YMMV / StarCraft II: Co-op Mode

• Annoying Video Game Helper: A lot of the Mission Control characters just never shut up.
  • The advisers for defense-oriented missions like Miner Evacuation and Mist Opportunities completely freak out any time the objective takes damage, be it from an enemy attack wave or a lone Zergling scratching the paint job. Couple that with them also alerting you to enemy attack waves coming for the objective, and it can result in a nonstop barrage of complaints and alerts.
  • Rosa Morales in Dead of the Night constantly complains about you attacking enemy structures at night because it isn't safe. Even if your units aren't actually being attacked while they do it, or even worse, if you're wiping the floor with the infested.
  • General Davis in Part and Parcel is very stern towards you whether you're doing well or not. It got worse when the map was changed so that Balius parts extend your short starting timer, meaning that General Davis will inevitably end up yelling at you for taking too long just a few minutes into the mission when your base isn't even completely set up yet.
  • Stone on Cradle of Death will alert you every time your truck is attacked, when your ally's truck is attacked, when the enemy is sending an attack wave to your truck, and if your units are being attacked by a construct and you need to use a truck to disable it. While the dialogue is just meant to emphasize and remind players of the need for the trucks (which are a unique type of mechanic to this mission, so a player may forget), when it comes time to attack the enemy positions and you have to bring your trucks into the line of fire, expect him to go nuts with alerts as a single enemy attacks them, or a construct gets off one attack before your truck shuts it down.
  • Donny Vermillion of The Vermillion Problem will get on your nerves very quickly with his constant snide remarks. While he's still doing his job of being the Mission Control, his constant snarky remarks tend to get old very fast, especially when he does so at your expense, like losing a unit to the lava surge. Even when you're doing the stuff he tells you to, like killing the molten salamander or playing the objective, he'd still find a way to sensationalize and spin it against you like you've just committed a heinous crime. In fact, the annoying factor ramps up to eleven if you lose, since he gets to rub it in both of your faces and Valerian's.
    Donny: Could the Emperor's allies have done more? The answer is yes. Thanks Valerian.
  • Advisers in general often emphasize that bonus objectives are optional and not necessary for you to do if you can't handle it or don't have time, and in some missions they admit there isn't a need for you to do it, they'd just prefer it if you could do them a favor. Then when you don't do the bonus objective, they complain about you not doing it.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Karax. Some think his high unit costs, coupled with his tight tech tree forcing him to use certain limited unit compositions, make him far too weak to be effective. Others say that his instant-construct static defenses and Spear of Adun abilities make him perfectly viable, and the complainers just aren't playing him the right way. Then there's people who agree with both sides — Karax's unique strengths make him effective, but he really could use a buff to his army anyway. The addition of Masteries mitigated the debate somewhat with a Mastery to reduce his unit building costs; at Level 90 with 30 points sunk into the skill, he has the same costs as other Protoss commanders, letting him keep up with them just fine. Karax was eventually also given a significant army buff in Patch 4.11 - his units now have an additional 50% health and shields (and the unit cost mastery now instead gives them even more health and shields), giving Karax's army something to justify their increased costs.
  • Stukov. A lot of people are disappointed in the limited strategy of his infested units, plus the tendency for him to take huge casualties. Others don't mind using the Zerg Rush in such a fashion, and enjoy using infested mechanical units.
  • Swann became this once Nova was released and he became Overshadowed by Awesome. Swann's bread-and-butter units (Hellbat, Goliath, Siege Tank) are also available for Nova; the major problem is that thanks to their higher stats and unique upgrades, Nova's units are plain better than Swann's. She also has an Airlift calldown that is basically Swann's Hercules as a calldown, and her Ravens have a healing drone even better than the Science Vessel's repair beam, so Swann loses those advantages too. Finally, Swann's playstyle is overall a Mighty Glacier, taking time to build up his forces and upgrade them for maximum efficiency, while Nova can build up her army quickly, reinforce them in the field, and her upgrades research faster than normal due to a Talent. The result is that Swann's detractors claim that most everything Swann can do, Nova can do better. However, Swann has other perks Nova lacks (army size, the laser drill, turrets, Vespene drones) that his defenders claim gives him his own identity without being "Nova Lite", provide him some advantages over her that just aren't immediately apparent, and he's still perfectly viable and effective in his own right.
• Breather Level:
  • "Void Launch" is one of the easiest maps of the pool. The mission involves you defending against waves of enemy Shuttles flying for Warp Conduits just north of your bases, and the Shuttles come with increasingly large escorts. Pretty much any commander can solo the mission by just building rows of anti-air turrets in front of the Warp Conduits and let them take care of the Shuttles while the player's army mops up the attack waves and escorts. The bonus objectives are also easy to secure. To make things even easier, the enemy bases have tight choke points at their entrances, but aren't that difficult to break into with a decently sized army, allowing players to fight to the places the Shuttles depart from and spawn camp them. And as a bonus, this is one of the few maps where the enemy bases have resource nodes, so you can claim a third base and use it as a foothold to intercept the shuttle waves, which tend to go right by you there. Even on Brutal difficulty, the map isn't that challenging if players know what they're doing.
  • "Void Thrashing". The map is very small, the objectives all spawn in fairly close proximity to your bases, and players can force the objectives to spawn by attacking the spawn point, which will trigger them. And killing the enemy strongholds and the void thrashers is not difficult, either. If you know what you're doing, the map can be completed in well under 20 minutes. That being said, the fast pace of this map can also be a limiting factor if your commander has a slow ramp, such as Swann or Tychus, who in most cases will not be able to fight at full strength without a lot of forward planning (and in the case of Tychus, maybe not at all due to the wait time between hiring new outlaws).
  • "Dead of Night" is also pretty easy, for the primary reason that there's no loss condition other than simply losing your whole base, but the mission is centered on defending your base during the night and then attacking the enemy structures during the day. As long as you're putting together a half-decent defense against the infested (which isn't hard; every commander has access to some form of splash damage or powerful stationary defense, if not both), you can take as long as you need to take out their structures during the day; there's no form of escalating difficulty other than the infested attacking from more angles, but that stops after the third night. The bonus objective is also pretty generous, appearing during the night phases as the infested attack, but it only in a handful of places, and only in areas you've previously cleared out, making it easy to prepare for in advance. Lastly, the home base starts out with extra resources to compensate for the fact that there are no expansions, albeit with one less gas node than usual per player, making an early economy relatively rich.
