Blizzard looked at a skyscraper teetering on collapse and decided to blow up the foundation. This isn’t a “balance patch”—it’s a catastrophic demolition of SC2’s core DNA. The 5.0.16 PTR doesn’t iterate; it obliterates.
Your “pro scene” is already on life support. Most pros are semi-retired, and the few still playing aren’t theorycrafting—they’re mourning. You’ve taken a competitive ecosystem running on fumes and poured sand in the gas tank. Few will waste months re-learning economy, supply, and production timings because some detached developer had a “vision” for one-to-three-base gameplay.
The casuals? They’re not adapting—they’re lost. The playerbase that endured a decade of neglect is now told to forget everything they know about macro, builds, and timing unit
But the real crime is the knowledge death spiral. Veterans who spent years refining guides and coaching methods now have curricula that are worthless overnight. They can’t teach what they don’t understand. Meanwhile, new players—already fighting SC2’s brutal learning curve—have been cut off at the knees. They learn half a build, the patch hits, and suddenly they’re stuck in a game that no longer resembles the one they were trying to learn. You’ve walled off generations of players and bricked up the door.
SC2 wasn’t dying because the early game was too short. It was dying because Blizzard abandoned it, then occasionally returned to kick it in the teeth. This isn’t a revival. It’s the final shovel of dirt on the coffin.
This is the only way this game rises out of this dead state. It just needs destroyed and remade anew and this is a great attempt at making it a new game without making a new game. Some people like the 12 worker change, but looking at the skeleton crew that’s left playing it that’s it. The faster pace killed the game. This has a chance to revive it and bring back normal players.
The Warp Gate changes are 15 years overdue. The foundation always had two huge cracks, Warp Gate and Forcefield. This is an attempt to fix one of them.
I like the 8 worker start but regardless of the starting workers, the Warp Gate change is needed.
While I have my problems with warp-gate, I think the more egregious issue is actually recall. Warp-gate has been a foundational part of sc2 since Wings of liberty, and the game has been balanced around it. It’s a core part of Protoss’ identity.
Should it be changed? I honestly don’t know. I don’t mind the idea of making warp-gate be a trade-off. The execution though, leaves a lot to be desired, and frankly it feels to me like this trade off isn’t good enough to stop using warp-gate as the main production.
The 8 worker start however, is absolutely atrocious.
What is your problem ? I am glad that somebody at least tried to bring back something that resembles old good 6 worker start. 8 is still fine though.
Actually the game needs redesign. LOTV mechanics with 12 workers plus base spamming every 2-3 minutes was literally unplayable for people with less than 150 apm. They should have considered 8 workers in 2015 before LOTV was released.
I agree that changing Warp Gate in some capacity is necessary so that Protoss stops having so many… what’s the phrase - battlefield-folding abilities, I think?
The combination of Warp Gate’s on-demand unit production and Recall is simply so much positional safety. That’s why so many tweaks and nerfs got applied to units, why Stalkers in particular are so mediocre at actually fighting but are a central backbone core unit despite that, and kind of bends Protoss’ general strategic flow around it - Unlike T/Z, Protoss does not need to be in everywhere at once, because if you get a small drop in their main, they can warp-in; if you doom drop it they can recall. They do not need to split their army into more than two main large sections to both have the ability to maneuver to all their bases in timely fashion and exert pressure outward, and you need very few warp prisms to create a meaningfully lethal amount of drop pressure - just enough to get through whatever turrets exist.
I really hate how Warp Gate is a significant cost per transformation, but I recognise a big part of that is the adjustment sucks.
My personal issue with it is the gas cost, since Protoss is so heavily gas restrained already. Even in late game situations I rarely have banked gas so I struggle to see where I’d scrounge that extra vespene from to afford those warp gates – yeah, I can just not use warp gates, but then I have a significantly different flow to how I need to be moving (as per above, I think that that’s probably actually a good thing for game health), which creates more learning friction and when I’ve played against it, it doesn’t feel obvious where that power is being taken from because the worker start change is its own bundle of throwing everything out of wack.
