Over the past month, we featured two sets of possible changes on the testing tab. After digesting all the discussion and feedback, we’re ready to announce the final set of changes in the upcoming balance update. These changes will be updated to the balance test mod later today, and the final set of changes will go live on the ladder on August 20th, the start date of season 3. Before we reveal the final list of changes, we’d like to go over some of the changes we decided not to move forward with:
Warp Prisms no longer start with the Warp Conduit passive ability and warp-ins will take 11 seconds when not near a Warp Gate or Nexus, up from 4. The Gravitic Drive upgrade now has the added functionality of granting Warp Prisms the Warp Conduit passive ability, reducing warp-in time from 11 to 4. We saw a lot constructive discussion surrounding this proposal, and we believe a change along these lines could have a lot of interesting consequences. However, we felt the impact of the change using the numbers proposed would be too great, especially for a mid-year patch.
Zealot Charge additional impact damage decreased from 8 to 0. After researching Charge, Zealots will still retain the ability to always hit a fleeting target at least once. This change was originally proposed to address multiple concerns, such as the potency of all-ins in PvZ, the frontal pushing power of the Protoss army, especially in PvT, and the overall potential for harassment when used with Warp Prisms. However, after further consideration, we now believe the totality of the remaining changes proposed are sufficient to address these concerns for now.
New Change
Infested Terran Infested Rockets weapon cooldown increased from 0.95 to 1.14. In the last community update, we proposed fixing a bug, which allowed Infested Rockets to ignore armor. This was in lieu of a different proposal from a previous update to decrease Infested Rockets attack damage from 14 to 12. Though these two changes are comparable, the bugfix is a much greater hit to the Infested Rocket’s effectiveness against naturally high-armored air units.
Following this last update, we received additional feedback that even with the bugfix, Infested Terrans would be still too powerful against Protoss late-game armies. While we considered going forward with both the bugfix and the damage decrease, we thought the combination would synergize too much at weakening their damage output against high-armored air units. And while this is desirable to some extent, our primary intention was to temper the Infested Terran’s strength against Interceptors. Thus, we’d instead like to go with an approximate 20% weapon cooldown increase, which would more evenly reduce the Infested Terran’s effectiveness against all air units. This brings us to our final list of changes:
Final Changes Terran
Stimpack upgrade research duration decreased from 121 seconds to 100 seconds.
New upgrade: Enhanced Shockwaves: Increases the radius of the Ghost’s EMP Round from 1.5 to 2. Cost: 150/150. Research time: 79 seconds.
Zerg
Overlord/Overseer Pneumatized Carapace upgrade research cost decreased from 100/100 to 75/75. Infested Terran Infested Rockets weapon cooldown increased from 0.95 to 1.14. Bugfix: Infested Terran Infested Rockets weapon will no longer ignore armor. Protoss
Warp Prism cost increased from 200 minerals to 250 minerals. Warp Prism pick up range decreased from 6 to 5. Carrier Interceptor build time decreased from 11 seconds to 9 seconds. Nexus Strategic Recall cooldown increased from 85 to 130 seconds. The remaining changes proposed over the last month have generally been well received, and we’re confident in moving forward with this finalized list. As always, we thank you for your valuable continued feedback. We’ll see you on the ladder!
Interesting, happy about the terran changes, hope the protoss nerfs aren't too much and feels kinda iffy cheapening zergs already poweful scouting tool. Worried overlord speed and perfects scouts will take over the meta.
Real men stim pack without a medivac. Its going to be fun inventing new stim pack timing pushes with these changes.
I'm glad they kept the Zealot strong. The way Blizzard discusses this I think Zealot drops combined with a round of Zealot warp-ins is considered extremely powerful. I'm glad they nerfed this by modifying the Warp Prism rather than weakening the Zealot. I hope the Zealot remains as strong as possible.
Disclaimer: I play 60% as Random and 40% as Terran.
Thank you Blizzard. As of now, there is only one Korean Terran (Maru) out of 8 Korean players in contention to qualify for the Blizzcon finals. And there are only 2 Zerg in Korea in the top 8: https://wcs.starcraft2.com/en-us/standings/
And yet there are 5 Protoss players that are in contention to qualify for Blizzcon. 5 Protoss players out of 8 total in Korea for Blizzcon, This is the state of the game in 2019.
On August 07 2019 05:03 THERIDDLER wrote: Not doing the warp prism warp prism change was good, but the charge change should've went though.
There was never a way they were going to nerf a core unit that much in the middle of the year. Any change to Zealots/Marines/Zerglings are HUGE because they are core units, and affect every match up. They're very likely to address the way Charge works in their end of year changes because they've obviously been looking at it for a while if they were even talking about it in July.
On August 07 2019 03:30 BRAT_OK wrote: TvP still broken. Its looks like only one guy works in balance team and he playing as protoss, and he very bad at playing. Good job Activision
word up. just thinking about TvP makes me want to throw up
On August 07 2019 05:03 THERIDDLER wrote: Not doing the warp prism warp prism change was good, but the charge change should've went though.
There was never a way they were going to nerf a core unit that much in the middle of the year. Any change to Zealots/Marines/Zerglings are HUGE because they are core units, and affect every match up. They're very likely to address the way Charge works in their end of year changes because they've obviously been looking at it for a while if they were even talking about it in July.
Blizzard never had any problems changing a core unit, unless its terran. Here are all the lotv changes.
Zergling: adrenalin increased from 18% to 40% Hydra: cooldown buff, speed on creep buff, hp buff roach: burrow movement speed buff, upgrade cost reduced, health regen reduced
Marine: unchanged Marauder: unchanged (nerfed then reverted) Medivac: show me 2 games where ppl actually got the upgrade.
terran buffs: check protoss nerfs: tones down. zerg nerfs: added. am i missing something? was that really the intentioned goal of the upcoming balance patch?
At full upgrades on both sides, Infested Terran currently does 17.9DPS to BC, after the patch, it will be 9.6DPS a 47% decrease, I think this will help turtle terran way to much in lower leagues, as that composition is much easier to operate than the Zerg counters. At least give us the option to order burrowed infestors to cast fungal, which would result in just that one infestor unburrowing. Right now, infested terrans are my panic button. If I'm to disorganized, mess up control groups, have some part of army lagging, etc., I just unload bunch of infested terrans. Since they take a while to hatch and are slow, my opponents just back up and wait for their expiration, which gives me time to collect myself, now when they only do half the damage, they could just push through with their A-move composition, so it would be nice if I could at least throw a few fungles w/o exposing all my infestors so that I could run. Plus, it wouldn't hurt the high level balance, since those guys can just do this with their skill.
On August 07 2019 06:23 batatm wrote: terran buffs: check protoss nerfs: tones down. zerg nerfs: added. am i missing something? was that really the intentioned goal of the upcoming balance patch?
Is that how you read patchnotes? The intent behind patches is e never "nerf x race and buff y race", it is a thousand times more precise. Like buff x race in a certain situation mid game, decrease the power of a specific build/timing.
Yes I do believe that balancing ZvX lategame was one intention as well as decrease the timing window in PvT for protoss to greed while having map control and harassing terran because of stim delay. WP was also intended to be toned down and it was.
All accordning to plan.
Edit:
On August 07 2019 06:36 MrFreeman wrote: At full upgrades on both sides, Infested Terran currently does 17.9DPS to BC, after the patch, it will be 9.6DPS a 47% decrease, I think this will help turtle terran way to much in lower leagues, as that composition is much easier to operate than the Zerg counters. At least give us the option to order burrowed infestors to cast fungal, which would result in just that one infestor unburrowing. Right now, infested terrans are my panic button. If I'm to disorganized, mess up control groups, have some part of army lagging, etc., I just unload bunch of infested terrans. Since they take a while to hatch and are slow, my opponents just back up and wait for their expiration, which gives me time to collect myself, now when they only do half the damage, they could just push through with their A-move composition, so it would be nice if I could at least throw a few fungles w/o exposing all my infestors so that I could run. Plus, it wouldn't hurt the high level balance, since those guys can just do this with their skill.
Yes, zergs do have one massable powerful unit that creates free units at the cost of energy which can be used as a panic button if anything goes wrong. That is the exact reason they are toning infested terrans down, it is too powerful. I don't like the BCs as they are either and believe they are OP as well but at least they have counters. Infestors have 0 counters.
On August 07 2019 06:41 Shuffleblade wrote: Yes, zergs do have one massable powerful unit that creates free units at the cost of energy which can be used as a panic button if anything goes wrong. That is the exact reason they are toning infested terrans down, it is too powerful. I don't like the BCs as they are either and believe they are OP as well but at least they have counters. Infestors have 0 counters.
Yes, that is true for Master and GM, but when I'm forced to counter A-move army with micro intensive army, it should either have clear advantage or not be as difficult. I think that if casting making it so that casting Fungal also unburrows the Infestor that is casting it would help, while not messing pro play, as player with good micro can do this already with just his/her skill.
I came in here to echo a lot of what people are saying. I feel like the chargelot change shouldve went through, given how much they cost and how little they need to be micro'd.
Warp Prisms and chargelots regularly end games at every level of every matchup, yet not one of those units costs ANY gas (if you dont count the cost of charge). No other race has that in this game. No other race has a drop option that costs 0 gas. No other race can use said 0 gas drop unit to instantly build an entire production cycle in any location on the map.
I see the need for chargelots in a protoss army, they are essential for tanking for all the wonderful splash damage options a protoss player can entertain. I just dont see a need for zealots to also do a fair amount of damage on top of all that - especially since they require absolutely no micro. CAN you even micro a zealot? The world may never know.
A decent set of changes. Now maybe late game will be a genuinely viable option in PvZ and hopefully mass infestor dies a death while also making infestors a desirable caster to have a few of in the late game.
On August 07 2019 06:41 Shuffleblade wrote: Yes, zergs do have one massable powerful unit that creates free units at the cost of energy which can be used as a panic button if anything goes wrong. That is the exact reason they are toning infested terrans down, it is too powerful. I don't like the BCs as they are either and believe they are OP as well but at least they have counters. Infestors have 0 counters.
Yes, that is true for Master and GM, but when I'm forced to counter A-move army with micro intensive army, it should either have clear advantage or not be as difficult. I think that if casting making it so that casting Fungal also unburrows the Infestor that is casting it would help, while not messing pro play, as player with good micro can do this already with just his/her skill.
I don't really follow your logic here, you complain about turtle terran and A-move army?
If we are actually talking about a turtle terran their A-move shouldn't be an issue because they are turtling? Yes if zerg doesn't harass, takes bases aggressively and let a turtle terran reach max supply in BCs without getting damage done or a bigger bank that zerg has a problem but its not due to balance.
Turtle terran is rarely a problem and not due to balance, if you need the current infestors to stay at 50% vs terran you need to work on something on your side.
Also really interesting to have a zerg complain about unfairness in micro intensity, TvZ is the opposite is basically every other scenario and has been the opposite for all of SC2. (with the exception of the WM, when I think about it every time a zerg has to micro more than terran its unfair but its always been fair how terran needs to split their asses off)
In my opinion its not as straight up amove as you make it sounds, with neural terran needs to be exceptionally careful with amoving a BC army. If terran does a mistake its GG, if zerg does its panic button time and regroup. I think the nerf is needed.
On August 07 2019 03:30 BRAT_OK wrote: TvP still broken. Its looks like only one guy works in balance team and he playing as protoss, and he very bad at playing. Good job Activision
Is this a joke? Protoss got gutted in this "balance" patch despite no sign of Protoss being too strong.
At least Blizzard is trying with some changes in the right direction... But I'm afraid it is not enough. There are way more impactful core issues with every matchup that are just patched up and not entirely addressed. In LotV both Terran and Protoss got buffs to be able to deal with mass roach ravager attacks, which was really bad because it did not deal with any issues. The dominance of the composition in ZvZ for the entire lifespan of SC2 should have been a clue that it is not healthy, but I guess people got used to ZvZ being a roach fest and don't complain anymore.
Also, the real problem in TvP is the insane early game greed Protoss can get away with, because with the way Terran production operates, Terran has no way to punish a greedy Protoss. For interested, watch Rotterdam's stream sometimes, Protoss can go twilight, robo, 3rd base and double forge all off just 1 gateway and still hold any commited aggression with good micro and shield batteries. That is insane. Meanwhile, Terran cannot make a 3rd cc before 6th minute mark without risking to die to Protoss' NON-COMMITED aggression (i.e. 3 gate blink with 3rd base and double forge behind). The problem is that Terran production needs addons to be effective, and the addon build time has not been adjusted when the starting economy was buffed from 6 to 12 workers.
And the most broken thing that may not yet seem too impactful is the lategame strength of Zerg in ZvX matchup. The problem here is that Zerg can make 10 broodlords, 15 infestors (70 supply), a few queens and a spore forest and basically slow push into any position. They don't even need any anti air other than spores anymore because the broodlords zone away all the ground units, while the infestors can neural/fungal the air units for the spores to kill them. With viper abduct, things become even worse. The offenders here are both the infestor and the spore. The strength of the infestors was what brought us the gglord winfestor era, and as it seems right now we're heading for the gglord winfestor era 2.0. The spore is problematic, because its role is not healthy for the game. Static defense SHOULD-NEVER-BE-ABLE-TO-SLOW-PUSH.It says it in the title: static DEFENSE. The problem that caused that is that Zerg doesn't have reliable anti-air in the early game, so Blizzard compensated with supreme anti-air firepower in the lategame instead of fixing the lackluster early game. But was that a good idea?
Also, what I think contributed to Terran's downfall in recent times is the ease with which the Zerg and Protoss can scout what Terran is doing. There is no surprise factor anymore, Protoss flies a hallucination in your base at 3-4 minutes, can also scout with adepts, speed buffed observers and phoenixes, while the Zerg has speedlings and overlords (with speed upgrade buffed). This is imo the most impactful in TvZ, since Zerg is the race that can, if scouting properly, deal with anything. The only option for Terran to hide what he's doing is by proxying, but even then, factory proxies are currently useless, and if the starport is proxied, the other race sees that it's missing in the main base and can easily deal with liberators/banshees/BCs/medivac drops, since all of them require a similar response. You can't go wrong with mass queens as Zerg and Protoss can just go blink and observers.
And just to throw this in: in my opinion, ravagers should be redesigned to be a reliable early game anti-air option instead of a ground siege unit. The strength of mass roach should also be addressed, before we get 2014 flashbacks of 40 drone mass roach all ins and maybe then, the overpowered units of Terran and Protoss can be toned down for the sake of the game.
On August 07 2019 03:30 BRAT_OK wrote: TvP still broken. Its looks like only one guy works in balance team and he playing as protoss, and he very bad at playing. Good job Activision
Is this a joke? Protoss got gutted in this "balance" patch despite no sign of Protoss being too strong.
Your use of the term "gutted" while trying to accuse someone's argument of being a "joke" is fatally ironic.
Honestly this is pretty bad - BC Mech vs Z is already very strong - as Maru displayed at WCG - now you are going to have better EMP vs infestors and 45% less damage on the main tool Z uses to fight BCs? How is this a viable option?
Understand the intent to make ZvP late game more even - but until we see Zerg dealing with BC mech evenly with the current infestors and ghosts - how can we think its a good idea to literally take half the DPS away from infested terrans which are the main tool to counter BCs while also buffing ghosts?
On August 07 2019 07:33 DomeGetta wrote: Honestly this is pretty bad - BC Mech vs Z is already very strong - as Maru displayed at WCG - now you are going to have better EMP vs infestors and 45% less damage on the main tool Z uses to fight BCs? How is this a viable option?
To quote Zergs from 2016, don't let them get there.
You just have to research the ability. And this was the reasoning for zealots not being nerfed? Well I guess we will see more a move Protoss into Terrans who are all sieged up and well defended. This is stupid. I will continue to play Protoss I guess. Nobody uses emp anyway.
On August 07 2019 07:33 DomeGetta wrote: Honestly this is pretty bad - BC Mech vs Z is already very strong - as Maru displayed at WCG - now you are going to have better EMP vs infestors and 45% less damage on the main tool Z uses to fight BCs? How is this a viable option?
Understand the intent to make ZvP late game more even - but until we see Zerg dealing with BC mech evenly with the current infestors and ghosts - how can we think its a good idea to literally take half the DPS away from infested terrans which are the main tool to counter BCs while also buffing ghosts?
Maru crushing Reynor says literally nothing about the ZvT matchup. If those games weren't such one sided stomps the only thing it would show is how broken Zerg is. Reynor does just fine against EU terrans (aka the players on his skill level). Dark has been doing just fine against that style from Maru on ladder. The huge majority of Terrans including other pros struggle with Z in lategame. Pro zergs like solar have admitted the infestor broodlord comp is currently unbeatable in a direct fight for Terran. Something this drastic was definitely needed.
On August 07 2019 07:35 Rusty253 wrote: You just have to research the ability. And this was the reasoning for zealots not being nerfed? Well I guess we will see more a move Protoss into Terrans who are all sieged up and well defended. This is stupid. I will continue to play Protoss I guess. Nobody uses emp anyway.
The reasoning came down to how integral the zealot is to all three of the matchups and so changing it midyear would be too large of a change considering how would it would change almost all of Protoss' compositions. I wouldn't be surprised to see some iteration of the charge nerf come in at the end of the year. Honestly, I wouldn't mind seeing a move towards the stalker being the backbone of the protoss army as it is a far more microable unit.
On August 07 2019 06:41 Shuffleblade wrote: Yes, zergs do have one massable powerful unit that creates free units at the cost of energy which can be used as a panic button if anything goes wrong. That is the exact reason they are toning infested terrans down, it is too powerful. I don't like the BCs as they are either and believe they are OP as well but at least they have counters. Infestors have 0 counters.
Yes, that is true for Master and GM, but when I'm forced to counter A-move army with micro intensive army, it should either have clear advantage or not be as difficult. I think that if casting making it so that casting Fungal also unburrows the Infestor that is casting it would help, while not messing pro play, as player with good micro can do this already with just his/her skill.
I don't really follow your logic here, you complain about turtle terran and A-move army?
If we are actually talking about a turtle terran their A-move shouldn't be an issue because they are turtling? Yes if zerg doesn't harass, takes bases aggressively and let a turtle terran reach max supply in BCs without getting damage done or a bigger bank that zerg has a problem but its not due to balance.
Turtle terran is rarely a problem and not due to balance, if you need the current infestors to stay at 50% vs terran you need to work on something on your side.
Also really interesting to have a zerg complain about unfairness in micro intensity, TvZ is the opposite is basically every other scenario and has been the opposite for all of SC2. (with the exception of the WM, when I think about it every time a zerg has to micro more than terran its unfair but its always been fair how terran needs to split their asses off)
In my opinion its not as straight up amove as you make it sounds, with neural terran needs to be exceptionally careful with amoving a BC army. If terran does a mistake its GG, if zerg does its panic button time and regroup. I think the nerf is needed.
As a terran, I can get a decent number of Tanks and Libs to reliably defend my 3/4 base setup while I'm building the brawn of my army, usually BC at first to harass and hopefully even make them build Corruptors and then thors, cos they don't need to be microed and trade super well against everything Zerg has. It works well, is easy to do and only thing I'm worried about are the infestors. When they all have to unburrow in order to cast fungal, it is really easy for me to snipe them with tanks, as I already have them on their own control group. As for micro intensity, it is a lot about unit fragility. As a zerg, I need to always be on my toes, Hydras, Infestor, Roaches, Lings and Banes can die extremely quickly when I look away, corruptors are better, but it is so easy to overmake them and BL transformation takes soo long, plus BL aren't great against Thors w/o micro and can be outmanoeuvred (would really love if they had the ability to transform between corruptor and BL like Vikings and hellbats can ). Meanwhile, as a terran, I can easily leave my army in the middle of the map without that much worry, I just siege my tanks with the control group and can be pretty sure, that my stuff will not die before I can get back to it. I can siege libs quite fast with rapid fire and stuff like thors, hellbats or Vikings fights pretty well even when I'm not microing them. I really miss the days when terrans were going bio, those were wild, violent games. This turtle into big units isn't much fun.
On August 07 2019 03:12 Shuffleblade wrote: Interesting, happy about the terran changes, hope the protoss nerfs aren't too much and feels kinda iffy cheapening zergs already poweful scouting tool. Worried overlord speed and perfects scouts will take over the meta.
there's no such thing as a perfect scout, scouting happens all game long. in LOTV zerg identifying the tech building is really never game over for terran or protoss unless it's a crazy aggressive proxy. builds like DT drop and battlecruiser rush are completely playable even when "perfect scouted." i dunno what the concern is
On August 07 2019 07:09 Z3nith wrote: A decent set of changes. Now maybe late game will be a genuinely viable option in PvZ and hopefully mass infestor dies a death while also making infestors a desirable caster to have a few of in the late game.
i don't like mass infestors either, but now we're going toward no infestors. honestly the design of infested terran is flawed: they are fragile to begin with and usually don't even hatch with full hp, meaning they can't do much unless massed. now that their damage is being nerfed quite hard they would have even less of an impact in low numbers.
as for the rest of the infestor abilities: fungel damage is negligible on most units and usually available too late to help deal with BS tactical jump harass or immortal warp prism juggle, limiting it's usefulness. neural parasite can be useful but it's hard to be cost efficient with it since the infestors quite often die rather fast while channeling it.
under this conditions, what role the infestor fulfill that the viper can't do better?
