EPTI've consistently had ideas/thoughts that are not really worth a forum post, so I figured I'd open up a blog to talk about some of it, whether or not anyone decides to read it, keep in mind these are concept ideas that are generally not fleshed out or organized very well, if I get interest in one/some I'll try and flesh out the various implementations possible with it/them.
warning: this is a very stream of consciousness style of post.
In beta, I felt zerg was lacking the interesting oomph that terran had a tonne of, and protoss had a decent amount of. With heart of the swarm around the corner, people have been wondering, what can blizzard add to zerg that would fit with their idiom, without unbalancing them or overlapping with existing units. With that, here are a few of the ideas I've had floating around in my head.
Creep tumour upgrades:
the ability at lair, or hive depending on balance, to upgrade your creep tumours to provide one of a number of benefits/negatives to units on the creep it has generated. These I think should not work for allied non-zerg, or enemy zerg, instead just being for yourself and any allied zerg units. This may have some issues making zerg heavy teams more favorable, but that already exists with the current creep spread, and we don't see it having much/any impact on the team ladders. I also think that the creep should have a distinctive look to it for each of the bonus's, allowing an opponent the ability to tell at a glance what the creep is capable of.
1) Faster regen for your troops. A simple bonus to the current zerg regen rate
2) Faster speed for your troops. Even faster then the current creep
3) Lower speed for enemy troops
4) enemy troops take damage over time. This may be controversial, but considering that the tumour can be killed with detection, I don't think it makes it any different then area denial with other cloaked units.
Since each tumour would only be able to be upgraded to one of these bonus's and the upgrade would cost a certain amount of minerals/gas, it would provide an interesting dynamic of what kind of bonus's you want for your creep. It could be done as either not allowing more then one bonus creep type in an area at a time, or simply make it not economically feasible to try and stack all the bonus's
This would allow zergs the mid-game defensive advantage they are currently lacking, as well as providing a very solid reason to require mobile detection against a zerg player. Placing/replacing creep tumours would be even more important then it is now, making more of a demand for queens.
Corruption:
Corruption is a very bland uninteresting ability right now, so what can we do to make it interesting again. One concept that was talked about by Idra was to move contaminate off the overseer back onto the corruptor, giving the corruptors something to do when there are no air units for them to kill. I disagree with this however, as I think that would make corruptor builds too in certain circumstances, as well as taking a key ability away from the overseer.
Instead, what I would propose is that it does what it currently does, increasing damage taken, but also spawns 2 broodlings if it's a ground unit that dies under the effects, if it's an air unit, have 2 scourge spawn. With the scourge I would prevent them from attacking for 1-2 seconds after spawning, to allow the opponent a chance to pick them off or move away, otherwise a zerg could just corruption the enemy fleet and watch the cascade. Scourge would then have the same timed life of a broodling.
Zerg need another caster of some form. Everybody's favorite defiler pops to mind instantly, but instead of trying to pick a defined unit, let's look at possible spells first. But before that, we need to look and see where the zerg army is lacking, and what it has a lot of trouble dealing with, and I think everybody can agree that the term "deathball" comes to mind instantly, as well as "slowpush"
The infestor by function should be the counter to a deathball, FGing it in place and NPing the key big units. However this is not the case generally due to the range on NP being the same/less then the colossus/siege tank range, and FG being a very short term solution. When compared to the defiler of BW, which shared the same role, we can see 1 defiler with a supply of lings able to single handedly bolster the zerg army enough to hold off the pushes seen in BW. The reason for this is that dark swarm was a much longer duration area control/push delaying spell, and the defiler could eat lings to keep it up indefinitely. Then when it came to big death balls, 1-2 well placed plagues would do enough damage to turn the battle completely in the favor of the zerg. Now, if fungal growth would have a longer duration, OR do a decent amount more damage, OR infestors having an energy regen mechanic like defilers allowing them to cast it over and over again at a cost. Any of these would make the zerg capable of taking that "impossible to approach" deathball that inevitably rolls through your army/base.
