EPTCall to Action: October 2 Balance Testing - Page 7
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a176
Canada6688 Posts
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never_Nal
Costa Rica676 Posts
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Fody03
Italy310 Posts
On October 04 2013 00:27 mechengineer123 wrote: lol now all the new terran things are gone. Warhound already removed in beta, haven't seen hellbats in months, and after this patch widow mine is gone too. Good stuff. it doesnt particoularly bother me,but heck if its not true | ||
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Existor
Russian Federation4295 Posts
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Empirimancer
Canada1024 Posts
On October 04 2013 00:47 Existor wrote: You are overreacting to these changes. This is only slight nerf to widow mine and you call it "Widow Mine is gone". It's still can do it work It's a 50% reduction to its area of effect. It's a HUGE nerf. | ||
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ETisME
12265 Posts
On October 04 2013 00:04 Big J wrote: Not really. A nerfed mine just means that the current standard build is weaker, possibly even too weak. Meanwhile they could have buffed (cerain) other units from the get go, because it doesn't interact with mine builds. For as long as mines are just a support unit, I don't really see the reason for this nerf and I hope that it still does not diminish the viability of mines too greatly. Of cause it will. The nerf to the mine is to get rid of bio mine style completely and blizzard isn't really trying to hide their intention here. They said it well, it should not be a unit to replace tank's role, instead of making tank a niche unit and widow mine being a key unit, they want to change the order up. This patch is mainly to set a direction for tvz because they don't think it is going the right way. Similar to beta where reaper had a lot of different changes. I have no doubt win rates for T will drop a lot in the next few months, but we would also see new meta developing and blizzard will patch things as it goes along. (oops and I meant make mech more viable along with bio tank in the original sentence there) | ||
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FLuE
United States1012 Posts
On October 04 2013 00:27 lolfail9001 wrote: %25? you mean to the default mech army speed? Well, there comes your problem: you have to heavily nerf damage and/or range of thor's attack and it suddenly loses it's actual utility against muta clumps that are sniping stuff. In fact, blizzard i believe gave that 1 shot muta attack to widow mine just for the sake of giving some kind of mobile anti-muta stuff to couple it with thor. Yes you'd also make it do 1/3 the damage or whatever. Basically, the Thor sucks for what it is suppose to help with. Honestly, you could leave widow mines as is but make it so they don't shoot air, and then make the Thor actually work as an AA unit. The problem is the Thor stinks for AA especially before you have several out and then you need the mine to help with Muta harassment. But they want Muta Harassment to be good so they buffed the muta with regen and speed. But if you don't catch the Terran before turrets/mines the mutas stink. Ultimately they just keep balancing themselves in a circle because they don't fix any real problems. The mine isn't the problem, zerg detection is the problem. They just keep making the faster units even faster, and then the slower units become more worthless. They can't decide on the games mobility structure, and when you couple that with the ever changing map size it is a giant cluster. | ||
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Goldfish
2230 Posts
On October 03 2013 12:51 bittman wrote: Only reason I'm neutral with the roach thing is that it feels like Blizzards answer seems to be to just keep making things walk faster and faster. I'd prefer different approaches. I like the slow roach crawl hehe Burrow I guess I'm a bit fine (mainly because it feels really underpowered before) but I agree in general about making things faster. The Oracle change, you need to look at what it does and what it benefits from faster movement. The Oracle concept itself is nice but Edit - For some reason, I forgot about Revelation (ironically since it's in the patch note itself) and focused simply on Pulsar Beam (which when just against workers, faster speed doesn't really help much except maybe the occasional early game oracle rush but that usually done with proxy star gates anyway). The speed helps Oracle scouting + Revelation more so than than it destroying worker lines. The speed change with the Oracle I am fine with in that case. We'll see what it does. So disregard my comment about it (I forgot about Revelation, even though it was in the patch notes, for some reason >.