While Co-op Missions is built on Rule of Fun as it's all about using cool stuff from the campaigns to fight back against Amon, not every commander and unit lives up to their hype...
Examples about former letdowns rescued by buffs or another mechanic are found in the YMMV page under Rescued from the Scrappy Heap.
open/close all folders
Commanders
- Zagara hits all sides of the spectrum in every way possible. She specializes in throwing waves of Zerglings, Banelings and Scourge at enemies and that's it. This reliance on suicidal units means she runs a terrible economy and is awful at long-term engagements. Furthermore, unlike most commanders, Zagara has no way to support an ally; all she has is Mass Frenzy, an attack and movement speed buff to ally allies and Drop Pods to spawn Roaches to help out in a fight. Otherwise Zagara can do nothing but just send more units to fight and if they aren't making a difference she's pretty useless. On the flip side though, very often a bunch of Banelings and Scourge are enough to wipe out attack waves and objectives without needing help. The end result is that, she's widely seen as a boring and overspecialized commander who is poor for actual cooperative play between players and her strategy is too strong when it's effective and too weak when it isn't.
- Many players find Fenix/Talandar to be one of the weakest Commanders. Most of this centers around his units being too costly, his 6 champion units being lackluster, not having much synergy when fighting alongside other Commanders and way too much micromanagement for little benefit. It also doesn't help that he lacks global top-panel abilities outside the 3 Fenix/Talandar transformations compared to many other Commanders who have much more to work with.
- While several patches after his release buffed his gameplay significantly in all fields to try and redeem him, he ran into another problem: since he's mostly an A-move commander that's encouraged to build all of his units to cover for each other's weaknesses, he's drawn flak for being kinda boring to play since there's not a whole lot of variety in his builds aside from varying his unit ratios (unless you want to challenge yourself and not build a portion of his army entirely) and there really isn't anything interesting you can do with units that are designed to just attack-move into the enemy. Furthermore, like Zagara, all he really does most of the time is just throw units at the enemy, with only a few ways to support his ally.
- Many players dread partnering with Stukov. Not because there's anything wrong with him gameplay-wise, but because his masses of Infested troops tend to cause ungodly amounts of lag on lower-end machines, making the game virtually unplayable for his partner. Even higher-end hardware isn't immune since a sufficiently large horde can start taxing the game engine itself. Horror stories have been told of players unfortunate enough to get a Stukov partner on Dead of Night and subsequently being forced to sit through a slideshow of Infested clawing at each other.
- The Horners rank among the weaker commanders at higher difficulties. The biggest problem with them is that they combine a relatively fragile army with limited production, as Mira can only have five Assault Galleons while Horner only has one Starport that produces units at a trickle (like Nova but without her powerful defensive calldowns). As such, they really cannot afford to take heavy losses, which will force them to take a long time to rebuild their army - which is all too possible with their unit composition being very tempting to just A-move through enemies, when they actually require a deceptive amount of micro to not take more damage than they deal. It doesn't help that Assault Galleons will follow your army into battle if you select your whole army, where they serve as big, slow targets that will go down if focus fired, setting you back even further. Their lack of a dedicated healing unit means that in most instances, they need to rely on SCVs to repair mechanical units, which in turn costs more resources, until unlocking the talent for Horner's units to heal automatically and even then, Assault Galleons did not benefit from this talent until a much later patch which gave them the regen if they have a Drone Hangar installed.
Units
- Artanis initially caught a lot of flak for his Zealots, as his Zealots change to Aiur Zealots when he reaches Level 4. The problem is that Aiur Zealots only deal one attack instead of two like normal Zealots, but have the same base damage, resulting in Artanis' Zealots having a 50% damage penalty. Their Whirlwind ability makes up for it, but the player has to tech up to a Twilight Council and research the ability and it costs 150/150/90 so it isn't an insignificant investment. Jokes have been made that Artanis is the only commander to downgrade as he levels up. Blizzard thankfully took note of this problem, and Patch 3.1 buffed the Aiur Zealot's damage to 16 to match the standard Zealot. Ironically, he has the best Zealots now, as the single attack means they're less penalized by enemy armor and they still get the Whirlwind ability.
- Swann can be a difficult commander to play due to his slow build-up and resource-intensive playstyle, but still has many defenders due to his powerful units and defensive structures. However, his Hellbats are considered very weak units. Not only are they way too fragile for their frontline role (with less health than even Goliaths), but they're overshadowed in anti-ground firepower by eight Siege Tanks in a Hercules and his vespene drones mean that Swann rarely, if ever, needs a mineral dump. Even with their health buffed by a whole 100 points in patch 4.2.0, almost doubling their HP, they are still often left on the backburner.
