There has been a great deal of discussion in general terms about buffing the Siege Tank in order to make positional mech play functional. However, because of the possibility of backlash, I think many people are reluctant to talk specific numbers about how much of a buff the tank actually requires. In this post I will propose specific numbers for a buffed tank.
Currently the SC2 Siege Tank does 35 (+15 Armored) damage in Siege Mode. The obvious comparison to the Brood War tank bears repeating. The BW tank costs 150m/100g, 2 supply, and shoots in siege mode for 70 Explosive damage, also always dealing full damage to Protoss shields.
Another unit worthy of comparison is the Disruptor, which is a Protoss positional unit with a similar resource cost and tech level to the Siege Tank. The Disruptor costs 150m/150g and 3 supply, and once every 21 seconds fires a projectile that splashes for 145 (+55 Shield) non-radial splash damage to every unit in the radius. Unlike the Siege Tank it does not need to siege up, and moves at a speedy 3.15 all the time.
Another vital point to note: the Siege Tank deals radial splash; the Siege Tank's splash damage decreases with distance from the center of the blast. Diagram:
The Disruptor does not have this disadvantage, and deals its full 145 damage hit to every unit affected. What this means for the Siege tank is that most of the clustered units which are damaged by the tank's shot are actually taking only 25% of the listed damage value.
Buff Numbers
All of this assumes that the ridiculous tank lift in the Medivac is removed. You should have to unsiege, load into the Medivac, drop, and then siege again, like the tank was meant to do.
That said, first, the tank's instantaneous-hit weapon should be changed to a projectile with a travel time, and its range increased.
Suppose the tank shot projectile flies at a speed of 26, and the weapon's range is increased to 15. Against a target enemy unit entering the tank's range at 15 distance from the tank, moving directly towards the tank at a speed of 4.0 (e.g. Zergling or Stalker), the tank's projectile will take 0.5 seconds to arrive before hitting the unit at 13 distance from the tank.
The primary purpose of this mechanical change is to make tanks overkill targets. A group of tanks parked right next to each other will all fire at this target unit during that 0.5 second window before the first set of projectiles kill the target. To avoid this, tanks should be spread out far enough apart that a target unit's movement does not cause so many tanks to fire at it in the time before the first shots kill it.
However, the most important change is to directly buff the tank's sieged damage. I propose that the tank's sieged damage be increased to 50 (+25 Armored).
This change will have the following damage effects:
This design of the tank is undoubtedly highly effective against units like Roaches and Stalkers. However, there are abundant counters available to both Zerg and Protoss which can be used to counter a siege line. Mutalisks, Vipers with Abduct and Blinding Cloud, Zealot bombs, Immortals, Tempests, etc.
TvZ Mech Gameplay
This tank change has absolutely no effect regarding Ling/Bling/Muta. Tanks already 1-shot the only units it can hit in this matchup, and in the 50% splash radius it still takes 2 hits to kill zerglings and banelings. Tanks are still not really that effective against large groups of Zerglings, especially now that a single Zergling can potentially waste an entire tank salvo.
What this tank change does affect is Roach/Ravager. Tanks will 2-shot both of these units, giving Terran a method of forcing the Roach/Ravager to exercise some tactics rather than always directly attacking. A group of four tanks' overlapping splash can kill about 3-5 Roaches in one salvo, forcing the Roach/Ravager to be a bit more tactical than always attacking directly into the Terran.
Most likely Zergs will respond to a stronger tank by using Corrosive Bile from beyond the tanks' range to attack targets which can be reached, and attacking where the tanks are not present, possibly even using burrow move to ambush tanks from inside their minimum range where they cannot fight back.
This changes when Vipers hit the field, since Abduct is almost a guaranteed kill on a tank when used correctly, enabling a Zerg to gradually thin the ranks of a tank line by picking off tanks using Vipers one at a time, until eventually the tank line is weak enough to crush. Also, Blinding Cloud completely disables an affected tank, or several tanks sieged too close together, since its range is reduced to below its minimum range. This can be used in advance of a big assault, or to facilitate a snipe using other units, such as disabling some tanks so a Corrosive Bile salvo can pick one off.
Also of note, tanks will also 2-shot Hydralisks. And of course tanks outrange Lurkers, again a unit they are intended to counter. Ultralisks can potentially directly assault into a tank line in sufficient numbers, but this is a dangerous gamble that is probably best reserved for desperate situations only.
TvP Mech Gameplay
TvP is where this tank buff will have the most pronounced effect. The dramatic reduction in the number of hits required to kill units like Zealots and Stalkers (to the same number of shots as BW) will greatly enhance the tank's viability in this matchup.
However, Protoss also has a wide variety of strong counters. The most obvious is a Stargate transition including Tempests, Void Rays, or Carriers. This will force a large number of Vikings since the Siege Tanks are useless against these units. However, Stalkers counter Vikings, and Siege Tanks counter Stalkers. The result is that the Siege Tanks can create a safe airspace for the Vikings to be protected from Stalker attacks, and the Vikings protect the Siege Tanks from being attacked by Tempests and other flying units.
Gateway units also have some play. Adepts can quickly phase inside the Siege Tank's minimum range, allowing them to attack the Siege Tanks with impunity, and forcing Siege Tanks in groups to kill each other with splash. Stalkers are also highly maneuverable, particularly with Blink, and can go around tank lines to reach expansions, pick off isolated or relocating tanks, and are still useful even though they should never directly assault a tank line without overwhelming force.
The Warp Prism also deserves special mention here. The Warp Prism is ideal for highly mobile, multi-pronged aggression, such as going for their mineral line instead of directly assaulting a tank line outside your base. Moreover, the Warp Prism can drop units directly on top of tanks, causing them to kill each other. Zealot bombs are the unit of choice in BW. But in SC2 I strongly suspect that Immortals are a better bomb choice; they deal 50 damage to Armored units like tanks (4 shot kill), and their Barrier ability makes them effectively invincible for a brief period. I suspect Protoss players will load Immortals into Warp Prisms and drop them directly onto a tank line, destroying a tank, and picking up again to wait for the Barrier cooldown to refresh.
It is also a possibility to directly attack into the tanks using Immortals or Archons. These units can absorb a lot of tank fire before going down, but are expensive and this assault will always result in casualties. Just as with Ultralisks, this is a dangerous move that requires large numbers to succeed, and it's always better to pick off tanks by some other method before going for the direct assault.
TvT Mech Gameplay
It is unlikely TvT will be much affected, because both sides have access to the same tank. The most significant change is that Siege Tanks' increased damage will 2-shot Marauders instead of 3-shotting them. Although in the 100% damage radius, Marines are killed in 1 shot, they die in 2 shots in the 50% area, 3 shots with combat shield, at least until the mech player gets +3 weapons. Marines will indeed take more damage, so in a Marine-Tank fight the tanks are dealing more damage. But in a straight tank fight the number of shots is similar.
Medivac mobility allows a bio player to avoid engaging a tank army if they wish, such as going for the mineral line or production facilities. Increasing the Siege Tank's power in a straight up fight allows smaller groups of tanks to cover more places on the map, rather than only one large group, which the bio player never engages. Bombing a tank line is still an option, but is seldom done in TvT because it isn't necessary when you can directly kill their base or expansions instead.
Conclusion
These two changes should make the Siege Tank a powerful positional unit again. Like the Disruptor, it will push enemy forces away beyond its range, and force them to engage with caution and special tactics rather than always fully engage in a pitched battle. Making the Siege Tank's weapon a projectile will cause it to overkill, and increasing its damage will enable a smaller number of tanks on the field to effectively zone out enemy units from entering its range.
However a tank buff alone is not sufficient to make Factory ground mech viable again. The Factory also needs a unit that is an anti-air specialist, which will enable a player with many Factories to respond to a huge air transition. Without a unit from the Factory that can do this job, Terran players will still avoid making many Factories, and will still make mainly Barracks and Starports instead.
Extension Mod
By popular request I have created an extension mod with the changes discussed in this thread. Specifically, the tank now fires a projectile on a parabolic trajectory, dealing 50 (+25 Armored) damage. Siege Tech research is back. And the Cyclone is now a dedicated anti-air specialist, only attacking flying units, but shooting on the move for 12 (+12 Light) damage.
Also, the Raven's Point Defense Drone now blocks tank shots, and I have also changed PDD to give it a firing cooldown of 0.2 seconds per shot, but they also last 90 seconds. I have my fingers crossed that bio with PDD is at least competitive with tanks. I have a sneaking suspicion PDD is way too strong against tanks and bio will roflstomp tanks with PDD support.
To play the mod, look under multiplayer custom games (not arcade) click on "Create with Mod" and search for "ledarsi Mech Mod."
I make absolutely no claims to this mod being the epitome of balance. Undoubtedly numbers and mechanics will need fine-tuning. But hopefully by playing around with it, people will realize that strong mech actually leads to interesting games, and not turtle games the way skyterran does.
I disagree with you on the projectile bit. Just go back to BW tanks where there's no projectile but remove "smartfire" on them.
I think Tanks should do more damage, but not have smart fire. This makes them more effective in low numbers but not imba in high numbers.
That alone would fix it, I think. And for Flash's sake remove the silly Medivac lift.
Comparisons to the Disruptor don't belong here IMO. The Disruptor can't shoot up or down cliffs, and the Disruptor shoots on a much longer cooldown than the Tank. A Tank in siege mode with the proper support can keep firing and put out a lot more damage than a Disruptor over time. Also a Tank takes care of itself while a Disruptor always has to be microed to do anything. They're just different units and I think you're forcing it.
A little quip about the Disruptor since you're stats slightly misrepresent it. You have to manually cast its projectile, while you don't have to do this with a siege tank. Of course you can control this projectile which is most likely a plus but does take some apm. Also due to the tech tree massing Disruptors takes quite a bit more time than massing siege tanks.
I'm curious, has anyone ever coded Overkill tanks into the game in a custom map? I get the strong impression that having tanks be deliberately stupid is gonna get real stupid real fast.
Don't forget to mention that a projectile opens up Raven use in TvT. That kind of play maybe quit interesting, where Terran attempts to EMP or Viking snipe enemy Ravens.
EDIT:
On December 02 2015 11:33 BEARDiaguz wrote: I'm curious, has anyone ever coded Overkill tanks into the game in a custom map? I get the strong impression that having tanks be deliberately stupid is gonna get real stupid real fast.
I believe there is a SC BW mod on Arcade that did this. And im not sure but I believe Starbow does this as well.
I don't know about how it would play because it would feel extremely different at first, but one thing I want to mention is the plain fact that I believe the numbers don't work out well. It's still kind of meh against Protoss which should be the main target of a redesign, while one-shooting stimmed marines and two-shooting marauders has insane potential to just kill the bio-style in TvT and I'd make the same argument for roach/hydra type of play.
I'm a general supporter of the idea of overkill tanks with more impact though, but I'm very sceptical about any given numbers until they are thoroughly tested in some unit testers at least. I also think that there are a bunch of alternatives to overkill/greatly buffed damage, namely a plain buff to the tanks +vs armored from 35+15 to 35+25 (no impact on marines and hydras), or a buff to the main target damage alone, e.g. to 50+25. These sorts of buffs give the tank more of a role and help it dealing with high health targets against which it is bad or mediocre at the moment (archon, immortal, ultralisk, collossus) while trying to keep the splash relations with units like zerglings, banelings or marines the same.
Nice thread. I really do hope they buff the tank somehow because mech right now is in the worst state it has ever been, and is almost unplayable atm, especially factory based mech. Obviously "mech" is playable if you end up massing liberators and air units...but that's not really "mech" when you're essentially purposely trying to avoid creating siege tanks because siege tanks are so cost inefficient.
I don't think they need to do any crazy overkill changes or projectile changes...really the tank just needs it's damage back so that it's more like the liberator...and can trade cost effectively when the opponent runs into them.
Like right now, if there's 3 liberators zoning out an area...you can really see and feel that in the game. THAT my friends is how the siege tank used to feel in brood war. If you saw a bunch of tanks you couldn't just 1A randomly into that area, you would get blown to smithereens.
The liberator does what the tank should have been doing all this time, and you can see why - liberators do 85 dmg single target per shot. Obviously a tank should not do as much as a liberator since tanks do splash...but tanks do need damage back..
Lots of people including blizzard are probably scared of turtle mech or what not...but honestly buffing tank damage will make aggro mech and movement possible for mech, and i think turtle mech is already massively addressed through the economy of LOTV - you're at a severe disadvantage if you try to turtle on 3 base.
It's just right now, mech is extremely weak because tanks are still weak, there are even more counters to tanks as mentioned in the OP, and then the new economy on top of that and cyclones not being good anti-air...there are so many reasons why mech is near unplayable atm and has been (in general) for the longest time.
I hope more people read this thread, good OP, and maybe we can get blizzard to consider making the tank do some damage again...
4 tanks up a ramp or somewhere on the map...imagine if the opponent actually had to be afraid of that instead of "wow tanks? lol ill just amove a few chargelots and kill them all."
4 liberators up a ramp..."um...yeah not going anywhere near that, going to pick them off instead, or force them to move" -> that's what tanks should be :D
This is the most popular suggestion, but as you touch on in your TvZ section, there are a lot of unanswered questoins.
First of all, this attempt to solve all of the tank's problems with one change in no way addresses the hard counters Siege Tanks already have in SC2. What is a meching Terran supposed to do in LotV against Brood Lord/Viper? How does a tankline survive Disruptor pressure? Disruptor vs Tank is essentially HotS SH vs Tank, and we know how that plays out. Never mind the switch to skytoss.
The second thing is there are a lot of SC2 units that are simply too good at closing the distance. BW units clumped up less and did not walk in straight lines, and while "units clumped less" sounds like bad news for tanks who deal AOE damage, in practice it took a pack of units a lot longer to reach a siege line and effectively start hitting back. There just weren't as many units engaging tanks at any given time.
I randomly pulled up a Jaedong vs Flash game (Apollo casting!)
Watch any engagement during 15mins+, like at 24:30, and you'll see how slow a Zerg army is to trickle in because of pathing. Dragoon pathing is infamous enough that I don't think I need to refer to a visual aid. Bad pathing inherently favors units with longer range because they spend less time being dumb and more time attacking. Siege Tanks had the longest range and did not move at all while attacking, which minimized dumbness further, so it seems to me that everything in SC1 conspired to make tanks into fantastic units.
Not only that, there were very few speed-boosting abilities to close the gap. In SC2 we have creep speed, we have Chargelots, we have Blink, Adept shade for invulnerably, we have units like Roaches that are simply sturdy as fuck and give zero shits. Lings are so efficient at moving around and flanking, they have no real trouble getting close.
My guess is that tanks would need an AOE boost on top of a damage boost to be truly competitive core units in TvZ and TvP. And that's presupposing we do something about all the hard counters first. (EN: obviously Terran nerfs may be called for afterwards; the goal is to open up Terran playstyles, not make Terran unbeatable)
It's a very steep climb IMO. I want with all my heart for Blizzard to try it, but I don't think it's as simple as slapping a damage buff on them.
I don't think they need to do any crazy overkill changes or projectile changes...really the tank just needs it's damage back so that it's more like the liberator...and can trade cost effectively when the opponent runs into them.
Well I think part of the idea of adding the overkill is to prevent Terran from simply massing all their tanks in a ball. Over Kill forces Terran to spread their tanks.
From a spectators perspective this is much better for viewing.
On December 02 2015 11:59 nanaoei wrote: are disruptors vs siege tanks a thing? they cost more and don't quite have the range to do it safely iirc, unless it's an incomplete siege -line-.
Not to mention tanks super out range Disruptors. I would be more worried about Adept Suicides.
On December 02 2015 11:59 nanaoei wrote: are disruptors vs siege tanks a thing? they cost more and don't quite have the range to do it safely iirc, unless it's an incomplete siege -line-.
I had the unfortunate pleasure of playing a mech vs Protoss that started massing disruptors....
It felt exactly like mech vs swarmhosts as some1 mentioned - except worse lol. The guy just kept sending in invulnerable balls of death to kill my depots over and over and any tanks that were sieged or any stray units lol.
If you send an Adept using its shade right up next to a Siege Tank, even if you never attack, it will take 3 tank shots to kill the Adept. And the splash from those 3 tank shots will kill the tank it is standing next to. Unless you build a solid wall of buildings in front of the tank so the Adepts can't phase up next to the tank, this is basically not counterable.
An adept costs 100m/25g, a tank costs 150m/125g. This is a very good trade for Protoss.
On December 02 2015 12:07 ledarsi wrote: If you send an Adept using its shade right up next to a Siege Tank, even if you never attack, it will take 3 tank shots to kill the Adept. And the splash from those 3 tank shots will kill the tank it is standing next to. Unless you build a solid wall of buildings in front of the tank so the Adepts can't phase up next to the tank, this is basically not counterable.
An adept costs 100m/25g, a tank costs 150m/125g. This is a very good trade for Protoss.
If we're actually using this thread to problem solve, the first solution to try would be to make Adept shades not invulnerable, and give them something ridiculous like 15 armor. Shade functionality against bio and early Zerg units remains unchanged, but mech now has an answer.
This would be a super easy change to implement in a test map and would require no engine coding changes or complex triggers (data editor only solution).
My only question for now is whether the tank projectile would be especially excluded from Raven PDD like the roach weapon is. I have no idea if adding this Raven-Tank interaction would be a good thing or not - but it would take less than a minute to add or remove. As a projectile rather than a hitscan, it would also mean you could blink-dodge and pick-up micro passed tank fire too.
I'm not actually convinced it would be a problem for Adepts to be able to 'phase bomb' against tanks. We would have to test it ingame.
If it turns out to be a problem, it's probably better to start with simple solutions like having a shade have zero vision, so you would need another unit to get vision on the tanks to be able to order the shade right next to a tank.
If it was still a major issue then perhaps a more significant change to the shade might be warranted. There are a lot of possible cool ways to design a shade-type ability, such as linking its HP to the Adept, giving it a weapon or ability of its own, or allowing the Adept to teleport manually, or various other things that might be tried. Shades with linked HP to their Adept which are cloaked but can be killed might be interesting. Could have a Dark Shrine upgrade allowing Adept shades to attack, or perhaps do damage by phasing through units.
This would make tanks actually kill stuff so its a move in the right direction. However, I think it would still be very difficult to attack with tanks in small number without spider mines covering them.
On December 02 2015 12:07 ledarsi wrote: If you send an Adept using its shade right up next to a Siege Tank, even if you never attack, it will take 3 tank shots to kill the Adept. And the splash from those 3 tank shots will kill the tank it is standing next to. Unless you build a solid wall of buildings in front of the tank so the Adepts can't phase up next to the tank, this is basically not counterable.
An adept costs 100m/25g, a tank costs 150m/125g. This is a very good trade for Protoss.
If we're actually using this thread to problem solve, the first solution to try would be to make Adept shades not invulnerable, and give them something ridiculous like 15 armor. Shade functionality against bio and early Zerg units remains unchanged, but mech now has an answer.
I don't think we need to go that far, just some small changes.
Like why the fuck does the ability needs to go through everything, simple making it so it doesn't goes through units helps a ton, also maybe not go so fucking far, the thing is already amazing, fast as fuck, gives vision, can be canceled, has a really short cool down, I think a simply toning down could help.
On December 02 2015 12:07 ledarsi wrote: If you send an Adept using its shade right up next to a Siege Tank, even if you never attack, it will take 3 tank shots to kill the Adept. And the splash from those 3 tank shots will kill the tank it is standing next to. Unless you build a solid wall of buildings in front of the tank so the Adepts can't phase up next to the tank, this is basically not counterable.
An adept costs 100m/25g, a tank costs 150m/125g. This is a very good trade for Protoss.
If we're actually using this thread to problem solve, the first solution to try would be to make Adept shades not invulnerable, and give them something ridiculous like 15 armor. Shade functionality against bio and early Zerg units remains unchanged, but mech now has an answer.
I don't think we need to go that far, just some small changes.
Like why the fuck does the ability needs to go through everything, simple making it so it doesn't goes through units helps a ton, also maybe not go so fucking far, the thing is already amazing, fast as fuck, gives vision, can be canceled, has a really short cool down, I think a simply toning down could help.
Them moving though units is a good thing imo. I think about units not being able to move through shades and I get nightmares. I can see crazy abuse that seems broken in theory with shades preventing retreats, splitting up armies, blocking off terrain and ramps. A group of adepts would be like a movable force field.
I'm not sure there is any need for a projectile. In WoL sure, but in HoTS and LoTV there are ways to punish clumped Tanks with the Viper ,Disruptor, Adepts shade. Tanks just need to be a lot stronger to perform in smaller numbers and also when you are forced to spread out.
I like the look of this suggestion a lot. Tanks need their balls back.
On December 02 2015 11:24 DinoMight wrote: I disagree with you on the projectile bit. Just go back to BW tanks where there's no projectile but remove "smartfire" on them.
That's all "smartfire" is. Because the damage is calculated instantly and units are killed before evaluating the next tank there's no overkilling. It's not a clever algorithm called smartfire, that was just a name blizzard put on it. Making it a projectile just adds that little delay between firing and hitting that allows overkilling. It' doesn't need a physical projectile to be rendered. I'm not sure if you can make that change without making PDD's absorb the volleys though, which might potentially be an issue in TvT given the low rate of fire.
Kinda wish this thread would have mentioned that the damage nerf to tanks was done because Blizzard wanted to make bio viable in TvT in order to get rid of Tank/Viking stalemates. So that Bio dies in less shots is actually the biggest deal of it all. Atleast it makes this suggestion meaningless in the eyes of Blizzard as it gives no solution for why the nerf was introduced in the first place. Add to that that Blizzard hates to remove their nerfs for whatever silly reason >.>.
On December 02 2015 18:52 mostevil wrote: I like the look of this suggestion a lot. Tanks need their balls back.
On December 02 2015 11:24 DinoMight wrote: I disagree with you on the projectile bit. Just go back to BW tanks where there's no projectile but remove "smartfire" on them.
That's all "smartfire" is. Because the damage is calculated instantly and units are killed before evaluating the next tank there's no overkilling. It's not a clever algorithm called smartfire, that was just a name blizzard put on it. Making it a projectile just adds that little delay between firing and hitting that allows overkilling. It' doesn't need a physical projectile to be rendered. I'm not sure if you can make that change without making PDD's absorb the volleys though, which might potentially be an issue in TvT given the low rate of fire.
No Smartfire really is smart, the units check if other units already target something and if it would kill this unit. So even if the tank has delay between choosing its target and actually fireing they would still not do overkill. So they really just have to turn of smartcast on the tanks, not even a projectile needed.
Surprisingly good post about a topic that I thought was already discussed to death. Anyway, let's get a proper conversation going !
My remarks to the OP:
I doubt Blizzard will remove smartcast. If they were ready to do so, they probably would have done it already. It's the same with unit pathing/clumping. And as Iaguz mentionned, I'm not sure making things intentionnally stupider (by removing smartcast) is the way to go. The only thing I'm sure, is that this change will have a myriad of consequences that are pretty much impossible to anticipate. The OP tries to analyse the most obvious effects, but there are always side effects that aren't anticipated.
The TvT analysis is really lacking. You basically say there won't be any changes to TvT since both sides will have the same tank. That is simply wrong. Tanks 1-shotting marines will impact the "marine-tank" based compositions (as well as the pure bio ones) that are the most common compositions in the current meta. So it will have an impact, and it might be a huge one !
You didn't completely adress why everyone is so scared about buffing tanks: the defensive turtle/campy playstyle. You mentionned the economy, but without much analysis (how many bases needed for 5 fact production ? How many bases needed to max out with upgrades ? How much time it takes ? etc).
