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On October 15 2010 08:02 whoopadeedoo wrote:
Planetary Fortresses and ultralisks also are nice benefactors of the VR nerf.
Oh yeah, completely forgot about the PF.
So can't really kill those either. Takes pretty much 100 supply worth army to kill those with reasonable amount of damage back at your ground army from that 40 splash damage.
Didn't use VR against ultras anyway but i'm sure that there has to be another way to make toss take carriers into play than constantly nerfing all the other units.
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On October 15 2010 08:31 whoopadeedoo wrote:Show nested quote +On October 15 2010 08:27 devolore wrote:
Where's the "Void Rays are significantly stronger now" option?
Yeah, on paper, if you built a proxy pylon or something and used it to charge your VR's up or your opponent was just completely unprepared you could get in and do some serious damage. But as soon as he scouted it or fought off the first wave of VR's they were basically useless for the rest of the game; you could build them, but he'd just chase them off before you did any real damage, all while massing up an army that you can't keep up with. So Protoss would build 1-2 void rays and then stop entirely.
Now you can actually do something resembling damage with them using some hit and run tactics. They don't have to be charged up to start hurting. They don't hurt as much fully charged as they used to, sure, but they did such a ridiculous amount of damage before that that isn't really saying much. There are plenty of units that still do less damage than a charged Void Ray.
To put some math behind it, say you sneak in and attack a Barracks or something. It takes 8 seconds "normal" time for a Void Ray to charge. In the old model, you'd do 5 damage per second (the Void Ray has an attack speed of 1) for 8 seconds, and then 25 damage from then on. So if it takes your opponent 12 seconds to move his units over, you did a total of (5x8) + (25x4) = 140 damage.
Under the new model, you do 10 damage for 8 seconds, followed by 16. So again, if it takes 12 seconds for your opponent to move his units over, you do a total of (10x8) + (16x4) = 144 damage. So we can assume that, for any attack that would have been 12 seconds or shorter before (ie: most harass), this was actually a buff.
(Obviously that's if you're playing on normal speed; it's something like 5.5 seconds for it to charge on Faster, putting the crossover point somewhere around 9 seconds in a real game)
I don't know about anyone else, but the problem I've always had with Void Rays was that they're amazing when you can get them to charge, but completely worthless until they do. It's also very tough to get them to actually charge in a lot of situations. So although they're no longer MONSTER DPS once fully charged, they're still pretty good DPS, and they're not worthless until that point.
I dunno, I think they're a lot more actually usable with this change. I'm pretty sure VRs only take 6 seconds of game time to charge. You aren't going to convince me the level 2 nerf is offset by +1 (+4 armor) buff in level 1. The only two things it helps kill appreciably better are roaches and marauders, and when do you build a 250/150 air unit to deal with those?
So true. People are saying that voidrays are still usable, when the truth is there are units that do what the voidray does now better and cheaper, so it just simply isn't worth getting voidrays.
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yeah, void rays are pretty much completely obsolete at this point. they just really don't do enough to justify their extremely high cost. their damage is comparable now to a stimmed marauder which is just ludicrous given the cost of these two units.
personally i feel this nerf was due to team games/lower level ladder games because theres just no way that anyone at a pro or high diamond level though void rays were so overpowered that they needed a 40% damage nerf AND a speed nerf. how many times did we see a void ray in a gsl match? i think it was under 10. i'll be very surprised if we see them at all in gsl 2; carriers, despite being pretty poor for the cost are way better than a void ray hitting for 8+8.
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They seem pretty useless now. Yes, their uncharged DPS is better now, but for their cost it's still not very good. 17DPS against armored... For 250/150? And they do barely more DPS than a single Marine against anything that isn't armored. With more than 1/3 their charged DPS lopped off the top, they're no longer game-changing when they get charged up, just finally pulling their weight for the cost.
Enough with all this pure out-of-context theorycraft, though. Let's look at actual matchups and see if they still have a role:
PvP: as has been said a billion times on this thread already, while they used to be good enough against Stalkers to be a viable option, they no longer are. Maybe they could be a very situational option against a mass Zealot into Robo build, but the old PvP VR builds are probably dead in the water and if there is a new one, it's a pretty narrow timing window against a single enemy build.
