Order of Gear for Blaze?

I used to go “left to right” with his gear, but I’m guessing I should take into account more specialized situations?..
===== His ability and 3 gears…
Oil Spill — Douses enemy ground units in oil, reducing attack and movement speed by 75% and preventing them from cloaking. When a unit under the effect of Oil Spill is hit by a fire attack, it takes 5 (5 vs Light) damage per second over 10 seconds.

High Capacity Containers — Increases the radius Blaze’s of Oil Spill by 100%.

Hades Oil — Improves the damage dealt by the Enflame effect from Blaze’s Oil Spill to deal +25 per second vs. light units.

Wildflame Fuel Additives — When units Enflamed by Blaze’s Oil Spill die, they explode, spreading Enflamed to enemy units in the area.
=======.

One would be on DoN. Get Wildflame gear first? Then Hades Oil?

Any other comments about his gear in general?

As P2 you can get away with just the 3rd one for night 2 if you want, then add the 2nd. Against zerg ground comps you want both as fast as possible (probably in this case Blaze is your 3rd Outlaw but those are the first 2 pieces of gear purchased).

The first piece of gear is one of my last pieces of gear to ever get out of all outlaws.

On DoN Blaze can hold the main entrance and Sirius can stand on the ramp placing turrets in front of the rocks. Tychus is clearing buildings (target fire buildings individually and use grenade to clear trash).

For me personally i always liked doing the fire on death → +25 dps vs light (tickle battery dps to armored) As the highest priorities then the +100% radius oil just as more of a qol thing for clunky pathing or more liberal fire and forget use dousing hybrids and often having leeway on splattered lurkers and creep spores providing extra area.

Aoe on death is a obvious one, it helps him deal with waves. I usually get it first but if someone wanted to hypothetically get the +25 dps with a targeted douse to hit multiple buildings to focus less on wave clear but on targeting a building douse to get all the early buildings in manually and then get chain fire later, i could definitely see that as a viable variant/preference at least.

You nearly always want to have both Fire on death + 25 dps though. The 2x radius is more of a qol thing and if you have to finess Blaze more to the front to individually micro him to light the targets on fire to cope for his ai sometimes getting bodyblocked, it can help make his fires much more reliable.

The Radius thing is definitely the lowest priority but a nice thing to have when resources are spare.

On Miner’s evacuation i’ve messed around sometimes with a experiment just to see what happens if you only got the +fire on death, no +25 dmg with wondering if you could use it to sustain infinite burning fires like a fuse on a slow death.

The results were, it kinda works, but you definitely get a lot more kills with both combined. If you just get fire and no +25 dps to light upgrade, the fires will have much greater ease constantly spreading on the living trickle of dead…

But they get to shoot you while they’re alive and in vision. The +25 dps upgrade kills them practically fast enough to put the fire out.

But it’s just undeniable that you just get a lot more kills with both combined than just 1 without the other.

Though it’s pretty fun to mess around with just hordes of flaming undead burning on miner evac forever, the +25 dps upgrade and +fire spread on death are just great combined.

The dmg upgrade is also nuts on don buildings so it’s almost a must have to have both. While on Miner evac if you wanted to get away with a one upgrade eternal fire blaze you can. But he’s just so much more effective with both combined.

He’s mostly effective (and very effective), on infested and zergling swarms for obvious reasons.

His armored damage is disapointingly low enough on roaches, but you can still use him to set swarms of marines on… Fire if you’re into war crimes. (Marines are rarely too uncompact to need more than a grenade though.).

But he does also set hordes of light infantry on fire okay, but he’s mostly a anti infested(DoN/Miner Evac)/Swarmling pick.

His ult gear is pretty much worthless and of all the outlaws the lowest ult gear priority so you don’t have to worry about researching it.

The only units it really helps against, yamato cannons to the face and Hybrids to the face aren’t really units you should be building a anti light ground unit specifically for anyways and he still handles them fine without it.

