There’s a valid point here, you want people who are impartial and educated to make balance changes. Pros are not impartial and you can debate the educated part for sure.
It’s basic conflict of interest and I think the results speak for themselves with some of the bonehead ideas they’ve pushed through.
That said the bigger issue is a lack of privacy mode to stop people from looking up your build orders and trying to do dumb stuff based on that. The higher up you get the more this becomes an issue, to the point where it is a massive influence on the pro meta and is why it’s not really indicative of what does and doesn’t work for non-pros.
I would just like to thank the balance council for taking time out of their practice and tournament prep and instead giving it to us plebs through balance patches. It’s obvious that they would prefer a blizzard dev to do it rather than what is in effect free labor.
Eh, weak is relative. Zealots are pretty good for what they do, stalkers and adepts are both pretty bad as a core damage unit, and just about every protoss tech unit has pretty glaring weaknesses that NEED to be covered by another unit or they just get rolled over.
Honestly, of the units you listed, only adepts are actually bad as a core unit. Stalkers provide a solid and microable anti-air defense while also having reasonable DPS and survivability if you have even basic micro capabilities. Not to mention, blink timings are as deadly as they come in TvP.
Even a failed blink timing isn’t all in 95% of the time - at least as far as ladder goes - because short of literally throwing all of your stalkers away and getting nothing at all, you’re almost always going to come out at the bare minimum even, and most likely ahead. Blink timings on this map pool are REALLY strong too, since every map is a blink map, with maybe one or two exceptions.
And Zealots? Zealots are genuinely incredibly strong. A decent sized ball of Chargelots is one of the most terrifying things to go up against. They’re tanky, they deal a lot of damage, absorb a lot of damage, cause friendly fire from tanks and mines, and the latter does bugger-all to them now with the splash radius nerf, so they’re even harder to kill than they already were. Hellbats are honestly the only good answer to them, but hellbats are terrible in PvT for several other reasons I don’t care to go into right now. And they also make closing or killing any of the “main damage threats” that Protoss have (colossus, Storm, Disruptors) Extremely difficult at the best of times, even with 4MGL or MMMVG. Also, they’re a brilliant mineral sink in a race that’s primarily gas heavy. Genuinely they’re some of the best units Protoss have.
charge zealots can defend any early push with free 3 base open. thats really silly cuz the late game for terran is terrible, no need to say perfect mirco needed, but protoss almost like just need to A…only need to control serveral AOE unit, redicous.
They arent trash. But if they need a little tweak, they will certainly buff them again. It was important to take away the instant game ending threat from widow mines. And frankly no one needed the cyclone rework. And after the rework they were completly broken. Now cyclones are only not really good at top pro level but they are so strong and easy to use they are pretty good for low level players aka 99.9% of the players.
As a 4600 offrace terran on eu, you can still use them for defense in tvz or tvp. It almost turns down any early game cheese and its still viable for us low level players to go battlemech vs zerg with cyclones.
If Protoss does that, Terran should just make some hellbats. It’s literally that simple. But Terran players in general are allergic to doing things correctly lol. Sure it sucks making Hellbats but you know what sucks more?
Not being able to move out of your base to grab a 3rd while the Protoss just keeps exponentially expanding, adding more gateways, getting hard counter tech while they just keep 1-Aing zealots at your nat cuz you didn’t make the unit that beats zealot aggression.
Mind you this gets more complex once other units get added and without keeping up in eco you’re going to eventually run out of steam to fight back. TvP is a bit nuanced because your composition has to revolve around what the P player is doing. There’s no real 1 build to rule them all thing going on.
It’s far from that simple. Hellbats with Bio are bad, for numerous reasons. You’ll see them in TvZ once, for a timing attack IF the helions survive the opening. Beyond that you won’t see them used with bio at all.
Hellbats are notoriously bad against the same things that Bio is bad against. They also lack the microability of bio, and despite being tankier than marines, they’re worse against pretty much anything else that isn’t a Zealot or a Zergling than marauders are for the same purpose. They’re clunky, slow, and they utilize completely separate upgrade paths than bio does too. Plus, they also got nerfed.
Hellbats are genuinely one of the worst things to add to a bio composition.
Yes, Hellbats deal with Zealots specifically, kind of okay. But nothing else. And Helions don’t even do that well.
Super early defense against oracles, unupgraded stalkers and maybe phoenix. Against Zerg, they’re really only useful in defending early roach pressure. Cyclones are bad outside of that, though they do have a place early TvT.
Mines, however, are REALLY bad against Protoss now, though they’re still passable against Zerg. Hitting the mine with 4 nerfs simultaneously does, unsurprisingly, make it a pretty bad unit. The kicker in TvP though was the splash radius nerf. Everything else was fine and acceptable, but that actually killed its usage as an anti-zealot buffer.
IDK I disagree to a point. Yes, they’re kinda bad with bio because of how slow they are but they really, really screw with zealots bad.
It isn’t monobattles so compositions do matter, if they’re going heavy on zealots then it’s an answer. If not then don’t do it, stimball is enough for moderate amounts of zealots unless they put pressure on ur nat all game and kept ur army values low enough that you can’t get a stimball going.
Hellbats vs toss? Are you kidding me? I think you never play this game or you are under 4000MMR, showing no understanding with the game. Hellbats are counted by stalker,disrupter, Colossus，Storm，etc, basically everything, it has no mobility and is not a viable frontline unit. Why zealots and ultralist are good? Fast moving!!!baby.
Hellbats vs zealots. Hellbats handle zealots pretty darn well, its basically their only job. If they persist in making just zealots, just make hellbats and roll them over. If they start making other units, then congratulations, you can stop making hellbats and make your regular composition now. Mission accomplished.
This was presumably intended to be ironic, but people apparently felt the need to jump in and prove it a literal truth.
Nope. Its worse but its not bad. We still see widow mine drops, we still see widow mines vs zealots in pro play, so they still see them as viable. And frankly pro terran doesnt struggle with toss anyways nor do they actually need widow mines to defend vs zealots.
Having a niche unit to easily defend something with a bare minimum of micro is a pretty nice thing to have and i havent seen cyclone battlemech in pro play right now (but i actually dont follow the scene that closely right now), but obviously its viable for us plebs below 6k. I mean there were always guys playing mech vs protoss which is rather unviable but because its not pro play you can mech it happen.
That’s for sure. The wm nerf drastically improved zealot archon comps in PvT. The next time I hear that HT aren’t viable in PvT I’m going to link them ESL spring.
We also saw mines in both TvP and TvZ after the awful mine nerf in 2013 that wiped out Terran representation across the board, because they were still the best option that we had out of an incredibly rubbish bunch. Now, of course, it’s a different time, but the point still stands.
They genuinely feel much worse than they were before to a point where I’ve been looking for alternatives.
The matchup has completely flipped, by the way, and is, much like PvZ is currently, in Protoss’ favour, flipping completely in the other direction. It’s flipped from PvT being 47% to PvT being 52%. Both are quite within the 5% margin of error, though it is quite a drastic jump.
HTs have always been viable. You just have to put them in a prism and use them there to protect them from EMPs. Also don’t lose the prism, which is THE MOST common mistake from every protoss pro I see, to an astounding degree.
Exactly. Terran is not getting bad results right now.
Cmon now. Dont exaggerate.
What happend to letting the meta settle? If its protoss whos struggleing its usually “let the meta settle for a year or two”.
Ofc its looking much worse right now because a core win condition got more or less removed. That was the key of the patch. We should let the meta settle and look what happens. Knowing the fate of protoss, they will release a patch soon enough and protoss is getting the short end of the stick again rather than having a balanced state.