Terran players complaining while they only got buffs, I'm not surprised. I don't know exactly what will the stim buff bring to the game(was it really needed?), but I am extremely worried about the state of lategame TvZ when to the legit infestor nerf we add that ghost upgrade(it's super cool but it might break the matchup).
P and Z changes seem on point, reverting those huge nerfs to Protoss was a good idea considering the race is not overperforming at the moment; I'd have personally toned down a little the recall nerf, the cooldown was increased of more than 50% of its current value.
I’m largely fine with these, nothing too radical as of yet but I feel radical changes should really be left until Blizzcon has passed.
PvZ is way better than a few months ago at least at the top level of play, and that was solely based on players adjusting things in that matchup. Still not quite there, but holding off from making major changes to the matchup seems to have been the right call in retrospect.
Chargelot change is such a huge change to PvT that, maybe it’s a good one, maybe it’s not. I tend to the latter, but either way that’s a huge thing to throw out before the culmination of your WCS series.
On August 07 2019 09:12 Xain0n wrote: Terran players complaining while they only got buffs, I'm not surprised.
terran players won't be happy until they automatically win the game for building 1 tank
How hilarious would it be if TvZ becomes broken and Dark can't get out of the group he built so accurately for once? I hope I'm just overestimating the changes, of course.
On August 07 2019 03:30 BRAT_OK wrote: TvP still broken. Its looks like only one guy works in balance team and he playing as protoss, and he very bad at playing. Good job Activision
I can't understand: The balance team reduced the robot price to 150 mineral from 200, now the warp prism price was increased to 250 from 200. So why not return the robot price but increase prism price?
Cant blame the balance team or those few souls still supporting this game...the damn company is to be blamed...mass layoffs after record profits and climbing stocks for activision
Prevalent problem across the game development industry...
On August 07 2019 11:03 Less_Du_Et wrote: Cant blame the balance team or those few souls still supporting this game...the damn company is to be blamed...mass layoffs after record profits and climbing stocks for activision
This is incorrect. Revenue was UP and proift was DOWN. ATVI did not generate "record profits" ... the dividend they pay investors was lower. When this happens it is common for a company to lower expenses.
Blizzard has been losing many millions of active users over the past 2 years.
On August 07 2019 07:33 DomeGetta wrote: Honestly this is pretty bad - BC Mech vs Z is already very strong - as Maru displayed at WCG - now you are going to have better EMP vs infestors and 45% less damage on the main tool Z uses to fight BCs? How is this a viable option?
Understand the intent to make ZvP late game more even - but until we see Zerg dealing with BC mech evenly with the current infestors and ghosts - how can we think its a good idea to literally take half the DPS away from infested terrans which are the main tool to counter BCs while also buffing ghosts?
Maru crushing Reynor says literally nothing about the ZvT matchup. If those games weren't such one sided stomps the only thing it would show is how broken Zerg is. Reynor does just fine against EU terrans (aka the players on his skill level). Dark has been doing just fine against that style from Maru on ladder. The huge majority of Terrans including other pros struggle with Z in lategame. Pro zergs like solar have admitted the infestor broodlord comp is currently unbeatable in a direct fight for Terran. Something this drastic was definitely needed.
Also just on a side note, investors still have alot of vercitility to them along side spores, corruptors, and vipers.
I'm not to worried for zerg to be honest it just might make terran late game viable not broken.
This is quite bad. TvZ late game looks relatively balanced if not slightly imbalanced for T with BC mech (Maru @WCG). Reducing the counter unit (ITs) damage by 50 percent while also buffing the unit that counters it (ghost) is a horrendous idea. The BC needs a nerf to it if these are going through or its going to broken for sure. I dont understand how super obvious things like this ever make it into patches (stalker buff etc) you only need a very limited experience playing or watching to know how stupid this is.
On August 07 2019 12:03 DomeGetta wrote: This is quite bad. TvZ late game looks relatively balanced if not slightly imbalanced for T with BC mech (Maru @WCG). Reducing the counter unit (ITs) damage by 50 percent while also buffing the unit that counters it (ghost) is a horrendous idea. The BC needs a nerf to it if these are going through or its going to broken for sure. I dont understand how super obvious things like this ever make it into patches (stalker buff etc) you only need a very limited experience playing or watching to know how stupid this is.
Pros get to comment on proposed balance changes and they don’t share your concerns.
Also, Maru is just better than Reynor at late game. Serral wiped the floor with Special’s BC battlemech and swept him 4-0 just like Maru swept Reynor.
Serral was asked about those WCG games and his response was Reynor sucks at late game.
If we saw Maru beat Serral 4-0 with BCs, then maybe we should be concerned about their power.
On August 07 2019 11:03 Less_Du_Et wrote: Cant blame the balance team or those few souls still supporting this game...the damn company is to be blamed...mass layoffs after record profits and climbing stocks for activision
This is incorrect. Revenue was UP and proift was DOWN. ATVI did not generate "record profits" ... the dividend they pay investors was lower. When this happens it is common for a company to lower expenses.
Blizzard has been losing many millions of active users over the past 2 years.
When was the last time Blizzard released anything that wasn't a remaster or a WoW/Hearthstone expansion? Maybe they should try doing that.
On August 07 2019 13:46 Muliphein wrote: Why are they still adjusting the unit stats of the game? How many times were the stats of SC BW changed? What is the factor of difference?
SC BW became balanced the moment Blizzard abandoned it.
BW was far from balanced the moment Blizzard abandoned it.
There is a reason 4 out of the 5 bonjwas are terran, and the only non-terran one was implicated in match fixing scandal
When it was realized that Terran was broken and Protoss was trash, they started heavy focus on map design to try and balance things out.
SC2 balance > BW balance imo. Balance by map design is a failure imo
I'm fine with the changes as they are rather small. It's a good start to see where this is going for top tier players. I've never been a big fan of too drastic changes. I still doubt the infested terran nerf will fix PvZ lategame, but we'll see.
On August 07 2019 13:46 Muliphein wrote: Why are they still adjusting the unit stats of the game? How many times were the stats of SC BW changed? What is the factor of difference?
SC BW became balanced the moment Blizzard abandoned it.
Uh.. the bug with scarabs randomly deals 0 damage is not Balance.
On August 07 2019 12:03 DomeGetta wrote: This is quite bad. TvZ late game looks relatively balanced if not slightly imbalanced for T with BC mech (Maru @WCG). Reducing the counter unit (ITs) damage by 50 percent while also buffing the unit that counters it (ghost) is a horrendous idea. The BC needs a nerf to it if these are going through or its going to broken for sure. I dont understand how super obvious things like this ever make it into patches (stalker buff etc) you only need a very limited experience playing or watching to know how stupid this is.
Haven't seen IT used vs BC in any bigger tournament lately only vs Carriers. But i've seen a lot BCs getting neuroed and rekt by Corruptors afterwars. And Ghosts might have been buffed but considering how hard it is to land a good EMP in lategame I don't see that as a big problem.
The funny thing is, according to aligulac, we were on the most balanced situation since 2015 on TVP, but instead of wait for the meta to stablish we get protoss nerfs and terran buffs. Meanwhile zerg still on the lead on early, mid and specially late game.
Remember the WOL-end balance ? Winfestor - Imbarruptor - GGlord ? We´re back there and nobody cares. Even zerg gets a scout buff lol
I love seeing all the Terrans whining again despite the fact that there has been only one Protoss title in the last two years. You should really be focusing on Zerg Late Game. It’s too strong for Protoss for sure and probably Terran - there’s hardly any answers there.
To quote Rotti, “Terran has become a spoiled child when they don’t get their way.”
On August 07 2019 17:34 EESCLuna wrote: The funny thing is, according to aligulac, we were on the most balanced situation since 2015 on TVP, but instead of wait for the meta to stablish we get protoss nerfs and terran buffs. Meanwhile zerg still on the lead on early, mid and specially late game.
Remember the WOL-end balance ? Winfestor - Imbarruptor - GGlord ? We´re back there and nobody cares. Even zerg gets a scout buff lol
Thanks Stats for winning something since 2016.
A full Korean line up tournament is nowadays less than a foreigner tournament where many top Koreans are missing? Am I missing a hidden joke?
On August 07 2019 17:34 EESCLuna wrote: The funny thing is, according to aligulac.
I found the flaw in your reasoning.
Aligulac treats every match as though they are an equal match as the next match.
Korean winrates are lower because the level of competition is higher. Put any top tier foreign pro into a series of Korean tournaments and watch their winrates and aligulac scores plummet.
On August 07 2019 17:34 EESCLuna wrote: The funny thing is, according to aligulac.
I found the flaw in your reasoning.
Aligulac treats every match as though they are an equal match as the next match.
Korean winrates are lower because the level of competition is higher. Put any top tier foreign pro into a series of Korean tournaments and watch their winrates and aligulac scores plummet.
Also because the scenes are split and the skillset is different we see different issues in Korea and in WCS. e.g. Terrans seem fine-ish in the Code S while they struggle everywhere else. If you scratch Code S suddenly you have a huge Terran crisis. But how does Code S helps WCS Terrans? (except mjr Special) A big Zerg dominance in WCS, we wouldn't say that even in our wildest dreams about Korea, would we? etc.
So Aligulac watching over both leagues isn't much helpful.
On August 07 2019 12:03 DomeGetta wrote: This is quite bad. TvZ late game looks relatively balanced if not slightly imbalanced for T with BC mech (Maru @WCG). Reducing the counter unit (ITs) damage by 50 percent while also buffing the unit that counters it (ghost) is a horrendous idea. The BC needs a nerf to it if these are going through or its going to broken for sure. I dont understand how super obvious things like this ever make it into patches (stalker buff etc) you only need a very limited experience playing or watching to know how stupid this is.
Thankfully a 4 GSL back to back to back to back winner can beat a 16-17yo foreigner zerg, that doesn’t indicate that his comp was broken, especially since zergs do very fine vs that against same skill competition.
See the Reynor Special game in last WCS, if anything it indicates Terran need help against broodlord infestor.
Edit: @poster_above: How is 1/8 Terran at BlizzCon fine-ish from a code S perspective?
On August 07 2019 12:03 DomeGetta wrote: This is quite bad. TvZ late game looks relatively balanced if not slightly imbalanced for T with BC mech (Maru @WCG). Reducing the counter unit (ITs) damage by 50 percent while also buffing the unit that counters it (ghost) is a horrendous idea. The BC needs a nerf to it if these are going through or its going to broken for sure. I dont understand how super obvious things like this ever make it into patches (stalker buff etc) you only need a very limited experience playing or watching to know how stupid this is.
Thankfully a 4 GSL back to back to back to back winner can beat a 16-17yo foreigner zerg, that doesn’t indicate that his comp was broken, especially since zergs do very fine vs that against same skill competition.
See the Reynor Special game in last WCS, if anything it indicates Terran need help against broodlord infestor.
Edit: @poster_above: How is 1/8 Terran at BlizzCon fine-ish from a code S perspective?
Inno slumping, GuMi slumping, TY slumping for the first half of the year. Military Terrans not up to the task (yet?)
Meanwhile Protoss players playing really well (Trap, Dear)
Dunno. I don't think it is that much drama as some make it seem
On August 07 2019 12:03 DomeGetta wrote: This is quite bad. TvZ late game looks relatively balanced if not slightly imbalanced for T with BC mech (Maru @WCG). Reducing the counter unit (ITs) damage by 50 percent while also buffing the unit that counters it (ghost) is a horrendous idea. The BC needs a nerf to it if these are going through or its going to broken for sure. I dont understand how super obvious things like this ever make it into patches (stalker buff etc) you only need a very limited experience playing or watching to know how stupid this is.
Thankfully a 4 GSL back to back to back to back winner can beat a 16-17yo foreigner zerg, that doesn’t indicate that his comp was broken, especially since zergs do very fine vs that against same skill competition.
See the Reynor Special game in last WCS, if anything it indicates Terran need help against broodlord infestor.
Edit: @poster_above: How is 1/8 Terran at BlizzCon fine-ish from a code S perspective?
One Terran and two Zerg...it's just that in Korea, Protoss had a couple of months in which they seemed super strong and they amassed the results that granted the points they currently have in GSL standings; no balance patch was released, their strategies were figured out and now Protoss do not ever appear overpowered anymore to anyone but whiners. Terran are performing fine in Code S in Season 3.
Terran, unlike Protoss, already had all the weapons to deal with infestors; since infested terrans are getting nerfed, I see no reasons to buff ghosts(while buffing carriers is more than needed).
On August 07 2019 17:39 StarcraftSquall wrote: I love seeing all the Terrans whining again despite the fact that there has been only one Protoss title in the last two years. You should really be focusing on Zerg Late Game. It’s too strong for Protoss for sure and probably Terran - there’s hardly any answers there.
To quote Rotti, “Terran has become a spoiled child when they don’t get their way.”
Last year Maru won so much tournaments yet Protoss won more money than terran. So it’s the other way around actually.
I don't understand, so many people post about whining terrans. Yet I see almost no whining terran in the thread?
Are you guys just joining the thread, not even reading the posts and taking for granted terrans are whining? o_o
I like the patch, especially for TvP, agree that IT needed a nerf but I do think that BCs are also a bit OP and should be if not nerfed closely watched.
That is the only thing I'm worried about with this patch that BCs will be too strong in TvZ but either way IT should be nerfed, if zerg needs that crutch to survive BCs the crutch should be taken away and either nerf BCs or buff something else in the zerg arsenal that can help vs BCs.
On August 07 2019 12:03 DomeGetta wrote: This is quite bad. TvZ late game looks relatively balanced if not slightly imbalanced for T with BC mech (Maru @WCG). Reducing the counter unit (ITs) damage by 50 percent while also buffing the unit that counters it (ghost) is a horrendous idea. The BC needs a nerf to it if these are going through or its going to broken for sure. I dont understand how super obvious things like this ever make it into patches (stalker buff etc) you only need a very limited experience playing or watching to know how stupid this is.
Thankfully a 4 GSL back to back to back to back winner can beat a 16-17yo foreigner zerg, that doesn’t indicate that his comp was broken, especially since zergs do very fine vs that against same skill competition.
See the Reynor Special game in last WCS, if anything it indicates Terran need help against broodlord infestor.
Edit: @poster_above: How is 1/8 Terran at BlizzCon fine-ish from a code S perspective?
uhm, they're there and compete and can get quite high in the competition? They can't do that as good in any other tournament besides WESG. As you just pointed out Blizzcon is NOT GSL Code S tournament. So surprise, bad Terran representation. This just proves my point, once you remove the Code S from the statistics the "Terran is fine" is no longer valid.
Edit> The major issue I have with this is the fact that Blzizard took so long for any action that Blizzcon is already hard to reach many players because Protoss was "slightly stronger" for more than 6 months...
On August 07 2019 19:10 Shuffleblade wrote: I don't understand, so many people post about whining terrans. Yet I see almost no whining terran in the thread?
Are you guys just joining the thread, not even reading the posts and taking for granted terrans are whining? o_o
I like the patch, especially for TvP, agree that IT needed a nerf but I do think that BCs are also a bit OP and should be if not nerfed closely watched.
That is the only thing I'm worried about with this patch that BCs will be too strong in TvZ but either way IT should be nerfed, if zerg needs that crutch to survive BCs the crutch should be taken away and either nerf BCs or buff something else in the zerg arsenal that can help vs BCs.
First page was full of Terran salt and tears when I first read it. Maybe some were edited or maybe you are the one that didn't read all. Either way, there WAS a lot of whining. As usual
I agree that IT will probably doing nothing vs BC's anymore,but Neural, Fungal and Corrupters were mostly the weapons of choice before the patch and nothing changed in that regard. IT's were more of a anti Protoss weapon. At least that's what I saw. Weren't that many super late games in ZvT though maybe I'm wrong here.
On August 07 2019 17:39 StarcraftSquall wrote: I love seeing all the Terrans whining again despite the fact that there has been only one Protoss title in the last two years. You should really be focusing on Zerg Late Game. It’s too strong for Protoss for sure and probably Terran - there’s hardly any answers there.
To quote Rotti, “Terran has become a spoiled child when they don’t get their way.”
On August 07 2019 12:03 DomeGetta wrote: This is quite bad. TvZ late game looks relatively balanced if not slightly imbalanced for T with BC mech (Maru @WCG). Reducing the counter unit (ITs) damage by 50 percent while also buffing the unit that counters it (ghost) is a horrendous idea. The BC needs a nerf to it if these are going through or its going to broken for sure. I dont understand how super obvious things like this ever make it into patches (stalker buff etc) you only need a very limited experience playing or watching to know how stupid this is.
Pros get to comment on proposed balance changes and they don’t share your concerns.
Also, Maru is just better than Reynor at late game. Serral wiped the floor with Special’s BC battlemech and swept him 4-0 just like Maru swept Reynor.
Serral was asked about those WCG games and his response was Reynor sucks at late game.
If we saw Maru beat Serral 4-0 with BCs, then maybe we should be concerned about their power.
LMAO. How can you contradict your own logic in 1 post? Marus games vs Reynor dont matter bc Maru is better at late game but Serrals games vs Special do? The gap between Serral (top zerg) and Special (maybe top 10 Terran?) is far larger than the gap between Maru (top Terran) and Reynor (easily top 5 Zerg). When we see the best Terrans losing to the best zergs with this style your point will be valid but we have not. And now we are taking half the damage away from the literal way you saw Serral and Reynor try to deal with this style. So even if your hypothesis is that its balanced now bc the "better player" will win how does a 50 percent nerf make any sense whatsoever?
On August 07 2019 19:10 Shuffleblade wrote: I don't understand, so many people post about whining terrans. Yet I see almost no whining terran in the thread?
Are you guys just joining the thread, not even reading the posts and taking for granted terrans are whining? o_o
I like the patch, especially for TvP, agree that IT needed a nerf but I do think that BCs are also a bit OP and should be if not nerfed closely watched.
That is the only thing I'm worried about with this patch that BCs will be too strong in TvZ but either way IT should be nerfed, if zerg needs that crutch to survive BCs the crutch should be taken away and either nerf BCs or buff something else in the zerg arsenal that can help vs BCs.
First page was full of Terran salt and tears when I first read it. Maybe some were edited or maybe you are the one that didn't read all. Either way, there WAS a lot of whining. As usual
I agree that IT will probably doing nothing vs BC's anymore,but Neural, Fungal and Corrupters were mostly the weapons of choice before the patch and nothing changed in that regard. IT's were more of a anti Protoss weapon. At least that's what I saw. Weren't that many super late games in ZvT though maybe I'm wrong here.
Lol, you are right, first page is filled with terran whine xD
Maybe its me that is so used to it I don't even reflect on it anymore. Maybe a lot of terran players just dont like TvP and their dislike for the matchup is turning into whine about balance when the actual complaint isn't really about balance but about fun.
I haven't played in a while but I do think PvT doesn't really look very fun to play at the moment which can make people yearn for changes that will effect the meta in a bigger way than this will even if it makes the game pretty balanced.
On August 07 2019 12:03 DomeGetta wrote: This is quite bad. TvZ late game looks relatively balanced if not slightly imbalanced for T with BC mech (Maru @WCG). Reducing the counter unit (ITs) damage by 50 percent while also buffing the unit that counters it (ghost) is a horrendous idea. The BC needs a nerf to it if these are going through or its going to broken for sure. I dont understand how super obvious things like this ever make it into patches (stalker buff etc) you only need a very limited experience playing or watching to know how stupid this is.
Pros get to comment on proposed balance changes and they don’t share your concerns.
Also, Maru is just better than Reynor at late game. Serral wiped the floor with Special’s BC battlemech and swept him 4-0 just like Maru swept Reynor.
Serral was asked about those WCG games and his response was Reynor sucks at late game.
If we saw Maru beat Serral 4-0 with BCs, then maybe we should be concerned about their power.
LMAO. How can you contradict your own logic in 1 post? Marus games vs Reynor dont matter bc Maru is better at late game but Serrals games vs Special do? The gap between Serral (top zerg) and Special (maybe top 10 Terran?) is far larger than the gap between Maru (top Terran) and Reynor (easily top 5 Zerg). When we see the best Terrans losing to the best zergs with this style your point will be valid but we have not. And now we are taking half the damage away from the literal way you saw Serral and Reynor try to deal with this style. So even if your hypothesis is that its balanced now bc the "better player" will win how does a 50 percent nerf make any sense whatsoever?
