I love how people say ghost ghost ghost why don't you go ghost?
Seriously even the pros don't use ghost anymore even with bio. Maru, Innovation, ForGG , Bomber they gave up on ghost in profit on only MMM because let's face it ghost are really expensive and slow your upgrades severely. Ghost are great in late game when you are already 3/3 but it's the time protoss shine. So the ftw bet is to not invest on ghost and focus on upgrades to break protoss midgame when he is a little bit vulnerable.
So now explain me how a mech player who have to invest so much gas to get units (factory cost armory cost , tanks/thor/mines/viking/banshee) can afford the 250 gas upgrade + the high gas cost of ghost + the absolute non synergy with mech upgrade. Seriously this is viable even further than the bio case! It's viable if your plan is to hard turtle for a 30 min game.
So basically going ghost with mech is saying to the protoss. NO RUSH 15 min plz. And when you go out you have mass tempest giving you a warm welcome!
Double shots for tanks has to be researched a little more, as it would make armor count twice too, so some units it would one shot would perhaps became change to 2 (well 4) shots).
right now u need 10 tank shots to get rid of the shields and then 4 more for the 200 hitpoints
Or you could just EMP the immortals to remove the shields on the immortals, or any other protoss unit for that matter. EMP also has the added bonus of being able to make sentries, HT, DTs and archons useless.
Toss players get immortals to counter your tanks, rather then ask for a patch to fix your problem, why don't you get something that counters the immortal?
I feel people need to play differently to do better rather then everyone asking for different changes to suit them.
Terrans build their counters to immortals. Its called playing bio.
Even with ghosts, Mech does not get costefficient against immortals.
It does get. The problem is not mech units itself. Withouts shields, immortals are almost useless, they die so fast.
The problem is harrash. As mech player how do you stop protoss from harrashing your base? Ye its quite hard. Another thing is that mech is slow to rebuild. Hellbat, siegetank,ghost,raven, (thor) wins protoss army when sieged. But its slow to rebuild and very bad at defending several places at the same time.
Go to a unit tester and try it... Ghost and Tank cost both nearly as much as an Immortal. for 10tanks and 5ghost (2500/1750) you get like 13immortals.
And if Immortals with 200HP "die so fast", guess what Tanks do with 160HP.
Ghostmech gets costefficient against Immortals when the armies get huge. Before that immortals completely shut you down on their own, even if you counter them as hard as you can.
How do I shut down harass? Hellions, Vikings, Turrets. It's actually not that hard if you have a little bit of experience with TvT Mech vs Bio play, Mech vs harassbased Protoss is a cakewalk.
Hellbat, siegetank,ghost,raven, (thor) wins if you get into a 200 vs 200 deathball fight with only 30scvs left and the Protoss has been reluctant to switch into VR/Carrier/Tempest of 5 bases when he maxed at 15mins and instead kept on throwing away ground units for 10mins while the Terran did this passive turtle off 3-4bases.
Since when tempest has been counter to mech? Thor>voidray
Tempests are really really good against Mech in the late game actually, similarly to how they would be used in PvZ by just adding 3-5 of them to the otherwise very specialized ground army (could be lots of immortals, archons, chargelots, mass blink stalker+colossus, whatever fits best against what the terran is doing) and restrict every movement the terran could make by being able to outrange and outmaneuver him. Also having a couple of Stargates and potentially being able to techswitch into a number of Void Rays is always neat against Mech. I think once a Protoss is in such a good economic position it gets naturally very difficult for a meching terran because a smart Protoss will always be able to find holes and good engagements in the late game and the tech switches Protoss can do as well as the warp in mechanic are pretty nasty to deal with in the lategame.
