[D] The raven buff does not address TvZ issues - Page 16

On August 19 2012 21:03 Psychobabas wrote:


From ForGG's twitter:

"박지수 ‏@ForGG1

fucking zerg imba..... "


Say that again? -_-

On August 19 2012 21:08 Grumbels wrote:

forGG is on a foreigner team since a short while

On August 19 2012 21:03 Psychobabas wrote:


From ForGG's twitter:

"박지수 ‏@ForGG1

fucking zerg imba..... "


Say that again? -_-

On August 19 2012 21:12 Ramiz1989 wrote:

That doesn't prove anything... I can also point out that Stephano said ZvT currently is 50/50, and how Taeja has great win ration against the Zerg players. I've also seen that ForGG lost to Vortix, and then some Terran players said that even though they think ZvT is in a Zerg's favor, ForGG played terrible and deserved to lose.

So, your point is?

On August 19 2012 21:24 Plansix wrote:


Also, Koreans love to balance whine. They are in no way immune to this fault.

On August 19 2012 21:12 Ramiz1989 wrote:

That doesn't prove anything... I can also point out that Stephano said ZvT currently is 50/50, and how Taeja has great win ration against the Zerg players. I've also seen that ForGG lost to Vortix, and then some Terran players said that even though they think ZvT is in a Zerg's favor, ForGG played terrible and deserved to lose.

So, your point is?

On August 19 2012 21:38 iloveav wrote:
I dont agree with you on one point especially:
HSM take too much time to get done, and have a low probability of working.
If you look at the time that it takes for a zerg to switch to broodlords, ravens are very short to get.
On the "hard to use" part, positioning of broodlords+funguals is also tricky.

I dont really know if its "harder" to use brood/corruptor/infestor/baneling or marine,HSM, tank and... ghost maybe?

But i do know that the ghost/templar/infestor battles are the ones that decide the battle in the first place, so its about even for me.

Also i dont think having 1 build (HSM) that hard counters a long term investment like broodlord / infestor tech is fair.
Its like vortex vs zerg air + archon toilet. Its just not fair that you can lose a full army in 1-2 seconds (except with nuke maybe?).

Dont know, but its how i see it.

On August 19 2012 21:28 DougJDempsey wrote:


do you people actually read before you post? the first guy who posted "foreigner mentality at it´s best - crying instead of getting better.", he responded with what forgg said. taking things out of context is fun huh? and get in line, you are only the 15th person to bring up taeja. is there really so few other examples? oh wait.

On August 19 2012 11:07 avilo wrote:
...
There are a few core issues to why so many Terrans, including pro korean Terran players are suddenly being beaten handily by inferior Zergs, most often when the game goes to lategame.
After watching some of the TvZs at IEM I was surprised to see the Korean terrans drop games to Zergs that I have barely ever heard the name of. This pretty much never happened before. However it is not something new to SC2, but rather to the terran race. Great zerg players have been dropping games to inferior players (in particular terrans) since I first started following the scene, a few months after release. Early TvZ seemed like an exam the zerg had to score high on to then be in an ~even mid game. I don't agree that there are issues in TvZ. Or if there are, it is too soon to tell. At least Korea doesn't seem to have a problem.

1) Raven HSM can be cost effective if the opponent clumps up broodlord/infestor, but you need about a 3 minute wait time to ever get HSM and you have to perfectly predict your opponent 100% committing to broodlord/infestor/corruptor. The problem: time, efficiency, fungal growth.
They are also great against banelings and corruptors. I agree that it takes way too long to get anything back for your resources invested, though. If a fight breaks out before you get the energy to cast HSM, the ravens are going to be dead weight. Turrets pretty much suck and PDD is only useful against air. I think buffing or changing turrets for a new spell might be a good idea, here, so the Ravens without 100 energy are not useless. Infestors can dump any excess energy for iTerrans, maybe ravens would be more viable if they could dump their energy into something better.