You mention counterplay to this new tank. You did mention that protoss do have tools against it (notably the adept shade ability, stalker blink, immortals to an extent and later on tempests, void rays). What about zergs ? The ones you mentionned (Ultras, BL, vipers) all happen kind of late in the game (high tech units). If that changes makes zergs totally unable to attack a defensive terran before T3, then we're back to "No Rush 15" types of games, which are terrible for the viewers (and that a lot of players do not enjoy either, myself included). Same for terran: with a buffed tank, is it possible to "break" a defensive player, or are we back to NR15 games where you have to wait for 4+ bases to take air superiority before any attack is possible ?
The initial post is a good start, but it's still very incomplete ! But that's OK, we're all here to work towards a better SC2 :-)
I have been a defender of buffing the siege tank damage since late WoL, which was basically some weeks after it got the base damage nerfed and given +bonus damage against armored.
And I don't even like Terran I just want tanks to be decent/good.
Like someone said in another thread: a line of sieged tanks should make people think "get the hell out of here now".
Removing smartcasting would be a great move too IMO. Zealot/adept/roach bombs could become a thing. Doesn't need to affect the AI, just adding a delay between the shot and the impact does the trick.
On December 02 2015 11:36 GinDo wrote: Don't forget to mention that a projectile opens up Raven use in TvT. That kind of play maybe quit interesting, where Terran attempts to EMP or Viking snipe enemy Ravens.
On December 02 2015 11:33 BEARDiaguz wrote: I'm curious, has anyone ever coded Overkill tanks into the game in a custom map? I get the strong impression that having tanks be deliberately stupid is gonna get real stupid real fast.
I believe there is a SC BW mod on Arcade that did this. And im not sure but I believe Starbow does this as well.
Starbow tanks are set to overkill. This is done by adding a small delay between the shot and the impact damage.
Another thing to remeber is that BW maps are TINY compared to the general SC2 maps we have now. 128x128 was the standard size for them. Mech positional play is no good on larger maps, and I don't think stronger tanks with overkill will cause too much trouble in SC2 (as long as they unsiege when picked up by a medivac). It will rather improve it.
Changing the tank's attack to fire a missile/projectile will definitely cause overkill. Tested and confirmed.
And as for the PDD shooting down a projectile - you can just make it so that the PDD will exclude certain units (roach missile for its ranged attack) or just make the missile unit invulnerable (like EMP and Fungal growth)
However, further testing shows that all you have to do is change a certain field that excludes targeting 'dead' units (or units that would mathematically be marked for destruction already) and overkill returns even with hitscan weapons. This is how 'smartfire' happens' - when scanning, it won't acquire a unit that is a 'dead man walking.' Basically every weapon in SC2 is set to exclude targeting dead units - but there's nothing hard-coded about this.
Which makes this an option too, if we're concerned about screen pollution or variable response times due to missile travel times. But a missile version would open up raven interactions and other things if that is preferable.
***
And as a point of technical clarity, 'smartcast' is indeed just the name blizzard has used to talk about things generally. In the editor, no such term appears - unless it's somewhere obscure or new that I haven't seen.
There is, however, a little box you can checkoff on activatable abilities called 'best unit' that makes only 1 unit (the 'best unit' - prioritized in various editable ways, usually by distance and energy) at a time use a spell when a group of those units is selected and the command given. This 'smartcasting' is why high templar and ghosts no longer all fire their storm at once.
There is also something called 'smart command' - but this is what allows things like using right-click to make a transport unit automatically and smartly load-up ground units rather than following them.
Any serious buff to the tank right now will wreck TvT. You'd have to get rid of sieged pickup first and that would bring a lot of balancing issues with ravagers.
I hate the entire idea of buffing tanks. I feel like you could easily make them OP and then start a cycle of making other things stronger to counter it and then turn SC2 into even more of a "terrible terrible damage" fest.
Also, on the topic of mech in general, I completely disagree that it's weak. A 200 supply of upgraded tanks + thor + liberators + hellbats wreck the everliving shit out of just about anything you throw at it, including the dreaded 200/200 3/3 + armor upgrade ultra army. The problem imo is getting to that point, because going mech is pretty weak to mid game pressure against both toss and zerg.
On December 02 2015 19:39 LoneYoShi wrote: Surprisingly good post about a topic that I thought was already discussed to death. Anyway, let's get a proper conversation going !
[list]My remarks to the OP: [*] I doubt Blizzard will remove smartcast. If they were ready to do so, they probably would have done it already. It's the same with unit pathing/clumping. And as Iaguz mentionned, I'm not sure making things intentionnally stupider (by removing smartcast) is the way to go. The only thing I'm sure, is that this change will have a myriad of consequences that are pretty much impossible to anticipate. The OP tries to analyse the most obvious effects, but there are always side effects that aren't anticipated.
There are already a lot of units in this game that do overkill namely every unit that has a projectile. Stalkers, Tempests, Marauders, Roaches. If tanks also had a projectile they would just act exactly the same way those units do.
On December 03 2015 01:35 DinoMight wrote: I don't get this Adept vs Tank thing...
Hellbats are good against the Adepts if they're willing to get in that close and you can always pick up your tanks and move them back.
The suggestions not that adepts are good vs tanks but that suicide shading a single adept to kill tanks with splash is super cost effective. As you say you can move them back if you've a medivac in range but it could force constant tank lift micro with a handful of adepts. Other people have clarified the tank smartfire thing. It's tested, its not true, it's just a fancy name for hitscan style projectiles that makes people imagine there's more going on than there is. Target selection for tanks isn't using different rules to anything else. It doesn't go for the middle ling in a group either. The microbot splitting against tank fire shows that fairly well.
why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
this is the thing that blows me away about terrans who complain about the "state of mech" - even if factory units are viable and play a legitimate role in games, they insist that it's not good enough and they want "tank mech", they want to make 3+ factories and they want the main part of their skill to be based in positioning tanks, and they don't want other races to have units/compositions that shut tanks down, their position is literally "tanks should always be 100% the strongest unit in the game in any direct fight"
i'm not going to argue that you don't have to be good to set up tanks properly, because sure, you do, but it's the same thing with forcefields in HOTS - it takes skill, but when it's strong it creates an obnoxious, static game state with frustratingly low levels of counterplay other than "go somewhere else". engagements should be based on an interaction between two players' skill, not "did the player with the positional tool set up perfectly or did he let slightly too many roaches leak through".
but to the end of the earth terrans will demand to be allowed to win games by sieging tanks correctly. sometimes i think these people should actually be playing turn-based strategy, not real-time??
also the title of this thread is very misleading and makes it sound as if blizzard has announced a tank buff.
On December 02 2015 19:06 FeyFey wrote:No Smartfire really is smart, the units check if other units already target something and if it would kill this unit. So even if the tank has delay between choosing its target and actually fireing they would still not do overkill. So they really just have to turn of smartcast on the tanks, not even a projectile needed.
Nope. I saw a cool test of this once with marines vs hydra. They changed all hydra stats to be marine stats, then showed how crazy inefficient hydras are just due to the projectile travel time meaning they overkill like crazy. Marines will never overkill at all, just because their attack is instant.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
Because not everyone cares about what is "boring playstyle" to watch or not. Many like to play Mech style, that does not mean we should not because the average twitch player will find it boring.
The game is meant to be played not meant to be watched. MECH MUST BE VIABLE!
You dont have to make the weapon a projectile to remove over kill. You can leave it as an instant damage effect and simply add a 0.01 second wait before the damage is applied. Black Lithium did it this way in his Mod.
I've been saying this for ages using your exact numbers.
I don't even play Terran and the tank needs a buff.
The only issue I see is that bio + tank will be really strong.
I think marine damage or hp should be toned down, tanks should do their 50 dmg and retain their current firing pattern (no overkill, no projectile). Make tanks useful. They still have counters but there's actual incentive to use them. In all my LotV games (100+), I've seen tanks maybe 7 times.
Tanks need a buff, especially now. I'd rather see tanks buffed than roach/ravager nerfed because it's stomping all over bio. Give tanks some beefy damage to compete and at least punish the ravagers that are focusing them.
This way, bio + tank is strong but not broken and Terran has more viable mech.
I don't get it. it's not enough that mech was used in TvT in Wol and Hots and TvZ in Hots. Instead terran should have a boring playstyle which is dull and boring to play against and is basically as bad as protoss deathball syndrome. I really don't understand. Am I missing something? Why is Terran so special that it needs to have viable a boring mech playstyle across all 3 matchups?
On December 03 2015 02:42 Dangermousecatdog wrote: I don't get it. it's not enough that mech was used in TvT in Wol and Hots and TvZ in Hots. Instead terran should have a boring playstyle which is dull and boring to play against and is basically as bad as protoss deathball syndrome. I really don't understand. Am I missing something? Why is Terran so special that it needs to have viable a boring mech playstyle across all 3 matchups?
Because currently (and for the last 5 years) the only truly viable strategy for Terran has been bio.
To rephrase your question: "Why should Terran be forced to play a boring play style across all 3 matchups simply because no other play style is viable?"
One of the biggest reasons I don't play Terran is because spamming MMM in every game is stale. Unfortunately if people want to really do well as Terran that's pretty much the only option they have.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
You mean the three HotS games where mech was used? If we are talking about HotS horrors I would imagine more something like swarmhost vs toss air.
On December 03 2015 00:54 heishe wrote: I hate the entire idea of buffing tanks. I feel like you could easily make them OP and then start a cycle of making other things stronger to counter it and then turn SC2 into even more of a "terrible terrible damage" fest.
Also, on the topic of mech in general, I completely disagree that it's weak. A 200 supply of upgraded tanks + thor + liberators + hellbats wreck the everliving shit out of just about anything you throw at it, including the dreaded 200/200 3/3 + armor upgrade ultra army. The problem imo is getting to that point, because going mech is pretty weak to mid game pressure against both toss and zerg.
You are kidding, right? The problem isn't getting there, okay that is also a problem, but at that point you lost the game. Your post shows exactly the one strong point of mech: People being horrible at countering it.
That 200 supply army would get killed by 5 BLs, 5 corruptors, and two vipers. (Of course it depends a bit on the ratio, if you have 1 thor, 1 tank, 1 hellbat, and 40 liberators you might beat it, with correct splitting). For toss something like 5 carriers and 5 voids should do the trick.
If you want ground army, the only thing stopping either toss or zerg from either just walking around it and wrecking everything else, or in an open area to simply walk over it, would be mass liberators in defender mode. Hard to deny those are good units, but lets face it, Blizzard will nerf them and then 2 months later do something to compensate for it.
On December 03 2015 00:51 pmp10 wrote: Any serious buff to the tank right now will wreck TvT. You'd have to get rid of sieged pickup first and that would bring a lot of balancing issues with ravagers.
Pickup is stupid anyway, and ravager balance issues are there already also anyway. You counter early game ravagers with banshees, later on the damage boost of tanks would well compensate for taking some more ravager shots.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
this is the thing that blows me away about terrans who complain about the "state of mech" - even if factory units are viable and play a legitimate role in games, they insist that it's not good enough and they want "tank mech", they want to make 3+ factories and they want the main part of their skill to be based in positioning tanks, and they don't want other races to have units/compositions that shut tanks down, their position is literally "tanks should always be 100% the strongest unit in the game in any direct fight"
Well duh. Unless the other unit has some other huge weaknesses, or is an air unit, it should be countered by a unit which cannot move. But if the majority of the units counter tanks, without huge weaknesses of their own, then the point of making tanks is a bit lost on me.
And while there are always discussions about what is considered mech and what not, moving marines to the factory does not mean mech is suddenly viable...
I actually stopped watching HotS tournaments when Mech started to be used on a more regular basis. I refuse to watch a game where a player sits in his base and builds 50 turrets whilst building the ultimate Mech death ball, and then on top of that transition to mass raven.
It was bad enough watching Protoss ZvP. but once Mech started to happen i simply thought fuck it, its simply not entertaining watching SC2 anymore
If you Mech watch Broodwar, i do and its way more entertaining than the SC2 version
I always found it weird that people call Mech "boring" while this was Protoss' main strategy in WoL and HotS by getting up to three bases and getting 4 Colossi and A-move to victory. Hell, Zerg did this in WoL too with BL/Infestor. Why is Mech getting singled out in this instance?
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
this is the thing that blows me away about terrans who complain about the "state of mech" - even if factory units are viable and play a legitimate role in games, they insist that it's not good enough and they want "tank mech", they want to make 3+ factories and they want the main part of their skill to be based in positioning tanks, and they don't want other races to have units/compositions that shut tanks down, their position is literally "tanks should always be 100% the strongest unit in the game in any direct fight"
i'm not going to argue that you don't have to be good to set up tanks properly, because sure, you do, but it's the same thing with forcefields in HOTS - it takes skill, but when it's strong it creates an obnoxious, static game state with frustratingly low levels of counterplay other than "go somewhere else". engagements should be based on an interaction between two players' skill, not "did the player with the positional tool set up perfectly or did he let slightly too many roaches leak through".
but to the end of the earth terrans will demand to be allowed to win games by sieging tanks correctly. sometimes i think these people should actually be playing turn-based strategy, not real-time??
also the title of this thread is very misleading and makes it sound as if blizzard has announced a tank buff.
From my perspective, I just hate playing Bio. I don't like that Bio doesn't develop as the game goes on because it uses the same units for the entire game length. Sure, you add supporting units like Vikings, Mines, or Liberators, but to me the idea of having to use Bio every game is really boring.
For me, it doesn't have to be tanks as a mech backbone. I just want unit compositions that can consistently win games as an alternative to bio play. "Tank mech" is just the most obvious thing to go for since it existed in BW and the data is already there.
I think this is an excellent solution. I wish Blizzard tried this out on a test map, it could improve the game a lot. Not sure if the projectile is needed though.
On December 02 2015 11:24 DinoMight wrote: I disagree with you on the projectile bit. Just go back to BW tanks where there's no projectile but remove "smartfire" on them.
I think Tanks should do more damage, but not have smart fire. This makes them more effective in low numbers but not imba in high numbers.
That alone would fix it, I think. And for Flash's sake remove the silly Medivac lift.
the idea of having a projectile attack with projectile speed(per frame I guess...) highter than range is a workaround to remove "smartfire" the end resolution would be same I think.
Also one other thing that can be twiked is where accually tank hits. At the relase of wol radial splash dmg units where hitting the closest point of occolusion cirle of units they were attacking. later they they patched this to hit center of units. I dont have the numbers to back this up but my logic says this made siege tanks more effective agains smaller units while less effective against larger ones. Since when you put the splash circle on top of a unit instead of corner of it, you hit more units but your maximum effective splash dmg is mostly spent on main unit you hit.
anyway, there is an option to tweak here (like putting the splash circle to farthest point of occolusion circle) that OP might have forget or didn't knew about. just wanted to put it back on your minds.
OR just give an upgrade located at the factory tech-lab that increases damage vs shields by X, much easier to tweak numbers wise, and doesn't require as much re-balancing.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I think that's why alot of people want changes to the tank/factory units. So that they can be used & trade more effectively in an aggressive manner. The style you are referring to was used so that mech would trade cost efficiently. Players felt turtleing if u will, was the best way to achieve that, due to the stats of the tank & how it worked.
The changes people are suggesting would give another option for terran, which would increase the strategic diversity of the race, & allow mech to be not only viable, but entertaining.
Idk if u played BroodWar, but was mech there, slow & boring? I'm afraid you're missing the point.
On December 03 2015 03:21 HeroMystic wrote: I always found it weird that people call Mech "boring" while this was Protoss' main strategy in WoL and HotS by getting up to three bases and getting 4 Colossi and A-move to victory. Hell, Zerg did this in WoL too with BL/Infestor. Why is Mech getting singled out in this instance?
Because a lot of the time turtle mech didn't even move out until the map was nearly mined out. In the other two cases normally the 'a-move to victory' would happen shortly after reaching 200 supply.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
Because not everyone cares about what is "boring playstyle" to watch or not. Many like to play Mech style, that does not mean we should not because the average twitch player will find it boring.
The game is meant to be played not meant to be watched. MECH MUST BE VIABLE!
Why? I want to play only robo units. ONLY ROBO UNITS PLAY MUST BE VIABLE!
I can understand that players want another playstyle, but I don't get the "MUST!!!!!" thing. It sounds to me stupid.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
Because not everyone cares about what is "boring playstyle" to watch or not. Many like to play Mech style, that does not mean we should not because the average twitch player will find it boring.
The game is meant to be played not meant to be watched. MECH MUST BE VIABLE!
Why? I want to play only robo units. ONLY ROBO UNITS PLAY MUST BE VIABLE!
I can understand that players want another playstyle, but I don't get the "MUST!!!!!" thing. It sounds to me stupid.
True, but all units should have a sound identity and some availability in every matchup. And maybe not each of those roles should be "hey, you can rush that and drop that of 1-2 bases before you go bio". This isn't WoL anymore, blizzard had years to repair what they themselves marked as flaws from 2011-2013.
On December 03 2015 00:51 pmp10 wrote: Any serious buff to the tank right now will wreck TvT. You'd have to get rid of sieged pickup first and that would bring a lot of balancing issues with ravagers.
He states at the top all of these numbers assume tank pickup is removed.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
Because not everyone cares about what is "boring playstyle" to watch or not. Many like to play Mech style, that does not mean we should not because the average twitch player will find it boring.
The game is meant to be played not meant to be watched. MECH MUST BE VIABLE!
Why? I want to play only robo units. ONLY ROBO UNITS PLAY MUST BE VIABLE!
I can understand that players want another playstyle, but I don't get the "MUST!!!!!" thing. It sounds to me stupid.
True, but all units should have a sound identity and some availability in every matchup. And maybe not each of those roles should be "hey, you can rush that and drop that of 1-2 bases before you go bio". This isn't WoL anymore, blizzard had years to repair what they themselves marked as flaws from 2011-2013.
I agree and that's why I found liberator stupid and idiotic
On December 03 2015 03:21 HeroMystic wrote: I always found it weird that people call Mech "boring" while this was Protoss' main strategy in WoL and HotS by getting up to three bases and getting 4 Colossi and A-move to victory. Hell, Zerg did this in WoL too with BL/Infestor. Why is Mech getting singled out in this instance?
Because a lot of the time turtle mech didn't even move out until the map was nearly mined out. In the other two cases normally the 'a-move to victory' would happen shortly after reaching 200 supply.
That's an extreme case, which I know for a fact rarely happened. Majority of Mech games push out at 200/200 and transition into Sky Terran.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
Because not everyone cares about what is "boring playstyle" to watch or not. Many like to play Mech style, that does not mean we should not because the average twitch player will find it boring.
The game is meant to be played not meant to be watched. MECH MUST BE VIABLE!
Why? I want to play only robo units. ONLY ROBO UNITS PLAY MUST BE VIABLE!
I can understand that players want another playstyle, but I don't get the "MUST!!!!!" thing. It sounds to me stupid.
It mainly stems from the fact that Terran upgrades are separated, so mixing units together for T mostly suck. You see Blizzard found this problem too which is why Cyclones and Widow Mines have spell damage to bypass this, and Liberators's AtG attack is so strong it doesn't need upgrades (though upgrades are required for it's air attack).
When Ground/Air upgrades were combined in the armory this wasn't an issue, but now that weapon upgrades are separated, it's extremely difficult to mix in units that come from different production facilities that doesn't involve timing attacks off of 1 or 2 bases going for a quick win.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
Because not everyone cares about what is "boring playstyle" to watch or not. Many like to play Mech style, that does not mean we should not because the average twitch player will find it boring.
The game is meant to be played not meant to be watched. MECH MUST BE VIABLE!
Why? I want to play only robo units. ONLY ROBO UNITS PLAY MUST BE VIABLE!
I can understand that players want another playstyle, but I don't get the "MUST!!!!!" thing. It sounds to me stupid.
Agreed, lets remove adepts, remove the buff from zealots, and remove the nerf to collossus.
I dont get that protoss "MUST" be able to get another playstyles. It sounds to me stupid.
On December 03 2015 03:40 FruitsPunchSamurai wrote:
On December 03 2015 03:21 HeroMystic wrote: I always found it weird that people call Mech "boring" while this was Protoss' main strategy in WoL and HotS by getting up to three bases and getting 4 Colossi and A-move to victory. Hell, Zerg did this in WoL too with BL/Infestor. Why is Mech getting singled out in this instance?
Because a lot of the time turtle mech didn't even move out until the map was nearly mined out. In the other two cases normally the 'a-move to victory' would happen shortly after reaching 200 supply.
That's an extreme case, which I know for a fact rarely happened. Majority of Mech games push out at 200/200 and transition into Sky Terran.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
Because not everyone cares about what is "boring playstyle" to watch or not. Many like to play Mech style, that does not mean we should not because the average twitch player will find it boring.
The game is meant to be played not meant to be watched. MECH MUST BE VIABLE!
Why? I want to play only robo units. ONLY ROBO UNITS PLAY MUST BE VIABLE!
I can understand that players want another playstyle, but I don't get the "MUST!!!!!" thing. It sounds to me stupid.
It mainly stems from the fact that Terran upgrades are separated, so mixing units together for T mostly suck. You see Blizzard found this problem too which is why Cyclones and Widow Mines have spell damage to bypass this, and Liberators's AtG attack is so strong it doesn't need upgrades (though upgrades are required for it's air attack).
When Ground/Air upgrades were combined in the armory this wasn't an issue, but now that weapon upgrades are separated, it's extremely difficult to mix in units that come from different production facilities that doesn't involve timing attacks off of 1 or 2 bases going for a quick win.
The problem is that with combined weapons the air transition is too strong and without is what you described. It needs more work to be properly balance and it's too fragile. I don't envy this work. Poor Blizzard.
Also the problem is that with combined upgrades the air units are too good to be actually countered, stupid countering and too much free air space on maps ><
Anyway, I was more annoyed with this attitude of "IT MUST BE POSSIBLE!!!"
On December 03 2015 03:40 FruitsPunchSamurai wrote:
On December 03 2015 03:21 HeroMystic wrote: I always found it weird that people call Mech "boring" while this was Protoss' main strategy in WoL and HotS by getting up to three bases and getting 4 Colossi and A-move to victory. Hell, Zerg did this in WoL too with BL/Infestor. Why is Mech getting singled out in this instance?
Because a lot of the time turtle mech didn't even move out until the map was nearly mined out. In the other two cases normally the 'a-move to victory' would happen shortly after reaching 200 supply.
That's an extreme case, which I know for a fact rarely happened. Majority of Mech games push out at 200/200 and transition into Sky Terran.
On December 03 2015 03:47 deacon.frost wrote:
On December 03 2015 02:22 WrathSCII wrote:
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
Because not everyone cares about what is "boring playstyle" to watch or not. Many like to play Mech style, that does not mean we should not because the average twitch player will find it boring.
The game is meant to be played not meant to be watched. MECH MUST BE VIABLE!
Why? I want to play only robo units. ONLY ROBO UNITS PLAY MUST BE VIABLE!
I can understand that players want another playstyle, but I don't get the "MUST!!!!!" thing. It sounds to me stupid.
It mainly stems from the fact that Terran upgrades are separated, so mixing units together for T mostly suck. You see Blizzard found this problem too which is why Cyclones and Widow Mines have spell damage to bypass this, and Liberators's AtG attack is so strong it doesn't need upgrades (though upgrades are required for it's air attack).
When Ground/Air upgrades were combined in the armory this wasn't an issue, but now that weapon upgrades are separated, it's extremely difficult to mix in units that come from different production facilities that doesn't involve timing attacks off of 1 or 2 bases going for a quick win.
The problem is that with combined weapons the air transition is too strong and without is what you described. It needs more work to be properly balance and it's too fragile. I don't envy this work. Poor Blizzard.