I think to make mech "viable" it should be dangerous and scary to face in the midgame, not in the lategame. Tempests being a great unit in the lategame is how they are meant to be played, it's not necessary to change that. The problem is that Mech overall is just not that great in the midgame. I don't think it's possible to narrow it down to Immortals, although they definitely play a role. Even more important in my opinion however is how differently SC2 works as a game. In SC:BW it's very hard to crack a base or attack up to high ground, so it's actually possible to defend whole bases with just a small number of tanks and clever building placements and maybe some scvs helping. In SC2 the defender's advantage is just really bad comparatively, Protoss has tons of units specialized to circumvent even the little advantage that you have in the first place (Blink Stalkers, Colossus, Immortals) and also Supply Counts work differently in SC2, in general the transition from mid to lategame is very abrupt and players just suddenly have 200/200 with almost half of the supply being workers. It almost seems like battles are designed around being fair when fought at equal supply counts, but I personally don't think that's a clever way to design an RTS. The incentive behind that might be to make the game easier to watch for new viewers and to make it "esports compatible" and easy to compare supply counts. I personally don't think it contributes to the goal of what makes the "SC:BW-style" RTS genre (I'm just saying that's a thing) so much fun to play and strategic in the first place, because to contribute to that specific goal you need diversity and less "shallowness" (for lack of a better word) in your opportunities, and the counters and interactions between units and even whole races in SC2 are pretty one-dimensional and straight-forward more often than not.
Not saying that that is necessarily a bad thing, because it opens up a lot of opportunities for the players to get really good at showing incredibly strong army movement and map awareness skills, also a strong sense of choosing the right army engagements. These kinds of opportunities weren't always there in SC:BW because there was so much other stuff to do. From a game design perspective though it's always more rewarding (but also more risky) to go for maximum opportunities and interactions that you don't necessarily completely understand yourself (so you trade diversity for balance and understanding of your own game), while at the same time cutting out redundencies (for example 2 different unit types that function similarly are unnecessary) to make the game easier to understand for new players. Balance is then achieved later by a whole lot of work and trying to be clever about how to approach changes to the ideas you implemented, which could include cutting stuff out.
I think Blizzard generally approaches their game with this mindset, but they seemed very cautious and almost hesitant to go all out on diversity in SC2 in fear of making the game imbalanced and not viable for esports. Again, not saying that this makes the game bad, but it is very hard to create such a deep and in many ways groundbreaking game like SC:BW with a cautious mindset.
Here's a nice interview with Mike Morhaime where he talks about the original Starcraft and how they approached the game design for it, interestingly he says they got a lot of inspiration for how to design it from Magic: The Gathering, a game which itself has a very viable and alive competitive scene.
Tempest is the worst unit that you can do vs mech. Ravens>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>tempest
Tempest is the worst unit that you can do vs mech. Ravens>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>tempest
You go HT + Tempest. IMO that's by far the best late game unit compositon vs mech.
I actually think this is where mech vs toss becomes more viable and as interesting as it can get. instead of having ghost vs ht micro. the unit composition and interaction becomes more interesting, with ghost and tanks to zone out the HTs etc
right now u need 10 tank shots to get rid of the shields and then 4 more for the 200 hitpoints
Or you could just EMP the immortals to remove the shields on the immortals, or any other protoss unit for that matter. EMP also has the added bonus of being able to make sentries, HT, DTs and archons useless.
Toss players get immortals to counter your tanks, rather then ask for a patch to fix your problem, why don't you get something that counters the immortal?
I feel people need to play differently to do better rather then everyone asking for different changes to suit them.
Terrans build their counters to immortals. Its called playing bio.
Even with ghosts, Mech does not get costefficient against immortals.
It does get. The problem is not mech units itself. Withouts shields, immortals are almost useless, they die so fast.
The problem is harrash. As mech player how do you stop protoss from harrashing your base? Ye its quite hard. Another thing is that mech is slow to rebuild. Hellbat, siegetank,ghost,raven, (thor) wins protoss army when sieged. But its slow to rebuild and very bad at defending several places at the same time.
Go to a unit tester and try it... Ghost and Tank cost both nearly as much as an Immortal. for 10tanks and 5ghost (2500/1750) you get like 13immortals.
And if Immortals with 200HP "die so fast", guess what Tanks do with 160HP.
Ghostmech gets costefficient against Immortals when the armies get huge. Before that immortals completely shut you down on their own, even if you counter them as hard as you can.
How do I shut down harass? Hellions, Vikings, Turrets. It's actually not that hard if you have a little bit of experience with TvT Mech vs Bio play, Mech vs harassbased Protoss is a cakewalk.
