|
Everyone is familiar with the 4.0 redesign of Protoss, most notably the removal of the Mothership Core. Of course, there were many other changes (Shield Battery, Recall, Stalker buff, etc) but the largest aspect of 4.0 for Protoss was the MSC being removed, and the subsequent redesign of Protoss around its absence. And I think I speak for most people when I say that, on the whole, the state of Protoss post-4.0 has been far and away superior to Protoss pre-4.0. Obviously there were some balance issues that needed to be worked out, but at this point I think it’s safe to say that removing the MSC was a resoundingly successful redesign.
Recently, there has been some design-related attention towards Zerg (specifically from uthermal), most of which can be distilled down to the Queen and its many, many roles. Creep-spreading, hatch-injecting, early-defense anti-air with transfusions, you name it and the Queen does it. They’re massed in the early game for defending harass. They’re massed in the lategame for transfuse. They’re massed because they’re quite frankly great units and too many Queens is a rare problem indeed.
The flip side to this is of course that Queens are absolutely essential to keeping Zerg in the game. Without good creep spread, defending is impossible. Without injections, there are no larvae. Without beefy tanks, hellions and adepts run wild. Without AA, drops pull the Zerg apart. Without transfusions, critical units die in seconds. Without Queens, Zerg is quite simply hopeless.
So. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. What’s to do?
At this juncture, it’s very important to note that Queens are NOT a balance problem. Much like Protoss can and was balanced quite well around the MSC, Zerg can and is balanced quite well around the Queen. That being said, simply because something is not a balance problem does not mean it cannot be improved design-wise.
With 4.0, the current balance team has shown that it is capable of redesigning major aspects of the Protoss race in a competent fashion. What say you about letting them try with Zerg?
|
|
|
I've always found inject larva to be a profoundly unfun part of Zerg, and I never entirely got over how much more fun the game was to play during that LotV beta patch when transfuse was automated.
The problem is that it's a necessary APM handicap on Zerg players, due to their simplified (otherwise) macro. I would absolutely love for Queens to be redesigned and for injection to be removed. However, it must sadly be admitted that something else would need to rise in order to take injection's place, unless major changes were made elsewhere to Zerg.
|
(Accidental double post, please delete)
|
It would be nice.
Redesigning the queen is probably a harder task than redesigning the mothership core though. The MC's role was essentially to allow Protoss to survive early on with some utility in the midgame. The queen does all that (and is one of the only forms of defensive advantage in early ZvZ), and so much more.
|
A Queen redesign could be nice, but part of the problem that you guys already mentioned is that the Queen does so much (which I guess is a reason for the re-work) that if you took out some of it's options, then presumably you'd have to give some more power/tools to other units/buildings.
While I think that could be possible, I don't think it would be very easy to do.
|
If the sky is the limit, I would love this paired with a total overhaul of Zerg's AA. To start I'd like them to strip the queen of any early AA abilities and just switch the hydra with the roach on the tech tree with rebalanced stats respectively.
Additionally, queen AA is now a cheap hive upgrade and hives can produce multiple queens at once. This way they still have their lategame utility as an inexpensive support/AA unit.
|
Disclaimer: I am evil.
Some QoL "improvement" (like the high templars) along with emphasis on base mobile defense instead of very long range.
Do you hate when your queen is not close enough to the hatchery and can't inject? Or kited by that carrier that is flying away? I present the Queen-ken.
Increase the larva inject range to 3, and reduce anti air attack range to 7 reduce transfusion cast range to 5. Queens health is reduced to 125. Increase off-creep movement speed to 2.63 (This is the same speed as upgraded Overlord, faster than Brood lord and can kite Carriers off creep.) Increase on-creep speed to 3.9375. (This is the same speed as Hydralisk.).
Queen will now gain a new passive ability:
Symbiosis:
Queen will received increased regeneration speed to 1.4 Hit Point per second while in 3 range of a hatchery.
What if I need to keep queens in place? Queen will now gain a new ability:
Make Nest:
Grants the Queen 25% wider vision, and increase its ground attack range to 6 and anti-air attack range to 8, but removes its ability to move. This ability is instant cast but have a 1 second cool down. The nest will spread creep for a range of 6 until the queen is killed or stop making nest. This ability can be canceled after activation. This ability can be cast while burrowed.
Enjoy send your queens to middle of nowhere. (Or proxy hatch and make a queen next to it.)
|
On July 18 2018 09:14 FrostedMiniWheats wrote:
To start I'd like them to strip the queen of any early AA abilities and just switch the hydra with the roach on the tech tree with rebalanced stats respectively.
Queue every single ZvP and ZvT ending to Oracles and Banshees. And when Zergs figure out how to rush to hydra tech fast enough to not instantly die to air harass, then Terrans and Protoss just go for fast ground pushes because being forced into those quick hydras would be extremely brittle and you'd have to cut so many drones and other stuff in order to get them out in time for Banshees and especially Oracles.
Which is a pretty good representation of the criticality of Queens as they are in the current version of the game. Change one fairly small piece of them (small considering their many, many roles) and Zergs would basically never win a game. Again, in the game as it currently is.
|
I don't like it that playing Zerg requires building a lot of queens. Massing queens should not be a thing, Zerg needs buffs elsewhere to make it less dependent on the queens.
Design-wise it would be somewhat cooler if you could build only one queen per base. It could then be made more tanky to help defend early rushes with just 1-2 queens + zerglings.
To compensate creep spreading, Zerg could get a new building like Creep Colony, which would allow to drop a creep tumor every 30 seconds or so. That would make it possible to respread creep without having tons of queens.
|
I think there should be a limit to the number of queens per hatchery (of course still allowing you to remake them if they die). I guess 2 per hatch would be a good limit?
I don't think it would overly nerf zerg, it would just disrupt zerg's ability to make queens literally nonstop from the start of the game. They'd need to wait for their new hatcheries to come in.
|
I'm 100% in favor of a queen redesign as they are the one unit in the game that ignores the economy and attacking unit trade off dynamic and anything that is that extreme of an outlier is probably bad.
While they are doing that, I'd like to see them also get rid of Terran and Protoss macro mechanics. Even without them, the skill ceiling of SC2 will still be well above what humans are capable of and there is no reason to artificially raise the skill floor in a competitive game.
On July 18 2018 10:00 travis wrote:
I think there should be a limit to the number of queens per hatchery (of course still allowing you to remake them if they die). I guess 2 per hatch would be a good limit?
I don't think it would overly nerf zerg, it would just disrupt zerg's ability to make queens literally nonstop from the start of the game. They'd need to wait for their new hatcheries to come in.
Do Zerg players ever really go over 2 queens per hatchery? Snute's 9-10 queens come to mind, but isn't he usually on 4-5 bases by that point? Maybe he'd be down to 8 queens with 4 hatcheries which is still kind of insane.
|
On July 18 2018 10:19 Boggyb wrote:
I'm 100% in favor of a queen redesign as they are the one unit in the game that ignores the economy and attacking unit trade off dynamic and anything that is that extreme of an outlier is probably bad.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Do you mean within Zerg specifically, not the game as a whole? There's no economy and attacking unit trade off dynamic within Terran and Protoss other than putting resources into one means less to put into the other, and at 200 supply you have to choose how much of each to have. And both of those things apply just as much to queens.
Also the overlord is another unit that ignores any trade off between economy and attacking units, as it does neither.
|
On July 18 2018 10:19 Boggyb wrote:
I'm 100% in favor of a queen redesign as they are the one unit in the game that ignores the economy and attacking unit trade off dynamic and anything that is that extreme of an outlier is probably bad.
While they are doing that, I'd like to see them also get rid of Terran and Protoss macro mechanics. Even without them, the skill ceiling of SC2 will still be well above what humans are capable of and there is no reason to artificially raise the skill floor in a competitive game.
They tried this in the LotV beta and the game was considerably worse because if it. It only lasted a short time before they realized it wasn't working.
|
On July 18 2018 09:14 FrostedMiniWheats wrote:
If the sky is the limit, I would love this paired with a total overhaul of Zerg's AA. To start I'd like them to strip the queen of any early AA abilities and just switch the hydra with the roach on the tech tree with rebalanced stats respectively.
So, where would Ravagers go?
Take away the Queen's AA, move Hydra to Hatchery tier, move Roach... somewhere, change Spore Crawlers. Would Spire units need to be changed as well? Should Lairs gain AA defenses when upgraded? Or would Infestors (Infested Terrans and Fungal Growth) need to be tweaked?
|
Thats funny..I might be bias, but i think queens are one of the best designed unit in the game. They have a clear defensive role, and while massing them will make you stronger defensively and give you a better set up for the long macro game ( creep spread, injects, etc). By massing queens, the zerg becomes stronger defensively but weaker offensively. Also, they have some good decision making involved on how you spend the energy, and they reward faster and more skilled players by allowing faster and better creep spread and transfuses.
As far as i know, there isnt any unit in the game that is made unviable because of the existence of the queen.
Meanwhile, you have units like thors and pheonix that completely invalidates mutalisks, no amount of micro can save that.
Mutalisks are a badly designed unit currently in my opinion. Its the regeneration that is too strong, and it makes super hard counters like thors and shoot while moving phoenixes; with range upgrade even, almost mandatory.
I feel like mutalisks should lose a lot of their regen, but gain 1 extra armor possibly or a bit more life to compensate. After that, you could actually nerf thors and pheonixes, so the interactions between those units are less 1 sided.
I mean i guess Queens could use a small combat nerf, but it would require, like said above, a swap of the hydra and roaches accessiblity and stats/price. I would love a 1 supply cheaper and weaker hydra. And a 2 supply stronger but more expensive roach.
|
On July 18 2018 10:55 Torrefy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 18 2018 10:19 Boggyb wrote:
I'm 100% in favor of a queen redesign as they are the one unit in the game that ignores the economy and attacking unit trade off dynamic and anything that is that extreme of an outlier is probably bad. I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Do you mean within Zerg specifically, not the game as a whole? There's no economy and attacking unit trade off dynamic within Terran and Protoss other than putting resources into one means less to put into the other, and at 200 supply you have to choose how much of each to have. And both of those things apply just as much to queens. Also the overlord is another unit that ignores any trade off between economy and attacking units, as it does neither.
Having to choose between one or the other is what I mean. Queens are both until you reach the point where you're no longer going to be making drones which if you're not NoRegreT is mid to late game.
On July 18 2018 11:09 esReveR wrote:Show nested quote +On July 18 2018 10:19 Boggyb wrote:
I'm 100% in favor of a queen redesign as they are the one unit in the game that ignores the economy and attacking unit trade off dynamic and anything that is that extreme of an outlier is probably bad.
While they are doing that, I'd like to see them also get rid of Terran and Protoss macro mechanics. Even without them, the skill ceiling of SC2 will still be well above what humans are capable of and there is no reason to artificially raise the skill floor in a competitive game. They tried this in the LotV beta and the game was considerably worse because if it. It only lasted a short time before they realized it wasn't working.
The fact that they only tested it for a short time is why it never worked. That's the kind of change that requires months of testing.
|
On July 18 2018 10:00 travis wrote:
I think there should be a limit to the number of queens per hatchery (of course still allowing you to remake them if they die). I guess 2 per hatch would be a good limit?
I don't think it would overly nerf zerg, it would just disrupt zerg's ability to make queens literally nonstop from the start of the game. They'd need to wait for their new hatcheries to come in.
This is extremely bad design for new and lower skill level players as it is another, very non-optional thing to keep in mind all the time on top of everything else, and would be an extreme disadvantage for anyone playing Zerg compared to Protoss or Terran as Zerg as a whole would require players to have that limitation in mind part, if not most, of the time and Protoss and Terran would not, I assume, also gain a new disadvantage.
It could work, but it would more than likely complicate Zerg too much for the majority of Zerg players. Sure, the limitation could mostly be ignored depending on how balance goes, or if players stick to build orders which have the limitation in mind for them, but it's "one more thing" to keep track of that brings its own balance and design complications with it.
|
On July 18 2018 11:28 Boggyb wrote:Show nested quote +On July 18 2018 11:09 esReveR wrote:On July 18 2018 10:19 Boggyb wrote:
I'm 100% in favor of a queen redesign as they are the one unit in the game that ignores the economy and attacking unit trade off dynamic and anything that is that extreme of an outlier is probably bad.
While they are doing that, I'd like to see them also get rid of Terran and Protoss macro mechanics. Even without them, the skill ceiling of SC2 will still be well above what humans are capable of and there is no reason to artificially raise the skill floor in a competitive game. They tried this in the LotV beta and the game was considerably worse because if it. It only lasted a short time before they realized it wasn't working. The fact that they only tested it for a short time is why it never worked. That's the kind of change that requires months of testing.
No matter how much testing they do for however long, gameplay suffered and players hated it. That's why it didn't work.
|
It's a tough call. I might be in the minority but I tend to think the queen is a bit too strong balance-wise, but actually makes a lot of sense design wise.
Zerg can just die to so many things and the queen adds a stability to the race that I think is really important. Yes, early game defence is way too centralised on the queen, but I think that is balanced somewhat by the fact that queens have very little offensive potential. I imagine any design change to zerg would very likely have too strong offensive/cheese potential, coupled with the larva mechanic would make things really bad IMO.
The lack of offensive anti-air in the early game for Zerg IMO is actually super important to allow any sort of macro game in ZvP. Almost every other build in PvZ has fallen out of favour because it's so hard to consistently take a third base against Zerg without a SG. People talk about stuff like tier 1 hydras etc, I think it's a dumb idea that would take so many other changes to have it work at all; larva is just too strong in sc2 for zerg to have actual well rounded units in early game.
I don't actually mind the queen dynamic in ZvT, and again I think it's important that it fixes a lot of defensive holes for Zerg without being able to be used offensive (except for Nydus/Proxy, and I do think Nydus should be looked at a bit for this reason). I just feel like it's too good, Zerg masses queens to stay alive but even if the Terran never attacks, they aren't behind. It seems like making a lot of queens is ideal in every scenario (mass queens does allow Terran to get into the late game to some extent, but Terran late-game isn't good enough for this to be an actual good tradeoff).
I'd prefer things more in line with:
Limit maximum energy on Queens so they don't store many transfuses as the game goes on
General nerfs to the strength of the Queen
Terran late game buffs (I think this is really important because the reason queens are so good rn is that terrans want to end the game as early as possible and queens become so useful and relevant against this style)
If someone comes up with some genius design change, I'd be happy to change my mind but it seems like a really difficult thing to do. I'd personally just be really happy to see what Queens would be like if their energy capacity was severely limited.
|
Queens don't need a re-design, they need a -1 range nerf aka a revert on the old buff they were given that was a bandaid fix to the fact liberators used to be incredibly OP.
