Mines, Swarm hosts and the lack of creative ideas. - Page 2

On December 15 2012 03:58 Tedde93 wrote:
I can't believe you actually went ahead and talked about the dps of a spider mine, no offense but that was one of the most stupid arguments I have ever heard about anything in starcraft ever. DPS doesn't directly correlate damage. Yeah the widow mine has a very low dps but that DOESN'T MATTER since fights don't last for infiniy, they usually last like 10-25 seconds. So a unit that has 10 dps will during the course of the fight assuming that it survived deal a MAXIMUM of 100-250 damage, but most of these units will die before they ever get to that point or they will not be attacking for the entire period of the battle whitch is the case for most ranged units. Burst damage is also the best kind of damage since it will instantly kill units and will render them unable to attack since they are dead. You are also way to hung up on the word mine, it isn't really a mine anymore it is more like a stealthy rocket launcher.

On December 15 2012 03:09 Plansix wrote:


I agree, I wish TL would clamp down on these sorts of threads. I go blind every time I read "no matter what Blizzard does, the units in HotS will never be good because of serious design flaws". What does that even mean?! Every one of these threads just rehashing of the same old "BW units were better, here is why" that we have been reading for nearly 2 years. They are all backed up with the same, vague, overly general arguments that everyone makes because they read them on the forums. It is like the complaining about Blizzard hive mind decides to post about the same 10-15 issues about every week or so.

Lets go down the check list:

Positional play/area/board control - check
Reference lurker and spider mine - check
Mine must be zero supply - check
Claim Blizzard has not idea what they are doing - check
Provide zero evidence that Blizzard has not idea what is going on beyond saying the units are bad - check
Reference BW at every point when claiming the units are bad - check
Design used over 10 times in a single post - check
Defenders advantage - likely to appear in a later post, but not present
Removing warp in - not present, but will be referenced at some point when PvT is brought up

We have heard this all before. We would all be better off just playing HotS, rather complaning about "design".(I can't play, Im on lunch at work)

On December 15 2012 04:34 one-one-one wrote:


Didn't you already post that above?

Hmm. let me think.

You might be right. Dps of the widow mine is maybe not the most well defined measure. What I wanted to demonstrate with the dps argument can be stated more generally I guess. We are talking about supply-efficiency and cost-efficiency.
In these terms it seems, judging by prolevel games, that the widow mine is not effective enough in the lategame.
There are simply other units that will make your army trade better. This is on average of course.
Some mines will hit high value targets while some other will be killed before doing anything and some mines might hit target(s) of low value that also would have been hit by an alternate unit. For instance it might be better to have 2 tanks and a turret than 3 widow mines in a battle. Sure the tanks and turret costs more, but this is not a problem if you are maxed out on and have a good economy to back it up.

This kind of analysis has to be done just because the supply cost of the unit. If you lower the supply of the mine then the expected damage it has to do to justify its supply goes down. Widow mines not being employed in lategame scenario will be a huge indicator of this problem.

On December 15 2012 05:21 Mig wrote:
Your op is mostly just your personal complaints and not a topic designed for discussion so moved to blogs.