Link: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/16411181909#1 With some of the renewed discussion on Swarm Hosts over the weekend, we wanted to provide an update on where we’re at with the balance test map. While we haven’t seen the level of feedback we were hoping for with a change of this scale, there have been some high profile showmatches which have provided us with some useful information. In the games we’ve seen, we’re noticing a few important things:
The new Swarm Hosts are extremely effective at harassment in smaller numbers. Due to their high mobility and the flying locusts, it seems like there could be a lot of potential in this area. The new Swarm Hosts are clearly weaker when in mass which was our intention. However, we’d like to push this even further to discourage mass Swarm Hosts. If we do push Swarm Host even more towards a pure harassing role, we’ll have holes we need to fill. These are: Terran mech and Zerg being able to zone out High Templars in late game engagements.
So the changes we’re considering for the balance test map are:
Locust duration decreased from 30 to 25 This will allow countering mass Swarm Host armies during the long downtime between Locust spawns even better, while not hurting the smaller scale mobility based harassment cases as much.
Viper Blinding Cloud range increased from 10 to 11 This is to help vs. Mech especially since the range difference between Vipers and Vikings will be slightly greater.
Tempest no longer has +massive damage vs. air Brood Lords can still be countered by the long range of Tempests, but they won’t be the hard counter they are now, meaning Brood Lords can serve to fill the missing gap created by the redesign of the Swarm Host.
Targeted release and continued testing While these changes aren’t final, our current target time frame to release a live patch with the updated Swarm Host is shortly after the WCS Season 1 finals. This date will be coming up fast, so please continue playtesting on the balance test map and providing us with feedback. The next few weeks will be crucial in helping shape our next balance update. It will be difficult to patch such a major change without help from our community and the pro players.
Good changes, they seems to know whats up, but I don't know if its enough specially in PvZ.
Also are they just nerfing the raven? As a terran it makes me really sad that they decided to ditch it altogether, its one of our only 2 spellcasters and is in a horrible spot right now :c
On February 26 2015 04:33 SNSeigifried wrote: Tempest no longer has +massive damage vs. air Brood Lords can still be countered by the long range of Tempests, but they won’t be the hard counter they are now, meaning Brood Lords can serve to fill the missing gap created by the redesign of the Swarm Host.
Should just remove Massive tag from Broodlords or it slightly affects PvP
I'm also quite glad with the viper buffs, but that is more for ZvP as I am horrid at feedback dodging, and late I like to drop a cloud or two before starting in with my abducts.
Targeted release and continued testing While these changes aren’t final, our current target time frame to release a live patch with the updated Swarm Host is shortly after the WCS Season 1 finals. This date will be coming up fast, so please continue playtesting on the balance test map and providing us with feedback. The next few weeks will be crucial in helping shape our next balance update. It will be difficult to patch such a major change without help from our community and the pro players.
Thank you.
This kind of thing really bugs me. If they REALLY wanted help they'd create either a playlist or a map in unranked/ladder play so people didn't have to try to find custom games to test this stuff. They could give u 1 extra veto than normal and you could just use it on that map if you didn't want to play it. The point is, it needs to be easier to play and submit feedback while it also gathers your rating so that they can get more comprehensive evidence from more players faster and easier.... I've been saying this for a while @_@;;
Well, I am not really sure how these new changes will affect the game. The tempest change is pretty big considering it will make BCs usable, possibly.
Though, I won't actually know until the patch is released because I am not going to go around asking people to play on this play test map >.>...
Targeted release and continued testing While these changes aren’t final, our current target time frame to release a live patch with the updated Swarm Host is shortly after the WCS Season 1 finals. This date will be coming up fast, so please continue playtesting on the balance test map and providing us with feedback. The next few weeks will be crucial in helping shape our next balance update. It will be difficult to patch such a major change without help from our community and the pro players.
Thank you.
This kind of thing really bugs me. If they REALLY wanted help they'd create either a playlist or a map in unranked/ladder play so people didn't have to try to find custom games to test this stuff. They could give u 1 extra veto than normal and you could just use it on that map if you didn't want to play it. The point is, it needs to be easier to play and submit feedback while it also gathers your rating so that they can get more comprehensive evidence from more players faster and easier.... I've been saying this for a while @_@;;
Well, I am not really sure how these new changes will affect the game. The tempest change is pretty big considering it will make BCs usable, possibly.
Though, I won't actually know until the patch is released because I am not going to go around asking people to play on this play test map >.>...
Maybe, but the community is clearly not doing enough to try these changes out. I tried putting together some strategies based around the new swarmhost and got very little feedback, and at the pro level there have only been a couple of games here and there where not all of the pros playing have even given any thought to using the new swarmhost. We as a community can definitely do more, at all levels.
Lol so mass Tempest doesn't counter mass Tempest anymore, such display of intelligence and reasoning is impressing me. More seriously : RIP Swarm Host, 2012 - 2015, you lived happy spawning beautiful locusts with an exceptional regularity, and gave us a lot of memorable moments. Stephano will cry on your grave for sure.
i completely lost any trace of sanity/sense in blizzards actions... zoning out HTs in ZvP?... sorry wat? removing + damage vs mass air from tempests for the sake of Broodlords being viable in ZvP? waaat? btw... Broodlords being viable in ZvP? u are F*&$ing kidding me right? Tempest being useless vs anything after that change... (even vs colosi btw that is HUGE) is something they don't even care.... i just don't get anything they are trying to do... leave this game alone pls....
Blizzard, you went the easy road with hots making units hardcoutner other units. Hope for lotv you really have the balls to balance the game around units stats and not their hardcounter - which i will say again, is a really boring way of playing an rts
Since they're not interested in balancing the game in a meaningful way (Toss wins overwhelming majority when they all-in, and get their face bashed in when macroing), it appears they are trying to maintain a "free win condition" for Zerg in late game. Before it was make "x amount of swarm hosts and have static D," now it will be "simply make a broodlord." Blizzard is a master at finding a way to achieve 50% win rate, while having horrible games where no race is balanced at any given stage. It's magical, really. Really have to hand it to them. If only they actually started caring about whether the game was enjoyable for spectators and whether the game was truly balanced or not, rather than thinking of ways to fudge numbers.
On February 26 2015 04:58 insitelol wrote: i completely lost any trace of sanity/sense in blizzards actions... zoning out HTs in ZvP?... sorry wat? removing + damage vs mass air from tempests for the sake of Broodlords being viable in ZvP? waaat? btw... Broodlords being viable in ZvP? u are F*&$ing kidding me right? Tempest being useless vs anything after that change... (even vs colosi btw that is HUGE) is something they don't even care.... i just don't get anything they are trying to do... leave this game alone pls....
Well, it is easy to lose sanity if you react to balance test map changes like that.
Good. BL will now probably be the go-to lategame choice for Z in PvZ. I love the direction they're taking. I'm not sure blinding cloud needs the buff, then again abduct is generally a bigger deal. I agree with all the choices, and even more with the ideas.
Edit : I'd probably go even harder on the duration nerf, probably 20 sec with 40 sec downtime, even if that needs making the locusts quicker/have more life/whatever. Then again 25 needs to be playtested before. Maybe it's enough.
On February 26 2015 05:05 TW wrote: Do sth with mass Z static defence, without tons of spines ans spores SH wont be so effective. This change should be easier to do.
To be honest, after this rework, SH+static D strat is half dead due to SH downtime.
On February 26 2015 05:01 MyrionSC2 wrote: Hope pvp doesn't go back to war of the worlds now that tempest massive damage will be nerfed.
This is already war of the worlds. Open your eyes. A colossus player will always kill you while you transition to tempests if you're not ahead enough. Even the chargelot immortal archon frenzy has faded away. Tempests are rendered useless, as they should before they're got rid of in LotV. Or at least I hope so ^^
These changes are great. Tempest can still be used to pick off key units and force engagement but should not be massed. Swarm host will be good for harass but the boring mass swarm host games are finally gone. Viper change is also good and needed.
SH doesn't need to be a harassing unit, it just needs to give the opponent some counterplay opportunities. All they had to change was removing Enduring Locusts. It's that simple.
On February 26 2015 04:57 Jenia6109 wrote: Make the polls please!
Also, straight nerf to Tempest? Carriers and Battlecruisers are viable now? I hope PvP late game won't be Colossus vs Colossus again...
Does colossus count as air or ground for ranged attacks?
It can be hit as a ground unit, so Tempests are still a hard counter.
Tempests bonus against massive only works against ground. So yeah, it's the end of that hypocrisy pretending you can play something else than colossi in macro PvP.
On February 26 2015 05:01 MyrionSC2 wrote: Hope pvp doesn't go back to war of the worlds now that tempest massive damage will be nerfed.
Time for that carrier buildtime-buff I've been waiting for for 4 years!
Let's be careful with that one. PvZ airtoss is already pretty strong, I wouldn't say I'm confident the carrier buffs should go through without any more thinking.
On February 26 2015 04:57 Jenia6109 wrote: Make the polls please!
Also, straight nerf to Tempest? Carriers and Battlecruisers are viable now? I hope PvP late game won't be Colossus vs Colossus again...
Does colossus count as air or ground for ranged attacks?
It can be hit as a ground unit, so Tempests are still a hard counter.
Oh, wait, they removed the Tempest +Massive damage against ground a while back, didn't they? Then yeah, the Tempest doesn't do extra damage against the Colossus anymore.
Omg, SH has become super expensive units that for long durations is just dead weight. I'm pretty sure SH the way the test map before this one had changed them made them pretty much useless. Too expensive to just use for harass (unless late game) and leaving waaaay too big of an opening if you make too many to try and actually "fight" with them.
Seriously the duration you have on you to counter a SH player is more than enough, with WG or medivacs you can even exploit the window that SH is just dead weight without even having to wait for the locusts to die off. If your bio gets attacked by locusts just loead you medivacs and boost into Zs base, the locusts will be dead by the time they run back and by the time SH can make more locusts the main is totally annihilated. If you want to argue "erm what if they attack me with locusts while I'm turtling in my base, don't turtle in your base against the new SH. There's no point, the weakness of the SH is counterattack if you are active on the map you have a huge advantage.
The 5 seconds reduce in how long the locusts last doesn't mainly effect the way the time gap can be exploited against SH in my opinion it will reduce the effectiveness of locusts. I think this is an outright stupid idea, I mean the time gap that a player has to counter SH is huge as it is, it wil keep being huge. The difference is that locusts will make even less damage.
It seems the design team is thinking that P and T and is going to turtle against SH like the use to do, lol, WHY would they do that it would be retarted. Imagine T or P takes map control, which they can easily do seeing as there is a huge time gap between the locusts waves. If they scout locusts coming they can just retreat with their army and the locusts won't even scratch the enemy, then when the locusts die the P or T army can you just go and outright kill the Z player. Are blizzard thinking the Z player is supposed to yolo the SH into the enemy army and release the locusts hoping they can get some damage off? Skillful players will keep map control against SH and they won't get close enough to even scratch a base, I don't think SH would be used at all besides the late game with the previous changes that was planed. Nerfing them even harder is just silly.
Blizzard even say it themselves, that they are nerfing them so hard that they can't even fulfill their role anymore. But hey they are great harass units if you have 1000min 1000 gasto throw away at units that can't be used in an actual fight.... Which is like never
Omg, SH has become super expensive units that for long durations is just dead weight. I'm pretty sure SH the way the test map before this one had changed them made them pretty much useless. Too expensive to just use for harass (unless late game) and leaving waaaay too big of an opening if you make too many to try and actually "fight" with them.
Seriously the duration you have on you to counter a SH player is more than enough, with WG or medivacs you can even exploit the window that SH is just dead weight without even having to wait for the locusts to die off. If your bio gets attacked by locusts just loead you medivacs and boost into Zs base, the locusts will be dead by the time they run back and by the time SH can make more locusts the main is totally annihilated. If you want to argue "erm what if they attack me with locusts while I'm turtling in my base, don't turtle in your base against the new SH. There's no point, the weakness of the SH is counterattack if you are active on the map you have a huge advantage.
The 5 seconds reduce in how long the locusts last doesn't mainly effect the way the time gap can be exploited against SH in my opinion it will reduce the effectiveness of locusts. I think this is an outright stupid idea, I mean the time gap that a player has to counter SH is huge as it is, it wil keep being huge. The difference is that locusts will make even less damage.
It seems the design team is thinking that P and T and is going to turtle against SH like the use to do, lol, WHY would they do that it would be retarted. Imagine T or P takes map control, which they can easily do seeing as there is a huge time gap between the locusts waves. If they scout locusts coming they can just retreat with their army and the locusts won't even scratch the enemy, then when the locusts die the P or T army can you just go and outright kill the Z player. Are blizzard thinking the Z player is supposed to yolo the SH into the enemy army and release the locusts hoping they can get some damage off? Skillful players will keep map control against SH and they won't get close enough to even scratch a base, I don't think SH would be used at all besides the late game with the previous changes that was planed. Nerfing them even harder is just silly.
Blizzard even say it themselves, that they are nerfing them so hard that they can't even fulfill their role anymore. But hey they are great harass units if you have 1000min 1000 gasto throw away at units that can't be used in an actual fight.... Which is like never
I'm OK with SH and Tempests being nerfed into oblivion. Those units should never have existed in the first place, what is going on is the closest Blizzard could come with their stupid pride to being reasonable and throwing those shames of units away.
On February 26 2015 04:33 SNSeigifried wrote: Tempest no longer has +massive damage vs. air Brood Lords can still be countered by the long range of Tempests, but they won’t be the hard counter they are now, meaning Brood Lords can serve to fill the missing gap created by the redesign of the Swarm Host.
Should just remove Massive tag from Broodlords or it slightly affects PvP
Colossus vs colossus incoming Or void ray vs void ray maybe?
On February 26 2015 05:00 SetGuitarsToKill wrote: Tempest Nerf = BL/I time?
BL/infestor alone doesn't work. You'll need corruptors, vipers (!) and queens against mass air. But overall, BL based compositions might be more playable than before.
These changes are so big that it's almost impossible to tell if they'll be good or not. I'm slightly leaning towards not good but it's very much a case of "we'll have to see"
On February 26 2015 04:57 Jenia6109 wrote: Make the polls please!
Also, straight nerf to Tempest? Carriers and Battlecruisers are viable now? I hope PvP late game won't be Colossus vs Colossus again...
Does colossus count as air or ground for ranged attacks?
It can be hit as a ground unit, so Tempests are still a hard counter.
Oh, wait, they removed the Tempest +Massive damage against ground a while back, didn't they? Then yeah, the Tempest doesn't do extra damage against the Colossus anymore.
The Tempest uses its air attack on the Colossus and still does bonus damage AFAIK
I really like how our most expensive units are either our worst units or the least viable. Units that used to have a purpose that now provide nothing: mothership, tempest. Unit that has never been viable: carrier. The other most expensive unit for Toss: colossus. Which other unit is expecting nerfs to it? Good guess.
We don't even get a price reduction or at least a cool strobe light added to the mothership. If avilo himself were in charge of design, Toss would have more useful units or at least have the price come down once units get stripped of all redeeming qualities.
I can't wait to see this game go from rallied units to "sick transfuses" as invincible broodlords kill everything. Every game is going to become "attack before they can get them," just like WoL.
On February 26 2015 05:31 SetGuitarsToKill wrote: These changes are so big that it's almost impossible to tell if they'll be good or not. I'm slightly leaning towards not good but it's very much a case of "we'll have to see"
I don't think we can even doubt the fact that passive mass SH play won't be a thing any more is great for the game. What's hard to say is whether it'll be detrimental for balance in big ways or not, but honestly do we care ? I'd rather have a game where Z is maybe slightly weaker and no game ever goes to the 4h mark and repels any potential viewer than what we currently have. And I'm pretty sure Z will be doing just fine with those changes.
On February 26 2015 04:57 Jenia6109 wrote: Make the polls please!
Also, straight nerf to Tempest? Carriers and Battlecruisers are viable now? I hope PvP late game won't be Colossus vs Colossus again...
Does colossus count as air or ground for ranged attacks?
It can be hit as a ground unit, so Tempests are still a hard counter.
Oh, wait, they removed the Tempest +Massive damage against ground a while back, didn't they? Then yeah, the Tempest doesn't do extra damage against the Colossus anymore.
The Tempest uses its air attack on the Colossus and still does bonus damage AFAIK
Yup.
I do think the Tempest needs a little love. Without the bonus to damage, and without Static Defense wall with swarmhosts im not sure when I will use them now.
They have pitiful DPS, so unless im gonna be pulling a Rotti Build PvT I can't see their use anymore. I think a small concession should be made so that the fleet beacon is more useful than just unlocking Air Upgrades and the Anion Pulse Crystals.
On February 26 2015 05:31 SetGuitarsToKill wrote: These changes are so big that it's almost impossible to tell if they'll be good or not. I'm slightly leaning towards not good but it's very much a case of "we'll have to see"
I don't think we can even doubt the fact that passive mass SH play won't be a thing any more is great for the game. What's hard to say is whether it'll be detrimental for balance in big ways or not, but honestly do we care ? I'd rather have a game where Z is maybe slightly weaker and no game ever goes to the 4h mark and repels any potential viewer than what we currently have. And I'm pretty sure Z will be doing just fine with those changes.
On February 26 2015 04:57 Jenia6109 wrote: Make the polls please!
Also, straight nerf to Tempest? Carriers and Battlecruisers are viable now? I hope PvP late game won't be Colossus vs Colossus again...
Does colossus count as air or ground for ranged attacks?
It can be hit as a ground unit, so Tempests are still a hard counter.
Oh, wait, they removed the Tempest +Massive damage against ground a while back, didn't they? Then yeah, the Tempest doesn't do extra damage against the Colossus anymore.
