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This is something that I have written up on the HotS beta forums. I thought it would be worth sharing here.
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/6794032960?page=1#4
This is more about design than balance, and it isn't the usual whine, or at least I hope not. I hope to advance a constructive dialogue much like ArcherofAuir did with his article on macro.
Introduction: What are Protoss and how is this identity reflected mechanically?
First Born of the Gods, the Protoss represent the setting's height of civilization and cerebral development. They are Purity of Form made manifest. Mechanically, the Protoss reflect this favored station with high unit damage and health versus their counterparts, absurdly powerful spells, and a high cost in minerals, vespane, and supply. When playing Protoss, the player should feel like they are in command of a small, but elite group of warriors.
What does Micro mean to Protoss? Protoss do not reproduce quickly. After the events of Starcraft 1 and the ensuing Brood War, the Protoss are a shattered people and a broken empire. Thematically, Starcraft 2 captures this with units like the Immortal, as well as their increasing reliance on robotic units like the Sentry and Colossus to supplement their waning numbers. This means that each unit, while durable, is precious and hard to replace. Every unit saved is a victory, every unit lost, a defeat. A Protoss general should be worried when their Stalkers take hull damage, and grimace when they lose a High Templar to a Ghost’s sniper rifle. Design that supports this theme is good for the game and the experience because it encourages a distinct skill set and builds tension for player and unit alike. In this respect, Starcraft 2 does very well in communicating the identity of the Protoss. They know they are an endangered species and they are resorting to whatever means they can to tip the scales in their favor.
The Old Way: Unfortunately, playing the defeated guys doesn't feel terribly fun. Protoss players miss the days when they commanded infantry that demanded the enemy to make tier 2 units to meet them on even terms. Times have changed, and Zerg and Terran have units at tier 1 that efficiently exchange in straight up fights: The Marauder and the Roach, while these units enable a play style diversity, this is coupled with some really cool Protoss advances that have necessitated balance tweaks, creating an unfun dynamic which I will explain below.
Warp In is a fantastic and awesome mechanic that feels very Protoss. They need to allocate their few warriors where and when they need them. However, introducing it as a staple mechanic at a pivotal point in the Protoss tech tree (Cybernetics Core) is problematic. The ability to make units anywhere you have a power grid drastically reduces the defender’s advantage for the opposing player. Moreover, Warp Gate is treated as a macro mechanic, meaning that the optimal play is to always make your gateways into Warpgates, raising the skill ceiling due to the fact that you can’t queue up units. To make this fair, Protoss units have been diminished significantly. The Stalker has 20 less health than its predecessor, the Dragoon (along with the coveted +2 damage per upgrade), and the Zealot has lost 10 Shield. Because of the power of Warp In, the High Templar can’t enjoy an energy upgrade without breaking match ups, and the Dark Templar has a 100 second structure with no upgrades to compensate for the ability to appear next to a Hatchery the moment the tech finishes.
What does this dynamic do? It creates an environment where Protoss still pay the most for their units, but their units aren’t worlds ahead of their tier 1 or tier 1.5 equivalents, and often inferior when upgrades like Stim are taken into account. This means that Gateway units are frantically warped in as fodder to protect their powerful Tier 3 units like the Colossus and the High Templar. It’s like playing Zerg with a bad credit rating. I feel like I spend and sacrifice so much to achieve so little.
To better understand why this is dynamic exists, let’s look at the numbers between the tier 1 units of BW and SC2.
Unit Name Cost: Supply: HP/Shields Damage
BW Zealot 100/0 2 100/60 16
BW Dragoon 125/50 2 100/80 10 (+5 Med+10 Large)
BW Zergling 25/0 .5 35 5
BW Hydra 75/25 1 80 5 (+2.5 Med +5 Large)
BW Marine 50 1 40 6
BW Firebat 50/25 1 50 4 (+4 vs Med +12 vs Small)
The relationship is pretty stark between Protoss and the other races. Protoss units cost around double (or quadruple in the case of the Zergling) the amount of resources, but in exchange have 100%+ advantage in damage and durability. A Zealot about 3 times as much damage as a zergling or a marine. A Hydra literally does half the damage of the Dragoon. These are huge discrepancies that made Protoss the powerhouse it was in Brood War. Let’s look at current unit relationships in Wings of Liberty.
Unit Name Cost Supply HP/Shields Damage
WOL Zealot 100/0 2 100/50 8x2
WOL Stalker 125/50 2 80/80 10(+4 Armored)
WOL Zergling 25/0 .5 35 5
WOL Roach 75/25 2 145 16
WOL Marine 50 1 45+10 6
WOL Marauder 125/25 2 125 10(+10 Armored)
Here we see the relationship get pretty murky. Zerg gets a unit that has 2.5% less total health than a Zealot and 20% less HP than a Stalker, yet does effectively more damage than the Zealot (Armor reduces damage by 1 for the roach vs twice for the zealot) and does more damage than the Stalker’s base or vs armored values. We see the same issue with the Marauder and the Stalker where a Tier 1.5 Terran unit can solo a Stalker. This is because the Marauder does 40% more bonus damage than its Protoss counterpart without losing much in the way of durability (it has about 70% of the Stalker’s hp) while the Stalker is more fragile than its predecessor. WoL’s basic unit relationships are not clear in their power relationship to one another, making things frustrating for everyone involved. This means that Protoss are the most expensive race without being the most powerful per unit. This is the core problem, not Warp In in of its self. It is important to note that Warp In limits how powerful Gateway units can be. (The Immortal was moved to the Robotics right before the WoL beta because of this issue.)
So we have established that the defining elements of core units have changed considerably between Starcraft 1 and 2, making Protoss’s status as “heavy hitters” less distinct. This dissatisfaction has yielded a backlash from traditionalist portions of the community (most notably Team Liquid). These portions of the community wish to revert to older norms, the scrapping of Wings of Liberty’s additions in favor of old favorites like the Reaver, Dragoons, Corsairs, and Old Carriers. This is an understandable reaction because presumably the old system works. However, this is not necessarily correct, nor desirable. A sequel should draw on the design roots to further the design of a game, not replicate it. Warp In and Force Field are fantastic additions to Starcraft 2, but like many things in design, their current implementation produces gameplay that is less satisfying and dramatic than it could be.
A less noticeable identity crisis: Khala and the Dark Templar casts.
With Wings of Liberty, Blizzard has pushed the theme of unity between the despondent Protoss tribes. This is fantastic and naturally flows from the events of Starcraft 2, while producing potentially divergent playstyles within the same race. Love it. And some of their implementation is fantastic. The Stalker is more fragile than the old Dragoon, but has mobility and cunning in exchange. A good Executor can use Stalkers to infiltrate and backstab unwary opponents and retreat to the shadows in the span of 30 seconds. Top notch. The Immortal is a very Khala unit, it is very durable and has very high damage, but is very expensive and is prone to being overwhelmed by lesser units. Units like the Oracle are also spot on where conflict is avoided and tricks are used to harass and befuddle the enemy. All Protoss units are expensive and (should be) high damage relative to their opposing factions. The difference between the casts should be the Khala’s direct and durable vs the Dark Templar’s subtly and fragility (relative to cost). The Voidray is a deeply confused unit and should be addressed.
Gameplay Solutions:
I am not going to claim that these are the best options, and some of them certainly aren't the easiest. But implementing these changes requires no programming or fundamental overhaul of the Protoss tech structure. They require no new units, and they synergize well with the new Mothership Core and the new Stargate units.
Potential Solutions
Again, these ideas are not about achieving numerical balance, but rather to achieve the racial dynamic where Protoss will win fights on a unit to unit basis (not necessarily cost for cost, or supply for supply). All my proposed changes hopefully raise the skill ceiling without raising the skill floor. Good esports are easy to learn, tough to master. Finally, changes to thinks like force field are intended to create gameplay situations that have gameplay options on both sides, not just one. It makes for less binary gameplay, and more gradients in success that Dustin talks about in his lecture on esports.
Change Package #1
-Make Warp Gate require Twilight Council to research.
-Warp Gate Reduces unit build time by N seconds (N is a number to be determined by testing)
-Warp In cooldowns are equal to 120% of the unit’s build time.
-Increase Conversion time by 5 Seconds.
This combination of changes allows Warp Gate to be a powerful Macro oriented research while allowing Protoss core units to be a little bit stronger since they are subject to the same defender’s advantage as the other races. This also lets late game macro toss be viable without heavy use of Warp In without screwing up early timings. With the addition of the Mscore’s recall, Protoss can be highly aggressive at the cost of delaying their Warp In research (Mscore costs 100 gas and the Twilight Council costs 100 gas)
Projected Effect: This change will allow for two different playstyles, a steady legionary march style vs a Special Operations deployment style. The following unit changes are less definite and would require more testing. I do feel that these changes would allow for a stronger Protoss army. Again, even if the numbers are squiffy, this is about yielding a better feel for the race.
Change Set #2
A Tier 1.5 Immortal!
-Move Immortal to Gateway from Robotics Facility. It requires a Cybernetics Core to be built.
-Hardened Shield is now an upgrade costing 150/150 with a research of 75 seconds at Twilight Council
-Health reduced to 100 from 200.
-Damage Reduced to 15+15 vs Armored. (Upgrades give +1/+2 vs Armored) The immortal may hit air units.
-Cost Reduced to 150/75. Supply Reduced to 3.
-Build Time reduced to 35 seconds.
Projected Effect: Making the Immortal a massable unit is a risky proposition. The reason I advocate for such a dramatic shift is because of its binary relationship to Mech. Currently, because a unit exists that can completely ignore tank volleys while doing 50+ damage a shot to armored targets, makes for a relatively predictable TvP. Making Hardened Shields a pricey upgrade allows for tanks and Immortals to have a less binary relationship. Given their slow speed, Immortals would be less likely to simply run over an opponent after a victory, allowing the opponent some time to rally, hopefully yielding more back and forth games. Ghots are also made more effective, as their EMP negates half of the Immortals effective health rather than one third. Finally, it would actually improve Protoss's ability to hold against mass Roach, and give Protoss soldiers that can unit for unit hold their own.
Anti-Light Stalker
-Damage changed to 10+ 4 vs Light (Upgrades remain +1)
Projected Effect: The Stalker becomes a rather nasty soft counter to marines until shields or stim are researched, but must be wary of marauders. They give Protoss a smoother solution to mass muta play. Zerglings are still dangerous post speed, given that it would take +3/0 Stalkers to 2 shot 0/0 Zerglings. What this would do would allow for Blink Stalkers to be more powerful as a core harassment or anti harassment unit. This answers the desire for a dangerous harassment option that deals physical damage to the enemy economy.
Tier-2 Sentry at Robotics
-Move Sentry to Robotics Facility from Gateway.
-Increase cost to 100/150. Supply increased to 3.
-Increase Health and shield to 80/80.
-Increase damage to 10
-Increase Build Time to 35 seconds.
-Guardian Shield now halves the duration of slows and roots.
-Force Field now counts as a neutral structure with 500 HP and N base armor.
-Hallucination no longer requires research.
Projected Effect: Making the Sentry a beefier slightly more expensive support unit allows Protoss to less reliant on landing a single spell. Furthermore, investing in Forcefield delays Colossus tech, making Protoss players choose how they want to dominate the ground. The change to Forcefield allows counterplay for all army compositions and forces the opponent to make a split decision. “Do I kill these forcefields at the cost of damage, or do I try to trade as best as possible?” It also lets the Protoss player kill Forcefields early if they chose.
Change Set #3 Star Gate Tech
Phoenix
-Pulse Crystal Upgrade increases range of Graviton Beam
Projected Effect: Phoenix can more reliably use Graviton Beam to snipe key units like Infestors, Ghosts, or Tanks in the late game.
Glass Cannon Voidray
-Decrease Health to 100 Decrease shield to 80
-Increase base damage to 8+2 Armored. Increase Charge damage to 14+4 Armored.
-Add Prismatic Battery upgrade at Fleet Beacon. (100/100/60 seconds) Increase charge rate by 50% +2 seconds to charge duration.
Projected Effect: This makes the Voidray a dangerous airborne harassment option that requires the opponent to deal with them quickly to mitigate damage. However, due to their decreased durability, they are not a cost efficient a move unit. (3 Storms will kill them.) The Prismatic Battery upgrade enhances their ability to perform their role as well as incentive protoss to move their Voidrays around more.
A non capital ship Tempest
-Tempests do not require a fleet beacon.
-Reduce Shields HP to 100/200 from 150/300
-Bonus damage to Massive reduced to +10
-Cost Reduced to 200/150 Supply reduced to 4 from 6
-Reduce Build time to 50 seconds from 75.
