Zagara’s prestiges are interesting but her overall composition could use a few tweaks to make her tanky units more viable.
P0 - Aberration
Incubate Banelings and Scourge + every 30 seconds, a baneling spawns and explodes around the Aberation, adding limited crowd (affected by baneling upgrades)
Aberration Protective Cover + provides increased armor or % damage reduction (25% or 35%)
Supply cost - reduce to 2 (to be on par with Corruptors)
P0 - Corruptor
+50 hitpoints (they won’t get one shot by BCs with P2)
Corruption + can be cast on buildings (such as mission objectives
Incubate Banelings and Scourge + shoot a scourge once every 30 seconds to a nearby enemy, adding limited crowd control (affected by scourge aoe upgrade)
P1
Scourge Nest + research two upgrades at once (or allow us to build two nests, 8 free scourge is not game breaking)
P2
Overseer + increased health and health regeneration from the prestige bonus
Health regeneration + increase slightly, or make Aberations more tanky to allow them to heal up fully faster after a fight
Closing notes
Overall, Zagara is well balanced and powerful with her swarmy units, but even with P2 her normal units are sadly a downgrate to mass scourg or bane. And they really can’t handle swarmy compositions well, forcing a switch to swarmy units even with the prestige unless ally has crowd control.
And I always wondered why Corruptors are missing the spit attack, could make them more viable. Now they just derp around after the air units are killed.
I may have overdid it with the suggestions, but do let me know what you think.
No change on HP or incubating scourge but I would rather add protective cover ability for it (as well as 5 second lasting effect outside its aura).
It would be great if Corruptors can autocast their corruption.
I think Corruptor’s building effect can go further and deal 100 damage in 10 seconds just like Corruptor’s Caustic Spray.
I want Scourge’s gas discount to be affected by Corruptors as well. They are so gas inefficient.
agreed on two upgrades at once.
I don’t think these changes are necessary.
Unrelated note, I wish Banelings and Scourges can regenerative acid (33% of its potential) so they can add endurance for larger units as well as act as potion for other biological units.
I made a demo
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6Nv0_MiBuk
I’m not sure if straight buffs like the ones you propose are the way to go here. While they might make Zagara much stronger, this wouldn’t change anything in terms how she actually plays; you’d a-move the same way you did before, except now it just does more.
I think we should turn our attention to Zagara’s Queens - at the moment they’re seldom-made, and they could fill a couple of holes in her army if they were tweaked a bit to be a viable army unit. If they were viable, they’d provide Zagara’s only Ground-to-Air and ranged Ground-to-Ground attacks (outside of Zagara herself, of course) and they’d be able to heal up her Aberrations and Corruptors with Transfusion to keep them in the fight. Come to think of it, I’m surprised that P2 doesn’t offer any buff for Queens since they’d fit in with the theme perfectly.
Anyway, here are some ideas for how they could be buffed into viability (not meant to all be applied at the same time, though):
An optional upgrade to increase their movement speed, especially off-creep. Some version of this would likely be needed to make Queens viable as a combat unit/caster since they’d need to keep up with the rest of her army.
An optional upgrade to remove their supply cost. This is probably the easiest way to encourage their usage since this is the most common complaint I’ve seen about them. This alone would mainly promote their usage as a macro unit (which probably wouldn’t address the issues raised in this thread, but it’d be something to consider)
Have Queen attacks scale harder with upgrades. Right now Queens gain +1 vs Air and +2 (since they attack twice) vs ground from each upgrade. What If this was changed to +5 or even +10 per upgrade level? What if their anti-air attacks gained damage vs light targets, to compliment the Corruptor’s damage vs armoured? Queens could start the game as a macro unit, then transition to hard-hitting combat units in the late-game if the player wished; if they were mixed in an Aberration/Corruptor army, players could also look to use Transfusion more, which would make those units last longer as well.
I think Queens have a lot of potential to be an interesting take on a combat caster for Zagara, and present an opportunity to deepen the commander’s late-game options. If we’re looking to buff Zagara’s army, I think it’s an option worth considering.
Whenever proposing these kind of changes, remember to balance against how many of this unit a player can make. The follow up proposal also reduces their supply cost, so upwards of 30-40 abbs that explode around them.
Even at 10 aberrations, that’s a lot of on and off 30sec cycles of spawn. A player can literally roll out an army of abbs here with exploding Banelings and Scourges as they roam the map. Even 1 bane/scourge would do devastating dmg to a wave, it is often overkill. With Abb’s high bulk, they just walk up with different exploding cycles and erase.
I think if this did happen, I’d just send groups of 10 to different directions and watch the map clear.
At least that’s how I’m seeing this particular proposal.
The proposed P1 changes would be good. I do prefer P1 zag as a main, she i so obnoxiously OP late game as P1, but lags hard early, especially if there are air enemies. 2 nests would be great at adding in some air support, i would honestly rush that.
Yes, having combat queens or queen buffs in general for Zagara P0 and Kerrigan (at least P1) would be nice.
Overall, I think tumors should be untargetable, and have a wider radius.
Autocast on transfuse would be nice to have.
And better range for attack against ground, and slightly more damage.
And maybe have them rally with combat units - lets be honest, most people don’t inject that much.
Or have a build option for a inject non combat queen and a combat one that rallies.
Zagara’s Queens need autocast larva to be worthwhile.
autocast transfuse would be good for defense (even without a move speed bonus)
Her Corruptors should have an upgrade so that when a corrupted unit dies, the corruption spreads to another unit (possibly allowing it to apply to buildings, and making it autocastable as well)
Yes, autocast Corruption on targets that have more health than a specified threshold would be nice (mission objectives, hybrid, battlecruisers, anything over 500).
