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aka: Starcraft II Coop

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Co-Op Commanders

StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void introduced Co-op Mode, where two human players can choose 1 commander each out of multiple choices to represent them in the battlefield. Each commander has their own advantages and disadvantages. The missions are all time-based, and players can choose them manually, or allow a random selection (for a slight experience boost). The two human players will battle a random race and unit composition, along with hybrid units.

Each race is represented by six commanders for a total of 18, and experience for each commander is tracked separately. Besides random mission selection, players can play at higher difficulties for greater experience gain. Levels gained through experience unlock more passive and researchable upgrades for the commanders to utilize until maxing out at level 15. Raynor, Kerrigan and Artanis are playable commanders for players that did not purchase Legacy of the Void, the other ones being exclusive to it. From Abathur onwards, players would have to pay to access new commanders.

The ten year anniversary update brought about a major expansion to Co-op Mode with the introduction of Prestige Talents. Each commander is given three new Prestige sub-classes that the player can switch between after reaching level 15 normally. These sub-classes offer different strengths-and-weaknesses that could even bring about an entirely different play-style compared to how that commander is normally played. The kicker? Each Prestige sub-class starts over at level 1; meaning that the player now has up to 54 new commanders to level up.


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Terran Commanders

    James Raynor, Renegade Commander 

Prestiges: Backwater Marshal, Rough Rider, Rebel Raider

"Now that's what I call victory!"

Jim Raynor specializes in Barracks units, building armies of Marines supported by Medics, Firebats, and Marauders. However he also has an impressive arsenal in the Factory and Starport. Raynor's talents lend him to a Zerg Rush strategy, as he has three particular themes — building units fast, boosting their attack speed, and using drop pods to reploy them to their rally point instantly. This means Raynor can quickly build up a massive army with great damage output, and then keep reinforcing them in greater numbers than they fall, to overwhelm the enemy through sheer firepower. As a calldown ability he can bring in a squadron of Dusk Wing elite Banshees to support, or summon the Hyperion, his Cool Starship that supports units fighting in range of it.


Provides examples of:

  • A Commander Is You:
    • Given that he's the main character for the Terran race, which is advertised as being the all-around race, it should be no surprise that he follows the Generalist doctrine. More often than not, Raynor will be relying on Marines and Medics, Vultures and Vikings, or Battlecruisers.
    • More advanced strategies put him firmly in the Economist territory. His armies are fairly mediocre on their own, and are devastated by Area of Effect attacks. However, his Orbital Command's MULE calldown can exceed the standard "3 workers per mineral patch" mining limit, and there's no limit to the number of Orbitals he can make. As such, he can pull in resources so fast that even though he suffers enormous losses fighting many enemy compositions, he army can be replenished faster than the enemy can kill it.
    • Numbers-wise, he's the biggest Spammer among the Terrans. Unlike the other commanders, Raynor's units are lacking in significant bonuses, making them relatively weak. However, he does have the best economy among them; with good macromanagement, he can make up for his units' relative weakness by simply producing them in enormous numbers.
    • His Backwater Marshal prestige pushes him slightly away from Spammer and removes his Economist benefits in exchange for flat-out doubled health on all his infantry units.
    • Rough Rider and Rebel Raider both encourage more balanced, and in the case of Rebel Raider, outright Elitist playstyles focusing on his mechanical units. The former is a classic Cannons/Ranger playstyle that uses rapid-fire Siege Tanks and Vikings to melt enemies in a hail of explosive death, while the latter leans towards a Techincal army that supplants it's cheaper air units with an endless deluge of Calldowns.
  • Achilles' Heel: Despite them being potentially very strong, even more so with the Backwater Marshal prestige equipped, his bio ball units are still rather squishy all things considered, and likewise are still very susceptible to high-damage AoE or anti-infantry attacks. This means that Reavers, Lurkers, High Templars, and Siege Tanks are still going to be the bane of them, as are Ravens and Banshees, and their tendency to bunch closely together certainly doesn't help their life expectancy when faced with these units.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • The Backwater Marshal prestige. Having double the health on your infantry units is pretty neat, no doubt about it, but when the enemy starts massing area-of-effect damage on higher difficulties, the extra health starts to mean a lot less, and the loss of MULEs makes it harder for Raynor to recover from taking losses and support his army with Spider Mines. Furthermore, having more health on your units will tax your Medics a lot more, resulting in them being chronically out of energy. While it can be useful, your micromanagement really needs to be on-point to avoid getting shredded by tougher enemies.
    • Battlecruisers. While Tactical Jump does have its uses and Yamato Cannon can provide some much-needed burst against Hybrids and the like, they're also incredibly tech-intensive, cost a fortune to deploy, and are generally less damaging than their equivalent cost in Marines, making it very slow to ramp up with them on a commander that's very reliant on ramping up quickly. It doesn't help that they're also a very tempting unit to rush out for Raynor players, which in turn makes them into The Load in the early game if they don't know what they're doing. Unless, of course, you have the Rebel Raider prestige. With the ability to build a quick Starport into a Fusion Core along with a gas discount (and the increased mineral cost being made largely irrelevant by MULEs), a Rebel Raider Raynor can pretty much go an entire mission building nothing but Battlecruisers if he knows what he's doing.
  • Balance Buff: His 15% training speed bonus was eventually increased to a 50% bonus and applies to all his units (Previously, it only applied to his infantry; missions where his infantry were unsuitable left him at a disadvantage with his Factory and Starport units). His mechanical units also costs less gas to build. In Patch 3.7, his Medics were given the ability to heal mechanical units, and units being healed take reduced damage.
  • Boring Yet Practical:
    • As detailed under "Zerg Rush" below, Raynor is best at rapidly building a large army of Marines with variable support from Medics, Marauders, or Firebats as needed, and his other tech options are workable but less impressive. Fortunately, the classic MMM (Marine, Marauder, Medic/Medivac) has long been one of the simplest but most efficient strategies in Starcraft II on both the campaign and multiplayer fronts, so this strategy is perfectly viable for most every Co-op mission too.
    • His workers gain an ability to complete construction of Supply Depots instantly. Nothing fancy, but when you're pumping out an army as quickly as Raynor can, getting supply blocked is a real problem.
    • His Vultures can replenish their supply of Spider Mines at small mineral costs, allowing a small force of Vultures to create an utterly massive mine field. Given that many Co-op maps rely on defending key objective points and/or have enemy attack waves coming at you from predictable land paths, this is perfectly effective for quickly obliterating the enemy if you know the mission well enough to anticipate where they'll strike.
    • The Orbital command can call down a MULE, which harvests minerals a few times faster than an SCV for a time, and then breaks down and a new one can be called. However, they are immune to the normal limits of miners per mineral patch, and there is no limit to the number of Orbital Commands a player can build. As such, a Raynor player can achieve a resource income more than double that of a normal commander, allowing for We Have Reserves levels of attrition.
    • He can instantly deploy his units to the rally point of his construction buildings, making it much easier for him to mass units since he doesn't have to worry about his infantry's squishy selves getting picked off in transit. This also allows him to bypass the normally-dreaded fog of war that blocks the use of calldowns and targeted transports, letting him deploy behind enemy lines with ease.
  • Cast from Hit Points: Raynor's Marines and Marauders can spam Stimpacks to gain a whopping 75% increase to their attack speed at a slight ding to their HP with each use. A savvy Raynor player would be having scores of Medics on hand specifically to remedy this small issue on top of keeping their men alive.
    • The Rough Rider effectively turns Afterburners into a mechanical Stim. It also drains a bit of HP from affected units to give them a tremendous attack speed boost.
  • Death from Above: Jim can call down the Hyperion or Dusk Wings (advanced Banshees) to help out in the battlefield for 60 seconds. He also gets an upgrade to deploy his trained Barracks and Factory units to the rally point instantly via drop pods.
  • Death of a Thousand Cuts: His marines aren't any stronger than normal ones. Instead, they gain +15% base attack speed, an extra 25% on stimpacks on top of their normal +50%, and when they spawn, they can temporarily be even faster resulting in even a single marine performing an obscene number of attacks. And Raynor doesn't use single marines.
  • Defog of War: Raynor's Orbital Command centers can use Scanner Sweep to reveal any location on the map on top of acting as his sole method of active detection.
    • His Orbital Drop Pods talent lets him plop down units anywhere on the map regardless of fog and/or vision.
  • Difficult, but Awesome: On higher difficulties, Raynor can struggle to get anything done, usually due to his (usually) very mineral-focused bio army bottlenecking without the use of large amounts of MULEs, usually provided by 3-4 (sometimes more) Orbital Command centers, and his army is quite fragile without the ability to quickly replace them. In addition, it's easy to get tunnel vision and forget to build tech beyond a Factory to back up the bio units with the likes of Siege Tanks, Banshees, and/or Vikings to deal with threats that his bio army would simply melt against. On the other hand, he also needs as many production structures as he can get, or he ends up sitting on a large bank of resources that he simply can't spend fast enough to remax if something goes horribly wrong. Overcome both these obstacles, and Raynor becomes one tough customer.
  • Elite Army: Raynor's Backwater Marshal prestige gives his otherwise fragile Barracks units double their usual health at the expense of him no longer having MULEs. Combined with his Vanadium Plating talent causing his armor upgrades to also give bonus health, this prestige easily makes his infantry almost as tough as Nova's elites. He won't be able to hoard minerals as easily to replace his units en masse, but ideally he won't be taking as many losses in the first place.
  • Elite Tweak: In an example that borders on Violation of Common Sense, the Hyperion actually deals far more damage while moving (in which case it automatically strafes nearby enemies) than when it's actually given an attack command, causing it to focus all it's firepower at a single target, and very likely, overkill it, wasting several shots in the process due to projectile speeds. Additionally, it has a higher attack speed while moving, which isn't seen in any other Battlecruiser. As such, optimal use of the calldown requires players to constantly micro the Hyperion to keep it moving and take advantage of this.
  • Gameplay and Story Integration: In Wings of Liberty, Raynor expressed his love and nostalgia for his old Vulture bike, despite Swann pointing out how fragile and unreliable they generally were. Unsurprisingly, Vultures are included amongst his units.
  • Glass Cannon: His Banshees are very much this, dealing a lot of damage to ground units, but have the staying power of a wet napkin when those same ground units start shooting back at them. Because of this, most players don't even bother massing them, relying on the infinitely more powerful (and free) Dusk Wings calldown instead.
  • Gunship Rescue: He can call down the Hyperion or a squadron of Dusk Wings fighters to invoke this trope. The Rebel Raider prestige ideally plays like this; it jacks up the mineral cost of his army by 50%, but removes the tech and gas requirements for his Starports along with slashing the Vespene cost of their units by 30%, thus making his usual bio ball much less practical to mass, but encourages a focus on air. Furthermore, each Viking, Banshee, and Battlecruiser Raynor controls reduces the cooldown of his calldowns by 1% per unit of their Supply, meaning Raynor is going to be fielding a large air force and constantly spamming Dusk Wings and the Hyperion to make up for his weaker bio.
  • It's Raining Men: At Level 8 his units are spawned from their structure's rally point via drop pod for Barracks and Factory units. Starport units don't bother, settling for a Dynamic Entry instead. Units deployed this way have the added bonus of being able to drop down anywhere that's solid ground (and Starport units, everywhere), without needing line of sight and/or visibility, allowing Raynor to quickly setup offensive positions from wherever he so chooses, or strike at targets entrenched deep behind enemy lines, making him especially versatile when playing certain mutations.
  • Magikarp Power: Raynor's units are fairly weak in the early game, as outside of calldowns their only advantage over their main game counterparts is the free, less damaging stim. By the lategame those units are... still fairly average, but backed up by an economy so strong that one can make it rain marines faster than they can be killed.
  • The Medic: Gets Medics to keep his and allied units fighting fit. They can also repair mechanical units.
  • More Dakka:
    • Raynor's last commander perk is to increase infantry attack speed by 15%. He also has a superior brand of stimpacks that increase rate of fire and movement speed by 75% rather than 50%. The Marines will be doing this.
    • The Rough Rider prestige lets his mechanical units get in on the fun as well by letting Afterburners increase units' attack speed, essentially giving them stimpacks as well.
  • Nostalgia Level: Most of Jim's arsenal hearkens back to Brood War, with only Marauders, Vikings and Banshees being from Starcraft II.
  • Sequence Breaking: The Rebel Raider Prestige removes the tech requirements from the Armory, Orbital Command, and Starport, allowing him to skip the Barracks and Factory entirely and go straight into air units.
  • Stone Wall:
    • He gets both Bunker upgrades from the campaign (Shrike Turret and Reinforced Bunker) along with upgrades to increase Bunker capacity and armor by 2. This makes his Bunkers obscenely tough when fully loaded, and gives Raynor a powerful defensive line. Throw in some Siege Tanks and a few Vultures for laying minefields, and very few enemies can break through.
    • His Backwater Marshal prestige turns his bio ball into this, with doubled health and HP-boosting effects from armor upgrades. With Vanadium Plating, a maxed-out Marine alone has a whopping 136 HP in addition to armor, while his firebats boast an excessive 430 health, matched with a battlecruiser-esque 6 armor and potentially further damage reduction from a Medic's Stabilizer Medpack.
    • Battlecruisers, of course, and they stand out even more on Raynor for being his tankiest unit. They are also his slowest unit, with their main methods of mobility being the heavily cooldown-restrained Tactical Jump and Afterburners. On a meta level, they also take quite a while to get rolling due to being an extremely-expensive, highest-tech unit: by the time you get a single Battlecruiser out, you could also have a small army of infantry backed up with a Siege Tank or two. The prestige Rebel Raider, however, makes Battlecruisers much quicker to roll out, due to the restriction removal on the Starport, as well as the dramatic vespene discount. Battlecruisers' durability also makes them a great choice on mutations that punish you for losing units, such as Slim Pickings.
  • Trap Master: He gets access to Vultures for laying down Spider Mines, letting him sink his excess minerals (and make no mistake, it's very easy to get excess minerals with enough Orbital Commands) into placing explosive traps for enemy attack waves. While they get easily swept away by detection, controlling enemy spawn points allows Raynor to lay minefields down on them, decimating ground-based attack waves and letting his army easily mop up whatever's left.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Raynor's only means of detection is through Orbital Command scans. If his Orbital Commands are out of energy, he's out of luck. While this can be circumvented through building more Orbital Commands, he still needs to rely on manual detection scans as opposed to dedicated detector units that everybody else uses, forcing him to stay on his toes lest he take massive losses to cloaked enemies.
  • We Have Reserves: He WILL lose a huge number of units against most enemy compositions, second only to Zagara and Stukov. Due to his incredible resource collection rate, it doesn't slow him down much.
  • Zerg Rush: In perhaps the greatest instance of Irony in the Koprulu Sector, Raynor's kit allows him to emulate the doctrine of his greatest foes perfectly. His first Talent lets him build Barracks and train units faster; he is also the only Terran commander with the ability to construct Orbital Commands and consequently use MULEs. In tandem with a comparatively shallow pool of Factory and Starport units (though what he does have is perfectly effective), this results in him leaning towards a large army of (relatively) cheap, rapidly-built infantry units that will likely die fast, but can be replaced easily en-masse.

    Rory Swann, Chief Engineer 

Prestiges: Heavy Weapons Specialist, Grease Monkey, Payload Director

"Hey, not bad for a wrench-jockey, eh? Haha!"

Rory Swann specializes in the mechanical stuff; he can only produce Factory and Starport units, fielding an army of Terran vehicles and starfighters. His mechanical army is slow to build and upgrade, but Swann has several ways improve his efficiency, including drones to boost his Vespene mining, utilizing multiple SCVs to build structures faster, and Tech Labs to build two units at once. The comparatively high costs, supply, and build times of his forces, along with the many upgrades they have, means Swann needs time to get momentum going, but once he does he has a very powerful, versatile deathball that can roll over the enemy. Swann also gets the Drakken Laser Drill at his base, which will automatically attack enemies around the map and can be upgraded for increases damage and to unlock Swann's calldowns. Without infantry and Bunkers for defense, Swann can build automated turrets, with three kinds to choose from that together form a very sturdy defense network.


Provides examples of:

  • A Commander Is You:
    • Numbers: Elitist, by Terran standards. His basic unit, the hellbat/hellion, costs the same in minerals and supply as a Protoss zealot, for instance. However, his units are all pretty beefy, and the hellbat can be upgraded to do massive damage to light units and get an excellent armor rating.
    • Doctrine: Brute/Ranger/Turtle/Industrial/Economist, with a side order of Unit Specialist. His army isn't very sophisticated, but he has many ways to boost their health, heal them without expending minerals and even bring them back from death in some cases. Fully upgraded, several of his units boast missile attacks with impressive range. His army is also generally quite slow, apart from the hellion and the Hercules dropship, and his static defences are, obviously, static. But when fully upgraded a mass of turrets can become a self-sustaining firewall capable of attacking and holding off any kind of unit in any quantity. His SCVs can be upgraded to build buildings more quickly by joining forces, and repair mechanical units at no extra cost. His Vespene Harvester drones can also kickstart his and his ally's vespene economy, allowing their more powerful units to join the fray earlier.
  • Back from the Dead: His Thors and Siege Tanks can be rebuilt in the field when destroyed, provided the wrecks aren't destroyed themselves.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • Swann's Vespene Harvester allows him to increase the speed of vespene extraction from all friendly extractors AND gives 50% of the increased haul to his ally. With how hungry players often are for vespene, the boost is very effective.
    • He gains the ability to allow his buildings to self-repair up to 50% of their maximum hitpoints if they go below that, which removes the Achilles' Heel of Terran buildings burning down when in the "red" zone. On top of that, he also has the Tech Reactor, which combines the advantages of a Tech Lab and Reactor into one add-on building.
    • All of his air units besides the Wraith. The Hercules is not a dramatically-powerful unit, being a transport and all, but if it gets its cargo to their destination it's already done its job, and the ever-helpful Science vessel is basically a flying medic for mechanical units, which means he can repair his forces for free.
  • Cool, but Inefficient: Wraiths are generally agreed to be the weakest unit in Swann's roster, costing the same as a Goliath while boasting inferior DPS against both air and ground targets. The only thing they have going for them is their stealth, and with enemy detectors not exactly in short supply even that isn't a strong recommendation. They were eventually bumped up to Difficult, but Awesome with an upgrade that greatly boosts their damage while moving, meaning that stutter-stepping Wraiths can unload massive burst damage as long as you have the APM to keep them alive and moving.
  • Death from Above: The Combat Drop, which drops ARES war bots onto the target location.
  • Death is Cheap: Retains the Immortality Protocol upgrade from the campaign, which allows destroyed Thors to be rebuilt for a small vespene cost and Swann's version applies to Siege Tanks as well. With his enhanced gas income, Swann rarely has problems affording the repair cost, making his Tanks and Thors difficult to kill for good.
  • Difficult, but Awesome:
    • Swann is notorious for being one of the hardest commanders to use effectively due to his abysmal early game. He takes an awfully long time to come online due to his high costs, his relative lack of economy boosts, and most of his units only being effective in large numbers, rendering him The Load early on. Even when he does get the ball rolling, it takes some fancy micromanagement to use his army well. However, a good Swann player can be an absolute beast on both offense and defense.
    • Hercules + Siege Tank is the preferred strategy of high-level Swann players, but ignored in the lower levels due to the ulcer-inducing amount of micro involved. Nonetheless, it still has the highest damage output of any army Swann can field, and a player that can use this strategy well will turn Siege Tanks of all things into a highly-mobile force capable of vaporizing everything on the ground.
  • Elite Army: Swann has a wide variety of mechanical units, almost every one in the game in fact. Coupled with each of them having at least one unique upgrade, in addition to some universal upgrades that affect all of them, this makes his army expensive to build and upgrade, but very effective once he does so.
  • Elite Tweak: Tactical Hercules use for Swann can be just as devastating as drop play on ladder maps, especially when combined with Siege Tanks to improve their mobility and protect them from ground attack. While Swann can roll out a deathball of Goliaths and Thors and still do perfectly fine, throwing in a Hercules loaded with tanks improves his anti-ground damage dramatically and with little risk as long as you micro the Hercules well.
  • Energy Weapon: The Drakken laser drill. It has unlimited range and can be upgraded twice. Its one weakness is that it has a minimum range, which is where Swann's turrets come in.
  • Foil: To Karax. Both commanders are heavily tech-based and capable of erecting strong static defenses, but whereas Karax tends to focus more on building turrets due to most of his upgrades benefiting that playstyle on top of his units being exorbitantly expensive, Swann's kit instead encourages the player to amass a large mechanical army to do most of the heavy lifting, and his turrets are weaker than Karax's at holding off high-intensity enemy waves.
  • Jack of All Trades: His Goliaths are capable of attacking ground and air, are fairly durable and aren't super expensive. Their special multi-lock upgrade allows them to have some of the highest DPS per supply in the game and annihilate most combinations that Amon can throw at them.
  • Healing Factor: One upgrade allows his Factory and Starport units to heal slowly over time.
  • Hypocritical Humor: One of his responses towards discovering Terran enemies: "Great... enemy Terrans. Hate these guys..."
  • I Call It "Vera": His upgraded defensive turrets are named Spinning Dizzy (missile turret), Flaming Betty (perdition turret), and Blaster Billy (devastation turret).
  • Kill It with Fire: Flaming Betties and Hellbats/Hellions are Swann's main defences against swarms of small units.
  • Long-Range Fighter: Swann's main combat units, the Goliath and Thor, both can be upgraded to nearly siege unit ranges, letting him gun down enemy defensive structures from outside their range and have his entire army open fire on an enemy despite his force's large footprint. To say nothing of the range of his Siege Tanks.
    • Exaggerated with the Laser Drill. It's a turret that can't move, but it's range is literally global, allowing it to open fire on anything that it can see.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter: He can't build Barracks or train infantry at all, instead skipping straight to Factories. His Factories have no Vespene cost to make up for his dependence on them.
  • The Medic: His Science Vessel is a mechanical version. It can also heal protoss mechanical units.
  • Mighty Glacier:
    • Without the use of his Hercules dropships, Swann's army isn't very fast (save for the Hellion). However, they hit hard and they can take many hits.
    • Swann's army also has one of the slowest ramp-up times in the game, meaning that he'll take quite a while to get his army ready for combat. But once his army is fully built and upgraded, they can simply trample anything in their way.
  • Power Up Letdown: Initially, his Tech Reactors had the issue of taking longer to build than Tech Labs or Reactors. In the campaign, this wasn't as much of a concern as Tech Labs and Reactors are still available to players, but Swann loses the ability to build the former two when he unlocks Tech Reactors, meaning that it slowed his ramp-up even further. A Balance Buff reduced the build time of his Tech Reactors, eliminating this issue.
  • Robot Master: Every single one of Swann's units is mechanical, and he specializes in building and upgrading armies of mechanized troops.
  • The Turret Master: His other specialty aside from being the resident Robot Master. Swann is effectively Karax's Terran counterpart with his Drakken laser drill, and the Perdition, missile, and the Co-Op exclusive devastation turrets, giving him a versatile and effective system of static defenses. His Grease Monkey prestige makes his turrets twice as effective at the cost of a 50% increase to the gas cost of combat units, encouraging Swann players to rely on mass turrets instead of a mobile army.
  • Support Party Member: While not as support-oriented as Karax, Rory's free vespene is nothing to scoff at, and combined with free repairs for any other mechanical-heavy army, especially protoss ones who can't repair, he's quite useful even without counting his heavy artillery.
  • Wave-Motion Gun: The Drakken laser drill has two abilities as it upgrades that do devastating area-of-effect attacks across the entire map.
  • Why Won't You Die?: Rory's Thors, and to a lesser extent every other mechanical unit in his army (That is to say, all of them), are very hard to put down for good. His SCVs repair for free, he has Science vessels with Nano-repair (which costs no energy after one cheap upgrade), and can project shields onto his units, and if they actually do go down, his Thors and Siege tanks can get back up.

    Nova Terra, Dominion Ghost 

Prestiges: Soldier of Fortune, Tactical Dispatcher, Infiltration Specialist

"They never saw us coming."

Nova takes the field herself as a hero unit, commanding an army of powerful Spec Ops units that have higher stats than normal. Her units build differently from normal Terrans, producing "charges" at her production facilities that she expends to call units in immediately via drop-pods. This allows her to rapidly summon large numbers of reinforcements in the field and quickly adapt her army's composition to best suit the flow of battle. As a downside though, Nova is limited to 100 supply, limiting how large her army can grow. Furthermore, her units are more expensive than most other commanders' and their "charges" have long cooldowns, requiring extra care to be taken to keep her handful of troops alive; fortunately, she has defensive drones and bio-mechanical repair drones for just that.


Provides examples of:

  • Boring, but Practical: As always, Automated Refineries, but it's even more practical for Nova. When you only have 100 supply, saving twelve of it by not needing SCVs to harvest vespene is extremely useful.
  • A Commander Is You:
    • Numbers: Elitist. Nova's forces are among the strongest Terran units in the game, but they're prohibitively expensive and she is capped at 100 supply and 1 of each production facility. Furthermore, her production structures use charges, making her unable to mass-produce units quickly and forcing her to conserve her forces as much as possible.
    • Doctrine: Research/Technical/Generalist. With a limited army size, Nova needs to make good use of abilities and calldowns to keep them going for as long as possible. This also frees up resources for researching her units' various upgrades, making them more effective in the field. Nova's production mechanics mean that she usually can't mass one or two unit types, forcing her to invest in multiple different units. Fortunately, her arsenal has options for dealing with any enemy.
  • Continuing is Painful: Moreso than virtually any other commander, Nova cannot afford to take heavy losses. Her units cost a mint to train and are limited by cooldown, meaning that rebuilding her army after getting wiped will be a slow, arduous process... and the mission timer certainly won't cut you any slack.
  • Crossover: With the Covert Ops DLC; her army consists of units she has in that campaign and they have the same upgrades as well. Nova likewise has many of the same abilities and equipment from the DLC.note 
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: When playing as the Infiltration Specialist, one must hold back from accidentally clicking directly onto enemy units with Nova selected, as this will direct her to start attacking them; this breaks her Super Cloak.
  • Death from Above: As a Ghost, Nova of course can call down nuclear strikes. She can also call in the Griffin to strafe an area.
  • Death is Cheap: Instant Regeneration allows Nova to be revived on the spot for a mineral price. With a store of minerals the player can revive her several times in succession to keep fighting. Stops being cheap if she keeps dying repeatedly, however.
  • Deflector Shield: She can summon defensive drones to grant a Defensive Matrix to allied units. Nova herself gets a temporary shield after using Blink.
  • Discard and Draw: The Infiltration Specialist prestige eschews Nova's Assault Mode entirely, instead doubling down on the capabilities of her Stealth Mode by giving her Super Cloak as long as she's not using her rifle, as well as improving the cooldowns and blast radius of her Sabotage Drone and Nuclear Strike.
  • Doppelgänger Attack: Nova's Assault Mode has the Holo Decoy ability, which creates a sword-wielding shade of her to help in battle. The decoy is not controllable, but it doesn't have to be; not only can the decoy quickly clear out groups of enemies, it can take quite a bit of damage as well.
  • Double Tap: Triple Tap; her Ghosts can upgrade to fire three Sniper rounds at once.
  • Drone Deployer: One of her calldowns is Defensive Drone and she has an access to Ravens Type II.
  • Elite Army: Being the Spec Ops commander, Nova focuses very much on quality over quantity. All of her units are much more powerful than their normal counterparts and have resistance against stun effects, and she also gets a selection of defensive abilities to keep them alive along with the ability to research upgrades more affordably and quickly. However, she only has a 100-supply limit to work with and her units are more expensive, which means she won't be getting the large armies other commanders can.
  • Flash Step: Nova gets the Blink ability to teleport a short distance. It also stores up to three charges.
  • Foreshadowing: Unintentionally; as her army and abilities are all based on the Covert Ops DLC, her Blink ability turned out to be this; she only acquires it in Part 3 of the campaign, which was released after she was added to Co-op.
  • Glass Cannon: Nova's hard-hitting units tend to be this.
    • Don't let their 250 base HP fool you, Nova's Spec Ops Ghosts are surprisingly fragile for their cost. Without Marines or Marauders acting as their Meat Shield, a small mob of mid-game enemies can wipe the floor with them, thus crippling your economy because of the high costs that go into replacing them. They can also tear the enemy a new one with Triple Tap Snipe if they're sufficiently upgraded and are deployed in large enough amounts. If you know what you're doing, then you can forego other unit types entirely once your Spec Ops Ghosts have hit critical mass, at which point this trope is no longer relevant. They do however have the downside of only being able to Snipe biological units, restricting their usefulness against things that aren't Zerg or Hybrid.
    • Even with three times the health of a regular Marine and the ability to heal with Super Stimpack, Nova's Elite Marines tend to go down quickly when focused without Defensive Drone and Raven support. However, they also pack excellent firepower for their cost.
    • Nova herself is also this, especially when in Assault Mode where she must get close to the enemy to give them the business. To play Assault Mode Nova properly is to carefully manage her Blinks, so that she can get away from enemy attacks before they hit her and replenish her shield.
  • Gunship Rescue: She can call in the Griffin to strafe an area with bombs, or to pick up her army and transport them somewhere else.
  • Healing Factor: Nova's Ravens can deploy drones that heal damaged friendly units, and her Marines can be upgraded with a Super Stimpack that heals them instead of being Cast from Hit Points. Nova's unit regeneration mastery also provides passive healing to all units when not engaged in combat.
  • Hero Unit: Nova herself is controllable in the field. While not the force of unbridled destruction that Kerrigan and Dehaka can be, Nova can still take on early enemies solo and easily soften up enemies for her forces.
  • It's Raining Men: Nova doesn't just train units, hers are instantly hot-dropped into the field when deployed. Even her air support flies in from orbit.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter:
    • She trains units instantly and deploys them via drop pods, and then the production facility then takes time to recharge; this overall makes her production facilities function similar to Warp Gates.
    • She can only build one each of the unit producing facilities.
    • Her supply is limited to 100, but she has no need for Supply Depots.
    • Her calldowns all cost minerals to use, a distinction only Zeratul shares and for a while was exclusive to Nova.
  • Money Sink: Players throughout Starcraft often wind up with far more minerals than they know what to do with. Not Nova; all of her calldown skills require minerals to use, with the Griffin airstrike costing 1000. This coupled with its short cooldown, and of course her other mineral-using calldowns, means she always has a way to get rid of excess minerals in ways that don't involve upgrading and expanding the army.
  • Nerf: Patch 3.8 changed her Strike Goliath's Lockdown Missiles so they no longer stunned Heroic units, preventing her from turning Void Launch and the bonus objective on Rifts to Korhal into a Curb-Stomp Battle.
  • Odd Name Out: She and Tychus are the only Terran commanders to be referred to by their given names. The rest of the roster are identified by their last names instead.
  • Shotguns Are Just Better: In her Assault Mode she wields the Hellfire Shotgun, allowing her to blow away enemy infantry en masse. At level 15, the switch buff from Stance Dance doubles the damage of Nova when she enters Assault Mode, allowing her Penetrating Blast ability to one-shot every light infantry unit in the game, including Protoss Adepts. Even Terran Ghosts, which don't have any specific armor tags, will just outright die to the 100 base damage of a Stance Dance-buffed Penetrating Blast. And this is before the increased damage from Mastery Points, which can make Nova's shotgun ability max out at a whopping 150 base damage, which even kills Roaches.
  • Squishy Wizard: Nova isn't the most powerful hero unit in direct combat. Naturally she favors stealth and subterfuge, infiltrating enemy bases to soften them up by disabling key enemies before her army comes in to mop up the rest. In Assault Mode she has heavier firepower but is still not very effective as a direct attacker.
    • Spec-Ops Ghosts, as to be expected from a Ghost variant. Their cloaking is their only native defense against instantaneous death against the forces of Amon, but their Snipe and EMP spells are very potent.
  • Stance System: She can switch between Stealth Mode, which allows her to remain permanently cloaked and has abilities based around subterfuge, and Assault Mode, which disables cloaking but makes her a more capable front-line combatant.
  • Stealth Expert: The Infiltration Specialist prestige removes Nova's Combat Suit, but in return makes her undetectable while not attacking or using Snipe. This allows Nova to sneak into enemy defenses with impunity to blow everything up with Sabotage Drones.
  • Stone Wall: Her elite units have much more health than their regular counterparts (for example, her Elite Marines have 100 more health than Zealots, counting shields), but their firepower advantage is generally much smaller in comparison, meaning while her small ball of units is quite resilient, it has difficulty matching the firepower of say, Raynor's hundred-something marines.
  • [Verb] This!: One of Nova's lines as she calls down a nuke:
    Nova: Detect this.
  • You Nuke 'Em: She has the ability to call down nuclear strikes, but only in Stealth Mode.
  • Zerg Rush: Her Soldier of Fortune Prestige enforces this, as much as is applicable for Nova — she can build her production structures in any order and the first one out will gain charges twice as quickly, but the other two will only gain charges at half the rate, forcing her to invest heavily in one particular unit type. This is especially the case if she goes Barracks first, since she will be fielding large numbers of Marines, Marauders, and Ghosts, but few of her higher-tier units.