Also the problem is that with combined upgrades the air units are too good to be actually countered, stupid countering and too much free air space on maps ><
Anyway, I was more annoyed with this attitude of "IT MUST BE POSSIBLE!!!"
By logic, the more you tech, the "better" units you should have.
The problem with Terran is that the ultimate unit is the Marine, the more you tech, the worse the options become. And as they said, bio and and mech can't be mixed due to separate upgrades. Mech also represents the late game of Terran (Or supposed to). I play Terran and I tell you massing MMM in every match up in every single phase of the game is pure retardness.
But shutting down mech because "too boring to watch" is even more retarded. The game is meant to be enjoyed by playing it not to by watching!
But shutting down mech because "too boring to watch" is even more retarded. The game is meant to be enjoyed by playing it not to by watching!
That's actually untrue to a certain degree. If a game is uninteresting to watch, you don't get viewers/promotion/attention for the game. In the long run, that will kill a game. There's a reason why only certain games are played/streamed in tournaments, and that's exactly why. Not because they're amazing games, but because they attract alot of people.
Where you are right though, is shutting stuff down because it's too shitty to watch. The correct answer would be, make it interesting to watch.
I watch Polt every night, pretty much, purely because to me has one of the best personalities and mindsets of any sc2 player. And i just can't see bio anymore. I'm just sick of it.
Out of curiosity, why don't we forget about damage buffing the Tanks, and simply give Tanks a speed upgrade that makes them as quick as Hellions.
It's still slow/expensive to produce, still has the same counters. But, Terran is incentivized to play aggressively with his Mech rather then hardcore Turtle-Mode.
Maybe even give Cyclones another mode where they become stationary, but have a stronger AA. Imagine small hit squads of Tank/Hellion/Cyclone speeding around every where, being able to defend expansions, and then morphing into stronger more immobile units.
But shutting down mech because "too boring to watch" is even more retarded. The game is meant to be enjoyed by playing it not to by watching!
That's actually untrue to a certain degree. If a game is uninteresting to watch, you don't get viewers/promotion/attention for the game. In the long run, that will kill a game. There's a reason why only certain games are played/streamed in tournaments, and that's exactly why. Not because they're amazing games, but because they attract alot of people.
Where you are right though, is shutting stuff down because it's too shitty to watch. The correct answer would be, make it interesting to watch.
I watch Polt every night, pretty much, purely because to me has one of the best personalities and mindsets of any sc2 player. And i just can't see bio anymore. I'm just sick of it.
I had to stop watching Polt for this reason. I bring his stream up on the off-chance he tries something new but Polt is bio, bio, bio all day, everyday. Nothing against him, but so much bio for days would make my brain melt.
He is having trouble in TvP though which is causing him to experiment more.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
Yup I agree with this 100%. Mech is boring to watch, let alone play against. I can't imagine how people play it without dying of boredom. No matter how you address mech, if Mech becomes viable there will be no aggression (other then maybe some hellion/liberator/muta harass) for most of the game. No matter how Blizzard tries it, with the way sc2 is designed Mech will never be like it was in BW (which was still boring imo, but not as bad as sc2 mech).
Anyone who thinks it's actually possible to make Mech not boring is deluding themselves. If you miss mech that much go play it in BW.
But shutting down mech because "too boring to watch" is even more retarded. The game is meant to be enjoyed by playing it not to by watching!
That's actually untrue to a certain degree. If a game is uninteresting to watch, you don't get viewers/promotion/attention for the game. In the long run, that will kill a game. There's a reason why only certain games are played/streamed in tournaments, and that's exactly why. Not because they're amazing games, but because they attract alot of people.
Where you are right though, is shutting stuff down because it's too shitty to watch. The correct answer would be, make it interesting to watch.
I watch Polt every night, pretty much, purely because to me has one of the best personalities and mindsets of any sc2 player. And i just can't see bio anymore. I'm just sick of it.
I agree with you. I'm not against "watching" aspect of the game. But against it taking priority over playing. Giving attention to viewer more than the player is playing is horrible method to promote a game. It is built on deceiving people into liking it and when they try it they will see how horrible it is compared to the viewing experience.
Playing experience should ALWAYS be priority compared to watching experience
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I'm with Ret on this one. SC2 =! BW mech. If SC2 mech was like BW, methodical, strategic,high skill and rewarding, then I could get behind it. But SC2 mech has proven to be nothing more then another lowly deathball. To first make mech viable we have to redesign mech so its more like its BW counterpart.
I my mind adding overkill back would be a step in the right direction, I'm not sure if it would be enough on its own, but at least it should be tested and then we can move on to more ideas. As for tank buffs, I agree damage should be the name of the game, but it shouldn't be pushed to the point where they make bio obsolete, part of the beauty of SC2 was the clash of styles.
I made another post along the same lines in legacy thread but I think its worth reposting here too.
Sieged damage to everything but armored is tuned to 44 +1 per upgrade. Up from the 35 + 2 of now. The key difference here is that the sieged damage is much, much higher at a low level. This is important because siege tanks suffer the most in the early from a lack of efficiency in small numbers. This should help alleviate this problem. Overall though, the damage to unarmored is exactly the same with +3 as it is now with +3, except tanks have a stronger early game power and they still don't 1 shot stimmed marines.
Against armored is trickier, because if you buff the damage any more then it is now, it might mean +3 tanks murder marauders even harder. A post stim marauder goes down to 105 HP. A siege tank at with 0 damage upgrades already deals 98 damage to marauders, nearly 2 shotting them. With + 1 the tank already passes into the zone of 2 shotting as it deals 106 damage.
Another possible solution would be to, again buff the early game numbers while reducing the scaling, but still keeping the late game power level the same. So something like tanks damage going up to 59 + 2 per upgrade level. Overall damage is the same but early game killing power is better.
Another option is to tackle the problem from two angles and also reduce the damage a marauder gets from stim, by 10 or 5, giving them slightly more survivability. However this is dangerous in the effect that the change could have in the other matchups.
Also, since there is no way to upgrade sieged damage to unarmored or armored more without it adversely impacting TvT or other MUs I suggest that tanks get a in built + damage vs shields. It doesn't even need to be big, just +7 vs shields would guarantee they 3 shot zealots for instance.
I think at the very least these would be good starting points for a balance test maps. More things like additional damage to shields or a maelstrom round can be added later on as needed.
But shutting down mech because "too boring to watch" is even more retarded. The game is meant to be enjoyed by playing it not to by watching!
That's actually untrue to a certain degree. If a game is uninteresting to watch, you don't get viewers/promotion/attention for the game. In the long run, that will kill a game. There's a reason why only certain games are played/streamed in tournaments, and that's exactly why. Not because they're amazing games, but because they attract alot of people.
Where you are right though, is shutting stuff down because it's too shitty to watch. The correct answer would be, make it interesting to watch.
I watch Polt every night, pretty much, purely because to me has one of the best personalities and mindsets of any sc2 player. And i just can't see bio anymore. I'm just sick of it.
I agree with you. I'm not against "watching" aspect of the game. But against it taking priority over playing. Giving attention to viewer more than the player is playing is horrible method to promote a game. It is built on deceiving people into liking it and when they try it they will see how horrible it is compared to the viewing experience.
Playing experience should ALWAYS be priority compared to watching experience
Player experience would keep mech not viable then. It's so boring to play against, I can only imagine how boring it is to actually do it yourself (which sounds as boring as turtle swarmhost, turtle Protoss deathball, etc etc).
I know it will never come to pass, but I feel that it would overall be better for the game if the triple +armor/attack/shields upgrades were removed altogether.
True, it would remove a bit of strategic depth and some of the timing attacks, but at the same time it would enable more diverse army compositions to be viable. Terran, for example, wouldn't need to decide if he wants to focus on bio or on mech, but ideally have mixed forces of both. Every race could incorporate some air into their main army without needing to commit resources to upgrades for it to be up to par with the rest of their units--not to mention that tech switches would become more fluid for terran and for protoss (it could prove to be just a bit too good for zerg, but it's nothing some balance couldn't fix).
On December 03 2015 05:47 Tritanis wrote: I know it will never come to pass, but I feel that it would overall be better for the game if the triple +armor/attack/shields upgrades were removed altogether.
True, it would remove a bit of strategic depth and some of the timing attacks, but at the same time it would enable more diverse army compositions to be viable. Terran, for example, wouldn't need to decide if he wants to focus on bio or on mech, but ideally have mixed forces of both. Every race could incorporate some air into their main army without needing to commit resources to upgrades for it to be up to par with the rest of their units--not to mention that tech switches would become more fluid for terran and for protoss (it could prove to be just a bit too good for zerg, but it's nothing some balance couldn't fix).
Tech switches don't not happen in TvZ just because of upgrades alone, it also has to do with terran production being tied up in 3 different buildings. This the reason why terran armies need to be very strong on their own, because they can't switch, once they chose bio, they are stuck with it for a long time and they need bio to be strong enough to at the very least last them until the very late game where they can switch.
This is also a indirect result of the larva mechanic. If larva inject wasn't as strong as it was, neither protoss nor terran would need some of the hyper strong hard counters they had so far, and the game would have been much better of. As is, zerg still has a inject that is still 75% as efficient as the last but neither terran nor protoss ability to tech switch has improved all that much.
For the sake of the game I'm starting to lean more and more towards either the complete removal of larva inject or its replacement with its Starbow counterpart.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
Yup I agree with this 100%. Mech is boring to watch, let alone play against. I can't imagine how people play it without dying of boredom. No matter how you address mech, if Mech becomes viable there will be no aggression (other then maybe some hellion/liberator/muta harass) for most of the game. No matter how Blizzard tries it, with the way sc2 is designed Mech will never be like it was in BW (which was still boring imo, but not as bad as sc2 mech).
Anyone who thinks it's actually possible to make Mech not boring is deluding themselves. If you miss mech that much go play it in BW.
Luckily infestor broodlords, or swarmhosts, were fascinating zerg strategies. Hell maybe it is just me, but two armies of roach ravagers moving into each other gets really boring soon. That you don't like some units/a style does not mean it should be nerfed into uselessness. If we start like that I can also make a list of stuff I would like to see nerfed of protoss and zerg because I don't like it.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
Because not everyone cares about what is "boring playstyle" to watch or not. Many like to play Mech style, that does not mean we should not because the average twitch player will find it boring.
The game is meant to be played not meant to be watched. MECH MUST BE VIABLE!
Why? I want to play only robo units. ONLY ROBO UNITS PLAY MUST BE VIABLE!
I can understand that players want another playstyle, but I don't get the "MUST!!!!!" thing. It sounds to me stupid.
Okay, fine, we do it your way. Remove all robo bay units from protoss. (Or nerf them to useless). (Well you may keep your warp prism). Then nerf some other units away. Delete stalkers, introduce a zealot which is half strength of a normal zealot and better vs light units. Make normal zealot anti-armor.
Have fun, every game you may mass zealots + mini zealots + some sentry support. And if you get into mid-late game you are allowed to add some HTs.
In addition to Destructicon's post above: In HotS I considered a few times going bio vs late game protoss air, I even tried it a few times. Don't know if it was that good in theory, but hey, why not. Well I can tell you why not: First I got to make 8 barracks or so (if you switch to mech you might have enough with 6 factories, but they are more expensive). Then you can get tech labs to get your upgrades. And you add another engineering bay to start 1/1, 2/2, and finally 3/3. And now it makes sense to start adding units. It is just not realistic to do it.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
Because not everyone cares about what is "boring playstyle" to watch or not. Many like to play Mech style, that does not mean we should not because the average twitch player will find it boring.
The game is meant to be played not meant to be watched. MECH MUST BE VIABLE!
Why? I want to play only robo units. ONLY ROBO UNITS PLAY MUST BE VIABLE!
I can understand that players want another playstyle, but I don't get the "MUST!!!!!" thing. It sounds to me stupid.
A more apt comparison would be nerfing the shit out of disruptors and immortals and calling robo tech ok because toss makes a few observers.
But shutting down mech because "too boring to watch" is even more retarded. The game is meant to be enjoyed by playing it not to by watching!
That's actually untrue to a certain degree. If a game is uninteresting to watch, you don't get viewers/promotion/attention for the game. In the long run, that will kill a game. There's a reason why only certain games are played/streamed in tournaments, and that's exactly why. Not because they're amazing games, but because they attract alot of people.
Where you are right though, is shutting stuff down because it's too shitty to watch. The correct answer would be, make it interesting to watch.
I watch Polt every night, pretty much, purely because to me has one of the best personalities and mindsets of any sc2 player. And i just can't see bio anymore. I'm just sick of it.
I agree with you. I'm not against "watching" aspect of the game. But against it taking priority over playing. Giving attention to viewer more than the player is playing is horrible method to promote a game. It is built on deceiving people into liking it and when they try it they will see how horrible it is compared to the viewing experience.
Playing experience should ALWAYS be priority compared to watching experience
Player experience would keep mech not viable then. It's so boring to play against, I can only imagine how boring it is to actually do it yourself (which sounds as boring as turtle swarmhost, turtle Protoss deathball, etc etc).
I'm horrible at explaining so I'm going to spit out everything I have and hopefully it can be made into useful sentences.
HOTS Mech was not ideal, it was bad for reasons everyone know and was mentioned time and a time. It was used only in 2 situations. TvT and TvZ.
In TvZ because Mech has superior advantage over power in term of fire power and durability. The only option for bio is "dancing around" but if the Mecher has good defenses, then it is pretty much GG.
In TvZ it was used because of the "Removal" of SH, nothing was given to the zerg to balance their lose of the only option they had vs the most cost efficient army in the game. Also, the maps in season 3 played a role in making TvZ bio vs MLB much harder, so everyone turned into mech.
In TvP, well, it was GG the moment you want to do it (PRO LEVEL, NOT LADDER).
How to fix Mech to be not deathball? - Give mech an option to be aggressive early game.
This can be done by looking at BW and taking lessons. Vultures came at a cost of 75 minerals only with 2 upgrades (Spider Mines and Movement Speed). Vultures could do:
1. Harass. 2. Lay mines to: a. Zone out Enemy b. Map control / presence c. ability to fight Protoss units to a degree since they did full damage vs shields and had much faster attack speed than Hellions.
Siege Tanks were the anti armor of Mech, It was bad vs light units but it is superior vs armored and massive units like Ultralisks / Archons / Dragoons... etc.
Goliaths, The backbone of AA for the Mech army. Superior AA at cheap cost with acceptable AG.
These 3 units alone formed an interesting mech for both players and viewers.
Now lets apply this to SC2.
Hellions are good for their linear splash vs workers or lings and suck compared to Vultures to cover the roles that it used to cover.
Siege Tanks are much weaker compared to how it was in BW and comes in higher supply with addition of races having more ways to counter them.
The lack of factory AA as it was in Goliath.
Because of these reasons, mech is forced to turtle to get its giant deathball. Thanks to tanks smart firing, they scale exponentially with their number, from garbage into obliterate anything on the ground when you have 20+ of them clumped together.
So how to fix that? Tanks has to scale better with numbers LINEARLY. This can be achieved by: - Remove of smart firing. - Increase their fire power with slowing their attack speed a bit.
Hellions needs to be more useful other than anti workers and anti lings. Or we can have the Cyclone to fit that role and see early game with Hellion Cyclone composition as aggressive start for mech while both players are building up their bases and forces. (Ofc, Cyclones has to be tuned down both cost and power to fit with Hellions as aggressive early game mech).
AA from factory, if we go with the previously mentioned Cyclones, then we need Goliaths or redesign Thors to be Goliath 2.0.
This is what I have, hopefully it is understandable.
But shutting down mech because "too boring to watch" is even more retarded. The game is meant to be enjoyed by playing it not to by watching!
That's actually untrue to a certain degree. If a game is uninteresting to watch, you don't get viewers/promotion/attention for the game. In the long run, that will kill a game. There's a reason why only certain games are played/streamed in tournaments, and that's exactly why. Not because they're amazing games, but because they attract alot of people.
Where you are right though, is shutting stuff down because it's too shitty to watch. The correct answer would be, make it interesting to watch.
I watch Polt every night, pretty much, purely because to me has one of the best personalities and mindsets of any sc2 player. And i just can't see bio anymore. I'm just sick of it.
I agree with you. I'm not against "watching" aspect of the game. But against it taking priority over playing. Giving attention to viewer more than the player is playing is horrible method to promote a game. It is built on deceiving people into liking it and when they try it they will see how horrible it is compared to the viewing experience.
Playing experience should ALWAYS be priority compared to watching experience
Player experience would keep mech not viable then. It's so boring to play against, I can only imagine how boring it is to actually do it yourself (which sounds as boring as turtle swarmhost, turtle Protoss deathball, etc etc).
Mech is not boring to play or watch, wheter it is Innovation doing a unstable push thorugh locust with a handfull of tanks, Flash spliting his army to siege different bases at the same time, ForGG using viking/tanks squads to forward his siege line, Mvp doing multiple hellbat/tank/thor drops to tax the attention of his enemy, Gumiho doing a 2 base push that disrupts the plans of even the best zergs or MMA multitasking hellions and banshees to stop his enemy from expanding, the mech games I've watched and played are amazing, people keep saying that like these never existed but they did and they where the same mech.
Yes people chose wan't they want and I can see what some chose the BAD mech games, what is it they are trying to make from this? Does it have to do with the fact that the terrans are the ones asking for mech and the non-terrans are the ones saying that this shouldn't happen? Because frankly thats stupid. You talk about bad for the viewers but all you want is whats best for you in almost Avilo-esque way. OH I had problem against turtle terrans in the WCS? NO MECH FOR YOU!!
Asking for a more viable mech is only half of what we ask for. Why, pray tell eveyone, do we use overkills in tanks as the biggest change? If we simply wanted a stronger mech that allows us to sit on our asses for 40 minutes and mass an overwhelming army, why not ask to revert the ravens nerfs? or stronger BCs? or old alpha cylones? or something like that? The fact that we want tank overkill is because we want FUN mech, not an super stronger mech that cannot be beaten, or a mech that is just sitting behind turrets and PFs until the map is minned out. If you as a player, or as a viewer chose that and don't want to open up for posibilities, thats your problem. We want mech, and we want it to be fun, and we want it to be strong. (not broken strong, but as strong as it should be).
No we don't want to win simply because we put the tanks in the right place, or because we made the right units, if you think that, then either you don't understand the change or you simply don't understand the game.
Lastly, why do we ask so much for this, why MUST it be? Simply because we, as customers, as players, as viewers, we have the right to do so. If we simply backed up on everything simply because it was too hard we wouldn't have LotV, we would just have WoL 3.0 or HotS 2.0, nobody says making these big changes will be easy, or fast, or it would be exent of unseen difficulties, but then again, what LotV change isn't like that anyway?
But shutting down mech because "too boring to watch" is even more retarded. The game is meant to be enjoyed by playing it not to by watching!
That's actually untrue to a certain degree. If a game is uninteresting to watch, you don't get viewers/promotion/attention for the game. In the long run, that will kill a game. There's a reason why only certain games are played/streamed in tournaments, and that's exactly why. Not because they're amazing games, but because they attract alot of people.
Where you are right though, is shutting stuff down because it's too shitty to watch. The correct answer would be, make it interesting to watch.
I watch Polt every night, pretty much, purely because to me has one of the best personalities and mindsets of any sc2 player. And i just can't see bio anymore. I'm just sick of it.
I agree with you. I'm not against "watching" aspect of the game. But against it taking priority over playing. Giving attention to viewer more than the player is playing is horrible method to promote a game. It is built on deceiving people into liking it and when they try it they will see how horrible it is compared to the viewing experience.
Playing experience should ALWAYS be priority compared to watching experience
Player experience would keep mech not viable then. It's so boring to play against, I can only imagine how boring it is to actually do it yourself (which sounds as boring as turtle swarmhost, turtle Protoss deathball, etc etc).
Mech is not boring to play or watch, wheter it is Innovation doing a unstable push thorugh locust with a handfull of tanks, Flash spliting his army to siege different bases at the same time, ForGG using viking/tanks squads to forward his siege line, Mvp doing multiple hellbat/tank/thor drops to tax the attention of his enemy, Gumiho doing a 2 base push that disrupts the plans of even the best zergs or MMA multitasking hellions and banshees to stop his enemy from expanding, the mech games I've watched and played are amazing, people keep saying that like these never existed but they did and they where the same mech.
Yes people chose wan't they want and I can see what some chose the BAD mech games, what is it they are trying to make from this? Does it have to do with the fact that the terrans are the ones asking for mech and the non-terrans are the ones saying that this shouldn't happen? Because frankly thats stupid. You talk about bad for the viewers but all you want is whats best for you in almost Avilo-esque way. OH I had problem against turtle terrans in the WCS? NO MECH FOR YOU!!
Asking for a more viable mech is only half of what we ask for. Why, pray tell eveyone, do we use overkills in tanks as the biggest change? If we simply wanted a stronger mech that allows us to sit on our asses for 40 minutes and mass an overwhelming army, why not ask to revert the ravens nerfs? or stronger BCs? or old alpha cylones? or something like that? The fact that we want tank overkill is because we want FUN mech, not an super stronger mech that cannot be beaten, or a mech that is just sitting behind turrets and PFs until the map is minned out. If you as a player, or as a viewer chose that and don't want to open up for posibilities, thats your problem. We want mech, and we want it to be fun, and we want it to be strong. (not broken strong, but as strong as it should be).
No we don't want to win simply because we put the tanks in the right place, or because we made the right units, if you think that, then either you don't understand the change or you simply don't understand the game.
Lastly, why do we ask so much for this, why MUST it be? Simply because we, as customers, as players, as viewers, we have the right to do so. If we simply backed up on everything simply because it was too hard we wouldn't have LotV, we would just have WoL 3.0 or HotS 2.0, nobody says making these big changes will be easy, or fast, or it would be exent of unseen difficulties, but then again, what LotV change isn't like that anyway?
We just want better SC2, thats all.
I'm all for the game being designed for the players, but really, the game is WoL 3.0 and HotS 2.0. You are just delusional if you still believe the game is or will be anything else. Blizzard has made it very clear in one of their first Community Updates that they are not going to fundamentally change the game. I understand your frustration about this though and I believe the best decision would have been to not buy the game if you actually cared so much about these things.
Love the people commenting about how mech is boring and terrible when they only knew swarmhost vs mass raven which was painful for literally everyone involved but was also literally the only way to play the game if you wanted to "go mech" otherwise you'd die to locusts every single game with no PDD farm.
There's arguably way too many counters to tanks in the current game, and tanks themselves are way too weak which is what this thread is about and what many people know for the longest time.
Obviously they need to buff the tank back to some of it's former glory, and ideally would remove the gimmicky medivac tank pick-up.
Turtle mech would still happen, but guess what? With the economy and new units there's already a bajillion more ways to kill mech in LOTV. Mech right now is WORSE in LOTV than it is in HOTS and WOL which is pretty disgusting.
But with a more viable siege tank, offensive mech will become more of the norm because tanks will trade better, so someone going mech can mass more factories. Although, mech still has no AA unit so every game will still end up being mass liberators with some PDDs lol.
But none of this matters if blizzard does not ever attempt to buff the tank, so many this thread will inspire them to address how weak the tank and mech is in LOTV?
I had originally thought it would be alright if players would pick up siege tanks like normal, but doing so would force the tank to 'unsiege' inside the medivac so that if players redropped those tanks they would have to resiege and create a window of counterplay before tanks were set up.
That said, I do think that tanks should be able to evacuate by being picked up, simply as a response to the wide variety of area denial abilities and units that have been slowly added to the game over time.
On December 03 2015 05:10 GinDo wrote: Out of curiosity, why don't we forget about damage buffing the Tanks, and simply give Tanks a speed upgrade that makes them as quick as Hellions.