    • It is also the haven for those trying to grind for achievements, particularly those that demand the player kill a certain amount of enemies with a calldown or ability. Due to the sheer amount of infested on the map at night, especially if Nydus Worms also spawn, as they're basically an infinite source of enemy trash units, many players tend to drag the game out for as long as possible with only a handful of structures remaining to grind without hassle.
  • "Lock and Load" is generally a fairly quick and easy mission to clear due to the objectives being relatively lightly defended, allowing players to just sweep through enemy fortifications with good use of calldowns, and attack waves are fairly predictable and give you plenty of time to deal with them. Furthermore, because enemies ignore your base in favor of targeting the locks and the mission does not have a hard timer, there is usually little pressure on players.
  • Released after the more time-restrictive and difficult missions that are "Scythe of Amon" and "Part and Parcel", "Malwarfare" is a more straightforward escort mission that gives the players more breathing room. The transport the players need to protect is fairly bulky and its bonus objectives, though having a price tag, have a relatively generous timer before expiration, and can be completed relatively quickly.
  • "Miner Evacuation" requires you to defend evacuation ships from waves of attacking Infested and drops from Amon's forces. The Infested waves are numerous, have double HP and bring Volatile Infested to threaten ground units, but are still very easy to deal with as they have almost no anti-air and still get chewed up by long-ranged splash damage. The later Infested are also accompanied by Hybrid, but by then your army should be large enough to rip through them. With a competent partner, it's entirely possible to rush through the mission by launching multiple ships at once.
• Cheese Strategy: Mengsk's Earthsplitter Ordinance allow him to clear certain maps with almost contemptuous ease by simply bombing objectives into a smoking crater from long range. Rifts to Korhal is particularly infamous, as there's a spot on the map where he can set up a battery of Earthsplitters that can hit every Void Shard that spawns while never getting attacked by Amon's forces. All his ally has to do once he's set up shop is hunt down the bonus objectives and fend off attack waves (and even the latter might not be necessary if the Mengsk player is good at leading the target with Contaminated Strike, while he can deal with the former using a handful of Sky Furies). Similarly, he can cheese Scythe of Amon by clearing far Slivers with bunkers and nukes before using Earthsplitters to kill the two closest to his base.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Due to the comparatively small map pool, any player who plays the mode often will know them all like the back of their hand. Cue timing pushes on various maps to hit objectives just as they become viable, preparing at specific map routes for enemy attack waves before they spawn, lines of turrets on maps like Void Launch, and so forth. This is a major reason why the Mutator mechanic was introduced, to add new gameplay twists to existing maps and make players approach them differently.
  • The limited maps and unit layouts in Co-op also leads to most commanders having a single game-plan that players will rarely deviate from. For instance, you'll rarely see Alarak players trying to kill things with units other than Ascendants (aside from maybe a few Wrathwalkers for knocking down buildings) and you'd be forgiven for assuming that Karax's only combat units are Sentinels, Carriers, and Photon Cannons.
  • While every Prestige has its benefits and drawbacks, some see more use than others because the former vastly outweigh the negative compared to the commander's other prestiges.
    • Raynor players most often stick to Backwater Marshall, as it gives all of his biological combat units (aka the bread-and-butter of Raynor's strategies) double the HP in exchange for loss of MULEs, but with his infantry being much more durable Raynor won't be needing the extra mineral income as much anymore.
    • Zagara players often use Scourge Queen, as its drawback — no Zagara — is hugely outweighed by the benefits, which are +50 max supply, 4 more free Banelings from the Baneling Nest, and free Scourge from the Scourge Nest. Zagara was already the master of the Zerg Rush, this talent makes her even better at it and lets players easily run over enemies with swarms of free suicidal units, and they can mass more than ever thanks to the increased supply cap.
    • Vorazun will stick to Spirit of Respite. It upgrades Emergency Recall to fully heal recalled units and they recall to the nearest Dark Pylon or Nexus instead of just Nexus, allowing players to use forward Dark Pylons to get units back into the fight faster. It also halves the cost and cooldown of Dark Pylons, allowing Vorazun to make more liberal use out of them and open the game by calling one down for a slight boost to her economy. The only drawback to this Prestige is that Dark Pylons lose their ability to use Recall, which was always a niche use at best that most missions will rarely, if ever, call for.
    • Stukov players will be using Lord of the Horde, as it allows Stukov to mass Infested Bunkers which will produce an endless stream of Infested Troopers to supplement his Infested Civilians, and the drawback — his Bunkers no longer have cargo capacity — means he isn't as good defensively, but with the vastly increased size of his infested army, they'll prove that the best defense is a good offense.
    • Nova players will be using either Soldier of Fortune to more easily mass Nova's units, or Infiltration Specialist if the mission calls for scouting the enemy. Soldier of Fortune encourages Nova to focus on building an army composition of a single type and rarely fielding the other two, and properly microed Infiltration Specialist's drawbacks are completely moot.
    • Tychus commanders will probably be using Technical Recruiter, since the buffs it offers Tychus and his Outlaws with proper micro are ridiculous and turn each of them into a One-Man Army, and Tychus can start clearing the map on his own the moment he spawns. The drawback — increased cost and cooldown to recruit new Outlaws — is negligible since the player can instead put their money towards upgrading the Outlaws they already have.
    • Mengsk commanders tend towards Toxic Tyrant, as its benefits greatly power up his Contaminated Strike calldown and make Earthsplitter Ordinance (which is already pretty good) more viable and generates mandate when troopers are manning those structures. The drawback is that he loses his Nuclear Annihilation calldown, but given that it costs 100 Mandate to use, it was Awesome, but Impractical in the first place, and his Dogs of War calldown is just as effective. Those seeking to level up Mengsk prior to level 10 literally have nothing to lose with this prestige, as Nuclear Annihilation is locked behind that level to begin with.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Basically, every special Infested variants encountered in Dead of Night can qualify. Hunterlings are cliffjumpers who can leap on their prey to stun them, and if they're the kind randomly chosen to appear the first night, they tend to make a beeline for your worker line before you even know they're coming over the cliffs around your base. Chokers can lash targets to stun and damage them, and against single units (like say, a hero unit) they can chainstun them to death. Kaboomers are giant Banelings that saturate areas with acid clouds for continuous damage and explode to do the same when killed, making them lethal against commanders that rely on groups of weak units. Finally, there's the Spotters, who are giant Overseers that can use Void Statis on structures to basically lock them down for several seconds, making them the bane of commanders that rely on static defenses (and Protoss need to be wary of losing their Pylons, potentially de-activating much of their base). Finally there's the Stank, Ultralisks with thousands of HP and an area-of-effect stun, and unlike the other infested they don't burn up when the sun rises, players have to gun them down the hard way.
