Is there any hope for this ability? Does it actually get any usage at the pro level?
The cost and amount of gating just seems to make this spell prohibitive, and then its actual impact seems mediocre at best.
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There haven’t really been any tournaments yet, so we don’t have any data to go on.
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Then you just dont follow the scene at all. There have been tons of tournaments this year including the best players (EU and Korean) of the world including Serral in the IEM qualifier. We have loads of data but I havnt seen it used once yet, so yeah the ability def needs another change
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I do follow the scene, but 2 months worth of tournaments is not a lot of data. The meta takes a long time to develop. It’s probably going to take a couple balance patches before people start using it because yes, it has a ridiculous gate behind it, that needs to be alleviated some before we can really see what is happening.
Nah, shroud sucks. The fact that pros won’t even attempt using it in tournaments says it all.
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No it doesn’t. The meta doesn’t shift that fast. You can’t make a call like that based off of a couple tournaments. Meta changes take place slowly. We’ve seen many things become dominant years after their introduction. It’s going to take a couple larger tournaments and blizzard making a couple tweaks to take out the high gatekeeping before we can begin to make a judgment call, and even then it can be tweaked to become more useful. Something like maybe reducing spell damage or splash damage as well idk but to just say it sucks right after it’s introduction with almost zero date is ridiculous. I remember WOL people just said no, you don’t make hydras vs terran at all, then near the end stephano made a whole roach hydra style vs terran that was pretty good. The lurker is a good example. Blizzard cut it in early beta/late alpha because it saw minimal use just imagine if the lurker had been in WOL, would have alieviated some of the issues we ended up seeing like zerg being forced to go BL infestor, the immortal sentry push being almost unstopable in the right hands, zerg being dead if they got stuck on roach hydra comp past minute 8, and we probably wouldn’t have gotten stuck with the swarm host.
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Without adjusting shroud it’s completely useless. It’s supposed to be a replacement for infested terrans, which were a core part of Zerg’s AA, and players flat out refuse to use it. This is enough to know how bad it is and why it’s needs to be changed.
against toss, shroud is a big green “storm here” mark. against terran… it could be MAYBE usefull, if the terran go full mass bc, but in that situation, theres allrdy better options for zerg.
shroud never will be used at its current state.
after a little bit of thinking, i came to the following conclusion:
to make it usable, but not op, you would have to make it function like the aam. but instead of armor reduction, allied units within the cloud would recieve a +1 armor bonus.
this way, it wouldnt be op in any way and still a great spell, which would be used a lot.
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Hydras have many counters like storm and immortals, collosi and what not. So microbial shroud is underused. Because it doesn’t matter anyways, you gonna use corruptors against air. What about giving zerg t3 capital ship leviathan like other races can mass bcs and carriers. Because zerg has nothing vs carriers. Or it could cost 7-8 supply, but be one epic unit like mothership. To tank and counter t3 units.
Shroud being a “storm here” marker is the biggest complaint. If shroud protected hydras from AOE instead of just air, you might see some use.
They need to stop beating around the bush and just make it Dark Swarm
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Zerg players wants it as easy as possible that they dont want to have to move units out of the shroud and cast another one. They want the most minimal effort as possible to win.
Its pathetic.
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If the game was a monobattle carriers vs hydras + cloud, sure shrood be used, but HT/chargelots destroy mass hydras making them not viable.
Currently the best zerg anti-air is the spore, so you make a crazy amount of them, and stay behind them with broodlords/lurkers to zone HT, and corruptors/vipers to grab carriers. A small amount of hydras is not bad to clean interceptors, but as you stay behind spores, it’s not useful to get extra-tanking for hydras. Better make infestor for neural.
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Shroud probably needs some buffs but it’s still too early to tell, given that the pro scene is obnoxiously slow to adapt…but even in theory, there’s very few instances where using Shroud would pay off, bar not having any decent AA left and only having MS as your one out currently on the field.
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Says it could be as good as mass oracle. Or as good as hellions back when blue flame was +10 damage. Or as good as Phoenix/adept. Or… you get the point.
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difference is, all this units do dmg against every unit (even if only a little). shroud can only be used in niche situations and again, zerg allrdy has better options for every case, where you would use shroud. so no, it will NEVER be abused like mass oracle etc.
Ah yes, the legendary oracle AA!
Completely ignoring the point of my post, what a surprise.
Tell me a SINGLE unit comp with shroud, which has the potential to be op or atleast as good as f.e hydra viper. A SINGLE one.
Blizz hasnt learned anything from the past decade of balance patch meta. Obviously people are angry, stubborn slow learning and resistant to change. To compensate for this all new units and abilities MUST be OP initially or no one will use them. After they have been used a while and ppl become invested and familiar with them, then you scale them back to a reasonable level.
Blizzard did the exact opposite of correct with microbial shroud- they made it UP at first and are slowly scaling it up. You could make it 0 energy and double the radius and it would still not get used for like a month, because the mindset of “shroud sucks” has already congealed.
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Well now, if pros can’t think of something how could I have. We can’t say much about MS right now, it might suck, it might be really strong. Personally, I think the problem is that vipers and corruptors are already the best AA in the game, bar maybe thors. So why would you waste effort on microbial shroud?
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