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United States4883 Posts
In my own personal experiments with widow mines, I've had very random success. The only thing that seems to work fairly reliably for me is widow mine drops and blocking bases with them. Widow mine drops are excellent and take so long to clean up that you can pull way far ahead in economy.
In TvZ, specifically, I'm having a lot of trouble connecting reliably with widow mines. If zerg players simply run over the mines with lings, they will take minimal damage; example is game 5 of Flash vs. Life, where Flash ran backwards into a series of mines that literally only killed around 15 lings total. I haven't played around with hold position micro much, but I'm planning on doing that this week. I'm hoping that it fixes things some, but I think there will still be the problem of lings being practically invulnerable to them if they just run over them.
Also, random note: it seems 100000x harder to kill ultralisks now, I have no clue what to do when ultras get out except cry.
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I've had them work fine depending on how well I micro my surrounding Bio forces, personally.
What I do is I use my Bio to kill off the individual Zerglings and smaller packs of Zerglings that would trigger the Widow Mines, instead letting them trigger on the larger groups. It's harder than just marine splitting, but very effective when I manage to do it correctly. Obviously, it's easier if I have more widow mines since I have more chances, and am not reliant on one or two 75/25 investments.
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heres something i want to know about mines
supposedly, I think, mines have a mechanic that says "mine will only track a target IF no other mines are currently targeting that unit. But if the unit is over 125health it allows more mines to target"
this means if 1 zergling runs into 5 mines it would only set off 1 mine
pretty much the mines are coded to not overkill
is this true?
if its true it means you can realistically stack 10 mines really close together in a defensive position and you never need to worry about 1 zergling setting off all your mines. they have overkill prevention
this could allow reactored mines to be very useful for defense letting terran be super defensive with just making dem mines, while going 5CC behind his base then once you have 25 mines you move out more and expand and mine up getting tanks/marines whatever. if mines really have overkill prevention they could serve as very powerful defensive units allowing for less marines early game, more mines, more CC's (vs zerg only of course)
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That's right, mines don't overkill when they automatically attack.
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On March 19 2013 02:56 centergoliath4 wrote:
heres something i want to know about mines
supposedly, I think, mines have a mechanic that says "mine will only track a target IF no other mines are currently targeting that unit. But if the unit is over 125health it allows more mines to target"
this means if 1 zergling runs into 5 mines it would only set off 1 mine
pretty much the mines are coded to not overkill
is this true?
if its true it means you can realistically stack 10 mines really close together in a defensive position and you never need to worry about 1 zergling setting off all your mines. they have overkill prevention
this could allow reactored mines to be very useful for defense letting terran be super defensive with just making dem mines, while going 5CC behind his base then once you have 25 mines you move out more and expand and mine up getting tanks/marines whatever. if mines really have overkill prevention they could serve as very powerful defensive units allowing for less marines early game, more mines, more CC's (vs zerg only of course)
Although you are forgetting that if there are 10 mines all stacked up, and 10 zerglings run in range at the same time, all ten will fire. At the same time, if there was 1 mine and 10 zerglings, the one mine will fire and still kill the 10 zerglings.
The mine is very... niche to say the least. I think too many people expect the mine to deal huge amounts of damage just because it has the potential to. Most of the time, this should not be the inferred case. They are just too random to be expecting these huge connects to occur every time a mine goes off. Yeah occasionally it will happen, but this should not be considered the norm.
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On March 19 2013 02:56 centergoliath4 wrote:
heres something i want to know about mines
supposedly, I think, mines have a mechanic that says "mine will only track a target IF no other mines are currently targeting that unit. But if the unit is over 125health it allows more mines to target.
One small point. Even if a unit has more than 125 hp, only one mine will target it at a time. If a colossus walks over two mines that are next to each other, one mine will go off and then the other will 1.5 seconds later.
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I just posted this in another thread, but I think the details from the editor should be posted in here, too.
Well, if you are able to read the editor's data, you can figure out how the mine works:
- The widow mine's attack has a prepare time of 1.5 game seconds.
=> This means, that it needs to focus at an enemy for 1.5 seconds before it executes the attack. The unit is required to be targetable and within range during the complete duration.
- The widow mine has range of 5 and no "range extra". So the range for the targeting is exactly 5. Most units have a range extra of 1 allowing them to fire at units that barely touched its max range and run away again.
Ranges use the true distance between the units. This means the attack radius of each unit includes the own unit radius and the target's unit radius to calculate the distance.
- It should target closest valid unit by itself, if it is loosing its target unit (-> unit dies/burrows/cloaks/is out of range/morphs to a structure).
- It doesn't automatically target disguised changelings, revealed hallucinations or units that other mines are targeting.
- Its attack ability is a "smart" ability making it able to be casted via right click on units. (Of course it needs to focus on the target unit again.)
- Widow mines can't target larvae and its targets are required to be visible.
- It can fire in an arc of 360 meaning that it doesn't need to turn to fire.