  • On higher difficulties, Terran enemies will often send Ghosts to nuke your base. While it's easy to kill the Ghosts if you have detectors in place and a way to respond to them, their real threat potential shows itself when you don't, since they tend to sneak in during moments when you're likely to be distracted. Cue a massive Oh, Crap! moment when your army is busy doing its thing on the far end of the map and you hear a nuke warning, doubly so if your commander lacks a way to quickly move their units to respond to it. They're even able to sometimes see your base from low ground, like in Oblivion Express and Cradle of Death, where they can just sit underneath a ledge and nuke from there, and those missions and others put players in the middle of the map so there's more area to search for the Ghost. To make matters more annoying, their nuke drops outrange most of your static defense or detection options, so even Karax players aren't safe behind their walls of cannons and monoliths. When faced with these guys, it really pays to be Properly Paranoid.
  • Certain enemy attack waves make life hell for players.
    • Any of the three "Protoss Armada" compositions (colloqually referred to as "Skytoss") will send massive fleets variably consisting of Oracles, Phoenix, Void Rays, Carriers, and Tempests. For the Terrans, Dominion Battlegroup ("Skyterran") will send fleets of Ravens, Banshees, Vikings, Liberators, and Battlecruisers. Such a mixed force, especially in the number present on higher difficulties, would crush even pro-level melee players, but consider that Co-op commanders have more limited tech trees; for some of them, they may simply have no feasable way to regularly fend off large numbers of top-tier air units. Terrans also have "Shadow Tech", which basically means their most annoying burst damage units — early waves will be Reapers, who can very quickly destroy structures, Cyclones to kite armored units, Liberators to siege your units with artillery from above, Battlecruisers to fire Yamato Guns at eveything, and Ravens to unleash Seeker Missiles on your deathball.
    • Not to be outdone, the Zerg have their own lethal unit composition, Explosive Threats — their attack waves will consist of large numbers of Banelings and Scourge, which will melt pretty much any army no matter what commander you are or what units you're using. When they're gone, you get to deal with Zerglings, Aberrations (who deal bonus damage to armored units), and Vipers (who retain their Disabling Cloud and Parasitic Bomb abilities from melee play, as well as Abduct to easily get your valuable units killed), a unit composition that can quickly shred battered and weakened armies left over from the wave of suicidal units. It's quite telling that Explosive Threats had to be nerfed by replacing some of the Scourges in attack waves with Mutalisks to reduce their Anti-Air damage output because it was just that good at utterly murdering air units.
  • Most enemies unique to Co-op and its Mutators are specifically designed to be exceptionally deadly.
    • Propagators, spawned by the Mutator of the same name, quickly gained infamy among players for effectively being an instant Game Over if not dealt with appropriately. When a Propagator comes in contact with one of your units or structures, it will One-Hit Kill its target before turning it into another Propagator. And no, your Hero Units are just as vulnerable to this trick. If not handled properly, this can result in a massive snowball of Propagators that will destroy your army in seconds, followed by your base. Stukov in particular is especially weak against these enemies, due to his massed infected Terrans providing them with ample fodder, and he himself has relatively limited means of dealing burst damage from range, as well as Stetmann due to his Stetellites still being vulnerable to their replication attack. Thankfully, Propagators themselves are still vulnerable to crowd-control effects like Vorazun's Time Stop, or Kerrigan's Immobilization Wave, which can allow certain commanders to shine in this particular scenario, though it will be a very different story if the "Chaos Studios" Mutation rolls Propagators while you're playing a commander that's not good against them...
    • Void Reanimators can revive dead enemies — they don't care if a unit has been dead thirty seconds or thirty minutes, and don't care if it's a Marine or a Battlecruiser, it gets revived. Unless you have the ability to take control of the entire map for the long haul, they will wander the map reviving your enemies and sending them to attack you, and of course the longer and longer the mission wears on, the more fallen foes there will be for them to revive. Finally, there are no alerts or minimap indicators to let you know where they are, how many there are, or even if there are revived enemies coming, meaning that attack waves will hit you without warning, and even as you fight them off the Void Reanimators are reinforcing their numbers by the second. On Brutal, up to four Reanimators can be active at a time.
    • Void Rifts are another pesky Mutation enemy. They're structures that spawn randomly on the map, often behind enemy lines, and will periodically spit out occasional attack waves while harassing you with a constant stream of basic units. Not only do the attack waves spawned by Void Rifts get harder over time, but there's also no hard cap on the number of Void Rifts that can be in play at once^note the only limit being that Void Rifts can't spawn in close proximity to your base, large clumps of enemies, or other Void Rifts, so if you can't deal with a wave of Rifts quickly enough or if your army gets wiped out trying, the enemy spawns can quickly build up and overwhelm you. Quick and thorough map control and/or Defog of War followed by excessive force are all but required to deal with these before they become a real problem.
    • The Void Slivers on "Scythe of Amon" have a chance to randomly spawn Death Grip Crystals. These buggers can stun multiple units at the same time, and if you don't destroy the crystal before the stun ends, all of those units die. Thankfully, they can't target hero units, but they can really put the hurt on commanders with relatively small armies by disabling and potentially destroying a large portion of their forces at the same time.
    • Boom Bots are invulnerable units that slowly march toward your base and army, detonate a nuke as their basic attack, and can only be dealt with by having one player read the code above them and relay it to the other player, who must then type it in to defuse the Boom Bot. That's right, these things force you to play Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes while playing Starcraft. This will take up an immense amount of your attention and force you to keep your communication on point, because entering a wrong code prevents you from attempting to defuse that Boom Bot again for a short time and makes it speed up. If you or your partner can't keep up, these things will turn you into radioactive dust.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Egon Stetmann didn't make much of an impact in Wings of Liberty, being pretty much a background decoration save for one mission, which was optional. His return as Mission Control for "Mist Opportunities" got him a lot more attention thanks to his Sanity Slippage that made him a hilariously kooky Mad Scientist obsessed with terrazine.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Snooze Opportunities" for the Mist Opportunities mission because of how much it tends to drag near the end, as a team of two competent players can easily clear the map and quickly destroy attack waves as soon as they spawn by then.
