Starbow - Page 127

OK, love the mod and have had some really good discussions with the modders, who seem like really nice people who care about the game. Just love playing it so, so much.

With that being said, I really strongly disagree with the irradiate change and the justification for doing so. Don't mean any disrespect to the mods and devs, just want to outline my concerns. I'd be very curious to see responses to these changes/things I've missed etc:

1) "Irradiate will create more micro scenarios with Terran engaging lurkers". Disagree. By the time Terran has his first irradiate Zerg almost has defilers. By the time Terran has more than 3 irradiates, zerg has defilers. Lurkers should from this point never engage terran without dark swarm, rendering micro against the lurkers impossible for the Terran. If zerg delays defilers and gets more lurkers Terran will generally overwhelm him due to having better units and upgrades. The amount of pressure a good Terran can put on a zerg pre-hive in BW and Starbow is insane.

2) "This will fix the strength of vessels with mech." Disagree. Vessels still have the same DPS against muta and will still be considerably stronger in mech than they were in bw because of the natural clumping of the muta. If the natural clumping of Muta is removed, there will be fewer problems. You can sort of do it with stop on the mutas, but not really. Noone was actually killing Muta with pure vessel, people were using vessels to support ground to air fighting units, so changing it from Mutas taking 180 to only taking 120 and living with 2 hp doesnt really matter. They'll still be useless for fighting those marines/goliaths.

3) "We expect Nerve Jammer to replace irradiate against lurkers." Not bad for breaking ramps with bio before defiler, I admit. Certainly better than d matrix for doing this, and a bit more interesting. Good ability imo, slightly weaker vs ultras at hive also. Completely pointless once zerg has defilers unless you want to run by the lurkers under dark swarm, so it can't replace irradiate.

4) "Making Dark Swarm have a lower aoe balances the change". Nope. Swarming over lurkers at a natural to defend a 4th gas is just as good now, but playing a more active game with defilers and flanking in the centre (which was already very hard in bw and starbow) is now even harder. So it just encourages a turtley play style.

5) There is no mention of the effect this will have on Bio vs ultra ling. It will however, make it almost impossible to play late game with bio for Terran. An irradiate now only does 120 damage to a 400hp ultra? I would honestly have taken the removal of AOE from irradiate for the damage being replaced with the 250 damage from BW. You just can't play Science Vessel/bio vs zerg late game now, and it's just a shame to see Terran lose so much versatility. Especially when TvZ was so, so much fun before the patch, from both sides of the MU.

The last two points outline why it will be such a turtley match-up now. Zerg can get 4 base gas very safely and go ultra ling very safely. They don't have to worry about vessel counts or anything since Vessels are now very, very bad vs ultralisks. In fact, I'd be curious if you even need to make scourge in the mu anymore, given that Terran now needs twice as many irradiates to kill lurkers under swarm and they just tickle ultras. I'll need to test.

Anyways, I really hope you revert to the old patch values for irradiate. I also think Dark Swarm should have its AOE put back up again, with the casting range left as it is, as I don't think the zerg needed a nerf to the strength of their defiler lurker army when it's out on the map. If you really want to tinker with Irradiate, a solution would be to make the splash damage much lower or remove it altogether and increase the single target damage of the spell to make it more viable against ultralisks. Or, as I've said previously perhaps make it possible for mutas to unclump, to make Muta a more viable fighting unit against mech.


Hope that this isn't considered rude or offensive to anyone who has dedicated so much of their time to making this mod, as I do greatly appreciate it, and a great deal of their changes have made certain MUs very fun and different from bw (ghosts in TvT are very interesting and super viable, the Viper vs mech is interesting, the sentinel is a great unit in TvP). I just worry a little about the impact some of these changes will have on the game.