[D] 1.1.2 Void Ray changes (with poll) - Page 8

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.