This is a collection of changes I’ve come up with to improve certain prestiges. It is composed of some previous ideas I’ve had, as well as some popular suggestions from the forums. Some are just basic balance adjustments, while others are more experimental in nature.
The list is constantly updated as I come up with new ideas and people make new suggestions. (All changes are in addition; previous functionality is only removed or replaced where specified.)
Your Han and Horner P2 and P3 suggestions are awful, absolutely not acceptable…
Drone Hangars just got Endurance Training for Galleons and are overall a phenomenal upgrade while H&H calldowns are one of the coolest in the game.
H&H p2 should just be improved to 25% mineral and gas cost reduction for Horner units along with a 75% cooldown reduction to its spawn timers.
Perhaps letting Endurance Training regen continue even during combat would be nice.
H&H P1 has the issue where the improved death buff mastery does not work at all.
This also makes it strangely somewhat weaker to default H&H because default H&H can stack both the regular hellion buff and the improved hellion buff - which end up stronger than P1 hellion buff.
H&H p3 has a really simple fix: precision strike cooldown reduced to 20 seconds (from 60) and Platform building cost reduced by 25% (in total limited to 10 platforms). Strike Fighters are invulnerable (can’t be killed to cause longer cooldown).
Downside is that Platforms now cost 5 population (up from 2) which takes a bigger chunk of your army population (10 platforms would take 50 instead of 20 population).
Swann P2 (turrets) should also let Science Vessels repair and cast Defensive Matrix on structures. Would be nice if turrets could be 20% cheaper as well.
I think Alarak’s P1 could simply give his mech units the Sacrifice ability. My supplicants would rarely die and I was actually attacking Alarak in downtime for him to sacrifice them and give the units the buff, which was very dull.
I would like to throw in my suggestions for Swann P2 since I’ve been playing with it a lot lately and I do see plenty of room for improvement in that one:
Fire Suppression System upgrade repairs to 100% (instead of just 50%).
Unlock the Planetary Fortress upgrade for Swann command centers, makes a ton of sense for this prestige, could have the benefit of using the turret upgrades as well in this case. It would be THE planetary fortress when you think about it, and it fits Swann perfectly.
Decrease the tradeoff: combat units cost 25% more vespene gas (instead of 50% more). This allows anyone playing this prestige to have a little less of a hard time playing ‘random’ instead of just focusing on defensive maps.
(optional) Add a unique style to Grease Monkey by allowing turrets to gain Cloak, either by default with the prestige, or as a new cool upgrade unique to this prestige (I would go for making it a new upgrade, Swann could easily put Wraith stealth tecnhology into his turrets and add flavor to the prestige in this way, they can call it something like ‘Stealth Targeting System’ for example). Should be an ability you can toggle though, if you create a choke point it could come in handy to have cloak on, but you also don’t want enemies to run past your turrets sometimes.
Swann P2 (turrets) should also let Science Vessels repair and cast Defensive Matrix on structures. Would be nice if turrets could be 20% cheaper as well.
Science Vessels repairing structures and being able to cast Defensive Matrix on them is a really good idea, I like that one.
Respectfully, I fail to see why my proposed changes in this area are the level of poor quality that you have suggested. Drone Hangars are indeed a phenomenal upgrade, but are two Assault Galleons with Drone Hangars really superior to five without? Being limited to two Assault Galleons means that’s three Assault Galleons less that could be producing Reapers.
I also fail to see why disabling the calldowns is such a terrible idea. Several other commander prestiges disable calldowns. If you mean to say that Han and Horners’ calldowns are too much of a loss to justify the bonus, then that would be fair and valid criticism. At the very least, it’s still a vast improvement over what the prestige is now. If it’s still too underpowered, the platforms can receive a 20-25% discount as you proposed, or the Strike Fighters could gain invulnerability. Or perhaps instead of disabling the calldowns, the calldown cooldown rate could be 50% slower.
I’m glad to see that you have your own ideas as to how these prestiges could be improved, which I actually like very much. But I would like to hear better criticism on why my proposed changes are worse than the prestiges as they are now. The criticism “these changes disable good things” does not tell me anything about why said changes would make for unfun and poor gameplay, as most every prestige (with very few exceptions) has to disable or nerf things that are good in order to improve or add to other areas.
This doesn’t mean that I’m convinced my ideas are great ideas. I’d just like to hear your reasoning in more depth.
This is essentially making the current benefits even more powerful, which is a fine approach.
It sounds like this should qualify as a bug if it’s not delivering as advertised.
An interesting reinvention. Instead of giving you unlimited platforms, it makes your ten Strike Fighter Platforms much better in exchange for less supply for your army. It concentrates more power in fewer platforms, achieving a similar result in a different way. I like this idea.
This idea is brilliant.
