On February 15 2024 22:56 Creager wrote: Just make Sensor Towers show a red indicator on the minimap also for burrowed/cloaked units, this way Terran needs to invest in a forward-positioned Sensor Tower and defend it, but it still would allow for some more defensive positional play as you at least are made aware of the threat of such a unit in the tower radius, but would still require you to actually detect them in order to attack, thus eliminating the element of luck/trial & error, so allowing for a more efficient spending of scans/opt for other means of detection.
I'd call that a great compensation for trash Raven (compared to the good old days of HSM and PDD) and the stationary no-skill mode for Observers and Overseers!
It’s also a great way to make an offensive spotting observer pretty close to useless against all but the least observant Terrans. And lategame DTs about as useful as a lace condom.
I mean that's the point, after all, don't spoil all the fun for lazy mech Terrans like me, would you? Nobody understands how oppressive burrowed Zerglings at your 3rd/4th are, just attaching a cloaked-forever Obs to an army and never think about that again is also kinda luxurious, don't you think? And DTs are just disgusting Protoss BS all the way.
There have been always possibility to balance all things out - real or imaginary IMBAs:
Just arrange so that players of a match up are obliged to play both races of that match up, and it is purely on luck who starts with race X or Y (in longer run an impact of that luck factor evens out statistically). Players would be by default forced to play every race in every possible combination, including all mirror matches.
It would be about overall SC2 skill then, and impact of possible race imbalances would be minimized naturally. Everyone would play more or less "off-race" all the time. Obvious solution...
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Dark. But even if you disagree, you're effectively arguing that reapers should be reverted (everyone acknowledged Byun was literally the single human who could use reapers in the masterful way he did). So think about whether you're comfortable with that.
On ghost counters, I don't get this argument. Ghosts were counterable before their recent nerf with back-of-army infestor pull-up fungals, broods, and ling-bane-lurker. We don't need to speculate about this, we can just look at all the titles Serral, Reynor, Dark, Rogue, Solar, etc. won against late game ghost play. They even won against the ridiculous mass ghost strats that got popular in the last few years. I support the ghost nerfs, but ghosts were countable pre-nerf with the above-described tactics, and that's definitely still the case now post-nerf without needing to have a cloaked spellcaster that can create game-ending damage basically embedded with your opponent's army.
I don’t think it’s that relevant how few people can execute a strat, tactic or technique, the pertinent factors for me are: 1. Is it counterable? And is the counterplay at least reasonably equivalent to execute compared to the opponent’s effort put in employing it? 2. Is it the kind of unit interaction that you want to see? (Extremely, extremely subjective)
Byun’s reapers were during my one real hiatus from following the game, and I’m sure it was pretty hype at the time, and subsequently watching it it’s a godlike feat of micro.
But, on the flipside once the novelty of observing such fantastic control, if your counter in many instances is ‘hope Byun messes up his control’, you don’t really have that effective counterplay in your locker. Plus it’s kinda fundamentally silly to me to have a scout/skirmish unit just be massed and snowball provided sufficient control is there.
For me with this Infestor play it’s also hard to execute, but primarily because it’s one of many other things you’re trying to manage. There may yet be effective counterplay to be discovered, and fundamentally I quite like the play, where Zergs have been pushed to work out how to jump on Bio/Ghost balls without being kited to death and trading horribly. Which they’ve found, now the ball has been passed to Terran to counter this tactic.
If over time it starts to be very common and oppressive and Terrans just cant figure consistent counters, as I’ve said before I’m not against some minor tweaks, perhaps to visibility, perhaps Infestors are only visually invisible if they’re stationary, perhaps a very slight delay on cast post-burrow. There’s plenty there as a suitable candidate.
It would be something of a shame though if a pretty nifty tactical innovation got nuked before that process played out.
I’m not a betting man but I’m definitely one for predictions! I think we’ll see some continued success from the Serrals of this world, but Terrans will be more wise to it. Even with those top guys you’ll probably see some games where through improved star sense or blind luck, 15/20 Infestors get spotted and wiped before they can spring a good trap. And probably a whole load of lesser Zergs not quite getting the splitting/army movement and syncing down to make much use of it.