    Mira Han and Matt Horner, Mercenary Leader and Dominion Admiral 

Prestiges: Chaotic Power Couple, Wing Commanders, Galactic Gunrunners

"Right. Now I must say my goodbyes, Mira. It's been fun... sort of."

With the Dominion decimated by Amon's attack on Korhal, Matt Horner has to call in some help from his "lovely wife" Mira Han to bolster his forces, forming an army comprised of both ruthless mercenaries working for Han and Dominion militia under Horner's command. The two field Assault Galleons, mobile assault ships that manufacture Han's units — the Reaper, the Hellion, and the Widow Mine — on the move, while Horner calls in Dominion air units from an Elite Starport at their home base. Han can deploy Mag Mines to track and destroy enemy units that stray close, and "Space Station Reallocation" lets her smash a pirate space station into enemies with the force of a nuke. Horner can call down precision bombing strikes against targets of interest and summon the Dominion fleet to bombard a large area from orbit.


Provides examples of:

  • Achilles' Heel: No ground-to-ground defensive structure. Not Raynor's bunkers, not Swann's perdition and devastation turrets, not Nova's railgun turrets, not even Tychus' piddly little autoturrets or Mengsk's emergency supply bunkers; the closest thing they get are Widow Mines. This can make them very vulnerable to early game enemy waves that catch them unprepared.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • The Drone Hangar upgrade for Assault Galleons lets them deploy automated drone fighters to supplement your forces in combat, basically turning them into Carriers, and gives them the ability to heal over time. However, upgrading your Galleons also costs a fortune in vespene gas, and given that Horner's units and Strike Fighters are also pretty gas-heavy, you'll probably have to forgo upgrading some of them in order to get your more impactful late-game units.
    • A build focusing entirely on Precision Strike spamming can output hilarious levels of damage that can reach any corner of a map, allowing the player to just sit in their base and casually send out bomber after bomber until their target is reduced to smoldering ruins. The catch is that, doing so without a strong defensive ally will basically hobble their staying power even further than it already is if the enemy decides to swing over for a visit, since this playstyle dedicates most of its resources to building Strike Platforms instead of actual military. As such, it should only be attempted if the situation allows for it, which it doesn't most of the time.
      • As an extension of the above, the Galactic Gunrunners prestige. Infinite Strike Fighter platforms sounds decent on paper, but doubled costs on Strike Fighters makes it a lot slower and clunkier to build them en masse. Furthermore, they take forever to knock down mission objectives and can't hit air units, meaning that you'll need an actual army to push the objective and deal with airborne enemies, and since the Strike Fighters still take up supply... you're not gonna have a whole lot of army to work with.
  • Badass Navy: Matt Horner commands the best ships in the Dominion Navy, which are stronger, tougher and better equipped versions of base Starport units.
  • Battle Couple: As much as Matt tries to avoid the matter, they are married after all, and work together as a single commander.
  • Benevolent Boss: Implied. According to her quotes, Han pays her crew very well, and one of her Berserk Buttons seems to be killing off large numbers of her men.
    Mira Han: We can't let our crew die after all we paid them!
  • The Battlestar: Assault Galleons, flying airships that can fight enemies themselves and automatically manufacture automated drone fighters to fight as well, to say nothing of producing Reapers and Hellbats to fight on the ground.
  • Cannon Fodder: Han's units all die quickly, but are quick and cheap to mass up.
  • Colony Drop: Han can teleport an entire space station to crash into enemies and deal heavy damage. The space station is a One-Hit Killnote  against anything that's not a mission objective or Heroic unit, to which it deals 500 damage instead.
  • A Commander Is You:
    • Numbers: Han is a Spammer, while Horner's an Elitist. Han's army is comprised of cheap units that hit hard but die fast, and can train very quickly with one of her talents; furthermore, their ability to salvage resources from destroyed units allows her to recoup some of the units' cost. Horner, on the other hand, uses highly expensive units with much better stats than their regular counterparts which can only be produced in a trickle.
    • Doctrine: Technical/Guerrilla/Ranger/Unit Specialist. Han and Horner work best when using their calldowns for making precision strikes, then sending in their army to mop up. Horner can also Tactical Jump his air force to key locations to help facilitate this tactic. Some micromanagement is naturally required to help minimize losses due to their lack of reliable healing and Han's units being innately squishy, as well as to use Strike Fighters and Mag Mines efficiently, and outside of some of Han's lesser-used units, all their forces are either entirely flying, or can atleast opt into it temporarily, negating many dangerous enemy attackers like Siege Tanks and Reavers, but at the same time being especially vulnerable to Thors and Vipers.
  • Composite Character: Han's Hellions can be upgraded with Tar Bombs, which have a slowing effect like the Marauder's grenades, and their normal attack deals bonus damage to armored enemies like the Marauder.
  • Crutch Character: Han's army in a nutshell. Her units are cheap and fast to build and her Assault Galleons pack a decent amount of firepower, so you'll be relying on them for the early game. When the game goes late, their lack of survivability and limited production rate starts to show, but by that point, you should have enough of an economy that Horner can take over with his Elite Army.
  • Death from Above:
    • Han's Assault Galleons and Horner's air force means they'll be using primarily a large, powerful force of air units.
    • Their "Call in the Fleet" cooldown orders the Dominion fleet to bombard a large area with attacks from orbit.
    • Their Strike Fighters bombard an area with a fast-moving fighter craft. They're normally capped at 10 but a Prestige removes the cap in exchange for increasing their cost, letting Horner bombard an area endlessly.
  • Elite Army: Horner's air units are all upgraded with superior stats over their normal counterparts, but also higher costs.
  • Foil: To Raynor. Both commanders focus on massing infantry and backing them up with mech support and can aggressively deploy troops on the battlefield, but while Raynor has more options for setting up a defense line, the Horners favor overwhelming offensive power. Raynor's mech units are more of a supplement to his infantry backbone, while Matt's air units take equal importance to Mira's mercenaries. Raynor masses infantry by generating a huge economy and getting lots of production structures, while Han masses infantry by scavenging resources from lost units and training units very quickly off a limited number of Assault Galleons.
  • Gameplay and Story Integration: According to their preview trailer, the reason Matt decides to work with Mira's mercenaries is because the Dominion's standing forces could use the numbers, and in the Legacy of the Void campaign the Dominion was decimated by Moebius Corps and left in no condition to fight in the End War. This reflects in-game with Mira's mercenary units being cheap to build in large numbers in the early game, but they're meant to be used as Cannon Fodder to support the player while they bank up resources to slowly build up Matt's Elite Army aircraft, which are much more powerful but very expensive and difficult to mass.
  • Glass Cannon:
    • Han's ground units have much higher power than their normal counterparts, but their HP is lower.
    • The commander in general is this. Han and Horner pack withering amounts of firepower between their army and calldowns, but their lack of defensive calldowns and healing means they're not good in sustained combat, encouraging players to soften enemies up with their topbar before marching their army in to clean up the rest.
  • Healing Factor: Horner's air units and Han's Reapers will restore health over time while out of combat, as will Assault Galleons with Drone Hangars equipped.
  • Incoming Ham: In stark contrast to her usual soft-spoken demeanor, if the player drops a space station onto the battlefield, Han will thunderously laugh her ass off.
    Mira Han: Ah haha ha! Ah, it's like a bomb just went off in my heart!
  • In Love with Your Carnage: Han's voice lines when A-moving your unit ball suggests she's turned on from doing it. Likewise, she has several lines addressing Horner in a flirtatious way after completing an objective. Zig-zagged in that the player doesn't necessarily have to have Horner units in their composition for her to say any of that.
    Mira Han: How suggestive...
  • Keystone Army: An interesting version, based on the Significant Others mechanic. The more Han units exist, the more HP Horner's get. The problem is that Han's army is intentionally easy to kill en masse. If enough Han units die, Horner's fleet falls behind critical HP thresholds and will start dropping like flies.
  • Kill It with Fire: Han's Hellbats not only use flamethrowers, but can be upgraded to set enemies on fire upon death. Horner's precision bombardments can be upgraded to use napalm rounds.
  • Last Ditch Move: Han's units all have upgrades that trigger a final attack that is automatically used when they die. Hellbats ignite the terrain to scare enemies, Hellions boost the attack and movement speeds of allies, Reapers release a final flurry of explosives at their killer, and Widow Mines fire missiles in all directions.
  • Magikarp Power: Contrasting Han, Horner's Elites are extremely expensive, individually powerful units that once built up en masse, can roll through enemy armies with minimal losses. The keywords there being once built up, which, given their high costs and highly limited production rates, will take quite some time, until then, you'll need to rely on Han's mercenaries to form the bulk of your army.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter: Especially since they're functionally two separate commanders that are played as one.
    • Han commands the ground units while Horner commands the air power, and this is an important distinction to make for how their talents affect either unit type.
    • They don't build conventional production facilities at all; Han builds Assault Galleons, mobile production facilities that train a mix of Barracks and Factory units, and Horner has a single Elite Starport that calls in powerful air units instantly, then takes time to replenish charges.
    • Han's units are intended to be used as Cannon Fodder, as they cost only minerals, build quick and cheap, and when they die they activate a devastating final attack and leave behind salvage to return some of the resources used to build them. Horner's units, being an Elite Army, are expected to avoid losses, and in that vein they heal when outside of combat and can be upgraded to have Tactical Jump so they can instantly retreat from a losing battle.
    • They share weapon and armor upgrades for all their units, but they're researched at the Armory, while their Engineering Bay researches unit-specific upgrades for Han's units like a traditional Tech Lab would.
  • Money for Nothing: Amazingly enough, even they of all people can actually float a lot of resources should the player commit to a Precision Strike-focused playstyle. Assuming they don't have to rebuild or repair anything afterwards, as soon as the tenth strike platform is built and all of their relevant techs are researched, Han and Horner will basically stop consuming vespene and minerals.
  • Mythology Gag:
    • Horner's Sovereign Battlecruisers can be upgraded to change their attack to a single powerful shot, much like how Battlecruisers attacked in the original StarCraft. Additionally, when their damage are fully upgraded, they deal 260 damage per shot, this value is exactly the damage dealt by the Yamato Gun of the Battlecruiser in the original game.
    • Horner's Call in the Fleet, which summons the Dominion Fleet for a strafing run, is extremely similar to one of Raynor's heroic abilities in Heroes of the Storm, where he calls in the Hyperion to do the same.
  • No Cure for Evil: Han has no way to heal her units besides the gradual regeneration on her Reapers, and Horner's limited to regenerating his own force's health, with no way to heal her units besides upgrading her Assault Galleons. Anything else has to be manually repaired, or more likely, replaced.
  • Orbital Bombardment: Horner's ultimate, Call in the Fleet, calls in the Dominion fleet to scourge an area from above for a short time.
  • Power Floats: A major point for Han's Reapers; they can upgrade to supercharge their jetpacks for a short time, letting them take off into the sky and be air units, including the ability to shoot back at enemy air.
  • Spikes of Villainy: Well, Spikes of Punch Clock Villainy: Han's units and structures have spikes integrated into their design to play into the "rough and tough mercenary" theme. When upgraded Horner's units gain these spikes as well.
  • Stance System: Once upgraded, Horner's Sovereign Battlecruisers can freely switch between their strafe-firing AT-X Laser Battery for use when dealing with mass trash units, and the stronger (but slower) mini-Yamato cannon that deals very high damage per shot but cannot be fired on the move.
  • Straight Man and Wise Guy: Their overall dynamic; Mira's having the time of her life blowing things up with her husband by her side, and Matt just kind of ignores her antics and would kindly like to get things over with as quickly as possible.
  • Tele-Frag: Space Station Reallocation does this with, well, a space station, dealing massive damage to Heroic units and a One-Hit Killnote  to anything else. An upgrade turns it into an improvised nuclear bomb, allowing it to do even more damage after it's appeared.
  • We Have Reserves: Han's units compensate for their frailty by being insanely fast and cheap to train and unleashing Last Ditch Moves on death. Special mention goes to her Hellions, which you actually want to die first in an engagement since they give a hefty attack speed buff to nearby units when destroyed. Played with however, in that she can't replace her losses as quickly as some other commanders due to having a maximum of five galleons to build from, and losses can easily overtake production if she tries to handle everything by throwing waves of her troops at it, necessitating Horner's elites to form a more permanent core force to anchor her.

    Tychus Findlay, Legendary Outlaw 

Prestiges: Technical Recruiter, Lone Wolf, Dutiful Dogwalker

"I'll drink to that. You're buyin'."

What If? Tychus survived the end of Wings of Liberty, reformed the Heaven's Devils, and reconciled with Raynor to fight together against Amon's forces? Tychus favors quality over quantity, commanding only the aforementioned Devils in the field and compensating for their lack of numbers with a variety of useful gadgets, psionic skills, and plenty of guns. To make up for their lack of mobility, the Devils can call in Medivacs to reposition themselves rapidly, and when the time comes to call in the big guns, Tychus can bring in the mighty Odin to fight.


Provides examples of:

  • Adaptation Deviation: During regular co-op play, the Big Red Button upgrade for the Odin allows for a single-shot Nuke every time it's deployed. In the original Wings of Liberty campaign mission Engine of Destruction, the big red button instead triggers a Barrage, while the Nuke is fired by pressing a different button with a skull on it. In-game, researching Big Red Button replaces the Odin's Barrage ability with the nuke, so it can presumably be chalked up to the Devils rewiring the Odin's controls.
    Campaign!Tychus: Hello there, now how'd I miss this button with a skull on it?
  • An Adventurer Is You: The Outlaws run the gamut, being partially inspired by World of Warcraft and RPGs in general
    • The Guns, are primarily DPS.
      • Tychus is an Archer, with much of his value coming from his monstrously powerful minigun and armor-shredding bullets. His shredder grenade lets him dabble in Area of effect nuking and crowd control.
      • Crooked Sam is the Nuker, focusing on taking out single important targets with his demolition charges, while also dealing decent, if not particularly spetacular damage with his pistols. With upgrades, he also stun enemies he sticks his charges to, and dabble in trying to be an Avoidance Tank.
      • James "Sirius" Sykes is the Minion Master of the Heaven's Devils with his turrets, which can output even more damage than Tychus when they're all out on the field, while also serving as the Mezzer with his fear-inducing attacks and nuking air units.
    • The Muscle are primarily tanks.
      • Blaze is the Mitigation Tank with his ability to reduce damage he takes to at most, 30, as well as the DoT Master thanks to his powerful upgraded oil spill.
      • Rattlesnake is a Jack of all trades with the second-best healing of all the Outlaws, does decent damage output, especially against armored enemies, the ability to buff everyone's attack speed, deal splash damage, while being a fairly bulky character all make Rattlesnake one of the most popular Outlaws.
      • Cannonball serves as a Meat Shield and Regeneration Tank with his ability to self-revive upon taking fatal damage every minute and his massive health pool. He also acts as one of the Mezzers in the Devils with his area-stunning charge move and a Blademaster Melee DPS with his ultimate gear.
    • The Fixers, then are mostly Support Party Members
      • Lt. Nikara is the purest Healer in the Devils and has some aspects of the Premptive Healer
      • Nux is an area of effect oriented DoT Master that can also reduce the cooldowns for everyone. As the Outlaws don't use any resource but Cooldowns this makes him their Resource Master
      • Vega is a combination of Petmaster and Mezzer. She can dominate enemy units to turn them to your side temporarily, increasing their damage and possibly attack speed and letting the snowball potential of all her stolen heavies crush otherwise overwhelming foes. One niche ability that lets her force air units to fall to the ground, immobile, lets her further serve as a situational Mezzer, especially useful if you're using multiple muscle.
  • A Commander Is You:
    • His Hero Unit-only playstyle is basically Elitist taken to its logical extreme.
    • Doctrine-wise, he's Gimmick due to only using hero units. As he needs to pick the right Outlaws for the job and use their abilities well to make up for the lack of numbers, there's some Technical in there as well. Given his forces slow movement and powerful crowd control and durability, he'd be classified as a Powerhouse, Finally, he falls under Research as he focuses on upgrading his squad through upgrades rather than recruitment, since he's hard-capped at five units in the field.
    • Technical Recruiter, as it's name implies, pushes Tychus towards Technical, trading off a slower and more expensive start for the ability to throw out more abilities.
    • Lone Wolf is Tychus's Guerrilla talent, giving him the ability to attack from multiple angles with empowered Outlaws, but weakening his ability to push in with a full team.
    • Dutiful Dogwalker on the other hand, is pure Brute, adding a near-permanent Odin with it's monstrous health pool and powerful splash-heavy weapons to Tychus's team. However, the Odin is both slower than a normal Outlaw, and using the prestige to it's fullest means not taking the mastery for reducing the cooldown of Tychus's Medivacs, noticeably reducing his mobility in exchange for brute strength.
  • Action Bomb: James "Sirius" Sykes, the Warhound, can get an upgrade to explode for area damage on death. While letting him die just to use the ability is generally not a good idea, it also applies to his turrets, which are much more expendable.
  • A Day in the Limelight: One of his Outlaws is a Warhound, which marks the first time in years that this unit has been playable without the use of mods.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit:
    • Despite his posse consisting of eight Outlaws in addition to himself, Tychus can only bring three, at most four into each mission, up to a maximum headcount of five. Additionally, he has to wait to bring out a new one, though there's no in-universe reason given. With the Dutiful Dogwalker prestige, this headcount is (temporarily) bumped up to six as the Odin is a separate unit from Tychus itself, complete with its own pilot.
    • His supply is capped at 100, except that unless the player builds far more SCVs than they neednote , they'll never be in danger of supply capping because Tychus' army just isn't big enough even with the large supply cost each one has.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: The Odin itself sees rather little use if the player is reasonably competent. While powerful, it's far from a gamechanger. The Odin's main utility is to provide the player with a one-shot crowd-control attack, and an instant nuke if upgraded. That, or a quick response to their base being sieged. Unless in a pinch, most players will usually stick to the default Five-Man Band for most of the game, while putting the Odin on the backburner until a quick fix is needed. On his own, Tychus is a lot more mobile, attacks faster and can spam Shredder grenades constantly. That being said, it's lessened at higher levels - with multiple Medivac platforms, the Devils can easily respond to attack waves, freeing up the Odin to spearhead base assaults with the Big Red Button.
  • Badass Crew: Tychus literally only has access to the Devils, with no regular troops available to him. And yet, he and four of them are able to do as much work against Amon's forces as the armies that the other commanders can bring.
  • Canon Immigrant: One of the Devils that Tychus can call upon, is Miles "Blaze" Lewis, the Firebat first introduced in Heroes of the Storm.
  • Can't Drop the Hero: Regardless of who you pick for your group of Devils, Tychus himself will be present in every party, being the first Devil out of the bar, automatically and for free.
  • Character Class System: Tychus' forces are classfied as "Guns" (Glass Cannon DPS), "Muscle" (Mighty Glacier damage tanks) and "Fixers" (Support Party Members).
  • Color-Coded Characters: Unlike other commanders, who have a single faction color, the Heaven's Devils each have their own unique color scheme to make them stand out from each other.
    • Tychus: Blue
    • Crooked Sam: Cyan
    • James "Sirius" Sykes: Brown
    • Miles "Blaze" Lewis: Orange
    • Rob "Cannonball" Boswell: Pink
    • Kev "Rattlesnake" West: Green
    • Lt. Layna Nikara: Turquoise
    • Vega: Yellow
    • Nux: Purple
  • Combo: Tychus' upgraded Shredder Grenadesnote  plus Nux's fully upgraded Ultrasonic Pulse equals a thoroughly dead attack wave. Add Cannonball or Blaze for flavor.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: Both Crooked Sam's demo charges (when upgraded to stun enemies) and Blaze's oil can disable Heroic enemies such as Hybrid, giving Tychus an exemption on it.
  • Cool, but Inefficient: One of his achievements requires you to acquire ultimate gear on all 5 of your heroes by the 20-minute mark; doing so requires the ability to expand very early and completely forsake building anything that isn't the Devils' tech structures and a Command Center + refineries, as well as ignore his more practical engineering bay upgrades.
  • Crippling Overspecialization:
    • Tychus' kit is heavily geared towards aggressive attacks, while leaving him with very little in the way of defensive options. This, coupled with his small number of units, makes him struggle on more defensive maps like Temple of the Past and especially Dead of Night. He also doesn't have much to react to an unexpected attack other than a quick Medivac ride to intercept them, or calling down the Odin.
    • Lt. Nikara provides incredible amounts of healing to Tychus's crew and nothing else; unless you need absurd amounts of healing for a Mutation or are focusing hard on the squishier Outlaws, Rattlesnake usually provides all the healing you need and has the bonus of more utility (such as anti-Hybrid damage).
    • Blaze is either the tankiest or second tankiest outlaw, depending on the type of incoming damage faced, and his splash damage and fast-spreading damage over time let him wipe out entire hordes on his own. However, said damage is almost entirely reliant on it's targets being light units, and Blaze's offensive potential is largely negated against Armored opponents.
    • Playing with Lone Wolf reveals that just about all of Tychus's Outlaws suffer this to some degree or other, which is usually countered by all of them working as a team and dealing with their specialties. Crooked Sam has no Herd Hitting Attacks, which makes him terrible against mobs of enemies, which is made worse by him having the lowest health pool of all Outlaws. Both Rattlesnake and Cannonball have the sheer damage, health, and self-sustain to power through most opposition, but cannot hit air units. Nux is reliant on his Ultrasonic Pulse to do damage for him, given his mediocre base attack and is highly limited when it's on cooldown and Vega needs others to take damage for her while she builds up to a critical mass of mind controlled units. Only Tychus and Sirius are relatively reliable all-rounders.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!
    • The nature of Tychus' kit encourages players to pretty much command his entire squad as a single unit with very light micro needed, if at all. While this isn't normally a problem, players using Lt. Nikara in their build will be in for a nasty surprise should they prefer A-moving over precise micro, as she will always, repeat always, go wherever she is told to at all cost, sometimes charging ahead of the squad and getting shot along the way. This is because she lacks a basic attack, and thus interprets "attack-move" as "move here".
    • Additionally, each member's ability is tied to a different hotkey based on which order they were hired, which will change as you adapt to scenarios...one game, "W" might be Rattlesnake's big heal, in another it'll be Crooked Sam's demo charge or Sirius's turret.
  • Death is Cheap: Both literally and logistically, since downed Devils can be redeployed for 250 minerals a pop. Considering how most Tychus players will be literally sitting on a cache of minerals in the late game with nothing to spend on, this is much more practical to spam than say, Nova's Instant Regeneration. That being said, unlike Instant Regeneration, redeploying the Devils does require time, which can be costly when an objective is on the run or Hybrids are marching on your base.
  • Disc-One Nuke:
    • Miles "Blaze" Lewis, one of the four starting Outlaws, is pretty much all you'll ever need if you know what you're doing. His Oil Spill ability becomes frighteningly useful when upgraded to spread fire to nearby enemies when a burning target dies, making him a huge asset in crowd-control. If done right, Miles by his lonesome could clear out much of the Dead of Night map just by spamming this one skill, since burning enemies will daisy-chain to one another when they die and potentially spreading fire to the infested structures as well. Because of this insane level of power, he has since been Nerfed so that the burn damage from Oil Spill requires direct line-of-sight, and enemies within the fog of war will no longer spread fire to each other, but this can be easily sidestepped by playing with a teammate with good map control such as Stetmann or Kerrigan.
    • Another starting Outlaws, Crooked Sam, could be upgraded to cause demolition charges to stun an enemy on hit while also temporarily disabling their detection capability. While this sounds rather lame compared to Blaze's ability, it could potentially save the crew's lives in a pinch, as currently Heroic and Massive enemiesnote  are not immune to the stun. Drop a charge on an enemy Hybrid Behemoth and watch as it melts under the combined fire of Tychus and co. Did we mention he can carry up to three charges at most and there is only a negligible cooldown between each use? Crooked Sam's ultimate gear also has a chance to reduce charge cooldown substantially with each attack, making it highly spammable.
  • Dungeon Bypass: Naturally for Crooked Sam, who's a Reaper King Mook. However, this can work against his favor as his AI will take the shortest route possible when moving the whole squad, which can cause him to blunder straight into an enemy encampment that you're trying to skirt around.
  • Fighter, Mage, Thief: Tychus's three categories of Hero Units form this dynamic. The Muscle are about soaking damage and wreaking havoc on the front lines, the Guns are built for dishing out damage from the rear, and the Fixers boast useful support abilities.
  • Foil
    • Is one to Nova. Both have 100-supply limit that focuses on quality over quantity, however, Nova relies on upgraded tech to boost her Elite Army. Tychus relies on his connections for his crew and the skills they have.
    • Is one to Fenix. Both commanders have access to unusually large amounts of Hero Units compared to the other commanders, but while most of Fenix's heroes are empowered by having other units that are of the same type as the hero, his Champions being extraordinary Protoss warriors honored for their prowess and courage by the rest of Protoss Society, Tychus has no other units aside from his heroes; his heroes instead make use of upgrades from his structures and a variety of abilities on top of their dramatically increased stats to keep up with the armies all his allies use, as his Outlaws being renegades who broke from the rest of Terran Society to strike out on their own.
  • Gatling Good: Tychus wields a minigun as big as he is on the battlefield.
  • Goomba Stomp: The Odin damages any enemies underneath it when deployed into battle.
  • Grappling-Hook Pistol: Rob Boswell, the HERC Muscle, retains his base unit's signature ability to grapple to an area.
  • Herd-Hitting Attack: To compensate for their low numbers, several of Tychus' units have special abilities that hit multiple units at once, with upgrades focused on increasing the damage, radius and duration.
  • Hero Unit: Easily the epitome of this trope among the commanders, as they are literally all his army consists of. They are divided up into three categories: the Guns, the Muscle and the Fixers. Specifically:
    • The Guns:
      • Tychus himself: Carried over almost wholesale from the "Belly of the Beast" mission in Wings of Liberty. Tychus is a Marine using a chaingun who also packs Shredder Grenades to hit a wide area of lightly-targeted units.
      • Crooked Sam: A Reaper who carries Demolition Charges, special grenades that can be thrown at a single target to deal heavy damage after a small duration.
      • James "Sirius" Sykes: A Warhound. Deploys turrets, which gain upgrades to their damage output and range alongside him.
    • The Muscle:
      • Miles "Blaze" Lewis: A Firebat. His special abilities focus on spreading his flame attacks around and dealing damage over time, which other flamethrower-wielding units such as Hellions can synergise with.
      • Kev "Rattlesnake" West: A Marauder. Can deploy Revitalizers, special structures designed to heal and augment friendly units in their vicinity over time.
      • Rob "Cannonball" Boswell: A HERC. Incredibly bulky and has the special ability Heavy Impact which pulls him to a target location, stunning and damaging enemies on impact.
    • The Fixers:
      • Vega: A female Ghost. Specializes in using Mind Control abilities to cause disruption and confusion amongst enemy ranks.
      • Nux: A Spectre. His unique ability Ultrasonic Pulse is specially-designed to hit large groups of enemies for major damage over time.
      • Lt. Layna Nikara: A Medic. Naturally, she lacks offensive output in favor of powerful healing single-target healing and a Restorative Burst that heals allies in a wide area.
  • Humongous Mecha: It just wouldn't be Tychus without the Odin. When it is called in, Tychus will be its pilot, unless the Dutiful Dogwalker prestige is selected, in which case it will be its own unit and reuse the portrait from Heart of the Swarm.
  • I Call It "Vera": In-game tooltips reveal that several of the Outlaws have named weapons. Tychus's minigun is named "Sweet Talker", Crooked Sam's pistols are "The Negotiators", Cannonball called his flash welder "Meteor Smasher", and Sirius's main gun is "Big Tom" while his turrets are "Little Tom".
  • In-Series Nickname: Several of them have one, with Crooked Sam, Vega, and Nux being Only Known by Their Nickname.
  • Jack of All Stats
    • Kev "Rattlesnake" West, the Marauder. He starts with slightly above average health on par with Tychus and Sirius, has respectable damage for a Muscle (especially against armored enemies), and can deploy Revitalizers to heal, letting him do a bit of everything except anti-air. However, he's not the best at any of those; Lt. Nikara has better healing, the Guns have better damage and can hit air, and the other two Muscle are more specialized for tanking than he is.
    • Tychus himself leans more towards damage dealing, but has comparable health to Kev, a hard-hitting rapid-fire weapon with extremely high damage that's good against both single tough targets and swarms of smaller ones, and a grenade that lets him handle early game waves by himself and can be upgraded into a powerful crowd control tool.
    • Similarly, James "Sirius" Sykes combines the highest non-muscle health pool with one of the most versatile abilities of all Outlaws. His Warhound turrets let him absorb damage without taking the hits himself, deal high sustained damage, and make him the only outlaw capable of detecting stealth without upgrades.
  • The Juggernaut: The Odin itself. With anywhere from 3000 at base to 4500 fully upgraded health, and upwards of 8 armor, it can easily soak up more fire than most of what Amon's armies can even put out, and that's without using the fact that Rattlesnake heals it for 180 health a second to make it even more obscenely resilient.
  • Kill It with Fire: This is Miles "Blaze" Lewis' MO. Being a Firebat, it is a given that his kit revolves around devastating use of fire to burn his enemies to a crisp. His Oil Spill ability amplifies the burning damage received by his enemies, and can be upgraded to cause his victims to explode and spread even more fire around them when they die.
  • Leeroy Jenkins: Due to the Firebat's nature as a melee-ranged combatant, Miles "Blaze" Lewis will frequently charge ahead into mobs of enemies in order to burn them. This normally isn't a problem, being one of the tank options for the crew, but if this isn't properly managed or the crew is short on healing abilities, he may die very fast, resulting in the rest of the crew being down a tank to draw aggro away from them.
    • Surprisingly, and perhaps frustratingly, Lt. Nikara can be especially guilty of this if the player prefers A-moving the entire party over using micro. Despite, or perhaps because of, her inability to attack, the Lt. Nikara will always go where you A-move her to instead of standing at a safe distance and engage the enemies like any sensible combat unit would. This means that placing an attack-move command into the middle of a base will see the Lt. Nikara obediently strolling up to wherever she was told to and getting perforated like an idiot, while the rest of the group is held back by the bulk of the enemies to slowly die because they are now down a Medic. This behavior is, incidentally, a side-effect of giving Nikara identical unit AI to the medics fielded by Raynor; the difference is that unlike Raynor's medics, Nikara doesn't usually have to heal units constantly; if Raynor's units took fights as efficiently as the Heaven's Devils tend to, his own medics would do the exact same things Nikara does when A-moved with the army.
  • Lightning Bruiser: Rob "Cannonball" Boswell starts out as a Stone Wall, but once upgraded he has the second highest damage output of all the Outlaws, after Tychus, a powerful dash that stuns enemies, shares the highest health pool with fellow muscle, Blaze and can revive himself on death once per minute, making him a veritable one-main wrecking ball. Unfortunately his Redline power cells take a while to spin up and his clumsy focus on single hard-hitting attacks with critical hits on top of that makes him waste much of his damage output.
  • Mauve Shirt: The Heaven's Devils have some unique abilities, names, and some have slightly modified models, but they aren't very distinct as individuals and aside from generic unit quotes, have no unique lines to flesh out their personalities.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter:
    • Tychus does not field traditional units, but instead takes to the battlefield along with up to four of his fellow Outlaws as a party of beefed-up hero characters, each with their own upgradable gear and unique abilities. The idea for this unusual playstyle came from the Belly of the Beast mission, in which the player controls a band of similar hero units.
    • Aside from the usual damage/health upgrades, which are researched normally, Tychus and his fellow Outlaws each have up to four unique pieces of kit that can be bought from their respective buildings. Said upgrades are prohibitively expensive, but are researched(or, more accurately, purchased) instantly.
    • Similar to, but also different from Nova, when either Tychus or his men bite it, they don't respawn at the Command Center after a set period. Instead, they are teleported back to Joeyray's Bar and stay there until the player shell out the minerals to bring them back into the fight.
    • In a subtle but critical difference, Tychus' command card doesn't work like normal. In other gameplay modes when the player has selected multiple unit types, the Tab key shifts between the unit types in the command card to allow the player to view their upgrade and ability icons and use the latter. To ease microing of Tychus and his forces, any time they're selected together, the bottom row of the command card is always their activated ability, so you don't need to Tab between them constantly. This also means that Tychus' command card and hotkeys change in every mission; the bottom row in the command card has Tychus' grenades hotkeyed to Q every time, and then as you bring in his forces one by one, their ability is added to the row and it fills in from left to right.
    • Weapon and armor upgrades usually max out at 3; Tychus can go to 5 (although the level 4 and 5 upgrades are so horrendously expensive that you'll usually just stick with +3/+3).
  • Mighty Glacier: As a whole Tychus and his men are very tough, able to tank a lot of damage and rapidly kill pretty much anything they come against. Even without major health and damage upgrades, a competently-played crew could go toe-to-toe with late-game mobs on Brutal difficulty with little trouble, provided their core passives are unlocked. Their primary weakness is their mobility, or lack thereof — Tychus has no air units, and all of his ground units are pretty slow. He is thus completely reliant on his Medivac pickup calldown to move his troops around the battlefield, or else they take a looong time to get there on foot. Subverted once he gets the ability to build three Medivac platforms, which actually gives him phenomenal army mobility that only the likes of Kerrigan and Fenix can match.
  • Mind Control: Vega, the Ghost, can use Dominate to take control of enemy units for a short time.
  • Money for Nothing: Unlike other commanders, Tychus is finite in what he can build and research, so if a game lasts long enough, the player could hypothetically run out of upgrades to purchase and end up sitting on a large cache of resources with nothing to spend on but more SCVs and auto-turrets. However, each individual upgrade for Tychus' men costs 700/250 (lowered to 600/150 with a Talent) and their ultimate costs 1200/400, so you'd have to purposefully drag a game out in order to research all of them and still have money left over.
  • More Dakka: Tychus can research an upgrade from the Engineering Bay to increase his own (already high) fire rate, and that of Crooked Sam and Sirius. What's the name of this upgrade? ITC-E/"Itchy" Triggers.
  • Mythology Gag:
    • Tychus' playstyle takes cues from the Belly of the Beast mission in Wings of Liberty, where the player commands a small pool of elite units. Tychus even has his Shredder Grenades from that mission.
    • He also takes a lot of inspiration from Heroes of the Storm; each of his hero units has a single special ability that they "upgrade" like Talents, and their individual upgrades research instantly like such. His units also all each have an "ultimate" upgrade that unlocks once their first three have been purchased, like a Talent.
  • Odd Name Out: He and Nova are the only Terran commanders to be referred to by their given names. The rest of the roster are identified by their last names instead.
  • One-Man Army
  • Only in It for the Money: Lt. Nikara's explicit reason to join up with Tychus and co. is to get paid, as mentioned in her bio.
  • Overt Operative: Unlike the regular Spectre and Ghost, Nux and Vega cannot cloak.
  • Pintsized Powerhouse: On a tactical level, each being about twice the size of a normal terran infantry unit, Tychus and his Outlaws have a relatively tiny footprint, making them more effective at pushing up small ramps or working alongside large, space-filling armies like that of Stukov.
  • See the Invisible: Cloaked and/or burrowed enemies can be temporarily revealed by splashing them with Blaze's Oil Spill, in addition to traditional detection offered by the Fixers via an upgrade.
  • Sixth Ranger: The Odin itself tags along as a separate unit from Tychus with his Dutiful Dogwalker Prestige equipped, and with the right masteries, can almost always be permanently on the field. However, it loses access to it's active abilities when doing so.
  • Stone Wall:
    • Miles "Blaze" Lewis, the crew's designated Firebat tank. While Blaze already has a staggering health pool compared to the next biggest Outlaws on the teamnote , his tier 4 upgrade also reduces all incoming damage to a maximum of 30. Unfortunately, as he lacks Cannonball's auto-revive and takes bonus damage from anti-armor weapons, he's more reliant on healers than his fellow Outlaws to keep him alive.
    • Rob "Cannonball" Boswell, the HERC. While his damage output is average at best, he has a very large health pool on par with Blaze, and one of his passives gives him a full heal when his health runs out, making him even harder to kill in most scenarios. That said, he becomes a significantly harder-hitting fighter with his ultimate gear and fully stacked Redline.
    • As a whole, Tychus and his crew struggle to match the damage output of larger armies, even with the most dps-oriented outlaws like Cannonball, Sirius, and Sam. However, their durability and many forms of powerful crowd control allow them to pull out on top anyway.
  • Taking You with Me: Researching James "Sirius" Sykes' D99 Detonator allows him to self-destruct his Warhound on death to deal 300 damage to anything caught within the blast. His turrets can also do this when destroyed, albeit only doing a sixth of the Warhound's explosion damage.
  • Throw Down the Bomblet: Tychus chucks grenades as his special ability, dealing splash damage in a large area. Crooked Sam, the Reaper, chucks demolition charges to a target that explode after a period of time.
  • The Turret Master: James "Sirius" Sykes, the Warhound, specializes in spawning auto-turrets.
  • Token Good Teammate:
    • Unlike a majority of his fellow Outlaws, Kev "Rattlesnake" West is a rather upstanding member by Heaven's Devils standards, having been honorably discharged from the Dominion Armed Forces instead of going AWOL. He also lives by his own moral code, and refuses to accept any job that would entail collateral damage, no matter how big the pay.
    • Mild pyromania aside, Miles "Blaze" Lewis is surprisingly tame for a Firebat. He isn't a resocialized criminal and in fact used to be part of Raynor's Raiders, doesn't smoke, dislikes the smell of napalm in the morning, and appreciates the opportunity to do good while setting things on fire.
  • What If?: Explicitly the mantra used to justify Tychus as a commander, playing on the Broad Strokes nature of the co-op missions. His appearance as a co-op commander is handwaved as the result of an alternate continuity where Tychus didn't die by Raynor's hands on Char, and lived to reform the Heaven's Devils into a mercenary unit to aid in the war's efforts against Amon.
  • You Nuke 'Em: The "Big Red Button" upgrade, unlocked at level 15, can be researched at Tychus's engineering bay, which will replace the Odin's Barrage ability with a nuclear missile.
  • Your Mom: Tychus' nickname for the occasional Hybrid. Interestingly, this line is currently only used on Temple of the Past, meaning it's addressed towards Rohana.
    "Aww, you didn't tell me your mama was comin'."

