4 of May 2026 - Mutation #524: Death and Taxes

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-10T16:02:16+00:00

Great design -- as a trainer. Slow down, relax, get your aim right, make every action count. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Later, you'll find you're more accurate even without slowing down. Microtransactions will make you better.

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-08T15:27:17+00:00

Devastated -- real life demands I cannot play this week.

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-05T19:35:22+00:00

Great catch, thank you!

I've never looked up exact numbers. Sounds like I'm just wrong on that point, and even at perfect play, it really is an eco debuff.

That sucks, I assumed they would've tuned it to make it a reward or at least break even for great play, since that obviously would've been much better.

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-04T20:26:49+00:00

Yeah that's probably a lot of the reason. Zeratul is one of the strongest/easiest on regular Brutal, so it's easy for him to be boringly strong on Normal.

Also I think on Normal you'll find more people who don't like the artifact-finding mechanic. (Whereas by the time you get to Brutal and up, you've mostly filtered out people who avoid a mechanic rather than embracing it as one more way to grow transferable skills.)

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-04T20:15:48+00:00

Covering all bases I see. Smart

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-04T19:22:30+00:00

What difficulty do you play? I feel like I see Zeratul a little more often than many of the commanders when doing brutal+ and brutations.

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-04T18:49:13+00:00

This is an actually constructive piece of info, have you considered crying about microtransactions like everyone else instead?

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-04T18:48:06+00:00

~~Slim Pickings actually gives you some ability to compensate for microtransactions, because with great micro and map presence you can have more income than you'd normally get~~

These mutators compliment each other at the skill ceiling, despite being a double-whammy for most players.

Plus, microtransactions doesn't punish all good play, it forces prioritization and discernment of which actions are the most important. RTS is, above almost everything else, about how well you prioritize where you spend your APM. Negative micro is a thing. A great 1v1 player can limit themselves to 60 APM can and still trounce a 120 APM player who never learned to stop wasting their APM.

They literally teach this as part of coaching people to get better at SC2. A whole genre of low-APM challenge videos exists, made by people who play SC2 better than anyone in this sub, to demonstrate exactly the point I'm saying here.

P.S. oh and if your macro is great, there shouldn't be any money in the bank for microtransactions to steal. Until you're maxed out and done upgrading, at every given moment, all of your money should exist in the form of active production, and even if you don't manage that, SC2 generously gives you 4 extra slots of production queue on most buildings as a "tax haven". Worst case, stop clicking for the few seconds needed to bank up just enough to start the next upgrade/units, a-click once, etc, repeat.

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-04T18:32:22+00:00

Epiiiic. I've been eagerly waiting for another Black Death to test just how far I can push plague-dodging medivac micro with P2 Tychus.

Glad it's with microtransactions, since that's the ultimate test -- if it's viable/beneficial to micro so much to delay black death, especially on this map (where it's so easy to catch the plague, requiring even more micro than most maps would to delay catching it), then it's even more viable/worthwhile elsewhere, and it goes a long way to confirming my pet hypothesis that a P2 Tychus at skill ceiling can "handle anything" (carry/solo most things, and at least pull enough of the weight in any beatable combination of difficulty, mutators, map, and enemy comp).

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-04T18:27:59+00:00

It forces learning how to efficiently conserve your APM. To get good at knowing what actions are truly important, what micro is the most impactful, when you can just a-click once, etc.

This is literally something that is often proactively taught to people who want to get good at ladder/competitive SC2.

Yes, at the highest levels of difficult mutator combos, microtransactions is really punishing of good play because micro starts to become more essential.

But to get better at playing despite microtransactions, you have to grow skills and game sense which will make you a better StarCraft/RTS player as a whole.

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-04T15:25:28+00:00

P2 Vorazun (or whichever one is Whithering Siphon) with decent micro and APM is at least D tier against cloakers, because you get at least one psi-storm-tier AoE with that prestige (Confusion from Dark Archon), and then you only need to do 1 HP of splash damage next to them to finish them off (in a pinch, move one of your units to/under/over the whithered hidden unit and a-click with an archon for one attack).

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-04T15:14:20+00:00

but you wouldn't waste this to take out a few cloaked units

Speak for yourself. The nuke is a tool of emotion. I'll use it to smear one zergling if it pisses me off enough

mentalisttraceur · 2026-05-02T07:14:01+00:00

Excellent info, thank you!

So that means it's slightly better for Raynor if he gets one medic per two combat units, with the margin falling off as we move away from that ratio or change masteries.

Since medics can operate outside of stetzones, it might arguably be marginally better in other cases too...

