Finally, unabductable mothership! It makes a lot of sense from both the game and lore perspectives. I feel that it is definitely in the right direction but I do agree that it might be slightly overbuffed now with the damage targets increase. That being said, I like the target increase because it is supposed to be a flying fortress with multiple cannons.
Hence, consistent with the above viewpoint, we can nerf it a little by taking away its maneuverability. Maybe we can adjust its acceleration/deceleration and/or damage point. In this way, we can keep it a powerful yet clunky hero unit while requiring the player to babysit it because it can stray away from the main army if protoss simply f2 A move.
Imo, it’s not gonna be as op as people say it is, it’s not the permanent cloack mothership anymore. You can force the cloack, desengage and reengage as zerg.
From what I see, the cloaking field has always been “nice to have” ability but almost never directly results in a victory due to the abundance of overseers and spores. What I am slightly worried about is the compounding effect of its improved damage output to multiple targets and its ability to tank damage now. In the past, zergs is the king of swarming and when the enemies are too big to swarm as a whole, they pull a chunk out to swarm it. With the MS change, this will change.
I am a protoss player and I love protoss buffs. I love the idea of MS being unabductable but I also understand that abduct is a major part of how they counter the MS. Hence, they need to give MS another weakness to justify such a sensible yet major change which puts the zerg at a disadvantage in the late game. The last thing I want to see is the balance team simply reverting this change because it is too OP. I just want to reiterate that a lot of people think this is the right direction but it may require some adjustments / tradeoff to make it justified and workable.
Abduct is really too hard of a counter to the Mothership. It makes more sense to make the Mothership immune to abduct and Neural Parasite, and then rebalance the unit accordingly.
Personally I still like the idea of keeping it abductable, but halving the distance the mothership specifically can be pulled, so it requires multiple abducts to displace the same distance, and makes it easier to retreat to the army for the mothership itself with the potential to feedback being there.
This is the kind of change that needs to be tested. I’m initially a bit worried because there is no way to kill it behind a maxed army. Hydras and corruptors, the main ways to kill it, cannot dive the mothership without massive losses.
How much overseers can help against the cloaking field is the kind of thing that needs to be tested before any definitive conclusion is reached, bearing in mind that tempests outrange overseer sight without oversight mode and with it they are static so an easy target.
Having a button on a 50seconds cooldown that reads “This army is immune to engagements for 20 seconds” would be extremely overpowered if overseers cannot offer enough help. I’m open to testing though, lets see how it plays out.
If pros tested and it is really too OP, halving the abduct distance kinda works. From another direction, how about buffing parasitic bomb so that when it is cast on MS, the other toss air units really have to move away? Specifically, make the disease cloud somewhat proportional to the unit size. So the effect of disease cloud is maximized on the MS while it wont change the interaction with other units as much?
Parasitic Bomb has a radius of 3 and 120 total damage. If that spell needs changes at all, it is much closer to needing a nerf than a buff.
The only air units that aren’t significantly affected by Parasitic Bomb are massive units with tons of health, but you have Corruptors to counter those. Also, Parasitic Bombs will wipe out Interceptors if you take the risk of flying your Corruptors into the Skytoss army.