I think you should read that post you quoted again. You missunderstood at least half of it I think
He said BOTH those series don't matter because of the large skill gap.
We will see how Zergs deal with it. Maybe the answer is Fungal/ neural Maybe it is countless counterattacks and try to evade the main fight. Maybe it is Corrupter + Viper (yank) Maybe it is a mix of all the above
Edit: @Shuffleblade I guess the large meta changing patch will come between Blizzcon and WCS 2020, if they plan on doing one
On August 07 2019 12:03 DomeGetta wrote: This is quite bad. TvZ late game looks relatively balanced if not slightly imbalanced for T with BC mech (Maru @WCG). Reducing the counter unit (ITs) damage by 50 percent while also buffing the unit that counters it (ghost) is a horrendous idea. The BC needs a nerf to it if these are going through or its going to broken for sure. I dont understand how super obvious things like this ever make it into patches (stalker buff etc) you only need a very limited experience playing or watching to know how stupid this is.
Pros get to comment on proposed balance changes and they don’t share your concerns.
Also, Maru is just better than Reynor at late game. Serral wiped the floor with Special’s BC battlemech and swept him 4-0 just like Maru swept Reynor.
Serral was asked about those WCG games and his response was Reynor sucks at late game.
If we saw Maru beat Serral 4-0 with BCs, then maybe we should be concerned about their power.
LMAO. How can you contradict your own logic in 1 post? Marus games vs Reynor dont matter bc Maru is better at late game but Serrals games vs Special do? The gap between Serral (top zerg) and Special (maybe top 10 Terran?) is far larger than the gap between Maru (top Terran) and Reynor (easily top 5 Zerg). When we see the best Terrans losing to the best zergs with this style your point will be valid but we have not. And now we are taking half the damage away from the literal way you saw Serral and Reynor try to deal with this style. So even if your hypothesis is that its balanced now bc the "better player" will win how does a 50 percent nerf make any sense whatsoever?
You overestimate Reynor by a large margin, but it's to be expected because zerg was crazy strong in 2018 and still pretty strong in 2019, and you underestimate special. The thing to consider during the special vs serral series was the beach map (I don't remember the name), where Reynor was on 3-4 bases with like no creep and special had way more bases but Reynor was able to turtle with his deathball and comeback for a win à la WoL broodlord/infestor. And it's not like special played really badly or anything, he just could not win a fight decisively. TvZ is currently difficult in lategame versus zerg so this nerf is probably a good thing, infestors will still be super strong units with fungals and neural parasites. Have you personally played against infestors? If so you'll realise that this nerf is probably necessary to even things out.
All in all this seems like a good patch with nothing too crazy. Maybe they should have adressed nydus because it looks kinda stupid from a design point of view but it's maybe balanced. The TvP problems will probably be solved with the stimpack reduction / ghost buff.
On August 07 2019 19:10 Shuffleblade wrote: I don't understand, so many people post about whining terrans. Yet I see almost no whining terran in the thread?
Are you guys just joining the thread, not even reading the posts and taking for granted terrans are whining? o_o
I like the patch, especially for TvP, agree that IT needed a nerf but I do think that BCs are also a bit OP and should be if not nerfed closely watched.
That is the only thing I'm worried about with this patch that BCs will be too strong in TvZ but either way IT should be nerfed, if zerg needs that crutch to survive BCs the crutch should be taken away and either nerf BCs or buff something else in the zerg arsenal that can help vs BCs.
First page was full of Terran salt and tears when I first read it. Maybe some were edited or maybe you are the one that didn't read all. Either way, there WAS a lot of whining. As usual
I agree that IT will probably doing nothing vs BC's anymore,but Neural, Fungal and Corrupters were mostly the weapons of choice before the patch and nothing changed in that regard. IT's were more of a anti Protoss weapon. At least that's what I saw. Weren't that many super late games in ZvT though maybe I'm wrong here.
Lol, you are right, first page is filled with terran whine xD
Maybe its me that is so used to it I don't even reflect on it anymore. Maybe a lot of terran players just dont like TvP and their dislike for the matchup is turning into whine about balance when the actual complaint isn't really about balance but about fun.
I haven't played in a while but I do think PvT doesn't really look very fun to play at the moment which can make people yearn for changes that will effect the meta in a bigger way than this will even if it makes the game pretty balanced.
Maybe? :p
I don’t really understand the Terran psyche at this point, I must confess. They seem to want the ego points for playing the hard race, but get pissy that it’s hard, most confusing. The whine is way worse on every other platform other than TL though, people are generally reasonable in their posting here.
I’d quite like to see more satisfying matchups, but I do feel the balance is pretty decent at present across the board.
I suppose I have a different perspective to some as I took a pretty big gap from almost all SC-related activity from the early LoTV era until this season. The game now is much better than that era, but to get to that point a whole slew of changes had to be made.
We could improve it yet further but I think that requires too many big changes that could backfire to introduce before Blizzcon
I’m down for changes, but I don’t think they’d be balance changes, one could call them ‘fun fiddling’ or what have you.
On August 07 2019 17:34 EESCLuna wrote: The funny thing is, according to aligulac, we were on the most balanced situation since 2015 on TVP, but instead of wait for the meta to stablish we get protoss nerfs and terran buffs. Meanwhile zerg still on the lead on early, mid and specially late game.
Remember the WOL-end balance ? Winfestor - Imbarruptor - GGlord ? We´re back there and nobody cares. Even zerg gets a scout buff lol
Thanks Stats for winning something since 2016.
A full Korean line up tournament is nowadays less than a foreigner tournament where many top Koreans are missing? Am I missing a hidden joke?
Oh my God, Protoss won the Super Tournaments, they win so much. Out of the 27 tournaments in the past two years, Protoss has won... five. Three ST's, ASUS ROG, and the WCS America that's the equivalent of the NA qualifiers of a normal WCS event.
On August 07 2019 12:03 DomeGetta wrote: This is quite bad. TvZ late game looks relatively balanced if not slightly imbalanced for T with BC mech (Maru @WCG). Reducing the counter unit (ITs) damage by 50 percent while also buffing the unit that counters it (ghost) is a horrendous idea. The BC needs a nerf to it if these are going through or its going to broken for sure. I dont understand how super obvious things like this ever make it into patches (stalker buff etc) you only need a very limited experience playing or watching to know how stupid this is.
Pros get to comment on proposed balance changes and they don’t share your concerns.
Also, Maru is just better than Reynor at late game. Serral wiped the floor with Special’s BC battlemech and swept him 4-0 just like Maru swept Reynor.
Serral was asked about those WCG games and his response was Reynor sucks at late game.
If we saw Maru beat Serral 4-0 with BCs, then maybe we should be concerned about their power.
LMAO. How can you contradict your own logic in 1 post? Marus games vs Reynor dont matter bc Maru is better at late game but Serrals games vs Special do? The gap between Serral (top zerg) and Special (maybe top 10 Terran?) is far larger than the gap between Maru (top Terran) and Reynor (easily top 5 Zerg). When we see the best Terrans losing to the best zergs with this style your point will be valid but we have not. And now we are taking half the damage away from the literal way you saw Serral and Reynor try to deal with this style. So even if your hypothesis is that its balanced now bc the "better player" will win how does a 50 percent nerf make any sense whatsoever?
Mass BCs are completely broken taken in isolation, they’re kept in check by Infestor counter measures, or being exceptionally difficult to mass and not die in vP
I’m not sure if nerfing ITs/fixing the ignore armour bug will see a big swing in the matchup, hopefully not. In most games I’ve seen Zergs have pounced on BCs before they hit critical mass, Serral has used fungal/bile combos rather than IT spam etc to good effect.
We’ll have to see. I personally hate the unit because it’s bloody ridiculous outside of novelty, so really don’t want to be seeing mass BCs every other lategame.
I don’t like that you can’t dodge Yamato no matter how far you get away once it starts, at least by distance. Sure it’s not a super common occurrence but in those games where players split off small BC hitsquads to hit outlying bases you can’t engage them without taking guaranteed losses.
If you could dance in and force them to waste Yamato shots you could more reliably defend small numbers of BCs with relatively small numbers of units, and whittle them down gradually.
Come to think of it can you dodge a Yamato shot with burrowing/going into a Nydus/being picked up by a prism or medivac or via a recall?
On August 07 2019 04:15 xelnaga_empire wrote: Thank you Blizzard. As of now, there is only one Korean Terran (Maru) out of 8 Korean players in contention to qualify for the Blizzcon finals. And there are only 2 Zerg in Korea in the top 8: https://wcs.starcraft2.com/en-us/standings/
And yet there are 5 Protoss players that are in contention to qualify for Blizzcon. 5 Protoss players out of 8 total in Korea for Blizzcon, This is the state of the game in 2019.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe right now most of the best players in Korea play toss? I mean the two best players in Europe are Zerg. You can argue that there isnt a toss in the top 5 players in Europe right now but you aren't complaining about that. Get out of here with that mess.
On August 07 2019 09:12 Xain0n wrote: Terran players complaining while they only got buffs, I'm not surprised.
terran players won't be happy until they automatically win the game for building 1 tank
How hilarious would it be if TvZ becomes broken and Dark can't get out of the group he built so accurately for once? I hope I'm just overestimating the changes, of course.
I would be sad but laugh nonetheless. That would be hilarious indeed.
On August 07 2019 04:15 xelnaga_empire wrote: Thank you Blizzard. As of now, there is only one Korean Terran (Maru) out of 8 Korean players in contention to qualify for the Blizzcon finals. And there are only 2 Zerg in Korea in the top 8: https://wcs.starcraft2.com/en-us/standings/
And yet there are 5 Protoss players that are in contention to qualify for Blizzcon. 5 Protoss players out of 8 total in Korea for Blizzcon, This is the state of the game in 2019.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe right now most of the best players in Korea play toss? I mean the two best players in Europe are Zerg. You can argue that there isnt a toss in the top 5 players in Europe right now but you aren't complaining about that. Get out of here with that mess.
Have it occured to you that if a multitude of players of the same race suddenly becomes better than "all" other players that that could possibly be related to game balance?
I'm not saying its one way or the other but you come across as very close minded in your post.
As the situation is at the moment one of the differences between korea and the rest of the world is the structure of the tournaments. GSL is a prep based tournament, terrans have an edge in that style because of how their race and their builds work, zerg has a disadvantage due to their race and protoss is pretty middle of the road. Therefore if PvT gets unbalanced its not weird that it would effect GSL greatly because the structure of the tournament favores terrans who gets knocked out by protoss and zergs are in general slightly unfavored.
Weekender style tournaments favor zerg when the prep time is limited and therefore zerg dominating there is not weird plus that there are so many great zerg players in europe.
Therefore if you look deeper it makes sense that it is like that, that zerg dominate the weekender scene and protoss the GSL scene if TvP is protoss favored.
On August 07 2019 09:12 Xain0n wrote: Terran players complaining while they only got buffs, I'm not surprised.
terran players won't be happy until they automatically win the game for building 1 tank
How hilarious would it be if TvZ becomes broken and Dark can't get out of the group he built so accurately for once? I hope I'm just overestimating the changes, of course.
Dark and Maru have played eachother on stream a lot over the last couple weeks, and Dark has smacked him every single time (with Maru going for BCs in most games). He's made infestors look just as busted as in ZvP
As far as BCs being broken, people need to realise Reynor's ZvT is just not good enough to beat the best in the world.
If Maru 4-0'd him with regular mech or bio there would be no complaints. It's stupid how people complain about balance based on what games look like instead of which race is actually winning.
On August 07 2019 04:15 xelnaga_empire wrote: Thank you Blizzard. As of now, there is only one Korean Terran (Maru) out of 8 Korean players in contention to qualify for the Blizzcon finals. And there are only 2 Zerg in Korea in the top 8: https://wcs.starcraft2.com/en-us/standings/
And yet there are 5 Protoss players that are in contention to qualify for Blizzcon. 5 Protoss players out of 8 total in Korea for Blizzcon, This is the state of the game in 2019.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe right now most of the best players in Korea play toss? I mean the two best players in Europe are Zerg. You can argue that there isnt a toss in the top 5 players in Europe right now but you aren't complaining about that. Get out of here with that mess.
Have it occured to you that if a multitude of players of the same race suddenly becomes better than "all" other players that that could possibly be related to game balance?
I'm not saying its one way or the other but you come across as very close minded in your post.
As the situation is at the moment one of the differences between korea and the rest of the world is the structure of the tournaments. GSL is a prep based tournament, terrans have an edge in that style because of how their race and their builds work, zerg has a disadvantage due to their race and protoss is pretty middle of the road. Therefore if PvT gets unbalanced its not weird that it would effect GSL greatly because the structure of the tournament favores terrans who gets knocked out by protoss and zergs are in general slightly unfavored.
Weekender style tournaments favor zerg when the prep time is limited and therefore zerg dominating there is not weird plus that there are so many great zerg players in europe.
Therefore if you look deeper it makes sense that it is like that, that zerg dominate the weekender scene and protoss the GSL scene if TvP is protoss favored.
When did this happen though? Judging from before and now a fair distance after, Super Tournament was the anomaly rather than indicative of that particular trend.
Terrans aren’t exclusively being knocked out by Protoss anyway, but there seems to be this perception that that is the case. Perhaps a player like Patience prepared better last season because Ro16 is close to his ceiling, others were complacent, people had an off day or whatever.
Either way last season Innovation by virtue of having better TvT eliminated the obvious best TvPer in the world.
Even with that happening, Inno still knocked Stats out in the Ro16, and his series with Trap who is amongst the best PvTers in the world went to the deciding rubber.
Special’s recent good GSL runs have been on the back of beating Protoss players. He complains most about Protoss but it definitely seems to be his strongest matchup.
Protoss last season lost Zest and sOs in Ro32, and Stats and Dear in Ro16, and as a race were largely fine. Terran lost TY and Maru Ro32, GuMiho in Ro16.
I’m just counting champions and people with pedigree here, other players are still very good players obviously. If Terrans lose even one or two of those players it’s a disaster for the race, Protoss have champions to burn.
Every single best Protoss of all time (in my opinion and also going by Najakin’s competition) is still playing in GSL today with the exception of Rain and MC.
Classic going to military sucks for all sorts of reasons, but Protoss as a whole has that much depth that the race is still fine in GSL. Take away Maru or Inno from Terran at this point and it’s a really big blow.
Realistically I don’t see how Protoss won’t be the best performing race in GSL without players falling off a lot, or other players or new talent stepping up.
On August 07 2019 09:12 Xain0n wrote: Terran players complaining while they only got buffs, I'm not surprised.
terran players won't be happy until they automatically win the game for building 1 tank
How hilarious would it be if TvZ becomes broken and Dark can't get out of the group he built so accurately for once? I hope I'm just overestimating the changes, of course.
Dark and Maru have played eachother on stream a lot over the last couple weeks, and Dark has smacked him every single time (with Maru going for BCs in most games). He's made infestors look just as busted as in ZvP
As far as BCs being broken, people need to realise Reynor's ZvT is just not good enough to beat the best in the world.
If Maru 4-0'd him with regular mech or bio there would be no complaints. It's stupid how people complain about balance based on what games look like instead of which race is actually winning.
Does Dark ever stream or is this from Maru’s stream? (That I always miss and there’s no VoDs for )
Dark is a god with multiple spellcaster lategame armies, that don’t look flashy but are hard as fuck to control (well, I find it harder than just microing bio or whatever)
I don’t think BCs are currently broken, I’m wary about nerfing their countermeasures too much so that their brokenness is brought out and exposed.
They can offensively teleport, are incredibly hard to kill especially with full armour upgrades, have Yamato and can be repaired back to full effectiveness pretty quickly.
Which in isolation is insane but with countermeasures being strong enough, or the ‘don’t let them get there’ actually being reasonable they’re fine.
On August 07 2019 04:15 xelnaga_empire wrote: Thank you Blizzard. As of now, there is only one Korean Terran (Maru) out of 8 Korean players in contention to qualify for the Blizzcon finals. And there are only 2 Zerg in Korea in the top 8: https://wcs.starcraft2.com/en-us/standings/
And yet there are 5 Protoss players that are in contention to qualify for Blizzcon. 5 Protoss players out of 8 total in Korea for Blizzcon, This is the state of the game in 2019.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe right now most of the best players in Korea play toss? I mean the two best players in Europe are Zerg. You can argue that there isnt a toss in the top 5 players in Europe right now but you aren't complaining about that. Get out of here with that mess.
Have it occured to you that if a multitude of players of the same race suddenly becomes better than "all" other players that that could possibly be related to game balance?
I'm not saying its one way or the other but you come across as very close minded in your post.
As the situation is at the moment one of the differences between korea and the rest of the world is the structure of the tournaments. GSL is a prep based tournament, terrans have an edge in that style because of how their race and their builds work, zerg has a disadvantage due to their race and protoss is pretty middle of the road. Therefore if PvT gets unbalanced its not weird that it would effect GSL greatly because the structure of the tournament favores terrans who gets knocked out by protoss and zergs are in general slightly unfavored.
Weekender style tournaments favor zerg when the prep time is limited and therefore zerg dominating there is not weird plus that there are so many great zerg players in europe.
Therefore if you look deeper it makes sense that it is like that, that zerg dominate the weekender scene and protoss the GSL scene if TvP is protoss favored.
When did this happen though? Judging from before and now a fair distance after, Super Tournament was the anomaly rather than indicative of that particular trend.
Terrans aren’t exclusively being knocked out by Protoss anyway, but there seems to be this perception that that is the case. Perhaps a player like Patience prepared better last season because Ro16 is close to his ceiling, others were complacent, people had an off day or whatever.
Either way last season Innovation by virtue of having better TvT eliminated the obvious best TvPer in the world.
Even with that happening, Inno still knocked Stats out in the Ro16, and his series with Trap who is amongst the best PvTers in the world went to the deciding rubber.
Special’s recent good GSL runs have been on the back of beating Protoss players. He complains most about Protoss but it definitely seems to be his strongest matchup.
Protoss last season lost Zest and sOs in Ro32, and Stats and Dear in Ro16, and as a race were largely fine. Terran lost TY and Maru Ro32, GuMiho in Ro16.
I’m just counting champions and people with pedigree here, other players are still very good players obviously. If Terrans lose even one or two of those players it’s a disaster for the race, Protoss have champions to burn.
Every single best Protoss of all time (in my opinion and also going by Najakin’s competition) is still playing in GSL today with the exception of Rain and MC.
Classic going to military sucks for all sorts of reasons, but Protoss as a whole has that much depth that the race is still fine in GSL. Take away Maru or Inno from Terran at this point and it’s a really big blow.
Realistically I don’t see how Protoss won’t be the best performing race in GSL without players falling off a lot, or other players or new talent stepping up.
The Twilight Council will be soon greatly affected by korean army enlistments(I presume) since, after Classic, the next in line are Stats, herO and Zest (as well as soO, Gumiho and some others), all born in 1992.
Also, Infestors proclaimed to be the bane of Terran because Dark beats Maru in ladder games? Let's see what happens if they play against at GSL vs The World...
On August 07 2019 09:12 Xain0n wrote: Terran players complaining while they only got buffs, I'm not surprised.
terran players won't be happy until they automatically win the game for building 1 tank
How hilarious would it be if TvZ becomes broken and Dark can't get out of the group he built so accurately for once? I hope I'm just overestimating the changes, of course.
Dark and Maru have played eachother on stream a lot over the last couple weeks, and Dark has smacked him every single time (with Maru going for BCs in most games). He's made infestors look just as busted as in ZvP
As far as BCs being broken, people need to realise Reynor's ZvT is just not good enough to beat the best in the world.
If Maru 4-0'd him with regular mech or bio there would be no complaints. It's stupid how people complain about balance based on what games look like instead of which race is actually winning.
Does Dark ever stream or is this from Maru’s stream? (That I always miss and there’s no VoDs for )
Dark is a god with multiple spellcaster lategame armies, that don’t look flashy but are hard as fuck to control (well, I find it harder than just microing bio or whatever)
I don’t think BCs are currently broken, I’m wary about nerfing their countermeasures too much so that their brokenness is brought out and exposed.
They can offensively teleport, are incredibly hard to kill especially with full armour upgrades, have Yamato and can be repaired back to full effectiveness pretty quickly.
Which in isolation is insane but with countermeasures being strong enough, or the ‘don’t let them get there’ actually being reasonable they’re fine.
