I am tired of Isabel and arby, so I am trying this one. I’ve heard is hard to use, but anyway, is it viable in 1s? Is there any way you can stop rushes other than suis? I am average player at best anyway
He’s a very cunning leader.
I’m not a 2s guy but i would love to go Shipmaster + Isabel and combo Displacement+Ghost in the Machine on some Vultures XD. Or use displacement on the bridge map
Shipmaster is a difficult leader to use for sure. The best players I see with him use his leader to harass mini bases and then hits with armies in other locations.
I come from some losses, the last one because of a huge mistake from me, anyway: Isn’t tactical gateway ridiculously short? I can’t find any use for it, seems like a waste of power, maybe i’m missing something
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> I come from some losses, the last one because of a huge mistake from me, anyway: Isn’t tactical gateway ridiculously short? I can’t find any use for it, seems like a waste of power, maybe i’m missing something
Ship master underperforms right now in the current hog meta. The banished also underperform right now against Spartans so they lose on two fronts. The best banished leader right now is arby because for his mid game phantoms. If you are going ship, I highly recommend the spirit support power for engagements. Since he doesn’t have any nukes, he needs the reinforcements in engagements.
I love using shippy but in order to learn him it’s a lot of trial and error. Mainly use your teleport and leader powers to not engage in a fight directly, instead flank to a side of the map they’re not at and start sniping bases. Take power nodes with your leader and just be annoying. Cap power nodes or go to a base and start hitting it with the honor guard, force them to move their army and spread out. I particularly like marauders and locust combo but he has many good army comps. Mainly don’t engage an enemy unless they are severely weekend as the only thing you have on your side is T3 glassing beam which you won’t get until late into the game. And a VERY important thing is when referring to “shipmaster” always call him “shippy”. If you don’t you will lose every time trust me this is definitely true. Definitely.
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> I come from some losses, the last one because of a huge mistake from me, anyway: Isn’t tactical gateway ridiculously short? I can’t find any use for it, seems like a waste of power, maybe i’m missing something
You need line of sight to use it, have cloaked honor guard go all the way across the map at super sonic speed and then use it, another thing I like to do is surprise attack bases with locust in 3s. It can go pretty much anywhere on the map. It’s like a two-way teleport that has insane range but needs line of sight
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> > 2533274826183449;5:
> > I come from some losses, the last one because of a huge mistake from me, anyway: Isn’t tactical gateway ridiculously short? I can’t find any use for it, seems like a waste of power, maybe i’m missing something
>
> You need line of sight to use it, have cloaked honor guard go all the way across the map at super sonic speed and then use it, another thing I like to do is surprise attack bases with locust in 3s. It can go pretty much anywhere on the map. It’s like a two-way teleport that has insane range but needs line of sight
That’s it, that’s what I was missing, thank you!!!
You need good timing and good map awareness skills in order to use him effectively.
I main shipy, but in team war, so I hope my experience with him helps:
Honor guard is an extremely effective early game hero. Whenever I want to prioritize map control I rush him and his first upgrade to turn him into a little speedy gonzalez. He wins fights against pretty much anything thanks to his cloak ability. Once they are just about to bring down his shield simply cloak and keep fighting. Your shield will just about come back by the time cloak is gone. He is almost as fast as a chopper with his first upgrade so he is great for darting to any part of the map you need to clean up any amount of early game infantry or lone scouts or even heroes. You could even just go to their base and kill one of their buildings. There isn’t much they can do about it but it does leave you open to losing your hero/losing map control/nodes.
If enemy goes early aggression or infantry just get the scout mine. Very low cooldown and it wrecks infantry. His teleport is fantastic for suicide grunts of course. If the enemy isn’t going early aggression I’d probably grab extraction over scout mine as it is a better ability throughout the rest of the game and makes you extra annoying to deal with. Especially with your early game honor guard aggression. Banished raid is practically useless and isn’t worth any leader points until it is about the only thing to spend it on. I really want them to rework this ability somehow to make it sometimes better than teleport.
If the enemy is going hogs I’d recommend going for marauders. Maybe banshees but I find marauders to be the safer choice. Marauders can trade favorably against hogs, but if you put a point into advanced cloaking instead of cleansing beam then your marauders will absolutely wreck hogs if you cloak them intelligently. Couple that with your honor guard who is fast enough to chase down and deal massive damage to the hogs should they ever stop moving to actually engage. Late game mass hogs also lose to wraiths so you’re setting yourself up to win if they don’t switch to something else.
I find that vehicle comps supported by a few shrouds and engi’s, or full banshee supported by shroud and engi’s are his most effective mid to late game armies. Late game is where things can get difficult though. Always be ready at the beginning of engagements to teleport your army out of the area of effect for damaging leader abilities. You will have to pick your battles.