-Range reduced to 9 from 15
-Speed increased to 2.25 from 1.88
-Add Gravitation Sling Upgrade at Fleet Beacon (100/100/ 80 Seconds: +6 Range to Tempests)
Projected Effect: This set of changes is intended to make the Tempest a more viable option for dealing with massive threats like Brood Lords, Thors, and Battle Cruisers. They are more supply efficient for their damage, allow for Stargate bases strategies be aggressive by giving Protoss an early siege unit that is vulnerable to units like Marines, Hydras, Mutalisks, Vikings ect, that evolves into a beast of a sniping unit late game that requires sight and good positioning to optimally use. Furthermore, this differentiates it from the Carrier while still making it a cool addition to the Protoss Armada. Entaro Tassadar!
Improved Carrier
-Decrease build time to 90 seconds from 120.
-Increase base Armor to 3 from 2.
-Increase Interceptor Armor to 2.
-New Passive: Interceptor Squadron Allow Interceptors to stay outside of a moving carrier so long as it is moving. If ordered to attack, they will deploy with greater speed. (Equal to that of a current Gravaton Catapult upgraded Carrier)
-Replace Graviton Catapult with Repair Bay upgrade (100/100 80 seconds: Interceptors are fully repaired upon entering the carrier.
Projected Effect: Carrier has arrived! The Carrier will be a capital ship worth fearing. By legitimizing the old interceptor bug, the vision of the Carrier as a sudden strike craft is enabled from the get go, allowing surprise tech switches to be dangerous. The upgrade provides the old tension that NonY describes in his video regarding the Carrier. The counters to this unit are still in place. Vikings and Corruptors are cost effective, but Marines, Hydras, and Stalkers must rely on good positioning rather than just shredding the Carrier's interceptors.
Mothership:
-Vortex Removed
-New Passive: Psionic Web: Mothership provides a constant powerfield in a radius around it.
-New Spell: Temporal Dilation (100 Energy/Range /Radius:4 Reduce the movement speed and attack speed of all units within area by 50%
Projected Effect: The Mothership continues to serve as a mobile objective that provides more counterplay than Vortex currently does. Temporal Dilation was a fantastic ability in the WoL beta and it is a shame it was removed. For one, you can't abuse it like you can the Archon toilet. Two, landing a good Dilation is strong, but still allows good army splitting to mitigate the damage before and during the spell. Finally, it synergies with good army positioning like Vortex. Also note, that a well timed Nerual could cancel a huge warp in. Big plays 
General Projections- Gateway management becomes a measurable aspect of player skill and increases the skill ceiling without raising the skill floor. Good players can stabilize by having gateways pumping out reinforcing units mid battle, or if they are gaining an advantage, can choose to risk the potential of future units by converting their gateways to warp gates and going all in. It provides choices that are not clearly optimal. This makes for interesting gameplay and more involved matches for the viewer. Cooler Stargate play is something I think we all could enjoy watching.
PTR Update: Internal testing is going well. The Immortal is currently a bit too strong for what it costs and is being tweaked. (A bit less damage vs armor and we are giving it a projectile attack so PDD is effective at mitigating damage.)Pre Hardened Shield, Immortals and Tanks are well matched, post research the same issues arise. By making the attack a projectile, Terrans can support their Tank compositions via Bio with the Ghost's EMP, or use the Raven's PDD to further fortify areas. We are also experimenting with making the Jotun light armored and waving the tech lab requirement (but not the armory, allowing them to be mass produced like Hellions.) Gateway/Warpgate play really affects how you place your buildings. Stalkers are an Tier 2 unit and have been buffed slightly to compensate. Having that much damage out at Tier 1.5 was silly vs Hydras, Lings, and Marines. In short, TvP feels pretty damn fun again. With the Widow Mine and MShip core and Tempest, I think we could see a truly varied and rich match up.
PTR Update: 11/25/2012
A NOTE TO ALL: THESE VERSIONS ARE NOT FINAL. NOT ALL OF THE CHANGES WE WANT TO MAKE ARE IN PLACE YET. We are still tweaking HotS units as well as problem units like the Mothership. Feel free to play, and give us feed back at onevoicemod@gmail.com . Just know that things are changing rapidly.
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awesome!
Especially moving a sentry to robotics, It's just so logical and fluent!
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Haha, thanks! Robo's theme in WoL has been ground dominance, (I actually like the presence that SC2 robo has. It feels more unsubstantial than BW given the you only had the Reaver.) I think making the Sentry a more powerful unit gives Robo some fantastic options that fit that theme, while making Force Field more of a playstyle option and less of a prerequisite.
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This is actually pretty brilliant. I've really been irritated with sc2 toss for a long time but my solutions have tended to be "just give me my fucking Reaver back". I really like how you address the warp-in mechanic since I do feel it's a good macro mechanic at differentiating Protoss and Terran and it adds another level of thought to your reinforcing. I'd be curious to see how the Force Field change would play out, I don't particularly like the mechanic as it makes most protoss units weaker because of how powerful it is.
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Clearly a well thought out thread, and all the races have issues that players would like to fix, or revert back to BroodWar.
BroodWar was, and still is the best RTS ever made. As a Terran I still want the Goliath back, and buffed tanks. And most of your suggestions are good and worth thought, but if Blizzard was interested in making SC2 more like BW they've shown no sign of it so far.
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OMFG This is really well thought out. I'm gonna send over some of these ideas to the Starbow Mod guy(s)
Gj
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A Hydra literally does half the damage of the Dragoon, but hydras still rape dragoons!
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On October 11 2012 04:13 mlspmatt wrote:
Clearly a well thought out thread, and all the races have issues that players would like to fix, or revert back to BroodWar.
BroodWar was, and still is the best RTS ever made. As a Terran I still want the Goliath back, and buffed tanks. And most of your suggestions are good and worth thought, but if Blizzard was interested in making SC2 more like BW they've shown no sign of it so far.
Thanks for your input! I also miss strong tanks and the goliath. However, I don't think you are being entirely fair to Blizzard. The games I have played in post Warhound Heart of the Swarm have been decidedly better design wise than WoL. The Swarm Host is a surprisingly well designed unit, though some tweaks could be made. The Mothership Core gets my love because Protoss it provides a fun and unique way for protoss to move out across the map without going all in. The new Widow Mine is a fantastic addition to SC and with enough tuning, would be a BW quality unit. Contrary to the doom and gloom, things ARE improving. They will improve more quickly the more articulate, civil, and consistent a dialogue we engage in.
If you folks want to see more changes like this, go to reddit and upvote articles like this. You can find my submission here: http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/new/
Don't just look at mine though, get involved in the reddit and forum communities. The more eyes that we bring to these issues, and the more insistent our voices are, the better chance we have at creating a lasting dialogue with Blizzard. Designing a game is tough, and good ideas often take many many iterations; not to mention the game industry can be pretty insular. Look at Starbow and how many iterations it has gone through.
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Very interesting proposals. I like thinking of how different Protoss gateway will be if the immortal and sentry's switched around. Leaving twilgiht with 3 unit upgrades with warpgate seems to leave it a bit heavy on that side while robo will still be absolutely necessary for observers. I'm not sure how that complication will work out, but it'll probably create more meaningful decisions on the unit composition than what we have now.
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This is the kind of massive redesign is what the race needs. Between HoTS and WoL toss is too stale and some of these ideas would give actual options to the race...
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Really need to convince Browder that buffs/nerfs tweaks aren't what  needs, but a serious redesign of the core concepts.
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These proposals are all very well thought out, and just make so much sense. In particular, stalkers specializing against light rather than armored, switching the sentry and immortal, and making the gateway/warpgate into an actual choice for the player to decide (with pros/cons to each). I would be very happy if these changes were implemented - and I hope the development team reads these ideas.
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Very nice thread. As a Terran player i am especially quite fond of the way that you adress Tanks vs. Immortals. Alternatively, something that i have given some thoughts lately, is the idea of giving Immortals energy, and making Hardened Shield somewhat similar to PDD, although i am not quite if this would be too much of a nerf in TvP. Furthermore i am not quite sure if it is a good idea for HTs to counter Immortals.
Anyway - very nice thread with a lot of valid points!
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Nice read. I agree with you 100%.
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Well thought out post. Though I don't think some of these changes have to be as difficult as you make them, and some of the changes are so big that they probably never will happen, like the Immortal on gateway tech (yes, I know it would be rebalanced, but it's too big of a change for Blizzard to make).
Regarding Warpgate tech, while interesting, I really would wish if they just made it so that gateway armies would be produced FASTER than warpgate armies, instead of the other way around. That way both techs would still be viable (warpgate for the harassment, gateway for the normal producing of army). Ground units could be balanced accordingly then.
Anyway, great post (truly), but too much for Blizzard to change.
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I like the analysis of how the two games, BW and SC2, feel very different as protoss. Protoss definitely feels alot "weaker" on a unit by unit basis. SC2 is sitll very balanced and fun to play but I have to say the feel of Protoss in BW was better, dare I say much better?
Honestly, while I LOVE the warp in mechanic, I'd sacrifice it to allow for some more old school protoss units feel.
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Changing the Stalker damage like this would also make mech viable in TvP.
I'm always for any buff to Stargate units.
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On October 11 2012 04:58 Grendel wrote:
Well thought out post. Though I don't think some of these changes have to be as difficult as you make them, and some of the changes are so big that they probably never will happen, like the Immortal on gateway tech (yes, I know it would be rebalanced, but it's too big of a change for Blizzard to make).
Regarding Warpgate tech, while interesting, I really would wish if they just made it so that gateway armies would be produced FASTER than warpgate armies, instead of the other way around. That way both techs would still be viable (warpgate for the harassment, gateway for the normal producing of army). Ground units could be balanced accordingly then.
Anyway, great post (truly), but too much for Blizzard to change.
These changes are too big to make in one beta alone. And some of these changes probably aren't worth the upheaval they would cause. These are ideas to address the lack of verity in Protoss play in a constructive, civil and articulate way. And we have the LotV beta as well. Eventually, we can work with Blizzard to make protoss a more diverse and rewarding race
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On October 11 2012 05:03 K_osss wrote:
I like the analysis of how the two games, BW and SC2, feel very different as protoss. Protoss definitely feels alot "weaker" on a unit by unit basis. SC2 is sitll very balanced and fun to play but I have to say the feel of Protoss in BW was better, dare I say much better?
Honestly, while I LOVE the warp in mechanic, I'd sacrifice it to allow for some more old school protoss units feel.
We don't have to lose the Warp In mechanic, or Force Fields for that matter. It is just a matter of implementation.
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On October 11 2012 05:06 ItWhoSpeaks wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2012 05:03 K_osss wrote:
I like the analysis of how the two games, BW and SC2, feel very different as protoss. Protoss definitely feels alot "weaker" on a unit by unit basis. SC2 is sitll very balanced and fun to play but I have to say the feel of Protoss in BW was better, dare I say much better?
Honestly, while I LOVE the warp in mechanic, I'd sacrifice it to allow for some more old school protoss units feel. We don't have to lose the Warp In mechanic, or Force Fields for that matter. It is just a matter of implementation.
Right, I didn't say that very clearly - rather than sacrifice it totally I meant sacrifice it's current position in the tech tree. Don't make me chose between the old feel of protoss and the new warp mechanic haha!
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On October 11 2012 05:11 K_osss wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2012 05:06 ItWhoSpeaks wrote:On October 11 2012 05:03 K_osss wrote:
I like the analysis of how the two games, BW and SC2, feel very different as protoss. Protoss definitely feels alot "weaker" on a unit by unit basis. SC2 is sitll very balanced and fun to play but I have to say the feel of Protoss in BW was better, dare I say much better?
Honestly, while I LOVE the warp in mechanic, I'd sacrifice it to allow for some more old school protoss units feel. We don't have to lose the Warp In mechanic, or Force Fields for that matter. It is just a matter of implementation. Right, I didn't say that very clearly - rather than sacrifice it totally I meant sacrifice it's current position in the tech tree. Don't make me chose between the old feel of protoss and the new warp mechanic haha!
I think a lot of good stuff was added to WoL Toss. The Stalker is one of the best units in SC from a design stand point. However, like many creative works, implementation provides a different set of challenges.
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Nice, really like your thoughts on the gateway units, I really like your thought about the difference in Khala and Dark tempars! However, I don't think its needed to move warp ins up to Twilight Council. Consider this instead, just remove warp ins at pylon power and give Nexus, Warp Prism and Mothership ability to have/create warp in fields.
