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After complaints recently about balance and heavy discussion here I thought it deserved it's own thread. My suggestions:
Protoss
* Photon cannon building armour increased from 0 to 1
* Photon cannon ground and air attack damage increased from 20 to 21
* Plasma shield upgrade cost decreased from 200/300/400 to 150/250/350
Zerg
* Dark swarm duration decreased from 37.8 seconds to 25 seconds
Terran
* Siege Tank range decreased from 12 to 11
Justification:
PvZ
From my observation, macro games are relatively balanced but protoss has too much trouble surviving various aggressive plays between zergling runbys, hydra busts, and muta/scourge attacks early game.
Photon cannons feel like paper, giving them more armour makes them slightly stronger against hydras, lings, mutas, and increasing their damage to 21 means they 4 shot hydras (25% faster kill time) and 6 shot mutas (17% faster kill time), and 2 shot 3/3 adrenalings (they can survive 3 hits?!) while not changing how fast they kill marines and vultures.
This should make relatively little impact on mid and late game but make the early zerg attacks much, much easier to defend. The +1 carapace upgrades will negate the difference later. +1 Building armour upgrade will help later, but it's probably negligible compared to how much it will help against early rushes.
Dark swarm duration shouldn't impact the PvZ matchup much; dark swarm is good but Zerg generally doesn't camp under for it for a very long time, and if he does it's pretty oppressive.
PvT
It seems that late game upgraded terran is a little hard for protoss to deal with, and reducing siege tank range should reduce the overall strength of a terran army if he spreads out, while Psionic storm can punish a more clumped army.
Siege tanks hitting nexuses from across the map in another base is also a little bit ridiculous.
ZvT
Zerg needs defilers to be able to survive against Bio terran, barely staying alive with a huge supply disadvantage in the most standard games, but the top zergs can seem unbeatable with their dark swarm defense, decreasing the duration gives more windows to punish zerg with for example sieged tanks which can pick off units hiding under dark swarm when it expires, unless Zerg is constantly baby sitting with replacing new swarms which can be killed by irradiate.
Siege tank range reduction might help slightly counterbalance swarm expiring much faster. Mid game pushes rarely leverage the full 12 range anyway
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Context: I've seen discussions about balance changes on reddit etc but it's from people who have no clue about the game, suggesting things like "remove consume" where Zerg will basically never beat Terran then as you can never stop a bio/tank/vessel ball without a big lead.
Similarly, Protoss has so many things that can straight up kill terran in PvT that you have to be very careful nerfing anything that will just allow them to play nexus first and destroy every terran.
The siege tank range reduction might make SnOW style Reaver stalling even more oppressive, the other options I was looking at it somehow making the attack upgrades for terran less impactful. (Vultures changed to have 2 attacks so armour blocks it better? Siege tank getting +4 instead of +5 damage?)
When blizzard changed sunken from 400 to 300 health +2 armour, it made them die in exactly the same amount of hits from zealots (26) but in 76 hits from marines instead of 67, so it was an elegant way to make MnM sunken busts a bit weaker without changing drastically the rest of the game (it also made them weaker against goliaths and dragoons where they are already strong against them). I think adding building armour to cannons is quite elegant as it mainly targets Zerg which have low attack damage with high speed, and marines vs cannons you never see anyway in PvT. The +1 damage is similar as it targets the +1 hp regen zerg get instantly that makes their units tankier than on paper as they survive with 1 hp a lot. (Cannon vs hydra, +0 zealot vs hydra, drone vs vulture, turret vs muta etc)
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No balance patch ever, blizzard can't be trusted (see sc2). Don't give them stupid ideas.
Better map making process for ASL (trickles to ladder, maps are the main culprit).
Yes pvz may be problematic but again maps... Any balance change is too risky, we cant predict the consequences. It would likely break the game in worse ways. Can't have that after 25 years of stability.
You can make UMS stuff with any and all stat changes if you want to test things.
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Very interesting ideas, and actually quite reasonable.
The problem with trying to fix BW balance is that there is now a long and extensive history, basically dating back to Patch 16.1. Changing the balance would create the first major disconnect between modern matches and older matches, where only the maps and the meta were different.
The other problem is that this could trigger an endless series of patches, in a mindset typical of SC2 (which, in my opinion, is partly what led to the game’s demise).
