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On September 17 2015 13:43 TheWinks wrote:Show nested quote +On September 17 2015 11:25 parkufarku wrote:On September 17 2015 05:42 TheWinks wrote: A unit only makes sense within the context of the game it is in. There is no exterior objective measure of too good/too bad to be made. If people were only building liberators that would be an indication that they are too strong relative to opponent units or relative to the strength of other terran units, but they're not being massed like the initial incarnation of the ravager, for instance. Just because it's not the only thing massed does NOT mean it's not too strong. Worst logic I've ever heard. Not being massed certainly harms the accusation that it is too well rounded of a unit. It could be too strong overall, but it certainly isn't obviously too strong. We could say that about a lot of units in Legacy right now, like the adept, lurker, and the viper with parasitic bomb.
Ok, so take Colossus. We give them 100 extra health, nice splash AA, and lower its cost by 100/100/2 supply. That would make them pretty OP right? No one would disagree with that. But would the Protoss player simply just mass these units? No, he would pair them with other gateway units, and also make spellcaster units. Especially when these things only come out of Robo, like how Liberators come out of Starports. Not being purely massed by itself doesn't prove anything.
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On September 17 2015 14:16 parkufarku wrote:Show nested quote +On September 17 2015 13:43 TheWinks wrote:On September 17 2015 11:25 parkufarku wrote:On September 17 2015 05:42 TheWinks wrote: A unit only makes sense within the context of the game it is in. There is no exterior objective measure of too good/too bad to be made. If people were only building liberators that would be an indication that they are too strong relative to opponent units or relative to the strength of other terran units, but they're not being massed like the initial incarnation of the ravager, for instance. Just because it's not the only thing massed does NOT mean it's not too strong. Worst logic I've ever heard. Not being massed certainly harms the accusation that it is too well rounded of a unit. It could be too strong overall, but it certainly isn't obviously too strong. We could say that about a lot of units in Legacy right now, like the adept, lurker, and the viper with parasitic bomb. Ok, so take Colossus. We give them 100 extra health, nice splash AA, and lower its cost by 100/100/2 supply. That would make them pretty OP right? No one would disagree with that. But would the Protoss player simply just mass these units? No, he would pair them with other gateway units, and also make spellcaster units. Especially when these things only come out of Robo, like how Liberators come out of Starports. Not being purely massed by itself doesn't prove anything.
Are you seeing high-level LotV games where Terran goes mass Liberator? Or, are you facing players that are going mass Liberator? Everything I've seen includes Liberators in composition, like you'd expect. Similar to the Colossus. The Liberator needs ground support because their directional attack is a vulnerability, as well as their stationary position when in AG mode.
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I'm watching many different P players' streams and their T opponents constantly get around 6-8 Liberators in the mid game. Once that count is reached, P players rarely win. It's the Colossus all over again. However, unlike Colossi, which get countered by Vikings pretty effectively, there is no P unit that counters Liberators, except for Carriers. Tempest and voidrays are bad against the bio part of the composition and phoenix die to liberators as soon as there are 4-6 of the latter on the filed.
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On September 17 2015 14:16 parkufarku wrote:Show nested quote +On September 17 2015 13:43 TheWinks wrote:On September 17 2015 11:25 parkufarku wrote:On September 17 2015 05:42 TheWinks wrote: A unit only makes sense within the context of the game it is in. There is no exterior objective measure of too good/too bad to be made. If people were only building liberators that would be an indication that they are too strong relative to opponent units or relative to the strength of other terran units, but they're not being massed like the initial incarnation of the ravager, for instance. Just because it's not the only thing massed does NOT mean it's not too strong. Worst logic I've ever heard. Not being massed certainly harms the accusation that it is too well rounded of a unit. It could be too strong overall, but it certainly isn't obviously too strong. We could say that about a lot of units in Legacy right now, like the adept, lurker, and the viper with parasitic bomb. Ok, so take Colossus. We give them 100 extra health, nice splash AA, and lower its cost by 100/100/2 supply. That would make them pretty OP right? No one would disagree with that. But would the Protoss player simply just mass these units? No, he would pair them with other gateway units, and also make spellcaster units. Especially when these things only come out of Robo, like how Liberators come out of Starports. Not being purely massed by itself doesn't prove anything. No, in that case the colo would start getting massed and you'd work towards a mass colo comp as your endgame because it's super cheap, super effective, and good against everything. Any other units you built would be because you have to, not because you want to. You would want to just build colossus.