I think you’re missing the part about how long it takes to research warp gate on every single individual gate and how this will affect the macro pacing of the entire protoss especially in comparison with regards to playing against the other races and how fast they develop their own armies and how fast protoss can respond macro-lly (or “macro-wise”) in real-time in the game. I don’t know why nobody else is talking about this. I remember way back in LoTV when it was a bigger deal of when the warp gate upgrade got completed in PvT because the meta was a lot different then and you had to get that upgrade to upgrade your army production capabilities in order to hold your natural and stay in the game. Edit: or mayvbe that was in HoTS, in any case, this really will break the game especially at the top tier level as Protoss, ideally or theretically anyway, should be out-paced by zerg and terran as Protoss is slow to develop anyway and often has a very small army at the start of the game anyway as Protoss units are the most costly but more higher health and quality or have more abilities (or more high-tech you could say) than any other race.
You research the Warp Gate technology at the gateway, which still takes 100 seconds.
Once that technology completes, the train buttons on the gateway are replaced with faster ones, and all gateways unlock the transform to warp gate button.
The transform to warp gate button still only takes 10 seconds to perform, but now costs 50 minerals and 50 gas the first time that you transform a given gateway into warp gate. (You can still change it back into a gateway, and if you do, it doesn’t cost that 50/50 a second time.)
You research the Warp Gate technology at the gateway, which still takes 100 seconds.
Once that technology completes, the train buttons on the gateway are replaced with faster ones, and all gateways unlock the transform to warp gate button.
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Oh….well why move the warp gate technology research onto the gateway at the start of the game instead of the cyber core making the gateway unavailable to use for 100 seconds especially as that affects PvZ so much with Protoss needing atleast 1 unit early on much of the time to just plug the natural wall at the least…and then another a lot of the time to back up the other one, an adept behind a zealot at the natural wall for example…
Anyways, my bad, I thought that you had to research warp gate on every single gateway or something and this would significantly alter the balance of the macro of the game….
I understand now. Thank you. !!.
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I don’t see how this mechanic will make that much of a difference though especially in terms of pro or high level games because the apm of just turning every gate into a warpgate when you want that ability is not really anything of a big deal…just transform to warp gate once you have a warp prism and want to use the warp in ability to pressure or reinforce your push and once you stabilize on a lot of eco I don’t think many ppl would care to worry about production time increases from not transforming your gates to warp gates as having warp-in ability is more beneficial for defensive and offensive mobility uses and if you want more army production and potential gateway you know, warp in capability you would just build more gateways…
I don’t disagree here, Warp Gate means Gateway units must be balanced around the ability to warp them in at any warp field location. If Warp Gate is weakened, that calls for corresponding rebalancing of Gateway units - specifically in ways that can make up for the time gaps for travel time and “burst reinforcement,” meaning, ways that provide standing strength and longevity in combat. Right now, Forcefield kind of fills that gap instead of strong, micro-scalable units unless you are a master of using Blink Stalkers, in which case you are largely just massing one unit until you transition.
I’d much prefer a fun, microable synergy of Zealots + Adepts. To me, this could look like Zealots that live longer with their speed upgrade moved out of Charge and into the Cyber Core, maybe with a bit less damage output, and Adepts that are agile damage output units, perhaps with a high-burst weapon to make them less efficient against workers but more usable against combat units, and a more short-range shade ability that’s useful for repositioning in combat rather than bouncing between enemy bases.
This turns Gateway-oriented gameplay into positioning the army correctly and using things like stutter-step and focus-fire for Adepts, and Zealots primarily as microable body-blockers. That seems way more fun to me than “let’s avoid combat by shading between bases and cutting off paths with Forcefield.”
Recall is a bandaid positional need stemming from the reality of Gateway units not being able to scale well without a deathball of high-tech units, which is a reality that Warp Gate basically forces. Brood War didn’t have this issue since Dragoons are such bread-and-butter units.
Related to that, Protoss tech units in Brood War behave in a way where positioning “around” Dragoons is necessary to make them effective, which discourages deathballs. Colossi being able to step over units and Disruptor shots having no collision contribute to making this kind of play obsolete in SC2, but I don’t think they are as big of factors as Warp Gate and Forcefield in holding back the potential for it. High Templar at least function somewhat similarly in both games.
All this does is slow down Warp Gates and push them to the late game instead of mid game.
Warp Gates were broken because you could build more than your economy could handle and still get a massive benefit. The main issue was that the cooldown happened before you bought the unit, letting you warp them in anywhere instantly. They still let you do this, but now it’s delayed until the end game where it belongs.
