Screams from a planet

Advent Revelation Battlecruiser lvl 6 ability.

I think that's my favorite planet bombing effect in the entire game.  It's so creepy.  You should zoom in close and watch the planet the next time it goes off and you'll see horror-show pictures above the planet.  Unfortunately I never get to see that because no one builds Revelations in humans v. humans games in online multiplayer (not even new players).  Even if someone did pop out a Revelation, it probably wouldn't survive to Level 6.   Someone should put a video of that up on YouTube.

Revelation takes a triple-whammy of being fragile, having only one really good ability, and having negligable damage output (including strike craft capacity).  When it comes to picking your capital ships in Sins, this makes it a very niche selection and you'll probably get pummeled for taking it instead of Progenitor or Halcyon.  Reverie is quite nice, but one ability in isolation does not make a viable whole.

As much as provoke hysteria looks awesome, as far as ultimate abilities go it's average at best.  Certainly looks awesome, and in theory it's quite nice, but all things considered it's not an appropriate kick-back for the incredible difficulty of raising a level 6 capital ship.

Provoke Hysteria is great if you're dealing with a planet that has 6000 hit points (or more), I think.

Reverie might be useful for halting a Level 6 Marza's missile barrage but that's about it I think.  Clairvoyance Level 1 can be useful, but purchasing a capital ship for the privilege of scouting planets is silly when you could just use scouts.  I'd also hate to spend a valuable capital ship ability slot on something I can do with scouts.

The other ability that reduces ability cooldown times is pretty useless for the Advent.  Maybe it would be good if used on itself and combined with Provoke Hysteria to reduce the Provoke Hysteria cooldown time.  I could also see using it on an ally's Level 6 Evacuator, Level 6 Marza, or Level 6 Radiance (for Cleansing Brilliance).

Overall I can't justify wasting capital ships slots, fleet supply, and money on that ship.  I need capital ships that provide a good bang for the buck right away, which means Progenitors and Halcyons.  The Rapture a nice edition to a larger, later-game battle ball.  A sacrificial Level 1 Radiance might be good if you need to fight a Level 6 Marza or if you already have a Rapture and want to do Animosity-Vengeance combos.  I really don't see a spot for the Revelation in my battle ball; the abilities on the other four capital ships are just so much better.

Reverie is good for stopping caps from jumping to safety too as it stops jumps as well as interupting abilities.  Quar used to use it as a first cap when he dabbled with advent to snipe caps with so they couldnt escape.  The cooldown reducer does not work on ultimate abilities btw so it does no good for cleansing brilliance, missle barrage etc.  Clairvoyance is a wasted ability when I can just use a much cheaper scout to do the same job.  Provoke hysteria is only the best sieger when its against a fully upped planet(6000) due to it being percentage based.  Everywhere else it is matched or beaten by a non ultimate Marza raze planet, vulkoras siege platforms, or level 6 egg.  It is the weakest of the advent caps without a doubt.

[_]-Greyfox

There are three problems with that.  Firstly, the Revelation will never be able to siege a planet independently unlike a Marza, Vulkoras, or Jarrasul.  For an ultimate ability whose only purpose is to bombard planets, that's entirely inexcusable.  Secondly, many players end up with 1500 hp planets and a starbase with auxiliary government, and this ability is patently worthless in that very common front-line scenario.  Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the 4500+ hp mark doesn't make it exceptional, it just brings it into line for what we expect from an ultimate-level ability, and only for a few niche cases.

Clairvoyance is useful if your enemy has got his "back end" completely sealed up, but the fact that one scout with the lingering presence upgrade can get you the same effect in most cases really hurts the ability in my eyes.  Not to mention we're talking about the only faction that actually does have a passive spying technology in its civic tree that lets it keep tabs on every gravity well its culture touches.  I'd probably label it more as a convenience tool than something of necessity, though it outclasses guidance significantly...

Which is why I've been suggesting that Guidance and Repulsion be switched.  Retool guidance as a cruiser ability for the guardian and give a slightly modified repulsion to the Revelation.  This would instantly make it a very popular capital ship, if not a must-have. 

