On February 27 2011 02:42 Terr wrote: Most pros seem to be really happy about the balance changes. And if they are happy I'm happy as well. That's all I got to say.
On February 27 2011 02:42 Terr wrote: Most pros seem to be really happy about the balance changes.
If you could provide some sources/snippets/quotes on these happy pros, I'd be super thankful.
Always love reading their insight.
On February 27 2011 02:44 raf3776 wrote: Im kinda confused about the grandmaster league. Does that mean the top 200 is gonna be the same people until the end of the season?
Seems like it, yes. Looks like people will only be replaced when inactive.
That's pretty ridiculous, now that I think about it. I understand that having this updated constantly is not feasible, but demoting some and promoting others once a month or so doesn't seem too terrible.
On February 27 2011 02:42 Terr wrote: Most pros seem to be really happy about the balance changes. And if they are happy I'm happy as well. That's all I got to say.
On February 27 2011 02:07 Salv wrote: As a 2500 Masters Protoss whose MMR matches me against ~3300 Terrans, I am very upset with the amulet change. If you suck at EMP, then yes, storm is imbalanced, but good Terrans make attacking with HT very, very difficult. Having to charge up your HT energy is a huge, huge nerf to Protoss. You can argue, well you just have colossus, but colossus are not effective late game - they take too long to keep making them and replenishing your army. I can only hope they never, ever implement this.
As a 3200 points Master Terran, who plays against 3700 points protoss, I say that you wrote an utter bullshit. Colossus not effective late game ? Seriously...
I think he's talking about continuing games with only Colossi. No switching to HTs. The fact that a 3,2k master T doesn't get this is indeed kinda disturbing...
Of course 3+ attack colossi are devastating to bio. But not the pure nerf of HTs is bad in itself, but it is also an indirect nerf to colossi. Why? Because of the metagame....yes sorry for using this word yet again. Until now, terrans - due to their lack of good scouting - where mostly in the dark when the switch to HTs will come. With the removal of the amulet, this switch is now WAY less threatening than before. This means, a terran doesn't have to speculate as to when to cut vikings but simply continue producing them. The danger of a lategame HT switch gets reduced drasticly which means simply staying with vikings becomes less of a strategy-poker.
If I had to guess, I'd say that colossi/phoenix will become the standard way to go. A strategy that I personally don't like at all because the phoenixes serve no purpose beside being pure meatshield. But with a HT nerf and the phoenix-buff from the previous patch, it seems like this is how blizz wants it to play out...I guess....
On February 26 2011 23:12 Consummate wrote: If Archon toilet is a problem, an alternative is that they should make it impossible to enter the vortex after it has been dropped, your units just walk around it instead.
Of course, that will make it so you don't have to control your units as well to avoid the vortex, but this also means that Archons have to be in vortex range for the Archon toilet to work rather than vortexing an army then walking your Archons in.
But the current change is a little stupid unless units that came out of the vortex can't attack for 1.5 seconds either.
BC speed upgrade: Imho this unit isn't used nearly as much as it should be and hopefully this speed upgrade will make it a little more enticing. The real debate about this buff is whether or not the bc isn't used because everything else is so good it isn't needed or if the bc is unusable because of being slow (obviously it is a mixture of both but what part draws emphasis).
Bunker build time increased 5 secs: obvously this requires testing to see whether it is important or not but I doubt it will do too much for 2 rax pushes, but it will delay bunker timings on defense. In all honesty this change will have very little effect.
Stim time increased 30 seconds: A stim timing push comes around 7-7:30 in game, increasing this by 30 seconds might help with Z because it will allow an extra set of drones before building units. I don't know about pushes against P (an extra sentry might make the difference though) but the real problem is toss VR play, this will have to be tested (in reality it will do very little)
Protoss-
Zealot charge buff- completely needed, silly that a "glitch" would reduce the effectiveness of an obvious use on this unit
Mothership nerf- There is so much splash in the Toss army that with more development in Toss gameplay this could have been op (you can't counter the toilet with micro, only way to counter is killing the ship before it vortex's) but the removal of such a sweet concept is sad, I'm sure they will still be effective but with 1.5 secs it gives you a chance to spread ur units.
Templar nerf- This is easily the biggest change in the patch atm. making it so you can't harrass with templar and defend harrassment with templar is really big, Because storm is such a powerful ability it doesn't really make sense that you can have a storm for every gateway you have at all times. Storm was even more powerful in bw but it took time to gain the energy. This change will be interesting and we might be seeing more maurader based armies in late game against toss.
Zerg-
Infester: +20 health, this changes the the ammount of damage taken from siege tanks from 2 shots to 3 shots which is potentially big, I doubt this will change too much outside of that but that in itself is nice Doubling the dps while cutting the duration of the ensare by 4 seconds is interesting, This makes infestors more of a central strategy instead of mixing in like 3 infestors. I think the biggest thing in question with this is how much will medivac heals negate this... Because medivac heals completely negated it previously, maybe with double dps it could actually tax the terran army instead of just delaying it. 30% of 35 damage is 10.5 damage added to the infestor which will probably have more of an effect in zvz than anywhere else (although 3 fungals will kill marauders).
