As everyone knows, Brood War hasn't had a balance patch in well over a decade. Despite this, it remains surprisingly balanced at the top level with every race having a good chunk of representation. Still, it's also pretty clear that each race has one slightly favourable matchup and one slightly unfavourable one. Zerg vs. Protoss favours Zerg by about 54.5%, Terran vs. Zerg favours Terran by about 54.5% and Protoss vs. Terran favours Protoss by about 52.5%. Now, these numbers aren't really all that far from 50% which is why Brood War is lauded for its balance but it still makes a difference. This is especially true in individual tournaments where Protoss seem to struggle.
So hypothetically, if you had control over balance patches, what changes would you make to try and make the game as balanced as possible? Ideally, a balance patch for one matchup should affect a different matchup as little as possible.
In Terran vs. Zerg, it seems obvious that if you nerf bio somehow, it wouldn't affect the other matchups. But at the same time, if you just nerf bio, it could just mean an increase in mech play instead, since mech is relatively viable, even in TvZ. That said, it would be interesting to find out the winrate of Mech TvZ vs. Bio TvZ. Either way, I don't think a bio nerf would do much other than making more players use mech. My best idea was a science vessal nerf. My first variant of this idea was to make irradiate cost 100 but I figured that would be way too much of a nerf. I think the best way to balance it would be to increase the time it takes for it to deal all of its damage. According to liquipedia, Irradiate deals 250 damage over 37 in-game seconds. If that was nerfed to, say, 50 seconds, I think it would be significant enough to make a difference, but still leave it as an essential tool to have.
In Zerg vs. Protoss, the obvious unit to nerf is the hydralisk. It's the unit that Protoss has the most trouble with in the mid-game and it's not really used in the other 2 Zerg Matchups. My first idea here was a simple damage nerf so that instead of 10 base damage, Hydralisks would do 9. Essentially a -1 range attack upgrade. Another idea for the hydralisks would be a health nerf from 80 to 75. This lets dragoons and zealots kill it in one less hit each. An alternative would be a buff to a Protoss unit. Here, the obvious unit to help out is the corsair. A +1 damage buff comes to mind but it's pretty clear that it would be way too much. A health buff from 100 health 80 shields to 120 health 80 shields would mean it would still die to a pair of scourge, but it would be slightly more sturdy against mutalisks and hydralisks. A Psi Storm buff also came to mind but I think that this too would be a bit much. The fact that 1 storm doesn't kill a lurker is key point so any damage buff would be overkill.
Protoss vs. Terran is more even than the other two matchups but I still feel some adjustments could be made. The obvious one to mirror my first TvZ idea would be to buff EMP to cost 75 energy instead of 100. I don't think this does much against anything but arbiters and really late game Protoss armies so I think it's reasonable. You can't really buff Tanks, Vultures or Goliaths without having to worry about the TvZ matchup so that's probably a no-go. I know that nobody wants to nerf carriers. I would say get rid of the Arbiter attack but everyone knows it doesn't do shit anyway. Probably the best change to the arbiter would be to increase stasis field cost to 125 but even that might be a bit too much.
These are just my thoughts. I'm sure a lot of these are actually stupid and I'm just being an idiot but what ideas do you guys have for hypothetical balance changes?
Brood War is not played in a vacuum. Are you forgetting maps in your equation?
And balance =/= design (which people don't give Brood War enough credit)
On January 21 2015 04:53 neobowman wrote: Still, it's also pretty clear that each race has one slightly favourable matchup and one slightly unfavourable one. Zerg vs. Protoss favours Zerg by about 54.5%, Terran vs. Zerg favours Terran by about 54.5% and Protoss vs. Terran favours Protoss by about 52.5%.
On. Which. Map?
And, no it's not "pretty clear" since the metagame is still evolving to this day.
Now time for Artosis/Thorin to explain everything to you:
This thread seems like a troll bait thread. First and foremost, races were balanced and still are balanced by maps. 2ndly, racial balance doesn't even matter because if you take a player like Flash or Jaedong and planted him in an era where the maps disfavored him, they would still dominate because of their own personal skills rather than the abstract concept of balance.
On January 21 2015 04:53 neobowman wrote: As everyone knows, Brood War hasn't had a balance patch in well over a decade. Despite this, it remains surprisingly balanced at the top level with every race having a good chunk of representation. Still, it's also pretty clear that each race has one slightly favourable matchup and one slightly unfavourable one. Zerg vs. Protoss favours Zerg by about 54.5%, Terran vs. Zerg favours Terran by about 54.5% and Protoss vs. Terran favours Protoss by about 52.5%. Now, these numbers aren't really all that far from 50% which is why Brood War is lauded for its balance but it still makes a difference. This is especially true in individual tournaments where Protoss seem to struggle.
So hypothetically, if you had control over balance patches, what changes would you make to try and make the game as balanced as possible? Ideally, a balance patch for one matchup should affect a different matchup as little as possible.
In Terran vs. Zerg, it seems obvious that if you nerf bio somehow, it wouldn't affect the other matchups. But at the same time, if you just nerf bio, it could just mean an increase in mech play instead, since mech is relatively viable, even in TvZ. That said, it would be interesting to find out the winrate of Mech TvZ vs. Bio TvZ. Either way, I don't think a bio nerf would do much other than making more players use mech. My best idea was a science vessal nerf. My first variant of this idea was to make irradiate cost 100 but I figured that would be way too much of a nerf. I think the best way to balance it would be to increase the time it takes for it to deal all of its damage. According to liquipedia, Irradiate deals 250 damage over 37 in-game seconds. If that was nerfed to, say, 50 seconds, I think it would be significant enough to make a difference, but still leave it as an essential tool to have.
In Zerg vs. Protoss, the obvious unit to nerf is the hydralisk. It's the unit that Protoss has the most trouble with in the mid-game and it's not really used in the other 2 Zerg Matchups. My first idea here was a simple damage nerf so that instead of 10 base damage, Hydralisks would do 9. Essentially a -1 range attack upgrade. Another idea for the hydralisks would be a health nerf from 80 to 75. This lets dragoons and zealots kill it in one less hit each. An alternative would be a buff to a Protoss unit. Here, the obvious unit to help out is the corsair. A +1 damage buff comes to mind but it's pretty clear that it would be way too much. A health buff from 100 health 80 shields to 120 health 80 shields would mean it would still die to a pair of scourge, but it would be slightly more sturdy against mutalisks and hydralisks. A Psi Storm buff also came to mind but I think that this too would be a bit much. The fact that 1 storm doesn't kill a lurker is key point so any damage buff would be overkill.
Protoss vs. Terran is more even than the other two matchups but I still feel some adjustments could be made. The obvious one to mirror my first TvZ idea would be to buff EMP to cost 75 energy instead of 100. I don't think this does much against anything but arbiters and really late game Protoss armies so I think it's reasonable. You can't really buff Tanks, Vultures or Goliaths without having to worry about the TvZ matchup so that's probably a no-go. I know that nobody wants to nerf carriers. I would say get rid of the Arbiter attack but everyone knows it doesn't do shit anyway. Probably the best change to the arbiter would be to increase stasis field cost to 125 but even that might be a bit too much.
These are just my thoughts. I'm sure a lot of these are actually stupid and I'm just being an idiot but what ideas do you guys have for hypothetical balance changes?
the problem for zergs in TvZ is not bio, it's the late mech transition on maps like fighting spirit. nerfing bio/vessels would break the match up.
in PvZ, if you nerf hydra's, zerg will be too weak composition wise. IMO, protoss biggest problem(any expert on pvz please correct me) is hydra busts. it's a weird idea but maybe if corsairs spawned with energy and dweb available it could create some cool meta-game, but obviously zerg should be compensated somehow if that would be included.
TvP is relativly balanced on the highest level and shouldn't be touched imo, but if renewing the meta game is considered, then I think ghosts and DA's should be buffed.
I understand Brood War is not played in a vacuum. Heck, I made BW maps for years. Yet, if you factor in all the maps, and take a look at a map that everyone considers balanced (Fighting Spirit), then it's pretty obvious that there is this slight imbalance for each race.
Now, yes, individual players are good in and of themselves. There's no denying that, but take a look at their winrates. Try denying that Flash's TvZ is better than Jaedong ZvT. They're both amazing at the matchups, but Flash (and if you look in the past, other Bonjwas), have had stunningly good TvZ in comparison to their Zerg counterparts' ZvT. Great players exist for all races, but the overall trend is still there.
Now, I was not aware of the changed PvT balance in SOSPA. I would be interested to see the statistics since I can't find them myself.
On January 21 2015 05:30 upro)wraith wrote: the problem for zergs in TvZ is not bio, it's the late mech transition on maps like fighting spirit. nerfing bio/vessels would break the match up.
in PvZ, if you nerf hydra's, zerg will be too weak composition wise. IMO, protoss biggest problem(any expert on pvz please correct me) is hydra busts. it's a weird idea but maybe if corsairs spawned with energy and dweb available it could create some cool meta-game, but obviously zerg should be compensated somehow if that would be included.
TvP is relativly balanced on the highest level and shouldn't be touched imo, but if renewing the meta game is considered, then I think ghosts and DA's should be buffed.
I'm not saying nerf hydras into oblivion. I'm saying to nerf them so they're not quite as crazy for Protosses to deal with while keeping them a substantial threat. Now, I'm not sure if my proposed changes accomplish that but that's what I want to be discussing.
Discussions, theories, and thoughts regarding any potential changes (especially something like BALANCE CHANGE) on a game which its professional league/field haven't been changed for more a decade are expected with heavy criticism. I hope you realize that OP before making that thread.
Another thing to note is that for OP or anyone else for that matter to bring up meaningful discussions and arguments also require intensive knowledge and research of the current gameplay and meta in recent events down to years past for reference. But mostly recent trends/factors/meta/etc like things happening currently in Korean SC BW scene.
I fail to see that here currently and to argue against OP, all the suggestions have counters and current balance aren't considered a game-breaker when played among progamers. Sure we can talk about balance patch among non-pros but at the end of the day, everyone who plays this game are pretty much mirroring one another in terms of strategy/tactics/build orders like how non-pros would often try builds by pros or pros trying other pros build or how one would experiment with their own builds and most likely it's not your original build since a variation of such was done at some point somewhere.
Just as you would often see Terran > Zerg > Protoss > Terran logic at times, Terran < Zerg < Protoss < Terran easily happens as well over the years not by the game balance itself but by changing perspective/strats/builds/tactics that gamers themselves invented.
Putting aside balance patch, we already have meta in SC BW constantly evolving by maps, gamers and outside factors (player condition, mind games, willpower, etc) which makes this game fine as it is.
So I think this is completely unnecessary and my stance is against such a patch as any balance patch may potential ruin the fine wine we have today.
I'm totally fine with criticism. Yet, I think it's also important, even for a concretely developed scene like that in BW, to be open to ideas of change. I totally get that people like it how it is, but if don't understand why people wouldn't even contemplate ways to potentially improve the game.
Now, I will come out and say I haven't been following the amateur scene since the last OSL, but I have been following the current season of KSL and SSL. I have been thinking about this idea of potential change for years. My thoughts and ideas may be outdated but I don't have access to current statistics in race trends so I have to go with what I have. If I'm wrong about the statistics, all you have to do is tell me.
I understand that the units I mentioned aren't considered game-breakers. Sure, hydras are countered by storm. Sure, science vessels can be sniped by scourge. I'm not saying these units are completely overpowered. But in tweaking balance, you can come closer to the perfect 50% winrate for each matchup. I don't think there's any reason to have to avoid conversation or discussion about it.
Sure, there are occasionally reversed trends in the meta like the period after Bisu beat Savior where Protoss were hugely favored against Zerg. But even that trend was stabilized into the current standard of Zergs having a slight advantage against Protoss.
I'm not saying this game is bad. I love this game. I think it's amazing, I think the meta's constantly evolving and growing. I agree that outside factors are totally at play. But I don't think that's any reason to try to avoid talking about balance at all.
If there was another patch. I would rather them address the bugs to make it a cleaner game. For example, fix the goon ai so they don't get stuck as often. Things like that, etc.
On January 21 2015 06:31 SolaR- wrote: If there was another patch. I would rather them address the bugs to make it a cleaner game. For example, fix the goon ai so they don't get stuck as often. Things like that, etc.
That would be a balance patch in some sense because bad goon AI affects game balance. I want the game itself to remain as it is for now and forever. There's something to be said for tradition when the game is already more than good enough.
If Blizzard were to release a patch, then it should be a patch that addresses more mundane matters like
Native windowed mode
Color fix
Direct IP connections for multiplayer
Honestly, even if Blizzard could make the balance "better", I don't want them to "fix" anything. Once those guys start "fixing", they may never stop.
On January 21 2015 06:04 neobowman wrote: I'm totally fine with criticism. Yet, I think it's also important, even for a concretely developed scene like that in BW, to be open to ideas of change. I totally get that people like it how it is, but if don't understand why people wouldn't even contemplate ways to potentially improve the game.
Now, I will come out and say I haven't been following the amateur scene since the last OSL, but I have been following the current season of KSL and SSL. I have been thinking about this idea of potential change for years. My thoughts and ideas may be outdated but I don't have access to current statistics in race trends so I have to go with what I have. If I'm wrong about the statistics, all you have to do is tell me.
I understand that the units I mentioned aren't considered game-breakers. Sure, hydras are countered by storm. Sure, science vessels can be sniped by scourge. I'm not saying these units are completely overpowered. But in tweaking balance, you can come closer to the perfect 50% winrate for each matchup. I don't think there's any reason to have to avoid conversation or discussion about it.
Sure, there are occasionally reversed trends in the meta like the period after Bisu beat Savior where Protoss were hugely favored against Zerg. But even that trend was stabilized into the current standard of Zergs having a slight advantage against Protoss.
I'm not saying this game is bad. I love this game. I think it's amazing, I think the meta's constantly evolving and growing. I agree that outside factors are totally at play. But I don't think that's any reason to try to avoid talking about balance at all.
Not to be disrespectful or offend you but let me give you another quick food for thought to take in from my own perspective:
Not mentioning any other particular/specific game outside of SC BW but in a general POV, every time there is a "balance patch" or "gameplay" changes in the game, who benefits the most, who benefits the least? Who becomes the winners and losers?
The answer is whoever can adapt to new changes, exploit the new changes and lead the new changes.
So what about the rest of people who can't adapt as well as Player 1, or stuck in a limbo of this new change, or find themselves in a whole different position than before (ie. one of the better players before change but not anymore due to factors like balance change or unable to adapt to new settings)?
Their answers will be "the game isn't what it used to be", "lack/lost of interest", "unfair", "retirement". This may very well be minority or majority but you cannot call the game SC BW 1.16.1 anymore, some will say you cannot even call it the same game anymore.
Sure there may be more people welcomed by whatever new set of changes are but there's always a consequence, a pro/con, and those who will be affected by it. What if a balance patch end up being (or even partially) a reason that this/that progamer we know and love quit/retire? What if that turns into a domino factor where the active player base is reduced to 70%, 50%, 25% or even 10%?
There's some truth to reasons why last "official" universal change/patch of board game Chess was last seen in 19th century.
On January 21 2015 05:19 L_Master wrote: Not to mention in the SOSPA era PvT is a terran favored MU. Last I compiled all the games from the TLPD database PvT was 48.2% WR for protoss
Bisu has often said that all maps will eventually move toward favoring Terran at the highest level because of the race's defensive nature. As Terran optimizes how to defend various strategies and tactics on each map, whatever initial disadvantage it had when the map was first released is reduced and whatever advantages it had become magnified.
This leads to an interesting theory-crafting question for map-makers: Should maps initially be designed so that they appear slightly bad for Terran at first glance? If Bisu's theory of eventual Terran optimization holds, then such a map would become balanced over time even if it initially appears bad for Terran.
Ow, that's weird, I thought that terran beats protoss. But anyway. I would love to see more units and spells involved into playing. I play protoss and do feel that each (EACH) protoss unit/spell has great potential. It just requires decent micro and quick-thinking. Scouts sometimes can be Really useful, as well as hallucination, d-web and mind control. But as I think (mind please, that these suggestions aren't founded on any statistics, or years of experience; I just feel it is so, though I may be mistaken ofc). So I think that these units/spells require too much investment. And if corsairs being produced with d-web researched would be way too much and fat, scouts with speed already researched would be really nice. Also, hallucination costs too much energy, imo, 50, instead of 100 mp, would be alright. Then, if energy upgrade for dark archons is researched and u merge 2 dts, that dark archon will still start with 50 energy. This should be fixed as well, I think. Oh, forgot to note, I'd love to increase d-web's duration, and decrease dark swarm's one a bit. This is only my opinion, ofc
Why buff ghosts? These are casters, not fighters, and they are already good. Kinda like arbiters. You need a bunch of ghosts, decent cloning micro and 3 upgrades researched — lockdown ,cloaking and energy upgrade. Then you go and own them, unless they play zerg. Sounds like theorycrafting, but 1. Why not? 2. Boxer did this! here is the proof
On January 21 2015 05:47 QuickStriker wrote: So I think this is completely unnecessary and my stance is against such a patch as any balance patch may potential ruin the fine wine we have today.
Why so worried? Another official balance patch is highly unlikely, BW hasn't had one for almost 14 years now.
Only scenario I can think is pretty far-fetched... a hypothetical 'BroodWar: 20th Anniversary Edition' or Bnet 2.0 Edition or somesuch, released after LoTV... AND Blizzard decides to put some effort into further refining BW balance for it.
Vegas odds against *both* those things happening are pretty huge. Makes me lol when ppl worry about things that are incredibly unlikely.
Buff / change the underused units, Scouts, ghosts, firebats, wraiths and maybe queens.
Fuck win %'s, just make more units viable.
Oh and make nukes more accessible. Make the silo a normal building that doesn't take up a spot on the command center and remove the damn supply cost for them.
Well pretend there will be another balance patch with someone's ideas implemented, there wouldn't be the same amount or at least enough games played to make a comparison with current balance stats
Anyone else watch the first 15-20 minutes of that and go, "Jebus H Christ, I'm glad I'm into BW and not SC2?". Probably not the intent of the vid.
It's basically the same ol' "it'll be balanced by LoTV, really, it will, trust us" stuff, plus a lot of apologism for all the ways in which SC2 is not so gud.
Also disagree with him on his comment that you balance only taking into account the very top of the pro scene. Yeah, I get why that's Bliz's stance, but if you take a hypothetical RTS game (i.e. not BW or SC2), and had it perfectly, incredibly, immaculately balanced for the top .001% of players in the world, but also had it be an absolute steaming pile of crap balance-wise for the broad middle of regular players, who would really want to buy or play that game?
The pro scene is awesome. But let's see pros buy up 11 million copies of a game (BW sales). Ain't gonna happen.
The one thing that's true is that you can't balance for the bottom, 'cuz newbies will obviously do random, crazy, lame sh!t that no one can account or balance for, short of God himself. It'd be like trying to be a life coach for an active meth addict. It would break any game designer's mind who made the attempt.
Actually I think just making ZvZ more stable would be the only real change that I can think of that would improve SC:BW quality. Making the spore colony so its better vs biological air would probably do wonders for the ZvZ matchup.
On January 21 2015 08:06 Bswhunter wrote: Buff / change the underused units, Scouts, ghosts, firebats, wraiths and maybe queens.
Fuck win %'s, just make more units viable.
The lonely, unused/underused units do make me sad.
Every race has 2-4 units that are essentially benchwarmers.
Let me check the unused units in BW: Terran - Ghosts = 1 unit Protoss - Scouts = 1 unit Zerg - 0
Total of 2 unused units.
And to the subject i think most of the "core" units in BW are overpowered , imbalanced.The magic of this game is that , all this imbalancedness (wtf is there a word like this?) clashesh in to eachother , with all the imbaStorms , imbaTanks , imbaSwarm ,imbaradiiate , imbascarabs , imbastimmarines , imbacrackzerglings and let`s not forget imbamuta (i`m looking at Jaedong picture) , creating the most balance RPG game of all time.We actually manage to made from the chaos , order.So whoever you are whatever u from , remember u a playing BroodWar and u a fucking awesome.
On January 21 2015 06:04 neobowman wrote: Now, I will come out and say I haven't been following the amateur scene since the last OSL, but I have been following the current season of KSL and SSL. I have been thinking about this idea of potential change for years. My thoughts and ideas may be outdated but I don't have access to current statistics in race trends so I have to go with what I have. If I'm wrong about the statistics, all you have to do is tell me.
I'm not saying this game is bad. I love this game. I think it's amazing, I think the meta's constantly evolving and growing. I agree that outside factors are totally at play. But I don't think that's any reason to try to avoid talking about balance at all.
Thanks for bringing up this hypothetical imbalance patch. I think it's a perfectly fine and fun topic to brain storm about
As far as post-KeSPA/SOSPA imbalance stats go, the easiest way is probably to look at their TLPD match-ups by map. The listing of the top five most played maps are available on Liquipedia. Using Fighting Spirit as an example:
Race Stats (leagues only): vs : 240-135 (64%) vs : 175-175 (50%) vs: : 183-207 (47%)
Race Stats (all cataloged games, including team leagues, invitationals and a few show matches): vs : 429-315 (58%) vs : 377-363 (51%) vs: : 363-374 (49%)
And the second most played map of the era, Circuit Breaker, leagues only: vs : 91-53 (63%) vs : 84-56 (60%) vs : 70-94 (43%)
And finally the third most played, Neo Electric Circuit, leagues only: vs : 68-51 (57%) vs : 68-49 (58%) vs : 69-59 (54%)
Effectively, as neobowman and others have pointed out, the numbers point to a T > Z advantage on most maps, including these top three, such that Fighting Spirit is not balanced.. The ZvP and PvT advantages appear more nuanced depending on the map...
At the same time, looking at the TLPD Elo rankings, the top echelon are filled with Terran players (five of the top seven players are , including the current #1), with a few Zerg, followed by all the Protoss, with Bisu the only Protoss in the top 10.
I don't know how much of this is skewed by the generally weaker level of play in the current era, as some progamers have themselves mentioned, or lack of regimented training as that used in the KeSPA era, but presumably these factors affect the whole field, rather than one isolated race or another
On January 21 2015 06:01 GGzerG wrote: BroodWar is balanced Perfectly.
That's impossible. Best you can realistically say is it's 'balanced enough'.
no asymmetrical game is perfectly balanced. However, Broodwar has proven over time and time that it is very well balanced. Perhaps as balanced as a game can get. If anything, Protoss seems to lack a slight bit at the very top level, but then again it might be determined by individual talent that we never had a Protoss Bonjwa or anything alike. Broodwar furtheron is balanced by the maps and that suffices. The time of the six dragons was an phase induced also by a mappool that was protoss friendly enough.
I definately think that the game could be made better for spectators and players alike if slight alterations were made to some units. The alterations which I have in mind are not geared towards creating a more balanced game though. For me, the issues that the game is riddled with are (with but a few exceptions) very minor aesthetical ones, if you could label them as such. With that said, I do however take balance and/or the net enjoyability of spectating/playing into account whenever I analyse whether a certain change should be implemented or not.
So, to name a few problems I have with the game:
1. Ground carapace upgrade gives zerg coccons +1 armor for some strange reason. That feels iffy.
2. D-matrix "leaking" damage is not something I'm a fan of. I don't see any reason for why this should occur.
3. A zealot being able to survive a Yamato Gun blast. Yuck.
4. Scout ATG attack is equal to that of the Wraith? Nope. Make it 10. Then you would have a nice arithmetical progression in the ATG attack damages done by Wraiths, Mutas and Scouts - 8, 9 and 10, respectively. Thats some nice shit right there.
5. ZvZ could be made alot more interesting if Plauge did not affect Zerg units and if Spore Colonies were given 300 health and 2 armor (just as the Sunken Colonies) as well as a damage output of 25 normal damage with a cooldown of 22.5 instead of 15 (liquipedia values). One would of course have to buff Scourge HP to 30 instead of 25 in order for them not to be one-shoted by the Spore Colonies. This last change makes Spore Colonies more effective against Mutas, by killing them a bit faster and being more resilient against Zerglings. Hopefully this will lead to a signifiant increase in Hive ZvZ, where we would hopefully be spaired having to watch defilers spitting plagues everywere at all times.
6. I also don't like that Battlecruisers lose so comprehensively against Wraiths (when equal supply numbers of both units engage eachother). Therefore I propose giving Wraiths a 2x8(+2x1) attack instead of 1x20(+1x2) attack. Thereby letting one Battlecruiser barely win out against 3 Wraiths and live up to their percieved stature as the most intimidating (air-) units in the Terran arsenal, not to mention making lategame TvT more interesting (to me at least).
There are about 100 or so other changes that I've thought about over the years, so these were just "off the top of my head" stuff. Opinions on wether or not they would completely- and obviously break the game altogether are of course welcome.
On January 21 2015 09:08 Tadah wrote: I definately think that the game could be made better for spectators and players alike if slight alterations were made to some units. The alterations which I have in mind are not geared towards creating a more balanced game though. For me, the issues that the game is riddled with are (with but a few exceptions) very minor aesthetical ones, if you could label them as such. With that said, I do however take balance and/or the net enjoyability of spectating/playing into account whenever I analyse whether a certain change should be implemented or not.
