Mass infestors might be the most broken thing in SC 2, of all time. A bug fix is going to be their “nerf?” This is definitely the pro of not being a pro Toss player. Could you imagine having your livelihood depend on this team? Geez…
Next “patch change” will be “Toss pros now have to pick cotton 10 hours a day” and spend the rest of the day worshiping a statue of a 6 year old Zerg “prodigy.”
GREAT job! Really, waited for it sooooo long.
These changes are about STARCRAFT. Not about buffing and supporting a-click oriented gameplay that protosses usually use! TvZ is a standart of what game should be (intense, hard, micro, macro, timings, tactics and strategies from BOTH sides!). I strongly believe charge nerf is good, especially if we talk about skill, if you are a good player you have time to micro, adapt and plan attacks (not just building a prism and 8 gates tbh), if not, then please let ordinary players that think and train their micro get higher above you. Terrans are always been reffered on such discussions due to their number of achievements in eSports (Maru, TY, ByuN, INnoVation etc a lot of them…) thats because terran race has a basement for really good, i would even say near GOD level players so they can put their efforts as much as they can and win everything, while protoss race (dont talk about zerg because it is simmilar to terran) has just good units, easier mechanic (cmon dont argue, everyone knows that) and some good things. The main problem is that protoss things much better against terrans, who cant play like Maru, who cant use every aspect of bio (splitting, targeting, multi frontening and macroing at once…), it is just required to win or there are always were some cheesy builds for easy wins, what bad is now terrans dont have them (remember cyclones? it is slowly nerfed now, it is still strong but requires more control). So at all i think Toss race has to be nerfed like that, but it is too cruel to decrease charge from 8 to 0 without micro options, marines die fast, but 1-tier players do miracles with them, so what can be an option for microing zealots??? I mean it is a reasonable nerf, but zealot still a-click type unit… But idea about forcing protoss and zerg players research upgrades in PvZ is GREAT, it should be so!
Overlord Pneumatized Carapace upgrade is very useful, thats a sweet change.
And i totally agree with proposal nerfing prism, 200 to 250, warp-in time and “new” Gravitic Drive upgrade. BUT changing pickup range is savage, maybe queen attack range nerf also required??? if queen and prism would have shorter range thats good then, protoss still will be able to micro with prism, but queens will not kill it that easy, also some air units will have some space!
SORRY for my english, great changes!
In my opinion this set of changes can’t be really considered as whole.
Let’s focus on PvT.
Aligulac PvT percentage shows a 51% so I don’t really understand why there is so much need of change.
With no doubt there are some game time windows where a race has ad advantage over the other and maybe this should be addressed more than nerfing units and new strategies that become popular (and this everytime only for protoss…)
The prism itself is a core unit of protoss army: despite the chronoboost, the protoss need the prism to keep the opponent busy with harassing and counter attack.
Imagine a situation where there is no harass from protoss: while he slowly build t3 army to counter t1 army of other races, he just get overmacroed and die from anything on 2 bases.
Also an HEAVY buff to terrans like 20 sec on stim plus HEAVY nerf on two core units like zealots and prism, will break totally this matchup.
I read the “problem” is some protoss strategies that revolves around the prism: why are you forcing a meta change and don’t let players to adapt?
The margery can be easily countered if you scout properly and know how to react, f.e.
The stim change is too much a big buff because surely we have adepts and battery, but we still miss the “time” to make things up. A proxy rax or 3 rax build with fast stim will still hit faster and way more harder and straight kill the protoss that won’t have enough warpins or resources to build defense/units without delay natural. This will be a win-win situation for terran anyway; kill protoss or just delay them getting macro advantage. Why this change anyway? It won’t help in any way the current pvt issue but only favor terran cheese (like they need more).
The pickup range nerfed from 6 to 5 is ok, it’s a try to fix an issue reported by almost any player. No point doing overkill with increasing the cost (already nerfed hp, you remember? now a mine oneshot it and queens melt them)
Zealots are a core unit of protoss army, can’t be straight nerfed. I don’t see games at high levels with compositions heavy on stalkers or adepts, they tend to be early game units or very situational.
If you plan nerfing zealots, you need to add some value to these units to help protoss have something cheap to defend higher tier units.
Ghost buff, is not necessary. Ghost is a pure skill unit where you need to aim correctly to maximize damage. Adding an upgrade to lower their skill need is unfair; for the same logic add to distruptors an upgrade that increase explosion radius. I didn’t see any struggle around ghosts in pro games, it’s always the positioning and micro fight that pays off.
For me the only change that make sense is the pickup range nerf.
Also DO NOT make all these changes live at once, they will inevitably break the game!
It baffle me as a zerg that blizz doesn’t address the zerg late game issue consider how powerful they are. With the infestors basically take control of the entire army of terran and protoss and they can’t do anything about it
Notice how Kespa was discontinued after lotv released? Since we are slowly going back to hots, maybe there will be interest again for kespa?
The pvx match up won’t be as stupid and unfun to watch after these changes go through.
The infested terran’s anti-air weapon was added on patch 4.0.0, on Nov 15, 2017. I wonder why it takes 20 month for the community and balance team to discover and fix the bug.
