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I'm constantly contemplating new ways of using different units and abilities and incorporate those in my regular play.
In order for something to pass the test, so to speak, the 'gimmick' needs to be not effective but efficient (cost effective). That being said I simply couldn't find a way to use the hunter-seeker efficiently, allow me to explain why.
1)The raven costs a lot of gas, gas that a Terran needs desperately, you use gas for tanks, vikings, banshees... pretty much every unit excluding marines and hellions, so the only situation i get ravens out is if i need mobile detection, or in some cases for the point defense drone (which is also effective not efficient, but since i already have a raven out, might as well use it, but that's another story)
2)The Hunter-seeker needs to be researched which adds more gas cost, and time to research making it a late game spell
3)The hunter seeker does 100 AoE damage instant, while some would argue that this the best of its equivalents, it simply is not the case. Energy cost wise 2.5 fungal growths deal the same damage, storms would over time deal more damage as well. Hunter seeker also damages your own units, so the only good units to use it against in a scirmish would be on the clumped enemy ranged units (i.e. Hydras), which brings us to the next problem, the cast range.
4)Cast range and dodgeability. The cast range is relative, if you want to make sure it hits you need to get closer, getting closer means the raven is likely to die, casting it from far makes the enemy more likely to dodge it, since it moves extremely slow.
5)125 energy cost! It needs to be researched.
All these points add up to an unusable spell in terms of efficiency.
1)200 gas could be used to get 2 tanks which will do more damage than 1 hunter-seeker, a raven can't cast more than 1 in the same battle.
2)200 gas could be used to get a ghost which has EMP, a better spell for the same amount of gas + no research cost.
3)In every matchup, other units are more rewarding for the same gas investment.
In TvZ its better to get tanks, they will kill more units than ravens with the same gas cost.
In TvP massing ravens is not an option since you are saving up your mana which BEGS you to get Fed-back by templars. if you have a raven out better to use the energy for point-defense drones.
In TvT you just don't get ravens often, TvT is often Viking heavy, and the only use of a raven in that MU is to cast point-defense drone in viking scirmishes.
Conclusion: The Hunter-seeker is just an inefficient spell. getting it when you are not in a huge lead can put you behind. And its design is bad: it's verry simmilar to a scarab from SC:BW, but thrown from the air (flying scarabs! imba right  ), but it doesn't cost minerals to build, it requires a ton of energy and is easily countered and dodged, unless you want to get close and sacrifice a viking to get it in, but as mentioned before, get 2 tanks and voila, same damage, or get something else. Is it a good investment if you already have vikings out? No, use point-defense drone.
I don't want to sound regressive but i wish i had Irradiate over this spell.
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Sweden33719 Posts
The hunter seeker missile was fine in the first patch, when it was super bugged and did 12398012930123 damage, but probably still not imbalanced.
Now it's useless, maybe ok in late game viking vs viking wars....
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the missile was good before when it was "bugged" but now its ridiculously weak for its cost. It should atleast be better than PDD since it requires more research and energy but its not.
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125mana.... thats way too much. Even if you research the +25mana upgrade, it will still take forever to reach the mana needed.
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The raven is good for a lot more than just casting HSM. So if ravens are part of your overall strategy, then HSM is probably totally worth it, because you will probably have plenty of ravens that can build up energy.
You are right that HSM probably isn't something you rush to or will be a bulk damage ability like storm, but that doesn't mean it is useless. It is like, if you build one or two reapers as part of your opening to push on a little pressure and to scout, then you probably don't want to get reaper speed, it just isn't worth it. However, if you are opening heavy reaper in order to keep your opponent in his base while you expand, reaper speed is definitely worth it.
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Sweden33719 Posts
In the vast majority of situations, I'd rather have PDD or auto-turrets. It's ok vs Mutas, ok vs Vikings.... But it should be cheaper or better.
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I also tried to mass ravens in a 3v3 recently. I'v shot a blob of marines with 1 HSM, and only 2 marines died. A few patches ago, it would have killed them all... The AOE damage effect change greatly affected the HSM imo.
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On May 30 2010 23:48 FrozenArbiter wrote:
In the vast majority of situations, I'd rather have PDD or auto-turrets. It's ok vs Mutas, ok vs Vikings.... But it should be cheaper or better.
Exactly, PDD and autoturret are just a better use of the energy than HSM, and you don't use gas to research.
