When it comes games there’s of course a pretty large overlap between annoyance and difficulty, but I’m trying to think of the mutators or mutation/map combos that are particularly bothersome and out of proportion with their difficulty
Things like -
Darkness/Dead of Night or Vermillion Problem
Fatal Attraction/any commander that needs micro
Concussive Attacks/Blizzard/WHY AM I STUCK IN THE MUD!!
Etc.
What would be the maximally annoying combination of mutations?
Any mutation that cannot be killed is annoying and therefore irrelevant. Lava killbots and other sad mutators contribute nothing to fun of playing for me.
Fatal attraction polarity on dead of night. Add broodlings if that’s not enough
Wouldn’t it just depend on the commander and/or map?
Some commanders are better suited for some mutators and vice versa.
Mag mines on TotP - per the other active thread now, as I’ve noticed it mentioned well before that. A known bug that won’t be fixed.
Cradle of Death with Darkness - not that annoying but need to be familiar enough with the map to know which Gatekeeper Constructs to look out for which guard the current active area. Got a random ally in last week’s mutator queue (In the Name of Love) who used the Brutal+ bug to play that week’s mutation. First thing I asked was “why? this is harder than the current weekly”. We got Darkness, went to the wrong bases, lost that one. Re-rolled again on random, got the regular mutes, completed it one go, despite not playing very well.
Darkness on any map that requires you to memorise enemy attack wave patterns to deal with effectively - eg TotP, MO.
Void Rifts, any map (except maybe VP) - pretty sure the rifts spawning at 2:20 instead of 3:20 was a bug/typo, but they saw how many pros worked with/around it, so left it as is.
Void Reanimators, Void Rifts, Just Die - FFS! I assume rolling all 3 is not possible even at Brutal +6 since it has a combined score of 22, and threshold for +6 is 19. Lucky us :-/
Barrier + Walking Infested and/or Alien Incubation + Just Die - All enemy comps would already be buffed. Now the extra spawns of broodlings and infested get that much harder to kill. An apparent workaround for Barrier is to one-shot the enemy units - but how many units do we have that do enough of that damage in a single shot and can be massed? Immortals, Siege Tanks, Tempests, BC’s?
Barrier on Dead of Night would be an absolute pain for the fist night. Most static defense doesn’t one-shot the infested. The first Shuttle on Miner Evac would also get that much harder to deal with.
The primary issue is that the mutator algo, how ever over-smart it’s trying to be but isn’t, just doesn’t account for or re-score mutators based on their interactions. As if that’s hard to figure out and add in to the algo.
I actually meant to include that, but neglected to include an example. Map, mutation, and commander.
Not the most annoying combo I’ve had, but a conveniently obnoxious one was scorched earth and speed freaks in a heavy zergling comp, where 2-3 of them ran into my mineral line and died there as a special little f*** you.
That’s exactly the combos I’ve been looking for. Stuff that isn’t just frustratingly hard, but makes you grit your teeth a bit.
and a nice sprinkle of Explosion.
You guys have definitely forgotten vertigo. It has been removed from official mutations. That’s a direct hit on the player’s mentality.
Mineral shields. Pretty easy mutation on its own, but it has some terrible interactions:
with Laser Drill - shields give vision for drill so it starts killing your workers and base if you don’t clear fast enough
with Fatal Attraction - each time shield is destroyed, workers get pulled in and stops mining. Have to reassign mine command constantly
with Photon Overload - mineral shields start attacking back when you try to get rid of them
with Polarity - can’t get this on Brutal +1 random queue, so I never experienced this one personally. But I believe polarity applies to mineral shields so you have to depend on your ally to clear some.
Darkness i don’t find very bad. You can counter it pretty well with many commanders. Like creep spread as zerg, stetelites, omega worms, spreading observers in static mode (risiculous how much vision range zeratuls observers get).
Much more annying is shortsigthed. I feel like it is 10 times worse than darkness. It’s pretty much the only mutator i always quit. It just bugs me in the worst way possible.
That being said, life leech + dispersion seems ridiculous, almost to the point where enemies become unkillable unless you outrange the dispersion range. Not sure if this is a bug or really way intended interaction between the two mutators.
Agreed on that. But you can deal with them Terrans and Protoss commanders as long as you don’t enter 5 range.
Negative. Photon overload does not activate on them, nor they spawn units of certain mutators (reanimators, kill bots, etc).
I just tested this on Maguro’s test map on Arcade. Photon overload does apply to mineral shields.
This website also confirms: h ttps://starcraft2coop.com/resources/mutators if you select the two mutators in the dropdowns, if it’s any assurance.
Strange. I still have doubts.
Not mentioned above is the combo of Life Leech and Avenger. It’s definitely not as broken as Life Leech and Dispersion but it can shut down some games as fast as Propagators.
Does Photon Overload-ed Mineral Shield target its attacker first (a canon, baracks, spine crawler, whatever) or whatever’s nearest or highest priority? Which is the long way of asking - before manually targeting static def on the shields, do you need to pull away your workers?
I suppose it can be semi-countered by having more static def (or whatever) so that each mineral shield has minimal time between first attack and destroyed. Ideally, enough to one-shot the shields with, for example, 3 canons.
Here’s an irritating combo which will effectively have no additional adverse effects: Mineral Shields & Slim Pickings: coz then there’s even less of a reason to bother mining for minerals. That would be a Brutal+2. Throw in Photon Overload and it’s still B+2. No point spending minerals on static def trying to remove mineral shields which will attack your units/structs, just so that your workers can get back to mining 1-mineral per round.
So you’d effectively be dealing with just Slim Pickings for mining, and Photon Overload when attacking enemy bases.
From my experience, photon overload prioritizes attacker first -> workers second -> any nearby structures last. As you said, it actually becomes trivial once you get enough static defense to clear them in one swoop. And if you clear fast enough, you don’t have to pull workers. Only in the early game when you don’t have anything, it’s better to just let them expire, which does hurt your early economy.
I will say getting Barrier on top of these 2 makes it significantly worse, which is a possible 3-mutation combo in Brutal+1.