Patch 1.4 PTR Notes (updated 9/8) - Page 323

On September 10 2011 01:14 Sea_Food wrote:


Well ravens can fly, move faster, detect and they have PDD. Also they have more health. Imo after the patch ravens will be a harder to produce, more versatile version of high templar.

On September 10 2011 01:03 jdsowa wrote:
If this goes live as it is, nobody will ever use NP. Why build an infestor, get the upgrade, and waste the energy NPing a T2 unit like a stalker when I could've just built my own roach or hydra instead? But this could be OK if they:

1) removed the neural upgrade and made it standard out of the gate
2) allowed you to neural while burrowed
3) removed the 15 second time limit and made it permanent

This would encourage players to try out more cute and pesky plays. For example:

1) easier to sneak around and NP opponent's harvesters to build structures
2) could burrow and NP opponent's army while they're standing around and force them to snipe their own unit if they don't have detection
3) threat of having a burrowed infestor NP your dropship before it unloads

On September 10 2011 01:17 Oktyabr wrote:
It affects PvZ more than TvZ IMO. Terran was always able to use siege tanks to hit the infestors who are chanelling the command, whereas Protoss players have to sacrifice blink stalks if they want to deal with stolen archons.

On September 10 2011 01:21 Shade_CsT wrote:
We need a Situation Report from David Kim for clarification on patch 1.4 changes !

Who agrees with me ?

I made a request on EU PTR forum here : http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/2624976746

I recommend North American players to do the same on US PTR Forum.

On September 10 2011 01:14 Lonyo wrote:

Agreed, infestors have become the go-to unit and are pretty much broken, but they need to fix the rest of zerg like you say if they are going to heavily nerf infestors.
Terran and protoss have ways to deal with infestor NP (EMP eliminates the ability to NP, and feedback kills the infestor if it has enough energy for NP).
It's just going to put zerg back to almost where they were before infestors became useful, since there are no core changes elsewhere, which is pretty stupid.

On September 10 2011 01:22 QTIP. wrote:
They aren't finalized yet. Some of them are probably experiments by Blizzard - I don't think they have any concrete explanations that they can present to the player base quite yet.

On September 10 2011 01:16 rdj107 wrote:
Ignoring the impulse rage at this, it does make sense. The ability to effectively take high cost units and make them your own mid battle is game breaking no matter how effective it is. My concern is that while yes, p and t can once again make those units without the crippling fear of having it flipped against them, zerg still doesn't have a truly effective way of taking down a high tier army with vastly out of proportion resource costs.

Specifically I'm talking about carriers/motherships and battlecruisers (bear with me). The massive ground units are an issue on their own, but their are units that work against them so I'll leave them out of this post.

Currently zerg has a total of 5 units that can hit air; spores, queens, mutas, hydras, and corrupters. Spores and queens have obvious practicality issues so I'll ignore those:

Mutas are a harass unit and a good one, but do not trade evenly with any unit that can hit them except stalkers/voids (?); this includes vikings and phoenixes, which honestly aren't that hard to get out along the techpaths of the high tier units mentioned. Due to this in a standard mix mutas are not a solution, as to have mutas be effective you need to invest in a lot of them which is going to cripple your ground army strength; this would only get worse if you tried infestor/muta/x due to high gas and (depending on x) supply cost.

Hydras are the most viable solution to air heavy late game comps, but results have already shown that hydra heavy mixes are fragile at best and hard countered at worse. And it does need to be a heavy mix to guarantee that the hydras do anything at all; a light smattering of them honestly isn't going to do anything unless the air units specifically don't focus them.

Finally corrupters...suck, which given that they are supposed to be what takes down the high tech air units is an issue. Very literally they suck huge amounts of supply for what they do, and are brought down by pretty much everything they aren't specifically supposed to counter. Voidrays, vikings, any air to ground, and indirectly even phoenixes work fine for just soaking shots while they slowly whittle down the corrupters trying to hunt down carriers that can retreat to extreme distances while still having interceptors fight. Also keep in mind that against battlecruisers, there's the danger of yamato instantly tipping the scales on corrupters trading cost effectively if the bc numbers are not constantly kept in line.

Beyond unit specific issues, they all have the common weakness of needing to be in very large numbers in order to have any sort of effect. When people bring up having a proper unit composition that just isn't the way zerg works. Its strength is pumping out massed pure unit armies for the situation and when you keep units in reserve to develop a proper composition this strength falters or outright disappears. For how ineffective all of these units are making them in advance isn't feasible.

Tl;dr: Neural parasite on certain units was gamebreaking, but without the threat of it against high tier air tech there will be little reason not to make them late game, bringing the issues zergs have dealing with air units into play harder than ever.

On September 10 2011 01:22 RedDragon571 wrote:
No more np for mothership.... thats going to be retarded

On September 10 2011 01:20 roemy wrote:
i'm only willing to forfeit NP vs massive units if it becomes an AoE spell -.-
that, at least, would justify the suicidal amount of energy required for it (see feedback) while being of temporary nature(!). if we can only grab small units, it better be more than one per cast.