[D] Brainstorming a balance patch for Brood war

Slayer91

Ireland23365 Posts

After complaints recently about balance and heavy discussion here I thought it deserved it's own thread. My suggestions:

Protoss
* Photon cannon building armour increased from 0 to 1
* Photon cannon ground and air attack damage increased from 20 to 21
* Plasma shield upgrade cost decreased from 200/300/400 to 150/250/350

Zerg
* Dark swarm duration decreased from 37.8 seconds to 25 seconds

Terran
* Siege Tank range decreased from 12 to 11

Justification:

PvZ
From my observation, macro games are relatively balanced but protoss has too much trouble surviving various aggressive plays between zergling runbys, hydra busts, and muta/scourge attacks early game.

Photon cannons feel like paper, giving them more armour makes them slightly stronger against hydras, lings, mutas, and increasing their damage to 21 means they 4 shot hydras (25% faster kill time) and 6 shot mutas (17% faster kill time), and 2 shot 3/3 adrenalings (they can survive 3 hits?!) while not changing how fast they kill marines and vultures.
This should make relatively little impact on mid and late game but make the early zerg attacks much, much easier to defend. The +1 carapace upgrades will negate the difference later. +1 Building armour upgrade will help later, but it's probably negligible compared to how much it will help against early rushes.

Dark swarm duration shouldn't impact the PvZ matchup much; dark swarm is good but Zerg generally doesn't camp under for it for a very long time, and if he does it's pretty oppressive.

PvT
It seems that late game upgraded terran is a little hard for protoss to deal with, and reducing siege tank range should reduce the overall strength of a terran army if he spreads out, while Psionic storm can punish a more clumped army.
Siege tanks hitting nexuses from across the map in another base is also a little bit ridiculous.

ZvT
Zerg needs defilers to be able to survive against Bio terran, barely staying alive with a huge supply disadvantage in the most standard games, but the top zergs can seem unbeatable with their dark swarm defense, decreasing the duration gives more windows to punish zerg with for example sieged tanks which can pick off units hiding under dark swarm when it expires, unless Zerg is constantly baby sitting with replacing new swarms which can be killed by irradiate.

Siege tank range reduction might help slightly counterbalance swarm expiring much faster. Mid game pushes rarely leverage the full 12 range anyway

Slayer91

Ireland23365 Posts

26 minutes ago

Context: I've seen discussions about balance changes on reddit etc but it's from people who have no clue about the game, suggesting things like "remove consume" where Zerg will basically never beat Terran then as you can never stop a bio/tank/vessel ball without a big lead.
Similarly, Protoss has so many things that can straight up kill terran in PvT that you have to be very careful nerfing anything that will just allow them to play nexus first and destroy every terran.

The siege tank range reduction might make SnOW style Reaver stalling even more oppressive, the other options I was looking at it somehow making the attack upgrades for terran less impactful. (Vultures changed to have 2 attacks so armour blocks it better? Siege tank getting +4 instead of +5 damage?)

When blizzard changed sunken from 400 to 300 health +2 armour, it made them die in exactly the same amount of hits from zealots (26) but in 76 hits from marines instead of 67, so it was an elegant way to make MnM sunken busts a bit weaker without changing drastically the rest of the game (it also made them weaker against goliaths and dragoons where they are already strong against them). I think adding building armour to cannons is quite elegant as it mainly targets Zerg which have low attack damage with high speed, and marines vs cannons you never see anyway in PvT. The +1 damage is similar as it targets the +1 hp regen zerg get instantly that makes their units tankier than on paper as they survive with 1 hp a lot. (Cannon vs hydra, +0 zealot vs hydra, drone vs vulture, turret vs muta etc)

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[D] Brainstorming a balance patch for Brood war

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