle that you wouldn’t just go for in P0, banelings and scourge at minimum should have stim-like Frenzy implemented into them. In fact, it could even have a tradeoff of banelings and scourge exploding afterwards.

Furthermore, for anyone who considers leveling in this prestige: please don’t, until you’re at least lvl9. You’re going to be absolutely useless. Also, please Blizzard, change the damn masteries for this prestige. Masteries feel absolutely worthless because they’re focused on things that this

P2 and P3 are fine. I mean, P2 sucks because it boosts units that are mostly awful for Zagara more or less, but still, it’s fine considering the tradeoff and maybe there’s a single Zagara player who likes playing abbies and corruptors.

Vorazun

P1 is fine. I mean, it sucks considering the tradeoff, but let’s not kid ourselves; I feel like 90% of Vorazuns I see are not aware that they can actually solve not only their mobility issues, but also their allies.

P2 is absolutely awful, but everyone knows it at this point.

P3 is also… questionable in its usefulness. You make a tradeoff between taking early expansion or using the shadowguard for first wave. That already is pretty significant for Vorazun, because she actually needs the income pretty badly with any of her comps.

Bigger problem is that it goes against her kit heavily. There’s a reason you don’t want to actually use shadowguard beyond at max 2 casts of it and this reason is called “Vorazun sucks against air without black hole”. Black hole in general is so good for her that it’s really impossible to justify using P3 even in scenarios when it technically is doable. Like, you don’t need any anti-air units in Dead of Night as Vorazun. But even then, black hole is just way more beneficial for you?

Karax

All is good, actually if there was such a thing as gold standard for prestige design, Karax would fare well there. Between meme cannons, spamming orbitals and having probably strongest army comp in the game that is absolutely broken, Karax is great.

Abathur

P1 I thought sucks. But then I realized it doesn’t, it’s actually really good once you accept that you don’t have ultras. The thing is, lvl15 upgrade synergizes so well with P1 that it’s just great alternative way to play him. Only thing I don’t still like about Abathur is how bulky his units get - I really think that biomass should not make his army units any bulkier because it kind of gimps them in a certain way slightly even though it makes sense visually.

P2 is also very good, very fine and very fun.

P3 sucks. I know why it exists but it just flat out sucks. 150 would be tolerable but 200 is so much that you’d rather not. Problem is that Abathurs early to mid is extremely challenging while the end of it is pretty similar with or without P3.

In void thrashing, this actually is a straight up nerf, as it turns out.

Alarak

P1 is fine

P2 just straight up sucks really. Encourages you to keep your army together and removes your only source of some mobility. Good luck without strats such as spawn camping with cannons in some maps like Temple of The Past.

P3 is kind of fine. I know a lot of people complain about it but the Death Fleet was only ever useful for mobility. What I do think though is that P3 should give you the mothership from the very beginning of the game (or when Alarak spawns) to make it at least marginally tolerable for people who keep constantly losing it somehow. I don’t play pure mech with Alarak (always ascendant openers only) so it’s hard for me to lose the mothership, but for pure mech comps that F2A their army, the mothership is guaranteed to die. The voidrays honestly are useless, why even include them?

Nova

Come on, why remove mineral dump from her in P2? Make the tactical airlift have no cooldown but similarily cost minerals per army supply. Others are fine.

Stukov

P1 is fine if you mass diamondbacks, it’s kind of funny playstyle honestly.

P2 sucks, way too much micro involved to make it work. This is coop, not ladder, after all.

P3 is ehh, I think it sucks mostly but honestly who cares, I guess? It definitively is one of those “fun factor” prestiges

Fenix

Nothing to say about Fenix at all. I hate Fenix and I didn’t try him out in PTR and he is probably going to be the last one I level. Admittably, they all look interesting except the very first one is kind of hard to understand as to what it does per description. I have to say though that if Akhundelar isn’t absolutely awful, Fenix might have most interesting prestiges. It’s just that playing Fenix is incredibly annoying - I’ve rarely seen Fenixes and when I play him, I know why - he requires more work than any other commander, really.

Dehaka

Not much to say. P1 and P2 are interesting, P3 sucks but it has its fun factor.

Mira (aka H&H)

P1 is fun

P2 is… bad? Like is it just me who thinks so? The problem is with having just two galleons: you tend to lose your reapers so fast and without the reapers, the Horner units just tend to get screwed with aoe. I mean, you don’t lose the reapers technically, it’s just that remaxing on them is very, very hard.

P3 sucks. It belongs to the same category of sucking as Abathurs P3: it’s very impractical and absolutely never useful. My “test” for this is whenever you can do Dead of Night quicker with P0 or P3 and obviously P0 always won. I did it with a P1 Karax just to be clear (wasn’t hard to find a Karax who wanted to try out memecannons there)

Problem is that the increased cost literally means that you will need twice the amount of resources for same amount of platforms. By the time you have 2, you already could have 4 and so on.