Yeah the point here is not that BCs are broken in the current state - the point is that every Zerg we have seen beat this style (which is not a huge sample since Maru really first unveiled this specific style at WCG) heavily relies on infestors and infested terrans. The way special used them vs Serral is not close to what Maru did vs. Reynor mass expanding behind the early aggression and comboing them with 20 ranged liberators. The point is that if you take half the damage away from the IT's in what is arguably a relatively balanced dynamic you are nuts to think it's not going to become imbalanced. Just that nerf alone is enough - and on top of giving the literal unit that is made to counter infestors another buff with emp radius. Both of the changes are targeted for other matchups as it's clearly been stated in the multiple updates - IT strength vs carriers and emp buff vs Protoss. It's very clear that they didn't consider how heavily this will throw TvZ late game off - which I'm not saying right now is a problem - but am certain will become one if they don't add compensatory BC nerf.
Honestly like these changes. Balancing 3 asymmetric races is incredibly hard and I think they are doing a really good job. I like that they are tweaking less and less in major patches. At least to me, it seemed like they used to nerf things into the ground a bit too hard.
Also, was wondering if making infestors 3 supply instead of 2 or lowering total energy were reasonable nerfs instead of the weapon speed reduction (but including the armor bug). I feel like infestors in small numbers are a very reasonable unit, and its when they are massed that they become a problem. Because it seems to me like nerfing their strength directly might make them too weak to BCs, and if you pay close enough attention to this game you'd know thats the only answer Zerg have against BCs.
On August 07 2019 17:34 EESCLuna wrote: The funny thing is, according to aligulac, we were on the most balanced situation since 2015 on TVP, but instead of wait for the meta to stablish we get protoss nerfs and terran buffs. Meanwhile zerg still on the lead on early, mid and specially late game.
Remember the WOL-end balance ? Winfestor - Imbarruptor - GGlord ? We´re back there and nobody cares. Even zerg gets a scout buff lol
Thanks Stats for winning something since 2016.
A full Korean line up tournament is nowadays less than a foreigner tournament where many top Koreans are missing? Am I missing a hidden joke?
Oh my God, Protoss won the Super Tournaments, they win so much. Out of the 27 tournaments in the past two years, Protoss has won... five. Three ST's, ASUS ROG, and the WCS America that's the equivalent of the NA qualifiers of a normal WCS event.
I didn't say that, I replied to the thing that Stats won something since 2016. Stats himself won 2018 ST1 It's plainly not true, you can't based the discussion on the premise protoss didn't win anything from 2016 when they won. We can discuss different views, but then we're at the fact that out of 4 Code S finals Maru won, he won 3 against Protoss players. Stats was 2nd at Blizzcon and at GSL vs TW. Like, don't get me wrong, I would love to see some Protoss champs, but they were getting many 2nd places which wasn't that bad. In the mean time Zerg wasn't getting 2nd places at all... (edit> obviously in Korea, that's why I often mention the issue of splitting regions)
On August 07 2019 12:03 DomeGetta wrote: This is quite bad. TvZ late game looks relatively balanced if not slightly imbalanced for T with BC mech (Maru @WCG). Reducing the counter unit (ITs) damage by 50 percent while also buffing the unit that counters it (ghost) is a horrendous idea. The BC needs a nerf to it if these are going through or its going to broken for sure. I dont understand how super obvious things like this ever make it into patches (stalker buff etc) you only need a very limited experience playing or watching to know how stupid this is.
Pros get to comment on proposed balance changes and they don’t share your concerns.
Also, Maru is just better than Reynor at late game. Serral wiped the floor with Special’s BC battlemech and swept him 4-0 just like Maru swept Reynor.
Serral was asked about those WCG games and his response was Reynor sucks at late game.
If we saw Maru beat Serral 4-0 with BCs, then maybe we should be concerned about their power.
Pros aren't the only ones playing the game. Pros can manage to control Infestors and Vipers, all the while sniping air with corruptor ball jabs w/o moving them into pack of marines/Thors, all the while launching SH wave, flanking and having small counter attack. Us average players can handle one caster tops and maybe a flank that hits at somewhat reasonable time. And even at pro level, Nukes are still crazy strong, so I think the very late game at pro level might be slightly T favoured now (it was slightly Z favoured b4 imo).
Finally Blizzard understands that Toss aint as good as all those whining terrans say. Nonetheless the T buff is needed and the Z nerf aswell. Think this, together with the P changes, can work fine.
On August 07 2019 17:34 EESCLuna wrote: The funny thing is, according to aligulac, we were on the most balanced situation since 2015 on TVP, but instead of wait for the meta to stablish we get protoss nerfs and terran buffs. Meanwhile zerg still on the lead on early, mid and specially late game.
Remember the WOL-end balance ? Winfestor - Imbarruptor - GGlord ? We´re back there and nobody cares. Even zerg gets a scout buff lol
Thanks Stats for winning something since 2016.
A full Korean line up tournament is nowadays less than a foreigner tournament where many top Koreans are missing? Am I missing a hidden joke?
Oh my God, Protoss won the Super Tournaments, they win so much. Out of the 27 tournaments in the past two years, Protoss has won... five. Three ST's, ASUS ROG, and the WCS America that's the equivalent of the NA qualifiers of a normal WCS event.
I didn't say that, I replied to the thing that Stats won something since 2016. Stats himself won 2018 ST1 It's plainly not true, you can't based the discussion on the premise protoss didn't win anything from 2016 when they won. We can discuss different views, but then we're at the fact that out of 4 Code S finals Maru won, he won 3 against Protoss players. Stats was 2nd at Blizzcon and at GSL vs TW. Like, don't get me wrong, I would love to see some Protoss champs, but they were getting many 2nd places which wasn't that bad. In the mean time Zerg wasn't getting 2nd places at all... (edit> obviously in Korea, that's why I often mention the issue of splitting regions)
yeah, Z doesnt have 2nd places cuz currently the alway get FIRST :D
On August 07 2019 17:34 EESCLuna wrote: The funny thing is, according to aligulac, we were on the most balanced situation since 2015 on TVP, but instead of wait for the meta to stablish we get protoss nerfs and terran buffs. Meanwhile zerg still on the lead on early, mid and specially late game.
Remember the WOL-end balance ? Winfestor - Imbarruptor - GGlord ? We´re back there and nobody cares. Even zerg gets a scout buff lol
Thanks Stats for winning something since 2016.
A full Korean line up tournament is nowadays less than a foreigner tournament where many top Koreans are missing? Am I missing a hidden joke?
Oh my God, Protoss won the Super Tournaments, they win so much. Out of the 27 tournaments in the past two years, Protoss has won... five. Three ST's, ASUS ROG, and the WCS America that's the equivalent of the NA qualifiers of a normal WCS event.
I didn't say that, I replied to the thing that Stats won something since 2016. Stats himself won 2018 ST1 It's plainly not true, you can't based the discussion on the premise protoss didn't win anything from 2016 when they won. We can discuss different views, but then we're at the fact that out of 4 Code S finals Maru won, he won 3 against Protoss players. Stats was 2nd at Blizzcon and at GSL vs TW. Like, don't get me wrong, I would love to see some Protoss champs, but they were getting many 2nd places which wasn't that bad. In the mean time Zerg wasn't getting 2nd places at all... (edit> obviously in Korea, that's why I often mention the issue of splitting regions)
yeah, Z doesnt have 2nd places cuz currently the alway get FIRST :D
In Korea? Interesting view on things considering how long it was without a (Korean) Zerg winning a Korean tournaments
On August 07 2019 17:34 EESCLuna wrote: The funny thing is, according to aligulac, we were on the most balanced situation since 2015 on TVP, but instead of wait for the meta to stablish we get protoss nerfs and terran buffs. Meanwhile zerg still on the lead on early, mid and specially late game.
Remember the WOL-end balance ? Winfestor - Imbarruptor - GGlord ? We´re back there and nobody cares. Even zerg gets a scout buff lol
Thanks Stats for winning something since 2016.
A full Korean line up tournament is nowadays less than a foreigner tournament where many top Koreans are missing? Am I missing a hidden joke?
Oh my God, Protoss won the Super Tournaments, they win so much. Out of the 27 tournaments in the past two years, Protoss has won... five. Three ST's, ASUS ROG, and the WCS America that's the equivalent of the NA qualifiers of a normal WCS event.
I didn't say that, I replied to the thing that Stats won something since 2016. Stats himself won 2018 ST1 It's plainly not true, you can't based the discussion on the premise protoss didn't win anything from 2016 when they won. We can discuss different views, but then we're at the fact that out of 4 Code S finals Maru won, he won 3 against Protoss players. Stats was 2nd at Blizzcon and at GSL vs TW. Like, don't get me wrong, I would love to see some Protoss champs, but they were getting many 2nd places which wasn't that bad. In the mean time Zerg wasn't getting 2nd places at all... (edit> obviously in Korea, that's why I often mention the issue of splitting regions)
yeah, Z doesnt have 2nd places cuz currently the alway get FIRST :D
In Korea? Interesting view on things considering how long it was without a (Korean) Zerg winning a Korean tournaments
On August 07 2019 04:00 JimmyJRaynor wrote: Real men stim pack without a medivac. Its going to be fun inventing new stim pack timing pushes with these changes.
I'm glad they kept the Zealot strong. The way Blizzard discusses this I think Zealot drops combined with a round of Zealot warp-ins is considered extremely powerful. I'm glad they nerfed this by modifying the Warp Prism rather than weakening the Zealot. I hope the Zealot remains as strong as possible.
Disclaimer: I play 60% as Random and 40% as Terran.
I agree I'm interested to see what the stim buff will bring. I'm also a bit worried though.
On August 08 2019 01:39 TentativePanda wrote: Because it seems to me like nerfing their strength directly might make them too weak to BCs, and if you pay close enough attention to this game you'd know thats the only answer Zerg have against BCs.
agreed. BCs are currently what carriers used to be: completely broken against both of the other two races if you ever get the time and money to mass them. Yamato needs to cost energy again
On August 07 2019 09:12 Xain0n wrote: Terran players complaining while they only got buffs, I'm not surprised.
terran players won't be happy until they automatically win the game for building 1 tank
How hilarious would it be if TvZ becomes broken and Dark can't get out of the group he built so accurately for once? I hope I'm just overestimating the changes, of course.
Dark and Maru have played eachother on stream a lot over the last couple weeks, and Dark has smacked him every single time (with Maru going for BCs in most games). He's made infestors look just as busted as in ZvP
As far as BCs being broken, people need to realise Reynor's ZvT is just not good enough to beat the best in the world.
If Maru 4-0'd him with regular mech or bio there would be no complaints. It's stupid how people complain about balance based on what games look like instead of which race is actually winning.
Does Dark ever stream or is this from Maru’s stream? (That I always miss and there’s no VoDs for )
Dark is a god with multiple spellcaster lategame armies, that don’t look flashy but are hard as fuck to control (well, I find it harder than just microing bio or whatever)
Dark usually streams once a week or so (although vods are behind a subwall). Maru less often but he did a lot in the run up to GSL vs the world. Both were at 7 - 7.1K in the games I saw.
Either way Dark was smashing Maru's BC builds pretty damn hard. Either by going fast corruptor/roach aggression and overwhelming him, or by taking it to a split map scenario and making infestors look busted. Obviously ladder games don't always carry over to tournaments, but after seeing that I'd bet on Dark to take Maru in a series right now. Which also means smashing every terran by default.
On August 07 2019 09:12 Xain0n wrote: Terran players complaining while they only got buffs, I'm not surprised.
terran players won't be happy until they automatically win the game for building 1 tank
How hilarious would it be if TvZ becomes broken and Dark can't get out of the group he built so accurately for once? I hope I'm just overestimating the changes, of course.
Dark and Maru have played eachother on stream a lot over the last couple weeks, and Dark has smacked him every single time (with Maru going for BCs in most games). He's made infestors look just as busted as in ZvP
As far as BCs being broken, people need to realise Reynor's ZvT is just not good enough to beat the best in the world.
If Maru 4-0'd him with regular mech or bio there would be no complaints. It's stupid how people complain about balance based on what games look like instead of which race is actually winning.
Does Dark ever stream or is this from Maru’s stream? (That I always miss and there’s no VoDs for )
Dark is a god with multiple spellcaster lategame armies, that don’t look flashy but are hard as fuck to control (well, I find it harder than just microing bio or whatever)
I don’t think BCs are currently broken, I’m wary about nerfing their countermeasures too much so that their brokenness is brought out and exposed.
They can offensively teleport, are incredibly hard to kill especially with full armour upgrades, have Yamato and can be repaired back to full effectiveness pretty quickly.
Which in isolation is insane but with countermeasures being strong enough, or the ‘don’t let them get there’ actually being reasonable they’re fine.
Yeah the point here is not that BCs are broken in the current state - the point is that every Zerg we have seen beat this style (which is not a huge sample since Maru really first unveiled this specific style at WCG) heavily relies on infestors and infested terrans. The way special used them vs Serral is not close to what Maru did vs. Reynor mass expanding behind the early aggression and comboing them with 20 ranged liberators. The point is that if you take half the damage away from the IT's in what is arguably a relatively balanced dynamic you are nuts to think it's not going to become imbalanced. Just that nerf alone is enough - and on top of giving the literal unit that is made to counter infestors another buff with emp radius. Both of the changes are targeted for other matchups as it's clearly been stated in the multiple updates - IT strength vs carriers and emp buff vs Protoss. It's very clear that they didn't consider how heavily this will throw TvZ late game off - which I'm not saying right now is a problem - but am certain will become one if they don't add compensatory BC nerf.
I agree that a compensatory BC nerf might be needed but the dynamic of infestors are not balanced or healthy for the game. At the moment you can compare infestors to the SH of hots, its a unit that can periodically throw out free units with high dps. Don't forget IT can be used in conjunction with fungle (its kind of insane both those spells are on the same unit) and with abduct. Meaning there are pretty solid ways of getting a use out of the slow free units with great dps. IT were never designed to be used as a main army that is just as bad design as hots SH.
IT were designed to be used as an harass tool, a way to zone during engagements or as a "oh shit my infestors lack mana for the other spells and there is a battle right now button". That IT are being used as a main army means it needs to be nerfed period and the damage is the right way to go because that is why its being used that way. Infested terrans are still good to zone, cover retreat or harass a mineral line even if the damage is nerfed (if you have 3-5 infestors as intended).
Multiple posters comment on the ghost buff and how ghosts are a counter to infestors and this nerf and buff to the counter can be too much, it is not. Ghosts are not a counter to infestors because of EMP, I would even say ghosts aren't a counter but that is only half true. If Z doesn't have BLs then yes ghosts steady targeting counter infestors but not because of EMP, EMP barely matters against infestors since Z can just back off and regen the mana. The only way the emp effect that particular matchup is in the viper vs ghost dance if that is needed, that its easier for a terran to preempt that a viper will try to abduct and emp if the area is slightly bigger.
On August 07 2019 13:46 Muliphein wrote: Why are they still adjusting the unit stats of the game? How many times were the stats of SC BW changed? What is the factor of difference?
SC BW became balanced the moment Blizzard abandoned it.
Uh.. the bug with scarabs randomly deals 0 damage is not Balance.
Don't know what you mean. First of all, the SC2 engine is completely bugged. It doesn't allow the user to control the units. It would be a good engine for an RPG, not for an MOBA, and certainly not for an RTS. This was demonstrated by LaLush (and many other before him) in https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/433944-depth-of-micro The SC2 engine was engineered to be fundamentally unsuitable for an RTS game. Why did this happen? Because while the engineers did a hell of a job in putting in all these features that seem like a good idea to a non-RTS player, and it is a technical marvel that it all works, in the end the SC2 developers had zero affinity with RTS games.
Second, reavers and balance; the thing patched about reavers was that they used to shoot their scarabs instantly after being unloaded. This made reavers overpowered and broke the game.
You say SC BW is not balanced because reaver scarabs randomly deal no damage, and that this is a bug. First of all, if reavers dealt no damage it wouldn't unbalance the game. If reavers are too weak to use, protoss players simply build their other units. Yes, it will be one less thing to defend against. But that's about it. Now, if scarabs always did full damage all around it when it fails to find it's target, that would make reavers a lot stronger. An overpowered unit breaks balance. Not a weak unit. Scouts are weak units. Scouts don't break the balance of the game.
And lastly, it is factually incorrect that reavers randomly deal zero damage. They deal no damage if it cannot hit it's target. And this is not random. It is up to you if you can this a 'bug' or a 'feature'. To me, SC2 units responding as if they are moving through some very viscous fluid is a bug. To you it is a feature. SC2 units trying to occupy a single spot and them all swarming around that spot and rearranging themselves without receiving any others to do so to minimize their distance to that spot, to me that's a bug. To you it may be a feature.
But nothing about reavers make SC BW unbalanced, broken, or boring. SC2 on the other hand, these 'features make the game not enjoyable to play, because it feels like you are fighting the interface rather than playing the game, and the clumping of the units make positioning of units in battles something that only plays a role at the highest level of play. This in contrast to SC BW, which is much easier to play, and allows even low level players to control their units and get benefit from it.
On August 07 2019 07:33 DomeGetta wrote: Honestly this is pretty bad - BC Mech vs Z is already very strong - as Maru displayed at WCG - now you are going to have better EMP vs infestors and 45% less damage on the main tool Z uses to fight BCs? How is this a viable option?
Understand the intent to make ZvP late game more even - but until we see Zerg dealing with BC mech evenly with the current infestors and ghosts - how can we think its a good idea to literally take half the DPS away from infested terrans which are the main tool to counter BCs while also buffing ghosts?
Lol. Maru crushing Reynor is no indication of balance. Maru is the clear TvZ goat of SC2 with the best TvZ lategame, miles ahead of Reynor mechanically. If Maru crushed Dark 4:0 it could spur a legitimate discussion. But some random beyond the game tourney where 1 player is so much better then the other... not so much
On August 07 2019 06:41 Shuffleblade wrote: Yes, zergs do have one massable powerful unit that creates free units at the cost of energy which can be used as a panic button if anything goes wrong. That is the exact reason they are toning infested terrans down, it is too powerful. I don't like the BCs as they are either and believe they are OP as well but at least they have counters. Infestors have 0 counters.
Yes, that is true for Master and GM, but when I'm forced to counter A-move army with micro intensive army, it should either have clear advantage or not be as difficult. I think that if casting making it so that casting Fungal also unburrows the Infestor that is casting it would help, while not messing pro play, as player with good micro can do this already with just his/her skill.
Zerg player complaining about A-move, and against Terran at that. Now I have seen everything.
Do you remember a time when Terran had to kills Zerg before Ultras? Or before GGLords? Before 15 mins? Or micro and split as a god against BLing muta Amove? I think I remember it, its been going on for the past 5 years at least lol.
Now after so long TvZ lategame is actually quite balanced and Zergs start complaining. Just learn to play against it. Its tough to learn to actually micro your units at first after so long of "spam larvae button and Amove", but with practice it should be possible
On August 07 2019 07:33 DomeGetta wrote: Honestly this is pretty bad - BC Mech vs Z is already very strong - as Maru displayed at WCG - now you are going to have better EMP vs infestors and 45% less damage on the main tool Z uses to fight BCs? How is this a viable option?
Understand the intent to make ZvP late game more even - but until we see Zerg dealing with BC mech evenly with the current infestors and ghosts - how can we think its a good idea to literally take half the DPS away from infested terrans which are the main tool to counter BCs while also buffing ghosts?
Lol. Maru crushing Reynor is no indication of balance. Maru is the clear TvZ goat of SC2 with the best TvZ lategame, miles ahead of Reynor mechanically. If Maru crushed Dark 4:0 it could spur a legitimate discussion. But some random beyond the game tourney where 1 player is so much better then the other... not so much
Yeah I'm not saying it means BC's are broken what I'm saying is that they are strong and viable in the current meta - and blizz is proposing to nerf the counter play by 50% and buff ghosts on top of it - you can emp infestors and in the dynamic vs mass BC u normally dont have many if any broodlords (imagine that) because there is nothing to shoot on the ground aside from ghosts which are really good vs. broodlords.
On August 07 2019 06:41 Shuffleblade wrote: Yes, zergs do have one massable powerful unit that creates free units at the cost of energy which can be used as a panic button if anything goes wrong. That is the exact reason they are toning infested terrans down, it is too powerful. I don't like the BCs as they are either and believe they are OP as well but at least they have counters. Infestors have 0 counters.
Yes, that is true for Master and GM, but when I'm forced to counter A-move army with micro intensive army, it should either have clear advantage or not be as difficult. I think that if casting making it so that casting Fungal also unburrows the Infestor that is casting it would help, while not messing pro play, as player with good micro can do this already with just his/her skill.
Zerg player complaining about A-move, and against Terran at that. Now I have seen everything.
