Yeah Tychus is one of the most favorable commanders to level up on brutal lvl 1-15 or prestiege easily.
As well as zeratul VS a mastery and level gated commander like karax. (no fast expand/insta cannons/painful leveling),
Tychus by comparison basically mostly only misses out on +15% gun attack speed and odin nuke on the 1-15 grind. All his prestieges can be very powerful and he can be very fun to play and easy to level on brutal like zeratul.
Both Rattlesnake and Nikara can work very well. Outside of “we move unseen”/aoe mutators, i prefer rattlesnake for p0/p3. Nikara can make a good p2 LW healstation or be assigned to follow a ally’s army or a vega double healer Mind Control mc comp as well though.
Though, he’s not all strengths. Tych/nova tends to suck against killbots. The best feed is a scv and each dilutes non p2 LW upgrades.
And tych can easily lack non army options for sturdy static defense on DoN or some mutators.
For instance, on reviver mob mutations: zeratul can be nice for both strong his strong army + unit AND strong defence in tele cannons.
This can let zera easily spawncamp the corpse pool, keeping the mutator rez unit from rezzing easily, while advancing and spreading tele cannons to provide detection on demand. Providing strong coverage for up to 2-4 areas at once.
Tychus’s turrets have high dps, but are honestly flimsy and drain resources from his pricy but powerful upgrades. They get destroyed very easily, and have no inherent repair/shield system like karax/swann/protoss do. (Or even passive zerg regen)
You mainly use them to open rocks, kill oblivion express ghosts, and maybe shoot a missle or hunterling.
He’s great for base brutal and can work fine on weekly brutations. But im not sure if he’s necessarily close to top 3 best brutal+ 1-6 pick.
Abathur and Dehaka as well as Zeratul/mengsk/stettman tend to shine a bit with a variety of approaches to brutal+1-6.
Tych has a strong and versatile army, but mutators tend to favor anti unit mutations where karax /static def is unpunished. Nests/stellites provide vision, and one base economy can be sometimes important.
Killbots basically force nova/tych to feed scvs which hurt eco. Tychus tends to want to use 4-5x outlaw abilities at many times which can get annoyingly taxed more on microtransactions vs f2a following a f2a army for example. However his prestieges can solve many aspects of that.
P1 offers a lot of mutator versatility with more turrets and abilities for extended fights and just die mutators.
Many mutators punish armies. But turrets are rarely affected. Neither is just mind controlling a powerfully buffed unit with shields. You might keep the buffs, but it adds Mutator versatility.
P2 is notorious for being the speedrun or one base mutator solo enabler. Though its been nerfed vs the old +150-200% people often used to showcase it. It spikes up the apm/split army focus, but often can still have great solo brutation/speedrun results.
P3 often got ignored since most people f2a moved all units in one group. And what good is a 4000 hp, 10 armor 100-200 dps unit that arrived after your army already beat the wave?
Most people don’t put into the effort to split army control and split the Odin so you could defend 2-3 points at once. But it’s a incredibly powerful pugstomper in split army control.
For instance, with p3 you can often defend 2 objectives, or defend a Dead of night choke while attacking at night lighting chainfires for a 18 min soft carry 120/150 building kill clear with 70-80% of kills. A player just f2a moving p0 tych with 1 point at a time might reach 22-24 minutes instead.
Pre prestiege tychus was notorious for lacking p0 don solos, to the point one of the only known pre prestiege tych don solo was a 40 min long vid where both players flew their bases off the map. I think it was one of the only commander/map combos that nobody even bothered with.
Now p2/p3 Tych can often curbstomp don. But Tych still benefits greatly from micro/chainfire and/or multi army control on don.
If you want a standard all rounder comp for base brutal, you can nearly always use the core 4 for anything.
Tych/rattle/ sirius/sam
Upgrade priority: x2 rattle healing > (If facing Zerglings: Sirius 50 dmg suicide turrets) > +50 dmg grenade >= -5 armor bullets == Sirius aoe fear > Tych or sirius ult gear
Tychus can also benefit greatly from hotkeying all research buildings so you can micro his outlaws. I tend to use 1:Cc, 2:bar, 3: army 4: guns 5: eng bay 6: muscle 7: fixers.
But if you use p2, the hotkeys can often be individual outlaws.
I kinda find him fun and micro rewarding with many rewards for ability use and divergent playstyles.
Mind control fleets with tele jump yamatos are fun, Micro chainfire blaze is fun. Sirius turrets + c4 bombing is fun.
F2a spinning zeratul can get boring. Raynor stim stutter step can gets old. Dragoons are just fat marines with even less abilities. Stukov can sometimes let a rally point afk for him.
Some people think Tych is “braindead” over f2a armies, pointing to lack of macro.
But if the same 100 actions were spent building 20 supply depos and sending 8-16 mules or larva injects.
I think i’d feel bored after the 80th game of larva injects VS the 80th game of bombing a engagement, mind controlling a fleet, and starting a chainfire.
Mileage and personal playstyle preferences can easily vary though.
Though it’s undeniable a f2a + q w floor is enough to pass brutal with him.
I think there’s a lot of fun to mastering him with high ability use, p2/p3 army/odin/mc multi army control, memorized spawns for mc sequence breaking, blaze chainfiring, and sam c4 runs for him.
You don’t feel like you hit a plateau where apm has no benefit, split army control no upside, or better ability use didn’t lead to a quicker and more devastating outcome.
If you get bored of bioball raynor, mass air doesn’t change f2a gameplay past a tele jump. You can add all the marauders or firebats you want. They dont dynamically change stim stutterstep gameplay the same way abilities can.
I like how ability use makes him always seem quite fun to play and even his P0 off meta picks are often all quite good for p1 or p2 or certain maps.
If you’re looking at pure number of most mutators soloed though or fastest speedrun times though.
Abathur pretty much held (or holds) all solo speedrun ecords, Abby+Haka nearly held all duo records, as well as Abathur also held most mutators soloed records. But you never have to worry about resetting on air/bunkers.
Tychus’s full building clear time will often be terrible from his well hidden weaker raw building dps, he can’t sequence break without vision or flying, or grow 6 outlaws from biomass. And he’s crap at feeding killbots and gets taxed by the irs.
But he’ll often be able to instantly tele kill 4 waves, protect a ally, deploy a odin, mc a army, heal a ridicolous amount, open rocks asap with powerful full coverage early game and late. And often completely does everything you need for base brutal until you’re a top 0.5% speedrunner.
He’s basically the teleporting invincible ak47 commander of sc2. He may not be speedrun optimal.
But you’ll rarely find a situation where he’s not useful. But as mentioned for brutal+ or 2-6. There’s some more reliable options available.
His prestieges do add a lot of coverage though and pretty much any one can lead to a 900:400 k to 1200:134 kill blow out for stock brutal.
But so can a base raynor with 900:300 kill ratios. Individual micro/skills can make any commander excel or beat mutators with good partners.
After like 90 to 1000 most lvls can become just a flex. It can be good to pick a commander you find fun and enjoyable to play, but also a right fit as well.
I do think he’s fun with diverse abilities and prestiege gameplay styles. But yeah, mileage can vary, and he might not always be the most adaptable brutal+ 1-6 pick.
But he’s pretty dang fun and if we were just after meaningless xp a hr, we’d all be karax farming b+6 cradle or spamming 9-11 minute void thrashers. It’s fun to have fun screwing off sometimes.
Though i admit yeah if you know the brutation there’s still plenty he can smash through. 5 sec stun c4 charges, turbo healing, mc, there’s some pretty powerful kits in there. But very little beats top player abathurs.
