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On September 23 2012 03:22 Acritter wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2012 03:11 avilo wrote:On September 23 2012 03:00 Grumbels wrote:
I think it's a bit annoying to have leftover vikings or corruptors after colossi are dead, it's nice if you can use those units for different purposes. Corruptors can be used for morphing to brood lords, but vikings lack a bit of purpose for harassment and such. I view them a bit like overlords: you have them already, so why not design them so you can do some cool stuff with them. Buffing ground damage is a simple solution to that. They used to have +2 ground damage, but Blizzard changed that because tank/viking was dominant in TvT iirc. Viking tank was never dominant in the sense some people are thinking. Remember...steppes of war, desert oasis, *crap station, delta quadrant, lost temple, kulas ravine...lots of terrible maps. Also, no one knew how to play bio back then properly with transitions to air/nukes/tanks themselves...also tanks did way more damage back then before david kim decided he hated them. So no, tank/viking as a strategy itself was not mega strong, it was mostly popular because of the map pool and people's lack of understanding of the game at that time, as well as tanks being stronger so you did not need as much hellion support to buffer against bio/other tanks. Which is why it's also worrying that blizzard is currently tweaking HOTS balance based off of what a lot of people would argue are not well designed maps. You can't do entire balance tweaks to a game on a terrible map pool, otherwise you end up with an entirely different balance on well designed maps. First: Vikings are arguably the best air-to-air in the game, possessing excellent mobility, superb range, and great damage. If they never had a ground mode in the first place, Terran would still be balanced. Ground mode is a situational ability that allows you to get even more use out of an already superb unit. The only air-to-air that can even compare is the Corruptor, which lacks the lethal range and ground attack of the Viking. Second: if you'd been paying attention, Blizzard has a PhD statistician who has been running tests on those maps and has found that player skill is infinitely more important than map balance in terms of determining wins. Maybe you should stop reading Destiny's blogs all the time. To summarize: the maps aren't an issue as much as the players are in HotS. Vikings are already fantastic units, and asking for a better ground form is like asking for icing on your cake. Terran already has one unit that's great against anything (Marine), it hardly needs more.
Yeah, the marine is what's gonna solve TvP mech. Great analysis.
The problem is exactly that Blizzard has a PhD statistician. Balance is not judged out of statistics.
50/50 win rates does not imply any balance whatsoever. They need people with great understanding of the game.
They should hire retired progamers to help them with game balance because they have the necessary "PhD" in SC2 required to make good balance judgements.
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The only change I'd like is to make Vikings more well-rounded rather than pigeonholed to air to air.
Something like nerf the range, but buff ground DPS and armour. It's a bit silly that the Viking has artillery range. (The Colossus+Fungal would probably need to change as well for this to work).
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I was thinking the same thing but with diff changes a while ago, glad to see i'm not the only one that see's the potential
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Let's talk about TvP. Right now, terrans have to think a little bit about exactly how many vikings they make. Too many, and they're fairly useless after colossi are dead. Too few, and you can't kill all colossi in time, and you may lose as a result.
Similarly, protoss players need to think about how many colossi they want to make. More than a couple of colossi is a big risk, banking on the terran player not committing heavily enough to vikings. Making too few is also a big risk, since the only other significant AoE damage dealer is the high templar, and terran may blanket emp your whole army, or cloak and lead with a few ghosts to snipe/emp templar.
This balancing act is something valuable. You don't want to destroy it by giving vikings too much utility. If a terran player thinks "Oh well, I might as well overmake vikings, since they're pretty good in my ball anyways," this eliminates strategic thinking and cheapens the matchup.
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On September 23 2012 00:48 Piousflea wrote:
4) Vikings are surprisingly good against Archons. Throw a ball of ground vikings into a ball of archons in Unit Tester. The viking's fast attack busts through shields while its bulky size and Mechanical nature makes the archon's attack highly ineffective.
I'm sorry, this is just wrong. Vikings lose to archons in equal numbers, on equal supply (10 vs 20) and at both 3/3/3 vs 3/3 and 0/0/0 vs 0/0.
