Finally got around to playing mission 5. The ability to not activate the drill until your army reaches a critical mass makes the mission easy on any difficulty. The base north of the Drill has too many resources in my opinion, I ended the mission with more than 10k minerals in the bank thanks to it.
All units feel like they have a valuable role. There is no "mass x" composition that does better than a mix. Stalkers are the most efficient DPS, but are large+bulky. Adepts cost a lot, but they will lower the size of your army. Supplicants are cheap mineral tanks that do no damage. And vanguards are anti-ground but can be dodged by mobile enemies.
The hybrid feel varied. The boss wasn't really noticeable aside from being a large hp bar.
A large step up from the previous mission 5, but still loses the brilliant tension put in mission 4.
- I was testing two days auto sacrifice and it was okey. The supplicant use that ability only if alarak has damaged health.
seems like Auto-sac activates when he takes any hp damage, which is a bit soon tbh. Needs to be like critical or half health. It's hard to see visually if you're getting hp healing out of that.
- I will check these slayers. Maybe I will change their shield ability to something more useful and new.
Yeah more testing has revealed that ALL their cooldowns activate when one activates heal.
As for whether shield healing is useful? I'm going to say "not really" because blink micro exists. I mean it's useful if you want to put them back in combat right away or as a skill floor for ppl who don't blink micro, but other than that not that big a deal tbh.
I didnt nerf main base resource limit ^^
I see, it's just that the hybrid are tough to take down in large numbers with only 30-40 stalkers + alarak. That's def good, makes them as frightening as they should have been tbh. Will have to take more than 1 base next time.
Havn't managed to find myself some time to play the full map (mission 5), but I think the resource limit on the main base was a good nerf to players, and does up the difficulty as they need to defend multiple points sooner. Still think that destruction wave remains a little strong due to it's low cooldown and lack of long range units that aren't as affected by it, and that you can mine out everything before activating the drill. But please take this with a grain of salt because I didn't get much father than grabbing a second base.
Bugs:
When you select a bunch of stalkers and use capacitor, if ANY of them have damaged shields, it activates it for ALL stalkers, not just the ones damaged.
I don't think auto-sacrifice is working right? My shields weren't even broken and supplicants got sacc'd, losing out on half that healing.
Disagree that vanguards are too strong. They are easily tanked by a few full HP zealot and then your ranged units can get the kill, given their long attack delay. And they are a nice counter against the 150 shield immortals you can run (however, if protected, your immortals will turn the tide).
Update to Wrath of the Tal'darim mission packs 1 and 2.
If anyone's interested in skeleton stats: 40hp with 1 armor, 10 damage per attack with 1 attack speed. Basically whenever a unit dies spawn a zealot that takes 3x damage from colossi.
Without a detailed changelog I can only guess at the full extent of the changes, but some are:
Increase in early-wave difficulty in mission 1.
Attack wave no longer hits your base a minute after rift spawns, giving your time to deal with it.
Heavy increase in base defenses in mission 2. You will not be able to break the bases very easily, and not without crippling your late game changes, given:
Probes can no longer move while collecting Terrazine
Slight decrease in minerals in main base mission 2 (i think)
Heavy difficulty increase in mission 2. Late-game Attack waves can be around 25-40 supply worth of units.
Immortals have barrier no longer. This is an early-game nerf for you (where you will be stealing most immortals you see), but a late-game buff for the enemy.
Attack waves in mission 1 aren't increased late-game to compensate for this.
AI can still use the Void Ray's active ability though.
This bug might have been in the previous version, but I hadn't noticed it: stealing a void ray in the "void ray" wave after terrazine #3 is collected doesn't get rid of the minimap circle.
My thoughts:
Mission 1 got too few changes for a replay to be worthwhile imo. Still can clear everything off of 1 base. Mission 2 got significant difficulty upgrades, and while geyser defenses/spawns are still weak compared to attack waves, I think this is a big step in the right direction. You should replay mission 2 if you are looking for an additional challenge, because you will receive it.
I didn't mention this before because I was picking up units from bases, but I do like how attack waves in 2 are designed, giving you tools that you really want to get through the mission. Colossi to deal with skeletons, immortals to deal with literally everything with an "armored" tag, and void rays to do some damage to everything. (and you can pick up a dark archon if you hit the south geyser followed by the west geyser).
