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Hi TL!
I've recently played some WoL again, just for fun, and came up with a thought that I would like to hear your opinion on.
While playing (with every race actually) I've come to find that the game is much more fun without medivac boost. It fixes so many bad and broken strategies and tactics, that IMO should have no place in this game. The matchups where it matters the most are obviously TvP and TvT.
While it would certainly weaken elevator play and drop openings in TvT, I feel like the mid- and lategame are way less coinflippy and all-innish with doom drops. Even though the Meta already kind of went away from it, depending on the mappool and the new meta that will evolve in LotV, there is def. a chance it will go back to doomdropping all over.
Even though some openings will be weakened or even removed from TvT, I don't think that would necessarily be a problem, since the matchup was already fine in WoL and was pretty much the most solid and interesting to watch mirror matchup.
The biggest difference though is obviously TvP. I'm sure many people (Terrans) think differently, but I don't think that widow mine drops should be a solid strategic choice and opening for terrans with (depending on your commitment) very few risks. It's simply a low risk high reward strategy that can ALWAYS work if your opponent doesn't pay full attention to it for just about 2 seconds. And even then we've all seen plenty widow mines shooting after 10 probes that were rallied away just a split second to late. Surely fun to win with, but frustrating and really stupid to lose against. Innovation recently went even further and went for speed burrow mine drop which just destroyed zest (I'm sure someone will say Zest failed here, I don't care, it's just an example to make a point and discuss a strategy). Though the real problem of this is a badly designed unit called widow mine, a removal or change of the medivac boost would drastly change the effectiveness of this strategy, since it will give the defending player way more time to catch the medivac flying in, making it more of a risk for the terran.
The other part is the midgame, which is kind of the core of really any matchup. Let's be honest here. Everyone who has played a PvT against a fairly decent Terran opponent has to know how ridiculously stupid this ability can be. It's a flying unit, that can pick up and carry pretty much an entire army (you don't only build 2 medivacs), which is faster than any Protoss ground unit really. While it can be really hard to defend good Terran aggression in the midgame, that is not even the problem. If you have watched a lot of (especially european) PvT in the past few weeks, you've pretty much seen the Protoss player defend till the 20 minute mark to finally attack and still get basetraded into stupid situations where it is often even possible for the Terran to get a draw, even though he would have lost any straight up engagement. The constant threat of devastating counterdoomdrops in PvT and also TvT can make it really frustrating to play those matchups.
I'm sure you'll find many more good and bad points about Medivac boost (excitement since more action, wooo!. but please look at it as a player), but with the coming balance phase in the LotV Beta, and also in general, I would like to hear your opinions on it!
Gl hf everyone.
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Of course medivac boost was a mistake, introduced for the sake of encouraging action, resulting in tied hands and bandaids like photon overcharge.
Mark my words, the same thing is happening with the warp prism. Building the game around an attacker's advantage is simply bound to fail.
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On September 22 2015 04:27 [PkF] Wire wrote:
Of course medivac boost was a mistake, introduced for the sake of encouraging action, resulting in tied hands and bandaids like photon overcharge.
Mark my words, the same thing is happening with the warp prism. Building the game around an attacker's advantage is simply bound to fail.
You're right. The warpprism is pretty much the same thing, especially with the new, way to huge, pick up radius. The thing is, that they will probably change this when seeing that warpprism adepts dominate 2 or even all 3 of the protoss matchups.
I don't think that they are putting much time and effort into Medivac Boost (and/or widow mines) even though I and many? other people would like to see so. Maybe raising awareness to it will help, since they have not yet said anything about boost, even though they've been changing old abilities like Revelation/Envision.
I'm aware that this would drastly change the current PvT metagame, but LotV will have completely new metas in every matchup anyways, so why not talk about it now, when everything is changing anyways. With the weakened Colossus, I don't think Medivac Boost is quite as necessary as it (maybe!) was in HotS.