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On September 23 2012 03:31 one-one-one wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2012 03:22 Acritter wrote:On September 23 2012 03:11 avilo wrote:On September 23 2012 03:00 Grumbels wrote:
I think it's a bit annoying to have leftover vikings or corruptors after colossi are dead, it's nice if you can use those units for different purposes. Corruptors can be used for morphing to brood lords, but vikings lack a bit of purpose for harassment and such. I view them a bit like overlords: you have them already, so why not design them so you can do some cool stuff with them. Buffing ground damage is a simple solution to that. They used to have +2 ground damage, but Blizzard changed that because tank/viking was dominant in TvT iirc. Viking tank was never dominant in the sense some people are thinking. Remember...steppes of war, desert oasis, *crap station, delta quadrant, lost temple, kulas ravine...lots of terrible maps. Also, no one knew how to play bio back then properly with transitions to air/nukes/tanks themselves...also tanks did way more damage back then before david kim decided he hated them. So no, tank/viking as a strategy itself was not mega strong, it was mostly popular because of the map pool and people's lack of understanding of the game at that time, as well as tanks being stronger so you did not need as much hellion support to buffer against bio/other tanks. Which is why it's also worrying that blizzard is currently tweaking HOTS balance based off of what a lot of people would argue are not well designed maps. You can't do entire balance tweaks to a game on a terrible map pool, otherwise you end up with an entirely different balance on well designed maps. First: Vikings are arguably the best air-to-air in the game, possessing excellent mobility, superb range, and great damage. If they never had a ground mode in the first place, Terran would still be balanced. Ground mode is a situational ability that allows you to get even more use out of an already superb unit. The only air-to-air that can even compare is the Corruptor, which lacks the lethal range and ground attack of the Viking. Second: if you'd been paying attention, Blizzard has a PhD statistician who has been running tests on those maps and has found that player skill is infinitely more important than map balance in terms of determining wins. Maybe you should stop reading Destiny's blogs all the time. To summarize: the maps aren't an issue as much as the players are in HotS. Vikings are already fantastic units, and asking for a better ground form is like asking for icing on your cake. Terran already has one unit that's great against anything (Marine), it hardly needs more. Yeah, the marine is what's gonna solve TvP mech. Great analysis. The problem is exactly that Blizzard has a PhD statistician. Balance is not judged out of statistics. 50/50 win rates does not imply any balance whatsoever. They need people with great understanding of the game. They should hire retired progamers to help them with game balance because they have the necessary "PhD" in SC2 required to make good balance judgements.
You're making a strawman argument there. Battle Hellions are already fixing the worst issue with mech TvP, which is that a warpin round of Chargelots comes quickly enough that the Terran can't properly replenish the buffer that protects the tanks.
You clearly don't have any "great understanding of the game", or you'd realize that having player skill matter more than map balance means that it IS possible to balance with those maps. Oh, and you know what? They ARE getting the help of progamers. There is a private Blizzard forum that the progamers who were invited into HotS have access to. It's where the PhD statistician comment came from, incidentally. Remember that new Oracle shield ability? Grubby came up with that one. So please, stop talking out of your ass. It's embarrassing to watch.
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On September 23 2012 03:33 SarcasmMonster wrote:
The only change I'd like is to make Vikings more well-rounded rather than pigeonholed to air to air.
Something like nerf the range, but buff ground DPS and armour. It's a bit silly that the Viking has artillery range. (The Colossus+Fungal would probably need to change as well for this to work).
You're absolutely right on the last point. Vikings right now NEED to be that strong against air, because otherwise Terran has no good answer to Colossi or Corruptor/Infestor/Broodlord. I'd like to see a set of sweeping changes to fix all of that, but I'm not sure if Blizzard would be on board with it. Plus, there would be a LOT of whining in the community.
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On September 23 2012 03:20 GoldenH wrote:
Vikings are already ridiculously good on the ground. I remember in the olden days I used to go mass blink stalker to try and win the vs ground army, cuz every terran would go mass viking to beat colossus, and even after I beat the ground army, as soon as he landed the vikings I'd die. Because, as I learned, viking >> Stalker.
So you already have a unit that's better for air superiority, and better as a ground army than a stalker. Flying has better mobility than blink. They are only slightly worse than corruptors for air battles, but then once you win air superiority, you can land, and then they're like free marines?
