OneGoal: A better SC2 [Project Hub] - Page 56

On April 25 2013 13:59 ItWhoSpeaks wrote:


Why? Its basically a slightly beefier Golaith that hits harder and attacks slower. Hellions and Vultures are very strong and mobile. However, they are dependant upon Tanks to support them in straight up fights, which is where the concept of "slow" mech comes from. Try pitting the Warhound against units without siege-tanks. They are pretty awful unless they are attacking air units, like the Goliath.

More over the Thor is an awful unit that contributes to deathball armies due to its high cost/stats and dependance on other units to support it. You can do a ton more micro with 3 goliaths than you can ever do with a Thor, even though its the same supply for supply. Giving players the opportunity to spread their damage out (as well as reducing the effectiveness of that damage in concentrated armies) is a big part of what made BW great!

On April 27 2013 01:13 ItWhoSpeaks wrote:
MSCs are more conditional speed boost medivacs that can come out earlier but have limited uses (energy means you can only safely push once every few min per mothership core.) Their overall utility may be too much, but the unit cannot be made unique because it puts too much pressure on the units design.

the unit cannot be made unique because it puts too much pressure on the units design

"Fight Duration"
One thing that we remember hearing since beta is that things die very quickly. This has been reiterated by players, casters, and professional players again and again; more units can be on the screen in SC2 than BW, pathing is better, and units tend to deal more DPS than their predecessors. Simply put, a lot happens in a short amount of time, making it harder to track who is doing what to whom. And then, too often, one side rolls into the other person’s base and the game ends. (This is seen less at the pro level because good players tend to avoid these conflicts as long as possible. A Kespa player recently stated (Flash) that SC2 is harder precisely because fights end so quickly and decisively.)

The Mothership has been plagued by conflicting identities. It is supposed to be a powerful capital ship that can turn the tide of battle, and they are precious and rare ships, hence their unique status. They also are supposed to have a balanced place in multiplayer and not outshine dedicated combat ships like the Carrier. As a result, the Mothership has gone from being ignored to dominant. This is primarily due to spells like Vortex. Instead of effectively removing the Mothership from competitive play, we feel that changes can be made to make the Mothership feel like a core late game power-caster that scales with skill and produces interesting games, rather than ending them.

-Stat Changes
-Scale reduced to .8 of the original model.
-Speed increased to 2.25 from 1.4
-Acceleration increased to be the standard of all air units.
-Vortex removed
-Cloaking Field removed
-New spell added: Isolation pulse. 100 Energy. 3 second delay at target 2.5 area location. All units in location are Isolated. They can’t attack, be attacked, target, or be targeted, or use abilities that cost energy. They can still move and use movement based abilities. 15 second duration.
-New Spell Added: Envision: (as HotS Oracle.)
-Mass Recall’s energy cost increased to 150 from 100.
-Total cost reduced to 200/200 from 400/400.
-Health reduced to 200 from 350
- Shields reduced to 200 from 350
-Supply cost reduce to 4 from 8
-This unit is no longer unique
-Still upgrades from MSC, meaning there is a soft limit of one per nexus.

--Affected Dynamics
PvZ is no longer a coin flip. Landing a sick Isolation Pulse effectively wins a battle, but allows the enemy to retreat. Brood Lords can be removed from the fight, but they can be saved, at the cost of the Protoss army getting to do whatever it wants for 15 seconds. Isolation Pulse can be used to save units, or grant units safe passage to a location. Watching a team of Zealots waltz through a spine forest and position themselves around a hatchery is fantastic, because it forces the enemy to make a decision. Do they split off some units to deal with the attack? Do they attack the diminished protoss army? With Storms and Colossi and archons, that might not be the best idea. Long story short, Isolation Pulse produces a ton of gameplay and counterplay. With good reflexes, opponents can mitigate or even dodge the spell, or if they have the right units, use the spell to their own advantage like enabling invincible ling run-by’s. Our testing thus far shows this to be a ton of fun.

Mass Recall has been made more precious due to the combination of the non-unique status of the Mothership as well as its increased speed. Offensive and Defensive Recalls alike are more common now, allowing for action to consistently occur across the map.

Envision advances the general utility of the Mothership as a support unit.


All in all, the Mothership now has a real place in every matchup’s end game without breaking the game, or reducing a game to a coin toss.