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I really like the post, I've had similar thoughts tat I couldn't phrase that clearly. I think the gameplay changes are much too drastic to be realistically implemented (that wouldn't be Starcraft 2 anymore) but the "powerhouse" concept is worth mentioning. Perhaps this will influence the design of future protoss units? =)
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On October 11 2012 05:16 Majk wrote:
Nice, really like your thoughts on the gateway units, I really like your thought about the difference in Khala and Dark tempars! However, I don't think its needed to move warp ins up to Twilight Council. Consider this instead, just remove warp ins at pylon power and give Nexus, Warp Prism and Mothership ability to have/create warp in fields.
I think that is less readable from a gameplay perspective and removes the diversity of play that Warp In was intended to provide. It is an interesting thought though.
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I support each and every single thing that was mentioned in the OP.
It was never about balance. It was about making protoss feel like protoss.
And since you briefly touched on it: is the void ray a DT unit or a Khalai unit? It looks like a DT unit and "void" implies DT, but... it's beefy like a main-line protoss unit, and its "We are the light of the Khala!" line makes no damn sense.
You have no idea how much this totally irrelevant detail has bugged me these last few years.
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Only power Protoss have in SC2 is Colloss and Force Felds ... they become wery boring race to play and its sad..
BW protoss are truly protoss not this FF colloss gameplay of SC2... its so retarded...
i stop playing game becous i am toss player.. i dont like other races.. but i hope BW toss will comeback.. in SC2...
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On October 11 2012 05:17 Telenil wrote:
I really like the post, I've had similar thoughts tat I couldn't phrase that clearly. I think the gameplay changes are much too drastic to be realistically implemented (that wouldn't be Starcraft 2 anymore) but the "powerhouse" concept is worth mentioning. Perhaps this will influence the design of future protoss units? =)
Get on Reddit and support threads that discuss this sort of thing. Luciferon had this to say!
"From a Grandmaster protoss perspective (25th at the last MLG) the changes that you describe here totally exceeded my expectations. For a long time I've wanted protoss to have a stronger earlier unit prescence, decreased reliance on force fields, and move warp to twilight council. I articulated these suggestions along with others (make fungal be a slow rather than root etc) to a blizzard rep at MLG Raleigh, but I don't believe that was the proper channel of communication.
I 100% support everything that you wrote here. I cannot thank you enough for putting in the time to conceive of and write this. I applaud you. Bravo.
If all of these changes were implemented, with balance tweaks on numbers - not concepts - as necessary, I agree that the race would be back to where it should be in terms of racial asymmetry.
The next step, as others have mentioned, is raising awareness of this post. I personally came to this page from r/starcraft, but I haven't seen anything on Teamliquid yet. I'd suggest cross posting it there if you haven't already. Whatever you do, don't put it in the blogs section if you can avoid it. Try the SC2 General section for increased visability.
Edit: Also I'm not sure how good it would be to have force fields have hp. Maybe a shorter duration (5 seconds shorter?) would be better as chained force fields are less important due to being later in the tech tree. That might need some tweaking/revision"
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Completely agree, i love the way you have changed the immortal/stalker into deadly but fragile units. I love the ideas around protoss having to utilise shields more effectively, e.g taking hull damage is unforgivable. I think the current game has made this hard because in all battles you cannot retreat, when you commit to a battle you risk your life in the game. Not saying there should be no risk in attacking thats why i like the idea of the MS core ability to recall.
I think the phoenix is fine, personally. The voidray i would prefer just the old speed upgrade.
Great Read.
Restored protoss faith.
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A couple criticisms.
1. During timing pushes, your warpgate changes still make using warpgates really, really good. Consider that the 4-gate (the most notorious use of warpgates) doesn't actually build units using the warpgate until right as the attack is occuring. Your changes kill 4-gate obviously, but don't think we won't see people using warpgate right before a timing anyway (thereby still negating defender's advantage to some extent, but doing it later in the game).
2. Making the Immortal a slightly cheaper "stalker and a half" is an interesting suggestion, but allowing them to shoot up at 30 damage a shot means the immortal (with +1 attack) 3 shots a viking. This will lead to some likely unholdable 2-base Colossus/Immortal timing pushes in PvT. In addition, having a 3 supply unit consume a warpgate cooldown is poor design. Consider that by building mostly 2 supply units right up until your push, and then warping in nothing but 3-supply units both bypasses defenders advantage (due to point 1) and also maximizes use of the warpgates ability to frontload supply. And I shudder to think of the 6 or 7 gate 2-base timing attack with zealots and Immortals warped in (which annihiliate both spines and roaches).
3. 2 armor interceptors and 3 armor carriers will make carriers stupidly good in PvT. I really don't think people appreciate how close the carrier is to being good in PvT. HuK used to use Carriers pretty well in PvT lategame - with an additional armor upgrade and survivability buff to interceptors, I think that only leaves Vikings to get in the Carriers way - now see bullet 2 about how Vikings won't stand in the carrier's way.
I think the spirit of your changes is fine. The specifics, though, clearly haven't been tested. I really, really doubt your version of the game would result in anything less than protoss domination in both PvT and PvZ.
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I agree (with everything)
I love warp gates, I really do, but they have way too much of an effect on everything else. Gateway units were balanced with the knowledge they can be warped in to a fight immediately, which does happen but really isn't always so - so there is kind of a shifting power level with Gateway units, it doesn't feel too consistent.
edit: I sincerely hope this reaches DB or DK; these are greaaaat changes.
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These are brilliant changes. I would love to see a beta or a PTR patch with these in it as an experiment for community feedback. I feel like this could be really valuable in the hands of the pro players.
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On October 11 2012 05:44 Treehead wrote:
A couple criticisms.
1. During timing pushes, your warpgate changes still make using warpgates really, really good. Consider that the 4-gate (the most notorious use of warpgates) doesn't actually build units using the warpgate until right as the attack is occuring. Your changes kill 4-gate obviously, but don't think we won't see people using warpgate right before a timing anyway (thereby still negating defender's advantage to some extent, but doing it later in the game).
2. Making the Immortal a slightly cheaper "stalker and a half" is an interesting suggestion, but allowing them to shoot up at 30 damage a shot means the immortal (with +1 attack) 3 shots a viking. This will lead to some likely unholdable 2-base Colossus/Immortal timing pushes in PvT. In addition, having a 3 supply unit consume a warpgate cooldown is poor design. Consider that by building mostly 2 supply units right up until your push, and then warping in nothing but 3-supply units both bypasses defenders advantage (due to point 1) and also maximizes use of the warpgates ability to frontload supply. And I shudder to think of the 6 or 7 gate 2-base timing attack with zealots and Immortals warped in (which annihiliate both spines and roaches).
3. 2 armor interceptors and 3 armor carriers will make carriers stupidly good in PvT. I really don't think people appreciate how close the carrier is to being good in PvT. HuK used to use Carriers pretty well in PvT lategame - with an additional armor upgrade and survivability buff to interceptors, I think that only leaves Vikings to get in the Carriers way - now see bullet 2 about how Vikings won't stand in the carrier's way.
I think the spirit of your changes is fine. The specifics, though, clearly haven't been tested. I really, really doubt your version of the game would result in anything less than protoss domination in both PvT and PvZ.
1. This is very true, this is why I think an increased warp transition time would help make things a bit less swingy. But none the less, it could be game breaking.
2. The immortal redesign (upgraded Dragoon) with AA would necessitate changes to the other races in all likelihood. But if that is the price one pays for blue goo, then so be it . In all seriousness though, AA might not even be necessary. I would just like to see it tested.
3. The Carrier probably doesn't need half of the buffs I suggested. Just tossing ideas out.
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This is a very well thought out post, it is obvious you have a strong understanding of the game. The idea of switching the immortal and the sentry in the tech tree would give protoss players the early game muscle to stand on their own feet without the need for forcefield. I do have a few concerns and suggestions.
Your proposed change to the stalker is very interesting; making it anti light would give it natural synergy with the anti armor immortal in the midgame, but it would definitely raise some early game concerns, as the stalker would now 4 shot marines and 3 shot zerglings.
If the sentry was moved to robo and made costlier and beefier, then forcefield would need a few fundamental changes to remain competitive. I agree that making FFs breakable would be a positive change, but there would still need to be a buff at some point since the same spell at the same energy is now much harder to access.
I like the direction you're trying to go with the tempest, though I would consider decreasing the starting range to 7 or so. Being able to access to such a long range unit so early on, even if its initial range was decreased to 9, simply wouldn't work with Starcraft 2. To get what I mean, think of the tech requirements the colossus needs to achieve this range.
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On October 11 2012 05:56 v3chr0 wrote:
I agree (with everything)
I love warp gates, I really do, but they have way too much of an effect on everything else. Gateway units were balanced with the knowledge they can be warped in to a fight immediately, which does happen but really isn't always so - so there is kind of a shifting power level with Gateway units, it doesn't feel too consistent.
edit: I sincerely hope this reaches DB or DK; these are greaaaat changes.
Dustin just responded! I am very happy he got this feedback. He seems pretty receptive to it.
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"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.
Well, there is the first blue response!
FAITH HATH BEEN RESTORED!
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some ideas but why do compare damage of units? zealot for example does a lot more dps then a roach and wins vs a roach (unmicroed).
and your fix to the bad gateway units (with sentrys not available on gateway tech) is to buff zealot/stalker which works out fine on gateway tech. if warpgate is available + blink/charge zealot/stalker would become superimba. thats the whole problem with warpgate tech. you can only buff zealot/stalker if you remove warpgates from the game. or you would have to buff terran and zerg in any other part of the game to compensate for stronger chargelots/blinkstalker.
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What makes this worse is that Sentries are hard to use
What?...I don't know. Easy doesn't mean good nor does hard mean bad (you could actually make a case for the opposite). The more you put in the more you get out does not seem to be a philosophy of Starcraft 2's balance.
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Again, this isn't about balance, this is about creating a dynamic that is fun and engaging. Test and balance is something that can be done later unless the idea is fundamentally broken. It is difficult to determine such dynamics.
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Everytime I read one of these "I know how to 'fix' Protoss" threads, I'm glad DB has indicated no substantive change to WG and Sentry/FF. He gets a lot of crap, most of it undeserved. But he is dead right on that score.
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Wonderful post, and while I feel like some of these changes go too far, I love the general direction of your thought.
The stalker change in particular makes a lot of sense.
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I'm honestly not sure what to think. On the one hand, my heart says warp gates are an amazing utility and a major part of the reason I play protoss. The strategy potential is amazing if implemented right and is absolutely required to make them an interesting mechanic.
On the other hand, my head says getting warp gates as early as they currently are (t1) provides balance issues and promotes deathballs because t1 units have to be weak and t3 units have to be as good as tier 3 units, AND pick up the slack from the bad t1 units. I think making Warp Gates t2 would be the best solution, it gives gateway units viability in the early game to be more powerful, and therefore colossus/ht can get nerfed slightly as well.
Also, because I love the Warp Gate mechanic so much, I have wondered why only gateway units can be warped in via warp gates. It would obviously have to be balanced, but imagine warping in a colossus on the field of a carrier. That would be the single most epic aesthetic effect in sc2, and it would feel very protoss - warping in massive war machines with their extremely developed technology is something I could imagine fitting in. Another problem is because colossus die very easily to corruptors/vikings, if you don't have enough to do enough damage before they die you've lost because the gateway units that are left are just not good enough. There are really interesting dynamics about the protoss race that warrant a redesign, but not completely. Warp gate should stay. But not as t1. Warp gate should also affect every production building (even make it t3).
I will be watching this discussion closely though I think.
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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. Well, there is the first blue response! FAITH HATH BEEN RESTORED!
I dunno... I really dislike his his answer 
For example I don't believe that "Gateway units are weak because of warp-in."
This line hurts the most
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I feel like he didn't really talk about anything in the OP.
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heh, I like how "Rock" would like to make sentries easier to use 
I'm pretty bad at this game and I still find them fairly simple...more range might be nice to be of use in countering stim-stutter step retreat.
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This is such a good post and so true. Gateway Units are just too weak without sentry for their cost.
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Sentries are not hard to use.. lol ? I don't know how he concluded that ? Main problem with protoss is that they relied on force fields so much...
And it's so boring mechanic to use and to watch from E sport perspective of watching game that one player can control army of other that is so ridiculous...Its not good for game and E sport...
Dont make force fields easier to use remove them completely from the game its so boring to watch and to play its not good for the game...fungal have same problem...REMOVE FORCE FIELDS !!! make sentries regenerate shields or something...
thx for reading
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These are great ideas, but this late into the lifetime of the game I simply don't see them happening
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Wonderful ideas. I love most of your suggestions especially the ones regarding sentry and warpgates.