Tychys

All is good, I’d say? P2 is kind of “broken”, but so are many others, I’m kind of afraid of a huge nerf wave incoming and I’d rather see power creep than huge nerf waves. Brutal + 6 is pretty difficult, after all, and plenty of mutators and combinations of them are also super broken.

Zeratul

P3 is just… bad. Really bad. Why no third fragment? Come on, his army really benefits from the third fragment and the gimmick sort of doesn’t justify it for me at least.

Rest are meh, not much to say about them.

Stetmann

P1 should be part of his default kit. Not having Super Gary is just really, really bad. Unplayable levels of bad when you deal with stuff like second wave in Chain of Ascension. Stetmann always had the problem of having to deal with satellites meanwhile having to deal with micro-intensive army and also a bit of macro at home. P1 is really necessary to be part of his default toolkit. At least the invicible part of stetellites.

P2 conversely is the only reasonable pick for him: super gary turned into hypergary. Less micro-intensive army, more presence earlier on and so on. But those stetellites still suck as they always do - I would never play Stetmann anymore except with an ally who I can trust to take care of early game so that I can play P1.

P3 sucks except in niche cases: infested maps. Surprisingly good in them. Maybe consider buffing it, but I’m fine with it as-is - I mean at least two maps where its good.

Mengsk

P1 is bordering on “broken” for reasons that everyone knows, but honestly it’s fine in most maps. It’s just mostly void thrashing spam where it’s “broken” because it really trivializes the whole map after the first thrasher.

P2 is really good

P3 is… ehh? People say it’s good because it gives him better early presence - true - but the actual gimmick isn’t a thing at all because you still don’t want to lose your imperial troopers. I don’t really know what’s the fix here - it’s not a bad prestige but I don’t think it works for him the way Blizzard perhaps hoped it would.

12 Likes

what do you by “Once fixed” ? just curious.

from what I understand, it’s essentially the ability “deploy Fenix/Talendar” from the LOTV campaign, although you can control him. He’s not part of your army, he’s a powerful calldown, and like in the campaign, he leaves after 20 seconds of being on the battlefield–interesting prestige idea to say the least.

For now I will only rate my main commander, imo ;

  • Normal Abathur 10/10
  • P2 Aba 7/10
  • P1 Aba 2/10
  • P3 Aba 1/10

You have said P1 Abathur seems not that bad for itself and I agree with you. But compared to default Aba, it sucks. Ultimates evolutions are core damage/tankiness of the army. P3 sucks and is counter productive, not need to talk about.

None of the 3 prestige is any better than normal Abathur, so the meaning of prestige is questionable.

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This is 100% wrong lol. Tyrant Ascendant doesn’t require spawn camping in the slightest if you’re constantly on the move. An active Alarak is a good Alarak.

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I only leveled up 3 commanders so far.

Raynor

  • His prestiges are good except P3. BCs need to be cheaper, it takes minimum 18 minutes to max out on BCs with 8CC and by this time most coop missions are over. Also most of the mission you spend pumping mules so it removes most of the fun in my opinion. Plus you have to rely completely on calldowns in the first 10 minutes or so.

Kerrigan and Zagara

  • All their Prestiges are good but there are a few bugs that I guess will be fixed next patch?

I’d rate Nova since I play her a lot.

P1 would be great if you knew you wouldn’t fight some AOE comps (you can throw some Marauders there but mostly I personally use a few Hellbats, Raven’s Turrets or Tank’s mines to draw aggro/tank them). The prestige mostly cancels high tech units (aside from the ghost) to deal with some hard comps/mutations. For other comps, they do just fine and strenghts her midgame but suffering a bit in the lategame. A decent prestige.

P2: I don’t think I will ever use this. Griffin is already a great tool on a short CD I can use to deal with some waves without relocating my army. It also helps a lot with pushing and breaking tough defenses. I use arilift maybe 2 or 3 times per game.

P3: Haven’t tested it yet but looks fun to use. Only been able to spam a single ability that doesn’t affect air seems a bit underwhelming, but hey, Nova isn’t Tychus and you can destroy a base from the inside. Also I don’t know when you lose Super cloack you are revealed or you are sent back to normal cloack for 4 seconds.

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The solution is to not play sub optimally. Creep highway + kerri mobility abilities is usually plenty mobility, and detection isn’t a huge issue either. You can save like 800 gas early game too, which is pretty nice.

