On May 07 2014 04:12 Ganseng wrote: as for the late game protoss deathball, i think it could be fixed by making tempests more expensive and buffing broodlords/corruptors a little bit... but that's just my opinion slightly off topic
When has this been a problem recently in any pro match? Not really an issue.
It's not necessarily a huge problem now, but making colossi and tempests immune to abduct completely breaks zerg late game vs toss. It's an absolutely essential tool.
Yeah, I would rather they go half way and just say that massive units are pulled a shorter distance. Not only does it make sense, it still makes the ability useful. It seems a better middle of the road change.
Even this is a massive hit tbh. The biggest problem for zerg in the late game vs air armies is the short range of corruptors, you have to get in the enemy wheelhouse to do any damage, and thus expose yourself to storm/PDDs/seekers/archon splash etc. Not to mention tempest volleys and yamotos dealing damage with no reciprocation.
The zerg counter to this is to move the enemy unit away from it's supporting cast so it can be focused without your on air army getting torn to shreds. The zerg air force is completely awful in a straight up fight assuming equal supply and good army comps. I think you and some others underestimate just how pivotal abduct is for zerg to be able to deal with mass tempests/BC/raven etc.
Yes, please change the viper and make it unable to abduct bigger units. A viper abducting a Mothership is ridiculous and does not agree with Newton's third law of motion.
On May 07 2014 04:25 sabas123 wrote: I would like to see an option for zerg to counter mech other then swarm host so that they maby could remove it.
The Viper should be the key IMO. Some sort of ling roach hidra combo on the ground and blinding cloud. That spell could force tanks to spread out so helping Zerg and making the game look cool at the same time. So much potential there instead of the retarded SH Raven crap we see.
Vipers are already immensely strong vs mech. Zerg has little or no issue dealing with ground based mech, roach/hydra with vipers can deal fine already. It's the air armies that are the real killers. And that's where the viper goes from great to outright mandatory.
On May 07 2014 03:47 Ercster wrote: Would capping the amount of swarm hosts you can have at once help? I'm not talking about increasing their supply cost, but just making it so you can only have something like 15-20 out at a time?
Changes like this are just poor design. You end up with a ton of unintuitive corner cases, which makes learning the game much harder. All changes need to make sense when compared to previously existing changes.
You could presumably design a balanced game where each unit deals a different amount of damage to each other unit, and with weird unit caps to each unit but it would be way too restrictive and confusing to play.
Not that I agree with him (its one of the dumber ideas I've heard) but the unit limit has already been done with the Mothership and the Mothership Core. Blizz is already okay with arbitrary non-supply limitations in the number of units.
It's still not a good solution. It basically acknowledges that they've made a unit that snowballs too well, but doesn't change the underlying cause on why it snowballs. Plus the swarmhost doesn't really even have special spells that would make it even feel like a hero unit like the Mothership. (And I never liked the idea of a mothership in the first place.)
I mean, realistically this could be the solution to any unit composition problem. Marauders are too good and Terran will only make pure marauders to snipe everything on the ground and shrug off air attacks. Solution? You can only make 20 marauders... or fix the reason why Terran only goes marauders every game.
It sounds like they want a short term fix, though. Long term would be to change what makes them good in a comp, and that doesn't seem likely in this expansion. It's kinda the reason why I presented the idea of the unit cap. It wasn't to be the end all solution to the unit, but for the time being it might fix the problems it has until they decide to rework the unit.
A short term fix that doesn't fuck up zerg late game is preferable, and available. Make BLs immune to abduct. Done.
"- Change the Viper’s Abduct ability to make massive units immune to it. o By making Brood Lords immune to Abduct, we’d solve the stalemate. Late game ZvZ would be mostly about who wins in the air. o There are downsides -- Abduct is a really cool ability, and it is something Zerg needs vs. Colossi in PvZ. o To address that, we’d consider a potential buff to Blinding Cloud so that Vipers would still be a valuable utility unit in the ZvP matchup."
To me, it doesn't seem like they're capable of doing that otherwise it would have been suggested instead of all massive units. And I don't think applying it to all massive units would be helpful.
What prevents them from just making the broodlord immune exclusively? Ultras are immune to roots and snares.
I think elegance is part of the problem, if you have more exceptions than rules it becomes very hard to understand the game. Maybe make it so Abduct doesn't work vs Biological units? This would fix the problem with Abduct vs Brood Lord without affecting ZvMech or ZvP.
