On September 11 2012 08:44 Grumbels wrote: I don't get it, protoss has the most 'intrusive' new unit out of all the races: the mothership core. That unit alone is going to change gameplay significantly for protoss. I understand the complaints if you're discontent with the state of protoss in WoL and want to see a design overhaul, but if it's just jealousy at terran players for their new factory tools then it's really misguided imo.
Haha you are close! It's jealousy at the fact that so many of terran's underused WoL units have gotten a revamp. The raven (100 energy HSM and increased move speed), the BC (back to the old improved damage and 100 Yamato Gun), the reaper (now heals). Blizzard is trying to make all of terran's units viable. And it is really quite amazing. This plus the added units to the factory makes any style you try with the terran race fun, and effective.
Now we look back at protoss... Any changes to the existing units? YES They took out the carrier...
Then they add two new gimmicky (and boring) units to the already most gimmicky tech branch in SC2. They took away cloak from the oracle, the only interesting thing about it.
The mothership core was slotted to be amazing though. I was so ready to energize a sentry for 25 energy so I wouldn't have to build 5 of them and could spend that 400 gas on other things like tech. Guess what, they changed energize to 100 energy. Boring. The only thing I see as exciting is the recall, and that was already in WoL, just took longer to get.
On September 11 2012 06:36 ChristianS wrote: I also don't quite understand why people are saying gateway units are "bad." Zealots are really strong (considered maybe too strong in late-game PvT), especially in the hit points area. Stalkers are weak by themselves, but early on they do well with zealot support, and later on they support colossi well. They can even take on brood lords; it's the infestors that shut that down as a viable response to bl/infestor. And sentries, as has been acknowledged by OP and others, are nearly game-breaking with their forcefields.
So when you say they're "weak," I assume you mean you can't build your composition solely out of zealots and stalkers all game, the way Terran can (sort of) do with MMM. In which case, no, you can't, and you shouldn't be able to. Pure gateway compositions die to MMM, as they should, because MMM dies to higher Protoss tech, and if they died to gateway compositions too, there'd be no viable composition for Terran. 2-base gateway attacks were standard PvZ for a while to deny the third base, and they're exactly the reason that Zerg gets the roach warren as early as they do. But there's no reason to stay on pure gateway compositions, because higher Protoss tech is better (as higher tech should be). This is exactly the way the game should function, and does not need a massive overhaul of the game in order to "fix" it.
Let me explain what we mean.
About Zealots The difference between Fresh zealots and 3/3 chargelots is HUGE, but they are not actually that good and mostly they are just used as a meat shield, so your deathball can live longer. Same goes for stalkers and stalkers with blink.
While they are really good when are working together, mostly gateway units is just junk you throw against your enemy so your robo/templar tech could do the killing. You take the robo/templar tech away and gateways will just be annihilated badly, so this gets us to point that you MUST get AOE, you MUST get TECH or DIE. So this puts P in position, that before tech you can do nothing, you can just barely survive early-midgame (and with swarmhost and gghound even more buffing Z and T midgame, it's going to be painful to watch), as your units just don't stand a chance against other race (just to be clear, I'm talking about macro games, not a 1-2 base allin). And although lategame protoss units are really good in deathball, when you chip them away from it, they just die to everything.
About toss all in all. Though Protoss is a race that has it's strong points, very strong tech, colossus (which i find stupid design), templar (which is awesome) but if we look into core mechanics they are very gimmick and stupid. For example - the Force Field, both T and Z hate the force field, as it's clearly an unfair spell that destroys your army synergy, and the protoss should love the spell, right?... Wrong most of the protoss do not like it, as for having It in our arsenal P pay for It with the price of ALL the early game being around it, every single toss remember how many games he has lost due a single incorrectly placed FF, which is just plain stupid. And there are other examples of this, like having a slow, flying 22 range 300/300 roach.
I'll quote you a guy from Bnet forums.
