EPT2, I prefer air units untouched, and i want to increase the anti-air power. However, Pararistic bomb needs a nerf: make it unstackable, decrease its effect range and its DPS.
Discussion - Air Units Too Powerful in LOTV - Page 2
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Thinh123456
70 Posts
2, I prefer air units untouched, and i want to increase the anti-air power. However, Pararistic bomb needs a nerf: make it unstackable, decrease its effect range and its DPS. | ||
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Isarios
United States153 Posts
P Carriers T Liberators Z - meh. Maybe a slight slight decrease to Parasitic Bomb damage, but it can be easily mitigated and isn't A-move. The other two are literally A-move. PvP - You have no good options if the other person goes air and you went Robo. Also reduces value on Robo significantly. The reason why Hots worked out with robo is that massing tempests or carriers wasn't possible. Now, carriers are very massable, and once again, really annoying in mass. ZvT - Mass liberators is freaking annoying. FREAKING. ZvP - With HT and Carriers, you really don't have good options for killing mass Carriers. How about give Corrupters more armor so they can tank and focus fire better? | ||
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Estancia
Korea (South)335 Posts
On October 17 2015 11:02 Isarios wrote: ZvP - With HT and Carriers, you really don't have good options for killing mass Carriers. How about give Corrupters more armor so they can tank and focus fire better? The two units that kill mass corruptors quickly for protoss are high templar and archons. Considering storm damage goes through armor and armor doesn't do much against archon's high damage, I think there needs to be an alternative. | ||
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oOOoOphidian
United States1402 Posts
On October 17 2015 09:29 brickrd wrote: i think a more elegant solution is separate air supply. supply nerfs won't ultimately fix the dichotomy between "good enough to make/too strong when massed" vs "not overpowered but also not worth making". it's like the new swarm host - they're theoretically useful, but the supply nerf, which was intended to end massing, also made them not really worth having separate air supply will never actually happen, but i truly think it should happen The current swarm host would be fine to make if it cost a lot less. At the moment it's just a combination of many weaknesses in the unit that make it not viable. Relative to their power, they feel like they take up a fairly reasonable amount of supply for a harass squad, but they are just overpriced given that is their only use. The supply nerf to swarm hosts along with the cooldown forcing them to be useless in typical engagements makes massing them a bad choice. They can easily accomplish similar nerfs with other units that they want to avoid people turtling to and massing. | ||
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YyapSsap
New Zealand1511 Posts
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Aiobhill
Germany283 Posts
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Big J
Austria16289 Posts
avilo is right on the issue, but it's deeply rooted in the game and given the economy the focus is always on unitcounters, thereby forcing you to have viable AtG to counter dominant GtG. | ||
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RoomOfMush
1296 Posts
On October 17 2015 17:24 Big J wrote: yeah, but that's an inherent design issue when you put powerful AtG units into an RTS game. If such units are to be viable then there cannot be an easy solution to them. It also has massive balance implications. Say the broodlord is counterable by a "goliath". well then Im not going to make costly T3 unupgraded broodlords when you have factories. the way to kill your tankline then has to be frontal attacking, the very thing we dont want with positional units. avilo is right on the issue, but it's deeply rooted in the game and given the economy the focus is always on unitcounters, thereby forcing you to have viable AtG to counter dominant GtG. It doesnt have to be hard counters. BW has proven that A2G and G2A can be balanced with the goliaths and carriers. Sometimes the Carriers won and sometimes it was the Goliaths. It came down to skill. But in the open ground with even footing the G2A always had the upper hand and that is how it should be. Air units should be strong for abusing the terrain not because they are simply strong in general. Furthermore, carriers were a really good air unit because you didnt need to actually kill the carrier itself, you could kill the interceptors. Killing interceptors cost protoss money and makes the carriers weaker to the point of being useless. This is not possible with broodlords or liberators. You HAVE to get up close and personal with these guys. | ||
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Big J
Austria16289 Posts
On October 17 2015 18:09 RoomOfMush wrote: It doesnt have to be hard counters. BW has proven that A2G and G2A can be balanced with the goliaths and carriers. Sometimes the Carriers won and sometimes it was the Goliaths. It came down to skill. But in the open ground with even footing the G2A always had the upper hand and that is how it should be. Air units should be strong for abusing the terrain not because they are simply strong in general. Furthermore, carriers were a really good air unit because you didnt need to actually kill the carrier itself, you could kill the interceptors. Killing interceptors cost protoss money and makes the carriers weaker to the point of being useless. This is not possible with broodlords or liberators. You HAVE to get up close and personal with these guys. economy, economy, economy | ||
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Penev
28474 Posts
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Steelo_Rivers
United States1968 Posts
