Patch 1.4 PTR Notes (updated 9/8) - Page 361

Sometimes I feel like while Blizzard has good intentions, they go about fixing certain issues in the most backwards and illogical way possible.

Let's examine briefly why PvZ is zerg favored at the moment:

-The queen mechanic allows zerg players to create/recreate drones much faster than protoss players can make probes. Due to this, protoss players are forced to be aggressive at all times to force units to be made instead of drones, or adapt a turlte-until-200-food-deathball strategy to rampage around and kill expansions. Neither option is ideal for a strategy game like starcraft. Being forced to be aggressive at all times to stay even in a game isn't realistic when obviously timings shift back and forth for who has the army advantage (and you don't want to be engaging at a disadvantage). Turtling until you get a 200/200 deathball does in some ways remind me of brood war TvP, but the way the siege tank works allowed terran players to at least defend multiple locations efficiently with just a couple units (the protoss equivalent back in bw was reavers.... too bad 1 colossus can't defend a base with cannons like a reaver could), and thus terrans could take expansions safely, whereas in sc2 if you try to turtle off 2 base to 200/200 it's going to be hard to go secure expansions and defend against counter-attacks because your army is useless when not all together in a deathball. This is a problem in the design of protoss units essentially.

-The infestor severely limits what options protosses have available. You should never be getting more than ~5 phoenixes because 1 single spell cast from out of your sight range so you can't even see it coming is enough to trap your entire air army of phoenixes (when running around trying to harass) and end the game for you. Protoss is already severely limited on the harass front. Really the only options are phoenixes (countered by infestors), dark templar (countered by infestors), storm drops (countered by infestors), and any other drops (which are all countered by infestors). So while it seems the only way for protoss to get an edge is to harass a zerg, literally every single harassment option is countered by infestors. This is clearly a problem... But here's why I don't understand Blizzard's logic. The reason infestors counter all of these options is the 100% root/snare on units, not the damage, or neural (obviously). Yet they nerf the damage and don't touch the root of fungal... Think about how much of a difference it would make if perhaps fungal slowed by 90% (like an ensnare) instead of completely rooting in place even when units are stacked on top of each other. In a game like SC2 where units stack up for many reasons, having spells that keep them glitchily stacked is not a good idea.

-Protoss players have a tough time scouting zergs. This is a problem that has dated back to the start of SC2, where they changed the zergling to be slightly faster than workers even when off creep and without the speed upgrade. This has never made any sense to me at all. What kept PvZ balanced in BW was that you could keep your probe alive for a very long time to actually see what a zerg is doing and prepare accordingly. Even though now zergs have creep to speed up their units even without the ling speed upgrade, Blizzard decided to just speed up zerglings in general anyways. What gives? If they changed this so lings are the same speed as probes off creep I honestly feel PvZ would improve a drastic amount. Forcing a protoss to either rush to robo tech or pump out 8+ sentries and halluc just to get scouting information (which you don't get in time for many all-ins) in the early game is silly and there's no reason for it.

-Securing/defending expansions is difficult in PvZ. This is mostly due to the fact that the zerg army is so much more mobile than the protoss army in most cases (unless it's like mass hydra vs mass blink stalker). This isn't such a big deal at the moment and can be fixed by things like wallins, but infested terrans from infestors cause huge problems as even if your entire army is in place you're still going to lose a lot when a bunch of infestors spam a shitton of ITs. And yet despite how stupid it is that you can lose an expansion with like 8 cannons to a couple infestors throwing down some energy, blizz isn't nerfing IT at all and is instead nerfing the damage on fungal and what units neural can target.

-Maps are often "zerg favored" in that the 3rd base is hard to secure and defend without a mobile army, and main attack paths/centers of maps are generally very wide open, preventing effective force field usage. Large, wide-open chokes at natural expansions also cause a lot of trouble for protosses taking a fast first expansion. Yet blizzard keeps making these trash maps, forcing them upon us on ladder, saying they do this because they want tournament/ladder map pools to be separate, and then using those outdated, terrible ladder maps for their own gigantic tournament (blizzcon). Not only does this make no sense, it's alarmingly hypocritical.

While in the long run limiting neural usage will help as carriers and motherships won't be 100% useless anymore (worse than useless since they'd always be fighting against you), it's going to cause major problems shifting the metagame back allowing terribad protosses that just mass up colossi and attack move to win against better zergs. I don't think this is the style anyone wants to watch in pro-games. People like to see dynamic, shifting games. Not a game where one person sits in their base doing nothing all game until they have a big enough army, then they attack move with no micro and the zerg loses and the game's over. This is as boring as a game of SC2 can essentially possibly be.

What I'd like to see but will probably never happen:

-Zergling speed (without upgrade and off creep) decreased slightly to be even with workers. (been hoping for this since day 1 of beta, guess it'll never happen and well keep coin-flipping in sc2 for a while until the expansions change some shit)
-Fungal root changed to a 90% decrease in speed (still prevents abilities like blink from being used, etc)
-Fungal damage removed (aka with these two changes replace fungal with ensnare), given instead to another caster with the expansion, or perhaps a similar damage spell would replace infested terrans? Not sure
-Infested Terran lifespan increased by 1.5x, dps decreased by 35%
-Colossus attack speed lowered by 50%, movement speed decreased by 30%, cliff-walk removed, damage increased enough so that 1 colossus will 1shot probes but attack extremely slowly (this will nerf colossi quite a bit, but at least allow them to 1-shot workers so you can do col drops in warp prisms similar to reaver drops in bw)

There are plenty more changes I'd do but those are the most important ones for PvZ. Who knows how well it would actually work, but I think it's pretty clear whatever blizzard is doing now isn't working