Why are people suddenly wanting to re-design things in the game that already work perfectly fine. Queen design/Zerg design is perfectly fine.
What's not fine is building 10+ queens early game vs Terran let's a Zerg player be invincible to every possible attack and build that exists in the game. That is not fine, or balanced.
I think creep tumors could be adjusted, getting free vision is too strong. If you have high apm/mechanics, you are getting something entirely for free that is simply an advantage over the other races. If Terran players had something like creep spread that we could simply spend extra APM on and get free vision...they would all love to do that too.
So yes, people could recommend balance tweaks to queens, but do people really think queens themselves are designed poorly? They seem pretty well designed to me, just balanced poorly.
|
I'm always nervous about patching the queen nowadays, because we saw with the queen patch how powerful and unbalanced the game can become when you alter the queen (2012 Queen Patch), because it is such a fundamental unit.
|
On July 18 2018 11:33 blunderfulguy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 18 2018 11:28 Boggyb wrote:On July 18 2018 11:09 esReveR wrote:On July 18 2018 10:19 Boggyb wrote:
I'm 100% in favor of a queen redesign as they are the one unit in the game that ignores the economy and attacking unit trade off dynamic and anything that is that extreme of an outlier is probably bad.
While they are doing that, I'd like to see them also get rid of Terran and Protoss macro mechanics. Even without them, the skill ceiling of SC2 will still be well above what humans are capable of and there is no reason to artificially raise the skill floor in a competitive game. They tried this in the LotV beta and the game was considerably worse because if it. It only lasted a short time before they realized it wasn't working. The fact that they only tested it for a short time is why it never worked. That's the kind of change that requires months of testing. No matter how much testing they do for however long, gameplay suffered and players hated it. That's why it didn't work.
There are no mules, injects, nor chrono boosts in Brood War and people don't seem to mind. I'm hard pressed to believe that people suddenly decided that having to hit something every X seconds was essential game play.
|
Queens are fundamentally flawed units. They are essentially the swiss army knife of the Zerg. They wear nearly every hat that typical starcraft armies are made up of (melee, ranged, spellcaster). They are the most economically effective unit in the game without question.
While a redesign would help bring interest back to the race and welcomed by most current Zerg players (maybe I'm wrong here) I don't see how it is possible without adding 1-2 new units or completely revamping the tech tree.
Would be cool but Blizzard.
|
This thread will be my armchair balance designer masturbatory dream.
Queens have been pure bullshit ever since their range was increase from 3 to 5.
If zerg was forced to make meaningful armies (not 20 lings and 6 queens in tvz) before getting to 80 drones into infinity larva production the game would be much more interesting and active in the midgame.
Obviously this will likely require a buff. My suggestion would be better ling damage, but weaker scaling for lings (such as making adrenal slightly worse)
I can rant for days on how stupid the queen range buff was back in WoL. I entirely blame it on the broodlord infestor meta and have never forgiven david kim for it. I will go to my grave seething with petty rage over a videogame.
|
On July 18 2018 12:03 Boggyb wrote:Show nested quote +On July 18 2018 11:33 blunderfulguy wrote:On July 18 2018 11:28 Boggyb wrote:On July 18 2018 11:09 esReveR wrote:On July 18 2018 10:19 Boggyb wrote:
I'm 100% in favor of a queen redesign as they are the one unit in the game that ignores the economy and attacking unit trade off dynamic and anything that is that extreme of an outlier is probably bad.
While they are doing that, I'd like to see them also get rid of Terran and Protoss macro mechanics. Even without them, the skill ceiling of SC2 will still be well above what humans are capable of and there is no reason to artificially raise the skill floor in a competitive game. They tried this in the LotV beta and the game was considerably worse because if it. It only lasted a short time before they realized it wasn't working. The fact that they only tested it for a short time is why it never worked. That's the kind of change that requires months of testing. No matter how much testing they do for however long, gameplay suffered and players hated it. That's why it didn't work. There are no mules, injects, nor chrono boosts in Brood War and people don't seem to mind. I'm hard pressed to believe that people suddenly decided that having to hit something every X seconds was essential game play.
Comparing Brood War to StarCraft 2 and LotV like this is nonsensical. In BW you have to constantly fight against the game itself while staying on top of macro and micro, it isn't about "BW players don't seem to mind" not having Mules, Injects, Chrono, etc. They're different games, different mechanics, different designs, different players. Removing macro mechanics in SC2 would be like fixing all of the "glitches" in BW.
And "having to hit something every X seconds" was far from sudden in gaming and it didn't start with SC2 + Show Spoiler +BW forces you to click something every few seconds if you want to win, Counter Strike forces you to move if you want to win, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, DDR, Call of Duty, if you want more loot and dead demons in Diablo you have to keep clicking, World of Warcraft and however many other MMOs keep you moving and have you clicking abilities every second (literal 1 second global ability timers); believe it or not, gamers like being forced to stay busy if they want to win, going all the way back to Pong in the 70s, before that was tennis several hundreds of years ago, before that was football/soccer thousands of years ago unless my history is off
If something is removed, you must replace it with someone of equal value (or hopefully greater, when you're talking about game design). Otherwise you leave an empty void where that thing was; you create a vacuum, and I for one very, very much dislike vacuums, as do most living creatures and nature itself and I'm not one to argue with nature.
|
1) Restore our nerfed larave, heck, buff it. Make Zerg zergy again.
2) Give us better early game AA. It has to be fast and nimble. Either great if done preemptively or fast enough to be reactive, pick one, not both so it's not OP.
|
On July 18 2018 12:04 FarmI3oy wrote:
Queens are fundamentally flawed units. They are essentially the swiss army knife of the Zerg. They wear nearly every hat that typical starcraft armies are made up of (melee, ranged, spellcaster). They are the most economically effective unit in the game without question.
While a redesign would help bring interest back to the race and welcomed by most current Zerg players (maybe I'm wrong here) I don't see how it is possible without adding 1-2 new units or completely revamping the tech tree.
Would be cool but Blizzard.
This sums it up so very nicely and saves me - and the reader - from voicing the same in worse english.
|
On July 18 2018 12:03 Boggyb wrote:Show nested quote +On July 18 2018 11:33 blunderfulguy wrote:On July 18 2018 11:28 Boggyb wrote:On July 18 2018 11:09 esReveR wrote:On July 18 2018 10:19 Boggyb wrote:
I'm 100% in favor of a queen redesign as they are the one unit in the game that ignores the economy and attacking unit trade off dynamic and anything that is that extreme of an outlier is probably bad.
While they are doing that, I'd like to see them also get rid of Terran and Protoss macro mechanics. Even without them, the skill ceiling of SC2 will still be well above what humans are capable of and there is no reason to artificially raise the skill floor in a competitive game. They tried this in the LotV beta and the game was considerably worse because if it. It only lasted a short time before they realized it wasn't working. The fact that they only tested it for a short time is why it never worked. That's the kind of change that requires months of testing. No matter how much testing they do for however long, gameplay suffered and players hated it. That's why it didn't work. There are no mules, injects, nor chrono boosts in Brood War and people don't seem to mind. I'm hard pressed to believe that people suddenly decided that having to hit something every X seconds was essential game play.
Hitting something every X second is the quintessential mechanic of T, P and Z.
The core of SC2 is hitting something every X seconds.
EDIT: Also if these mechanics disappear you get a game with a very low skill ceilling and people stop playing it.
|
On July 18 2018 12:03 Boggyb wrote:Show nested quote +On July 18 2018 11:33 blunderfulguy wrote:On July 18 2018 11:28 Boggyb wrote:On July 18 2018 11:09 esReveR wrote:On July 18 2018 10:19 Boggyb wrote:
I'm 100% in favor of a queen redesign as they are the one unit in the game that ignores the economy and attacking unit trade off dynamic and anything that is that extreme of an outlier is probably bad.
While they are doing that, I'd like to see them also get rid of Terran and Protoss macro mechanics. Even without them, the skill ceiling of SC2 will still be well above what humans are capable of and there is no reason to artificially raise the skill floor in a competitive game. They tried this in the LotV beta and the game was considerably worse because if it. It only lasted a short time before they realized it wasn't working. The fact that they only tested it for a short time is why it never worked. That's the kind of change that requires months of testing. No matter how much testing they do for however long, gameplay suffered and players hated it. That's why it didn't work. There are no mules, injects, nor chrono boosts in Brood War and people don't seem to mind. I'm hard pressed to believe that people suddenly decided that having to hit something every X seconds was essential game play.
There's also no multiple building selection and no worker rally straight towards the minerals. Do you see the relation here?
|
On July 18 2018 12:04 FarmI3oy wrote:
Queens are fundamentally flawed units. They are essentially the swiss army knife of the Zerg. They wear nearly every hat that typical starcraft armies are made up of (melee, ranged, spellcaster).
i wanna mention the flipside of it. most early/midgame zergunits get hardcountered pretty easily. if your sacrificial overlord does not collect the necessary information, without the queen there would be coin flip decision early on in the game. lack of information is already a difficult thing against certain build (ex: phoenix first). imo thats sth to keep in mind, when thinking about a redesign.
|
Funny how most of the posts are from terrans and protosses... Just go redesign your own races, keep away from Zerg. I bet u all would delete queens from the game, so u could easy win with every ballshit from your arsenal.
I think current Queen is fine. Comparing it to hero unit which MSCore was with all it's imbalanced skills is crossing the line. Whining that Queen is versatile unit which can be useful at every state of the game is sooo biased especially from protoss players, who have so much units with that "ability".
Protoss redesign with MSCore removal was a must, because shooting pylons was ballshit idea. Queen is one of the best designed units that gives Zerg this unique feel. Spreading the creep, injecting, it's pretty much what differences good Zerg player from bad, so stripping this race from that "skill factor" makes it more boring and "a-move" race.
In a world where Protoss and Terrans has soo many ways to kill Zerg in early game, removing or drastically redesigning queen basically means removing Zerg from the game, or redesigning all races very, very deep.
|
Remove larva inject and add it as an ability to the hatchery itself? at the cost of a queen. Same cool down and same larva spawn time (although either could be tweaked a bit in length I guess). Just less time and actions wasted on injects. Perhaps also force single hatch select for it to work so a player has cycle through each or something like to take the edge off of it.
Call it "Metabolism Explosion" or something.
|
Maybe there could be a cooldown on queen production so it takes longer to build up a good force of them
|
not sure if the queen redesign is a good idea or not - maybe - but if it fixes the ZvZ meta so standard isn't taking a third hatchery while also doing a ling bane allin every single game then i'm for it
|
Dont change whats not broken
|
On July 18 2018 09:14 FrostedMiniWheats wrote:
If the sky is the limit, I would love this paired with a total overhaul of Zerg's AA. To start I'd like them to strip the queen of any early AA abilities and just switch the hydra with the roach on the tech tree with rebalanced stats respectively.
Additionally, queen AA is now a cheap hive upgrade and hives can produce multiple queens at once. This way they still have their lategame utility as an inexpensive support/AA unit.
Wouldn't moving Roaches back in the tech tree just insta kill Zerg vs Archondrops/Hellbats/Gladepts/Banelings/etc?
|
On July 18 2018 19:12 TrashPanda wrote:Show nested quote +On July 18 2018 09:14 FrostedMiniWheats wrote:
If the sky is the limit, I would love this paired with a total overhaul of Zerg's AA. To start I'd like them to strip the queen of any early AA abilities and just switch the hydra with the roach on the tech tree with rebalanced stats respectively.
Additionally, queen AA is now a cheap hive upgrade and hives can produce multiple queens at once. This way they still have their lategame utility as an inexpensive support/AA unit. Wouldn't moving Roaches back in the tech tree just insta kill Zerg vs Archondrops/Hellbats/Gladepts/Banelings/etc?
Maybe gladepts but the rest could be defended with hydras assuming they were cheaper weaker tier 1 tech
|
P and T have too many harass otion available in early game while zerg got nothing early to really counter them since wol except ravagers that are too expensive to be produce if the other isn't in a 2 bases semi-all in.
Nerfing/reworking queens will mean hellbats need to require upgrade again, even some adept/reapers/hellions/cyclon are too good at poking if zerg haven't the queens, every flying units has to be nerfed oracles/phoenix/liberator/medivac/banshee/warprism.
So no queens are fine, if it seems ugly not to be able to kill a zerg which mass queens remember 2 shield batteries or one tank achieve the same and deny every attempts for zerg to kill P/T.
But yeah, Terrans have the nostalgia of early wol with queens with 3 range and their 70% winrates vs Z when they kill zerg before 5min with bunker rush or hellions banshee.
|
Remove hatcheries, make queens hatcheries, now that would be cool.
|
On July 18 2018 19:16 serendipitous wrote:Show nested quote +On July 18 2018 19:12 TrashPanda wrote:On July 18 2018 09:14 FrostedMiniWheats wrote:
If the sky is the limit, I would love this paired with a total overhaul of Zerg's AA. To start I'd like them to strip the queen of any early AA abilities and just switch the hydra with the roach on the tech tree with rebalanced stats respectively.
Additionally, queen AA is now a cheap hive upgrade and hives can produce multiple queens at once. This way they still have their lategame utility as an inexpensive support/AA unit. Wouldn't moving Roaches back in the tech tree just insta kill Zerg vs Archondrops/Hellbats/Gladepts/Banelings/etc? Maybe gladepts but the rest could be defended with hydras assuming they were cheaper weaker tier 1 tech
as a zerg player i'm not totally against the idea of tier 1 hydras, but i don't think you should underestimate the impact of giving the zerg race a tier 1 unit that shoots up
|
|
|
On July 18 2018 18:39 hiroshOne wrote:
Funny how most of the posts are from terrans and protosses... Just go redesign your own races, keep away from Zerg. I bet u all would delete queens from the game, so u could easy win with every ballshit from your arsenal.
So like Protoss with the Mothership Core resulting in a tier 5 player beating a two time world champion. Zerg players were more than ok with that and cried about the dropperlord nerf.
User was warned for this post.
|
On July 18 2018 22:05 Boggyb wrote:Show nested quote +On July 18 2018 18:39 hiroshOne wrote:
Funny how most of the posts are from terrans and protosses... Just go redesign your own races, keep away from Zerg. I bet u all would delete queens from the game, so u could easy win with every ballshit from your arsenal. So like Protoss with the Mothership Core resulting in a tier 5 player beating a two time world champion. Zerg players were more than ok with that and cried about the dropperlord nerf.
i don't remember zergs crying about the dropperlord nerf. as a zerg i was in favor of it. other zergs i saw talking about it also agreed it was strong and the nerf was OK. any time there's a nerf at least one person will whine, but zergs weren't really complaining about that one.
|
On July 18 2018 11:38 avilo wrote:
Queens don't need a re-design, they need a -1 range nerf aka a revert on the old buff they were given that was a bandaid fix to the fact liberators used to be incredibly OP.
