Hello everyone, today we would like to talk about some of the upcoming changes being placed on the testing matchmaking.
Protoss Air Power We want to shift some of Protoss’s air strength around. We are buffing the Tempest’s damage vs massive bonus and adding a downside to the Void Ray’s Prismatic Alignment.
Since we increased its supply cost back in November, the Tempest’s air to air attack has been unchanged. This has made it less desirable as a Protoss capital ship option, and we want to sharpen its role vs other capital ships with a buff to its massive damage. This should also make it more of an interesting option in PvP as a response to an opponent going for Carriers.
We believe that Void Rays could be a bit less straightforward powerful. To this end we are testing out a change to Prismatic Alignment that will decrease the speed of the Void Ray while the ability is active. This tradeoff between power and speed should allow for more counter play from the opponent as they can now better decide when to run, and when to stand and fight.
Zealot We are testing a reduction of the Charge upgrade cost to help Zealots out. Due to it being the most expensive upgrade on the Twilight Council the upgrade is less interesting to get early on compared to other options. However, we are also open to considering other changes to the Zealot.
Thor In a very experimental change, we are removing the High Impact Payload option from the Thor and instead changing its Javelin Missile Launchers to be flat damage instead of providing a bonus vs. light. While this does reduce the Thor’s single target damage vs high armor capital ships, it greatly increases its overall damage to most grouped air units.
Burrowed Infestor Art We are making burrowed Infestors more easily seen without detection. This was done in response to feedback that the Infestor was too hard to see compared to other active burrowed units like Widow Mines.
Warp Prism In a previous community feedback we mentioned a potential change to Warp Prism’s warp-in mode. With the number of other changes proposed we are going to hold off on implementing this into testing for now. This is to prevent too many changes from going in at once and possibly causing the results of testing to be less clear.
Swarm Hosts As an additional note, we hear that there is concern that Swarm Hosts continue to inhibit Terran Mech play. We are continuing to gather feedback but have not included changes in this round of testing so as to give more focus on other changes first.
Of course, none of these changes are final and are subject to altered or be removed. Let us know what you think in the comments, and we will see you in the testing matchmaking when it goes live!
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Edit 1: Details for April 20 balance testing released
"StarCraft II challenges you to constantly improve your skills and push yourself to new heights. There are many methods available to help a player improve, but the most fundamental one is reviewing your replays to understand what mechanics need the most attention. We’re introducing a new feature, Rewind, to make navigating your replays easier than ever before.
Currently, if you had just completed a match and wanted to review the final battle, you would need to exit the match, find and load the replay, and fast-forward to that critical moment. Now, after a game ends, the new ‘Rewind’ button will appear on the Victory or Defeat dialogue. Clicking on it will immediately convert the game into a fully loaded replay, allowing you to rapidly jump to any point in the match. In addition to the end-of-match dialogue, you can also ‘Quit and Rewind’ during a match through the in-game menu. You’ll be able to see exactly where that proxy Pylon was hiding in mere seconds!
The Rewind feature will be available in all modes that support replays normally, including Multiplayer, Arcade, and Co-op. Note that if you are in a party, Rewind will place you in your own replay and will not affect your teammates — if you want to watch a replay with your teammates, you will still need to utilize the ‘Watch With Others’ feature.
Whether you’re a streamer making tutorials, a commander who wants to know who’s really carrying their weight in Co-op, or a ladder hero perfecting their mechanics, we hope the new Rewind feature will make reviewing key moments in StarCraft II better than ever."
On April 21 2017 02:37 eviltomahawk wrote: Thor In a very experimental change, we are removing the High Impact Payload option from the Thor and instead changing its Javelin Missile Launchers to be flat damage instead of providing a bonus vs. light. While this does reduce the Thor’s single target damage vs high armor capital ships, it greatly increases its overall damage to most grouped air units.
On April 21 2017 02:37 eviltomahawk wrote: Thor In a very experimental change, we are removing the High Impact Payload option from the Thor and instead changing its Javelin Missile Launchers to be flat damage instead of providing a bonus vs. light. While this does reduce the Thor’s single target damage vs high armor capital ships, it greatly increases its overall damage to most grouped air units.
Charge being cheaper is certainly nice, but the upgrade cost was never the issue. It's that widow mines still kill chargelots, and charge/archon has essentially no anti-air capabilities to deal with pushes that include liberators. I'm all for making charge/archon a big thing again, but I don't think this is enough. If anything I'd say leave the cost as it is and focus on its build time instead, or buff zealot shields so they can deal with mines better.
To see more Zealots in TvZ it would be nice if it was possible for Zealots to somehow drag mine shots into the Terran army, similar to BW. This could be probably done with the charge being slightly faster and Zealots more resilient(?)
We are buffing the Tempest’s damage vs massive bonus
we want to sharpen its role vs other capital ships with a buff to its massive damage.
Isn't this also a buff vs. Thors ? Thor's are massive units.
One of the biggest reasons why mech is not viable is the lack of strong and reliable AA, that is able to compete with other lategame comps. Especially mass air like BL/Viper/Hydra or Mass tempest/Carrier can hardcounter mech very easy simply because mech can't bring up enough AA power.
Vikings are too fragile to fit the role of a reliable lategame AA power unit.
The addition of parasitic bombs, split up mech upgrades and buffed corruptors makes Vikings not only terrible vs Protoss (Storms), but also terrible vs zerg lategame.
I think it would be good to turn Thors into a unit that can keep up with mass air compositions, because other wise we will simply don't see mech.
Anti air is such an important aspect. Having not enough anti air is always game ending. If you want to make Mech viable or terran in general better in lategame, you have to give terran a strong and reliable GtA unit, that can keep up with the other races.
In the current version of SC2, mech can be hardcountered by basically sitting back and just massing air units.
The key to more healthy RTS gameplay is to give every race and playstyle reliable Ground-to-air units.
No! Let's not buff Protoss Air T_T. Why can't we just buff their ground army so we can see more skirmishes in the early/mid game? I wouldn't mind seeing buffs/changes to Stalkers and Zealots to make other Gateway units aside from the Adepts useful again. Aside from the air changes the rest of the proposed changes looks good!
We are buffing the Tempest’s damage vs massive bonus
we want to sharpen its role vs other capital ships with a buff to its massive damage.
Isn't this also a buff vs. Thors ? Thor's are massive units.
Pretty sure they're talking only against massive air units. Like it was in HotS.
If this is the case then im very happy. Buffing a high ranged flying siege unit with high HP is basically the worst possible thing you could do, if you want to make mech viable.
If they buff Anti-air units im totally fine with it, doesn't matter which race.
Big air units like BL/Carrier/Tempest/BC just create absolutely terrible and frustrating gameplay.
I personally think that air units should be nothing more than tactical tools, something like a banshee or phenix. I really dislike this capital type of air unit. Those units have absolutely zero interesting aspects. They are just expensive, slow and super strong. They also all share those traits. It's terrible.
At some point it just becomes a matter of who can mass more air units or if the opponent is able to bring up enough AA.
This is very one dimensional RTS gameplay in my opinion.
I think SC2 would be better, if ground based army compositions would be more dominant, instead of someone just sitting back massing Air unit X and then slowly crawl across the map.
The beauty of ground units is that you have to consider a lot of tactical factors like the positioning of the opponents army, choke points, high and low grounds, etc...
The Thor change is interesting. Not sure if is strong enough but mech need serious help vs Air. An alternative change would be keeping High Impact Payload but increase its damage so Thors do a better job vs capital ships.
Swarm Hosts must be nerfed. They are much to cheap and very hard to counter with mech. They basically counter mech harder than the immortal did back in HOTS: The problem is that they are so easily massed, mech will never work as long as Swarm Hosts just cost 75 gas. I suggest increasing the gas cost to 125.
I agree with decreasing the cost of Zealot charge. Using more Zealots and less mass Adepts should be encouraged for the sake of game diversity.
I disagree with giving Tempest increased damage vs Massive. It may help in PvP but it will make it even harder to fight against Carriers in TvP. BC currently is the only working counter to Carriers, if they become easily countered by Tempest then Terran has no answer to Protoss air. Maybe if the Thor anti-air damage was strong enough this would be an ok change though.
I agree with the Void Ray change. Making Void Rays slower while using Prismatic Alignment would provide more counter play options.
Tempest change, means no more BCs vs toss lategame? Needs to be tested, but seems like it kills any chance Terran has lategame.
Thor change seems massive for TvT viking wars. Useless vs toss, not great vs high armor Corruptors and they're still really bad vs Broods and food for Vipers.
I know it sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm still happy with this feedback. It seems they're going towards the right direction. DK is gone and there is hope for this game again.
Tempest cannot be buffed. Ever. It's a unit you mass and accumulate late game. How do balance devs not understand instead of massing carriers you'll then just mass tempests instead, even in PvP late game.
Air units should never be buffed honestly. Across all 3 races. It's just bad for gameplay when air units are stronger than ground units.
Units like the Thor that they mention should be made stronger against air so you can play actual ground versus ground games where units are traded, instead of massed and accumulated with nothing happening.
There currently is no AA mech unit because Thors don't trade vs even a few capital air units like goliaths do in SC1. At least they are looking at this but they should really look at the custom upgrade that i made ages ago that made thors able to counter air units.
Swarmhost are finally mentioned after 5 months - hooray. This unit is complete and utter idiocy and has ruined the game for many players for a while. It needs not one change - it needs multiple massive changes. A unit like this cannot be mega fast. A unit can't be this cheap as it is now. And it needs to have potentially the light tag so that it can be chased down by hellions, adepts, or whatever.
I dunno if anyone has seen me or other players abusing swarmhost vs mech/protoss on stream. It's really disgusting how if you can get up to 20 swarmhost you can just continuously bomb bases with zero counter play.
The unit needs to be eviscerated by the balance team and never seen again. It does not belong in an RTS game.
I do not understand the reasoning of ruining the game for the last 5 months with swarmhosts in their current state. Let's hope this balance team without a certain heavy weight holding them back can start making actual balance changes that are relevant to the game.
I will admit it's refreshing to see a balance team that might actually have some balls again posting updates. Maybe we'll see some ITERATION after all.
On April 21 2017 04:05 Saggymidgetbooty6969 wrote: Message to David Kims successor, NERF ALL AIR UNITS
Yep. Air units make for stalemate / turtle gameplay. Because they are stronger than ground, so whoever masses more air always has the advantage.
Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 had this problem for a while as well.
If anyone wonders why Brood War is such an exciting game to watch - there's very rarely, if ever mass air vs air games. Like the goal of a Brood War game is not to sit afk and mass air every single game. Sure, there are mass wraith TvT games and carriers in TvP but these things also have clear cut counters and aren't oppressive to the point that the entire game is that from end to finish.
Issue with air units in SC2 is that once you reach around 130-140 supply every race has an air unit that is flat out stronger than any ground anti-air. Broodlords, tempest, carrier, BC, liberators... all these units are unhealthy as fuck for the game because they have no ground counters. The only counter to these units is to mass your own air units.
The only healthy-for-gameplay air units in SC2 from my point of view at least are mutalisks, phoenixes, and banshees. These units have clear weaknesses and are very vulnerable to splash damage en masse. Also ground anti-air can manage with masses of these units. Like sure, you can mass muta, phoenix, and banshee if you really want to, but your opponent can respond with thors, widowmines, storm, stalkers, archons, etc. and end up with a stronger ground army.
The balance team really should consider looking at ground anti-air across the board or they should look at current supply costs of all of the "oppressive" air units in the game. Perhaps increasing supply of broodlords, BC, carrier, tempest, raven, will dissuade the massing of them or it'll shift more supply into player's ground armies to be able to handle these "bullshit" lategame armies.
On April 21 2017 03:07 Olli wrote: Charge being cheaper is certainly nice, but the upgrade cost was never the issue. It's that widow mines still kill chargelots, and charge/archon has essentially no anti-air capabilities to deal with pushes that include liberators. I'm all for making charge/archon a big thing again, but I don't think this is enough. If anything I'd say leave the cost as it is and focus on its build time instead, or buff zealot shields so they can deal with mines better.
I don't get why they buff tempests, isn't Protoss already the best late game race? So they don't need buff for PvX. However, if in PvP mass carrier is the way to go, buffing tempest would probably just change it toi PvP go mass tempest in late, as avilo said.
As for the swarm hosts, I have seen zergs play bad (and even admitting it) yet beat turtle terrans that traded very well, just because they switched to mass swarm hosts. On the one hand this is stupid to be able to hard counter a well thought out game plan with one key, after the player traded horribly. On the other hand the Terran played an horrible turtle style into raven/ghost/mech without ever attacking the Zerg, so he doesn't deserve to ever win playing such a style (because if you let your opponent do whatever he wants you shouldn't be able to win). So I don't know if I want swarm hosts not to hard counter obnoxious turtle styles or not.
On April 21 2017 04:18 Poopi wrote: I don't get why they buff tempests, isn't Protoss already the best late game race? So they don't need buff for PvX. However, if in PvP mass carrier is the way to go, buffing tempest would probably just change it toi PvP go mass tempest in late, as avilo said.
As for the swarm hosts, I have seen zergs play bad (and even admitting it) yet beat turtle terrans that traded very well, just because they switched to mass swarm hosts. On the one hand this is stupid to be able to hard counter a well thought out game plan with one key, after the player traded horribly. On the other hand the Terran played an horrible turtle style into raven/ghost/mech without ever attacking the Zerg, so he doesn't deserve to ever win playing such a style (because if you let your opponent do whatever he wants you shouldn't be able to win). So I don't know if I want swarm hosts not to hard counter obnoxious turtle styles or not.
Swarm hosts as a counter to turtle play is literally trying to treat cancer with cancer.
The solution is to make mech more mobile, not introduce a unit that completely invalidates any sort of positional gameplay.
On April 21 2017 02:58 ByuuN wrote: They should give zealot +10 shields to make them better at absorbing damage.
i prefer Blizzard keeps buffing the Zealot and nerfing the Adept if Protoss Gateway units are too strong. Generally, overall, I prefer to see Zealots used more than Adepts.
Buffing tempest is fine, but they need to NERF CARRIERS to compensate. The void ray isn't really a problem, since counter-play already exists with baiting out the charges.
So many changes... Seems like the balance devs confused sc2 with LoL. You can't just throw a million random changes out every few weeks in an RTS. Let the players figure things out.
DK is gone for a few weeks and everything is already going downhill. Adept nerf was also implemented way to fast.
Dear Blizzard: Please Give Greg Black more power on the multiplayer design team. the guy is a really damn good.
On April 21 2017 04:05 Saggymidgetbooty6969 wrote: Message to David Kims successor, NERF ALL AIR UNITS
seems like they've been nerfing air units since LotV came out... which i'm happy about. please Blizzard , keep on nerfing air units
On April 21 2017 04:12 avilo wrote: Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 had this problem for a while as well.
and when Greg Black nerfed the Vindicator ( Allies Air Unit) you said it would become a suicide bomber and said you'd quit the game because of it. neither happened. The Vindicator got nerfed and it was still an important viable Allies Air Unit. you kept on playing and found other stuff to insult Greg about.
The tempest must NOT be buffed. It's the most boring unit imn the game. Seeing 10 carriers amoving across the map is 10× times more exciting than seeing tempests killing everything from 2 screens away.
ZvP & broodlord concerns come before PvP design concerns. Bringing massive a2a damage up again is not a good change for PvZ. Late-game might seem stale and all, "skyzerg imba skytoss imba" whatever. But do not return to HOTS Blizzcon-patch state where Z 200/200 default-loses to 200/200 P. Different mid-high to top level Z and P players are claiming opposite sky armada is OP, so ... Blizzard should know best here and have some serious stats and number crunches on the 30+ minute high mmr games involving these comps. Even if it still sometimes looks awfully stale, skytoss vs skyzerg is in the best spot it's ever been in the history of SC2 and current balance where Broodlords do NOT get 3shot by tempests is better than anything we've had before. Is PvZ late game well designed? No. But after playing multiple engagements and PvZ late-games in LOTV, it feels like you at the very least have way more power to influence the outcome of fights compared to any of the previous iterations of the game.
Void ray movement effect is a very minor piece and is probably best saved for another day. In PvZ, void rays almost always are in fungal or working more as a support unit vs zerg yolo amoves. Voids rarely play a role in standoffs and speed isn't important here. Corruptors can already be pretty nasty already (in midgame, muta corruptor for example) and they just got buffed. Probably better to wait a little bit before the void ray gets nerfed. Skytoss-skyzerg wise most of the dancing/micro from zerg revolves around splitting corruptors vs psi storm, not void rays. But even that's a pretty low priority to be honest. Zerg almost never ever actually engages until the army has been nuked by pbomb and fungal, VR mobility will not make a big difference here. That being said, as a Zerg wouldn't mind voidrays being a bit slower when the deathbeams are on, if it was introduced I'd view it as a good change. ^tldr: voidrays kill everything anyway when the beam is on when the button is pressed. Zerg respectfully backs off, no matter VR speed or not.
The real threat of this feedback update is in the tempest-broodlord interaction. Tempest/BL range is at the heart of skytoss vs skyzerg balance. Tilt it too far in one direction, like buffing tempest a2a or broodlord a2g ... and one of the races will be done for. Think twice should apply before buffing capital ships even more, especially the damage of an unit with 15 range. People want to fight and cast spells, not be chipped away at over 8 minutes by the opposing player's race's superior capital ship (subject to present balance).
Thor is already pretty strong and very underrated but the suggested change probably won't break much. Terran mech is very strong if swarmhost doesn't exist btw, raven and BC's will probably need some big nerfs down the line if SH gets 'deleted' again.
On April 21 2017 03:07 Olli wrote: Charge being cheaper is certainly nice, but the upgrade cost was never the issue. It's that widow mines still kill chargelots, and charge/archon has essentially no anti-air capabilities to deal with pushes that include liberators. I'm all for making charge/archon a big thing again, but I don't think this is enough. If anything I'd say leave the cost as it is and focus on its build time instead, or buff zealot shields so they can deal with mines better.
Zealots are already good enough against Zerg,
Yes, zealots are absurdly tanky. Protoss will just get charge, throw 10 zealots at third hatchery and kill it early game. We already see how they can simply do this in late game, no matter how many spines zerg got. Don't make this mistake Blizzard.
It seems that mechers have the most trouble against big ships, so idk about that thor buff, just make sure to not bring a liberator 2.0 aa. If mutas become unviable again in ZvT i'll just quit the game.
On April 21 2017 05:08 xTJx wrote: It seems that mechers have the most trouble against big ships, so idk about that thor buff, just make sure to not bring a liberator 2.0 aa. If mutas become unviable again in ZvT i'll just quit the game.
You realize that the change does not affect Mutas at all? The only difference is that Thors will do better vs stacked armoured units, not stacked light units.
They didn't say exactly what kind of damage buff Tempest is going to get, it could be some extra damage against shields for example, given they talked about it in PvP context alone.
On April 21 2017 05:08 xTJx wrote: It seems that mechers have the most trouble against big ships, so idk about that thor buff, just make sure to not bring a liberator 2.0 aa. If mutas become unviable again in ZvT i'll just quit the game.
You realize that the change does not affect Mutas at all? The only difference is that Thors will do better vs stacked armoured units, not stacked light units.
Yes, for now. But capital ships don't stack much, so they'll probably try something else, better to prevent it.
There is also the matter of vipers and corruptors. Make thors too strong against them and zerg will have no way to deal with siege tanks.
