My Vengeance Has Come! - An Alarak Prestige Guide

Co-op Missions Discussion
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So, you want to play Alarak and are dreading the Prestige grind? Not having a good time with a sloppy build? Losing your armies left and right in Brutal? This is the guide for you.

This guide is meant for more experienced players who have a basic, fundamental understanding of Alarak, and build timings. If you inexperienced with playing Robo Alarak or Ascendant Alarak, please don’t Prestige grind in Brutal until you get familiar with these builds.

In spite of what a lot of people may feel or think about Alarak as a commander, even at Level 1, he can hold his own in Brutal fairly well. Between Structure Overcharge, Alarak himself, and his Wrathwalkers, Alarak has some very strong burst damage and kiting potential. A lot of people who have ran into me during their prestige grinds have been pleasantly surprised at how effective Alarak can be in capable hands, in spite of their low levels.

Section 1: Prestiges

Like every other commander, Alarak has access to 4 Prestige tiers:
-Highlord of the Tal’Darim
-Artificer of Souls
-Tyrant Ascendant
-Shadow of Death

Each one affects Alarak’s play style in their own ways. Your main goal is to have each one unlocked, as all three are very impactful to Alarak’s gameplay.

-Artificer of Souls
When a nearby Supplicant dies, one of Alarak’s nearby non-heroic mechanical combat units gains 10% permanent attack speed and damage. Stacks up to 10 times.
Alarak’s Deadly Charge and Destruction Wave deals 50% less damage.
Note: This isn’t a “random” ability. The closest valid mechanical unit to the Supplicant that dies will get the stack buff.

If you choose this talent, be sure you keep your mech, specifically your Wrathwalkers, microed in the back so you don’t lose them and their stacks. The DPS increase is nice, but also applies randomly to your units. Having Alarak, your main front liner of your army, be so heavily gimped also makes fighting and kiting a lot harder. Destruction Wave no longer one-shots Marines, Zerglings, Banelings, or Scourge. That makes your Wrathwalker’s survivability much lower.

Edit: After bringing to light that there is an abuse for this talent, I have confirmed that you can turbo stack your mechanical units. To do this, you need a War Prism and some Warp Gates. Position your mech nearby/under the War Prism, and warp in some Supplicants. Before they finish (at any time), transform your War Prism from Phasing Mode to Transport Mode. This will cancel the warp-in of the Supplicants, which counts as them “dying”, but still refund you the Warp Gate charges and the minerals used to warp them in. Repeat this process until your mech is fully stacked.

Edit 2: As of patch 5.0.2, the Warp-In death bug has been addressed and is no longer relevant. As such, this talent goes back to being trash outside of a Mech-Ascendant Hybrid build.

-Tyrant Ascendant
Empower Me cooldown is reduced by 50%.
Death Fleet is unavailable.

On first glance, losing out on Death Fleet is a rough trade-off. But on a map like Oblivion Express, you don’t need the mobility. Once you have Empower Me unlocked on Alarak (Level 5), this should be you go-to while grinding for your third prestige, and during third prestige early levels. 120 second cooldown Empower Me with a mechanical army to back it up is nothing to sneeze at.

-Shadow of Death
The Death Fleet is now permanent.
The cooldown time for calling in the Mothership is doubled. (Does not affect coolup period.) Mothership’s Mass Teleport now works like Super Gary’s Teleport, and has a 60 second cooldown.
Reactivating this will resummon the Death Fleet, replacing your previous Mothership and all Destroyers.

In most games, this is your go-to prestige talent. Having a permanent Mothership to be able to zip around to places, and having her Line AoE Thermal Lance is going to be a major boon. The only key unit you care about is the Mothership, as keeping it alive allows you to have a little bit of a higher DPS, and a mass mobility tool.
This talent shouldn’t be equipped until Level 10, when you unlock the Death Fleet ability. Otherwise, you’re better off just taking Tyrant Ascendant.

Section 2: Leveling Up/The Grind

Leveling Alarak is actually pretty simple. Until Level 4, you’re always going to play Robo Alarak with mass Wrathwalkers. They are your hardest hitting unit, and your most consistent form of damage until you gain access to the Death Council Upgrade Cache (Level 4). Once you hit Level 4, you can switch to mass Blink Slayers for even more DPS. If you wish to play with Artificer of Souls, it is highly recommended that you make a War Prism to grant easy max stacks to your units.
Once you hit Level 5, you can swap your prestige talent to Tyrant Ascendant (if it is available.) This will drastically improve your wave clearing abilities, and objective sniping potential.
Once you hit Level 6, you can mix Blink Slayers with Wrathwalkers with the Robotics Bay Upgrade Cache. Mass Wrathwalkers is also much more viable again.
When you hit Level 10, you can opt to switch from Tyrant Ascendant to Shadow of Death. Your Death Fleet isn’t as powerful as it could be, but it gives you additional free units to fight and Empower with.
Upon reaching Level 12, you can stop using Mech altogether. This is when you obtain the Ascendant Upgrade Cache, which allows your Ascendants to scale with each Sacrifice cast. With Ascendant play, you can use any of the three talents, but I personally prefer Shadow of Death once Burning Skies (Level 13) is unlocked. Mass Ascendant or Ascendant/Wrathwalker is the recommended build from here on out.

