How to fix protoss. No specific buffs requested

General Discussion
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The problem with toss is that you are trying to balance it on a knifes edge. The core problem is that gateway units suck and are under itemized(shut up, yes they are open up excel and see for yourself) and in response blizz has had to stack crutches on top of crutches to get it to work. This is where the problem lies and WHY the race as a whole is so unstable as a whole.

Now i understand the concept of Asymmetric balance and a little is fine and healthy in a game such as sc2. But at some point in order to be balanced you have to have some symmetry to base your logic off of. Otherwise you are just shooting in the dark and the only way you balance the game is if you get lucky. Hence the last 40 or so patches that didnt balance the game for anybody.

Simplify the problem and then work the solution. I am sure everyone will be ecstatic if they were able to delete shield battery overcharge.

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Problem is, and with stalkers in particular, the combination of warp gate and the high shield regen rate out of combat (Imagine if every Terran unit had the reaper passive for half their HP; that’s basically how Protoss shields work).

So, Protoss units that stay alive in the early game can keep coming back in without needing to return to base (much like bio after medivacs come out, but bio is gated by multiple upgrades and tech to do what some protoss units can do from the start).
Stalkers/adepts/oracles/phoenixes can poke in and trade some damage, then leave and get all their shields back to do it again unless the opponent has the DPS and mobility to shut that down. It’s why Terran bio can’t leave the base until stim and enough units are out vs blink. Protoss just picks them apart with more mobile units that naturally/quickly regen the damage they took if the terran tries to do anything before those upgrades/medivacs, even if they’d get steamrolled in a straight fight.

The early game, especially vs Terran, which has the least ability to contend with stalkers before certain upgrades, revolves around that.

Warp Gate is the other issue because it effectively removes the normal defenders advantage created by reinforcements needing to walk across the map. When your opponent can just produce their units in your base, their units need to be somewhat weaker to compensate.

At the very least, removing/heavily nerfing base shield regen (and tying the current value to an upgrade or pylon power or something, or possibly just leaving it out or it only to specific units, like archons), would give some room for slight buffs to the cost efficiency of protoss units (eg: -25 to stalker mineral cost), as they wouldn’t be able to simply trade out shields for units when they have the mobility advantage and similar/greater range.

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All races have ways of healing.

We are not watching the same pro games and I dont know what you are going thru on ladder but i can assure you that you will win 50 percent of your games and lose 50 percent of your games. Protoss cheeses or turtles around shield batteries till tech.

Simply not true. Again i am sorry about your ladder experiences.

This used to be true before they nerfed it directly and indirectly two dozen times. And i assure you that if ever even begins to approach an advantage in the future it will get nerfed again.

The entire procommunity is basically in agreement protoss is weak and unstable in the early game. When things are weak, you buff them. This tit for tat thing would be useful if you were trying to fix a problem without messing up balance. But a needed buff is not an opportunity for you to nerf something you dont like.

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So the problem with protoss and why they lose so much is cause stalkers are very good units?

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Indeed; but not all races get healing from default without input from an external source. Shields regen 2 per second after 7 seconds out of combat for free which no other race can do - Zerg by contrast regenerate 0.5 health per second out of combat (roaches and mutas being the exception), and Terran can’t heal at all without spending money (25% of the unit or building being repaired) to do so or getting medivacs depending on the unit.

Every race has advantages and disadvantages. Protoss shield regeneration is a double-edged sword because they don’t regenerate health but they do regenerate shields very quickly even without shield batteries (which regenerate up to 50 shields a second - though I’m unsure if this takes into account battery overcharge or not).

Asamu isn’t wrong in this, though it might seem otherwise given how quickly teching does happen in games.

It’s still true now. It completely negates any form of defenders advantage for multiple reasons, and is specifically the primary reason for gateway units being considered weak.

Against Zerg it’s both early and midgame. Frankly speaking, the ability to have a proper wall greatly hinders Protoss players ability to defend against a Zerg early game.

Against Terran, it’s in the midgame when stim comes online. They don’t have issues early game vs Terran.

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Some minor corrections:

If you are using faster speed, Protoss units have 2.8 shield regeneration per second and Zerg units have about 0.383 life regeneration per second.

You completely missed the point. Shield regeneration gives Stalkers and other Protoss units a significant advantage against Terran in the early-game (early, not mid). This is one factor limiting the power that Protoss Gateway units can have.

