Battery overcharge problem/bug : Fix needed

There is an issue with battery overcharge pointed out by Parting on his stream. It can be easily tested and shown by anyone.

Simply put if you have multiple batteries that can heal a unit, the battery that gets overcharged most of the time doesn’t get used because you can only have one shield battery healing a single unit and the overcharged battery doesn’t take precedence for healing.

For example, if I have 4 stalkers shooting a zealot that is standing in front of 3 batteries, one of the batteries will heal the zealot. If you use the battery overcharge on any other battery, it does nothing. You see the overcharge graphic but it will not heal the zealot until the other battery is out of energy and has stopped healing. I don’t know how batteries decide which gets to heal first if they are all in range (it may just be chance), but it appears that building multiple batteries will severely reduce the likelihood that the overcharged battery will do the healing. If you have 3+ batteries there’s a very very high chance that the ability won’t kick in in time because the overcharged battery will have to wait for all the other batteries to be depleted. In Parting’s stream he had a situation where he built 4 batteries all in range of the same unit and the overcharge never kicked in because it was waiting for 3 other uncharged batteries to be fully depleted. By the time they were depleted, the ability had already ended and never contributed to the defense. This means for many times when its sorely needed, the utility gets burned without giving anything to the protoss player.

This seems to be an issue particularly when the game designers stated they didn’t want to create decision paralysis where the protoss player must specifically think a lot about which battery to overcharge.

The fix is simple: let whatever battery is overcharged take precedence for healing. I’m also not sure if this can be categorized as a bug but I think it’s close to that. It’s certainly not a design feature that was intended.

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Why the hell do you have to be so god damn coherent?

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Yeh I don’t think this is intentional. Pretty stupid that it doesn’t have priority over the normal ones.

i agree the battery overcharged is super dumb and makes toss even more overpowered than it already is.

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don’t you have my little pony to go watch ?

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I was going to say just wait until all of the batteries run out of energy before you use it, but that’s a bad strategy too as the overcharge gives a higher rate of healing, so yes this does need to be fixed.

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While we are on this topic of battery bugs. I have had difficulty “turning off” a battery. So, if I focus it on a pylon, but they back off so I want to stop that, it typically won’t actually turn off until the battery is down to like 10 energy. Have you noticed this as well?

Are you suggesting that any one or two [or more] batteries should heal a single unit at the same time?

By his post you can clearly tell that is not his intention. Dont try to provoke a protoss whine complaint by not reading correctly.

Thank you

No. Feel free to test it yourself.

The issue is that when multiple batteries can potentially be the battery that should heal a unit, the overcharged battery is often not the one healing the unit because it doesn’t take priority over other batteries. For an extreme example if you have 10 batteries all in range of healing a zealot, if you overcharge one of them it seems like it’s actually about a 1/10 chance that overcharged battery will be the one that will heal that zealot because the overcharged battery doesn’t get priority over normal batteries. In fact the overcharged battery may end up being the 8th or 9th or 10th battery to finally heal something because batteries kick in when other batteries have run out of energy assuming they all are in range of the same unit. The ability lasts for 14 seconds so if there is a lot of competition between batteries for which one gets to heal the overcharged ability often gets wasted because it never actually gets used in the 14 seconds that the ability is active because it’s waiting for other batteries to run out of energy before it kicks in. It seems that once you have about 3-4 batteries the odds your overcharged batteries will actually heal in the 14 seconds it’s active is pretty low.

This does matter because the healing rate is a major component of why the overcharge can keep units alive . In addition it causes decision paralysis about shield batteries (how many, when it overcharge, which to overcharge, etc) which blizzard was trying to avoid.

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The “fix” might be a little difficult. Batteries have a range of coverage and I don’t think there is any priority given to which units would need their shields recovered. Like if you move a unit into a group of batteries, I’m pretty sure the game will choose whatever battery is first within range to activate. Would the game have to then check continuously if the overcharged battery gets within range and switch which battery is active?

A temp fix may be to allow the user to manually dictate the overcharged battery to heal the targeted unit and stop the other batteries from healing it until the overcharged battery is destroyed or the overcharge wears off.

I love the idea. This fix should be implemented.