IT’s were nerfed, but the infestors other spells do need to be slightly toned down since they allow the Infestor and large numbers of them to handle too much.
Now with that said, here is what I would do to tone down the Infestor while still keeping it useful if I was working on SC2 Balance:
1) Reduce the radius of Fungal from 2.25 to 2
For context, Storm has a radius of 1.5 and EMP has a radius of 1.5(2 after upgrade). Also if you look at the balance history of Fungal it had 2 radius since WOL and HOTS.
Reducing the Fungal radius down to 2 brings it inline with the other AOE spells of the other ground casters which promotes counter play with spell interactions(EMP and Feedback). It also makes it so it’s more possible to engage Infestor-broodlord from the air using non-T3 air units(something Fungal has made impossible for many years, even more so now with the Vipers Parabomb). The reduction of radius also helps when it comes to trying to engage infestor-broodlord from the ground.
2) NP can no longer be cast while burrowed
NP is such a powerful spell since it will completely snowball an engagement if you are Zerg in the late game. Any high tech Terran or Protoss unit that they build against Zerg gets completely nullify by NP.
So many times we have seen Zerg burrow all the infestor and just NP entire late game armies of Protoss and even Terran. With little to no risk of the Infestors getting killed at all.
Making NP unable to be cast while burrowed creates counterplay and risk vs reward.
Also Zerg has the Viper with Abduct now for handling key enemy units and taking them out of the fight and into the Zerg army to die. The Viper with Abduct has more counter play and risk vs reward compared to the Infestor with NP.
Fungal sounds good, neural idk. Neural is just one of those spells where it is either broke or plain bad. I’d say as of now to leave the game as is until November and just redesign it like they did with the Raven.
Isn’t 2 radius what fungal had before it was first buffed, you know before burrow fungal and before anyone made infestors?
And neural, maybe a range reduction, but why unburrowed neural? Again with the same as back when nobody made infestors. And burrowed/unburrowed neural makes next to 0 difference for mass infestor. What it matters for is when there are only a few infestors, when Zerg is still getting to lategame and the infestors are not OP because no critical mass.
Basically, you are planning to revert to LotV release infestor but fungal no longer roots (nerf) and ITs now shred air. Considering that IT is the spell that is being spammed mindlessly in endless hordes, maybe that’s nerfs are needed?
And seriously, fungal does not need a nerf at all, please.
If we want to buff the Raven back into something respectable, that’s a good idea and a good suggestion. Separately, though, the Raven was “redesigned” into a useless hunk of sh*t.
This was a stupid move on Blizzard’# part. Don’t do this to the infestor, either.
The IT nerf will do nothing to stop mass infestors NP and Fungaling things to death in late game ZvP.
Its the single reason why Infestor-broodlord is so strong against anything. It handles ground AOE,Air AOE, debuffing and anti-air all in one spell.
AAM did everything that the current Fungal does now, and it got changed quickly to be a pure debuff spell while Fungal has been a damage-debuff spell for 9 years and has created the most awful lategame composition in the game and has created a entire late game playstyle that is completely the opposite of what Zerg should be.
75% slow barely allows for any movement and you get chain fungal all the time.
Big units?. NP got you covered.
Ground and Air AOE?. Fungal has you covered and it even debuffs.
Fungal had 2 radius from WoL and HOTS to patch 4.0.0 of LOTV where it was increased to 2.5 radius and Infested Terrans got the rocket launcher. All in one patch.
People certainly built large numbers of infestors during WoL and HOTS and they certainly went infestor-broodlord.
If lategame Protoss is helpless against lategame Zerg AND Terran (infestors and bcs), why look for more infestors nerfs? Why not Protoss lategame buffs
The infestors is zergs late game equalizer. Neutering it would make Zerg late game garbage.
Infestors aren’t broken against Terran though. Ravens were broken against everything
The problem is that Protoss lategame is absolute trash. So trash that it’s unreal. Meanwhile Time 3-0d a top 4 at worst Zerg player on the planet (and one of the GOAT sc2 players) including in the late game.
The Terran lategame got buffed just now too. Specifically the Terran counter to infestors.
The only argument against infestors really is ZvP. And critical mass of BCs are invincible against Protoss too.
The common denominator is that Protoss loses to a critical mass of Zerg and Terran units. The common denominator is Protoss lategame weakness. It was never aboutbZerg lategame strength
They have been the reason why Terrans cannot fight Corruptor-broodlord from the Air with vikings or AA mode liberators over the past 9 years thanks to Fungal.
But wait!. Zerg now has Parabomb, and together with Fungal that is 150 damage combined against air units. Vikings have 135HP and Liberators have 180HP.
Since Terrans lack an AOE spell to do damage, they should really buff the Liberators AA attack since it was originally nerfed and the Thor AA splash attack and extra armor buffs were done as compensation. But now both those Thor buffs are reverted and Terran has a Liberator with a pitifully weak AA attack against late game armies(particularly Zerg) filled with clumped air units killing everything because there is no AOE short of them walking into nukes to kill them!.
Protoss late game power was only changed when it comes to the Carrier, but no one goes Carriers against BC’s anyways and Late game Zerg was overclocked to fight that mass Carrier late game ZvP which now no longer exists.
“You have no energy and your forces are bright orange with armor reduction” - Terrans.
“Your army is dead because I have Fungal and Parabomb and plenty of Larva to remax” - Zergs
You can’t do that because fungal was repurposed from being a generalized spell to being an anti-interceptor spell.
Other races don’t need a solution to carriers. Other races already have solutions to carriers.
This change wouldn’t affect anything since any protoss worth his salt is using 2 oracles to cast revelation. What you want are hand-outs to people who are too lazy to hit “R” and click. Terrans have mass orbital so they absolutely don’t need help there either.
Vikings are supposed to counter armored air units. Corruptors are armored air units, so are broodlords.
Liberators in AA mode are designed to splash clumped up air units.
Are you seriously saying Broodlords should beat Vikings in the air?
And Infestors destroy all of those using the various spells they have.
Fungal to reveal and zone out ghosts, Fungal also disables TJ.
NP handles the Thors and BC’s. You can even NP ghosts for EMP’s.
IT’s handle the BC’s and even the Thors.
IT’s are the anti-Interceptor spell. Also nowhere was it stated that Fungal was changed to deal with Interceptors.
Fungal radius should have always stayed 2.0. When they made the radius bigger it make counter play vs other spells and other AOE spells favor the Infestor instead of coming up even.
It would affect many things since Zergs would have to protect the Infestors that are NP and building too many infestors would require Zerg to think about pathing during engagements.
None of those units beat carriers my friend. Infestors are the only counter to skytoss that Zerg has, and Zerg spent a solid 2 years suffering without the infestor during which time it was literally impossible to beat a skytoss protoss no matter how far ahead you were. As far as I am concerned the infestor is the golden calf of zerg - without it the race is non-functional - and as such all this talk about nerfing is just talk about deleting the one way zerg has to win and thus deleting zerg as a race.