Asamu’s suggestion is basically to lock all or part of the innate shield regeneration behind an upgrade. This would allow early-game Protoss units to be balanced with better innate stats, since their regeneration would come online closer to the point where Medivacs and other upgrades are out.

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It’s because many of their units are very good at specific points in the game.
Stalkers very early vs T/P, oracles/prism+adepts/immortals/archons before Zerg has sufficient anti-air, Colossus vs a Terran that’s heavy on marines before vikings/without interference matrix, disruptors in mass vs a large ground army, carriers vs Zerg without corruptors/shroud, Adepts w/ glaives before Zerg has a sufficient speed roach count, etc…
Think back on the voidray cost change when it was buffed. Suddenly voidray cheeses were everywhere and it was the standard opener vs Zerg because VRs could get reliable damage and were more stable than oracles for defense. Were voids OP outside of the early game at that cost? No, but they were still a problem because Zerg early anti-air is limited/weak, and the buff was reverted, which once again made voidrays bad at practically all stages of the game in every match up (Not having hatch tech hydras was, IMO, a major design flaw in SC2, and I’d still like to see Hydras moved to hatch tech).

There are points when Protoss’s lower efficiency head-to-head matters a lot less because of an advantage in economy and/or tech and/or regen with small unit counts.

(The eco advantage is because probes don’t lose much mining time to make buildings, and chronoboost gives Protoss an initial worker lead, so they can mine more in the first 5 minutes or so of a game. That initial advantage + chronoboost can be leveraged into additional tech or production to hit a timing before the T/Z catch up with their stronger macro scaling and more efficient units. Zerg will absolutely outscale the Protoss in eco if left alone, and Mules more than compensate the early disadvantage for Terran, but they need a bit of time to catch up).

(The tech advantage comes from a branching, rather than linear, tech tree, and chronoboost letting the Protoss power out critical upgrades to hit timings earlier.)

Stalkers are very strong early vs Terran and in PvP due to leveraging shield recharge and high initial mobility/range, but are pretty bad units in the later stages of the game for what they cost. They scale poorly due to a high damage point and slow projectiles resulting in a lot of overkill/wasted damage, and once army DPS is high enough to burn through them faster than they can blink back and regen shields and mobility is enough to run them down, the value of microing them decreases significantly, which is especially relevant vs Terran due to the extremely high DPS/mobility of stimmed bio.

Vs Zerg, early stalkers aren’t a problem, because speedlings absolutely murder them, and they aren’t particularly efficient vs roaches.
They’re also absurdly inefficient if the Zerg goes heavy on speedlings in the mid-game, which is why the currently popular mass stalker/expand pressure style often looks terrible when the Zerg player doesn’t commit to roach/ravager against it and instead goes for much higher speedling counts and techs more aggressively instead.

The dynamics of early PvZ and early PvT are pretty much complete opposites, and Terran actually has more ability to move out early vs Zerg than Protoss does, since its units are more efficient in a straight fight, and they have units that can effectively counter speedlings very early in the game without techs with hellions.

Protoss can’t really utilize shield regen vs Zerg with anything on the ground early, and Zerg can flip from making workers to full unit production at any time, so Protoss is mostly pinned behind their wall due to the extreme inefficiency of their units vs what Zerg can make in the early game, outside of drops/oracles or suiciding adepts to trade for drones.
It’s not until a bit later in the game that, if the Zerg is going roach/ravager, that Protoss can try to leverage their higher passive regen with shields in the same way they do vs Terran (See the mass stalker style started by HerO that’s been popular recently among the top Protoss players).

That’s a big part of the reason 7-pooling was meta in ZvP for so long back in HoTS, and speedling all ins were a major source of frustration until the addition of battery overcharge (which killed them off almost entirely back when it was added in 2020), queen timings, proxy hatch spine rushes, nydus “all ins”, etc… are so deadly even at the pro level, despite none of those builds/timings ever really working vs Terran.
About the only cheese you see vs Terran is the occasional baneling bust or ravager rush, and those tend to see less success than the seemingly random timing attacks vs Protoss.

Just think back on how significant hatch tech drops were in PvZ, and how they made things basically unplayable for Protoss. The match up is currently pretty balanced, but… it’s still a bit of a mess, and nothing actually seems stable.
One of the more meta plays at the top level atm, which is that mass stalker style started by HerO, looks like a bit of a joke when the Zerg masses speedlings into it instead of going roach/ravager.