>). Anyway, what I was saying not specific to the Oracle (and in fact, the oracle change is fine) but with SC2 in general. That most of the difficulty in things comes with speed but yet that's the only thing. We have overpowered things in SC2 but yet the difficulty in controlling (and countering against them) and how huge of an impact of the game they have is a problem. Widow Mines are an example (the difference between a good widow mine hit compared to a bad hit is enough difference to change the outcome of an entire battle and potentially the entire game). Though since they're nerfing it, at least Blizzard understands (though I said this before, I think I would rather them adding a max target cap on it and/or slowing down the speed of the projectile a bit but we'll have to see what this radius nerf does first). Widow Mines (like Banelings and other huge AoE stuff against clumps of units) are also supposed to promote micro and provide a challenge. It does but it's not very practical to split marines or micro zerglings and stuff against widow mines (for example). I said this before but micro in SC2 is mostly just how fast you can do things. Outside of speed, it doesn't have as much depth. And in fact, lots of people lately have been catching on that SC2 is actually way too fast (battles that win or lose games can occur in 10 seconds or less, which is not enough time for most people to react). The game being hard doesn't mean the game has depth (and depth is important). Deep games are probably also difficult to master. However, difficult games are not necessarily deep games (it depends on what was done to make the game difficult). In BW, micro wasn't simply about speed (nor was it the important thing most of the time actually) but about precision and depth. Mutalisk are a good example. When microing Mutalisk, you have to pay attention to what direction the Mutalisk is facing (before attacking, depending on which unit command you use) and distance between the Mutalisk and the target, etc. And after taking all that into account, you have to decide whether to use attack move, attack (directly), patrol, hold position, etc. I could go in more depth but anyone who has played BW can also vouch and say that Mutalisk micro was just very deep. There was so many decisions you can make and so many ways to improve, and it was practical and easy micro to do. You didn't need super quick speed or anything to start microing Mutalisk against scourge or marines or whatever. It had a ton of depth and it was easy (and practical) to learn too. Compared to SC2 where all micro is "how fast you do it", it's really watered down in comparison. Again, I don't blame Blizzard or anything, I think HotS was a good experiment but I really think some key gameplay mechanics from BW should return in SC2 (yes, most of them were accidental but look at most competitive games like fighting games or FPS, a lot of them have "accidental" deep gameplay mechanics but they end up being encouraged by the developers in later installments). I remember reading here that BW was doing #6 place in PC bangs in South Korea while SC2 (after HotS) was only doing at #11. If BW is still beating SC2, then something is wrong. I think it is very important to emphasis the difference in gameplay and depth in BW compared to SC2. Using "whether it is hard to do or not" as a gauge to judge whether it is deep or not is wrong. SC2, microing is hard and the skill ceiling is high but what does it all come down to? Simply how fast you can split marines or whatever. BW was hard but at the same time it has depth. SC2 microing is hard but it doesn't have much depth compared to BW. Just want some food for thought as I know Blizzard can't change anything big until LotV (these small changes I am fine in HotS). Again, it's very important to emphasis that depth =/= difficulty. While SC2 has difficulty in micro, it doesn't have as much depth as BW and depth in difficulty (not just difficulty by itself) is a key part in what helps make a game fun. | ||
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annedeman
Netherlands350 Posts
On October 04 2013 00:56 Empirimancer wrote: It's a 50% reduction to its area of effect. It's a HUGE nerf. people tend to easily underestimate nerfs in radius of aoe spells as the area goes with the square of the radius, i feel that with the current change the splash is small enough now that they will not be viable anymore, a change to a radius of 1.5 contributes to about 26 percent reduction of area which i think should be enough. | ||
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Naphal
Germany2099 Posts
On October 04 2013 01:02 ETisME wrote: Of cause it will. The nerf to the mine is to get rid of bio mine style completely and blizzard isn't really trying to hide their intention here. They said it well, it should not be a unit to replace tank's role, instead of making tank a niche unit and widow mine being a key unit, they want to change the order up. This patch is mainly to set a direction for tvz because they don't think it is going the right way. Similar to beta where reaper had a lot of different changes. I have no doubt win rates for T will drop a lot in the next few months, but we would also see new meta developing and blizzard will patch things as it goes along. (oops and I meant make mech more viable along with bio tank in the original sentence there) david kim also said on several occasions that he does not like the tank / tankplay and is ok with it being phased out, so i think someone forced him here. | ||
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ETisME
12265 Posts
On October 04 2013 01:28 Naphal wrote: david kim also said on several occasions that he does not like the tank / tankplay and is ok with it being phased out, so i think someone forced him here. we all know starcraft has a balance team, he is merely the team leader or something | ||
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bo1b
Australia12814 Posts
Seems stupidly out of place when zerg is clearly starting to start winning zvt, if not have an advantage (statistically at least) in korean zvt. | ||
