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Lately I have been trying the point out the flaws in units, ever since I found out about the hellbat/banshee patch, which seems okay thusfar.
The swarm host is a boring unit. Burrow it in the ground and free units come out, concaving around bases and armies, blocking pathing and forcing retreat. Its boring and one-dimentional, and I really dont see the skill cap that they have with micro and builds that center around them. Most builds that do that, mainly just in ZvP, are boring and macrofests. I also think that Locusts kind of overlap with the roach, as they are a ground-only ranged unit (mind you free) that lasts for a short time. You need at least 10 swarmhosts to snipe a base and lay siege to one area, but they are not that mobile around the map. Not much micro at all, besides burrow micro.
What do you think needs to be done to the swarm host to make it a more usable unit in all three matchups?
My Opinion:
I think the unit needs a complete overhaul. I know that this is a bit of an extreme change, but it would be cool to see this happen in a later version of the game.
Lets say the swarm hosts keep their mechanic of spawning free units. Unupgraded, they can burrow and act like the current swarm host, spawning locusts that shoot missiles. Enduring Locusts is the same.
But there is some potential for more here.
One idea, seems rough, but would it be interesting to have locusts benefit from tunneling claws/burrow. This would lead to more harass potential and micro necessary and strategic capability. Obviously not a huge change to the unit, but I thought I could take that idea a bit further -- a new infestation pit upgrade for the swarm host: something like Razor Hide.
Razor Hide: est. cost 150/150?
Locusts and Swarm Hosts gain razor-sharp zerg hide(?) that damages any unit standing above them while burrowed. 5+4 to light damage per second, benefits from Ground Armor upgrade - raises damage by 15%/30%/45% (rough).
While burrowed, you can see the spikes of the Razor Hide coming out of the ground, but the units can not be detected without overseer, turret, etc.
Since the swarmhost itself isn't seen in the thick of battle unless its one-sided and they all get sniped, being able to see the unit's spikes would not effect the unit, while giving more of an indication as to where locusts/swarm hosts are positioned while burrow, replacing its current status of being able to see the egg sacs being spawned from the ground.
Basically what I am thinking is that swarm hosts could be borrowed and micro'ed underneath ground armies with a the same base speed as a marine, mineral lines, etc. It adds necessary micro of the locusts to do damage, raising the skill ceiling on the unit. It also requires more micro It also has the potential for builds to incorporate builds around it. Something like a +2 Swarm Host timing to take out expansions/economy (burrow in and get kills before someone can react and retreat, then unburrow and snipe base, making defense and offense more based on skill than just camping in some cases, and it seems like it would fit in pretty well with infestors, hydras, etc in a core army, forcing detection to be around where the locusts are.
They also resemble the lurker in its upgraded form, giving more utility to the unit, while keeping its free unit/siege unit image that the swarm host has.
Since balance in the game is pretty steady now, fixes to some of the game mechanics, small or big, can impact the game positively still. Obviously the above stated idea is probably too radical of a change to implement now, but maybe could be an idea for future unit changes.
I'd like to hear your guys' opinion on not only swarm hosts, but any other unit you would like to see changed in order to affect the game positively in a strategic and variable way, whilest not compromising the balance of the game.
 
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I can't believe after broodlord they would make another unit like this. Its completely illogical. They either produce too many locusts and overwhelm everything, or they get run over. No middle ground makes for boring scenarios, one side tends to get stomped instead of constant back and forth fights which are what's enjoyable.
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Hmmmm, very interesting. My opinion, Kill the unit, make the overlord speed upgrade 3x as fast, and also the ability to shoot AOE slime on air units that slowly take some health.
Scratch that attack, but i do think drops would be a lot more fun for zerg if the OL could move quite a bit faster. But as concerning the swarm host, i really have no strong opinion. It just kinda dosn't feel right though.
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There is a fair bit of skill required to use Swarm Hosts. For example, you hardly notice any pros pushing with Locusts then retreating and attacking at another angle, or backing up. And sometimes you notice them pop-up Swarm Hosts too early and block the Locusts. There's a ton to differentiate good SH users and bad SH users. Early on that difference was just whether your SH died because of a bad rally, but now it's getting better. Potential micro improvements is stronger creep spread so your SH can pull back a lot easier, and re-engage on different areas of the map that have been creeped.
However, you probably noticed that we're slowly losing the maps that SH excelled in. Namely the split-map easy-to-defend multiple pathways maps where SH users would mass static defense and just use the regenerating power of the Locusts.
There are several issues with SH at least what I can see.