PvT: they can't deal with Vikings very effectively with nerfed charged DPS, so I can't really see them being useful after the initial harass phase. Taking one extra tick to kill a Marine while charged probably isn't the end of the world, although it sure doesn't help, but significantly less charged DPS to turrets will allow them to shut down VR harass much more efficiently.
PvZ: a 250/150 T2 air harass unit losing in a 1-on-1 fight with a Queen? Yeah, VR harass is dead in this matchup.
As for the Banshee comparison ("Banshee tech takes longer which is why it's fair that VRs lose to a Queen 1:1 while Banshees win")... Pylon-Gateway-Core-Stargate takes (25+65+50+60) = 200 seconds build time, and (100/0+150/0+150/0+150/100) = 550/100 in building cost to tech to VRs. For Banshees, you need Depot-Rax-Factory-Starport with a tech lab somewhere along the way, for (30+60+60+50) = 200 seconds build time, and (100/0+150/0+150/100+150/100+50/25) = 600/225 in cost to tech to Banshees (not counting time on tech lab since it doesn't delay your other tech). The tech paths take the same build time and Banshee tech costs only 50/125 more (just over the cost of the one Sentry Protoss will need to stay alive on a fast tech build, which Terran can achieve with a walloff), and once the tech is done, banshees cost a full 100/50 less apiece. Banshees are really not any significantly slower or more difficult to tech to (and come on, 1/1/1 for Terran is a much more stable build to transition into the midgame than 1 gate -> Stargate for Toss), and they are clearly more effective than VRs at it once they're out.
Obviously, VRs and Banshees are different units from different races, so that above analysis in no way "proves VRs are overnerfed" or whatever; I just felt the need to answer some erroneous claims that this nerf was necessary to prevent VR rush in PvZ from being worse than Banshee rush in TvZ.
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the change make sense
however with this damage void rays should now cost 100 Gas at most, maybe even 75...
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I'd be willing to bet this is due more to balance in team games than 1v1. In 3v3 and 4v4 you see a lot of mass Void Rays and the outcome is always stupid.
I have to agree completely with solistus... thankfully I rarely play P.
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also the people complaining about void rays vs zerg are sort of funny, theres a reason no one uses that strategy in top level games (yes, i know idra lost to lotze making a fake robotics + proxy void rays and sitting in his base with one sentry to block the ramp) and its that void rays are worthless against zerg. the only MU they were really even solid in was tvp, and they weren't even good enough to be anything standard there. they certainly weren't good enough to be nerfed.
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On October 15 2010 08:55 sk` wrote:
I'd be willing to bet this is due more to balance in team games than 1v1. In 3v3 and 4v4 you see a lot of mass Void Rays and the outcome is always stupid.
I have to agree completely with solistus... thankfully I rarely play P.
I refuse to believe blizzard is stupid enough to balance team games at the cost of 1v1. I simply refuse.
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On October 15 2010 08:28 bulge wrote:
i just did some testing. the voids still work very well. they kill equal food of BCs, vikings, corruptors, mutas, hydras, phoenix.
they still do terrible terrible damage, especially against armored. the only difference is charged voids are less auto win than before. i think 99% of the player base wanted this.
the guy above me made a very good point. for harass and general army composition, voids are now better.
You can't base it on food counts. Basing it on resources is much better, but it's not even adequate. You need to factor in everything, from resources to food count to build times to tech levels, etc.
In actual gameplay, void rays used to beat BCs (as intended), lost to vikings (you can't just test it by a-moving), fared on par against corrupters (as intended), did not fare well against muta swarms, totally sucked against hydras, and beat phoenixes (because phoenixes are made of glass and do no damage to armored). None of these matchups got better for the VR except phoenixes mutas, and we all know how often VRs are used to fight phoenixes and mutas. The bottom line is what they were intended to fight, they now fight a lot less effectively.
What do they harass better now? The amazing +1 damage to workers?
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On October 15 2010 06:25 Autofire2 wrote:
What I dont like about it is that it seems to play into the "power underwhelming" trope of SC2 (relative to BW) that was explained so well in another thread at TL. Siege tanks were nerfed so they dont decimate ground armies in a matter of seconds, high temps cant take out thors auto-instantly anymore, roaches went from being crap-your-pants to "oh, roaches. K." reapers have been rendered almost useless (I believe, don't quote me on this) except as scouts and now void rays.
