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Lately there has been a lot of criticism over the fact that certain aspects of SC2 can be frustrating in terms of quickly receiving large amounts of damage without an opportunity to counter. In particular the Widow Mine and Oracle have entered into the community cross-hairs as examples of the most annoying things to deal with.
While I personally don't mind Oracles much because you can prepare a passive defense that more or less protects your workers (Marines + turrets, Queens and spore, etc), I do have to concede that widow mines are a bigger challenge especially for Protoss. Protoss players can be aware of the fact that widow mine drops are coming and still have a very difficult time executing the defense.
Suggestion
Increase the time it takes for a widow mine to fire and make an upgrade that returns it to the hots timing.
You could even have the timing be part of the drilling claws upgrade.
Widow mines now have the tracker graphic to indicate their target, but being fast enough to take advantage of this is unrealistic for the majority of players in my opinion. If it took a little longer for the mine to fire then you could run all your workers at the last second and still have an opportunity to do a decent split.
Having the faster shot be on an upgrade would help buff the mine for later game while giving people breathing room in the early game.
I also think you can play with some of the other stats to buff the mine in other ways. Maybe if it took longer to fire at its target, then it would be OK to reduce the overall cooldown. This would make mines more of a constant threat during battles, but easier to counter from moment to moment. That way you have a more fair engagement in a situation such as MMM vs Ling/Bane/Muta, and it would also give the mine more presence during the entire battle instead of only mattering during the first shot and then getting killed afterwards.
Anyways, it would be nice to see this particular unit addressed in some way in Legacy of the Void. The problem isn't necessarily that a lot of workers can die quickly. This happens in other ways as well, such as storm drops, but rather that it can happen very early in the game and for a small investment.
What does TL think?
tl;dr
Increase the time between lock on and firing for widow mines. Have it be an upgrade to return to the original timing.
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Any nerf to this unit whatsoever is a positive step for starcraft 2
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I find the best way to tone down the Widow Mine is for opponents to just not suck as much.
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No, the damage just needs to be tweaked so as to not 1-shot workers. Everything else is fine. Not necessarily ideal, but fine. The +shield damage will have to be removed from the splash component and damage needs to be lowered to 35 or 30.
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On September 24 2015 05:35 Pontius Pirate wrote:
No, the damage just needs to be tweaked so as to not 1-shot workers. Everything else is fine. Not necessarily ideal, but fine. The +shield damage will have to be removed from the splash component and damage needs to be lowered to 35 or 30.
Wouldn't that eliminate the usage of widow mines to counter zealots and archon? Seems like a massive nerf to remove the shield damage. I'd prefer seeing there be an unlisted exception for probes, even though that's not Blizzard style.
Regardless, if WM doesn't 1-shot workers, then I am pretty sure that nobody would ever do widow mine drops.
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My problem with widowmines is that they're invisible until your units are being targeted. Can't engange effectively when i don't know how many and where they are. And don't even come with that "they make a black dot" bullshit.
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Just make it so that they can only hit shit that is in their range as opposed to being able to target units infinitely far away as long it locks on.
I feel like pulling the workers out of the widow mine acquisition range should be enough, but sometimes that doesn't save you.
I'm honestly sick of seing mines traveling half way across the screen and killing 15 workers or 20 banelings.
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On September 24 2015 05:52 alexanderzero wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2015 05:35 Pontius Pirate wrote:
No, the damage just needs to be tweaked so as to not 1-shot workers. Everything else is fine. Not necessarily ideal, but fine. The +shield damage will have to be removed from the splash component and damage needs to be lowered to 35 or 30. Wouldn't that eliminate the usage of widow mines to counter zealots and archon? Seems like a massive nerf to remove the shield damage. I'd prefer seeing there be an unlisted exception for probes, even though that's not Blizzard style. Regardless, if WM doesn't 1-shot workers, then I am pretty sure that nobody would ever do widow mine drops.
If the +shield damage is kept on single target, then it's still useful against Zealots and especially Archons. Once the splash component of the shield damage is removed, you can even experiment with upping it to 105, enough to 1-shot an upgraded Adept. At the very least, it could be increased to 55, in order to 1-shot unupgraded Adepts. Both of these would also 2-shot an Archon.
WMs actually started getting used in the TvP matchup before the buff to their +shields damage, first as a niche deal, and then later as a specific response to Chargelot-Archon, against which they performed alright. Not great, but alright. The +35 shield damage that they'd done since the end of the HotS beta was enough to make them usable against Zealots. In fact, WM usage was on the rise in TvP throughout much of 2013 until patch 2.0.12, where their splash radius was changed from flat to graduated, mostly ending that trend. Then patch 2.1 BU 2 came around in January of the next year and Terran players started reincorporating WMs into their compositions against Protoss and people started acting like this was a new thing, just because it disappeared during patch 2.0.12 of November of 2013. Then of course, patch 2.1.3 came along and reverted WMs splash to a flat splash, but included the +40 shields damage of the inner splash radius of patch 2.0.12, and all of a sudden, they were so good that they almost entirely suppressed the Chargelot-Archon style of play. That's a very fun style, and if WMs need some retweaking in order to encourage it to make an appearance again, so be it. Besides, Protoss has the Disruptor now, which can deal quite well with WMs.