Why are people suddenly wanting to re-design things in the game that already work perfectly fine. Queen design/Zerg design is perfectly fine.
What's not fine is building 10+ queens early game vs Terran let's a Zerg player be invincible to every possible attack and build that exists in the game. That is not fine, or balanced.
I think creep tumors could be adjusted, getting free vision is too strong. If you have high apm/mechanics, you are getting something entirely for free that is simply an advantage over the other races. If Terran players had something like creep spread that we could simply spend extra APM on and get free vision...they would all love to do that too.
So yes, people could recommend balance tweaks to queens, but do people really think queens themselves are designed poorly? They seem pretty well designed to me, just balanced poorly.
Terrans have Sensor Tower.... that's basically free vision without having to spend any apm besides building the thing.
|
On July 18 2018 22:05 Boggyb wrote:
User was warned for this post.
Mods are all kind of dumb if they think that noting the ridiculous of something that happened 6 months ago is balance whining. Can I report people who say bad things about the broodlord infestor era? That's "balance whining".
|
TLADT24920 Posts
On July 19 2018 01:07 Boggyb wrote:Mods are all kind of dumb if they think that noting the ridiculous of something that happened 6 months ago is balance whining. Can I report people who say bad things about the broodlord infestor era? That's "balance whining".
If you have a problem with moderation, take it to website feedback please. Thanks!
|
I think the Queen is a massive game design problem. It acts as a useless and mindless APM sink, and it's overwhelming strength defensively (much like the MSC) destroys a lot of chances for early action and pushes.
Give Zerg more micro potential for units. That will send the APM somewhere more fun to watch and more to play, and mitigate any loss of the Queen's strength defensively.
|
On July 19 2018 01:34 BronzeKnee wrote:
I think the Queen is a massive game design problem. It acts as a useless and mindless APM sink, and it's overwhelming strength defensively (much like the MSC) destroys a lot of chances for early action and pushes.
Give Zerg more micro potential for units. That will send the APM somewhere more fun to watch and more to play, and mitigate any loss of the Queen's strength defensively.
"overwhelming strength defensively" has to be a statement by someone who has never microed a queen. they have normal, appropriate strength defensively. if queens weren't as strong as they are on AA defense then 2-1-1 would be autowin for terran
|
On July 19 2018 01:34 BronzeKnee wrote:
I think the Queen is a massive game design problem. It acts as a useless and mindless APM sink, and it's overwhelming strength defensively (much like the MSC) destroys a lot of chances for early action and pushes.
Give Zerg more micro potential for units. That will send the APM somewhere more fun to watch and more to play, and mitigate any loss of the Queen's strength defensively.
Meanwhile, zerg is the race that gets killed the most in the early game. Its the race that gets harassed the most in the early game. Its also the race that gets cheesed the most in the early and very early game.
How does it destroy any chance for early action and pushes?
A terran that opens reaper into hellion/banshee while switching to cyclone if roaches are coming is 100% invincible against any early zerg aggression, always ending up ahead.
Name any aggression zerg can do early versus a terran that opens cyclone banshee. None.
So if queens are too strong defensively and negates any early game aggression possibilities, explain why they are the most harassed race in the early game.
|
On July 18 2018 08:44 404AlphaSquad wrote:
yes!
Wasn’t in the case that creep didn’t provide a speed boost in Starbow? imo, the 30% speed boost is kinda broken
Queens have always had the following problems: anti scouting with ranged attack, free defensive potential for a macro unit, early-game spellcaster, general problems with larva and macro..
I think Starbow had a mechanic where queens could attack, but it costs energy, which is a solution to most of the listed problems.
But I forgot all about my past life of playing Starbow. 
|
On July 19 2018 04:02 Grumbels wrote:Wasn’t in the case that creep didn’t provide a speed boost in Starbow? imo, the 30% speed boost is kinda broken Queens have always had the following problems: anti scouting with ranged attack, free defensive potential for a macro unit, early-game spellcaster, general problems with larva and macro.. I think Starbow had a mechanic where queens could attack, but it costs energy, which is a solution to most of the listed problems. But I forgot all about my past life of playing Starbow.
It's so broken than... Zerg can't win a fight offcreep vs T if they don't have a huge supply lead, with T3 units.
Hey what about Terran players stop making threads every day where they ask again and again for massive nerfs for others races, or massive buffs for Terran. That will be the best redesign SC2 needs.
|
The problem with queens is that they are too strong for their cost and they can defend too much simply by being massed. Queens are not too strong but what zergs have found is that they can save larva and money by defending with mostly queens, they are simply to cost efficient on defense. When defending an opponents push you could either make units which wastes larva and costs more or you could make a lot of queens. It is simply the most efficient choice, you defend it either way but you get a few more drones out with mass queens.
I believe we need a change that makes mass queens worse, for example prevent transfuse from working on queens. That way they can support an army but they can't be the army. If needed change the transfuse spell but as they are now quuens are too good massed
|
Hello from France,
I m only talking about ZvT,
At the start of SC2, on WoL, prevent the creep to spread was not a condition to victory, in this terms it was not so important. Now I m looking at the future of replacement for the terran scene and i do care to find how you could refresh the ZvT game.
Why ? Cause you can t stop the creep if you ren t Korean.
When i see there s no replacement of pro europeans terran except Clem who is the only one to bring to PRO level a new strategy (but failed) with building a siege line of bunkers (with turrets AA + sensor towers) during THE MID GAME in front the creep, I mean, something has to be done...
During HotS, everybody talked about different Build Order, but the 12 workers decision has killed a lot of this little strategies. So I hope something should be done in favor of "the bunker siege line style" if this vision is shared by players and viewers.
Don t you enjoy this kind of strategy ? Unfortunetly, i hadn t the link of the game for now....
Last year, I was finally really excited to know if his new strategy (and such a different strategy!!!) could disturb the Z but the fu*** creep keep going to spread everywhere and Clem couldn t hold the position cause Banelings do 80 point damage to bunkers... Honestly, i don t think changing the damage is a good option, also changing the hit points of the bunker fell wired.
That s why i m thinking to modify "Hi-Sec Auto Tracking" adding a +1 bonus range to marines and marauders inside the bunker.
Then you can remove "Neosteel Frame" (cause nobody do it) and add a new fast ability to transform each bunker adding 2 supply army in the cargo space.
|
On July 19 2018 04:11 Tyrhanius wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2018 04:02 Grumbels wrote:On July 18 2018 08:44 404AlphaSquad wrote:
yes! Wasn’t in the case that creep didn’t provide a speed boost in Starbow? imo, the 30% speed boost is kinda broken Queens have always had the following problems: anti scouting with ranged attack, free defensive potential for a macro unit, early-game spellcaster, general problems with larva and macro.. I think Starbow had a mechanic where queens could attack, but it costs energy, which is a solution to most of the listed problems. But I forgot all about my past life of playing Starbow. It's so broken than... Zerg can't win a fight offcreep vs T if they don't have a huge supply lead, with T3 units. Hey what about Terran players stop making threads every day where they ask again and again for massive nerfs for others races, or massive buffs for Terran. That will be the best redesign SC2 needs.
its a redesign, ofc some units would be buffed in compensation
|
I think queens are well balanced and a really interesting unit and prefer them to be kept exactly how they are.
|
Just lower the queen attack range & damage. It's supposed to be a macro mechanic, not an all purpose unit. Or implement a 1 queen per hatchery/lair/hive(macro structure) limit and increase the damage/range to compensate. Being able to mass them with the current strength they have is a bit too strong.
|
On July 19 2018 05:19 Grumbels wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2018 04:11 Tyrhanius wrote:On July 19 2018 04:02 Grumbels wrote:On July 18 2018 08:44 404AlphaSquad wrote:
yes! Wasn’t in the case that creep didn’t provide a speed boost in Starbow? imo, the 30% speed boost is kinda broken Queens have always had the following problems: anti scouting with ranged attack, free defensive potential for a macro unit, early-game spellcaster, general problems with larva and macro.. I think Starbow had a mechanic where queens could attack, but it costs energy, which is a solution to most of the listed problems. But I forgot all about my past life of playing Starbow. It's so broken than... Zerg can't win a fight offcreep vs T if they don't have a huge supply lead, with T3 units. Hey what about Terran players stop making threads every day where they ask again and again for massive nerfs for others races, or massive buffs for Terran. That will be the best redesign SC2 needs. its a redesign, ofc some units would be buffed in compensation
You are aware that means every zerg ground units should be buffed if the creep boost disappears ? Why, because you don't like creep ? No way you can manage to balance that, there is too many variables changing at the same time.
Creep is actually a unique mecanism, it's the only RTS you have that, and it's the identity of the zerg race.
So no, we don't want to touch creep, it's fine. If you want to play starbow, play starbow.
I find Zerg race is really bad designed on starbow, so i don't play it. Don't want to be forced to play it.
If starbow was so nice, everyone would be playing it instead of SC2, it's not the case.
|
On July 18 2018 22:33 vult wrote:Show nested quote +On July 18 2018 11:38 avilo wrote:
Queens don't need a re-design, they need a -1 range nerf aka a revert on the old buff they were given that was a bandaid fix to the fact liberators used to be incredibly OP.
Why are people suddenly wanting to re-design things in the game that already work perfectly fine. Queen design/Zerg design is perfectly fine.
What's not fine is building 10+ queens early game vs Terran let's a Zerg player be invincible to every possible attack and build that exists in the game. That is not fine, or balanced.
I think creep tumors could be adjusted, getting free vision is too strong. If you have high apm/mechanics, you are getting something entirely for free that is simply an advantage over the other races. If Terran players had something like creep spread that we could simply spend extra APM on and get free vision...they would all love to do that too.
So yes, people could recommend balance tweaks to queens, but do people really think queens themselves are designed poorly? They seem pretty well designed to me, just balanced poorly. Terrans have Sensor Tower.... that's basically free vision without having to spend any apm besides building the thing.
"Free"
"Cough" 150/100 "cough"
|
On July 19 2018 03:01 Snakestyle1 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2018 01:34 BronzeKnee wrote:
I think the Queen is a massive game design problem. It acts as a useless and mindless APM sink, and it's overwhelming strength defensively (much like the MSC) destroys a lot of chances for early action and pushes.
Give Zerg more micro potential for units. That will send the APM somewhere more fun to watch and more to play, and mitigate any loss of the Queen's strength defensively. Meanwhile, zerg is the race that gets killed the most in the early game. Its the race that gets harassed the most in the early game. Its also the race that gets cheesed the most in the early and very early game. How does it destroy any chance for early action and pushes? A terran that opens reaper into hellion/banshee while switching to cyclone if roaches are coming is 100% invincible against any early zerg aggression, always ending up ahead. Name any aggression zerg can do early versus a terran that opens cyclone banshee. None. So if queens are too strong defensively and negates any early game aggression possibilities, explain why they are the most harassed race in the early game.
Nydus or Queen Ravager allins regularly destroy terrans going hellion/banshee
|
I don't know about a full 4.0 style rework, but I don't think they need 9 range anymore after the repeated Liberator nerfs especially in the early game.
Maybe move some of their early game power to some research tech. Like will it REALLY imbalance the match ups if Queens went back to 7 range and then had a +2 range upgrade at hive tech?
|
On July 19 2018 05:25 Haighstrom wrote:
I think queens are well balanced and a really interesting unit and prefer them to be kept exactly how they are.
This.
|
Everybody (well, T and P it seems) is quick to demand a change but nobody wants to think about the consequences. I don't think Zergs will be convinced that it could work until somebody takes a deep dive into the supposed "issues" and gives well thought out, substantial ideas on how to "fix" the Queen.
"Just move Hydras to Hatchery tech" ... like, what? Even on an incredibly shallow level that's absurdly complicated. "Just reduce the Queen's AA range" even though it is what it is for several reasons. "Just *insert something about changing larva here*" or how about we just think about that a little more and maybe ask why that might be a terrible thing for anyone at Blizz or here to spend time and effort trying to make work.
The range reduction seems the most reasonable, but with Auto Turrets back and all the other harassment units still in the game, I'm not sold on it even if you could research an upgrade for them at Hive or Lair tech. Especially since most of the time, by far, that I hear anyone talk about Queen range it's Terran players saying "I/they would have won there if Queen's weren't so OP."
|
On July 19 2018 12:16 blunderfulguy wrote:
Everybody (well, T and P it seems) is quick to demand a change but nobody wants to think about the consequences. I don't think Zergs will be convinced that it could work until somebody takes a deep dive into the supposed "issues" and gives well thought out, substantial ideas on how to "fix" the Queen.
"Just move Hydras to Hatchery tech" ... like, what? Even on an incredibly shallow level that's absurdly complicated. "Just reduce the Queen's AA range" even though it is what it is for several reasons. "Just *insert something about changing larva here*" or how about we just think about that a little more and maybe ask why that might be a terrible thing for anyone at Blizz or here to spend time and effort trying to make work.
We tought the same of the MsC and the game is much better now.
I think it can be done, think about it, right now the queen gives much defence and allows zerg to power throug with few units, this in comparison is one of the reason all the races are the one that harass zerg because if they don't zerg can drone so hard that if you don't they just win.
If the zerg had better early game units at the cost of a less strong queen it means zerg needs to drone less and spend more on units to defend but such a thing means that zerg could be allowed to the agressor, again because they have better units in the early game.
I think hatch tech hydras actually work in this situation, roaches can't be pushed back tho, hydras would too squishy to survive things like hellions or adepts.
But I think It CAN work, fighting a protoss that uses gateway armies, fast expands and splits its armies has made protoss MUs way better than playing against a protoss that defended until a colossus death/ball so I can see the same thing with zerg.
Changes to the strenght and cost, the posibility of upgrades differentiating the strenght of hatch hydras and lair hydras, are needed yes but not impossible.
|
On July 19 2018 12:16 blunderfulguy wrote:
Everybody (well, T and P it seems) is quick to demand a change but nobody wants to think about the consequences. I don't think Zergs will be convinced that it could work until somebody takes a deep dive into the supposed "issues" and gives well thought out, substantial ideas on how to "fix" the Queen.
"Just move Hydras to Hatchery tech" ... like, what? Even on an incredibly shallow level that's absurdly complicated. "Just reduce the Queen's AA range" even though it is what it is for several reasons. "Just *insert something about changing larva here*" or how about we just think about that a little more and maybe ask why that might be a terrible thing for anyone at Blizz or here to spend time and effort trying to make work.