  • Using Dehaka's Hero Unit to break expansion rocks at the start of a Co-op Missions game (a very inefficient thing to do given a level 1 Dehaka's low damage output, not to mention wasting time he could be using to collect Essence) is common enough to be known as "rockslapping".
• Game-Breaker: Many. This is a major reason that Mutators were added, and later difficulties above Brutal — because some commanders were just so powerful that even Brutal Mutators posed little challenge to them.
  • Vorazun was considered the best commander when the game first released, and Nerfs over her lifespan have still left her as the best of the original six. Her talents give cloaked units (including your teammate's) a 15% damage buff, quadruple shield regeneration rate, increased energy regeneration, and Emergency Recall, teleporting them to a nearby Nexus on death to save them every four minutes. This goes great with her Dark Templar, which have higher shields, lower gas cost, and faster build time than in melee, and her Corsairs, which can be uploaded to be permanently cloaked and cast Disruption Web to stop ground enemies from attacking. Or you can just drop a Dark Pylon as a calldown, which gives a cloaking field to all nearby units and structures. Her other main calldown is Black Hole, which stuns enemies and clumps them together for several seconds, setting them up for splash damage units and calldowns. And her ultimate calldown is Time Stop, freezing all units on the map for 20 seconds, and a Mastery gives allied units a speed boost while it's in effect. This also all doesn't take into account her other units, which include Centurion Zealots that can stun enemies, Dark Archons that can use Mind Controls and Confuse, and Void Rays that retain their original mechanic of dealing more damage once their lenses align, and an upgrade gives them a huge boost to their attack range once they're charged up.
  • Abathur can steamroll many maps when played correctly, due to his Biomass mechanic. A player who knows the map layout can quickly hunt down some pre-positioned enemies, and if Abathur can't kill them himself, he can lure them into his Toxic Nests to kill them. It doesn't take much to mutate his first pack of Roaches into Brutalisks, giving him three powerful hero units very early in the game, and once he gets air units he can get Leviathans too. Though he's limited to three of each, his normal units can still accrue Biomass that gives them bonus HP, HP regen, energy regen, and a Life Drain on their attacks. In the late game, Abathur's deathball of Zerg will have higher stats than capital ships. And to support his army, he has a topbar ability that heals all allied units instantly and gives them HP regen over time.
  • Alarak, due to his Ascendants. They have three spells — Psionic Orb, which is basically Psionic Storm over a much larger area of effect; Mind Blast, a 200 point single-hit spell that casts instantly; and Sacrifice, which kills a Supplicant to fully restore the Ascendant's energy and can be set to autocast. With an upgrade his Ascendants gain +100 max shields and +25% ability damage whenever they use Sacrifice, capping at 10x bonus. This means that Alarak can get a deathball of Ascendants that are as durable as Archons and have powerful spells to wipe out both waves of weak enemies and quickly focus down powerful single targets.
    • His Prestiges make him even more overpowered. Artificer of Souls nerfs Alarak's active abilities in exchange for his mechanical units getting a +10% buff to damage and attack speed whenever a Supplicant is sacrificed nearby, also capping at 10x. A deathball of empowered Wrathwalkers can march across the battlefield killing everything in sight, and when supported by Ascendants, nothing can stop them. On the other hand there's Shadow of Death, which makes Alarak's Death Fleet calldown into an ability that constructs a permanent Tal'darim Mothership, which can build Destroyers at half the cost of normal Void Rays. While the Mothership still costs a hefty 400/400 resources, it has no tech costs and starts with no cooldown, so an Alarak player can save up for the few minutes and then summon in a hero unit before most hero units even spawn. The Mothership can clear most maps on its own, and later in the mission a fleet of Destroyers will simply melt anything that attacks them.
  • Nova begins with her max supply set to 100 and her army deploys to the rally point instantly with drop pods, and her Talents make their unique upgrades at the Tech Lab cheaper and faster to research. Her combat units have higher stats over their normal counterparts, are immune to stunning effects, with a Mastery they have health regeneration, and they cover every tactical option you'll ever need — Marines, Marauders, Ghosts, Hellions, Goliaths, Siege Tanks, Liberators, Banshees, and Ravens. (which can deploy a mobile drone to heal any allied unit). Her calldowns let her summon a defensive drone to autocast Defensive Matrix on units under attack, calling the Griffon to carpet bomb an area for massive damage, and having the Griffon instantly ferry her army to anywhere she has vision. This means that Nova's army is very powerful, she can instantly reinforce them on the frontlines and in large numbers, she can change up her unit composition at a moment's notice, she can teleport her army around the map for a handful of minerals, and for a more significant investment she can bombard an enemy for massive damage.
  • Tychus became one when Prestiges were added; his Lone Wolf Prestige gave him and his Outlaws +150% damage and 50% damage reduction when they're fighting alone, at the cost of +25% gear cost and no ultimate gear. Each Outlaw was already a One-Man Army, but this Prestige let Tychus himself clear much of the map within the first ten minutes of a mission, and his other Outlaws could solo enemy attack waves. When a patch the next week came to fix glitches in the new campaign achievements, they also nerfed Lone Wolf to a +75% damage bonus; while the patch notes said they would look at balancing other Prestiges in the future, it says something that they recognized this one specifically had to be nerfed immediately, and it later got nerfed again to a +30% damage boost.
  • Kerrigan's Mutalisks became massively powerful from a patch. Originally they had the upgrade "Sundering Glave" which gave them bonus damage against armored enemies, but the patch changed it to "Severing Glave", which caused their attacks to get a 10% boost in damage when they bounced. They also have a separate upgrade, "Vicious Glave", which causes their attacks to bounce two additional times. This turned Kerrigan's Mutalisk swarms into meat grinders, capable of dissolve attack waves instantly, and letting players engage in some cheese by attacking their own buildings (like a summoned Omega Worm in the middle of an enemy base) and letting their shots bounce onto enemies with a damage boost. A later patch nerfed Severing Glave to remove the damage bonus, instead simply causing Mutalisk attacks to not lose damage when bouncing, which lowered them from "ridiculously overpowered" to merely "ridiculously powerful".