(Not to say PvZ is “imbalanced”. The win rate on the pro scene is at 50/50, favoring Zerg at the very top end, but favoring Protoss on the lower end. This is just about the relative dynamics of PvZ/PvT/TvZ, particularly in the early game, and how things that might seem insignificant, like how quickly shields regenerate and a very early small eco advantage actually play a pretty significant role in that).

I’d like to see what would happen if Protoss started with 1 less worker than the other races, and shield regen was cut from 2/s (editor value), to maybe 0.5/s (with maybe an upgrade to bring it back up to the current 2/s value), and/or maybe increasing the cost of the cybercore from 150m to 200m, and how much room that would give for lowering the cost or buffing the stats of many Protoss units.

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I wasn’t entirely sure if the zerg regen listed on Liquipedia has been corrected for realtime or game-speed since it didn’t say. Thanks for the correction.

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Until stim comes out, unless the Terran is cheesing, Protoss is in the Terran’s face with stalkers, maybe an adept or two, and maybe a zealot if they made one; it’s pretty common for the Protoss to poke at a wall depot while using an adept shade to spot as they delay/deny the Terran’s natural. Once they deal with that first reaper (if Terran made one), it’s straight across the map with their first few units to poke for some damage, scout, and try to trade shields pick off marines/SCVs. If the Protoss went blink, they’re in and out of the Terran base looking for damage until Terran has their critical upgrades and enough units to push across the map without the stalkers being a major issue. Blink and stargate openers revolve heavily around trading shield damage to pick off units/scvs.

The top Protoss players do not sit in their base unless they can’t move out on the map for some reason, such as the opponent putting on their own more committed/more dangerous pressure. Otherwise, they’re always trying to create pressure, whether that’s with chargelot warp ins, blink stalkers, DTs, Oracles, Phoenixes, Tempests, etc… They aren’t sitting around turtling unless they have no other options.

In the mid-game. Not the early game, and the specifics are different depending on the match up. Vs Zerg, it’s early and mid game that are unstable. Vs Terran, it’s after stim is done and they reach the critical mass to easily deal with blink stalkers trying to shave away at the army.

Nobody in their right mind would think stalkers costing 40% more than marauders (or 25m more than hydras) while being a weaker unit against everything except air units and siege tanks (still not good at all vs tanks, but they have blink) is good when comparing in a vacuum, but buffing the stalker’s stats or reducing its cost so it’s a little bit more efficient/scales better without nerfing something else about it would completely break PvT, where blink openers/mass stalker are already very difficult for Terran to deal with in the early game (pre-stim); 4 gate blink into Colossus is the most meta opener in the match up at the highest level for a reason.
Shield regen is the identifiable issue in that case, because it’s the only thing that Terran specifically has a much more difficulty preventing than Zerg at that stage of the game. Terran can drive the stalkers out, but they can’t kill them. Zerg just runs them down with lings, so they never get the chance for shields to come back.

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" * Make Protoss more stable on a professional level in the early game vs Raven pushes and more able to fight Terran mid-late game armies without solely relying on Disruptors" From the proposed patch notes.

Edit: also there is to much to unpack here condense it down to one post please and i will respond further.

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Zerg has cheap units and queens. Not every race is supposed to have exactly the same amount of healing from the same exact sources.

He is tho, you both are. There isnt a single protoss warpgate all in that cant be held with a single bunker and a couple scvs till stim comes online.

Gateway units are considered weak because they are weak. And it doesnt completely negate the defenders advantage. Its just protoss flavor that you dont like.

“Make Protoss more stable on a professional level in the early game vs Raven pushes” Balance council.

Is that so?

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Do you know what defender’s advantage is?

What planet are you on that you’re actually thinking this?

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I do. I also know how to add 7+11. Weird how switching gateways into warpgates and warping units in negates almost the same exact amount of time that warpgate puts protoss ahead.

Earth. Welcome.

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Raven pushes are when stim finishes, and both players are fully established on at least 2 bases, which I’d consider the start of the mid-game. Economy, critical tech, and production are online, which marks the end of the early game.

It’s just a difference in perspective, or them not really thinking about specifically defining phases and just throwing the “early” label on there, because it’s not about the late game or later stages of the mid-game, but the first major Terran attack of the game.