My only major concern on the PTR is the Ghost. An uninterrupted Snipe doing 170 damage has no counterplay. Plus, 20 flat damage is way too strong against the small number of army units Zerg can actually produce early on. With the slower economy, it makes the Ghost way too OP in the early game, and it just snipes Queens like it’s going out of style.
You already have this with current zealot stalker interactions. To do this the adept itself would probably need some fairly significant changes.
I honestly disagree. It’s a bandaid, yes; but only in the sense that it allows you to completely ignore being out of position with your army. Which, you know, every other race has to deal with in some way shape and form through good map vision and positioning.
You can literally solve this issue through the tactical use of observers, pylons or zealots/probes placed on the map.
I’m quite tired of this narrative that gateway units are weak. They haven’t been weak for a long, long time.
As an aside though, Protoss is designed very differently; they’re designed around having strong core units in templar, colossus etc, while the gateway units support them. Gateway units by themselves are more than enough to deal with small squads of units, while big army clashes should and do require high tech units for protoss to win - and that’s what they should be.
These days however it’s more gatewayman style where you can swarm your opponent because your econ is superior, until they have enough tech units they can actually fight you. Ghosts and liberators.
ZvP is a bit of a sh!t-show because… well, currently toss’ ability to Zerg a Zerg is stronger than Zerg’s ability to Zerg a protoss because their gateway units are generally just… better units for the most part.
Protoss should need to use Observers and good positioning (another point against Warp Gates and Forcefields as a crutch). Zerg and Bio armies are generally easier to reposition due to their mobility - you can reposition some Gateway units quickly as Protoss, but most Protoss tech units are significantly slower than the units than opposing bread-and-butter units, with a few exceptions like Brood Lords in the lategame.
Mech core units are also slow (slower than Protoss tech units when considering siege/unsiege for Tanks), but Protoss has Warp Gate + Recall that bandaid those issues for them which allows them to compete better than Mech at higher levels.
Protoss didn’t always have Recall as one of the bandaids here, but that was also in a time where mass expansions weren’t encouraged as early in the game as they currently are.
I highly doubt this strategy would work as well as it does if Warp Gate didn’t allow the benefit of reinforcing closer to or sometimes directly onto the front lines. If Protoss reinforcements had to travel all the way from the main base, with predictable reinforcement paths with opportunities to pick units off out-of-position, I think this kind of strategy is likely to fall apart.
If Gateway combat units aren’t good enough to do this kind of strategy without Warp Gate and without Forcefield, then it’s not their strength alone that’s letting them compete toe-to-toe.
Now, I will temper that with saying that I think Zealots are too much of all-rounder units in some situations once they have Charge and upgrades. That’s why I also mentioned lowering their damage output, so (redesigned) Adepts would be required for damage output and Chargelot “swarming” wouldn’t be an optimal strategy.
I don’t think you have it without Warp Gate as a crutch for reinforcement. I’m also totally fine with significant Adept changes.
They had Recall in HotS, it was just tied to the mothership core. Now, it’s on every nexus, they don’t have to pay for it, and they start with enough energy on every nexus to always have it available whenever they need it.
Ironically, I don’t mind forcefields. I’m a bit mixed on warpgate, because it definitely does serve as a huge crutch, but at the same time it’s also quite iconic.
The thing is, Protoss’ design is completely different from BW. And that’s okay - they should rely on power units, that’s always been their fantasy from the earliest days of WoL through LotV.
I’m not against tech units, I do think they should be positionally interesting and not deathbally, i.e., “Disruptors go to the sides of the army or in Warp Prisms since their shots have collision” and “Colossi can’t walk over units so the army needs to move and potentially split in a way that let’s them walk where they need to in-advance” and balancing them around that.
I also think the existence of Warp Gate and Forcefield both locks up potential for good, fun changes to Gateway units that would be great for the game. We can disagree on that, though.
What I don’t want is a half-baked patch that just makes the game broken and gets reverted because it wasn’t iterated on enough to be actually good, which is sadly what I think is going to happen if the pattern we’ve seen with patches continues.
The only way to balance this game and make protoss viable at pro-level is this:
-remove warp gate entirely (should have never been in the game in the first place)
-buff gateway units so that they fight with terran bio and zerg hatch units head-to head without AOE
-decrease bio and ling speed so that protoss army does not need to rely on recall
-remove band-aid: recall, force fields, shield/energy battery etc.