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On January 01 2013 01:05 KamikazeDurrrp wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 00:48 Hider wrote:
Yeh, don't use that much time on people who don't get proper game design. RIght now the people who defend fungal growth is just a minority, and there will always be some of them.
Yeah, I know but the reason I wrote that post was that fungal's problem goes beyond fungal, and I feel that people really need to understand the difference between "good" design and "bad" design, which applies a lot to how blizzard is currently balancing HOTS right now. I mean everything blizzard has done has hurt my head in terms of "bad design" and yet people want MORE of it. Also I wanted to put to death the "it's used in a moba so it should be used in SC2" argument. I mean, the silliness of that argument is just staggering. It's even worse than "apples and oranges".
Then define good design and bad design.
For me it's something that that can work out balancewise and many people consider it fun to watch and play with it.
+ Show Spoiler +And in b4 someone comes in and tells me "getting your units stunned isn't fun". Well, getting your units killed isn't fun either in itself. However, the dynamics that are being introduced around stunning and killing can be fun.
Hell, I'm having a thousand times more fun watching Leenock tearing Bogus apart with roach/ling/Infestor in the midgame, then watching "I wish every Zerg would play like that again" 2-2 muta/ling/bling busts.
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On January 01 2013 01:07 Rabiator wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 00:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 31 2012 16:49 Rabiator wrote:On December 31 2012 15:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 29 2012 00:11 Rabiator wrote:On December 28 2012 23:20 Big J wrote:On December 28 2012 23:05 Rabiator wrote:On December 28 2012 18:31 Serenity12 wrote:
Infestor play is simply making games where Zerg are involved less fun to watch. It is a unit for Zerg players that has too much versatility, so no wonder they build mass amounts of them. The best thing would be to nerf Infestors effectiveness while at the same time buffing other zerg units like hydras. Since that kind of "restructuring" would involve some pretty big changes to the stats I would think that adding some "bonus damage" to certain core Zerg units would be a good incentive to push players into building stuff like Hydralisks. In BW Hydralisks had "explosive" damage and were more effective against larger targets, but in SC2 neither the Roach nor the Hydralisk have any unit type they are weak against. Thus adding something like this would give an incentive to build Hydralisks more and thus build a possibly "less optimal" unit. Right now Zerg only build Roaches (unless they already have a crapton of them and can fill the second row with Hydralisks) when they want to build ranged units and that is an advantage over Terrans for example, who will probably have a mix of Marines and Marauders. Obviously such "bonus" damage should not be implemented as it is for the Hellion for example, where the bonus damage is so big that the base damage is insignificant ... which makes the unit pretty much useless against non-bonus-type-units. That is the perfect example of rock-paper-scissors gone wrong. The BW ratios of 100%/75%/50% are much better. SC2: Hellion: 100% vs light/ 57% else Hellion with BF: 100%vs light/ 42% else Marauder: 100% vs armored/50% else BW: Firebat: 100%/50%/25% Ghost: 100%/50%/25% Vulture: 100%/50%/25% Care to elaborate why the 57% or 42% are so much worse than the BW ratios of Firebat, Ghost or Vulture? Firebat, Ghost, Vulture - Who built that unit for its combat abilities? Of those three only the Vulture was built as a standard unit, but not primarily for its own combat abilities but rather for the Spider Mines. They are good against SMALL units ... and thus against MOST infantry (all except the Dragoon which is large and the Hydralisk which is medium), which makes up the majority of the units. Their primary role is worker harrass and scouting. Now look at the SC2 units: Hellions are pretty bad against everything that isnt Zerglings or Workers ... without the Spider Mines; Marauders are bad against light junk and only work due to their armor, Stimpack and being healed through Medivacs, but without the Medivac or Stimpack they dont really work against Zerglings ... just as Stalkers are going to die against them without either Blink or Forcefields. With the excessive number of units built in SC2 any form of scouting with units is going to be sacrificial and you dont want to use expensive bikes for that, but in BW that worked well enough. Its not only the percentages but also the meaning of them AND the lack of "bonus damage" on the Zerg side of the fence which makes the game badly balanced atm. Hellions aren't nearly as bad as you seem to think they are, in large numbers they actually trade cost efficiently vs. a lot of their supposed 'counters' since they all deal splash damage. Once you get to the point where a group of hellions can one shot, say, a stalker, you'll actually see them annihilate groups of stalkers that are way more expensive. It's not all that uncommon to see a bunch of hellions roasting roaches alive when the roaches don't heavily outnumber them once you get to your critical mass of hellions. With regards to your comments on the marauder, I can say only this: Will people PLEASE stop thinking about units in a vacuum? We're not playing under arbitrary mono-battle rules in the game unless we want to, nobody is forcing you to not make medivacs. Therefore, it is completely reasonable to assume medivacs. Marauders with medivacs are awesome. I don't really know what else to say. Maruaders are ridiculously good. You quite lost me at that point. You do realize that you need TWENTY Hellions to one-shot a Stalker? I dont think that you can even arrange them in such a way to make this happen and in any case both Protoss and Zerg have easy countermeasures of Forcefield and Banelings. Marauders are terribly boring and bad against light units. You might realize that if you would stop thinking in "dream compositions". On December 31 2012 12:02 Filter wrote:On December 31 2012 10:32 zJayy962 wrote:On December 31 2012 10:16 Serpico wrote:On December 31 2012 09:59 Zahir wrote:On December 31 2012 08:53 Xequecal wrote:On December 28 2012 23:20 Big J wrote:
SC2:
Hellion: 100% vs light/ 57% else
Hellion with BF: 100%vs light/ 42% else
Marauder: 100% vs armored/50% else
BW:
Firebat: 100%/50%/25%
Ghost: 100%/50%/25%
Vulture: 100%/50%/25%
Care to elaborate why the 57% or 42% are so much worse than the BW ratios of Firebat, Ghost or Vulture? In BW everything did full damage to shields. This is why mech was effective against P in BW but isn't in SC2. In BW, Archons were completely useless against Terran mech. In SC2, they annihilate Terran mech. Also because of the shield mechanics, in BW Dragoons were a very soft counter to Vultures, as opposed to Stalkers being a hilarious hard counter to Hellions in SC2. In fact I suspect that if it wasn't for the 12-unit selection limit, Vultures would have beaten Dragoons cost-for-cost in BW as you would have been able to surround with like 40 of them and drop 40 spidermines at once. Excellent point. If only blizzard had incorporated this mechanic into Sc2 there would have been no need to dick around with 1a units like warhounds or battle hellions. As things are, there is probably going to end up being some really wonky mechanic to make tank mech viable vs toss, something like buffed massable widow mines. Actually, I'm increasingly convinced that tank heavy play is just never going to be viable in this matchup. Congrats to whatever wiz on the devteam dreamed up immortals. Probably browder, because almost every unit needs a useless gimmick (well hardened shields are pretty useful at destroying any chance of mech play I guess) in order to make them SUPER COOL WITH TERRIBLE DAMAGE. This is a great point. SCBW units like marine, goliath, dragoon, etc were all fine even though they were all 1A units, they had their own unique pathing, range, attack animation, and micro capabilities they were still interesting to watch and play. Now every unit must have some sort of gimmick to be added into the game. The loss of the Goliath is what really kills mech in most mu's (Immortal aside). Thors are super expensive, super slow and take forever to build. There's also no real way to have a good mix of them, if Thors were smaller and 2 supply you could easily mix the right number for your opponents comp, with the current Thor you can't do that really. Supply heavy units/Power units really hurt strategic decisions. Since Blizzard reduced the size of the Thor and gave it a single target attack, maybe they are starting to realize this problem of the missing Goliath and the Thor being terrible at what it was designed to do. I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was all that unusual in a purely mech composition to have a lot of hellions. The point was that they have a critical mass because they deal splash damage where they actually just trade well with almost anything on the ground that doesn't also deal splash, it doesn't have to be light. Splash damage is pretty good. Banelings are easy to micro against with hellions until fungal is out (at which point zergs usually stop making banelings), and yeah, forcefield can help prevent hellion micro, but hellions actually just dominate protoss in the early game until splash damage is out due to how expensive everything toss has is and how lousy they are at actually killing hellions. Stalkers kinda do shit for damage. Your comment on dream compositions is laughable. People make compositions, period. What the composition is depends on the matchup and how it develops, but they are never pure marauder once you get out of silver league. I really wish people would stop with the negative hyperbole 'My opponent can just forcefield me, hellions are useless always!' The thing isnt that you could have 20 Hellions, but these have to be clumped up to hit that one Stalker and thats what is so ridiculous about it. Half of that number might work, but as I said no smart player should miss the obvious weak point of massive numbers of Hellions. Forcefield does ruin the day of Hellions and if they cant kill their opponents due to being "limited in numbers" then the whole idea of "Hellions could be used to kill Stalkers" is revealed as the pipe dream it is. The whole maneuverability and space required for those Hellions is a big problem you neglect to consider; it might work on an open space, but most maps arent that open ...
The point that Whitewing is trying to make is that there is an odd point when stalkers top trading efficiently with hellions. Both units do not do bonus damage against each other and are not known for their amazing DPS. Because of the line splash damage, the multiple hellions start to hit multiple stalker is a straight up fight. Of course it always depends on the specific engagement, but stalkers do not automatically do well against hellions. It has been commented on before on some podcasts and shows, but does not come up in WoL, because hellions are not common vs protoss.
I agree with Whitewing that many of the comments having to do with HotS are overarching, negative responses to more nuanced issues. A lot these comments are coming from a few people who are really focused on complaining about the specific play style they wish were better. This persists across multiple threads and makes it really difficult to have any discussion on any topic.
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On January 01 2013 01:23 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 01:05 KamikazeDurrrp wrote:On January 01 2013 00:48 Hider wrote:
Yeh, don't use that much time on people who don't get proper game design. RIght now the people who defend fungal growth is just a minority, and there will always be some of them.
Yeah, I know but the reason I wrote that post was that fungal's problem goes beyond fungal, and I feel that people really need to understand the difference between "good" design and "bad" design, which applies a lot to how blizzard is currently balancing HOTS right now. I mean everything blizzard has done has hurt my head in terms of "bad design" and yet people want MORE of it. Also I wanted to put to death the "it's used in a moba so it should be used in SC2" argument. I mean, the silliness of that argument is just staggering. It's even worse than "apples and oranges". Then define good design and bad design. For me it's something that that can work out balancewise and many people consider it fun to watch and play with it. + Show Spoiler +And in b4 someone comes in and tells me "getting your units stunned isn't fun". Well, getting your units killed isn't fun either in itself. However, the dynamics that are being introduced around stunning and killing can be fun.
Hell, I'm having a thousand times more fun watching Leenock tearing Bogus apart with roach/ling/Infestor in the midgame, then watching "I wish every Zerg would play like that again" 2-2 muta/ling/bling busts.
Haven't you read the argument already 100 times ? If you are trying to promote active micro during battles, a spell that denies micro during battles is bad design.
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On January 01 2013 01:23 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 01:05 KamikazeDurrrp wrote:On January 01 2013 00:48 Hider wrote:
Yeh, don't use that much time on people who don't get proper game design. RIght now the people who defend fungal growth is just a minority, and there will always be some of them.