The range reduction seems the most reasonable, but with Auto Turrets back and all the other harassment units still in the game, I'm not sold on it even if you could research an upgrade for them at Hive or Lair tech. Especially since most of the time, by far, that I hear anyone talk about Queen range it's Terran players saying "I/they would have won there if Queen's weren't so OP."
Let me rant about the queen being an overpowered multi-tool. And remember over the course of my rant that the ONLY nerf I would want to see is the Queen range being reduced from 5 back to 3 on the ground. And I would balance out my queen nerf with a zergling damage buff.
- Creep spread is way too strong given that a Terran army essentially cannot fight on it.
- Once on 80 drones, especially with the buff allowing injects to stack, larva supply is infinite. Zerg players build up enormous banks in lategame (all matchups) precisely because they know they can resupply 120 army supply in less than a minute in the lategame.
- Zerg can get to 80 drones too easily because queens are great at stopping all early harass. With some skillful scouting, a zerg player is rarely surprised by anything and can hold off any air based attack with queens. Any hybrid air/ground (
Like archon drop) with mostly queens and about 20 supply of ground units. Almost every terran timing (noteworthy exception is the relatively recent 2-1-1 into additional barracks 2 tank timing attack) can be held with a few lings and queens. Protoss timings are admittedly harder to hold. Hellion harrass and adept harass is stopped by queens.
- Transfuse mana costs are too small to notice. In early game harass situations, 6 queens with transfuse can hold off a lot of attacks all on their own. One would think that burning all that mana on transfuse would at the very least slow down creep spread, but with 6 queens mana management literally does not matter. I think transfuses in large engagement situations are extremely skillful and cool to see. I just don't like how it has basically no opportunity cost to the zerg player.
- Nydus allins with queens? Holy jesus that is annoying.
- Queens can outrun stimmed marines on creep just fast enough for 20 ling reinforcements to arrive in time on any map. No punishment at all for having queens out of position on the map, and in a place that they can be surprised by marines. Further once the few tumours are destroyed and the harass repelled, the queens can lay down new tumours and the Terran player essentially traded 300 faster minerals in a scan for roughly 1-10 seconds of delayed creep spread (contingent on how good the zerg player is at repelling an attack and immediately replanting tumours)
- Roach/hydra on creep are as fast as hellions.
There is no game where a zerg player doesn't have a hilarious amount of extra queens. This is because they are critical to economy (larva), infrastructure (creep spread) and are decent army units to boot.
Why do I want queens to be 3 range? I want them to be unable to fight in a timing attack or all-ins with roaches. I want them to not be able to deflect marine harass. I want them to require intelligent positioning in order to deflect hellion harass. I want it to be a little bit riskier to leave queens alone on the edge of creep. What I essentially want is for queens to be BAD ground combat units in trade for granting map hacks, infinite larva for instant resupply, and very good defensive ability + anti air (at least early game)
Granted, the queen is such a massive crutch for zerg players that this change would probably plummet zerg winrates to 30%. What would I want in exchange? Make zerglings good again. Like, 2008 zerglings good. Make terran have to be smarter with their army against zerglings, because zerglings in an open field can crush them. Make protoss players get punished HARD for missing forcefield or not positioning zealots correctly against zerglings. But most of all, make zerg create ground units before getting to 80 drones that are not. fucking. queens.
|
Seeing 8 Queens under a Brood deathball is one of the reasons I stopped playing/watching this game.
I get the unit is a necessity, a macro and early defense unit, but is it really ok for it to scale so well into the lategame?
|
Most of the posts here are not a redesign but just a straight up nerf.
The queen allows Zerg to defend early game harass without falling behind in economy, just putting hydras on hatch tech isn't gonna cut it then.
You would also have to severely nerf the macro capabilities of the other races, which will force them even more to do early game agression.
Things like double stargate oracle might also just be totally broken without queens as AA.
And of course moving hydras to hatch tech will give them weaker stats and costs, it will leave a hole in the midgame and will need to be replaced by something else.
Blizzard would have to put a lot of resources into this, with the risk of it not working out well, I don't think that is realistic at this point in the game.
And lastly I think queens are fine as is, very strong defensively, but not very mobile.
Nydus also isn't as strong as some people here seen to think, you barely see them at the highest level and proxy rax probably has a better winrate
|
On July 19 2018 14:01 Thaniri wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2018 12:16 blunderfulguy wrote:
Everybody (well, T and P it seems) is quick to demand a change but nobody wants to think about the consequences. I don't think Zergs will be convinced that it could work until somebody takes a deep dive into the supposed "issues" and gives well thought out, substantial ideas on how to "fix" the Queen.
"Just move Hydras to Hatchery tech" ... like, what? Even on an incredibly shallow level that's absurdly complicated. "Just reduce the Queen's AA range" even though it is what it is for several reasons. "Just *insert something about changing larva here*" or how about we just think about that a little more and maybe ask why that might be a terrible thing for anyone at Blizz or here to spend time and effort trying to make work.
The range reduction seems the most reasonable, but with Auto Turrets back and all the other harassment units still in the game, I'm not sold on it even if you could research an upgrade for them at Hive or Lair tech. Especially since most of the time, by far, that I hear anyone talk about Queen range it's Terran players saying "I/they would have won there if Queen's weren't so OP." Let me rant about the queen being an overpowered multi-tool. And remember over the course of my rant that the ONLY nerf I would want to see is the Queen range being reduced from 5 back to 3 on the ground. And I would balance out my queen nerf with a zergling damage buff. - Creep spread is way too strong given that a Terran army essentially cannot fight on it. - Once on 80 drones, especially with the buff allowing injects to stack, larva supply is infinite. Zerg players build up enormous banks in lategame (all matchups) precisely because they know they can resupply 120 army supply in less than a minute in the lategame. - Zerg can get to 80 drones too easily because queens are great at stopping all early harass. With some skillful scouting, a zerg player is rarely surprised by anything and can hold off any air based attack with queens. Any hybrid air/ground ( Like archon drop) with mostly queens and about 20 supply of ground units. Almost every terran timing (noteworthy exception is the relatively recent 2-1-1 into additional barracks 2 tank timing attack) can be held with a few lings and queens. Protoss timings are admittedly harder to hold. Hellion harrass and adept harass is stopped by queens. - Transfuse mana costs are too small to notice. In early game harass situations, 6 queens with transfuse can hold off a lot of attacks all on their own. One would think that burning all that mana on transfuse would at the very least slow down creep spread, but with 6 queens mana management literally does not matter. I think transfuses in large engagement situations are extremely skillful and cool to see. I just don't like how it has basically no opportunity cost to the zerg player. - Nydus allins with queens? Holy jesus that is annoying. - Queens can outrun stimmed marines on creep just fast enough for 20 ling reinforcements to arrive in time on any map. No punishment at all for having queens out of position on the map, and in a place that they can be surprised by marines. Further once the few tumours are destroyed and the harass repelled, the queens can lay down new tumours and the Terran player essentially traded 300 faster minerals in a scan for roughly 1-10 seconds of delayed creep spread (contingent on how good the zerg player is at repelling an attack and immediately replanting tumours) - Roach/hydra on creep are as fast as hellions. There is no game where a zerg player doesn't have a hilarious amount of extra queens. This is because they are critical to economy (larva), infrastructure (creep spread) and are decent army units to boot. Why do I want queens to be 3 range? I want them to be unable to fight in a timing attack or all-ins with roaches. I want them to not be able to deflect marine harass. I want them to require intelligent positioning in order to deflect hellion harass. I want it to be a little bit riskier to leave queens alone on the edge of creep. What I essentially want is for queens to be BAD ground combat units in trade for granting map hacks, infinite larva for instant resupply, and very good defensive ability + anti air (at least early game) Granted, the queen is such a massive crutch for zerg players that this change would probably plummet zerg winrates to 30%. What would I want in exchange? Make zerglings good again. Like, 2008 zerglings good. Make terran have to be smarter with their army against zerglings, because zerglings in an open field can crush them. Make protoss players get punished HARD for missing forcefield or not positioning zealots correctly against zerglings. But most of all, make zerg create ground units before getting to 80 drones that are not. fucking. queens.
Mass hellion/hellbats would probably have a 100% winrate victory then... Well, I exagerate but an intelligent positioning won't change the kitting ability of the hellion who in mass would nullifie the zerglings, static D would be a must have (at least 1 spine on the B2/B3, creep spread will be heavely delayed and the first push on the terran way stronger), the 3rd will be very delayed too buff zerglings or not... OH I forgot about the reaper who will do a lot more damage, actually, mass reapers should be supreme with a -2 range one tthe queen... Anyway, if you survive, I guess roachs would be the way to go against the 6-8 hellions in early which makes the zergling buff useless in this stage of the game.
Moreover, protoss and terran are already punished hard when they make positionning error, the game is really unforgivable and zerglings are fast, it seems a bit harsh to make this stuff stronger. Zvp might be a just a bit more easier but zvt is totally screwed, I wonder how innovation/Maru won't have a 100% winrate against any zerg after this honestly, no way anyone survive the first 10 minutes; And scrubs like me would be so much abused, honestly, I'll just stop playing like in 2015.
And for the hydra T1, that's pretty much it, a gap should be adressed in T2 then. All in all, a design change on the queen would need a total reworking on the zerg race in every stage of the game and maybe even on their basic macro mechaniics which basically work like this since 2010, it's not even comparable to the MSC one and personally, I am fine with the way it is. If Blizz team this thread they won't adress the design anyway considering all the nerf adresses.
Btw, your last line is a blatant balance whine considering a Z with 66 drones and only queen basically die to any kind of agressive play and as a diam 1 Z, I generally don't last +10 min against T(around 25% winrate) while I'm performing well in the other mu, that's because of my terrible early sure but I don't think a lot of Z on my level or Master 2-3 find themselves very confortables in zvt.
|
I absolutely hate the inject mechanic and pretty much makes me avoid playing zerg.
but i cant see what can be changed here realistically
|
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/J4qhEIW.jpg)
Terrans tought...
Closed ? not really
|
I would propose to redesign the entire game by taking elements from the Starbow and Brood War mods. I know this is not going to happen, and it's too late, but with the serious design issues that SC2 has, a complete and radical redesign of the game would be necessary.
|
I always need to pay attention on what i walk, despite the fact creep tumours are visible to me.
Kappa
User was temp banned for this post.
|
On July 19 2018 19:32 the_last_terran1 wrote:Terrans tought... Closed ? not really
Incredible sample size of 7 is totally representative...
|
On July 19 2018 20:10 loginn wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2018 19:32 the_last_terran1 wrote:Terrans tought... Closed ? not really Incredible sample size of 7 is totally representative...
You know terran is doing badly when there's only 7 left of them...
|
|
|
On July 19 2018 20:20 the_last_terran1 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2018 20:10 loginn wrote:On July 19 2018 19:32 the_last_terran1 wrote:Terrans tought... Closed ? not really Incredible sample size of 7 is totally representative... The percentage of 7 persons which agree themself is equal to 1 chance on 128... I think this is not completely a bad result..
That's only if you consider all answers to have 50% chance to be selected which is hard with 5 answers... and if your poll isn't biased.
Also sample size refers to the # of ppl that answered not their agreement.
AKA : 7 / 100k Terran players is not representative of the opinion of the 100k Terran players as it is 0.007% of the Terran population.
On topic :
One fun idea to explore is to nerf queens as a macro unit and to give them the ability to morph into a defensive/support unit like a ling morphs into a bane.
|
On July 19 2018 20:29 loginn wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2018 20:20 the_last_terran1 wrote:On July 19 2018 20:10 loginn wrote:On July 19 2018 19:32 the_last_terran1 wrote:Terrans tought... Closed ? not really Incredible sample size of 7 is totally representative... The percentage of 7 persons which agree themself is equal to 1 chance on 128... I think this is not completely a bad result.. That's only if you consider all answers to have 50% chance to be selected which is hard with 5 answers... and if your poll isn't biased. Also sample size refers to the # of ppl that answered not their agreement. AKA : 7 / 100k Terran players is not representative of the opinion of the 100k Terran players as it is 0.007% of the Terran population. On topic : One fun idea to explore is to nerf queens as a macro unit and to give them the ability to morph into a defensive/support unit like a ling morphs into a bane.
Whatever to me, the result is pretty interesting,
|
I think it is mandatory for zerg to have a strong anti-air as the queen, even if it is not larvae dependent. There is too much air abuse possible otherwise, and air units being dominant is bad for the game. We shouldn't touch its anti-air stats.
However, to me it is a BIG problem that zergs can get away with almost only queens in the early game against grounds units. This is actually really bad and is not consistent with how the race works, that is the fact that zerg has to choose between economy and army, and that other races can slow zerg development by attacking (and HAVE TO, because otherwise you are dead).
Multiple solutions are possible in order for zerg to need slightly more units in reaction to aggression (of course all of the below at the same time would be absurd) :
- Adding a light OR armored tag to the queen (the downside being it can change some interactions with phoenix/void ray, but not critically in my opinion)
- -1 base armor
- -1 ground range AND -1 ground damage
- Putting a 5 to 10 sec cooldown on transfusion
- A 5-10 sec cooldown on creep tumor queen ability, helping to reward creep cleaning a bit more
- Some combinations of the above
And to people saying that queen is exclusively a defensive unit, don't forget about lategame healing queens, and don't forget about nydus allins with queens that is absurd and really too strong given how much heal and tankiness queens can provide.
|
On July 19 2018 04:02 Grumbels wrote:Wasn’t in the case that creep didn’t provide a speed boost in Starbow? imo, the 30% speed boost is kinda broken Queens have always had the following problems: anti scouting with ranged attack, free defensive potential for a macro unit, early-game spellcaster, general problems with larva and macro.. I think Starbow had a mechanic where queens could attack, but it costs energy, which is a solution to most of the listed problems. But I forgot all about my past life of playing Starbow.
I wouldnt really go look to deep at starbow for a solution of the sc2 queen problems (if there are any) since they are entirely different. When tinkering with the queen you change so many aspects of how a matchup is played.
Ofc starbow has it easier because of the stable core of Brood War so all we had to do was ask ourselves the question what can a queen add to the game? The zerg race was already finished design wise from BW and we added our version of the queen on top of it.
In sc2 the queen is part of the core zerg race of sc2 which is why you have to approach it with alot more caution because it covers strongly alot of areas effectively, where the normal zerg army cannot compete (macro, creep spread, Anti-air, Defense, support). Entire army movements depend on there being creep or not. You cannot think of sc2 zerg without the queen. Starbow zerg is still functional though admittedly a bit less without the queen.
