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So, the sentry has been around for a while, and previously it may have seemed like a somewhat average unit as many did not know how to use this guy to it's full potential. But now, especially in the high plat leagues, this guy can and will be abused to great affect.
-Forcefield-
Basically a sentry's forcefield allows you to manipulate any battle to your favor. It can split up an enemy force(lowering dps, or just leading to half the army dead), prevent it from running when needed (which can lead to every unit lost), block ramps indefinitely (can kill expos, secure tech, etc), prevent any damage from a melee army. The AI associated with forcefield is retarded in such a way that the units prefer to run straight into it rather than around it.
Recently I've been playing on my brothers plat account for fun just going zealots and sentries to start, and can win a majority of my games just by abusing sentires. This is most effective against terran who go marauders, i'll just create a forcefield wall behind them and watch as my zealots slaughter the trapped units =D. I'm not saying forcefield is the end all be all instant win, but in the hands of a skilled player, is clearly extremely powerful.
-Guardian Shield-
Whoever thought of guardian shield must have clearly been thinking of a counter to the terran race early game. This nifty little move provides 2 ranged armor, meaning that marines will do 33% less damage against all toss units, and marauders will do 20% less damage to non-armored and 10% less damage to armored units. This is huge, considering this move really only counters early game Terran, and gives the Toss a huge advantage in rushing (sentry zlot all-ins come to mind, mixed army sentry rushes, etc). I find that FE against a toss who rushes with sentry armies properly is nearly impossible, if possible, and i'm not saying that terran should have that option, but they usually did. Not to mention the forcefields can be used to stop bunker repair. Why should protoss instantly get an ability with an effectiveness of 250/250 + building (forge) cost and lots of time investment (armor upgrades)?
-Proposed Changes to Forcefield-
Because forcefield is easily spammable if you have more than a few sentries, the simple solution would be to make it cost more mana. This is viable, however, I would actually recommend keeping the mana cost the same, but rather reducing the diameter of forcefield by 50% (maybe mana cost can be slightly reduced). Now it would require 2 forcefields to block a ramp instead of one. This would make forcefield a more skill-intensive move, as more forcefields would be needed to produce the same effects, requiring precise motion and quick fingers, and leaving more room for error. The way forcefield is right now is, admittedly, too easy.
-Proposed Changes to Guardian Shield-
Quite simply, the most reasonable change to this ability is to make it reduce 1 armor instead of 2. This still reduces the damage of marines by 16% and the damage of marauders by 10% against non-armored and 5% against armored targets. I find this to be a more fair amount which should lead to more diversity in terran's early game options.
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I say reduce the duration of force field from 15 seconds to 12 or 9 seconds maybe... I would leave guardian shield alone.
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I disagree.
However, I won't bother typing the same "whys" and "becauses" nerfing the sentry would change toss too much because everyone on TL has read this thread and the discussion 100 times and knows both sides of the argument like the back of his or her hand.
I do appreciate you bringing it to the forums once again though.
Wait. No I don't.
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Oh gee, is this a serious sentry discussion?
Anyway, I see no problem at all with guardian shield, all terrans can deal just fine with it, protoss needs it early and midgame against Z so nerfing it isnt an option.
Forcefield needs its time reduced, and/or have its mana cost increased a bit
the only problem I really see with force field is how spammable it is, and how broken permanent ramp block with 2 sentries is
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I never really felt that Guardian Shield is too strong. It's not that hard to focus down one or two sentries with activated shield if it really bothers you too much.
Changing the Forcefield has been brought up many times by a lot of people and a small nerf seems to be appropriate. There were a lot of different approaches to this (making the FF destroyable or not placeable on top of units to push them away) but I think the diameter reduction is the best idea. Although your proposed 50% seems to be too much. It would be pretty hard to use them effectively on open terrain because you need twice as many of them. In a situation like this it would be like increasing the manacost by 100%. Something like 25% diameter reduction would be better since it would still need at least two FF's to completely block a ramp and they could be used better in the open.
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United States1967 Posts
I think the forcefield change is bad. You're balancing it for PvT, but terran already has a counter to mass forcefield (ghost emp), while you'd be nerfing PvZ. There's a lot of situations, especially early game where 1 forcefield blocking a ramp is crucial to toss surviving, like vs a speedling/baneling rush.
maybe have forcefield cost more, 75 energy?
