(I will mention the MOST OBVIOUS THING FIRST TO GET IT OUT OF THE WAY, FURTHER DOWN A MORE IMPORTANT THING NOT NOTICED BUT STILL IMBALANCED NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED).
The balance team has time and time again ignored the players complaints about the WIDOW MINE and how blatantly imbalanced the thing is since its release. They did not even remotely listen. Any person with HALF A BRAIN can see the problem.
Lets look at it.
Widow Mine:
75/25 (ITS DIRT CHEAP) (literally no questions asked its DIRT CHEAP).
MASSIVE SPLASH DAMAGE TO AIR AND GROUND UNITS. (way too much power)
(this is a good place to point out the balance teams bias since they refused to bring the Scourge back into SC2 which was zergs splash damage vs air. But had no problem adding this ridiculous over powered unit).
The unit is easily able to be massed because it can be refactored. So another words terran can have these in spades⌠just everywhere if they want. The 2 supply cost means nothing as terran will not hit max supply until the game has basically been decided for most TvZ games⌠notice how long it takes terran to hit max⌠Ya. Another reason this donât mean squat is that its still a good supply cost⌠ya its the same cost as many other units⌠and FINALLY why this donât mean anything is because terrans literally throw away SCVs at those late stages⌠because terran is the only race with FREE WORKERS which they do not have to pay minerals for or supply for. (imbalanced).
Notice at pro level this unit is sometimes shown to be absolutely broken. The funny thing is terrans that are really good at using these broken OP units do not use them in every game. Because they do not want it to get the rightful nerf it may deserve OR lets not forget a proper buff to zerg to deal with the blatant imbalance.
So how do you fix the Widow Mine? well there are numerous ways to do it.
But something needs to be done it should not have been introduced in this over powered state anyway. The person should be fired who allowed it or said it was ok.
Ok so I said the first thing every person knows.
Now I want to mention something that is not widely known unless you played vs good
terrans on ladder but is also very apparentif you have seen it by watching a stream.
Battecruisers WARP ability.
The fact is its over powered. Its huge to force zerg to make corruptors and vipers ONLY to completely make those corruptors and vipers USELESS. (well congrats the balance has been broken again with the introduction of warp to BC).
IT NEGATES THE ENTIRE ARMY MEANT TO COUNTER IT. While at the same time BC can still deal tons of damage.
It takes no genius to figure this out.
Attack -you can roll over anything zerg has except for the direct counter to BC. Even then⌠though BC can hold their own vs corruptors and vipers with a few well placed yamatos they can actually win.
So the issue is warp will completely prevent zerg from kill the BC. Period their is no IFS,ANDS OR BUTS. Terran can 100% prevent zerg from killing his BC. All he has to do is time warp so they can leave before dying.
I have seen terrans sit and attack with BC even while corruptors attack them⌠and they simply warp out at half health before they die⌠again⌠THIS IS SHOWING BLATANT IMBALANCE. Teran is laughing in the face of zergs weakness and inability to counter the unit.
When you actually learn to use these properly you will NOT lose your BCs and this means you will continue to BUILD YOUR BC COUNT UNTIL YOU HIT MAX SUPPLY. Then you again throw away SCVs etc. Make more BC. Eventually you get a mass of BCs zerg cannot counter.
during all this time you can be attacking with BC sniping units and buildings. Then zerg comes in to counter and you warp away to safety.
LETS TALK ABOUT SOLUTIONS
1st. I personally do not want to jump on the wagon and have it removed.
2nd I want to look at buffs to zerg before a nerf to BC.
So my idea is very straitforward. give a FLYING UNIT A SPELL OR ABILITY THAT CAN PREVENT WARP FOR A LITTLE WHILE SO ZERG CAN CATCH AND KILL THEM.
It could be a new ability but why?
It would probably be easy to simply make parasitic bomb prevent Warp.
This would be a nice solution. Terran can still use warp but zerg now has some counter play.