Displacement is better for hit and run tactics, for defensive play, and for splitting an army you couldn’t ordinarily beat. If you are behind and defending a base, fight under your shield generator. Once shield goes down make a judgement call on when to displace the attacking army away so you can take an efficient trade, have the shield come back up, and continue producing units. Other uses: displace away a reinforcing army so you can kill the base; displace enemy army into your base for a home field advantage; displace a portion of enemy army so you can 2 to 1 fight the rest.
Mass cloak is good for straight buffing your army as it gives a health siphon and a movespeed increase (and if they don’t have detection units it is absolutely amazing). Sometimes it is better to put more points into cleansing beam rather than put a point into mass cloak however. Tactical gateway is situational at best. Mostly useful in team games for reinforcing allies. I have found it’s offensive uses to be very limited (you have to have vision on both ends of the gateway in order to place it) so you are best off teching into other things first. Late late game it can be useful to outmaneuver the enemy, but I consider Mass cloak, displacement, and upgrading cleansing beam far more important. (also I should mention that ALL players, including your enemy, can go through the tactical gateway. So you could theoretically go through, die, and have the enemy come back through your end for a rapid assault on your own base).
Cleansing beam is strong vs infantry and air in particular, and luckily shipy has a great cleansing beam. Take this if you don’t specifically need the marauder cloak buff. Spirit support is situational and you’ll just have to feel it out to get an idea of when it is useful. I find when I’m going heavy early aggression with the intent to kill the base, spirit support is great for supplementing your army. Honestly, the most useful part of it is actually the two engineers you get, with the veteran hunter being okish and the elite ranger being negligible. Late game the spirit support becomes rather lackluster.
Shipy is very micro intensive. He doesn’t have many damaging leader abilities so you are very reliant on your actual units to do the damage for you. Kiting with shrouds and engineers supporting your units will be your best friend a lot of the time.
Last piece of advice is don’t force engagements, especially not while you don’t have any movement based abilities. If you are taking an unfavorable engagement, walk into a leader ability on accident, or did some damage and are in danger of losing units to the push back/reinforcements then don’t be afraid to just use extraction to get out of there. Keep your units alive to fight another battle.
I have go didagree with you in a few points but mostly thats very well written.
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Honor Guard is indeed very strong but let the enemy have an engineer or 1 or 2 well protected snipers or an sensor tower on base he will get raped in an instant so you have to keep an eye on him amd extract when required.
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I see myself hardly ever using scout mine in offense or early at all. Its more usefull to keep an scout on base slots or ofg paths to see enemy movement. Basically its more usefull as scout than offensive since suis + have a way better effect.
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If youre against hogs you shouldnt rely on marauders alone, id mix a few hunters in since they do their job fairly good minus the mobility issue.
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Advance cloaking i simo more late game usefull but keep in mind that if you take your marauders get an 15s/30s cloak ability with it, make use of that.
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I advise highly against taking glassing beam until super late. While using it you cant micro anything and a good enemy will use that mercilessly against you.
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Spirit support situational? That abilty is an absolutels amazing unit drop which gives you a phantom shooting enemies, 2 vet 1 engis, a 3 ranger and 2 star hunter. With it you can have engis without apex and insanely strong counter units.
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Tactical gateway is a 2 edged sword. While its true all players can use but you can place it whereever you want so dont open it in ones bases but a bit off to have time to react. Also if you feel overhelmed just retreat through it most players wont dare to enter because of the risks.
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Banished raid 2 and 3 arent worth it i agree but the first point for sight range and capture speed is an absolute must have as 1st point. Aside of it making it easier to get map control you can send a unit close to base and set it on hold for an ongoing scout with hardly a risk for letting them even know youre scouting them (i have hardly anyone ever seen moving units on the back of his base without reason)
So and now a few mentions of my own:
Be inventive with all your leader powers.
Use tp to dodge leaderpowers like eradication or maelstrom
Extraction is perfect for hit and runs. Send a few locust to an base, when enemy approaches extract them and let your army attack somewhere else meanwhile.
Displacements just as above mentioned, the plays youre able to pull off with it are endless.
Focus in an engagement any detect units first then just hit mass cloak for an easy win. Enemies will hardly have many of those unless you went air and they massed AA. Just have a fair share of AA on your own for gales and engis.
Those are pretty good pieces of advice! Thx a lot!
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> I have go didagree with you in a few points but mostly thats very well written.
>
> 1. Honor Guard is indeed very strong but let the enemy have an engineer or 1 or 2 well protected snipers or an sensor tower on base he will get raped in an instant so you have to keep an eye on him amd extract when required.
