They say the best offense is a good defense. Not only can Amon's forces evade and absorb your attacks, but the Void also provides them with impervious defenses against a single army. You and your ally must coordiante your assault in order to secure victory.
Map: Oblivion Express
Polarity: each enemy unit is immune to either your units or your ally's units
Evasive Maneuvers: enemy units teleport a short distance away upon taking damage
Barrier: enemy units gain a temporary shield upon the first time they take damage
Immune units have a floating shield on their head, to make things clear.
The mutation is really easy: won at first try using Vorazun. I thought that Disruption Web should have been very good, as it disables units even when they are immune to me.
Was matched with a level 11 Raynor (who played well, however), and we easily took it home.
Wasn't too bad. I played raynor, partner was artanis.
Early game was a bit rough because my ally had a bit of a slow start. It turns out immune banelings are pretty deadly to bio when your ally doesn't have enough units. Guardian shell just makes it so you end up with an entire army of nearly dead marines. Didn't really have medic energy until much later on in the game.
This is the one mission you can't solo carry though, no matter how good you are at the game.
I suspect a swann karax combo would be the easiest if you wanted to go the turret defense route.
Won very easily in first try with bonus obj. I was Raynor and went marine/medic and maxed out pretty fast. My ally was Karax and went cannons on both ways. The key was to stay close to cannons with the army, because you never know which unit will be invulnerable to one of you.
Beat it as Alarak with an Artanis ally. Found it pretty tough to build up ascendants until I got matched with Artanis actually. Normally you keep your ascendants in the back of your army to stay out of enemy firing range, but the combination of teleporting units plus some of them being invincible means they stay alive and in-range long enough to prioritize your weak juicy ascendants first. I kept loosing them before they could get tanky enough to survive on their own until I got matched with Artanis's emergency sheild.
Other than that one little observation, the difficulty of this one comes entirely from your ally. For example...
I got matched with a Kerrigan who was only able to make 10 zerglings and 4 hydralisks prior to us losing to the two trains at once wave.
I got matched with an Artanis who spent all his time telling me that my buildings were too close to his and that my pylons were getting in the way of his army instead of responding to his half of the units that I couldn't kill for him.
I got matched with a Karax who didn't build a single energizer, shield battery, or kaydarin monolith and burned all his energy trying to barrage the units that were invincible to him.
And when I tried playing Kerrigan with mass lurker/static D I got matched with a Raynor who insisted on running his pure marine army out to meet the trains and their escorting army solo before they got to my stationary defenses.
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A few simple tricks that might help reduce frustration:
If you see your team mate building some cannons or other static defense somewhere, put down one or two of your own with it so it doesn't just die to invulnerables. This can help make sure that random wandering hybrids or other left over enemies don't become a huge hassle when you find them eating up your mineral line and there's nothing you can do about it.
Don't split your forces when 2 trains come at once!!! Keep your forces combined and kill the top one together first preferably, as it reaches open ground first and will often lead to units attacking your expansions if you ignore it. Once the top one is dead, attack the bottom one together. You can do them in the other order if you have to, but the units that accompany the top train are much more likely to spill into your bases if not killed quickly.
It should be obvious, but just don't split up in general on this mutator. Two giant deathballs running around as a single blob is the best way to get this one done. Don't try to do a static defense build on this mutator unless you really really know what you are doing and you know your opponent knows how to adjust their play style to work with you.
It's easy if you and your ally can macro well. Commanders which start off strong are good for this one.
Note that when two trains come at once, one train will be immune to player A and the enemy units will be immune to player B, and the other train is the opposite. As such, you gotta destroy the trains together and hopefully quickly. Oh, and it really sucks when their army attacks your natural while you're hitting the trains. If you don't think you'll get back in time, both players should build a bit of static D there to stall.
To be honest, I lost twice with Swann and a decent Raynor ally. Then I switched to Vorazun with the same ally and it was a pretty easy win. The difficulty with this is that sometimes you have to deal with something in multiple places, and ordinarily you take for granted how easy it is (like getting rid of a stray hybrid attacking your base while the train is running) but when some of them are invulnerable it suddenly becomes a huge deal. Also, with Swann, the combo of invulnerable units + teleporting really makes herc-tanks a lot weaker (with their main strength being killing things from a long distance before they're reached).
On another note, this is the one that just got me the 100 bounty achievement! We're not really supposed to get that for another 3 weeks, but in the first few weeks there was a bug where if you beat the mutation with "7 days left" and then beat it again later, you get the bounties twice. So I think this is truly the first week that you can get that 100 bounty.
I've tried this like 10 times with different commanders, beat 3 times with Aba, Alarak, Vora.
I can tell that it doesn't matter what commander you play, best chance a good player has is that his ally quits. Admittedly I had good luck with the leaver so that combo was Karax+Vora, but it was obvious at the 10min mark when he quit that game was over within 2min if he didn't leave, but was still salvageable when he did. Usually when you think mutation would be easier to just play alone, there's some multitasking to do. On this one you absolutely would have easier time just playing 2 races and 1a balling with 2 commanders' armies.
Easy mutation if you get OK ally. Impossible if you get bad ally.
Well, it was easier than I thought thanks to doing it with a friend. I expected the AI to just do the usual and attack anyone in sight so we would need to manually target those that can take regular damage but turns out it was automatically done. Basically just a-move with ally at the same place instead of splitting up as usual. I won't do this mutation again because the trains lag my awful computer really hard as usual.
