[D] Swarm Host Redundant? - Page 18

On October 25 2011 16:45 Charon1979 wrote:


Why? Just wait for the first wave -> stim a couple of marines (scan) -> profit

On October 25 2011 17:39 HaXXspetten wrote:
swarm host/brood lord/unfestor/viper/corruptor seems pretty insane :o

On October 25 2011 17:44 Remb wrote:
I don't understand. This is just a Brood Lord.
Spawns free minions with a duration. It's slow. It's a siege unit. It has large range. The only difference is one requires anti-air one requires detection.
I literally can not think of a strategy using Swarm Host, that can not be replaced by Brood Lords.
It's particularly ignorant of posters saying this will be used to break "turtling" players. This is exactly what the Brood Lord does.
Why then, make a unit that serves the exact same role as a Brood Lord.

One might say: Swarm Host comes before Hive tech, so Swarm Host has a role. But essentially, Blizzard could make Brood Lord lair tech and it would be the EXACT same thing. And it would be imbalanced.

I am so adamant at how identical a Swarm Host is to a Brood Lord, that I suspect Blizzard might be removing the Brood Lord.
edit: also there were rumors about removing the Corruptor. So if Corruptor is gone, you can't make Brood Lords. It's speculation, but this makes a lot of sense.

On October 25 2011 17:44 Remb wrote:
I don't understand. This is just a Brood Lord.
Spawns free minions with a duration. It's slow. It's a siege unit. It has large range. The only difference is one requires anti-air one requires detection.
I literally can not think of a strategy using Swarm Host, that can not be replaced by Brood Lords.
It's particularly ignorant of posters saying this will be used to break "turtling" players. This is exactly what the Brood Lord does.
Why then, make a unit that serves the exact same role as a Brood Lord.

One might say: Swarm Host comes before Hive tech, so Swarm Host has a role. But essentially, Blizzard could make Brood Lord lair tech and it would be the EXACT same thing. And it would be imbalanced.

I am so adamant at how identical a Swarm Host is to a Brood Lord, that I suspect Blizzard might be removing the Brood Lord.
edit: also there were rumors about removing the Corruptor. So if Corruptor is gone, you can't make Brood Lords. It's speculation, but this makes a lot of sense.

On October 25 2011 18:19 Umpteen wrote:


Swarm hosts are by no means identical to Brood Lords.

Brood Lord: Does guaranteed damage every time it fires, with broodlings spawning in melee range and thus also guaranteed to provoke friendly splash, should tanks be sieged nearby. Necessitates an immediate response. Minimum DPS: 8 (plus 4 if the broodling gets to nibble anything)

Swarm Host: Burrows and spawns the first two Locusts in approximately the same set-up time as the Terran Shredder (yes, really). No guaranteed damage: if there aren't enough Locusts, none of them will get through. Those who are saying you should stagger-burrow Hosts are, to my mind, setting up a nice slow conveyor-belt of Locusts, about as useful as streaming slow, melee-only roaches in two-by-two. If we assume every single Locust gets a hit in (which strikes me as quite generous), the effective DPS of a Swarm host is two.

Imagine 5 broodlords, rather than 9 swarm hosts, laying siege to the same entrenched position as in the swarm host video, and grant them whatever support units you were presuming existed. Exactly.

On October 25 2011 18:25 Sated wrote:
I don't think people are realising that you can burrow them in a staggered manner so you have a constant flow of Locusts coming out of them. Once you've set up this staggered "siege", you can protect them with expendable units like Roaches whilst the Locusts deal constant damage. It's a fairly strong contain if you pay attention to it.

I kinda like this unit. It will be interesting to see how it's used. But the Locusts definitely need a damage boost - perhaps they should explode on contact and deal minimal splash damage?

On October 25 2011 18:30 Hattori_Hanzo wrote:
Except that in your example, that will never happen due to BL being hive tech, unless of course you're in bronze league then yes, that scenario could happen, your opponent still on one base, with just 5 siege tanks and 20 marines by the time you have 2 bases, teched up to hive, got corruptors, morphed them and moved to their base.

Do you post while drunk?

On October 25 2011 17:31 Treble557 wrote:
By blizzards logic, the Swarm Host is Redundant for the same reason the Lurker was. The baneling.

gg blizz.

