Mengsk Mastery Set 3: Increasing Royal Guard Experience is underestimated

Co-op Missions Discussion
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Hi All commanders who love Mengsk,

I’ve been using Mengsk recently in Brutal and Brutal +1, and trying to different Mastery set as well.

As most people do, I used to choose Mastery of cost reduction and initial mandate. However, I noticed the usefulness of experience increasement. (At least it’s fun to use).

Reason #1: Mengsk suffers from a lack of RG experience in the end.

With Cost Reduction Mastery, he generally can produce more than enough RGs considering of Exps we can get. For greater late game power, He generally suffers from the amount of experience more than resources due to power spikes at Rank3.

Reason #2: Initial Mandate (30) doesn’t do much without fast expansion.

With only one starting bunker in maps where you cannot expand, the economic boost you can receive is quite limited. this doesn’t have as much impact as fast expanding with the bunker.

Reason #3: 15% experience increasement can allow RGs reach Rank3 faster rate than 15%.

In certain situation, Required Exp for Rank3 is more than 15% lesser than usual.

Let’s say there is “RG A”, which requires 1150 Exp to reach Rank3. You defeat 1000Exp worth enemies and produce one more RG B after that,

For “RG A” to achieve Rank 3, following amount of EXP is required:

With Mastery : 1000EXP
Without Mastery: 1300EXP
In this case, you need approximately 30% less EXP with Mastery!

As you noticed, required EXP for both RGs to achieve Rank3 still differs only 15%. However, as mentioned earlier RG’s power spikes come at Rank3, so this can change the engagement result much. This mastery has more impact than the impression of 15% has.

Reason #4: He can still get fast expand dealing with early waves.

He has many tools for fights with fewer resources. With proper use of bunkers, turrets, repairing labors, weapon and calldowns, he can handle any early waves in Brutal. It’s challenging to adapt your army, but it’s dealable and fun as well. In certain mutation it’s wise to have greater early game power though.

I just want to know if anyone else is using this and more players to try this mastery. What do you think? Any comments are welcomed!

2 Likes
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Actually i never used mastery points on Mandate in set 3.

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It’s not underestimated, it is a decent mastery, but it simply pales in comparison to the alternative.

Royal Guards have more of a support role, with some of them being static most of the time (thors and tanks work best in their “deploy” mode, which is static) - mainly because of their high gas cost, which means you can’t really make a big, strong deathball composed of SGs fast enough, and if you lose some units, they will be hard to replace. The main sources of damage for Mengsk - save for those few defensive maps (and maybe even then) - is troopers, ESO, and calldowns.

Plus, there’s the gimmick of units earning experience, all the units share experience, not just the killing unit, unless it is alone in the area. That’s not bad in itself, but the problem is that once you reach level 3 with a unit, it will still “drain” experience from the kills. So even if you gain more experience from mastery, you also lose more due to this fact. It’s not like, say, you made 10 bcs and you manage to get 3 of them to level 3, 5 to level 2 and 2 at level 1 without experience bonus, and with bonus you’re gonna level them all to 3. Nope - you will probably level 2 more to level 3 and 2 and have none at level 1, or so. Plus, the units will get experience anyway, and while it’s nice to have stronger units earlier, it’s rarely a game-changing thing, or even a true requirement - wave difficulty advances mostly on par with your units’ levels.

And then there’s the instant-bunker-mastery. This is not only useful for fast expanding, but also the fact that it allows you to have 6 more workers right from the start, which can start gather resources faster. SGs being so gas-heavy, that bunker allows you to get your expo faster, or refineries faster, or both, so that you can start pumping out SGs sooner, which usually translates in more units which gain experience sooner. So you might get 1 or 2 extra waves or some extra random kills with more SGs on the map, meaning some extra experience compared to the scenario where you didn’t have that extra bunker because you choose the other mastery. Ofc, it’s likely that the extra exp you gain this way will not be comparable to the one given from the mastery, but it’s still a thing to keep in mind.

Like I said in the beginning, it’s not a bad mastery or anything, but like a lot of other masteries, the alternative simply tends to be better.

5 Likes
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I’ve gone 15/15 split. I need to wait a minute to get to 25 mandate, but it hasn’t been a show stopper for me to create my first Supply Bunker, then drop that a bit later to clear rocks.

I do like leveling up my RG faster!

1 Like
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Max rank RG units do not “drain” XP from other RG. If it has max rank, XP will simply be distributed elsewhere. So you don’t lose anything from having a max rank guard, and frankly I don’t see why one would even think that.

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This is why you don’t make too many royal guards, and use the 15 range of exp absorption to prioritize leveling one guard at a time. If you float gas, dump them into ESOs.

First off, check this site for how to fast expand on pretty much all contested expansion maps (SoA can be cheesed so I’d exclude that, but it’s possible): https://starcraft2coop.com/commanders/mengsk

Second, first bunker drop can be either used to expand, or to get six workers (because, y’know, troopers can convert to laborers?) for basically free and save Mengsk 240 minerals in workers + 100 minerals in the bunker. If instantly saturates your mineral line for free doesn’t sound good to you, then I have nothing to say.