Yeah, I know but the reason I wrote that post was that fungal's problem goes beyond fungal, and I feel that people really need to understand the difference between "good" design and "bad" design, which applies a lot to how blizzard is currently balancing HOTS right now. I mean everything blizzard has done has hurt my head in terms of "bad design" and yet people want MORE of it. Also I wanted to put to death the "it's used in a moba so it should be used in SC2" argument. I mean, the silliness of that argument is just staggering. It's even worse than "apples and oranges". Then define good design and bad design. For me it's something that that can work out balancewise and many people consider it fun to watch and play with it. + Show Spoiler +And in b4 someone comes in and tells me "getting your units stunned isn't fun". Well, getting your units killed isn't fun either in itself. However, the dynamics that are being introduced around stunning and killing can be fun.
Hell, I'm having a thousand times more fun watching Leenock tearing Bogus apart with roach/ling/Infestor in the midgame, then watching "I wish every Zerg would play like that again" 2-2 muta/ling/bling busts.
First, fungal doesn't add interesting dynamics to the game. The two activities fungal encourages are pre-splitting and sniping infestors with small groups of bio.
Pre-splitting isn't entertaining to do or watch. As a player, it is a chore and while there is some satisfaction in doing it well, it is only gratifying because it is necessary to have a chance at winning the game at a later stage. Failure to pre-split effectively equals auto-loss. As a viewer, there is nothing more anti-climactic and less interesting than to watch a pro accidentally eat massive fungals and die instantly (or keep fighting until his inevitable defeat a few minutes later). Broodwar was a fantastic spectacle, in part, because the game rarely came down to one mistake , one bad engagement, or one spell cast. It was the cumulative effect of many engagements, economic harassment, positioning and control. Fungal really doesn't fit with any of those things.
Sniping infestors with small groups of bio is pretty difficult to pull off against players who manage their infestors well (and not in a "wow, this is so difficult, I want to master it" sort of way), and it's not exciting to watch games revolve around killing one type of unit that, if allowed to snowball, will break the game.
Second, your argument is a strawman. The issue is not whether infestor play is preferable to 2-2 muta/ling/bling busts. The issue is whether infestor play is good for the game from a design perspective. We don't have to consider alternatives, though many people have (and have said what they think should happen in this very thread). The point is infestor play is boring to watch and not that fun. Cool zerg play is fun to watch. Epic flanks. Impeccable timing. Razor-thin holds against impossible odds. Those are things I remember from watching brood war. Infestors (and queens) don't encourage that kind of zerg. With queens, zergs don't really have to manage the tradeoff between economy, tech, and upgrades that defined their race (at least in tvz it seems). And that sucks.
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On January 01 2013 01:07 Rabiator wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 00:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 31 2012 16:49 Rabiator wrote:On December 31 2012 15:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 29 2012 00:11 Rabiator wrote:On December 28 2012 23:20 Big J wrote:On December 28 2012 23:05 Rabiator wrote:On December 28 2012 18:31 Serenity12 wrote:
Infestor play is simply making games where Zerg are involved less fun to watch. It is a unit for Zerg players that has too much versatility, so no wonder they build mass amounts of them. The best thing would be to nerf Infestors effectiveness while at the same time buffing other zerg units like hydras. Since that kind of "restructuring" would involve some pretty big changes to the stats I would think that adding some "bonus damage" to certain core Zerg units would be a good incentive to push players into building stuff like Hydralisks. In BW Hydralisks had "explosive" damage and were more effective against larger targets, but in SC2 neither the Roach nor the Hydralisk have any unit type they are weak against. Thus adding something like this would give an incentive to build Hydralisks more and thus build a possibly "less optimal" unit. Right now Zerg only build Roaches (unless they already have a crapton of them and can fill the second row with Hydralisks) when they want to build ranged units and that is an advantage over Terrans for example, who will probably have a mix of Marines and Marauders. Obviously such "bonus" damage should not be implemented as it is for the Hellion for example, where the bonus damage is so big that the base damage is insignificant ... which makes the unit pretty much useless against non-bonus-type-units. That is the perfect example of rock-paper-scissors gone wrong. The BW ratios of 100%/75%/50% are much better. SC2: Hellion: 100% vs light/ 57% else Hellion with BF: 100%vs light/ 42% else Marauder: 100% vs armored/50% else BW: Firebat: 100%/50%/25% Ghost: 100%/50%/25% Vulture: 100%/50%/25% Care to elaborate why the 57% or 42% are so much worse than the BW ratios of Firebat, Ghost or Vulture? Firebat, Ghost, Vulture - Who built that unit for its combat abilities? Of those three only the Vulture was built as a standard unit, but not primarily for its own combat abilities but rather for the Spider Mines. They are good against SMALL units ... and thus against MOST infantry (all except the Dragoon which is large and the Hydralisk which is medium), which makes up the majority of the units. Their primary role is worker harrass and scouting. Now look at the SC2 units: Hellions are pretty bad against everything that isnt Zerglings or Workers ... without the Spider Mines; Marauders are bad against light junk and only work due to their armor, Stimpack and being healed through Medivacs, but without the Medivac or Stimpack they dont really work against Zerglings ... just as Stalkers are going to die against them without either Blink or Forcefields. With the excessive number of units built in SC2 any form of scouting with units is going to be sacrificial and you dont want to use expensive bikes for that, but in BW that worked well enough. Its not only the percentages but also the meaning of them AND the lack of "bonus damage" on the Zerg side of the fence which makes the game badly balanced atm. Hellions aren't nearly as bad as you seem to think they are, in large numbers they actually trade cost efficiently vs. a lot of their supposed 'counters' since they all deal splash damage. Once you get to the point where a group of hellions can one shot, say, a stalker, you'll actually see them annihilate groups of stalkers that are way more expensive. It's not all that uncommon to see a bunch of hellions roasting roaches alive when the roaches don't heavily outnumber them once you get to your critical mass of hellions. With regards to your comments on the marauder, I can say only this: Will people PLEASE stop thinking about units in a vacuum? We're not playing under arbitrary mono-battle rules in the game unless we want to, nobody is forcing you to not make medivacs. Therefore, it is completely reasonable to assume medivacs. Marauders with medivacs are awesome. I don't really know what else to say. Maruaders are ridiculously good. You quite lost me at that point. You do realize that you need TWENTY Hellions to one-shot a Stalker? I dont think that you can even arrange them in such a way to make this happen and in any case both Protoss and Zerg have easy countermeasures of Forcefield and Banelings. Marauders are terribly boring and bad against light units. You might realize that if you would stop thinking in "dream compositions". On December 31 2012 12:02 Filter wrote:On December 31 2012 10:32 zJayy962 wrote:On December 31 2012 10:16 Serpico wrote:On December 31 2012 09:59 Zahir wrote:On December 31 2012 08:53 Xequecal wrote:On December 28 2012 23:20 Big J wrote:
SC2:
Hellion: 100% vs light/ 57% else
Hellion with BF: 100%vs light/ 42% else
Marauder: 100% vs armored/50% else
BW:
Firebat: 100%/50%/25%
Ghost: 100%/50%/25%
Vulture: 100%/50%/25%
Care to elaborate why the 57% or 42% are so much worse than the BW ratios of Firebat, Ghost or Vulture? In BW everything did full damage to shields. This is why mech was effective against P in BW but isn't in SC2. In BW, Archons were completely useless against Terran mech. In SC2, they annihilate Terran mech. Also because of the shield mechanics, in BW Dragoons were a very soft counter to Vultures, as opposed to Stalkers being a hilarious hard counter to Hellions in SC2. In fact I suspect that if it wasn't for the 12-unit selection limit, Vultures would have beaten Dragoons cost-for-cost in BW as you would have been able to surround with like 40 of them and drop 40 spidermines at once. Excellent point. If only blizzard had incorporated this mechanic into Sc2 there would have been no need to dick around with 1a units like warhounds or battle hellions. As things are, there is probably going to end up being some really wonky mechanic to make tank mech viable vs toss, something like buffed massable widow mines. Actually, I'm increasingly convinced that tank heavy play is just never going to be viable in this matchup. Congrats to whatever wiz on the devteam dreamed up immortals. Probably browder, because almost every unit needs a useless gimmick (well hardened shields are pretty useful at destroying any chance of mech play I guess) in order to make them SUPER COOL WITH TERRIBLE DAMAGE. This is a great point. SCBW units like marine, goliath, dragoon, etc were all fine even though they were all 1A units, they had their own unique pathing, range, attack animation, and micro capabilities they were still interesting to watch and play. Now every unit must have some sort of gimmick to be added into the game. The loss of the Goliath is what really kills mech in most mu's (Immortal aside). Thors are super expensive, super slow and take forever to build. There's also no real way to have a good mix of them, if Thors were smaller and 2 supply you could easily mix the right number for your opponents comp, with the current Thor you can't do that really. Supply heavy units/Power units really hurt strategic decisions. Since Blizzard reduced the size of the Thor and gave it a single target attack, maybe they are starting to realize this problem of the missing Goliath and the Thor being terrible at what it was designed to do. I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was all that unusual in a purely mech composition to have a lot of hellions. The point was that they have a critical mass because they deal splash damage where they actually just trade well with almost anything on the ground that doesn't also deal splash, it doesn't have to be light. Splash damage is pretty good. Banelings are easy to micro against with hellions until fungal is out (at which point zergs usually stop making banelings), and yeah, forcefield can help prevent hellion micro, but hellions actually just dominate protoss in the early game until splash damage is out due to how expensive everything toss has is and how lousy they are at actually killing hellions. Stalkers kinda do shit for damage. Your comment on dream compositions is laughable. People make compositions, period. What the composition is depends on the matchup and how it develops, but they are never pure marauder once you get out of silver league. I really wish people would stop with the negative hyperbole 'My opponent can just forcefield me, hellions are useless always!' The thing isnt that you could have 20 Hellions, but these have to be clumped up to hit that one Stalker and thats what is so ridiculous about it. Half of that number might work, but as I said no smart player should miss the obvious weak point of massive numbers of Hellions. Forcefield does ruin the day of Hellions and if they cant kill their opponents due to being "limited in numbers" then the whole idea of "Hellions could be used to kill Stalkers" is revealed as the pipe dream it is. The whole maneuverability and space required for those Hellions is a big problem you neglect to consider; it might work on an open space, but most maps arent that open ...
Well you shouldn't have many sentries vs mech, especially since tanks can just snipe them, and you would probably prefer the gas for other stuff. (Well, at least according to the games I've seen, yea FFs work pretty well on sentries but it doesn't seem like it's a must have is what I mean).
Just want to vouche though, in decently clumped situations, hellions actually beat stalkers for cost (of course not supply, and i'm considering that gas is worth roughly 1.5 its amount in minerals). For example, if you have 60 hellions vs 30 stalkers, you should have like 40 hellions left. Of course, they should have blink and be able to split up and such, but that example is just to show how much damage they can do if they get good shots off (like if blink is in cooldown for example, or if it's earlier game and they don't have blink but it's a 30 hellion vs 15 stalker situation and you're lucky enough to trap/surround them).
