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On September 10 2012 18:30 blug wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2012 18:27 Alex1Sun wrote:
Well, I basically agree with all that you said, but I still think that interesting positional play can be archived simply by nerfing the warhound. Just nerf it hard enough, so that it becomes situational and is build for-example only against mass immortals/stalkers. Then most of the time people would still be building tanks, and just sometimes sprinkling warhounds to help with specific units.
Problem solved. Yeah, I would agree with this. Honestly the only real reason I'm not looking forward to HotS is because I get the feeling I am going to be doing nothing but vs war hounds in zvt, pvt, and tvt. The only issue I find with your philosophy is I really don't see a position where situationally it will be good.
Nerf their main attack to the ground and make their armor light. Leave their strong health, high speed and great haywire range and damage (probably even buff their haywire damage). You get a unit that can kite stalkers and immortals with haywire, doesn't receive bonus damage from them, but sucks vs zealots/archons since its dps is too low without haywire (if you nerf their main attack a lot, for example to 10). If your opponent doesn't build stalkers/immostals, the warhound can still be used as a meat shield for your thanks, but battle helion would be a much better meat shield vs zealots/archons. Either way, main dps then comes from tanks.
p.s. probably also reduce warhounds' gas cost, and increase their mineral cost, so that you would be able to build both warhounds and tanks in case you need warhounds to complement your tanks vs specific units.
p.p.s. thus protoss wouldn't mass immortals vs tanks, and tanks with battle hellion and widow mine support (and ocasional sprinkle of warhounds vs ocasional immortals/stalkers/sentries) would work.
p.p.p.s. similar in tvt, warhounds redesigned like this would sort of help to break siege lines, but they would be extremely weak vs bio or air play or even vs siege tanks with good meaty bio support, so warhounds wouldn't be massed.
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i wish they would just increase siege tank range in hots instead of that silly warhound idea. would make it easier to out-range enemy tanks by sieging within range and then getting vision
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Well said Orb. Should repost it on Reddit.
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Post this on the Blizzard HOTS beta forum... I want the Blizzard devs to read this!
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wow, such a great post orb!
I agree 100% to your statement.
I hope blizzard at least gets to read this.
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Well said, well said.
I'm still thinking that we should make a petition with signatures or something.
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On September 10 2012 19:53 Belha wrote:
Well said, well said.
I'm still thinking that we should make a petition with signatures or something.
I don't know if the community is that serious. I'm starting to believe we're just a loud minority of people of the community that actually care while the rest of the people just don't care or they like it. lol I think we just need to accept the modern way of rts of playing games.
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god dammit orb you're so smart. Böizzard is somewhat ruining the whole StarCraft-feeling imo
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Basically disagree with everything the OP wrote. Yes, the Warhound as stands is a horrible unit but the beta is like one week old. The Tempest is turning into a great unit and Oracle is meh for harassing but great for supporting Tempest. No more maxed out armies moving around trying to bait the other guy into a bad position. Yawn. Yeah the game needs balance but so what?
Easy to learn, hard to master are the best kind of games possible. Thinking otherwise is completely illogical.
Not everyone wants to devote tons of times playing a video game. People act like this needs to be some secret society you qualify to enter. Every sport you can think of is easy to learn, hard to master. Even chess isn't too tough to learn. What's the issue?
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Well it's not like anyone is going to reach the skill ceiling of Starcaft 2 ever anyway. And we have seen players dominate like MVP which indicates that the game is skill based enough for players to distinguish themselves from the pack.
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Agree with that. Everyone said the same thing about the colossus and what happend in HOTS? The Carrier got removed lol.
I think the only chance we have to make them change the Warhound is if we make them understand that Tanks should be the core of a mech army and not 1a units.
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I just want you oldschool BW guys to know, that even though some of the new fans of Starcraft never really gave a shit about BW, we do understand - at least some of us do. I completely agree with your post and I never cared at all about BW, for whatever reasons, time, lazyness, just never grabbed me.
The only reason I feel I can even begin to understand and agree with your post is GSL, GSL, GSL and spectating. It's ALL about the spectating! I've watched at least 200 hours of SC2 on the GSL maybe more. I may have almost no skill at all (I'd say I'd be in the bottom 10% of this website) but god damnit do I know exciting and good play when I see a good match.
Your post is spot on the money and the reaver drop is a brilliant example. From what little I remember of the reaver and BW, it might sound overpowered but as your example states - to execute the move requires genuinely high level skills.
The warhound is straight out of C&C or Supreme Commander. I've been insulting the unit for weeks now. It looks ugly, it plays ugly and for all I know, I could genuinely believe that one of the developers asked their kid for an idea, took the idea and ran with it. The unit literally doesn't even "feel" Starcraft.
One of the better comments I heard was "it looks like a toddler which just discovered running" god it's an awful unit.
I will say one thing about the warhound, you guys - yes you guys are partially to blame. When you all latched on to the word "mech" to describe positional play and you perpetuated the use of that word for the last decade, you've slowly seeped the word into the minds of Blizzard. Thinking they need to address "mech" because the community "demand mech!" they've utterly misinterpreted your requests.
I really, really dislike the unit, I think it's an example of really shitty game design to be honest. (before people dismissing me as a whiner say it, I'm not convinced all the changes in HoTS are bad, infact some of them seem quite clever and interesting)
Your real problem isn't convincing me though. Sure you've convinced one "non broodwar" fan about how good things were in the past but the giant, mammoth uphill battle is with Blizzard. Even if you did get your post into the hands of the right people there, you then need to deal with a several things working against you such as stubbornness, the time / money / "got to ship it!" factor and even possibly worse, simply not understanding why your post is spot on the money.
