Not everyone has played the campaigns and knows what a ‘death crystal’ is for example. Even though I’m new to coop, I can play the game decently well and have a lot more SC knowledge than a newcomer (I beat WoL on brutal twice and watch tournaments religiously), I got completely bopped by death crystals and void rifts on one mission without even knowing what they did. I didnt even know they were the enemy since new commanders like Alarak/Zeratul have so many space wizard abilities that look similar. I had to watch the replay and study the last fight closely to figure out what was going on, and that’s just not realistic to expect everyone to do. With the inevitable influx of newcomers to SC as a whole with the COVID lockdown, this is going to happen a lot and aggravate a lot of players.
So I dont really care how you do it or where you put it, but it would be very helpful to at least create an index of novel map mechanics that people will encounter in coop with short videos on what to look for. Fanmade wikis usually just have text that doesnt explain it nearly as well.
This is a great idea, but unlikely to be implemented by Blizz. They aren’t even giving us a regular commander anymore, never-mind something as new as tutorials
You might be able to find some kind-hearted, bored soul willing to make such videos for people of their own volition. I would, but i have neither the time or the skills to make anything useful
It was like Jim Jones hosted a rave. There were a lot of colored lasers, then everyone died.
But if it is true that coop is now their biggest source of revenue from starcraft, its probably their biggest source of new players as well. So you’d think they would see the sense in investing in things that make it more accessible.
I’m just glad all replays are automatically saved, but since the moment in question is usually at the very end, it is rather tedious to try to fast-forward to that spot. Even in a 16 minute game, it felt like 3-5 minutes of fast-forwarding. I dont think most people are going to do that. If every game required me to do so just to figure out why I lost, I would probably stop playing as well. I also found it surprisingly hard to find the tiny icon that explains the death crystal effect in the UI by selecting a unit it was tethering. But at least I knew the game well enough to know where the icon would likely be cause I dont think a newcomer would find it.
The feedback loop with some of these mechanics just arent there. A battle is over so fast that its not always clear what contributed to it, and a lot of spells and nukes are instacasts so its not even clear who did it. Warcraft 3 at least had a lot of channeling spells that let you know what unit is casting it, not to mention a significantly longer time-to-kill so almost no nuke would just instantly vaporize an army. At least the death crystal red laser helped me narrow it down. Half the time a nuke spell is used, I don’t know who is even responsible. I never thought starcraft would get to the point where my units would glow red and I don’t know if thats a good thing or bad thing. Brood War had very few spell effects but SC2 coop is 50% space wizards.
Yeah, coop is fairly fast paced in terms of the mission progression. Definitely can be overwhelming for newer players. That said, there definitely are lower difficulties that run on non-fastest speeds, which do give time to learn. However, the gameplay is vastly different than even Brutal.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for newer players who aren’t interested in going onto Normal or Casual to have some form of expectations. After all, there is an empty loading screen, perfectly suited to have some of these suggestions written in - nothing wrong with that.
Death grip crystals are quite silly. The other sliver powers have big, obvious circles that you intuitively know to stay out of.
Death grip, on the other hand, will suddenly snatch your army out of the blue, and first timers might go, “okay, some units are stunned, I’ll free them once I take care of these enemy units–wait, my units exploded!”
Or they have the misfortune of having the crystal spawn out of vision, so all they see are their units getting lifted and killed with no indication of what was responsible.
In 6 months of co-op, I still haven’t seen one. I’ve been lucky enough to not get caught in them more than a few times but I’ve only noticed exactly what you describe. No Red crystal before that, just that my units are trapped…and now they’re dead. The effect is similar to the hybrid on Part & Parcel (stasis) except they don’t float and don’t die after.
But for the bonus on Chain of Ascension - when Slayn Elementals(?) trap you in the yellow/amber stasis+death globe, Ji’Nara makes it a point to mention what has happened and what you need to do.
Funny (in a sad way) that a bonus objective on one mission gets that voice info but a primary objective on another does not.
Death Grip Crystal is broken because their range is so ridiculously long.
I opened the Editor to see their stat, their standard range is 20 and “Stat: Range Extra” is 10. So from what I guess its 30 range.
So even the standard range is longer than Observer/Overseer/Raven’s watch mode.
Count yourself lucky, but it’ll happen to you one of these times for sure, the more you play. Either by one of your unit ran forward into its range triggering it or one of your ally’s.
The worst part of Death Grip is it locks a number of units. So when you have not quite enough to overwhelm the sliver but enough to take it down, at time it can take you by surprise. Rare but it happens lol.
it’s more work for the team - Manpower is always tight it seems
Not everyone reads them anyways
It might get overwhelming to have this, and many others for each mission. That could be a turn off
IIRC, they can’t go after heroic units, nor Nova’s (elite) units right? (I’m sure that’s what that means for her lv1 talent). At least they’re still better than Chokers from Dead Of Night (although I read up that they can only target one heroic unit at a time. However, look out if multiple of them come knocking on your base!).
As much as that map gives me issues, I kind of do like their function. They act as a ‘force multiplier’ and keep death balls from steamrolling everything otherwise. Granted, if your forces are THAT powerful, you can beeline for the Void Sliver and win anyways, but those situations, it’s moot regardless.
Right, and they can’t go after massive units either.
Chokers can stun level 1~5 Dehaka. When Dehaka turns Level 6 and gets massive tag, they can’t target him anymore.
Its not a perfect solution. But I think its better than depending on newcomers to study replays and know what to look for. It is work but its the kind of tedious but predictable work that knowledge workers often need to fill in lulls between creative sessions. Im not saying this is priority 1 urgency, but its not going to be controversial like balance changes. If they did it in the background, most veterans wont even notice, but it might help some new players stick around. But I think its more important than adding some random cosmetic thing for example.
As for playing on an easier difficulty, I was steamrolling hard before moving up to brutal. It was pretty much a-move and its very unlikely I would even notice new mechanics if my army is that much better. Its not like Warcraft where fights go on for so long that you can actually study stuff during the fight. Most fights in SC2 seem to have a tipping point where one side just gets annihilated, all in under 10-15 seconds.
When I watch replays on YouTube, I slow the action down to 0.25 to 0.5x the speed just so I can figure out what the freak happened in some battles. Seriously… you blink twice, and it’s all done.
Normal and Hard is good for players starting off and want an easier time. However, there are things that you could get away with there, but not in Brutal.
Last but not least, I wouldn’t mind if people just jumped into Coop without doing any sort of “advanced studying” nor “prep work”. It’s probably more fun that way too. However, as a casual mode, we do need to accept that we’ll have rockslappers from time to time, and will continue to do as such even if you tell them that’s not an efficient use for Dehaka.
I’d say about 5-6 times out of 75 (from the combined counts on the replay files). I meant, I’ve never seen one: 
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