And ultimately it’s less of a ZvT strat so much as an anti-Maru (and Clem to a slightly lesser degree ) innovation anyway. Other players aren’t consistently able to even get to the split-map/borderline split phase in a good position, nor execute that defensive attritional style to the requisite level. I’m slightly exaggerating but it’s almost like nerfing one dude for something he only needs to get out of the locker to beat 2 other dudes with
I like your framework here, it’s just that maybe I’d answer the questions differently than you. In general in RTS I don’t think I want to see some kind of offensive spellcaster that is able to shark around the opponent’s army and cause game-ending damage on the regular without a clear and obvious mistake on the opponent’s part unless it also is a very risky and costly strategy. To me sharkfestor is like nukes, but instead of causing game-ending damage 1 out of 1000 times exclusively when the opponent makes a terrible mistake, it’s 1 out of 10 times when the opponent hasn’t spammed enough scans and turrets all over the map. This dynamic is pretty unique to mid-to-late game TvZ for me due to the unique interactions associated with the ability to chain fungal, prevent medivac pickup, complete the ghost genocide, and remax/ship a few waves without much risk. We’ve all watched these TvZs. If the banes hit the ghosts it’s pretty much over. I’m okay with that in general and even in most fungal scenarios like the the normal pull-up infestor move from the back of your army. Sharkfestor doesn’t sit right tho. Maybe you’re right and we’ll see the Raven counter or something that will change my mind. But honestly I’ve felt this way for years now, mostly in relation to Dark’s abusive play, but as I said it’s not really about any one player and more about the unit interactions.
On February 13 2024 22:29 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: If we're going to nerf Ghost, I would like to say that the auto attack or snipe should be nerfed, please do NOT nerf EMP. Nerfing EMP has the side effect of unnecessarily nerfing Mech, especially in TvP.
Please focus the nerfs or unit reworks in a way that target bio play firstmost, and mech last. Mech TvP especially does not deserve a single unnecessary nerf ever again.
I hate when changes are made that are mostly to address bio or standard play, but end up nerfing Mech, and there are easy ways to compensate for that without affecting bio or other MUs but unfortunately because no one left playing/watching cares enough about Mech, there's no one to vouch and implement it i guess...
On that note, I was just thinking again: Was the cost revert for Ghost from 200/100 back to 150/150 really necessary? I tend to hear from casters that Ghosts are expensive, but gas isn't really a limiting factor for Bio is it? It's minerals.
David Kim said that the reason Ghost was changed to 200/100 from 150/150 (way back in WoL) was to make it more costly for Bio to get, while making it easier for Mech to get (since Mech is much more gas heavy and doesn't mind sinking minerals).
I still don't fully understand why the newer balance team reverted this. Their reasoning IIRC was that it makes more expensive, but does it really? I agree with David Kim's reasoning more. We see games where most resources are mined out, and mineral patches are emptied first with mass OC/MULE, while Refineries still have lots of gas.
Raven rework into being more of a early game / bio spellcaster also hurt Mech. I really hate how much the AA missile debuff specifically helps bio's weapons way more than Mech weapons. Now both spellcasters benefit Mech less for the cost compared to how much more they became useful to Bio ;( (Though thankfully with the new Cyclone, AA missile is significantly more useful!) I would be happy if Ghost cost was changed even to 175/125 and snipe slightly nerfed further (maybe 1 sec longer delay before firing? that way the damage is less burst and less potent in battles), that gas is precious.
The Ghost cost is currently 150/125, which I think is a really good cost for it. 200/100 was weird and I think in any regard 200/100 is better than 150/150, because you can just opt out of the Refinery and expand quicker as a Bio player anyhow.
The Raven missile was changed when we had the pew, pew Cyclone, so that is actually why the change made sense. Now it is sadly just a Bio support unit, which is lame, when the original purpose of the unit was positional play AKA Mech play (Auto Turret, PDD with long lifetimes).
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Dark. But even if you disagree, you're effectively arguing that reapers should be reverted (everyone acknowledged Byun was literally the single human who could use reapers in the masterful way he did). So think about whether you're comfortable with that.
On ghost counters, I don't get this argument. Ghosts were counterable before their recent nerf with back-of-army infestor pull-up fungals, broods, and ling-bane-lurker. We don't need to speculate about this, we can just look at all the titles Serral, Reynor, Dark, Rogue, Solar, etc. won against late game ghost play. They even won against the ridiculous mass ghost strats that got popular in the last few years. I support the ghost nerfs, but ghosts were countable pre-nerf with the above-described tactics, and that's definitely still the case now post-nerf without needing to have a cloaked spellcaster that can create game-ending damage basically embedded with your opponent's army.
