On April 11 2013 11:45 ElMeanYo wrote: Swarm Hosts need to be buffed ALOT. They are really bad vs anyone with any level of multi-tasking and micro. Anytime you see a Zerg start building Hosts you know he's gonna lose. Probably why you hardly see them at high-level play.
Bio and Stalkers just go around them and there is no way the Zerg player can respond in a timely fashion with Hosts. 3+ collosi or 5+ tanks shut down any number of locusts. They are just bad, bad, bad.
I would say make them less supply, move faster, unburrow faster, and locusts have a longer life span. I don't think locusts need to do more damage, that is one thing they are good at, if they can ever manage to hit the enemy army.
lol I disagree with you so hard on swarmhosts. Their good if zergs know how to use them and right now almost NOBODY does.
Ok so you think SH are good as is? or do you think they could use help and people aren't using them right? I'm no joe pro, but i'm not terrible, I do however find them wanting in ZvT and ZvZ. Bio with speed medivacs just simply out maneuvers you way to well and in ZvZ mutas do the same thing.
So how are they good if they are only good in one match up??? Which I would say ZvP they are good but that's the only time they are good. Anything you do with them to make them work in ZvZ or ZvT is some kind of meta gamey gimmicky garbage that's not really solid. IE: Something like using nydus with them to try to help with their immobility problem...issue is they don't shoot Air so drops / muta will still eat your face.
From a logical point of view, I would wish that the swamhost eggs would be targetable once they spawn, however that would only make them worse and I agree that the swarmhost is definitely underused in the current game (and I can see why).
On April 11 2013 11:45 ElMeanYo wrote: Swarm Hosts need to be buffed ALOT. They are really bad vs anyone with any level of multi-tasking and micro. Anytime you see a Zerg start building Hosts you know he's gonna lose. Probably why you hardly see them at high-level play.
Bio and Stalkers just go around them and there is no way the Zerg player can respond in a timely fashion with Hosts. 3+ collosi or 5+ tanks shut down any number of locusts. They are just bad, bad, bad.
I would say make them less supply, move faster, unburrow faster, and locusts have a longer life span. I don't think locusts need to do more damage, that is one thing they are good at, if they can ever manage to hit the enemy army.
lol I disagree with you so hard on swarmhosts. Their good if zergs know how to use them and right now almost NOBODY does.
Ok so you think SH are good as is? or do you think they could use help and people aren't using them right? I'm no joe pro, but i'm not terrible, I do however find them wanting in ZvT and ZvZ. Bio with speed medivacs just simply out maneuvers you way to well and in ZvZ mutas do the same thing.
So how are they good if they are only good in one match up??? Which I would say ZvP they are good but that's the only time they are good. Anything you do with them to make them work in ZvZ or ZvT is some kind of meta gamey gimmicky garbage that's not really solid. IE: Something like using nydus with them to try to help with their immobility problem...issue is they don't shoot Air so drops / muta will still eat your face.
Hmm their really good vs toss and good vs terran mech. vs terran bio their not so good and it's so easy to make a mistake with them vs bio and then they die in a heart beat.
They will never be good zvz if both players do muta that shouldn't even really be your case for why they are bad. zvt I can hear a case, but saying their bad and bringing up zvz isn't a good one. Also it's probably better that swarmhost doesn't become standard do you know how boring it would be to see zvz's where both players went sh's? Oh man that would be like bl vs bl just as boring and bad.
zvt like I said good vs mech, very hard vs bio and good zvp all around. I wouldn't mind a buff though to make them more useful vs bio though .
On April 11 2013 16:37 Topdoller wrote: The should have brought the lurker back its as simple as that. As to fixing Swarmhosts how about the hosts being able to hit air too? It would make them a bit more versatile and i think would encourage them to be used in general play
No this would make swarmhosts broken as fuck. It would make protoss engaging swarmhosts near impossible (observers) it would make it impossible for zvz to ever end (both players overseers would get sniped) and it would just be way way way to strong. Them hitting air is something that can never happen.
The lack of swarm host use is not surprising at all to me. In its current iteration, it is a unit that you have to mass in order to make it useful, but countering the unit with AoE is so easy that no one wants to make that commitment (of massing swarm hosts). You cant make 1-2 swarm hosts to complement your army, because 4 locusts wont make any difference. You will have to make 5-6 swarm hosts to have an impact, and at that point you realize that the best thing to do is to mass even more swarm hosts.
