On August 26 2015 22:59 Hider wrote: Balance aside, LOTV - more than ever- suffers from the neverending midgame state. In order for a proper lategame dynamic to be established, you need large army sizes spread out all over the map. The income rate in LOTV is way too low and instead most games ends up being scrappy and snowbally.
Is that really a bad thing, though? One of the things I love about BW was how, after a certain point, the players just kept constantly trading units with each other. WoL and HotS' lategame annoyed me because it was way too easy to get to 200/200. After that, the players sat on their asses, built a huge bank and waited until they had the perfect composition. The sight of 200/200 armies doing nothing while the players built up huge banks is just terribly boring. Give me scrappy any day.
I don't feel it would be fair for cyclone AA attack damage to be doubled - their speed and range is very extreme
I would give back terran mules at 20 per trip (from 30). I think that would be a big enough nerf to continue to have decisions between when to get the OC and would also add realistic tradeoffs between supply calldown and mule calldown. And most importantly, it will make the balace of terran much easier. Of all of the macromechanics, mule is still very very easy and doesn't take up alot of attention.
One of the things I love about BW was how, after a certain point, the players just kept constantly trading units with each other. WoL and HotS' lategame annoyed me because it was way too easy to get to 200/200
BW lategame had a very high income rate. Frequently it was even higher than what you saw in HOTS as worker income continued to contribute post 16 worker (on 1 base).
In LOTV you often find your self at 2-2½ base income on average whereas in BW you would an income rate that responds to 4 bases.
When the income rate is very low, the game becomes less forgiveable, because if you lose a decent army value at one point in time, you can't easily replace that and will often lose the game after that. The effect is that you often time won't get back and fourth trading in LOTV. If one player trades a bit too well, the game will often times be over afterwards, and it's why all LOTV games are so short and snowbally.
BW had very distinct phases between the early game, the midgame and the lategame. In my opinion the early-game and especially the midgame was often times too passive in BW: I think adding much stronger harass units is the proper approach for a more actionpacked midgame, and in that regard, LOTV works very well. However, in the late game you need 3 components:
1. High income rate --> To make the game back and fourth 2. Players spread out over multiple bases --> To incentivize multitasking 3. Offensive tools that can break defensive position, such as Arbiter Recall, overlord drops (which indirectly were stronger in BW) and big medivac drops.
My proposed solution/adjustment to LOTV economy
1. Increase income rate by 10-20% (e.g. add 6 minerals per trip instead of 5).
2. Reduce BT of buildings across the field. This will accomplish 3 things:
(a) build order timings will be adjusted so builds feel similar given the new highe income rate (b). If bases can be build faster, losing a base will be less punishing --> more back and fourth (c) It further speeds up periods of the game where nothing else happens (and this time the "other" consequences will be positive).
At last, I also propse a supply reduction to multiple units so players can afford - once they enter the late game - to have more workers if they have more bases. This will also make it possible to spread out your (larger) army across multiple bases rather than moving around with a mobile supply ineffective deathball.
On August 26 2015 22:59 Hider wrote: Balance aside, LOTV - more than ever- suffers from the neverending midgame state. In order for a proper lategame dynamic to be established, you need large army sizes spread out all over the map. The income rate in LOTV is way too low and instead most games ends up being scrappy and snowbally.
Is that really a bad thing, though? One of the things I love about BW was how, after a certain point, the players just kept constantly trading units with each other. WoL and HotS' lategame annoyed me because it was way too easy to get to 200/200. After that, the players sat on their asses, built a huge bank and waited until they had the perfect composition. The sight of 200/200 armies doing nothing while the players built up huge banks is just terribly boring. Give me scrappy any day.
gonna agree with this sentiment too. idk about you guys, but the greatest satisfaction i get from this game is when you get an opponent you're constantly trading with and you finally eek out the win after a big struggle.
on the other hand, when i'm playing against mech or turtley protoss air, it's a snooze fest.