On September 11 2012 Xion wrote: Yeah, the Oracle seems a bit dire at the moment. I think more tweaking with numbers with the Tempest, Oracle and Mothership Core could help make Protoss in HotS on more equal footing to the other races, however doesn't really change the gimmicky-ness of it all.
I miss the Arbiter and Reaver from BW. I can't help but compare the Oracle to the Arbiter because of the cloaking field they initially had for it, and I can't help but be disappointed.
It just makes me sad that Protoss are viewed by others as a race in shambles, the A-move race, the gimmick race. Give me a chance to micro, and I'll micro my heart out, I'd love to, we just barely get the opportunity to with the A+move deathball we're stuck with.
I miss BW where you used speedlots to drag mines into siege lines, while dodging EMPs from Science Vessels and landing the clutch stasis on top of them, while dropping HTs and Reavers with the speed shuttle to storm the siege line between tank rounds.
Now its sorta, oh look my zealots are charging forward, zap-zap Colossus kills stuff, blink with stalkers... maybe some forcefields and storm... nothing exciting. APM sitting at 2 for clicking A + LMB =.=, it's just boring.
-Zealots are absolutely used for a "meat shield" in late-game scenarios quite often. Of course they are! It's a melee unit with 100 shields, and another 100 health which has a point of natural armor. The thing is designed to tank damage, as it was in BW for that matter.
-Stalkers, on the other hand, are pretty bad at tanking damage. They're not exactly low on hit points because they're Protoss units, but they're primarily good because they're mobile, ranged, and anti-air. In a colossus/zealot army, the zealots are designed to tank damage, but in a colossus/stalker/zealot army, the stalkers are there to shoot down vikings or corruptors and add a little DPS.
It's absolutely true that pure gateway armies tend to die to MMM, or to mass roach/ling, but that's absolutely how it should work.PvT basically functions this way: MMM kills gateway units, but toss higher tech kills MMM. Then Terran has specific counters to toss's higher tech to try and negate that advantage and force him back to the killable pure gateway army. If MMM couldn't convincingly kill gateway units, then Terran would have no way to beat Protoss even before higher tech came into play, and there'd really be no hope once you added in colossus.
Gateway armies aren't exactly weak, anyway. The 4gate absolutely wrecked the metagame for a long time, and 2base 6gate attacks can only really be defended by T because of bunkers + mass repair. Honestly without warpgate there would still be very little room for buffing gateway units, because delay a 6gate attack by the 30 seconds it takes to walk your stalkers across the field, and its still a REALLY powerful attack. But gateway units are still tier one units, and toss has much more powerful core compositions. Nor are they as uninteresting to attack with as random Bnet poster would have you believe; storms and forcefields require impressive micro, and colossi depend on positioning them to do damage before the vikings completely destroy them.
Ok just a few corrections.
Zealots have only 50 shields, not 100. Stalkers are not made to add a little DPS. Stalker DPS is so low, that when I play terran, I fist pump whenever I can force my opponent to make them.
Going on this idea, the weakness of gateway units is indeed their DPS. Only zealots have good DPS. And they are slow, melee units, meaning that their actual DPS against a ranged army that is capable of kiting, is actually cut in half, at least! Obviously it gets better with charge, but stimmed bio is still faster for example, and concussive shells doesn't help.
Therefore you see protosses doing all ins and timing attacks, because they actually have a fighting chance in the early game when FFs are still useful. Once medivacs or ghosts or infestors or broodlords come out, FFs become much weaker.
This also means that protoss has to rely on strong aoe units like the colossus and HT in order to actually fight most battles after the timing attack window is closed. The colossus is super powerful but vulnerable to everything. Therefore you need zealots to tank for it and are forced to make stalkers to defend it from air. You have to keep this whole bunch together, because none can stand on their own. The HT has a similar problem. Again, while powerful, it is the slowest caster in the game, and doesn't have an energy upgrade, so it needs to be babysat with units too.