I don’t think it’s that relevant how few people can execute a strat, tactic or technique, the pertinent factors for me are: 1. Is it counterable? And is the counterplay at least reasonably equivalent to execute compared to the opponent’s effort put in employing it? 2. Is it the kind of unit interaction that you want to see? (Extremely, extremely subjective)
Byun’s reapers were during my one real hiatus from following the game, and I’m sure it was pretty hype at the time, and subsequently watching it it’s a godlike feat of micro.
But, on the flipside once the novelty of observing such fantastic control, if your counter in many instances is ‘hope Byun messes up his control’, you don’t really have that effective counterplay in your locker. Plus it’s kinda fundamentally silly to me to have a scout/skirmish unit just be massed and snowball provided sufficient control is there.
For me with this Infestor play it’s also hard to execute, but primarily because it’s one of many other things you’re trying to manage. There may yet be effective counterplay to be discovered, and fundamentally I quite like the play, where Zergs have been pushed to work out how to jump on Bio/Ghost balls without being kited to death and trading horribly. Which they’ve found, now the ball has been passed to Terran to counter this tactic.
If over time it starts to be very common and oppressive and Terrans just cant figure consistent counters, as I’ve said before I’m not against some minor tweaks, perhaps to visibility, perhaps Infestors are only visually invisible if they’re stationary, perhaps a very slight delay on cast post-burrow. There’s plenty there as a suitable candidate.
It would be something of a shame though if a pretty nifty tactical innovation got nuked before that process played out.
I’m not a betting man but I’m definitely one for predictions! I think we’ll see some continued success from the Serrals of this world, but Terrans will be more wise to it. Even with those top guys you’ll probably see some games where through improved star sense or blind luck, 15/20 Infestors get spotted and wiped before they can spring a good trap. And probably a whole load of lesser Zergs not quite getting the splitting/army movement and syncing down to make much use of it.
And ultimately it’s less of a ZvT strat so much as an anti-Maru (and Clem to a slightly lesser degree ) innovation anyway. Other players aren’t consistently able to even get to the split-map/borderline split phase in a good position, nor execute that defensive attritional style to the requisite level. I’m slightly exaggerating but it’s almost like nerfing one dude for something he only needs to get out of the locker to beat 2 other dudes with
I like your framework here, it’s just that maybe I’d answer the questions differently than you. In general in RTS I don’t think I want to see some kind of offensive spellcaster that is able to shark around the opponent’s army and cause game-ending damage on the regular without a clear and obvious mistake on the opponent’s part unless it also is a very risky and costly strategy. To me sharkfestor is like nukes, but instead of causing game-ending damage 1 out of 1000 times exclusively when the opponent makes a terrible mistake, it’s 1 out of 10 times when the opponent hasn’t spammed enough scans and turrets all over the map. This dynamic is pretty unique to mid-to-late game TvZ for me due to the unique interactions associated with the ability to chain fungal, prevent medivac pickup, complete the ghost genocide, and remax/ship a few waves without much risk. We’ve all watched these TvZs. If the banes hit the ghosts it’s pretty much over. I’m okay with that in general and even in most fungal scenarios like the the normal pull-up infestor move from the back of your army. Sharkfestor doesn’t sit right tho. Maybe you’re right and we’ll see the Raven counter or something that will change my mind. But honestly I’ve felt this way for years now, mostly in relation to Dark’s abusive play, but as I said it’s not really about any one player and more about the unit interactions.
You make some damn fine points here, the only point I would make as a counter is the sharkninjafestor interaction is a bit more singular, a bit more obvious and evocative, and that may skew perceptions a bit. Nailing that 1-2 punch is pretty damn brutal, and it’s super obviously game-changing with even a couple of successful efforts.
An entrenched setup with ghosts tends not to do that, it’s consistently decent to brutal trades that individually aren’t that impactful, but cumulatively add up to rather a lots. In a really intense game with tons going on, a handful of big moments stand out more than a ton of cumulatively equivalent trades.
Maybe a stretch but hey, I think you get what I mean. A monster disruptor hit will resonate more than a bunch of skirmishes where bio squads rinse gateway units when armies are split, but really they’re both kinda equivalent in deciding how a game goes ultimately.
Balance can be tweaked, and we all have our personal biases. I think the Infestor is broadly what a caster should be, and a huge departure from previous incarnations. Spoken as someone who once uninstalled the game after 8 BL/Infestor PvZ games right in a row on ladder.