They are so good, only issue is, they're not a tanky unit. (but then, what is? The only unit in SC2 I'd even suggest is 'tanky' is a roach) So no, if you land them in front of your tanks to try and soak up damage it's not going to work very well (But they do fare very well against splash). But if you buff their health you'd better lower their DPS proportionally. They sure don't need easier damage upgrades.
Which is how it should be. The viking should still be good on the ground and not a paper weight. There's lots of situations tvp/tvz where the Terran appropriately counters his opponent's units and then the opponent remaxes on pure ground and the vikings become worthless.
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On September 23 2012 03:48 iKill wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2012 00:48 Piousflea wrote:
4) Vikings are surprisingly good against Archons. Throw a ball of ground vikings into a ball of archons in Unit Tester. The viking's fast attack busts through shields while its bulky size and Mechanical nature makes the archon's attack highly ineffective. I'm sorry, this is just wrong. Vikings lose to archons in equal numbers, on equal supply (10 vs 20) and at both 3/3/3 vs 3/3 and 0/0/0 vs 0/0.
Why would you think of supply equivalence to make this comparison? That's a bizarre way to think about it, since archons cost 300 gas. Gas is the bottleneck in a protoss army (and also in a mech army), so that's what you should be talking about. Try again--40 vikings to 10 archons.
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On September 23 2012 03:53 avilo wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2012 03:20 GoldenH wrote:
Vikings are already ridiculously good on the ground. I remember in the olden days I used to go mass blink stalker to try and win the vs ground army, cuz every terran would go mass viking to beat colossus, and even after I beat the ground army, as soon as he landed the vikings I'd die. Because, as I learned, viking >> Stalker.
So you already have a unit that's better for air superiority, and better as a ground army than a stalker. Flying has better mobility than blink. They are only slightly worse than corruptors for air battles, but then once you win air superiority, you can land, and then they're like free marines?
They are so good, only issue is, they're not a tanky unit. (but then, what is? The only unit in SC2 I'd even suggest is 'tanky' is a roach) So no, if you land them in front of your tanks to try and soak up damage it's not going to work very well (But they do fare very well against splash). But if you buff their health you'd better lower their DPS proportionally. They sure don't need easier damage upgrades. Which is how it should be. The viking should still be good on the ground and not a paper weight. There's lots of situations tvp/tvz where the Terran appropriately counters his opponent's units and then the opponent remaxes on pure ground and the vikings become worthless.
The problem you're describing sounds like it's caused by terran making too many vikings.
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Here we go again.
Terran logic: None of our units should have any weaknesses of any kind.
I mean really. Vikings have 9 RANGE, can be reactored, and are incredibly cost efficient(vs. air). So what if they're not as great against ground.
Corruptors can shoot ground at all.
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On September 23 2012 03:50 Acritter wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2012 03:31 one-one-one wrote:On September 23 2012 03:22 Acritter wrote:On September 23 2012 03:11 avilo wrote:On September 23 2012 03:00 Grumbels wrote:
I think it's a bit annoying to have leftover vikings or corruptors after colossi are dead, it's nice if you can use those units for different purposes. Corruptors can be used for morphing to brood lords, but vikings lack a bit of purpose for harassment and such. I view them a bit like overlords: you have them already, so why not design them so you can do some cool stuff with them. Buffing ground damage is a simple solution to that. They used to have +2 ground damage, but Blizzard changed that because tank/viking was dominant in TvT iirc. Viking tank was never dominant in the sense some people are thinking. Remember...steppes of war, desert oasis, *crap station, delta quadrant, lost temple, kulas ravine...lots of terrible maps. Also, no one knew how to play bio back then properly with transitions to air/nukes/tanks themselves...also tanks did way more damage back then before david kim decided he hated them. So no, tank/viking as a strategy itself was not mega strong, it was mostly popular because of the map pool and people's lack of understanding of the game at that time, as well as tanks being stronger so you did not need as much hellion support to buffer against bio/other tanks. Which is why it's also worrying that blizzard is currently tweaking HOTS balance based off of what a lot of people would argue are not well designed maps. You can't do entire balance tweaks to a game on a terrible map pool, otherwise you end up with an entirely different balance on well designed maps. First: Vikings are arguably the best air-to-air in the game, possessing excellent mobility, superb range, and great damage. If they never had a ground mode in the first place, Terran would still be balanced. Ground mode is a situational ability that allows you to get even more use out of an already superb unit. The only air-to-air that can even compare is the Corruptor, which lacks the lethal range and ground attack of the Viking. Second: if you'd been paying attention, Blizzard has a PhD statistician who has been running tests on those maps and has found that player skill is infinitely more important than map balance in terms of determining wins. Maybe you should stop reading Destiny's blogs all the time. To summarize: the maps aren't an issue as much as the players are in HotS. Vikings are already fantastic units, and asking for a better ground form is like asking for icing on your cake. Terran already has one unit that's great against anything (Marine), it hardly needs more. Yeah, the marine is what's gonna solve TvP mech. Great analysis. The problem is exactly that Blizzard has a PhD statistician. Balance is not judged out of statistics. 