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On September 22 2015 04:34 Obsi wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2015 04:27 [PkF] Wire wrote:
Of course medivac boost was a mistake, introduced for the sake of encouraging action, resulting in tied hands and bandaids like photon overcharge.
Mark my words, the same thing is happening with the warp prism. Building the game around an attacker's advantage is simply bound to fail. The thing is, that they will probably change this when seeing that warpprism adepts dominate 2 or even all 3 of the protoss matchups.
I'd like to have that remaining glimmer of hope in Blizzard's abilities to analyse the game further than "hey, we strengthen a harass tool, so more action, so more good games !" (do I even have to explain why that reasoning fails ? Just watch what medi boost made PvT, and expect the same at least for TvP if the warp prism remains the same).
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Personally I don't like medivac boost either. I think it enables some downright silly maneuvers to be very effective, especially large drops. I guess it is kind of Terran's compensation for the speed of other races' flying units(mutas and oracles) but I still don't really like it.
It is pretty low on the change priority list though, with the widow mine and all. Honestly I wouldn't mind if they chose to replace many of the HotS changes with new LotV ones, rather than adding on.
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As a Terran I'd gladly lose medivac boost, TvT in WoL was the matchup where the better player has the biggest chance of winning, in HotS it can often come down to being out of position just a tiny bit too much. I like it in the other matchups though, I understand widow mine drops are nasty, but so are the 23987589234 gimicky tools Protoss has against Terran.
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On September 22 2015 04:45 Averse wrote:
I guess it is kind of Terran's compensation for the speed of other races' flying units(mutas and oracles)
Funny how you precisely mention the two biggest fails of HotS design wise (Swarm Hots are in a category of their own, and they got patched) : muta regen and oracles. I have no words for how bad the oracle is for TvP early game.
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I agree with the idea of changing HotS changes instead of adding even more stuff, but since the units are in for quite a long time now already (in the beta) I doubt they will go back to this. They're also kind of expected to drastically change they game, aren't they? But when already changing so much, why not do both?
I kind of feel like nerfing Infestors and adding Vipers would have been enough for HotS (or WoL) to be a much better game. Even though the MSC did make some things better, I'm sure there would've been better options. Even PvP was quite a stable Matchup in the end of WoL. Or at least it hasn't gotten much more stable with mass Blink Stalkers and what we have now. Maybe Hellbats were nice too to make Mech more viable, if only they needed an Upgrade so they weren't so OP in the early game against Zerg...
Removing or weakening Medivac Boost and Oracles would also make MSC less necessary...
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I agree kill the power units! Buffing the units that make matchups fun, which they have done with Warp Prism, Medivac, Mutalisk, Oracle does lead us to interactive games, but it also destroys variety, because if your strategy doesn't revolve around the imba units, your simply missing out.
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On September 22 2015 05:19 ejozl wrote:
I agree kill the power units! Buffing the units that make matchups fun, which they have done with Warp Prism, Medivac, Mutalisk, Oracle does lead us to interactive games, but it also destroys variety, because if your strategy doesn't revolve around the imba units, your simply missing out.
I'm not sure those units really make the matchups fun
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On September 22 2015 05:19 ejozl wrote:
I agree kill the power units! Buffing the units that make matchups fun, which they have done with Warp Prism, Medivac, Mutalisk, Oracle does lead us to interactive games, but it also destroys variety, because if your strategy doesn't revolve around the imba units, your simply missing out.
Well.. not fun on the receiving end :/ . But variety is another concern. With adding even more units, they are actively making their own life of balancing the game in a good manner even harder. Allowing a diverse meta is a really hard task for a game designer I'd imagine. The more units you have, the more variables that have to be well balanced. Either that or we'll have way more Swarm Host-like (post patch) units in the near future. Removing or weakening extremely powerful tools, as the medivac boost, might be good help.
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if boost is removed, shouldnt overcharge aswell? With overcharge leading to earlier blinks, isn't it impossible to pressure with drops anymore in tvp?
Also op, provide some good examples, or just dont post ok?......