Hellbat, siegetank,ghost,raven, (thor) wins if you get into a 200 vs 200 deathball fight with only 30scvs left and the Protoss has been reluctant to switch into VR/Carrier/Tempest of 5 bases when he maxed at 15mins and instead kept on throwing away ground units for 10mins while the Terran did this passive turtle off 3-4bases.
Since when tempest has been counter to mech? Thor>voidray
Tempests are really really good against Mech in the late game actually, similarly to how they would be used in PvZ by just adding 3-5 of them to the otherwise very specialized ground army (could be lots of immortals, archons, chargelots, mass blink stalker+colossus, whatever fits best against what the terran is doing) and restrict every movement the terran could make by being able to outrange and outmaneuver him. Also having a couple of Stargates and potentially being able to techswitch into a number of Void Rays is always neat against Mech. I think once a Protoss is in such a good economic position it gets naturally very difficult for a meching terran because a smart Protoss will always be able to find holes and good engagements in the late game and the tech switches Protoss can do as well as the warp in mechanic are pretty nasty to deal with in the lategame.
I think to make mech "viable" it should be dangerous and scary to face in the midgame, not in the lategame. Tempests being a great unit in the lategame is how they are meant to be played, it's not necessary to change that. The problem is that Mech overall is just not that great in the midgame. I don't think it's possible to narrow it down to Immortals, although they definitely play a role. Even more important in my opinion however is how differently SC2 works as a game. In SC:BW it's very hard to crack a base or attack up to high ground, so it's actually possible to defend whole bases with just a small number of tanks and clever building placements and maybe some scvs helping. In SC2 the defender's advantage is just really bad comparatively, Protoss has tons of units specialized to circumvent even the little advantage that you have in the first place (Blink Stalkers, Colossus, Immortals) and also Supply Counts work differently in SC2, in general the transition from mid to lategame is very abrupt and players just suddenly have 200/200 with almost half of the supply being workers. It almost seems like battles are designed around being fair when fought at equal supply counts, but I personally don't think that's a clever way to design an RTS. The incentive behind that might be to make the game easier to watch for new viewers and to make it "esports compatible" and easy to compare supply counts. I personally don't think it contributes to the goal of what makes the "SC:BW-style" RTS genre (I'm just saying that's a thing) so much fun to play and strategic in the first place, because to contribute to that specific goal you need diversity and less "shallowness" (for lack of a better word) in your opportunities, and the counters and interactions between units and even whole races in SC2 are pretty one-dimensional and straight-forward more often than not.
Not saying that that is necessarily a bad thing, because it opens up a lot of opportunities for the players to get really good at showing incredibly strong army movement and map awareness skills, also a strong sense of choosing the right army engagements. These kinds of opportunities weren't always there in SC:BW because there was so much other stuff to do. From a game design perspective though it's always more rewarding (but also more risky) to go for maximum opportunities and interactions that you don't necessarily completely understand yourself (so you trade diversity for balance and understanding of your own game), while at the same time cutting out redundencies (for example 2 different unit types that function similarly are unnecessary) to make the game easier to understand for new players. Balance is then achieved later by a whole lot of work and trying to be clever about how to approach changes to the ideas you implemented, which could include cutting stuff out.
I think Blizzard generally approaches their game with this mindset, but they seemed very cautious and almost hesitant to go all out on diversity in SC2 in fear of making the game imbalanced and not viable for esports. Again, not saying that this makes the game bad, but it is very hard to create such a deep and in many ways groundbreaking game like SC:BW with a cautious mindset.
Here's a nice interview with Mike Morhaime where he talks about the original Starcraft and how they approached the game design for it, interestingly he says they got a lot of inspiration for how to design it from Magic: The Gathering, a game which itself has a very viable and alive competitive scene. http://youtu.be/JEs-aA0eZ2Q?t=18s
Tempest is the worst unit that you can do vs mech. Ravens>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>tempest
PDDs are indeed really strong against Tempests so you might be right, I didn't think about that.
HTs are also incredibly strong against Ravens though (if you want to use the Ravens offensively), so I'm not sure how that scenario would play out in practice, investing a lot of gas into more than 2 or 3 Ravens is the Terran shouting into the world that he wants to go into ultra lategame and turtle for 20 more minutes, and at that point Protoss should just take 3 more bases and build 5 Robos and 5 Stargates for techswitching purposes and delay every new expansion that the terran wants to take as much as possible and be deliberate about what kind of engagement he wants to take.
