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Thors have great anti air against light units, but against armored air units, their air attack is beyond terrible. With equal upgrades against Carriers, Thors do 4x4 = 16 damage per volley. That's less DPS than a stimmed Marine.
Thors weakness against armored air targets would be reasonable if they weren't so high up on the attack priority. In a large battle with Carriers on one side and Thors on the other, Thors do basically no DPS, unless you manually target Thors on ground units, they spend the entire fight shooting Interceptors and Carriers.
Now I know what you're saying: Get Vikings to kill Armored air units. But the problem is that Vikings suck on the ground. The problem is that getting armored air units is almost always a win for the Protoss in TvP. This is only masked by the fact that most TvPs are over fairly quickly and don't ever get past 2-3 base for the P, because almost all Terrans use bio. There are three ways getting Vikings to counter Carriers can go:
1. The best case scenario is that you make just enough to kill his Carriers then hope you win the ground battle. Terran maybe comes out slightly ahead in this case. But it's very difficult to hit the exact right amount of Vikings.
2. If you lose the air battle and he has carriers left over you lose the battle. Nothing else you have that shoots up (Marines and Thors) are good vs Carriers with support.
3. If you win the air battle with too many vikings left over, you'll lose the ground fight. Vikings that are 0/0 and on the ground are pretty terrible.
Also they are on an entirely separate upgrade table so you're at 0/0 when they already have some upgrades.
There are a couple of solutions to this problem:
Change Thor anti-air damage to be 12x4, or 24x2 instead of 6+6lightx4.
Change Thors to automatically target ground units over armored air units and Interceptors.
If Thors were changed so that Terrans had a viable counter to armored air other than Viking/Marines, I believe we would see playstyles other than bio open up.
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Um...the reason that terrans go bio is not because they are afraid of carriers. It's because bio is strong.
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On November 18 2010 19:39 Daniel C wrote:
Um...the reason that terrans go bio is not because they are afraid of carriers. It's because bio is strong.
It's both, so both would need to be addressed I think. If protoss doesn't have workable answers to bio plays (debatable whether this is so) then play styles will remain as they are, but protoss air just kills to death almost all non-bio plays of terran at the same time.
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To be honest : in about 350 ladder games i have seen carriers maybe... once or twice. Protoss has the same problem with air-upgrades that you say the vikings have (if protoss starts with colossi,terrans sometimes get +1 air attack even, so...). Also letting thors do normal damage vs. armored would make them stronger vs. BCs/Broodlords also, so it would also effect the other matchups... i dont think this is a good idea to be honest
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Making Thors good against armored air would be kinda cool, and also open up other match ups such as ZvT (Mutas wont be hard countered by 1-2 thors). Terran already got mega strong turrets to use against mutas so it would be a cool change. But this won't be done by Blizzard as it is a way too big of a change to the game.
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I agree the reason people go bio is not because they are afraid of Carriers. But you'd see other things if Thors could hit armored air well.
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Or or you can get battlecruisers. Combine with EMP for instant-win.
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I'd love to see a Protoss player go Carrier tech vs. Terran and actually win. Vikings are just so good that even if he does tech switch to Mass Gateways and High Templar after you dominate his air forces, and even if you build 5-6 too many Vikings to deal with the threat, you'll still have enough of a ground army to take out whatever he manages to scrape together after wasting all those resources on Carrier tech. At the same time, you yourself can put up a Ghost Academy while he's tech switching to counter the inevitable High Templar that will come next, as the only other counter to terran Bio is Colossi, which are also countered by your "spare" Vikings.
Even if the Vikings have nothing to shoot, the Protoss player can't just ignore them. Vikings take away a LOT of the Protoss player's options.
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On November 18 2010 19:43 Espelz wrote:
To be honest : in about 350 ladder games i have seen carriers maybe... once or twice. Protoss has the same problem with air-upgrades that you say the vikings have (if protoss starts with colossi,terrans sometimes get +1 air attack even, so...). Also letting thors do normal damage vs. armored would make them stronger vs. BCs/Broodlords also, so it would also effect the other matchups... i dont think this is a good idea to be honest
Because you obviously don't play mech or you protoss opponents don't know how to respond to mech appropriately, it's really an issue. Mech is really really strong against protoss in late game, but weak thor AA makes it almost impossible to make a steady unitmix because you either have a groundarmy that obliterates everything and then you lose 15 tanks against 1 carrier or some void rays or you have 10 vikings and he just stops making air at all and vikings are really the most worthless unit in the game in the late game and just waste supply, so you lose the ground fight horribly. Plus they are on a different upgrade path, so they naturally aren't that good in later stages of the game.
Playing mech against mass gateway + starport + occassional robo/immortal is IMO not really winnable (steadily) if the protoss knows what to do, and that's really sad because mech would be a great response to protoss late game if it's upgradable AA would be existant.
Make thors much weaker against ground, change their 6(+6)x4 with 3.0s cd splash attack to something like 10x2 or 12x2 with 1.5s cooldown without or with really little splash, and they will be perfectly fine balanced. They are so slow, that they can't be the ultimate counter to air, because air naturally is very mobile, but at the same time they at least ARE some sort of Mech-AA possibility, which atm is non-existant and not even really viable against light air units without armor (mutalisks, phoenix) which they should counter gamedesign-wise.
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On November 18 2010 19:54 X-Codes wrote:
I'd love to see a Protoss player go Carrier tech vs. Terran and actually win. Vikings are just so good that even if he does tech switch to Mass Gateways and High Templar after you dominate his air forces, and even if you build 5-6 too many Vikings to deal with the threat, you'll still have enough of a ground army to take out whatever he manages to scrape together after wasting all those resources on Carrier tech. At the same time, you yourself can put up a Ghost Academy while he's tech switching to counter the inevitable High Templar that will come next, as the only other counter to terran Bio is Colossi, which are also countered by your "spare" Vikings.
Even if the Vikings have nothing to shoot, the Protoss player can't just ignore them. Vikings take away a LOT of the Protoss player's options.
Carriers are way way better than you think, Vikings do not beat them cost effectively, they roughly trade with Carriers. Especially since he'll be ahead in upgrades (he knows he's going Carriers before you know you're gonna need Vikings, has Chrono, and an idle Cybernetics Core while you probably have either no armory or a working armory).
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Marines are seemingly the most cost-effective unit in the game; I can't see a justification for Terran to play mech instead of Marine + Mech. In Broodwar, you saw pure mech because Vultures were much stronger than Hellions, and Marines had 40HP instead of 55...
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i'm confused doens/t thor beat all of protoss ground units for cost ?
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On November 18 2010 20:21 Severedevil wrote:
Marines are seemingly the most cost-effective unit in the game; I can't see a justification for Terran to play mech instead of Marine + Mech. In Broodwar, you saw pure mech because Vultures were much stronger than Hellions, and Marines had 40HP instead of 55...
Marines are extremely strong any time there isn't area effect damage going around, but their effectiveness greatly diminishes when Storm/Colossus are out.
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450 Minerals + 250 gas for 1 Carrier = 3 Vikings + 25 Gas leftover. 1 Carrier and 3 Vikings also have equal supply cost. Also, a Reactor'd Starport produces 3 Vikings in roughly the same amount of time it takes to create 1 Carrier from a perfectly Chronoboosted Stargate. With just a little more micro than a moving the Vikings into the Carriers, you should be able to not lose a single viking in this exchange. Yes, not ONE. Why not? Because Carriers are so laughably slow, even slower than Vikings, that they just can't catch a retreating Viking, and they can't escape from an engagement with them. I'm also not taking into account the inevitable Marine support that the first wave of Vikings will have.
Also, if you do any scouting at all then the Protoss player can't go all Suddenly... CARRIERS! on you. If they don't completely neglect their ground army, then they can probably fund 1 Stargate off 1 base and 3 Stargates off 2. So, you have an opportunity to scout their fast expo easily enough. Next is that it takes 1 minute to build the stargates and 1 more to build the Fleet Beacon. Only then do they get the pleasure of spending 2 minutes building 3 Carriers off these two bases. That's a huge window of opportunity to scout the stargates and build Vikings to counter whatever they're doing (and Vikings really do counter WHATEVER they do with Stargates).
Carriers vs. Terran is a trap of Ackbarian proportions.
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Can someone point me to a game where mech actually dominated lategame? I've only seen Goody do it TvP at high level, and he gets rolled more often than not, judging from the replay packs and whatnot.
How is mech with non-existant mobility beat a colossus+HT+gateway(assuming late late game as you said), let alone toss air.
I think most people go bio simply because bio / biomech > mech tvp
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You just NEED to work more with EMP - try EMP-ing the carriers (they are godawfulslow, impossible to miss), then they die like paperplanes.
If you say feedback, then yes, toss ALSO needs templars in play. But then again he can't have everything, all the time, everywhere.
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If the Toss goes heavy on the carriers, he cannot have a strong ground force at the same time, so going vikings is very viable and will not auto-lose you the ground battle, especially since you can just land them to get some extra firepower on the ground once the carriers are taken care of. Also, if he goes heavy air and gets air upgrades, he cant have a fully upgraded ground force at the same time making your ground army more cost effective against his so you can spare some supply on vikings.
changing the Thors AA so that it will do well against armoured air targets is a horrible, horrible idea balance wise since it would effectively create a unit that is good against pretty much everything.
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On November 18 2010 20:22 TibblesEvilCat wrote:
i'm confused doens/t thor beat all of protoss ground units for cost ?
Zealots.
Also ranged colossi, if you're kiting.
On November 18 2010 20:24 Nadagast wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 20:21 Severedevil wrote:
Marines are seemingly the most cost-effective unit in the game; I can't see a justification for Terran to play mech instead of Marine + Mech. In Broodwar, you saw pure mech because Vultures were much stronger than Hellions, and Marines had 40HP instead of 55... Marines are extremely strong any time there isn't area effect damage going around, but their effectiveness greatly diminishes when Storm/Colossus are out.
Hellions suffer from splash as well, but without the sick DPS to compensate. You have extra minerals to spend as a meching Terran; if it's not on Marines or Hellions, it'll have to be Turrets or SCVs or buildings.
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Marines really do have a place in just about every T strategy IMO. MMM has Marines in the name, any kind of Mech play generally needs AA support, which Marines have, and any kind of Starport Fast Tech requires a lot of Marines out of the initial rax to fend off early pressure.
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right.. show me replays because serriousley this feels like somone wanting thor to be anti all god unit.
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I think people are misunderstanding the situation I'm referring to. You haven't seen very many high level long TvPs because almost everyone goes bio and either loses or wins before P gets on 3+ bases.
I'm talking about late game 4+ bases for each, where you both have pretty much the full tech tree. Marines are not a good unit at this point because he can have so many Templar and Storm decimates your Marines. You can EMP (and it works great if you hit all of his HTs and force a battle right after) but it is extremely risky to have significant supply stuck into marines lategame since with one spell you can lose 20+ food instantly.
And the strategies I'm talking about aren't about pure mech. But giving the Factory a response to armored air that is somewhat effective will open up options for Terran in TvP, IMO. Not pure mech options, it's too immobile. But bio+mech will become much more viable, and a mix of bio/mech/air will become much more viable.
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Him going carriers is as big of an investment as you going bcs. Try going Bcs and see if you're going to have a strong army.. The answer is that you won't. Since he probably won't have collosuss with that composition bio becomes really strong so I'd suggest bio + vikings. As it allows you to own a non aoe ground while having the upper hand in the air and marines also boost your AA.. So to be honest if you can't beat this you were already behind when he got carriers so stop QQing over something that is clearly counterable. Since it's not until very late game he can go carrier + ground aoe and have both of them strong and have an army back them up.
Edit: Saw your last post.. all I can say is that late game terran needs some tweaking but your strentgh is in your mobility you can harass him pretty much everywhere and if youre in such a late game stage you should be able to get vikings to get his carriers and although they aren't great vs ground they still reduce his carrier count quite quickly. And though they aren't strong vs ground they can still assist but the thing is they are strong! Their weakness is their movement speed. The carriers eat into a lot of money / supply even at 4 base. And hts are just as they always are .. quite annoying but with ghosts you can nullify them a bit at least. Bcs are something to consider with yamato they eat carriers and hts don't do shit against them however the feedback is a threat but if you keep your energy low with emp or using yamato it could work quite well.
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marines rape carriers so hard it's not even funny... interceptors don't stand a chance vs them... turrets that are being repaired are also good... vikings have bigger range, move faster and can be repaired... bcs are better than carriers/interceptors... I even saw terran fighting them off with HSM
also you mentioned vikings are weak on ground, they actually have bigger dps than stalkers (vs light and armored)
seriously... show me a replay where you're having problems vs carriers
yes thors are bad vs carriers, but you have a lot of viable options
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On November 18 2010 20:25 sleepingdog wrote:
You just NEED to work more with EMP - try EMP-ing the carriers (they are godawfulslow, impossible to miss), then they die like paperplanes.
If you say feedback, then yes, toss ALSO needs templars in play. But then again he can't have everything, all the time, everywhere.
The whole point of Vikings is that they require 0 teching outside of what's standard for a TvP Bio build (some of them might even get a few out on principle, because P always seems to counter Bio with Colossus). Ghosts are obviously a fantastic supporting player in the build, but they generally don't show up until after the first engagement because resources are going into teching to Medivacs.
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I guess I haven't been clear enough on another point: the presence of an armored air unit turns the Thor into less DPS than a stimmed marine, unless you manually target each of your Thors (which is very difficult to keep up for 5+ Thors in a large battle).
Just the fact that a Void Ray or Carrier exists on the field means that your Thors are doing terrible damage unless manually targeted. I'd be okay with them simply changing the attack priority to have armored air and interceptors as a Thor's lowest priority.
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On November 18 2010 20:40 Nadagast wrote:
I guess I haven't been clear enough on another point: the presence of an armored air unit turns the Thor into less DPS than a stimmed marine, unless you manually target each of your Thors (which is very difficult to keep up for 5+ Thors in a large battle).
Just the fact that a Void Ray or Carrier exists on the field means that your Thors are doing terrible damage unless manually targeted. I'd be okay with them simply changing the attack priority to have armored air and interceptors as a Thor's lowest priority.
Well .. what purpose would the viking serve if the thor was strong vs all air? I'd say that it requires u to be a bit more reactive but still if the thor was good vs all air with it's strentghs vs ground it just wouldn't be a balanced unit.
And also if it requires micro to make them efficent that's great there's too much 1 a these days in my opinion.
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I didn't really realize that this was that big of an issue...
How many 200/200 vs 200/200 colliding balls of death between thors and carriers happen on the pro-level?...
I just feel like OP is tackling the whole argument incorrectly:
1) Thor AA should NOT be an end-all be-all solution to both armored AND light air. That's just OP
2) Instead of a+clicking and leaving it at that, I don't think its too much to consider manually making your thors target high value targets like HT/archons/colo (when applicable), and immortals.
I just don't know how to feel about this topic because its soooooooo situational. Closer to theorycrafting than anything.
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On November 18 2010 20:40 Nadagast wrote:
I guess I haven't been clear enough on another point: the presence of an armored air unit turns the Thor into less DPS than a stimmed marine, unless you manually target each of your Thors (which is very difficult to keep up for 5+ Thors in a large battle).
Just the fact that a Void Ray or Carrier exists on the field means that your Thors are doing terrible damage unless manually targeted. I'd be okay with them simply changing the attack priority to have armored air and interceptors as a Thor's lowest priority.
Then replace the Thor with a Stimmed Marine and build units you know how to/are willing to micro.
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On November 18 2010 20:43 simme123 wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 20:40 Nadagast wrote:
I guess I haven't been clear enough on another point: the presence of an armored air unit turns the Thor into less DPS than a stimmed marine, unless you manually target each of your Thors (which is very difficult to keep up for 5+ Thors in a large battle).
Just the fact that a Void Ray or Carrier exists on the field means that your Thors are doing terrible damage unless manually targeted. I'd be okay with them simply changing the attack priority to have armored air and interceptors as a Thor's lowest priority. Well .. what purpose would the viking serve if the thor was strong vs all air? I'd say that it requires u to be a bit more reactive but still if the thor was good vs all air with it's strentghs vs ground it just wouldn't be a balanced unit.
'Strong' isn't a binary property. Vikings would still be stronger vs air and are much more mobile than slow walking Thors.
What I am proposing would simply be to make the Thor outdps a stimmed Marine on armored air targets. 50/0 vs 300/200 and the Marine does more dps. What I am proposing is giving Thors roughly the equivalent of 2.5-3 stimmed Marine's dps against armored air.
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For all the people replying telling me to simply build bio... I know.
I am not saying that the matchup is imbalanced, I am saying that Thor's AA weakness limits Terran creativity. Unless you want to see Marine/Marauder/Ghost/Viking/Medivac against Protoss until the end of time, this is important.
On November 18 2010 20:45 SwizzY wrote:
I didn't really realize that this was that big of an issue...
How many 200/200 vs 200/200 colliding balls of death between thors and carriers happen on the pro-level?...
I just feel like OP is tackling the whole argument incorrectly:
1) Thor AA should NOT be an end-all be-all solution to both armored AND light air. That's just OP
2) Instead of a+clicking and leaving it at that, I don't think its too much to consider manually making your thors target high value targets like HT/archons/colo (when applicable), and immortals.
I just don't know how to feel about this topic because its soooooooo situational. Closer to theorycrafting than anything.
If Thors did more than 1 stimmed Marine's DPS vs armored air, you'd have already seen different things in this matchup.
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On November 18 2010 20:47 Nadagast wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 20:43 simme123 wrote:On November 18 2010 20:40 Nadagast wrote:
I guess I haven't been clear enough on another point: the presence of an armored air unit turns the Thor into less DPS than a stimmed marine, unless you manually target each of your Thors (which is very difficult to keep up for 5+ Thors in a large battle).
Just the fact that a Void Ray or Carrier exists on the field means that your Thors are doing terrible damage unless manually targeted. I'd be okay with them simply changing the attack priority to have armored air and interceptors as a Thor's lowest priority. Well .. what purpose would the viking serve if the thor was strong vs all air? I'd say that it requires u to be a bit more reactive but still if the thor was good vs all air with it's strentghs vs ground it just wouldn't be a balanced unit. 'Strong' isn't a binary property. Vikings would still be stronger vs air and are much more mobile than slow walking Thors. What I am proposing would simply be to make the Thor outdps a stimmed Marine on armored air targets. 50/0 vs 300/200 and the Marine does more dps. What I am proposing is giving Thors roughly the equivalent of 2.5-3 stimmed Marine's dps against armored air.
Well the thor doesn't only have the dps it's hp is much higher than that of a marine. And what you pay for when you get a thor isn't a strong anti armored air unit. It's fine as it is if you ask me. It's still really strong vs light air and all ground (with support).
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On November 18 2010 20:49 Nadagast wrote:For all the people replying telling me to simply build bio... I know. I am not saying that the matchup is imbalanced, I am saying that Thor's AA weakness limits Terran creativity. Unless you want to see Marine/Marauder/Ghost/Viking/Medivac against Protoss until the end of time, this is important. Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 20:45 SwizzY wrote:
I didn't really realize that this was that big of an issue...
How many 200/200 vs 200/200 colliding balls of death between thors and carriers happen on the pro-level?...
I just feel like OP is tackling the whole argument incorrectly:
1) Thor AA should NOT be an end-all be-all solution to both armored AND light air. That's just OP
2) Instead of a+clicking and leaving it at that, I don't think its too much to consider manually making your thors target high value targets like HT/archons/colo (when applicable), and immortals.
I just don't know how to feel about this topic because its soooooooo situational. Closer to theorycrafting than anything. If Thors did more than 1 stimmed Marine's DPS vs armored air, you'd have already seen different things in this matchup.
I do see your point but my answer would be to get rid of the thor and add the goliath it was ok vs all air and the range was it's strength but it didn't have the vs ground strentgh that the thor has.
The viking is pretty much the same unit but I think being able to use both weapons without having to morph is better.
The protoss doesn't leave room for much creativity either. You have to do the collosuss build to like make it in the midgame. I think both races have their limitations in the matchup. And this is just like scbw. You didn't see much bio vs toss back then. Because it simply wasn't good. It's all about adjusting for each matchup.
