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this looks more like a balance suggestion to me, but oh well. Range 7 Neural is more then fine. Range 9 Neural was pretty overpowered as it removed half of the other races units from the game. There was no need to get Neural, because the opponent wouldn't dare building those units. Imo they changed it to quickly as a few Zergs just started dominating Protoss with this and it went past the majority of people, so they didn't really see a reason for this change.
Neural is still perfect to take over Archons and to some extent the units they denied before, but now the opponent is able to actually do something against the Neural.
Your suggestion aims at disabling this interaction, so the Neural becomes a save thing to use.
As for your microability examples, Voidray change made the unit horrendous easy to use as a tradeof the unit got extremely weak. Now the Voidray is just effective at protecting the Protoss army against armored units and lost all the micro to it, while the opponent can't react to it at all since the Voidray shoots while moving and has extended range. There is no escape from the beam, unless the Voidray player simply a-moves.
Another point on Neural though. With the Viper Abduct you can grab units and Neural them afterwards from a save distance. So you can easily grab a Colossus and take it over for free.
Contaminate is still the same as before, but you need to invest the same amount of resources as before into it. In other words 2 Overseers.
Why it is not used is rather simple, you often don't notice the effect yourself and the actions needed to pull this of is rather high. Also Overlords got faster, so no need to invest into Overseers as Overlords just do fine. Which brings up another reason, no Speed research needed, which makes Overseers easy to intercept.
Contaminate would never be used in any form, except if being game breaking and then they would have to make the other races stronger, which would force the use of this skill. Sure it would make the game harder, but it would also be boring to see every game.
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Neural is used a lot, when it gets to the air army stage in late game you have to use it. It's not a jack of all trades ability, but it doesn't need to be.
Contaminate isn't used much because people aren't fast enough to use it constantly or can't afford the gas in their build to have a flock of overseers shitting purple goo all over the place to shut something down for 15 secs or we it is. It's used in ZvZ a bit when it's roach vs roach, but since almost everyone goes muta now, you can't really fly overseers in his main.
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maybe a 8 range NP but a shorter time would be perfect.
permanent NP would be insanely OP. Imagine you just had an engagement and NP a few colossus and won, you now have built a stronger ball than before
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I dont believe they should allow permanent Neural Parasite. Zergs ability to be a 300/200 army with the Spine/Spore drone trick for more units and then NP a colossi would give them massive gains.
That said, it would be nice to see an Abduct from Viper into NP from Infestor, kind what alot of zergs do now with vipers abducting Colossi/VR/Tempest even. Stealing them that way would to some degree give them issues with skytoss based armies...
Obviously the micro for that is beyond a Plat/Diam player who plays Toss but on steams it would look sweet :D
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@ All
-Regarding the permanent NP ability.
You would lose the infestor, the animation time woud allow to micro back the targeted unit (which is simply impossible in the actual version).
And what if the infestor would die EVEN IF the spell was not successfull ? You can imagine it fires its head to the unit, but if it's microed correctly (so microed back from ranged infestor, whatever the range is), the head simply fires and get to the unit, but WHITOUT the neural control ability. The head of the infestor would simply provide an equivalent for BW "parasite" that granted vision and for example prevent the shield of a protoss unit to restore, a bio unit to be healed, a mech unit to be repaired and a zerg unit to regain health.
-Regarding the balance demanded by this balance request
It would not be huge precisely because the risks are extreme most of the time in the way the upgrade is designed. You could simply micro back if you are targeted, AND in any case you know the ennemy player loses a 150 energy infestor (!!!) that i will not have used against your army for any other purpose in order to even try the spell.
So why would it be effective then ? Because zerg could chose between fungal and neural in a battle. The upgraded range would force the protoss to micro and the zerg to take risks with its infestor (since the spell can really fail).
-Regarding the fact that infestor already has enough spells and is hard to balance
Well this speel would not require any nerf because micro would be the nerf. Is that not what every toss/terran player was beging for since fungal ? And then if it works, you still give a free infestor, AND it would be extremely easy to make impossible to cast it once the zerg army reaches 200 supply, or force you to donate supplies.
