Abilities that nullify micro - Good or bad? - Page 12

On March 20 2011 00:52 Captain Peabody wrote:
FF is a great spell, and very Starcraft-y. The ability to create chokes, trap units, and manipulate the battlefield is very exciting, strong, and dynamic. It by no means "nullifies micro," any more than Dark Swarm from BW nullified micro. Like Dark Swarm, it cannot be "countered" in such a way as to completely nullify the advantage of its use* (which is what many people seem to think should be happening); but it can be responded to in many ways which make it less effective and less devastating than it would be.* This is a good thing, not a bad thing; and saying it makes the game not fun is stupid, and wrong-headed.
DS is also similar to FF in that it's a spell which is almost necessary for their given race to be able to survive in certain stages of the game. And like DS it serves to isolate and almost completely "nullify" certain groups of units, and helps when attacking fixed fortifications.
Yes, it makes you work harder and can devestate you playing against it; but it's a good spectator spell, it's exciting, and it should stay in the game. So there.

Removing FF or weakening it significantly would be like removing or weakening DS; it would take away excitement factor, remove skill, and make the game blander. Give the other races tools to deal with FF, if they really can't deal with it; but don't remove it or weaken it, because the design of the spell is actually very good, and very Starcraft-y.

And anyway, FF is still nowhere near as powerful as DS; now THAT was a spell so imba that if it was in SC2 in its BW form, we'd have at least a dozen threads whining about it...

*Admittedly, if the Protoss does a bad job placing his forcefields, it can be pretty much 100% useless...but we're assuming that that's not going to happen at high levels.

*No doubt people will respond by saying that DS is a Hive-tech level spell while Sentry is T1.5. However, the fact that Sentries are very, very vulnerable, don't have infinite energy with Consume, are very gas heavy in the early game where you don't have much gas, and take many more clicks and skillful placement to be useful mitigates this.

On March 20 2011 00:42 Sanguinarius wrote:
Everyone watches the GSL and notes the amazing FFs and how they owned up July, but what people dont notice is that its REALLY REALLY hard to do that. And forcefields are unforgiving in that if you mess them up, you are more than dead. There is a tiny margin for err.

Pros are Pros, and things that might be slightly OP for pros are not a balance issue for many of us, because we just suck at placing FFs.

On March 19 2011 19:17 Skyze wrote:
to anyone who says FF is imbalance.. I have a simple challenge for you.

Try to play Protoss at Masters WITHOUT using one forcefield.. I dare you. See how badly forcefield is required.

And even if you do use it, 99.9999% chance you will get no where near as good as forcefields as MC.. He is the best in the world, point blank. Watch every other "pro" Protoss player, they dont win every game simply by going mass sentries.. If it was that easy, every protoss would be winning every single game like nothing. Forcefield "placing" is a large talent, trust me.. I have over 2000 protoss games so far, and I still land shitty forcefields once in awhile. It really is an art, and put it this way; you miss one forcefield vs terran, its gg.

On March 19 2011 23:55 epoc wrote:
Imo nerfing force fields isn't a good idea. They should instead give zerg some kinda counter. For example a spell that removes force fields. I know this is very bad example but something that zerg can do to counter without completely removing ff.

On March 20 2011 01:47 Kimaker wrote:
...to everyone saying FF's are "hard" to pull off effectively, go try and blanket storms in BW, then come back to me. You have NO clue what you're talking about. I'm not taking anything away from MC, because god knows I can't FF like that, but it really is almost too easy to rip apart a Zerg with FF which requires relatively little actual micro ability. I mean, sweet Jesus, his army was almost pure sentry at some points.

Edit: I'm not saying that anything should be changed, just that people need to realize that how "hard" something is, is a relative measure and that when compared to their yield, FF's are very simple to pull off.

On March 20 2011 02:04 ParasitJonte wrote:


but it's intruguing to think if the game would actually be better with a poorer user interface...

On March 19 2011 18:22 H0i wrote:

For example MC vs July. Because of the huge number of forcefields, and MC's skill to place them, there was nothing july could do.

On March 20 2011 02:21 Exstasy wrote:
I don't understand?, Forcefields are strong for sure, but so are alot of abilities.
there is nothign wrong with them as far as I can see. There is a way to deal with it it's not broken, July just got a third spire tech hydra AND Burrow, no way he can afford enough roaches to hold a 2 base all in, let alone he didn't make any spines.
Soon everyone will figure this out the same way everyone figured out kyrixs low tier Aggression and Nestea Stopped MKP's Reign with marines back in Season 2.

On March 20 2011 02:27 Zelniq wrote:

I'm getting tired of hearing this, the reason why July kept being unable to hold off the attacks is because he didn't go for burrowed roach, instead kept making hydra dens or hydralisks or spires. You can easily hold those attacks with just burrowed roach, even easier if you went burrowed move instead of roach speed as the first roach warren upgrade, but you dont even need that all you need is burrow and roaches. It's like imagine if terrans were whining about similar force field attacks when terran made vikings, it's just the wrong unit choice (although its an extreme example, the same idea applies)