Designated Balance Discussion Thread - Page 159

On October 16 2011 09:22 Ben... wrote:
The simplest solution would be to make it so CCs can't lift off. Yes, it doesn't follow the Terran trait of lift-off buildings but it puts them on equal footing with the other races in terms of risks you have to take when expanding, and gives the other races vital scouting information because they can Actually know if the Terran is planning to expand or do something else instead of going to the Natural, seeing nothing, poking up the ramp, seeing a few marines and continuing to be in the dark until appropriate tech comes out to scout effectively (Which is too late in some cases).

On October 16 2011 20:14 Toadvine wrote:
I still don't like all the "perfect scouting in the early game" ideas. They're just another bandaid. No race should ever need perfect scouting, nor should they have it. In BW, Protoss couldn't scout the inside of a Terran's base for a long time either, and needed a Robo for detection against a Terran core unit that always got massed in TvP (the Vulture). Still, the matchup was fine.

I'd much prefer the scouting woes to be solved by making the races more robust, so they can have safe builds that have the capacity to deal with anything. Terran has these, which is why they're the best race. Zerg has them in ZvP, although they're not easy to execute correctly; in ZvT it seems like they almost do, but Terrans constantly come up with new ways to abuse them. And in PvT, there is no build like that, not even close.

On October 16 2011 20:16 Sir Christoffee wrote:


For example, Marine King raping Haypro today just using mass hellions off 3 reactor factory.

On October 16 2011 21:24 Xenorawks wrote:
I know this isn't a really huge issue, but just a little of something of what I feel. I myself do play all 3 race and although Zerg is probably my favourite but I try not to be biased.
Problem: Roaches are a little too cost effective.
-If you compare them among the "tank-type" units, Roaches can tank like a marauder, zealot or a stalker because of the amour bonus, their HP isn't very low either.
-Roaches have pretty OK DPS, probably uncomparable to marauders but with Stalkers and Zealots they are quite equal with each being good in their own way.
-Have shorter range yes, but it moves pretty damn fast with speed upgrade/on creep. And they are not melee like zealots with super slow speed that requires an expensive and long upgrade from the twilight council, the roach speed upgrade is easily accessible.
-Biggest issue, it sure is cheap. If you say a Marauder is much stronger, but they costs more too. Stalkers might have speed and range, but are expensive. With that small mineral and gas cost for each roach, it makes them a very very cost effective unit.

I can't really think of a solution to this though. Increasing the cost a little might make zerg even more vulnerable to early timing attacks. By removing the base armor it would make it a not-so-useful unit seeing that it can't even attack air. Although roaches are easily countered by units like Immortals/Void rays etc. but it definitely comes out ahead of many other tier1 units in a fight (based on cost).

Roaches are like a "must have" unit in the zerg arsenal. Nevertheless, once a zerg's macro kicks in, I feel the "mass roach rally" can be very punishing in a cost effective manner.

I know some of you might see this as a 'no head no tail, no beginning no ending, no point and no solution' post, but I would still like to hear your opinions on this.

On October 16 2011 19:29 robinroz wrote:
Problem: Protoss needs to be able to scout better in the early game. Hallucination is a nice option but it costs 100/100 and precious early-game Sentry energy.
Solution: Move Hallucination to the Nexus.
Side Effects: Another early scouting option (makes 1-1-1 easier to hold!). Also gives another use to Nexus energy instead of pure chronoboost, consequently adding a decision-making aspect.

Still doesn't solve the problem of forcing the Protoss to go robo-tech for detection, but a step in the right direction?

On October 16 2011 21:59 theOnslaught wrote:
Automatic Match Making Balance Charts

Problem: Blizzard taking balance information off a system that is designed to have you lose and win untill you're at 50% makes the balance information innacurate.
Solution: For balance reasons, only two equally skilled players can be taken into consideration when balance is discussed. Only results from high level tournaments with more than 32 players should be taken into account when discussing balance. basically only MLG, IEM, Dreamhack, WCG and GSL should be taken into consideration, on bo3 formats.
Side Effects: They cant say a PVT is balanced if a protoss wins when the matchup is beign played by a low master's terran, vs a high masters protoss. only players of the same calibre can be compared in this type of charts. for protoss to have less than 40% win rate in October in tournament results, it just makes it obvious that there are too great of discrepancies between races.

