SC2 could be so much more - design and balance

As we all know, there are/were numerous balance and design issues with Starcraft II throughout its life. Broodlord/Infestor, Blink all-ins, 4 Gate PvPs, Swarm Hosts etc... there were plenty of things that could have been prevented if only Blizzard acted in time, some may say. But to me it seems like all this crap could have been stopped long before it reached ladder: with internal testing and spending some more time thinking how a things work and why they work that way. In this thread I would like to discuss design and balance, along with rules that in my opinion should be followed when intoducing new units to the game and rebalancing the old ones. Before I start, I think it is in good manner to introduce myself.
I'm a 26 year old who focused most of his life playing computer games in his spare time. Be it RTS like Age of Empires II, Warcraft series, SC:BW, Dune, Command and Conquer games. Turn based strategies like HoM&M series or Age of Wonders II. Hack 'n' Slashes like Diablo 2, Torchlight. 4x games like Galactic Civilizations II and Civilizations. Also RPGs, be it Final Fantasies, Witchers, Elder Scrolls or D&D based games.
I'm a hardcore gamer, completionist, min-maxer, powergamer, but even more then gamer, I am a designer and a modder. I used to make my own maps, campaigns, mods, classes and balance tweaks to games I play. Working with numbers, as well as analyzing and understanding the game brings me sometimes more joy then playing it. My latest finished project was Community Based Update for Galactic Civilizations II on which I worked on as a part of a small team of passionate gamers. I know a bit on how the balance works.
Having said that, I never achieved anything in SC2. I played through campaigns and only some 1v1s and 2v2s on my friends key. I wasn't Masters. Not even Diamond. I was at most Gold/Platinum when I played SC2, as I could stand my own quite alright playing vs other Platinums. I never played more then 50-60 games - so I didn't have time to improve and get to Masters to satisfy people who are going to call on my low rank. But I have been watching games and lurking on the forums for almost 5 years.
Some may say that if I don't have Master/Grandmaster in SC2 I should not try to balance the game as I lack game knowledge. I disagree. Skill should have nothing to do with balance and design, I do not believe that a Coach needs to be better then the Player. A 60 year old football coach who can hardly run can still be a great coach.
I play Brood War occasionally. Around 20-30 games every season or two on iCCup. I don't mass games. My mechanics are bad - as a Zerg I average 70-85 APM per game. And yet I could hit easily C- if I played more then 60-70 games and was serious about it. Some of you probably laugh. C- or C is a noobland and nothing to be proud of. Well... most people of my level have 150-200 APM. Even in D+ almost noone has less then 120 APM, and if they do, they're Protoss, not Zerg lol. But back to me: I'm 2-3x slower then my opponents and I still beat them, so yeah, I'm proud of myself. For my mechanical lazyness and weak Macro I make up with game sense, strategy, tactics and mind-games. I'm a much better player then most people with the same speed as me (even people in D- show more the 85 APM). Mechanics in Brood War matter but not as much as peple think. Some people overestimate mechanics - Savior was known for his low APM, yet he used to be the best Zerg around.
But that's enough about mechanics and my credentials.

LoTV is going to be released soon. Many people jump on bandwagon flaming Blizzard. Some for the right reasons, some not - I didn't come to blame or defend anyone, but to present my thoughts on game balance and design, on what went wrong and what should have been done differentely. I believe it is too late to fix some core issues without upsetting the balance so late into Beta, we don't have the time before game is released. The time in the beta was spent on simple balance patches, while the only big changes were 12 worker start and "half patches".
Starcraft 2 was and still is in need of drastic changes. We had a chance when we had gone from WoL to HotS, but apart from new units and some balance patches, core of the game had the same flaws, and some other flaws were only amplified. Some of the design choices and omissions left us with engine that cannot perform basic things that SHOULD have been in Starcraft 2 from the start, like moving shot for air and maybe some ground units, or things as dead simple as turret tracking for the Siege Tank.
In here, I want to present my thoughts on the state of the game, provide alternative solutions to common problems, or simply highlight problems for the Blizzard/Starcraft community to see.
There is a lot to talk about, and I spent couple (5-8) of weeks now (25/10 at the time of writing) writing this down. Lately I'm a busy family man, and I do not have as much time as I would like to have for this project. If there are things that have been fixed in later patches, and I ramble on about something long gone, please forgive me. I will proof-read everything once I decide it is the time to post, but there is always a chance that something will slip.

First I would like to talk about Overkill Protection / Smart Fire (SF). SF prevents units from firing if total damage of units within range is greater then their targets HP. In other words, if you have 10 Siege Tanks within range of a damaged (10 HP) Zergling, only one of them will fire at it. If you had 20 Marines, only 2 (enough to 1 shot it) would fire. SF works only for units dealing instanteneous and ray damage like Marine, Siege Tank, Thor's and Viking's ground attack, Void Ray, Immortal etc.. It doesn't work with projectile based units. Smart Fire prevents the loss of effectiveness of units in larger groups - you can compare our SC2 10 HP Zergling being dropped on line of Siege Tanks - only one will fire at it, the rest will wait for other targets to get inside their range. In Brood War this feature didn't exist, and all the units would fire simultaneously, wasting damage, or simply, overkilling.
Logic dictates that the longer the cooldown of unit's attack is, the more it benefits from Overkill Protection. Imagine if Siege Tank had 100 damage but every 3 seconds - every wasted shot hurts. Single wasted shot is not as hurtfull if it deals 16 damage every 0.5 second.
Why overkilling is a good thing in a control oriented game like Starcraft 2? It does 3 important things for us:
- Reduces effectiveness of Deathballs by reducing damage increase per every added unit. Adding 1 more tank to a group of 5 increases damage potential of a single tank more then adding 1 tank to a group of 20. Removing Smart Fire discourages Deathballs by a small degree.
- Some shots are wasted and by that overall DPS is reduced. With less damage, units die slower, there is more time to micro and position your units during the engagement. Many complain about fights in SC2 ending in a matter of seconds - even as removal of SF would probably not increase average time of a fight by more then 10%, 6.5 seconds is still better then 6.
- Also, new unit interactions and micro can arise. Zealots/Zerglings dropped on top of sieged up Tanks or even sending single units to force overkill and protect your main army, or sending a ling to retreat a Lurker burrowed in Siege Tanks range etc.
Removal of SF is not a cure to Deathball play or game ending fights lasting less then 5 seconds, but it helps slightly with these problems.
Notice that so far I spoke almost only about Siege Tank, it is because I want to come back to some of those points later when I touch its subject, but the general idea applies to the rest of the units with Smart Fire, but it is easier to visualize it on Siege Tank model.
tl:dr
Overkill / Smart Fire makes deathballs more efficient and contribute to deathballing.

Force Fields were hated since their introduction. Formerly to help Protoss in their early game, so Protoss wouldn't die to rush tactics, but also to split enemy army effectively halving DPS of Zerg/Terran and winning the game for Protoss. Blizzard tried some bandaids for it - increasing burrow speed, making Massive units destroy FF, and lastly, designing a unit with a sole purpose of fighting FF (the unit in question now is being redesigned as a Liberator/Tank/Lurker siege stopper which I think is silly). Lets not to forget about Photon Overcharge and lately Pylon Overcharge, which don't just help with defence - PO simply shuts down any kind of early game pressure/harassment. Implementation of a hero unit - Mothership Core (MSC) - is also a widely debated.
But why does Protoss need early game protection, if most units in the game have same or similiar stats as they had back in Brood War, where Protoss was fine or even was the primary agressor? Because Warp Gate (WG). Let me explain - Protoss production is centered around Warp Gate and that is the "standard" Protoss production rate of units required to keep up with Terran and Zerg. Someone thought that Gateway is not enough, that P needs a new fancy way of making units - and that is fine by itself. Now, Warp Gate produces units faster then Gateway and can spawn units anywhere on the map. Spawning units on the map is fine as an upgrade, but Gateway being so inferior to WG is a bad design. There is no benefit of choosing Gateway over Warp Gate. None whatsoever. Producing early game units from Gateway is inefficient - Zealots are warped 35% faster with WG, Sentries by 15% and Stalkers by 31%. It means that before switching to WG, Protoss produces his units at lower rate then other races. While WG is balanced in mid and late game, Gateway is lacking. Terran can produce much more units thanks to Reactor, while Zerg with Injects can spend a lot of extra larva on attacking units. Gateway in the meantime is still just a Gateway. Because Gateway production is slow compared to increased production of Zerg and Terran, and everything was balanced around Warp Gate build times, Protoss cannot field same amount of units as effectively as other races. Early rushes and timing attacks would kill Protoss outright because Gateway production without Chronoboost is not enough compared to what other races have. That is, in my opinion, the reason why FF is invulnerable, easy to spam and comes so early in the game.
So what about Mothership Core and Pylon/Photon Overcharge? Its existence is a result of three separete issues: one of the WG (already discussed), one of drops (which will not be discussed just yet), and the last one being the Chronoboost. Heresy! Or is it? Lets think about what Chronoboost does: it speeds up the rate of production (economy), alternate production (army), or technology. You can be very flexible with it:
- Boost Probe production, gaining an edge against players who play too safe
- Boost upgrade/gates/WGs for a powerfull timing attack/all in
- Boost Probe production while going for a less powerfull timing attack but better economy to gain lead in mid-late game
- Boost a unit production and its upgrades/tech for harassement
- Boost a random building (Nexus/Cybernetics Core/Robo) to fake your techpath/build.
And many more, but boosting one dimension (army/tech/economy) comes at a cost of falling behind in another.
Protoss without Chronoboost is mediocre when it comes to economy (no MULE, cannot convert army production for extra probes like larva), army production or tech/upgrades. Yes, attack/shield/armor upgrades can be boosted and finished faster then those of other races, but because of a possibility of CB, crucial tech has been slowed down in order nerf all-ins. Think about how Blink and WG research time was increased as a result of strong cheese play. But, both of those (or at least WG) are necessary for Protoss just to not fall behind and stay in game if playing standard. Both are painfully slow to research if you're not all-inning. But can still hit quickly if you CB them, which led in the past to exploiting it in the Blink all-in era. This is why Protoss cannot be balanced as long as there is Chronoboost - standard play can be very economical but at the same time is too slow to keep up with the enemy army and tech, resulting in P having to rely on FF, MSC and its PO for defence in the early game. Yet in a same way harass and all-in/cheese is way too strong if it is boosted. There is no middle ground in Protoss strategy. And that my dear is exactly why so many people don't like to play agains Protoss - because with Chronoboost, there are many more timings to which you have to adapt in order not to lose vs Protoss, making their cheese/all-ins stronger, but not helping Protoss as much while playing standard. And in order to give Protoss some defensive advantage, MSC with Photon Overcharge was introduced.
tl:dr
Protoss being gimmicky is a consequence of Chronoboost - either cheese is too strong, or standard play too weak, as balancing between the two is next to impossible. P needs Force Field and a hero unit (Mothership Core) with Pylon cannons to play standard game and not to die when if not cheesing. Gateway producing units at much lower rate then Warp Gate is also a big contributor to this (or rather, Larva Inject, Reactors and Techlab switching make Gateway production much worse in comparison).
With Chronoboost the PvP looks like safe>>>aggressive>>>greedy>>>safe, without it will be more like safe>>aggressive>>greedy>>safe, which would reduce a bit the coinflip nature of PvP, even if just a little bit.

Lets get back to the Force Field for a moment. They are bandaid, most will agree, but they don't have to be this way. I advice against removing Force Fields, but champion for their redesign. I've seen those threads many times, someone bringing up same complaint now and again - Force Fields (FF) preventing micro on opponents side, or rather micro being one dimensional. And I fully agree with it - you cannot micro agains FF. You can either go back home because you're not getting up that ramp, or you can retreat your units so that you can take the engagement with the Protoss in a position where you have enough room to manouver around FF with the rest of your units - simply flank from different directions... which takes a lot more APM and skill then simply throwing a couple of FF on the ground in a neat line.
Are the Force Fields OP? That is not what interests me and I have no desire to find out. I'm more interested in how to make it so that the opponent can micro against it without using a gimmick like Ravager bile.
- Give Force Field 3 armor, 80 HP (for example) and change it to a neutral unit (destructible) when spawned. It has to be targeted manually (so your units will do nothing unless ordered to attack) so there is some basic micro involved, has to have enough armor to make it viable against early cheese/rush, but HP low enough to be disposed of relatively quickly with higher tiered units. Its armor should not be classified as light, nor armored, nor building, so no bonus damage is applied to it, and all units big and small, anti-light and anti-armored destroy it equally fast, or equally slow. Armor and HP values are subject to balance ofc.
- You could also allow Sentries to target friendly Force Field with their normal attack and "heal" it by attacking it. You can even make it so that FF have low HP, a relatively high armor (2-3), and Sentries "heal" is necessary to keep FF up. With low amount of HP (30-50) it could be destroyed easily and Protoss will have to target different FFs to prevent the enemy from getting up that wide ramp on a silly map.
In my opinion it gives some opportunity to micro against the FF without making it terribly bad and easy to break through. Also second suggestion offers some counter micro for the Protoss player as well. It gives players some more degree of control, some more micro opportunity, while keeping FFs job intact. It also allows a band-aid of Ravager a chance to be redesigned as a more "zergy" unit, to fill some other role in Zerg arsenal. A Zerg unit with long range and MOBA like skill shots just doesn't fly with me, but that is my personal opinion.
If this Force Field is not enough for the Protoss to protect themselves against super early rush openings, maybe Protoss should consider altering their openings a little? Or simply some of the build times should be slighly altered to help them? Or even slight buff to Gateway units? Anything is possible, but i firmly believe with a bit of creativity Force Fields won't be hated so much, if their design is altered in a good way, allowing counterplay and micro on both sides.
tl:dr
Force Field prevents equal micro opportunisties, and requires much more APM/skill on the opponent side to play against it. Making it vulnerable could create interesting interactions while still keeping it as a good defensive spell.

While we are discussing Force Field, I want to address something else that comes out from Sentry. Guardian Shield (GS). In no way an ability with "fire and forget" mechanic is good for a game like Starcraft. Even Blizzard realized it when they changed Immortals shield ability to auto-cast. Guardian Shield though is still a "click to buff", a no-brainer ability. It's so easy to use it that a monkey could do it. It's one of those abilities that are being turn on by default without thinking. So here's my proposition, a very simple one.
Guardian Shield
- Cast on the ground where the Sentry is located, or with a small (1-2) range cast, does not follow the Sentry
- Benefits only ground units (to prevent enemy air units from flying in)
- Benefits enemy units as well (to make it less zero thinking cast)
- Radius can be lowered from 4 to 3 to make each GS more valuable or the energy cost could go up to 100
This way there is at least a minimum of thinking required when using GS because enemy can force you out of position and gain buffs. It also can fail miserably vs melee units unless you block them from getting inside: more micro involved for both players as Protoss tries to deny any melee units the bonus armor and other player actively tries to get his melee inside the GS.
But why nerf Sentries abilities, if Sentry is being used less anyway? What actually prevents players from building Sentries early in the game is their really high gas cost. I believe their cost and maybe stats should be lowered. For example, 50 mineral and 50 gas cost, but a bit lower speed (2.25->2), shields and health (both 40->30).
Another ability that works exactly like Guardian Shield is Void Rays Prismatic Alignment. Remember how Void Ray had to charge up before, with different charge levels, each increasing Void Ray's damage by small amount? Boy it was interesting to watch Marine vs Void Ray micro. It was a much better design - there was also some degree of decision making involved, on how do I charge, on a builiding or workers? When to engage, and when to wait for a better opportunity. Void Rays were more interesting, now you just press the button. This means that the only decision making boils down to "should I used the power up, or not yet in case he is only baiting the Prismatic Alignment?". Maybe Void Rays had some balance problems, but small changes with numbers would be sufficient. For example:
- Void Ray range down to 5 (so it gives Marines better chance to actually do something), with maybe a 100/100 (or even 125/125) +1 range upgrade in Cybernetics Core.
- cost and supply nerfs reverted
- 3 stages of charge:
1. 6 (+4 vs armored)
2. 7 (+6 vs armored)
3. 8 (+8 vs armored)
- each charge up lasts for 3-4 seconds, if Void Ray does not attack anything within that period, it loses one charge
- everything else about the ability remains the same.
- numbers are subject to balance of course
tl:dr
Guardian Shield is the same kind of a brain-fart ability like previous iteration of Immortal Shield (or Barrier, or however it was called). Same can be said about the Void Ray, which used to be interesting to watch, and forced some micro on both sides, and its problem was maybe only with the numbers like range, damage etc.. "Press X to benefit" spells should have no place in Starcraft 2, they could be altered to involve at least a minimum of decisionmaking or micro.

Warp Gate warping time and units taking more damage when warped in. Blizzard wanted to balance defensive and offensive warpins, and came up with a solution which is not elegant and it only gives new players another set of numbers that they have to remember. Different warp-in times for Pylons out in the open, different for Warp Prism and different for Pylons powered by Nexus/Warp Gate is bad. How are you going to notify a completely new player to this mechanic? Send him to a website? All the information to understand the game should be in the game. And tooltips which take half the screen prove only that you have messed up somewhere.
I have seen this sort of tweak on the forum before and I thought of it myself as well. Why not just make it, so the bigger the distance from the Nexus (completed of being built), the longer it takes to warp-in units. There can even be a small tooltip just by the cursor that says how long it will take to warp-in. There could be a 6-10 range around Nexus that warp-in units in fixed time (1-2 seconds), and after that the time increases with range away of that radius. Simple, elegant solution. With it, there is no need to have different times for Warp Prisms and Pylons. It is easy to understand for newcomers.
tl:dr
New players should not be bombarded with information that is there because someone wanted to complicate things. Stuff should be easy to remember and understand, instead of having players resort to googling for anwsers. If there is a simple solution to a problem, use it, but don't overcomplicate things.