Reverie on level 3 can keep one enemy cap helpless FOREVER, or up to 3 caps for 3 or more minutes, depending on whether you have a bare lvl5 revelation or some AM upgrades/Lf sucking AM off the enemy etc.
Even on level one, this ability can keep one cap frozen continuously for a long time.
This means you can:

- Stop a skirantra forever. GG Scrambe Bombers. GG Repair Cloud.
- Stop a halcyon forever. No more telepush -> happy hours for your own bombers/fighters.
- Stop a Marza forever -> yeah, no MB from you dude. Or Rad bomb. Or even a fart, for that matter.
- Stop a Progenitor forever -> I need shields!! I need Shields!!! STOP GAPING LIKE THAT IDIOT RECHARGE TEH SHIELDS!! AAaAAAaaa11!!11
- Stop a Kortul forever -> Oh look, I'm not losing antimatter anymore. And my fighters are cool as well. Well, your assailants are not...
- Stop a Sova forever -> This is my income, not yours. No, we don't accept payment in missile turrets. GTFO.
- Stop a Vulkoras forever -> The citizens of this planet beg for mercy. Look, they sent you a porn movie. You like it? yeah, keep watching...
- Stop an EGG -> No moar nanz pl0xTy. And stop hoovering my planet, ok? My communal services department is doing fine in keeping things clean, we don't need your help, tyvm.
- Stop a Radiance forever -> with all due respect, my antimatter is fine and doesn't need to be detonated, unlike you. And I don't need a flashlight.

You can also use this as an interrupt or to stop a retreating cap.

TEC and Vasari have no way of stopping this, though I'm not sure if antorak's POH won't cleanse it. Not that it matters, your cap will be dead by the time you make an antorak as a counter anyway, cause there is no reason to make the antorak above any other cap until you have a dozen caps already.

Reverie is imbalanced as an ability and the only reason why it is not imbalanced in the whole scheme of things is because the other Revelation's abilities are as situational as the forsaken Antorak. Clairvoyance is good, but most people either forget to scout at all or are doing well with scout frigates and don't need this ability.

And if you think Reverie is not imba as an ability, then let me tell you that I'm ready to trade my Phase Out Hull or even Disruptive Strikes for Reverie ANYTIME! Hell, I would give antorak away for a cap that can spew reveries.

<laugh>  Nice post N3rull.  I guess my ignorance just shows how little I've used this ship.  I might have to give it a try sometime.  (I think this would be a great way to kill a Level 5 Marza that's trying to escape.)

Reverie is not imbalanced.  Vasari have several means of accomplishing basically the same thing.  In regards to preventing a retreating cap, vasari has several methods.  PJI of course is mentioned but is for all 3 races.  However if you were to combine that with an egg's gravity warhead(which is AE and NOT single target), you can prevent a whole fleet from retreating and they die for trying(something that Howthe used to love doing).  Using subverters(also AE) accomplishes the same thing for fleet and stops them from fighting but it does not work for caps.  Disruptive strikes which you also mentioned saps AM(no AM means no reverie), interupts, and costs no AM.  Also, reverie only lasts the whole time if you leave it completely alone for the duration as a small amount of damage will make it poof so its only really good to interupt a jumping cap or otherwise slow its retreat or to take a cap out of the picture temporarily in a fight/interupt a channeling ability.  Reverie is basically the only good ability on the ship and even that is meh.  Clairvoyance is replaced by a 200 credit scout.  The cooldown reducer does not work on itself and does not work on ultimate abilities.  Provoke hysteria is nice if you can get one to 6 and even then it is beaten by non ultimate abilities on other races' caps.

As to Darvin's comment about putting repulse on the revelation rather than a guardian, that is a very foolish idea as far as I am concerned unless you are going to redo all 3 races support cruisers while you are at it.  That is unless your goal is to eliminate almost anyone from playing advent at all online(excluding me as I will stick with advent until I quit the game).  You may like ICO to be all vasari all the time like it almost is now but I do not and sins of a vasari empire doesn't quite have the same ring to it.  At least with repulse you can still shoot/fight.  It takes a decent amount of forethought of positioning and micro to keep the guardians in a place to prevent a retreating fleet.  With subverters you cannot do anything useful unless you use large amounts of micro to keep a wide spread to your ships so subverters cannot hit them all at one whack or use lots of SC to kill off the subverters before they can do much damage.  Even then you gotta hope there is no phasic trap/flak/fighters/jam weapons being used to incapacitate the SC or ruiners there to lay mines around your defenseless fleet. 