If you’re using lone wolf or splitting for any reason. One small trick is that if you don’t need the precise control of a minimap to pilot 5 outlaws from once, you can either pilot them all from the minimap itself to make controling multi outlaws/armies easier, as well as double tap control groups like 3 twice to teleport your camera to wherever they are.

This can make using lone wolf much less of a camera headache as well as enhance abilities to pilot and control multiple armies at once such as lone wolf tychus, Dogwalker odin + mind controlled 17 battlecruiser/Carrier/Thor+nikara army + main army in a 2 healer Tych/Rattle/Vega/Nikara/Sirius Flex Malwarefare p3 fun comp.

Or be pretty handy for splitting up beefy commanders who might have mobility as bigger problems than their deathball like p1 raynor who can easily split his army into 2-3 deathballs fine and use the micro freed up from muling to pilot additional armies or spawncamp with vultures much more relaxedly at 200/200 carefreely.

The control group double tapping makes it easier to control multiple groups and snap cameras if needed for precise targeting, the minimap targeting alongside shift quing orders can make it easier to have units or control groups self pilot themselves while another group is microed. (Though minimap nade targeting is crap), it is a pretty nice system.

SCVs can also be used to provide vision and for the first night while tychus can struggle to split, a scv at the top can be used to medivac and defend the first base. A p3 odin can also usually solo defend the center south gate fine with it’s aoe and tankiness and by preventing the first gate from breaking, it buys much more time for the group to clear out the other nights as the north gate tends not to be attacked again if protected.

Chokers however on north with bad rng can be a crappy major game risk however, as they are one of the few units that can easily immobilize and shut down a tychus army and 2-3 chokers + horde in the north with bad luck (or a bad ally), can semi softlock them into a choked state until it’s too late or too much attrition damage has been taken etc. Otherwise without it, you can usually chainfire. The fire is limited by vision so sometimes you can spread it further by having blaze or sirius(low auto dps), to go on scenic walks to spread it further.

If you do it right, you can even have the infested attacking you set the buildings they’re coming from on fire with chainfires.

It’s extremely powerful and if you got a excellent defender who’s not a idef fail like a p0 karax who… doesn’t attack during day, but loves to afk single target, aoeless cannons… With a prestige that can’t mass siege tanks like swann or add aoe monoliths like Zeratul or the attack boost of p1.

It can be easy to get a bit paranoid with defences but if your ally is a solid and you can just attack nonstop, you can easily take advantage of the chainfires to continue attacking during the night with tychus’s great sustain and chain fires to set buildings ad naseum on fire. (Just be ready to always watch the base in case of breakage. And if your ally spawns on left and gets hunterlings, sometimes a railgun turret can be pretty nice for them. The 2x2 high dps is pretty good at fitting behind the mineral lines to kill hunterlings.

If you’re optimizing the order of gear purchase on Blaze on DoN, I have a feeling you should be optimizing your build order from scratch.

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Is that a small prison escapee abseiling down the prison wall again?

Personally, I’d go in reverse – Wildflame, Hades, High Cap. Burn them turbo.

Yeah you either want the chainfire to kill crowds first or the +25 light dps for rapid ignition / early day don structure damage for defence or offence first but both soon as you can get it.

It has to be either one of those two first, fire on death is infinitely better than 100% radius for a first upgrade as it keeps the fires going.

On non Don maps if you just want to use blaze for lings or infested, just getting the [fire on death] upgrade first usually allows you to spread it more.

Arguably its extremely much easier to burn undead like a slow burning fuse and even move the blaze and have like a mini vision microed sirius drop some turrets to provide burn vision as the slow trickle of staggered undead deaths make it easier to keep fires going in multiple zones.

But the dps gap is just too much to bother especially on DoN. Tychus for all his strengths has excellent wave clear/stuns/fear/pushing but does surprising fractions of structure dps vs the other commanders.

I think its something like loose ballparks are 10 supply of raynor marines can get you 10x14 = 140 dps for 500/0.

Meanwhile i think it was something like tychus does like 70-140 dps for (3 x 600/150 + 1200/400 = 3000/850)

Sirius literally only does like 14 -23ish autoattack dps for 1000/200 but can spawn like 23-40 dps turrets x2-4 to whittle down objectives he moves past.

