The Darth Nihilus (Comments) ***MEGATHREAD***

"Nikoms565;921376" wrote:
4 Reasons it's possible (not guaranteed) Nihilus will NOT be overpowered:

1) He cannot ignore taunt. If his annihilate ability is live and there is a taunt up, he will have to target the taunt - or wait...for another turn.

2) He can be ability blocked (and he's slow) meaning it will be difficult for him to reduce his cooldown if he is blocked early on in the fight.

3) He is his own worst enemy - meaning that if both sides have Nihilus, they will be increasing each others cooldowns (most likely). Now this does lead to another issue I can't stand. Everyone has him, so everyone runs him....so all arena teams start to look the same. Similar to when they first buffed RG with auto-taunt...and everyone's team had RG in a matter of hours. Same with EP. I honestly hope he is not so powerful that everyone has to run him...but I am expecting to be disappointed.

4) Everyone thinks he's OP - so he will be the first and primary target - of everything. Shock, stun, AB, Execute, etc.

Here's the rub: Zaul.

Why Zaul? The 20% tm start. Nihilus has a base speed of 120. TFP of 170 (why pick TFP? Because he's the fastest person in the game, so it's a great example). If you can add 100 speed to each, that's 270 to TFP and 220 for Nihilus. +100 speed is pretty much in range for high end arena, so it's a good number to start with. Given Zaul's leader, Nihilus starts with 20% tm, meaning his first round speed is effectively 220 * 1.25 = 275. In other words, he's faster than TFP. Sid has a max speed of 161. To get him to go just before Nihilus, he would need an effective speed of 276 in this scenario. That means that, after mods, he needs a speed of 276/1.25 = 221 (rounded up), or only 60 in additional speed from mods. If you can come up with another 99 in speed mods, you can just about guarantee five debuffs by making Palpatine (122 base speed) 1 faster than Nihilus as well.

So all mods being equal, you can easily get one, or two, AOE debuffs going, before Nihilus, who can go before the fastest character in the game. Nihilus then gets to use Drain Force, put every ability of the opposite team on cooldown (devs have confirmed that this ability will take an unused ability and put it on cooldown 1) and reduce his annihilate ability's cooldown to either 2 or 0 (depending on whether it's by person or by ability).

It seems like the only counter (again, assuming equal modding available) is a Rex lead to get full tm from the first AOE debuff, and then to make sure you don't target Nihilus (including with an AOE) until Rex has a chance to put tenacity up.