Making immortal a slightly stronger dragoon is also a really good idea. Also an anti light stalker might just solve blink stalker allins since they won't be able to overwhelm tanks,roaches or other armoured units so easily anymore due to decreased damage vs them.
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I am pretty certain that I don't fear BW Zealots with my Cracklings or Dragoons. Yet i don't want to send Cracklings into Zealots in SC2. Also don't forget that the t2 upgrades for Protoss t1 are extremely potent compared to the other races, excluding stim. But we had that for the Zealot already. I mean Zealots and Dragoons ... try to fight speed Hydras without the reaver/psy if you forgot the speed upgrade for Zealots.
It is also fairly interesting that you ignored the attack speed of the units, as leaving them out really supports your arguments. A Zealot attacks every 1.2 seconds and a Roach every 2 seconds.
That being said a roach is easy to mass because of the 3:1 cost that fits perfectly with base income.
You also shouldn't forget about the shields. In BW your army didn't regained alot of "health" after each battle. And now if you micro well you end up regenerating shields even in battle.
I think Protoss didn't changed their Identity and only added their dark side to it.
Anyway the suggestions were really fun to read, just like the arguments leading there. Especially after a long ZvP, atleast now I know that Zealots and Goons don't protect the Reavers and Templars, but are the actual problems for Zerg t1 units. (ya I know what Goons really are supposed to do against Zerg)
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The positive response to this is very telling.
very well written and amazingly thought out thread!
One thing I would ask is whether some custom mapmaker out there would be so kind as to make a custom with these changes for toss? I would love to see some replays of how these changes played out.
again, very nice!
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This makes a lot of sense, most impressive.
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Rocks answer:
We are talking about ways to make the Sentry easier to use so more Protoss players can get value out of him
HAHHAHHAAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAH
This game is doomed.gg
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United States7483 Posts
Most of this looks pretty good. I think a few of the numbers could use some tweaking, but the overall idea is pretty solid.
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On October 11 2012 07:15 SarcasmMonster wrote:Show nested quote +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. Well, there is the first blue response! FAITH HATH BEEN RESTORED! I dunno... I really dislike his his answer Show nested quote +For example I don't believe that "Gateway units are weak because of warp-in." This line hurts the most
I feel the same. Gateway units were also toned down because of the sentry, but they definitely were also effected by the Warp Gate mechanic, something had to give and it was the units stats. I can see his point, because it is true, but I think it's only half the reason.
The faith being restored part is about him seeing the thread in general, his answer wasn't the most promising but at least he read it. I am glad however, that he at least admits/agrees the void ray needs a looking at. Let's hope he took more into consideration... because quite frankly none of these changes are extremely drastic, nothing is really being removed; just stat changes.
edit:
On October 11 2012 08:08 TheKefka wrote:Rocks answer: Show nested quote +We are talking about ways to make the Sentry easier to use so more Protoss players can get value out of him HAHHAHHAAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAH This game is doomed.gg
He could mean that they are removing forcefield/making it weaker, or giving it something else that is easier to use but less effective. Could go both ways, I'm hoping that's the case anyway.
edit2: ^ nvm. lol
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I love your thought process behind your suggestions. Protoss does feel quite awkward and lost in Sc2 right now as a race and needs the "Strong but Expensive" feel back from bw. The change i find most interesting is the Immortal -> Gateway and Sentry -> Robo, I feel like a change like this will really diversify Protoss play and as you said decrease the insane focus 'forcefield' has on the game. Literally ff is the most used/relied/gamechanging spell in the game. Awesome post btw!
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On October 11 2012 08:08 TheKefka wrote:Rocks answer: Show nested quote +We are talking about ways to make the Sentry easier to use so more Protoss players can get value out of him HAHHAHHAAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAH This game is doomed.gg
Man... I wanna have faith in blizzard, but its just so hard.
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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~
-David Kim
Phew! Bullet dodged.
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United States7483 Posts
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.
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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.
That reveals a lot. I'm not so sure about all of that, but we'll see. I think that Protoss would be more fun to watch if it were less Stalker-heavy, so I like the idea of making Stargate units like the Void Ray and Phoenix stronger.
FF's are not fun to watch. Stalker balls are not fun to watch. I wish he'd step away from these and add powerful combat units to the Robotics Facility and Stargate.
The Widow Mine is the kind of unit the Protoss should have; it would help tremendously to break up their balls and to lessen the turtling.
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United States4883 Posts
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.
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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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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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Hallucination not requiring an upgrade will result in games of me getting excellent scouting only to realize I no longer have enough force field energy to hold off the incoming attack.
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Look ppl there is game that look more like blizzard would made it ... it's cold starbow.. Blizzard SC2 will not lest that much simply it gets boring very fast ...Force fields Dynamic pathing (death ball) fungel it isnt simply E sport frendly .. its noob frendly ...
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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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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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.
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United States7483 Posts
On October 11 2012 08:59 SC2John wrote:Show nested quote +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.
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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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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On October 11 2012 09:19 aZealot wrote:Show nested quote +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 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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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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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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Well, Zealots are real strong when slicing down marines backed against a wall of forcefields... Stalkers are strong when a whole army of them can fire on a small chunk of roaches segmented by forcefields...
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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Protoss has arguably the weakest tier 1 army. Its this way because warpin makes prottoss attacks alot more powerful than Z or T attacks since defenders advantage is almost non existant, this was balanced by making their units weak.
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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United States7483 Posts
On October 11 2012 09:26 Crawdad wrote:Show nested quote +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?
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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I really like everything you said, except for the mothership changes. if you have a buff that surrounds the mothership then the second the mothership comes out it would be in protoss's best interest to deathball because of the increased damage output... TBH i don't really like the mothership as a whole, but I don't know what i would change to make it less of a problem.
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Really nice job here, I especially like the stargate proposals. I think the void ray/tempest need a bit more work since they both do +massive and it would be nice to see more synergy and diversity within the fleet.
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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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On October 11 2012 09:54 Serpico wrote:Show nested quote +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.
Sounds like a good plan.
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Great thread, first of all. We need more like these. Someone already made the suggestion to make sentries into a mobile shield battery.(while removing FF and buffing gateway units) Something I could totally get behind.
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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.
Balancing the entire gateway tech path around 1 unit is incredibly bad design. I'm going to be severely disappointed if they choose not to radically change how force field interacts with the Protoss gateway composition. Forcefield's are too powerful for a T1.5 unit and it cripples Blizzards ability to change the Protoss early game in any meaningful way.
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On October 11 2012 10:31 Laids wrote:Show nested quote +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. Balancing the entire gateway tech path around 1 unit is incredibly bad design. I'm going to be severely disappointed if they choose not to radically change how force field interacts with the Protoss gateway composition. Forcefield's are too powerful for a T1.5 unit and it cripples Blizzards ability to change the Protoss early game in any meaningful way.
Yet at the same time, without forcefields, there are many rushes P dies to - and buffing the units to the point that they withstand these rushes might prove too much.
I just hope they don't make FFs too much easier to use, it's already one of the few skills that sets protoss players apart.
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The reason this is brilliant in my opinion is because of how it connects the correct play style pairings around unified buildings. Going down Twilight gives you mobility and harassment (blink, warp gate, DT's, Zealot-Archon, by this logic Warp Prism should go here too), going down Robo gives you power in straight up fights (force fields, guardian shield, colossi). It just feels like this is for the most part a much better place for these units in the tech tree. However, I'm not convinced the Immortal needs to be moved to the gateway, if the warpgate is removed from the Core and the Zealot and Stalker are buffed it might be able to stay in the Robo.
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So intelligent... the idea of strategically switching to warpgate, forcing people to scout for double reinforcement is so smart. Also, having the mothership provide power is so intuitive and fucking awesome. Haveing zealot stalker immo at gateway makes so much sense as well, though immos still feel like a robo unit.
Protoss how it should be played. I do worry about TC being too critical to ignore and/or setting up impossible choices between robo twilight and stargate (need to upgrade at TC to stay in the game, but need robo for detection, stargate never used until lategame) but overall it's sounds much more interesting than the current design.
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Very good post. Perhaps making the lower tech protoss units stronger and the higher tech protoss units weaker will also make fights last longer and also reduce the strong scaling of the protoss deathball via AOE in the lategame. It can also fix the problem vs mech, since even though the gateway units might die quickly, strong units like the immortal or colossus aren't killed fast by the AOE, leaving the strong protoss units to dish out damage for a long duration.
this could take a lot of reworking but may be worth it
just read more of the post, a LOT OF drastic changes, but good backing up and such! it is an expansion now after all, and it's better to get things messy and fixed instead of leaving it messed up slightly for many years later
i'm not sure what i think of some of the changes, but i'm sure some blizz people will read it and consider the ideas
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Good ideas, will blizzard listen, doubt it
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On October 11 2012 12:52 TheLunatic wrote:
Good ideas, will blizzard listen, doubt it
they've already posted in the thread
i don't get why so many people doubt blizzard, particularly that they "never listen". It might take them a while, but they do listen and eventually get things right
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This is a very very good post and I am sure almost all our us who played Protoss in both bw and SC2 has part of that feeling in their heart: why my gateway units are so weak!!
FF and warp-in are nice mechanism, but they take away too much of the strength that Protoss unit are suppose to have. The change of stalker into anti-light also make a lot of sense, as this is one of the key reason the P has a hard time harassing and anti-harassing.
I truely hope Blizzard will be brave enough to test this in the beta... It takes a lot of courage, but it has the chance to hugely increase the popularity of SC2 and its future in esports.
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"zerg with a bad credit rating" struck me as a very well put idea. Protoss feels really dull, and not as potent as they were in BW. I think the problem is the colossus, to be honest. It's shaped the entire game around itself, and that's a bad, bad thing.
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On October 11 2012 13:25 Honeybadger wrote:
"zerg with a bad credit rating" struck me as a very well put idea. Protoss feels really dull, and not as potent as they were in BW. I think the problem is the colossus, to be honest. It's shaped the entire game around itself, and that's a bad, bad thing.
The collosus is there because the gateway units are so weak by themselves; it is also the core of the "death ball" dependency of Protoss.
With stronger gateway units, Protoss actually does not need a unit as powerful as collosus, it can be changed and nerfed accordingly.
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This is a really good and well thought out op! I especially like how you brought in comparisons to BW without making this another "derp give us back brood war units" whine thread.
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I fully support every single one of the proposed changes. Thank you for writing this OP, I sincerely hope Blizzard swallow their pride and take notice.
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Completely awesome and fantastic OP! I support this design 100%!
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For what it's worth, if these changes were implemented, I'd actually want to learn to play 'toss. Not necessarily all of them, but I'm all for making early Tier 1 something to be feared outside of gimmicky bullshit like force fields.
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I 100% agree with the immortal and sentry change. Great write up.
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Thanks for all of the interest! It means the world to me that we care so much about this game. It is very important that we keep sight on what is possible and what is constructive in the coming weeks. If we are persistent, civil, and loud enough, we can improve the game play of SC2 Heart of the Swarm. HotS is looking much better than it first appeared, lets make sure that they know that we want a more fun and involved take on the Warp Gate and the Sentry!
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Very very mad props.
Saw this on Bnet getting dev responses(the only reason to ever visit bnet imho). Too bad they didn´t sound as excited as us common mortals.
You had me at "Anti light stalker".
Though VR sounds a bit expensive for the few good it does. I´d say it would be better to make the VR itself smaller and cheaper in general, but that´s just me.
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Tbh thats how i imagined 2 years ago, that blizzard will finally move warp tech to 2nd or even 3rd tier. Because many people suggested that(so that this upgrade will be matter of choice not neccesity), but blizzard was happy enough with standard warp tech nerf and growth of maps.
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very very well written and i love your concept. This would be great upgrade and absolute game changer. I think it would be better to play and more funny to watch sc2 games in general. Get rid of vortex and with buffs to gate units ... man epic encounters like in bw .Love it absolutely love IT!!!!!
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I'm just curious how durable you want gateway units to be. They're already pretty horrifying in all but the very earliest scenarios.
I'd also note that this whole "other races have to go to T2 to beat us" idea is a little silly considering terrans don't actually have the ability to tech through tiers like that. You haven't done anything about the mech/immortal relationship (besides moving it to the Twilight Council, thus delaying the ultimate protoss deathball by.. 3 minutes so with stronger gateway armies exactly how is terran supposed to win?
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On October 11 2012 17:26 Evangelist wrote:
I'm just curious how durable you want gateway units to be. They're already pretty horrifying in all but the very earliest scenarios.
