In Starcraft 2, each race has one main offensive spell caster. Terran has the ghost, zerg has the infestor, and protoss has the high templar. Each one has two powerful offensive spells.
Back in the days of Brood War, spell casters weren't quite like this. Each one had, at most, one powerful offensive spell. Additionally, smartcasting didn't exist. Because of this, with the exception of science vessels in TVZ or a unique situation, you NEVER saw spellcasters being massed.
Zerg would steadily produce defilers in the late game vs terran bio because they'd get killed off by science vessels, but you'd never see a zerg army with 8 defilers. Defilers were absolutely essential for late game in that situation, but due to a variety of reasons, massing them just wouldn't accomplish anything.
High templar still had storm, possibly the most powerful spell in the game, but you still would usually see just 4-6 with a protoss army. This is largely because of two things: firstly, their secondary spell, hallucination, simply was not a powerful offensive spell. It could be used creatively to great effect in certain situations, but it couldn't kill your opponent's army. Secondly, with no smartcasting, storm was very difficult to use. You couldn't simply have 12 high templar in your army and spam storm all over the place.
Now, back to Starcraft 2. For some reason, despite the fact that smartcasting now exists, the main spell casters of each race have been overloaded with powerful offensive abilities. Why, though?
What if EMP was given to the raven, replacing the rarely used auto-turret, and the ghost were given a new, less powerful spell? Now in TVP, instead of just massing ghosts and spamming EMP and snipe all over the protoss army and high templar so that your army can mow it over in seconds, the terran can make some ghosts to snipe and some ravens to EMP. Obviously additional changes would be needed as the gas costs would be very high, but this results in a wider variety of units being used and more interesting game play.
What if the infestor simply didn't have infested terrans as an option anymore? Now, fungal growth is still an extremely powerful spell and neural can be as well, so infestors will still be an extremely important unit for zerg. But, will you really want to have 30 of them out at a time? Again: more variety of units, and one single unit doesn't decide the fate of the game so much.
These ideas obviously aren't completely fleshed out or anything, but I think it's something that should be considered for the future. A single spell caster simply should not be so strong as to determine the fate of a game on its own.
Ghosts are somewhat of a non-issue in this problem since Snipe was nerfed against BLs and Ultras in TvZ, and cannot be used in groups of more than 6 because it wastes too much supply. Also, Lockdown was arguably an offensive spell when used on critical targets like BCs and Arbiters. However, EMP does cause the lategame to be too focused on a single spell. However, Blizz's endeavors to make mech viable, which will succeed when they start patching WoL units, can and will negate this problem.
I disagree that spellcasters have too many offensive spells. Sentries have Shield and Hallu, plus FF is very effective defensively. Ravens have PDD. Infestors... you got me there, but it's no mystery that they're imbalanced. My favorite spellcaster (besides HTs, of course) will be the Viper, which currently has no offensive spells whatsoever.
If you moved EMP to Raven, then Ghosts would be nerfed to non-viability. I would like to see a more interesting Ghost spell, and I would like to see Ravens used more often, but even with a new spell I feel that Ghosts simply wouldn't be made any more. I still like the idea, though. If someone can think of an interesting enough new spell for Ghosts, then I'm all for it, as long as Snipe gets buffed to 50 (-25 vs. Massive).
On Infestors, I think that IT shouldn't be able to be used while Infestors are burrowed. This makes Infestors harass a lot more difficult than it should be because you have to unburrow. Then give Fungal a 80-75% slow instead of root so that the workers (and any clump of units, for that matter) have a chance to split. Removing IT from Infestors completely is a unique concept that would cause Zergs to rely less on Infestors for AA, but if you want that you could simply prevent ITs from shooting up.
Having lots of spell casters isn't a bad thing in itself. Having 15 infestors would be fine if 15 infestors made for interesting gameplay. If you only had 5 infestors instead of 15, they'd still be boring units. So I don't think this is the biggest problem, or even a problem in itself at all.
A good example of this is queens in Brood War. You'll often see 12 or more queens. Sometimes even 20, or 24. Does this make for boring games? No, it does not.
