Normal Vorazun can’t “handle” the first wave on RtK, not on Brutal anyway. You either cheese it with your Dark Pylon (and hope you don’t get Vikings) or you make a Forge and put down 2-3 canons, if ally is doing nothing. You’ll also probably need to drop a blackhole to ensure canons kill off that first wave. Or you take 30 secs of damage and then drop SG.
If you’ve done just the 22/8 split on Chrono/SoA then Normal Vora and P3 Vora have the same issue anyway. The first wave hits by 2:30 so you can’t use SG that early. And then you’re taking 30 seconds of damage until SG.
For P3 Vora with the 5-min TS bug/nerf yeah that delays the expo way too much. If it’s a normal 4-min TS then use that one to clear your ally’s expo and the first shard. As I mentioned, if the 5-min TS is an intentional nerf and not a bug, it’s definitely a hard no for me:
If you use P3 on RtK, use 22/8 split and put first dark pylon at your natural. Use shadow guard on attack wave (tank with 2nd pylon+ cyber if needed) and recall to your nat.
This assumes you have 0 points in shadow guard duration. If you go full 30 into it, you can play like normal vorazun.
I place a DP near ally’s rock every time. You’ll already have at least 1 DP in your base since you should open with it rather than build pylon. And you’d summon SG at exp usually. This gives you easy access and removes the time wasted walking between these 3 points.
So you can quick expand, kill wave, and still have time to break ally’s exp. That said, I do have my SG duration mastery (cuz TS speed increase isn’t worth it).
It allows 2 Templar to delete late game skytoss waves. It allows storm to 3 shot carriers and tempests. It makes Artanis’ zealots one of the most effective mineral units in co-op. And with cd mastery, it sets the cooldown of Phoenix graviton beam to 1.5 seconds. This prestige may be monotonous because in the majority of cases those are the only 3 units you will ever use (though infinite ammo reavers are quite good against infested) but it allows Templar to be competitive with ascendants minus the time commitment. One of the strongest of the new prestige options imo.
Ok seriously why do people overvalue guardian shell so much? Anyways, gimmick uses? Well it lets Artanis expand at the 0 second mark since a single orbital strike set allows you to kill main rocks. It allows a single orbital strike to take out decently sized waves with those archons, who more importantly provide 5,000hp of tanking for your army. And the real win, it halves the energy cost and cooldown of shield overcharge, which is a ridiculously strong ability now with about 40% uptime.
I’d argue there’s a problem in that the prestige are so good, why would you ever use generic Karax? Otherwise, Karax is amazing.
Actually, I think that’s the reverse of the solution for p2 Alarak. The waves don’t actually reach the temple at the same time and your main base to your ally’s main base is a MUCH shorter walk than spawn point left to spawn point right. If you want a map where this prestige falls flat, I would refer you to Mist Opportunities.
It’s slightly better than Abathur p3 in that it has 1 niche use. Vermillion Problem and Temple of the Past see virtually no action for the first 10 minutes of the game, allowing you to create a massive field of strike fighter platforms. Which, you know could be useful if you’re trying to avoid Fatal Attraction or something. Very very narrow niche, but technically not nothing. Still needs buff.
Ok let’s be perfectly honest here, most Zeratul speedruns have almost finished clearing the map by the time the third artifact spawns. With a significantly shorter cooldown on cleave, it’s likely that on several maps Zeratul will clear the map before the third artifact would have spawned. Useful outside of speed running? Maybe not as much. But it proves Zeratul can clear the map perfectly fine without the 3rd fragment as is.
Mengsk has solo cleared several void rift mutations since this came out. The amount cheaper that the weapons are with this prestige is insanely powerful. The downside has no effect on ESOs whatsoever. And the trooper explosions coupled with the fact that everyone gets a weapon means that his trooper ball can actually function without any topbar. Not that it needs to, because troopers still generate more mandate than royal guard anyways and because medivacs you are now cutting used to be the one thing in you army to generate 0 mandate.
I think P3 is perfectly fine although perhaps 30-60sec duration would be nicer, some utility is often lost due to unit pathing. Guardian shell is always nice to have but is not reason enough to justify “Artanis sucks without it” kind of sentiment. A strategy/gameplay relying on dying to cheat dying thusly viable is a poor strategy. We should strive to not lose units as much as we can whenever possible.
Regarding P1 though, I’m not so sure the buff is entirely that superb. It’s a great prestige but 195gas for a HT and 390 for two. For almost similar price, 450 gas you can get 3 HT. Ok, so simple math is simple. So there are a few utility that I think everyone should take into account when deciding what is really better.