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Not sure what I'm missing, Viking and/or Marine/Medivac is all you'll need against any Protoss air, besides mass Phoenix (Which Thor is for)
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On November 18 2010 20:47 Nadagast wrote:
'Strong' isn't a binary property. Vikings would still be stronger vs air and are much more mobile than slow walking Thors.
What I am proposing would simply be to make the Thor outdps a stimmed Marine on armored air targets. 50/0 vs 300/200 and the Marine does more dps. What I am proposing is giving Thors roughly the equivalent of 2.5-3 stimmed Marine's dps against armored air.
simply no, because thors and marine fullfill different roles. Build the units that are up to the task that you intend to use them for. if thors do badly against carriers, build something else to battle them, dont come complaining that your favourite unite is unable to kill everything there ist.
Wasted DPS is not a problem specific to Thors, if you build a thor-heavy army, you must be willing to micro accordingly. Just as protoss must be carful not to waste immortal DPS against lings, just as zerg needs to be careful not to waste banelings on armoured units.
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On November 18 2010 20:49 simme123 wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 20:47 Nadagast wrote:On November 18 2010 20:43 simme123 wrote:On November 18 2010 20:40 Nadagast wrote:
I guess I haven't been clear enough on another point: the presence of an armored air unit turns the Thor into less DPS than a stimmed marine, unless you manually target each of your Thors (which is very difficult to keep up for 5+ Thors in a large battle).
Just the fact that a Void Ray or Carrier exists on the field means that your Thors are doing terrible damage unless manually targeted. I'd be okay with them simply changing the attack priority to have armored air and interceptors as a Thor's lowest priority. Well .. what purpose would the viking serve if the thor was strong vs all air? I'd say that it requires u to be a bit more reactive but still if the thor was good vs all air with it's strentghs vs ground it just wouldn't be a balanced unit. 'Strong' isn't a binary property. Vikings would still be stronger vs air and are much more mobile than slow walking Thors. What I am proposing would simply be to make the Thor outdps a stimmed Marine on armored air targets. 50/0 vs 300/200 and the Marine does more dps. What I am proposing is giving Thors roughly the equivalent of 2.5-3 stimmed Marine's dps against armored air. Well the thor doesn't only have the dps it's hp is much higher than that of a marine. And what you pay for when you get a thor isn't a strong anti armored air unit. It's fine as it is if you ask me. It's still really strong vs light air and all ground (with support).
Against Carriers:
10 Marines (500/0) vs 1 Thor (300/200)
550 (450) HP vs 400 HP
69.7 dps vs 5.3 dps
All I'm asking is that Marines aren't 13 times more effective against armored air. Thors will still be worse than Marines and Vikings against armored air, but they will be doing better than shooting blanks which is basically what they are doing now.
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On November 18 2010 21:00 Nycaloth wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 20:47 Nadagast wrote:
'Strong' isn't a binary property. Vikings would still be stronger vs air and are much more mobile than slow walking Thors.
What I am proposing would simply be to make the Thor outdps a stimmed Marine on armored air targets. 50/0 vs 300/200 and the Marine does more dps. What I am proposing is giving Thors roughly the equivalent of 2.5-3 stimmed Marine's dps against armored air. simply no, because thors and marine fullfill different roles. Build the units that are up to the task that you intend to use them for. if thors do badly against carriers, build something else to battle them, dont come complaining that your favourite unite is unable to kill everything there ist. Wasted DPS is not a problem specific to Thors, if you build a thor-heavy army, you must be willing to micro accordingly. Just as protoss must be carful not to waste immortal DPS against lings, just as zerg needs to be careful not to waste banelings on armoured units.
Wasted DPS is not a problem specific to Thors. Wasted DPS on this order of magnitude absolutely is. Immortals shooting non-armored is not even close to as much of a damage loss, and they don't automatically target non-armored. Banelings are much easier to move around in a pack and explode on what you want them to than it is to individually target every single shot for every single one of your Thors (if you don't target, they will attack the air units, where they do basically 0 damage).
You basically need 50 APM for each Thor (or small group of Thors that can target as one) you have in a battle that involves Carriers or Void Rays.
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I don't know about carriers, but terrans definitely are forced to go bio in TvP because of two specific units: void rays and immortals.
Both of these units completely devastate pure mech play from terran because of the lack of any decent anti-air besides marines for void rays, and the the fact that tanks/hellions/thors get completely demolished in small numbers vs small numbers against immortals.
I really really wish pure terran mech was a legitimate option, but sadly, with how things are currently, it's not at all. You need marines, and that's all there is to it.
I agree though that if Thors were able to compete against void rays/air in general besides mutas in any fashion, mech would be a lot more appealing as an option for TvP.
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On November 18 2010 20:24 X-Codes wrote:
450 Minerals + 250 gas for 1 Carrier = 3 Vikings + 25 Gas leftover. 1 Carrier and 3 Vikings also have equal supply cost. Also, a Reactor'd Starport produces 3 Vikings in roughly the same amount of time it takes to create 1 Carrier from a perfectly Chronoboosted Stargate. With just a little more micro than a moving the Vikings into the Carriers, you should be able to not lose a single viking in this exchange. Yes, not ONE. Why not? Because Carriers are so laughably slow, even slower than Vikings, that they just can't catch a retreating Viking, and they can't escape from an engagement with them. I'm also not taking into account the inevitable Marine support that the first wave of Vikings will have.
Also, if you do any scouting at all then the Protoss player can't go all Suddenly... CARRIERS! on you. If they don't completely neglect their ground army, then they can probably fund 1 Stargate off 1 base and 3 Stargates off 2. So, you have an opportunity to scout their fast expo easily enough. Next is that it takes 1 minute to build the stargates and 1 more to build the Fleet Beacon. Only then do they get the pleasure of spending 2 minutes building 3 Carriers off these two bases. That's a huge window of opportunity to scout the stargates and build Vikings to counter whatever they're doing (and Vikings really do counter WHATEVER they do with Stargates).
Carriers vs. Terran is a trap of Ackbarian proportions.
I'm an unbiased Zerg player but I couldn't agree more with this. If you fail to scout his carrier tech then DUH of course you wont be prepared for it. If you do scout it then as stated, 3 vikings vs 1 carrier = 3 vikings alive 1 carrier dead, and you spent less than he did. Vikings superior range and speed make any air unit basically useless against them (Aside from Yamato)
Why are you complaining about having to micro in battles? 5 thors... select all right click ground unit, hold down shift, right click another ground unit, repeat until all ground units have been right clicked, then shift right click carriers. So hard.
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so shift-queue your targets, but please, please stop complaining about how a unit not being used in its intended fashion is bad!
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For all the people replying telling me to simply build bio... I know.
I am not saying that the matchup is imbalanced, I am saying that Thor's AA weakness limits Terran creativity. Unless you want to see Marine/Marauder/Ghost/Viking/Medivac against Protoss until the end of time, this is important.
how creative is it going to be if you just kill everything with thors?
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On November 18 2010 20:49 Nadagast wrote:For all the people replying telling me to simply build bio... I know. I am not saying that the matchup is imbalanced, I am saying that Thor's AA weakness limits Terran creativity. Unless you want to see Marine/Marauder/Ghost/Viking/Medivac against Protoss until the end of time, this is important. Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 20:45 SwizzY wrote:
I didn't really realize that this was that big of an issue...
How many 200/200 vs 200/200 colliding balls of death between thors and carriers happen on the pro-level?...
I just feel like OP is tackling the whole argument incorrectly:
1) Thor AA should NOT be an end-all be-all solution to both armored AND light air. That's just OP
2) Instead of a+clicking and leaving it at that, I don't think its too much to consider manually making your thors target high value targets like HT/archons/colo (when applicable), and immortals.
I just don't know how to feel about this topic because its soooooooo situational. Closer to theorycrafting than anything. If Thors did more than 1 stimmed Marine's DPS vs armored air, you'd have already seen different things in this matchup.
Serious Protoss players don't get armored air vs. Terran. I thought we've been over that already. Basing a substantial change to a unit because of one conditional situation that only happens in very low-level play on very rare occasion is extremely bad game design.
That said, we're not going to see MMM w/ Ghost & Viking support until the end of time in TvP. We've got two expansions for SC 2 in the works, and who knows? Maybe one of these packs will bring back the Corsair, and said Corsair will own Vikings. Maybe there will be a new Goliath that is an effective ground-based counter to heavy air-assault units. Lots of things can happen, but it's not going to be any of your ideas.
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Thors have an upgrade. I suggest you upgrade it. Strike cannons tear apart basically anything. It locks down an enemy unit and prevents it from attacking. That means that the enemy unit is dealing less dps THAN AN OBSERVER. For toss to go heavy carrier, they either have no ground force or they only have 3-4 carriers. Either way, thors should eat those armies.
Note that I suggest targeting the carrier in this situation and not a high templar or a zealot with the cannon. Just to be clear I present the following:
1) Select Thor
2) Target Carrier with Strike Cannon
3) ????
4) Profit
I'd find a replay, but I never see carriers except from the carrier rush daily.
Also, i noticed you commented on losing 15 tanks to one carrier. Standard terran play generally has at least 2 vikings for sighting purposes to abuse the range. I realize that you're trying to steer clear of this, but its truly the strongest play available on 2 or less bases. Also, if you actually can get to 3 bases then you should have enough money to make vikings and tanks with thors thrown in. No upgrades though 
User was warned for this post
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The attack priority should be changed at least. Carriers (and vr) do own late game mech tvp...
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On November 18 2010 21:13 X-Codes wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 20:49 Nadagast wrote:For all the people replying telling me to simply build bio... I know. I am not saying that the matchup is imbalanced, I am saying that Thor's AA weakness limits Terran creativity. Unless you want to see Marine/Marauder/Ghost/Viking/Medivac against Protoss until the end of time, this is important. On November 18 2010 20:45 SwizzY wrote:
I didn't really realize that this was that big of an issue...
How many 200/200 vs 200/200 colliding balls of death between thors and carriers happen on the pro-level?...
I just feel like OP is tackling the whole argument incorrectly:
1) Thor AA should NOT be an end-all be-all solution to both armored AND light air. That's just OP
2) Instead of a+clicking and leaving it at that, I don't think its too much to consider manually making your thors target high value targets like HT/archons/colo (when applicable), and immortals.
I just don't know how to feel about this topic because its soooooooo situational. Closer to theorycrafting than anything. If Thors did more than 1 stimmed Marine's DPS vs armored air, you'd have already seen different things in this matchup. Serious Protoss players don't get armored air vs. Terran. I thought we've been over that already. Basing a substantial change to a unit because of one conditional situation that only happens in very low-level play on very rare occasion is extremely bad game design. That said, we're not going to see MMM w/ Ghost & Viking support until the end of time in TvP. We've got two expansions for SC 2 in the works, and who knows? Maybe one of these packs will bring back the Corsair, and said Corsair will own Vikings. Maybe there will be a new Goliath that is an effective ground-based counter to heavy air-assault units. Lots of things can happen, but it's not going to be any of your ideas.
How would you know this?
Are Inka and Socke not 'serious' Protoss players? Plenty of high level 'serious' Protoss players do get armored air if they get the chance, especially if you are using any strategy besides mass bio.
I like how everyone is treating me like I'm a newb. Sigh.
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[B
1) Select Thor
2) Target Carrier with Strike Cannon
3) ????
4) Profit
wait, strike cannons can target air units? 0.0
can someone please confirm or refute this, because if it is true, then we have the answer to all the OPs worries right there...
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On November 18 2010 21:20 Nycaloth wrote:wait, strike cannons can target air units? 0.0 can someone please confirm or refute this, because if it is true, then we have the answer to all the OPs worries right there...
Strike Cannons cannot target air units, unless I am totally crazy.
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You cannot use Strike Cannons on air.
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On November 18 2010 21:19 Nadagast wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 21:13 X-Codes wrote:On November 18 2010 20:49 Nadagast wrote:For all the people replying telling me to simply build bio... I know. I am not saying that the matchup is imbalanced, I am saying that Thor's AA weakness limits Terran creativity. Unless you want to see Marine/Marauder/Ghost/Viking/Medivac against Protoss until the end of time, this is important. On November 18 2010 20:45 SwizzY wrote:
I didn't really realize that this was that big of an issue...
How many 200/200 vs 200/200 colliding balls of death between thors and carriers happen on the pro-level?...
I just feel like OP is tackling the whole argument incorrectly:
1) Thor AA should NOT be an end-all be-all solution to both armored AND light air. That's just OP
2) Instead of a+clicking and leaving it at that, I don't think its too much to consider manually making your thors target high value targets like HT/archons/colo (when applicable), and immortals.
I just don't know how to feel about this topic because its soooooooo situational. Closer to theorycrafting than anything. If Thors did more than 1 stimmed Marine's DPS vs armored air, you'd have already seen different things in this matchup. Serious Protoss players don't get armored air vs. Terran. I thought we've been over that already. Basing a substantial change to a unit because of one conditional situation that only happens in very low-level play on very rare occasion is extremely bad game design. That said, we're not going to see MMM w/ Ghost & Viking support until the end of time in TvP. We've got two expansions for SC 2 in the works, and who knows? Maybe one of these packs will bring back the Corsair, and said Corsair will own Vikings. Maybe there will be a new Goliath that is an effective ground-based counter to heavy air-assault units. Lots of things can happen, but it's not going to be any of your ideas. How would you know this? Are Inka and Socke not 'serious' Protoss players? Plenty of high level 'serious' Protoss players do get armored air if they get the chance, especially if you are using any strategy besides mass bio. I like how everyone is treating me like I'm a newb. Sigh.
That's probably cuz you're a WoW player  lulz. We've all seen tons of pro level protoss games, and very rarely does it get to that point in a game where any player needs to even worry about carriers, unless a toss does like a 2 base carrier all-in surprise attack thing then I don't see it being a big problem in more than maybe... .01% of TvPs. But really, at the point in the game you are suggesting (4+ base) you should already have a starport with either a techlab or reactor. You could use hunter seeker missiles on a carrier by this point if you wanted to. EMP + Thor strike cannon maybe? Or just make vikings. If you make vikings then kill carriers and he switches to heavy ground army, use the vikings to harass his mineral lines. Vikings are cheap, so might as well through a few in your army anyways.
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On November 18 2010 19:33 Nadagast wrote:
Thors have great anti air against light units, but against armored air units, their air attack is beyond terrible. With equal upgrades against Carriers, Thors do 4x4 = 16 damage per volley. That's less DPS than a stimmed Marine.
Thors weakness against armored air targets would be reasonable if they weren't so high up on the attack priority. In a large battle with Carriers on one side and Thors on the other, Thors do basically no DPS, unless you manually target Thors on ground units, they spend the entire fight shooting Interceptors and Carriers.
Now I know what you're saying: Get Vikings to kill Armored air units. But the problem is that Vikings suck on the ground. The problem is that getting armored air units is almost always a win for the Protoss in TvP. This is only masked by the fact that most TvPs are over fairly quickly and don't ever get past 2-3 base for the P, because almost all Terrans use bio. There are three ways getting Vikings to counter Carriers can go:
1. The best case scenario is that you make just enough to kill his Carriers then hope you win the ground battle. Terran maybe comes out slightly ahead in this case. But it's very difficult to hit the exact right amount of Vikings.
2. If you lose the air battle and he has carriers left over you lose the battle. Nothing else you have that shoots up (Marines and Thors) are good vs Carriers with support.
3. If you win the air battle with too many vikings left over, you'll lose the ground fight. Vikings that are 0/0 and on the ground are pretty terrible.
Also they are on an entirely separate upgrade table so you're at 0/0 when they already have some upgrades.
There are a couple of solutions to this problem:
Change Thor anti-air damage to be 12x4, or 24x2 instead of 6+6lightx4.
Change Thors to automatically target ground units over armored air units and Interceptors.
If Thors were changed so that Terrans had a viable counter to armored air other than Viking/Marines, I believe we would see playstyles other than bio open up.
Wow i cant believe you are complaining! Viking dominates air and bio dominate ground. The only problem you have is to get the correct amount. Protoss has to survive enough to get those carriers + hope you over commit on ground/air. Why do you want another counter to armored air? you already got 2 great unit to deal with those. One of which is given at you from the very first minutes. Look at how protoss struggles much more against air armored units ( we havent got a decent unit against them ).
Please this is just ridiculous.
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On November 18 2010 21:19 Nadagast wrote:
How would you know this?
Are Inka and Socke not 'serious' Protoss players? Plenty of high level 'serious' Protoss players do get armored air if they get the chance, especially if you are using any strategy besides mass bio.
I like how everyone is treating me like I'm a newb. Sigh.
Because air units are good at fighting a mechanical ground army. thy have to be because nothing can really stand up to tanks and thors on the ground. bio units on the other hand handle the air threat better but are vulnerable to colossi and storm. the trick is to get the right mix of both and not just mindlessly mass any one given unit.
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He doesn't want another counter to armored air, he wants an attack priority change so he doesn't need to have 500apm just for microing the Thors in his army when there are armored air units out and about (the most common instance of this being Carriers in late-game PvT).
Most people don't get to late-game PvT and don't understand why this is a needed change so Nadagast looks a little crazy, but as the game progresses and strategies mature, carriers will likely see a lot more use vs mech terran in lategame (which is currently a very popular strategy amongst high level players)
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Ok, I predominantly play Zerg. In my mind, Zerglings are always useful. They're fast, they're easy to micro, and they're deadly when they get their surround. All of these are traits common to successful play as the Swarm.
I intend to learn Terran as well, and my philosophy there is going to be: never stop building marines. No reason to ever do so. They're cheap, they hit hard, and they're the best AA unit Terrans have.
Finally, Protoss. I see far too little Zealot play for my liking from even some of the best Protoss players. At 100 minerals and 150 overall health, Zealots have the best resource to HP ratio of any mobile unit in the game, with the added benefit of a base armor of 1 and an extremely strong Melee attack. It also synergizes very well with Sentry's Guardian Shield and can gain the Charge ability to close to melee in the blink of an eye and start dealing it's damage ASAP.
IMO, every race has their staple unit that should be continually produced as it always serves a purpose. Complaining about Marines being the Terran staple is, frankly, odd.
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Just beeing curious, but if Thors were that much more effective against air (case A) how should a P react to you then probably going Bio + Thor against his armored air + probably some "typical" warpgate-stuff?
And if Thors wouldn't target the armored air with such a high priority (case B), wouldn't you still need to get vikings anyway? Ofc you might get the edge in the ground-battle, but still would that be enough?
I see you want to stay with Bio + some Fac units because of the time/ressources you have invested in the tech here, but if you could I just don't really know what P should do.
Hope that's not "treating you like a noob". It's meant more like a "noob asking pro for advice on how to understand/handle stuff". 
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On November 18 2010 21:14 Hopeless1der wrote:Thors have an upgrade. I suggest you upgrade it. Strike cannons tear apart basically anything. It locks down an enemy unit and prevents it from attacking. That means that the enemy unit is dealing less dps THAN AN OBSERVER. For toss to go heavy carrier, they either have no ground force or they only have 3-4 carriers. Either way, thors should eat those armies. Note that I suggest targeting the carrier in this situation and not a high templar or a zealot with the cannon. Just to be clear I present the following: 1) Select Thor 2) Target Carrier with Strike Cannon 3) ???? 4) Profit I'd find a replay, but I never see carriers except from the carrier rush daily. Also, i noticed you commented on losing 15 tanks to one carrier. Standard terran play generally has at least 2 vikings for sighting purposes to abuse the range. I realize that you're trying to steer clear of this, but its truly the strongest play available on 2 or less bases. Also, if you actually can get to 3 bases then you should have enough money to make vikings and tanks with thors thrown in. No upgrades though
Lol, don't try to discuss a unit based un bullshit.
What I feel Nadagast is trying to say is that Thors don't really need a buff for the sake of it being a better unit. It needs to do more damage versus armored air to make mech a viable unit composition in TvP so we don't all have to see endless bio-suiciding. Marine marauder is boring and unfulfilling.
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On November 18 2010 21:29 Seagull_ wrote:
He doesn't want another counter to armored air, he wants an attack priority change so he doesn't need to have 500apm just for microing the Thors in his army when there are armored air units out and about (the most common instance of this being Carriers in late-game PvT).