On October 17 2015 06:17 cactus555 wrote: i agree that air units are too strong but some of the points you make are straight up silly, for example hydras arent supposed to counter storm, and that toss army is way more expensive than 55 hydras so its rly dumb to say this to make a point about air being too strong His point is that Hydras are meant to be Anti-Air in a zerg ground army. Not sure why the Zerg didn't build corrupters but, but I guess that furthers his point as to the only counter to air units in the game is other air units. | ||
Destructicon
4713 Posts
You could even experiment with hydras having a small aoe on their anti-air attack, that way they could be a significant threat to muta balls and might be able to kill interceptors faster. You could even buff the anti-air damage of both units if its needed. The change just has so much potential. | ||
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deth
Australia1757 Posts
From a terran perspective, I think there should be consistency in design - parasitic bomb should work like HSM, where you have the opportunity to micro and mitigate/negate the damage completely. Vipers trivialise sky armies. Protoss air is problematic as well, carriers counter the units that should theoretically counter them and tempests feel like they're purely in the game to ensure that BC's aren't viable. | ||
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avilo
United States4100 Posts
Just bumping this thread again for serious discussion. A lot of people might not be aware the game is like this, or might not believe that it is. Imo blizzard needs to make ground anti-air units stronger and perhaps nerf the health of things like carriers/tempests/broods/liberators or something. | ||
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varsovie
Canada326 Posts
On October 17 2015 19:31 Steelo_Rivers wrote: His point is that Hydras are meant to be Anti-Air in a zerg ground army. Not sure why the Zerg didn't build corrupters but, but I guess that furthers his point as to the only counter to air units in the game is other air units. Hydras isn't the only, nor the most effective Z G2A unit. There's the Queen, that while have lower DPS can still pack quite a punch with upgrades, has long range, good mobility (for defencive purposes) and very good standing value with injects, they also can boost with said injects your other AA like corruptors, hydras or spores. Seriously do not underestimate mass Queen. There's the infestor, fungal is quite strong vs clump of air, more so when combined with other AA (remember queen's range nad the fact fungal stops units?). Yes the DPs of fungal isn't the biggest one, but it has AoE which can work very well vs air units since they stack so much in SC2, or at least force 'em to split and lose a lot of alpha dmg. The infested Terran isn't worth much since WoL though. There's the spore crawler, one of the highest g2a DPS, it has it's issues of course but can greatly complement a ground Z army since it's basically free on supply, can relocate and cost no gas. They're a good deterent and even a good offencive unit if you have creep spread. And finally there's the ravager ability, but I don't think it could be considered more than a stop-gap or a lucky hit vs small amount of air units. And finally there's the lings, most unit composition people listed here lack in mobility, mass ling multi-prongs harassment can buy you enough time to tune up your own composition. Or heck even win you the game... Quite frankly if your answer to any "late game mass air" is pure hydras, unless you have 90 drones to back it up go back to bronze. | ||
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TimeSpiral
United States1010 Posts
On October 21 2015 22:45 avilo wrote: Are people really OK with LOTV essentially boiling down to "whoever spams their OP air units?" Just bumping this thread again for serious discussion. A lot of people might not be aware the game is like this, or might not believe that it is. Imo blizzard needs to make ground anti-air units stronger and perhaps nerf the health of things like carriers/tempests/broods/liberators or something. I personally am not okay with it. I didn't like it in super late-game TvT in WoL and HotS and I don't like it now in all three matchups. TvT - mass air battles are boring, and essentially come down to composition. If someone builds too many vikings and not enough liberators, or someone gets a luck HSM, or someone builds too many battlecruisers, etc ... It then almost always tech switches back into a ground battle. It's a little too difficult to split vikings effectively against mass liberator, and liberator crushes Thors pretty hard. TvZ - Parasitic Bomb is absolutely devastating. It essentially requires you to get lucky with EMP, or catch them out of position with an air flank or something like that. It is also extremely difficult to deal with the tech switch when mass air is such a threat. The amount of Starports needed to deal with Zerg's mass air becomes a huge issue if you trade in the air, or maybe even take a small air victory, but take heavy losses. The tech switch is too punishing, because you have no idea what it will be. If it's mass Ling Ultra and you have a crippled air army and some ground support, you just die. If you heavily prepare for a ground tech switch and they fake you out and just mass air again, you just die. I get that the tech switch is part of Zerg--and I like that--but with the utter dominance of mass air, combined with Ultra's strength against bio, it just makes the situation feel impossible. TvP - Carriers wreck everything. I mean, there is no more explanation needed. I tried to start a thread about this, but the mods shut it down for balance whine. I'm glad it's now seemingly on the radar anyway, and Blizzard is talking about and so are all the high level streamers, and this OP. Carriers are too strong. I don't know the other matchups well enough to comment on them. SOLUTIONS BRAINSTORM I'm just brainstorming here. I don't portend to know how to balance this out. And keep in mind, no major design changes are going to be made, so any solutions has to be tweaks at this point. Terran - Liberators - Nerf their damage to armored air units. Zerg - Viper - Remove consume. Make it more costly to cast their extremely powerful spells. Protoss - Carrier - Remove the "release interceptors" ability. It's wildly OP. The interceptors absolutely melt everything, and finally clearing them up actually means nothing, because the Carriers were nowhere to be seen, and have a full fleet of instant death machines ready to go again. These are things that can be easily and quickly changed, and tested. | ||