The Tempest uses its air attack on the Colossus and still does bonus damage AFAIK
Yup.
I do think the Tempest needs a little love. Without the bonus to damage, and without Static Defense wall with swarmhosts im not sure when I will use them now.
They have pitiful DPS, so unless im gonna be pulling a Rotti Build PvT I can't see their use anymore. I think a small concession should be made so that the fleet beacon is more useful than just unlocking Air Upgrades and the Anion Pulse Crystals.
I won't give any love to a siege air unit that just stole the role a legit carrier should have fulfilled and only limits the opponent's options instead of giving you some. It will take a massive redesign for the tempest to be something interesting.
On February 26 2015 05:31 SetGuitarsToKill wrote: These changes are so big that it's almost impossible to tell if they'll be good or not. I'm slightly leaning towards not good but it's very much a case of "we'll have to see"
I don't think we can even doubt the fact that passive mass SH play won't be a thing any more is great for the game. What's hard to say is whether it'll be detrimental for balance in big ways or not, but honestly do we care ? I'd rather have a game where Z is maybe slightly weaker and no game ever goes to the 4h mark and repels any potential viewer than what we currently have. And I'm pretty sure Z will be doing just fine with those changes.
On February 26 2015 05:31 SetGuitarsToKill wrote: These changes are so big that it's almost impossible to tell if they'll be good or not. I'm slightly leaning towards not good but it's very much a case of "we'll have to see"
I don't think we can even doubt the fact that passive mass SH play won't be a thing any more is great for the game. What's hard to say is whether it'll be detrimental for balance in big ways or not, but honestly do we care ? I'd rather have a game where Z is maybe slightly weaker and no game ever goes to the 4h mark and repels any potential viewer than what we currently have. And I'm pretty sure Z will be doing just fine with those changes.
On February 26 2015 05:31 SetGuitarsToKill wrote: These changes are so big that it's almost impossible to tell if they'll be good or not. I'm slightly leaning towards not good but it's very much a case of "we'll have to see"
I don't think we can even doubt the fact that passive mass SH play won't be a thing any more is great for the game. What's hard to say is whether it'll be detrimental for balance in big ways or not, but honestly do we care ? I'd rather have a game where Z is maybe slightly weaker and no game ever goes to the 4h mark and repels any potential viewer than what we currently have. And I'm pretty sure Z will be doing just fine with those changes.
If that's in that way, I'm pretty OK with it, that was beautiful. And no one forced Harstem to go that far into Snute's trap.
I mean, he'll never win if he does nothing, so that's really not exciting.
Even the casters saw it coming. Attacking that position was not a great idea, he could have attacked into the fourth or cleared more creep before. He was just too much of an easy prey here. And if they still find a way to make mass SH work, put the duration time to 20 sec. That should just not be a thing.
On February 26 2015 05:45 Dingodile wrote: I approve the tempest change vs BL but vs Collossi needs something. maybe +100 shield massive air attack.
Can you think of a less elegant change ? Someone said it before in the thread : we should go away from the hardcounters game. They're doing it with LotV for the immortals, they're doing it again for the tempests. That's a great thing. And for Christ's sake, you already have no other choice but colossi compositions in macro PvP. If you try to transition to tempests and the opponent has a brain, you die.
On February 26 2015 05:01 MyrionSC2 wrote: Hope pvp doesn't go back to war of the worlds now that tempest massive damage will be nerfed.
sorry not a protoss but cant you still go for tempest if they try to go mass colossus im not sure i get what you're trying to say. because if they go for the war of the worlds type stuff(mass colossus) wont tempest just shit on them, or do colossus count as massive air units? Im pretty sure they dont count as air so i think tempest will still be ok. right?
On February 26 2015 05:31 SetGuitarsToKill wrote: These changes are so big that it's almost impossible to tell if they'll be good or not. I'm slightly leaning towards not good but it's very much a case of "we'll have to see"
I don't think we can even doubt the fact that passive mass SH play won't be a thing any more is great for the game. What's hard to say is whether it'll be detrimental for balance in big ways or not, but honestly do we care ? I'd rather have a game where Z is maybe slightly weaker and no game ever goes to the 4h mark and repels any potential viewer than what we currently have. And I'm pretty sure Z will be doing just fine with those changes.
If that's in that way, I'm pretty OK with it, that was beautiful. And no one forced Harstem to go that far into Snute's trap.
I mean, he'll never win if he does nothing, so that's really not exciting.
Even the casters saw it coming. Attacking that position was not a great idea, he could have attacked into the fourth or cleared more creep before. He was just too much of an easy prey here. And if they still find a way to make mass SH work, put the duration time to 20 sec. That should just not be a thing.
Obviously, Harstem took the shittiest engagement possible with no Recall available. But with the damage these Locusts now do in the time they are there they'll still be aggrevating to deal with.
On February 26 2015 05:01 MyrionSC2 wrote: Hope pvp doesn't go back to war of the worlds now that tempest massive damage will be nerfed.
sorry not a protoss but cant you still go for tempest if they try to go mass colossus im not sure i get what you're trying to say. because if they go for the war of the worlds type stuff(mass colossus) wont tempest just shit on them, or do colossus count as massive air units? Im pretty sure they dont count as air so i think tempest will still be ok. right?
Even in the current state of the game, if you try to go for tempest and the opponent identifies it, he can attack into you with his colossi + chargelot + archons and reinforce with stalkers if you managed to get any air going. So no, you can't if your opponent is sending hallucinations all the time like he should. No one goes really mass colossi by the way (10+), it's usually 6-8 into chargelot archon immortal.
On February 26 2015 05:45 Dingodile wrote: I approve the tempest change vs BL but vs Collossi needs something. maybe +100 shield massive air attack.
Can you think of a less elegant change ? Someone said it before in the thread : we should go away from the hardcounters game. They're doing it with LotV for the immortals, they're doing it again for the tempests. That's a great thing. And for Christ's sake, you already have no other choice but colossi compositions in macro PvP. If you try to transition to tempests and the opponent has a brain, you die.
Going away from hardcounters appears to work for LotV because its LotV there are a LOT of changes aside from the units.
I'm not sure it works for HotS. Especially because they are effectively deleting tempests. At least hosts can still do some harass damage. Tempests have again, 9.09 DPS. At +3 air they have a whopping wait for it: 11.82 DPS. Against a unit with 3 armor (from upgrades) you actually do less with full ups than you did when both units were at zero upgrades.
On February 26 2015 05:01 MyrionSC2 wrote: Hope pvp doesn't go back to war of the worlds now that tempest massive damage will be nerfed.
sorry not a protoss but cant you still go for tempest if they try to go mass colossus im not sure i get what you're trying to say. because if they go for the war of the worlds type stuff(mass colossus) wont tempest just shit on them, or do colossus count as massive air units? Im pretty sure they dont count as air so i think tempest will still be ok. right?
I'm not a protoss either, but the way I think it works now is that you start the transition to Tempest, and hide it well. If your opponent sees you, he will come for you. If you manage to have 4 tempest outs, you can 1 shot collosi. If you keep them alive against the blinkstalkers for long enough, you will probably win. If you don't, he will walk over you. Like other already said in this thread, that often happens. With the new changes, you would need about 10 tempests to do the same.
Wait what. I'm pretty sure this affects colossi, since the tempests bonus is already vs massive air only, and colossi count as air. If so then the nerf is extremely retarded, tempests were intended to fix mass colossi in PvP and it added an interesting mechanic in the matchup, aka finding the correct balance between tempests and ground army. Please, don't touch tempests in PvP.
Tempests are already bad vs BCs because of ravens. Meching terrans will only build BCs when they already have a lot of ravens for PDDs. Even if blizzard wants to go through with the PDD nerf, it would still be very strong against tempests just because how ridiculously slow they fire.
So the only matchup where the tempest nerf makes sense is against Zerg. Not a really good trade imo. As someone already wrote, maybe the best thing to do would be removing the massive tag from broodlords. Although I'm not sure how this would affect ZvZ.
Oh and btw: a funny fact is that without tempests +massive air bonus, a pure carrier army would be unbeatable in PvP.
On February 26 2015 05:45 Dingodile wrote: I approve the tempest change vs BL but vs Collossi needs something. maybe +100 shield massive air attack.
Can you think of a less elegant change ? Someone said it before in the thread : we should go away from the hardcounters game. They're doing it with LotV for the immortals, they're doing it again for the tempests. That's a great thing. And for Christ's sake, you already have no other choice but colossi compositions in macro PvP. If you try to transition to tempests and the opponent has a brain, you die.
Going away from hardcounters appears to work for LotV because its LotV there are a LOT of changes aside from the units.
I'm not sure it works for HotS. Especially because they are effectively deleting tempests. At least hosts can still do some harass damage. Tempests have again, 9.09 DPS. At +3 air they have a whopping wait for it: 11.82 DPS. Against a unit with 3 armor (from upgrades) you actually do less with full ups than you did when both units were at zero upgrades.
They're not deleting tempests. Tempests will still be useful in at least one scenario : to battle against ghost viking without relying too much on storms. Most PvTs don't reach that stage, but you will still be able to add tempests in that stage of the game to force bad engages from the T, which you can't do otherwise since vikings outrange colossi. Then again I'm probably biased because I fucking HATE Tempests and I think removing them would be smart.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote: tempests were intended to fix mass colossi in PvP
But did they ? Every pro chooses colo tech if the game ever goes past 10:00. True this could mean a resurgence of double colo builds, but if you committed to colo yourself and saw double colo from your opponent the wisest decision was already to go double colo yourself and try to win the colo war. Going tempests is a gamble, if you can survive the transition you're good otherwise you're dead. Or am I wrong ? I really think that won't effectively change much as far as PvP goes.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote: Wait what. I'm pretty sure this affects colossi, since the tempests bonus is already vs massive air only, and colossi count as air. If so then the nerf is extremely retarded, tempests were intended to fix mass colossi in PvP and it added an interesting mechanic in the matchup, aka finding the correct balance between tempests and ground army. Please, don't touch tempests in PvP.
Tempests are already bad vs BCs because of ravens. Meching terrans will only build BCs when they already have a lot of ravens for PDDs. Even if blizzard wants to go through with the PDD nerf, it would still be very strong against tempests just because how ridiculously slow they fire.
So the only matchup where the tempest nerf makes sense is against Zerg. Not a really good trade imo. As someone already wrote, maybe the best thing to do would be removing the massive tag from broodlords. Although I'm not sure how this would affect ZvZ.
Oh and btw: a funny fact is that without tempests +massive air bonus, a pure carrier army would be unbeatable in PvP.
Then BL are pretty useless in ZvZ as few months ago und mass SH vs mass SH most used ZvZ play again. Thors, Archons etc are al ot weaker vs BL.
On February 26 2015 05:01 MyrionSC2 wrote: Hope pvp doesn't go back to war of the worlds now that tempest massive damage will be nerfed.
sorry not a protoss but cant you still go for tempest if they try to go mass colossus im not sure i get what you're trying to say. because if they go for the war of the worlds type stuff(mass colossus) wont tempest just shit on them, or do colossus count as massive air units? Im pretty sure they dont count as air so i think tempest will still be ok. right?
Even in the current state of the game, if you try to go for tempest and the opponent identifies it, he can attack into you with his colossi + chargelot + archons and reinforce with stalkers if you managed to get any air going. So no, you can't if your opponent is sending hallucinations all the time like he should. No one goes really mass colossi by the way (10+), it's usually 6-8 into chargelot archon immortal.
i see thank you. Now what i hope happens is that protoss start using immortal warp prism like terrans use medivacs hellbat drops on armys, YES i know toss don't have speed boost but toss do have speed upgrades and hallucinations to fake a couple prisms and drop on the army. Now obvious I'm not a toss and have no idea if this will work but i think it would be soooooo sick to see and would be better then seeing mass colossus armies. .
Viper Blinding Cloud range increased from 10 to 11 This is to help vs. Mech especially since the range difference between Vipers and Vikings will be slightly greater.
Thank you.
and there goes any hope of playing mech outside of tvt. it will probably never be a viable strategy as long as DK is the leader of the balance team. he's really doing everything to keep it from being viable.
On February 26 2015 05:01 MyrionSC2 wrote: Hope pvp doesn't go back to war of the worlds now that tempest massive damage will be nerfed.
sorry not a protoss but cant you still go for tempest if they try to go mass colossus im not sure i get what you're trying to say. because if they go for the war of the worlds type stuff(mass colossus) wont tempest just shit on them, or do colossus count as massive air units? Im pretty sure they dont count as air so i think tempest will still be ok. right?
Even in the current state of the game, if you try to go for tempest and the opponent identifies it, he can attack into you with his colossi + chargelot + archons and reinforce with stalkers if you managed to get any air going. So no, you can't if your opponent is sending hallucinations all the time like he should. No one goes really mass colossi by the way (10+), it's usually 6-8 into chargelot archon immortal.
i see thank you. Now what i hope happens is that protoss start using immortal warp prism like terrans use medivacs hellbat drops on armys, YES i know toss don't have speed boost but toss do have speed upgrades and hallucinations to fake a couple prisms and drop on the army. Now obvious I'm not a toss and have no idea if this will work but i think it would be soooooo sick to see and would be better then seeing mass colossus armies. .
Good P player are already using that strat, but in conjonction with their own colossi. State does that all the time for instance. It's really good because it abused the lack of anti-air in a standard lategame PvP composition, you can warp zealots on top of the colossi to mess with their AI, it's really strong. But if you don't have colossi of your own, well it'll be cute, but you'll get slaughtered.
Viper Blinding Cloud range increased from 10 to 11 This is to help vs. Mech especially since the range difference between Vipers and Vikings will be slightly greater.
Thank you.
and there goes any hope of playing mech outside of tvt. it will probably never be a viable strategy as long as DK is the leader of the balance team. he's really doing everything to keep it from being viable.
Which, seeing how exciting and action packed SC2 mech has been so far, is something I'm pretty OK with.
The Tempest change is so bad :/. People whining about hardcounters have no idea what they're talking about. Brood Lords don't need to be effective during every stage of every late-game.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote: tempests were intended to fix mass colossi in PvP
But did they ? Every pro chooses colo tech if the game ever goes past 10:00. True this could mean a resurgence of double colo builds, but if you committed to colo yourself and saw double colo from your opponent the wisest decision was already to go double colo yourself and try to win the colo war.
I agree up to this point.
Going tempests is a gamble, if you can survive the transition you're good otherwise you're dead. Or am I wrong ? I really think that won't effectively change much as far as PvP goes.
Well it's not really a gamble... it's like saying that adding hydras and infestors to a roach army in ZvZ is a gamble. It depends on each game. Surely you don't wanna switch into tempests if your opponent is going to attack you very soon. However the more the game goes on, the more likely the players will add tempests to their armies.
Tempests are all that make lategame PvP interesting. Before, there was a pretty much defined end-game composition, which was around ~9 colossi, and the rest immortals/archons. Now, there isn't really a composition that's better than all the others. You want at least 5 tempests to oneshot colossi, but if your opponent has tempests too, then you're gonna need more tempests, but you can't build too many or you can get countered by blink stalkers and archons, and so on. So you have a lategame where thinking about which is the best composition in each moment actually comes into play, and it adds a lot of depth into the matchup.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote: tempests were intended to fix mass colossi in PvP
But did they ? Every pro chooses colo tech if the game ever goes past 10:00. True this could mean a resurgence of double colo builds, but if you committed to colo yourself and saw double colo from your opponent the wisest decision was already to go double colo yourself and try to win the colo war.
Going tempests is a gamble, if you can survive the transition you're good otherwise you're dead. Or am I wrong ? I really think that won't effectively change much as far as PvP goes.
Well it's not really a gamble... it's like saying that adding hydras and infestors to a roach army in ZvZ is a gamble. It depends on each game. Surely you don't wanna switch into tempests if your opponent is going to attack you very soon. However the more the game goes on, the more likely the players will add tempests to their armies.
Tempests are all that make lategame PvP interesting. Before, there was a pretty much defined end-game composition, which was around ~9 colossi, and the rest immortals/archons. Now, there isn't really a composition that's better than all the others. You want at least 5 tempests to oneshot colossi, but if your opponent has tempests too, then you're gonna need more tempests, but you can't build too many or you can get countered by blink stalkers and archons, and so on. So you have a lategame where thinking about which is the best composition in each moment actually comes into play, and it adds a lot of depth into the matchup.
I agree with your points. But as you said, mass carrier is now unbeatable on paper. So, why not add carriers instead of colossi now that tempests don't make them useless ? Ofc the transition is slower, but if you're in those very lategame scenarios you're sitting behind cannons and maybe a mothership, I'm pretty sure that could be something.
Eh, they could just scrap the balance patch at this point and release the LotV beta. It's looking less and less likely that they'll be able to introduce some of the LotV changes into HotS and not break the game.
On February 26 2015 04:55 Tenks wrote: So whats the point of Tempest now? Will this make BC actually viable in TvP?
BCs weren't bothered by Tempest to much. But those HTs :< and no way to get there. Glad they finally allow you to attack in between Swarmhost waves. And they still work just as well as before, but they don't remove units from the matchup anymore. Carriers still better if you have upgrades.
Viper Blinding Cloud range increased from 10 to 11 This is to help vs. Mech especially since the range difference between Vipers and Vikings will be slightly greater.
Thank you.
and there goes any hope of playing mech outside of tvt. it will probably never be a viable strategy as long as DK is the leader of the balance team. he's really doing everything to keep it from being viable.