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On September 22 2015 05:22 mderg wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2015 05:19 ejozl wrote:
I agree kill the power units! Buffing the units that make matchups fun, which they have done with Warp Prism, Medivac, Mutalisk, Oracle does lead us to interactive games, but it also destroys variety, because if your strategy doesn't revolve around the imba units, your simply missing out. I'm not sure those units really make the matchups fun
They're super fun!!!
For one of the sides.
I couldn't agree more, everything is already on meth, everything is already too fast, too volatile, too uncontrolable. The game should be about control and skill not about losing because you looked at something else while your entire base was doom droped.
It goes for everything that is too fast, I think its like the "terrible, terrible damage syndrome" but with speed.
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Basically everything Blizzard did with HotS has been detrimental to the game. Wings of Liberty was in a decent place, it had a lot of the foundations laid to be a great game, just some fundamental problems that could be fixed over time. What they did instead was slap an orb-shaped bandaid over the whole thing and jam harassment down our throats. They decided on their own that harassment was the most exciting thing about the game, and then made units that were only good at harassment, they were paper tigers if you decided you wanted to put them in with your army.
You're not supposed to design units expressly for harassment, though. Harassment in StarCraft originated with taking a unit that was designed to be part of an army, and repurposing it using strategy and creativity. Blizzard has elected to take everything in their own hands, instead of letting the players develop the sport, and it is failing spectacularly as a result. All the big moments that make sports what they are, those are supposed to be created by the player, Blizzard has systematically forced the game to produce these moments all the time. Your "Terrible, Terrible Damage" is supposed to be a special moment created by two players when the stars align, not something that happens when you look away from your army for 3 seconds.
Harassment is supposed to be something developed by the player, no unit in BW was designed to harass only, it was designed as an army unit first. Players then did what they wanted. Everything that made BW an E-Sport, and everything that SC2 needs to be an E-Sport like BW before it, is supposed to be generated by the players. It's supposed to be a special moment that the game doesn't force, but merely allow. Blizzard completely failed to understand that, they move to force harassment and micro to happen by designing units to be useless in any other context. They're not allowing it to happen, they're forcing it to happen. Sounds a lot like their approach to expanding, doesn't it? Having moar bases = better e-spoart, so they force players to expand with the new model.
Why is Blizzard doing this? Easy. They're not looking at SC2 as a game. They're looking at it as a sport. They're treating SC2 as an activity you perform so other people can watch you do it, plain and simple. They are not treating SC2 as a game that is meant to be fun, that is not their goal. The act of playing SC2 will be tantamount to running around in a coliseum while a bear tries to kill you, mark my words. Much more fun to watch than to do. Except when people start to realize it's no fun to be in there running for your life, they stop enjoying it so much.
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On September 22 2015 06:14 NewSunshine wrote:
Basically everything Blizzard did with HotS has been detrimental to the game. Wings of Liberty was in a decent place, it had a lot of the foundations laid to be a great game, just some fundamental problems that could be fixed over time.
Wow, so I'm not the only one to think that ?
Take LotV. Take HotS. And now, think about WoL, make fungal a projectile, give pheonix 4 range and have ultras do the damage they do in HotS. I think the third version is infinitely superior to the others.
My biggest problem with HotS is that it mostly added things to fill holes that didn't exist in the first place instead of focusing on fixing what was wrong with WoL. What is the role of the oracle for instance ?
I like that they really tried hard to improve the game foundations for LotV. But man, I can't help feeling they failed. As I said in another thread, I really don't like what happened to warpgate. A total removal of macro mechanics would have been better. And so on. Not to mention five months of beta were basically wasted, with only one really bold change done early on (the eco change that I think does what it intends to do but is bad in every other regard).
I have to say I remain optimistic about LotV, but Blizzard really needs to simplify their approach. An overcomplicated game won't attract people, a good and elegant one will.