+ Show Spoiler +1. They're completely ineffective the second you can zone out the Locusts. So for example, if you send the Locusts out on a split pathway, after 12-15 seconds the other player will just rush the empty pathway and kill you, and now you have XX supply in SH that aren't contributing to the fight, and lose instantly unless you have an advantage and built up a superior army and static defense. This is the same issue with Brood Lords, except that Brood Lords have the ability to attack while being attacked, move while attacking, and blocking unit path.
In the same vein, you can zone out the Locusts the second you have too many ranged, AoE attack units. Large Colossi numbers crush SH play before Vipers come out. Tanks completely wipe Locusts before they arrive once you've hit a high number of Tanks.
2. They're not really useful unless you have at least 4-5 of them. At very low supplies single SH are useful in almost no situation. The Locusts will die immediately, and it's 3-6 supply in SH that waste 400 gas and aren't contributing in any meaningful way for the next 40 game seconds. It's too much.
3. Regenerating units fit in with the Zerg idea. Throw units at them until they die. The problem is really more to do supply/cost and usage. For the supply/cost, it simply can't be justified unless you're certain you have a huge window of non-activity from your opponent, and can justify doing enough damage with them to keep them in your composition throughout the entire game. There's no trade-SH-for-extra-supply strategy because the second you lose your 20-30 supply in SH, if your opponent counter-attacks you generally lose instantly.
The other point is that Zerg units are meant to be swarmy. You're supposed to have quick, expendable, mobile units. However, the SH is the complete opposite of that. You need to have good positioning, but you're controlling the weird Locusts. You can't quickly run over your opponent with SH, you just starve them or poke them to death. They're not mobile, nor expendable, ever. The unit doesn't fit with the race that well, just like how Broodlords never fit because it's a slow-pushing death push. And there's no defensive use for them - an opponent will run around your SH and kill everything before they arrive, so it's promoting mass static defense to defend, which isn't zergy at all. The style of game they want just doesn't fit the reason a lot of players like playing Zerg for. In ZvZ they're becoming better, but it just feels wrong.
The Baneling doesn't really overlap with the Lurker as much as Blizzard has claimed it has. The issue is the bum-rushing strategy you have to use to win engagements with Banelings. The Lurker provided a good degree of zoning which the Baneling can't really achieve. It's too squishy, and with how all maps only use narrow pathways, you will never get a really advantageous surround with the Baneling. In all cases, you'll just try to bum-rush the opponent with Zerglings ahead of the Banelings and hope they don't zone you out. If you try to retreat, they chase after you without worrying about taking damage, while you've definitely lost Banelings in the battle, and there's no way for you to keep zoning since you're melee and for the most part everyone else is ranged. A Lurker had at least the ability to zone units back, and when bum-rushing either zoned you back or did some damage. Banelings bum-rush the opponent and you hope you completely destroyed them because if you don't, you're probably not going to have enough afterwards if you pull back. And since you have to spend time remaking them, the opponent can push forward since you have no ability to zone, save the Infestor. The Infestor+Baneling is the equivalent to the single Lurker, except that even with the fungal hit, you have only one opportunity, which is to either have enough Banelings that they can't just kill the Banelings before they connect, or hope you "chain-fungal". Otherwise, you lost your one shot, need to re-energize and will probably lose the next engagement.
idk, i wrote a lot and some of it makes sense to me. The SH just doesn't feel right, like the Infestor or the BL, and I rarely use the three (probably why I lose a lot).
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there is a very high skill requirement to use swarmhost, simply burrowing and set rally point is just an inexperienced player opinion. you need a constant knowledge where the opponent army is, one mistake and you can lose upto half or all of the swarmhost.
i wish the game would look more fun with them though
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On July 14 2013 17:19 ETisME wrote:
there is a very high skill requirement to use swarmhost, simply burrowing and set rally point is just an inexperienced player opinion. you need a constant knowledge where the opponent army is, one mistake and you can lose upto half or all of the swarmhost.
i wish the game would look more fun with them though
Many of the high masters zergs I talk to would disagree. They think swarms hosts are the least skillful unit zerg has. I think blizzard could at least look at making the locusts themselves smaller, so splash would be more effective.
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I don't know what Blizzard was thinking with the host. It is far too niche of a unit; its designed to kill pinned down / turtling players, so naturally it is awful against Terran due to their 10+ dropships available, and super-effective against Protoss. If you were to fix Protoss by giving them the ability to take map control with a ground force during the early and mid game (like in Brood War), then suddenly the unit would be awful against everyone.
It is both a horribly redundant and weird unit (like the Roach) and the browderteam's baby, so it will not go away.
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What they should do, is keep the cool-down and timing of the unit, but make the zerg player have to manually spawn the locusts. This ups the skill required to use it rather than just planting them somewhere and forgetting about them.
It also allows control for the player to perhaps fake with one wave of locusts to lure an enemy while having another 3+ burrowed Swarm Hosts for somewhat of an ambush.