Which, seeing how exciting and action packed SC2 mech has been so far, is something I'm pretty OK with.
in tvt it is extremely exciting. taeja vs innovation, flash vs byoong, mma vs gumiho just to give a few examples. the problem in tvz is that SHs force you to turtle extremely hard until you get that mass raven cloud and then slowly siege across the map. that's because it's boring, not because of mech but because of SHs (and because of ravens but terran wouldn't need them without SHs.) with nerfs to shs and ravens mech could be similarly entertaining than in tvt, no need to kill that style.
Viper Blinding Cloud range increased from 10 to 11 This is to help vs. Mech especially since the range difference between Vipers and Vikings will be slightly greater.
Thank you.
and there goes any hope of playing mech outside of tvt. it will probably never be a viable strategy as long as DK is the leader of the balance team. he's really doing everything to keep it from being viable.
I'm OK with that. Right now, except for a few players, everyone that plays mech plays it turtle style forcing horribly long swarm hosts games. If a mech army is more beatable, maybe it will force terran to go for a more dynamic style and produce more entertaining games, A good direction could be making the army less invencible while making early game more viable.
Also, with locusts being able to fly and land on siege tanks I don't think changing the blinding cloud range will make any difference.
Viper Blinding Cloud range increased from 10 to 11 This is to help vs. Mech especially since the range difference between Vipers and Vikings will be slightly greater.
Thank you.
and there goes any hope of playing mech outside of tvt. it will probably never be a viable strategy as long as DK is the leader of the balance team. he's really doing everything to keep it from being viable.
meh not to worried about it as long as you scout the vipers and have enough vikings with turrets support to snipe them and a good spread on tanks with a senors tower to scout the attack coming (still might be very hard to hold but) i think its manageable.
but i do kinda agree they are trying there hardest to make mech harder/less viable to appease the louder crowd of ppl that want only bio play. but just so ppl know not everyone that plays mech plays like avilo turtling till mass ravens all game. some of us do attack and play aggro mech(medivacs are good with mech too ppl try 4 tank drops they shit on building) but when ppl see mech they only think avilo so GL HF.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote: tempests were intended to fix mass colossi in PvP
But did they ? Every pro chooses colo tech if the game ever goes past 10:00. True this could mean a resurgence of double colo builds, but if you committed to colo yourself and saw double colo from your opponent the wisest decision was already to go double colo yourself and try to win the colo war.
I agree up to this point.
Going tempests is a gamble, if you can survive the transition you're good otherwise you're dead. Or am I wrong ? I really think that won't effectively change much as far as PvP goes.
Well it's not really a gamble... it's like saying that adding hydras and infestors to a roach army in ZvZ is a gamble. It depends on each game. Surely you don't wanna switch into tempests if your opponent is going to attack you very soon. However the more the game goes on, the more likely the players will add tempests to their armies.
Tempests are all that make lategame PvP interesting. Before, there was a pretty much defined end-game composition, which was around ~9 colossi, and the rest immortals/archons. Now, there isn't really a composition that's better than all the others. You want at least 5 tempests to oneshot colossi, but if your opponent has tempests too, then you're gonna need more tempests, but you can't build too many or you can get countered by blink stalkers and archons, and so on. So you have a lategame where thinking about which is the best composition in each moment actually comes into play, and it adds a lot of depth into the matchup.
I agree with your points. But as you said, mass carrier is now unbeatable on paper. So, why not add carriers instead of colossi now that tempests don't make them useless ? Ofc the transition is slower, but if you're in those very lategame scenarios you're sitting behind cannons and maybe a mothership, I'm pretty sure that could be something.
This might be true. Although this would mean that both players would start to slowly turn their army into a pure carrier army, and then you would have a pathetic mass carriers vs. mass carriers lategame. That's not fun either. Tempests are interesting because you can't mass them for the win in PvP, you need to find the proper balance. Maybe the only crazy thing that could happen would be if people started to go straight into skytoss to get ahead on upgrades, but it's not really possible. Blink stalkers are too good against low numbers of air units.
Whelp, PvP is going to suck now, no tempest response to colossi anymore. It's not going to effect too much, I suppose, but it is going to make every end game battle mass colossus vs. mass colossus again. There was a while there where we saw templar into tempest responses to robo centric builds, those were really cool, but that style is now completely dead with this.
Viper Blinding Cloud range increased from 10 to 11 This is to help vs. Mech especially since the range difference between Vipers and Vikings will be slightly greater.
Thank you.
and there goes any hope of playing mech outside of tvt. it will probably never be a viable strategy as long as DK is the leader of the balance team. he's really doing everything to keep it from being viable.
I'm OK with that. Right now, except for a few players, everyone that plays mech plays it turtle style forcing horribly long swarm hosts games. If a mech army is more beatable, maybe it will force terran to go for a more dynamic style and produce more entertaining games, A good direction could be making the army less invencible while making early game more viable.
Also, with locusts being able to fly and land on siege tanks I don't think changing the blinding cloud range will make any difference.
no exactly this is what won't happen. have you ever played vs roach hydra viper? on open field it's nearly impossible to not get blinding clouded because the vipers can come from every direction and it's also harder to spread your tanks when you are aggressive with them. with the new change moving out on the map will just be suicide.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote: tempests were intended to fix mass colossi in PvP
But did they ? Every pro chooses colo tech if the game ever goes past 10:00. True this could mean a resurgence of double colo builds, but if you committed to colo yourself and saw double colo from your opponent the wisest decision was already to go double colo yourself and try to win the colo war.
I agree up to this point.
Going tempests is a gamble, if you can survive the transition you're good otherwise you're dead. Or am I wrong ? I really think that won't effectively change much as far as PvP goes.
Well it's not really a gamble... it's like saying that adding hydras and infestors to a roach army in ZvZ is a gamble. It depends on each game. Surely you don't wanna switch into tempests if your opponent is going to attack you very soon. However the more the game goes on, the more likely the players will add tempests to their armies.
Tempests are all that make lategame PvP interesting. Before, there was a pretty much defined end-game composition, which was around ~9 colossi, and the rest immortals/archons. Now, there isn't really a composition that's better than all the others. You want at least 5 tempests to oneshot colossi, but if your opponent has tempests too, then you're gonna need more tempests, but you can't build too many or you can get countered by blink stalkers and archons, and so on. So you have a lategame where thinking about which is the best composition in each moment actually comes into play, and it adds a lot of depth into the matchup.
I agree with your points. But as you said, mass carrier is now unbeatable on paper. So, why not add carriers instead of colossi now that tempests don't make them useless ? Ofc the transition is slower, but if you're in those very lategame scenarios you're sitting behind cannons and maybe a mothership, I'm pretty sure that could be something.
This might be true. Although this would mean that both players would start to slowly turn their army into a pure carrier army, and then you would have a pathetic mass carriers vs. mass carriers lategame. That's not fun either. Tempests are interesting because you can't mass them for the win in PvP, you need to find the proper balance. Maybe the only crazy thing that could happen would be if people started to go straight into skytoss to get ahead on upgrades, but it's not really possible. Blink stalkers are too good against low numbers of air units.
Straight skytoss should not be possible because you'll die while transitioning against straight blink stalkers if you're rushing the fleet beacon or blink stalkers + templars/archons if you're trying to use void rays first as shown by the first months of HotS.
I'm not a good player so I may be saying really stupid things because I never built a tempest (OK, I actually built some once during a PvT ladder game to seal a victory against a pretty BM T that had no more eco but a fucking strong 180 supply ghost viking army). For instance I had never realized the interesting interaction you mentioned in your previous post (tempests, but not too many). But I'm sure there are options to be explored besides the 8 colossi + immortal archon. Why not colossi void rays with archon support for instance ? The void ray has seen heavy use in the early days of HotS, then people realized they were terrible against storms, and no one goes void rays any more. But void rays are really strong in HotS. Maybe things like that could appear.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote: Oh and btw: a funny fact is that without tempests +massive air bonus, a pure carrier army would be unbeatable in PvP.
I just tested this for the lulz, 132 supply of fully upgraded Carriers lost to 132 supply of fully upgraded Archons.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote:Oh and btw: a funny fact is that without tempests +massive air bonus, a pure carrier army would be unbeatable in PvP.
I just tested this for the lulz, 132 supply of fully upgraded Carriers lost to 132 supply of fully upgraded Archons.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote: tempests were intended to fix mass colossi in PvP
But did they ? Every pro chooses colo tech if the game ever goes past 10:00. True this could mean a resurgence of double colo builds, but if you committed to colo yourself and saw double colo from your opponent the wisest decision was already to go double colo yourself and try to win the colo war.
I agree up to this point.
Going tempests is a gamble, if you can survive the transition you're good otherwise you're dead. Or am I wrong ? I really think that won't effectively change much as far as PvP goes.
Well it's not really a gamble... it's like saying that adding hydras and infestors to a roach army in ZvZ is a gamble. It depends on each game. Surely you don't wanna switch into tempests if your opponent is going to attack you very soon. However the more the game goes on, the more likely the players will add tempests to their armies.
Tempests are all that make lategame PvP interesting. Before, there was a pretty much defined end-game composition, which was around ~9 colossi, and the rest immortals/archons. Now, there isn't really a composition that's better than all the others. You want at least 5 tempests to oneshot colossi, but if your opponent has tempests too, then you're gonna need more tempests, but you can't build too many or you can get countered by blink stalkers and archons, and so on. So you have a lategame where thinking about which is the best composition in each moment actually comes into play, and it adds a lot of depth into the matchup.
I agree with your points. But as you said, mass carrier is now unbeatable on paper. So, why not add carriers instead of colossi now that tempests don't make them useless ? Ofc the transition is slower, but if you're in those very lategame scenarios you're sitting behind cannons and maybe a mothership, I'm pretty sure that could be something.
This might be true. Although this would mean that both players would start to slowly turn their army into a pure carrier army, and then you would have a pathetic mass carriers vs. mass carriers lategame. That's not fun either. Tempests are interesting because you can't mass them for the win in PvP, you need to find the proper balance. Maybe the only crazy thing that could happen would be if people started to go straight into skytoss to get ahead on upgrades, but it's not really possible. Blink stalkers are too good against low numbers of air units.
Straight skytoss should not be possible because you'll die while transitioning against straight blink stalkers if you're rushing the fleet beacon or blink stalkers + templars/archons if you're trying to use void rays first as shown by the first months of HotS.
I'm not a good player so I may be saying really stupid things because I never built a tempest (OK, I actually built some once during a PvT ladder game to seal a victory against a pretty BM T that had no more eco but a fucking strong 180 supply ghost viking army). For instance I had never realized the interesting interaction you mentioned in your previous post (tempests, but not too many). But I'm sure there are options to be explored besides the 8 colossi + immortal archon. Why not colossi void rays with archon support for instance ? The void ray has seen heavy use in the early days of HotS, then people realized they were terrible against storms, and no one goes void rays any more. But void rays are really strong in HotS. Maybe things like that could appear.
Mostly because of the way upgrades work, and because storm exists, and deals with void rays quite well. For the player going colossus/voidray/archon, he's going to need air, ground, and shield upgrades to compete with a 3/3 ground army from his opponent, which is far easier to get to without dying, and void rays are shredded by storms. The composition doesn't work at a high level.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote: tempests were intended to fix mass colossi in PvP
But did they ? Every pro chooses colo tech if the game ever goes past 10:00. True this could mean a resurgence of double colo builds, but if you committed to colo yourself and saw double colo from your opponent the wisest decision was already to go double colo yourself and try to win the colo war.
I agree up to this point.
Going tempests is a gamble, if you can survive the transition you're good otherwise you're dead. Or am I wrong ? I really think that won't effectively change much as far as PvP goes.
Well it's not really a gamble... it's like saying that adding hydras and infestors to a roach army in ZvZ is a gamble. It depends on each game. Surely you don't wanna switch into tempests if your opponent is going to attack you very soon. However the more the game goes on, the more likely the players will add tempests to their armies.
Tempests are all that make lategame PvP interesting. Before, there was a pretty much defined end-game composition, which was around ~9 colossi, and the rest immortals/archons. Now, there isn't really a composition that's better than all the others. You want at least 5 tempests to oneshot colossi, but if your opponent has tempests too, then you're gonna need more tempests, but you can't build too many or you can get countered by blink stalkers and archons, and so on. So you have a lategame where thinking about which is the best composition in each moment actually comes into play, and it adds a lot of depth into the matchup.
I agree with your points. But as you said, mass carrier is now unbeatable on paper. So, why not add carriers instead of colossi now that tempests don't make them useless ? Ofc the transition is slower, but if you're in those very lategame scenarios you're sitting behind cannons and maybe a mothership, I'm pretty sure that could be something.
This might be true. Although this would mean that both players would start to slowly turn their army into a pure carrier army, and then you would have a pathetic mass carriers vs. mass carriers lategame. That's not fun either. Tempests are interesting because you can't mass them for the win in PvP, you need to find the proper balance. Maybe the only crazy thing that could happen would be if people started to go straight into skytoss to get ahead on upgrades, but it's not really possible. Blink stalkers are too good against low numbers of air units.
Straight skytoss should not be possible because you'll die while transitioning against straight blink stalkers if you're rushing the fleet beacon or blink stalkers + templars/archons if you're trying to use void rays first as shown by the first months of HotS.
I'm not a good player so I may be saying really stupid things because I never built a tempest (OK, I actually built some once during a PvT ladder game to seal a victory against a pretty BM T that had no more eco but a fucking strong 180 supply ghost viking army). For instance I had never realized the interesting interaction you mentioned in your previous post (tempests, but not too many). But I'm sure there are options to be explored besides the 8 colossi + immortal archon. Why not colossi void rays with archon support for instance ? The void ray has seen heavy use in the early days of HotS, then people realized they were terrible against storms, and no one goes void rays any more. But void rays are really strong in HotS. Maybe things like that could appear.
Colossus/void rays/archons would not work. Void rays are weaker than immortals in terms of dps and of the protection they can give to your colossi. Of course they fly, but if you lose all your colossi and archons, it won't really matter. Also it feels like they would simply get beaten by a lot of archons.
Actually a few carriers mixed in your ground army would not be that useful either. It takes too much time for them to focus down colossi, unlike tempests, and you would lose the ground battle too easily. Only mass carriers would be unbeatable. That's why tempests (which I can agree with you, are not the best unit in PvT and PvZ) fit so well with PvP.
Anyway, I'm pretty OK with lategame PvP being a collateral victim of that SH redesign. I can understand why people feel sad the tempest won't counter colossi anymore, but it's not like most PvPs go to lategame anyway. What I can say for sure is that I like the ideas underlying this patch and that I fully support them.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote:Oh and btw: a funny fact is that without tempests +massive air bonus, a pure carrier army would be unbeatable in PvP.
I just tested this for the lulz, 132 supply of fully upgraded Carriers lost to 132 supply of fully upgraded Archons.
Seriously ? That's interesting ^^
Yes. Unfortunately didn't have the time to test both current and LotV Carriers (the difference being LotV Interceptors not immediately dying when the Carrier goes down because of that new ability), for some reason I used LotV instead of HotS, so I can't say whether Stalkers and Voidrays currently work with focus fire, but in LotV they definitely wouldn't.
Woah. Ravens, Swarm Hosts, Tempests and Immortals are all getting major changes or nerfs in LoTV?
Now if only they'd do something about the Collosus all of my hopes and dreams for changes to the units I hate in this game would be realized.
All in all I think these changes are a good direction to go in. The Tempest's +Massive damage was the wrong way to address Infestor/Broodlord in ZvP and with Mass Swarm Host no longer being a viable way to combat the Protoss deathball in the late game for Zerg, the return of the Broodlord seems like an obvious trade off.
They don't want to remove the massive tag from broodlords because of ZvZ, and doing this might make battlecruisers more common in TvP. I guess they just don't mind the damage to PvP with this change, which is unfortunate, because I was really loving the Templar into Tempest style we were seeing from players like Rain.
On February 26 2015 06:39 Whitewing wrote: They don't want to remove the massive tag from broodlords because of ZvZ, and doing this might make battlecruisers more common in TvP. I guess they just don't mind the damage to PvP with this change, which is unfortunate, because I was really loving the Templar into Tempest style we were seeing from players like Rain.
Only time I saw Rain attempting something gateway based into tempests he died pitifully to Zest's colossi on King Sejong Station. Do you have games showcasing that style ?
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote:Oh and btw: a funny fact is that without tempests +massive air bonus, a pure carrier army would be unbeatable in PvP.
I just tested this for the lulz, 132 supply of fully upgraded Carriers lost to 132 supply of fully upgraded Archons.
Seriously ? That's interesting ^^
Test it again. Archon only have 3 range. Carriers can abuse terrain.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote: Oh and btw: a funny fact is that without tempests +massive air bonus, a pure carrier army would be unbeatable in PvP.
I just tested this for the lulz, 132 supply of fully upgraded Carriers lost to 132 supply of fully upgraded Archons.
I'd imagine that archon aoe murdered the interceptors
How is this tempest nerf going to affect ultra-lategame vs zerg anyway?... The best composition against zerg, currently, is mass tempests/hts with a few colossi to clear locust waves. I doubt that broodlords would be very good against that. They're just too slow and they can't compete with tempests' 15 range combined with revelation.
On February 26 2015 06:39 Whitewing wrote: They don't want to remove the massive tag from broodlords because of ZvZ, and doing this might make battlecruisers more common in TvP. I guess they just don't mind the damage to PvP with this change, which is unfortunate, because I was really loving the Templar into Tempest style we were seeing from players like Rain.
Only time I saw Rain attempting something gateway based into tempests he died pitifully to Zest's colossi on King Sejong Station. Do you have games showcasing that style ?
I'd have to find the replays, and I don't remember in which tournaments I saw it, but he did it several times on Foxtrot and in a few other places, and he won several times with it against some really good players.