Swarm Host: Burrows and spawns the first two Locusts in approximately the same set-up time as the Terran Shredder (yes, really). No guaranteed damage: if there aren't enough Locusts, none of them will get through. Those who are saying you should stagger-burrow Hosts are, to my mind, setting up a nice slow conveyor-belt of Locusts, about as useful as streaming slow, melee-only roaches in two-by-two. If we assume every single Locust gets a hit in (which strikes me as quite generous), the effective DPS of a Swarm host is two.

On October 25 2011 18:48 dakalro wrote:
Do people really fail to acknowledge the obvious and stated use for this unit, siege breaker?

You get 6 units every 24s(?) that have 3x the hp of a broodling, almost 2x that of an infested terran, for free, on tier 2. That's 500 hp worth of tankiness from one host.

If they do make contact they have a lot higher dps than a stimmed marine, obvious since they're not supposed to survive that long.

Sure a big amount of tanks will decimate them but you can't expect 1 host to be of use against 10 tanks. But 10 hosts, that's 5000 hp of meat every 24 seconds. Spread the spawns and some will eventually get through.

On October 25 2011 18:57 Dommk wrote:

No it isn't

Swarm Hosts are not good for immediate defense, like the Lurker or the Baneling. They have something like 15seconds of ramp up time, so if you expect to use them like Lurkers/Siege tanks then they are probably going to archive very little.

You won't be able to push forward as well as Lurkers/Tanks because of this. It feels more like a unit that you would use to apply constant pressure to a location. Like outside a Protoss base. It won't be that hard to stop in the late game, but think early two base where Protoss are still teching to Colossus. All they have to defend themselves at that time are Forcefields and Static defense, no real AOE.

You could use these in those Spine crawler/Hydralisk pushes to move creep tumors and burn forcefields and just chip away at the enemy army in general.

IMO, the most important thing about this unit is that you need an army to back up the Locust to inflict the most damage, you can't use them like a Siege tank where it will do all the work.

In terms of a single attack, the Swarm host is a waste of army supply, but they only become efficient if you have to attack a position more than once

Although their DPS is low due to the long spawn time, if you actually attacked WITH the locust then it is a different story. If you think about attacking in waves then you don't really include the time in which your army is retreating and your getting back into formation.

If you use each wave of Locust as the signal attack with the rest of your army then backout when they are dead then they are quite a strong unit, mostly because during the first few seconds they actually do decent damage.

Kind of like a Carrier in that sense, their DPS is actually quite mediocre but they have ridiculous burst DPS. Due to graviton catapult their damage their DPS is something like 3 times higher during initial release than when they have settled down. Kinda why it is pretty advantageous to hit and run with Carriers

On October 25 2011 19:33 fleeze wrote:

well, exactly. you won't be able to push forward at all with swarm hosts .and if your timing window closes and he gets colossi your swarm hosts are dead. great for a "space controlling" unit to be hard countered by colossi or siege tanks. just look at that video in the OP again and image there would be tanks at the top of the cliff... have fun walking up (or even down when defending your own base) with those slow melee units through a choke.



yes because buffing the famous spine crawler / hydra push is what all zerg have requested for such a long time... colossi shuts this down quickly. so it's a niche tactic.


in fact, they won't be better with your army.
with what unit do you want to cover your swarm hosts exactly? zerg isn't terran. we don't have long range vikings to protect tanks from air and a bunch of ranged units to. swarm hosts also have a range of zero (they're melee...) so how does this prevent a terran to just engage and clean up those 2 locusts per host with the army and sieging? a terran could pushing his siege line forward will actually push the swarm hosts back because they can do nothing to prevent it...
even better with protoss. colossi > swarm host (and hydra, the most obvious unit it has synergies with).
compare that to a terran push with 3 tanks sieging below your ramp. THIS is actually space control...

the only use of locusts is tanking and i'd imagine the best dps behind them would be hydras. and they get countered by the same long range siege units of terran and protoss. for the gas cost of a swarm host you could build 4 roaches. i think they would do a better job in tanking for the hydras and we all know how good roach/hydra is nowadays.
the problem is that this unit is supposed to control space which it simply isn't. it has neither a long enough range (well no range at all) nor splash. just free units. hell it would be better if it would just spawn infested terrans...

this unit has no role in the game in it's current state and will be very difficult to balance properly. either you have overpowered free units or they suck.

On October 25 2011 19:38 iky43210 wrote:


I think the point of swarm host isn't to break siege tank lines, but preventing the sieges or marines from moving forward.

If the locusts have enough hp to make it to the tank line melee range, then it has served its purpose