> 2. I see myself hardly ever using scout mine in offense or early at all. Its more usefull to keep an scout on base slots or ofg paths to see enemy movement. Basically its more usefull as scout than offensive since suis + have a way better effect.
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> 3. If youre against hogs you shouldnt rely on marauders alone, id mix a few hunters in since they do their job fairly good minus the mobility issue.
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> 4. Advance cloaking i simo more late game usefull but keep in mind that if you take your marauders get an 15s/30s cloak ability with it, make use of that.
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> 5. I advise highly against taking glassing beam until super late. While using it you cant micro anything and a good enemy will use that mercilessly against you.
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> 6. Spirit support situational? That abilty is an absolutels amazing unit drop which gives you a phantom shooting enemies, 2 vet 1 engis, a 3 ranger and 2 star hunter. With it you can have engis without apex and insanely strong counter units.
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> 7. Tactical gateway is a 2 edged sword. While its true all players can use but you can place it whereever you want so dont open it in ones bases but a bit off to have time to react. Also if you feel overhelmed just retreat through it most players wont dare to enter because of the risks.
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> 8. Banished raid 2 and 3 arent worth it i agree but the first point for sight range and capture speed is an absolute must have as 1st point. Aside of it making it easier to get map control you can send a unit close to base and set it on hold for an ongoing scout with hardly a risk for letting them even know youre scouting them (i have hardly anyone ever seen moving units on the back of his base without reason)
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> So and now a few mentions of my own:
>
> Be inventive with all your leader powers.
> Use tp to dodge leaderpowers like eradication or maelstrom
> Extraction is perfect for hit and runs. Send a few locust to an base, when enemy approaches extract them and let your army attack somewhere else meanwhile.
> Displacements just as above mentioned, the plays youre able to pull off with it are endless.
> Focus in an engagement any detect units first then just hit mass cloak for an easy win. Enemies will hardly have many of those unless you went air and they massed AA. Just have a fair share of AA on your own for gales and engis.
I agree with some of what you said, not some of the rest.
For what I agree on: Yes Honor Guard isn’t unstoppable early, which I think is probably a good thing because that would mean he was broken. There should always be counterplay. That doesn’t diminish how strong of an opener he is though. Shippy requires heavy micro and honor guard is no exception. You should be able to easily clean up any infantry off the start and even heroes without detection support. Even if they have a couple snipers, honor guard is so fast he can kill them anyways and cloak to fight the rest if the enemy isn’t playing it right. Start to lose and just run out of there at the speed of light, or extract him out. That is one of the reasons I prefer running extract actually, to pull him out once the enemy starts reacting and he is in some kind of danger. Don’t want to lose that hard earned veterancy.
I do agree that you shouldn’t go only marauders, but I disagree about the hunter choice. Yes they counter hogs, but hunters aren’t actually very efficient as someone pointed out on a recent AV post. Besides not trading well, hunters cannot kite, are slow units, are rather expensive, offer no real threat to buildings, cannot target air at all, require tech 3 to even produce in the first place (might as well do wraiths instead at t3 for hogs), and can lose half their DPS once one of them in the squad dies. If this was HW1 I’d agree with you. But in HW2 I feel banshees are the stronger option. They’d offer a nice dps boost, don’t slow down your army, can fire while moving, are protected by the marauders, and force the enemy to tech into expensive AA units that the marauders handle well. Also, a summit is far more useful than a raid camp, you have no excuse not to add 2-3 engineers and even a shroud or two to your army if you have one. Raid camp is very limiting.
Yes, spirit support is quite good, don’t let me mislead you. I really like it as an ability and frequently pick it first depending on the situation. It does however fall off in usefulness after mid game as the spirit’s DPS becomes negligible (and AA are at the point by then they can simply kill it) and it ends up being used as an extra health buffer for your army. There are few scenarios where I would ever recommend not making your own engineers anyways by time you can choose it. You would have to be going extremely aggressive to not be able to afford a single summit somewhere. Again though, the ability is very good in the right circumstance, but you wouldn’t exactly pick it against an air army. That point would be better spend bolstering your cleansing beam or getting displacement to counter the air’s mobility.
Advanced cloak is very good early game I agree. Mid to late game there are usually enough detect units to make the extra cloak time not that much better though, so it isn’t exactly amazing. Sometimes I finish a game wishing I hadn’t bothered putting a point into it because the enemy remembered he was playing a shipmaster and didn’t let up on his detection. Other games it makes my army win a decisive, game changing engagement.
As for what I disagree with: glassing beam is good at all stages of the game. Just don’t use it in situations where you should be microing instead. Cleansing beam is great for defense of a base or you could scout them for vision and initiate the beam before your army even moves in. They can’t just ignore the cleansing beam.
