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As I posted in the HOTS Beta forum at Blizzard-
I'm essentially trying to sum up all the problems the widow mines create in PvT. Let me know what you all think.
My thread got locked for "emotional feedback" where there was none.
I think I made a very legitimate point- if I see an early gas on terran, I cannot literally defend all of his options anymore. If he goes for a quick stim push, that's stoppable. If he goes for hellion drop, that's stoppable. If he goes for widow mines, that's stoppable.
But I'm locked out from his base once that first marine pops, until I manage to get observers. And I fail to see how I can defend all three of those main options the terran has without scouting before my first observer pops. Even if I test his front with the usual stalker-zealot, I still don't have enough information.
Is the widow mine OP as well? Yes. But it wouldn't be so bad if I could actually get an observer out before he's already building them. Then I just toss down a cannon in both mineral lines, put my probes in a hotkey group, and be ready to pull them if he drops.
My complaint was that the SPEED with which the widow mine pops, and the near impossibility of me scouting after my probe leaves, and the multiple options a terran has off of a quick gas essentially make it impossible for me to defend everything. He HAS to screw up in some way (revealing his hand too early, letting me run by stalkers, etc.) for me to handle PvT early game.
And the worst thing is that even if I know he's dropping widows, even if I build a cannon (because if you just leave an observer around, it dies instantly) I have to respond INSTANTLY to not lose 10+ probes on a saturated base.
So toss got a cute little lockdown from the Oracle that just stops mining for 45 seconds, AT BEST, but like 5-10 against a high level player, and terran got a unit that, at worst, makes me spend like 300 per base on static defense and/or observers and still probably lose 10+ probes, and even if I pull instantly, I lose more time mining than what any Oracle I have does against him.
So yeah. Call my criticism emotional. But the widow mine is so OP its just kind of absurd.
Oh, and if I throw down a cannon against a terran rushing widow mines, and then he just switches into MMM and drops with medivacs, the cannon is totally useless, AND I have to rebuild the cannon in case he deices to drop widow mines next time.
You see my point? Widow mines are unbalanced because the response they necessitate is so useless against other terran harassment options, and it makes the early game an incredible, almost unmanageable strain, on Protoss.
Look, either buff slightly protoss early game and give us another detection option that the widow mine doesn't smash to pieces, because throwing down cannons in my base just does nothing if he then switches to MMM. And if he knows I cannoned, he can just post his two widow mines at his front and in the middle of his production lines (and then rotate them around his base at intervals) and if I'm not checking my observer every thirty seconds, POOF, there goes all my scouting info.
Seriously, this isn't emotional feedback. This is just pure gameplay analysis. Dealing with MMM drops w/o blink was already difficult enough, and now he has a unit that requires an entirely different response to defend, AND if used well can essentially deny all my scouting? I even had a game where the guy just rushed 4 widow mines, and then stutter walked the pairs up my front lol. If I tried to attack while they were burrowing, poof goes all my zealots. If I try to just attack with my stalkers, they don't do enough damage to kill them, and then I have to wait for my observer, while he takes his natural and I'm bottled up in my base.
Basically I'm reduced to rushing a MSc and a bunch of stalkers and using high ground vision to hit his base that way. Of course, if he just plays it cool, pulls his units back and lets me snipe a couple of depots, and waits for the widow mines to pop, I have to pull back and now I've got like 8 stalkers, a MSc, no sentries, and no zealots (such a great unit comp if he goes MMM right? Sarcasm, fyi).
Look, I'm high diamond in WOL because I out think my opponents. My macro is meh, my micro is decent, and my build orders are really loose and usually not well tailored to what I end up going. I play high level competitive chess and am studying game theory- that's my basis for this essay. This is not an idle complaint- HOTS PvT is broken. My honest opinion is that a perfectly playing Toss, against a perfectly playing Terran, is just playing rock-paper-scissors. You have to get lucky and guess correctly what he's going to do with that gas. You have to GUESS. A terran just rotating between hellion-drop, quick stim push, and widow-drop should theoretically win 66% of the time, just straight up. The necessary responses from Toss are too different, and Toss tech switches and early gas usage too high, to defend all 3 well.
Anyways, lock me again if you like? I figured the purpose of HOTS beta was to get detailed feeback on the matchup problems and balancing issues. That's what I'm giving- Toss has too long a period where they can't scout (so we have to build in the dark), too high gas usage (I need sentries against stim-push, but lots of early gas for robo and chronoed observers+ stalkers against widow), and almost no ability to "re-orient" tech (not enough gas on one base to even attempt a tech switch, too long a build time on Nexus not to be behind substantially against a Terran tech switch [like widow drop into MMM]), and one of our vision options, the observer, can get sniped by widows (and, as I pointed out, cannons are a giant waste of minerals against MMM and will die instantly to stim-drop) (and then have to be rebuilt anyways because he can just drop widows the next time).