Its just a stupid unit and it should never have been spawning units. We already had the broodlord and the infestor to do that. Just think about how awesome the game would be right now if they had introduced the lurker instead of the swarm host. You can build 1-2 lurker to complement your army, and you immediately gain some map control. But they are too proud to do such a thing, thus they rather prefer to introduce flawed units like the swarm host.
edit: lol i just watched the interview and even david kim says "the biggest succes you can get out of the unit, is to make as many swarm hosts as possible". He even makes that statement himself and still does not realize how a unit that is designed that way is terrible for the game. Units that you have to mass (because they dont work well with other units) is exactly what makes the swarm host so bad and boring. Cant believe he actually admitted that himself. /facedesk
- Mech is fine, it just isn't being experimented with and that is less of a balance problem than it is a player problem - Swarm Host is biggest disappointment in terms of its lack of use. Decreasing burrow time or increasing the movement speed of Swarm Hosts could be potential solution
Swarm host is fine, it just isn't being experimented with and that is less of a balance problem than it is a player problem.
Why it can't go both ways ? Mech apart TvT (in which it is great) is pretty much shit, and most of the streaming pros already say that.
On April 11 2013 14:10 Masada714 wrote: I'm sure most Zergs will disagree with me but I'm sad that they are considering buffing the Swarm Host. It is incredibly strong in ZvP, not sure about ZvT. But locusts do incredible amounts of damage and Toss typically doesn't have a good way to deal with it. They usually pop out with 10 - 15 Swarm Hosts at once and have support to instantly snipe any detection we have to deal with it. If you try to counter they will just completely destroy your base and if you try to engage it directly, more often then not it won't be very cost efficient if you kill everything and the you die to the resupply.
However, I'm really happy with the map discussion and it only looks like it will keep improving with every season. I'm curious to what maps we will see on the ladder for the next season.
I agree, swarm hosts are incredibly frustrating to deal with as protoss where zergs can fly overseers with coruptors and spores to kill your observers so you need to be really careful. But I can understand them being too weak in tvz as they can stim and scan to clear sh easily, it's a hard thing to balance.
The reason mech is boring is because blizzard chose to make mech deathball'ish rather than multitaskbased. I wonder whether David Kim/the Blizzard team is aware of this.
Every time something is not used they talk about buffing it. Mech is not used, it's the players problem for not trying harder...At least he admitted they don't actually want mech viable in the same way bio is. Why do they hate BW so much?
Make option for Swarm Host to send ground-only and air-only attack locusts. You can manually choose which locust comes out every cycly and default is last pick. To balance this out you can only attack visible unit (not even revealed units like observers etc)
Swarmhost issue is really obvious. I remember watching leenock stream and he was at like 5 bases vs 3 bases toss but lost because the locust didn't find the enemy army and he didn't notice until the army came from the side and just lost all the swarm host for almost nothing on the toss side. he even said swarmhost is trash
the issue is that swarmhost just makes the game volatiles too quickly and easily.
On April 11 2013 11:45 ElMeanYo wrote: Swarm Hosts need to be buffed ALOT. They are really bad vs anyone with any level of multi-tasking and micro. Anytime you see a Zerg start building Hosts you know he's gonna lose. Probably why you hardly see them at high-level play.
Bio and Stalkers just go around them and there is no way the Zerg player can respond in a timely fashion with Hosts. 3+ collosi or 5+ tanks shut down any number of locusts. They are just bad, bad, bad.
I would say make them less supply, move faster, unburrow faster, and locusts have a longer life span. I don't think locusts need to do more damage, that is one thing they are good at, if they can ever manage to hit the enemy army.
Not sure what league you are but I'm a high-mid masters and a 2-base nydus+SH+queen+Spore build versus protoss works really well. After that you can expand to a 3rd and add hydralisks.
I've successfully used them versus terran as well, A LOT.
On April 11 2013 20:21 ETisME wrote: Swarmhost issue is really obvious. I remember watching leenock stream and he was at like 5 bases vs 3 bases toss but lost because the locust didn't find the enemy army and he didn't notice until the army came from the side and just lost all the swarm host for almost nothing on the toss side. he even said swarmhost is trash
the issue is that swarmhost just makes the game volatiles too quickly and easily.
ALternate your positioning and make sure you have proper map control before using SH's, if the enemy managed to completely flank him and catch him by surprise, he obviously did not have map control.