Initial Mandate is a huge buff to Mengsk’s early game by speeding up his economy.

The reason why a lot of people got angry at the nerf to said mastery was because 60 starting mandate, coupled with fast laborer production and fast build, allowed you to fast expand and saturate faster than the majority of commanders.

This is not the case. Rank 3 guards are removed from the “pool” of guards eligible to receive exp, and thus will not take exp away from other not-maxed guards.

3 Likes
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Nah in those times my Mengsk was only like 7-8 level so…

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You seriously missed out, having double bunkers was ridiculous, you only needed to make two workers and you were already maxed. Powerbuild two refineries with 3 workers each and you have max economy on one base in 30 seconds. No one even came close to that level of fast eco.

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It’s kinda too cheaty, Mengs now is still very good.

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In the end game statistics i always have around 70-100k damage dealt by troopers and 20-40k dealt by RG. Why would I bother wasting mastery for units which are there just to support instead of units that are actually getting the job done?
Mengsk doen’t need boosts in the mid/late game, he needs it in the early game to fast expand, fully saturate and set up mandate generation, production and upgrades.
But it is only for regular Brutal, I guess. On +1 troopers often get rekt by AOE mutators which are pretty common. In situation where you have to rely mostly on RG, Exp mastery can be a good choice, I think. But on regular Brutal its still a waste, I tried it couple times and didn’t like it at all.

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I think fast eco is overestimated, at least in serious commander strenght discussion no one considers eco as a factor, timings much more important than how fast you saturate are how fast you can get a good enough army to attack, mobility, ramp up, etc, and while these things are helped by economy it is not the definitive factor, in fact the strongest commander in the game (abby) has the weakest economy of all, but this also makes him not care about a mutator like slim pickings while commanders that depend on economy get affected badly by it.

But while I say this I don’t mean you should just forget eco, all the commander timings or ramp talk will just assume the player is not being dumb and getting the eco up as fast as possible, and the truth is that Mengsk even before the mandate nerfs couldn’t start attacking confortably faster than most commanders, he could have a temporary boost (the maguro calldown) but those are temporary units and it has a big opportunity cost (1360 minerals in troopers + bunkers and the extra mandate generation of 24 troopers).

Anyway by picking the experience mastery you make a commander that already doesn’t have fast build up an even slower commander, and with how important the early game is in coop this is definitely not good.

1 Like
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Royal Guard experience mastery could be 5,000% and it still wouldn’t be as good as starting mandate, not even close.

Mengsk is a macro commander. Getting his economy up to full speed is the best thing you can do for a macro commander because there’s only 2 bases for the player to work with.

It doesn’t matter how fast the Royal Guard level up, you still have to purchase the units and that costs money. Getting his economy up as fast as possible GIVES you that money.

Plus, Royal Guard level up fast enough as it is.

3 Likes
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Thanks for giving me feedback, and I appreciate all of your comments. I thought this topic, saying this mastery can be useful, has not come to the forum so that’s why I raised it up. I’m glad a few people already use this option.

This is a good point, and I know many Mengsk players wished if they can produce more RGs than the system allows.

This mastery is for making the dream come true. Assuming you execute proper macro (constant worker production and buy all upgrades in EB and RGs ability you use) you can seamlessly produce RGs and much more 15% than usual of them can reach Rank3 thanks to Reason #3 . With this mastery, RGs can affect the games much more than usual.

Without Mandate Mastery, it’s true he faces challenges in the early game. But once you remember utilizing frontline bunkers, repairing it and choose proper weapons, he can survive and limit the casualty to low. I don’t say fast-expanding is not impactful. Speaking of map which can allow FE with one bunker and need fast push, such as Mist Opportunity, Initial Mandate is great. But it’s also true most of the contested expos need two bunkers so the impact is limited in the situation.

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It was great. TBH i still think they should’ve kept it. maybe nerfed something else to comp. But mengsk as a lightening econ felt right

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Not that I don’t agree with starting Mandate being better, but that’s a bit of a flawed way of thinking. Trooper damage doesn’t go down, so if going xp gain rate gives 10% (or what it may be) damage to Royal Guard overall on longer maps than that’s simply added on top of everything else.

Of course, the flip side is true as well depending on how short a map length is.

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I’ve talked with a couple of Mengsk players in-game and they said while Blizz really nerfed that, it was very rightfully done so. It was too extreme.

RG tanks damage, so that makes them support in this case. If it keeps Troopers alive longer, then it does add to their DPS. It’d be like saying Medics are useless since they do no damage, while Marines do.

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What I think is needed to solve the imbalance in that mastery
1-start everyone with 20 mandate (probably from level1)
2-have bunker drop only start with 1 charge
(so everyone gets 1 starting bunker drop, the mastery is for starting zerg)

then
3-more mandate from leveled royal guard (~50% more lvl1, 75% more lvl 2, 100% more lvl3)
4-bump the exp mastery up to 22.5%