EPTBeen a while since my last blog, I had a lot of vacationing and traveling over the past couple months so I haven't posted a blog since my gf made the Terran Cake:http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=358757. Since then I've started up school, played as much SC2 as I have had time for (almost Masters in KR :D), and have gotten a chance to play the HotS beta. I spent an entire day on Sunday playing the beta, about 50 games total, and during this I got to play a wide range of skill including some of the better known players in the community.
Before I go into the details, I wanted to let you guys know that I will be streaming my HotS games on a regular basis where I will be going over my games and interacting with people in chat as we try to figure out this new game.
Tuesdays: 8pm - midnight PST
Wednesday: 6pm - midnight PST (with a break for dinner)
I'll be streaming on my CSL team's page @ twitch.tv/sdsuesports.
So, here's a compilation of my thoughts and experiences with the beta...
My Experience with HotS so far:
I'll go over my experiences with the new units emphasizing Protoss as that is the race I played the most..
NOTE: I'm not going to talk balance at all, I'm only going to talk about how I used these units and my experiences against them. I don't work for Blizzard so any changes that I may or may not want to happen to these units isn't worth discussing.
Oracle: At first I couldn't find the point of this unit, it's expensive as hell, requires a tech path that I don't typically use, and dies really REALLY fast. I did not use this unit at all in PvT, although if I decide to deal with the new Terran mech with Stargate tech I would definitely try to mix an Oracle in somewhere. Nor did I find a use for it, yet, in PVP. Where I used this unit the most was in PvZ, and I didn't really use entomb that much. Typically I would fire off a couple Entombes earlier in the game until the tech-heavy Zerg units were out. What I found was useful for this unit was detection when engaging Swarm Host based Zerg armies. Zerg usually has overseers anyways so I felt that this unit did a better job at spotting that observers did.
Tempest: Not used in PvT or PvP yet, although I can see some use for it against a Meching Terran later in the game. I tried to use this in PvZ, what I found was this was a really great unit for harassing expansions during the mid-game and picking off Swarm Hosts and other units when paired with an Oracle. One thing I've noticed about this unit is that it gets a lot better with Air upgrades. So during most of my games with the Tempest I was emphasizing the Protoss Air Upgrades.
Mothership Core: This unit is pretty straight forward as far as use. The turret-like ability can be used when cutting corners with units in the early game. The turret-like ability loses it's magic as the game progresses as I found during battles it was better to spend the energy on re-energizing my other units. Recall when you need to recall, this can be used with timings or just if a forced battle happens that you don't want to be a part of. The Energize ability was really cool, this allows for some early game FF gains and was also helpful against Terran with HTs at home.
Now to the units I played against...
Battle Mode Hellion: So in exchange for speed and range, the Hellion gains 30HP ( i think? I know it's close to that) and a wider attack cone. Honestly I felt like this "Battle Mode" is only good in certain situations, I saw a lot of people over-using it when the standard mode Hellion would suffice. How this affected me is that against Terran player who were meching, Zealots lost a lot of thier power in large battles to the Battle Hellion. I almost am at the point where I want to scrap Zealots past the mid-game against Mech if Hellions are being made, feels like a waste of minerals to me but I'll keep playing with this.
Widow Mine: I honestly was never in a situation where this unit changed any of my thought processes. The unit feels kind of underwhelming for now, I don't think anyone has figured out how to use it correctly yet.
Warhound: Okay so, PvT will never be the same because of this unit. I played against Warhounds being used all sorts of ways. Some people used them all game long with mech, some players just made them for early game attacks, some players would mix them in randomly with bio based armies (which I think is not smart because as the game progresses you will either have to get mech upgrades just for them or have under-upgraded units). This unit can make an appearance very early in the game and if you aren't prepared for it you are screwed.
(Right here I started to type a bunch about how I delt with this unit in various ways but after a couple paragraphs I decided I'm going to make a blog about just this unit and how I am dealing with it. I'll do this later in the week after I play the beta more.)
Swarm Host: This unit is probably the strongest out all of the units I've encountered thus far. It creates an issue for Protoss that we haven't faced before, containment potential from Zerg. Normally we can hold of x number of Zerg units with spells like FF, Storm, walls, cannons, and other things. The swarm host shoots free units at us (almost as strong as a roach) that we must deal with without losing any units of our own. This creates a problem, how do we deal with this? Colossus seems to be the best answer, with that long range, Storm seems like an okay option with the Mothership Core for energize but still not as efficient as the Colossus. The thing to keep in mind is that you never want to engage Locusts with your main army because you are exchanging your minerals, gas, and time for only their time. However, if you can catch this unit in the open field, you can kill it very easily so keep that in mind.
Viper: I didn't encounter the Viper a lot just yet, mainly because most of my games were ending before the Viper got a chance to really shine. A lot of their abilities have obvious effects so I'm not going to go much into detail.
Hydras with speed: Didn't affect me much, they still die really fast. Maybe as the game matures and the games get longer we will see more use of them.
Ultra Burrow Charge: Same deal as before, the games haven't really been lasting long enough to give any good feedback on this. It's a good ability.
Well that's all I have for now, hopefully this all makes some sense as I wrote it over the course of three different classes (paying half attention
). I'll make another blog after I've played some more games. If you guys want to chat feel free to PM me or hit me up on my stream chat if you ever catch me streaming (check the schedule above for HotS streaming times).Also, I wanted to add that the current ladder maps are very diverse and make the game really fun. Some maps make it easy to take 4 bases, some maps are hard to take a third, some maps you can take a natural almost uncontested. I really hope this trend continues as I think adding more map variables makes the game a lot more fun to play.
As always, thanks for reading!