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On September 18 2015 01:50 CheddarToss wrote: I'm watching many different P players' streams and their T opponents constantly get around 6-8 Liberators in the mid game. Once that count is reached, P players rarely win. It's the Colossus all over again. However, unlike Colossi, which get countered by Vikings pretty effectively, there is no P unit that counters Liberators, except for Carriers. Tempest and voidrays are bad against the bio part of the composition and phoenix die to liberators as soon as there are 4-6 of the latter on the filed.
Oh, don't worry. According to the Terran posters here, since Terrans don't get pure liberators, it's not broken.
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On September 18 2015 01:50 CheddarToss wrote: I'm watching many different P players' streams and their T opponents constantly get around 6-8 Liberators in the mid game. Once that count is reached, P players rarely win. It's the Colossus all over again. However, unlike Colossi, which get countered by Vikings pretty effectively, there is no P unit that counters Liberators, except for Carriers. Tempest and voidrays are bad against the bio part of the composition and phoenix die to liberators as soon as there are 4-6 of the latter on the filed.
Okay. 6-8 is not "mass" Liberators, imho. This does seem to be the target number when I play. I don't really understand your complaint. You listed two units that would do well in the given scenario: phoenix and/or carrier.
This is the mid-game. So a direct engagement is likely going to result in a full trade down for both, or a lop-sided victory for the weaker composition, or for the player who has already lost to a snowball effect from earlier in the game. So for you, the phoenix's might die, but now the Liberator's aren't attacking the ground units, so Terran's whole ground army will evaporate, or at least trade poorly, and the some--or all--of the Liberators will die. So you have a situation that--for the most part--works as intended. The units trade out, and perhaps superior tactics / control can tip it one way or another. If the Liberators stay in ground mode, the Terran will trade better on the ground and lose all of the liberators and you'll trade better in the air.
If you build carriers, the Terran can't win anyway, so that's kinda a throw-away statement ; )
The one thing I'll give you is that the Liberator is highlighting a problem for Terran right now. Without this powerful, versatile, skill unit, it feels virtually impossible to win in all three matchups. At least in the current meta, Terran has to go Liberator, or get completely obliterated by Zerg and Toss. (Early game build-order wins and rush cheese excepted, naturally) So in that sense, it does feel a little like the HotS Colossus, which I agree is a bad thing. But I don't necessarily think this problem is because of the Liberator, necessarily, more that the overuse of the Liberator is a symptom of something more fundamental.
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United Kingdom20284 Posts
Okay. 6-8 is not "mass" Liberators, imho. This does seem to be the target number when I play. I don't really understand your complaint. You listed two units that would do well in the given scenario: phoenix
Did you read the same post as me?
there is no P unit that counters Liberators, except for Carriers. phoenix die to liberators as soon as there are 4-6
Straight carrier on equal footing to terran doesn't really work very well
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Without this powerful, versatile, skill unit, it feels virtually impossible to win in all three matchups. At least in the current meta, Terran has to go Liberator, or get completely obliterated by Zerg and Toss. (Early game build-order wins and rush cheese excepted, naturally) So in that sense, it does feel a little like the HotS Colossus, which I agree is a bad thing. But I don't necessarily think this problem is because of the Liberator, necessarily, more that the overuse of the Liberator is a symptom of something more fundamental.
Well, as I've said multiple times in this thread, the Liberator is a too well rounded unit with no real weakness. If it stays this way other T units will have to stay sub par in order to compensate. It would be better to nerf the Liberator and buff other units as needed.