Lastly reverting the spell to a missile could potentially nerf infesters into the ground.... Depending on the travel time, if you can outrun the spell easily (we want super gosu players to be able to out run it but not average ppl) then the spell becomes worthless. Some people were mentioning that emp is a missile effect and if the fg is tha fast then it will be fine.
Overall I don't think this is enough of a change to really change Z's fates but is a great change to PvT and severly limits the Toss' army options to Colossi. Just like with the 5 rax reaper being nerfed and Terran using the 2 rax instead we are just going to see different strats being used. Speaking of reapers, when are they going to buff them to usable status again....
- A new menu option is available in the Gameplay tab to change the behavior of Control Group Buttons. These can now be set to ignore mouse clicks or be hidden completely.
why wasn't this already in the game, feels kind of like apple releasing "right mouse-click" as a new feature
On February 27 2011 02:59 JDM.s2000 wrote: Has nobody talked about HT nerf vs zerg muta ling mass spine?
Also how come my PTR keeps updating and wont finish.
Have you run SC2 and gotten the latest patch (w/ the new maps)? My blizzard updater kept looping as well, then I went to run SC2, got the live server patch (which also updates the blizzard updater). Now I just get a window saying the PTR is down, but it's not looping/trying to install anymore.
Can anyone who didn't have issues with the installer confirm PTR is down at the moment?
I don't really get why they don't just make Amulet give +20 mana instead of 25. Removes the instant cast problem, still makes templars usefull when warping them in on both harass and defense and it means you can reinforce your push with relativly fresh templars.
On February 27 2011 02:58 ixi.genocide wrote: Terran balance changes-
BC speed upgrade: Imho this unit isn't used nearly as much as it should be and hopefully this speed upgrade will make it a little more enticing. The real debate about this buff is whether or not the bc isn't used because everything else is so good it isn't needed or if the bc is unusable because of being slow (obviously it is a mixture of both but what part draws emphasis).
The main reason why BCs aren't used much is a) their speed - which will be somewhat fixed but more importantly b) their abyssimal dps.
Assuming upgrade parity, a BC does 26.7 dps to a 0 armor and 22.2 dps to a 1 armor target. That is less than 4 unstimmed or 3 stimmed marines (which the BC costs 14 times as much as a marine). A single banshee does almost as much dps as a BC !
On February 27 2011 02:07 Salv wrote: As a 2500 Masters Protoss whose MMR matches me against ~3300 Terrans, I am very upset with the amulet change. If you suck at EMP, then yes, storm is imbalanced, but good Terrans make attacking with HT very, very difficult. Having to charge up your HT energy is a huge, huge nerf to Protoss. You can argue, well you just have colossus, but colossus are not effective late game - they take too long to keep making them and replenishing your army. I can only hope they never, ever implement this.
Colossus arent effective late game??? lol
all these changes I think are fairly reasonable, it buffs protoss early game by making stim timing much later and make it so you dont have to be 5x better than your opponent to beat them if they have storm + amulet up.
Although, since they did this, I am suprised they arent making emp an upgrade. That would seem to me a reasonable way to balance the situation out.
They're effective as a unit, but once a Terran has enough vikings to simply one-shot them, and they take so long to rebuild, it's difficult to continue making colossi. Switching to HT, or adding in HT is necessary if a game goes long. However EMP is a huge, huge problem with HT, it makes attacking with HT extremely difficult. If you don't think so, you just don't play Protoss or have yet to play a good Terran.
I am fairly confident that the Terrans here bitching are either just happy that it will be that much easier now to beat a Protoss, or that they are simply bad players with bad control and don't know how to effectively deal with HT. No Protoss will make HT now if you have to wait so long. They will be good to have defensively perhaps, but you would never attempt to attack with them because you cannot afford to them EMPed and be next-to useless. At least defensively they can store up some energy and it's easy to defensively storm than it is to do on the offense.
I agree to a certain extent... But there is no reason you cant add HTs into your late game composition still. You just have to plan a bit ahead, instead of relying on warp ins every 15 seconds. Terrans rarely get the ghost energy upgrade, so the HT is now on par with the ghost in terms of energy. You might now have to position your HTS better to help with drops or warp them in earlier to give them energy. But really, were talking about 30 seconds real time for a HT to reach energy to storm. This doesnt really nerf the late game comp, its still hugely strong, the only difference now is you cant:
A. Retreat warp in storm all his weakened units and pretty much save your bacon even if your down in food count.
B. deal with drops nearly as effectively. You will have to scout them like zerg does. I mean you can still warp in other units, and late game when you have like 15 gates ways you can pretty much deny any small-medium sized drop.
All that said, I still think that EMP should be an upgrade, or at least require more energy to use. Im not trying to start a conflict, just giving my opinion on the matter.
edit. also im am compeletly shocked they removed shakuras, that was probably the best macro map in the pool.
Wow, looking at the "missle" they shoot now, it looks terrible! I'm leaning towards the whole thing being a nerd against P but a buff vs T. Isn't Infestors suppose to be some sort of counter to Blink Stalkers ?
Hmm, what happens to Banelings when they exit a vortex now?
Will they blow up in vain because all the other units are invulnerable at that moment? Then again, blowing up would mean that they're themselves are not invulnerable upon exiting. >_>