All changes appear reasonable, but would create other problems. Air toss is too powerful and this tweak will not fix it. Zealot, good idea to make it active but is adept problem resolved yet? Thor - it would be nice to make Mech more viable - ok (its countered by Zerg with Swarm Hosts (terrible unit - but only viable option in zvt). There are more problems in mech vs z. If you just buff Thor and nerf Swarm Hosts - the result will be deplorable. In fact either of these changes alone will be terrible. Burrowed infestor - yes its stupid, but its just as stupid as marines with fast medivacs, liberators, widow mines etc. So it just balances the stupidity and not even sufficiently I believe. Warp prism this issue should be resolved quickly and is long overdue.
Plz no to + massive on tempest. All this buff does is kill t3 air options out of Terran. Protoss does not need an answer to mass t3 air except in the mirror but you are hitting the other races unesisarily with this change.
On April 21 2017 04:05 Saggymidgetbooty6969 wrote: Message to David Kims successor, NERF ALL AIR UNITS
Yep. Air units make for stalemate / turtle gameplay. Because they are stronger than ground, so whoever masses more air always has the advantage.
Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 had this problem for a while as well.
If anyone wonders why Brood War is such an exciting game to watch - there's very rarely, if ever mass air vs air games. Like the goal of a Brood War game is not to sit afk and mass air every single game. Sure, there are mass wraith TvT games and carriers in TvP but these things also have clear cut counters and aren't oppressive to the point that the entire game is that from end to finish.
Issue with air units in SC2 is that once you reach around 130-140 supply every race has an air unit that is flat out stronger than any ground anti-air. Broodlords, tempest, carrier, BC, liberators... all these units are unhealthy as fuck for the game because they have no ground counters. The only counter to these units is to mass your own air units.
The only healthy-for-gameplay air units in SC2 from my point of view at least are mutalisks, phoenixes, and banshees. These units have clear weaknesses and are very vulnerable to splash damage en masse. Also ground anti-air can manage with masses of these units. Like sure, you can mass muta, phoenix, and banshee if you really want to, but your opponent can respond with thors, widowmines, storm, stalkers, archons, etc. and end up with a stronger ground army.
The balance team really should consider looking at ground anti-air across the board or they should look at current supply costs of all of the "oppressive" air units in the game. Perhaps increasing supply of broodlords, BC, carrier, tempest, raven, will dissuade the massing of them or it'll shift more supply into player's ground armies to be able to handle these "bullshit" lategame armies.
Just a thought.
well said, i dont know why SC2 keep this balance changes since the release of the game... they dont listen and this is the reason why broodwar will be played in a few years again in every place.
On April 21 2017 04:45 JimmyJRaynor wrote: Dear Blizzard: Please Give Greg Black more power on the multiplayer design team. the guy is a really damn good.
On April 21 2017 04:12 avilo wrote: Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 had this problem for a while as well.
and when Greg Black nerfed the Vindicator ( Allies Air Unit) you said it would become a suicide bomber and said you'd quit the game because of it. neither happened. The Vindicator got nerfed and it was still an important viable Allies Air Unit. you kept on playing and found other stuff to insult Greg about.
i like to "pay attention to outcomes"
Wait, when the heck, I didn't realize Greg Black came over to Blizzard until now. That's crazy to see all these old C&C folks here now. Was he a recent addition?
On April 21 2017 04:45 JimmyJRaynor wrote: Dear Blizzard: Please Give Greg Black more power on the multiplayer design team. the guy is a really damn good.
On April 21 2017 04:12 avilo wrote: Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 had this problem for a while as well.
and when Greg Black nerfed the Vindicator ( Allies Air Unit) you said it would become a suicide bomber and said you'd quit the game because of it. neither happened. The Vindicator got nerfed and it was still an important viable Allies Air Unit. you kept on playing and found other stuff to insult Greg about.
i like to "pay attention to outcomes"
lol the vindicator nerf was not that much of a nerf..... vindicator was by far the best unit in RA3 if you could use stop micro correctly. It remained a staple allied unit ever since people figured out you could kill multiple infantry per bombing run. Probably the finest and best designed rts air unit I've ever seen tbh. Red alert air was just a lot better designed than sc2 and dare I say it even bw air. In this game evrey unit is a helicopter but in ra3 air units had to return to base after they depleted ammunition. This ment that air units could be incredibly strong without creating slow moving flying death balls or fast moving flying deathballs, caugh "mutas" caugh. I'd take the way air works in ra3 any day it was probably the best part about that game. It also made air units require constant babysitting which ment that there was a soft cap on how many a player could use. Rarley would you see even very good allied players go beyond 8 air units because the micro it required was just not worth the reward.
Edit yes there were mecha tengu and copter swarms, I'm not referring to "those" ra3 air units.
Plz no to + massive on tempest. All this buff does is kill t3 air options out of Terran. Protoss does not need an answer to mass t3 air except in the mirror but you are hitting the other races unesisarily with this change.
well actually it's the opposite there is no counter to mass bc. the only option is to kill the terran before it gets there
Blizzard seems not understand that minor balance change will not bring back some player on the game... So this is the plan ? Buff this.. nerf this... and stay with this game ? like DK did ?
David Kim is gone, and no major change ? no talk about the 12 harvesters start who killed this game ? no reflexion on the GSL competition with the HOTS Mineral ? Sincerely, i love this game so much, but continue like this and in 6 month you will have no organisation on this game, no BaseTrade, no Ogaming, no TB, all will gone... It's so pathetic to kill a game like this. How you can do this i will never understand.
So yes ! let's talk about the Thor ! the Void ! and tomorrow, when nobody will watch the pro game, it will be so interesting to have a "balance game" with no player and no viewer.
Really disappointed.. And trust me i m a big fan of SC2. But Blizzard, you don't understand nothing. it's boring now.
On April 21 2017 03:07 Olli wrote: Charge being cheaper is certainly nice, but the upgrade cost was never the issue. It's that widow mines still kill chargelots, and charge/archon has essentially no anti-air capabilities to deal with pushes that include liberators. I'm all for making charge/archon a big thing again, but I don't think this is enough. If anything I'd say leave the cost as it is and focus on its build time instead, or buff zealot shields so they can deal with mines better.
Zealots are already good enough against Zerg,
So what about ling/bling style? It's not about the cost of upgrade.
On April 21 2017 06:38 c0sm0naut wrote: how about we do none of this, keep the adept nerf and see how that is?
i fail to see how the last few months of starcraft have lead us here
another thing: as others (including myself + nerchio a few posts ago) have repeatedly said on this topic.. zealots are already pretty damn good vs z
Justify your comment about zealots. I don't see them as being good anymore considering dominant ling/bling style. It's one of the reasons I stopped playing LotV (dumb metagame). PvZ isn't fun with that style but that's another topic.
Blizzard seems not understand that minor balance change will not bring back some player on the game... So this is the plan ? Buff this.. nerf this... and stay with this game ? like DK did ?
David Kim is gone, and no major change ? no talk about the 12 harvesters start who killed this game ? no reflexion on the GSL competition with the HOTS Mineral ? Sincerely, i love this game so much, but continue like this and in 6 month you will have no organisation on this game, no BaseTrade, no Ogaming, no TB, all will gone... It's so pathetic to kill a game like this. How you can do this i will never understand.
So yes ! let's talk about the Thor ! the Void ! and tomorrow, when nobody will watch the pro game, it will be so interesting to have a "balance game" with no player and no viewer.
Really disappointed.. And trust me i m a big fan of SC2. But Blizzard, you don't understand nothing. it's boring now.
Maybe they wait until blizzcon for major changes. I don't know. All i know is that LotV is still far away from what SC2 could be.
On April 21 2017 06:38 c0sm0naut wrote: how about we do none of this, keep the adept nerf and see how that is?
i fail to see how the last few months of starcraft have lead us here
another thing: as others (including myself + nerchio a few posts ago) have repeatedly said on this topic.. zealots are already pretty damn good vs z
Justify your comment about zealots. I don't see them as being good anymore considering dominant ling/bling style. It's one of the reasons I stopped playing LotV (dumb metagame). PvZ isn't fun with that style but that's another topic.
even after resonating glaives zealots do more than double the dps that adepts do, without any upgrades at all. for each dmg upgrade adepts do .9 more DPS and for each dmg upgrade zealots do 2.33 more DPS.
so eseentially +3 zealots do triple the dps of adepts and have a higher hp to shields ratio so late game zealots tank way more damage. once you get +3/+3/+3 then this equation changes slightly. if you warp in 4 zealots and right click a hatchery, zerg has to respond. once you get +3, that hatchery will die in seconds
having big upgrades on your zealots makes the protoss race less deathball-y, it lets you do, for instance, exactly what im talking about above (warping in 5 zealots from prism, targetting down a Gspire) while pushing elsewhere and running by with zealots at another expansion
his main army tries to punish you by picking a fight and ignoring your counter attacks? zealots natural tankiness makes them perfect for buying time in this situaotion, where adepts would just melt, or at least not force your opponent to kite which makes them lose dps or take triple the dps of adept dmg (despite their armor type or upgrades)
I think these are the best changes I have seen in years. This addresses a lot of the crap in the game. The turrets lasted too short, did too much damage, made no sense visually. The Thor being junk against so many targets unless on stupid mode that made no sense visually was dumb, about time they just bite the bullet and make the thing a giant goliath (the next change should be stripping the back guns off the model since they cannot be fire in game and reducing the supply cost). The void ray slow down is a long time coming as well, prismatic rays could just A-move through unlimited vikings if they ever got in range, now there will be some kind of counter play against that one mis click.
All the game needs now is a minor mineral cost on swarm hosts. They keep buffing and nerfing the unit, but a free unit generator will always be impossible to balance in a mineral constrained game. Either they are weak and free like a few patches ago, or they are free, strong, and unbreakable by mech like they are now. 10 minerals a locust, but make them strong.
EDIT: the raven, void ray, and thor changes are pure David-Kim's-Ego-Isn't-Here changes. It is about time they start going back on bad design decisions that previous egos kept going.
Side note on the rewind feature: why is SC2's replay system so bad? If I load up a replay in Dota 2 I can scroll to any moment in an hour long match with only a few seconds of loading time, but if I want to go 10 minutes in to a SC2 replay, I basically have to wait for the entire game to play itself back. It feels like they rushed out the replay system in WoL beta and haven't touched it since.
On April 21 2017 07:07 Solar424 wrote: Side note on the rewind feature: why is SC2's replay system so bad? If I load up a replay in Dota 2 I can scroll to any moment in an hour long match with only a few seconds of loading time, but if I want to go 10 minutes in to a SC2 replay, I basically have to wait for the entire game to play itself back. It feels like they rushed out the replay system in WoL beta and haven't touched it since.
On April 21 2017 07:07 Solar424 wrote: Side note on the rewind feature: why is SC2's replay system so bad? If I load up a replay in Dota 2 I can scroll to any moment in an hour long match with only a few seconds of loading time, but if I want to go 10 minutes in to a SC2 replay, I basically have to wait for the entire game to play itself back. It feels like they rushed out the replay system in WoL beta and haven't touched it since.
New autoturret does even more total damage than before , lol. Classic useless so called nerf, just like the so called pylon overcharge nerf in the past...
On April 21 2017 07:23 Aegwynn wrote: New autoturret does even more total damage than before , lol. Classic useless so called nerf, just like the so called pylon overcharge nerf in the past...
It's like 10 hp difference in total. Current theoretically deals 300 damage (practically slightly less) over 7.14 seconds and proposed theoretically 310 over 10.
On April 21 2017 07:07 Solar424 wrote: Side note on the rewind feature: why is SC2's replay system so bad? If I load up a replay in Dota 2 I can scroll to any moment in an hour long match with only a few seconds of loading time, but if I want to go 10 minutes in to a SC2 replay, I basically have to wait for the entire game to play itself back. It feels like they rushed out the replay system in WoL beta and haven't touched it since.
My guess is the way they were storing replays didn't allow them to use random access (any time in the replay) from an algorithmic point of view. They've probably changed how replays are stored to address this issue. It's just a guess though.
I agree though. They should have fixed this issue a long time ago.
On April 21 2017 07:23 Aegwynn wrote: New autoturret does even more total damage than before , lol. Classic useless so called nerf, just like the so called pylon overcharge nerf in the past...
It's like 10 hp difference in total. Current theoretically deals 300 damage (practically slightly less) over 7.14 seconds and proposed theoretically 310 over 10.
i thought they were gonna nerf it? Considering it is the most broken ability in the game atm
On April 21 2017 07:23 Aegwynn wrote: New autoturret does even more total damage than before , lol. Classic useless so called nerf, just like the so called pylon overcharge nerf in the past...
It's like 10 hp difference in total. Current theoretically deals 300 damage (practically slightly less) over 7.14 seconds and proposed theoretically 310 over 10.
i thought they were gonna nerf it? Considering it is the most broken ability in the game atm
Yeah, but it was about worker harass wasn't it, with the patch you'd lose much less since it will take 3 shots instead of two to kill one.
On April 21 2017 07:07 Solar424 wrote: Side note on the rewind feature: why is SC2's replay system so bad? If I load up a replay in Dota 2 I can scroll to any moment in an hour long match with only a few seconds of loading time, but if I want to go 10 minutes in to a SC2 replay, I basically have to wait for the entire game to play itself back. It feels like they rushed out the replay system in WoL beta and haven't touched it since.
My guess is the way they were storing replays didn't allow them to use random access (any time in the replay) from an algorithmic point of view. They've probably changed how replays are stored to address this issue. It's just a guess though.
I agree though. They should have fixed this issue a long time ago.
Even BW has a better replay interface in terms of skipping or going back to any point. A little strange D:
On April 21 2017 04:45 JimmyJRaynor wrote: Dear Blizzard: Please Give Greg Black more power on the multiplayer design team. the guy is a really damn good.
On April 21 2017 04:05 Saggymidgetbooty6969 wrote: Message to David Kims successor, NERF ALL AIR UNITS
seems like they've been nerfing air units since LotV came out... which i'm happy about. please Blizzard , keep on nerfing air units
On April 21 2017 04:12 avilo wrote: Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 had this problem for a while as well.
and when Greg Black nerfed the Vindicator ( Allies Air Unit) you said it would become a suicide bomber and said you'd quit the game because of it. neither happened. The Vindicator got nerfed and it was still an important viable Allies Air Unit. you kept on playing and found other stuff to insult Greg about.
i like to "pay attention to outcomes"
lol the vindicator nerf was not that much of a nerf..... vindicator was by far the best unit in RA3 if you could use stop micro correctly. It remained a staple allied unit ever since people figured out you could kill multiple infantry per bombing run. Probably the finest and best designed rts air unit I've ever seen tbh. Red alert air was just a lot better designed than sc2 and dare I say it even bw air. In this game evrey unit is a helicopter but in ra3 air units had to return to base after they depleted ammunition. This ment that air units could be incredibly strong without creating slow moving flying death balls or fast moving flying deathballs, caugh "mutas" caugh. I'd take the way air works in ra3 any day it was probably the best part about that game. It also made air units require constant babysitting which ment that there was a soft cap on how many a player could use. Rarley would you see even very good allied players go beyond 8 air units because the micro it required was just not worth the reward.
Edit yes there were mecha tengu and copter swarms, I'm not referring to "those" ra3 air units.
Vindicators were fucking stupid and one of the reasons why Allied air was so overpowered in the first place next to the Cryocopter. A Tier 1(!) (vindicator) that is able to kill multiple GtA Infantry with the counter (the AA infantry) barely scratching its paint. Sorry but thats not good design. Not to mention that most Anti-Air got countered by the Units it was supposed to counter. Especially as Soviets with their overpriced Bullfrog that was completely defenseless against ANY ground Unit. BW was much better in this with most Air Units having a weak AtG attack besides the capital ships. And AA Units could actually shoot down stuff, like the Goliath that could also defend itself from Ground Units. Not strong but also not helpless.
See it like this: for the Allies player the Vindicator may have been a cool Unit to use but for the opponent it was very frustating because you couldn´t countermicro. Your infantry Units, even the AA ones were basiclly sitting ducks because the bombs always hits.
On April 21 2017 07:52 NBird wrote: Lots of changes implemented very often. Is Model of buffing / nerfing so often allowing any real stable meta to develop?
No. But this trend won't continue for long. I think it was the adept post that they let us know this test map would be coming soon.
On April 21 2017 08:07 Poopi wrote: Thankfully raven nerf so TvT won't be : "oh shit he killed more workers with his raven, gotta allin or die tryin'" anymore! :D
Well, it's a raven buff. If you react fast, then it's nerf. Yay for another coinflip change.
Agree with everything proposed here to a greater or lesser degree. Feel so strange to be happy about a balance update, but the team really hit a lot of current problems right on the head.
On April 21 2017 07:07 Solar424 wrote: Side note on the rewind feature: why is SC2's replay system so bad? If I load up a replay in Dota 2 I can scroll to any moment in an hour long match with only a few seconds of loading time, but if I want to go 10 minutes in to a SC2 replay, I basically have to wait for the entire game to play itself back. It feels like they rushed out the replay system in WoL beta and haven't touched it since.
On the other hand, Dota 2 replay files are significantly larger than SC2 replay files.
The chargelot change is a good idea. I'm not a big fan of late game air army buffs in general though.
Air armies are cool, but you can't make them the focal point of a Starcraft game, but right now they are! Instead, the focal point should be on ground armies. Why? Because ground armies have to adhere to terrain which is more interesting. It's that simple. Air armies should be left as supporting units.
It's way too easy in starcraft 2 to turtle into mass carrier, or mass battle cruiser etc... you only need 3-4 bases which on many maps is quite easily secured at high-pro level. This is a problem that was supposed to be addressed in lotv and which, for a time looked promising when people were still learning the new economy, but now it's clear that the new economy did not fix turtling to tier 3 units.
A lot of the changes to the lotv economy sped up the game, which I think in the end is a good thing, but it did not fix turtling. That is the main thing I would like to see worked on in the upcoming balance changes.
The last update made it seem like the balance team was a bit lost. Perhaps they should go back and change the real problem with adepts, the shade. There isn't a strong hatred for adepts because of their base stats. Hatred for the adept stems from the adepts ability to shade around your base killing workers and making you feel helpless and also from it's ability to negate terrain and positioning.
Sensing a theme here?
Air armies and adepts(because of shade) have the same fundamental flaw. They both negate terrain and positioning much more than other armies/units.
On April 21 2017 03:07 Olli wrote: Charge being cheaper is certainly nice, but the upgrade cost was never the issue. It's that widow mines still kill chargelots, and charge/archon has essentially no anti-air capabilities to deal with pushes that include liberators. I'm all for making charge/archon a big thing again, but I don't think this is enough. If anything I'd say leave the cost as it is and focus on its build time instead, or buff zealot shields so they can deal with mines better.
WM could not 1 shot things if we got more useful units in early game TvP and oracles didn't destroy entire mineral lines in seconds
On April 21 2017 04:45 JimmyJRaynor wrote: Dear Blizzard: Please Give Greg Black more power on the multiplayer design team. the guy is a really damn good.
On April 21 2017 04:05 Saggymidgetbooty6969 wrote: Message to David Kims successor, NERF ALL AIR UNITS
seems like they've been nerfing air units since LotV came out... which i'm happy about. please Blizzard , keep on nerfing air units
On April 21 2017 04:12 avilo wrote: Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 had this problem for a while as well.
and when Greg Black nerfed the Vindicator ( Allies Air Unit) you said it would become a suicide bomber and said you'd quit the game because of it. neither happened. The Vindicator got nerfed and it was still an important viable Allies Air Unit. you kept on playing and found other stuff to insult Greg about.
i like to "pay attention to outcomes"
Wait, when the heck, I didn't realize Greg Black came over to Blizzard until now. That's crazy to see all these old C&C folks here now. Was he a recent addition?