    • Her Prestige Folly of Man makes Kerrigan herself a game breaker. Whenever she casts Leaping Strike or Psionic Shift, Kerrigan spends all of her Fury stacks to damage and stun a number of nearby enemies, with the damage and number of targets based on the number expended. Fury builds by simply attacking things, so all she needs to do is hit enemies and cast her abilities to unleash nukes with a huge area of effect (roughly a screen's width), letting her wipe enemy armies out with almost contemptuous ease and making her nigh-unkillable with her Shifting Carapace. The prestige does cut her carapace generation and the abilities' actual damage in half, but she deals so much damage with Fury explosions that you won't even notice the downside.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Phoenixes. Their lack of a ground attack means they'll sometimes ignore ground units, in particular hero units (which can't be targeted by Graviton Beam) and go straight for your base. While they can't shoot buildings, that won't stop them from camping in your mineral line and using your workers and Overlords as target practice, forcing you to pull units back to take them out.
  • Oracles are fairly non-threatening as far as attack units go since they die very quickly to a decently-sized army, but the annoyance starts when you try to push out only to find that they've littered your attack path with Stasis Wards. While the enemy will never actively capitalize on this (unless you pushed out at a very inconvenient time and an attack wave is en route), this does force players to slow down quite a bit and wait for the stasis to wear off so that they don't end up attacking fortified enemy positions with half their army missing. Oh, and Stasis Wards trap Heroic units as well, so even hero commanders aren't immune.
  • Swarm Hosts. Because they don't attack themselves, their Locusts attack for them, they don't trigger the "we're dealing with cloaked units" alert that other units do, so a player could be caught off-guard if they don't know Swarm Hosts are about. Then there is actually locating them, because without a detector the player has to watch the area for when the Locusts eggs pop up, which is infrequent, while other cloaked units can be detected by watching for the ripple from their attacks that come every second or two. They also have ridiculous vision range and can send Locusts at you from a fair distance away.
  • Ravens can be comically annoying with their tendency to drop down an autoturret to piddle away at your army before flying over unpathable terrain to hide, making them a pain to take out for ground units. They're also Detectors, just to make them that much more obnoxious. However, Ravens upgrade to Demonic Spiders on Brutal difficulty - instead of building autoturrets, they fire Seeker Missiles, which can easily end up taking out a chunk of your army if you're not careful and will most likely cost you a unit or two even if you are. And since Ravens will fire missiles from as far away as possible before flying away to hide, it's almost impossible to stop them from spending all their energy on missiles before bringing them down.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • For Alarak around the time he was originally added to Co-op, oversights with his Mothership's Mass Recall resulted in it teleporting things it should not be able to, like the resources dropped by Kerrigan's Assimilation Wave, Ji'nara in "Chain of Ascension" (resulting in her sprite vanishing but the mission continues as normal), the research vessels in "Void Launch," and Artanis' Power Field. Most of these bugs didn't significantly affect gameplay, though, so most players just found it funny.
    • Another particularly infamous one for Alarak gave his Wrath of the Highlord ability (which resets his cooldowns when a Supplicant is sacrificed nearby) global range. This led to the "1QE2C" strategy where you would park a bunch of Ascendants at your base and have them casually sacrifice Supplicants to both build them up and remove Alarak's cooldowns, turning him into a walking death machine that can single-handedly trash entire bases without putting your army in the line of fire (assuming, of course, your APM is good enough to cycle through six abilities per second).^note The name comes from the key inputs: Control group 1 for Alarak, Q and E for his spells, switch to Ascendants in control group 2, C for Sacrifice. Repeat until everything dies. Alarak players were not pleased when the bug was quietly fixed.
  • No one's certain if it's a bug or a feature, but the Stetmann patch allowed Protoss commanders (barring Karax due to, ironically, a buggy interaction with his Chrono Field passive) to Chrono Boost structures as they are being warped in, allowing them to construct faster and leading to some interesting early game build timings. It's since been patched out, though.
  • When prestiges were introduced, an Artificer of Souls Alarak could get the prestige's buffs (which require Supplicants to die near your mech units) for cheap by simply warping in Supplicants from a Warp Gate and then cancelling them. This wasn't allowed to stay for more than one week.
  • In addition to boosting the training and research speeds of allied structures, Karax's Chrono Wave also causes allied Nexuses to warp in faster.
  • The Hyperion can attack nearby enemies automatically even while disabled from attacking (such as when stunned by the pirate ships on "Rifts to Korhal" or cocooned by the Slayn Elementals on "Chain of Ascension"). Also, for some reason, it has a higher attack speed when it automatically attacks nearby enemies after being given a move command, meaning that veteran Raynor players will often have the Hyperion constantly moving around in a fight to improve its damage output.
  • Stetmann's Synthetic Adrenal Pumps upgrade for his Mecha Zerglings doesn't drain Egonergy on each attack like it's supposed to, basically giving his Zerglings a free attack speed boost.
  • At one point, Zeratul's Shieldguards had a bug with their Reflective Shield ability (50% chance to deflect enemy's attack back at attacker): it was possible to deflect attack of the Propagator... resulting in it turning itself into a Propagator under player's control, retaining its signature ability to make anyone killed into more Propagators. The bug was quickly patched out.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Has its own page.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The commanders' voice lines for their calldowns. They usually signal that whatever your teammate is fighting is going to get a harsh asskicking very shortly.
  • Swann's voice lines for deploying vespene drones and Karax's voice lines for Chrono Wave. Actually having enough gas to work with for once and getting your upgrades done in a heartbeat are both very nice, no matter the situation.
    Swann: Starting up a drone. Free vespene, gotta love that, right?
    Karax: I am activating Chrono Boost now. That should greatly increase the output of our structures.
• Replacement Scrappy: General Davis wasn't all that notable for unpopularity from Covert Ops, but when she became the central character for "Parts & Parcel" she attracted near-universal disdain for replacing Cal, the character in the fan version of the map that was fairly well-liked and had a much more interesting personality.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Donny Vermillion spent Wings of Liberty playing a Strawman Political in a series of heavy-handed digs at propaganda news outlets, which many didn't care for. Here he gets to be Mission Control for "The Vermillion Problem", where he relays you mission information as a newscast, and acts like the hammy front desk anchor he was in Wings of Liberty. But he spends the entire time taking passive-aggressive potshots at Valerian and the commanders, criticizing the players no matter what they're doing, and pulling off Hypocritical Humor, Blatant Lies, and Crosses the Line Twice in the process. The result is that he's funny this time around, and some have favorably compared him to a professional Starcraft commentator.