A caster IMO should be potent on its own, but shouldn’t ideally scale positively with too many additional casters. It should dovetail with the faction’s overall identity and play style and augment it.
In this sense, with my particular bias I think Infestors may be the best designed caster in the game currently, followed by Templar, followed by sentries. A genuinely unthinkable scenario if you talked to 22 year old me as opposed to 34 year old me!
Ravens in TvT can be so potent that having an extra one can swing a game with disables. Vipers fly and there’s less positional consideration as a result, and they basically hard counter mech. Ghosts in TvZ you hit a point where they’re massable and an efficient combat unit, which I don’t think casters should generally be.
I think the question shifts to whether the very specific sharkfestor deployment is too good or not, and as I said I’ll wait and see.
If it does prove overtooled in the next few months, by all means nerf it. My favourite adjustment (if needed) would be to keep it basically invisible while stationary, more prominent when moving. That way you can still setup some traps, but you can’t easily shadow an army and really have to position even better. And if you do shadow an army you can’t point to a Terran not being observant rather than being lucky/unlucky with scans.
I think that would keep it as a viable play, but a little harder to execute on the Zerg’s end, and a little easier to defend on the Terran’s. Whereas a more drastic nerf would borderline eliminate it as an option.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Are you seriously gonna tell me players like Reynor, Dark , Solar etc are unable to do what Serral did with infestors? Serral is leading the way to what is possible because he is the best Zerg right now. All Serral is doing is opening their eyes to what is possible and opening our eyes to what is obviously way to strong.
Ya we are seriously telling you no other Zergs other than Serral can pull off those infestor plays constantly.
We already saw solar reynor and dark try it, let me give you a hint. They sucked at it
Literally almost all the terrans can do the same thing with mass ghosts.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Dark. But even if you disagree, you're effectively arguing that reapers should be reverted (everyone acknowledged Byun was literally the single human who could use reapers in the masterful way he did). So think about whether you're comfortable with that.
On ghost counters, I don't get this argument. Ghosts were counterable before their recent nerf with back-of-army infestor pull-up fungals, broods, and ling-bane-lurker. We don't need to speculate about this, we can just look at all the titles Serral, Reynor, Dark, Rogue, Solar, etc. won against late game ghost play. They even won against the ridiculous mass ghost strats that got popular in the last few years. I support the ghost nerfs, but ghosts were countable pre-nerf with the above-described tactics, and that's definitely still the case now post-nerf without needing to have a cloaked spellcaster that can create game-ending damage basically embedded with your opponent's army.
I don’t think it’s that relevant how few people can execute a strat, tactic or technique, the pertinent factors for me are: 1. Is it counterable? And is the counterplay at least reasonably equivalent to execute compared to the opponent’s effort put in employing it? 2. Is it the kind of unit interaction that you want to see? (Extremely, extremely subjective)
Byun’s reapers were during my one real hiatus from following the game, and I’m sure it was pretty hype at the time, and subsequently watching it it’s a godlike feat of micro.
But, on the flipside once the novelty of observing such fantastic control, if your counter in many instances is ‘hope Byun messes up his control’, you don’t really have that effective counterplay in your locker. Plus it’s kinda fundamentally silly to me to have a scout/skirmish unit just be massed and snowball provided sufficient control is there.
For me with this Infestor play it’s also hard to execute, but primarily because it’s one of many other things you’re trying to manage. There may yet be effective counterplay to be discovered, and fundamentally I quite like the play, where Zergs have been pushed to work out how to jump on Bio/Ghost balls without being kited to death and trading horribly. Which they’ve found, now the ball has been passed to Terran to counter this tactic.
If over time it starts to be very common and oppressive and Terrans just cant figure consistent counters, as I’ve said before I’m not against some minor tweaks, perhaps to visibility, perhaps Infestors are only visually invisible if they’re stationary, perhaps a very slight delay on cast post-burrow. There’s plenty there as a suitable candidate.
It would be something of a shame though if a pretty nifty tactical innovation got nuked before that process played out.
I’m not a betting man but I’m definitely one for predictions! I think we’ll see some continued success from the Serrals of this world, but Terrans will be more wise to it. Even with those top guys you’ll probably see some games where through improved star sense or blind luck, 15/20 Infestors get spotted and wiped before they can spring a good trap. And probably a whole load of lesser Zergs not quite getting the splitting/army movement and syncing down to make much use of it.