Something I noticed is that when a carrier dies (there is now some in the enemy bases) each interceptor will spawn 3 skeletons as well. Would be fun if that can be worked in without worrying about Ras'gul stealing one, just a massive wave of skeletons as a bunch of (heroic?) carriers die.
Okay I know I'm posting again, but this is likely the last post until a major update/another review. I've been replaying mission 4 to see how it works since my previous vid was just throwing small groups of units into a meat grinder.
Here's a video of a zealot/ascendant strat for mission 4:
Note: this is my second success with this strategy after a total of 8-10 failures, so it's not very easy to pull off. I don't feel like that is a bad thing tho, I'm absolutely fine with losing, and losing even more if I have extremely limited my unit comp. 75% of my losses were to North generator (which I hit second) and the remaining 25% were to South (which I hit third).
It's much harder to pull off this composition with mission 4 due to 2 major things.
Heavy splash damage (vanguards, collossi, destroyers) eat through zealots, take 2 mindblasts to kill, and there are a fair number of them by the generators. Partially counteracted by the +25 shields zealot which on a 1hp 50 shield zealot means +50% increased survivability, which is really good value. I seriously doubt I could have pulled off that video without it, if you're looking for a good place to nerf.
Low mobility means that it takes longer to respond to attacks, and it's hard to reinforce/disengage. Countered by that even end-game attacks will lose to 8 zealots and 4 ascendants.
I think mission 4 is pretty well done in regards to difficulty. However, it's not made clear which generator you should attack first. Via rewatching my vid, I find difficulty to be East < West/North < South, which is hard to understand by the minimap given how close the South generator seems to the base compared to the north and west generators.
I'd just like to say that while it's not clear given all I've written, but the good in these missions far outweighs the bad. I cannot wait for mission pack 2 to be released and hope for improvements to the few weaknesses of mission pack 1.
I decided to do a run of Temple of the Damned (on brutal of course) with only zealots/ascendants, just to gauge how powerful ascendants are.
Here's the vid:
Please note that cannons could be placed to slow down units so you don't get caught off guard by an air attack.
I think the main thing that makes Ascendant's op is the base macro combined with the energy refill. The ability to refill an ascendants energy (guaranteed 2*200 damage) and get a 50 hp zealot for 100 minerals is absolutely nuts. Plus you spend 150/150 to warp in a full energy ascendant and a 75hp zealot.
Would making all heroic units invincible to mind blast prevent mass ascendant strats? I don't think so, as I am floating 3k minerals by the time the first hybrid gets here, minerals that can be spent to deal specifically with those heroic units. The change in strategy would be to mindblast the frontline units instead of the hybrid, and let some fresh (non-sacrificed) zealots take care of it. You can see at 16:32 that 11 fairly weak zealots charge off on the left side to confront a hybrid and 10 seconds later, I look back to see it mostly dead (under 200hp) at the cost of 9 of them. With better micro and units in better health, it should be easy to take it out without much waste.
Of course, heroic immunity would mean that the last wave from the right would steamroll your base, but all the structures that you've put there should delay it for more than long enough.
Maybe look into limiting gas somehow by reducing or removing one or two vespene geysers. As the largest gas cost/unit, ascendant strategies will be the hardest hit by vespene income reduction (or reduced vespene gained during a game)
Edit: of course I don't know how strong the boss is, so it could easily eat up a ton of zealots before it goes down.
I've played through the first 3 missions so far. Yes the first mission is pretty easy, but then again, it's the first mission. It's a nice introduction to Ras'Gul and his abilities.
I disagree that being a "first mission" is a reason to make it easy on the player. The Mar Sara missions of WoL are not easy on brutal at all.
The 2nd mission is harder than the first, but as the mission progresses, you start to ball out of control. I don't see this as an issue at all since most macro maps follow this trend. The enemy attacks your base frequently enough that you definitely have to respond or set up a lot of cannons. Cannons will die so fast to enemy destroyers and collosi so they serve mostly to delay. If I remember correctly, the first 2 and the last terrazine extraction points had a good amount of enemies warping in to defend them. For the remainder, I don't recall any forces warping in, so they were pretty easy to take. I would just make sure there are at least some enemy forces warping in once you start the extraction. I also noticed that the probe could move once the extraction starts and if you move it back to the extraction point, it resets the timer.
