EPTThe next major balance patch - David Kim - Page 23
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aka_star
United Kingdom1546 Posts
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DaNkS
United States9 Posts
On December 05 2012 11:43 aka_star wrote: My number 1 request is to Fix death ball play please! lol thats funny because fixing death ball you should be able to fix it yourself by constantly on the aggression side so you minimize their army. deathball only occurs when you let them get a deathball and 100% of the time if they have a huge deathball you have one as well just saying | ||
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ledarsi
United States475 Posts
Blizzard needs to create incentives to split your forces and gain combat power from doing so. Otherwise, if you split your army you are asking to get defeated in detail by an opponent's deathball. Which will crush each piece of your forces with minimal casualties. | ||
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DaNkS
United States9 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25216 Posts
On December 05 2012 11:58 ledarsi wrote: For the last time- a deathball isn't just having a lot of units. The deathball is when you have all your units in one place. As opposed to, say, having 1/3 of your army defending your natural, 1/3 of your army spread over the map covering ramps and positions of interest, and 1/3 of your army attacking an enemy base. Blizzard needs to create incentives to split your forces and gain combat power from doing so. Otherwise, if you split your army you are asking to get defeated in detail by an opponent's deathball. Which will crush each piece of your forces with minimal casualties. 100% agreed! Deathball annoying people is a combination of a number basic factors. Not sure if you've read my 'design philosophy' thread which deals with the Blizzard/community interaction. It's WHY they make design decisions that are bad, despite knowing that, for example we don't tend to like deathballs. Why people don't like deathballs 1. Terrible, terrible damage at a base level. 2. The feeling that a guy who is deathballing you isn't working as hard to get tangible benefits. 3. The feeling that your race is balanced around deathballs, so you don't get benefits from say, micro. 4. Deathball play being too effective so that other styles are ignored. You have to address deathballs on these terms, otherwise you cannot improve the game. Simply nerfing the units will not do this, you have to think laterally sometimes. How I would approach deathballs, with reference to Protoss vs Terran to address EVERYONE's concerns 1. Wouldn't touch the general concept because I haven't figured out how/Blizz apparently like it 2. Make the Protoss deathball harder to control, but not weaker if it is well controlled. This will remove a small amount of T frustration, he'll see the difference between a Protoss who has good control and positioning and a Protoss who is bad at those aspects. 3. Protoss players get rewarded for good micro, so the Protoss player doesn't feel as limited. 4. Protoss have more microable base units, so that multipronged, non-deathball styles have an actual benefit to employ, especially in the hands of a Code S Protoss. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25216 Posts
On December 05 2012 12:03 DaNkS wrote: lol well whos fault is that? if you cant regroup your units? I think that is called catching your army out of position Read my post, I think me and led are somewhat talking about the same thing. It's not a matter of 'fault' when we're talking about deathballs, but a problem in design philosophy and how it's being employed. | ||
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ledarsi
United States475 Posts
Deathballs are a product of forces increasing in strength exponentially as the number of local units increases. Whether this is Colossus' reliable area of effect dps effectively protecting the Colossi from being killed, or Broodlords creating free units that allow broodlord armies to win battles against smaller armies with zero, or at least minimal, losses. Fixing deathballs is really not that complicated. The problem is, Blizzard secretly likes deathballs. They claim to dislike how it plays, however they deliberately make changes to try and encourage players to do things that inevitably lead to deathballs. Such as "we don't want players making lots of reapers for harass" and "we don't want players to make lots of tanks and defend." Or, my favorite "unit X counters unit Y. If the enemy is making Y, then you should just make X, and then you will win!" For starters, Blizzard seems to think big units, with higher supply costs, are "cool." They are not- they are boring, there are fewer pieces on the board, and they encourage deathballs. Battles between small units have fewer deathball problems. For example, zerglings, marines, or any other inexpensive unit with little combat power that dies easily. Having a tremendously large force of these units is less advantageous than having a smaller presence in multiple locations. Not so for big units like Colossi and Thors. A big enough army of big units will crush smaller armies with minimal casualties, as the threshold