On April 21 2017 07:03 Aunvilgodess wrote: mech must not be viable. Its a shitty turtle comp that is cancer to the game
Just because you dont like it or lose to it doesn´t mean it shouldn´t be viable. I hate to do it but I can only quote a post from myself here in another thread (long post so i put it in spoilers):
Also turtling is a viable tactic in RTS games (ofc it shouldn´t be like the disaster during the Swarmhost/Raven era) so you just have to deal with it. There are 4 core strategies that always should work in RTS games: - Rushing (focusing on early attacks and harass) - Turtling (focusing on economy and strong defense) - Guerilla (sneaky attacks that can catch the opponent off guard) - Steamroll (Teching early to high tech Units) All these strategies interact with each other. If the opponent turtles you rush. If the opponent goes for guerilla tactics you turtle etc, etc. All these styles should have counters for a healthy game.
We DO NOT WANT an unbeatable composition. We just want Mech to be a healthy option because it´s part of the Terran race. Fyi terran´s are Humans. And Humans do use Mechanical warfare even in real life. This doesn´t make it a 4th race.
For example: During the redesign Blizz said they want the Thor to be the main Anti-air Unit. How is this supposed to work with a Unit that is big, slow with a long production time and high cost? A main AA Unit has to be responsive not so slow to produce that the opponent can outnumber you with the air Units you want to counter before you have enough to shoot them down.
Another problem with this threads is when they see "Mech" they immediately think of avilo as if he would be the only Mech player. They only see his playstyle and think that´s all what Mech should be: Never attack. Ofc this is NOT what Mech should be. Yes it is more defensive and takes a bit time to ramp up and that´s totally fine. But there should be a time in the match where the meching player can and should push out, like a wall thats get closer and closer but still not uncounterable.
Please guys do yourself a favor and get out of this mindset "You just want an A-move comp, turtle forever" etc. And please stop thinking of only avilo when you think about Mech. You could even go so far and blame him that people are so against Mech because of his playstyle. There are so many better Mech players like: - Goody Very strong game sense. While he is defensive he is also capable of being aggressive and pushes out when he sees the opportunity, like when he succesfully repeled an attack. - HTOMario Very, very strong macro and also quite good micro if needed.
Im sure there are more but just stop hating on us that just want Mech a little bit better and thinking everyone wants to be an avilo. Instead of constantly jumping on the hate train you should discuss how we, or Blizz, could make it better without mech becoming an unbeatable style. Because, and i can only repeat this, that´s not what we want.
If we only have rush,rush,rush,aggro,aggro,aggro (which LotV was somewhat forced into with the economy changes) we will have a pretty stale game sooner or later. Im sure thats not the intent of Blizzard and players alike. There are situations were you have to or want to turtle, like when you expect an attack. You don´t attack with your whole army when this occurs unless you want a basetrade scenario. A small distraction force could also help ofc.
Mech is a bit more defensive than Bio it´s just the nature of this playstyle because it ramps up slowly. But it surely shouldn´t be only turtling it should also be capable of steamrolling (Note: NOT A-move I mean strong high tech Units) like I mentioned in my quoted post. From these 4 strategies i explained in my post Mech falls into Turtling and Steamrolling.
Help me out here guys: What is the damage difference dealt from High Impact to the new Javalin Missiles. The Thor "buff" looks like a nerf. Now Thors have no chance against BroodLords. Any mech against late game Zerg air is going to be a joke. High Impact at least helped out quite a bit. This patch takes late game Terran air and throws it even further into the trash.
Please tell me how this helps the BL, Viper, Corruptor (now faster) transition against mech armies? And don't say the answer is to turtle and mass raven...
On April 21 2017 02:37 eviltomahawk wrote: Thor In a very experimental change, we are removing the High Impact Payload option from the Thor and instead changing its Javelin Missile Launchers to be flat damage instead of providing a bonus vs. light. While this does reduce the Thor’s single target damage vs high armor capital ships, it greatly increases its overall damage to most grouped air units.
I swear they tried this before
They never went through with it in the past. The test mod myself and nice username made almost over a year ago with "Thor Hyperballistic Missile" is quite literally this change + a slight range increase packaged into an upgrade.
I dunno if it'll really change much in ground vs air interactions...but it has the potential to make thors really good vs interceptors and clumped air.
Honestly if thors or cyclones or something from the factory is finally able to shoot down air...it might mean the return of AGGRESSIVE mech off of 5+ factories. Meaning you may not have to mass pure starport units to counter mass air, which hopefully would then mean they can tone down ravens imo.
The only thing i see is...it might help a lot in TvP and TvT where the other player is massing high value air units that are lower in numbers...but vs Zerg it really might only help vs clumps of corruptors. It won't do much vs broods because of broodlings and such.
On April 21 2017 04:45 JimmyJRaynor wrote: Dear Blizzard: Please Give Greg Black more power on the multiplayer design team. the guy is a really damn good.
On April 21 2017 04:12 avilo wrote: Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 had this problem for a while as well.
and when Greg Black nerfed the Vindicator ( Allies Air Unit) you said it would become a suicide bomber and said you'd quit the game because of it. neither happened. The Vindicator got nerfed and it was still an important viable Allies Air Unit. you kept on playing and found other stuff to insult Greg about.
i like to "pay attention to outcomes"
I remember that lol. I probably overreacted at the time but the vindicator nerf was fine. I think Greg Black got a lot better with balance on that game from what i remember there was a point where he started to listen a lot to the community/forums and you could see the effects it had on the game.
I clearly remember the hammerhead nerf was something that the cnc3 devs kinda didn't "get" at the time. That was when e-sports was still getting started and the hammerhead was very much like mutalisks in Brood War in terms of if you were really good with microing them you could stay just out of range of units and pick them off. They nerfed the speed of the unit which killed the micro potential...i was really vocal about that i remember.
But then later on i also remember, as i mentioned above, the devs kinda started to "get it" and what people were talking about for the micro potential and buffed it's speed a little bit back to what it was.
None of us really know the ins and outs of the blizzard balance team i think we all just are hoping they really kick the "iteration" into high gear and test more changes that are good for the game and fix things that are broken in design, like swarmhosts for example.
On April 21 2017 05:00 Liquid`Snute wrote: as Zerg, NOPE, nope
ZvP & broodlord concerns come before PvP design concerns. Bringing massive a2a damage up again is not a good change for PvZ. Late-game might seem stale and all, "skyzerg imba skytoss imba" whatever. But do not return to HOTS Blizzcon-patch state where Z 200/200 default-loses to 200/200 P. Different mid-high to top level Z and P players are claiming opposite sky armada is OP, so ... Blizzard should know best here and have some serious stats and number crunches on the 30+ minute high mmr games involving these comps. Even if it still sometimes looks awfully stale, skytoss vs skyzerg is in the best spot it's ever been in the history of SC2 and current balance where Broodlords do NOT get 3shot by tempests is better than anything we've had before. Is PvZ late game well designed? No. But after playing multiple engagements and PvZ late-games in LOTV, it feels like you at the very least have way more power to influence the outcome of fights compared to any of the previous iterations of the game.
Void ray movement effect is a very minor piece and is probably best saved for another day. In PvZ, void rays almost always are in fungal or working more as a support unit vs zerg yolo amoves. Voids rarely play a role in standoffs and speed isn't important here. Corruptors can already be pretty nasty already (in midgame, muta corruptor for example) and they just got buffed. Probably better to wait a little bit before the void ray gets nerfed. Skytoss-skyzerg wise most of the dancing/micro from zerg revolves around splitting corruptors vs psi storm, not void rays. But even that's a pretty low priority to be honest. Zerg almost never ever actually engages until the army has been nuked by pbomb and fungal, VR mobility will not make a big difference here. That being said, as a Zerg wouldn't mind voidrays being a bit slower when the deathbeams are on, if it was introduced I'd view it as a good change. ^tldr: voidrays kill everything anyway when the beam is on when the button is pressed. Zerg respectfully backs off, no matter VR speed or not.
The real threat of this feedback update is in the tempest-broodlord interaction. Tempest/BL range is at the heart of skytoss vs skyzerg balance. Tilt it too far in one direction, like buffing tempest a2a or broodlord a2g ... and one of the races will be done for. Think twice should apply before buffing capital ships even more, especially the damage of an unit with 15 range. People want to fight and cast spells, not be chipped away at over 8 minutes by the opposing player's race's superior capital ship (subject to present balance).
Thor is already pretty strong and very underrated but the suggested change probably won't break much. Terran mech is very strong if swarmhost doesn't exist btw, raven and BC's will probably need some big nerfs down the line if SH gets 'deleted' again.
I think all Terran players can agree that mass raven is really too strong vs everything. The issue is mass raven is also one of the only viable lategame units versus the other race's late games.
Pure mass viking can't counter fungal + air spam, or storm + air spam, the Terran just gets eviscerated from splash and with the recent corruptor buffs, infestor burrow cast buffs, carrier buffs...vikings just basically suck. All that leaves for T anti-air is massing raven (Seeker+auto turrets), and massing BCS. Seeker is really the only mega late game splash threat T has versus free parasitic bombs, storms, etc.
I play both Z and T and know lategames of each race and i do not see how it would be possible for T to win versus Z without ravens unless lategame Z is also nerfed appropriately (which won't happen cause Z only gets more buffs xD).
I like one thing you said though about "people don't wanna be chipped away at over 8 minutes by the opposing player's capital ship."
That's really i think the issue with every race's late game - ravens, carrier, tempest, brood/infestor/parabomb...all these things promote stalemates and then you use free abilities/energy to kill units almost 1 or 2 at a time for the next 10 minutes.
Brood War doesn't have this issue because ground units are entirely superior to air units. You get 50 bajillion fights of ground units crashing into ground in Brood War, making for a really engaging game since you are both fighting for resources and economy, rather than fighting to maintain your ball of overpowered air units that ignore terrain and half of the units in the game (because air units cannot be attacked by ground).
On April 21 2017 07:03 Aunvilgodess wrote: mech must not be viable. Its a shitty turtle comp that is cancer to the game
Just because you dont like it or lose to it doesn´t mean it shouldn´t be viable. I hate to do it but I can only quote a post from myself here in another thread (long post so i put it in spoilers):
Also turtling is a viable tactic in RTS games (ofc it shouldn´t be like the disaster during the Swarmhost/Raven era) so you just have to deal with it. There are 4 core strategies that always should work in RTS games: - Rushing (focusing on early attacks and harass) - Turtling (focusing on economy and strong defense) - Guerilla (sneaky attacks that can catch the opponent off guard) - Steamroll (Teching early to high tech Units) All these strategies interact with each other. If the opponent turtles you rush. If the opponent goes for guerilla tactics you turtle etc, etc. All these styles should have counters for a healthy game.
We DO NOT WANT an unbeatable composition. We just want Mech to be a healthy option because it´s part of the Terran race. Fyi terran´s are Humans. And Humans do use Mechanical warfare even in real life. This doesn´t make it a 4th race.
For example: During the redesign Blizz said they want the Thor to be the main Anti-air Unit. How is this supposed to work with a Unit that is big, slow with a long production time and high cost? A main AA Unit has to be responsive not so slow to produce that the opponent can outnumber you with the air Units you want to counter before you have enough to shoot them down.
Another problem with this threads is when they see "Mech" they immediately think of avilo as if he would be the only Mech player. They only see his playstyle and think that´s all what Mech should be: Never attack. Ofc this is NOT what Mech should be. Yes it is more defensive and takes a bit time to ramp up and that´s totally fine. But there should be a time in the match where the meching player can and should push out, like a wall thats get closer and closer but still not uncounterable.
Please guys do yourself a favor and get out of this mindset "You just want an A-move comp, turtle forever" etc. And please stop thinking of only avilo when you think about Mech. You could even go so far and blame him that people are so against Mech because of his playstyle. There are so many better Mech players like: - Goody Very strong game sense. While he is defensive he is also capable of being aggressive and pushes out when he sees the opportunity, like when he succesfully repeled an attack. - HTOMario Very, very strong macro and also quite good micro if needed.
Im sure there are more but just stop hating on us that just want Mech a little bit better and thinking everyone wants to be an avilo. Instead of constantly jumping on the hate train you should discuss how we, or Blizz, could make it better without mech becoming an unbeatable style. Because, and i can only repeat this, that´s not what we want.
If we only have rush,rush,rush,aggro,aggro,aggro (which LotV was somewhat forced into with the economy changes) we will have a pretty stale game sooner or later. Im sure thats not the intent of Blizzard and players alike. There are situations were you have to or want to turtle, like when you expect an attack. You don´t attack with your whole army when this occurs unless you want a basetrade scenario. A small distraction force could also help ofc.
Mech is a bit more defensive than Bio it´s just the nature of this playstyle because it ramps up slowly. But it surely shouldn´t be only turtling it should also be capable of steamrolling (Note: NOT A-move I mean strong high tech Units) like I mentioned in my quoted post. From these 4 strategies i explained in my post Mech falls into Turtling and Steamrolling.
I'm not saying that turtling shouldn't be viable. But I am going to suggest that you not be able to sit on two bases for fifteen minutes and still be able to compete with someone who is on three or four bases. Turtling should really only be strong (imo) against cheese.
Cheese>Eco>turtle>cheese
I'm fine with some turtling if you have something else that can take mech on (as Zerg) in a straight up fight and not just get rolled over and die.
I personally think there are way too many changes in the list, all going way too quickly to actually judge the impact of all of it. But we'll see I guess.
On April 21 2017 07:03 Aunvilgodess wrote: mech must not be viable. Its a shitty turtle comp that is cancer to the game
Just because you dont like it or lose to it doesn´t mean it shouldn´t be viable. I hate to do it but I can only quote a post from myself here in another thread (long post so i put it in spoilers):
Also turtling is a viable tactic in RTS games (ofc it shouldn´t be like the disaster during the Swarmhost/Raven era) so you just have to deal with it. There are 4 core strategies that always should work in RTS games: - Rushing (focusing on early attacks and harass) - Turtling (focusing on economy and strong defense) - Guerilla (sneaky attacks that can catch the opponent off guard) - Steamroll (Teching early to high tech Units) All these strategies interact with each other. If the opponent turtles you rush. If the opponent goes for guerilla tactics you turtle etc, etc. All these styles should have counters for a healthy game.
We DO NOT WANT an unbeatable composition. We just want Mech to be a healthy option because it´s part of the Terran race. Fyi terran´s are Humans. And Humans do use Mechanical warfare even in real life. This doesn´t make it a 4th race.
For example: During the redesign Blizz said they want the Thor to be the main Anti-air Unit. How is this supposed to work with a Unit that is big, slow with a long production time and high cost? A main AA Unit has to be responsive not so slow to produce that the opponent can outnumber you with the air Units you want to counter before you have enough to shoot them down.
Another problem with this threads is when they see "Mech" they immediately think of avilo as if he would be the only Mech player. They only see his playstyle and think that´s all what Mech should be: Never attack. Ofc this is NOT what Mech should be. Yes it is more defensive and takes a bit time to ramp up and that´s totally fine. But there should be a time in the match where the meching player can and should push out, like a wall thats get closer and closer but still not uncounterable.
Please guys do yourself a favor and get out of this mindset "You just want an A-move comp, turtle forever" etc. And please stop thinking of only avilo when you think about Mech. You could even go so far and blame him that people are so against Mech because of his playstyle. There are so many better Mech players like: - Goody Very strong game sense. While he is defensive he is also capable of being aggressive and pushes out when he sees the opportunity, like when he succesfully repeled an attack. - HTOMario Very, very strong macro and also quite good micro if needed.
Im sure there are more but just stop hating on us that just want Mech a little bit better and thinking everyone wants to be an avilo. Instead of constantly jumping on the hate train you should discuss how we, or Blizz, could make it better without mech becoming an unbeatable style. Because, and i can only repeat this, that´s not what we want.
If we only have rush,rush,rush,aggro,aggro,aggro (which LotV was somewhat forced into with the economy changes) we will have a pretty stale game sooner or later. Im sure thats not the intent of Blizzard and players alike. There are situations were you have to or want to turtle, like when you expect an attack. You don´t attack with your whole army when this occurs unless you want a basetrade scenario. A small distraction force could also help ofc.
Mech is a bit more defensive than Bio it´s just the nature of this playstyle because it ramps up slowly. But it surely shouldn´t be only turtling it should also be capable of steamrolling (Note: NOT A-move I mean strong high tech Units) like I mentioned in my quoted post. From these 4 strategies i explained in my post Mech falls into Turtling and Steamrolling.
I'm not saying that turtling shouldn't be viable. But I am going to suggest that you not be able to sit on two bases for fifteen minutes and still be able to compete with someone who is on three or four bases. Turtling should really only be strong (imo) against cheese.
Cheese>Eco>turtle>cheese
I'm fine with some turtling if you have something else that can take mech on (as Zerg) in a straight up fight and not just get rolled over and die.
I personally think there are way too many changes in the list, all going way too quickly to actually judge the impact of all of it. But we'll see I guess.
I think you missed a patch, made last year when the game lauched, it reduced the minerals and gas on bases to 60%, thats the change that makes turtling on 2 and even 3 bases weaker to someone on more bases.
What's wrong with high-impact payload? I thought you didn't want to make the thor an all-around unit. This change is retarded. What non-light flying unit so dominates the meta that terran needs a thor buff to deal with it? This seems like it's pandering to low level terrans who lose to mass void rays.
Burrow infestor art change fine.
The Raven is a cool unit that requires a different response than the other units in the game. This is not a bad thing. And I like seeing ravens snipe real units. The auto turret makes the Raven totally viable early game. I don't want to see it changed, and reduce Terran tech options.
Prismatic Alignment speed reduction will make it too easy to kite voids with vikings.
Given that void rays are used almost entirely defensively vs Blink timings in PvP or as Medivac/Liberator defense in PvT, I don't understand the reason to nerf Prismatic Alignment... Unless it's absolutely crushing at low level or something.
On April 21 2017 02:37 eviltomahawk wrote: Thor In a very experimental change, we are removing the High Impact Payload option from the Thor and instead changing its Javelin Missile Launchers to be flat damage instead of providing a bonus vs. light. While this does reduce the Thor’s single target damage vs high armor capital ships, it greatly increases its overall damage to most grouped air units.
I swear they tried this before
Me too...
That's weird to do the same again. Ans since they are increasing ( again ) the power of tempests, to be powerful in PVP, they will be use in PVZ and PVT as well and as terrans we could need thors power to to a single target to fight against that. And against broodlords too.
Drop the charge upgrade cost is the wrong way too, the way they think that will increase the number of games with zealots... Adepts is imba that's the problem ! Nerf them and zealots will be back !
And for sure they have to do something for burrowed infestors... Make them more visible or increase the number of available scans or drop the Raven cost. That's insane because we have to scan everywhere, for creep, for burrowed banelings and now for that... They can surround the terran army and fungal in addition with banelings, ultras or ravagers can destroy totally the terran army in one instant.
On April 21 2017 07:52 NBird wrote: Lots of changes implemented very often. Is Model of buffing / nerfing so often allowing any real stable meta to develop?
