Design Club: The Carrier - Page 4

On July 09 2015 04:56 uh-oh wrote:
I've been doing carrier builds since WoL(and stuck at plat forever), played much less recently because of my studies but I think I have a few extra things to say about carriers.

First, carriers are extremely upgrade dependent. Interceptors deal 5(+1/upgrade)x2 damage per attack, so each air attack upgrade increases 20% damage, which is crazy! On the other hand that also means that each point of armor reduces damage by 20%, which is also crazy. I believe it's one of the problems(along with build time) preventing an effective late game carrier transition, because when you try to transition into carriers opponent would already have +2 armor at least, and you have to invest in air attack upgrades to make them actually deal meaningful damage.

Another difference between BW and SC2 carrier is how fragile the interceptors are, in particular affected by the meta they exist in. In BW when you go carriers, terrans counter with goliaths, which are primarily used to damage the carriers themselves and zone them away without being able to tear interceptors apart. In SC2 however, when you go carriers people just counter with stim marines which are really good at melting interceptors. Same thing happens against zerg, albeit to a lesser extent because hydralisks have projectile attacks that takes time to travel to their target, which leads overkill on the interceptors and reducing the overall damage. But there are still fungal growths to consider, once rooted the interceptors simply wont do anything.

For the first problem a simple fix would be to change the interceptors attack to 10x1 to make it less upgrade dependent, or maybe reduce a bit if 50% less armor reduction for the target is too much, they are just numbers anyway.

For the second problem I suppose you could increase interceptor HP. Another idea is to increase the radius which the interceptors circle/flyby their targets when attacking. For those of you who dont know, blizzard stealth patched the interceptor flyby radius a long time ago(you can look at some old White-Ra videos to see them in action). I am not 100% sure about this but perhaps increasing the flyby radius would screw with the targeting AI a bit, as interceptors are constantly entering and getting out of range, anti air fire would have to keep switching targets instead of focusing down a single interceptor, which reduces the chances of them being destroyed.

Finally getting graviton catapult significantly increases interceptor launch speed(to almost instantly, still within launch range though), so please for the love of god research it while your first carrier is building! It's power comes from the fact that you get a damage burst on your first volley, which is probably going to kill a couple of units and immediately remove firepower from the enemy.

PS here's a trick of how I deal with the leash range problem(being unable to instantly launch trailing interceptors at a target between launch range and leash range) when you are trying to snipe a high value target. I approach a target(usually a hatch) I want to snipe from the side, launch interceptors at something within my carriers' launch range, then switch onto the target immediately after the interceptors are out. I think Grubby did this in a super epic WCS EU PvP where he launched his interceptors at his own msc(in front of the carriers), after which he switched target to a fleeing archon within leash range and killed it.

On July 11 2015 00:24 vOdToasT wrote:


I wouldn't go as far as to call it counter intuitive, but as a beginner, you have to spend around 30 minutes learning things like item recipes and secret shops.
It's not as easy to pick up and play as LoL. The first times that I played DotA, I was quite lost.

On July 12 2015 00:04 SixStrings wrote:
How did you make that GIF have such a high frame rate?

On July 11 2015 05:16 LaLuSh wrote:


There are a million small things to learn even beyond the basics. Like if you overshoot your blink distance with blink dagger, you will only blink 4/5ths of the max range. Also I have to face the direction I'm blinking within a certain degree arc if I want the blink to be instant (super important for heroes like puck).

And every item or spell has some special exception to how it interacts with certain spells or heroes. BKB provides magic immunity, yes? But there's still a list of ultimates that can pierce BKB.

Which orb effects stack and which don't? Which orb/bash effect has the priority if they should conflict? Which auras stack and which don't?

Oh you can purge spells in dota? But why can't I purge these spells?

When I RP with Magnus, I can decide which direction the RP'd targets are gonna end up in by move clicking a split second before the RP. I don't even have to physically turn to be able to do this.

The more you sit and think the more of this stuff you find. If I go through every individual hero in the game, I'm gonna find hundreds of weird interactions and weird special cases. And truth be told most of it has absolutely zero impact on beginner level play or beginner level enjoyment.

Beginners are busy learning the heroes, the spells, the locations of shops, the items. They can play for years and not even notice the fact that dota has a million high level complexities, condradictions and exceptions to exceptions.

On July 09 2015 06:38 Liquid`TLO wrote:


The whole baby sitting philosophy in sc2 is a total joke. Most of us played broodwar as young kids and we understood easily. Dota2 is one of the most counter-intuitive flat out illogical games and look how they're doing!

Hard things don't matter too much for begginers cause they're caught up learning the basics and once they're advanced enough to have to care about the more difficult stuff it won't be confusing to them anymore.

I would even argue that it can make the learning process of a game more rewarding, if there's more things to figure out over a longer period of time you'll feel progress until you know it all, even when your mechanical skill isn't increasing.