Blizzard want a piece of the new DOTA pie. Blizzard want to take SC2 to where BW was and beyond. They really really like money and it's become more obvious lately. The problem is, SC2 isn't the place to do it. It'll only ever make a certain amount because it'll never appeal to the more casual crowd. They are going to slowly dilute SC2 down into a very simple game in an attempt to try and rake in some of that glorious cash that's floating around for things like DOTA.
The worst part of all this is I only discovered the world of Starcraft in early 2010 and now, only 2 and a half years later, some of the changes in the gaming industry and moves Blizzard are making have me convinced that what you point out in your post will never, ever be addressed. I just no longer have the faith in them seeing that big picture anymore. I just don't.
Long story short, good post. Good luck convincing them though.
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Also blizzard justifying the warhound as a "siege line breaker". Do they even watch high level TvT? MMA vs MVP in today's GSL shows that TvT is an incredible matchup, and doesn't need to be "fixed" by the warhound.
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Blizz needs to stop making the game easier...
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On September 10 2012 16:18 -orb- wrote:
I'd like to add in response that I do not mean this to be only addressing the warhound. The primary focus of this thread (even though the emphasis is in relation to the warhound as it is the most extreme example) is to try to convince people (hopefully blizzard employees though that's unlikely) that a design philosophy that promotes easy-mode units is not the right one to use for starcraft.
If I can just convince people that units need to be difficult to use for this game to be good, then you can extrapolate that to affect any and all offending units, rather than just the warhound.
I recommend you copy and paste the post to the Blizzard forums and you slightly reword it for politeness. I get the impression the Blizzard folk are,.. not as thin skinned as you'd expect game developers to be. They'll just switch off at the first sign of... well insolence of any kind.
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On September 10 2012 19:46 Prophecy3 wrote:
Well said Orb. Should repost it on Reddit.
As much as I dislike the groupthink on that site, it's regretably popular. I'd have to agree with this.
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Absolutely agree. This actually applies to all games too... too often developers make games easier to try and make them sell better when in the end they just end up crap (remember Spore).
Also, it makes no sense. Blizz is trying to make this an E-sports game, which means it has to be skilful to play and fun to watch... and the warhound isn't any of these!!! (or the roach/collosus/corruptor/viking etc)
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On September 10 2012 20:55 Gben592 wrote:
Absolutely agree. This actually applies to all games too... too often developers make games easier to try and make them sell better when in the end they just end up crap (remember Spore).
Also, it makes no sense. Blizz is trying to make this an E-sports game, which means it has to be skilful to play and fun to watch... and the warhound isn't any of these!!! (or the roach/collosus/corruptor/viking etc)
What? The Viking is an anti-air unit, It can transform into a ground unit. It has an attack animation and range that allows it to kite very effectively. Would you like it to dance for you? Would that make it interesting enough?
The corruptor reminds of a devourer in that it just needs to be there. It doesn't need abilities that make it super awesome fun time, it just needs interaction with other units that creates interesting dynamics.
Collosi are given for shitty units
Roaches were a failed design idea in beta which had the be relegated to generalist range unit that can't shoot up so it's weird. But you can still use the roach in interesting ways. No one ever tries burrowing micro with it, bu it'd be efficient to do so IMO.
Warhounds are also stupid. Being amove is not a problem in itself. Zealots are amove. I can't do much more in battle other than amove but zealots force a really interesting dynamic where the Terran kites them. You an also use zealots to harass because they only cost minerals. Warhounds could probably be removed entirely for 0.5 supply mines since mech doesn't need 2 meat shield units. Battle hellions are fricken fantastic meat shields already. The siege tanks are supposed to be doing the damage, it's the entire point of mech
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100% agree with orb, i'm sure 99% of the rest of the player/fan population does as well. Everyone is already saying the same thing about the warhound.
Gundam marauder needs re-design immediately. Even the part orb mentions about "EA games" strikes me as accurate as when I use the warhound it feels like a command and conquer 1A mass mass mass type of unit right now, especially in TvP/TvT.
This is all regardless of balance. The unit just does not add anything intricate to the game.
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The only condition that a unit requires for inclusion in a game is that it has substantive differences than another unit. That is why a battlecruiser and a marine are able to co-exist despite arguably being comparable to each other (terrans only have two low damage rapid fire units). The only problem with the warhound is that it overlaps far too much with the marauder and at the same time is also better than the marauder. This is due to the following reasons:
- it costs the same supply and only slightly higher amounts of resources
- it is more mobile
- it carries improved damage against nearly all of the opponents a marauder is expected to face
- it has a longer range
- it has higher HP
- it can be mass repaired
So for the same supply you get improved damage, longer range, more mobility, high survivability and the ability to be repaired. It is even larger, so it suffers less from siege tank fire.
There were plenty of overlapping units in BW. This constant harping on about the reaver and the dragoon and so on - there was nothing particularly special about the dragoon or the vulture or lurkers. Lurkers were just immobile hellions. Dragoons were just stalkers with a bit more damage. The vulture doesn't even have the micro of the hellion for gods sake.
The only unit people keep going on about is the reaver. Well you know what? I've had it with the reaver. I'm going to call it what it was. It was a complete design failure. It was a stupid unit that couldn't survive without entire tactics being based around its use. It was slow, buggy and looked ridiculous. There was no micro involved in the reaver without the use of shuttles. It lagged a mile behind every other unit, it required extra building micro in a game already overloaded with it. What's more, it was a dumb fire unit - it just did splash damage in a game completely overloaded with splash damage
The reaver epitomised everything that was wrong with BW design. It epitomised everything people misunderstand about system design. The colossus is a far better unit.
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EPT
