At the beginning, block the gate, build some turrets, then you can handle the first wave very well. When the second wave comes, you have plenty choices already.
To use p3 to full potential, Nova must be on the move all the time. You just drop bot, snipe whats left (with defensive drone, you can kill whatever survives - hybrids, banshees, bcs…) and you run to next enemy base, while your army is doing objectives. You can clear almost the whole map on MO before your 3rd set of bots starts with Nova alone.
Orders of magnitude? You… know that’s not just an expression, right? It means at least 10x, if not 100x or 1000x. That means at the most, you do 6-7K damage with baseline Nova. That’s absurdly low though, 30-40K seems more likely. And P3 Nova is invariably doing a lot of damage to structures that can’t fire back, so her damage will always be inflated relative to her actual contribution.
Not saying you’re wrong about your conclusions, but “I do 60-70K damage with P3 Nova and this is orders of magnitude higher than baseline” has some issues.
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I actually didn’t know orders of magnitude meant at least X10 - I thought it was a “several” thing.
So, to be more specific, vanilla Nova often does 10-15k damage. Sometimes 20k, if assault mode is used a lot against zerglings. Super Ghost form will, like I said, often do well over 50k damage. Of course enemies aren’t fighting back, but a base cleared with drones before the rest of the army arrives certainly counts as damage dealt. She isn’t inflating her damage counter.
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Hm, I seem to get higher than that, more like 30-40K. But I tend to play with a heavy focus on Nova and Assault Mode, I’ll even take mid-game ground waves solo with her.
I do think damage to structures that don’t fire back is inflation. The value of damage done is very dependent on what you damaged. A hero who does 2000 damage sniping every troublesome spellcaster in a base did more work than one who blew up 10,000 HP’s worth of defenceless structures that would’ve been mopped up anyway. (Extreme example, not trying to model baseline vs P3 Nova there.)
Of course, it’s not the full story, and I appreciate that P3 Nova can do really good work.
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It isn’t about how much more damage Nova gets as p3 vs p0. Majority of the damage comes from a combination of Griffin Strike and Nova’s sabotage drone + the nukes. When all of these are used as much as possible, the mission is left in a crippled state for clean up.
So either use units or have an ally who isn’t afk the whole time.
Yes true. Every single map and most mutators can be improved by extra nukes (don’t take any resources away from your army, and doesn’t even need you to micro her since she’s perma-invis) and more effective airstrike targeting as a mineral dump. And you still have the freedom to make any army comp you want, because your mech isn’t hindered (unlike P1) and you still have airstrikes to soften waves or pushes before bringing them in (unlike P2).
With P3 and nuke mastery, the cooldown becomes 165. That gives you nukes for a variety of scenarios that aren’t available in P0, such as having it up for every single night on Dead of Night*, every single panic launch on Miner Evac, every research vessel on VL etc. It’s one of the most powerful spells in the game for a reason.
(*Except Night 1)
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And you get to hear Nova say “nuclear launch detected” more often, which is boss.
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On this particular mastery set, I found it still unfortunately more worthwhile to go Griffin Strike cost reduction.
It’s utility and repeatability is just far too great.
On the other hand, with enhanced droning, Nova loses less units, meaning there’s more money to spend on Griffin Strikes. A single ghost costs 500m and 250g. That’s a particularly expensive unit obviously, but even 2 marines are the cost difference between a reduced Griffin Strike and a regular Griffin Strike. If weakened bases saves you from losing 4 marines, 1 ghost, and 1 tank over the course of a mission, that’s 1,200 minerals - or the additional cost of 4 Griffin Strikes without mastery.
edit: got my math wrong - losing those units would be 600 + 500 + 400 = 1,500 minerals, or 5 Griffin Strikes. Plus the 550 gas.
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On most maps I usually end up with a capped army and still floating minerals anyway even with 1k strikes. The cost reduction is really nice mid-game but I think either mastery is viable 
Yes, the wider drone can easily make up for the cost difference (to say nothing of nuking more waves or the inside of an enemy base while your drone handles the perimeter def.) Walking your army into a crippled base usually results in few casualties.