Scout mine is actually more useful than you think. Part of the reason you probably don’t like it is because you don’t like to use it when it is most potent. The real strength of scout mine is how cheap it is and the low CD. It is totally worth blowing it on anything really. Engage the enemy first, then drop the mine in the middle of them. More times than not it will arm immediately explode. Later, put it in choke points or use if for some cheap and easy damage in any engagements later on. I used to not like it until I played more with it.
Lastly, I 100% disagree that banished raid should be prioritized above literally anything haha. Shippy doesn’t usually build heavy into infantry so the movespeed and LOS is wasted. Grunts already capture quick enough. That is a point that could be spent on ANYTHING else for more effect. You will definitely need teleport, so you might as well get that. If you get both, then you are deciding to ignore both scout mine and extraction. Your next choice would be scout mine, extraction, cleansing beam, or advanced cloak. Probably need to pick extraction or cleansing beam just to give yourself some viable options to play with. By picking a passive that mostly only benefits your starting infantry you disadvantage the rest of the game unless it goes late enough you can go full circle and get the missing powers.
DISCLAIMER: every game and playstyle is different though. So in the end it comes down to what works for you and what you enjoy.
You know it’s been several months that I’ve seen a Shipmasters in 1vs1. He is one of the hardest leaders to use, he’s a very good hit and run leader, especially on the PC. Oh man, Shipmaster on PC and Shipmaster on console is like fighting two different leader playstyles. A plus is your micro managing skills will improve with ship Master.
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I have killed myself a few honor guards by simply trapping him with marines and flamers and then keep 2 or 3 snipers in opposing close range, even if the HG manages to escape he wont be able to kill all snipers in time and will die if not teleported or extracted. Every high lvl player will have a reasonable amount of detect units if they face a Shipmaster.
Hunters DO trade quite well against hogs i have pushed a few forges back with them and the matter of survivabilty and movement is solved with engis and teleport/displacement. And i guess you mixed something up because hunters are T2 units, not T3 - they just get an upgrade there. Also banshees against hogs is like forfeiting the game instantly. If the enemy triple pumps hogs how long will it take for them to get a few wolves in?
I have dropped scout mines on enemy sometimes but you just have to target it and then it does hardly any dmg, in my opinion its a scout mine so use it to scout base slots and passages if you kill or dmg some units with that the better (fun times when you could drop it on enemy base xD)
So Banished Raid now… let me explain you why a first point in it is usefull - at least to me.
The increse of LoS will let you see enemies long before they can see you, thats an advantage you really have to put on use. I frequently send a grunt to the my opponents base to get a scout on it and keep it on the back at hold to have an consistent scout on him. On maps like badlands or fissures people tend to not look behind their base and wont see my scout until they eventually build a sensor tower. The increase of capture speed is fast enough for grunts you say, but why shouldnt it be any faster? This way you can capture enemy nodes even faster so he has to act quickly if he wants to keep it and with cloaked grunts he even has to send a detect unit.
Last but not least let me show you my way of biying LPs in a regular match:
- BR1 - because above
- & 3. - TP and Extraction - whatever you feel in need of get the one first the other 2nd. If you get rushed at 3 or 4 min mark you HAVE to get extraction since the whole front row of buldings is getting healed by it not to mention the units.(If enemy attacks your main base extract a few suis and watch the firework
) - Spirit Support - At around 7 or 8 mions its extremely usefull to have high vet counter units they can really be a game changer, have been many times
- Displacement - Fun power with funny uses to tinker with
- Mass cloaking - since i usually go vehicles at T2 and tend to have hardly cloak until that power my enemy wont have many detect units so focus them, trigger it - GG
- Tactical Gateway - Send an cloaked honor guard to enemy base while he is marching to you, drop your TG attack his base. If he tries to base trade -> displace his army away. If he retreats and tries to save his base -> displace his army. If he drops any leader powers -> Dodge with TP and keep moving. If you do it right you drop his base without engaging his army and massive casualties.
After that you may start upgrading TP or extraction or invest in adv. cloak or glassing beam in case the game carries over to super late game.
That is how i play if the game is even or i have an upper hand of course. I may skip tp or extract to get scout mine or glassing beam if suis arent enough to drop an massive infantry rush but imo BR1 is just way too usefull to be ignored (and besides, BR3 is actually quite usefull but more a late game thing since you’d have to invest 3 points for a neat speed boost on marauders and wraiths)
EDIT: I know that in the current meta you usually hardly ever go infantry but back in S4/S5 you had great success with him using an counter ball + locusts, hopefully at some point it will be viable again