LOTV Beta: Balance Update Preview June 9

Second, we’d like to tackle Archon mode and any necessary improvements to how players will control shared units in StarCraft II. We’ve been exploring various options, including your suggestions. After many discussions and test sessions, we decided to abide by this rule:

“Only make changes that can’t be handled by good communication.”

Archon mode is a mode where you only play with arranged teams. And part of an arranged team’s skill—not just in Archon mode, but as a whole—is good communication.

So far, we have one Archon-friendly change that we’re exploring:

When you select units and use the Alt + (number) command, those units are added to that number’s corresponding control group, and removed from other control groups.

This change addresses a common situation in Archon mode where one player is controlling a bunch of units when that player’s teammate wants to take a few of those units off to harass the enemy from another direction. Currently, there’s no easy way to do this.

For example:

Player A is controlling all Marines and Medivacs and needs to focus on the main attack
Player B wants to take 2 Medivacs and 16 Marines for a Medivac drop harassment

In this scenario, Player A would have to add 16 Marines and 2 Medivacs to Player B’s control group. Player B would then have to figure out which 16 Marines and 2 Medivacs Player A removed from their control group.

With our proposed alteration to how control groups are handled in cooperative games, after the strategy has been communicated, Player B can Alt control group the 16 Marines and Medivacs without having to interrupt Player A. This is something we’re currently working on, and it won’t make it to the next balance update, but we’ll try our best to get it out to the beta test as soon as possible for testing.

Third, we’d like to address potential improvements to the Minimap. We haven’t begun testing anything in this area, but we’d like to share our perspective so that we can gather initial player feedback.

We are looking at two areas of potential improvement. One is the issue of destructible rocks and towers not showing up on the Minimap—this can be confusing, especially on newer maps. Because we cycle through maps faster now, we feel that this would be a good thing to address before the Legacy of the Void launch.

We’re also looking at displaying spawn locations more clearly in-game. We have more and more maps, mostly in 1v1, where there are special case rules for possible spawn location such as diagonal spawn locations only or vertical spawn locations only. With many new maps coming in every season, it’s something we feel should be addressed. One way we could do this would be to ping the Minimap at the start of the game to indicate all potential enemy spawn locations. This way, we wouldn’t have to explain anything to the players through text—they’ll know where to scout by tracking the ping locations.

Ghosts would gain a new ability that spawns a flying drone on an enemy target. That drone would channel a beam at the enemy unit, reducing its Armor by 3. The drone would have a fixed duration and can be attacked and killed. The main purpose of this ability is to help Terran bio armies better deal with a current weakness—high armor targets.

We’d like to try this one out to see if Ghosts can be better combined with other bio units.

After testing out this popular suggestion, we decided to give it a go during the beta. We feel that with the Nydus Worm changes in Legacy of the Void, doom drops have been buffed with the Nydus Worm, so we wonder if Overlords can be served for the small drops.

We were exploring various upgrade replacements for the Medivac, and tried upgrades ranging from providing straight-up power in combat to various utility upgrade ideas that change up their gameplay. We decided to try reducing the unload delay because we feel that Medivacs don’t need to be buffed in strength in main engagements, but we wanted them loading and unloading in various locations throughout combat or during harassment.

Disruptors aren’t very effective in the PvP mirror matchup, so we wanted a targeted change that only affects that matchup.

Ravager is looking too fragile now, so we wanted to buff its survivability.

In larger fights against many air units, the micro we wanted to see wasn’t happening if too many Parasitic Bombs were used at once. So we wanted to reduce the number of Parasitic Bombs being used per combat situation so that we can see the micro and counter-micro a lot more in engagements involving this ability.

With the upgrades being split out again, we felt the choice of committing into the specific tech routes is cool, but we wanted to make each path similar in terms of investment needed.

While the Lurker add is working well in ZvZ in terms of transitioning out of Roaches, we’re seeing that fights are generally trending to be ground-based only. We’d like to have the option to go Mutalisks in some ZvZ games, so we’re reducing the +bio damage of Spore Crawlers. We’re looking for Spore Crawlers to still counter Mutalisks well, but at the same time, we don’t want Mutalisks to almost never be used in the matchup. We think this is a good starting point to get the damage value of Spore Crawlers to the right place, but we can continue tuning it as needed throughout the beta.

While 3 workers per mineral patch is the max efficiency, 2 per is optimal in multiplayer games of SC2, so we decided to try out this change in the beta.

This change is due to performance issues caused by potentially having so many splats in a given spot.