Community Feedback Update 7/29

On July 30 2016 23:02 IMPrime wrote:
Personally I would make a lot of sweeping changes. Essentially, things that have too much combat power/durability for their mobility and cost need to be nerfed (liberator, adept, BANELING *Cough Cough etc.). Things that make it too easy to harass and kill workers. There is absolutely nothing fun in not paying attention to your mini map for 3 seconds and then having half your worker line die. In general, defending harasses is so much harder than executing them (unless you're protoss, then MSC beats every small harass).

While win rates may be becoming more and more even, the game is simply too stressful to be fun. For example, while tankivac is not problematic in tvp, protoss has so much bullshit that you need tankivac to even have a chance in the mu, and tankivac is ruining tvt and is making zvt annoying as well. If you scale down on all the obvious bullshit things, you can also nerf things that are too strong defensively (like MSC and to an extent queens). The important thing to note is that while pros have gotten good at dealing with most of the BS, it is not fun to play against these things that are just instant win buttons if you aren't paying attention for a few seconds to your mini map.

For example, in early HotS hellbats were nerfed in that they took up 4 cargo space in a medivac instead of 2. While pros were getting better at defending hellbat drops, it was simply ridiculous that 4 hellbats could fall out and your worker line would immediately evaporate if you weren't paying attention.

Widow Mine - Cannot lock on to workers (workers can still die in the splash damage)
While pros generally don't have trouble not losing that many workers to widow mines, it is still simply annoying to deal with them, particularly since widow mines don't trigger any warnings until half of your workers are gone. It forces opponents to get detection very early because of how quickly widow mines can come out.
Compare that to BW vultures where spider mines needed to be researched (and if you rushed out mines, you would have shitty slow vultures, so getting the speed upgrade on top of that would delay any spider mine rushes further), plus spider mines don't trigger on workers. Vultures' basic attack killed workers quickly anyway, but they really needed both upgrades to be at full strength, so not only did it take awhile to get to that point, it was a big commitment to do so. They also die pretty quickly to cannons/dragoons and mutas could chase them away.

Siege Tank - remove tankivac from the game, gain bonus damage to shields (on top of bonus damage to armored, unless this actually can't be programmed, in which case just buff the damage slightly).

Medivac - Afterburners must be researched.
It gives too much mobility to the terran army in the midgame, and it makes it too easy to do damage in drops and then get away with most of your units. If terran's lategame gets significant buffs (the thor and BC are totally useless, for example) then you could probably remove afterburners entirely. If you keep terran's lategame units shit you need to make medivacs lategame fast so terrans can actually move around the toss and zerg super armies which tend to be fairly immobile, as terrans have severe issues dealing with toss and zerg lategame.

Liberator - Defender mode must be researched.
Again, pros don't lose much (photon overcharge is broken, zergs are getting mass queens, and terrans can make 1 viking quickly), but it is simply a BS thing to deal with. While they still will own mutas, if their ground attack must be researched, making liberators will come with an actual cost and you can't just make a bunch of them without actually scouting.

Ravager - Roach warren must be morphed into a new building (like how hydralisk den must be upgraded into lurker den) before you can morph in ravagers.
Being able to kill forcefields has forced protoss to have severely bullshit units/mechanics of their own, as in WoL and HotS tosses were basically forced to rely on forcefields to not instantly die in the earlygame (photon overcharge definitely helped in HotS though) and ravagers throw that out the window with how early they can be made. With tankivac removed they will also kill every terran unless he just rushes stim every game, thus ravagers get nerfed.

Ultralisk - Ultralisk armor upgrade only gives +2 def instead of +4 (would be 6 armor fully upgraded), but their base HP is increased to 650.
They completely own terrans but are useless against toss. This change means they don't completely own marines and marauders, and makes them slightly less shitty against immortals. It also makes them slightly better against ghost snipe too.

Queen - revert range buff
If the other races are getting weaker at harass, the queen would become too good at stonewalling harass. For example, with medivacs needing to research afterburners, a couple of queens will easily stop a drop while taking nearly zero losses.

Adept - Reduce to 40 shields and 40 health.
They completely destroy pvt because they can just shade on top of marines and melt the army in seconds. They kill workers too quickly; even if you have defenses at home they are still guaranteed kills because they randomly have 150 total shields/health (literally the same as a damn zealot) and kill drones/probes in 2 hits (against terrans they mostly have only marines because of how their race is built, so if they don't have a ton of marines at home you just kill the marines and then all the scvs). It gives the protoss far too much freedom and map control because shade is so powerful. Adept harass with shade is so easy to execute relative to how difficult it is to deal with it. They've completely phased zealots out of the picture, and protosses are starting to make fewer and fewer of other units as well. People complain about terrans massing marines, but mass adepts are way worse. At least marines die to AoE and they can't teleport and they're absolute shit until you get stim.
There are many ways to try and address these issues, but reducing their health drastically at least separates them from zealots and means that tosses can't just mass adepts so easily. They will become glass cannon harass units, and given that units like the reaper, hellion, and mutas all exist (units that suck in straight up fights but are made to harass workers) there's no reason why the adept can't be molded to fit this role, particularly if the other races are also getting nerfed. Remember that adepts are only 25 gas and can be warped in; there's no reason for them to be so powerful.

Warp prism - Reduce pick up range
Warp prisms allow tosses to execute harasses without losing any units. Essentially it's similar to how tankivac makes zvt miserable; terrans can harass them for free and are at no risk of losing the tank or the medivac. Relative to what the defender has to do to stop warp prism harass, it is far too easy to execute this.
(late edit: Perhaps changing warp prism to something like 40 shields/160 health could be a nerf, or even something like 10 shields/190 health. This means that warp prisms start taking hull damage earlier which means the harass has to eventually end. At 100 shields coupled with how fast shields regen out of combat, it's too easy for tosses to harass over and over and never be in any danger of losing units or the warp prism)

Mothership core - Alter photon overcharge into a spell that instead temporarily increases the attack speed of units and buildings near the targeted pylon
MSC can defend all minor harasses with just 50 energy and pylons that you have to make anyway. But terrans need to make turrets and leave a healthy amount of marines at home, and zergs need to make spores. Toss almost never make cannons, and those extra minerals saved lead to toss getting an early 3rd. Toss is the only race that can't die to cheesy all ins because of PO (while cheesy all ins shouldn't exist in general, it is BS that terrans and zergs can die to cheeses while tosses can't). The change means that tosses can't stonewall all minor harasses and early all ins without dedicating actual resources, but the change actually makes them better at holding mid-lategame attacks which tosses did have some trouble with in pvz (ravagers and lurkers).

Baneling - ???? Wheres the baneling nerf? It fits perfectly into your mold of doing catastrophic damage for virtually no cost and little effort.....

While a lot of people will cry out that I'm bad at the game, git gud, etc., please notice that nearly all of these changes are to make it not as easy to harass and kill workers. I am also not favoring any race; all 3 races are getting notable nerfs. These changes were intended to help slow down the pace of the game and strike a better balance between executing harasses vs defending harasses. I've won many games where I did an easy harass, and it simply shouldn't happen.