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The hardest wars are those of attrition. The temple is under siege, minerals can be difficult to harvest, and Amon's army is both resilient and fanatical. Hold out as long as you can, and hope it is enough.
Map: Temple of the Past
Mutators: Mineral Shields - Mineral clusters at player bases are periodically encased in a shield which must be destroyed for gathering to continue. Barrier - Enemy units gain a temporary shield upon the first time they take damage. Avenger - Enemy units gain increased attack speed, armor, and life when nearby enemy units die.
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This is a fairly easy but fun mutation. I and Monk went on SEA with a level 5 Raynor/Swann combo and beat it, so I don't imagine any commander will have too much trouble here.
Notes: Mineral shields have 50 hp and are not auto-acquired by defenses or units, so you need to manually kill them, listen for the ping. They also benefit from Barrier, so try to kill them in one shot. (Karax can just Orbital Strike them to clear them out very quickly.) Barrier is a 100 hp shield that lasts for 5 seconds according to the editor. Avenger boost is 1.1x attack/movement speed, +0.3 life armor, +10% life and shields, and +1 life/shield regeneration per unit death. Only one unit can benefit from the death of another unit and it apparently caps at +10 boosts, so if you get zerglings you're not totally screwed. Hybrids can benefit from the boost though, be careful.
I imagine the usual turtle strategies will be the best here: Lurkers, Tanks, Spider Mines, Bile Launchers, Cannons, etc. Whirlwind Zealots and Shadow Fury DTs will also be useful because ability damage is not affected by armor. Abathur doesn't really have dedicated defensive units, but Vile Roaches will help quite a bit in keeping buffed units managable. The major difficulty will probably be from air waves.
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Meh. 2nd easy mutation in a row. Would like the difficulty to get back to level where you may fail couple times before succeeding. Or dunno if I was just lucky playing mass muta as aba vs. zerg, I lost pretty much no units entire game, was able to amove to corners of the map and destroy everything without losing a unit multiple times. So IF this mission actually is hard with some commanders against some heroes, at least the aba mutas strat seems like easiest crap ever.
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Tried it with Raynor. He still seems king of this map. The only problem might be getting the first set of mines on time. After that, he's golden. I had a cluster of marines sitting at each mineral node. 0/0 marines take the locking crystals out pretty quickly. I imagine this tactic works well with all commanders. (Have spines as zerg, a few turrets as Karax/Swann, etc.) I even forgot about the mineral clusters sometimes, but Raynor's mules don't care.
I must say I'm a little disappointed. The temple is my favourite map and I thought we'd have something insane coming. I have a feeling the commander ranking will be the same as it is on the regular temple map.
I haven't tried other commanders, but I will later today. I'll use the usual strats. Zagara - mass bile launchers. Scourge to intercept the north drops. Spines at mineral nodes Swann - lots of turrets and herc-tanks. More goliaths if they're air. Blaster turrets at mineral nodes Kerrigan - mass lurkers, unless they're air. Then just mass hydras. Spines at nodes Abathur - ground army + air army. Ground army stays home and defends big waves, air army goes out and does stuff Karax - usual lol style cannons. Either mass immortals, phoenix, or carriers to go out and get the thrashers/stones Artanis - idk... mass units?
@Xsyq: GJ on the level 5 win. I find even regular brutal to be hard at level 5. (Though I haven't been that level in a really long time... except with Abathur, for whom brutal was really easy anyway)
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I was under the impression that there were only ground waves this mutation, but apparently that was just me getting ground waves ten times in a row, so I can't really say how the commanders match up overall. Vs ground waves however they're pretty much the same as normal. Vorazun massing DTs is still the easiest win, followed by Raynor spamming spider mines and Abathur massing mutalisks. Swann and Zagara are next, tank/turret/goliath and bile launcher/baneling/scourge still wreck everything. I'd say Kerrigan, Artanis, and Karax are about the same. Karax can have a tough time at the start when he's still getting his cannon numbers built up and can't just strike everything because of Barrier and Avenger bonuses, but he ends up fine in the late game. Kerrigan can also have trouble early with Barrier and boosted units; you'll probably want to use the leap attack instead of dash unless you can one-shot everything. Artanis has trouble because Whirlwind doesn't do enough to offset Barrier and Avenge, so you'll want to go Reavers ASAP. Don't make HTs, storm is terrible against Barrier and Avenge. Probably my favorite mutation so far. No commander is really screwed right off the bat and you have to play a bit smarter than normal. Letting an immortal or hybrid get the maximum Avenge boosts can wreck you pretty quickly.
Protip: DTs, Orbital Strike, Maelstrom Tanks, Bile Launchers, and Reavers can one-shot Mineral Shields without triggering Barrier, so it can be useful to stick one next to your mineral line permanently. Other commanders can just make do with cannons/spines/marines.
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Swann+Karax is about as broken as you'd expect, just stick a cannon or two into your mineral line. I actually kinda welcome the mineral barriers, gives you something to do since this map is pretty boring otherwise. Just make sure to build up your AA, especially at the 2 o'clock entrance, those drops can get annoying otherwise and the shields make them harder to burst before they unload.
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United States8476 Posts
This mutation is trivial with petty much any commander, but here's a ranking anyways:
- Raynor: Mules, Mines, Vikings. Mines are the best unit/ability on this map period.