Now, at lair I believe the infestor is balanced, but I strongly believe that a hive level upgrade that gives the infestor some sort of bonus would allow the zerg to compete late game vs the other races without having to keep them on 2 bases.
1) Actually just give consume researchable at hive, verbatim from SC1
2) Give the infestor another energy regaining method, example:
Tentacle attaches to the target friendly or unfriendly unit, dealing 10 damage a second for 10 seconds, the only way to interupt this is the death of the infestor or the unit in question. Infestor regains 100% of the damage dealt as energy. cost: 25 energy.
nubmers obviously tweaked for balance, but it would essentially give a bonus of 100 energy from a large unit. one concern would be whether it would be balanced with roach burrow, allowing infestors to charge up at no cost.
looking back I don't think it's balanced, but I'll leave it in to spark further thought on differing styles of consume that fit the infestor more.
Now, for other general spells, either for a theoretical new caster, or to be added to an existing unit:
Damage over time spell, that jumps to a new target if a unit dies under it's affect, resetting it's duration. possibly jumping to 2 targets each time, or adding damage each jump, though that may be too powerful. Possibly have it jump to a new target if one is in range when the duration runs out no matter what, even if the target is alive, making the player need to pull the affected unit out of the group to stop the DoT from jumping.
possible stats:
hive
50 damage over 5-10 seconds, jumps to a new target if the current dies or the duration expires
5 seconds seems too harsh, while 10 seems like it wouldn't be a threat, but it's difficult to tell without seeing it in action, I think if the jump distance was 3 or 4 range instead of the 1 range I was originally thinking of, it would be balanced at 10 seconds, but I'm not sure. this version I think would prevent it from getting out of hand like the next 2 could, making it more balanced at all skill levels instead of just at the higher levels where people are capable of pulling units out of a group quickly.
or,
hive
50 damage over 10 seconds, if the target dies it jumps to 2 new targets and starts again.
This would start slow, but escalate to losing your entire army very quickly, especially if the zerg casts multiple at once, and in conjunction with a muta or fungal growth attack, so you can't catch them all and pull them out in time, what prevents this from killing everything is that the target is only taking 50 damage total, which, if it isn't enough to kill it, stops that branch of the disease right there.
or,
20 damage over 5 seconds, if the target dies while under the effect, it jumps to another target and gains a stack, dealing 40 damage over 5 seconds to the 2nd target, and then 60 over 5 to the 3rd, etc. This would require some work to get going, but once it got it's stacks up, it would tear through an army in seconds. This is too bursty for my tastes, even if each new stack only added 10% and initial damage was higher, it feels like, if it was balanced, it would mean a win or a loss based on if it got it's stacks up or not within the enemy army.
Zerg really could use a new style of plague, where you want the enemy army to be hit by it BEFORE the engagement, so it's a constant game of cat and mouse to get it off before the armies clash.
Razer swarm, but massively increased duration and reduced damage. Razor swarm is the reskin of psi storm that kerrigan gets in the campaign. Essentially take psi storm, increase it's area of effect and duration, and then drop the damage down to very low (5-7 damage a second?), enough so that it discourages an army from trying to march through, but not enough to wipe out army before it can move out of it. This in combination with fungal growth could make for some very interesting late game plays by zerg. It could be either friendly fire capable or not, depending on how the balance worked out.
Another interesting idea stemming from the previous ones would be an area of effect ability that lasts a long time, that gives any enemy units that move through it a DoT doing 3 damage a second for 10 seconds, or whatever numbers work out. It wouldn't be incredible to use on the enemy army during a fight, due to it's low front end damage, but using it in the path the army wants to take, or on the army when it's grouping up getting ready to move out, it would soften them up slightly, or prevent them from wanting to just plow through. what's important is the long duration of the spot on the ground, and a short duration of the DoT it applies, so for 30 seconds anybody moving through the area it's dropped will take 30 damage over the next few seconds, then if it goes through again it will take yet more damage. It would be kind of like a zerg forcefield, but bigger units just wouldn't care because the damage is so minimal. again friendly fire capable or not depending on the balance once it's seem.
