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Everybody agrees that Deathballs should be broken up and removed from the game. I feel like most people, including Blizzard, are going about breaking up the deathball completely backwards. The current opinion is to make units that function well enough on their own that they can don't fit into the deathball very well. Units like the Oracle, Tempest and Swarm Host are all ideas designed to breakup the Deathball.
Every new unit that shouldn't be deathballed, and design tweaks on the old ones is currently designed to be effective offensively. This I feel is completely the wrong approach. Players are not going to pull stuff out of their deathball for an offensive reason because... a stronger deathball is always going to be better offensively.
Tweaking the game to promote defensive positioning might just be the cure to all this turtle nonsense that we're looking for. Players currently turtle to get the strongest possible deathball army. Bringing in units and tweaking older units to be much better defensively might just be what we're looking for.
Imagine if you could effectively defend an army 3x the size of your defenders until reinforcements got there. You'd start to pull tanks off your main army, with some marines and good bunker positioning to defend that expansion. If this was applied across all three races you'd start to see a lot more skirmishing of smaller armies all across the map.
Map control and scouting becomes extremely important. If you can get to your opponents third base before he has a chance to establish a strong defensive position there you'd be in great shape. Players would be able to move their armies out on the map much earlier to battle over key positions on the map etc.
Encouraging players to use small squads of units to defend expansions and key points on the map would be pretty awesome, at least from my perspective. I'd love to see a few swarm hosts with some hydra's and maybe an infestor or two easily repel a much larger protoss army because they had a solid entrenched position. Forcing a player to make a decision to break one of these points while taking heavy losses would be a cool interaction. This I feel is much better than the current situation of a small force getting steamrolled while the attacker doesn't even lose a unit.
Changing the game in this way would probably require a complete redesign of the entire Protoss force, but I think most would agree that would be a good thing. Terran and Zerg could probably be tweaked to achieve this style of play and would not need a complete overhaul.
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I don't understand how this would work? These defensive units would be 3x tougher than attacking forces.. How? Building placement?
Would they not be 3x stronger than enemy forces when used offensively?
I'm a little confused o.O
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We need a real high ground mechanic in Starcraft 2. I think that's a bigger deal than force fields, warpgates, and most of the other problems people base the issues of this game on. It's a way to make defensive positioning matter, and can allow all units to be naturally stronger defensively than offensively. I think that could be a huge proponent of breaking up clusters of units. You could control more space effectively, being able to control more space means you need to spread out units, etc.
Of course it goes without being said that it would also revitalize the state of mapmaking that people are complaining about lately.
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I don't think that would work, purely because if something is very good defensively, why would they bother being offensive when it makes turtling easier...
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rather than buffing units, buff static defense. But I don't think that's the right way to go either because then it's simply too easy to defend and we don't want that.
I've always thought the best method was simply changing the mining rate AND the amount of resources per base. However, the game is currently balanced around the current mining rate and # of resources per base. There were problems in 7m and 6m maps because the mining rate ratio for mins/gas was off base and needed actual changes from blizzard to make it solid.
People were hoping blizzard might address the # of resources per base in HotS, so maybe someone should go over to their forums and remind them.
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Hey filter
I agree with your points but you don't really provide any suggestions so it's hard to comment or discuss!
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i think a small change like ranged units on low ground have -1 range shooting up would help. Make high ground positionally stronger while not making it obscenely broken. This way units would cluster a bit more before getting in to attacking range, making a defended position harder to break with a ball of units.
i don't like miss percentage as its random and this isn't warcraft 3
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On the topic of defense
across the field how would you win with a small army if a defensive force a third the size of your own
you would need more siege and offensive specialists to break a turtle and focusing on your own offense would set you behind you would be looking at longer games as players tried to trade well offensively
You could go the other way though more damage means that a few high damage aoe units could punish large masses of units
but again then you have issues with it either needing to deploy ie buff siege tanks concept
I feel the best way is to create new unit types such as raiding instead of harass a raiding unit would specialize at killing buildings allowing for tech sniping destroying production ie raiding their base not their econ
that would at least force people to rethink mine and burn bases or leaving their base undefended because raiding units would allow for favorable base trading even against a larger force meaning you can have an army at base defending against a deathball while you wreck their base but it would lose out in larger engagements but in small unit to unit brawls they would shine with higher front on damage or unique abilities
For zerg
Concept would be fast stealthy
A move while burrow unit that burrows and unburrows almost instantly and can move while burrowed unique ability to leap from below the ground similar to blink but not up cliffs just over units buildings void areas ect
It would mean you have to spread out your forces or lose outer bases, tech or production
For protoss
Concept would be either fast high damage or durable juggernaut style
Think dark templar's big mean olderbrother
Or and elite zealot style unit
DTsOlderbrother
Would be fast have and ability to use void shroud cloaking allied units in a small area akin to storm but it would dissipate faster with more units under its effects this unit would make small harass style attacks much more effective and as a unit it would have high damage to structures so it would tear up base defenses forcing a reaction
Elite zealot
High shields unit akin to archon but with 2 shields armor and bonus damage to structures again slow high damage attacks and instead of charge its shields would recharge faster after battle making it better at hit and run but with most of its health in shields you would have to make sure you pulled out early and it wouldn't be good against something that could chase it or out ranged it
Terran
A real Gunship meant to support mech and take out structures works well with banshee and any mech comp witch tend to be immobile it would have high health and trade well against small groups of GtA but poorly against typical AtA but you allow for more mid map control and forcing the enemy to keep some AA patrolling their bases
Edit: Of coarse this wouldn't fix everything but I think this and other unit types could help make the game more dynamic and good offensive options benefit not just staying in base since you can do real noticeable damage to your turtleing opponent
A player focusing on defensive structures would lose out to raids a player focusing on unit defense would lose out to a direct push so you have to balance both against your opponent.