required for them to lose a single unit is much higher. Consequently, the supply costs of lots of units should be lowered, with their power lowered to match. This means 1 supply marauders, roaches, hydras, etc. And 2 supply tanks, swarm hosts, etc. as well as 4 supply ultralisks, perhaps thors, colossi, etc., with stats adjusted to suit. More actual units will create a bigger incentive to split your forces. Secondly, powerful positional units and abilities. Spells like Dark Swarm discourage deathballs because a smaller army which has access to such an ability can hold off, or even defeat, a much larger army. These types of spells exist in SC2, but are much, much weaker; i.e. Guardian Shield and Point Defense Drone. These spells don't have the raw power needed to change the landscape of the battlefield. You can't position a few tanks and a PDD the way you can put a few lurkers and a dark swarm down to hold a position in BW. In SC2, having a few units out on their own is just asking to get them killed for nothing. And lastly, less deterministic combat. This is a big can of worms, but essentially it boils down to how predictable is a given battle? How much can player micro, positioning, use of abilities, etc. actually change the outcome of a fight? If the fight is very deterministic (largely about composition only), as SC2 is presently, players have no incentive to split their armies. In fact, the bigger army has a large advantage by default. However if units become much more effective when individual, skilled attention is paid to them, then a player who is confident in their skills will deliberately split their forces into multiple, smaller groups and try to eke out extra advantage from each. Even if they are engaging a larger army, they will still perform better overall than if they just balled up and threw their forces into battle if you add together the multiple, smaller engagements. edit: One more thought. Back to my point above about how Blizzard secretly likes deathballs- their fixation on unit counters is a massive contributor. If you just get enough of a counter unit in a given location, you can almost guarantee a win in a fight. It is important to note that the absolute amount of the counter unit is the important metric- you can have lots of other units as well and still win that fight due to the presence of that counter unit. Logically, the best way to win any fight is to get nicely rounded composition-blob of units in one place and smash them into your opponent's blob, and rely on your composition to win the fight, with micro helping a little. It needs to be a legitimate thing to tell a new player when they say "how do I beat X" you should just be able to say "Learn to micro your units better. You don't need a different composition." The idea that unit X counters unit Y leads to deathballs. If you can have unit Y and still beat unit X because of superior micro, that counteracts deathballs substantially. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25216 Posts
On December 05 2012 12:32 ledarsi wrote: It appears DakNkS is trolling, if I had to guess. Deathballs are a product of forces increasing in strength exponentially as the number of local units increases. Whether this is Colossus' reliable area of effect dps effectively protecting the Colossi from being killed, or Broodlords creating free units that allow broodlord armies to win battles against smaller armies with zero, or at least minimal, losses. Fixing deathballs is really not that complicated. The problem is, Blizzard secretly likes deathballs. They claim to dislike how it plays, however they deliberately make changes to try and encourage players to do things that inevitably lead to deathballs. Such as "we don't want players making lots of reapers for harass" and "we don't want players to make lots of tanks and defend." For starters, Blizzard seems to think big units, with higher supply costs, are "cool." They are not- they are boring, there are fewer pieces on the board, and they encourage deathballs. Battles between small units have fewer deathball problems. For example, zerglings, marines, or any other inexpensive unit with little combat power that dies easily. Having a tremendously large force of these units is less advantageous than having a smaller presence in multiple locations. Not so for big units like Colossi and Thors. A big enough army of big units will crush smaller armies with minimal casualties, as the threshold required for them to lose a single unit is much higher. Consequently, the supply costs of lots of units should be lowered, with their power lowered to match. This means 1 supply marauders, roaches, hydras, etc. And 2 supply tanks, swarm hosts, etc. as well as 4 supply ultralisks, perhaps thors, colossi, etc., with stats adjusted to suit. More actual units will create a bigger incentive to split your forces. Secondly, powerful positional units and abilities. Spells like Dark Swarm discourage deathballs because a smaller army which has access to such an ability can hold off, or even defeat, a much larger army. These types of spells exist in SC2, but are much, much weaker; i.e. Guardian Shield and Point Defense Drone. These spells don't have the raw power needed to change the