Starbow - Page 123

- Lurker unburrow hotkey changed from E to R.
- Dark Templar hotkey changed from K to R.
- Dark Swarm now protects both friendly and enemy units. (Earlier only friendly units...)
- Viper nest can now be canceled during construction.
- Banelings now have a button for the Explode ability.
- Firebats now deal proper damage. (Earlier did x3 dmg vs Light units...)
- Defilers can no longer Consume Changelings for energy.
- Medic Stimpack now displays the right text.
- Defiler model smaller.
- Dragoon micro & model size adjusted to feel more smooth.
- Reaver unloaded from Warp Prism now has a 2 second delay before attacking. Allows Protoss to target fire with the first Scarab, and gives more time for the enemy player to react.

- Defiler life changed from 120 to 80.
- Defiler starting armor changed from 0 to 1.
- Consumtion for Viper no longer requires an upgrade.
- Dark Swarm range increased from 5 to 7.
- Dark Swarm radius decreased from 3.5 to 2.75

- Arbiter life changed from 100 to 200.

- Reaper upgrade no longer requries a Factory.
- Irradiate damage lowered from 180 over 30 seconds to 120 over 20 seconds. (Maintains the same DPS)
- Mech & Air upgrades are merged into the same upgrade at Armory.
- Nerve Jammers reduction of burrowed ground units attack damage increased from 25% to 50%.
- Ghost cloak research time increased from 72 seconds to 110 seconds.

If you watched any TvZ late game, chances are that you watched Science Vessels for mass Irradiate and Dark Swarm all over the battle. At the moment, the strength of these two abilities evens each other out. Its worth pointing out, that we don’t see this meta as just being temporary, as both of the abilities were heavily used in BW as well and with the introduction of smartcast, they have become easier to use.

While these two abilities can be pretty cool, we would like to see more variation. By making Irradiate barely not kill Mutalisks, Vipers, Lurkers and Guardians, we believe it will still be incredibly strong against Z, but in order to finish of for example the Mutalisks, the terran will need to mix in Vikings. Against Lurkers, we don’t find it to be particularly interesting gameplay when an Irradiate always ends up killing the Lurker. We prefer to see micro that has more counter-elements to it. By buffing Nerve Jammer against Burrowed units, we expect Nerve Jammer to replace Irradiate against Lurkers. Against Nerve Jammer, the Zerg player can reposition his Lurkers or simply target fire the Nerve Jammer to prevent it from activating.

We can see usage for Vikings and Banshee’s in the early game/early midgame, however as the game progresses they become increasingly obsolete due their low damage values which make them quite bad against upgraded enemy units. Given the Irradiate-nerf, we think air units sharing upgrades with mech will be important for balance, but also lead to more variation in the gameplay.

Regarding Dark Swarm, we originally attempted to make this a bit harder to use by giving it a smaller casting rage. After hearing a lot of feedback, we realize this isn’t the correct approach. Further, given Irradiate being nerfed, it would only seem fair that we nerfed this ablity as well. We think the AOE-nerf will make it harder to use optimally during battles and should add a bit more diversification to the zerg army in the lategame.

By giving Vipers the Consumption ability from start, we want to encourage the usage of this unit, which also might help to further add diversification to the Zerg army. For the same reason, the Reaper upgrade is now easier for Terran to obtain, which hopefully encourages more early & mid game harassment.

Arbiter and Defiler life are changed to fit better with the BW values. As we have mentioned earlier, we intend to use values and stats from BW to balance the game, as long as there is no apparent reason for not using them. The reason for this is that we do not have a huge statistical database w/ numbers and are not fulltimed employed w/ Starbow. So in order to make life as "easy" as possible for us, we rely on BW numbers to balance the game where we think it can be justified.

We are constantly looking into solving more bugs and adjusting the balance/design of the game. Spider mines, Bio vs Zerg, Mutalisks, Lurkers, Protoss air, Macro mechanics and many other things are on our to-do-list! We appreciate all feedback regarding the balance, design and gameplay, aswell as bug-reports.