Stripping for Jaedong + HotsContest

This is my very first blog so I apologize if it's bad

Note: I'm going to skip over some people we met, otherwise this blog would get too long. I would eventually get autographs from Jinro, Stephano, Sheth, Pokebunny, and some others I can't keep track of right now.

This blogging is surprisingly pretty tiring. Anyway...

The HotS stations allowed you to either 1v1 someone else or to play the AI. The computers were faster than mine which was good, but you couldn't re-bind hotkeys so that kind of messed up my gameplay. Nonetheless, the reason to play was to try out the new units, not to win. Oh and there was a time limit of how long you could play.


Overall

Not sure if relevant but I'm a masters terran player if you want background.

I feel like a lot of HotS units are re-makes of BW units. For instance: spidermine=widow mine, tempest=guardian, oracle=arbiter (cloak and "stasis" minerals), viper=flying defiler (consume, dark swarm), battle hellions=firebats, and swarm host = non-splash lurker. Just my thoughts. Excited about all the other improvements though.

The new tentacle creep tumor animation is fun to look at, it looks like it's penetrating the ground to get to where it needs to go instead of just popping up.

Hydras ftw.

Terran


Hellion/Battle Hellion

I feel like they mesh well with the rest of the mech units. They're pretty slow in battle form and are decent meat shields. I feel like they might not do very well against a lot of banes though. I think they stay in the "light" category which means extra damage to them, but they shouldn't be way out in front anyway (players could probably focus fire the banes with tanks or use the other mech units as shields). The ability to transform makes the unit more dynamic and usable as more than just a harassment unit. Not to mention that the animation to transform is pretty cool to stare at.



Warhound

I used this unit in a TvZ and against it in a PvT. Added up, it's a very scary unit even for toss and it doesn't really need much micro. To me, mech in SC2 isn't going to need as much micro as SC1 mech. I see most terran players using hellions in battle mode in most head on battles so there isn't really much to micro. Even the tanks have that auto-aim to prevent from overkilling units. I guess terran will have to practice good positioning then. But I digress.



Widow Mine

I think in upper levels this might be pretty useless, all it will do is cause the opponent to use apm to bring the targeted unit out of his army. 10 seconds is a pretty long time to detonate imo, with the amount of times pros check their army they'll never sustain a lot of damage. Maybe in big battles, but then the opposing army can just run away and leave the infected units to hopefully kill your units chasing it. Although it will probably be very good at killing workers vs an unprepared opponent.

The range of the mine is sort of what bothers me, when I used them in TvZ the zerg units had to be almost on top of the mine for it to attach. This would be fine in some cases but don't flying units have ranged attacks to harass with? If the mine is near the mineral line then it might never attach to the unit attacking because it's too far away. (Another thing I'm wondering is that if the mine attaches to a harassing air unit, can't the player suicide it into your mineral line and kill your scvs? Unless it has friendly fire, I forgot).

Also related to map control, since the attachment range is so short, how useful will it be on big maps? You can't fill the entire map with them because that would be a waste of build time. I guess you can just put them in chokes. Never mind.


Zerg


Swarm Host

I don't see why they can't just spawn locusts when they see a unit to attack, but I'm not a game developer. Locusts are a pretty good unit, it can attack air which is really nice compared to the lurker. Not much to say about it, just that it allows for decent map control.


Viper

When I first saw the abilities of the viper I immediately thought "flying defiler". I feel like the blinding cloud ability could be a little overpowered vs rine-tank. Well the viper in general could be a little overpowered vs rine-tank. Abduct for obvious reasons, and blinding cloud because it really hurts the marine. I feel like the reason dark swarm was good was because the splash dealing lurkers were immobile and couldn't catch rines/tanks if they ran away. But banes can move, and fast on creep. I guess the rines will just have to run even farther and with no tank support since the tanks will either be abducted or with melee range in siege mode (which means they can't attack).


Protoss

Mothership Core

Toss will be able to hold their ramps easier and have templars able to storm faster. Enables toss to have more chronos for upgrades/tech/gateways. Can recall army to nexus. Can also attack.

As a biased terran player I think this is pretty OP. To me it looks like it makes 2 base timings stronger, while also make it easier to defend all-ins (because of sentry energy). The army recall also enables the toss to kill an expo then go back to their base with 0 damage taken. At least when terran snipe the expansions the army has a chance of dying, if toss does it then they can get away with maybe shield damage. And the toss already has warp-ins to deal with drops effectively, why give them another crutch to deal with drops if they make an army positioning mistake?

The mothership core ability to attack is fine imo, canons not too good at defending lol. Gives toss the extra edge if terran does a 2-3 medivac drop and the toss runs out of warpins.


Tempest

Honestly when I saw the stats of the tempest I thought they would be extremely OP. But in actual gameplay they're not as good as I previously thought. The range is good but they seem to be a little too expensive for the damage output. Especially in open terrain they can easily be killed, not to mention that they're kind of slow. A reason that broods/guardians were good were because they could get to behind a natural or wherever as a corrupter/muta then transform into the siege-breaker. Tempests come out slow and stay slow forever.


Oracle

Good unit with potential. Entomb is fun to use, though I'm not sure how much economical damage it does. Interesting to see what would happen if a toss uses multiple oracles and entombs every min line of an opponent, essentially making him have 0 mineral income.

I never really used the building vision skill.

The cloaking field is better than the mothership cloak currently. With multiple oracles able to cloak units/buildings toss can hold onto expansions easier by quickly cloaking all the probes/nexus giving vital time needed to reposition army or warp in. Zerg can abduct them, getting rid of the cloak and terran always have scan so the cloak won't be super op.

Should be easy enough to stop with good turret placement or maybe a viking ^^.