A single target 3 second immunity spell would be interesting, possibly only affecting ranged attacks, making it a single target short duration dark swarm. The intent at any rate would be to cast it on the target the enemy is focusing, soaking up a LOT of damage in those couple seconds. like for example putting it on your lead ultralisk in a charge into a terran fortified position would allow zerg to actually break terran fortifications late game like they could in BW with darkswarm+ultras. key here would be to not have the units auto-retarget other units like divine shield did in WC3, but instead make it like a 3 second defence matrix without a cap on how much it can soak
A remake of the devourer acid spores, without the attack speed slow. I'd actually postulate actually re-adding in the devourer almost verbatim, except allow it to attack ground and reduce it's damage and damage per second, but increase it's attack speed, allowing for a quick application of acid spores. In addition reduce the area in which the acid spores hit, as things clump up more.
I'd make the unit like this:
Mutated from muta, requires an upgrade at spire, upgrade has no reqs
cost 75/50/0 (no supply increase from muta)
HP: 150
type: armoured
armour 0
damage 8
attack speed 1.5
range 6
able to attack ground and air
move speed equiv to corruptor, possibly slightly slower, they are not intended to always be there with your mutas for harass, but instead provide a reason to have mutas in an even pitched
acid spores:
passive on-attack application, stacks to 10, splash area so if targeting the middle of a pack of stalkers hit would hit the immediately adjacent, but only barely. hopefully there's a middle ground where it will get only 1 adjacent marine, as well as get adjacent stalkers
increases all damage taken by 1 per stack
This would synergise extremely well with mutalisks, exactly like it did in BW, but it would also be a massive force multplier for hydras and lings as well.
Looking back on this, I think it's overpowered to be added into the game as it is currently, but with other units being added to other races as well, I think it could work (like how adding medics to terran without lurkers to zerg would have been all WTF for SC -> BW)
It overlaps with the nydus worm a bit, but a burrowed moving transport would be very neat. Though it would be a big change, allowing nydus exits to burrow and move while burrowed with a hive upgrade would be interesting, though I don't know if it's really something zerg needs right now. I do however think there could be an addition to somehow allows nydus worms to be more useful, even if it's just halving the cost of the network+worms. Although, the main reason they are not seeing as much use as I think blizzard anticipated is because zerg is so weak on the defensive front compared to BW. If zerg was able to spend the money on nydus, and actually leave their base with it without very real concern that the other player can just stomp over their base, and probably their whole army due to the investment in nydus. So a way for zerg to delay the opposing army, similar to how darkswarm allowed them to do, I believe would make nydus used more right there.
An interesting concept for a caster unit would be to have it start at 0 energy, and instead of gain energy it loses it at twice the rate others gain it. to gain energy it has to attack, gaining 25 per attack or something similar, making it similar to a voidray in that you want to charge it up on something before going into a fight, possibly by combining it with a burrowed roach. The spells for such a caster, I think at least, should be more combat focused, instead of support, maybe a pull, grabbing a single unit and pulling it into melee range with it, or possibly a targeted charge that does aoe damage in a line, or even the 3 second immune idea I had above, but only on itself, both the charge and the immunity would synergise well in that you'd want to charge up it's mana beforehand, and then use both to get right into melee range and soak up as much damage as you can while the rest of your stuff gets into combat range free from all the firepower that is instead being soaked.
I doubt anyone will actually read all of this, but it felt good write it, so that's good enough for me.
If anyone perchance did read it, please please post comments/criticisms/ideas. I'd rather you told me my ideas all suck bowel and why then to not say anything at all.
its what made zvt realkly fun and amazing i think
