I’ve been playing a lot of Zeratul lately and I’m confused how anyone can rely on him in brutal. I can find discussions about getting to the last artifact alive but little about finding it, as though figuring where they are is somehow easy for most people.
Put simply, no artifacts = no win.
I use my gateway rally line to scan the map, but it can take at least a minute to find a point on the edge of the map that causes the line to show up in the thought bubble, but the really difficult part is finding anything remotely similar looking along that line.
I’ve had several maps where I never managed to find the last couple artifacts even on lower difficulties. On higher difficulties I’ve given up the search as our bases are destroyed and my ally is screaming at me to contribute more to the match.
Is there a way to force the green circle to appear? Is there a way to force it to be smaller? Are there some tricks for narrowing down the search? Usually when I look at the bubble, I have no idea where to start. It could be anywhere on the tileset. I don’t have time for that on brutal.
Am I really the only person that has this problem? Is everyone else really content with this system? Because I can think of lots of simple ways to improve it, but I’ve never seen anyone else complain that the artifacts are sometimes too hard to find. I’ve never had much trouble getting to an artifact once I knew about where it was.
When you use Zeratul’s Prophetic Vision, you get a window that shows you the terrain around the artifact. Zeratul has no black to his Fog of War, so he can see the terrain of the whole map.
Just find the spot on the map that looks like the area Zeratul prophecies about and that’s where your artifact is.
I’ve always just looked at the bubble and managed to quickly scan around the map with areas that I think would be similar given visible cliffs/water/lava and the structure stuff. That alone cuts possibilities down extensively. Never personally had an issue?
The only thing that normally takes longer is remembering to check and see if prophetic vision is cooled down
Just try to focus on the terrain instead of the tileset: ramps, cliffs, edges and other stuff, it’ll help you narrow it down, even if it only shows a flat piece of ground there is only so many places that could be.
I suppose thats the thing with zeratul, he’s an interesting design, since he is powergated not by how good your macro or economy is but by how good you can memorize terrain
The thing is, often I find an artifact right away. I really like Zeratul, but it’s just not fair to other players to be stuck with me searching for the last artifact like I’m AFK for five minutes.
Guess I’ll just have to stick to normal/hard slowmo mode.
I stopped playing Zeratul because of this. It’s just too annoying and I feel I chase artifacts for the whole game instead of doing the objective and helping my partner.
Well, you can argue you’re helping your partner in the long run by finding AF.
That said, that’s the main reason I don’t like Zeratul. I’m awful at finding them ASAP. At least you don’t need to worry about making gas buildings and macro. If they took that away, I’d probably quit if I got him under Random CO.
One of these days, I’ll pick an “easy map” and try to get that achievement, but I’m not in any rush (in more ways than one)
Are you not using the minimap to place the rallies? Hot key your gateways, press that hotkey once you start doing the vision, then just keep spamming the edge of the minimap until you see that line show up. You should be able to do this in 5-10 seconds.
Once you find the line, don’t just end there! Move the rally back from the edge of the map towards your gateways until you have the actually rally in the middle of the vision. That should take another 10 seconds at most. At that point, you can send Zeratul to that rally and you will find the artifact.
Rally trick and map familiarity goes a long way in improving your ability to find the artifact. There are only so many places the artifact can be in.
My general time for max artifacts is around 10:00.
Also: If you play Temple of the Past, do not destroy the Zenith Stone in the central lane until you have collected your 2nd artifact. Once the stone is destroyed it will restrict pathing around it, which will screw you over if the artifact decides to spawn there.
The artifacts aren’t that hard to figure out if you spend some time with him in each mission. There’s only certain locations it will spawn, and if you play the maps enough, you should be able to discern where they are upon seeing the vision.
I consider it part of the meta; yeah it can be annoying, and really frustrating on Mutations with vision restricting mutations, but that’s part of the meta. You can either adapt and overcome, or let it beat you.
Depends how long you have been playing the game. After a few thousand games there is no difficulty in finding artifacts, you’ll know every bush in the map.
In case it doesn’t, I think the bug where legion arrow counts as a unit is still in the game.
You don’t even have to actually spawn it. Just hit Ctrl Z, and click on the artifact. Using this, you can grab the artifact anywhere, as long as you used Zeratul to reveal it and have vision.
I generally find fragments in around 20s or so. Every now and then I get stuck and it takes a couple minutes, but I don’t think it’s a concern for his viability. In exchange he never pays for upgrades or research, it’s a pretty good deal.
I haven’t tried this yet, but if you were to space your production structures out as much as possible in your base, their rally lines would intersect with more of the map. This might be something to experiment with if you’re struggling.
I’m at 104 mastery mostly playing norm/hard random, I would think that I should have seen each map enough times, just on different commanders.
Thanks for all the great replies guys.
RE: Drow
At least I’m not fully alone.
RE: Terin
Yes I do track back along the line but moving the rally tends to result in me loosing my spot.
RE: Arms
I could see that, I got about 1.3k games mostly co-op and it’s gotten a bit easier since I first started getting into zeratul.
RE: Sereyn
Early on I got in the bad habbit of only using my gateway rally and not building gateway units because I kept canceling queues and having dudes wander off and die alone. A second rally can help though even if the buildings are fairly close.
RE: Gachatar
OMG that is so helpful. Here, have some more hearts.
also:
I think that will solve most of my issues. Thankyou all for the helpful suggestions.
