On August 30 2021 23:09 datastuff wrote: Is this gaslighting zergs into thinking it's their fault for toss going skytoss lol. Also btw fungal hasn't stopped interceptors for years.
Yeah. Protoss would still go skytoss if their ground army was competitive, because it's an insanely strong comp that (with the current void and battery) you can tech straight into with almost no redundancy. You jump right into your endgame comp that ignores terrain, has a ton of health and can fight at good range with basically just a-move and the use of 1 caster like HT / ruptor. For everyone not playing against Dark and Serral, it's an obviously good choice if you want / have to play out a macro game.
Removing Zerg's best / only tool to chip at it and cost-effectively create weaknesses wouldn't make us see more toss ground, it would just make Zerg die harder to skytoss.
On August 30 2021 23:09 datastuff wrote: Is this gaslighting zergs into thinking it's their fault for toss going skytoss lol. Also btw fungal hasn't stopped interceptors for years.
Did you watch Dark against Skytoss in the previous GSL?
Yes? How is this relevant?
Dark literally went Queen-Infestor Fungal+Microbial Shroud against Carriers and took out all the interceprtor. You sure you didnt miss that game against Parting?
Fungal damages and slows interceptors, it doesn't stop them. See the fungaled interceptors still flying towards the ultra I'm not sure you watched it.
Wrong game though, and the Fungal did not hit the Interceptor well enough, the Infestor get chased way by Templar and Immportal. In the game against Parting (game 4 @ 20:15 gametime), Dark hit most of the Interceptors, slow them down and took them out.
On August 30 2021 23:09 datastuff wrote: Is this gaslighting zergs into thinking it's their fault for toss going skytoss lol. Also btw fungal hasn't stopped interceptors for years.
Yeah. Protoss would still go skytoss if their ground army was competitive, because it's an insanely strong comp that (with the current void and battery) you can tech straight into with almost no redundancy. You jump right into your endgame comp that ignores terrain, has a ton of health and can fight at good range with basically just a-move and the use of 1 caster like HT / ruptor. For everyone not playing against Dark and Serral, it's an obviously good choice if you want / have to play out a macro game.
Removing Zerg's best / only tool to chip at it and cost-effectively create weaknesses wouldn't make us see more toss ground, it would just make Zerg die harder to skytoss.
The general point is still true tho i think, so a nerf to skytoss probably should be paired with a slight nerf to the lurker (and i think both could hopefully make pvz more interesting).
removing both Upgrades is way overkill. Back when they had 9 range they weren't even used that much - 8 range max would make them insanely bad. I think just reverting the range buff and have them back at 9 will probably be enough. I don't expect any balance changes though.
and that change would remove Lurkers from ZvT so it's maybe better this way
On August 30 2021 20:05 Nebuchad wrote: Without commenting on the post in general I find it hard to imagine a situation where 8 lurkers hit your unit(s) simultaneously and it's not your fault
Yeah maybe in my post it made it seem like it was the most common scenario. While it does happen, normally it doesn't. Still the point is more that any ground unit that enter the lurker attack range are instantly killed, forcing you into air.
On August 30 2021 23:09 datastuff wrote: Is this gaslighting zergs into thinking it's their fault for toss going skytoss lol. Also btw fungal hasn't stopped interceptors for years.
You're right, it doesn't stop them completely anymore, but they become so slow that they can barely deal damage.
Ok, maybe forget about the Viper abduct removal. Even though it's ridiculous I agree that's getting into major rework territory and I wanted to focus on the Lurker.
nerfing shield batteries and buffing zealots would improve this matchup (actually every protoss matchup). it'd make lurkers easier for protoss to handle and make defensive protoss teching builds (like carriers) easier for zerg to handle
Good post. Lurker/Viper trumps every Protoss ground army and this is a large part of the reason that Protoss air was buffed in the first place. I think Protoss and Zerg players would both like the matchup more if the default metagame Protoss army were ground-based. This can't happen without either giving Protoss something with which to counter Lurker/Viper, or a nerf to Lurker/Viper.
As far as the specific solutions you've offered, I agree that nerfing the Lurker *and* the Viper at once is probably a bit much. If I were balancing the game I'd make smaller tweaks first and see what happens. Removing one of the Lurker upgrades is probably a good start. I also think they move way too fast, I wonder about reducing their move speed off creep or something.
I like the idea of buffing the Infestor, too. Maybe giving the energy upgrade for free and also increasing the radius of fungal by 0.5 or 1?