It makes sense, kind of, but this seems to go against the grain of exciting matches. If you can predict the winner 9 times out of 10 by looking at the army count and composition before the battle thats...going to be a problem.
I'm probably being stupid, but that sounds contradictory to me. Surely siege tanks decimating ground armies in a matter of seconds, high templar insta-gibbing Thors etc etc heightened the predictability of a battle's outcome, based purely on army count and composition.
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The void ray may prove to be effective for sniping tanks, especially when sentries can use FF to keep the marines from coming back. I imagine 2 void rays will kill 4-5 tanks pretty quickly, though I haven't tested as of yet.
I really agree with a poster before- the void ray was an all in unit before because of how flimsy they were; if you didn't surprise your opponent, your tech was useless and you're going to get rolled. Now the void ray seems prone for some type of harass.
Or, they may prove to be very effective late game counters for corruptors, 1-2 to protect your colossus? Seems that Protoss has lacked a viable air counter for the corruptor, this may be one?
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why would you use void rays to snipe siege tanks when you can now use phoenixes which are almost half the cost, build quicker, and are more versatile......
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Void rays actually do have a niche in the protoss arsenal, now there's a sagging hole. In pvt with battlecruisers, void rays are the only things that can really dps them down, stalker fire id quite piddly. In PvZ against either ultralisks (they force hydras, and can't be blocked by lings, unlike the immortal) or broodlords (they do pretty decent against corrupters as well, with feedback/storm).
The only problem was void ray cheese, not so much in pvt, but in pvp, if you leave your base you die. PvP, zealot voidray was sick against stalkers, depending on the situation.
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Well, anyone who was dieing for the scout to be added back into sc2 just got their wish.
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The only change I agree with is the speed nerf. Other than that I have not noticed a large misuse of the Void Ray in 1.1.1. The only time I saw people consider them IMBA found themselves in 2 situations:
1) They had no counter built at the time
2) They allowed VR's to reach that critical mass where they do become unstoppable
I think all the changes made today were to ultimately make Zerg more appealing, which I think we will see the numbers shift slightly over the next month or so. The nerf was a little overboard in my opinion; the damage output seemed appropriate to me before the patch.
As for the complaints about in some post regarding the range nerf in prior patches, I feel that was completely necessary as cliff harassment was definitely a huge advantage for Protoss.
Note: I am strictly a Terran player so I have zero bias in this situation.
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Toss air is just in a horrible place now. The void ray was practically the only consistently good unit, with the phoenix coming in a distant second. I rarely made a void ray in PvT or PvP, it seems robo or templar tech is always a better option in most lategames anyway. Plus blink stalkers do a better job at holding AA units off your collosi then phoenixes do.
So my stargate use is pretty much limited to my PvZ phoenix opening. That doesn't seem like a great design.
On October 15 2010 08:55 sk` wrote:
I'd be willing to bet this is due more to balance in team games than 1v1. In 3v3 and 4v4 you see a lot of mass Void Rays and the outcome is always stupid.
I have to agree completely with solistus... thankfully I rarely play P.
The flux vanes nerf was definitely a team game move. The problem is that the logic is "well this never sees use in 1v1, so let's nerf it for team games".
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Man Void Rays where one of my favorite units, not because they where very strong when charged, but because of the gimmick that came with them. This just makes them weird, and not as fun.
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Phoenixs are awesome in all matchups. Don't dis them! Carriers are horribly underused/underrated too.
No problem with this change in concept, but the numbers might be too low. Time will tell.
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underrated?
compared with the original carriers, this new carrier that:
no longer heals interceptors when they return
moves slower
attacks slower
sucks complete balls. being underrated means that people simply don't think it's good, when it in fact is. the sc2 carrier is not the case. it just sucks.
oh and, vikings?
there is a reason why the koreans make fun of the carrier (and the warp prism and the mothership for that matter)
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If they nerf Void Rays, they should at least do something about the carrier. By the time late game comes around and you actually have the infrastructure to build carriers, the opponent probably has upgrades.
Against any type of unit with high armor like Ultras and BCs, carriers are abysmal due to their 5 x2 damage. Make the damage 10 flat for each interceptor and I'll use carriers.
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EPT
