Nothing to see here, no imbalance what so ever. Its only the highest level of play in this game.
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Meanwhile in other world Skillous 2:0 Heromarine and MaxPax taking out Buyn like he is nothing.
That said, I do believe that Zerg have an edge over Protoss and Protoss should get some anti-Zerg buff, e.g. WP gets a pick-up range upgrade or cost of FF is reduced (as much as I would like Queens getting the nerfhammer in a form of e.g. “armored” tag, this would be too much).
I wish MaxPax played on live tournaments. Sigh…
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No, we just need to nerf Terran. The problem protoss has always had is PvT. PvZ is pretty equal all around. Plus ZvT is such a terrible matchup with widow mines and literal shift + rapid fire snipe. Just look at Byun vs Dark in GSL this week. Byun 2-0ed Dark by doing the same two base marine allin. It was the dumbest starcraft matches I’ve ever seen. Dark had more minerals in just the queens than Byun had Marines. Yet stim a-move is supreme.
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TvP/PvT is almost exactly 50% win rate at the moment.
Zerg is OP in both XvZ match-ups.
PS. MaxPax btw 2:1 Clem and got 0:2 by Reynor 
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it doesn’t matter who wins as long as everybody’s having fun. I am glad I got to watch 12 TvZ’s, it reinforces the idea that roaches are bonkers strong in the matchup.
Terran > Zerg > Protoss. Enjoy watching your TVT semi-finals and finals.
BTW katowice 2023 was also a TVT finals with only 1 protoss in the round of 8. In katowice 2022, there were no protoss in the round of 8. Obviously protoss is OP and needs to be nerfed further. We shouldn’t have any protoss in the round of 16 or 32.
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Watching roach, ravager, lurker, infestor, viper get steamrolled by basic marine marauder was a true delight to witness. Outside of the rare scenario where the terran walked his entire army into fungals, and then the zerg ALSO coupled this with bile, the terran was winning every engagement from A to Z. If they didn’t win the fight, they traded more efficiently. So even when Zerg wins, he loses.
It’s a map issue. Small maps force zerg onto roaches to survive the early/mid game, but roaches have negative value the moment the terran finishes 2/2 OR he gets out 5 siege tanks, and have zero ability to deal with medivac harass (which is another point on the map issue board). Your army goes from being able to keep you alive to having negative value the moment 2/2 finishes.
This is probably the most terran favored map pool I have ever seen. I still think PvT favors Protoss, but the maps are so good for medivacs that there is nothing either zerg nor protoss can do. Every map was designed to make it impossible to defend medivacs. Whoever approved this map pool was an absolute idiot. I took 1 glance at these maps and I knew exactly what was going to happen. The fact that you can easily go from sieging the third to being in someone’s main base 3 seconds later is just beyond broken. Either one of these on their own would be powerful. But, losing your third AND having your main threatened is so beyond busted it was crystal clear that medivac abuse would cause terran to dominate this season, and I could tell that within seconds after seeing the maps.
That’s the problem with Blizzard. They don’t have smart people calling the shots. I doubt the people who manage the game even play it. This map pool was so blatantly problematic that anyone with 3 brain cells would’ve rejected it within a minute of seeing it. Somehow we are watching the GSL be played on this map pool. That’s idiocracy at its finest.
Imagine for a second if someone claimed to be a motocross expert who could do a back-flip on a bicycle while drunk. Now imagine if this same person also had parkinson’s. That’s the level of incompetence that we’re dealing with here. A guy who can’t hold a glass of water is in charge of doing back-flips with a motorbike. Why is it that the people who are in charge of the map pool can’t understand basic game concepts like medivac boost?
If you can pick what the GSL winner will be based on the map pool alone, something is very wrong with that map pool.
