Imagine Devourers

Yeah, those difference would make Irradiate less useful and more difficult to balance in SC2 compared to how it functioned in Brood War. The Terran player probably won’t have the full 25 seconds (editor time, 18 seconds actual) for Irradiate to deal its full damage in combat; assuming it was used on a target where it actually needs to deal that much damage.

Unless Irradiate’s damage is significantly nerfed, it would take 2 transfuses to fully negate one Irradiate on one target. However, the spell still has a long “time to kill” against such units either way, and that could be a problem on its own.

I do believe that Irradiate’s cost and the fact that it stops dealing damage if the main target dies can both be used to discourage massing Irradiate against anything too small or inexpensive. The splash damage basically stops if the main target dies first, so pretty much any change that causes the main target to take damage faster than the surrounding targets would weaken the spell against units such as Zerglings, Banelings, Hydralisks, etc. Two such examples:

  • Irradiate could be changed to deal some instant biological damage to the main target as it is applied.
  • Irradiate could be changed to deal relatively less splash damage and slightly more damage to the main target.

I can give you a few suggestions, but those would require testing and tweaking to get right either way:

  • As suggested above, the spell could be tampered with to make it better against the main target compared to splash targets (an instant component or just different damage numbers for the main target and splash targets are options).
  • Bonuses versus massive or psionic could help.
  • The spell may be tweaked to explicitly reduce healing effects, if that is possible in the SC2 engine.
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