Feedback it Appreciated Thanks :D and remember these are just examples 
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maybe if units on higher ground were 66% harder to hit.
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I've been convinced we need an innate defenders advantage, so what about a static 30% damage reduction on damage taken by units being hit from below. No need for the 66% harder to hit or the random miss chance - just a normal reduction.
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There's been some mention of a highground mechanic... I think the random-chance of a miss is lame, and reduced damage just doesn't fit. What about a range difference? Force low-ground units attacking high-ground units to move a bit closer, thus
A) taking more damage before attacking and
B) having fewer units simultaneously attacking than the high-ground player?
Just a thought.
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I disagree with your situation analysis. A lot of the new units are designed to simply not work in a straight up combat.
-) Tempest has too little dps for straight up combat application (outside of countering massive)
-) MSC and oracle have hardly any combat applications
-) Widow Mine is meant to be setup before combats, in a way that you can avoid it
-) Swarm Hosts are not really good in straight up fighting, if your opponent has a strong army himself, because then he can just use the window between the spawns to win
-) Viper; well blinding cloud is a straight up combat application, but one that is not that useful outside of breaking static positions, or holding ground, but surely adds a little to the deathball
-) Hellbat is also a combat unit and adds to the deathball
But I agree, additionally there should be better global area control mechanics. High ground advantage is just one form of them, but I also think that there could be interesting mechanics with sight blockers (one way sight blocker; sight blocker that also block sight from air, right now this gets denied too easily; range/damage reduction if you attack through blockers) or other new Terrain features.
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Philippines189 Posts
If ever there will be a high ground mechanic, it should be as simple as possible. Yes, a 30% reduction seems about right.
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Just make siege units ridiculously powerful so you can use them to defend.
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Blizzard is very bad at designing defensive units that can't also be used for offense.
See Widow mine and Mothership core.
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I suggest a new kind of ability, like "Oracle increase the armor of 6 (and 6 only) surrounded units by 1".This will impose a "Critical Mass" value, where if you add units to that squad you will get no (or near none) benefit.
Notice that above is only a example.
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I think this idea is not bad.
Seems to go with HotS, we already got the widow mine for additional defense and the swarmhost and tempest as siege breakers.
I am absolutely voting for a siegetank damage and aoe buff and a siegetime nerf, so it becomes more immobile but stronger in offense.
Now if photon overcharge is changed to work without MSC and is strengthened a bit it would also help with deffending or add something like the shield batteries from SC1.
Zerg already has queens for defense but maybe there could be an option to mutate spine crawlers into a more powerful version that can't move any more.
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Why does so many solutions to deathballs involve better defensive positioning? I really dont get it, we already have a matchup functioning that way -> mech TvT. Now it might just be me, but i really dont consider that particular matchup all that fun to watch or play. If you buff defensive positioning you will get more defensive positioning. Its actually pretty simple, but defensive positioning isn't really what anybody want is it?
Personally what I want to see is more harass. Currently hellions, oracles, banshees, terran bio drops and infestors does this well, in my opinion. Most of these units share the same weakness in that they too fragile to be used in real combat so they rely on hit and run tactics to do the damage they need. That, if you ask me, is the key to breaking up death balls; making units that are good enough to warrant use, but are too fragile to be used in deathballs. Its not actually about breaking up deathballs by demotivating the use of deathballs, but rather about motivating the use of units that just plain dont fit into deathballs. Most of the new units fit reasonably well into this scheme. You can always argue whether we have enough of these new units, but we are definately (in my opinion) moving in the right direction.
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It should not be dictated whether a unit be used defensively and offensively. A good unit can be used in BOTH situations effectively, precisely because it is designed well...
I really don't think deathballs will ever cease to exist in this game. We will only see players getting better at managing them to the point that they become nonexistant...
I'm not really sure what to think. I am disappointed with the lack of a lurker, but more than that I am angry at the damage system in SCII, which really doesn't make sense and makes units which SHOULD be strong (tanks) die easily to + damage to armored T1.5 units. The thing most people aren't getting here is that you CANNOT add all these things to the game. They may be good ideas...but the core of SC and these types of RTS games is SIMPLICITY. That is key. To have developed something simple from which many different situations can be derived (a unit which is effective in offense and defense) is brilliant.
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EPT
