I’ve given more thought to the VR speed buff.
The devs suggest to give the VR a map control creep/overlord cleaner role. But :
- Current proposal (3.85 / 5.11 speed with fluxvanes) make them as fast than vikings in early, and faster than cyclones or stimmed marines in late (I already feel the base-trade trolling potential with marines unable to reach voidrays, and stalkers being inefficient against them). And that while still being slower than mutalisks, or than corruptors before fluxvanes.
- An intermediate (+0.175 speed = 3.67 / 4.82) speed buff wouldn’t break early viking kiting possibilities that much, but would still allow fluxvanes voidrays to reverse counter cyclones and to escape even stimmed marines.
- Buffing the viking’s speed would preserve their interaction against VR, but while still breaking the one with cyclones and stimmed marines, and affecting the one of the other units meddling with vikings, such as corruptors & capital ships (which wouldn’t be that bad), but also oracles’, medivacs’, warprism’ which would certainly affect balance.
I think the balance team is proposing to give the voidray a role that it isn’t meant to fill (not to mention it would still be bad at it due to mutas). The VR is an aerial heavy assault fighter. To clear creep and map control, a fragile but fast scouting/harassing unit, with enough speed to escape queens, speedhydras, corruptors, and not being too vulnerable to mutalisks would be better. And to me, that’s the oracle :
- Faster than queens
- Faster than speed hydras even on creep
- Same speed than mutas
- No interaction breaking with vikings, cyclones nor stimmed marines, and less cancer base-trade potential
- Aligns perfectly with your harass SG openers. Because cleaning creep is nice but it’s killing drones that you want in the end
Just incite the protoss to make more oracles and to clean the creep with them, by just reducing oracle pulsar beam activation cost from 25 to 10 or 15. Leave voidray’s speed untouched, but lower the corruptors’ one to match speedrays’ current (4.72 → 4.65) to improve their role as an assault fighter, and we’re good. 