Terran

Problem: Inconsistency between the three races macro mechanics, specifically mules. It is almost rewarded to save energy into the late game, where a terran can land mules with all the accumulated energy, and gain a huge advantage over his opponent on the resources mined per minute.
Solution: Only allow 1 mule active at a time per orbital command.
Side Effects: Diminishes the potentially large advantage that provides late game mules from 3+ command centers. Punishes energy accumulation.

Problem: Ghost EMP.
Solution: Make it either a missile that you can possibly avoid, or an area of effect that drains energy over time rather than instantly.
Side Effects: The EMP range is already too great, it beign applied instantly makes it too strong of an ability, making the terran gain almost instant advantage over a protoss army that can only fight marauders with medivaks head on with shields and forcefields.

Problem: Ghost Snipe.
Solution: Increase mana cost, 45 damage for 25 mana is too great.
Side Effects: Marines and tanks already provide a good enough DPS, specially upgraded. Ghost Snipe's completely deny the ability of zergs to bring the stronger tier 3 units into play and making them completely useless.

---------------------------------------------

General Balance

Problem: Air units like mutalisks can easly avoid AOE Air by using hold position to avoid the splash damage, making archons and thors useless on a straight on fight vs mutas (when they're supposed to counter them). Rendering almost impossible for a protoss player to stop Mutalisk Harassement when the mutas grow too big in numbers.
Solution: Grow the hit boxes of the targets, so even when "magic boxing" you can atleast hit two or three adjacent targets with archons or thors (aka hitting 3-4 mutas per hit if they're magicboxing rather than manually splitting towards different directions, rather than one). The archon atack specially should work like a cone-spell type of ability, where it hits anything that's in front of him in X range.
Side Effects: Mutalisks only weakness is single target high damage. Marines, do great thanks to medivaks and their sick dps, as well as turrets thanks to scv's repair. But Protoss suffers greatly from the fact that:

1. A protoss can't easly replenish their economy after losing workers (as it denies the early army advantage on upgrades or amount of units that you so much need to be able to fight head on with the terran or protoss). Both terran and zerg have an easier time with it since a terran can use mules , and the zerg can replenish the drones quite easly

2. It makes it almost impossible to grab a 3rd base on most maps, as splitting your stalkers can lead to an end game situation where a huge flock of mutas engages the stalkers, kills them and gains too great of an advantage to overcome from that point on.

-----------------------------------------

On a side note, i think we can all agree though that the protoss army without sentries is pretty useless, which is trickier and harder to balance... they either bring the cost of the units down...

for example: Stalker 125 / 25 rather than 50 gas. And immortal's 200 / 75 rather than 250 / 75. Either that or an increase in damage is needed for the stalkers to be able to rival strong ranged units like marauders or roaches without forcefields.

On October 16 2011 20:05 Sir Christoffee wrote:
To compare, lets look at some changes (or a relative lack off?) to Zerg. Lings pretty much stayed the same so woot. Though for some reason, burrow was pushed back to lair. My only theory to this that at some stage they decided the combo of fast regeneration on tier one roaches made an early roach push with burrow too powerful, otherwise I am not aware why.

On October 17 2011 00:46 Resistentialism wrote:


I think the former provides the reasoning for the latter. There is one big change for zerglings from BW to sc2, which is that they can deny scouting workers regardless of how good your opponent is at keeping their scout moving. If you can't keep the scout worker alive after zerglings come out, you can't keep tabs on the hatchery to see if burrow is being researched.

On October 16 2011 21:59 theOnslaught wrote:
Automatic Match Making Balance Charts

Problem: Blizzard taking balance information off a system that is designed to have you lose and win untill you're at 50% makes the balance information innacurate.
Solution: For balance reasons, only two equally skilled players can be taken into consideration when balance is discussed. Only results from high level tournaments with more than 32 players should be taken into account when discussing balance. basically only MLG, IEM, Dreamhack, WCG and GSL should be taken into consideration, on bo3 formats.
Side Effects: They cant say a PVT is balanced if a protoss wins when the matchup is beign played by a low master's terran, vs a high masters protoss. only players of the same calibre can be compared in this type of charts. for protoss to have less than 40% win rate in October in tournament results, it just makes it obvious that there are too great of discrepancies between races.

Terran

Problem: Inconsistency between the three races macro mechanics, specifically mules. It is almost rewarded to save energy into the late game, where a terran can land mules with all the accumulated energy, and gain a huge advantage over his opponent on the resources mined per minute.
Solution: Only allow 1 mule active at a time per orbital command.
Side Effects: Diminishes the potentially large advantage that provides late game mules from 3+ command centers. Punishes energy accumulation.