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On January 01 2013 05:36 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 01:07 Rabiator wrote:On January 01 2013 00:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 31 2012 16:49 Rabiator wrote:On December 31 2012 15:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 29 2012 00:11 Rabiator wrote:On December 28 2012 23:20 Big J wrote:On December 28 2012 23:05 Rabiator wrote:On December 28 2012 18:31 Serenity12 wrote:
Infestor play is simply making games where Zerg are involved less fun to watch. It is a unit for Zerg players that has too much versatility, so no wonder they build mass amounts of them. The best thing would be to nerf Infestors effectiveness while at the same time buffing other zerg units like hydras. Since that kind of "restructuring" would involve some pretty big changes to the stats I would think that adding some "bonus damage" to certain core Zerg units would be a good incentive to push players into building stuff like Hydralisks. In BW Hydralisks had "explosive" damage and were more effective against larger targets, but in SC2 neither the Roach nor the Hydralisk have any unit type they are weak against. Thus adding something like this would give an incentive to build Hydralisks more and thus build a possibly "less optimal" unit. Right now Zerg only build Roaches (unless they already have a crapton of them and can fill the second row with Hydralisks) when they want to build ranged units and that is an advantage over Terrans for example, who will probably have a mix of Marines and Marauders. Obviously such "bonus" damage should not be implemented as it is for the Hellion for example, where the bonus damage is so big that the base damage is insignificant ... which makes the unit pretty much useless against non-bonus-type-units. That is the perfect example of rock-paper-scissors gone wrong. The BW ratios of 100%/75%/50% are much better. SC2: Hellion: 100% vs light/ 57% else Hellion with BF: 100%vs light/ 42% else Marauder: 100% vs armored/50% else BW: Firebat: 100%/50%/25% Ghost: 100%/50%/25% Vulture: 100%/50%/25% Care to elaborate why the 57% or 42% are so much worse than the BW ratios of Firebat, Ghost or Vulture? Firebat, Ghost, Vulture - Who built that unit for its combat abilities? Of those three only the Vulture was built as a standard unit, but not primarily for its own combat abilities but rather for the Spider Mines. They are good against SMALL units ... and thus against MOST infantry (all except the Dragoon which is large and the Hydralisk which is medium), which makes up the majority of the units. Their primary role is worker harrass and scouting. Now look at the SC2 units: Hellions are pretty bad against everything that isnt Zerglings or Workers ... without the Spider Mines; Marauders are bad against light junk and only work due to their armor, Stimpack and being healed through Medivacs, but without the Medivac or Stimpack they dont really work against Zerglings ... just as Stalkers are going to die against them without either Blink or Forcefields. With the excessive number of units built in SC2 any form of scouting with units is going to be sacrificial and you dont want to use expensive bikes for that, but in BW that worked well enough. Its not only the percentages but also the meaning of them AND the lack of "bonus damage" on the Zerg side of the fence which makes the game badly balanced atm. Hellions aren't nearly as bad as you seem to think they are, in large numbers they actually trade cost efficiently vs. a lot of their supposed 'counters' since they all deal splash damage. Once you get to the point where a group of hellions can one shot, say, a stalker, you'll actually see them annihilate groups of stalkers that are way more expensive. It's not all that uncommon to see a bunch of hellions roasting roaches alive when the roaches don't heavily outnumber them once you get to your critical mass of hellions. With regards to your comments on the marauder, I can say only this: Will people PLEASE stop thinking about units in a vacuum? We're not playing under arbitrary mono-battle rules in the game unless we want to, nobody is forcing you to not make medivacs. Therefore, it is completely reasonable to assume medivacs. Marauders with medivacs are awesome. I don't really know what else to say. Maruaders are ridiculously good. You quite lost me at that point. You do realize that you need TWENTY Hellions to one-shot a Stalker? I dont think that you can even arrange them in such a way to make this happen and in any case both Protoss and Zerg have easy countermeasures of Forcefield and Banelings. Marauders are terribly boring and bad against light units. You might realize that if you would stop thinking in "dream compositions". On December 31 2012 12:02 Filter wrote:On December 31 2012 10:32 zJayy962 wrote:On December 31 2012 10:16 Serpico wrote:On December 31 2012 09:59 Zahir wrote:On December 31 2012 08:53 Xequecal wrote:On December 28 2012 23:20 Big J wrote:
SC2:
Hellion: 100% vs light/ 57% else
Hellion with BF: 100%vs light/ 42% else
Marauder: 100% vs armored/50% else
BW:
Firebat: 100%/50%/25%
Ghost: 100%/50%/25%
Vulture: 100%/50%/25%
Care to elaborate why the 57% or 42% are so much worse than the BW ratios of Firebat, Ghost or Vulture? In BW everything did full damage to shields. This is why mech was effective against P in BW but isn't in SC2. In BW, Archons were completely useless against Terran mech. In SC2, they annihilate Terran mech. Also because of the shield mechanics, in BW Dragoons were a very soft counter to Vultures, as opposed to Stalkers being a hilarious hard counter to Hellions in SC2. In fact I suspect that if it wasn't for the 12-unit selection limit, Vultures would have beaten Dragoons cost-for-cost in BW as you would have been able to surround with like 40 of them and drop 40 spidermines at once. Excellent point. If only blizzard had incorporated this mechanic into Sc2 there would have been no need to dick around with 1a units like warhounds or battle hellions. As things are, there is probably going to end up being some really wonky mechanic to make tank mech viable vs toss, something like buffed massable widow mines. Actually, I'm increasingly convinced that tank heavy play is just never going to be viable in this matchup. Congrats to whatever wiz on the devteam dreamed up immortals. Probably browder, because almost every unit needs a useless gimmick (well hardened shields are pretty useful at destroying any chance of mech play I guess) in order to make them SUPER COOL WITH TERRIBLE DAMAGE. This is a great point. SCBW units like marine, goliath, dragoon, etc were all fine even though they were all 1A units, they had their own unique pathing, range, attack animation, and micro capabilities they were still interesting to watch and play. Now every unit must have some sort of gimmick to be added into the game. The loss of the Goliath is what really kills mech in most mu's (Immortal aside). Thors are super expensive, super slow and take forever to build. There's also no real way to have a good mix of them, if Thors were smaller and 2 supply you could easily mix the right number for your opponents comp, with the current Thor you can't do that really. Supply heavy units/Power units really hurt strategic decisions. Since Blizzard reduced the size of the Thor and gave it a single target attack, maybe they are starting to realize this problem of the missing Goliath and the Thor being terrible at what it was designed to do. I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was all that unusual in a purely mech composition to have a lot of hellions. The point was that they have a critical mass because they deal splash damage where they actually just trade well with almost anything on the ground that doesn't also deal splash, it doesn't have to be light. Splash damage is pretty good. Banelings are easy to micro against with hellions until fungal is out (at which point zergs usually stop making banelings), and yeah, forcefield can help prevent hellion micro, but hellions actually just dominate protoss in the early game until splash damage is out due to how expensive everything toss has is and how lousy they are at actually killing hellions. Stalkers kinda do shit for damage. Your comment on dream compositions is laughable. People make compositions, period. What the composition is depends on the matchup and how it develops, but they are never pure marauder once you get out of silver league. I really wish people would stop with the negative hyperbole 'My opponent can just forcefield me, hellions are useless always!' The thing isnt that you could have 20 Hellions, but these have to be clumped up to hit that one Stalker and thats what is so ridiculous about it. Half of that number might work, but as I said no smart player should miss the obvious weak point of massive numbers of Hellions. Forcefield does ruin the day of Hellions and if they cant kill their opponents due to being "limited in numbers" then the whole idea of "Hellions could be used to kill Stalkers" is revealed as the pipe dream it is. The whole maneuverability and space required for those Hellions is a big problem you neglect to consider; it might work on an open space, but most maps arent that open ... Well you shouldn't have many sentries vs mech, especially since tanks can just snipe them, and you would probably prefer the gas for other stuff. (Well, at least according to the games I've seen, yea FFs work pretty well on sentries but it doesn't seem like it's a must have is what I mean). Just want to vouche though, in decently clumped situations, hellions actually beat stalkers for cost (of course not supply, and i'm considering that gas is worth roughly 1.5 its amount in minerals). For example, if you have 60 hellions vs 30 stalkers, you should have like 40 hellions left. Of course, they should have blink and be able to split up and such, but that example is just to show how much damage they can do if they get good shots off (like if blink is in cooldown for example, or if it's earlier game and they don't have blink but it's a 30 hellion vs 15 stalker situation and you're lucky enough to trap/surround them).
It's not just Stalkers, it's the fact that chargelots hammer them too. It takes 11 shots to kill a zealot or roughly 27.5 seconds, on the other hand a Zealot kills a hellion in 6 attacks or roughly 7.2 seconds. That means to trade cost effectively Hellions need to get four splash per burst and thats just to trade evenly. Think about that in terms of chargelots hunting down hellions protecting a tankline and it becomes very clear that it just doesn't work.
if the unit hellions "counter" can smash them, then what about units they don't counter like Immortals, Colossus and archons?
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Demuslim said the infestors were "buffed" in his interview the other day. Meanwhile Idra calls them "worthless"
What did Demu mean by calling them buffed?