  • Scouts got this treatment when Fenix came out. In the original game they were ridiculed as useless to Protoss players due to their huge resource cost and long build time versus their pitiful stats. Now, Fenix's Scouts build quickly, have an economical cost, provide good firepower, and his Scout hero Mojo deals effect damage to enemy air power as a secondary attack. The result is that Scouts finally get to be the potent air-superiority fighters they were always meant to be.
  • Firebats were considered a niche unit at best in StarCraft and borderline useless in the Wings of Liberty campaign; their short range meant that the few times they weren't trapped behind your army, they would wander out of range of your Medics and die quickly. In Co-Op, however, Raynor's Firebats get much longer range at level 3 and the Juggernaut Plating upgrade at level 4 - which, unlike the campaign version, grants not only +2 armor but also +100 health. Combined with improved stimpacks, Firebats are now effective anti-infantry tanks, shining especially on infested maps.
  • Artanis used to get flak in general for essentially being a Skill Gate Character: easy to pick up and use, but otherwise underwhelming in almost every way. His army units are good, but not great at their roles compared to other commanders' arsenals, and they all suffer from relatively low damage output. His calldowns are considered some of the weakest in the game; Shield Overcharge and Solar Bombardment are crippled by their glacial cooldowns, his power field is good for replacing units and not much else, and Orbital Bombardment is just embarrassingly bad in general (especially since Karax has the exact same calldown, only better in nearly every way). What usage he did have in lategame more or less boiled down to being brought along to use his Guardian Shell to cheese mechanics based on dealing high burst damage, an ability that requires precisely zero actual involvement on his player's part. He got a massive buff on all fronts in 4.2.4, which mostly saved him.
  • Swann's Wraiths used to serve only to remind players why they were replaced by Vikings and Banshees in melee. Whereas the Hercules and the Science Vessel serve as force multipliers that much improve his army once in the field, Wraiths were generally agreed to be the weakest units in Swann's roster; they weren't powerful, cheap or even good at their specific job. With subsequent buffs, they got a new upgrade that greatly increases its attack damage while moving, making it viable in its own right for the sheer burst damage they can deal while stutter-stepping.
  • Alarak's third Prestige, Shadow of Death, initially allowed his Death Fleet to become permanent additions to his army instead of being temporary... at the expense of the Death Fleet's units all having their life, shields, and damage cut in half and Summon Death Fleet's cooldown being drastically increased. Unfortunately, this also means that it's no longer good for anything other than giving him a mass teleport on a 60-second cooldown, which while effective in its own right, came off as severely disappointing to Alarak fans since the Death Fleet dies very easily and won't do much of anything aside from that, and it's heavily overshadowed by his other Prestiges (Artificer of Souls turns his Wrathwalkers into meat grinders, while Tyrant Ascendant turns Alarak himself into a murder machine with Empower Me constantly up). Shadow of Death thus became the first Prestige to be completely reworked, as Patch 5.0.3 changed its functionality entirely to let Alarak build a Mothership for 400/400 using the calldown and then warp in Destroyers from the Mothership for additional resources, and most significantly removed the lowered stats. The end result is considered far more powerful and enjoyable, finally allowing the Death Fleet to live up to its name and allow Alarak to rampage through enemies with a massive deathball of air units. The new Shadow of Death also rescued the Destroyer, as the prestige's version costs less supply and half the resources of the version in the campaign while warping in almost instantly, making it far easier to build a critical mass of them.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The "Vertigo" Mutator is almost universally reviled. What it does is flip your camera around to random angles periodically; not only does this introduce a bunch of frustrating Fake Difficulty when trying to micromanage your army, but it's possibly the first instance of an RTS game causing motion sickness in players. Vertigo was so hated that, after two runs, the Mutator was never used in weekly Mutations again, and it will never be rolled as a random mutator in Custom Mutations nor on Brutal+.
  • "Microtransactions" is another Mutator that didn't go over well. When the Mutator is active, any command you issue to any unit will drain your resources by an amount proportionate to its cost. Considering that spam-clicking is pretty commonplace in this game and is actively punished by the mutator, it can make building and controlling an army way tougher than it needs to be.
  • The "Blizzard" Mutator isn't generally considered too troublesome, since the blizzards move slowly, never touch your base, and are visible on the minimap. However, it has one really annoying behavior: the storms can move through your expansion. This usually means losing everything there if you're not paying attention, and losing a lot of mining time if you are, inevitably resulting in starvation of resources. Thankfully, expansions were eventually made into safe zones from blizzards, meaning it no longer starves you of resources.
  • When Prestige talents were added in Patch 5.0, they were implemented very poorly. Unlocking all three Prestige talents requires resetting the commander's level to 1 three times, making them a lot of trouble to grind through, and you have to unlock them in a specific order, so if you want a commander's third Prestige you need to unlock the first two. With Prestiges being unlocked upon reaching level 15, doing so immediately essentially means that the benefits from reaching level 15 are rendered useless. The worst problem though is that many Prestige talents affect units or abilities that the commanders don't have at level 1 and may be very high on their talent list, disallowing players to use the very thing they just unlocked for several levels. Prestiges can also run into conflicts with Masteries, which are designed to work with a commander's base kit and, in some cases, might not be usable with a certain Prestige that takes away parts of their arsenal.
• That One Achievement:
  • "In the Name of Love" requires Kerrigan to stun a grand total of 5000 units with Immobilization Wave. 5000. This ability doesn't extend to the entire map, which means one has to go out of their way to position Kerrigan in a way to affect as many units as possible, and decide when to use it, as its cooldown is very long. Fortunately, you can grind the achievement on Dead of Night and Miner Evacuation, which spawn truckloads of infested units for Kerrigan to hit.
  • "Finger of Death" and "Scorched Earth" require a certain amount of kills (50 and 200, respectively) in a single mission with certain Spear of Adun attacks on at least Hard difficulty. It's harder than it sounds. However, a later added Co-op map known as "Dead of Night", which is a remake of Wings of Liberty's "Outbreak" mission, has made this achievement a lot easier to obtain due to how easy it to use the Spear of Adun on clumped up infested Terrans (although Scorched Earth can still be a bit of a pain due to Solar Lance's long cooldown, unless you're willing to grind your ass off to get Solarite Celestial).
