EPTPatch 1.4.3 - Preview Blog - Page 159
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Please DISCUSS the changes and the impact they will have on gameplay. Straight up whining and bitching will get you a ban, no exceptions. | ||
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SC_Ghost
United Kingdom64 Posts
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IMoperator
4476 Posts
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roymarthyup
1442 Posts
On February 12 2012 11:40 jgelling wrote: Actually, that game convinces me a bit things could be fine with HSM and nukes replacing using ghosts for snipe - abuse the Zerg immobility with nukes/HSM. Since that game, HSM acceleration has been increased and fungal was slightly nerfed - I think it's reasonable to think ravens and nuke play could make up for the mass snipes on brood lord/infestor? that game was on metro, the newest map, in the newest season i think HSM is good against broodlord/infestor/corrupter.but its not the final solution however, i also think blizzard is not going to make this 25/25 snipe change final. i think blizzard will nerf snipe, but not that hard, and afterwards i think ghost / viking / raven / tank / hellion / marauder / marine / thor is still going to be the main endgame army against zerg with ghost/viking still being used to counter broodlords, however it will just not counter them as hard as it currently does | ||
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kofman
Andorra698 Posts
On February 12 2012 11:40 jgelling wrote: Actually, that game convinces me a bit things could be fine with HSM and nukes replacing using ghosts for snipe - abuse the Zerg immobility with nukes/HSM. Since that game, HSM acceleration has been increased and fungal was slightly nerfed - I think it's reasonable to think ravens and nuke play could make up for the mass snipes on brood lord/infestor? Ravens are terrible, they are way to expensive, build way to slowly, are immoblie, and HSM doesn't even do that much damage. Even with the snipe nerf, ghosts are much better vs brood lords than ravens are. | ||
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m4inbrain
1505 Posts
Its just getting too much for terran micro, and actually too little for zerg (protoss, i think thats a good balance with a full grown deathball - FFs, GS, blinks, Colossimicro, storms/fb). Micro makes or brakes an engagement for terrans, you can either win with 170 supply or just straight up lose your whole army. | ||
Elyvilon
United States13143 Posts
On February 12 2012 11:42 SC_Ghost wrote: Well yes but Ravens HSM range is lower than FG, let alone HSM splash is a very small radius and a huge Energy cost. I'm just going to requote myself: On February 12 2012 08:20 Elyvilon wrote: okay so let's put aside ghosts for a moment and talk about ravens in lategame tvz autoturrets are obviously basically useless against blord/infestor/corruptor. PDD actually has a use(it can eat corruptor shots while your vikings attempt to kill the broodlords), but it's usually worse than just building more vikings. But what about the mighty seeker missiles? Well, they cost 125 energy, meaning any raven can't shoot a seeker missile more than once every 70 game seconds, on average. Luckily, that's largely irrelevant; since seeker missiles only have 6 range, your raven will generally either die to corruptors, get neuraled and shoot the missile at your stuff, or get fungalled and die. The reward for managing to do this? Well, shooting a single missile with pathetic splash (http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/images2/b/bf/Marauderafter.jpg) that kills about 40% of a broodlord. Oh, and there's a pretty good chance your raven is dead. luckily, that way you can use the supply for units which actually do things. That said, I haven't seen the Morrow/Leenock game, so I guess I'll watch that at some point in the near future and see if it changes my mind. | ||
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FinestHour
United States18466 Posts
On February 12 2012 11:47 Elyvilon wrote: I'm just going to requote myself: That said, I haven't seen the Morrow/Leenock game, so I guess I'll watch that at some point in the near future and see if it changes my mind. Don't bother. I hate it when people use that game as an excuse for trying to make ravens sound good. Leenock was HORRIBLY out of position with his broods when he was fighting and had 0 infestors and 0 corrupters nearby for backup. He gave Morrow his broods for free by just letting them all get missled without doing anything about it. | ||
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CptCutter
United Kingdom370 Posts