On February 26 2015 06:42 KingAlphard wrote: How is this tempest nerf going to affect ultra-lategame vs zerg anyway?... The best composition against zerg, currently, is mass tempests/hts with a few colossi to clear locust waves. I doubt that broodlords would be very good against that. They're just too slow and they can't compete with tempests' 15 range combined with revelation.
BL will probably allow the Z to have a good enough timing around 18-20:00 before you get your super lategame army going. I see roach hydra corruptor into BL being something in that meta.
And yeah, getting tempests against Z in that meta wouldn't be good. Corruptors are just too cost efficient vs them.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote:Oh and btw: a funny fact is that without tempests +massive air bonus, a pure carrier army would be unbeatable in PvP.
I just tested this for the lulz, 132 supply of fully upgraded Carriers lost to 132 supply of fully upgraded Archons.
Seriously ? That's interesting ^^
Test it again. Archon only have 3 range. Carriers can abuse terrain.
The Archons kill all Interceptors, even with 22 Carriers constantly rebuilding them, and in a real fight you'd of course then reinforce with something that can reach the Carriers (i.e. Stalkers). Nevermind that this is a situation that is too absurd for a real game.
On February 26 2015 06:42 KingAlphard wrote: How is this tempest nerf going to affect ultra-lategame vs zerg anyway?... The best composition against zerg, currently, is mass tempests/hts with a few colossi to clear locust waves. I doubt that broodlords would be very good against that. They're just too slow and they can't compete with tempests' 15 range combined with revelation.
mass tempest was only really used against mass SHs, normally you want mass VR/templar/collossi with a few tempests mixed in to kill broodlords. Pure tempests die to mass corruptor, it was only used against sh styles because all other air units die to spores
edit: and without tempests BLs can zone out templar while corruptor fungal kills the air army.
On February 26 2015 05:59 KingAlphard wrote: Oh and btw: a funny fact is that without tempests +massive air bonus, a pure carrier army would be unbeatable in PvP.
I just tested this for the lulz, 132 supply of fully upgraded Carriers lost to 132 supply of fully upgraded Archons.
I'd imagine that archon aoe murdered the interceptors
In a direct ingagement yes, but you can always pull back your carriers and build more interceptors.
This actually looks quite promising to my diamond mind. I like the fact Blizz will finally do a big change to the game without waiting for an expansion. Gogogo
On February 26 2015 06:42 KingAlphard wrote: How is this tempest nerf going to affect ultra-lategame vs zerg anyway?... The best composition against zerg, currently, is mass tempests/hts with a few colossi to clear locust waves. I doubt that broodlords would be very good against that. They're just too slow and they can't compete with tempests' 15 range combined with revelation.
mass tempest was only really used against mass SHs, normally you want mass VR/templar/collossi with a few tempests mixed in to kill broodlords. Pure tempests die to mass corruptor, it was only used against sh styles because all other air units die to spores
edit: and without tempests BLs can zone out templar while corruptor fungal kills the air army.
It's not pure tempests. It's tempests and hts, with a few archons as well if you want to. You can't engage that directly with mass corruptors. Tempests are preferred over void rays mostly because of their ability of dealing with chain abducts. If the zerg player goes for chain abducts against a void ray army, he'll get units for free. Against tempests, the protoss player will fire a ton of shots before the zerg player gets in and out of abduct range with his corruptor/overseer/viper cloud.
The thing is with broodlords, if you want to zone out high templars you need to get within 9 range with them, which means they are easily under tempests fire. Consider how much time it takes for a broodlord to get between 15 and 9 range too. That's a lot of tempest shots they have to eat.
The strength of Swarm hosts is that they can zone out high templars without committing real units under tempest fire at all.
On February 26 2015 06:42 KingAlphard wrote: How is this tempest nerf going to affect ultra-lategame vs zerg anyway?... The best composition against zerg, currently, is mass tempests/hts with a few colossi to clear locust waves. I doubt that broodlords would be very good against that. They're just too slow and they can't compete with tempests' 15 range combined with revelation.
mass tempest was only really used against mass SHs, normally you want mass VR/templar/collossi with a few tempests mixed in to kill broodlords. Pure tempests die to mass corruptor, it was only used against sh styles because all other air units die to spores
edit: and without tempests BLs can zone out templar while corruptor fungal kills the air army.
It's not pure tempests. It's tempests and hts, with a few archons as well if you want to. You can't engage that directly with mass corruptors. Tempests are preferred over void rays mostly because of their ability of dealing with chain abducts. If the zerg player goes for chain abducts against a void ray army, he'll get units for free. Against tempests, the protoss player will fire a ton of shots before the zerg player gets in and out of abduct range with his corruptor/overseer/viper cloud.
The thing is with broodlords, if you want to zone out high templars you need to get within 9 range with them, which means they are easily under tempests fire. Consider how much time it takes for a broodlord to get between 15 and 9 range too. That's a lot of tempest shots they have to eat.
The strength of Swarm hosts is that they can zone out high templars without committing real units under tempest fire at all.
we will see how it turns out but i doubt tempests will be built anymore with this change
On February 26 2015 06:42 KingAlphard wrote: How is this tempest nerf going to affect ultra-lategame vs zerg anyway?... The best composition against zerg, currently, is mass tempests/hts with a few colossi to clear locust waves. I doubt that broodlords would be very good against that. They're just too slow and they can't compete with tempests' 15 range combined with revelation.
mass tempest was only really used against mass SHs, normally you want mass VR/templar/collossi with a few tempests mixed in to kill broodlords. Pure tempests die to mass corruptor, it was only used against sh styles because all other air units die to spores
edit: and without tempests BLs can zone out templar while corruptor fungal kills the air army.
It's not pure tempests. It's tempests and hts, with a few archons as well if you want to. You can't engage that directly with mass corruptors. Tempests are preferred over void rays mostly because of their ability of dealing with chain abducts. If the zerg player goes for chain abducts against a void ray army, he'll get units for free. Against tempests, the protoss player will fire a ton of shots before the zerg player gets in and out of abduct range with his corruptor/overseer/viper cloud.
The thing is with broodlords, if you want to zone out high templars you need to get within 9 range with them, which means they are easily under tempests fire. Consider how much time it takes for a broodlord to get between 15 and 9 range too. That's a lot of tempest shots they have to eat.
The strength of Swarm hosts is that they can zone out high templars without committing real units under tempest fire at all.
we will see how it turns out but i doubt tempests will be built anymore with this change
Same for me. The Z should be able to make something happen before you have too many tempests, and even when you have 6-7 tempests transfuses will help keep key units alive.
Viper Blinding Cloud range increased from 10 to 11 This is to help vs. Mech especially since the range difference between Vipers and Vikings will be slightly greater.
The current range of Blinding Cloud is 9 afaik. Liquipedia says the same, it is 9range. So are Liquipedia and I incorrect here, and does this mean the range is increased from 9-->10 or from 9-->11?
On February 26 2015 06:42 KingAlphard wrote: How is this tempest nerf going to affect ultra-lategame vs zerg anyway?... The best composition against zerg, currently, is mass tempests/hts with a few colossi to clear locust waves. I doubt that broodlords would be very good against that. They're just too slow and they can't compete with tempests' 15 range combined with revelation.
mass tempest was only really used against mass SHs, normally you want mass VR/templar/collossi with a few tempests mixed in to kill broodlords. Pure tempests die to mass corruptor, it was only used against sh styles because all other air units die to spores
edit: and without tempests BLs can zone out templar while corruptor fungal kills the air army.
It's not pure tempests. It's tempests and hts, with a few archons as well if you want to. You can't engage that directly with mass corruptors. Tempests are preferred over void rays mostly because of their ability of dealing with chain abducts. If the zerg player goes for chain abducts against a void ray army, he'll get units for free. Against tempests, the protoss player will fire a ton of shots before the zerg player gets in and out of abduct range with his corruptor/overseer/viper cloud.
The thing is with broodlords, if you want to zone out high templars you need to get within 9 range with them, which means they are easily under tempests fire. Consider how much time it takes for a broodlord to get between 15 and 9 range too. That's a lot of tempest shots they have to eat.
The strength of Swarm hosts is that they can zone out high templars without committing real units under tempest fire at all.
we will see how it turns out but i doubt tempests will be built anymore with this change
Same for me. The Z should be able to make something happen before you have too many tempests, and even when you have 6-7 tempests transfuses will help keep key units alive.
Well definitely the ultra+broodlord+queen(+viper) timing attack will become insanely powerful. But here, I'm talking about numbers like 25 tempests. If you are able to reach that stage, there isn't a better composition. There's nothing that can make up for the ridiculously high range and supply efficiency of the tempest.
I think the beginning of LotV is gonna be pretty rough for zerg. As glad as i am to see swarmhosts go, i don't think zerg will initially have the tools to combat protoss deathballs nor terran mech. Unless they buff broodlord infestor way up, which would be absolutely hilarious (in an awful de ja vu type way)
we’ll have holes we need to fill. These are: ... Zerg being able to zone out High Templars in late game engagements.
I'm worried that they think this is all that SH were doing in the ZvP MU. Clearly the SH were very useful against nearly any composition with the exception of mass colossus (still not useless) and air-toss (also not entirely useless).
we’ll have holes we need to fill. These are: ... Zerg being able to zone out High Templars in late game engagements.
I'm worried that they think this is all that SH were doing in the ZvP MU. Clearly the SH were very useful against nearly any composition with the exception of mass colossus (still not useless) and air-toss (also not entirely useless).
I think they're aware of that issue and hope BL (now that tempests don't slaughter them) or infestors can play that zoning role.
On February 26 2015 07:24 Lobotomist wrote: I think the beginning of LotV is gonna be pretty rough for zerg. As glad as i am to see swarmhosts go, i don't think zerg will initially have the tools to combat protoss deathballs nor terran mech. Unless they buff broodlord infestor way up, which would be absolutely hilarious (in an awful de ja vu type way)
it's to early to tell because so much will change until release but at his point zerg seems to be by far the strongest race. ravager destroying forcefields, warpgate nerf and lurker will absolutely fuck with protoss and i can't imagine bio being viable at all vs zerg. marauder nerf + ultra buff is INSANE, ultras will basically never die vs bio. maybe mech with cyclones will be pretty good but ultras will also be extremely strong vs mech.
On February 26 2015 07:25 Luolis wrote: Just fucking remove SH already, its a fucking retarded bs unit that doesnt seem to have anything else in mind but make the other player kill himself.
On February 26 2015 04:33 SNSeigifried wrote: Tempest no longer has +massive damage vs. air Brood Lords can still be countered by the long range of Tempests, but they won’t be the hard counter they are now, meaning Brood Lords can serve to fill the missing gap created by the redesign of the Swarm Host. Thank you.
I find it hilarious that they finally throw the BC a bone and don't even mention it. 3rd class citizenship status.
Viper Blinding Cloud range increased from 10 to 11 This is to help vs. Mech especially since the range difference between Vipers and Vikings will be slightly greater.
Thank you.
and there goes any hope of playing mech outside of tvt. it will probably never be a viable strategy as long as DK is the leader of the balance team. he's really doing everything to keep it from being viable.
I'm OK with that. Right now, except for a few players, everyone that plays mech plays it turtle style forcing horribly long swarm hosts games. If a mech army is more beatable, maybe it will force terran to go for a more dynamic style and produce more entertaining games, A good direction could be making the army less invencible while making early game more viable.
Also, with locusts being able to fly and land on siege tanks I don't think changing the blinding cloud range will make any difference.
no exactly this is what won't happen. have you ever played vs roach hydra viper? on open field it's nearly impossible to not get blinding clouded because the vipers can come from every direction and it's also harder to spread your tanks when you are aggressive with them. with the new change moving out on the map will just be suicide.
You're doing it wrong.
By the time Vipers start coming out, you should be moving towards a 4th base and aiming towards being able to produce vikings 4-6 at a time. 8-10 Vikings don't take up a ton of supply but they zone out Vipers EXTREMELY well. If you're active with your Vikings and Hellions you can posture aggressively without being too exposed, and aggressive posturing leaves you room to pull back for a better trade if you get forced into an engagement.
Too many meching players hole up on 3 bases with not enough production facilities vs. Z. TvZ is the only meching matchup where taking a 4th base is relatively easy, and you should be cranking out of 6-8 factories on 3 bases while adding 1-3 starports once you take your 4th.
On February 26 2015 07:24 Lobotomist wrote: I think the beginning of LotV is gonna be pretty rough for zerg. As glad as i am to see swarmhosts go, i don't think zerg will initially have the tools to combat protoss deathballs nor terran mech. Unless they buff broodlord infestor way up, which would be absolutely hilarious (in an awful de ja vu type way)
it's to early to tell because so much will change until release but at his point zerg seems to be by far the strongest race. ravager destroying forcefields, warpgate nerf and lurker will absolutely fuck with protoss and i can't imagine bio being viable at all vs zerg. marauder nerf + ultra buff is INSANE, ultras will basically never die vs bio. maybe mech with cyclones will be pretty good but ultras will also be extremely strong vs mech.
Ultra buff? Warpgate nerf? Damn i did not read some stuff. Ravagers and hatch tech free burrow move look ridiculous, i guess i had assumed that ravager was going to get heavily nerfed and burrow move would never make it live.
On February 26 2015 08:12 ejozl wrote: I don't know I think the Tempest need some kind of slight buff, with this change, or at least a change in it's role.
Who cares about the tempest, let the boring unit die.
Ugh, we have to wait until the end of WCS Season 1 to get rid of swarm hosts? We're not even done with the Round of 32 yet! I can see why they wouldn't do a balance change in the middle of a round since that means players aren't all on the same footing, but why can't they just do it after the Ro32 is over? At that point none of WCS, SSL or GSL will be in the middle of a round, it's the perfect time!
This is in fact in the right direction. There are still several changes that absolutely need to be made. Zerg need VIABLE anti air to combat Protoss, dragging queens across the map will not do. Zerg also need a way to trade less cost inefficiently against Protoss deathballs. The best option is probably a hydra buff in the form of removing either the range upgrade or the move speed upgrade and making it default. They are already lair tech so its not like hydra busts are going to be a problem, especially with the mothershipcore being so defensively strong in the time that upgrade would matter. I think it would be a cool change for Zerg to make queens massive, mostly to help defend against force fielding the main ramp. Either that or add some other vulnerability to force fields because they are the longest standing aspect of absolutely terrible game design in sc2. Maybe give them HP and be destroyable. While I'm pointing out aspects of terrible game design, what's with oracles insane amount of dps. Wouldn't it be better to have something with more counter-play to it. Maybe instead of lasering everything to death it could just place a static "bomb" that would detonate after a second. If there was a melee cast range to that there would be little options for abuse against large forces late game. There's much more reward for watching the mini-map closely and scouting the edges of your base and it would be reminiscent of reaver drops. Running your workers away would actually achieve something as well. As it stands its just one more Protoss megalaser.
I'd actually really like to see the Tempest's damage and cooldown increased, as well as a total speed increase, in exchange for lowering its acceleration to something ridiculous like .25 or .125 so that it behaves more like a flying Siege Tank that must be guided into position before the fight starts.
On February 26 2015 08:51 Yakikorosu wrote: Ugh, we have to wait until the end of WCS Season 1 to get rid of swarm hosts? We're not even done with the Round of 32 yet! I can see why they wouldn't do a balance change in the middle of a round since that means players aren't all on the same footing, but why can't they just do it after the Ro32 is over? At that point none of WCS, SSL or GSL will be in the middle of a round, it's the perfect time!
Because these changes are huge and will change the strategies a lot for all three races. Players won't have enough time to try, test and practice all that stuff. You have been waiting for 2 years already, sky won't fall if this doesn't happen in few weeks...
So the point of this patch is to kill two hots units right?
SH- now an awkwardly supply heavy, expensive, rarely fighting unit. They sure are unique in this sense. How about give them a spell e.g. a 'heavy creep' ability (remember the goo in load runner that slowed everything down?) or something that made them useful in the interim. Or forget them as I think zergs will be content with the un-preventable nydas worms and mutas for harass (cheaper, more useful)
Tempest- why nerf a niche unit anyway? First, get your story straight- is it midgame pvz that is an issue, lategame pvz that is an issue, or pvz overall that's an issue? I don't think tempests are the problem here, somewhere along the line they just became the autistic kid in the family that no one really bothered to deal with.
Viper- stats are already good. It's a great unit that shows up in the game too late to help vs midgame toss deathballs to matter. Works well as is vs meching terrans and LOTV proposed changes (especially roach burrow and ravager zoning) are already going to help zergs a lot. Counteroffer: make viper available at spire tech. Add spire upgrade for faster consumption or make able to consume creep tumors (they already kind of have the ability to take queen energy with transfuse right? this would just be a tactical tradeoff that allows vipers to get some mana on the go.
What bothers me the most is blizzard saying that they don't get enough feedback. While not even considering that their direction might be wrong. Here is feedback:
Fucking free units that get launched from 20,30, 40, 50 range will now also be able to fly. Ask any player that just got out of Swarm Host game about which part of the last game he didn't enjoy. The answer will be: "THEY ARE FUCKING FREE. HE KILLS STUFF WITHOUT ANY FUCKING RISK OR COST!"
The idea to make them fly enforces that principle. The idea to let Swarm Hosts run around at Stalker Speed and evade all harm enforces that principle.