Not saying thats good or bad, just leaving my impression on it.
About my overjoyed "yes" response, i have to admit that i was just a little bit salty about them as a terran player  . From personal preference i have to say that i would find a match up generally more interesting if I dont have to fight 8 queens while the zerg builds 80 drones and then pushing with tier 3/2 units.
Generally my impression was, that when they buffed the queen range from 3-5 in late wol, the queen allowed zerg to "skip" to the mid and lategame and thus foregoing the early game. It was a cheap and easy way to fix a problem zerg had at the time against early harass, but I dare say that it was probably not the best.
Since then the queen has been buffed again, which shows that this is the direction Blizzard want the game to go in.
|
Some of these Queen ideas are completely suicidal even if they look minor.
Changing queen to light, is basically forcing zerg into 3min roach warrens vs T, and mass spore every game vs P, can you imagine Phoenix/Oracle with Queens being light?
To nerf the queen like some of you want, you'd have to redesign the game completely.
The Queen is fine and unique, a big part of playing zerg is managing your queens.
It's not like people are making 20 queens at the pro level, max you see is like 10 queens very late game.
|
Russian Federation205 Posts
We really need some real buffs of zerg , now zerg looks to poor vs protoss , who use immortal/archon every game and take ez victorys . They dont even use brain to play protoss , since using one same build every game , and zerg from game to game need find really suprise and new key to victory . Auto-enject lavra is obvious buff , since zergs really needs focus on defense early game ( zerg at this time cant make their own agression ) . And in mid game we need buffs against immortals , i think for begin we can change ravagers cut speed , so shot can down much faster than its now ( atm its too ez do doge , and ravager itself too weak too expensive unit )
|
On July 20 2018 00:01 terribleplayer1 wrote:
Some of these Queen ideas are completely suicidal even if they look minor.
Changing queen to light, is basically forcing zerg into 3min roach warrens vs T, and mass spore every game vs P, can you imagine Phoenix/Oracle with Queens being light?
To nerf the queen like some of you want, you'd have to redesign the game completely.
The Queen is fine and unique, a big part of playing zerg is managing your queens.
It's not like people are making 20 queens at the pro level, max you see is like 10 queens very late game.
Thanks for cherry picking and completely ignoring the other changes proposed, and the fact that I said that of course not all the change must be done at the same time. 1 of them could be largely enough. Damn I make a regular argumentation, with several proposal, and still there are people who manage to react like this and like they did not read.
And no, pro zerg can do 10 queens even on 3 bases, most of the time the 2-1-1 build of terrans was defended by like 7-8 queens and very few units. No the queen against ground aggression is not fine, and this has to change somehow. No complete redesign is needed. Just a few stats changed.
|
On July 20 2018 00:09 Fbaby wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2018 00:01 terribleplayer1 wrote:
Some of these Queen ideas are completely suicidal even if they look minor.
Changing queen to light, is basically forcing zerg into 3min roach warrens vs T, and mass spore every game vs P, can you imagine Phoenix/Oracle with Queens being light?
To nerf the queen like some of you want, you'd have to redesign the game completely.
The Queen is fine and unique, a big part of playing zerg is managing your queens.
It's not like people are making 20 queens at the pro level, max you see is like 10 queens very late game. Thanks for cherry picking and completely ignoring the other changes proposed, and the fact that I said that of course not all the change must be done at the same time. 1 of them could be largely enough. Damn I make a regular argumentation, with several proposal, and still there are people who manage to react like this and like they did not read. And no, pro zerg can do 10 queens even on 3 bases, most of the time the 2-1-1 build of terrans was defended by like 7-8 queens and very few units. No the queen against ground aggression is not fine, and this has to change somehow. No complete redesign is needed. Just a few stats changed.
You can't just nerf queens, the game is currently balanced around Zerg being able to defend early game with Queens.
Zerg is already behind in worker count vs toss early game until you reach 40+workers.
This can only work if Zerg get's compensated eco wise, for example give 4 larva injects back, but remove the stacking
|
Oh you just want Zerg nerfed I see.
What changes you want me to address? -1 Air range is doable, armored maybe, since VR's are so slow.
I just don't think there's any issues with Queens, definitely no balance issues, Zerg is already the most abused race early/mid game as we saw in DH Valencia.
|
While we're at it, give back the queens their flying ability, maybe as a hive research. They are overworked with no apparent advantageous feature that opponents have to prepare against.
|
as far as I'm concerned, I would like at least some tries around the queen and the creep.
it doesn't feel imba, but it looks like it kills a lot attempts or does too much.
|
On July 19 2018 19:13 stilt wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2018 14:01 Thaniri wrote:On July 19 2018 12:16 blunderfulguy wrote:
Everybody (well, T and P it seems) is quick to demand a change but nobody wants to think about the consequences. I don't think Zergs will be convinced that it could work until somebody takes a deep dive into the supposed "issues" and gives well thought out, substantial ideas on how to "fix" the Queen.
"Just move Hydras to Hatchery tech" ... like, what? Even on an incredibly shallow level that's absurdly complicated. "Just reduce the Queen's AA range" even though it is what it is for several reasons. "Just *insert something about changing larva here*" or how about we just think about that a little more and maybe ask why that might be a terrible thing for anyone at Blizz or here to spend time and effort trying to make work.
The range reduction seems the most reasonable, but with Auto Turrets back and all the other harassment units still in the game, I'm not sold on it even if you could research an upgrade for them at Hive or Lair tech. Especially since most of the time, by far, that I hear anyone talk about Queen range it's Terran players saying "I/they would have won there if Queen's weren't so OP." Let me rant about the queen being an overpowered multi-tool. And remember over the course of my rant that the ONLY nerf I would want to see is the Queen range being reduced from 5 back to 3 on the ground. And I would balance out my queen nerf with a zergling damage buff. - Creep spread is way too strong given that a Terran army essentially cannot fight on it. - Once on 80 drones, especially with the buff allowing injects to stack, larva supply is infinite. Zerg players build up enormous banks in lategame (all matchups) precisely because they know they can resupply 120 army supply in less than a minute in the lategame. - Zerg can get to 80 drones too easily because queens are great at stopping all early harass. With some skillful scouting, a zerg player is rarely surprised by anything and can hold off any air based attack with queens. Any hybrid air/ground ( Like archon drop) with mostly queens and about 20 supply of ground units. Almost every terran timing (noteworthy exception is the relatively recent 2-1-1 into additional barracks 2 tank timing attack) can be held with a few lings and queens. Protoss timings are admittedly harder to hold. Hellion harrass and adept harass is stopped by queens. - Transfuse mana costs are too small to notice. In early game harass situations, 6 queens with transfuse can hold off a lot of attacks all on their own. One would think that burning all that mana on transfuse would at the very least slow down creep spread, but with 6 queens mana management literally does not matter. I think transfuses in large engagement situations are extremely skillful and cool to see. I just don't like how it has basically no opportunity cost to the zerg player. - Nydus allins with queens? Holy jesus that is annoying. - Queens can outrun stimmed marines on creep just fast enough for 20 ling reinforcements to arrive in time on any map. No punishment at all for having queens out of position on the map, and in a place that they can be surprised by marines. Further once the few tumours are destroyed and the harass repelled, the queens can lay down new tumours and the Terran player essentially traded 300 faster minerals in a scan for roughly 1-10 seconds of delayed creep spread (contingent on how good the zerg player is at repelling an attack and immediately replanting tumours) - Roach/hydra on creep are as fast as hellions. There is no game where a zerg player doesn't have a hilarious amount of extra queens. This is because they are critical to economy (larva), infrastructure (creep spread) and are decent army units to boot. Why do I want queens to be 3 range? I want them to be unable to fight in a timing attack or all-ins with roaches. I want them to not be able to deflect marine harass. I want them to require intelligent positioning in order to deflect hellion harass. I want it to be a little bit riskier to leave queens alone on the edge of creep. What I essentially want is for queens to be BAD ground combat units in trade for granting map hacks, infinite larva for instant resupply, and very good defensive ability + anti air (at least early game) Granted, the queen is such a massive crutch for zerg players that this change would probably plummet zerg winrates to 30%. What would I want in exchange? Make zerglings good again. Like, 2008 zerglings good. Make terran have to be smarter with their army against zerglings, because zerglings in an open field can crush them. Make protoss players get punished HARD for missing forcefield or not positioning zealots correctly against zerglings. But most of all, make zerg create ground units before getting to 80 drones that are not. fucking. queens. Mass hellion/hellbats would probably have a 100% winrate victory then... Well, I exagerate but an intelligent positioning won't change the kitting ability of the hellion who in mass would nullifie the zerglings, static D would be a must have (at least 1 spine on the B2/B3, creep spread will be heavely delayed and the first push on the terran way stronger), the 3rd will be very delayed too buff zerglings or not... OH I forgot about the reaper who will do a lot more damage, actually, mass reapers should be supreme with a -2 range one tthe queen... Anyway, if you survive, I guess roachs would be the way to go against the 6-8 hellions in early which makes the zergling buff useless in this stage of the game. Moreover, protoss and terran are already punished hard when they make positionning error, the game is really unforgivable and zerglings are fast, it seems a bit harsh to make this stuff stronger. Zvp might be a just a bit more easier but zvt is totally screwed, I wonder how innovation/Maru won't have a 100% winrate against any zerg after this honestly, no way anyone survive the first 10 minutes; And scrubs like me would be so much abused, honestly, I'll just stop playing like in 2015. And for the hydra T1, that's pretty much it, a gap should be adressed in T2 then. All in all, a design change on the queen would need a total reworking on the zerg race in every stage of the game and maybe even on their basic macro mechaniics which basically work like this since 2010, it's not even comparable to the MSC one and personally, I am fine with the way it is. If Blizz team this thread they won't adress the design anyway considering all the nerf adresses. Btw, your last line is a blatant balance whine considering a Z with 66 drones and only queen basically die to any kind of agressive play and as a diam 1 Z, I generally don't last +10 min against T(around 25% winrate) while I'm performing well in the other mu, that's because of my terrible early sure but I don't think a lot of Z on my level or Master 2-3 find themselves very confortables in zvt.
You could be right. I insist on making queens terrible as ground combat units. I don't give a fuck what needs to be buffed to fill the ENORMOUS defensive hole that nerfing queens would leave. As long as whatever gets buffed for zerg early defense costs larva I would be satisfied.
|
Does anyone have the build order for 80 drones on 20 army supply ZvT? Much appreciated.
|
On July 18 2018 08:22 pvsnp wrote:
Everyone is familiar with the 4.0 redesign of Protoss, most notably....
With 4.0, the current balance team has shown that it is capable of redesigning major aspects of the Protoss race in a competent fashion. What say you about letting them try with Zerg?
thanks for posting about the Queen's Jack-Of-All-Trades multi-roles. you make some great points.
i think the Queen transfuse needs to use up a lot more energy and to keep things balanced for the late game the Zerg's most advanced late game units need to be buffed in some way.
other than that... leave the queen alone.
|
On July 20 2018 00:44 Thaniri wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2018 19:13 stilt wrote:On July 19 2018 14:01 Thaniri wrote:On July 19 2018 12:16 blunderfulguy wrote:
Everybody (well, T and P it seems) is quick to demand a change but nobody wants to think about the consequences. I don't think Zergs will be convinced that it could work until somebody takes a deep dive into the supposed "issues" and gives well thought out, substantial ideas on how to "fix" the Queen.
"Just move Hydras to Hatchery tech" ... like, what? Even on an incredibly shallow level that's absurdly complicated. "Just reduce the Queen's AA range" even though it is what it is for several reasons. "Just *insert something about changing larva here*" or how about we just think about that a little more and maybe ask why that might be a terrible thing for anyone at Blizz or here to spend time and effort trying to make work.
The range reduction seems the most reasonable, but with Auto Turrets back and all the other harassment units still in the game, I'm not sold on it even if you could research an upgrade for them at Hive or Lair tech. Especially since most of the time, by far, that I hear anyone talk about Queen range it's Terran players saying "I/they would have won there if Queen's weren't so OP." Let me rant about the queen being an overpowered multi-tool. And remember over the course of my rant that the ONLY nerf I would want to see is the Queen range being reduced from 5 back to 3 on the ground. And I would balance out my queen nerf with a zergling damage buff. - Creep spread is way too strong given that a Terran army essentially cannot fight on it. - Once on 80 drones, especially with the buff allowing injects to stack, larva supply is infinite. Zerg players build up enormous banks in lategame (all matchups) precisely because they know they can resupply 120 army supply in less than a minute in the lategame. - Zerg can get to 80 drones too easily because queens are great at stopping all early harass. With some skillful scouting, a zerg player is rarely surprised by anything and can hold off any air based attack with queens. Any hybrid air/ground ( Like archon drop) with mostly queens and about 20 supply of ground units. Almost every terran timing (noteworthy exception is the relatively recent 2-1-1 into additional barracks 2 tank timing attack) can be held with a few lings and queens. Protoss timings are admittedly harder to hold. Hellion harrass and adept harass is stopped by queens. - Transfuse mana costs are too small to notice. In early game harass situations, 6 queens with transfuse can hold off a lot of attacks all on their own. One would think that burning all that mana on transfuse would at the very least slow down creep spread, but with 6 queens mana management literally does not matter. I think transfuses in large engagement situations are extremely skillful and cool to see. I just don't like how it has basically no opportunity cost to the zerg player. - Nydus allins with queens? Holy jesus that is annoying. - Queens can outrun stimmed marines on creep just fast enough for 20 ling reinforcements to arrive in time on any map. No punishment at all for having queens out of position on the map, and in a place that they can be surprised by marines. Further once the few tumours are destroyed and the harass repelled, the queens can lay down new tumours and the Terran player essentially traded 300 faster minerals in a scan for roughly 1-10 seconds of delayed creep spread (contingent on how good the zerg player is at repelling an attack and immediately replanting tumours) - Roach/hydra on creep are as fast as hellions. There is no game where a zerg player doesn't have a hilarious amount of extra queens. This is because they are critical to economy (larva), infrastructure (creep spread) and are decent army units to boot. Why do I want queens to be 3 range? I want them to be unable to fight in a timing attack or all-ins with roaches. I want them to not be able to deflect marine harass. I want them to require intelligent positioning in order to deflect hellion harass. I want it to be a little bit riskier to leave queens alone on the edge of creep. What I essentially want is for queens to be BAD ground combat units in trade for granting map hacks, infinite larva for instant resupply, and very good defensive ability + anti air (at least early game) Granted, the queen is such a massive crutch for zerg players that this change would probably plummet zerg winrates to 30%. What would I want in exchange? Make zerglings good again. Like, 2008 zerglings good. Make terran have to be smarter with their army against zerglings, because zerglings in an open field can crush them. Make protoss players get punished HARD for missing forcefield or not positioning zealots correctly against zerglings. But most of all, make zerg create ground units before getting to 80 drones that are not. fucking. queens. Mass hellion/hellbats would probably have a 100% winrate victory then... Well, I exagerate but an intelligent positioning won't change the kitting ability of the hellion who in mass would nullifie the zerglings, static D would be a must have (at least 1 spine on the B2/B3, creep spread will be heavely delayed and the first push on the terran way stronger), the 3rd will be very delayed too buff zerglings or not... OH I forgot about the reaper who will do a lot more damage, actually, mass reapers should be supreme with a -2 range one tthe queen... Anyway, if you survive, I guess roachs would be the way to go against the 6-8 hellions in early which makes the zergling buff useless in this stage of the game. Moreover, protoss and terran are already punished hard when they make positionning error, the game is really unforgivable and zerglings are fast, it seems a bit harsh to make this stuff stronger. Zvp might be a just a bit more easier but zvt is totally screwed, I wonder how innovation/Maru won't have a 100% winrate against any zerg after this honestly, no way anyone survive the first 10 minutes; And scrubs like me would be so much abused, honestly, I'll just stop playing like in 2015. And for the hydra T1, that's pretty much it, a gap should be adressed in T2 then. All in all, a design change on the queen would need a total reworking on the zerg race in every stage of the game and maybe even on their basic macro mechaniics which basically work like this since 2010, it's not even comparable to the MSC one and personally, I am fine with the way it is. If Blizz team this thread they won't adress the design anyway considering all the nerf adresses. Btw, your last line is a blatant balance whine considering a Z with 66 drones and only queen basically die to any kind of agressive play and as a diam 1 Z, I generally don't last +10 min against T(around 25% winrate) while I'm performing well in the other mu, that's because of my terrible early sure but I don't think a lot of Z on my level or Master 2-3 find themselves very confortables in zvt. You could be right. I insist on making queens terrible as ground combat units. I don't give a fuck what needs to be buffed to fill the ENORMOUS defensive hole that nerfing queens would leave. As long as whatever gets buffed for zerg early defense costs larva I would be satisfied.