  • "Solar Fury" and "Target Purified" involves killing 50 enemies with a single stroke from Solar Bombardment and the Purifier Beam, respectively. It takes coordination to accomplish this. Once again, Dead of Night is your friend.
  • "Roach Rampage" requires Zagara to get 100 kills in a single mission using her Infested Drop. While the drop pods do impact damage, it's not likely to kill anything bigger than a Zergling, and then you have to pray that your low-damage Roaches survive long enough to actually kill enemies before getting gunned down themselves or timing out. They also only attack ground units, so if the Random Number God gives you an air composition you might as well not even bother attempting this one.
  • "Push In Case of Emergency" requires Tychus to kill 1000 enemies with the Odin's Big Red Button ability. Several factors make this achievement difficult. First of all, Big Red Button is Tychus's final talent, so you have to buy Tychus and grind him up to level 15 just to get started. Secondly, even after you unlock Big Red Button, it has to be researched at the Engineering Bay for a not-insignificant investment of 200 minerals and gas. Finally, Tychus's Odin doesn't see much use to begin with due to its low mobility and long cooldown, and just to add insult to injury, Big Red Button can only be used once every time the Odin is deployed. The Dutiful Dogwalker prestige cannot be used here; the Odin cannot use Barrage or Big Red Button when it is active.
  • "Buy Buy Buy (Buy Buy)" requires Tychus to get all the gear for all five Outlaws before the 20 minute mark. In regular play, you'd be lucky to fully upgrade three of them by that point due to the finite resource income; you pretty much have to skip basically everything else that demands resources, have a Kerrigan ally to generate gas and minerals for you, or get your teammate to leave (which gives you access to their resources) to even stand a chance of getting this. And even with extremely tight macro and an optimized build order, you'll likely only get the achievement with less than 20 seconds to spare.
  • "Devolution Retribution" requires Zeratul to kill 500 units devolved by the Avatar of Essence in a single game. Problem: the Avatar only becomes available to Zeratul after he collects all three Artifact Fragments, at which point the mission is at least halfway over, and has a short duration and long cooldown; you'd be lucky to get two uses out of it in a regular mission. And even then, you'll be lucky to get around 50 kills per Avatar dropped, meaning you're going to have to summon it 10 or more times in a single mission (that's 40+ minutes with the cooldown Mastery), which is pretty much only possible by dragging out Dead of Night for over an hour. Even more baffling is that one of Zeratul's other achievements, "Bank Shot, Pocket Natural", is a lifetime achievement easily achievable in a single game, leading some players to believe that Blizzard somehow mixed up the conditions for the two achievements. Devolution Retribution eventually had its requirement reduced to 200 units, cutting its requirements to below half of the original quota, yet still requires focusing mastery points on Avatar longevity, acquisition, and cooldown reduction and generally derailing focus on the objective to be completed.
• That One Level:
  • "Scythe of Amon". The goal is to destroy the Void Slivers on the map before time runs out. Like in "Rifts to Korhal", destroying each Sliver buys time on the countdown. Here, however, the timer begins immediately (the timer on Rifts to Korhal at least only starts when the first Void Shard appears), and the time given certainly isn't generous. The Void Slivers are heavily defended (as is most of the rest of the map) and surrounded by Void Rifts that freely spawn lots of units of all three races, and each one gets a shield buff when you destroy another, making them very hard to take down. Additionally, the Slivers themselves have powerful stunning and damaging abilities that can really hurt your army. The bonus objective sucks too, but is listed further down.
  • "Part and Parcel" is another mission that's stingy with its timer; smashing up various Moebius property does provide more seconds on the clock, but the initial amount provided really puts players on the edge. If one (or both) commanders are of the variety that can't pump out an offensive straight away, it may necessitate a suicidal dash towards one of the property clusters closest to the players' base (all of which are defended to some degree). The fights against the Hybrid bosses are also difficult; fail to concentrate enough firepower on them, and the Balius will need to make a swift retreat, leaving the players bereft of a reliable damage sponge. Like "Scythe of Amon", the bonus objective is on an equally strict deadline.
  • "The Vermillion Problem" is considered one of the more frustrating missions not because it's hard, but because it's an utter drag. Every couple of minutes, the map gets flooded with lava, grinding the mission to a halt until it recedes. Additionally, the xenon crystals you need to collect for the mission objective only spawn after a lava surge in small numbers, meaning that the mission inevitably goes on for much longer than it needs to. It's also one of the more micro-intensive missions, since you need to commit workers to collect the crystals and make sure they don't get killed while also making sure that your army is out of the low ground when the lava hits while also making sure that you're not rallying units into the lava.
  • Speaking of missions that go on for way longer than they should, "Mist Opportunities". The goal is to escort several waves of Stetmann's harvesting bots to terrazine geysers, protect them while they work, and then escort them back. Bots are sent out in sporadic waves, meaning there's no way to speed up the mission if you're doing exceptionally well, and they move very slowly... and when they reach the geysers, they stay there for a couple more minutes, which all amounts to lots and lots of waiting, broken only by the occasional attack wave, and even then, a strong enough defense line makes them a non-issue. It's not uncommon for players, especially in a team where one commander has strong static defense and/or is diligently spawn-camping, to go and clean up the bases on the map because they're bored, and then sit around twiddling their thumbs on the last bot wave because there's literally nothing left to do. And to make it worse, a Zerg enemy can make you instead lose the mission at the first hurdle, as not having enough area damage to kill early Zergling waves will result in the bots being swarmed and destroyed in seconds.
  • "Cradle of Death" is a frustrating and difficult mission all-around. The mission is an Escort Mission where players need to bring their trucks to enemy bases and plant them at a specific site to destroy them. The trucks are pretty fragile and easily destroyed if left unattended, and as the mission goes on the enemy will send attack waves for them and spawn them very close to the trucks no matter their position. Each base is defended by a large enemy army that includes Xel'naga Constructs, which are invincible until a truck comes in range to shut them down; this means attacking without trucks is suicide and if your truck is lost in the battle you're pretty much screwed. To add further annoyances, the bases you have to destroy are somewhat randomized, as are the spawn points of the bonus objectives, so you can't anticipate where to attack next and prepare to strike there, all of the enemy bases are on high ground with ramps to push up (and Constructs guarding them), and the longer the mission goes the more Constructs will be at each base, requiring players to micro their truck to disable them before they tear apart their armies. Finally, this is one of the few co-op missions where a single player can't really go things alone, because both players need to bring their trucks to the detonation sites and there's so many constructs a single truck can't reliably counter all of them, so carrying an ally who isn't pulling their weight and not controlling their truck properly is very difficult.