I think it’d be interesting if P2 gave Wrathwalkers the ability to automatically sacrifice nearby Supplicants to save themselves, like Alarak does. Or perhaps Vanguards could gain a Barrier ability that requires the sacrifice of a Supplicant to activate.
Great ideas. I can’t believe nobody uses Planetary Fortresses yet. This is perfect for Swann.
Drone Hangars act as a very good distraction for Horner’s expensive units. When dealing with Scourges, Missile Turrets or Phoenixes, they tend to draw fire very well.
Right now HnH P2 feels weird when you need to upgrade Drone Hangars. Since you can only have 2 galleons, your production capacity is reduced by 50% if you upgrade them one at a time, which is hurting on map with tight timers.
Maybe this is presumptuous of me to say, but at least my idea does sidestep that unfortunate issue. And losing something as important as Drone Hangars gives a really good excuse to buff Horner’s army production.
Alternately, maybe raising the Assault Galleon limit to three would bypass some of this difficulty.
I have introduced a number of ideas mentioned in this thread to the following prestiges, giving all credit:
I am interested in hearing further feedback on these, and will continue to modify accordingly.
How good would it be if P3 had the starting cooldown affected by Death Fleet cooldown mastery? This change would give the mastery a use with P3, but I suspect it might be too uneven progression-wise.
Maybe the starting cooldown should be 360 seconds instead. Or perhaps it could be tied behind a specific structure, like the Robotics Bay. Or maybe P3 just doesn’t need any adjustment.
Noted. I’ll keep this feedback in mind. Maybe the build time for Drone Hangars could be reduced to get around the issue mentioned by Starfont.
For example:
Han and Horner P2 – Wing Commanders
Horner’s unit mineral costs are also reduced by 20%. Drone Hangar build time is reduced by 50%.
If we were to tie it to a specific structure I’d vote for the Death Council, it’d give a smoother transition as you need it to open up his Forge upgrades and you’re still generally going to want Supplicants and their upgrades anyway.
However, if we did lock the Momaship behind a tech path or coolup I’d actually prefer if say the Nexus could warp in Destroyers after maybe Cyber Core. It wouldn’t be any more of an air rush than for example Raynor P3 to be fair, and it would allow him to start up his fleet before getting the big one out later on.
That would still end up with 2 different prestige aimed at his champions though. In my opinion a better replacement would be removing his champions, but then altering the TDW to give some measure of bonuses to all units of a type (to the same supply max as previous, so as to make single unit massing not necessarily the right choice.)
That way we’d have P1 Fenix focused, P2 champ focused, P3 army focused.
For now I’ve decided to remove Shadow of Death from the list, as it may be too soon to judge accurately how balanced it is.
What I’d like to hear about is what could be done to make Alarak’s P2 more interesting. Does anybody have any improvements or ideas that could be applied to that one, or is it good as-is?
I love the change suggestions for Grease Monkey. Mostly, having Planetaries is just such a power fantasy for Swann IDEF. Allowing Science Vessels to synergize with turrets is also a beautiful idea.
Primal Baneling Barrage is hilarious, I love the visual ideas of it.
These changes to P3 Abathur sound broken for certain speedrunners. I dunno how they’d feel about having to constantly nest lure, but at least it’d let Abby retain his natural ramp-up instead of nerfing it for no real reason.
My suggestion for Broodbrother (as people are arguing it’s a straight buff now) is to implement a Lone Wolf-style debuff, where Dehaka and Zweihaka’s cooldowns are slower if they’re not within range of each other. As of right now, you could theoretically just use Dehaka, and never have Zweihaka see action, which is really no different from default Dehaka.
People have reported that Stronger Death mastery doesn’t stack with P1 Han, which is DUMB. There should be even STRONGER effects!
I was trying to fix this exact problem with my suggestion. With my suggestion, if you choose to only use one of them, you’re always at a 25% essence deficit, because 25% percent is always going to the other. Some people suggested a 50/50 essence split so they’d always be at the same level, but I like the unequal split better.
With your idea, my main concern is that it would punish splitting, negating some of the additional capability granted by the prestige. You’d have to be very careful not to exceed the max range, so most people would probably just keep them together. Apart from that, it’s an interesting idea.
I could change my suggestion by restoring biomass to its default effectiveness and nerf Toxic Nests further. Would that improve it?
No, actually. Nerfing biomass effectiveness makes nest luring even more risk-reward as it makes roaches much more vulnerable, but you can guarantee getting an evo from it if it survives. It’s an interesting dynamic and I know high-level Abathur players would enjoy it.
As for Broodbrother, perhaps alternating buffs/debuffs could be applied based on if Dehaka and Zweihaka are close.
The Shield Overcharge topbar now applies a one-time use Guardian Shell passive to all units it affects, in addition to shields. The GS passive lasts until the unit takes fatal damage, upon which it’ll do its thing, and then disappear. GS can be reapplied by casting Shield Overcharge once more.