50/50 win rates does not imply any balance whatsoever. They need people with great understanding of the game. They should hire retired progamers to help them with game balance because they have the necessary "PhD" in SC2 required to make good balance judgements. You're making a strawman argument there. Battle Hellions are already fixing the worst issue with mech TvP, which is that a warpin round of Chargelots comes quickly enough that the Terran can't properly replenish the buffer that protects the tanks. You clearly don't have any "great understanding of the game", or you'd realize that having player skill matter more than map balance means that it IS possible to balance with those maps. Oh, and you know what? They ARE getting the help of progamers. There is a private Blizzard forum that the progamers who were invited into HotS have access to. It's where the PhD statistician comment came from, incidentally. Remember that new Oracle shield ability? Grubby came up with that one. So please, stop talking out of your ass. It's embarrassing to watch.
You are just clueless. You didnt even understand what I wrote. No need to discuss anymore with you.
User was warned for this post
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On September 23 2012 03:59 one-one-one wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2012 03:50 Acritter wrote:On September 23 2012 03:31 one-one-one wrote:On September 23 2012 03:22 Acritter wrote:On September 23 2012 03:11 avilo wrote:On September 23 2012 03:00 Grumbels wrote:
I think it's a bit annoying to have leftover vikings or corruptors after colossi are dead, it's nice if you can use those units for different purposes. Corruptors can be used for morphing to brood lords, but vikings lack a bit of purpose for harassment and such. I view them a bit like overlords: you have them already, so why not design them so you can do some cool stuff with them. Buffing ground damage is a simple solution to that. They used to have +2 ground damage, but Blizzard changed that because tank/viking was dominant in TvT iirc. Viking tank was never dominant in the sense some people are thinking. Remember...steppes of war, desert oasis, *crap station, delta quadrant, lost temple, kulas ravine...lots of terrible maps. Also, no one knew how to play bio back then properly with transitions to air/nukes/tanks themselves...also tanks did way more damage back then before david kim decided he hated them. So no, tank/viking as a strategy itself was not mega strong, it was mostly popular because of the map pool and people's lack of understanding of the game at that time, as well as tanks being stronger so you did not need as much hellion support to buffer against bio/other tanks. Which is why it's also worrying that blizzard is currently tweaking HOTS balance based off of what a lot of people would argue are not well designed maps. You can't do entire balance tweaks to a game on a terrible map pool, otherwise you end up with an entirely different balance on well designed maps. First: Vikings are arguably the best air-to-air in the game, possessing excellent mobility, superb range, and great damage. If they never had a ground mode in the first place, Terran would still be balanced. Ground mode is a situational ability that allows you to get even more use out of an already superb unit. The only air-to-air that can even compare is the Corruptor, which lacks the lethal range and ground attack of the Viking. Second: if you'd been paying attention, Blizzard has a PhD statistician who has been running tests on those maps and has found that player skill is infinitely more important than map balance in terms of determining wins. Maybe you should stop reading Destiny's blogs all the time. To summarize: the maps aren't an issue as much as the players are in HotS. Vikings are already fantastic units, and asking for a better ground form is like asking for icing on your cake. Terran already has one unit that's great against anything (Marine), it hardly needs more. Yeah, the marine is what's gonna solve TvP mech. Great analysis. The problem is exactly that Blizzard has a PhD statistician. Balance is not judged out of statistics. 50/50 win rates does not imply any balance whatsoever. They need people with great understanding of the game. They should hire retired progamers to help them with game balance because they have the necessary "PhD" in SC2 required to make good balance judgements. You're making a strawman argument there. Battle Hellions are already fixing the worst issue with mech TvP, which is that a warpin round of Chargelots comes quickly enough that the Terran can't properly replenish the buffer that protects the tanks. You clearly don't have any "great understanding of the game", or you'd realize that having player skill matter more than map balance means that it IS possible to balance with those maps. Oh, and you know what? They ARE getting the help of progamers. There is a private Blizzard forum that the progamers who were invited into HotS have access to. It's where the PhD statistician comment came from, incidentally. Remember that new Oracle shield ability? Grubby came up with that one. So please, stop talking out of your ass. It's embarrassing to watch. You are just clueless. You didnt even understand what I wrote. No need to discuss anymore with you.