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On September 22 2015 05:49 sabas123 wrote:
if boost is removed, shouldnt overcharge aswell? With overcharge leading to earlier blinks, isn't it impossible to pressure with drops anymore in tvp?
Also op, provide some good examples, or just dont post ok?......
Already felt like I wrote too much. Wasn't writing this just for people like you to post TL;DR. Overcharge serves a defensive purpose for every matchup, Medivac Boost does not. It is almost! exclusively offensive. I actually do think, that Photon Overcharge and the MSC in it's entirety should get removed. That would lead to way more problems though. The introduction of the adept might help that out on the other hand. But yes, please, let's remove this one of hero unit. Drops without boost would actually be at least a little bit of an commitment again, forcing the Terran to be really careful while flying in or scouting the army/scanning beforehand. I'm pretty sure we've seen drops in WoL aswell.
And do you really think, that a specific example of a game, where the terran opens widow mine drop, boosts in and kills about 12 probes because the protoss reacted a second late is needed? If you have not seen plenty of those games, you didn't follow professional SC2 for quite a while I guess. And yes I know, that widow mines are a large portion of that problem, but removing medivac boost would weaken it quite a bit, or at least the medivacs would even survive and fly away less often.
Since doomdropping has fallen a LITTLE bit out of fashion in TvT, you'd have to go a few months back to see how stupid TvT has been.
For the main factor PvT, just watch some non-korean games where they don't 1 base all in each other (or 3 base blink all in if you like pigbaby) all the time. The draw between ForGG and MaNa at WCS Finals for example. Pretty stupid game if you ask me. Must have been hella fun to play...
I can't quote him exactly, but a few days ago PtitDrogo played a PvT on stream, and while attacking the terran 21 minutes in the game for the first time, he said that this is what PvT looks like nowadays. You defend for 20 minutes and after they've failed enough times, you can go and kill them.
If you're lucky you were so far ahead, that you can leave a good bunch of your army at home to defend the counterdrop that is going to come. Interactive yes, fun and strategicly demanding? No.
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I'm going to go ahead and assume you are a protoss player.
It's simply a low risk high reward strategy that can ALWAYS work if your opponent doesn't pay full attention to it for just about 2 seconds
You just described every single strategy in the entire game.
Innovation recently went even further and went for speed burrow mine drop which just destroyed zest (I'm sure someone will say Zest failed here, I don't care, it's just an example to make a point and discuss a strategy)
And here we see that the one example you could concoct to depict widow mine drops as imbalanced, you admit is actually a bad example. So I am wondering where the bodies are.
Maru actually made mine drops a thing for a time. If it was that effective, why did he stop doing it? The answer is because the protoss players were scouting it, making 1 cannon, (or, you know, the oracles they make every game anyway) and losing nothing. It's not cost effective to do if it gets scouted, even by an amateur player.
which is faster than any Protoss ground unit really
Except, you know, the protoss anti-air unit.
even though he would have lost any straight up engagement.
This quote really sums up your flawed approach to Starcraft. What game are you playing that the game ought be to fought out in a big 1 vs. 1 attack? If the game were played that way, protoss would win everything. That is the protoss strength, yes, but you cannot utilize that strength until you learn to properly defend aggression and counter-attack.
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Hm. I think Medivac boost is alright, except I do not think it should be on a timer-based cooldown. I feel like things/units/stuff should have a plus and a minus. Right now, the most obvious way to balance it would be to just have it drain medivac energy for however long you boosted. In fact, I think it would make the unit wayyyyy more interesting.
Scenario:
You've got a brand new medivac. You've got 6 marines and a widow mine or something. You can pick all those units up, and spend -all- the energy you have to get to the opponent asap. Or, you could just save the energy, and go there at a normal speed. Or, you can use a little bit, but save maybe 25 energy for when the drop actually hits.
