StarCraft 2's impossible mission has been beaten after 14 years by a guy who turned the 'Archon Toilet' into an 'Archon Bidet'
StarCraft 2's impossible mission has been beaten after 14 years by a guy who turned the 'Archon Toilet' into an 'Archon Bidet'
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Had to look these up:
Appreciate the link, TIL!
"The Archon Toilet refers to a Protoss tactic unique to Wings of Liberty that combines the Mothership's Vortex ability with the Archon's high splash damage output to destroy large groups of enemy units quickly."
I haven't played StarCraft since like 1999 but that actually makes sense. Huh.
I still don't know wtf is going on
It's a "Black hole" that temporarily sucks the enemy's units in. Players quickly learned they can send in their units along with the enemies. So the trick is you send in a unit called the Archon which does splash damage. The split second that the black hole ends all the units emerge at the same time in a super concentrated area, so the Archon's slash damage hits all the enemy's units at once.
Ok that's fuckin rad
The vortex was never supposed to be damage dealing. It was just a way to temporarily remove part of an enemies army to deal with the rest, and then when those came back you can deal with that. Many players chose to not let their army split up so they would force whatever didn't make it into the vortex in, effectively just putting the entire fight on pause until the vortex finished.
Then the archons started jumping into the toilet. And hilarity ensued causing a match ending play when the splash damage of the archons would wipe an entire army.
The big ship on the right casts a black hole and sucks the other air ships into it. These are strong units and normally are pretty spaced out so they are safe from splash damage. The black hole however spits everyone back out in the exact same spot so they are momentarily clumped together. So to take advantage of this you have those big blue balls of energy called archons. They have short range, lots of damage, lots of splash, not so good hp/shield so they are kinda of squishy. But if you throw them into the black hole too then they can come out at the same time as the enemies and blow shit up (since clumped enemies + your units in range with lots of splash)
And that's the archon toilet!
The only thing is that archons aren't squishy, they have a huge shield and basically no hp. So their entire gimmick is they regenerate health. Zealot, the "tanking" unit in the toss army has 100/50 hp/shields, and it's cheap. For archon it's 10/350, but expensive. They can also be further reinforced with the shield battery, which will regenerate their shields like crazy. For comparison, the huge flying ships that got owned in the "toilet" were battlecruisers - 550/0 hp/shields.
What makes them squishy against terran is the introduction of the ghost - which has a spell that does a shitload of shield damage, after which the archon is one fart away from death.
Edit: also the thing that cast the black hole - the mothership - is 250/250 hp/shields.