Terran can micro his BC out of the cloud and then still use warp. But while in the cloud warp would be prevented.
I like it.
Also the fact terran can drop a group of mules to repair BC as they are being attacked by corruptors⌠making them really unkillable⌠again all I have to say is IMBALANCED and BAD DESIGN.
It will never change brother. The biggest problem with this game is it is balanced around Pro play. Pro players could give two s**** about disruptors, ghosts, lurkers, widow mines, etc. because they can micro against them. Theyâre never in the situation even a GM player is in against these units. As long as Pro players are the only ones that consider balance, weâll never get changes and this game will slowly die.
I apologize for spending, apparently, over two hours of my life researching and writing this post; but thereâs things that need to be said and properly so this is a very long post.
The Widow Mineâs splash damage is fairly huge per-shot. Letâs list out all the units with huge amounts of effectiveness on a per-shot basis, okay? Not necessarily splash but just power.
You know what all of the unstarred ones have in common? Their cooldown isnât 30 seconds long.
Widow Mines might deal an insane 40 splash damage in a huge 1.75 radius area, but assuming they hit five targets each shot, their DPS is ⌠11.375 (+5.6 shields).
Did you know a single stimmed Marine deals 14.6512 (+2.4419) DPS at half the price of the Widow Mine? And that Roaches, a unit often considered pretty bad at damage, deals about the same DPS (11.2) as Widow Mines.
Now, obviously, this is neglecting one of their most important features - Up front damage is better than over time damage.
But also their weakness - unmoving, taking a long time to get ready to fire and not having a huge range to make up for that.
^ Broodlings are crazy, even if the actual BL attack is unimpressive, generating a body each attack does a ton.
Scourge donât do splash damage in SC1. This is literally the reason that the Scourge action cloning technique is so important.
Just like the dozens of assertions about balance or design issues, you say something but it just doesnât line up with the reality the rest of us observe.
These contradict your point.
If Widow Mines are good enough to justify their supply cost in a late-game army then Terran shouldnât be needing to throw their workers away or should be continually building them en masse - but the number of mines doesnât continue climbing, it stays pretty steady. This is because the effectiveness of the mine dramatically decreases the more of it you have. Thatâs why the army composition is not âand 30 minesâ, itâs âand 10 minesâ, because more than that just doesnât help because of the mineâs numerous other critical weaknesses.
Iâm not really the person who should say this, but youâre also rambling a lot in this bullet about multiple things which makes it really hard to understand what youâre actually complaining about - like, thereâs a missing bullet-point / newline.
And this is where you go from me questioning whatâs going on to having resolved that you have no idea what youâre talking about.
The Mine isnât broken in pro play because it is in pro play where the Mine gets consistently answered with fairly minimal losses - itâs barely worth doing mine harass - the reason it gets done is because it is mentally taxing, it adds stress and strain to the player because itâs a thing that has to be dealt with.
What it has in pro play is an inherent issue to the mine, that it up-front can win the whole game if you have a cough while itâs coming in by having two shots annihilate the entire worker line.
But thatâs not overpowered. Thereâs a cost and risk and itâs pretty much guaranteed you wonât get that. Itâs stupid and unfun and when it happens it ruins the enjoyment; but none of those are indicative of âthe unit is too strongâ.
People said all those same words about the Banshee back in Wings of Liberty, and that unitâs only changes since Wings are buffs - Cloak research cost down, new speed upgrade, cost and timing reductions on that upgrade.
And itâs not like the Banshee is a unit thatâs too strong. If it was, it wouldnât be getting buffs!
Let me take you back to Heart of the Swarmâs beta when the unit was being added:
It was kind of bad. They thought about a lot of things to do, but the original Widow Mine latched onto an enemy, then exploded a bit later.
For the Widow Mine, we wanted to make a few updates to achieve the following goals:
Make the Widow Mine into an actual cloaked threat.
Make the Widow Mine into a powerful piece that players can revolve strategies around.