LOTV is pretty dead - there's nobody queing archon worth more than +1 point for us and we're not that good. It's hard to make good balance observations from that, i can just say the warp prism pickup range of 6 (rather than 0-2) is rather silly and release interceptor probably needs looking at
looks like my buddy and i dropped rank lol. we're in grandmaster archon but the ppl we face are generally platinum and diamond with the occasional gm 1v1 thrown in there too.
i thought that this was an interesting video from incontrol
i like how he discusses how you have to change your current way of thinking about the game in order to test out the changes, much like some streamers are unable to do and proceed to bitch and moan and play another game instead of trying to learn and adapt :coughavilocough:
i agree with most of what he says, thoughts?
Yeah, very much what I think too. It's their choice what to do with the expansion and I really like the approach to shake up the game fundamentally. I think it was pretty clear with HotS already that the "small scale" expansion is just not a good model these days, at least not if the expansion is released 2-3years after the last iteration.
For the first time I'm very happy with the direction LotV has taken. In the first months of beta it really felt like they would just add units and do their tiny economy tweaks, polish and done. With the macro boosters gone and finally some substantial experimentation with warp gate - and hopefully the mothershipcore next - they have finally showcased true changes are on the menu. I just wish the beta would be a few months longer. I would like to see a bit of a design-balance rythm: 1) make 1-2 big design changes 2) evaluate them for a week and tweak the game around it a bit afterwards 3) evaluate them for another week and then conclude if going that direction is worthy or not; start again with another change
They wasted a lot of time in the early beta and alpha, TT
LOTV is pretty dead - there's nobody queing archon worth more than +1 point for us and we're not that good. It's hard to make good balance observations from that, i can just say the warp prism pickup range of 6 (rather than 0-2) is rather silly and release interceptor probably needs looking at
looks like my buddy and i dropped rank lol. we're in grandmaster archon but the ppl we face are generally platinum and diamond with the occasional gm 1v1 thrown in there too.
i thought that this was an interesting video from incontrol
i like how he discusses how you have to change your current way of thinking about the game in order to test out the changes, much like some streamers are unable to do and proceed to bitch and moan and play another game instead of trying to learn and adapt :coughavilocough:
i agree with most of what he says, thoughts?
Yeah, very much what I think too. It's their choice what to do with the expansion and I really like the approach to shake up the game fundamentally. I think it was pretty clear with HotS already that the "small scale" expansion is just not a good model these days, at least not if the expansion is released 2-3years after the last iteration.
For the first time I'm very happy with the direction LotV has taken. In the first months of beta it really felt like they would just add units and do their tiny economy tweaks, polish and done. With the macro boosters gone and finally some substantial experimentation with warp gate - and hopefully the mothershipcore next - they have finally showcased true changes are on the menu. I just wish the beta would be a few months longer. I would like to see a bit of a design-balance rythm: 1) make 1-2 big design changes 2) evaluate them for a week and tweak the game around it a bit afterwards 3) evaluate them for another week and then conclude if going that direction is worthy or not; start again with another change
They wasted a lot of time in the early beta and alpha, TT
yeah i definitely feel like im heavily critical towards blizzard for waiting until beta to hold their pro player summit and make changes like this.
but who knows, blizzard is notorious for extending their timeline to wait until the game is ready so maybe we'll get more time in beta
They wasted a lot of time in the early beta and alpha, TT
I really feel that they did, we're like 4.5 months into beta and they didn't test very big changes until very recently.
There's fewer people than HOTS beta online and queueing games even though WAY more people are in, which is unfortunate. A lot of people were excited to get in early and get ahead of the competition for HOTS but nobody cares now at the higher levels because the state the game was in 4 months ago would have been useless to train in for competitive play at any point in time. With no high level streamers, the lower guys don't follow.
Also i have 170 ping to the beta which, combined with engine delay, gives a 0.25 - 0.3 lag on unit commands. It's very annoyingly playable for a lot of the game but stuff like phoenix vs muta micro is impossible to do properly. That ping is awful, i wonder where the server is because i get ~100 ping to a lot of US servers and 24 ping to the WoW europe servers.
but who knows, blizzard is notorious for extending their timeline to wait until the game is ready
they're also infamous for extending delays for a very long time and then releasing products that clearly were not ready for the light of day (see Diablo 3 and WoW:WOD)
Actually i'm gonna go ahead and quote.