By making both healing and boosting require energy, the player now has to decide how to spend the energy. This seems like by far the best compromise, and would actually give the idea of 'boosting' a lot more depth. However, I do believe they would need to make boost drain energy quite fast for balance purposes. Maybe 10 energy per second? I'm not sure. You wouldn't want medivacs to always be uncatchable because they can just use a short boost to escape from ground units. But still, I think having boost require energy would be a really cool way of balancing boost, and making it more interesting all around. You could do some really awesome micro stuff with a toggle-able boost.
I think Blizzard should try and make units so that there is always a significant cost to each action. Feedback? Does 50% of energy drained to the high templar too, so that way, players are not actually at a disadvantage versus HT's when they have a unit with 200 energy (HT has 80 effective life, so 160+ energy would be suicidal). I'm not necessarily saying this idea is that great, or at all necessary. It's just an example.
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On September 22 2015 06:23 [PkF] Wire wrote:
Take LotV. Take HotS. And now, think about WoL, make fungal a projectile, give pheonix 4 range and have ultras do the damage they do in HotS. I think the third version is infinitely superior to the others.
My biggest problem with HotS is that it mostly added things to fill holes that didn't exist in the first place instead of focusing on fixing what was wrong with WoL. What is the role of the oracle for instance ?
I like that they really tried hard to improve the game foundations for LotV. But man, I can't help feeling they failed. As I said in another thread, I really don't like what happened to warpgate. A total removal of macro mechanics would have been better. And so on. Not to mention five months of beta were basically wasted, with only one really bold change done early on (the eco change that I think does what it intends to do but is bad in every other regard).
I have to say I remain optimistic about LotV, but Blizzard really needs to simplify their approach. An overcomplicated game won't attract people, a good and elegant one will.
If only they would patch WoL and people would start playing it competitively again. What a fun game we had. Instead we get super speedy units that never get catched, widow mines, pylon rushes (LotV) and the likes. Adding abilites over abilities doesn't help either if you ask me. Completely agree with simplifying. More stuff =/= better game.
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On September 22 2015 06:56 Obsi wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2015 06:23 [PkF] Wire wrote:
Take LotV. Take HotS. And now, think about WoL, make fungal a projectile, give pheonix 4 range and have ultras do the damage they do in HotS. I think the third version is infinitely superior to the others.
My biggest problem with HotS is that it mostly added things to fill holes that didn't exist in the first place instead of focusing on fixing what was wrong with WoL. What is the role of the oracle for instance ?
I like that they really tried hard to improve the game foundations for LotV. But man, I can't help feeling they failed. As I said in another thread, I really don't like what happened to warpgate. A total removal of macro mechanics would have been better. And so on. Not to mention five months of beta were basically wasted, with only one really bold change done early on (the eco change that I think does what it intends to do but is bad in every other regard).
I have to say I remain optimistic about LotV, but Blizzard really needs to simplify their approach. An overcomplicated game won't attract people, a good and elegant one will. If only they would patch WoL and people would start playing it competitively again. What a fun game we had. Instead we get super speedy units that never get catched, widow mines, pylon rushes (LotV) and the likes. Adding abilites over abilities doesn't help either if you ask me. Completely agree with simplifying. More stuff =/= better game.
When I started playing WoL seriously, I couldn't help thinking "well, the number of units for each race is already quite high, and I don't see a role that cannot be filled by an already existing unit. Yet, two expansions are to happen and it's really unlikely units aren't added each time. Man, they'll have to be really good to add useful/interesting stuff and notably improve the game".
Needless to say, I don't think they were really good. Some additions were okay I guess (viper), some were simply detrimental (the unholy oracle - muta regen - medi boost trinity, with the mothership core being their hideous child) and some were the Swarm Hosts. Problem is I don't see the situation being better with the HotS -> LotV transition. The adept and disruptor could end up OK, same with ravager and lurker. But most of the other things don't leave me too hopeful.
I remember they said they would scrap some units before adding others at some point before HotS. For instance, remove SHs, introduce lurkers ; remove colossus, introduce disruptors. Wouldn't it have made much more sense ? They're stacking up units over units, and I wonder what will come from that mess.
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EPT
