EPTRehauling the stargate is another thing that probably needs to be done, but can't be done effectively. I think if Blizzard works at making the tempest a more mid-tier unit like the void ray, stargate will become much more viable though.
Protoss Identity in SC2: Power and Cost - Page 4
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EsportsJohn
United States4883 Posts
Rehauling the stargate is another thing that probably needs to be done, but can't be done effectively. I think if Blizzard works at making the tempest a more mid-tier unit like the void ray, stargate will become much more viable though. | ||
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unteqair
United States308 Posts
Just to clarify, we don't mean we're changing Force Fields in any way. We love how the ability works. What we are thinking currently for the Sentry is what if Hallucination didn't require an upgrade? This might be good because: 1. Scouting is more important in HotS due to the added new threats. 2. Protoss has a lot of trouble vs. early Widow Mines. (Hallucinations can be a soft counter until detection is ready) 3. Players who aren't able to utilize Force Fields well will be able to use the more expensive Hallucinations to combo with their army. Please remember all this isn't final decisions, but we're just trying to be as open about our thoughts as possible. Thanks~ Well that's not so bad. | ||
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EsportsJohn
United States4883 Posts
On October 11 2012 08:47 Whitewing wrote: Hallucination being free of research time helps, but doesn't fix the problem. Sentries are expensive, and the energy cost on hallucination is pretty damn high. You can't afford to use it to scout as soon as you hit 100 energy, because if you spot an attack coming, you won't have the forcefield energy to actually defend it. You need at least 3-4 sentries out before you can really afford the energy costs to use hallucination at all, and that's a lot of gas. In PvZ that's not that hard to justify, because you can defend super early aggression with wall-offs and cannons, and the lack of long range units early game means forcefields are very powerful. But in PvT, you just plain can't afford it, you absolutely have to start teching ASAP in order to hold stim timings. You simply cannot defeat stim marine/maruaders with medivac support unless you have AoE, and sentries cost so much gas that getting enough to hold super early pressure AND be able to afford the energy cost of hallucination will seriously delay that tech. It seems that their supposed solution to Protoss fragility is to make Protoss more fragile. ...actually, there's this thing called energize. Right now in a lot of HotS streams, players are getting a fast MSC to build energy and energizing a single sentry to deal with potential threats. Assuming you only need 4 FF to hold a ramp safely, you have about 100 energy built up on a sentry built after MSC to use for hallucination, then you can energize. This also means that you can start teching up faster. All of this, 200 gas. Ezpz. | ||
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theNational.
Canada54 Posts
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bole
Serbia164 Posts
that kind of mechanics need to be replaced to SC2 become what it should and true blizzard game not Activision. game.. Blizzard need to listen to as not Activision ... and SC2 will be saved... for long time... Remove force fields not make it easyer lol .. protoss are strong race not some race that hide behind force fields to be able to survive... from lore point of view protoss are strong they are not hiding from enemy... with force fields !!!! in the end we community will made made it exist game called starbow .. that is BW 2.0 simply game is more balanced and clean from e Sport perspective to watch.... thx for reading  | ||
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Zato-1
Chile4253 Posts
On October 11 2012 04:31 thezanursic wrote: A Hydra literally does half the damage of the Dragoon, but hydras still rape dragoons! Dragoon does 20e damage per attack with cooldown 30, Hydra does 10e damage per attack with cooldown 15; in other words, Dragoons do twice the damage per attack, but Hydras shoot twice as fast, so assuming a 0 target armor, 1 hydra does the same damage as 1 dragoon. Source: http://classic.battle.net/scc/protoss/pstats.shtml http://classic.battle.net/scc/zerg/zstats.shtml | ||
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Sabu113
United States11035 Posts
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Whitewing
United States7483 Posts
On October 11 2012 08:59 SC2John wrote: ...actually, there's this thing called energize. Right now in a lot of HotS streams, players are getting a fast MSC to build energy and energizing a single sentry to deal with potential threats. Assuming you only need 4 FF to hold a ramp safely, you have about 100 energy built up on a sentry built after MSC to use for hallucination, then you can energize. This also means that you can start teching up faster. All of this, 200 gas. Ezpz. Doing that sacrifices the purify for defense or the mass recall to actually have a chance to be aggressive without going all-in. Yeah it's possible, but like I said, it's just shoehorning with a fragility to counteract another fragility issue. We're solving spell problems with spells. That's never going to be solid, it'll always be fragile. | ||
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aZealot
New Zealand5447 Posts
On October 11 2012 06:34 v3chr0 wrote: "Rock, Developer" - + Show Spoiler + Thanks for the post! There is a lot of good detailed feedback here. I don't agree with everything but it's a great discussion. For example I don't believe that "Gateway units are weak because of warp-in." I do agree that Sentry is core to Gateway and that Gateway units are balanced around the use of Sentry. What makes this worse is that Sentries are hard to use. Guardian Shield isn't too difficult to manage, but Force Fields can be very difficult to use correctly. We are talking about ways to make the Sentry easier to use so more Protoss players can get value out of him. I think that Gateway units can be very, very deadly. It's just a matter of when. Stalkers with blink are very powerful and Zealots with charge are very dangerous as well (even against Stim Terrans). But when I fight with my Gateway units against most Terran players I don't yet have these upgrades. I believe that most Protoss players (myself included) feel the need to go Robotics first to scout and to avoid cloaked threats. If we give the Mothership Core someway to detect cloaked units Protoss players should be able to open Twilight Council and upgrade their Gateway units very quickly. This might reduce the Terran stim timing attacks and make it less required for Protoss to go Robo or Templar tech as fast as possible to avoid being crushed by an infantry timing. Though