So you only care about giving yourself what you want regardless of how it would affect anyone else and even knowingly to the detriment of everyone else on top of blatantly disregarding feedback about your why your ideas are flawed and how much work would need to be done to attempt to force your ideas to work. It seems like no matter what you never be satisfied and your arguments are entirely ill-founded and useless.
If the Queen is going to get an overhaul, no matter how it happens, you have to think about the big picture and every single detail in that picture with respect towards all players of all races and skill levels. Toxic demands are no way to make things happen. They are a way to staunch progression and collapse communities, though, so if that's the goal here then please continue.
Additionally, when making observations as part of your argument for why a change needs to happen, instead of saying "__ is annoying" then stopping or "X on creep is as fast as Y" and nothing more, say "__ is annoying to deal with because __ and __" or "X on creep is as fast as Y, and those players also have Z to deal with Y so X feels unnecessary." "Queens have had their range buffed multiple times" is not useful for arguments either, as it on its own ignores why the buffs happened and why the buffs are relevant to the current discussion. Additionally, "X is essential to Zerg play" is usually an argument for keeping the current design and is an argument against messing around with it.
"Queens have had their range buffed multiple times, and..." it's that "and..." part that needs to be expanded on and dived into. What good does it do for Zergs? How is it difficult for Terrans and Protoss? What would increasing it or decreasing it do for Zergs? And Terrans, Protoss? What about their range being what it is makes it a problem for you or other people? Does anything about the problem have to do with map design? Are Medivacs' Boost not fast enough? Are Warp Prisms' pickup or unload range not far enough? What else could be done to help Banshees, Oracles, what-have-you show up more often? How many units would pressure Zergs more if Queen range was reduced? Marines, Reapers, Hellions, Banshees, Ravens, Widow Mines, Vikings, Liberators, Adepts, Stalkers, Phoenix, Oracles, Void Rays, Roaches, Vipers, Brood Lords... And what if Transfuse was given a cooldown or the Queen's energy pool was reduced, how would that affect the early, mid, late, and very late game for Zergs? How would Nydus play be affected if Tranfuse was given a cooldown? How would Zerg's macro and late game fighting capability against T and P be changed if Queens had smaller energy caps, started with less energy, or Transfuse cost more energy? Too many questions with too many difficult or downright poor excuses for answers from my perspective.
And this Zergling buff argument to compensate somehow... I don't see how it can work. "Why not change Zerglings?" "Why not change Marines?" Because the entire game was built around them. They're part of the foundation, and digging up and replacing the entire foundation is not feasible with everything that has been built on it over the years.
|
On July 20 2018 02:07 blunderfulguy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2018 00:44 Thaniri wrote:On July 19 2018 19:13 stilt wrote:On July 19 2018 14:01 Thaniri wrote:On July 19 2018 12:16 blunderfulguy wrote:
Everybody (well, T and P it seems) is quick to demand a change but nobody wants to think about the consequences. I don't think Zergs will be convinced that it could work until somebody takes a deep dive into the supposed "issues" and gives well thought out, substantial ideas on how to "fix" the Queen.
"Just move Hydras to Hatchery tech" ... like, what? Even on an incredibly shallow level that's absurdly complicated. "Just reduce the Queen's AA range" even though it is what it is for several reasons. "Just *insert something about changing larva here*" or how about we just think about that a little more and maybe ask why that might be a terrible thing for anyone at Blizz or here to spend time and effort trying to make work.
The range reduction seems the most reasonable, but with Auto Turrets back and all the other harassment units still in the game, I'm not sold on it even if you could research an upgrade for them at Hive or Lair tech. Especially since most of the time, by far, that I hear anyone talk about Queen range it's Terran players saying "I/they would have won there if Queen's weren't so OP." Let me rant about the queen being an overpowered multi-tool. And remember over the course of my rant that the ONLY nerf I would want to see is the Queen range being reduced from 5 back to 3 on the ground. And I would balance out my queen nerf with a zergling damage buff. - Creep spread is way too strong given that a Terran army essentially cannot fight on it. - Once on 80 drones, especially with the buff allowing injects to stack, larva supply is infinite. Zerg players build up enormous banks in lategame (all matchups) precisely because they know they can resupply 120 army supply in less than a minute in the lategame. - Zerg can get to 80 drones too easily because queens are great at stopping all early harass. With some skillful scouting, a zerg player is rarely surprised by anything and can hold off any air based attack with queens. Any hybrid air/ground ( Like archon drop) with mostly queens and about 20 supply of ground units. Almost every terran timing (noteworthy exception is the relatively recent 2-1-1 into additional barracks 2 tank timing attack) can be held with a few lings and queens. Protoss timings are admittedly harder to hold. Hellion harrass and adept harass is stopped by queens. - Transfuse mana costs are too small to notice. In early game harass situations, 6 queens with transfuse can hold off a lot of attacks all on their own. One would think that burning all that mana on transfuse would at the very least slow down creep spread, but with 6 queens mana management literally does not matter. I think transfuses in large engagement situations are extremely skillful and cool to see. I just don't like how it has basically no opportunity cost to the zerg player. - Nydus allins with queens? Holy jesus that is annoying. - Queens can outrun stimmed marines on creep just fast enough for 20 ling reinforcements to arrive in time on any map. No punishment at all for having queens out of position on the map, and in a place that they can be surprised by marines. Further once the few tumours are destroyed and the harass repelled, the queens can lay down new tumours and the Terran player essentially traded 300 faster minerals in a scan for roughly 1-10 seconds of delayed creep spread (contingent on how good the zerg player is at repelling an attack and immediately replanting tumours) - Roach/hydra on creep are as fast as hellions. There is no game where a zerg player doesn't have a hilarious amount of extra queens. This is because they are critical to economy (larva), infrastructure (creep spread) and are decent army units to boot. Why do I want queens to be 3 range? I want them to be unable to fight in a timing attack or all-ins with roaches. I want them to not be able to deflect marine harass. I want them to require intelligent positioning in order to deflect hellion harass. I want it to be a little bit riskier to leave queens alone on the edge of creep. What I essentially want is for queens to be BAD ground combat units in trade for granting map hacks, infinite larva for instant resupply, and very good defensive ability + anti air (at least early game) Granted, the queen is such a massive crutch for zerg players that this change would probably plummet zerg winrates to 30%. What would I want in exchange? Make zerglings good again. Like, 2008 zerglings good. Make terran have to be smarter with their army against zerglings, because zerglings in an open field can crush them. Make protoss players get punished HARD for missing forcefield or not positioning zealots correctly against zerglings. But most of all, make zerg create ground units before getting to 80 drones that are not. fucking. queens. Mass hellion/hellbats would probably have a 100% winrate victory then... Well, I exagerate but an intelligent positioning won't change the kitting ability of the hellion who in mass would nullifie the zerglings, static D would be a must have (at least 1 spine on the B2/B3, creep spread will be heavely delayed and the first push on the terran way stronger), the 3rd will be very delayed too buff zerglings or not... OH I forgot about the reaper who will do a lot more damage, actually, mass reapers should be supreme with a -2 range one tthe queen... Anyway, if you survive, I guess roachs would be the way to go against the 6-8 hellions in early which makes the zergling buff useless in this stage of the game. Moreover, protoss and terran are already punished hard when they make positionning error, the game is really unforgivable and zerglings are fast, it seems a bit harsh to make this stuff stronger. Zvp might be a just a bit more easier but zvt is totally screwed, I wonder how innovation/Maru won't have a 100% winrate against any zerg after this honestly, no way anyone survive the first 10 minutes; And scrubs like me would be so much abused, honestly, I'll just stop playing like in 2015. And for the hydra T1, that's pretty much it, a gap should be adressed in T2 then. All in all, a design change on the queen would need a total reworking on the zerg race in every stage of the game and maybe even on their basic macro mechaniics which basically work like this since 2010, it's not even comparable to the MSC one and personally, I am fine with the way it is. If Blizz team this thread they won't adress the design anyway considering all the nerf adresses. Btw, your last line is a blatant balance whine considering a Z with 66 drones and only queen basically die to any kind of agressive play and as a diam 1 Z, I generally don't last +10 min against T(around 25% winrate) while I'm performing well in the other mu, that's because of my terrible early sure but I don't think a lot of Z on my level or Master 2-3 find themselves very confortables in zvt. You could be right. I insist on making queens terrible as ground combat units. I don't give a fuck what needs to be buffed to fill the ENORMOUS defensive hole that nerfing queens would leave. As long as whatever gets buffed for zerg early defense costs larva I would be satisfied. So you only care about giving yourself what you want regardless of how it would affect anyone else and even knowingly to the detriment of everyone else on top of blatantly disregarding feedback about your why your ideas are flawed and how much work would need to be done to attempt to force your ideas to work. It seems like no matter what you never be satisfied and your arguments are entirely ill-founded and useless. If the Queen is going to get an overhaul, no matter how it happens, you have to think about the big picture and every single detail in that picture with respect towards all players of all races and skill levels. Toxic demands are no way to make things happen. They are a way to staunch progression and collapse communities, though, so if that's the goal here then please continue. Additionally, when making observations as part of your argument for why a change needs to happen, instead of saying "__ is annoying" then stopping or "X on creep is as fast as Y" and nothing more, say "__ is annoying to deal with because __ and __" or "X on creep is as fast as Y, and those players also have Z to deal with Y so X feels unnecessary." "Queens have had their range buffed multiple times" is not useful for arguments either, as it on its own ignores why the buffs happened and why the buffs are relevant to the current discussion. Additionally, "X is essential to Zerg play" is usually an argument for keeping the current design and is an argument against messing around with it. "Queens have had their range buffed multiple times, and..." it's that " and..." part that needs to be expanded on and dived into. What good does it do for Zergs? How is it difficult for Terrans and Protoss? What would increasing it or decreasing it do for Zergs? And Terrans, Protoss? What about their range being what it is makes it a problem for you or other people? Does anything about the problem have to do with map design? Are Medivacs' Boost not fast enough? Are Warp Prisms' pickup or unload range not far enough? What else could be done to help Banshees, Oracles, what-have-you show up more often? How many units would pressure Zergs more if Queen range was reduced? Marines, Reapers, Hellions, Banshees, Ravens, Widow Mines, Vikings, Liberators, Adepts, Stalkers, Phoenix, Oracles, Void Rays, Roaches, Vipers, Brood Lords... And what if Transfuse was given a cooldown or the Queen's energy pool was reduced, how would that affect the early, mid, late, and very late game for Zergs? How would Nydus play be affected if Tranfuse was given a cooldown? How would Zerg's macro and late game fighting capability against T and P be changed if Queens had smaller energy caps, started with less energy, or Transfuse cost more energy? Too many questions with too many difficult or downright poor excuses for answers from my perspective. And this Zergling buff argument to compensate somehow... I don't see how it can work. "Why not change Zerglings?" "Why not change Marines?" Because the entire game was built around them. They're part of the foundation, and digging up and replacing the entire foundation is not feasible with everything that has been built on it over the years.
I am looking at the big picture. I know that nerfing queens on the ground is a HUGE change. I'm also aware that in order to compensate we need to buff something else. I, for reasons I've outlined in my previous post, want whatever gets buffed to compensate for queens being shit to cost larva.
You are basically ignoring my post. Buff SOMETHING I don't care. Make roaches good at defending early, who cares. Just make queens bad.
|
My ideal patch in light of "zerg = comparatively easy, mechanically" would be:
1. injects stackable twice, not infinite times
2. creep tumor creep spread radius slightly reduced
3. overlord default speed slightly reduced (upgrade stays the same)
I think this would task the zerg more and thus indirectly affect some issues that larvae presents combined with huge vision and multi-role queens.
|
One of the best things about the Protoss changes was the introduction of choice (Mothership Core was mandatory, Shield Battery and Recall are options).
I've said this for a long time and I'm pretty convinced it's true: mandatory units or structure simply weaken the strategic/tactical aspect of the game. Sure, some are units and structures necessary but even they have a tradeoff (you can have to much workers for example).
In this spirit: I think Queens should be able to have a production and a defensve/offensive role but it should be mutually exclusive. Something like the following ability would make sense to me (nevermind the terrible name choice  ):
Brood
The queen roots itself on the ground and starts spawning larvae (at half the rate of a hatchery).
While brooding the Queen cannot move, attack, spawn Creep Tumors or cast Transfusion.