And ultimately it’s less of a ZvT strat so much as an anti-Maru (and Clem to a slightly lesser degree ) innovation anyway. Other players aren’t consistently able to even get to the split-map/borderline split phase in a good position, nor execute that defensive attritional style to the requisite level. I’m slightly exaggerating but it’s almost like nerfing one dude for something he only needs to get out of the locker to beat 2 other dudes with
I like your framework here, it’s just that maybe I’d answer the questions differently than you. In general in RTS I don’t think I want to see some kind of offensive spellcaster that is able to shark around the opponent’s army and cause game-ending damage on the regular without a clear and obvious mistake on the opponent’s part unless it also is a very risky and costly strategy. To me sharkfestor is like nukes, but instead of causing game-ending damage 1 out of 1000 times exclusively when the opponent makes a terrible mistake, it’s 1 out of 10 times when the opponent hasn’t spammed enough scans and turrets all over the map. This dynamic is pretty unique to mid-to-late game TvZ for me due to the unique interactions associated with the ability to chain fungal, prevent medivac pickup, complete the ghost genocide, and remax/ship a few waves without much risk. We’ve all watched these TvZs. If the banes hit the ghosts it’s pretty much over. I’m okay with that in general and even in most fungal scenarios like the the normal pull-up infestor move from the back of your army. Sharkfestor doesn’t sit right tho. Maybe you’re right and we’ll see the Raven counter or something that will change my mind. But honestly I’ve felt this way for years now, mostly in relation to Dark’s abusive play, but as I said it’s not really about any one player and more about the unit interactions.
You make some damn fine points here, the only point I would make as a counter is the sharkninjafestor interaction is a bit more singular, a bit more obvious and evocative, and that may skew perceptions a bit. Nailing that 1-2 punch is pretty damn brutal, and it’s super obviously game-changing with even a couple of successful efforts.
An entrenched setup with ghosts tends not to do that, it’s consistently decent to brutal trades that individually aren’t that impactful, but cumulatively add up to rather a lots. In a really intense game with tons going on, a handful of big moments stand out more than a ton of cumulatively equivalent trades.
Maybe a stretch but hey, I think you get what I mean. A monster disruptor hit will resonate more than a bunch of skirmishes where bio squads rinse gateway units when armies are split, but really they’re both kinda equivalent in deciding how a game goes ultimately.
Balance can be tweaked, and we all have our personal biases. I think the Infestor is broadly what a caster should be, and a huge departure from previous incarnations. Spoken as someone who once uninstalled the game after 8 BL/Infestor PvZ games right in a row on ladder.
A caster IMO should be potent on its own, but shouldn’t ideally scale positively with too many additional casters. It should dovetail with the faction’s overall identity and play style and augment it.
In this sense, with my particular bias I think Infestors may be the best designed caster in the game currently, followed by Templar, followed by sentries. A genuinely unthinkable scenario if you talked to 22 year old me as opposed to 34 year old me!
Ravens in TvT can be so potent that having an extra one can swing a game with disables. Vipers fly and there’s less positional consideration as a result, and they basically hard counter mech. Ghosts in TvZ you hit a point where they’re massable and an efficient combat unit, which I don’t think casters should generally be.
I think the question shifts to whether the very specific sharkfestor deployment is too good or not, and as I said I’ll wait and see.
If it does prove overtooled in the next few months, by all means nerf it. My favourite adjustment (if needed) would be to keep it basically invisible while stationary, more prominent when moving. That way you can still setup some traps, but you can’t easily shadow an army and really have to position even better. And if you do shadow an army you can’t point to a Terran not being observant rather than being lucky/unlucky with scans.
I think that would keep it as a viable play, but a little harder to execute on the Zerg’s end, and a little easier to defend on the Terran’s. Whereas a more drastic nerf would borderline eliminate it as an option.
We shall see!
You’re of course right the big moments stand out, and surely skew our perception, but don’t forget the ghosts are supposed to trade brutally in TvZ. This is the setup. Failing to have the trades go brutally in your favor as Terran is the loss condition on most TvZ maps and unit comps. I think for the same reasons we can overemphasize the big moments, we can watch ghosts insta-murder dozens of zerglings and pew-pew premium units without getting touched and forget that Terran is expected to seek out and achieve trades like this in the match-up. I don’t think this makes the matchup easier or harder for one side, it’s just the way it is.