[_]-Greyfox

ya, vasari need thier numbers reduced...

but we cant nerf them back to when they were almost non-existant...

do you remember before carriers were buffed? skirantras were still quite common back then... expecially when compared to kortuls, mauraders, and desolators.  course, everyone got them for thier 2nd or third cap ship for the repair cloud.  skrantras didnt really need to be buffed, but Scramble bombers was horrible, so thats fine... but then, buffed again! rediculous! a mid point between rediculous (now) and horrible (then) needs to be found.

Though, that might not quite be enough.  May i suggust lowering the modifier of (VASARI ONLY) assailants and vasari bombers vs cap ships from 75% to 66%. this lowers their damage output to capital ships only by 12%.   The reasoning is phase missles, and the higher shield mitigation on capital ships... since the phase missle research increases damage depending on the shield mitigation of the target. (do the math... 30% phase missle upgrades increase damage by 45% vs frigs, compared to 70% vs a lv 5 capship)  I think this will do just enough to not kill off the vasari, and maybe bring a bit of advent back.

Vasari need their numbers reduced.

Very funny. Really. The only thing that needs to be done is to rework SB. It is clear by now that there is no middle ground for this ability. Nerf it and it becomes obsolete. Leave it and people start spamming it and pretty much winning games with scrambled bombers only.
SB has to go. Something else has to be put there, or the way it works has to be changed into something that does not allow a player to win by just picking 3 skirantras.

I strongly oppose reducing Vasari "numbers", however. Vasari already have the shittiest fleet/caps IN TERMS OF HOW THEY WORK TOGETHER. Nothing in their fleet really supports other ships, nothing cooperates.
Subverters disable the enemy and die.
Overseers still only manage to heal caps and starbases, anything else dies before they turn to face it. reintegration on enforcers and skirmishers is still a joke really, completely unhelpful.
Assailants excel only at attacking single tough targets, their missiles' speed is so bad that they can fire two salvos at a target that would die of the first one anyway, effectively losing a huge amount of firepower in huge battles, unlike illums or javelis.
Discharging missiles are absolute, total junk on assailants - you can, for example, kill a lvl5 cap with only tier 1 missile upgrades done and discharging missiles on; as the cap goes down you notice that a light frigate is hovering next to it with its hull barely touched because of discharging missiles procing off the cap.
DM are decent at sentinels, but the sentinel AI is so dumb that they simply refuse to turn DM on when in the middle of your fleet - nooo, they have to fly to the other side of the GW and there, there is the place to engage DM. So it is either forget you had DMs or turn them manually on/off on all your sentinels - have fun.
And so on.
Without any cooperation, synergy between the ships, big vasari fleets lose to big fleets of other races simply because "every man for himself" cannot defeat a fleet where each ship supports the other.

Bottom line is - without the ability to snipe caps with bombers/assailants, Vasari will be pretty much an "orky rush or sub/ruiner combo" race.

As for:

None of what you said negates how good the ability is.
- if someone tries to retreat from a fleet with an egg and PJIs around, then he's either drunk, high or in coma. Such a person, upon regaining conciousness and mental stability, should read MY ARTICLE ON SOASE WIKI about the Vasari egg.
- Subverters are good, but as you said - don't work on caps and the caps are the juiciest targets.
- Disruptive strikes is absolutely useless against Revelation because you cannot shoot and therefore drain Revelation's AM if you're affected by reverie. And that's what a revelation should do first, Reverie on the Kortul. No weapon jams, no DS, no volatile nans.
- the fact that damage cancels reverie is not a problem at all. As of patch number something, ships tend to refuse to aquire Reverie'd targets. When the victim finally wakes up, it is alone in the middle of a hostile fleet. Have a nice day.

Dozens of times I played Advent AIs and my most important caps just froze for half of the fight, until I managed to eliminate the enemy Revelations without any of my core abilities. Only then I managed to regain a resemblance of control over the battle and work out a victory. Had the AI been smarter with those revelations I am pretty sure I would have been left with craplods of debris floating between a couple of frozen caps, picked one by one by the enemy fleet.

Reverie is awesome, one just has to understand how to treat it. It is not POH that throws the target completely out of existence. It is not just an ion bolt that interrupts. It is not just a single-target grav bomb to stop the victim.