Do you remember a time when Terran had to kills Zerg before Ultras? Or before GGLords? Before 15 mins? Or micro and split as a god against BLing muta Amove? I think I remember it, its been going on for the past 5 years at least lol.
Now after so long TvZ lategame is actually quite balanced and Zergs start complaining. Just learn to play against it. Its tough to learn to actually micro your units at first after so long of "spam larvae button and Amove", but with practice it should be possible
When Bio was 90% of what we saw in TvZ this was relevant - with battle-mech and BC mech taking over the meta - the days of one race clearly having a more difficult time microing are over - there's nothing more difficult about microing battle-mech and BC's than there is about even Protoss units lmao
On August 07 2019 06:41 Shuffleblade wrote: Yes, zergs do have one massable powerful unit that creates free units at the cost of energy which can be used as a panic button if anything goes wrong. That is the exact reason they are toning infested terrans down, it is too powerful. I don't like the BCs as they are either and believe they are OP as well but at least they have counters. Infestors have 0 counters.
Yes, that is true for Master and GM, but when I'm forced to counter A-move army with micro intensive army, it should either have clear advantage or not be as difficult. I think that if casting making it so that casting Fungal also unburrows the Infestor that is casting it would help, while not messing pro play, as player with good micro can do this already with just his/her skill.
Zerg player complaining about A-move, and against Terran at that. Now I have seen everything.
Do you remember a time when Terran had to kills Zerg before Ultras? Or before GGLords? Before 15 mins? Or micro and split as a god against BLing muta Amove? I think I remember it, its been going on for the past 5 years at least lol.
Now after so long TvZ lategame is actually quite balanced and Zergs start complaining. Just learn to play against it. Its tough to learn to actually micro your units at first after so long of "spam larvae button and Amove", but with practice it should be possible
When Bio was 90% of what we saw in TvZ this was relevant - with battle-mech and BC mech taking over the meta - the days of one race clearly having a more difficult time microing are over - there's nothing more difficult about microing battle-mech and BC's than there is about even Protoss units lmao
Did you read the post? Yes, for the last 8 months terran hasn't actually been the most micro intensive race (still the most macro intensive race btw). That doesn't change that for remaining 90% of SC2 lifespan terran has been clearly the most micro intensive and there have never been any zergs around saying "Its too easy to micro muta/ling/bling vs terran whom have it so hard, please balance team make it fair and harder for us to micro" yet when a period dawns when zerg in one late game scenario experience the same discrepencies in micro intensity that terran has had for 90% of the games history in most phases of the game then its a problem.
On August 07 2019 13:46 Muliphein wrote: Why are they still adjusting the unit stats of the game? How many times were the stats of SC BW changed? What is the factor of difference?
SC BW became balanced the moment Blizzard abandoned it.
Uh.. the bug with scarabs randomly deals 0 damage is not Balance.
Don't know what you mean. First of all, the SC2 engine is completely bugged. It doesn't allow the user to control the units. It would be a good engine for an RPG, not for an MOBA, and certainly not for an RTS. This was demonstrated by LaLush (and many other before him) in https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/433944-depth-of-micro The SC2 engine was engineered to be fundamentally unsuitable for an RTS game. Why did this happen? Because while the engineers did a hell of a job in putting in all these features that seem like a good idea to a non-RTS player, and it is a technical marvel that it all works, in the end the SC2 developers had zero affinity with RTS games.
Second, reavers and balance; the thing patched about reavers was that they used to shoot their scarabs instantly after being unloaded. This made reavers overpowered and broke the game.
You say SC BW is not balanced because reaver scarabs randomly deal no damage, and that this is a bug. First of all, if reavers dealt no damage it wouldn't unbalance the game. If reavers are too weak to use, protoss players simply build their other units. Yes, it will be one less thing for terrans to defend against. But that's about it. Now, if scarabs always did full damage all around it when it fails to find it's target, that would make reavers a lot stronger. An overpowered unit breaks balance. Not a weak unit. Scouts are weak units. Scouts don't break the balance of the game.
And lastly, it is factually incorrect that reavers randomly deal zero damage. They deal no damage if it cannot hit it's target. And this is not random. It is up to you if you can this a 'bug' or a 'feature'. To me, SC2 units responding as if they are moving through some very viscous fluid is a bug. To you it is a feature. SC2 units trying to occupy a single spot and them all swarming around that spot and rearranging themselves without receiving any others to do so to minimize their distance to that spot, to me that's a bug. To you it may be a feature.
But nothing about reavers make SC BW unbalanced, broken, or boring. SC2 on the other hand, these 'features make the game not enjoyable to play, because it feels like you are fighting the interface rather than playing the game, and the clumping of the units make positioning of units in battles something that only plays a role at the highest level of play. This in contrast to SC BW, which is much easier to play, and allows even low level players to control their units and get benefit from it.
You are literally describing Brood War, a game I also happen to love incidentally.
You’re conflating ‘RTS fundamentals’ (whatever that means) with ‘stuff I like in Brood War’ Scarabs bugging is one thing, it’s far far from the only thing that is not intuitive at all in that game. It’s better to use hold position while retreating and engaging with Dragoons? You can stack your corsairs by bugging a probe between pylons and grouping them? It’s extremely difficult to tell if a wall is tight or not just by looking at it? Patrol micro, etc.
Plenty of this adds to the game sure, what new player isolated from previous knowledge can hope to figure such things out?
As far as I’m aware there is nothing in SC2’s engine that precludes doing certain things like moving shot etc anyway, it’s a matter of how the engine prioritises certain things over others.
You could just swap these priorities and mess with some figures to enable certain behaviours.
SC2 for all its faults has by far the best pathing of any RTS I’ve ever played, which probably means its engine is pretty damn good as a baseline to build an RTS. It’s very consistent and predictable, even with the clumping (that I don’t really like personally).
I mean by all means prefer a game or not, to claim BW is easier to play than SC2 is preposterous though.
On August 07 2019 06:41 Shuffleblade wrote: Yes, zergs do have one massable powerful unit that creates free units at the cost of energy which can be used as a panic button if anything goes wrong. That is the exact reason they are toning infested terrans down, it is too powerful. I don't like the BCs as they are either and believe they are OP as well but at least they have counters. Infestors have 0 counters.
Yes, that is true for Master and GM, but when I'm forced to counter A-move army with micro intensive army, it should either have clear advantage or not be as difficult. I think that if casting making it so that casting Fungal also unburrows the Infestor that is casting it would help, while not messing pro play, as player with good micro can do this already with just his/her skill.
Zerg player complaining about A-move, and against Terran at that. Now I have seen everything.
Do you remember a time when Terran had to kills Zerg before Ultras? Or before GGLords? Before 15 mins? Or micro and split as a god against BLing muta Amove? I think I remember it, its been going on for the past 5 years at least lol.
Now after so long TvZ lategame is actually quite balanced and Zergs start complaining. Just learn to play against it. Its tough to learn to actually micro your units at first after so long of "spam larvae button and Amove", but with practice it should be possible
When Bio was 90% of what we saw in TvZ this was relevant - with battle-mech and BC mech taking over the meta - the days of one race clearly having a more difficult time microing are over - there's nothing more difficult about microing battle-mech and BC's than there is about even Protoss units lmao
Did you read the post? Yes, for the last 8 months terran hasn't actually been the most micro intensive race (still the most macro intensive race btw). That doesn't change that for remaining 90% of SC2 lifespan terran has been clearly the most micro intensive and there have never been any zergs around saying "Its too easy to micro muta/ling/bling vs terran whom have it so hard, please balance team make it fair and harder for us to micro" yet when a period dawns when zerg in one late game scenario experience the same discrepencies in micro intensity that terran has had for 90% of the games history in most phases of the game then its a problem.
Its hilarious.
What’s wrong with Terran being the micro race anyway?
I don’t presume to speak for Dome although I feel he has a similar position to me. As it is it’s hard to control lategame Z and beat mass BCs, hard but absolutely doable and we see it at the top level.
If you were to nerf the current state of affairs, then maybe the pendulum swings too far and it becomes very difficult/borderline undoable, then that’s not exactly desirable.
I’d rather neither, but given a choice I’d rather have Infestors too strong than BCs. As a pretty neutral observer as per racial preference goes.
I don’t think we’re arguing that as things stand the lategame is super unfair, but actually rather OK in this interaction, but too much nerfing (the rationales coming from TvP tweaking) could potentially affect the current state of affairs.
On August 08 2019 07:23 Wombat_NI wrote: You are literally describing Brood War, a game I also happen to love incidentally.
This is getting oh so old. Being able to control units more easily and more accurately is not 'just being identical to SC BW'. SC BW has actual bugs that are not helpful. But SC2 has more of them.
You’re conflating ‘RTS fundamentals’ (whatever that means) with ‘stuff I like in Brood War’ Scarabs bugging is one thing, it’s far far from the only thing that is not intuitive at all in that game.
I never said that scarabs behaving the way they do is a good thing. But it is not a bug and certainly not random. If it is desirable or not is up to debate.
Plenty of this adds to the game sure, what new player isolated from previous knowledge can hope to figure such things out?
SC2 is less intuitive. If you are new to SC2 and you try to micro your units, you will make it worse. If you are new to SC BW and you try to micro your units, you are improving the performance of your units.
As far as I’m aware there is nothing in SC2’s engine that precludes doing certain things like moving shot etc anyway, it’s a matter of how the engine prioritises certain things over others.
You didn't watch the video. They hard coded all these things into the engine which are engineering marvels but completely antithetical to RTS. And all SC2 players do is complain their race was nerfed in the large balance patch. The latency SC2 had during beta and initial release is another example. Blizzard never had people sit down in a room and discuss 'let's make the best engine for RTS possible. But what qualities make an engine a good RTS engine?' because that required a completely upside down way of thinking compared to WoW. When Blizzard started developing SC2, they had almost no RTS expertise in-house. During beta, they weren't even able to understand user feedback. And this shows in the engine.
SC2 for all its faults has by far the best pathing of any RTS I’ve ever played, which probably means its engine is pretty damn good as a baseline to build an RTS. It’s very consistent and predictable, even with the clumping (that I don’t really like personally).
I mean by all means prefer a game or not, to claim BW is easier to play than SC2 is preposterous though.
Why? SC BW is way easier and intuitive to understand. In SC2, units have a mind of their own. The rules that govern unit behavior in SC2 are way more complex than in SC BW. Exactly because the UI tries to be more powerful. On top of that, the core game itself is also more complicated. Blizzard added 'macro mechanics' to make the game more 'difficult', which makes no sense and makes the game more difficult that it ought to be. There are more units and most units have a special ability. SC2 is way more complicated to play. I didn't say SC BW is easier to master. Obviously, that game has a much better skill curve for competitive play. But that doesn't matter to 99% of us playing.
We played SC BW for years and we thought it was an easy straightforward game. Yes, we were not very good and playing at 40 apm and barely beating the AI. But the game was easy to play. If we had a new friend joining our LAN we could explai n her the game in about 5 minutes and we would just be playing after that.
On August 08 2019 07:23 Wombat_NI wrote: You are literally describing Brood War, a game I also happen to love incidentally.
This is getting oh so old. Being able to control units more easily and more accurately is not 'just being identical to SC BW'. SC BW has actual bugs that are not helpful. But SC2 has more of them.
You’re conflating ‘RTS fundamentals’ (whatever that means) with ‘stuff I like in Brood War’ Scarabs bugging is one thing, it’s far far from the only thing that is not intuitive at all in that game.
I never said that scarabs behaving the way they do is a good thing. But it is not a bug and certainly not random. If it is desirable or not is up to debate.
Plenty of this adds to the game sure, what new player isolated from previous knowledge can hope to figure such things out?
SC2 is less intuitive. If you are new to SC2 and you try to micro your units, you will make it worse. If you are new to SC BW and you try to micro your units, you are improving the performance of your units.
As far as I’m aware there is nothing in SC2’s engine that precludes doing certain things like moving shot etc anyway, it’s a matter of how the engine prioritises certain things over others.
You didn't watch the video. They hard coded all these things into the engine which are engineering marvels but completely antithetical to RTS. And all SC2 players do is complain their race was nerfed in the large balance patch. The latency SC2 had during beta and initial release is another example. They never had people in the room and sit 'let's make the best engine for RTS possible. What qualities make an engine a good RTS engine?' because that required a completely upside down way of thinking compared to WoW. When Blizzard started developing SC2, they had almost no RTS knowledge in-house. And this shows in the engine.
SC2 for all its faults has by far the best pathing of any RTS I’ve ever played, which probably means its engine is pretty damn good as a baseline to build an RTS. It’s very consistent and predictable, even with the clumping (that I don’t really like personally).
I mean by all means prefer a game or not, to claim BW is easier to play than SC2 is preposterous though.
Why? SC BW is way easier and intuitive to understand. In SC2, units have a mind of their own. The rules that govern unit behavior in SC2 are way more complex than in SC BW. Exactly because the UI tries to be more powerful. On top of that, the core game itself is also more complicated. Blizzard added 'macro mechanics' to make the game more 'difficult', which makes no sense and makes the game more difficult that it ought to be. There are more units and most units have a special ability. SC2 is way more complicated to play. I didn't say SC BW is easier to master. Obviously, that game has a much better skill curve for competitive play. But that doesn't matter to 99% of us playing.
We played SC BW for years and we thought it was an easy straightforward game. Yes, we were not very good and playing at 40 apm and barely beating the AI. But the game was easy to play. If we had a new friend joining our LAN we could explai n her the game in about 5 minutes and we would just be playing after that.
I’ve watched the video, agreed with many of the points within.
You seem to be conflating being intuitive with your own personal preferences. Macro mechanics are perfectly intuitive, x does y, use it as you see fit. A game can be incredibly complex but each of the individual elements within be intuitive by themselves, which is basically SC2.
Bad pathing and a bunch of engine exploits are not intuitive at all. Having to sit down and learn FFE layouts per map and spawn position is not especially intuitive.
Mario is as simple a game there is, but there’s a crazy amount of stuff people have figured out in the speed running community. It’s a very simple game to play casually, not intuitive at all to play competitively, which is Brood War in a nutshell.
Sticking in a latency cap isn’t a flaw in the engine at all, neither is a lot of the other stuff. They’re decisions made for various reasons, one can agree or disagree on those decisions but they’re not inherent engine flaws.
I fight the UI way more in BW or WC3 (which is probably my favourite game ever) than I do in SC2. In WC3 for example if I’m trying to go through a narrow space with a bunch of units, the pathing will predict the space being filled and send units around the passage to meet at the other side, which oft results in either losing the units that do, or having to box sections of my force and force them through in smaller groups.
I don’t really understand your posting motivation, it’s either saying we’re all plebs for finding a limited Alphastar on the ladder interesting or posting that SC2 is completely fucked in an SC2 balance thread.
Don't know what you mean. First of all, the SC2 engine is completely bugged. It doesn't allow the user to control the units. It would be a good engine for an RPG, not for an MOBA, and certainly not for an RTS. This was demonstrated by LaLush (and many other before him) in https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/433944-depth-of-micro The SC2 engine was engineered to be fundamentally unsuitable for an RTS game. Why did this happen? Because while the engineers did a hell of a job in putting in all these features that seem like a good idea to a non-RTS player, and it is a technical marvel that it all works, in the end the SC2 developers had zero affinity with RTS games.
Second, reavers and balance; the thing patched about reavers was that they used to shoot their scarabs instantly after being unloaded. This made reavers overpowered and broke the game.
You say SC BW is not balanced because reaver scarabs randomly deal no damage, and that this is a bug. First of all, if reavers dealt no damage it wouldn't unbalance the game. If reavers are too weak to use, protoss players simply build their other units. Yes, it will be one less thing to defend against. But that's about it. Now, if scarabs always did full damage all around it when it fails to find it's target, that would make reavers a lot stronger. An overpowered unit breaks balance. Not a weak unit. Scouts are weak units. Scouts don't break the balance of the game.
And lastly, it is factually incorrect that reavers randomly deal zero damage. They deal no damage if it cannot hit it's target. And this is not random. It is up to you if you can this a 'bug' or a 'feature'. To me, SC2 units responding as if they are moving through some very viscous fluid is a bug. To you it is a feature. SC2 units trying to occupy a single spot and them all swarming around that spot and rearranging themselves without receiving any others to do so to minimize their distance to that spot, to me that's a bug. To you it may be a feature.
But nothing about reavers make SC BW unbalanced, broken, or boring. SC2 on the other hand, these 'features make the game not enjoyable to play, because it feels like you are fighting the interface rather than playing the game, and the clumping of the units make positioning of units in battles something that only plays a role at the highest level of play. This in contrast to SC BW, which is much easier to play, and allows even low level players to control their units and get benefit from it.
Agree. SC2 is simply a bad game, why does it cost people to admit this? perhaps because they are players of the new generation accustomed to the shit that large companies produce and perhaps also because SC2 hasn't had competition since no other relevant RTS has been made in the last eight years.
Don't know what you mean. First of all, the SC2 engine is completely bugged. It doesn't allow the user to control the units. It would be a good engine for an RPG, not for an MOBA, and certainly not for an RTS. This was demonstrated by LaLush (and many other before him) in https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/433944-depth-of-micro The SC2 engine was engineered to be fundamentally unsuitable for an RTS game. Why did this happen? Because while the engineers did a hell of a job in putting in all these features that seem like a good idea to a non-RTS player, and it is a technical marvel that it all works, in the end the SC2 developers had zero affinity with RTS games.
Second, reavers and balance; the thing patched about reavers was that they used to shoot their scarabs instantly after being unloaded. This made reavers overpowered and broke the game.
You say SC BW is not balanced because reaver scarabs randomly deal no damage, and that this is a bug. First of all, if reavers dealt no damage it wouldn't unbalance the game. If reavers are too weak to use, protoss players simply build their other units. Yes, it will be one less thing to defend against. But that's about it. Now, if scarabs always did full damage all around it when it fails to find it's target, that would make reavers a lot stronger. An overpowered unit breaks balance. Not a weak unit. Scouts are weak units. Scouts don't break the balance of the game.
And lastly, it is factually incorrect that reavers randomly deal zero damage. They deal no damage if it cannot hit it's target. And this is not random. It is up to you if you can this a 'bug' or a 'feature'. To me, SC2 units responding as if they are moving through some very viscous fluid is a bug. To you it is a feature. SC2 units trying to occupy a single spot and them all swarming around that spot and rearranging themselves without receiving any others to do so to minimize their distance to that spot, to me that's a bug. To you it may be a feature.
But nothing about reavers make SC BW unbalanced, broken, or boring. SC2 on the other hand, these 'features make the game not enjoyable to play, because it feels like you are fighting the interface rather than playing the game, and the clumping of the units make positioning of units in battles something that only plays a role at the highest level of play. This in contrast to SC BW, which is much easier to play, and allows even low level players to control their units and get benefit from it.
Agree. SC2 is simply a bad game, why does it cost people to admit this? perhaps because they are players of the new generation accustomed to the shit that large companies produce and perhaps also because SC2 hasn't had competition since no other relevant RTS has been made in the last eight years.
Interesting forum to voice such an opinion, full of people invested in the game of SC2 and its future direction.
What does it cost to admit SC2 is a good game that’s not to your personal tastes?
Don't know what you mean. First of all, the SC2 engine is completely bugged. It doesn't allow the user to control the units. It would be a good engine for an RPG, not for an MOBA, and certainly not for an RTS. This was demonstrated by LaLush (and many other before him) in https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/433944-depth-of-micro The SC2 engine was engineered to be fundamentally unsuitable for an RTS game. Why did this happen? Because while the engineers did a hell of a job in putting in all these features that seem like a good idea to a non-RTS player, and it is a technical marvel that it all works, in the end the SC2 developers had zero affinity with RTS games.
Second, reavers and balance; the thing patched about reavers was that they used to shoot their scarabs instantly after being unloaded. This made reavers overpowered and broke the game.
You say SC BW is not balanced because reaver scarabs randomly deal no damage, and that this is a bug. First of all, if reavers dealt no damage it wouldn't unbalance the game. If reavers are too weak to use, protoss players simply build their other units. Yes, it will be one less thing to defend against. But that's about it. Now, if scarabs always did full damage all around it when it fails to find it's target, that would make reavers a lot stronger. An overpowered unit breaks balance. Not a weak unit. Scouts are weak units. Scouts don't break the balance of the game.
And lastly, it is factually incorrect that reavers randomly deal zero damage. They deal no damage if it cannot hit it's target. And this is not random. It is up to you if you can this a 'bug' or a 'feature'. To me, SC2 units responding as if they are moving through some very viscous fluid is a bug. To you it is a feature. SC2 units trying to occupy a single spot and them all swarming around that spot and rearranging themselves without receiving any others to do so to minimize their distance to that spot, to me that's a bug. To you it may be a feature.