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On January 01 2013 05:59 Filter wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 05:36 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:On January 01 2013 01:07 Rabiator wrote:On January 01 2013 00:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 31 2012 16:49 Rabiator wrote:On December 31 2012 15:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 29 2012 00:11 Rabiator wrote:On December 28 2012 23:20 Big J wrote:On December 28 2012 23:05 Rabiator wrote:On December 28 2012 18:31 Serenity12 wrote:
Infestor play is simply making games where Zerg are involved less fun to watch. It is a unit for Zerg players that has too much versatility, so no wonder they build mass amounts of them. The best thing would be to nerf Infestors effectiveness while at the same time buffing other zerg units like hydras. Since that kind of "restructuring" would involve some pretty big changes to the stats I would think that adding some "bonus damage" to certain core Zerg units would be a good incentive to push players into building stuff like Hydralisks. In BW Hydralisks had "explosive" damage and were more effective against larger targets, but in SC2 neither the Roach nor the Hydralisk have any unit type they are weak against. Thus adding something like this would give an incentive to build Hydralisks more and thus build a possibly "less optimal" unit. Right now Zerg only build Roaches (unless they already have a crapton of them and can fill the second row with Hydralisks) when they want to build ranged units and that is an advantage over Terrans for example, who will probably have a mix of Marines and Marauders. Obviously such "bonus" damage should not be implemented as it is for the Hellion for example, where the bonus damage is so big that the base damage is insignificant ... which makes the unit pretty much useless against non-bonus-type-units. That is the perfect example of rock-paper-scissors gone wrong. The BW ratios of 100%/75%/50% are much better. SC2: Hellion: 100% vs light/ 57% else Hellion with BF: 100%vs light/ 42% else Marauder: 100% vs armored/50% else BW: Firebat: 100%/50%/25% Ghost: 100%/50%/25% Vulture: 100%/50%/25% Care to elaborate why the 57% or 42% are so much worse than the BW ratios of Firebat, Ghost or Vulture? Firebat, Ghost, Vulture - Who built that unit for its combat abilities? Of those three only the Vulture was built as a standard unit, but not primarily for its own combat abilities but rather for the Spider Mines. They are good against SMALL units ... and thus against MOST infantry (all except the Dragoon which is large and the Hydralisk which is medium), which makes up the majority of the units. Their primary role is worker harrass and scouting. Now look at the SC2 units: Hellions are pretty bad against everything that isnt Zerglings or Workers ... without the Spider Mines; Marauders are bad against light junk and only work due to their armor, Stimpack and being healed through Medivacs, but without the Medivac or Stimpack they dont really work against Zerglings ... just as Stalkers are going to die against them without either Blink or Forcefields. With the excessive number of units built in SC2 any form of scouting with units is going to be sacrificial and you dont want to use expensive bikes for that, but in BW that worked well enough. Its not only the percentages but also the meaning of them AND the lack of "bonus damage" on the Zerg side of the fence which makes the game badly balanced atm. Hellions aren't nearly as bad as you seem to think they are, in large numbers they actually trade cost efficiently vs. a lot of their supposed 'counters' since they all deal splash damage. Once you get to the point where a group of hellions can one shot, say, a stalker, you'll actually see them annihilate groups of stalkers that are way more expensive. It's not all that uncommon to see a bunch of hellions roasting roaches alive when the roaches don't heavily outnumber them once you get to your critical mass of hellions. With regards to your comments on the marauder, I can say only this: Will people PLEASE stop thinking about units in a vacuum? We're not playing under arbitrary mono-battle rules in the game unless we want to, nobody is forcing you to not make medivacs. Therefore, it is completely reasonable to assume medivacs. Marauders with medivacs are awesome. I don't really know what else to say. Maruaders are ridiculously good. You quite lost me at that point. You do realize that you need TWENTY Hellions to one-shot a Stalker? I dont think that you can even arrange them in such a way to make this happen and in any case both Protoss and Zerg have easy countermeasures of Forcefield and Banelings. Marauders are terribly boring and bad against light units. You might realize that if you would stop thinking in "dream compositions". On December 31 2012 12:02 Filter wrote:On December 31 2012 10:32 zJayy962 wrote:On December 31 2012 10:16 Serpico wrote:On December 31 2012 09:59 Zahir wrote:On December 31 2012 08:53 Xequecal wrote:
[quote]
In BW everything did full damage to shields. This is why mech was effective against P in BW but isn't in SC2. In BW, Archons were completely useless against Terran mech. In SC2, they annihilate Terran mech. Also because of the shield mechanics, in BW Dragoons were a very soft counter to Vultures, as opposed to Stalkers being a hilarious hard counter to Hellions in SC2. In fact I suspect that if it wasn't for the 12-unit selection limit, Vultures would have beaten Dragoons cost-for-cost in BW as you would have been able to surround with like 40 of them and drop 40 spidermines at once. Excellent point. If only blizzard had incorporated this mechanic into Sc2 there would have been no need to dick around with 1a units like warhounds or battle hellions. As things are, there is probably going to end up being some really wonky mechanic to make tank mech viable vs toss, something like buffed massable widow mines. Actually, I'm increasingly convinced that tank heavy play is just never going to be viable in this matchup. Congrats to whatever wiz on the devteam dreamed up immortals. Probably browder, because almost every unit needs a useless gimmick (well hardened shields are pretty useful at destroying any chance of mech play I guess) in order to make them SUPER COOL WITH TERRIBLE DAMAGE. This is a great point. SCBW units like marine, goliath, dragoon, etc were all fine even though they were all 1A units, they had their own unique pathing, range, attack animation, and micro capabilities they were still interesting to watch and play. Now every unit must have some sort of gimmick to be added into the game. The loss of the Goliath is what really kills mech in most mu's (Immortal aside). Thors are super expensive, super slow and take forever to build. There's also no real way to have a good mix of them, if Thors were smaller and 2 supply you could easily mix the right number for your opponents comp, with the current Thor you can't do that really. Supply heavy units/Power units really hurt strategic decisions. Since Blizzard reduced the size of the Thor and gave it a single target attack, maybe they are starting to realize this problem of the missing Goliath and the Thor being terrible at what it was designed to do. I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was all that unusual in a purely mech composition to have a lot of hellions. The point was that they have a critical mass because they deal splash damage where they actually just trade well with almost anything on the ground that doesn't also deal splash, it doesn't have to be light. Splash damage is pretty good. Banelings are easy to micro against with hellions until fungal is out (at which point zergs usually stop making banelings), and yeah, forcefield can help prevent hellion micro, but hellions actually just dominate protoss in the early game until splash damage is out due to how expensive everything toss has is and how lousy they are at actually killing hellions. Stalkers kinda do shit for damage. Your comment on dream compositions is laughable. People make compositions, period. What the composition is depends on the matchup and how it develops, but they are never pure marauder once you get out of silver league. I really wish people would stop with the negative hyperbole 'My opponent can just forcefield me, hellions are useless always!' The thing isnt that you could have 20 Hellions, but these have to be clumped up to hit that one Stalker and thats what is so ridiculous about it. Half of that number might work, but as I said no smart player should miss the obvious weak point of massive numbers of Hellions. Forcefield does ruin the day of Hellions and if they cant kill their opponents due to being "limited in numbers" then the whole idea of "Hellions could be used to kill Stalkers" is revealed as the pipe dream it is. The whole maneuverability and space required for those Hellions is a big problem you neglect to consider; it might work on an open space, but most maps arent that open ... Well you shouldn't have many sentries vs mech, especially since tanks can just snipe them, and you would probably prefer the gas for other stuff. (Well, at least according to the games I've seen, yea FFs work pretty well on sentries but it doesn't seem like it's a must have is what I mean). Just want to vouche though, in decently clumped situations, hellions actually beat stalkers for cost (of course not supply, and i'm considering that gas is worth roughly 1.5 its amount in minerals). For example, if you have 60 hellions vs 30 stalkers, you should have like 40 hellions left. Of course, they should have blink and be able to split up and such, but that example is just to show how much damage they can do if they get good shots off (like if blink is in cooldown for example, or if it's earlier game and they don't have blink but it's a 30 hellion vs 15 stalker situation and you're lucky enough to trap/surround them). It's not just Stalkers, it's the fact that chargelots hammer them too. It takes 11 shots to kill a zealot or roughly 27.5 seconds, on the other hand a Zealot kills a hellion in 6 attacks or roughly 7.2 seconds. That means to trade cost effectively Hellions need to get four splash per burst and thats just to trade evenly. Think about that in terms of chargelots hunting down hellions protecting a tankline and it becomes very clear that it just doesn't work. if the unit hellions "counter" can smash them, then what about units they don't counter like Immortals, Colossus and archons?
I wasn't commenting on that, just saying that hellion splash is often underestimated.
But about chargelots, are you forgetting that charge has a cooldown and so you only get hit about once and then you can kite again?
Yes, it's less possible in a fight because there's less space and you want to protect your tanks, but it's certainly not 1 hit for 1 hit. You should be able to get 1-2 hits off before a fight starts too.
Your point in the last question doesn't make sense to me. First of all just because something "counters" something does not mean it beats its in every way possible in all possible situations. Also that's illogical to link the relationships of the zealot and hellion to those other protoss units. Zealots may be able to smash hellions but not without hellions smashing the zealots.
Actually, I think your quotation marks are throwing me off here. Basically, are you mocking the belief that hellions counter zealots or are you calling hellions' counter to be the zealot? Are you saying "the hellions' counter, the zealots, can smash them" or are you saying "the unit that hellions counter can smash them"?
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On January 01 2013 06:20 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 05:59 Filter wrote:On January 01 2013 05:36 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:On January 01 2013 01:07 Rabiator wrote:On January 01 2013 00:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 31 2012 16:49 Rabiator wrote:On December 31 2012 15:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 29 2012 00:11 Rabiator wrote:On December 28 2012 23:20 Big J wrote:On December 28 2012 23:05 Rabiator wrote:
[quote]
Since that kind of "restructuring" would involve some pretty big changes to the stats I would think that adding some "bonus damage" to certain core Zerg units would be a good incentive to push players into building stuff like Hydralisks. In BW Hydralisks had "explosive" damage and were more effective against larger targets, but in SC2 neither the Roach nor the Hydralisk have any unit type they are weak against. Thus adding something like this would give an incentive to build Hydralisks more and thus build a possibly "less optimal" unit. Right now Zerg only build Roaches (unless they already have a crapton of them and can fill the second row with Hydralisks) when they want to build ranged units and that is an advantage over Terrans for example, who will probably have a mix of Marines and Marauders.