Finally, Brood War / Remastered is, in a way, a two-tiered game. There’s the pro BW scene, where players take the game to new heights and push it to its absolute limits; and then there’s “regular” BW, played by just about every other player. The game’s internal structure and mechanical limitations are the main cause of this stratospheric difference. A good example is Game 3 of Group B in the current ASL between Leta and Queen. Leta simply does something (Wraith micro) that none of us will ever be able to do.
While TvP may seem to put Protoss at a disadvantage at the highest levels (that’s up for debate), this simply isn’t the case all the way up to A rank-ish, where Protoss is an easier race to play than Terran, or at least one that allows for many more free wins.
In short, what I’m saying is that a patch could be a great idea at the pro level, but a disaster for everyone else.
As good as your ideas sound. It's probably better not to change anything.
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Balance with maps, there are still so many ideas left to explore. For example, one idea that has been played around with is neutral spells. Many previous implementations have admittedly felt clunky to me, but there are a lot of creative map makers out there, and if they were encouraged to really let loose on some creative spell placement, I imagine that certain match-ups can be swayed in certain scenarios (e.g., a DWeb in the only place where a Gateway in the nat is rangeable by Hydra but not covered by perfect Cannon placement).
And, as has been mentioned in other threads recently, someone can always make a UMS version of InsertModernMapHere with all of these proposed changes for testing, and to play a tournament in, to get pro feedback on... But somehow it seems we as a community never make it far past the "talk in circles about it on the forums" stage. If the situation was so dire that the game was truly broken at any level, you would think there would be more of a collective urgency to resolve it. I mean, are we all just that collectlviely lazy, or maybe there is nothing that pressing to begin with?
I personally think it's mostly the latter but it could also be a bit of this a bit of that, too.
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On September 10 2026 23:18 WGT-Baal wrote:
No balance patch ever, blizzard can't be trusted (see sc2). Don't give them stupid ideas.
Blizzard made balance changes to get to the game the way it is now.. there's no reason to reject changes outright.
What needs to be avoided is anything that can majorly change the game, perhaps an option to select patch as well in custom lobbies so we can always revert to the last good version
In short, what I’m saying is that a patch could be a great idea at the pro level, but a disaster for everyone else.
Agree, but lower ranked players are probably not going to notice 1 armour on photon cannons, it all depends what the changes are.
In anything, protecting lower rank players from cheesey plays like hydra busts will probably help the enjoyment of games in lower rank lobbies.
Also, the "second tier" of players playing a different game, are already impacted by balance issues that are different than at the pro level, but mild imbalances there can easily be overcome by skill so it's easy to argue that once the game is overall fun it doesn't really matter if the balance is not perfect.
For example, I'm pretty sure it's MUCH easier for P to play against T at B rank than vice versa, but is it really detrimental to the game? Micro adjustments to balance are really for fans to enjoy a pro experience with games that enjoyable to watch and have huge skill expression (people enjoy mirrors less, people don't want to see lots of all-ins because someone can't win a macro game etc)
Balance with maps, there are still so many ideas left to explore.
Balancing with maps is an idea that was born out of desperation, when blizzard would clearly NEVER make any actual balance changes in the game. There are EXTREME measures being taken like putting lowground sections purely to target one specific strat in one matchup (9-7-3 hydra busts).
Even if blizzard would be willing to make changes, the trust in blizzard is low as we can see from the posts here.
Diversity and map making to change the games and tweak the balance is fantastic, but it's not the perfect way all the time.
The other problem is that this could trigger an endless series of patches, in a mindset typical of SC2 (which, in my opinion, is partly what led to the game’s demise).
Endless series of patches sort of requires an actively supported game which BW isn't.
You can make UMS stuff with any and all stat changes if you want to test things.
This is completely correct, the protoss changes could be done in a custom map if everyone agreed it was good for the game.
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On September 11 2026 00:37 Slayer91 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2026 23:18 WGT-Baal wrote:
No balance patch ever, blizzard can't be trusted (see sc2). Don't give them stupid ideas.
Blizzard made balance changes to get to the game the way it is now.. there's no reason to reject changes outright. What needs to be avoided is anything that can majorly change the game, perhaps an option to select patch as well in custom lobbies so we can always revert to the last good version Show nested quote +
In short, what I’m saying is that a patch could be a great idea at the pro level, but a disaster for everyone else.