- Vorazun: Corsair/DT or maybe just DTs.
- Abathur: Mutalisks will snowball
- Swann: Standard Tank/Goliath/Herc/Vessel
- Zagara: Standards units + Bile Launchers
- Karax: Surprising not the best here as his cannons are actually a bit weak compared to some of the insane things other commanders can do.
- Kerrigan: She can solo the first few waves, but doesn't have anything absurdly powerful here.
- Artanis: Reaver-based compositions are best here. Again, he doesn't have anything here that's absurdly broken.
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Abathur is very fun here. You can still lose early when you have few mutas, but it's easy after that.
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Scourges can be reeeeaaaally nasty here.
If a bunch of them get all the boni you get a handfull of scourges going past your defenses and crashing into the temple bringing it down almost by half HP instantly.
Other than those I find it fairly easy. I really enjoy it a lot more than the last ones, can't stand these ground effects screwing over all your units.
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On June 28 2016 07:11 Nocci wrote: Scourges can be reeeeaaaally nasty here.
If a bunch of them get all the boni you get a handfull of scourges going past your defenses and crashing into the temple bringing it down almost by half HP instantly.
Other than those I find it fairly easy. I really enjoy it a lot more than the last ones, can't stand these ground effects screwing over all your units.
Yeah, I lost my first of 2 brutal attempts as Zagara solely due to scourge. They're kinda hard to kill when they literally move faster than hydralisk spines.
I really think scourge waves need to be removed from Temple in general. Unless you're air none of your units will auto-acquire them and individually targeting them is damn near impossible. If you or your partner aren't ready for them they just wipe the temple before you can blink.
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If a zergling can be killed in one hit normaly, will his shield fail to trigger in this mutation? I was just trying it out on normal, went for Tempests, Zealots and a group of Phoenix like I usualy do here, while some cannons were there to free up minerals. I can say for sure that the basic orbital strike kills zerglings in one hit btw..
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Disappointing mutator given this was my favorite co-op map, beat it first try as Kerrigan and a good Karax. It's a little more difficult than the standard brutal map.
Maybe a cool idea for mutators is to add a new difficulty above brutal specifically for mutator-weeklys where the only difference is that they add an extra mutator to make things spicy because most mutators so far except Bad Weather has given me a challenge.
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Air composition is hard. As raynor I always got air units super buffed at every wave and vikings are not really useful in low numbers against high armour units. One time the temple got obliterated by banshees in mere seconds, absolutely ridiculous. I am much prepared now but unfortunately T and Z air never appeared after the first few tries.
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Died to mass Scourge
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On June 28 2016 01:32 monk wrote:This mutation is trivial with petty much any commander, but here's a ranking anyways: - Raynor: Mules, Mines, Vikings. Mines are the best unit/ability on this map period.
- Vorazun: Corsair/DT or maybe just DTs.
- Swann: Standard Tank/Goliath/Herc/Vessel
- Abathur: Mutalisks will snowball
- Zagara: Standards units + Bile Launchers
- Karax: Surprising not the best here as his cannons are actually a bit weak compared to some of the insane things other commanders can do.
- Kerrigan: She can solo the first few waves, but doesn't have anything absurdly powerful here.
- Artanis: Reaver-based compositions are best here. Again, he doesn't have anything here that's absurdly broken.
I'd put Abathur over Swann, just from the experience I've had with both. Maybe Swann dominates the ground waves, but against air he struggles. You have to mass up goliaths quickly, which means your tank count will suffer, and his anti air is not nearly as strong as his anti ground. Abathur, on the other hand, can just put a few devourers in his muta comp, and even fully buffed air hybrids will melt. He also struggles immensely against the baneling/scourge combo, Abathur not so much (just requires some muta micro). Against ground they both have an extremely easy time.
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What can I do with Artanis if the enemy happens to be Zerg? Should I build Phoenix to strafe around Scourges? Turrets don't kill very fast and they cost a load of minerals that would better go into an army..
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On June 29 2016 00:17 MrTic wrote: What can I do with Artanis if the enemy happens to be Zerg? Should I build Phoenix to strafe around Scourges? Turrets don't kill very fast and they cost a load of minerals that would better go into an army..
Archons would be my choice here, I think.
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This mutation's difficulty is mainly based on the enemy's composition. Pure ground is as easy as normal game, because there are a lot of units that do massive damage to ground, such as spider mine, Swann's tank, ultralisk, dt and reaver. The bigger problem is air units, especially when they come together with ground units or they come as early as second wave. Try to engage their air units first, because you dont want to face Hyperion-like battlecruisers, Mohandar's void rays and leviathan-like mutalisks. However, Odin-size thor or Tychus marine can still be stunned, cloud covered, or just killed in seconds.
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I'm reading on the net that some are building air units or lifting terran buildings as meat shield for those Scourge. Anyone tried it?
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Luckly I have not met scourge yet.. even when I got against zerg. They seem a pain to defend against!
I'm tried Karax and found him strangely harder than what I was hoping for.. still doable, anyway. Then played some with Abathur: easy as a cake. Just try to get a critical mass of mutalisks quickly: a few of them may still be killed if you happen to get air waves early (especially phoenixes against toss).
I even almost soloed with Abathur, as a Kerrigan I was paired with never managed to keep alive more than a dozen hydra.
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