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Disruptor is a piece of garbage. Hard to use effectively because now for each disruptor you have 2 things to micro... And the cooldown is so long that you need a lot of them to properly fight a bio army. So it's just too many units that are effectively spellcasters.
With all the new stuff in the game they really should give the Colossus a little bit more love. Protoss is really hard right now unless you're winning with Adept allins.
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On September 24 2015 06:34 DinoMight wrote:
Disruptor is a piece of garbage. Hard to use effectively because now for each disruptor you have 2 things to micro... And the cooldown is so long that you need a lot of them to properly fight a bio army. So it's just too many units that are effectively spellcasters.
What if you're not investing in a large number of them, just a few to combat the WMs, specifically in support of a Chargelot-Archon comp?
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I don't think there is anything wrong with the current widow mine. If you go straight widow mine drop, you rarely get more than 1-2 workers vs anyone above like platinum league.
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On September 24 2015 05:52 alexanderzero wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2015 05:35 Pontius Pirate wrote:
No, the damage just needs to be tweaked so as to not 1-shot workers. Everything else is fine. Not necessarily ideal, but fine. The +shield damage will have to be removed from the splash component and damage needs to be lowered to 35 or 30. Wouldn't that eliminate the usage of widow mines to counter zealots and archon? Seems like a massive nerf to remove the shield damage. I'd prefer seeing there be an unlisted exception for probes, even though that's not Blizzard style. Regardless, if WM doesn't 1-shot workers, then I am pretty sure that nobody would ever do widow mine drops.
if i never saw a widow mine drop again i'd be happy. widow mine drops were basically patched into the meta in hots to slow down protoss development as an awkward way of increasing terran's odds of overwhelming in the midgame, which gave us a bunch of stupid probe pull interactions to watch, horrendous games like super vs cure in proleague, and games where terran just stims onto colossus after 7 minutes of death animation buildup because they got so far ahead that protoss couldn't do anything (note that this isn't a balance complaint, i'm saying widow mine games are just bad). not to mention killing storm openers which everyone except terrans who were bad against them agrees were sick
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I am Protoss and Q_Q alot. Nerf the tank, the mine, and while you on it .rm the ravager pls.
Mines should rather kill stuff Faster.
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On September 24 2015 07:03 NKexquisite wrote:
I don't think there is anything wrong with the current widow mine. If you go straight widow mine drop, you rarely get more than 1-2 workers vs anyone above like platinum league.
I have to dispute you on this one. WM drops are wrecking probes at every level, including Korean pros. If there are multiple televised matches of this happening, then just imagine how often it occurs on ladder.
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i mean there isnt any problem with early widow mines, so there would be a big diffrent expcet another upgrade and one less eraly option for Terra
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I'd rather Blizzard focus on things like liberators / adepts / carriers / flying siege tanks before they start worrying about the widow mine...
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Theres an unused unit attribute called "hover" (like mechanical, light, structure, psionic etc) that blizzard can just slap onto workers, and make a special case that widow mines can't target units with the hover attribute. This, however, would make some people whine about how certain units (such as the archon or disruptor) are technically hovering yet don't have the hover attribute (which doesn't really matter so w/e). Easy solution to shut down widow-mine harass. The problem with widow mine harass is that it depends on if the player is watching the minimap, and theres such a random element to how many probes it kills. Sometimes its 1, sometimes its 11. As for nerfing the damage, the problem would be that zealot/archons would be stronger, because, as mentionned, you would not just need to nerf the damage, but also the shield damage because they would then 1-shot probes. But if you nerf the damage, zealots/archons suddenly are much stronger.
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Alright guys, I've got an idea for this. Seems like we mostly agree Zergs don't really have an issue with these, since they have an easier time getting detecting by the time WM drops come out. The real problem here is protoss and detection.
So, what if we gave protoss a low tech unit that could reliably deal with terran bio. This takes some pressure off protoss, and lets them build their tech structures (Robo, forge, stargate, twilight) a bit sooner, giving them the option of detection when they need it.
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On September 24 2015 06:09 DinoMight wrote:
Just make it so that they can only hit shit that is in their range as opposed to being able to target units infinitely far away as long it locks on.
I feel like pulling the workers out of the widow mine acquisition range should be enough, but sometimes that doesn't save you.
I'm honestly sick of seing mines traveling half way across the screen and killing 15 workers or 20 banelings.
^ This. Mines should only be able to fire to the extent of their range. Few things are more frustrating than reacting and pulling yet still losing a brutal amount of units.
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Why couldn't the WM be a single target monster? High single target damage, no splash. So it wouldn't overlap with the siege tank and it could get toned down to 1 supply and 50/25.
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EPT
