How could herO be so bad and make it to the semifinals? He can’t split his units, can barely micro outside of pressing nova over and over. He can’t pull probes vs harass, doesn’t realize 30 workers are idle in game 2. Meanwhile herO was ahead almost the entire time in every game and still lost because Terrans bio is 10x better than gateway units and lifting into medivacs and boosting away is about as easy as recall. Its no wonder so many people are leaving this game. I seriously miss HOTS balance where all three races had to micro extremely well to have any chance of winning. Not just “mass this unit” and do minimal stutter stepping to win a game. Or in Protoss case, keeping all your units in one giant clump and pressing a spell over and over.
Man complains about widow mines and wants hots back at the same time. Also talks about Protoss deathballs just as a spicy zingy meatball bait.
There were better options to deal with deathballs and widow mines in hots. Now we have nerfed lurkers, nerfed banes, nerfed infestors, and nerfed broodlords.
Both Protoss deathballs and Widow mines (baring the nerfed period) were stronger in HotS than they are in LotV.
Lurkers didn’t exist in Hots at all, Hydras were worse, Mutas were the same, Infestors had Infested terrans that were genuinely useless since they didn’t scale with upgrades and had no special abilities, and Fungal was still a projectile. Vipers didn’t have Parabomb either, which meant dealing with air units was much harder, every ZvZ was Muta vs Muta.
I’ll give you that broods were slightly better, if only because the broodling lasted longer, but broodlords were also significantly slower than they are now.
The colossus was much stronger, feedback did 1-1 damage to spell casters, ravagers didn’t exist so forcefield was incredibly strong to the point that the Soul Train was effectively un-counterable without a burrow ambush and some significant luck, the Mothership core was a thing that basically invalidated early harassment against Protoss so they were able to get deathballs faster and more effectively, basically taking 3 bases off 1 gateway and a mothership core.
Widow mines were permanently cloaked, had wider damage radius (again, not including the mine nerf period where terran functionally didn’t exist), visual targeting wasn’t anywhere nearly as obvious (actually, it wasn’t a thing at all), so you had to guess which unit the mine targeted. Oh and they had bonus damage to shields on splash as well as on their single target.
If you’re talking about the Nerfed mine era, then Terran just straight up didn’t exist at all in pro or ladder play outside of 1-2 Terrans. But sure, mines were much easier because you didn’t have to micro against them ever. There were so many complaints about the mine because Zerg players didn’t want to do the bare minimum micro at all (having almost literally never had to in their life up to that point) that they nerfed the mine and subsequently removed terran from the game for the better part of almost a year (that’s not an exaggeration).
And yet you want the worst - and most boring - period of sc2 to come back? Oh, and we had sc2 games that were, without exaggeration, multiple hour long trades against free units where nobody moved and did anything.
Despite the fact that everything you mentioned is true -i’d still prefer HOTS over LOTV any day of the week because of slower build up. At least in hots casuals had enough apm to pull almost any strategy. Nowadays with LOTV idiotic eco, i can barely keep up production and microing two harassment groups at the same time with my 150-180 APM.
And cheeses were MUCH weaker in HOTS due to 6 worker start - if it failed it was game over which is not the case in LOTV where any failed cannon rushes or 1 base roach ravagers can still easily transition into normal game or further pressure. That’s another argument against LOTV.
Also there were far less micro-able units than LOTV - no cyclones, ravagers, disruptors, 5- range warp prisms, adepts etc.
HOTS was far from perfect but it was 10x better than this garbage we have today.
the fast start is better for “standard” games.
but the ecco explodes extremely quickly. Hots have been played longer on 3-4 bases.
Lotv pro is also different from Lotv ladder.
yes and herO was easily the best protoss player in the world around 2014/2015…he has seemed to have fallen off a bit…
I don’t think I would ever have called HerO, of all people, the best protoss in the world until he came back from his military service and won GSL. Prior to that there were an absurd number of issues with his gameplay. Not the least of which was that he couldn’t macro to save his life. He was the Korean version of Has until recent years.