The real question is "How quickly do you ball out of control" though. Imo, you do it way too early at seventy or so supply, especially since that you're given two bases. And just because "most maps do it" doesn't mean it's a good thing either. Defence-wise you could set up an "early-warning system" via a pylon placed below the ramp and one very far to the east of your base. The attack waves aren't incredibly strong either, so it may be possible to split your army as in mission 1, maybe have your immortals stay at base, given the armored nature of the waves.
The 3rd mission is not easy at all. The enemy attacks from multiple directions and sends quite a few hybrid at you. I lost the first time I played it as I wasn't prepared for one of the air attacks that went straight for Ras-Gul.
Losing via a sudden curveball (i.e. the sudden introduction of more attack waves) doesn't mean it's difficult. I do note that it is "The best mission from a difficulty standpoint in my opinion." And hybrid die really easily to ascendants, given that they always attack from the same side except for one.
This is my review of WotT pack one. The experience that I'll be basing my review off here:
(note: mission 3 and 4 weak vids)
The story is interesting, if straightforward. Clear goal for the entire pack, and for mission. Clear characterization of Ras'Gul. A small lore issue where Ras'Gul refers to Alarak as the "First Ascendant". Alarak's ascent up the chain was likely much more recent than Ras'gul's exile.
The maps are designed well, from Awakened Evil's Narrow corridors for high tornado coverage, to the depleted terrazine geysers in Echoes of Death, to the two-pronged map putting the battle in the center in mission 4.
I think the hero units abilities/cooldowns are designed well, and the attack waves in mission 1 and 2 prevent him from being absolutely oppressive. The no-supply mind control thing may be a bit much in mission 2 where you can get 4-6 supply units very easily from attack waves.
Gameplay:
The missions seem to be a little too easy.
Going in depth about the first and second missions. Most of these are my opinion, so you may disagree.
Attack waves were just weak in mission 1, where you could hold with around 20 supply worth of zealots while your army of 25-50 units just a-move around the map. They do not scale with size as your army scales.
Defences in mission one were very weak. Most of my losses were to enemy bases, which just killed off my numberless zealot meatshields. Most battles consisted of deciding which unit to mind control and just watching.
Base defences in mission 2 were much better, given the narrow ramp up to the base. Since I had a large amount of extra-high tech units, I won't speculate about how good the terrazine defenses were.
Tornado's didn't do much, they were too easy to avoid rather than something you had to dictate engagements around
In the same vein, poor resource limitations. I could make a huge amount of units before the base is mined out in both 1 and 2 (while 3 and 4 were timed, so it didn't matter as much)
Mission 3 was a high micro for high reward mission focussed on ascendants, but they made the 1k hp boss trivial. Good focus on multi-pronged attacks with just enough spacing to kill the valuable units before the next wave showed up kept the mission fast-paced and kept my APM up. The best mission from a difficulty standpoint in my opinion.
I'm not going to say much about Path to Power as I dislike hard timed missions like that, and whatever I say would be heavily biased by that. That said, defences were tough and set up well, and attack waves were powerful enough to be a threat (with my poor strategy it is tough to tell how strong they would have actually been). However, it does seem that once I crossed the 150 supply mark I started to steamroll.
However, Path to Power seems to have an issue where minerals aren't placed close enough to the nexus.
I'd be more than happy to try out some silly strategies for 3 and 4, like a no-stalker run of mission three, if anyone is interested in optimum strategies/cheese strategies/unexpectedly powerful builds.
Finally got around to playing mission 5. The ability to not activate the drill until your army reaches a critical mass makes the mission easy on any difficulty. The base north of the Drill has too many resources in my opinion, I ended the mission with more than 10k minerals in the bank thanks to it.
All units feel like they have a valuable role. There is no "mass x" composition that does better than a mix. Stalkers are the most efficient DPS, but are large+bulky. Adepts cost a lot, but they will lower the size of your army. Supplicants are cheap mineral tanks that do no damage. And vanguards are anti-ground but can be dodged by mobile enemies.
The hybrid feel varied. The boss wasn't really noticeable aside from being a large hp bar.
A large step up from the previous mission 5, but still loses the brilliant tension put in mission 4.
The condensed Custom Campaign Initiative is on this Google Sheet!
List of my Custom campaign text reviews (warning: only the first half of each is serious)
seems like Auto-sac activates when he takes any hp damage, which is a bit soon tbh. Needs to be like critical or half health. It's hard to see visually if you're getting hp healing out of that.