Make the Widow Mine into a unit opponents fear, forcing them to react accordingly when Terran players bring them out.
So they actually went and made the unit more usable and good. Being a suicidal unit was not actually particularly useful due to its 2 supply cost compared to the Banelingâs 0.5, even if it was cheaper to connect with for a variety of reasons.
Naturally, to compensate for the fact that the Widow Mine now built a missile every 40 seconds instead of being a gigantic bomb itself, its damage went down - Iâve already spent WAY too much time dredging through the HotS prebeta notes and videoes and having to trudge wayback archives to try and find more information to refresh myself.
But the majority opinion was that this revamp to the Widow Mine was a good change because it made the unit more threatening but in an interesting way. Itâs very potent against armies and sits in an interesting space; and thatâs why it was made that way.
So, no, your basis is completely off and if itâs a joke it isnât funny.
Based on what.
On what are you basing this statement.
Because if we look at pro games, the BC is basically a noncontender. It doesnât exist most of the time.
Pros will always use whatever is the best with enough frequency that itâs obvious why itâs a very strong strategy. They are literally paid to win.
We can also look at how, until the energy cost was removed from tactical jump, the battlecruiser was almost never built because it was still trash.
An equal cost and supply of Corruptors - no Vipers - is able to kill a bundle of BCs, even accounting for Yamato deleting Corruptors.
I did this math and tested it in-game six days ago and posted it as a response to you:
And Parasitic Bomb, if the Battlecruisers are remotely close, will add an incredible amount of damage that makes you need 15-or-less Corruptors to two-shot the ships and make Terran spend far more money on repairs if they do still escape.
Or Abduct to pull them in and disrupt the control, letting the Corruptors snack on the cattle.
And if the BC is in a good position while having Tac-Jump available, that means that it wasnât scouted or the Terran is doing a very good job with their positioning.
Tactical Jump takes just over 1 second for the BC to warp out and the Corruptorâs attack cooldown is 1.36. You have to start the warp out almost instantly after the Corruptorâs attack hits.
So no, this is also wrong. You can ignore facts when making emotional arguments, but factually speaking, this just is not reality.
A ratio of 3 Corruptors per Battlecruiser wins the fight, and this scales linearly - even if you have enough Battlecruisers to kill multiple Corruptors during their attack cooldown - this requires fifteen Battlecruisers (90 supply) of one of two units thatâre objectively the hardest to mass in the game - As if you have 15 BCs, you still get countered by 45 Corruptors, because at that point, after the Yamato volleys, the Corruptors one-hit-kill the BCs.
So, while your underlying point - the army that counters the BCs is one that canât do much else - holds, the problem is that the BCs kind of canât do much because in order for this to be true, the BCs have toâŚ
Save Yamato to kill Corruptors, and save Tac-Jump to run away from them afterward.
Congratulations, you have a unit thatâs incredibly mediocre except when its 71 second cooldown abilities are available. And then it has to run home and very slowly accrue value from weird attrition tactics.
You know the other unit in the game thatâs like that? The Swarm Host. And it is similarly awful niche, have you noticed?
The Battlecruiserâs damage is actually pretty awkward because of how it canât really focus-fire and will spread its shots a bit inconsistently as it drifts around. It also, despite being a 700 resource unit, has to give 125 resource Spore Crawlers their own space and respect, and also they will always shoot at it first because itâs a âthreatâ.
It doesnât really make sense, though.
Itâs also the case that if this is a âBattlecruisers are overpoweredâ problem, then this doesnât solve TvP; though if this is specifically a âvs Zergâ then this is adequate.
And if the problem is âZerg canât stop warpâ; Fungal Growth did that at some point - I havenât tested that one in months though, since Neural works too and is more fun.
Repair restores HP equal to (100% / build time) per second per worker.
In order for this to be a meaningful amount against Corruptors, you need to have 30 workers dedicated on repairing all the same unit.
So no, this is also wrong. Youâre just complaining - which is valid.
