Prestige system review: Swann & suggestions

PTR Feedback
1

After playing few games as Swann for each prestige at brutal, brutal+ difficulty, I am little frustrated at the missed opportunity.

Aside from the fact that penalties seem little too harsh for each prestige benefit, the new prestige didn’t actually provide new play experience. Why? Because I am literally building the same things no matter what prestige I go with: hercules, tanks, goliaths, sci vessels. In a reasonably difficult setting, this is the most versatile and reliable composition.

I want to see Blizzard breaking this concept by improving under-used units or give completely different spin-offs to Swann’s current tools.

Here are some examples:

  1. Upgraded Regenerative Biosteel

Advantage: Upgrading Regenerative Biosteel allows all combat units to heal 50% of the damage dealt including from abilities (thor’s barrage cannon, cyclone’s lock on)

Disadvantage: Vespene harvesters and tech reactors are no longer available.

Intention: removing vespene harvesters and tech reactors slow down the ramp up time for tank/goliath set up. At the same time, upgraded regenerative biosteel opens up different unit compositions: hellions/cyclones, mass wraiths etc.

  1. Offensive turrets

Advantage: Reduce build time of any turret to 1 second

Disadvantage: the cost of the turret is increased by 200% and they are no longer salvageable (or only return 50% of the cost)

Intention: Opens up offensive options for turrets, but at the same time, increased costs punish thoughtless spams. I much prefer this to happen rather than encouraging turtle/passive play.

  1. Aggressive Tactical jump

Advantage: Reduces the cooldown of Tactical jump to 20 seconds. Science Vessels now gain Tactical Jump as well

Disadvantage: Top bar drill abilities are no longer available.

Intention: the idea comes from the current 3rd prestige, but the modified advantage provides global presence + detection, but the removal of the top bar abilities punishes misplayed teleportation.

1 Like
2

The current problem I think is that the turret Prestige just doesn’t feel all that impactful, a bit more range and attack speed just isn’t that noticeable, and it seems like the autorepair upgrade isn’t improved, though that might be a bug. I would like to see it repair to 100% percent.

But I like the idea of turrets buildings faster, though it encroaches on Karax a bit. Multiple SCV can still build pretty fast, but not quite fast enough, it leaves them vulnerable if offensively pushing.

Another part of the Prestige could then be that you can only fast build turrets with multiple SCV, and not other buildings, but those turrets are then built 3-4 times as fast.
Don’t really want them to be more expensive, but having them maybe only salvage for half value would be pretty fair.

3

I’m curious how an “anti- A-move” prestige would pan out. Something like

All combat units gain +20% hp, -20% resource cost, +300% cooldown speed.
No Hercules, goliath, or wraith.

4

I agree his prestiges don’t change gameplay enough.

Some other suggestions:

Allow the hercules prestige to pick up science vessels and defensive turrets. (The idea of air transport carrying air units is already done with Zeratul, so it’s not crazy.)

Allow all units with channeled abilities to channel it three times simultaneously., and greatly reduce energy consumption. This encourages cyclone and thor use, because you can get 3 lockons or barrages at once with each unit. And it encourages wraith use because of the cheaper cloak. Increase cost, or remove tech reactor.

One possible game changing prestige would be to dramatically reduce the power of the laser abilities, and make them only work locally (limited range). But allows you to build additional laser drills. That way you can scatter them throughout the map and constantly use their abilities.

5

Idk if it’s just me but the current Advanced Construction button seems bugged (even on live server) that no matter how many times I press the hotkey for the button, SCVs don’t respond to that. Only right-clicking the building works. So, this causes a problem for buildings with small radius (aka. turrets), as the constructing SCV tends to cover up the building itself, so you often end up clicking the SCV instead. This becomes a super hassle in offensive situation where you only got 2-3 seconds to do in time. That’s why 1 sec construction time makes this whole thing a lot simpler.

But you are right that the cost increase could be too much as you need several turrets for them to be relevant. Removing salvage could be the way to approach this.

6

This encourages mass Thor composition which results in A-move. If you want to remove even Thor to accomplish anti a-move, it could work. Although I am not sure
what you mean by 300% cooldown reduction. Which does this apply to?

Also the current Wraith is effective only when they are attack-moving, so I am sure wraiths are not A-moving. They are just extremely vulnerable to any AOE spell, which is why they are sub-optimal atm.

7

Hercules picking up Science vessel and turrets sounds crazy, but I like it! That’s another way of giving different options to players.

I have thought about increasing the number of targets for thor and cyclone’s abilities. I wasn’t sure if blizz needs to reanimate some parts to make them look natural. But this would require extra money/resources on their end.

Building local laser sounds very unique. I am not sure how to balance this so that they stay impactful but they don’t break the game.

8

Perhaps for Payload Director, add no Science Vessels as a disadvantage but make the Hercules a detector and change Regenerative Bio-Steel to only work while inside the Hercules but heals for more per tick.

Basically instead of Science Vessels healing and bubbling units that need it during combat, you’d be saving units by microing them back into the Hercules.

9

Cyclone lock on, thor barrage, vessel defense matrix. My thought process is if you a-move, youre going to spend forever doing anything. You need to use barrage on thors and split push with them