Starbow - Page 329

After last patch unit decrease a lot of splash effects and AOE spells got the strength they deserved, but it felt like we were fighting against the SC2 engine and not playing to its strength. The editor only allow for certain unit sizes which is especially noticeable when units become very small. These small units would clump up a lot more and have a very hard time blocking properly at ramps and chokes. The change from last patch was not in vain, as many units were not just too big, but had wrong sizes relative to each other. Therefore, this is not a reversal of the change from lat patch, but a simple +% increase of all units sizes and AOE effects while respecting the unit size relation changed from last patch. This does feel better from testing, and units are overall still a bit smaller than they were in SC2.

This has nothing to do with balance, but just aesthetics. IF we want to keep wiki up to date and make sure numbers can be somewhat remembered for timings etc in the game, then having a building finish after 37.7 seconds is just a nightmare.

Many build time of buildings were off compared to BW. These all had some good reasoning behind them, but it was mostly connected with reactor for terran and strong nurture swarm on zerg. So many changes have happened after this odd build times were introduced so we feel safe to revert this back to BW value. One change is different. Robotics facility is 10 seconds shorter than in BW and robotics support bay is 10 seconds longer. This encourages drop play with warp prisms while not buffing early reaver drops.

Units are still generally smaller than what we had some patches ago and they also clump up more than is desirable. Hence this change.

A heavily underused and not too strong spell that took away too much heal energy.

We wanted wraiths to be an alternative to dealing with carriers and battlecruisers. They were just simply not doing enough damage vs these units becasue of the thick armor. This should help a little.

With no damage on impact, we tested making these units a tad less sluggish. Feels a lot better, but we have not done enough testing to really set Merc values right, so these changes are up for discussion after more testing. Seems fine for now though.

Some very early porxy Merc builds were proven a tad strong. We wanted the Merc to help bio play deal with protoss and to some extent terran, but the intent was not to give a new, crazy cheese vs protoss. This helps giving the Merc decent values at reasonable times in the game.

The battlecruiser seemed to be headed into a direction where any other counter than battlecruisers seemed less than optimal. With 75 energy warp and 200 energy max you blink away from ghost seeker drones, wraith shots and basically anything you tried to trow at them. This energy cost let's the BC player chose more carefully when to warp drive and when to use yamato. The movement speed also, let you defend too many bases too easily with one group of battlecruisers. For a unit to be possible to counter and interesting, it needs a clear weakness, and the old Battlecruisere just seemed to have everything. This Battlecruisere is still better than the BW counterpart in the fact that it has warp drive which is very useful.

We did not even know it was 70% until recently. We've always just assumed 100%.

Reapers are now moved to this late-game mobile tech switch option. A group of reapers late-game is expensive and carry some risk in making to make them pay for themselves. Microing away from the charges felt too easy and the charges felt like a not too good investment. Hopefully this helps. This has not been tested to the extent we'd like as very few players make reapers. Give it a try!

Tech lab's are cool and all, but we base the game around BW balance, and a bio player in BW did not need a ton of add on's late-game. Hopefully this will bring in the best from both games. And also, firebat in Starbow is very strong now, so it belongs with a tech-lab.

You were able to place spider mines directly under enemy units, which is very hard to micro vs compared to how they worked in BW. And the only reason this was the case in SB was because it is how the vulture was made from the SC2 campaign.

They are still a bit tricky to micro compared to other units because of the moving shot thingy. This might make them a tad too strong though, but we were just so tired of seeing groups of vultures endlessly moving round and around when they were suppose to stand still. Let us know if they are too strong now or not.

A sloth beat it once in a fun-run.

Sentinels were under-preforming quite a bit, and the null-wards were never suppose to kill each other by intent of their design. This makes them much stronger, but on the other hand, terran can make wraiths now to deal with them.

How cool is that?

This ability has just proven better and better, especially on very high level games. 10 seconds is still a decent time to scout out a whole lot of stuff. 27 seconds was just ridiculous.

A carrier with BW behavior in the SC2 engine preforms a whole lot better as the interceptors move around much more smoothly and seems much harder to pick off. Also, BW interceptors took 14,2 sec to build AND you needed an upgrade to have 8 AND they started with 0 interceptors. The interceptor BT in Starbow was 10. Now it is 15.

Some crazy builds vs forge fast expanding protoss involving queens laying tumors on creep residuals from canceled hatcheries + spine crawlers seemed hard to stop and was fairly far away from any intentions on our part.

Spawn broodling, while reliable, was not the most interesting spell. This one feels like a happy middle ground. You get 100 damage for sure, which is reliable, but you also get some extra which can kill a lot more, or almost nothing depending on the situation which adds some more skill to the spell as the locusts can be individually microed.

The spell above tired to combine spawn broodling with infested terran. This should also make the infest part of contaminate not too powerful anymore.

Lair BT decreased as well, so we don't want super-early mutas etc.

Everything in moderation.

Yes, this is only good vs zerglings and 1 hp zealots. But it adds some much needed stability to early-game zvz.

"It was like this in BW"

This unit is still open for change, but we wanted to add one version of it to live SB so we can see it more in play and get more feedback. We are becoming more and more pleased with its attack, but we are very unsure about giving it abduct. Have fun abusing this unit so we can change it more later The Hydra/spore anti-bio removal should be obvious when we add this unit.

TO THE MOON!

Yes, this is a big "back to BW", but the current Starbow Arbiter promoted deathball play quite a lot while the most non-deathball play, the recall, was heavily nerfed compared to BW. This is hopefully a step in the right direction for a more "all over the place" protoss late-game.

Eruptor is still not the "what an awesome unit!" that we would have liked, but it is slowly shaping into "something decent". Future changes for this unit will probably occur as we see more and more of it.

They are still under-preforming it seems so they will probably get more changes in the future. The fact that they have to connect + firebats being very good counters will probably open up for testing with plasma damage or maybe even normal damage in the future.

Zerg could tech to lair AND tech to drop/speed and there was no way for the opponent to know. On the other hand, the other races have their transport units buffed in various ways. This was a way of buffing the zerg transport in a more controlled environment.

The main design of this spell is the "catch fast units". Vultures, mutalisk, corsairs etc. If zerg wants to soften up armies, he can use plague.

Mutalisk harass already feels quite strong in ZvT.