Also, science vessels. These days in TvZ people often transition in to mech, and therefor only make a few science vessels. But sometimes people still play the older style of massing science vessels, getting a huge cloud of them (and back when it was the most common playstyle, it still made for interesting games). HiyA did this in the SSL.
Edit: Ok, people who go mech can still get lots of science vessels eventually, once they get enough bases and enough gas.
Science Vessels have irradiate, an extremely powerful offensive spell. However, it's not a boring unit - to use, or to play against. Therefor, it's ok that you have large amounts of them. So again, the problem is boring unit design in itself, not the fact that making large amounts of the same spell caster is effective.
I also don't see why having multiple offensive spells on the same unit is necessarily a bad thing. I don't think that's the reason SC2 units are boring.
On November 07 2012 15:47 Antylamon wrote: On Infestors, I think that IT shouldn't be able to be used while Infestors are burrowed. This makes Infestors harass a lot more difficult than it should be because you have to unburrow. Then give Fungal a 80-75% slow instead of root so that the workers (and any clump of units, for that matter) have a chance to split. Removing IT from Infestors completely is a unique concept that would cause Zergs to rely less on Infestors for AA, but if you want that you could simply prevent ITs from shooting up.
If infestors couldn't AA, no one would ever make them in the midgame because of drops. Drops are already significantly harder to handle with infestors as the midgame weapon of choice than with mutas because of speed / mobility.
On November 07 2012 19:14 vOdToasT wrote: A good example of this is queens in Brood War. You'll often see 12 or more queens. Sometimes even 20, or 24. Does this make for boring games? No, it does not.
"often" might not be the word I would use here Most queens in a game is probably not even 12. Zero vs Bisu on Heartbreak Ridge is the only game with lots of queens that comes to mind:
counting them right now, will get back to you later
Five queens. And it's exceptionally rare that queens are built at all.
Zero vs Bisu on Heartbreak Ridge is the only game with lots of queens that comes to mind: .
I guess you've missed out on Terran mech vs Zerg in the recent past. Zergs don't always make queens against mech, but when they do, they make a lot. ( I so wanted to make that beer meme out of this )
Zero vs Bisu on Heartbreak Ridge is the only game with lots of queens that comes to mind: .
I guess you've missed out on Terran mech vs Zerg in the recent past. Zergs don't always make queens against mech, but when they do, they make a lot. ( I so wanted to make that beer meme out of this )
Zero vs Bisu on Heartbreak Ridge is the only game with lots of queens that comes to mind: .
I guess you've missed out on Terran mech vs Zerg in the recent past. Zergs don't always make queens against mech, but when they do, they make a lot. ( I so wanted to make that beer meme out of this )
yeah ive seen a lot of hydra/queen unit compositions vs a mech terran. usually its about 6-10 queens i think and they come in and attempt to broodling the tank line as much as possible and terran tries to emp those queens and you try to concave your hydras as best possible vs a (hopefully) diminished tank line..
bw just seems more epic.. too many spells makes it feel like dota there was a game of cola vs shinee as an event match on sonics stream where cola does a flawless execution of a hydra queen build and eventually eats a command center and makes an infested terran O_O it was awesome haha
On November 07 2012 15:47 Antylamon wrote: On Infestors, I think that IT shouldn't be able to be used while Infestors are burrowed. This makes Infestors harass a lot more difficult than it should be because you have to unburrow. Then give Fungal a 80-75% slow instead of root so that the workers (and any clump of units, for that matter) have a chance to split. Removing IT from Infestors completely is a unique concept that would cause Zergs to rely less on Infestors for AA, but if you want that you could simply prevent ITs from shooting up.
If infestors couldn't AA, no one would ever make them in the midgame because of drops. Drops are already significantly harder to handle with infestors as the midgame weapon of choice than with mutas because of speed / mobility.
I wasn't endorsing the idea of removing ITs, I was saying that there are better options than removing ITs. As I said, "I think that IT shouldn't be able to be used while Infestors are burrowed."
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