Tychus

Tychus
Range	Unknown
Role	Offensive
Req. Rank	Unknown
Active Skills	Frag Grenade, Flaming Betty, Psionic Storm, Stimpack
Passive Skills	Irradiate, Adaptive Armor, Inspire,Berserk

Character

Tychus is a strong offensive character that excels at pressuring hatcheries but struggles with bosses compared to Nova or Swann. He deals very high sustained damage and AoE with his talents and masteries and makes a great character for pushing with troops and holding locations against enemy waves.

His unlocked mastery is Psionic Warrior, the mastery takes away your Psionic Storm skill and instead gives you a 10% chance to cast it when attacking enemies, with the storm centered on the enemy you are attacking when it procs. This takes his AoE damage and ramps it up hugely with massive hordes of enemies thanks to his high attack speed, pushing through the enemy lines to expose structures becomes very easy with a Psi-Warrior Tychus leading the charge.

Against bosses you will find your damage lack-luster for the most part, you can deal lots of damage but it takes time to do it. However, your attacks ignore enemy armor, so even though your damage is low it will be constant across all enemies. If you are fighting alone then try and use troop lines to slow enemies down letting you get your high sustain damage onto the boss for long enough to chip it's health bar down and remember to use Flaming Betties to break aggro and reposition.

Key Talents

For a full list of Tychus's talents, see List of Tychus's talents.

Masteries

Energy Mastery

This is a good mastery towards the late game, or after you have taken Light Weight Equipment as you’ll be allowed to use a lot more abilities.  Generally you should take this talent when you feel like you’re struggling with your energy and can’t use your abilities to their fullest.

Shadow Nimbus Mastery

This is generally a mastery you will be taking in the late game (if at all), simply because it doesn't really provide a lot compared to the other masteries. Its good if you aren't too familiar with how the map works however, as the stealth and reduce blocking can help you out, but, the other masteries far outshine it in the hands of a better player.

Iron Man Mastery

This mastery will slowly over a half hour, increase your hitpoints by a medium amount. Other than that, it will also make sure you lose 0 XP and money every time you die, making it a great talent for beginners. Once you get at higher levels though, it starts to get less and less useful as you aren't supposed/allowed to die at all. For insane, it’s the least taken mastery outside of Tank Swann, and even there it’s not as strong as the other masteries.

Armor Mastery

This is one of the best starting mastery next to iron man for newer players. The increased armor makes it a lot more difficult to kill you in the early game and it means you can tank most units as well without dying. On Hard/Fking insane, it’s recommended that you take this as your first or second mastery, as armor makes a huge difference there, due to the creeps' insanely high attack speed.

Nuke Mastery

This mastery increases the radius of your nuke, the damage of it versus heroic and allows you to cast it anywhere on the map that you have vision of. This is a late game mastery, and is mostly used for killing the last few bases at a faster pace, or “cheesing” them by killing the production facilities of the zergs. It’s commonly used for killing the creep towers near the last boss, and is best combined with Radical Restructuring and Massive Blast.

Big Game Hunter Mastery

This mastery increases your auto attack damage versus Massive units, your Frag Grenade damage, and gives you 15% more Experience for Massive units. It can be taken in the mid/late game, as its main purpose is to increase damage towards Ultralisks and other massive units. However, if you pick BGH early, you will get the most benefit from the experience bonus.

Close Quarter Combat Mastery

This mastery gives you 6 armor, increases the damage output if your Frag Grenade by 100 and the damage of your physical attacks. This is a great starter mastery, and recommended for advanced players, as it gives you a bit of armor, more damage (which compensates the damage reduction by Heavy Barrel) and increases the damage of your Frag Grenade by a good margin.

Weakspot Mastery

This mastery makes you completely ignore the armor of the enemy, while also increasing your damage towards previously "armored” targets. This is overall a very good talent, and provides the second highest damage increase next to Weapon Research. An example could be the Infested Ultralisk, which has 7 armor, thus giving this a flat out 7 damage increase against it.

Haywire Missile Mastery

This ability equips Tychus with a missile launcher, shooting out 3 missiles with a 5 seconds internal cooldown. Deals increased damage to massive and psionic units making it very useful against bosses or Ultralisks and Queens. A good player will keep a track on the timer, and always use it on massive units whenever possible. It can also be used to burst units down when you’re kiting them, by turning around every 5 seconds to launch the missiles at them. It also works on structures, and can be used to burst spinecrawlers down.  Overall it’s a great mastery and very recommended in the mid-game, as it's rather useless in the early game due to the enemies low health.