Vorazun: Corsair/DT is extremely mobile, especially with Dark Pylon support. Disruption web affects units you can't attack as well. Your invisible units will also be mostly immune to attacks. Black Hole and Time Stop are both abilities that are especially helpful here as well. Finally, smaller Dark Templar groups can be instantly warped in to clean up small forces of units across the map.
Kerrigan: Nydus and creep spread are both really good here as Nydus allows you to jump across the map. Asslimination aura is amazing on this mission if you know that each train section drops 50/50 in resources.
Raynor: Bio with Vulture support is the way to go here. Mines help your ally when you're not there.
Abathur: Abathur has a lot of strengths and weaknesses on this mutation.
His units are very durable, not very likely to be picked off.
Blinding Cloud is also especially helpful here, preventing attacks from units you can't hit.
Toxic nests not hitting half the units hurts your early game a lot. Against air especially, you can have problems defending the third wave from the south without a Brutalisk at that timing.
Unless you go Mutalisks, Abathur has a DPS problem on the trains. However, Mutalisks are hard to tech to here because of the aforementioned early-game problems.
Artanis: Tempests can shoot from afar and not get damage. However, he's very low DPS with this comp, which especially hurts against trains.
Alarak: Ascedents get targeted too easily. Robo Alarak or Slayers are better here.
Karax: Static defense is solid on this mission, but only with another static defense user. You need an ally who knows what he's doing more so than other commanders though.
Swann: A bit awkward unless he's with Karax. He's not great at taking hits throughout the game because his units all need to be babied a bit.
Zagara: Severely lacks in the late game as you're continuously losing random units to enemies you can't hit.
Does the tempest ability in the game currently, I believe it's disintegrate? (can't recall at the moment) but the one that does like 500dmg over time. Is that able to be cast on multiple sections of the train to help alleviate the low dps for the tempests?
It's been awhile since I've played Artanis, let alone on the train mission so I have no clue.
I don't think tempests are the way to do this? Same issue as with dragoons that you have hard time hitting anything as they keep teleporting and projectiles will miss.
...but to be fair nothing else seems to work either vs. full air comps. Mass VR/carrier/oracle/scout totally wrecked me on one attempt eventhough I tried to make most reasonable archon based army. You just don't have enough gas for enough archons, at least if ally isn't there to always fight his half of the units. So pure air, maybe tempests would be good (?) but then your train dmg should be horrid.
But I don't know answer to the question, and I'd expand that: do aoes generally hit many train wagons at once? Could you potentially get 4x dmg with solar lance for example? I always try to do it but have never been able to tell if it did dmg as there's full armies hitting train simultaneously.
I did it on my second try (first time ally was utter shit kerrigan who didn't build units). Second time around I had a decent vorazun ally who went for mass DT. Made mass vulture mines and vikings. EZ son!
The most difficult part of this mutation is your stupid ally when some immune units are attacking your units and his units are nowhere to find. However, when both you know what to do, then it is as easy as no mutation. Communicate with your ally is always a good idea. Either move together or split half your army with half of your ally's army and both should work. Be sure both of you should build a few defense at the entrance of your base.
On October 11 2016 21:51 SidianTheBard wrote: Does the tempest ability in the game currently, I believe it's disintegrate? (can't recall at the moment) but the one that does like 500dmg over time. Is that able to be cast on multiple sections of the train to help alleviate the low dps for the tempests?
It's been awhile since I've played Artanis, let alone on the train mission so I have no clue.
I do believe you can hit each section of the train with Disintegrate, and you definitely should if went tempests, but its still tough to keep up with the DPS needed until you get mass tempests in the late game. Reavers + Immortals works great on the train mission, but can sometimes get wrecked by air based opponents.
agree super easy if you have a teammate that makes units. took 2 tries. 1st try artanis i was with tried going pure tempest and we couldnt down the trash waves fast enough when 2 trains came. 2nd try with a zagara + raynor we overwhelmed ezpz
faced ling bane zerg with raynor + artanis failure. faced terran bio tank BC with zagara raynor success
its all really dependant on enemy composition as well.
Sky protoss / zerg and especially terran really wreck some heroes. And if one of you gets owned by battlecruisers, you both do.
If you snowball and throw down cannons with the excess minerals, its easy. If you lose too much and dont - it feels like the most difficult mutation of all time.
Oh god this one is annoying. I've only tried three times yet but already lost on the first wave when my ally didn't show up to help.
Edit: Beat it with Karax. Half the time my ally didn't help me clear some waves till minutes later. Shield Batteries ftw, keeping those defenses alive under immune Hybrid attacks for minutes.
I found Raynor/Kerrigan combo to be the most effective. Raynor can burst down the trains really quickly with bio, and having access to the nydus worms is key to getting to the trains in time. If you're decent st multitasking, you can skip cultures entirely and rely on two groups of bio to kill all the units not immune to you. For kerrigan, she will be enough AA for the first few trains while you tech to ultras, and from there add on queens and hydras. Don't forget to drop the early nydus and start spamming them in lanes for quick mobility.
Having beaten this with all commanders now, my ratings for solo queue:
1) Vorazun 2) everyone else 3) Karax 4) Artanis
Artanis absolutely sucks against air compositions on this. Phoenixes don't hit trains, archons cost too much gas, goons and tempests get kinda wrecked by evasive maneuvers. Karax is absolutely fine for this, but as you cannot escape with cannons, he dies with bad allies when they don't have units at your cannons when needed. Artanis felt like the only one who needs a bit of carrying if you have to play against toss-air comp (starts with scouts->oracle->VR->carriers). I somehow got that 4 times in a row