I noticed a thread up for favorite mutators so I figured I’d make a least favorite mutators thread. My list:
Missile Command.
I’ve always hated this mutation with a burning passion. Some heroes like Karax are pretty good at dealing with it, but one of the things that really annoys me about it is that before you can even get static defenses up your structures will have already taken considerable damage. All the visual noise and choas it makes. I usually play Dehaka and Dehaka can’t even eat the missiles since apparently they count as structures.
Kill bots
I am not fond of the idea of enemies that completely immune to attacks unless you sacrifice some units to fill their kill count. Plus it sometimes takes them a while to kill the required units needed for them to disappear. This cans slow down the game a lot and feels kinda cheap.
Purifier Beam, Nuclear Option and Lavabust.
Also not really a fan Hazards that can wipe your entire army in moments unless you have your eyes on them at all times.
Orbital Strike I perhaps irrationally dislike; it’s not even bad in the scheme of things, I just hate how large an area it covers by the end of the game and how it chases my army across the map. Commanders with slow armies need not apply.
Double. Flippin. Edge. Might be my least favorite of all. I will go to my grave swearing that it only heals you back like 50% of the damage it deals, despite what the description says. Again, certain commanders need not apply.
Propagators make me upset. I hate seeing my army and base get swallowed.
Orbital Strike I don’t consider as bad as Purifier beam personally. This is mainly due to that Orbital Strike gives both a visual and audio warning before it hits. And especially if you are using fast moving units it can be easy enough to dodge. However with purifier beam, sometimes purifier beam takes up entire pathways and choke points as it moves around and it means you have to babysit newly created units as they are coming in. It also can be a problem for units that require burrow like widow mines, lurkers and swarm hosts. Unless they are rooted in safe zones.
Most (if not all) Coop missions are designed in such a way to stimulate doing different objectives on the map in parallel, and this god awful mutator just goes against the natural order of things, because it forces your ally to go exactly where you go, and vice versa. Not to mention the fact you have to have a great ally for this (so you both build a decent army at the same time) and also is open for communication to agree upon maneuvers — good luck finding one while playing with randoms.
Microtransactions
StarCraft, mind you, is a real time strategy. That means you not just have to do right things, but do them FAST. And the best way to accomodate to such gameplay is to learn clicking anywhere around, sometimes many times, sometimes in vain — just to get up to required speed. This cursed mutation, once again, goes against natural order of things, forcing you to become slower, as now you have to thoroughly think about your every action and not being allowed to rely on your reflexes. As a result, any attempt to micro your army against hazards in a large scale fight will either turn into a complete disaster (if you’re too slow) or kiss your budget goodbye (if you’re fast as usual).
Slim Pickings
Resource gathering in SC2 in general is supposed to be a trivial action of constructing CCs/Hatcheries/Nexi and then queueing the worker production using hotkeys while not even looking on them most of the time — thanks to this you can concentrate most of your attention on tech tree, army production, upgrades and microing. This mutator, however, turns normally trivial activity into an unstoppable headache, while also hampering all your other more important activities.
I’ve never played polarity before, but after looking up what it does I am glad I haven’t. That doesn’t seem like fun in the good way.
Yes. Microtranscations is another thats annoying to play with. Not my most hated but up there. Slim picking though I don’t mind because you can do pretty good if you collect the mineral drops.
Polarity – this is one of those mechanics where having an ally makes the game more difficult, which I think makes for poor design. I would rather they implement an 80% damage reduction or something like that.
Vertigo – for obvious reasons. These are the only two mutators I refuse to play.
While the other mutators are annoying, at least you can play around them, but the same cannot be said for these two.
Propogators - The margin of error can be very low on this one. Almost feels like a game with perma-death, but cranked way up. Like with Polarity, having a bad ally can make or break this.
Polarity - Too much coordination. I’m aware this is “Coop”, but the threshold is too high for such a mode where people don’t use headsets (which I would come to find out, is actually pretty neat)
Fatal Attractions - It’s most annoying when it gets to your worker line, as you now gotta redirect them to gather resources again.
Going Nuclear and Lava Burst - Nukes and lava bursts don’t appear on the mini-map. Mind you, I find Twisters, Blizzard, PB, and OS to be not that much better in terms of needing to babysit your units. However, the latter most has an audio warning, while everything else appears on the mini map.
EDIT: Going Nuclear was the one. NOT Mutually Assured Destruction.
In theory, it’s not that terrible. But its implementation makes it unbearable. Rifts start spawning too quickly, they have a high chance to spawn in hard to reach (at least in early-to-mid game) places, they start spawning T2 and T3 units even at the early stages of the game and the intervals between rift spawns are pretty small. In general, it has lots of potential to spiral out of control too fast, and in most cases you’re pretty much helpless about it.
What should’ve been “smack it here and now” is actually “restart time and time again till you get lucky” instead.
Going Nuclear
Agreed with what ackmondual said above, when nukes drop silently, it sucks. Though I guess they confused “Going Nuclear” with “Mutually Assured Destruction” — the latter is about hybrids detonating nukes on death, which is actually acceptable.
Afraid of the Dark
There is one thing making both this one and the previous one annoying — you must keep a watch on your army permanently.
Once again, cursed mechanics that go against the natural order of things — after all, it’s a strategy game that involves multitasking by bouncing between your base, your army AND your ally. If I wanted to keep my camera on one spot indefinitely, I’d play HoTS instead.
I agree that the Void rifts mutation has some problems in how its implemented. I don’t like how some can spawn well behind enemy lines so early. I still like the mutation though because it can be quite a challenge and I like mutations that add enemies.
Microtransactions I usually don’t mind. With certain commanders that need to continually spend while they fight (nova, zag) it’s really bad, but most commanders can build a deathball and spend relatively little after that. A lot of games end with me floating 9k resources, so with micro I just cap my army and go nuts.
Of course, if I lose my army I’m screwed, but considering the power of most armies that’s not a huge concern.
Killbots because, on any map that cannot be fast-cleared, it always turns into “if you don’t have at least one Zerg commander, you die”. And for those that can deal with it, the mutator is pretty much non-existent.
Boombots because i play SC2 to play SC2, not to play a typing game. If i wanted that, i would stay on General Chat, or go to social media and argue with people there. Having to pause the game makes it extra annoying.
I’ve never had a chance to play with Boombots. Do people normally pause the game for that? If it were something done on a frequent basis, it would annoy me. However, I can make exceptions with some Mutators/Mutations (such as more pinging, or actual communications). If it gets THAT bad, then just avoid those altogether (this weeks’ Polarity and Props is looking ripe for that!)