Noone gives a shit about meta/development/skill whatsoever these days. Some just whine and bitch about everything they can't handle in the game (because they don't even wana try to improve) while the others are just creating work for themselves simulating "support" and "caring". With DK gone it's gonna be even worse because now they "have" to prove they are worthy (aka "we gonna change this fucking game every fucking week, look at us!"). I gave up on reasoning anyone on this matter, it's all in vain. SC2 dev team just shits on dedicated players who actually play the game. Their shity excuses like "we are gonna tune they game till it's in a perfect state" are rediculous. They got 6+ years to reach that goal... What do you expect from them now? Random weekly balance shuffle to attract attention.
Agree that they make changes very often. A new-meta cant appear as fast as they change the balance. When they nerf adepts? A 3-4 days ago and already we have new community update to new changes! Stop changing game at all! Make interceptors cost 25 again and stop. Let the game and players of all skill evolve by themself. Remember - a golden era of BW was after 7-8 years WITHOUT any changes at all! Metagame and real masters of a game appeared because the balance was stable. It maybe wasnt perfectly 'balaced' by itself, but it was stable. How you can master a game that changes every month?
Blizzard, If you are so obsessed with changing the game look at capcom for instance. One relatively big balnce patch every year. So everyone is warranted the game won't be touched for at least one year. What you do these days is just obscene. Throwing in changes during tournaments, w/o any proper analysis/data. Every freaking time "community feedback" thread pops up i tremble in both horror and anger and pray BW HD is coming out sooner or starting to think about fully switching to SFV. And i'm playing starcraft since 98.
On April 21 2017 05:00 Liquid`Snute wrote: as Zerg, NOPE, nope
[...]
The real threat of this feedback update is in the tempest-broodlord interaction. Tempest/BL range is at the heart of skytoss vs skyzerg balance. Tilt it too far in one direction, like buffing tempest a2a or broodlord a2g ... and one of the races will be done for. Think twice should apply before buffing capital ships even more, especially the damage of an unit with 15 range. People want to fight and cast spells, not be chipped away at over 8 minutes by the opposing player's race's superior capital ship (subject to present balance).
Thor is already pretty strong and very underrated but the suggested change probably won't break much. Terran mech is very strong if swarmhost doesn't exist btw, raven and BC's will probably need some big nerfs down the line if SH gets 'deleted' again.
Isn't the biggest problem in the balance of SkyZerg/Toss lategame the fact that your army is tagged pretty much for free and without any risk by oracles? I mean a stronger Tempest would not be as much an issue if your army was not continuously seen by protoss and thus slowly chipped away.
On April 21 2017 04:03 avilo wrote: Tempest cannot be buffed. Ever. It's a unit you mass and accumulate late game. How do balance devs not understand instead of massing carriers you'll then just mass tempests instead, even in PvP late game.
Air units should never be buffed honestly. Across all 3 races. It's just bad for gameplay when air units are stronger than ground units.
Units like the Thor that they mention should be made stronger against air so you can play actual ground versus ground games where units are traded, instead of massed and accumulated with nothing happening.
There currently is no AA mech unit because Thors don't trade vs even a few capital air units like goliaths do in SC1. At least they are looking at this but they should really look at the custom upgrade that i made ages ago that made thors able to counter air units.
Swarmhost are finally mentioned after 5 months - hooray. This unit is complete and utter idiocy and has ruined the game for many players for a while. It needs not one change - it needs multiple massive changes. A unit like this cannot be mega fast. A unit can't be this cheap as it is now. And it needs to have potentially the light tag so that it can be chased down by hellions, adepts, or whatever.
I dunno if anyone has seen me or other players abusing swarmhost vs mech/protoss on stream. It's really disgusting how if you can get up to 20 swarmhost you can just continuously bomb bases with zero counter play.
The unit needs to be eviscerated by the balance team and never seen again. It does not belong in an RTS game.
I do not understand the reasoning of ruining the game for the last 5 months with swarmhosts in their current state. Let's hope this balance team without a certain heavy weight holding them back can start making actual balance changes that are relevant to the game.
I will admit it's refreshing to see a balance team that might actually have some balls again posting updates. Maybe we'll see some ITERATION after all.
I agree, but you must put your money where you stand. Tempests are terrible as of now, try using them vs BCs and report back with a replay. Want to nerf air? Fine then, vouch for the air nerfing campaign and let's start with BCs, Vikings, Ravens and company.
The problem with charge isn't the cost as much as the actual tech and time required. Should zealots receive a proper buff people would start bitching about them too... I appreciate Blizzard's effort but stay frosty, because I'd be genuinely surprised if it went through.
The Void Ray nerf feels kind of heavy handed and from what I understand they're not really the problem in late game skytoss vs Zerg. Void Rays are already kind of rare. Do correct me if I'm wrong.
Let's hope the Tempest goes through so that it can be placed as a complimentary unit in Zealot/Archon to counter Brood Lords. 6 supply Tempests aren't exactly good....
To all the people starting they're reasoning with phrases like "WELL IN BROOD WAR" I'd like to quote Artosis from the recent Dank Shrine stream where he said "Brood war isn't a gem, it has issues just like SC2"
I like the change to the charge cost. Zealot offers a fun playstyle, now we can get to it faster. The tempest change is not too relevant in my opinion. I mean it doesn't really solve the problem of pvp carriers. Sure, you can counter them with tempest but the unfun aspect is that you can only beat air with air. I would prefer a buff to +3 ground attack upgrade so that stalkers could deal with mass air better. Or some change in this direction. A nerf to the void ray is good but I still dont see the role of void rays in the game. There isnt a specific job that you need void rays for. Maybe they are good at parking them next to your base and deffending from drops. But this nerf takes away this identity as well. They are also a very unfun unit for low level gameplay. This movement speed nerf may be for that void ray pvp style that harstem highlighted. Pig has a daily about it if I'm not mistaken.
On April 21 2017 07:07 Solar424 wrote: Side note on the rewind feature: why is SC2's replay system so bad? If I load up a replay in Dota 2 I can scroll to any moment in an hour long match with only a few seconds of loading time, but if I want to go 10 minutes in to a SC2 replay, I basically have to wait for the entire game to play itself back. It feels like they rushed out the replay system in WoL beta and haven't touched it since.
My guess is the way they were storing replays didn't allow them to use random access (any time in the replay) from an algorithmic point of view. They've probably changed how replays are stored to address this issue. It's just a guess though.
I agree though. They should have fixed this issue a long time ago.
It's not that easy though. The way Blizzard manages rewinds and jumps is to store the game state in memory every few seconds to serve as a reference point. The problem with jumping forwards is that you first have to play through the game. You can't add them to the replay because it would increase the file size, and you can't quickly generate reference points in the background while loading the replay because it might take too long or be too much of a strain on the system.
I don't know how Valve manages it for DotA, though.
On April 21 2017 19:08 Musicus wrote: Please don't buff air units like the Tempest!
The rest looks interesting.
I agree. Massing air should be discouraged. I suggest removing 50 hitpoints from Carriers, Tempest and BCs and 25 from Brood Lords. Remove the Liberator range upgrade. Then increase Raven supply to 4 and increase Swarm Hosts gas cost to 125 and we have a perfect game. Well not perfect but at least better than now.
On April 21 2017 11:12 avilo wrote: Brood War doesn't have this issue because ground units are entirely superior to air units. You get 50 bajillion fights of ground units crashing into ground in Brood War, making for a really engaging game since you are both fighting for resources and economy, rather than fighting to maintain your ball of overpowered air units that ignore terrain and half of the units in the game (because air units cannot be attacked by ground).
Has Blizzard ever acknowledged this? In WoL the Brood Lord was in ascendance for a long time before finally breaking through in mid-2012, but I never heard about Blizzard monitoring the unit because they didn't want BL/Viking battles to become the norm. And they did promote the phoenix as a counter to mutalisks, fantasizing about the micro potential and such.
The reason corsair vs muta works in BW is because mutalisks are mostly good when grouped up and in that formation they fall easily to the corsair's splash attack. Furthermore, you can't effectively chase mutalisks with corsairs. In SC2 the way to adapt to phoenixes is to make more mutalisks and vice versa, also phoenixes are faster than mutalisks.
I'm not sure if Blizzard understands that air units are best suited to interacting with ground units, and that every air vs air interaction needs to be carefully designed so that it won't become dominant.
I've seen a lot of games that are like: Viking vs brood lord phoenix vs mutalisk mutalisk vs mutalisk brood lord vs tempest
On April 21 2017 07:03 Aunvilgodess wrote: mech must not be viable. Its a shitty turtle comp that is cancer to the game
Just because you dont like it or lose to it doesn´t mean it shouldn´t be viable. I hate to do it but I can only quote a post from myself here in another thread (long post so i put it in spoilers):
Also turtling is a viable tactic in RTS games (ofc it shouldn´t be like the disaster during the Swarmhost/Raven era) so you just have to deal with it. There are 4 core strategies that always should work in RTS games: - Rushing (focusing on early attacks and harass) - Turtling (focusing on economy and strong defense) - Guerilla (sneaky attacks that can catch the opponent off guard) - Steamroll (Teching early to high tech Units) All these strategies interact with each other. If the opponent turtles you rush. If the opponent goes for guerilla tactics you turtle etc, etc. All these styles should have counters for a healthy game.
We DO NOT WANT an unbeatable composition. We just want Mech to be a healthy option because it´s part of the Terran race. Fyi terran´s are Humans. And Humans do use Mechanical warfare even in real life. This doesn´t make it a 4th race.
For example: During the redesign Blizz said they want the Thor to be the main Anti-air Unit. How is this supposed to work with a Unit that is big, slow with a long production time and high cost? A main AA Unit has to be responsive not so slow to produce that the opponent can outnumber you with the air Units you want to counter before you have enough to shoot them down.
Another problem with this threads is when they see "Mech" they immediately think of avilo as if he would be the only Mech player. They only see his playstyle and think that´s all what Mech should be: Never attack. Ofc this is NOT what Mech should be. Yes it is more defensive and takes a bit time to ramp up and that´s totally fine. But there should be a time in the match where the meching player can and should push out, like a wall thats get closer and closer but still not uncounterable.
Please guys do yourself a favor and get out of this mindset "You just want an A-move comp, turtle forever" etc. And please stop thinking of only avilo when you think about Mech. You could even go so far and blame him that people are so against Mech because of his playstyle. There are so many better Mech players like: - Goody Very strong game sense. While he is defensive he is also capable of being aggressive and pushes out when he sees the opportunity, like when he succesfully repeled an attack. - HTOMario Very, very strong macro and also quite good micro if needed.
Im sure there are more but just stop hating on us that just want Mech a little bit better and thinking everyone wants to be an avilo. Instead of constantly jumping on the hate train you should discuss how we, or Blizz, could make it better without mech becoming an unbeatable style. Because, and i can only repeat this, that´s not what we want.
If we only have rush,rush,rush,aggro,aggro,aggro (which LotV was somewhat forced into with the economy changes) we will have a pretty stale game sooner or later. Im sure thats not the intent of Blizzard and players alike. There are situations were you have to or want to turtle, like when you expect an attack. You don´t attack with your whole army when this occurs unless you want a basetrade scenario. A small distraction force could also help ofc.
Mech is a bit more defensive than Bio it´s just the nature of this playstyle because it ramps up slowly. But it surely shouldn´t be only turtling it should also be capable of steamrolling (Note: NOT A-move I mean strong high tech Units) like I mentioned in my quoted post. From these 4 strategies i explained in my post Mech falls into Turtling and Steamrolling.
I'm not saying that turtling shouldn't be viable. But I am going to suggest that you not be able to sit on two bases for fifteen minutes and still be able to compete with someone who is on three or four bases. Turtling should really only be strong (imo) against cheese.
Cheese>Eco>turtle>cheese
I'm fine with some turtling if you have something else that can take mech on (as Zerg) in a straight up fight and not just get rolled over and die.
I personally think there are way too many changes in the list, all going way too quickly to actually judge the impact of all of it. But we'll see I guess.
I think you missed a patch, made last year when the game lauched, it reduced the minerals and gas on bases to 60%, thats the change that makes turtling on 2 and even 3 bases weaker to someone on more bases.
Just saying cuz maybe you missed that change.
I didn't miss it, I do like that change a LOT.
I still think turtling in general shouldn't be some cure all, where you can build this unstoppable mech army that just crushes everything in its path.
I personally struggle against mech, and unless they play it super horribly, I end up getting stomped. In experimenting with a bunch of different options, but turtling for twenty minutes every time I play with it all coming down to one engagement of 200/200 armies is boring, both from a player perspective and a spectator perspective.
Oh and might I propose a Colossus buff? For a unit that is tier 3, costs 300/200 and requires a 200/200 upgrade to hit the field it has felt underwhelming since lotv. A while back you said you would have experimented with 12 (+4) light on the test map. What happened to this idea?
On April 21 2017 17:45 insitelol wrote: Blizzard, If you are so obsessed with changing the game look at capcom for instance. One relatively big balnce patch every year. So everyone is warranted the game won't be touched for at least one year. What you do these days is just obscene. Throwing in changes during tournaments, w/o any proper analysis/data. Every freaking time "community feedback" thread pops up i tremble in both horror and anger and pray BW HD is coming out sooner or starting to think about fully switching to SFV. And i'm playing starcraft since 98.
So Blizzard should wait 1 year before chaging stuff that are clearly broken in the game? They did that for Ultra armor and i didn't see the playerbase or viewers numbers going up.
The thor AA change/buff needs to come with an upgrade to increase cyclone's AA damage to give mech single target AA damage from the ground, or else every protoss and terran playing against mech will go straight into tempest/liberators or BCs.
On April 21 2017 20:47 icesergio wrote: Oh and might I propose a Colossus buff? For a unit that is tier 3, costs 300/200 and requires a 200/200 upgrade to hit the field it has felt underwhelming since lotv. A while back you said you would have experimented with 12 (+4) light on the test map. What happened to this idea?
colossus are good enough, 12+4 idea was cancelled cuz it's obviously imba and it was mentioned in previous updates
On April 21 2017 05:00 Liquid`Snute wrote: Thor is already pretty strong and very underrated but the suggested change probably won't break much. Terran mech is very strong if swarmhost doesn't exist btw, raven and BC's will probably need some big nerfs down the line if SH gets 'deleted' again.
Really??? Thor pretty strong and underrated? the unit wich doesnt do it´s job vs any air unit its meant to be "good against". the unit wich gets hardcountered by every tier 1 unit ingame... the unit wich is so slow fat and clunky that it cant even do its job vs mutas well enough... cant get how u feel thor is strong and underrated... its just a waste of minerals and gas, coz it has absolutly no job that other units cant do better...
On April 21 2017 05:00 Liquid`Snute wrote: Thor is already pretty strong and very underrated but the suggested change probably won't break much. Terran mech is very strong if swarmhost doesn't exist btw, raven and BC's will probably need some big nerfs down the line if SH gets 'deleted' again.
Really??? Thor pretty strong and underrated? the unit wich doesnt do it´s job vs any air unit its meant to be "good against". the unit wich gets hardcountered by every tier 1 unit ingame... the unit wich is so slow fat and clunky that it cant even do its job vs mutas well enough... cant get how u feel thor is strong and underrated... its just a waste of minerals and gas, coz it has absolutly no job that other units cant do better...
I've always viewed thors as a tank unit (similar to an ultralisk) whose job was to help zone out balls of flying units (specifically mutalisks) - and provide okay ground damage.
Ground damage was mainly taken care of by tanks
Air damage was mainly taken care of by marines / valks.
They definitely ARE slow, and I feel like that's one thing that is against them.
I personally wouldn't mind seeing stronger AA in the cyclone (have it not be tied to an ability) - at the cost of some of its air range (obviously) and at the cost of some of its ground damage (so it just doesn't become the only unit you bother to make out of a factory...don't want a repeat of the warhound, where there was no purpose in building anything BUT that unit)
i think Blizzard should improve the Thor along the lines they suggest in the previous 2 community updates. Improve the Thor to the point that we see them used occasionally. if Thors become the most commonly used Mech Unit then that is too much.
Specifically, "While this does reduce the Thor’s single target damage vs high armor capital ships, it greatly increases its overall damage to most grouped air units." .. i like this thinking here. This is great stuff.
Thors are "very under rated"? "very under rated" by whom?
You should be able to turn off Prismatic Alignment if it slows the Void Ray that much. That nerf is huge, and I think it is way too much unless Prismatic Alignment is buffed unless they want to make Void Rays like Carriers in WOL.
On April 21 2017 11:12 avilo wrote: Brood War doesn't have this issue because ground units are entirely superior to air units. You get 50 bajillion fights of ground units crashing into ground in Brood War, making for a really engaging game since you are both fighting for resources and economy, rather than fighting to maintain your ball of overpowered air units that ignore terrain and half of the units in the game (because air units cannot be attacked by ground).
Has Blizzard ever acknowledged this? In WoL the Brood Lord was in ascendance for a long time before finally breaking through in mid-2012, but I never heard about Blizzard monitoring the unit because they didn't want BL/Viking battles to become the norm. And they did promote the phoenix as a counter to mutalisks, fantasizing about the micro potential and such.
The reason corsair vs muta works in BW is because mutalisks are mostly good when grouped up and in that formation they fall easily to the corsair's splash attack. Furthermore, you can't effectively chase mutalisks with corsairs. In SC2 the way to adapt to phoenixes is to make more mutalisks and vice versa, also phoenixes are faster than mutalisks.
I'm not sure if Blizzard understands that air units are best suited to interacting with ground units, and that every air vs air interaction needs to be carefully designed so that it won't become dominant.
I've seen a lot of games that are like: Viking vs brood lord phoenix vs mutalisk mutalisk vs mutalisk brood lord vs tempest
and they're all infuriating to watch...
i absolutely agree with you.
When Air units start to become dominant, RTS turns into a pure numbers game where most tactical and strategic factors don't play a role anymore. Such games are hard to watch and play. Not enjoyable at all in my opinion.
the main reason zealots are horrible in lotv is because of accelerated economy making mineral expenditure more delicate for protoss
tbh adepts should cost 100/50, it wouldnt do anything to adept timings since protoss floats crazy gas in the midgame, but it would make it harder for toss to fuck around on mass adept while forcing opponent back into their mineral lines for the entire midgame while banking gas for doom tech later (like adept phoenix in pvt, adepts into carriers/storm in pvz, etc.)
charge cost reduction might actually help zealots a bit but probably not enough to make them as good as adepts. as everyone has pointed out, the adept is too preferable to zealots with its fast worker 2shotting and teleport. even with vision reduction it's still far far preferable to have an adept which can shade back and forth wasting the enemy's time than a zealot which, when caught, just simply dies, and also can't target workers from range
or they could just make adepts not tank units, which everyone has been asking for since beta since it makes no sense watching tiny unarmored protoss who throw energy balls take 500 hits from a roach and kill mineral lines while surrounded by army, and make zealots much tankier/maybe take away the passive speed increase from charge
pvz has been ridiculous since hots because protoss is designed around getting free drones to limit the zerg economy. at this point i would even be okay with something radical like a nexus cost decrease + some nerf to defense (overcharge maybe) to allow protoss to just play the economic game properly. because the progression of "use micro to get massive amounts of free drones with adept or phoenix -> get to 3/4 base -> get air or storm" is the same shit we've been seeing since hots and it's what makes pvz garbage - not talking about balance, just the way the game plays out. and i feel like in lotv the same is partly true of pvt
edit: didnt know the adept nerf was live when i wrote this, not sure it changes much though since reducing adept hp just makes them weak/decent and poorly designed instead of strong and poorly designed
Chargelots are just too good vs Zerg right now, there isn't really a good cost effective response, both roach and baneling are really average to fight chargelots, that are gas free, tanky and have a really good DPS, while need no micro at all.
