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Hey, in this blog I'm going to get some thoughts about the Zerg additions to Legacy of the Void out of my head.
I'm not going too deep into what the changes actually are, so any reader might be required to first read up on the LotV changes, e.g. here.
The Ravager might be the best addition in Legacy so far. The reason I think this is that it offers some things that zerg has been lacking but in a way that enforces micro from both sides. It's ability can kill cliffabuse (return of Shakuras style cliffs possible?), break early canon/bunker contains and allows for offensive siege play when zerg gets an advantage. Even more, it finally adds a splash option to the ranged tech path that may allow roach and roach/hydra based play to transition smoothly against greater armies.
But on top of having a ton of strategic potential (that will come down to its final balance state), the unit is just well-designed from a fun point of view. It encourages micro from both sides. It isn't completely helpless (like so many other units in this game) once an air unit pops up. And it comes at a basic level, so that you actually get to use and experiment with the unit. Most other cool zerg tools aside from the 4core units (ling/bling, roach, queen) only start coming into play after 10-15mins. Ravagers as they are designed now at hatch/roach tech have a chance to directly counter enemy stuff, opposed to how zerg indirectly counters everything right now by trying to get ahead in economy and numbers.
The one thing I kind of dislike about the ravager is that it is another midranged unit for zerg, the corrosive bile ability aside. With its 6range, and the queens 5range and the roaches 4range and the hydralisks 5-6range and then the new lurker also starting at 6range, there is a ton of potential overlap. It's not really needed from a design perspective to have another midrange option.
The Lurker. So, everyone who has played Broodwar is very excited about this unit. I rather have mixed feelings about it. The Lurker in Broodwar was absolutly iconic, however, with how Starcraft 2 works this unit has a lot of potential to end up as a nieche unit after half a year of LotV gameplay. The reason I think this is that unlike Broodwar, it is rather easy to break single units in SC2. 2-3 lurkers? No problem for a scan and a few spread out marauders. You'd probably have to go rather high in the counts with such units to start working very well... and then you fall into SC2's trap of supermobility. Because if you have 5 or 10 lurkers concentrated somewhere, you don't have them around to defend the drops, the warp prisms and all that stuff.
But regardless of this, the unit itself looks very fun. It has a location directed attack, unlike all other stuff in the game that follows the unit. Hence, it can be outmicroed in cool ways. Also it is a strong, positional unit, something that this game can definitely need - assuming positional play can work against supermutas, speedivacs and teleportprisms. Wouldn't the ravager already add splash to the ranged tech path, I'd give a bigger strategical hurray for the lurker. Same goes for its lategame siegerange, but then again, the siegerange comes very late so it's not going to matter too much for challenging a turtling opponent. You'll only reach 9range when the opponent already has 15tanks and 5Colossi, so it's not of bigger help to break these core compositions.
After all, I really hope that the unit finds a nice place in the game, but I have my doubts.
The new Swarm Host. I can't really find many good words for it, to be completely honest. So it now has those flying guys, which is nice... but still just a free unit dealing free damage. It now has a higher cooldown to prevent those eternal low damage sieges, which is nice because the opponent can walk out against it. But why do I build the unit? If I want to spend a lot of money - and they do cost a lot - on harassment, wouldn't a flying, fast unit that can attack for as long as it wants and not just every 50seconds for a few seconds be much better? Harassment play is about finding and creating opportunities. I have a hard time imagining this will work with the Swarm Host, even if it is more mobile now. I think the unit will eventually still be used to just break enemy siege lines in combination with spells such as blinding cloud. Now with a little more oooomph (buffed locusts!!!), and massive "all-inish" drawbacks if they get defended. Because then you have 30 or more supply of units being idle for another half minute when the retalitation happens.
My wish would be that they just removed the unit at this point. If they get it wrong another time and the Swarm Host becomes a vital part of Zergplay, there is no more expansion to remove it...
Other Zerg changes. The Nydus change helps Nydus-play a lot, yet, I'm not sure whether this is a good thing. I imagine 2base roach/nydus cheeses becoming much stronger if the nydus cannot be killed easily. I think it will strengthen certain cheeses, but still not be very viable against a good opponent with mapawarness who positions his army to deal with the nydus when it pops.
The Ultralisk Armor Change is something I don't really understand. Ultralisks are fine in HotS, no need to buff them. Combined with the change to the marauder, this might just be way over the top.