On February 12 2012 10:58 roymarthyup wrote: At first i thought the snipe change was bad but i guess in the scheme of things it makes sense because ghosts have an autoattack while infestors do not. Regardless, many people seem to think with the mousescroll trick ghosts will still be able to obliterate broodlords just at a lesser rate than before. Allow me to clear up some things. Snipe has a cooldown meaning at 25 damage for 25 micro'ing that is almost not even worth it. Snipe actually has about a 0.5 second cooldown/casttime and the ghost cannot attack/fire during that cooldown With the new mousescroll wheel trick you can cast a bunch of snipes at once, however its still limited by the ghost snipe cooldown so all it does is it makes all your ghosts fire instantly but still they individually have cooldowns. also ghosts cannot do their normal DPS while chain sniping. So while chain sniping you are losing your normal DPS, but gaining snipe DPS (assuming you are chaining 25 energy snipes). So if snipe is made 25 energy for 25 damage, it wouldnt be THAT bad as long as the 0.5 second cooldown on snipe was removed. Not only that, but the 0.5 second cooldown on snipe should not effect the firing rate of ghosts, meaning if you A-MOVE a group of ghosts then hold down the snipe button and use the mousescroll trick, you could literally spam 100 snipes in 2 seconds while also not messing any of the ghosts autoattacks up. I guess if that was possible, the change wouldnt be so bad. However right now because snipe has like a 0.5 second cooldown AND the fact that you have to consume APM to use it AND the fact that when you use a snipe it RESETS the attack timer of ghosts resulting in less autoattack DPS, when you actually use ghosts to snipe right now you are losing dps from their autoattack damage, and with a 25 damage snipe it probably becomes completely not worth it to even use your APM to cast snipe as each bit of APM you use on snipe actually results in a minuscule amount of extra damage being created when you factor in the lost DPS from ghosts autoattacks. The above is the main point of this post and something i think should be cleared up. Blizzard probably already knows about it somewhat but the community doesnt completely know about it and maybe blizzard is just talking about a 25/25 snipe now the same way they talked about NP not working on massive units, but its just a tactic by blizzard to suggest a massive nerf at first and then bring in a lesser nerf in the real patch. That is just speculation, who cares, but regardless maybe there is a small percent chance the balance team isnt completely aware of how the cooldown results in lost ghost DPS meaning casting a 25 damage snipe is almost a non productive use of APM because you lose DPS for almost a miniscule amount generated damage. So above is the main point of the post, and below is just my opinions on possible solutions. This is just one possible solution im thinking of. These are just my opinions, and i dont know what solution blizzard will go with im just brainstorming. The MAIN part of this post is just to aware people of the snipe cooldown and how a 25 damage snipe is almost removing the spell completely as its not even worth it to click anymore, this part of the post is just opinions/brainstorming on possible solutions but if you dont like reading that kinda stuff you can just stop reading now if you like. Okay, now moving onto my opinions. I think because removing that 0.5 second cooldown on snipe would be hard to do, i think the easiest and simplest way to balance snipe is to make it 125 energy for 125 damage So in conclusion, I think 1 energy for 1 damage on snipe is not a bad balance move because one 2food ghost can dish out 200 energy for 200 damage and that means 2 ghosts at 4food can instantly destroy a 4food broodlord while still surviving to live another day and regenerate energy and do it again, but 25 damage on snipe is just pitiful and not worth the APM clicks. So i suggest making snipe 125 energy for 125 damage, or possibly 100 energy for 100 damage. This would allow ghosts to almost 1shot zealots and still with max energy bars ghosts lategame would still do the dirty and kill broodlords/ultras quickly. But at a lesser rate than current. Lets look at my proposed idea. 3ghosts vs 2 ultralisks, both cost 6food. 4ghosts with max upgrades and energy bars could launch 4 snipes at a ultralisk and deal 500 damage to it, leaving it with 1health to get 1shotted and then launch 2snipes at the other ultra dealing 250 damage leaving it with 250 health remaining and the 6ghosts can autoattack and kill the other one shortly after. So with my change ghosts would still destroy ultras and broodlords, and but it requires them to regenerate to 125 energy on all of them, and its HARD to produce plenty ghosts, and infestor fungals with mass ling swarms would still #!