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Big J
Austria16289 Posts
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TimeSpiral
United States1010 Posts
On October 22 2015 00:11 Big J wrote: Air unit movement changed to regular movement without overlap. Problem solved Maybe. Might make it mush worse. Imagine vikings that automatically formed an enormous concave? Imagine how much more difficult it would be to kill air units from the ground if splash was essentially useless because the units pre-split? I like the idea. It sounds simple, and elegant, but I'm just trying to work out unintended consequences. | ||
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Destructicon
4713 Posts
On October 21 2015 22:45 avilo wrote: Are people really OK with LOTV essentially boiling down to "whoever spams their OP air units?" Just bumping this thread again for serious discussion. A lot of people might not be aware the game is like this, or might not believe that it is. Imo blizzard needs to make ground anti-air units stronger and perhaps nerf the health of things like carriers/tempests/broods/liberators or something. No, of course I'm not ok with it. I already posted a small suggestion above regarding Hydras and Archons. I think they should switch some of the anti-air power away from vikings and corrupters into Thors, Archons and Hydras. I'd even go as far as suggest some HP nerfs to all the capital ships like -50 HP to BLs, Carriers and BCs (maybe even more for Carriers and BCs). Of course that can't happen in a vacuum because the Colossus would possibly become to good again, so I'd also suggest removing that while we are at it. | ||
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DarKcS
Australia1237 Posts
This is assuming you try something like droning up your 4 bases and then trying to max on corruptor / queen once you see toss rushing to 3 stargates behind 4 cannons at every choke because you know with photon overcharge and smart positioning pressure usually does jack all and you just go up against pure carriers (ignoring voids sans the initial safety one, if they make too many voids they delay Critical Mass on carriers severely they are harming themselves). Storm absolutely rekts everything Zerg (Mass festors/queen/viper) with feedback and obs and splash. Once they get this out in tandem it becomes even more difficult to engage in to it. So how do you beat Toss once they have carriers? Let's assume you're in a position to take engagements, In HOTS economy, Zerg would easily have 2-4k bank to remax on corruptors after trades, in LOTV if you're floating 2k you're doing something wrong. Since Twitch vods basically don't exist, it's hard to link good examples but I just saw Harstem's game on "the New Scrap Station" today where he lost his 2 new mining bases and his ground army (sans a warp in of 12 stalkers after) from a broodlord timing, but Z had NOTHING to beat back the 4 carriers that came out to save Toss after the dmg was done, and he was able to remake his 2 nexus with 0 risk and go on to win easily. For sake of the rest of my examples though, I'm going to only imagine games where toss turtles straight to carriers in the safest most abusive way possible (which many Protoss are doing on ladder), not epic long games with multiple tech switches and windows where carriers aren't a threat or aren't in critical mass. So what's the OPTIMAL way for Z to deal with them in LOTV? Is anyone actually thinking about this stuff? "Wait for Korea" is the worst possible answer here and I'm sick of hearing that. You need something like 4 consecutive AoE viper hits (someone confirm?) in order to put a carrier in the red or kill it, but leash range alpha hits EVERY viper after casting if toss doesn't mismicro his units, and this doesn't take in to account feedback denial either when considering your chance of connecting. Then there's also the fact it takes time to consume and carriers are so big (unlike voidrays) their tendency to declump and ease in selecting and spreading them once you see vipers cast, it's not consistent at all. Even if you had 100% chance connecting, spreading carriers during an engagements unlike other units in the game don't involve a DPS reduction dynamic from move attacking. Just another thing that makes carriers brain dead A-Move. Let's just assume that sitting under your spores with queens and what not is the only safe position to be in once Toss is moving about (and they don't just go fuck that I'll go in to your main over deadspace, kill all your tech and recall when I'm scared of your army moving). Does this mean that you need to hit carriers clumped THREE TIMES during an engagement without fail? How many times are you going to get close to his army in that span of time, assuming you immediately engage to recast before shields have regen'd and his army hasn't fallen back or not? And when you say fuck that, I'll just abduct 1 or 2 at a time, how do you deal with the fact interceptors can not sit over an area indefinitely at huge ranges, that vipers die basically instantly after casting almost every time, that feedback and obs and positioning smartly can reliably guarantee the worst options for the Zerg player, that storm deals with mass Hydra, infestor and queen and muta and clumped corruptors...there's just nothing that stays alive long enough against alpha shot carriers with respawning interceptors between AND during engagements. | ||
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