Energy pool is 400 vs 600 (since most would/should research energy).
While damage from 2 storms is doubled (effective 4x regular storms), is there real difference when it comes to wave clearing when 3 storms are cast?
Archons archons archons, can’t make half-archonling with 1 HT, so prices do matter. And not just archons/HT, gate and Robo are dramatically costly. Ever hated Karax unit price? Well, this is just that.
Limited utility for everything else. Phoenix play Artanis’s Graviton already picks up plenty. Tempest unfortunately can’t stack Disintegration. Immortals don’t really die anyway. But great charge-whirlwind that’s for sure.
Not against P1 but I find often P2 is overly sold while P1 is thought as good without really much objective perspective. You can always warp at a different location rather than teleporting your army there. A good Artanis player knows to not max on a bunch of Zealots and die to an air wave attack because he’s supply blocked, if you know what I mean.
A suggestion for Nova P3 might be so that when you use snipe you only go from super cloak to regular cloak, instead of being completely visible, this would add a fun dynamic of taking out detection first then HVT’s etc.
And if that’s too OP then make an extra disadvantage to combat unit vespene cost or something like that.
ATM the fact that if you use snipe you are fully visible really takes away from the infiltration feeling of the build and takes away all the dynamics because you just have to spam abilities only once you “infiltrate”.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I think Artanis P1 would be more interesting if the advantage was a 50% boost for both spell ability and weapon damage. That would make it more uniform to units across the board, while also not turning Phoenixes into into rapid-fire lifters (something I feel might be an unintentional oversight from a lack of balancing), or rendering the Reaver capacity upgrade pointless.
In essence, it would make Artanis the opposite of baseline Karax, which is rather novel when one thinks about it. 30% more expensive units that deal a lot of damage, as opposed to 30% more expensive units that can tank a lot of damage. That’s something I find interesting and would love to play with.
However, you’re discounting Zeratul 3 a lot. Yes, your army is weaker and you have no avatar, but the tornado move does crazy damage on a 2 second cooldown. I’ve taken down the trains in P&P solo using him this way on PTR. It goes towards your cursor so you can aim it for maximum effect. And of course, the tornado is tied to his Shadow Cleave, which means that is two seconds also - great for some annoying comps like banelings.
You don’t lose any DPS at all effectively by not getting the 3rd fragment. Yeah it’s a nice calldown to use but basically entirely pointless.
Zeratul’s army DPS is very high even without the Avatar’s boost and its devolve ability. Nor does he miss any AoE that the Avatar musters up with its storm or little cubes.
To provide some perspective, I’ve recently finished SoA in 12min using P3 with a friend of mine using Nova P3 (sub 15). And we were not trying that hard at all. That short 2sec cleave-nado is Aaaamazing. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise lol.
Zeratul goes from one cast and run to “cleave cleave cleave” wave dead.
was - if your army is getting more and more powerful, you don’t need either Avatar. Makes more sense to take away Avatar from your ‘army getting stronger’ prestige (2) and give it to the Army doesn’t get anything extra prestige (3) and is ideal for a Zeratul solo. Also consider the 3rd fragment benefits you’re not getting in P3, whether using Army or Solo.
Kerrigan P1: Don’t forget that Amon can destroy it. Considering that high difficult Amon will always have detector… yea, good luck defend that Creep tumor.
Stukov P3 is one of the garbage until you get mastery 90, then it become fun/good/brainless.
Fenix P1 is to make use of the suit skill. One of them are very powerful.
Zeratul P1 replace one of his semi useful skill into one of the beast that let him make both his army and his ally army into near invulnable state for 15s. This is basically a buff, a god tier buff.
P2 is also a buff that let him upgrade his army infinite amount of time throughout the game. The trade off is not bad either and long map definitely give this P2 a “Broken” status
Stettmann:
P1 is godlike, what do you mean? The only reason that I get Super-gary ever is because he is a detector and a charge in each skill. It’s nice to have but not necessary. This is not to mention that most of the downside in P1 can be mitigate by mastery.
P3 suck. Why use it when you can just… you know, use Lurker or something?
Han Horner P2 is for players like me and is fantastic
A little weak to air, but easy enough to soon mass Viking + BC to overwhelm the enemy fleet
Minimize mineral costs early on. Make Strike Fighters vs ground and Carriers vs air to assist. Make only a few Hellions + Hellbats for the buffs; save the minerals for maxing 2nd base. Then, afterwards you will have resources to spam starships.
This is actually a setup where HH needs to max out both bases sooner rather than later since starships are no longer as gated behind timers, and you won’t be able to rely on cheap merc spam