Another potential fix imo is to reduce the size of locusts, this would make banelings more effective vs them and baneling / ultra can actually wreck SH compositions in ZvZ (The banelings clear a wave of locusts and the ultralisks can't be stopped by fungal so they run in and decimate the SH's before the next wave spawns). It would also be a slight buff to other AoE counters to SH (Tanks and Hellions / Hellbats, Collosi and Storm). This also runs the risk of giving locusts more dps / surface area though.
The spore nerf and hydra buff would bring ZvZ back to muta v muta since hydras don't actualy matter. At the point where a roach player gets to hydras or infestors the muta player will have stopped going muta already anyway and the damage has been done. The abduct change would really hurt zergs other matchups. I'm not even sure that it would fix the SH versus SH issue either since broodlords don't kill the locusts quick enough. The locusts might just clean up all the spores at which point a bunch of corruptors clean up the broods. Or the game might become a BL SH versus BL SH fest, wow what an improvement right.
On May 07 2014 03:47 Ercster wrote: Would capping the amount of swarm hosts you can have at once help? I'm not talking about increasing their supply cost, but just making it so you can only have something like 15-20 out at a time?
Changes like this are just poor design. You end up with a ton of unintuitive corner cases, which makes learning the game much harder. All changes need to make sense when compared to previously existing changes.
You could presumably design a balanced game where each unit deals a different amount of damage to each other unit, and with weird unit caps to each unit but it would be way too restrictive and confusing to play.
Not that I agree with him (its one of the dumber ideas I've heard) but the unit limit has already been done with the Mothership and the Mothership Core. Blizz is already okay with arbitrary non-supply limitations in the number of units.
It's still not a good solution. It basically acknowledges that they've made a unit that snowballs too well, but doesn't change the underlying cause on why it snowballs. Plus the swarmhost doesn't really even have special spells that would make it even feel like a hero unit like the Mothership. (And I never liked the idea of a mothership in the first place.)
I mean, realistically this could be the solution to any unit composition problem. Marauders are too good and Terran will only make pure marauders to snipe everything on the ground and shrug off air attacks. Solution? You can only make 20 marauders... or fix the reason why Terran only goes marauders every game.
It sounds like they want a short term fix, though. Long term would be to change what makes them good in a comp, and that doesn't seem likely in this expansion. It's kinda the reason why I presented the idea of the unit cap. It wasn't to be the end all solution to the unit, but for the time being it might fix the problems it has until they decide to rework the unit.
A short term fix that doesn't fuck up zerg late game is preferable, and available. Make BLs immune to abduct. Done.
"- Change the Viper’s Abduct ability to make massive units immune to it. o By making Brood Lords immune to Abduct, we’d solve the stalemate. Late game ZvZ would be mostly about who wins in the air. o There are downsides -- Abduct is a really cool ability, and it is something Zerg needs vs. Colossi in PvZ. o To address that, we’d consider a potential buff to Blinding Cloud so that Vipers would still be a valuable utility unit in the ZvP matchup."
To me, it doesn't seem like they're capable of doing that otherwise it would have been suggested instead of all massive units. And I don't think applying it to all massive units would be helpful.
What prevents them from just making the broodlord immune exclusively? Ultras are immune to roots and snares.
Yeah i second that thought. The abduct problem is with BL only. It's absolutely necessary to have it vs collosi-tempest.
On May 07 2014 04:08 LingBlingBling wrote: Is Swarm host in zvz really a thing?? Come on now no one in NA or Korea uses it. Blizzard really considering making drastic changes because a few obnoxious EU pros are using it to stall out Tournaments??? ZvZ for rest of the world is roach vs roach muta into roach ect. Stephano is like the only person along with a few EU players that do that anyways, and they do it to make the other guy mad lol.
Well, that's why waiting a bit longer isn't too bad. Did Stephano break ZvZ and everyone else is behind the curve and we're about to get inundated with SH stalemates? Or is this a freak game?
In my heart of hearts, I'd like to think that it couldn't be possible to even have such a freak game, that design could preclude such a possibility. But who knows with how people will play. What does make it disturbing is it was such a bad stalemate in maxed army, macro situation. Rather than a weird base trade where someone has a cannon left and the other has a DT left and neither can attack the other. That's hard to account for, but it's also very rare. Maxed, macro games are a lot easier to get to. A lot easier to repeat the conditions that led to a stalemate. But for that reason, a wait and see is for the best, imo. (Even if I think SH's inherently lend themselves to passive gameplay.)
I agree. I can't help but feeling, yet again, that Blizzard would be better to ignore the hysteria. To be fair, they have conceded these are just preliminary thoughts. Still, I'd hate to see HOTS degenerate into patch-a-lot WOL. Wait and see, Blizzard.