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Its easy, you bring back the lurker.
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As a spectator, I think the swarmhost is quite boring to watch. Its attack method overlaps with the broodlord way too much. Watching locusts (which are very powerful en-masse) slowly take down bases a bit at a time doesn't really fit the Zergy style of overwhelming numbers, force, and speed imo.
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Regardless of the skill involved, I don't think you can have a unit that is more boring than the swarm host. It spawns free, auto attack units, and the units are so slow that its not even worth microing them.
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I find swarm hosts incredibly boring due to the fact that locusts are free. It just makes a ton of meaningless battles for the entire game, ending if the Zerg has enough, or if protoss can break through. Either way, it makes games be the protoss constantly pulling back, then engaging when they think they are ready. Then it just turns into one final battle which decides the game. I agree that they need to be redesigned, however, I think the answer is making locusts weaker, making swarm hosts cheaper, and lowering their supply.
If they weren't strong enough to win games alone, zerg would have to use other units in addition to the swarm hosts. Maybe removing or nerfing enduring locusts to make them more timing oriented would make them more entertaining too. Yet the problem then is that blizzard would have to make them have good synergy with other units.
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On July 14 2013 23:51 sluggaslamoo wrote:
Its easy, you bring back the lurker.
Except Blizzard seems so adamant about bringing back Broodwar units.
Swarmhosts takes away from the excitement, which is odd since David Kim said they were looking for fast gameplay.
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On July 14 2013 19:31 jcroisdale wrote:Show nested quote +On July 14 2013 17:19 ETisME wrote:
there is a very high skill requirement to use swarmhost, simply burrowing and set rally point is just an inexperienced player opinion. you need a constant knowledge where the opponent army is, one mistake and you can lose upto half or all of the swarmhost.
i wish the game would look more fun with them though Many of the high masters zergs I talk to would disagree. They think swarms hosts are the least skillful unit zerg has. I think blizzard could at least look at making the locusts themselves smaller, so splash would be more effective.
And how many zergs are that? Unless you are on a split map (newkirk for example) you can't really just sit on your ass with swarmhosts with mass static defense and win.
Your master zerg friends also must have never used broodlords, or the bl/corr/infestor composition in wol.
In general I like the swarmhost, gets a lot of hate but blame the design of zvp, if zerg doesn't do swarmhost style play at all then zerg would never win late game zvp.
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Swarmhost/viper is great, it breaks the "slow down and get enough lasers/splash in one place to kill everything" spirit that a player with a stagnant style has, and rightfully so - NOT by easily killing off the said lasers/splash, but by killing the support units around it. In a rough analogy to fighting games, it's like dealing with a character who's very dependent on mashing great normal attacks by shitting on them with projectiles and zoning. The point of the swarmhost build is to grind it out and either win by attrition or force a favorable "cornering" situation, whereas the objective of the player facing such a build is to work a bit to get close and then smash the swarmhosts, which is quite easy to do when your zealots and colossi are on top of that immobile army.
In the sense that this interaction exists, the ideas that you suggest - that is, the swarmhosts being more dependent on close-range abilities - would completely nullify the point of the swarmhosts. Furthermore, since most direct fights on top of swarmhosts don't last a long time, the ability would be about as useful as three corruptors using corruption on a 10-colossi army.
As for the interaction itself, I feel that this is actually quite balanced. There are plenty of fighting games that work around this sort of give-and-take, where if the player with shorter-range manages to poke in, they can just completely put the pressure on the opponent. This analogy is complicated by the fact that zerg also has close-range static defense. However, just as the zerg player must take some damage to engage and abduct/kill the critical protoss units, the protoss should be willing to take damage to engage and cripple the swarmhost army also.
tl;dr: you should zealot harass more and time your engagements right so that you get hit by the minimal number of swarmhosts during the attack.
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I have noticed the swarmhost to make zvz ffa/lategame pretty fucking stupid. Your main army composition is infestors and swarm hosts which make tons of free units, backed by creep spreading and tower placing. (and possibly a few corruptors or hydras in case they decide to mass broods or something). I actually played a ZvZvZvZ FFA the other day and I did exactly this and was being attacked by 2 people at the same time throughout the game, only minimally losing a base or some towers and creep spread while they lost entire maxed out armies. After a long while I started to drop nydus heads everywhere and just unload infestors and hydras and drop a ton of ITs and just leave (sort of like a nuke).
Anyways, I digress, I think a better way for the swarm host to work is to have the locusts spawn much faster, timed die faster, and have like no hp. Either that, or lower the locust attack range and damage and tweak stuff to make that work.