Yeah more testing has revealed that ALL their cooldowns activate when one activates heal.
As for whether shield healing is useful? I'm going to say "not really" because blink micro exists. I mean it's useful if you want to put them back in combat right away or as a skill floor for ppl who don't blink micro, but other than that not that big a deal tbh.
The condensed Custom Campaign Initiative is on this Google Sheet!
List of my Custom campaign text reviews (warning: only the first half of each is serious)
Havn't managed to find myself some time to play the full map (mission 5), but I think the resource limit on the main base was a good nerf to players, and does up the difficulty as they need to defend multiple points sooner. Still think that destruction wave remains a little strong due to it's low cooldown and lack of long range units that aren't as affected by it, and that you can mine out everything before activating the drill. But please take this with a grain of salt because I didn't get much father than grabbing a second base.
Bugs:
When you select a bunch of stalkers and use capacitor, if ANY of them have damaged shields, it activates it for ALL stalkers, not just the ones damaged.
I don't think auto-sacrifice is working right? My shields weren't even broken and supplicants got sacc'd, losing out on half that healing.
The condensed Custom Campaign Initiative is on this Google Sheet!
List of my Custom campaign text reviews (warning: only the first half of each is serious)
Note: mission 5 is not complete, cybros is still making balance changes
The condensed Custom Campaign Initiative is on this Google Sheet!
List of my Custom campaign text reviews (warning: only the first half of each is serious)
Disagree that vanguards are too strong. They are easily tanked by a few full HP zealot and then your ranged units can get the kill, given their long attack delay. And they are a nice counter against the 150 shield immortals you can run (however, if protected, your immortals will turn the tide).
The condensed Custom Campaign Initiative is on this Google Sheet!
List of my Custom campaign text reviews (warning: only the first half of each is serious)
Update to Wrath of the Tal'darim mission packs 1 and 2.
If anyone's interested in skeleton stats: 40hp with 1 armor, 10 damage per attack with 1 attack speed. Basically whenever a unit dies spawn a zealot that takes 3x damage from colossi.
Without a detailed changelog I can only guess at the full extent of the changes, but some are:
My thoughts:
Mission 1 got too few changes for a replay to be worthwhile imo. Still can clear everything off of 1 base. Mission 2 got significant difficulty upgrades, and while geyser defenses/spawns are still weak compared to attack waves, I think this is a big step in the right direction. You should replay mission 2 if you are looking for an additional challenge, because you will receive it.
I didn't mention this before because I was picking up units from bases, but I do like how attack waves in 2 are designed, giving you tools that you really want to get through the mission. Colossi to deal with skeletons, immortals to deal with literally everything with an "armored" tag, and void rays to do some damage to everything. (and you can pick up a dark archon if you hit the south geyser followed by the west geyser).
Something I noticed is that when a carrier dies (there is now some in the enemy bases) each interceptor will spawn 3 skeletons as well. Would be fun if that can be worked in without worrying about Ras'gul stealing one, just a massive wave of skeletons as a bunch of (heroic?) carriers die.
The condensed Custom Campaign Initiative is on this Google Sheet!
List of my Custom campaign text reviews (warning: only the first half of each is serious)
Okay I know I'm posting again, but this is likely the last post until a major update/another review. I've been replaying mission 4 to see how it works since my previous vid was just throwing small groups of units into a meat grinder.
Here's a video of a zealot/ascendant strat for mission 4:
Note: this is my second success with this strategy after a total of 8-10 failures, so it's not very easy to pull off. I don't feel like that is a bad thing tho, I'm absolutely fine with losing, and losing even more if I have extremely limited my unit comp. 75% of my losses were to North generator (which I hit second) and the remaining 25% were to South (which I hit third).
It's much harder to pull off this composition with mission 4 due to 2 major things.
I think mission 4 is pretty well done in regards to difficulty. However, it's not made clear which generator you should attack first. Via rewatching my vid, I find difficulty to be East < West/North < South, which is hard to understand by the minimap given how close the South generator seems to the base compared to the north and west generators.
I'd just like to say that while it's not clear given all I've written, but the good in these missions far outweighs the bad. I cannot wait for mission pack 2 to be released and hope for improvements to the few weaknesses of mission pack 1.
The condensed Custom Campaign Initiative is on this Google Sheet!