And as for Liberators being a "skill unit", I don't agree. Liberators, due to their mobility and amazing range are rather a low skill unit, in my opinion. Tanks are a skill unit. Liberators are very easy to use in comparison.
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United Kingdom20284 Posts
They take skill to abuse when you have a few of them, but not 8. At that point you can create a wall of fields and kite back through it or leapfrog them towards a base and use them to cover your army
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On September 18 2015 02:49 Cyro wrote: They take skill to abuse when you have a few of them, but not 8. At that point you just get to the point where you have a wall of liberator fields up and your opponent has to attack into them for any reason Yes, but they don't get abused very often against P, because P can deal very well with low numbers of them.
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United Kingdom20284 Posts
On September 18 2015 02:51 CheddarToss wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2015 02:49 Cyro wrote: They take skill to abuse when you have a few of them, but not 8. At that point you just get to the point where you have a wall of liberator fields up and your opponent has to attack into them for any reason Yes, but they don't get abused very often against P, because P can deal very well with low numbers of them.
with stargate opening, sure
you said yourself though
I'm watching many different P players' streams and their T opponents constantly get around 6-8 Liberators in the mid game. Once that count is reached, P players rarely win
that is the same thing that i saw
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Well, now that I've played almost to Masters I guess I could chime in with an ever so slightly educated opinion on the Liberator.
While the unit itself might not be "OP" it has a variety of problems that remind me of the Infestor/Colossus all kind of mixed into one big bag of crap.
First off, I like the fact that it's a Starport unit that can hold it's own against Mutalisks in small numbers because we all know Vikings CAN fight Mutalisks once they have stacks of armor upgrades and 12+ of them, as a Zerg player watching the Mutalisk deathball rip Terran bases to shreds sucks.
On the note of the "Mutalisk deathball" Terran probably already has at least 3 reliable ways of countering this. Mutalisks no matter how stacked get massacred by Marines, Widow Mines, and Thors, so did Terran really need yet another way of fighting them? Eventually so many counters are going to be added that Mutalisks will be built only to shut down drops just like when Phoenix was overbuffed with the upgrade which kind of made Mutalisks obsolete in ZvP. Is that really what we want? One of the most micro heavy and skill cap units in the game to get phased out for idiot units like the Cyclone?
Second off, the ground attack is mildly overpowered even if there are ways of dealing with it, Zerg does not need another situation like Sentry/Immortal where no matter how well you play you are kind of just relying on the other player to make a mistake because when executed properly it's more so on your opponent then you. The radius needs to be nerfed for offensive purposes alone and the main thing that it does...
Is that is creates another method of Cancer turtle mech. Once Terran stacks Turrets, Tanks, and Liberators, they ruled the skies/ground all at once, the Liberator burst damage making it suicidal to engage the army Vipers be damned. No more cancer mech PLEASE.
Third off and another contributor (probably half) of the reason it's OP is that it's reactored, I'm sorry but thats merely the typical David Kim "Let's make the unit so strong that they HAVE to test it out" approach, this needs to be the first nerf, then we can talk about the AOE on the ground mode.
Also, for a design team that seems so incredibly against units overlapping, the Liberator overlaps with several Terran units VERY obviously, why build Thors when Liberators? Why build Vikings when Liberators? Banshees are good, but Liberators do the same drone line damage or more AND can kill Overlords.
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Adding a tech lab requirement and nerfing the radius to the release radius would be fine, I think.
But the damage _should_ be scary. If you're not afraid to step in the circle, what's the point? Space control needs to be in the game, whether the lIberator or the tank does it is immaterial.
So many of the problems in this game come down to a lack of defender's advantage and consequently, a lack of positional play. If you can't leave a few units behind to defend, you're forever stuck with moving your entire deathball around everywhere.
Slow compositions need to be viable without deathballing, and to do that they need to have units that control space well.