You want feedback? Here is feedback from someone who tried the map (not very often because it is hard to find players) and the inoffical LotV mod (in which many conditions are different, but there is still the flying locust SH to try): Get rid of the combination of free units and longrange. You may solve the issue of long games with this patch (which in itself is only an issue for some players), but you are still not creating something that is fun to play or play against. People are not going to combat against free units. It's going to be free damage from one player done to another player. And then the Swarm Hosts will go offline for 60seconds and the other player is going to do free damage to the first player. That is not interesting, that is like putting a boxsack into the ring and ask the athletes to take turns on hitting it, instead of hitting each other.
I think what forced many zerg players to go SH was that they really lack choices playing vs a patient turtling player who just goes for 200/200 army because zerg's core units lack supply efficiency. SHs are very supply effective right now. So there is a supply effectiveness gap that has to be filled with somehow. Supply effective zerg units are blords, banes, infestors, and corruptors. Corruptors are vs air, and banes don't work in 200/200 situations. So are zergs supposed to go back to infestor broodlord composition?
Omg, SH has become super expensive units that for long durations is just dead weight. I'm pretty sure SH the way the test map before this one had changed them made them pretty much useless. Too expensive to just use for harass (unless late game) and leaving waaaay too big of an opening if you make too many to try and actually "fight" with them.
Seriously the duration you have on you to counter a SH player is more than enough, with WG or medivacs you can even exploit the window that SH is just dead weight without even having to wait for the locusts to die off. If your bio gets attacked by locusts just loead you medivacs and boost into Zs base, the locusts will be dead by the time they run back and by the time SH can make more locusts the main is totally annihilated. If you want to argue "erm what if they attack me with locusts while I'm turtling in my base, don't turtle in your base against the new SH. There's no point, the weakness of the SH is counterattack if you are active on the map you have a huge advantage.
The 5 seconds reduce in how long the locusts last doesn't mainly effect the way the time gap can be exploited against SH in my opinion it will reduce the effectiveness of locusts. I think this is an outright stupid idea, I mean the time gap that a player has to counter SH is huge as it is, it wil keep being huge. The difference is that locusts will make even less damage.
It seems the design team is thinking that P and T and is going to turtle against SH like the use to do, lol, WHY would they do that it would be retarted. Imagine T or P takes map control, which they can easily do seeing as there is a huge time gap between the locusts waves. If they scout locusts coming they can just retreat with their army and the locusts won't even scratch the enemy, then when the locusts die the P or T army can you just go and outright kill the Z player. Are blizzard thinking the Z player is supposed to yolo the SH into the enemy army and release the locusts hoping they can get some damage off? Skillful players will keep map control against SH and they won't get close enough to even scratch a base, I don't think SH would be used at all besides the late game with the previous changes that was planed. Nerfing them even harder is just silly.
Blizzard even say it themselves, that they are nerfing them so hard that they can't even fulfill their role anymore. But hey they are great harass units if you have 1000min 1000 gasto throw away at units that can't be used in an actual fight.... Which is like never
I'm OK with SH and Tempests being nerfed into oblivion. Those units should never have existed in the first place, what is going on is the closest Blizzard could come with their stupid pride to being reasonable and throwing those shames of units away.
From seeing some of your other posts, I don't think we enjoy the same type of metagame. However, I hate tempests and SH as well. These units should never have gone past HotS beta. I guess these units united the community. Against them.
On February 26 2015 09:01 CthulhuWarlord wrote: I think it would be a cool change for Zerg to make queens massive, mostly to help defend against force fielding the main ramp.
This idea has been around for awhile and from what I recall it was not done for two main reasons: phoenix won't be able to pick up queens anymore and ... force fields . Seriously though with ravagers we Zergs won't have the same kinds of problems with FF.
Actually, come to think of it the simplest solution for now would probably just be to make locusts cost something like 5 minerals each (maybe increase their hp or something to compensate). As many people have pointed out, SH games are not necessarily boring to watch. The problem comes when the game takes more than an hour to complete and progress stops happening. If locusts had a cost then the game would at least have a time limit once the map was completely mined out.
F**k it dog... Let it burn, let it all burn to the ground... "Mew mew mew" zerglings burnin'.... "Arggghhhh, not like this!" Marines burnin'... "puff (blue smoke)" ez race protoss burnin'...
From a game play perspective swarm hosts seem a bit too easy as a unit. They're invisible, they spawn free units, you don't have to move them to continue sieging an area, they don't have a huge tech tree (like BLs) and you can make a lot of them without being hardcountered right away. Make them harder to use Blizz and the game will be more interesting. My suggestion, NO BURROW, yet still must be set in siege mode to spawn locust. This way a blob of SHs would have to be spread out nicely in order to have full effect.
Viper Blinding Cloud range increased from 10 to 11 This is to help vs. Mech especially since the range difference between Vipers and Vikings will be slightly greater.
Thank you.
and there goes any hope of playing mech outside of tvt. it will probably never be a viable strategy as long as DK is the leader of the balance team. he's really doing everything to keep it from being viable.
You must be joking. Adding one range to the viper is not going to make mech less viable in ZvT. And with the swarm host change, I personally believe we will see more mech than ever before in pro matches.
On February 26 2015 14:08 My_Fake_Plastic_Luv wrote: From a game play perspective swarm hosts seem a bit too easy as a unit. They're invisible, they spawn free units, you don't have to move them to continue sieging an area, they don't have a huge tech tree (like BLs) and you can make a lot of them without being hardcountered right away. Make them harder to use Blizz and the game will be more interesting. My suggestion, NO BURROW, yet still must be set in siege mode to spawn locust. This way a blob of SHs would have to be spread out nicely in order to have full effect.
There's a burrow animation used in the campaign that makes them immobile, but not truly burrowed and stealthed. It would be rather nice to bring that back, and have true burrowing not allow locust spawning. That having been said, people with high APM could just go back into mobile mode and then burrow after spawning the locusts and eat up the cooldown while burrowed, and then pop back up again and semi-burrow to launch another wave. It's only like 4 extra actions in total, but combined with removal of Enduring Locusts (with perhaps a creep movement buff to compensate), it could keep the SH in it's main role, while taking more skill to use, being more fun to play against, and not being able to create long, boring games.
If half the people discussing sc2 balance on forums/reddit/social networks spent half the time they use to write their comments to play test balance map, half the games issues would be solved in less than half the time it needs now.
On February 26 2015 17:20 Gwavajuice wrote: If half the people discussing sc2 balance on forums/reddit/social networks spent half the time they use to write their comments to play test balance map, half the games issues would be solved in less than half the time it needs now.
(failed Bilbo Baggins parody)
IMHO people are not playing the test maps because they don't believe in Blizzard, there were some test maps where people said "it is a dumb change, don't do this" and they did. Why to play the test maps when they ignore your opinions anyway? ,-)
this is all good except the Tempest change...leave Tempest as is and decrease BL morph cost and morph time. This would allow the zerg to tech switch easily between broods and SH late game forcing a reaction from P similar to that P forces T (ie t must make viking or ghost depending colo or templar tech or a mix of both).
Not bad changeas imao, but I think that they have to tune the changes a bit more, as they are almost deleting a big part of Mech in TvZ while Bio has possibly an easier time against Swarm Hosts.
And Tempest play through almost all the matches is gone with this changes.
Why would you use a 300/200 unit with 10DPS that moves slow and shots even slower (with relatively low micro potential) against lategame (High HP) units)? It's a no-brainer. While Tempest change doesn't change much ZvP interactions (only allowing Broodlord play, which is nice) it renders the unit useless in PvP and PvT. Paired with speed increase for SH and flying locusts, the Tempest has no role to fill. They should consider speed buffs/ damage type rework (25+15vs armor/ 30+20vs massive, 30+30 vs buildings) for the Tempest to be microable and effective when played correctly, and an ability to deal damage. Without that, it's useless, as it would have less pressence in the game than now.
IMAO part of this problem is the low speed/"siege" range and HP/armor values of the Broodlord, which makes them a very easy target for any advanced composition and makes them very unviable most of the times. Moving at Carrier speed and having better acceleration than now, they would shine again and Tempests damage vs Massive could be reduced to 20 (30+20), maintaining a position against BCs, Colos and Carriers. I've always thought that the man who wrote +50vs massive for the tempest misunderstood "Total damage vs massive: 50" on a work meeting.
However, the Swarm Host update allows (and demands) Thor play to counter it, which is nice, and we have Phoenixes in PvZ, so this might refresh the meta a bit. Now Phoenix Colossus Archon will be very important in PvZ.
On February 26 2015 17:20 Gwavajuice wrote: If half the people discussing sc2 balance on forums/reddit/social networks spent half the time they use to write their comments to play test balance map, half the games issues would be solved in less than half the time it needs now.
(failed Bilbo Baggins parody)
IMHO people are not playing the test maps because they don't believe in Blizzard, there were some test maps where people said "it is a dumb change, don't do this" and they did. Why to play the test maps when they ignore your opinions anyway? ,-)
First "don't do this it's dumb" is not really quality feedback, second I don't think this is true anyway cause they have been multiple changes tested on balance maps that never came live cause people gave negative feedback.
Thing is a solid feedback is needed, with real tests and not just people reading the change log and trying to figure out how it will impact the game.
as a side note, the so called "community" is not really relevant, as shown in the #dreampool season, people can massively vote for some changes and then accuse blizzard of being dumb for making these very exact changes.
-back to the topic :
The SH change is huge, it totally changes the way you play the unit, you have to micro it around, big engagements are not easy to take micro wise (I think the opponent can hit and runway before the locust come into play) but they have a huge harassing power (going to one base and killing it is fast as fuck now). The result is a huge change in the dynamic of the game it's potentially a very good change leading to very fun games, but the big questions are :
- how can the other races adapt to this new ultra mobile hit and run unit? - do maps needs to be changed? and how? (esp regarding the 4th and 5th base location ) - are the speed of the SH offcreep, the locust's speed, damage and lifespan ok?
This requires a shitload of testing and we can safely assume that any input will be appreciated by Blizzard.
But again, it takes time and work, and it's just much harder than just doing nothing and blaming blizzard with #dedgaem bullshit...
On February 26 2015 06:39 Whitewing wrote: They don't want to remove the massive tag from broodlords because of ZvZ, and doing this might make battlecruisers more common in TvP. I guess they just don't mind the damage to PvP with this change, which is unfortunate, because I was really loving the Templar into Tempest style we were seeing from players like Rain.
Only time I saw Rain attempting something gateway based into tempests he died pitifully to Zest's colossi on King Sejong Station. Do you have games showcasing that style ?
LOL, if you're talking about last year's Proleague finals SKT vs KT, Rain vs Zest on King Sejong Station, Zest lost pitifully.
I really hate that they are doing this to HoTS. I would be willing to come to terms with losing my SHs in LoTV for the hope that I can still load up HoTS and find some people to play the good game against. But a patch means that the previous version is lost forever and there is no hope of playing it again.
People still haven't really figured out how to play against SHs but they are getting better and better, show creative ways to play against SHs and more and more interesting games, it is about time to kill them completely! It's always the same story: there is something strong and unique, posing a great challenge that we watch unfold and top players slowly inching their way forward to solving it ... and right there Blizzard patches it based on "community feedback", that is, the opinion of mostly loud idiots.
At this point, I wish people realised that every other Blizzard game is complete shit, the company went bankrupt, someone set up hacked SC2 servers and we could just have the game untouched forever like BW.
On February 26 2015 23:58 Polemarch wrote: For those talking about the effect of the tempest change on PvP vs. colossus:
The change text was:
Tempest no longer has +massive damage vs. air
So tempest will still have +massive damage vs. massive ground units like ultralisks and colossus.
When tempests fire at colossi, do they use the air or the ground attack?
Are people actually aware that Tempests do only bonus damage vs Massive AIR units (current state) or do they not read Unit descriptions? They only dealt bonus damage to ground and air in HotS beta as far as I remember. And to answer the question: Yes Tempests use their Air weapon vs Colossus.
I like the changes. Im only a bit concerned about the Viper change. They are already very strong Casters that can render an entire ground army useless. Its not as bad for Battle Hellions as they are somehow Melee fighters anyway. But for Tanks and Thors this is horrible. You cant just unsiege your Tanks and run out of it since it takes them 4 seconds to do that, which is almost half the time BCloud lasts. And kiting with Tanks isnt that good either cause of non-trackin turrets and bad damage point. For Thors its even worse because their damage point is terrible. They stare several seconds at their target before opening fire. Maybe they should increase the energy cost to 125 or 150 to compensate for it so its not that spammable and Vipers can consume to regenerate Energy anyways. But I do understand that Zerg needs some other options to fight (and I mean FIGHT not completely counter it) Mech.
Oh and on Feedback: How do they recieve feedback and where do we leave our thoughts? Im sure they mostly look for feedback on the US forums. I dont think they will read the german forums and recieve it.
On February 26 2015 11:55 Big J wrote: What bothers me the most is blizzard saying that they don't get enough feedback. While not even considering that their direction might be wrong. Here is feedback:
Fucking free units that get launched from 20,30, 40, 50 range will now also be able to fly. Ask any player that just got out of Swarm Host game about which part of the last game he didn't enjoy. The answer will be: "THEY ARE FUCKING FREE. HE KILLS STUFF WITHOUT ANY FUCKING RISK OR COST!"
The idea to make them fly enforces that principle. The idea to let Swarm Hosts run around at Stalker Speed and evade all harm enforces that principle.
You want feedback? Here is feedback from someone who tried the map (not very often because it is hard to find players) and the inoffical LotV mod (in which many conditions are different, but there is still the flying locust SH to try): Get rid of the combination of free units and longrange. You may solve the issue of long games with this patch (which in itself is only an issue for some players), but you are still not creating something that is fun to play or play against. People are not going to combat against free units. It's going to be free damage from one player done to another player. And then the Swarm Hosts will go offline for 60seconds and the other player is going to do free damage to the first player. That is not interesting, that is like putting a boxsack into the ring and ask the athletes to take turns on hitting it, instead of hitting each other.
I agree on the feedback point, but let me push back on SH a bit. I find as a concept manageable. They function similarly to a siege tank, if they are set up, you need to avoid that area or lose way too much. Siege tank pushes function similarly to SH: unless the line is broken with overwhelming force, they will kill everything incredibly cost-effectively.
I just think the unit doesn't work with Z as well, if you can build tons at once, you can tech-switch to kill too easily, and if they are too costly and weak, losing them one loses you the game every single time.
I like the tidal wave aspect that Swarm Host brings to the table. So the more it becomes non-constant semi threats the better.
The things they should consider with the new change, is the upgrade is not always an improvement, but a change in role. With the upgrade it becomes what they envision, but I can totally see some players neglect the upgrade, have the extra speed that comes with walking on Creep and play it out as they do currently pre patch, but with more utilization of Infestors and static defense. It'll be a lot harder to get to, but they can still create stalemate situations which is what we want to prevent.
Do people consider that flying locusts can die before locusts alight and attack? Yes Terran and Protoss units which can attack air units can attack flying locusts.
On February 26 2015 11:55 Big J wrote: What bothers me the most is blizzard saying that they don't get enough feedback. While not even considering that their direction might be wrong. Here is feedback:
Fucking free units that get launched from 20,30, 40, 50 range will now also be able to fly. Ask any player that just got out of Swarm Host game about which part of the last game he didn't enjoy. The answer will be: "THEY ARE FUCKING FREE. HE KILLS STUFF WITHOUT ANY FUCKING RISK OR COST!"
The idea to make them fly enforces that principle. The idea to let Swarm Hosts run around at Stalker Speed and evade all harm enforces that principle.
You want feedback? Here is feedback from someone who tried the map (not very often because it is hard to find players) and the inoffical LotV mod (in which many conditions are different, but there is still the flying locust SH to try): Get rid of the combination of free units and longrange. You may solve the issue of long games with this patch (which in itself is only an issue for some players), but you are still not creating something that is fun to play or play against. People are not going to combat against free units. It's going to be free damage from one player done to another player. And then the Swarm Hosts will go offline for 60seconds and the other player is going to do free damage to the first player. That is not interesting, that is like putting a boxsack into the ring and ask the athletes to take turns on hitting it, instead of hitting each other.
I agree on the feedback point, but let me push back on SH a bit. I find as a concept manageable. They function similarly to a siege tank, if they are set up, you need to avoid that area or lose way too much. Siege tank pushes function similarly to SH: unless the line is broken with overwhelming force, they will kill everything incredibly cost-effectively.
I just think the unit doesn't work with Z as well, if you can build tons at once, you can tech-switch to kill too easily, and if they are too costly and weak, losing them one loses you the game every single time.
I'm going to disagree with you, there's no analogy between swarmhosts and siege tanks simply because both function differently , yes, you may say that both are siege units(maybe the only common term, loosely) , but, again, both function differently. Anyway, in my oppinion, swarmhosts shouldn't have been added in HotS (and we already know by now that that wasn't the brightest idea), instead let zerg players use Vipers as core composition (which is by far the most potent counter to terran/protoss if used properly), favoring a more dynamic game play. What can I say, right now swarmhosts are way too disruptive , as in forcing the opponent to take a much more careful (more than necessary sometimes) approach hence killing the dynamic of the game. All in all, guess ppl back in beta were to busy scolding the "newest" terran unit aka "Warhound" to realize the potential "damage" swarmhost can inflict. Mistakes over mistakes that we have to live with...
On February 26 2015 22:38 opisska wrote: I really hate that they are doing this to HoTS. I would be willing to come to terms with losing my SHs in LoTV for the hope that I can still load up HoTS and find some people to play the good game against. But a patch means that the previous version is lost forever and there is no hope of playing it again.
People still haven't really figured out how to play against SHs but they are getting better and better, show creative ways to play against SHs and more and more interesting games, it is about time to kill them completely! It's always the same story: there is something strong and unique, posing a great challenge that we watch unfold and top players slowly inching their way forward to solving it ... and right there Blizzard patches it based on "community feedback", that is, the opinion of mostly loud idiots.