Obviously such "bonus" damage should not be implemented as it is for the Hellion for example, where the bonus damage is so big that the base damage is insignificant ... which makes the unit pretty much useless against non-bonus-type-units. That is the perfect example of rock-paper-scissors gone wrong. The BW ratios of 100%/75%/50% are much better. SC2: Hellion: 100% vs light/ 57% else Hellion with BF: 100%vs light/ 42% else Marauder: 100% vs armored/50% else BW: Firebat: 100%/50%/25% Ghost: 100%/50%/25% Vulture: 100%/50%/25% Care to elaborate why the 57% or 42% are so much worse than the BW ratios of Firebat, Ghost or Vulture? Firebat, Ghost, Vulture - Who built that unit for its combat abilities? Of those three only the Vulture was built as a standard unit, but not primarily for its own combat abilities but rather for the Spider Mines. They are good against SMALL units ... and thus against MOST infantry (all except the Dragoon which is large and the Hydralisk which is medium), which makes up the majority of the units. Their primary role is worker harrass and scouting. Now look at the SC2 units: Hellions are pretty bad against everything that isnt Zerglings or Workers ... without the Spider Mines; Marauders are bad against light junk and only work due to their armor, Stimpack and being healed through Medivacs, but without the Medivac or Stimpack they dont really work against Zerglings ... just as Stalkers are going to die against them without either Blink or Forcefields. With the excessive number of units built in SC2 any form of scouting with units is going to be sacrificial and you dont want to use expensive bikes for that, but in BW that worked well enough. Its not only the percentages but also the meaning of them AND the lack of "bonus damage" on the Zerg side of the fence which makes the game badly balanced atm. Hellions aren't nearly as bad as you seem to think they are, in large numbers they actually trade cost efficiently vs. a lot of their supposed 'counters' since they all deal splash damage. Once you get to the point where a group of hellions can one shot, say, a stalker, you'll actually see them annihilate groups of stalkers that are way more expensive. It's not all that uncommon to see a bunch of hellions roasting roaches alive when the roaches don't heavily outnumber them once you get to your critical mass of hellions. With regards to your comments on the marauder, I can say only this: Will people PLEASE stop thinking about units in a vacuum? We're not playing under arbitrary mono-battle rules in the game unless we want to, nobody is forcing you to not make medivacs. Therefore, it is completely reasonable to assume medivacs. Marauders with medivacs are awesome. I don't really know what else to say. Maruaders are ridiculously good. You quite lost me at that point. You do realize that you need TWENTY Hellions to one-shot a Stalker? I dont think that you can even arrange them in such a way to make this happen and in any case both Protoss and Zerg have easy countermeasures of Forcefield and Banelings. Marauders are terribly boring and bad against light units. You might realize that if you would stop thinking in "dream compositions". On December 31 2012 12:02 Filter wrote:On December 31 2012 10:32 zJayy962 wrote:On December 31 2012 10:16 Serpico wrote:On December 31 2012 09:59 Zahir wrote:
[quote]
Excellent point. If only blizzard had incorporated this mechanic into Sc2 there would have been no need to dick around with 1a units like warhounds or battle hellions. As things are, there is probably going to end up being some really wonky mechanic to make tank mech viable vs toss, something like buffed massable widow mines. Actually, I'm increasingly convinced that tank heavy play is just never going to be viable in this matchup. Congrats to whatever wiz on the devteam dreamed up immortals. Probably browder, because almost every unit needs a useless gimmick (well hardened shields are pretty useful at destroying any chance of mech play I guess) in order to make them SUPER COOL WITH TERRIBLE DAMAGE. This is a great point. SCBW units like marine, goliath, dragoon, etc were all fine even though they were all 1A units, they had their own unique pathing, range, attack animation, and micro capabilities they were still interesting to watch and play. Now every unit must have some sort of gimmick to be added into the game. The loss of the Goliath is what really kills mech in most mu's (Immortal aside). Thors are super expensive, super slow and take forever to build. There's also no real way to have a good mix of them, if Thors were smaller and 2 supply you could easily mix the right number for your opponents comp, with the current Thor you can't do that really. Supply heavy units/Power units really hurt strategic decisions. Since Blizzard reduced the size of the Thor and gave it a single target attack, maybe they are starting to realize this problem of the missing Goliath and the Thor being terrible at what it was designed to do. I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was all that unusual in a purely mech composition to have a lot of hellions. The point was that they have a critical mass because they deal splash damage where they actually just trade well with almost anything on the ground that doesn't also deal splash, it doesn't have to be light. Splash damage is pretty good. Banelings are easy to micro against with hellions until fungal is out (at which point zergs usually stop making banelings), and yeah, forcefield can help prevent hellion micro, but hellions actually just dominate protoss in the early game until splash damage is out due to how expensive everything toss has is and how lousy they are at actually killing hellions. Stalkers kinda do shit for damage. Your comment on dream compositions is laughable. People make compositions, period. What the composition is depends on the matchup and how it develops, but they are never pure marauder once you get out of silver league. I really wish people would stop with the negative hyperbole 'My opponent can just forcefield me, hellions are useless always!' The thing isnt that you could have 20 Hellions, but these have to be clumped up to hit that one Stalker and thats what is so ridiculous about it. Half of that number might work, but as I said no smart player should miss the obvious weak point of massive numbers of Hellions. Forcefield does ruin the day of Hellions and if they cant kill their opponents due to being "limited in numbers" then the whole idea of "Hellions could be used to kill Stalkers" is revealed as the pipe dream it is. The whole maneuverability and space required for those Hellions is a big problem you neglect to consider; it might work on an open space, but most maps arent that open ... Well you shouldn't have many sentries vs mech, especially since tanks can just snipe them, and you would probably prefer the gas for other stuff. (Well, at least according to the games I've seen, yea FFs work pretty well on sentries but it doesn't seem like it's a must have is what I mean). Just want to vouche though, in decently clumped situations, hellions actually beat stalkers for cost (of course not supply, and i'm considering that gas is worth roughly 1.5 its amount in minerals). For example, if you have 60 hellions vs 30 stalkers, you should have like 40 hellions left. Of course, they should have blink and be able to split up and such, but that example is just to show how much damage they can do if they get good shots off (like if blink is in cooldown for example, or if it's earlier game and they don't have blink but it's a 30 hellion vs 15 stalker situation and you're lucky enough to trap/surround them). It's not just Stalkers, it's the fact that chargelots hammer them too. It takes 11 shots to kill a zealot or roughly 27.5 seconds, on the other hand a Zealot kills a hellion in 6 attacks or roughly 7.2 seconds. That means to trade cost effectively Hellions need to get four splash per burst and thats just to trade evenly. Think about that in terms of chargelots hunting down hellions protecting a tankline and it becomes very clear that it just doesn't work. if the unit hellions "counter" can smash them, then what about units they don't counter like Immortals, Colossus and archons? I wasn't commenting on that, just saying that hellion splash is often underestimated. But about chargelots, are you forgetting that charge has a cooldown and so you only get hit about once and then you can kite again? Yes, it's less possible in a fight because there's less space and you want to protect your tanks, but it's certainly not 1 hit for 1 hit. You should be able to get 1-2 hits off before a fight starts too. Your point in the last question doesn't make sense to me. First of all just because something "counters" something does not mean it beats its in every way possible in all possible situations. Also that's illogical to link the relationships of the zealot and hellion to those other protoss units. Zealots may be able to smash hellions but not without hellions smashing the zealots. Actually, I think your quotation marks are throwing me off here. Basically, are you mocking the belief that hellions counter zealots or are you calling hellions' counter to be the zealot? Are you saying "the hellions' counter, the zealots, can smash them" or are you saying "the unit that hellions counter can smash them"?
I use the term "counter" because even on Blizzards own guide they list the Zealot as one of the two units it's good against, when in reality it's not. It's good against extremely small numbers of Zealots, with nothing to back them up in the very early game and thats about it. You can't kite chargelots because once charge comes out you're trying to use your hellions to defend your tanks, they can only pull back so far.
The only time hellions are good is when they can kill something in 1-2 blasts, like lings, workers and marines that aren't firing back. They lose out in any other situation and thus are terrible units to be used as a core. Terran desperately needs something in mech to help be the marine of the mech army capable of fighting toe to toe with siege tank support, but right now there really isn't anything to fill the role aside from the marine.
There's many units that hard counter in sc2, the hellion just isn't part of that club even though the original design of the unit was to counter light leaving the heavy firing to thors and tanks it just isn't very effective. Compare that to Protoss units that "counter" like Immortals and Colossus and they both do their jobs extremely effectively and thats without touching on the Infestor which quite literally counters every unit in the game.
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On January 01 2013 01:23 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 01:05 KamikazeDurrrp wrote:On January 01 2013 00:48 Hider wrote:
Yeh, don't use that much time on people who don't get proper game design. RIght now the people who defend fungal growth is just a minority, and there will always be some of them.
Yeah, I know but the reason I wrote that post was that fungal's problem goes beyond fungal, and I feel that people really need to understand the difference between "good" design and "bad" design, which applies a lot to how blizzard is currently balancing HOTS right now. I mean everything blizzard has done has hurt my head in terms of "bad design" and yet people want MORE of it. Also I wanted to put to death the "it's used in a moba so it should be used in SC2" argument. I mean, the silliness of that argument is just staggering. It's even worse than "apples and oranges". Then define good design and bad design. For me it's something that that can work out balancewise and many people consider it fun to watch and play with it. + Show Spoiler +And in b4 someone comes in and tells me "getting your units stunned isn't fun". Well, getting your units killed isn't fun either in itself. However, the dynamics that are being introduced around stunning and killing can be fun.
Hell, I'm having a thousand times more fun watching Leenock tearing Bogus apart with roach/ling/Infestor in the midgame, then watching "I wish every Zerg would play like that again" 2-2 muta/ling/bling busts.
Abilities that stun or otherwise take away a player's ability to control their units or do something with them are inherently bad for both spectators and players. The only way that they work is if they are on units that are expensive/hard to get, if the ability is costly, and if it is powerful and interesting. Things like Fungal and FF fit none of these categories. A perfect example of something that does work is Stasis from BW. The Arbiter was very expensive and took a long time to build. Stasis costs a lot of energy, was powerful (could significantly change the dynamic of a fight), but was interesting (locked down units, but made them invulnerable, so they'd come back a short time later).
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On January 01 2013 07:11 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 01:23 Big J wrote:On January 01 2013 01:05 KamikazeDurrrp wrote:On January 01 2013 00:48 Hider wrote:
Yeh, don't use that much time on people who don't get proper game design. RIght now the people who defend fungal growth is just a minority, and there will always be some of them.
Yeah, I know but the reason I wrote that post was that fungal's problem goes beyond fungal, and I feel that people really need to understand the difference between "good" design and "bad" design, which applies a lot to how blizzard is currently balancing HOTS right now. I mean everything blizzard has done has hurt my head in terms of "bad design" and yet people want MORE of it. Also I wanted to put to death the "it's used in a moba so it should be used in SC2" argument. I mean, the silliness of that argument is just staggering. It's even worse than "apples and oranges". Then define good design and bad design. For me it's something that that can work out balancewise and many people consider it fun to watch and play with it. + Show Spoiler +And in b4 someone comes in and tells me "getting your units stunned isn't fun". Well, getting your units killed isn't fun either in itself. However, the dynamics that are being introduced around stunning and killing can be fun.
Hell, I'm having a thousand times more fun watching Leenock tearing Bogus apart with roach/ling/Infestor in the midgame, then watching "I wish every Zerg would play like that again" 2-2 muta/ling/bling busts. Abilities that stun or otherwise take away a player's ability to control their units or do something with them are inherently bad for both spectators and players. The only way that they work is if they are on units that are expensive/hard to get, if the ability is costly, and if it is powerful and interesting. Things like Fungal and FF fit none of these categories. A perfect example of something that does work is Stasis from BW. The Arbiter was very expensive and took a long time to build. Stasis costs a lot of energy, was powerful (could significantly change the dynamic of a fight), but was interesting (locked down units, but made them invulnerable, so they'd come back a short time later). You mean like Vortex, right?
Oh wait. People hate Vortex.
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United States7483 Posts
On January 01 2013 08:24 Scrubwave wrote:
People hate Vortex because it's the coin that turns PvZ lategame into a coin flip.
No, that was the dynamic between Vortex and Broodlord/infestor. Take Vortex away and it's just an auto win for zerg if the game goes that late.