Diablo:
We commonly use the term “soon” when referring to Blizzard releases, because we know that no matter how hard we’re working to reach a target, we’re not going to compromise and launch a game before it’s ready. For Diablo III, we were aiming to launch by the end of 2011. As we’re announcing globally today, our new target for the game is early 2012.
While this news might not be a complete surprise, I know that many of you were hopeful that Diablo III would ship this year. We were too. However, this week we pulled together people from all of the teams involved with the game to decide whether we felt it would be ready before the end of December, and we grudgingly came to the conclusion that it would not. Ultimately, we feel that to deliver an awesome Diablo sequel that lives up to our expectations and yours as well, we should take a little more time and add further polish to a few different elements of the game.
WOD:
Quality is the most important thing, so if we have to make a choice between getting you something two months ago or getting you a great expansion in November, the choice is obvious.
Both had huge problems on launch, well beyond hardship that starcraft has seen as of yet. Blizzard gives those lines on every launch - and it's no more indicative of a quality release as "oh god we fucked this up, we can't launch like this or somebody will burn blizz HQ to the ground". D3 was D3 (needed a lot of patching and an expansion to fix most of the problems) and WOD went from 10 million subs at launch to 5 million subs in 7 months, with an expected freefall to 2-3 million subs before the next expansion launch (previous minimum in the history of the game since ~2006-2007 was 7.6m). Unarguably the worst expansion by far, yet it took them longer and they delayed it for "quality".
On August 26 2015 22:59 Hider wrote: Balance aside, LOTV - more than ever- suffers from the neverending midgame state. In order for a proper lategame dynamic to be established, you need large army sizes spread out all over the map. The income rate in LOTV is way too low and instead most games ends up being scrappy and snowbally.
Is that really a bad thing, though? One of the things I love about BW was how, after a certain point, the players just kept constantly trading units with each other. WoL and HotS' lategame annoyed me because it was way too easy to get to 200/200. After that, the players sat on their asses, built a huge bank and waited until they had the perfect composition. The sight of 200/200 armies doing nothing while the players built up huge banks is just terribly boring. Give me scrappy any day.
I totally agree with this, this is the main thing that made BW so awesome to watch, it wasn't the difficult macro, that part was only visible to skilled players, to everyone else what was so cool was to see constant small scale micro battles. Mid game is the best part of the game, it's the least deathball phase of the game at least, in HOTS mid game we see Prism harass, Medivac drops, Mutalisk control, and now we'll have Lurkers/Liberators/Uhh.."Disruptors"
Notice I said micro battles, not every unit in the game needs an activated ability, that's some moba shit, I do kind of like the Kog'Maw Ravager attack but I'm not a fan of the Adepts new ability, I don't know, I think Blizzard could just do a little bit better even though I'm a fan of the unit itself and what it brings to the table for Gateway unit compositions.
Notice I said micro battles, not every unit in the game needs an activated ability, that's some moba shit
I strongly prefer microable quirks with range, movement and agility
There are A LOT of units in the game now that have to stop and stare at an enemy unit for like 0.1 - 0.2 seconds when they fire, which prevents you from stutter stepping, kiting or bouncing in and out of combat effectively that didn't exist in BW and WC3 and they're really noticable. The engine change too reduces unit responsiveness. It feels to me as a protoss player with stalkers blinking, adepts ghosting, immortals now having to activate their shield to be decent, disruptors having to be manually clicked on, fired and then having their ball controlled, sentries having ff/guardian - there's just SO MANY activatable click abilities and it doesn't feel unique or fun.
If you have a unit that just moves and attacks and you make that fun like a brood war vulture or mutalisk, you've struck gold. If it moves and attacks but you can only amove with it and let it do its thing because it's slow, has to stop moving for 0.25 seconds before firing, can't move while channeling the shot etc so enemies catch up to it - that's nowhere near as usable or fun for either side.