At this point, I wish people realised that every other Blizzard game is complete shit, the company went bankrupt, someone set up hacked SC2 servers and we could just have the game untouched forever like BW.
The fact that people could learn to play better against swarm hosts over time isn't the point. Swarm hosts aren't really "OP" (though certainly they're one of the strongest units in the game)--all you have to do is watch Koreans play against Swarm Hosts to see this. It requires a particular style that's very different from the way you play against other styles and most foreigners don't seen to be very good at it. The issue with swarm hosts as presently designed is they actively encourage ridiculously boring nonsense games that have the entertainment value of watching someone play Pong (or a little less). Thankfully I never watch games live anyway, so whenever I see a mass swarm host game starting I just skip to the next game but making people do that is no way to make an e-sport more popular. They need to go and frankly end of Season 1 is too long to wait.
On February 26 2015 22:38 opisska wrote: I really hate that they are doing this to HoTS. I would be willing to come to terms with losing my SHs in LoTV for the hope that I can still load up HoTS and find some people to play the good game against. But a patch means that the previous version is lost forever and there is no hope of playing it again.
People still haven't really figured out how to play against SHs but they are getting better and better, show creative ways to play against SHs and more and more interesting games, it is about time to kill them completely! It's always the same story: there is something strong and unique, posing a great challenge that we watch unfold and top players slowly inching their way forward to solving it ... and right there Blizzard patches it based on "community feedback", that is, the opinion of mostly loud idiots.
At this point, I wish people realised that every other Blizzard game is complete shit, the company went bankrupt, someone set up hacked SC2 servers and we could just have the game untouched forever like BW.
The fact that people could learn to play better against swarm hosts over time isn't the point. Swarm hosts aren't really "OP" (though certainly they're one of the strongest units in the game)--all you have to do is watch Koreans play against Swarm Hosts to see this. It requires a particular style that's very different from the way you play against other styles and most foreigners don't seen to be very good at it. The issue with swarm hosts as presently designed is they actively encourage ridiculously boring nonsense games that have the entertainment value of watching someone play Pong (or a little less). Thankfully I never watch games live anyway, so whenever I see a mass swarm host game starting I just skip to the next game but making people do that is no way to make an e-sport more popular. They need to go and frankly end of Season 1 is too long to wait.
I dunno, if Swarm Hosts encourage the Zerg player to be passive and to defend, then it also encourages the Protoss/Mech player to be aggressive and harass/attack, and thus gives exciting games. See Snute vs herO at IEM Toronto.
On February 26 2015 11:55 Big J wrote: What bothers me the most is blizzard saying that they don't get enough feedback. While not even considering that their direction might be wrong. Here is feedback:
Fucking free units that get launched from 20,30, 40, 50 range will now also be able to fly. Ask any player that just got out of Swarm Host game about which part of the last game he didn't enjoy. The answer will be: "THEY ARE FUCKING FREE. HE KILLS STUFF WITHOUT ANY FUCKING RISK OR COST!"
The idea to make them fly enforces that principle. The idea to let Swarm Hosts run around at Stalker Speed and evade all harm enforces that principle.
You want feedback? Here is feedback from someone who tried the map (not very often because it is hard to find players) and the inoffical LotV mod (in which many conditions are different, but there is still the flying locust SH to try): Get rid of the combination of free units and longrange. You may solve the issue of long games with this patch (which in itself is only an issue for some players), but you are still not creating something that is fun to play or play against. People are not going to combat against free units. It's going to be free damage from one player done to another player. And then the Swarm Hosts will go offline for 60seconds and the other player is going to do free damage to the first player. That is not interesting, that is like putting a boxsack into the ring and ask the athletes to take turns on hitting it, instead of hitting each other.
I agree on the feedback point, but let me push back on SH a bit. I find as a concept manageable. They function similarly to a siege tank, if they are set up, you need to avoid that area or lose way too much. Siege tank pushes function similarly to SH: unless the line is broken with overwhelming force, they will kill everything incredibly cost-effectively.
I just think the unit doesn't work with Z as well, if you can build tons at once, you can tech-switch to kill too easily, and if they are too costly and weak, losing them one loses you the game every single time.
I'm going to disagree with you, there's no analogy between swarmhosts and siege tanks simply because both function differently , yes, you may say that both are siege units(maybe the only common term, loosely) , but, again, both function differently.
Wait, so are you gonna elaborate on why they're different or just simply state your counterargument to his post without giving a reason for disagreeing?
On February 26 2015 22:38 opisska wrote: I really hate that they are doing this to HoTS. I would be willing to come to terms with losing my SHs in LoTV for the hope that I can still load up HoTS and find some people to play the good game against. But a patch means that the previous version is lost forever and there is no hope of playing it again.
People still haven't really figured out how to play against SHs but they are getting better and better, show creative ways to play against SHs and more and more interesting games, it is about time to kill them completely! It's always the same story: there is something strong and unique, posing a great challenge that we watch unfold and top players slowly inching their way forward to solving it ... and right there Blizzard patches it based on "community feedback", that is, the opinion of mostly loud idiots.
At this point, I wish people realised that every other Blizzard game is complete shit, the company went bankrupt, someone set up hacked SC2 servers and we could just have the game untouched forever like BW.
The fact that people could learn to play better against swarm hosts over time isn't the point. Swarm hosts aren't really "OP" (though certainly they're one of the strongest units in the game)--all you have to do is watch Koreans play against Swarm Hosts to see this. It requires a particular style that's very different from the way you play against other styles and most foreigners don't seen to be very good at it. The issue with swarm hosts as presently designed is they actively encourage ridiculously boring nonsense games that have the entertainment value of watching someone play Pong (or a little less). Thankfully I never watch games live anyway, so whenever I see a mass swarm host game starting I just skip to the next game but making people do that is no way to make an e-sport more popular. They need to go and frankly end of Season 1 is too long to wait.
I dunno, if Swarm Hosts encourage the Zerg player to be passive and to defend, then it also encourages the Protoss/Mech player to be aggressive and harass/attack, and thus gives exciting games. See Snute vs herO at IEM Toronto.
Like I said, when the player playing against swarm hosts is a strong Korean, swarm hosts are (often) fine. But when you need a much weaker player using swarm hosts against a much better player playing against to make it exciting, that's a bad sign for a unit's place in the game. No offense to Snute but he (like all other foreigners) is not on the level of someone like herO absent swarm hosts.
On February 26 2015 22:38 opisska wrote: I really hate that they are doing this to HoTS. I would be willing to come to terms with losing my SHs in LoTV for the hope that I can still load up HoTS and find some people to play the good game against. But a patch means that the previous version is lost forever and there is no hope of playing it again.
People still haven't really figured out how to play against SHs but they are getting better and better, show creative ways to play against SHs and more and more interesting games, it is about time to kill them completely! It's always the same story: there is something strong and unique, posing a great challenge that we watch unfold and top players slowly inching their way forward to solving it ... and right there Blizzard patches it based on "community feedback", that is, the opinion of mostly loud idiots.
At this point, I wish people realised that every other Blizzard game is complete shit, the company went bankrupt, someone set up hacked SC2 servers and we could just have the game untouched forever like BW.
The fact that people could learn to play better against swarm hosts over time isn't the point. Swarm hosts aren't really "OP" (though certainly they're one of the strongest units in the game)--all you have to do is watch Koreans play against Swarm Hosts to see this. It requires a particular style that's very different from the way you play against other styles and most foreigners don't seen to be very good at it. The issue with swarm hosts as presently designed is they actively encourage ridiculously boring nonsense games that have the entertainment value of watching someone play Pong (or a little less). Thankfully I never watch games live anyway, so whenever I see a mass swarm host game starting I just skip to the next game but making people do that is no way to make an e-sport more popular. They need to go and frankly end of Season 1 is too long to wait.
Well ,that's what i've said by "killing the dynamic of the game", didn't said swarmhost were IMBA or stuff like that, the use of this unit leads to freakish weird long games (btw, don't give koreans as an example , they don't master swarmhosts/mech game play, hence those crazy weird games that made no sense, and I'm going to explain this a little : from what I've observed since SC2 came into scene, korean players always had a very aggressive approach, well , swarmhosts and mech doesn't fit in that picture).
On February 26 2015 22:38 opisska wrote: I really hate that they are doing this to HoTS. I would be willing to come to terms with losing my SHs in LoTV for the hope that I can still load up HoTS and find some people to play the good game against. But a patch means that the previous version is lost forever and there is no hope of playing it again.
People still haven't really figured out how to play against SHs but they are getting better and better, show creative ways to play against SHs and more and more interesting games, it is about time to kill them completely! It's always the same story: there is something strong and unique, posing a great challenge that we watch unfold and top players slowly inching their way forward to solving it ... and right there Blizzard patches it based on "community feedback", that is, the opinion of mostly loud idiots.
At this point, I wish people realised that every other Blizzard game is complete shit, the company went bankrupt, someone set up hacked SC2 servers and we could just have the game untouched forever like BW.
This is not a question about balance, this is about design and tournaments. Imagine you have finals planned for 9 PM, but Snute is playing some SH style games in BO5 all 5 games and each game takes 40 minutes(not Blizzard minutes) to end. At 9 PM you are in game 4 and as it looks 1 game is ahead of us... your tournament is officially broken. I took Snute because he plays this style and is a good player. Now imagine that it's not only Snute, but some other Zerg used it in previous games from where Snute's opponent resulted... delay, delay, delay. Also SH as a unit doesn't fit into RTS scheme and rules, but that's my weird view at this thing, that everything in RTS has to have some cost(energy, resources).
SH are bad from tournament view, it can bring to you an hour game where literally nothing is happening because of waves of free units without any moment to attack(because of the delay for locusts) and are a huge problem in lower leagues thanks to the autocast and the inability do to multiple things at once while defending.
Some maps are more viable for this style, yes, but they are not a balance problem.
On February 26 2015 22:38 opisska wrote: I really hate that they are doing this to HoTS. I would be willing to come to terms with losing my SHs in LoTV for the hope that I can still load up HoTS and find some people to play the good game against. But a patch means that the previous version is lost forever and there is no hope of playing it again.
People still haven't really figured out how to play against SHs but they are getting better and better, show creative ways to play against SHs and more and more interesting games, it is about time to kill them completely! It's always the same story: there is something strong and unique, posing a great challenge that we watch unfold and top players slowly inching their way forward to solving it ... and right there Blizzard patches it based on "community feedback", that is, the opinion of mostly loud idiots.
At this point, I wish people realised that every other Blizzard game is complete shit, the company went bankrupt, someone set up hacked SC2 servers and we could just have the game untouched forever like BW.
The fact that people could learn to play better against swarm hosts over time isn't the point. Swarm hosts aren't really "OP" (though certainly they're one of the strongest units in the game)--all you have to do is watch Koreans play against Swarm Hosts to see this. It requires a particular style that's very different from the way you play against other styles and most foreigners don't seen to be very good at it. The issue with swarm hosts as presently designed is they actively encourage ridiculously boring nonsense games that have the entertainment value of watching someone play Pong (or a little less). Thankfully I never watch games live anyway, so whenever I see a mass swarm host game starting I just skip to the next game but making people do that is no way to make an e-sport more popular. They need to go and frankly end of Season 1 is too long to wait.
I dunno, if Swarm Hosts encourage the Zerg player to be passive and to defend, then it also encourages the Protoss/Mech player to be aggressive and harass/attack, and thus gives exciting games. See Snute vs herO at IEM Toronto.
Like I said, when the player playing against swarm hosts is a strong Korean, swarm hosts are (often) fine. But when you need a much weaker player using swarm hosts against a much better player playing against to make it exciting, that's a bad sign for a unit's place in the game. No offense to Snute but he (like all other foreigners) is not on the level of someone like herO absent swarm hosts.
Allow me to disagree here, as Snute not only did beat other well-known Koreans without Swarm Hosts, but more importantly the very reason we don't see many long SH games in Korea is that Korean Protosses do just fine against Swarm Hosts used by Korean Zergs.
On February 26 2015 22:38 opisska wrote: I really hate that they are doing this to HoTS. I would be willing to come to terms with losing my SHs in LoTV for the hope that I can still load up HoTS and find some people to play the good game against. But a patch means that the previous version is lost forever and there is no hope of playing it again.
People still haven't really figured out how to play against SHs but they are getting better and better, show creative ways to play against SHs and more and more interesting games, it is about time to kill them completely! It's always the same story: there is something strong and unique, posing a great challenge that we watch unfold and top players slowly inching their way forward to solving it ... and right there Blizzard patches it based on "community feedback", that is, the opinion of mostly loud idiots.
At this point, I wish people realised that every other Blizzard game is complete shit, the company went bankrupt, someone set up hacked SC2 servers and we could just have the game untouched forever like BW.
This is not a question about balance, this is about design and tournaments. Imagine you have finals planned for 9 PM, but Snute is playing some SH style games in BO5 all 5 games and each game takes 40 minutes(not Blizzard minutes) to end. At 9 PM you are in game 4 and as it looks 1 game is ahead of us... your tournament is officially broken. I took Snute because he plays this style and is a good player. Now imagine that it's not only Snute, but some other Zerg used it in previous games from where Snute's opponent resulted... delay, delay, delay. Also SH as a unit doesn't fit into RTS scheme and rules, but that's my weird view at this thing, that everything in RTS has to have some cost(energy, resources).
SH are bad from tournament view, it can bring to you an hour game where literally nothing is happening because of waves of free units without any moment to attack(because of the delay for locusts) and are a huge problem in lower leagues thanks to the autocast and the inability do to multiple things at once while defending.
Some maps are more viable for this style, yes, but they are not a balance problem.
As much aas I'd like SHs to be reworked in order to be more exciting, your point is ridiculous. StarCraft is not a game with a set time limit, which means that there are possibilities of games being very long just like there are possibilities of games being very short (I'm pretty sure that last year's IEM Katowice grand finals clock under one hour if you exclude the filler parts). Is it an issue for scheduling and broadcasting? Sure, but tournaments and people have to deal with it. Just like with Tennis, some Tennis games can go on for very long yet nobody complains about the games delaying the TV station's schedule.
On February 26 2015 23:58 Polemarch wrote: For those talking about the effect of the tempest change on PvP vs. colossus:
The change text was:
Tempest no longer has +massive damage vs. air
So tempest will still have +massive damage vs. massive ground units like ultralisks and colossus.
Colossi count as air units iirc, which is why corruptors/vikings can hit them. I might be wrong though.
Colossi count as both. Units that have seperate vs. ground and vs. air attacks will always use the one that's stronger against the target, which is why the current Tempest uses its vs. air attack against Colossi. And yes, the Tempest's + massive damage vs ground was removed ages ago. I think when HotS was still in beta, actually.
Yeah best example of this is, Thor if in range will use ground attack, but if u have single target hit mode on, if the colossus is only in range of the air attack the thor will use that one.
I don't think the Tempest change is as large as people make it out to be. You don't mass tempest in PvZ or PvT because of their anti-massive strenght - you mass them because of the range in tandem with Psionic Storm and Revelation.
As for mech, aerial Locust + Blinding Cloud +2range will make sure Tanks go back to their place of TvT staple, they're not strong and this just adds a hardcounter and buffs another. I don't like putting Tanks back into non-existence...
On February 27 2015 03:39 MagnuMizer wrote: I feel like Blizzard is slowly letting this game die off purposly by seemingly having interns do the balance patching like this...
They are clearly focused on Heroes of the Storm where the money is...
Here's that company giving us biweekly updates on their balancing. They must not care daed gaem fuck blizzard noobnoob game never good no skill balance interns DK get a disease alallalala trollolol herpderp
I don't think the Tempest change is as large as people make it out to be. You don't mass tempest in PvZ or PvT because of their anti-massive strenght - you mass them because of the range in tandem with Psionic Storm and Revelation.
This could however shake up Mech and lategame PvT, since it effectively makes the BC a counter to the Tempest and the Carrier. This is a massive blow to Skytoss vs Mech (I'm 100% not complaining about this, but this needs to be pointed out), making mass BC with Yamato a very strong lategame composition. Same goes probably for bio, even to a much lesser extend. But still, this could severly shake up how Terran can play the TvP lategame or even the TvP game at all.
PvZ the change makes Broodlords very, very strong in many scenarios. Broodlords aren't unplayable now, they are just not stable and need to come as surprise against a ground-reliant Protoss player. With this change just having Broodlords in your army (which are a very supplyefficient comambat unit against any ground unit in the game, if not straight up the best) in the lategame might become viable, which changes the combat dynamics a lot and is very hard to predict, but obviously a very strong buff to Broodlords.
PvP is the matchup I know the least about, but from my impressions I'd say that this makes sitting on your ass and rushing out Colossi much stronger. HotS PvP often uses a much more dynamic Immortal/Archon midgame and later Colossi than WoL, but I think without the Tempest you may as well just lean back and mass double robo Colossi early.
On February 27 2015 04:10 SC2Toastie wrote: I don't think the Tempest change is as large as people make it out to be. You don't mass tempest in PvZ or PvT because of their anti-massive strenght - you mass them because of the range in tandem with Psionic Storm and Revelation.
As for mech, aerial Locust + Blinding Cloud +2range will make sure Tanks go back to their place of TvT staple, they're not strong and this just adds a hardcounter and buffs another. I don't like putting Tanks back into non-existence...
On February 27 2015 03:39 MagnuMizer wrote: I feel like Blizzard is slowly letting this game die off purposly by seemingly having interns do the balance patching like this...
They are clearly focused on Heroes of the Storm where the money is...