I'd also note that this whole "other races have to go to T2 to beat us" idea is a little silly considering terrans don't actually have the ability to tech through tiers like that. You haven't done anything about the mech/immortal relationship (besides moving it to the Twilight Council, thus delaying the ultimate protoss deathball by.. 3 minutes so with stronger gateway armies exactly how is terran supposed to win?
Bigger numbers and smart deployment of mines.
i.e. How Arnold Schwarzenegger's character managed to win a single Predator. By the skin of their teeth. And Arnold's character used mines (a booby trap) in that movie.
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I've just one question, though.
As it appears now, protoss seem to have the current strongest lategame, wouldnt this just buff thier lategame? ie - instead of warping on 15-20 chargelots, they now warp in 15-20 "super chargelots"?
some of the ideas seem nice, but the core issue is the fact that warpgate actually exist, and that will forever make the lategame really annoying to play against.
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On October 11 2012 17:53 Tankz123 wrote:
I've just one question, though.
As it appears now, protoss seem to have the current strongest lategame, wouldnt this just buff thier lategame? ie - instead of warping on 15-20 chargelots, they now warp in 15-20 "super chargelots"?
some of the ideas seem nice, but the core issue is the fact that warpgate actually exist, and that will forever make the lategame really annoying to play against.
That's the thing, without the current widow mine, there would be NO way for a Terran to recover from a zero sum battle.
With the "return" of the firebat and spidermine, the return of the "super" zealot becomes feasible again.
Dustin could consider adding +1 armor and +1 attack upgrade (Zeal?) for Zealot in addition to chargelot.
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On October 11 2012 17:53 Tankz123 wrote:
I've just one question, though.
As it appears now, protoss seem to have the current strongest lategame, wouldnt this just buff thier lategame? ie - instead of warping on 15-20 chargelots, they now warp in 15-20 "super chargelots"?
some of the ideas seem nice, but the core issue is the fact that warpgate actually exist, and that will forever make the lategame really annoying to play against.
Protoss only has a strong late game because of Storm and Colossus, bioballs melt through gateway armies will very little loss at the late game.
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Well, the widowmine doesnt seem that good to deal with it if the protoss player is just careful, he can easily pick off the widow mines (obs + range 9 colo) - or hell, he can zealot bomb the tank lines, and the widow mines will completly destroy it because you dont really have some decent GtA as mech (+ tanks being really awful versus zealots and archons doesnt really help)
Also, i dont know why they made helions bioloigcal, they're completly awful versus archons now and gets melted into pieces.
edit to ^ - Yes, but now, remove the factor of the weak gateway army (i dont see any changes to colo/storm here) and well, the lategame will be ugly.
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I just hope blizzard realizes this before it's too late..
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That analysis of the OP is wrong in nearly every detail...
Zealots in BW did do 2*8 damage, not 1*16.
Roaches don't do the same amount or even more damage than the Zealot, they do considerably less, because they attack very slowly.
those are the dps numbers:
zealot BW: 18.8dps
dragoon BW: 8.3 (12.5 vs med, 16.6 vs large) dps
zergling BW (without adrenalin glands): 15.625 dps
hydralisk BW: 8.3 (12.5 vs med, 16.6 vs large) dps
marine BW(pre stim): 10dps
firebat BW(pre stim): 4.54 (9.09 vs medium, 18.18 vs small) dps
(real seconds, fastest speed)
zealot SC2: 13.3 dps
stalker SC2: 6.9 (9.7 vs armored) dps
zergling SC2 (without adrenalin glands): 7.2 dps
roach SC2: 8 dps
marine SC2(pre stim): 7dps
marauder SC2(pre stim): 6.7 (13.4) dps
(blizzard seconds, fastest speed)
zealot SC2: 18.354 dps
stalker SC2: 9.52 (13.39 vs armored) dps
zergling SC2 (without adrenalin glands): 9.94 dps
roach SC2: 11.04 dps
marine SC2(pre stim): 9.66dps
marauder SC2(pre stim): 9.24 (18.49) dps
(real seconds, fastest speed)
also this:
On October 11 2012 20:28 Kipsate wrote:
I don't think you have taken into account that in BW, shields would take full damage from every source, this means that for example a vulture who dealt concussive damage would deal 20 damage to Dragoon shields until the shields depleted, after that he would only deal 5 damage to the life of the Dragoon itself. Hydralisks deal explosive damage, they would deal 50% damage against zealots, yet they did 100% of damage against Zealots Shields.
Analyze this however you want, but don't post bullshit like the OP about roaches doing the same damage as zealots, zergling damage being the same in BW and SC2 etc etc etc
Edit: btw, I do like some of the OPs ideas, though I think some lack detail - though this could just be a problem of putting ideas out in a way that people will read them.
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On October 11 2012 17:53 Tankz123 wrote:
I've just one question, though.
As it appears now, protoss seem to have the current strongest lategame, wouldnt this just buff thier lategame? ie - instead of warping on 15-20 chargelots, they now warp in 15-20 "super chargelots"?
some of the ideas seem nice, but the core issue is the fact that warpgate actually exist, and that will forever make the lategame really annoying to play against.
First of all, Zerg has the strongest lategame.
Secondly, Protoss vs Terran, Terran also wins lategame. I will not go into detail too much but getting a lot of Vikings and a lot of Ghosts kills Protoss ground (you can kill the Observers really fast, giving you no way to deal with the Ghosts).
This is shown by the current Protoss almost all of them try to avoid big one-fight games where it all comes down to 200/200 vs 200/200. If they let it come to this they make sure they are in with a big advantage (like 200/200 vs 180/200 and better upgrades)
Like NaNiwa did against Flash.
It is true that if only a-moved the Protoss "Deathball" will win against Terran Bio, but kiting makes it impossible to deal damage with Colossi while they get killed by Vikings and also makes it hard to land Storms, plus, you know... the Zealots ALSO deal very little damage.
And that is what good players now do, they are not afraid to kite through the entire map because it means they will not lose a lot more hp than the cost of Stim.
So no, they do not have the strongest lategame, why else would Protoss players feel the need to add 30 Gateways to reinforce in a fight and then just barely win?
I sooo love OPs ideas, it would make the PvP problems disappear.
It would give me the option to not go Colossi every single game.
I wish Blizzard would hire this guy tomorrow...
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Fine, they might not have the strongest (this can be argued to no end) - but they defo have the most difficult to deal with if you're not a high skilled player (but then again, that's just my opinion and several others) - and these changes wont exactly help with that (also, most games Rain have won recently have been macro, where he completly destroyed his enemy - most protoss seem to aim for the lategame, so it would be weird if they didnt consider this thier strongest point of the game.
edit - to get back on track, as stated before, some of the ideas are good, but stuff like the immortal change doesnt really make sense, and these changes just seem to screw over mech a lot more than it currently is (from a terran pov)
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Sadly I do not have a NA account so I cannot answer in the Forum but please people express your opinions!!
With enough feedback Blizzard might change more than they want to right now.
Also Dustin Rock had this to say: "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. "
I don't WANT Protoss early and mid game to be designed around the Sentry. It makes map design very one dimensional since the Sentry relies on the terrain. It also makes the game frustrating for Protoss and the other races.
Whenever I win with a Sentry based all in my opponents say how incredibly hard it is to hold this off and I feel a little more dirty.
Whenever I lose a game because I missed those one or two critical forcefields by a second I just want to punch someone for this ridiculously bad designed gameplay.
Honestly, why would you Balance Protoss off all races around such a gimmicky mechanic?!
Call for change and change we will get. Blizzard listens to the community, so PLEASE post in the BNet thread, post here, go on reddit and post there. Make it happen, this is our chance to make Starcraft 2 a game we want to love for the next 15 years!
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On October 11 2012 20:00 Tankz123 wrote:
Fine, they might not have the strongest (this can be argued to no end) - but they defo have the most difficult to deal with if you're not a high skilled player (but then again, that's just my opinion and several others) - and these changes wont exactly help with that (also, most games Rain have won recently have been macro, where he completly destroyed his enemy - most protoss seem to aim for the lategame, so it would be weird if they didnt consider this thier strongest point of the game.
edit - to get back on track, as stated before, some of the ideas are good, but stuff like the immortal change doesnt really make sense, and these changes just seem to screw over mech a lot more than it currently is (from a terran pov)
The Immortal deals less damage and has half the HP, in addition to that hardened shield has to be researched.
For just one supply less, the Immortals damage against mechanical units has gone down from 50 to 30, and I still would love to see these changes. I know you now can build them earlier, but why would I go for blind mass Immortals against Terran and die to Marines?
Obviously the numbers have to be tested to be sure, but I think those changes would make Starcraft 2 so much better.
Also, I wouldn't mind getting a buffed Carrier and losing the Colossus, I think it is a terrible unit design and no-one disagrees, why the hell would they keep it?!
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Netherlands45349 Posts
I don't think you have taken into account that in BW, shields would take full damage from every source, this means that for example a vulture who dealt concussive damage would deal 20 damage to Dragoon shields until the shields depleted, after that he would only deal 5 damage to the life of the Dragoon itself. Hydralisks deal explosive damage, they would deal 50% damage against zealots, yet they did 100% of damage against Zealots Shields.
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From the changes you suggested I liked the most:
- Tempest idea - nice idea though the range upgrade would get tricky combined with the increased movement speed.
Maybe more like 7 basic range +3 with upgrade or 9 range and upgrade for speed instead.
- Mothership idea - definitely agree with removing the vortex, permanent powerfield and slow are great ideas
- Sentry robotics - would change the game completely though since zealot/stalkers would need buff to hold early game.
Maybe the logics behind warpgates is that only small units may be warped through, that way it makes sense and is elegant the way it is now.
I'd suggest changing voidrays by giving them an upgrade(probably fleet beacon 150/150) that would allow them to charge themselves before battle.
For example it would take 10 seconds to charge with 60 second cooldown or something. Would make them much useful past early game.
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On October 11 2012 20:09 rEalGuapo wrote:
Sadly I do not have a NA account so I cannot answer in the Forum but please people express your opinions!!
With enough feedback Blizzard might change more than they want to right now.
Also Dustin Rock had this to say: "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. "
I don't WANT Protoss early and mid game to be designed around the Sentry. It makes map design very one dimensional since the Sentry relies on the terrain. It also makes the game frustrating for Protoss and the other races.
Whenever I win with a Sentry based all in my opponents say how incredibly hard it is to hold this off and I feel a little more dirty.
Whenever I lose a game because I missed those one or two critical forcefields by a second I just want to punch someone for this ridiculously bad designed gameplay.
Honestly, why would you Balance Protoss off all races around such a gimmicky mechanic?!
Call for change and change we will get. Blizzard listens to the community, so PLEASE post in the BNet thread, post here, go on reddit and post there. Make it happen, this is our chance to make Starcraft 2 a game we want to love for the next 15 years!
In PvP and TvP, Protoss relies only very little on sentries in a lot of strategies. Most protoss get a few early on when they tech or chrono probes, while they actually rely mostly on stalkers. I think the relation in those matchups are quite fine,
In ZvP... it's the stupidity that is superpowerful mass 4range roaches early/midgame into superweak 2supply roach(/hydra) lategame that needs to be changed for gateway units to get the right basic unit relation.
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United Kingdom14103 Posts
Really quite a brilliant OP, well thought out and interesting ideas, none of that "BRING BACK REAVER" nonsense.
Browder really needs to see that protoss could be so much better designed, warp tech makes gateways just a stepping stone to warp gates which isn't well thought out imo
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Very nice ideas that in theory would work well.
i dislike nerfing the immortal in that way but with stalkers doing (even) worse against roaches it would be necessary. It just doesnt feel right.
The changes to voidray and tempest would make them overlap heavily.
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also, with warpgates being set to different cooldowns depending on what unit has been built makes protoss unit production macro hell compared to the other races. unfair.
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To be honest, in SC1 Toss didn't really have tier 1 units that overpowered Terran and Zerg.
In PvZ, toss would always fast expand then hide behind cannons till tier 2 tech was out, in the form of reavers or templar. Zealots would only be useful once leg speed came out; once that happened they would do quite well vs both speedlings and hydras, but once the hydra balls got really big Toss had to rely on storm or reaver to fight it. Dragoons were never really good against Zerg tier 1, they were used more for breaking lurker fields or fending off mutas.
In PvT, zealots did decently against marines at the start, while dragoons with the range upgrade could kite infantry to death easily, so Terran had to turtle. However once Terran had stim, range, medics and a decent amount of infantry out, they would actually trade against Toss tier 1 pretty cost effectively, perhaps even have the upper hand once numbers on both sides grew larger. The reason Terran had to use tier 2 to fight Toss was that storms/reavers countered Terran tier 1 far too hard for them to be of any use.