with Widow Mine in the picture I'm not sure how that will change things. Since that is another cloak threat. We will be looking some at the Void Ray soonish. I don't know what if anything we will decide to do with him but your feedback on this unit has certainly been heard. Thanks again for taking the time to write this up. Woah, nice to see Rock (aka DB) respond. Thank heaven, the lead designer of the game actually says that WG does not make Gateway units "weak". (However, that fallacy is probably never going to go away.) I'm not sure I like the idea of FF being easier - if that is what he means. Good FF usage is fundamental to good Protoss play, and poor FF should, rightly, be punished by Zerg and Terran players. In the same way that they suffer from good FF use. Of course, I may be misinterpreting making Sentry easier for making FF easier, when DB could mean something else entirely - if that is what he means by free Hallucination. As a Protoss player, I would love that, as with MSC and energize, the tech sacrifice of Sentry production is minimized allowing faster access to Protoss AOE along with earlier and safer scouting (all this has trade-offs, of course). But this leads to one of the main issues with this kind of discussion. Any meaninful comparison can only be made to WOL where we have 2+ years of gameplay to analyse. HOTS Beta is still very much in its early days, and from the approach thus far, will likely have substantive changes even after launch. As such, I doubt any meaninful analysis can be made of proposed major design changes as we do not know enough yet. This is especially the case if design changes rest on shaky ground. | ||
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eviltomahawk
United States11133 Posts
On October 11 2012 09:19 aZealot wrote: Woah, nice to see Rock (aka DB) respond. Thank heaven, the lead designer of the game actually says that WG does not make Gateway units "weak". (However, that fallacy is probably never going to go away.) I'm not sure I like the idea of FF being easier - if that is what he means. Good FF usage is fundamental to good Protoss play, and poor FF should, rightly, be punished by Zerg and Terran players. In the same way that they suffer from good FF use. Of course, I may be misinterpreting making Sentry easier for making FF easier, when DB could mean something else entirely - if that is what he means by free Hallucination. As a Protoss player, I would love that, as with MSC and energize, the tech sacrifice of Sentry production is minimized allowing faster access to Protoss AOE along with earlier and safer scouting (all this has trade-offs, of course). But this leads to one of the main issues with this kind of discussion. Any meaninful comparison can only be made to WOL where we have 2+ years of gameplay to analyse. HOTS Beta is still very much in its early days, and from the approach thus far, will likely have substantive changes even after launch. As such, I doubt any meaninful analysis can be made of proposed major design changes as we do not know enough - yet. This is especially the case if changes rest on shaky ground. It looks like David Kim just clarified that they aren't changing Force Field, but they are thinking about changing Hallucination. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/6794032960?page=3#50 | ||
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Crawdad
614 Posts
On October 11 2012 09:13 Whitewing wrote: Doing that sacrifices the purify for defense or the mass recall to actually have a chance to be aggressive without going all-in. Yeah it's possible, but like I said, it's just shoehorning with a fragility to counteract another fragility issue. Why would you need Purify if you just Energized a Sentry? | ||
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Cloak
United States816 Posts
On October 11 2012 09:09 Sabu113 wrote: Wish the author had mentioned combining the DT shrine with the templar archives. If we are goin to bring up BW comparisons, we might as well mention the flexibility combining the two structures adds to toss. Definitely, now that Widow Mines made cloaked things so cheap, Banshees and Dark Templars need a facelift. | ||
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Woizit
801 Posts
Then "when" those warpgate units are strong are forced out by the spam of unbreakable walls created by sentries. Oh yeah, those sentries are warpgate units too, I guess that means DB's right in that warpgate units are strong. It seems strange to me however, that he still wants to make forcefields easier to use and let Protoss players get more out of sentries. It just doesn't seem right that he agrees gateway's completely based around forcefield strength and he still wants to make it revolve around it more. | ||
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MasterCynical
505 Posts
However the lack of strength was balanced with the forcefield used for defending and keeping the army alive. If you want stronger tier 1 units like in BW, warpgate and forcefield will have to be weaker. | ||
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Whitewing
United States7483 Posts
On October 11 2012 09:26 Crawdad wrote: Why would you need Purify if you just Energized a Sentry? Because not all aggression can be held with just 4 forcefields, and it's map dependent as well. Further, if you're burning energy on hallucination you'll have even less forcfields. The point is that it's fragile, and making hallucination the answer doesn't make it less fragile, it makes it more so, because you're putting a premium on energy even more-so as a main resource super early into the game. That doesn't mean it's necessarily imbalanced, but it's a bad design. | ||
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ferralis
United States23 Posts
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Erik.TheRed
United States1655 Posts
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Serpico
4285 Posts
On October 11 2012 08:51 SC2John wrote: While I don't think that rehauling warp gate is the right thing to do, I really believe that protoss needs a meatier gateway unit before archons. It would be really nice to have something of a small immortal buildable at the gateway. This would also necessarily change the early game options of protoss even more. Rehauling the stargate is another thing that probably needs to be done, but can't be done effectively. I think if Blizzard works at making the tempest a more mid-tier unit like the void ray, stargate will become much more viable though. Nerf warpagates and we'll talk buffing your gateway units. | ||
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SarcasmMonster
3136 Posts
On October 11 2012 09:54 Serpico wrote: Nerf warpagates and we'll talk buffing your gateway units. Sounds like a good plan. | ||
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Phoenix2003
126 Posts
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