The only thing that don't make them too strong right now is the tech is expansive, so they prefer unlock adepts upgrades, so are a lategame tech.
With a cost reduction, Protoss will be able to save a lot of gas, so get better upgrades, faster skytoss or templar/archons tech, or more immortal.
Due to larva nerf, the early game for Zerg is just droning hard to try to catch Protoss superior economy for the first 5-6min.
If Protoss get even more cost effective army with reducing a lot the gas cost that is the limiting factor, well zerg wouldn't be able to beat protoss at all.
Most of these ideas sound sensible to test. I completely agree with the sentiment that buffing air units is generally bad and that they should support ground armies rather than being a composition on their own. The possible exception to this is mass carrier, so long as it takes long enough for the protoss to build up to, allowing the other races a good chance to 'stop them before they get there' as it is in broodwar PvT. Tempests/Voids/BL+Corruptor/Banshees/BCs on the other hand should definitely not follow this mantra.
I'm most uncertain about the Thor change - the high impact payload didn't seem particularly game changing vs. broods/tempests carriers, but then again, it's not like anyone masses Thors in response to mass air by Protoss or BL/corrupter.
While I don't think that the Thor should hard counter air in sufficient numbers, I think it should be tweaked so it trades better to give Terran mech a more even trade without it being straight up even or superior. I wonder if adding some kind of late game upgrade to the Thor's AA that either increased the range or damage would be worth trying? Something relatively expensive with fusion core you could go for if you scout the air transition, it might help put the opponent on a clock to push with their air comp rather than turtling up for too long. Other suggestions to help terran out with air could be a damage point reduction to vikings to improve their micro vs. corruptors or an upgrade to increase viking range by 1-2. Would also add an interesting dynamic to TvT air battles if one player has air superiority (similarly to how the pulse crystals can change the phoenix battle in PvP)
I play T but I can see the zealot buff causing problems in early midgame ZvP before lurkers are out, I suppose banes will still help out quite a bit.
The main problem with the swarm host aside from the cost IMO is the lack of counter play, in sufficient numbers they can just swoop in in destroy a CC/Nexus/Hatch before you can respond, even if some units are present they have enough tanking ability to just ignore them (you need to have a large chuck of your army in position just to have a chance). In saying this I guess the real counter play is to have map awareness/vision and intercept them before they deploy. Which is a skill that I suspect is probably underdeveloped due to a lot of high level players either not going mech or not playing against them enough.
Other ideas for changing the swarm host: -Make it easier for the opponent to scout that the zerg is probably going for swarm hosts. Either: The appearance of the infestation pit changes slightly when enduring locusts is finished or, require a cheap and quick morph at the infestation pit to build swarm hosts.
-Change the locusts to be more squishy in the air, allows more to be gunned down before they own your base.
-Change the locusts to burrow rather than fly but be able to move under walls etc. Duration expires slightly more slowly while burrowed and increases when unburrowed. Makes having detection able to counter them. locusts automatically unburrow when they reach their target destination but if attacked prior to this the player needs to manually un-burrow them to trade, requiring more attention/APM cost from the zerg.
On April 21 2017 11:12 avilo wrote: Brood War doesn't have this issue because ground units are entirely superior to air units. You get 50 bajillion fights of ground units crashing into ground in Brood War, making for a really engaging game since you are both fighting for resources and economy, rather than fighting to maintain your ball of overpowered air units that ignore terrain and half of the units in the game (because air units cannot be attacked by ground).
Has Blizzard ever acknowledged this? In WoL the Brood Lord was in ascendance for a long time before finally breaking through in mid-2012, but I never heard about Blizzard monitoring the unit because they didn't want BL/Viking battles to become the norm. And they did promote the phoenix as a counter to mutalisks, fantasizing about the micro potential and such.
The reason corsair vs muta works in BW is because mutalisks are mostly good when grouped up and in that formation they fall easily to the corsair's splash attack. Furthermore, you can't effectively chase mutalisks with corsairs. In SC2 the way to adapt to phoenixes is to make more mutalisks and vice versa, also phoenixes are faster than mutalisks.
I'm not sure if Blizzard understands that air units are best suited to interacting with ground units, and that every air vs air interaction needs to be carefully designed so that it won't become dominant.
I've seen a lot of games that are like: Viking vs brood lord phoenix vs mutalisk mutalisk vs mutalisk brood lord vs tempest
and they're all infuriating to watch...
i absolutely agree with you.
When Air units start to become dominant, RTS turns into a pure numbers game where most tactical and strategic factors don't play a role anymore. Such games are hard to watch and play. Not enjoyable at all in my opinion.
SC2 has a lot of air units relative to BW, accounting for underused air units in BW. And there are some more units that mostly ignore terrain, like the stalker, colossus, reaper. Terran is very mobile with medivacs too, you have so many of them and you can often just pick up your entire army.
In BW you had the carrier, shuttle and the corsair, in SC2 it is the carrier, void ray, tempest, stalker, mothership (core), colossus, warp prism, phoenix that all see use. Excluding zealots, you can basically march your entire army up and down cliffs.
On April 21 2017 20:47 icesergio wrote: Oh and might I propose a Colossus buff? For a unit that is tier 3, costs 300/200 and requires a 200/200 upgrade to hit the field it has felt underwhelming since lotv. A while back you said you would have experimented with 12 (+4) light on the test map. What happened to this idea?
I would rather see the Colossus get a redesign since it has been the poster boy for boring unit design and deathball issues since WoL.
On April 22 2017 01:44 Tyrhanius wrote: Chargelots are just too good vs Zerg right now, there isn't really a good cost effective response
You attack me with 20 chargelots and I will laugh with my 5 lurkers and 1 spore crawler.
First you won't have lurker tech when they will have 20 chargelots.
Second, a decent Protoss will just use revelation on your lurkers and they won't lose anything.
Honestly just look the profil of the top Zerg of EU :
What's the worst MU of Nerchio, Snute, Elazer, Lambo, True, Zanster, Stephano,TLO, Denver, Namshar ?
ZvP... (some have even 20% difference with the other MU)
What will happen in your opinion if they buff chargelots, and tempest while nerfing swarm host ?
oh, now we're talking about MU balance. I was just talking about your wild comment that chargelots have no cost effective counter
most people when discussing design are referring to actual in-game situations that happen while players are trying to establish economy and tech, not made up scenarios where you can have any number of any unit just to prove some theoretical concept of cost efficiency
On April 21 2017 20:47 icesergio wrote: Oh and might I propose a Colossus buff? For a unit that is tier 3, costs 300/200 and requires a 200/200 upgrade to hit the field it has felt underwhelming since lotv. A while back you said you would have experimented with 12 (+4) light on the test map. What happened to this idea?
I would rather see the Colossus get a redesign since it has been the poster boy for boring unit design and deathball issues since WoL.
i've always wanted them to make it possible to fuse observers to colossus so the observer can't be targeted haha
not a serious balance suggestion, i just think it would be hilarious
On April 21 2017 11:12 avilo wrote: Brood War doesn't have this issue because ground units are entirely superior to air units. You get 50 bajillion fights of ground units crashing into ground in Brood War, making for a really engaging game since you are both fighting for resources and economy, rather than fighting to maintain your ball of overpowered air units that ignore terrain and half of the units in the game (because air units cannot be attacked by ground).
Has Blizzard ever acknowledged this? In WoL the Brood Lord was in ascendance for a long time before finally breaking through in mid-2012, but I never heard about Blizzard monitoring the unit because they didn't want BL/Viking battles to become the norm. And they did promote the phoenix as a counter to mutalisks, fantasizing about the micro potential and such.
The reason corsair vs muta works in BW is because mutalisks are mostly good when grouped up and in that formation they fall easily to the corsair's splash attack. Furthermore, you can't effectively chase mutalisks with corsairs. In SC2 the way to adapt to phoenixes is to make more mutalisks and vice versa, also phoenixes are faster than mutalisks.
I'm not sure if Blizzard understands that air units are best suited to interacting with ground units, and that every air vs air interaction needs to be carefully designed so that it won't become dominant.
I've seen a lot of games that are like: Viking vs brood lord phoenix vs mutalisk mutalisk vs mutalisk brood lord vs tempest
and they're all infuriating to watch...
i absolutely agree with you.
When Air units start to become dominant, RTS turns into a pure numbers game where most tactical and strategic factors don't play a role anymore. Such games are hard to watch and play. Not enjoyable at all in my opinion.
SC2 has a lot of air units relative to BW, accounting for underused air units in BW. And there are some more units that mostly ignore terrain, like the stalker, colossus, reaper. Terran is very mobile with medivacs too, you have so many of them and you can often just pick up your entire army.
In BW you had the carrier, shuttle and the corsair, in SC2 it is the carrier, void ray, tempest, stalker, mothership (core), colossus, warp prism, phoenix that all see use. Excluding zealots, you can basically march your entire army up and down cliffs.
Yeah all this mobility makes it so it's very hard to play styles which don't revolve around mobile armies and if you want to you have to turtle extra hard.
Air to air unit interactions are all about numbers and that's simply boring to watch and play. I really would hope blizzard addresses this one day, but it being a rather big change i don't have much hope.
On April 22 2017 03:11 VHbb wrote: It's amazing how the community whined about adepts for months, they got nerfed, and immediately after the whine about chargelots starts..
On April 22 2017 03:11 VHbb wrote: It's amazing how the community whined about adepts for months, they got nerfed, and immediately after the whine about chargelots starts..
"Chargelots are too good vs zerg right now."
this is beyond absurd
it's almost as if communities consist of separate people who have separate opinions and once group A is satisfied group B will be unsatisfied and begin complaining
I think there was a poll about races. Zergs were the most on teamliquid, so I'd not be surprised if most balance changes are in favour of zerg just because they're the biggest group (more vocal?).
On April 22 2017 03:45 Shield wrote: I think there was a poll about races. Zergs were the most on teamliquid, so I'd not be surprised if most balance changes are in favour of zerg just because they're the biggest group (more vocal?).
I've seen some Snute, Scarlett, nerchio, Pigs posting here multiple times and make some good propositions but never been listened by Blizzard.
I don't think they read a lot teamliquid, it seems they rather read reddit and battle net.
I think Zealots should do less damage but have more HP or shields. They wouldn't be as great end game as random mineral dump harass units since they would do less damage but they still might be useful to your army as 3/3/3 meat shields.
On April 22 2017 04:38 FarmI3oy wrote: Still no discussion of the success of the Faction Wars tourney, and no acknowledgment of the failed LOTV economy model.
I think this will be the next big topic to discuss. The economy is such a fundamental part of SC2 and RTS in general and LotV proved that the current economy is not optimal for the gameplay.
I've seen some Snute, Scarlett, nerchio, Pigs posting here multiple times and make some good propositions but never been listened by Blizzard.
I don't think they read a lot teamliquid, it seems they rather read reddit and battle net.
I'd be very surprised if the balance team actually read any posts on TL/Reddit/Bnet in depth. Of course they have to say that they're "listening to the community" for PR purposes, but Blizzard gets specific feedback directly from Afreeca and pros. Undoubtedly, they also have a bunch of internal data analytics on ladder games and winrates and so forth. Combined, that gives them pretty solid coverage of the entire playerbase.
They probably skim the forums to make sure they haven't missed a big issue that everyone's complaining about, but no more than that.
I mean, if I was a Blizzard dev, there's no way I would do more than that. Nothing more frustrating as a professional engineer than having some idiot without the slightest understanding of your job try and tell you how to do it (I get quite enough of that already, thanks). If you throw in the sheer amount of toxic/whine/shit posting that floats around these forums on top of that, I wouldn't go near it without a ten-foot pole, a hazmat suit, and a flamethrower.
I've seen some Snute, Scarlett, nerchio, Pigs posting here multiple times and make some good propositions but never been listened by Blizzard.
I don't think they read a lot teamliquid, it seems they rather read reddit and battle net.
I'd be very surprised if the balance team actually read any posts on TL/Reddit/Bnet in depth. Of course they have to say that they're "listening to the community" for PR purposes, but Blizzard gets specific feedback directly from Afreeca and pros. Undoubtedly, they also have a bunch of internal data analytics on ladder games and winrates and so forth. Combined, that gives them pretty solid coverage of the entire playerbase.
They probably skim the forums to make sure they haven't missed a big issue that everyone's complaining about, but no more than that.
I mean, if I was a Blizzard dev, there's no way I would do more than that. Nothing more frustrating as a professional engineer than having some idiot without the slightest understanding of your job try and tell you how to do it (I get quite enough of that already, thanks). If you throw in the sheer amount of toxic/whine/shit posting that floats around these forums on top of that, I wouldn't go near it without a ten-foot pole, a hazmat suit, and a flamethrower.
And that's why you don't sell any games. Games are sold to people not to pro gamers. Same with software (I'm a software developer). Applications and games are for people. The moment you refuse to listen to them, you're out of business.
what about increasing the food usage by about +50% for every air unit? late game air only comps would be much weaker, but before limit they would behave similar to current game (op or not).
And that's why you don't sell any games. Games are sold to people not to pro gamers. Same with software (I'm a software developer). Applications and games are for people. The moment you refuse to listen to them, you're out of business.
Software dev? Pleased to meet you, so am I, as you could probably tell by my username.
I don't work with games (never liked C++), and even if I did, selling them is marketing's job. I'm an engineer. Division of labor means I can happily give no fucks whatsoever about what the consumers think.
I've seen some Snute, Scarlett, nerchio, Pigs posting here multiple times and make some good propositions but never been listened by Blizzard.
I don't think they read a lot teamliquid, it seems they rather read reddit and battle net.
I'd be very surprised if the balance team actually read any posts on TL/Reddit/Bnet in depth. Of course they have to say that they're "listening to the community" for PR purposes, but Blizzard gets specific feedback directly from Afreeca and pros. Undoubtedly, they also have a bunch of internal data analytics on ladder games and winrates and so forth. Combined, that gives them pretty solid coverage of the entire playerbase.
They probably skim the forums to make sure they haven't missed a big issue that everyone's complaining about, but no more than that.
I mean, if I was a Blizzard dev, there's no way I would do more than that. Nothing more frustrating as a professional engineer than having some idiot without the slightest understanding of your job try and tell you how to do it (I get quite enough of that already, thanks). If you throw in the sheer amount of toxic/whine/shit posting that floats around these forums on top of that, I wouldn't go near it without a ten-foot pole, a hazmat suit, and a flamethrower.
And that's why you don't sell any games. Games are sold to people not to pro gamers. Same with software (I'm a software developer). Applications and games are for people. The moment you refuse to listen to them, you're out of business.
That is one particular way to look at it. I would say that in many respects listening to "what people want" is bad too.
It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. - Steve Jobs
I've seen some Snute, Scarlett, nerchio, Pigs posting here multiple times and make some good propositions but never been listened by Blizzard.
I don't think they read a lot teamliquid, it seems they rather read reddit and battle net.
I'd be very surprised if the balance team actually read any posts on TL/Reddit/Bnet in depth. Of course they have to say that they're "listening to the community" for PR purposes, but Blizzard gets specific feedback directly from Afreeca and pros. Undoubtedly, they also have a bunch of internal data analytics on ladder games and winrates and so forth. Combined, that gives them pretty solid coverage of the entire playerbase.
They probably skim the forums to make sure they haven't missed a big issue that everyone's complaining about, but no more than that.
I mean, if I was a Blizzard dev, there's no way I would do more than that. Nothing more frustrating as a professional engineer than having some idiot without the slightest understanding of your job try and tell you how to do it (I get quite enough of that already, thanks). If you throw in the sheer amount of toxic/whine/shit posting that floats around these forums on top of that, I wouldn't go near it without a ten-foot pole, a hazmat suit, and a flamethrower.
And that's why you don't sell any games. Games are sold to people not to pro gamers. Same with software (I'm a software developer). Applications and games are for people. The moment you refuse to listen to them, you're out of business.
That is one particular way to look at it. I would say that in many respects listening to "what people want" is bad too.
It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. - Steve Jobs
That's why there is agile development. You show prototypes to the user, then rely on feedback. You don't develop the full product first because it costs more. Again, you rely on users. I think it's going a bit offtopic though.
I hope everyone is playing on the test map! It is the only way to know for sure.
So far Thor seems slightly more useful vs air but still worthless vs ground in TvP. I really doubt mech will be viable in TvP but I will continue testing.
Since this is about balance/design I might as well ask this here: In TvZ mules and inject balance each other out. But Terran has to pay much more to build its infrastructure (barracks / fact / spatio etc... it amounts to more money than a few queens and macro hatches). What is it counter balanced by?
On April 22 2017 06:32 ypslala wrote: why do auto turrets from raven deal damage immediately, but infested terrans from the infestor have a spawning time?
infested terrans would be so much more usefull without the spawning time.
Do we want infested terran to be more useful?
One of the biggest complaints from the community that hasn't been addressed by blizzard ever is free units. Zergs has plenty of those, and half of them are borderline OP.
I've seen some Snute, Scarlett, nerchio, Pigs posting here multiple times and make some good propositions but never been listened by Blizzard.
I don't think they read a lot teamliquid, it seems they rather read reddit and battle net.
I'd be very surprised if the balance team actually read any posts on TL/Reddit/Bnet in depth. Of course they have to say that they're "listening to the community" for PR purposes, but Blizzard gets specific feedback directly from Afreeca and pros. Undoubtedly, they also have a bunch of internal data analytics on ladder games and winrates and so forth. Combined, that gives them pretty solid coverage of the entire playerbase.
They probably skim the forums to make sure they haven't missed a big issue that everyone's complaining about, but no more than that.
I mean, if I was a Blizzard dev, there's no way I would do more than that. Nothing more frustrating as a professional engineer than having some idiot without the slightest understanding of your job try and tell you how to do it (I get quite enough of that already, thanks). If you throw in the sheer amount of toxic/whine/shit posting that floats around these forums on top of that, I wouldn't go near it without a ten-foot pole, a hazmat suit, and a flamethrower.
And that's why you don't sell any games. Games are sold to people not to pro gamers. Same with software (I'm a software developer). Applications and games are for people. The moment you refuse to listen to them, you're out of business.
You realize tho, that balance patches don't affect how much money they got (and not get, since apart from skins, coop and other weird things that come bundled with the multiplayer, they aren't selling more things to you once you bought the game) from sc2? So why would they specifically listen to random people more than pros? The casual players don't play sc2 anymore (and never really played it). I remember some online friends that are "casual" sc2 players... They got WoL, finished the game. Never played after that (okay maybe they played a bit of 4v4 and stuff on WoL). HotS came out, they got it day one, finish the solo, stop it. LotV, after all these years, they still buy the *** game 40€ only to play a few hours then never play it again (maybe they played Nova idk). Those who milk money to blizzard don't play the multiplayer so they don't talk about it either.
Would like to see a carrier change really. Interceptor cost was a good way of making sure Protoss could only go carriers when ahead. Sky based mid-late compositions are pretty boring and should not be seen regularly imo. Where is the fun there? Positional play is way more rewarding and gives more options to retreat to fight again.
Thor anti-air: I don't get it. Would be nice to see the thought process behind this. Why don't they buff cyclone anti-air? Just seen two cyclones locked on an oracle in the PiG tournament and it still got a bunch of scv kills without dying. Can anyone explain why cyclone AA is so weak?
This is my initial feedback based on having played exclusively on the the test map since it was released.
