Which commander is objectively weaker that Stetmann?
In terms of difficulty, build up time, and time to clear map, what is stronger or weaker than mass infestors (his best build)?
How do his other builds compare?
What do you prefer for support: Stetmann’s speed, Swann’s gas, or Karax’s chrono-wave?
Commander rankings are hard to do – they depend on a lot of variables we won’t all agree on. I could give you my rankings but almost everyone will vehemently disagree with most of it. I’m currently thinking Stetmann-With-Rebalanced-Infestors would be middle of the pack, dare I say about Vorazun-level.
Stronger than mass Broken-Infestors? I haven’t had the desire to really play much mass Infestor, but from what I’ve seen and heard, Abathur might be the only potential contender. Maybe. ViS will have a better idea. It’s hard to judge the insanity of being able to take out a maximum (7/7) SkyTerran attack wave with 4 Infestors.
Other compositions… not terribly close. Though a pack of Corruptors remove air attack waves with the trivialising dominance of Zeratul Enforcers and Abathur Devourers – the best AA options are just ridiculous. He seems to have a lot of relatively even compositions otherwise.
A good support-focused, skilled Stetmann ally surely outshines Swann or Karax by far. And offers a lot more than just a FAST field. I play mostly solo but… I guess for randomers, I’d prefer Swann’s vespene harvesters. Got to be a more sure thing, right?
Stetmann requires a clear ramp up between early-mid game. His entire repertoire is a gradual increase until macro picks up, most notably his currently imbalanced Mecha Infestors. As such my personal evaluation is:
He will not be able to solo-speed run to break any current records held by Abathur, Dehaka, Raynor, etc. That said, he is not slower compared to current commanders at all. Karax is probably the most problematic commander in this department, due to his heavy reliance on ally’s ability to push speed.
Support wise he is unparalleled compared to any other commander. When satellites used properly, ally player gain a number of buffs no other can reach. This include increased income, mobility, damage output, sustainability, and robustness with abilities. I predict we haven’t seen true synergy video since Overcharge bonus can be gained from all 3 zone types.
His other builds all work just fine as his main power come from proper use of zones with Overcharge. That said, Mecha Infestors remain at the top by far. His support style is by far the best as it doesn’t force a player into a sole-reliance situation.
Each commander have both weak and strong. Like Elyssaen has mention there’s a lot of variables that goes into this. Some may not be easy to understand. So, it will be hard to answer your question.
For your last question I will pick all because all will be great use to have depending on the build I’m going for.
Depends on how you define strength.
Overall, I think most commanders are stronger than stetmann’s infestors, since for less ramp up time you can get things like 14 well stacked ascendants, or 8 carriers + gate support from Fenix, or mass spider mine from raynor, or a fully stacked up Tychus with buddies, or 3 Brutalisks + 3 leviathans, or 3 Hercules full of tanks, or 15 Omega Networks (which can spawn WAY more hp)
Meanwhile, in the time it takes for him to make those infestors, the map is more than half cleared by Artanis, or Zagara, or Fenix, or Bio Raynor, or on a few maps even Kerrigan hero solo.
And meanwhile, the only armies slower or more cumbersome than Stetmann’s infestor glob are mass Thor (unless you use hercules) or Abathur’s swarm hosts (which are bad) and ascendants (which are significantly better than infestors and have deathfleet and overcharge to cover them). And yes, that’s accounting for stetzones, if you have speed boost on then that means you won’t have a lot of energy when you get there.
However, Stetmann’s corruptors are possibly the best anti-air in the game (tough call against scourge), his lurkers are incredibly good, having burrow charge on LURKERS, and being able to cast their focused strike for EVEN MOAR AoE. Further, his hydra/ling/bane is a better early-midgame than most commanders are capable (not all, but most) and transition rather smoothly to corruptor/lurker. And then he has his ultras, which are very specialized but good at what they do.
And to clarify, yes, I am saying that his infestors are not his best build, I think that they are only his best build on defensive maps where you can just turtle in the purple stetzone and spawn faster than the units die. There, it’s his best build. But otherwise, I don’t think so.
you can elaborate more on the variables; but just think, for the average game.
Agreed with others about ranking commanders isn’t something objective or easy to do.
Regarding your second question if I have to choose between having a Swann or a Karax ally and contrary to my past decisions, I would always pick Karax now. Satellites are great too.
Reasons are Karax’s passive will heal my buildings and my mech automatically. Chrono boost is nice and the gas from Swann too but they require your ally to press a button, and believe I had many BAD allies. Like many Swann’s never building a single sci-vessel, Swann btw and imo is harder to master than Karax and hence harder to support too.
I levelled all commanders but Mech Stukov is my main, and the healing is always appreciated. I learnt to play without benefits anyway, so it doesn’t matter if my ally does not give me drones or place his satellites on my base, I won’t even ask him to do. I know what I have to do and 90% of my matches I always carry my allies.