Yes shift queueing a viking to every dead air space then scanning ahead of your bc fleet is very difficult and is why bc players have such high apm.
The BC player is supposed to scan ahead for infestors and rapid fire yamato then blink away, comparatively this is much easier than maintaining vision of a fleet of air units with an ability to one shot any unit that can grant vision, while positioning infestors and then target firing with corruptors, on top of maintaining a higher base count,
and even done optimally the zerg can only kill about 3 bcâs while the terran gets to delete 1500 gas then hide behind missile turrets and mass repair.
The onus is on zerg to destroy the fleet before the free trades get out of hand, but his ability to do so is dependent on the terran player misplaying by getting his bcâs fungaled (although the zerg has to misplay first to allow a bc transition).
A 3 base armour flyer hitting air and ground that can attack while moving is not mediocre, it has like 33% more ground dps than a carrier ffs.
You know what else the swarm host has? Actual dead time when its ability is on cd. Itâs also a ground unit that can only hit ground and its ability to teleport is dependent on a separate structure with a 14 second build time and gas cost.
If the BC was a zerg unit it wouldâve already been nerfed into the ground.
And the bc has 400/300/6 cost, needs a tech lab and a fusion core. And it doesnât come with yamato pre built.
They arenât really comparable. Bcs are more of a typical high value high cost t3 unit, while sh are t2 technical harass option.
Not quite âto the groundâ, but any Zerg unit above 1-supply (except for Queens) needs to be weaker than it would be for Terran or Protoss. That is a side effect of larva production.
Terran and Protoss need to explicitly build a number of Stargates/Starports to mass-produce their capital ships. They also build units in queue (one at a time, each unit restricted by the previous unitâs build time); whereas Zerg can accrue larva and build units in parallel. Despite any build times, the true limiting factor for Zergâs production is the rate the player can generate larva.
Arguably, the slow build time is the reason why Battlecruisers have tactical jump. Tactical Jump gives Terran opportunities to use Battlecruisers before they have built up a critical mass.
this is a bad point / argument and makes no sense.
there is a difference if a unit dies after x seconds or immediately.
another point would be baneling: cd = infinite, because dead=> 16(19)+2/ extremely high number = ~0.00000001
Is that why bane is so ineficient? Why does toss not like bane +2 in ecco line they have ~0 dpsâŚ
this also works with DisruptorâŚ
but i like the idea that you want to rework wm. to a burrow aoe overtime effect. gives more counter play.
Reactor production is still queued. It just allows 2 units to go through the queue at once.
Units that can be trained through a reactor are typically lower supply than the Tech-lab units, so the production differences mostly balance out.
Two problems:
Eliwan never actually said that.
Shredder Mines were tested in the HOTS beta, and that was a disaster. It was impossible to balance Shredder Mines to be useful against anything except Zerglings, Banelings, and workers without being overpowered against Zerglings, Banelings, and workers; as those units would all die to the dot in droves before any other units. If Shredder Mines were balanced to be useful against any Terran or Protoss units, then Zergling/Baneling would be unplayable against them. A shredder mine in the mineral line would also be worse, as you couldnât resume mining until the stealth unit is dead.
Some people complain about the Widow Mine now, but it is really not a balance issue like the Shredder Mine would be.
At this point, you are just lying. Itâs not a difference of opinion, that statement is a lie.
Each structure has a fixed production queue (1 slot normally, 2 slots for a reactor), and the next unit cannot be started until the previous unit finishes training. This ties Terran and Protoss production rates directly to the build time of the unit (or the cooldown for warpgate units).
Larva does not work that way. Larva continues to accrue as units are building, irrespective of the unitâs build time, so large units like Ultralisks can be produced at the same overall rate as smaller units like Roaches and Hydralisks. You know this. To claim otherwise is simply dishonesty.
You are being purposefully obtuse and dishonest about how production works for all three factions.