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yeah i thinking the forcefield size is needed in like PvZ
for PvT i'd say just fix it so that you can't target an area where there are already units (but that would make cloaked unit finding sorta weird), but same shit with landing buildings in vision areas with burrowed lings
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On April 12 2010 23:56 TheMango wrote:
I think the forcefield change is bad. You're balancing it for PvT, but terran already has a counter to mass forcefield (ghost emp), while you'd be nerfing PvZ. There's a lot of situations, especially early game where 1 forcefield blocking a ramp is crucial to toss surviving, like vs a speedling/baneling rush.
maybe have forcefield cost more, 75 energy?
I'm not balancing it for PvT. Forcefield is extremely effective against melee such as zerglings and this change addresses that problem as well. Ghost EMP is not viable in that usually you will not be able to get ghosts in time, and that the sentries can be much more multiple than say immortals, or other units you would EMP on, so they would be spread out and impossible to hit every one. Especially if you don't have lots of ghosts, as, which I said, would be impossible to get early game.
And the only reason 1 forcefield blocking a ramp is "crucial to toss surviving", is because protoss players found this way to be the easiest to abuse, and built their game around it. you can easily use the half-radius forcefield and, say, a building or a unit or two to block the same ramp. Not to mention a dozen other options you could probably think of, including just dropping 2 forcefields instead of one (yes it might require build changes, but that is expected).
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make em destroyable
ggnore discussion
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On April 13 2010 00:11 MMmmmmmmmm wrote:
make em destroyable
ggnore discussion
This defeats the whole concept and point of forcefield, and IMO is a terrible change, which is why I have not suggested it.
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My god what is up with these moronic threads asking for nerfs on the weakest race.
For fucks sake the unit has only 40 health and 40 shields, what more can you want.
You already have stim on marauders which makes no sense at all
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On April 13 2010 00:15 -orb- wrote:
My god what is up with these moronic threads asking for nerfs on the weakest race.
For fucks sake the unit has only 40 health and 40 shields, what more can you want.
You already have stim on marauders which makes no sense at all
rofl weakest race, sounds like you're biased and have nothing constructive to share =/
edit: and some micro makes 80HP go a long way. remember you can keep them behind the rest of your army as well.
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just wondering what race you play??
i play protoss (gold rank#4) and i think the sentry and immortal are the only 2 units that keep protoss in the fight yet they are being called to strong.... if all these players got there way and they both got nerfed what would toss have left???......
Edit: wanted to say what orb did but didn't want to be as harsh hah
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stupid thread. i was against marauder changes and now i am against sentry changes. the reason is simple, people suck in this game and should learn first how to play before they want to change things.
you lose vs ff, find a solution and "crying ff is imba change it" is not a solution its just pathetic.
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8748 Posts
I don't think I see any arguments for balance changes yet. You're just picking on Sentries. Basically you've just said, in an ideal situation, how super effective Sentries can be. But really effective moves ought to be in the game unless you want SC2 to be a snoozefest. Yeah, there will be, and ought to be, times when one unit enables something crazy good, even against a pro opponent.
Balancing the game comes from an entirely different starting point. Like "oh, Terran is losing 55% of their games against Protoss. Let's take a closer look at why... oh I see, they are either losing the game very early or getting a pretty significant disadvantage in the early game, let's take a closer look at early game. Oh, it seems that it's mostly just 3gate or 4gate builds, and the Terrans are truly doing all that they can do, but what makes this so effective?" And then at that point you might say that there are a number of things working together to make the attack effective, one of them being Sentries, and you decide what change you can make to bring each race's chances back to 50/50 in that situation without screwing anything else up, which might involve a tweak to Sentries.
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i think that it wont be a big impact if you make forcefields attackable.
that way there is still the posibility to contain someone for some time but not infinite.
ofc they should have enough hp to make it balanced in the different game stages. in its current version a protoss can contain a zerg for long enough to get so far ahead in eco/tech that its hard to catch back up because all Z can do is either tech to lair+nydus/spire/overlord transport(edit or roach burrow move). any of those 4 is far more expensive than 5-6 sentries and forces you to cut unit production while protoss is free to build more army/eco.
guardian shield is totaly ok and forecfield should stay at same energy costs.
