Lets talk. The current Proposed change for charge is a mess. Giving Adepts and Zealots two additional upgrades on the twilight council bring it to a total of five is already overkill is not intuitive.
Now Blizzard wants to target the Zealot’s strength in the mid-game but there is a way to do this while changing up the game in a new and more interesting way. Now how do we approach delaying their mid game strength while addressing their early game weakness?
Splitting up their upgrade into two separate forms is a good way to go about it but not the proposed way.
Instead there should be two upgrades for the Zealot. One to increase their usefulness in the early-mid to mid game to help the transition of strength so we go from a bad unit, to a capable unit to a core unit. As well delaying their full strength from manifesting without commitment and time.
So I propose splitting charge into two separate upgrades.
Zealot Speed- Increases Zealot movement from 3.15 to 4.13, costs 75/75, build time 180s and researched on the cyber core (Mind you gateway tech also take 114s to research)
Zealot Charge- Temporarily increases the movement speed by 4.62, allowing Zealots to intercept nearby enemies, dealing 8 damage to the charged target, and guaranteeing the Zealot will strike the enemy. costs 125/125, build time 100s, researched on the twilight council. (With a possible pre-requisite of having zealot speed.)
This different proposed change still delays the full strength of the zealot but dramatically changes the dynamics of the game in a more healthy way.
Protoss get a slight buff to their early core unit without having to commit into a tech building but you will still have to likely wait for a 114s warp gate upgrade. 36s twilight council build time and a 180s leg upgrade before you can have a full strength charge.
But now you can try out a bunch of different compositions since you can be upgrading other units while you wait for the Zealot upgrade to complete.
Blink stalker/leg-lots, immortal sentry/leg-lots, adept with leg-lot meat shield.
The current proposed change keeps charge with the same timings +100s and +100/100 to hit full power.
My proposed change delays the current timings by +135s, +100/100 and that’s not even factoring the delay added that the extra 75/75 you will have to pay before getting a twilight council.
The difference is that it keeps less of the heavy lifting from the Twilight council. Making more interesting early game choices and giving Protoss a very slight early-mid-game bump for a weaker mid game.
It’s obvious that I could actually be too harsh with my suggestion.
But it’s one in which I believe Protoss players would be happy to try out.
I like these propositions. I think a base speed upgrade could be really interesting. It could make the army compositions more interesting in early/mid game. I would even say they could put Zealot charge on the Templar archives, if they want to delay that power spike
That would be a even more severe nerf with nothing to gain from it, again, how will Protoss players like this?
And moving charge to the Templar Archives would be a HUGE nerf since it’s forcing you to open Storm tech and delaying the upgrade time with Storm. Protoss would never again be able to survive Stim timings since we will be forced to chose Charge and defend the third without Storms or Storm and defend the third without chargelots.
I am a Protoss player and i would like this actually. Having a base speed upgrade available on the cyber core would benefit zealots quite a bit actually. Also this is not a thread about adepts. “A Better Way to address Charge”…
Zealots already get that speed increase with Charge.
The major difference (in the upgrades themselves, not the structure that they are placed on) between this person’s proposal and Blizzard’s proposal is that Zealots don’t get charge until they research the second upgrade, whereas in Blizzard’s version the Zealot gets Charge and speed from the first upgrade and the damage-on-charge from the second upgrade.
I know, what i am proposing and what i think Apocalypse is saying too, is break down charge like blizzard wants to, but in a different way.
Zealot’s base movement is 3.15.
Zealot with charge (Currently) base movement speed increases to 4.13
Zealot with charge (Currently) can “Charge” an enemy which increases speed to 9.1
What I am proposing is
Zealot speed (new upgrade at cyber core) increases zealot base movement speed to 4.13.
Zealot Charge (Revised upgrade at either Twilight or Templar Archives depending on how much Blizzard wants to delay the power spike) Temporarily increases zealot speed to 9.1 and deals no damage.
I like the idea but I think that between the two upgrades can not cost more 150/150 also the research time is too high. The upgrade for zealots to do 8 more damage on impact by 100/100 seems very silly to me
I agree, the build time should be slightly shorter. I think Zealot speed should be 50/50 and Charge 100/100. But i think this will open up some interesting possibilities as far as builds go.
Yes, and your suggestion is more of a nerf than Blizzard’s implementation.
The power spike that Blizzard wants to delay is the on-charge damage, which was added in LOTV to improve the Zealot. The charge timing and cost are completely fine and don’t need changes.
Just to explain this further, his suggestion is more of a nerf than Blizzard’s because it essentially means that Zealots cannot close distance and get damage in (even without the on hit damage). This is, in part, due to how much more effective microing bio is compared to BW, in addition to the fact that Conc-shell marauders exist.
Hmm. You guys make a good point here. After considering it a bit more and messing around with it in the BTM, I think the way it is proposed is fine, however, I still don’t like the 2 step upgrade thing. As I have said before, this seems clunky to me, and very inconsistent with other upgrades.