Here's that company giving us biweekly updates on their balancing. They must not care daed gaem fuck blizzard noobnoob game never good no skill balance interns DK get a disease alallalala trollolol herpderp
I mean, this change does not really do anything to mass tempest for reason you mentioned. What this change does achieve is actually killing a strat of mixing in 4-5 tempests to one-shot collosi/broods/BCs (never happens, but whatever).
Also, are not aerial locust wrecked by Thor AoE anyways?
I don't think the Tempest change is as large as people make it out to be. You don't mass tempest in PvZ or PvT because of their anti-massive strenght - you mass them because of the range in tandem with Psionic Storm and Revelation.
This could however shake up Mech and lategame PvT, since it effectively makes the BC a counter to the Tempest and the Carrier. This is a massive blow to Skytoss vs Mech (I'm 100% not complaining about this, but this needs to be pointed out), making mass BC with Yamato a very strong lategame composition. Same goes probably for bio, even to a much lesser extend. But still, this could severly shake up how Terran can play the TvP lategame or even the TvP game at all.
PvZ the change makes Broodlords very, very strong in many scenarios. Broodlords aren't unplayable now, they are just not stable and need to come as surprise against a ground-reliant Protoss player. With this change just having Broodlords in your army (which are a very supplyefficient comambat unit against any ground unit in the game, if not straight up the best) in the lategame might become viable, which changes the combat dynamics a lot and is very hard to predict, but obviously a very strong buff to Broodlords.
PvP is the matchup I know the least about, but from my impressions I'd say that this makes sitting on your ass and rushing out Colossi much stronger. HotS PvP often uses a much more dynamic Immortal/Archon midgame and later Colossi than WoL, but I think without the Tempest you may as well just lean back and mass double robo Colossi early.
PVT: I don't think buffing Terran lategame can be argued against. PvT is incredibly stupid past a certain phase in the game and Terran receiving a possible transition only improves that. PVZ: Broodlords are ONLY strong if Protoss is too late in getting a counter out. They're slow, fragile units. Instead of a 3-hit kill (A 15 range 3-hit kill on a unit that costs 300/250. Seriously?) it's more like 7/8 hits. This makes Broodlords usable, with Queen support, even when Protoss has the counter out. I don't see a problem in this situation either. You'll just have to engage and harass the Broodlords before the main engagement starts. Additionally, Locust nerfs means Broodlords might be more necessary to ensure presence on the ground for Zerg. PVP: Whilst this might once again draw in the Collosi wars, this is a problem with Gateways and Collosi people have been complaining about for 5 years. I really do not want to see potentially excellent PvZ and PvT changes stopped (AGAIN) because Protoss is an atrociously designed race.
swarmhost totally (wanted to use some other words here but changed last second to make post less offensive) useless now good job blizz. "make them a harras unit only in small groups" in other words a crappy version of oracle, BUT NO NOW ONLY HARRAS UNIT NO PROBLEM, if its a protoss unit it has to be multifunctional but zerg units being crappy and annoying as hell seems to be like the life goal of blizzard.
i might be overreacting and the swarmhost may not be that bad but it sure seems like a weird choice to make a new harras only unit, while they tried so hard to make the oracle also a valiable army unit, even to the point they "almost" made it OP.
On February 27 2015 04:41 Tenks wrote: Why was the ground +massive removed from Tempest in the first place?
It was stupidly powerful against Ultralisk IIRC. Sick damage vs Archon and Thor were stupid as well.
Overall, 15 range is stupid. Adding a 80 damage attack (over 20 DPS IIRC) is realllllyyy stupid.
I agree the Tempest fundamentally is a really silly unit. I always forget Archons are massive. But I feel if you need to tweak the damage numbers so much depending on if the unit is shooting ground or shooting air that should be a sign that the unit itself is flawed.
I don't think the Tempest change is as large as people make it out to be. You don't mass tempest in PvZ or PvT because of their anti-massive strenght - you mass them because of the range in tandem with Psionic Storm and Revelation.
This could however shake up Mech and lategame PvT, since it effectively makes the BC a counter to the Tempest and the Carrier. This is a massive blow to Skytoss vs Mech (I'm 100% not complaining about this, but this needs to be pointed out), making mass BC with Yamato a very strong lategame composition. Same goes probably for bio, even to a much lesser extend. But still, this could severly shake up how Terran can play the TvP lategame or even the TvP game at all.
PvZ the change makes Broodlords very, very strong in many scenarios. Broodlords aren't unplayable now, they are just not stable and need to come as surprise against a ground-reliant Protoss player. With this change just having Broodlords in your army (which are a very supplyefficient comambat unit against any ground unit in the game, if not straight up the best) in the lategame might become viable, which changes the combat dynamics a lot and is very hard to predict, but obviously a very strong buff to Broodlords.
PvP is the matchup I know the least about, but from my impressions I'd say that this makes sitting on your ass and rushing out Colossi much stronger. HotS PvP often uses a much more dynamic Immortal/Archon midgame and later Colossi than WoL, but I think without the Tempest you may as well just lean back and mass double robo Colossi early.
PVT: I don't think buffing Terran lategame can be argued against. PvT is incredibly stupid past a certain phase in the game and Terran receiving a possible transition only improves that. PVZ: Broodlords are ONLY strong if Protoss is too late in getting a counter out. They're slow, fragile units. Instead of a 3-hit kill (A 15 range 3-hit kill on a unit that costs 300/250. Seriously?) it's more like 7/8 hits. This makes Broodlords usable, with Queen support, even when Protoss has the counter out. I don't see a problem in this situation either. You'll just have to engage and harass the Broodlords before the main engagement starts. Additionally, Locust nerfs means Broodlords might be more necessary to ensure presence on the ground for Zerg. PVP: Whilst this might once again draw in the Collosi wars, this is a problem with Gateways and Collosi people have been complaining about for 5 years. I really do not want to see potentially excellent PvZ and PvT changes stopped (AGAIN) because Protoss is an atrociously designed race.
I fully agree with PvT, just wanted to point it out that it has potential to deeply alter some gameplans to begin with. Since you were saying it's not as big of a deal, but I think it is only not as big of a deal if the players still play the way they do with the change. PvZ it is very hard to evalute, even without putting the SH changes into the picture. And will not be evaluated through the Test Map, the changes are way too deep to be figured out soon. HotS has changed so many variables in the early- and midgame of PvZ (mainly for the better), that the situations in which Broodlords can make sense and when they can't after such a Tempest change are pretty much unexplored.
I don't know if PvT really changes. BC will still be vulnerable to feedback and VRs. I don't think it was the Tempest that was keeping BC out of the matchup.
-edit-
Wait I've got it. You use the flying and fatness of the BC to make it so the Protoss can't actually click your Ghosts to feedback them allowing you free reign to carpet bomb with EMP and snipes. Genius.
On February 27 2015 05:36 Tenks wrote: I don't know if PvT really changes. BC will still be vulnerable to feedback and VRs. I don't think it was the Tempest that was keeping BC out of the matchup.
-edit-
Wait I've got it. You use the flying and fatness of the BC to make it so the Protoss can't actually click your Ghosts to feedback them allowing you free reign to carpet bomb with EMP and snipes. Genius.
Feedback through minimap or zoom in like terran does vs obs
I'd like to see Blizz try something really radical with SH, like make them bigger and stronger, but cost 8 supply 400/400, and spawn 12-20 locusts for a mineral cost that are much weaker and attack like interceptors. You know like a ground-based version of the protoss carrier. You only need/can afford a few of them to back up your army.
On February 27 2015 06:22 ElMeanYo wrote: I'd like to see Blizz try something really radical with SH, like make them bigger and stronger, but cost 8 supply 400/400, and spawn 12-20 locusts for a mineral cost that are much weaker and attack like interceptors. You know like a ground-based version of the protoss carrier. You only need/can afford a few of them to back up your army.
That sounds awful. An 8 supply unit? And why would we want anything like the carrier?!
On February 27 2015 06:22 ElMeanYo wrote: I'd like to see Blizz try something really radical with SH, like make them bigger and stronger, but cost 8 supply 400/400, and spawn 12-20 locusts for a mineral cost that are much weaker and attack like interceptors. You know like a ground-based version of the protoss carrier. You only need/can afford a few of them to back up your army.
Seeing as how that costs more than the Mothership, it would be more comparable to a Mothership than a Carrier. I think that's a terrible idea.
Swarm Host sounds like a really expensive Reaper now. Good to make in a group of 3-4 to harass a base MAYBE, but they're not worth keeping in your army.
yes, let's nerf zerg because obviously they are winning everything right now!!! LOL. Where would zerg show up at top levels if you take out the superhuman play of Life? Blizzard, you want zerg to be able to deal with terran mech ? here's a thought? nerf terran mech. instead you decide to nerf something zerg needs against it and then let zerg figure it out. Makes perfect sense. you want zerg to be able to deal with protoss mass air? here's a crazy idea -- nerf protoss air!!!! any thought to maybe decreasing the completely ridiculous range of tempests? even by 1 range unit? NAH, protoss obviously needs every bit of that so that they don't lose any of their precious tempests. Of course, zerg can afford to lose entire lategame armies and they're still fine, so who cares about that. The only reason zerg was surviving against protoss lategame as it is was using mass swarm hosts!!! so you decided to remove that, now toss beats zerg for sure in lategame. oh well,, just reason 76 (every single one related to new units and balance) to not buy LoTV. tempest nerf is at least something that makes sense (I guess someone at blizzard DID happen to notice that protoss were making tons of tempests lategame and winning easily against zerg, something so bloody obvious with the design of the unit that no testing is even necessary). At times I think rolling dice to decide how to design new units would stand a better chance of balance than what is being done. So zerg needs to be prevented from basing armies around swarmhosts... logically, here's some other armies that need to be nerfed: bio mine, terran mech, hellbats, immortal sentry stalker, colossus voidray stalker, forcefields, right? nah, seeing these armies melt zerg armies with nearly no losses is just part of the game.
On February 27 2015 09:15 baabaa wrote: yes, let's nerf zerg because obviously they are winning everything right now!!! LOL. Where would zerg show up at top levels if you take out the superhuman play of Life? Blizzard, you want zerg to be able to deal with terran mech ? here's a thought? nerf terran mech. instead you decide to nerf something zerg needs against it and then let zerg figure it out. Makes perfect sense. you want zerg to be able to deal with protoss mass air? here's a crazy idea -- nerf protoss air!!!! any thought to maybe decreasing the completely ridiculous range of tempests? even by 1 range unit? NAH, protoss obviously needs every bit of that so that they don't lose any of their precious tempests. Of course, zerg can afford to lose entire lategame armies and they're still fine, so who cares about that. The only reason zerg was surviving against protoss lategame as it is was using mass swarm hosts!!! so you decided to remove that, now toss beats zerg for sure in lategame. oh well,, just reason 76 (every single one related to new units and balance) to not buy LoTV. tempest nerf is at least something that makes sense (I guess someone at blizzard DID happen to notice that protoss were making tons of tempests lategame and winning easily against zerg, something so bloody obvious with the design of the unit that no testing is even necessary). At times I think rolling dice to decide how to design new units would stand a better chance of balance than what is being done. So zerg needs to be prevented from basing armies around swarmhosts... logically, here's some other armies that need to be nerfed: bio mine, terran mech, hellbats, immortal sentry stalker, colossus voidray stalker, forcefields, right? nah, seeing these armies melt zerg armies with nearly no losses is just part of the game.
Calm down. Take a step back and think without ur Zerg-eyes. We do not want any race to be underpowered or overpowered so we can win ezly. We want a fun game, not frustrating 2h games. If the SH change (nerf/ buff,up to u how u wanna call it) is healthy for the game, but makes Zerg weak, they will tweak other things. And even if u say that mech is the issue that is causing all this, then I can assure u 99% of all mech players would appreciate to be able to move out much earlier than 200/200. We could continue the same way with Protoss etc. etc. Try to improve the game as a whole.. not only ur race.
On February 27 2015 08:56 sagefreke wrote: Swarm Host sounds like a really expensive Reaper now. Good to make in a group of 3-4 to harass a base MAYBE, but they're not worth keeping in your army.
A no risk Reaper. You can keep them active and trade still constantly. Just not anymore in this great scale.
On February 27 2015 08:56 sagefreke wrote: Swarm Host sounds like a really expensive Reaper now. Good to make in a group of 3-4 to harass a base MAYBE, but they're not worth keeping in your army.
A no risk Reaper. You can keep them active and trade still constantly. Just not anymore in this great scale.
until you weight in the cost for infestation pit, swarmhost cost and the total absence of drop defense. I don't even know why people keep thinking free units means no risk, with some slight tweak, swarmhost efficiency will be reliant on player's skill.
On February 27 2015 08:56 sagefreke wrote: Swarm Host sounds like a really expensive Reaper now. Good to make in a group of 3-4 to harass a base MAYBE, but they're not worth keeping in your army.
A no risk Reaper. You can keep them active and trade still constantly. Just not anymore in this great scale.
"No risk reaper" is taking it a little harsh. Due to the relatively low duration of Locusts now, you have to get the host fairly close to your actual target. I wouldn't say it's risk-free, just less risky. Which should be fine considering the cost and tech-requirement of the unit and the fact that it takes away a lot of firing power for zerg.
I hate that the testmap is on Deadwing, it's not only the map I'm least likely to go swarmhosts to harrass because Mutas are so much better, but it also has shitty spawning positions. Also am I mistaken or is the EU version not up to date?
On February 27 2015 08:56 sagefreke wrote: Swarm Host sounds like a really expensive Reaper now. Good to make in a group of 3-4 to harass a base MAYBE, but they're not worth keeping in your army.
A no risk Reaper. You can keep them active and trade still constantly. Just not anymore in this great scale.
I mean, it's certainly a risk using that much supply and gas on just a few harass units, which ultimately makes your main army weaker in a fight. And is a reaper really risky either? If you micro it properly, you really should not be losing it.
On February 27 2015 09:15 baabaa wrote: yes, let's nerf zerg because obviously they are winning everything right now!!! LOL. Where would zerg show up at top levels if you take out the superhuman play of Life? Blizzard, you want zerg to be able to deal with terran mech ? here's a thought? nerf terran mech. instead you decide to nerf something zerg needs against it and then let zerg figure it out. Makes perfect sense. you want zerg to be able to deal with protoss mass air? here's a crazy idea -- nerf protoss air!!!! any thought to maybe decreasing the completely ridiculous range of tempests? even by 1 range unit? NAH, protoss obviously needs every bit of that so that they don't lose any of their precious tempests. Of course, zerg can afford to lose entire lategame armies and they're still fine, so who cares about that. The only reason zerg was surviving against protoss lategame as it is was using mass swarm hosts!!! so you decided to remove that, now toss beats zerg for sure in lategame. oh well,, just reason 76 (every single one related to new units and balance) to not buy LoTV. tempest nerf is at least something that makes sense (I guess someone at blizzard DID happen to notice that protoss were making tons of tempests lategame and winning easily against zerg, something so bloody obvious with the design of the unit that no testing is even necessary). At times I think rolling dice to decide how to design new units would stand a better chance of balance than what is being done. So zerg needs to be prevented from basing armies around swarmhosts... logically, here's some other armies that need to be nerfed: bio mine, terran mech, hellbats, immortal sentry stalker, colossus voidray stalker, forcefields, right? nah, seeing these armies melt zerg armies with nearly no losses is just part of the game.
Calm down. Take a step back and think without ur Zerg-eyes. We do not want any race to be underpowered or overpowered so we can win ezly. We want a fun game, not frustrating 2h games. If the SH change (nerf/ buff,up to u how u wanna call it) is healthy for the game, but makes Zerg weak, they will tweak other things. And even if u say that mech is the issue that is causing all this, then I can assure u 99% of all mech players would appreciate to be able to move out much earlier than 200/200. We could continue the same way with Protoss etc. etc. Try to improve the game as a whole.. not only ur race.
I agree, but I can fully understand baabaa's frustration. Blizzard keeps on doing this to zerg, trashing our core lategame units every two years. Meanwhile the Colossus is still the same bullshit it has been, Terran is still able to play the game without having to think about transitions past 10mins and one annoying infromation-gamble play after the other has been added for 4years since the 2011 Immortal buff.
They nerf Zergs core lategame ground unit and then talk about how they want Tempests to be weaker vs Broodlords. Why not nerf the Colossus and the High Templar? Those are the main reasons* why we build Swarm Hosts against Protoss. Not the Tempest. Not the Voidray. Not the Carrier. We can deal with all of that with hydralisks and mutalisks and stuff like that. But we can't deal with what the Protoss builds to kill our hydralisks in the first place. Also it would be way fairer. My core gameplan for lategame is gone, yours is gone. Not: "Your gameplan is gone, but there might be a new one with that other patch. Maybe you'll figure it out in the next half year. If not, well, we hope you don't mind losing a lot while your opponents can still play exactly as they played before."
*of course it is the combination of all of those units. But if it wasn't for ultimate Colossus+HT+Immortal+Gateway combos destroying all our ground forces with hardly any scratches we wouldn't even have to talk about how Zerg has to switch into air deathballs or Swarm Host turtles to begin with.