It is a tool that allows you to virtually cut your enemy's hands off by locking down his core caps and never allowing them to take action until you've dealt with their whole supporting fleet.

If you have a Revelation, you calculate:
"can my whole fleet with my caps - Shield restore, telepush, energy amp aura etc etc - deal with the enemy fleet if he suddenly doesn't have any caps?"
If the answer is yes, and it usually is, you disable the enemy's caps, wipe his unsupported fleet and finish the leftover caps off.

As I said - I would trade DS or POH for Reverie any time.

There was never a time when vasari was almost non-existant.  Even when advent supposedly ruled the roost, there were still many that played vasari at least online.  TEC was the least played then.  It sounds as if you play mostly single player from the things you say(talking about the AI's behavior a lot and ignoring the reverie'd ship, etc.).  Single player is a completely different thing and you can get away with a lot more with the AI.  The damage limit very much negates how good it is.  If you are aiming to getting rid of the cap permanently by killing it, you are left to just stopping it from jumping out(as I said) and there are better area effect alternatives to this as vasari on more worthwhile cap(egg)/unit(subverters).  There is no damage limit on gravity warhead or with the subverter disable.  There are better interupt abilities(including detonate AM and disruptive strikes).  Otherwise you are left with an ability that disables a cap(presumably thats what you would use it on) for a short amount of time if you ignore it completely.  The removal of cap weapons fire is a small proportion of dps if you are talking about anything except a very early game fleet.  Preventing or stopping an ability is accomplished with the better radiance cap and detonate AM(can't use abilities for the duration, usable on starbases, removes AM, and does damage). 

That leaves you with the lone superiority of reverie as i have mentioned......to stop a jumping cap so you can finish it off.  This is obviously situational at best and thus the best ability on an already lukewarm cap is not that great.  It has its moments of usefulness but money is better spent elsewhere.  If you like it then more power to you but there are better ways to spend your resources.  To each their own.

[_]-Greyfox

I made a nice big wall of text to pinpoint every flaw of your arguments, so if you want to discuss this further - see "view edits".

The bottom line however is that

1. Gravbomb can delay a retreat only once. The enemy will jump out before your cooldown ends. Subs don't affect caps, so they're outta this. Reverie gives you control of when the enemy starts jumping again and with minimal micro you can stop him forever.

2. DA < DS < Reverie. Yeah, DA has situations where it is better. But DS kills DA (I needz no AM to weip ur AM lol). Reverie kills DS. That's also when your argument that eliminating cap dps is no good - it is GOOD when it's about the kortul, the only sensible interrupt of the vasari.

3. one has to stop thinking like a fantasy dwarf (i.e. with his axe) and stop throwing countless arguments of why Reverie is shit against a cap ship that you want DEAD RITE NAO. I agree, Reverie is shit in THAT scenario. But Reverie gives you the option to do something else completely - shut down the enemy cap and kill his fleet, which will not be supported by the caps during the fight. Sometimes it is a worse idea than snipe the caps and gtfo (like, you're attacking and the enemy orky is closing in). But just as often you might be defending or fighting over neutral ground when doing the second thing is not any worse, or even better (you force the enemy to stay here and fight an unever fight to guard the locked caps or just leave them to die).

Snipe caps & kill the fleet (or gtfo)
VS
lock the caps, murder the unsupported fleet, then murder the unsupported caps.

If you're playing SC2 beta, protoss have an abiltiy called forcefield on their T1,5 unit, sentry.
That above second scenario is EXACTLY what FF does - it allows you to cut the enemy army in half or spread it all over the battlefield. It lets you turn a "30 enemies vs 15 of your units" into five consecutive "6 enemies vs 15 of your units" fights.
And nobody there dares to suggest FF is bad.

Believe as you like Nrull.  I did not say reverie was shit.  The only thing I actually said was that it was "meh" and basically the only halfway good ability on the whole cap.  It has its uses but it is situational at best.  This in my opinion is not enough reason to spend resources on it that are better spent elsewhere.  If I want an interupt, I will get a radiance which I have already stated that I believe to be superior.  If I want to prevent a retreat, I will get guardians to repulse or PJIs.  If I want to remove caps from the equation I will repulse them away from the rest.

I do not play SC2.  I play sins and advent exclusively.

[_]-Greyfox