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It’s not a map issue. Zerg just has no real units to fight terran bio with other than the baneling. They also have no ability to catch medivacs unless you go risky mutas. Protoss for example has blink which punishes medivacs. In fact without blink (or phoenix), you will get crushed because you can never trade effectively vs terran unless you have perfectly positioned splash or you’re killing medivacs and stopping the unit healing. Zerg has no such thing. Zerg used to have rangy queens but that got nerfed. They used to have infested terrans that got nerfed. With each patch, zerg has become more and more reliant on banelings (and lucky ling runbys) to win. I’m not critiquing the patches, just stating what I see. Hydras, lurkers, mutas, broodlords, ultras won’t win you the game so why build them?
I don’t play the game anymore and just mostly watch pro VODs online. I quit at masters league and my main race is protoss. I literally do not care about zerg but I do care when pro games are unwatcheable because the outcome is more or less predetermined. To me its bad design where in a TVZ where the zerg dominates the terran, the zerg will trade at a 5-10K resource deficit for most of the game until the decisive push where they win. That makes no sense to me. Furthermore, I think at the end of the day a 75 drone zerg economically is on the same footing as like a 55 to 60 SCV terran. I don’t really know how to fix TVZ and PVZ (I have ideas but they may break the game) but the issues are pretty obvious.
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Both of those can be solved by different maps, though. You can make it easier to defend medivacs by making the air-to-air travel distance longer, and the ground-to-ground distance shorter, between bases. To offset how incredibly bad zerg units are vs terran, you need a larger map which allows zerg to have more drones and more money to make more units.
I totally agree. I saw exactly these kinds of games coming the moment I played a few games on the new map pool. Months in advance, I could’ve picked the GSL winner. It’s going to be a Terran, and a Terran with the strongest TvT. That Terran is Maru. It’s pretty bad when you can pick the winner of a tournament months in advance.
What’s funny about this is that I saw this coming, right. It’s so obvious it’s like staring at the sun. You can’t not see the sun. It’s impossible to miss it. But, terran streamers didn’t see this coming. I hoped onto BerryCrunch’s stream once, and he was crying that Serral was pointing out how busted Terran is at the moment. Serral said terran wins “all” the tournaments, which is a fairly accurate descriptor since they absolutely dominate ESL cups, for example. ClownCrunch wouldn’t even admit that Serral was right on the facts. He just kept crying that Zerg wins all the tournaments which is absolutely false.
Mind you, this guy is GM in SC2. How is that possible? He clearly has the game sense of a brick. He couldn’t tell that the game drastically favored terran even though it was so obvious that you couldn’t miss it. How can someone with the game understanding of a brick become a grandmaster?
That’s what’s funny here. These guys make an absolute fool of themselves on Twitch. It’s the “Twitch Terran Trio”: “Avilo, ClownCrunch, and Ruff.” Sometimes it seems like all they do is cry about balance even though terran is so busted you could trip and fall and find a win in the gutter as terran. These guys are GM because Terran bestows it on them, and yet they STILL can’t see how strong terran is.
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I don’t think maps fix the medivac issue. Zerg actually does ok with drops because creep lets units move so quickly. The main issue is that medivacs never die and create amazing value and trades over the course of the game. Zerg just generally has no way to catch them (no blink or phoenix). Hydras are trying to do what stalkers do for protoss but are much less effective at it (less HP, no blink). There are mutas but mutas are high risk low reward as a unit . If you’ve ever played PVT without using blink and phoenix, you’ll know what I mean. Its impossible to get a good fight when someone can just pick up and run somewhere else and you literally can’t do a darn thing about it. They pick you apart. This is why zerg trades at deficits of thousands of resources over time even in games where they win.
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That’s absolutely correct with the exception that I think different maps would make it easier to catch medivacs. For example, there is lots of airspace that can’t be reached by zerg ground units, which means medivacs can easily camp there and they are safe. Simply remove those spots from the maps and it will be a lot easier to kill medivacs.