Psionic Warrior Mastery

After 1000 kills without dying, this mastery will unlock. It removes your Psionic Storm ability, and instead gives it a 10% chance to proc on auto-attacks, meaning you will get a lot more storms out of it. Also reduces your energy regeneration slightly. This doesn't matter at all though, as you no longer have to spend energy on the Psionic storm ability. This mastery increases your AoE potential by a lot, and makes it a lot easier to slaughter groups of units and pushing forwards in the middle/late game. It is generally also a huge dps increase against bosses and psionic units. The key part to this talent though, is the fact that it procs Berserk, which increases your attack speed by a lot, which in return procs even more storms. Overall a great mastery that should be taken as soon as possible.

Weapons Research Mastery

This mastery will consume 5000 minerals over 10 turns (being 500 per turn) and in return, grants 10 damage, 0.5 range and attack speed. Overall it’s a good talent to take in the mid-game, providing you haven’t spent money on nukes.

Lightweight Equipment Mastery

This mastery will consume 4000-5000 Minerals over 20 turns (200-250 per turn) and will reduce the cooldown of your Stimpack, Flaming better, Psionic storm and Frag grenade. As of 2.23 this mastery is slightly bugged, meaning you’ll get more out of it by researching it after you've gotten the talent Quickening, which halves your cooldown on Psionic storm, Frag Grenade and Flaming Betty. Going LW -> Quickening will provide a 6 second cooldown on Frag grenade and a 18 second cooldown on Flaming Betty. Taking Quickening first will provide a 3 second cooldown on Frag Grenade and a 14 second cooldown on Flaming Betty. This mastery is best taken in the mid/late game. This has been fixed however, and it's still a strong mastery.

Ranger Mastery

This mastery increases the range of your auto-attacks by 2, almost double the range of your auto turret and increases the casting range of your Psionic Storm. It is very useful once you have gotten the Weapons Research Mastery, as you will outrange Spine Crawlers, easily taking them out.

Allrounder Mastery

This mastery gives you two additional talent points and increases your max energy. This is generally a late game mastery, best taken when you have either run out of good talents to take, or feel like you need the two talent points to get a critical talent like Berserk.

Guides

BlacKcuD and Tankz have release a full-fletched Mental Guide. It covers basic strategy, Perk, Mastery and talent choices. Link to guide.

Example Mental Mastery Order

1. Haywire Missile Mastery - This mastery is hands down the strongest early game mastery. The burst allows you to kill everything quicker, and you can use it to dance in and out of Spine Crawlers' range while killing them from far away.
2. Ranger Mastery - Outside of detection, the increased range from this mastery makes it very strong as a second mastery. Not only that, but if you happen to get the auto turret drop early on, you will get a monster of a turret every time its dropped.
3. Weapons Research Mastery - Since it grants a higher damage advantage than Weakspot Mastery and provides 0.5 range, making it possible to outrange Spine Crawlers, this is definitely your third mastery, as nothing else comes close to its usefulness at this point.
4. Weakspot Mastery - Just a raw damage increase against everything. Since its higher than CQC, you want this instead of CQC.
5. Psionic Warrior Mastery - The strongest mastery by far that Tychus has. It removes the ability to cast storm, but puts a 10% chance on your auto attacks to proc storm. Combining that with Berserk, which increases your attack speed and movement speed every time you use psionic storm/frag grenade, means that you will have a nearly 100% uptime on this buff, giving a way higher DPS. 
6. Lightweight Equipment Mastery - Cooldown reduction on your flaming betty is REALLY handy to have at this point, as it makes it a lot easier to deal with the primal brutalisk.
7. Nuke mastery from Leviathan, as you will be using nukes from this point on.
8. Energy Mastery OR Close Quarter Combat Mastery - if you need energy, take that, if not, CQC is better.

It doesn't really matter what you take after this, and its completly up to you if you need more energy in case you took CQC, more damage if you took energy mastery or missing some key talents.

Mental Solo Replays

http://drop.sc/398542 - Mental solo tychus in 2:39:40.