But nothing about reavers make SC BW unbalanced, broken, or boring. SC2 on the other hand, these 'features make the game not enjoyable to play, because it feels like you are fighting the interface rather than playing the game, and the clumping of the units make positioning of units in battles something that only plays a role at the highest level of play. This in contrast to SC BW, which is much easier to play, and allows even low level players to control their units and get benefit from it.
Agree. SC2 is simply a bad game, why does it cost people to admit this? perhaps because they are players of the new generation accustomed to the shit that large companies produce and perhaps also because SC2 hasn't had competition since no other relevant RTS has been made in the last eight years.
WHy are you on SC2 forum then? Go to the BW section then... SC2 is way better game than BW, I played BW for hundreds of hours, it has its ups, it has its downs and I really don't want to go back there.
Edit> If you will insist on this debate, we can go into more evil things I can say about BW. It's not just this But you don't see me shitting on BW in the BW section. I generally doesn't want to do it even in the SC2 section as I still like the game, it's just not good by my standards.
On August 08 2019 08:44 deacon.frost wrote: WHy are you on SC2 forum then? Go to the BW section then... SC2 is way better game than BW, I played BW for hundreds of hours, it has its ups, it has its downs and I really don't want to go back there.
Edit> If you will insist on this debate, we can go into more evil things I can say about BW. It's not just this But you don't see me shitting on BW in the BW section. I generally doesn't want to do it even in the SC2 section as I still like the game, it's just not good by my standards.
Someone else started to randomly attack SC BW. All I see here is people hating on Blizzard for nerfing their race. It is fucking stupid. Blizzard has been buffing and nerfing your race for years now. Where does it lead?
Mario is as simple a game there is, but there’s a crazy amount of stuff people have figured out in the speed running community. It’s a very simple game to play casually, not intuitive at all to play competitively, which is Brood War in a nutshell.
Starcraft is a simple game to learn and a hard game to master. It is intuitive to play on a casual level, but yes on a competitive level all these new details emerge. SC2 is the opposite. It is a very complicated game to get into and learn. But once you have learned the basics, you just have to learn to do what you already know more flawlessly; it is hard to learn, easy to master.
Now, maybe this is my personal opinion and everyone where just prefers a game that is hard to learn, easy to master. But I don't and I remember a time when almost no one here did. I guess the fact that this has no changed, that people want a hard to learn game and that people are ok with the fact that their units have minds of their own and respond as if they are moving through go when you give them a command is exactly the selection enforced by SC2. People that post here generally still play. And if they didn't like what SC2 is, they wouldn't be playing or posting.
There is a solution to balancing the game. It is to stop changing unit stats and to balance through maps. There is a solution to too much A move attack. It is to limit the number of units you can select in a single control group. When Starcraft was released in 1996, all competitors had unlimited unit selection. Blizzard specifically put in a cap to solve the problem I now see several people describing august 2019.
On August 08 2019 08:44 deacon.frost wrote: WHy are you on SC2 forum then? Go to the BW section then... SC2 is way better game than BW, I played BW for hundreds of hours, it has its ups, it has its downs and I really don't want to go back there.
Edit> If you will insist on this debate, we can go into more evil things I can say about BW. It's not just this But you don't see me shitting on BW in the BW section. I generally doesn't want to do it even in the SC2 section as I still like the game, it's just not good by my standards.
Someone else started to randomly attack SC BW. All I see here is people hating on Blizzard for nerfing their race. It is fucking stupid. Blizzard has been buffing and nerfing your race for years now. Where does it lead?
Mario is as simple a game there is, but there’s a crazy amount of stuff people have figured out in the speed running community. It’s a very simple game to play casually, not intuitive at all to play competitively, which is Brood War in a nutshell.
Starcraft is a simple game to learn and a hard game to master. It is intuitive to play on a casual level, but yes on a competitive level all these new details emerge. SC2 is the opposite. It is a very complicated game to get into and learn. But once you have learned the basics, you just have to learn to do what you already know more flawlessly; it is hard to learn, easy to master.
Now, maybe this is my personal opinion and everyone where just prefers a game that is hard to learn, easy to master. But I don't and I remember a time when almost no one here did. I guess the fact that this has no changed, that people want a hard to learn game and that people are ok with the fact that their units have minds of their own and respond as if they are moving through go when you give them a command is exactly the selection enforced by SC2. People that post here generally still play. And if they didn't like what SC2 is, they wouldn't be playing or posting.
There is a solution to balancing the game. It is to stop changing unit stats and to balance through maps. There is a solution to too much A move attack. It is to limit the number of units you can select in a single control group. When Starcraft was released in 1996, all competitors had unlimited unit selection. Blizzard specifically put in a cap to solve the problem I now see several people describing august 2019.
How is it complicated to learn? You keep just reiterating this point, things generally do what they’re supposed to do, the information is there, much of it in game via the campaign through how they introduce units. Other stuff you can observe and figure out pretty easily from watching tournaments never mind streams.
VS BW which to nowadays play 1v1 ranked to any kind of standard there’s a ton of completely unintuitive elements that you have to grind and learn, because without them you’ll just get pumped.
Both are simple and fine to enjoy casually, as many of us did with BW back in the day.
Did Blizzard specifically put in that cap in 1996 for that reason? I’ve never heard anyone who worked on the game say that,or anything to the contrary either.
Considering nobody has yet mastered SC2 in nearly a decade I’d also query the second part of your ‘hard to learn easy to master’.
On August 08 2019 08:44 deacon.frost wrote: WHy are you on SC2 forum then? Go to the BW section then... SC2 is way better game than BW, I played BW for hundreds of hours, it has its ups, it has its downs and I really don't want to go back there.
Edit> If you will insist on this debate, we can go into more evil things I can say about BW. It's not just this But you don't see me shitting on BW in the BW section. I generally doesn't want to do it even in the SC2 section as I still like the game, it's just not good by my standards.
Someone else started to randomly attack SC BW. All I see here is people hating on Blizzard for nerfing their race. It is fucking stupid. Blizzard has been buffing and nerfing your race for years now. Where does it lead?
It leads to something better than utter Terran dominance and 4/5 bonjwas being a single race like we had in BW
It leads to something better than a game balanced by maps.
SC2, and the balance attempts by Blizzard, aren't perfect. Fact remains that it's still damn good (for us on a SC2 forum), and better than what BW was.
This whole discussion was started by someone comparing SC2 to BW.
I think I speak for vast majority of SC2 fans when I say it is preferred that Blizzard tries to actively balance the game rather than leave it alone like they did for BW. BW being perfectly balanced is a myth. While BW is legendary, it was never balanced and at times the unbalance was absurd. This is coming from someone whose favorite video game of all time is BW
The huge radius increase in EMP is not to be underestimated here. Will definitely make lategame TvP more doable. All in all, I'm a fan of the way this panned out.
I'd still rather not be locked in to going carriers as my only lategame option against zerg, but maybe someone will figure out an awesome ground game that I'm not seeing... It's just when Z gets broodlords, you really need tempests and I don't see any drawback to just getting carriers after that.
Stimpack upgrade research duration decreased from 121 seconds to 100 seconds New upgrade: Enhanced Shockwaves: Increases the radius of the Ghost’s EMP Round from 1.5 to 2. Cost: 150/150. Research time: 79 seconds. Nexus Strategic Recall cooldown increased from 85 to 130 seconds. Overlord/Overseer Pneumatized Carapace upgrade research cost decreased from 100/100 to 75/75 Warp Prism pick up range decreased from 6 to 5.
I'm behind these changes. The rest are a little superfluous.
On August 08 2019 13:11 ThunderJunk wrote: These changes seem good to me.
The huge radius increase in EMP is not to be underestimated here. Will definitely make lategame TvP more doable. All in all, I'm a fan of the way this panned out.
I'd still rather not be locked in to going carriers as my only lategame option against zerg, but maybe someone will figure out an awesome ground game that I'm not seeing... It's just when Z gets broodlords, you really need tempests and I don't see any drawback to just getting carriers after that.
i mean, you can just get the tempests and then do a timing attack with ground + tempest? what units do you want to counter lategame zerg with? storm/archons are already necessary to deal with mass corruptors, and immortals don't shoot up. do you want an upgrade that makes stalkers have 10 range? mass void ray was a thing in HOTS and it was way more boring and stupid than carrier play
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
Stop putting needless weight on the current korean blizzcon standing. Yes it proves protoss has out performed all other races in GSL, yes it is a worrisome statistic in regards to balance in GSL tournament format but that is all.
It doesn't mean blizzcon is "messed up", what do you even mean with that statement. In regars to having as many zergs or terrans as possible? A perfect race distribution from korea and wcs is not really important, the important thing is that the best players are there and its good if it has an overall even race distribution.
Since protoss has had PvT advantage and has the edge over zerg in GSL style prep tournaments this result is not weird and it is unlikely to translate into a protoss dominated blizzcon.
On August 07 2019 06:41 Shuffleblade wrote: Yes, zergs do have one massable powerful unit that creates free units at the cost of energy which can be used as a panic button if anything goes wrong. That is the exact reason they are toning infested terrans down, it is too powerful. I don't like the BCs as they are either and believe they are OP as well but at least they have counters. Infestors have 0 counters.
Yes, that is true for Master and GM, but when I'm forced to counter A-move army with micro intensive army, it should either have clear advantage or not be as difficult. I think that if casting making it so that casting Fungal also unburrows the Infestor that is casting it would help, while not messing pro play, as player with good micro can do this already with just his/her skill.
Zerg player complaining about A-move, and against Terran at that. Now I have seen everything.
Do you remember a time when Terran had to kills Zerg before Ultras? Or before GGLords? Before 15 mins? Or micro and split as a god against BLing muta Amove? I think I remember it, its been going on for the past 5 years at least lol.
Now after so long TvZ lategame is actually quite balanced and Zergs start complaining. Just learn to play against it. Its tough to learn to actually micro your units at first after so long of "spam larvae button and Amove", but with practice it should be possible
When Bio was 90% of what we saw in TvZ this was relevant - with battle-mech and BC mech taking over the meta - the days of one race clearly having a more difficult time microing are over - there's nothing more difficult about microing battle-mech and BC's than there is about even Protoss units lmao
Did you read the post? Yes, for the last 8 months terran hasn't actually been the most micro intensive race (still the most macro intensive race btw). That doesn't change that for remaining 90% of SC2 lifespan terran has been clearly the most micro intensive and there have never been any zergs around saying "Its too easy to micro muta/ling/bling vs terran whom have it so hard, please balance team make it fair and harder for us to micro" yet when a period dawns when zerg in one late game scenario experience the same discrepencies in micro intensity that terran has had for 90% of the games history in most phases of the game then its a problem.
Its hilarious.
Yeah I read the post - And I agree with the fact that Terran has been the hardest race to micro since sc2 inception - up until the post 2018 blizzcon patch. Being the most difficult race to micro has an implied trade-off with being the race with the highest skill cap - and I'm fine with this existing in sc2. The part of the post that I think is ridiculous is that he states right in the post that we are at quite a balanced lategame meta and yet thinks there is no problem with nerfing one sides counter unit dps by 50% lmao - What I'm saying is that now that Terran is more like Protoss and Zerg we can't use the same trade-off logic we previously did - if it took maru level bio mechanics to execute the BC or Battle-Mech styles we see today then it's probably OK to nerf the other side of a "quite balanced" late game meta - but in the current state it's absolutely not - it's completely illogical.
On August 09 2019 01:25 DomeGetta wrote: And I agree with the fact that Terran has been the hardest race to micro since sc2 inception - up until the post 2018 blizzcon patch. Being the most difficult race to micro has an implied trade-off with being the race with the highest skill cap - and I'm fine with this existing in sc2. The part of the post that I think is ridiculous is that he states right in the post that we are at quite a balanced lategame meta and yet thinks there is no problem with nerfing one sides counter unit dps by 50% lmao - What I'm saying is that now that Terran is more like Protoss and Zerg we can't use the same trade-off logic we previously did - if it took maru level bio mechanics to execute the BC or Battle-Mech styles we see today then it's probably OK to nerf the other side of a "quite balanced" late game meta - but in the current state it's absolutely not - it's completely illogical.
I've just accepted the fact that my league ranking as a Terran player will be a little bit lower than it should be. its not that big of a deal... its not like the game is my full time job.
The top level of the game must be very well balanced. At my level of play ( Tier 1 Diamond ) the game only needs to be somewhat balanced. IMO, really cool and interesting diversity amongst all 3 races is much more important than perfect balance amongst players who are below GM level.
The overwhelming vast majority of 3+ race, diverse race RTS games are no where near as well balanced as SC2.
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
Stop putting needless weight on the current korean blizzcon standing. Yes it proves protoss has out performed all other races in GSL, yes it is a worrisome statistic in regards to balance in GSL tournament format but that is all.
It doesn't mean blizzcon is "messed up", what do you even mean with that statement. In regars to having as many zergs or terrans as possible? A perfect race distribution from korea and wcs is not really important, the important thing is that the best players are there and its good if it has an overall even race distribution.
Since protoss has had PvT advantage and has the edge over zerg in GSL style prep tournaments this result is not weird and it is unlikely to translate into a protoss dominated blizzcon.
I think you sort of agreed with him here while trying to disagree.
Yes - the important thing is that the best players are there -
Typically we don't see 62 percent of the best players from the same race - it's a leading indicator that there may be or have been a balance problem. Kr is the top performing region in the world for this game - so the top performing players racial distribution is actually a really good place to gather intell from on this subject.
What is that overlord/overseer change... the biggest problem with zerg was already that they're able to scout everything way too easily. The terran changes look nice, and protoss reasonable too. Can't believe people aren't being grateful for the increased recall cooldown.
On August 07 2019 06:41 Shuffleblade wrote: Yes, zergs do have one massable powerful unit that creates free units at the cost of energy which can be used as a panic button if anything goes wrong. That is the exact reason they are toning infested terrans down, it is too powerful. I don't like the BCs as they are either and believe they are OP as well but at least they have counters. Infestors have 0 counters.
Yes, that is true for Master and GM, but when I'm forced to counter A-move army with micro intensive army, it should either have clear advantage or not be as difficult. I think that if casting making it so that casting Fungal also unburrows the Infestor that is casting it would help, while not messing pro play, as player with good micro can do this already with just his/her skill.
Zerg player complaining about A-move, and against Terran at that. Now I have seen everything.
Do you remember a time when Terran had to kills Zerg before Ultras? Or before GGLords? Before 15 mins? Or micro and split as a god against BLing muta Amove? I think I remember it, its been going on for the past 5 years at least lol.
Now after so long TvZ lategame is actually quite balanced and Zergs start complaining. Just learn to play against it. Its tough to learn to actually micro your units at first after so long of "spam larvae button and Amove", but with practice it should be possible
When Bio was 90% of what we saw in TvZ this was relevant - with battle-mech and BC mech taking over the meta - the days of one race clearly having a more difficult time microing are over - there's nothing more difficult about microing battle-mech and BC's than there is about even Protoss units lmao
Did you read the post? Yes, for the last 8 months terran hasn't actually been the most micro intensive race (still the most macro intensive race btw). That doesn't change that for remaining 90% of SC2 lifespan terran has been clearly the most micro intensive and there have never been any zergs around saying "Its too easy to micro muta/ling/bling vs terran whom have it so hard, please balance team make it fair and harder for us to micro" yet when a period dawns when zerg in one late game scenario experience the same discrepencies in micro intensity that terran has had for 90% of the games history in most phases of the game then its a problem.
Its hilarious.
Yeah I read the post - And I agree with the fact that Terran has been the hardest race to micro since sc2 inception - up until the post 2018 blizzcon patch. Being the most difficult race to micro has an implied trade-off with being the race with the highest skill cap - and I'm fine with this existing in sc2. The part of the post that I think is ridiculous is that he states right in the post that we are at quite a balanced lategame meta and yet thinks there is no problem with nerfing one sides counter unit dps by 50% lmao - What I'm saying is that now that Terran is more like Protoss and Zerg we can't use the same trade-off logic we previously did - if it took maru level bio mechanics to execute the BC or Battle-Mech styles we see today then it's probably OK to nerf the other side of a "quite balanced" late game meta - but in the current state it's absolutely not - it's completely illogical.
I get your point but its not only about "balanced meta" or not, there is also the question of fun playing the game, healthiness for the game and overall power of a strategy. A matchup can be balanced but when one side is relying heavily on one strat that is too poweful, not fun to play against/with or not good for the game a nerf might be needed anyway.
If mass infestors is the only way for zerg to stay relevant and keep 50ish winrate vs late game terran then you are right but we don't know if that is true, I don't believe that to be true. Infestors is the current strategy and because it is very powerful no one is using other strategies, it is too powerful. Personally I prefer when one race is favored late game because that usually means more intense and hectic early/mid game fights and less lategame snoozefests that aren't fun to watch. Even if terrans lategame becomes slightly favored after this that doesn't mean the matchup isn't balanced, the "don't let them get there" is an old classic it has just never been said before about terran.
Edit. I consider current infestors as bad for the game has hots SH, it slows the game down and makes it boring and the units are very poweful. Nerf them, its better for everyone, players and spectators.
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
It doesn't prove anything, but it certainly suggests it. I don't think anyone truly puts herO, PartinG, or Hurricane over TY or INno in terms of skill.
On August 07 2019 06:41 Shuffleblade wrote: Yes, zergs do have one massable powerful unit that creates free units at the cost of energy which can be used as a panic button if anything goes wrong. That is the exact reason they are toning infested terrans down, it is too powerful. I don't like the BCs as they are either and believe they are OP as well but at least they have counters. Infestors have 0 counters.
Yes, that is true for Master and GM, but when I'm forced to counter A-move army with micro intensive army, it should either have clear advantage or not be as difficult. I think that if casting making it so that casting Fungal also unburrows the Infestor that is casting it would help, while not messing pro play, as player with good micro can do this already with just his/her skill.
Zerg player complaining about A-move, and against Terran at that. Now I have seen everything.
Do you remember a time when Terran had to kills Zerg before Ultras? Or before GGLords? Before 15 mins? Or micro and split as a god against BLing muta Amove? I think I remember it, its been going on for the past 5 years at least lol.
Now after so long TvZ lategame is actually quite balanced and Zergs start complaining. Just learn to play against it. Its tough to learn to actually micro your units at first after so long of "spam larvae button and Amove", but with practice it should be possible
When Bio was 90% of what we saw in TvZ this was relevant - with battle-mech and BC mech taking over the meta - the days of one race clearly having a more difficult time microing are over - there's nothing more difficult about microing battle-mech and BC's than there is about even Protoss units lmao
Did you read the post? Yes, for the last 8 months terran hasn't actually been the most micro intensive race (still the most macro intensive race btw). That doesn't change that for remaining 90% of SC2 lifespan terran has been clearly the most micro intensive and there have never been any zergs around saying "Its too easy to micro muta/ling/bling vs terran whom have it so hard, please balance team make it fair and harder for us to micro" yet when a period dawns when zerg in one late game scenario experience the same discrepencies in micro intensity that terran has had for 90% of the games history in most phases of the game then its a problem.
Its hilarious.
Yeah I read the post - And I agree with the fact that Terran has been the hardest race to micro since sc2 inception - up until the post 2018 blizzcon patch. Being the most difficult race to micro has an implied trade-off with being the race with the highest skill cap - and I'm fine with this existing in sc2. The part of the post that I think is ridiculous is that he states right in the post that we are at quite a balanced lategame meta and yet thinks there is no problem with nerfing one sides counter unit dps by 50% lmao - What I'm saying is that now that Terran is more like Protoss and Zerg we can't use the same trade-off logic we previously did - if it took maru level bio mechanics to execute the BC or Battle-Mech styles we see today then it's probably OK to nerf the other side of a "quite balanced" late game meta - but in the current state it's absolutely not - it's completely illogical.
If mass infestors is the only way for zerg to stay relevant and keep 50ish winrate vs late game terran then you are right but we don't know if that is true, I don't believe that to be true.
Thing is its not even like mass infestor is keeping them at a 50% winrate. I'd love to have stats of race win rates specifically in lategame, but I would wager on z being up much more than that.
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
While it doesn't prove anything your metaphor is flat out wrong.
First thing it insinuates sc2 result is 100% based on luck, you roll a die and you see how it goes.
Using the exact same argument I could say that there is a chance a player rolls the same number 10 times in a row, Serral winning multiple championships doesn't prove its because he is good. Flukes happen and sometimes multiple times, you can use this argument in any context. Like the science says, sure you've done the experiment a million times but are you sure that if you tried once more you wouldn't get a different result? No science is never sure, its almost always only very very likely.