It's still slow/expensive to produce, still has the same counters. But, Terran is incentivized to play aggressively with his Mech rather then hardcore Turtle-Mode.
Maybe even give Cyclones another mode where they become stationary, but have a stronger AA. Imagine small hit squads of Tank/Hellion/Cyclone speeding around every where, being able to defend expansions, and then morphing into stronger more immobile units.
I agree. Giving a +shield damage may be warranted for TvP, but I'd be extremely wary of any other damage buffs as they could potentially destabilize TvT.
I'd like to see Blizzard try to give more mobility to the tank. For example, reducing Unsiege time from 3s to 1s could go a long way, making it easier to dodge Corrosive Bile and other such target fire. I'd like to see something like the Medivac's Emergency Boosters, or a weaker version of Sgt. Hammer's (Heroes) speed boost ability, on the Tank.
The tank does not need a speed boost ability, or to siege/unsiege faster. The entire identity of the tank is that it controls the area where it is sieged, and the enemy can play around it knowing that the tank must invest at least a certain amount of time in order to move to cover a different location. The tank doesn't need mobility; it needs firepower to actually push the enemy outside of its firing solution.
What people don't seem to realize is that the reason why turtle mech was a fact of life in HOTS was because the tank is so garbage, nobody ever actually wanted to use it. Instead it was turtle to skyterran, with mass ravens and such. They don't actually want to make the tanks; they actually want the flying units. And they're certainly not going to make a predominantly ground army and actually attack with it, although that would be much quicker than massing the gas-expensive skyterran compositions.
The Disruptor and Liberator are perfect examples of how this should work. They do so much damage that the enemy should take steps to avoid taking fire from these units. The tank is the original, and also a quite inferior version, of this mechanic, since it is much less mobile than either, and also deals considerably less damage than either.
It's not like there's nothing the other player can do about sieged tanks. Regardless of race there are more ways to deal with sieged tanks than practically any other individual unit in the game.
Regarding TvT and marines; the 100% splash radius is about the size of a zergling. A tank shot will be gibbing one marine. Although not inconsequential, especially if there are many tanks, it isn't like the tank's entire splash is gibbing marines. The majority of the tank's damage against marines comes from its 50% and 25% damage radii, which deal on a 50 damage shot deal 25 and 12.5 damage, respectively. Currently the 35 damage tank's 50% and 25% radii deal 17.5 and 8.75 damage, respectively. Within the 50% radius this changes the number of shots required from 3 shots to 2 shots, unless combat shield, in which case it is 3 shots either way.
With stronger tanks and weaker skyterran, you will definitely see mech terrans seizing map control and being up in the other player's face using tanks. You know, besieging the enemy base the way the SIEGE tank was meant to do. Turtling in your base only makes sense if you are defending until you can get something else.
avilo is absolutly right. Mech is not boring to watch if you have to play more agressive. Its better for the game to have 2 playstyles as terran (everey race has mor than 1 playstyle but not terran....). Also with the new economey you cant turtle all the time you have to move out. If you dont do that, you will die at a certain point (also turtle style would be map dependent.....). Trust us i paly mech since wol in everey game and i played it in BW. Mech is not always turtle style and in Lotv it gets punished very hard if you only turtle. It will be fun to watch! Also If you can only turtle its hard to win the game its not an auto win. At the beginning you saw mech agains toss with cyclone hellione. It was so much fun to whatch. Now we have nothing. Only the same boring bio style.
We need a stronger siege tank (and pls remember the tank has enough counters!). It will be better for the game to play and to watch. Blizzard pls buff the tank and make mech viable! It will be better for the game in everey aspect!
you know nothing. Fitrst of all you have to afford both in high numbers. Which is very hard to get (too much gas). Also it would be easy to stop because both units have hard counters and Need enough protection. Most People dont know how to Play against mech or liberators. If they really know what to do they can crush it easy!
We need a buff for the siege tank for a better SC II for Viewers and playstyle of the game! Blizzard has to buff the tank!
Knock knock, who's there? Buff, Buff who? Buff the Siege Tank, thats who! This is how sorry its gotten, please Blizzard, Buff the friggin Tank already!
Mech being weak has little, if anything, to do with tanks damage output. This argument gets made time and time again and it's almost like people forgot that early wings TvT with better tanks was purely played with Tanks and Vikings before tanks got a damage nerf. Yes the game and the players were nowhere near as good as they are now but those games were incredibly boring to both play and to watch. There was no variety, players personal style and expression did not come into play and buffing tanks damage would just recreate this exact same time of situation.
Mech and Terran units in general have one major problem. They don't have any health. The roach at 145hp, the Zealot at 150hp and the Adept at 170hp have more health than every Terran unit except the Tank at 160, the worthless Thors at 400 and Battlecruisers at 550. This means Terran units have to do way more damage than they receive to even stand a chance of winning. Both Zerg and Protoss have easy access to units that can soak damage very easily while Terrans only damage sponge units are high tier low damage and incredibly immobile.
This leads to a state of the game where Terran either obliterates their opponents army and wins or gets rekt and loses with very little margin between those two states. Giving the tank more damage would only make this margin more small. This also leads to a very difficult to balance type of situation for Terran buffs, we've all seen how even very small changes to Terran can swing a matchup heavily either against them or into their favour.
Terran also has massive mobility issues outside of a few units Terran stuff in general is incredibly slow. Outside of stimmed bio the only units Terran have that can outpace even workers are very situation units like the Reaper, Cyclone, Hellion, Liberator which can't move while hitting ground and of course stimmed bio. Without stim though Bio is slower than almost everything on the field, it's a big reason why ghosts are rarely used even at the highest levels of play.
Terran in general and mech even more so desperately need something that can soak up damage while still being fairly mobile and bringing reasonable damage to the table. Combine a unit that can fill that type of role with more health on Tanks and then engaging into a Terran army becomes a lot more dangerous than it currently is and opens the game up for more tuning without swinging matchups to an extreme degree.
Maybe we need to start an online petition to buff the tank...Blizzard may take notice. Kinda sad when the product owners who stand to gain the most from a better game have to be forced to even consider good ideas.
The mobile, durable unit you basically describe is the Vulture; a mobile unit with good HP/cost ratio. The Hellion, although costing 25 minerals more, can potentially do this job of probing for weaknesses, moving to reinforce when an enemy attack is incoming, and of speedy map control from the Factory.
The basic problem is simple; tanks trade away all their mobility and get nothing in return. Marines and Marauders are cheaper, far more mobile, are more durable for cost, have higher damage, and also synergize very well with Medivacs both for healing and for drops. There's practically no reason to do anything else as Terran- everyone knows the MMM combo is that strong. If you watch the best Terrans stream, this is what they do, for obvious reasons.
What I would ideally like to see happen is the Terran will always have a use for both the mobile, expendable bio units and also the strong, positional mech. Going pure mech is possible, but makes it extremely difficult to respond to harassment or to attacks on distant expansions without always being pre-emptively ready before the attack hits. Going pure bio is possible, but against a high-resource, late game enemy army you are going to be outclassed in firepower. The mix of units is flexible, depending on player style and what the enemy is doing.
If you will recall TvT in the era you are talking about was actually marine-tank, with Vikings to spot for the tanks and ensure you aren't sniped by Banshees. There were actually LOTS of marines being produced and standing in front of the tanks for both sides, and a lot of dead marines in each battle on both sides. But going straight tank means you die to one successful drop, as you cannot respond quickly enough, and you also cannot drop the enemy.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I think that's why alot of people want changes to the tank/factory units. So that they can be used & trade more effectively in an aggressive manner. The style you are referring to was used so that mech would trade cost efficiently. Players felt turtleing if u will, was the best way to achieve that, due to the stats of the tank & how it worked.
The changes people are suggesting would give another option for terran, which would increase the strategic diversity of the race, & allow mech to be not only viable, but entertaining.
Idk if u played BroodWar, but was mech there, slow & boring? I'm afraid you're missing the point.
BW mech was interesting because of the other races' units and the stronger advantage gained by positioning and splitting armies, tbh.
Have you played/watched BW? Seems like you have no idea who Ret is
People should just stop suggesting that Blizzard removes smart fire. It's NOT gonna happen, no matter what.
I like your suggestions though, except the part where it travels as a projectile. I don't think any unit fires like that, except for abilities of course. The siege tank is kind of too mediocre of a unit, it should be staple.
On December 03 2015 10:18 Filter wrote: Mech being weak has little, if anything, to do with tanks damage output. This argument gets made time and time again and it's almost like people forgot that early wings TvT with better tanks was purely played with Tanks and Vikings before tanks got a damage nerf. Yes the game and the players were nowhere near as good as they are now but those games were incredibly boring to both play and to watch. There was no variety, players personal style and expression did not come into play and buffing tanks damage would just recreate this exact same time of situation.
This is not realistic. If you go back and actually watch these games, you will see that they give no indication of what's going to happen whatsoever. I'm pretty sure a plat player today could destroy the pro's back then.
On December 03 2015 06:48 XerrolAvengerII wrote: I had originally thought it would be alright if players would pick up siege tanks like normal, but doing so would force the tank to 'unsiege' inside the medivac so that if players redropped those tanks they would have to resiege and create a window of counterplay before tanks were set up.
That said, I do think that tanks should be able to evacuate by being picked up, simply as a response to the wide variety of area denial abilities and units that have been slowly added to the game over time.
I agree, but a medivac should be able to pick up TWO sieged tanks instead of one. Nonetheless a medivac has the capacity to carry two tanks, right?
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I think that's why alot of people want changes to the tank/factory units. So that they can be used & trade more effectively in an aggressive manner. The style you are referring to was used so that mech would trade cost efficiently. Players felt turtleing if u will, was the best way to achieve that, due to the stats of the tank & how it worked.
The changes people are suggesting would give another option for terran, which would increase the strategic diversity of the race, & allow mech to be not only viable, but entertaining.
Idk if u played BroodWar, but was mech there, slow & boring? I'm afraid you're missing the point.
BW mech was interesting because of the other races' units and the stronger advantage gained by positioning and splitting armies, tbh.
Have you played/watched BW? Seems like you have no idea who Ret is
On December 03 2015 06:48 XerrolAvengerII wrote: I had originally thought it would be alright if players would pick up siege tanks like normal, but doing so would force the tank to 'unsiege' inside the medivac so that if players redropped those tanks they would have to resiege and create a window of counterplay before tanks were set up.
That said, I do think that tanks should be able to evacuate by being picked up, simply as a response to the wide variety of area denial abilities and units that have been slowly added to the game over time.
I agree, but a medivac should be able to pick up TWO sieged tanks instead of one. Nonetheless a medivac has the capacity to carry two tanks, right?
On December 03 2015 11:48 cheekymonkey wrote:I like your suggestions though, except the part where it travels as a projectile. I don't think any unit fires like that, except for abilities of course. The siege tank is kind of too mediocre of a unit, it should be staple.
Are you... trolling? Every single ranged attack except Marines and Siege Tanks uses a projectile.
Those balls of light that the Tempest shoots? Projectile. The acid that Roaches shoot? Projectile. The grenade that Marauders shoot? Projectile.
It is flatly untrue that there are no other units which use a projectile. You might dislike introducing the projectile since it causes units to overkill, but the tank would hardly be the only unit with a projectile for an attack.
On December 03 2015 11:48 cheekymonkey wrote: People should just stop suggesting that Blizzard removes smart fire. It's NOT gonna happen, no matter what.
I like your suggestions though, except the part where it travels as a projectile. I don't think any unit fires like that, except for abilities of course. The siege tank is kind of too mediocre of a unit, it should be staple.
I also like to point out that there was a video/thread a while back showing Hydralisk with identical stats and everything as that of a marine. Then the two unit clashes and marine just completely obliterated Hydralisk (without stim of course). So speed of projectile does actually make a difference in term of a unit. Not sure if this was due to actually due to overkill though since it wasn't entirely figured out then.
On December 03 2015 11:48 cheekymonkey wrote: People should just stop suggesting that Blizzard removes smart fire. It's NOT gonna happen, no matter what.
I like your suggestions though, except the part where it travels as a projectile. I don't think any unit fires like that, except for abilities of course. The siege tank is kind of too mediocre of a unit, it should be staple.
I also like to point out that there was a video/thread a while back showing Hydralisk with identical stats and everything as that of a marine. Then the two unit clashes and marine just completely obliterated Hydralisk (without stim of course). So speed of projectile does actually make a difference in term of a unit. Not sure if this was due to actually due to overkill though since it wasn't entirely figured out then.
To research the effect of overkill you would have to start a fight such that the all the first projectiles of the Hydra's first shots hit at the same time as the first shot volley of the marines. Otherwise you basically have both of them engaging in a round based fight where each round = one volley, but the marines will eventually be the first to kill something because they "started one round earlier".
There is a reason why blizzard created the liberator the way they did. It is vulnerable, it has a high single target damage (not aoe) and it does everything people wish the tank did.
Blizzard introduced medivac siege tank drop because they havent seen another solution to the problem.
If anybody thinks, the idea above was not the first idea blizzard thought about, is just naive. They must have thought about it, tested it and it didnt work as intended. Why cant we close this topic. Also why doesnt any of the supporters create testmaps to see if it works as intended.
I personally think that overkill wont matter at all. The difference must be very underwhelming because tanks stay naturally spread out (a small difference should be already enough to make up for overkill). The bigger issiues are stalemates and the better pathing as pointed out above by someone. Also making units stupid is very inconvenient for beginner. Its a hidden mechanic. If overkill makes a big difference, a beginner wont know why his tanks do less damage than the opponents and will get frustrated. That happened a lot in bw.
You have a lot of faith in a dev team that designed the Colossus, Swarm Host, Mothership Core, Marauder, Roach, Tempest, Hellbat healable by Medivacs, etc. and that's only the stuff that made it into the game. Remember the Replicator? The Warhound?
We're talking a dev team that added Warp Gate and then was surprised when people made pylons in the enemy base to warp directly there. Can you think of a more obvious application for that ability?
You give them entirely too much credit by asserting that "they must have considered it." No, I don't think they even realize what is going on. I think they believe tanks' immobility leads to turtle mech because they don't understand RTS games, or how their own game actually works.
The reason people turtle mech is because skyterran air blobs are really strong, because Blizzard doesn't seem to realize they have an airblob problem. They probably think massing a ton of air units "looks cool" or some such shit. Half their design decisions are based on superficial appearance only; everything from the gimmicky transforming Viking/Hellbat to oversized Ultralisks is confusing game design for artistic design, and putting the wrong one first. Regardless, the Liberator is adding to the airblob problem, not alleviating it.
If Factory units were strong, people would build Factory units and attack with them. Because Factory units suck, people are not attacking with them and instead are turtling until they have something that is actually strong enough to attack with.
On December 03 2015 13:54 ledarsi wrote: You have a lot of faith in a dev team that designed the Colossus, Swarm Host, Mothership Core, Marauder, Roach, Tempest, Hellbat healable by Medivacs, etc. and that's only the stuff that made it into the game. Remember the Replicator? The Warhound?
We're talking a dev team that added Warp Gate and then was surprised when people made pylons in the enemy base to warp directly there. Can you think of a more obvious application for that ability?
You give them entirely too much credit by asserting that "they must have considered it." No, I don't think they even realize what is going on. I think they believe tanks' immobility leads to turtle mech because they don't understand RTS games, or how their own game actually works.
Agreed. If the tank were actually not terrible and served it's role then people would actually attack more, because it would be possible to move out and hold positions on the map without turtling all game.
On December 03 2015 10:18 Filter wrote: Mech being weak has little, if anything, to do with tanks damage output. This argument gets made time and time again and it's almost like people forgot that early wings TvT with better tanks was purely played with Tanks and Vikings before tanks got a damage nerf. Yes the game and the players were nowhere near as good as they are now but those games were incredibly boring to both play and to watch. There was no variety, players personal style and expression did not come into play and buffing tanks damage would just recreate this exact same time of situation.
Mech and Terran units in general have one major problem. They don't have any health. The roach at 145hp, the Zealot at 150hp and the Adept at 170hp have more health than every Terran unit except the Tank at 160, the worthless Thors at 400 and Battlecruisers at 550. This means Terran units have to do way more damage than they receive to even stand a chance of winning. Both Zerg and Protoss have easy access to units that can soak damage very easily while Terrans only damage sponge units are high tier low damage and incredibly immobile.
This leads to a state of the game where Terran either obliterates their opponents army and wins or gets rekt and loses with very little margin between those two states. Giving the tank more damage would only make this margin more small. This also leads to a very difficult to balance type of situation for Terran buffs, we've all seen how even very small changes to Terran can swing a matchup heavily either against them or into their favour.
Terran also has massive mobility issues outside of a few units Terran stuff in general is incredibly slow. Outside of stimmed bio the only units Terran have that can outpace even workers are very situation units like the Reaper, Cyclone, Hellion, Liberator which can't move while hitting ground and of course stimmed bio. Without stim though Bio is slower than almost everything on the field, it's a big reason why ghosts are rarely used even at the highest levels of play.
Terran in general and mech even more so desperately need something that can soak up damage while still being fairly mobile and bringing reasonable damage to the table. Combine a unit that can fill that type of role with more health on Tanks and then engaging into a Terran army becomes a lot more dangerous than it currently is and opens the game up for more tuning without swinging matchups to an extreme degree.
Helbats? Thors? Raven pdds? and terran isnt immobile at all.
Pure mech is immobile (tank thor helbat) but mobile enough. The general counter to mech pushes, you attack when tanks unsiege and retreat when they are sieged. Imagine tank would be more mobile. This counter play wouldnt be possible anymore or it would take less time for terran to push from one end to the other end of the map.
Tanks are immobile. The complete mech composition does contain mobile units, specifically Vultures in BW, but Hellions occupy that role in SC2. They allow you to scout, get map control, harass workers, and block the enemy from running up to your tanks.
Hellbats are a poorly designed "unit" but it's an option which trades mobility for more HP and healable like bio, I suppose. I guess it's more likely in SC2 that if tanks were buffed that bio in medivacs would still be used for aggression instead of relying on Hellions only, since they lack much of the functionality of Vultures.
On December 02 2015 11:51 avilo wrote: 4 tanks up a ramp or somewhere on the map...imagine if the opponent actually had to be afraid of that instead of "wow tanks? lol ill just amove a few chargelots and kill them all."
4 liberators up a ramp..."um...yeah not going anywhere near that, going to pick them off instead, or force them to move" -> that's what tanks should be :D
LOL )), but you are completely true about this. However, if this really happens without any changes to bio or clumping thing in SC2, then i feel sorry for the bio play in TvT.
On December 03 2015 13:54 ledarsi wrote: You have a lot of faith in a dev team that designed the Colossus, Swarm Host, Mothership Core, Marauder, Roach, Tempest, Hellbat healable by Medivacs, etc. and that's only the stuff that made it into the game. Remember the Replicator? The Warhound?
We're talking a dev team that added Warp Gate and then was surprised when people made pylons in the enemy base to warp directly there. Can you think of a more obvious application for that ability?
You give them entirely too much credit by asserting that "they must have considered it." No, I don't think they even realize what is going on. I think they believe tanks' immobility leads to turtle mech because they don't understand RTS games, or how their own game actually works.
The reason people turtle mech is because skyterran air blobs are really strong, because Blizzard doesn't seem to realize they have an airblob problem. They probably think massing a ton of air units "looks cool" or some such shit. Half their design decisions are based on superficial appearance only; everything from the gimmicky transforming Viking/Hellbat to oversized Ultralisks is confusing game design for artistic design, and putting the wrong one first. Regardless, the Liberator is adding to the airblob problem, not alleviating it.
If Factory units were strong, people would build Factory units and attack with them. Because Factory units suck, people are not attacking with them and instead are turtling until they have something that is actually strong enough to attack with.
Turtle mech existed also in bw. It exists allways when one side has a very cost efficient way of defending. It doesnt matter how good these units are in aggressive play (e.g. swarmhosts, tank+viking in wol, turtle mech in bw).
You say that all the designers who studied many years, all the mathmaticians, engineers are all wrong and do only mistakes. But just because we dont understand their decisions it doesnt mean they werent valid! Blizzard does a great job i trust that they had valid reasons for all these units and changes. And some are just brainstorming and ideas, dont overexxagerate. A good designer has no opinion until he has tested the unit. Otherwise you couldnt create something new and unpredicted.
You trust the average bob? But you dont trust people who have studied and who are very successful at their job?
It's going to be a boring game if tanks are highly viable and you end up with tank and viking dominated make-ups.
The root design space problem is the vikings, but redesigning the viking means redoing the entire air game for all three races, so instead tanks you have tanks not viable.
What if we're thinking about the problem wrong. Instead of buffing the tank while in siege mode, why not buff the tank in tank mode? Make the unsieged tank better at absorbing damage (like an actual tank) and then players will have to choose between sieging for burst and area denial, or staying unsieged for mobility and durability.
I've always been disappointed that unless they are sieged, tanks are basically worthless for their cost.
On December 03 2015 13:45 todespolka wrote: I personally think that overkill wont matter at all. The difference must be very underwhelming. The bigger issiues are stalemates and the better pathing as pointed out above by someone.
Me!
Blizzard introduced medivac siege tank drop because they havent seen another solution to the problem.
If anybody thinks, the idea above was not the first idea blizzard thought about, is just naive. They must have thought about it, tested it and it didnt work as intended. Why cant we close this topic. Also why doesnt any of the supporters create testmaps to see if it works as intended.
I can't agree with you here. Blizzard has made more than enough boneheaded and nonsensical moves in the history of SC2 to make blind faith in their abilities a very dangerous proposition. These are the same guys who set up a PTR to test different Burrow buttons, but absolutely positively could not and would not set up a PTR to just let the community TRY the community double harvest economic model, during a freaking beta?
Why didn't they ever set up a PTR with different Siege Tank stats? Higher damage, higher splash, bigger radius, longer range, change their hard counters, tweak smartfire? These are all things we could have been trying on PTRs for 5 years to see what the community thinks, but instead we have to take it on faith that I guess Blizzard tried it and I guess it doesn't work.
The same Blizzard that still thinks invulnerable Nydus Worms might be good for the game. Those are the guys you think couldn't have possibly botched the job.
On December 03 2015 14:56 XerrolAvengerII wrote: What if we're thinking about the problem wrong. Instead of buffing the tank while in siege mode, why not buff the tank in tank mode? Make the unsieged tank better at absorbing damage (like an actual tank) and then players will have to choose between sieging for burst and area denial, or staying unsieged for mobility and durability.
I've always been disappointed that unless they are sieged, tanks are basically worthless for their cost.
We already had A+move mech, it was called Warhounds, and nobody except Blizzard liked it.
People want a positional playstyle. Buffing tank mode won't achieve that goal.
I think it's time for everyone to accept that "Positional Mech" won't ever come to fruition.
As the thread goes on people realize that just buffing tank damage won't solve everything. Maps, hard counter units, and the immobility of Mech in general are still very heavy issues.
Instead of begging for something to happen that never will, perhaps it time to look at other compositions that doesn't involve parking your units somewhere.
On December 03 2015 13:45 todespolka wrote: I personally think that overkill wont matter at all. The difference must be very underwhelming. The bigger issiues are stalemates and the better pathing as pointed out above by someone.
Blizzard introduced medivac siege tank drop because they havent seen another solution to the problem.
If anybody thinks, the idea above was not the first idea blizzard thought about, is just naive. They must have thought about it, tested it and it didnt work as intended. Why cant we close this topic. Also why doesnt any of the supporters create testmaps to see if it works as intended.
I can't agree with you here. Blizzard has made more than enough boneheaded and nonsensical moves in the history of SC2 to make blind faith in their abilities a very dangerous proposition. These are the same guys who set up a PTR to test different Burrow buttons, but absolutely positively could not and would not set up a PTR to just let the community TRY the community double harvest economic model, during a freaking beta?