Rattlesnake i forget but he’s like 26-40ish dps light 56-80 dps vs armored or something depending on if he’s stimpacked which is a lower value upgrade.

All in all he has excellent clear and the dogwalker or p2 lone wolfs especially pre nerf definitely helped his don but i haven’t messed with it much post nerf from +150-200% to 30% a outlaw.

It used to be extremely ridicolous, and having the chainfire solo buildings was just ridicolous but it was one of the few prestieges that could be nausea inducing if you tried all 5 at first early on for like the few weeks it lasted like that.

But you’re likely working with like a raw army dps of 70-140 tych + 26 rattle + (14 sirius + 23-40 per turret) + 70 dps sam for like a 200-400 raw dps army while someone like raynor or han and horner would get 1400 dps from like 100 marines easily whioe the cost to max a single 4000/1050 outlaw could easiy match the 5000/0 of 100 marines + mule/p1 economy. Many of his strengths comes from his nonstop pushing ability and 3 hop mobility and even rattle has a tendency to double or triple outheal all the damage of a dehaka or kerrigan unit.

But he’s always seemed much to me like a hidden heal brawler tank in disguise as a minigun toting dps. The difference in 300 raw Tych dps vs 1500 dps raynor on like 3x 500 health buildings is only like a 4 second difference but it can be a 5 vs 1 second difference potentially repeated 50x more times.

But its mostly because all his incredible wave clear and c4s are in abilities just makes it so building damage is the only con he has to worry about that you might not even notice until don. Taking out half their hp and dropping a turret to finish off weak infested or even using night to attack with defense can use roaming undead to re ignite. He can night push extemely well if a ally attacks during day and ally properly defends during the night with say, raynor/swann siege tanks/lurkers/p3 odin. But for the tychus pre prestige don solos, he stood out as a sore thumb as like one of the only commanders that had their speedrunners resort to having them and their ally fly their bases off the map to make a don solo with his p0 structure dps possible.

He’s a strong commander by all rights but without ability dps his structure dps is technically literal fractions. You technically can pay 1000/200 to 4000/1050 for the 14-140 dps 50/0 to 500/0 of dps marines can buy.

But he tends to have strong waveclear and great mobility and good turrets and the chainfires really help him out a ton on don. He’s still extremely strong with ability based tools though and learning how to set maps on fire, micro individual outlaws to damage split and improve blaze pathing when needed/bodyblocked and sometimes coddling the longer range sirius into a dmg splitting meatshield for rattle comps even aoe healing can all be major aspects though.

He’s far from weak, he just disguises his absurdly lower structure dps very well all up to the point don was reached but prestieges help a lot with that as i think the p3 odin literally doubles his structure dps. With p3 Odins 300 dps vs structures and enough 4000 health to solo push easily. 600 tych raw dps vs 1500 raynor dps from 100 marines won’t mean he beats don raynor’s siege tanks and raw 2-5x more raw dps anytime soon, but it makes the map and his double defending/pushing ability a lot stronger and add that to chainfires and it can be a fun time.

But to some people in coop, having a experience where both sides need to contribute can be more fun than a game one person soloed it in 11 minutes and the other person had the game end before their starport was even done building it’s first army. Its kinda a coop pve game at the end of the day, but i’ll always think the ability based gameplay is a fun change from the usual where once you have the apm to micro its nice to have more to do than just stutter stepping and damage splitting and getting units in range.

I think wildflame and hades oil should be the priority respectively. You don’t really need the increased AoE to keep the burn going and sometimes the slow could disrupt the spread because the burning units don’t hit the incoming slowed units when they explode.

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Having these gears in any order is fine… as any prestige for Tychus can deal with DoN perfectly fine. This isn’t like getting Sirius and AA gear against air comp or Nikara double healing against anti-DPS mutators.

For Blaze to hit the point where the flame propagate, it needs to hit at least N2 halfway through, by then you should have more than plenty resources… making this entirely moot.

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