That being said, I do not like ghosts in PvT. I’ve seen too many games end when the Protoss army somehow gets EMP’ed and then it’s bye bye glass cannon. The ghosts should remember the fungal genocide before they abuse toss armies…the one thing they have in common with the Protoss robo tech is that once gone, it’s pretty much T-15 seconds until enemy is in your main and it’s GGs.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Dark. But even if you disagree, you're effectively arguing that reapers should be reverted (everyone acknowledged Byun was literally the single human who could use reapers in the masterful way he did). So think about whether you're comfortable with that.
On ghost counters, I don't get this argument. Ghosts were counterable before their recent nerf with back-of-army infestor pull-up fungals, broods, and ling-bane-lurker. We don't need to speculate about this, we can just look at all the titles Serral, Reynor, Dark, Rogue, Solar, etc. won against late game ghost play. They even won against the ridiculous mass ghost strats that got popular in the last few years. I support the ghost nerfs, but ghosts were countable pre-nerf with the above-described tactics, and that's definitely still the case now post-nerf without needing to have a cloaked spellcaster that can create game-ending damage basically embedded with your opponent's army.
I don’t think it’s that relevant how few people can execute a strat, tactic or technique, the pertinent factors for me are: 1. Is it counterable? And is the counterplay at least reasonably equivalent to execute compared to the opponent’s effort put in employing it? 2. Is it the kind of unit interaction that you want to see? (Extremely, extremely subjective)
Byun’s reapers were during my one real hiatus from following the game, and I’m sure it was pretty hype at the time, and subsequently watching it it’s a godlike feat of micro.
But, on the flipside once the novelty of observing such fantastic control, if your counter in many instances is ‘hope Byun messes up his control’, you don’t really have that effective counterplay in your locker. Plus it’s kinda fundamentally silly to me to have a scout/skirmish unit just be massed and snowball provided sufficient control is there.
For me with this Infestor play it’s also hard to execute, but primarily because it’s one of many other things you’re trying to manage. There may yet be effective counterplay to be discovered, and fundamentally I quite like the play, where Zergs have been pushed to work out how to jump on Bio/Ghost balls without being kited to death and trading horribly. Which they’ve found, now the ball has been passed to Terran to counter this tactic.
If over time it starts to be very common and oppressive and Terrans just cant figure consistent counters, as I’ve said before I’m not against some minor tweaks, perhaps to visibility, perhaps Infestors are only visually invisible if they’re stationary, perhaps a very slight delay on cast post-burrow. There’s plenty there as a suitable candidate.
It would be something of a shame though if a pretty nifty tactical innovation got nuked before that process played out.
I’m not a betting man but I’m definitely one for predictions! I think we’ll see some continued success from the Serrals of this world, but Terrans will be more wise to it. Even with those top guys you’ll probably see some games where through improved star sense or blind luck, 15/20 Infestors get spotted and wiped before they can spring a good trap. And probably a whole load of lesser Zergs not quite getting the splitting/army movement and syncing down to make much use of it.
And ultimately it’s less of a ZvT strat so much as an anti-Maru (and Clem to a slightly lesser degree ) innovation anyway. Other players aren’t consistently able to even get to the split-map/borderline split phase in a good position, nor execute that defensive attritional style to the requisite level. I’m slightly exaggerating but it’s almost like nerfing one dude for something he only needs to get out of the locker to beat 2 other dudes with
I like your framework here, it’s just that maybe I’d answer the questions differently than you. In general in RTS I don’t think I want to see some kind of offensive spellcaster that is able to shark around the opponent’s army and cause game-ending damage on the regular without a clear and obvious mistake on the opponent’s part unless it also is a very risky and costly strategy. To me sharkfestor is like nukes, but instead of causing game-ending damage 1 out of 1000 times exclusively when the opponent makes a terrible mistake, it’s 1 out of 10 times when the opponent hasn’t spammed enough scans and turrets all over the map. This dynamic is pretty unique to mid-to-late game TvZ for me due to the unique interactions associated with the ability to chain fungal, prevent medivac pickup, complete the ghost genocide, and remax/ship a few waves without much risk. We’ve all watched these TvZs. If the banes hit the ghosts it’s pretty much over. I’m okay with that in general and even in most fungal scenarios like the the normal pull-up infestor move from the back of your army. Sharkfestor doesn’t sit right tho. Maybe you’re right and we’ll see the Raven counter or something that will change my mind. But honestly I’ve felt this way for years now, mostly in relation to Dark’s abusive play, but as I said it’s not really about any one player and more about the unit interactions.
