I don’t know what patch everyone else on this forum has been playing with, but I for one LOVE the new patch. I hadn’t touched Zeratul in months- my coop partner and I had made it a rule not to use him in mutations as the mass cannon strat made selecting any other commander pointless. Now he’s finally in line with other commanders and actually interesting to play.
Mengsk has become my new main since his release (ok that’s not totally true, Nova forever), and I for one welcome his balance. Assuming you get three imperial witnesses (one for each base and one to sit on your army) you should be swimming in mandate regardless. Also, I have to assume that anyone who calls his troopers useless doesnt know how to properly macro. I finish most matches with six to eight CCs- ya they’re squishy, but pumping out 8 troopers at a time, dropped anywhere on the map? Hes better at flooding an objective with bodies than stukov.
I won’t tell you to learn to play, as that’s just rude. But there is a whole range of difficulties you can play on- if the changes make you struggle, there’s no shame in dropping down to hard or medium for a bit until you adjust. Coop is more fun when it provides an adequate level of challenge- welcome to videogames.
I love it how these people are just casually bashing OP.
Mengsk rebalances seem fine for me. Halving the starting mandate was pretty harsh (should have been a 1/4 nerf instead of 1/2, imo. But that’s just me.) And the new base regen makes up for it pretty well. (1 mandate every 6 seconds vs 1 mandate every 14ish seconds.)
Just because Mengsk’s early game got nerfed doesn’t automatically mean that you’re useless until 15 minutes into the game. Just go 1/1/1 off of CC first, and push out your double mandate research, then you’re good to go.
The worst bit of his mandate nerf is dealing with a contested expansion. It’ll be much later than before, but still doable.
By no means is Mengsk bad or dead in the water. Neither is Zeratul. People just need to learn to adapt.
My issue with Zeratul nerf is that using his cannons as just normal static defense isn’t worth it. 400 for a cannon? They are useless. I can’t see myself ever even building them for any reason, even on dead of night.
I max out his supply, have enough minerals for buying legions 5 times over… They are zeratuls only mineral float. That is my use for them. With the stunning of the monolyth, they are still fine.
His cannons still have superior stats to other protos cannons, even scaling damage with artifacts. They may be little ovepriced in terms of minerals/stats, but they still have utility to project, which is well worth the price.
It’s still a detector that can shoot at ground or air and appear anywhere on the map- I’ve been making a couple just for the odd lurker or ghost that catches me out of position
It just seemed easier to straight up banning him then to use him with the asterisk of no cannons, but you’re right, that would have also been an option.
The problem with the mandate deal is that if everything goes right, you will have infinite mandate, but also if everything goes right then you didn’t need the topbar anyways.
Mengsk is somewhat the reverse if Artanis, where with warp haste and guardian shell and just a general emphasis on warp gate and temporary power, the more stress you put on Artanis’ army, the better it performs. With Mengsk on the other hand, the more stress you put in his army, the less potent his army becomes, putting itself under more stress and causing things to spiral out of control very fast.
Oh, and as for the troopers, while I agree that the troopers can do pretty well for flooding objectives or just being able to use them in spite of slaughter mutators like magmines and power overwhelming, I would point out that if the plan is ti make it rain men Raynor is still better at that.
This patch is basically Stukov 2.0 but with Zera, so mixed feeling is a given for something like this.
Also, I don’t get the decision of overbuff Vega and add more nerf to Stetmann Infestor.
Zeratul is still miles ahead of where stukov is at… it’s not stukov 2.0. They toned down an overpowered commander in Zeratul. Stukov needs buffs… Zeratul does not.
Stukov needs a rework IMO. Basing so much of his playstyle around spamming free units has never sat right with me, and we just saw with Stettman again how that playstyle got nerfed.
I think they need to rethink how his Infested mechanic fundamentally works. They also need to rethink his CDs too.
Stukov is just designed in a way where too much of his kit is based around his CDs and his free units. None of which require resources to manage.
I agree. I feel like the whole infestation arc can be explored more. Infesting enemy units / buildings could have very cool and variant effects depending on what you infest, etc. But that’s just one idea.