Quick Fix for Swann P1

Losing your topbar is terrible, and the splash laser isn’t nearly good enough to compensate.

So here’s a suggestion - P1 should have the drill be available immediately.

Thus you are sacrificing lategame power (the drill emergency buttons) for a lot of early game utility instead (laser can clear your and ally’s expansion, deal with the early waves while you build Swann’s slow army, even chip away at some bonuses and enemy camps provided you can get vision.

Thoughts?

9 Likes

You know what, this is a better aproach because changes the opening a lot. I wouldnt mind it.

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(To be totally clear, this would be in addition to the aoe/snare laser P1 has now, so it would be a straight buff. No conc beam or pulse cannon is a huge disadvantage.)

Not a bad idea but I would like to add that drill upgrades should also be cheaper and/or have no tech requirements to further expand on early-mid game power.

3 Likes

Yes - no tech (or even automatic) drill upgrades would work well with this too!

How about add automatic/free upgrades to the drill but change the disadvantage to no vespene drones or maybe the vespene drones give half the normal gas. I think removing the top bar abilities is too big of a nerf for how mediocre the AoE from the laser is.

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No coolup time
2-3x damage

I think that would work well

Not bad, a refreshing idea for sure. I am curious about the practical aspects though. Between 1-2min you probably don’t want to float a fragile SCV around just to poke about (even at expansion rocks… though this is probably its best use).

I had an idea that the drill could fire multiple beams to strike different targets. I don’t think that it would look good visually though, because there’d be too many large beams cluttering the screen.

Somebody else made the far better suggestion of having the beam split and branch off to hit nearby enemies, like the Destroyer’s beam.

So kinda like, whizzing with a b*ner

It’s suppose to buff the drill, so the whole thing is confusing. Either:

  • Multiple less powerful top bars. OR
  • Drill does more damage and splits (or +AoE).

The slow beam in action is just silly.

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All you’d really have to do with that SCV is put a depot or a turret next to the expansion, something you’d probably want to do anyway. Then take them back home to work while the laser continues doing its thing on the rocks. I could see this being especially useful on VL, L&L, VT, MO etc.

It would also be nice for missions where there are enemies lurking outside your base, like P&P or ME. It would let Swann do some luring tricks similar to Abathur on those maps.

Instant laser also gives you a head start on time crunch missions like CoD and SoA.

That seems simple and would work. TBH, I’d like to give it even more “oomph” (since I feel that much about losing Concentrated Beam and Pulse Cannon), so I pitched my suggestions here…

I definitely think any potential fixes should be rather simple as just improving the effect. Just bolster the debilitating effect of the drill.

It should deal at least 50% of the primary target damage in a larger, and slow both movement and attack speed by 75% (less amount for Heroic), and maybe even disable the casting of energy-based abilities while being hit by the laser. Or maybe even remove the detection abilities, as well, making Wraiths a thing if you hit any detectors with the Drill. In essence, You should be rewarded in this prestige for microing the Drill to hit dangerous, high-priority targets like Green Hybrid or Battlecruisers.

This might help if you’re leveling Swann with P1, but with the Laser Mastery unlocked this doesn’t change much.

The bigger problem with P1 is just that the AoE is too small to be worth it. Increase the AOE radius to make giving up Concentrated Beam and Pulse Cannon worth it. The Mastery already takes care of the deployment time.

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The suggestion is good.

Or they can have increase damage on his laser drill, much higher.

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Or have the ability to build additional lasers.

I reseted Swann and didn’t read his cons about this prestige just to find that his drill calldowns are gone, but you still can pay it…

Worst prestige ever. It should be completely reworked, maybe you can’t have immortality protocol or can’t train thors and tanks. But no drill calldowns? On a drill prestige? No thanks.

I got frustrated and stayed with vanilla Swann which is rusty and outdated but still works better than that “prestige”.

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Imho the drill attack is mostly useless due to its awful slow animation when switching targets.

If you aim it at some huge objective or hybrid (so no target switching) then lvl3 Drill provides 50dps which is less than a single Thor (65dps without upgrades).

And swann can clear expansion very early thanks to super turrets that you recycle for 100% value so an early drill is not even needed for faster expo.

I would much rather have a prestige that completely disables the drill attack but makes calldowns available without paying for drill upgrades and with a (lets say) 20% cooldown reduction.

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Still having to do the drill upgrades but no top at is dumb as hell. Give the fully upped drill of the bat if I’m gonna lose topbar