Rather than nerfing sky toss why not buff corruptors? I would suggest a price reduction. As is max corruptor loses to max carriers at max upgrades at a ratio of 2-1. I did 63 corruptors vs 21 carriers and 10 carriers remain. (with focus fire) 126 vs 126. Not acknowledging that Toss often has more supply since zerg has queens and more workers. They also cost more by supply than carriers. Feels like there should be some reliable counter to mass carriers besides out microing the opponent in a viper vs HT fight over mass static D. I think it would make the match up more dynamic and solve the headache of 99% of zerg players. A single storm or archon shot would still wreck the corruptor ball so it wouldn’t make sky toss unviable. Perhaps a buff vs biological for Distruptors would be required so that they 1 shot lurkers, or a nerf for spores vs shields to keep pro play balanced.
Though I still am of the opinion basing balance around the top 5 zergs is ridiculous. (Serral Rogue, Dark, Reynor and Solar or Lambo, all of whom have lost vs skyoss in the not too distant past anyway.) Imagine if BW was balanced around keeping flash at a 50% win rate. LOL tries to nerf Fakers heroes, but then he just excels with a different hero. Some players are just better than others.
Corruptors not only do not need a buff but people would argue that they need a nerff (in the HP department).
Just to counter a single unit (mass-corruptors) Protoss need to build a comp of: Carriers + Voids + Archons + HT.
Corruptors have 29s build time to 64s of Carrier’s, and Protoss player usually won’t construct more than 4 carriers at the time. Decreasing cost of corruptors would in my point make carriers useless, by making corruptors free win button in such case.
Also I have no idea where you took numbers from. Corruptors hard counter ALL protoss air units in terms of supply efficiency with low level micro and their worst match up is vs mass Void Rays, which they win regardless, if Prismatic Aligment is dodged.
On first attempt, for not doing it for months, I repeated your scenario and had 47 corruptors left, so you do something significantly wrong. Check video in linked post for inspiration.
Yes, High Templars are huge in such fight, but it does not seem to be purpose of the thread, and you can add a few ultralisks to the comp for HTs sniping, while having lower supply than Protoss.
Serral vs Trap in the “pig fest” tournament showed Trap a-clicking with near zero micro, losing entire armies for free, while maintaining a 50/50 win-rate vs Serral who was quite obviously working much harder with more micro. At one point in time he did this weird recall maneuver and Serral killed an entire army for basically free. It made near zero impact on Trap’s standing in the game. Serral was always one step ahead in the army movements. There were many times Trap could’ve killed a base but reacted way too slow to spotting where Serral’s army was at. In one game he remaxes on mass stalkers and loses all those for free and still barely loses by the skin of his teeth. Trap made many, many, many monstrous mistakes that would cost a Terran or a Zerg the game in a millisecond if the shoe was on the other foot. It doesn’t matter to a Protoss because late game favors them enough to outweigh all the bad play. The number of times he lost all his high templar for free without casting any storms is just mind boggling.
It is an objective fact that skytoss armies are way too powerful. If Trap played as well as Serral did, it would have been a clean-sweep 5-0 for Trap. Trap is nowhere near Serral’s skill level. That’s plain as day in the quality of play.
Ah i did have my upgrades off i stand corrected. my experiment had the carriers fully upgrades vs ungraded corruptors. No need to be so hostile btw, it isn’t a good look.
I mean, if they nerf skytoss, even indirectly, they need to do something for protoss ground, because ground is not even an option in PvZ once vipers, lurkers, or brood lords are out. You can’t give zerg both complete dominance on the ground and the stronger air composition without some notable weakness (The difficulty of controlling that air + spellcaster composition), and expect the match up to be even remotely balanced.
Back in WoL/HoTS, protoss was able to really pressure Zerg on the ground, and it was harder/took longer for Zerg to tech to their main anti-ground tech (brood lords), while Protoss ground was stronger than it is now, which generally gave protoss a window to push while Zerg teched into broods. Things were still usually a bit Zerg favored, but the sentry pushes kept the match up in check.
There’s a reason the match up went to like a 35% win rate for Protoss at the start of LoTV when ravagers/lurkers were introduced and colossus were gutted vs non-light units.
They can nerf skytoss, but there needs to be compensation somewhere (like reverting the colossus nerf from the start of LoTV, nerfing lurkers, nerfing queens vs ground, etc…).
The main thing that’s favoring Protoss right now is that they can just go straight into voids, which are cheaper and move faster than before. Toning down voids with a cost increase and/or base speed nerf would probably fix that.
Corruptors don’t need a buff, they already hardcounter both skytoss massive units, what zerg needs vs skytoss is stackable aa splash or anti-caster tech.
Tell that to Trap who recently went mass stalker vs Serral in the ultra late game. He lost, but that’s because he blinked the stalkers under broods and accidentally focus fired them all on an extractor for the entire duration of the fight. The problem with using pro play to try to judge balance is that there are massive disparities in skill and effort between players. If you only looked at the fact the stalkers lost, you’d think they are bad. But if you look at the game, you realize they had a slam dunk victory and lost because the player using them wasn’t in the same universe in terms of skill/effort. The number of top Protoss professionals who can’t properly do basic micro like focus fire is just mind blowing which also perfectly explains their preference for micro-less strategies like skytoss.
You don’t even have to worry about pathing and terrain since skytoss is an air comp and you can move straight to whatever target you click on. That greatly simplifies your army movements/positioning too. Bad players are bad and prefer strategies that reduce the game to a simpler form and that’s exactly what skytoss is. The rest of Protoss is fine - it is VERY strong but it takes skill to use which they don’t have and that’s just fine. We shouldn’t buff Protoss to where skill isn’t a factor anymore. That’s basically what skytoss did and look at how it has completely ruined the game. Protoss are twice as numerous in GM as Zerg for crying out loud. If anything we should make skill a LARGER factor in Protoss by making the units weaker under a-move conditions.