Designated Balance Discussion Thread - Page 1029

On July 01 2014 18:17 FaultyReDD wrote:
they just need to give us the old mine back

On July 01 2014 18:21 MrLightning wrote:


So its ok to balance whine when it suits your purpose? People who disagree with you become the scourge of humanity until your race is on top again then no one has the right to balance whine.

See what I did there, according to your logic I am whining about your whining of people who whine on people who balance whine. That's a lot of wine.

On July 01 2014 18:14 Hider wrote:


The reason terran takes a later 4th is that the advantages of getting out a larger army outweights the disadvantas of a marginally better economy. That might not have been the case in earlier HOTS where a smaller terran army could deal better with a larger Zerg army.

Note that zerg skyrockets due to how their production/economy works. For your theory to be correct, there would need to be a lot of games where Mutalisks does a lot of damage in the midgame. It's imo very rarely that Mutalisks kill more than a couple of workers/1-2 Turrets in this phase of the game (when it is harassing).

Well that's how the game is balanced. The Mutalisk threat exists and forces the terran play in a certain way. Is that fun or not? That's really the main way I look at it in terms of assessing whether Mutalisk should be nerfed or Widow Mines buffed. I think the latter creates far more interesting gameplay.

Well it allows terran to split up his bases a lot better. But doesn't you need to find more games where terran (once he goes on 4+bases) gets kinda torn apart by Mutalisk in the late game? I referred to the Snue vs Taeja series that you linked to as an example that Taeja "easily" could secure 4bases without dying to Mutalisk threat. I am sure I could find a lot more games where this is the case as well, but games where terrans gets shredded are IMO a lot less common.

On July 08 2014 08:11 Spect8rCraft wrote:
I feel like one solution that might make finagling with late game units better is to increase the supply of them, like the capital ships.

One of the major problems with balancing capital ships is that the multiplicative factor of having more of them gets out of hand (i.e. critical mass occurs), to which the air mass becomes an unstoppable force. BC + ravens is a classic example of this, where a cloud becomes so strong both defensively and offensively that even void rays and vikings would have a tough time eating through them. Yet, at almost any point before this, it would be so easy to eat the Terran alive before the transition is complete.

The same applies to carriers. sOs showed that with proper leverage, carrier + colossi can be a threat; it's just that the means don't justify the ends, so few are insane enough to try it.

The Zerg fortunately don't have this issue, because their transition period is much quicker, from larvae to corrupters to brood lords. Their issue is lacking a proper AA air unit; the corrupter is too clunky and gets chewed up by the long-ranged vikings and the vaporizing void rays, while mutalisks are great in clouds, but don't stand up to a proper air army. But that's a different issue; I digress.

If capital ships like the BC and carrier have their supplies increased to, say, 8, or even 10 (however ludicrous it may seem), then we can justify a proper buff to strengthen them and justify the time required to produce them, even if they must be increased as well. They might scale better to the late game situation in which they appear, where a single capital ship would typically be swallowed by high-DPS units before it can many so much as a dent; a few of them would be legitimate threats on the battlefield, and one wouldn't be able to build an invincible cloud because the supply limits the ability to reach critical mass. At least in theory; that can be tweaked further down the road.

On July 09 2014 00:42 Grumbels wrote:
The ultimate units in Starcraft 2 aren't that extreme compared to standard infantry, the game is scaled down to the point that a handful of marines can bring down massive space ships. To contrast, in Supreme Commander 2 the higher tech units can be absurdly powerful.

+ Show Spoiler +

The mothership never worked out and Blizzard abandoned the Odin-esque thor. And Blizzard has essentially never bothered trying to make the carrier a useful unit, and I believe they also reverted some buffs for the battlecruiser in HotS beta under the pretext of it ruining other game modes(?). They've also reduced the mothership to irrelevancy and have publicly said that they're okay with capital ships making only rare appearances. (I think the tempest is different because it's a HotS unit and therefore has special protection.)

In my opinion, ultimate units slow the game down too much, feel too awkward to handle, and the infrastructure requirements are too high so that you're forced into passive play. I think better odds lie with redesigning the battlecruiser so that it has some useful ability that doesn't stack, so that you're immediately rewarded for having at least one of them. I don't think Blizzard will bother to make any of them viable in any upcoming patch though.

On July 08 2014 15:42 BurningRanger wrote:
I don't think this is a good idea. Mass BC + Raven is actually not a good composition, because the BC overall is too weak. Voidrays would deal pretty well with them (if they're not clumped so much that they're seekered to death, but that's a Mass Raven problem then, not mass BC). Usually mass Raven + mass Viking + a few BCs (maybe) deals a lot better with anything.
I'm not too sure about the Carrier nowadays. In WoL massing them against Bio was suicide. I guess in HotS this hasn't changed really. Mass Vikings still can mess with mass Carriers.

Increasing the capital ships supply would make them go extinct again... well... BC is pretty much extinct already.

On July 08 2014 07:31 CakeSauc3 wrote:


That's what I was thinking. He always seems so calm xD

I guess balance frustration has an effect on even the most calm of souls.