Normally TvT is about who gets the air advantage at least if one of the players uses mech. You mass vikings and ravens so that you get air control and then use tanks or liberators to take over the ground. Thor are basically useless in the matchup.
This has completely changed on the test maps!
Thanks to the new Thor there is a completely new and more complicated interaction between the units. Basically, there is a dance between tanks, thors, vikings and liberators. Tanks kill the thors, thors kill the vikings, vikings kill the liberators and liberators kill the tanks. Plus liberators can kill thors and thors can kill tanks as well.
It is much more complex and fun and becomes less about who masses the most air units but more about who uses his units in the best way. It is also more back and forth and you can trade units all the time instead of turtling up and trying to get the air advantage.
So really good job Blizzard! TvT is more fun and less one-dimensional with the new Thor!
On April 22 2017 20:23 MockHamill wrote: This is my initial feedback based on having played exclusively on the the test map since it was released.
Normally TvT is about who gets the air advantage at least if one of the players uses mech. You mass vikings and ravens so that you get air control and then use tanks or liberators to take over the ground. Thor are basically useless in the matchup.
This has completely changed on the test maps!
Thanks to the new Thor there is a completely new and more complicated interaction between the units. Basically, there is a dance between tanks, thors, vikings and liberators. Tanks kill the thors, thors kill the vikings, vikings kill the liberators and liberators kill the tanks. Plus liberators can kill thors and thors can kill tanks as well.
It is much more complex and fun and becomes less about who masses the most air units but more about who uses his units in the best way. It is also more back and forth and you can trade units all the time instead of turtling up and trying to get the air advantage.
So really good job Blizzard! TvT is more fun and less one-dimensional with the new Thor!
Nice to hear that its fun in TVT but unfortunaly it breaks lategame ZvT. Thirs were already good in the matchup especially vs Broodlords. Now they are pretty much shutting donw this comp especially with vikings in the mix.
I would rather see more thoughtful changes being implemented. They should analize more how it would affect other matchups. For example Zealot buff seems good for TvP but it's totally unnecessary in ZvP etc. This changes overall are just shifting the meta not fixing balance
Balance can really only be fine tuned so much, there is alot of things that can't merely be patched out with a balance update that really are affecting the meta
1) Muta regeneration requiring hard counter's 2) Aerial armies being in general stronger when massed then ground 3) 12 worker start kicking things off incredibly quickly (faster tech is now the norm because why not really?) 4) Many units that have been specifically geared for worker kills has made economy raiding the defacto play style (for the most part I know mech has become more prevalent but if it just sits and turtles it can be overwhelmed)
On April 22 2017 20:23 MockHamill wrote: This is my initial feedback based on having played exclusively on the the test map since it was released.
Normally TvT is about who gets the air advantage at least if one of the players uses mech. You mass vikings and ravens so that you get air control and then use tanks or liberators to take over the ground. Thor are basically useless in the matchup.
This has completely changed on the test maps!
Thanks to the new Thor there is a completely new and more complicated interaction between the units. Basically, there is a dance between tanks, thors, vikings and liberators. Tanks kill the thors, thors kill the vikings, vikings kill the liberators and liberators kill the tanks. Plus liberators can kill thors and thors can kill tanks as well.
It is much more complex and fun and becomes less about who masses the most air units but more about who uses his units in the best way. It is also more back and forth and you can trade units all the time instead of turtling up and trying to get the air advantage.
So really good job Blizzard! TvT is more fun and less one-dimensional with the new Thor!
Nice to hear that its fun in TVT but unfortunaly it breaks lategame ZvT. Thirs were already good in the matchup especially vs Broodlords. Now they are pretty much shutting donw this comp especially with vikings in the mix.
I would rather see more thoughtful changes being implemented. They should analize more how it would affect other matchups. For example Zealot buff seems good for TvP but it's totally unnecessary in ZvP etc. This changes overall are just shifting the meta not fixing balance
That's a really good point, these constant balance changes don't help improving the game in the long run, but I guess that's the only way without having to touch underlaying issues (aka putting in real effort) - races taking turns being OP.
On April 22 2017 20:23 MockHamill wrote: This is my initial feedback based on having played exclusively on the the test map since it was released.
Normally TvT is about who gets the air advantage at least if one of the players uses mech. You mass vikings and ravens so that you get air control and then use tanks or liberators to take over the ground. Thor are basically useless in the matchup.
This has completely changed on the test maps!
Thanks to the new Thor there is a completely new and more complicated interaction between the units. Basically, there is a dance between tanks, thors, vikings and liberators. Tanks kill the thors, thors kill the vikings, vikings kill the liberators and liberators kill the tanks. Plus liberators can kill thors and thors can kill tanks as well.
It is much more complex and fun and becomes less about who masses the most air units but more about who uses his units in the best way. It is also more back and forth and you can trade units all the time instead of turtling up and trying to get the air advantage.
So really good job Blizzard! TvT is more fun and less one-dimensional with the new Thor!
Nice to hear that its fun in TVT but unfortunaly it breaks lategame ZvT. Thirs were already good in the matchup especially vs Broodlords. Now they are pretty much shutting donw this comp especially with vikings in the mix.
I would rather see more thoughtful changes being implemented. They should analize more how it would affect other matchups. For example Zealot buff seems good for TvP but it's totally unnecessary in ZvP etc. This changes overall are just shifting the meta not fixing balance
That's a really good point, these constant balance changes don't help improving the game in the long run, but I guess that's the only way without having to touch underlaying issues (aka putting in real effort) - races taking turns being OP.
I think it's important to update lotv currently. You shouldn't let a game settle that suffers from gameplay issues.
Get the game in the right spot and then you can let it settle.
Why would you wait to do the necessary changes ? People will simply get annoyed and frustrated with the game and eventually stop playing it.
On April 23 2017 00:46 jpg06051992 wrote: Balance can really only be fine tuned so much, there is alot of things that can't merely be patched out with a balance update that really are affecting the meta
1) Muta regeneration requiring hard counter's 2) Aerial armies being in general stronger when massed then ground 3) 12 worker start kicking things off incredibly quickly (faster tech is now the norm because why not really?) 4) Many units that have been specifically geared for worker kills has made economy raiding the defacto play style (for the most part I know mech has become more prevalent but if it just sits and turtles it can be overwhelmed)
Remove WidowMines from the game and u will get removal of Muta Regeneration and this will cause straight Phoenix nerf. I call this reverse balancing as muta regen and phoenix buff in the end were strictly caused by introducing WidowMine in HOTS.
Edit:
To be honest I wonder when Blizzard will realize that all balance issues are connected to BIO being lil bit OP. For example interactions between Zerg and Toss units are pretty much balanced more or less. It's BIO that determines mech being weak and Toss to have stupid shooting pylons or Adepts. They really should start from toning down BIO and adjusting the game from that point. But in the same time I know that it's too much effort and they will never try this out. Sad but true. And if they won't we will be condemned to this hot fixes that won't solve anything.
On April 23 2017 00:46 jpg06051992 wrote: Balance can really only be fine tuned so much, there is alot of things that can't merely be patched out with a balance update that really are affecting the meta
1) Muta regeneration requiring hard counter's 2) Aerial armies being in general stronger when massed then ground 3) 12 worker start kicking things off incredibly quickly (faster tech is now the norm because why not really?) 4) Many units that have been specifically geared for worker kills has made economy raiding the defacto play style (for the most part I know mech has become more prevalent but if it just sits and turtles it can be overwhelmed)
Remove WidowMines from the game and u will get removal of Muta Regeneration and this will cause straight Phoenix nerf. I call this reverse balancing as muta regen and phoenix buff in the end were strictly caused by introducing WidowMine in HOTS.
Edit:
To be honest I wonder when Blizzard will realize that all balance issues are connected to BIO being lil bit OP.
They won't realize this because it's not true. ZvT has always been the poster boy for what Sc2 could be - it's amazing to watch. I would even say TvT is pretty cool now that we can't pick up seiged tanks. ZvP and TvP, however, are pretty awful. If I'm remembering correctly, TvP was great in HotS, but the end-stage ZvP was why I quit the game. I'm not saying toss are the problem, but it's not the strength of bio.
Apparently the Thor change is a nerf against light units, so it will be worse against Mutas and such. Then again I almost never see Thors used against mutas like they were in HotS so it will still be a lategame buff against BL and Corruptors.
On April 23 2017 03:49 pvsnp wrote: Apparently the Thor change is a nerf against light units, so it will be worse against Mutas and such. Then again I almost never see Thors used against mutas like they were in HotS so it will still be a lategame buff against BL and Corruptors.
That's only the upgrade difference, isn't it? They still do flat 12 vs mutas at +0. They just made bonus DPS baseline. So if anything this only affects mech where thors still are still a must vs mutalisks :p. Then again, the dmg buff will also very likely affect mech vs BLs only.
That's only the upgrade difference, isn't it? They still do flat 12 vs mutas at +0. They just made bonus DPS baseline. So if anything this only affects mech where thors still are still a must vs mutalisks :p. Then again, the dmg buff will also very likely affect mech vs BLs only.
Yep, an upgrade difference only. A fully upgraded Thor post-patch does 3 less damage vs light than pre-patch.
Agree that this will only be a mech thing. Tbh I doubt it will have much of an effect regardless because I hardly ever see Thors at all outside of mech. What the Thor really needs is a cost+size reduction and a speed buff (*cough* Goliath *cough*).
As it is mech is even worse off in TvP compared to live. There are 4 reasons for this.
1. Thors do less damage against Tempest and Carriers. 2. HIP made it easier to focus fire down Tempest/Carriers. Now they often lose DPS trying in vain to kill to kill interceptors instead of killing ground or air units. 3. Zealots gets speed earlier which means that your helllbats are worse off if they attack you before you can get blueflame. 4. Tempest do more damage to BC which is the only effective counter to Carriers.
So even though TvT is improved it is hardly worth it since TvP got even worse. Solution Keep High Impact payload but give it bonus damage to mechanical. This solves problems both in TvT and TvP. It also solves the problem with that the new Thor is actually OP vs Zerg.
On April 22 2017 04:38 FarmI3oy wrote: Still no discussion of the success of the Faction Wars tourney, and no acknowledgment of the failed LOTV economy model.
On April 23 2017 04:10 MockHamill wrote: As it is mech is even worse off in TvP compared to live. There are 4 reasons for this.
1. Thors do less damage against Tempest and Carriers. 2. HIP made it easier to focus fire down Tempest/Carriers. Now they often lose DPS trying in vain to kill to kill interceptors instead of killing ground or air units. 3. Zealots gets speed earlier which means that your helllbats are worse off if they attack you before you can get blueflame. 4. Tempest do more damage to BC which is the only effective counter to Carriers.
So even though TvT is improved it is hardly worth it since TvP got even worse. Solution Keep High Impact payload but give it bonus damage to mechanical. This solves problems both in TvT and TvP. It also solves the problem with that the new Thor is actually OP vs Zerg.
We all know this is the real solution:
It's Blizzard's exact flat damage change packaged into an upgrade and gives thors the extra AA range to deal with capital ships that clump.
But you know...only was made and tested and proven viable over 1+ yr ago. Devs might wanna take a look at it.
The upgrade was designed for the exact reason you said - thors can not even get into range of carrier/tempest because of the ground in front.
It's based off the same concept of the goliath charon booster upgrade in Brood War. I can't fathom why SC2 devs don't realize carriers were also imbalanced vs mech in SC1 UNTIL Brood War came along and the developers solved the problem by giving goliaths the massive range upgrade via a machine shop upgrade.
Same thing can be done for SC2. It's proven in the video i just linked.
This solves problems both in TvT and TvP. It also solves the problem with that the new Thor is actually OP vs Zerg.
Could you please explain why the new Thor is OP vs zerg ? It's not stronger vs mutas than before. It just counter corruptors better now, so that vikings are able to kill broodlords.
This solves problems both in TvT and TvP. It also solves the problem with that the new Thor is actually OP vs Zerg.
Could you please explain why the new Thor is OP vs zerg ? It's not stronger vs mutas than before. It just counter corruptors better now, so that vikings are able to kill broodlords.
Atleast that's my observation so far.
Well in my experience Thor/Viking now beat BroodLord/Corruptors mostly because that corruptors stacks. It is very possible this is not true on higher levels though were people are better at spreading out their units.
Also my opponents so far has not used vipers which may turn the table.
On April 23 2017 04:10 MockHamill wrote: As it is mech is even worse off in TvP compared to live. There are 4 reasons for this.
1. Thors do less damage against Tempest and Carriers. 2. HIP made it easier to focus fire down Tempest/Carriers. Now they often lose DPS trying in vain to kill to kill interceptors instead of killing ground or air units. 3. Zealots gets speed earlier which means that your helllbats are worse off if they attack you before you can get blueflame. 4. Tempest do more damage to BC which is the only effective counter to Carriers.
So even though TvT is improved it is hardly worth it since TvP got even worse. Solution Keep High Impact payload but give it bonus damage to mechanical. This solves problems both in TvT and TvP. It also solves the problem with that the new Thor is actually OP vs Zerg.
It's Blizzard's exact flat damage change packaged into an upgrade and gives thors the extra AA range to deal with capital ships that clump.
But you know...only was made and tested and proven viable over 1+ yr ago. Devs might wanna take a look at it.
The upgrade was designed for the exact reason you said - thors can not even get into range of carrier/tempest because of the ground in front.
It's based off the same concept of the goliath charon booster upgrade in Brood War. I can't fathom why SC2 devs don't realize carriers were also imbalanced vs mech in SC1 UNTIL Brood War came along and the developers solved the problem by giving goliaths the massive range upgrade via a machine shop upgrade.
Same thing can be done for SC2. It's proven in the video i just linked.
Yeah this may the best solution. Hope Blizzard tries this is the next version of the test map.
This solves problems both in TvT and TvP. It also solves the problem with that the new Thor is actually OP vs Zerg.
Could you please explain why the new Thor is OP vs zerg ? It's not stronger vs mutas than before. It just counter corruptors better now, so that vikings are able to kill broodlords.
Atleast that's my observation so far.
Well in my experience Thor/Viking now beat BroodLord/Corruptors mostly because that corruptors stacks. It is very possible this is not true on higher levels though were people are better at spreading out their units.
Also my opponents so far has not used vipers which may turn the table.
That's exactly what the thor buff is for. Thor is a underused unit, because the GtG attack gets overshadowed by tanks and the AA is too bad to compete with other lategame compositions.
Vikings don't cut it anymore, because a lot of viking counters got buffed, mech upgrades got split up and vikings are just very fragile.
The problem with mech is that it simply doesn't has a reliable way to deal with mass air, so mech games often turn into turtle scenario's where the opponent just tries to get the perfect air deathball and mech player tries to basically do the same, because there's no GtA option available.
The fact that you have to counter air units with your own mass air units, ruins mech play and creates awful gameplay.
That's why i think buffing the thor's AA is a good step.
This solves problems both in TvT and TvP. It also solves the problem with that the new Thor is actually OP vs Zerg.
Could you please explain why the new Thor is OP vs zerg ? It's not stronger vs mutas than before. It just counter corruptors better now, so that vikings are able to kill broodlords.
Atleast that's my observation so far.
Well in my experience Thor/Viking now beat BroodLord/Corruptors mostly because that corruptors stacks. It is very possible this is not true on higher levels though were people are better at spreading out their units.
Also my opponents so far has not used vipers which may turn the table.
Oh no, god forbid Terran actually has a chance lategame!
On April 23 2017 04:53 avilo wrote: We all know this is the real solution:
i do not like approaching a change in a unit with this mindset. it leads to confirmation bias. i prefer the "experiment and discover" mindset. your Thor modification is worthy of experimental exploration. Until its fully tested in the hands of the game's best players its impossible to say for certain if its the correct change for the Thor. To say in advance it must be the solution is to cheat the process... and Blizzard is all about process.
On April 22 2017 20:23 MockHamill wrote: This is my initial feedback based on having played exclusively on the the test map since it was released.
Normally TvT is about who gets the air advantage at least if one of the players uses mech. You mass vikings and ravens so that you get air control and then use tanks or liberators to take over the ground. Thor are basically useless in the matchup.
This has completely changed on the test maps!
Thanks to the new Thor there is a completely new and more complicated interaction between the units. Basically, there is a dance between tanks, thors, vikings and liberators. Tanks kill the thors, thors kill the vikings, vikings kill the liberators and liberators kill the tanks. Plus liberators can kill thors and thors can kill tanks as well.
It is much more complex and fun and becomes less about who masses the most air units but more about who uses his units in the best way. It is also more back and forth and you can trade units all the time instead of turtling up and trying to get the air advantage.
So really good job Blizzard! TvT is more fun and less one-dimensional with the new Thor!
Nice to hear that its fun in TVT but unfortunaly it breaks lategame ZvT. Thirs were already good in the matchup especially vs Broodlords. Now they are pretty much shutting donw this comp especially with vikings in the mix.
I would rather see more thoughtful changes being implemented. They should analize more how it would affect other matchups. For example Zealot buff seems good for TvP but it's totally unnecessary in ZvP etc. This changes overall are just shifting the meta not fixing balance
That's a really good point, these constant balance changes don't help improving the game in the long run, but I guess that's the only way without having to touch underlaying issues (aka putting in real effort) - races taking turns being OP.
I think it's important to update lotv currently. You shouldn't let a game settle that suffers from gameplay issues.
Get the game in the right spot and then you can let it settle.
Why would you wait to do the necessary changes ? People will simply get annoyed and frustrated with the game and eventually stop playing it.
Oh sorry, my wording may have been a bit misleading, what I meant was that they should really take a thorough look and do a greater revamp (like partly reverting the economic changes introduced with LotV, at least that's what I personally would like to see as a player), then tweak here and there until it feels good and leave it at that, just like you.
This is what has been Blizzard's approach for the majority of LotV, or at least that's what they told the community.
However, reality is that we have had constant tweaking/changing without addressing the core issues which make the game frustrating to play, namely 12 worker start, which somewhat killed diversity and sacrificed better playability for a "better" viewer experience.
HotS was quite balanced at the end, meta was a bit stale, people disliked Swarm Hosts vs. Mech, sure, but it probably was in the best state SC2 has ever seen balance-wise. BW had quite long periods of stale meta, as well.
On April 23 2017 03:49 pvsnp wrote: Apparently the Thor change is a nerf against light units, so it will be worse against Mutas and such. Then again I almost never see Thors used against mutas like they were in HotS so it will still be a lategame buff against BL and Corruptors.
WTF?! So it's a nerf in every way except what? Clumped voidrays? Protoss air buff and Terran anti air nerf lol
The only reason why serral has made this work was also because showtime moved his air units away allowing serral to get his spores into position. If showtime were to just slowly chip away the spores with oracle relevation and tempest range, things would have been very different. The only reason why serral's spore push is doing anything is due him threatening showtime's base.
Why they are nerfed thors against light? Every upgrade can add +1 +2 +3 against light and its will be good. Blizzard, give sensor tower power - warp prism cant did warp in sensor tower range, only drop. In late game warp prism too good.
If we look at the bigger picture, blizzard is caught in a buff spiral concerning air fights. Parasitic bomb, steroided seeker missile, steroided corruptor, steroided void ray, steroided carrier, steroided thor, steroided banshees : nearly everything that flies got buffed at some point in LOTV. That means that AA options had to be buffed, which is why we've got a queen that shuts down everything that flies, that's part of the reason why the overcharge can't really be removed in the current state of the game, that's part of the reason why mech sucks, that's why the viper is a 4 spell caster and that's why the viking sucks (never got buffed to match the air threats).
