Abathur is a strong commander BUT not in early game and not before mastery points. In the beginning he is slow, expensive and weak. All 3 prestiges actually made him even weaker in early game.
The situation is: Abathur RELIES on brutalisks, he NEEDS to make one as soon as possible. Without him he is weak against ground and totally defenseless against air. There sometimes occurs situation with carrier-corsair rush and he literally has nothing to counter that. Some spores? A couple of queens? 3 ravagers with no upgrades? We all know it’s laughable, let’s just accept that. Abathur desperately needs a brutalisk to just stay in game.
In all 3 prestiges this point even more unreachable.
P1 - you don’t have brutalisks at all. How is a roach with 125 biomass is any better than bruta? What will you do when air comes? You will not have your own air in early game, also you don’t have strong ground to air attackers.
P2 - getting brutalisk is same hard as usual. Your awesome swarmers will not be ready any soon.
P3 - getting brutalisk takes TWICE more time and effort.
So. This commander is obviously a late game hero but often he doesn’t have a chance to make to this late game. Prestiges (or the very core mechanics) must have some help to make 1st brutalisk earlier. Like Tychus buys his 1st soldier for half a price. Or all units collect biomass for only one of them till he evolves.
Or there must be another solution vs air rush.
First of all double pumping queens must be available by default. In late game you will have 4 hatcheries anyway, you will not need it. Double queens from 1 building is literally a thing you need in the beginning.
Queen’s air attack must be increased. Because this is the ONLY simple unit with ground to air attack. And you can’t make them in numbers soon, even with double prodiction.
Or we can have another option. Vipers available after Lair. To make one or to against air rush.
As always some people will hate, this is why they exist. But Bliz should pick in work some of these suggestions or make something else. Abathur can not stay a commander of boring and painful early game. Also before around lvl 10 he is almost unplayable.
Upd. Just had one more idea. 1st brutalisk (or all of them) appear at 50 biomass but they are small at the beginning and need to collect +50 more or +100 more to reach the full strength. So you get them earlier but at the same time this is not a permanent jump from zero to hero. This may be idea for P3 or even for the very core.
I think p2 is fair, but the other ones could be a little more interesting and better. Maybe they should add symbiotes to regular units for the p1, but increase the biomass you need to get the symbiote
P1 is just fine. I don’t care much for farming UEs early on, and enjoy mass Ravager play. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean that it needs a “rebalance”.
Bile, even without the additional damage, is still very strong. 60 damage per bile, that splashes in an AoE, regardless of how small it is, is extremely useful. With a good enough Ravager ball, you can easily kite and destroy a “5 min carrier rush”.
Yeah Abathur played in standard player hands tends to be a rampup commander with one of the strongest no sell armies that can kidnap and blind and -75% attack speed any opposing unit for a 100 mineral roach. He’s able to ignore or over power a lot of unit buff mutators honestly and in sequence breaker hands Abathur actually holds like 99% of all solo speed run records and Abathur Dehaka for duos while technically the only close contender was pre nerf zeratul (who could apparently a move through every mutator, but didn’t need to know baits). I think it makes sense that they might not have wanted to potentially make him any stronger, since like a lot of Abathur solos were like 8:23s faster than previous 8:47 duo speed runner vt records.
I will have to disagree on that.
P0 is the best prestige for Abathur early power because it allows you to have a powerful all-round super tanky unit without much tech requirements and the less amount of biomass.
Both the P1 and P2 are more mid-game than P0 and P3 is super late game as of current patch.
So the benchmark for a commander being good now is dealing with an endgame wave of Carriers at 5 minutes? What has it come to?..
Seriously though, your issue isn’t Abathur. Your issue is that you were playing Chain of Ascension and were not ready for it.
Ah, yes, Chain of Ascension. One of the best maps to test map knowledge, and to kill unprepared… i mean, how prepared people are for playing on brutal.
That map has a fun oversized attack wave coming at you at 7 minutes. If you chill and let it play automatically, it comes at you and kills you. And if it doesn’t kill you outright, the hybrid spawn at 9 minute will, because you will have nothing to deal with them.
The solution is: kill hybrids before the wave, which delays the wave by 2 minutes. So you have to be aggressive. The more aggressive you are, the later the wave comes, and the easier the map becomes.