Lastly your metaphor is based on the assumption the wcs standings are based on one result, one roll of a die. It is not, it is based on 2 currently and in the end 3 different tournaments. A "fluke" is not enough to get into top 8, you need multiple flukes in a row, interesting that all players from the same race happen to make these incredibly unlikely flukes in a row. Maybe their dice are different than the other players huh
If you run a game for 10 years with plenty of tournaments, and the odds of a player in the tournament being protoss is 1 in 3, because the game is perfectly balanced, then the odds of having 5 out of 8 players being protoss isn't that low.
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
Stop putting needless weight on the current korean blizzcon standing. Yes it proves protoss has out performed all other races in GSL, yes it is a worrisome statistic in regards to balance in GSL tournament format but that is all.
It doesn't mean blizzcon is "messed up", what do you even mean with that statement. In regars to having as many zergs or terrans as possible? A perfect race distribution from korea and wcs is not really important, the important thing is that the best players are there and its good if it has an overall even race distribution.
Since protoss has had PvT advantage and has the edge over zerg in GSL style prep tournaments this result is not weird and it is unlikely to translate into a protoss dominated blizzcon.
I think you sort of agreed with him here while trying to disagree.
Yes - the important thing is that the best players are there -
Typically we don't see 62 percent of the best players from the same race - it's a leading indicator that there may be or have been a balance problem. Kr is the top performing region in the world for this game - so the top performing players racial distribution is actually a really good place to gather intell from on this subject.
It’s certainly a good starting point for sure. With other factors of play.
Between military service, a small player pool, the destruction of the team house system and a lack of new players coming through, it’s super benefitted Protoss.
Protoss haven’t lost a real solid player since Rain to military service, almost all of the historically best players of Protoss are still active.
Terrans have lost what ByuN, Taeja, Flash, Dream and others in the last few years. Zerg lost a certain unnamed fellow amongst other.
All these losses are manageable if there’s a pipeline of new talent to come and replace them, but post Kespa breakup this just hasn’t happened.
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
It doesn't prove anything, but it certainly suggests it. I don't think anyone truly puts herO, PartinG, or Hurricane over TY or INno in terms of skill.
You don't get WCS points because you are more skilled; also, why do you underrate herO so much?
Why are we still speaking of that? Protoss in GSL effieciently capitalized in the two months when they were ahead of the meta. And I will keep repeating that we have had four Protoss qualifying to BlizzCon from GSL in 2016 and 2018 already.
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
My bad. I should've been more clear. I meant game quality not race balance. Pro-gamers will be amidst a new meta half way through a tournament.
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
It doesn't prove anything, but it certainly suggests it. I don't think anyone truly puts herO, PartinG, or Hurricane over TY or INno in terms of skill.
I don’t know why you wouldn’t, herO and Parting have won way more than TY in SC2
It’s really not the fault of Protoss players that Inno and TY have massively underperformed this year, although TY seems to be on an upward curve
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
Yeah, but if you keep rolling for 6 months you won't get heavy domination of smoe numbers like we've seen with Protoss, do you?
On August 09 2019 16:06 deacon.frost wrote: Yeah, but if you keep rolling for 6 months you won't get heavy domination of smoe numbers like we've seen with Protoss, do you?
Besides the part that sort of protoss domination only exists in your imagination. Yeah, maybe they overperformed a bit in ONE (the last) GSL season and one or two Super tournaments. So what? That would be 3 out of 15+ tournaments in that timeframe.
As you can see very nicely in the posting of NinjaNight for all bigger tournaments in 2019. And this is 2019, so you also can't say the strength of Zerg is only because of Serral, who for sure was completely dominating in 2018. Of course he is still strong, but not longer completely dominating.
On August 09 2019 16:06 deacon.frost wrote: Yeah, but if you keep rolling for 6 months you won't get heavy domination of smoe numbers like we've seen with Protoss, do you?
Besides the part that sort of protoss domination only exists in your imagination. Yeah, maybe they overperformed a bit in ONE (the last) GSL season and one or two Super tournaments. So what? That would be 3 out of 15+ tournaments in that timeframe.
As you can see very nicely in the posting of NinjaNight for all bigger tournaments in 2019. And this is 2019, so you also can't say the strength of Zerg is only because of Serral, who for sure was completely dominating in 2018. Of course he is still strong, but not longer completely dominating.
That's the issue when you split regions, we got the domination IN THE KOREA. Similarly Zergs are screwed only IN THE KOREA. Similarly Terran success is only IN THE KOREA. Then we need to talk if we want to balance around the top(Korea) or what to do, because if we take only the Korea, then you have heavy P favorism. At the same time if you take away from the overall results Korea than you have heavy T issues at WCS...
That's what many are saying, you can't look nowadays at the World as a whole because the two regions have different balance issues.
Edit let's have some fun, shall we? (P/T/Z) 6/1/5 IEM 6/6/4 S1 8/4/4 S2 9/2/5 ST(7/1/0 for the first time in the history of Starcraft, not just SC2, this overcame even the BL infestor era) 6/6/4 S3
But hey, this is fine, nothing wrong, we obviously don't have more than 4 good Zergs because that's how many of them can get into RO16(RO12 of IEM + Serral). For years Zergs are the least represented race in Korean tournaments but it's all fine and dandy because Serral dominates players who are a league bellow his skill and thus overall numbers are fine. (and that's just 2k19 numbers in Korean tourneys)
Edit2> 2018 6/5/5 S3 (uh, one more Zerg! oh the joy) 7/5/4 S2 7/5/4 S1 5/2/5 IEM Katowice(such high Terran representation) 5/5/6 ST2(into 4/2/2) 6/5/5 ST1(which resulted in quite balanced RO8, I'm shocked)
So we had a half year of 2k19 of Protoss dominance in Korea(while Dark won the Code S but overall we had Protoss dominance) but because it's not happening at WCS it's fine? Seriously? And in the long term Zergs in Korea are under represented but nobody cares, because Serral is winning, them Koreans bad. (similar case can be said against Terran and Maru)
Edit3> based on this numbers we can say - if you're a Terran, don't go to Katowice, it's not very friendly to Terrans, go WESG instead(didn't add it as the qualis are more saying than the tourney itself). If you want to be a good player in Korea, don't play Zerg, there are only 4 spots in Code S Ro16
I mean, if there are just more very good protoss players in the KR region then zerg (and also Terran i think) players ... or more very good zerg players in EU then protoss or terran ... isn't it "normal" and balanced then, when you also have more of them in RO8?
Looking at KR for example ... Zerg ... you have Dark, soo, Rogue ... maybe Solar ... who are are good enough to can make it to Ro4 or even winning. Terran ... Maru, Inno, TY, Gumiho ... maybe Fantasy, Cure ... a bit more at least And Protoss ... Stats, Zest, Classic, Trap, Dear, hero, sOs ... maybe Patience and Parting ... there are just more good players of them.
But Top Players of each race can make it very far or of course win ... like Dark in Season 2 GSL. So i don't see Zerg screwed in Korea ...
Same in WCS ... can you say Zerg is overpowered, just because there are just more good players of them?
Plus the point players have their good times and their bad times. Look at Rogue ... not long ago he was clearly No. 1 within KR zergs ... but not much of him has been seen in the last months. But other Zerg Players like Dark and soo had huge successes ... so you for sure can't say "Rogue is bad because Zerg is bad now"
On August 09 2019 07:40 JimmyJRaynor wrote: When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
Wrong. If you role a 6 sided die 200 times and it hits 1 or 2 on 167 occasions, you have a broken die.
Blizzcon standings are over the tournament from the entire year. Your suggestion that if there is over performance of Protoss in one tournament is true. But since the Blizzcon standings are for the performance for the entire year, there is something wrong with the balance.
Want me to simplify this for you? Protoss has been over performing the entire year for Korea professional players and the Blizzcon standings support this assertion.
On August 09 2019 07:40 JimmyJRaynor wrote: When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
Wrong. If you role a 6 sided die 200 times and it hits 1 or 2 on 167 occasions, you have a broken die.
Blizzcon standings are over the tournament from the entire year. Your suggestion that if there is over performance of Protoss in one tournament is true. But since the Blizzcon standings are for the performance for the entire year, there is something wrong with the balance.
Want me to simplify this for you? Protoss has been over performing the entire year for Korea professional players and the Blizzcon standings support this assertion.
Protoss have been overperforming for two months and the current WCS standings support this assertion.
On August 09 2019 07:40 JimmyJRaynor wrote: When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
Wrong. If you role a 6 sided die 200 times and it hits 1 or 2 on 167 occasions, you have a broken die.
Blizzcon standings are over the tournament from the entire year. Your suggestion that if there is over performance of Protoss in one tournament is true. But since the Blizzcon standings are for the performance for the entire year, there is something wrong with the balance.
Want me to simplify this for you? Protoss has been over performing the entire year for Korea professional players and the Blizzcon standings support this assertion.
Protoss have been overperforming for two months and the current WCS standings support this assertion.
2 months is a big exaggeration. It was ridiculous for 2 months to the point that even Toss players agreed. It has remained present for the entire year. Looking at it from the perspective of "who won" only you could say Protoss hasnt overperformed at all. But as we know "who won" is only 1 factor amongst many to consider..but we will always have players of X race holding onto whatever supports their arguement etc.
On August 09 2019 07:40 JimmyJRaynor wrote: When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
Wrong. If you role a 6 sided die 200 times and it hits 1 or 2 on 167 occasions, you have a broken die.
Blizzcon standings are over the tournament from the entire year. Your suggestion that if there is over performance of Protoss in one tournament is true. But since the Blizzcon standings are for the performance for the entire year, there is something wrong with the balance.
Want me to simplify this for you? Protoss has been over performing the entire year for Korea professional players and the Blizzcon standings support this assertion.
Protoss have been overperforming for two months and the current WCS standings support this assertion.
2 months is a big exaggeration. It was ridiculous for 2 months to the point that even Toss players agreed. It has remained present for the entire year. Looking at it from the perspective of "who won" only you could say Protoss hasnt overperformed at all. But as we know "who won" is only 1 factor amongst many to consider..but we will always have players of X race holding onto whatever supports their arguement etc.
Protoss didn't overperform in WCS(the whole season), at IEM Katowice(Terran underperformed) and at WESG(no korean Protoss was there); they didn't overperform at HSC XIX and ASUS Rog. In GSL, Protoss didn't overperform in Code S S1 and are not overperforming in the current season; they did, however, overperform at Super Tournament I(which they won like they have always been doing in the last edition, but their overrepresentation was notable) and in Code S S2 before the finals(since a Zerg won it). From mid April to mid June, I count two months.
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
While it doesn't prove anything your metaphor is flat out wrong.
you missed the point. the dice is balanced and should result in 1-2 33% of the time meaning we should get 8/3 rolls that are 1-2. If the game is perfectly balanced we should get Protoss representation 33% of the time. Therefore if the game is balanced we should have 8/3 Protoss players. However, if you roll the dice in reality you'll have plenty of times when its 1-2 5 out of 8 times.
Therefore, the single fact presented by the person whose post i replied... doesn't prove the game is IMBA at the top level.
Now, if you add new facts that changes things. The only fact presented by the poster proves nothing. A deeper analysis is required.
On August 09 2019 07:40 JimmyJRaynor wrote: When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
Wrong. If you role a 6 sided die 200 times and it hits 1 or 2 on 167 occasions, you have a broken die.
Blizzcon standings are over the tournament from the entire year. Your suggestion that if there is over performance of Protoss in one tournament is true. But since the Blizzcon standings are for the performance for the entire year, there is something wrong with the balance.
Want me to simplify this for you? Protoss has been over performing the entire year for Korea professional players and the Blizzcon standings support this assertion.
Protoss have been overperforming for two months and the current WCS standings support this assertion.
2 months is a big exaggeration. It was ridiculous for 2 months to the point that even Toss players agreed. It has remained present for the entire year. Looking at it from the perspective of "who won" only you could say Protoss hasnt overperformed at all. But as we know "who won" is only 1 factor amongst many to consider..but we will always have players of X race holding onto whatever supports their arguement etc.
Protoss didn't overperform in WCS(the whole season), at IEM Katowice(Terran underperformed) and at WESG(no korean Protoss was there); they didn't overperform at HSC XIX and ASUS Rog. In GSL, Protoss didn't overperform in Code S S1 and are not overperforming in the current season; they did, however, overperform at Super Tournament I(which they won like they have always been doing in the last edition, but their overrepresentation was notable) and in Code S S2 before the finals(since a Zerg won it). From mid April to mid June, I count two months.
Yo my friend!
So protoss did not overperform code S season 2 since a zerg won it and they didn't overperform in Asus rog which they won because... you don't think they did?
Just to be clear, you understand the fact that protoss is OP in korea but not in WCS right? So lets take a look at how our protoss guests from korea did at Asus rog compared to other races, specifically to the korean zergs and terrans.
Stats, herO, Zest and Dear goes on a rampage, the only series losses in PvT or PvZ are innovation taking herO in second groupstage (herO gets revenge in the rubber match) and Zest losing 0-2 to Serral in group 2 and later on 0-3 to Solar. Besides Inno going 2-2 with herO and Zest being weak in PvZ the korean protoss seemed unstoppable. You know what happened? Stats vs herO and Zest vs Dear in RO8. Therefore PvP knocked out the korean protosses, Stats won the tournament Zest is Zest (in PvZ) and both herO and Dear got knocked out by their fellow korean protoss.
Imagine the RO8 would have been Dear vs Time, Stats vs Serral, Zest vs Gumiho and herO vs Solar. We could have had 4 protoss in RO4, because of the draw that didn't happen. Does that mean since the draw made the protoss champions knock each other out protoss isn't OP? Because luck is not on their side? lol
Every single korean protoss reach RO8 until they met eachother, how about the other races? Bomber, out in first groupstage didn't win a map (against showtime and Bly). Armani, out in first groupstage against Ptitdrogo and Snute. Taeja, Out in first groupstage defeated by Heromarine twice. soO out in second groupstage against Solar and herO. Innovation out in second groupstage against Solar and herO. Ragnarok, out in second groupstage defeated by Showtime and Time.
What did Asus rog show us, that the only korean protoss out of 4 to get knocked out by a foreigner or a zerg or terran was Zest vs Solar. Sure the best of the best from korean in other races wasn't there but we did have Gumiho, Innovation, soO and Solar (that did really well).
Asus rog show the same indications, korean protoss op.
On August 09 2019 07:40 JimmyJRaynor wrote: When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
Wrong. If you role a 6 sided die 200 times and it hits 1 or 2 on 167 occasions, you have a broken die.
Blizzcon standings are over the tournament from the entire year. Your suggestion that if there is over performance of Protoss in one tournament is true. But since the Blizzcon standings are for the performance for the entire year, there is something wrong with the balance.
Want me to simplify this for you? Protoss has been over performing the entire year for Korea professional players and the Blizzcon standings support this assertion.
Protoss have been overperforming for two months and the current WCS standings support this assertion.
2 months is a big exaggeration. It was ridiculous for 2 months to the point that even Toss players agreed. It has remained present for the entire year. Looking at it from the perspective of "who won" only you could say Protoss hasnt overperformed at all. But as we know "who won" is only 1 factor amongst many to consider..but we will always have players of X race holding onto whatever supports their arguement etc.
Protoss didn't overperform in WCS(the whole season), at IEM Katowice(Terran underperformed) and at WESG(no korean Protoss was there); they didn't overperform at HSC XIX and ASUS Rog. In GSL, Protoss didn't overperform in Code S S1 and are not overperforming in the current season; they did, however, overperform at Super Tournament I(which they won like they have always been doing in the last edition, but their overrepresentation was notable) and in Code S S2 before the finals(since a Zerg won it). From mid April to mid June, I count two months.
Yo my friend!
So protoss did not overperform code S season 2 since a zerg won it and they didn't overperform in Asus rog which they won because... you don't think they did?
Just to be clear, you understand the fact that protoss is OP in korea but not in WCS right? So lets take a look at how our protoss guests from korea did at Asus rog compared to other races, specifically to the korean zergs and terrans.
Stats, herO, Zest and Dear goes on a rampage, the only series losses in PvT or PvZ are innovation taking herO in second groupstage (herO gets revenge in the rubber match) and Zest losing 0-2 to Serral in group 2 and later on 0-3 to Solar. Besides Inno going 2-2 with herO and Zest being weak in PvZ the korean protoss seemed unstoppable. You know what happened? Stats vs herO and Zest vs Dear in RO8. Therefore PvP knocked out the korean protosses, Stats won the tournament Zest is Zest (in PvZ) and both herO and Dear got knocked out by their fellow korean protoss.
Imagine the RO8 would have been Dear vs Time, Stats vs Serral, Zest vs Gumiho and herO vs Solar. We could have had 4 protoss in RO4, because of the draw that didn't happen. Does that mean since the draw made the protoss champions knock each other out protoss isn't OP? Because luck is not on their side? lol
Every single korean protoss reach RO8 until they met eachother, how about the other races? Bomber, out in first groupstage didn't win a map (against showtime and Bly). Armani, out in first groupstage against Ptitdrogo and Snute. Taeja, Out in first groupstage defeated by Heromarine twice. soO out in second groupstage against Solar and herO. Innovation out in second groupstage against Solar and herO. Ragnarok, out in second groupstage defeated by Showtime and Time.
What did Asus rog show us, that the only korean protoss out of 4 to get knocked out by a foreigner or a zerg or terran was Zest vs Solar. Sure the best of the best from korean in other races wasn't there but we did have Gumiho, Innovation, soO and Solar (that did really well).
Asus rog show the same indications, korean protoss op.
Read better, I wrote that Protoss overperformed in Code S S2. And it's not like Protoss are op in GSL, there are simply more top Protoss player left than other races; when Patience and Hurricane look like Championship contender then get back to their usual performance(like they did earlier this year), we can agree that Protoss were doing better than usual; since the regression happened without any balance patch being released, it's likely they were just ahead of the meta and not effectively overpowered.
As for ASUS Rog, look at the lineup and tell me that Protoss weren't expected to do well; they were fewer in number but higher in average quality; we were also one game from having a ZvZ final.
On August 08 2019 16:28 NExt wrote: Is this going to mess up GSL Ro16?
Blizzcon is already messed up. 5 out of 8 players for Korea at Blizzcon are Protoss so far. This could be one of the worst Blizzcons ever, in terms of race representation for Korea.
When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
It doesn't prove anything, but it certainly suggests it. I don't think anyone truly puts herO, PartinG, or Hurricane over TY or INno in terms of skill.
I don’t know why you wouldn’t, herO and Parting have won way more than TY in SC2
It’s really not the fault of Protoss players that Inno and TY have massively underperformed this year, although TY seems to be on an upward curve
As of the last year or two? They certainly haven't looked better than TY. Not in the slightest except if you include herOs peak at the end of 2017.
Its not the fault of protoss players or course, just funny how a bunch of then miraculously got better after a series of patches while every terran got worse.
People really need to stop using tournament wins by race to justify their views on balance. Not only is it a terribly small dataset, you would also have to factor in individuals.
Like if you looked at GSL wins per race since 2017 it would look like: Terran: 6 Zerg: 1 Protoss: 1
But if you looked at GSL winners by race in the last 2 years it would look like: Terran: 3 Zerg: 1 Protoss: 1
It's still not even, but with only a pool of 5 players, it's hardly definitive evidence for balance.
On August 10 2019 00:33 Brutaxilos wrote: People really need to stop using tournament wins by race to justify their views on balance. Not only is it a terribly small dataset, you would also have to factor in individuals.
Like if you looked at GSL wins per race since 2017 it would look like: Terran: 6 Zerg: 1 Protoss: 1
But if you looked at GSL winners by race in the last 2 years it would look like: Terran: 3 Zerg: 1 Protoss: 1
It's still not even, but with only a pool of 5 players, it's hardly definitive evidence for balance.
Non sequitur. You're only looking at a single, very unique tournament which makes no sense. It only makes sense to look at all premier tournaments for the year.
On August 09 2019 07:40 JimmyJRaynor wrote: When you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times... sometimes it hits on 1 or 2 on 5 occasions. 5 out of 8 players being Protoss doesn't prove the game favours Protoss at the top level of play.
Wrong. If you role a 6 sided die 200 times and it hits 1 or 2 on 167 occasions, you have a broken die.
Blizzcon standings are over the tournament from the entire year. Your suggestion that if there is over performance of Protoss in one tournament is true. But since the Blizzcon standings are for the performance for the entire year, there is something wrong with the balance.
Want me to simplify this for you? Protoss has been over performing the entire year for Korea professional players and the Blizzcon standings support this assertion.
Assuming perfect balance there is a 50% odds that protoss wins over any other race. Therefore, the chance of a player being protoss is 1 in 3 as the strength of a race plays no role and it is just a matter of how many races there are.