Most people don't get to late-game PvT and don't understand why this is a needed change so Nadagast looks a little crazy, but as the game progresses and strategies mature, carriers will likely see a lot more use vs mech terran in lategame (which is currently a very popular strategy amongst high level players)
He's suggesting more than that.
Also, you don't need anywhere near 500 APM for this.
Did you ever even play Broodwar?
Like where we needed to click on each individual high templar and then hit T and then click.
Or like where we had to click on each production building and then tell it what to make.
If we had to cast spells and build units by clicking on each individual caster/building back in BW and we did this with 200-300 APM (Broodwar APM not SC2 APM) then I think good terrans will be fine having to use a little extra micro to complete this task.
If you aren't fast enough to use thors when carriers are out, build vikings. Or you just aren't good enough to play at the level you currently are.
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On November 18 2010 21:37 CCow wrote:Just beeing curious, but if Thors were that much more effective against air (case A) how should a P react to you then probably going Bio + Thor against his armored air + probably some "typical" warpgate-stuff? And if Thors wouldn't target the armored air with such a high priority (case B), wouldn't you still need to get vikings anyway? Ofc you might get the edge in the ground-battle, but still would that be enough? I see you want to stay with Bio + some Fac units because of the time/ressources you have invested in the tech here, but if you could I just don't really know what P should do. Hope that's not "treating you like a noob". It's meant more like a "noob asking pro for advice on how to understand/handle stuff".
Probably the exact same normal composition as usual, except maybe adding in a few more Immortals. Thors aren't that great against Protoss ground later in the game (they're really only good against P ground super early game), so they would really only be there for anti-air.
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I think the AI fix maybe a decent solution. Giving thors a strong anti armored air is not.
They already have a strong ground attack and a devastating anti-light flyer attack. No need to make them strong anti-armored as well.
Also, pure zealots may beat pure thors (debatable), however more often than not , there are a host of units that accompany the thor, such as igniter hellions, or pure stimmed bio which decimate the protoss army while they try to focus the Thor down. In fact +1 thors two shot zealots IIRC.
The Thor fits its current role perfectly. Any buffs to its armored anti air capabilities would make it ridiculous for its cost.
IMO any buff to the terran late game should come through Siege tank buffs.
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If a protoss were to be able to get to a collosus/carrier/gateway units composition in the late game unscathed, it would be unbeatable. Luckily that's pretty much impossible.
You need 4 vikings per carrier to come out on top, and that means the vikings aren't shooting the collosi, marines get melted at that point so aren't a valid option, it's a scary composition! (but that's all in theory, don't let the toss get there ^^)
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On November 18 2010 21:29 Seagull_ wrote:
He doesn't want another counter to armored air, he wants an attack priority change so he doesn't need to have 500apm just for microing the Thors in his army when there are armored air units out and about (the most common instance of this being Carriers in late-game PvT).
Most people don't get to late-game PvT and don't understand why this is a needed change so Nadagast looks a little crazy, but as the game progresses and strategies mature, carriers will likely see a lot more use vs mech terran in lategame (which is currently a very popular strategy amongst high level players)
Like many people are saying, it doesn't take 500 APM. Probably doesn't even take 100 APM. Just queue a few targets in order of priority.
Also, I suppose I could conceive of a strategy where the Terran player goes Marine/Thor and makes an early(ish) push, and forces the Protoss player to go Void Rays to counter, but if that's the plan then in this specific instance the Terran player should not only be prepared for that, but expect it. Vikings should already queued in his Starport by the time the VR shows up so that he can maximize his one-two punch. That said, if it doesn't work then expect both sides to transition back into the normal play of MMM vs. Gateway + Colossi/HT.
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On November 18 2010 21:39 Angra wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 21:37 CCow wrote:Just beeing curious, but if Thors were that much more effective against air (case A) how should a P react to you then probably going Bio + Thor against his armored air + probably some "typical" warpgate-stuff? And if Thors wouldn't target the armored air with such a high priority (case B), wouldn't you still need to get vikings anyway? Ofc you might get the edge in the ground-battle, but still would that be enough? I see you want to stay with Bio + some Fac units because of the time/ressources you have invested in the tech here, but if you could I just don't really know what P should do. Hope that's not "treating you like a noob". It's meant more like a "noob asking pro for advice on how to understand/handle stuff". Probably the exact same normal composition as usual, except maybe adding in a few more Immortals. Thors aren't that great against Protoss ground later in the game (they're really only good against P ground super early game), so they would really only be there for anti-air.
But, well...
You as a P can't "deny" the T from using his strike cannons anymore as you could with Feedback before. So the T can use it to quite some effect against your Immos. So you would really need quite a lot of Immos, wouldn't you?
Ofc, it's just my feeling telling me so. I might as well just be way off. xd
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while were at it, can't we just give thors 3000 HP, make them free to build. Give them anti everything and splash on the ground damage should be about 1000 a hit otherwise they feel weak.
Then all the poor terran troubles in the oooooohhhh so hard PvT match-ups are over.
ow and please give marines and scv' s the ability to morph in to thors for free.
wait what am i saying please don't make poor terrans build more then 1 unit!!!
Thors need to be build for free at the command center
User was temp banned for this post.
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On November 18 2010 21:19 Nadagast wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 21:13 X-Codes wrote:On November 18 2010 20:49 Nadagast wrote:For all the people replying telling me to simply build bio... I know. I am not saying that the matchup is imbalanced, I am saying that Thor's AA weakness limits Terran creativity. Unless you want to see Marine/Marauder/Ghost/Viking/Medivac against Protoss until the end of time, this is important. On November 18 2010 20:45 SwizzY wrote:
I didn't really realize that this was that big of an issue...
How many 200/200 vs 200/200 colliding balls of death between thors and carriers happen on the pro-level?...
I just feel like OP is tackling the whole argument incorrectly:
1) Thor AA should NOT be an end-all be-all solution to both armored AND light air. That's just OP
2) Instead of a+clicking and leaving it at that, I don't think its too much to consider manually making your thors target high value targets like HT/archons/colo (when applicable), and immortals.
I just don't know how to feel about this topic because its soooooooo situational. Closer to theorycrafting than anything. If Thors did more than 1 stimmed Marine's DPS vs armored air, you'd have already seen different things in this matchup. Serious Protoss players don't get armored air vs. Terran. I thought we've been over that already. Basing a substantial change to a unit because of one conditional situation that only happens in very low-level play on very rare occasion is extremely bad game design. That said, we're not going to see MMM w/ Ghost & Viking support until the end of time in TvP. We've got two expansions for SC 2 in the works, and who knows? Maybe one of these packs will bring back the Corsair, and said Corsair will own Vikings. Maybe there will be a new Goliath that is an effective ground-based counter to heavy air-assault units. Lots of things can happen, but it's not going to be any of your ideas. How would you know this? Are Inka and Socke not 'serious' Protoss players? Plenty of high level 'serious' Protoss players do get armored air if they get the chance, especially if you are using any strategy besides mass bio. I like how everyone is treating me like I'm a newb. Sigh.
Obviously this is bullshit, if I were you I wouldn't respond to people claiming toss doesn't use armored air vs terran - every protoss-player "eventually" gets it, the problem (as you correctly stated) is that armored air comes even AFTER templars are out. Most games end already BEFORE that point though.
This doesn't change the fact that in lategame many pro-tosses go carriers or void rays (I generally prefer going carriers because of the coolness - voids are a must on huge maps like shakuras for harass though).
I get your point completely - but I'm STILL convinced that the answer doesn't lie within the thor. The thor isn't meant to be useful vs armored air, hell, even the funny achievement-thingy tells you that you should use carriers vs thors (!). The fact that vikings don't "own" carriers/void rays is absolutely essential to make those units viable in the first place.
I once lost such a game (30+ minutes) with carriers because the terran managed to get EMPs off on my carriers and immediately sniped some of them with vikings. Don't underestimate the strength of EMPs used against air-units!
So I'd say in lategame you should use a combination of fully upgraded tanks and vikings, supported with ghosts and low (!) numbers of MM for meat.
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On November 18 2010 21:52 JDeathmetal wrote:
while were at it, can't we just give thors 3000 HP, make them free to build. Give them anti everything and splash on the ground, and please make them free.
Then all the poor terran troubles in the oooooohhhh so hard PvT match-ups are over.
ow and please give marines and scv' s the ability to morph in to thors for free
To be honest it has nothing to do with the actual Thor itself. It has to do with the fact that there's literally no good response to Protoss air, except for Marines. And that makes for a really stale matchup.
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On November 18 2010 21:52 JDeathmetal wrote:
while were at it, can't we just give thors 3000 HP, make them free to build. Give them anti everything and splash on the ground damage should be about 1000 a hit otherwise they feel weak.
Then all the poor terran troubles in the oooooohhhh so hard PvT match-ups are over.
ow and please give marines and scv' s the ability to morph in to thors for free.
wait what am i saying please don't make poor terrans build more then 1 unit!!!
Thors need to be build for free at the command center
What's your point? T_T
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1. Thors AA is fine were its at... maybe the A.I could use some fine tuning but the DPS is meant to be like that because of the splash damage.
2. You don't use vikings on the ground, at least you don't build them for that purpose unless your going to do some harassment drop.
3. I have never seen/heard of Terran's having issues with Carriers 2-3 bases in game.
Terran doesn't need buffs at all right now so stop QQing and practice harder.
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Aren't you just annoyed that you're thor play doesn't work against everything? Yes Thors are weak against armoured air, so we should nerf armored air! so there is nothing thors are weak against and you can always win by making thors. If they are going air, don't use thors it's that simple.
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On November 18 2010 21:54 Angra wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 21:52 JDeathmetal wrote:
while were at it, can't we just give thors 3000 HP, make them free to build. Give them anti everything and splash on the ground, and please make them free.
Then all the poor terran troubles in the oooooohhhh so hard PvT match-ups are over.
ow and please give marines and scv' s the ability to morph in to thors for free To be honest it has nothing to do with the actual Thor itself. It has to do with the fact that there's literally no good response to Protoss air, except for Marines. And that makes for a really stale matchup.
Can I ask you the thousand pro matchups where we see protoss air dominate everything of terran cause there is no anti? The OP wants to see that thors counter all air, which is bs.
Terran has enough anti air, I mean viking being the cheapest and strongest air unit, countering everything that toss can throw at them in the air.
I don't know how you can complain about this.
Indeed the match-up feels stale but thats not because protoss is so dominant in the air.
Only thing I agree at is that thors should not give armored air priority, but then again a little apm from the terran side shouldnt hurt. Something else then T A+Click
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Um, Wtf?
Ever heard of vikings? T has the best AA in the game, with their air-siege-tank aka the Viking.
Why not make Thors kill armored and remove broodlords from the game! Good idea.
TL needs an auto-lock policy about any thread in this forum with unit-imba qq thread title.
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Viking and Marine/Medic is all you need to fight Armored Protoss Air.
Thor AA is meant to deal with Phoenix.
Also, High Templar don't always come before Armored Air. Particularly if you had some kind of early-midgame Phoenix play (common versus MMM+Viking) and have left over Stargates, you can easily star producing Void Rays or (w/ added Fleet Beacon) Carriers.
Only time I'll ever get Storm before Air is if I'm fighting Battlecruisers, because, how else are you going to kill them?  Otherwise I get Storm after Air, because they'll switch their army composition to have more anti air, which gets destroyed by Storm (Vikings and Marine/Medivac)
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Splash damage against ground units can be balanced because there is a physical limit to cramming ground units together. Air splash damage can not, because ALL air units can occupy a single location.
The Thor's full splash damage mechanic is, frankly, ridiculous. It is not possible to balance a weapon with unlimited multiplying damage potential. Yes, bundling up your units should be a stupid move, but it should NOT make the difference in getting a 200 food army killed in 3 standard hits. Adding to the absurdity is the magic box. The entire splash potential of Thors can be nullified with a single movement order.
I think the Thor's anti air weapon needs to be reworked. If it's going to provide anti air swarm support, it can't be something so hit or miss.
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On November 18 2010 21:53 sleepingdog wrote:Obviously this is bullshit, if I were you I wouldn't respond to people claiming toss doesn't use armored air vs terran - every protoss-player "eventually" gets it, the problem (as you correctly stated) is that armored air comes even AFTER templars are out. Most games end already BEFORE that point though.
This doesn't change the fact that in lategame many pro-tosses go carriers or void rays (I generally prefer going carriers because of the coolness - voids are a must on huge maps like shakuras for harass though).
In this paragraph, most means pretty much every single game I've seen. I was exaggerating a little, and I know there are uses for Void Rays outside of the main army, but I see no purpose for carriers other than to mess with the AI against people who don't micro their thors, and if there are Vikings already in play because of Colossi being used to counter Bio, it won't last long enough to be that useful.
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Now that i think of it...hmm...I think people just haven't had a reason to investigate mech deeply. especially since most maps aren't mech favored due to the fact that FE(Real FE like 1 rax Expand or 14 CC) isn't that viable at the moment. Plus with back doors its just not gonna happen.
Technically what protoss needs to invest inorder to make the Terran crap his pants can be dealt with using lower amounts of resources.Example 1/2 ghost can deal with all immortals. And 5-10 vikings can deal with all Protoss Air. The fear of drops is countered by Sensor Towers. And Basic Chargelot and Stalker Blink is dealt with by basic micro(Unsieging some tanks. Spreading Tanks appart, and microing hellions).
The issue lies in the fact that people want to turtle hard when they mech. This allows Protoss to make what ever they want(and as much as they want) and thus win because they are ahead in bases. MECH MUST HARASS COUNITIOUSLY. Most likely through Hellion Drops and Run-bys. And be active about it.
MECH DOES NOT REQUIRE MULES. Mech is gas intensive. YOu'll ahve plenty of minerals. Thus you should concentrate on scanning and scouting in orde to detect transiotions. Then you can 1) Counter or 1) Kill him for transitioning to drastically.
Real Balence Changes Needed-IMHO
The only thing i think needs SOME love is the tank. amybe 100 gas or a little more dmg. And immortals should be 125 gas but less minerals.200/125-This way they cant be double pumped off of 1 base. Which is redicoulous IMHO. And Chrono boosted Voids come in so fast its hard to detect the transiotion at times.
The Real reason Mech isn't viable is because of BLIZZARD maps.
1)Hard to secure natural-Most Naturals are open which means Protoss can 4gate you FTW.
2)Back Doors.
3)Predictable Map design. Pretty much 1 main attack path unlike BW Kespa maps. This KILLS hellion run-bys.
4) Lack of accesible Thirds. Stupid Rocks.
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On November 18 2010 21:54 Angra wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 21:52 JDeathmetal wrote:
while were at it, can't we just give thors 3000 HP, make them free to build. Give them anti everything and splash on the ground, and please make them free.
Then all the poor terran troubles in the oooooohhhh so hard PvT match-ups are over.
ow and please give marines and scv' s the ability to morph in to thors for free To be honest it has nothing to do with the actual Thor itself. It has to do with the fact that there's literally no good response to Protoss air, except for Marines. And that makes for a really stale matchup.
oh dear and i have to build like banelings in all zvts. How will i ever live that down? Oh noes
And another thing i dont think thors do less dps then marines.
And even if it did marine is one of the best DPS units in game, as JD pointed out, you want 3000 hp with that too?
Such a dissapointing thread to see from someone high level.
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On November 18 2010 20:32 TibblesEvilCat wrote:
right.. show me replays because serriousley this feels like somone wanting thor to be anti all god unit.
Yeah. I also think that the fact that Terran now has even the option to use thors against protoss is diversity enough. The patch hasn't been out long enough to really gauge the extent of their viability either.
If you increase their AA damage you have to take away their splash and that's going to have drastic ripple effects in 2 other matchups. I don't think it's worth it.
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Wow, I can't believe how stubborn the responses are in this thread. Nadagast has a point. Listen to him before blindly questioning what he's trying to point out. Each thor does insane dmg vs ground so you have to basically manually target every single one of your thors if the protoss has any kind of armored air or you're turning your 500 resource unit into one comparable to a marine in terms of dps (50 resource unit). That requires a insane amount apm to do if you have multiple thors. That's clearly an unintended side effect of thors anti-air priority and I expect it to be patched soon because it only makes the game more one dimensional.
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Once game goes to late game bio just melts to collusi+storm so hard it's not even funny. Tell me to go mech? Toss add's on 2 stargates and voids rape your army. At that point marines just mnelt without doing damage. Even if you're on 30 reactored barracks they'll insta-die.
Vikings? Vikings lose to void rays. Find the thread about GooDys mech versus SocKe. The voids will have ups that terran most probably won't (get upgrades? that's third tech path. I'll get them, but only later so I'll be behind). Win the air-battle? LOL as your 10 vikings left over just die when they try to land.
Argue that toss can't have everything? By late game you can easily have collsui+templar+voidrays (collusi+temps hold bio, toss sees mech switch and adds voids when terran switches). And a good amount of them. Once collusi reach a god amount (6ish) it takes so many vikings to kill the collusi before they rape your bio. So you switch to mech and lose to air. Tell me to drop everywhere and EMP? EMP's radius is LESS then the splash animation. Put a few cannons at each expo and you can hold most drops (cannons old off till warpins).
By NO means a QQ post. Terran early game seems pretty strong against toss (until Protoss learn to forcefield well like TesteR). But late game is mostly Terran gg unless Toss fucks it up.
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Nadagast you're absolutely correct. The people disagreeing with you don't seem to understand the issue with Thor attack priority. Mixing in a single carrier, or even void ray with your ground army, completely nullifies Thor's normally high DPS. It is far too hard a counter. Fixing this issue would make TvP considerably more interesting as we'd see a lot more late game-oriented play.
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On November 18 2010 19:33 Nadagast wrote:
Change Thor anti-air damage to be 12x4, or 24x2 instead of 6+6lightx4.
You want thor to become anti air monster + remain good anti ground. It just wont happen no matter how broken the mu is in anyones opinion, even if its blizzard. On the other hand since when going carriers is imba? I use them sometimes but believe me: the game is already won at that point I just need a sureproof way to finish it. You probably turtle too much and than he rolls over you with superior tech and army.
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On November 18 2010 22:26 sandroba wrote:
Wow, I can't believe how stubborn the responses are in this thread. Nadagast has a point. Listen to him before blindly questioning what he's trying to point out. Each thor does insane dmg vs ground so you have to basically manually target every single one of your thors if the protoss has any kind of armored air or you're turning your 500 resource unit into one comparable to a marine in terms of dps (50 resource unit). That requires a insane amount apm to do if you have multiple thors. That's clearly an unintended side effect of thors anti-air priority and I expect it to be patched soon because it only makes the game more one dimensional.
I don't quite understand how it takes such insane apm?
Ctrl+ left click on thor (select all thors)
Shift + A-click on the units you want it to attack
Depending on how many thors you have Shift and left click on portraits to lessen your selection and tell those thors to attack new targes to lessen overkill.
non?
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On November 18 2010 22:30 HalfAmazing wrote:
Nadagast you're absolutely correct. The people disagreeing with you don't seem to understand the issue with Thor attack priority. Mixing in a single carrier, or even void ray with your ground army, completely nullifies Thor's normally high DPS. It is far too hard a counter. Fixing this issue would make TvP considerably more interesting as we'd see a lot more late game-oriented play.
This doesn't even make any sense. TARGET FIRE WITH THE THOR! It's really not hard to do at all. You can even repair the thor if you want in the battle and then it's just invincible because the rest of the P army is dead after that, and then the 1 thor can take on like 200000 carriers by itself cuz of SCVs repairing it. Giving T a unit that counters every P ground unit and air unit in the game is just stupid lol. If you don't know how to target fire units you don't deserve to be playing in MLG.
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The way I see it:
Thors can't be effective against everything, simple as that. If you say a stimmed marine has more DPS, then use stimmed marines instead, ezpz.
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On November 18 2010 19:33 Nadagast wrote:
Thors have great anti air against light units, but against armored air units, their air attack is beyond terrible. With equal upgrades against Carriers, Thors do 4x4 = 16 damage per volley. That's less DPS than a stimmed Marine.
Thors weakness against armored air targets would be reasonable if they weren't so high up on the attack priority. In a large battle with Carriers on one side and Thors on the other, Thors do basically no DPS, unless you manually target Thors on ground units, they spend the entire fight shooting Interceptors and Carriers.