#@ ghosts, and my change still follows the 1energy for 1damage guideline that blizzard wants to follow. However, zergs reading the above description may still feel thats overpowered, because they might think "dang, the reason they are nerfing snipe is cuz is kills ultras and broods too well, with your change it almost seems like a buff because 6ghosts will still destroy 2ultras" And you know what zergs, maybe you are right. Maybe it should be 75 energy for 50 damage. Maybe 150 energy for 125 damage (which would still lead to my scenario happening, but it would cost more energy to do it increasing the reload time). I dont know what exactly the main final solution will be, thats why this part of my post is just my opinions. The main part of this post was explaining how a 25 damage snipe is pretty pointless, and my opinions are just my opinions, so yes zergs maybe your right, i dont know, these are just my opinions and i think brainstorming is a good thing. Further thoughts. A comparing fungal damage i remember seeing a game where MVP had 30 spread +3 vikings trying to counter broodlords and they were still destroyed by infestors. I forget who he was facing tho. Id say in that game even with good spreads it was normal to deal 300 damage for 75 energy with the fungals on vikings. that is insane. thats 4 damage for 1 energy. One might think fungal is way too good compared to snipe if they compare the two spells. But I think the balance lies in the fact that multiple infestors cannot really "stack" their damage instantly, while many ghosts can stack their damage instantly with snipe. These two properties of the spells can create a trade off balance between the two spells where they both are strong in different areas but pretty well balanced in the scheme of things. Based on the spells mechanics and how infestors do DoT damage in a AoE, and snipe is a instant unload of all energy damage instantly, the mechanics seem to suggest infestors are stronger early, but when the terran has a 200food army with a ton of ghosts the "stacking" effect kicks in and ghosts are able to instantly unload all their damage while infestors must "wait" for the DoT spell to finish before turning more energy into more damage. So based on these mechanics blizzard has to come up with some kind of number scheme they feel is fair given the two spells properties and you dont want ghosts to be too powerful in that lategame scenario, possibly only just as powerful as the infestors. I dont know what numbers blizzard will finalize with, the point of this post was just to aware everyone how 25 damage snipes are pretty worthless. With that said, whatever solution ultimate is reached will probably be a good one so i guess lets just wait and see. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7-DMvESA9o&feature=player_embedded Watch this game between morrow and leenock. I think if snipe was 125 energy for 125 damage, morrow could do the same thing in the game (murdering broodlords with snipe) however it would take less apm to pull off. So once again zergs might think 125 energy for 125 damage is pretty OP, and maybe you are right, whatever numbers are finalized i hope blizzard spends plenty of time trying to come up with the perfect numbers. i really like how you completely missed the cost of the ghost out of the equation. in relative terms, ghosts have the highest cost of all spell casters, do negligable actual damage compared to cost, their AOE affect only damages protoss (and even then it is NOT permanent) which leaves just snipe for them to use. with you change, a ghost would have had to be on the field for an incredible amount of time for it to reach 200/200 energy (which never happens btw). i just dont see how anything you said is viable. if fungal did not affect air then vikings would be useable, but hey ho, zerg would not be able to deal with drops without going muta if it didnt. when this patch goes through, we will see a significant drop in win rate for terran in tvz until either vikings are buffed, ghost is buffed or broodlord/infestor/corruptor is nerfed. without it, zerg will be able to go infestor broodlords without any trouble. btw, i only read the first two paragraphs of what you said before i stopped because you seemed like you had totalbuscuitian level of game knowledge (and yes thats an actual scale, kind of comparable to plancks length constant and a metre) | ||
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mlspmatt
Canada404 Posts
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RaspberrySC2
United States168 Posts
That seems to only make sense if the zerg player expanded to the toss natural and plopped a spire right in front of him... or just say at the beginning of the game: "I'm going to muta, k? Get your tech path ready." I'm no pro though. Maybe this change will make phoenix perfectly viable. | ||
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roymarthyup
1442 Posts