... -.-
Yeah, he does. I don't think you're "talking out of your arse", just being a bit misinformed, but you basically forfeit the argument.
OP: It's a very interesting thought, but I can't help but feel like Mech would be a little too strong. Between the Thor, the Viking, the BH, the Widow Mine(possibly), and the Tank PvT would be hell and ZvT would be worse.
HTs can't do much splash with Storm and can only feedback Thors, Archons are destroyed by Thors, Zeals are obliterated by BHs, Stalkers would be killed by Tanks and Thors, anything in the sky would be taken out by either Thors or Vikings.
A BL/Corruptor/Infestor army would be the best chance Zerg has against it, provided they can even get to it in time, but Vikings and Thors cover it pretty well. Ultras, meet Thors. A Ling/Bling/Muta army would have its blings shot by tanks, lings burned by BHs, and Mutas shot down by Thors and Vikings. BHs and Vikings would kill locusts too quickly for Swarm Hosts to be useful.
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It fills holes because the Viking is almost exactly the same as a Goliath except it's AA is stronger and AG is weaker. Give Ground Vikings 1 armor is a really good idea imo. Should probably make the ground attack and armor scale off mech upgrades too
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On September 23 2012 04:03 Antylamon wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2012 03:59 one-one-one wrote:On September 23 2012 03:50 Acritter wrote:On September 23 2012 03:31 one-one-one wrote:On September 23 2012 03:22 Acritter wrote:On September 23 2012 03:11 avilo wrote:On September 23 2012 03:00 Grumbels wrote:
I think it's a bit annoying to have leftover vikings or corruptors after colossi are dead, it's nice if you can use those units for different purposes. Corruptors can be used for morphing to brood lords, but vikings lack a bit of purpose for harassment and such. I view them a bit like overlords: you have them already, so why not design them so you can do some cool stuff with them. Buffing ground damage is a simple solution to that. They used to have +2 ground damage, but Blizzard changed that because tank/viking was dominant in TvT iirc. Viking tank was never dominant in the sense some people are thinking. Remember...steppes of war, desert oasis, *crap station, delta quadrant, lost temple, kulas ravine...lots of terrible maps. Also, no one knew how to play bio back then properly with transitions to air/nukes/tanks themselves...also tanks did way more damage back then before david kim decided he hated them. So no, tank/viking as a strategy itself was not mega strong, it was mostly popular because of the map pool and people's lack of understanding of the game at that time, as well as tanks being stronger so you did not need as much hellion support to buffer against bio/other tanks. Which is why it's also worrying that blizzard is currently tweaking HOTS balance based off of what a lot of people would argue are not well designed maps. You can't do entire balance tweaks to a game on a terrible map pool, otherwise you end up with an entirely different balance on well designed maps. First: Vikings are arguably the best air-to-air in the game, possessing excellent mobility, superb range, and great damage. If they never had a ground mode in the first place, Terran would still be balanced. Ground mode is a situational ability that allows you to get even more use out of an already superb unit. The only air-to-air that can even compare is the Corruptor, which lacks the lethal range and ground attack of the Viking. Second: if you'd been paying attention, Blizzard has a PhD statistician who has been running tests on those maps and has found that player skill is infinitely more important than map balance in terms of determining wins. Maybe you should stop reading Destiny's blogs all the time. To summarize: the maps aren't an issue as much as the players are in HotS. Vikings are already fantastic units, and asking for a better ground form is like asking for icing on your cake. Terran already has one unit that's great against anything (Marine), it hardly needs more. Yeah, the marine is what's gonna solve TvP mech. Great analysis. The problem is exactly that Blizzard has a PhD statistician. Balance is not judged out of statistics. 