The issue is larger than that, though, since the “safe spots” are carefully positioned to allow Terran to do the most abusive offensive maneuvers. If you put the safe spots in the direction that is opposite of sensitive infrastructure, then terrans would have to choose between damage or safety – if they commit to damage, they are heading away from the safe zone. Right now they get both for free and it’s guaranteed / risk free, because you can head towards a safe zone by heading towards zerg’s mineral lines, and that’s straight up brain dead map design.
I’d accuse Avilo of having designed this map pool, but I honestly don’t think he’s smart enough to be able to design something this sophisticated. The level of sophistication that went into making these maps busted in favor of terran is profound. Someone who knew what they were doing designed / picked these maps for being a terran’s wet dream. In a land of paradise, sipping coconut drinks on the beach as hot women in bikinis fondle their hair, terran players are playing SC2 on this map pool – fixated on stutter stepping their marines, the enamored gesticulations of scantily clad women go unnoticed in the background.
Terran players are going to be forevor whining that Terran is underpowered because it’s all downhill from here. I don’t think we will ever see a map pool this biased ever again, and, mark my words, they will measure every map pool against this one from now until eternity (and they will do this with the assumption that this map pool is balanced, nonetheless).
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ESL SC2 Masters 2023 Summer: Europe, 32 players → 18 Toss.
toss has other problems.
dust zones that affect only air units or build the terrain smart.
would also be interesting if maps would change the main base.
for “Ignite Afterburners” (boost) an upgrade is needed like before. would make early droop play more risky.
I think they changed this because the maps used to be bigger in earlier times.
That’s a very interesting idea. How about zones that can’t be passed by air, but can be passed by ground? That would definitely make it easier for zerg’s ground units to catch medivacs. Perhaps some floating rocks, or something to that effect?
It’s just absolutely wild that, on these maps, medivacs have virtually risk free access to the third and main, and that there are many safe-zones that allow a terran to hit sensitive parts of your base while heading towards a safe-zone, and, as you’ve pointed out, they can do this with vision of everything that’s going on, AND that the ground-to-ground travel distance between these points is huge but the air-to-air travel distance is very short.
Across every domain, it’s all designed to help terran get free damage. There isn’t a single variable in a single domain, that I am aware of, that hurts terran on these maps. There probably is one or two, but you’d have to search long and hard to find it, while counter-examples are obvious and plentiful.
For once we see what we’ve been seeing past years with Zerg. All T. But best four T from KR. I would put Oliveira among them if we had to count global.
We have only seen a ZvZ in a GSL final once in 10 years, it is by far the least common matchup. Korea has never had as many Dominant Zerg pro players as Europe.
Duuude, such nostalgia seeing the days of 2011 GomTvT back
Back then it was Mvp, Polt, MMA and Marineking disputing every semifinals
The “best” terrans don’t even play the game anymore, my man. Bunny’s overall win-rate is 54%. Do you know what Innovation’s win-rate is, even after returning from the military and competing out of shape? 65%. Bunny is a “top terran” – since when? Lmao. This GSL was an absolute joke.
Anyone who played Terran got a free pass EXCEPT that they were gate-kept by TvT.
Historically Zerg never build bases in triangle formation because that puts them at massive disadvantage in ZvT for multiple reasons.
If map forces Zerg to do so than it puts Zerg at disadvantage.
In lategame Zergs deflect drops on main with either couple of spores or Queens or Hydras on patrol because Medevacs are quite fragile.
Nonsense, Lurkers absolutely hard counter bio, unless there are just 3-4 of them they shred bio army to pieces.
Terran army needs healthy number of tanks sieged in good enough position to zone out Lurkers.
Again nonsense.
Zerg can easily kill Medevacs with Parasitic and/or Fungal.
Queens range was not touched in a long, long time.
Watch ESL: all good Zergs are European.
Okay, obviously Koren pro Zerg are also extremely strong players. My point is that Serral and Reynor are just on next level compared to them.
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Well, the queen range was indeed nerfed, together with lib and tempest.
I meant that that was done long time ago