you engage with your 200food army with 2-3 ravens in the back just chilling, then after the first few fungals go off you send in the ravens to launch missiles at clumped corrupters, and corrupters generally clump heavily and HSM travels faster than corrupters Lategame terran against zerg should have about 60 SCV's with about 8 orbitals. That leaves 140food for army 2 siege tanks, 9food 3 ravens, 6food 17 vikings, 34food 10 hellions, 20food 8 marauders, 16food 4 medivacs, 8food 8ghosts, 16food 19 marines, 19food 2thors, 12food that army is 140 food. the only units in the army that dont directly combat air is the 10 hellions (which are needed for anti ling), 8 marauders, and 2 tanks. Everything else has combat use against air units You group your thors, marauders, and hellions as the frontline group1 everything else is grouped as group2 except for ravens ravens are group3 which is set to follow group2 normally but before combat pull back ravens and 5 repairing SCV's are group4 which you bring along with you to do between battle repairing as you move across the map you are constantly scanning to see where zergs position is. as you move across the map you need to be constantly spreading units along the marching path to avoid bad fungals when the big battle starts hopefully all your units are pre-spread because you constantly are spreading them while moving across the map. you are scanning to see where the zergs army is and trying to not get caught in a bad position while always spreading your units. Ok, once the battle starts 1a - 2a everything with group1 being the frontal group and 2/3 being directly behind group1 after that, quickly CTRL+CLICK your hellions to micro back your hellions after their first shot then a-move the hellions after they are micro'ed once then press 2 and that should select all your ghosts then you spam as much EMP as you can on nearby infestors after that, press 3 which selects your 3 ravens then move then in and chances are you hit plenty of EMPS on the nearby infestors, meaning before zerg has time to bring in his backup infestors you will fly in and throw out 3 HSM missiles on the clumped corrupter helping to massively destroy them all Doing the above tactic, you are using HSM missile as a sort of "icing on the cake" spell. after the zerg gets off his fungals on your vikings, your emp's go off on any close infestors and then a second later your 3 ravens are flying in ready to launch HSM's on the corrupters at this stage of the game, 10 blueflame hellions eradicate mass lings quickly and marauders tank baneling hits so you no longer need to rely on tanks to fight banelings. This is why i only suggest 2tanks in the endgame army. And the only purpose of the tanks is to serve as a anti-ultra insurance policy. If your enemy has broodlords, do not siege up your tanks and rely on hellion/marauder to do the tanking and ling killing. However, if your scans reveal the enemy is going for only a couple broodlords and heavy ground based army with ultralisks, thats where your tanks come in. your 2 siege tanks should heavily help in massive ground battles, just remember do not siege up your tanks until AFTER the couple broodlords are dead (because sieged tanks when broodlords are alive end up doing more damage to you than to the enemy). So lategame TvZ you should hopefully already have transitioned into 10 +3attack blueflame hellions and 8 marauders which provide heavy crowd control against mass ling/bane, and instead of having plenty tanks you focus on mostly anti air (viking/ghost/marine/thor) This army will probably trade evenly with most zerg armies because the HSM allows you to do nice damage to the corrupters. Problem is prepatch you could start throwing out snipes to kill any leftover corrupters, but if snipe is changed to 25/25 it will be pretty much not worth it to even bother casting snipe I think 25/25 is a overnerf to snipe and chances are blizzard will change the numbers to something else before the patch goes live. So im not worried about snipe i think whatever number blizzard comes up with it will still make snipe useful, just less useful than current | ||
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setzer
United States3284 Posts
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SC_Ghost
United Kingdom64 Posts
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TechSc2
Netherlands554 Posts