Mothership Core
The Mothership is a powerful defensive option that allows for early protoss aggression in the early game. The issue is that it turns into the unique Mothership, which creates issues as a one of unit due to binary gameplay (Either you land x important spell and you win, or you lose.) To allow the Mothership to be a non-unique unit, The Mothership core has had to have a softer limit on the number fielded at a time. As a result, energy costs have been adjusted accordingly.

--Stat Changes
-Mothership Core armor type changed to Medium from Armored.
-Mass Recall energy cost increased to 125 from 100.
-Mothership Core is no longer unique.
-You may have as many Mothership Cores as you have Nexuses.
-Envision removed.
-New Spell Fortify:
Cost: 50
Range: 9
Duration: 30 seconds
AoE: 5
Effect: All friendly buildings in AoE have Hardened Shields and Detection.

--Affected Dynamics
The Mothership Core is now weaker for one-base play, but stronger on multiple base-play, encouraging two and three base timing pushes, while still contributing to applying, and defending against early pressure. The Mothership Core doesn’t stack particularly well in a death ball due to redundant effects and poor fighting stat’s for cost. This means that as more bases are taken by protoss, using multiple Mothership Cores is only beneficial if you have multiple attack groups attacking. This increases multi-tasking potential while increasing the opportunities for counterplay (more Mothership Cores to snipe with less attention devoted to each of them.)
This also means that this style yields much smaller death balls, increasing the defenders advantage, and providing a fuller game experience. Fortify allows for Protoss to survive Baneling busts without Force Fields and gives Toss time to marshal forces versus tank based pushes. We are adding detection to fortified buildings to allow for strong conditional detection to help protoss deal with cloaked threats. This spell allows the MSC to provide the protection that the Sentry once did without forcing frustrating dynamics.

--Concerns
The main risk of this change is giving Protoss too many “get out of get out of jail free cards” While this is true in part, this only comes into play with macro heavy playstyles, and each Recall is more precious. This creates timing windows where Photon Overcharge is not available. Additionally, having three Motherships means you have three fewer Immortals in your army, or you have 300 less gas to spend on units or upgrades.

On April 27 2013 08:30 ItWhoSpeaks wrote:
I am going to quote some stuff from our design post as to why we made the MSC non unique. I hope this is a complete answer for you.


Blizzard has taken steps to solving this problem by adding units rather than changing fundamentals like pathing and economy. Photon Overcharge, and Recall offer different forms of defenders advantage. When it is riding on a 200 max energy pool, that presents problems.

Here is an excerpt from why we changed the Mothership to a non-unique


Here are the benefits of a non-unique MSC



It makes deathball play less optimal and squad based pushes more optimal. So what do you exactly want from us? You are quick to hammer us when something supposedly encourages deathball play; why go after a non-unique msc when the "unique" handle is one of the most derided and problematic "gimmicks" in SC2? A dynamic that was so toxic, that it actually made PvZ borderline unwatchable thanks to the overwhelming importance of landing Vortex.

On April 27 2013 11:24 TonberryBleu wrote:


It's because there is really no trade-off that was given for removing the soft cap on Mothership Cores. The addition of Ion Aegis and a stronger Photon Overcharge more than makes up for a 25 energy increase for Recall. If anything, wouldn't that make turtling to deathballs a more attractive choice? In what way do your changes make "deathball play less optimal"? You just said yourself that this makes Protoss less vulnerable to Baneling busts, tank pushes, etc. so what's to stop the Protoss player from taking advantage of this stronger defense to get their deathball safer/quicker? Your stance would make sense if you made Recall cost 75 and Overcharge cost 150/Aegis 100, but you raised the cost of the harassment-based ability and increased the usefulness of their defensive spells. What you said and what you did don't match.

If you're going to remove the soft cap, then the spells of the Mothership Core HAVE to be less catch-all. Overcharge doing 40 damage and a new spell that gives buildings Hardened Shield just makes turtling easier. Yes, with multiple MSCs you opened up the ability for Protoss to harass with squads, but what's to prevent them from abusing the changes to make turtling into a 3/4-base deathball an every game occurrence? Nothing. That's what I'm getting at. The changes you made DO open up a squad-centric way to play Protoss, but it also strengthened turtle-to-deathball styles (which is prevalent in all races) significantly.