50/50 win rates does not imply any balance whatsoever. They need people with great understanding of the game. They should hire retired progamers to help them with game balance because they have the necessary "PhD" in SC2 required to make good balance judgements. You're making a strawman argument there. Battle Hellions are already fixing the worst issue with mech TvP, which is that a warpin round of Chargelots comes quickly enough that the Terran can't properly replenish the buffer that protects the tanks. You clearly don't have any "great understanding of the game", or you'd realize that having player skill matter more than map balance means that it IS possible to balance with those maps. Oh, and you know what? They ARE getting the help of progamers. There is a private Blizzard forum that the progamers who were invited into HotS have access to. It's where the PhD statistician comment came from, incidentally. Remember that new Oracle shield ability? Grubby came up with that one. So please, stop talking out of your ass. It's embarrassing to watch. You are just clueless. You didnt even understand what I wrote. No need to discuss anymore with you. ... -.- Yeah, he does. I don't think you're "talking out of your arse", just being a bit misinformed, but you basically forfeit the argument. OP: It's a very interesting thought, but I can't help but feel like Mech would be a little too strong. Between the Thor, the Viking, the BH, the Widow Mine, and the Tank PvT would be hell and ZvT would be worse. HTs can't do much splash with Storm and can only feedback Thors, Archons are destroyed by Thors, Zeals are obliterated by BHs, Stalkers would be killed by Tanks and Thors, anything in the sky would be taken out by either Thors or Vikings.
Yeah I did, but there wasn't gonna be any good discussion anyways. Whatever...
I wouldn't worry about mech being too strong vs protoss anytime soon. At least as long as they don't put the warhound back in. There are already soooo many things protoss can do to punish mech. If all high level terrans would start playing mech I bet we would see even more ways to deal with mech.
After all, protoss has many good units and mechanics vs mech.
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You didn't read my edit about vZ.
Oh, and what kinds of things punish mech? I'm neither Terran nor Toss so I don't really know these things.
EDIT: This conversation is getting awkward...
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On September 23 2012 04:11 Antylamon wrote:
You didn't read my edit about vZ.
Well. It is only theorycrafting ...
edit: stop writing to me using "edits" 
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Corruptors and Phoenixes are really bad against ground too. They also need buffs. Having pros and cons to investment is half the strategy of this game. Investing in Vikings is investing in air superiority, not ground superiority. It would be better to keep it that way. Not to mention that a buff to Vikings is just as much a buff to bio as it is mech.
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United Kingdom12029 Posts
On September 23 2012 03:57 Phoenix2003 wrote:
Here we go again.
Terran logic: None of our units should have any weaknesses of any kind.
I mean really. Vikings have 9 RANGE, can be reactored, and are incredibly cost efficient(vs. air). So what if they're not as great against ground.
Corruptors can shoot ground at all.
Corrupters turn in to the best unit in the game arguably :p
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On September 23 2012 04:55 Cloak wrote:
Corruptors and Phoenixes are really bad against ground too. They also need buffs. Having pros and cons to investment is half the strategy of this game. Investing in Vikings is investing in air superiority, not ground superiority. It would be better to keep it that way. Not to mention that a buff to Vikings is just as much a buff to bio as it is mech. Phoenixes bad vs ground?
Phoenixes own vs tanks, are good vs ground in PvP, and are good vs infestors in PvZ.
Corruptors can also change in to brood lords, and given how zerg's production works them being bad vs ground is not particularly important. Corruptors being bad vs ground hasn't been relevant since roach/hydra + corruptor vs protoss days.
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EPT
