[P]New Units, Abilities, Evolutions, & Removals - Page 9

On October 24 2011 08:14 blackbrrd wrote:

Yeah, a lot of options. Taking sneaky expansions and recalling your probes there and back again when it's noticed would be awesome.

Same with the replicant. About to get a 1-1-1 push in your face? Replicate a siege tank and get a defenders advantage.

I do believe these two mechanics are so swingy it's going to get nerfed to hell and back again or plainly removed. If they manage to balance the game with them in I am going to get impressed.

On October 24 2011 08:37 Brutaxilos wrote:
i feel like blizz coulda instead tried to fix the carrier instead of dropping it completely. however, they seem very adamant about the fact that its only gone as of right now and that there is still the possibility of return. underused units generally give us the most excitement during a professional game so its not extremely needed to remove them

On October 24 2011 08:26 haitike wrote:
Viper grab should be like Pudge Hook of dota. A Line Skillshot that get the first ally/enemy it touchs. So the enemy can put a zealot in the middle of the way to save the colosus.

More micro is always better.

On October 24 2011 08:47 ShatterZer0 wrote:
Ultralisks also lost their anti armor damage and gained anti light damage fyi.

On October 23 2011 14:33 ohampatu wrote:



Quoteing this for the truth.

So many toss are angry. I feel like the only toss who's ready to hit taldarim altar in a pvt.
Once its 3 base vs 3 base i got some really good ideas for 2 oracles and a warp prism with 4 zealots. We can actually out multitask our opponents now. We have shit to do other than build units and attack in a big ball.

The replicator is a little gimicky, and wont have alot of use except for copying casters or copying some terran unit to help defend an allin (1 tank to stop 1/1/1).

Nexus cannon needs to be changed to not work on pylons or gas.
Recall is fucking sweet, almost to the point of op.

Toss is already one of the highest micro races in the game especially in the early game. This will reward high apm/multitasking and allow us to be completely aggressive with a town portal so we dont have to commit so often, cause currently we have to commit to any battle once outside base.

On October 24 2011 08:55 mrKamiya wrote:

Holy moly I just had the idea of replicatig a CLOAKED banshee in 1/1/1 and kiting the marines to death.

On October 24 2011 08:44 Fishgle wrote:
Why do people dislike Viper's Hook? It's great for killing colossus or help attack into siege lines.

On October 24 2011 08:36 Qikz wrote:
The tempest does AOE to all air units, not just mutas so stacked corrupters will too be attacked by the tempest.

On October 24 2011 07:58 Sandermatt wrote:


I think they saud that they want the Thor to be a unit that low league players can have fun with in team games, but will balance it in a way that pros will hardly ever use it.
About the banshee, even if the copied banshee didn't have cloak, the replicate will have (as the replicator currently works).

On October 24 2011 07:53 Grumbels wrote:
The community's opinion is absolutely useless. I honestly think that if you would do a poll about what units and dynamics people like in WoL that first of all, a lot of people will simply dislike everything, either because it belongs to their race - and they're stuck with this awful and pathetic race - or because it belongs to the enemy races - and of course their units are lame and overpowered; second of all, if you would compare and contrast with a hypothetical poll at the start of beta you'd find they have little in common as reaction is just based on emotion, not on suspending judgement before seeing it in action, while that's supposed to be the only thing that matters.

Fact is that calling the Replicant lame and gimmicky might be fun to do now, but how can you be sure that players won't come up with a million and one clever uses of it? To me this unit has a lot of potential for outthinking your opponent and in any case, until you see it in use you won't be able to get a good feel for it. Why outright say you dislike it then?

Similarly for the shredder. I keep being surprised this concept is universally disliked. It's quite similar to spidermines and gives you board control that is always thought to be such a beloved concept. Was that just a vocal minority and do we really just want more attack-move units? There's positive reception of battle-hellion, goliath, tempest, swarm host -- it's notable that except for the viper basically all the units that can be used in a straight-up fight are rated highly, while the more tricky units (that require you to see them in action first) are rated badly.

What I think is that Blizzard does 'get it', but they might have a shallow understanding of what 'it' means. Take micro, if they come up with cool micro mechanics they're certainly not going to go out of their way to remove it and of course they'll be happy with it. However, if they don't have a really strong understanding of micro then if there's ever a trade-off between micro-ability and something else, it can become harder to argue for. Now Starcraft II has two design constraints that influence this a lot: 1) they want the game to be playable by casuals, therefore maps must be small and filled with rocks, races must have armies that you can attack-move across the map. 2) they want it to be playable on higher latency and for people that have worse computers.
Both of those ensure that you can't have the super-responsive and intricate mutalisk micro that you saw in Brood War. Instead there will be units like the shredder: you can set them up beforehand if you're not a fast player, but they have also uses for faster players. I think if you err too much on always having multiple, 'casual' uses for every unit you have the chance to miss out on some potential though. That said, it's still very much possible to create cool and responsive micro. (marine vs baneling)

If Starcraft Ii as a spectator activity becomes profitable and widespread enough then Blizzard also might think there is more of a market in just making the game fun to watch instead of fun to play. (and the former translates to fun to play for more competitively minded players -- even if Blizzard really just has to create better game modes for casuals if they want to keep their interest)

Another issue with Blizzard developing this expansion is someone like David Kim: he approaches new unit design from the perspective of 'holes in WoL that need filling up'. It's a complete insider's perspective where you can only try to augment the existing structure, not replace it. I hope they mostly keep him far away from the design process and just let him work on balancing the units the actual designers come up with.

On October 24 2011 09:00 TheRealPaciFist wrote:


And I'm arguing that they should have given this low league fun unit to Protoss instead of Terran, because it just doesn't feel right on Terran.

And yeah I know, getting cloak even if they don't have it will be awesome