This match-up is basically broken right now. End. of. Story. If a blizz rep wants to come have a dialogue with me, either in here or via messaging/email, I would love to hear another side to the debate. Maybe they think MSc use+Stalker rush (the only thing I have success with right now) is the counter to one basing Terran. If anyone wants to take Blizzard's side of the debate, I'd love to hear that too. I'm not claiming I'm 100% right, but I haven't heard a single argument from a blizz rep, or even another player, that PvT is a balanced matchup in HOTS.
Anyways, looking forward to the next patch, and seeing what changes get made. I still think the Oracle is fairly useless (mainly because of the necessity of detection in both PvT and PvZ right now) and I honestly haven't used a tempest once (I play gateway expand pressure builds against zerg, so I either win or lose by the time they're relevant).
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i'm against every fast-nerf, let's see how other race will adapt first
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I get how its hard to defend them early game, but I feel like you can get a robo pretty quick too. Now granted there are a ton of options when a terran is getting gas.
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One thing is that it definitely does stop nexus or 1 gate expands from being viable,ever. Because he just proxy factory in your face and then burrows one spidermine at each base, and you won't be able to kill it before it burrows even if it is focused by all your probes and stalkers.
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Need to poke with the first Zealot and Stalker, classic scouting to count the Marines and may be a Marauder.
To scout Reactor openings, seriously the game changes and if you just sit in your base and do nothing, I have no sympathy.
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You have a flying unit a few minutes in.
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I feel like you can hold all three of the pressure you're claiming 'require completely different responses' with a standard 1 gate fe into 3 gate robo. Get at least 3-5 stalkers (stalker + obs can outrange widow mines and deal with hellion drops, they also deal with cloak banshee, reapers, and almost any other tech you might see from a gas terran) and if they go for a 3 rax stim all-in you can use the MsC ability (the one that makes the nexus attack) to buy yourself time as you get more zealots / immortals / sentries out. Cannons are completely unnecessary against widow mines in the early game, and you'll be getting cannons up in the mid-late game anyway.
Honestly, I feel like you're just struggling against the new mechanics of the widow mine and venting your frustrations. Which is fine. But the new widow mine has only been out for 3 days; I agree it needs some tweaking (I personally think armory requirement and have the attack scale with vehicle upgrades- right now it's too strong in the early game and too weak in the late game), but I haven't seen anything that suggests it's op in my games (playing T and P mostly).
Edit: And if losing your observers is a problem, you really just need to work on minimap awareness / unit control. Losing an observer to a widow mine shouldn't be an issue unless you're moving your observer around recklessly.
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On October 08 2012 03:36 aaycumi wrote:
Need to poke with the first Zealot and Stalker, classic scouting to count the Marines and may be a Marauder.
To scout Reactor openings, seriously the game changes and if you just sit in your base and do nothing, I have no sympathy.
? I said I did that. The point is that hellion drop, quick stim, and widows will all show the same thing damn thing (unless he's a retard and builds his factory right where I can see it).
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I remember people saying stuff like "oh it's impossible to defend against terran because you can't scout their base early on" in Starcraft 2. Do you people really have this short of a memory? People are leveling all of the same whiny, made up complaints about the game now that they did before...
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its been like a few days man, you said yourself that your only diamond level, lets give it some time to see what the pros do? In WOL, terran has to worry about blink stalkers, dts, void rays, etc etc etc and it can be very hard to account for all of these things at leagues lower than highish master. I havent even played hots but ive watched plenty of it, there are plenty of new and changing strats that we see every day. lets give it a little time, saying that "pvt is broken end of story" has no place in the discussion at this point
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? I said I did that. The point is that hellion drop, quick stim, and widows will all show the same thing damn thing (unless he's a retard and builds his factory right where I can see it).
correct me if i'm wrong but protoss is the same. 1 gas taken when scout goes in can mean a lot of different things (4 gate, early robo immortal push, fast blink all in, void ray, etc...)
granted terran have a scan. however, the scan comes at a risk as well because if it misses what it needs to see then the terran is out 1 mule.
The fact that you cannot instantly tell what an opponent is doing from 1 gas gives the game some depth. how boring would this be if all you had to do was walk into your opponents base with your first scout, see a gas, and say "alright this is exactly what's going on, here is how i counter it." The game is more fun when it is played out like "alright this is what i THINK my opponent can do and here is a response that can protect me from xyz and understand that I am still weak to abc and know how to deal with those situations if it were to come up."