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also, with warpgates being set to different cooldowns depending on what unit has been built makes protoss unit production macro hell compared to the other races. unfair.
You realise that is already the case? Considering you apparently never noticed I dont think it is that big of a deal. You select all your warpgates with your hotkey, and SC2 automatically allows you to produce units from whichever warpgate isnt on CD.
But you can of course always switch back to normal gateways if you rather got the 'easier macro' that other races have.
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Well, Blizzard definitely moving towards making Protoss a completely new race in HotS. Looks awesome!
They still got Colossus to work on, though.
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News at five (or a short form of your entire first paragraph/theme):
Marauders and Roaches are bad for the game because they don't fit in with their races.
I totally and absolutely disagree with your Immortal/Stalker idea tho, Stalkers that are strong against Zerglings? Why would you build a Zealot ever gain? Immortals on T1.5 which is just a "diffrent" Stalker until the twllight count upgrades?
Thats just a bad idea.
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My idea is simple remove the hardened shield from immortal and turn it into a spell to buff another unit, sentry or oracle.
That way we could have those epic Protoss battles again.
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Glad to see this getting some attention on the bnet forums. I think it's definitely worth considering the ideas the OP is trying to convey. Even if there is little to no implementation at this point.
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@OP
You seem to be a well articulated fellow with a lot of interesting approaches to the Protoss race i general. For that attitude i praise you. I do not, however, praise you for your motives. As stated, you wish to incorporate changes to the protoss-variables, thus changing the entirety of how Sc:II is played and perceived, with the overall goal of making the Protoss race more true to its lore-based storyline - expensive and strong. In my opinion, this rapidly becomes utopic, at least when combined with the already present (and more prevalent?) ambition to make the game balanced. Balancing a complex and beautiful game like SC is hard enough as it is. Mixing in the goal of making the races true to some lore-based, non-strategial ideal, doesnt seem worth it to me. Yes, more people might buy the game initially. But those same people are equally prone to leaving it mere months later, due to probable imbalance.
Including my own opinion of the current state of the monstrosity that is the Protoss-race, I feel obliged to adress, for the umpteenth time, that sc SHOULD be a game of positioning. A decent RTS-game does, in my honest opinion, always include some sort of variable of skill regarding army-placement. Not stating that the following Protoss-mechanincs are imbalanced (a discussion for another day), I will however explain why i see them as "bad" for the game:
- Forcefields
- The research Blink
- Vortex
Now, before you go rage about how screwed toss would be without these abilities, let me specify. I am not suggesting blindly removing these assets from the game - but rather that substitutes/modifications should be considered. Seeing as they all, in one way or another, contribute to toss being able to "modify" the map (be it through creating chokes, ignoring cliffs/ramps or distorting the dimensions), they all take away from this beautiful game by minimizing the skill-level required in positioning. The trickery of setting up flanks, conducting elaborate decoy-drops or performing a well time runby, all symbolize important techniques that Terran/Zerg-players rely heavily on in gaining the strategical edge. Thus, it would please me to no end, if the same standards were patched to Protoss. Im sure a lot of Bronze-Diamond players would be completely thrown off at first, suddenly having to utilize more than the singleton army control group. I do however believe, that the Protoss race - heck, the entire game - would benefit from these changes. Or maybe Im wrong. People might not care as much for positioning as me...
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I generally agree with the spirit of the OP, especially moving the immortal to gateway+cyb core. But the post mostly got me thinking of what could be done about warp gates. While I like the warpgate mechanic in general, it's not as well implemented as it could be. I have always thought that there should be some sort of trade-off between the warpgate and the gateway. Currently, there are only benefits with warp gates making it a no-brainer. I mean, you can produce units almost anywhere and faster than you could before!
Now, suppose each warp gate had an energy pool, just like the nexus, and that warp-ins would cost energy.
The first thing that comes to mind is probably that you can't do any defensive warp-ins when you are out of energy, but that is part of the trade-off: The whole idea is to bring in a new kind of economy. If you would have conserved your energy you could have defended faster. This way gateways take on the role of the main macro buildings and warpgates become more specialized and can be used to perform sneak attacks, reinforce and defend quickly. Obviously, as the player gets more warp gates, the energy will become less of an issue.
As for the energy cost of warp-ins, I think it should depend on the unit being warped in. A zealot should cost less than a stalker, and much less than a DT. This is where the biggest difference from the cool-down based warp-in comes in. Currently, you can keep warping in units as long as you wait for the cool-down but if the energy pool were enough for, say, exactly 2 DTs you can warp in a few DTs in a burst but then you'd need to wait for the energy to replenish before you can warp in another one. To have such a burst available, though, you would need to store energy for that attack or use the mothership core's ability to quickly refill.
If Protoss units were to be buffed, this way the warp gate mechanic could be nearly unchanged and IMO made more interesting while still limiting the power of the warp-in.
Any thoughts?
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I have always hated the ability to transform a warp gate to a gateway. It feels so stupid since no one would ever do it. With these changes, it would actually make sense!
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From an entirely lore-based viewpoint, and not at all to do with game balance throughout a matchup, I think it's actually quite fitting that Protoss start out weak.
They are the few, tired warriors (Zealots), tricked out wheelchairs for their weak (Stalkers), and protection from their mechanical ingenuity (Sentries). As they progress, they augment their basic forces with powerful technology from the robotics facility and stargates, and improve their basic fighters with twilight council upgrades. Templar are a great example of late tech combining both a sense of power and weakness. Dark Templar do huge damage in a single hit, but the attack speed is so slow that it feels as if every hit could be their last.
I feel that the journey Protoss makes each game is one from the brink of death, to become the powerful race they used to be.
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On October 12 2012 00:37 awNuts wrote:
I feel that the journey Protoss makes each game is one from the brink of death, to become the powerful race they used to be.
Then you get run over and ground into the dust by Infestor/Broodlord/Corruptor. Just saying. >_>
OP got really good general ideas. Not everything would be exactly like that after balancing I think, but its all on the right lines and addresses the areas that really need addressing.
And its a hugely refreshing change from the usual "REMOVE FORCEFIELD", "REMOVE WARPGATE" and "SWAP COLOSSUS FOR REAVER" yelling.
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Lots of interesting ideas in this thread.
It would be pretty awesome to see Warpgate as a strategic choice. However, your changes don't achieve that. The problem is that Warpgate is just too damn good. Frankly, you haven't gone far enough to compensate for having an extra 1200m 400g or so of units in the fight at any given time by the time you reach 2 base. Shifting the tech to TC just delays the problem; it'll still show up ASAP in every functional build.
I think it's more interesting if Warpgate is viable early like now and viable later on, and possible to ignore completely in moderate length games.
Let's imagine playing without Warpgate. Currently it'd force a defensive, almost turtling playstyle for Protoss with limited map control and weaker drops. In order to make that equally viable we need to both compensate for the unit disadvantage above and give Protoss better tools to poke, scout and harass.
First of all, let's bring the costs in line. Let's make Warpgate an expensive tech choice - say, 100m/100g to research, and 50m/50g to convert a Gateway to a Warpgate. 4gate is now set back by 250m/250g. A 2 base Warpgate Protoss is now throwing 400m 400g purely into Warpgate tech. A gateway 'toss in the same situation might have Colossus tech instead of the five or six gateway units Warpgates could throw forward across an average size map. They might be on their way to +2/+1. Suddenly, the costs start to look kinda balanced! The gas cost makes Warpgate a major tech investment, especially if you have lots of Gateways. Still advantageous, but expensive. Most significantly, the transformation cost directly eats into that first wave of units, weakening the timing push that Warpgate tech provides (and it's no good balancing Gateways vs Warpgates unless we also balance the transition from one to the other).
Secondly: map control. IMO the simplest route to this would be to buff the Stalker and Sentry significantly (since they're more likely to show up in the non-Warpgate path due to gas contention), buff Protoss air power via the Stargate tech tree and make Charge and Blink more accessible. I'm in agreement with DB that giving the Mothership Core a way to reveal cloaked units would instantly make Twilight more viable and thus achieve this goal. Making Hallucinate free tech on the Sentry would also boost scouting a ton.
So, here's a possible balance-Warpgate package:
- Warpgate research now costs 100m/100g
- Promoting a Gateway to a Warpgate now costs 50m/50g
- Stalker shields increased from 80 to 120
- Sentry Hallucinate no longer needs to be researched
- buff Stargate tech tree to improve Protoss mobility, harass and map control options (as is underway in HotS)
- Mothership Core gains Detector passive (possibly a bit extreme, but it'd be fun to try!)
- adjust T1 units as necessary to keep the early game/midgame balanced; spend a few years gradually rebalancing the lategame in patches now that we've just broken every single PvX matchup
This would undoubtedly make Protoss weaker, especially in the opening; we might have to follow this up by buffing T1 units further but making them less massable or upgradeable. My hope is that it'd open up build orders and styles dramatically by crippling the Warpgate -> Robotics Facility path we all know so well and providing viable alternatives to Warpgate mobility/power and Observers.
I'm definitely curious what people could achieve if a switch to Warpgate became a tech path in itself; something you could work in at any point in a build, for a cost. I certainly want to see what might happen if fast Stalkers could become a viable rush with careful micro, instead of the weak poke they represent currently. I know I want to see reliable builds which achieve map control through airpower, not ground mobility.
Even so... this still might not go far enough, it'd raise a whole bunch of other problems (like devastating Blink Stalker all-ins) and it'd be hard to justify crippling Warpgate like this in an expansion.
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Regarding changing Immortals, this feels like a very heavy-handed solution to immortal vs. mech. I'd prefer to see a gas-intensive Terran mech unit with a range 8 Lockdown style spell that can neutralise both Immortals and enemy Siege Tanks, maybe even capital ships. (Along the lines of a more specialised Warhound, or perhaps replacing both that and the Thor with its similar 250mm Cannons.) Likewise I think your Sentry changes are excessive (we could just increase the energy cost of Forcefield to delay and reduce the number that show up). They dilute it as a unit by giving it a more generic, combat oriented role and emphasise Robo play even more excessively IMO by putting Colossi, Sentries and Observers on the same tech path.
I'd like to see how your Void Ray and Tempest changes play out. I think the Void Ray needs more drastic changes, though; you're playing around in the edges of the role it's always occupied, and Prismatic Battery would perhaps be the first upgrade in Starcraft designed to make a unit less unique
Those Carrier changes are straight up OP. Carriers aren't bad! The problem's always been getting to them, especially with advanced Air Weapons upgrades. The more well-rounded Stargate tech path we're getting should do a lot in that regard. The shorter build time might be worth playing with.
I think the bigger problem with the Carrier is role overlap with the Void Ray and Tempest. I'd think I'd like to try out the Carrier re-imagined as a shorter-range AoE air-to-ground platform - launching bombers, not interceptors. It'd thus naturally complement other Stargate ships, being vulnerable but filling an important gap rather than operating as an ultimate unit. However, I feel like that concept would be near broken in PvZ due to having no cost-effective ground counter.
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Just a few thoughts on the topic:
-) If Gateway beats bio, bio becomes unavailable in TvP. Even more so, I'd say that the gateway is stronger in PvT than in PvZ or PvP (which are very robobased matchups).
Also, blinkstalker allins, 4gate, 3gate pressure are all strong early game builds vs bio Terran, chargelot/Templar/Archon really forces a Terran to have a lot of higher Tier bio (support) units - ghosts and medivacs.
Imo, this relationship should not get touched, or bio needs another high tier unit or another strong support unit (like tank/thor in TvZ)
-) PvP... well, the Colossus is not counterable (PvP) in WoL and Colossus>ground unit for nearly all ground units in the game. Hopefully gate/air or gate/air/immortal gets playable in HotS.
-) PvZ... what's the real problem? it's that there is a unit that was supposed to be an early safety unit vs those zealots and stalkers, but was given too much range and now works in a way that you can get 50 of those and still make most of them shoot.
Else? Not really anything. Zerglings can be dealt with, even without (mass) forcefields quite easily. Hydras are OK, but that's what they have always been against pure low tier gateway and in SC2 probably even less than in BW, for higher cost.
So in conclusion: It's the roach that needs to go back to 3range (or less) in some form, so that 10000000000roach scenarios that beat defensive mass gateway can't appear.
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On October 12 2012 00:37 awNuts wrote:
They are the few, tired warriors (Zealots).
Wrong. Zealots spend their whole life training their combat techniques. In BW, at a cost of 100 mins, they could beat any ground unit 1v1 except Ultralisk and Reaver. With speed upgrade, there was absolutely no escape from their blades of death. Hell, Zealots are the reason alone for me picking toss.
