Many prestiges suck and need either tuning or rework

[arms-1885]

@Ritz-1736

I’d rate Nova since I play her a lot.

P1 would be great if you knew you wouldn’t fight some AOE comps

If only she had a unit that could disable casters, something like a emp could work, they should add that in.

[Bogdanov89-2777]

i dont think ghost EMP will work against disruptors, reavers, banelings, siege tanks etc etc…

[Spudd-1263]

I’m actually having fun with Abathur’s P3. You just need to:

1. Re-spec Mastery for Double Biomass Chance

2. Play on long maps (not Random)

Best thing is if you decide to go mostly roach / Brutalisk, there’s no need for that much gas.

[aneroid-11199]

@Fourier-2978

P3 is also… questionable in its usefulness. You make a tradeoff between taking early expansion or using the shadowguard for first wave.

If they fix the Time Stop bug (if it’s a bug and not a nerf) then it’ll be awesome. You can use 72-sec SG to clear rocks and then the first TS to deal with the first attack wave. You’ll be partly giving up on your other calldowns (DP and BH) for the rest of the mission, but it’ll be a worthwhile tradeoff.

More here:

@aneroid-11199

if you timed it right, you’d have SG from 3:00 to 4:12. First TS is usually between 4:00 - 5:00 anyway (sometimes at 6 ish depending on mutations etc.). You’d then have some SG’s for an additional 72 secs when you do the 1st TS. So it could be something like SG from 3:00 to 4:12 and then TS @ 4:15 with SG last until 5:27.

If they don’t fix, and it’s a nerf to TS, then I’ll only use it occasionally.

[BadDark-21414]

@Spudd-1263

I’m actually having fun with Abathur’s P3. You just need to:

1. Re-spec Mastery for Double Biomass Chance
2. Play on long maps (not Random)

Best thing is if you decide to go mostly roach / Brutalisk, there’s no need for that much gas.

Fundamentally you also need a mate that is not an idiot, knowing how to play Abathur, and let you lure ennemies into nest.

[FearrWhalins-1432]

@BadDark-21414

let you lure ennemies into nest.

This can be mostly mitigated by being more active very early. Most less experienced players are still making workers and doing their own thing (or with some commanders waiting for their hero to spawn). Making nests then waiting for your ally to “use” them is just a gamble.

This becomes drastically more crucial with Limitless due to the 200 biomass cap.

[BadDark-21414]

@FearrWhalins-1432

This can be mostly mitigated by being more active very early. Most less experienced players are still making workers and doing their own thing (or with some commanders waiting for their hero to spawn). Making nests then waiting for your ally to “use” them is just a gamble.

This becomes drastically more crucial with Limitless due to the 200 biomass cap.

I’ve never written “your ally should lure ennemies to nest”. You must do it before your ally mess it.

There are too many conditions to make Abathur P3 to work, while you can just play normal Abathur. Up to everyone’s envy tho.

[Chickenator-21736]

Vikings melt everything in air if you have critical mass of them and use forward scan. Even if scourge somehow approach them(which i really doubt) you can add few marines on hold to intercept scourge. Parasitic bomb is countered by splitting and using medics.

@Fourier-2978

What’s more, Vermillion in particular. The P1 does nothing there, absolutely nothing. The creep just gets destroyed by the lava and that’s the end of that. I mean you could spread it further into places during no lava, but you really want to be focusing on Kerrigan at all times and it’s impossible to keep up with the creep.

P1 Kerri is just not good design, unfortunately. But it’s also partially because creep in general is not good design in co-op. Even Stukov suffers from his design - they have never addressed Malwalfare for him.

1. Make creep spread autocast in first creep spread direction and this will be much better. But I totally agree about omega network being ultra-strong thing and losing it needs ultra-strong advantage as trade-off.
2. Before creep patch I used 3rd CC and didn’t have any problem, now I just put creep for my bunkers with help of overlords. No problem here.

[arms-1885]

@BadDark-21414

Fundamentally you also need a mate that is not an idiot, knowing how to play Abathur, and let you lure ennemies into nest.

You can say that again. For some reason this also happens when I play canon Karax - I place canons in the path of the wave so my ally can move on to the next objective, but many allies jump in front of canons so I don’t get even one shot at the enemy.

[Fourier-2978]

I thought of this exact thing but… there are maps where first waves hit earlier than that. Rifts of Korhal in particular, there’s no feasible way to play with P3 that doesn’t essentially involve you asking your ally to take care of defense or alternatively skip on getting the base with SG.

Normal Vorazun deals with the wave first, then gets the rocks. A good Vorazun can even help to get allys rocks. But this stupid duration nerf makes it rather impossible, you either have to pick between killing the first wave or getting your expo.

Although, alternatively you could use your first SG to take the wave and then as soon as TS is available, use it to clear the expo rocks?

[aneroid-11199]

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:

@aneroid-11199

It’s not just the TS every 4 mins becoming 5 mins - it’s that you need to skip some TS’es (like the one at 10:00) as save it for 12:00 or 13:00 min, then delays the next TS to 18… but if it’s a mission where you’ve got a big base to kill at 20-21, then you’ll save the TS for then. Effectively, you’ve gone from 5-6 Time Stops in a typical game to just 3, sometimes 4. Wouldn’t be worth it to anyone, especially since by late game you’ve usually already got a massive army.

[Fiddlefaddle-1674]

Sooo, it just now occurred to me that Fenix’s second prestige doesn’t unlock until level 15. Wowie. Talk about pointless grind.

[Chickenator-21736]

If you like playing co-op it’s not grind for you. If you don’t like, every game is a grind. Simple.

[Fiddlefaddle-1674]

Do you not understand the context of my post?

[Rhyme-1300]

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.

[FearrWhalins-1432]

Yeah gotta make use of those recalls.

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).

[Chickenator-21736]

Do you not understand the context of your post?

[WireBender-1359]

@Fourier-2978

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.

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.

@Fourier-2978

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.

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.

@Fourier-2978

All is good, actually if there was such a thing as gold standard for prestige design, Karax would fare well there.

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.

@Fourier-2978

Good luck without strats such as spawn camping with cannons in some maps like Temple of The Past.

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.

@Fourier-2978

P3 sucks. It belongs to the same category of sucking as Abathurs P3: it’s very impractical and absolutely never useful.

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.

@Fourier-2978

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.

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.

@Fourier-2978

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.

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.

[FearrWhalins-1432]

Agreed on Artanis’s prestiges.

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.

1. Energy pool is 400 vs 600 (since most would/should research energy).
2. 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?
3. 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.
4. 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.

[Fiddlefaddle-1674]

Yup. I hear answering a question with the same question is productive though. Good work.