In my opinion the patch has missed the mark on balance while failing to make the game more interesting to play (and watch). It is unclear to me what the actual intentions of the patch were.
“ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS” GAMEPLAY DYNAMIC IS AMPLIFIED
The 8 worker start has encouraged an increase in rock-paper-scissors gameplay, which has led to significantly more games that are automatically won/lost before scouting can be done or any real information can be gathered. Scouting costs a proportionally higher amount of your early economy, meaning that you have to make a real sacrifice to gain information. While this isn’t a bad thing on its own, you are punished for spending that economy to scout someone who plays a more greedy opener. This is the rock-paper-scissors effect: greedy openers beat scouting openers beat aggressive openers beat greedy openers. This is always going to be true to a point, but a higher opportunity cost on scouting forces more players to decide on their openings blind, without being able to react to what their opponents are doing.
DISRUPTION TO THE GAME’S LEGACY, AND UNCERTAIN EFFECTS ON ITS PLAYERBASE
Every build order that people have learned and optimized over the last 11 years has to be thrown out and rebuilt from scratch. For some this is an exciting challenge; for others this is a hurdle that they will no longer be willing to jump over, leading them to just quit the game entirely. There has been talk of the patch “bringing old players back to the game”, but I have seen no significant evidence that this is the case. Regardless, returning players will quickly find that the challenging core mechanics of the game have not changed and they will be unlikely to continue playing for long. If any of these changes were made with the goal of shaking up the game, I sincerely believe that the meta will fully settle again within 6 months and we will be back to the same level of diversity we had before, only without any community resources for lower level players to follow.
PROTOSS STILL HAS NO DOOR
Gateway units are weaker on their own than zerg/terran tier 1/1.5 units to compensate for how easy it is to warp them in anywhere on the map very quickly, and this half-in half-out warpgate approach means that you still cannot buff them because warpgates are still available at a higher cost.
Balance aside, the Warpgate changes are a logistical nightmare. Protoss as a race is designed around the warp-in mechanic, and doing simple things like rallying gateway units outside your base turns into a massive challenge in a matchup like PvZ where you need to keep a unit in your wall at all times.
If the answer to that challenge is to simply use Warpgates in PvZ, then the change is just an across-the-board nerf to Protoss. It makes Gateways cost 175/25, and increases the warp-in cooldown of most of the gateway units. The larva changes are just an absurdly overtuned buff for Zerg, to the point that most pro players agree that it is a problem. Once you do factor in balance, it is even worse. Zerg has a dramatic advantage in both of its non-mirror matchups, currently sitting around 58% in ZvP and 54% in ZvT.
Between the Planetary Fortress, Sensor Towers, Turrets, and Siege Tanks, Terran has extremely powerful specialized defensive tools that help them defend against harassment in multiple places. Zerg has creep to allow them to respond to attacks quickly. The way Protoss deals with harassment is by being able to warp in specific units to respond to the threat. With the gateway changes, if you haven’t swapped to warpgates your only way to respond to harassment is by using nexus recall, which has a 5 minute cooldown. If you try to rally to a location to defend, you better hope the units you started 15 seconds ago were the correct ones. Cannons can only defend so much, and fall off in effectiveness very quickly as army supplies start to rise.
PATCH POTPOURRI PROBLEM
With the worker start changes, gateway changes, and larva changes taking up such a large part of the conversation, it is challenging to determine if any of the other (smaller, and more specific, by comparison) balance adjustments have impacted the game in a meaningfully positive or negative way so it doesn’t make very much sense to try and judge them at this time. These include the latest changes to the Ghost, Carapace Upgrades, and Psi Storm among others. I understand the logistical/time problems that the design team deals with, but this number of changes is very challenging to balance at once. If Protoss is struggling, how can you determine if it is due to the 8 worker start or due to the gateway changes? The Legacy of the Void changes were in Beta for 7 months, we had 3 weeks of a buggy PTR that almost nobody played before this went to live.
NEW PATCH, SAME PROBLEMS
An additional thing to note is that this patch has done nothing to address the stale lategame issues that the community has been frustrated with over the past year. In PvT Protoss still has a ton of map control in the midgame, and Terran armies are still effectively impossible to engage against once they build up a critical mass. Skytoss continues to be a pain point in PvZ, further exacerbated by it seeming to be one of the only viable ways to play right now. The mid-lategame of TvZ is almost completely unchanged as well.
LIMITED RESOURCES, ENORMOUS SCOPE
Ultimately this patch (and the PTRs that preceded it) have impacted the game in a way that I do not believe the developers were aware of or capable of predicting, due to the extremely short amount of time that they allocate to actually review the game. This has left me with absolutely no confidence that they are capable of getting the game back into a balanced state with the changes that they have made. The scope of the economy/larva/warpgate changes are so far-reaching that there is no way a team that reviews this game part-time can possibly make it fair, so these changes need to be reverted until a team with adequate time and knowledge to implement them properly can do so.