    Arcturus Mengsk, Emperor of the Dominion 

Prestiges: Toxic Tyrant, Principal Proletariat, Merchant of Death

"Sons and daughters of the Dominion, we march ever onward."

What If? Arcturus Mengsk wasn't killed at the end of Heart of the Swarm, and brought his brand of propaganda warfare to the war with Amon? Instead of SCVs, Mengsk trains Dominion Laborers to build structures and gather resources, and can conscript them into the Dominion militia as Dominion Troopers. Troopers can be upgraded for more specialized weaponry that will be dropped on the field if they die, allowing another Trooper to grab it to continue the fight and keep the Dominion war machine chugging. Mengsk can also field his Elite Guard, powerful advanced troops with high stats and special abilities that gain experience and level up to grow stronger. To maintain his control over the populace, Mengsk's "energy" for his calldowns takes the form of Imperial Mandate, generated by deploying the Elite Guard and using support units to spread propaganda among his Laborers — as Mengsk inspires loyalty to generate Mandate, he can use more powerful versions of his calldowns in exchange for consuming more Mandate to use them.


  • A Commander Is You: Combines elements of Brute, Industrialist, and a little Technical.
    • Mengsk has hands-down the strongest economy in the game, as his workers are not only cheaper, they're built much faster and can rush his structures. With a Mastery to give him an extra 30 Imperial Mandate at the beginning of the mission, he can call a Supply Bunker loaded with Troopers that can then switch over to Laborers, letting Mengsk get six extra resource gatherers immediately and thus rapidly begin building his economy.
    • His economy supports a combination of Spammer Troopers and Elitist Royal Guards that together form the bulk of his army, which he uses to crush enemies with multiple area-of-effect attacks, overwhelming calldowns, and sheer firepower. Mengsk also supplements this with his massive Earthsplitters, which flatten entire enemy defensive fortifications by drowning them in artillery shells.
    • His downsides are primarily in that his main army is slow to get around and has very few tools that can move it faster (other than building an excessive number of Intercessors and using them to ferry his troops around, which is impractical at the best of times), and he has difficulty replacing losses in his Royal Guard, being the only Terran commander with no way to repair his high-cost mechanical units besides standard repairs (which cost resources).
    • His Principal Proletariat prestige encourages him to go full Elitist by making his Royal Guards more economical to deploy with their reduced gas costs, but the increased supply and mineral costs mean they eat up more of the budget that originally went to his Troopers, and he can have less of them active at a time. This isn't all bad, though, since the increased supply costs also mean that each Royal Guard generates more Imperial Mandate, which translates to more frequent calldowns and Royal Guards are so powerful for their supply cost that even reducing their numbers by a third doesn't really impede them all that much once they're leveled up.
    • The Merchant of Death prestige, on the other hand, is his Spammer prestige. Without Intercessors, any damage taken by Aegis Guards and Emperor's Shadows becomes permanent, and his Troopers have no healing in the field, instead having to convert to Laborers to repair each other. However, the cheaper weapons mean that he can quickly equip a crew of them, and he can mitigate Trooper losses by Bunker rushing (also made far more economical by the cheaper weapons) and deliberately sacrificing a few Troopers to weaken attack waves with their death explosions before the rest of his army marches in to mop up.
  • Action Bomb: While his Merchant of Death Prestige is active, Mengsk's Troopers take a page out of Han and Horner's expendable units by blowing themselves up on death. The downside to this is that they no longer drop their gear.
  • Admiring the Abomination: His responses to Kerrigan's Immobilization Wave sound downright impressed by her newfound powers.
    "Terrifying... I really should let you do more of the work."
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • His Troopers and Laborers have to report to a Supply Bunker or a Recruitment Center to switch between roles. For this reason, his Troopers retain the ability to erect a few structures themselves, including Supply Bunkers, and can still work together to do so rapidly. This means if you need Laborers and are a long way from home, your Troopers can quickly erect a Supply Bunker and use it to switch over.
    • The EXP given to his Royal Guards are taken from enemies killed, no matter who delivered the killing blow. This helps give all of his Royal Guards the EXP to rank up, even if they're not in combat.
  • Affably Evil: While Mengsk is still, well, Mengsk, this version of him is significantly more gracious and cooperative compared to his campaign self. While he's still ruthless in his strategies, he's not above complimenting his allies if they perform well, and expresses gratitude should they help him. One should not forget, however, that Mengsk is a Manipulative Bastard who only helps others if doing so benefits him in some capacity, so all of this could very well be an act.
  • A.I. Breaker: At level 11, Contaminated Strike inflicts a Fear debuff on enemies it hits, forcing them to run around uselessly for a few seconds. Notably, this also makes them forget what they were doing, allowing Mengsk to stop attack waves in their tracks simply by nailing them with a Contaminated Strike.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • Sky Fury (as seen in Crippling Overspecialization below) can bring down even the largest of capital ships in a handful of shots, but their mediocre damage output vs anything else leaves much to be desired when fielding them.
    • Prides of Augustgrad at max rank can delete entire attack waves with a triple-tap barrage of AoE Yamato Cannons. Unfortunately, this power is offset by the abysmal cooldown of the Pride's Yamato at 3 minutes per charge, not to mention the astronomical XP requirements to max out the rank of just one (for reference, it takes 220 supply of enemy units to bring one to rank 3) and exorbitant cost of the unit itself (900 vespene gas for each one, requiring the entire output of both bases for over a minute to afford it, with the cost reduction mastery only bringing it down to 720 a pop)
  • Big Brother Is Watching: Heavily implied. At low levels of Mandate, his Laborers and Troopers are clearly hesitant at whatever they're doing, only performing their roles because they're being watched and don't want to be punished for slacking off.
    Trooper: I'm complying, *hushed voice* stay calm...
  • Bling of War: His Royal Guards are all incredibly ornate, sporting golden decorative plates on their armor as well as fancy uniforms. Even the lowly Laborers and Troopers are significantly more blinged-out than the standard SCV.
  • Boring, but Practical: Mengsk's first topbar calldown is to drop a bunker with six troopers from the sky. It's not particularly flashy compared to, say, 41 missiles, but the value it provides is immense during the early game, essentially giving him six workers for free.
  • Canon Immigrant: His Dogs of War are based on the zerg waves from Heroes of the Storm's Braxis Holdout map, which feature similar mechanical control implants and are built up before being unleashed in a massive wave.
  • Combining Mecha: Imperial Intercessors, besides their normal transport duties, can pick up his Siege Tanks in Siege Mode, allowing them to use their punishing artillery cannons against other air units instead.
  • Continuity Nod: Mengsk has unique quotes for when playing with either Raynor, Kerrigan, or Tychus, all of which reference specific events that took place throughout StarCraft and StarCraft II. To this end, he will comment on the first time said commanders unleash their ultimate abilities (the Hyperion, Immobilization Wave, and the Odin, respectively) in a match.
  • Continuity Snarl: Despite its adherence to Loose Canon, the co-op storyline had always made it clear that Valerian Mengsk took over the Dominion after Arcturus' demise at the conclusion of Heart of the Swarm, and is acknowledged by various characters as its current sitting Emperor. Now, with Arcturus being revealed to still be alive in-setting without even the slightest handwave, and is still the Emperor, this complicates the narrative quite a bit.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: Sky Fury have a huge damage bonus vs targets with the Massive tag, but have mediocre performance vs anything else. Combined with their Glass Cannon status, they tend to be one of Mengsk's least-useful Royal Guard unit.
  • Crosshair Aware: The areas being fired upon by his Earthsplitter Ordnances and Contaminated Strikes are highlighted with huge blast footprints, giving the player a clue as to what they will hit in the next salvo. As a holdover from Ghosts, Mengsk's Emperor's Shadows also cast a highlighting crosshair when launching their tactical missiles.
  • Cutting the Knot: Mengsk's kit allows him to bypass a lot of obstacles and difficulties that would otherwise come up in normal gameplay.
    • His Earthsplitter Ordinances will continually bombard a target area to deal heavy damage to ground enemies, and they have 50 range, +25 with an upgrade. Properly placed, Earthsplitter Ordinances can hit anywhere on the map, and if the objective is a ground target, Mengsk can sit back and slowly blow it to bits without sending a single unit to the frontlines.
    • His Laborers and Troopers can work together to build structures faster, and his Troopers can build Supply Bunkers, Missile Turrets, and Earthsplitter Ordinances. This means Mengsk is almost immune to getting supply blocked, since any time he hits the supply cap, he can order a handful of his Laborers and/or Troopers to build another Supply Bunker and they'll have it up almost instantly. It also means he doesn't necessarily need to field Imperial Witnesses for detection, as Troopers can quickly erect a Missile Turret to detect cloaked and burrowed foes even in the heat of battle, and then it can be torn down once it's not needed anymore.
    • His Laborers and Troopers can be upgraded to be delivered to their rally point via drop pods. This allows Mengsk to mass up an army anywhere he wants, even behind enemy lines or at a point not accessible by ground, and is particularly handy for destroying objectives easily by ignoring the enemies that are protecting them from a frontal assault.
    • The fog of war is of little concern to Mengsk. His Contaminated Strike, Earthsplitter Ordinances, and the drop pods for his Laborers and Troopers, can be called down anywhere without needing vision, and all will provide vision of their target area to allow Mengsk (or his ally) to use a calldown that does require vision.
  • Damage-Increasing Debuff: The Toxic Tyrant prestige turns Mengsk's Contaminated Strike into arguably the most potent example in the game, making all enemy units in a given area take twice the amount of damage than usual.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
    • The Aegis Guard and Emperor's Shadow, Mengsk's own version of Marauders and Ghosts, cannot enter Supply Bunkers. Players who are used to entrenching their standard variants inside normal Bunkers will be in for a nasty surprise when an enemy rush comes, and they try to get these expensive units inside cover, only for them to stand out in the open and get killed. On that same note, Supply Bunkers share the same hotkey as regular Supply Depots, so Terran players who were used to playing as Raynor are likely to experience some awkwardness.
    • His Earthsplitter Ordinance's Bombardment ability is mapped to B by default, which is right next to V on the keyboard, which is assigned to Salvage. Many a players have tried to order their Ordinances to concentrate fire on a location, get confused by nothing happening, and realize in horror that they've just ordered their expensive artillery building to self-destruct instead by mistake, which can't be canceled.
  • Death from Above:
    • Mengsk's Earthsplitter Ordinance lets him bombard areas from range with explosive shells. The Contaminated Strike calldown has them all fire radioactive shells to deal damage over time.
    • His Emperor's Shadow Ghosts can summon Nukes, naturally. His Nuclear Annihilation calldown summons a barrage of nuclear missiles to rain down on a target.
  • Do a Barrel Roll: Leveled up Sky Fury squadrons will roll while dodging attacks, courtesy of Evasive Maneuvers.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: Fitting with his callous and cold attitude towards his troops, Mengsk plays rather a lot like a Zerg commander. His town hall structure produces both worker units and combat units with separate rally points, just like the Zerg Hatchery. His Troopers are comparable to Zerglings in that they're weak but cheap and quick to mass in numbers, he can upgrade them with different weapons similar to how Zerg units can evolve into different strains, and his other structures unlock specialist units that he'll produce in comparatively smaller numbers to support his Trooprs. His usage of Imperial Witnesses is similar to Queens or Overseers, keeping one at home to bolster his infrastructure and bringing a few into the field for army support and detection. His Dogs of War topbar ability lets him summon actual Zerg to fight for him, and given that it's usable at any mandate level and requires no additional work to maximize its potential, a player is likely to end up using it often.
  • Early Game Hell: At level 1, a Mengsk player is liable to have an extremely bad time playing as him, due to his Imperial Mandate gain being abysmal, and he won't have Earthsplitter Ordinances to rely on for static defense. His Troopers are also restricted to using only assault rifles, making them below-average at both offense and defense, and even worse at taking hits for the more expensive Royal Guards. Once levels 2 to 5 roll over, however, Mengsk suddenly receives a huge leap in power, particularly at level 5, which grants him significantly increased Mandate gain through the Unquestioned Authority talent.
  • Enemy Mine: In this timeline, Mengsk was willing to throw in his lot with Raynor, Kerrigan and Artanis in order to fight against Amon, instead of standing his ground and perishing at Augustgrad. He still states in no uncertain terms his utter contempt for his newfound "allies", however, only reasoning that they are lesser threats that could be dealt with later.
  • Expy: Many of his units have abilities that are intentional references to War Craft III or other real-time stategy games.
    • The mechanics of his Laborers and Troopers are an intentional callback to the human Peasants and their Call to Arms ability. Unlike Peasants, however, Laborers converted to Troopers don't automatically "expire" and revert after a certain amount of time, and the player must perform the change manually.
    • His Shock Division tanks can be upgraded to fire at air units in siege mode while being towed by Imperial Intercessors, similar to how Night Elf archers could mount Hippogryphs and gain flight.
    • Mengsk's Dominion Supply Bunker combines a Supply Depot with the defensive capabilities of a Bunker, not unlike an Orc Burrow.
    • His Promotion mechanic is based on the Veterancy mechanic from the Command & Conquer series, with units gaining new abilities, with the new abilities similarly to those in Tiberian Sun or Red Alert 2, while the third level often vastly increases the unit's rate of fire, similar to how units in Tiberium Wars or Red Alert 3 would double in fire rate at heroic (the final rank) veterancy.
    • Another mechanic, Imperial Mandate, is similar to the "Global Resource" mechanic in Dawn of War II, most notably the Imperial Guard's Command and Space Marine's Zeal. It's generated by training troops, using propaganda, and generally engaging in combat, and used to activate powerful calldown abilities.
    • His Earthsplitter Ordnance call to mind the heavy stationary artillery of Supreme Commander with it's massive range, area of effect, and random fire pattern.
    • His forces dropping their weapons, allowing others to pick them up is similar to the way units in Company of Heroes could pick up more powerful weapons after an ally (or even an enemy) drops them.
  • Elite Army: Mengsk's Royal Guard are prohibitively expensive and need to gain experience to unlock their full potential, but are even more powerful than Nova's Special Forces and Horner's Elites.
  • Field Power Effect: Mengsk's Imperial Witness, Blackhammer, and Pride of Augustgrad all buff nearby allies, granting them improved speed, resilience, and range respectively. Combined, they significantly boost the performance of his core units and those of nearby allies.
  • Foil
    • To Raynor. Like Raynor, Mengsk relies on sending waves of disposable infantry at the enemy and building them in bulk, and they can reinforce their armies on-the-go since they're deployed via drop pods. But where Raynor has a diverse army of infantry units for a well-balanced army, Mengsk only has one kind and equips them with different weaponry to suit the enemy they're fighting. Bunkers make up a big part of Raynor's playstyle, while Mengsk's Supply Depot-equivalents all double as Bunkers, so he'll have a lot too, and he can build more instantly via orbital drops just like Raynor can (though for Mengsk it's calldown, not a talent).
    • To Stukov. They both have tech trees with small numbers of powerful specialist tech units and otherwise rely on waves of expendable infantry; Stukov's infantry are general purpose while Mengsk can upgrade his for specialized purposes.
    • To Karax. Both have army units with high costs that makes it difficult to build them in large numbers, but they have many calldowns to support their ally without having to field an army, and they both have ways to increase the rate at which they generate energy to use those calldowns. While Karax uses Orbital Strikes to blast enemies apart, Mengsk can bombard an area of effect with Earthsplitter Ordinances, and appropriate they function like a high-value stationary turret, which Karax specializes in.
    • To Alarak. Both specialize in supporting a small core of powerful offensive units with expendable, mass-produced Cannon Fodder and have powerhouse units that scale in power over time, and appropriately enough are more or less the respective Evil Overlords of their factions. Mengsk's Troopers are used for augmenting his Royal Guards with additional firepower while screening against enemy fire, while Alarak's Supplicants are only meant as meat shields for his backline and fuel for Alarak and his Ascendants. Mengsk's Royal Guards gain power by defeating enemies on the battlefield, while Alarak's Ascendants gain power by sacrificing his own Supplicants.
  • Friendly Fireproof: While no Co-Op commander is capable of hurting their ally, Mengsk takes it to the next level with artillery barrages, chemical weapons, and nuclear strikes having no effect on friendly units.
  • Gameplay and Story Integration:
    • His Laborers and Troopers have different quotes at different levels of Imperial Mandate. Initially, they're Sour Supporters who complain about everything. But as the level of Imperial Mandate rises, their quotes become increasingly enthusiastic and fanatical.
    • In-story, Arcturus is a despotic tyrant who relies on being a Villain with Good Publicity to keep his citizens loyal through propaganda. His Imperial Mandate mechanic is a topbar energy meter with calldowns similar to other commanders, but for Arcturus it isn't energy for a weapons system, it represents the support he has from the Dominion people, which decreases as he uses amoral means to combat his enemies like forced conscription, chemical agents, brainwashed zerg, or nuclear strikes. This reflects that Arcturus won't take actions that would hurt his standing with his citizens unless he has enough support to withstand the backlash.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: Despite Mengsk being, you know, the Emperor of the Dominion, nobody relevant has any special quotes to address him specifically. This gets especially weird when playing Part and Parcel, as General Davis will acknowledge Valerian as the current sitting Emperor, despite ol' Arcturus being alive and well in this continuity. Likewise, other Dominion personnel such as Corporal Faraday and Sergeant Bama "Hammer" Kowalski are similarly mum when Mengsk is playing on their respective maps.
  • Glass Cannon: When fielding a weapon upgrade, Mengsk's Troopers move quickly and deal pretty good damage, especially the ones armed with anti-air missile launchers, who gain range and damage against air targets comparable to Goliaths. Of course, Troopers still only have 45 HP, 145 if outfitted with flamethrowers, so they're just as easily killed as before.
  • Godzilla Threshold: His Nuclear Annihilation calldown. Massively destructive with a wide area of effect, but it costs his entire supply of Imperial Mandate to use and has a hefty cooldown, meaning that both from a story and a mechanical perspective he needs strong justification to use it.
    Mengsk: You left me no choice. Say goodbye to your constituent atoms!
  • Highly-Visible Ninja: His Royal Guard ghosts, the Emperor's Shadow, are very brightly colored (and even have swords like ninja) but cannot directly cloak like normal ghosts. Rather, at Rank 1 they can temporarily become untargettable by the enemy.
  • It's Raining Men: His Recruitment Centers can be upgraded to deploy Troopers and Laborers directly to their rally points via drop pods. Prior to this upgrade, freshly trained units will walk to the rally. Also, his first calldown power is him airdropping a Supply Bunker loaded with six Troopers directly onto an area.
  • Interface Screw: Unintentionally. Mengsk uses a similar shade of red for his army as the enemy faction always does, so Mengsk's teammate may not be able to easily tell them apart on the minimap without turning on Friend/Foe colors.
  • Irony: Despite being bitter enemies, Mengsk actually has very strong synergy when paired with a Raynor or Kerrigan partner. Coincidentally, he also gets unique voice lines whenever Raynor or Kerrigan first use their ultimate abilities.
    • A Raynor teammate could support Mengsk's Troopers and Royal Guards with Medics, on top of providing on-demand detection with scanner sweeps, while Mengsk can return the favor with the buffs provided by Imperial Witnesses, Prides of Augustgrads and Blackhammers while tanking for Raynor's squishy army with Aegis Guards. Mengsk will comment about Raynor using the Hyperion, originally Mengsk's flagship.
    • Kerrigan provides his units with great protection in the form of her own Hero Unit, extra resources with Assimilation Wave, as well as extreme map mobility and detection with Omega Worms, offsetting Mengsk's expensive Royal Guard and slow army, while Mengsk's Defog of War and powerful indirect fire weapons offset Kerrigan's vulnerability to large enemy formations. Mengsk marvels at Kerrigan using her Immobilization Wave.
  • Last Chance Hit Point: At commander level 15, his Sky Furies could be upgraded to automatically enter Assault Mode and barrier up as they take fatal damage.
  • Leaked Experience: All Royal Guard units get equal EXP for the kills both Arcturus and his ally makes, negating any need to focus on his Royal Guards firing the killing blow. The distribution varies depending on how many Royal Guards he has fielded, meaning that having more Royal Guards means less EXP for each of them individually. This is the reason why getting exactly 50 supply's worth of Royal Guards is the optimal means of getting one of his achievements, which involves getting that many Royal Guard units to Rank 3 in a single mission.
  • Macross Missile Massacre: Aptly named "Nuclear Annihilation", in fact. It starts with 20 miniature tactical nuclear payloads being showered onto a designated area, to 40 with the Complete Annihilation talent. These are then followed by a standard big nuke.
    Mengsk: (calling Nuclear Annihilation) "Fire missiles! Fire again! Fire them all!"
  • Magikarp Power: Mengsk himself plays like this in general, as noted under Early Game Hell.
    • Most of his Royal Guards start out rather lame, with only the most basic of powers and slightly above-par stats. Keep them alive for long enough for them to reach Rank 3, however, and their power level increases dramatically.
    • In small numbers, his Earthsplitter Ordnance isn't terribly effective due to its slow travel time and random targeting. But if the player invests enough resources into building large batteries of these, their sheer volume of fire directly offsets their poor accuracy, effectively turning a clump of Ordnances into a giant shotgun, where firing blindly into a crowded area will almost always hit something.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter:
    • Mengsk doesn't train SCVs or Marines like most Terran commanders. Instead, he conscripts large numbers of cheap Laborers, who could be equipped with light armor and weaponry to serve as Troopers. His Troopers are also trained from Recruitment Centers, his own version of the Command Center, rather than at the Barracks.
    • With his Dogs of War, Mengsk is the only Terran commander to make use of Zerg units.
    • His Earthsplitter Ordinance is sort of like a long-range Siege Tank-type turret, where the player targets it at an area within range (50 base range, 75 with an upgrade) and it will continuously bombard that area with shells, but it fires slowly. But like a Bunker, the Earthsplitters can be loaded with up to four Troopers or Laborers, each increasing its rate of fire.
    • Mengsk builds no addons for his Barracks, War Factories, or Starports. His non-trooper units are too expensive to be mass-produced, and whatever isn't available immediately is locked behind the Royal Academy, Armory, and Fusion Core.
  • More Dakka: His level 15 talent, Promotion Granted, unlocks the final promotion level for his Royal Guards. Most of them receive tremendous boosts to their fire rates. The Pride of Augustgrad in particular could fire its Yamato Cannon thrice in rapid succession.
  • My Country, Right or Wrong: Zig-Zagged. While his laborers and troopers have this as their mantra, when the Imperial Mandate is low it's more of an appeasement and show of fear rather than actual loyalty. Mengsk needs to boost his Imperial Mandate to near the top to really instigate their Patriotic Fervor.
    Trooper: My Dominion, right or wrong!
  • Mythology Gag:
    • Mengsk's Royal Guard units are named after his Elite Mooks from the final campaign mission of Heart of the Swarm.
    • His ability to allow his Siege Tanks to fire on enemy air units is a sly call-back to Uprising in which Mengsk had Siege Tanks prepped inside the Hyperion's loading bays to fire broadsides at the Norad II as neither Battlecruiser had any broadside-mounted armaments.
    • One of his Tier 2 mastery upgrades is called "Terrible Damage".
    • His Sky Fury Vikings have a +6 damage boost to Armored, which rises to +25 to Massive at rank one. invoked Word of God has said this is a reference to the Heart of the Swarm opening cinematic, and a particularly mocked moment when a Viking lands to fight an Ultralisk rampaging through Augustgrad and gets trampled for his courage. Now, seeing the stats of Mengsk's Sky Fury Vikings, a player can understand how a pilot might think they could win that confrontation.
    • The Emperor's Shadow unit seems to have been designed after an early concept art of Mengsk with a Ghost-esque operative standing in his shadow, bearing the same gear and all. It's especially noteworthy, considering how the concept is almost twelve years old at the time of Mengsk's debut as a co-op commander and actually preceded the release of StarCraft 2 by nearly three years.
    • The concept of Mengsk using Troopers instead of Marines goes back even further than the Emperor's Shadow, to the alpha phase of the game. Early on Blizzard examined the gameplay of the races down to their racial identity, and played with the idea of replacing Marines with "prison infantry guards" (PIGs), which in the lore were to be neural-resocialized prisoners who were outfitted with the cheapest gear the Dominion could afford and sent into battle as Cannon Fodder before the better-equipped Marines stormed in. This is pretty much identical to how Mengsk utilizes his Troopers in tandem with his Elite Guard, right down to him forcibly conscripting civilians.
  • Nerf: Mengsk used to be able to start with up to 60 Mandate with his tier 3 mastery. This gave him one of the strongest economic openers in the entire mode by allowing him to instantly deploy two supply bunkers as soon as the match started, letting him clear expansions almost immediately, and then converting the free twelve Troopers that come with them into Laborers to prop up an auxiliary base in no time at all. This was later reduced down to 30 starting Mandate at most, which would still let him drop one bunker, but effectively cleaving his opening strength by half.
  • No Cure for Evil: Unique amongst Terran Commanders, Mengsk does not have a free out on repairing his mechanical units. Raynor's medics can be upgraded to heal mech, Swann has free repairs and Science Vessels, Nova has Ravens with bio-mechanical repair drones, Horner's fleet regenerate when not damaged, and Tychus's fixers all have universal healing. Meanwhile, Mengsk is limited to paying for repairs on his costly Royal Guard mech units out of pocket, although thankfully he still has his Intercessors to heal biological units... unless you double down on his callous tactics and go with the Merchant of Death prestige, where he doesn't even have that.
  • No-Sell: Unlike most static defenses, his Supply Bunkers are immune to disabling effects like that of the Spotter in Dead of Night, allowing them to return fire at will instead of being shut down over and over again like their automated counterparts.
  • The Paragon: His Royal Guard units have the best gear, the best stats and the best skills for units of their type in the game. Deploying them in the field increases the rate at which Imperial Mandate increases simply because of how their presence inspires awe from those around them. Their greatest weakness is their low numbers and slow build times that effectively make them a super-Elite Army vulnerable to being overwhelmed. Fortunately, they have troopers to provide a mass of bodies to screen incoming fire.
  • Patriotic Fervor: As part of Mengsk's Propaganda Machine, he appeals to the state pride of the Dominion in multiple quotes, and his Troopers and Laborers start spouting nationalistic slogans as support for the cause (i.e Mandate) increases.
  • Powerful, but Inaccurate: His Earthsplitter Ordnances in a nutshell. They do horrific amounts of damage per shot, but their accuracy is so low that you'd be having a hard time actually hitting anything with individual units. When built in sufficiently large numbers, however, their inaccuracy ceases to be a problem, in fact it gets turned on its head as the wide shot spread lets them carpet bomb entire regions with saturation fire, akin to a massive shotgun blast.
  • Power Harness: Labourers are equipped with the arms of an SCV, but the limbs and back are stripped down to the point that it's just a servo-frame. It resembles the prototype Hardiman man-amplifier from the 1960s.
  • Power Up Letdown:
    • Despite being Elite Mooks, Mengsk's Emperor's Shadows are slightly weaker initially compared to Nova's Ghosts. They are somewhat superior statistically at promotion level 3, though it takes a while for them to actually get there, and they don't start with their full skill set. Their repertoire makes them more akin to Squishy Wizards than your run-of-the-mill Ghosts.
    • They actually fire tactical missiles instead of full-sized nukes. Compared to other nuke-type "ultimates", such as those of Nova, Tychus' Odin, and the final explosion of Han & Horner's space stations, they only deal a fraction of the damage, but with the upside being that they can be called down multiple times in rapid succession, and are only limited by the number of Royal Academies you have.
    • Cloak has also been removed, effectively making them Overt Operatives. The only way they can turn invisible is by getting hit once at Rank 1, which hides them for 10 seconds and runs on a whopping 30 second cooldown. Unless backed up by a Red Shirt Army of Troopers, they are bound to die fast.
    • They also can no longer snipe, with this ability being replaced by Pyrokinetic Immolation, therefore making them better at handling mobs of squishy enemies bunched up together, but substantially worse against tanky targets that would have otherwise been melted in an instant by normal Ghosts.
  • Propaganda Machine: Mengsk's rule relies on a secondary resource called "Imperial Mandate", which is a gauge of how loyal his men are, and how much the population of the Dominion "approves" of his radical methods. To increase Mandate, Mengsk needs to make himself and his Royal Guards look good, while reminding his workforce that they're risking their lives for the good of the Dominion. In layman's terms, this means whenever he deploys and levels his Royal Guards, and/or has wide coverage of Imperial Witnesses among his mineral lines. Mandate serves as his "energy", as well as a measure of strength for his calldowns, with additional effects being bestowed at high Mandate counts.
    • His Imperial Witness unit is a literal one. Apart from being detectors, they could enter Patriot Mode where, with the Unquestioned Authority talent, they could Indoctrinate nearby Laborers, Troopers, and Royal Guards to enable and double their Mandate gain. They do this by blaring Mengsk's propaganda messages through loudspeakers and giant TV screens attached to their sides, culminating in a huge hologram of the Emperor delivering his speech when upgraded.
  • Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Occasionally, Mengsk would assure his men via Imperial Witnesses that no, he's not dead, and the him strutting around isn't a clone.
    Mengsk: Whatever nonsense you might hear, I am not a clone.
  • Red Shirt Army: Mengsk's troopers and laborers are literal Red Shirts, being fragile as napkin and quite visibly wearing red armor padding regardless of commander color.
  • Remember the Alamo: When facing Protoss enemies, Mengsk may implore his troops to "Remember Chau Sara!"
  • Shout-Out: Mengsk has two references to prominent StarCraft community members in his Dogs of War's flavor text.
    • The Enthralled Zergling's flavor text mentions that the Dogs of War are made from the Maguro Brood, a reference to the co-op community content creator Maguro.
    • The Enthralled Hydralisk and Ultralisk's flavor text mentions the creator of the brood being one Dr. Rudolfo Subsourian, referring to Subsourian - one of the StarCraft Fandom wiki's administrators and a prominent lore enthusiast.
  • Sigil Spam: Wolves and eagles, especially the former. As in the main campaign, wolves are all over Arcturus' units and structures, and most of his units have a wolf's head somewhere on their model. His secondary motif, the eagle, is less prominent but still appears in menu icons. This is most apparent with his calldown interface, where an eagle head adorns the counter for the Imperial Mandate his Troopers and Laborers generate, and a wolf head is on the counter for the Mandate his Royal Guard generates.
  • Simple, yet Awesome: A major part of what makes Mengsk so effective is not any particular topbar ability, unit composition, or special trait that he has — it's that he has the most powerful economy of any commander. His workers build quicker and cheaper than usual, they can work together to rush construction of structures, and with a mastery he can start every mission by dropping a bunker with six Troopers, which he can instantly convert into Laborerers or use to clear out rocks blocking an expansion site. This allows Mengsk to build up momentum very quickly with full worker saturation and early expansions faster than any other commander, and the player can then leverage his economic advantage into whatever build order the mission requires.
  • Slave to PR: Arcturus' "energy" that he uses for his calldowns represents the support he has among the Dominion people — the more they support Arcturus, the more powerful calldowns he can use, and the higher-level ones are more extreme and amoral. This implies that Arcturus could hypothetically use his calldowns freely whenever he wished, but he refuses to do so unless he feels he has enough support from his citizens to get away with it.
  • Stance System:
    • His Laborers can be equipped with gear to transform them into Troopers, Mengsk's equivalent of Marines, but nowhere near as durable. Troopers can be switched back into Laborers at the player's discretion.
    • This also applies to the weapons he can outfit them with. The assault rifle does double the damage of their standard weapon and can attack ground and air units, the flamethrower deals even more which is doubled against lightly-armoured targets but can only attack ground units and the rocket battery can only attack air units but does so at absurdly long range and does extra damage to armoured-type enemies.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Twenty to forty missiles followed by a nuke may seem a bit excessive, but when you see how heavily populated and defended enemy bases can be, it becomes justified.
  • This Is Gonna Suck: Pretty much the sentiment of all Laborers and Troopers at low levels of Imperial Mandate. Considering their Red Shirt nature, they aren't wrong.
    Laborer: This... could go bad.
  • Throwing Your Gun at the Enemy: With the Merchant of Death prestige, Mengsk's equipped Troopers will activate a self-destruct device on their weapons and throw them at the enemy when killed. While this obviously makes it impossible for weapons to be retrieved, Trooper weapons also have their cost drastically reduced while this prestige is active.
  • Token Evil Teammate: Mengsk is the only outright evil member of the entire Terran co-op roster. Everyone else is an Anti-Hero at worst.
  • Underground Monkey: Aside from some new additions, his Royal Guards are composed of many of the unique variants of standard units seen at the end of Heart of the Swarm like the Blackhammer, Aegis Guard, Pride of Augustgrad, Shock Division, and so on.
  • The Unfettered: Unleashing brainwashed Zerg on the enemy, calling down a nuclear bombardment, sending hundreds of Dominion Troopers out to fight and die in the field — no strategy is too ruthless or too unethical for Arcturus, if it means the Dominion (and him) are safe.
  • Villain with Good Publicity: Mengsk relies upon cultivating this image via his Propaganda Machine so that even when he's unleashing hordes of brainwashed Zerg and dropping a hail of nuclear ordnance, the people of the Dominion believe it is all for their good and continue to support him.
  • We Have Reserves: Zig-zagged.
    • His Troopers are very cheap and expendable, so much so that a single weapon system costs about four soldiers combined, but these armaments are valuable and infinitely reusable. If a Trooper dies while carrying a weapon, another can pick it up and use it. His troopers know this, especially if they come under fire while carrying weapons, but can't exactly do anything about it.
    Trooper: [upon taking damage] Hey! I'm not expendable.
    • On the flip side of the coin, his other units, the Royal Guards, are expensive and valuable.
    • Ironically, in the lategame, Mengsk players often end up using their Aegis Guards as living meatshields for his cheaper, more expendable troopers, who are equipped with long-ranged missile launchers as support for the purely anti-ground guard.
    • And then we get to his Dogs of War, in which Mengsk throws upwards of 105 supply's worth of stock Zerg units at any problem. They're on timed life and despite their sheer numbers, are one of the faster call-downs when it comes to recharge timers.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: His Royal Guards are indeed powerful, but they are also slow and vulnerable to Zerg Rushes, both the literal and figurative kind. Unless backed up by large numbers of Troopers and Intercessors, they're going to die fast. Their high costs don't exactly help matters, since their numbers are going to be small to begin with. They are also vulnerable to cloaked units, as Mengsk's only option for a mobile detector is the defenseless Imperial Witness (or having his Troopers scrape together a Missile Turret).
  • What If?: Kerrigan made sure that there was no trace of him in Augustgrad by blowing him up. His appearance as a co-op commander is handwaved as the result of an alternate continuity.
  • Why Am I Ticking?: At commander level 15, his max-ranked Emperor's Shadows receive a buff to their Pyrokinetic Immolation that also causes the victim(s) to explode when they die.
  • You Don't Look Like You: His co-op units use new skins and don't resemble their campaign versions in the least.
  • You Nuke 'Em: Taken to the extreme compared to other nuke users; see Macross Missile Massacre above. At commander level 14, his Emperor's Shadows could also be upgraded to drop nukes instantly without having to sit in one spot to target.