Now I know what you're saying: Get Vikings to kill Armored air units. But the problem is that Vikings suck on the ground. The problem is that getting armored air units is almost always a win for the Protoss in TvP. This is only masked by the fact that most TvPs are over fairly quickly and don't ever get past 2-3 base for the P, because almost all Terrans use bio. There are three ways getting Vikings to counter Carriers can go:
1. The best case scenario is that you make just enough to kill his Carriers then hope you win the ground battle. Terran maybe comes out slightly ahead in this case. But it's very difficult to hit the exact right amount of Vikings.
2. If you lose the air battle and he has carriers left over you lose the battle. Nothing else you have that shoots up (Marines and Thors) are good vs Carriers with support.
3. If you win the air battle with too many vikings left over, you'll lose the ground fight. Vikings that are 0/0 and on the ground are pretty terrible.
Also they are on an entirely separate upgrade table so you're at 0/0 when they already have some upgrades.
There are a couple of solutions to this problem:
Change Thor anti-air damage to be 12x4, or 24x2 instead of 6+6lightx4.
Change Thors to automatically target ground units over armored air units and Interceptors.
If Thors were changed so that Terrans had a viable counter to armored air other than Viking/Marines, I believe we would see playstyles other than bio open up.
they fixed this in the latest patch: thors now prioritise attacking ground units over air units
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fun fact:
landed vikings are about equal to Stalkers and the higher the upgrades go, the better for the Viking.
the key point is the shield upgrade, 3/3/0 Stalkers vs 3/3 Vikings is a very very close fight, realy depending who ever shoots first who is going to win the fight.
if terran goes 3/3 mech and the protoss goes 3/3/0 ground, for the level3 shieldupgrade, costing a wooping 900/900, the terran can get 2/2 ship upgrades and have some spare cash, or can up to 3/3 ship for just 150 gas/mins more.
Vikings are not weak on the ground, they are about equal to stalkers, once in a ball, beat out Zealots and are not realy effected by forcefields.
psy storm does also very little because of the size of the vikings.
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On November 18 2010 21:58 JDeathmetal wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 21:54 Angra wrote:On November 18 2010 21:52 JDeathmetal wrote:
while were at it, can't we just give thors 3000 HP, make them free to build. Give them anti everything and splash on the ground, and please make them free.
Then all the poor terran troubles in the oooooohhhh so hard PvT match-ups are over.
ow and please give marines and scv' s the ability to morph in to thors for free To be honest it has nothing to do with the actual Thor itself. It has to do with the fact that there's literally no good response to Protoss air, except for Marines. And that makes for a really stale matchup. Can I ask you the thousand pro matchups where we see protoss air dominate everything of terran cause there is no anti? The OP wants to see that thors counter all air, which is bs. Terran has enough anti air, I mean viking being the cheapest and strongest air unit, countering everything that toss can throw at them in the air. I don't know how you can complain about this. Indeed the match-up feels stale but thats not because protoss is so dominant in the air. Only thing I agree at is that thors should not give armored air priority, but then again a little apm from the terran side shouldnt hurt. Something else then T A+Click
I never said that Terran has no anti-air. I said that if Marines weren't made, they would have no anti-air. Most professional games involve bio, which means Marines. Believe me, if Marines didn't exist, we would see a LOT more Protoss air in the PvT matchup.
It's not even that Thors don't automatically target things like Void Rays. It's that Thors are AWFUL against Void Rays in terms of damage output, regardless if you "micro" to shoot at them or not. Considering Vikings, you need almost double the Void Ray count to deal with them if you don't have Marines. Void Rays kill Vikings almost instantly if you slip up once on keeping them out of range. The only reason Vikings have any sort of effectiveness against Void Rays is because they can take pot-shots at them out of range while being protected by Marines in the front. If those Marines didn't exist, pure Viking vs pure Void Ray is a joke.
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On November 18 2010 22:35 aike wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 22:30 HalfAmazing wrote:
Nadagast you're absolutely correct. The people disagreeing with you don't seem to understand the issue with Thor attack priority. Mixing in a single carrier, or even void ray with your ground army, completely nullifies Thor's normally high DPS. It is far too hard a counter. Fixing this issue would make TvP considerably more interesting as we'd see a lot more late game-oriented play. This doesn't even make any sense. TARGET FIRE WITH THE THOR! It's really not hard to do at all. You can even repair the thor if you want in the battle and then it's just invincible because the rest of the P army is dead after that, and then the 1 thor can take on like 200000 carriers by itself cuz of SCVs repairing it. Giving T a unit that counters every P ground unit and air unit in the game is just stupid lol. If you don't know how to target fire units you don't deserve to be playing in MLG.
Uh, what the hell?
If it didn't make sense, why did Blizzard JUST CHANGE THE THOR so that it doesn't automatically target MEDIVACS over everything else? So that you can use it in late game TvT without the AI glitching out on you continuously.
Why would this be any different for TvP? And you realize target firing isn't even a great solution, right?
What if I have just three Thors in the late game? I can't exactly put them in a single control group and have them focus fire, they would overkill and waste their DPS. I would have to click each one individually, and have each one individually trying to kill ground units continuously, and the second I stop it will go back to firing against air etc etc.
OP brings up a decently valid point that it's pretty silly for a Thor to auto-target air over ground. I'd rather manually focus Mutalisks in TvZ than have to continuously babysit them in every other possible situation.
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omg terran is weak!
i want a thor to be effective vs EVERYTHING. i want to kill every unit that protoss somehow can get just by getting thors!
sorry, but just the fact alone, that a thor CAN shoot air is more than strong. imagine collossi could kill mutas!
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On November 18 2010 22:38 ace246 wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 19:33 Nadagast wrote:
Thors have great anti air against light units, but against armored air units, their air attack is beyond terrible. With equal upgrades against Carriers, Thors do 4x4 = 16 damage per volley. That's less DPS than a stimmed Marine.
Thors weakness against armored air targets would be reasonable if they weren't so high up on the attack priority. In a large battle with Carriers on one side and Thors on the other, Thors do basically no DPS, unless you manually target Thors on ground units, they spend the entire fight shooting Interceptors and Carriers.
Now I know what you're saying: Get Vikings to kill Armored air units. But the problem is that Vikings suck on the ground. The problem is that getting armored air units is almost always a win for the Protoss in TvP. This is only masked by the fact that most TvPs are over fairly quickly and don't ever get past 2-3 base for the P, because almost all Terrans use bio. There are three ways getting Vikings to counter Carriers can go:
1. The best case scenario is that you make just enough to kill his Carriers then hope you win the ground battle. Terran maybe comes out slightly ahead in this case. But it's very difficult to hit the exact right amount of Vikings.
2. If you lose the air battle and he has carriers left over you lose the battle. Nothing else you have that shoots up (Marines and Thors) are good vs Carriers with support.
3. If you win the air battle with too many vikings left over, you'll lose the ground fight. Vikings that are 0/0 and on the ground are pretty terrible.
Also they are on an entirely separate upgrade table so you're at 0/0 when they already have some upgrades.
There are a couple of solutions to this problem:
Change Thor anti-air damage to be 12x4, or 24x2 instead of 6+6lightx4.
Change Thors to automatically target ground units over armored air units and Interceptors.
If Thors were changed so that Terrans had a viable counter to armored air other than Viking/Marines, I believe we would see playstyles other than bio open up. they fixed this in the latest patch: thors now prioritise attacking ground units over air units
Nope. It only lowered medivac priority, not all air.
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On November 18 2010 22:49 ltortoise wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 22:35 aike wrote:On November 18 2010 22:30 HalfAmazing wrote:
Nadagast you're absolutely correct. The people disagreeing with you don't seem to understand the issue with Thor attack priority. Mixing in a single carrier, or even void ray with your ground army, completely nullifies Thor's normally high DPS. It is far too hard a counter. Fixing this issue would make TvP considerably more interesting as we'd see a lot more late game-oriented play. This doesn't even make any sense. TARGET FIRE WITH THE THOR! It's really not hard to do at all. You can even repair the thor if you want in the battle and then it's just invincible because the rest of the P army is dead after that, and then the 1 thor can take on like 200000 carriers by itself cuz of SCVs repairing it. Giving T a unit that counters every P ground unit and air unit in the game is just stupid lol. If you don't know how to target fire units you don't deserve to be playing in MLG. Uh, what the hell? If it didn't make sense, why did Blizzard JUST CHANGE THE THOR so that it doesn't automatically target MEDIVACS over everything else? So that you can use it in late game TvT without the AI glitching out on you continuously. Why would this be any different for TvP? And you realize target firing isn't even a great solution, right? What if I have just three Thors in the late game? I can't exactly put them in a single control group and have them focus fire, they would overkill and waste their DPS. I would have to click each one individually, and have each one individually trying to kill ground units continuously, and the second I stop it will go back to firing against air etc etc. OP brings up a decently valid point that it's pretty silly for a Thor to auto-target air over ground. I'd rather manually focus Mutalisks in TvZ than have to continuously babysit them in every other possible situation.
Oh right, i'm sorry, I forgot all the noobs want Blizzard to just easy mode starcraft 2 for them so they don't even have to play. Just 1a your whole army into enemy army and sit back and watch as you win the game. I totally forgot, please forgive me.
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On November 18 2010 22:40 PulseSUI wrote:
fun fact:
landed vikings are about equal to Stalkers and the higher the upgrades go, the better for the Viking.
the key point is the shield upgrade, 3/3/0 Stalkers vs 3/3 Vikings is a very very close fight, realy depending who ever shoots first who is going to win the fight.
if terran goes 3/3 mech and the protoss goes 3/3/0 ground, for the level3 shieldupgrade, costing a wooping 900/900, the terran can get 2/2 ship upgrades and have some spare cash, or can up to 3/3 ship for just 150 gas/mins more.
Vikings are not weak on the ground, they are about equal to stalkers, once in a ball, beat out Zealots and are not realy effected by forcefields.
psy storm does also very little because of the size of the vikings.
lol. Nice to know. That makes this thread even funnier.
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Carriers aren't the issue in TvP at all, triple or even just double Reactor Starport can easily deal with Carriers.
The problem in TvP (IMO) is transitioning out of Bio into something else and actually staying alive while doing it. Transitioning into Mech is so vulnerable to a timing attack that sticking with Bio tends to get favored, until HT & Colossi show up and melt everything.
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I wonder how it would be if Thors 250mm cannon could target air. mmmmm
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I love people who go, "Vikings have no use once all the air units are gone!" Well, they just made their use right there. You just forced them to go and face your Thor/Bioball army with their inferior ground army. That's a pretty good use right there.
And people don't realize that they are pretty good harassment units as well. 4 Vikings can take down a ton of probes and then fly away once they see the stalkers coming in to get them. If you can't find use for your vikings after they've done their job, you're not thinking hard enough.
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On November 18 2010 20:24 X-Codes wrote:
450 Minerals + 250 gas for 1 Carrier = 3 Vikings + 25 Gas leftover. 1 Carrier and 3 Vikings also have equal supply cost. Also, a Reactor'd Starport produces 3 Vikings in roughly the same amount of time it takes to create 1 Carrier from a perfectly Chronoboosted Stargate. With just a little more micro than a moving the Vikings into the Carriers, you should be able to not lose a single viking in this exchange. Yes, not ONE. Why not? Because Carriers are so laughably slow, even slower than Vikings, that they just can't catch a retreating Viking, and they can't escape from an engagement with them. I'm also not taking into account the inevitable Marine support that the first wave of Vikings will have.
Also, if you do any scouting at all then the Protoss player can't go all Suddenly... CARRIERS! on you. If they don't completely neglect their ground army, then they can probably fund 1 Stargate off 1 base and 3 Stargates off 2. So, you have an opportunity to scout their fast expo easily enough. Next is that it takes 1 minute to build the stargates and 1 more to build the Fleet Beacon. Only then do they get the pleasure of spending 2 minutes building 3 Carriers off these two bases. That's a huge window of opportunity to scout the stargates and build Vikings to counter whatever they're doing (and Vikings really do counter WHATEVER they do with Stargates).
Carriers vs. Terran is a trap of Ackbarian proportions.
Comparing Carriers to Vikings cost wise is so stupid idk what to say. Or maybe I do: HARD COUNTER. Carriers are good vs ground units and semi good vs certain air units.
The OP didn't mean to ask what to do about Carriers but why is terran mech so bad vs air in general (unless its muta)?
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On November 18 2010 20:32 TibblesEvilCat wrote:
right.. show me replays because serriousley this feels like somone wanting thor to be anti all god unit.
That's how I feel as well, I had a game last night where a 2 base terran was just going thor and marine while I had 4 bases up and I lost... I don't blame the loss to thors since I realize I did not do the proper counter but trying to take away any weakness the unit has seems unfair to me.
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It's really hard to have much sympathy for people complaining about actually having to micro their Thors in this (rather rare) situation, when Protoss players facing Thors have to individually target each SCV repairing them. Yes, the game's AI targetting could use some changes in a few different situations, but that doesn't justify the OP wanting to turn Thors into some kind of god-unit. Demands for idiotic buffs like that don't really belong anywhere on TL, and certainly not in the strategy section.
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I would love to see any replay/VOD from the 'l2mirco!' crowd, featuring them efficiently preserving the DPS of 3+ thors in an engangement of two 140 food armies, where the toss brings gateway units and their crowd control units (colo or HT) with 3 voids or 1 carrier against their mech army.
The problem being described isn't that the terran gets owned by the air units, but by the thors not contributing to the fight the second they can shoot at armored air targets.
This also counters all the 'but toss can never get 5 carriers all of the sudden!' arguements. They don't have to. When going mech, you rely alot on the single target DPS of thors to augment you splash dmg of tanks and hellions. Protoss being on gateway/colossi just needs to bring in 1 or maybe 2 carriers or - if he needs to attack quickly - 3-4 voids and the same army that would have lost convincingly to the mech army will now just overrun them, because the thors are not participating in the actual fight. With the thor temporarily out of the equation, tanks just get owned by zealots (damaging each other and the thors in the process) and the hellions get roasted by the collosi.
Another problem is the fact, that vikings don't solve this problem. They just shorten the time during which the thors are disabled and usually they are not worth the gas that you need for your mech army unless you see the stargates - and then it's too late.
Also - if toss does a serious switch to carriers, you better have forseen that. Yes, in theory land 1 viking perfectly controlled kills infinity carriers, but in reality you cannot kite forever, because they are doing damage to your ground army or base while chasing your kiting vikings.
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The issue with Mech is vulnerability to blink stalkers... Yes, it can't address armored air well, but that's fine in my opinion.
Theoretically, Stalkers should be pretty badly countered by tanks or thors. However, because of the bloody blink, a pure stalker composition will counter thor/siege tank (As a T player, I've experimented with this against a practice partner; it's possible I suck, but it just seems that blink-surrounds decimate the soft tanks or even thors easily for cost. And stalkers are hardly a niche unit for P.
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On November 18 2010 22:33 Panoptic wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 22:26 sandroba wrote:
Wow, I can't believe how stubborn the responses are in this thread. Nadagast has a point. Listen to him before blindly questioning what he's trying to point out. Each thor does insane dmg vs ground so you have to basically manually target every single one of your thors if the protoss has any kind of armored air or you're turning your 500 resource unit into one comparable to a marine in terms of dps (50 resource unit). That requires a insane amount apm to do if you have multiple thors. That's clearly an unintended side effect of thors anti-air priority and I expect it to be patched soon because it only makes the game more one dimensional. I don't quite understand how it takes such insane apm? Ctrl+ left click on thor (select all thors) Shift + A-click on the units you want it to attack Depending on how many thors you have Shift and left click on portraits to lessen your selection and tell those thors to attack new targes to lessen overkill. non?
Have you even played the game man? What you're suggesting is absurd. It can't be done. Not by anyone.
Seriously what the fuck is up with all the lunacy straight outta Bronze telling you to manually target stalkers with your Thors? Even if you could do it (which you can't), you'd be giving up a fuckload of DPS.
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On November 19 2010 00:30 HalfAmazing wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 22:33 Panoptic wrote:On November 18 2010 22:26 sandroba wrote:
Wow, I can't believe how stubborn the responses are in this thread. Nadagast has a point. Listen to him before blindly questioning what he's trying to point out. Each thor does insane dmg vs ground so you have to basically manually target every single one of your thors if the protoss has any kind of armored air or you're turning your 500 resource unit into one comparable to a marine in terms of dps (50 resource unit). That requires a insane amount apm to do if you have multiple thors. That's clearly an unintended side effect of thors anti-air priority and I expect it to be patched soon because it only makes the game more one dimensional. I don't quite understand how it takes such insane apm? Ctrl+ left click on thor (select all thors) Shift + A-click on the units you want it to attack Depending on how many thors you have Shift and left click on portraits to lessen your selection and tell those thors to attack new targes to lessen overkill. non? Have you even played the game man? What you're suggesting is absurd. It can't be done. Not by anyone. Seriously what the fuck is up with all the lunacy straight outta Bronze telling you to manually target stalkers with your Thors? Even if you could do it (which you can't), you'd be giving up a fuckload of DPS.
Have you guys ever even heard of control groups? Saying it can't be done is like saying I can't cast 10 storms within 5 seconds in BW on a giant army of hydras under dark swarms. Or I can't dodge lurker shots with marines. I will make you guys a replay and show you how it's done because you all seem so terrible you can't use 50 APM to target a few units manually. I've almost never played Terran and I bet I can do this no problem.
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Does anyone here actually see the tvp matchup right now? The terran DOMINATES the early game. This makes any transition to carriers on 2 base impossible without a timing attack outright killing you. Even if I could somehow take the marines out of the equation any terran should already have a reactored starport for medivacs that he can switch up for vikings and throw down another to help as well if i have too many carriers already. Vikings also should be a standard part of any tvp army composition to stop colossi. If you want to build mech you still need marines to kill the immortals and vikings to kill any air that the protoss comes out with. I would also as a protoss player rather go for Void Rays vs mech than go for carriers. Carriers are just too expensive and too slow while void rays can harass the terran base as well as target fire down some of the siege tanks from the back during the battle.
My suggestion if you people are so into going mech just try it, but don't go crying to Blizzard when it doesn't work. Bio is already an auto win vs protoss of an equal level as you.
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Vikings are really terrible against carriers and this post is interesting.
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I still don't understand why people propose balance problems on this forum. It is almost as though they actually think it will get changed if they get backing on Team Liquid, when most of the forum is about strategy discussion.
And on that aspect, There is no reason to change a unit to make it strong against everything. To beat carriers, you deny teching through aggression, and if that doesn't work, you make vikings. Vikings rape both colossus and carriers, and will leave you with enough money to spend on 6 barracks marines and marauders, which would rape both carriers and colossus.
Saying Thors are bad against carriers isn't imbalanced, it is just a poor decision.
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Thors are great against any gateway unit. HTs are worthless against them now that they don't have energy. They are reasonbaly cost effective vs. Colossi, and they can own Immortals with strike cannons. They demolish Pheonixes.
That means that of the Toss tech trees, Thors are outstanding against 1 (gateway), solid against 1 (robo), and situationally useful against 1 (stargate).
So you're proposal is to make them great against all the other stargate units too?
What the hell. That's a terrible idea. "Let's give Terran a unit which is great against everything a Toss can build and has no counters".
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On November 18 2010 20:22 TibblesEvilCat wrote:
i'm confused doens/t thor beat all of protoss ground units for cost ?
thors are really good vs ground, but terran already has tanks/marauders for that, so unless they need AA theres no point building a thor
thor needs a vs ground nerf if its getting an AA buff though
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Wow. No wonder few pros even read the strategy section, let alone post in it. Thanks for sharing Nadagast.
How many of you all even read the thread before posting?
On November 18 2010 22:04 DaemonX wrote:
Um, Wtf?
Ever heard of vikings? T has the best AA in the game, with their air-siege-tank aka the Viking.
Why not make Thors kill armored and remove broodlords from the game! Good idea.
TL needs an auto-lock policy about any thread in this forum with unit-imba qq thread title.
Seriously dude? Seriously? At least try to read whats going on in the thread. If anyone deserves a warning, it's for a post like this.
I'm going to try an appeal to reason here. Nadagast isn't saying that anything is imbalanced. He's not saying he wants the Thor to counter armored air.
He's saying that if you want to see something other than bio in TvP (which everyone on both sides of the match up complain about) you could accomplish that by changing an obvious inefficiency.