Agree, but lower ranked players are probably not going to notice 1 armour on photon cannons, it all depends what the changes are. In anything, protecting lower rank players from cheesey plays like hydra busts will probably help the enjoyment of games in lower rank lobbies. Also, the "second tier" of players playing a different game, are already impacted by balance issues that are different than at the pro level, but mild imbalances there can easily be overcome by skill so it's easy to argue that once the game is overall fun it doesn't really matter if the balance is not perfect. For example, I'm pretty sure it's MUCH easier for P to play against T at B rank than vice versa, but is it really detrimental to the game? Micro adjustments to balance are really for fans to enjoy a pro experience with games that enjoyable to watch and have huge skill expression (people enjoy mirrors less, people don't want to see lots of all-ins because someone can't win a macro game etc) Balancing with maps is an idea that was born out of desperation, when blizzard would clearly NEVER make any actual balance changes in the game. There are EXTREME measures being taken like putting lowground sections purely to target one specific strat in one matchup (9-7-3 hydra busts). Even if blizzard would be willing to make changes, the trust in blizzard is low as we can see from the posts here. Diversity and map making to change the games and tweak the balance is fantastic, but it's not the perfect way all the time. Show nested quote +
The other problem is that this could trigger an endless series of patches, in a mindset typical of SC2 (which, in my opinion, is partly what led to the game’s demise).
Endless series of patches sort of requires an actively supported game which BW isn't. Show nested quote +
You can make UMS stuff with any and all stat changes if you want to test things.
This is completely correct, the protoss changes could be done in a custom map if everyone agreed it was good for the game.
You have your logic backwards. Blizzard then had competent, passionate employees. Blizzard now is a shell of the past. They are not to be trusted. And it d be, as you concede, a one time and done patch. There is no way they get it right in one go (possibly ever). It s a legacy game, it should stay this way. Only thing should be qol changes (network, game modes, colours etc...)
And for a UMS with changes, the onus is on the change to prove its worth. Make a UMS with your proposed changes. Play it. Have others, as it grows if it catches on and everyone agree (up to ASL/korea) that s when we could push it to blizzard. Essentially we d need to present blizzard with a fully tested and approved set of changes.
This will never happen from the foreign scene given the relative number of players (vs Korea). I m not saying there are no issues, your proposals are even well argumented, but there is simply no way and the risks far outweigh the benefits unless you can prove by worldwide testing it is better. GL with that
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To be clear, this is a discussion thread, not a campaign to get the changes implemented. People love to whine about the balance but generally don't come with concrete ideas of what's actually wrong with the game and what should be adjusted.
I agree with what you said, the changes even if everyone liked them at the pro level would have to be first tested and wrapped up and sent to blizzard with a please and thank you note. But I don't think there's any harm in at least discussing what could be an improvement to the game.
These small changes would be almost unnoticeable up until the pro level anyway, it would have to be reviewed and tested by pros honestly. You could do a micro map and try to hydra bust with the 21 damage 1 armour cannons, I'm pretty sure 6 cannons could hold off a LOT more hydras, for example.
You have your logic backwards. Blizzard then had competent, passionate employees.
The game has competent, passionate fans, professional players and map makers, it would make no sense for blizzard to devise the changes rather than something coming from the former list. All blizzard has to do it ship the code changes.
I also agree the main thing blizzard could do for SC:R is try to improve the networking, and not setup a balance team. There are a whole community of people willing to do these things like analysing balance ideas or maps for "free" or as part of their "job".
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On September 10 2026 23:18 WGT-Baal wrote:
No balance patch ever, blizzard can't be trusted (see sc2). Don't give them stupid ideas.
Better map making process for ASL (trickles to ladder, maps are the main culprit).
Yes pvz may be problematic but again maps... Any balance change is too risky, we cant predict the consequences. It would likely break the game in worse ways. Can't have that after 25 years of stability.
You can make UMS stuff with any and all stat changes if you want to test things.
I agree, when you introduce a balance patch then you've started a shitstorm. Do you know how much whining Blizzard would open themselves up to? Then there's a possibility for never ending balance patches which would have you ending up with a totally different game and also splitting up the community with private servers running 1.16
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What about scout buff with less cost for scouts
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United States10556 Posts
Every "proposed patch" thread is the same. Propose ideas that will never be implemented. Just tell map makers to maybe stop fing over protoss so much and we'll have a better pool.