On May 07 2014 04:41 sumsaR wrote: "Abduct can't be used on flying massive units."
There, solved it.
How would you kill tempest balls?
The spore is definitely the issue. The problem with the swarm host style is that if you put up spores there is almost nothing that can kill your swarm hosts. Without the spore buff it would be different. People would have more opportunities to gogo muta switches.
On May 07 2014 03:47 Ercster wrote: Would capping the amount of swarm hosts you can have at once help? I'm not talking about increasing their supply cost, but just making it so you can only have something like 15-20 out at a time?
Changes like this are just poor design. You end up with a ton of unintuitive corner cases, which makes learning the game much harder. All changes need to make sense when compared to previously existing changes.
You could presumably design a balanced game where each unit deals a different amount of damage to each other unit, and with weird unit caps to each unit but it would be way too restrictive and confusing to play.
Not that I agree with him (its one of the dumber ideas I've heard) but the unit limit has already been done with the Mothership and the Mothership Core. Blizz is already okay with arbitrary non-supply limitations in the number of units.
It's still not a good solution. It basically acknowledges that they've made a unit that snowballs too well, but doesn't change the underlying cause on why it snowballs. Plus the swarmhost doesn't really even have special spells that would make it even feel like a hero unit like the Mothership. (And I never liked the idea of a mothership in the first place.)
I mean, realistically this could be the solution to any unit composition problem. Marauders are too good and Terran will only make pure marauders to snipe everything on the ground and shrug off air attacks. Solution? You can only make 20 marauders... or fix the reason why Terran only goes marauders every game.
It sounds like they want a short term fix, though. Long term would be to change what makes them good in a comp, and that doesn't seem likely in this expansion. It's kinda the reason why I presented the idea of the unit cap. It wasn't to be the end all solution to the unit, but for the time being it might fix the problems it has until they decide to rework the unit.
A short term fix that doesn't fuck up zerg late game is preferable, and available. Make BLs immune to abduct. Done.
"- Change the Viper’s Abduct ability to make massive units immune to it. o By making Brood Lords immune to Abduct, we’d solve the stalemate. Late game ZvZ would be mostly about who wins in the air. o There are downsides -- Abduct is a really cool ability, and it is something Zerg needs vs. Colossi in PvZ. o To address that, we’d consider a potential buff to Blinding Cloud so that Vipers would still be a valuable utility unit in the ZvP matchup."
To me, it doesn't seem like they're capable of doing that otherwise it would have been suggested instead of all massive units. And I don't think applying it to all massive units would be helpful.
What prevents them from just making the broodlord immune exclusively? Ultras are immune to roots and snares.
I think elegance is part of the problem, if you have more exceptions than rules it becomes very hard to understand the game. Maybe make it so Abduct doesn't work vs Biological units? This would fix the problem with Abduct vs Brood Lord without affecting ZvMech or ZvP.
Another potential fix imo is to reduce the size of locusts, this would make banelings more effective vs them and baneling / ultra can actually wreck SH compositions in ZvZ (The banelings clear a wave of locusts and the ultralisks can't be stopped by fungal so they run in and decimate the SH's before the next wave spawns). It would also be a slight buff to other AoE counters to SH (Tanks and Hellions / Hellbats, Collosi and Storm). This also runs the risk of giving locusts more dps / surface area though.
I'm unconvinced, Dota 2 is riddled with exceptions and special rules, yet pulls huge viewer numbers consistently. It's confusing one or two times.
Anyone who would find something like that hard to process is not very likely to be watching competitive Sc2. People who are interested enough in this game to watch other nerds play games for hours on a friday night probably have a decent understanding of what is going on already. And honestly, the market for new players getting into Sc2 at this point is likely negligible.
Get rid of abduct. Take neural parasite away from the infestor and give it to the viper. Make NP'd units immune to blinding cloud.
Vipers are harder to kill than infestors, so neural parasite will actually be useful again, but they're more vulnerable than vipers that use abduct. NP and Blinding Cloud will have better synergy than Abduct and Blinding Cloud. Solves the ZvZ problem because NPed Brood Lords won't shoot themselves or get abducted into spores while giving back Zerg's old method of dealing with Colossi and shit.
Tah-dah. Fix old, unused spell to replace new (and stupid) broken one.
I don't like the spore buff reverted. You would have to keep a good number of hydras in your base instead of the spores. And I don't like the abduct potential change either. I think it is good that they can abduct broodlords to kill them off...
EPT