How can Protoss defend against the drops? The most common defense is using Photon Overcharge/Pylon, which requires a hero-like unit in the game. It could be moved to the Nexus, or some more spammable unit like Oracle/Sentry, but in my opinion a "click to prevent harass and early game rush" ability is a bad design. If one of the races in the game needs such a band-aid, there is something wrong with this race's production if it cannot keep up with others - which I believe I covered enough of when talking about the Gateway/Warp Gate. But even then, how can you defend against the drop if your units are out in the field fighting the enemy on the frontlines? Photon Cannons.
But they are expensive, you need at least 2 to cover your mineral line, and they don't protect you from the drops at all. In Brood War, a Marine is 2 shotted by a Cannon - but in SC2 it takes 3 shots to kill a Marine. Another thing is, Marauder with its +armored damage demolishes cannons with ease, and it is able to tank considerable amout of damage. Cannons are not as good at protecting as they are in Brood War - Hydralisks have been replaced with Roaches, Marines got Marauder support etc. Cannons are not able to dish out the damage they need to protect the base. They are more tanky, yes - they have extra 50 shield and 50 health, but its the damage that is the problem - Cannon cannot kill a unit that is being healed with a Medivac.
Yet at the same time Cannon cannot be buffed in damage without increasing its cost, or reducing its total HP. Increasing the cost will make FFE much harder to pull off, while reduction of HP will make it vulnerable and useless against bigger groups of units. If I could rebalance the Cannon, I would decrease its total HP from 300 to 250, but increase damage from 20 to 23-25. That is more offtopic, because either way Cannon is not sufficient to protect your base.
What unit can be warped-in, and can single handedly deny, or at least protect the mineral line untill reinforcements arrive? High Templar that is. But HT does not have enough energy to cast the Storm, right? Well, what about if we bring back Khaydarin Amulet, after all, offensive warp-ins have been severely nerfed with the warp-in time.
Khaydarin Amulet upgrade would help Protoss immensily with drop defense. Because of long warp-in time, High Templars won't be used as much for harassment anyway. There is no reason for HT not to have an energy upgrade like other spellcasters.
tl:dr
Bring back Khaydarin Amulet for High Templar - since it cannot be used offensively or in harassment as it is so easy to pick it off when it is warping-in, the main reason why it was removed in a first place, but it will help Protoss defend the drops and hopefully we will take one step towards removing some of the band-aids that just don't belong in the game.

Smart Cast (SC) is in my opinion bad for the game, but please listen to what I have to say about it before making any judgements. Some may say we should not use archaic UI, that Smart Cast is a step into right direction - to the future. But there are also steps backwards that are preventing Starcraft 2 from reaching greatness:
- Because of how easy it is to cast spells and abilities, spells are easy to use and their potential increases with each additional spellcaster. Without SC every additional spellcaster gives you less value for money, as every additional unit requires more and more APM and it becomes excessively harder and harder to use its abilities with each extra unit. SC causes casters to be easily massable - Raven clouds, mass Infestor, you name it, those were the cause of Smart Cast and great scaling of casters, without the drawbacks like lack of APM to control them.
- SC necessitates the nerf of abilities or buffs to core units. Think how Psionic Storm went from 112 damage in Brood War to 80 in SC2. How Fugal Growth lost range and later became projectile, how EMP drains 100 shield instead of compete depletion, how Marine got so much extra health since Brood War to make bio viable vs all compositions, and how radius of EMP and Storm has also decreased. But it doesn't end on AoE abilities - single target spells are equally easy to abuse: Snipe has gone from 45 damage to 25+25 vs Psionic, Neural Parasite gone from 9 to 7 range. All of the abilities that deal damage or immobilize/disable got nerfed pretty hard. Not only because of the pathing/unit clumping - otherwise single target spells would be unchanged. Its the ease of casting that magnifies the problem of clumping, or even is the problem itself.
Whithout SC you have to find your High Templar, click on it, press the hotkey and move mouse back where you want to cast Psionic Storm. If you want to cast another storm but your HT depleted his energy, you have to select another HT, see if he has enough energy, if not, find next one, if yes, move mouse back and cast a new Storm. With SC you just select a group of units press the hotkey and click like a madman where you want your Storms. Without SC a pro can dish out at most 3, maybe 4 Storms per second. An amateur probably 1 or 2. With SC both can throw even 10-15 Storms or more per second (depends only on how fast you can click and how much energy is stored). Skill floor rises, but skill ceiling drastically decreases. A Plat/Diamond (maybe even Gold) player can throw Storms/Fungals/EMPs in same way and with almost the same effectiveness as a pro. And when a casual player can do same job "microing" spellcasters just like a pro, you end up with..
No wow factor. "If I can do almost the same thing as a pro, I'm not going to care" mentality. It doesn't matter that a pro can macro at the same time, or send a Dropship and unload it somewhere in opponents base, because those actions are not as clearly visible to the viewer. What's worse a Master player can do very similiar job to a pro when it comes to microing units, and also shift que a Dropship to attack a base before a fight. And while it is true that pros will do it a bit better, is not something to be excited about because the gap between a pros and an amateur execution is not big enough. A spectactor won't see how good a macro of a player is when there is a battle going on, and people don't care about things they don't see. People are also less concerned with pure mechanics - you don't hear teenagers screaming when a pro Zerg keeps energy on his Queens below 25 throughout the game, the teenagers scream when they see sick micro. And I'm not talking about ability/spell spam, which can be done by high Diamond players with same ease as what pros do it, but about things like splitting units, and shifting unit positions throughout the engagement. Unfortunately, because the fights are over in seconds and it's better to simply let units do their job without disturbing them, all the spectactor see is abilities being thrown and units dying in seconds without positional micro involved. Simply put, Marine vs Baneling micro is interesting to watch because it involved micro that is harder to perform then ability spam. It could be even more entertaining if it lasted a bit longer then 2 seconds, but that's different issue.
Second issue is that weak but massable spells cause abilities to become less impactful. Less exciting to watch. There's less interest. And it's bad viewer experience. Units barely take damage from a single spell, so spells are less impactful. Because of the easy casting, multiple spells being cast are less spectacular because even lower level players can do that. To get the point across, lets bring some analogical example. If in basketball the ring was twice the size, we would get much more points, but scoring an individual point would be so much less exciting to watch.
The game has been balance around Smart Cast since WoL, so rapidly cutting it out would shake up the balance quite a bit. Probably it's not worth doing it so far into the development. But I sincererly hope that if Blizzard makes another Starcraft or Warcraft game, it will be without Smart Casting, as it is bad for everyone. Pros don't have as much to differenate themselves from amateurs, and spectactors get less fun from watching. Both those things are not good for the games future.
tl:dr
Smart Cast means spells need to be weaker, and weaker spells are not exciting to watch or play with. Smart Cast means a Master player can be as good as a pro when it comes to caster micro, which further adds to "meh, if I can do it like a pro, then pro are not that great".

Infestor as a whole is quite underperforming. While we most definetely don't want the revival of Broodlord/Infestor, fact is Infestor could use some rebalancing and redesigning.
Fungal Growth seems hard to balance out on the first glance. On one hand, immobilizing effect is deadly, but it is hard to get a good shot with the projectile. The ability therefore becomes "hit or miss", meaning that having only 1 Infestor is gambling and you need more of them to ensure that you use Fungal Growth (FG) effectively, or rather at all. In my humble opinion, casters should be on the battlefield as support units - High Templar is never massed, and you only need a few for them to be effective. Even a single HT can do its job fine, storming units or feedbacking Dropships. You cannot say the same about the Infestor. You need a number of them to be effective, unless you wait for the opponent to make a mistake and not look at his army sitting on creep for longer then 2 seconds. Neural Parasite on the other hand is totaly worthless as its range prevents it from being useful. Infected Terran is weak without armor and attack bonuses.

FG prevents micro from the opponent, which is bad in a game that focuses so much on control/micro. It is frustrating to play against. If it lands, it becomes one of the scariest abilities in the game. Imagine a Deathball of units being massacred by spread out Lurkers and Banelings without a way of escaping. Yeah, in right circumstance it is very powerful. Still, to me, any ability/spell that removes micro without good reason is bad for the game, especially since Smart Cast makes it so easy to carpet bomb units with spells. Therefore, I believe a much better design for Fungal Growth is to not immobilize, but to slow down units affected by it by 50% just like Concussive Shells. In case of units with speed upgrades, any unit would just revert its movement speed back to unupgraded kind, or we can just slap 50% movement reduction onto all and be equal. To balance it out, the projectile speed could be increased by 75-150% and duration changed to 8-12 seconds. The projectile should also follow the unit it has been cast on, or we can just go without the projectile altogether and revert it to how it used to be, an instant effect spell. With such changes, even a single Infestor has a bigger chance of getting his FG on his target. At the same time, enemy can still split/micro his affected units, only not as effectively because of the of the slow effect. While projectile should be fast, range of the FG should not be bigger then 9 or 10, with 9 being a good starting point to see if range can stay or should be increased or decreased.
On another note, while we stay with Fungal Growth, I want to say that having a cheap spell (75) dealing small amounts of damage over relatively short period is bad because it encourages players to mass a certain caster. Remember when Fungal was instantenous, you locked down a group of marines and then casted another Fungal to kill them, without a chance for the Terran to micro against it? Yeah, exactly. If Fungal did more damage, but over a longer period, massing of Infestors would not be as efficient. But then again FG would have to have a higher energy cost to balance extra damage and duration, no? And if we did that, wouldn't we end up with some warped version of a Brood War Plague? Yes, we would.
Plague is a good spell actually, much better designed then FG. While it deals 300 damage over 25 seconds (ingame seconds), it doesn't kill the unit, leaving it with 1 hp instead. That made the Plague worthless to cast multiple times, contrary to Fungal Growth. In SC bio can be healed, mech repaired, zerg can regenerate, while Protoss at least doesn't suffer shield damage. Units are not immobilized, which means you can save them if you micro correctly and retreat. In that regard, Plague is a superior design. So how can we take good things about it, and mix it into Fungal Growth? Lets recap with previous changes, and keep everything in one place. Reworked Fungal Growth:
- Range up to 9.
- Much faster projectile (+75-150%) or the projectile follows targeted unit (prefferably both).
- Slow effect instead of immobilize effect.
- Slight radius increase (+10-25%)
- Duration increased to 8-12 seconds.
- Damage over 8-12 seconds (real time seconds), increased to 60-90 or 40-60 (7.5 or 5 damage per second) but
- Fungal Growth doesn't kill the target, leaving it with 1 hp.
- Units with 1 hp hit with another Fungal Growth cast on them can either die or FG can have no effect, subject to balance.
- Possibly FG needing and upgrade before its usable, or an upgrade for FG to deal its damage in the first place.
With such set of effects FG will be used a lot more as a "poke and cast on enemy deathball if you can", but should still get a lot of screen time on the battlefield. Opponent is granted an option to micro with the Fungal Growth effect on, and skill is not stupidly underpowered or overpowered, which is better for everyone. Balance can be achieved tweaking last 4 points, without playing with range/speed of projectile which I think should be long/fast accrodingly.
On the side note, duration of engagements could be increased by changing Fungal Growth from dealing damage to slowing attack speed, with similiar rules to what Ensnare done in Brood War. I believe longer engagements are better and more interesting to watch then putting more and more high or "terrible, terrible" damage abilities into the game so everything dies within seconds, but this might be too much of a change for Blizzard, plus it is too similiar to Ensnare, and we all now Blizzard is very recluctant when introducing old stuff into the game. Which is a shame, because Ensnare could be much easier to balance and make for better ability to watch it on streams and play against, as it increases duration of battles and isn't so overpowered by making units completely immobile.
tl:dr
Fungal Growth is a pain to balance because of the immobilizing effect. Changing it to do something else (like slow effect) makes it a lot easier, also a couple of changes to the way Fungal hits the target makes even single Infestor strong, and reduces effectivenes of massed Infestor vs a couple of them.
Also, cheap spells that cause damage are not good because they encourage masses of spellcasters, which are uninteresting to watch compared to normal unit interactions and movement.
Bonus: Less buffing and damaging abilities, more nerfing "status effects" is a better philosophy because it prolongs engagements.

Neural Parasite has gone from 9 range to 7 range, or in other words, from useful to useless. What if Blizzard could try range 8 for this spell? It's still beta, so we could try it for at least a week or two, no? If it is too strong, we could tweak it in some other way then nerfing range. Simple thing like increasing energy cost to 125 or even 150 could balance them out. Yes, making such a big energy cost can cause turtling with Infestors in order to save up energy and to mass NP enemy army with some timing push (I don't see it, but everything is possible in SC2 meta lol [sarcasm]), but keep NP on 7 range and you will almost never see it. Range 8 and increased energy cost seems like a good tweak to otherwise unused ability. In the unlikely even that Neural Parasite is still bad on 8 range, maybe casting while burrowed should be implemented. There are so many ways of nerfing and buffing skills, not only range/radius/damage - even 7.5-8 range but cast while burrowed would help to get more airtime for this interesting ability. First time I saw a player (don't remember who, maybe Fruitdealer, dunno) NP terran ghost and then casting EMP on the rest of the Ghosts to prevent them from sniping Broodlords, I thought "wow, this is cool". I think that was back when Infestor Broodlord with spores and slow pushing wasn't invented yet, and the start of the show was the Neural Parasite. It was exciting to watch, will Ghosts snipe/EMP Infestors, or will the Infestor get the first shot of his Neural Parasited Ghost? Unfortunately, NP was cut from 9 to 7 range somewhere after that game.
And this is why I don't like Blizzards approach, they either overbuff or overnerf things. They don't reduce range by 1 to see if then need to adjust it further, but by 2 or they don't increase energy cost, but instead make ability deal half its original damage etc.
tl:dr
Dear Blizzard, it would be great if you nerfed OP stuff in time, but gradually introducing elegant solutions, and not after months of waiting but slapping interesting spell or unit into oblivion with nerfs.

Infected Terran... I think it's good if they are not used much, and I would not change them in any drastic way. Infected Terrans with upgrades were suffering from same design flaw as Swarm Hosts - free units, which are never good for the game. Free units have to be weak by definition - they do not cost anything, so they have to be weaker then units with a cost. That creates the "useless in low numbers, but strong in critical number" playstyle that we have also seen during the Swarm Host era. Free units are either useless, or cause turltling if they are not.
Infestor could get some new ability - personally I would love to see the return of Infest Command Center, which would spawn larva at half or full rate of a Hatchery, but without the option of the Inject, if it stays in the game, and maybe the option to build the Infested Terrans there for low cost.
Or simply replace it with Ensnare or Parasite of Brood War Queen, if there are no changes to Fungal Growth. Parasite, while not contributing much to army vs army fight, is a really cool idea that softly counters units by revealing their location, removing them from the main army or causing them to be used in suicidal attacks to get rid of the "map hacking" unit(s).

Next thing I want to discuss is the focus on air units and making it possible for "skytoss" or anything "sky" to exist in the first place. Lets compare air units of Brood War for each race:
Protoss:
- Corsair: AoE AtA, some ground utility with an upgrade (Disruptor Web)
- Scout: weak AtG, strong AtA
- Arbiter: Caster/Support
- Carrier: Capital ship
Zerg:
- Mutalisk: all rounder
- Devourer: designated tank/AtA superiority battleship
- Guardian: slow siege unit
- Scourge: suicidal AtA unit
Terran:
- Science Vessel: support unit/caster
- Wraith: all rounder, weaker then Mutalisk, makes up for it with cloak
- Valkyrie: AoE AtA
- Battle Cruiser: Capital ship
As you can see, each race has sort of an all rounder (Muta, Wraith, Scout), but other then that there are notable differences. Zerg has the only siege and suicidal unit (Guardian and Scourge) and Terran/Protoss have the only Capital ships. Both Capital ships funcion differently: Battle Cruiser is a tank with powerfull ability, while Carrier is a more of a "stay in the back" unit.
Zerg has superior all rounder (Mutalisk), but both T and P have great AoE AtA (Valkyrie, Corsair) that deal efficiently with it. Both of those AoE AtA are vulnerable to Scourge, until they reach critical mass of 5-7. Terran and Protoss have the only spell flying support, with Arbiters being much rarer and not massable as opposed to Science Vessels.
Zerg can only maintain air superiority if combination of Mutalisks and Scourge cloning is used, because Devourers come way to late to be of any use (unless late game PvZ happens). Scourges are strong but need to be microed and split before they can pose a threat to a pack of T and P AoE units. If the game lasts long enough, Devourers can fight back and regain air dominance. By then Terran and Protoss can switch to an all out Capital ship production, with Terran Capital ship in need of support to fight against mass Scourge, and Protoss Carrier in need of detection against cloaked Wraith attacks.
The only forms of flying harassement units are Mutalisk and Wraith, and while Mutalisk beats Wraith in effectiveness, Wraith has cloak which can at least even up the fight and forces micro on both sides.
Simply put, there is a good degree of diversity between units, and every race feels unique having access to different types of air units.
The only harass units in the game are:
- Mutalisks (they come late and are relatively easily repelled if scouted)
- Wraith (come early but can be very easily repelled if scouted)
- Corsair (only vZ, and can be repelled with ease if scouted)
All of those units are still easy to defend against even if you don't prepare specifically for them, with the exception of Mutalisk which can end the game if not scouted. Wraith and Corsair might put you in disadvantage, and Corsair need the support of other units (DT, Reaver) to do game ending damage.