I'd be much happier if air units were nerfed in this game because air units don't rely on strategy but on execution, hard counters and snowballs.
On April 23 2017 04:10 MockHamill wrote: As it is mech is even worse off in TvP compared to live. There are 4 reasons for this.
1. Thors do less damage against Tempest and Carriers. 2. HIP made it easier to focus fire down Tempest/Carriers. Now they often lose DPS trying in vain to kill to kill interceptors instead of killing ground or air units. 3. Zealots gets speed earlier which means that your helllbats are worse off if they attack you before you can get blueflame. 4. Tempest do more damage to BC which is the only effective counter to Carriers.
So even though TvT is improved it is hardly worth it since TvP got even worse. Solution Keep High Impact payload but give it bonus damage to mechanical. This solves problems both in TvT and TvP. It also solves the problem with that the new Thor is actually OP vs Zerg.
It's Blizzard's exact flat damage change packaged into an upgrade and gives thors the extra AA range to deal with capital ships that clump.
But you know...only was made and tested and proven viable over 1+ yr ago. Devs might wanna take a look at it.
The upgrade was designed for the exact reason you said - thors can not even get into range of carrier/tempest because of the ground in front.
It's based off the same concept of the goliath charon booster upgrade in Brood War. I can't fathom why SC2 devs don't realize carriers were also imbalanced vs mech in SC1 UNTIL Brood War came along and the developers solved the problem by giving goliaths the massive range upgrade via a machine shop upgrade.
Same thing can be done for SC2. It's proven in the video i just linked.
Yeah this may the best solution. Hope Blizzard tries this is the next version of the test map.
I disagree. This change would just create another abomination: a super high range, high damage, splash G2A unit. Granted, it's balanced somewhat by the Thor's cost and it's slow movement speed (and the fact that it's a ground unit). But I still think it would be too good.
So, to keep it clean and simple, if the Thor should be able to gain additional range, something needs to be taken away. Ideally the splash G2A should be low range and single target G2A (High Impact Payload) — after putting it back into the game — should be long range.
I've always favored transferring the Lock-On mechanic from the Cyclone to the Thor's single target G2A because I think it would fit really well. This way you actually would have to micro Thors by selecting targets for the long range G2A much like the Ghost's Snipe.
Overall, the changes seem to be headed in the right direction though. They actually address issues like mech AA and Swarm Hosts now. Really good to see!
On April 23 2017 18:22 JackONeill wrote: If we look at the bigger picture, blizzard is caught in a buff spiral concerning air fights. Parasitic bomb, steroided seeker missile, steroided corruptor, steroided void ray, steroided carrier, steroided thor, steroided banshees : nearly everything that flies got buffed at some point in LOTV. That means that AA options had to be buffed, which is why we've got a queen that shuts down everything that flies, that's part of the reason why the overcharge can't really be removed in the current state of the game, that's part of the reason why mech sucks, that's why the viper is a 4 spell caster and that's why the viking sucks (never got buffed to match the air threats).
I'd be much happier if air units were nerfed in this game because air units don't rely on strategy but on execution, hard counters and snowballs.
Agree on everything.
I still believe that one of the biggest mistakes of lotv was the addition of even more units.
They are the reason for 99% of bad changes during lotv's lifetime.
This solves problems both in TvT and TvP. It also solves the problem with that the new Thor is actually OP vs Zerg.
Could you please explain why the new Thor is OP vs zerg ? It's not stronger vs mutas than before. It just counter corruptors better now, so that vikings are able to kill broodlords.
Atleast that's my observation so far.
its just better it used to be its not OP. right now broods are in a GREAT place becuase of the corruptor buffs. at least this change is relevant in low-mid msters
On April 24 2017 04:35 WeddingEpisode wrote: Enough Concussive Shells should stun Ultras. The interplay between bio and Ultras would be more fun this way.
Ultras are supposed to be this giant, DGAF unit that forces the Terran to play differently. But sure, let's make 3/3 bio counter everything
On April 24 2017 04:35 WeddingEpisode wrote: Enough Concussive Shells should stun Ultras. The interplay between bio and Ultras would be more fun this way.
Ultras are supposed to be this giant, DGAF unit that forces the Terran to play differently. But sure, let's make 3/3 bio counter everything
I hope you do realize that terrans need to produce a lot of bio in order to have a shot at winning the game, if you render bio useless once ultras are out, it's terribly bad game design? It's what happened before tankivacs, but since liberators were also stupidly good and you could open aggressively with reapers it evened things out balance wise, but it was still horrible design wise.
hey blizzard, theres a good idea, why dont u make zealots only biological? i think this will solve in a huge way vs ling-hydra-bane (unstoppable) style, you see how zerg deal with most of protoss army tiers just with that composition? its because baneling counter every single protoss gate units (and some of robo too), so this actually will force zerg to transitioning tier units and dont be comfortable doing the same style the whole game (and win).
On April 24 2017 05:50 wiNgiAN wrote: hey blizzard, theres a good idea, why dont u make zealots biological? i think this will solve in a huge way vs ling-hydra-bane (unstoppable) style, you see how zerg deal with most of protoss army tiers just with that composition? its because baneling counter every single protoss gate units (and some of robo too), so this actually will force zerg to transitioning tier units and dont be comfortable doing the same style the whole game (and win).
1) Zealots are already biological.
2) Being biological makes no difference for banes, being a light unit does.
I don't know about hydras/banes countering everything but neither of your statements make any sense.
On April 24 2017 05:50 wiNgiAN wrote: hey blizzard, theres a good idea, why dont u make zealots biological? i think this will solve in a huge way vs ling-hydra-bane (unstoppable) style, you see how zerg deal with most of protoss army tiers just with that composition? its because baneling counter every single protoss gate units (and some of robo too), so this actually will force zerg to transitioning tier units and dont be comfortable doing the same style the whole game (and win).
1) Zealots are already biological.
2) Being biological makes no difference for banes, being a light unit does.
I don't know about hydras/banes countering everything but neither of your statements make any sense.
On April 24 2017 04:35 WeddingEpisode wrote: Enough Concussive Shells should stun Ultras. The interplay between bio and Ultras would be more fun this way.
Ultras are supposed to be this giant, DGAF unit that forces the Terran to play differently. But sure, let's make 3/3 bio counter everything
I hope you do realize that terrans need to produce a lot of bio in order to have a shot at winning the game, if you render bio useless once ultras are out, it's terribly bad game design? It's what happened before tankivacs, but since liberators were also stupidly good and you could open aggressively with reapers it evened things out balance wise, but it was still horrible design wise.
Ghosts and Liberators are things that exist. There's no rule saying that Terran can only make Marines and Marauders for damage.
On April 24 2017 05:50 wiNgiAN wrote: hey blizzard, theres a good idea, why dont u make zealots biological? i think this will solve in a huge way vs ling-hydra-bane (unstoppable) style, you see how zerg deal with most of protoss army tiers just with that composition? its because baneling counter every single protoss gate units (and some of robo too), so this actually will force zerg to transitioning tier units and dont be comfortable doing the same style the whole game (and win).
1) Zealots are already biological.
2) Being biological makes no difference for banes, being a light unit does.
I don't know about hydras/banes countering everything but neither of your statements make any sense.
my point was "only biological", miss type
The other guy's point still stands, banes do + damage to light units. So you could make everything in the game biological and it wouldn't matter, they'd do the exact same damage they currently do
On April 24 2017 05:50 wiNgiAN wrote: hey blizzard, theres a good idea, why dont u make zealots biological? i think this will solve in a huge way vs ling-hydra-bane (unstoppable) style, you see how zerg deal with most of protoss army tiers just with that composition? its because baneling counter every single protoss gate units (and some of robo too), so this actually will force zerg to transitioning tier units and dont be comfortable doing the same style the whole game (and win).
1) Zealots are already biological.
2) Being biological makes no difference for banes, being a light unit does.
I don't know about hydras/banes countering everything but neither of your statements make any sense.
my point was "only biological", miss type
The other guy's point still stands, banes do + damage to light units. So you could make everything in the game biological and it wouldn't matter, they'd do the exact same damage they currently do
they do plus dmg vs light units, but if zealots were just a type: bio unit, bane wouldnt do the same dmg.
On April 24 2017 04:35 WeddingEpisode wrote: Enough Concussive Shells should stun Ultras. The interplay between bio and Ultras would be more fun this way.
Ultras are supposed to be this giant, DGAF unit that forces the Terran to play differently. But sure, let's make 3/3 bio counter everything
I hope you do realize that terrans need to produce a lot of bio in order to have a shot at winning the game, if you render bio useless once ultras are out, it's terribly bad game design? It's what happened before tankivacs, but since liberators were also stupidly good and you could open aggressively with reapers it evened things out balance wise, but it was still horrible design wise.
Ghosts and Liberators are things that exist. There's no rule saying that Terran can only make Marines and Marauders for damage.
The problem is not if ghosts or liberators are good. The problem is that MM were needed so you had to produce them BUT once ultras were out, even if you had more army (so outplayed your opponent), your core units became almost useless. That's bad design because it's basically: "you have to do this! And now it's useless haha! Pls buy nova missions"
On April 24 2017 04:35 WeddingEpisode wrote: Enough Concussive Shells should stun Ultras. The interplay between bio and Ultras would be more fun this way.
Ultras are supposed to be this giant, DGAF unit that forces the Terran to play differently. But sure, let's make 3/3 bio counter everything
I hope you do realize that terrans need to produce a lot of bio in order to have a shot at winning the game, if you render bio useless once ultras are out, it's terribly bad game design? It's what happened before tankivacs, but since liberators were also stupidly good and you could open aggressively with reapers it evened things out balance wise, but it was still horrible design wise.
Ghosts and Liberators are things that exist. There's no rule saying that Terran can only make Marines and Marauders for damage.
The problem is not if ghosts or liberators are good. The problem is that MM were needed so you had to produce them BUT once ultras were out, even if you had more army (so outplayed your opponent), your core units became almost useless. That's bad design because it's basically: "you have to do this! And now it's useless haha! Pls buy nova missions"
On April 24 2017 04:35 WeddingEpisode wrote: Enough Concussive Shells should stun Ultras. The interplay between bio and Ultras would be more fun this way.
Ultras are supposed to be this giant, DGAF unit that forces the Terran to play differently. But sure, let's make 3/3 bio counter everything
I hope you do realize that terrans need to produce a lot of bio in order to have a shot at winning the game, if you render bio useless once ultras are out, it's terribly bad game design? It's what happened before tankivacs, but since liberators were also stupidly good and you could open aggressively with reapers it evened things out balance wise, but it was still horrible design wise.
Ghosts and Liberators are things that exist. There's no rule saying that Terran can only make Marines and Marauders for damage.
The problem is not if ghosts or liberators are good. The problem is that MM were needed so you had to produce them BUT once ultras were out, even if you had more army (so outplayed your opponent), your core units became almost useless. That's bad design because it's basically: "you have to do this! And now it's useless haha! Pls buy nova missions"
What do the nova missions have to do with ultras?
and you assume that because you have more army you 'outplayed' your opponent as if to say macro was the only part of this game?
On April 23 2017 17:45 BRAT_OK wrote: Why they are nerfed thors against light? Every upgrade can add +1 +2 +3 against light and its will be good. Blizzard, give sensor tower power - warp prism cant did warp in sensor tower range, only drop. In late game warp prism too good.
A very interesting suggestion. Are you the real ex progamer? Anyway blizzard will never value good proposals like this; years ago they should have eliminated the warping.
On April 23 2017 17:45 BRAT_OK wrote: Why they are nerfed thors against light? Every upgrade can add +1 +2 +3 against light and its will be good. Blizzard, give sensor tower power - warp prism cant did warp in sensor tower range, only drop. In late game warp prism too good.
A very interesting suggestion. Are you the real ex progamer? Anyway blizzard will never value good proposals like this; years ago they should have eliminated the warping.
I would find it very unusual that the real brat_ok would be here saying things like, "Sensor towers should power down warp prisms, because that suggestion comes so out of the blue.
On April 24 2017 04:35 WeddingEpisode wrote: Enough Concussive Shells should stun Ultras. The interplay between bio and Ultras would be more fun this way.
Ultras are supposed to be this giant, DGAF unit that forces the Terran to play differently. But sure, let's make 3/3 bio counter everything
I hope you do realize that terrans need to produce a lot of bio in order to have a shot at winning the game, if you render bio useless once ultras are out, it's terribly bad game design? It's what happened before tankivacs, but since liberators were also stupidly good and you could open aggressively with reapers it evened things out balance wise, but it was still horrible design wise.
Ghosts and Liberators are things that exist. There's no rule saying that Terran can only make Marines and Marauders for damage.
The problem is not if ghosts or liberators are good. The problem is that MM were needed so you had to produce them BUT once ultras were out, even if you had more army (so outplayed your opponent), your core units became almost useless. That's bad design because it's basically: "you have to do this! And now it's useless haha! Pls buy nova missions"
It's not outplaying your opponent if you have the wrong army units. When the transition to Ultras is seen, or suspected, you need to have a better plan than more MM.
Even if the ultras are out, they still need the plating to be effective. Bio still works extremely well in drops to buy time for transition and dumping supplies.
They didn't work before they got patched so before 3.8. It just shows that Blizzard made poor design decisions over and over again, so we shouldn't hope too much at this point.
The damage point of Thors need to be lowered, both for air attack and ground attack, to make them more useful. (Damage point refers to the time between when a unit can attack another unit and when that attack actually begins.) For reference, see game 3 of Maru vs. Super in the GSL today (April 26). He makes them early and they have some use, then they get crushed by equal numbers of immortals (which are easier to produce and cost less).
The Thor is very expensive at 300/200 compared to its utility, and takes 43 seconds of a factory with a tech lab on it.
This damage point issue is the main problem with Thors in TvZ as well. By the time an enemy is within range and the Thor draws a bead, the unit is probably either already dead or so near death that the powerful shot of the Thor is overkill.
I think a more warranted "experimental" test would be for Thors to be able to simultaneously attack ground and air rather than the current test. I don't think the current test will make much difference.
^ Brilliant post about the Thor from Ransom and I also agree with Pino, the Thor sucks, it needs an overhaul, might as well just get it out of the way with the new balance team.
Also things that can be done to improve the flow of the match ups
1) Redesign Oracles with high range and lower damage to light units so it functions more like the Banshee would, not being hard countered by static defense but a game ender without it, middle grounds are best.
- Make Oracle detect innately to remove the need for Robo - Redesign Revelation to function like parasite from Brood War - Nerf Stasis field area and duration but reduce the mana cost proportionally, make it function like spider mines.
2) Nerf Blinding Cloud vs stationary units (Siege Tanks) but make them better vs. units that can be micro'd out of the cloud by changing the Blind to a flat range reduction of 5, this way Siege Tanks will have a much diminished but not hard countered range of 8 and things like Marines will be brought down to 1. Also make it so that units that leave the Cloud will be blinded temporarily and retain the -5 range, this effect dissipates after 1.5 seconds.
3) Remove the Swarm Host from the game completely, I'm a life time Zerg player and I'm here to tell you, that unit is bad from the ground up, design wise, balance wise, please remove it from the game and stop balancing the game around shitty free units, nobody likes to watch them, nobody likes to play against them, come on.
4) Redesign the Sentry to function more as a offensive based, mobile Protoss medic, to bolster Gateway armies throughout the game.
- Remove FF and replace it with Shield Battery, Ravagers being in the game makes FF a dumb binary reaction in LOTV, the Sentry deserves something better. (ex. Shield Battery replenishes 35 shield immediately and gives 35 over 8 seconds)
- Give Sentry innate 1 armor
- Buff Sentry laser beam to actually do SOME damage, not alot, but more then it does now.
5) Buff Stalker DPS vs. light so they don't look so hopelessly pathetic vs. post mid game M/M/M armies
6) Remove invulnerable Nydus and replace it with a new Nydus worm that is can be killed, is cheaper, can only transport 16 units, and can be cancelled for a 50% resource refund
7) Remove Psionic Transfer from Adepts, give them increased movement speed, Resonating Glaives now 200/200 and gives attack speed bonus and a +2 vs. light units
These are just things off the top of my head, like I said I'm a Zerg player and Protoss is just terrible in LOTV, not balance wise but design wise they are a complete and total mess.
played some testing maps and here are my thoughts :
-thor change isnt really that relevant, u dont really see it in use and the high impact payload mode had more damage vs tempest etc. -void ray slow prismatic alligment is actually nice indierct nerf to the unit. -Faster zealot charge is really cool idea, it enables for earlier attacks/skirmishes with zealots -Tempest buff feels liek its not really needed. -raven auto turret nerf is good enaugh that single turret cant shoot so any workers in seconds so its really cool. --------------------------- And here i would like to post some of my suggestions to the game: I think mech could use a bit mroe help vs air specially in tvp where if you want to go mech and protoss opponent opens phoenix u cant apply much pressure, and for sure you are gonna find urself fighting vs carriers. So i would like to adress Cyclone: add normal anti air attack like 18 damage per shot with 7 range and not really fast attack speed OR ( this option i write nearly under all community updates) change lock on so that its time when cyclone shoots is changed from 14 seconds to 7 seconds , so cyclones damage is actually visiblie ( it would be 16 damage instead dof 8 per shot) . Also adept is still in need to be nerfed, its a unit that just has option to cut distance between main protoss army and terran siege tank lines, its easy to break terran mid game mech push with just shade on top of tanks and presplit then engage with main army. Also really cool suggestion is to make all upgreads on armory mixed again , and make vikings available on factory level but just in mech form and lets say u need starport to transform. Then we have warp prism , its cool unit, has insane micro potential, but i would give it slow warpin so its not nearly insta gg with warp in to main of T/Z while both players are nearly maxed out. Protoss zealots should be a bit more beefy or buff them in some funky way like increase their attack speed.Also zerg: Swarm host needs a nerf badly, at first movement speed is to fast, and then we have its interaction with mech which is terrible as for now when Zerg gets swarm host meching terran has to instantly switch from factory to all starports.I m not really sure how to change swarm hosts... maby lower the dps of locust at start and increase cost of the unit.I think viper blinding cloud duration time could use a nerf.
( By the way im master protoss player ^^ ) I would really like to hear your opinion on my thoughts
^ the best way to change the Swarm Host is to remove it from the game, it's impossible to balance a free unit spawning unit, it's either imbalanced weak or strong, it currently fills no real role in the Zerg arsenal besides being OP vs. Mech and crap vs. almost everything else outside of wonky GSL level Swarm Host plays that also looks OP when pulled off well.
On April 27 2017 03:48 Ransomstarcraft wrote: The damage point of Thors need to be lowered, both for air attack and ground attack, to make them more useful. (Damage point refers to the time between when a unit can attack another unit and when that attack actually begins.) For reference, see game 3 of Maru vs. Super in the GSL today (April 26). He makes them early and they have some use, then they get crushed by equal numbers of immortals (which are easier to produce and cost less).
The Thor is very expensive at 300/200 compared to its utility, and takes 43 seconds of a factory with a tech lab on it.
This damage point issue is the main problem with Thors in TvZ as well. By the time an enemy is within range and the Thor draws a bead, the unit is probably either already dead or so near death that the powerful shot of the Thor is overkill.
I think a more warranted "experimental" test would be for Thors to be able to simultaneously attack ground and air rather than the current test. I don't think the current test will make much difference.
Not sure about the damage point change, but the Thor has zero micro potential. That's for sure.