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On January 01 2013 06:36 Filter wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 06:20 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:On January 01 2013 05:59 Filter wrote:On January 01 2013 05:36 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:On January 01 2013 01:07 Rabiator wrote:On January 01 2013 00:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 31 2012 16:49 Rabiator wrote:On December 31 2012 15:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 29 2012 00:11 Rabiator wrote:On December 28 2012 23:20 Big J wrote:
[quote]
SC2:
Hellion: 100% vs light/ 57% else
Hellion with BF: 100%vs light/ 42% else
Marauder: 100% vs armored/50% else
BW:
Firebat: 100%/50%/25%
Ghost: 100%/50%/25%
Vulture: 100%/50%/25%
Care to elaborate why the 57% or 42% are so much worse than the BW ratios of Firebat, Ghost or Vulture? Firebat, Ghost, Vulture - Who built that unit for its combat abilities? Of those three only the Vulture was built as a standard unit, but not primarily for its own combat abilities but rather for the Spider Mines. They are good against SMALL units ... and thus against MOST infantry (all except the Dragoon which is large and the Hydralisk which is medium), which makes up the majority of the units. Their primary role is worker harrass and scouting. Now look at the SC2 units: Hellions are pretty bad against everything that isnt Zerglings or Workers ... without the Spider Mines; Marauders are bad against light junk and only work due to their armor, Stimpack and being healed through Medivacs, but without the Medivac or Stimpack they dont really work against Zerglings ... just as Stalkers are going to die against them without either Blink or Forcefields. With the excessive number of units built in SC2 any form of scouting with units is going to be sacrificial and you dont want to use expensive bikes for that, but in BW that worked well enough. Its not only the percentages but also the meaning of them AND the lack of "bonus damage" on the Zerg side of the fence which makes the game badly balanced atm. Hellions aren't nearly as bad as you seem to think they are, in large numbers they actually trade cost efficiently vs. a lot of their supposed 'counters' since they all deal splash damage. Once you get to the point where a group of hellions can one shot, say, a stalker, you'll actually see them annihilate groups of stalkers that are way more expensive. It's not all that uncommon to see a bunch of hellions roasting roaches alive when the roaches don't heavily outnumber them once you get to your critical mass of hellions. With regards to your comments on the marauder, I can say only this: Will people PLEASE stop thinking about units in a vacuum? We're not playing under arbitrary mono-battle rules in the game unless we want to, nobody is forcing you to not make medivacs. Therefore, it is completely reasonable to assume medivacs. Marauders with medivacs are awesome. I don't really know what else to say. Maruaders are ridiculously good. You quite lost me at that point. You do realize that you need TWENTY Hellions to one-shot a Stalker? I dont think that you can even arrange them in such a way to make this happen and in any case both Protoss and Zerg have easy countermeasures of Forcefield and Banelings. Marauders are terribly boring and bad against light units. You might realize that if you would stop thinking in "dream compositions". On December 31 2012 12:02 Filter wrote:On December 31 2012 10:32 zJayy962 wrote:On December 31 2012 10:16 Serpico wrote:
[quote]
Probably browder, because almost every unit needs a useless gimmick (well hardened shields are pretty useful at destroying any chance of mech play I guess) in order to make them SUPER COOL WITH TERRIBLE DAMAGE. This is a great point. SCBW units like marine, goliath, dragoon, etc were all fine even though they were all 1A units, they had their own unique pathing, range, attack animation, and micro capabilities they were still interesting to watch and play. Now every unit must have some sort of gimmick to be added into the game. The loss of the Goliath is what really kills mech in most mu's (Immortal aside). Thors are super expensive, super slow and take forever to build. There's also no real way to have a good mix of them, if Thors were smaller and 2 supply you could easily mix the right number for your opponents comp, with the current Thor you can't do that really. Supply heavy units/Power units really hurt strategic decisions. Since Blizzard reduced the size of the Thor and gave it a single target attack, maybe they are starting to realize this problem of the missing Goliath and the Thor being terrible at what it was designed to do. I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was all that unusual in a purely mech composition to have a lot of hellions. The point was that they have a critical mass because they deal splash damage where they actually just trade well with almost anything on the ground that doesn't also deal splash, it doesn't have to be light. Splash damage is pretty good. Banelings are easy to micro against with hellions until fungal is out (at which point zergs usually stop making banelings), and yeah, forcefield can help prevent hellion micro, but hellions actually just dominate protoss in the early game until splash damage is out due to how expensive everything toss has is and how lousy they are at actually killing hellions. Stalkers kinda do shit for damage. Your comment on dream compositions is laughable. People make compositions, period. What the composition is depends on the matchup and how it develops, but they are never pure marauder once you get out of silver league. I really wish people would stop with the negative hyperbole 'My opponent can just forcefield me, hellions are useless always!' The thing isnt that you could have 20 Hellions, but these have to be clumped up to hit that one Stalker and thats what is so ridiculous about it. Half of that number might work, but as I said no smart player should miss the obvious weak point of massive numbers of Hellions. Forcefield does ruin the day of Hellions and if they cant kill their opponents due to being "limited in numbers" then the whole idea of "Hellions could be used to kill Stalkers" is revealed as the pipe dream it is. The whole maneuverability and space required for those Hellions is a big problem you neglect to consider; it might work on an open space, but most maps arent that open ... Well you shouldn't have many sentries vs mech, especially since tanks can just snipe them, and you would probably prefer the gas for other stuff. (Well, at least according to the games I've seen, yea FFs work pretty well on sentries but it doesn't seem like it's a must have is what I mean). Just want to vouche though, in decently clumped situations, hellions actually beat stalkers for cost (of course not supply, and i'm considering that gas is worth roughly 1.5 its amount in minerals). For example, if you have 60 hellions vs 30 stalkers, you should have like 40 hellions left. Of course, they should have blink and be able to split up and such, but that example is just to show how much damage they can do if they get good shots off (like if blink is in cooldown for example, or if it's earlier game and they don't have blink but it's a 30 hellion vs 15 stalker situation and you're lucky enough to trap/surround them). It's not just Stalkers, it's the fact that chargelots hammer them too. It takes 11 shots to kill a zealot or roughly 27.5 seconds, on the other hand a Zealot kills a hellion in 6 attacks or roughly 7.2 seconds. That means to trade cost effectively Hellions need to get four splash per burst and thats just to trade evenly. Think about that in terms of chargelots hunting down hellions protecting a tankline and it becomes very clear that it just doesn't work. if the unit hellions "counter" can smash them, then what about units they don't counter like Immortals, Colossus and archons? I wasn't commenting on that, just saying that hellion splash is often underestimated. But about chargelots, are you forgetting that charge has a cooldown and so you only get hit about once and then you can kite again? Yes, it's less possible in a fight because there's less space and you want to protect your tanks, but it's certainly not 1 hit for 1 hit. You should be able to get 1-2 hits off before a fight starts too. Your point in the last question doesn't make sense to me. First of all just because something "counters" something does not mean it beats its in every way possible in all possible situations. Also that's illogical to link the relationships of the zealot and hellion to those other protoss units. Zealots may be able to smash hellions but not without hellions smashing the zealots. Actually, I think your quotation marks are throwing me off here. Basically, are you mocking the belief that hellions counter zealots or are you calling hellions' counter to be the zealot? Are you saying "the hellions' counter, the zealots, can smash them" or are you saying "the unit that hellions counter can smash them"? I use the term "counter" because even on Blizzards own guide they list the Zealot as one of the two units it's good against, when in reality it's not. It's good against extremely small numbers of Zealots, with nothing to back them up in the very early game and thats about it. You can't kite chargelots because once charge comes out you're trying to use your hellions to defend your tanks, they can only pull back so far. The only time hellions are good is when they can kill something in 1-2 blasts, like lings, workers and marines that aren't firing back. They lose out in any other situation and thus are terrible units to be used as a core. Terran desperately needs something in mech to help be the marine of the mech army capable of fighting toe to toe with siege tank support, but right now there really isn't anything to fill the role aside from the marine. There's many units that hard counter in sc2, the hellion just isn't part of that club even though the original design of the unit was to counter light leaving the heavy firing to thors and tanks it just isn't very effective. Compare that to Protoss units that "counter" like Immortals and Colossus and they both do their jobs extremely effectively and thats without touching on the Infestor which quite literally counters every unit in the game.
Yes, there is not much space to pull back, but you're still not trading hits. Anyways, in that situation, it's hard to say if it's cost efficient or not, because you have to take the cost of the whole battle, not just the hellion vs zealot part, and look at the result as a whole.
Ok then going back to what you said about the counter, it doesn't make sense then. It's like you're saying "if banelings, which blizzard labels as a counter to marines, can be beaten by marines, then what about units they don't counter like thors and tanks", implying that they'll do even worse against thors. I don't see the logic there. In this case, banelings can be used against thors and/or tanks, and have been a response many times against mech (successfully). Or another example would be "if thors, who are labeled by blizzard to be counters to marines, are beaten by marines, then what about units they don't counter like banshees and hellions?"
So the two points I'm trying to make here are:
1) Blizzard's labeling of counters isn't done very well
2) No unit counters another unit in all possible situations in all possible ways
And what you seem to be implying is that if hellions are beaten by the units they're supposed to counter, then the units they're not supposed to counter are even stronger. That may be in the case of immortals and colossi, but again not in every situation. For example if we take sentries, hellions will beat them in an isolated situation. Or banelings beating or at the least, dealing with thor/hellion. Even in the case of hellions vs archon/immortal/colossi, there are ways to gain advantages such as abusing the latters' immobility by killing probes, which may be more important than keeping the hellions alive (and usually is so).
So, just because a hellion doesn't hard counter a unit blizzard says they are supposed to counter in every situation doesn't mean that hellions do even worse against all other units in every situation.
On another note, hellions do very well in zealots in more situations TvP if the protoss decides to open templar instead of robo. Reason obviously being that AOE comes out slightly later (storm instead of colossi) and HTs being slower than colossi (and storm being able to hurt your zealots, where you don't have to worry with that with colossi). If he keeps going HT/archon/zealot heavy, you can easily kill many zealots, making his naked HT/archon army pretty weak. Obviously, he should then adapt by adding in other units, but early on, you can get closer to the ideal isolated situation of zealot vs hellion than if he opens robo. But yes, I agree that their countering ability is less than many other units.
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On January 01 2013 06:17 MeLlamoSatan wrote:
Demuslim said the infestors were "buffed" in his interview the other day. Meanwhile Idra calls them "worthless"
What did Demu mean by calling them buffed?
I think one interview was pre patch the other after the patch. Not even idra could call that a nerf
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On January 01 2013 07:55 RampancyTW wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 07:11 Stratos_speAr wrote:On January 01 2013 01:23 Big J wrote:On January 01 2013 01:05 KamikazeDurrrp wrote:On January 01 2013 00:48 Hider wrote:
Yeh, don't use that much time on people who don't get proper game design. RIght now the people who defend fungal growth is just a minority, and there will always be some of them.
Yeah, I know but the reason I wrote that post was that fungal's problem goes beyond fungal, and I feel that people really need to understand the difference between "good" design and "bad" design, which applies a lot to how blizzard is currently balancing HOTS right now. I mean everything blizzard has done has hurt my head in terms of "bad design" and yet people want MORE of it. Also I wanted to put to death the "it's used in a moba so it should be used in SC2" argument. I mean, the silliness of that argument is just staggering. It's even worse than "apples and oranges". Then define good design and bad design. For me it's something that that can work out balancewise and many people consider it fun to watch and play with it. + Show Spoiler +And in b4 someone comes in and tells me "getting your units stunned isn't fun". Well, getting your units killed isn't fun either in itself. However, the dynamics that are being introduced around stunning and killing can be fun.
Hell, I'm having a thousand times more fun watching Leenock tearing Bogus apart with roach/ling/Infestor in the midgame, then watching "I wish every Zerg would play like that again" 2-2 muta/ling/bling busts. Abilities that stun or otherwise take away a player's ability to control their units or do something with them are inherently bad for both spectators and players. The only way that they work is if they are on units that are expensive/hard to get, if the ability is costly, and if it is powerful and interesting. Things like Fungal and FF fit none of these categories. A perfect example of something that does work is Stasis from BW. The Arbiter was very expensive and took a long time to build. Stasis costs a lot of energy, was powerful (could significantly change the dynamic of a fight), but was interesting (locked down units, but made them invulnerable, so they'd come back a short time later). You mean like Vortex, right? Oh wait. People hate Vortex.