So, to name a few problems I have with the game:
1. Ground carapace upgrade gives zerg coccons +1 armor for some strange reason. That feels iffy.
2. D-matrix "leaking" damage is not something I'm a fan of. I don't see any reason for why this should occur.
3. A zealot being able to survive a Yamato Gun blast. Yuck.
4. Scout ATG attack is equal to that of the Wraith? Nope. Make it 10. Then you would have a nice arithmetical progression in the ATG attack damages done by Wraiths, Mutas and Scouts - 8, 9 and 10, respectively. Thats some nice shit right there.
5. ZvZ could be made alot more interesting if Plauge did not affect Zerg units and if Spore Colonies were given 300 health and 2 armor (just as the Sunken Colonies) as well as a damage output of 25 normal damage with a cooldown of 22.5 instead of 15 (liquipedia values). One would of course have to buff Scourge HP to 30 instead of 25 in order for them not to be one-shoted by the Spore Colonies. This last change makes Spore Colonies more effective against Mutas, by killing them a bit faster and being more resilient against Zerglings. Hopefully this will lead to a signifiant increase in Hive ZvZ, where we would hopefully be spaired having to watch defilers spitting plagues everywere at all times.
6. I also don't like that Battlecruisers lose so comprehensively against Wraiths (when equal supply numbers of both units engage eachother). Therefore I propose giving Wraiths a 2x8(+2x1) attack instead of 1x20(+1x2) attack. Thereby letting one Battlecruiser barely win out against 3 Wraiths and live up to their percieved stature as the most intimidating (air-) units in the Terran arsenal, not to mention make lategame TvT more interesting (to me at least).
There are about 100 or so other changes that I've thought about over the years, so these were just "off the top of my head" stuff. Opinions on wether or not they would completely- and obviously break the game altogether are of course welcome.
1. Im fine with the egg
2. I agree
3. agree, they should change it to non explosive
4.agree or even increase attack speed from 30 to 22 similar to goliath.
5.zvz is hard one.. coz of so many variables like muta stacking, weak spore attack and hydra attack being explosive, the matchup is what it is atm
6.this one I disagree. Although I did consider buffing BC base attack to 30. IMO 1 BC should never win vs 3 wraiths simply coz BCs is both an anti air and anti ground unit, it has the versatility that a wraith does not possess. Wraith are mainly used for anti air combat and some light ground harass, only in large groups are they anti ground, but not as cost effect as BCs.
On January 21 2015 06:59 QuickStriker wrote: Not to be disrespectful or offend you but let me give you another quick food for thought to take in from my own perspective:
Not mentioning any other particular/specific game outside of SC BW but in a general POV, every time there is a "balance patch" or "gameplay" changes in the game, who benefits the most, who benefits the least? Who becomes the winners and losers?
The answer is whoever can adapt to new changes, exploit the new changes and lead the new changes.
So what about the rest of people who can't adapt as well as Player 1, or stuck in a limbo of this new change, or find themselves in a whole different position than before (ie. one of the better players before change but not anymore due to factors like balance change or unable to adapt to new settings)?
Their answers will be "the game isn't what it used to be", "lack/lost of interest", "unfair", "retirement". This may very well be minority or majority but you cannot call the game SC BW 1.16.1 anymore, some will say you cannot even call it the same game anymore.
Sure there may be more people welcomed by whatever new set of changes are but there's always a consequence, a pro/con, and those who will be affected by it. What if a balance patch end up being (or even partially) a reason that this/that progamer we know and love quit/retire? What if that turns into a domino factor where the active player base is reduced to 70%, 50%, 25% or even 10%?
There's some truth to reasons why last "official" universal change/patch of board game Chess was last seen in 19th century.
No offense taken man. Discussion is important.
I understand that some people can't or won't want to adapt to the change, but I don't think that's necessarily a reason to not change it. In chess, the reason it's not changed is because there are so few variables that you can change. Pieces move in certain ways and there are no points. Probably a more relatable game would be a sport. Say baseball. MLB is trying to take steps to implement a pitch clock to force pitchers to throw their pitch within 12 seconds of getting the ball back. Right now, many pitches take upwards of 20-30 seconds. Will this throw a lot of pitchers off if implemented? Absolutely. Should still be taken to implement it? Probably.
I don't think change is something to be avoided just because it causes turmoil. In terms of chaos, it wouldn't be any worse than some player somehow finding a way to make bio TvP work and players having to adapt to the new gameplay.
Starcraft was not designed or balanced to be played at a full 24 fps on today's resource-rich maps. It was designed for 18 fps on sparse islands and other shitty maps. Today, given how far the best players in the world are from the level of tactical depth nearer the theoretical management skillcap, it's apparent that Brood War is one of the very few games you could make an argument for being "too fast" despite the long length of matches (it's an RTS, so who's complaining, lol)
If you want to redesign the game for its current speed by increasing the reward relative to its difficulty for underused abilities, be my guest. In my opinion you should leave the three matchups alone and go for the mirrors, since the matchups are helped by maps and apparently even out entirely as player skill approaches infinity. (FJB had a reverse counter triangle going!)
Now for actual core balance suggestions: If you want to fix ZvZ without harming the other matchups, give Spore Colonies a 0 range splash effect, large enough to only affect ultratight stacks. This opens pandora's box on ZvZ (since Zerg has the ability to hardcounter every unit combination it can throw at itself) without severely affecting the early mutaling dynamic. Chamber builds, which, by the way, can be countered, would as a result lead to more long hivetech ZvZs. That idea I got from someone in the TLBW IRC, and I can't recall who.
I have no idea how to open up TvT without reducing the game speed enough to facilitate lockdown/optical flare in 200/200. The best idea I can think of is to have a new secondary effect of the Science Vessel's EMP cause an 8-second stun on grounded mechanical/robotic units (compare to Disruption Web). The sprite limit bug being fixed would definitely be amazing in this matchup since Valkyries have a strong niche in the making to be mixed in against mass wraith, and that bug really doesn't affect the Valk's strong role in TvZ.
PvP opens up by itself if both players go safe, but if you want to see more stargate builds I think Apial Sensors needs to be reworked. Scouts should have that 10 sight by default, and the Apial Sensors upgrade at the Fleet Beacon should instead grant them the ability to detect stealthed units, permitting them to be used for observer hunts while already being decent at chasing shuttles and arbiters. It would be just enough to give the Scout a lategame niche against Zerg and Terran, providing mobile detection for corsairs and an alternative (but expensive) means to clear minefields and put more pressure on the T to maintain map control.
3. A zealot being able to survive a Yamato Gun blast. Yuck.
That made me "WTF" until I looked it up... ohh, Yamato does 260 explosive damage. A zealot WILL survive it, lol. Yes, that is whacked. I picture of a very charred zealot looking up and extending his middle finger skyward in defiance afterwards, to the BC crew's shock.
4. Scout ATG attack is equal to that of the Wraith? Nope. Make it 10. Then you would have a nice arithmetical progression in the ATG attack damages done by Wraiths, Mutas and Scouts - 8, 9 and 10, respectively. Thats some nice shit right there.
One thing I never got... Bliz nerfing the ground attack of the Scout and Wraith in the big 1.04 balance patch, while leaving mutas' ground attack alone. And this even though new BW units (sairs, valks) had just come out that were EXPRESSLY DESIGNED to deal with things like mid-game air unit packs. Yeah, makes no sense. Would be cool/interesting to have Scouts and Wraiths get their air-to-ground damage up'd a bit. People might even use Scouts again, lol.
6. I also don't like that Battlecruisers lose so comprehensively against Wraiths (when equal supply numbers of both units engage each other). Therefore I propose giving Wraiths a 2x8(+2x1) attack instead of 1x20(+1x2) attack. Thereby letting one Battlecruiser barely win out against 3 Wraiths and live up to their percieved stature as the most intimidating (air-) units in the Terran arsenal, not to mention making lategame TvT more interesting (to me at least).
BCs are supposed to lose to Wraiths, it's in the Blizzard Air Model (look it up in Bliz's Starcraft Compendium).
The Wraith is a 'capital ship hunter', along with Scouts and Devs. Also, BCs don't lose to Wraiths by much if at all, if you factor in Yamato. Cloaking is sort of the saving grace, letting Wraiths get in a couple of sucker punches before getting scanned (and vessels ruin even that).
reminisce12, regarding you comment on my first point, I feel I should stress that it is not the egg I am talking about, but rather the cocoons from which Guardians and Devourers "hatch" from.
I think a simple fix to the Zealot/Yamato issue is to up the Yamato Gun blast damage from 260 to 310. A nice (aesthetically satisfying) effect of this change is that one full health Battlecruiser with full armor upgrades would be destroyed by 1 Yamato and EXACTLY 7 shots from a Battlecruiser with a fully upgraded attack.
As for your last point about Wraiths not possessing the same anti-ground capability. That is only true when evaluating Wraiths and Battlecruisers on a unit per unit basis and not in terms of equal supply numbers. 6supply of Wraiths (equal to that of one Battlecruiser) originally do 24 ATG damage (33 when fully upgraded) whereas 6 supply of Battlecruisers, i.e. one, will do 25 ATG damage (34 when upgraded). So I don't think your reasoning holds here.
The Wraith is a 'capital ship hunter', along with Scouts and Devs. Also, BCs don't lose to Wraiths by much if at all, if you factor in Yamato. Cloaking is sort of the saving grace, letting Wraiths get in a couple of sucker punches before getting scanned (and vessels ruin even that).
I can assure you, I have done countless and countless tests with 33 Battlecruisers against 100 Wraiths and I have never been able to even make it interesting. Wraiths just tear Battlecruisers a new one.
(This was in response to Starlight. I fucked up the quoting)
The Wraith is a 'capital ship hunter', along with Scouts and Devs. Also, BCs don't lose to Wraiths by much if at all, if you factor in Yamato. Cloaking is sort of the saving grace, letting Wraiths get in a couple of sucker punches before getting scanned (and vessels ruin even that).
I can assure you, I have done countless and countless tests with 33 Battlecruisers against 100 Wraiths and I have never been able to even make it interesting. Wraiths just tear Battlecruisers a new one.
(This was in response to Starlight. I fucked up the quoting)
Did you use mass Yamato?(33x, lol, probably not). That'd make it interesting.... but moreso at the scale of more realistic-sized battles. There's no real situation where you'd have 33 BCs after all, but 4-6, yes, and you can make good use of Yamato then.
And again, Wraiths are supposed to win.
I think a simple fix to the Zealot/Yamato issue is to up the Yamato Gun blast damage from 260 to 310. A nice (aesthetically satisfying) effect of this change is that one full health Battlecruiser with full armor upgrades would be destroyed by 1 Yamato and EXACTLY 7 shots from a Battlecruiser with a fully upgraded attack.
Or you could just change Yamato to Normal damage, as someone else suggested.
Issue solved, without potentially messing up other things. I honestly don't know why it should be Explosive. Can anyone think of a good reason?
On January 21 2015 09:33 Tadah wrote: reminisce12, regarding you comment on my first point, I feel I should stress that it is not the egg I am talking about, but rather the cocoons from which Guardians and Devourers "hatch" from.
I think a simple fix to the Zealot/Yamato issue is to up the Yamato Gun blast damage from 260 to 310. A nice (aesthetically satisfying) effect of this change is that one full health Battlecruiser with full armor upgrades would be destroyed by 1 Yamato and EXACTLY 7 shots from a Battlecruiser with a fully upgraded attack.
As for your last point about Wraiths not possessing the same anti-ground capability. That is only true when evaluating Wraiths and Battlecruisers on a unit per unit basis and not in terms of equal supply numbers. 6supply of Wraiths (equal to that of one Battlecruiser) originally do 24 ATG damage (33 when fully upgraded) whereas 6 supply of Battlecruisers, i.e. one, will do 25 ATG damage (34 when upgraded). So I don't think your reasoning holds here.
But ur also forgetting BCs get yamato guns and has better range.
and I didn't know bout the cocoons, that is indeed weird then.
On January 21 2015 04:53 neobowman wrote: I would say get rid of the Arbiter attack but everyone knows it doesn't do shit anyway.
Funnily enough, I've always thought that the Arbiter's attack is what keeps it balanced. The situation of an arbiter contributing meaningful damage is far less common than an arbiter's control being deferred in the midst of a hectic engagement. In those cases, the arbiter will stay to attack an offending turret instead of fleeing out of range after being attacked. I can't tell you how many times I've seen the arbiter count whittled down like this in pro games.
As for whether this topic is warranted, I think it's fun to theorycraft considering how unrealistic another balance patch is.
The Wraith is a 'capital ship hunter', along with Scouts and Devs. Also, BCs don't lose to Wraiths by much if at all, if you factor in Yamato. Cloaking is sort of the saving grace, letting Wraiths get in a couple of sucker punches before getting scanned (and vessels ruin even that).
I can assure you, I have done countless and countless tests with 33 Battlecruisers against 100 Wraiths and I have never been able to even make it interesting. Wraiths just tear Battlecruisers a new one.
(This was in response to Starlight. I fucked up the quoting)
Did you use mass Yamato?(33x, lol, probably not). That'd make it interesting.... but moreso at the scale of more realistic-sized battles. There's no real situation where you'd have 33 BCs after all, but 4-6, yes, and you can make good use of Yamato then.
I think a simple fix to the Zealot/Yamato issue is to up the Yamato Gun blast damage from 260 to 310. A nice (aesthetically satisfying) effect of this change is that one full health Battlecruiser with full armor upgrades would be destroyed by 1 Yamato and EXACTLY 7 shots from a Battlecruiser with a fully upgraded attack.
Or you could just change Yamato to Normal damage, as someone else suggested.
Issue solved, without potentially messing up other things. I honestly don't know why it should be Explosive. Can anyone think of a good reason?
The explosive dmg on the yamato is weird, the only small unit it doesn't kill is the protoss zealot, but funnily enough the zealot was initially designed with 80 shields and 80hp in mind but later changed to 100/60 . In other words blizz made it so it died to the yamato. Captial ships and ultralisks are not effected by the change.
On January 21 2015 06:04 neobowman wrote: I'm totally fine with criticism. Yet, I think it's also important, even for a concretely developed scene like that in BW, to be open to ideas of change. I totally get that people like it how it is, but if don't understand why people wouldn't even contemplate ways to potentially improve the game.
Now, I will come out and say I haven't been following the amateur scene since the last OSL, but I have been following the current season of KSL and SSL. I have been thinking about this idea of potential change for years. My thoughts and ideas may be outdated but I don't have access to current statistics in race trends so I have to go with what I have. If I'm wrong about the statistics, all you have to do is tell me.
I understand that the units I mentioned aren't considered game-breakers. Sure, hydras are countered by storm. Sure, science vessels can be sniped by scourge. I'm not saying these units are completely overpowered. But in tweaking balance, you can come closer to the perfect 50% winrate for each matchup. I don't think there's any reason to have to avoid conversation or discussion about it.
Sure, there are occasionally reversed trends in the meta like the period after Bisu beat Savior where Protoss were hugely favored against Zerg. But even that trend was stabilized into the current standard of Zergs having a slight advantage against Protoss.
I'm not saying this game is bad. I love this game. I think it's amazing, I think the meta's constantly evolving and growing. I agree that outside factors are totally at play. But I don't think that's any reason to try to avoid talking about balance at all.
...Not mentioning any other particular/specific game outside of SC BW but in a general POV, every time there is a "balance patch" or "gameplay" changes in the game, who benefits the most, who benefits the least? Who becomes the winners and losers?
The answer is whoever can adapt to new changes, exploit the new changes and lead the new changes.
So what about the rest of people who can't adapt as well as Player 1, or stuck in a limbo of this new change, or find themselves in a whole different position than before (ie. one of the better players before change but not anymore due to factors like balance change or unable to adapt to new settings)?
Their answers will be "the game isn't what it used to be", "lack/lost of interest", "unfair", "retirement". This may very well be minority or majority but you cannot call the game SC BW 1.16.1 anymore, some will say you cannot even call it the same game anymore.
Sure there may be more people welcomed by whatever new set of changes are but there's always a consequence, a pro/con, and those who will be affected by it. What if a balance patch end up being (or even partially) a reason that this/that progamer we know and love quit/retire? What if that turns into a domino factor where the active player base is reduced to 70%, 50%, 25% or even 10%?
You could've made that same argument against every balance patch Blizzard did, especially the comprehensive ones (1.04 and 1.08). Yet, rather than costing Bliz players, every balance patch seemed to make the game better and stronger.
If Bliz had left balance at what it was initially (i.e. NO balance changes after release), best guess is that SC would've been a flash in the pan. Would've been a boring Zerg-fest, with many broken things staying broken. Many of Bliz's RTS competitors never got balance right or even close, and their games faded in part as a result. It goes to re-playability.
There's some truth to reasons why last "official" universal change/patch of board game Chess was last seen in 19th century.
And as you probably know, prior to that, chess underwent a great many gameplay changes, usually for the better.
Id give Crack lings splash damage. a Reaver/Archon/Zealot/HT army is to strong and tooo costly for zerg to deal with. Protoss always makes profit vs Zerg in the Late game armywise, zerg has to make 3 armies just to beat 1 of those armies.
On January 21 2015 10:46 ICanFlyLow wrote: Id give Crack lings splash damage. a Reaver/Archon/Zealot/HT army is to strong and tooo costly for zerg to deal with. Protoss always makes profit vs Zerg in the Late game armywise, zerg has to make 3 armies just to beat 1 of those armies.
awesome suggestion, i should nominate you for next sc2 balance team
Don't fucking buff EMP TvP should not be changed It's a balanced match up that is entirely dependent on maps. Some maps favour T slightly, others favour P slightly. Examples of Terran favoured maps:
Circuit Breaker Fighting Spirit
Examples of Protoss favoured maps:
La Mancha I can't think of any more right now.
If you think that the match up is slightly P favoured, then you're stuck in the past. Things have changed. Terrans have gotten better. In the past, every one except Flash struggled slightly vs Protoss, but not any more.
Ghosts are already good in endgame TvT and in TvP if you play a turtle style and the map allows it, or if Protoss goes straight to carriers and skips arbiters. Then, vessels are pointless, and it's better to get ghosts.
The TvZ idea seems reasonable. I'd be willing to try a longer duration to cause the same damage for irradiate for a year, and see how it affects the statistics. If the change had bad effects, we'd revert to the past values.
But if I was the supreme overlord of Brood War, I wouldn't change the balance. I would just fix the following errors and add the following features:
-The ramp error, which struck Bisu on his stream once. It permanently makes units get stuck on a ramp, and other units who walk in to the blob become sucked in and are also stuck. It only happens on some ramps, like fighting spirit's 12'o clock one.
-Units getting stuck when, and needing a "stop" command to be released. If you are trying to attack move and then walk, but you mess up the timing, then having the unit not fire and play its weapon lowering animation for a few frames is punishment enough. This is too much, and it's just annoying. There is no thing that is fun about it.
-Spawn points. When a Terran walls off and gets 4 pooled, the starting location is a matter of life and death, because it's not possible to decide where the marine will spawn. So if you started at a location that will make him spawn on the outside, you're dead. It's also unfair to Protoss players defending vs hydra busts, who want to warp in high templars. Adding spawn points would remove pylon prisons vs dragoons in PvP, but in my opinion it's worth it.
-The sprite limit. I would increase it by over 9000%.
i dont think there needs to be any real balance patches at all, its been long since last one and it remained almost perfectly balanced id say all this time, with the help of map makers ofcourse. its one thing that will never happen with sc2 and it boils down to design, the volatile nature of sc2 simply demands balance patches all the time and its actualy gotten quite ridiculous with how many special rules in gameplay they introduce to potentialy fix a balance issue but just break other stuff
so for bw, what would be best is to fix any kind of remaining bugs or similar things that still linger around, like dragoon glitches, obs turret bug, reaver scarab, dark archon amulet upgrade not giving +12 mana, ensnare is kinda weird too with the slow having diffrent percentages vs diffrent units right?, zerg eggs dissapearing when atacked, valkyrie rocket limits etc, im not really in the loop with this, im sure theres way more, maybe how mining speed is diffrent for all 3 races because of hqs sizes, although currently seems fine toss has best and terran worst
for the balance changes if there really must be, id prefer to only do very small things with least number changing although they might have significant impact, for example if scout AtG dmg is bad, make it have 2x8 (as the name implys they have dual photon blasters, why dont they do 2x dmg like firebats/zealots), or firebat/ghost what would they be like without concussive dmg, nuke not cost suply or seperate building, infested terran actualy buildable with larva, hive tech? i dont know, maybe able to morph greater spire at lair, but still need hive for guardian/devouer (since theyre both not that good)
as for the casters maybe bigger changes, because some spells always seemed off, iradiate 75 mana, while emp matrix are 100, halucination 100 mana, could be 75, maybe maelstrom/discuprtion web each cost 25 too much too, ensnare is kinda weird which i mentioned before, optical flare/restoration could probably use either mana reduce or having aoe effect, i think ghost spells themselves are prety fine (wonder why pros never use lockdown to counter arbiters instead of emp). at the very least it would be interesting to see spellcasters used them where they werent previously and new counters that already exist, like dark archon feedback vs queen/medic/ghost if useage of them would spike or restoration vs plague/ensnare/maelstorm. halucination vs mines, ensnare vs bio, etc. theres quite alot of rarely seen spellcaster interactions
still im not sure how much is needed, what i can say for sure that nobody would mind is non balance bug fixing and updates to bnet, even new features. i would also love to see higher resolution support and actually able to customise hotkeys ingame, or well just make the damn game free download its old enough
One would of course have to buff Scourge HP to 30 instead of 25 in order for them not to be one-shoted by the Spore Colonies.
This is where balance gets tough. Do this and all of a sudden scourges become dramatically more effective against corsairs.
On January 21 2015 10:46 ICanFlyLow wrote: Id give Crack lings splash damage. a Reaver/Archon/Zealot/HT army is to strong and tooo costly for zerg to deal with. Protoss always makes profit vs Zerg in the Late game armywise, zerg has to make 3 armies just to beat 1 of those armies.
And nonetheless zerg is by far the superior lategame race in that MU. I'd be 100% confident in saying toss would literally never win a ZvP past midgame ever again if cracklings also did splash.
Unless we are talking about late, late, late game with the map mining out, at which point P absolutely does become imba as fuck
what would be best is to fix any kind of remaining bugs or similar things that still linger around, like dragoon glitches, obs turret bug, reaver scarab
You would need to completely rework the reaver if you did that. The fact that scarab damage is lessened or eliminated by running away is part of what makes the reaver worked. If scarabs always struck, reaver would be incredibly powerful. Certainly enough to dramatically alter gameplan and potentially create new balance issues.
For me, scarab duds have never felt like a bug but rather a natural aspect of the game.
I disagree with both of your statements. Neither Z nor P dominates the other in the lategame. Whichever race gets the better economy dominates. It's that simple.
On January 21 2015 11:30 vOdToasT wrote: I disagree with both of your statements. Neither Z nor P dominates the other in the lategame. Whichever race gets the better economy dominates. It's that simple.
I guess that depends on how we define economy. In a relatively typical, fairly passive macro PvZ zerg usually ends up on 4 bases with toss on 3 at the start of the early late game. At this point, assuming both players have played somewhat passive with no significant damage being incurred zerg is usually in that 70 drone range, but spread out over 4 bases, and possessing an extra gas.
It's hard to categorize because we don't keep stats that way, but when I watch afreeca and toss passively takes a third and sometimes even a quick fourth in response to a zerg that goes for low unit, drone away 4 base play toss loses much more than they win. Maybe not as much as 2/3, but certainly more than 50%. Even players like Bisu I've watched lose numerous games when he elects for passive play just taking bases of his own.
Doesn't mean PvZ is imba by any stretch, but from all my observations a macro oriented playstyle in response to zerg playing "4 base, drone till 70 food" is not a favorable matchup for P. It always surprises me when pros elect for this style in light of that. I'll have to try and keep some sort of stats on that specific situation, but I'll bet my life on toss losing that much more than 50%.
On January 21 2015 11:43 L_Master wrote: Even players like Bisu I've watched lose numerous games when he elects for passive play
Bisu never does passive play in PvZ, even when taking bases and without a main army he always actively controls his sairs/dt/shuttle and look for opportunities to do damage. bisu is like one of the few toss that push his multitasking to the highest and try to retain their sair count even going into the lategame.
On January 21 2015 10:46 ICanFlyLow wrote: Id give Crack lings splash damage. a Reaver/Archon/Zealot/HT army is to strong and tooo costly for zerg to deal with. Protoss always makes profit vs Zerg in the Late game armywise, zerg has to make 3 armies just to beat 1 of those armies.
awesome suggestion, i should nominate you for next sc2 balance team
On January 21 2015 11:14 iknowFiRE wrote: for the balance changes if there really must be, id prefer to only do very small things with least number changing although they might have significant impact, for example if scout AtG dmg is bad, make it have 2x8 (as the name implys they have dual photon blasters, why dont they do 2x dmg like firebats/zealots), or firebat/ghost what would they be like without concussive dmg, nuke not cost supply or [need] separate building, infested terran actualy buildable with larva, hive tech? i dont know, maybe able to morph greater spire at lair, but still need hive for guardian/devourer (since theyre both not that good)
Broodwar is balanced at a point, where it is not "perfectly balance" like some shout out fast, but at a point where you cannot balance it out any more, if you arent a K.I.
It is as far as a game with 3 races and humand developer can get to balance and is still the nr1 game, when any rts developer looks for rts balance, but it is not the perfect balance of a perfect univerese. You cant achive it.