My idea about Tempests being strong is in a 2-4 base scenario where Terran is mainly utilizing pure Factory tech with Ghosts and situationally adding Vikings if there is Stargate tech. Everything beyond that can't easily be mapped out in a strategic way in my opinion because it is like really lategame on 5+ bases where anything can happen, usually great players don't let their opponents turtle for 45 minutes to build up their dream composition.
That said, there is of course a possibility that there is a viable play for 3-4 base armies that incorporate Ravens and Ravens are very strong against Tempests which is a good point.
To whoever said it, I actually like the idea of buffing carriers against mech while accepting an immortal nerf. The logistics of that I'm not sure, but I'm down for making mech more powerful early on while buffing carriers. Especially now that we have combined mech/air upgrades, carriers won't dominate when they come out since vikings will be upgrading as well
On December 04 2013 23:50 klup wrote: I love how people say ghost ghost ghost why don't you go ghost?
Seriously even the pros don't use ghost anymore even with bio. Maru, Innovation, ForGG , Bomber they gave up on ghost in profit on only MMM because let's face it ghost are really expensive and slow your upgrades severely. Ghost are great in late game when you are already 3/3 but it's the time protoss shine. So the ftw bet is to not invest on ghost and focus on upgrades to break protoss midgame when he is a little bit vulnerable.
So now explain me how a mech player who have to invest so much gas to get units (factory cost armory cost , tanks/thor/mines/viking/banshee) can afford the 250 gas upgrade + the high gas cost of ghost + the absolute non synergy with mech upgrade. Seriously this is viable even further than the bio case! It's viable if your plan is to hard turtle for a 30 min game.
So basically going ghost with mech is saying to the protoss. NO RUSH 15 min plz. And when you go out you have mass tempest giving you a warm welcome!
Pretty much spot on. I saw avilo play yesterday and he went for mech-ghost composition, but it resulted in insanely long games because you simply do not have the choice. The composition is not viable unless you are getting gas from 4 bases. Smart protosses won't let you do that easily.
Why build ghoststo support tanks when building ghosts to support bio is stronger?
EMP is good in a straight up big fight. You don't split off 2-3 tanks with 2-3 ghosts to defend a choke since you'd just be throwin away 675 gas worth of units. When you go ghosts you clump them with your army and attack. But they move better with bio as the core than with mech.
Aww, you poor terrans can no longer go pure factory against gate/robo/stargate comps like you did in BW. Here's a tissue. You actually have to make a few ghosts/marines(which come out of the barracks) and/or a few ravens(which comes out of the starport). You've got it so rough. Here's another tissue.
Immortals are fine and doing what they're supposed to do. Sorry.
On December 05 2013 01:19 Phoenix2003 wrote: Aww, you poor terrans can no longer go pure factory against gate/robo/stargate comps like you did in BW. Here's a tissue. You actually have to make a few ghosts/marines(which come out of the barracks) and/or a few ravens(which comes out of the starport). You've got it so rough. Here's another tissue.
Immortals are fine and doing what they're supposed to do. Sorry.
Sorry but no, thanks for trying tho. Btw, what's the point of going mech if you should add marines and ghosts ? It's not like our race has all ground unit upgrade mixed, from colossus to zealot.
On December 05 2013 01:23 m0ck wrote: Isn't mech inevitably just "try-to-do-early-eco-damage-then-turtle-to-max-and-push"? Not very exciting.
sry for the short answer, but why?
I mean, every race has ultimate compositions, yet only rarely we see gameplay based upon only waiting for them. And basically everytime we do it is because the other options are kind of weak.
That is basically the reason why everybody asks for the Immortal to be weaker against Mech. It's not that a theoretical Mechball can't counter a theoretical Immortalbased-one. It is because the Immortal dominates Mech too hard in the midgame, so that you are left with turtling as the only semi-working option. Meanwhile the Protoss can turtle on said ball and still has a good chance to win the deathball battle. He can outexpand you. He can just go air the moment he scouts Mech. He can do various timings against your turtling and be successful. While you sit there and ask yourself if a 12min 3rd taken with a PF isn't too risky, since you can only take on the Protoss army in the most extreme defensive positions and the particular main/natural/third setup may not be defensive enough against certain busts.