You make some damn fine points here, the only point I would make as a counter is the sharkninjafestor interaction is a bit more singular, a bit more obvious and evocative, and that may skew perceptions a bit. Nailing that 1-2 punch is pretty damn brutal, and it’s super obviously game-changing with even a couple of successful efforts.
An entrenched setup with ghosts tends not to do that, it’s consistently decent to brutal trades that individually aren’t that impactful, but cumulatively add up to rather a lots. In a really intense game with tons going on, a handful of big moments stand out more than a ton of cumulatively equivalent trades.
Maybe a stretch but hey, I think you get what I mean. A monster disruptor hit will resonate more than a bunch of skirmishes where bio squads rinse gateway units when armies are split, but really they’re both kinda equivalent in deciding how a game goes ultimately.
Balance can be tweaked, and we all have our personal biases. I think the Infestor is broadly what a caster should be, and a huge departure from previous incarnations. Spoken as someone who once uninstalled the game after 8 BL/Infestor PvZ games right in a row on ladder.
A caster IMO should be potent on its own, but shouldn’t ideally scale positively with too many additional casters. It should dovetail with the faction’s overall identity and play style and augment it.
In this sense, with my particular bias I think Infestors may be the best designed caster in the game currently, followed by Templar, followed by sentries. A genuinely unthinkable scenario if you talked to 22 year old me as opposed to 34 year old me!
Ravens in TvT can be so potent that having an extra one can swing a game with disables. Vipers fly and there’s less positional consideration as a result, and they basically hard counter mech. Ghosts in TvZ you hit a point where they’re massable and an efficient combat unit, which I don’t think casters should generally be.
I think the question shifts to whether the very specific sharkfestor deployment is too good or not, and as I said I’ll wait and see.
If it does prove overtooled in the next few months, by all means nerf it. My favourite adjustment (if needed) would be to keep it basically invisible while stationary, more prominent when moving. That way you can still setup some traps, but you can’t easily shadow an army and really have to position even better. And if you do shadow an army you can’t point to a Terran not being observant rather than being lucky/unlucky with scans.
I think that would keep it as a viable play, but a little harder to execute on the Zerg’s end, and a little easier to defend on the Terran’s. Whereas a more drastic nerf would borderline eliminate it as an option.
We shall see!
You’re of course right the big moments stand out, and surely skew our perception, but don’t forget the ghosts are supposed to trade brutally in TvZ. This is the setup. Failing to have the trades go brutally in your favor as Terran is the loss condition on most TvZ maps and unit comps. I think for the same reasons we can overemphasize the big moments, we can watch ghosts insta-murder dozens of zerglings and pew-pew premium units without getting touched and forget that Terran is expected to seek out and achieve trades like this in the match-up. I don’t think this makes the matchup easier or harder for one side, it’s just the way it is.
That being said, I do not like ghosts in PvT. I’ve seen too many games end when the Protoss army somehow gets EMP’ed and then it’s bye bye glass cannon. The ghosts should remember the fungal genocide before they abuse toss armies…the one thing they have in common with the Protoss robo tech is that once gone, it’s pretty much T-15 seconds until enemy is in your main and it’s GGs.
Aye, although I do quite like that ghosts/ravens have different uses depending on mechanical/biological units. Not that it’s always fair but it does make the biological/mechanical or robotic distinction a bit more meaningful and adds a bit of grounding and flavour.
The ghost having a very different role in different matchups is pretty cool, but yeah it is rather strong against Toss to say the least, especially if the Toss makes an era.
I guess SC2 is just a punishing game all round and is full of pretty rough interactions. So long as folks don’t look the other way in ones that favour their preferred races while zoning in on one that negatively impacts them, then we can have fruitful discussion such as this.
If I could wave my magic wand I’d definitely have fewer instances of it, but I can’t see how you could rebalance the game with a skeleton crew to do it!
The bottom line is that there's really not another unit interaction in this game in which the game basically instantly ends without a super obvious mistake by the losing player
Are you sure ? If you get DTs and got no detection its gg...