This low DPS problem is what leads to the deathball. I don't know what makes Blizzard keep gateway DPS down, but I would welcome any change (aka nerf) that would allow for greater damage. With less reliance on strong vulnerable units to deal ALL the DPS, there would be no need for the deathball.
-Oh hey, you're right about zealot shields. Thanks! Doesn't change their role really, though.
-Sure its in DPS. Gateway armies have high HP and low DPS, MMM armies have high DPS and low HP. That means gateway units do well at defending their bigger units, while MMM armies do well at attacking undefended targets or killing the opposing army before it can get close to engage (kiting). This is how gateway armies were intended to work, and this is the way they always have worked, even back in BW.
-Of course colossi and HT need to be "babysat." Not every army can be mobile and strong in small numbers. One army is always more mobile than the other, which means one will clump and attack at once, while the other will try to spread out, slow it down, and generally abuse its mobility. So know your opponent's army, and if they're more mobile, clump up and do a death push; if they're less mobile, spread out and try to catch your opponent out of position.
Generally in terms of mobility, Zerg > Terran bio/biomech > Protoss > Terran mech. There are exceptions, of course; Pure bio from Terran is often more mobile than zerg, as a result of its drop potential. Broodlord/infestor armies are often far less mobile than Protoss or even Terran mech, although the comparison with Terran mech is different in different situations. Blink stalkers are really mobile, and in specific situations involving cliffs, colossi can be, too. But in general, Protoss armies are and should be less mobile, which means that they have to clump up.
The criticism against the tempest backfires as you claim it's nothing but 1a unit, expensive and has low dps. Well didn't you long for protoss units that were expensive, complex and powerful in the late game? The tempest commanded like a 1a unit gives you a small reward but used properly against the right units gives you a great reward. The tempest is good against all of the zerg late game units like the swarm host and broodlords. It saddens me that people don't seem to understand the way a tempest should be handled. As a final look I think that the WoL Carrier looks measly in comparison to the beastly and commanding Tempest.
On September 11 2012 09:06 archonOOid wrote: The criticism against the tempest backfires as you claim it's nothing but 1a unit, expensive and has low dps. Well didn't you long for protoss units that were expensive, complex and powerful in the late game?
The only thing protoss players ever really wanted was their units to stop being broken and require imagination to be used, and just worked properly. Carriers was never viable apart from weird games like Whitera's mass carriers. Void Ray has hardly ever been viable for anything that isn't cheese, for a long time now. Phoenix only is playable with superior multitasking for harassing purposes, and even so it falls behind any other harassing unit in the game (and it has never been a decent counter to enemy flyers as it should be). Not only Hots doesn't even try to fix any of these, it leaves broken units broken and add new units which will quickly fall off in the "broken" category as well leaving Protoss to play the only single way they have been ever played in the last 1 year and a half
On September 11 2012 08:14 ChristianS wrote: Gateway armies aren't exactly weak, anyway. The 4gate absolutely wrecked the metagame for a long time, and 2base 6gate attacks can only really be defended by T because of bunkers + mass repair. Honestly without warpgate there would still be very little room for buffing gateway units, because delay a 6gate attack by the 30 seconds it takes to walk your stalkers across the field, and its still a REALLY powerful attack. But gateway units are still tier one units, and toss has much more powerful core compositions. Nor are they as uninteresting to attack with as random Bnet poster would have you believe; storms and forcefields require impressive micro, and colossi depend on positioning them to do damage before the vikings completely destroy them.
If you delay a 2base 6gate timing attack by how long it takes to build your units (as opposed to near-instant build time from warp-in) plus how long it takes to get to the enemy base, then Terran will have stimpack (and more units) by when your attack starts so it's not a powerful attack at all. This timing attack hits JUST before stimpack and that's what makes it so powerful.