Any patch would do more harm, not because he could bring up one match up to a more balanced state, but you cannot balance one match up without hurting another. Broodwar found the best middleway.
But people in this forum either tend to "how can you? broodwar is 100% perfect for ever and ever!!!!" or they will give you balance advice which would hurt cpt. pickards head very much.
On January 21 2015 11:30 vOdToasT wrote: I disagree with both of your statements. Neither Z nor P dominates the other in the lategame. Whichever race gets the better economy dominates. It's that simple.
Zerg destroys Protoss lategame, defiler/crackling is way too cost-efficient vs protoss army.
and for zerg is really easy to deny a 4th or 5th expansion while expanding himself.
I don't see why you would want to nerf bio play in TvZ. While I like mech in PvT, I didn't like the trend over the last couple years where most TvZ seemed to make the mech transition. Fortunately it seems this latest SSL has seen a resurgence of bio TvZ, maybe due to maps. But I would never want to see bio TvZ nerfed, certainly not the irradiation.
Is 50:50 balance really something to strive for? I don't think so. What is important is that all possible builds/strategies have a theoretical counter. This is how balance is achieved. Whether the player has the skills and foresight in order to take the necessary steps to counter any strategy thrown at them is up to their individual skill.
Given this perspective, I think Broodwar is a balanced game, and as such, no changes are required. The better player should win more often than not, and Broodwar exemplifies this to a very high degree (more-so than SC2 for instance).
Hypothetically, you could make changes. If the changes are 'good', a new balance would be achieved. Thus you would have created a different game, a Broodwar cousin which looks and plays the same in most regards, however has it's own nuanced balance.
On January 21 2015 12:44 LilClinkin wrote: Hypothetically, you could make changes. If the changes are 'good', a new balance would be achieved. Thus you would have created a different game, a Broodwar cousin which looks and plays the same in most regards, however has it's own nuanced balance.
By that logic, SC vanilla has been 5 different games already, and Brood War, 3, thanks to Bliz's own balance patches:
For myself, I don't think that's so. Only two of the balance patches were comprehensive (1.04, 1.08), and even then, I wouldn't say either 'created a new game'. It was still very much BW, just improved.
Now BW vs SC vanilla, that's different. BW does feel like a different animal, not completely, but enough.
On January 21 2015 11:43 L_Master wrote: Even players like Bisu I've watched lose numerous games when he elects for passive play
Bisu never does passive play in PvZ, even when taking bases and without a main army he always actively controls his sairs/dt/shuttle and look for opportunities to do damage. bisu is like one of the few toss that push his multitasking to the highest and try to retain their sair count even going into the lategame.
Passive as in not attempting to break the zerg. Harassing with corsairs is nice, but I've seen games where all Bisu really does is some light sair harass, taking bases, and then expands while pressuring at both nats...but it's token pressure. He doesn't have the army to commit and never really does. Just comes in, drops a storm or two, then backs away.
On January 21 2015 08:49 BisuDagger wrote: Make comsats upgradable to nuclear silo+comsat combo. Ghosts can be created at academy. All upgrades for ghost still require SF+addon.
edit: Just going to ignore the god awful suggestions of the OP LOLOL.
Hey man, I'm totally cool with you not thinking my suggestions are good. But if so, could you point out what do you think is wrong about them and what you think would be better changes? Thanks bud.
On January 21 2015 12:44 LilClinkin wrote: Is 50:50 balance really something to strive for? I don't think so. What is important is that all possible builds/strategies have a theoretical counter. This is how balance is achieved. Whether the player has the skills and foresight in order to take the necessary steps to counter any strategy thrown at them is up to their individual skill.
Given this perspective, I think Broodwar is a balanced game, and as such, no changes are required. The better player should win more often than not, and Broodwar exemplifies this to a very high degree (more-so than SC2 for instance).
Hypothetically, you could make changes. If the changes are 'good', a new balance would be achieved. Thus you would have created a different game, a Broodwar cousin which looks and plays the same in most regards, however has it's own nuanced balance.
I think everyone would agree that a 50:50 balance is important. Here's an example about your point. Say Protoss build A counters Zerg build A at a 60:40 ratio. It loses to Zerg build B at a 80:20 ratio. Protoss build B counters Zerg build B at a 60:40 ratio. It loses to Zerg build A at an 80:20 ratio. Both builds counter another build and have their own counters, but this hypothetical game isn't balanced. Yes, the better player wins most of the time, but there are still racial imbalances. Maybe I'm totally wrong about TvP, but it seems that there are still kinks that can be ironed out in ZvP and TvZ from my perspective.
And I'm not entirely sold on the idea that changes are bad. It's like saying Brood War before 1.08 and after are different games. They're not, they're just balanced differently. And if balance can be improved without altering strategy too much, then I don't see why you wouldn't.
On January 21 2015 12:34 Falling wrote: I don't see why you would want to nerf bio play in TvZ. While I like mech in PvT, I didn't like the trend over the last couple years where most TvZ seemed to make the mech transition. Fortunately it seems this latest SSL has seen a resurgence of bio TvZ, maybe due to maps. But I would never want to see bio TvZ nerfed, certainly not the irradiation.
I totally agree that I think Bio TvZ is one of the most exciting parts about the game and I would definitely not want to see it go away. Do you have any ideas on what could be nerfed for Terran or buffed for Zerg instead?
On January 21 2015 11:43 L_Master wrote: Even players like Bisu I've watched lose numerous games when he elects for passive play
Bisu never does passive play in PvZ, even when taking bases and without a main army he always actively controls his sairs/dt/shuttle and look for opportunities to do damage. bisu is like one of the few toss that push his multitasking to the highest and try to retain their sair count even going into the lategame.
Passive as in not attempting to break the zerg. Harassing with corsairs is nice, but I've seen games where all Bisu really does is some light sair harass, taking bases, and then expands while pressuring at both nats...but it's token pressure. He doesn't have the army to commit and never really does. Just comes in, drops a storm or two, then backs away.
its because of these little things that add up that makes the zerg feel really pressured at multiple fronts (losing overlords,defense line at nat and 4th, dt/reaverdrops),
allowing bisu to shift the tempo of the game to his favour and become free to take his 4th and 5th unopposed and become further ahead. unlike a typical toss who usually struggle to grab additional bases from z pressure, when passivity on the toss part allow the zerg to gain tempo and wrest control of the game.
he has no need to take the risk to break the zerg defense early when he can just extend his advantage this way.
On January 21 2015 11:43 L_Master wrote: Even players like Bisu I've watched lose numerous games when he elects for passive play
Bisu never does passive play in PvZ, even when taking bases and without a main army he always actively controls his sairs/dt/shuttle and look for opportunities to do damage. bisu is like one of the few toss that push his multitasking to the highest and try to retain their sair count even going into the lategame.
Passive as in not attempting to break the zerg. Harassing with corsairs is nice, but I've seen games where all Bisu really does is some light sair harass, taking bases, and then expands while pressuring at both nats...but it's token pressure. He doesn't have the army to commit and never really does. Just comes in, drops a storm or two, then backs away.
its because of these little things that add up that makes the zerg feel really pressured at multiple fronts (losing overlords,defense line at nat and 4th, dt/reaverdrops),
allowing bisu to shift the tempo of the game to his favour and become free to take his 4th and 5th unopposed and become further ahead. unlike a typical toss who usually struggle to grab additional bases from z pressure, when passivity on the toss part allow the zerg to gain tempo and wrest control of the game.
he has no need to take the risk to break the zerg defense early when he can just extend his advantage this way.
Yea but he loses frequently even when he gets those 4th/5th no problem, and this is the best PvZer of all the time. I remember one time he was practicing versus larva and literally lost 5 or 6 straight trying to play that style, and each time he was getting 4+ bases against larvas own 4.
when you put a Protoss and a Zerg player of equal skill and on a balanced 50% map, zerg is going to win most of the time, due to the nature of the match up, its an uphill battle for the protoss player at the moment zerg secures 4 gas, on a decent drone count.
In my opinion, balance is not a concrete 50:50 on the stat sheet. I mean sure it keeps the outcome of games surprising but really it's not the supposed to be the game who should decide the winner, but the player him/herself. If the player succumbs to this balancing, the human element which the reason why it is esports is just not present.
I was going to write some changes to Terran because I find my own theories in line with Bisu's (see lemmata's post) but then I thought that its really hard to change units/buildings/spell etc without affecting all the matchups.
On a fun note. I really want bunker to 40 secs and up vulture cost because 75 min vults can kill 200 min 200 gas ultras and goons even without any unit (other than mines) present. ^^
Despite my lengthy suggestions earlier I'd like to agree that no matter how bad the overall game balance is (and it IS far worse than it could easily be made) the top priority regarding future patches to BW is, like voddy said, to fix all the weird detrimental shit like the sprite limit and rallypoints also affecting units' spawn locations.
On January 21 2015 14:16 c3rberUs wrote: In my opinion, balance is not a concrete 50:50 on the stat sheet. I mean sure it keeps the outcome of games surprising but really it's not the supposed to be the game who should decide the winner, but the player him/herself. If the player succumbs to this balancing, the human element which the reason why it is esports is just not present.
I was going to write some changes to Terran because I find my own theories in line with Bisu's (see lemmata's post) but then I thought that its really hard to change units/buildings/spell etc without affecting all the matchups.
But wouldn't balancing the game let the players decide who won more than the game? I mean, if we make it he game imbalanced e so that Marines do 20 damage per shot, then in that case, the players are deciding the outcome of the game. When things are even and every race has an even shot at winning, then players can best demonstrate their own skill.
It really is difficult to balance without affecting all three matches but that's part of why it's fun to try and hypothesize what changes could be good.
On January 21 2015 08:56 prech wrote: Cool TLPD stats
The numbers are pretty fascinating. It's pretty surprising how much of a tough time zerg are having against Terran.
On January 21 2015 14:33 Mirabel_ wrote: Despite my lengthy suggestions earlier I'd like to agree that no matter how bad the overall game balance is (and it IS far worse than it could easily be made) the top priority regarding future patches to BW is, like voddy said, to fix all the weird detrimental shit like the sprite limit and rallypoints also affecting units' spawn locations.
I know there's been a fair amount of starcraft mods in the past. I wonder if it's possible to make one without the sprite limit. The rally points thing seems a bit too complex but there could be a way to work more sprites into the engine.
I feel like this is one of those endless loops. Yes balancing the game will let the players' skill decide the ability, but then that brings us to the question of how do we determine if it is balanced? ^_^
On January 21 2015 15:35 c3rberUs wrote: I feel like this is one of those endless loops. Yes balancing the game will let the players' skill decide the ability, but then that brings us to the question of how do we determine if it is balanced? ^_^
Balance is subjective in a game with an unreachable skillcap. No one is even nearly playing with a full deck and never has, so it's up to what cards are in each player's hands.
The best way to ensure the balance of the game at the maximum possible level of skill is to isolate parts of the gameplay and compare them across races. Start by competing extensively at the slowest tolerated gamespeed. If the races fare equally well with the physical component neutralized, the game's strategic/tactical portion is balanced across the races.
Then, find a way to isolate mechanics from strategy (at maximum gamespeed, force both players of different races into a 50/50 strategy and 50/50 tactical maneuvers) and test that extensively as well, to see if the mechanical payout/requirement is balanced between the races. Since Starcraft is mostly mechanics, it might pay to automate segments of the game, like micro or macro, and test for those individually.
If one race has an advantage in some isolated scenarios and a disadvantage in others, then you can assume that in the complete game the balance will be somewhere between the two, and where exactly depend on how the different gameplay issues are weighted.
Unless you do all this to create a more-objective view of the game's balance, the answer to whether the game is balanced depends entirely on "Is every race faring healthily within this particular gamer population?
On January 21 2015 08:06 Bswhunter wrote: Buff / change the underused units, Scouts, ghosts, firebats, wraiths and maybe queens.
firebats are usefull against Zergs, they are specialized and situational, but still used frequently. Wrights? Are you kidding me? Its already one of the most powerfulll unit in TvT, and it has its niche also in TvZ as a hard counter against greater spire builds (plus wrights are already quite effective against Zerg in hands of good players).
Even queens are quite controversial on this list, since they finally found niche as a late anti-mech unit.
On January 21 2015 08:06 Bswhunter wrote: Buff / change the underused units, Scouts, ghosts, firebats, wraiths and maybe queens.
firebats are usefull against Zergs, they are specialized and situational, but still used frequently. Wrights? Are you kidding me? Its already one of the most powerfulll unit in TvT, and it has its niche also in TvZ as a hard counter against greater spire builds (plus wrights are already quite effective against Zerg in hands of good players).
Even queens are quite controversial on this list, since they finally found niche as a late anti-mech unit.
What's so hard to understand? Not every language will translate perfectly into another. Especially a word like wraith which is uncommonly seen outside of fantasy/scifi circles. Don't be a dick.
On January 21 2015 08:06 Bswhunter wrote: Buff / change the underused units, Scouts, ghosts, firebats, wraiths and maybe queens.
I know!
Give scouts a chargable attack where the damage increases with time Bring ghosts to tier2 Put firebats on wheels, like vultures, make detection for overloards upgradable -- buffs wraiths and to balance it for DTs, bring DTs to tier 3
Rework the queen and make them producible from the hatchery
all i really want is for borderless screen or windowed mode at fullscreen. also the fact that i have different mouse sens from regular computer to BW :/
On January 21 2015 09:33 Tadah wrote: reminisce12, regarding you comment on my first point, I feel I should stress that it is not the egg I am talking about, but rather the cocoons from which Guardians and Devourers "hatch" from.
During the Starcraft beta testing, the developers originally intended for the mutalisks to come down to the ground then morph into guardian, but it caused a bug when the muta would try to morph at a terrain that ground units can't be on (i.e. water), so they made a new unit called the 'cocoon' but apparently forgot to change from ground unit carapace to air carapace.
Interesting detail omission, although we won't know if this was done on purpose or not.
Another really interesting detail that Bliz probably forgot was a hallucinated queen can infest a command center.
On January 21 2015 09:33 Tadah wrote: reminisce12, regarding you comment on my first point, I feel I should stress that it is not the egg I am talking about, but rather the cocoons from which Guardians and Devourers "hatch" from.
During the Starcraft beta testing, the developers originally intended for the mutalisks to come down to the ground then morph into guardian, but it caused a bug when the muta would try to morph at a terrain that ground units can't be on (i.e. water), so they made a new unit called the 'cocoon' but apparently forgot to change from ground unit carapace to air carapace.
Interesting detail omission, although we won't know if this was done on purpose or not.
Another really interesting detail that Bliz probably forgot was a hallucinated queen can infest a command center.
Woah, really? I didnt know those..
I won't need a balance patch, because I'm too bad. But I have the firm belief that every current balance issue can be easily countered by micro or tactical decisions, compared to the size of the imbalance. Certainly compared to another similar, yet way too different game, at which I'm also terrible.
From a casual Zerg perspective I would perhaps like to have Broodling cost 100E (150E makes you wait way too long after investing in queen to fight Terran mech, which is against Zerg flexibility). I would also like to see good 8 player map other than Hunters and alikes (the default or perhaps the only choice if you happen to play 3x3 or 4x4 game)
On January 21 2015 09:33 Tadah wrote: reminisce12, regarding you comment on my first point, I feel I should stress that it is not the egg I am talking about, but rather the cocoons from which Guardians and Devourers "hatch" from.
During the Starcraft beta testing, the developers originally intended for the mutalisks to come down to the ground then morph into guardian, but it caused a bug when the muta would try to morph at a terrain that ground units can't be on (i.e. water), so they made a new unit called the 'cocoon' but apparently forgot to change from ground unit carapace to air carapace.
Interesting detail omission, although we won't know if this was done on purpose or not.
Another really interesting detail that Bliz probably forgot was a hallucinated queen can infest a command center.
Woah, really? I didnt know those..
I won't need a balance patch, because I'm too bad. But I have the firm belief that every current balance issue can be easily countered by micro or tactical decisions, compared to the size of the imbalance. Certainly compared to another similar, yet way too different game, at which I'm also terrible.
On January 21 2015 09:33 Tadah wrote: reminisce12, regarding you comment on my first point, I feel I should stress that it is not the egg I am talking about, but rather the cocoons from which Guardians and Devourers "hatch" from.
During the Starcraft beta testing, the developers originally intended for the mutalisks to come down to the ground then morph into guardian, but it caused a bug when the muta would try to morph at a terrain that ground units can't be on (i.e. water), so they made a new unit called the 'cocoon' but apparently forgot to change from ground unit carapace to air carapace.
Interesting detail omission, although we won't know if this was done on purpose or not.
Another really interesting detail that Bliz probably forgot was a hallucinated queen can infest a command center.
Woah, really? I didnt know those..
I won't need a balance patch, because I'm too bad. But I have the firm belief that every current balance issue can be easily countered by micro or tactical decisions, compared to the size of the imbalance. Certainly compared to another similar, yet way too different game, at which I'm also terrible.
On January 21 2015 08:06 Bswhunter wrote: Buff / change the underused units, Scouts, ghosts, firebats, wraiths and maybe queens.
firebats are usefull against Zergs, they are specialized and situational, but still used frequently. Wrights? Are you kidding me? Its already one of the most powerfulll unit in TvT, and it has its niche also in TvZ as a hard counter against greater spire builds (plus wrights are already quite effective against Zerg in hands of good players).
Even queens are quite controversial on this list, since they finally found niche as a late anti-mech unit.
Wright, wraith, wriath, wraif wait I'm confused.
He meant playwrights. Those suckers are way imba.
Just kidding, hitthat. You're from Poland, and I'm pretty sure your English is way better than my Polish.
54.5% is better than chess's 55% advantage for white.I think that's good enough.Sucks that P is the worst in individual leagues but I would argue that that is because P is less consistent rather than weaker. One may point to how hard Bisu slumps, but isn't it a bit strange that ALL of the top P have horrendous slumps, while JD/Flash/Fantasy have more modest slumps? I don't think so.
Balance patches is not the right way to go. I think it's best to just admit that three highly asymmetric races cannot be perfectly equal and that we should just take what we have.
Wow, this is the dumbest post I've read in like, two weeks. That's saying something, especially with this floating around. How did you come up with such a bad idea? Did you read any of the following for inspiration:
OR DID YOU EAT SOME WEIRD CHINESE TAKE-OUT AND THIS IS WHAT CAME OUT IN THE TOILET
On January 21 2015 04:53 neobowman wrote: As everyone knows, Brood War hasn't had a balance patch in well over a decade.
Okay.
Despite this, it remains surprisingly balanced at the top level with every race having a good chunk of representation. Still, it's also pretty clear that each race has one slightly favourable matchup and one slightly unfavourable one. Zerg vs. Protoss favours Zerg by about 54.5%, Terran vs. Zerg favours Terran by about 54.5% and Protoss vs. Terran favours Protoss by about 52.5%. Now, these numbers aren't really all that far from 50% which is why Brood War is lauded for its balance but it still makes a difference. This is especially true in individual tournaments where Protoss seem to struggle.
Protoss doesn't struggle in individual tournaments. Look through the defiler tournaments: http://defiler.ru/tourney/ and tell me which race is dramatically favored. Yellow Starleague finals was Breach vs Fold. Yellow Starleague 1 finals had one of each race in the semi-final and one walk-over. ASL1 was a final between WandS and Rush. ASL2 was a final between WandS and NoisE. CrSL1 finals were between jacklinks and PassiOn. CrSL2 finals didn't have a Protoss, boohoo. CrSL3 finals was Castle vs Radley. MaSL1 finals was Favian vs Southpark. MaSL2 finals was Favian vs Cryoc. ISL1 and 2 had icky non-protoss players in the finals. ISL3 had dOTY vs Sziky. TSL1 was won by iefnaij. TSL2 was won by NonY.
Of course,
2012 Tving OSL winner: Jangbi 2011 Jin Air OSL winner: Jangbi
In OSL championship history, there are: 14 Terran champs, 10 Protoss champs, and 9 Zerg champs
The MSL looks bad for Protoss, but really, it mostly shows player dominance. 3 wins for Oov, 3 for Flash, 3 for sAviOr, 2 for Jaedong, 3 for Bisu, and random championships won by other players like Calm.
Clearly, you didn't do any research, but came to some random-ass conclusion that Protoss is faltering in tournaments. Even if Protoss players were unable to win tournaments, you would have to assess whether sociological factors cause stupid people to play Protoss before examining the balance itself. You would have to look at maps. You'd have to look at individual players' playstyles. You would have to examine individual matches. There are a wide variety of factors that go into whether or not there is a balance problem, or a perceived balance problem. If you go "Well, every race should have 50% wins in all match-ups statistically, but they don't hur hur hur hur" and this is known as Gamblers' Fallacy. This logical fallacy states that if you flip a coin, you have a 50% chance of getting heads or tails, but over a long series of coin flips, the exact number of the results may not be 50%. You may notice that perhaps the coin flipped onto tails 54% of the time. Does that mean tails is imbalanced? No, it doesn't. Don't be an idiot and think this.
So hypothetically, if you had control over balance patches, what changes would you make to try and make the game as balanced as possible? Ideally, a balance patch for one matchup should affect a different matchup as little as possible.
If you even made a small change, it would change the way people form strategies. You would be changing the fundamental aspects of how the game works and operates. You can actually make UMS maps to test this out, but you won't get a large number of people as a test pool because generally people don't really give a shit about the 'balance' unless they are raging noobs. For example, I notice that a lot of new Zergs seem to really struggle with ZvP. If you only listened to the nerd-rage of noob-zergs getting stomped, you might conclude that psi storm is imbalanced and 'needs a nerf'.
In Terran vs. Zerg, it seems obvious that if you nerf bio somehow, it wouldn't affect the other matchups.
Deep 6
But at the same time, if you just nerf bio, it could just mean an increase in mech play instead, since mech is relatively viable, even in TvZ. That said, it would be interesting to find out the winrate of Mech TvZ vs. Bio TvZ. Either way, I don't think a bio nerf would do much other than making more players use mech.
This part is really dumb. I can't believe you actually said this public. A "BIO NERF" would make any kind of zergling rush super-powerful, so Terrans would have to over-defend to compensate for this. Since the Zerg knows the Terran is going mech, they have option to double expand, because they can fend off any threat of bunkers with lings, or can double expand into speedling.
Additionally, taking options off the table hurts a race in general. If I said "Zerg can only go mass Queen/Muta from now on in ZvP" then the whole concept of the game being a 'strategy game' sorta becomes voided. In any match-up, players are given many options, and a few different tech trees and/or unit compositions to pursue and eventually transition into a new tech tree to give them further options.
In short, forcing everyone to "go mech" is fucking stupid.
My best idea was a science vessal nerf. My first variant of this idea was to make irradiate cost 100 but I figured that would be way too much of a nerf. I think the best way to balance it would be to increase the time it takes for it to deal all of its damage. According to liquipedia, Irradiate deals 250 damage over 37 in-game seconds. If that was nerfed to, say, 50 seconds, I think it would be significant enough to make a difference, but still leave it as an essential tool to have.
So, seeing the error of your ways, you've decided that perhaps nerfing the infantry themselves isn't the right route. Therefore, you're going to nerf the Terran's primary (actually pretty much only) spellcaster!? Terrans playing strictly bio have a big obstacle to overcome, which is Dark Swarm. Irradiate gives Terran the ability to kill invincible lurkers and the defilers that create this scenario entirely. Changing the time would almost certainly give a huge cushion of time to do whatever. YOU WANNA KNOW WHY? DO YOU? Because a hydra -> lurker morph takes 40 seconds of game-time, which means that if there are two lurkers irradiated, the Zerg can simply morph two lurkers in before the first pair of lurkers is actually killed.
This would obviously also drastically effect the way science vessels are used to deal with mutalisks and guardians. If vessels are nerfed, the Terran is basically forced to invest in wraiths or valkyries, which are practically useless against Zerg unless they are in large numbers with upgrades, and then once they get plagued, it's all ogre.
A third thing would be irradiated ultralisks would be way more powerful post-vessel-nerf. If they attack infantry, the irradiate would deal splash damage to the infantry while allowing the ultralisks to live longer, thus dealing more damage in general. Additionally, if ultralisks are used against mech, irradiating them beforehand will do very little to deplete enough health to make it worth anything.
Therefore, this proposal would actually fuck Terran completely and utterly, and in the most brutal, prison-soap-dropping way.
In Zerg vs. Protoss, the obvious unit to nerf is the hydralisk. It's the unit that Protoss has the most trouble with in the mid-game and it's not really used in the other 2 Zerg Matchups. My first idea here was a simple damage nerf so that instead of 10 base damage, Hydralisks would do 9. Essentially a -1 range attack upgrade. Another idea for the hydralisks would be a health nerf from 80 to 75. This lets dragoons and zealots kill it in one less hit each. An alternative would be a buff to a Protoss unit. Here, the obvious unit to help out is the corsair. A +1 damage buff comes to mind but it's pretty clear that it would be way too much. A health buff from 100 health 80 shields to 120 health 80 shields would mean it would still die to a pair of scourge, but it would be slightly more sturdy against mutalisks and hydralisks. A Psi Storm buff also came to mind but I think that this too would be a bit much. The fact that 1 storm doesn't kill a lurker is key point so any damage buff would be overkill.