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On April 12 2010 23:40 JTPROG wrote:
-Proposed Changes to Forcefield-
Because forcefield is easily spammable if you have more than a few sentries, the simple solution would be to make it cost more mana. This is viable, however, I would actually recommend keeping the mana cost the same, but rather reducing the diameter of forcefield by 50% (maybe mana cost can be slightly reduced). Now it would require 2 forcefields to block a ramp instead of one. Great, now 2v2 would be completely broken for P because they have no way to block even some of the later rushes in time.
I don't see how sentries has screwed up the balance of the game, hence I don't see why it should be nerfed to begin with.
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On April 13 2010 00:29 Liquid`NonY wrote:
I don't think I see any arguments for balance changes yet. You're just picking on Sentries. Basically you've just said, in an ideal situation, how super effective Sentries can be. But really effective moves ought to be in the game unless you want SC2 to be a snoozefest. Yeah, there will be, and ought to be, times when one unit enables something crazy good, even against a pro opponent.
Balancing the game comes from an entirely different starting point. Like "oh, Terran is losing 55% of their games against Protoss. Let's take a closer look at why... oh I see, they are either losing the game very early or getting a pretty significant disadvantage in the early game, let's take a closer look at early game. Oh, it seems that it's mostly just 3gate or 4gate builds, and the Terrans are truly doing all that they can do, but what makes this so effective?" And then at that point you might say that there are a number of things working together to make the attack effective, one of them being Sentries, and you decide what change you can make to bring each race's chances back to 50/50 in that situation without screwing anything else up, which might involve a tweak to Sentries.
I understand this, and the situation you described is sort of what I'm hinting at right now, especially after the changes to marauders in TvP. You may say there's no arguments for balance changes YET, due to lack of solid statistics. But one can project his knowledge, logic, and inferences about how the game currently is, and make a pretty accurate hypothesis. That is the point of the discussion, to think about these mechanics in the game's most CURRENT state, and your second paragraph might be hitting that dead-on. The nerf, if needed, can wait, but the discussion can start now.
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Leave our Sentries alone for god sakes. This is the only unit allowing us to hold off on early pushes, decreasing the size of the Force Fields or increasing their energy cost would make us way too vulnerable. Guardian Shield doesn't need to be nerfed in a million years.
The only viable nerf would be to reduce the Force Field's duration to 12 or 13 seconds, but not a second less. For the rest, you'll just have to learn to deal with it.
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On April 13 2010 00:37 JTPROG wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2010 00:29 Liquid`NonY wrote:
I don't think I see any arguments for balance changes yet. You're just picking on Sentries. Basically you've just said, in an ideal situation, how super effective Sentries can be. But really effective moves ought to be in the game unless you want SC2 to be a snoozefest. Yeah, there will be, and ought to be, times when one unit enables something crazy good, even against a pro opponent.
Balancing the game comes from an entirely different starting point. Like "oh, Terran is losing 55% of their games against Protoss. Let's take a closer look at why... oh I see, they are either losing the game very early or getting a pretty significant disadvantage in the early game, let's take a closer look at early game. Oh, it seems that it's mostly just 3gate or 4gate builds, and the Terrans are truly doing all that they can do, but what makes this so effective?" And then at that point you might say that there are a number of things working together to make the attack effective, one of them being Sentries, and you decide what change you can make to bring each race's chances back to 50/50 in that situation without screwing anything else up, which might involve a tweak to Sentries. I understand this, and the situation you described is sort of what I'm hinting at right now, especially after the changes to marauders in TvP. You may say there's no arguments for balance changes YET, due to lack of solid statistics. But one can project his knowledge, logic, and inferences about how the game currently is, and make a pretty accurate hypothesis. That is the point of the discussion, to think about these mechanics in the game's most CURRENT state, and your second paragraph might be hitting that dead-on. The nerf, if needed, can wait, but the discussion can start now.
Wasn't his entire point that you should arrive at the conclusion to alter a mechanic like sentries after identifying a problem to be fixed with a specific unit makeup being too effective at some specific point in the game?
You didn't touch on their cost, build time, health, movement, or just about any part of how they actually fit into the game.
You're just complaining about sentries being too strong in general, even going as far to propose a bunch of nerfs off the bat.
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EPT