So basically, while your Queen is brooding she cannot do anything offensive (attack or spawn Creep Tumors) or defensive (cast Transfusion).
On the other hand you get a mini hatchery for 150 minerals which can be put anywhere on the map and the stupid APM drain for injects is gone. Imagine that!
|
On July 20 2018 02:33 Thaniri wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2018 02:07 blunderfulguy wrote:On July 20 2018 00:44 Thaniri wrote:On July 19 2018 19:13 stilt wrote:On July 19 2018 14:01 Thaniri wrote:On July 19 2018 12:16 blunderfulguy wrote:
Everybody (well, T and P it seems) is quick to demand a change but nobody wants to think about the consequences. I don't think Zergs will be convinced that it could work until somebody takes a deep dive into the supposed "issues" and gives well thought out, substantial ideas on how to "fix" the Queen.
"Just move Hydras to Hatchery tech" ... like, what? Even on an incredibly shallow level that's absurdly complicated. "Just reduce the Queen's AA range" even though it is what it is for several reasons. "Just *insert something about changing larva here*" or how about we just think about that a little more and maybe ask why that might be a terrible thing for anyone at Blizz or here to spend time and effort trying to make work.
The range reduction seems the most reasonable, but with Auto Turrets back and all the other harassment units still in the game, I'm not sold on it even if you could research an upgrade for them at Hive or Lair tech. Especially since most of the time, by far, that I hear anyone talk about Queen range it's Terran players saying "I/they would have won there if Queen's weren't so OP." Let me rant about the queen being an overpowered multi-tool. And remember over the course of my rant that the ONLY nerf I would want to see is the Queen range being reduced from 5 back to 3 on the ground. And I would balance out my queen nerf with a zergling damage buff. - Creep spread is way too strong given that a Terran army essentially cannot fight on it. - Once on 80 drones, especially with the buff allowing injects to stack, larva supply is infinite. Zerg players build up enormous banks in lategame (all matchups) precisely because they know they can resupply 120 army supply in less than a minute in the lategame. - Zerg can get to 80 drones too easily because queens are great at stopping all early harass. With some skillful scouting, a zerg player is rarely surprised by anything and can hold off any air based attack with queens. Any hybrid air/ground ( Like archon drop) with mostly queens and about 20 supply of ground units. Almost every terran timing (noteworthy exception is the relatively recent 2-1-1 into additional barracks 2 tank timing attack) can be held with a few lings and queens. Protoss timings are admittedly harder to hold. Hellion harrass and adept harass is stopped by queens. - Transfuse mana costs are too small to notice. In early game harass situations, 6 queens with transfuse can hold off a lot of attacks all on their own. One would think that burning all that mana on transfuse would at the very least slow down creep spread, but with 6 queens mana management literally does not matter. I think transfuses in large engagement situations are extremely skillful and cool to see. I just don't like how it has basically no opportunity cost to the zerg player. - Nydus allins with queens? Holy jesus that is annoying. - Queens can outrun stimmed marines on creep just fast enough for 20 ling reinforcements to arrive in time on any map. No punishment at all for having queens out of position on the map, and in a place that they can be surprised by marines. Further once the few tumours are destroyed and the harass repelled, the queens can lay down new tumours and the Terran player essentially traded 300 faster minerals in a scan for roughly 1-10 seconds of delayed creep spread (contingent on how good the zerg player is at repelling an attack and immediately replanting tumours) - Roach/hydra on creep are as fast as hellions. There is no game where a zerg player doesn't have a hilarious amount of extra queens. This is because they are critical to economy (larva), infrastructure (creep spread) and are decent army units to boot. Why do I want queens to be 3 range? I want them to be unable to fight in a timing attack or all-ins with roaches. I want them to not be able to deflect marine harass. I want them to require intelligent positioning in order to deflect hellion harass. I want it to be a little bit riskier to leave queens alone on the edge of creep. What I essentially want is for queens to be BAD ground combat units in trade for granting map hacks, infinite larva for instant resupply, and very good defensive ability + anti air (at least early game) Granted, the queen is such a massive crutch for zerg players that this change would probably plummet zerg winrates to 30%. What would I want in exchange? Make zerglings good again. Like, 2008 zerglings good. Make terran have to be smarter with their army against zerglings, because zerglings in an open field can crush them. Make protoss players get punished HARD for missing forcefield or not positioning zealots correctly against zerglings. But most of all, make zerg create ground units before getting to 80 drones that are not. fucking. queens. Mass hellion/hellbats would probably have a 100% winrate victory then... Well, I exagerate but an intelligent positioning won't change the kitting ability of the hellion who in mass would nullifie the zerglings, static D would be a must have (at least 1 spine on the B2/B3, creep spread will be heavely delayed and the first push on the terran way stronger), the 3rd will be very delayed too buff zerglings or not... OH I forgot about the reaper who will do a lot more damage, actually, mass reapers should be supreme with a -2 range one tthe queen... Anyway, if you survive, I guess roachs would be the way to go against the 6-8 hellions in early which makes the zergling buff useless in this stage of the game. Moreover, protoss and terran are already punished hard when they make positionning error, the game is really unforgivable and zerglings are fast, it seems a bit harsh to make this stuff stronger. Zvp might be a just a bit more easier but zvt is totally screwed, I wonder how innovation/Maru won't have a 100% winrate against any zerg after this honestly, no way anyone survive the first 10 minutes; And scrubs like me would be so much abused, honestly, I'll just stop playing like in 2015. And for the hydra T1, that's pretty much it, a gap should be adressed in T2 then. All in all, a design change on the queen would need a total reworking on the zerg race in every stage of the game and maybe even on their basic macro mechaniics which basically work like this since 2010, it's not even comparable to the MSC one and personally, I am fine with the way it is. If Blizz team this thread they won't adress the design anyway considering all the nerf adresses. Btw, your last line is a blatant balance whine considering a Z with 66 drones and only queen basically die to any kind of agressive play and as a diam 1 Z, I generally don't last +10 min against T(around 25% winrate) while I'm performing well in the other mu, that's because of my terrible early sure but I don't think a lot of Z on my level or Master 2-3 find themselves very confortables in zvt. You could be right. I insist on making queens terrible as ground combat units. I don't give a fuck what needs to be buffed to fill the ENORMOUS defensive hole that nerfing queens would leave. As long as whatever gets buffed for zerg early defense costs larva I would be satisfied. So you only care about giving yourself what you want regardless of how it would affect anyone else and even knowingly to the detriment of everyone else on top of blatantly disregarding feedback about your why your ideas are flawed and how much work would need to be done to attempt to force your ideas to work. It seems like no matter what you never be satisfied and your arguments are entirely ill-founded and useless. If the Queen is going to get an overhaul, no matter how it happens, you have to think about the big picture and every single detail in that picture with respect towards all players of all races and skill levels. Toxic demands are no way to make things happen. They are a way to staunch progression and collapse communities, though, so if that's the goal here then please continue. Additionally, when making observations as part of your argument for why a change needs to happen, instead of saying "__ is annoying" then stopping or "X on creep is as fast as Y" and nothing more, say "__ is annoying to deal with because __ and __" or "X on creep is as fast as Y, and those players also have Z to deal with Y so X feels unnecessary." "Queens have had their range buffed multiple times" is not useful for arguments either, as it on its own ignores why the buffs happened and why the buffs are relevant to the current discussion. Additionally, "X is essential to Zerg play" is usually an argument for keeping the current design and is an argument against messing around with it. "Queens have had their range buffed multiple times, and..." it's that " and..." part that needs to be expanded on and dived into. What good does it do for Zergs? How is it difficult for Terrans and Protoss? What would increasing it or decreasing it do for Zergs? And Terrans, Protoss? What about their range being what it is makes it a problem for you or other people? Does anything about the problem have to do with map design? Are Medivacs' Boost not fast enough? Are Warp Prisms' pickup or unload range not far enough? What else could be done to help Banshees, Oracles, what-have-you show up more often? How many units would pressure Zergs more if Queen range was reduced? Marines, Reapers, Hellions, Banshees, Ravens, Widow Mines, Vikings, Liberators, Adepts, Stalkers, Phoenix, Oracles, Void Rays, Roaches, Vipers, Brood Lords... And what if Transfuse was given a cooldown or the Queen's energy pool was reduced, how would that affect the early, mid, late, and very late game for Zergs? How would Nydus play be affected if Tranfuse was given a cooldown? How would Zerg's macro and late game fighting capability against T and P be changed if Queens had smaller energy caps, started with less energy, or Transfuse cost more energy? Too many questions with too many difficult or downright poor excuses for answers from my perspective. And this Zergling buff argument to compensate somehow... I don't see how it can work. "Why not change Zerglings?" "Why not change Marines?" Because the entire game was built around them. They're part of the foundation, and digging up and replacing the entire foundation is not feasible with everything that has been built on it over the years. I am looking at the big picture. I know that nerfing queens on the ground is a HUGE change. I'm also aware that in order to compensate we need to buff something else. I, for reasons I've outlined in my previous post, want whatever gets buffed to compensate for queens being shit to cost larva. You are basically ignoring my post. Buff SOMETHING I don't care. Make roaches good at defending early, who cares. Just make queens bad.
Like Roach have no more armor tag, have roach speed T1 without upgrade, and roach warren 100/0 instead of 150/0 ?
Else you die to tank push, cyclon, simple hellion push,2-1-1,... but it will make ZvP completly broken...
No the statu quo is better.
|
On July 20 2018 00:01 terribleplayer1 wrote:
Some of these Queen ideas are completely suicidal even if they look minor.
Changing queen to light, is basically forcing zerg into 3min roach warrens vs T, and mass spore every game vs P, can you imagine Phoenix/Oracle with Queens being light?
To nerf the queen like some of you want, you'd have to redesign the game completely.
The Queen is fine and unique, a big part of playing zerg is managing your queens.
It's not like people are making 20 queens at the pro level, max you see is like 10 queens very late game.
Actually I think you are a bit off. Changing queen to light would force a spine *at most* until enough lings came out. Or if you prefer to be on the more aggressive side or have versatility, the roach warren. It's not hard to micro queens/lings without losing many lings while attempting to secure a third. Hellions don't get to your base until 3:50ish(that's 2 hellions and a reaper tops when reaper expanding). 2 hellions and a reaper can be thwarted by 2 queens alone. At that point the zerg will have at least 2 pairs of lings(2 pairs is pretty standard vs reaper expand. I don't see how the zerg would be in trouble at all during this time frame. All the zerg would have to do is micro back and forth to buy enough time till enough lings are up to surround(that's only if the terran keeps sending hellions too). If they didn't open reaper expand, you'll be able to scout it in time with your OVs while still having enough time to adapt.
|
On July 20 2018 02:33 Thaniri wrote:Show nested quote +On July 20 2018 02:07 blunderfulguy wrote:On July 20 2018 00:44 Thaniri wrote:On July 19 2018 19:13 stilt wrote:On July 19 2018 14:01 Thaniri wrote:On July 19 2018 12:16 blunderfulguy wrote:
Everybody (well, T and P it seems) is quick to demand a change but nobody wants to think about the consequences. I don't think Zergs will be convinced that it could work until somebody takes a deep dive into the supposed "issues" and gives well thought out, substantial ideas on how to "fix" the Queen.
"Just move Hydras to Hatchery tech" ... like, what? Even on an incredibly shallow level that's absurdly complicated. "Just reduce the Queen's AA range" even though it is what it is for several reasons. "Just *insert something about changing larva here*" or how about we just think about that a little more and maybe ask why that might be a terrible thing for anyone at Blizz or here to spend time and effort trying to make work.