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I really think Durable Materials upgrade should upgrade HSM's range to 9 to make the skill useful.
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On May 30 2010 23:58 mrlie3 wrote:
I really think Durable Materials upgrade should upgrade HSM's range to 9 to make the skill useful.
That's another 100 or 150 gas... 
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HSM used to be amazing. It used to instant glib a group of hydralisks. 2 of them would annihilate a group of mutas/vikings. I much preferred it as a Fusion Core tech (harder to get) but simply much better.
Now it only kills 1 hydralisk and puts a few other hydralisks at half health. It probably does around 200 damage total for the same energy and research cost as Yamato Cannon which does a lot more. In fact, against most army compositions, it's not even worth the enemy's time to dodge the HSM's. I used it post-nerf against a blob of Protoss units. About 8 HSM's on his ball of stalker/zealot/collosus/sentry and they just strolled right through with maybe just a couple stalkers dying and slapping the shields off the rest. I have EMP for this which is much easier to use and to get. Prior to the nerf, it would have killed at least half his army.
I completely agree with you that HSM is not worth it in the current state of things. Blizzard's goal of making it more used made it completely useless.
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HSM has needed a massive buff since the beginning. The bugged splash damage is what kept it useful at all, but 125 energy on a unit you really don't want to be massing is ridiculous. 9 times out of 10 I'd rather throw down autoturrets or a PDD if I did want to use my raven energy. HSM should be 100 energy (so you can chain cast 2) and should do way more damage than it does now.
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has anyone tried cloaking a banshee, firing HSM at your banshee - flying your banshee about 25-30 range before exploding on a group of enemies?
quite a nice thought - your opponent just seeing a HSM appear from the fog of war.
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HSM felt fine at first, but now that it's got its "nerf" and that tanks and thors have been improved, the HSM feels a bit unnecessary since you have much more reliable ways of dealing splash damage.
@tarsier
yeah people did that and wrote about it on these forums a bit a while ago had much more payoff for time invested in the previous iteration of HSM
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Now that it is "working as intended" it simply isn't viable against almost anything. I mean it is great for walking into a mineral line and annihilating a bunch of workers, since the "half damage" splash range will still kill workers and has a decent radius, but you get it so late in the game that it's simply far too likely that air defenses will have been erected by that point and then it's simply impossible.
It would be nice if they went back to the HSM that was available on the Nighthawk when the unit was first shown to us in a battle report. It was probably a little OP back then though.
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Agreed. I want to use it because I love the original concept - but it's certainly not good enough for the cost. They need to either make it more powerful/easier to use (i.e. faster or with a bigger casting range) or drastically reduce the cost.
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It was great, but then blizz "buffed it" by making it not require Fusion Core and then, to prevent imbalance, made it worthless.
The range nerf is the worst, it practically turns a raven into a shitty baneling.
This is the story of SC2. Make something easier to get to, generally better, overall great, then unusable so as not to make it imba...
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i loved it the way it was. Now it feels so weak, even if you ignore cost of the raven, research, and time to get enough energy, it's almost too much of a fiddle to even bother using it for such a small reward. I mean, with the time spent microing a raven to get off a good HSM there's so many other things I could be doing instead, like dropping a nuke for 30x more damage.
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On May 30 2010 23:53 eugen1225 wrote:Show nested quote +On May 30 2010 23:48 FrozenArbiter wrote:
In the vast majority of situations, I'd rather have PDD or auto-turrets. It's ok vs Mutas, ok vs Vikings.... But it should be cheaper or better. Exactly, PDD and autoturret are just a better use of the energy than HSM, and you don't use gas to research.
i sincerely think that HSM is too weak right now, and useless compared to the other abilities of the raven. However, underpowered abilities like this one are crucial.
Comapring SC2 to SC:BW when in a specific matchup only a handful of units were used, now every race can successfully implement various strategies.
In this case, if you got a full-mana raven tucked away in your base for a rainy day (just a hypotesis) you can then snipe a bunch of grouped hydras, lings or maybe drones.
You can also defend your main army's retreat when the enemy's army chases them through a choke.
And even if the spell is utterly useless, it's good to have it in the game, as it expands the strategical pallete of a very creative player (cannot begin to imagine a BoXeR-like player using these)
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Raven does need to be buff-ed about the gas cost -.-' imo
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EPT