This prestige has essentially 0 downsides if you use shadow guard duration mastery. You get plenty of time to clear 1st rocks and attack wave. There is the downside of it having 5 minute cooldown instead of 4, but assuming that’s a bug that will get fixed, I think I’ll run this one constantly. You can still use black hole when you fight scary attack waves, and against ground comps, you can pretty much ignore black hole.

Alarak’s P2 is way better if you don’t use ascendants (for whatever reason). Mass slayers and mass wrathwalkers especially have decent enough mobility while having their insta wave clear potential greatly increased by this prestige. 41% uptime on empower me is nothing to sneeze at

Certainly fenix requires less work than raynor to play. Arguably less work than stukov or karax. Everyone says Akhundelar is absolutely awful except for me, for some reason.

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Why are you dismissing bc’s because it takes till 18m to max out? 12 bc’s is only 72 supply, and 12 bc’s are a serious force.

To the OP - what if prestige abilities aren’t necessarily supposed to make the commander better, but just different? I agree that there are few outright clunkers, but most seem to be geared towards lateral shifts in game play, not improvements or nerfs. Does that change your opinion at all?

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When did I speak about Battlecruisers?

DPS is one of Raynor’s biggest strength and this emphasizes that. Imagine Vikings, Banshees and tanks shooting as fast a marine.
U can take out any comp with the right build.

You can supplement with marines if u have the extra minerals.

Nah, it does in plenty of maps. Go ahead and play Temple of the Past. Lack of mobility has always been acknowledged to be Alaraks biggest draw and it’s no different here.

In maps like Mist Opportunitis and Temple of the Past, the typical solution is that you build your gateways all around the place so you can use overcharge and later on for bigger waves you’ll add in cannons and possibly a nexus (due to how much health nexus has - you might not be able to overcharge anything else effectively).

I got a lot of experience with Alarak, probably my most played commander. I know very well what his weaknesses are and how he plays like, Tyrant Ascendant sucks. Only map where I would find it decent is Malwalfare - it sort of makes pure Ascendant comp decent there and there’s only one wave that you would use taxi fleet to deal with, which can be dealt with by placing forges underneath (don’t really need more gateways at that point).

Say hello to AoE. That’s my whole point. I’ve played it, I’ve tried to make it work, but it’s a gimmick because Viking-based builds just aren’t great.

What’s worse, if your air army survives, you’ll have to spend a ton of time repairing it with mules due to sheer amount of stuff that needs repairing. P2 is a gimmick for now, doesn’t really seem to work that well in brutal, unfortunately.

“Different” is one thing, unplayable is another. Vorazun P2 is different, but it’s literally unplayable.

But more importantly, Kerrigan P1 is a good example of this. It’s supposed to be “different”, but all that really changes is actually the lack of omega worms. The palystyle doesn’t fundamentally change, the effect of Kerris P1 is so super marginal due to how fragile her army is. It’s not really “different” in any other way than just disabling omega worms.

I’ve said in certain cases that I think the prestiges suck but they’re fine - for example Vorazun P1. I think it’s awful, but it’s fine because most most Vorazuns I meet don’t know about pylon recall (I assume) so such players probably will love it.

Then there’s another interesting case: Artanis P1. I like the concept, but really the problem is that Artanis needs that P2 teleport so bad and everyone agrees. Without it, he has the same issues with mobility as a fleetless Alarak. P2 should have been part of default Artanis, in all honesty.

Or lastly, Stukov P3. I think it’s awful with extremely niche uses but it’s sort of fun I imagine for a lot of people, so whatever - I don’t mind it.

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As one who mains Alarak, I know his strengths and weaknesses better than most players. However, as such, I also know how to counteract those problems. An active Alarak is a good Alarak. If you’re having problems getting from point A to point B then that’s on you not being active enough.

By “fixed” I mean Kerris P3. Blizzard confirmed that the stats are wrong, i.e. DG should not have a cd etc.

Honestly Fenix P1 doesn’t sound that bad, just can’t rely on him for detection. But his P2 and P3 seem far more interesting to me overall, so kinda curious about them.

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Way to address what I said with nothing else but “Active Alarak is a good Alarak”. Got more meaningless statements?

Yes. Git gud. 20char

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I really disagree with Raynors P2 being decent, it just gets fragged by AoE heavily. And honestly, Raynors BC’s always suck. It’s one thing how long it takes to max out on them, it’s another that you’re essentially useless with them half of the game. But to be honest, this fact would be fixed if BC’s weren’t so ridiculously expensive.

He can compensate slightly with topbar especially in P3 but the topbar just doesn’t match Karax, who can do decent carrier rush because of the topbar (although carriers are extremely boring compared to his other comps)

So nothing at all, as much as I expected. Anyway, Alarak P2 sucks - removing the tiny sliver that he has of a mobility is too much of a downside. Although I do actually agree with the Empower Me uptime, it is really good.