TLO Interview about Legacy of the Void

ZeromuS: How are you doing today?

TLO: I'm quite happy to make it through after a really bad start yesterday so it feels really good.

ZeromuS: For sure, I remember talking to you yesterday and saying you were not feeling it, but i guess you came into today in the zone kinda thing? Walk my through that.

TLO: Traditionally it happens a lot to me that i do badly on day 1 and do well on day 2, whenever i'm down in a group I feel more confident afterwards cause historically it happened to me a lot of times that I lost the first match and then came back. More often winning the first match is always a bad sign to me.

ZeromuS: Ok great. So we're going to do some thing a bit different for this interview, and we're going to talk about your thoughts on Legacy Of the Void because I know you have a lot of thoughts on that. You released that article on the ultralisk(article here).
So what's your favorite thing about Legacy Of the Void so far that you've seen or played?


TLO: Well I like that it kicks off a little bit faster. I like the idea of making people expand a little more even though I don't like the execution of it as much. It still feels a little bit more dynamic than Heart of the Swarm but the problem I have with that is I'm not sure people know how to play the game yet because in early stages of Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm it was also more dynamic because people make more mistakes so you can make more interesting plays and maybe as soon as people figure out Legacy of The Void the more dynamic plays might fade away a little bit more again.

ZeromuS: Right, totally understood, so as far as units go what's your favorite new unit so far or changed unit?

TLO: I do like the Ravager, though I think they over-nerfed it, I think it has a really cool zoning ability, I would like it though if people couldn't see where you're shooting the artillery so you could mind game a little bit more, obviously that would be much stronger, but i feel that is more of a balance issue than a design issue. To be honest I don't like the terran units, obviously nobody likes a tracking missile turret a whole lot, and the liberator I can't really place it either. I like the disrupter though, i like the disrupter and the adept, I feel like they can be tweaked a little bit more to be interesting, the Adept they buff the HP a lot but that's a boring change, in my opinion they should change the mobility more, I would like it if you could go to the Shade whenever you want to, like if you just had an active and jumped to the Shade, but instead they made it very beefy, then it's kind of generic.


ZeromuS: So you want it to jump to the Shade for the same kind of mind games feel, is that what you're looking to see in Starcraft 2 with Legacy of the Void?


TLO: Yeah I feel it would be a more interesting place, you know if you could like, ok i'm sending out the Shade but am i going there or am I not going there, the other player has to make a decisions, but right now there's not a lot of decisions to be made, the decision the other play needs to make is whether to chase the Shade or to hit the Adept, but it's not knowing what to do.


ZeromuS: Right for sure, and you said that you like the Disrupter? Right now I know there's talks at Blizzard about making it less all or nothing as it is now, like yesterday they posted an article saying they wanted to keep it in its invulnerable mode after it goes off, but maybe lower its damage i think, something like that.


TLO: i think that's a bad solution in my opinion, I don't like it, because with one ability you need to be careful with it because it also limits interaction once again, if the unit is just invulnerable afterwards, once again it's all about Protoss doing the right thing and not the other player preventing Protoss from doing it kinda like forcefields a lot of times, it's kinda like if Protoss is placing good forcefields there's very little you can do afterwards as the other player and that feels very similar to me like that, I would prefer if they just make it similar to the idea of the Ultralisk where they would just make the Distrupter just a bit cheaper and reduce its damage, cause then it's already less all or nothing because it's not just gonna just blowup your whole army with 1 hit, instead you would need several hits to deal a lot of damage.


ZeromuS: Right and Protoss isn't relying on it to get a kill just to survive. It's a little bit more over time and you get more options and opportunities to interact with the unit and the other army and those kinds of things. So you said you wanted the Ultralisk to be smaller, move faster, be cheaper, can you see any other units that would benefit from a small change or small tweaks that are already in the game but have moved to Legacy of the Void without any changes for example, or ones that have changed that you don't like the changes for or prefer to see a different direction?


TLO: While in general, I think being faster off creep and slower on creep might be a good thing for Zerg, because I feel like Zerg as long as you're fighting on creep you're so incredibly strong but as soon as you're off creep it becomes very difficult which can lead to very passive play, like the idea of the Zerg is I have army outside of the creep, and it gets hard for the enemy to push onto the creep, because a few units at home will be effective, but I think overall i'm kinda fine with how most of the other units are, except maybe the Zealot, I'd like it to be more like Broodwar, so i might sound like an elitist again, but I don't like Zealot Charge as much because I feel like it's a very hands off ability, as soon as the Zealot charges, there's nothing interesting the player can do anymore so i'd prefer it if they just removed charge and just make it a little bit faster, so you can do cool micro against speedlings. Back in the day you could just like you hid you run you hid you run, melee kiting, that was always very cool, i think i'd prefer that a little more. I think they'd need to make zealot speed cheaper something like 100/100, so you can actually play a zealot based composition with speed like that, that would be cool to see.



ZeromuS: Very cool thoughts, great to hear your thoughts on this so thank you very much for that, and good luck in the rest of the tournament!



TLO: Thank you!