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Damage powerful, yes, but 1 shotting Hydras? Are you kidding me? That's Zerg's only reliable air-attacking ground unit and it gets 1 shot before it even has a chance to counter-attack. Unable to create counter-play and pure dominance just destroys not only the balance but also the game. It has no place in SC2.
At this point, we can agree that : tech lab requirement, radius reduction, damage reduction is deserved.
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If you reduce the radius, it's easier to avoid getting hit in the first place. If you walk your hydras into a prepared Liberator field, there's no way you should be getting a cost-efficient trade. If you allow your opponent to control a choke with a bunch of Liberators, you should be at a severe disadvantage.
I could see reducing the damage and upping the fire rare to get the same dps (so 60-ish damage with cooldown ~1.2) to avoid one-shots on expensive units like hydras/templars/sentries. But that's not interesting.
It would be better to go the opposite direction. Double the damage and double the cooldown. Say 150 damage with a 3+ cooldown. Now, if you want to engage Liberators via ground, you can bait out shots with cheap units or avoid them with drop/blink micro, and the Liberator player now has to manually target or risk wasting tons of damage on overkill.
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United Kingdom20284 Posts
I think tech lab requirement and slightly reduced air splash radius + ground AOE area would be a good start. AG damage is extremely high and that sucks for hydralisks but it's at least somewhat appropriate if it's sieged and only in a specific area.
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On September 18 2015 07:49 Cyro wrote: I think tech lab requirement and slightly reduced air splash radius + ground AOE area would be a good start. AG damage is extremely high and that sucks for hydralisks but it's at least somewhat appropriate if it's sieged and only in a specific area.
Hey, Cyro, I think you missed this response: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/legacy-of-the-void/490611-liberator-in-tvz-is-it-imba?page=26#517
I think you just missed it. This is a fast moving thread.
You and I both agree on the tech lab. That will slow down the ability to get the correct composition.
Reduced air splash radius - I don't think I'm on board with this. But I don't know that I'm horribly against it either. As long as the ability to counter mutas effectively is still there. But I also don't mind my opponent having to do some micro, as so many other units in the game force micro.
AG mode is not AOE. It's single-target DPS. I think that because there is a warning graphic of the attack radius, people assume this is an AOE. The radius is already fairly small, considering the attack radius of many other artillery ships (this is Terran's only artillery ship, keep in mind. Before this, we didn't have one.).
I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: if the damage gets nerfed in any significant way, I would like to see the warning graphic for the opponent removed. If utilizing the targeting range of the liberation zone, the Liberator itself is vulnerable from something like a 300-315 degree angle. This makes it incredibly vulnerable to flanks (and the obvious inability to shoot AA attacks while in AG mode).
Oh ... and, uh ... so here it is:
On Sept 17 2015, Blizzard wrote
Liberator's Defender Mode requires research again. Cost is 150/150. Research time is 79 seconds. Researched at Starport with Tech Lab
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United Kingdom20284 Posts
AG mode is not AOE. It's single-target DPS
Yea i get this, bad wording from me
I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: if the damage gets nerfed in any significant way, I would like to see the warning graphic for the opponent removed.
I don't think this should be done ever for sake of clarity, especially when the liberation zone range is cast by a unit that could fly over a cliff and/or shoot from 1.5x vision range away. Moving your army and then instantly losing 30% of it instantaneously to units that were 1.5x vision range away and stacking their liberation zones would be terrible, terrible gameplay (lol u see what i did there)
The main problem with the liberation zone isn't really the range it's cast from. Hell, it's probably even better if it's close to the liberator. It's just that you can drop half a dozen of them in a line like giant forcefields and then leap forwards and the enemy can't respond because if he chases your 80 supply army with his 80 supply army, he'll lose his entire army and the terran will still have 60 supply left. Even if you flank, you can get into the situation easily where terran blobs his entire army together inside the liberation zones - and your army attacking him will die, while his units will take zero friendly fire. "Stand in range of the stimmed bio and kill the liberators over his army" is unfortunately often not an option.