In the same vein, 4gate wrecked the metagame a long time ago because of warp-in, not due to Protoss gateway units being too powerful; without warp-in, 4gate would have been VASTLY weaker.
LOL this makes me hate the colossus even more. How could you ever leave that unit out and put this abomination in this game? o0
Seriously though...that's a great unit, because it is kinda hard to use, but if used godly the effect will be godly. There are very few units like that in sc2 right now.
Storm Drops are million times better. Warp Prism with 200 energy Templar can potentially clean up a WHOLE base and when it comes down it's pretty similar to a Oracle from a cost to cost standpoint.
AND since mothership core is doesn't need a stargate we ca completely bypass that useless tech branch.....
Pretty much all the tinkering that's silly in WoL is related to Warpgate/Force Field
I might quit Protoss. They're mechanically fubar'D
LOL this makes me hate the colossus even more. How could you ever leave that unit out and put this abomination in this game? o0
Seriously though...that's a great unit, because it is kinda hard to use, but if used godly the effect will be godly. There are very few units like that in sc2 right now.
The thing with SC2 is pretty much this, on the right side of the screen:
Now think about this happening every time you make a ball of marines:
Not saying it shouldn't happen, but it might not end up exactly like people are thinking.
I guess what I'm saying is that the colossus is really like a nerfed reaver made to fit in with SC2's engine, though I don't think many people have that idea, really.
LOL this makes me hate the colossus even more. How could you ever leave that unit out and put this abomination in this game? o0
Seriously though...that's a great unit, because it is kinda hard to use, but if used godly the effect will be godly. There are very few units like that in sc2 right now.
The thing with SC2 is pretty much this, on the right side of the screen:
Now think about this happening every time you make a ball of marines:
Not saying it shouldn't happen, but it might not end up exactly like people are thinking.
Well everyone with such a marineball deserves punishment, but yeah I get your point you might would have to tweak the splash since units tend to bunch up a lot more in sc2. As a concept though the reaver imho is first of all way more interesting and secondly way more skilldependent than lets say the colossus ~~.
On September 10 2012 15:39 BeyondCtrL wrote: So, on a fully saturated base that's about 170 minerals if the person reacts instantly. Given reaction times, for pros, I'd say you can deny 200-300 minerals. Pathetic.
The amount of times you would have to cast Entomb to even pay for the Oracle is just stupid.
If you take a WP and suicide 2 Zealots and manage to kill 3 workers you would deny the same amount of minerals as an Entomb :S
Let's say it's 250 minerals. That's 5 workers worth of cash. Any half assed harassment attempt can at least get home with 4-5 worker kills unless you really crash your warp prism into a wall of missile turrets. But wait! 5 worker kills actually means that the enemy loses 250 worth of minerals, and has to make another 5 workers so the potential damage is actually double. This is what most people (and definitely the designer eggheads at Blizzard HQ) fail to understand. Preventing mining is an issue, but losing workers is a BIGGER issue, because you lose a) the worker (50 cash each) b) the mining time c) the minerals you invest in re-training each lost worker. This is the very simple reason why Oracle and Entomb are completely worthless. I'll take a warp prism full of zealots or sentrie ANY day and try to get me some worker kills, rather than getting cheesy with the stupid entomb.
can't base Blizzard's design/balance decisions off of game scenarios involving skilled players, as seen in that first HotS PvT Battle Report lol. If anything, Blizzard playtesters probably ended up attacking their own workers instead of the entombed minerals.
On September 11 2012 08:14 ChristianS wrote: Gateway armies aren't exactly weak, anyway. The 4gate absolutely wrecked the metagame for a long time, and 2base 6gate attacks can only really be defended by T because of bunkers + mass repair. Honestly without warpgate there would still be very little room for buffing gateway units, because delay a 6gate attack by the 30 seconds it takes to walk your stalkers across the field, and its still a REALLY powerful attack. But gateway units are still tier one units, and toss has much more powerful core compositions. Nor are they as uninteresting to attack with as random Bnet poster would have you believe; storms and forcefields require impressive micro, and colossi depend on positioning them to do damage before the vikings completely destroy them.
