Starbow - Page 327

Units felt too bulky in many instances and splash effects seemed to be under-preforming. This fixes both.

Spellcasters in general are getting some buffs.

We wanted a spell for zerg which could deal with single targets on an air unit as the neural parasite on infestors felt like a range war between siege tanks and infestor neural cast range. Adding such a spell to the overseer was problematic for reasons explained in the balance forum. This is our solution atm. So far we are quite happy with it as similar spells on an air caster will change how the spells are used in an interesting way without the opponent having to memorize a lot of spells.

One of the main roles of the roach was to make earily game zvz not be all about zerglings. It did not do this in a pleasing manner and any addition to the roach in order to make them deal more effectively with zerglings would also make them buffed in ways we did not like for the other match-up's. Baneling with 36 damage does the trick in zvz and we are also trying to make sure that mass banelings in zvt mid and late-game is not a preferred strategy at the same time.

Irradiate and storm is getting buffed. Instead of just making the dark swarm cloud bigger, we thought it would be interesting to indirectly buff defilers by rewarding more consume, making it possible to plauge and dark swarm in the late-game from the same defiler.

Connecting far away bases for zerg and lair tech with instant reinforcements is not something we have seen too much but it seems quite broken from the little we saw of it. Zerg can already drop at lair tech, so the nydus canals are not really needed until hive tech anyways.

Since we got the Viper going, and overlords detect, this unit seemed redundant atm.

With gas cost to macro mechanics, the early masses of corsairs have gone down. The separation buff the scourges received a while back seems strong enough.

We wanted to add a bit more for each race for the late-game. The Dark Archon was a natural choice for Protoss. We are keeping Maelstrom in for now, knowing that it is not the most exciting spell out there, but it needs to be a powerful spell if making this unit should be worth it.

They are already medium instead of armor which is a big buff compared to BW as most AA ground units deal explosive damage.

The old nullward has a special place in many Starbro's a heart, but was hard to balance right with their permanent cloak. This is an attempt to bring them back without changing them too much. The testing we have done of this has been positive, but not extensive, so please test and give us feedback.

The micro of these unit's new attack seemed more interesting than them shooting hard. This change should explore that further.

Dark Archons have feedback.

This sends the scout back to mainly being an AA anti-armored ship. We are fine with this for now.

We've already talked a lot about the merc's in the forums and on streams. Feel free to ask specific questions about this here or in the balance forum and we'll try to answer as best we can.

Again, buffing spellcasters. We might also change the viking later, so this makes the SV slightly better at dealing with masses of mutalisks.

The battlecruiser attack had nothing interesting going for it at all. It was as bland as possible. We could have given it many smaller lasers like they have in SC2, but vikings already kinda have that in form of missiles. The hard punch of the BW battlecriuser made more sense in Starbow.

These are quite underused and after some testing with this change, it did not seem as imba as one would expect. Mostly due to the slow speed of the missile making it easy to place target unit in a relatively safe location until the effect wears off.