EPTWas Protoss given the same design focus?
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TaeTae
United Kingdom97 Posts
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dUTtrOACh
Canada2339 Posts
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Andi_Goldberger
Germany1608 Posts
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RogerChillingworth
2625 Posts
You can see the underlying problems in how Protoss has a long list of all-in strategies that involves massing a unit off 2-base and just going for it. Or proxies. They don't have any robust composition outside of deathball turtle splash damage. What they needed wasn't the adept, in LotV, but some anchor unit that doesn't specialize in something tactical. Protoss is lacking the dragoon, in my opinion--or something like that. A sturdy, hardy unit that is something of a blend of the immortal and stalker without the high mobility or ridiculous anti-mech damage output. But because we need new units and more units, we kept creating design forks and removing the "generic shooter" units that existed more in Brood War, like hydralisks and dragoons. outside of the economy differences, i feel Brood War definitely has one up on SC2 in this department. | ||
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greenturtle23
86 Posts
I feel with LOTV things are somewhat improved with a stronger warprism, the introduction of the disruptor, and a weaker collosus. | ||
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404AlphaSquad
838 Posts
I think the design of the races has changed so much over the decade, but terran still plays somewhat similiar it always had. You want to know my theory why? Because Terrans have Marines and arguably Marauders. Core stable and probably too efficient units by every metric. Zerg in the beginning had Roaches and Hydralisks as core of their armies, but the race has moved away from this. Protoss always felt off. When I switched from Protoss to Terran from Brood War to SC2, terran felt more akin to Brood War Protoss than Sc2-Protoss. Strong infantry units out of barracks, while Protoss relied on weak gimmicky units with force fields to even hold their choke. Its as if both races switched. | ||
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ejozl
Denmark3057 Posts
I think Terran could use more work, personally. | ||
Falling
Canada10839 Posts
On December 11 2020 06:03 dUTtrOACh wrote: You'll only get speculative responses on that here. Who else but the insiders at Blizzard who worked on the design aspect of each race would really know? How would you define "fair" (man hours or some other metric)? It does end up being speculation, and ultimately it doesn't really get at 'wherein lies its goodness' or 'wherein lies its badness?' to borrow from CS Lewis' essay on criticism. It could very well be that it received the most amount of focus but intended up terribly designed, whereas another race received half the focus, yet ended up a better design. So not only is it unanswerable with insider knowledge, but it doesn't really at the cause of what makes a design good or bad. | ||
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rogzardo_
24 Posts
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SootShade
31 Posts
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algue
France1436 Posts
On December 11 2020 05:07 TaeTae wrote: Do you think Protoss was let down on the design floor and has had to rely on novel niche builds? The warp gate mechanic sure feels under developed. Portals can warp units but other production buildings can't? Idk man, that's weird. You'd think they would at least have implemented a warp upgrade for the robotics facility in the robo bay and a warp upgrade for the stargate in the fleet beacon. Portal units ? There you go, have a brand new, unique, macro mechanic for your portal units ! Stargate and robotic facility ? Nah, you'll just get the same production mechanic as terran with chronoboost as a replacement for reactors. I wish they'd have been more ambitious with the warp mechanic. That's such a defining feature of Sc2 protoss compared to BW protoss. | ||
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Clear World
125 Posts
Warp-in was clearly the big addition to the race that Blizzard intended, but it was rather poor in their attempt to balance & design around the mechanic. I wish they were more ambitious while at the same time, more thoughtful of it. I am someone who defend the concept of Warp-In and it is one of the big reason why I like playing Protoss. Though myself and many others could make a very strong case that the Warp-in mechanic is what lead to the Protoss in being such a race being heavily dependent on hard-counters and extreme cases as Blizzard were extremely hesitant to nerf Warp-In directly. Addition to some poor choices to 'balance' the Protoss, they also basically became the race in which Blizzard decided they were the race of active abilities, therefore just kept adding active abilities to all of their units. Immortal's harden shield to Barrier. Void Ray attack charge to prismatic alignment. MSC and Nexus Overcharge/Photon Overcharge. Disruptor and their purification Nova. Oracle and basically most of their abilities (like Entomb or Pulsar Beam). The failed Carrier 'Release interceptor ability' or the numerous failed abilities for the Tempest, NOTE: I'm not saying all that I list here are bad design, just a overreliance on adding abilities. | ||
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jpg06051992
United States577 Posts
Gateway units have always been cost inefficient and pigeon holed. Zealots are not as tough as their BW counterparts, Stalkers suffer greatly against Zerglings and Marauders, both tier 1 units from the other race that hit the field very early, and while Adepts are kind of a blend, I almost wish that they hit air and had the shade taken away so that they felt like a more general usage unit like the marine. Personally I think they should have removed WG back in HoTS and started from scratch, but hey, Protoss still has pretty good representation on ladder and tournmanets seem pretty evenly distributed as well, so I'm not going to complain, this topic is literally almost 10 years old now haha edited for grammar @7:58 AM | ||