  • For Mutators, any one that includes "Avenger" or "Transmutation" tend to be the more difficult ones. Avenger gives enemy units an instant stat buff any time an allied unit nearby dies, and the more allies die the higher the buff grows, causing even small fries to become deadly threats, and Hybrid units, especially Behemoths, to be able to fight entire armies and win. Transmutation means that any time an enemy unit deals damage, it has a chance to transform into a stronger unit from any of the three races, including hybrid at the top of the chain, meaning that any attack wave of even just Zerglings can spontaneously transform into a varied attack force made up of units from all three races. This also means that the very first attack wave to hit you in the mission could completely wipe you out if you're unlucky with what the attackers turn into.
  • Wheel of Misfortune is a Mutation that only includes one Mutator. Unfortunately, that Mutator is Chaos Studios, which cycles through random Mutators at regular intervals, and can have a maximum of three Mutators active at a time. Given how a lot of Mutators require special planning and/or can completely mess you up (Transmutation comes to mind), it's nearly impossible to accomodate all the possible things this Mutator can throw at you, and that's before considering that the Random Number God can stick you with some truly disgusting combinations like Propagators and Speed Freaks.
  • Believe it or not, "Dead of Night" can also be this if your commander lacks any kind of strong defense that could reliably keep the infested out of your base during the later nights. It gets even worse if your teammate also lacks any kind of static defense whatsoever, leading to the two of you having to spread your forces very thin in order to cover all entries. It's because of this reason that Tychus or Han & Horner are usually the worst performers on this map if they can't afford to be extremely aggressive in clearing out the structures during the first three days, because as soon as the third barricade goes down, their bases will be at risk of being overwhelmed on all sides. The same could be said of "Temple of the Past", in which a static defense is crucial for holding off the enemy at the temple's choke points. Fail to secure the northwest and southeast entrances and your base is toast.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The bonus objective in the coop mission "Scythe of Amon" leaves little time for preparation and respite. It involves protecting a shuttle to three locations on the map, but given the mission's tense time limit and heavy enemy count, this is a lot harder to accomplish than it sounds. All of the locations happen to have an enemy base guarding them, and the shuttle's path takes it through other areas with a strong enemy presence. With the paths the shuttle takes between the three bases taken into account, you need to clear most of the map for the shuttle to get to its destination safely and approach the mission objectives in a specific order. The time limit between the second and third stops is particularly unforgiving, because it's less than a minute before the shuttle takes off from one end of the map to the other. Some have espoused that the bonus is so difficult that the mission focuses more on escorting the shuttle than destroying the Void Slivers, memorizing the enemy's attack patterns and destroying the slivers in a very specific order is mandatory for completion, or that the bonus is just not worth the trouble and don't even try to protect the shuttle.
  • The bonus objective of "Part and Parcel" provides no rest from the wicked either, as the first target spawns pretty early in the mission and behind enemy lines. If the way isn't cleared in time, the first train will escape. There isn't much time in between the first and second trains' departures either, and the first train usually leaves in time with the fight with the first Hybrid boss.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Even though the developers have gone full What If? and begun adding canonically dead characters as commanders, there remain some glaring omissions in terms of characters that were known to be a leader of their race and could have a unique playstyle made for them.
  • The UED remains a very popular faction from Brood War and their warfare tactics were well defined (infantry assault with the Marine and Medic, and air superiority with Goliaths, Valkyries, Wraiths, and Battlecruisers), but there's yet no DuGalle commander.
  • The original Starcraft and Brood War are full of Elite Mook Zerg breeds that could be redesigned for Co-op for a character like the Overmind, Daggoth, or Zasz.
  • Artanis represents the Daelaam, but the original Protoss Empire has no representatives, even though Tassadar, Aldaris, or the original Fenix, could all serve as commanders for such a race.
  • Gabriel Tosh was a prominent character in Wings of Liberty and his mission chain associates him with units (Reapers, Spectres, to a lesser extent the Goliath, Diamondback, and Siege Tank) that could provide a unique playstyle of stealth and infiltration. Oh, and as a one-up on the previous characters, Tosh is still alive according to Word of God, so you don't even need a What If? scenario to imagine him and his men fighting against Amon's forces.
  • Selendis is a fairly popular request for a Protoss commander that focuses heavily on air superiority and capital ships, given her presence as a Carrier pilot in Wings of Liberty and general prominence as a Protoss character. The fact that she was canonically Brainwashed and Crazy during Legacy of the Void is small potatoes compared to characters that are canonically dead. This is made all the more interesting by how Selendis already has commander data in the mission editor, suggesting that she was under consideration at one point in the past but wasn't followed up on.
  • Given the prominence of the Tal'darim Death Fleet in the Legacy of the Void campaign, some players wish that Alarak had the ability to build an air army rather than just having the Death Fleet as a temporary calldown (although the reworked Shadow of Death prestige is usually considered an acceptable compromise).
  • There are a variety of units that never see any action in this game mode whatsoever, or abilities that don't have much of a presence, such as the Predator, or the Infestor's Neural Parasite (the Aleksander does have the Neural Parasite ability, but it's tied to its anti-air attack, which damages its targets over time). The Purifier Instigator, a Stalker variant that only appeared in the campaign for a single mission as an NPC unit, is also a no-show despite Karax and Fenix both using Purifier units (promotional artwork for Fenix shows him with an Instigator, but he instead gets Adepts in the actual game, and Karax glaringly does not have a ranged Gateway unit).
• Unexpected Character:
  • Of all the characters players may have presumed would eventually be added as commanders, no one really saw Egon Stetmann coming, as he was a minor character in Wings of Liberty and was already serving as Mission Control for a co-op level.
  • Two words: Villain commander. Who's the first playable villain? Emperor Mengsk.
• The Woobie: Egon Stetmann became this in Co-op. His career is pretty much over, his sanity is slipping, and he's alone and forgotten on Bel'shir with no one but his robots to keep him company as Companion Cubes. And then he has a panic attack any time the enemy even plans to attack them. By the time you win the mission and he rejoices at having a chance to leave the planet, you're probably cheering for him to do the same.