On August 27 2015 08:30 CheeseCakez0 wrote: Can't wait for the game to come out.
Hop on the beta! If you didn't get access in the invite waves (which were pretty few, i think) or being in the top 20% of the ladder when they invited those, you can pre-purchase and get instant access with the prologue missions too. I didn't do those yet, but i wouldn't be able to stand watching a 9 month beta without access.
Blizzard is doing well and makes the game fair for every of the 3 races:
Zerg, Protoss and Terran have all now a reliable unit that deals aoe splash damage, fires constantly and offers micro on both sides and which main purpose is the infantry defence: Lurker, Colossus and Siege Tank.
And at the same time Zerg, Protoss and Terran have all now a kind of suicide aoe splash damage unit which creates tension: Baneling, Disruptor and Widow Mine.
I play Terran and I feel that while many players are frustrated because of the substantial changes to their own race, once you take a look at the overall impact of the most recent changes is becomes apparent that LOTV is really headed in a much better direction now.
For me, the removal of Chrono-boost, change to warp-ins, twelve worker start, ravager anti force field, and reinstatement of Cyclone anti-air early game really improve the game by leaps and bounds. Whatever happens in terms of balance will come with time.
The gameplay is going to be fantastic after a few LOTV patches if Blizzard continues down this road.
We've played 26 games of archon and only hit protoss once (when the player was random, landed toss and did that cannon rush) as far as i remember - i wonder how many protoss are playing the game in comparison to other races
if anyone hasn't seen the new warp in times, there's your example
I think this looks silly. If you want to REALLY nerf early offensive strats (and this is not such a nerf btw, just the first batch of units is later) just don't allow warp-ins at pylons (only at warpgates, warp prisms and around Nexi). This is a hundred times more elegant and simpler.
I think a slow as fuck warp in that's useless unless they're unknown or being heavily defended is a better middle ground than not being able to warp at all
I accidentally warped my first unit onto the wrong power field last game but was able to phase warp prism and turn the 15 second warp into 2 second warp, it actually sped up the remainder of the warp to 8x speed which was cool - saved me over 10 seconds (or losing a unit on the moveout). I thought it would be programmed in a more painful way and be locked in to the initial warp duration, but it was not
We're 13-2 in LOTV archon GM, not really sure of balance still. Killing a lot of terrans, but terrans are straight out doing a lot of stupid shit. Zerg games closer and harder, lurker spam seems very hard to deal with without quite a lot of disruptors or carriers and air exchanges are interesting - still no protoss.
Where are all the protoss? What are your rates of hitting them on ladder?
Viper seems very good. Not sure of balance in PvZ air but it's more micro intensive at least, had a game where we had a huge lead but got caught off guard in an engagement and got completely fucked by vipers (between abduct and the new AOE) and lost soon after. Carrier interceptor drop seems abusable but it also costs a huge amount of money, we're rarely in the position to say "Just drop the interceptors, pull back and spend 2.5 thousand minerals replacing them" without using sarcasm. Especially since lack of macro boosters and less minerals per base in LOTV, every mineral seems more precious
It's SUPER OBVIOUS to scout. If he wants to make the first 2 adepts immediately, he'll have to put the second gate in his first or second pylon 73 seconds before having any unit out capable of killing an scv or scout of any kind, you can see it. Depending on the map, a reaper can also arrive, scout and immediately leave, but that's less safe unless you know your timings.
If you either expanded from 1rax or you built 1-2 marines and then a reactor/techlab for your factory, WALL OFF. Bunker is really nice - a wall without a bunker might not help you enough, but a bunker without a wall is not great either. The worst thing that you can do is walk to lowground, put a bunch of scv's there, put a bunker down there with nothing else to wall off, and then not wall from your main to your natural either. You have layers of defense and the more you do well, the more chance you have of immediately shutting them down~
DO NOT DROP or split your army, faced 3 terrans recently who rushed a starport and lifted all their stuff up to go drop and then died immediately to 2gate adept attack that they scouted perfectly 3-4 minutes ago because 50% of their army is a quarter of the way across the map. The wall stops you from being vulnerable until prism comes out, which opens another timing window when terran isn't usually set up properly on 2 base and can lose some stuff before stabilizing
my opinion so far is that it's a little crazy how much damage you can do if the terran fucks up - but that he doesn't have to fuck up, i don't expect any good terran to leave themselves needlessly vulnerable. A lot of the damage that can be done comes from the super early warp prism following the 2gate adept, because of the 2 second warp in and ridiculous 6 range pickup which are two stats that could/should be adjusted if it were a problem.