The Hydralisk Upgrade Combination is really good, 450/400 techcost for the roaches' little brother is just too much designwise. It's one of the issues that you have when you either want to defend mutas with hydras in ZvZ, or when you want to transition out of pure roach... The costs are just sooo damn high for a unit that doesn't essentially alter the battlefield compared to a roach. The only concern might be ZvP timing attacks, but that is part of the beta balancing process, which we can usually trust blizzard on.
The Corruptor change is hard to evaluate in my opinion. Zerg can already snipe static undefended targets very well with mutas. How useful and fun this ability will be is probably up to balancing, but I think it could be improved a lot if it wasn't just a plain "ramp up the damage at that location"-thing.
Last but not least, the Infestor change sounds pretty amazing at first, then, when you think about it you come to the conclusion it will only work well with fast attacking units, hence zerglings. Because it has to be balanced around them. However, on a third thought, zerglings also die pretty fast, so they don't really profit all too much from the whole duration of that spell. Therefore I think the spell is way deeper and more useful than a first analysis might conclude. Beefier, slower attacking units such as roaches might not profit quite as much in damage output as squishy hydras and zerglings, but they can use more of the 15second duration. So even such combinations that don't look overly strong with that spell might turn out quite good. Currently, I really like that one and I'm looking forward to more infestor usage in LotV!
All together, I think the Zerg changes for Legacy sound like the most fun ones of all races. A lot of it though seems to be mainly potential so far and will depend on the actual balance of LotV to determine how well it actually is allowed to play out.
 
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United Kingdom10443 Posts
Pretty impressive list of thoughts, I think you are right though that we won't really know how the units will play out until we actually get to play with them.
Totally agree with you on swarm hosts, just get rid of this unit. We have a siege unit now in the lurker which is what I think the swarm host was meant to be.
I want to know if they have addressed the zerg issue of dealing with heavy air compositions, hydra buff is nice I guess and I think the ravager can hit air units with it's ability but I think this will be critical.
I think the lurker will disappoint a lot of people like you said. Partly due to map design and partly due to game design. In BW a few siege tanks or a few lurkers could hold off ridiculous numbers of enemy troops. Now you need like a mass amount of siege tanks to do the same thing and control space. So I think people are going to have to build a lot of lurkers to get a similar effect and that doesn't really bode well for zerg. If i have too much supply locked up in lurkers then my overall army is going to be pitiful, like 80 supply of roaches and some hydras just isn't going to do anything late game.
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Lurkers are a lot like siege tanks, but I think they are a better fit with SC2 because they're a bit more flexible. This game has a lot of high mobility / high dps compositions that can put too many constraints on a siege tank user. It's a unit that needs the game to be designed around it as it requires so much set-up to work yet it's slow and dies to everything. The lurker has the benefit of invisibility and creep to make it less of a target. It's also possible to morph lurkers only as you need them, which reduces vulnerability even more. The new nydus worm could offer additional protection as well.
That's not to say that the unit will work. The siege tank doesn't work very well in two thirds of the match-ups, so the lurker might suffer the same faith. I don't know if they can stand against ravagers for instance.
I also thought that the ability to dodge spines is a bit ridiculous. The way it should work is that if you're at max range and the lurker targets a fast unit that's already moving, then you can dodge the shot. But if the spines are very slow you can do silly moves like rushing a single hellion through a group of lurkers to draw all fire and take no damage. Spines should also have low width, because if the aoe damage is very high individual lurkers will, by necessity, be weak if not for critical mass. This forces high supply investment in lurkers simply to defend one position.
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Don't really like the placement of the ravager (if both the lurker and the ravager make it into the beta). I think Zerg ends up having too many morphable units if that goes through. A morphing unit is iconic in many ways.
I'd tend to agree with you that the lurker doesn't really have a place in SC2 right now. The problem is that it is definitely going to cost 3 supply. That coupled with its sub-par damage output means that it will have to be massed...which leads to the problem with harassment that you eloquently described. Really makes me sad as I feel the lurker is one of the most iconic units Zerg has.
This all stems from what I feel is a larger problem - which is that Zerg has no 1 supply unit. That really makes the race feel like it has a hole in the T1-T2 range. The roach doesn't fill that hole. Call that unit a hydra, call it a roach (would be pretty cool in all honesty) call it something else, it's the root of why Zerg doesn't feel "Zergy" IMO. The whole .5 - 1 - 2 supply unit progression is lost.
There are more ways to balance/slow the acquisition of mass unit #s than cranking up said unit's supply cost. Mineral/gas cost being the primary one. Time being another. Benefit of using this method is that economy starts to play an even larger role.