Why didn't they ever set up a PTR with different Siege Tank stats? Higher damage, higher splash, bigger radius, longer range, change their hard counters, tweak smartfire? These are all things we could have been trying on PTRs for 5 years to see what the community thinks, but instead we have to take it on faith that I guess Blizzard tried it and I guess it doesn't work.
The same Blizzard that still thinks invulnerable Nydus Worms might be good for the game. Those are the guys you think couldn't have possibly botched the job.
edit: ledarsi beat me to it.
Didnt we test the double harvest? We did it and it had no impact. Hell its not blind faith its reasonable thinking. You dont trust the community with your illness, no you go to an expert, to a doctor. Its the same here. These are experts and if i can think of these kind of tank changes they can it too!
They dont need to test everything for us. They gave the community all the tools to create test maps. If you want to test something, just do it.
EDIT: No matter what you say, sc2 is a great game. Its the best rts out there right now and that makes it a success. How can you deny that?
Mech = slow but does a lot of damage, that was the tradeoff till lotv. Also the units have a lot of delay: viking to groundmode? wait wait wait, finally in groundmode. Tank to siegemode? wait wait wait, finally in siegemode, you get the point. But its with mines, hellbats, ravens, BC's etc etc. Currently in LOTV, all races have siege units that can walk and shoot more less at the same time with huge damage. And mech got a lot and lots of nerfs. The mech army can now be beaten with simple mass unit compositions like stalker+disruptor. Roach, hydra ravengers are compositions that can be massed easily, fast moving, huge damage and easy to control while teching into something that counters mech even better. Sieged up to zone out the roaches or stalkers? no problemo, disruptor/ravenger just kill them like they are marines. Mines can be easily viewed when burrowed, unlike the other units from other races DT's, ob's, burrowed roaches, lings banelings etc. And lets give the mine a line when it aims for a target to give away another hint.
But but but... than go just into skyterran... thats another problem, but for a different topic.
One attack for every 3.48 marine attacks when in Siege mode. (One attack for every 1.21 marine attacks when in Tank mode).
Against light, Siege Tanks deal 35 damage in both BW and SC2, so it's actually a 43% damage increase in siege mode.
Against armored, it's basically the same overall DPS--technically still actually a mild DPS buff (2.6% increase).
I dunno, I honestly think people are romanticizing BW tanks, and seem to feel that if we had exactly BW tanks in every stat, that Tanks would somehow be good right now, and that somehow that not having BW tanks is the problem with Tanks right now. I will just quietly direct you to Lurkers, which were cut from WotL because they were so bad when faced with competent pathfinding. Look at their stats now--ok so they cost 20% more overall, but in exchange get a 50% range increase, get a 60% HP increase, get a 50% attack increase, and a 48% attack speed increase (overall 123% DPS increase).
Anyway, tanks. Point is, BW tanks with BW stats and AI would just not be that good in SC2. We're talking no smartfire. 4.3 second attack cooldowns instead of 3 second cooldowns, which makes a lack of smartfire hurt more. It would be 35 damage + 35 to armored. (And sure, maybe some bonus to shields). A single infestor egg, a single illusion, a single unit dropped, a single autoturret, a single Adept or stalker blinking in, a single warpin started in range of your tanks, and all your tanks dumbfire and are now on a 4.3 second cooldown. And this is SC2, where 4.3 seconds is actually a fairly long time in an engagement. Have fun with that!
On December 03 2015 13:45 todespolka wrote: I personally think that overkill wont matter at all. The difference must be very underwhelming. The bigger issiues are stalemates and the better pathing as pointed out above by someone.
Me!
Blizzard introduced medivac siege tank drop because they havent seen another solution to the problem.
If anybody thinks, the idea above was not the first idea blizzard thought about, is just naive. They must have thought about it, tested it and it didnt work as intended. Why cant we close this topic. Also why doesnt any of the supporters create testmaps to see if it works as intended.
I can't agree with you here. Blizzard has made more than enough boneheaded and nonsensical moves in the history of SC2 to make blind faith in their abilities a very dangerous proposition. These are the same guys who set up a PTR to test different Burrow buttons, but absolutely positively could not and would not set up a PTR to just let the community TRY the community double harvest economic model, during a freaking beta?
Why didn't they ever set up a PTR with different Siege Tank stats? Higher damage, higher splash, bigger radius, longer range, change their hard counters, tweak smartfire? These are all things we could have been trying on PTRs for 5 years to see what the community thinks, but instead we have to take it on faith that I guess Blizzard tried it and I guess it doesn't work.
The same Blizzard that still thinks invulnerable Nydus Worms might be good for the game. Those are the guys you think couldn't have possibly botched the job.
edit: ledarsi beat me to it.
Didnt we test the double harvest? We did it and it had no impact. Hell its not blind faith its reasonable thinking. You dont trust the community with your illness, no you go to an expert, to a doctor. Its the same here. These are experts and if i can think of these kind of tank changes they can it too!
People have been proposing replacements for the Colossus for literally as long as the unit's existed. It took Blizzard five years just to admit they should probably try. I don't think they're as ahead of the curve as you think.
They dont need to test everything for us. They gave the community all the tools to create test maps. If you want to test something, just do it.
And this would work brilliantly if the game had a different balance for every league. But it doesn't. So while I might be concerned about Solar nydusing TY's main, I have to playtest community tweaks with my Bronze league micro vs your Bronze league timing attacks. And, what, we just cross our fingers that the results will be relevant at the highest levels of play? Even if we think that they are, how are we going to convince anyone else that it's true? Never mind that only one out of a thousand people might find the magical timing, or composition, or playstyle, that makes something work (or proves how broken it is). 10 guys messing around for a couple of days isn't going to cut it.
Any serious PTR-esque attempts have to actually be initiated by Blizzard, or else they're not going to get any traction at all.
EDIT: No matter what you say, sc2 is a great game. Its the best rts out there right now and that makes it a success. How can you deny that?
SC2 being by far and away the best contemporary competitive RTS game doesn't say as much as you think, considering there is... one other on the market (CoH2). Please don't get me wrong. I love this game. But just because it gets a lot of stuff amazingly right doesn't mean it doesn't also get a lot of stuff shockingly wrong.
Why do they put up with all the bad PR in the community if disproving fan theories is literally as easy as throwing them up on an officially advertised PTR and saying "look, check it out, it doesn't work. Siege Tanks are hopeless"? Then we could move on to the next stage in the discussion, figuring out the underlying problems, figuring out if they're worth tackling... but instead we're still stuck on step 1, 5 years later, because they don't understand that they have PTRs and can use them.
On December 03 2015 14:06 ledarsi wrote: Tanks are immobile. The complete mech composition does contain mobile units, specifically Vultures in BW, but Hellions occupy that role in SC2. They allow you to scout, get map control, harass workers, and block the enemy from running up to your tanks.
Hellbats are a poorly designed "unit" but it's an option which trades mobility for more HP and healable like bio, I suppose. I guess it's more likely in SC2 that if tanks were buffed that bio in medivacs would still be used for aggression instead of relying on Hellions only, since they lack much of the functionality of Vultures.
Hellion occupy only the role of a fast unit and worker harasser that Vulture could do, it does not cover the ability to zone out enemy or gain map control. Once stalkers are on the map your hellions are forced to run away, Vultures could have put up a fight due to full damage vs shields and spider mines.
Hellbats were introduced to solve the issue of stupid hellions not able to fight light units head on like Vultures could due to high damage point and slow attack speed.
i'm thinking you're overdoing it a little bit on the numbers.
a projectile speed of 26 leads to, as you say, more than 0.5 sec delay between fire and impact. imagine how weird that would feel. i'd say at least double that speed is needed, >50 if it's gonna be a projectile.
buffing damage to 50+25 while also increasing range to 15 is a massive, massive buff. compared to the bw tank, 70 explosive, it's very brutal. but then again sc2 tank is more expensive.
as for tvt not being much affected, i think that is plain wrong. with these stats tvt would not be playable without tanks.
On December 03 2015 13:45 todespolka wrote: Also making units stupid is very inconvenient for beginner. Its a hidden mechanic. If overkill makes a big difference, a beginner wont know why his tanks do less damage than the opponents and will get frustrated. That happened a lot in bw.
If Blizzard had tested this, they probably would have made mention of it.
Additionally, overkill is already in the game and nobody complains about it. Marauders, Roaches, Hydralisk, Banshees. Half the units in this game overkill.
On December 03 2015 18:20 CYFAWS wrote: i'm thinking you're overdoing it a little bit on the numbers.
a projectile speed of 26 leads to, as you say, more than 0.5 sec delay between fire and impact. imagine how weird that would feel. i'd say at least double that speed is needed, >50 if it's gonna be a projectile.
buffing damage to 50+25 while also increasing range to 15 is a massive, massive buff. compared to the bw tank, 70 explosive, it's very brutal. but then again sc2 tank is more expensive.
as for tvt not being much affected, i think that is plain wrong. with these stats tvt would not be playable without tanks.
Current TvT isn't playable without tanks and SkyTerran remains unaffected.
On December 03 2015 15:46 todespolka wrote:EDIT: No matter what you say, sc2 is a great game. Its the best rts out there right now and that makes it a success. How can you deny that?
Just because that's the RTS that currently receives the largest amount of sponsoring and investments doesn't mean it is the best RTS or even such a great game^^
so much blizzard bashing, it's kind of ridiculous. one of the posts is actually just flat out true. if you want to create a test map to see how stronger tanks fare, you can totally do it. it takes intiative that arguably the games developers should make, but it's possible and quite easy.
i'd say you'd have a pretty alright time inviting higher level players to test it out for you since it's an interesting idea.
there's also another great point about the tank DPS as it is compared to the BW tank (the comparison that is so heavily made by the OP and other people here). believe it or not, it is actually pretty similar and the main differences are the initial shots (that kill and force commital in most cases) and essentially the burst damage.
bottom line is, nothing is magically going to get solved even if by all your might you are theory crafting through rose tinted glasses.
initially these threads started as, what's with mech? (about tanks) mech - how to make it viable (and it was about tanks) insert thread here, about tanks and now we have thread about the tank.
all the props in the world for putting together a concise and neatly formatted post that touches on what you feel is important (once again), but i have to say it gets old. IMO, get testing, or grab some connections if this matters so much to you and others.
On December 03 2015 16:47 metroid composite wrote: I dunno, I honestly think people are romanticizing BW tanks, and seem to feel that if we had exactly BW tanks in every stat, that Tanks would somehow be good right now, and that somehow that not having BW tanks is the problem with Tanks right now. I will just quietly direct you to Lurkers, which were cut from WotL because they were so bad when faced with competent pathfinding. Look at their stats now--ok so they cost 20% more overall, but in exchange get a 50% range increase, get a 60% HP increase, get a 50% attack increase, and a 48% attack speed increase (overall 123% DPS increase).
here is why the pathing is actually incompetent in SC2 : units automatically clump together. This was put into the game to make control as easy as possible for "noobs". It helps maximising damage automatically when you don't control your units. But in return, units also clump together automatically. Tactics teach us that it is in most cases a very bad move to clump all your entities together, as you are very vulnerable to AoE, friendly fire, and cannot surprise or control many positions, you show everything in one spot, etc. So you get a lot of extra necessary "split" action that's one of the main micro moves in SC2 to dodge the AoE damage. It is actually not competent pathing ^^ and it brings tremendous damage to the game strategically and tactically, including to the depth of micro. Not sure what you mean with your comparison with lurker, everything in SC2 deals a lot more DPS than in BW. Lurker has to deal more damage also especially in a game where everything is highly mobile or even teleports around and holding a position is most of the time not even particularly beneficial. So a tank in SC2 may want to have higher stats than in SC1 in that context, but currently it doesn't...
On December 03 2015 11:48 cheekymonkey wrote:I like your suggestions though, except the part where it travels as a projectile. I don't think any unit fires like that, except for abilities of course. The siege tank is kind of too mediocre of a unit, it should be staple.
Are you... trolling? Every single ranged attack except Marines and Siege Tanks uses a projectile.
Those balls of light that the Tempest shoots? Projectile. The acid that Roaches shoot? Projectile. The grenade that Marauders shoot? Projectile.
It is flatly untrue that there are no other units which use a projectile. You might dislike introducing the projectile since it causes units to overkill, but the tank would hardly be the only unit with a projectile for an attack.
I assumed OP meant that the projectile would fire at the units position at the ground, and not follow the unit it around like marauder or stalker shots. Thus it would miss a lot of shots, only dealing partial damage. OP could clarify perhaps.
On December 03 2015 16:47 metroid composite wrote: I dunno, I honestly think people are romanticizing BW tanks, and seem to feel that if we had exactly BW tanks in every stat, that Tanks would somehow be good right now, and that somehow that not having BW tanks is the problem with Tanks right now. I will just quietly direct you to Lurkers, which were cut from WotL because they were so bad when faced with competent pathfinding. Look at their stats now--ok so they cost 20% more overall, but in exchange get a 50% range increase, get a 60% HP increase, get a 50% attack increase, and a 48% attack speed increase (overall 123% DPS increase).
here is why the pathing is actually incompetent in SC2 : units automatically clump together. This was put into the game to make control as easy as possible for "noobs". It helps maximising damage automatically when you don't control your units. But in return, units also clump together automatically. Tactics teach us that it is in most cases a very bad move to clump all your entities together, as you are very vulnerable to AoE, friendly fire, and cannot surprise or control many positions, you show everything in one spot, etc. So you get a lot of extra necessary "split" action that's one of the main micro moves in SC2 to dodge the AoE damage. It is actually not competent pathing ^^ and it brings tremendous damage to the game strategically and tactically, including to the depth of micro. Not sure what you mean with your comparison with lurker, everything in SC2 deals a lot more DPS than in BW. Lurker has to deal more damage also especially in a game where everything is highly mobile or even teleports around and holding a position is most of the time not even particularly beneficial. So a tank in SC2 may want to have higher stats than in SC1 in that context, but currently it doesn't...
i think he's saying that even with strong lurker stats, they're not the shit.
competency with pathfinding probably alludes to how units that do not clump do not move efficiently around the map because players are taxed and cannot manually control units wherever they go. thus, ai is relied on with the use of sweeping mouse/keyboard inputs. on top of that, you were limited with the amount of shift commands you could do with units. i think it was 2, unless it were a move command, and this doesn't even apply to shift-queuing building placement. it's an example of anachronism, at least, to keep it that way in a newer RTS (along with removing MBS, of course).
two lurkers, or even just one could hold the line against seemingly infinite marines in a zvt because waypathing (a-clicking) brought marines in a (predictable) straight line, and as icing on the cake most maps zergs will take a far 3rd or 4th base with a tiny ramp to defend. it was just a differently played rts. the point is, moving quickly or efficiently across the map with your army is easier in sc2 (for both you and your opponent) and forces players to respect a different pace.
i'll use an example of MOBAs since most people have played some a bunch. you take a lategame teamfight and end up with arguably enough left over to push.
if the players are experienced, they will immediately push--perhaps baiting or taking the fight closer to the enemy's side of the map in anticipation of barely winning--hoping to deal as much damage as possible. if players are inexperienced throughout the same situations, they make weird engagements, don't get as much out of the fight, or start farming to catch up before realizing that the post-teamfight pushing is the play. once they start pushing, it's already too late to deal damage and the situation snowballs and the inexperience shows. this is a small example in attempts to show that the game is very different when the pacing is set differently (in the case of experience vs. non-experience in a moba) as is in the case of SC2 vs even its previous iteration (HotS). it's an obvious statement to make when sc2 as a whole is entirely different compared to how sc1 was played after 10 years of heavy competitive play.
seriously, the comparisons between the games are all pretty moot, or even unimportant.
On December 03 2015 21:27 WeddingEpisode wrote: Blizzard could just make a mod for us to play for a while in Custom Games.
or, if that doesn't happen, your average joe can do that. just give seige tanks a widow mine attack or similar and diddle the numbers a little.
offtopic, i remember they did this shit at MBCgame for a wc3 league when orc was dominating too hard. they nerfed some orc units and buffed some small things a tiny amount so players wouldn't notice, but would ever so slightly feel the difference. it became a scandal, obviously. point is, i'm 100% certain it was a 30minute job or an idea you could come up with on the toilet seat.
On December 02 2015 19:06 FeyFey wrote:No Smartfire really is smart, the units check if other units already target something and if it would kill this unit. So even if the tank has delay between choosing its target and actually fireing they would still not do overkill. So they really just have to turn of smartcast on the tanks, not even a projectile needed.
Nope. I saw a cool test of this once with marines vs hydra. They changed all hydra stats to be marine stats, then showed how crazy inefficient hydras are just due to the projectile travel time meaning they overkill like crazy. Marines will never overkill at all, just because their attack is instant.
i always thought it was personally dumb that marines actually shoot before their rifles even turn and that makes some crazy looking micro in return l0l
On December 02 2015 19:06 FeyFey wrote:No Smartfire really is smart, the units check if other units already target something and if it would kill this unit. So even if the tank has delay between choosing its target and actually fireing they would still not do overkill. So they really just have to turn of smartcast on the tanks, not even a projectile needed.
Nope. I saw a cool test of this once with marines vs hydra. They changed all hydra stats to be marine stats, then showed how crazy inefficient hydras are just due to the projectile travel time meaning they overkill like crazy. Marines will never overkill at all, just because their attack is instant.
i always thought it was personally dumb that marines actually shoot before their rifles even turn and that makes some crazy looking micro in return l0l
yeah they don't even need to stay in place during the rafale they shoot they can move immediately even though you hear a bunch of bullets being fired :S and you get the stutter bioball advancing forward almost freely
I always thought that smart fire for a single unit in game is stupid. Where is my smart blink or smart banelingmove? The idea that you can micro your bio while your tanks will be microed by AI is horrible and doesn't belong in that game.
But your concept will totally make Tank's role too much intersect with Liberator. My proposal - bigger splash area. Let the liberator handle big units while tank will deal with small ones.
On December 03 2015 23:23 sh1RoKen wrote: I always thought that smart fire for a single unit in game is stupid. Where is my smart blink or smart banelingmove? The idea that you can micro your bio while your tanks will be microed by AI is horrible and doesn't belong in that game.
But your concept will totally make Tank's role too much intersect with Liberator. My proposal - bigger splash area. Let the liberator handle big units while tank will deal with small ones.
all sc2 units with an instant attack have "smart fire", it's just a consequence of how the game engine works.
To the naysayers completely focused on picking apart specific ideas: you're missing the main point. Blizzard needs to do something. Something. Anything. At least make an effort! If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out, but until it's tried by the community (e.g. PTR map), we won't know.
Now, for a different idea, what if Blizzard just finally bit the bullet and combined terran ground upgrades and left air upgrades separate? Another poster already pointed out how much of an issue this is for Terran and it alone really quells unit diversity. Maybe combine ground attack, but keep factory and infantry armor separate (totaling 3 upgrades for all ground units, just like the other two races!).
Can anybody really justify why Terran needs to have completely different sets of upgrades for their ground units? Is this really an archaic relic carried over from Brood War?
On December 03 2015 23:23 sh1RoKen wrote: I always thought that smart fire for a single unit in game is stupid. Where is my smart blink or smart banelingmove? The idea that you can micro your bio while your tanks will be microed by AI is horrible and doesn't belong in that game.
But your concept will totally make Tank's role too much intersect with Liberator. My proposal - bigger splash area. Let the liberator handle big units while tank will deal with small ones.
all sc2 units with an instant attack have "smart fire", it's just a consequence of how the game engine works.
No they doesn't. They added this feature in WoL (or probably HotS) exclusively for siege tank. Smart fire doesn't mean that unit can't overkill. Right now siege tank changes it's target to maximize the splash damage.
For example: My protoss army of 1 zealot and 5 stalkers is attacking 5 siege tanks Zealot comes in their range first and take 5 shots but survives Tight ball of 5 stalkers staying very close to each other comes to the range before tank's second shot Zealot is still alive, but all tanks will shot their second attack inside of the stalkers to maximize their damage without any additional command from terran
On December 03 2015 23:23 sh1RoKen wrote: I always thought that smart fire for a single unit in game is stupid. Where is my smart blink or smart banelingmove? The idea that you can micro your bio while your tanks will be microed by AI is horrible and doesn't belong in that game.
But your concept will totally make Tank's role too much intersect with Liberator. My proposal - bigger splash area. Let the liberator handle big units while tank will deal with small ones.
all sc2 units with an instant attack have "smart fire", it's just a consequence of how the game engine works.
No they doesn't. They added this feature in WoL (or probably HotS) exclusively for siege tank. Smart fire doesn't mean that unit can't overkill. Right now siege tank changes it's target to maximize the splash damage.
For example: My protoss army of 1 zealot and 5 stalkers is attacking 5 siege tanks Zealot comes in their range first and take 5 shots but survives Tight ball of 5 stalkers staying very close to each other comes to the range before tank's second shot Zealot is still alive, but all tanks will shot their second attack inside of the stalkers to maximize their damage without any additional command from terran
On December 03 2015 23:23 sh1RoKen wrote: I always thought that smart fire for a single unit in game is stupid. Where is my smart blink or smart banelingmove? The idea that you can micro your bio while your tanks will be microed by AI is horrible and doesn't belong in that game.
But your concept will totally make Tank's role too much intersect with Liberator. My proposal - bigger splash area. Let the liberator handle big units while tank will deal with small ones.
all sc2 units with an instant attack have "smart fire", it's just a consequence of how the game engine works.
No they doesn't. They added this feature in WoL (or probably HotS) exclusively for siege tank. Smart fire doesn't mean that unit can't overkill. Right now siege tank changes it's target to maximize the splash damage.
For example: My protoss army of 1 zealot and 5 stalkers is attacking 5 siege tanks Zealot comes in their range first and take 5 shots but survives Tight ball of 5 stalkers staying very close to each other comes to the range before tank's second shot Zealot is still alive, but all tanks will shot their second attack inside of the stalkers to maximize their damage without any additional command from terran
this is complete bullshit
Yes, I fucked up. Apparently I did something wrong during testing long time ago.
On December 03 2015 23:33 p68 wrote: To the naysayers completely focused on picking apart specific ideas: you're missing the main point. Blizzard needs to do something. Something. Anything. At least make an effort! If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out, but until it's tried by the community (e.g. PTR map), we won't know.
Now, for a different idea, what if Blizzard just finally bit the bullet and combined terran ground upgrades and left air upgrades separate? Another poster already pointed out how much of an issue this is for Terran and it alone really quells unit diversity. Maybe combine ground attack, but keep factory and infantry armor separate (totaling 3 upgrades for all ground units, just like the other two races!).
Can anybody really justify why Terran needs to have completely different sets of upgrades for their ground units? Is this really an archaic relic carried over from Brood War?
Combining Upgrades means T would have to be rebalanced for that. As shown with combining armory upgrades. If Infantry and Vehicle upgrades were combined then we would have a Biomech army that gains too much of an advantage at too rapid of a rate. Nerfs would have to happen to compensate.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
It's easy to romanticise broodwar tanks because they were much less costly to produce, costing only 100 gas and only 2 supply instead of now. In broodwar it was easier to get a larger number of tanks on the battlefield, which would be mitigated by the problems of overkill and the need to spread tanks for best damage. It also meant that in broodwar, smaller numbers of tanks could be impactful and wouldn't put a significant drain on the resources a player needed for their composition.
Consider that standard mech in broodwar, vespene gas when exclusively to Tanks, Upgrades, and the Goliaths necessary to prepare for the arbiter/carrier late game or to screen mutalisks off the tank army. In SC2, mech (tanks in particular) not only costs more, but achieving the same sort of composition is more costly, as now medivacs and the more expensive viking are often included and achieving the same area denial strength takes a greater variety of units.