As I explained, every Terran/Protoss production building produces units through a queue. You cannot stock up 3 charges on a Barracks and push three units through the queue at once like you can with Larva on a Hatchery. The overall production rates of a Barracks, Factory, Robotics Facility, etc are always tied to the build times of the units being trained; whereas Zergâs production is only limited by larva generation rates regardless what unit they are training.
If Terran or Protoss want to increase their production rates to match Zerg, they have to invest in a lot of specialized production structures. The more supply the units being compared cost, the more production structures Terran and Protoss would need to build to match Zergâs production rates.
If Zerg had Battlecruisers or Carriers, it wouldnât be particularly difficult for them to build up a critical mass fleet all at once from only a few hatcheries (or even from a single hatchery that has been accruing injects for a long period). They already can do this with Ultralisks, but it is a waste because Ultralisks donât scale well into larger numbers. On the other hand. Protoss and Terran each need several production cycles from several Stargates & Starports in order to build up a fleet of capital ships. If you want to build a fleet all at once like Zerg can, you need a separate Stargate/Starport for every single capital ship in the fleet.
Zerglings and creep are not cleared by a roaming Viking? wow
Yes, it was an overgeneralization that has holes, I apologize. Blinding the enemy isnât an impossible task, but doing it tends to require taking effort and using units.
And that means that the Terran player did a good job and I donât think itâs unreasonable to say that a player should get rewarded for doing good work?
Like, Zerg should get rewarded for spreading creep - and they are, with speed and map vision. Itâs an analogous statement to me: If you do something that isnât trivial to do well / properly, you should get a payoff for it.
Not to discredit your content (I mostly agree with it), but the argument was specifically about unsupported Corruptors.
This doesnât match with any experience I have had or viewed though. If Zerg loses that much gas of units itâs when they get stomped.
Individually, yeah, itâs above average because thereâs not a lot of units running around to counter it.
But when mass BC is in play (which is the thing Iâm arguing against), thereâs no way Zerg doesnât have a ball of units that will delete the BCs unless their brain isnât present.
And in that case, the BC canât really roam out on the map to get value from its attack unless itâs being supported by a significant army or its abilities are available.
I submit it was my fault for trying to demonstrate something serious with an absurd comparison, but they are both incredibly niche units that have trouble contributing as the game goes on.
And ⌠Iâd hope the BC is better than a Host, and significantly so, since itâs cheaper, easier to build, Zerg and Terran build differently, the Host is safer since Locusts are separate?
I understand this not making sense - it is a weird comparison to look at. Let me expand it a bit. The heavy lifting is three lines above and two below what you quoted;
The Widow Mineâs splash damage is fairly huge per-shot. Letâs list out all the units with huge amounts of effectiveness on a per-shot basis, okay? Not necessarily splash but just power.
[âŚ]
Now, obviously, this is neglecting one of their most important features - Up front damage is better than over time damage.
The Widow Mine does have âmassive splash damage to air and ground unitsâ; but whether that is âway too much powerâ depends also on its effectiveness - and a significant part of that is its cooldown.
The purpose of the list is âunits that deal lots of damageâ - and each of those units has a very key and significant weakness - The Widow Mineâs two weaknesses are its 30 second cooldown and thus its damage per second, and its set-up time.
If a 100 resource 2 supply unit does significantly less DPS than a 50 resource 1 supply unit, how can you say that the 2 supply unit does too much damage?
That question is the basic thing Iâm alluding to / trying to say with that block of text. The Widow Mine has big strengths (burst damage and splash) but also big weaknesses (awful dps:cost and needing to burrow/arm).
I do want a Widow Mine rework! Everything else you said is wrong; if the Widow Mine was an actual DPS AoE effect it would have to be like, 7 or less. Even lower than the Sentryâs tickle beam levels, since itâd be area damage on a cheap unit.