Thors auto-target armored air above other units. They do negligible damage to said targets. Armored air units to quite well against mech. This means that no matter what the circumstance, if there is an armored air unit on the field it makes Thors almost useless as a damage dealer (to ground or air), contributing to making mech late game pretty much a no go.
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Well if it's such a problem that terran doesn't have any ground to armored air, then why aren't we making a huge deal about protoss not having anything good ground to light air.
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On November 19 2010 01:47 Tripal wrote:
Well if it's such a problem that terran doesn't have any ground to armored air, then why aren't we making a huge deal about protoss not having anything good ground to light air.
It's not a huge deal at all. It is a slightly bigger, but still small deal that Thors almost can't be used if there is armored air on the field (not for the balance of the match up, but for the creativity of it). If Thors could be used (not as a counter, but just as something other then negligible damage) then you could see the match up really open late game with mech plays.
It would also probably allow you to nerf Terran early game, if you really wanted to.
Right now we have this odd balancing act in the match up where Terran and bio is very strong early, and Protoss is very strong against bio late. It results in most Terran wins ending up in the first 10 minutes or so, and most the Protoss wins ending up after 10 minutes or so. It roughly ends up being even, but is that really where we want the match up to end up at?
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... Vikings beat toss air like a redheaded step child. End of story Thor is anti light Viking anti armor end of story
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i'm fine w/ changing attack priorities so you don't hit armored air as long as we also change the attack priority that thors won't prioritize light air.
I can understand prioritizing air in general, over ground. But it has to be one or the other you can't start setting priorities based on armor type. Either sacrifice dps against mutas or against heavy air, your choice.
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On November 18 2010 19:33 Nadagast wrote:
That's less DPS than a stimmed Marine.
Can you tell me something that has more?
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Umm so if the fact that thors don't do well cripples creativity of TvP I would say banshees and marines with stim cripple it even more. As if the marine numbers get big enough they rape everything that doesn't include colossi or storm. And banshees as you just have to get a robo because they MIGHT go banshee with cloak.
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On November 18 2010 20:33 Nadagast wrote:
I think people are misunderstanding the situation I'm referring to. You haven't seen very many high level long TvPs because almost everyone goes bio and either loses or wins before P gets on 3+ bases.
I'm talking about late game 4+ bases for each, where you both have pretty much the full tech tree. Marines are not a good unit at this point because he can have so many Templar and Storm decimates your Marines. You can EMP (and it works great if you hit all of his HTs and force a battle right after) but it is extremely risky to have significant supply stuck into marines lategame since with one spell you can lose 20+ food instantly.
And the strategies I'm talking about aren't about pure mech. But giving the Factory a response to armored air that is somewhat effective will open up options for Terran in TvP, IMO. Not pure mech options, it's too immobile. But bio+mech will become much more viable, and a mix of bio/mech/air will become much more viable.
First of all - Blizzard has already stated Terran is weak late game TvP but they feel they are too strong early game. They are looking to fix that.
You're looking for a fix to something that is not broken. If you want to be able to consistently win games by building units from only a single tech structure then you aren't looking at a balanced game. The fact that you need units from various different buildings and tech paths is indicative of the game being more balanced then imbalanced (though not perfectly so).
I stopped reading the thread after this post in order to respond to it so I apologize if this has already been posted but here is a game describing your situation (proving your point to an extent, that mech is too weak to air)
+ Show Spoiler +
However, this does not mean your suggested changes to the Thor are good ideas - they are horrible to be blatantly honest. Balance changes must be much more subtle, as not to effect other match-ups significantly (ideally, at all).
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On November 19 2010 02:08 Penatronic wrote:
... Vikings beat toss air like a redheaded step child. End of story Thor is anti light Viking anti armor end of story
Oh. Wow. Thanks. I never thought of that, and it has never been discussed in this thread. In fact this entire thread is just Terran QQ about not being able to beat air, instead of talking about a way to open up play and move it away from bio in the late game. It's a good thing people like you are here to read the thread before posting so you can make an informed statement.
On November 19 2010 02:09 DuneBug wrote:
i'm fine w/ changing attack priorities so you don't hit armored air as long as we also change the attack priority that thors won't prioritize light air.
I can understand prioritizing air in general, over ground. But it has to be one or the other you can't start setting priorities based on armor type. Either sacrifice dps against mutas or against heavy air, your choice.
I agree with you there. It would be unusual to take a specific unit and give it somewhat specific targeting priorities (though they just did that with the Thor/Medivac thing). If you read what Nadagast was saying earlier in the thread, I think his suggestion is to keep the priority the same and shift the damage so it does more to all targets but the same to light, since as it stand a Thor hitting an armored air unit which it prioritizes means that Thor is roughly doing the same damage as a single stimmed Marine.
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Wow, Nadagast. I feel really bad for you. So many people misunderstood your post or were disrespectful. Don't let it get you down though. It's always a treat when a talented player posts on TL and I'd like to thank you for voicing a concern that I've also had for a while.
I think we need to get used to the idea that the Thor cannot fulfill the role that the Goliath had in BW. Instead of a unit with a weak ground attack and very strong anti-air, it is the opposite - very strong ground attack and weak anti-air. We want it to be the Goliath though because it has a situational use against clumps of light air units. This is simply not the case.
However, it's ridiculous how the presence of armored air makes Thors that you want to be attacking the ground units near-useless. Thor AI should target Light Air->Ground->Armored Air in that order. There's really no excuse for the way it is now.
Until the AI priority gets fixed, there are alternatives to "Goliaths" that can work. Especially in close positions, a slow Turret push with Viking support (if necessary) is workable. Siege Tanks behind Turrets protect your push not only from air but from Colossi. For now though, mech is definitely the straight-and-narrow path for Terrans and it needs some work before the majority of players will consider learning it over 1-t-a click.
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Thors should probably autotarget ground units over air unit, if ground units are in range. It's much easier to have to focus-fire against air units than against ground units... and a unit with guns that big should be firing them when given the chance.
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imo there is a reason for it, and its called balance.
/sarcasim If they give thor better AA v Armored, then I want my collosus to be able to shoot up also, because its not fair that it can be targeted from AA units and ground units, and does 0 dmg compared to a 125/50 stalker to air units /end sarcasim
no but really, its balance, if blizzard wanted every army composition to contain thors in it, then you might get your wish... but realisically having thors good against 80% of ground units & all air units is just asking for too much, Not to mention I think interceptors are Light armored? I might be wrong but i think they are, so thors would still target those first... which is pointless because they arnt clumped up... so the fact that there is a good "Counter" to thors from protoss that doesnt get melted by 3 siege tanks is a good thing.
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Nadagast's post is a very good one. People should read it and not go "OMG whine" post. I think the bigger issue though is that T has no reliable AA late gave vs Toss except for turrets. Vikings are a waste of supply and die to everything especially storm and marines just get stormed to death.
The +1 range +2 armor turret is pretty much your only bet if you see Carrier/Templar.
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This thread is about targeting priority you morons, and one of the possible ways to fix the problem but unfortunately since 75% of you are illiterate you can't figure that out. As it is I wouldn't bother with thors in my composition because of this targeting issue.
All protoss constantly whine that why are T so newb they should just use a better mix of units, but the difference is ground atk upgrades apply to both gateway and robo whereas we have 2 different ground upgrades required and hence its harder to use a mix of both (which is what we have to do with the current state of protoss late game), and please don't say oh well we have air upgrades as well because so do we making your point void.
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I don't play T, but I like to respectfuly ask how can T have no good anti-air when T has turret, viking with 9 range and stimmed marine with massive DPS?
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On November 19 2010 03:39 Antisocialmunky wrote:
Nadagast's post is a very good one. People should read it and not go "OMG whine" post. I think the bigger issue though is that T has no reliable AA late gave vs Toss except for turrets. Vikings are a waste of supply and die to everything especially storm and marines just get stormed to death.
The +1 range +2 armor turret is pretty much your only bet if you see Carrier/Templar.
Ok so early game TvP is favored to the T, late game PvT is favored to the P... There needs to be something done about this, obviously, I'm sure we can all agree on that but making the thor a unit that is mixed into every matchup in every situation just seems far out there for me. I really don't think they should do well against armored air because they do so well against light and ground, it would be a 1 unit wrecking machine.
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On November 19 2010 03:47 statikg wrote:
This thread is about targeting priority you morons, and one of the possible ways to fix the problem but unfortunately since 75% of you are illiterate you can't figure that out. As it is I wouldn't bother with thors in my composition because of this targeting issue.
All protoss constantly whine that why are T so newb they should just use a better mix of units, but the difference is ground atk upgrades apply to both gateway and robo whereas we have 2 different ground upgrades required and hence its harder to use a mix of both (which is what we have to do with the current state of protoss late game), and please don't say oh well we have air upgrades as well because so do we making your point void.
The OP was not asking about a targeting issue alone.. OP wanted to double damage of thor against armored air
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On November 18 2010 20:24 KaiserJohan wrote:
Can someone point me to a game where mech actually dominated lategame? I've only seen Goody do it TvP at high level, and he gets rolled more often than not, judging from the replay packs and whatnot.
How is mech with non-existant mobility beat a colossus+HT+gateway(assuming late late game as you said), let alone toss air.
I think most people go bio simply because bio / biomech > mech tvp
Mech was good at high level TvP until it was nerfed (*cough david kim*) because of being "too powerful" or some shit (*cough davidkim had trouble with siege tanks*)
So yeah, with zealots getting changed + tanks, mass tank mech became 10x harder. And i agree with nadagast, if thors actually could kill carriers (HELLO SC1 GOLIATHS) then yeah...there'd be more mech options and such.
How about get rid of the useless ground to ground cannon of thor, and make it a Ground to Air ability that does that huge damage to air targets...it's still NEVER ever beneficial to research the cannon otherwise.
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On November 19 2010 03:58 GreEny K wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 03:39 Antisocialmunky wrote:
Nadagast's post is a very good one. People should read it and not go "OMG whine" post. I think the bigger issue though is that T has no reliable AA late gave vs Toss except for turrets. Vikings are a waste of supply and die to everything especially storm and marines just get stormed to death.
The +1 range +2 armor turret is pretty much your only bet if you see Carrier/Templar. Ok so early game TvP is favored to the T, late game PvT is favored to the P... There needs to be something done about this, obviously, I'm sure we can all agree on that but making the thor a unit that is mixed into every matchup in every situation just seems far out there for me. I really don't think they should do well against armored air because they do so well against light and ground, it would be a 1 unit wrecking machine.
Ideally I want a viking that doesn't suck vs ground completely ie, Viking ground takes ground ups and is slightly buffed on the HP front. However this necessitates buffing P's mid-game gateway/AA stuff.
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Thor targeting priorities are an issue with its range attack. Most units will pick a target and shoot until it dies. The Thor's Anti air range is 10, vs its 7 ground range. This means they'll typically shoot air units first in any engagement, and continue to fail until they die.
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Welcome to manual targeting. Every race with a unit that has different types of attacks or different damage outputs (armored vs non-armored) have to do it. Immortals automatically target marines because they are up front (range 5) compared to the marauder (range 6). Hell, even some units with only one type of attack have to be manually controlled during battle such as Collossi to use them to full potential. Void rays automatically target marines instead of the armored marauder.
Despite the tedious nature of having to manually control such units, we still see all of the units used because manually controlling units in battle is part of the game.
Edit: Everyone who says that the OP's point of his post is about Thor's attack priority... please re-read the OP. It starts out as a point about Thors, but somehow at the end, he's talking about Terran's lack of AA options and diversifying Terran build order.
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On November 19 2010 04:08 Antisocialmunky wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 03:58 GreEny K wrote:On November 19 2010 03:39 Antisocialmunky wrote:
Nadagast's post is a very good one. People should read it and not go "OMG whine" post. I think the bigger issue though is that T has no reliable AA late gave vs Toss except for turrets. Vikings are a waste of supply and die to everything especially storm and marines just get stormed to death.
The +1 range +2 armor turret is pretty much your only bet if you see Carrier/Templar. Ok so early game TvP is favored to the T, late game PvT is favored to the P... There needs to be something done about this, obviously, I'm sure we can all agree on that but making the thor a unit that is mixed into every matchup in every situation just seems far out there for me. I really don't think they should do well against armored air because they do so well against light and ground, it would be a 1 unit wrecking machine. Ideally I want a viking that doesn't suck vs ground completely ie, Viking ground takes ground ups and is slightly buffed on the HP front. However this necessitates buffing P's mid-game gateway/AA stuff.
I don't see vikings as sucking horribly, they can shred zealots and storm is not too effective against them since they are so large... And AFTER some upgrades they hold their own against stalkers.
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obviously the problem here is that the stimmed marine is too strong
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On November 19 2010 04:14 GreEny K wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 04:08 Antisocialmunky wrote:On November 19 2010 03:58 GreEny K wrote:On November 19 2010 03:39 Antisocialmunky wrote:
Nadagast's post is a very good one. People should read it and not go "OMG whine" post. I think the bigger issue though is that T has no reliable AA late gave vs Toss except for turrets. Vikings are a waste of supply and die to everything especially storm and marines just get stormed to death.
The +1 range +2 armor turret is pretty much your only bet if you see Carrier/Templar. Ok so early game TvP is favored to the T, late game PvT is favored to the P... There needs to be something done about this, obviously, I'm sure we can all agree on that but making the thor a unit that is mixed into every matchup in every situation just seems far out there for me. I really don't think they should do well against armored air because they do so well against light and ground, it would be a 1 unit wrecking machine. Ideally I want a viking that doesn't suck vs ground completely ie, Viking ground takes ground ups and is slightly buffed on the HP front. However this necessitates buffing P's mid-game gateway/AA stuff. I don't see vikings as sucking horribly, they can shred zealots and storm is not too effective against them since they are so large... And AFTER some upgrades they hold their own against stalkers.
Except you won't be upgrading both mech and air at the same time and they do get stormed to death when they are doing their AA job which is what they should be doing most of the time anyway. They are hardly cost effective against any unit, even carriers take them for cost.
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I'm really confused. Are carriers actually built in PvT at all consistently at high levels? I thought terran problems endgame were due to storm/collosus/gateway balls. I'm only 1900 diamond but I would say I see carriers in less than 2% of games. Can anyone link to a pro replay that demonstrates the problem the OP is talking about?
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Although not ideal, Protoss can handle anything with a mix of gateway units/immortal and smart sentry usage. Unfortunately this is botched due to Bansheephobia.
In Broodwar the protoss always poked terran wall with dragoons until the first tank. The addition of the marauder has changed everything, but protoss should be perfectly safe to poke with stalker and still have a chance to retreat (referring to stim/concussive).
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I just went through 7 pages and can't find a single replay. Don't tell me your argument, SHOW ME
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There's one on the first page of Goody TvP Mech thread. It'll only happen in late-late games as in mine out on most maps.
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well the way I see it once there is a strong Thor/tank/hellion force there is no way to beat that stuff on the ground so air is a natural counter to it. The problem is that the thor is too much of an allround unit to be also a hard counter against heavy air.
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This is as simple as doing the one change you suggested. Make Thors prioritize ground units. Done.
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On November 19 2010 04:25 tarath wrote:
I'm really confused. Are carriers actually built in PvT at all consistently at high levels? I thought terran problems endgame were due to storm/collosus/gateway balls. I'm only 1900 diamond but I would say I see carriers in less than 2% of games. Can anyone link to a pro replay that demonstrates the problem the OP is talking about?
Re-read the OP, the problem is terran strategic creativity not that terrans are finding it impossible to deal with carriers.
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I kinda think this is funny now when somebody goes on to say, "Terran Mech has no good anti air! T.T" Ummm, Protoss Robo HAS NO ANTI AIR... Literally, none, not one unit that can shoot up. And anti air units can actually target one of those units (colossi) and without a squishy stalker ball to shoot at those flying anti air units, your colossi are screwed.
How about we get rid of the thors ability to shoot air at all? That would solve the problem right there and then you'd be in the same boat as the Toss in having a great anti ground unit that can't do crap against the air and has to rely on the rest of your army to do that (*cough*marinesvikings*cough*) I mean, it seems the air attack for the Thor is only situational at best (Mutas) so why not just get rid of it?
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On November 19 2010 04:42 space_yes wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 04:25 tarath wrote:
I'm really confused. Are carriers actually built in PvT at all consistently at high levels? I thought terran problems endgame were due to storm/collosus/gateway balls. I'm only 1900 diamond but I would say I see carriers in less than 2% of games. Can anyone link to a pro replay that demonstrates the problem the OP is talking about? Re-read the OP, the problem is terran strategic creativity not that terrans are finding it impossible to deal with carriers.
Ah so his claim is that terrans are forced to go bio because they will die to carriers otherwise? Surely there must be a replay somewhere were a pro tried going mech and carriers shut him down? I'm just not at all convinced that the problem that carriers limit terrans options in any way is a real one.
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On November 18 2010 21:29 Seagull_ wrote:
He doesn't want another counter to armored air, he wants an attack priority change so he doesn't need to have 500apm just for microing the Thors in his army when there are armored air units out and about (the most common instance of this being Carriers in late-game PvT).
Most people don't get to late-game PvT and don't understand why this is a needed change so Nadagast looks a little crazy, but as the game progresses and strategies mature, carriers will likely see a lot more use vs mech terran in lategame (which is currently a very popular strategy amongst high level players)
How is it selecting Thors and shift-clicking to attack ground units 500 apm?
And... I haven't seen any late game diamond/pro Protoss players going carriers. They often go Imm/Coll/HT but I haven't seen mass carriers. Have you got any proof of pro/diamond players going mass carriers in late game?
I'm gonna be polite so I will stop writing here.
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On November 19 2010 04:49 Setev wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 21:29 Seagull_ wrote:
He doesn't want another counter to armored air, he wants an attack priority change so he doesn't need to have 500apm just for microing the Thors in his army when there are armored air units out and about (the most common instance of this being Carriers in late-game PvT).
Most people don't get to late-game PvT and don't understand why this is a needed change so Nadagast looks a little crazy, but as the game progresses and strategies mature, carriers will likely see a lot more use vs mech terran in lategame (which is currently a very popular strategy amongst high level players) How is it selecting Thors and shift-clicking to attack ground units 500 apm? And... I haven't seen any late game diamond/pro Protoss players going carriers. They often go Imm/Coll/HT but I haven't seen mass carriers. Have you got any proof of pro/diamond players going mass carriers in late game? I'm gonna be polite so I will stop writing here.
This thread isn't about toss going mass carriers and how to respond.
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Personally i feel they didn't give people enough time to figure out the counter to mech. They just nerfed it.
Did you know that although tanks did half damage to Smaller units in BW. SHIELDS took FULL DAMAGE.
Something to consider. IMO
But personally vikings are fine. An mobility -wise resulting in out macro can be solved by Hellion Runbys and drops.
Any investment Protoss has to do to kill mech i easily countered by 1) Micro 2) units of lesser gas.
Example: 2-3 ghost counter an infinite amount of Immortals.
Though i still believe Immortals should be 125 gas and 200 minerals to compensate. Being 100 gas allows them to be double pumped off of 1 base. Which is pretty gay since you cant do that with tanks. Maps need to allow for safe Naturals and obtainable thirds. NO BACK DOORS. And PLz multiple paths. Not just 1 route to their base. This way you can actually harrass with hellions more efficiently.
Air transitions arent that scary if scouted. Thors Kill phoenixes, Vikings kill everything else. If they lose their air and switch to mass ground again. YOU do realize your AHEAD in food? And its not like your gonna need a million VIkings. You just need some.
P.S. Vikings have same DPS as Goliaths on ground.
Concerning Upgrades. Consider double armory. 1 for mech weapons another for armor. Using the armor Armory for also air weapons by flip flopping the upgrades.
#1 enemy of mech= Blizzard maps
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On November 19 2010 04:48 tarath wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 04:42 space_yes wrote:On November 19 2010 04:25 tarath wrote:
I'm really confused. Are carriers actually built in PvT at all consistently at high levels? I thought terran problems endgame were due to storm/collosus/gateway balls. I'm only 1900 diamond but I would say I see carriers in less than 2% of games. Can anyone link to a pro replay that demonstrates the problem the OP is talking about? Re-read the OP, the problem is terran strategic creativity not that terrans are finding it impossible to deal with carriers. Ah so his claim is that terrans are forced to go bio because they will die to carriers otherwise? Surely there must be a replay somewhere were a pro tried going mech and carriers shut him down? I'm just not at all convinced that the problem that carriers limit terrans options in any way is a real one.