Zerg Commanders

    Sarah Kerrigan, Queen of Blades 

Prestiges: Malevolent Matriarch, Folly of Man, Desolate Queen

"Nothing can stop us."

Kerrigan fights in the battlefield as a hero unit, using powerful abilities to crush enemies while her army supports her. Fully upgraded, Kerrigan can take on entire enemy attack waves by herself and come out unscathed. Kerrigan's forces are the highly evolved Zerg breeds, like the Raptor, Lurker, Brood Lord, and Torrasque Ultralisk. This means her army is expensive to mutate and upgrade, but once she accomplishes this, Kerrigan can bring swift wrath to all that oppose her Swarm. Kerrigan has no calldown abilities, just her own unique powers, like an Assimilation Aura to absorb resources from fallen foes, or an Immobilization Wave to stun and damage all enemies in a large area around her.


Provides examples of:

  • A Commander Is You:
    • Numbers: Balanced. Kerrigan doesn't field the impressive numbers that Stukov and Zagara can put out, nor does she have the powerful bruisers of Dehaka and Abathur. Her units are generally the closest to the vanilla Zerg faction in terms of stats and techtree.
    • Doctrine: Brute/Guerilla. Kerrigan's army has no micro-intensive abilities and mostly just A-move through the enemy; even her Hydralisks' Frenzy ability is set to autocast. However, the Omega Network gives her ground army the advantage of being able to pop up anywhere on the map in an instant, letting her easily strike the enemy where it hurts. With her gas cost and evolution Masteries, she can add Industrialist and Economist to the mix. In tandem with her low-cooldown Assimilation Aura, these Masteries allow her to build her army much faster and offset their run-of-the-mill stats by quickly and cheaply getting all of their upgrades. Furthermore, Kerrigan's ridiculous early-game power means she can forgo early combat units in favor of building up her economy and tech.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Kerrigan's Malevolent Matriarch prestige enhances her Malignant Creep by giving it double the usual effectiveness, on top of making her creep tumors spawn and spread much further than they normally can, allowing her to cover huge stretches of a map with only a handful of them.
    • The catch is that her Nydus and Omega Worms are no longer available, thus severely crimping the mobility of both players while removing her most effective means of mobile detection, forcing her to spawn and escort the ever-so-fragile Overseers if the player runs into cloaked units. Their removal also eliminates the most convenience source of shelter for your units in the event of a push going wrong, or in hazard-type Mutations that can wreck overland infantry with ease.
    • Furthermore, the increased Malignant Creep strength means nothing if the player isn't diligent enough at spreading creep tumors, which can be destroyed by the enemy, making it much less powerful in practice, even less so with the removal of the Worms, which usually double as creep sources for a normal Kerrigan player. Unless the current enemy is also Zerg, the only teammate that can provide good synergy with this buff is Stukov, who passively generates creep from his main structure.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • Kerrigan's Level 15 talent simply increases her energy regeneration rate. Given how much energy she burns through, this is a very welcome boost, and combined with an upgrade that decreases her abilities' energy costs, this allows her to inflict much more damage without worrying too much about her energy running dry.
    • Assimilation Aura yields resources from slain enemies. The stronger the unit, the more resources. This can be a huge game-changer, especially when it comes to harvesting gas. Just pop this in the middle of an enemy base immediately before Immobilization Wave for massive profit.
    • Her reduced vespene cost and Expeditious Evolutions (reduces cost and research time of upgrades) masteries makes building her armies much easier, while allowing her to upgrade them very quickly.
    • Immobilization Wave, when compared to other "ultimate" abilities. It doesn't affect the entire map and isn't the most damaging thing ever, but it has a fairly low cooldown (2 minutes 24 seconds when upgraded compared to the 4-6 minute cooldowns for similar abilities used by other commanders), meaning that Kerrigan can have it up for every major push and can comfortably use it to defend without any real penalty.
  • Composite Character: Kerrigan's Hydralisks can evolve into Lurkers that have an Anti-Armor property to their attacks, like the Impaler.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: Kerrigan can single-handedly tear up almost anything on the ground, but she sucks at anti-air. Her only real options for dealing with large numbers of air units are to call in the Hydralisks and Mutalisks or committing an Immobilization Wave. Averted with the Desolate Queen Prestige, which gives Kerrigan abilities that can actually hit air units.
  • Dash Attack: Her Psionic Shift ability returns, letting her charge through enemies to deal damage.
  • Death is Cheap: If Kerrigan dies, she respawns at base for free in a short time. She also gets Torrasque-strain Ultralisks, which can periodically revive after being killed.
  • Deployable Cover: While not ostensibly their intended use, Omega Worms make excellent improvised barricades when multiple Omega Networks are constructed. As Omega Worms cost no resources and have a beefy 1000 health, they can stall attack waves while Kerrigan gets her army into position (possibly using those same Omega Worms).
  • Dig Attack: Ultralisks can be upgraded to perform burrow charges, tunneling through the ground and throwing around enemies they emerge under.
  • Discard and Draw: With her Desolate Queen prestige, Kerrigan is the only commander who for all intents and purposes gain an entirely different Hero Unit through progression. Aside from the visible model swap, a Desolate Queen Kerrigan has access to Crushing Grip and Kinetic Blast in lieu of Psionic Shift and Leaping Strike which lets her actually burst down air units, and enemies killed within range of Assimilation Aura drop twice their usual amount of resources.
  • Disc-One Nuke: Out of all the commanders with hero units, Kerrigan is hands down the most powerful right out the gate, with abilities that allow her to easily engage and escape fights while shredding early waves. Later in the mission, she remains fairly potent; only a Dehaka with large amounts of Essence is stronger than a well-controlled Kerrigan.
  • Dynamic Entry: Kerrigan's general game plan for assaulting entrenched positions: jump in, pop Immobilization Wave (maybe also Assimilation Aura beforehand), and then spawn an Omega Worm to dump an army of Zerg right on the unfortunate enemy's head before they can fight back.
  • Elite Army: Kerrigan's units lean more to the offensive side of the Zerg spectrum, with Raptor-strain Zerglings, Torrasques, Lurkers, and Brood Lords that are very powerful but have higher costs to mutate and upgrade than other units. Additionally, she has a mastery to reduce her research times and costs, letting her reliably pick up every upgrade for her units and making them extremely effective.
  • Glass Cannon: Most of Kerrigan's units can tear through enemies incredibly quickly, but die just as quickly under enemy fire. Her Torrasques are the one exception.
  • Hero Unit: Kerrigan herself appears to fight in the field. There are passive and researchable upgrades which increases her effectiveness.
  • Herd-Hitting Attack: In addition to doing exactly what it sounds like, Kerrigan's Immobilization Wave also deals significant damage to all nearby enemies. Most smaller units may die outright, while larger enemies will have considerable chunks of HP shaved off. There's also her standard Psionic Shift, which decimates anything in her travel path.
  • Home Field Advantage: Her Malignant Creep bonus causes Creep Tumors to spread creep faster and farther, while granting friendly units a bonus to attack speed and health regeneration on Creep. As her Omega Worms also spread creep, Kerrigan can easily make use of this bonus when attacking. Her Malevolent Matriarch prestige removes her Omega Worms in return for boosting the Malignant Creep bonuses even further, letting her blanket the map with creep easily (with or without Stukov as a partner) and also giving her units major combat bonuses.
  • In a Single Bound: She retains her Leaping Strike ability from the campaign and can double its range with a Talent. At a jump range of 12, she can leap further than most units can see, allowing her to move around easily and engage or flee from enemies in an instant.
  • Life Drain: As a holdover from Heroes of the Storm, Kerrigan gains temporary shields whenever she deals damage to an enemy.
  • Magikarp Power: Despite her strength, Kerrigan actually does require a lot of leveling to reach her peak viability.
    • Kerrigan herself requires many mid-level talents and upgrades in order to clear strong points reliably. Without Ruthlessness at level 3, her Psionic Shift and Leaping Strike only hit for half damage, and she needs Chain Reaction and Fury to counter mass infantry. Without the above upgrades, Kerrigan is merely a mildly-strong unit that gets overwhelmed pretty quickly on Hard and Brutal, even more so with the Folly of Man prestige equipped, as it slashes her ability power by half.
    • Malignant Creep and Omega Worms are basically a must-have for Kerrigan in most situations, and they both sit in the middle of her talent chart. The former lets all friendly units on creep attack faster and regenerate 1 HP per second, while the latter provides both players with an extremely convenient and spammable Portal Network that allows them to quickly relocate to anywhere on the map in a snap, while also conferring True Sight. Lacking any of them means an over-reliance on Overseers and slowly trudging through the map, making it very difficult to handle assault waves or cloaked enemies.
    • Her Ultralisks also require Tissue Assimilation and the Torrasque strain to improve their survivability, and are pretty useless beforehand due to their high cost and deceptive fragility when attacking large enemy groups. And both of these upgrades are basically her final talents, unlocking at levels 13 and 14, respectively.
    • Until the player has unlocked the Raptor strain at level 12, her zerglings are basically worthless against anything bigger than a Marine, even with all of their techs researched.
  • Mythology Gag: Kerrigan's Desolate Queen Prestige turns her into her de-infested from from the beginning of Heart of the Swarm (because continuity is already out the window in this mode), complete with the two starting abilities she had: Kinetic Blast and Crushing Grip.
  • Nostalgia Level: Kerrigan's units are mostly from the original StarCraft and Brood War, the StarCraft II Queens being a re-worked unit, while the Brood Lord is an upgraded Guardian.
  • One-Woman Army: Kerrigan's abilities revolve around her doing a lot of damage by herself. Fully upgraded she's nearly unstoppable. In fact, using only Kerrigan as the sole damage-dealer unit along with some Omega Worms for mobility and detection is key to winning many tougher mutations. That being said, by her lonesome she somewhat struggles against mass air without Hydralisk or Mutalisk support.
  • Shock and Awe: Kerrigan attacks with blasts of Pure Energy that take the form of electrical bolts.
  • Simple, yet Awesome:
    • Using Kerrigan herself to wipe out early enemies and attack-moving an army of Zerglings, Hydralisks and Ultralisks later on isn't a very sophisticated strategy and doesn't have too much complex micro involved, but it works just fine. This makes Kerrigan a very beginner-friendly commander.
    • With her Desolate Queen Prestige, Kerrigan gets her Kinetic Blast and Crushing Grip abilities from the Heart of the Swarm campaign. Kinetic blast hits any unit or structure in vision range for damage and casts instantly, making it far superior to Leaping Strike outside of the few times a player wants the mobility. It also has no cooldown, so with full upgrades and her energy regeneration Mastery, Kerrigan can spam Kinetic Blast as fast as most units can attack, letting her rapidly kill high-value single targets.
  • Superpower Lottery: In the campaign, Kerrigan had to choose between one of three abilities divided into tiers. Here she has no such restrictions, and the result is that many abilities on the same tier can now be combined. On the flipside, other abilities or powers are rendered unavailable when they otherwise would have been in the campaign.
  • True Sight: Her Omega Worms also provide passive detection on top of being a highly-convenient Tunnel Network.
  • Tunnel Network: Kerrigan has access to Omega Networks, upgraded versions of the Nydus Network that can instantly deploy Omega Worms to any visible part of the battlefield. They also unload units much faster than the regular Nydus Network, letting Kerrigan quickly and safely move her army around the battlefield. As an added bonus, Kerrigan's ally can also use Omega Worms, which can be highly beneficial for low-mobility commanders like Karax and Alarak.
  • What If?: Kerrigan's Desolate Queen prestige represents the Alternate Continuity in which she doesn't reinfest herself on Zerus, and thus remains as her partially-deinfested self seen in the first half of Heart of the Swarm. She accordingly receives Crushing Grip and Kinetic Blast at the expense of Leaping Strike and Psionic Shift, as the latter two are gained post-Primal Queen transformation. Doesn't explain how she still has access to Ability Efficiency, however, which is a high-tier Primal upgrade in the campaign.

    Zagara, Swarm Broodmother 

Prestiges: Scourge Queen, Mother of Constructs, Apex Predator

"We are the Swarm. There was no other outcome. "

Zagara fights in the battlefield herself as a hero unit. However, unlike Kerrigan who is a One-Man Army, Zagara's abilities revolve around summoning minions to do the fighting for her. Zagara bombards enemies with waves of disposable troops including the suicidal Baneling and Scourge, then rapidly mutates more to keep up the assault. Her combat units cost less minerals than normal, but she is limited to a 100 troop supply cap limiting how large her army can be. However, thanks to Swarmling-strain Zerglings, Scourge that mutate two at once, and the ability to rapidly produce more larva at her hatcheries, Zagara's army can still be plenty large enough to relentlessly assault the enemy.


Provides examples of:

  • A Commander Is You: Spammer and Brute. Zagara's very small pool of throwaway units leads to one simple strategy: start up your economy quickly, mass up a horde, A-move them through the enemy, rinse and repeat. She goes marginally more Elitist (at least, by her usual standards) with the Mother of Constructs and Apex Predator Prestiges, which buff her Aberrations and Corruptors or Zagara herself respectively, at the cost of making her less spammy (she no longer gets free Banelings with the former, while the latter increases her unit costs). Scourge Queen on the other hand just doubles down on her ability to throw waves of expendable fodder at the enemy.
  • Boring Yet Practical:
    • Her suicidal Banelings and Scourge deal heavy damage, and the Scourge can be upgraded for splash damage and lowered Vespene costs. This makes them fairly quick to mutate, effective at killing clumps of enemies, and cheap to produce in large numbers.
    • Her Zerglings, when fully upgraded, can pretty much tear up anything on the ground, and they mutate quickly and cheaply in large numbers.
  • Cool, but Inefficient:
    • Using Banelings and Scourge so much rapidly burns through her resource cache; a Zerg player on a two-base economy just can't afford to throw away units like Zagara tries to. A cluster of Banelings and Scourge can rapidly kill enemy attack waves and quickly hunt down mission objectives, and Zagara's talents give her enough free Banelings to do so comfortably, but relying on them exclusively is a good way to go broke. A properly balanced army needs non-suicidal units to be efficient, and let her Banelings and Scourge soften the enemy up so her Zerglings, Aberrations, and Corrupters can have an easier fight.
    • Zagara has a unique turret, the Bile Launcher, that slowly but continuously bombards a target spot with powerful area-of-effect attacks. They're way less effective than they sound — they need time and resources to upgrade, even upgraded their range isn't that good, they cost a fair bit of gas, and fire too slowly and over too small an area of impact to be effective by themselves, so you need several of them. They're generally only fielded on Temple of the Past and Dead of Night for spamming down choke points, and even then mainly because Zagara's static defense is lacking otherwise. Mengsk's Earthsplitter Ordinances are very similar to Zagara's Bile Launchers, but with numerous changes to actually make them viable.
  • Crutch Character: Zagara's explosive economy and cheap waves of suicidal cannon fodder can blow apart early enemies with ease. Unfortunately, her low supply cap, lack of supply-efficient units to begin with, absence of anything resembling a late-game powerhouse unit, and the constant bleed on her resources to replace her forces leads to Zagara running out of cash trying to keep her suicidal tactics up against increasingly powerful enemies. Ideally, her partner should be able to take over before then.
  • Fast Tunneling: The Apex Predator prestige allows Zagara to Deep Tunnel across the battlefield in a moment, and on a very short cooldown to boot.
  • Glass Cannon: Zagara's army as a whole has huge damage potential, but she tends to take massive losses if the enemy so much as sneezes on them. The backbone of her army being composed of suicide attackers doesn't help.
  • Hero Unit: Zagara herself appears to fight in the field. As noted above, her abilities revolve around summoning minions to do the fighting for her. However, the Scourge Queen Prestige takes away the hero unit in exchange for letting her spam more trash units, especially Banelings and Scourges. On the flip side, Apex Predator makes her hero unit even stronger, albeit also making her units more expensive and restricting Mass Frenzy to affecting only Zagara and her summons.
  • It's Raining Men: Infested Drop, which calls down numerous drop pods filled with Roaches on the targeted location.
  • Magikarp Power: At low levels, Zagara is very weak since she just doesn't have the tools to sustain her playstyle, and most of her strong talents are obtained very late. As she levels up, though, she can more easily keep up with the other commanders.
    • Her Banelings and Scourge attacks are very costly at early levels, since using suicide units so intensively really burns through her resources (vespene gas especially). As she obtains the ability to get free Banelings from the Baneling Nest periodically and the Scourge Vespene discount, building her army becomes much easier, and she can throw a lot more of these at enemies.
    • Additionally, her strategy hinges on using Swarmlings to overwhelm her enemies with weight of numbers... which she doesn't get until level 12, meaning that on higher difficulties she'll run out of steam very easily and become dead weight later in the mission. But once she does get those Swarmlings, she can easily throw a lot more Zerglings at her enemies for much, much cheaper.
    • Zagara's own hero unit, unlike most others, is extremely weak in sustained combat due to her lack of self-healing and her piss-poor energy regeneration, meaning she runs out of steam very quickly, and her abilities are mediocre and fall off relatively early into the mission. Fortunately, she gets a talent that buffs her abilities and cuts their energy costs in half, making her much more capable... but it unlocks at level 15, and even then, her poor energy regeneration remains until she gets an appreciable amount of mastery points to boost it. Until then, though, it's not uncommon for players to deliberately let Zagara get killed alongside her units because it's faster to let her respawn than have her regenerate energy the old-fashioned way.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter:
    • Her max supply is set to 100 instead of 200.
    • Instead of the standard Spire, she mutates Scourge Nests to unlock and upgrade her air units.
  • Mook Maker: Zagara's abilities all spawn units to aid her in combat.
  • Obvious Rule Patch: As her Baneling Nests spawn free Banelings periodically, Zagara is limited to 1 active Baneling Nest to prevent her from simply massing Banelings at no cost. And this extends to her Scourge Nest too for the same reasons if she has her Scourge Queen Prestige active.
  • One-Man Army: Played with. Like Kerrigan and Alarak, Zagara can fight enemy waves without an army backing her and win. However, she'll do it by using her abilities to spawn units to fight alongside her for a short time; on her own, she's relatively weak as far as hero units go. Played all the way straight with Apex Predator, which powers up Zagara with reduced cooldowns, increased regen, and the Deep Tunnel ability, encouraging her to travel around the map and devastate enemy positions by herself before moving her army in to clean up.
  • Power Glows: Zagara gains glowing purple markings all over her body when the Apex Predator prestige (which buffs her hero unit significantly) is equipped.
  • Stone Wall: Her "Mother of Constructs" Prestige removes her free Banelings, but her Aberrations and Corrupters get a resource discount increased health, and faster HP regeneration. This makes them much more effective in battle and easier to mass, trading Zagara's burst damage with Banelings for better staying power over the long-term.
  • Suicide Attack: Banelings and Scourge. She gets upgrades that make her Scourge cheaper and grant her free Banelings from their Nest.
  • Unstoppable Rage: She can incite this in both her own army and that of her ally with Mass Frenzy, which boosts their attack and movement speed.
  • Weaponized Offspring: She has a talent that makes her Baneling Nest periodically spawn free Banelings, an Aberration upgrade that births two Banelings upon death, and her Baneling Barrage ability spits a bunch of Banelings at enemies.
  • We Have Reserves: Lives and breathes this trope. She specializes in throwing cheap, disposable, and often suicidal units at any given problem until it goes away, and their reduced costs and mutation times, along with her early talent to double the number of larvae injected by Queens and ability to create Drones two at a time to quickly set up a healthy economy, all mean that she'll be able to field a lot of reserves.
  • When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Zagara has a very small pool of offensive units, and two of them are suicide units. Her army is mostly going to consist of Zerglings, Aberrations, and Corrupters, with smaller numbers of Banelings and Scourge, but those aren't exactly micro-intensive units and usually just attack-move crushing anything in their way. Thus, Zagara's strategy can pretty much be broken down into a very simple decision tree: "Mutate lots of Zerglings and attack the target. Is the target dead? If not, mutate some more Zerglings, add in some Banelings, Aberrations, Scourge, and/or Corrupters as the enemy unit composition demands, and attack again."
  • Zerg Rush: Zagara's combat units are cheaper, her Larvae spawn faster and she gets an upgrade that boosts the number of Larvae spawned by the Queen's Inject Larva, she has a preference for suicidal units, and her Zerglings upgrade into Swarmlings that mutate faster and in threes. This overall means Zagara is going to spend her time bombarding enemies with disposable units, and then rapidly replacing them to keep up the attack.
    • With the Scourge Queen Prestige, Zagara becomes even more spam-happy. In exchange for removing her Hero Unit, Zagara's Baneling Nest spawns double the free Banelings and her Scourge Nest spawns four free Scourge in the same manner, and her Zerglings and Scourge mutate an extra one from an egg. Along with a raised supply cap, this means Zagara will have an even easier time swarming enemies than before, and can do so much more often with much larger masses of units.

