Speed running ≠ commander strength

And what’s the point of discussing strength if that strength is unattainable 99% of the time or that strength becomes irrelevant to the gameplay? Isn’t commander strength eventually boiled down to finishing objectives as efficiently as possible?

And is taste the only thing that matters for a meal? Ignoring other things like nutritional value and ease of preparation?

Same for this, ease of getting that clear time or how flexible the CO is also very important.

There is a point here, a good player shouldn’t ever lose a regular brutal regardless of what the ally does or if he is afk and only helping capture forced coop objectives with workers, so at this point when winning a mission is guaranteed the only factor is how fast the win is achieved, and that’s where people looking at speedrun times for commander strength come from, you can also look at how easy a commander is but that factors something arbitrary (player skill) rather than purely how strong a commander is.

Mutation viability is a valid way to look at how strong a commander is, a commander viable vs most mutations shows that the commanders has few weaknesses, and no, not all commanders are viable vs all mutations. You might say “but ctg uploads vids with all commanders all weeks”, but sometimes he literally has to ask someone (lila or the eddier) to carry him with abathur or other strong commanders cause he has to make a video showing commanders that are horrible for the mutation.

Look at the top 5 commanders: Abathur,Zeratul,Dehaka,Kerrigan, Raynor. Tell me which one of them is not flexible against any kind of difficulties.
The bottom 5 struggle to keep up because their army is weak? No, because their army take a long time to reach critical mass or unsustainable thus reduce their strength by a whole lot.

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See OP as he’s the one who said in another thread that “Raynor is either too weak or unintuitive for mid to lower skilled players to use well.”

Ah, ok, then you’ll need to be specific about what strength means to you. Speed is must easier to define as we have unit speed and speedrun metrics. But by strength do you mean max achievable army DPS, ability to deal the most burst damage from all sources, ability to F2A into any wave without flinching, or something else. Actually, that last one is probably durability. I think most of us are talking about something more encompassing than just a few aspects.

Actually yes, I could tell you, speed running by it’s nature benefits from everything being exactly where it needs to be. The top times you see there are when things are set up correctly for the commander in question.

So say Raynor, what do you think the odds were that it was up against a heavy splash composition? Or Dehaka, do you think the enemy comp was giving a large or small amount of Essence?

Once again, I’ve never argued that it’s not a good idea to look at this as one metric. But at the same time I would in fact say that Artanis has far more than a 6th to the end would indicate.

No, Vorazun and Abathur both succeeded, that I am sure of.

There are probably 1000s of weekly mutation runs worldwide for every 1 speed run attempt, let alone custom mutations and brutal+.

That is probably the best shorthand one could ask for. Still, Zeratul and Abathur both are probably on par for real weaknesses, both clocking in at arguably 0. But Abathur is stronger because his counter solutions are, on average, a lot stronger.

For Raynor against AOE, play mech (vultures, banshee or BCs). If you still struggle with Raynor, just play like LilArrin. Personally, I don’t face any trouble playing Dehaka against any comp, he has good counters against all comp.

For Artanis, he’s at the right place, notice that it’s not that Artanis is weak, he’s just weaker than other commanders on top of the list. And you can see here Zag falls behind because she lacks a sustainable army to full clear the maps. The bottom 4 are just slowpokes.

Well, if blizzard open-sourced the replays then we can have Maguro write a report on it. But I think the majority of the discussion is just in normal mode, not mutation.

…? I don’t struggle with Raynor. That wasn’t the point. However I will say Banshee builds are slow, so are bad for clear rate, correct?

Do you know banshee has a speed boost that increases movement speed to 5.5 ??? For comparison, a full-upgraded zergling on creep which is the fastest unit in-game has a 6.5 movement speed.
If you don’t struggle with Raynor then he’s flexible for most situations?

Banshee builds, I edited that almost right after I wrote it, forum issues. They do not clear a mission fast.

Flexibility is not clear speed, that’s literally my point, that right there is another thing I can point at as another good metric.

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The other part of that quote is:
“While higher skilled players will need to have a greater level of knowledge and mechanics to perform as equally well with him as they would with most any other commander.”

That post was commenting on Raynor’s accessibility. His difficulty compared to most other commanders. I never said he wasn’t flexible, if by flexible you mean ability to adapt to different enemy compositions.

So we can finally agree that the top 5 speedrun commanders are indeed aligned with commanders’ strength.

My stance from the start…

Look at the sc2 coop site for example, they list such things as “ease of use”, “early game power”, and many others.

It’s not but the whole package of indicators is included in already with the final result recorded as one single index that is Time. Do you think a commander without flexibility, endurance, speed can compete for a full clear speedrun in an efficient and timely manner?

If you argue that speedrun records only use ez comp, well all of the speedruns are run with ez comp so it’s the same for all of them. I would argue it’s even harder for some bottom commanders like Karax to face specific comp like lings+bane vs top-tier Raynor.

Speed is part of strength. What is the point in having the most powerful army if your ally can clear everything before you are able to do so?

This is the exact problem with Karax’s army, by the time you moved out, ally cleared the map.

Also keep in mind that speedruns for the most part involve assaulting endgame bases as early as possible. Commanders with faster clear times have the necessary power to push through those final areas much more quickly than the other commanders. This is pretty clear for VT, which isn’t very cheesable due to the objectives requiring the surrounding area be cleared. SoA is very cheesable so it isn’t as convincing for measuring power, on the other hand.