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Snusmumriken
Sweden1717 Posts
So why nerf the mine at all? | ||
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Antisocialmunky
United States5912 Posts
@Why nerf now? Their patching department works on data driven-ness, so now they finally have data to say its OP after zergs have figured it out. I would hate to be one of those zergs that figured out how to deal with it, you know spend all that effort and have it patched to ez mode for everyone. | ||
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-Kyo-
Japan1926 Posts
In the same vein, I still believe that the oracle buff is pointless; while on the other hand, the other two race buffs are interesting and will most certainly need testing. I'm really curious to see how the widow mine works after their applied patch. | ||
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Zheryn
Sweden3653 Posts
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Shantastic
United States435 Posts
On October 04 2013 01:39 bo1b wrote: That is a fucking massive nerf to biomine holy shit. Seems stupidly out of place when zerg is clearly starting to start winning zvt, if not have an advantage (statistically at least) in korean zvt. It's not about one race or another winning. It's about the unit itself being really stupid. Widow mines are borderline coin-flippy because it's all about exploiting a single micro mistake from Zerg swinging games massively into favors. I'd be all for reducing the cost or cooldown of the Widow Mine and its attack, respectively. Gas units that have huge, powerful, game-winning attacks, with one big disadvantage lend themselves to volatile, annoyingly coin-flippy games. It's not fun to watch a Zerg slowly climb ahead just by playing cost-efficiently against Terran, only to lose the game because of one Sentinel Missile. Just like it isn't fun to watch a Terran try over and over and over again to get the golden mine shot and fail, thus losing by default to Muta-Ling. Tempering the mine so that it does less volatile damage (and maybe more often), is only good for the players and the viewers, not to mention the game overall. | ||
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bo1b
Australia12814 Posts
On October 04 2013 02:21 Shantastic wrote: It's not about one race or another winning. It's about the unit itself being really stupid. Widow mines are borderline coin-flippy because it's all about exploiting a single micro mistake from Zerg swinging games massively into favors. I'd be all for reducing the cost or cooldown of the Widow Mine and its attack, respectively. Gas units that have huge, powerful, game-winning attacks, with one big disadvantage lend themselves to volatile, annoyingly coin-flippy games. It's not fun to watch a Zerg slowly climb ahead just by playing cost-efficiently against Terran, only to lose the game because of one Sentinel Missile. Just like it isn't fun to watch a Terran try over and over and over again to get the golden mine shot and fail, thus losing by default to Muta-Ling. Tempering the mine so that it does less volatile damage (and maybe more often), is only good for the players and the viewers, not to mention the game overall. I'd agree with you except that the micro of top zergs recently has basically been making it so mines only ever detonate at best barely above cost efficient, and at worst on top of there own army. While I'm not a huge fan of the unit itself, terran is going to be without hope if this patch goes through without recompense. | ||
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Shantastic
United States435 Posts
On October 04 2013 02:00 Zheryn wrote: I don't like that they are trying to push zerg even more to muta/ling/bane in ZvT when it's already pretty much the only thing we see together with a few roach bane all ins. As a zerg player, this is why I dissaprove of both tank/mine change. I would like it more if they nerfed/changed mutalisks a little, I think their regen is too strong, especially for ZvP. I think nerfing muta regen and maybe increase their damage a little would make for a more interesting play, as they are already so bad in a heads up fight. Well they're trying to improve mech so that you see ranged ground + Vipers in ZvT as well, but they're doing it from the Terran side. Their aim IMO is to see Muta-Ling against Bio and Range Zerg against Mech, kinda like in BW from what I know (which isn't much). I think the mech buff really helps Vikings deal with Vipers in the late mid-game, forcing Zerg to mix in Corruptors or Hydras. While Brood Lord-Infestor isn't fun to watch vs bio because of straight up imbalance, I think those slow, split map games of SH/Infestor/BroodLord would be much more fun against a Terran that also gets a chance to get a Raven-mech ball up. That is probably a ways off still, but I like Blizzard's approach on this, to ZvT at least. Also it's possible the Tank buff makes them waaaaaay better against immortals in TvP, depending on the composition. We'll see how that works out. | ||
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Rhaegal
United States678 Posts
On October 04 2013 00:34 a176 wrote: I don't understand why giving vikings free upgrades is considered 'a step in the right direction' seems good to me. Was kinda dumb that Protoss immortals and collosi shared upgrades with stalkers/zealots. now terran has something similar. not like we are ever gonna make tanks in the matchup anyway | ||
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