    Abathur, Evolution Master 

Prestiges: Essence Hoarder, Tunneling Horror, The Limitless

"Evolution continues. Swarm grows stronger."

The master of Zerg evolution brings his talents to the field. While Abathur is in play, enemy units slain drop biomass, which his units can collect for stat boosts. Once they collect 100 stacks of biomass, they evolve into the most dangerous of Zerg breeds — his ground units evolve into Brutalisks and his air units into Leviathans. However, even without these mutations, picking up biomass will seriously buff Abathur's Zerg to be far stronger than would be expected of their strains. Abathur's army is comparatively simply, mostly relying on Roaches and Mutalisks with support from Swarm Queens, Vipers, and Swarm Hosts as needed; his Roaches and Mutalisks can further mutate into Ravagers, Guardians, and Devourers, for more specialized roles. Because his army is expensive to mutate and slow to build up power, he can deploy Toxic Nests to help with defense, explosive sacks that detonate when enemies pass by, and he can use Mend to heal his entire army in large battles.


Provides examples of:

  • A Commander Is You:
    • Numbers: The most Elitist among Zerg commanders. His basic army unit is the Roach, which is relatively expensive in both resources and supply compared to the standard Zergling. The biomass mechanic means that Abathur is actually discouraged from building excessive numbers of units as a mineral sink, as having more units means splitting biomass between them, making them individually weaker.
    • Doctrine: His army is the most Brute-ish of all commanders, focusing heavily on big tanky units that simply mash into enemy forces and power through with their high stats and lifesteal. He also has shades of Guerrilla with Mutalisks and the Deep Tunnel ability on his Brutalisks and Swarm Hosts. Finally, he also has some Technical aspects, namely micromanaging units to collect biomass, using Vipers, and spreading Toxic Nests in strategic locations.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: For no adequately explained reason aside from Competitive Balance, Abathur is capped at three Brutalisks and three Leviathans. He can remove the cap using his The Limitless Prestige, but in return, each individual Ultimate Evolution costs twice as much Biomass, and each individual stack of Biomass gives half as much benefit.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: The Limitless disables the cap on Ultimate Evolutions, which on paper allows for a full supply army of Brutalisks and Leviathans. In practice, the increased biomass it takes to morph a single one severely hampers Abathur's early game potential due to it taking twice as long to get a single Brutalisk and making his units gain durability much more slowly, which limits the locations Abathur can farm biomass from.
  • Brought Down to Badass:
    • Abathur's Leviathans don't have any of their various abilities from the campaigns, but are still plenty powerful in their own right.
    • The Essence Hoarder prestige prevents his units from morphing into Brutalisks or Leviathans, but given that it lets them hold more Biomass and makes them guaranteed to drop their Biomass on death, his army will still be able to hold their own.
  • The Bus Came Back: Brings the Devourer back from Brood War after it made no showing in any of the three campaigns.
  • Difficult, but Awesome:
    • The Viper. It's a very powerful unit that can sow confusion and harass enemies to death if used right, but Viper relies on extensive micro to be truly effective. This makes it pale in comparison to Abathur's other option where he can just steamroll over his enemies using brute strength alone. However, effective use of Vipers can make Abathur's steamroller tactics much more effective, especially if he opts for Mutalisks, as they can easily shut down and pick off dangerous enemies like Hybrid, Battlecruisers, and static defense.
    • Abathur's early-game in general. While he's fully capable of rolling out three Brutalisks before most hero units even spawn and then snowballing out of control from there, the catch is actually pulling that off. Getting such an explosive start requires the player to have terrific micro-management and thorough knowledge of the map and game mechanics, but players with that knowledge can single-handedly carry most Brutal Mutations.
  • Elite Army: Contrary to what you'd expect from the Zerg, Abathur's supply and resource costs for his Roaches and Mutalisks, and especially their evolutions, means he prefers to operate with a comparatively small force, using his biomass mechanic to power them up to make up the difference in lost numbers.
  • Elite Mook: His biomass mechanic lets his ground units evolve into Brutalisks and air units into Leviathans. However, he can only have three of each.
  • Fast Tunneling: His Brutalisks have the Deep Tunnel ability to let them move anywhere on the map in seconds. Not only does this ability not require vision of the destination, but it also has a very short cooldown, making Brutalisks very good at responding to attack waves or spearheading assaults. His Swarm Hosts also get the ability, albeit on a longer cooldown and requiring vision; with the Tunneling Horror prestige, his Roaches and Ravagers also get Deep Tunnel, and all of his tunneling units no longer need vision of the destination.
  • Foil:
    • To Zagara; both are Zerg commanders that focus on overwhelming enemies with brute force, but go about it in very different ways. Abathur focuses on keeping a small number of units alive and collecting biomass to power them up, resulting in a small army of very powerful units to crush the enemy with raw strength. Zagara, on the other hand, focuses on throwing masses of cheap, disposable units at the enemy and overwhelming them through sheer weight of numbers. Zagara takes to the battlefield as a Hero Unit with abilities focusing on offense, while Abathur stays out of the fight and supports his army with abilities focused on defense. Abathur makes use of a relatively wide pool of specialized unit types, while Zagara only fields a very small number of basic unit types. Zagara's explosive economy and limited techtree means that she excels in the early game but falls off later on, while Abathur's biomass mechanic means he starts out weak but gets exponentially stronger in the late game. Finally, Abathur's ground army consists entirely of ranged units while Zagara's consists entirely of melee units.
    • Also one to Dehaka. Abathur's biomass mechanic is very similar to Dehaka's essence mechanic, where destroyed enemy units drop a pick-up that they use to evolve into more powerful forms. However, Abathur gathers biomass for his army to mutate them into brutalisks and leviathans, while Dehaka collects essence for himself to level up and grow his skilltree of abilities. Dehaka also relies heavily on his Hero Unit and calldowns of pack leaders, while Abathur, again, has no hero unit and his reliance on calldowns is heavily downplayed to the point he can ignore them if he wishes.
  • Healing Factor: His units get Mend, he has Swarm Queens from the campaign that can use Rapid Transfusion, and one of his talents heals his units every time they inflict damage.
  • Made of Iron: His army can be surprisingly hard to kill, carrying both the medic-esque Swarm Queens from the campaign, and an affect-all version of Kerrigan's Mend ability. On top of that, Brutalisks and Leviathans have inherently high health pools, and biomass drastically increases his units' health, meaning that his army will regularly be walking around with several hundred HP at minimum and healing faster than they can be killed.
  • Magikarp Power:
    • As his units consume biomass, they grow much more powerful, with hundreds of HP and rapid regeneration. And that's before they hit 100 and turn into Brutalisks and Leviathans.
    • Abathur's anti-air options are severely lacking until he hits Hive tech, which is a problem on certain maps or against certain enemy compositions. Balancing your early game economy to get it up and running ASAP while fielding an army for early game objectives can be very challenging. On the other hand, once you finally have it under control, a massive ball of upgraded Corruptors and Guardians (with Leviathan support) can sweep away almost any opposition uncontested.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter:
    • He can't build Zerglings or Spawning Pools, skipping to Roaches and the Roach Warren. For that reason his Roaches and Roach Warren cost no vespene and he gets an early game defensive structure to help out.
    • His biomass mechanic causes enemy units killed to drop biomass that his units can collect. Gathering biomass gives them stat boosts and eventually allows them to evolve into Brutalisks and Leviathans.
  • The Medic: He has the ability to heal all friendly units on the map over time, and it affects both biological and mechanical units. His Swarm Queens also automatically heal units over time, as opposed to regular Queens who must manually heal their targets.
  • Mighty Glacier: It takes a while for Abathur's army to go from place to place. His Brutalisks and Swarm Hosts can circumvent this by deep tunneling to locations, and his air units are decently mobile, though.
  • Money for Nothing: Abathur tends to float minerals more than any other commander; his biomass mechanic means that he generally doesn't want to dump his excess resources into lots and lots of Roaches, since he wants to keep his army (consisting largely of gas-heavy units) relatively small and power them up, but he has nothing else to funnel minerals into aside from building a ton of static defense.
  • Power Up Letdown: While any of his units can become a Brutalisk or Leviathan, whether you'd want to transform that unit depends on what it is. While letting a Roach or Mutalisk transform is always a good deal, evolving Vipers or Swarm Hosts might not be a good thing as you lose out on those units' abilities, to say nothing of them being more expensive than his basic combat units. Fortunately, you can stop individual units from transforming automatically at full Biomass by disabling autocasting of the evolve ability.
  • Took a Level in Badass: He has it as a game mechanic; enemy units killed drop biomass that Abathur's units can collect for stat buffs, and collecting enough lets them evolve into Brutalisks and Leviathans.
  • Trap Master: He can plant Toxic Nests on any visible location on the map, which explode when an enemy approaches. A talent doubles the biomass dropped by Toxic Nest kills, giving Abathur a way to easily fend off early attack waves while quickly gathering biomass for his units. Toxic Nests also make him by far and away the best commander for spawn-camping attack waves, as an Abathur that knows the map well can simply plop down Toxic Nests on spawn points and decimate enemies before they can move out.
  • When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Abathur's army is mostly going to consist of Roaches, Mutalisks, and their evolutions, with some support from his Swarm Queen and Viper casters. Fortunately for him, used properly these units work just fine, and all can evolve into Leviathans and Brutalisks.
  • You Will Not Evade Me: Abathur's Vipers can use Abduct to fish enemy units into range of their allies for a brutal beatdown.

    Alexei Stukov, Infested Admiral 

Prestiges: Frightful Fleshwelder, Plague Warden, Lord of the Horde

"My favorite horror stories are the ones where the monsters win."

The former UED vice-admiral, now Infested Terran in alliance with Kerrigan, Stukov combines the power of the Terran army with the biological warfare of the Zerg. Stukov starts every mission with an infested colonist compound that automatically generates infested colonists with timed life, and through upgrades he can produce dozens of them every minute. In tandem with infested marines from his Barracks and Bunkers, and Stukov can overwhelm enemy through sheer, unrelenting masses of infested troops. If this isn't enough, Stukov still has higher-tier tech, able to build Factory and Starport units to break more fortified enemies. He can also call down a Cyborg fusion of Zerg biology and Terran technology, the Apocalisk, to fight for him, or bring in the Aleksander, the UED flagship, to bombard enemies with eggs that hatch into yet more infested terrans.


Provides examples of:

  • Abnormal Ammo: His siege tanks can fire volatile infested in siege modenote , which is essentially them shooting banelings into the enemy's face. The Aleksander meanwhile launches infested eggs at enemies that hatch into more infested units.
  • A Commander Is You:
    • Numbers-wise, he's the second biggest spammer in the game. Most of his front line consists of cheap infested colonists and infested marines, which can produce in huge numbers but are really weak and die after a while. His production structures also work like hatcheries in that all units are built independently of each other, letting him produce in waves rather than a slow trickle like most Terran and Protoss production works, so even if you lose a lot of soldiers, it's never a crippling blow.
    • In general, he follows the Brute doctrine, since there's not much you can do with his marines, civilians, and troopers, which make up the bulk of his army. However, he's got shades of quite a few other doctrines in there.
      • Gimmick — He's got Terran units, but with Zerg's burst production. He also can't micro his more basic units, which will go directly to the psi emitter and attack anything in their way. He's also in that all his structures can lift off and move, so that his timed life units can remain relevant on missions that force you to push across the map.
      • Generalist — Comes with the Terran package. His Factory and Starport units can give useful support depending on the mission and enemies.
      • Ranger — Another part of the Terran package.
      • Unit Specialist — his tech tree comes in two tiers, "Buttloads of zombies and zombie soldiers" and "Zombie machines that each have some sort of somewhat niche use to complement your buttloads upon buttloads of stronger zombies and zombie soldiers. Oh yeah, and SC1 queens too."
      • Siege tanks supplement your main buttloads by adding variable buttloads of broodlings depending on how many buttloads of tanks you brought. They can also load up their butts with your buttloads to heal a buttload of health, and launch buttloads of volatile infested while in siege mode to load the enemy buttloads' butts with butt payloads. note . If your butt is too loaded, they're basically a combo of siege tanks and swarm hosts that can consume infested infantry for use as healing purposes and their siege mode attack.
      • Diamondbacks are able to move while attacking, which allows them to constantly kite enemies. More importantly, however, is their ability to ground air units, allowing all of Stukov's units to attack it, sans liberators.
      • While they lose their defender mode, Liberators are the only unit besides infested marines that can hit air (read: Stukov has valkyries).
  • Action Bomb: The Volatile Infested that spawn as ammo for his Siege Tanks and from Infested Civilians with one of his masteries, essentially Infested equivalents of Banelings.
  • The Artifact: His Infested Bunker is effectively a recycled version of a cut unit from the Heart Of the Swarm unit, which could be spawned under normal Terran Bunkers found in the campaign to turn them into an armored creature with a series of guns mounted on it's back, something originally planned to be a one-way process, resulting in the current Infested Bunker's seeming ability to tear apart into a giant fleshy monster and then pull itself back together, and why instead of any fireports, it simply appears to hold four gauss rifles on itself, no matter how many troopers are inside.
  • Bad Boss: He infests his own men to conscript them into service to the Swarm. Alternatively, if his men are already infested to begin with, he still sends them in mass-attacks with little regard for their own safety.
  • Balance Buff: His mech units saw a variety of buffs in Patch 3.10 to try and make them more appealing to use — in particular having the cost of Diamondbacks and Siege Tanks being reduced, the tanks getting the Deep Tunnel ability and the Diamondbacks a range increase — and one of his masteries being replaced by an attack speed buff for his Factory and Starport units.
  • Base on Wheels: Stukov's structures can uproot like Zerg Spine and Spore Crawlers, allowing him to move his production facilities closer to the front line to counter the timed life of his Infested units.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • The fact that his Command Centers passively generate creep without limit means that a Zerg ally no longer needs to worry about using Creep Tumors to expand creep. This is especially nice for Kerrigan due to her Malignant Creep passive.
    • Infested Marines in general, as they can be produced en masse at a cheap cost.
    • Infest Structure can repair friendly structures and disable enemy ones. This can really shine against Pylons powering up buildings like Photon Cannons.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: The Aleksander can take control of enemy air units it attacks.
  • Call-Back: The Aleksander was the UED flagship Battlecruiser in Brood War, whose fate was unknown after Gerard DuGalle shot himself in its quarters.
  • Composite Character: Due to his forces being comprised of infested Terrans, he has units that combine Terran and Zerg traits, such as infested Siege Tanks with Spine Crawler-esque tentacles in place of turrets and Bunkers that can transform into some form of Zerg abomination.
  • Cyborg: His Apocalisk evokes this trope, being an otherwise normal Ultralisk with a functional Thor husk attached on it, as well as a pair of flamethrowers mounted on its scythes.
  • Damage Over Time: Stukov's Infested Bunker and Plagued Munitions upgrades, which allow him to send forth a constant stream of infested troopers that inflict a long-lasting damage over time effect to anyone they hit.
  • Dissonant Serenity: Most other commanders sound distraught when a large swath of their army is taken out. Stukov hardly breaks a sweat when it happens to his. After all, he's got way more where that came from.
  • Elite Army: His Frightful Fleshwelder Prestige removes the tech requirement for the Factory and Starport and gives Stukov a 30% discount on units built from them, but he can't use the Infested Colonist Compound. This means Stukov exchanges his massive army of disposable infested for an easier time getting his higher-tech units out, although swarming enemies with disposable troops from Infested Bunkers and Barracks is still most definitely possible if he needs a bit more firepower for a key push.
  • Expy:
    • Since they lack Defender Mode, Stukov's Liberators are essentially the UED's Valkyries in all but name.
    • Stukov's Diamondbacks are similar to Warcraft III's Crypt Fiends, as they are capable of bringing down air units to allow ground units to attack them.
  • Fastball Special: With the Plague Warden Prestige, Stukov's Banshees can load infested infantry and launch them at enemies.
  • Foil:
    • To Nova, the commander released immediately before him. Nova is the extreme micro-intensive Terran, with her base management mechanics simplified so the player can focus on commanding her army in the field, which is made up of small numbers of elite units with powerful upgrades; Stukov is the extreme macro-intensive Terran, focusing on building up and optimizing the layout of his base structures which generate large waves of weak infested terrans that auto-attack the target without needing direct supervision, and have a handful of passive abilities that just make them hit harder.
    • Also to Raynor. Like Raynor, Stukov relies on building up a massive army of infantry units from the basic Barracks, and usage of Barracks and Bunkers makes up a big part of his strategy. However, Raynor then relies on Medics and Stimpacks to improve his army's potency, while Stukov sends his infantry at enemies with no support because he can quickly replace them if they die. Additionally, Raynor can call down the Hyperion Battlecruiser which has a passive ability to boost the range of nearby troops; Stukov can call down the Aleksander infested Battlecruiser which has a passive ability to reduce the damage taken by nearby troops.
  • Fusion Dance: His "Apocalisk" is an Ultralisk with Thor armor melded onto it.
  • Gunship Rescue: He can call down the Aleksander, the UED flagship, to attack.
  • Healing Shiv: His ability to infest ally structure is actually a helpful ability to said ally since it spawns broodlings for instant defense and in addition repairs them.
  • Interface Screw: An unintentional example - because Stukov has so many units out at the same time, he's somewhat notorious for being the leading cause of lag in Co-op Missions simply because the game engine has trouble keeping up with his army. The Plague Warden Prestige took this even further - a fleet of Infested Banshees each launching 16 Infested Civilians will cause your machine to stutter.
  • Magikarp Power: Stukov is widely considered one of the worst commanders at low levels, as it takes time for him to build up his infested waves before they pose an actual threat, and even when he does peak, his troops aren't very threatening. Once he levels up and unlocks more upgrades, he can start fielding much bigger waves backed by powerful calldowns. With access to his Masteries, he can even throw Volatile Infested into the mix, which are leagues more powerful than his regular infested infantry.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter: Being an infested terran means that Stukov brings a unique mix of Terran and Zerg racial mechanics to the game (although the game still classifies him as a Zerg commander). As his preview trailer says, "my forces are unorthodox... but effective."
    • Instead of Supply Depots, he mutates Overlords to provide supply, and while he has a Command Center with SCVs for his home base, said Command Center spreads creep like a Hatchery. Additionally, he's also the only Zerg commander that doesn't start with an Overlord (barring Dehaka, who doesn't use them in the first place).
    • His Terran structures spit out eggs that mutate into the selected unit to build, like Zerg larvae sans the actual larvae.
    • Like the Terrans he can move his buildings around, but they uproot to move like Zerg defensive structures instead of lifting off.
    • His Infested Bunkers are particularly strange. They cost 4 Supply and 400 Minerals to build, because they construct with four Infested Marines already loaded in them. His Bunkers will automatically spawn an Infested Marine every 30 seconds, which will fill up any empty slots in the Bunker, or if the Bunker is full it'll pop out and follow Psi Emitter commands like a Marine from his Barracks. Finally, the Bunker structure is actually a unit itself; when uprooted to move around it reveals itself as a Zerg creature that has its own melee attack, while the Infested Marines inside it keep shooting.
    • His Banshees can Burrow; keep in mind Banshees are air units. The animation naturally depicts them landing and sinking into the ground. Even more strange, with the Plague Warden prestige active, Stukov's Infested Banshees can transport Infested Infantry like any transport.
    • In a more benign instance, his Command Center spreads creep with infinite range. Give him enough time and the entire map will be coated in a permanent layer of creep; contrast normal Zerg play with the need to use Creep Tumors to slowly expand the creep's reach.
    • Unlike most commanders, the majority of his units (infested infantry) at any time are commanded by a Psi Emitter instead of through selected (they can be directly selected though and given commands that way). Furthermore, these Infested infantry cannot be selected by the "select all military units" command.
    • His Overseers require the Factory to be constructed as a prequisite to making them. In addition, his Overlords cannot transport troops as his units without timed life are quite mobile on their own.
  • Night of the Living Mooks: His key skill is his ability to create an endless supply of infested terrans to continually assault enemies.
  • Ramming Always Works: When the timer on the Aleksander expires, it doesn't warp out like the Hyperion does. Instead, it crashes into the ground, ejecting more infested infantry until it blows up.
  • We Have Reserves: The point of Stukov's infantry: they're cheap (free in the case of Infested Colonists) and numerous. A fully upgraded civilian compound will eventually generate 64 Infested Colonists every 60 seconds, his Infested Marines only take a few seconds to mutate, and his Infested Bunkers will passively generate Infested Troopers periodically. Capping all of this off is that his Infested Colonists don't cost supply, so at the end of most missions the 'unit produced' statistic will show Stukov having produced well over a thousand units, so the enemy will inevitably run out of troops before Stukov runs out of Infested. While he does have a second tier on his Tech Tree, the units it produces are largely supplementary to Stukov's army core: weak, cheap waves of infested terrans.
  • Zerg Rush: Stukov's "quantity over quality" playstyle stands out even among the other Zerg commanders. He produces endless waves of infested infantry for free with both Infested Bunkers and the Infested Colonist compound and his Infested Marines cost a pittance to field and can be deployed in huge numbers, his Infest Structure generates a flood of Broodlings, and he can even research an upgrade to make his infested troops drop more Broodlings when they die. The Lord of the Horde prestige ramps up his swarming abilities by making his Bunkers cough up Infested Troopers much more frequently; with enough Bunkers laid down, Stukov can have an unbroken tide of Infested Troopers marching across the map.

    Dehaka, Primal Pack Leader 

Prestiges: Devouring One, Primal Contender, Broodbrother

"We are a tide. The enemy is driftwood."

The leader of the Primal Zerg leads his pack into battle personally, commanding a hero unit that absorbs essence from slain enemies to grow stronger. As Dehaka collects essence, he levels up and players can choose how to power up his abilities to fit the mission at hand, eventually growing him into a One-Man Army Kaiju. For his army, he commands "Primal" Zerg that can fight each other to evolve into more powerful, specialized forms, such as Hydralisks that turn into Mutalisks. Dehaka also brings with him three more Primal Zerg pack leaders who can join the fight under his command after their respective dens have been summoned as buildings.


Provides examples of:

  • Achilles' Heel: While Dehaka can solo pretty much any enemy force if played well due to his colossal potential health and healing from Devour backed by lots of area-of-effect damage, he struggles at taking on high-health objectives since he can't just Devour them and has a glacial attack speed. He needs to have an army and/or an ally backing him up to take these on, as otherwise he'll be reduced to slapping them to death very, very slowly.
  • A Commander Is You:
    • Numbers: Elitist, for a Zerg. His Zerglings spawn solo and cost the same in Minerals and Supply as a Marine, and combine into Ravasaurs who collectively cost the same as a Zealot. To compensate they are much beefier than anyone else's. In general his units cost more to field but have more fighting and staying power.
    • Doctrine: Brute/Gimmick/Industrial. His units in general all have special abilities designed to directly damage enemies or passively augment their allies in battle. Some of his units can only be created by existing, separate units combining themselves into each other. He does not have to spawn Overlords and starts with 200 Supply naturally. Unlike most other Zerg commanders, he does not produce combat units at his Hive structure and instead spawns them at separate buildings, letting him build up his armies quickly. He also techs up through the use of separate buildings rather than relying on the Hive.
  • Anti-Armor: Ravasaurs and Primal Impalers get a huge damage bonus when attacking armored targets. Dehaka can also temporarily gain bonus damage versus armored enemies if he Devours one.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • Amon's Ravens and Science Vessels in Co-op are tagged as Psionic, whereas their counterparts in other game modes are not. This is almost solely for the benefit of Dehaka since the added tag doesn't mean anything for any other commander - the explosion from Devouring Psionic units is one of Dehaka's best waves to break up crowds of enemy units, and without the tag on Ravens and Science Vessels, the only Psionic unit that appears in Terran enemy compositions is the comparatively rare Ghost. This could result in Dehaka struggling heavily against entirely mechanical Terran compositions, especially Dominion Battlegroup since his Scorching Breath can't hit air units.
    • Primal Contender powers up Dehaka's pack leaders, but disables Dehaka's own Hero Unit while a pack leader is active and also limits him to one active pack leader at a time. While using this prestige, the pack leaders gain an "ability" that simply despawns them, allowing you to switch back to Dehaka or deploy a different pack leader if the situation demands it.
  • Asskicking Leads to Leadership: As the strongest of the Primal Zerg, the other Primal pack leaders follow Dehaka's will.
  • Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: He starts out at roughly the same size as he was last time but gets bigger as he levels up. After reaching level 6 as a unit, he emerges from a chrysalis as an all-new zerg and continues growing to gigantic size until he towers over any other unit in the game.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • Devour is the only ability in the game that can instantly kill Hybrid, which can be extremely powerful. However, its cooldown is dependent on the HP of the devoured unit, and since Hybrid universally have high HP, it'll likely be unusable for the next minute, and not having your main heal for that long makes Dehaka much more vulnerable.
    • The Broodbrother prestige gives Dehaka a clone (named Zweihaka) to control alongside Dehaka himself, at the expense of both having less HP than a regular Dehaka. While having two Kaiju to trample over enemy bases sounds tempting, it's somewhat let down by the fact that the two have separate Essence counts, meaning that they only level up half as quickly unless you funnel all the Essence into one Dehaka (in which case you're better off just using his vanilla kit). Having two bodies to control means that Dehaka can farm Essence from two places at once, but given the amount of micromanagement just to keep one of him alive in the early game, this can be... difficult, to say the least. And let's not forget, should either Dehaka or his clone gets killed, the other dies instantly as well, putting even more pressure on microing and keeping both of them alive. That being said, the impracticality of this prestige was greatly lessened by a Balance Buff that removed the health penalty, making it much easier to keep Dehaka and Zweihaka alive in the early game, although the separate Essence counts for the two Dehakas means it still falls under this compared to his vanilla kit.
  • Big Eater: Exaggerated. Dehaka can use Devour to instantly eat any enemy unit whole in one gulp, which can be quite a sight to behold. Eating Marines, Zerglings or Zealots is at least semi-plausible. But Siege Tanks? Ultralisks? Colossi? Never mind the implausibility of swallowing whole a Battlecruiser, Leviathan or Mothership.
  • Breath Weapon: Scorching Breath creates a wave of flame across an area of effect. When Dehaka consumes an air unit, his ranged attack comes as a beam of fire. His Primal Roaches can evolve into Primal Igniters, who have short range flame breath attacks. Finally, Glevig has the ability to breathe a huge jet of flame across the ground, dealing heavy damage to everything inside it.
  • Cannibalism Superpower: Fitting the Zerg's Adaptive Ability, Dehaka gains temporary bonuses from Devoured enemies based on their attributes.
  • Co-Dragons: The other Primal Zerg pack leaders to Dehaka.
  • Color-Coded Characters: Zweihaka, summoned by the Broodbrother Prestige, has bright orange markings on his larger form, contrasting with Dehaka's teal ones. He also has a yellow health bar to further distinguish him.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: Zigzagged. On one hand, Dehaka's Devour ability ignores the Heroic tag, allowing him to one-shot Hybrid (among other things); on the other hand, it doesn't work on mission objectives, for obvious reasons.
    • Additionally, Dehaka cannot Devour enemy Hero Units that are spawned by Heroes From the Storm except for other Dehakas. He has a unique voice line for such an occasion.
      Dehaka: Death to the weak!
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Dehaka's production structures used to count as army units when uprooted for re-positioning, which occurs regularly as the frontline moves forward during offensive missions. Players who habitually select their entire army to do anything will be in for a rather nasty surprise when they move their units only for their Primal Wardens to slowly waddle across enemy territory as well and get perforated.
    • Patch 4.9 was released to address this issue, effectively averting the trope.
  • Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Dehaka can feed on Drones to speed up his regeneration if he's killed. With enough reserve Drones for him to munch on, he can reduce the timer to 0 and re-enter the fray immediately. And if he's killed again, he can go back to eating Drones, although since he can only produce Drones in trickles, this will take a toll on his economy.
  • Defog of War: Greater Primal Wurms can be summoned in areas where Dehaka has no vision, as long as it was previously explored. This makes them great for setting up a pack leader summon or Dehaka's Deep Tunnel.
  • Discard and Draw: The various evolved forms his Primal Zerg evolve into have distinctly different abilities and stats from the base forms, making them entirely different units in practice.
  • Extreme Omnivore: Dehaka is not a picky eater. Devour lets him happily gobble up anything not nailed to the ground or is a mission objective, be that a small squishy zergling, a towering Hybrid Behemoth, or a gigantic Mothership comprised of mostly metal and crystals.
  • Fashionable Asymmetry: Averted. While Dehaka begins like in the campaign — two claws, one on either side, missing — he regrows them as he evolves and takes on a more symmetrical form.
  • Fast Tunnelling: Dehaka gets the Deep Tunnel ability to quickly travel around the map. His Primal Wurms also get the ability, letting them be used offensively. Finally, Glevig has a version of the ability with no cooldown to offset his inability to move otherwise.
  • Fighter, Mage, Thief: The three pack leaders Dehaka can summon form this dynamic.
    • Glevig is the Thief, with high damage output and a zero-cooldown Deep Tunnel that lets him get around the map quickly, but also the lowest health out of the three.
    • Murvar is the Mage. She relies heavily on summoned minions to attack enemies and has a supportive ability that disables enemies' attacks and abilities.
    • Dakrun is the Fighter. He's built for sponging damage, with massive health, high armor, and abilities that let him charge into enemies and damage anything that attacks him.
  • Foil:
    • To Abathur.
      • As Abathur's units absorb biomass from slain enemies to evolve, Dehaka absorbs essence from slain enemies to evolve.
      • Both of their armies can evolve into stronger forms. However, Abathur's units evolve by killing enemies; Dehaka's evolve by killing each other.
    • Dehaka and Stukov split the signature characteristics of Zerg construction; while Stukov's SCVs can only build on creep, Dehaka's drones can summon structures anywhere but the drone is consumed in the process, literally in this case.
  • From a Single Cell: Fluff text for Zweihaka states that he grew from Dehaka's missing arm.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: Dehaka's dialogue in Heart of the Swarm has him emphasizing the difference between obsessively seeking size and power like the other Primal Packleaders, which he sees as a dead end, and seeking essence and constant change. In Co Op, he simply gathers Essence to make himself bigger and bigger to overpower his foes with brute force.
  • Healing Factor: Can be unlocked as a talent for Dehaka as his army levels up, although in a twist it regenerates the health of friendly biological units around him as well. It's the only way for Dehaka's army to heal his own units. Also, while purely visual, Dehaka will eventually grow his arm back as he evolves.
  • Hero Unit: Dehaka fights on the front lines, forming a key component of his army. Unlike other hero units, Dehaka can collect essence from slain enemies to become stronger over time. He also spawns in much faster than most heroes, deploying 1 minute into the mission compared to the standard 4 minutes.
  • Hyperactive Metabolism: Justified because that's how Primal Zerg work.
    • Snacking on an enemy instantly restores some health to Dehaka regardless of their size.
    • When he dies, the player can feed him Drones to speed up his regeneration.
    • The flip side to this is that eating enemies will only restore a set portion of Dehaka's health regardless of unit size, therefore making a behemoth of a Leviathan only about as nutritiously effective as a lowly marinenote .
  • In a Single Bound: Dehaka can use Leap to quickly get the jump on enemies, moving to the target area and stunning and damaging nearby enemies.
  • Kaiju: How big can he get? With an upgrade that requires him to be level 10, he gains the ability to melee air units.
  • Kill It with Fire: Igniters breathe fire as their weapon, and can be upgraded to do extra damage to lightly-armored foes.
  • King Mook: The Tyrannozor, even moreso than the Ultralisk, which makes it appropriate that they are created when Ultralisks enter Primal Combat. It has incredibly high ground DPS, its none-too-shabby air attacks negate the Ultralisk's Achilles' Heel of being vulnerable to air-to-ground assault and it can be upgraded to gain a smartcast AoE ability and grant +2 armour to friendly units around it.
  • Large and in Charge: A late-game Dehaka is bar none the single largest unit on the battlefield provided he's well-fed, and is often the tip of the spear when invading entrenched enemy positions, ''if'' he feels the need for an army, that is.
  • Let's You and Him Fight: Invoked. To evolve, units must fight each other to the death.
  • Logical Weakness: As of the 3.19 update, Dehaka can now be targeted by anti-air attacks once he reaches level 10, severely weakening his ability to trample enemy bases, especially Zerg bases before the Co-op nerf to Spore Crawlers that removed their bonus damage against biological units. Given that this is the level where he unlocks Deadly Reach, meaning that he's become big enough to swat air units out of the sky, it only makes sense that anti-aircraft fire can easily hit him.
  • Magikarp Power: At Level 1 Dehaka is slow, weak, and easily killed. As he consumes essence and grows he becomes the most powerful hero unit in Co-op, with devastating abilities, thousands of HP, and an attack power in the three-digit range.
  • Mechanically Unusual Class: As befitting a representation of the Primal Zerg, several of Dehaka's mechanics are extremely unusual:
    • Unlike any other Hero Unit in Starcraft, Dehaka can level up, gaining new abilities and growing in size as he does so.
    • Dehaka's tech tree as a whole functions as a combination of Zerg and Protoss mechanics; his Primal Wardens generate units by storing charges like a Warp Gate or Stukov's structures, and evolving his pack leader dens unlocks stronger units for the Wardens to build while also providing the upgrades for them.
    • Dehaka's Primal structures can uproot to move and gain an attack while doing so, also counting as army units in this form. His Primal Hive is used to construct Extractors by entangling nearby gas geysers.
    • Dehaka's units evolve into more powerful ones by fighting each other.note 
    • Dehaka does not use Larvae; his Drones are spawned directly from Primal Hives and his combat units are produced by Primal Wardens.
    • Dehaka's structures neither produce nor require Creep.
    • Dehaka starts out with 200 supply baseline, and never needs to morph Overlords or build other supply structures; his structures (the Primal Hive, Warden, and Wurm) also cost supply.
  • Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Dehaka originally had four arms, but in the campaign he lost one on either side in a battle. Here he can evolve to get them back, so having all four of his arms back is a sign of how evolved and dangerous he's become.
  • One-Man Army: He puts even the other hero commanders to shame; at Level 15 Dehaka deals 160 damage, has four armor, 1500+ HP (his HP will continue to increase as he keeps collecting essence, with no limit to how high it can go) note , a healing aura that boosts life regeneration for all nearby units including himself, detection, can attack air units, and his various abilities. Other heroes can solo enemy attack waves; Dehaka can solo enemy bases.
  • Power Copying: Devouring an enemy gives Dehaka temporary buffs depending on the type of enemy. Devouring an air unit gives him a ranged attack, Psionic units create an explosion and lower the cooldown of his abilities, Massive units cause damage to attacking enemies, and so on.
  • Rent-a-Zilla: At max level Dehaka is the biggest unit in Co-op, dwarfing Hybrid Behemoths, Brutalisks, Motherships...
    • A cheesy fanfare even plays when he reaches max level that wouldn't sound out of place in a 1950s Kaiju flick.
  • Roar Before Beating: Intimidating Roar's various debuffs (armor reduction, slowdown, and disabling energy usage) make it a great way for Dehaka to open a fight.
  • The Social Darwinist: Dehaka's units kill each other to gain the power to evolve into stronger forms.
  • Some Dexterity Required: Dehaka's macro is about as simple as you can get and his army isn't terribly micro-dependent either. Most of the difficulty in playing him, however, comes from controlling Dehaka himself, especially in the early game, while still building stuff back at home. Take your eye off Dehaka for too long and he gets squished, but focus too hard on him and your army takes longer to come online, and Dehaka alone can't easily deal with tougher missions. With the Broodbrother prestige, you get a second Dehaka to control and have to keep an eye on them both to rotate through their abilities while macroing up.
  • Summon Bigger Fish: He can summon the three pack leaders he commands to fight alongside them. Each of them is in their own right a boss unit with several thousand HP and powerful attacks and abilities.
  • Super-Scream: Intimidating Roar slows the movement and attack rate of nearby enemies. At higher levels, it also disables energy-based abilities and reduces armor.
  • Suspiciously Similar Substitute: The three Primal pack leaders he commands reuse the forms of the pack leaders in the Heart of the Swarm campaign, and are directly stated to have taken control of those packs they used to lead. Glevig replaces Yagdra, Dakrun replaces Kraith, and Murvar replaces Slivan.
  • Synchronization: Dehaka's Broodbrother Prestige spawns in an additional clone of him that can be controlled separately. However should either of them die, the other automatically expires as well.
  • Took a Level in Badass: The more enemies he kills and essence he devours, the bigger and stronger Dehaka becomes.
  • True Sight: One of Dehaka's passive upgrades is this, which alleviates the need for detectors and Primal Wurms.
  • Useless Useful Spell: Primal Regeneration gives Dehaka an aura that passively heals nearby friendly units over time, doubling as his only way to heal his units at all. This tends to be the one ability that always gets passed up, since Dehaka is usually out wreaking havoc on his own before marching his army in to clean up and the regeneration tops at a paltry 3 health per second with 3 points in the ability, which is far less efficient than the healing given by Devour and amounts to almost nothing in combat. Even with the Devouring One Prestige, which encourages Dehaka to have an army around, it's far outshone by the healing from Devouring biological units and tends to be skipped entirely.
  • You Don't Look Like You: Dehaka's in-game model uses his Heroes of the Storm form, and like in that game he regrows his severed arms as he grows stronger, but he retains his portrait from Heart of the Swarm. His army units meanwhile use a mix of Primal Zerg models and modified Swarm Zerg models, due in part because a few of his units were just Swarm Zerg breeds that the Primal Zerg copied.
  • You Will Not Evade Me: Whatever unit outside of his reach, Dehaka can just stick them with his Overly-Long Tongue and reel them in for a quick snack.

