Non-balance changes:

Ranked play has been added. The chat system has been significantly overhauled. The minimap now shows destructible debris as an icon. Possible starting locations are pinged at the beginning of each game.

Ranked play adds a level of measurable competition that will draw additional people to play the beta that were previously put off by the lack of visible progress. Ranked archon mode is still missing, but presumably that will come in time. The chat system has improved tremendously over the place-holder system we had before this patch. It doesn’t feel quite done yet, but with some additional tweaks it will be a vast improvement over what we once had. The minimap changes are nice quality-of-life changes to help players adjust to new maps more easily. These improvements are the sort of small things that show the developers are really thinking about and analyzing the game, its social features, and what needs to be fixed. Overall, the non-balance changes are all good improvements and bode well for future changes.

Balance Changes:

General

Siege tanks and Immortals will now track the nearest enemy while moving.
Added minimap icons for destructible rocks and destructible towers.
Made improvements when controlling a large number of air units.
Nice quality of life changes for making units a bit easier to control and reliable. Unsieged tanks now can be controlled like in Broodwar where kiting is much easier since the turret doesn’t reset after every shot. The air unit change has more to do with mutalisks than any other unit. I’ve played a bit of zerg since the patch but haven’t noticed a huge change.

Protoss

Disruptor

Cost reduced to 100/200.
Supply reduced to 3.
Purification Nova
Range reduced to 1.5.
After Purification Nova ends, the Disruptor is invulnerable for 3 seconds.
Speed when invulnerable increased to 4.25.
Can be picked up by Warp Prism during Purification Nova, canceling its effect.

The new disruptor has a much greater emphasis on survivability. It’s much harder to kill now that it has invulnerability before and after the explosion. In addition, with reduced cost and supply it is much easier to get a larger number of disruptors, and less punishing to lose one. That said, the disruptor’s reduced detonation radius means that it’s much harder to catch as many units as before. The current disruptor is very hard to kill, but also very difficult to utilize perfectly. The disruptor will likely be tweaked to be a bit easier to use, without retaining the absolutely lethal radius of its first incarnation..

Terran

Vehicle and ship armor upgrades have been combined.

This is probably the right balance of making more meaningful choices between air and ground units while not overloading upgrades. +Attack is the more important of the two while +armor is usually only used if you’re committing to an actual mech build or going for a longer/slower style. This change, in addition to the liberator, means that there are actual meaningful decisions regarding getting +air or +mech attack.

Ghost
New Ability: Steady Targeting.
Deals 170 damage after channeling for 3 seconds.
Can be interrupted if Ghost is attacked.
Costs 50 energy.

The new snipe appears to be mostly useless. While it feels cool thematically (and more in line with what you expect a ghost to do), the high mana cost and relative ease of interruption makes it feel not worthwhile. If the mana cost was refunded if canceled, or at least partially refunded I could see this being more valuable. As it stands, there aren’t enough meaningful targets to justify this ability in general. There’s virtually no use for it against Terran. Against protoss you would only really use this against zealots or adepts but due to the fact you have to stand still to channel it doesn’t feel incredibly effective. The most potential is against ultralisks as Terran bio has a lot of trouble digging through their increased armor in LoTV. The new ghosts seem to favor a more passive style to allow them to accumulate sufficient energy. Perhaps in the mid/late game a squad of ghosts can provide a sort of suppressing fire, but the ghost isn’t an easy unit to mass as its mineral heavy cost cuts into your standing army.

Liberator
Anti-Ground Mode no longer has to be researched; now only requires an Armory.
Switching back to Anti-Air mode duration reduced to 2 seconds.
Increased Anti-Ground range by 1.
Fixed issue allowing Liberators to fire into multiple AG zones.

This iteration of the liberator is probably slightly too strong or available slightly too early, but the previous version which required a 200/200 upgrade that was only available with an armory and starport tech lab made liberators come out so late that they rarely even saw use. Developers need a lot of games in order to get an accurate picture of the utility of a unit, so when that unit requires so much tech and investment that progamers aren’t getting it (even if it is worthwhile in the end), it’s hard to assess how strong it is. In addition, whenever you make a unit available much earlier than before, there are bound to be some timing and balance related issues. Imagine, for example, if you could build siege tanks out of a barracks. The tank’s stats are ‘fine’, but the point in the game at which it’s available is not. In HoTS, we saw these sorts of changes occur a lot with hellbats as Blizzard tried to figure out exactly what the correct tech was to allow hellbats to be made. Liberators fill important roles in all 3 matchups as their long range air to ground siege capabilities have no equal in the Terran arsenal. They are excellent at zoning ground units out and can be used to leap frog forward the way you would with siege tanks without having to worry as much about being overwhelmed by ground units.