landscape of the battlefield. You can't position a few tanks and a PDD the way you can put a few lurkers and a dark swarm down to hold a position in BW. In SC2, having a few units out on their own is just asking to get them killed for nothing. And lastly, less deterministic combat. This is a big can of worms, but essentially it boils down to how predictable is a given battle? How much can player micro, positioning, use of abilities, etc. actually change the outcome of a fight? If the fight is very deterministic (largely about composition only), as SC2 is presently, players have no incentive to split their armies. In fact, the bigger army has a large advantage by default. However if units become much more effective when individual, skilled attention is paid to them, then a player who is confident in their skills will deliberately split their forces into multiple, smaller groups and try to eke out extra advantage from each. Even if they are engaging a larger army, they will still perform better overall than if they just balled up and threw their forces into battle if you add together the multiple, smaller engagements. Perhaps he was, perhaps not. With reference to my post, can you find anything wrong, other than additional variables, with that post. I mean as an actual approach to balance in and of itself? Regardless of specifics, which are irrelevant. TLDR deathballs are bad not just because terrible terrible damage is bad, but because they don't have the necessary risk/reward balance, or difficulty of execution/success in application balance. | ||
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ledarsi
United States475 Posts
On December 05 2012 12:38 Wombat_NI wrote: With reference to my post, can you find anything wrong, other than additional variables, with that post. I mean as an actual approach to balance in and of itself? Regardless of specifics, which are irrelevant. TLDR deathballs are bad not just because terrible terrible damage is bad, but because they don't have the necessary risk/reward balance, or difficulty of execution/success in application balance. I don't think you're wrong, I was just elaborating more on why your numbered list works out the way it does, in the abstract. As you said, the design of the game makes deathballs optimal from a strategic perspective. That is why players do it- not because it is easy. There are examples of "deathballs" that are actually very difficult to execute, such as MMMVG against Colossus+HT in TvP. Both sides are using deathballs- only one of them has to EMP the High Templar and kill the Colossi in a hurry, before their infantry army gets too badly murdered by those units. A non-deathball game would look quite different. If large armies were actually less efficient than the same units split into multiple smaller groups, both sides would play very differently. Small groups of bio would engage small groups of gateway units in multiple locations on the map simultaneously. Because Colossi are such big units as now designed, it makes no strategic sense for a Protoss to have just one to accompany a small group of gateway units, as it would be likely to die, but if there were some smaller Colossus-analogue which can be counteracted without a deathball then that is what would likely happen. Deathballs aren't bad because they are inherently skill-less, or that they lead to passive games. They are bad because the real meat of strategy games is about decisions of where to put your forces, not rock-paper-scissors about what counters what. Putting all your troops in one location makes for a very strong army in that spot, but the enemy might have artillery or some other big weapon they can use to obliterate that entire force, or they can simply attack with smaller armies in ten other locations you aren't adequately defending, while your deathball is busy massively overkilling a single squad defending one location. Deathballs are a weak strategy in more interesting games of strategy. Putting two tanks over here, and two tanks and a few infantry units over there, and four tanks and two vikings over here, etc. etc. creates much more texture on the board, and creates vastly more possible decisions for both players. I could send six zealots to go attack the two tanks, or I could gamble and send the same units to that other place and try to fight the infantry too. Or I could send a seventh or eighth zealot, but that would weaken my force over there... etc. You can have a vastly interesting strategy game with only a single type of piece by relying purely on positioning. See: Go (board game). It makes no sense to forego this entire dimension of gameplay in favor of a more complex version of rock-paper-scissors (where you field a whole lot of each all at once, and the battle determines who wins, rather like a very complex single game of rock-paper-scissors). | ||
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SigmaoctanusIV
United States3313 Posts
On December 04 2012 03:09 MockHamill wrote: According to David Kim: Protoss 5. Tempest doesn't counter all late tech Zerg. We currently don't like how Zerg can't go Tier 3 units if Tempests are in play. Huh?? Tempest are not that amazing late game I would like something better at fighting Mass muta switches. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25216 Posts