I could write a book on how awful these ideas are. This shows a complete lack of understanding about the match-up in general, because if you ask any decent Protoss what they hate about PvZ, they will almost always say "cracklings" or "ultralisks", NOT fucking hydralisks. You have no mid-game as Zerg without hydralisks. You will die. You would have to play on Battle Royale for Zerg to be viable. The only options would be to go mass mutalisk, which almost always is followed by something hydralisk-based, or get lurkers and rush to hive. Again, this takes options off the table for Zerg, which wrecks the match-up entirely.
Protoss vs. Terran is more even than the other two matchups but I still feel some adjustments could be made. The obvious one to mirror my first TvZ idea would be to buff EMP to cost 75 energy instead of 100. I don't think this does much against anything but arbiters and really late game Protoss armies so I think it's reasonable. You can't really buff Tanks, Vultures or Goliaths without having to worry about the TvZ matchup so that's probably a no-go. I know that nobody wants to nerf carriers. I would say get rid of the Arbiter attack but everyone knows it doesn't do shit anyway. Probably the best change to the arbiter would be to increase stasis field cost to 125 but even that might be a bit too much.
These are just my thoughts. I'm sure a lot of these are actually stupid and I'm just being an idiot but what ideas do you guys have for hypothetical balance changes?
The highlighted line is correct. Everything else is wrong. What you don't seem to know is that in maps with wide-open spaces, Protosses have a slight edge in engagements. In maps with narrow chokes, and high-ground/low-ground stuff, Terran has an advantage in engagements. Of course, no matter what the map looks like, if you screw up your game plan, or it gets screwed up by your opponent being talented and skilled, you will have less stuff to throw into the big fight, giving your opponent an upper hand. The same principle applies in every match-up, where the more mobile ground force has the advantage on open maps, the more siege-y ground force has the advantage in confined space maps. I'm speaking rather generally, of course, because besides map types, there are a variety of playstyles that can work against the player or give them a huge advantage.
And I don't get this whole "bio" and "mech" categorizing when it comes to TvZ. You can mix infantry into a late mech army so the upgrades don't go to waste and you can even add vultures into an SK Terran army composition too if you want mines.
It's not so much unit attributes, but more so Terran play styles: positional play style vs multitasking/harassment play style.
Hey man. I appreciate that you took the time to post this. Discussion on these ideas is what I want to encourage. I understand that a lot of my ideas are stupid. I'm by no means anywhere close to good at this game, but that's why I want other people to pitch in with their ideas so people can pool their cool thoughts.
Now, you give a bunch of foreign tournaments as examples. I do think it's relatively well known that protoss is considered a stronger race when not looking at the top Korean scene, which is what I intended to discuss. I'm unfortunately not nearly as well versed in the foreign scene but for this post, I feel it's okay to ignore the less than top level play.
Next, you make the point that MSL has comparatively few protoss players because it was dominated by standouts like the Bonjwas, Bisu and Jaedong. Yet, maybe it's because of racial imbalance that the standout players are of a certain race and not another. Maybe iloveoov would not have experienced the same success he did if he played protoss instead. I don't think you can cherry pick out players who were 'special' from the statistics just because they were mostly of one race. I think the fact that they were mostly one race says something.
Now, I'm not sure what your point is about the gambler's fallacy. The very way we evaluate an individual player's success is through percentages. If a player wins 70 games out of 100, it seems for illogical to conclude that they were lucky rather than they were inherently skillful. If a map has a 70 percent Winrate for one race over another, it seems weird to me that you would conclude that it is simply luck that made it imbalanced that way, and that it will balance out eventually. Let's take a chess analogy. White wins 55 percent of the time, not counting draws. Does this mean that the percent will even out with more samples? I don't think so.
I realize there's no reasonable way to test these suggestions out. But I don't care about that. I just want to encourage an interesting debate about what would potentially be good. I understand that starcraft is a complex interconnected web of stuff, but trying to figure it out is a fun of its own.
I don't think my balance ideas are perfect, but I think you seem to be overblowing their inadequacies. But hey, what do I know? I encourage you to give your own suggestions about the topic. You certainly seem to know of more than me.
Edit: I'm going to address some of the ideas because I want to encourage more discussion and I have nothing better to do.
On January 22 2015 14:41 ninazerg wrote: Deep 6
I didn't take Deep 6 into account because it accounts for less than 1% of all TvP games and is an oddity at best. But it is, indeed, an option. I suppose it would affect TvP somewhat.
This part is really dumb. I can't believe you actually said this public. A "BIO NERF" would make any kind of zergling rush super-powerful, so Terrans would have to over-defend to compensate for this. Since the Zerg knows the Terran is going mech, they have option to double expand, because they can fend off any threat of bunkers with lings, or can double expand into speedling.
Additionally, taking options off the table hurts a race in general. If I said "Zerg can only go mass Queen/Muta from now on in ZvP" then the whole concept of the game being a 'strategy game' sorta becomes voided. In any match-up, players are given many options, and a few different tech trees and/or unit compositions to pursue and eventually transition into a new tech tree to give them further options.
In short, forcing everyone to "go mech" is fucking stupid.
I didn't think about the bio nerf affecting the early game. That's an interesting point. I totally agree with the rest. That's why I moved onto my next idea.
So, seeing the error of your ways, you've decided that perhaps nerfing the infantry themselves isn't the right route. Therefore, you're going to nerf the Terran's primary (actually pretty much only) spellcaster!? Terrans playing strictly bio have a big obstacle to overcome, which is Dark Swarm. Irradiate gives Terran the ability to kill invincible lurkers and the defilers that create this scenario entirely. Changing the time would almost certainly give a huge cushion of time to do whatever. YOU WANNA KNOW WHY? DO YOU? Because a hydra -> lurker morph takes 40 seconds of game-time, which means that if there are two lurkers irradiated, the Zerg can simply morph two lurkers in before the first pair of lurkers is actually killed.
This would obviously also drastically effect the way science vessels are used to deal with mutalisks and guardians. If vessels are nerfed, the Terran is basically forced to invest in wraiths or valkyries, which are practically useless against Zerg unless they are in large numbers with upgrades, and then once they get plagued, it's all ogre.
A third thing would be irradiated ultralisks would be way more powerful post-vessel-nerf. If they attack infantry, the irradiate would deal splash damage to the infantry while allowing the ultralisks to live longer, thus dealing more damage in general. Additionally, if ultralisks are used against mech, irradiating them beforehand will do very little to deplete enough health to make it worth anything.
Therefore, this proposal would actually fuck Terran completely and utterly, and in the most brutal, prison-soap-dropping way.
I never thought about irradiate time being that important. My reasoning was that it still kills defilers in a relatively short time, which should be your primary targets. I didn't think the interval between irradiating lurkers and new lurkers popping up would be so important. That's definitely a good point to bring up. Do you think a different irradiate change would be better or do you think the science vessel should be left untouched?
I could write a book on how awful these ideas are. This shows a complete lack of understanding about the match-up in general, because if you ask any decent Protoss what they hate about PvZ, they will almost always say "cracklings" or "ultralisks", NOT fucking hydralisks. You have no mid-game as Zerg without hydralisks. You will die. You would have to play on Battle Royale for Zerg to be viable. The only options would be to go mass mutalisk, which almost always is followed by something hydralisk-based, or get lurkers and rush to hive. Again, this takes options off the table for Zerg, which wrecks the match-up entirely.
I figured the -1 attack upgrade for Hydralisks or the hp decrease would be a significant enough nerf to affect how Zergs use them, but still leave them as a viable option. Do you have any ideas on how to make the hydralisk change work or should the focus be on some Protoss units and improving them?
The highlighted line is correct. Everything else is wrong. What you don't seem to know is that in maps with wide-open spaces, Protosses have a slight edge in engagements. In maps with narrow chokes, and high-ground/low-ground stuff, Terran has an advantage in engagements. Of course, no matter what the map looks like, if you screw up your game plan, or it gets screwed up by your opponent being talented and skilled, you will have less stuff to throw into the big fight, giving your opponent an upper hand. The same principle applies in every match-up, where the more mobile ground force has the advantage on open maps, the more siege-y ground force has the advantage in confined space maps. I'm speaking rather generally, of course, because besides map types, there are a variety of playstyles that can work against the player or give them a huge advantage.
tl;dr: l2p
I am quite well versed in mapping issues, if I do say so myself. Did you know that small unit paths generally favour Zerg over Terran and Protoss? Did you know that gas geysers positioned at the 12 and 9 o clock locations of the main structure provide the most efficient mining of gas? Less minerals per base also tends to favour Zerg over Terran and Protoss. Small chokes or ramps at a third gas location are favourable for Zerg as well. I digress.
I didn't want to dwell on it too much because, hey, I want to encourage discussion, but I think you should look on how you address people. Believe it or not, I'm a person as well. When you go on rants degrading my intelligence, whether or not I believe it, my feels are hurt. This is not the type of attitude that promotes this amazing Brood War comunity, nor one that encourages newcomers to post about their ideas and thoughts openly on Teamliquid. I mean no ill-intent to you. I think you could be a wonderful person if I met you face to face. Still, I think it would be prudent of you to check how you talk to others, even if it's on a faceless internet discussion board. Be nice and encourage participation.
On January 21 2015 08:06 Bswhunter wrote: Buff / change the underused units, Scouts, ghosts, firebats, wraiths and maybe queens.
firebats are usefull against Zergs, they are specialized and situational, but still used frequently. Wrights? Are you kidding me? Its already one of the most powerfulll unit in TvT, and it has its niche also in TvZ as a hard counter against greater spire builds (plus wrights are already quite effective against Zerg in hands of good players).
Even queens are quite controversial on this list, since they finally found niche as a late anti-mech unit.
Wright, wraith, wriath, wraif wait I'm confused.
He meant playwrights. Those suckers are way imba.
Just kidding, hitthat. You're from Poland, and I'm pretty sure your English is way better than my Polish.
I wouldnt be a true Polish, if I spoken perfect english ;P
On January 22 2015 16:07 neobowman wrote: I didn't want to dwell on it too much because, hey, I want to encourage discussion, but I think you should look on how you address people. Believe it or not, I'm a person as well. When you go on rants degrading my intelligence, whether or not I believe it, my feels are hurt. This is not the type of attitude that promotes this amazing Brood War comunity, nor one that encourages newcomers to post about their ideas and thoughts openly on Teamliquid. I mean no ill-intent to you. I think you could be a wonderful person if I met you face to face. Still, I think it would be prudent of you to check how you talk to others, even if it's on a faceless internet discussion board. Be nice and encourage participation.
Thoroughly agree here.
If folks can't be civil, don't post.
Don't hide behind an online ID and spew ad hominem attacks in ways one wouldn't dare utter to someone in real life. We have a small enough community as it is, let's play nice.
the issue man is that ppl talking about balance on bw is just ppl that don't understand the level of skill involved in actually beeing able to understand/ break the game at a certain match-up
its so much not about balance forget units, forget stats, races
its all about flow and timings its fucking kung fu
I think we should remove arbiters completely and double the supply, resource cost, and build time of carriers. (These units are obviously overpowered and only used in PvT.)
Also, zealots should cost 50 gas, and dark templar should be revealed for 2 seconds after each attack (fade time before becoming invisible again).
The zealot change should only affect PvT because you can forge expand anyway in PvZ, which defends against early ling rushes, and DTs don't alert zerg that drones are dying anyway, so it doesn't really matter whether they're invisible or not. That should bring PvT back to a nice even 50% win ratio without affecting other matchups.
Concerning hallucinated queens and cc — this is not true. I tried this 3 times, twice in a ums map, using my own cc, and once in Resonance II with a neutral cc. Doesn't matter, urs or someone's else the cc is, is it lifted off or not, hallucinated queens do not react, as the real ones should. They don't infest it, they simply can't
On January 22 2015 19:37 Sero wrote: I think we should remove arbiters completely and double the supply, resource cost, and build time of carriers. (These units are obviously overpowered and only used in PvT.)
Also, zealots should cost 50 gas, and dark templar should be revealed for 2 seconds after each attack (fade time before becoming invisible again).
The zealot change should only affect PvT because you can forge expand anyway in PvZ, which defends against early ling rushes, and DTs don't alert zerg that drones are dying anyway, so it doesn't really matter whether they're invisible or not. That should bring PvT back to a nice even 50% win ratio without affecting other matchups.
Legal Lord wrote: I think dragoons should be able to shoot across the entire map as a fair counterbalance to siege tanks.
And more members of the SC2 balance team weigh in.
On January 22 2015 16:07 neobowman wrote: I didn't want to dwell on it too much because, hey, I want to encourage discussion, but I think you should look on how you address people. Believe it or not, I'm a person as well. When you go on rants degrading my intelligence, whether or not I believe it, my feels are hurt. This is not the type of attitude that promotes this amazing Brood War comunity, nor one that encourages newcomers to post about their ideas and thoughts openly on Teamliquid. I mean no ill-intent to you. I think you could be a wonderful person if I met you face to face. Still, I think it would be prudent of you to check how you talk to others, even if it's on a faceless internet discussion board. Be nice and encourage participation.
Thoroughly agree here.
If folks can't be civil, don't post.
Don't hide behind an online ID and spew ad hominem attacks in ways one wouldn't dare utter to someone in real life. We have a small enough community as it is, let's play nice.
+1. NZ's a terrific poster with a lot to say (and I agree with some of her points), but she could've said everything she did without hollering insults every paragraph... and it probably would've come across more logically and succinctly too.
Ranting at someone is not only off-putting and childish, it also makes the community look hostile and non-welcoming to outsiders and new people. BW may be making a mini-comeback, but is it really to the point where you can afford to drive ppl away? I'm guessing no.
OP wrote: My best idea was a science vessel nerf. My first variant of this idea was to make irradiate cost 100 but I figured that would be way too much of a nerf. I think the best way to balance it would be to increase the time it takes for it to deal all of its damage. According to liquipedia, Irradiate deals 250 damage over 37 in-game seconds. If that was nerfed to, say, 50 seconds, I think it would be significant enough to make a difference, but still leave it as an essential tool to have.
On January 22 2015 14:41 ninazerg wrote: So, seeing the error of your ways, you've decided that perhaps nerfing the infantry themselves isn't the right route. Therefore, you're going to nerf the Terran's primary (actually pretty much only) spellcaster!? Terrans playing strictly bio have a big obstacle to overcome, which is Dark Swarm. Irradiate gives Terran the ability to kill invincible lurkers and the defilers that create this scenario entirely. Changing the time would almost certainly give a huge cushion of time to do whatever. YOU WANNA KNOW WHY? DO YOU? Because a hydra -> lurker morph takes 40 seconds of game-time, which means that if there are two lurkers irradiated, the Zerg can simply morph two lurkers in before the first pair of lurkers is actually killed.
Well, don't yell at me, but I'm not following that reasoning.
You seem to be saying irradiate's duration is 37 seconds because it has to be less than the 40 seconds it takes for a lurker morph, otherwise Zerg could replace irradiated lurkers faster than they died to irradiate. Well okay, but the lurker dies long before the irradiate's full 37 seconds... irradiate only has to do about half its total damage to kill a lurker. Irradiate does about 7 damage per second (on normal game speed).
So, what I took the OP to be suggesting was to slow down Irradiate to that it worked at like 5 damage per second (i.e. 250 damage over his suggested 50 seconds). Under that, the lurker would die after about 25 seconds, i.e. still much faster than a lurker morph would take.
That's not to say his idea is a good one, only that that particular reason for not liking it doesn't seem to be accurate... unless I totally misread your point here somehow.
This would obviously also drastically effect the way science vessels are used to deal with mutalisks and guardians. If vessels are nerfed, the Terran is basically forced to invest in wraiths or valkyries, which are practically useless against Zerg unless they are in large numbers with upgrades, and then once they get plagued, it's all ogre.
That seems more an argument to improve wraiths and valks than anything else.
A third thing would be irradiated ultralisks would be way more powerful post-vessel-nerf. If they attack infantry, the irradiate would deal splash damage to the infantry while allowing the ultralisks to live longer, thus dealing more damage in general. Additionally, if ultralisks are used against mech, irradiating them beforehand will do very little to deplete enough health to make it worth anything.
Those are good arguments for not nerfing irradiate in the OP's suggested way.
Therefore, this proposal would actually fuck Terran completely and utterly, and in the most brutal, prison-soap-dropping way.
On January 22 2015 21:51 [[Starlight]] wrote: And more members of the SC2 balance team weigh in.
Not exactly. Have you seen how small the siege tank range for SC2 is? There is something morally wrong with siege tanks that do not shoot across the screen.
Additionally, I think an important balance patch is to make scarabs detonate when they dud.
On January 22 2015 16:07 neobowman wrote: Hey man. I appreciate that you took the time to post this. Discussion on these ideas is what I want to encourage. I understand that a lot of my ideas are stupid. I'm by no means anywhere close to good at this game, but that's why I want other people to pitch in with their ideas so people can pool their cool thoughts.
Hey, I just wanted to say that the tone of my last post was legitimately mean and I would like to apologize to you personally. I'm not gonna sit here and make any excuses for why I was so rude, but I don't know what I was thinking, but it's embarrassing to look at that and go "Wow, I was really rude to this guy."
So I would like to say I'm sorry to you, and everyone who took the time to read that. Additionally, if anyone read through it and thought "Hey, this guy is an idiot! lololol" then I would ask you to kindly give neobowman a chance and hear him out and not be as disrespectful as I was.
On January 22 2015 16:07 neobowman wrote: Hey man. I appreciate that you took the time to post this. Discussion on these ideas is what I want to encourage. I understand that a lot of my ideas are stupid. I'm by no means anywhere close to good at this game, but that's why I want other people to pitch in with their ideas so people can pool their cool thoughts.
Hey, I just wanted to say that the tone of my last post was legitimately mean and I would like to apologize to you personally. I'm not gonna sit here and make any excuses for why I was so rude, but I don't know what I was thinking, but it's embarrassing to look at that and go "Wow, I was really rude to this guy."
So I would like to say I'm sorry to you, and everyone who took the time to read that. Additionally, if anyone read through it and thought "Hey, this guy is an idiot! lololol" then I would ask you to kindly give neobowman a chance and hear him out and not be as disrespectful as I was.
Thanks for taking the time to apologize. It is much appreciated =). I totally get the urge to try and make fun of silly design suggestions, which I'm sure a lot of my ideas are. And a lot of your suggestions are very insightful. Though I wasn't a fan of your tone, you brought a lot to the discussion and I think that's great.
On January 22 2015 21:51 [[Starlight]] wrote: And more members of the SC2 balance team weigh in.
Not exactly. Have you seen how small the siege tank range for SC2 is? There is something morally wrong with siege tanks that do not shoot across the screen.
LOLZ.
Didn't Total Annihilation (or another BW competitor) have a unit like that, i.e. one that could shoot all the way across the entire map?
Yeah... hated that game.
Additionally, I think an important balance patch is to make scarabs detonate when they dud.
That would seem to make sense. Short-bus scarabs (fail scarabs, derp scarabs) should still do something.
Make queens broodling 125 energy, while decreasing its starting energy by 25. And maybe add +1 armor for queen or sth.
Ppl always say, regarding making Queens more useful, "Broodling mana to 125!", but, I dunno. If you did that, then queens with the energy upgrade (& fully charged) could insta-kill two expensive units in the same battle... and queens don't cost that much. So to have a unit that costs no more than a mutalisk insta-kill two siege tanks, two high templar, or two ultras (though ZvZ doesn't often get to Hive tech) in the same battle, that seems a bit too good. I can understand why Bliz set Broodling mana cost to 150, as annoying as it is.
Some ppl might then say, "Well, sci vessels can kill a lot of stuff too, irradiate is pretty imba", but vessels are a much more expensive unit than queens, and irradiate isn't an insta-kill. If you cast irradiate in a non-harass way, i.e. during a battle, the units you cast it on can often still do their thing before dying. Irradiated defilers will likely still get their plagues or swarms off, HTs will still fire off storms before keeling over, etc. Irradiate's great vs low or medium hp non-spellcasters, but it doesn't have the 'boom, you're dead!" insta-kill goodness you get with broodling (though it does have splash).
What queens probably need to get used more often is a more broadly effective and predictable Ensnare spell. Ensnare is actually better than ppl think (especially in combination with lurkers or scourge), but it has weird effects where it seems to act wildly differently on different units in terms of slowing their rate of fire. Which is bad because Ensnare is the queen's make-or-break spell, not only because it costs only 75 mana (potentially 3 castings in the same battle out of the same queen), but because a queen will be able to cast it looooong before it can build up the 150 mana (or even 125 proposed) to cast a broodling. Queens made only to cast broodling would just sit there a long time doing nothing (playing cards, lol) while waiting to become useful.
Queens are cool in one (underappreciated?) way already though... you can do fast aerial scouting with them before any other Zerg unit (they can come out earlier than muta/scourge/fast-lords), which is rather nice if you can't get into the enemy main via ground to see what's up, and your slow-lords have already been chased away by enemy fire.
upmagic, a really unorthodox Terran player used to go bio against Protoss every game. It was really strange because it would actually work half the time. He'd mix in a siege tank or two and a science vessel for EMP's and he'd do a lot of dropship harass. It made for some pretty creative and fun to watch play.
On January 23 2015 07:23 DepressedOne wrote: upmagic, a really unorthodox Terran player used to go bio against Protoss every game. It was really strange because it would actually work half the time. He'd mix in a siege tank or two and a science vessel for EMP's and he'd do a lot of dropship harass. It made for some pretty creative and fun to watch play.
That's a huge exaggeration. He may have gone bio more often but it was still pretty rare. No Terran could go bio against an equal level Protoss more than few games in a row before getting hard countered. Bio is easy to scout and easy to counter, but also highly effective when used at the right time - exactly why it's the niche change of pace strategy / cheese it is.
On January 22 2015 21:51 [[Starlight]] wrote: And more members of the SC2 balance team weigh in.
Not exactly. Have you seen how small the siege tank range for SC2 is? There is something morally wrong with siege tanks that do not shoot across the screen.
LOLZ.
Didn't Total Annihilation (or another BW competitor) have a unit like that, i.e. one that could shoot all the way across the entire map?
Yeah... hated that game.
I actually really like TA. The long-range plasma cannon in TA can shoot pretty far, but if you're on a large enough map, it probably won't reach all the way across because the Core's LRPC shoots 10 screens and the Arm's shoots 8 screens. The 'rapid-fire' versions have shorter ranges, but they make attacking virtually impossible on the ground, because they'll take out a Krogoth in like 10 seconds. The nuclear missiles can hit anywhere, but they can't lock-on and there is a defense for them.
In SupCom, the UEF has an artillery gun that can hit ANYWHERE, so if you don't have shields up everywhere, you're basically screwed, and even then, keeping your shields up is tenuous at best.
On January 22 2015 16:07 neobowman wrote: Hey man. I appreciate that you took the time to post this. Discussion on these ideas is what I want to encourage. I understand that a lot of my ideas are stupid. I'm by no means anywhere close to good at this game, but that's why I want other people to pitch in with their ideas so people can pool their cool thoughts.
Hey, I just wanted to say that the tone of my last post was legitimately mean and I would like to apologize to you personally. I'm not gonna sit here and make any excuses for why I was so rude, but I don't know what I was thinking, but it's embarrassing to look at that and go "Wow, I was really rude to this guy."
So I would like to say I'm sorry to you, and everyone who took the time to read that. Additionally, if anyone read through it and thought "Hey, this guy is an idiot! lololol" then I would ask you to kindly give neobowman a chance and hear him out and not be as disrespectful as I was.
Thanks for taking the time to apologize. It is much appreciated =). I totally get the urge to try and make fun of silly design suggestions, which I'm sure a lot of my ideas are. And a lot of your suggestions are very insightful. Though I wasn't a fan of your tone, you brought a lot to the discussion and I think that's great.
I'm glad you accepted my apology, but I still feel bad and I would like to make it up to you somehow.
On January 22 2015 16:07 neobowman wrote: Hey man. I appreciate that you took the time to post this. Discussion on these ideas is what I want to encourage. I understand that a lot of my ideas are stupid. I'm by no means anywhere close to good at this game, but that's why I want other people to pitch in with their ideas so people can pool their cool thoughts.
Hey, I just wanted to say that the tone of my last post was legitimately mean and I would like to apologize to you personally. I'm not gonna sit here and make any excuses for why I was so rude, but I don't know what I was thinking, but it's embarrassing to look at that and go "Wow, I was really rude to this guy."
So I would like to say I'm sorry to you, and everyone who took the time to read that. Additionally, if anyone read through it and thought "Hey, this guy is an idiot! lololol" then I would ask you to kindly give neobowman a chance and hear him out and not be as disrespectful as I was.
Thanks for taking the time to apologize. It is much appreciated =). I totally get the urge to try and make fun of silly design suggestions, which I'm sure a lot of my ideas are. And a lot of your suggestions are very insightful. Though I wasn't a fan of your tone, you brought a lot to the discussion and I think that's great.
I'm glad you accepted my apology, but I still feel bad and I would like to make it up to you somehow.
No worries man. Just keep in mind to be considerate when posting and all is cool =).
On January 22 2015 21:51 [[Starlight]] wrote: And more members of the SC2 balance team weigh in.
Not exactly. Have you seen how small the siege tank range for SC2 is? There is something morally wrong with siege tanks that do not shoot across the screen.
LOLZ.
Didn't Total Annihilation (or another BW competitor) have a unit like that, i.e. one that could shoot all the way across the entire map?
Yeah... hated that game.