Without that, adept would be a little overtuned (bit too good for 100/25, it can survive a widow mine hit which is HUGE) but several things could be different:
with wall, initial attack can't do anything. Sentries break down walls better than adepts do, which is to say basically not at all. without prism or against certain terran openings, you can't do followup damage easily
i see the potential for damage, but with warp prism not having 6 range pickup, warp being ~5 seconds instead of 2 and adept cost being adjusted - and most importantly, terrans on ladder having any idea how to open or scout rather than opening randomly - it wouldn't be a huge problem.
sry a little repetitive stuff there, just wrote out at once without a particular plan - and my experience is a little biased and undercertain, because LOTV archon is just sitting at the top of GM (as regular masters players, especially my friend who is at the high end of masters) and having 5-10 minute queues into what is often plat-dia league tier players. We'd win regardless of balance, though zergs are giving us the most problems
It's SUPER OBVIOUS to scout. If he wants to make the first 2 adepts immediately, he'll have to put the second gate in his first or second pylon 63 seconds before having any unit out capable of killing an scv or scout of any kind, you can see it. Depending on the map, a reaper can also arrive, scout and immediately leave, but that's less safe unless you know your timings.
If you either expanded from 1rax or you built 1-2 marines and then a reactor/techlab for your factory, WALL OFF. Bunker is really nice - a wall without a bunker might not help you enough, but a bunker without a wall is not great either. The worst thing that you can do is walk to lowground, put a bunch of scv's there, put a bunker down there with nothing else to wall off, and then not wall from your main to your natural either. You have layers of defense and the more you do well, the more chance you have of immediately shutting them down~
DO NOT DROP or split your army, faced 3 terrans recently who rushed a starport and lifted all their stuff up to go drop and then died immediately to 2gate adept attack that they scouted perfectly 3-4 minutes ago because 50% of their army is a quarter of the way across the map. The wall stops you from being vulnerable until prism comes out, which opens another timing window when terran isn't usually set up properly on 2 base and can lose some stuff before stabilizing
my opinion so far is that it's a little crazy how much damage you can do if the terran fucks up - but that he doesn't have to fuck up, i don't expect any good terran to leave themselves needlessly vulnerable. A lot of the damage that can be done comes from the super early warp prism following the 2gate adept, because of the 2 second warp in and ridiculous 6 range pickup which are two stats that could/should be adjusted if it were a problem.
Without that, adept would be a little overtuned (bit too good for 100/25, it can survive a widow mine hit which is HUGE) but several things could be different:
with wall, initial attack can't do anything. Sentries break down walls better than adepts do, which is to say basically not at all. without prism or against certain terran openings, you can't do followup damage easily
i see the potential for damage, but with warp prism not having 6 range pickup, warp being ~5 seconds instead of 2 and adept cost being adjusted - and most importantly, terrans on ladder having any idea how to open or scout rather than opening randomly - it wouldn't be a huge problem.
sry a little repetitive stuff there, just wrote out at once without a particular plan - and my experience is a little biased and undercertain, because LOTV archon is just sitting at the top of GM (as regular masters players, especially my friend who is at the high end of masters) and having 5-10 minute queues into what is often plat-dia league tier players. We'd win regardless of balance, though zergs are giving us the most problems
This is generous of you. Walling versus Toss is now mandatory, for sure, but the Warp Prism Adept timing is ridiculously brutal ... any insight here you can offer?
NOTE: My Archon team is also in GM--somehow--and we're definitely not GM-level players.
EPT
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