No one is really arguing that ravens aren't the answer to TvZ lategame. What I will argue here is that the reason ravens don't work even when you do build them is because fungal growth many times locks down ravens making it so you cannot HSM (regardless of how well you split). I will also argue that the amount of time, research cost, and energy for the HSM is not appropriate or proportional or balanced for what the HSM is supposed to be able to do.
I too think the energy cost for HSM is a bit high. I believe it is this way to keep ravens from stocking 2 HSMs each. I propose lowering it slightly and also lowering the max energy on ravens. This wouldnt hurt Ravens much at all, seeing as after an HSM they can only drop a turret at the moment. This would be a bit of an odd change as all casters have a max of 200, but meh. It would make ghosts slightly better and HTs worse against max mana ravens. Yeah...

Templar/infestors are able to become useful 100% right when they pop out in the form of either feedbacks, archons, fungal, or IT. Ravens are a gamble and incredible risk because of the time necessary to make them pay off with HSMs, and even in the case you do get an HSM, if your raven is fungalled you suddenly have a paper weight in terms of an investment. Then the ravens die, that's -200 gas for TErran and the infestors are able to burrow and get away.
The raven is not the equivalent of the HT/infestor, that is the ghost, which is also useful right when it pops out. Yes they are a huge gamble, I agree again.

A raven speed buff does zero to address these issues because the problem is and never will be raven speed. The problem is how fungal growth pins down ravens making HSM unusable, and the amount of time necessary to put ravens into play and make them pay themselves off.
It would make it harder for zerg to fungal them, since they get less time, but yes, it doesn't really change much.

2) The queen buff. The queen range buff has been controversial, for obvious reasons. Blizzard recently has acknowledged that creep spread is incredibly powerful but I want to go over why creep has come into the forefront as a balance concern in zvt.

Everyone knows how Zerg works. Their economy with larva inject can grow exponentially, faster than both Terran and Protoss in theory. The catch? You can only get this super economy if you are able to drone, drone, drone unhindered.

Why has creepspread become such an issue? Well, it's a factor of many things. The queen buff (many dubb it the "queendralisk" nowadays) allows Zergs to make a unit that requires no larva, can accumulate heals, and also can spread creep - creep which helps deny a lot of timing attacks by simply being on the map giving vision/time to react.
Creep will not be the thing that scouts attacks for the zerg until far past the early and mid game. Everyone scouts with zerglings and overlords, and creep halfway across the map will most likely not be enough time to react if you were previously "drone, drone, drone"-ing.

Pre-queen buff, creep was more easily able to be controlled with hellions that could kite queens, allowing Terran to keep Zerg's economy in check. Ever since the queen buff, you now see queens holding off virtually all aggression in the first 10 minutes of the game to the point that Terrans have indeed been trying equivalent "greed" builds but all of these greed builds naturally lend themselves towards a lategame TvZ, which right now, as mentionted above - the raven is a gamble due to the amount of preparation time required to pay itself off.
Queens holding off attacks for the first 10 minutes probably says more about the attacks than the queens (or is someone you play against going mass queens?). 4-6 queens will be able to defend very small amounts of units without taking casualties, but any real attack would smash them. If terran is teching, upgrading, expanding and the like, they most likely wont have a force big enough to really hurt a zerg with a good amount of queens and the potential of reinforcements in a head-on fight. Real attacks work, pokes will have to avoid the queens if possible, and if not should not be attempted. If you do try these pokes and they are unsuccessful, obviously the zerg should be in the lead and the game will snowball from there.

The queen preventing hellions denying creep...allows more creep spread...allows denial of attacks...allow all larva to be used on drones until Zerg can power 100% units/tech...all of this snowballs to the point where Terran "has to do damage" but cannot due to the reaction time creep spread allows to deny attacks + the queens themselves.
Again, creep doesn't give reaction time. It does give mobility on the map and strength in battle, though.

3) Fungal growth/infestor
I believe this one is another core issue for late game, not only with TvZ but PvZ as well (yeh, as a random masters player I can talk a bit about this one too).
I am (or rather used to be) a random master player too, high five! With protoss being the winningest race in Korea, and almost tied with zerg internationally in the month of July, I don't see a reason to talk about issues in PvZ. (PvZ favoring protoss in both statistics.)

Broodlord infestor is basically the super army in both lategame TvZ/PvZ. The problem is not how strong broodlords are per se, it's the combination of fungal growth locking down stalkers/units, as well as fungalling vikings/ravens.