I actually really like TA. The long-range plasma cannon in TA can shoot pretty far, but if you're on a large enough map, it probably won't reach all the way across because the Core's LRPC shoots 10 screens and the Arm's shoots 8 screens. The 'rapid-fire' versions have shorter ranges, but they make attacking virtually impossible on the ground, because they'll take out a Krogoth in like 10 seconds. The nuclear missiles can hit anywhere, but they can't lock-on and there is a defense for them.
In SupCom, the UEF has an artillery gun that can hit ANYWHERE, so if you don't have shields up everywhere, you're basically screwed, and even then, keeping your shields up is tenuous at best.
TA always felt more like a technology-demonstrator (circa 1997) than a fully-realized game. I mean, Unit of the Week™? Yeah, that's gonna lead to some really great balancing, lol. And they went 3D too early, so a lot of units looked like a pair of polygons shooting at another pair of polygons. There were a few cool things in it, but I never could warm up to it overall.
BW smacks TA's ass, gives it a c-note, and tells it go buy itself something pretty.
On January 22 2015 16:07 neobowman wrote: Hey man. I appreciate that you took the time to post this. Discussion on these ideas is what I want to encourage. I understand that a lot of my ideas are stupid. I'm by no means anywhere close to good at this game, but that's why I want other people to pitch in with their ideas so people can pool their cool thoughts.
Hey, I just wanted to say that the tone of my last post was legitimately mean and I would like to apologize to you personally. I'm not gonna sit here and make any excuses for why I was so rude, but I don't know what I was thinking, but it's embarrassing to look at that and go "Wow, I was really rude to this guy."
So I would like to say I'm sorry to you, and everyone who took the time to read that. Additionally, if anyone read through it and thought "Hey, this guy is an idiot! lololol" then I would ask you to kindly give neobowman a chance and hear him out and not be as disrespectful as I was.
Thanks for taking the time to apologize. It is much appreciated =). I totally get the urge to try and make fun of silly design suggestions, which I'm sure a lot of my ideas are. And a lot of your suggestions are very insightful. Though I wasn't a fan of your tone, you brought a lot to the discussion and I think that's great.
I'm glad you accepted my apology, but I still feel bad and I would like to make it up to you somehow.
Props to you on saying that to the OP. There are many twits on the 'net who aren't man/woman enough to admit when they've crossed the line and apologize. It's good that you're not one of those.
Protoss doesn't struggle in individual tournaments. Look through the defiler tournaments: http://defiler.ru/tourney/ and tell me which race is dramatically favored.
first argument I read, first thing you basically just left here and hoped nobody would check I assume. Zerg is horribly favoured in there and it's not really a secret. The Top 10 basically features only Zerg and Terran. Protoss comes in at rank 14-16. Yet, there's Lancerx, who basically only one won gold in an international (Defiler) tournament. Then it's Dewalt (argueably the best PvZ foreign player in this time) and Tama next. One P isn't in, cause hack. Whaaaat. I mean it's pretty common knowledge that the past three or four years in foreign bw were ruled by Zerg.
It's not argument in favour of balance changes or anything, but... you're just being silly here and you probably knew while typing.
Protoss doesn't struggle in individual tournaments. Look through the defiler tournaments: http://defiler.ru/tourney/ and tell me which race is dramatically favored.
first argument I read, first thing you basically just left here and hoped nobody would check I assume. Zerg is horribly favoured in there and it's not really a secret. The Top 10 basically features only Zerg and Terran. Protoss comes in at rank 14-16. Yet, there's Lancerx, who basically only one won gold in an international (Defiler) tournament. Then it's Dewalt (argueably the best PvZ foreign player in this time) and Tama next. One P isn't in, cause hack. Whaaaat. I mean it's pretty common knowledge that the past three or four years in foreign bw were ruled by Zerg.
It's not argument in favour of balance changes or anything, but... you're just being silly here and you probably knew while typing.
I think the results are kind of skewed because Sziky and Scan have won so many tours. I really don't think their wins are a matter of imbalance, but just shows how talented they are. But I meant all the tours on the list, not just the main ones.
On January 23 2015 07:23 DepressedOne wrote: upmagic, a really unorthodox Terran player used to go bio against Protoss every game. It was really strange because it would actually work half the time. He'd mix in a siege tank or two and a science vessel for EMP's and he'd do a lot of dropship harass. It made for some pretty creative and fun to watch play.
Going through TLPD and scrolling through vods for like 2 minutes would be enough to show that you're really, really wrong. I'm not even going to because I've watched enough of Upmagic's games to know that he did not go bio against Protoss every game. It was a small minority.
Protoss doesn't struggle in individual tournaments. Look through the defiler tournaments: http://defiler.ru/tourney/ and tell me which race is dramatically favored.
first argument I read, first thing you basically just left here and hoped nobody would check I assume. Zerg is horribly favoured in there and it's not really a secret. The Top 10 basically features only Zerg and Terran. Protoss comes in at rank 14-16. Yet, there's Lancerx, who basically only one won gold in an international (Defiler) tournament. Then it's Dewalt (argueably the best PvZ foreign player in this time) and Tama next. One P isn't in, cause hack. Whaaaat. I mean it's pretty common knowledge that the past three or four years in foreign bw were ruled by Zerg.
It's not argument in favour of balance changes or anything, but... you're just being silly here and you probably knew while typing.
I think the results are kind of skewed because Sziky and Scan have won so many tours. I really don't think their wins are a matter of imbalance, but just shows how talented they are. But I meant all the tours on the list, not just the main ones.
I think people need to stop considering 50:50 win-rate as the true measure of whether the game is balanced or not.
All of the beautiful things in this world (including BW) exist as the result of imbalance. If everything was perfectly balanced, then not much would happen...for instance, if blood pressure values in your body were equal everywhere, there would be no blood flow. There is a reason coin flipping is not played as a professional sport, precisely because it is so perfectly balanced and player skill has no determination on outcome.
For BW to function as a 'balanced' competitive game there needs to exist a state that for any strategy, given both players of an equal skill level, there is a valid counter-strategy that can be executed to win. The success rate of the individual strategy does not have to be 50%. All that needs to be 50% is the total sum of wins if all possible strategy selections from player A were pitted against all possible strategy selections from player B. In fact, individual strategies that have a success rate of 50% are bad because choosing them is tantamount to flipping a coin. If all individual strategies had a 50% to succeed, the meta-game would be non-existent.
I will define strategy as including (but not limited to) the following: build order, economic management, unit selection, unit tactics and most importantly player skill. Note that this definition accounts for how differences in player skill will have a direct impact on the likely-hood that any given strategy will succeed. Hence, better-skilled players are able to choose from a wider variety of strategies and are more capable of making those strategies work against their opponents (better micro, mechanics etc.).
Taking this to its logical conclusion, a skilled player (let's call him Bob) will theoretically defeat a lesser skilled opponent more than 50% of the time if we randomly pitted all of his strategies against all of his opponents strategies, which is exactly what you want in a competitive game. Using proper application of strategy selection against his opponent (ie. applying meta-game), Bob could boost his win chances towards 100% by selecting only those strategies which will always beat his opponent: For example, if his opponent was an ultra-newbie, 4-pooling could be considered a 100% successful strategy (ie. it will win no matter what his opponent chooses to do, because his opponent lacks to skill to execute a strategy that beats the 4-pool).
If Bob were to play some one of equal skill, only then would you want to see win-rates approach 50% when strategies from both players were randomly selected and pitted against one another. This can lead to development of an interesting and dynamic meta-game, where for instance an individual strategy in Bob's repertoire may win against 80% of his opponents strategies (let's call this strategy X). If Bob applies meta-game correctly whereas his opponent only randomly selects strategies, then Bob can actually boost his win% to 80% by always choosing strategy X. However, if Bob's opponent also starts to apply meta-game, they will predict Bob using strategy X often, and will exploit this knowledge by carefully selecting from the 20% of strategies that counter X. Bob will realize he is being exploited, and will use strategy X less often. The net effect will be to bring the win-rates back down to 50:50.
The alternative to an exciting meta-game featuring seemingly imbalanced strategies such as X is to have a dull and boring 50% win-rate for Bob and his opponent, where meta-game is essentially non-existent because all strategies are only 50% to succeed against all other strategies. This might be because the game was designed with lots of hard counters which mitigate the potential for player skill to make a difference. Here, what Bob and his opponent may as well do is engage in a professional game of coin flipping.
Finally, if Bob were to play some one of significantly greater skill, you would want to see his win-rate decline below 50% when all of his strategies are randomly selected and pitted against his opponent. With proper application of meta-game, Bob's win rate should approach 0% regardless of what Bob chooses to do, as his opponent carefully selects only those strategies that defeat Bob regardless of what Bob does. For instance, if Bob played Flash, Flash would choose safe openers which carry him into the mid- and late- game, allowing his mechanics to shine and ultimately crush Bob regardless of what Bob chooses to do. Flash could choose to be risky and open double CC first, but why should he open himself to unnecessary risk? Bob might 4-pool and win.
tl:dr: Assymetry is GOOD. Balance whiners may as well sit on a see-saw with some one of equal weight and bet on coin flips.
On January 23 2015 16:56 SnowFantasy wrote: Yeah but is Scan really a foreigner? Let's discuss that.
If you buff the Koreans it will result in imbalance imo.
Balance should be a 50 percent chance that one player will win, disregarding individual skill and other factors outside of gameplay of course. However, for fun I'd like to do ay of these to Terran. Cause Terran op.
-Remove repair imba by allowing damaged stuff to be repaired to only to 75% of the original HP or just slow down repair rate.
-Vultures to 100 mineral cost or even 125. Zealots cost more than a vulture and yet vults can kill ultras even without being there.
Imagine a shopping network show. "Guys, if you call now you can get the amazing vulture for ONLY 75 minerals, buuUUT wait! There's more! If you add 100 minerals and 100 gas, you will get not 1, not 2, but 3 mini-nukes for absolutely free!
I think they should give Terran a nuclear silo as soon as there 3rd Command Center finishes in TvP, because that is a milestone for any Foreign Terran.
On January 23 2015 19:21 LilClinkin wrote: Finally, if Bob were to play some one of significantly greater skill, you would want to see his win-rate decline below 50% when all of his strategies are randomly selected and pitted against his opponent. With proper application of meta-game, Bob's win rate should approach 0% regardless of what Bob chooses to do, as his opponent carefully selects only those strategies that defeat Bob regardless of what Bob does. For instance, if Bob played Flash, Flash would choose safe openers which carry him into the mid- and late- game, allowing his mechanics to shine and ultimately crush Bob regardless of what Bob chooses to do. Flash could choose to be risky and open double CC first, but why should he open himself to unnecessary risk? Bob might 4-pool and win.
tl:dr: Assymetry is GOOD. Balance whiners may as well sit on a see-saw with some one of equal weight and bet on coin flips.
This argument seems to be arguing for individual winrates, if I am understanding it correctly. I think everyone would agree that letting an individual influence their winrate is a good thing. What I'm arguing against is a racial imbalance for everyone. We can take it to the logical extreme by supposing that Zergs lose 90% of the time against Terran. In that situation, a skilled Zerg player could win, say, 15% of their games while an unskilled would win 5%. That doesn't seem to be a situation where the better player wins. Once both races are evenly matched, that's when player skill can actually show.
On January 23 2015 19:21 LilClinkin wrote: For BW to function as a 'balanced' competitive game there needs to exist a state that for any strategy, given both players of an equal skill level, there is a valid counter-strategy that can be executed to win. The success rate of the individual strategy does not have to be 50%. All that needs to be 50% is the total sum of wins if all possible strategy selections from player A were pitted against all possible strategy selections from player B. In fact, individual strategies that have a success rate of 50% are bad because choosing them is tantamount to flipping a coin. If all individual strategies had a 50% to succeed, the meta-game would be non-existent.
I kind of take issue with the "equal skill" phrase because no two people are equal in skill. Even if their measure of skill is an approximation, one player is still going to have something the other does not.
Protoss doesn't struggle in individual tournaments. Look through the defiler tournaments: http://defiler.ru/tourney/ and tell me which race is dramatically favored.
first argument I read, first thing you basically just left here and hoped nobody would check I assume. Zerg is horribly favoured in there and it's not really a secret. The Top 10 basically features only Zerg and Terran. Protoss comes in at rank 14-16. Yet, there's Lancerx, who basically only one won gold in an international (Defiler) tournament. Then it's Dewalt (argueably the best PvZ foreign player in this time) and Tama next. One P isn't in, cause hack. Whaaaat. I mean it's pretty common knowledge that the past three or four years in foreign bw were ruled by Zerg.
It's not argument in favour of balance changes or anything, but... you're just being silly here and you probably knew while typing.
I think the results are kind of skewed because Sziky and Scan have won so many tours. I really don't think their wins are a matter of imbalance, but just shows how talented they are. But I meant all the tours on the list, not just the main ones.
And it still doesn't change that the next 10 players after them do not play Protoss as well and are mostly Zerg. It doesn't change the fact that you tried to give data as proof for something that isn't anywhere close to what you tried to say.
On January 22 2015 16:07 neobowman wrote: Hey man. I appreciate that you took the time to post this. Discussion on these ideas is what I want to encourage. I understand that a lot of my ideas are stupid. I'm by no means anywhere close to good at this game, but that's why I want other people to pitch in with their ideas so people can pool their cool thoughts.
Hey, I just wanted to say that the tone of my last post was legitimately mean and I would like to apologize to you personally. I'm not gonna sit here and make any excuses for why I was so rude, but I don't know what I was thinking, but it's embarrassing to look at that and go "Wow, I was really rude to this guy."
So I would like to say I'm sorry to you, and everyone who took the time to read that. Additionally, if anyone read through it and thought "Hey, this guy is an idiot! lololol" then I would ask you to kindly give neobowman a chance and hear him out and not be as disrespectful as I was.
On January 24 2015 03:29 Xyik wrote: I think they should buff Scout ground damage, lower Scout build time and decrease Mind Control cost.
Buffing Scout ground damage some makes sense.
Doing that AND lowering Scout build time could be problematical. At what point does a buffed ground damage 'scout rush' start to be a problem/borderline OP? I could see T having problems dealing with it potentially.
Decrease Mind Control cost? Urk. If you had it at 125 or 100 mana, then a single Dark Archon could potentially Mind Control TWO capital ships or ultras one right after the other. So, 4 BCs or Carriers or Ultras are incoming... no prob, just MC two of 'em, and have them fight the other 2. One Dark Archon completely halts a 4 BC or Carrier or Ultra attack all by itself. Seems a bit too good.
If you wanted more MC, maybe something like having it not drain the DA's shields would be a better way to go, IMO.
On January 24 2015 03:29 Xyik wrote: I think they should buff Scout ground damage, lower Scout build time and decrease Mind Control cost.
Buffing Scout ground damage some makes sense.
Doing that AND lowering Scout build time could be problematical. At what point does a buffed ground damage 'scout rush' start to be a problem/borderline OP? I could see T having problems dealing with it.
From my experience: you are right. terran would have trouble with early scouts.
On January 23 2015 19:21 LilClinkin wrote: For BW to function as a 'balanced' competitive game there needs to exist a state that for any strategy, given both players of an equal skill level, there is a valid counter-strategy that can be executed to win. The success rate of the individual strategy does not have to be 50%. All that needs to be 50% is the total sum of wins if all possible strategy selections from player A were pitted against all possible strategy selections from player B. In fact, individual strategies that have a success rate of 50% are bad because choosing them is tantamount to flipping a coin. If all individual strategies had a 50% to succeed, the meta-game would be non-existent.
I kind of take issue with the "equal skill" phrase because no two people are equal in skill. Even if their measure of skill is an approximation, one player is still going to have something the other does not.
Indeed! "Skill" is not well-defined.
Rather than "skill" what each player has is a skill profile---a combination of specific skills. Broadly, you might say that a player has macro skills and micro skills, but even that's not specific enough. There are many different specific micro skills. The same goes for macro. For example, compare Bisu and Stork. Stork was better at carrier micro but Bisu was better at probe micro. What this means is that the skill profiles of most players cannot be ranked against each other!!! In order to say that Player A is more skilled than Player B, it must be the case that A must be better in every skill dimension than B is. Chew on that for a second.
In fact there is no single number that captures the overall skill of a player. The number that comes closest is winning percentage. Being good at a skill that does not contribute much to winning should be less important than being good at a skill that does contribute a lot to winning. That relationship between a specific skill and winning percentage is determined by the game.
However, given any Player A, I can always find at least one player who has equal skill: himself! Suppose that we "balanced" the game so that two players of equal skill would have equal chances of winning any match up. This means that Bisu's Protoss versus Bisu's Terran should be a coin flip if equal effort were expended. I do not want such a game. I imagine that most fans of the pro scene do not either.
It is often said that, at the pro level (after an honest and strong effort to design maps that balance win rates), P slightly counters T, T slightly counters Z, and Z slightly counters P. However, this isn't true for everyone and this isn't true for every game.
The Korean casters often mention what is called "인간상성" as an element that makes the game more exciting. It is roughly translated as "human hard counter". Because of a particular skill profile possessed by Player A, he might be very good against Player B. Pure was bad vs Bisu, but great against Stork. Jaedong was the most successful ZvZ player by far, but he suffered in matchups against Hydra. Soulkey was way better against Fantasy than he was against other top Terrans.
I imagine that most complaints about skill being unfairly rewarded mean that too much of the complainer's pride is tied up in the game. Heck, even if someone wins more games by switching races, that just means that the person's specific combination of skills was better suited for another race.
Could the game be improved? Yes. That's true of pretty much any game. Is it already the best RTS game in the history of gaming? Yes. Do we want to risk breaking it? Hell, no.
On January 24 2015 03:29 Xyik wrote: I think they should buff Scout ground damage, lower Scout build time and decrease Mind Control cost.
Buffing Scout ground damage some makes sense.
Doing that AND lowering Scout build time could be problematical. At what point does a buffed ground damage 'scout rush' start to be a problem/borderline OP? I could see T having problems dealing with it.
From my experience: you are right. terran would have trouble with early scouts.
On the plus side... the Stove build just got a little more viable
Protoss doesn't struggle in individual tournaments. Look through the defiler tournaments: http://defiler.ru/tourney/ and tell me which race is dramatically favored.
first argument I read, first thing you basically just left here and hoped nobody would check I assume. Zerg is horribly favoured in there and it's not really a secret. The Top 10 basically features only Zerg and Terran. Protoss comes in at rank 14-16. Yet, there's Lancerx, who basically only one won gold in an international (Defiler) tournament. Then it's Dewalt (argueably the best PvZ foreign player in this time) and Tama next. One P isn't in, cause hack. Whaaaat. I mean it's pretty common knowledge that the past three or four years in foreign bw were ruled by Zerg.
It's not argument in favour of balance changes or anything, but... you're just being silly here and you probably knew while typing.
I think the results are kind of skewed because Sziky and Scan have won so many tours. I really don't think their wins are a matter of imbalance, but just shows how talented they are. But I meant all the tours on the list, not just the main ones.
And it still doesn't change that the next 10 players after them do not play Protoss as well and are mostly Zerg. It doesn't change the fact that you tried to give data as proof for something that isn't anywhere close to what you tried to say.
List starts from Defiler Tour #5, includes Defi tours, KidCa tours, gaz tours, and other minor tournaments. Winners, by race: Zerg - 86 Protoss - 44 Terran - 59
Average: 63 per race Zerg wins without Sziky and Trutacz: 50 Zerg wins without Sziky: 61 Average wins-per-race without Sziky: 51
Zerg win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 44% Protoss win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 24% Terran win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 32%
Zerg win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 33% Protoss win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 29% Terran win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 38%
Protoss doesn't struggle in individual tournaments. Look through the defiler tournaments: http://defiler.ru/tourney/ and tell me which race is dramatically favored.
first argument I read, first thing you basically just left here and hoped nobody would check I assume. Zerg is horribly favoured in there and it's not really a secret. The Top 10 basically features only Zerg and Terran. Protoss comes in at rank 14-16. Yet, there's Lancerx, who basically only one won gold in an international (Defiler) tournament. Then it's Dewalt (argueably the best PvZ foreign player in this time) and Tama next. One P isn't in, cause hack. Whaaaat. I mean it's pretty common knowledge that the past three or four years in foreign bw were ruled by Zerg.
It's not argument in favour of balance changes or anything, but... you're just being silly here and you probably knew while typing.
I think the results are kind of skewed because Sziky and Scan have won so many tours. I really don't think their wins are a matter of imbalance, but just shows how talented they are. But I meant all the tours on the list, not just the main ones.
And it still doesn't change that the next 10 players after them do not play Protoss as well and are mostly Zerg. It doesn't change the fact that you tried to give data as proof for something that isn't anywhere close to what you tried to say.
List starts from Defiler Tour #5, includes Defi tours, KidCa tours, gaz tours, and other minor tournaments. Winners, by race: Zerg - 86 Protoss - 44 Terran - 59
Average: 63 per race Zerg wins without Sziky and Trutacz: 50 Zerg wins without Sziky: 61 Average wins-per-race without Sziky: 51
Zerg win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 44% Protoss win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 24% Terran win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 32%
Zerg win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 33% Protoss win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 29% Terran win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 38%
And what's the point now, you basically take away players without justification - or because they are "more talented" - to make your point? It's a fact that foreign BW has a Zerg problem. Actually, we also have a Terran problem according to your logic, because we'd have to erase Gargoyle (won too much), Heme (too talented) and we'd all be like shieeet.
Protoss doesn't struggle in individual tournaments. Look through the defiler tournaments: http://defiler.ru/tourney/ and tell me which race is dramatically favored.
first argument I read, first thing you basically just left here and hoped nobody would check I assume. Zerg is horribly favoured in there and it's not really a secret. The Top 10 basically features only Zerg and Terran. Protoss comes in at rank 14-16. Yet, there's Lancerx, who basically only one won gold in an international (Defiler) tournament. Then it's Dewalt (argueably the best PvZ foreign player in this time) and Tama next. One P isn't in, cause hack. Whaaaat. I mean it's pretty common knowledge that the past three or four years in foreign bw were ruled by Zerg.
It's not argument in favour of balance changes or anything, but... you're just being silly here and you probably knew while typing.
I think the results are kind of skewed because Sziky and Scan have won so many tours. I really don't think their wins are a matter of imbalance, but just shows how talented they are. But I meant all the tours on the list, not just the main ones.
And it still doesn't change that the next 10 players after them do not play Protoss as well and are mostly Zerg. It doesn't change the fact that you tried to give data as proof for something that isn't anywhere close to what you tried to say.
List starts from Defiler Tour #5, includes Defi tours, KidCa tours, gaz tours, and other minor tournaments. Winners, by race: Zerg - 86 Protoss - 44 Terran - 59
Average: 63 per race Zerg wins without Sziky and Trutacz: 50 Zerg wins without Sziky: 61 Average wins-per-race without Sziky: 51
Zerg win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 44% Protoss win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 24% Terran win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 32%
Zerg win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 33% Protoss win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 29% Terran win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 38%
And what's the point now, you basically take away players without justification - or because they are "more talented" - to make your point? It's a fact that foreign BW has a Zerg problem. Actually, we also have a Terran problem according to your logic, because we'd have to erase Gargoyle (won too much), Heme (too talented) and we'd all be like shieeet.
Well, since you've told me on many, many occasions how much you 'hate' Zerg, I find it rather unsurprising that you would take this position. All I'm showing here is that percentages are skewed in favor of Zerg because of a couple of players. If there were 10 tours, and 6 of them were won by Zerg, and each was a different individual player, I would agree with you, but unfortunately for you, this is not the case.
Protoss doesn't struggle in individual tournaments. Look through the defiler tournaments: http://defiler.ru/tourney/ and tell me which race is dramatically favored.
first argument I read, first thing you basically just left here and hoped nobody would check I assume. Zerg is horribly favoured in there and it's not really a secret. The Top 10 basically features only Zerg and Terran. Protoss comes in at rank 14-16. Yet, there's Lancerx, who basically only one won gold in an international (Defiler) tournament. Then it's Dewalt (argueably the best PvZ foreign player in this time) and Tama next. One P isn't in, cause hack. Whaaaat. I mean it's pretty common knowledge that the past three or four years in foreign bw were ruled by Zerg.
It's not argument in favour of balance changes or anything, but... you're just being silly here and you probably knew while typing.
I think the results are kind of skewed because Sziky and Scan have won so many tours. I really don't think their wins are a matter of imbalance, but just shows how talented they are. But I meant all the tours on the list, not just the main ones.
And it still doesn't change that the next 10 players after them do not play Protoss as well and are mostly Zerg. It doesn't change the fact that you tried to give data as proof for something that isn't anywhere close to what you tried to say.
List starts from Defiler Tour #5, includes Defi tours, KidCa tours, gaz tours, and other minor tournaments. Winners, by race: Zerg - 86 Protoss - 44 Terran - 59
Average: 63 per race Zerg wins without Sziky and Trutacz: 50 Zerg wins without Sziky: 61 Average wins-per-race without Sziky: 51
Zerg win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 44% Protoss win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 24% Terran win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 32%
Zerg win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 33% Protoss win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 29% Terran win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 38%
And what's the point now, you basically take away players without justification - or because they are "more talented" - to make your point? It's a fact that foreign BW has a Zerg problem. Actually, we also have a Terran problem according to your logic, because we'd have to erase Gargoyle (won too much), Heme (too talented) and we'd all be like shieeet.