No I think he means Lockdown from BW that locks and mechanical unit down and lets you shoot it. Or maybe he meant Maelstrom, that stunned all biological units. Stuns are of course bad for players, because they are hard to deal with(increased difficult = bad in that case). But they are not bad for the design they create tension and force decisions. Do I give up on those units or will I save them etc. And so far every good rts uses abilities like that, because they add alot to your game.
And dunno but I found 6 cloaked ghosts grabbing a group of carriers without obs, pretty epic as a spectator. Or a Terran fighting to keep the ground near the units in stasis.
I think Sc2 is a bit brutal in that regard though, compared to BW you had a ton of reaction time, while the spells itself where devastating. Sc2 is extremely short most of the time when it comes to your reaction time, while the spells are weaker in return.
But atleast we don't have as many fingers of death like BW had. Oh wait we have in HotS.
Maybe Sc2 on fastest is not made for humans. But hey you can always reduce the game speed. Or say this game is to easy and just badly designed and ruin the game for yourself or spread the word and ruin it for others who belief you.
I doubt a Terran would agree with you if you say Darkswarm/consume combo is fine, because they have Firebats and tank splash to counter it.
I never had a problem microing against Fungal. Units that get hit by Fungal is a different thing, as this skill gives orders to your units to keep it noob friendly (well unless free units are around). Forcefields funnily is the other way round, your units will follow your orders which normally is pretty horrible for noobs. I always like microing units that got cut of by forcefield or move my army so that fungals won't pay off. Or of course place Forcefields or Fungals to force mistakes. Never understood the hate on skills that force micro. But you can view everything as you like.
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On January 01 2013 09:26 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 06:36 Filter wrote:On January 01 2013 06:20 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:On January 01 2013 05:59 Filter wrote:On January 01 2013 05:36 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:On January 01 2013 01:07 Rabiator wrote:On January 01 2013 00:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 31 2012 16:49 Rabiator wrote:On December 31 2012 15:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 29 2012 00:11 Rabiator wrote:
[quote]
Firebat, Ghost, Vulture - Who built that unit for its combat abilities?
Of those three only the Vulture was built as a standard unit, but not primarily for its own combat abilities but rather for the Spider Mines. They are good against SMALL units ... and thus against MOST infantry (all except the Dragoon which is large and the Hydralisk which is medium), which makes up the majority of the units. Their primary role is worker harrass and scouting.
Now look at the SC2 units: Hellions are pretty bad against everything that isnt Zerglings or Workers ... without the Spider Mines; Marauders are bad against light junk and only work due to their armor, Stimpack and being healed through Medivacs, but without the Medivac or Stimpack they dont really work against Zerglings ... just as Stalkers are going to die against them without either Blink or Forcefields.
With the excessive number of units built in SC2 any form of scouting with units is going to be sacrificial and you dont want to use expensive bikes for that, but in BW that worked well enough.
Its not only the percentages but also the meaning of them AND the lack of "bonus damage" on the Zerg side of the fence which makes the game badly balanced atm. Hellions aren't nearly as bad as you seem to think they are, in large numbers they actually trade cost efficiently vs. a lot of their supposed 'counters' since they all deal splash damage. Once you get to the point where a group of hellions can one shot, say, a stalker, you'll actually see them annihilate groups of stalkers that are way more expensive. It's not all that uncommon to see a bunch of hellions roasting roaches alive when the roaches don't heavily outnumber them once you get to your critical mass of hellions. With regards to your comments on the marauder, I can say only this: Will people PLEASE stop thinking about units in a vacuum? We're not playing under arbitrary mono-battle rules in the game unless we want to, nobody is forcing you to not make medivacs. Therefore, it is completely reasonable to assume medivacs. Marauders with medivacs are awesome. I don't really know what else to say. Maruaders are ridiculously good. You quite lost me at that point. You do realize that you need TWENTY Hellions to one-shot a Stalker? I dont think that you can even arrange them in such a way to make this happen and in any case both Protoss and Zerg have easy countermeasures of Forcefield and Banelings. Marauders are terribly boring and bad against light units. You might realize that if you would stop thinking in "dream compositions". On December 31 2012 12:02 Filter wrote:On December 31 2012 10:32 zJayy962 wrote:
[quote]
This is a great point. SCBW units like marine, goliath, dragoon, etc were all fine even though they were all 1A units, they had their own unique pathing, range, attack animation, and micro capabilities they were still interesting to watch and play. Now every unit must have some sort of gimmick to be added into the game. The loss of the Goliath is what really kills mech in most mu's (Immortal aside). Thors are super expensive, super slow and take forever to build. There's also no real way to have a good mix of them, if Thors were smaller and 2 supply you could easily mix the right number for your opponents comp, with the current Thor you can't do that really. Supply heavy units/Power units really hurt strategic decisions. Since Blizzard reduced the size of the Thor and gave it a single target attack, maybe they are starting to realize this problem of the missing Goliath and the Thor being terrible at what it was designed to do. I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was all that unusual in a purely mech composition to have a lot of hellions. The point was that they have a critical mass because they deal splash damage where they actually just trade well with almost anything on the ground that doesn't also deal splash, it doesn't have to be light. Splash damage is pretty good. Banelings are easy to micro against with hellions until fungal is out (at which point zergs usually stop making banelings), and yeah, forcefield can help prevent hellion micro, but hellions actually just dominate protoss in the early game until splash damage is out due to how expensive everything toss has is and how lousy they are at actually killing hellions. Stalkers kinda do shit for damage. Your comment on dream compositions is laughable. People make compositions, period. What the composition is depends on the matchup and how it develops, but they are never pure marauder once you get out of silver league. I really wish people would stop with the negative hyperbole 'My opponent can just forcefield me, hellions are useless always!' The thing isnt that you could have 20 Hellions, but these have to be clumped up to hit that one Stalker and thats what is so ridiculous about it. Half of that number might work, but as I said no smart player should miss the obvious weak point of massive numbers of Hellions. Forcefield does ruin the day of Hellions and if they cant kill their opponents due to being "limited in numbers" then the whole idea of "Hellions could be used to kill Stalkers" is revealed as the pipe dream it is. The whole maneuverability and space required for those Hellions is a big problem you neglect to consider; it might work on an open space, but most maps arent that open ... Well you shouldn't have many sentries vs mech, especially since tanks can just snipe them, and you would probably prefer the gas for other stuff. (Well, at least according to the games I've seen, yea FFs work pretty well on sentries but it doesn't seem like it's a must have is what I mean). Just want to vouche though, in decently clumped situations, hellions actually beat stalkers for cost (of course not supply, and i'm considering that gas is worth roughly 1.5 its amount in minerals). For example, if you have 60 hellions vs 30 stalkers, you should have like 40 hellions left. Of course, they should have blink and be able to split up and such, but that example is just to show how much damage they can do if they get good shots off (like if blink is in cooldown for example, or if it's earlier game and they don't have blink but it's a 30 hellion vs 15 stalker situation and you're lucky enough to trap/surround them). It's not just Stalkers, it's the fact that chargelots hammer them too. It takes 11 shots to kill a zealot or roughly 27.5 seconds, on the other hand a Zealot kills a hellion in 6 attacks or roughly 7.2 seconds. That means to trade cost effectively Hellions need to get four splash per burst and thats just to trade evenly. Think about that in terms of chargelots hunting down hellions protecting a tankline and it becomes very clear that it just doesn't work. if the unit hellions "counter" can smash them, then what about units they don't counter like Immortals, Colossus and archons? I wasn't commenting on that, just saying that hellion splash is often underestimated. But about chargelots, are you forgetting that charge has a cooldown and so you only get hit about once and then you can kite again? Yes, it's less possible in a fight because there's less space and you want to protect your tanks, but it's certainly not 1 hit for 1 hit. You should be able to get 1-2 hits off before a fight starts too. Your point in the last question doesn't make sense to me. First of all just because something "counters" something does not mean it beats its in every way possible in all possible situations. Also that's illogical to link the relationships of the zealot and hellion to those other protoss units. Zealots may be able to smash hellions but not without hellions smashing the zealots. Actually, I think your quotation marks are throwing me off here. Basically, are you mocking the belief that hellions counter zealots or are you calling hellions' counter to be the zealot? Are you saying "the hellions' counter, the zealots, can smash them" or are you saying "the unit that hellions counter can smash them"? I use the term "counter" because even on Blizzards own guide they list the Zealot as one of the two units it's good against, when in reality it's not. It's good against extremely small numbers of Zealots, with nothing to back them up in the very early game and thats about it. You can't kite chargelots because once charge comes out you're trying to use your hellions to defend your tanks, they can only pull back so far. The only time hellions are good is when they can kill something in 1-2 blasts, like lings, workers and marines that aren't firing back. They lose out in any other situation and thus are terrible units to be used as a core. Terran desperately needs something in mech to help be the marine of the mech army capable of fighting toe to toe with siege tank support, but right now there really isn't anything to fill the role aside from the marine. There's many units that hard counter in sc2, the hellion just isn't part of that club even though the original design of the unit was to counter light leaving the heavy firing to thors and tanks it just isn't very effective. Compare that to Protoss units that "counter" like Immortals and Colossus and they both do their jobs extremely effectively and thats without touching on the Infestor which quite literally counters every unit in the game. Yes, there is not much space to pull back, but you're still not trading hits. Anyways, in that situation, it's hard to say if it's cost efficient or not, because you have to take the cost of the whole battle, not just the hellion vs zealot part, and look at the result as a whole. Ok then going back to what you said about the counter, it doesn't make sense then. It's like you're saying "if banelings, which blizzard labels as a counter to marines, can be beaten by marines, then what about units they don't counter like thors and tanks", implying that they'll do even worse against thors. I don't see the logic there. In this case, banelings can be used against thors and/or tanks, and have been a response many times against mech (successfully). Or another example would be "if thors, who are labeled by blizzard to be counters to marines, are beaten by marines, then what about units they don't counter like banshees and hellions?" So the two points I'm trying to make here are: 1) Blizzard's labeling of counters isn't done very well 2) No unit counters another unit in all possible situations in all possible ways And what you seem to be implying is that if hellions are beaten by the units they're supposed to counter, then the units they're not supposed to counter are even stronger. That may be in the case of immortals and colossi, but again not in every situation. For example if we take sentries, hellions will beat them in an isolated situation. Or banelings beating or at the least, dealing with thor/hellion. Even in the case of hellions vs archon/immortal/colossi, there are ways to gain advantages such as abusing the latters' immobility by killing probes, which may be more important than keeping the hellions alive (and usually is so). So, just because a hellion doesn't hard counter a unit blizzard says they are supposed to counter in every situation doesn't mean that hellions do even worse against all other units in every situation. On another note, hellions do very well in zealots in more situations TvP if the protoss decides to open templar instead of robo. Reason obviously being that AOE comes out slightly later (storm instead of colossi) and HTs being slower than colossi (and storm being able to hurt your zealots, where you don't have to worry with that with colossi). If he keeps going HT/archon/zealot heavy, you can easily kill many zealots, making his naked HT/archon army pretty weak. Obviously, he should then adapt by adding in other units, but early on, you can get closer to the ideal isolated situation of zealot vs hellion than if he opens robo. But yes, I agree that their countering ability is less than many other units.