    Egon Stetmann, Hero Genius (Henius) 

Prestiges: Signal Savant, Best Buddy, Oil Baron

"The servants of Bel'Shir are invincible!"

After years of being stranded on Bel'Shir and driven a little bit kooky by terrazine exposure, former Raynor's Raiders boy genius Egon Stetmann joins the fight against Amon throughout the Koprulu sector. Stetmann sends out a swarm of Mecha-Zerg, robotic fascimilies of Zerg that have abilities adopted from Terran and Protoss technology. Fueling this bizarre mash-up of ideas is "Egonergy", a power source only Stetmann seems to know how to use. All of his Mecha-Zerg have some sort of passive ability they can use in combat, but doing so costs them Egonergy. Egonergy doesn't regenerate by itself, but that's okay, because Stetmann can deploy "stetellites" on the field, creating a power network he can use to restore Egonergy, heal wounded units, or boost their movement speed. With his best friend and favorite harvesting bot Gary to lead the Mecha-Swarm, Stetmann is ready to show the enemy what he's capable of — and between his questionable sanity and unquestionable genius, that could be almost anything.


Provides examples of:

  • All Your Powers Combined: His army is essentially the closest players can reasonably get to a combination of all three races — he commands robotic Zerg units with a mix of Terran, Zerg, and Protoss technologies.
  • A Commander Is You:
    • Numbers: Taking the crown previously held by Stukov, Egon Stetmann is the biggest Spammer in the game, period. Not only can he field an excruciatingly large amount of regular units at a time, his Mecha Infestors spawn a large amount of temporary miniature Mecha Roaches, plus miniature Mecha Ravagers with an upgrade at the Mecha Infestation Pit. With his Infestors alone casting the roach spawning ability, he can end up with over twice as many units as Stukov has. Incidentally, both characters tend to cause a lot of lag. Without Infestors, Stetmann is less of a Spammer than Stukov as his army is roughly equivalent to the one fielded by Kerrigan, but unlike Kerrigan, Stetmann can reconstruct destroyed units by gathering scrap.
    • Doctrine: Gimmick/Technical. His Stetzones, while having functions similar to zerg creep, isn’t actually zerg creep, nor does it provide power to structures like a real protoss power field. Almost all of his units have active abilities, very few of which are autocast; the sheer amount of active abilities in his army makes controlling said army surprisingly difficult even compared to other parts of the game.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: Stetelites cannot be destroyed once fully set up, only temporarily disabled. Once they've repaired themselves, the fields will pop back up. They are still vulnerable when initially deployed, however.
    • By their nature, Stetelites are virtually immune to being destroyed by lava or spouts when deployed over them in The Vermillion Problem, or in sectors about to explode in Cradle of Death. However, as mentioned under Hell Is That Noise and Interface Screw, this feature could end up backfiring in particularly hectic maps.
  • Anti-Vehicle: Stetmann's trailer describes his Mecha Ultralisks as anti-mech specialists, which their kit reflects as Mecha Mooch Module allows them to drain health from enemy mechanical units and their Burrow Charge can be upgraded to stun mechanical units when the Ultralisk emerge.
  • Ascended Extra: From a background character in Wings of Liberty to Mission Control for a Co-op map, and now he gets to be a playable commander.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Battlecarrier Lords have the capabilities of Brood Lords, Battlecruisers, and Carriers put together... but also cost about as much as the three put together, require extensive research and tech to make them worth that cost, and are horrendously slow if you don't have FAST configuration going with a lot of Stetzone coverage. But once you make a handful, they can steamroll most ground compositions, and dominate infested maps.
  • Bad Boss: Stetmann would occasionally threaten to dismantle Mecha zerg units who don't pull their weight. It stops there, however.
  • Boring, but Practical: Super Gary's ultimate ability, Gary-zone, simply projects a large radius Stetzone around Super Gary. Not a particularly flashy ultimate, but it can provide powerful bonuses, especially since Super Gary is one hard nut to crack.
  • Companion Cube: Gary, Stetmann's favorite harvesting bot — its in-game rank is "Best Friend".
  • Composite Character: Several of his units combine a base zerg units with elements of another from the terran and protoss armies.
    • His Mecha Drones function largely like the usual type, except that they can repair friendly buildings and mechanical units, like terran SCVs.
    • His Mecha Zerglings have a barrier ability that reduces incoming damage to a flat rate, similar to an ability formerly used by protoss Immortals.
    • His Mecha Hydralisks have an upgrade that translates to extra long-range Anti-Air missiles that do extra damage to airborne Armored-type enemies, much like the terran Goliath.
    • His Mecha Battlecarrier Lords are Brood Lords that can deploy interceptors and fire their own version of the Yamato cannon.
  • Cooldown Manipulation: So, so much of Stetmann's kit revolves around breaking the limits of allied units' attack and cast rate. For instance:
    • FAST Overload allows affected units to attack 25% faster.
    • UMI-C Charging Protocol for the Mecha Infestor allows the target unit to rapidly charge up energy as well as have 20% reduced ability cooldowns.
    • JUICE Config and JUICE Overload provide dramatically increased energy regeneration, especially when combined. Combine these with the UMI-C mentioned above and you can have a single unit generating energy faster than even Kerrigan or Nova.
  • Death is Cheap: Mecha Swarm units will drop remnants upon death, allowing them to be instantly rebuilt at their base structure once enough has been collected. Morphed units drop double their base unit's remnant, and zerglings and banelings drop double the remnant compared to other units. Ergo, banelings instantly reincarnate as zerglings upon death.
  • Developer's Foresight: If you take him into "Mist Opportunities", where Egon is your Mission Control, he still is, but his transmissions are now framed as him talking to Bel'Shir, Gary, or just himself. Gary instead serves as the player character.
  • Dig Attack:
    • His Mecha Lurkers can quickly tunnel to a new location and deal damage to any ground unit within their travel paths. This also burrows them automatically, letting them start attacking as soon as they reach their destination.
    • Mecha Ultralisks can perform a burrow charge ability like Kerrigan's ultralisks, with the added bonus of being able to stun mechanical ground units when they emerge, courtesy of an upgrade.
  • Difficult, but Awesome: Playing Stetmann effectively requires a lot of micromangement; he has respawning unit buildings to rally into the field, he needs to constantly be expanding his stetellite network so they can to support his army in the field, he has several units with manually activated abilities that need player input, his units don't passively regenerate health or energy on their own (necessitating switching the configuration of his stetellites to provide them these benefits), and he has a hero unit to watch over with abilities critical to his army's success. But if you can manage the APM to oversee all of this, he is a Lightning Bruiser of a commander with a very mobile, very economical, very powerful army.
  • Disc-One Nuke:
    • Mecha Zerglings and Banelings. Not only are they dirt-cheap and easy to mass, both are also incredibly strong when amplified with enough Egonergy that they could tear apart anything on land in large enough amounts. Since both are Cannon Fodder, they also drop plenty of scrap to rebuild them with, so reinforcing a strongpoint is rather simple. And to sweeten the deal, a level 13 talent lets them drop double their usual scrap amount. Their only weaknesses are hard-crowd control and air, which can be remedied by bringing Gary and some Mecha Hydralisks with them, along with switching your Stetfield to HUGS.
    • Mecha Hydralisks. They are available to him from the get-go, and possess two very powerful upgrades at the Den even at commander level 1. A sizable mob of them backed up by Gary and fitted with those upgrades could make very short work of nearly anything, even the normally-dreaded Terran air composition. Really, the only things you'll need in a normal Brutal game are upgraded Mecha Hydralisks, Gary, and maybe some Mecha Battlecarrier Lords to provide fire support against Hybrids.
  • Foil:
    • Is one to Han and Horner, with how slain units drop scraps that can be collected to construct new ones. Unlike H&H however, units rebuilt from scraps are free and are spawned immediately from their respective structures.
    • Is one to Stukov, with how they present themselves as Zerg commanders; while Stukov has gameplay similarities to Terrans and is, in fact, an Infested Terran himself, Stetmann is a regular Terran using robotic Zerg units and buildings, which are made up of a hybrid of Terran and Protoss technology. They can also both make use of Zerg Rush tactics; Stukov with masses of disposable Infested Marines or Infested Troopers, and Stetmann with large amounts of nearly anything in his arsenal, but commonly Mecha Roaches and Mecha Ravagers spawned by Mecha Infestors.
    • Is also one to Kerrigan. Kerrigan is a powerful solo combatant on her own merits, even at the higher difficulties, but can be made far more effective when she has an army backing her up, and she is a ground unit. Gary, on the other hand, is actually pretty weak on his own and absolutely needs an army behind him to be effective. He's also an air unit, making him very weak to enemy anti-air compositions and static defense. They also have a nearly-identical arsenal, the only difference being Corrupters vs Mutalisks and Stetmann having Banelings while Kerrigan doesn't.
  • Fun with Acronyms: His three top bar powers are Fun Accelerator for Speedy Transportation (FAST), Health Uptick Generating System (HUGS), and Just-in-time Uninterruptable Input for Charging Egonergy (JUICE).
  • Healing Shiv: Mecha Infestors can be upgraded with UMI-C Charging Protocol, Stetmann's take on the Neural Parasite. This provides the target allied unit with instant health and energy, as well as charging even 'more' health and energy over time, and provides faster ability cooldowns for its duration.
  • Hell Is That Noise: His Stetelites emit a global audio cue when disabled, that sounds like a high-pitched chirping noise. The thing is, every Stetelite under threat will make this sound, so if many are being attacked at once, which is a likely occurrence considering the need to spread them out, their alarms will create a cacophony of chirps and beeps that gets old really fast, especially when you're dealing with some more urgent threats elsewhere. Thankfully, patch 4.9.1 lowered the volume of this alert sound, but it could still be irritating to hear at times.
  • Hero Unit: Stetmann himself doesn't make a field appearance. Instead, his favourite terrazine harvesting bot will assume this role.
  • Home Field Advantage: While fighting inside Stetzones, Stetmann's army can quickly respond to threats and rapidly restore health and Egonergy, and any units that fall simply get recycled into new ones. Likewise, fighting near Stetellites allows Gary to overcharge them for additional bonuses and powers up his E-Gorb. However, they lose these advantages when fighting outside Stetzones, making them relatively weak; as such, spreading Stetellites is essential for Stetmann to reach his maximum power.
  • Humongous Mecha: The Mecha Ultralisk and Battlecarrier Lord, natch.
  • Hurricane of Puns: The names of so many of his units and talents are puns.
  • Identical Stranger: His entire Mecha Swarm is this to Project Simulant. Despite their similar concepts and practically identical unit skin sets, they are part of two entirely separate projects.
  • Interface Screw: His Stetelites cause insane levels of lag when deployed in large numbers. Made worse when playing on maps with huge numbers of units on the screen at once like Dead of Night and Miner Evacuation. Paired with a Stukov partner, this could lead to unplayable levels of stuttering at times. And that's even without the mini Roach and Ravagers spawned by his Mecha Infestors.
  • Made of Iron: While at first his army seems relatively fragile, combinations of certain abilities and upgrades are capable of making even Zerglings nigh-unkillable.
    • Mecha Zerglings might seem weak on paper, but the Hardened Egonergy Shield upgrade lets them shrug off hits that would instantly kill a normal Zergling. And this is before they regenerate their health thanks to the HUGS Stetzone.
    • Mecha Ultralisks make for prime targets of HUGS overload, granting them a constantly-replenishing shield, in addition to their health drain and a flat 25% damage reduction when upgraded.
    • Mecha Battlecarrier Lords, being siege units, are capable of sitting outside the range of enemy weapons while their minions take all the damage (and deal it). In addition, they share their bulk with the Terran battlecruiser, meaning it takes 2 Yamato cannons (3 if they're shielded via HUGS Overload) to put them down.
  • Magikarp Power:
    • On their own, Stetmann's units aren't anything remarkable, even more so when they're out of Egonergy to use their abilities. When complemented with full Stetelite coverage, unique upgrades, plentiful Egonergy to spend, and support from Gary, however, they make for an extremely durable and powerful mechanical tide, capable of flattening most bases with relatively few losses.
    • Gary in his default form is rather squishy and deals unremarkable damage. Once transformed into Super Gary, however, he became much more powerful, and can even generate a temporary Stetzone around himself while on the field.
    • The commander himself plays like this. Stetmann is rather weak during the early-to-mid-game and around the early levels, where his options are limited and the necessary talents haven't been made available yet, and so he relies quite heavily on his allies to cover his weaknesses while ramping up. Once his Mecha Swarm has hit critical mass with all the vital upgrades and full Stetelite coverage, however, he can steamroll over almost anything with ease.
  • Mecha-Mooks: The Mecha Swarm is made up entirely of robotic Zerg units.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter:
    • Stetmann's mechanical zerg doesn't spread nor benefit from creep, but a form of power field called Stetzones. Stetzones are spread using Stetelites similarly to Creep Tumors, and aren't required to build anything other than more Stetelites, since Stetmann can plop down his structures anywhere. Rather, Gary and other mecha zerg units within the fields have access to combat buffs, and Gary can teleport units within range to himself to a Stetelite like Vorazun's Dark Pylons. They also act as conduits for Stetmann's top bar powers, so full map coverage is encouraged.
    • He is also the only Zerg commander who has to repair his structures to keep them up. Stetmann's buildings don't regenerate health like other zerg, and will rapidly burn down when at 25% or less HP (like Terran structures in fact).
    • On the same note, unlike any zerg unit, none of his units regenerate health naturally. But this is a very minor issue as his Stetzones can bring them back to full health faster than the natural Zerg regeneration or he could use his Drones to repair them.
  • Mighty Glacier:
    • Mecha Battlecarrier Lords are the epitome of this amongst Stetmann's army. They're his slowest unit even in a maxed-out FAST field, but are capable of unloading massive amounts of damage with the combination of thrown broodlings, locustceptors, and up to six Stetmato Cannons (with mastery) one after the other per unit.
    • Gary becomes this with the Best Buddy Prestige active, gaining doubled health and damage but moving at a snail's pace outside of Stetzones.
  • Mission Control: Stetmann pulls double duty if playing on Mist Opportunities. Justified because he's crazy.
  • Mook Maker: His Mecha Infestors can spew out Mecha Roach eggs (don't ask how it works), which will then hatch and attack nearby enemies.
  • Promoted to Playable: Gary went from being a minor harvesting bot to a Hero Unit.
  • Shout-Out: On Mist Opportunities, he mentions having built his harvesting bots in a cave with a box of scraps.
  • Stance System: Stetmann's top bar "powers" are actually three different settings for his Egonergy field: FAST greatly increases friendly units' movement speed, HUGS slowly heals them, and JUICES refills their energy.
  • Token Human: Technically, Stetmann is Terran, though the game considers him Zerg for the purposes of commander faction affiliation. This makes him the only "human" Zerg commander, Kerrigan and Infested Stukov notwithstanding, as they are more Zerg than Terran at this point.
  • Took a Level in Badass: Gary, going from a near-defenseless harvesting bot to a potent mobile support unit.
  • True Sight: Gary gains Detection upon upgrading to Super Gary.
  • Underground Monkey: All of his Zerg units are more powerful versions of existing Zerg units seen in the multiplayer. Even the Mecha Battlecarrier Lord still fights like a Brood Lord, though with upgrades it also makes use of Interceptors like a Carrier, and a Yamato Cannon like a Battlecruiser.

Protoss Commanders

    Artanis, Hierarch of the Daelaam 

Prestiges: Valorous Inspirator, Nexus Legate, Arkship Commandant

"None can resist the might of the Templar."

Artanis utilizes the power of the Templar to crush enemies in a torrent of powerful Protoss forces. Artanis' army is not very micro-intensive, but has high stats and power, encouraging a deathball playstyle where he just hits critical mass and flattens anything in his way. He can use the Protoss' warp capabilities to their fullest, able to upgrade all his structures to warp in units anywhere with pylon power, and storing multiple warp charges for them, thus even a small number of structures can quickly yield a fair-sized army. To aid in this, Artanis can create a power field anywhere on the battlefield, and use it to constantly reinforce his army on the offensive. And to keep them fighting, he has Shield Overcharge to grant them a damage-absorbing barrier, and Guardian Shell to temporarily shield critical health units. With his frontline reinforcements and resilient army, few enemies can stand against the Templar.


Provides examples of:

  • A Commander Is You:
    • His numbers are a mix between spammer and elitist, though he heavily favors elitist.
      • Artanis' core damage comes from either reavers, tempests (both of which cost 300 minerals, 200 gas—a small fortune without Swann—and 6 supply per unit) or High Templar (which cost 150 gas apiece). Reaver and High Templar-based compositions also rely on immortals, another costly unit, to soak up damage. All three of these cores are found at the apex of the tech tree, requiring a specific building to be available (fleet beacon for tempests, robotics bay for reavers, and templar archives for high templar).
      • However, the high gas cost of Artanis' core units means he's generally left with plenty of minerals to spend on cheaper gateway units. Zealots are almost always used due to being an effective mineral dump, and most ground compositions use dragoons to deal with enemy air. Additionally, his power field calldown—along with all his production structures acting like warp gates—lets him instantly reinforce any position where he's got vision.
    • Doctrine-wise, he's mostly a brute who excels in simply plowing through any opponents, thanks to the sheer longevity provided by guardian shell and the fact that the few units that do fall can be replaced instantaneously. He also has shades of unit specialist; except for reavers and high templar, his units generally don't overlap (immortals provide anti-armor power and soak up hits, dragoons are cheap anti-air support, HTs and reavers deal ludicrous splash damage, etc.), so Artanis benefits from using multiple units to complement each other. Or just massing dragoons or tempests while spending excess minearals on zealots.
  • Ascended Meme: The mass warp-in of Zealots at the end of the Legacy of the Void opening cinematic prompted jokes about it being a "200-gate proxy all-in" or Artanis being low on Vespene gas. In Co-op, Artanis gets 200 supply right off the bat, instant warp-ins for all units, a power field that can be deployed anywhere, and a mastery option that gives his units a temporary Status Buff when they first warp in, so Artanis can get away with constructing a lot of production structures and warping in a massive army on the enemy's doorstep, a lot of which will likely be Zealots given the abundance of minerals and shortage of gas in Co-op Missions.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • His power field ability is a literal proxy pylon that lets you warp in units (first Gateway ones, then units from the Stargate and Robotics Facility) onto any visible area of the map. This makes it easy to warp in reinforcements to the front lines rather than having to wait for them to trek all the way from your production buildings. It can also serve to power up structures without the use of a Pylon.
    • His Level 15 talent makes him start with 200 supply. Nothing fancy, but it saves a couple thousand minerals in pylons you don't have to build and generally lets you focus on climbing the tech tree and pumping out units quickly.
  • Construct Additional Pylons: Averted upon reaching level 15, at which point he no longer needs Pylons for expanding his supply cap. A Mastery-level Artanis will almost always warp in a grand total of one Pylon per mission (for powering his buildings), and if his partner is Protoss, he might not even need that.
  • Death from Above: Two of his abilities call in orbital bombardments from the Spear of Adun.
  • Elite Army: The Valorous Inspirator Prestige doubles the effectiveness of his units' abilities, but also increases their cost, meaning he has more powerful units overall but can't spam them out as easily. This has obvious applications with Zealots, High Templar and Archons, giving Artanis even more splash damage, but can also be useful with Robotics Facility units (a 400-damage barrier on Immortals backed by constant Reaver fire is nothing to sneeze at) and his air army (Phoenixes can lift enemies twice as frequently, and Tempests do much more damage over time to big objectives).
  • Force and Finesse: The brute and straightforward Force to Vorazun's subvertive and stealthy Finesse. With the exception of the High Templar and the High Archon, Artanis basically builds a lot of offensive units, upgrades them, and attack-moves them into enemies crushing all resistance. Additionally, his Plasma Shield upgrade and the fact that Psionic Storm in Co-op is friendly-fire proof means that even when using High Templar and High Archons as part of his deathball, they can cast Psi-storm with impunity.
  • Herd-Hitting Attack: Between Psionic Storm, Whirlwind, Dual Graviton Beam, his offensive calldowns, and Reaver splash damage, Artanis's army has a lot of ways to break up crowds of enemies. Even more so with his Arkship Commandant prestige, which causes his Orbital Strike to summon Unbound Fanatics, which are basically stronger Archons with a powerful area-of-effect ability.
  • I Can Still Fight!: Guardian Shell shields allied units for 5 seconds when they take a fatal hit, keeping them alive a bit longer. A mastery further grants them brief HP regeneration for the shield's duration. Coupled with Shield Overcharge to give allied units a 200-point shield, and Artanis and his teammate's units are surprisingly hard to kill even as they hang on with single-digit HP.
  • Jack of All Stats: Overall, Artanis comes across as this. His mass warp-ins and lack of supply limit let him max out quickly, but he doesn't spam as quickly as Raynor or Zagara due to his lack of economy boosts and his maxed army doesn't have the late-game power of, say, Swann or Abathur. His Zealots and Dragoons give him a solid early-game, but not at the same level as hero commanders like Kerrigan. Even his calldowns reflect this, as he can use them to either protect allies or demolish enemies from above, but they're not quite as potent as the calldowns fielded by the likes of Nova, Karax, or Dehaka.
  • Magic Knight: His Archons can be upgraded to regain their High Templar abilities in addition to their powerful attacks.
  • Mass Teleportation: The perk of his Nexus Legate Prestige; when he redeploys his Power Field, any of his units standing in the old Power Field are teleported to the new location, and the Prestige also removes the Power Field's cooldown at the expense of giving it a small energy cost.
  • Mighty Glacier: Artanis has multiple options for both dealing heavy splash damage and sieging from long range, while his units can be quite resilient due to Guardian Shell and Shield Overcharge along with High Templars with Plasma Surge restoring their shields. However, the majority of his units are also painfully slow, and barring the Nexus Legate prestige he has no options to improve his army's mobility.
  • Nostalgia Level: Save for the Phoenix, Immortal, and Tempest, all of his units are from the original Starcraft: Zealots, Dragoons, High Templar, Archons, and Reavers.
  • Obvious Rule Patch: Patch 5.0.3 made Artanis start the game with a Power Field already deployed. This is usually meaningless since all it takes is a button press to deploy a free Power Field at the start of the game anyway... unless you're running the Nexus Legate Prestige, which makes the Power Field cost energy to use (and, in the same patch, was nerfed to make the Power Field cost much more energy than before), in which case getting a free Power Field allows him to go about his usual build without having to wait for the Spear of Adun to build up energy.
  • Required Secondary Powers: Artanis's Level 7 talent lets his Archons cast Psionic Storm and Feedback, just like their High Templar components. However, those abilities are useless without energy, so said talent gives them that too.
  • Sequence Breaking: His level 15 talent, Glory of the Daelaam, sets his starting supply to 200, removing the need for him to make Pylons to provide supply. In tandem with his Power Field calldown to create a power field anywhere he likes, Artanis can skip Pylons in his tech tree to build a Gateway or Forge right away, before coming back to build one so he can put his power field elsewhere. Artanis can potentially forgo Pylons completely if partnered with a Protoss ally, since they share power fields.
  • We Have Reserves: Not in-universe, but it sometimes feels like this. Thanks to his power field ability and warp production structures, he can literally reinforce and replace units instantaneously. As in, the game explicitly says "Warp your army instantly into battle."

    Vorazun, Matriarch of the Nerazim 

Prestiges: Spirit of Respite, Withering Siphon, Keeper of Shadows

"As one, we are unstoppable."

Vorazun brings the stealth and subversive tactics of the Nerazim to the forefront. Vorazun's army lacks in the pure power of some other commanders, but she makes up for it with an array of debilitative moves, with Centurions that can stun enemies, Oracles that can set statis wards to freeze them, and Corsairs that can deploy Disruption Webs to halt attacks. The pinnacle of this is the Dark Archon, which can confuse enemies and even take control of their minds to fight for Vorazun. Vorazun has many talents and upgrades to grant benefits to cloaked units, which she can make great use of since almost all of her army units can cloak in some way, and she can summon Dark Pylons that cast a cloaking field over all allied units and structures in their radius, and can Recall armies out of harm's way or to defend the base from an unexpected attack. Striking from the shadows to disable and destroy in the blink of an eye, the enemy has as much chance of evading Vorazun's wrath as they could their own shadow.