So the probability of success is 1/3 and you have 8 tries as we are talking about the top 8. And we need 5 successes/protosses. So there chance to get this outcome [b]in one tournament[/n] has a probability of 0.09.
But you are specifically selecting a tournament with an extreme number of protosses. The real question is that given all of SC2 tournament history, how many times can you expect to have 5 out of 8 protosses, assuming perfect balance.
So now you get a new problem, where the probability is 0.09 and you need only 1 success (this specific tournament) out of X number of trials, where the trials are all tournaments that are significant. So let's take 20 tournaments.
And then the odds that we get at least one tournament with more than 5 out of 8 protoss players when we have 20 significant tournaments is 0.84.
That said, all of this thinking is flawed because if you have one really dominant player, that will break all the statistics. If the best player in the game happens to be protoss and that person is winning because he is the best and just happens to play protoss, protoss is going to win more often even though the game is perfectly balanced.
And the same is true with trends. If the best player in your game is protoss, more players will play protoss. And more of the top players will be protoss. If everyone played protoss, balance doesn't matter because the odds of having more than 5 out of the top 8 being protoss is always 100%.
And thirdly, there is a correlation between what skills a player excels at, what skills certain races require, and what skills make you win games at the highest level. So if a certain race has to play through mindgames and tricks, and at the top level games are decided through mind games and tricks, then you will have more strong players of that race.
SC BW is balanced, and almost all the top players ever are terran. Why? Because terran is the hardest to play and so the most talented players in SC BW history picked that race for that reason. We have no reason to reject the idea that if Oov had picked Zerg, he would have been even more dominant. Or that if Flash had picked protoss, etc.
On August 10 2019 00:33 Brutaxilos wrote: People really need to stop using tournament wins by race to justify their views on balance. Not only is it a terribly small dataset, you would also have to factor in individuals.
Like if you looked at GSL wins per race since 2017 it would look like: Terran: 6 Zerg: 1 Protoss: 1
But if you looked at GSL winners by race in the last 2 years it would look like: Terran: 3 Zerg: 1 Protoss: 1
It's still not even, but with only a pool of 5 players, it's hardly definitive evidence for balance.
Non sequitur. You're only looking at a single, very unique tournament which makes no sense. It only makes sense to look at all premier tournaments for the year.
On August 10 2019 00:33 Brutaxilos wrote: People really need to stop using tournament wins by race to justify their views on balance. Not only is it a terribly small dataset, you would also have to factor in individuals.
Like if you looked at GSL wins per race since 2017 it would look like: Terran: 6 Zerg: 1 Protoss: 1
But if you looked at GSL winners by race in the last 2 years it would look like: Terran: 3 Zerg: 1 Protoss: 1
It's still not even, but with only a pool of 5 players, it's hardly definitive evidence for balance.
Non sequitur. You're only looking at a single, very unique tournament which makes no sense. It only makes sense to look at all premier tournaments for the year.
Balance exploits are seen at the highest level of play. Leaving WCS out of that metric is perfectly logical. Its not the highest level of play..never has been and contrary to all the hype still is absolutely not. You are seeing 2 to 3 zerg players at the highest level of play and 1 toss / terran making that list of would be code S contenders. Those players will always heavily skew the results. Kr is the only region where the majority of the field is a potential contender to beat on a good day the rest of the field. Protoss has been over represented in every Kr tournament since the post 18 blizzcon patch and the WCS points reflect that. Im NOT talking about who won the tournament. Im talking about the % of players advancing in each round.
Asserting that protoss just has the most top players left still playing is completely ridiculous. They were still playing on previous patches and they just magically became top players again post 18 blizzcon...riiight.
On August 07 2019 06:41 Shuffleblade wrote: Yes, zergs do have one massable powerful unit that creates free units at the cost of energy which can be used as a panic button if anything goes wrong. That is the exact reason they are toning infested terrans down, it is too powerful. I don't like the BCs as they are either and believe they are OP as well but at least they have counters. Infestors have 0 counters.
Yes, that is true for Master and GM, but when I'm forced to counter A-move army with micro intensive army, it should either have clear advantage or not be as difficult. I think that if casting making it so that casting Fungal also unburrows the Infestor that is casting it would help, while not messing pro play, as player with good micro can do this already with just his/her skill.
Zerg player complaining about A-move, and against Terran at that. Now I have seen everything.
Do you remember a time when Terran had to kills Zerg before Ultras? Or before GGLords? Before 15 mins? Or micro and split as a god against BLing muta Amove? I think I remember it, its been going on for the past 5 years at least lol.
Now after so long TvZ lategame is actually quite balanced and Zergs start complaining. Just learn to play against it. Its tough to learn to actually micro your units at first after so long of "spam larvae button and Amove", but with practice it should be possible
Well, except I'm not a zerg player and I still prefer to kill Z as soon as possible as P and T, since they have the ability to just explode in economy and army if I give them time to breathe and get greedy. PS: Except for MMM combo being super easy to lose through inattention, T is currently they easiest race to control for me.
On August 10 2019 00:33 Brutaxilos wrote: People really need to stop using tournament wins by race to justify their views on balance. Not only is it a terribly small dataset, you would also have to factor in individuals.
Like if you looked at GSL wins per race since 2017 it would look like: Terran: 6 Zerg: 1 Protoss: 1
But if you looked at GSL winners by race in the last 2 years it would look like: Terran: 3 Zerg: 1 Protoss: 1
It's still not even, but with only a pool of 5 players, it's hardly definitive evidence for balance.
Non sequitur. You're only looking at a single, very unique tournament which makes no sense. It only makes sense to look at all premier tournaments for the year.
Balance exploits are seen at the highest level of play. Leaving WCS out of that metric is perfectly logical. Its not the highest level of play..never has been and contrary to all the hype still is absolutely not. You are seeing 2 to 3 zerg players at the highest level of play and 1 toss / terran making that list of would be code S contenders. Those players will always heavily skew the results. Kr is the only region where the majority of the field is a potential contender to beat on a good day the rest of the field. Protoss has been over represented in every Kr tournament since the post 18 blizzcon patch and the WCS points reflect that. Im NOT talking about who won the tournament. Im talking about the % of players advancing in each round.
Asserting that protoss just has the most top players left still playing is completely ridiculous. They were still playing on previous patches and they just magically became top players again post 18 blizzcon...riiight.
Well, they do though. across not just patches but expansions there’s a strong cohort of top tier Protoss players with multiple tournament wins each, strong Proleague records etc.
I think it’s more indicative of a wider problem in the Korean scene, namely that new players aren’t coming through and developing to challenge the top Kespa players in the post-Kespa era, even years down the line.
Judging from ASUS ROG it doesn’t look like relying on returning talent is going to help much either, neither Bomber and Taeja even look at top foreigner level yet, never mind challenging the better players in Code S. Hopefully they’ll get back to that level in time.
Players outside of the usual Protoss suspects have made good runs this year for sure. They haven’t really pushed on outside of the Super Tournament/GSL season 2, but Hurricane and Patience were outliers of a sort I guess.
I don’t think GSL is nearly as extreme, but Flash dominating ASL isn’t really taken as anything indicative of balance because it’s accepted he is just better than the field.
Protoss fans don’t tend to complain much as, happens all the time a Zest or an sOs or Stats or whoever lose in the Ro32, or even don’t make GSL because there are plenty of other Protoss players on the same level who can go deep.
If a Maru or TY or Inno, or more than one lose early it’s a disaster for Terran because there aren’t as many of them on the top tier of their race, and those below them haven’t really stepped up over the years.
Of course balance problems can exist independently of that too, there’s still something to be said of how top players are racially distributed in Korea affecting the results out of GSL too though
On August 10 2019 12:54 batatm wrote: interesting discussion! here's my contribution: race distribution in gsl ro16 and ro8 during the last 2 years!
And a fine contribution there sir.
The order isn’t exactly a surprise but the raw numbers are a bit different to what I’d have guessed. Protoss is sightly lower than I would have thought, Terran a little higher, Zerg quite a bit worse.
On August 10 2019 12:54 batatm wrote: interesting discussion! here's my contribution: race distribution in gsl ro16 and ro8 during the last 2 years!
Having these numbers is nice, but the race distribution alone does not say anything about balance. Each player selects a race for personal reasons, which are not random, so in Korea there may be more Protoss pros/semipros than Terran and more Terran than Zerg.
For example, in Ranking List 246 (July 31) from aligulac.com, there are 23 P, 29 T and 16 Z. List 236 (March 13) shows 33 P, 29 T, 15 Z. Looking at these two samples, it seems than there are less Zerg pros. It would be interesting to gather these over time for the last two years to compare vs your numbers - but I am too lazy for that
On August 10 2019 12:54 batatm wrote: interesting discussion! here's my contribution: race distribution in gsl ro16 and ro8 during the last 2 years!
Having these numbers is nice, but the race distribution alone does not say anything about balance. Each player selects a race for personal reasons, which are not random, so in Korea there may be more Protoss pros/semipros than Terran and more Terran than Zerg.
For example, in Ranking List 246 (July 31) from aligulac.com, there are 23 P, 29 T and 16 Z. List 236 (March 13) shows 33 P, 29 T, 15 Z. Looking at these two samples, it seems than there are less Zerg pros. It would be interesting to gather these over time for the last two years to compare vs your numbers - but I am too lazy for that
that's why i chose to focus on the ro16 and ro8: when looking at this phases the total count of pro players in korea isn't as important imo, as only the absolute top representatives of each race make it this far.
On August 12 2019 06:39 batatm wrote: that's why i chose to focus on the ro16 and ro8: when looking at this phases the total count of pro players in korea isn't as important imo, as only the absolute top representatives of each race make it this far.
Yeah, but if one race has (even more then) double the amount of Pro Players then the other (Protoss vs. Zerg in Korea), wouldn't it be a logical assumption that maybe there are also more Protoss Pro Players then Zerg Pro Players who are able to be top?
And in this case ... well there are a lot of "Protoss Big Guns" who have won one or even multiple big tournaments in the past out there ... more then for Terran or especially Zerg. So for sure there maybe some imbalance regarding race destribution in Korea (same as in EU, only that there are sort of too much Zergies so it's the opposite of Korea) ... but that has nothing to do (or can be solved) with in-game balance ...
The change to Chargelots would be huge, as it is a core unit. Would be similar to removing zergling speed (or nerfing by 50+ Percent) or removing combat shields for Marines (or changing stim, that there would be no longer attack speed bonus, just move speed bonus). You can't change one of them without changing something for the others. Especially as long there simply is no sign of any protoss dominance besides ONE (the last) GSL Season and maybe one or two Super Tournaments ...
The change to Chargelots would be huge, as it is a core unit. Would be similar to removing zergling speed (or nerfing by 50+ Percent) or removing combat shields for Marines (or changing stim, that there would be no longer attack speed bonus, just move speed bonus). You can't change one of them without changing something for the others. Especially as long there simply is no sign of any protoss dominance besides ONE (the last) GSL Season and maybe one or two Super Tournaments ...
Have you checked the patch history in lotv?
Zergling: Slightly faster burrow and unburrow
Marine: Unchanged
Zealot: - Buff movement increase when charge is upgraded (2015) - Charge now deals 30 dmg on hit, previous charge movement buff reverted (2015) - Zealot charge damage reduced from 30 to 8 (2015) - Zealot movement speed increase with charge massively increased (2016) - Zealot charge upgrade cost from 200/200 to 100/100 (2017)
In lotv terran and zerg core units are untouched, the zealot has gained a very big runspeed buff when charge is researched, bonus damage on its charge attack and halved the cost of the charge upgrade. I could also mention that at launch of wol zealots didn't have a guaranteed hit with charge that was patched in 1 year after wol launched,
From launch the zealot has been hit with a literal bufftrain while the core units of other races has basically never been touched. (besides marine upgrade research time).
On August 12 2019 15:40 JoFar wrote:
You can't change one of them without changing something for the others.
Well thats what they have been doing for the whole history of this game, especially in lotv. The zealot was supposed to be powerful but clunky and now its powerful and fast, they keep patching away the only weakness of the zealot.
I'm not saying the nerf should have gone through, I'm actually undecided about it.
Edit: In my opinion it feels like the zealot is buffed into a new role, they have been made powerful enough to strongly contribute to immortal/archon compositions. Their previous slower itterations were a lot weaker in situations when they weren't buffering for units with enough range. Colossi or disruptor, without these or air the zealot used to be kitable without archons or immortals being able to get many hits off which made those compositions a bit iffy. The buffs have strengthened those comps while also making the zealot harassments OP.
On August 10 2019 12:54 batatm wrote: interesting discussion! here's my contribution: race distribution in gsl ro16 and ro8 during the last 2 years!
The GSL RO8 is fishy at best because of how the groups are created. If there would be a more fair way of the creation it would be more telling. That's why I use Ro16 from the Code S. Nice table though.
On August 12 2019 20:13 showstealer1829 wrote: Translation (Once again): Protoss removed from game.
Every time they remove the Protoss from the game it doesn't work and they keep coming back and are successfull, I think your translating module needs restart, it's broken.
So let me get this straight. They wanted to tone down Infestors to ease Protoss in lategame vs Zerg but instead they:
Nerfed Infestors to the ground - dmg of IT by 50%, to the point that there are useless again...Hmmm. There is a reason why all Zergs mass Infestors against lategame of Protoss and Terran- because everything else that worked was nerfed already. Now thanks to geniuses from Blizzard, Zerg won't have valiable options vs Toss or Terran that are turtling into super lategame. JUST FUCKING GREAT!
But that's not enough right? Let's just additiinally buff Carriers and Ghosts. Not only we are nerfing the only counter to T and P lategame, but we are buffing Carriers which this already nerfed Infestors were suppose to counter, and Ghosts which are hard counter vs Infestors already just to make OP mass BattleCruiser more OP. I just can't comprehend logic behind this. Why just not fix the bug which already makes IT much weaker? Or just tone down dmg lil bit. Nooooo, lets overkill nerf them to the ground and in the same time buff things which they should counter...I wonder what will Zerg do now vs Mass Carriers and Mass BCs. Just roll over and die right?
And if it wasn't enough, let's give minor, meaningless nerf to OP Warprism and let's destroy early game in ZvT with buffing the most powerful upgrade in the game -STIM.
At the end let's buff Overlord Speed by reducing it cost by 25/25 (LOL HAHAHAHAHA) just to let Zerg see earlier ehat is going to kill them straight.
WOW Blizzard. You really do everything to destroy this game. I just wonder how long will take for u to understand that u made things worse.
On August 14 2019 19:52 hiroshOne wrote: So let me get this straight. They wanted to tone down Infestors to ease Protoss in lategame vs Zerg but instead they:
Nerfed Infestors to the ground - dmg of IT by 50%, to the point that there are useless again...Hmmm. There is a reason why all Zergs mass Infestors against lategame of Protoss and Terran- because everything else that worked was nerfed already. Now thanks to geniuses from Blizzard, Zerg won't have valiable options vs Toss or Terran that are turtling into super lategame. JUST FUCKING GREAT!
But that's not enough right? Let's just additiinally buff Carriers and Ghosts. Not only we are nerfing the only counter to T and P lategame, but we are buffing Carriers which this already nerfed Infestors were suppose to counter, and Ghosts which are hard counter vs Infestors already just to make OP mass BattleCruiser more OP. I just can't comprehend logic behind this. Why just not fix the bug which already makes IT much weaker? Or just tone down dmg lil bit. Nooooo, lets overkill nerf them to the ground and in the same time buff things which they should counter...I wonder what will Zerg do now vs Mass Carriers and Mass BCs. Just roll over and die right?
And if it wasn't enough, let's give minor, meaningless nerf to OP Warprism and let's destroy early game in ZvT with buffing the most powerful upgrade in the game -STIM.
At the end let's buff Overlord Speed by reducing it cost by 25/25 (LOL HAHAHAHAHA) just to let Zerg see earlier ehat is going to kill them straight.
WOW Blizzard. You really do everything to destroy this game. I just wonder how long will take for u to understand that u made things worse.
On August 14 2019 19:52 hiroshOne wrote: So let me get this straight. They wanted to tone down Infestors to ease Protoss in lategame vs Zerg but instead they:
Nerfed Infestors to the ground - dmg of IT by 50%, to the point that there are useless again...Hmmm. There is a reason why all Zergs mass Infestors against lategame of Protoss and Terran- because everything else that worked was nerfed already. Now thanks to geniuses from Blizzard, Zerg won't have valiable options vs Toss or Terran that are turtling into super lategame. JUST FUCKING GREAT!
But that's not enough right? Let's just additiinally buff Carriers and Ghosts. Not only we are nerfing the only counter to T and P lategame, but we are buffing Carriers which this already nerfed Infestors were suppose to counter, and Ghosts which are hard counter vs Infestors already just to make OP mass BattleCruiser more OP. I just can't comprehend logic behind this. Why just not fix the bug which already makes IT much weaker? Or just tone down dmg lil bit. Nooooo, lets overkill nerf them to the ground and in the same time buff things which they should counter...I wonder what will Zerg do now vs Mass Carriers and Mass BCs. Just roll over and die right?
And if it wasn't enough, let's give minor, meaningless nerf to OP Warprism and let's destroy early game in ZvT with buffing the most powerful upgrade in the game -STIM.
At the end let's buff Overlord Speed by reducing it cost by 25/25 (LOL HAHAHAHAHA) just to let Zerg see earlier ehat is going to kill them straight.
WOW Blizzard. You really do everything to destroy this game. I just wonder how long will take for u to understand that u made things worse.
Mmmmhm Zerg Tears
yeh. let me just add: 'let the meta settle' like zergs have been spoon feeding us since GGlord-infestor.
Can't you guys just add new units instead of constantly making minuscule changes to the same units time and time again. Just add the reaver. Oh wait you would rather just continue to nickel and dime protoss and increase robo unit cost. My god
On August 19 2019 00:27 UtherTruthBringer wrote: Can't you guys just add new units instead of constantly making minuscule changes to the same units time and time again. Just add the reaver. Oh wait you would rather just continue to nickel and dime protoss and increase robo unit cost. My god
Reavers with Warp Prism pickup, Blizzard for all our sakes can you please do this? And by all I mean for the sake of my ladder MMR
The change to Chargelots would be huge, as it is a core unit. Would be similar to removing zergling speed (or nerfing by 50+ Percent) or removing combat shields for Marines (or changing stim, that there would be no longer attack speed bonus, just move speed bonus). You can't change one of them without changing something for the others. Especially as long there simply is no sign of any protoss dominance besides ONE (the last) GSL Season and maybe one or two Super Tournaments ...
Have you checked the patch history in lotv?
Zergling: Slightly faster burrow and unburrow
Marine: Unchanged
Zealot: - Buff movement increase when charge is upgraded (2015) - Charge now deals 30 dmg on hit, previous charge movement buff reverted (2015) - Zealot charge damage reduced from 30 to 8 (2015) - Zealot movement speed increase with charge massively increased (2016) - Zealot charge upgrade cost from 200/200 to 100/100 (2017)
In lotv terran and zerg core units are untouched, the zealot has gained a very big runspeed buff when charge is researched, bonus damage on its charge attack and halved the cost of the charge upgrade. I could also mention that at launch of wol zealots didn't have a guaranteed hit with charge that was patched in 1 year after wol launched,
From launch the zealot has been hit with a literal bufftrain while the core units of other races has basically never been touched. (besides marine upgrade research time).
You can't change one of them without changing something for the others.
Well thats what they have been doing for the whole history of this game, especially in lotv. The zealot was supposed to be powerful but clunky and now its powerful and fast, they keep patching away the only weakness of the zealot.
I'm not saying the nerf should have gone through, I'm actually undecided about it.
Edit: In my opinion it feels like the zealot is buffed into a new role, they have been made powerful enough to strongly contribute to immortal/archon compositions. Their previous slower itterations were a lot weaker in situations when they weren't buffering for units with enough range. Colossi or disruptor, without these or air the zealot used to be kitable without archons or immortals being able to get many hits off which made those compositions a bit iffy. The buffs have strengthened those comps while also making the zealot harassments OP.
The Zealot has always been trash compared to the Marine and the Zergling which is why it's being constantly buffed because it's supposed to be the backbone of the Protoss army. I'm still amazed people can't understand this unit costs 100 minerals, so when you see 5 Zealots going ham in your base it's equal to that of 20 Zerglings or 10 stimmed Marines. JUST TO PUT IT IN PERSPECTIVE FOR YOU SINCE MOST ARE NOT ABLE 2.
EPT![[image loading]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CM809rKWoAAiV0C.jpg)
Its going to be fun inventing new stim pack timing pushes with these changes. 
But you don't see me shitting on BW in the BW section. I generally doesn't want to do it even in the SC2 section as I still like the game, it's just not good by my standards. 
Premier Tournaments![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/YXZDCaZ.jpg)