Even for the average game there’s many. Your own words can be true for you. Without knowing so much on other commanders I can’t really say. There’s at least over 50 combination that can be played out. Knowing which is weaker a player have to play tons of games and on higher difficulty in order to say, however I’m not that player but I do know there’s so much there.
My goal for co-op commanders is to find as many as I can regardless how weak or strong or little bit of both. I will say view it like a tree diagram for starters each line will connect to another to branch off while others stop branching. It’s not a simple answer since you’re asking something so specific that has so much depth to it.
This. He is not weak, he is similar to Swann or Karax in terms of ramp up time, but he has no poferful cooldowns like S or K. He has Super Gary though.
I still prefer Swann or Karax as support. Satelites are good support on paper, but your units are not always in the active area (I usually push agressively in early game and there are definetly no satelites there so early) and you never know what type of zone will be active, unless you actively coordinate this with your ally (not usual in random queue).
Sure, your units may not always be inside a Stetzone but as an ally you can go visit one for replenishment whenever you need one. They’re like moon wells in WC3. Most protoss commanders can really use the heal-on-demand and medics / dark archons can go nuts with energy regen bonuses.
However, I think Swann is way more situational. Take the bottom row of commanders and you find a crew who can either happily live without gas drones or flat out cannot make any use of it. Tychus and Zertatul are mineral capped if anything and giving them any additional gas makes zero difference on their ramp up. H&H, well reapers don’t take gas and their mech is still a tanky gimmick so they don’t need it either. Nova can make extra liberators and siege tanks with more gas but she might as well get more spider mines and airstrikes instead so she’s good either way. And then there is bio Stukov who often doesn’t even take his expansion gas. Fenix has his Kerrigan like -nocostwhatsover-economy now so they both sure don’t need it.
The only commander where I even care about the gas drones nowadays are Vorazun and Dehaka.
I have to admitt, I mostly play Nova, Dehaka and Alarak. All of them benefit heavily from extra gas (Alarak only to some degree tho). I especially love early Swanns laser as Dehaka. It allows me to push even more agressively in early game. I usually say my Swann ally he can macro hard and doesnt have to care about early game at all, if he doesnt want to.
If you use spine crawler to clear the first waves/objective, and focus on reaching the objective (instead of ally base) in the start, you should be able to get 4 infestors to the objective by 6 minutes (ramp up gas cost is 100lair+100pit+100ravager upgrade, this is not particularly high), it keep 16~24 roach and 8~12 ravagers on the field at all times, even more roach if you infest the enemy structures, which static defense are useless against them.
How is that slow…?
not a lot of stuff can compete with his mass infestor build
Tychus is a pretty strong commander. Really good at pretty much all points in the game and can handle any army if you get up the right outlaws and their upgrades, and can clear the map really quickly. His only weakness is mobility which can be made up for with the medivac drops.
Nothing in the game really competes against mass festor past the midgame. It’s a weenie-spawning trash thrower that somehow still overpowers transmutation with brute force. It’s completely broken, and its only weakness is its moderate ramp time compared to speed comms like Abathur, Dehaka, etc.
I feel like I’m repeating myself here, but…
Things that can start clearing casualty free really early and do it better than infestors:
Maxed out armies that are better than infestors:
Meanwhile, infestors are cumbersome, flimsy if attacked, have poor anti-air, and can’t stray far from stetzones, and lack global teleports.
Why are infestors so great again?
I mean, with your logic, did you think mass bunker pre-nerf wasn’t “great” as well?
My original post was “mass”, so obviously im not referring to early game.
And if you are comparing a gas heavy end game build like mass carrier and “literally any abathur army” with infestors that spawn free units indefinitely, you’re completely missing the point.
dude his infestors cost 150 gas compared to 200 gas for a carrier (fenix). once u got 4-5 or so infestors you can start pushing and just make more as the game goes on.
I’m not sure what metrics you’re using here, but mass festor is stronger than all those things. It’s insanely obvious if you do mutation solos with them. They dumpster transmutation by amoving. They dumpster avenger + heroes by amoving. Even in duos, they tie up polarity basically forever at no additional resource cost.
You’ve consistently shown yourself to lack high level understanding of the game whenever you’ve commented on balance, and this topic is no exception.
Stetmenn and Zeratul are easily the 2 most op commanders in terms of getting brutations done. Zeratul Cannons, Mecha Infestors, and Void Templars are basically the God Tier Strategies and are able to do just about any brutation you can throw at them. I’ve already done the next 10 weeks worth of upcoming Brutations with them and most of the brutations I did on my first try. The only ones that took me two tries to beat were Polarity + Void Reanmators on the purifer map and Polarity + Just Die on the Trains map.
But if you’re into doing speed runs I’d say the best Commanders are Nova, Abathur, and Zeratul. Ive managed to beat Void Thrashing in under 8 minutes with any combination of those commanders and Scythe of Amon in under 9 minutes. Also just incase someone brings up Lock n Load, I dont really care about Lock n Load speed runs because that’s just pure cheese and you skip like 95% of the map to do it.