Solution is simple: nerf Tempest AtA range to 5, nerf AtG range to 3, and movement speed to 2.62 to match other Protoss capital ships: Void Ray, Carrier and Mothership.
To be more serious, the only role Tempest is good as is exactly that: launching potshots at enemy army from afar. And even then, they absolutely have to be paired with support - usually High Templar - to ensure that Tempests are not immediately swarmed upon, as in a direct battle Tempest’s damage output is pathetic.
And people are whining about one thing they’re admitting Tempest’s role is.
Tempest isnt an army unit now either? The other siege units are army units. People expect siege tanks, lurkers, liberators, and swarm hosts to be army units and be a part of the fight and do actual damage. You keep mentioning the mobility being too much for marines to catch or whatever, but honestly what other seige unit needs to run away from marines? Tempests aren’t support units like the sentry and they arent supposed to zone like the disruptor. They are supposed to dislodge seiged positions and turtle terran and protoss but they are awful at that.
Talking to you people is like talking to brick wall.
Tempest has massive dmg, can move freely and has most attack range of all things in the game. You cant make unit such as this be able to fight on its own. It is already too good.
You dont build 50. You should build 2-3 and poke with them for free dmg. You use them to force fight on your terms into your aoe. If you cant do this much, you dont deserve to use it and should go back to bronze you belong in.
All siege units move.
Tempest air to ground attack is 10 range. Many units equal or outrange the tempests when it comes to air to ground or ground to ground engagements. Cyclone lock on I believe is 15 range.
10 tempests one shot a supply Depot (which has only 400 HP) and I believe it takes 11 to one shot a spore crawler. 2-3 tempests poking actually don’t do enough damage to override the repair ability of scvs. Luckily 2 tempests can one shot scvs so it’ll take 6 seconds for them to kill the 3 scvs so I repairing that Depot which is good balance as per you for a t3 unit.
All at the cost of complete immobility in siege mode and a long transition time.
Honestly, the Tempest has always been relatively mobile for a siege unit even when it was slow (but at that time it was too tough to be balanced with any more DPS than it had).
The current Tempest has a combination of speed and mobility that would be problematic if the unit had decent DPS; although I personally think it could receive a 25% attack speed increase, a supply decrease, and a weapon change from a projectile to an “instant beam”. That should solve the overkill problem and make Tempests better without crossing the line.
It is the combination of range, speed, and durability that prevents Tempests from being balanced with much damage. Tempests have always had at least some combination of those attributes that requires very low DPS to balance them out; although as I have already conceded it should be possible to buff their current DPS by about 25% and reduce/remove the overkill without breaking the unit.
In PvT in particular there is also another issue: Terran doesn’t have anything that is good at chasing down and killing Tempests; so the balance point for Tempests in PvT is much “weaker” than the balance point that Tempests could have in PvZ and PvP; limiting their strength.
To elaborate on that issue: Vikings in particular have a lot of problem chasing down longer ranged air units. As Platy pointed out, Vikings potentially have to travel up to 27.5 distance (it was 33 distance before the last range nerf) to catch up to a tempest starting at max range, assuming that the Tempest has already accelerated or just doesn’t stop or slow down. Vikings are also much more vulnerable to splash damage than other air units because of their combination of speed and durability; so they are also much easier to zone/kill.
All of Terran’s other anti-air units that have the potential to catch up to Tempests are even more vulnerable to splash or simply ineffective against them (Liberators); so they are not really able to deal with Tempests.
Thors can only zone Tempests away from a few points. They are not capable of chasing Tempests unless the Tempests keep stopping to give them time to catch up.
Cyclones are a pretty good hard counter. As are Marines being dropped by the tempests. Not to mention ghosts and emps and Terran counter harass. Thor’s can zone pretty well. I don’t think Terran is hapless against them.
You clearly failed to read since this has been pointed out multiple times. Vikings are barely faster than Tempests, so they take a lot of time and have to cover a lot of distance in order to catch up.
In practice this makes Vikings a very weak counter to Tempests because they are easy to deny with other units as they are attempting to chase.
You are an idiot if you think that Cyclones actually hard-counter Tempests.
First of all, both Cyclones and Marines are very easy to deny from a safe distance with splash damage (which is a problem that I explicitly brought up). Any other supporting ranged units will also deny Cyclones very easily, including the Tempests themselves in most cases.
You may see how cyclones are useless in practice vs Tempests. Especially because one is flier while other not. One takes a second to lock on while other not.
The lock-in range of cyclones is 7 to start but 15 after the lock on is initiated and it does 800 damage vs tempests. If you watch TVP games where 1 or 2 base proxy tempest rush is played, cyclones are the mainline defense by pro Terran players and it works fine and many considered cyclones to be a hard counter due to the pure amount of damage. You may disagree, nonetheless they are the reason tempests rush are not so popular and are the defense consistently chosen by the pros.
I do not understand. One second you are saying Vikings are not a counter due to being outranged and now you’re saying they are. Look the proof is in the actual games. Proxy tempest rushes are held all the time by Terran and it’s generally either cyclones or vikings (with a little bit of Marine support).
If you’re right and neither Vikings nor cyclones are decent vs tempests, one would expect a fairly high win rate by proxy tempest users. However we don’t see that and this strat is rarely used because
tempests really aren’t very good overall (they kill some units but not buildings)
Usually it’s a mix unless we’re talking later on. 1-3 Cyclones and then Viking production. Mostly to keep vision for the Cyclones and to draw aggro.
Either or though are acceptable Tempest answers early on if used correctly.
Later on, if it’s rushed Tempests, get Thors and laugh as they’re now helpless.
That’s only when the tempests don’t kite and try to fight the vikings though… and you can almost always track down the tempests locations since they are so slowly moving.
Instead of so many small adjustments, I think the “gliding” option is a good one (maybe along with decreasing base speed), which make them similar to BCs in some sense. The tempests would then be able to appear in the blind spots of the opponent. They can enter deep into the opponent’s territory too if it easy for them to run away.
There are too many “increase base speed” for protoss in increase micro-ability these days (which would make tempests kite all days if they are too fast). Gliding option seems like the simplest fix.
If you rush Tempest, you dont have AOE to contest vikings. Easy as that. To pretend otherwise is trolling.
As for why Cyclones are made, its only to buy time. Terran production needs time to get rolling and you just cant even try to threaten Tempest with anything other than Cyclone at the time proxy/rush hits.
Yes, and normally Cyclones will die before they lock-on or deal much damage.
Proxy tempest may be a bit different because Protoss has no other units; but in all other cases Cyclones are simply denied and killed without doing anything to the Tempests.