Iâd actually want to go grab the idea removed in HotS patch 2.1.3, of actually having radially decaying splash damage. You could buff the inner radius damages as well, since as I stated in too many words, the unit isnât overpowered. Something like 60/30/15 in 0.67/1.33/2.0 range, which makes single shots not instantly explode bundles of workers and lings; which I think is a significant game design problem because itâs not fun to watch and feels un-strategic to see a single unit kill 10 units in an instant.
To a first approximation, Terran and Protoss need X production structures to build X units in Y time. Obviously this approximation has holes. But contrast: Zerg needs X/3 structures to build X units in ~Y+22 time, assuming we start the timer when the first larva weâre using spawns, which is approximately the worst case scenario.
As structure count and time-to-build increases, the native parallelism present in Zerg also increases in effectiveness. This is the basis of Terranicâs assertion:
any Zerg unit above 1-supply (except for Queens) needs to be weaker than it would be for Terran or Protoss.
This isnât actually about the supply cost of the unit: Itâs about its effectiveness and build time. These are factors usually tightly bound to a unitâs supply cost, because - well, the game is competently designed. As build time of units increases, Zerg gets a natural advantage when it comes to producing more of that unit, so Zergâs more expensive units are worse per-supply or per-resource than Terran and Protoss tech units to compensate for that.
It matches mine and Iâd be willing to bet most zergs have had this experience more than once. Thereâs one memory in particular I have burned into my mind, I was watching Nitixâs (6k bulgarian zerg) stream and just tuned in to see him lose to mass BC, next game itâs against the same player, I think on blackburn, and he knows the exact build heâs playing against down to the 5 second window the enemy is gonna try to run hellions into his mineral line. It gets like 5 too many drones and he gets corruptors pretty quick after, however due to the eco loss heâs forced to play macro, gets 5-6 bases up smoothly, but constantly losing corruptors from yamato into TJ.
Eventually itâs a split map, he has like 50 corruptors, 50 spores, vipers, infestors, everything he could possibly want vs bc, and the opponent is still just massing them and sacking scvâs to make more. All the while heâs commentating exactly what is going to happen before it happens, âgreat now I have to play 50 minutes vs mass bcâ, âit doesnât matter what I do now I lostâ, etc.
He was fighting for every inch of creep, sacking outer bases he couldnât defend, having spines finish at the exact time a hellion runby came, constantly repositioning spores and making sure his infestors and vipers were under their protection, it seemed like he eeked out every little advantage he could to get himself back into the game, but the moment a big fight came, the enemy yamatoâd 20 corruptors and blinked home and the game was done. All he could do was sit under his 50 spores with corruptor viper infestor and wait for the terranâs cds to come off and yamato him again. I think the final fight was at inner 5â clock base where the terran blinked into spore viper infestor corruptor queen and still won by a landslide, even with np, fungal, pb, and ms.
Now yes, nitix is not a top player, but heâs far better than me or the average joe, on sc2 pulse it says he peaked at 6.4k which is quite decent, and Iâve seen him micro queen drop to the extent he was dodging projectiles from stalkers while hitting his transfuses.
If even a player of his level can be forced into a 50 minute macro game he will eventually lose, how can the strat he played against be said to be non-viable or only good vs noobs?
Is it accurate to say he got âstompedâ just because he was a half second late on the evo block or drone pull when he won every skirmish he could for the next 40 minutes? The zerg takes an eco hit that prevents them from all-inning, and then their only chance of winning is spending half an hour hoping the terran gets impatient, is this acceptable gameplay?
Mass BC is peak âdonât let them get thereâ and because itâs difficult to attain, itâs allowed to stay, but that doesnât mean it should stay or is fine by design.
Losing to pure bc can be prevented by making some ground army especially some army that can consistently harass for free. Ie swarmhosts/broodlords and use infestors corruptors to keep the bcs at bay not necessarily dancing in and out of sight because indeed thatâs how you get yamatoâd. Also if any mech terran gets a half map scenario vs zerg itâs almost always a loss. That being said you shouldnât hemorrhage res like crazy just to deny him bases or kill a few bcs unless you also deal decisive damage