Now lets see what units each race has in SC2:LotV
Protoss:
- Pheonix: AtA, counters light, some utility with the pick-up ability, can be a harass unit
- Void Ray: AtA, AtG, counters armored, formerly counters massive, formerly used only as a harass unit
- Oracle: Mostly used as a harass unit, can help with detection as a Support/Caster
- Tempest: Siege unit
- Carrier: Capital ship
- Mothership Core/Mothership: Hero unit / band-aid / Capital ship
Zerg:
- Mutalisk: All rounder
- Corruptior: designated tank, AtA, counters massive
- Broodlord: Siege unit
- Viper: Support/Caster
Terran:
- Viking: Mainly AtA, counters armored, can be used as a harass vs Z
- Banshee: AtG, mainly used as a harass unit, can be a part of certain compositions, ability to cloak
- Raven: Support/Caster
- Battle Cruiser: Capital ship
- Liberator: Siege unit, AoE AtA vs light
My point is, races become less distinctive and more rounded. Everyone has a siege unit (Liberator, Tempest, Broodlord), designated AtA (Corruptor, Pheonix/Void Ray, Viking) and a caster/support (Viper, Raven and Oracle/Mothership/MSC). There is a total of 4 Protoss units that can be used for harass, 2 for Terran and 1 for Zerg. Everyone has some sort of vs armored unit (Viking/Void Ray, Corruptor to some extent). At the same time AoE have almost dissapeared until LotVs introduction of a Liberator (Valkyrie with AtG) and melee AtA in nowhere to be seen (poor Scourge).
Air units are stronger, easier to mass and complement each other more then ever. Before, only Mutalisks could stand their own against Protoss and Zerg ground based anti-air, now Banshees, Void Rays, Liberators and of course Mutalisks are all at least somehow efficient vs ground unit compositions, not only as harass/cheese builds.
Total of air units increased from 12 to 15, but air units are much better at their roles then they were before - Guardian was much weaker and fragile then Broodlord, Valkyrie is a Liberator without ground mode, Viking and Banshee is a Wraith split into 2 units, each stronger at their job, Corruptor comes earlier then Devourer making it much more common, Mothership is an improved Arbiter (albeit Recall to Nexus instead to Mothership doesn't feel so good). Every air unit is used now and again (maybe Tempest not as much, but whatever). In Brood War Scout and Devourer were not seen very often, so the total number of air units probably looks more like 10 vs 14/15, which is a 40-50% increase. Don't get me wrong, having a good variety is good for the game (if units don't overlap), but because there is so many of them, races lose their weaknesses and sometimes it may feel like ground units act as a support to air.
Air units should be less effective then ground units. A 100 minerals 100 gas air unit should always lose to a 100 minerals 100 gas ground unit. It should be quite even only vs 75/50 or 75/75 in one on one fight. The reason for this is air units basic design and feature: they ignore terrain and are able to move freely around the map. This increase in mobility compared to ground units necessitates them being less cost/supply efficient then ground troops. Without it, there would be no point in producing any ground army, because why would you, if you can make go to air and ignore wall off and simply march/fly into opponents base. So yes, air needs to be weaker then ground. Mobility is a big balancing tool that is underused or largely ignored in Starcraft 2.
Air vs Air battles are boring to watch. It is hard to distinquish which player has the advantage, positioning is not important, micro is practically invisible to the viewers, and its almost impossible to disengage. It is a chaotic mess and that shouldn't have place in a game like Starcraft, or at least not too often. Air vs Ground might be interesting if there is micro involved on both sides, But not ability micro, which I already covered when talking about Smart Cast. We need movement micro, but for that the moving shot is needed, something that hasn't been implemented very well in SC2, because the main and defining feature of all air units, moving-shot, has been, oops, forgot to be coded into the game engine. Seriously, I cannot phatom how some of the basic things that defined what made Brood War great have been just... well... wasted? I hope that in the future, when Blizzard or any other AAA developer makes another RTS, they won't make the air units as bland and OP as in Starcraft 2 games.
The reason I bring this up is because Blizzard's approach to put more and more air units into the game scares me. It makes me worry about the future of Starcraft 3 and Warcraft 4. End game compositions consisting of Broodlord+support, Liberator+support or even mass Carrier are alright, but not if it's the one and only, the ultimate way of playing the game.
tl:dr
Not every game should end with someone going air, such things should only happen in specific matchups or only in 1/10 games, but no more. Ground based armies are infinately more fun to watch.
Air units should be less supply and cost efficient then ground units, by as much as 50%, and no less then 20%. Otherwise everyone gonna transition into air anyway.
For more information about moving shot, I direct you to this article by LaLuSh: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/433944-depth-of-micro

Banshee deals almost 19.2 DPS to workers, Oracle 21.6. 3 Hellions 1 shot workers, same as one Widow Mine. There is so many things that are broken in this game and I do not know why has nobody brought this up before, or at least I haven't seen it in the threads I read. Why do you think Banshee and Oracle has so much DPS to be able to kill a worker every 2 seconds? Why Hellions are able to roast 10 workers with a single shot? The reasons are simple - and one of it is worker mining efficiency. Now I'm not talking about HMH or DH or worker pairing. I'm talking about how much minerals/gas can a worker shift on its single trip.
Why is it relevant, you may ask. Lets think about it for a second: a single worker shifts 4 minerals. Because Blizzard wanted good looking mining and implemented worker pairing, and worker AI was improved from previous game, mining efficiency was too big. The income was out of control because a base saturated with 16 workers yield much more minerals in Starcraft 2 with improved worker movement/AI then in Brood War. This was problematic because it altered all unit and tech interactions and Blizzard was not prepared to work from scratch. And who can blame them, units were mostly balanced in Brood War, there was no need to start from zero when designing the Marine, Siege Tank or Gateway build times. The stats were filled in, bulk of balance work was done for them already. So instead of making AI less efficient in mining, or altering how long workers mine a patch, they reduced how much a worker yields per trip. Seems like simple and sensible thing to do, does the job, income can be easily altered, everyones happy. Yet, that same exact change had a profound effect on worker killing and harassment effectiveness.
No longer killing a single worker cuts 8 mineral per trip per worker, now you need to kill 2 workers to achieve same effect of reducing your oponents income. As we know, and what has been further investigated by hicctl in his thread (http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-strategy/495035-overlooked-facts-of-harassment), the more workers you kill, the bigger effect it has on your opponents economy. So one would think, if individual worker mines less then it was in Brood War (4 down from 8), then strenght of harassment from Brood War is inadequate to deal sufficient amount of damage to opponent economy to justify investement in tech/unit/timing. Or in simple words, because now you need to kill almost twice as many workers to reduce enemy income by same amount, harass units need to be stronger to compensate for the cuts to your own economy when you decide to go for an agressive opening instead of a greedy one. But there are two other reasons why Oracle is killing worker in 2 seconds.
Banshee having such a high DPS is most likely a result of this exact reasoning (increased worker to income ratio), but high DPS could also be attributed to early game defense. Banshee, which is supposed to be a form of Wraith replacement, needs not only to score kills, but also avoid newly introduced units and techs that are encountered in almost every game. Even when if Banshee build is not scouted, there is a big chance of some kind of defence waiting for it anyway. Marines being reactored increases their production rate by a big margin with a relatively low investement, also bio is a very common style which provides good AtA. Queen provides a basic AtA for the Zerg and at least one is protecting each base. Banshee simply had to be a better unit in order to deal any kind of economical damage. If Wraith with its Brood War stats was in the game instead of the Banshee, Wraith openings would simply fail because some base defense is almost always there by default. The only way for Wraith to be viable could be in TvZ matchup, where Wraith can not only try to score some Drone kills (1-3, probably no more then that), but most of the time only some Overlord kills and scout denial as a result. So instead of a Wraith we ended up with high range, high AtG damage dealer which can cloak. And it would be fine if we didn't need to make the AtG damage so big to make the unit playable.
Another contributor is lack of a good moving shot. Wraith has terrible stats but it is still a good unit because it can be microed against Hydralisks. Its ground attack is very weak, but if it was any stronger, the unit would be broken and OP. Could make much a better core unit and be included in more compositions, if and, only if it was not microable as it is but with stronger AtG. And same rule applies to the Banshee and Oracle as well: If there was even a chance to micro units better (again, moving shot), range of those units along with their DPS could go down a bit, making it still good in harassment role without the "terrible terrible damage" which causes those units to obliterate workers in seconds. They would be even more worthless as a part of an army, but then again if there only were some late game upgrades for those units (simple example: Banshee cloak being constant), that would not be the case. All within reason ofcourse. And again I have to stress "late game" upgrades, if any, and not for cheap.

Mining difference, bigger chance to meet opposition and less microability of air units makes it somehow necessary to increase harass unit's effectivness, otherwise who would open with an aggressive build, if it can very easily fail and it is hard to perform, when if you choose less aggressive opening you end up with much bigger army/economy in the mid-game. Banshee could be made less strong vs ground, but given an air attack, making it still good as a harass opening vZ. It would simply be like a Wraith with better ground attack to account for the Queen.
I got a bit distracted, so I'll get back to the point I wanted to make: harass units may have high DPS because Blizzard thinks that harass units will be put against the Queen or MSC or a pack of Marines - and often they are in the lower leaques. But better playes (Silver+? Gold+?) know when to engage and when to avoid taking damage, which is what a harass unit job is by definition - kill as many workers as you can, avoid taking hits and get out. So when there is an Oracle, or a Banshee, or a flying Tank, or Hellions that are designed with DPS big enough to kill enough workers when a Queen or Photon/Pylon Overcharge damages them, the problem arises, because if you rush those units and skimp on economy(Chronoboost, Techlab/Reactor switching, cutting workers etc), there simply might not be enough, if any, defense at all in time to prevent you from killing half of the workers that you opponent has in total. Some may not build an extra Queen so early and die. Some may go for a Mech build and die without Marines, or make too many Marauders to protect themselves from some other stupid cheese/all-in like Adept attacks and get killed by air units. Some may have their Stalkers somewhere else then mineral line for a split second. Because even if you have the correct units to counter such cheese, if your units are out of position you will lose a lot before you move your forces back, and the stupidly high DPS vs workers is to blame for it.
tl:dr
Blizzards mistake was trying to change the formula: workers mining at different rate, units that everyone has to build (Queen, MSC), that are used as base defense, and increasing damage vs workers in so many places to counteract that. It just doesn't work very well as a whole, and there are always things that are going to be unbalanced until the "default" base defense is removed from the game, or until killing a single worker matters more, but killing a whole bunch of them relies more on your skill and not on build order win.

High Ground Advantage (HGA) should be in this game, because it creates much better system to have defenders advantage in the game. Without it we have Queens that have been buffed over the years (range etc), or MSC and its "click to kill cheese and aggression" button. There are band-aids to help players defend their bases against easy to perform rush builds. I believe that HGA should be in the game. Now, some people say that RNG (random number generator) should not have a place in Starcraft 2, and I have seen other propositions to implement it. I'll go through the 2 most common that I have seen on the forums, before I
Units shooting uphill have lower damage: Now this one could work in a very good way, or disastrous one, because of the high armour values on some units, and low damage values on others. It all depends when what is calculated. Lets say, we have a Marine shooting a Roach with upgrades, 2 armor total. Lets say our Marine has only 6 damage per shot, and the penalty for shooting uphill is 33% (to make it rounded for the sake of the argument). Our Marine does now only 4 damage per shot, and only 2 damage per shot to our Roach. So now our Marine does only 2/6 or 33% of its original damage, making defenders advantage very big. If, on the other hand, we could make it so the armor is counted first, our Marine would deal 4 damage (6 - 2 armor), and the reduction of 33% could kick in after that, reducing it to 3 (4 * 66%=3.666666..=3 rounded down). Second example is much better, because it doesn't punish low damage units and is more or less equal to all kinds of units.
Units shooting downhill have increased damage: While is has the same principle as the one above, it magnifies the problem of engagements ending in few seconds, which gives less room for players to show off their micro, and frustrates newbies who send their army on a-move somewhere and didn't look for 3 seconds, loosing their entire army, It's simply bad.
Range reduced shooting uphill or range increased shooting downhill: They're not bad per se, but they don't increase the time of engagements by any sort of clearly visible magnitude, while they can be very annoying to play against and may be confusing for new (maybe even old) players because you have to "remember" 2 different ranges for each unit - level and uphill/downhill. There are simply better options.
Random miss chance when firing uphill: Or in other words, the Brood War high ground mechanics, This mechanic can significally increase the time of engagements, which I and probably the majority of community will agree is good for the game. It is exciting because you don't know if one player will beat another players army that already in position. There is a big "what will happen next", the uncertanity, which is what keep people watching the game. The suspense is what keeps the view count high in every sport, and this is missing in Starcraft 2, because once you see a small army on a hill being pushed by a bit bigger army attacking it from the downhill, you can tell who is going to win. With random miss chance, you cannot always tell who is going to win, which is believe is good. At the same time I have to tell about the flaw of this solution - it can be frustrating when your Tank or another long range unit misses 3 times in a row, and you cannot open up the passage to some part of the map that has been cut off by the enemy units. It is exciting, yes, but sometimes can take enjoyment away.
I believe the two best ways to implement HGA is random miss chance and reduction of damage when shooting uphill, but only when applied after the armor penalty. Random miss chances advantage is randomness and not being so punishing to low damage units, while reductions advantage is reliability. We need HGA because positional play can be very interesting, not boring. There is a lot of focus on mechanics in Starcraft 2, and strategical play is suffering. Bringing HGA could give us the much needed defenders advantage (think PvP and all the band-aids to prevent 4G vs 4G that came later), and hopefully with it in place, some of the band-aids can go away. And if the band-aids go away or are nerfed at least, maybe we can also nerf harassment units damage a bit here and there.
With HGA in the game, I believe it should a bit less up to Blizzard, but more to the map-makers to balance the game. Small changes to maps can skew the races balance a lot, I would be great if the SC2 map-makers looked at what worked in Brood War maps. Not to simulate it, but to learn from it and its mistakes and evolution. Learn how change to expansions ramp or entrance can change the balance, how having open middle or chokes change the matchups. Think before maps are designed, and write down what works and what doesn't. Simply make better maps.
tl:dr
Bring some form of HGA to the game, it can make the game only more, not less exciting. Also, design the maps with HGA in mind.

I already covered it a little bit, but I would like to come back to the issues of the Siege Tank (ST). Fist of all, positional play is a lot less viable in SC2 then in other games. Some of it is because there is no High Ground Advantage. Some of it is because of the way maps are layed out, with multiple paths going everywhere, not allowing you to get and hold an access to expansions. And without positional play, there is no Mech. Yes, there are people that are happy that Cyclone is a unit that shoots when you move it around. People that are happy with Siege Tanks being picked up in Siege mode and dropped in it as well. But I think we lost something that was dear to many strategists. The real Mech style. What Mech style in Brood War represented, was a slow moving, largely immobile ball/cloud of death, that was very, very strong defensively, and could be broken by abusing its vulnerability (lack of mobility) by expanding more then Mech player. Mech player didn't have to be super quick, or have the best micro in the world. He had to outsmart his opponent with strategical play and careful placement of his/her units. It was truly so much different style than highly mobile Bio play. And that was the true Mech.
Mech was composed of units that supported each other by each doing it's dedicated job. Tank was the main ground damage dealer, with its powerful AoE, but was vulnerable to air attacks, was immobile and ineffective when not in Siege Mode. Goliath was a dedicated long range Anti-Air unit, with less then impressive, slow and weak ground attack. Vulture was the most mobile unit, but also with lowest DPS - but thanks to mines, Mechs big weakness of friendly fire could be reduced thanks to it ability. Melee units were disposed of with mines. Air units with Goliaths. Tanks destroyed other ranged units on the ground. Science Vessels provided detection and could be used to snipe other casters with EMP. They supplemented and helped each other, but the chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Attacking with air units without sufficient amount of Goliaths ended bad for the Mech. Masses of flanking melee units tore through Goliaths and Tanks without mines and cheap Vultures to block them. Catching the Mech ball when the Tanks are unsieged put Terran in big disadvantage. It was interesting to watch and play with, or play against.
The "problem" with SC2 mech is that it doesn't resemble that style. Mech in SC2 is too similiar to Bio, or the way Protoss play. There is much less strategy involved. If everything looks and plays in the same way, it becomes less interesting. There is also less choice for the players to differenate their style of play.
Mech doesn't need Goliath from Brood War to work like it used to. It needs units with clear job descriptions, weaknesses and different movement speeds, and also less overlap between them. Flying Siege Tank is therefore an anti-thesis of Mech as a style of play because it makes it possible to ignore Tank's two biggest weaknesses. And SC2 "mech" is not really what Mech is supposed to be like.
- You can change Tanks position without going first into the vulnerable unsieged mode, and you cut significant amount of time doing it, greatly increasing Tanks mobility. Not to mention, it looks fucking stupid.
- The Cyclone is not a bad unit vs air, but it is not weak vs ground either. It doesn't need support of a Tank that much to fight ground, while itself is not that great in protecting Tank lines from hit and run tactics because of its range and not the biggest DPS vs air.
- Hellion/Hellbat protects against masses of light units, but that is it. It is only thanks to unit clump that they can protect the Mech ball from massable melee units (Zealot/Zergling).
- Widow Mine does similiar job as a Vulture, protecting the ball from melee. It is also ridiculously strong vs clumped air, while still being great vs ground. It overlaps with Cyclone anti-air, and Hellion/Hellbat vs melee and friendly fire reduction. Also, having high (5) range, it overlaps with Siege Tank, doing high damage to a single target while in its primary, immobile attack mode.
- Thor can both block enemy units with its size and it is quite alright vs air. It therefore overlaps with the Cyclone and Widow Mine anti-air job, Hellion/Hellbat and Widow Mine job of preventing melee from overruning Tanks.
- Raven doesn't snipe casters in any way. PDD makes ranged units suck even more vs Tank line. Turret provides some high DPS defense, but has to be placed on unoccupied tiles which makes it unusable in battle, and usable only for turtling/harassment. Seeker Missile had a lot of reworks, current one being too slow to prevent casters from dealing damage, and only used to annoy ground forces. But even then, Raven is a good support unit all around.
- Ghost can snipe casters, both with its snipe ability, and with EMP rounds. Unfortunately, casters and their spells are nerfed massively because of the Smart Cast, so anti-caster is not as neccessary as it was in Brood War. Ghost is not a bad addition per se, but doesn't contribute from mech upgrades and requires a spare techlab on Barracks.