Terrans go bio b/c late game mech isn't very good b/c it is too vulnerable to air. The OP mentioned carriers but I found a control group of speed VR the most difficult to deal with. Most of the mech experimentation verse toss at a high level happened during the beta. <--- I'm thinking of Jinro here
EDIT: there are other issues (possibly larger issues) with mech verse toss too, but lack of AA late game is a problem that decreases the viability of mech however marginally
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Reading this entire thread was a great learning experience for me.
I had a profound realization that 95% of the people who do the actual posting on the TL Strategy forums have terrible, terrible reading comprehension. It's either that or they read only the opening post, half-heartedly, before their excitement to share their poorly-thought out ideas gets the best of them. It's unfortunate for people like Poor Nadagast who actually want to have an intellectual discussion without his thread being polluted by comments like "OMG WHY DO YOU WANT THOR TO BE OVERPOWERED??!!1one!" when he specifically said that to compensate for this added thor capability, that compensations must be made in the form of scaling down the Thor ground damage.
Now, for my contribution.
I don't think it's a matter of changing anything about the thor's attack. As you've stated, the attack priority is the real problem plaguing Terran in these battles. Carriers are fairly worthless without a supporting ground army, especially when confronted with a variety of mediocre but tenable dangers the Terran can pose (i.e. even a few vikings [I think somebody mentioned 2 or 3 matching the cost of a carrier, excluding tech time, etc.], mixed with a bio army and 2-5(debatable number) thors, not to mention EMP). The attack priority will allow the terran to spend his APM elsewhere in the battle (microing bio away from zealots, attacking carriers with marines, sniping guardian shields, EMPing HT; if you think terran is a-walk then you are ignorant). Without a ground army, the carriers will definitely go down, regardless of you composition - so long as you have AA obviously. As was mentioned by multiple posters, economy and more specifically cost-efficiency is key when it's 3+ bases against 3+ bases. If you go too hard on the vikings, you're going to lose the resource-trading war and you'll probably even outright lose to a tech switch and faster army reproduction. With improved Thor attack priority, you can invest a comparatively similar amount that you would put into vikings, except you have much hardier units that are both more practical to repair and retain as well as strong ground-attacking units. The only possible argument I can see to this is that the thors still do relatively small damage (that of a stimmed marine) but that's trivializing the damage thors can do to ground units before hitting the carriers as well as the durability and repair-ability of your giant metal stimmed marine.
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Just bring back the goliath and vultures. We'll never have real mech play in T v P without those two units. It'll just be boring bio vs everything in all 3 matchups.
Goody and Servyoa, the only two high level players who mech T v P, usually loses, convincingly, when they attempt it.
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On November 19 2010 05:17 link0 wrote:
Just bring back the goliath and vultures. We'll never have real mech play in T v P without those two units. It'll just be boring bio vs everything in all 3 matchups.
Goody and Servyoa, the only two high level players who mech T v P, usually loses, convincingly, when they attempt it.
You can have vultures and goliaths back as soon as we get scouts and dragoons (with better pathing) back
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Erm... this assumes that you gave protoss enough time/resources to have a sizeable ground army AND a sizable carrier army. You should probably not do this in the first place...
Also, carrier upgrades are on a completely different path than protoss' ground unit, so so i'm going to guess that the carriers are not well upgraded.
When has terran ever been able to go face to face with a carrier/ground unit army of protoss that has steady income and win consistantly (except flash). Carrier/ground army always has been the ultimate counter to terran. Terran's usual response to that has to be cut off protoss' income, since carriers are useless without steady mineral income. Then as soon as you kill a lot of his probes (with your hellions prob. since they're too quick for carriers) attack, then even if you kill the intercepter he should have a hard time replenishing that. Or, hit with hellions, and if he moves his carriers, flank the carriers while they're seperated from his ground army, then your vikings can go harass, and with the left over unit count mass up unit and attack (yeah yeah, theorycraft, but it's actually more doable). in the time it takes for him to make a sizeable carrier army again, you should be able to steam roll through everything.
Carriers when used with enough ground units are not really a unit you "counter with this unit", it's a unit you counter with strategy.
following your logic countering muta for P is ridiculous, since stalkers only do 10 dmg (with no splash) against mutas, and stargate is on a completely differnet tech path/upgrade. And honestly, you see mutas A LOT more than you see carriers o_O.
Thors are strong enough already. If thors got the damage boost you were talking about their would attack collossus (since it'll start doing more dmg with it's Javelin missiles) from far range with terrible terrible dmg,
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I agree that Thors should always target ground units with priority. It is easy to tell thors to attack air units, it is extremely not easy to continually tell them not to. Thor AI does a great job of ruining the unit in TvP (and used to in TvT until it was fixed).
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Another thing is that if they change thors' attack priority they will STILL SUCK against armored air, so armored air is still viable for toss late game. It's not like if you change thors will be good vs anything toss has. You as terran will still have to balance your viking numbers so you don't get raped in the ground battle. As a result you only have a more balanced late game vs toss.
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The way I see it OP wants T to be the one that forces P to change tech through their incredible long tech tree instead of T being the one having to change just by moving a couple of buildings.
You say that armored air cripples T from using mech but how would this not cripple P from using armored air?
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On November 18 2010 19:45 Nadagast wrote:
I agree the reason people go bio is not because they are afraid of Carriers. But you'd see other things if Thors could hit armored air well.
true, youd see even more imbalance outside of the scv timing pushes
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The thor already beats every light air unit, why would it need to beat EVERY AIR UNIT?
Quite simply, if the Thor could beat armored air units as well as light ones, you'd never need more than stimmed marauders and thors to win.
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On November 19 2010 05:20 Jonas wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 05:17 link0 wrote:
Just bring back the goliath and vultures. We'll never have real mech play in T v P without those two units. It'll just be boring bio vs everything in all 3 matchups.
Goody and Servyoa, the only two high level players who mech T v P, usually loses, convincingly, when they attempt it. You can have vultures and goliaths back as soon as we get scouts and dragoons (with better pathing) back
Only if our Vultures get better AI when planting mines.
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There IS a Terran response to Carriers besides Vikings and Marines. BATTLECRUISERS! They take about the same amount of time to tech to (probably less, since you already have a Starport and can just switch on a tech lab as your fusion core is building), and with Yamato there's no contest. Plus, the only real followup P has is ht + b-stalkers.
Of course, Vikings and Marines are still better, but you wanted diversity...
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You can have Thors not be distracted by void rays when my immortals actually spend the fight shooting at something that doesn't cost an 8th of their value.
Until then, I guess we're both stuck with microing or going mass colossus/bio.
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I think vikings are fine anti-armored AA as they are currently. When people complain about not knowing how many vikings to incorporate, I feel this is an area where skill is involved. It's not just the decision making of seeing X unit and then building Y to handle X, it's also knowing how much Y you need.
For example:
+ Show Spoiler +Corruptors operate the same way. If I just get 7 corruptors, I'm going to have a hard time against a Protoss that goes overboard on colossus -- 7 can't kill them fast enough to stop them from vaporizing my ground army. However, if he only built one, I'm going to burn through it quick and then have a bunch of useless corruptors around.
Change Thor anti-air damage to be 12x4, or 24x2 instead of 6+6lightx4.
I'm not sure this would really change anything. You're complaining that Thor DPS is low versus armies with Protoss air and acknowledge that sufficient numbers of vikings are very effective against at least the air portion. I'd be inclined to agree. Thor GtA DPS is lower than its GtG DPS even against light air. Making thors too effective against armored air would marginalize the vikings' role in the Terran army. Improving thors is dangerous -- they're already an extremely effective unit.
Change Thors to automatically target ground units over armored air units and Interceptors.
This change is by far more reasonable and is the correct answer, I think. It makes no sense that a thor would rather plink away at an overlord 9 range away instead of blasting the roaches right in its face. Thors should always prioritize ground (it's easier to manually tell them to hit air units than have them prioritize air and be forced to focus them on ground units).
EDIT:
...Poor Nadagast who actually want to have an intellectual discussion without his thread being polluted by comments like "OMG WHY DO YOU WANT THOR TO BE OVERPOWERED??!!1one!" when he specifically said that to compensate for this added thor capability, that compensations must be made in the form of scaling down the Thor ground damage.
Nerfing thor ground damage is moving in the wrong direction. Thors, on paper, are fine. It's the fact that the AI makes them do sub-par DPS by default against mixed air+ground that's the issue. You really can't make thors any weaker or you'll break TvZ.
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the most annoying things are mutas in tvz and thors splashdmg AA radius HAVE TO get fixed imo... its terrible and annoying, other than you have magic box ur mutas and cant focuss tanks as zerg there is almost no viable reason to use thors and they are hardcoutner to mutas???..
And yes i agree the AA dmg to armoured units from thors are terrible, but ive never met carriers on high dmg lvl tbh, more noticable were those 3-4 tvts i lost where my opponent opened banshee viking and went into bcs midgame with only air upgrades and you HAVE TO play thors against it, no chance u get aircontrol for vikings and once bcs pop ur dead...
But as i mentioned, the most reasonable change would be an further splashradius to rly have a counter against mutas since vikings are crap and rines get rickrolled by banelings/infestor.
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Honestly I believe the reason thor AA is considered weak in comparison to marines is because of the ridiculous damage that marines can put out. The splash light damage makes thors amazing against mutas / phoenix but there is no reason why they should be the end all be all anwser for every situation.
If you want the damage to be better in comparison to a stim marine, make the marine do less damage.
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Everyone's missing the point. The point isn't that Thors are weak, or Terran needs more help fighting Carriers. The point is that 99% of Terrans use the exact same build vs Protoss because it's really the ONLY viable build. It's not a weakness, its boring.
I'm all for creative play, and the current state of TvP is stale. MMM+Ghost+Viking, every game. Maybe if the Thor was more viable versus Armored air - not hard countering, just viable - maybe through an upgrade or other means, might bring some creativity back to the match-up.
Maybe while giving the Thor a buff versus Armored air, and weakening its strength vs light air, do the opposite to Vikings making them a little weaker vs armored air but stronger vs light air units. Maybe then we'd see more viking play versus zerg, and more mech play versus Protoss.
Again, it's not about balance or Thors being weak. Or even about Terran being OP or UP. I like seeing each race having more options available, and Natagasts point is a good one.
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Everyone's missing the point. The point isn't that Thors are weak, or Terran needs more help fighting Carriers. The point is that 99% of Terrans use the exact same build vs Protoss because it's really the ONLY viable build. It's not a weakness, its boring.
I'm all for creative play, and the current state of TvP is stale. MMM+Ghost+Viking, every game. Maybe if the Thor was more viable versus Armored air - not hard countering, just viable - maybe through an upgrade or other means, might bring some creativity back to the match-up.
Maybe while giving the Thor a buff versus Armored air, and weakening its strength vs light air, do the opposite to Vikings making them a little weaker vs armored air but stronger vs light air units. Maybe then we'd see more viking play versus zerg, and more mech play versus Protoss.
Again, it's not about balance or Thors being weak. Or even about Terran being OP or UP. I like seeing each race having more options available, and Natagasts point is a good one.
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On November 19 2010 04:49 Setev wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 21:29 Seagull_ wrote:
He doesn't want another counter to armored air, he wants an attack priority change so he doesn't need to have 500apm just for microing the Thors in his army when there are armored air units out and about (the most common instance of this being Carriers in late-game PvT).
Most people don't get to late-game PvT and don't understand why this is a needed change so Nadagast looks a little crazy, but as the game progresses and strategies mature, carriers will likely see a lot more use vs mech terran in lategame (which is currently a very popular strategy amongst high level players) How is it selecting Thors and shift-clicking to attack ground units 500 apm? And... I haven't seen any late game diamond/pro Protoss players going carriers. They often go Imm/Coll/HT but I haven't seen mass carriers. Have you got any proof of pro/diamond players going mass carriers in late game? I'm gonna be polite so I will stop writing here.
Lord al fucking mighty, why don't you understand this? You know what happens when you select multiple thors and shift attack every stalker? You'll overkill every single one of them and waste your DPS. There is _no way_ to do it manually without giving up DPS. Even if somehow you had the APM to manually target one stalker per thor, by the time you'd get to the last thor, your first thor will have killed its stalker, and started firing at the carrier, ignoring all of the other stalkers. Carriers see plenty of play at high level TvP against any non-bio macro build, and they fucking tear shit up. There is no counter for carrier/templar. Period. It's a big issue and it completely invalidates mech play. In fact, tvp's in which terran goes mech or air are the most fun to watch... right up until carriers.
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On November 18 2010 19:33 Nadagast wrote:
Thors have great anti air against light units, but against armored air units, their air attack is beyond terrible. With equal upgrades against Carriers, Thors do 4x4 = 16 damage per volley. That's less DPS than a stimmed Marine.
Thors weakness against armored air targets would be reasonable if they weren't so high up on the attack priority. In a large battle with Carriers on one side and Thors on the other, Thors do basically no DPS, unless you manually target Thors on ground units, they spend the entire fight shooting Interceptors and Carriers.
Now I know what you're saying: Get Vikings to kill Armored air units. But the problem is that Vikings suck on the ground. The problem is that getting armored air units is almost always a win for the Protoss in TvP. This is only masked by the fact that most TvPs are over fairly quickly and don't ever get past 2-3 base for the P, because almost all Terrans use bio. There are three ways getting Vikings to counter Carriers can go:
1. The best case scenario is that you make just enough to kill his Carriers then hope you win the ground battle. Terran maybe comes out slightly ahead in this case. But it's very difficult to hit the exact right amount of Vikings.
2. If you lose the air battle and he has carriers left over you lose the battle. Nothing else you have that shoots up (Marines and Thors) are good vs Carriers with support.
3. If you win the air battle with too many vikings left over, you'll lose the ground fight. Vikings that are 0/0 and on the ground are pretty terrible.
Also they are on an entirely separate upgrade table so you're at 0/0 when they already have some upgrades.
There are a couple of solutions to this problem:
Change Thor anti-air damage to be 12x4, or 24x2 instead of 6+6lightx4.
Change Thors to automatically target ground units over armored air units and Interceptors.
If Thors were changed so that Terrans had a viable counter to armored air other than Viking/Marines, I believe we would see playstyles other than bio open up.
You have just described the kind of balancing that Starcraft II has. Think of how wonderful it is you can't make a beastly unit that deals well with armored-ground, light-ground, armored-air, and light-air. Think of all those unused Vikings sitting inside the Starport because their macho comrade from the Factory just took over their role!
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The true problem is that 200/200 mech is not stronger than a 200/200 protoss army plain and simple.
Mech's playstyle is a "slowly but surely" mindset, massing a larger and larger force, taking expos, and harassing to deal economic damage for the inevitable big push. In BW 200/200 mech was slightly stronger than the protoss 200/200, which made it much more viable.
The lack of anti-air is just a problem in my opinion is the lack of scouting and adapting. Seeing as though a protoss sacrifices their ground unit count a bit. Seeing the tech switch too late and going on hellion/tank/ghost for too long will always get you killed. Just like BW, if you don't scout the tech switch to air, you won't get enough goliaths out in time to deal with it.
Even with EMP support, ghosts are expensive and result in lower tank count which is extremely important. You need to be preemptive with your EMPs. Otherwise the protoss will get 2-3 storms off, which by that time, EMPing his army makes no difference.
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On November 19 2010 04:32 Irrational_Animal wrote:
well the way I see it once there is a strong Thor/tank/hellion force there is no way to beat that stuff on the ground so air is a natural counter to it. The problem is that the thor is too much of an allround unit to be also a hard counter against heavy air.
Exactly, and that's the way it should stay. Can't have a unit that doesn't have a weakness, that would just be crazy.
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On November 18 2010 21:01 Nadagast wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 20:49 simme123 wrote:On November 18 2010 20:47 Nadagast wrote:On November 18 2010 20:43 simme123 wrote:On November 18 2010 20:40 Nadagast wrote:
I guess I haven't been clear enough on another point: the presence of an armored air unit turns the Thor into less DPS than a stimmed marine, unless you manually target each of your Thors (which is very difficult to keep up for 5+ Thors in a large battle).
Just the fact that a Void Ray or Carrier exists on the field means that your Thors are doing terrible damage unless manually targeted. I'd be okay with them simply changing the attack priority to have armored air and interceptors as a Thor's lowest priority. Well .. what purpose would the viking serve if the thor was strong vs all air? I'd say that it requires u to be a bit more reactive but still if the thor was good vs all air with it's strentghs vs ground it just wouldn't be a balanced unit. 'Strong' isn't a binary property. Vikings would still be stronger vs air and are much more mobile than slow walking Thors. What I am proposing would simply be to make the Thor outdps a stimmed Marine on armored air targets. 50/0 vs 300/200 and the Marine does more dps. What I am proposing is giving Thors roughly the equivalent of 2.5-3 stimmed Marine's dps against armored air. Well the thor doesn't only have the dps it's hp is much higher than that of a marine. And what you pay for when you get a thor isn't a strong anti armored air unit. It's fine as it is if you ask me. It's still really strong vs light air and all ground (with support). Against Carriers: 10 Marines (500/0) vs 1 Thor (300/200) 550 (450) HP vs 400 HP 69.7 dps vs 5.3 dps All I'm asking is that Marines aren't 13 times more effective against armored air. Thors will still be worse than Marines and Vikings against armored air, but they will be doing better than shooting blanks which is basically what they are doing now.
I'm all for nerfing marine anti-air in order to balance this equation. Maybe i can finally make some carriers as protoss
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On November 18 2010 19:58 Bommes wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2010 19:43 Espelz wrote:
To be honest : in about 350 ladder games i have seen carriers maybe... once or twice. Protoss has the same problem with air-upgrades that you say the vikings have (if protoss starts with colossi,terrans sometimes get +1 air attack even, so...). Also letting thors do normal damage vs. armored would make them stronger vs. BCs/Broodlords also, so it would also effect the other matchups... i dont think this is a good idea to be honest Because you obviously don't play mech or you protoss opponents don't know how to respond to mech appropriately, it's really an issue. Mech is really really strong against protoss in late game, but weak thor AA makes it almost impossible to make a steady unitmix because you either have a groundarmy that obliterates everything and then you lose 15 tanks against 1 carrier or some void rays or you have 10 vikings and he just stops making air at all and vikings are really the most worthless unit in the game in the late game and just waste supply, so you lose the ground fight horribly. Plus they are on a different upgrade path, so they naturally aren't that good in later stages of the game. Playing mech against mass gateway + starport + occassional robo/immortal is IMO not really winnable (steadily) if the protoss knows what to do, and that's really sad because mech would be a great response to protoss late game if it's upgradable AA would be existant. Make thors much weaker against ground, change their 6(+6)x4 with 3.0s cd splash attack to something like 10x2 or 12x2 with 1.5s cooldown without or with really little splash, and they will be perfectly fine balanced. They are so slow, that they can't be the ultimate counter to air, because air naturally is very mobile, but at the same time they at least ARE some sort of Mech-AA possibility, which atm is non-existant and not even really viable against light air units without armor (mutalisks, phoenix) which they should counter gamedesign-wise.
Hmmmm, remove their bonus double, then double the damage they do to all units and reduce the splash. So basically just make thors do double damage to armored units. That way nothing can kill them.
And as long as we are talking about protoss armored air units being overpowered, name one air unit that is cost effective versus mass rines with combat shields and stim. Not phoenixes, not carriers, not void rays for certain.
If you are playing mech. There is no reason why a protoss player will be able to build an air force without you destroying him.
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I think a lot of you are misunderstanding what I'm saying. Even with a buff to Thors anti armored air damage, they would still be a poor choice vs armored air. They just would no longer be so beyond absolutely terrible against armored air.
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Terran has the most specialized air units in the game. Vikings are good at what they do, kill armored air units. Banshees are good at harass. Ravens are a good caster. Medivacs are a good support unit. Battlecruisers could be useful some day.
Thors AA attack is designed to kill mutalisks and phoenixes. That's why the took away the medivac prioritization because Thors aren't supposed to kill medivacs.