The pathing issue is equally important. In broodwar, tanks had more time to inflict damage, because it was more difficult to make large numbers of units move up and engage. In starcraft 2, where a player would have 15 tanks in broodwar, they have 10 tanks now, and it's much easier to walk up to tanks and just kill them in close range, especially with the ease of units like zealots or massed zerglings which have incredibly efficient movement.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
Be that as it may, if Blizzard did a "nice" job by making mech unplayable, then you have to admit they lied about some of their goals for both HoTS and LoTV. I might not have the most fantastic impression about the Sc2 team, but complete scum that plays bait and switch with their fanbase i think they are not.
I was thinking that maybe a better way to fix Tanks might be to just reduce the cost and make them 2 supply. That way you can afford to trade a bit more and after all, fights are the most interesting when units kill other units and not just when one army completely destroys the other.
On December 04 2015 00:39 Sapphire.lux wrote: I was thinking that maybe a better way to fix Tanks might be to just reduce the cost and make them 2 supply. That way you can afford to trade a bit more and after all, fights are the most interesting when units kill other units and not just when one army completely destroys the other.
I think reducing supply that drastically is the thing that helps turtling by far the most. Instead of having to trade out your hellions/hellbats/widow mines to get lategame starport units out. you can sit on an even bigger army for a longer time.
Some form of cost buff on the other hand could indeed lead to just a little more freedom trading your units or just mixing in tanks in non-mech styles, without destroying existing shot-relations and such. That and attack speed (re-)buffs would be the conservative options that could increment towards more viability of the unit.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
So force terran into The same playstyle every fucking game? I don't see how it's a "good job" to limit unit diversity this much.
edit: mech doesn't have to be boring. TaeJa vs INnoVation, taeja vs flash, mma vs gumiho, flash vs bbyong, maru vs dream, jjackji vs revival to name a few examples. why anyone would be happy to see the same composition every single game is beyond me.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
Be that as it may, if Blizzard did a "nice" job by making mech unplayable, then you have to admit they lied about some of their goals for both HoTS and LoTV. I might not have the most fantastic impression about the Sc2 team, but complete scum that plays bait and switch with their fanbase i think they are not.
I never implied that they did a nice job with mech for HoTS though. Blizzard idea of a cool game is one with a lot of action through the game and everywhere, and they tried to push this design philosophy with LoTV. They have failed with WoL due to infestor brood lord, they corrected it with HoTS but introduced the equally boring swarmHost, corrected it and this has lead terran to have the equally boring playstyle with mech which is now apparently corrected.
I believe, and hope that I am true, that they have started LoTV on a healthier ground, and such boring playstyle will not be valid for any race.
Charoisaur : I completely disagree that terran are forced into the same playstyle, especially in TvZ and TvP. Bio Tank, bio mines, bio liberator or even the HoTS style with bio Hellbat thor for TvZ are all bio based army, but all are played differently and each of these style has different path to go there, so there is plenty of strategic depth and variety. I am absolutely fine with mech units being mostly support units for a bio based army (as I am fine with robot tech in Pv*) , given the variety of playstyle it allows.
On December 04 2015 00:39 Sapphire.lux wrote: I was thinking that maybe a better way to fix Tanks might be to just reduce the cost and make them 2 supply. That way you can afford to trade a bit more and after all, fights are the most interesting when units kill other units and not just when one army completely destroys the other.
I think reducing supply that drastically is the thing that helps turtling by far the most. Instead of having to trade out your hellions/hellbats/widow mines to get lategame starport units out. you can sit on an even bigger army for a longer time.
Some form of cost buff on the other hand could indeed lead to just a little more freedom trading your units or just mixing in tanks in non-mech styles, without destroying existing shot-relations and such. That and attack speed (re-)buffs would be the conservative options that could increment towards more viability of the unit.
I'm not sure turtling in a HotS sense is a thing any more with how the eco works and with the Raven nerfed. Playing defensive until you get a good number of Tanks should be fine if when you move out you have multiple fights; trading part of your units, advancing or retreating, etc.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
Be that as it may, if Blizzard did a "nice" job by making mech unplayable, then you have to admit they lied about some of their goals for both HoTS and LoTV. I might not have the most fantastic impression about the Sc2 team, but complete scum that plays bait and switch with their fanbase i think they are not.
I never implied that they did a nice job with mech for HoTS though. Blizzard idea of a cool game is one with a lot of action through the game and everywhere, and they tried to push this design philosophy with LoTV. They have failed with WoL due to infestor brood lord, they corrected it with HoTS but introduced the equally boring swarmHost, corrected it and this has lead terran to have the equally boring playstyle with mech which is now apparently corrected. They tried
I believe, and hope that I am true, that they have started LoTV on a healthier ground, and such boring playstyle will not be valid for any race.
You said "I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void." That clearly implies that Blizz did a good job making mech useless. So given that the goal was to make it MORE relevant for Terran, it's a clear and monumental failure, or a bate and switch tactic.
It's not that 3 base turtle till mass air is not viable(no one wanted that anyway, not even avilo) that is the problem, but that it's not viable in any form.
On December 02 2015 11:51 avilo wrote: Lots of people including blizzard are probably scared of turtle mech or what not...but honestly buffing tank damage will make aggro mech and movement possible for mech, and i think turtle mech is already massively addressed through the economy of LOTV - you're at a severe disadvantage if you try to turtle on 3 base.
Massive intellectual dishonesty by avilo here, in trying to convince us that turtle mech wouldn't be a problem. Avilo himself is the self-appointed king of passive, turtle play. The way you play is that you turtle, and creep your gun line to the next base, while building a hundred missile turrets all over. Avilo plays like this with his Liberators, and with awesome-buffed-siege tanks he would do the exact same. Defend, turtle, and when minerals are running out he starts floating a CC and moves his tank gun line five inches forward and zones out another expansion, so he can turtle again.
Bad opponents throw units at his super gun line, and then Avilo can finally attack and end the game. Good opponents delay and play 60 minutes with him, because there's no other way.
Siege tanks and Liberators sound cool in theory but promote exceptionally boring and bad game play. I'm not surprised Blizzard isn't eager to buff tanks.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
Be that as it may, if Blizzard did a "nice" job by making mech unplayable, then you have to admit they lied about some of their goals for both HoTS and LoTV. I might not have the most fantastic impression about the Sc2 team, but complete scum that plays bait and switch with their fanbase i think they are not.
I never implied that they did a nice job with mech for HoTS though. Blizzard idea of a cool game is one with a lot of action through the game and everywhere, and they tried to push this design philosophy with LoTV. They have failed with WoL due to infestor brood lord, they corrected it with HoTS but introduced the equally boring swarmHost, corrected it and this has lead terran to have the equally boring playstyle with mech which is now apparently corrected. They tried
I believe, and hope that I am true, that they have started LoTV on a healthier ground, and such boring playstyle will not be valid for any race.
You said "I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void." That clearly implies that Blizz did a good job making mech useless. So given that the goal was to make it MORE relevant for Terran, it's a clear and monumental failure, or a bate and switch tactic.
Yes, that is my point, I was worried about Mech when they discussed about it for LoTV and when they introduced the Liberator and the Cyclone, anticipating that these units would allow pure mech turtle-style. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that I was wrong and that Blizzard did not make this mistake, and instead did a pretty nice job about LoTV design wise.
It's not that 3 base turtle till mass air is not viable(no one wanted that anyway, not even avilo) that is the problem, but that it's not viable in any form.
And I am okay with pure mech being not viable, the same way that Protoss is mostly gateway centric + support units. I absolutely do not believe there is a way to make mech (*in SC2) both : viable, entertaining and at the same time not completely kill bio play. As I enjoy bio play, and I'm bored by mech, I am completely satisfied by the state of Terran in TvZ and TvP and the nice synergy we observed between the different mechanical units and the bio based army.
And whatever says Avilo wether he likes it or not, that is the way he plays the game since WoL. Always playing like this when you really don't like this, even when it was considered as weak or inadequate in some matchup (TvP), is masochist.
It would be a good start. Blizzard should at least make a balance test map.
Although I doubt mech would be viable the same way as was in BW. The air units in SC2 are crazy strong and almost no good ground anti air units.
Perhaps try even slower projectile speed with bigger splash and target indicator for more counter micro. It doesn't necessary has to be the same way as in BW. Which would not be the same anyway.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
Be that as it may, if Blizzard did a "nice" job by making mech unplayable, then you have to admit they lied about some of their goals for both HoTS and LoTV. I might not have the most fantastic impression about the Sc2 team, but complete scum that plays bait and switch with their fanbase i think they are not.
Charoisaur : I completely disagree that terran are forced into the same playstyle, especially in TvZ and TvP. Bio Tank, bio mines, bio liberator or even the HoTS style with bio Hellbat thor for TvZ are all bio based army, but all are played differently and each of these style has different path to go there, so there is plenty of strategic depth and variety. I am absolutely fine with mech units being mostly support units for a bio based army (as I am fine with robot tech in Pv*) , given the variety of playstyle it allows.
You are a pretty dishonest person if you say that, you can think that bio is fun and that mech should be unplayable, it is after all your opinion.
But saying that bio plus whatever is different its just outright lying, even thoug they offer some differences they are more fundamentally the same that any other compositions that share units. The bio is the very core of everything, to a point where you don't need something else, just look at Maru, he didn't even made support units PvT just pure bio.
And you are wrong in the PvX comparison, protoss worked the other way around, Robo units where the core and Gateway units as support, if you are so fine with races having no compositions but 1 then they have to remove the adept, because you know, you are fine with gateway comps not being viable in PvX.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
Be that as it may, if Blizzard did a "nice" job by making mech unplayable, then you have to admit they lied about some of their goals for both HoTS and LoTV. I might not have the most fantastic impression about the Sc2 team, but complete scum that plays bait and switch with their fanbase i think they are not.
I never implied that they did a nice job with mech for HoTS though. Blizzard idea of a cool game is one with a lot of action through the game and everywhere, and they tried to push this design philosophy with LoTV. They have failed with WoL due to infestor brood lord, they corrected it with HoTS but introduced the equally boring swarmHost, corrected it and this has lead terran to have the equally boring playstyle with mech which is now apparently corrected. They tried
I believe, and hope that I am true, that they have started LoTV on a healthier ground, and such boring playstyle will not be valid for any race.
You said "I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void." That clearly implies that Blizz did a good job making mech useless. So given that the goal was to make it MORE relevant for Terran, it's a clear and monumental failure, or a bate and switch tactic.
Yes, that is my point, I was worried about Mech when they discussed about it for LoTV and when they introduced the Liberator and the Cyclone, anticipating that these units would allow pure mech turtle-style. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that I was wrong and that Blizzard did not make this mistake, and instead did a pretty nice job about LoTV design wise.
It's not that 3 base turtle till mass air is not viable(no one wanted that anyway, not even avilo) that is the problem, but that it's not viable in any form.
And I am okay with pure mech being not viable, the same way that Protoss is mostly gateway centric + support units. I absolutely do not believe there is a way to make mech (*in SC2) both : viable, entertaining and at the same time not completely kill bio play. As I enjoy bio play, and I'm bored by mech, I am completely satisfied by the state of Terran in TvZ and TvP and the nice synergy we observed between the different mechanical units and the bio based army.
And whatever says Avilo wether he likes it or not, that is the way he plays the game since WoL. Always playing like this when you really don't like this, even when it was considered as weak or inadequate in some matchup (TvP), is masochist.
I'm not arguing tastes or opinions here, we like what we like, but you said Blizzard did a good job simply because the result happens to be to your liking, even though the intent Blizzard had and the result are completely different. IMO your post is dishonest and self serving.
And btw, what is it with posts that go in the direction of: i don't like it so no one should be able to play it.? I don't like Roach compositions that much because ling/bling/Muta is more fun; or heavy air strategies from Protoss because air units have no interaction with terrain and so on. Does that mean P and Z should only be allowed to play what i want them to play? It's a ridiculous selfish stance to have.
On December 04 2015 00:08 HeroMystic wrote: Combining Upgrades means T would have to be rebalanced for that. As shown with combining armory upgrades. If Infantry and Vehicle upgrades were combined then we would have a Biomech army that gains too much of an advantage at too rapid of a rate. Nerfs would have to happen to compensate.
Well, of course there's balance involved. But I don't get the impression that it would be game breaking by any means. It would open up a lot of options for Terran and help circumvent "bio vs mech" altogether. As is, most of the factory units are underwhelming and underused anyway; might as well open them up to be used alongside bio more reliably and see what happens. If Blizzard doesn't want a mech playstyle, then maybe they should consider creating some synergy with biomech (beyond bio + widowmine), even if it just comes down to sharing a single upgrade.
I am so bored of bio play I feel physically ill. At least give Terran some variate where those who love bio can play that and those who love mech can use that.
In Hots tanks were at least viable in two match ups. In LotV tanks are barley viable in one.
Tanks are the most iconic, interesting and strategic unit in the game. The have clear defined weakness like siege up time, mobility and no anti-air. All interesting units have clear weaknesses, not like Ravagers that are good vs almost everything.
All I ask for is that tanks should have some strength to balance their weaknesses. Please let them dish out some damage to balance their weakness so they are actually worth building.
Regardless of whether it is the tank/mech or something else, Terran is lacking a fundamental second option to approach the game. The tank being the popular, and somewhat obvious option. In general most of the Terran units are situational and dependend on the opponent's composition or only useful in the early game. And some of them hardly ever see the light of day.
On December 03 2015 10:18 Filter wrote: Mech being weak has little, if anything, to do with tanks damage output. This argument gets made time and time again and it's almost like people forgot that early wings TvT with better tanks was purely played with Tanks and Vikings before tanks got a damage nerf. Yes the game and the players were nowhere near as good as they are now but those games were incredibly boring to both play and to watch. There was no variety, players personal style and expression did not come into play and buffing tanks damage would just recreate this exact same time of situation.
Mech and Terran units in general have one major problem. They don't have any health. The roach at 145hp, the Zealot at 150hp and the Adept at 170hp have more health than every Terran unit except the Tank at 160, the worthless Thors at 400 and Battlecruisers at 550. This means Terran units have to do way more damage than they receive to even stand a chance of winning. Both Zerg and Protoss have easy access to units that can soak damage very easily while Terrans only damage sponge units are high tier low damage and incredibly immobile.
This leads to a state of the game where Terran either obliterates their opponents army and wins or gets rekt and loses with very little margin between those two states. Giving the tank more damage would only make this margin more small. This also leads to a very difficult to balance type of situation for Terran buffs, we've all seen how even very small changes to Terran can swing a matchup heavily either against them or into their favour.
Terran also has massive mobility issues outside of a few units Terran stuff in general is incredibly slow. Outside of stimmed bio the only units Terran have that can outpace even workers are very situation units like the Reaper, Cyclone, Hellion, Liberator which can't move while hitting ground and of course stimmed bio. Without stim though Bio is slower than almost everything on the field, it's a big reason why ghosts are rarely used even at the highest levels of play.
Terran in general and mech even more so desperately need something that can soak up damage while still being fairly mobile and bringing reasonable damage to the table. Combine a unit that can fill that type of role with more health on Tanks and then engaging into a Terran army becomes a lot more dangerous than it currently is and opens the game up for more tuning without swinging matchups to an extreme degree.
I 99% agree with Filter. The tank is way too weak. (EDIT: one consequence of this is that it is almost never used in Tank Mode, and DK needed to think up away to incentivize tank mobility, hence the reviled tankivac. In another post I called it the 'Siege Cart' because of how weak it is. The Flying Siege Cart is a crummy solution.)
need something that can soak up damage while still being fairly mobile and bringing reasonable damage to the table. Combine a unit that can fill that type of role with more health on Tanks
You're asking for the same unit. The Siege Tank should soak damage while mobile, and trade mobility and toughness when in Siege Mode. While in Tank Mode, it should Tank for marines. When in Siege Mode, it should be vulnerable and require marines/hellbats to protect them and keep them from blowing each other up.
Forget the damage buff. My suggestion: give Tank Mode +3 starting armor and 200hp which return to +1armor and 150hp in Siege Mode. If it keeps 7 range, early game engagements are an opportunity to micro the tanks in front of your marines to block banes/lings/adepts. Then you can take advantage of won position by entering Siege Mode.
This will make it less painful to keep the tanks in Tank Mode vs early game Ravagers. So you can save some of them.
On December 03 2015 10:18 Filter wrote: Mech being weak has little, if anything, to do with tanks damage output. This argument gets made time and time again and it's almost like people forgot that early wings TvT with better tanks was purely played with Tanks and Vikings before tanks got a damage nerf. Yes the game and the players were nowhere near as good as they are now but those games were incredibly boring to both play and to watch. There was no variety, players personal style and expression did not come into play and buffing tanks damage would just recreate this exact same time of situation.
Mech and Terran units in general have one major problem. They don't have any health. The roach at 145hp, the Zealot at 150hp and the Adept at 170hp have more health than every Terran unit except the Tank at 160, the worthless Thors at 400 and Battlecruisers at 550. This means Terran units have to do way more damage than they receive to even stand a chance of winning. Both Zerg and Protoss have easy access to units that can soak damage very easily while Terrans only damage sponge units are high tier low damage and incredibly immobile.
This leads to a state of the game where Terran either obliterates their opponents army and wins or gets rekt and loses with very little margin between those two states. Giving the tank more damage would only make this margin more small. This also leads to a very difficult to balance type of situation for Terran buffs, we've all seen how even very small changes to Terran can swing a matchup heavily either against them or into their favour.
Terran also has massive mobility issues outside of a few units Terran stuff in general is incredibly slow. Outside of stimmed bio the only units Terran have that can outpace even workers are very situation units like the Reaper, Cyclone, Hellion, Liberator which can't move while hitting ground and of course stimmed bio. Without stim though Bio is slower than almost everything on the field, it's a big reason why ghosts are rarely used even at the highest levels of play.
Terran in general and mech even more so desperately need something that can soak up damage while still being fairly mobile and bringing reasonable damage to the table. Combine a unit that can fill that type of role with more health on Tanks and then engaging into a Terran army becomes a lot more dangerous than it currently is and opens the game up for more tuning without swinging matchups to an extreme degree.
I 99% agree with Filter. The tank is way too weak. (EDIT: one consequence of this is that it is almost never used in Tank Mode, and DK needed to think up away to incentivize tank mobility, hence the reviled tankivac. In another post I called it the 'Siege Cart' because of how weak it is. The Flying Siege Cart is a crummy solution.)
need something that can soak up damage while still being fairly mobile and bringing reasonable damage to the table. Combine a unit that can fill that type of role with more health on Tanks
You're asking for the same unit. The Siege Tank should soak damage while mobile, and trade mobility and toughness when in Siege Mode. While in Tank Mode, it should Tank for marines. When in Siege Mode, it should be vulnerable and require marines/hellbats to protect them and keep them from blowing each other up.
Forget the damage buff. My suggestion: give Tank Mode +3 starting armor and 200hp which return to +1armor and 150hp in Siege Mode. If it keeps 7 range, early game engagements are an opportunity to micro the tanks in front of your marines to block banes/lings/adepts. Then you can take advantage of won position by entering Siege Mode.
This will make it less painful to keep the tanks in Tank Mode vs early game Ravagers. So you can save some of them.
4 starting armor is probably too much, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless. 4 armor against lings, marines and marauders is pretty insane and pretty strong against nearly everything else as well, 2 or *maybe* 3 would be more than enough imo. It would play very well into the identity of a "tank" and as someone who has played quite a fair share of CnC that kind of ranged assault unit is something I really, really miss in SC2.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
Be that as it may, if Blizzard did a "nice" job by making mech unplayable, then you have to admit they lied about some of their goals for both HoTS and LoTV. I might not have the most fantastic impression about the Sc2 team, but complete scum that plays bait and switch with their fanbase i think they are not.
I never implied that they did a nice job with mech for HoTS though. Blizzard idea of a cool game is one with a lot of action through the game and everywhere, and they tried to push this design philosophy with LoTV. They have failed with WoL due to infestor brood lord, they corrected it with HoTS but introduced the equally boring swarmHost, corrected it and this has lead terran to have the equally boring playstyle with mech which is now apparently corrected. They tried
I believe, and hope that I am true, that they have started LoTV on a healthier ground, and such boring playstyle will not be valid for any race.
You said "I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void." That clearly implies that Blizz did a good job making mech useless. So given that the goal was to make it MORE relevant for Terran, it's a clear and monumental failure, or a bate and switch tactic.
Yes, that is my point, I was worried about Mech when they discussed about it for LoTV and when they introduced the Liberator and the Cyclone, anticipating that these units would allow pure mech turtle-style. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that I was wrong and that Blizzard did not make this mistake, and instead did a pretty nice job about LoTV design wise.
It's not that 3 base turtle till mass air is not viable(no one wanted that anyway, not even avilo) that is the problem, but that it's not viable in any form.
And I am okay with pure mech being not viable, the same way that Protoss is mostly gateway centric + support units. I absolutely do not believe there is a way to make mech (*in SC2) both : viable, entertaining and at the same time not completely kill bio play. As I enjoy bio play, and I'm bored by mech, I am completely satisfied by the state of Terran in TvZ and TvP and the nice synergy we observed between the different mechanical units and the bio based army.
And whatever says Avilo wether he likes it or not, that is the way he plays the game since WoL. Always playing like this when you really don't like this, even when it was considered as weak or inadequate in some matchup (TvP), is masochist.
I'm not arguing tastes or opinions here, we like what we like, but you said Blizzard did a good job simply because the result happens to be to your liking, even though the intent Blizzard had and the result are completely different. IMO your post is dishonest and self serving.
I was just saying that I liked how the game has been designed, and the fact that known turtle player are now complaining about the game being unplayable is a sign of good design for me, I don't understand why this is so controversial for you.
And btw, what is it with posts that go in the direction of: i don't like it so no one should be able to play it.? I don't like Roach compositions that much because ling/bling/Muta is more fun; or heavy air strategies from Protoss because air units have no interaction with terrain and so on. Does that mean P and Z should only be allowed to play what i want them to play? It's a ridiculous selfish stance to have.
Isn't it what we all do in this thread? We all state ore personal opinion or desire. It is either "I'd like this playstyle to be viable so Blizzard should do the change in the game in order to satisfy my desires" or, by me for example, the opposite : "please, don't make a boring playstyle valid again". With that argument some could make a case about why the SwarmHost should have stayed in the game the way it was, some did enjoyed playing like this, although I can't understand why. We all have personal opinion here and none is better than the other, some people believe that if mech was a legit strat through buffing the tanks, it would improve the game, and I believe the opposite so if some are "lobbying" for a buffed tank I will do the opposite. To me, mech, SwarmHost, infestor BroodLord, full skytoss templar are very similar playstyle that I'd rather not watch nor play against.
I mean, there is always the option of 'changing' units so they are viable, without resorting to the gameplay people don't like. How come that isn't a possibel viewpoint.
I think I have an simpler solution that Blizzard is more likely to try out.
Tanks are already cost efficient when they are on max upgrades. Problem is that it occurs so late in the game that air counters tanks too easily at that stage.
So I suggest making tanks stronger in early game (i.e. in small numbers) but remain the same in late game, without adding any projectile attack or removing smart fire.
I suggest increasing its attack from 35 (50 vs armoured) to 40 (60 vs armoured). The effect from attack upgrades should be decreased from 3 per upgrade (5 vs armoured) to just 2 per upgrade flat. That way a max upgraded tank would have an attack of 46 (66 vs armoured) compared to (44/65) now.