There is a set of rules that needs to be followed in order to make it viable.
1. First rule is simple, we need 4 basic "mech" units to fill up 4 positions:
Anti-ground glass cannon unit that need to be babysitted
Anti-air unit
Melee stopper/surround preventer/damage "tank"
Support detector/caster killer
2. Anti-ground unit needs to be highly efficient and "OP" compared to other units in its price range. It cannot have any means of attacking or protecting itself from air.
3. Either anti-air, anti-ground, or both needs to be highly immobile and slow. Along with the one above, in means that Mech player cannot push out early and rush the opponent, but has to gather the composition of efficient anti-ground and other units solely for its protection.
4. Melee preventer is a unit that is either quite big in size, has a high DPS but very short range attack, or has some sort of slow/distraction effect on opponents units. Or a combination of those traits.
5. Melee preventer has also low HP, is light, not armored, and has relatively low cost and low to no gas cost - it is the first line unit that is hit most by Anti-Ground unit's splash attacks.
6. Support unit has next to no combat value on its own, is used as a detector, has relatively high gas cost, is highly mobile and counters casters.
7. Mech units in one core (vs ground, vs air) or more categories need to be a bit more expensive in cost but also more supply efficient then average unit. This makes Mech this scary force that takes time to prepare, but 200/200 Mech force needs to be killed with larger supply of units (240? 260?), but 200/200 Mech force should also cost more then 200/200 force made up from other, non-Mech units.

So how can we fix mech? Here is my proposition, which is one of many, maybe not the best one, but as long as you work with above points, you shouldn't have too many problems.
Some ideas may seem similiar to what Brood War did, it is intentional, because it simply did work. Some things are balanced taking into account removed macro mechanics, which I would like to discuss later.
Tank:
- 35 damage + 35 vs armored when sieged
- no more Overkill Protection/Smart Targeting
- cannot be picked up when in Siege mode OR after being picked up in Siege Mode, it is dropped unsieged with 2 second cooldown before first attack.
- siege/unsiege time increased by 10-20%
- 10-20 HP less
- 2-2.5 supply
Fills the role of a heavy DPS hitter that is very immobile and need to be babysitted, as it can be easily killed on its own. Removal of Overkill Protection makes it scale worse in the late game (or when massed), but overall buffs make it better in the early game. If it is too strong as a rush opening/cheese, Siege Mode research can be reintroduced.
Cyclone:
- cost down to 125/75
- can be reactored
- HP down to 130-140
- 16-20 air damage (+2 every upgrade), 1 second cooldown, 7 range
- 10-13 ground damage (+1 every upgrade), 1 second cooldown, 6 range
- Lock-On (or any other name, Steady Targeting would be fine for example) is a researchable passive ability that increases air range when Cyclone is not moving up to 9-10 range over time (example: +1 range every 2 seconds), and reduces air range back to 7 when Cyclone is moving (example: 1 range lost for every 1 second of movement)
- 2-2.5 supply
- no longer automatically attacks while moving
- has turret tracking
- same movement speed as a tank or 0-20% faster
Fills the role of a anti-air unit. Cost, HP and supply is reduced to allow it to be produced early in the game without having to wait for a good economy first. Ground attack is much worse to prevent it from becoming a unit which is good vs everything, which was a bad design. I also believe that automatic shooting on the move is bad as it doesn't encourage micro, it makes the unit mico for itself without players input which is just plain stupid.
Hellion/Hellbat:
- 75 Mineral cost
- Hellion can deploy a single Widow Mine, which cannot be replaced. Mines cannot be deployed in Hellbat mode.
- an additional upgrade increases available mines from 1 to 2 (or 3, subject to balance)
- radius and size increased by 5-15%
- Hellbat is no longer biological
- Hellbat HP reduced to 120 from 135
- Hellion targeting range down to 4 from 5 - fire length remains the same
- Hellbat base ground damage down from 18 to 14-16
Widow Mine:
- Drilling Claws removed from the game
- doesn't target workers and casters
- 100 splash damage
- single target damage removed
- Overkill Protection removed
- can aquire clocked units, but do not reveal clocked units (allows mine drag)
- range down to 3
- targets only ground units
- mine unburrows when locking on target (0.75 second lockdown duration), allowing it to be targeted without detection
- each mine can attack only once, and pounces onto its target during which time it can still be targeted and destroyed
- mine has 30-40 HP
- mine still follows the target it locked down on even if it exits range before lockdown is finished
It works like Vulture from Brood War while still being relatively different. It is cheaper then current Hellion -> more massable, but also bigger in size to block melee units better. Widow Mine is changed to work like Spider Mine -> with Siege Tank and Liberator another source of "mobile" positional control unit is uneeded, as the units overlap too much. Removal of anti-air prevents it from being a "build 2-3 mines and your Tanks are invulnerable to air with a few Cyclones/Thors/Liberators" formula. Changing it to non-reusable mine brings more decision making and strategy to its use. Additional upgrade can be added, so that once burrowed, mines can be unburrowed and repositioned.
Raven:
- gains EMP from Ghost at 100 energy cost, has to be researched first
- PDD has 30 hp and 250 energy, each point of damage shot down/blocked reduces energy by same amount, PDD loses 5 points of energy per second until it stops working. PDD requires 75 energy to cast and follows the unit it has been cast on - can be cast on a unit to follow it or on the ground as normal.
- Auto-Turret removed from the game
- HP up to 175-185
- movement speed buff reduced by 10-20%
PDD is a more balanced version of the current ability, which is discriminatory - it is bad vs fast attacking, low damage units, but makes high impact, high cooldown units efficiency a lot less useful. It should also be a lot less useful in turtling. EMP move to Raven is going to be discussed in more detail in "Ghost vs High Templar - two hard counters gone wrong". With the Parasitic Bomb, Raven needs more health, not speed that has been buffed so much not so long ago - a unit that is so expensive should never be so fragile, unless its abilities have a longer range then of a similiarly priced unit. Every race has an air unit that specializes in anti-air, so Raven's HP has to be increased at least to 175 imho.

Ghost is a unit that is used to counter High Templar with EMP. Problem is, High Templar is a unit that is used to counter Ghost with its Feedback. That produces a bad unit interaction, in which Ghost hard counters High Templar, and Templar can hard counter Ghosts if and only if they are not microed correctly. Snipe/EMP can instantly dispose of Ghost. Feedback can kill a Ghost outright. Snipe/EMP/Storm/Feedback is not a micro game - it is a Clicker Heroes game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clicker_Heroes
You click, and the spell is almost instanteneous. Range of each spell predeterminates who is going to come out ahead, as EMP usually hard counters HT, hard. In the same way, Feedback hard counters other spellcasters - Infestors, Vipers and Ravens, but also normal units that happen to have abilities like Medivacs or Banshees. I already discusses earlier the Smart Cast in SC2, and I believe without it, those bad interactions would not be as common, as every Feedback/EMP has to be cast individually, forcing players who will never break some of the APM barriers to make a choice then casting Storm or Feedback. Spellcasting becomes more taxing, but spells can be made stronger, and everyone should still be happy.
But lets go back to Feedback. Where does it come from, and how did it look like? It comes from Dark Archon in Brood War, an expensive 3-tier unit that costs 250 minerals, 200 gas, so it is more expensive then an Ultralisk or Reaver, and only Battlecruiser and Carrier cost more. So yes, it is an expensive and rare unit. What about Feedback? In Brood War it has 10 range, costs 50 energy and other than that, it is the same spell as in SC2. So how having Feedback fits with the Starcraft 2 Smart Cast on a relatively cheap unit that is High Templar? It works in Brood War because of the following reasons:
- it is only available on a high supply unit (4 is a lot in brood war) and very expensive unit (250/200)
- it is not massable because of above and lack of Smart Cast
- it is not massable because Dark Archon has no damage abilities on his own.
Let me focus a bit on the last point, by giving a couple of examples:
- BW: Queen - has spawn Broodling (150), killing some of the units types instantly, but has no damage dealing spells on its own
- BW: Science Vessel - has EMP and Irradiate, but Irradiate does not kill anything instantly and deals damage over time
- BW: High Templar - has no one-hit-KO abilities
- BW: Dark Archon - has Mind Control and Feedback, so two one-hit-KO abilities, but no damage dealing on its own
- BW: Defiler - has Plague which deals damage over time, no one-hit-KO abilities
- BW: Arbiter - has Stasis which immobilizes but also makes units invulnerable at the same time. No damage dealing spells
No spellcaster has a click and kill spell while having damage dealing spells at the same time. Now lets look at some SC2 spellcasters:
- HT: Feedback one-hit-KO (1hKO), Storm
- Viper: Abduct 1hKO, Parasitic Bomb
- Infestor: Neural Parasite 1hKO, Fungal Growth, Infested Terrans
- Raven: Seeker Missile 1hKO and Auto-Turret, BUT Seeker Missle does not work instantly
- Ghost: EMP 1hKO and Snipe 1hKO

Feedback and other 1hKO spells don't work in SC2 because it is available on a cheap, quite massable units that do damage on their own and are too easy to use properly because of Smart Casting.
Feedback counters Battlecruisers, Banshees, Medivacs, Infestors, Ravens and used to even counter Thors. It is simply too easily accesible and spammable. Instant spells that kill units with a single click are not micro. It is not a show off of skill, but fast clicking. It is not impressive when someone does that, because anyone can do it, even in Silver league or lower.
So how can we "fix" feedback? Well, if feedback was not accessible easily, and was available on a costly unit, simple solution would be to decrease its availability in half. 100 energy per cast, voila - more costly then Storm, bringing more decision making into the game - should I disable enemy spellcaster unit and prevent its spells/abilities, or Storm his units and deal damage? I believe this soft nerf to Feedback would be welcome.
So what about EMP? Terran needs it because from Brood War to SC2, Protoss technology has improved drastically. While in Brood War shields were taking full damage from attacks, now they only take whatever the base damage is. So if Tank deals 35+15 damage, now it only does 35 damage to Zealot's shields, not "full" damage which would be 35+15=50, like it would happen with BW shield. Terran needs EMP because Blizzard wants Bio viable in every matchup. In order to achieve that, they introduced us a Barracks unit that has more HP then Factory units (Marauder), so Terran ball is not decimated by Storm. To further prevent Storm from being effective, they gave us EMP on a bionic, mineral heavy unit (Ghost). And because Minerals are so easy to gather because of the Mule, Ghost can be produced in big numbers. Storm was also nerfed both in damage and radius from BW, and Marine's got an upgrade to its HP (55 total, 40 in Brood War). Just like Feedback casting is not impressive, neither is EMPs which can be cast from long range and only require fast clicking after pressing one button. Would it work better without Smart Cast? I believe so.
But another reason why EMP is so strong, is because Ghost is a very small unit that is hard to distinquish from other Bio when clumped and hard to snipe. It is frustrating to play against, when you struggle to see where the Ghosts are, with different spells being cast and Medivacs flying on top of them. I believe the EMP spell needs to be moved on a bigger, easier to spot unit - the Raven. It is big, flying, easy to target, mobile, and costs more gas, which reduced the massability aspect.
Raven already has a dissapointing spell - Auto-Turret. In past it had stuipid duration, making it good only for turtling. Now it has bigger damage, but short duration. Unfortunately, it cannot be placed during the battle because its placement works same as placing buildings - it there are units on the ground, the spell is useless. If we remove it and give EMP to Raven, we can kill two birds with one stone. Energy requirement should be higher, at 100 or 125 energy - it is a powerful ability, with long range, that turns casters into dead weight - 75 energy is just not enough.
Another reason why EMP should be moved, is because with it being on Ghost, Mech style of play is suffering having no good spellcasters on its own. A Raven flying over Bio army doesn't look as bad as a group of Ghosts tagging along Siege Tanks, Cyclones, Vikings and Hellions.
tl:dr
"Click and kill" spells are too common and cheap when it comes to energy requirement. I already discussed Neural Parasite before, I'm also going to talk about Abduct later, but the point is, they are not interesting to watch, frustrating to play against, they don't bring joy when you perform them yourself and being massable and easy to use with Smart Cast removes some of the decision making aspects of the game. This kind of abilities should be either on very expensive units which do not contribute themselves to damage dealing, or the requirements for energy should be way higher.

So we got rid of EMP on Ghost in the section above, how are we going to replace it? It is a known fact that Terran Bio needs a lot of minerals to be effective - Marines, Marauders and Barracks are mineral heavy units/building. Terran needs a gas dump with having to only pay for Medivacs, right? Then why is it that Ghost costs primarily minerals (200/100)? Once more I'm going to refer to Brood War - Ghost used to cost 25/75. Now it is a 200/100 unit. Lets compare this unit from the past to the current one:
- Cost: 25/75 to 200/100
- HP: 45 to 100
- Damage: 10 to 10+10 light, but with longer cooldown
- Range: 7 to 6
- Supply: 1 to 2
- Nuclear Strike time: 14 seconds + 3 to 20 seconds
Nuclear Strike damage: 500 or 2/3 of building HP, whichever is greater to 300 + 200 building

So is 175 minerals and 25 gas worth it to deal less DPS vs armored, a bit more DPS vs light, and 55 extra HP? While at the same time it loses 1 range, costs 1 more supply and the Nuke itself takes more time and cannot even bring powerful units down? Yes, it has Snipe ability and currently EMP, but that is still not right.
Ghost in my opinion should work as a specialist unit. It needs to be sneaky, long range assassin, capable of infiltrating enemy base. Here is my idea of reworked Ghost:
- 50 mineral 100 gas cost, 2 supply
- 80 HP
- 15 damage, + 10 biological or light, same cooldown as now
- range 7
- Nuclear Strike time down to 18 from 20, plus 4 seconds before landing Ghost can be microed again/killed without cancelling the Nuke
- Nuke damage to 500 or 1/2 of building HP, whichever is greater
- EMP moved to Raven
- New ability available to Ghost that has to be researched in Ghost Academy before its usable:
Disables mobile detector (Observer, Overseer, Raven, but not Turret or Photon Cannon), whatever name fits and you fancy, but the gist is:
- 10-18 second duration
- range 8-9
- energy cost 100-150
- mobile detector temporarly loses ability to detect (or to detect Ghosts only) for the duration
That way we get a Ghost that fits the image of a spec ops/sniper unit - longer range, lower HP, more damage, it becomes the gas dump for Terran Bio, possible increase in Nuke play, Ghost regains its identity of an invisible infiltrator.
Later I will post my idea for fixing the horribly designed 8 armor Ultralisk, so when we already talk about the Ghost, lets talk its Steady Targeting ability.
170 damage for 50 energy is just plain stupid and retarded. It will be overpowered as hell in lower leagues, where players will not be able to spot or damage the Ghost in time for it to kill your important units, while at the same time will be meh in pro games, once pros figure out how to deal with the Ghost and tickle it within those 2 seconds of channeling. Be it Storm or Fungal, damaging the Ghost is easy if you position your casters well. I suspect once LotV rolls out, we will see some OP ways of using Ghost, and after 2-3 weeks it is going to stop altogether. So here is my idea of the redesigned ability:
Scope Targeting
- targets a unit within 12 range, minimum range of 6 (can target anything 6 to 12 range away from the Ghost)
- channeling time of 2 seconds, doesn't stop when Ghost is damaged
- 30 damage +70 biological (or light, or both)
- 50 energy cost, if target closes under 6 range, or moves away from 12 range, energy is wasted and Ghost misses its shot
There you go, an ability that deals with Ultralisks and other casters, but can be baited - at the same time, baiting doesn't counter Ghost that much as it costs only 50 energy. It requires timing on when to use the ability - use it too soon, enemy might pull back and cause you to waste your energy, use it too late, enemy units will be too close and same thing will happen. It provides countermicro which is based not on damaging Ghost, but unit movement which is easier to perform and doesn't punish lower leagues as much. Damage values are subject to balance, as always, but I believe Ghost should not fire further then 12 range, or maybe even fire the ability uphill.
tl:dr
Terran Bio needs a gas dump, current Ghost doesn't help with it - it also doesn't make any sense that a sniper/spec-ops unit has same range as a Marine. Some changes are neccessary.

A simple snip from the great write up sums it all up:
"Not only is this visually unappealing when every army looks the same, but it makes combat extremely deterministic. After all, if engagements only can arise out of one formation, it makes sense that units will behave in one way as they fight in that formation. This determinism takes away a large amount of excitement and thrill from fights, because often the winner is known before the battle even starts."
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/301216-starcraft-2-and-the-philosophy-of-design
I highly advice anyone to read it, as it has very good points. Now, nobody is saying we should have Stalkers that are not able to go up the ramp - only a bit less efficient, less fluid pathing.

Parasitic Bomb (PB) is very strong it seems. It deals 90 damage over a short period of time, damaging units and destroying them. It is a weaker version of Defiler's Plague, so why people fuss so much about it? Lets compare Plague with PB:
- 300 damage vs 90 damage
- damage over 25 seconds (12 DPS) vs damage over 7 seconds (12.8 DPS)
- deals damage to all units in targeted radius vs deals damage to targeted unit and units around it
- doesn't kill units leaving them with 1 hp vs kills units
The last point is very important - it allows for counterplay. Parasitic Bomb is just a Plague with modifications which made something beautiful into something easily broken and OP. Even if Parasitic Bomb targeted ground units, and even if it dealt more damage over longer period, it would still be balanced and not OP as long as the spell does not:
- stack
- kill units but leaves them with 1 HP
It's that simple. I don't believe PB needs to be nerfed, I believe it could even be buffed with damage and duration, considering its cost (example, to 160 damage over 13 seconds), or even an option to also affect ground units (maybe an upgrade, Blizzard? Why not just make a Vipers Nest/Lair/Mound/Cavern/Den/Hole and "nerf" Vipers by intoducing upgrade requirement for its abilities?). But it absolutely cannot stack and should not kill units as it destroys counterplay. I believe it should work like Plague/Fungal Growth, affecting units in radius, and not like Irradiate which affects units around the targeted unit, but this is just my personal opinion. Buff Parasitic Bomb, but remove stacking, remove its ability to kill units, and possibly add an upgrade for Parasitic Bomb to target ground.