Raven
Auto turret damage increased to 16., duration decreased to 10 seconds.
Seeker missile cost increased to 125.
Durable Materials upgrade removed.
New Upgrade: Explosive Shrapnel Shells.
Increases damage of Seeker Missile and Auto Turret by 30%.

The new auto turret has changed from a long term zone control and harass spell to an incredibly strong timing and burst damage ability. The reduced duration means that you can’t mass them or create a long term threat but the greatly increased damage allows you to execute strong timing attacks. Overall, this is probably the right direction for the auto turret to take, as the minutes that it used to last seemed too much. A slight duration increase to 15 or 20 seconds is probably sufficient to solidify this change. I like the idea of increasing the mana cost of eeker missile, but it doesn’t really seem strong enough at 125 mana. Perhaps the idea is that the new upgrade will make it about as strong as the old in very raven heavy strategies without making it so overwhelming as it was before in that you could cast a huge number of missiles. Overall, these changes seem really spot on to reduce the Raven turtle style of HoTS, but currently feel largely irrelevant as LoTV’s economy has all but killed that sort of play already. I’d really like to see a little more love for the raven in this vein. The raven would be really great if it was a viable mid game unit rather than something you buy exactly 1 of, or as many as you possibly can and turtle forever.

Zerg

Ravager
Range increased to 6.

The ravager went from being one of the most overpowered LoTV units to one of the least powerful when its DPS was cut drastically in one of the recent patches. Before this patch, the ravager’s role overlapped a bit too much with the roach. Both were relatively low range, decently high damage outputs, although the ravager suffered from being very fragile compared to the roach's durability. By increasing its range to 6, the ravager may differentiate itself enough from the roach to fill a more distinct role, therefore promoting more play. Interestingly, the ravager’s greatest strength against terran right now is its ability to snipe sieged Liberators. Its splash damage projectile, which should probably be the defining characteristic of the ravager, has been sidelined in terms of balance for now as Blizzard tries to stabilize the ravager’s core combat statistics. This change definitely looks to be in the right direction, as the fragile ravager needs to stay farther from combat to stay alive but needs to deal some damage with its auto attacks to justify its steep cost.

Impressions of Balance

Balance still feels pretty off, which is to be expected considering the scale and volume of recent changes. I don’t expect balance to be super precise until at least some months after they’ve stopped adding or totally overhauling units. Most of the new units are still too strong in some form. Part of the difficulty in balancing the new units is that their strength must be balanced against their accessibility. The liberator is a great example of this concept. The liberator is incredibly powerful when attacking ground, but saw little use due to the high cost of researching its air to ground attack. This patch makes liberators more accessible, which will probably lead to some minor re-balancing of its combat numbers. In the past, Blizzard has stated that they try to err on the side of slightly too strong for new units to ensure that they see play. Once players are comfortable with the unit and using it consistently, they get a good idea of how and which numbers to tweak.

Overall impressions

The biggest takeaway from this patch is that Blizzard has heard the community. They understand that people want more communication. David Kim and others have been providing regular insight into Blizzard’s direction for LoTV as well as responses to various community topics. One of the most talked about topics of LoTV is the economy, which has not changed significantly for a long time. At this point, it seems likely that Blizzard will not be implementing any additional economy changes. LoTV’s current economy does what it needs to do well enough and I’m glad that Blizzard is spending their resources elsewhere rather than endlessly trying to test and tweak new economies. A new economy unhinges everything regarding balance, timings and the general flow of the game. Ensuring that a new economy is good for the game would require a tremendous amount of time and energy that I’d rather Blizzard put toward other issues. The current economy alreadyfixes many of the gameplay frustrations from HoTS regarding turtling and stagnant play. Due to the incredible complexity of this issue and varied stances, no matter what economy LoTV ends up using, a group of people will be unhappy with it. As the current LoTV economy addresses the major issues from HoTS already, the time that could be spent experimenting and testing new economies is time that can be better spent on quality of life improvements, additional balance and so forth.

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Previous installments:
Archon Mode
On Preparation and Build Orders
The Disruptor in Review
Liberator in Review
On SC2's Social Features
Re-thinking the Ladder