Want to understand Zeratul + Avatar of Essence

Co-op Missions Discussion
1

Today, while playing mutation #310 on Scythe of Amon, I notice my ally was doing very non standard thing as Zeratul P0.

What did was:

  1. move some void arrays to slivers so that he can teleport Zeratul to slivers faster.
  2. collect 3 artifacts
  3. calldown avatar of essence at home, and put Zeratul under the effect of avatar of essence(maybe some trick to get Zeratul in & out of the home void arrays to more buff??), this makes Zeratul evolve.
  4. teleport Zeratul alone to a sliver and kill the silver. Zeratul takes almost no damage while being focused fired by enemies, even at the last one.

I didn’t know Avatar of Essence is so powerful. Is this intended?

Anyway, this is fine to me because overall, I soloed 3 slivers and 3 bonus while my ally used this trick, so it is not overpowered in anyway because he needs to wait for avatar of essence to do this.

2

Question, why is this abnormal for P0?

Everything else seem senseless on your ally’s part (without more information). If this was P3 then soloing the slivers earlier make total sense, but then the 3 artifact portion of your list makes no sense as a result.

3

Could you post your replay so we can see what you mean?

4

How can Zeratul solo kill the fifth Sliver on the hero alone, with P0, taking almost no damage and has super high damage, with some form of essence trick.

5

This is P0 and I don’t know why Zeratul can tank so much damage to hero solo fifth Sliver on his own.

6

After looking at replay,

The Zeratul has evolution aura 4, 3,2 at the same time(probably through getting in/out void arrays)

I feel this gives him 90% damage reduction.

Then after losing all auras, he still takes almost zero damage… I guess there is a delay even though the aura is gone from display panel.

7

I will consider as a bug so I don’t plan to do such thing on my own.

8

It’s not a bug, Zeratul temp don’t take damage for 0.5sec every 5sec - One with the Shadows.

Being perm cloaked, if you actually micro to target detectors, which are few on SoA. You can just sit there and attack…

9

Having evolution aura 2,3,4 on at the same time is a bug.

He didn’t target detector and was focused fire by enemies, but the damage reduction is too high that shield recovery coveres that

10

You’d have to check the replay really carefully. Sometimes the aura itself is intended to stack, other times one is meant to replace the previous, and moreover sometimes the stacks aura has incorrect description (hence checking replay and actual damage suppose to be taken VS actually taken to account for true damage reduction).

I don’t have your replay, but it could be a case of each level gives 25% attack speed and 10% reduction, the aura simply stacks additively and displayed as “lvl 1 + lvl 2, etc.” rather than simply displaying “lvl 4, 100% atk spd and 40% reduction”.

If all that makes sense…

11

20 charcharrrrrrrrrrr

12

13

Flagged for trolling. Post the replay, and stop wasting our time.

14

There is actually a bug that you get Avatar of Essence buff stacks faster when loading/unloading as the buff is applied “on contact” instead of periodically. Hence why at the end his Zeratul was almost unkillable and can solo the Sliver because he has an absurd amount of stacks not achievable when playing normally using the Avatar’s duration.

15

From what you say, you can add the stacks faster than usual. But are also saying the stacks can go beyond 4?

16

I just tested it.

Rapidly entering and exiting the array neither speeds up the avatars buff, nor does it allow it to go over 4.

17

Just post the replay, and we can all have a look.

18

I checked CtG’s bug list. It said and I quote “Avatar of Essence buffs can be stacked using Void Arrays by quickly loading and unloading units”

I think this is the behavior that OP noticed. If the 4, 3, and 2 buffs add up all at once you would get 90% damage reduction on top of Zeratul’s one time damage negation.

19

Hmmm. I didn’t see that happening, unless its something you cant see in the UI.

Can you link the list here?

20

Yep this is a known bug, but not very well known from what I see in this thread, if you load and unload units very quickly in the void array you can stack the buff up to 10 times making them immortal and having insane dps, you say you think it isn’t too strong but it’s absolutely broken and in mutations it allows zeratul to cheese the objectives of several maps even with things like double edged.