I've never such a logic as "this unit has enough spells so don't balance the other ones". Poor ghost would be sad.
-Regarding heavy synergy snowball
Fungal + neural would be OP since you could simply fungal the units to mindcontrol them afterwards. Well yes and no, colossus would still have insane range,
You could also add some condition like "this unit must be free of any spell influence to be mindcontroled" that would be nice.
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Once when I was watching Spanishiwa stream, he basically won a ZvZ because he kept contaminating his opponent's hatches. His opponent couldn't spend his money. There didn't really seem to be a good way to deny it, so it looks like contaminate could actually be game changing in ZvZ? I know that you need all the gas possible for mutas, but at least in games where it somehow isn't muta wars like the game I described it could be great.
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These spells are actually fine I think and they see some niche use.
Contaminate got kind of pushed away when they made the overseer cheaper but contaminate more expensive to not imbalance contaminate builds. As a result pooping changelings is just a far more popular use of overseer energy then contaminate. Problem of course is that massing overseers is technically really easy lategame as they are 0 pop so the spells can't have any real combat use making them a bit dull. Maybe give contaminate a 25 energy decrease or 10 sec duration increase but it's sort of ok now.
Neural parasite is fine too I think, players are still testing the viper/infestor interactions more but it takes some time getting used to. Vipers and infestors are actually a really good pair and should be used in conjunction much more but aren't yet because it isn't realy easy.
Fungal and blinding cloud are a great combo yet rarely used. Keeping units in place while reducing their range to 1, it's really quite good against stalkers yet not used.
In the same way abduct and neural are a great pair. Keep your infestors lagging behind your army a bit, abduct a colossi/voidray and then just neural it. Infestor is completely safe.
Sure maybe it can have it's cost a little reduced or research time a bit shortened but I feel it's fine. Neural is a dangerous spell that can easily border between overpowered and useless with just a small range difference.
The infestor is just facing the wrath of being a boring overpowered unit for so long, it could seriously use a rebuff again, for example give it a small bonus agianst armored again.
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I can remember the first interviews to HotS
"Overseer and Corruptor are boring units, we will change or remove them"
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Free supply units (aka overseer) absolutely don't need powerhouse abilities. Contaminate is seen pretty much 100% of the games I see a pro actually need to get an overseer in an enemy base for whatever reason if it has enough energy. It's not an ability that needs fixing.
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On April 17 2013 07:13 CrazyPieGuy wrote:
I believe Blizzard put a lot of effort into the overseer in WoL, but their biggest concern was that it doesn't take up supply, so you could technically have an unlimited number of them.
there is a solution for that, though it would be slightly confusing.
make overseer cost supply, lets say 2 supply... while also giving supply. (or just make them cost supply but no longer give supply)
the result would be: overseers provide 8 supply and cost 2 supply, so effectively they provide 6 supply, unless you have reached max supply limit, in which case it just costs 2 supply and doesn't provide any supply.
the issue: no other unit or building in the game behaves like that. so it would be confusing.
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also, making contaminate too accessible makes ZvZ impossible, as it stops new larvae from popping out
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@ Tisalgado
Have you ever seen a contaminate in pro zvz ?
Me neither (one zvz in a hundred maybe).
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United Kingdom14103 Posts
On April 17 2013 13:08 orBitual wrote:
There are a couple more reasons why both of these spells are in limbo:
- The infestor must be among the most tweaked units in the game in terms of how many adjustment it has gotten in order to try to balance it, so that is a deterrent for more change; and it was nearly the most powerful unit in the game.
- Overseer was slated for removal in HoTS if I remember correctly. The viper had some skill that let it grant detection, I think. Probably there was no reason at the time to consider adjusting skills that would disappear.
It definitely was the strongest unit in the game at the time.
I'd say the spells mentioned aren't used due to their high investment cost.
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EPT