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On October 11 2012 18:31 Big J wrote:
Roaches don't do the same amount or even more damage than the Zealot, they do considerably less, because they attack very slowly. (etc)
I'm not in the OP's mind, but I think this is not quite his point. The way I feel it, the "racial feeling" really is related to damage, not dps.
A dragoon with half the cooldown and half the damage wouldn't feel like a dragoon, even though it has the exact same dps. The Brood War dragoon feels heavy, powerful, and each attack looks like it really hurts the enemy. With his faster attack speed and lower damage, the hyralisk had a very different feeling, it was something that was at your throat, not a large walker that makes big holes into stuff. Would a zergling with a cooldown of 1 and appropriate damage still feel like a zergling? To me, no.
So to me "damage" really was the matter, not dps. We are talking design here, not balance.
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this is brilliant, as a toss player, i like to warp in my units at the front, but moving warp tech to twilight would be more balanced, and made the toss to actually make gateways before halfway tech. one thing that could be changed too maybe: making warped in units weaker then 'normal' ones. Also the carrier, with interceptors that heal inside the carrier, you would need micro, i like that.
Thx for this great post
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Thanks to everyone who brings an opinion to this thread. A good number of you disagree with my proposals and I applaud you for it, I think some of the changes listed including a resource cost to convert from gateway to warpgate, would probably be a better idea than increasing conversion time.
I am currently writing and editing a post on Zerg and Supply, and what it feels to play Zerg in BW versus WoL. Hopefully we will see it sometime today.
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Hey, Husky actually made a video about the devs answers to your post :D
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On October 12 2012 04:34 Telenil wrote:Hey, Husky actually made a video about your post :D
Many of these ideas have been thrown around since WoL beta. And since that time, people would respond with the usual "dumb, leave the game designing to the game designers."
Its humorous that people pay attention now because it shows how much faith they have lost in blizzard to deliver a better product, a better experience.
Many of these ideas we should have had from the start but as always, you'll never see blizzard implement such changes.
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I may be one of the few Protoss who does not believe that the race needs a substantive redesign. This is one reason, that while I respect the OP and its intention, I really see little more than yet another wish list for Protoss (and SC2 in general).
The one idea I can get on board with is a buff to SG tech, although not necessarily the specific ideas for those buffs to SG tech. But this is something almost everyone in SC2 can agree with. AirToss in HoTS should be more viable. I doubt much can be done in WOL at this stage though. A strong buff to AirToss in WOL will likely make the race OP - especially late game.
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Great thread! Just want to thank you all!
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Amazing thread! Blizzard should hire you.
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I love almost all of the ideas and thoughts behind these changes. The only thing I wouldn't want to see is the Stalkers with + to Zerglings. I like the idea of making them light to hold against Mutas better but the core idea of them being ling crushers doesn't sit right with me.
But seriously really great ideas in here! Great job man
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Man, this is a phenomenal post. Applause to OP for taking the time to write such a well thought out and level-headed analysis.
Thoughts:
I like the idea of moving up the tech tree and creating more limitations to (but not fundamentally changing or removing) both sentries and warpgate. Propositions for Immortal and Stalker are extreme (and so I would imagine not going to happen at least not that such an extent), but an interesting direction to consider with the tweaks to sentry/warpgate. And I mean... yeah it seems a little silly but... Immortals... aren't... robots...? But sentries... are... robots. So... that would make... sense?
I really like the idea of motherships producing a power field. Opens up really interesting possibilites for play, and just kind of makes sense.
I just want to say that when the tempests were first introduced when the beta was released, aside from ANYTHING else, I just thought the 22 range was the coolest thing ever. Forget about how well the unit worked, or its dps, or cost tech blah etc. I just thought that kind of extreme range was unlike anything else in the game and extremely interesting. Can anybody explain to my why it doesn't/wouldn't work (with appropriate adjustments obviously) to have something in the neighborhood of 17-22 range? Because it just seems like it would be awesome. From a fun-oriented perspective. As a player and a viewer.
Changing stalkers to bonus vs. light instead of armored seems like it would cause problems as stalkers are valuable when trying to snipe down things like Brood Lords, Colossus, Vikings, Corruptors, etc. What about... So change stalker health/shields to 60/100 - minor direct engagement nerf as shields don't take the armor bonus, but goes in line with this hit-and-run philosophy, and change damage to 12 + 2? (not sure if the damage to armored should be kept at 14 or not but), as then 0/0 stalkers would 4-shot 0/0 marines same as they would with the 10+4 vs light. Idk that might be idiotic, just putting that idea out there.
Another thought on warpgate, has it ever been suggested to simply... make warp-ins take LONGER? Not the cool-down but the actual time it takes for a unit to complete the warp-in process in the field. I mean I feel like that must have been discussed somewhere, but wouldn't an adjustment like that do something about this whole defender's advantage shenaniganry? But yeah, I always wondered why there would be NO incentive to have gateways over warpgates. Seems to just take away a potentially interesting decision making / strategy feature.
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I fucking love the proposed changes. I fully support them. How can we do so, that we attract even more attention from Blizzard ?
At OP, I know it is very hard work, however could you and some other people form a team, so you can succesfully implement those changes in a test map, where the other races are left untouched,so people will find out what effect those changes would have ? And if they are good, we will really open Blizzard's eyes.The theory is insanely good, however I doubt Blizzard will really think much of it, if this theory is all that you have done.Just to say, I am not criticising, I just think that people who are good at map making should help you implement to changes to a map.
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Do we have any idea how long until a test map is available with the changes in the OP's articles (all three, not just this one)?
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i like the warp gate idea more or less but don't really get the immortal or stalker changes
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On October 14 2012 05:22 nevermindthebollocks wrote:
i like the warp gate idea more or less but don't really get the immortal or stalker changes
The idea for a smaller Immortal and an anti light stalker would be to provide Protoss with a stronger early army that would be less dependent on Force Fields and Warp Gate.
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On October 13 2012 17:51 MagmaPunch wrote:
I fucking love the proposed changes. I fully support them. How can we do so, that we attract even more attention from Blizzard ?
At OP, I know it is very hard work, however could you and some other people form a team, so you can succesfully implement those changes in a test map, where the other races are left untouched,so people will find out what effect those changes would have ? And if they are good, we will really open Blizzard's eyes.The theory is insanely good, however I doubt Blizzard will really think much of it, if this theory is all that you have done.Just to say, I am not criticising, I just think that people who are good at map making should help you implement to changes to a map.
There will be a PTR map for us to test different combinations of these changes.
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On October 14 2012 16:56 ItWhoSpeaks wrote:Show nested quote +On October 13 2012 17:51 MagmaPunch wrote:
I fucking love the proposed changes. I fully support them. How can we do so, that we attract even more attention from Blizzard ?
At OP, I know it is very hard work, however could you and some other people form a team, so you can succesfully implement those changes in a test map, where the other races are left untouched,so people will find out what effect those changes would have ? And if they are good, we will really open Blizzard's eyes.The theory is insanely good, however I doubt Blizzard will really think much of it, if this theory is all that you have done.Just to say, I am not criticising, I just think that people who are good at map making should help you implement to changes to a map. There will be a PTR map for us to test different combinations of these changes.
Do you mean a real PTR supported by Blizzard, with Hots models? That would be simply amazing.
Anyway i think i support every change you did propose for the 3 races.
What about the Oracle, role and spells? I couldn't find any info on it, but i'm sure you have some ideas on it  .
I'd personally really love to see Phase shift come back, limited to static defences *_*
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The PTR would not be supported by Blizzard, but after a period of testing (with enough replays), I would send our findings to Blizzard for consideration. This project is about establishing a more open dialogue between Blizzard and its community during the design process and doing so in the most constructive manner.
The Oracle and Colossus are both getting articles. The Colossus is tricky and is here to stay, I think there are adjustments that can make it more fun and skill intensive, without killing it for lower level players. For better and worse, there will be no Reaver in SC2.
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I really hope the PTR will be published on several servers, if thats possible. Even if you have you get a friend to do it. I really would test these changes thoroughly. Any sense of when the PTR will be available?
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This is a pointless effort.
First of all a TON of factors are completely ignored to make this comparision totally useless. Damage in BW and SC2 is not comparable like that, you should be comparing DPS, armor type / bonusses matter a lot, support units differ etc etc.
The role of protoss is different in sc2 and BW but why should that be problematic? The games are way too different than to try and make such a change that will solve issues. Yes I agree BW is many ways better as far as units and interesting tactics go but it;s also just terribly worse in a lot of other aspects. Stop trying to compare them too much..
Most changes suggested here such as moving units around to much, reversing the role of stalker etc. etc. are plain terrible and won't work. Among the changes are a few good ones though, I like the voidray, tempest and carrier changes though.
Shortly put I don't think changing too much in the framework for protoss is possible anymore at this point, you can't just change around warpgate and all other stuff around anymore, the game is already settled upon that now. Small changes to later tech units should be possible though and are generally much easier to balance, specifically I'd like to see a chance to stargate in general (something along the lines in the OP possibly) and to the colossus (just to make it more interesting unit microwise, possible replace the projectile with the reaver projectile..)
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I respectfully disagree. These suggestions are useless without real data and community support. Look at the Carrier as an example. The data eventually showed that Carriers could be viable in some contexts, this combined with the community outcry for the iconic capital ship was enough to secure the unit's place in SC2. Same thing happened with the Warhound, a unit that Blizzard was pretty happy with as was, until the data and community said otherwise. If these were half-assed suggestions with no follow through, that would be one thing. However, I am pretty sure some of these changes could result in a better game in the long run.
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On October 15 2012 05:33 ItWhoSpeaks wrote:
I respectfully disagree. These suggestions are useless without real data and community support. Look at the Carrier as an example. The data eventually showed that Carriers could be viable in some contexts, this combined with the community outcry for the iconic capital ship was enough to secure the unit's place in SC2. Same thing happened with the Warhound, a unit that Blizzard was pretty happy with as was, until the data and community said otherwise. If these were half-assed suggestions with no follow through, that would be one thing. However, I am pretty sure some of these changes could result in a better game in the long run.
Completely agree. I like a lot of changes, some of them I don't, but oh well, it comes down to the personal preference. And btw, Blizzard pretty much used your changes for the Tempest, well, kind of. :D
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i read all 3 of your post with T and Z and i like all three. Not sure about Blizzard because they don't take big steps. The only chance for them to test this is in beta. I hope they try these changes for a month or two.
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10387 Posts
Lol blizz should hire this guy
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On October 15 2012 07:17 boomudead1 wrote:
i read all 3 of your post with T and Z and i like all three. Not sure about Blizzard because they don't take big steps. The only chance for them to test this is in beta. I hope they try these changes for a month or two.
Hopefully FoxyMayhem and I will have something for you guys soon.
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On October 15 2012 14:09 ItWhoSpeaks wrote:Show nested quote +On October 15 2012 07:17 boomudead1 wrote:
i read all 3 of your post with T and Z and i like all three. Not sure about Blizzard because they don't take big steps. The only chance for them to test this is in beta. I hope they try these changes for a month or two. Hopefully FoxyMayhem and I will have something for you guys soon.
I'd try it out. I'm pretty sure it'd be broken, and I don't see the other races stopping 2-base Colossus play - but I'd try it, if only to prove my point.
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I like the ideas. Maybe not all of them but it would be nice to try them out in a ptr.
I like the concept of adjusting the units to how they are currently used now in wol. When the units for the game was designd for wol blizzard didnt really know how everything would play out.
Right now we see stalkers fighting mostly marines and mutas and adding light damage bonus would make allot of sense. Also switching the sentry around with the immortal solves allot of problem.
Blizzard have said them self that forcfield makes it hard for new/low lvl players, by making it a tech chose instead of a core choice it will allow those players to play with out it if they want. The extra punch of a weaker immortal actually gives protoss a good balanced anti armor unit. Maybe the numbers of everything need to be tweaked but most of the concepts are nice xD.
Giving voidrays bonus against biological instead of armored might be better. Since the tempest with is range is a better counter for tanks. Makes the voidray a better option then tempest against zerg.
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Impressive! And you got a response from Dustin Browder!?
GJ
Your argument for the "feel" of the protoss is great, really awesome. And it made me realize something that I was missing.
About your changes: I totally agree with the warpgate changes. If you have a tradeoff between a) instant almost anywhere reinforcements vs b) quick army production that can only help the game.
Part of the other proposals you made seem to have been addressed in a way by the last patches. The oracly is now a perfect glass cannon, great against unprotected buildings.And timewarp helps a gateway army while being more forgiving than ff.
I think the current oracle and tempest are really good though and if the void ray is tweaked to find a new role, things are starting to look up for the protoss.