I’ve been consistent on the pre-stim vs post-stim as where I define the early vs mid-game in the match up. It’s a good point to define it, as it represents the first major shift in how both sides play, with Terran able to go on the offensive, and Protoss becoming reliant on its tech units to take fights.

Stalker pressure isn’t an all in. 4 gate blink on 2 base into colossus is currently one of the most meta openers vs Terran at the top level, and it’s all about pressuring the Terran pre-stim, and occasionally wins outright. I suggest you actually watch some high level games and think about what the players are doing and why.

Nor do actual all ins typically get held by a single bunker and some SCVs.

The point is that Shield regen comes at strength much earlier and comes for free. Think about what would happen to the game if marines/marauders had the reaper passive healing and were ~10-20% faster baseline, and you could produce them almost anywhere without them needing to walk. but medivacs didn’t heal and stim didn’t give attack speed, and how they’d have to adjust their costs/stats to make that balanced. That’s basically where Protoss is at with shields.
Nerf the regen, and there’s pretty significant room for adjustment.

*Note that reapers have the same regen rate/delay as shields, but their extremely high gas cost, short range, and low damage mean they scale incredibly poorly and fall out of viability much earlier than units like stalkers, and they can’t kite marines like stalkers can.

Queens have other uses for their energy and can’t transfuse off creep.
Terran needs to spend resources/mining time to repair, or tech up to medivacs. Terran, due to the lack of something mobile that can chase down stalkers effectively pre-stim, has no good way to stop Protoss from backing up and getting shields back in the early game. They can’t force the issue effectively without getting picked apart.
(Conc shell marauder rushing, which is one of the strongest Terran cheeses vs protoss precisely because it stops protoss from kiting for shield regen, is not a macro opener, and with blink, conc shells is no longer enough on its own anyway).

Basically: The very early game dynamics are P>T>=Z>P - this is, in large part, because of shield regen, the economy/production build-up/costs, and specific unit dynamics. (Assuming all races doing standard macro builds.*)

Terran has units that are very strong vs lings off creep, but nothing that can effectively chase down gateway units or trade efficiently into them when accounting for micro, so they can effectively be out on the map vs Zerg, but Protoss can get “free” damage by trading shields to kill/destroy or damage Terran units/buildings to force them to spend extra resources.
On the other hand, Protoss has nothing that can trade effectively with or escape from Zerglings, which sort of gives free reign to Zerg in the early game and forces Protoss to tech more aggressively.

Protoss also has the strongest economy until orbitals are online or Zerg macro kicks in. Usually the other two races catch up in income around the ~35-40-ish worker count, but that’s a few hundred extra minerals for Protoss in the early game. That’s an issue for Terran, which has to invest similar amounts into production, but is behind in the early economy.
For Zerg, those early resources are more than offset by Protoss needing to spend more to set up production and having more expensive/less efficient units (Zerg has no extra costs for producing units aside from tech- it’s just an opportunity cost of drones vs units).

So, the advantages Protoss has over Terran in the early game are meaningless vs Zerg. Removing one or both of those advantages vs Terran would make more room for buffing Protoss units for a more stable early game vs Zerg and mid-game vs Terran without risking breaking PvT in half, which buffs to gateway units that aren’t locked behind upgrades could very easily do. (Other than maybe the Sentry or Zealot.).

Specific unit adjustments could also help shift the dynamics, like damage/attack rate changes for gateway units to be better at fighting lings without significantly changing their effectiveness vs other units (primarily through lower damage per hit and faster attack rates.)

No, it just negates it for gateway units. Gateway units can be produced inside the enemy base, they do not need to walk across the map, and terrain is a non-factor. It negates the advantage created by the time it takes to reinforce from wherever the production is set up.

Protoss also effectively gets a 1 production cycle advantage when reinforcing after losing units on top of their units not needing to walk across the map to reach a location, since warpgates can produce immediately on losing supply then go on cooldown, rather than waiting to the end of the cycle for the unit to pop out.

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Such a productive tone to begin with.

But which Gateway units? Charge Zealots are some of the strongest units in the game. Little to no micro required, almost unkillable without good Bane or Mine hits. Stalkers are great with the micro potential. Adepts and Sentries are quite crap, can’t argue.

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Convenient.

Yes they do. And terrans are dominating protoss at the highest level in the specific matchup you are describing. Hence why the pros are saying protoss needs help. I suggest you watch some pro games. Put them on your main monitor and pay attention.