Well, since you've told me on many, many occasions how much you 'hate' Zerg, I find it rather unsurprising that you would take this position. All I'm showing here is that percentages are skewed in favor of Zerg because of a couple of players. If there were 10 tours, and 6 of them were won by Zerg, and each was a different individual player, I would agree with you, but unfortunately for you, this is not the case.
And you're trying to make up numbers to make a case for ... not sure for what exactly. I never said anywhere that the foreign Zerg would be undeserved winners - especially not Sziky or trutaCz given how many games they played. I simply stated that foreign winners tend to be Zerg heavy. In the first post I quoted you made it sound as if this was not the case, then in the second to last post you dig out numbers that say exactly the opposite, but exclude two players randomly, because "they're just more talented" (which I still do not dispute). There are way, way more flaws in the statistics you did, e.g. that half of your numbers are wrong by 2% due to a typo, I assume, or that you count Scan as Scan and therefore Terran, when he half assed off raced in half of the tours, or that there are tours where only a handful of top tier players registered are compared to the MMM Tours, or that you say tour wins equal finishes by race. Disregard all that. Actually: LOOK AT ALL THE DEFILER TOURNAMENTS. NO WAIT I DIDNT SAY THAT, I SAID LOOK AT EVERY TOUR BUT DO NOT LOOK AT DEFILER EXCLUSIVELY. AND THEN DONT E V E R LOOK AT SZIKY. OR TRUTACZ [who doesn't matter stats wise for the defiler circuit with actual promotion and all]. Whatever.
Yes, I do loathe playing Zerg and I could puke every time I see Zerglings running through a wall on a map I rarely play, 'cause it feels like wasted time. <insert more examples that are annoying, e.g. random Hydra busts you missed to scout, cause Probe said no, I be seing this wall now and then scout inside of Zergling stomach hehehe>. Yet, I do not claim the game is imbalanced. My statement was: foreign Zerg win more. As to why, no idea. Probably it all boils down to some unobserved things, e.g. Zerg being able to play more effectively in the same time span than Protoss or Protoss more than Terran (which would explain why there are less top level Terrans than Toss in return). Just a thought, no proof, no indication. To elaborate, play ten ZvZs and try to play ten TvTs, then tell me who can train more with a limited amount of time outside of a professional scene.
Protoss doesn't struggle in individual tournaments. Look through the defiler tournaments: http://defiler.ru/tourney/ and tell me which race is dramatically favored.
first argument I read, first thing you basically just left here and hoped nobody would check I assume. Zerg is horribly favoured in there and it's not really a secret. The Top 10 basically features only Zerg and Terran. Protoss comes in at rank 14-16. Yet, there's Lancerx, who basically only one won gold in an international (Defiler) tournament. Then it's Dewalt (argueably the best PvZ foreign player in this time) and Tama next. One P isn't in, cause hack. Whaaaat. I mean it's pretty common knowledge that the past three or four years in foreign bw were ruled by Zerg.
It's not argument in favour of balance changes or anything, but... you're just being silly here and you probably knew while typing.
I think the results are kind of skewed because Sziky and Scan have won so many tours. I really don't think their wins are a matter of imbalance, but just shows how talented they are. But I meant all the tours on the list, not just the main ones.
And it still doesn't change that the next 10 players after them do not play Protoss as well and are mostly Zerg. It doesn't change the fact that you tried to give data as proof for something that isn't anywhere close to what you tried to say.
List starts from Defiler Tour #5, includes Defi tours, KidCa tours, gaz tours, and other minor tournaments. Winners, by race: Zerg - 86 Protoss - 44 Terran - 59
Average: 63 per race Zerg wins without Sziky and Trutacz: 50 Zerg wins without Sziky: 61 Average wins-per-race without Sziky: 51
Zerg win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 44% Protoss win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 24% Terran win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 32%
Zerg win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 33% Protoss win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 29% Terran win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 38%
And what's the point now, you basically take away players without justification - or because they are "more talented" - to make your point? It's a fact that foreign BW has a Zerg problem. Actually, we also have a Terran problem according to your logic, because we'd have to erase Gargoyle (won too much), Heme (too talented) and we'd all be like shieeet.
Well, since you've told me on many, many occasions how much you 'hate' Zerg, I find it rather unsurprising that you would take this position. All I'm showing here is that percentages are skewed in favor of Zerg because of a couple of players. If there were 10 tours, and 6 of them were won by Zerg, and each was a different individual player, I would agree with you, but unfortunately for you, this is not the case.
Yes, I do loathe playing Zerg and I could puke every time I see Zerglings running through a wall on a map I rarely play, 'cause it feels like wasted time. <insert more examples that are annoying, e.g. random Hydra busts you missed to scout, cause Probe said no, I be seing this wall now and then scout inside of Zergling stomach hehehe>. Yet, I do not claim the game is imbalanced. My statement was: foreign Zerg win more. As to why, no idea. Probably it all boils down to some unobserved things, e.g. Zerg being able to play more effectively in the same time span than Protoss or Protoss more than Terran (which would explain why there are less top level Terrans than Toss in return). Just a thought, no proof, no indication. To elaborate, play ten ZvZs and try to play ten TvTs, then tell me who can train more with a limited amount of time outside of a professional scene.
That doesn't account for why Protoss was domianting the foreign scene in 2007 - 2010 My hypothesis is that the current state of the game favours Zerg at our skill level, and in the past, the state of the game favoured Protoss at the current foreign skill level.
tbh, I'm not really sure what this latest argument is about. The orginal quote was responding to a perceived imbalance for Protoss. While a specific piece of evidence may be in question, it seems both nina and Gecko think there is no true racial imbalance in SCBW.
Protoss doesn't struggle in individual tournaments. Look through the defiler tournaments: http://defiler.ru/tourney/ and tell me which race is dramatically favored.
first argument I read, first thing you basically just left here and hoped nobody would check I assume. Zerg is horribly favoured in there and it's not really a secret. The Top 10 basically features only Zerg and Terran. Protoss comes in at rank 14-16. Yet, there's Lancerx, who basically only one won gold in an international (Defiler) tournament. Then it's Dewalt (argueably the best PvZ foreign player in this time) and Tama next. One P isn't in, cause hack. Whaaaat. I mean it's pretty common knowledge that the past three or four years in foreign bw were ruled by Zerg.
It's not argument in favour of balance changes or anything, but... you're just being silly here and you probably knew while typing.
I think the results are kind of skewed because Sziky and Scan have won so many tours. I really don't think their wins are a matter of imbalance, but just shows how talented they are. But I meant all the tours on the list, not just the main ones.
And it still doesn't change that the next 10 players after them do not play Protoss as well and are mostly Zerg. It doesn't change the fact that you tried to give data as proof for something that isn't anywhere close to what you tried to say.
List starts from Defiler Tour #5, includes Defi tours, KidCa tours, gaz tours, and other minor tournaments. Winners, by race: Zerg - 86 Protoss - 44 Terran - 59
Average: 63 per race Zerg wins without Sziky and Trutacz: 50 Zerg wins without Sziky: 61 Average wins-per-race without Sziky: 51
Zerg win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 44% Protoss win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 24% Terran win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 32%
Zerg win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 33% Protoss win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 29% Terran win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 38%
And what's the point now, you basically take away players without justification - or because they are "more talented" - to make your point? It's a fact that foreign BW has a Zerg problem. Actually, we also have a Terran problem according to your logic, because we'd have to erase Gargoyle (won too much), Heme (too talented) and we'd all be like shieeet.
Well, since you've told me on many, many occasions how much you 'hate' Zerg, I find it rather unsurprising that you would take this position. All I'm showing here is that percentages are skewed in favor of Zerg because of a couple of players. If there were 10 tours, and 6 of them were won by Zerg, and each was a different individual player, I would agree with you, but unfortunately for you, this is not the case.
On January 24 2015 08:42 Falling wrote: tbh, I'm not really sure what this latest argument is about. The orginal quote was responding to a perceived imbalance for Protoss. While a specific piece of evidence may be in question, it seems both nina and Gecko think there is no true racial imbalance in SCBW.
Well, Gecko always has to be "right". Actually, the initial posting of the link was wrong as evidence, because clearly if you look at all the tours from a purely racial-balance perspective, then you would see a ton of Zerg wins, and as soon I made the point that the numbers were skewed by Sziky and Trutacz (I thought Scan would have more of an impact on the list, but surprisingly not so), it turned into his usual semantics crusade to convince... someone... that I'm using some faulty logic.
You can't observe anything about the balance from recent tournament results except in the most consistent lopsides. People who are somewhat decent at a few parts of the game are the vast minority these days, even in Korea.
On January 24 2015 08:42 Falling wrote: tbh, I'm not really sure what this latest argument is about. The orginal quote was responding to a perceived imbalance for Protoss. While a specific piece of evidence may be in question, it seems both nina and Gecko think there is no true racial imbalance in SCBW.
Well, Gecko always has to be "right".
You replied to something utterly stupid in an equally stupid way. Half of what you wrote there is half-assed and has questionable sources at best, all pressed in vague formulations. My guess, you tried to circumvent a ban by being "funny". Aside from that, people must not be wrong on the internet, especially when either using LP or Defiler as source. Guilty as charged.
Protoss doesn't struggle in individual tournaments. Look through the defiler tournaments: http://defiler.ru/tourney/ and tell me which race is dramatically favored.
first argument I read, first thing you basically just left here and hoped nobody would check I assume. Zerg is horribly favoured in there and it's not really a secret. The Top 10 basically features only Zerg and Terran. Protoss comes in at rank 14-16. Yet, there's Lancerx, who basically only one won gold in an international (Defiler) tournament. Then it's Dewalt (argueably the best PvZ foreign player in this time) and Tama next. One P isn't in, cause hack. Whaaaat. I mean it's pretty common knowledge that the past three or four years in foreign bw were ruled by Zerg.
It's not argument in favour of balance changes or anything, but... you're just being silly here and you probably knew while typing.
I think the results are kind of skewed because Sziky and Scan have won so many tours. I really don't think their wins are a matter of imbalance, but just shows how talented they are. But I meant all the tours on the list, not just the main ones.
And it still doesn't change that the next 10 players after them do not play Protoss as well and are mostly Zerg. It doesn't change the fact that you tried to give data as proof for something that isn't anywhere close to what you tried to say.
List starts from Defiler Tour #5, includes Defi tours, KidCa tours, gaz tours, and other minor tournaments. Winners, by race: Zerg - 86 Protoss - 44 Terran - 59
Average: 63 per race Zerg wins without Sziky and Trutacz: 50 Zerg wins without Sziky: 61 Average wins-per-race without Sziky: 51
Zerg win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 44% Protoss win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 24% Terran win% with Sziky/Trutacz: 32%
Zerg win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 33% Protoss win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 29% Terran win% without Sziky/Trutacz: 38%
And what's the point now, you basically take away players without justification - or because they are "more talented" - to make your point? It's a fact that foreign BW has a Zerg problem. Actually, we also have a Terran problem according to your logic, because we'd have to erase Gargoyle (won too much), Heme (too talented) and we'd all be like shieeet.
Well, since you've told me on many, many occasions how much you 'hate' Zerg, I find it rather unsurprising that you would take this position. All I'm showing here is that percentages are skewed in favor of Zerg because of a couple of players. If there were 10 tours, and 6 of them were won by Zerg, and each was a different individual player, I would agree with you, but unfortunately for you, this is not the case.
Yes, I do loathe playing Zerg and I could puke every time I see Zerglings running through a wall on a map I rarely play, 'cause it feels like wasted time. <insert more examples that are annoying, e.g. random Hydra busts you missed to scout, cause Probe said no, I be seing this wall now and then scout inside of Zergling stomach hehehe>. Yet, I do not claim the game is imbalanced. My statement was: foreign Zerg win more. As to why, no idea. Probably it all boils down to some unobserved things, e.g. Zerg being able to play more effectively in the same time span than Protoss or Protoss more than Terran (which would explain why there are less top level Terrans than Toss in return). Just a thought, no proof, no indication. To elaborate, play ten ZvZs and try to play ten TvTs, then tell me who can train more with a limited amount of time outside of a professional scene.
That doesn't account for why Protoss was domianting the foreign scene in 2007 - 2010 My hypothesis is that the current state of the game favours Zerg at our skill level, and in the past, the state of the game favoured Protoss at the current foreign skill level.
Maybe. My observation was just that "new-ish" Zerg players tend to advance fast from 0 to somewhat good in no time, quickly followed by Protoss and Terran a long way behind. However, Zerg and Protoss start to whine early on in their career, once they realize there's more to late game than just having an advantage from the early stages, whereas Terrans suffer in silence and later out of a sudden start to play really well.
Not sure what's up with all the insults suddenly being hurled in this thread. Or why the mods aren't doing more.
Civil up, ppl. Differentiate yourself from the mindless internet herd by actually being reasonable (because, wow, isn't internet name-calling just soooo cutting-edge and original ).
A nice side benefit is that others will probably respect what you have to say more, rather than less.
The only thing I would like to see changed is the gas mining when the geyser is to the right of or below the CC/Nex/Hatch, it should mine at the same rate as when it's above or to the left.
Well, if you're interested in balance and its history, here's an interesting email I ran across that show the changes they were still doing in very late beta for BW/1.04 patch.
Many of these made it in, some didn't, but it shows what they were trying.
作者: Stalker (S．talk．er) 看板: Blizzard 標題: 嗚哇....Brood War 果然是 Blizzard 的年度大作.... 時間: Sun Oct 25 11:22:16 1998
Subject: Changes in Todays Brood War Beta Patch From: GFraizer(Shlonglor) (Blizzard) Host: Blizzard Entertainment Date: Sat Oct 24 18:35:16
Medic *Optic Flare - Casting cost to 75 mana *Move all researchable spells to the Academy *Should be able to heal all organic ground units (includes Zerg and Protoss)
Lurker * Damage type to Concussive *Attack range to 6 *Attack animation should be twice as fast *Should only do damage to a unit once per attack (currently bigger units get multiple hits) *Should flee from attacker when not burrowed //第一個非 Terran 的單位有 concussive type damage?
Devourer *Corrosive Venom (spores) should also affect the target *Change attack to the following: *25 Damage, 50 Cooldown, Mass Explosion Damage type, +3 Bonus
Corsair *Research Cost of Disruption Web to 200min, 200gas
Dark Archon *Maelstrom duration should be approx. 10 seconds (twice as long as current) *Mind Control should transfer the expansion unit technology
//新單位我不是 beta tester, 所以不與置評....
CHANGE TO EXISTING STARCRAFT UNITS
Parasite - Casting cost to 75, Casting range to 12 //可憐的 queen, 完全想不出調弱的原因, 尤其是有 medic
Arbiter - cost to 100min, 350gas. Should not respond to a call for help from other units //看看以後會不會有比較多的人用吧
Scout - Shields to 100, hit points to 150 //我也猜是為了平衡 Terran 的valkyrie
Carrier - Interceptor shields to 40, hit points to 40 Capacity upgrade cost to 100min, 100gas Carrier attack range to 9 //大家都越打越遠了, 升級變便宜, 小飛機本來就沒人在打吧....
Dragoon - Build time should be same as Zealot, Cost to 125min, 50gas //對我沒差, 我不生 dragoon 是因為 gas, 對空我寧願用 cannon 及 scout
Sunken Colony - Damage type to Normal, Damage to 35 //三族現在都有龜起來的本錢了
Hatchery - Cost to 400min //....
Goliath - Ground damage to 12 //無敵鐵金剛, 無敵鐵金剛 (開始唱起歌了)
Archon - Acceleration much faster
Zergling Adrenal Glands - Increased cost to 200min, 200gas Increased power of upgrade //FYI: 這是 zergling 第二個升級選項, 要三級 Hive 才能生的那個, 也是大 家常常忘記升的那個
-------------------------------- The question is then what do these changes mean to existing Starcraft and 1.04. The answer will be given when it's available. //嗚, 在資料片出來之前還會有個 1.04 版?
Next, non Brood War Beta Teters, please don't flip out over these changes, because this is the Brood War Beta, we will have a chance to see if things work or do not work.
On February 13 2015 23:20 BisuDagger wrote: How would people feel about scouts getting a bonus to armored units? Let's say +6 dmg.
Wha? Could you flesh that out a bit more?
Scouts could be a staple in PvT if they could do bonus damage against mech units (Tanks/Goliaths/BCs). Against zerg it would do bonus dmg vs Ultras and Guardians.
On February 13 2015 23:20 BisuDagger wrote: How would people feel about scouts getting a bonus to armored units? Let's say +6 dmg.
Wha? Could you flesh that out a bit more?
Scouts could be a staple in PvT if they could do bonus damage against mech units (Tanks/Goliaths/BCs). Against zerg it would do bonus dmg vs Ultras and Guardians.
But +6? Wow. I'd be happy if Scout ground dmg ever got upped to 10.
Bliz nerf'd Scout and Wraith ground attack for BW and 1.04 just for being one-third stronger than it currently is (better cooldown back then). I wonder if that was a mistake, since BW brought in some additional tools that could help better deal with massed Wraiths/Scouts than SC vanilla had ('sairs, valks, charon boosters).
But if 1/3 stronger makes Bliz nerf, what would +6 dmg to ground attack do?
On February 13 2015 23:20 BisuDagger wrote: How would people feel about scouts getting a bonus to armored units? Let's say +6 dmg.
Wha? Could you flesh that out a bit more?
Scouts could be a staple in PvT if they could do bonus damage against mech units (Tanks/Goliaths/BCs). Against zerg it would do bonus dmg vs Ultras and Guardians.
But +6? Wow. I'd be happy if Scout ground dmg ever got upped to 10.
Bliz nerf'd Scout and Wraith ground attack for BW and 1.04 just for being one-third stronger than it currently is (better cooldown back then). I wonder if that was a mistake, since BW brought in things that could better deal with massed Wraiths/Scouts than SC vanilla had ('sairs, valks, charon boosters).
But if 1/3 stronger makes Bliz nerf, what would +6 dmg to ground attack do?
+6 was just a number thrown out there. What should the number be then? Do you agree it should counter/be able to combat the units mentioned at least?
On February 13 2015 23:20 BisuDagger wrote: How would people feel about scouts getting a bonus to armored units? Let's say +6 dmg.
Wha? Could you flesh that out a bit more?
Scouts could be a staple in PvT if they could do bonus damage against mech units (Tanks/Goliaths/BCs). Against zerg it would do bonus dmg vs Ultras and Guardians.
But +6? Wow. I'd be happy if Scout ground dmg ever got upped to 10.
Bliz nerf'd Scout and Wraith ground attack for BW and 1.04 just for being one-third stronger than it currently is (better cooldown back then). I wonder if that was a mistake, since BW brought in things that could better deal with massed Wraiths/Scouts than SC vanilla had ('sairs, valks, charon boosters).
But if 1/3 stronger makes Bliz nerf, what would +6 dmg to ground attack do?
+6 was just a number thrown out there. What should the number be then? Do you agree it should counter/be able to combat the units mentioned at least?
Well, of the units you mention, I think Scouts already do pretty well against BCs and Guardians. A Scout will shoot down a Guardian almost three times faster than a Corsair can, for instance, and will beat BCs cost-efficiently if all the BCs don't have charged Yamato Cannons, lol.
Versus tanks, gols and ultras, I don't see tanks or gols as being that special a deal, they only have 1 armor and good-but-not-great amounts of hp. Ultras, yeah, they're a b*tch, really high armor and really high hp, bad for low dmg attacks to deal with. But do Scouts and/or Wraiths have to be what takes them down, or are there other better tools for the job?
On February 13 2015 23:20 BisuDagger wrote: How would people feel about scouts getting a bonus to armored units? Let's say +6 dmg.
Wha? Could you flesh that out a bit more?
Scouts could be a staple in PvT if they could do bonus damage against mech units (Tanks/Goliaths/BCs). Against zerg it would do bonus dmg vs Ultras and Guardians.
But +6? Wow. I'd be happy if Scout ground dmg ever got upped to 10.
Bliz nerf'd Scout and Wraith ground attack for BW and 1.04 just for being one-third stronger than it currently is (better cooldown back then). I wonder if that was a mistake, since BW brought in things that could better deal with massed Wraiths/Scouts than SC vanilla had ('sairs, valks, charon boosters).
But if 1/3 stronger makes Bliz nerf, what would +6 dmg to ground attack do?
+6 was just a number thrown out there. What should the number be then? Do you agree it should counter/be able to combat the units mentioned at least?
Well, of the units you mention, I think Scouts already do pretty well against BCs and Guardians. A Scout will shoot down a Guardian almost three times faster than a Corsair can, for instance, and will beat BCs cost-efficiently if all the BCs don't have charged Yamato Cannons, lol.
Versus tanks, gols and ultras, I don't see tanks or gols as being that special a deal, they only have 1 armor and good-but-not-great amounts of hp. Ultras, yeah, they're a b*tch, really high armor and really high hp, bad for low dmg attacks to deal with. But do Scouts and/or Wraiths have to be what takes them down, or are there other better tools for the job?
Currently there are better tools. What I want from this discussion is to discover a way to determine what role scouts can fill with a patch. If scouts can take down tanks quicker and more cost effectively it'd help the Stargate/Gateway late game more. Of course, that might make protoss to OP. In PvZ I don't know what role they could fill that sairs don't already fill.
On February 13 2015 23:20 BisuDagger wrote: How would people feel about scouts getting a bonus to armored units? Let's say +6 dmg.
Wha? Could you flesh that out a bit more?
Scouts could be a staple in PvT if they could do bonus damage against mech units (Tanks/Goliaths/BCs). Against zerg it would do bonus dmg vs Ultras and Guardians.
But +6? Wow. I'd be happy if Scout ground dmg ever got upped to 10.
Bliz nerf'd Scout and Wraith ground attack for BW and 1.04 just for being one-third stronger than it currently is (better cooldown back then). I wonder if that was a mistake, since BW brought in things that could better deal with massed Wraiths/Scouts than SC vanilla had ('sairs, valks, charon boosters).
But if 1/3 stronger makes Bliz nerf, what would +6 dmg to ground attack do?
+6 was just a number thrown out there. What should the number be then? Do you agree it should counter/be able to combat the units mentioned at least?
Well, of the units you mention, I think Scouts already do pretty well against BCs and Guardians. A Scout will shoot down a Guardian almost three times faster than a Corsair can, for instance, and will beat BCs cost-efficiently if all the BCs don't have charged Yamato Cannons, lol.
Versus tanks, gols and ultras, I don't see tanks or gols as being that special a deal, they only have 1 armor and good-but-not-great amounts of hp. Ultras, yeah, they're a b*tch, really high armor and really high hp, bad for low dmg attacks to deal with. But do Scouts and/or Wraiths have to be what takes them down, or are there other better tools for the job?
Currently there are better tools. What I want from this discussion is to discover a way to determine what role scouts can fill with a patch. If scouts can take down tanks quicker and more cost effectively it'd help the Stargate/Gateway late game more. Of course, that might make protoss to OP. In PvZ I don't know what role they could fill that sairs don't already fill.
Well, when making changes, IMO the first thing you have to think about, as you alluded to, is "Will this break the game?". Obviously anything very OP farks everything else up, so you have to know what the limits are before anything else.
WIth scouts, for instance, they seem fine air-to-air, and do everything they're supposed to do there. It's the ground attack that's the prob. But you have to be careful in upping it, Bliz obviously nerfed it for a reason (even if they did go too far). The reason they nerfed seems to be mobility.
IIRC, Bliz stated reasoning along the below lines on their forums when the 1.04 patch and BW came out, when ppl started complaining angrily about the scout and wraith ATG nerfs.
Specifically, Bliz cited mobility. As in, if you've gone heavy scout or wraith, then all your air-to-ground is concentrated in one mob; meanwhile, all of your opponent's anti-air (if he didn't go heavy air like you did) is split up between his main, his expansions, and his army. Your superior mobility allows you to "hit him where he ain't", you get to choose where to engage, and if he doesn't have 'all bases covered', he's in trouble. You attack wherever, but he has to defend everywhere.
Sure, antiair ground units are usually pretty cost-effective in their GTA role. But even if antiair ground can beat two or three times its cost in air units, that still isn't so good, because you'll routinely have your antiair split between 3-5 bases plus an army in the field. You're cost-efficient, but still not cost-efficient enough... in other words, it doesn't take much of an improvement to make mobs of scouts and wraiths (or mutas for that matter) OP, because of the mobility.
Given that, a good starting point would seem to be something like upping ATG damage to 10 or 11 for scouts/wraiths, which brings you back to near the same (10) or the same (11) damage per second you had pre-nerf. It's probably better to improve damage than improve cooldown, because the former works a bit better against armored targets if you do the math.
With wraiths, you might even change their ATG attack to a split attack as well, limiting their improvement against armored ground units, since wraiths are already fairly effective in TvT.
Let's not also forget things like patrol micro and air unit stacking, which improve air unit 'mobs' effectiveness, and which probably weren't foreseen by the designers when they were making 1.04 and BW (I certainly don't remember them being in use by the time of 1.04's and BW's release).
So, sadly, I'm not sure scouts can ever be 'tank-killers' to the level you apparently envision without breaking the game. Though with mild up's they could probably be decently effective in doing that, with assistance from things like stasis cutting down the active goliath count, even if the T player concentrates much of his antiair with his army/push. Or failing that, they could backstab mineral lines.