It never made sense to me that a seige unit has insane dmg/high hp/armored/mobile AND requires detection. Look at all the other seige units in the game, liberator,tank,tempest all have apparent weaknesses. Lurkers have none and basically guarantees trades in ur favor
The lurker really is too strong. It's even stronger in ZvT, but i find the changes that you propose kind of weird. Getting rid of the two upgrades doesn't "nerf" the lurker, it effectively removes it completely from the game. That could be reasonable if you counterbalanced other options in zerg late game, but even with the lurker broken as it is ZvT and ZvP are not exactly zerg favored in the late game.
At the same time, looking at the infestor problem doesn't really "deal" with the zergs mid game anti air problem. And it's not really only in ZvP, ZvZ right now is basically in a "blind counter mutas every game" kind of state, because the zergs antiair option is just not good enough in midgame. So you get in a situation where zergs rely on queens for midgame antiair, since hydras are garbage against air units, and because of that the only option that they have is to turtle forever.
And i don't buy the argument that skytoss is a "fine composition", it really isn't. Air units, by default, are far less interesting as primary composition because they're not (in most maps) affected by the terrain. Their interactions are a lot more straightforward and not nearly as cool as, let's say, both players with ground units trying to outmanouver each other.
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So, basically, i think when analysing the matchup, we can identify a couple problems (there are other problems in ZvP, like the queen walk, but let's just focus on the lurker vs air interaction):
- The lurker, like you said, doesn't really have weakness besides air units in the late game. So there's no interaction, it's basically just: Do you have the units to deal with it or not?
- Zerg doesn't have a reliable mid game antiair. Corruptors are really good, but they are so when they have a lot of support. Queens are really, really good, but they are purely defensive units. Hydras, in a vacuum, are ok-ish, but when you consider the fact that they are ground units, and how weak they are against banes / storms / disruptors, they are quite bad.
- Skytoss is strong, in the fact that until a certain point it's easier to play with skytoss than it is to play with zerg. That is not to say that it's imba, because zergs have found good ways to deal with it, and those ways force a lot of micro on the protoss part too, but it really isn't a cool composition, and it forces an ultra defensive playstyle from the zerg, where both sides can't really break one another.
- You didn't put this part on your post, but i feel like broodlords, if skytoss isn't viable, are still really strong, so there's that.
To deal with that:
- A much more elegant solution, in my opinion, would be making the lurker cheaper, but a lot weaker, and basically a midgame unit that doesn't scale well into the late game. To do that you could reduce it's health, it's damage, remove the upgrades, and probably buff it's base burrow speed just a little bit.
- Nerf the attack speed of the broodlords while increasing their damage (so it has less broodlings, making it easier for ground armies to move around and engage)
- Buff the hydra antiair so it can deal with air units even with less supply.
- Change the power of the late game zerg from the lurker to the ultra (i think a good starting point would be removing the armored tag of the ultra, leaving it without tag, while reducing the health, armor and cost of the unit to 200/200)
The ultra is a unit with really defined strenghts and weakness, and just because of that they are already a lot more interesting to play against and with. You would have to be careful with the tweaking though because i don't think anyone wants a repeat of ZvT in 2016~2017.
Like i said before, i agree that the lurker is a really big problem, but your proposed changes don't really modify anything. Hell, no one even gets hydras or lurkers anymore against double stargate openings, it's basically queen walks or just going for broodlords / ultras, a shitton of spores, and queen, viper and infestor support.
what a stupid post, honestly. lurkers are a snowball unit, in even games a nice concave of immortal archon chargelot storm destroys any realistic amount of lurkers. additionally, they can be chipped away by storms or straight up one shotted for free by 2 disruptors.
I must live in a weird timeline where Protoss suddenly thinks they can't beat lurkers with a ground composition anymore even though they did for years.
Did buffing Voidrays lead to Protoss forgetting that the weakness of the lurker is that their AoE is super narrow? This makes them an easy target for surrounds and units with high dps like the immortal.
This feels like a propaganda piece written by a diamond league player.
On August 31 2021 03:26 freelifeffs wrote: what a stupid post, honestly. lurkers are a snowball unit, in even games a nice concave of immortal archon chargelot storm destroys any realistic amount of lurkers. additionally, they can be chipped away by storms or straight up one shotted for free by 2 disruptors.
On August 31 2021 05:52 Railgan wrote: I must live in a weird timeline where Protoss suddenly thinks they can't beat lurkers with a ground composition anymore even though they did for years.