On February 12 2012 08:40 SC2MuffinMan wrote: I think the phoenix change is dumb. Whos gonna get fleetbeacon? when ur on like 2 base (if you FFE). It more efficient to have cannon and blink and go towards templar tech. Stop blatantly splurting out comments with your empty head and do research before you whine about a awesome good change that even costs less then the templar route This is all based off 2 bases to defend, and not considering you cannot afford to go blink stalkers + templars off 2 bases Example 1: 2 cannon in each mineral line means 4 cannons = 900 minerals Twilight council = 150 minerals 100 gas Blink = 150 minerals, 150 gas Templar archives = 150 minerals 200 gas Storm = 200 minerals 200 gas you need at least 1 templar at each mineral line, and about 4 in your army to actually move out = 6x 50 minerals and 6x 150 gas ( 300 minerals, 900 gas ) Example 2: Stargate = 150 mineral, 150 gas Fleat beacon = 300 minerals, 200 gas I think you need at least 6 phoenix to scare away muta's, since you can now reliably micro against them with a 3 range advantage Example 1 to deal with muta is 1850 minerals and 1550 gas Example 2 to deal with muta is 1450 minerals and 1250 gas So if the upgrade cost from the fleet beacon is less then 400/300 you'll be in good shape. Besides that it's easier to kill templar then to kill off phoenixes, templars just die too easy to muta's. Besides that you can actually regain map control rather quickly if you get a good engagement on the muta's and will force the zerg player to start pumping out some infestors at least to deal with the phoenix harass you can do on your terms. This is without any backup like normal stalkers involved just to keep it a more cleaner comparison, either way you need stalkers ( but with phoenix support you don't need blink ) to deal with muta's regardless. You also save yourself the headache from expanding at the 9 minute mark and hoping you can defend it because you need the gas from that third base 100% off the times when you go blink stalker storm. You an safely get 6-8 phoenixes without cutting into your stalker production too much on 2 base, it's only on 2 stargates with full chrono on phoenix where you will get gas starved. So the phoenix will now become a more reliable way off dealing with muta, instead of the hit and miss with storms if he catches you offgaurd for a second. | ||
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Doz
United States145 Posts
On February 12 2012 09:30 Mephtral wrote: Spread marines is 'micro intensive' ? .. yeah if you're being chased by banelings, not if you're being attacked by broodlords (check the movement speed for broodlords.. do you think it's difficult to spread marines vs thors too when you see them coming at you from the other side of the map?) EMP'ing infestors is no more difficult than fungaling vikings/marines, you really dont have to snipe them, they're wortless once 2 emps hit them, it's actually better not to kill them, because then the zerg cant build new ones while the battle is going on. "magic box vikings" or simply pre-spread them behind your tanks..? and once the broodlords come, you A-move them to the other side of the map and they will keep the spread pretty good, after that you need to emp aggresively to keep infestors away. And you need to drop 2 pdd's - something that you call "Micro intensive".. !? those 2 pdd's makes it impossible for the corruptors to hurt vikings/ravens, so you dont even have to snipe them to protect your vikings, just focus on emp'ing the infestors and putting down new pdd's when needed. You obviously don't have a clue what you're talking about. 1. The problem isn't with BL movement speed, but broodling movement speed and the way all those broodlings simply bug out and clog up unit pathing so bad. Secondly, we don't necessarily see your brood lords coming all the way from across the map because if you have decent creep spread, it's dangerous to move anything over creep without running the risk of it quickly being surround and killed off (you do have the fastest moving units in the game). Sure we might see it coming with a scan, but you have to admit nobody is every going to get that right 100% of the time. Plus if we try to move marines up through the mess of broodlings to kill the BL's, fungal is certain to stop them first. 2. The cast delay on emp makes up for the 1 range less that fungal has I'll give you that, but if you should happen to land your spell first, you can chain it and there's nothing a Terran can do about it even if you're in range. 3. If we leave even pre-spread vikings in front of the tank line, they're ripe targets for fungals so long as the vikings are at least 3 range in front of the tanks. Furthermore if we "a-move them across the map" they're basically out of the fight then aren't they? Same for what you said for marines. Yeah, we really want to leave our expensive tanks undefended, that we can't un-siege because then the lings just run right up and rape them anyway. 