So what about Abduct? I believe this ability should be scrapped if it's not changed. As there are no extra animations for ground units landing, it creates the uncanny valley effect. It also offers almost no counterplay, as any unit pulled out will be destroyed in split of a second. It looks horrible and unnatural, its too cheap to cast for a unit that can replenish energy (75), there is next to no counterplay against it. To me that is 3 strikes, with energy cost being the only one that can be changed without complete redesign of the ability.
So how do we go about redesigning the Abduct? Here is a better looking, counterplay offering suggestion:
- There is an animation same as now, of Viper being connected to the targeted unit, but lasts 6-10 seconds
- Unit is not being yanked in direction of a Viper, it is being slowly pulled towards it at 75% of its speed or normal worker speed, whichever is greater
- Connection and pull is disrupted if the distance between Viper and targeted unit is greater then 10-15 units of range
- Cannot be used on Tanks is Siege mode (that would look silly), or is less effective (25% of pull power)
- Possibly +1 range, or stays the same, subject to balance
What it does, it allows some counterplay, as you can micro your unit to run away in opposite direction (although slowly), you can also kill the Viper before your unit is pulled by it towards the Zerg ball. Also, it doesn't look so distrubing. You can let your unit be pulled out, but still attack with it, or you can try to run away and not get pulled, at the expense of damage your unit would otherwise deal. Simple, less overpowered, offers more options on both sides, scores high marks in my book.
Balancing can be twisted around the speed of the pull (50-125% of units speed), energy cost, amount of time being pulled, range of how far can Viper be before the connection is broken - there are many options to choose from.

Consume is also changed from BW for no good reason. It steals HP from a building, instead of sacrificing a unit. While the need to feed of building to replenish energy prevents Viper from staying on the battlefield all the time, it is not good enough as a sacrifice. Losing this couple of hundred HP on a Hatchery/Lair or other high HP buildings doesn't sacrifice anything - if a Terran drop kills a Hatchery, he will most likely kill it with or without full HP. What Consume on buildings does, it only forces Zerg to get another Viper, so one is always near the battlefield, making Zerg army even less supply efficient.
Consume cast on units is different and arguably requires more skill to use, even if you don't have to go back to nearest base to send the Viper to replenish energy. Yes, you can do it on the same screen where the Viper is, but it has a cost - it costs minerals, it costs gas. Yes, you can consume two Zerglings to replenish 100 energy and it costs you only 50 minerals - but it still has some cost. Besides, do you always have Zerglings on the battlefield? What if you play some ranged, or even air composition - in both cases, it will cost you probably 100-200 minerals and at least 50-100 gas to replenish energy on a Viper. Might as well get another Viper and have two for the same cost, right? Yes, but it requires you to wait longer for a single spell to be usable.
Having Consume on units instead of buildings always carries some cost, however small, and to keep it small, you have to remember to build and save Zerglings somewhere outside of the fight, but close enough for the Viper to get to it quickly. Viper consuming buildings HP does not cost anything but time, you might just as well get another Viper, in that case you only lose some supply and cost of the Viper. If, however, you consume units, you lose minerals, gas, more larva, and while your attack is coming faster, because you can recharge on the battlefield, your attack is weaker, because you have just sacrificed your own units.
Consuming units is therefore both short term buff (you cast spell now, not after Viper goes back to and from a base), but also long term nerf (you lose more resources, larva, and units that you won't have anymore because you sacrificed them). I believe it is also more interesting, and changing how Consume works just for the sake of making it different from Brood War wasn't worth it.

Blinding Cloud (BC) is not a bad ability per se, but it is inferior design-wise from Dark Swarm. Now, a lot of what I wrote in earlier points about other units etc. may feel like I cry for a BW 2.0, but it's not it. I appreciate good design when I see it, even if I don't point it out (example, I believe Medic+Dropship=Medivac is a great design which gives a lot more synergy to Bio). But in this case, the design, while not bad, is inferior. Dark Swarm is a defensive/offensive spell that when cast on the ground creates an area where any unit (friend of foe) benefits from not being hit by direct ranged hits, only by melee and splash. Blinding Cloud is mainly a defensive spell, with much lower offensive potential.
When you cast BC on enemy units, their range is reduced to 1. Enemy either has to push forward, exposing themselves to melee units, or run away. Pushing forward is a very bad move, as your units don't attack while they are being attacked at the same time as you move out of the BC, and melee units have shorter distance to get to your ball. So you pull away. But as you pull away, Zerg will be more likely to stay back and wait for BC to dissapear, because if Zerg moves into BC to chase you, his ranged units will lose their range and be in disadvantage. The only composition of Zerg that benefits from BC is melee/air. BC does not synergise with Roaches and Hydralisks, which are both core units in some matchups. It doesn't synergise well with melee units - all it does, is makes the opponent pull out and position themselves outside of the Blinding Cloud, while still shooting your melee. Shame, that the only compositions working with BC at its fullest are mostly Broodlord based compositions.
With Dark Swarm, no composition is penalized. You can throw down Dark Swarm and move Hydra/Ling inside to profit. You can move only your Lings to profit. You could move in Roaches, Ravagers, anything that your heart desire, and benefit from the spell, slowly pushing with next Dark Swarms towards your opponents base. And while Mutalisk/Guardian or any other air unit was not synergising with Dark Swarm, that was still ok because they were generaly not used as a part of the army in Brood War anyway. Broodlord, on the other hand, synergises with BC all too well, as air units are unaffected by it, while at the same time, Viper can protect Broodlords with Parasitic Bomb.
I'm not saying we need Dark Swarm on Viper. But I wanted to point out the flaw of BC, which is lack of support for offensive power of ground ranged units and even melee units. I already talked why "Skyxxxx" is not good for the game, and the point still stands - Bloodlord/Viper is a result of Blizzard trying to give us Dark Swarm which is not Dark Swarm at the same time. Just give us Dark Swarm on Viper and the horrible Broodlord balling in every game will stop - as I said before, air compositions or "sky" should not always be the ultimate end-game composition. Dark Swarm doesn't have to be 100% same as in Brood War - maybe chance to hit could be changed from 100% to 75%. Dark Swarm supports ground units, not air, which is better for everyone.
tl:dr
Viper abilities could and should be redesigned. Unit is very often blamed for being OP in combination with Broodlord especially, and its abilities do not offer countermicro. I provided some redesign ideas that should be taken into consideration.

Nydus Worm. This might be a bit biased and maybe I'm wrong, but this is my personal opinion, but current Nydus Worm makes me cry. First, Blizzard makes Nydus Worm (NW) being able to be built anywhere on the map. Not on creep, anywhere, even in your opponents base. They also move it to tier 2. They create this ping on the map "the Nydus has popped down there!" to warn players of NW location. Then, later on, they decide it isn't working, they need to make it invulnerable to damage when being build. The reasoning is as follows: "To enhance the diversity and strength of harass options for Zerg, the Nydus Worm can no longer take damage until it is finished unburrowing.". Problem is, races identities are blurred and races are less diverse.
Nydus Worm functions a lot like Warp Prism - allowing you to attack enemy bypassing the cliffs and drop/unload directly into opponent base. While they work in different way, both have same feeling and the effect of using them is sameish. Bypassing cliffs and terrains is gimmicky, unless you use drops, in which case you can lose your units on their way in the transport if it's sniped. As it is now, it is not worth it to transport units between bases in Nydus Network, and NW is almost only used for harassment, which together with invulnerability is just plain stupid and irritating to play against. Not everyone should be able to ignore terrain, like many units already do, which is bad in my opinion. Reaper, Collosus, Adept (kind of), Stalker, Warp Prism+Warp Gate, Nydus - it is enough, those cliffs are and should be in place for a reason.
What about Overlord transport? In BW, WoL and HotS, Overlords have upgrade that makes all Overlords being able to transport units. And I think it was pretty good, and nothing was wrong with it. It is actually unique to Zerg that they don't use dropships that are made one by one - instead, an upgrade makes all of them capable of transporting troops. What Blizzard is doing, is trying to replace something that already works by something new, for the sake of it being new, and changing the thing that works and redesigning it. So now we have NW that is doing Overlords job of dropping. Were Overlords underused? Possibly, but not because there was a Nydus Worm, but maybe because Overlord Drop was not viable in current economy, or simply, there was no units (Lurker wasn't there yet) that could be dropped reliably and not only kill workers, but also delay mining. Banelings die when they kill workers, meaning there is nothing stopping Protoss or Terran from pulling his workers away, killing banelings with ease and going back to mining. Also, without speed upgrade, Overlord is not a good dropping tool. With the speed upgrade it is viable, but it takes a lot of time and resources. Because you will most likely have only one Lair, you can research Speed and Drop one after another, not at the same time, and because compared to Brood War, economy is faster, this long tech time is not appropriate as it doesn't come early enough to justify the cost and research times.
So what could be done instead? And how do we go about Nydus Worm that is being pushed to be an invulnerable "doom drop" tool?
- Overlord Drop upgrade is back and it is moved to Hatchery, so it can be researched from your second hatch while you research Overlord Speed in Lair
- Overlords with Speed still too slow to be viable? Increase Speed Overlord speed by 10%. If still too slow, another 10%, until we find a good spot
- Does the new Overlord Drop come too quickly in the early game (the Elevator technique)? Increase the cost or research time.
- Nydus Worm no longer gives global warning/sound effect to other players
- Nydus Worm requires to be build on Creep (can be build on creep provided by an Overlord)
- Nydus Worm is no longer invulnerable when being build, it gains health over time like all other Zerg buildings when build
- Nydus Worm cost decreased to 50/50 or even 25/25
- Nydus Network cost decreased to 150/150
- Possibly Nydus Network build time increased by some amount so it is more scoutable
Nydus can still be used to cheese in combination with an Overlord, Zerg regains its unique dropship characteristics, super early drops in the early game are no longer possible and band-aid requirement of Evolution Chamber can go away. Overlord drop in mid-late game is more viable. If, and I'm saying IF, Tanks are brought back to their former glory, or if High Ground Advantage is introduced, so that positional play becomes more important - then there will be more then enough place for a Nydus in the game.
tl:dr
Killing something that makes races more unique in favour of pushing something new that's "bigger, better, faster" is not the way to go. If you can balance something with smaller changes, do it, but please don't make races bland and behaving in a same way. Zerg should not be able to ignore terrain so easily, and not every race should have the exact same tools (Nydus=Warp Prism, Zerg having to "build" every transport seperately like Protoss or Terran).

Ultralisk should be one of the easiest units to balance - melee units are much simpler after all. What was the primary role of Ultralisk in Brood War? It used to be quite big (about 50% bigger then Dragoon or Siege Tank), tanky unit (400 HP), that had good armor and speed, but single target damage. It is used not as a damage dealer, as Ultralisk is actually not that good in killing things itself, comparing its cost to damage ratio. 4 Zerglings which cost 100 minerals and 200 gas less are more effective in dealing damage. Hydralisks are better because they don't get stuck on terrain and other units, dealing damage from behind. The Ultralisk is therefore a "tank", not a damage dealer. This is the key to why Ultralisk is in such a bad shape from design stand-point.
This may be a little far-fetched comparison, but lets look how MMOs work (Blizzard, you have some experience here, no?). You usually have different classes, each one made for a different role. You have healers, mages, tanks, rangers, and assasins.
- healer doesn't contribute to the DPS, but buffs or heals the party (BW - none, SC2 Terran Medivac - good, Queen - quite bad at both)
- mages are fragile, ranged, able to debuff the enemy or cause damage (BW - Queen, Defiler - good, SC2 Infestor - good but unreliable, Viper - good)
- tanks are terrible at dealing damage, but are able to take a lot punishment (BW Ultralisk - good, SC2 Roach - quite good, SC2 Ultralisk - too good at both)
- rangers don't have the most DPS, support or health, but are good all around (BW Hydralisk - good, Roach - quite good, SC2 Hydralisk - bad)
- assasins are fragile, deal enourmous amounts of damage and are very fast (Zergling - good)
Obviously, SC2 is not a MMO - ranged units are much, much more common, and there are also other differences. But Zerg can fit into the comparison. Roach is hated because it does tanking well but its dps and speed are also quite good, resulting in a very bland and uninteresting unit. Infestor doesn't do a good job debuffing or dealing damage because Fungal Growth is too easy to evade. Hydras are way too fragile for their cost. Ultralisk is good at tanking but is also too good at dealing damage. And that is exactly why Ultralisk has problems as a melee unit:
Problem 1: it cannot be too fast, otherwise it will be OP because of both its HP and damage dealing - a melee unit cannot be good in all 3 areas of speed, attack and defense
Problem 2: because it is not fast and it is big, it derps around when there are Zerglings involved and cannot get to deal its damage
Problem 3: extention of 2 - because it stays behind, it doesn't tank for Zerglings, which die in seconds, leaving slow Ultralisk to fight on their own when Zerglings are dead
Blizzard tried to solve problem 2 - anyone remembers that nonsense of a ability that let Ultralisk burrow and charge? Yeah... another band-aid instead of looking at the actual issue. And now instead of tweaking it to tank for Zerglings, Blizzard increased its armor to be almost invulnerable to low damage units.
Fixing Ultralisk is easy, you just need to use your brain a litttle. I'll do the job for the designers instead:
- Ultralisk size and radius decreased by 25% (possibly more), so it doesn't derp as much
- Armor upgrade back to +2 from +4, so Terran Bio is no longer hard countered
- Speed upgrade makes a comeback, bringing Ultralisk speed to 95% of Zerligng speed with its speed upgrade off Creep, and likewise 95% on Creep to reduce derping even more
- Cost down to 250/200, or 225/200 with health reduced to 450
- Supply down to 5 (or even 4.5) from 6, because of the change below
- Splash damage is gone, Ultralisk deals 26(+3) damage, animation and model slightly altered to correspond with new attack
This way Ultralisk will not be left behind Zerglings and be on the frontline, being targeted more and performing role of a tank like it should. DPS is reduced, with +1 attack it kills Marine with Combat Shields up to +2 armor in two hits, so while its not good as with the splash, its not useless either. These modifications don't buff or nerf the Ultralisk - they change it to work as a part of composition, not as a big bad Slowling 2.0 that hardcounters Bio.
tl:dr
Make Ultralisk smaller, give it an upgrade to be almost as fast as Zergling with Speed. This way Ultralisk can actually be a part of the fight and do its supposed job of soaking up the damage. Remove splash to reduce supply and resource cost, making Ultralisk more accesible and actually worth to be produced. Revert the +4 armor upgrade back to +2. Make it synergise with Zergling, not compete with it.

Here we come - the unit that has been called underpowered since WoL, and is accepted only because of how long it remained unchanged in the game. Lets compare Hydralisk from Brood War and the one in Starcraft 2:
Cost 75/25 vs 100/50
Supply 1 vs 2
HP 80 vs 80
Damage 10 (+1) (5 vs small/light) vs 12 (+1)
Cooldown 0.63 vs 0.54
Range 4+1 vs 5+1
Speed 0.75 and 1.1 (upgrade) of worker speed vs 0.8 and 1 of worker speed
What can be gathered without looking at combat stats is that SC2 Hydralisk is 2:1 mineral to gas ratio unit - it is a unit that slows down the rate of other tech. BW Hydralisk and SC2 Roach offers 3:1 ratio, which allows Zerg to include gas heavy units in compositions. BW Hydralisk is 10% faster off Creep, has same HP while it costs less, takes up less supply, has 1 less range. So why exactly are we paying 25 extra minerals and 25 gas for? 1 Range, less speed, less HP per cost, and less units because of 100% increase in supply cost? Crap damage scaling with upgrades? Each +1 attack increases BW Hydralisks damage by 10%, in SC2 only by 8%. Not a lot? Okay, but +3 BW hydralisk dealt 20.6 DPS, while SC2 deals 27.7 - difference is small if you take cost into account. BW Hydralisk deals damage more frequently on lower cooldown, meaning that a Hydralisk in BW will overkill less often - having a instanteneous attack also reduces overkill by a large margin, even without Overkill Protection. So even damage output is lowered, so again, what are we paying for, not having 50% less damage vs Marine, Zergling and Mutalisk penalty?
Yes we are. In SC2 we have none, light, armored and massive defense types. Massive is almost always armored, so in this case we will ignore it - Hydralisk doesn't deal +massive, nor such thing exists in Brood War. For now, lets assume they wanted Hydralisk to stay as it was in BW, 10 damage and all.
Step 1: In SC2 we have a Phoenix which is light, but Hydralisk is the only Anti-Air for Zerg. How can we make a Hydralisk that does 10 damage to Phoenix, but 5 to Mutalisk? We cannot, as 10-5 biological doesn't exist, and even then, Corruptor, Broodlord, Viper - would also take only 5 damage, so in ZvZ everyone would rush to SkyZerg, or die to all-in while trying. 5+5 armored? Then Hydralisk doesn't deal at all with Phoenix, and what's worse, Phoenix counters Hydralisk. Best way, lets stay with 10 damage to all, and also prevent boring (on the side note, imo exciting because at least it was different) Muta vs Muta wars.
Step 2: So we make ground to ground 5+5 armored. Well... what about the Hellion? We can make the attack 5+5 armored/mechanical. Meaning +5 is applied if the unit is either armored OR mechanical. Case closed.
Step 3: Oh boy oh boy, what about the Zealot? In BW Hydralisk dealt full 10 damage to shields, now it is 5 light +5 armored/mechanical, how do we make it right? add another "or +5 vs shields"? That's a bit too much now. Lets just make it 10 and get on with it.
Step 4: So we have a 10 damage air and ground Hydralisk, meaning it will be better vs Marines, Zerglings, Mutalisks and workers. Oops! We need to increase its cost to balance it out. Well, I guess we can just give it +1 range, and +2 damage. Lets also decrease its attack cooldown, because we don't know what are we doing. Lets also make it slower, and add one more supply cost, because a 100/50 unit should not cost 1 supply.
Step 5: Oh my, Hydralisk is "too strong" now for tier 1, lets move it to Lair, but lets leave both upgrades from BW, meaning that Hydralisk will be gimped without them (even as Stalker and Marine don't need to research +1 range anymore).