If you delay a 2base 6gate timing attack by how long it takes to build your units (as opposed to near-instant build time from warp-in) plus how long it takes to get to the enemy base, then Terran will have stimpack (and more units) by when your attack starts so it's not a powerful attack at all. This timing attack hits JUST before stimpack and that's what makes it so powerful.
In the same vein, 4gate wrecked the metagame a long time ago because of warp-in, not due to Protoss gateway units being too powerful; without warp-in, 4gate would have been VASTLY weaker.
But it's completely inaccurate to assume the player gets out the other gateways at the same time without warpgate. 6-gate builds are timed out to have the production to spend all the money you've accumulated up to that point. Without warpgate you don't get a free production cycle at the front end, but you've mined just as much money, so you'd just build the production earlier. Maybe you need one extra gateway to get the same number of units, but the army size is about the same for a given time; its just built at your base instead of at your forward pylon.
-Sure its in DPS. Gateway armies have high HP and low DPS, MMM armies have high DPS and low HP
Ummm.....What? Marauders are probably the beefiest early tier unit in the game....
Zealots are beefier and cheaper, and early game armies tend to rely more on marines, unless you're talking a 2rax or proxy tech lab rax or something. Marauders also have significantly worse DPS to compensate. Meanwhile stalkers and roaches are beefy with low dps, zealots are beefy with good dps (but melee), zerglings have brilliant dps but they're weak and melee, and marines have good dps but almost no hp. On average an MM army will have higher DPS than other races' counterparts, while it will have lower hitpoints than other races' counterparts.
On September 11 2012 08:14 ChristianS wrote: Gateway armies aren't exactly weak, anyway. The 4gate absolutely wrecked the metagame for a long time, and 2base 6gate attacks can only really be defended by T because of bunkers + mass repair. Honestly without warpgate there would still be very little room for buffing gateway units, because delay a 6gate attack by the 30 seconds it takes to walk your stalkers across the field, and its still a REALLY powerful attack. But gateway units are still tier one units, and toss has much more powerful core compositions. Nor are they as uninteresting to attack with as random Bnet poster would have you believe; storms and forcefields require impressive micro, and colossi depend on positioning them to do damage before the vikings completely destroy them.
If you delay a 2base 6gate timing attack by how long it takes to build your units (as opposed to near-instant build time from warp-in) plus how long it takes to get to the enemy base, then Terran will have stimpack (and more units) by when your attack starts so it's not a powerful attack at all. This timing attack hits JUST before stimpack and that's what makes it so powerful.
In the same vein, 4gate wrecked the metagame a long time ago because of warp-in, not due to Protoss gateway units being too powerful; without warp-in, 4gate would have been VASTLY weaker.
But it's completely inaccurate to assume the player gets out the other gateways at the same time without warpgate. 6-gate builds are timed out to have the production to spend all the money you've accumulated up to that point. Without warpgate you don't get a free production cycle at the front end, but you've mined just as much money, so you'd just build the production earlier. Maybe you need one extra gateway to get the same number of units, but the army size is about the same for a given time; its just built at your base instead of at your forward pylon.
While the issue you're mentioning does exist (warp gate cooldown being lower than gateway production time, therefore you need extra gateways to match the production of warp gates operating at full speed), it's not what I meant. Rather, the difference between warping in next to the enemy vs. producing at home is that...
*When warping next to the enemy, it takes 5s and then you have your unit right where you want it.
*When building units from gateways, it takes 37-42s to build your unit (depending on whether you're building a sentry, zealot or stalker) and then you have to run them across the map to the enemy base before they're ready.