As a whole the unit is just clumsy as fuck. It burrows slow, and since it's medium/large unit they all have to spread apart and burrow too which is even slower. Then when it burrows it spawns before you have a chance to set the rally so the first eggs always have to manually be sent 3-5 seconds later. And the rally setting thing is kind of clumsy and inefficient as well. Reminds me of like how the earlier versions of WoL had units rally points auto attacking on spawn which is terrible especially if you have a guy right on your hatch and you just need to build up a pile of lings that are about to spawn to go in with the rest of your army. Or if you want to move units passed enemy stuff and then start attacking in a more critical or undefended location.
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On July 14 2013 14:55 Feartheguru wrote:
I can't believe after broodlord they would make another unit like this. Its completely illogical. They either produce too many locusts and overwhelm everything, or they get run over. No middle ground makes for boring scenarios, one side tends to get stomped instead of constant back and forth fights which are what's enjoyable.
Exactly. At the exact moment that swarmhosts are not able to be run over, they begin to run over.
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First of all, nice proposal! But I do not think the Swarm host is rescuable.
I cannot say if anything is "OP" or not, or if it is hard to play, because I do not invest that much time in playing SC2, more in viewing, and lurking on TL 
It is like football, also a sport I love to watch, the Brazilian, the Spanish, or even the German team since a couple of years are far more exciting to watch than the Italians, who ofc are as good as all of those other 3 teams imo.
From a viewer's point, SHs are as boring as the Italians. I wanna point out again that this does not mean both are bad or not viable or successful in any way.
What I like when viewing Zerg is the pace potential. In my opinion the coolest and most exciting unit in the game is the Speedling. Basic, yes. They are so beautifully animated when in a swarm, when they stand they twitch constantly, when they run they look like a swarm of fish. I love watching those little fukers on MDMA running over the map, harassing in small groups or soaking damage in masses. They are cheap, but not free. They are zergish.The swarm host is the complete opposite. It is static.
Also, besides Zerg have been narrowed down to Inf BL in WoL which was not good as well, I see Broodlings more as a range attack than free units, because you cannot control them directly. So I do not see they can really be compared to Swarm Hosts.
In the games I do myself, I try to avoid them, they feel wrong. In my low leagues you can win a lot of games with SH Hydra and a few Overseers and camp in front of the enemy's bases, If you get your Hydras not being "dragged" by the locusts or aggro'd by the enemy, you could afk for some minutes, for example go kiss your wife/girlfriend, do some housework, or make yourself a steak (real men cook on their own). In professional games it is different, I see a lot of burrowing/unburrowing play and microing of locusts. Well, yawn. Still very boring.
I would love to see Swarm hosts removed in LotV.
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United States4883 Posts
On July 15 2013 06:50 blade55555 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 14 2013 19:31 jcroisdale wrote:On July 14 2013 17:19 ETisME wrote:
there is a very high skill requirement to use swarmhost, simply burrowing and set rally point is just an inexperienced player opinion. you need a constant knowledge where the opponent army is, one mistake and you can lose upto half or all of the swarmhost.
i wish the game would look more fun with them though Many of the high masters zergs I talk to would disagree. They think swarms hosts are the least skillful unit zerg has. I think blizzard could at least look at making the locusts themselves smaller, so splash would be more effective. And how many zergs are that? Unless you are on a split map (newkirk for example) you can't really just sit on your ass with swarmhosts with mass static defense and win. Your master zerg friends also must have never used broodlords, or the bl/corr/infestor composition in wol. In general I like the swarmhost, gets a lot of hate but blame the design of zvp, if zerg doesn't do swarmhost style play at all then zerg would never win late game zvp.
I totally believe that there is a huge skill ceiling with SHs, probably the highest skill ceiling available to zerg. This is an opinion formed on watching players like Rekatan as well as several pros use them as well as my own experience playing with them in the first month or two of HotS.
That said, I think there is one issue with swarm hosts and that is that locusts are just too good. They have a lot of health and a really high damage output; one of those has to be lowered. It's honestly really frustrating dealing with locusts as a protoss (and mech) player because you can just never get close to the swarm hosts without trading some units. This ends up making swarm hosts very massable units, much like the BL (backed up only by AA). I'm not sure if Blizzard realizes how powerful locusts and swarm hosts are, and that might have a lot to do with a majority of pro players still sucking with them. So far, the only pro player I've seen that uses SH well is hyvaa (ironically).
In the end, what I would rather see is really tanky locusts with low damage output that do almost nothing without an army to back it up. This makes swarm hosts a fairly useless massing unit and again encourages more active engagements. I'm not talking about a HUGE nerf, just something like lowering locust damage from 12 to 8ish. This doesn't really change lategame scenarios that much, but it allows players to break out of this awful swarm host contains.
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EPT