It's not always the most fun matchup to watch, but in those terms, it's why it's a 'good' matchup, in fact the ONLY good one at the moment. I can expand on the reasons why if you so desire, but they're forming part of my article/thesis about Blizzard's approach to balance by neglecting design, in terms of RTS concepts. (@ledarsi) | ||
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guN-viCe
United States687 Posts
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Crawdad
614 Posts
On December 05 2012 13:03 SigmaoctanusIV wrote: Huh?? Tempest are not that amazing late game I would like something better at fighting Mass muta switches. Just like most other units in the game, they are amazing at a specific role, which includes the annihilation of both T3 Zerg units (does the Viper count as a T3 unit?). It's definitely a problem for Ultralisks, which were already unpopular in the matchup. I'm a little worried about the implications for BLs, but with the Infestor being "heavily nerfed" and the Void Ray being buffed, I think that Protoss players will find a way without Vortex. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25216 Posts
On December 05 2012 14:32 Crawdad wrote: Just like most other units in the game, they are amazing at a specific role, which includes the annihilation of both T3 Zerg units (does the Viper count as a T3 unit?). It's definitely a problem for Ultralisks, which were already unpopular in the matchup. I'm a little worried about the implications for BLs, but with the Infestor being "heavily nerfed" and the Void Ray being buffed, I think that Protoss players will find a way without Vortex. The Tempest merely lets us deal with Inf/BL deathballs, by building another form of deathball.  | ||
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blade55555
United States17423 Posts
On December 05 2012 14:35 Wombat_NI wrote: The Tempest merely lets us deal with Inf/BL deathballs, by building another form of deathball. Well it's not like you need many, 2 tempests will 1 shot a broodlord (unless I am mistaken they do 60 vs massive and broods have 120 health iirc or is it 150?). So not like you have to mass tempests. | ||
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waki
58 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25216 Posts
On December 05 2012 14:36 blade55555 wrote: Well it's not like you need many, 2 tempests will 1 shot a broodlord (unless I am mistaken they do 60 vs massive and broods have 120 health iirc or is it 150?). So not like you have to mass tempests. Is it as little as that? Anyway, regardless I suppose it's not really that they're a 'deathball' but the frustrating aspect of BL/Infestor is just swapped over. It's incredibly hard to play against BL/Infestor because they zone you out, you can't chip away at the holes really. Tempest/Templar with the range of the Tempest enable Protoss to hit BL/Infestor from an entrenched position at very little risk that is what annoys Protoss in WoL about Infestor/BL. | ||
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Crawdad
614 Posts
On December 05 2012 14:36 blade55555 wrote: Well it's not like you need many, 2 tempests will 1 shot a broodlord (unless I am mistaken they do 60 vs massive and broods have 120 health iirc or is it 150?). So not like you have to mass tempests. Lolwut? BLs have 225 health, it takes four Tempests to one-shot a BL. | ||
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GinDo
3327 Posts
On December 05 2012 11:56 DaNkS wrote: lol thats funny because fixing death ball you should be able to fix it yourself by constantly on the aggression side so you minimize their army. deathball only occurs when you let them get a deathball and 100% of the time if they have a huge deathball you have one as well just saying So true.The way you minimize Death Balls is through aggression and constant trading. Now the real question is how do we stimulate the use of aggression. Force the opponent to invest in units that they already have the tech for, and as a result we deley the ultimate death ball. The issue were having is that some maps are much to big. MUCH TO BIG. And alot allow you to easily turtle on 3 bases. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland25216 Posts
On December 05 2012 15:05 GinDo wrote: So true.The way you minimize Death Balls is through aggression and constant trading. Now the real question is how do we stimulate the use of aggression. Force the opponent to invest in units that they already have the tech for, and as a result we deley the ultimate death ball. The issue were having is that some maps are much to big. MUCH TO BIG. And alot allow you to easily turtle on 3 bases. Big maps aren't a problem, by themselves. If that was the case, Ryung's TvZ games on Whirlwind, one of the biggest maps, by dropping and trading wouldn't have occurred. He saw the downside of Inf/BL (mobility) and also that this could be used to his advantage because of the map design. On a map like Daybreak, you cannot employ the same kind of approach because there's a lot less options in this regard due to how its laid out. | ||
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