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Clear World
125 Posts
On December 11 2020 06:31 Andi_Goldberger wrote: I feel like in the WoL release it definitely was underdeveloped compared to the other races, especially terran. but like the other poster said, only the designers themselves can confirm this fully - maybe in some interview in 10 years. Will, we can confirm that the Protoss were probably the race last to be finalized with their concept and overall design. If you were to look at the battle report before Wings of Liberty launched, they probably had the most significant changes between those initial battler reports and launch. A list of few of those changes - Chrono boost was added, replacing another ability that was doing something to the probes. - Immortal could no longer be warp-in (probably means Immortal used to be build in the Gateway). - Remove the dark pylon (or whatever that green pylon was called) That immortal change is definitely significant as it implies that Gateway composition was initially designed to be strong with the immortal, (a.k.a, Stalkers were probably not designed to be the main damage dealers for the gateway composition), but that was lost when it was moved to Robo. | ||
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Xamo
Spain830 Posts
I’d love Terrans having better options to go for defensive macro play, together with non-commital harassment. Tanks and Liberators are too static, a minor positional disadvantage is sometimes definitive. Mech does not provide good enough harassment options IMO. For Zerg I’d like to see some form of reliable detection added. Protoss feels well rounded after the addition of the shield battery. | ||
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Morbidius
Brazil3449 Posts
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NoobSkills
United States1489 Posts
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Sadistx
Zimbabwe5568 Posts
All the new Terran units follow the same formula of "deploy - wait - deal massive ranged damage", and it results in really boring army compositions that are still 98% MMMT and a few of the new units for flavor. Maybe that's actually "good" design, idk. Some people certainly prefer the consistency of making the same 4 units for 10 years straight, but in my subjective view that's insanely boring and a design failure. | ||
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Splynn
United States225 Posts
When HotS came out, I thought it was probably the last chance to really redo Protoss design. They didn't do it, and I pretty much lost interest in playing the race. I messed around with Zerg/Terran, both of which were more interesting and more cohesive. Zerg especially really came together design-wise during HotS. The mothership core was, imo, Blizzard admitting that Protoss was broken, and here was a bandaid fix. The problem with the race can probably be, as others have suggested, traced to Warpgate. Protoss either has to all-in or turtle into lategame and play super passively. Protoss has a few problems. Detection, mobility, and what I can only describe as an over-reliance on high tier units just to fight the basic units of other races. There was a time during WoL where Protoss had to rush T3 to hold off a basic marine/marauder push. You could go HT or colossus, but colossus was better almost every time. The colossus hamstrings the entire race. People say its warpgate, but in a lot of ways it's actually colossus/immortal. Those units are SO strong that if WG units were as strong as they should be, protoss would win every engagement. Colossus is a braindead unit. Needs to be way slower somehow (like reaver, or it needs to siege to attack like tank/liberator), but can keep cliff walking. This is where the WG stuff comes into play. You can't make robo units weaker and buff the WG units because all of those all-ins become way stronger. Blink meta and 4 gates are back. You can probably keep WG by tethering it to within x range of a Nexus. I could talk about this forever. Still mad about it 10 years later! | ||
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Ben...
Canada3485 Posts
Terran has been the opposite. It was by far the best designed race out of the gate in Wings of Liberty but that has made it so very little has actually been needed to be done to the race over the years and as a result not a lot has been given to Terran other than newer forms of harassment and niche units. The base units were already so good that adding more similar units would have either been redundant or would have been too good (the warhound comes to mind. It was the mech equivalent of a meat and potatoes base unit but when combined with everything already available it was just too powerful). They've tried to fix the lack of variety in Terran over the years with varying degrees of success. Zerg is the weirdest one because I think their initial design intent for Zerg was good and made sense but the race has been severely hampered by a bunch of rather poor design decisions post-release over the years. The first big mistake they made was rebalancing the queen to make it an early game Swiss army knife defence unit rather than addressing the gaps in Zerg's early game. A lot of Zerg's issues today stem from this decision. It's why we see Zerg make 10 queens and be able to drone much more than was likely intended since they can defend with minimal units. It was obvious at the end of Wings of Liberty that Zerg had some serious issues, especially those caused by the broodlord, but rather than attempt to address these issues properly they basically doubled down and added a unit that had the worst traits of all of the broodlord along with more spellcasters. This has left them in a place of trying to fix this massive mistake for years and it's only been this year that these design issues have been solved. | ||
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