Mengsk mastery Terrible Damage increases dmg done by Enthralled Zerg (Dogs of War), Nuclear Annihilation and Contaminated strike by 30% (30/30).
However even without this mastery almost nothing survives Nuclear Annihilation or the Dogs of War.
Terrible Damage may help Contaminated strike but i don’t feel its worth the 30 mastery points.
The competing mastery is Royal Guard Cost reduction by 20% which is pretty sweet.
Perhaps Terrible Damage should be replaced by a mastery that reduces cooldown of Nuclear Annihilation and Dogs of War?
This mastery will be important in certain mutations. On brutal everything dies fast. This mastery slot is well designed, both options have impact and are viable.
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For nuclear I agree. But for Dogs, the more damage, the more they kill…the less time they spend attacking a target, the more they spend traveling to/attacking a new target.
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IF you get to maTSery lvls, it’s no longer dogs, it’s WOLVES.
Feels good to be a smarta$$…
nuclear annihalation will kill even the 5th void sliver by itself with the mastery. also it is far more likely to kill hybrids in attack waves.
the royal guard cost may seem good, however the more royal guard units you have on the field, the longer it takes for them to rank up.
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Biggest benefit to Royal guard cost seems like it would be getting them out sooner.
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I’ve felt very similarly, a lot of his talents are extremely 1 dimensional and there’s almost never a reason to do anything but go for Reduced Cost and Starting Energy. The mutations where “Terrible Damage” is better than “Reduced Cost” are better translated as mutations where “A certain commander” is better than “mengsk”.
This isn’t saying he’s bad but there are certainly some affixes that are better suited to some commanders than others.
Well Im pretty sure Nuclear Annihilation can’t solo destroy a shard on Scythe of Amon, Rifts to Korhal, and well pretty much every other objective structure without mastery, so I think that’s a big plus.
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Do you know if level 3 units soak up XP?
Look like they do until they have full bar.
I tested it and an unmasteried nuclear Annihilation can take out a train on both the Tarsonis mission and also the Bonus train on the Ballius mission. But you do need masteries to take out smaller, more compact units, such as void shards or void thrashers. Even untalented the splash in the radius is strong enough to “basically” kill them that you’d still be better off with 4 or 5 fully upgraded elite units by the end of the game instead of 1 slightly faster killed void thrasher.
I use Earthsplitters to beat like 90% of my brutal+ games I play, so I often don’t really need Royal Guards and use contaminate strikes quite a bit, so the bonus Nuclear Anhhilation damage is mostly just a extra bonus to me anyway.
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I see lots of people talking about earthsplitter spec and I just don’t see the appeal. It looks cool but it can’t even hit air units.
Contaminated strike hits air units and does 100 damage (without mastery) now that it’s fixed. Either way, Mengsk has far more problems with ground units than air units. If you take out the ground defenders, air is trivialized by missile troops, vikings, etc.
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Once you have like 10 earthsplitters you can basically just say good bye to all the ground enemy units for the rest of the match especially since you can always salvage your Earthsplitters for full refund when you need to move them closer. Usually I also got contaminated strikes + troopers with AA, Nukes, or Dogs of War to deal with whatever air I cant kill with the Earthsplitters.
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The point of it all is the mastery set is competitive and has specific ingame purpose. So it doesn’t need a tweak. Anyone who’s worth their Mengsk would be able to tell.
If you rush starport (as you should), rush reactor (as you should), get 1 witness on top of main and expo ASAP and upgrade for double mandate from workers (as you freaking should), you’ll be able to use WOLWES every time it becomes available with the 100 mandate bonus; if you put 30% on top it becomes one of the best calldowns in the game… having 30% bonus apply to C strike and Nuclear bombs is just gravy… Wolwes are the missing piece in the army and they never get wasted…
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I am still baffled why Elite Cost reduction is 20% not 30%?
I mean wouldn’t it be rather comfortable to just set the numbers to 1% instead of 0.667%?
'cause 20% is A LOT already, especially consideriand a full mastery mengsk has THE fastest economy PERIOD. Just because terrible damage goes up in 1% increment it doesn not mean that the alternative mastery has to do the same… if it was 15% reduction for 30 points, it would still be good.