- It deals 125 damage and up to 35 damage versus shields to the target unit.
- The splash has a radius of 1.75 and can't hit structures and your own widow mines.
- The damage uses the spell type meaning that hardened shield does not reduce its damage.
- The damage has 0 armor reduction meaning that armor can't reduce its damage.
- Attack has a cooldown of 40 seconds.
- "A-Click" doesn't do anything.
- During the focusing, all enemies can see an untargetable image of the widow mine.
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Elements of the Lurker and the Reaver, cool little unit.
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I hope mines continue to work like this in that Blizzard does not make it fully automatic or anything. Seem like it has a lot more potential, which I can not say about a lot of SC2 units.
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updated OP with comprehensive guide/mechanic information
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I feel like that is all great stuff for improving the micro of the widow mine for all terran players. But based off this I can see see a small amount of potential for more late game use of widow mines. Initially I thought they wouldn't make it past 15-20 minutes into the game. I personally like that I can control the placement of shots from the widow mine, I just never noticed it when I had already been doing it 
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On March 19 2013 04:32 Ahli wrote:
- It doesn't automatically target disguised changelings, revealed hallucinations or units that other mines are targeting.
I've done some more testing on this, and the part about not targeting units that are already being targeted is quite important.
It means that :
- Mines do not overkill. Blinking a Stalker in the range of 5 mines will only activate exactly one.
- If you blink a group of 5 stalkers directly in the range of 5 mines, all 5 mines will target different Stalkers and they will all die.
- If you move a unit with high HP, say, an Ultralisk, in a field of 5 mines, it will take a lot of time for the Ultralisk to die, because each mine will wait for the previous mine to fire before starting to activate. Since an Ultralisk requires 5 mines to die, and it takes 1.5 seconds to launch a missile, it means that it will take 7.5 seconds of the Ultralisk staying in the mine field for the mines to kill it.
- You can, however, bypass this by right-clicking. If you select all mines and right-click the Ultralisk as it enters the range of the mines, all five mines will fire, and the Ultralisk will die after only 1.5 seconds. Beware though, that this leads to overkill. Say you have 15 mines selected, all 15 mines will fire and you will waste 10 shots.
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Mines do not overkill. This isn't exactly true. While it is true that multiple mines will never overkill on a single target, they will overkill on multiple targets that would otherwise all be destroyed by splash damage. For example, if you have 5 stalkers walking over 5 Widow Mines, all the widow mines will fire. If you have 5 zerglings or 5 marines walking over 5 widow mines, all widow mines will fire, despite only one or two needing to fire in order to destroy the targeted units.
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What happens if you select multiple widow mines (say five) and manually targets multiple enemy units (for instance say you want to target 5 infestors)?
Will this count as "resetting" the proces over and over (so it won't target any units at all) or will it count as you targetting all of the five infestors?
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On April 02 2013 04:39 Hider wrote:
What happens if you select multiple widow mines (say five) and manually targets multiple enemy units (for instance say you want to target 5 infestors)?
Will this count as "resetting" the proces over and over (so it won't target any units at all) or will it count as you targetting all of the five infestors?
I believe the answer is in the updated OP.
If you select multiple widow mines and right click one unit, they will all fire on the target and likely overkill onto said target. You must select each individual widow mine and target the specific target you wish to attack.
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so i noticed a neat trick with the mines
if i see a pack of lings and i have 6~7 mines burrowed, selecting a few and unburrowing them only activates 1 or 2 mines instead of all of them. all depends on micro though, i'm gonna test it out more on ladder
also, with this kind of micro, it's essential that you have the drilling claws upgrade
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On March 19 2013 02:56 centergoliath4 wrote:
heres something i want to know about mines
supposedly, I think, mines have a mechanic that says "mine will only track a target IF no other mines are currently targeting that unit. But if the unit is over 125health it allows more mines to target"
this means if 1 zergling runs into 5 mines it would only set off 1 mine
pretty much the mines are coded to not overkill
is this true?
if its true it means you can realistically stack 10 mines really close together in a defensive position and you never need to worry about 1 zergling setting off all your mines. they have overkill prevention
this could allow reactored mines to be very useful for defense letting terran be super defensive with just making dem mines, while going 5CC behind his base then once you have 25 mines you move out more and expand and mine up getting tanks/marines whatever. if mines really have overkill prevention they could serve as very powerful defensive units allowing for less marines early game, more mines, more CC's (vs zerg only of course)
If i saw a terran go 5 CC-widow mine, I would go gasless 5 base into fast hive and he couldn't do jack shit about it. I would then win the game with ultra viper broodlord bling corrupter.
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I play SC2 on lowest settings, currently saving up to buy a nice rig, atm it's decent enough to run sc2. i noticed on stephano's stream im guessing he plays on max setting that a widow mine shows a black indent. Can you see this on lowest setting!?!? IWhat is the lowest setting needed to view this.
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EPT