The game economy was rebalanced from 1-3 base plays to 5-7 base plays, and this emphasizes mechanics over all else because the sheer volume of stuff to manage is just so flipping high (serral wins almost exclusively through this mechanism, by the way). HotS era protoss selected protoss because it was a mid game timing attack race with heavy emphasis on micro, and that style of play just isn’t viable in modern lotv. Micro is basically irrelevant because Code S terrans will throw away 5 medivacs of marines for free and it basically doesn’t affect his odds to win at all. Why? Because literally nothing matters except how well you can spam APM to stay on top of the multitasking load of managing a 7 base economy. Basically, they deleted protoss champions from the game by rebalancing the economy & now they all act confused why protoss can’t win a premier tournament.
To quote Bill Burr, “The men in the room have to sit there an act like they don’t know what the answer is. Women’s soccer doesn’t make any money? Huh? Why is that? I dunno … it’s because you don’t sell any tickets.”
“Protoss don’t win any tournaments? Huh? Why is that? I dunno … it’s because you deleted their playstyles from the game.”
A sc2 youtuber was talking about this on one of his casts which probably is reflective of the conversations being had by the community at large. Anyway he says the 12 worker start was done for the sake of esports because they want to jump right into the action to hold the attention of the viewers. That’s a great theory, just misapplied because 12 worker starts slow down the action. Instead of a minute or two of building up workers, we instead have 10 minutes of meaningless interactions before something actually happens that is consequential to the game outcome.
A common way a TvZ goes is that hellions deny creep tumors for several minutes and everyone is twiddling their thumbs while that happens. Back in hots by comparison you could 9p with gas or 10p without gas vs terran as a standard build. As a result, terrans went reactored hellions off 1 base and then expanded. It was much more action packed. Nowadays I literally fast forward using the youtube skip hotkey. I just fast forward through probably 9 in 10 games. It’s the same game, it just takes 30 minutes for a TvZ to play out and that’s boring as heck. So I just 
over and over until the match is over. I legit am not going to spend 2 hours watching a single best of 7. 12 worker start was one of the biggest design screw ups.
The gaming industry has been moving away from long games to short games. Hearthstone is a good example. A typical hearthstone game is 5 minutes, and they very rarely exceed 15. That’s the range of HotS games because it was common for a 9p to kill terran players in about 5 minutes.
- Action starts at 5:36. Game ends at 6:49.
- Action starts at 4:09. Game ends at 7:01.
- Action starts at 2:58. Game ends at 12:55.
vs
- Action starts at 4:20. Game ends 13:39.
- Action starts 4:13. Game ends 14:43.
- Action starts 4:05. Game ends 11:20.
- Action starts 5:24. Game ends 9:12.
- Action starts 4:38. Game ends at 32:27.
- Action starts 4:24. Game ends 7:35.
- Actions starts 5:27. Game ends 24:32.
By “action” I mean “any interaction capable of significantly altering the game outcome”. So the reaper doesn’t count as action. Another thing worth noting is that “action capable of winning the game” doesn’t occur until drastically later in LotV games while in HotS games it starts at literally 3-5 minutes. So LotV games have “action capable of affecting the game outcome” starting at ~4 minutes while HotS games had “action capable of ending the game” in about the same time period. But people still say it wasn’t action packed. Meanwhile the 12 worker start now causes 20 and 30 minute games to be very common.
I consider the 12 worker start to be one of the biggest blunders in game design ever made because I think it basically killed SC2 esports. It had the opposite effect that they intended it to. It made games longer and more prone to stalemate, and didn’t even speed up the early game at all. Besides, it was a solution to a non-problem because if esport people want to cut out the slow game starts, they can just start the cast when the action picks up. So basically they ignored the trends in the gaming industry at large, screwed over the player base in favor of esports, and actually made esports worse. But that’s not the end of it. They did this over a non issue that had a very easy solution. It’s incompetence to the power of incompetence. It’s literally incompetence squared.