Ultralisk change makes sense. Right now ultralisks literally melt to anything that has + armor damage. It's pathetic. Compare that to BW where marines "tickled" max upgrade ultras. You're spot on about "coupled with the change to the marauder," yeah. Might be a bit too much. Then again it might force late-gate Terran to use more siege tanks/move to a mech-based composition. Wait a second. They happen to have two brand new power units, one of which is great against ultralisks. Fuck.
Hydra combination is great. Would like to see either the hydra or the roach dropped down to 1 supply. In general, I want to see a lot of units dropped in supply cost. If the problem of them being "massable" still remains (voidray has always been that sort of problem child) then it's likely more a problem with the damage system or the unit itself. I really just want to be able to play hydra/ling. It costs too damn much to get the ball rolling. At least this way hydra/ling/corruptor will be a viable build with a transition straight into mass moota (tee hee hee).
Corruptor ability just looked like it was taking a piss on a nexus LOL.
Infestor change is awesome; I love anything that synergizes with zerglings (most interesting unit Zerg has IMO).
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The infestor spell is similar to the shaman's bloodlust ability in WC3 (which wasn't very fun tbh, but then WC3 is a different game). This spell actually had a clear animation: the unit becomes slightly bigger and redder and you can notice it attacking more quickly. The LotV video showed aggressive mutation with a sand cloud trailing the affected units, which I personally thought looked a bit chaotic. I hope Blizzard changes the spell to also increase attack speed (maybe, perhaps it's fine if it only works well with zerglings though).
I thought there were some similarities between the infestor and the immortal's new ability. Both of them add more dynamism to focus firing and basic army interactions. Suppose immortals are fighting roaches. A targeted immortal's shield flares up, the zerg player has to decide to either run away or target a different immortal. Now an infestor casts aggressive mutation on a number of roaches and it's up to the immortals to target the affected roaches or use a warp prism to escape etc.
This type of design change might have two positive effects:
1. The spells signal to viewers that micro is being performed as opposed to the nuances of focus firing
2. Because of the power of these spells there is higher variance in the outcome of a battle, which raises the importance of micro decisions
And because it's all based on simple army interactions it hopefully doesn't look cluttered and is clear to viewers. Actually, I have high hopes for these abilities. It's not ideal to have to provide micro potential by adding abilities, but at least these ones aren't contrived and nicely synergize with existing interactions. You don't have to use them, but diligence will be rewarded.
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I think the new swarmhost has potential, the new change makes it much more effective in low numbers and not so massable.
I actually think it is way too strong right now, the damage output is insane and in lotv economy, it is the type of units that shine imo.
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In the fanmade alpha the ravager seems overpowered.
You can fit 4 of them in an overlord and the spell it casts is on a short cool down. So you can constantly harass with them and explode units every 3 seconds almost indefinitely. Best application is on the refinery/workers going in/out since even if it misses you will eventually burn it down.
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Thanks for the nice responses.
After watching the qxc vs Pokebunny match on the mod I already feel somewhat confirmed in my believes about Swarm Hosts. They only play a minor role there, but they can kill off pretty big army chunks now pretty fast, so it will be even more about dodging them as a Protoss/Terran - or breaking static positions from a faaaaaaar range as zerg play.
The unit values are of course not final, like I don't believe that the ravager stats are final (also other units, e.g. the disruptor is completely overpowered too). In particular the build time and the cooldown of the blast ability. What I'm talking about is basically the concept and the current ideas behind the unit.
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Zerg army is going to get a little too supply efficient with all these morphs for my taste.
This is more subjective than anything but I dislike how Blizzard has been stripping away what makes Zerg... Zerg.
But that's SC2 in general... a lot of things have been dumbing down each expansion.
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On December 06 2014 07:15 Gamegene wrote:
Zerg army is going to get a little too supply efficient with all these morphs for my taste.
This is more subjective than anything but I dislike how Blizzard has been stripping away what makes Zerg... Zerg.
But that's SC2 in general... a lot of things have been dumbing down each expansion.
Hm, I think what you want to say goes more along the lines of zerg army having too many "non-swarmy" options (and possible too few swarmy ones), right? Which is something I could kind of get behind. Zerg has no 1supply unit and now gets two more 3supply units. At that point, Terran bio-play is probably going to produce higher numbers of units than a zerg in quite some scenarios (if we discount free units of course).
A 66.6resource/supply isn't necessarily more supply-efficient than a 100resource/supply mutalisk or a 125resource/supply infestor, right? (to name two amongst many zerg units that aren't morphs but have much cheaper res/supply; 150/supply banelings are already in the game too)
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