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17082 Posts
Re: increased cannon armor, this may also matter for cannon rushes in PvZ, where the Zerg player often uses drones to attempt to stop the warping-in cannons.
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On September 11 2026 04:38 Empyrean wrote:
Re: increased cannon armor, this may also matter for cannon rushes in PvZ, where the Zerg player often uses drones to attempt to stop the warping-in cannons.
Agree, but the meta is overpool as a standard because cannon rushes are already hard to block if you let them get started, and I believe building armour only kicks in when the building is finished, so it should not impact the game much.
On September 11 2026 03:59 KameZerg wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2026 23:18 WGT-Baal wrote:
No balance patch ever, blizzard can't be trusted (see sc2). Don't give them stupid ideas.
Better map making process for ASL (trickles to ladder, maps are the main culprit).
Yes pvz may be problematic but again maps... Any balance change is too risky, we cant predict the consequences. It would likely break the game in worse ways. Can't have that after 25 years of stability.
You can make UMS stuff with any and all stat changes if you want to test things. I agree, when you introduce a balance patch then you've started a shitstorm. Do you know how much whining Blizzard would open themselves up to? Then there's a possibility for never ending balance patches which would have you ending up with a totally different game and also splitting up the community with private servers running 1.16
Yes, this is a fair point, however if we living purely in theory, balance patches are of course a more sensible way to balance a game then bending over backwards trying to do the same thing just with maps.
Risk of splitting the community is the worst thing I think.
I believe there is a bit of a slippery slope fallacy in everyone thinking if you make a single change, the floodgates open and the game will burn in flames, this is not necessarily true. Starcraft:Remastered fixing the valkyrie sprite limit for example, didn't break the game, it made more builds viable.
On September 11 2026 04:35 FlaShFTW wrote:
Every "proposed patch" thread is the same. Propose ideas that will never be implemented. Just tell map makers to maybe stop fing over protoss so much and we'll have a better pool.
I have no expectation any changes will be implemented, but it's fun to discuss what would be potentially make the game more balanced and lead to more exciting games!
I do believe making (very, very small) balance changes is absolutely correct, but for the solid reasons given by many posters here I do think it's too impractical to happen without a massive community push. Good luck getting anyone to agree on anything there.
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On September 11 2026 05:30 Slayer91 wrote:
Good luck getting anyone to agree on anything there.
People seem to have overwhelmingly agreed, for decades here and I believe in Korea as well, that the game would not benefit from patching. 
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Norway28892 Posts
I think the only change here that is okay is the plasma shield reduced price suggestion. Swarm reduction is way too long, reducing tank range is bigger than you think (not to mention that it would completely fuck with terran players who have spent 10000 hours getting used to a certain range being just enough to hit a target), and the cannon change wouldn't just help protosses survive busts they sometimes die from - it'd also let them play greedier in a way that'd snowball a lot of games.
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On September 11 2026 06:03 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I think the only change here that is okay is the plasma shield reduced price suggestion. Swarm reduction is way too long, reducing tank range is bigger than you think (not to mention that it would completely fuck with terran players who have spent 10000 hours getting used to a certain range being just enough to hit a target), and the cannon change wouldn't just help protosses survive busts they sometimes die from - it'd also let them play greedier in a way that'd snowball a lot of games.
Interesting thoughts. The REALLY long swarm is hard to quantify the value, definitely it causes terrans to lose mining time, and makes it cheaper for zergs to defend with less frequent need to cast consume, I didn't think 25 seconds was too short, but could be wrong. Most of the value from swarm in my opinion comes in the first 10-15 seconds though.
Arguably, ZvT doesn't need any changes and you could leave it alone or let map makers do their thing.
I get your overall point - if the threat of all-in builds is less, it means you can play greedier by default but - I don't think they can play super greedy in a standard game? They still need the 1-2 cannons
It's more that the all-inish plays are easier to defend
Versus ling run bys - the cannon changes are irrelevant, mostly, it just helps them not melt if lings get a surround (46 hits instead of 41, 12% more durable vs lings)
Versus hydra bust - 1 or 2 cannons will be only marginally stronger, but it will be a significant difference when its 4-6 cannons.
Versus mutas - it's standard for toss to get 1 cannon in minerals + corsairs, 0 cannons won't work still.
So overall I don't believe that the changes are over-reaching in favour of protoss, but of course I could be wrong with that.