- Kerrigan's Brood Lords are roughly in the same boat as Swann's Hellbats. They're slow, fragile and very expensive, making it very hard to justify using them over any of her other anti-ground options like Zerglings or Ultralisks (or just Kerrigan herself). Further rubbing salt in the wound, is the fact that they're arguably overshadowed by the very Mutalisks they evolved from as an air force, since her Mutalisks can attack everything and deal much more damage overall while also having better mobility and not being much more fragile than the Brood Lords, especially with their regeneration upgrade making them great for sustained combat. Blizzard had to buff the Brood Lords several times just to make players consider using them.
- While Vorazun is considered a good commander, her Centurions are generally not given nearly as much respect. Despite being better than the version in the campaign (due to Darkcoil now giving them a temporary shield boost), they have to directly compete with her buffed Dark Templar, which deal with ground units much better than the Centurions do by simply shredding them and have better survivability than Centurions to boot. Furthermore, their lack of cloaking and tendency to charge out of her Dark Pylons’s radius means that Centurions don't benefit from her most powerful bonuses.
- Vorazun's Dark Archons took a huge fall in grace compared to their campaign version. In addition to Mind Control being nerfed to have controlled units take up supply (a huge detriment considering the enormous energy cost of Mind Control practically requires the player to build multiple Dark Archons to use it effectively), the faster pace of Co-op and the requirement to build all the required infrastructure and needing to research their abilities on top of that, makes them extremely slow to deploy. This isn't helped by their exorbitant gas cost and the limited gas income of Co-op. To top it all off, they tend to draw enemy aggro extremely easily and lack cloaking, meaning they don't get Vorazun's most powerful bonuses unless she wastes energy deploying Dark Pylons. The randomized nature of enemy army compositions in every mission also makes the use of Mind Control entirely dependent on them, making such a strategy ineffective against armies that prioritize quantity over quality.
- Stukov's Brood Queens get little love for a few reasons. First, they're purely biological, meaning that unlike the rest of Stukov's manually controlled units (the Overseer notwithstanding), the Brood Queen’s health points cannot be restored by units such as SCVs and Science Vessels; any damage they take will be that much more long-term. Ocular Symbiote is rendered redundant with the Overseer unit as well as the ability not increasing a unit's attack range in addition to its field of vision and Spawn Broodling is rendered redundant with the Broodlings spawned from infested civilians and the Infest Structure ability. With a unit that has little longevity and few worthwhile tricks to provide, the Brood Queen is seen as an investment better made on more armored units and research.
- Tychus, while generally considered to be a great commander that both serves to support others with his strong earlygame presence and his ability to heal and tank damage for his ally while maintaining a tiny footprint, has a few Outlaws that are mostly relegated to the bench. Blaze is largely overshadowed as a tank by the more practical Cannonball due to the latter's ability to reliably bring aggro on himself by diving into the enemy first, not taking bonus damage due to lacking the Armored tag and having his main tanking gear not be his ultimate, while Blaze's main advantage over Cannonball largely boils down to being good at clearing large groups of Light units, something that's only really relevant in Infested-centered maps. Similarly, Lt Nikara finds herself largely overshadowed by Rattlesnake due to her focus being entirely dedicated to healing, inability to heal herself and having no attack.
Prestiges
Prestiges change parts of a commander's kit to shift their focus and open up new playstyles, but some of them give such questionable benefits for their drawbacks that it's doubtful whether resetting your levels for them is even worth it.
- Zagara's first Prestige, Scourge Queen, is widely considered the worst Prestige of them all. It gives players +50 max supply, Zerglings and Scourge spawn an extra one from eggs for free, Zagara's Baneling Nests spawns eight free Banelings instead of four, and her Scourge Nest spawns four free Scourge too. In exchange, Zagara is not usable as a Hero Unit. This is a huge loss — without Zagara, players have no response to enemy attack waves but to throw Banelings and Scourge at them, and they have no source of anti-air but Queens (who are not combat units) until they tech up to a Lair and get a Scourge Nest. Players also lose Zagara's Mass Frenzy and Drop Pods, meaning they have no way to react to attacks away from their army or reinforce an ally. In essence, players are tunnel visioned into Zerg Rushing the opponent and have no other possible strategies in combat situations where that isn't viable. And to add insult to injury, two of Zagara's masteries affect Zagara herself — boosting her HP and energy regen/boosting her attack, and boosting Drop Pods or Mass Frenzy — and with this Prestige those masteries do absolutely nothing. This led to Zagara's masteries being completely shifted around and her HP/energy regen mastery also being buffed to benefit her Queens, meaning that a Scourge Queen Zagara is no longer locked out of most of her Masteries... at least in theory, since the swapping of her masteries was very poorly implemented. As in, the shuffled Masteries are still internally bound to their old power sets, and Blizzard isn't in any rush to fix the problem either; it took several patches before all the bugs with Zagara's Masteries were finally ironed out.