4. Raven could be be kept over the tanks and cast their pdd to still be in range to help the vikings, sure, but who's to say some incredibly talented zerg such as yourself wouldn't just pull back and wait for them to expire? Just think on it. Why do zerg choose to use this composition? It's not because it can easily be countered, no brilliant zerg player such as yourself would ever make that choice. You use that composition because it's so strong at breaking fortified lines. For months before Terrans figured out how to use ghosts to beat that comp, zergs kept telling us to keep trying different things out to beat it, and once we did you call for a nerf. Tell you what, if it's so easy, why don't we run it 10 times on metalopolis. You can be Terran and I'll be Zerg. Hell let's run it 100 times. And if metalopolis makes it too hard for you, we can do it on antiga, or whatever other map you want, cause I'm 100% certain right now that you've never once tried to defend that unit composition. Then you can try dealing with managing 2 casters and 2 micro necessary sets of troops while sieging your tanks and tell all the Terrans what terrible players they all are. We can even raise the stakes: Loser gets the fuck off the server | ||
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Ghizz
Hong Kong8 Posts
On February 12 2012 12:20 setzer wrote: It's hilarious Blizzard actually believes their way of calculating "CAPM" is an effective way of measuring the a players' effective speed. Blizzard is blizzard! | ||
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Kharnage
Australia920 Posts
On February 12 2012 11:57 CptCutter wrote: i really like how you completely missed the cost of the ghost out of the equation. in relative terms, ghosts have the highest cost of all spell casters, do negligable actual damage compared to cost, their AOE affect only damages protoss (and even then it is NOT permanent) which leaves just snipe for them to use. with you change, a ghost would have had to be on the field for an incredible amount of time for it to reach 200/200 energy (which never happens btw). i just dont see how anything you said is viable. if fungal did not affect air then vikings would be useable, but hey ho, zerg would not be able to deal with drops without going muta if it didnt. when this patch goes through, we will see a significant drop in win rate for terran in tvz until either vikings are buffed, ghost is buffed or broodlord/infestor/corruptor is nerfed. without it, zerg will be able to go infestor broodlords without any trouble. btw, i only read the first two paragraphs of what you said before i stopped because you seemed like you had totalbuscuitian level of game knowledge (and yes thats an actual scale, kind of comparable to plancks length constant and a metre) WTF are you on about? 200/100 is a lot cheaper than 50/150 or 100/150 since gas is the limiting factor. You get 3 ghosts for 2 HT or Infestor. And they have EMP out of the box from a structure that costs 150/50 instead of 150/200 + 200/200 for storm. Ghosts can shoot stuff and do good damage to light units like zealots, have more HP, fit perfectly into the MMM composition. Killing a ghost is damn near impossible unless you land a feedback and the ghost has more than 100 energy. They aren't light OR armoured making most of units bonus damage not count. If you EMP the HT during an engagement, the HT is going to die. They are so slow with this big shadow saying 'kill this dude here!' that storms are pretty much suicide bombs. Like super gas heavy banelings. I think in 1 PTR they made fungal not hit air units, and terran rofl stomped all over zerg and they retracted it. Zerg couldn't deal with drops in the mid game and it was insanely one sided. In fact, take away infestor hitting air and Protoss will rofl stomp zerg by massing phoenix every game and just killing every single OL that spawns. | ||
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ooozer
Germany231 Posts
/Edit: now that i think about it: SInce toss has to afford a lot more gas on regular army, getting HT's is harder for them | ||
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MelodyBW
Ukraine154 Posts
On February 12 2012 08:59 Sapphire.lux wrote: Tell you what. I play mainly mech in all 3 MU. Here is how tech tiers work for me: 0-2 siege tanks tier 1 2-7 siege tanks tier 2 a lot of siege tanks tier 3 :p Sorry for being a bit off-topic here, but.. what build order and unit composition you have with mech TvP? | ||
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BanelingXD
130 Posts
Terran players shouldn't be able to "energy expo" with mules and 6 CCs as a 4 click action when Zerg and Toss have nothing remotely comparable. Set Mule cast cooldown to 30 secs and this tactic dies. I actually don't mind gold expos, but why do they need 2 gas on everything? Low resource and island maps are badly needed. I don't like the snipe change. Another ability that could have been fixed with a small damage nerf and extended cooldown. Blizzard responds to every innovative play with a nerf. Its annoying. | ||
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