One major problem I’ve ran into while leveling Alarak is that Bane/Scourge is the bane of your existence. If you are playing with Artificer of Souls, and are not Level 12 yet, this army composition will absolutely trash your army, forcing you back to square one. I’ve lost games because of this. You can handle any other composition except Bane/Scourge. If you run into this, pray to the Gods that your ally will back you up, otherwise you’re better off just leaving the game.

Section 3: Build Orders

For most of the games you play, build orders are going to be the same. The reason some of these timings are off is due to your Structure Overcharge being slow as a snail, causing a build-up of extra resources to spend.

13/14 Pylon (you can put it at your expansion if you want to, I opt to not do that.)
15 Assimilator
17/18 2nd Pylon, Overcharge your rocks when you are able to.
20 Nexus > Max your gas
21 Assimilator
22 Gateway
24 Pylon
25 Overcharge again. If you ally has cleared your rocks for you, hold onto this Overcharge for attack waves/objectives.
25 Forge (More important later in the grind, as it gives you access to Telekinesis upgrade.)
27 Cybernetics Core

Production Lines:
-Ascendant Play:
8 Gateways + 1 Robotics Facility (For War Prism. If you don’t want to use War Prism, skip the Robo.) + 1 to 2 Forges (Shield is priority, Shield + Armor if double Forge.)
Pairs up well with Tyrant Ascendant and Shadow of Death.

-Blink Slayer Play:
6 to 8 Gateways + 1 Robotics Facility (Optional again) + 2 Forges (Attack + Shield)
Pairs up well with Tyrant Ascendant and Shadow of Death.

-Mass Wrathwalker Play:
4 Gateways + 2 Robotics Facilities + 2 Forges (Attack + Shield)
Pairs up well with all three talents.

-Wrathwalker/Slayer Play:
6 Gateways + 2 Robotics Facilities + 2 Forges (Attack + Shield)
Side note for this build: Focus a bit more heavily on your Slayers and keep your Wrathwalkers in the back. Slayers can help protect your Wrathwalkers from pesky air units.
Pairs up well with all three talents.

-Wrathwalker/Ascendant Play:
8 Gateways + 1 to 2 Robotics Facilities + 1 to 2 Forges (Attack + Shield, Attack is more important if only 1 Forge)
Side note for this build: Focus more on your Ascendants early on. Once you get a small ball of about 6 to 8 of them, you can start production of your Wrathwalkers. Wrathwalkers should cap out at around 6 to 8, and Ascendants can go between 12 and 20.
Pairs up well with all three talents. Especially so with Artificer of Souls.

Closing Notes
I wrote this up as a way to give back to the Co-op community. This is my first ever written-up guide, so any and all feedback and criticisms are welcome.

17 Likes
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Thanks for the write-up! You had touched on it, but is there any maps you found particularly tough with one of the Talents?

Small typo I think, did’ja mean “your second prestige”?

As someone who plays lots of Bio/Gateway builds, Bane/Scourge is already scary…

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No, actually. This is used grinding for and during the third prestige. The way I perceive it is that Prestige Levels go as follows:
0-15 (Highlord), 1-15 (Artificer), 2-15 (Tyrant), 3-15 (Shadow). You make use of Tyrant Ascendant for most, if not all of Prestige 2, and if you wish, most of Prestige 3.

Ascendants turn Bane/Scourge into goop. But not having access to full power Ascendants means that Bane/Scourge is just “gg, we tried” territory.

As for the maps, I find that Part & Parcel and Cradle of Death are the two hardest maps for Alarak. On P&P, your expansion is a long ways away, and heavily fortified, both getting to it and clearing it. As for Cradle, well… Cradle is Cradle. One wrong move when microing your army and truck, and it all goes down the drain. When playing Alarak, even at level 15, I tend to avoid this map as it’s just no fun. Too much to manage between Alarak, Mech/Ascendants, War Prism/Probe for Overcharge, the truck, and incoming attack waves. (It also doesn’t help that it causes sensory overload for me too.)

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It is not. You do not need ascendants to activate Artificer of Souls. Simply attacking alarak so he kills them will also grant the buff. (And also if the enemy kills a supplicant normally). It is worth it, as long as you keep enough survivability.

Only if you’re running artificer of souls, and even then you can kite back to wipe all the zerglings and banelings. With any other prestige, you can destruction wave to insta-wipe everything, leaving only the vipers, aberrations, and swarm hosts. Important to note that slayer’s blink, deadly charge, and destruction wave are unaffected by viper blinding cloud, so you can abuse the mobility if you want to poke scary waves a little more.

