HOTS Patch notes [9/14/2012] - Page 5

As you may know, we have entered the second week of the Heart of the Swarm beta test. Thank you all for the time and effort you have put in to playing and testing the game these last few weeks. Our plan to deliver balance patches for the beta will be very different from how we do patches on the live game. We will be making frequent iterations on balance throughout the beta test in order to reach our goals as quickly as possible. Accordingly, we expect that some of the changes we make will naturally have a larger impact on overall balance and that additional tuning may be necessary; however, we feel that the beta test is the perfect time to take these risks and learn from the results.

Here are some of the major changes we’re making this week:

Remove oracle ability: Preordain

Because Preordain overlaps with Revelation in that both spells grant vision, we’ve decided to remove Preordain. All in all, we feel that Revelation is a cooler spell because it also acts as a soft detection mechanism.

New oracle ability: Phase Shield -- Targeted friendly units are shielded from harmful effects for 5 seconds

Phase Shield is a new oracle ability that can be used to prevent harmful effects like the marauder’s Concussive Shells, the infestor’s Fungal Growth, or the viper’s Abduct. We feel that with the addition of swarm hosts and vipers, protoss is in need of a spell that can help against some of the new unit compositions.

Carrier is back!

We continue to receive a lot of feedback from both our community and professional players suggesting that the Tempest is difficult to use. We agree that it’s not an easy-to-use capital ship like the carrier, and feel it could be cool to have two big air units in the protoss fleet. The carrier will be the easy to use, multifunctional capital ship, whereas the tempest will be a more strategic and positional unit that can’t just be blindly massed. We know how much the carrier means to everyone and think that this is a great opportunity to give the carrier another chance before making a final decision on the unit’s future.

Mothership core’s Recall energy reduced from 150 to 100

Initially, we were worried Recall would be too brutal in the early game, especially in the PvZ matchup; however, this has not been the case in the early stages of the beta test. We’d like to really push this ability as much as we can to ensure that the unit is widely used in all matchups in Heart of the Swarm.

Mothership core’s Purify attack range increased from 7 to 10

Due to the slow movement speed of the mothership core and its 7 attack range, we feel it is too easy to move out of attack range. With this change, we’re hoping the mothership core serves as a better defensive tool in the early game.

Mothership starts with 50 energy when upgraded from the mothership core

Motherships starting out with max energy was an unintended side effect of the change in how it’s built. Vortex is an especially deadly ability, and we feel it’s important to give players fighting against the mothership some time to react. A mothership being able to cast 2 Vortexes right when they finish building was just too much.

New hellion upgrade: Transformation Servos -- allows hellions to change to Battle mode

In TvZ, battle hellions with good split micro are performing a bit too well vs. zergling/baneling openers. Therefore, we are adding an upgrade requirement to change modes, giving zerg players more time to make the necessary adjustments to their unit composition.

Swarm host’s locust attack range decreased from 3 to 2

We are decreasing the range of the swarm host’s locusts from 3 to 2 to slightly reduce the unit’s effectiveness while still maintaining its usefulness in a number of different situations. After this change, when locusts are able to freely attack things, they should still be pretty deadly. Additionally, small to medium-sized armies will have to do some kiting in order to reduce locust counts, because head-on battles will not be cost-effective. On the other hand, larger armies (especially those with lots of splash damage) can take down swarms of locusts fairly efficiently unless swarm hosts are backed up by other units. Swarm hosts in the earlier stages of a game can be used by themselves, but in the later parts of the game, they will need to be used in combination with other units such as corruptors or infestors.

Thanks again for all of your feedback. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on these changes.