So in your example where you've mined just as much money and it takes 30s to run across the map, from the moment you have the money and start your warp-in of stalkers it would take 5s for them to be exactly where you need them (but then the warp gates are on cooldown for a bit); if from the moment you have the money you start building your stalkers from gateways then move them to the enemy base when they're ready, it would take 42s of build time plus 30s of travel time for a total of 1min 12s to get the same units to the same place, or 1 min 7s more time than it would take if you use warp-in. Delaying a timing attack by that much time makes a colossal difference in terms of the effectiveness of said timing attack.
On September 11 2012 08:14 ChristianS wrote: Gateway armies aren't exactly weak, anyway. The 4gate absolutely wrecked the metagame for a long time, and 2base 6gate attacks can only really be defended by T because of bunkers + mass repair. Honestly without warpgate there would still be very little room for buffing gateway units, because delay a 6gate attack by the 30 seconds it takes to walk your stalkers across the field, and its still a REALLY powerful attack. But gateway units are still tier one units, and toss has much more powerful core compositions. Nor are they as uninteresting to attack with as random Bnet poster would have you believe; storms and forcefields require impressive micro, and colossi depend on positioning them to do damage before the vikings completely destroy them.
If you delay a 2base 6gate timing attack by how long it takes to build your units (as opposed to near-instant build time from warp-in) plus how long it takes to get to the enemy base, then Terran will have stimpack (and more units) by when your attack starts so it's not a powerful attack at all. This timing attack hits JUST before stimpack and that's what makes it so powerful.
In the same vein, 4gate wrecked the metagame a long time ago because of warp-in, not due to Protoss gateway units being too powerful; without warp-in, 4gate would have been VASTLY weaker.
But it's completely inaccurate to assume the player gets out the other gateways at the same time without warpgate. 6-gate builds are timed out to have the production to spend all the money you've accumulated up to that point. Without warpgate you don't get a free production cycle at the front end, but you've mined just as much money, so you'd just build the production earlier. Maybe you need one extra gateway to get the same number of units, but the army size is about the same for a given time; its just built at your base instead of at your forward pylon.
While the issue you're mentioning does exist (warp gate cooldown being lower than gateway production time, therefore you need extra gateways to match the production of warp gates operating at full speed), it's not what I meant. Rather, the difference between warping in next to the enemy vs. producing at home is that...
*When warping next to the enemy, it takes 5s and then you have your unit right where you want it.
*When building units from gateways, it takes 37-42s to build your unit (depending on whether you're building a sentry, zealot or stalker) and then you have to run them across the map to the enemy base before they're ready.
So in your example where you've mined just as much money and it takes 30s to run across the map, from the moment you have the money and start your warp-in of stalkers it would take 5s for them to be exactly where you need them (but then the warp gates are on cooldown for a bit); if from the moment you have the money you start building your stalkers from gateways then move them to the enemy base when they're ready, it would take 42s of build time plus 30s of travel time for a total of 1min 12s to get the same units to the same place, or 1 min 7s more time than it would take if you use warp-in. Delaying a timing attack by that much time makes a colossal difference in terms of the effectiveness of said timing attack.
The idea is to lessen Protoss' reliance on said timing attacks. Plus it would give a real defender's advantage in PvP which is one of the key components in its instability as a matchup. For example reinforcing from the now-faster gateways would give you the necessary extra units to hold a big warpgate push atyour own base.
It'd open up a whole world of interestingness having stronger gateway units too, the other side of a warpgate redesign. Imagine for example playing a PvZ where you don't have to rely on doing big +1 Zealot pressures, or gateway allins but could instead send out a few units, micro your heart out while expanding behind it. PvZ having no real back-and-forth dynamic is a big turnoff for many with the matchup and needs to be looked at in a more fundamental way.
These are just extremely rough examples, but I think the idea behind them is reasonably clear.