I never disagreed with the notion that Motherships as a unique unit with Vortex was toxic for the game. It was. Although the Mothership needs some buffing in HotS (it should keep Photon Overcharge, should cost less to upgrade from MSC to Mothership), the current role of the MSC is perfectly fine. It has uses offensively and defensively, and though the duration of Overcharge should be nerfed slightly, everything else about it is fair and balanced. Whether you want to believe it or not, your changes to the MSC in this mod actually encourage deathballing more so than before.

On April 27 2013 20:37 StandAloneComplex wrote:
Hi all. How are you doing?
Can we talk a bit about protoss today ?

I want to talk about the mothershipcore as an support unit.
I want to talk about the oracle as an unique raid unit.
-How they should be , and how they are now.

I also want to talk about additional protoss buildings/structures which could define
protoss concept/identity more clean.


To make the post not too long i will split it up in two posts

1.Post

What must be taken out of the game, to make space for more skillbased useful abilities

2.Post

New protoss unitideas

This is not zerg balancing whining. I would love to see the concept of the
protoss as a high tech alien race succeed.

But its not their in the moment.Not in Hots and also not in OneGoal.
I know you are in the try out phase and changes are being constantly made.
But you must really ask yourself in which direction you want to take the protoss race
on a more elementary level.


What must be taken out of the game, to make space for more skillbased useful abilities:

Put photon overcharge out of the game right now!!
Every second you let it in the game, it ruins the game more and more.

Its the worst designed ability in the whole sc history.

It stops all early game aggression against the race, with 3 apm required.
The player presses one button and the medivec or the zerglings
of the enemy explodes. Its an, I don't have to scout, I have an button to
press and all medivecs zergling/ baelings are gone, ability.


-Its skillless (one button press required)
-Its boring beside the graphics
-It avoids scouting
-With lategameunits being as strong as they are in protoss case,
why should the protoss player has the ability to lay back and tech up save
to midgame?

Can you explain the community why photon overcharge has to stay in the game.
With introducing multiple mothershipcores you even buffed it , as it was not
ridiculous enough in the beginning.

Oracle is boring the way it is in Hots and OneGoal. Its an more fragile but faster version of the
voidray, with 2 out of 3 abilities being uninteresting.

Give us an alternate to the collosus we are sick of seeing it , even if you changed its
attack patterns.We saw it for more than 2 years dominating unitcompositions.

You must not take it out of the game , but give the protoss player an alternate tech-decision.
I don't care if you don't like the reaver, but we like it very much, so if you can't
give us something equal cool than the reaver(which is not an redesigned colossus), than give us the reaver.


Why are you continuing buffing protoss units and nerfing zerg units.

Please explain why roaches should, in your opinion, not being good in large engagements anymore.
Why do you see the urge to redesign them as "hunting pack unit".

We have with the zergling/speedling/baeling/mutalisk our "hunting pack unit´s ".
What we don't have, after your redesign, is an reliable and beavy thanking unit,
which can reflect damage and defend against all ins or heavy amored aggression in the early till mid game.

Why damagenerfing hydras. Antiair to defend the roaches was always a weakspot in the zerg gameplay.
Why making that issue even worst . There is no reason even with introducing the ventralisk.
Not every zerg can afford to wait till spire for his anti air, if he goes roach.

Ventralisk could be cool and i appreciate that, but stop nerfing zerg units without good reasons!!!!

If you go down that road any further than most zerg will certainly not play your mod.
I can predict that for sure.

P.S: The healing changes for the queen (200 after 4 sec. instead of 150 instant) is an heavy nerf.
Zerg buildings will now die of much quicker without healing beeing instant.
Zerg buildings have the least HP in the whole game!

Did you reduce the repair ability of teran workers or the shield regeneration of toss.
No, but you introduced an shieldbattery for toss(which i find cool) but nerf healing for zerg at the same time.

I dont understand your intention behind that.

On April 28 2013 22:46 Spaceboy wrote:
Great fun last night everybody!

Incidentally someone mentioned that the medivac has an upgrade that allows it to deploy units quicker? (and this is why the medivac sometimes had a different model)... however this is not listed on the 1st page where it details differences from standard HotS, which I guess is why I'd never heard about it.

On April 28 2013 22:46 Spaceboy wrote:
Great fun last night everybody!

Incidentally someone mentioned that the medivac has an upgrade that allows it to deploy units quicker? (and this is why the medivac sometimes had a different model)... however this is not listed on the 1st page where it details differences from standard HotS, which I guess is why I'd never heard about it.