It definitely helps toss in the type of games they want to make tons of corsairs without dying to 5 hatch hydra, so from that perspective, i could see it swinging PvZ too far in toss favour, in that case maybe the +1 building armour alone and not the +1 attack as well would be safer.
That kind of depends on if corsair play is too strong without the threat of hydras busting 4+ cannons. I'm not qualified to comment on that
I would definitely agree it's bad to go down the rabbit hole of
Let's tinker with this early game buff for protoss, and then nerf/buff something else to compensate, and oops then let's buff another thing to compensate for THAT
Rather the goal would be to make, verrry small and targeted changes that minimally impact almost everything else.
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On September 11 2026 00:27 Jealous wrote:
Balance with maps, there are still so many ideas left to explore. For example, one idea that has been played around with is neutral spells. Many previous implementations have admittedly felt clunky to me, but there are a lot of creative map makers out there, and if they were encouraged to really let loose on some creative spell placement, I imagine that certain match-ups can be swayed in certain scenarios (e.g., a DWeb in the only place where a Gateway in the nat is rangeable by Hydra but not covered by perfect Cannon placement).
And, as has been mentioned in other threads recently, someone can always make a UMS version of InsertModernMapHere with all of these proposed changes for testing, and to play a tournament in, to get pro feedback on... But somehow it seems we as a community never make it far past the "talk in circles about it on the forums" stage. If the situation was so dire that the game was truly broken at any level, you would think there would be more of a collective urgency to resolve it. I mean, are we all just that collectlviely lazy, or maybe there is nothing that pressing to begin with?
I personally think it's mostly the latter but it could also be a bit of this a bit of that, too.
That's because the people running BW are all in Korea. It's super conservative over there. Matchup specific maps are ready to be applied any time but the idea has never ever entertained them.
Players don't like big changes either. They are essentially all streamers now. Most have kids now and their biggest concern is the daily income from streaming, rather than an ASL title which gives them as much money as a month of streaming, let alone "the future of the game". So why changes something that has been giving them regular income for years.
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On September 11 2026 07:10 TMNT wrote:Show nested quote +On September 11 2026 00:27 Jealous wrote:
Balance with maps, there are still so many ideas left to explore. For example, one idea that has been played around with is neutral spells. Many previous implementations have admittedly felt clunky to me, but there are a lot of creative map makers out there, and if they were encouraged to really let loose on some creative spell placement, I imagine that certain match-ups can be swayed in certain scenarios (e.g., a DWeb in the only place where a Gateway in the nat is rangeable by Hydra but not covered by perfect Cannon placement).
And, as has been mentioned in other threads recently, someone can always make a UMS version of InsertModernMapHere with all of these proposed changes for testing, and to play a tournament in, to get pro feedback on... But somehow it seems we as a community never make it far past the "talk in circles about it on the forums" stage. If the situation was so dire that the game was truly broken at any level, you would think there would be more of a collective urgency to resolve it. I mean, are we all just that collectlviely lazy, or maybe there is nothing that pressing to begin with?
I personally think it's mostly the latter but it could also be a bit of this a bit of that, too. That's because the people running BW are all in Korea. It's super conservative over there. Matchup specific maps are ready to be applied any time but the idea has never ever entertained them. Players don't like big changes either. They are essentially all streamers now. Most have kids now and their biggest concern is the daily income from streaming, rather than an ASL title which gives them as much money as a month of streaming, let alone "the future of the game". So why changes something that has been giving them regular income for years.
Great point - if it ain't broke - don't fix it.
The flipside would be the changes might drum up some excitement for the game - ultimately they want to keep things somewhat fresh and keep creating content somehow, so there is some incentive to have changes but not mess everything up. Usually the map rotation is the main way to freshen things up.
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I wish the shield battery was viable in more situations, it's a nice concept. More starting energy, can heal buildings, it could be a more common defensive tool in PvZ. Though it could end up being used for zealot/cannon rushes... that's why I wouldn't touch cannons.
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70 million replay analysis shows that at MMR > 2400, the overall win rates are as follows:
PvT 46.25%
PVZ 47.46%
TvZ 55.73%
ZvT is actually statistically the worst matchup, people just so blinded by soulkey and soma being the godlike outliers. i prefer no balance patches, because why change things now when it has stayed the same for 20 years? balance can already be implented with changing the map pool, but if anything in the matchup should be nerfed, the discussion should be nerfing SCIENCE VESSALS and not DEFILERS
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