The range reduction seems the most reasonable, but with Auto Turrets back and all the other harassment units still in the game, I'm not sold on it even if you could research an upgrade for them at Hive or Lair tech. Especially since most of the time, by far, that I hear anyone talk about Queen range it's Terran players saying "I/they would have won there if Queen's weren't so OP." Let me rant about the queen being an overpowered multi-tool. And remember over the course of my rant that the ONLY nerf I would want to see is the Queen range being reduced from 5 back to 3 on the ground. And I would balance out my queen nerf with a zergling damage buff. - Creep spread is way too strong given that a Terran army essentially cannot fight on it. - Once on 80 drones, especially with the buff allowing injects to stack, larva supply is infinite. Zerg players build up enormous banks in lategame (all matchups) precisely because they know they can resupply 120 army supply in less than a minute in the lategame. - Zerg can get to 80 drones too easily because queens are great at stopping all early harass. With some skillful scouting, a zerg player is rarely surprised by anything and can hold off any air based attack with queens. Any hybrid air/ground ( Like archon drop) with mostly queens and about 20 supply of ground units. Almost every terran timing (noteworthy exception is the relatively recent 2-1-1 into additional barracks 2 tank timing attack) can be held with a few lings and queens. Protoss timings are admittedly harder to hold. Hellion harrass and adept harass is stopped by queens. - Transfuse mana costs are too small to notice. In early game harass situations, 6 queens with transfuse can hold off a lot of attacks all on their own. One would think that burning all that mana on transfuse would at the very least slow down creep spread, but with 6 queens mana management literally does not matter. I think transfuses in large engagement situations are extremely skillful and cool to see. I just don't like how it has basically no opportunity cost to the zerg player. - Nydus allins with queens? Holy jesus that is annoying. - Queens can outrun stimmed marines on creep just fast enough for 20 ling reinforcements to arrive in time on any map. No punishment at all for having queens out of position on the map, and in a place that they can be surprised by marines. Further once the few tumours are destroyed and the harass repelled, the queens can lay down new tumours and the Terran player essentially traded 300 faster minerals in a scan for roughly 1-10 seconds of delayed creep spread (contingent on how good the zerg player is at repelling an attack and immediately replanting tumours) - Roach/hydra on creep are as fast as hellions. There is no game where a zerg player doesn't have a hilarious amount of extra queens. This is because they are critical to economy (larva), infrastructure (creep spread) and are decent army units to boot. Why do I want queens to be 3 range? I want them to be unable to fight in a timing attack or all-ins with roaches. I want them to not be able to deflect marine harass. I want them to require intelligent positioning in order to deflect hellion harass. I want it to be a little bit riskier to leave queens alone on the edge of creep. What I essentially want is for queens to be BAD ground combat units in trade for granting map hacks, infinite larva for instant resupply, and very good defensive ability + anti air (at least early game) Granted, the queen is such a massive crutch for zerg players that this change would probably plummet zerg winrates to 30%. What would I want in exchange? Make zerglings good again. Like, 2008 zerglings good. Make terran have to be smarter with their army against zerglings, because zerglings in an open field can crush them. Make protoss players get punished HARD for missing forcefield or not positioning zealots correctly against zerglings. But most of all, make zerg create ground units before getting to 80 drones that are not. fucking. queens. Mass hellion/hellbats would probably have a 100% winrate victory then... Well, I exagerate but an intelligent positioning won't change the kitting ability of the hellion who in mass would nullifie the zerglings, static D would be a must have (at least 1 spine on the B2/B3, creep spread will be heavely delayed and the first push on the terran way stronger), the 3rd will be very delayed too buff zerglings or not... OH I forgot about the reaper who will do a lot more damage, actually, mass reapers should be supreme with a -2 range one tthe queen... Anyway, if you survive, I guess roachs would be the way to go against the 6-8 hellions in early which makes the zergling buff useless in this stage of the game. Moreover, protoss and terran are already punished hard when they make positionning error, the game is really unforgivable and zerglings are fast, it seems a bit harsh to make this stuff stronger. Zvp might be a just a bit more easier but zvt is totally screwed, I wonder how innovation/Maru won't have a 100% winrate against any zerg after this honestly, no way anyone survive the first 10 minutes; And scrubs like me would be so much abused, honestly, I'll just stop playing like in 2015. And for the hydra T1, that's pretty much it, a gap should be adressed in T2 then. All in all, a design change on the queen would need a total reworking on the zerg race in every stage of the game and maybe even on their basic macro mechaniics which basically work like this since 2010, it's not even comparable to the MSC one and personally, I am fine with the way it is. If Blizz team this thread they won't adress the design anyway considering all the nerf adresses. Btw, your last line is a blatant balance whine considering a Z with 66 drones and only queen basically die to any kind of agressive play and as a diam 1 Z, I generally don't last +10 min against T(around 25% winrate) while I'm performing well in the other mu, that's because of my terrible early sure but I don't think a lot of Z on my level or Master 2-3 find themselves very confortables in zvt. You could be right. I insist on making queens terrible as ground combat units. I don't give a fuck what needs to be buffed to fill the ENORMOUS defensive hole that nerfing queens would leave. As long as whatever gets buffed for zerg early defense costs larva I would be satisfied. So you only care about giving yourself what you want regardless of how it would affect anyone else and even knowingly to the detriment of everyone else on top of blatantly disregarding feedback about your why your ideas are flawed and how much work would need to be done to attempt to force your ideas to work. It seems like no matter what you never be satisfied and your arguments are entirely ill-founded and useless. If the Queen is going to get an overhaul, no matter how it happens, you have to think about the big picture and every single detail in that picture with respect towards all players of all races and skill levels. Toxic demands are no way to make things happen. They are a way to staunch progression and collapse communities, though, so if that's the goal here then please continue. Additionally, when making observations as part of your argument for why a change needs to happen, instead of saying "__ is annoying" then stopping or "X on creep is as fast as Y" and nothing more, say "__ is annoying to deal with because __ and __" or "X on creep is as fast as Y, and those players also have Z to deal with Y so X feels unnecessary." "Queens have had their range buffed multiple times" is not useful for arguments either, as it on its own ignores why the buffs happened and why the buffs are relevant to the current discussion. Additionally, "X is essential to Zerg play" is usually an argument for keeping the current design and is an argument against messing around with it. "Queens have had their range buffed multiple times, and..." it's that " and..." part that needs to be expanded on and dived into. What good does it do for Zergs? How is it difficult for Terrans and Protoss? What would increasing it or decreasing it do for Zergs? And Terrans, Protoss? What about their range being what it is makes it a problem for you or other people? Does anything about the problem have to do with map design? Are Medivacs' Boost not fast enough? Are Warp Prisms' pickup or unload range not far enough? What else could be done to help Banshees, Oracles, what-have-you show up more often? How many units would pressure Zergs more if Queen range was reduced? Marines, Reapers, Hellions, Banshees, Ravens, Widow Mines, Vikings, Liberators, Adepts, Stalkers, Phoenix, Oracles, Void Rays, Roaches, Vipers, Brood Lords... And what if Transfuse was given a cooldown or the Queen's energy pool was reduced, how would that affect the early, mid, late, and very late game for Zergs? How would Nydus play be affected if Tranfuse was given a cooldown? How would Zerg's macro and late game fighting capability against T and P be changed if Queens had smaller energy caps, started with less energy, or Transfuse cost more energy? Too many questions with too many difficult or downright poor excuses for answers from my perspective. And this Zergling buff argument to compensate somehow... I don't see how it can work. "Why not change Zerglings?" "Why not change Marines?" Because the entire game was built around them. They're part of the foundation, and digging up and replacing the entire foundation is not feasible with everything that has been built on it over the years. I am looking at the big picture. I know that nerfing queens on the ground is a HUGE change. I'm also aware that in order to compensate we need to buff something else. I, for reasons I've outlined in my previous post, want whatever gets buffed to compensate for queens being shit to cost larva. You are basically ignoring my post. Buff SOMETHING I don't care. Make roaches good at defending early, who cares. Just make queens bad.
In general, changing balance is feasible as long as it is done properly. Other games change balance on a regular basis all the time(see HOTS, see LOL, etc etc) and they make it work, there is no reason blizzard shouldn't follow suit. It keeps players on their toes and also keeps the game interesting. To say in so many words that "we are too far deep to change" is simply not true. There is nothing that gives the incentive for things to stay the same forever. Players and spectators would get extremely bored after a couple seasons and the playerbase would eventually die down because things become stagnant. We saw this happen in the past before during the b-lord/infestor era. It's definitely in blizzards best interest to retain the player base other they risk losing their "clients" to other company's games. Just some food for though.
|
>Hellions don't get to your base until 3:50ish(that's 2 hellions and a reaper tops when reaper expanding).
Usually 4 hellions show up at 4min~ if theyre doing cc reaper expand.
1 spine crawler + lings like WoL style to stop hellions from running in, otherwise hellions will just shoot and kite, similar to WoL were Terran took 3rd's before Zerg, until the BL/Infestor patch.
|
Screw it, make lings faster off creep so that it's easier to surround hellions.
But, because if you repeat something often enough it becomes the truth. Reduce queen range from 5 to 3 on the ground.
|
I think a good start would be to change transfuse so that it is no longer instant, it takes 1 second or so for the health to ramp up
|
Interestingly enough, this topic was also discussed on r/starcraft and bnet, but instantly devolved into balance whine. Or at least, more whine than here.
You'd think that "4.0-style redesign" would trigger some memories of Protoss strength post-4.0 but I guess kneejerk reactions are too ingrained.
|
Dudes, I have a proposal that's a bit crazy.
1. Queens are now an upgrade of sorts, now sitting inside the hatchery; hatchery gains an attack(maybe extend the range to compensate), inject and transfuse ability. Also to spawn creep tumors, of course.
2. New building: Lesser Spire, 100/100, pre-lair, allows morphing of Scourges from zerglings.
But I have to admit, that's not entirely about queens but also about zerg AA being complete arse.
|
Since the biggest concern seems to be zerg not having to spend larva on early defence, why not make the Queen spawn from larvae.
Obviously this would screw up the early game timings a lot...
|
On July 20 2018 19:25 Jazzbear86 wrote:
Since the biggest concern seems to be zerg not having to spend lava on early defence why not make the Queen sqawn from lava.
Obviously this would screw up the early game timings a lot...
Well, I have never really thought of that, but I actually like this idea a lot!
|
Almost every single idea here is just a flat nerf. And most of them would make "Zerg will never win a GSL" 100% guaranteed. So much of this is T and P players who have seen the times Queens have stopped themselves / favourite player from winning with some early pressure or whatever making the smallest change that would flip that situation on its head.
If queens came from larvae, Zerg would be down 2 drones the time they hit 30 supply in every matchup. More if they needed to defend something. Early game is much more change-sensitive than later on.
If queens just had their AA range reduced, oracle and speedivac pressure would become insane. Zerg has NO other mobile AA before lair and an extra structure, and both other races have strong early aggression that flies.
Making queens light would just make hellbat pushes stupidly disproportionately difficult to hold. For minimal investment Terran could force a bunch of roaches or early gas mining (each geyser mining costs a drone, and 3 mineral drones, on a race with already nerfed larva mechanic).
If you want to just give queens a flat nerf, have a reasonable idea of how you are going to compensate for the change. Not "Lol nice nerf Zerg pls".
|
On July 20 2018 20:22 Ciaus_Dronu wrote:
Almost every single idea here is just a flat nerf. And most of them would make "Zerg will never win a GSL" 100% guaranteed. So much of this is T and P players who have seen the times Queens have stopped themselves / favourite player from winning with some early pressure or whatever making the smallest change that would flip that situation on its head.
If queens came from larvae, Zerg would be down 2 drones the time they hit 30 supply in every matchup. More if they needed to defend something. Early game is much more change-sensitive than later on.
If queens just had their AA range reduced, oracle and speedivac pressure would become insane. Zerg has NO other mobile AA before lair and an extra structure, and both other races have strong early aggression that flies.
Making queens light would just make hellbat pushes stupidly disproportionately difficult to hold. For minimal investment Terran could force a bunch of roaches or early gas mining (each geyser mining costs a drone, and 3 mineral drones, on a race with already nerfed larva mechanic).
If you want to just give queens a flat nerf, have a reasonable idea of how you are going to compensate for the change. Not "Lol nice nerf Zerg pls".
Yeah you're right, it would obviously be a nerf if queen's spawned from larvae without a compensation.
I guess most people here are just brainstorming on changes to the queen. These are nerfs because they think the queen is too strong. Other parts of the game would have to compensate such a queen nerf. (FYI: I don't really mind the queen we have at the moment. I just thought of this after reading the discussion. Plus I mostly play zerg or random so no real anti-zerg bias here.)
There are ways to compensate for this nerf. Just on top of my head: new hatcheries could have three larvae instead of one.
Now nothing really changes for a hatch first opener and the first two queens. Pool first builds would one have one less larva before the second base finishes but would get an additional larva after that, so it's kind of evening out in the end, I think.
|
And even with the proposed larvae buff for new bases another buff on top of that would be needed because zerg now would have to spend larvae for creep-spreading/defensive queens. Maybe make them a little bit cheaper (like 25 mins per queen?)
|
On July 20 2018 19:25 Jazzbear86 wrote:
Since the biggest concern seems to be zerg not having to spend larva on early defence, why not make the Queen spawn from larvae.
Obviously this would screw up the early game timings a lot...
I support this idea.
|
I don't think major reworks to the queen are required at this time, yes it's a bit silly how heavily zergs now rely on queens for deffense, injects, insane creep spread, anti air, and healing. But that's just the way things have progressed from wings when queens only had 4 range. Having Zerg without queens would require a huge rework of the whole race in a much more significant way than what Protoss got when they removed mscore. It would be really hard and difficult to ballance and what would the game really gain from it? Queens are strong but I don't particularly hate them, defending as Zerg still requires good scouting, positioning and decision making so I don't think they are to opresive, and the queen is an actual unit so it's not like a Zerg investing into them is deffending without any cost. I don't think it's like the ms core which allowed Protoss to be safe vs almost any aggressive build with a 100/100 unit that you almost always would build and a few button clicks. Additionally if queens were outright removed zerg would have to be given a tier 1 unit that shoots up, maybe a new unit would be ok but giving zerg access to tier 1 hydras or mutas sounds nuts. At least with queens there primarily a deffensive unit and only used offensively in a few Allin builds like nydus, proxy hatch and on some weird maps queen walk allins. Redesigning Zerg without queens would cause all kinds of instability in overall game ballance because whatever zerg would get as a replacement would have to be significantly stronger in outright attacking power since it does not bring all the utility queens do. Honestly it would just change the game to radically.
I could see a world were to compensate the Zerg for the loss of queens you gave them a nerfed version of the hydra at tier 1 and alllooooot more larva generation, significantly more than what zerg get from queens now because holding allins without queens would mean zerg would have to walk the units vs drones tight rope a lot more carefully making there early game way to punishing unless they had more larva overall to work with. But this kind of change would make zerg allins crazzzy good imagine evrey zerg Allin that we have now but hitting 30 seconds earlier and with 2-3 more roaches or 4-6 more zerglings and you'd see my point.
No I like the way Zerg works overall as is. Mabey a tweek here or there but not a rework.
|
Zerg identity was destroyed when it stopped revolving around hatcheries. The coolest thing about brood war is having clusters of hatcheries everywhere.
My ideas:
- Queen should morph from larvae, same as every other zerg unit
- Queen now has the ability to birth a larva (similar to how it now can drop a creep tumour, off creep it will die instantly) (It can no longer inject larvae)
- Queen's abilities are now cooldown-based instead of mana-based.
- Queen requires a queen's nest (tier 1 building that costs 100 minerals for example)
- Queen can now poop creep
- Queen's nest has a queen speed upgrade for off-creep
- Hatcheries now have the ability to spawn a single creep tumour (or possibly cooldown based).
- Creep tumour can be evolved into a mini hatchery for 150 minerals that will spawn larvae (similar production to what a single queen would give)
|
My pet idea: lair goes upto 4 larva, hive upto 5, but make queens cost larva and make transfuse not stack so well.
|
Played Zerg exclusively in all betas, Protoss main otherwise. I would switch to Zerg if it became less queen-centric. My ideas for a 4.0-style rework
Queen
+ Transfuse does an extra 50hp heal over 1 second. heal/time does not stack
+ 50 energy ability to gain +3 attack range+damage for air+ground for 10 seconds
- Cost changed from 150/0 to 125/25
- Remove spawn creep tumor, inject larva
- Set range to 5 for both ground and air
- Increase size by 10% (easier to block ramps)
Hatchery
+ spawn creep tumor (target anywhere near edge of natural hatch creep)
+ spawn additional larva (works same as self being injected by a queen)
* has 100 total energy, starts with 50, like a nexus, abilities cost 25 each
Creep tumor
+ "autospread" toggle-able (shared across all tumors): active tumors spawn a new tumor when ready in the direction that is furthest from existing tumors + towards enemy spawn
+ increase hp (maybe +10?) or armor
- no longer burrowed/cloaked
Reasoning
This returns hatcheries to being central to zerg macro identity. Queens are now a specialty defensive unit and offensive support unit for late game. Early game defense is slightly stronger with fewer queens, but you can mass them if you want and do interesting aggressive plays with the new ability. Gas cost means you have to choose between massing queens or teching up/building better units, as they aren't necessary for macro anymore.
Creep spread will be easier and remove the unskilled drain on APM, and still serve the purpose of map control and vision/scouting. There will be higher average creep spread across all skill levels, but will be balanced out by no longer requiring detection to clear. However, to continue to buy similar amount of time, the survival of a tumor should be slightly increased.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
