Warning: Long form esssay ahead, I will try to add something of a table of contents at the end
It’s no secret that Karax can feel cumbersome and sometimes unwieldy in the modern world of co-op. Even the most emphatic Karax players will usually admit his ramp up time feels real slow. And there are many reasons for this, ranging from weak economic bonuses and terrible rock killing abilities to overpriced upgrades and units. A couple weeks back there was a lot of discussion around what could be done to improve Karax’s situation, but there was no overpowering majority in favor of any solution or design direction for Karax. So rather than try to suggest ways to fix Karax, it seems better advised to simply lay out what is holding him back, and what of his struggles is actually unique among commanders.
Karax’s early economy does get very real boosts, but this fact is obscured by a lack of early power units. Karax’s chrono field is a passive 15% increase in the work speed of all buildings, a boost who’s potency is a bit subjective as evidenced by the debates around chrono boost mastery. But whatever way you look at it, the fact is this does create faster saturation, which means more money overall. And Karax does get instant pylons, which eliminates the forced supply block protoss commanders experience at the beginning of the game for a few seconds without some supply boost. If you count mastery, only Alarack lacks a solution to this. Yet these economy boosts are not the whole picture.
Karax is probably the worst rock killer in the game. If you use his cannons, then he is outstripped by pretty much everyone except maybe Tychus and Abathur, and Tychus can go CC first next to the rocks while Abathur has half the expansion build time even without mastery, let alone with. He can use full SoA starting energy mastery to destroy the rocks almost immediately, but this is a contentious method as many consider it a waste of mastery and a huge blow to Karax’s already sub-par early power, and in addition it could be argued that if you are using that mastery purely for economic gain chrono mastery might fit your agenda better. And if you use sentinels to clear the rocks, on one hand at least you have units that you may use later depending on strategy, but it’s still definitely not going to set any records for expansion time.
The third major contributor to Karax’s slow feeling ramp up time is his lack of a good early game unit and the over-reliance of his early units on upgrades. For most commanders, you want to start off the mission with a hero unit and/or semi-durable ranged units. This allows for unit conservation while still accomplishing meaningful progress against early bases that shouldn’t be causing you significant casualties. Karax has no such unit. The only other commanders with neither hero nor unit that comfortably fills this role are Raynor and Stukov. However, Raynor, though his best unit for this role is the not-so-glorious marauder, can use banshees and/or Hyperion as effective hero units, and Stukov not only has the apokalisk but has literally free units from his colonist compound to compensate.
For Karax, you only really have 3 options for early units: Sentinels, immortals, and Cannons. Cannons obviously don’t fit this role because they cannot be moved. Any money you put into cannons is now stuck there for the rest of the game, which is a problem for most maps. Meanwhile, his Sentinels are not only melee, but are actually quite fragile until you get a twilight council and pay 150/150 for reconstruction, which also takes a while to research. And while Karax does have the SoA, it does cost an incredible amount to upgrade, meaning using it will only add to the problem of a slow ramp-up. The best unit he has to fill this role is the immortal, which is a weak choice because of how Karax has nothing to allow him to more quickly tech up to immortals. But they do a decent enough job filling this role to popularize one of 3 popular Karax builds: mass immortal. Even still, this is another regard in which Karax is weakest among commanders.
Karax is not without strengths, and it would be unfair to look only at where he falls short. Karax’s static defense is quite strong, and while it may have more competition today than when Karax first hit the field, it still has some distinct advantages. The most notable advantages are the incredible resilience of shieldbattery/cannon set ups with reconstruction beam helping, and the ease with which orbital strikes can quickly thin out enemies clumped up by their efforts against the cannons, and the cannons clean up from there. In fact, this leads into another strength of Karax: his global presence. Orbital strikes can be fired anywhere on the map without any prep or travel time to speak of. You can strike on three different fronts within seconds of each other with no issues.
Karax also benefits from very versatile units. He can function very well with relatively simple armies, not relying on the synergy of 4-5 different units together the way many other commanders must. This fact is again augmented by the SoA, as orbital strikes can be focused on the counters to whatever units Karax is using. His units are also very durable, primarily because of Unity Barrier. Unity Barrier protects his units from high damage burst spells such as Yamato Cannon and Seeker Missile. These spells are usually the bane of high value targets such as Nova or Zeratul’s units.
And finally, Karax is incredibly good at supporting his ally. Karax has more abilities than most commanders that can affect his ally. From repairs to pseudo-guardian shells to subtle but potent economy boosts, Karax does a lot of little things everywhere that add up fast. Further, Karax can support his ally with his SoA arsenal. The greatest power in his armies and his defense both came from how the SoA excels both at focusing down counters to your army and at instantly supporting soft spots in a defense.
However Karax also has shortcomings. This is natural, all commanders have some weaknesses. However, when each commander got their own revamp, most commanders had their weaknesses significantly lessened, and in some cases removed altogether. Karax however still maintains many weaknesses that while not initially problematic are becoming more apparent with time.