Provides examples of:

  • Achilles' Heel: With a dash of irony — Vorazun, the stealth specialist of the Protoss, has problems with detection. Enemy detectors tend to be air units, and Vorazun's tech tree nudges her to focusing on a ground-based army that isn't good at quickly killing air units, so she can't easily snipe an opponent's detectors. When it comes to the enemy's cloaked and burrowed units, she can use Photon Cannons for defense but has no Observers, instead her Oracles are her detectors. The problem is that Oracles are Fragile Speedster Squishy Wizards that tend to rush ahead of her army and get killed easily, especially if they're the only air unit Vorazun has in her army and thus all the enemy's dedicated anti-air focuses down her Oracles. Fielding Oracles is also a problem since Vorazun will need to build a Stargate and spend a lot of gas to build them, and to upgrade them at a Fleet Beacon requires even more time and resources.
  • A Commander Is You:
    • Vorazun is a Balanced commander adhering very much to the Guerilla doctrine. Stealth is the bread and butter of her Glass Cannon army, who for their cost can't last as long in a melee and don't have the advantage of overwhelming numbers on their side.
  • All Your Powers Combined: Her Dark Templar combine powers of all their variants from the campaign; they have the Shadow Fury ability, the Void Stasis of the Blood Hunter, the Blink ability of Zeratul, and one of her talents gives all friendly cloaked or burrowed units (the Dark Templar being permanently cloaked) the Emergency Recall ability of the Avenger, though recalled units don't regain full health and shields unlike in the campaign.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: The Void Ray, just like its campaign counterpart, can melt through enemies when you have enough of them. Emphasis on "when you have enough"; because Co-op Missions starts you out with no infrastructure aside from a Nexus and twelve probes, you have to manually sink resources and time to tech up to the Stargate, and even then you need a Fleet Beacon to research their range upgrade. Their cost, particularly in vespene gas, also severely limits the rate at which they can be built, which isn't good considering how quickly enemy attacks ramp up in Co-op.
  • Balance Buff: Her Dark Templar has more shields than the average, all the abilities of their variants from the campaign, a passive 15% boost to damage courtesy of a Talent and cost 50 less vespene to warp in. This makes them much more effective in combat and much more economical to use.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • She can use the Spear of Adun to remotely harvest vespene from Assimilators, both eliminating the need for probes to do the job and allowing remote geysers to be harvested quickly without the need for a nearby Nexus.
    • The Black Hole ability can force an army into a tiny spot, making it a prime target for a single strike (such as a Spear of Adun attack, or a Nuke). Vorazun herself lacks any significant area attacks to make use of this; her ally, on the other hand...
  • Brought Down to Badass: When Legacy of the Void was first released, Vorazun was the best commander and by far the best one due to her overpowered army. Numerous patches have since nerfed her in various ways; she's still a very effective commander and still considered one of the best.
  • Combat Pragmatist: Her abilities overall focus on disabling enemies and striking using cloaked units.
  • Force and Finesse: The subversive and stealthy Finesse to Artanis's brute and straightforward Force. While her units are perfectly capable in a fight, their abilities are more supportive than the offensive powers of Artanis and she has more spellcasters in general, and her playstyle encourages Vorazun players to use her spellcasters to disable enemies for an advantage. She also makes prominently use of cloaked units to attack the enemy's vulnerable points.
  • Forgot About His Powers: Unlike in multiplayer, Vorazun's Dark Templars cannot be merged together to create Archons. Or Dark Archons, for that matter, who exist as a separate unit choice deployed from the Gateway.
  • Gathering Steam: She shares this same crimp with Swann, who also relies heavily on tech units to form most of his army. While Vorazun is extremely powerful once she has hit her stride with a big blob of Dark Templars and Archons, backed up by fleets of Corsairs and Void Rays to serve as air damage, her main weakness is her expensive and slow ramp, as all of her useful units are high up on the tech tree and require a lot of buildings to even unlock. This makes her early game very weak if her Shadow Guards happen to be on cooldown, and even when her core army is available, they would still need to have their researches purchased to get them up to speed. As a result, she is particularly bad in Mutations that hit your economy, or those that have panic events that strike early and have to be carefully dealt with such as Propagators, since losing your entire army to an opening wave will set you back immensely considering the sheer amount of tech Vorazun needs. As well, many of her stronger talents are level-gated, meaning that a low-level Vorazun will likely struggle on the harder difficulties if you decide to jump into them early.
  • Glass Cannon: Vorazun's army has alarmingly high damage output, but none of her units can take a hit. Of course, if played well, the enemy won't get a chance to hit back.
  • Heel–Face Brainwashing: Enemy units hit with her Dark Archons' Mind Control are permanently transferred to her control. Unlike other commanders with similar abilities, enemy units mind controlled by Dark Archons do not expire after a certain amount of time, though they will also take up their own weight in supply which she has to compensate for with her own pylons.
  • Heroic Second Wind: Once the appropriate Talents have been unlocked, dropping a Dark Pylon on the battlefield will boost the damage of all friendly units in the area of effect by 15%, and grants them the Emergency Recall ability.
  • Invisibility Cloak: Her Dark Pylons cloak nearby units and structures, she has Dark Templar, and she can upgrade her Corsairs and Oracles with permanent cloaking. Her Stalkers can also be upgraded to briefly cloak themselves upon Blinking.
  • Mass Teleportation: Her Dark Pylons can use Recall to warp masses of allied units to their location.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter:
    • She can't build the Robotics Facility or any of its units. In lieu of Observers, her Oracles act as her detectors.
  • Mind Rape: She has the Dark Archon, which use Confuse and Mind Control to disable enemies via mental manipulation.
  • Obvious Rule Patch: Aside from the numerous other nerfs she got hit with over time, Patch 3.6 added rocks over the vespene geysers of expansions that must be destroyed to build mining facilities. Players quickly noted that this doesn't affect most commanders, since those expansions already had rocks blocking the construction of town halls and that coupled with the build time for them meant that the geyser rocks doesn't really affect the time it takes to expand. Vorazun is the exception to that, as she could build her automated assimilators over them to mine from afar and now could no longer do so. invoked Word of God is this change was to hit Vorazun and Swann (who could build unmanned Refineries and set harvesting drones on them), but it affected her far more than him.
  • Power Up Letdown: Her first Prestige Talent, Spirit of Respite is infamous for how pointless it is until you've nearly, already finished leveling her... It's primary benefit, an upgraded Emergency Recall, something that's unlocked at level 13. Additionally, the downside, disabling normal recall usage for her Dark Pylons, only actually has an effect once recall is unlocked at level 11, meaning that for two thirds of the process of leveling her first prestige talent, all it does is maker her dark pylons cheaper. That being said, it doesn't have any downsides either, so it's still used for early-level grinding.
  • Teleport Spam: Combined with Flash Step and Blade Spam. Her Dark Templars (and Shadow Guards) inherit their campaign counterparts' Shadow Fury ability, which lets them zip rapidly around an area of engagement and deal heavy damage to mobs of enemies.
  • Time Stands Still:
    • Her ultimate ability is Time Stop, which freezes the entire map in time for 20 seconds. That's not an exaggeration - it even pauses objective timers and delays enemy attack waves.
    • Her Oracles also have the ability to place cloaked stasis wards on the ground which, upon detonation, will trap nearby enemy units in stasis for 30 seconds. When upgraded, units can continue to attack enemies affected by stasis.
  • Useless Useful Stealth: Subverted. While enemies on higher difficulties will frequently bring along Detectors, Vorazun has Talents which boosts the damage of all cloaked friendly units by 15%, grants them the Emergency Recall ability, and increases the recharge rate of their shields by 400%. In a fierce battle, the strategic dropping of a Dark Pylon on the right units can turn the tide, as seen in the Heroic Second Wind entry above.
  • Weak, but Skilled: Enforced by her second Prestige, Withering Siphon. It cuts the attack power of all her combat units, but enemy units under the effect of Darkcoil, Void Stasis, Confusion, Disruption Web, or Stasis Ward, lose 20 HP a second and these abilities also disable Heroic units (as a balance precaution the Prestige also greatly reduces the duration of Stasis Ward). Even without it, Vorazun is very light on splash damage, and her units are relatively fragile and rely on ambush tactics and crowd control to compensate for her lack of raw power.

    Karax, Khalai Phase-smith 

Prestiges: Architect of War, Templar Apparent, Solarite Celestial

"That is the power of a phase-smith properly applied."

The Khalai phase-smith embodies the mechanical brilliance of the Khalai Caste and fights with an arsenal of Purifier units and robotic supporters, and can upgrade the Spear of Adun to use its powers more often. While his army is incredibly expensive and slow to deploy, Karax possesses some of the strongest defensive capabilities of any commander, devastating enemy attack waves with powerful Khaydarin Monoliths and Shield Batteries to supplement his Photon Cannons. Karax can also use the Spear of Adun's Reconstruction Beam and his Carriers' Repair Drones to fix up mechanical units and deploy a Chrono Wave to greatly increase the efficiency of allied structures, making him a valuable supporter in any mission.


Provides examples of:

  • A Commander Is You:
    • Numbers: Elitist/Balanced. His units are more expensive but also bulkier than the Protoss norm and come with various strong abilities, meaning he doesn't have the easiest time massing units, especially compared to his static defense. However, since his units don't have increased supply costs and he can instantly undo supply blocks, he can still build up a decently-sized army if he focuses on Robotics Facility units and Sentinels.
    • Doctrine: Karax's ridiculously strong defensive line with instant-warp Photon Cannons and Khaydarin Monoliths alongside the Spear of Adun, along with the very long time it takes for his army to come online, make him the biggest Turtle in the game. He also has elements of Industrial (once again, instant warp-ins on turrets, which can be combined with Orbital Strike for ridiculously fast expansions) and Research (can upgrade much faster with Chrono Wave, has a ton more upgrade options than most commanders in general).
    • Architect of War emphasizes his Turtle side, making his defense line even more obscenely tough to break but reducing his army's staying power, making it harder for him to push efficiently.
    • Templar Apparent deserves mention here for pushing him into Spammer territory - with the cost reduction, Templar Apparent Karax actually has the cheapest army units of any Protoss commander, and they still get to keep their increased health and shields. Combined with his ability to instantly build Pylons and vastly speed up production, and Karax can ramp up very quickly.
    • Solarite Celestial, on the other hand, goes full Gimmick - he ramps up even slower than normal without his production-boosting abilities, meaning he'll be hard pressed to get any sort of decently-sized army out. Instead, the Spear of Adun becomes his mainstay, with the reduced costs and cooldowns allowing him to easily bombard enemies into the dirt with his calldowns.
  • Ascended Meme: Karax is built around the idea of cheesing his opponents by cannon rushing, which entails getting a Forge before a Gateway and making Photon Cannons outside of the opponent's base. Karax's Pylons and defensive structures warp in instantly, which not only means that cannon rushing an early objective point is not only viable for him, but with his more expensive units that need upgrades to fight efficiently, it's his preferred strategy.
  • Back from the Dead: His Sentinels can be upgraded with the Reconstruction ability from the campaign, allowing them to revive themselves upon death once every two minutes.
  • Beam Spam: He has the same Orbital Strike as Artanis, but his only costs five energy a blast and there's no limit to how many he can call down, allowing a Karax player with a good energy reserve to rapidly bombard an area with continuous fire. To facilitate the spam, Karax can research upgrades to increase the rate at which he gains energy.
    • Even better, the Solarite Celestial prestige lowers the energy cost of Orbital Strike by 40%, making it only three energy a blast, allowing for even more spamming.
  • Benevolent A.I.: He specializes in Purifier units from the campaign, robots that fight alongside the Protoss against Amon.
  • Boring, but Practical: The way he uses Orbital Strike; he doesn't need to be committed to using five shots each time he needs to use it, making it far more economic than Artanis' version.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: Karax's Templar Apparent prestige gives him a more offensive edge by reducing the cost of his combat units, allowing him to take the initiative and mobilize an army if he so chooses instead of being reduced to cannon-dropping or sitting in the base defending it. The trade-off is that it also takes away all of his static defense options aside from Shield Batteries, making him completely exposed if a ghost decides to nuke his base, not to mention his inability to fortify positions with structures.
  • Death from Above: Three of his commander abilities call down orbital attacks from the Spear of Adun.
  • Early Game Hell: Karax is downright awful at level 1, as he lacks his trademark instant-warp static defense (which doesn't unlock until level 11) and his army is both slow and expensive to ramp up, especially with the gimped Chrono Wave at early levels. Even when he does get an army out, the lack of Reconstruction Beam severely cuts down their staying power and his anti-air is very lacking. Once he gets all his upgrades, though, Karax can be a force to be reckoned with.
  • Elite Army: His units all have their costs increased by 30% to make up for the fact they have powerful support abilities and 50% more health than normal. Additionally, his best units are the Immortal, Colossus, and Carrier, which all have high supply costs, so his army isn't going to be as large as other commanders. One of his masteries can increase their health and shields even further, making even his lowly sentinels exceedingly hard to put down.
  • Foil:
    • To Swann; they both have a tech tree made up of mechanical units, have a unique building to upgrade their calldown skills and help out on the offense from afar, have economy-boosting abilities, and use static defensive structures prominently. The difference is that Swann leans more to building and upgrading a powerful army and vespene harvesting, while Karax focuses more on his calldowns and defenses and accelerates production with Chrono boosts.
    • To Fenix; they both primarily use Purifier units which have a high cost in making them. However, Karax plays it safe with a Stone Wall doctrine with instant-warp Pylons and Cannons alongside the Reconstruction Beam. Fenix, on the other hand, has no means of healing his forces, forcing him to charge in with bulky units.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: Upgrading the Spear of Adun for him at the Solar Forge has no affect on an allied Artanis or Vorazun, despite the fact they're all using the Spear of Adun for their calldown abilities (and in the case of Artanis, he and Karax have the same calldown).
  • Healing Factor: He has the Spear of Adun's Reconstruction Beam to slowly repair his (or his ally's) mechanical forces.
  • Heel–Face Brainwashing: His Energizers can take control of enemy robotic units, but causes them to blow up once the duration timer runs out.
  • Kill It with Fire: Has the Colossus and the Spear of Adun's Solar Lance to scorch enemies with beams of fire. He can upgrade both of them to set the ground on fire in their wake, dealing more damage to enemies that pass by the site.
  • Magikarp Power: Karax is one of a fairly small number of commanders who plays quite differently at Lv.1 than they do at Lv.15. The abilities that form the core of his gameplay style — Ridiculously Fast Construction and, to a lesser extent, the Regenerating Health — are only unlocked at Lv.11 and Lv.7, respectively. It's a long time before you can even play him the way he's meant to be played. (There's also a monetary investment, since, under normal circumstances, you're capped at Lv.5 on commanders you haven't bought.) Compare this to Tychus, who has the core of his gameplay unlocked by Lv.2, with the remaining levels only adding on additional Hero Units and the Medivac mobility option (which, to be sure, is very necessary at higher difficulties).
  • Mighty Glacier: Aside from the Sentinel, all of Karax's units are a bit on the slow side, but are very powerful and have high stats. Also comes into play with Karax himself; his high unit building costs and the many upgrades he needs to make them viable, along with the upgrades he needs to optimize his calldowns and turrets, mean he takes a while to get momentum going, but once he does he's quite powerful.
  • More Dakka: A lot more Dakka to be precise. Karax's Architect of War prestige allows his static defense to benefit from his speed-boosting effects, thus massively increasing their fire rate, especially when he activates Chrono Boost.
  • Regenerating Health: At level 7, Karax gains access to the Reconstruction Beam, which slowly restores the HP of allied mechanical units and also repairs structures, and can target up to five recipients at once with an upgrade. His Architect of War prestige ramps this up by doubling the healing rate and the number of targets, up to ten at once with said upgrade researched, though it will no longer affect allied units, only structures.
  • Ridiculously Fast Construction: Another specialty of his. Once he has reached the appropriate level, Karax can warp in Pylons, Shield Batteries and his defence buildings instantly.
  • Robot Master: All of his units are mechanical constructs run by AI programs, with the exception of the Immortal and Carrier that have biological pilots.
  • Sentry Gun: He gets Photon Cannons along with the Khaydarin Monolith and Shield Battery from the campaign. He can further upgrade the former two for greater range and attack speed, and the latter with a barrier ability that lets it shield structures from damage. This gives Karax far and away the best defensive line of any Protoss commander, or any commander in the game, period.
  • Shout-Out: Makes one to The A-Team of all things when completing a mission, with his quote being a paraphrashing of Hannibal Smith's famous line.
    "I greatly appreciate it when a plan is brought to fruition."
  • Support Party Member: Karax as a whole is designed to be this.
    • His high unit building costs and high tech units mean that while he can field a powerful army if required, it takes a lot of time and resources to get them together and struggles to rebuild if they're lost. He's more useful for his Chrono Boost-type abilities that boost production times for the whole team, and using his calldown abilities to support his ally on the offensive without actually being on the front lines with them.
    • His basic Gateway units are the Sentinel, a mechanical Zealot variant that can rebuild itself when destroyed, and the Energizer, which can cast Chrono Beam on an ally to give it an attack and speed boost equivalent to the Marine's Stimpack. In a battle with an ally's units also present, Karax's Sentinels are durable meatshields to defend the rest of the army, while his Energizers rapidly buff the group to improve their combat efficiency.
    • He's the only Protoss commander with Shield Batteries and the ability to repair mechanical units on his own; pairing him with other Protoss commanders will give them the chance to recharge the shields of their units while in combat and allow on-the-move repairs for mechanical units. Pairing up with a Terran commander means that they don't have to worry about structure fires and repairing defensive lines outside of combat.
    • His ability to warp in his turrets and shield batteries instantly allows him to create a functional defense or offense post in seconds with a single probe. Provided the ally can distract the enemy for a second, Karax can rapidly create a line of turrets to help them out.
    • Subverted in different ways with each of his prestiges: Architect of War prevents him from supporting units with repair and Unity Barrier, Templar Apparent removes his cannons and monoliths, and Solarite Celestial removes every variant of Chrono Boost from his kit (save for Energizers' Chrono Beam).
  • Time Master: He has several variants of the Chrono Boost ability that lets him speed up production time for himself and allies, and his Energizers can use Chrono Beam to boost the movement and attack speeds of allied units. The Architect of War prestige offer the same option by allowing Chrono Boost, Chrono Wave and Chrono Field to boost the attack speeds of defensive structures (both Karax's and his ally).
  • The Turret Master: Not only does Karax get Khaydarin Monoliths and Shield Batteries to complement his Photon Cannons, but he also gets an array of upgrades for them and can warp them in instantly. It's not uncommon for Karax players to go an entire mission without training a single combat unit, instead relying entirely on turrets and the Spear of Adun.
    • Taken even further with the Architect of War prestige which allows Chrono Boost, Chrono Wave and Chrono Field to boost the attack speeds of defensive structures, up to +500% fire rate. And it also allows the Unity Barrier to affect defensive structures with a much lower cooldown to it. All of this also affects Karax's ally defensive structure. But it has a high cost: Unity Barrier only affects defensive structures instead of units and Repair beam only affects structures.
  • Unwanted Assistance: One of the greatest hindrances to a typical Karax player is a teammate who builds with no consideration for his building plan. An even greater inconvenience would be a genuinely well-meaning ally who attempts to "help" him by building their own static defenses, often right where he is going to place his Cannons or Monoliths, significantly weakening his defensive capabilities. Almost anyone can be an Unwanted Assistant to Karax, but the most common culprits tend to be his fellow Protoss commanders such as Artanis or Vorazun, who might be tempted to take advantage of the power field of his pylons to plop down their own Cannons, which will never be as strong or sturdy as his own.
  • Wave-Motion Gun: One of his talents allows him to fire a Purifier Beam from the Spear of Adun. A second talent increases the beam's speed and damage.

    Alarak, Highlord of the Tal'darim 

Prestiges: Artificer of Souls, Tyrant Ascendant, Shadow of Death

"I don't see why they needed two of us. I could have done this alone."
The Highlord of the Tal'darim, Alarak takes the field himself to slaughter enemies personally. He absorbs the life force of his victims to rejuvinate his health and shields, and if the battle is too pitched, he'll resort to doing the same to his own allied units to keep himself alive. Alarak's Supplicants eagerly give their lives for his glory, and not just for him — Alarak's Ascendants are powerful psionic spellcasters that can consume the life of a Supplicant to restore their energy. Rounding out Alarak's forces are his robotic arsenal, the Slayer, the Vanguard, and the Wrathwalker, and he can also summon the Death Fleet to scour the enemy with a fleet of Destroyer Void Rays led by a Mothership. Alarak will be the first into battle and the last to leave, and his armies will support him to the death, theirs or the enemy's, by the will of the Highlord.


Provides examples of:

  • A Commander Is You:
    • One of the more Technical commanders in Co-op. Proper ability use is vital to getting the most of Alarak and his Ascendants, while his robotic units' slow attack rates mean a lot of careful target-firing.
    • In terms of numbers, he's a weird cross between Spammer and Elitist. While he warps in lots and lots of Supplicants over the course of the game, they're meant as death fodder to fuel Alarak and his Ascendants, and he relies on a relatively small force of powerful units to actually kill things.
  • A.I. Breaker: A minor instance. Alarak's Supplicants can get +25 Shields through an upgrade, bumping them up to a combined total of 225 health and shields, which is just high enough to make Battlecruisers waste their Yamato Cannons on them due to how the AI is coded.
  • Badass Boast: "I am as strong as any army!", "Witness the might of the Death Fleet!", and plenty more.
  • Bad Boss:
    • One of his passive abilities absorbs health from nearby allied units to heal Alarak when he gets at low HP, even to the point of killing them if he must. Quote Blizzard: "His passive, Soul Absorption... allows him to steal the souls of his allies whenever he is near death — with no cooldown. Alarak WILL be the last one standing!"
    • One of his reaction quotes to taking heavy losses in his army is to snark that "[his] weakest warriors have been culled"; his tone makes it clear he isn't too broken up over their deaths. One of his other reaction quotes to taking heavy losses has him commenting that he'd kill his troops a second time for their failure if he could.
    • The Artificer of Souls prestige is an extreme case. Whenever a Supplicant dies with the prestige active, one of his nearby mech units gains a stacking bonus to attack damage and attack speed, but unlike Ascendants, they can't manually sacrifice Supplicants, and Ascendants themselves cost a lot of vespene gas, making them hard to build early on while you're also building up a mech army. The solution? Kill the Supplicants manually. (Or better yet, have your units target-fire Alarak, so that he sacrifices Supplicants en masse to refill his health between each volley.)
  • Balance Buff: In the campaign, Alarak was unable to attack air units. His hero unit here is given an air attack to keep him from being helpless against air power.
  • The Battlestar: The Shadow of Death Prestige makes the Mothership from Summon Death Fleet permanent and allows it to construct Destroyers (though it no longer enters play with a Destroyer escort).
  • Boring, but Practical: His Structure Overcharge isn't anything flashy, but it's very effective at clearing out expansion rocks or defending against unexpected attacks, especially since Alarak isn't good at repositioning his army in a hurry.
  • Brought Down to Normal:
    • The Artificer of Souls Prestige reduces the damage output of Alarak's abilities in exchange for the potential power boost to his mechanical units, forcing him to play more cautiously in the early game since he now takes longer to kill things.
    • The old version of the Shadow of Death Prestige lowered the Death Fleet's stats by 50% as a tradeoff for them being permanent. It basically turns the Death Fleet into less of a force for leveling bases and more as a way to get Alarak's army around the map faster by having a Mothership over his head at all times.
  • Cannon Fodder: His Supplicants, who aren't much in a fight themselves and basically exist to power up Alarak and his Ascendants, who have abilities that rely on having Supplicants nearby to support them. Supplicants themselves in turn are cheap and expendable since supporting Alarak and his Ascendants is their primary purpose; the AI is even coded to sacrifice them first if Alarak needs to restore his health. They also qualify in the traditional sense: with the offensive capabilities of a wet noodle but a decent amount of shields and an almost obscene amount of armor when fully upgraded, they make fantastic damage sponges for Alarak's actual attacking units.
  • Continuity Snarl: Kind of. While co-op runs with Loose Canon in mind, it would be quite hard to believe Alarak would be on Shakuras defending the xel'naga temple. Despite first appearing in Forbidden Weapon, Alarak's official debut and Heel–Face Turn took place during Artanis' exploration of Ulnar, which happened way after Shakuras went kaboom in Last Stand. Although possibily similar to how Tychus and Zeratul of all people survived to join the co-op roster, Shakuras itself might not have been blown up in this continuity, thus justifying Alarak's defense of it.
  • Cooldown Manipulation: Alarak's final talent, Wrath of the Highlord, resets both of his basic abilities' cooldowns when a Supplicant is sacrificed near him. Note that Alarak doesn't have to do the sacrificing - the Ascendant's Sacrifice ability also triggers the talent. By cycling through Alarak's abilities and Sacrifice on his Ascendants, Alarak can dish out spell damage at an alarming rate, especially with Empower Me active.
  • Crutch Character: Slayers. They serve as Alarak's primary anti-air unit at early levels, but when he unlocks the more powerful Ascendants, he'll be using his resources and Warp Gates for those instead.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The hotkeys for Alarak's Deadly Charge and Destruction Wave are flipped from the ones used in the campaign. This is a relatively minor case since Alarak is only playable for a single campaign mission, but going straight from Co-op to that mission or vice versa will result in you messing up and casting the wrong ability at least once.
  • Dark Is Not Evil: Especially prominent since Alarak gets the Tal'darim skins for all his buildings and units and his style of gameplay would fit an Evil Overlord well, but Alarak is still on the same side as the other commanders and fighting to stop Amon.
  • Death from Above: He can bring in the Death Fleet as a calldown, summoning a Mothership and several Destroyers to attack. With the Shadow of Death Prestige, only a Mothership is called down, but she can warp in Destroyers for a resource cost and both the Mothership and Destroyers are permanent and take up supply, allowing Alarak to build an air-based army if he so desires.
  • Developer's Foresight: Taking him into "Chain of Ascension" prompts different dialogue from Ji'nara, since she's his second-in-command.
  • Disc-One Nuke: Shadow of Death allows Alarak to deploy his Mothership as soon as he can afford it. If you rush out your Assimilators, it can come down before Alarak himself even spawns and then proceed to dominate the early game. As an added bonus, the Mothership and any Destroyers it summons will also make his first Empower Me incredibly potent for that point in the game, if your two hero units weren't already killing things fast enough.
  • Easter Egg: Clicking the red jewel where other Protoss commanders would have their Solarite count prompts amusing quotes from Alarak.
  • Elite Tweak: Enforced by a patch — in normal campaign and melee gameplay, Warp Prisms in Phasing Mode are considered units, but Alarak's War Prisms are consider structures in Phasing Mode. This makes them compatible with his Pylon Overcharge ability, letting his War Prisms provide support fire and giving them a barrier to keep them alive longer while in Phasing Mode. As Alarak's playstyle is a Glass Cannon, offensive War Prism play to let him reinforce his troops is critical to his staying power and this tweak makes that strategy much more viable.
  • Foil: To Artanis, fitting given their interaction in the campaign. Both Artanis and Alarak can summon massive armies quickly through warp-in (Artanis via his instant warp-ins and his structures storing up to three charges, Alarak by warping in Supplicants two at a time), but while Artanis aims to keep his army alive with his Guardian Shell and Shield Overcharge, Alarak sacrifices his troops to keep himself alive. It's even shown by the Zealot and Supplicant's creation quotes: "My life for Aiur!" versus "My life for the Highlord!"
    • Also to Vorazun. While they both lean towards Glass Cannon units, Alarak leans towards overwhelming the opponent with sheer firepower while using Supplicants to sponge damage while Vorazun favors combat pragmatism with cloaking and disruptive calldowns, preventing the opponent from returning fire at all. Their armies also have heavy emphasis on high-tier Gateway units (Dark Templar for Vorazun, Ascendants for Alarak). Finally, they're both locked out of a production building: Vorazun can't build the Robotics Facility, while Alarak is unable to use Stargates.
  • Frontline General: Rather literally; since Alarak's combat units are ranged and Alarak himself is a melee fighter, Alarak is probably going to charge headfirst into battle ripping up enemies while his army supports him from range.
  • Gameplay and Story Integration: One of Alarak's abilities allows his nearby units to psionically empower him, a tactic he previously used in his Rak'Shir duel with Ma'lash. The graphical effects for it are even the same as in that mission, a swirling vortex of psionic power surrounding Alarak.
  • Glass Cannon: Alarak's playstyle as a whole leans towards an army of overwhelming offensive power, but not much in the way of longevity, defensive capability, or even mobility. Once he's ramped up, anything that gets in his way will melt very quickly, but if he's caught wrong-footed or if he can't march his army across the map in time to intercept enemies, he can easily take catastrophic losses.
    • His hero unit is not as durable as others, with only 200 shields and HP, and as a melee attacker when most of his army is ranged, he'll attract a lot of attention in battle. He's reliant on his Soul Absorption passive to stay alive while he uses his powerful damaging abilities to quickly crush the enemy. If the enemy force is too strong, or if Alarak lacks enough Supplicants to keep himself alive, he'll die in short order.
      • This status is highlighted by his ultimate ability, Empower Me. It grants him an attack buff that increases as more allied units are nearby; with enough of them, his attacks deal almost one hundred splash damage and his damaging abilities deal hundreds of damage. However, it has a cooldown of several minutes and only lasts twenty seconds, so it must be used wisely.
    • The Ascendant, Wrathwalker, and Vanguard are the offensive backbone of Alarak's armies. They're very powerful units, but tend to die quickly if not protected and are expensive and time-consuming to replace. Also, like Alarak Ascendants are reliant on having lots of Supplicants to keep their energy reserves high to spam their offensive abilities, and are much less powerful without Supplicants or energy.
  • Hero Unit: Alarak appears in the battlefield himself to fight in the front lines, with abilities focused on dealing heavy damage to enemies.
  • Ineffectual Loner: Ironically, Alarak isn't the most effective solo combatant: Empower Me requires him to have an army at his side, and if things get hairy, he needs Supplicants nearby to sacrifice in order to replenish health. He's still fairly powerful on his own, but he needs units backing him up.
  • Life Drain: A variant: Alarak drains his own units' health to restore his own. He also retains his ability from the campaign to restore health by killing enemies.
  • Magikarp Power: His Ascendant are a minor example. Psionic Orb's inital damage isn't much good for killing anything tougher than zerglings and Mind Blast deals respectable damage but plenty of enemies are capable of surviving it. And Ascendants are a bit fragile. Research Power Overwhelming though, feed them a few supplicants and they get a good boost in power and shields. At ten stacks, they boast 1040 shields (that's almost three Archons) and can potentially one-shot most enemies shy of Hybrids.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter:
    • He's the only Protoss commander that doesn't get Zealots or a variant thereof, using the Supplicant instead. As a result, only Alarak himself uses melee attacks, his entire army uses ranged attacks.
    • His Havocs act as his Detectors, making him the first commander with a ground-based Detector unit (and still the only ground Detector that's not a Hero Unit). This is also unique to the franchise in general — previously Detectors have been buildings, air units or hero units.
    • He's unable to build Stargates, his aerial arsenal limited to the War Prism built from the Robotics Facility and the temporarily summoned Death Fleet. This also gives him the unique quirk that his Cybernetics Core researches upgrades for the Havoc instead of air upgrades, and his weapons and shield upgrades apply to both ground and air units.
    • Shadow of Death makes Alarak the first commander that can bring in a production structure with a calldown, as the Prestige gives his Mothership the ability to construct Destroyers. This also makes him the second commander after Mengsk whose calldown summons permanent army units, which take up their weight in supply.
  • Nerf: Alarak's Vanguards and Mothership have much less powerful attacks than their campaign counterparts. Additionally, his Mothership possesses a much weaker (but much more spammable) Thermal Lance and trades its other two abilities for the ability to teleport itself and nearby units, making it more of a support unit than a frontline attacker.
    • A patch made it so that the weapon and armor upgrades at his forge are now for both ground and air units; this severely weakens the early-game power of his Death Fleet, as prior to the change they basically had 3/3/0 for free.
  • Not the Intended Use: Structure Overcharge is meant to be for defending your base. Many players instead use it on a flying Terran structure as ghetto battlecruiser, or against rock formations that block resource spots. A patch acknowledged its offensive potential by letting Alarak Overcharge his War Prisms in Phasing Mode, basically giving him makeshift Siege Tanks.
  • One-Man Army:
    • Like Kerrigan, Alarak takes the field himself to fight and has numerous abilities to boost his combat potential, allowing him to take on enemy armies alone and come out on top. Best demonstrated by his voice lines for using Empower Me, which lets him wade into enemy bases and attack waves and eviscerate them in short order. Even moreso with the Tyrant Ascendant Prestige, which cuts Empower Me's cooldown in half, letting him easily have it available for every major push, and with max points in the duration Mastery, he can have it up almost 50% of the time. Needless to say, when you're running this Prestige, Alarak will personally be doing most of the work.
    • His Ascendants have the potential to become this as well, due to an upgrade that allows them to gain a permanent stacking bonus to shields and ability damage each time they sacrifice a Supplicant. It takes a lot of Supplicants to get there, but you can eventually get an Ascendant with several Archons worth of shields that can One-Hit Kill a Battlecruiser or low-tier Hybrid with Mindblast.
  • Overshadowed by Awesome: His Slayers don't have much place in his army, due to how they're the Jack of All Stats units that have to compete with Supplicants and Ascendants for supply and Warp Gate usage, and those two units are much more critical to Alarak's playstyle. Even as anti-air, ostensibly their intended niche, a couple of Ascendants with Psionic Orb and Mindblast in conjunction with Wrathwalkers will do far more damage to an enemy air fleet than several Slayers could.
  • Pet the Dog: Enforced by one of his achievements, which is rewarded by killing enough enemy units using Structure Overcharge on an ally's buildings; in essence, you earn the achievement by using the ability to defend an ally's base for them. That being said, his voice lines for casting Structure Overcharge fall squarely into Kick the Dog territory.
    "Your base is becoming a liability!"
  • Power Glows: As Alarak's Ascendants gain stacks of Power Overwhelming, they become surrounded by a bright red glow that becomes stronger with each stack, making them resemble Archons. With the Artificer of Souls prestige, mechanical units will gain glowing red Tron Lines and begin crackling with energy as they gain attack damage and speed.
  • Some Dexterity Required: Alarak needs a lot more than just F2, A, and left click. To play him to his fullest potential, you need to be able to cycle through Alarak's abilities and those of his Ascendants and focus fire key targets with his Wrathwalkers instead of wasting shots on Marines, all the while keeping up a steady stream of Supplicants to replace the ones that get sacrificed over the course of regular gameplay. And that's before taking into account the "No Cooldown Alarak" technique, in which you cycle through Alarak's abilities and the Ascendants' Sacrifice as quickly as you possibly can to constantly reset Alarak's cooldowns, shredding everything near him with massive spell damage.
  • Spikes of Villainy: Alarak's units and buildings use the Tal'darim skins, making everything extra spiky, though subverted since Alarak is at worst morally grey.
  • Support Party Member: He gets one in the Supplicant, a unit that exists to grant Alarak power rather than be effective by itself. He also gets the Havoc from the campaign, which is a Detector in addition to its usual kit to compensate for his lack of Observers.
  • Unique Enemy: Unlike any other commander up to his introduction, Alarak has three units exclusive to his Co-op arsenal that don't appear anywhere else in the game: the Supplicant, a sacrificial meat shield used for recharging Alarak's health and giving energy to his Ascendants; the Slayer, a Stalker variant with the Mirage's Phasing Armor and the ability to deal bonus damage after blinking; and the War Prism, a Warp Prism variant that can attack enemies in transport mode.
  • We Have Reserves: Basically Alarak's approach to Supplicants. It helps that they warp in two at a time and only cost a handful of minerals, of which Co-op players generally end up having far more than they know what to do with anyway.
  • Why Did You Make Me Hit You?: Or, more accurately, Why Did You Make Me Hit My Supplicants? Many of Alarak's abilities give him increased attack power and cooldown reductions when he sacrifices a Supplicant, implying that he's going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge... to avenge the Tal'darim the enemy "made" him sacrifice.
  • You Will Not Evade Me: Alarak has multiple ways to keep enemies from fleeing; his Slayers deal extra damage after blinking, his Havocs can drop Force Fields, and he himself can use his Destruction Wave to send the enemy army straight into his army.
  • Your Soul Is Mine!: Alarak drains the life from his Supplicants to keep himself alive, and his Ascendants do the same to restore their energy. With his Artificer of Souls Prestige, Alarak's mechanical units gain a stacking buff to damage and attack speed each time a Supplicant is sacrificed.