My personal suggestions would be these:
1. Robotics facility requires warpgate instead of cybernetics core
2. Zealot charge is researchable at the cybernetics core
These are two simple changes that could help a lot with early game protoss while hopefully not breaking too much.
I also vote for your gateway change and agree that it might makes sense to at least try out to push the availability of force fields a bit back in the tech tree.
Maybe just give hallucination for free and make FF an expensive research?
Anyways, great post!
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Oh yeah and the stalker proposal somehow feels incredibly fascinating as well although that's really a huge change.
It would totally break mass marine and muta vs toss. Lings might become worthless vs toss.
Instead it will probably encourage mech or roach play.
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Hey guys this is my very first post on TL and I'm very excited to become a part of this community.
First off I love these changes specifically mostly change set 1&2. Ive always wondered since launch why there is no downside to warpgates. Giving pros and cons as you proposed OP gives choice and with choice much more interesting gameplay.
On October 15 2012 00:13 Markwerf wrote:
Shortly put I don't think changing too much in the framework for protoss is possible anymore at this point, you can't just change around warpgate and all other stuff around anymore, the game is already settled upon that now. Small changes to later tech units should be possible though and are generally much easier to balance
I dont understand posts like these. Such changes as the OP suggests are possible to be patched in WOL however unlikely. The fact that HOTS isn't released yet makes it far more likely. As for the 'beta' being settled as you say, so what? You rather have a worse off game just because you dont want to upset the "settled" players who are playing the beta? I agree small changes are easier, but if mechanics are broken or inherently boring, no amount of small changes will rectify that. You need some drastic changes. I think you forget that this is an expansion no mere patch, they could do whatever they want and furthermore close the beta to implement these changes in need be.
At worst, these changes can be made post launch if its deemed balanced but that would be overall undesirable.
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Update: Internal testing is going well. The Immortal is currently a bit too strong for what it costs and is being tweaked. (A bit less damage vs armor and we are giving it a projectile attack so PDD is effective at mitigating damage.)Pre Hardened Shield, Immortals and Tanks are well matched, post research the same issues arise. By making the attack a projectile, Terrans can support their Tank compositions via Bio with the Ghost's EMP, or use the Raven's PDD to further fortify areas. We are also experimenting with making the Jotun light armored and waving the tech lab requirement (but not the armory, allowing them to be mass produced like Hellions.) Gateway/Warpgate play really affects how you place your buildings. Stalkers are an Tier 2 unit and have been buffed slightly to compensate. Having that much damage out at Tier 1.5 was silly vs Hydras, Lings, and Marines. In short, TvP feels pretty damn fun again. With the Widow Mine and MShip core and Tempest, I think we could see a truly varied and rich match up.
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Agreed. However, I would like to see a little bit more TvZ, as I am worried that mech compositions may become a little bit too strong, especially given the widow mine coming in HotS.
Any idea on when the HotS units will be incorporated into the custom map, or the proposed colossus change?
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I cannot articulate to you how awesome you are, ItWhoSpeaks. I don't care how you do it, you need to get Blizzard to listen to you. Get your custom map to become massively popular such that it starts to cut into people playing ladder. That'll do it.
All your changes are huge steps in the right direction. That said, there are some things that remain which could be addressed with further changes. Reducing supply costs of many units across the board is an important point. For example, the 3 supply Immortal available at Cybernetics Core. I understand the idea- that Protoss has fewer, stronger units, and we are dealing with an environment that has 2 supply marauders and roaches. However I think the best way to solve this problem, if unlimited changes are allowed, is to reconsider those supply costs. So the Immortal reaches a 2 supply price point , as do many of these protoss units (such as the new Sentry). This will likely involve serious rebalancing of the marauder and roach around the 1 supply price point. Suppose the basic units of the game are all 1 supply, with beefier, stronger units being 2. Rather than the current state of affairs where we have the 1-2 supply zone for basic units, and then this 3 supply Twilight Zone, and then super units at a ridiculous 6 supply each.
Another big point of contention is the huge units- the Mothership (and the core), being special cases due to their arbitrary number limitation. This should be reworked, ideally bringing back a smaller caster unit with smaller abilities, of which you are allowed to make many copies. This means more units on the board, more actions to move them around and use their abilities, etc. etc. Vortex is not the problem with the Mothership- the idea of having a single unit be such a huge deal is the problem. No matter what abilities or powers it has it will produce instability, have few choices ("to get or not to get" instead of "how many, and where?"), and require little skill to use (only one cast, as opposed to many).
In a similar vein, the Thor, Colossus, and Ultralisk need shrinking. The ultralisk especially, as its huge size makes it very weak because it's a bloody melee unit and its size directly influences its ability to get into melee range, and how many ultras can simultaneously attack one target. The Ultralisk was a 4 supply unit in Brood War, and was much smaller relative to other units than it is now in SC2. The ultra needs some liposuction. The Thor needs to become a 2 supply Goliath (or add the goliath and make the thor something completely new), and the Colossus is going to need a spark of genius in order to get it to work properly. Just shrinking it won't get the job done, although it's a start. A smaller, weaker, 4 supply Colossus is one possible approach... But I just don't see a simple, effective, solid way to fix that unit.
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Search One Voice In the Custom Games Lobby (not the arcade). One Voice PTR CloudKingdom and Ohana are now up. GOGO COMMUNITY !
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Yeeeeaaaaahhh
jumping on bnet after breakfast
EDIT: Is it not available on EU ?
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Got to say PvP is defiantly in a better state than the 4 gate era a few years ago, however i do feel that warp gate tech is the main reason its a pure coin-flip still and cant really see it improving that much in the future unless the HOTS units change it completely
EDIT :Opps wrong thread, ignore this post
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You just said that Protoss should be an expensive and powerful unit and yet you repeatedly give nerfs to the stats to make the units more easily made. This goes against practically everything you stated above. It leaves me, the reader, slightly confused about your post that you obviously put much effort into.
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it's not that protoss feel weak, it's that the others race got a serious buff in T1-1.5 departement(roach, marauder)
basically they are all protoss now, which is bad, really bad and super boring...
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No EU
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Tried the test map, like the changes especialy to protoss. thou immortal doing bonus damage to armored air seems a bit too strong, maybe considered that the bonus to armored only applies to ground
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Wow, brilliant post my friend, giving back toss that powerfull OP feeling while keeping an interesting marco mechanic and not relying on forcefields all the time. I hope blizzard can implement at least some of these ideas for LOtV
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On November 25 2012 23:36 KaiserKieran wrote:
You just said that Protoss should be an expensive and powerful unit and yet you repeatedly give nerfs to the stats to make the units more easily made. This goes against practically everything you stated above. It leaves me, the reader, slightly confused about your post that you obviously put much effort into.
Ummm, in it's "nerfed" state, the T 1.5 Immortal has 20 more shield than the Dragoon, does twice the base damage, and 50% more base damage to armored and can be upgraded to walk into tank lines at the cost of + 25/25/1 supply. Oh, and it can attack air. Not sure how that goes against what I have stated.
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On November 26 2012 03:26 Ap_Furio wrote:
Wow, brilliant post my friend, giving back toss that powerfull OP feeling while keeping an interesting marco mechanic and not relying on forcefields all the time. I hope blizzard can implement at least some of these ideas for LOtV
The Ohana version is an old version and should be removed. The Immortal and Hydra were decidedly OP then.
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A NOTE TO ALL: THESE VERSIONS ARE NOT FINAL. NOT ALL OF THE CHANGES WE WANT TO MAKE ARE IN PLACE YET. We are still tweaking HotS units as well as problem units like the Mothership. Feel free to play, and give us feed back at onevoicemod@gmail.com . Just know that things are changing rapidly.
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It's very good to see someone thinking the way I think about the Protoss race. Current Protoss feels like too reliant on gimmicky things and cannot win straight up fights. And it's too immobile, generally all you can do is something cheesy, something out-microing, or getting a death ball and a moving around. Whenever I see an army of MMM, mass roach, roach hydra, mass muta, I feel that I have an inferior army and must rely on storms, ff's, or die in a 1 on1 fight.
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Wow. Didn't expect someone to take Blizz up and implement changes. Might actually redownload WoL onto my lappie for this.
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On November 26 2012 04:59 Sabu113 wrote:
Wow. Didn't expect someone to take Blizz up and implement changes. Might actually redownload WoL onto my lappie for this.
This is a mod which is totally independent from Blizz afaik
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AWESOME man, totally agree with you
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Some of the upgrades are rly good and would make the protoss race more fun. The problem is just that warpage is necessecarry because it increases the production time of protoss and whit a later upgrade proxys and 2 gate zealot start vs zerg would be too strong (because you need to drecrease the unit build time then from normal gateway). The real problem is moving sentrys to robo and let them cost more. I agree forcefield is an extremly strong spell and much too early availabe, but the problem is that you need it vs zerg. You cant win whitout forcefield against roach army and even zerglings (when you dont play only zealots). Vs terran its possible to win whitout forcefields but then you are forced to go collossi rly fast and cant make fast expansions. So chaning the forcefield that much is not possible in sc2 because the game is balanced arround forcefield. Even with the forcefields (that everyone uses especially good players) the win ratio is 50/50 for all races. moving forcefield to robo and making the sentry cost much morewould change this ratio to like 20 %.
Edit: Ok whith a tier 1.5 gw Immortal you could deal with roaches prob even whitout forcefields but the problem would be then that an immortal stalker army would own terran completly. (stalker bonus dmg vs light marines, immortal bonus dmg vs the marauders all ranged). I think this is not rly that easy to balance and blizzard workerd before we saw this game really hard on thinks like this. All the balance updates and work in this game blizzard put up since beta was made arround forcefield. What you suggest is a completly new game that starts by 0. And its not even clear if protoss could be integrated like this into the balance pool. So you would have to change again the other races. If you just look on a baneling bust. whitout forcefield these strats are not even to hold (forcefield on tier 1 ) terran can counter it because of bunkers and early marines protoss has not enough range when the bust starts.
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We have standardized Immortal's range (5 range), removed its range upgrade, and decreased its starting speed with a movement upgrade at cybercore. This allows Terran bio to do pre stim pokes without losing everything.
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Bosnia-Herzegovina14 Posts
I have one suggestion for Immortals. Could you make Immortals have one ability that would activate high output damage and turn harden shields off. So, Immortal would be unit with:
* deals 20 dmg
* has harden shields activated
* has ability: Weapon overload that would read: This will run power from harden shields in weapons. It will add +30 dmg vs armored, but it will turn off the shields.
With this we would get a new dynamic that will reward micro, but it wouldn't penalize skill-less players too much. So now to approach tank line you would have to march with immortals, and when tanks are in range activate this ability to output high damage.
I would also make cool down of "Weapon overload" last as long as roach attach speed, so you could, with good micro, minimize roach dmg and maximize immortals by constantly activating/deactivating it. Of course, if you have APM to support this, but that is whole point of eSport games... reward skill.
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Hmmm, that seems like giving Immortals a stim. Since they can fire up, they would trounce BCs and Carriers since Hardened Shield does nothing, so you might as well just swap for damage and a-move. You would also leave it oh vs Hydras for a huge damage boost. We will put it on our test list, but my first thought about Weapon Overload would be that it is more often than not just going to be a damage boost.
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Is it on hots or on Wol US server ?
Edit : If it's WoL US serve, make it EU server also, plz.
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Bosnia-Herzegovina14 Posts
On December 05 2012 04:35 ItWhoSpeaks wrote:
Hmmm, that seems like giving Immortals a stim. Since they can fire up, they would trounce BCs and Carriers since Hardened Shield does nothing, so you might as well just swap for damage and a-move. You would also leave it oh vs Hydras for a huge damage boost. We will put it on our test list, but my first thought about Weapon Overload would be that it is more often than not just going to be a damage boost.
We misunderstood each other. I asked you to make immortal only have this change from WoL version. Not to add this to the one that you already altered by adding air attack, reducing dmg, speed nerf, etc.
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Understood! Well, as soon as we get the OneGoal PTR maps published on EU in the next few days, I hope to hear your feedback!
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Amazing read. Warp Gate really needs to be removed or reworked in order to fix Protoss.
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Instead if reducing time of warpgate production. How about making it produce units with shield and energy charged lower than usual. In other words, units have 20 lower shield and 20 lower energy (if they have energy). This does not decrease the maximum shields our energy of the unit. K-Amulet could then even be brought back. Would also lower the strength of mass warpgate reinforcements. Maybe zealot and stalker could get a small buff too..
Not sure if an idea like this has already been brought up? Sorry if it has. Still hope blizzard are considering a change to warpgate..
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EPT