This is the trouble with people who are born on 3rd base. Because they are born on 3rd base, they have no clue how they got there. They don’t know what to do next. So they take actions that backfire, putting them on 2nd base and then finally 1st base. The game ends and they act like they hit a home run. That’s what happened with SC2 during HotS. Game designers were handed a wildly successful game with billions in potential value and then they added a 12 worker start, putting them on 2nd base. Then they removed game ending moments and banned koreans from foreign events, putting them on 1st base. Now they pretend like they hit a home run when in reality they were handed a pair of aces and still went bust.
The ship has sailed for fixing most of these issues, unfortunately, but every game designer on the planet can learn from this scenario. DO YOUR MARKET ANALYSES AND DESIGN THE GAME TO MATCH MARKET NEEDS. It’s not hard. Also, DO NOT PRIORITIZE ESPORTS OVER YOUR GAME QUALITY AND OR PLAYER BASE. Thanks for attending my ted talk.
PS if they wanted to increase the action of the early game, they didn’t need to give a player 12 workers but instead start them out with 6 workers and 8 zerglings (or 2 zealots, or 4 marines). You want action right from the start? Congrats, you’ve got action.
PS 2: Another thing worth noting is that early game action is far preferable over mid and late game action because late game action has so much going on that everything is simply a blur. The user is probably going to find that boring. The early game action by contrast is simple, comprehensible, understandable. That’s the reason why League of Legends interactions are more interesting than SC2 interactions. There is just so much going on in the late game that viewers are going to tune out. The unit-retainment micro of the early game by contrast is something the viewers would find riveting because it’s not this cacophony of 5 trillion things happening on the screen at the same time.
“We did 12 workers to speed up esports”:
Maybe I’m nostalgic, but I feel the same, I know that LOTV is the better version,but I enjoyed the few first chill minutes of warmup because in lotv after the first overlord/pylon/depot you are already starting the timing/build, I found that stopping cheeses was harder in lotv because of the eco speed some cheeser could chain cheeses like cannon+proxy void
LMAO
“Terrans throw away 5 medivacs for free”
“Protosses lose oracles to spores”
Meanwhile zerg players, who never, NEVER make any mistakes, play without vipers and keep crying about skytoss. I don’t know what you’re smoking kid but leave some of that stuff for me.
Yeah best around then would almost certainly have been Zest. Zest was so strong in mid-late HoTS. Then of course you had sOs (greatest Protoss of all time dont @ me) pulling out some of the coolest stuff. I don’t think herO would even be number 3 when we also had Classic.
Zest, sOs, Stats, Classic, Parting, Trap… all people I would have put above HerO.
And while HerO has improved, putting him now, up against the aforementioned players in their prime; I’m really not sold that his skill would match them at their peaks.
I think a core memory I have from HoTS, is herO’s signature stalker/sentry style getting absolutely styled on by Rogue with mass bane rains on all the sentries. Rogue gained me as a fan that day, for sure.
I really don’t think the HOTS Swarm host meta was in any way better than what we have today. Noobs can still pull off whatever strategies they want to as they will be playing against players of equal skill. if you can’t manage to micro two harassment groups simultaneously then don’t do that. In general don’t sacrifice your macro to micro more stuff as that just puts you behind. if you have more stuff than your opponent you will probably win the fight so long as you aren’t super hard countered to do something really stupid like fight around a corner into siege tank fire.
oh and you can still play the game with the heart of the swarm ruleset whenever you want just load a custom game up you usually won’t have to wait long for a 1v1 or 2v2 lobby to fill up.
The HoTS swarm host meta was indeed awful, but it was a perfect storm. Protoss was at it’s probably strongest relative state, Zerg had no decent anti-air, and mass raven was a thing. I’m glad the Swarm Host got changed, but stuff like Mass Raven needed to go aswell (which gladly it did)
Tbh - swarm host was the only argument against HOTS (maybe mass Raven uncounterable to zerg was also a thing) but the rest was absolutely better. All they needed to do was to change Swarm host and tweak a Raven so it wouldn’t be abused in TvZ match ups - this would result in a really decent and balanced game imo.
Swarm hosts. Mass raven. Mothership core photon overcharge 13 range 2k HP 60 second cannon. Blink Era. So many different issues with HotS man. So many.