Breaking out of a siege.
Aethallyn
Member
Say you're in a situation where there's a Celesta set up outside your base, with her Purifiers in siege mode, building ion cannons.
What do you do? Obviously the best solution is to not let it happen, but mistakes occur and you can get behind and give her the chance she needs to get set up.
As is, breaking such sieges seems really difficult. I was playing the plant guy, and I'd spam saplings for sight / to tank damage, and they'd die almost as quickly as I could cast them, with my army not far behind.
I think one thing that would help is if neutral weapons couldn't shoot without vision. It might let you at least leave and try to farm some gems / do something to get the opponent to move so you could strike them at a worse position.
Comments
Varies on the situation and what squads you are your teammates are. If Celesta is pushing you by herself keep in mind it is a 3v3 so can ask an ally for help. If it's multiple people pushing, try to coordinate a flank with your teammates or use your AoEs together to kill the siege units. Neutral weapons can't attack your units so all you have to focus is their siege units and then clean-up the rest of their units.
Go somewhere else and either set up an attack from multiple fronts or force enemy units away from that deathball. I saw a bunch of games today where people just tried to attack directly into a Purifier line, both against me and on my team. It's the same concept as BW- in SC2 you were much more able to just engage head on and kill the tanks quickly, but that isn't the case currently in Atlas unless you have units that can get close to them right away.
I really like this element of space control, personally, and would hate to see it go away.
A really fun strat to try as Alder is to upgrade Insatiable Appetite and Thicker Thicket for the T3 unit Bramblethorn Goliath, then have the Goliath eat a Tree of Life and three Sapliings and run that guy into the siege line, and when all the Purifiers are attacking it run in the rest of your team as well :D
Note on the vision thing, buying and placing a ward anywhere REALLY helps. You don't need to be too close to Celesta's sieged position to gain vision over it.
Yeah I feel like team play is often super necessary to fight Celesta. I was playing as eris against her and I would just wait until the rest of her units were positioned to fight an ally, and then I'd rocket forward and try to kill the purifiers. I'd usually lose a lot in the process, but once her purifiers are down she falls pretty quickly, so it seems fair.
I find it really easy to kill Celesta and her purifiers. I main Vela and I just snipe them down with my T2 units and my abilities.
1 Shot snipe kill
Played vs a few strong Celesta sieges. Vision Wards are almost necessary to holding them IMO, you need to know exactly what your opponent is doing, when youcan push in ect. IMO the best options are to get tier 3 with Ryme / Grath / Hydros / Alder (this isn't actually that hard to do, you only need 12 gems total, all these tier 3 units cost barely more than a Purifier in gold and Purifiers only start to be scary once there are 3-4 on the map anyway), Vela does a good job sniping down Purifiers with it's high damage and long range, and you can set up your own siege lines to stall with Celesta or use your ultimate to break through. It's definitely trickier with Vex / Eris I think, but still possible by flanking.
I had a pretty tough game against Vela as Celesta in the bottom lane recently. What really helped was using Celesta's Hawk ability when the Deadeyes were taking aim -- any hit to a Deadeye disrupts their cast.