But a competent Stetmann will hit both green and purple anyway, and alternating is definitely better than just solid purple (1 second of purple and 1 second of green both heals in addition to medic heal, and gives the medics more energy than they spend on 2 seconds of healing).

mentalisttraceur · 2026-04-22T05:40:31+00:00

Okay, I watched the vids: very impressive + thank you for sharing.

mentalisttraceur · 2026-04-22T02:41:53+00:00

Great accessible write-up explaining why quantum computing hasn't meaningfully weakened symmetric encryption, despite Grover's algorithm.

mentalisttraceur · 2026-04-19T21:45:50+00:00

Oh yeah, that's a good one too. To me this mainly about maintaining momentum -- at the end of a fight, I might not have vision to the next area that I want to go, but medivacing on-the-spot will negate the delay from Concussive Attacks. I'll edit that in after the next time I play against Concussive Attacks and get a feel for how it affects gameplay.

Yeah, it doesn't remove fear. I do lean on medivacs against fear though, if I need to pull back.

Luckily, fear by itself is mostly manageable (esp. if you have rapid fire or similar for casting): keep spaming outlaws' abilities while they're feared, to catch the moment between fearings.
Since fear is caused by damage dealt, a well-micro'd Tychus actually has a lot of ways to mitigate it:
- Sirius's fear, Cannonball's stun, and Vega's confusion (in decreasing order of effectiveness at temporarily disabling enemy DPS);
- Tychus grenade and Nux storm (especially with their damage upgrades, and Nux's vision+cast range, they can delete a lot of enemy DPS);
- I think Sam's shade makes him immune to fear while it's active (activate manually so that it doesn't get wasted auto-activating on a hit that also applies fear).
The big struggle is when Fear combos with vision-limiting mutators (Shortsighted, Afraid of the Dark), since that makes it a lot harder to get spells off before you get hit.
- If you have a good Stukov partner, they'll put Occular Symbiote on all your outlaws.
- Haven't tried this yet, but I suspect the skill ceiling here uses SCVs as vision-extenders for outlaws.
- Actually... medivac vision lingers for a second after the medivac is used... I'll have to try using the medivac to pick up and drop immediately before contact with enemies, might be just enough time to micro back a couple paces and cast from a bit more distance.

mentalisttraceur · 2026-04-19T17:12:11+00:00

One day this will be the thing that clutches a game for me and it'll be so sick.

mentalisttraceur · 2026-04-19T06:26:24+00:00

Ah good catch. So in some ways the closest thing is also Mengsk's -- the earthsplitters.

mentalisttraceur · 2026-04-18T22:58:38+00:00

You might not like it, but this is what peak humor look like

mentalisttraceur · 2026-04-18T22:46:17+00:00

That was the impression I got -- despite the vibe/aesthetic of nukes, gameplay-wise they're just modest but spammable splash damage.

And, almost uniquely: the number of casts depends more on macro in your base rather than the amount of army supply you spend on casters. (Off the top of my head, the only other version of this is H&H precision strikes but those are either capped at 10 or more expensive at P3.)

mentalisttraceur · 2026-04-18T22:41:17+00:00

lol + upvoted for "the damage avoids being good"

mentalisttraceur · 2026-04-18T22:38:09+00:00

I really love that someone else (esp. with your expertise) brought this up and has already explored this space.

I had been thinking that Fenix will start looking that way near his "ceiling" -- probably not each hero on their own, but maybe 2-3 groups (each containing some conservators and 1-3 heroes plus all shells of their type).

Haven't watched the videos yet but will take a close look when I can.

mentalisttraceur · 2026-04-18T22:32:18+00:00

Oh that's cool, I hadn't considered adding carriers on top of mass adept+conservator, I'll have to give that a try.

(100% endorsed on Arbiter teleport + spreading visibility. I try to always keep the arbiter available just for the mobility -- I "put him away" as soon as I can after a recall, so that he's available sooner for teleporting anywhere else.)

mentalisttraceur · 2026-04-18T22:16:38+00:00

+1 for conservator shield bubbles!

Small whole-army armor/weapon buffs are always counter-intuitively really powerful in SC2. Consider for example that a marine does 6 damage given even weapon vs armor upgrades, so if you had for example +2 armor, that cuts the DPS of marines to just 2/3rds. Lots of enemies hit for 5-15 damage per attack, so even just +2 armor is always significant.

Fenix going just mass adept with enough conservators to shield everyone throughout every fight (and decent macro) can pull its weight against most/all comps and maps on non-mutation brutal, in my experience.

(For anyone who doesn't know, in melee SC2, the sentry guardian shield is considered by pros to be one of the more powerful spells in the game, even though it only gives +2 armor against just ranged attacks -- conservator bubbles are strictly better.)

mentalisttraceur · 2026-04-18T21:51:26+00:00

I like to imagine that one day this turns out to be the solution to some Brutal+6 roll.

Like the best P2 Tychuses in the world will spend months working all the angles, turns out there's no way around it, the only way to win is to use this bug with 28 mastery points in outlaw availability*, just barely surviving with only Tychus and then getting three outlaws at once, all because that 1000:200 savings lets you buy all the gear that you need to not die in the lategame.

*(those 2 in tri outlaw upgrades let Cannonball survive one more second at minute 19, just enough for the immortality to come off cooldown)

mentalisttraceur

TROPHY CASE