    Fenix, Purifier Executor 

Prestiges: Akhundelar, Network Administrator, Unconquered Spirit

"Nothing is as exhilarating as glorious combat."

A Purifier war machine bestowed with an AI replication of the Templar warrior of the same name, Fenix commands the fearsome Purifiers in battle. Since his true being is a formless AI, Fenix can transfer his consciousness between three distinct forms at will — an experimental Immortal prototype armor that excels at melee combat, a Dragoon shell powered by Solarite with powerful ranged attacks, and an Arbiter vessel with support skills. Fenix also commands Purifier A.I.s based on six legendary Protoss heroes. While deploying his forces, Fenix's AI heroes will take up residence in the shell of an appropriate unit and command them to battle, and if their current shell is destroyed their AI will transfer to another available shell and keep fighting. Coupled with Talents to play fast and loose with the Protoss tech tree, and Fenix can field a versatile, powerful army of units backed by his AI lieutenants.


Provides examples of:

  • Alpha Strike:
    • The Solarite Dragoon's Arsenal Overcharge ability temporarily removes all cooldowns on its other abilities, letting Fenix unleash about ten seconds worth of concentrated Beam Spam to blast everything around him into smithereens. However, doing so will heavily deplete the Dragoon's energy reserves, leaving it low on energy for the next few minutes.
    • Fenix's Akhundelar Prestige is basically this. It massively ramps up the power level of his combat platforms at the expense of a 20 second timed life and a sevenfold cooldown timer (extending his suit cooldowns from 15 seconds to roughly two minutes), requiring incredibly precise timing in order to make the most out of his deployments or else risk a failed assault when he expires.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: Fenix's Akhundelar prestige massively increases the cooldowns of all his suits in exchange for ramping up their power level. However, his Cybros Arbiter gets to keep its regular cooldown given that it's his primary form of mobility and detection rather than a combat platform (and thus gains relatively little benefit from the prestige's bonuses).
  • Body Backup Drive: The six heroes can transfer their consciousness to the body of another unit of their type upon death.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • While Fenix can skip tech outright using Operational Efficiency, his level 10 talent, going up the regular Protoss tech path while taking advantage of Operational Efficency's bonuses enables Fenix to open up all of his tech options a lot quicker than his fellow Protoss commanders, and makes fielding armies full of Gateway, Robotics Facility, and Stargate units a breeze, whereas most other Protoss commanders usually only have enough time to commit to one or two tech paths due to how expensive their tech buildings are, and how much time it takes for them and their requisite buildings to warp in. Doing this allows Fenix to cover almost every weakness each of his units has by having all of his units out at once, and more importantly, lets him deploy all of his Hero Units as quickly as possible.
    • One of the bonuses he can put his Mastery points towards is starting supply, which will significantly reduce the amount of pylons he requires to reach his 200 supply max. Considering he tends toward high tier units, and even his Zealot variant costs 3 supply, this goes a long way toward helping him in the early game.
  • Came Back Strong: The level 11 talent, Avenging Protocol, grants his hero units a brief period of increased attack and movement speeds when they enter a shell after their previous one is destroyed. Especially noticeable on Kaldalis, whose leap attack means he'll almost always be the first into the fray and subsequently the first to die, only to come back and tear enemies up even faster. His Unconquered Spirit prestige is all about abusing Avenging Protocol; not only does it double the benefits given (making your Champions obscenely fast when they revive), but it also removes their bonus health and shields compared to their base units and reduces their attack range to ensure that they'll be in the frontline. They also refund resources on death to make losing them far more affordable.
  • Canon Immigrant: As seen in Easter Egg, Probius can appear among Fenix's probes after all 6 champions are researched. While Heroes of the Storm describes Probius as the probe from the Legacy of the Void opening cinematic, the aforementioned MOBA was also the first time Probius was actually given a name, let alone a personality, before its cameo in StarCraft II's Co-Op.
  • Can't Drop the Hero: Averted. While most commanders' representative Hero Unit (if they have one) is deployed automatically within the first 4 minutes of the mission, Fenix spawns via a calldown instead. A sufficiently competent player can complete whole missions without ever having to use him.
  • A Commander Is You:
    • Numbers-wise, he's Balanced, at least compared to the armies of Artanis and Karax or Zeratul. His armies are more expensive than Artanis's armies and he can't field as many units, but the armies of Karax and Zeratul are even more expensive.
    • His doctrine tends toward Brute since his combat units have basically no active abilities that aren't autocast (even his Adepts' shades are more or less passive) meaning his army just attack-moves through most enemies, though there's some Technical mixed into his army via Conservators, Disruptors, and Fenix's own deployable suits, which each have abilities that make either themselves or the units around them more potent in one way or another.
  • Continuity Nod: All six of Fenix's subordinate heroes are established characters: Kaldalis is the Zealot from the Legacy of the Void opening cinematic, Talis was the Adept who sacrificed herself to let Zeratul escape at the end of the prologue missions of the same, Taldarin appeared in a mission in the Nintendo 64 version of the original game, Mojo and Warbringer appeared in the Enslavers campaign, and Clolarion was the Purifier executor who Artanis negotiated with in Legacy of the Void.
    • Special mention for Kaldalis, his charge ability is a perfect replica of his namesake's leap at the end of the Legacy of the Void opening cinematic. Doubles as a Call-Back. And if you pay attention to his portrait, he's still missing an eye even as a Purifier (although it's not the same eye that was scarred over in life, and his unit model still has both eyes due to just being a bigger Legionnaire).
  • Death is Cheap: Played with. Fenix's combat suits can be destroyed, but as an A.I. construct transferring between shell bodies, he can't really die. The result is that Fenix can instantly deploy in another body the moment his current one is destroyed. However, his three shell bodies take longer to regenerate when destroyed than if they are heavily damaged, thus it's still better to switch bodies beforehand and not let that happen. Played straighter with his AI champions - when they're killed, they just hop into another shell and keep fighting, or wait for one to be produced if there aren't any.
  • Disc-One Nuke: Fenix's ability to bypass the techtree lets him roll out an Immortal or Colossus right off the bat and then upgrade it with the corresponding champion AI. With their heavy area damage, Taldarin and Warbringer can easily solo early attack waves, clear out expansion rocks, and probably do a number on the first objective as well. Alternatively, simply going for a Gateway and using Kaldalis to shred early enemies with his massive damage output works just as well.
  • Doppelgänger Attack: Fenix's Adepts create Shades that can attack enemy units.
  • Easter Egg: Once all six AI personalities are researched, Probiusnote  will appear among his probes as the next probe created. Unfortunately, he is exactly like his fellow probes, the only thing to distinguish him from them being the glowing ring behind him like the other Champions have. If he dies, he won't transfer to another probe.
  • Elite Army: Fenix tends to high-tier tech options for his army, and even his basic zealot variant, the Legionnaire, has increased supply and resource costs (though it has higher stats to make up for it). This means he can't get the biggest armies, but they'll be quite effective.
  • Fighting a Shadow: Once a hero's AI has been researched, it's completely unkillable: killing its physical form just lets it download into another Purifier and wiping every last one of their specific type out still lets it take control of the next to be built. The same applies to Fenix: killing one of his bodies just means he can transfer to another and killing all three only means he needs to wait for one to be repaired.
  • Foil: To Karax. While both specialize in Purifier units, their armies and playstyles are almost complete opposites: Karax specializes in providing support with static defense and calldowns as his army and upgrades get quite expensive and most of his units are relatively weak for their cost, while Fenix has stronger units than the norm and gets reduced costs on his tech structures and units, but has weak static defense and no real calldowns to fall back on. Incidentally, this also makes them a fairly strong combination in-game as they cover each other's weaknesses perfectly.
  • Gameplay and Story Integration: Lore has long established that Carriers have personal armaments for purifying planets infested by the Zerg, but this has never come up in gameplay. Clolarion ends that distinction by having a Wave-Motion Gun on his Carrier in addition to Interceptors that is visually identical to how Carriers have been shown using their weapons before, though only as an anti-air weapon.
    • The Legacy of the Void campaign established that the Purifiers were made with a synthetic replication of the Khala, causing them to function more efficiently while in close proximity with one another. This is represented in gameplay by Fenix's ultimate talent, Tactical Data Web, which directly empowers the abilities of each champion for each unit of their type you control.
  • Hero Unit: The Commander. Fenix has a grand total of seven hero units consisting of himself and the following six: Kaldalis (Zealot), Talis (Adept), Taldarin (Immortal), Warbringer (Colossus), Mojo (Scout), and Clolarion (Carrier).
  • Large and in Charge: While controlling a body, the six heroes grow larger than normal units of their type.
  • Magikarp Power: At low levels, Fenix's army is slow, expensive, and inefficient, and Fenix's own hero unit will be a Crutch Character to support them, and his Champions are just beefed-up ordinary units who aside from Kaldalis and Talis aren't anything special and have no unique abilities. Once he hits Level 9, his tech structures lose their tech requirements and become much cheaper, letting his army start ramping up much easier, and from then on every Talent he gets (save for one that buffs Fenix himself) powers up his Champions with stat boosts and unique abilities to make them far more powerful.
  • Mass Teleportation: The Cybros Arbiter naturally retains the Mass Recall ability, giving Fenix a way to quickly reposition his and his ally's armies.
  • Meaningful Rename: In-universe example, carried over from the campaign; patch 3.14 added a forge upgrade – costs about 25 of each resource type by default – that changes the Fenix hero unit's name to Talandar, which means "one who bears a strong heart" in the protoss native language. This does not appear to affect him in any gameplay sense, but it does serve as a nod to his Character Development throughout the Legacy of the Void campaign he debuted in.
    Fenix/Talandar: I am honored to choose my own name. It will be... Talandar.
  • Mecha-Mooks: His army is based around the Purifier faction and everything in it is robotic.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter:
    • Unlike other hero unit commanders, Fenix has no energy regeneration in the field, and no way to recover HP once his shields fall. His two shell bodies that he isn't currently using regenerate energy and HP while inactive, thus players need to keep cycling out his bodies to let them recover to full power. Also, Fenix himself is a calldown, so players can instantly deploy him anywhere in the field with a click of the mouse.
    • One of Fenix's talents allows him to bypass tech requirements for buildings and removes the Vespene cost of his buildings: this lets him build anything he wants, any time he wants. A Fenix player can hypothetically skip right to Stargates or Robotics Facilities and ignore Gateway units entirely, or warp in Photon Cannons without a Forge for a super-early expansion or defensive effort.
    • He controls not one, but a total of seven hero units.
  • Mighty Glacier: Outside of his air power, Fenix's combat units tend to be rather slow, but they're terrifically powerful.
  • Mythology Gag:
    • Fenix's Dragoon body is an obvious reference to the eventual fate of his namesake.
    Fenix: (swapping into Solarite Dragoon) I am a Dragoon once more!
    • In the first StarCraft, Taldarin was a Dragoon and Warbringer was a Reaver; here, Taldarin is an Immortal (who in the lore are upgraded Dragoons), and Warbringer is a Colossus (who take the Reaver's role as the Protoss siege unit).
    • The six heroes are an update of the Hero Unit concept in Starcraft, where a Hero Unit tended to just be a more powerful version of an existing unit (the original Fenix as Zealot and Dragoon, for instance).
    • The Scout was originally planned to be the Purifiers' starfighter in the Legacy of the Void campaign before being replaced by the Mirage. Here, Fenix uses Scouts as his primary air superiority unit.
    • As stated in Easter Egg, Probius will appear once as the next probe trained after all 6 heroes have been researched in the Purifier Conclave. If he dies, though, he's gone for the rest of the mission.
    • As Kaldalis' leap has a longer range than the standard Zealot charge, he'll still end up "the tip of the spear", and quick to die. Avenging Protocol makes this useful mechanically-speaking as well.
    • His Akhundelar prestige is basically a reversion to his role as a time-limited Nigh-Invulnerable wrecking ball in Legacy of the Void, turning him from the permanent hero unit he is normally to a pseudo-call down.
  • Nerf: Being the nigh-unstoppable force he was in the campaign, Blizzard reduced his Praetor Armor's potency in co-op by giving the armor an energy limit to counter-balance the fact Fenix will likely be on the field for far longer than 30 seconds. His energy will also not recharge while he's deployed, encouraging him to switch to a different shell for a while if he runs out.
  • One-Man Army: It's entirely possible to drop Fenix in his Praetor Armor to open a can of whup-ass on the enemy on his own for a while, just like he does in the campaign, and in his Solarite Dragoon form a barrage of area abilities can decimate even the largest attack waves. His Network Administrator Prestige focuses heavily on buffing his AI champions through Tactical Data Web, resulting in things like Kaldalis dealing 100 cleave damage per hit or Mojo instantly evaporating enemy air squadrons, at the expense of his non-heroic units being half as powerful as they usually are.
  • Power Up Letdown: Network Administrator is perhaps the single worst case of this amongst all of the prestiges, as it's primary benefit is an (admittedly very potent) buff to his Tactical Data Web, at the cost of greatly weakened non-champion units. Tactical Data Web is his last talent, and beforehand he's simply stuck with extremely weak versions of his normal units that rely on swarming to get anything done.
  • Sequence Breaking: Operational Efficiency removes all techtree requirements on Fenix's production buildings, letting him do things like getting Immortals and Carriers before even building a Gateway. In fact, one of his achievements requires you to get Clolarion and four Carriers within a time limit, pretty much forcing you to rush out multiple Stargates right off the bat.
  • Stance System: Fenix's bodies act like this, each giving him access to different abilities.
    • Praetor Armor: His Stone Wall armor, using Shield Capacitors to constantly recharge his shields for sustained combat on the front lines. However, he can't attack air units and is a melee fighter.
    • Solarite Dragoon: His Glass Cannon armor, with area-of-effect damaging abilities and a powerful long-range attack normally, but it isn't suitable for prolonged usage as it'll quickly run out of energy for its abilities.
    • Cybros Arbiter: His Support Party Member armor, with handy support abilities to aid armies, but by far the weakest offensive potential of his three suits.
  • Teleport Spam: Fenix's suits can be deployed anywhere on the battlefield, and on a very short cooldown for each. The end result is generally akin to this trope.
  • Unique Enemy: Like Alarak, Fenix has a few unique units: the Legionnaire, a tougher Zealot that Kaldalis can possess, and the Conservator, which can become a power field like the Energizer and deploy a shield that reduces all incoming damage. Fenix himself also counts; while his Praetor Armor was seen in the campaign, his Cybros Arbiter and Solarite Dragoon were not seen anywhere before his reveal for Co-Op.
  • Villain Override: A heroic example. The way the six heroes work is that once researched, they automatically take control of a unit of their specific type on the field, and upon death, they immediately possess another unit of that type. If you have none remaining when they die, they will take control of the first you produce.
  • Why Am I Ticking?: Taldarin's upgrade, Gravimetric Overload, allows him to store a percentage of the damage he deals to enemy units within them. When they die, they'll explode for the cumulative damage applied by Taldarin.

    Zeratul, Dark Prelate 

Prestiges: Anakh Su'n, Knowledge Seeker, Herald of the Void

"I have crossed the threshold of destiny... and lived to see it."

In an alternate timeline where he lived to see the End War unfold, Zeratul calls upon the wisdom of the Xel'naga to guide him in battle. He commands an army of Xel'naga Remnant warriors with increased life and damage as well as additional abilities compared to their Protoss counterparts. With his Prophetic Vision ability, he can hunt down fragments of a Xel'naga Artifact scattered around the map, and as he collects them his forces grow stronger, with upgraded stats and new abilities, and new calldowns for the player to access. Zeratul's army is small and limited, with a handful of unit choices and a supply cap of 100, but their power is enough to make up the difference, provided Zeratul is quick to locate the artifact fragments to unlock their full combat potential.


Provides examples of:

  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • When Zeratul is in play, the map's terrain is revealed similar to a multiplayer game rather than the mode's norm of covering it in black until it's explored. This is to benefit Zeratul's Prophetic Vision ability during his artifact hunt; the way it works is it shows a real-time image of the area the next artifact piece can be found, and if it were to be covered in black like normal, this picture would be worthless to the player. Additionally, repeated uses of Prophetic Vision eventually point out the specific general region of the map the fragment is hidden within and gradually reduce the indicated area as it keeps being used.
    • Zeratul's Abrogators (Xel'naga Disruptors) are low on the command card priority when selecting the whole army, but are capable of auto-casting their own Purification Novas. The Purification Nova is also treated as a basic attack, which prevents the Abrogators from wandering to the front of Zeratul's army and dying.
  • Balance Buff: Zeratul's hero unit has much more powerful attacks than he did in the campaigns, and he can now attack air units.
  • Beyond the Impossible: His Knowledge Seeker Prestige increases the cost of combat units by 25%, but allows Zeratul to collect unlimited artifact fragments. Though the unique upgrades they grant still cap at the third, each subsequent artifact will continue to give a weapon/armor/shield upgrade, letting Zeratul go well beyond the usual level three cap and get as many levels as he likes.
  • Blown Across the Room: At two collected artifact fragments, Zeratul's Enforcers gain a knockback effect to their anti-air attacks that pushes struck air units backwards and stuns them. The knockback is large enough to cancel Battlecruisers from channeling Yamato Cannon, which comes in handy when nearly all of Zeratul's army are valid targets for it.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • Zeratul's Nexus will automatically construct automated assimilators over nearby vespene geysers, meaning that he'll never be short on gas. Every single combat unit of his requires gas, so this is even more useful than you think.
    • His Level 12 Talent reduces the supply costs of his supporter units (reducing Void Arrays to 1 supply each and Watchers to 0). Not very flashy, but when you have only 100 Supply to work with, it's very useful.
  • Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Zeratul's units and structures use Xel'naga skins and go by different names, but are still immediately recognizable as the base unit with a different skin and name. Instead of Stalkers, he builds "Xel'naga Ambushers", instead of Gateways he builds "Xel'naga Passageways", and so forth.
  • The Cavalry: His three possible Legendary Legion calldowns all summon allies to fight alongside him. He can choose from a legion of Zealots lead by a High Templar, a fleet of Void Rays, or a number of Dark Archons.
  • A Commander Is You:
    • As far as numbers go, he's the most Elitist protoss commander in the game, with a 100-supply maximum and Glass Cannon units that are prohibitively expensive.
    • Doctrine-wise, he's very deceptively Technical; many of the abilities his units make use of are set to autocast. Some of these autocast abilities, such as the Ambusher's Blink, tend to be more efficient when manually cast due to a damage dealing property acquired after certain amounts of artifact fragments are collected.
  • Construct Additional Pylons: Soundly averted, as Zeratul starts with 100 supply right off the bat and can warp in structures anywhere he desires.
  • Continuity Nod: Telbrus and Zoraya, the hero High Templar and Void Ray that Zeratul can call in, are both taken from a tie-in short story for Wings of Liberty.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Most hero units have their abilities bound to QWERT for ease of use. Zeratul does not, and in fact will mess with the Blink capabilities of his troops when selected along with everyone else (he Blinks together with Void Templar, but not Ambushers).
  • Deflector Shield: His Shieldguards can be upgraded to create a small area of effect where 50% of incoming projectiles are reflected back towards their source. This even includes spells like Yamato Cannon.
  • Defog of War: A hidden passive of Zeratul reveals the terrain of whichever map he's currently playing on to facilitate the use of his Prophetic Vision, which also (kind of) reveals where certain important map objectives are (e.g. infested structures in Dead of Night and evac ships in Miner Evacuation have their locations revealed on the minimap). Mag Mines also show up as red blips on the minimap when playing certain mutations.
    • Zeratul can use his Void Seeker to transport himself to any point on the map regardless of vision.
    • As his Watchers cost no supply once he levels up enough, Zeratul can spend any floating vespene gas on lots and lots of Watchers to plant them around the map and provide vision.
  • Difficult, but Awesome: While both Zeratul's Ambushers and Void Templars are nothing to sneeze at by themselves, making the most of their kits requires a good level of micro to control their Blink(s). This means the player will need to sort them into their own control groups, and then control those groups separately, as selecting the entire army will override their Blink with Zeratul's own, making them less effective overall.
  • Doppelgänger Attack: Zeratul's Ambushers can be upgraded to leave behind copies of themselves upon Blinking, that can attack once for 50% of their parent unit's damage before dissipating.
  • Elite Army: Zeratul is fixed at 100 supply, meaning that his army size is limited; they offset this disadvantage by being more powerful than regular units. They're also exceptionally expensive compared to regular Protoss units.
  • Fetch Quest: At the start of each game, three Xel'naga artifacts are scattered across the battlefield for Zeratul to retrieve. The exact locations are random and must be revealed via Prophetic Vision, which displays an approximated area where a fragment may be, and using the ability again in its proximity reveals the shard itself.
    • His Knowledge Seeker prestige ramps this up by adding a potential 100 extra artifact fragments that Zeratul can collect.
  • Foil: Is one to Nova. Both have a 100-supply limit that focuses on quality over quantity; however, Zeratul's units are all Glass Cannons that can be quickly trained, while Nova's combat units are Stone Walls that she can only deploy in staggered amounts.
  • Gathering Steam: Zeratul's core mechanic is the Artifact Fragment hunt, which confers additional upgrades and buffs to himself and his units at the expense of both of them being rather weak right off the bat. If allowed to mass and gather fragments, Zeratul can steamroll through just about anything, and his Knowledge Seeker prestige has 103 whopping ones to collect, which while still capping unit upgrades to three levels, has practically no upper limit to how ridiculously strong you can buff your own Hero Unitnote , provided you and your partner can have the patience to wait that long. In exchange, a "maxed out" Zeratul can solo basically entire maps by himself with his 5,000-point shield, Shadow Cleaves that deal one thousand damage per hit and technically infinite Teleport Spam.
  • Glass Cannon: Most of Zeratul's offensive units have terrifically better power than their normal counterparts, but about the same HP and shields, resulting in an army that hits very hard but isn't very difficult to kill.
  • Hero Unit: Zeratul himself is controllable on the battlefield. His gameplay revolves heavily around this by making you move out with him and search for the three artifact fragments hidden on the map. Furthermore, his Legendary Legion calldowns all incorporate a hero unit.
  • Humongous Mecha: His final calldown ability allows him to summon either the Avatar of Form, a psionic expert specialised in dealing direct damage, or the Avatar of Essence, a force multiplier that buffs the attack speed of nearby allies and "regresses" nearby enemies to lower tier units.
  • Invisibility Cloak: The Anakh Su'n prestige changes Zeratul's Void Seeker's functionality from transporting him around the map to granting Super Cloak to allied units in an area, letting them fight without fear of retaliation even if the enemy has detection.
  • Loophole Abuse:
    • The "Darkness" and "Afraid of the Dark" mutators disable Zeratul's Defog of War and make it harder for players to find Artifact Fragments. However, rally points still show up in Prophetic Vision, allowing players to locate the Fragments by rallying a random structure around the approximate spawn area.
    • The Knowledge Seeker prestige prolongs the Fetch Quest by spawning extra Artifact Fragments around the map after the first three. There is a loophole to that however: the Artifact has a specific "spawning point" that it moves away from to determine its actual spawning point, and it is possible to force the Artifact Fragment to only spawn in one specific spot by walling off the spawn point with buildings, significantly cutting down the time and attention span needed to collect the Fragment.
  • Magikarp Power: Zeratul's units, while beefed up compared to their standard brethren, are still relatively easy to kill from the get-go due to their unupgraded armaments and lack of abilities. After collecting all three fragments, however, the difference becomes night and day.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter:
    • Zeratul doesn't use Pylons; he can warp in buildings anywhere he wants, and has 100 supply to begin with. This also means that his Gateways (or rather, Xel'naga Passageways) can't be upgraded to Warp Gates.
    • Zeratul's Assimilators are warped in by the primary Nexus in their resource cluster instead of by Probes. If an expansion is already cleared of rocks when a Nexus finishes warping in, it will automatically construct Assimilators over the geysers.
    • Instead of researching upgrades, Zeratul's army is upgraded as he collects artifact fragments. These upgrades do not need to be paid for and have no wait time. Similarly, his calldowns are gradually unlocked with each fragment he collects.
    • Zeratul's top bar features up to three separate options for each of its four available slots, allowing him to tailor his calldowns to suit the mission at hand instead of being stuck with a fixed set.
    • Zeratul is the only Protoss Commander who cannot use zealots of any kind (barring Telbrus' legion); his basic combat unit is the Xel'Naga Ambusher, equivalent to the Stalker.
    • His level 12 talent removes the supply cost of his observers.
  • Mighty Glacier: Despite their prevalent use of Blink, Zeratul's units can take a rather long time to get anywhere at all depending on the current map. Good thing he has his Void Arrays to rely on.
  • Mind Rape: Serdath and his dark archon legion, naturally. Unlike Vorazun's archons, Zeratul's can cast Maelstrom on enemy units, stunning them through sheer concussion.
  • Money for Nothing: Despite his slow ramp, once Zeratul has managed to shore up a sizable army he's all but invincible, and requires little to no reinforcement during the late game due to his units' absurd survivability at three Artifact fragments. Unless one deliberately let their units die, a Zeratul player will end up sitting on a huge cache of resources in the late game with nothing to spend on except Legion calldowns and mass turrets.
  • Mundane Utility: Players quickly took to using the Legendary Legions to break any expansion-blocking debris in the early game.
  • Mythology Gag: His Legendary Legion calldowns are based on Zeratul's tendency to encounter allies on his quest, such as Karass and Talis, who usually end up dying for his sake. The Legions can't be controlled directly (like most of said allies) and can only be attack-moved to locations, which usually means that they end up fighting to the death.
  • Portal Network: He has access to the Xel'naga Void Array, a unit that essentially combines the Warp Prism and the Nydus Network, letting units load at one and unload at another. With enough of them set up, Zeratul can easily move his army around the map.
  • Ridiculously Fast Construction: One of his later talents cuts his units' training speed in half, compensating for his lack of warp-in.
  • Spectacular Spinning: Zeratul's Shadow Cleave ability has him swing his warp blade in a circle around him, damaging everything nearby. With the Herald of the Void prestige allowing Zeratul to cast it even faster while also adding tornadoes to the mix!
  • Teleport Spam: Blink is the bread and butter of Zeratul's army, so much so that many of his talents and upgrades focus on reducing the cooldown between each use, on top of allowing himself and his Ambushers to store up to three charges at level 15. Reaches its logical extremes with the Knowledge Seeker prestige if you've somehow managed to collect all 103 fragments that can spawn during a mission, at which point Zeratul's Blink cap will have been increased to just as high, allowing him to zip around the map with impunity, while the stacks regenerate faster than you can spend them.
  • Underground Monkey: His army is made up of Xel'naga constructs based on regular Protoss units.
  • Weaponized Teleportation: One of the Ambusher's upgrades leaves behind a shade that attacks once for double its weapon damage upon blinking, and the Void Templar can be upgraded to damage any enemy it blinks through.
  • What If?: Like Tychus before him, Zeratul's existence as a commander in Co-op is justified by the presence of an alternate timeline where he survives the botched retaking of Aiur.
  • Why Won't You Die?: Fully leveled, almost all of his units have ways of avoiding death: Ambushers blink whenever they take damage to their actual health pool, Shieldguards recharge friendly shields and can reflect projectile attacks, Enforcers gain a barrier that absorbs three times as much damage and heals them to full, and Void Templar gain an Auto-Revive on a three minute cooldown and that is without factoring in the Knowledge Seeker Prestige which can make Zeratul's Elite Army nearly unkillable the more fragments you collect.

Alternative Title(s): Starcraft II Coop

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