On September 11 2012 08:14 ChristianS wrote: Gateway armies aren't exactly weak, anyway. The 4gate absolutely wrecked the metagame for a long time, and 2base 6gate attacks can only really be defended by T because of bunkers + mass repair. Honestly without warpgate there would still be very little room for buffing gateway units, because delay a 6gate attack by the 30 seconds it takes to walk your stalkers across the field, and its still a REALLY powerful attack. But gateway units are still tier one units, and toss has much more powerful core compositions. Nor are they as uninteresting to attack with as random Bnet poster would have you believe; storms and forcefields require impressive micro, and colossi depend on positioning them to do damage before the vikings completely destroy them.
If you delay a 2base 6gate timing attack by how long it takes to build your units (as opposed to near-instant build time from warp-in) plus how long it takes to get to the enemy base, then Terran will have stimpack (and more units) by when your attack starts so it's not a powerful attack at all. This timing attack hits JUST before stimpack and that's what makes it so powerful.
In the same vein, 4gate wrecked the metagame a long time ago because of warp-in, not due to Protoss gateway units being too powerful; without warp-in, 4gate would have been VASTLY weaker.
But it's completely inaccurate to assume the player gets out the other gateways at the same time without warpgate. 6-gate builds are timed out to have the production to spend all the money you've accumulated up to that point. Without warpgate you don't get a free production cycle at the front end, but you've mined just as much money, so you'd just build the production earlier. Maybe you need one extra gateway to get the same number of units, but the army size is about the same for a given time; its just built at your base instead of at your forward pylon.
While the issue you're mentioning does exist (warp gate cooldown being lower than gateway production time, therefore you need extra gateways to match the production of warp gates operating at full speed), it's not what I meant. Rather, the difference between warping in next to the enemy vs. producing at home is that...
*When warping next to the enemy, it takes 5s and then you have your unit right where you want it.
*When building units from gateways, it takes 37-42s to build your unit (depending on whether you're building a sentry, zealot or stalker) and then you have to run them across the map to the enemy base before they're ready.
So in your example where you've mined just as much money and it takes 30s to run across the map, from the moment you have the money and start your warp-in of stalkers it would take 5s for them to be exactly where you need them (but then the warp gates are on cooldown for a bit); if from the moment you have the money you start building your stalkers from gateways then move them to the enemy base when they're ready, it would take 42s of build time plus 30s of travel time for a total of 1min 12s to get the same units to the same place, or 1 min 7s more time than it would take if you use warp-in. Delaying a timing attack by that much time makes a colossal difference in terms of the effectiveness of said timing attack.
The idea is to lessen Protoss' reliance on said timing attacks. Plus it would give a real defender's advantage in PvP which is one of the key components in its instability as a matchup. For example reinforcing from the now-faster gateways would give you the necessary extra units to hold a big warpgate push atyour own base.
It'd open up a whole world of interestingness having stronger gateway units too, the other side of a warpgate redesign. Imagine for example playing a PvZ where you don't have to rely on doing big +1 Zealot pressures, or gateway allins but could instead send out a few units, micro your heart out while expanding behind it. PvZ having no real back-and-forth dynamic is a big turnoff for many with the matchup and needs to be looked at in a more fundamental way.
These are just extremely rough examples, but I think the idea behind them is reasonably clear.
While I agree with what you're saying, I'm pretty sure you're missing the context of the discussion I was having with ChristianS about whether gateway units, with their current stats and costs, are weak overall or not; he was arguing that they're not weak because some timing attacks with gateway units- namely, 4gate and more recently 2base 6gate timing vs. Terran- are quite strong, and they would remain strong even without warp-gates. I was pointing out that these timing attacks would become a lot weaker without warp-in, so therefore his argument wasn't valid for claiming that gateway units are strong enough as-is.
Why does everyone always reference them self as "high-level" X player, does that give more brownie points of credence to the whine that follows? I'm not convinced 'till I see Hero, Seed, Parting, etc. play P in HotS because the new units have so much potential.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0lRu4.jpg)