Don't play the game like rock paper scissors. Sometimes rock needs to beat paper.
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what's kinda annoying is if you expand 30 food or later they can plant a widow mine at your nat and you can't take it until you get an observer. Before the patch you could just run a probe into it but now it seems you have to rush expo (and be semi-vulnerable to window mine rushes into your main mineral line) or be content to be behind on macro.
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Man, this does seem emotional! If you didn't type things like End. of. Story., put question marks at the end of statements, have your title in all caps, or type things like So yeah, then it would not seem as emotional.
I say just give it more testing time.
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what's kinda annoying is if you expand 30 food or later they can plant a widow mine at your nat and you can't take it until you get an observer. Before the patch you could just run a probe into it but now it seems you have to rush expo (and be semi-vulnerable to window mine rushes into your main mineral line) or be content to be behind on macro.
i think this could be an issue of using old build orders against the new units. If we were to theory craft here could you assume that terran had to cut a lot of corners defensively to get the widow mine out that quickly (ie: less barracks, delayed stim, etc...) . Would it be possible to transition into something aggressive like an early immortal timing and just kill them?
edited for quote tags
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They don't have to cut any corners to get widow mines early, think of it as the same as a hellion build but without having to get the reactor (still could get it if they want) just gas->rax->factory. I think an old school 1 gate expo would get the nexus up just barely before the mine gets there, but I've been mostly doing builds that involve a mothership core before expo which slows the nexus down by 15-20 seconds.
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On October 08 2012 03:16 TennesseeNA wrote:
As I posted in the HOTS Beta forum at Blizzard-
I'm essentially trying to sum up all the problems the widow mines create in PvT. Let me know what you all think.
My thread got locked for "emotional feedback" where there was none.
I think I made a very legitimate point- if I see an early gas on terran, I cannot literally defend all of his options anymore. If he goes for a quick stim push, that's stoppable. If he goes for hellion drop, that's stoppable. If he goes for widow mines, that's stoppable.
But I'm locked out from his base once that first marine pops, until I manage to get observers. And I fail to see how I can defend all three of those main options the terran has without scouting before my first observer pops. Even if I test his front with the usual stalker-zealot, I still don't have enough information.
Is the widow mine OP as well? Yes. But it wouldn't be so bad if I could actually get an observer out before he's already building them. Then I just toss down a cannon in both mineral lines, put my probes in a hotkey group, and be ready to pull them if he drops.
My complaint was that the SPEED with which the widow mine pops, and the near impossibility of me scouting after my probe leaves, and the multiple options a terran has off of a quick gas essentially make it impossible for me to defend everything. He HAS to screw up in some way (revealing his hand too early, letting me run by stalkers, etc.) for me to handle PvT early game.
And the worst thing is that even if I know he's dropping widows, even if I build a cannon (because if you just leave an observer around, it dies instantly) I have to respond INSTANTLY to not lose 10+ probes on a saturated base.
So toss got a cute little lockdown from the Oracle that just stops mining for 45 seconds, AT BEST, but like 5-10 against a high level player, and terran got a unit that, at worst, makes me spend like 300 per base on static defense and/or observers and still probably lose 10+ probes, and even if I pull instantly, I lose more time mining than what any Oracle I have does against him.
So yeah. Call my criticism emotional. But the widow mine is so OP its just kind of absurd.
Oh, and if I throw down a cannon against a terran rushing widow mines, and then he just switches into MMM and drops with medivacs, the cannon is totally useless, AND I have to rebuild the cannon in case he deices to drop widow mines next time.
You see my point? Widow mines are unbalanced because the response they necessitate is so useless against other terran harassment options, and it makes the early game an incredible, almost unmanageable strain, on Protoss.
Look, either buff slightly protoss early game and give us another detection option that the widow mine doesn't smash to pieces, because throwing down cannons in my base just does nothing if he then switches to MMM. And if he knows I cannoned, he can just post his two widow mines at his front and in the middle of his production lines (and then rotate them around his base at intervals) and if I'm not checking my observer every thirty seconds, POOF, there goes all my scouting info.
Seriously, this isn't emotional feedback. This is just pure gameplay analysis. Dealing with MMM drops w/o blink was already difficult enough, and now he has a unit that requires an entirely different response to defend, AND if used well can essentially deny all my scouting? I even had a game where the guy just rushed 4 widow mines, and then stutter walked the pairs up my front lol. If I tried to attack while they were burrowing, poof goes all my zealots. If I try to just attack with my stalkers, they don't do enough damage to kill them, and then I have to wait for my observer, while he takes his natural and I'm bottled up in my base.
