- Zerg, without a doubt, for numerous reasons. Though I’m not sure it’s by much
- That’s difficult to say - the Terran in me says that they’re the weakest, but Maru really didn’t perform at what I would consider his best - he was clearly experimenting; it looked like he was trying to find something, anything to work with. Byun looked incredible on day 2, then his wrist started hurting and it was down hill from there. Ryung looked pretty good day 1 then Day 2 looked good, just… not good enough.
Creator was the surprise turn-up pretty much this entire season - he’s looked incredible, and it’s wonderful to see after so long for him. I actually hope he wins this season, however ZvP really feels like a rough matchup in general, though if memory serves the stats indicate that it’s a lot closer. - I know PiG feels that the patch didn’t do what it was supposed to do, as do quite a few pros. We’re still seeing the presence of queen timings, as well as voidray into skytoss on both sides, and both styles of play are so common and played out that it’s boring to watch. Many people feel that the matchup is boring to play on both sides, boring to watch, and boring to face. It’s not necessarily a balance issue, but Protoss ground certainly seems to have less success than protoss air does in ZvP - between Ravagers demolishing forcefields and early defenses, Banes in the mid and late-game and Lurkers in the late-game, it’s no wonder players would rather just go air and not have to face them. Ravagers especially feel like they remove the one thing Protoss’ early game was balanced around initially - forcefields (I posted a thread on that a while back)
The PvZ Problem - Sentry/Ravager - Golden-wall being back… Well frankly TvZ is a nightmare on that map. The map is uniquely interesting, to be certain, but it’s certainly one of the worst maps for TvZ. Not sure about TvP or PvZ because we never really saw those matches on that map. Nautilus is another 4-player map, which typically inherently favour Zerg just by virtue of random spawns alone. That said, I’m not sure if it’s imbalanced, because it’s really dependent on what spawns you get, as well as whether your spawns are scouted. We haven’t really seen enough of the map to know. Most of the maps in the pool seem to currently favour Zerg as it is though - the sheer size of the maps make them far better for Zerg with one or two exceptions.
Eh… I don’t think this is strictly 100% true - looking at trends over a long period of time can certainly show whether something is balanced or not. Winners and runner-ups are just one metric that should absolutely be considered, though never in isolation. They’re meaningless if you’re just looking at the winner and runner-up of one tournament though.