So Tanks become better in smaller numbers without becoming too strong in the late game.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
Be that as it may, if Blizzard did a "nice" job by making mech unplayable, then you have to admit they lied about some of their goals for both HoTS and LoTV. I might not have the most fantastic impression about the Sc2 team, but complete scum that plays bait and switch with their fanbase i think they are not.
I never implied that they did a nice job with mech for HoTS though. Blizzard idea of a cool game is one with a lot of action through the game and everywhere, and they tried to push this design philosophy with LoTV. They have failed with WoL due to infestor brood lord, they corrected it with HoTS but introduced the equally boring swarmHost, corrected it and this has lead terran to have the equally boring playstyle with mech which is now apparently corrected. They tried
I believe, and hope that I am true, that they have started LoTV on a healthier ground, and such boring playstyle will not be valid for any race.
You said "I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void." That clearly implies that Blizz did a good job making mech useless. So given that the goal was to make it MORE relevant for Terran, it's a clear and monumental failure, or a bate and switch tactic.
Yes, that is my point, I was worried about Mech when they discussed about it for LoTV and when they introduced the Liberator and the Cyclone, anticipating that these units would allow pure mech turtle-style. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that I was wrong and that Blizzard did not make this mistake, and instead did a pretty nice job about LoTV design wise.
It's not that 3 base turtle till mass air is not viable(no one wanted that anyway, not even avilo) that is the problem, but that it's not viable in any form.
And I am okay with pure mech being not viable, the same way that Protoss is mostly gateway centric + support units. I absolutely do not believe there is a way to make mech (*in SC2) both : viable, entertaining and at the same time not completely kill bio play. As I enjoy bio play, and I'm bored by mech, I am completely satisfied by the state of Terran in TvZ and TvP and the nice synergy we observed between the different mechanical units and the bio based army.
And whatever says Avilo wether he likes it or not, that is the way he plays the game since WoL. Always playing like this when you really don't like this, even when it was considered as weak or inadequate in some matchup (TvP), is masochist.
I'm not arguing tastes or opinions here, we like what we like, but you said Blizzard did a good job simply because the result happens to be to your liking, even though the intent Blizzard had and the result are completely different. IMO your post is dishonest and self serving.
I was just saying that I liked how the game has been designed, and the fact that known turtle player are now complaining about the game being unplayable is a sign of good design for me, I don't understand why this is so controversial for you.
And btw, what is it with posts that go in the direction of: i don't like it so no one should be able to play it.? I don't like Roach compositions that much because ling/bling/Muta is more fun; or heavy air strategies from Protoss because air units have no interaction with terrain and so on. Does that mean P and Z should only be allowed to play what i want them to play? It's a ridiculous selfish stance to have.
Isn't it what we all do in this thread? We all state ore personal opinion or desire. It is either "I'd like this playstyle to be viable so Blizzard should do the change in the game in order to satisfy my desires" or, by me for example, the opposite : "please, don't make a boring playstyle valid again". With that argument some could make a case about why the SwarmHost should have stayed in the game the way it was, some did enjoyed playing like this, although I can't understand why. We all have personal opinion here and none is better than the other, some people believe that if mech was a legit strat through buffing the tanks, it would improve the game, and I believe the opposite so if some are "lobbying" for a buffed tank I will do the opposite. To me, mech, SwarmHost, infestor BroodLord, full skytoss templar are very similar playstyle that I'd rather not watch nor play against.
Some people here need to open their minds a little bit. In an RTS there will always be someone attacking and someone defending. Would you call that defending period "turtling"? Where do you draw the line and say its turtling? Defending for 50% of the game? 60% of the game? 80%? People complain about the way mech functioned in HOTS and WOL because mech units were so bloody fragile to do anything on the map or hold more open areas. Hence, the ONLY way to play and not lose with mech WAS to defend until you massed something else (ie. Raven/BC). Now, imagine a world where mech can actually push out and hold its own and deal damage to the enemy. The meching player no longer NEEDS to turtle to win. Better tanks, means terran can push out and grab bases and expand faster, and therefore allowing more open and larger maps to be viable. Larger maps also means more positional importance and viola...the game has actually become interesting to watch and play rather than the 2 or 3 attack paths on 95% of maps.
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
Be that as it may, if Blizzard did a "nice" job by making mech unplayable, then you have to admit they lied about some of their goals for both HoTS and LoTV. I might not have the most fantastic impression about the Sc2 team, but complete scum that plays bait and switch with their fanbase i think they are not.
I never implied that they did a nice job with mech for HoTS though. Blizzard idea of a cool game is one with a lot of action through the game and everywhere, and they tried to push this design philosophy with LoTV. They have failed with WoL due to infestor brood lord, they corrected it with HoTS but introduced the equally boring swarmHost, corrected it and this has lead terran to have the equally boring playstyle with mech which is now apparently corrected. They tried
I believe, and hope that I am true, that they have started LoTV on a healthier ground, and such boring playstyle will not be valid for any race.
You said "I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void." That clearly implies that Blizz did a good job making mech useless. So given that the goal was to make it MORE relevant for Terran, it's a clear and monumental failure, or a bate and switch tactic.
Yes, that is my point, I was worried about Mech when they discussed about it for LoTV and when they introduced the Liberator and the Cyclone, anticipating that these units would allow pure mech turtle-style. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that I was wrong and that Blizzard did not make this mistake, and instead did a pretty nice job about LoTV design wise.
It's not that 3 base turtle till mass air is not viable(no one wanted that anyway, not even avilo) that is the problem, but that it's not viable in any form.
And I am okay with pure mech being not viable, the same way that Protoss is mostly gateway centric + support units. I absolutely do not believe there is a way to make mech (*in SC2) both : viable, entertaining and at the same time not completely kill bio play. As I enjoy bio play, and I'm bored by mech, I am completely satisfied by the state of Terran in TvZ and TvP and the nice synergy we observed between the different mechanical units and the bio based army.
And whatever says Avilo wether he likes it or not, that is the way he plays the game since WoL. Always playing like this when you really don't like this, even when it was considered as weak or inadequate in some matchup (TvP), is masochist.
I'm not arguing tastes or opinions here, we like what we like, but you said Blizzard did a good job simply because the result happens to be to your liking, even though the intent Blizzard had and the result are completely different. IMO your post is dishonest and self serving.
I was just saying that I liked how the game has been designed, and the fact that known turtle player are now complaining about the game being unplayable is a sign of good design for me, I don't understand why this is so controversial for you.
And btw, what is it with posts that go in the direction of: i don't like it so no one should be able to play it.? I don't like Roach compositions that much because ling/bling/Muta is more fun; or heavy air strategies from Protoss because air units have no interaction with terrain and so on. Does that mean P and Z should only be allowed to play what i want them to play? It's a ridiculous selfish stance to have.
Isn't it what we all do in this thread? We all state ore personal opinion or desire. It is either "I'd like this playstyle to be viable so Blizzard should do the change in the game in order to satisfy my desires" or, by me for example, the opposite : "please, don't make a boring playstyle valid again". With that argument some could make a case about why the SwarmHost should have stayed in the game the way it was, some did enjoyed playing like this, although I can't understand why. We all have personal opinion here and none is better than the other, some people believe that if mech was a legit strat through buffing the tanks, it would improve the game, and I believe the opposite so if some are "lobbying" for a buffed tank I will do the opposite. To me, mech, SwarmHost, infestor BroodLord, full skytoss templar are very similar playstyle that I'd rather not watch nor play against.
Some people here need to open their minds a little bit. In an RTS there will always be someone attacking and someone defending. Would you call that defending period "turtling"? Where do you draw the line and say its turtling? Defending for 50% of the game? 60% of the game? 80%? People complain about the way mech functioned in HOTS and WOL because mech units were so bloody fragile to do anything on the map or hold more open areas. Hence, the ONLY way to play and not lose with mech WAS to defend until you massed something else (ie. Raven/BC). Now, imagine a world where mech can actually push out and hold its own and deal damage to the enemy. The meching player no longer NEEDS to turtle to win. Better tanks, means terran can push out and grab bases and expand faster, and therefore allowing more open and larger maps to be viable. Larger maps also means more positional importance and viola...the game has actually become interesting to watch and play rather than the 2 or 3 attack paths on 95% of maps.
I think we are losing our time talking with him.
He will diss the change no matter how it is and complain no matter what he say.
He doesn't want mech because he has the right to do so, so we should simply stop trying to discuss with him, because he already has the opinion that terran should always be bio 100% pure MMMM all MUs and that anything else is bad. Is his opinion, so we should just leave him be.
EDIT: I find pretty telling that 90% of his post on the LotV threads are of him saying mech is bad while dissing every opinion with the same argument of, mech is bad (without anything else as part of the argument).
For whatever it's worth (and there will inevitably be questions about how much worth a PTR or test-made not heavily played by top pros has), there's now a test map on b.net with the changes* proposed in the OP on NA and EU.
"ledarsi Tank Tester - Orbital Shipyards"
Found in multiplayer -> custom maps. Not the arcade.
*undocumented change: exploding cows are features, not bugs.
On December 04 2015 07:22 LessDuEt wrote: Some people here need to open their minds a little bit. In an RTS there will always be someone attacking and someone defending. Would you call that defending period "turtling"? Where do you draw the line and say its turtling? Defending for 50% of the game? 60% of the game? 80%?
So first of in essence I agree with this opinion. There is simply always going to be someone that can draw an advantage from taking a more defensive stance.
People complain about the way mech functioned in HOTS and WOL because mech units were so bloody fragile to do anything on the map or hold more open areas. Hence, the ONLY way to play and not lose with mech WAS to defend until you massed something else (ie. Raven/BC). Now, imagine a world where mech can actually push out and hold its own and deal damage to the enemy. The meching player no longer NEEDS to turtle to win.
Yes, but also turtling may get better and may stay the superior option to begin with even if "aggressive Mech" becomes better. Making players push is really a twosided thing between giving the options to do so and punishing them for not doing so. For example a bio-player simply has to put on a certain amount of pressure when the opponent chooses to play a defensive anti-bio style. And when that doesn't work out the style does get in trouble. And similar dynamics apply to basically every aggressive style in the game. For Mech that means that the choice to push must also be semi-forced by enemy decisions when they have the option to play like that. The option to turtle against everything - the innovation/flash-esque playstyle where you just sit back and wait for the opponent to attack you - must severely backfire too if you choose wrong. (e.g. when you sit on your ass and build improved tanklines against an opponent that took 2 more bases than you did then the option to just mass orbitals and air units and take it to the lategame must be gone too; you either actually attack then, or you actually expose yourself as much as your opponent did -- note that the opponent now is exposed, because of the improved push capability).
On December 03 2015 02:08 Liquid`Ret wrote: why anyone would want mech to be in this game is beyond me, it's a slow boring playstyle that doesn't require a whole lot of execution. Be it a 200/200 a move mech push or the horrors of Hots mech camp play with a Lotv twist.
Personally couldn't be happier that it's gone after the horrors we all experienced in hots.
Tanks are already pretty good, just look at byun use em with bio. :D
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
Be that as it may, if Blizzard did a "nice" job by making mech unplayable, then you have to admit they lied about some of their goals for both HoTS and LoTV. I might not have the most fantastic impression about the Sc2 team, but complete scum that plays bait and switch with their fanbase i think they are not.
I never implied that they did a nice job with mech for HoTS though. Blizzard idea of a cool game is one with a lot of action through the game and everywhere, and they tried to push this design philosophy with LoTV. They have failed with WoL due to infestor brood lord, they corrected it with HoTS but introduced the equally boring swarmHost, corrected it and this has lead terran to have the equally boring playstyle with mech which is now apparently corrected. They tried
I believe, and hope that I am true, that they have started LoTV on a healthier ground, and such boring playstyle will not be valid for any race.
You said "I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void." That clearly implies that Blizz did a good job making mech useless. So given that the goal was to make it MORE relevant for Terran, it's a clear and monumental failure, or a bate and switch tactic.
Yes, that is my point, I was worried about Mech when they discussed about it for LoTV and when they introduced the Liberator and the Cyclone, anticipating that these units would allow pure mech turtle-style. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that I was wrong and that Blizzard did not make this mistake, and instead did a pretty nice job about LoTV design wise.
It's not that 3 base turtle till mass air is not viable(no one wanted that anyway, not even avilo) that is the problem, but that it's not viable in any form.
And I am okay with pure mech being not viable, the same way that Protoss is mostly gateway centric + support units. I absolutely do not believe there is a way to make mech (*in SC2) both : viable, entertaining and at the same time not completely kill bio play. As I enjoy bio play, and I'm bored by mech, I am completely satisfied by the state of Terran in TvZ and TvP and the nice synergy we observed between the different mechanical units and the bio based army.
And whatever says Avilo wether he likes it or not, that is the way he plays the game since WoL. Always playing like this when you really don't like this, even when it was considered as weak or inadequate in some matchup (TvP), is masochist.
I'm not arguing tastes or opinions here, we like what we like, but you said Blizzard did a good job simply because the result happens to be to your liking, even though the intent Blizzard had and the result are completely different. IMO your post is dishonest and self serving.
I was just saying that I liked how the game has been designed, and the fact that known turtle player are now complaining about the game being unplayable is a sign of good design for me, I don't understand why this is so controversial for you.
And btw, what is it with posts that go in the direction of: i don't like it so no one should be able to play it.? I don't like Roach compositions that much because ling/bling/Muta is more fun; or heavy air strategies from Protoss because air units have no interaction with terrain and so on. Does that mean P and Z should only be allowed to play what i want them to play? It's a ridiculous selfish stance to have.
Isn't it what we all do in this thread? We all state ore personal opinion or desire. It is either "I'd like this playstyle to be viable so Blizzard should do the change in the game in order to satisfy my desires" or, by me for example, the opposite : "please, don't make a boring playstyle valid again". With that argument some could make a case about why the SwarmHost should have stayed in the game the way it was, some did enjoyed playing like this, although I can't understand why. We all have personal opinion here and none is better than the other, some people believe that if mech was a legit strat through buffing the tanks, it would improve the game, and I believe the opposite so if some are "lobbying" for a buffed tank I will do the opposite. To me, mech, SwarmHost, infestor BroodLord, full skytoss templar are very similar playstyle that I'd rather not watch nor play against.
Some people here need to open their minds a little bit. In an RTS there will always be someone attacking and someone defending. Would you call that defending period "turtling"? Where do you draw the line and say its turtling? Defending for 50% of the game? 60% of the game? 80%? People complain about the way mech functioned in HOTS and WOL because mech units were so bloody fragile to do anything on the map or hold more open areas. Hence, the ONLY way to play and not lose with mech WAS to defend until you massed something else (ie. Raven/BC). Now, imagine a world where mech can actually push out and hold its own and deal damage to the enemy. The meching player no longer NEEDS to turtle to win. Better tanks, means terran can push out and grab bases and expand faster, and therefore allowing more open and larger maps to be viable. Larger maps also means more positional importance and viola...the game has actually become interesting to watch and play rather than the 2 or 3 attack paths on 95% of maps.
I think we are losing our time talking with him.
He will diss the change no matter how it is and complain no matter what he say.
He doesn't want mech because he has the right to do so, so we should simply stop trying to discuss with him, because he already has the opinion that terran should always be bio 100% pure MMMM all MUs and that anything else is bad. Is his opinion, so we should just leave him be.
EDIT: I find pretty telling that 90% of his post on the LotV threads are of him saying mech is bad while dissing every opinion with the same argument of, mech is bad (without anything else as part of the argument).
Well, for a starter, you do realize that initially I just started posted in this thread to say that I agreed with LiquidRet right? Dismissing my opposition to these threads all talking about mech buff that are popping in this forum lately, is not only disrespectful to me, but also to all who does not share your particular opinion. These threads from Avilo and ledarsi which are the two accounts very active about mech buff are directed toward Blizzard (although they are often not respectful to them), so if Blizzard is actually reading this, I also want them to know that some also approved their design choices and that there is no consensus on the fact that mech.
It's not even about what I want and what I don't want, to answer LessDuEt it is just that I do not believe that there is absolutely no simple way to make a mech style both viable and interesting in Starcraft 2 (while, of course from time to time good mech games can be found), and especially not by just tweaking some units stats. This is not BroodWar, and everything at the core of the game, from IA to pathing to economical models and architecture of the maps is made in such a way that the only mech style viable in the game, is either by turtle play or timing attacks before particular tech. While the latter can be interesting from time to time from a strategical point of view, turtle play is when stalemate is actually encouraged as it is the best option for the "attacker" to win the game, and not, as you say LessDuEt, "someone attacking and someone defending" .
I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void.
I'll add that I actually likethe high mobility tank with medivacs pick ups, it has made bio tanks playable against, which is very nice.
Be that as it may, if Blizzard did a "nice" job by making mech unplayable, then you have to admit they lied about some of their goals for both HoTS and LoTV. I might not have the most fantastic impression about the Sc2 team, but complete scum that plays bait and switch with their fanbase i think they are not.
I never implied that they did a nice job with mech for HoTS though. Blizzard idea of a cool game is one with a lot of action through the game and everywhere, and they tried to push this design philosophy with LoTV. They have failed with WoL due to infestor brood lord, they corrected it with HoTS but introduced the equally boring swarmHost, corrected it and this has lead terran to have the equally boring playstyle with mech which is now apparently corrected. They tried
I believe, and hope that I am true, that they have started LoTV on a healthier ground, and such boring playstyle will not be valid for any race.
You said "I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void." That clearly implies that Blizz did a good job making mech useless. So given that the goal was to make it MORE relevant for Terran, it's a clear and monumental failure, or a bate and switch tactic.
Yes, that is my point, I was worried about Mech when they discussed about it for LoTV and when they introduced the Liberator and the Cyclone, anticipating that these units would allow pure mech turtle-style. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that I was wrong and that Blizzard did not make this mistake, and instead did a pretty nice job about LoTV design wise.
It's not that 3 base turtle till mass air is not viable(no one wanted that anyway, not even avilo) that is the problem, but that it's not viable in any form.
And I am okay with pure mech being not viable, the same way that Protoss is mostly gateway centric + support units. I absolutely do not believe there is a way to make mech (*in SC2) both : viable, entertaining and at the same time not completely kill bio play. As I enjoy bio play, and I'm bored by mech, I am completely satisfied by the state of Terran in TvZ and TvP and the nice synergy we observed between the different mechanical units and the bio based army.
And whatever says Avilo wether he likes it or not, that is the way he plays the game since WoL. Always playing like this when you really don't like this, even when it was considered as weak or inadequate in some matchup (TvP), is masochist.
I'm not arguing tastes or opinions here, we like what we like, but you said Blizzard did a good job simply because the result happens to be to your liking, even though the intent Blizzard had and the result are completely different. IMO your post is dishonest and self serving.
I was just saying that I liked how the game has been designed, and the fact that known turtle player are now complaining about the game being unplayable is a sign of good design for me, I don't understand why this is so controversial for you.
And btw, what is it with posts that go in the direction of: i don't like it so no one should be able to play it.? I don't like Roach compositions that much because ling/bling/Muta is more fun; or heavy air strategies from Protoss because air units have no interaction with terrain and so on. Does that mean P and Z should only be allowed to play what i want them to play? It's a ridiculous selfish stance to have.
Isn't it what we all do in this thread? We all state ore personal opinion or desire. It is either "I'd like this playstyle to be viable so Blizzard should do the change in the game in order to satisfy my desires" or, by me for example, the opposite : "please, don't make a boring playstyle valid again". With that argument some could make a case about why the SwarmHost should have stayed in the game the way it was, some did enjoyed playing like this, although I can't understand why. We all have personal opinion here and none is better than the other, some people believe that if mech was a legit strat through buffing the tanks, it would improve the game, and I believe the opposite so if some are "lobbying" for a buffed tank I will do the opposite. To me, mech, SwarmHost, infestor BroodLord, full skytoss templar are very similar playstyle that I'd rather not watch nor play against.
Some people here need to open their minds a little bit. In an RTS there will always be someone attacking and someone defending. Would you call that defending period "turtling"? Where do you draw the line and say its turtling? Defending for 50% of the game? 60% of the game? 80%? People complain about the way mech functioned in HOTS and WOL because mech units were so bloody fragile to do anything on the map or hold more open areas. Hence, the ONLY way to play and not lose with mech WAS to defend until you massed something else (ie. Raven/BC). Now, imagine a world where mech can actually push out and hold its own and deal damage to the enemy. The meching player no longer NEEDS to turtle to win. Better tanks, means terran can push out and grab bases and expand faster, and therefore allowing more open and larger maps to be viable. Larger maps also means more positional importance and viola...the game has actually become interesting to watch and play rather than the 2 or 3 attack paths on 95% of maps.
I think we are losing our time talking with him.
He will diss the change no matter how it is and complain no matter what he say.
He doesn't want mech because he has the right to do so, so we should simply stop trying to discuss with him, because he already has the opinion that terran should always be bio 100% pure MMMM all MUs and that anything else is bad. Is his opinion, so we should just leave him be.
EDIT: I find pretty telling that 90% of his post on the LotV threads are of him saying mech is bad while dissing every opinion with the same argument of, mech is bad (without anything else as part of the argument).
Well, for a starter, you do realize that initially I just started posted in this thread to say that I agreed with LiquidRet right? Dismissing my opposition to these threads all talking about mech buff that are popping in this forum lately, is not only disrespectful to me, but also to all who does not share your particular opinion. These threads from Avilo and ledarsi which are the two accounts very active about mech buff are directed toward Blizzard (although they are often not respectful to them), so if Blizzard is actually reading this, I also want them to know that some also approved their design choices and that there is no consensus on the fact that mech.
It's not even about what I want and what I don't want, to answer LessDuEt it is just that I do not believe that there is absolutely no simple way to make a mech style both viable and interesting in Starcraft 2 (while, of course from time to time good mech games can be found), and especially not by just tweaking some units stats. This is not BroodWar, and everything at the core of the game, from IA to pathing to economical models and architecture of the maps is made in such a way that the only mech style viable in the game, is either by turtle play or timing attacks before particular tech. While the latter can be interesting from time to time from a strategical point of view, turtle play is when stalemate is actually encouraged as it is the best option for the "attacker" to win the game, and not, as you say LessDuEt, "someone attacking and someone defending" .
On December 04 2015 07:54 The_Frozen_Inferno wrote: For whatever it's worth (and there will inevitably be questions about how much worth a PTR or test-made not heavily played by top pros has), there's now a test map on b.net with the changes* proposed in the OP on NA and EU.
"ledarsi Tank Tester - Orbital Shipyards"
Found in multiplayer -> custom maps. Not the arcade.
*undocumented change: exploding cows are features, not bugs.
I want to confirm that there actually are exploding cows.
On December 04 2015 00:35 Sapphire.lux wrote: [quote] Be that as it may, if Blizzard did a "nice" job by making mech unplayable, then you have to admit they lied about some of their goals for both HoTS and LoTV. I might not have the most fantastic impression about the Sc2 team, but complete scum that plays bait and switch with their fanbase i think they are not.
I never implied that they did a nice job with mech for HoTS though. Blizzard idea of a cool game is one with a lot of action through the game and everywhere, and they tried to push this design philosophy with LoTV. They have failed with WoL due to infestor brood lord, they corrected it with HoTS but introduced the equally boring swarmHost, corrected it and this has lead terran to have the equally boring playstyle with mech which is now apparently corrected. They tried
I believe, and hope that I am true, that they have started LoTV on a healthier ground, and such boring playstyle will not be valid for any race.
You said "I totally agree with this. Hearing people like Avilo complain about how mech has become unplayable made me think that Blizzard did a nicer job than I anticipated at designing Legacy of the Void." That clearly implies that Blizz did a good job making mech useless. So given that the goal was to make it MORE relevant for Terran, it's a clear and monumental failure, or a bate and switch tactic.