Problem with the Hydralisk is that it deals too much damage vs everything, making them too good vs Lings non-viable in ZvZ, while at the same time its unchanged health pool means that it loses cost-efficiently vs everything else, for example Roaches, which cost much less. It takes 14 shots for the Hydralisk to kill a Roach (10.5 second), while Roach kills Hydralisk in 5 shots, or 10 seconds. Roach therefore will kill Hydralisk that costs around 50% more mining time (100+50=150 vs 75+25=100). Hydralisk is slower then the Roach, meaning that they can't even kite them well with their range.
- Changing its 10 attack every 0.6 second to 12 every 0.54 is a really small upgrade.
- Being a tier 2 unit, and not being even faster then a worker with the upgrade makes it hard to micro Hydralisks and evade AoE attacks like Storm. Coming this late, the upgrade should be scrapped, and the bonus (speed or range) moved directly to the Hydralisk. I believe Hydralisk should get 3.1 speed off Creep, to be faster then the Roach.
- Only 80 health on a 100/50 unit is way too low, it means that any kind of AoE will decimate those expensive units in no time. 2 supply makes this only worse.
- with its DPS, cost and health the Hydralisk is not even a glass cannon, it is just glass. 2 Marines don't cost gas, have more HP between them, can be healed, are faster, have almost same range, and deal almost twice as much damage.
What could have Blizzard done instead? Keep it 75/25, 1 supply, 0.6 second cooldown, 4+1 range, keep it at Hatch tech with 80 HP and slow speed without the upgrade. 10 damage vs all air, but small changes to ground damage: 5 damage and +5 armored or mechanical or shields (maybe as a passive ability if engine cannot recognise that. Or, just go with tried and tested small, medium, large unit types, which gives more flexibility.
tl:dr
Hydralisk was underpowered for far too long, and it still is, just a bit less then before. Thank god range and speed upgrade has been merged, but it still isn't enough - for 2 supply and 100/50, you just don't get enough health for Hydralisk to be the unit that everyone loved in Brood War. I have not idea how its speed upgrade have been left so long on Hive tech, why its health was reduced from 90 to 80, and why it still is so slow off Creep. But this is another reason for Blizzard why they should not take something that work (damage types/armor types) and change it for the sake of changing it - Hydralisk, being an iconic unit, now only possesses the anti-air role.

...which is toned down in Starcraft 2. Lets talk about Zerg first, as I just finished writing about Hydralisk.

Zerg is the "swarmy" race. By that people mean loads of cheap, fragile but fast units streaming across the map. And if you compare damage to hp ratio in Brood War for all races, you will see that Zerg core units (Hydralisk, Mutalisk, Zergling, Lurker) are fast, deal great amount of damage, but at the same time do not have high HP. What they have in common is that they are not really cost-efficient - Zerglings die fast to stimmed Marines with Medics, die super fast to Storm, Archon splash, Reaver splash, Tank fire. Hydralisk die fast to those units as well, same with Mutalisks, while Lurkers are still countered by Storm, Dragoons, Tanks, are easily killed when caught out of position even by Marines. Hydralisks and Zerglings, the most core units, are both very supply efficient - it means you can have a really big number of them if you max out on them. And this is "swarmy" - an expensive resource wise, but very supply efficient army. It meant that while Zerg had almost constantly lower supply of units then Terran or Protoss, the Zerg player could trade almost equally with the opponent. Zerg core army in Brood War consists of fairly fragile units, requiring Zerg to use support units, like Ultralisk, to soak up damage, and casters to debuff the enemy and increase survivability of Zerg units (Plague, Dark Swarm, Ensnare). Even Devourer, Zerg's ultimate anti-air unit, was only a support unit for Mutalisks/Hydralisks, dealing low damage on its own, but debuffing armor and attack speed of the opponent.
Zerg army in Starcraft 2 is completely different - Roaches and Hydralisks are slow off Creep. Roaches HP is bloated to the point where it doesn't care much for AoE. Roaches are not fragile enough or mobile for a Zerg unit, and are supply inefficient but cost efficient (75/25 and 2 supply). Hydralisk on the other hand is too fragile for its cost, is supply inefficient, and not greatly cost-efficient (10 Brood War Hydralisks cost 750/250 and 10 supply for 800 HP, 158 DPS, while 700/350 army of SC2 Hydralisks cost 14 supply for 560 HP and 155 DPS - the difference is striking). Lurkers cannot be killed easily out of position because of their 200 HP and high range. Only Mutalisk and Zergling remain almost (almost) untouched.
Zerg needs a 1 supply unit, and it is a shame Hydralisk cannot perform this role, while Roach that had a good design in WoL beta was changed into bland, Marauder type unit, also with 2 supply, same as Hydralisk. I believe Blizzard messed up on this one, and to bring "swarm" into the Swarm gave us the... Swarm Host, Infestor, Broodlord, or in other words, free units.

Protoss core units used to have the most HP of all other races, while also the lowest DPS across the board. Protoss support was not about buffing or debuffing, but dealing damage. Powerful Storms, Reavers, Archons. Protoss had the only perm-cloaked unit, and a cloak-generating flying unit that is not a Hero and you could have more then one at the same time. Protoss used to be space nomads, rough and powerful. A ball of tough units that lasted long in battle, requiring the slow moving, heavy hitting but fragile support of High Templar and/or Reaver. Again, same with Zerg, Protoss got more rounded with other races, with its units having less HP/Shields (Zealot, Stalker/Dragoon), support that is mobile and with loads of HP but not the greatest damage output (Collosus), Storm got nerfed because of clumping (I believe also because Blizzard wanted to make Bio viable, but there were other ways of doing it without the Storm nerf).
Protoss should have more robust army - more hp, more damage per attack, longer cooldown, expensive units. As basic rules of design dictate, high damage should come with long cooldown. High HP was, kind of is, and definately should be normal for the Protoss race. Because of both HP and burst damage, units should be relatively expensive to balance it out. Pretty simple rules, which are basis of a good balance in any game. On the other hand, long cooldown with high damage means low or normal levels of DPS, so units should not be that much more expensive. I'll better show it as an example: unit 1 deals 10 damage every 2 seconds, has 40 hp and costs 50x, unit 2 deals 20 damage every 4 seconds, has 80 hp, costs 90 - more then 2x unit 1, because a group of units 2s can one shot units 1 more effectively, reducing overall unit's 1 combat dps much quicker - simple rules, basic of balance.
Another beef I have with SC2 Protoss is that it has more robots in its army then ever before (Oracle, Collosus, Disruptor, Sentry), while amount of Psi units have decreased (Dark Archon, anyone?) to... 2, HT and Archon (maybe Adept, but it doesn't have the psychic feel). I will talk a bit about the Zealot and Stalker later, probably I'll talk about Immortal as well, so I won't talk too much about Protoss for now. I like couple of Blizzards ideas (Warp Gate, Warp Prism), but I don't like their execution - I already said why when I wrote about Chronoboost/Warp Gate and Sentry.

Terran core army has been divided into Bio+support, and Mech. Bio+support works almost as it did, with the exception of Marauder, which I believe should be 1 supply, with less HP, less damage, less cost. I believe Bio should be vulnerable to AoE as a compensation for greatest DPS of all compositions in the game. I believe, with Medivac being a dropship that doesn't require upgrade, the extra mobility needs to be compensated by low base HP of Bio, Marauder included. I really don't like that Terran Marauder, basically a bloke in armored suit, feels almost as tanky as a Protoss unit, or a damn Siege Tank. It didn't feel right for me the minute I saw this unit in the WoL beta, and that feeling just won't go away even now, years later.
Mech I already covered, I will only say that it needs to be reworked for it to have an actual positional play and zoning. Liberator is a good design, but badly balanced in my opinion.

Similarity of air units has already been somehow discussed in the Air unit section before.
tl:dr
I would be easier if Blizzard converted all units and buildings exactly as they were in Brood War, not as Marines with 15 HP more, Siege Tanks tickling opponents, Zealots being less tanky, Storms and Archons that are less scary or Ultralisks that are untouchable. I wish Blizzard just added new units/abilities/techs on top of it. Work with what already was proven to work, and done some small balance tweaks here and there. I'm not saying they have to bring back every unit, like Goliath, Firebat, Scourge, Devourer, Arbiter, Dark Archon, Reaver. But some of the new units were/are hated by the community because they are just not as great as what we have already seen in previous game. This is why people don't like and that's why they are complaining - because Blizzard didn't address the actual issues and still doesn't listen to the community. They added or changed units against design of their respective races, without anyone asking for it. They suffocated racial diversity with units like Collosus, Roach, Marauder, high dps Ultralisk, filling in the holes that should be left empty.

This will be rather short. People ask Blizzard to buff Protoss Core units/Gateway units, that they are not as good and cannot fight efficiently. You can see people asking for a Zealot buff, or Stalker buff. While I believe Zealot should get his 10 shields back, and Legs upgrade instead of a Charge... Stalker is a different beast. It cannot be buffed as long as it can Blink, because it would defy basic balance rule - a unit that has increased mobility, cannot be as good as "average" unit in a straight up fight.
Think about it for a second - what would happen, if Zealot had an ability allowing it to climb up and down on cliffs, ignoring terrain. Whoa, that would be OP. Think about Zerglings having such an upgrade at Lair - even more OP, right? What if High Templar or Broodlord suddenly got +200% increase in speed? OP? Yes, yes and yes again. Mobility necessitates that unit has to remain weaker then its less mobile counterparts. That is why Stalker cannot have 100 Health 80 Shield like Dragoon. Because of the Blink ability.
Same thing happens to the Adept - because of its Shade ability, its stats have to be balanced around the early game - but even here Blizzard doesn't listen to the voice of reason - If Adepts didn't 2 shot Marines/workers, people wouldn't have so much grief with the unit. Blizzard is going to reduce its HP/Shields even more, leaving us with a non-Protoss, relatively low HP but high DPS unit. Because of its mobility in the early game and is low position in the tech tree, its stats will be too low to scale good into the mid or late game. There would be nothing wrong if Adept had cloak as an upgrade in the Dark Shrine instead of shields and replace Dark Templar altogether.
A bit higher base attack and lower +light damage, scaled so that Adept didn't 2 shot tier 1 units would go a long way as well. The unit and the Shade ability has the potential, but more as a harass unit, not a core unit.
In case of the Reaper, same thing is true - cliff jumping prevents the unit from getting better stats, and with weak stats the unit is only good as a scouting tool or a cheese tactic. KD8 ability looks bad because of the same reason as Viper's Abduct - it looks unnatural and silly without extra animations in a game that doesn't use cartoon filter, like XIII for example. I'm going to repeat myself here, Reaper is to Terran as Stalker/Adept to Protoss. If Hydralisk was moved to tier 1, and Queen buffs reverted, then Reaper could be used against the Zerg, like it was some time ago, where Reaper openings vZ were common and quite full of unit micro - some balance tweaks with numbers could be used. There are also other ways of making Reaper work (as giving it some extra utility), but I won't discuss it now.
tl:dr
Gateway units won't be buffed as long as the terrain is ignored by them. Same thing applies to the Reaper.

Collosus is the unit with great visual design, but because of its looks, its game design suffers. Let me explain: Collosus is a big unit, so big in fact that it has to be targeted by anti-air, otherwise it would not make too much sense. Because of that, it absolutely cannot be fragile - Corruptors, Vikings, they all target Collosi reliably and without being blocked by ground units. To counterbalance it, Collosus has to have its HP increased, but it creates another problem - because of high HP pool, it cannot be also reliable as a burst damage dealer like Reaver or Siege Tank in Brood War, otherwise it would be overpowered. In effect, we got ourselves an expensive, high HP, relatively low DPS unit with long range and some splash. It breaks the rule of Protoss support being slow, but powerful and fragile. Collosus is fast, not so powerful and definately not fragile (for its cost, maybe, but not compared to other Protoss units with its massive 350 life). What makes it fragile is ability of anti-air focused units to target it, but any health boosts would break its ground vs ground balance.
What is also problematic is its speed of movement and ignoring terrain. A slow, hard hitting unit with a different attack pattern would be much more better for the game. Siege units should be slow or immobile - it is one of the basic rules of RTS balance, think of any RTS with an artillery, or even real life artillery. Siege units should also have long cooldowns if they are to deal terrible, terrible damage. And Collosus is a on a verge of being a siege unit with its 9 attack range.
Its attack pattern could also be changed. This is just an example, there could be (or rather are) better ideas, but here is mine - Collosus targets a unit and hits it with a laser beam that lasts 2 seconds. The unit doesn't suffer damage from the Collosus. Instead, Collosus "targets" the ground underneath the targeted unit and burns it, leaving a "path of fire" which is what is actually dealing damage. Plus, the damage of the "fire" doesn't stack. This way, you need to give your Collosi different units to target, otherwise the damage will be wasted, as the "path of fire" would not stack. Well, maybe I'm not the best at describing, but you should get the idea.
From Liquipedia, on cut features of SC2: "The Reaver was fully replaced by the Colossus because the Colossus required the same tech but was superior in mobility, hitpoints and needed less micro to handle.". Seriously? And now, in LotV, we have a Disruptor that doesn't even attack on its own and its nothing but micro. It only shows how Blizzad Starcraft 2 team have no idea what to do. Shame, as we could have a Reaver since early WoL.
tl:dr
Slower movement, longer attack cooldown but higher damage, this is what I would like to see from dev team to consider for the Collosus. Maybe some experimentation with how it attacks to make it more interesting and microable.

Lurker has suffered from Hydralisk being moved to tier 2 - being 2.5 (or 2.5-2.9 lol) unit, it cannot be the same as the BW Lurker. So, because it comes so late (Hydralisk Den build time, Lurker Den build time), it needs better stats. Lets compare two units:
- 125/125 vs 150/150 cost
- 2 vs 3 supply
- 125 vs 200 HP
- 20 vs 20+10 armored damage
- 6 vs 9 range
- 1.54 vs 2 attack cooldown
- 1.2 vs 1.05 worker speed
Lurker became a little more expensive, but supply efficiency dropped a lot. It gained a lot of range, but slower movement speed, a lot more HP and a little more damage. Lets review the changes.
As long as we have a 100/50 Hydralisk in the game, the cost is appropriate for the unit - Lurker comes later, it needs to be stronger to fight effectively against stronger units that are already on the field. 25 more gas and 25 more minerals is good to warrant a little buff here and there to the unit.
If Lurker is to be a defensive unit, its supply cannot be so high. You need at least 2 Lurkers at each base to give it some degree of defense against the harass, as 1 is not enough, assuming Zerg has 3-4 bases, that means that a supply of anywhere between 9-24 is frozen in just units at home, add a Queen for each Hatchery, and you end up with 15-30 supply in bases. How is Zerg supposed to fight against Protoss and Terran with such low supply left for units (which some of them are, again, supply inefficient)? Having Zerg lose his units once in order to chip away and weaken P/T deathball, before another remax and final battle? Lurkers should cost 2.5 supply, not 3. They should be not cost efficient, but supply efficient, otherwise there will be no Lurkers guarding choke points, as that supply will be crucial for Zerg in direct engagement. Cost increased by 20%, supply should not increase by 50%. With 2.5 supply, that is only 25% increase in supply cost.
Lurker should not be so tanky. If its burrowed and opponent has no detection, Lurkers HP is irrelevant. If opponent attacks into set up Lurkers, he should suffer terrible damage, and be severely damaged or destroyed. If, however, you push with the Lurkers, the slow, long ranged and tanky Lurker is boring. Faster, less tanky Lurker is better as an actual core unit or a support, and is better for the viewership. Repositioning a slow, long range lurker is like repositioning Siege Tanks - slow, hard to prevent on opponent side, constantly pushing but not really attacking. Fast, short range but high burst damage Lurker is more interesting, and can be used as a part of an attack, not just a slow, almost turtlish, push. It brings more drama and more suspense - will the Lurkers be able to get into range (which is always true for 9 range Lurker) before they get killed (which is more likely "no" with 200 HP)? Will the Zerg get a good surround and prevent Terran/Protoss from escaping, or will the Lurkers be focus fired, or maybe Terran/Protoss tries to kite the Zerg until Lurkers are left without support? Or maybe retreat altogether and leave some ground for the Zerg to take?
I would like to suggest some tweaks to the Lurker, here is my balance changes:
- 150/150 cost
- 2.5 supply
Explained before, but here we go again - cost has increased by 20%, so supply should not increase by more then 25%.
- 130 HP, 2 armor
Armor is to help Lurker survive longer with its HP reduction, and HP is drastically reduced to make Lurkers more susceptible to Psionic Storm. Disruptor should not be the only counter to them. Protoss needs some more flexibility, and Templar tech needs some more love anyway.
- 22(+2 or +3) base + 6(+0) light damage
This change helps Lurkers deal with Bio ball in different regard. In BW, a Lurker 2 shots a Marine, in SC2, it 3 shots it. But, with the Medivac heal, the difference can be much more dramatic. Lurkers should be good against the Marines, not Marauders - if Marines are 2 shoted by Lurkers, only Marauders will remain on the battlefield - which are performing worse against Zerglings. Lurkers being gas intensive will require support consisting mostly of Zerglings, which die to Marines, but counter Marauders. Therefore, interesting interaction is created - Lurker>Marine>Zergling>Marauder>Lurker. Lurkers that have "+vs armor bonus damage" don't deal good with Marines, but still don't deal very well with Marauders either - both MM still deal damage and kills Zerg force, while Lurkers chip away slowly both Marines and Marauders, not being efficient vs either.
Same thing happens with the Protoss - +light damage disposes of Zealots quickly, and Zerglings have much better rates of survival, countering Stalkers. It may force Collosus response to combat Zerglings and outrange Lurkers (more about it in a second), or High Templar to do the same job (HT has an advantage of not requiring detection to kill off Lurkers - Storm works even without it). This change of bonus damage from armored to light brings back some more melee oriented composition to the Zerg arsenal, which is what I believe lacks in Starcraft 2.
- 6-7 target range with 7-8 range spines length
It helps the Protoss, vastly increasing Stalkers cost effectiveness against the Lurker. It also helps Marauders, and changes Lurkers so they don't outrage base defenses. Lurker being a siege unit is just bad - it's better if it becomes a more micro intensive/micro forcing unit. Spines can hit a unit standing behind Lurkers target on the verge of its max targeting range - it means that while Lurker spines travel further, Lurker cannot by itself attack a unit at its full range, but can if it is hit by another unit targeted by the Lurker. It brings another dimension to Lurker attack. Reduction of range is a part of another change, which is...
- speed changed from 2.95 to 3.37
It improves vastly the offensive capabilities of a Lurker, which should lead to more engagements with it. If you have a slow, long range unit, you won't want to attack, you will slowly reposition it or turtle with it. Modifying range and speed changes the unit's role a lot.
- frienzied status (not sure about this one actually)
It would suck if Lurker/Ling vs Bio interaction was disrupted by couple of Marauders. With range and damage against them reduced, Marauders should not have an extra hand against Lurkers. Alternatively, Lurkers can gain a new passive ability, preventing movement altering abilities/spells from affecting it.
One of the biggest changes from Brood War to SC2 in ZvT is definately the introduction of Medivac, which ensures that Terran can always transport his army. Without Scourges to control the air with its almost instantaneous damage, no matter how strong or weak the Lurker is, Terran can and will ignore them, vastly decreasing Lurkers defender advantage. This is why I believe Lurkers should come out much sooner, or some form of kamikaze anti-air should be introduced, which I don't believe Blizzard wants. Hydralisk Den could be moved to Hatchery tech, and Hydralisk base speed and/or range could be nerfed even more, with Hydralisk Muscular Augments buffed to compensate for the difference. Muscular Augments could also stay in the Lair tech, to prevent the 100/50 Hydralisk from becoming too strong in the early game, while keeping Hydralisk intact once Lair is reached. This way, Hydralisk Den could be made before Lair, and Lurker Den could be made so much sooner.
I also believe Lurker Den should go away to make room for Lurker Aspect upgrade. If you think about how long does it take to build Hydralisk Den and later morph it to Lurker Den, and think about how easy it is for other player to drop and snipe it, Lurker tech becomes a very risky tech patch. With Lurker Aspect upgrade however, after it has been researched, sniping Hydralisk Den would not hurt so much, as it could be rebuild quicker then Lurker Den.
tl:dr
Lurker needs to be faster with less range, as it will increase microability of a unit by a lot and force players to use it more offensively. It will also lower the "Lurker counters Protoss ground" that can be heard over the forums. Lowering supply cost to 2.5 (or maybe even 2) will make Lurkers better at defending. Some way of giving the player the opportunity for earlier Lurkers should be in place, it is not the timing of the Lurkers that is the problem, but their current range and health.