Too many people ITT want pure hard counters in SC2 :/
Immortals hard counter certain units and suck against others. Boring unit. Corruptors hard counter certain units and suck against others. Boring unit. Vikings hard counter certain units and suck against other units. Boring unit. Tempests hard counter certain units, while being mediocre versus other units. That mediocrity is where they become interesting. I'd much rather watch Tempests attack and maneuver against Corruptors and mutalisks than just straight up RAPING brood lords.
This is where TvP mech sucks ass. Tanks get hard countered too quickly and easily. It's boring as fuck to watch the terran unsiege for a split second and then instantly die to immortals, chargelots, and archons. And the only counter to this is to build a hard counter (the ghost) which swings the battle in the exact opposite direction. 3 EMPs go off and the archons and immortals are dead in one second. This instant death problem is why I don't really like SC2 Protoss matches at the moment. Also, it's why I can't stand ghosts vs P.
Too much hard countering in SC2 and too many battles over in 2 seconds :/
On December 05 2013 01:19 Phoenix2003 wrote: Aww, you poor terrans can no longer go pure factory against gate/robo/stargate comps like you did in BW. Here's a tissue. You actually have to make a few ghosts/marines(which come out of the barracks) and/or a few ravens(which comes out of the starport). You've got it so rough. Here's another tissue.
Immortals are fine and doing what they're supposed to do. Sorry.
When people ask for "mech" they are not asking for Factory only units, they are asking for an ability to hold 4-6 screenlengths worth of terrain with the drawback of immobility.
Ghosts casting EMP is only useful against large clumps of army units or for disabling support units that only follow main army units around. In other words, Ghosts solve large army fights. That is not what is being discussed.
Goody is suggesting a work around to the hardened shield problem that isn't about giving a "shield piercing upgrade" nor does it ask for a nerf to the immortal.
Its asking for the attack to register as 2 shells landing instead of 1 shell landing. It would mean that hardened shields would take 20 damage per hit instead of 10 damage per hit. Which means that instead of cutting tank damage by 80%, tank damage is only mitigated by 60%
Goody's suggested change does not require nerfing immortals, and is actually asking for tanks to be nerfed in order to get through hardened shields.
If implemented, +3 armor zealots reduces damage by 6 not counting the fact that tanks only deal high damage to armored units.
On December 04 2013 16:44 KaizoOnFire wrote: i would say we also buff skytoss because its completely trash vs. bio
Sky toss will never work anyways since you dont have a cheap mineral fodder. Mech is on the rope of working and it just need an extra push. It also distinctively different style from bio so if mech is viable without affecting bio then it good for the over all game for making the game more diverse. Think of mech as a race rather than some sort of unit composition because it play completely different from traditional bio and other race act completely different against it. Will skytoss be different from traditional protoss deathball? No, it will probably just be another slow deathball unit composition like collosus/HT because the core unit in sky toss are slow and therefore offer no real difference from traditional protoss. Making mech work is good for the overall game by making the game more different. And guess what, sky toss is actually pretty good against mech and could be a possible future meta if mech is viable.
why would you see it as a race? its just a techtree which has pros and cons just like everyething else. either you commit to it or not you can play mech vs. terran and zerg and usually not vs. protoss just like you can play skytoss vs. toss and zerg but not vs. bio. why should they buff it even more, just play bio then in that matchup. i've never seen anyone playing skytoss vs. bio and there are reasons for it btw, saying you can play skytoss vs mech is like saying you can play baneling vs. marines lol, like i said, all has pros and cons, thats the funny part of the game :-)
Mech should be considered a race because of how distinctively different it is from bio. Also transitioning out of mech to bio is almost impossible and generally there no reason to do. So once you commit to mech you are going to stick to mech. Same goes for bio. That is why mech could be considered a different race. The terran race is the only race that has the capability of doing this and it is not being utilized. There are pro and cons but mech is the most immobile unit composition and the pro does not out weight the con. They should buff it cause TvP been the exact same thing for 5 years and it in need of serious diversity.
Skytoss vs mech is nothing like baneling vs marine.
EPT