Also if you want to get snarky and disrespectful that can go both ways.

Condense this and make an actual point. Im aware the the different factions operate different. That was my point to begin with.

Lol condense this and i will respond to it.

Answer a hypothetical question for me. Think of it as an iq test.

Say, hypothetically, warpgate negated defenders advantage. Now take the warpgate and nerf it, However you see fit hypothetically, so that the unit timings are one cycle behind zerg and terran. Does it still negate defenders advantage?

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Are you kidding? Stalkers already have a hard time dealing with marauders and seiged tanks. They aren’t even particularly good against marine stimmed either. Your complaint is the tiny 20 second window to cutoff stim and marauder production when the seiged tank count is just one. And for that you want to add another unnecessary nerf to protoss early game. For what? So that terrans who already have EMP and zerg with their fast roach ravagers timings have another advantage over protoss. I actually stated this before that stalker shield regeneration needs to be doubled and shield regeneration cooldown halved and blink usage restore 20 points of shield.

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Terran at the very highest level has a slight edge. They aren’t “dominating”, and they aren’t advantaged at every single stage of the game. Outside of that very highest level, Protoss actually seems to be winning more.

After stim, Terran has pretty clear advantages, and in the very late game with air units, Terran is clearly stronger (Disruptors throw a wrench in that if they try to stay on the ground, since there’s a point where microing vs disruptors becomes basically impossible), but very early in the game, Protoss has the edge and is often able to find damage (in fact, they seem to rely on it. Games where protoss doesn’t get damage in with oracles, phoenixes, or blink stalkers seem to generally go in favor of the terran).

Protoss has no trade-off for their shield regen, which is available earlier than Zerg/Terran healing. Zerg/Terran have opportunity, location, and/or resource costs involved.
Terran units are slower than gateway units pre-stim, so shields can be leveraged effectively.

Try reading? Terran can’t effectively stop shield regen early. Stalkers with micro > Pre-stim bio, hellions, and reapers. Zerg can stop it: Speedlings > all gateway units.
Protoss Eco is a bit stronger until ~35-40 workers, which gives them a few hundred extra minerals in the early game. Zerg offsets that because of no cost to set up production. Terran does not.

IE: Shield regen and the very early economy create problems in PvT that don’t exist in PvZ. Removing one or both gives room for changes/buffs that could help stabilize Protoss in both match ups without causing problems in PvT, where Protoss already has a clear edge in the early game that is already leveraged to give Protoss a solid chance in the match up even at the highest level.

The simplest change for “fixing” the defender’s advantage issue would be to make warp prisms not provide empowered power fields and empowered pylon power depend on range from a nexus or already empowered pylon, rather than also working with warp gates, which are easier to proxy. This would mean a warp in time of 16 instead of 5 in editor seconds with current values. That’s still 20% shorter than the time it takes Nydus Worms to pop up, and Nydus worms do pretty much the same thing, if even better because they can transport existing army and provide creep. Maybe give prisms more capacity so Protoss can drop more units or something to compensate a bit.

The cycle thing wasn’t about defender’s advantage and changing that would require some needlessly complicated function that puts warpgates on cooldown when supply capped. That’s about reinforcing when a fight is ongoing or recently ended, and the same change of limiting green power fields further would be enough to make it a non-concern.

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Yes. Stalkers actually trade poorly even with unstimmed marines if they stand and fight, but any number of stalkers can kill infinite pre-stim marines or marauders with micro and enough space, because they are faster and have regen.

Also, 20 second windows matter. Remember any of the times when a 10-20s upgrade time change shifted the match up win rate by 2-3% in pro play? That’s happened multiple times.

The goal is not to nerf Protoss early, but to shift that power from shield regen into actually better or cheaper units. Nobody is suggesting nerfing shield regen in the early game with no other changes.
IE: If the cost of stalkers was reduced from 125/50 to 100/50, and their attack rate/damage point were slightly buffed, the Protoss could have both more and better units, but blink stalker timings wouldn’t actually be any stronger.

This would only make blink even more oppressive early and do nothing for stalker scaling in the mid/late game, where they actually have a problem.

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Going on 8 years of terran and zerg handing gsl/esl back and forth disagrees with you. You dont think Classics kids need shoes too?

The entire game is a trade off. Stop it.

No.

They do just fine.

You failed.