- Abathur's third Prestige, The Limitless, allows him to have any number of Leviathans and Brutalisks active instead of being capped at 3 apiece. The problem? This prestige reduces the bonuses his units get from Biomass and ups the Ultimate Evolutions' requirement to 200 Biomass. This cripples his early game so much it's often considered a direct nerf from his base kit, since Abathur's game plan hinges on him snowballing with early Biomass to roll out Brutalisks as quickly as possible and use them to push; halving the rate at which he powers up and gets his Ultimate Evolutions means you're hard-pressed to get even your first six Ultimate Evolutions, much less the seventh and beyond. Unlike many other underpowered Prestiges, The Limitless did not receive any buffs in the first batch of Prestige changes in patch 5.0.3 and is now considered one of the worst in the game, and is only ever used by skilled Abathur players as a Self-Imposed Challenge.
- Abathur's Essence Hoarder prestige doesn't fare a lot better. While the expanded Essence capacity paired with the ability to always recover Essence from killed units has advantages against certain Mutations (most notably Black Death) and is useful when grinding a low-level Abathur, the early game power spike provided by his Symbiote-augmented Ultimate Evolutions is just too big to pass up in general play.
- Kerrigan's first Prestige, Malevolent Matriarch, doubles the bonuses from Malignant Creep, letting her Creep Tumors spread Creep faster and farther and give more attack speed and health regen. However, this comes at the hefty cost of removing her Omega Network, which is not only better at getting her army around the map than the speed boost from Creep but also does what the Prestige tries to do (let her spread Creep around the map more easily) way more effectively. Furthermore, spreading Creep with Creep Tumors is way, way too slow for the aggressive pace of Co-op Missions even with the increased spread range, especially since one attack wave will clean up most of your Creep Tumors and make you start from scratch, limiting this Prestige to a heavily situational option for when you know you're going to be turtling on Dead of Night or Temple of the Past. The prestige was thus heavily buffed to give her Queens full movement speed off Creep and allow them to deploy Creep Tumors off Creep to make it easier to use, though her other prestiges are still much more impactful.
- Vorazun's second Prestige, Withering Siphon, is another Prestige that was laughable at best. Its advantage caused her units' disabling abilities to drain 20 health a second from affected enemies, but reduced her combat units' attack damage by a hefty 50%. Given that Vorazun is all about heavy burst damage with cloaked units and only a handful of her units actually have abilities affected by this Prestige, this makes much of her arsenal nearly unusable, in exchange for an almost inconsequential amount of damage over time; a ball of Dark Templar without the Prestige tends to melt enemies far more quickly and efficiently than Withering Siphon could ever hope to. When the first set of buffs rolled around, Withering Siphon was unsurprisingly improved, reducing the damage penalty from 50% to 25% and also allowing affected abilities to disable heroic enemies. While this does give the Prestige a niche in the ability to chain-stun Hybrids and the like, it's still considered to be fairly unremarkable.
- While most prestiges have their fans and uses, very few people are willing to defend Stukov's Plague Warden prestige. The benefit of the prestige is allowing Infested Banshees load his Infested infantry and launch them at enemies, at the expense of his Infested having a shorter timed life. In addition to literally railroading him into a single game plan with a situational/underwhelming unit, there's very little tactical advantage to using the prestige's gimmick compared to just marching your Infested across the map normally, and players that like drowning enemies with Infested default to Lord of the Horde instead since that prestige does the same thing better. Furthermore, unloading the Banshees also causes insane amounts of lag even by Stukov's standards.
- Swann has the dubious honor of getting questionable benefits from all three of his prestiges, making it doubtful whether resetting your level on him is worthwhile. Heavy Weapons Specialist allows the Laser Drill to deal splash damage and slow enemies and lock on faster, making it stronger early on, but it also loses its calldown abilities, making him weaker in the late game, and good Swann players rarely need the early boost. Grease Monkey improves his turret upgrades, which is useful in certain situations, but is poor for general play since it makes his army even more expensive and his turrets are plenty strong already. Finally, Payload Director improves his Hercules and lets his Science Vessels use Tactical Jump, but the improvements are mostly incidental and the downside of doubling his Laser Drill's ability cooldowns far outweighs them.
- Han & Horner's Galactic Gunrunners seems entirely self-defeating. It removes the cap on Bombing Platforms, but building more than 10 is excessive and supply-consuming enough already. With this prestige doubling the price of building Bombing Platforms and not decreasing their demand in supply (which could be used for building an army), the benefits of this prestige may as well not exist.