Did buffing Voidrays lead to Protoss forgetting that the weakness of the lurker is that their AoE is super narrow? This makes them an easy target for surrounds and units with high dps like the immortal.
This feels like a propaganda piece written by a diamond league player.
And this sounds like propaganda written for a diamond league player: unless Zerg seriously overextends and sends nothing along with the lurkers, how exactly is Protoss going to surround them? They certainly aren't going to do so if the lurkers are on creep and the Zerg player is, you know, not actively on fire or otherwise indisposed.
On August 30 2021 23:21 angry_maia wrote: As a spectator I really wish toss vs zerg had viable lategame ground armies. Coming from broodwar it feels wrong to me that a maxed out air army can just kill maxed out ground in a straight up fight (in brood war carriers need to micro and abuse terrain to beat goliaths while in sc2 it seems like carriers + 2 psi storms can shred any number of hydras).
I think the BW comparison is good: in that game, carriers work on the basis of catching opponents off guard and micro around terrain. Going into them is situational, and the are other reasonable options for Protoss (well, against Terran anyway; air units other than corsairs are pretty bad vs Zerg). Trying to achieve something similar in SC2 seems desirable, but difficult. Nerfing lurkers would have to be part of the solution though—only other thing I can think of is replacing the Mothership with a ground based spellcaster that could fight lurkers in some way. (Or I guess changing existing spellcasters as has been suggested, but that would have more impact sooner in the game.)
On August 30 2021 20:58 BisuDagger wrote: Let’s make forcefields relevant in late game. Lurker spines cannot go under/pass through forcefields. You could effectively shut lurkers down and force them to move.
Really interesting idea... but can Protoss afford Sentries late game?
The solution imo is to remove Adaptive Talons from the game entirely, it was an upgrade for a different time when the Lurker was a newly introduced unit and there needed to be heavy incentives to utilize it. That time has long since passed, we all know the Lurker is damn good.
On August 30 2021 20:58 BisuDagger wrote: Let’s make forcefields relevant in late game. Lurker spines cannot go under/pass through forcefields. You could effectively shut lurkers down and force them to move.
This is actually very interesting as it also gives reason to possibly have some Ravagers in Zerg army with Lurkers. They probably could have some other changes or upgrades that make them more useful later for example allowing zealots go through them and make EMP destroy them. Generally anything that allows more mid fight interactions outside of just splitting is great.
Not sure how viable this is though. Aside from doing number changes/removal/tweak to damage here and there, I don't think the intern at blizzard can implement this.
On August 30 2021 20:58 BisuDagger wrote: Let’s make forcefields relevant in late game. Lurker spines cannot go under/pass through forcefields. You could effectively shut lurkers down and force them to move.
This is actually very interesting as it also gives reason to possibly have some Ravagers in Zerg army with Lurkers. They probably could have some other changes or upgrades that make them more useful later for example allowing zealots go through them and make EMP destroy them. Generally anything that allows more mid fight interactions outside of just splitting is great.
Not sure how viable this is though. Aside from doing number changes/removal/tweak to damage here and there, I don't think the intern at blizzard can implement this.
I m not sure of what you say... Did you check the possibility to code that ? I don t think lurker attack "work" as a basic attack. I think his code looks like more to a spell, so you can interrupt the spell.
There s also some deep work in modifying the abduct spell (not expected..unfortunetly), if community wish massive units be abducted less far...
In terms of balance, it seems more revelant for community to modify the gameplay instead of caracteristics.
I personally feel that PVZ is fine. However the matchup is currently dominated by two units: the lurker and the carrier. Both sides from the start of the game are thinking "how do I stop or manage if the other guys makes lurkers/carriers?". It's similar to how dominant proxy robo was in PVP before the shield battery buff . My entire PVZ playstyle is trying to force the zerg to NOT make lurkers or to make them at a point in the game where they aren't that useful. I agree with the OP that lurkers should be nerfed.
What I would recommend is adding an upgrade to disruptors or to templars that increases the damage of their spells or abilities to burrowed units. Disruptors should one shot lurkers and templars should be able to kill lurkers with one or two storms if the lurker is not microed. Because it affects only burrowed units, it'll be a highly specific change targeting lurkers.
Disruptor lurker dynamics work fine and are interesting, the problem there is with vipers being so ridiculous. The nerf I would do is to make the viper a ground unit. Abduct is still abusive ownage but now at least they aren't supremely mobile and the HT + disruptor vs lurker + viper dynamic should be pretty neat to watch.
EPT