In response to your PvZ comment, I think scouts, if their ATG were improved, could certainly have a role there. They could harass in ways that corsairs can't, since sairs obviously don't have ATG, and they actually shoot down overlords quite a bit faster than sairs too.
On the downside, scouts build times are horrendous yet probably can't be improved much without causing problems, and they aren't fully effective units 'til they get speed upgrade researched (a research which probably could be faster/cheaper).
That's my take on it, could be wrong. Also don't know if it's what you wanted to hear. Balance is complex and frustrating, I really respect game designers, getting it right is kinda like banging your head against the wall 'til it's all good or 'til you brain-bleed out from a major concussion, whichever comes first.
Scouts do do well vs guardians, devourers, bcs, but how often do u see bcs in tvp? I've personally met them only thrice, the first time was on an island (!) map vs some peruvian (!!). The second time was vs an opponent who haven't played bw for about 6 years, and the third time was in a very ridiculous non-ladder game, so we both did some crazy things. And in pro-games? Were there ever cases of going bcs in tvp?
And why do u want to use scouts as atg unit, if they were designed as capital ship hunters? ie they are created to dominate in air, not on ground? IMO all they need is speed upgrade already researched, and that's it
On February 14 2015 20:10 GreenWillow wrote: Scouts do do well vs guardians, devourers, bcs, but how often do u see bcs in tvp? I've personally met them only thrice, the first time was on an island (!) map vs some peruvian (!!). The second time was vs an opponent who haven't played bw for about 6 years, and the third time was in a very ridiculous non-ladder game, so we both did some crazy things. And in pro-games? Were there ever cases of going bcs in tvp?
And why do u want to use scouts as atg unit, if they were designed as capital ship hunters? ie they are created to dominate in air, not on ground? IMO all they need is speed upgrade already researched, and that's it
Very little BC usage in TvP is another issue IMO, and it contributes to scouts not getting used much. I mean, you see carriers a fair amount in TvP, but BCs almost never, as you say. Why one cap ship but not the other? Because P has a number of good counters, and BCs don't seem to wreak as much havoc vs ground as carriers do (compare damage per second between the two).
Far as wanting scouts to be useful as an ATG unit, well, yeah. Why do you think they have an ATG attack then? For show? ATG is mentioned because its a considerable part of the reason why they don't get used... scouts' air attack is already good, ATG isn't. But air units that are only effective vs air generally tend not to have that big a role, except to shoot down air units that *are* good against ground (or overlords, and sairs are adequate enough to do that already).
Better ATG and more BC usage would both be helpful to seeing scouts more often.
tbh i dont give a fuck about scouts. The problems with bw are that ZvZ is so linear and that hydra busts keep killing progamers to this day (ZvP) if you know the problem you know where to pay attention, not that is gonna happen but thats where id start. I think there may be some other minor thing that im forgetting but those as a spectator are the most saddening.
On February 14 2015 20:21 sertas wrote: tbh i dont give a fuck about scouts. The problems with bw are that ZvZ is so linear and that hydra busts keep killing progamers to this day (ZvP) if you know the problem you know where to pay attention, not that is gonna happen but thats where id start. I think there may be some other minor thing that im forgetting but those as a spectator are the most saddening.
It's not an either-or, zero-sum thing. Seeing scouts get fixed doesn't necessarily keep the issues you cite from being fixed, in some hypothetical alternate dimension where Bliz releases a '20th Anniversary Brood War' with a balance patch (which probably has about the same odds of happening as being hit by lightning and mauled by a grizzly bear in the same day ).
On February 14 2015 20:21 sertas wrote: tbh i dont give a fuck about scouts. The problems with bw are that ZvZ is so linear and that hydra busts keep killing progamers to this day (ZvP) if you know the problem you know where to pay attention, not that is gonna happen but thats where id start. I think there may be some other minor thing that im forgetting but those as a spectator are the most saddening.
Make spores do bonus damage to bio. That's what blizzard did in SC2 to eliminate muta battles.
Arbiters have their 10 dmg, but no one wants to increase it simply becuz arbiters aren't attacking units (generally) One guy once shared his thoughts that this "damage" was made intentedly. Say, when a turret is shooting a shuttle, it flies away, no matter, being controlled or not. When a turret is shooting an arbiter, he begins to attack that turret, and, if not manually taken away, dies. MB the same thing with scouts. But I have another proof that scouts cannot be used as mutas or wraiths can be. Take a look at the wraiths. The only mobile detection both z and p have are overlords and observers respectively. Both can be shot by the cloaked wraithes, so, if no storm-ensnare-plague availible, z and p have to retreat to static detection (spores and cannons). I am pretty bad at expressing my thoughts, but hope u've got the idea. Then mutalisks. They are exremely effective both on battlefield and in harassment becuz of their wyrm blade, which hits not 1, but 3 units at the same time. And now — scouts. No cloaking, no "splash" damage. No single thing. + they are initially slow. They simply were not designed for air to ground battles.
Also, concerning battlecruisers. Just my thoughts, but probably they aren't seen in tvp becuz of what modern maps are. One needs to exploit highground, unpassable terrain, other map peculiarities in order to use bcs to a great effect. Due to their slow movemnt speed they are very vulnerable to storm and to dragoons. And when I mentioned modern maps, I generally meant that F+ Show Spoiler +
On February 14 2015 21:02 GreenWillow wrote: And now — scouts. No cloaking, no "splash" damage. No single thing. + they are initially slow. They simply were not designed for air to ground battles.
But they have tons of shield and hit points, i.e. can hang in against ground fire much longer than wraiths and mutas can. And with the speed upgrade they're just as fast as wraiths and mutas. Ironically, it's probably the potential strength of scouts (before the nerf, anyway) that made Bliz hold them back a bit with the need for said speed upgrade.
And if scouts were not designed for at least some ATG usage, Bliz probably would've stripped out their ATG attack, or not given it one in the first place.
Well, there was a game where p made lots of static defence + reavers, meanwhile using scouts to a great effect (killing drones and overlords). But that's only vs zerg, and this is not the easiest way to win a game. What I mean is that spores are relatively expensive and weak, comparing to cannons and turrets. Especially turrets, which are cheap and deadly. These prevent scout harassment. Cannot imagine any other usage of scout's atg attack but that one above + the stove. Also, 1 scout is 275-125. For example, 1 ht and 1 shuttle cost 250-150.
On January 21 2015 06:01 GGzerG wrote: BroodWar is balanced Perfectly.
That's impossible. Best you can realistically say is it's 'balanced enough'.
i think bw is balanced enough , close prefection and it depends too much of maps and THE PLAYER, bw doesnt need to be balanced , i hope valve creates BW2 like dota2 keeping gameplay and units , maybe a 4th race ??
On February 14 2015 21:49 GreenWillow wrote: What I mean is that spores are relatively expensive and weak, comparing to cannons and turrets.
Especially turrets, which are cheap and deadly. These prevent scout harassment.
Spores aren't that weak... have 400hp, double what cannons and turrets have. They also have a fast rate of fire and do Normal damage.
Their drawback is that they do take longer to kill things than an equivalent cost in turrets, but they are harder to take out than turrets. Which is why you see pros 'triple up' on turrets in various locations... lone turrets just get destroyed before they can do anything.
Cannot imagine any other usage of scout's atg attack but that one above + the stove.
Which is why scouts' ATG should be better.
Also, 1 scout is 275-125. For example, 1 ht and 1 shuttle cost 250-150.
Plus another 200-200 for storm research. Scouts do need/want speed upgrade, but so do shuttles. Storm drops are awesome, but mana in midgame is a limited resource, while aerial harassment can keep on going and going, assuming it's effective. For instance, I think Z would still do muta harass even if they somehow in some alternate universe had high templars to do storm drops with (though yeah, they'd probably use both).
ZanCo: i think bw is balanced enough , close prefection and it depends too much of maps and THE PLAYER, bw doesnt need to be balanced , i hope valve creates BW2 like dota2 keeping gameplay and units , maybe a 4th race ??
People said BW is 'balanced enough' after every balance patch, yet Bliz still kept on changing/improving/refining the game.
Do like the idea of a BW2, though a 4th race might be a balance nightmare. Heck, SC2 has been kind of a balance nightmare, even with just 3 races.
On February 14 2015 20:21 sertas wrote: tbh i dont give a fuck about scouts. The problems with bw are that ZvZ is so linear and that hydra busts keep killing progamers to this day (ZvP) if you know the problem you know where to pay attention, not that is gonna happen but thats where id start. I think there may be some other minor thing that im forgetting but those as a spectator are the most saddening.
Make spores do bonus damage to bio. That's what blizzard did in SC2 to eliminate muta battles.
A mac more BW-esque solution would be to make it do bonus to small units. I believe the only small air units are interceptors, mutations and scourge.
Mutations? You mean mutas, they are classified as small units (despite how they look).
Though I dislike this inelegant and unintuitive "bonus DMG to x" solution from sc2. Better would be to bump the damage significantly and classify it as concussive damage. Now that's the BW way.
On February 15 2015 08:58 vOdToasT wrote: SC2 is balanced enough. The problem is that it's just not fun or interesting.
Maybe now it's good enough (though some still say no), after years and years and umpteen patches. The balance part that is, not the fun or interesting part, you are very right about that.
I'm glad Blizzard doesn't listen to people calling for BW balance changes :D. ZvZ is great imo... always enjoyed it's change of pace. ZvP hydra busts are kind of ridiculous I agree though :0
On February 15 2015 10:25 Probemicro wrote: Mutations? You mean mutas, they are classified as small units (despite how they look).
Though I dislike this inelegant and unintuitive "bonus DMG to x" solution from sc2. Better would be to bump the damage significantly and classify it as concussive damage. Now that's the BW way.
My autocorrect doesn't know how to play starcraft.
The problem with concussive is that while it does full damage to small units, it does quarter damage to large. Compare this with explosive damage which does half damage to small and full to large. Thankfully there are no medium air units iirc but this still leaves us with a problem if we use concussion damage. Spores that would do, say 20 damage to mutas instead of the current 15 would do 5 damage to wraiths if a Terran goes 2port wraith. The brute force solution would be to just make spores ridiculously overpowered against scourge and mutas but I don't think that would be ideal.
On February 15 2015 10:25 Probemicro wrote: Mutations? You mean mutas, they are classified as small units (despite how they look).
Though I dislike this inelegant and unintuitive "bonus DMG to x" solution from sc2. Better would be to bump the damage significantly and classify it as concussive damage. Now that's the BW way.
My autocorrect doesn't know how to play starcraft.
The problem with concussive is that while it does full damage to small units, it does quarter damage to large. Compare this with explosive damage which does half damage to small and full to large.
Thankfully there are no medium air units iirc but this still leaves us with a problem if we use concussion damage. Spores that would do, say 20 damage to mutas instead of the current 15 would do 5 damage to wraiths if a Terran goes 2port wraith. The brute force solution would be to just make spores ridiculously overpowered against scourge and mutas but I don't think that would be ideal.
fyi corsairs and queens are medium. agree with the rest of your post.
On February 13 2015 23:20 BisuDagger wrote: How would people feel about scouts getting a bonus to armored units? Let's say +6 dmg.
assuming you mean large;)
anyway, on the scout vs ground units debate.. scouts had their air to ground attack nerfed pretty hard during some early patch, 1.02 or something? I don't actually think they changed the damage, just the cooldown, but well, until they did, mass scout was a dominant strategy. I recall playing a game (this is like, summer 1998 lol) where me and my opponent had split a map in half, so economy was the same for both players, I was terran, he was protoss.. my choice of units? turrets and goliaths. his choice of unit? scouts. And he destroyed me! completely! And I was overall a better player than him - that was the only time I ever lost against him! granted this was before goliath range and valkyries, but still. scouts with slightly faster air to ground attack were so good that they, for cost, destroyed pure turret+goliath.
Now the game has changed so much that it wouldn't look the same, but buffing scouts ATG attack in any significant way could really fuck with pvt.. If you've ever played a free for all and you've met some protoss jerk who microes well and managed to amass 24 3 3 3 speed scouts, you'll know what I mean, because fighting against that is absolutely terrible even when they just have 8 base attack. make it 14, it'll be craazy.
On February 15 2015 10:25 Probemicro wrote: Mutations? You mean mutas, they are classified as small units (despite how they look).
Though I dislike this inelegant and unintuitive "bonus DMG to x" solution from sc2. Better would be to bump the damage significantly and classify it as concussive damage. Now that's the BW way.
My autocorrect doesn't know how to play starcraft.
The problem with concussive is that while it does full damage to small units, it does quarter damage to large. Compare this with explosive damage which does half damage to small and full to large. Thankfully there are no medium air units iirc but this still leaves us with a problem if we use concussion damage. Spores that would do, say 20 damage to mutas instead of the current 15 would do 5 damage to wraiths if a Terran goes 2port wraith. The brute force solution would be to just make spores ridiculously overpowered against scourge and mutas but I don't think that would be ideal.
btw the orignal post says that zvz is linear and boring which i dont really agree. sure its kinda onedimensional, but at least ling/muta dogfights require plenty of control and game sense, and with the scarcity of larvae can really decide who knows to allocate resource better.
imo its better than sc2 zvz well you just watch 2 sets of roaches shooting at each until one becomes larger than the other and snowball from there.(only good thing is ling/bane warfare). no BW magic box and no scourges means sc2 mutas are pretty boring anyway, you jsut mass them up and hit stuff or run if too many spores, no depth to it whatsoever.
anyway i was just suggesting stuff more in the spirit of the original BW classification rather resorting to D.Kim M.D style of brute force inelegant balancing which would look off-putting compared to the rest of the numbers ingame. this thread is meaningless in the long run since blizz wont touch BW and nobody is going to seriously hold the balance lessons of BW to heart and just continue proposing changes in their newly created RTS just for fun sake before allowing meta to settle down for a long period of time.
On February 15 2015 20:14 GGzerG wrote: game is an artwork itself.
but...it contradicts your previous post :o
On January 21 2015 07:13 GGzerG wrote: Maybe make Gateway build time 10 seconds faster, for when I proxy 2gate.
thought i guess this kind of sums up what people post in this thread, their bias idea of how a game should be (changing for the sake of changing to their tastes) rather than thinking of the overall meta of the game itself, which even with no changes for long has already rigorously proven itself over the years. "If it aint broke don't fix it". That why I frown on threads like these.
On February 15 2015 10:25 Probemicro wrote: Mutations? You mean mutas, they are classified as small units (despite how they look).
Though I dislike this inelegant and unintuitive "bonus DMG to x" solution from sc2. Better would be to bump the damage significantly and classify it as concussive damage. Now that's the BW way.
My autocorrect doesn't know how to play starcraft.
The problem with concussive is that while it does full damage to small units, it does quarter damage to large. Compare this with explosive damage which does half damage to small and full to large. Thankfully there are no medium air units iirc but this still leaves us with a problem if we use concussion damage. Spores that would do, say 20 damage to mutas instead of the current 15 would do 5 damage to wraiths if a Terran goes 2port wraith. The brute force solution would be to just make spores ridiculously overpowered against scourge and mutas but I don't think that would be ideal.
...anyway i was just suggesting stuff more in the spirit of the original BW classification rather resorting to D.Kim M.D style of brute force inelegant balancing
okay, I'm still annoyed at you from the other thread, but that's pretty good.
On February 13 2015 23:20 BisuDagger wrote: How would people feel about scouts getting a bonus to armored units? Let's say +6 dmg.
assuming you mean large;)
anyway, on the scout vs ground units debate.. scouts had their air to ground attack nerfed pretty hard during some early patch, 1.02 or something? I don't actually think they changed the damage, just the cooldown, but well, until they did, mass scout was a dominant strategy. I recall playing a game (this is like, summer 1998 lol) where me and my opponent had split a map in half, so economy was the same for both players, I was terran, he was protoss.. my choice of units? turrets and goliaths. his choice of unit? scouts. And he destroyed me! completely! And I was overall a better player than him - that was the only time I ever lost against him! granted this was before goliath range and valkyries, but still. scouts with slightly faster air to ground attack were so good that they, for cost, destroyed pure turret+goliath.
Now the game has changed so much that it wouldn't look the same, but buffing scouts ATG attack in any significant way could really fuck with pvt.. If you've ever played a free for all and you've met some protoss jerk who microes well and managed to amass 24 3 3 3 speed scouts, you'll know what I mean, because fighting against that is absolutely terrible even when they just have 8 base attack. make it 14, it'll be craazy.
This.^ As I kinda tried to explain on page 9, maybe not so well. It's not as hard to make scout/wraith ATG OP as ppl might think, though yeah, it is underwhelming as it stands.
Basically in 1.04/BW, Bliz did two things to tone down scout/wraith ATG:
1) the scout/wraith ATG cooldown nerf 2) the intro of a whole new class of air units that specialized in ATA/taking down scout/wraith/muta packs: sairs, valks, devs (though devs need support from other air units). Also a major upgrade, goliath range.
IMO, they should've done one or the other, not both. Mutas had only one done to them, and they're still very good at harassment. Scouts and wraiths had both done to them, and they aren't anymore ('cept for wraiths in TvT).
i think the most obvious nerf would be something to zergling attack speed with adrenal glands upgrade, lategame watching 1 zergling nearly kill a zealot is kinda absurb imo.
On January 21 2015 07:13 GGzerG wrote: Maybe make Gateway build time 10 seconds faster, for when I proxy 2gate.
thought i guess this kind of sums up what people post in this thread, their bias idea of how a game should be (changing for the sake of changing to their tastes) rather than thinking of the overall meta of the game itself, which even with no changes for long has already rigorously proven itself over the years. "If it aint broke don't fix it". That why I frown on threads like these.
If you honestly for a split nano second I was being serious... (LOL) ...
BW is perfectly balanced, it just needs updates to the interface.
some spells I'd like to see used in actual games more:
*hallucination - seen it used for dragging mines,beefing up ur army or flanking terrans idle defense by casting it on nearby terran armies which are static. idle templars energy early game are just like underutilized comsats, plus casting it is cheap enough.
*optical flare and medic energy upgrade combo - very useful for lurkers, reavers, carriers. the A.I.seems to use this thing so much more efficiently and is super annoying
Queen: parasite energy (75) down to 50, spawn broodling energy (150) down to 125
Devourer: new upgrade - Devourer attacks deal splash damage on targets based on number of spore stacks, max 9 (NOTE: does not affect primary target)
Scout: replace sight upgrade with +2 range upgrade (from 4 to 6)
Dark Archon: mind control energy (150) down to 125. If target unit max HP > 125, drain shield on HP/energy difference. Lose control of target unit(s) if Dark Archon dies, but retain building control from captured workers.
Nuclear silo: can build/launch nukes while detached from CC but capturable by enemy CC
Medic: optic flare also reduces ranged attack ranges by (-1), melee units not affected. blind unchanged
On February 16 2015 08:55 arb wrote: i think the most obvious nerf would be something to zergling attack speed with adrenal glands upgrade, lategame watching 1 zergling nearly kill a zealot is kinda absurb imo.
also swarm fuck swarm
You might not be being very serious but you'd be delusional if you were.
Assuming equal upgrades: Zealot life = 60 Shield, 100 life, 1 armour; Zergling damage = 5 = {(60÷5)+(100÷4)} = 37 hits. Attack rate of once every 6 frames with Adrenal Glands = 222 frames @ 24 frames per second = 9.25 real time seconds at fastest speed.
Zergling life = 35 life, 0 armour; Zealot damage = 2×8 = {(35÷16} = 3 hits. Attack rate of once every 22 frames = 66 frames @ 24 frames per second = 2.75 real time seconds at fastest speed.
9.25≉2.75.
On February 15 2015 16:44 neobowman wrote: [...]Thankfully there are no medium air units iirc but this still leaves us with a problem if we use concussion damage. [...]
It doesn't really affect your intended point but Queens and Corsairs are medium.
On February 15 2015 10:25 Probemicro wrote: Mutations? You mean mutas, they are classified as small units (despite how they look).
Though I dislike this inelegant and unintuitive "bonus DMG to x" solution from sc2. Better would be to bump the damage significantly and classify it as concussive damage. Now that's the BW way.
My autocorrect doesn't know how to play starcraft.
The problem with concussive is that while it does full damage to small units, it does quarter damage to large. Compare this with explosive damage which does half damage to small and full to large. Thankfully there are no medium air units iirc but this still leaves us with a problem if we use concussion damage. Spores that would do, say 20 damage to mutas instead of the current 15 would do 5 damage to wraiths if a Terran goes 2port wraith. The brute force solution would be to just make spores ridiculously overpowered against scourge and mutas but I don't think that would be ideal.
...anyway i was just suggesting stuff more in the spirit of the original BW classification rather resorting to D.Kim M.D style of brute force inelegant balancing
okay, I'm still annoyed at you from the other thread, but that's pretty good.
On February 15 2015 10:25 Probemicro wrote: Mutations? You mean mutas, they are classified as small units (despite how they look).
Though I dislike this inelegant and unintuitive "bonus DMG to x" solution from sc2. Better would be to bump the damage significantly and classify it as concussive damage. Now that's the BW way.
My autocorrect doesn't know how to play starcraft.
The problem with concussive is that while it does full damage to small units, it does quarter damage to large. Compare this with explosive damage which does half damage to small and full to large. Thankfully there are no medium air units iirc but this still leaves us with a problem if we use concussion damage. Spores that would do, say 20 damage to mutas instead of the current 15 would do 5 damage to wraiths if a Terran goes 2port wraith. The brute force solution would be to just make spores ridiculously overpowered against scourge and mutas but I don't think that would be ideal.
I haven't checked the thread extensively so just in case someone hasn't corrected you on this already I should inform you that Sairs are indeed classified as medium. You wouldn't want them to be made more or less impervious against spores do you now? :D
With regards to your suggested spore buff, I think my earlier suggestion in this thread, of giving Spore Colonies a damage output of 25 with an increased attack cooldown, from 15, to 22.5 would be ideal (of course you would have to give scourges 30 hp instead of 25, but I have no issues with that. Battlecruisers would basically have to be fully upgraded to one shot them, which I am ok with). Mutas will be killed in ( (Muta HP)/(Spore attack) ) x (Spore attack cooldown) = 108 (kill efficency units?) as opposed to 120 as it stands now. A slight improvement. An upside of my proposed change would also be that Corsairs no longer just get tickled by Spores but will actually sustain some real damage from them.
On February 16 2015 12:17 riyanme wrote: this balance talk is utterly USELESS.... nerfs?! do you even understand counters? that mentallity makes what SC2 so bad today...
No, that's not the reason that SC2 is bad It's bad because it never had interesting or fun units If it had had such units, then that mentality would threaten them, but since those units have never existed in the first place, it's not the reason for the game being boring.
On February 16 2015 12:17 riyanme wrote: this balance talk is utterly USELESS.... nerfs?! do you even understand counters? that mentallity makes what SC2 so bad today...
Gotta luv the ppl who jump into a thread to complain about it while contributing nothing.
Don't like it, don't read it... simple as that. Or at least offer specific examples/useful thoughts while complaining.
On February 15 2015 20:14 GGzerG wrote: game is an artwork itself.
but...it contradicts your previous post :o
On January 21 2015 07:13 GGzerG wrote: Maybe make Gateway build time 10 seconds faster, for when I proxy 2gate.
thought i guess this kind of sums up what people post in this thread, their bias idea of how a game should be (changing for the sake of changing to their tastes) rather than thinking of the overall meta of the game itself, which even with no changes for long has already rigorously proven itself over the years. "If it aint broke don't fix it". That why I frown on threads like these.
If you honestly for a split nano second I was being serious... (LOL) ...
BW is perfectly balanced, it just needs updates to the interface.
No game this complex can ever be perfectly balanced, that 's impossible.
Best one could say is that balance is 'good enough'. Some ppl feel that it is, some don't, and there's good arguments on both sides.
On February 16 2015 10:13 Lightswarm wrote: Queen: parasite energy (75) down to 50, spawn broodling energy (150) down to 125
A lot of ppl suggest Spawn Broodling to 125 mana in order to make Queens more useful, but.... an inexpensive unit that just flies in and insta-kills two ultras, tanks, high temps, whatever? Probably too good. I mean, irradiate is a borderline unfair spell against zerg, but at least it comes out of an expensive unit, and it's not an insta-kill, irradiated units can still get spells off, fight for awhile, etc (and ultras don't even die to it).
If you want to see more Queens (I do), the key is probably making ensnare better/more effective. As a 75 mana spell, it also would get used earlier and in a more bread-and-butter kind of way than broodling ever could be.
Devourer: new upgrade - Devourer attacks deal splash damage on targets based on number of spore stacks, max 9 (NOTE: does not affect primary target)
I kind of think the way to get devs used more is to increase the role of air in general... if you see more BCs, Scout packs, Wraith packs, etc, then you should see more devs, because muta/dev is POWERFUL.
Would be nice if devs came out a bit earlier too, they're considerably higher on the tech tree than other races' pure anti-air (sairs, valks).
Scout: replace sight upgrade with +2 range upgrade (from 4 to 6)
Scouts just need a better ground attack IMO, perhaps cheaper/faster speed upgrade too. Their air-to-air is quite powerful already, doesn't really need a range upgrade.
Dark Archon: mind control energy (150) down to 125. If target unit max HP > 125, drain shield on HP/energy difference. Lose control of target unit(s) if Dark Archon dies, but retain building control from captured workers.