Yes, that is my point, I was worried about Mech when they discussed about it for LoTV and when they introduced the Liberator and the Cyclone, anticipating that these units would allow pure mech turtle-style. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that I was wrong and that Blizzard did not make this mistake, and instead did a pretty nice job about LoTV design wise.
It's not that 3 base turtle till mass air is not viable(no one wanted that anyway, not even avilo) that is the problem, but that it's not viable in any form.
And I am okay with pure mech being not viable, the same way that Protoss is mostly gateway centric + support units. I absolutely do not believe there is a way to make mech (*in SC2) both : viable, entertaining and at the same time not completely kill bio play. As I enjoy bio play, and I'm bored by mech, I am completely satisfied by the state of Terran in TvZ and TvP and the nice synergy we observed between the different mechanical units and the bio based army.
And whatever says Avilo wether he likes it or not, that is the way he plays the game since WoL. Always playing like this when you really don't like this, even when it was considered as weak or inadequate in some matchup (TvP), is masochist.
I'm not arguing tastes or opinions here, we like what we like, but you said Blizzard did a good job simply because the result happens to be to your liking, even though the intent Blizzard had and the result are completely different. IMO your post is dishonest and self serving.
I was just saying that I liked how the game has been designed, and the fact that known turtle player are now complaining about the game being unplayable is a sign of good design for me, I don't understand why this is so controversial for you.
And btw, what is it with posts that go in the direction of: i don't like it so no one should be able to play it.? I don't like Roach compositions that much because ling/bling/Muta is more fun; or heavy air strategies from Protoss because air units have no interaction with terrain and so on. Does that mean P and Z should only be allowed to play what i want them to play? It's a ridiculous selfish stance to have.
Isn't it what we all do in this thread? We all state ore personal opinion or desire. It is either "I'd like this playstyle to be viable so Blizzard should do the change in the game in order to satisfy my desires" or, by me for example, the opposite : "please, don't make a boring playstyle valid again". With that argument some could make a case about why the SwarmHost should have stayed in the game the way it was, some did enjoyed playing like this, although I can't understand why. We all have personal opinion here and none is better than the other, some people believe that if mech was a legit strat through buffing the tanks, it would improve the game, and I believe the opposite so if some are "lobbying" for a buffed tank I will do the opposite. To me, mech, SwarmHost, infestor BroodLord, full skytoss templar are very similar playstyle that I'd rather not watch nor play against.
Some people here need to open their minds a little bit. In an RTS there will always be someone attacking and someone defending. Would you call that defending period "turtling"? Where do you draw the line and say its turtling? Defending for 50% of the game? 60% of the game? 80%? People complain about the way mech functioned in HOTS and WOL because mech units were so bloody fragile to do anything on the map or hold more open areas. Hence, the ONLY way to play and not lose with mech WAS to defend until you massed something else (ie. Raven/BC). Now, imagine a world where mech can actually push out and hold its own and deal damage to the enemy. The meching player no longer NEEDS to turtle to win. Better tanks, means terran can push out and grab bases and expand faster, and therefore allowing more open and larger maps to be viable. Larger maps also means more positional importance and viola...the game has actually become interesting to watch and play rather than the 2 or 3 attack paths on 95% of maps.
I think we are losing our time talking with him.
He will diss the change no matter how it is and complain no matter what he say.
He doesn't want mech because he has the right to do so, so we should simply stop trying to discuss with him, because he already has the opinion that terran should always be bio 100% pure MMMM all MUs and that anything else is bad. Is his opinion, so we should just leave him be.
EDIT: I find pretty telling that 90% of his post on the LotV threads are of him saying mech is bad while dissing every opinion with the same argument of, mech is bad (without anything else as part of the argument).
Well, for a starter, you do realize that initially I just started posted in this thread to say that I agreed with LiquidRet right? Dismissing my opposition to these threads all talking about mech buff that are popping in this forum lately, is not only disrespectful to me, but also to all who does not share your particular opinion. These threads from Avilo and ledarsi which are the two accounts very active about mech buff are directed toward Blizzard (although they are often not respectful to them), so if Blizzard is actually reading this, I also want them to know that some also approved their design choices and that there is no consensus on the fact that mech.
It's not even about what I want and what I don't want, to answer LessDuEt it is just that I do not believe that there is absolutely no simple way to make a mech style both viable and interesting in Starcraft 2 (while, of course from time to time good mech games can be found), and especially not by just tweaking some units stats. This is not BroodWar, and everything at the core of the game, from IA to pathing to economical models and architecture of the maps is made in such a way that the only mech style viable in the game, is either by turtle play or timing attacks before particular tech. While the latter can be interesting from time to time from a strategical point of view, turtle play is when stalemate is actually encouraged as it is the best option for the "attacker" to win the game, and not, as you say LessDuEt, "someone attacking and someone defending" .
Did you like mech vs bio in TvT?
That is indeed the case I can remember where there was some pretty good games with mech in Starcraft 2, of course as everyone I remember the Taeja's series and Maru and its crazy surround against Innovation, but I haven't forgot all the bad one too, ending with an unstoppable deathball attack or worse, with Raven war.
I think the problem with buffing the tank, and removing the mobility medivac buff, is that it will promote more turtle play where instead of the player countering their opponent, they instead try to go for an unbeatable composition, reverting back to the stale mech gameplay we saw in HOTS.
I do agree that roach ravager pushes against terran need some tweaking and I think the main goal of LOTV should be to promote strong counter play. At the moment the strongest counter to the roach ravager push is the banshee, unfortunately this unit, although good as a surprise or in small numbers, falls off greatly when considering Terran's macro requirements. I would argue that the cost to make banshees macro wise is greater than the cost for zerg to trainsition into a counter unit.
But still early days yet, we have some terrans at the top of the KR ladder, I think we are worrying a bit too much atm. And to those who want to see mech in professional tournaments I don't believe the turtle tank is the answer but I'm sure blizzard will come up with something eventually.
How would buffing seige tank affect the other units? For example, the Liberator is a great zoning unit. If you buff seige tank, do you nerf Liberator? What about the widow mines?
It is hard to compare BW and SC2 bc there are so many diff units interactions like you are comparing apples and oranges.
Blizzard will never remove tank lift, whether you like it or not. They implemented it since beta and never considered removing it. This is their respond to turtle plays in TvT.
The only things you can tweak is loading/unloading seige tank (probably more on the unloading side) and its damages.
The problem is that if you make siege tank very strong and/or flexible to make TvT more exciting to watch, you will wreck TvZ and/or TvP.
I know the Seige tank is the icon of Terran. Unfortantely, the Liberator is a lot better zoning units (IMO) and can take that role better than the tank.
On December 04 2015 07:17 MockHamill wrote: I think I have an simpler solution that Blizzard is more likely to try out.
Tanks are already cost efficient when they are on max upgrades. Problem is that it occurs so late in the game that air counters tanks too easily at that stage.
So I suggest making tanks stronger in early game (i.e. in small numbers) but remain the same in late game, without adding any projectile attack or removing smart fire.
I suggest increasing its attack from 35 (50 vs armoured) to 40 (60 vs armoured). The effect from attack upgrades should be decreased from 3 per upgrade (5 vs armoured) to just 2 per upgrade flat. That way a max upgraded tank would have an attack of 46 (66 vs armoured) compared to (44/65) now.
So Tanks become better in smaller numbers without becoming too strong in the late game.
That's actually a very very good idea. I mean the whole point is to actually allow mech players to get out on the map with units that can take a fight with good positioning. No one denies tanks are very strong in late game, but yeah I feel like your idea is very good.
Actually, making the maps bigger (without making them more open) would allow mech players to get out on the map to take little niche positions, and the enemy would have to send an appropriate answer, with the mech units still being able to take some kind of a fight if the position is good. So yeah. Make the tanks better in early game - mid game, without making "HURRR DURR MASS TANKS MASS TURRETS" the only way to go mech.
A lot of people are talking about unit pathing makes me think maybe a range buff would be a better choice and helps to differentiate tank and liberator's role a bit more
On December 04 2015 10:20 2d_Sparrow wrote: I think the problem with buffing the tank, and removing the mobility medivac buff, is that it will promote more turtle play where instead of the player countering their opponent, they instead try to go for an unbeatable composition, reverting back to the stale mech gameplay we saw in HOTS.
I do agree that roach ravager pushes against terran need some tweaking and I think the main goal of LOTV should be to promote strong counter play. At the moment the strongest counter to the roach ravager push is the banshee, unfortunately this unit, although good as a surprise or in small numbers, falls off greatly when considering Terran's macro requirements. I would argue that the cost to make banshees macro wise is greater than the cost for zerg to trainsition into a counter unit.
But still early days yet, we have some terrans at the top of the KR ladder, I think we are worrying a bit too much atm. And to those who want to see mech in professional tournaments I don't believe the turtle tank is the answer but I'm sure blizzard will come up with something eventually.
Ravager's regular attack could have a shorter range or be removed once for all, and nonetheless, correctly categorize it as armored unit.
On December 04 2015 10:20 2d_Sparrow wrote: I think the problem with buffing the tank, and removing the mobility medivac buff, is that it will promote more turtle play where instead of the player countering their opponent, they instead try to go for an unbeatable composition, reverting back to the stale mech gameplay we saw in HOTS.
Did you read any other post in this topic before making yours? The reason for turtling as mech is because moving out is instant suicide. The second reason for turtling as mech is to transition to a better composition you couldn't start with directly (skyterran). So not making moving out suicide won't promote turtling, it will do the opposite. If people would still turtle to an unbeatable late game composition (which is extremely unlikely to be mech, for starters because it is enormously hardcountered by air from both races), then your goal should be to make sure that composition is not unbeatable by balancing. (For example changing the raven if that would be required, but since ravens has already been comlpetely changed I wouldn't nerf it before you have a reason to assume it needs nerfing).
imo i think they should reduce either bonus damage to armoured and its normal damage by 5 then make it cost the same as bw tank including suppy wise. would not make it over powered and make them more accessible.
Although I very much appreciate whoever made the test map, in all honesty it's not very well-made. The cow projectile is because there's an error with the model. And there's also only the one map Orbital Shipyards.
To fix this, I have made an extension mod which is playable on any melee map, and which has properly implemented projectiles on the tank. Although the tank shells do look a little goofy firing close to minimum range, they generally look pretty good. I also changed the cyclone into a dedicated anti-air specialist, because if I'm going to the trouble to mod the game I'm going to make both the changes that really ought to be made so they can be tested together.
To play it, under multiplayer custom games (not arcade) click on "Create with Mod" and search for "ledarsi Mech Mod." I have also edited the OP to refer people to the mod.
I am going back and forth on whether it would be better to have tanks require Siege Tech again before they can use siege mode. It's currently in, but what do you guys think?
On December 04 2015 19:05 ledarsi wrote: Although I very much appreciate whoever made the test map, in all honesty it's not very well-made. The cow projectile is because there's an error with the model. And there's also only the one map Orbital Shipyards.
To fix this, I have made an extension mod which is playable on any melee map, and which has properly implemented projectiles on the tank. Although the tank shells do look a little goofy firing close to minimum range, they generally look pretty good. I also changed the cyclone into a dedicated anti-air specialist, because if I'm going to the trouble to mod the game I'm going to make both the changes that really ought to be made so they can be tested together.
To play it, under multiplayer custom games (not arcade) click on "Create with Mod" and search for "ledarsi Mech Mod." I have also edited the OP to refer people to the mod.
I am going back and forth on whether it would be better to have tanks require Siege Tech again before they can use siege mode. It's currently in, but what do you guys think?
Depends on how big the buff is, really. The one in the opening post would probably make the siege tank way OP imo, but I still think its a good starting point to create discussion.
Big buff ---> make siege tech an upgrade Just an ok buff ---> don't
Mmmmh I think it is good to have a siege tech upgrade as long as the tank is not useless without it, should have still good damage to do interesting stuff with punch damage if you choose to upgrade something else first
Make no mistake, this is a big buff. My biggest concern here is that I just know there's going to be some knucklehead who attack moves a Stalker army into a siege line and immediately rages that it's OP without adjusting their play in the slightest to deal with a strong positional tank.
What I would really like to see is a lot of finesse-based tricks to either bypass or pick away at a tank line, such as using Immortals in Warp Prisms, or Adepts with their shade ability to kamikaze into a tank, causing them to kill each other, or other friendly units. And there's the Tempest/Carrier skytoss late game answer so the tank army has a timer before it's basically worthless, so it must do damage before then.
Zerg has Zerglings which tanks are terrible against, Vipers for Blinding Cloud and Abduct, as well as Mutalisks to pick away at isolated tanks, and Broodlords as a late game answer to a large tank army.
The big experiment here, I think, is about TvT because bio with PDD could either be hopelessly outclassed, or might just roflstomp all over a tank army because PDD stops tank shots. Either way, stuff will require tuning, either by adjusting PDD up or down to maintain a relative equilibrium between bio and mech, or by adjusting tank stats.
On December 04 2015 19:05 ledarsi wrote: Although I very much appreciate whoever made the test map, in all honesty it's not very well-made. The cow projectile is because there's an error with the model. And there's also only the one map Orbital Shipyards.
To fix this, I have made an extension mod which is playable on any melee map, and which has properly implemented projectiles on the tank. Although the tank shells do look a little goofy firing close to minimum range, they generally look pretty good. I also changed the cyclone into a dedicated anti-air specialist, because if I'm going to the trouble to mod the game I'm going to make both the changes that really ought to be made so they can be tested together.
To play it, under multiplayer custom games (not arcade) click on "Create with Mod" and search for "ledarsi Mech Mod." I have also edited the OP to refer people to the mod.
I am going back and forth on whether it would be better to have tanks require Siege Tech again before they can use siege mode. It's currently in, but what do you guys think?
The reason for a siege mode upgrade would be too strong early game tanks (for example 1-1-1 pushes). Considering if anything early game is where tanks are weakest, I would not put it in.
On December 04 2015 19:05 ledarsi wrote: Although I very much appreciate whoever made the test map, in all honesty it's not very well-made. The cow projectile is because there's an error with the model. And there's also only the one map Orbital Shipyards.
To fix this, I have made an extension mod which is playable on any melee map, and which has properly implemented projectiles on the tank. Although the tank shells do look a little goofy firing close to minimum range, they generally look pretty good. I also changed the cyclone into a dedicated anti-air specialist, because if I'm going to the trouble to mod the game I'm going to make both the changes that really ought to be made so they can be tested together.
To play it, under multiplayer custom games (not arcade) click on "Create with Mod" and search for "ledarsi Mech Mod." I have also edited the OP to refer people to the mod.
I am going back and forth on whether it would be better to have tanks require Siege Tech again before they can use siege mode. It's currently in, but what do you guys think?
The reason for a siege mode upgrade would be too strong early game tanks (for example 1-1-1 pushes). Considering if anything early game is where tanks are weakest, I would not put it in.
or too easy to defend very early expo with siege but i doubt it in SC2? the cost of it also has an impact generally on the tech investment for T that is important to consider I think (races don't need / can't be equal in tech investment costs overall)
The reason why I decided to put Siege Tech in was that I was afraid of the superfast factory showing up with a tank with siege in only a few minutes. I don't think it's any faster than Ravagers, but the tank has way more range and could potentially put some serious hurt on their base. It's easier to see if it's too strong without such an early rush being possible, and if the early game is too weak we can just take siege tech out.
On December 04 2015 19:34 ledarsi wrote: Make no mistake, this is a big buff. My biggest concern here is that I just know there's going to be some knucklehead who attack moves a Stalker army into a siege line and immediately rages that it's OP without adjusting their play in the slightest to deal with a strong positional tank.
What I would really like to see is a lot of finesse-based tricks to either bypass or pick away at a tank line, such as using Immortals in Warp Prisms, or Adepts with their shade ability to kamikaze into a tank, causing them to kill each other, or other friendly units. And there's the Tempest/Carrier skytoss late game answer so the tank army has a timer before it's basically worthless, so it must do damage before then.
Zerg has Zerglings which tanks are terrible against, Vipers for Blinding Cloud and Abduct, as well as Mutalisks to pick away at isolated tanks, and Broodlords as a late game answer to a large tank army.
The big experiment here, I think, is about TvT because bio with PDD could either be hopelessly outclassed, or might just roflstomp all over a tank army because PDD stops tank shots. Either way, stuff will require tuning, either by adjusting PDD up or down to maintain a relative equilibrium between bio and mech, or by adjusting tank stats.
Consider trying a smaller buff first. Something like 50+15 or 45+20.
Note that you suggestion upgrades the anti armored damage from 50 to 75. That is a 50% buff. Collossus was considered OP by most terrans and after a 20% damage nerf is now terrible.
Most terrans probably didn't think the Colossus was overpowered, so much as totally uninspired and boring deathball-centric nonsense that always demands you make Vikings in response, without any variety, ever.
It's a 50% damage buff to a single tank; but a group of tanks now overkills targets and wastes shots. This means one or two tanks is now 50% better, but a large group of tanks in one spot is a lot worse.
We basically need to test it. I am not denying that it's entirely possible it's outrageously OP. But if you compare its numbers to the Disruptor and factor in its immobility and overkill....
About tactics, the maps don't allow for it that well. The maps are open-spaced in design. Tank change good, but map change is needed.
To use an example from the OP's Ravager & Tank interplay, where is the Ravager supposed to come from in order to apply this indirect-attack strategy? There aren't enough nooks, ramps, blind-spots, high-ground, tunnels, etc.. to do this from. I think the maps dont have enough narrowness; that is to say, there aren't enough effect surprise or sabotage spots. It's just a shooting gallery type design. The map is too accommodating of all units throughout too much of the map.
If an Ultra is too big to go down a certain path, this is not unfair, it just determines a new consideration in the game.
On December 04 2015 19:53 ledarsi wrote: The reason why I decided to put Siege Tech in was that I was afraid of the superfast factory showing up with a tank with siege in only a few minutes. I don't think it's any faster than Ravagers, but the tank has way more range and could potentially put some serious hurt on their base. It's easier to see if it's too strong without such an early rush being possible, and if the early game is too weak we can just take siege tech out.
Why is Transformation Servos for Hellion/Hellbat present?
One of the early tests I did showed it was pretty straightforward to hit this "perfect storm" timing of having some tanks with siege tech, hellbats, and an upgrade from your armory. Even if it's not overpowered it would be better not to have a magic timing that may or may not be possible to defend against.
The point of the Transformation Servos upgrade on the Factory Tech Lab is to compete for research time; it's cheap, but takes 140 seconds during which you could be researching something else from that tech lab, particularly Siege Tech.
On December 04 2015 21:36 ledarsi wrote: One of the early tests I did showed it was pretty straightforward to hit this "perfect storm" timing of having some tanks with siege tech, hellbats, and an upgrade from your armory. Even if it's not overpowered it would be better not to have a magic timing that may or may not be possible to defend against.
The point of the Transformation Servos upgrade on the Factory Tech Lab is to compete for research time; it's cheap, but takes 140 seconds during which you could be researching something else from that tech lab, particularly Siege Tech.
Fair enough. At first I was miffed that there were so many research upgrades, but after playing around with it, I feel it's okay, especially Siege Tech. I feel the point is if you're going to go mech, it's gonna take time to assemble a full army.
On December 04 2015 20:25 WeddingEpisode wrote: About tactics, the maps don't allow for it that well. The maps are open-spaced in design. Tank change good, but map change is needed.
To use an example from the OP's Ravager & Tank interplay, where is the Ravager supposed to come from in order to apply this indirect-attack strategy? There aren't enough nooks, ramps, blind-spots, high-ground, tunnels, etc.. to do this from. I think the maps dont have enough narrowness; that is to say, there aren't enough effect surprise or sabotage spots. It's just a shooting gallery type design. The map is too accommodating of all units throughout too much of the map.
If an Ultra is too big to go down a certain path, this is not unfair, it just determines a new consideration in the game.
Ah? I'm not sure I get your point. The maps being to open is good for anti-tank play, a positional unit like the siege tank is stronger the more details theres in a map that can be exploited. When a map is big and open, the tanks are weaker because, they can no longer cover the ground in the same way, they become less efficient. This already true even for current tanks.
On December 04 2015 07:17 MockHamill wrote: I think I have an simpler solution that Blizzard is more likely to try out.
Tanks are already cost efficient when they are on max upgrades. Problem is that it occurs so late in the game that air counters tanks too easily at that stage.
So I suggest making tanks stronger in early game (i.e. in small numbers) but remain the same in late game, without adding any projectile attack or removing smart fire.
I suggest increasing its attack from 35 (50 vs armoured) to 40 (60 vs armoured). The effect from attack upgrades should be decreased from 3 per upgrade (5 vs armoured) to just 2 per upgrade flat. That way a max upgraded tank would have an attack of 46 (66 vs armoured) compared to (44/65) now.
So Tanks become better in smaller numbers without becoming too strong in the late game.
That's actually a very very good idea. I mean the whole point is to actually allow mech players to get out on the map with units that can take a fight with good positioning. No one denies tanks are very strong in late game, but yeah I feel like your idea is very good.
Actually, making the maps bigger (without making them more open) would allow mech players to get out on the map to take little niche positions, and the enemy would have to send an appropriate answer, with the mech units still being able to take some kind of a fight if the position is good. So yeah. Make the tanks better in early game - mid game, without making "HURRR DURR MASS TANKS MASS TURRETS" the only way to go mech.
Yes improving tanks early game and mid-game without making them any stronger late game is the solution we all have been looking for. The advantage of my solution compared to the one in the OP is that it introduces less changes but still improves tanks at the stage in the game where they need to be improved. I really hope this suggestion reaches Blizzard and that they try it out on the next balance map.
I feel like this mod should have it's own topic. There's currently two (maybe three) conversations going on here and it muddles the intent of the mod.
That said I only fooled around with it, so I'll give bullet points.
* Tanks are much better in smaller numbers, and doesn't feel overpowered in larger numbers thanks to the lack of smartfiring. I think the range increase is unnecessary though. It makes siege positions that much stronger.
* It's probably just me, but I feel Hellion/Hellbats serve no purpose other than being meatshields. Fortunately, now that Tanks actually do their job, Hellbats are able to perform their job better too because Hellbats are less likely to be overrun by sheer power. That said, I feel Marines do the job better than Hellbats and that's a problem imo.
* I like the change to the Cyclone. Instead of Lock-on, which takes forever to dish out the damage it needs, it instead has one large burst of damage and serves the Anti-Air role pretty well. Good support unit.to other Anti-Air units like Thors and Vikings.
Well apart from adding Transformation Servos I didn't touch Hellions or Hellbats. I was sorely tempted, as it would not have been difficult, but I did not.
If the tank doing its job makes the Hellbat unnecessary (completely unsurprising to me; Hellion mobility is what it brings to the table) then how should the Hellion be changed, assuming the tank is functional?
On December 05 2015 10:07 ledarsi wrote: Well apart from adding Transformation Servos I didn't touch Hellions or Hellbats. I was sorely tempted, as it would not have been difficult, but I did not.
If the tank doing its job makes the Hellbat unnecessary (completely unsurprising to me; Hellion mobility is what it brings to the table) then how should the Hellion be changed, assuming the tank is functional?
Hellions need to be better at holding map control. I couldn't tell you how this can work without essentially making it a Vulture though.
On December 05 2015 10:10 avilo wrote: So Blizzard just released a "community feedback update..." aaaaaaaaaaand ignored literally everything and anything about mech, tanks, etc.
Maybe they should read this thread =/
they're actually working on balance issues, that's why.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/L74DetK.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Yw2vUx1.png)
I just want tanks to be decent/good.
![[image loading]](http://static.tweakers.net/ext/f/aI9BmpECwHGHxxVBpVuL6kQD/full.png)