Basically I'm reduced to rushing a MSc and a bunch of stalkers and using high ground vision to hit his base that way. Of course, if he just plays it cool, pulls his units back and lets me snipe a couple of depots, and waits for the widow mines to pop, I have to pull back and now I've got like 8 stalkers, a MSc, no sentries, and no zealots (such a great unit comp if he goes MMM right? Sarcasm, fyi).
Look, I'm high diamond in WOL because I out think my opponents. My macro is meh, my micro is decent, and my build orders are really loose and usually not well tailored to what I end up going. I play high level competitive chess and am studying game theory- that's my basis for this essay. This is not an idle complaint- HOTS PvT is broken. My honest opinion is that a perfectly playing Toss, against a perfectly playing Terran, is just playing rock-paper-scissors. You have to get lucky and guess correctly what he's going to do with that gas. You have to GUESS. A terran just rotating between hellion-drop, quick stim push, and widow-drop should theoretically win 66% of the time, just straight up. The necessary responses from Toss are too different, and Toss tech switches and early gas usage too high, to defend all 3 well.
Anyways, lock me again if you like? I figured the purpose of HOTS beta was to get detailed feeback on the matchup problems and balancing issues. That's what I'm giving- Toss has too long a period where they can't scout (so we have to build in the dark), too high gas usage (I need sentries against stim-push, but lots of early gas for robo and chronoed observers+ stalkers against widow), and almost no ability to "re-orient" tech (not enough gas on one base to even attempt a tech switch, too long a build time on Nexus not to be behind substantially against a Terran tech switch [like widow drop into MMM]), and one of our vision options, the observer, can get sniped by widows (and, as I pointed out, cannons are a giant waste of minerals against MMM and will die instantly to stim-drop) (and then have to be rebuilt anyways because he can just drop widows the next time).
This match-up is basically broken right now. End. of. Story. If a blizz rep wants to come have a dialogue with me, either in here or via messaging/email, I would love to hear another side to the debate. Maybe they think MSc use+Stalker rush (the only thing I have success with right now) is the counter to one basing Terran. If anyone wants to take Blizzard's side of the debate, I'd love to hear that too. I'm not claiming I'm 100% right, but I haven't heard a single argument from a blizz rep, or even another player, that PvT is a balanced matchup in HOTS.
Anyways, looking forward to the next patch, and seeing what changes get made. I still think the Oracle is fairly useless (mainly because of the necessity of detection in both PvT and PvZ right now) and I honestly haven't used a tempest once (I play gateway expand pressure builds against zerg, so I either win or lose by the time they're relevant).
1. Its a beta test for a reason. They are testing the new widow mine concept where it burrows and attacks every 40 seconds. They can easily tweak the damage numbers to balance this.
2. You should try getting faster robo
3. You do sound emotional, so I think they made the right call in locking your thread
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I think the problem is with conflicting Robo timings. If you see their gas and they are going for fast widow mines then you need that robo directly after your first gate. You will stop the widows with an obs if you do this, but the problem then if they are going say some kind of fast 3 rax or delayed 2 rax tech-reactor push then you won't have enough units off of 1 gate to stop it, since your gates 2 & 3 will be delayed because of the necessarily fast robo. You could alternatively get the robo later, and use sentries to stop the widow mines from coming close, but that means being stuck in your base, letting the Terran do what they want at your own natural until you have an obs out (deny mining, bunker your nexus, kill your nexus even if they are particularly aggressive). It's bringing PvT back to the same robo-dependent restrictiveness that we see in Wings of Liberty, which is the complete opposite of their intentions of diversifying the match-ups (this is after all why the Oracle got a detection ability). Personally I think they either need to make Widow Mines require an Armory, or make them cost enough gas that fast widow mines require an unusually early gas timing like 11 gas that would tip the protoss off.
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ya have to agree with serenity (post above this). gateway units+robo after expo still hold all of the terran 1 base tech stuff anyway (marine/widow mine/tank pushes off 1 reactor rax 2 factory might actually be super tough to stop but haven't seen them yet). Just need to keep stalkers in your main to ward off medivacs with widow mines mine (same as you would vs hellion drop and banshee).
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This change is relatively recent so you can't call it OP before people have had time to adapt.
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Here's a fix. When the Widow Mine Shots it's missle, it reveals itself for a short while, Giving the Protoss a quick second to be able to disable the mine without the need for detection. However, Protoss have to have lightning reflexes in order to do so.
Much like how Protoss would eliminate Spiders pre-Obs in BW.
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EPT