Fungal growth completely negates any possible micromanagement from Protoss/Terrans and simply makes the game into a game of running away from the fungal growth, or in the Zerg's case hitting 1 fungal growth means you 100% force an engagement because the opponent cannot flee or use their units.
I agree, the anti-micro part of fungal is boring. Hitting clumps of infestors with EMPs is pretty much a forced retreat for zerg. Same for EMP on HTs. Same for a HT getting a good storm on MMM(, although the terran wont have to wait as long to recoup.) The speed of stimmed MM can also force engagements or secure a decent chunk of army lost for nothing.

For TvZ, a lot of lategame air vs air battles turn into "dodging the 1 fungal growth" to the point every pro terran will scan everywhere when engaging brood/corruptor with vikings/ravens to see where the infestors are. 1 fungal results in a chain of 5-10 more fungals can often times mean the end of a game or losing a large expensive chunk of your army for free. In Terran's case, that means their AA is gone from 1 fungal landing into chain fungals, in Protoss's case it's many times a ton of blink stalkers that simply will never be able to reach the broodlords, or archons being trapped in place.
Nice having scan, though, huh? Zerg would probably love to know where your ghosts and ravens are when they engage. Don't complain that terran players are using one of their staple spells. Also, if all your AA dies to 1 chain fungal then I would propose splitting better.

The infestor is not OP per se, but the stunning effect of fungal is quite problematic in every match-up.
Again, PvZ is favoring protoss and ZvZ is a mirror. Pulling in "every match-up" is pointless. There are bigger balance problems. Protoss winning ~52.3% of match-ups in Korea would suggest taking a look at protoss would be time better spent, at least in my eyes. Fungal's anti-micro is more of a design problem than one of balance actually.
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The above essentially describes what has happened with TvZ. The raven speed buff will not change a thing because the above issues are the core issues. It does not matter how fast your raven is if it gets fungalled. You can build ravens but never have them guaranteed to pay themselves off like infestors/templar are able to because of the current HSM energy/time/research requirements.
Infestors and HTs are not guaranteed to pay themselves off. Ghosts, feedback, tanks etc. can all neutralize them before they give any return.

Blizzard has said they are nerfing creep spread. They are looking at the raven obviously. What I would suggest and bring up for discussion is to tweak the raven hsm energy/upgrade research times/build times/tweak the splash+damage accordingly and make it so these units do not end up as paper weights so often like they do.
If they want to change the raven I would agree making changes around the energy or the turret spell.

To be honest, at this point what would be best for the game period (including ZvP) is to revert the queen change. The overlord speed buff was an excellent change, giving zerg a better scouting option, but the queen change has proven over the last 2-4 months to be too much - perhaps it's time to acknowlege a mistake.
ZvP is, again, not favoring zerg, why would this help the match-up? The overlord speed change was not a buff, it was an un-nerf considering maps have gotten a lot bigger since release (metropolis vs any release map). It was taking longer and longer for zerg to get anything out of their overlords and they covered much less of the map. These 2-4 months have proven that Korean terrans adapt way faster than non-Korean ones.

But if blizzard does not want to go the route of reverting the change, they need to buff the raven or tweak something else in some way. A raven speed change does nothing for the match-up nor address any of the current problems with ravens or unhindered Zerg economies.

If other masters/gm/pro Terrans can leave their input in this thread, that would surely be appreciated by the entire community. I hope I at least put out some food for thought and that this will lead to discussion.

The worst thing that could possibly happen in terms of a balance patch is ravens are given a speed buff and then Terran is left alone for the next 5 months wondering, "how did this address anything?"

On August 19 2012 21:56 Elvin wrote:
Make Ravens automatically spawn with 2 HSM which you cannot resupply (Like Vultures and mines in BW). Use energy for turrets/PDD.

On August 19 2012 21:28 DougJDempsey wrote:


do you people actually read before you post? the first guy who posted "foreigner mentality at it´s best - crying instead of getting better.", he responded with what forgg said. taking things out of context is fun huh? and get in line, you are only the 15th person to bring up taeja. is there really so few other examples? oh wait.