On April 11 2013 19:38 gh0un wrote: The lack of swarm host use is not surprising at all to me. In its current iteration, it is a unit that you have to mass in order to make it useful, but countering the unit with AoE is so easy that no one wants to make that commitment (of massing swarm hosts). You cant make 1-2 swarm hosts to complement your army, because 4 locusts wont make any difference. You will have to make 5-6 swarm hosts to have an impact, and at that point you realize that the best thing to do is to mass even more swarm hosts.
It depends which phase of the game you're in. If you get swarmhosts early enough, you do fine with like 2-3, at which you can start adding on more. It's all about the timing windows to (ab)use. That most of the professionals refuse to let go of their beloved WoL compositions doesn;'t mean SH's are useless.
How many years did it take again for zergs to start using infestors? and for the metagame to actually stabilize? And how long has HotS been out thus far?
On April 11 2013 20:19 Sapphire.lux wrote: Every time something is not used they talk about buffing it. Mech is not used, it's the players problem for not trying harder...At least he admitted they don't actually want mech viable in the same way bio is. Why do they hate BW so much?
Because they won't replicate BW by buffing mech. In order to replicate the BW mech metgame they will have to redesign so many parts of the game. Either that is too complicated/time consuming for the Blizzard team or they are not competent enough to understand how to do it.
the guy is totally ignorant sometimes. Mech is a total failure, even less used than in WoL perhaps. Completely unviable in TvP and not used in TvZ. Tanks see only TvT play basically despite having a free upgrade now. Admittedly TvZ and PvZ are a bit better now with some more action going on. TvP however is hardly improved, it's even more an all-in or defend game for P now with the occasional guessing game of oracles vs widow mines.
TvP in general, ZvZs mutafest and skytoss in ZvP could use some tweaking. Inevitable the medivac will gain a small nerf too, I guess the speedboost will just get a longer cooldown or something.
On April 11 2013 10:49 Aiios wrote: As the title states, Dignitas Apollo recently sat down and discussed a few different things with David Kim, lead balance designer at Blizzard. Here is the video:
To summarize what the interview states:
- Blizzard is receiving overall positive feedback and are being asked to leave the game as it is by many pros (mainly Koreans) - Blizzard wants to take things slow in terms of rolling out balance patches - They felt as if the Medivac Speed Boost is the biggest complained about issue in Starcraft - They are not going to roll our nerfs but they think it could get boring to see every TvZ as a mass drop fest if it is all that ever happens - Mech is fine, it just isn't being experimented with and that is less of a balance problem than it is a player problem - Swarm Host is biggest disappointment in terms of its lack of use. Decreasing burrow time or increasing the movement speed of Swarm Hosts could be potential solution
I hope I didn't leave anything out!
gah, please dont buff swarmhosts.
I feel like zerg players have not totally figured out how to safely incorporate swarm hosts into their play without dying, but when they do theyll become way more common.
On April 11 2013 19:38 gh0un wrote: The lack of swarm host use is not surprising at all to me. In its current iteration, it is a unit that you have to mass in order to make it useful, but countering the unit with AoE is so easy that no one wants to make that commitment (of massing swarm hosts). You cant make 1-2 swarm hosts to complement your army, because 4 locusts wont make any difference. You will have to make 5-6 swarm hosts to have an impact, and at that point you realize that the best thing to do is to mass even more swarm hosts.
It depends which phase of the game you're in. If you get swarmhosts early enough, you do fine with like 2-3, at which you can start adding on more. It's all about the timing windows to (ab)use. That most of the professionals refuse to let go of their beloved WoL compositions doesn;'t mean SH's are useless.
How many years did it take again for zergs to start using infestors? and for the metagame to actually stabilize? And how long has HotS been out thus far?
Problem with just splashing a few swarmhosts is that they don't synergize at all with the rest of the zerg army in that way. Mixing in a few slow siege units in an otherwise very fast army is troublesome, you kinda lose the speed advantage of zerg then. SH are good for relentlessly sieging something letting the locusts get in on themselves, for which you just need some sort of critical mass. Getting a few and then pushing with your traditional army plus the locusts works quite poorly, the locusts tend to block your army immensely or vice versa and your troops just get demolished in the downtime between waves. With roach/hydra this get's a bit better but this comes into play a bit later and AoE starts becoming a real problem then.
The entire design of the swarm host is flawed a bit, they don't well as an early siege unit. They are just a mass or not use at all unit too much. Later on their role is kind of overshadowed by broodlords as well.
EPT
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