List of my Custom campaign text reviews (warning: only the first half of each is serious)
I decided to do a run of Temple of the Damned (on brutal of course) with only zealots/ascendants, just to gauge how powerful ascendants are.
Here's the vid:
Please note that cannons could be placed to slow down units so you don't get caught off guard by an air attack.
I think the main thing that makes Ascendant's op is the base macro combined with the energy refill. The ability to refill an ascendants energy (guaranteed 2*200 damage) and get a 50 hp zealot for 100 minerals is absolutely nuts. Plus you spend 150/150 to warp in a full energy ascendant and a 75hp zealot.
Would making all heroic units invincible to mind blast prevent mass ascendant strats? I don't think so, as I am floating 3k minerals by the time the first hybrid gets here, minerals that can be spent to deal specifically with those heroic units. The change in strategy would be to mindblast the frontline units instead of the hybrid, and let some fresh (non-sacrificed) zealots take care of it. You can see at 16:32 that 11 fairly weak zealots charge off on the left side to confront a hybrid and 10 seconds later, I look back to see it mostly dead (under 200hp) at the cost of 9 of them. With better micro and units in better health, it should be easy to take it out without much waste.
Of course, heroic immunity would mean that the last wave from the right would steamroll your base, but all the structures that you've put there should delay it for more than long enough.
Maybe look into limiting gas somehow by reducing or removing one or two vespene geysers. As the largest gas cost/unit, ascendant strategies will be the hardest hit by vespene income reduction (or reduced vespene gained during a game)
Edit: of course I don't know how strong the boss is, so it could easily eat up a ton of zealots before it goes down.
The condensed Custom Campaign Initiative is on this Google Sheet!
List of my Custom campaign text reviews (warning: only the first half of each is serious)
I disagree that being a "first mission" is a reason to make it easy on the player. The Mar Sara missions of WoL are not easy on brutal at all.
The real question is "How quickly do you ball out of control" though. Imo, you do it way too early at seventy or so supply, especially since that you're given two bases. And just because "most maps do it" doesn't mean it's a good thing either. Defence-wise you could set up an "early-warning system" via a pylon placed below the ramp and one very far to the east of your base. The attack waves aren't incredibly strong either, so it may be possible to split your army as in mission 1, maybe have your immortals stay at base, given the armored nature of the waves.
The condensed Custom Campaign Initiative is on this Google Sheet!
List of my Custom campaign text reviews (warning: only the first half of each is serious)
This is my review of WotT pack one. The experience that I'll be basing my review off here:
(note: mission 3 and 4 weak vids)
The story is interesting, if straightforward. Clear goal for the entire pack, and for mission. Clear characterization of Ras'Gul. A small lore issue where Ras'Gul refers to Alarak as the "First Ascendant". Alarak's ascent up the chain was likely much more recent than Ras'gul's exile.
The maps are designed well, from Awakened Evil's Narrow corridors for high tornado coverage, to the depleted terrazine geysers in Echoes of Death, to the two-pronged map putting the battle in the center in mission 4.
I think the hero units abilities/cooldowns are designed well, and the attack waves in mission 1 and 2 prevent him from being absolutely oppressive. The no-supply mind control thing may be a bit much in mission 2 where you can get 4-6 supply units very easily from attack waves.
Gameplay:
The missions seem to be a little too easy.
Going in depth about the first and second missions. Most of these are my opinion, so you may disagree.
Mission 3 was a high micro for high reward mission focussed on ascendants, but they made the 1k hp boss trivial. Good focus on multi-pronged attacks with just enough spacing to kill the valuable units before the next wave showed up kept the mission fast-paced and kept my APM up. The best mission from a difficulty standpoint in my opinion.
I'm not going to say much about Path to Power as I dislike hard timed missions like that, and whatever I say would be heavily biased by that. That said, defences were tough and set up well, and attack waves were powerful enough to be a threat (with my poor strategy it is tough to tell how strong they would have actually been). However, it does seem that once I crossed the 150 supply mark I started to steamroll.
However, Path to Power seems to have an issue where minerals aren't placed close enough to the nexus.
I'd be more than happy to try out some silly strategies for 3 and 4, like a no-stalker run of mission three, if anyone is interested in optimum strategies/cheese strategies/unexpectedly powerful builds.
The condensed Custom Campaign Initiative is on this Google Sheet!
List of my Custom campaign text reviews (warning: only the first half of each is serious)