Karax’s static defense lacks splash damage. Until recently, this was pretty standard, only Swann and Zagara had splash, and Zagara’s was hard to use, with it being difficult to justify bile launchers as splash damage when they were really just short range orbital strikes. However, with the recent addition of tesseract monoliths, there now exists static defense that accounts not only for massive area splash damage but also a spectacular amount of crowd control, virtually stunlocking entire armies. Usually, lack of splash in static defense is covered by siege units such as tanks, lurkers, reavers, and colossi. However, this adds a substantial gas cost to static defense, which is a problem for Karax as he already struggles with this. Even without adding splash, energizers will often be employed to give a substantial attack speed boost to Karax’s defense, however these units are also very high gas cost, which can be strained further by the highly unpopular 30% unit tax. Further, Karax’s Khadarin monolith is the only defense structure aside from the aforementioned bile launchers with a gas cost. Adding the additional gas cost of colossi on top of all this doesn’t add up very well.
And then there are the flaws in Karax’s army. While his army’s ability to function with only a small set of units is one of his greatest strengths, it is also forced on him in a rather heavy handed way. This is done firstly by the 30% unit tax, which keeps Karax’s army size small. This tax can be removed with mastery, but this comes at the expense of hampering the greatest strength of Karax’s defense: its durability. Further, the mastery has some noticeable rounding error problems, ranging from the 1 extra gas cost on mirages to the 11 extra minerals for immortals. RTS as a rule revolves around critical masses; unless a unit is designed largely around non-stacking support spells, over-diversifying is a major weakness in an army. This is why Fenix’s champions had to be so powerful before the 6-champion army saw widespread use. As a result, Karax is usually inclined to focus largely on the most flexible unit he can find, thus leading to his most popular armies: Mass Carrier, Mass Immortal, and sentinel/energizer against large mind-controllable mech armies.
Another crippling weakness for Karax’s army is his upgrade costs, and this is something that touches his static defense too. Excepting weapons/armour lvl. 3 and hero upgrades, all unit upgrades cost between 50/50 and 150/150, with the exception of Karax. Shadow Cannon and Repair Drone both cost 200/200. From the aforementioned hero upgrades, only Tychus’ upgrades and Kerrigan’s ability efficiency exceed 150/150. Further, Karax has to pay 200/200 each for 2 of his 3 static defense upgrades, and the third is bugged as outlined by Maguro’s bughunt post. So not only does Karax struggle to get a well sized army on the field, but that army also has high cost premium upgrades involved with every new unit type added.
Even more exorbitant than the unit upgrades however are the Spear of Adun upgrades. The Solar Forge starts you out with a 200/200 upgrade right near the start of the game, and it’s one that does very little to help with clearing out expansions, rocks or otherwise. For the full SoA upgrade set, the total bill comes out at 1350/1350. However, given the relatively specific applications of some of the upgrades, it is often not necessary to buy the full Spear of Adun Deluxe package. Instead, it can be perceived once again to be more like the Fenix Champion AIs. Like Fenix’s champions, the SoA is supposed to be a very core part of Karax’s identity. However, the Spear currently is more expensive even than Fenix’s original cost for the full outfit of champions, 1200/900. Even at this slightly lower cost, Fenix was deemed far too expensive, and the total cost was ultimately reduced to a mere 600/250 for the full 6 champion outfit. Like with the SoA, Fenix has the option of only summoning the right champions for the job, but with the reduced cost it is also viable for Fenix to summon the whole team. Karax however is rarely justified in purchasing all SoA upgrades excepting at the end of the game on very long maps.
Karax has real strengths, and weaknesses that often have a logical coloration to those strengths, but he also seems to fall short in potency. At the end of the day, Karax has somehow become a jack-of-all-trades, where anything he has seems to be a watered down version of something another commander, newer or older, already has. The most recent offender in this field is Stetmann’s HUGS algorithm, which heals for twice as many hitpoints/second, with mastery that gives twice the percentage increase, and which heals a theoretically infinite number of targets, rather than max 3, upgradable to 5. Granted, Stetzone healing on allied units is halved while repair beam works at full strength, but even still with mastery it tallies to 8 HPS for Stetmann and only 6.5 HPS for Karax. This continues back: Zeratul’s static defense has range, AoE, and stun. H&H’s strike fighters don’t require vision. Fenix has similar units but for far cheaper and with far cheaper upgrades. This goes on, Karax not only has very few things that only he can do, but most of the things he can do he’s not the best at.
Ultimately, all of these problems lead to a Karax that can feel slow, overpriced, and at teams even lackluster or pigeon holed. The foundation is there for a strong Karax, but currently his weaknesses are overpowering his strengths. It’s not just one thing that’s wrong with thing, it’s the way the whole picture is adding up. All of the most commonly cited flaws with Karax are both the cause and the result each other. It’s difficult to demonstrate exactly how everything is connected together, and even more difficult to decide what to change. But at some point, something has to be shifted, because Karax has a lot of unique weaknesses that pile onto each other into a difficult situation. Karax needs a way to get his power onto the field more practically, so that he can show the world what he can do, rather than the focus falling on what he can’t do.
Paragraph topics in order (table of contents thing):
- Introduction
- Economy strengths
- Openers and rocks
- Skirmishing/early power units for other commanders
- Skirmishing/early power units for Karax
- Static defense strengths
- Army and offensive power strengths
- Support and global presence
- Brief interlude on commander weaknesses
- Static defense weaknesses
- Army flaws and weaknesses
- Upgrade costs
- Spear of Adun and the Solar Forge
- Overlap with newer commanders
- Conclusion
Overall, I don’t expect everyone is going to go through the whole wall of text. I just wanted us to have a common foundation for discussions around Karax in the future.