On April 27 2017 04:54 jpg06051992 wrote: ^ Brilliant post about the Thor from Ransom and I also agree with Pino, the Thor sucks, it needs an overhaul, might as well just get it out of the way with the new balance team.
Also things that can be done to improve the flow of the match ups
1) Redesign Oracles with high range and lower damage to light units so it functions more like the Banshee would, not being hard countered by static defense but a game ender without it, middle grounds are best.
- Make Oracle detect innately to remove the need for Robo - Redesign Revelation to function like parasite from Brood War - Nerf Stasis field area and duration but reduce the mana cost proportionally, make it function like spider mines.
2) Nerf Blinding Cloud vs stationary units (Siege Tanks) but make them better vs. units that can be micro'd out of the cloud by changing the Blind to a flat range reduction of 5, this way Siege Tanks will have a much diminished but not hard countered range of 8 and things like Marines will be brought down to 1. Also make it so that units that leave the Cloud will be blinded temporarily and retain the -5 range, this effect dissipates after 1.5 seconds.
3) Remove the Swarm Host from the game completely, I'm a life time Zerg player and I'm here to tell you, that unit is bad from the ground up, design wise, balance wise, please remove it from the game and stop balancing the game around shitty free units, nobody likes to watch them, nobody likes to play against them, come on.
4) Redesign the Sentry to function more as a offensive based, mobile Protoss medic, to bolster Gateway armies throughout the game.
- Remove FF and replace it with Shield Battery, Ravagers being in the game makes FF a dumb binary reaction in LOTV, the Sentry deserves something better. (ex. Shield Battery replenishes 35 shield immediately and gives 35 over 8 seconds)
- Give Sentry innate 1 armor
- Buff Sentry laser beam to actually do SOME damage, not alot, but more then it does now.
5) Buff Stalker DPS vs. light so they don't look so hopelessly pathetic vs. post mid game M/M/M armies
6) Remove invulnerable Nydus and replace it with a new Nydus worm that is can be killed, is cheaper, can only transport 16 units, and can be cancelled for a 50% resource refund
7) Remove Psionic Transfer from Adepts, give them increased movement speed, Resonating Glaives now 200/200 and gives attack speed bonus and a +2 vs. light units
These are just things off the top of my head, like I said I'm a Zerg player and Protoss is just terrible in LOTV, not balance wise but design wise they are a complete and total mess.
Agree with this. Especially the combination of removing FF and making Stasis more spammable.
Another good Blinding Cloud change might be to introduce a miss chance for all enemy units inside the cloud. Could be used offensively as well as defensively with that change.
On April 27 2017 05:53 jpg06051992 wrote: ^ the best way to change the Swarm Host is to remove it from the game, it's impossible to balance a free unit spawning unit, it's either imbalanced weak or strong, it currently fills no real role in the Zerg arsenal besides being OP vs. Mech and crap vs. almost everything else outside of wonky GSL level Swarm Host plays that also looks OP when pulled off well.
Actually removing all free units and redesigning their host units would be great too.
quoting Blizzard: "We hear that Swarm hosts continue to inhibit terran mech play."
In case this is news to you Blizzard, sometimes zerg units ACTUALLY NEED TO DO SOMETHING TO PREVENT OTHER RACES FROM WINNING.
If you are actually , really, making a comment like this, after you have ALREADY NERFED Swarmhosts more or less out of the game, this is DEFINITELY the nail in the coffin, I'm never playing LOTV again.
Have you, ever, Blizzard, happened to hear any comments about: * terran reapers inhibiting the entire zerg early game, resulting in terrans at high levels basically auto-making reapers, * terran hellbat drops just ending games, period. * terran liberators inhibiting the ability of zerg and protoss to actually collect any resources... * terran widow mines inhibiting zerg lings and banelings from having a chance of surviving to even connect any damage to a terran army? WELL BLIZZARD I guess you have to: * nerf widow mines into the ground, nerf reapers into the ground, nerf liberators into the ground, as well as a bunch of other units that INHIBIT terran opponents from having a reasonable chance to win the game.
this is why you have lost so many players for this game. despite the "supposed" commitment to discussing balance changes with the community, still have absolutely no intention of dealing with feedback equitably. there is still a terran unit that has SPLASH damage, ATTACKS AIR, Is CLOAKED, is AUTO ATTACK, is basically AUTOMATICALLY COST EFFECTIVE, and it costs the same as.... let's see now.... ONE ROACH, which * has NO SPLASH DAMAGE, does NOT attack air, does NOT AUTO ATTACK, requires UPGRADES to burrow. Broken, broken game. And what did you do to zerg's best way of countering widow mines? you nerfed them into the ground, Blizzard. THANK YOU for your kind inattention to game balance.
Guys, the reason pro Terrans don't opt for or bother playing mech other than as a "SURPRISE, IM PLAYING THE BAD STRAT!" is because they rely on tournament success for their income.
Most pros already have known about swarmhost abuse since the patch was out, or found out shortly after, and it would never be worth it for them to even attempt mech knowing 1 unit called the swarmhost will essentially hard counter the entire play style with little to no cost and effort.
We definitely could see a lot of pro mech play if they do address swarmhosts though. I hope the raven auto-turret nerf is also enough to prevent the mass raven spam in both lategame TvT and TvZ.
For the people that continually comment over the years you don't want "turtle mech," you have to realize turtling is always going to be possible with all 3 races and that in itself is not a bad thing! It's just a play style choice players have.
What is bad is when the "turtle style" involves resourceless units that aren't trading against the opponent. The best example i can give of a HEALTHY turtle style is how i play ZvT/ZvZ/ZvP with mass lurker, viper, spores, and other people probably do this now too.
This is a HEALTHY turtle style because lurkers are not spawning a free unit from 3 screens away. There are ways to break lurkers and attack into them, but lurkers are also strong enough that they can hold positions better than siege tanks can.
An UNHEALTHY turtle style would be sitting afk into mass ravens or swarmhosts or tempest/carrier/archon.
That last statement always perplexes people because their immediate reaction is "BUT AVILO YOU DO THAT IDIOTIC STYLE EVERY TIME YOU PLAY!" Well, yes, because as a streamer and someone that opts to go mech every game, there is an imba unit called the swarmhost that forces the game to be nothing other than free units or lose the game to locusts.
The thor changes blizzard are testing, along with hopefully a swarmhost fix soon...these will lead to AGGRESSIVE MECH play where you can confidently trade units versus your opponent, instead of going 5-10 factories and knowing 100% you now autolose the game because of locusts/vipers unless you turtle to 50 ravens.
Anyways, let's hope they do something soon about swarmhosts. Blizzard really needs to get on the ball with balance changes.
Autoturret nerf was really not enough. It's still massable. Still it's massive free damage- someone calculated here that it's really a buff. It lasts longer with smaller damage- so denial on mineral lines (as we now see in ZvT Raven harras) will be longer. This is not enough- it still will be cancerous to play against mass ravens.
Avilo. When will you realize that SH play does counter only your style. Many Terrans being more active with their units (building mass turrets and PF's does not count) have no problem with SH. Without SH Mech would be autowin for Terran. Now, I know that this is your real goal, but i really hope that some day you will regain common sense. I watch your stream from time to time, and what i noticed is that You whine so much about Zerg, but still You win almost every ZvT with your cancer mech. Now, IF Zerg manages to win you always rage about him being a hacker or stream cheater. So the only one and logical explanation is that only with hacking or stream cheating Zerg can win vs mech. Wouldn't you agree? :-)
i dont know why ppl keep wasting time on balance, blizzard is so scared to do a change.. not like riot, they dont give a f*ck if people complain about a champion, if the see that something is broken, the fix it asap, but you my good friend blizzard.. u dont nerf things until a match up is like 70% win rate for a race, or players doing the same starts over and over again (protoss: adept oracle phoenix/zerg zergling baneling hydralisk/ terran MMML), at least u nerfed adepts, and now a couple of protoss are trying to open robo/colossus pvt, most of them with no success, because its a slow opening, you have to defend until minute 10 when u have a good army and storms.. but still terran have a lot of harrass options, that makes that build a waste of time, so the protoss that are still winning some games are the one that open adepts/oracle and do a huge dmg to terran, thats the only way to win this MU i guess.
pvz is a bit different, at least protoss have 3 effective openings vs zerg, the best one is skytoss i guess, because they dont have to deal with banelings splash dmg like ground units does, still a bit favored zerg match up.. but not as favored as terran is tvp, im pretty sure if adepts all in werent strong, protoss could have like a 40% winrate vs the other races.
last thoughts about balance, sentrys and stalkers should be a bit strong, same for zealots, theyre supposed to be the core unit for protoss, not adepts, so youre welcome if you nerf adepts again (theyre not really strong but w/e) but give zealots some usefull thing, colossus should have a buff too, mbe their thermal lance being quickier for research, or 150/150, because theyre so far for being a good robotics unit, give tempest a buff, so pvp is not a stupid skytoss vs skytoss a+click carriers/vr vs carriers/vr, tempest should counter carrier or vr somehow, NERF disruptors, a lower nova aoe explosion dmg or speed, NERF swarmhost (theyre needed vs mech i guess, but theyre very strong, a lot of dmg from FREE locust FailFish) make ravagers biological-armored, NERF a bit the hydra-bane-ling style, zerg can deal with all the protoss ground tier with that composition almost the entire game. NERF liberators-tanks-wm(splash range) and the bc's teleport make it not usable if bc got dmg 2 seconds before or something, so it cant be abuse on turtle style.
On April 27 2017 08:53 avilo wrote: Guys, the reason pro Terrans don't opt for or bother playing mech other than as a "SURPRISE, IM PLAYING THE BAD STRAT!" is because they rely on tournament success for their income.
Most pros already have known about swarmhost abuse since the patch was out, or found out shortly after, and it would never be worth it for them to even attempt mech knowing 1 unit called the swarmhost will essentially hard counter the entire play style with little to no cost and effort.
We definitely could see a lot of pro mech play if they do address swarmhosts though. I hope the raven auto-turret nerf is also enough to prevent the mass raven spam in both lategame TvT and TvZ.
For the people that continually comment over the years you don't want "turtle mech," you have to realize turtling is always going to be possible with all 3 races and that in itself is not a bad thing! It's just a play style choice players have.
What is bad is when the "turtle style" involves resourceless units that aren't trading against the opponent. The best example i can give of a HEALTHY turtle style is how i play ZvT/ZvZ/ZvP with mass lurker, viper, spores, and other people probably do this now too.
This is a HEALTHY turtle style because lurkers are not spawning a free unit from 3 screens away. There are ways to break lurkers and attack into them, but lurkers are also strong enough that they can hold positions better than siege tanks can.
An UNHEALTHY turtle style would be sitting afk into mass ravens or swarmhosts or tempest/carrier/archon.
That last statement always perplexes people because their immediate reaction is "BUT AVILO YOU DO THAT IDIOTIC STYLE EVERY TIME YOU PLAY!" Well, yes, because as a streamer and someone that opts to go mech every game, there is an imba unit called the swarmhost that forces the game to be nothing other than free units or lose the game to locusts.
The thor changes blizzard are testing, along with hopefully a swarmhost fix soon...these will lead to AGGRESSIVE MECH play where you can confidently trade units versus your opponent, instead of going 5-10 factories and knowing 100% you now autolose the game because of locusts/vipers unless you turtle to 50 ravens.
Anyways, let's hope they do something soon about swarmhosts. Blizzard really needs to get on the ball with balance changes.
Pig just releases a guide here on how dark shutdown mech.
And it's really funny how the best Zerg of the world playing the best mech player of the world Gumiho, don't build any SH...
The most probable is gumiho has figured how to play vs SH (pushing when the SH are in cooldown for example), so Dark don't use them as it's not that strong.
When we watch your stream you're always ready to claim balance problem, the other cheating, but never : "i could have played differently and i can have won".
There is better mech players that you, and you play far inferior players than Dark and co. Still you have always claimed "mech not viable", even before they introduce SH, while you have always played mech, it's kind of funny.
On April 27 2017 08:53 avilo wrote: Guys, the reason pro Terrans don't opt for or bother playing mech other than as a "SURPRISE, IM PLAYING THE BAD STRAT!" is because they rely on tournament success for their income.
Most pros already have known about swarmhost abuse since the patch was out, or found out shortly after, and it would never be worth it for them to even attempt mech knowing 1 unit called the swarmhost will essentially hard counter the entire play style with little to no cost and effort.
We definitely could see a lot of pro mech play if they do address swarmhosts though. I hope the raven auto-turret nerf is also enough to prevent the mass raven spam in both lategame TvT and TvZ.
For the people that continually comment over the years you don't want "turtle mech," you have to realize turtling is always going to be possible with all 3 races and that in itself is not a bad thing! It's just a play style choice players have.
What is bad is when the "turtle style" involves resourceless units that aren't trading against the opponent. The best example i can give of a HEALTHY turtle style is how i play ZvT/ZvZ/ZvP with mass lurker, viper, spores, and other people probably do this now too.
This is a HEALTHY turtle style because lurkers are not spawning a free unit from 3 screens away. There are ways to break lurkers and attack into them, but lurkers are also strong enough that they can hold positions better than siege tanks can.
An UNHEALTHY turtle style would be sitting afk into mass ravens or swarmhosts or tempest/carrier/archon.
That last statement always perplexes people because their immediate reaction is "BUT AVILO YOU DO THAT IDIOTIC STYLE EVERY TIME YOU PLAY!" Well, yes, because as a streamer and someone that opts to go mech every game, there is an imba unit called the swarmhost that forces the game to be nothing other than free units or lose the game to locusts.
The thor changes blizzard are testing, along with hopefully a swarmhost fix soon...these will lead to AGGRESSIVE MECH play where you can confidently trade units versus your opponent, instead of going 5-10 factories and knowing 100% you now autolose the game because of locusts/vipers unless you turtle to 50 ravens.
Anyways, let's hope they do something soon about swarmhosts. Blizzard really needs to get on the ball with balance changes.
Pig just releases a guide here on how dark shutdown mech.
And it's really funny how the best Zerg of the world playing the best mech player of the world Gumiho, don't build any SH...
The most probable is gumiho has figured how to play vs SH (pushing when the SH are in cooldown for example), so Dark don't use them as it's not that strong.
When we watch your stream you're always ready to claim balance problem, the other cheating, but never : "i could have played differently and i can have won".
There is better mech players that you, and you play far inferior players than Dark and co. Still you have always claimed "mech not viable", even before they introduce SH, while you have always played mech, it's kind of funny.
You can do mental gymnastics all day, but the straightforward evidence of Mech being able to beat SH should come from games where mech is used successfully versus swarmhosts; and not games where non-swarmhost compositions were used successfully versus mech.
If anything, Dark vs. Gumiho game is evidence that Zergs don't need to build swarmhosts to win versus mech. And you've weakened some posters' position that Zergs need swarmhosts to beat mech. For example:
On April 27 2017 15:37 hiroshOne wrote: Autoturret nerf was really not enough. It's still massable. Still it's massive free damage- someone calculated here that it's really a buff. It lasts longer with smaller damage- so denial on mineral lines (as we now see in ZvT Raven harras) will be longer. This is not enough- it still will be cancerous to play against mass ravens.
Avilo. When will you realize that SH play does counter only your style. Many Terrans being more active with their units (building mass turrets and PF's does not count) have no problem with SH. Without SH Mech would be autowin for Terran. Now, I know that this is your real goal, but i really hope that some day you will regain common sense. I watch your stream from time to time, and what i noticed is that You whine so much about Zerg, but still You win almost every ZvT with your cancer mech. Now, IF Zerg manages to win you always rage about him being a hacker or stream cheater. So the only one and logical explanation is that only with hacking or stream cheating Zerg can win vs mech. Wouldn't you agree? :-)
It's nice to see that after 3 iterations of the game and countless patches Blizzard still has yet to find a way to make the Thor effective vs anything but at least they are still trying...
On April 29 2017 12:53 NKexquisite wrote: It's nice to see that after 3 iterations of the game and countless patches Blizzard still has yet to find a way to make the Thor effective vs anything but at least they are still trying...
its almost as if slow moving hero units replacing the goliath was a bad idea
On April 27 2017 08:53 avilo wrote: Guys, the reason pro Terrans don't opt for or bother playing mech other than as a "SURPRISE, IM PLAYING THE BAD STRAT!" is because they rely on tournament success for their income.
Most pros already have known about swarmhost abuse since the patch was out, or found out shortly after, and it would never be worth it for them to even attempt mech knowing 1 unit called the swarmhost will essentially hard counter the entire play style with little to no cost and effort.
We definitely could see a lot of pro mech play if they do address swarmhosts though. I hope the raven auto-turret nerf is also enough to prevent the mass raven spam in both lategame TvT and TvZ.
For the people that continually comment over the years you don't want "turtle mech," you have to realize turtling is always going to be possible with all 3 races and that in itself is not a bad thing! It's just a play style choice players have.
What is bad is when the "turtle style" involves resourceless units that aren't trading against the opponent. The best example i can give of a HEALTHY turtle style is how i play ZvT/ZvZ/ZvP with mass lurker, viper, spores, and other people probably do this now too.
This is a HEALTHY turtle style because lurkers are not spawning a free unit from 3 screens away. There are ways to break lurkers and attack into them, but lurkers are also strong enough that they can hold positions better than siege tanks can.
An UNHEALTHY turtle style would be sitting afk into mass ravens or swarmhosts or tempest/carrier/archon.
That last statement always perplexes people because their immediate reaction is "BUT AVILO YOU DO THAT IDIOTIC STYLE EVERY TIME YOU PLAY!" Well, yes, because as a streamer and someone that opts to go mech every game, there is an imba unit called the swarmhost that forces the game to be nothing other than free units or lose the game to locusts.
The thor changes blizzard are testing, along with hopefully a swarmhost fix soon...these will lead to AGGRESSIVE MECH play where you can confidently trade units versus your opponent, instead of going 5-10 factories and knowing 100% you now autolose the game because of locusts/vipers unless you turtle to 50 ravens.
Anyways, let's hope they do something soon about swarmhosts. Blizzard really needs to get on the ball with balance changes.
Tempest/Carrier/Archon doesn't involve free units, Mass Ravens kind of does but there's still energy management. Still don't see how either are unhealthy by your definition.
Here are some ways to make mech more viable. To me, there are two ways to approach this.
A. "A more harass heavy mech"
1. A speed increase to Hellions would make their stick and move a more viable option. LOTV's economy increase has meant that hellions are much less useful in the past, as any standard army clump wards them off. The reaper bomb was added specifically because of this reason, while the hellion had no change. 2. Lowering the damage point (the time between when a unit can attack and when it actually does attack) of Hellions would mean that they can do more damage to mineral lines when they dive in, even for a kamikaze style attack. 3. A dps increase to the air damage of Cyclones would mean mech can get out on the map without danger of losing all the hellions and cyclones for next to nothing.
Any one of these increases would make speed Banshees more powerful, since the main issue with them right now is an opponent who is unbothered by harass will have so much army and static defense strength that no amount of banshees will do much good or something like 4-6 infestors being out makes them a foolish investment.
B. "A more turtle-heavy mech" 1. This is where tweaking the Thor will drive mech. The Thor is just about the turtle-eyest unit in the game with its slow movement and slow attack speed. The design of the Thor and the Seige Tank are the two main factors that make mech require turtle play.
I would personally be more in favor of (A), give mech the option of simple map control and harass options rather than the reliance on the turtle style.
EPT![[image loading]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CM809rKWoAAiV0C.jpg)
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