Hellions don't work in TvP except in some kind of very, very early drop against a nexus first/1gate expand, and even then it's mainly if they're not scouted. I don't see why you're defending the hellion so much, it's one of the biggest examples of the problems sc2 has right now. It would be fine if it was mainly a strong early game unit/good harrass unit much like the Banshee but with the way mech is played out it has to be a core unit despite not having much to offer in many situations. If there was something else to fill the role of beef in a terran mech army things would look a lot different. You could straight add Goliaths to the mix and solve a lot of mech problems, especially if they were considered light units. If Goliaths were built as kind of mid game focused unit that was good against Zealots/decent against stalkers/immortals/air it would be a fantastic addition to the game.
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Hydralisk are still garbage. Stalkers are way more efficient and they cost almost the same.
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People who are asking for a straight up nerf on fungal obviously don't understand the game. Anyone who understands the state of the game right now (hopefully Blizzard) will nerf the shit out of fungal (make it a slow and reduce range) nerf infested terran damage and increase neural parasite range, give the hydralisk more hp or remove the speed upgrade (increase hydra speed obviously) and buff the ultralisk (charge or make ultralisks able to walk over other units AND make it only cost 4 supply, there is zero reason ultralisks cost more supply than broodlords that is so stupid). If any of these changes create an unstoppable zerg lategame then you can nerf the broodlord (not sure how to nerf the broodlord on this one). Obviously these suggestions are just templates. What Blizzard NEEDS to do to help the Zerg race can be summarized in a couple steps.
1. Nerf fungal and infested terrans, increase neural parasite range.
2. Buff hydralisk hp
3. Buff ultralisk
You have now fixed the Zerg race by giving zerg another option than infestor broodlord lategame that involves the ultralisk. Turtling infestor/broodlord style is still good and the great mutalisk changes make the ling/bling/muta a great midgame option and hydralisk doesn't suck so roach hydra without infestors is also playable (maybe even vs Terran). Finally Zerg has options mid and late game.
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United States7483 Posts
On January 01 2013 09:58 Filter wrote:Show nested quote +On January 01 2013 09:26 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:On January 01 2013 06:36 Filter wrote:On January 01 2013 06:20 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:On January 01 2013 05:59 Filter wrote:On January 01 2013 05:36 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:On January 01 2013 01:07 Rabiator wrote:On January 01 2013 00:03 Whitewing wrote:On December 31 2012 16:49 Rabiator wrote:On December 31 2012 15:03 Whitewing wrote:
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Hellions aren't nearly as bad as you seem to think they are, in large numbers they actually trade cost efficiently vs. a lot of their supposed 'counters' since they all deal splash damage. Once you get to the point where a group of hellions can one shot, say, a stalker, you'll actually see them annihilate groups of stalkers that are way more expensive. It's not all that uncommon to see a bunch of hellions roasting roaches alive when the roaches don't heavily outnumber them once you get to your critical mass of hellions.
With regards to your comments on the marauder, I can say only this: Will people PLEASE stop thinking about units in a vacuum? We're not playing under arbitrary mono-battle rules in the game unless we want to, nobody is forcing you to not make medivacs. Therefore, it is completely reasonable to assume medivacs. Marauders with medivacs are awesome. I don't really know what else to say. Maruaders are ridiculously good. You quite lost me at that point. You do realize that you need TWENTY Hellions to one-shot a Stalker? I dont think that you can even arrange them in such a way to make this happen and in any case both Protoss and Zerg have easy countermeasures of Forcefield and Banelings. Marauders are terribly boring and bad against light units. You might realize that if you would stop thinking in "dream compositions". On December 31 2012 12:02 Filter wrote:
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The loss of the Goliath is what really kills mech in most mu's (Immortal aside). Thors are super expensive, super slow and take forever to build. There's also no real way to have a good mix of them, if Thors were smaller and 2 supply you could easily mix the right number for your opponents comp, with the current Thor you can't do that really. Supply heavy units/Power units really hurt strategic decisions. Since Blizzard reduced the size of the Thor and gave it a single target attack, maybe they are starting to realize this problem of the missing Goliath and the Thor being terrible at what it was designed to do. I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was all that unusual in a purely mech composition to have a lot of hellions. The point was that they have a critical mass because they deal splash damage where they actually just trade well with almost anything on the ground that doesn't also deal splash, it doesn't have to be light. Splash damage is pretty good. Banelings are easy to micro against with hellions until fungal is out (at which point zergs usually stop making banelings), and yeah, forcefield can help prevent hellion micro, but hellions actually just dominate protoss in the early game until splash damage is out due to how expensive everything toss has is and how lousy they are at actually killing hellions. Stalkers kinda do shit for damage. Your comment on dream compositions is laughable. People make compositions, period. What the composition is depends on the matchup and how it develops, but they are never pure marauder once you get out of silver league. I really wish people would stop with the negative hyperbole 'My opponent can just forcefield me, hellions are useless always!' The thing isnt that you could have 20 Hellions, but these have to be clumped up to hit that one Stalker and thats what is so ridiculous about it. Half of that number might work, but as I said no smart player should miss the obvious weak point of massive numbers of Hellions. Forcefield does ruin the day of Hellions and if they cant kill their opponents due to being "limited in numbers" then the whole idea of "Hellions could be used to kill Stalkers" is revealed as the pipe dream it is. The whole maneuverability and space required for those Hellions is a big problem you neglect to consider; it might work on an open space, but most maps arent that open ... Well you shouldn't have many sentries vs mech, especially since tanks can just snipe them, and you would probably prefer the gas for other stuff. (Well, at least according to the games I've seen, yea FFs work pretty well on sentries but it doesn't seem like it's a must have is what I mean). Just want to vouche though, in decently clumped situations, hellions actually beat stalkers for cost (of course not supply, and i'm considering that gas is worth roughly 1.5 its amount in minerals). For example, if you have 60 hellions vs 30 stalkers, you should have like 40 hellions left. Of course, they should have blink and be able to split up and such, but that example is just to show how much damage they can do if they get good shots off (like if blink is in cooldown for example, or if it's earlier game and they don't have blink but it's a 30 hellion vs 15 stalker situation and you're lucky enough to trap/surround them). It's not just Stalkers, it's the fact that chargelots hammer them too. It takes 11 shots to kill a zealot or roughly 27.5 seconds, on the other hand a Zealot kills a hellion in 6 attacks or roughly 7.2 seconds. That means to trade cost effectively Hellions need to get four splash per burst and thats just to trade evenly. Think about that in terms of chargelots hunting down hellions protecting a tankline and it becomes very clear that it just doesn't work. if the unit hellions "counter" can smash them, then what about units they don't counter like Immortals, Colossus and archons? I wasn't commenting on that, just saying that hellion splash is often underestimated. But about chargelots, are you forgetting that charge has a cooldown and so you only get hit about once and then you can kite again? Yes, it's less possible in a fight because there's less space and you want to protect your tanks, but it's certainly not 1 hit for 1 hit. You should be able to get 1-2 hits off before a fight starts too. Your point in the last question doesn't make sense to me. First of all just because something "counters" something does not mean it beats its in every way possible in all possible situations. Also that's illogical to link the relationships of the zealot and hellion to those other protoss units. Zealots may be able to smash hellions but not without hellions smashing the zealots. Actually, I think your quotation marks are throwing me off here. Basically, are you mocking the belief that hellions counter zealots or are you calling hellions' counter to be the zealot? Are you saying "the hellions' counter, the zealots, can smash them" or are you saying "the unit that hellions counter can smash them"? I use the term "counter" because even on Blizzards own guide they list the Zealot as one of the two units it's good against, when in reality it's not. It's good against extremely small numbers of Zealots, with nothing to back them up in the very early game and thats about it. You can't kite chargelots because once charge comes out you're trying to use your hellions to defend your tanks, they can only pull back so far. The only time hellions are good is when they can kill something in 1-2 blasts, like lings, workers and marines that aren't firing back. They lose out in any other situation and thus are terrible units to be used as a core. Terran desperately needs something in mech to help be the marine of the mech army capable of fighting toe to toe with siege tank support, but right now there really isn't anything to fill the role aside from the marine. There's many units that hard counter in sc2, the hellion just isn't part of that club even though the original design of the unit was to counter light leaving the heavy firing to thors and tanks it just isn't very effective. Compare that to Protoss units that "counter" like Immortals and Colossus and they both do their jobs extremely effectively and thats without touching on the Infestor which quite literally counters every unit in the game. Yes, there is not much space to pull back, but you're still not trading hits. Anyways, in that situation, it's hard to say if it's cost efficient or not, because you have to take the cost of the whole battle, not just the hellion vs zealot part, and look at the result as a whole. Ok then going back to what you said about the counter, it doesn't make sense then. It's like you're saying "if banelings, which blizzard labels as a counter to marines, can be beaten by marines, then what about units they don't counter like thors and tanks", implying that they'll do even worse against thors. I don't see the logic there. In this case, banelings can be used against thors and/or tanks, and have been a response many times against mech (successfully). Or another example would be "if thors, who are labeled by blizzard to be counters to marines, are beaten by marines, then what about units they don't counter like banshees and hellions?" So the two points I'm trying to make here are: 1) Blizzard's labeling of counters isn't done very well 2) No unit counters another unit in all possible situations in all possible ways And what you seem to be implying is that if hellions are beaten by the units they're supposed to counter, then the units they're not supposed to counter are even stronger. That may be in the case of immortals and colossi, but again not in every situation. For example if we take sentries, hellions will beat them in an isolated situation. Or banelings beating or at the least, dealing with thor/hellion. Even in the case of hellions vs archon/immortal/colossi, there are ways to gain advantages such as abusing the latters' immobility by killing probes, which may be more important than keeping the hellions alive (and usually is so). So, just because a hellion doesn't hard counter a unit blizzard says they are supposed to counter in every situation doesn't mean that hellions do even worse against all other units in every situation. On another note, hellions do very well in zealots in more situations TvP if the protoss decides to open templar instead of robo. Reason obviously being that AOE comes out slightly later (storm instead of colossi) and HTs being slower than colossi (and storm being able to hurt your zealots, where you don't have to worry with that with colossi). If he keeps going HT/archon/zealot heavy, you can easily kill many zealots, making his naked HT/archon army pretty weak. Obviously, he should then adapt by adding in other units, but early on, you can get closer to the ideal isolated situation of zealot vs hellion than if he opens robo. But yes, I agree that their countering ability is less than many other units. Hellions don't work in TvP except in some kind of very, very early drop against a nexus first/1gate expand, and even then it's mainly if they're not scouted. I don't see why you're defending the hellion so much, it's one of the biggest examples of the problems sc2 has right now. It would be fine if it was mainly a strong early game unit/good harrass unit much like the Banshee but with the way mech is played out it has to be a core unit despite not having much to offer in many situations. If there was something else to fill the role of beef in a terran mech army things would look a lot different. You could straight add Goliaths to the mix and solve a lot of mech problems, especially if they were considered light units. If Goliaths were built as kind of mid game focused unit that was good against Zealots/decent against stalkers/immortals/air it would be a fantastic addition to the game.
I think you are vastly underestimating the hellion, and the battle hellion was added exactly to do what you are requesting: when you get into a fight, turn it into battle mode and you gain a pretty decent tank.
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