I also believe infestor need some change. Just like the Raven before nerfed, infestors are very hard to counter when massed, especially for Protoss. They are too versatile against everything.
It’s true that the very top players are usually Terran or Zerg, but those are outliers and not relevant to balance. When Maru and Serral were winning everything other Terrans and Zergs were not. No one Protoss dominated last year but many of them made it to finals and late stages of tournaments. Overall the last couple of years ended up being much better for Protoss players as a whole.
I think the reason no single Protoss player stands out is because Protoss doesn’t have a very good way of rewarding a player’s potential. Most of the spells and unit control like storm, disruptor shots and blink micro don’t have a very high skill cap. I think that’s why Protoss players tend to have similar performance depending on balance. They’re either all weak or all strong, and not usually at the very top. I think they should introduce a new mechanic that does a better job of rewarding top players.
Interesting set of changes, I like the direction of both Zealots and Prism changes. Glad Blizzard is listening to the community.
About Overlord speed I don’t think Zerg needs any kind of buff to their scouting abilities as it is already very very strong, specially with how strong Nydus is at the moment, if we couple it with speed Overlords, it will be even more problematic. Zerg is already winning every tournament, Blizzard team, they don’t need any kind of buffs right now.
I hope Blizzard also addresses the Cannon Rush problem, specially on PvP, it became rampant and requires a lot more effort to defend than to execute. Another issue IMO is the Nydus, it is way too cheap and people are literally SPAMMING it on ladder.
The changes are reasonable and I think better compared the first version. What is missing is
You know you’re playing a rigged and biased game when pro Zerg players can’t even get their own race nerfed. Every pro Zerg could come out and say “x unit of ours is completely broken. Seriously,” and it would be more likely to get buffed than nerfed.
Even Ray Charles can see the infestor is broken. How does any other unit justify being nerfed more than the infestor in this patch? In what world? This is coming from someone that is HAPPY to see units of his own race be nerfed. But, come on man, nothing Protoss has EVER been as good as the infestor is right now, lol.
Next up can you guys try to make Lurkers more viable? We rarely see them outside of zvz and its because their counters from T and P are too strong.
Lurkers does cost a bit much and take a while to build but maybe first try to nerf their counters before buffing their cost and build time?
Liberators: Defender Mode-Duration into it slightly decreased. The circle is also slightly decreased in size.
This will make it so the circles cover less ground area giving Lurkers more room.
On the protoss side, chargelot nerf does help and temepst ground attack range nerf from a long time ago slightly helped too, what also slightly helped was the nerf to revelation, but the main problem are immortals. I mean yeah they are slightly more expensive but their overall power is the same.
Disrupters can make it hard too to go Lurkers.
At least maybe more Zergs will survivie ZvP long enough to see those infestors, that Protoss whine about. Personally, I don’t even remember last time I had a chance to make those in ZvP.
I’m sorry, but as a Terran player, reducing the zealot damage down to zero is way too much of a nerf all at once. I do not think that the zealot needs any nerfs, as the unit is really strong and works in its intended role. I would suggest either reducing it by half or replacing the ability with something different, like a zealot getting 50 extra shields for 4 seconds after charge so the can survive a bit more damage. IIts a suggestion, but the charge nerf as is goes a bit too far.
Overall, everything else looks really good, I would like the stim upgrade to be taken back to a half measure, maybe 110 instead of 100, but I won’t complain.
The fact that somebody sucks in the game is not enough to warrant such nonsense.
I think i might change to the easiest race too. Buffing zerg vision that always has been very strong? Especially with these safe spots for overlords. With speed buff i can spam nydus all day because no one will catch my speedlords. In general I like the idea of nerfing the weakest race in terms of tournament winnings and overall race population in higher leagues. So Protoss can finally go extinct and we see zvz only on NA/EU (if it isnt like that already). Like shown in WCS we dont already got enough of zvz.
I want to see terran buffed, Zerg nerfed hard and protoss mostly untouched (nerf warp prism juggle).
But as far as i can tell Blizzard is very zerg biased so i might just change to zerg already. No more micro, build order losses or not enough vision.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way saying terran or zerg is super op. Specially from my perspective. I’m not good enough for balance to really have much of an effect on.
I just find it funny when people say Toss is super OP when they don’t win anything. You would think if they are indeed super OP they would win at least half the tournaments. Currently toss isn’t even winning 20%.
He has a point zerg does not survive the protoss agression. This was the reason for warp time nerf but they are avoiding it now giving zerg ovie speed still gonna be hard cause of inherit zerg scouting problems.
The fact the balance team didn’t fix this infestor “bug” before the WCS finals lets you know A) how much they care about Zerg imbalance and/or B) how little of a difference it makes. This is all bush league and ridiculous.
Sure, this is not the endo of it. Next patch we will apply other protoss nerffs. Until a 4000MMR Terran/Zerg can have a 50% win-rate with a 6000MMR Protoss.
Next in line for nerffs will be Storm, Colossus and Phoenix.
Zerg is not supposed to have great harass potential. Thats just how the race is designed. If zerg had the same harass potential as Protoss and Terran, zerg economy would be way too strong. The biggest reason why terran and Protoss have so many options for harass ist to keep the zerg economy from growing out of control.