Brood Lord, Swarm Host, Infestor - all suffering from the same design, which is free unit spawning. Free unit spawners have a one nasty issue - they are either so weak that they are underused or completely usless in higher level play, or so strong that they either dominate everything else, as the "fine balance line" being so thin, it is almost impossible to get it right. Swarm Host and Infestor's Infested Terran used to be really powerfull, and both units used to be massed. Free Unit Spawners (FUS) have to be massed to reach the ciritical point, otherwise they are not viable as a part of a composition. You don't see a single Swarm Host tagging along a Roach/Hydra composition, or Ling/Bane/Muta composition when building only one or just a few of them was part of the plan, and not some leftovers from previous battle. I remember first introduction of a Swarm Host, the first in-game video, of a couple of Swarm Hosts (I think 3-4) spawning Locusts to attack a Bunker with Marines and a Siege Tank behind it. If there was lower count of Swarm Hosts, Locusts would die without dealing any significant damage to the Terran Bunker, but, because a critical mass for that encounter was reached, Locusts destroyed the Bunker, and Marines/Tank in one or two following spawns. You have to reach critical mass, otherwise FUS are useless. Trying to reach critical mass leads to turtling and very defensive play, which I don't think many members of the community like and want to see/play against.
Brood Lord (BL) suffers from the same design issue. First, it was Infestor, now, we have a "Brood Lord/Viper OP" cry. Maybe it's not the Viper that is the problem, maybe it's the Brood Lord itself.
Morphing one or two BLs is not enough to capitalize on them - there is simply not enough Broodlings, which block the movement and mess with the opponents units AI. When you use Brood Lords, you use 5+ of them, when the critical mass is reached. No matter what spellcaster you use with the BL, at some point nerfs will come, and most likely, nerfs to the spellcaster. But as a FUS, the BL is the problem, not the caster that is paired with it.
I propose a solution to the problem, not a nerf, but a change to the BL from a FUS based unit, to a DPS one.
- Sight decreased to its range
- Damage increased to 30 (+3) from 20 (+2)
- Cost of morph decreased by 50 each (150/150 -> 100/100), bringing total Brood Lord cost from 300/250 to 250/200
- Supply down to 3 from 4
- Cooldown reduced from 1.79 to 1.5
- Armor up to 2 from 1
- Health down from 225 to 180
- Broodlings are not spawned with each attack, instead, a biological unit killed by a BL spawns Broodlings, 1 per each supply of a killed unit (killing Marauder spawns 2 Broodlings, killing a Marine only 1), or just spawning 1-2 Broodlings for each unit killed.
FUS role of a unit is drastically decreased, making BL rely more on its long range and higher DPS (from 8 DPS to 20 with above changes). Lower cost is balanced around lack of FUS, which makes BL so strong. Lower supply allows Zerg to have the supply used for other units, helping to preserve the Swarmy feel of a Zerg race. Cost reduced to correspond better with reduced supply. Higher armor helps it against anti-air splash and enduring Marine fire (a slow, 250/200 unit should not die easily), while lower health makes it more vulnerable to spell damage.
tl:dr
Any unit that spawns other units for free is going to be horribly hard to balance, why not just scrap the idea altogether, as it is quite proven not to work, and look for supply reductions instead of a Free Unit Spawners to make Zerg feel "swarmy".

Scouting should not be guaranteed. It might be easy to get the first worker into opponents base when scouting the right position first, but that early worker can always be killed. It should be hard to scout afterwards. Scouting should require some degree of skill to it. A Reaper coming early into a base after first tech buildings are planted is bad for the game. A hallucination that is so easily controlled is also bad for the game. "Yeah, so how are we supposed to scout what our opponent is doing?". Here I would like to discuss something I haven't seen elswhere (or maybe I haven't tried looking hard enough) - scouting in SC2 is too easy and to reliable. You can build a Reaper or two and see everything what your opponent is doing. You can hallucinate a Phoenix and do the same. You can spawn a Changeling and do the same thing. You can see everything what your opponent is doing if you try hard enough. So how come so many people die to cheese and all-in tactics?
Because Starcraft 2 scouting is hard to read. Let me give you an example on Terran 1/1/1 opening variations. We are not interested if its expand first or not, only focusing on the tech path that Terran chooses. So, with 1/1/1 build, if you come into Terrans base, and see Rax, Factory and Starport starting or just finished, and your scout (Overlord/Overseer/hallucination/Reaper etc.) gets killed, you are left with these possibilities in your mind:
- a Siege Tank drop, aka flying Tank
- a Hellion opening/drop
- a Hellbat drop
- a Banshee harass
- a Liberator harass
- a Bio+Liberator
- Widow Mine drop
- 4M
- 3M
- some other strategy
The problem is, scouting has nothing to do with knowing what is going to hit your base in a minute or two. Yes, once you reach certain point in your gaming career, you acquire knowledge on opponents builds and timings (such as, you know that it is *this* build because the Techlab was build 5-10 seconds later then in *that* build), you can profit from seeing what buildings are in your opponents base, alright, I get that. But in lower leagues, it is still a gamble, as those openings force you to respond in different ways and you will fail miserably if you don't prepare accordingly, but at the same time overreacting will also cost you a game.
If you take Protoss for example, things become easier:
- Collosus, Disruptor and Immortal require different counters, but Collosus and Disruptor also requires Robotics Bay
- Pheonix and Void Ray don't require vastly different counters, only Oracle can be problematic
- the problem however arises when any tech building is proxied on the map, but this doesn't make it hard to read, but hard to scout
In comparison, Zerg is easy to read, as almost every unit has its own building requirement.
Protoss is relatively easy, but because of different use of Chronoboost, the timing of an attack can be impossible to tell. This means that you will be in slight disadvantage if you prepare for an attack 1 minute too early, as you could spend the investement on quicker economy/tech. It also means you can die easily if you underestimate the Chronoboost and the attack comes 20 earlier then you thought.
Terran is very hard to read, and sometimes it can be near impossible to read Terran who denies you scouting, as for example countering a Liberator (or Banshee) and a Siege Tank requires you to build completely different units, while both builds can look very similiar at first.
I will allow myself another comparison to Brood War - in BW, there was a Machine Shop and Control Tower, both functioning like a Techlab, but they could not be exchanged by lifting and landing. Should we bring them back, we will lose something that defined the Terran in SC2. Bringing back an Academy would help to differenate Bio and Mech/Starport openings, narrowing the possible cheese and helping Terran builds being easier to read. But other then that, I have no other ideas at the current time to help with this issue.
tl:dr
Just like any book writer will tell you, "show, not tell" is the way to go. "Showing" is just an act of looking at opponents base at knowing what is coming. "Telling" is giving you reliable ways so you can scout your opponents base every 10 seconds if you want. The build orders should be easy to read and distinquish, not convulted. Don't give us more Reapers and easily accessible Hallucinations. Don't give us dedicated scouting tools. Instead, make it so that getting into opponents base in the first place is the hard part, but once you are there, you know exactly what is going on.

You would have thought that everything has been already said about the Macro Boosters (Mule, Chronoboost, Inject). I firmly believe Macro Boosters (MB) should have no place in Starcraft 2. I fully agree with what has been said by w3jjjj in his good analysis: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/legacy-of-the-void/493457-7-deadly-sins-of-macro-boosters
Also, we can see in this poll how much people wanted to remove MB, or at least test it: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/closed-threads/494703-poll-macro-booster-community-feedback
Without MB, the job of balancing the game is also much easier, and I hope I don't need to explain why. Blizzard could test removal of all MB somewhere in the beggining of the Beta, and by now we would probably have an already finished product, with a small need of polish here and there. Instead, time was wasted for small balance patches, a kind which you would expect not in Beta, but in already released product.
People complained that without MB, Terran could not keep up with other races. This could be because Terran didn't adapt properly, but contributing factor is also Terran unit costs balanced with increased mineral income in mind. Also, Bio compositions become much weaker - not only because there is not enough minerals for the Marines/Marauders, but because unlike in Brood War, Terran who goes Bio needs to mine gas very early to be able to produce gas expensive Starport and Medivacs. It forces Terran to mine gas when the core of his army is mineral intensive, not gas intensive. Without additional unit, like a simple Medic, Mules are absolutely crucial for the Terran. It could be implemented by Blizzard in a easy way - Medics require Academy (new building, houses upgrades for the medic like good old Restoration), can be Reactored with an upgrade from the Academy (like in WoL campaign), and can be combined with a Dropship, creating the Medivac. Easy to explain in the lore, also should be relatively easy to implement. This way Terran Bio would be fixed. What about the Mech? Some cost reductions here and there could be necessary, or simply buffs like the ones I wrote earlier in my Mech analysis.
What about the Protoss? Without the Chronoboost, P does not need any immediate buffs or nerfs - it needs build time adjustments, that's all. You could even steal them from Brood War without too many imbalances. P would be alright with some delicate number tweaking, but one thing is for sure - most technologies will definately need a research time reduction.
And Zerg? I read it a lot on the forums, that Zerg without the Inject does not need to go back to his base as often as Protoss or Terran, that Zerg macro becomes way too easy. On the contrary. What Zerg would need, is to keep maximum larvae per Hatch to 3. With such low larvae stacking and production without the Queen, Zerg macro becomes easier mechanically, but much harder when it comes to decision making. The Drone vs Units becomes much more difficult for players to manage, bringing another dimension to Zerg's macro. Losing a Drone when morphing a building hurts the Zerg more. Back in WoL beta, when I first saw the Queen and Inject Larva, I instantly knew something beautiful has been taken away from the Zerg. The ability to differenate a good Zerg from the bad ones, by how the larvae is spent. Zerg may not need to come back to his base like P or T to build Pylons/Depos, but same was true for BW Zerg. P and T had to coma back to their base to produce units, while Zerg could fit most of his production on 5-0 hotkeys up to an early late game. But, Larvae being another resource to manage brings some more uniqueness to the game, and more difficulty based not on speed alone, but thinking and game sense, which differenated Zerg macro from that of Protoss and Terran.
tl:dr
Macro Boosters inflated some of the problems with balance. I already wrote a bit about the Chronoboost and its gimmicky nature which gimps Protoss in standard play. Larva Inject removes the unique characteristic that exists in Brood War Zerg. Mule leads to imbalances in the very late game (Blizzard fixed it with cast range, then reverted it), but other then that it has no design issues. Without Macro Boosters (way back, like first month of the Beta) game would be in much better state now. There are also other reasons for removing MB, but I won't waste any more time on this. Other people have already said enough on this matter.

Yes... back in HotS, Overlord was sent out around a minute earlier compared to LotV (someone could correct me on exact timing, but this is not that important). Zerg cannot scout the inside of an enemy base without a flying unit. If Overlords scout a minute later then in HotS, and waiting for Spire can end up in dying to cheese/all-in, what other solutions do we have? Sending a starting drone will not help against a wall-in, Marine or a Cannon in the front. I just talked about scout readability, but in this case scouting itself becomes very hard. By the time Overlord reaches enemy base, there will be more Marines/Stalkers/Sentries to kill it then what would be waiting for it in HotS. Here are two suggestions to help Zerg scouting:
- Starting Overlord gains a +100% speed increase at the start of the game, lasting 10-20 seconds. First spawned Overlord gains same boost for half the duration of the starting Overlord (15 second and 7.5 second for example). Rest of the Overlords function same as they used to. This solution have appeared on Teamliquid before.
- Increase unupgraded Overlord speed by some degree (like 20-30%)
tl:dr
12 worker start and its impact on Overlord scouting is one of the things that cannot be balanced without such a band-aid, and nobody will change Blizzard's mind to try starting with 8 or 9 workers instead of 12. But, something should be done.

Those are just a couple of things that I can think of on top of my head. Thing is, strategic and tactical mistakes should be punishable.
If you send Medivac to a defended expansion, or if you didn't hide it well enough and your opponent spots it, and you still want to try dropping, you should be punished for rushing things. If you make a mistake like that, your opponent should be rewarded with an opportunity to repel or snipe the drop. It is your job to make sure you avoid being spotted with the drop and not dropping on defended positions.
If you are too greedy and want to pick off some tech building, some more workers, or something else in opponents base, and you allow your Mutalisks to suffer heavy damage, you should be punished by slow regeneration rate. You should be punished if you are bad at harassing and still attempting to do it. It is your job to look after Mutalisks and not take engagements that your force cannot handle.
If you do a bad job baby-sitting your units, you should not be able to pick them up from 7 range. If your opponent tries to focus fire your Warp Prism and you have to retreat it behind your force, your opponent should be rewarded by you not being able to use Warp Prism without the risk of losing it. It is your job to look after your Warp Prism and retreat it and the units that you want to save.
If you put a Tank line in a position where they can be easily surrounded and destroyed, you should not be able to save them. Your opponent should be rewarded by getting to them and damaging them in the first place (which would be hard if Blizzard actually buffed Tank damage). It is your job to anticipate enemy's army movement and spread your Tanks accordingly.
If you build a Nydus right in front of your opponents base so he can see it, he should be able to snipe it with ease and cost you resources. It is your job to keep the Nydus from being scouted.
If you go for a cheesy opening, should your opponent scout you and prepare, you should be in disadvantage. He should be rewarded for good job at scouting. It is your job to hide your build and deny scouting.

List could probably go on and on. There has to be a risk for any action that can put you in advantageous position. 7 pick up range on Warp Prism removes this risk, same as Medivac boost, Nydus Invulnerability, Sieged Tank pick up, Mutalisk high regen/speed. Cheese openings that don't put you behind in tech or economy (or both) remove this risk as well. Harass openings should rely on doing actual damage or aquiring map control - if you don't deal any damage, you should be behind, and you should be the one that has to work harder to win the game, if your harass fails.
To put it into something easy to understand: If you have a Sentry on top of the ramp, and Terran walks his Marines into your base, you should not be able to rewind the time by 2 seconds (because you were busy with something else like macro) and put the Force Field up. It was your mistake because you didn't keep an eye on the mini-map or didn't put more units to block the path. Simple as that.
tl:dr
Every action needs a reaction. Abilities and ways of saving yourself without giving your opponent a chance to capitalize on your mistake should not be in a competitive game like Starcraft 2. You should be made to work harder to correct any mistakes that you've done, and your opponent needs to have an option of taking advantage of the situation as well.