Again, like 125 mana broodling, probably too good. With 125 mana mind control, okay, four capital ships are incoming. A single DA could potentially MC two of them, have those two fight the other two. One lone DA potentially stops four capital ships, without support. Yeah, seems a bit too rock star.
For more MC and more DA, probably just make DAs more survivable after using MC... either MC only partially drains shields (as you suggested), or DAs get a bit more hp.
Nuclear silo: can build/launch nukes while detached from CC but capturable by enemy CC
Why? Just make ghosts a bit better.
Medic: optic flare also reduces ranged attack ranges by (-1), melee units not affected. blind unchanged
Have no opinion on optic flare, it doesn't get used, maybe it should. The bigger issue with medics is that, as many ppl have noted over the years, medic/marine is borderline OP vs zerg, the heal rate is pretty damn fast. Z needs to get a really good surround and/or just flat have very superior numbers to do much vs M&M until lurkers or mutas come out.
After some thinking, I think Guardian movespeed should be buffed a bit. The upgrade mineral cost should go up to 75 (50 before) in exchange for better mobility.
A problem with nerfing MnM is it lessens the viability of bio TvZ too much. I think tweaking the zerg midgame without affecting vP is the key. But really the only thing I'd change in terran is the bunker build time.
For protoss, I don't know, lessen hallucination energy cost to 75 and lessen the upgrade cost to 100,100? Adds to the protoss quality of durability by taking hits and adds creativity I guess.
@ Liquid`Drone I definitely agree that changing the scout could really change the dynamic of things. I guess this is what we were all hoping SC2 would be. A slight change to everything resulting and in different game dynamics.
Honestly, I think a mini expansion should happen in this fashion:
Protoss: - 1 new robo unit
Terran: - More viable ghosts - 1 new barracks unit
Zerg: - 1 new lair tech ground unit
I know that the addition of units would greatly affect the balance of things, but the gameplay of broodwar is perfect although having new units could really spice things up. One thing I like about SC2 is that there are a ton of options available for all three races. Regardless of how you feel about the units, there is a variety. Now you might be asking, how do we add these new units without having an overlap in roles? Honestly, it's okay if a new unit overlaps other unit roles. Then it is up to the player to choose which one they prefer and as a viewer would be extremely exciting to dissect why one was chosen over the other.
Each interceptor shot should be buffed to do 150 dmg. This will encourage people to all switch to Protoss and only rush to carriers every game. The advantage to this would be that people would then realize the game was fine before and then ask for it to be returned to normal.
On February 20 2015 01:58 ninazerg wrote: Each interceptor shot should be buffed to do 150 dmg. This will encourage people to all switch to Protoss and only rush to carriers every game. The advantage to this would be that people would then realize the game was fine before and then ask for it to be returned to normal.
Cloaked wraiths and medics+blind could still take that down .
archons 350/10---> 400/10 with 1 natural shield resistance(alternatively give archons a research at the tribunal for +2.shield a la ultralisk armor upgrade)
doesn't affect PvT, (very minimal affect on PvP), and helps lower the cost effectiveness of lategame cracklings.
My personal hobby-horse for patching the game has been to un-nerf storm. I don't any more remember what the original damage was, but the 1.08 patch dropped it to the point it is now, where lurkers survive a single storm. I don't know that I'd want it bumped all the way up to one-hit-kill tanks (PvT being tilted slightly Protoss already), but bumping it to e.g. 8*16 instead of the current 8*14 would be a tiny change that would mainly affect one matchup (PvZ) which is at least historically fairly Zerg-favored.
Of course the fallout is unpredictable. It would make lurker play less effective, deal more damage to lings and hydras as well, kill mutas faster... and it doesn't deal with what iirc is the most one-sided matchup, TvZ. But it's one idea I've wanted to see for a while.
On February 20 2015 09:53 VGhost wrote: My personal hobby-horse for patching the game has been to un-nerf storm. I don't any more remember what the original damage was, but the 1.08 patch dropped it to the point it is now, where lurkers survive a single storm. I don't know that I'd want it bumped all the way up to one-hit-kill tanks (PvT being tilted slightly Protoss already), but bumping it to e.g. 8*16 instead of the current 8*14 would be a tiny change that would mainly affect one matchup (PvZ) which is at least historically fairly Zerg-favored.
Of course the fallout is unpredictable. It would make lurker play less effective, deal more damage to lings and hydras as well, kill mutas faster... and it doesn't deal with what iirc is the most one-sided matchup, TvZ. But it's one idea I've wanted to see for a while.
My actual realistic request is to make certain terrain types on the installation tileset buildable, so mapmakers have another tileset to use in mapmaking. Would be pretty sweet.
Even better, give us the option to paint our own custom pathing on the map if we so require. It would actually be pretty easy to implement and would allow for even more style of maps.
On February 20 2015 00:49 BisuDagger wrote: @ Liquid`Drone I definitely agree that changing the scout could really change the dynamic of things. I guess this is what we were all hoping SC2 would be. A slight change to everything resulting and in different game dynamics.
Honestly, I think a mini expansion should happen in this fashion:
Protoss: - 1 new robo unit
Terran: - More viable ghosts - 1 new barracks unit
Zerg: - 1 new lair tech ground unit
I know that the addition of units would greatly affect the balance of things, but the gameplay of broodwar is perfect although having new units could really spice things up. One thing I like about SC2 is that there are a ton of options available for all three races. Regardless of how you feel about the units, there is a variety. Now you might be asking, how do we add these new units without having an overlap in roles? Honestly, it's okay if a new unit overlaps other unit roles. Then it is up to the player to choose which one they prefer and as a viewer would be extremely exciting to dissect why one was chosen over the other.
Basically agree with everything in this post. I think ghosts should have a slightly lower gas cost (you need the gas for factory units) and come with the occular implants already installed so you don't need to research that. Maybe lower the build time by a second or two as well.
TBH Scouts look kinda shitty anyway so I am not really sad that they aren't viable.
I mean Broodwar is close to perfect, but we can still fantasize about additional units and balance patches, which I guess is the whole idea behind this thread.
On February 20 2015 09:53 VGhost wrote: My personal hobby-horse for patching the game has been to un-nerf storm. I don't any more remember what the original damage was, but the 1.08 patch dropped it to the point it is now, where lurkers survive a single storm. I don't know that I'd want it bumped all the way up to one-hit-kill tanks (PvT being tilted slightly Protoss already), but bumping it to e.g. 8*16 instead of the current 8*14 would be a tiny change that would mainly affect one matchup (PvZ) which is at least historically fairly Zerg-favored.
Of course the fallout is unpredictable. It would make lurker play less effective, deal more damage to lings and hydras as well, kill mutas faster... and it doesn't deal with what iirc is the most one-sided matchup, TvZ. But it's one idea I've wanted to see for a while.
Does it really need to be that lurkers die to one storm? Seems okay as it is now, one storm hurts lurkers bad, then goons can come in and mop up. Are ppl having a really hard time keeping their obs alive? Are lurkers really the core of whatever imba is left in PvZ? Seems like P players complain more about hydra busts/other things.
Or, pondering possible root causes... maybe it's the strength of sunkens + Sim City that's more the issue? If P can't really threaten early, Z gets away with some pretty greedy builds and can run over P not too much later. Storm winds up being a bandaid, and things like the Bisu build a reaction, to a fundamental issue?
I think sunks originally did 20 damage, then in 1.04, their damage got upped to 40, their build time got decreased, cost got decreased, and their attack rate got upped. Sure, they sucked before, but that's a lot of up's. Unintended consequences?
On February 20 2015 02:55 ItsFunToLose wrote: archons 350/10---> 400/10 with 1 natural shield resistance(alternatively give archons a research at the tribunal for +2.shield a la ultralisk armor upgrade)
doesn't affect PvT, (very minimal affect on PvP), and helps lower the cost effectiveness of lategame cracklings.
i dont think archons need a buff.. their one of the most cost effective units, on top of that they are recycled from 2 hts...
On February 20 2015 01:58 ninazerg wrote: Each interceptor shot should be buffed to do 150 dmg. This will encourage people to all switch to Protoss and only rush to carriers every game. The advantage to this would be that people would then realize the game was fine before and then ask for it to be returned to normal.
No, the advantage would be that we have carriers every game! :D
On February 20 2015 02:55 ItsFunToLose wrote: archons 350/10---> 400/10 with 1 natural shield resistance(alternatively give archons a research at the tribunal for +2.shield a la ultralisk armor upgrade)
doesn't affect PvT, (very minimal affect on PvP), and helps lower the cost effectiveness of lategame cracklings.
i dont think archons need a buff.. their one of the most cost effective units, on top of that they are recycled from 2 hts...
Archons need blink so they can engage tanks quickly.
I think its obvious scouts need to be fixed, so buff those or reduce their costs, i like the idea about new robo units, lair tech ground units, and a new barracks unit. Storm should be buffed, emp reduced energy cost, carrier cost increased or interceptor attack reduced, and ghost cost decreased and hp improved. i think that would be a good start. Obviously all tilesets should be buildable as someone mentioned and it would be good if ground unit AI was fixed in the case of dragoons and goliaths. Also battle.net UI needs a serious update graphically and latency wise to remove the need for a launcher, and get rid of users encountering problems hosting games. the game needs to be entirely lag free and hack free where all users can host games. It would also be good to add a new queen, defiler, high templar and ghost spell.
On February 21 2015 13:42 alexyoung wrote: I think its obvious scouts need to be fixed, so buff those or reduce their costs
This old chestnut.... Air maps are already extinct due to zergs weakness vs toss air.Why buff toss air further? Lets talk about buffing guardian & devourer first.
On February 21 2015 13:42 alexyoung wrote: I think its obvious scouts need to be fixed, so buff those or reduce their costs
This old chestnut.... Air maps are already extinct due to zergs weakness vs toss air.Why buff toss air further? Lets talk about buffing guardian & devourer first.
I thought the Z prob on island maps (post-1.04) is that they can't get to 2nd and 3rd gas fast enough?
Agree with you that guards and devs could use a bigger role.
People are saying that storm needs to be buffed? It's already the second most powerful spell (not far behind #1 is dark swarm). Storms kill hydras and tanks easily.
Buffing spawn broodling (somehow) would be interesting. Scout: if it starts with the speed upgrade, it might become usable.
On February 21 2015 13:42 alexyoung wrote: I think its obvious scouts need to be fixed, so buff those or reduce their costs
This old chestnut.... Air maps are already extinct due to zergs weakness vs toss air.Why buff toss air further? Lets talk about buffing guardian & devourer first.
Devourers should def be buffed. Also the new Lair tech ground unit could maybe hit air units
On January 21 2015 09:27 Mirabel_ wrote: Starcraft was not designed or balanced to be played at a full 24 fps on today's resource-rich maps. It was designed for 18 fps on sparse islands and other shitty maps. Today, given how far the best players in the world are from the level of tactical depth nearer the theoretical management skillcap, it's apparent that Brood War is one of the very few games you could make an argument for being "too fast" despite the long length of matches (it's an RTS, so who's complaining, lol)
If you want to redesign the game for its current speed by increasing the reward relative to its difficulty for underused abilities, be my guest. In my opinion you should leave the three matchups alone and go for the mirrors, since the matchups are helped by maps and apparently even out entirely as player skill approaches infinity. (FJB had a reverse counter triangle going!)
Of course I read every post in this thread, backwards, before I saw this gem.
Now for actual core balance suggestions: If you want to fix ZvZ without harming the other matchups, give Spore Colonies a 0 range splash effect, large enough to only affect ultratight stacks. This opens pandora's box on ZvZ (since Zerg has the ability to hardcounter every unit combination it can throw at itself) without severely affecting the early mutaling dynamic. Chamber builds, which, by the way, can be countered, would as a result lead to more long hivetech ZvZs. That idea I got from someone in the TLBW IRC, and I can't recall who.
Everyone seems to agree with this general sentiment. It's the sc2 balance, but hey, it'd be better in BW. I think a simple damage difference would work well though. 40 concussive from a spore colony? It'd destroy scourge and mutas, better deter corsairs (since shields take full damage), and interceptors would get vaporized. Sunken does 40, why not the spore?
That said- ensnare is crap. Right now it's the anti-stimpack. Mech doesn't suffer attack speed reduction. And it's really supposed to be an anti T spell that has more uses in vP and vZ. I'd vote to just make it Entangle, ie freeze the movement of units it affects while not adjusting their attack patterns. Curiously, this could be a harassment spell, slowing down scv mining.
Some people have remarked that Spawn Brokdling could be improved somehow... :/. Maybe it could spawn a larva with the spell in addition to the broodlings, so you can grow stuff like drones from ursadons on islands or an ultra next to a siege tank.
it seems like blizzard wanted banelings in BW. DTs found their way into the game, and the campaign ends with 50 damage infested terrans. I dunno what the damage should be, but a Greater Spawning Pool would be neat. It'd be cool to have a Greater Den as well, instead of morph upgrades. Banelings would help against bio. I really feel like this is a vacuum for Zerg too. With the lurker they got a seige unit but they still lack a vulture/DT companion- ie something that makes lings, rines, and drones go POP before you can blink. And it'd be in ZvZ. It might need deal concussive damage and have a splash as big as the firebat splash.
Maybe guards should have splash as big as firebats too.
I have no idea how to open up TvT without reducing the game speed enough to facilitate lockdown/optical flare in 200/200. The best idea I can think of is to have a new secondary effect of the Science Vessel's EMP cause an 8-second stun on grounded mechanical/robotic units (compare to Disruption Web). The sprite limit bug being fixed would definitely be amazing in this matchup since Valkyries have a strong niche in the making to be mixed in against mass wraith, and that bug really doesn't affect the Valk's strong role in TvZ.
Again, we are on the same page. If EMP did the effects of Ensnare to mechanical and robotic units (why not air?) on top of the shield and battery drain, it not only would have better flavor, have use against toss outside Arbiters, but it'd also be strategically more compelling in wraith+ fights.
Everyone knows that wraiths are not very viable outside Mirrors. And scouts even less viable. These units are supposed to destroy BCs, which no one ever makes. These units would be way cooler if they had balanced attacks, like the muta. Say the wraith didn't have missiles, but hit ground and air units for 10-15 explosive damage- and scouts dealt 15-20 explosive damage... They'd be tank killers; they wouldn't be especially awesome at mineral harass or killing marines. They'd be a bit better against Hydras. Valkyries would be slightly more valuable in TvT and with the EMP+Ensnare spell, wraiths would still destroy BCs.
I wouldn't know what to do with ghosts though.
PvP opens up by itself if both players go safe, but if you want to see more stargate builds I think Apial Sensors needs to be reworked. Scouts should have that 10 sight by default, and the Apial Sensors upgrade at the Fleet Beacon should instead grant them the ability to detect stealthed units, permitting them to be used for observer hunts while already being decent at chasing shuttles and arbiters. It would be just enough to give the Scout a lategame niche against Zerg and Terran, providing mobile detection for corsairs and an alternative (but expensive) means to clear minefields and put more pressure on the T to maintain map control.
I like this. Robo=detector/cloaking; archives=cloaking/harass; stargate=detector/harass. Imo, permanent detection would be OP, but if the scout had an ability like Comsat Scan, but smaller AOE and ya know like a range of 8 or whatever. Plasma Flare. Or Tactical Relay. Or whatever ya wanna call it. Envision!
Maybe the archon could have shield regeneration and a mana bar like the Shield battery. It wouldn't be much but give the unit some flexibility in most match ups. Hallucinate would be better suited on the observer than Templar imo.
Lastly- my crazy idea. Spell asters have "one of" spells (that you can upgrade to "three of"- maybe). So like queens start off with a one-shot parasite. After using the spell once, which takes no mana, that unit can't use it anymore. Like vultures running out of spider mines. Likewise, medics could start with one optic flare, and temps start with a one-shot hallucination or something
Either way, with everyone suggesting new mana costs for most spells, I think it's obvious that certain spell casters could be tweaked to make them more fun without screwing overall balance. I'd love to see a badass Scout come into Terrans base, start ripping apart a tank, only to get blinded by a medic with a one-shot optic flare- and then said scout occasionally casts a micro scan to keep... Scouting. Oh yer still useless but so much fun.
On February 21 2015 13:42 alexyoung wrote: I think its obvious scouts need to be fixed, so buff those or reduce their costs
This old chestnut.... Air maps are already extinct due to zergs weakness vs toss air.Why buff toss air further? Lets talk about buffing guardian & devourer first.
Devourers should def be buffed. Also the new Lair tech ground unit could maybe hit air units
why should devouver be buffed? that would only make pvz harder than it already is, and you don't need devs in zvt.
On February 22 2015 18:26 reminisce12 wrote: devourers could use a speed buff to mutas, they should help u win late game muta on muta battles, and help u combat sair carrier late game.
if you want devourers into muta vs muta battle, that would mean upgrading into hive first. (queen's nest -> hive -> greater spire -> morphing mutas into devourers.
vs sairs and carriers i consider devourers being fast enough since they can fight corsairs easily during fight, and they're already faster than carriers. vs sair+carrier plague is needed of course.
edit: after giving few more thoughts about this, maybe speed buff would not be bad idea, but as a counterbalance their damage should be decreased so that late game corsairs would not lose too much viablity in pvz.
On February 22 2015 18:26 reminisce12 wrote: devourers could use a speed buff to mutas, they should help u win late game muta on muta battles, and help u combat sair carrier late game.
if you want devourers into muta vs muta battle, that would mean upgrading into hive first. (queen's nest -> hive -> greater spire -> morphing mutas into devourers.
vs sairs and carriers i consider devourers being fast enough since they can fight corsairs easily during fight, and they're already faster than carriers. vs sair+carrier plague is needed of course.
edit: after giving few more thoughts about this, maybe speed buff would not be bad idea, but as a counterbalance their damage should be decreased so that late game corsairs would not lose too much viablity in pvz.
when it comes to devourer dmg, they have one the worst dps if not the worst dps of all air units.. they are only good for letting mutas do extra amounts of dmg. The problem is that mutas get wiped out by sairs b4 they can get close. In really late game zvp, if toss has a large amount of sairs with carriers, its almost impossible to do anything as zerg, u can apply ur triple rainbow colour and hope for the best, but at the same time toss has spells like maelstorm combo.
On February 22 2015 04:38 29 fps wrote: People are saying that storm needs to be buffed? It's already the second most powerful spell (not far behind #1 is dark swarm). Storms kill hydras and tanks easily.
Buffing spawn broodling (somehow) would be interesting. Scout: if it starts with the speed upgrade, it might become usable.
Speed upgrade and 50 mineral cost deduction at the very least.
On February 22 2015 18:26 reminisce12 wrote: devourers could use a speed buff to mutas, they should help u win late game muta on muta battles, and help u combat sair carrier late game.
if you want devourers into muta vs muta battle, that would mean upgrading into hive first. (queen's nest -> hive -> greater spire -> morphing mutas into devourers.
vs sairs and carriers i consider devourers being fast enough since they can fight corsairs easily during fight, and they're already faster than carriers. vs sair+carrier plague is needed of course.
edit: after giving few more thoughts about this, maybe speed buff would not be bad idea, but as a counterbalance their damage should be decreased so that late game corsairs would not lose too much viablity in pvz.
when it comes to devourer dmg, they have one the worst dps if not the worst dps of all air units.. they are only good for letting mutas do extra amounts of dmg. The problem is that mutas get wiped out by sairs b4 they can get close. In really late game zvp, if toss has a large amount of sairs with carriers, its almost impossible to do anything as zerg, u can apply ur triple rainbow colour and hope for the best, but at the same time toss has spells like maelstorm combo.
I do not agree with you. In ground maps, if toss goes for mass air, zerg has a timing window to overwhelm his expansions. getting enough carriers to kill anything in pvz is quite a work. meanwhile zerg can just mass expand to every single free expansion on the map. after that swarm+plague+hydra+devouver combo works pretty well vs slow ass carriers. keep killing the interceptors like in tvp vs mass carriers, and the toss will eventually dry out. snipe a carrier only when you know you can.
I see a problem only in air maps, but imo balancing those would require tech three changes.
On February 22 2015 15:43 Captainrooster wrote: Again, we are on the same page. If EMP did the effects of Ensnare to mechanical and robotic units (why not air?) on top of the shield and battery drain, it not only would have better flavor, have use against toss outside Arbiters, but it'd also be strategically more compelling in wraith+ fights.
Everyone knows that wraiths are not very viable outside Mirrors. And scouts even less viable. These units are supposed to destroy BCs, which no one ever makes. These units would be way cooler if they had balanced attacks, like the muta. Say the wraith didn't have missiles, but hit ground and air units for 10-15 explosive damage- and scouts dealt 15-20 explosive damage... They'd be tank killers; they wouldn't be especially awesome at mineral harass or killing marines. They'd be a bit better against Hydras. Valkyries would be slightly more valuable in TvT and with the EMP+Ensnare spell, wraiths would still destroy BCs.
EMP's already a hard counter against Archons as well. As I said before wraith is perfectly fine against Zerg in hands of good player who can micro (Leta, Fantasy, Flash) and is the primary reason Guardians are risky options. I have no Idea, how you want use EMP+wriths+Ensnare against battlecruisers. Terrans dont use ensnare. With mutalisks already ruining ZvZ buffing wriths against hydralisks is awfull idea. Oh, and infested terrans are 500 damage, not 50.
On February 25 2015 16:44 raviy wrote: It's incredible that this thread is still going after a month, so I'll throw in my 2 cents.
With the view that any change should not be game-breaking, and should act to make games more interesting to play/watch:
1. That 0 range spore splash idea is fantastic.
2. Ghost lockdown range +1. Ghost cloaking upgrade reduced to 50/50.
3. Hallucination upgrade cost reduced to 50/50. Energy cost reduced to 75.
4. Dark Archon starting energy buffed to 100. Mind Control energy cost reduced to 130.
5. Ensnare upgrade cost reduced to 50/50. Research time reduced to 60.
6. Optic flare upgrade cost reduced to 50/50. Research time reduced to 60.
7. Remove or substantially increase sprite limit.
8. Nuclear silos to store 2 nukes each.
If someone more knowledgeable than myself can tell me if any of the above would be game-breaking, please share.
FYI, if you look at all the BW upgrades and spells, none cost less than 100/100, and no research time is less than 80. Seems to be a minimum for Bliz.
Also, all Bliz spell mana costs seem to be in multiples of 25. They wouldn't have a spell that costs 130 mana, or 135, or whatever.
Emphatic agree on fixing the sprite limit. That was always a major 'WTF, Bliz?!?' for me.
The 0 range spore colony splash idea may not be so fantastic. One thing you'd probably want in any hypothetical balance patch would be for scouts and wraiths to be more effective harassers, like they were before they got nerfed in 1.04.
So if they got fixed, you'd see more stacks of scouts and wraiths (in other matchups than TvT), and spore colonies with splash would utterly hose them, and not just mutas.
I'm not saying spores don't need some help, but rather, the right fix.
Their problem isn't damage type, their Normal damage is definitely the way to go, since explosive would be weak vs mutas, and concussive would be VERY weak vs scouts/wraiths/valks/BCs/shuttles/dropships.
They certainly have enough hp, they're tough to take out/are tough enough when attacked directly. The problem obviously is that they just don't output enough damage per second to interfere with muta harass as much as they should (mutas that just go straight for the worker line and ignore the spore fire).
For instance, two missile turrets cost less than 1 spore, yet output 1/3 more damage/second vs small units (mutas) than 1 spore does. And that's WITH the turrets doing only half damage vs small (explosive dmg); vs large air the dmg output difference is really enormous.
So, you'd want to up spores' damage output, while also realizing that you can't do it TOO much, otherwise you're hosing wraith/scouts/dropships/shuttles, etc again. You'd also want to reduce spore colonies' hp by a proportionate amount, so that they're no more difficult to take out overall than before/aren't too strong in a stand-up fight, as opposed to harassment deterrence.
You could do something slightly heavy-handed and up their damage to 20, while reducing hp to 300. You now kill a muta in 7 hits rather than 9 (regeneration), and the spore colony is no stronger overall if directly attacked. Good so far. Unfortunately, you also now kill a wraith in 6 hits instead of 8. Oh, and scouts would go down in 13 hits instead of 17. So, bleah.
Better way to do it might be to up damage to 18, and cut hp to 350 (technically 333 health for spores to be no stronger, but close enough). Mutas would still die in 7 hits instead of 9. Wraiths die in 7 as well, which is only one less than it is now, and could be more than made up for by having a more effective ground attack for them. Scouts would take 15 hits (shield regeneration), so pretty much the same deal for them. It seems doable.
A lot of time it just comes down to 'numbers-fu', i.e. finding the right math rather than doing something kooky/major like making spores' do concussive, with all the unintended bad consequences that come along with.
PS to Reminicse (who posted below) - Spores and turrets both take up the same 2x2 matrix 'box size' (so you can't place turrets with greater density/in a smaller space than spores), it's just that the graphic for spores is considerably larger within that same box size.
PPS – Another balance idea: Medics only being able to heal up to 75% of damage inflicted. Would keep T infantry more honest vs Z, and stim wouldn't be something you could do infinitely without consequences.
And, finally... VERY BAD call on locking the thread. A good discussion was going.
I'm as surprised as anyone that this thread is still alive. I figured it would have died by now. But since it hasn't I'm going to send it to the grave.
EPT
most played
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Breach vs 
Rush. ASL2 was a final between 
NoisE. CrSL1 finals were between 
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