You can’t be aggressive that early? Then macro up and build an army. 7 minutes is more than enough time to get some units and upgrades. Plus, Jinara pushing waves + first fortification + expansions should have more than enough biomass for at least one Brutalisk, as long as you bait stuff into your nests. Unless it’s Terran, or your ally is “helping” you to kill stuff, that is.
If you can’t be aggressive nor macro up quickly enough, don’t play on brutal Chain of Ascension. Otherwise, you will be facing problems not just with Abathur, but with most commanders.
No no, clearly the benchmark of something good or bad has to pass the Helleformer test, where anything his skill level excels at is worthy and wherever his skills is lacking… nvm, it’s never lacking… it’s the design issue, devs don’t know what they’re doing. Duh.
Stop entertaining this dude, lmao. Report and move on.
Wow , you opened a fair amount of thread just to show that you have no idea how to play Co-Op ? … Abathur its one of the best if not the best early game commander :S .
His conclusion isn’t completely wrong (mostly wrong, or partially right for the wrong reasons), although the thought process getting there isn’t great. The “issue” is simply base Abathur being too strong, if you know what you’re doing. He definitely isn’t a great early game Hero (not as bad as the OP make it out to be for sure) without Symbiotes, but that changes completely once he does, so no, you don’t need Masteries for that.
P1 is a very good way to level at least until level 10 when you get Symbiotes. Without it, UEs are very fragile and playing with 50% chance to get back some Biomass is just bad. The OP is incorrect about this cannot deal with Air waves. Bile is one of the most efficient ways to deal with air waves as long as you have one single unit that can shoot up (hi Queen) to lock them in place. Without a primary aggro target sometimes unit can re-target other stuff and shuffle around for some reason. This is still a fine, albeit probably inferior, Prestige compared to P0.
P2 is largely the same with rushing UEs, but you have a different sub-set of army to play with. So the first half is pretty much the same as P0. Still fine though.
P3 is bad and needs retuning.
In a vacuum it’s more like Abathur P0 could use a nerf if balance actually matters in Co-op.
Ground is nests. Either you have better nest placement, or more nests. Or bettering luring with your Roach. Absolute worst case is that you just have a fat roach, and you place Nests directly under whatever, you pop Mend, things die, and then you have a Brutalisk.
The closest thing to a carrier rush is Chain of Ascension with SkyToss. Which, to be fair, is really annoying most commanders. Even if you were really bad at luring, there’s more than enough potential biomass that is literally in front of you that you can get out a Brutalisk.
Funny thing is, Carriers mean you’re facing PROTOSS, which is by far Abby’s best race to lure on this map.
Basically, this is how a regular game will go with proper Abby play:
Get 2 Bruts and clear out first Hybrid area and trigger it BEFORE the first wave
Get 3rd Brut off first Hybrid wave and clear out 2nd Hybrid area
Trigger 2nd Hybrid wave at around 4-4:30, generate enough biomass for at least 2 Leviathans
FIRST attack wave gets announced at 5:30 because you delayed it with Hybrid waves. Now you have all 6 Ultimates and can start pushing the middle and final areas. You probably won’t even see the 2nd attack wave until you’re pushing the final area.
Ok, first of all, thx for the info - I guess, I didn’t know that if you killed they hybrids, the wave gets delayed.
That being said, you’re pretty much wrong in assuming the wave will kill you if you “chill and play automatically” (it can, it has happend to me, but like in 1-2 games out of 50). Pretty much any commander can deal with it at 7 minutes, the only issue is actually knowing the wave will come and saving your calldown for it / not getting your heroes on low-life while pushing into encampments. And trust me, you’ll have plenty of means / units left to kill hybrids at 9 minutes too, after the wave.
Also, suggesting to kill hybrids before the wave is tricky, because aside from them, there are also some regular units spawned with them. And if it’s hyb-behemoth it’s okay-ish, but if it’s dominator hyb it might get even trickier. You can delete the 7th min wave with a good calldown alone (hyperion, aleksander, nova carpet bomb, purifier beam, solar bombardment, concentrated beam). I’m pretty sure you can’t say the same about the hybrid. So basically you’re saying “attack the strong enemy, because otherwise you’ll lose because of another strong enemy, but weaker than the first one”.