The bottom line is that there's really not another unit interaction in this game in which the game basically instantly ends without a super obvious mistake by the losing player
Are you sure ? If you get DTs and got no detection its gg...
just get 1 damn Raven and stop whinning
I see surprise DT GGs rarely, and anyway they are like various build order losses that are not very fun to watch but happen occasionally primarily in the early game in all match-ups when one side cuts corners and fails to scout or get detection and the other side happens to choose a build that hard counters. This is the kind of thing that happens in any strategy game with information asymmetry, for better or for worse. The last time I saw any kind of DT build do game-ending damage in the mid or late game was Classic's DT blink meme build against Rogue at Blizzcon in 2019. DTs are interesting units for sure, but because they are slow melee units without splash damage or powerful spells they don't come close to infestors in their ability to do game-ending damage. You don't have to take my word for it, just think about how a pack of ghosts handle DTs versus sharkfestor. The DTs of course would be revealed and sniped before they could get many swipes off, whereas the sharkfestor may die but will still get its fungal or neural-EMP off, either of which could win the game on re-max. Serral, Dark, and Reynor take out Terrans that are otherwise stable pretty consistently in the mid and late game with sharkfestor play. Is it hard to execute? Sure. Is it harder to execute than Byun's reaper play? Probably not.
It may be reasonable to ask Terrans to "just build a raven" (this is Harstem's take), but most reactions to the new infestor nerf seem to welcome it for many of the reasons discussed in this thread. I've been feeling this way about sharkfestor for years now, glad to see the balance council recognizing how problematic this unit is. I agree with some of the commentators who were saying the vision nerf probably isn't enough, but we'll need need to see how it plays out.
Funny how toss always needs to bring obs against terran and Zergs
Zergs need to bring overseer against toss and terran
Yet terran think they shouldn’t bring a “raven” because it’s too slow
Terran are way too entitled and used to having things given to them on a silver platter. They already giving all the most forgiving mechanics ie scans, mules, instant depot drops.
The part where you try to read pigs mind was a bit cringe. Also your entire post seems to be mostly about burrowed infestors, which, did get nerfed. Is this a troll?
On April 13 2024 07:00 goldensail wrote: Here's a game just played between Clem and...PiG...yeah PiG... www.youtube.com
I challenge anyone to say with a straight face after watching this how infestors are *not* OP.
So OP they carry Zerg to tremendous feats in the last few weeks like...uh...lets see...Shin won 2-1 against GuMiho...and then...mhm, Elazer 2-0ed Gerald! Damn those infestors! But hey, atleast PiG won against Clem in an insignifcant game, that clearly shows how OP a unit is.
Stop your whining already, with Serral out of business for a while you won't see a Zerg win anything atleast until ESL Spring and even that will completly depend on the form of Serral (if he is even able to play).
Clem won the match convincingly without ever being in any trouble....
What is the point of the Zerg OP argument? That Pig won a few engagements while being outmined and outproduced?
Zerg should never win an engagement vs Terran, if Zerg wins a single engagement where they come from 2 sides into a full surround and land fungals into clumped up Terran army it means Zerg is OP.
im not sure what you are saying. the infestor is easy to see while burrowed. What you need to do some in inspect the maps. Look at what the ground looks like normally, over time you can tell that it looks different. in fact id argue its easier to see moving than any other cloaked unit. oh ye, lets mot talk about what seems like infinite scans when you get to these points in the game.
anyways, infestors dont just turn up, build a raven, place turrets, tanks are great cover, if ur toss, observers are might as well be free at this point but oracles are amazing. See you arent putting an argument to how a zerg is supposed to deal with a 100 supply balled up army with all the late game 3/3 shit when the other races a similar ability (and better) at their disposal, tanks are the same unit more or less, but guess what their salvos are fucking free! Storms, holy shit, build 6 templar and guess what, you get another unit when all the energy is done to mop up the already fucked units after the storms!
With the state of the game right now, fungals and detection on an expensive ass unit which is slow as all fuck is fine. tell me, when you see an infestor venture over the front lines do you ever see it survive?
Im now doing to watch how 1 fungal which does fuck all damage really turned the whole game. Fungal for me recently has become a zoning tool but damn, im already controlling 3 other control grps, this shit is hard!
PiG outplayed Clem in those engagements, simple as that. Now he never had any real chance for the win, because that would need incredible cost efficiency that only the top Zergs can obtain.
The Burrowing isn't a problem, what is OP is the 10 range on a spell with 2.25 radius. This was what the cabal managed to get in, because we all know ZvP was balanced and must be maintained balanced, and a +1 vision on Pylon is the same as +1 range on Fungal..
EPT
