On Zeratul's Artifacts

Co-op Missions Discussion
1

Just played with a Zertaul for the first time in a while, and had a thought. What if the artifacts collected in-mission were pulled randomly from a larger pool. Each one in the pool would carry different, unique upgrades for Zeratul’s units/structures/economy.

I don’t have list of buffs or anything prepared, just this outline. But i’m imagining some which focus on:

  • AOE damage
  • Health capacity
  • Health Regen (very limited - fractions of a point/second)
  • Structure health/shields
  • shade health/cooldown
  • mineral/gas collection rate (very very minor increase. Fractions of a min/gas per collection)
  • unit cost
  • spell effectiveness (blink attacks, bubbles, Legion’s storms/ MC/ etc, disruptor extra shot things)
  • unlocking current, high-tier abilities (blink damage, predictive blink, bubbles, maybe immortal air-AOE, disruptor extra shot things,

This would replace his current upgrade mechanic - armor/weapon upgrades would be closer to H&H, with a single weapon upgrade and a single armor upgrade for all units.
Unit-specific upgrades would be researched (for the basic ones - blink, void array capacity, observer range, maybe immortal air-AOE), or collected via artifact RNG (for the advanced ones - blink damage, predictive blink, bubbles, maybe immortal air-AOE)

Top bar would be largely unchanged - collect an artifact, get a top bar slot. I see no need to re-work the top bar based on these changes (current adjustment needs aside)

I feel this would fit better with the ‘hunting the artifact’ lore-base they were shooting for with Zeratul. He didn’t know what he was going to find, and every planet he went to in his search had some new, weird demands. The current method, while easy to use and understand, reflects this rather poorly. Not to mention that it would make playing him far more interesting - who knows what combination of buffs you’re going to get from the artifacts?

I know they won’t ever change a commander this drastically, but i figured you’d all enjoy the discussion.

1 Like
2

I’m kinda okay with this, but definitelly the cooldown on searching artifact has to be reduced, so you can see different artifacts to choose what to pick first, also because Zeratul needs to do some damage himself, so he can’t really be hunting artifacts all the time.

3

Sooo… You want him to become a roulette commander, where if you don’t get good artifacts your army is complete crap? No thanks.

4

Zeratul is one of the strongest commanders, he could handle some nerfs and still be plenty strong.

I rather like the idea. It would probably be unpopular because it would be too random, but it might be fun to have the artifact found dictate the top bar ability. To make up for not being able to pick your own abilities, it would come with a global buff to your army.

5

I’d rather have to manually research abilities and passives than have him introduce more RNG to his gameplay. Finding artifacts can be bad enough with how deep you need to dive to find some of them.

6

That looks too random. I would be fine with it if you could choose, but Zeratul has already that with his topbar.

I’m fine with some randomness, but mainly with the mission and not with the commander. You don’t want going into a tough mutation hoping you will get a certain artifact, and restart otherwise. You would want these upgrades to be relatively strong if they were to be interesting.

With map some RNG is fine I think. On my [mm] temple of the past, in survival mode, I have solarite upgrades (bonus regen, bonus strucure range, bonus shield, CDR). But at least you can choose from 3 randomly selected upgrades.

7

Maybe each artifact enables only 2 of the 3 top bar options (and the variation doesn’t come in until the 3 options are available)
This would only work for the first two artifacts, but it would allow some choice. (would require a better rebalancing of the options though)