If you're having trouble against carriers, then you're having trouble scouting. It takes a long time to go carriers during which time the Protoss is vulnerable.
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I dont remember seeing these kinds of threads when lurking in the BW era?
Just imagine it: "Too strong storms crippling TvP creativity" in the BW strategy forum. The problem is not in the game.
Think about it: Instead of one goliath, you now have two better goliaths! The viking flies and the thor is a freaking monster vs ground and light air. The tradeoff is that thors are weak vs armoured air, and vikings have to land to fire against ground.
The units are different, I can see the problem with Thors targeting carriers, but why post about what to change in the game, instead of finding a workaround? The game already does a lot of things for you, but why make it choose optimal targets for you? Would banelings also have to be changed to target squishý bio, eliminating blunders like rolling into thors? And should zergling split so banelings get free paths to the bioball? The next step after that would be rightclick psionic storms from hts and autostim when a major battle breaks out.
I am not saying im a good player, I lose games running my banelings into mech like any other person, but I dont complain that the game didn't play itself for me.
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On November 19 2010 07:32 Nadagast wrote:
I think a lot of you are misunderstanding what I'm saying. Even with a buff to Thors anti armored air damage, they would still be a poor choice vs armored air. They just would no longer be so beyond absolutely terrible against armored air.
If your opponent is making carriers, use a scan to count how many there are and then make 3 x # of carriers. It's cost effective and will guarantee they don't make more carriers afterwards. If you make too many vikings, then that is your fault.
As far as thors, if they nerfed the ground damage, then buffing their anti-air would be fine, but otherwise they would be waaaaaay too cost effective. Marines are already cost effective as is, carriers and void rays are already countered by marines, vikings, and battleships. Giving terran another choice would make them way too strong.
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One carrier beats 3 vikings with +1. In larger battles the carriers win by an even bigger margin due to viking missile overkill.
1. Terran air armor upgrades are 50% more expensive than Protoss air attack upgrades. Terran needs dedicate an armory for air armor upgrades, but Protoss already has a idle cyber core for air attack upgrades.
2. You can never overbuild carriers since they are strong in all situations against any army composition. You can easily over/under build vikings.
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While the weak anti armor Thor attack is certainly a problem it is not the most important thing crippling TvP creativty - its the lack of versaitly of the Hellion compare to BW Vulture.
Spider Mines played a crucival role in mech builds, if Hellions would have mines instead of Preiginter they would be much more versatile.
This would reduce the pressure on the terran to go bio and allows for a more late game oriented style.
Building vikings would still be worse than producing Goliaths, but Toss has to upgrade air separatly too.
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Vikings in ground mode should receive Terran vehicle upgrades instead of Terran air upgrades. That'd help, a tiny bit.
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This is a terrible thread, how on earth is it 9 pages? The thor is a unit with an AA attack that includes multiple attacks and a massive bonus against light units, of course its bad against armored anti-air. It doesn't receive its bonus, and each attack is penalized vs. armor. This is the exact same balance you see on the phoenix, which can't kill a corrupter to save its life - multiple attacks, no attack bonus.
The really bizarre thing is, thors are really good in the TvP matchup already - there are a couple different variations on timing pushes that revolve around the thor. In the lategame, if you want to kill carriers and voidrays and stuff, why are you looking at specialized tier 3 unit when your own analysis says your most basic, tier 1, bread-and-butter unit does it better? Or you could get reactored vikings, the best AA unit in the game. This isn't a complaint even about TvP balance (and we could all agree it could use a few tweaks here and there), its a complaint that the thor doesn't do what it isn't designed to do.
You complain that if you go head to head, vikings vs. carriers, you might lose the ground battle. What ground battle? Carriers in any number are extraordinarily expensive and time consuming (its faster to get a mothership than a carrier), which is going to come at the cost of the protoss ground army... and terran units are superior in small numbers battles against gateway units. Even then, you still have hightech options like yamato, EMP, HSM, that can really pulverize expensive units like carriers.... Or your own, self admitted stim marines which do significant AA damage with no overkill. The thor isn't your answer to carriers, no. Nor is it designed to be.
Now, if you wanted to make a more open thread regarding AI attack priorities, that I could get behind. Units with several hundred percent attack gains when shooting specific unit types.... probably should go find those units and plasterize them. Immortals should naturally want to shoot marauders over marines, thors should shoot ground targets instead of voidrays, etc. That is a worthy discussion, and I'm sure many people would argue that having non-braindead AI removes part of the starcraft allure. Either way, at least you have an argument - complaining that a unit amazing vs. everything on the ground, and that can obliterate light air units in the blink of the eye, is not also amazing vs. armored air units is not a terribly productive use of time.
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On November 19 2010 08:01 link0 wrote:
One carrier beats 3 vikings with +1. In larger battles the carriers win by an even bigger margin due to viking missile overkill.
1. Terran air armor upgrades are 50% more expensive than Protoss air attack upgrades. Terran needs dedicate an armory for air armor upgrades, but Protoss already has a idle cyber core for air attack upgrades.
2. You can never overbuild carriers since they are strong in all situations against any army composition. You can easily over/under build vikings.
What are you talking about? I seriously tested this yesterday. Sure if you are shooting the interceptors then yeah, carriers pwn, but you should be targeting the carrier itself. The only cost effective air unit against vikings are motherships and 1 or more carriers (motherships by themselves are not, but add in 1 carrier and they are because the carrier gets to do unlimited dmg while the mothership tanks, otherwise vikings are very cost effective against carriers.
Vikings counter carriers http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Viking
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As a Protoss player, I completely agree with the OP. Having a unit like the Thor prioritize armored air over ground targets is nothing short of retarded. Some may contradict by saying that it introduces an element of "micro" or whatever you want to call it into battles through target-fire requirement. To those I say to each their own - I would much rather spend my APM on more meaningful things than telling the pilot of a huge warmachine which targets his weapons actually do damage to AFTER EVERY KILL. So yeah - fix Thor AI plx.
The suggestion to increase Thor damage vs. all air I don't agree with - I understand the reasoning behind it, but I find that it would be much simpler and much less volatile from a balance perspective to just fix the AI; buffing the damage in this case is beating around the bush and not fixing the real problem.
And on topic of AI - I would LOVE for my Voidrays to not prioritize anti-air units. Blizzard may have tried to make the Voidray more viable as a component of a regular army composition with the changes they've made not long ago, but that goal would be much better served by making the AI prioritize armored over anti-air. I'd love to be able to use Voidrays in this way vs. Zerg, but it's a bit hard when they charge straight into the Hydras which are HIDING BEHIND the roaches that the Voidrays are supposed to be killing.
Reading through this thread is pretty depressing btw - so many people COMPLETELY missing the point in the OP is scary.
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Yeah a lot of these replies are depressing...
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On November 19 2010 08:23 RyN wrote:
As a Protoss player, I completely agree with the OP. Having a unit like the Thor prioritize armored air over ground targets is nothing short of retarded. Some may contradict by saying that it introduces an element of "micro" or whatever you want to call it into battles through target-fire requirement. To those I say to each their own - I would much rather spend my APM on more meaningful things than telling the pilot of a huge warmachine which targets his weapons actually do damage to AFTER EVERY KILL. So yeah - fix Thor AI plx.
The suggestion to increase Thor damage vs. all air I don't agree with - I understand the reasoning behind it, but I find that it would be much simpler and much less volatile from a balance perspective to just fix the AI; buffing the damage in this case is beating around the bush and not fixing the real problem.
And on topic of AI - I would LOVE for my Voidrays to not prioritize anti-air units. Blizzard may have tried to make the Voidray more viable as a component of a regular army composition with the changes they've made not long ago, but that goal would be much better served by making the AI prioritize armored over anti-air. I'd love to be able to use Voidrays in this way vs. Zerg, but it's a bit hard when they charge straight into the Hydras which are HIDING BEHIND the roaches that the Voidrays are supposed to be killing.
Reading through this thread is pretty depressing btw - so many people COMPLETELY missing the point in the OP is scary.
I think everyone is ignoring the point in the OP because there are a lot of situations like this. Why do my immortals target marines instead of marauders sometimes? Void rays? Targeting buildings over units? Yet marauders always effectively target zealots first, and hydras target ranged.
There are a lot of AI issues that could be fixed. One about the thor targeting air targets over ground is because they were meant to be an effective anti-air unit against mutalisks. The short is, if you don't like what your unit is shooting, use your micro to change it's target.
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On November 19 2010 08:27 Nadagast wrote:
Yeah a lot of these replies are depressing...
They need the Pro Strategy forum already. :[
Don't worry, what you said makes sense and its one of the problems that makes TvP stupid and boring to play.
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Nadagast (correct me if I'm wrong) tests a lot of this shit out with none other than PainUser. He (Pain) talks about some of these findings at length on the most recent State of the Game podcast.
So please, at least engage in civilized discussion here instead of mocking what you don't understand.
But you probably know better than PainUser right? -_-
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late-game Bio is still effective, you just need to adjust your micro once HT hit the battle field. I don't remember what replay I saw but it was TvP casted by husky on desert oasis. the toss went straight to HT and managed to skip colossus without getting punished. The terran was able to be extremely effective by keeping his bioball with his tanks and only taking a handful of units forward to bait storms and to bait units back to the range of his tanks and the rest of the bio ball. its just so incredibly powerful to NOT have your entire ball within storm but still have them in a good position to force combat against the inneffective t1 gateway units.
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On November 19 2010 08:38 IPA wrote:
Nadagast (correct me if I'm wrong) tests a lot of this shit out with none other than PainUser. He (Pain) talks about some of these findings at length on the most recent State of the Game podcast.
So please, at least engage in civilized discussion here instead of mocking what you don't understand.
But you probably know better than PainUser right? -_-
Only when he says that would rather have a DT than a Banshee...
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first your completely wrong.
thors weak AA against armoured units are not the reason that terran is restricted to bio and protoss is restricted to robo builds.
ther are two units in this matchup that pigeon holes both races into certain tech trees.
they are the banshee and the immortal.
the banshee is an insta win against any protoss that doesnt open with a robo. which is why protoss MUST open robo just because of the risk of cloacked banshees. this moves to the next problem of the matchup. because the banshee forces a robo, immortals are always available to be built.
and immortals are the reason you dont see huge tank lines like you did in BW, and with hellions not filling as many useful roles as the vulture did pure mech builds are just not that effective.
an immortal can tank 14 YES THATS FOURTEEN tanks shots whilst they are sieged. meaning well yeah that gives protosses army time to get into the tanks range completely nulifiing the advantage of siege tanks in the first place.
sure you could say that charge lots and what not also reduce te effectiveness of mech. but nothing more then the immortal can.
so essentially the banshee has pigeon holed the entire matchup.
threat of banshee=must open robo=mech openings dont work= bio play from terran = collosus into ht play from toss.=terran only staying in the late game if they drop enough=protoss winning late game unless terran does enough damage with drops.
if the clocked banshee didnt exist then we might see different openings from protoss, either stargate play or templar tech. meaning someone could then attempt to open mech abuse a timing where the toss hasnt gotten a robo straight away and potentially open up the matchup in alot of new different ways.
but blizzard instead of opening up new avenues is going to do the half assed job and just nerf whats currently being used.
so no OP thors weak antiarmoured AA goes with the unit. strong on ground, and able to beat mutas cost effectively. sorry but you cant have your super unit.
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Haven't read thread but putting armoured air targets lower on the priority list for thors solves OPs problem. No buff required, only tweak.
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On November 19 2010 08:31 Antisocialmunky wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 08:27 Nadagast wrote:
Yeah a lot of these replies are depressing... They need the Pro Strategy forum already. :[ Don't worry, what you said makes sense and its one of the problems that makes TvP stupid and boring to play.
WoW has a gated forum community ( www.arenajunkies.com ) where only Gladiators (top 0.5% maybe equivalent right now to roughly ~2.3k+ Diamond) can post. I think that'd be something nice to have for Starcraft. I don't mean to be an elitist but I really feel like any serious thread is ruined by a swarm of random people posting who really have no idea what they are talking about. Their only experience with high level play is spectating games on streams. They simply don't have the experience/game sense to post reasonable comments about balance (especially in situations like this which rarely, if ever, show up in a stream). Plus there are so many posts that are filled with anger because they think their race sucks.
ArenaJunkies isn't perfect, but it's way better than the WoW public forums. If people who aren't at the top tier of the community want to see balance discussed in a reasonable way by people of at least decent skill level, this is really the only option I think. Otherwise balance talk and strategy discussion will be limited mostly to private areas (skype, PMs, ventrilo, etc).
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If thor was good against armor as well, that would be the most OP unit in the game
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If he goes carriers, get BCs and 1-2 ghosts. EMP + Yamato will trivialize carriers. At that point you just reinforce with vikings. (Although frankly you can outmicro with vikings alone, but since you have such a viking aversion...)
You're trying to argue "buff thors" by using a flawed army comp as your basis.
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All races have poor ground to air. This is totally by design. If ground to air capabilities were easy to come by, air would serve no purpose other than harassment.
There's 5 parts to the air equation that all races have.
1: Air Superiority
2: Transport
3: Light Harass
4: Heavy Assault
5: Detection
1: Air superiority is covered by Mutalisks, Vikings and Phoenix. They are the fast, cheap, air to air units. Mutas are inherently weak so they can be backed up by corruptors in heavy air to air engagements, but typically don't need to be because they often have a large numbers advantage.
2: Transport is obvious, but if you are trying to transport when your opponent has air superiority there are serious issues risks involved.
3: Light Harass can be done by the air superiority units. It can also be done by the harass units (Mutas, void rays, banshees). Notice that muta is both air superiority and harass, that's because it's not particularly great at either job, but it's cheap and fast, and can be produced more easily than other races. Again, if you try to use your light harass units when your opponent has air control, you'll be a lot less effective. Light harass can be pretty easily dealt with by ground to air forces.
4: Heavy Assault is Battlecruisers, Carriers and Broodlords. If your opponent has air superiority, these are barely usable. When you have air superiority and use these units, they're very difficult to kill. However, they are also cost-inefficient and risky to get. They are very supply-efficient however. They're quite strong against ground to air units.
5: Mobile detection is all air, Ravens, Observervers and Overseers. Having air control (which allows you to safely have detection of your own for the observers) allows you to deny your opponents detection making your cloaked units more powerful if you're interested in that.
This whole ecosystem is reliant on the fact that things kind of suck for shooting up. I mean, battlecruisers are rarely used as it is, but in a TvT, the only thing that isn't completely horrible at killing a battlecruiser is a viking. I've won TvTs where the opponent has massively invested into tanks/thors/marines and won simply because I've had a couple of battlecruisers. Thors and marines both are severely impacted by the BC's base armor, and BC air to ground damage is quite high. But BCs need to have that air control in order to work, a few vikings would have completely ruined it. If my opponent cedes air control to me, that's easy enough to manage.
It would be the same against a protoss who goes carriers. Carriers have good armor, mitigate damage by drawing fire on their interceptors, but they kind of suck against a reasonable viking force. The same with brood lords.
The best ground to air each race has is in their standard "versatile" unit, and that's the marine, stalker, hydra. Stimmed Marines deal 10.5 dps/supply, but lose about 1.8 dps per armor of the target and are very fragile. Stalkers deal 4.86 dps/supply, and only lose only about 0.3 dps/supply per armor of the target and are quite sturdy. Hydralisks deal about 7.2 dps per supply, they lose about 0.6 dps/supply per armor of their target, and are more sturdy than stimmed marines, but less so than stalkers. In short, they all suck against reasonably armored air units with powerful ground attacks.
The exception is marines supported by medivacs, but then again, medivacs means you're investing in starport tech, and starport tech is what should deny heavy air units.
Thors should not get a powerful ground to air attack, no other ground units have a powerful ground to air attack.
If you want to defend against heavy air like carriers, you should either not let them get ahead to the point where they can get carriers without dying, or you should use the air control units like vikings to deal with them. Sure, the vikings aren't great after the carriers are gone, but you let him get carriers, so it's your own fault.
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On November 19 2010 08:45 Nadagast wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 08:31 Antisocialmunky wrote:On November 19 2010 08:27 Nadagast wrote:
Yeah a lot of these replies are depressing... They need the Pro Strategy forum already. :[ Don't worry, what you said makes sense and its one of the problems that makes TvP stupid and boring to play. WoW has a gated forum community ( www.arenajunkies.com ) where only Gladiators (top 0.5% maybe equivalent right now to roughly ~2.3k+ Diamond) can post. I think that'd be something nice to have for Starcraft. I don't mean to be an elitist but I really feel like any serious thread is ruined by a swarm of random people posting who really have no idea what they are talking about. Their only experience with high level play is spectating games on streams. They simply don't have the experience/game sense to post reasonable comments about balance (especially in situations like this which rarely, if ever, show up in a stream). Plus there are so many posts that are filled with anger because they think their race sucks. ArenaJunkies isn't perfect, but it's way better than the WoW public forums. If people who aren't at the top tier of the community want to see balance discussed in a reasonable way by people of at least decent skill level, this is really the only option I think. Otherwise balance talk and strategy discussion will be limited mostly to private areas (skype, PMs, ventrilo, etc). It's weird, the public is basically ruining their chance to see more of what high level players think by posting so ignorantly and violently.
I completely agree; I thought your OP was decent and could have stimulated some good discussion about late game mech and terran AA. Too bad every other post is more or less absolute shit.
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You do realize that thors do the most DPS in the game on the ground & benefit the most from upgrades( +3x2/upgrade), seriously, why not just be happy with that? I'd be happy with a unit that does 61DPS and a range of 7. that's more than colossi (single target of course) and ultralisk, which are dedicated to attacking ground units (since they can't lift their necks up)
marines and vikings should be flying with your thors and if they ever get to carriers (3+ bases) you will have thors also.
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On November 19 2010 08:45 Nadagast wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 08:31 Antisocialmunky wrote:On November 19 2010 08:27 Nadagast wrote:
Yeah a lot of these replies are depressing... They need the Pro Strategy forum already. :[ Don't worry, what you said makes sense and its one of the problems that makes TvP stupid and boring to play. WoW has a gated forum community ( www.arenajunkies.com ) where only Gladiators (top 0.5% maybe equivalent right now to roughly ~2.3k+ Diamond) can post. I think that'd be something nice to have for Starcraft. I don't mean to be an elitist but I really feel like any serious thread is ruined by a swarm of random people posting who really have no idea what they are talking about. Their only experience with high level play is spectating games on streams. They simply don't have the experience/game sense to post reasonable comments about balance (especially in situations like this which rarely, if ever, show up in a stream). Plus there are so many posts that are filled with anger because they think their race sucks. ArenaJunkies isn't perfect, but it's way better than the WoW public forums. If people who aren't at the top tier of the community want to see balance discussed in a reasonable way by people of at least decent skill level, this is really the only option I think. Otherwise balance talk and strategy discussion will be limited mostly to private areas (skype, PMs, ventrilo, etc). It's weird, the public is basically ruining their chance to see more of what high level players think by posting so ignorantly and violently.
Granted. I personally accept what you say to be good and true. But can't you see how your suggestion at least sounds like one that would make Thor would be OP? I'm not sure you've given sufficient reason as to why that wouldn't be the case, and you also haven't suggested any effects it might have in the other matchups. Remember, Thors are often a pretty integral unit against Zerg and Terran. I think having a unit perform really well in all matchup's is rare because, well, it's hard to balance.
Also, whilst a large part of your concern stems from the matchup not being interesting or dynamic enough, people still value balance over that, and I think rightly so...to a degree.
Either way, if any concensus is reached that something does have to be changed, the point of contention will lie here:
Change Thor anti-air damage to be 12x4, or 24x2 instead of 6+6lightx4.
Change Thors to automatically target ground units over armored air units and Interceptors.
This is what I imagine most people are flipping out about.
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This issue isn't buffing Thors, the issue is making TvP 200% less boring because T's GtA is unreliable, its AtA eats away too much ground army, and the Thor AI is retarded...
That's the thing people miss.
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Really I don't think there needs to be a change at all. Due to the fact that interceptorts no longer auto-repair properly (compared to BW anyways) stilled marines and thor aa would easily rape interceptors much faster than the protoss can rebuild them. Thor aa has bonus to light, which interceptors are, so they do a very good job at killing them.