Problem: Ghost EMP.
Solution: Make it either a missile that you can possibly avoid, or an area of effect that drains energy over time rather than instantly.
Side Effects: The EMP range is already too great, it beign applied instantly makes it too strong of an ability, making the terran gain almost instant advantage over a protoss army that can only fight marauders with medivaks head on with shields and forcefields.

Problem: Ghost Snipe.
Solution: Increase mana cost, 45 damage for 25 mana is too great.
Side Effects: Marines and tanks already provide a good enough DPS, specially upgraded. Ghost Snipe's completely deny the ability of zergs to bring the stronger tier 3 units into play and making them completely useless.

---------------------------------------------

General Balance

Problem: Air units like mutalisks can easly avoid AOE Air by using hold position to avoid the splash damage, making archons and thors useless on a straight on fight vs mutas (when they're supposed to counter them). Rendering almost impossible for a protoss player to stop Mutalisk Harassement when the mutas grow too big in numbers.
Solution: Grow the hit boxes of the targets, so even when "magic boxing" you can atleast hit two or three adjacent targets with archons or thors (aka hitting 3-4 mutas per hit if they're magicboxing rather than manually splitting towards different directions, rather than one). The archon atack specially should work like a cone-spell type of ability, where it hits anything that's in front of him in X range.
Side Effects: Mutalisks only weakness is single target high damage. Marines, do great thanks to medivaks and their sick dps, as well as turrets thanks to scv's repair. But Protoss suffers greatly from the fact that:

1. A protoss can't easly replenish their economy after losing workers (as it denies the early army advantage on upgrades or amount of units that you so much need to be able to fight head on with the terran or protoss). Both terran and zerg have an easier time with it since a terran can use mules , and the zerg can replenish the drones quite easly

2. It makes it almost impossible to grab a 3rd base on most maps, as splitting your stalkers can lead to an end game situation where a huge flock of mutas engages the stalkers, kills them and gains too great of an advantage to overcome from that point on.

-----------------------------------------

On a side note, i think we can all agree though that the protoss army without sentries is pretty useless, which is trickier and harder to balance... they either bring the cost of the units down...

for example: Stalker 125 / 25 rather than 50 gas. And immortal's 200 / 75 rather than 250 / 75. Either that or an increase in damage is needed for the stalkers to be able to rival strong ranged units like marauders or roaches without forcefields.

On October 17 2011 01:29 Toadvine wrote:


Actually ling dps took a huge nerf, as did the bonus from adrenal glands. In BW a ling with no upgrades would win against a Marine with no upgrades, you need two in SC2; three lings would kill a Zealot in BW, you need four in SC2, etc.

On October 16 2011 16:19 shadowboxer wrote:


Terran's been nerfed the most and they're STILL the strongest race of the three. That says a lot.

On October 17 2011 02:48 kofman wrote:
This could be evidence that Terran players are just stronger than players of the other races.

On October 17 2011 01:29 Toadvine wrote:


Actually ling dps took a huge nerf, as did the bonus from adrenal glands. In BW a ling with no upgrades would win against a Marine with no upgrades, you need two in SC2; three lings would kill a Zealot in BW, you need four in SC2, etc.

Problem: Inconsistency between the three races macro mechanics, specifically mules. It is almost rewarded to save energy into the late game, where a terran can land mules with all the accumulated energy, and gain a huge advantage over his opponent on the resources mined per minute.
Solution: Only allow 1 mule active at a time per orbital command.
Side Effects: Diminishes the potentially large advantage that provides late game mules from 3+ command centers. Punishes energy accumulation.

On the other hand, Zerg game play is much narrower (opening wise) comparatively. Tech is slower and pretty much any 1 base ZvT build, the Zerg has committed to it. If they fail to win out right or completely cripple the terran, it is gg. No transition to metagame. For everything else, there is fast expand, to try and support any current viable Zerg strategy to deal with the quick tech being thrown at them. Zerg then gets dubbed the "reactionary race" up until you can get a solid 2-3 bases up, where the player can take a commanding role.

In my opinion, this "reactionary race" excuse is an overall design floor by blizzard that I feel would have not arisen had they tried to stick more bit more to the roots of the mechanics of Broodwar, and would also possibly cover other issues that have fruited over time.