In SC2 we have a matchup (actually 2, if we count mirror as well) in which melee vs melee fights take place. ZvP or PvZ, where Zealots battle it out against Zerglings. Improvements in pathing have drastically lowered the skill ceiling of this interaction. In Zealot vs Zergling fight, you want your Zerglings to spread out, surround and flank the Zealots while making it so that all of your Lings attack the Zealots at the same time. You do that because Zealot will die to 4 Lings if they attack it all the the same time, but single Zealot can kill much higher number of Zerglings if they fight him one by one. That is why attacking all at the same time is important, and to achieve that, you attack from different sides to surround Zealots as quickly as possible, not wasting any DPS.
In case of Zealot, the opposite is true. You want to minimize surface area, meaning that you want to keep your Zealots together, as close as possible. You may want to retreat into a corner, so that your Zealots are against a wall, reducing the surface area even more. You also want to attack Lings in tight formation, but if the number of Lings for you to win in head on engagement is too big, and you have nowhere to retreat, you may want to move away from Zerglings, attack them, try to move away again, attack, and so on and so on, basically stutter-stepping, or kiting. That prevents your Zealots from being surrounded, which lets you to take on higher numbers of Zerglings.
In Brood War, the skill floor for Zealot vs Zergling is low. It all comes down to A-Move one ball into another. Anyone can do it. However, the skill ceiling is very high, because of the less efficient pathing system. It is harder to surround the Zealot ball, it is harder to time it so all the Zerglings attack at the same time. Getting Zerglings to move is easy, getting them to move how you would like them to is another league, as there is a high degree of skill involved in it. When it comes to Zealots, they don't just clump, and their surface area is bigger - you need to manually bring them together to close up any holes that increase the surface area and allow Zerglings to go inside and attack from yet another angle. This also requires a high amount of APM and skill. For both Zergling and Zealot control, the skill ceiling is very high, and this keeps true to other melee units, Archons and workers included. Skill floor, however, is still relatively low - you only need to attack move, but to increase your unit efficiency, you need to give them additional commands. And with that, you can accomplish almost impossible feats, like 30 lings killing 10 Zealots (without Adrenal Glands upgrade) or 2 Zealots winning against 8-10 Lings and not even one of them dying.
However, in Starcraft 2, the skill ceiling is much lower. Zealots clump naturally, while Zerglings don't get freaked out by friendly units on their way that stop to attack, almost automatically surrounding the enemy. Both Zergling and Zealot micro is simplified, making the interaction less about the skill, and more about the numbers. The difference between a average Gold and average Diamond player microing those units is smaller then if average Gold and average Diamond player duked it out in hypotethical SC2 with Brood War pathing.
The skill ceiling has been lowered, and the skill gap between good and bad player has closed a bit. You don't have to micro your Zerglings, because they surround almost automatically. You don't have to micro Zealots, because they clump automatically. Even worse, Zealot Charge takes even greater portion of control away from the player. This is not what Brood War is about. Microing melee units became something that the game engine almost does for you, and it created the syndrom of "6 pool OP", "Ling rush OP" or "Proxy Zealot OP" way back in WoL, mostly heard from Bronze to Silver league players. It's not that Zerglings or Zealot rushes are OP by themselves - they are however, if the engine helps a rushing Bronze player to micro, but doesn't help the other Bronze player who has to defend with 1 or 2 Marines and a couple of SCVs.
As the game progresses, Zerglings and Zealots become less and less effective. This is because even with the helping hand of the engine, melee units cannot do much against a ball of clumped ranged units. there is simply not enough of a surface area for melee units to join in the fight and deal damage. In Brood War, units didn't clump as much, and melee units were viable way into the late game. In fact, both Zealots and Zerglings were used not only to tank first volleys of fire, but to deal great amounts of damage if microed correctly.
For Zealot, his damage dealing ability was based on his survivability - based on his high HP, it is reasonable to think that increase in HP will increase damage that Zealot is able to deal before it dies. For some reason, Zealot in SC2 lost 10 HP and gained some DPS by lower attack cooldown.
For Zergling, its damage dealing ability was based on speed and fast attack speed - quickly closing the distance and attacking very fast, Zergling was able to deal massive damage despite its low HP, being weak to AoE damage. Because of its almost automatic surround in SC2, Zergling has lost some of its attack speed compared to its Brood War counterpart. Even with the Adrenal Gland upgrade, it is not enough to help Zergling become more of a Core unit, as the unit clumping results in smaller surface area of targets. That's when we see Zerglings running around the Terran ball like headless chickens looking for a place to attack, and dying to Marine fire who are just standing there being healed by the Medivac.
As we speak about the Zealot Charge, it is worth noting that it breaks another dimension - Zergling dying to two Zealot attacks if Protoss attack upgrade > Zerg carapace upgrade, and 3 if otherwise. Now, as long as there is Charge, Zealot will always 2 shot a Zergling. Terrible, terrible damage, and upgrades not important anymore. I wish Blizzard gave Zealot his 10 HP back. I wish Blizzard removed Charge and gave us Zealot Speed upgrade. I wish Blizzard either buffed Zergling attack speed, or gave us 50/50 or 100/100 upgrade in Lair, increasing their attack speed by 20%, and later at Hive tech, with Adrenal Glands that would increase attack speed to 50% of base attack speed (so up by 10%). I wish pathing wasn't so efficient, because when I watch a pro vs pro Ling Bling ZvZ, I don't know how much of the unit movement can be attributed to the engine, and how much to indivudual players skill. This, for me, dulls any excitement I could have, because suddenly, pro vs pro doesn't look that much more different then random Master or Diamond players game.
Same can be said about in ranged vs ranged unit discussion, but I chose to concentrate on melee aspect of the game.

Back in Brood War, micro is about moving your units and controlling them each step of the way to increase their efficiency. Dodging Lurker spines with Marines, Vulture Patrol micro, Mutalisk stacking and Patrol/Hold micro, getting better spread against powerful splash attacks, getting better concaves, surrounding units with Zerglings, kiting, running Zealots past the Lurkers and many more. Nowadays, classic micro is almost only seen in Marine vs Baneling spread, vs Disruptor splitting, and kiting - that's it, there is no other type of micro that requires your near constant attention. Movement as micro has almost dissapeared thanks to the "improved pathing and AI". Fluid unit movement and modern engine left us with units that do not benefit from movement micro, you almost always want to keep them in default, deathball formation to increase your DPS. In Brood War, however, micro was not about actions which you didn't have to do to play the game in intended way (simply by a-moving), but what you could do to increase the efficiency of your units by a large degree by simple and easy to understand actions of move/hold/attack move and patrol move. Micro was something that not everyone could perform, differenating the best from the simple "good" players. It was exciting to see a pro player do things no ordinary ladder player could do. This created the moments that left the audience in awe. Now, in SC2, the "micro" is just something that you have to do, in order to play the game how the designers have intended us to play.
To give us the replacement of true micro, Starcraft 2 has moved from its movement based micro to a more Warcraft 3 based micro. Abilities, activated and passive, and lots and lots of them. Core units have activated and passive abilities (Ravager, Stalker, Phoenix, Marauder, Medivac, Adept, Cyclone, Disruptor, Oracle attack, Sentry Guardian Shield, old Immortal Ability, Void Ray attack bonus and many more) that you are required to use to play the game properly. You have to activate them and use them, giving you impression of microing without the actual micro.
Activating an ability or spamming a spell is only a mechanical challenge (keyboard speed), even in highest levels of play. Compared to Brood War and its inefficient pathing and lack of Smart Cast, you did not only have to be fast keyboard typist. Mouse precision mattered because you had to click on every caster individually to cast a single spell, and casting spells in quick succesion was impressive in itself, and Korean girls screamed in appreciation. Also, because units didn't move so fluidly, you had to predict and give commands to groups of units throughout the engagement - experience and "knowledge" of unit movement mattered. This gave the pros more room to differenate between them and be recognized by their style of play.

Unit clumping is also the main reason why fights end so quickly - units fit in smaller area, which greatly increases DPS. In Brood War, a part of your army will be behind the main force, or sometimes your army may be spread out across half the map - in that situation, it is obvious that not all of the units will attack at once, therefore, initial DPS will be lower, and it increases as the rest of your units join the fight. This is something that is not seen in SC2 - your army is almost always gathered in a silly looking, unnatural clump, or simply, a Deathball. I don't really want to talk about the subject of Deathballing, as there have been many threads about it, and even here, however briefly, the crucial point on why the Deathball is the way it is has been explained.
tl:dr
With the improved pathing, the careful balance has been broken. Melee units became too strong in the early game and required gentle nerfs, while at the same time they became not strong enough in the late game to compete with the ranged units. The skills that make difference between Bronze and Gold/Platinum have vanished, and even on the other side of the spectrum, melee unit control have taken a blow.

Let me tell you what Brood War is about. Brood War is about spending your limited resource of attention and speed, or focus, however you want to call it. You can either spend it on macro, or micro. Multitasking is nothing different but splitting your attention between the two, so if you want, you can split it three ways, it doesn't matter. What matters is, in Brood War there is a division between how many things need to be done, and how many can you do. Player can spend time focusing only on couple of them at the time - building units from your base has to be done by physically looking at it and selecting buildings one by one, and you cannot micro at the same time. In SC2 however, it can be done with a few keystrokes (with exception of Protoss who still has to come back to his base most of the time to produce units). The beauty of Brood War is that you could theoretically do 5 things at the time, but had the time to only do 2 of them.
You have to:
- make workers
- send previously produced workers to mine
- create supply and place production/tech buildings (or simply building stuff)
- train units
- micro and army management
With MBS and automining in SC2, you have 4 things to do and time to do 2.5-3. There is less choice.
This closes the skill gap between players of different levels. You don't have to "be" in your base to do macro related stuff, with the exception of building construction. This also prevents players from developing unique playstyles, where some players would focus more on micro, some more on macro, and others try to strike the balance between them - in SC2, it is easy to make units while you watch your army.
Ultimately, in Brood War, you had to make a decision on what is more important to you - microing your units right this moment in order to gain some advantage, like secure an expansion, or deny opponents expansion, or set up/break a contain, or is it more important to prevent that drop that you spotted from happening, or is it more important to train new units, or check the progress on an upgrade, or something else completely. You could not do everything in heat of the moment, you had to choose.
Knowing that even a progamer doesn't watch his army at all time changes our perception of things.
- In SC2, if you didn't watch your army and it died to Banelings/Disruptor/Widow Mine/whatever, you are being called sloppy, and you just have made a game ending mistake. The time you just spent on macro at home has cost you a game, because in normal situation, you should be watching your army and doing macro at the same time.
- In Brood War, because of naturally spread out armies, game ending damage almost didn't happen in Brood War, and smaller parts of army might have been sacrificed because the player choose to train 5 Tanks 2 Vultures and 3 Goliaths, instead of microing 4 Goliaths on the field. Maybe the choice was between securing an expansion and losing 20 supply of units - but there was always a choice and room for a better (not only faster, but also more strategical) player to shine.

Multiple Building Selection (MBS) and Unlimited Unit Selection (UUS) is, considered by some, as an improvement over Single Building Selection (SBS) and Limited Unit Selection (LUS). The reason for that is because people say that it removes the artificial limitations of the interface and brings the game to todays standards. People say that with easier to use interface, and easier macro, people can focus more on other aspects of the game. There are however problems with this argument. Strategy will be in the game regardless whever macro is easy or hard. Easy macro does not help better strategist to beat a player with better mechanical skill. It helps a better strategist to beat an otherwise better mechanical player that is without or with bad strategy. What we have to remember is that more focus or more time to strategize does not mean that your strategy will be better - it is more likely (almost guaranteed) that a pro player can think about strategy while performing his normal macro cycle without breaking a sweat. Lowering the mechanical skill ceiling of macro does not mean that the strategies will be better.
Less time spent on macro also does not mean that the extra time will be spent on micro. If by micro, we define the unit movement, spellcasting etc. during the battle, then no, easier macro will not make games more micro intensive. There will be more time to position units before the battle. There will be extra time to reinforce before the battle. But during the battle there will be almost the same amount of micro dispalyed, as during the most intensive micro manouvers, even pro will not macro. And those less intensive micro? The less intensive micro is not as impressive, so more of it will not suddenly make the fights much more exciting to viewers.
What we have to remember, is that Starcraft 2 and Brood War are both RTS games, not TBS (turn based strategy games). In TBS games, more "noob-friendly" interface is more welcome. Interface that helps you perform the "macro in TBS" is always a good addition. However, dumbing down the interface in RTS games by making macro easier can only result in said game becoming more shallow and less interesting. RTS is about real time - about speed, clicking and typing speed included. Fast clicking and typing is to RTS as what aiming is to FPS game - both genres utilize strategy, which is important in both, and separetes the experienced (or talented) players from the noobs. Speed is to RTS what aiming is to FPS - it seperates the players who dedicate time to achieve certain level of skill from the casuals with less skill. It also gives a faster player a way to shine in his own right - but there have to be ways for him to spent this speed/APM in an effective way. With MBS, a "super fast" pro will not have a much better macro then a simply "fast" pro. There is less room for players to show off their skill, therefore, the skill ceiling is lowered.
Someone could argue that even with the MBS, pros macro is not perfect. But it is not far away from it - a top GM player will not be far behind from a top SC2 pro in terms of macro alone. And even in Brood War, there were games when pro macroed almost perfectly, and most likely they always do macro perfectly up to 40 or 50 supply, and on some occasions, games are decided before that. Anyway, in Brood War and its SBS, even a B teamer could not match an A teamer level of macro. Macro was harder, but because of that, games were less random. Even if a top pro made a strategical mistake, he could make up for it with his superior speed/mechanics and win against a less skilled player. Build order loses were less common because of that. Hell, even in pro games a 12 hatch could win against 9 pool thanks to better micro/macro and decision making. That is how bonjwa and other high profile celebrities were born. Without the legendary celebrities, no sport (or e-Sport) can survive.

Once Blizzard decided to improve the UI (automining, MBS etc.), they knew they need to give players something else to manage in their base. Problem is, if that additional action does not benefit you, you will not do it. Hence we ended up with extra larva, extra minerals, extra production/research boost. It breakes the balance of economy vs technology, but this is another topic. It gave us something else to do - but most people want Macro Boosters gone. So what can be added to macro, without actually adding anything to production, economy or technology? There is no such thing, unless you make stupid decision and, for example, make supply buildings/Overlords half price, half size, half HP, and half supply. Why not simply remove all the bullshit altogether and get rid of the Multiple Building Selection?
Adding anything to the macro (to compensate for MBS) with a benefit for added thing brings volatility to the game. We would all be better off without MBS altogether.

UUS is also limiting the skill ceiling and narrows the skill gap between players. It also has a negative impact on balance and turtling.
Think about it for a second - with LUS, you won't see 30-40 Mutalisks flying around one shotting all anti-air. When Jaedong controlled 2 groups of Mutalisks in one of his games in Brood War on Blue Storm, that was considered pimp and became the stuff of legends. Now, players just group as many units as they can, and this level of control will never be showcased again, because it is simply not needed anymore.
Deathballing can also be blamed on UUS to a certain degree. If you had to select a maximum of 5 units, making a 200/200 army suddenly would not sound so cool, right? Imagine the terror of moving such an army with a limit of 5 units - this in itself is discouraging turtling. With 12 unit selection limit in Brood War, ZvX are full of action, even more in TvZ where Terran also is penalized for massing high numbers of units (penalized, as in requiring a lot more attention to control high amounts of units). Unit limit promotes action by itself, be it in Bronze or Masters league. You can still group units in hotkeys and send them to fight, but even then they arrive more in waves then in one massive blob.
Even the developers of Warcraft 1 knew what interface changes meant for the game. I shall quote Patrick Wyatt, long time designer for Blizzard: "Later in the development process, and after many design arguments between team-members, we decided to allow players to select only four units at a time based on the idea that users would be required to pay attention to their tactical deployments rather than simply gathering a mob and sending them into the fray all at once. We later increased this number to nine in Warcraft II."
He was on the ball Blizzard, while your current team doesn't even know where the ball is.
tl:dr
This time there will not be tl:dr, as the design choices in question cannot be simply summarised in 2 sentences.

By no means I'm saying that Blizzard needs to remove MBS, Marco Boosters and provide limit unit selection and different pathing - after 5 years, it is way too late for that. But with such changes, and many others, Blizzard have alienated the hardcore community. It's loyal customers since Brood War. Catering to casuals and dumbing down the the game is not the way to go - RTS, by definition, is not a genre for casual play. You have to dedicate time to be any good at it. Casual players will leave regardless, and it is only the hardcore playerbase that will stay for longer. Casuals might be interested in the campaign - which is a whole other story, but let me tell you this: if Blizzard released at least 3-5 missions for each race in each expansion, and properly introduced players to basic build orders and unit interactions, and if story was actually gripping and full of twists and turns, casual players could stay just to see what happens next. Maybe they would rethink the choice of their main race, if they played different races in the campaign, and in the end, enjoy the game more, and maybe, just maybe, changed from casual players to hardcore gamers.
LotV is even less casual friendly then any previous expansion. Casual players like to play slow - and most people complain about LotV's speed. 12 worker start means no more time to think trough your opening - you have to build first buildings seconds after starting the game. Casual players like to play on fewer bases, preferably on one - which won't work with the "half patches". Game demands that you expand asap. Units reqiure you to activate mindlessly abilities, and casual ca't do that fast enough. The game is frustrating and uninviting to the new players.
If you wanted good sales, you should make the campaign and the story good and worth replaying. Give a proper tutorial for each race. Give us better Arcade system, so casual players could try out something different, or maybe even make some sort of ladder system for the Arcade - you already failed to monetize on the best seller which was DOTA back in Warcraft III, there is no need to do that again. I honestly cannot imagine why there was no proper chat system since WoL - even Diablo 2 and SC1 had it, which made the game so much more social and worth coming to - not only to play, but to play with other people met on the internet. You know, your gaming buddies.
There are quite a few things I have covered in this post - and there could be more if the Beta didn't end so quickly - but I hope that when you make another Warcraft game, you won't change the formula and stay true to the W3 spirit. I hope when, and if, another Starcraft game is made, it builds on top of SC:BW, without trying to reinvent the wheel. If you want your games to stand out from other RTS games, don't change them, let them be unique in their own right.
Starcraft 2 is a good game. But it is not a great game, and that is the problem, as from a company that made those beautiful, fantastic games in the past, we expect only greatness.
Personally, I will still buy the game and play LotV, if only for the campaign. I want to see how the story will end. I advise you to do the same, even if just for the sake of W4 and SC3.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, whoever you are. Hate it or love it, leave some constructive feedback. Thank you.