TLDR: instead of focus firing the carriers themselves, just atim the marines and let the thors and marines shred the interceptors -.-
Edit: If I'm missing something here please feel free to correct me. It's just that the general consensus as to why carriers really aren't seen so often is the fact that they're not only expensive and take forever to get, interceptors fragility also gimped carrier viability.
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On November 19 2010 09:19 Antisocialmunky wrote:
This issue isn't buffing Thors, the issue is making TvP 200% less boring because T's GtA is unreliable, its AtA eats away too much ground army, and the Thor AI is retarded...
That's the thing people miss.
And the issue that I think we can deduce all the flaming bronze level noobs are having is that the current suggestions for making Tvp 200% less boring basically look like big fat buffs.
See how it's all inter-linked?
I for one have no idea whether the current suggestions would be imbalanced. I don't think you do either. I don't think nadagast does. The only way you can really know is to implement it and test it out.
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On November 19 2010 08:57 space_yes wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 08:45 Nadagast wrote:On November 19 2010 08:31 Antisocialmunky wrote:On November 19 2010 08:27 Nadagast wrote:
Yeah a lot of these replies are depressing... They need the Pro Strategy forum already. :[ Don't worry, what you said makes sense and its one of the problems that makes TvP stupid and boring to play. WoW has a gated forum community ( www.arenajunkies.com ) where only Gladiators (top 0.5% maybe equivalent right now to roughly ~2.3k+ Diamond) can post. I think that'd be something nice to have for Starcraft. I don't mean to be an elitist but I really feel like any serious thread is ruined by a swarm of random people posting who really have no idea what they are talking about. Their only experience with high level play is spectating games on streams. They simply don't have the experience/game sense to post reasonable comments about balance (especially in situations like this which rarely, if ever, show up in a stream). Plus there are so many posts that are filled with anger because they think their race sucks. ArenaJunkies isn't perfect, but it's way better than the WoW public forums. If people who aren't at the top tier of the community want to see balance discussed in a reasonable way by people of at least decent skill level, this is really the only option I think. Otherwise balance talk and strategy discussion will be limited mostly to private areas (skype, PMs, ventrilo, etc). It's weird, the public is basically ruining their chance to see more of what high level players think by posting so ignorantly and violently. I completely agree; I thought your OP was decent and could have stimulated some good discussion about late game mech and terran AA. Too bad every other post is more or less absolute shit.
I second that. Meh... people want to talk not to listen, what else is new?
I am all for the elitist discussion because TBH, i do not give a flying duck about what a bronze-mid diamond player thinks about balance. Not because they should not have the right to speak, but because they have so much to learn that 99% of what they think they know is wrong. It is so much easier to say "imba"/be arrogant/aggressive/disrespectful then to ask for help.
I am a big fan of Mech play and really want it to be viable in all MUs (in different ways). To me, the Thor is the worst unit in the late mech army specifically because of its AA function. Between magic box mutas and low vs armored dmg, you just can not relay on it.
I'll say it again, the mech nerf is what ducked Terran's late game in both TvP and TvZ. You need a lot more Tanks then you did before, drastically reducing your AA capabilities to the point where the stile became unviable.
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On November 19 2010 08:49 Craton wrote:
If he goes carriers, get BCs and 1-2 ghosts. EMP + Yamato will trivialize carriers. At that point you just reinforce with vikings. (Although frankly you can outmicro with vikings alone, but since you have such a viking aversion...)
You're trying to argue "buff thors" by using a flawed army comp as your basis.
The level of understanding evident in replies such as this is so aggravating.
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i agree that the ai for thors is bad, if there is an interceptor and a stalker it will attack the interceptor ^^ but i dont think that if u change the thor ai for the better it will change how tvp is played and even now a good player like painuser transitions from his 2/3 rax bio into a more mech based game (mlg game on kulas vs nony for example).
I think bio is too strong and cost effective early to midgame compared to other options and that is the reason most tvp games are rather dull.
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On November 19 2010 10:09 {ToT}ColmA wrote: I think bio is too strong and cost effective early to midgame compared to other options and that is the reason most tvp games are rather dull.
This is obviously correct, but there's really no other way to play the match-up, either. You just can not beat an equally skilled protoss player without going bio -> vikings/ghosts. It's not that terran players are lazy and don't want do do anything other than bio, it's that everything else is literally pure shit. Try playing a really good protoss player without doing some boring, bland, predictable bio build, and he will come at you from so many angles you'll want to claw your eyes out. It's just fucked.
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On November 19 2010 08:49 Craton wrote:
If he goes carriers, get BCs and 1-2 ghosts. EMP + Yamato will trivialize carriers. At that point you just reinforce with vikings. (Although frankly you can outmicro with vikings alone, but since you have such a viking aversion...)
You're trying to argue "buff thors" by using a flawed army comp as your basis.
I agree with a previous poster...replies like this are why we can't have nice things.
I think if your refutation to a strategy involves 2 ghosts and yamato cannon, you shouldn't be posting in the strategy forum,
A simple easy solution would just be to add a "1800+ Diamond" forum which enforces that you need to be 1800 or higher diamond to post. You don't even need to put on a hard restriction, saying it is enough to cut down on 90% of the bronze posts.
As far as the OP goes... buffing and already top-of-the-line beastly unit is not the way to go about opening up room for creativity. If Thors beat everything else dollar for dollar, every game would be Thors. If that's what you want your games to look like, a couple of units that are the best at everything and are spammed every game, there's a game called Command and Conquer.
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My girlfriend got me "Madlibs: Starcraft 2" the book today! I think the OP skipped ahead to page 15, because I hadn't seen this yet, but now I wanna try filling it out.
Lemme try:
On November 18 2010 19:33 Some random l2p Zerg wrote:
Now I know what you're saying: Get Viking Corrupters to kill Armored air units Colossus. But the problem is that Vikings suck on the ground Corrupters can't attack ground. The problem is that getting armored air units Colossus is almost always a win for the Protoss in TvP ZvP. This is only masked by the fact that most TvPs ZvPs are over fairly quickly and don't ever get past 2-3 base for the P, because almost all Terrans Zergs use bio Muta/ling. There are three ways getting Viking Corrupters to counter Carriers Colossus can go:
1. The best case scenario is that you make just enough to kill his Carriers Colossus then hope you win the ground battle. Terran Zerg maybe comes out slightly ahead in this case. But it's very difficult to hit the exact right amount of Viking Corrupters.
2. If you lose the air battle and he has carriers Colossus left over you lose the battle. Nothing else you have that shoots up attacks ground (Marines Roaches and Thors Hydralisks) are good vs Carriers Colossus with support.
3. If you win the air battle with too many viking Corrupters left over, you'll lose the ground fight. Viking Corrupters that are 0/0 and on the can't attack ground are pretty terrible.
Also they are on an entirely separate upgrade table so you're at 0/0 when they already have some upgrades.
If Thors Hydralisks were changed so that Terran Zerg had a viable counter to armored air Colossus other than Viking/Marines Muta/ling, I believe we would see playstyles other than bio open up Muta/ling fest.
But seriously, how is this situation any different than Zerg being forced to get corrupter's to counter colossus? If you don't do it exactly right, you're in this exact same situation.
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Thors A.I can be improved when chargelots stop running circles around the thor and ring of scvs so fast it will make your fucking head spin.
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Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your suggestion. You are saying that a a thor, which shoots once every 3 in game seconds, should deal 50 or 52 damage per shot to a voidray with +1 weapons, which has 250 HP, and therefore takes 15 seconds to kill.
The voidray, which costs only 50/50 less than the thor, takes the same amount of time to build, and which even when charged does 15 damage or 17 with +1 attack every .6 seconds, to a thor that has 400 HP, and takes 16 seconds to kill with no upgrade, and 14 seconds to kill with +1. If the thor has +1 armor, it actually survives for a full 15 seconds and will always get the 1st shot because it has longer range.
I'm sorry but that just doesn't seem reasonable to me. Voidrays are meant to be the most effective way for Protoss players to deal with single powerful targets. Perhaps there could be some sort of tweeking with thors, but giving them the full +6 bonus to armored is far too powerful.
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unless you manually target Thors on ground units, they spend the entire fight shooting Interceptors and Carriers.
Signed. Terran should be able to A+MOVE and win.
User was temp banned for this post.
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On November 19 2010 12:24 RexFTW wrote:Show nested quote +unless you manually target Thors on ground units, they spend the entire fight shooting Interceptors and Carriers. Signed. Terran should be able to A+MOVE and win.
LOL, i cant agree more with you
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Couple of quality posts above this one. You guys should be proud of yourselves.
Brainpower:
With my suggestion of 12x4 or 24x2, a Thor would do 48 damage every 3 seconds or 16 DPS to a Void Ray. A charged Void Ray would do 15 damage every .6 seconds or 25 DPS to a Thor. It would take 16 seconds for the VR to kill the Thor and 15.6 seconds for the Thor to kill a Void Ray.
Void Rays are less expensive than Thors and far more mobile. Stargates are cheaper than a Tech Lab + Factory. I don't see this as too terrible. Void Rays would still be extremely powerful vs Thors, especially with any ground support whatsoever. It would merely make it so that it's not so incredibly one sided. Generally if air units fight ground units that can shoot up in a straight up battle, they lose cost for cost. It has to be this way otherwise air units become extraordinarily powerful. If they can cost effectively trade/beat ground units then flying around harassing and picking off small clumps of units becomes too strong.
If it turns out that 24x2 or 12x4 is too powerful, then change Thors to (10+2Light)x4 or (20+4Light)x2.
It is the ridiculous level of damage reduction that Thors take when shooting armored air that I want to negate somewhat. Especially since they automatically target air.
Going from ~50 DPS shooting ground to ~5 DPS shooting armored air is not acceptable while Thors prioritize armored air. The Thor pilot shouldn't be so stupid as to intentionally target things he does 90% less damage on
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On November 19 2010 12:38 Nadagast wrote:Going from ~50 DPS shooting ground to ~5 DPS shooting armored air is not acceptable while Thors prioritize armored air. The Thor pilot shouldn't be so stupid as to intentionally target things he does 90% less damage on
if you're going to argue for this, you really need to argue that each unit should automatically target whatever unit it can do the most damage to, not just Thors. So Immortals will auto target Marauders, and banelings should neatly dodge any tanks and roll themselves into the nearest marine ball without help.
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On November 18 2010 23:11 Krejven wrote:I wonder how it would be if Thors 250mm cannon could target air. mmmmm
250mm cannon should be changed to target massive air. After all, they (Carriers/BCs/Broodlord) are themselves, the size of buildings.
If IRL, a 19th century tank can shoot down a blimp (WWI), a 25th century 50ft tall mech shouldn't have a problem, no?
Edit: Read through the entire thread.
Bonus vs X unit AI should be fixed ASAP
*Thor pilots should be choosing those roaches burning off their marine friend's faces than the Corrupter standing around doing its thing.
*Immortal pilots should be bashing in the Ultralisk's face that's slicing his poor zealot friends than the lings munching on their butt.
*sadly zerg players don't really have this problem, aside from banelings. :-(
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Probably the only thread in TL that says Thors and Vikings are underpowered.
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On November 19 2010 13:20 Paradice wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 12:38 Nadagast wrote:Going from ~50 DPS shooting ground to ~5 DPS shooting armored air is not acceptable while Thors prioritize armored air. The Thor pilot shouldn't be so stupid as to intentionally target things he does 90% less damage on if you're going to argue for this, you really need to argue that each unit should automatically target whatever unit it can do the most damage to, not just Thors. So Immortals will auto target Marauders, and banelings should neatly dodge any tanks and roll themselves into the nearest marine ball without help.
And to add to that, you'd have to make a priority list, because it can't just be air vs ground, (otherwise the thor would target zerglings over mutas and Z could exploit the AI there) it would have to be split between armored air, light air, armored ground, light ground. Would you want the thor to rank it 1) light air, 2) armored ground, 3) armored air, 4) light ground? This would mean a single void ray would get attack priority over zealots. Or would you switch armored air and light ground, which would mean broodlings get priority over the broodlords? There's no easy answer. In fact, some units don't do damage based on armored or light. What about the archon? Shouldn't the archon then prioritize marines over hellions because marines are bio, even though they're both light?
You would have to create a unique attack priority list for every single unit, but then people could exploit the AI, baiting it to attack the wrong thing.
...Or you could just make some fucking marines/vikings and kill the carrier.
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I don't understand how you can QQ about Vikings sucking on the ground.
They're a ridiculously good AA unit with NINE RANGE and addition to that, they can land on the ground.
Zerg has corruptors, and ALL they do is attack air.
It seems like you just want to be able to build 1 unit to deal with everything, which is pretty ridiculous. If someone is going Carriers, AND a big ground force, then your macro at that stage, if equal to theirs, should allow you to create Vikings and a significant ground army.
This post seems pretty ridiculous, its like you want Thors to be awesome against everything.
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The changes I proposed wouldn't make Thors 'awesome' at killing armored air. They would simply be better than the horrible piece of garbage they are now at killing armored air.
I don't think many of you realize just how bad Thors are vs armored air...
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I think the answer is nerf marines
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The thing is I dont think thor is suppose to be killing armored air. Will you be happier if they remove it completely?
If you want an awesome ground force killing machine you will have to build anti-air to supplement it. If I build collosus I will need stalker and phoenix to defend it.
I think I will start requesting collosus to be able to shoot lasers into the sky now. pewpewpew all die
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On November 19 2010 14:10 Zaurus wrote:
The thing is I dont think thor is suppose to be killing armored air. Will you be happier if they remove it completely?
I would actually be happier if Thors just couldn't shoot armored air/interceptors at all, yes.
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anw, u should not complain, i have been shift clicking scv hidden under the big thor with my zealot w scv repairing. I also have to micro my collosus back. Forcefield, guardian shield and maybe storm. Forcefire marauder using stalker, and then click my pylon and warp in units. I think a little micro is needed in battle
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Wow Nadagast, so many silly trolls in here, its nice that you can keep your cool. Some idiot whining that its impossible to go carriers because vikings are so good, and he doesn't even know how much a carrier costs LOL. Here's the thing guys, Nadagast is right, he is a very smart player maybe a bit unknown, but he has tested out mech / thor based armies a lot and he knows what he is talking about. You guys are saying " OH JUST GO BIO, MARINES ARE SO GOOD LOLOLOL " and well, you are idiots and you are wrong. The problem with TvP is that once the protoss get on 3 base bio is just not cost-effective agaisnt the protoss death ball and you will lose if you go bio. Thors are a really good lategame switch and I believe that they are also viable to build in the early-midgame and do really well agaisnt protoss if you use them correctly. However, once the protoss gets 2 carriers out, you instantly lose the game, the only counter to carriers is to have 3-3 marines ready and waiting. Vikings are not a counter to carriers and thors are just disgustingly bad agaisnt carriers, and even having 1 carrier in your army will destroy the thor's AI so badly that if you have 10 thors in your army they will all shoot at the 1 carrier while they get rolled over on the ground. It would be really nice for blizzard to fix this in some way, I don't know if they can change thors to be more effective vs protoss without making them too strong in TvZ.
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On November 19 2010 14:00 Nadagast wrote:
The changes I proposed wouldn't make Thors 'awesome' at killing armored air. They would simply be better than the horrible piece of garbage they are now at killing armored air.
I don't think many of you realize just how bad Thors are vs armored air...
Tanks are even worse versus armored air. What's your point? Why SHOULD thors be good against armored air? Their role is specifically to 1) kill everything on the ground, and 2) completely shut down mutas and phoenixes. So when you see armored air, your response is to build marines/vikings, not to expect thors to be able to deal with them.
I'm trying not to be rude here, but are you even listening to yourself? There are eleven pages of people saying the same thing. Are you really Nadagast? I always defend WOW arenas on TL, but this arena imba whining attitude does not belong in the Starcraft community.
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Does the OP actually think that Thor's anti-air capabilities are crippling the creativity of TvP? Because that is ridiculous. Terran is by far the most creative race because you have so many options.
And let us not forget that Thors have anti-air splash, which works well against interceptors and multiple Voids. Mass Thors beats mass voids because of splash.
Stupid Terrans need to realize that the only anti-air ground unit Protoss has are Stalkers. Stop complaining and learn to deal with your situation instead of calling TvP "uncreative" because Thors need a buff.
Worried about which units your Thors target? Micro.
I almost find this thread offending as a Protoss player.
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On November 19 2010 13:20 Paradice wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 12:38 Nadagast wrote:Going from ~50 DPS shooting ground to ~5 DPS shooting armored air is not acceptable while Thors prioritize armored air. The Thor pilot shouldn't be so stupid as to intentionally target things he does 90% less damage on if you're going to argue for this, you really need to argue that each unit should automatically target whatever unit it can do the most damage to, not just Thors. So Immortals will auto target Marauders, and banelings should neatly dodge any tanks and roll themselves into the nearest marine ball without help.
thats just stupid, thors are so complete garbage agaisnt armored air, the protoss shouldn't have to just make 1 carrier and abuse the AI for a freewin vs 15 thors because his ground army will now not take ANY damage
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On November 19 2010 14:20 lao wrote:Show nested quote +On November 19 2010 14:00 Nadagast wrote:
The changes I proposed wouldn't make Thors 'awesome' at killing armored air. They would simply be better than the horrible piece of garbage they are now at killing armored air.
I don't think many of you realize just how bad Thors are vs armored air... Tanks are even worse versus armored air. What's your point? Why SHOULD thors be good against armored air? Their role is specifically to 1) kill everything on the ground, and 2) completely shut down mutas and phoenixes. So when you see armored air, your response is to build marines/vikings, not to expect thors to be able to deal with them. I'm trying not to be rude here, but are you even listening to yourself? There are eleven pages of people saying the same thing. Are you really Nadagast? I always defend WOW arenas on TL, but this arena imba whining attitude does not belong in the Starcraft community.
If you followed WoW arenas at all, you'd know I'm not the type to complain imba. I played one of the worst comps in the game (WLD) at tournaments and didn't really complain about it.
The problem is that Thors cannot accomplish role 1 (kill everything on the ground) if there are armored air units out. It takes far more micro to have all your Thors individually targeting separate Stalkers/Zealots than it does to control a Baneling pack or a few Immortals to focus tanks/ultras.
I think the problem in this thread is that people don't understand that magnitudes exist. Just because it's qualitatively similar to force my Thors to attack ground as it is for you to target fire with Immortals or control a Baneling pack, does not make them equivalent. One is much more difficult to do.
Just because Thors doing less damage to armored air than ground is qualitatively similar to Banelings doing less damage to armored and Immortals doing less damage to Light, does not make them equivalent. One is far more devastating to the damage a unit puts out.
Here's a simple way of putting the problem:
A Carrier or two is essentially dark swarm/PDD for your entire army from Thor damage. Yes it's partially negate-able (with emphasis on the word partially) with micro but it is extremely powerful for the cost. It has far more 'charges' than a PDD and a larger radius, and it's passive, you don't have to cast anything.
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On November 19 2010 14:29 Barca wrote:
Does the OP actually think that Thor's anti-air capabilities are crippling the creativity of TvP? Because that is ridiculous. Terran is by far the most creative race because you have so many options.
And let us not forget that Thors have anti-air splash, which works well against interceptors and multiple Voids. Mass Thors beats mass voids because of splash.
Stupid Terrans need to realize that the only anti-air ground unit Protoss has are Stalkers. Stop complaining and learn to deal with your situation instead of calling TvP "uncreative" because Thors need a buff.
Worried about which units your Thors target? Micro.
I almost find this thread offending as a Protoss player.
yes you are right that mass thors can beat mass voidray because of splash, but voidrays can be spread out or "magic boxed" lol and also they are much faster, and they fly, and they are cheaper than thors.
I think you guys are a bit confused, Nadagast is trying to find a way to make mech viable vs Protoss, which right now it is not at all because of voidrays and carriers.
Also you idiots are not even reading and going " JUST MAKE BIO " are stupid, because bio is not viable in the LATE game ( WE ARE TALKING ABOUT THE LATE GAME NOT THE EARLY GAME ) and right now, neither is mech. Right now it is REALLY REALLY hard to win vs a good protoss in the late game, and if you do not agree with me then try playing vs kiwikaki huk or socke and you will see its freaking impossible
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Osaka27128 Posts
This thread isn't producing anything but bans. If you want to continue it, synthesize the main arguments and repost it.
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EPT
