[IEM XI] Gyeonggi - Grand Final - Page 11

On December 19 2016 04:35 Charoisaur wrote:

glad I'm not the only one with this opinion.

On December 19 2016 05:12 ZigguratOfUr wrote:


With INnoVation outclassing Stats that much, this series would have been meh with or without colossi.

On December 19 2016 05:18 opisska wrote:


If the colossus hadn't been buffed, the finals could have been even meh-er, because it was just the colossuses that kept stats alive during some minutes ...

On December 19 2016 05:21 ZigguratOfUr wrote:


Yeah, that's a point too. What unit composition should Protoss go for in PvT? Without colossi I don't Protoss has anything. Though this map pool is very good for terran in TvP.

On December 19 2016 05:29 opisska wrote:


I think the root of the problem is: what is Blizzard's plan for Protoss? In PvT, terran is obviously the harass, mobile, multi-prong race - and I honestly think that that's a great idea and one of the greatest ideas of SC2 as a whole: terran bio with medivacs as a natural hit-and-run force, being everywhere and nowhere. The question is, what do we want against it? To make a balanced game, you could either make all races equally mobile, but that would be kinda against the idea that they should be different, right? So then you need to make them able to defend and push in one place, but that's the unpopular deathball play ... And that is how protoss sort of is nowadays - they have a lot of tools to fight harass, they have some harass of their own, but terran besides early game can handle it pretty well. And then they have some deathball options, that are just not very good against terran at the moment ...

On December 19 2016 05:43 ZigguratOfUr wrote:


Blizzard does have stuff they could do to the match-up. For example it could try to move Protoss towards templar based armies rather than colossi armies maybe by reducing storm research time and cost or increasing feedback range or something while nerfing colossi incrementally. I think that would be fine in PvZ, since high templar aren't really core in PvZ until later on with players preferring immortal archon armies. This would preserve the dynamic of Protoss being the defender in the match-up, while making the gameplay better. But no one's actually talking about this, and no one's going to unless Protoss starts winning with colossi deathballs, so I doubt anything will happen.

On December 19 2016 06:09 opisska wrote:


Oh, I am afraid that any buff to HTs would really deepen the mass carrier issue in PvZ. The "Golden armada" becomes really hard to beat exactly when HTs are standing below it and if you buff feedback range, you remove vipers completely, the last hope the zerg actually has ... Reducing storm research could similarly harm the last hope on a hydra timing before too many carriers.

I would personally prefer seeing more HTs in TvP, because the periods when HTs were dominant brought some really great PvT games and there are many positional tactics to be done with them. But the PvZ issue cannot be so easily dismissed.

On December 19 2016 08:06 The_Red_Viper wrote:
The colossus is an extremely boring unit and there is no way the game should be balanced/designed around using it.
It also forces this stupid "do i have enough vikings?" scenario which is boring as well because there really are no interesting unit interactions going on here.
Buffing the colossus simply because balance might asks for it is the lazy way and not the one which creates the best possible product.

On December 19 2016 08:54 FrkFrJss wrote:


It seems that a buffed aoe is not the answer against Terran. Either you give them a boring aoe like colossus or you give them somewhat gimicky aoe with the HT and the Disruptor. Those are both fine options, but they rely more on the Terran being bad than the Protoss being good.

I wonder if a buff to the chargelot could be in order. Maybe give it a lategame buff from like the twilight council that increases health or shields and armor. That way it would be much more effective against bio, but still weak enough that pure chargelots couldn't kill everything. At the same time, it wouldn't hurt the PvZ matchup as much because zealot armor does't affect the PvZ matchup all that much. (I mean, mass zergling, maybe, but it's not like zerglings vs zealots late game was that big of a late game matchup. Perhaps against pure roaches, but I'm thinking this would be a later game buff after charge (perhaps needing templar archives as a pre req), and I think with roach hydra, the + armor and shields/health wouldn't change hydras shredding them.

And if you wanted to buff HT, perhaps don't make it do friendly fire. I've not really seen any instances aside from with chargelots where storm doing friendly fire really made much of any difference.

Also, I wonder if you could give the liberator a nerf of damage vs light. Perhaps it could do only 50 damage to light. This would enable chargelots to more effectively engage a terran bio army without melting too fast to liberators. And widow mines would still be a threat, but that would mean careful control of chargelots.

I would see this change only affecting really chargelots, adepts, and hydralisks, and to make it fair, you could change hydralisk armor and take away the "light" tag so that they are still killed in one attack. Then, to make that fair, you could slightly buff the adept damage vs all to compensate for its lost damage against hydralisks. Perhaps have adepts do 15 flat damage or something + bonus to light.

So in summary, although it's heavily theory crafting, I'm wondering

Zealot late game upgrade from twilight w/ templar archives pre req:
+ 1 armor
+ shields/health (maybe health to reduce bonus damage from widow mines or add shields to make it vulnerable to ghosts)

HT
- Storm no longer does FF

Liberator Ground damage vs light changed to 50 vs light, 85 vs everything else

Hydralisk no longer has the light armored tag (this would change it vs baneings, but I don't see that dynamic quite as much).

I think the point here is to have stronger zealots against primarily Terran bio, because they are more of a high dps, low statistical damage, whereas the Zerg tends to be closer to Protoss in that it is higher damage, lower fire rate. And banelings would still counter Zealots. Liberators would be weaker vs light units, but I think with keeping its damage against hydras, nothing much would change. Obviously, zealots, adepts, and high templars have a lot greater survivability, but I think that's fine because you don't often seen high templars running into liberator zones as much