On February 27 2015 09:15 baabaa wrote: yes, let's nerf zerg because obviously they are winning everything right now!!! LOL. Where would zerg show up at top levels if you take out the superhuman play of Life? Blizzard, you want zerg to be able to deal with terran mech ? here's a thought? nerf terran mech. instead you decide to nerf something zerg needs against it and then let zerg figure it out. Makes perfect sense. you want zerg to be able to deal with protoss mass air? here's a crazy idea -- nerf protoss air!!!! any thought to maybe decreasing the completely ridiculous range of tempests? even by 1 range unit? NAH, protoss obviously needs every bit of that so that they don't lose any of their precious tempests. Of course, zerg can afford to lose entire lategame armies and they're still fine, so who cares about that. The only reason zerg was surviving against protoss lategame as it is was using mass swarm hosts!!! so you decided to remove that, now toss beats zerg for sure in lategame. oh well,, just reason 76 (every single one related to new units and balance) to not buy LoTV. tempest nerf is at least something that makes sense (I guess someone at blizzard DID happen to notice that protoss were making tons of tempests lategame and winning easily against zerg, something so bloody obvious with the design of the unit that no testing is even necessary). At times I think rolling dice to decide how to design new units would stand a better chance of balance than what is being done. So zerg needs to be prevented from basing armies around swarmhosts... logically, here's some other armies that need to be nerfed: bio mine, terran mech, hellbats, immortal sentry stalker, colossus voidray stalker, forcefields, right? nah, seeing these armies melt zerg armies with nearly no losses is just part of the game.
Calm down. Take a step back and think without ur Zerg-eyes. We do not want any race to be underpowered or overpowered so we can win ezly. We want a fun game, not frustrating 2h games. If the SH change (nerf/ buff,up to u how u wanna call it) is healthy for the game, but makes Zerg weak, they will tweak other things. And even if u say that mech is the issue that is causing all this, then I can assure u 99% of all mech players would appreciate to be able to move out much earlier than 200/200. We could continue the same way with Protoss etc. etc. Try to improve the game as a whole.. not only ur race.
I agree, but I can fully understand baabaa's frustration. Blizzard keeps on doing this to zerg, trashing our core lategame units every two years.
They don't do it for no reason. terran doesnt even have lategame units, so stop the qq. It's a massive change, we don't even know the effects.
On February 27 2015 09:15 baabaa wrote: yes, let's nerf zerg because obviously they are winning everything right now!!! LOL. Where would zerg show up at top levels if you take out the superhuman play of Life? Blizzard, you want zerg to be able to deal with terran mech ? here's a thought? nerf terran mech. instead you decide to nerf something zerg needs against it and then let zerg figure it out. Makes perfect sense. you want zerg to be able to deal with protoss mass air? here's a crazy idea -- nerf protoss air!!!! any thought to maybe decreasing the completely ridiculous range of tempests? even by 1 range unit? NAH, protoss obviously needs every bit of that so that they don't lose any of their precious tempests. Of course, zerg can afford to lose entire lategame armies and they're still fine, so who cares about that. The only reason zerg was surviving against protoss lategame as it is was using mass swarm hosts!!! so you decided to remove that, now toss beats zerg for sure in lategame. oh well,, just reason 76 (every single one related to new units and balance) to not buy LoTV. tempest nerf is at least something that makes sense (I guess someone at blizzard DID happen to notice that protoss were making tons of tempests lategame and winning easily against zerg, something so bloody obvious with the design of the unit that no testing is even necessary). At times I think rolling dice to decide how to design new units would stand a better chance of balance than what is being done. So zerg needs to be prevented from basing armies around swarmhosts... logically, here's some other armies that need to be nerfed: bio mine, terran mech, hellbats, immortal sentry stalker, colossus voidray stalker, forcefields, right? nah, seeing these armies melt zerg armies with nearly no losses is just part of the game.
Calm down. Take a step back and think without ur Zerg-eyes. We do not want any race to be underpowered or overpowered so we can win ezly. We want a fun game, not frustrating 2h games. If the SH change (nerf/ buff,up to u how u wanna call it) is healthy for the game, but makes Zerg weak, they will tweak other things. And even if u say that mech is the issue that is causing all this, then I can assure u 99% of all mech players would appreciate to be able to move out much earlier than 200/200. We could continue the same way with Protoss etc. etc. Try to improve the game as a whole.. not only ur race.
I agree, but I can fully understand baabaa's frustration. Blizzard keeps on doing this to zerg, trashing our core lategame units every two years.
They don't do it for no reason. terran doesnt even have lategame units, so stop the qq. It's a massive change, we don't even know the effects.
I don't think the Tempest change is as large as people make it out to be. You don't mass tempest in PvZ or PvT because of their anti-massive strenght - you mass them because of the range in tandem with Psionic Storm and Revelation.
This could however shake up Mech and lategame PvT, since it effectively makes the BC a counter to the Tempest and the Carrier. This is a massive blow to Skytoss vs Mech (I'm 100% not complaining about this, but this needs to be pointed out), making mass BC with Yamato a very strong lategame composition. Same goes probably for bio, even to a much lesser extend. But still, this could severly shake up how Terran can play the TvP lategame or even the TvP game at all.
Now this is going to be really cool. With how lopsided PvMech is in being Protoss favored this will finally allow the BC to get some usage.
Kudos to Blizzard for addressing the absolutely terrible design of the Tempest hard-courting all capital ships out of the game, and SH's toxicity (though it still remains to be seen if the new SH will be problematic).
On February 27 2015 08:56 sagefreke wrote: Swarm Host sounds like a really expensive Reaper now. Good to make in a group of 3-4 to harass a base MAYBE, but they're not worth keeping in your army.
A no risk Reaper. You can keep them active and trade still constantly. Just not anymore in this great scale.
I mean, it's certainly a risk using that much supply and gas on just a few harass units, which ultimately makes your main army weaker in a fight. And is a reaper really risky either? If you micro it properly, you really should not be losing it.
As you shouldnt lose your swarmhosts either. It wasnt a balance complain, just thinking that the "reaper" comparison is utterly stupid. And these swarmhosts will do more in fights than reapers because they still can deal dmg from far away.
I didnt say it was good or bad. Me personally I am all in favor of this change because picking off some units here and there and harrassing is more exciting than having a snowball unit which drags out the game unneccessarily long and noone has fun playing against it (Yes I know there are still other units like this in the game). It rewards Apm/ beeing active with those things and get as much dmg done as possible.
On February 27 2015 08:56 sagefreke wrote: Swarm Host sounds like a really expensive Reaper now. Good to make in a group of 3-4 to harass a base MAYBE, but they're not worth keeping in your army.
A no risk Reaper. You can keep them active and trade still constantly. Just not anymore in this great scale.
I mean, it's certainly a risk using that much supply and gas on just a few harass units, which ultimately makes your main army weaker in a fight. And is a reaper really risky either? If you micro it properly, you really should not be losing it.
As you shouldnt lose your swarmhosts either. It wasnt a balance complain, just thinking that the "reaper" comparison is utterly stupid. And these swarmhosts will do more in fights than reapers because they still can deal dmg from far away.
I didnt say it was good or bad. Me personally I am all in favor of this change because picking off some units here and there and harrassing is more exciting than having a snowball unit which drags out the game unneccessarily long and noone has fun playing against it (Yes I know there are still other units like this in the game). It rewards Apm/ beeing active with those things and get as much dmg done as possible.
Agreed. You really can't compare it to the reaper at all. It's so far off from it, actually, that I'm surprised they were even compared. And I think it will be great for Zerg to have a back door harass option other than the Muta.
On February 27 2015 09:15 baabaa wrote: yes, let's nerf zerg because obviously they are winning everything right now!!! LOL. Where would zerg show up at top levels if you take out the superhuman play of Life? Blizzard, you want zerg to be able to deal with terran mech ? here's a thought? nerf terran mech. instead you decide to nerf something zerg needs against it and then let zerg figure it out. Makes perfect sense. you want zerg to be able to deal with protoss mass air? here's a crazy idea -- nerf protoss air!!!! any thought to maybe decreasing the completely ridiculous range of tempests? even by 1 range unit? NAH, protoss obviously needs every bit of that so that they don't lose any of their precious tempests. Of course, zerg can afford to lose entire lategame armies and they're still fine, so who cares about that. The only reason zerg was surviving against protoss lategame as it is was using mass swarm hosts!!! so you decided to remove that, now toss beats zerg for sure in lategame. oh well,, just reason 76 (every single one related to new units and balance) to not buy LoTV. tempest nerf is at least something that makes sense (I guess someone at blizzard DID happen to notice that protoss were making tons of tempests lategame and winning easily against zerg, something so bloody obvious with the design of the unit that no testing is even necessary). At times I think rolling dice to decide how to design new units would stand a better chance of balance than what is being done. So zerg needs to be prevented from basing armies around swarmhosts... logically, here's some other armies that need to be nerfed: bio mine, terran mech, hellbats, immortal sentry stalker, colossus voidray stalker, forcefields, right? nah, seeing these armies melt zerg armies with nearly no losses is just part of the game.
Calm down. Take a step back and think without ur Zerg-eyes. We do not want any race to be underpowered or overpowered so we can win ezly. We want a fun game, not frustrating 2h games. If the SH change (nerf/ buff,up to u how u wanna call it) is healthy for the game, but makes Zerg weak, they will tweak other things. And even if u say that mech is the issue that is causing all this, then I can assure u 99% of all mech players would appreciate to be able to move out much earlier than 200/200. We could continue the same way with Protoss etc. etc. Try to improve the game as a whole.. not only ur race.
I agree, but I can fully understand baabaa's frustration. Blizzard keeps on doing this to zerg, trashing our core lategame units every two years.
They don't do it for no reason. terran doesnt even have lategame units, so stop the qq. It's a massive change, we don't even know the effects.
The effects are very easy to see. The moved SH from core lategame unit to purely harrass role. It's not like people never played without swamhosts, they had and it doesn't work in lategame.
On February 28 2015 02:34 MrFreeman wrote: Is it OK to post here what I posted to battle.net about this topic or do you recognize it as a duplicity post? Thanks
Post it, quote it, link it. It's not a duplicate unless you posted it here already I believe.
On February 28 2015 02:34 MrFreeman wrote: Is it OK to post here what I posted to battle.net about this topic or do you recognize it as a duplicity post? Thanks
Post it, quote it, link it. It's not a duplicate unless you posted it here already I believe.
Thanks for ur answer :-) .
Personally I think that 100% balance on lower skill levels isn´t that important and isn´t achievable. As for the achievability, it is easy to explain, in a complex game relative profit from an aspect of chosen race is different on each skill level and with growing complexity and skill diversity, it is still more difficult to have the design to account for each skill level and it is unrealistic to expect this. Fortunately, it is not needed, all you need to care about is an even matchup. It doesn´t matter that much, if your opponent is little better or worse and the gap is filled with the race strength difference on your specific skill level as long as the design is consistent and robust and it stays relevant to both races you are not playing. Of course, it has to be perfectly balanced on the top levels, because you want the most skilled player to win that is why it is OK for me, if their balance focus lays on the pro-level players. They probably also provide better feedback. What they need to get rid off is frustrating things that make players of all skill levels not play and I think that is exactly what they are after here. Other thing they need is to avoid paper, stone, scissors scenario, where race one has edge on race 2 but is weak against race 3 on some skill level, but again, I think they are on that. I personally would like game to be little bit less stressful as well. It could for example allow greater zoom-out, allow queuing of things you don´t have the money for (maybe with delay in beginning of the production, to profit good macro), give info about total amount of each unit/structure/upgrade to the payer, like in replay, more auto-cast, but it doesn't seem they want to go this way, but that is only my personal preference :-) .
On February 27 2015 09:15 baabaa wrote: yes, let's nerf zerg because obviously they are winning everything right now!!! LOL. Where would zerg show up at top levels if you take out the superhuman play of Life? Blizzard, you want zerg to be able to deal with terran mech ? here's a thought? nerf terran mech. instead you decide to nerf something zerg needs against it and then let zerg figure it out. Makes perfect sense. you want zerg to be able to deal with protoss mass air? here's a crazy idea -- nerf protoss air!!!! any thought to maybe decreasing the completely ridiculous range of tempests? even by 1 range unit? NAH, protoss obviously needs every bit of that so that they don't lose any of their precious tempests. Of course, zerg can afford to lose entire lategame armies and they're still fine, so who cares about that. The only reason zerg was surviving against protoss lategame as it is was using mass swarm hosts!!! so you decided to remove that, now toss beats zerg for sure in lategame. oh well,, just reason 76 (every single one related to new units and balance) to not buy LoTV. tempest nerf is at least something that makes sense (I guess someone at blizzard DID happen to notice that protoss were making tons of tempests lategame and winning easily against zerg, something so bloody obvious with the design of the unit that no testing is even necessary). At times I think rolling dice to decide how to design new units would stand a better chance of balance than what is being done. So zerg needs to be prevented from basing armies around swarmhosts... logically, here's some other armies that need to be nerfed: bio mine, terran mech, hellbats, immortal sentry stalker, colossus voidray stalker, forcefields, right? nah, seeing these armies melt zerg armies with nearly no losses is just part of the game.
Calm down. Take a step back and think without ur Zerg-eyes. We do not want any race to be underpowered or overpowered so we can win ezly. We want a fun game, not frustrating 2h games. If the SH change (nerf/ buff,up to u how u wanna call it) is healthy for the game, but makes Zerg weak, they will tweak other things. And even if u say that mech is the issue that is causing all this, then I can assure u 99% of all mech players would appreciate to be able to move out much earlier than 200/200. We could continue the same way with Protoss etc. etc. Try to improve the game as a whole.. not only ur race.
I agree, but I can fully understand baabaa's frustration. Blizzard keeps on doing this to zerg, trashing our core lategame units every two years.
They don't do it for no reason. terran doesnt even have lategame units, so stop the qq. It's a massive change, we don't even know the effects.
The effects are very easy to see. The moved SH from core lategame unit to purely harrass role. It's not like people never played without swamhosts, they had and it doesn't work in lategame.
the effects on the overal game are impossivle to see, and biased forum knights make it hard to change anything in this game the right way. I simply cannot understand how people complain about balance in this topic...
On February 27 2015 09:15 baabaa wrote: yes, let's nerf zerg because obviously they are winning everything right now!!! LOL. Where would zerg show up at top levels if you take out the superhuman play of Life? Blizzard, you want zerg to be able to deal with terran mech ? here's a thought? nerf terran mech. instead you decide to nerf something zerg needs against it and then let zerg figure it out. Makes perfect sense. you want zerg to be able to deal with protoss mass air? here's a crazy idea -- nerf protoss air!!!! any thought to maybe decreasing the completely ridiculous range of tempests? even by 1 range unit? NAH, protoss obviously needs every bit of that so that they don't lose any of their precious tempests. Of course, zerg can afford to lose entire lategame armies and they're still fine, so who cares about that. The only reason zerg was surviving against protoss lategame as it is was using mass swarm hosts!!! so you decided to remove that, now toss beats zerg for sure in lategame. oh well,, just reason 76 (every single one related to new units and balance) to not buy LoTV. tempest nerf is at least something that makes sense (I guess someone at blizzard DID happen to notice that protoss were making tons of tempests lategame and winning easily against zerg, something so bloody obvious with the design of the unit that no testing is even necessary). At times I think rolling dice to decide how to design new units would stand a better chance of balance than what is being done. So zerg needs to be prevented from basing armies around swarmhosts... logically, here's some other armies that need to be nerfed: bio mine, terran mech, hellbats, immortal sentry stalker, colossus voidray stalker, forcefields, right? nah, seeing these armies melt zerg armies with nearly no losses is just part of the game.
Calm down. Take a step back and think without ur Zerg-eyes. We do not want any race to be underpowered or overpowered so we can win ezly. We want a fun game, not frustrating 2h games. If the SH change (nerf/ buff,up to u how u wanna call it) is healthy for the game, but makes Zerg weak, they will tweak other things. And even if u say that mech is the issue that is causing all this, then I can assure u 99% of all mech players would appreciate to be able to move out much earlier than 200/200. We could continue the same way with Protoss etc. etc. Try to improve the game as a whole.. not only ur race.
I agree, but I can fully understand baabaa's frustration. Blizzard keeps on doing this to zerg, trashing our core lategame units every two years.
They don't do it for no reason. terran doesnt even have lategame units, so stop the qq. It's a massive change, we don't even know the effects.
The effects are very easy to see. The moved SH from core lategame unit to purely harrass role. It's not like people never played without swamhosts, they had and it doesn't work in lategame.
the effects on the overal game are impossivle to see, and biased forum knights make it hard to change anything in this game the right way. I simply cannot understand how people complain about balance in this topic...
Have you played one of those testmaps? Have you? Because I have, quite a bit - though it is obviously hard to get equal skilled opponents. You keep on saying that we can't know the effects, but you know what, the people who actually test it can get a very good feel for it. And so far I can only say I'm very concerned for balance and even more the change isn't good to begin with. Everyone who has lost a base to locusts randomly flying in from some random angle doesn't have good words for the unit. Everyone who tried to hold anything with those 200gas/4supply abominations hasn't had a good word for the unit. --> it isn't even a good solution to the existing problem to begin with.
If this patch goes through like that my prediction is that we might see a few games in which those Swarm Hosts win games because it is zerg and the right way to deal with zerg tech stuff is usually to put on pressure at the right times and limit them from even doing that and people will have to find those points in time. Then zergs will realize that they can't hold anything when they build those Swarm Hosts because they are too expensive, at best they can snipe a nexus and forcing the opponent to pull his workers, while the enemy is ravaging your stuff with an army that sits on top your production and just wins the game. Then Zergs are going to push Swarm Hosts out of their gameplan because everything else is going to be more important and then we will end up with the same endgame plays from Terran and Protoss just without Swarm Hosts.
I guess against Protoss turtling into massive Broodlord timings might actually become a thing again though.
The least thing blizzard should do to try and counterbalance is reintroducing the Terran Air Upgrades (which is something they are planning for LotV anyways) so that a Terran cannot go as freely from shitting on all your ground with Factory Tech into shitting on all that's left with Starport tech.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/TF90k1G.png)
. Seriously though with ravagers we Zergs won't have the same kinds of problems with FF.
