Hello!
Personally, I find Microbial Shroud isn’t a terribly fun spell to use. It just looks like a little bit of goop. You don’t really get any feedback on how well the spell is working. Compare it to a spell like Psi Storm, or Blinding Cloud. With Psi Storm, you see the (hopefully) enemy units taking damage, or with Blinding Cloud you see the units stop firing. My personal favorite, the Ghost’s Snipe, has a satisfying audio queue to go with it too. On the other hand, Microbial Shroud doesn’t tell you how well its working. I would love to see the opacity increased, or a special sound effect for units hit under it.
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If only the game was not on life support…
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Well, it is still finding a place in the meta I guess.
At the moment, even with the 50% damage reduction, it isn’t attractive enough compared to:
- Viper Abduct
- Infestor Fungal
I believe they were toying around with it for quite some time, but it still didn’t take off.
Perhaps a consideration would be to make it like Blinding Cloud (but against air). This will force it to become something that is more positional based (forcing the opponent to move or retreat), rather than having the opponent just hard counter it by having more dps.
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In a sense, I think they are trying to go for something similar to the original game’s Dark Swarm, but I believe the consensus is that that will be way too powerful in StarCraft II since that spell makes all ranged attacks miss (with the exception of splash damage attacks like the Siege Tank and Archon). Notably, practically all bio would be nullified.
Unfortunately, considering the unit in question, Fungal Growth simply has far more utility - if you assume the Infestors are paired with Hydralisks - since Fungal Growth can ensnare and damage Interceptors and mass-damage Void Rays and Mutalisks that have a habit of clumping up… and it reveals cloaked Banshees. The only time that Microbial Shroud theoretically is superior is when fighting deployed Liberators, but here it’s better to use a Viper.