I guess if people want to abuse artificer, there’s an oversight that lets you instantly max stack all your mech units for free:

  • Siege a war prism
  • Start warping in a bunch of supplicants via warp gates
  • Unsiege war prism
  • Repeat.

This will repeatedly kill supplicants and refresh your money and warp gate charges, leading you to max stacked mech with no money investment.

3 Likes
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I am well aware of this. Ascendants are just the most effective way of using this talent. During any given game, I find that it’s rather lack-luster to use Artificer of Souls, given how little Alarak has been actually “dying”. Then again, that’s probably just because I’ve been that good at keeping him alive outside of Bane/Scourge, or Reaver/Immortal/Disruptor.

Vipers, my dude. Vipers. Vipers shut down the build completely without Ascendants to back it up. Between Blinding Cloud slowing and muting your units, and Abduct yanking your giraffes around, late game Bane/Scourge facerolls Artificer of Souls pre-level 12.

This, I actually did not know about. I’ll have to try it later on to see. If this is the case, then Blizzard needs to correct this, as it’s such a horrible abuse.

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Not disagreeing or anything but it may help some players to note that Havoc’s force field can help out here somewhat. While force fields aren’t a hard counter to ling/bane, mostly due to the existence of so many force field breakers in Amon’s army, well placed force fields can help to somewhat funnel the lings and banes. This can really help your Vanguard maximize their killing power and save a lot of your army.

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  1. Abberations are in Bane/Scourge. They trample Force Fields, making them near useless.
  2. Vanguards won’t help much. Vipers will have disabled them before they could do anything meaningful. On top of this, during the leveling process, until you get access to the Robotics Bay Upgrade Cache, they fire as slow as molasses.
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One thing confuses me in this guide. It starts as a guide for prestige grinding and talks about possibility of having powerful builds at low levels (such as Alarak Level 1) but then talks about choosing talents and skipping stuff. It appears as it is written from both the point of grinding the prestiges for the first time (linear progression) and from already having all three prestiges unlocked.

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Yes. I wanted to have as much information as possible for people going through the grind. Informing people that skipping over certain things is part of that deal. The first section talks about the prestiges and how effective they are, as well as why/when they should be or shouldn’t be picked.
The second section goes over how army progression goes during the grind, and when to equip or make the most of your new prestiges.
The third section goes over build orders and what I feel is proper production investment. This is to simplify things for people who aren’t entirely sure on what they should be doing during the grind and be discouraged from playing the commander at all.

It may jump around a bit, but the thing to keep in mind is that this goes over the process of grinding all three prestiges. During Prestige 1, you don’t want to make use of Artificer of Souls. The active gimp to Alarak without Ascendants to mix in makes it not worth while. During Prestige 2, you can either take Highlord or keep Tyrant equipped, as there’s no real downside during this grind. Prestige 3 bounces between Highlord, Tyrant, and Shadow, depending upon your level and how you want to play it.

And yes, it is written for first-time grinders and from the point of having all 3 unlocked. I played during the PTR and got to test all of them. On the live patch, I got to test them during the full grind as well. Thus, I have knowledge and understanding of how they work during the grind and after the grind.

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Yeah, I’d draw attention from everyone looking to play Alarak to do this.

It’s a small investment for little work (unnecessary but if you have down time on maps, why not).

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Once again, I’ll have to test it for myself. Once I do and can confirm it, I will add it to the post.

Edit: Just got to try this abuse. It confirmed works, and should probably be reported as an unintentional bug. I think it counts the warp-in cancels as “Deaths”, so it adds a stack each time.

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Bumped. The OP has been updated with an updated build order for the grind, as well as a correction for the Artificer of Souls bug fix that rolled out in 5.0.2.

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So, is it still worth it to run Artificier if you got no other prestige at lower levels?

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Imo, no. Twilight ascendant is best while leveling, followed by highlord of the taldarim. Artificer is still usable but I prefer Alarak damage

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Nope. Not with the warp-in death bug removed. It’s an active gimp to Alarak. You’re better off waiting until you have Ascendants, either basic or full power.

I think you mean Tyrant Ascendant. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Should’ve just made it be a feature tbh.

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Mmm… I don’t agree with that. It made maxing out on the stacks way too easy too early on. They scaled much faster and much better than Ascendants. The idea behind it was to make it a hybrid talent that used both mech and Ascendants. That way they scaled together.

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Nice guide, minor suggestion is to search through the text and remove mentions of the war prism P1 bug due to it being fix (its still mentioned in some parts of guide).

I am still very sad that there is no proper full-mech alarak prestige (similar to how stukov has pure-mech prestige).

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I kept the bug included in the post because it was relevant. I went in and did a strike through with an update edit to state that even though the bug did exist, in the current patch it was fixed and no longer doable. Nothing else needs to be changed.

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So a hybrid ascendant build? Not sure what mech unit to build though. Ascendant is gas expensive while supplicants are mineral intensive so they’re already perfect with each other.