I wouldn’t really calculate it based on half because you can’t summon half of a cooldown of any unit. So the money saved/spent should be double that.
A full mastery griffin strike is also 700 min vs 1000 min.
Regardless, lol, Nova’s P3 is fantastic. Anyone who thinks differently I guess can do so haha, but I think it works great.
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What the hell for? Enemy comes in continuous stream. At best will give you 20 seconds of respite from 1 direction.
see above. Miner evac is the map where that prestige is literally useless.
Struggle to think why you need nuke there.
Extra nuking is fun, but you clearly overvalue it too much. 700mineral airstrike can do the same much more often.
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There are 4 more heavily fortitude areas in DoN (NW, NE, E, and SE). A nuke dropped on each of them means they are cleared with virtually no resistance. I don’t think he was suggesting using the nuke defensively. Nova can also do her own version of the HH playbook and clear buildings during the night phase using drones.
On ME, I would use the drones and early nukes to clear ship areas, and later nukes can be used against the hybrid waves on launch 4 and 5.
In any case, regardless of prestige, heavy tanks are going to be doing the bulk of your work.
P3 is at worst no less effective at any given map, and for many maps is significantly more effective. This one, Artanis P2, and Dehaka P1 are the three prestiges I’ve used so far that I think are straight improvements to the base commander. They don’t play quite the same way obviously, but the performance is a good deal better.
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In general that’s all you need to recover. Unless you’re misplaying badly, the enemy tends to break through just one side at a time (e.g. Stank or Spotters breaking static) and a nuke on that side clears out the aberrations and infested for a huge radius to let you reinforce.
And yes, the nuke can be used offensively on the fortified areas too.
If a nuke is “useless” then you’re not using it right. It one-shots aberrations (which can spawn right next to the ship) and waves of nearly any comp.
Waves again.
The point is that Nova can delete a wave without needing her army (or even an airstrike.)
It’s not either/or. 300 minerals is nothing. You can nuke in one place and airstrike in another, making the prestige stronger overall.
I think this debate is taken a bit out of context.
P3 Nova isn’t “bad” at infested maps, it’s bad if you’re (for whatever reason) going to solo-Nova. Anyone with a brain would see before even using her solo to know that won’t work. And that’s where her roster of units, which remain unaffected by P3 comes in play. Therefore, P3 is a straight up buff.
Combat Mode is very cool, switching between the two has many advantages but is only purely as Nova-solo style. Outside of that, no matter how good you are with a Nova, you are always going to fall short when compared to Nova-army + Nova lol (no ifs and buts).
An active P3 Nova player will make good work of all maps with her Super Cloak, increased Snipe and Nuke. The focus on these isn’t about “hey look, I can kill more things with my drone than you, haha”. The focus is that by doing so, you can clear out bases, thus allowing you to push objectives with far quicker timing.
And timing in coop mission is everything. I don’t mean speedrunning, but it’s just how every mission works - the faster you can do A means you have more time to do B, and so on for C. The players who often fail and think SoA is hard is for this exact reason.
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It’s been a while and I actually had the honor to play with a handful of random P3 Novas.
As expected, they behaved like release-Tychus players. Or usual Tychus players. Ignore objectives, clear bases (even unnecessary ones, just to increase the kill count I assume), no army, resources dumped on Airstrikes.
The things I wondered about in my earlier post? Most don’t even give a damn past the 4 Marines needed to clear their rocks.
I thought this prestige would encourage some “selfish” play, but damn this is like Lone Wolf Tychus, except they don’t even leave a Nux behind to defend . I mean it’s fine, I’m used to carrying the early game 8 times out of 10, no matter the commander, but I have yet to see a p3 Nova even bothering with early game presence in any shape or form.
Give people more time to level prestiges and I’m sure we will see more posts describing the above.
Back luck I guess. With her simple macro, I mostly spend my apm between pushing/defending objectives with my army (ravens are great to sink some apm) and Nova clearing forward bases alone. I save Griffin mostly for waves.
Bad players will be bad regardless of prestige. Good Nova players know she isn’t Tychus, her army is part of her kit even in P3.
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