Units having a strength is good, hell i'd love if tanks could do that to some extent (they absolutely cannot, it's way easier to engage into tanks at every stage of the game) but they do so much outside of that one strength (they build twice as fast as tanks and have really good anti-air and mobility) that it seems OP. The research helps a bit since terrans would always build that armory to enter the midgame anyway
Liberator's Defender Mode requires research again. Cost is 150/150. Research time is 79 seconds. Researched at Starport with Tech Lab
Very early game lib was a bit silly sometimes, but never the main problem i think. This change seems primarily aimed at making it more of an investment to get a few in the extremely early game
In this case, he has to keep a tech lab on the starport for 2 production cycles so he can only build 2 instead of 4 with 1 starport in the first 2 production cycles with an addon. They don't have to keep the tech lab on past the 79 second research time
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On September 18 2015 08:43 Cyro wrote:Yea i get this, bad wording from me Show nested quote +I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: if the damage gets nerfed in any significant way, I would like to see the warning graphic for the opponent removed. I don't think this should be done ever for sake of clarity, especially when the liberation zone range is cast by a unit that could fly over a cliff and/or shoot from 1.5x vision range away. Moving your army and then instantly losing 30% of it instantaneously to units that were 1.5x vision range away and stacking their liberation zones would be terrible, terrible gameplay (lol u see what i did there) The main problem with the liberation zone isn't really the range it's cast from. Hell, it's probably even better if it's close to the liberator. It's just that you can drop half a dozen of them in a line like giant forcefields and then leap forwards and the enemy can't respond because if he chases your 80 supply army with his 80 supply army, he'll lose his entire army and the terran will still have 60 supply left. Even if you flank, you can get into the situation easily where terran blobs his entire army together inside the liberation zones - and your army attacking him will die, while his units will take zero friendly fire. "Stand in range of the stimmed bio and kill the liberators over his army" is unfortunately often not an option. Units having a strength is good, hell i'd love if tanks could do that to some extent (they absolutely cannot, it's way easier to engage into tanks at every stage of the game) but they do so much outside of that one strength (they build twice as fast as tanks and have really good anti-air and mobility) that it seems OP. The research helps a bit since terrans would always build that armory to enter the midgame anyway Show nested quote + Liberator's Defender Mode requires research again. Cost is 150/150. Research time is 79 seconds. Researched at Starport with Tech Lab
Very early game lib was a bit silly sometimes, but never the main problem i think. This change seems primarily aimed at making it more of an investment to get a few in the extremely early game In this case, he has to keep a tech lab on the starport for 2 production cycles so he can only build 2 instead of 4 with 1 starport in the first 2 production cycles with an addon. They don't have to keep the tech lab on past the 79 second research time
So it seems to me that your primary issue is damage output. But is its damage output really higher than say, Banelings, Lurkers, Colossus, Storm, or Disruptors when they get their juicy hits? Terran doesn't have very powerful AOE options, like Zerg and Toss, we've always relied on single-target DPS units (which support). The tank is maybe the only exception, but discounting TvT, heavy tank use went away in WoL.
Are you just looking for a straight damage nerf? Like, maybe making the AG attack cooldown 1.25 instead of 1.14, or something along those lines?
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United Kingdom20284 Posts
So it seems to me that your primary issue is damage output
Not really damage output, just the way that they can guarantee that damage to happen if you're attacking into them or backed into a corner (during any kind of attack) because he can daisy chain the zones together fairly easily and kite through them or stand inside them without friendly fire. It's much easier to place them abusively from a unit that has wings and is 1.5x faster than a sentry or tank with substantially higher range.
Phoenix just feels like an awkward/bad response as some people in this thread have stated that liberator is, by design, an AOE anti-light-air unit
Liberator is performing all of its design functions very well in the midgame - it's tailor made for abusing protoss with or without phoenix and the responses don't have the luxury of being tailor made for anti-lib+bio
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