“When is Blizzard going to…” No. Development ended. You got a problem, you find a solution yourself, Grandmaster Player.
Truth be told, I am solving it myself. That’s why I have my own rts game in the works. Sc2 is on its way out while games like stormgate and zerospace and sins are on the rise. Every game dev on the planet watched this game bomb from the king of esports to a meme, and we learned a lot for it, and for that we are so very grateful.
I predicted, literally 10 years ago, that zerg would continue to dominate esports so long as the zergling runby was unnerfed. I saw life use it and it clearly had no sufficient counter. 10 years later, serral wins any tournament he decides is worth his time. What was blatantly obvious to an outsider, the game devs were chronically blind to, and that is how sc2 became a meme.
Nerfing the zergling would fix so many problems in all zvx matchups. Gotta love casters freaking out about how “protoss need a door!”. No, ling runbies need nerfs.
Zerg has been always OP (maybe except early Wings of Liberty). Not only lings but the ultralisks and someday people will realize it out how ultralisks are OP like I’m saying to this day for over 10 years.
EDIT:
Almost 15 years*
Duke, I need your help. If we are to defeat the ultralisk, we must discover why the area moment of inertia grows as the squared distance from the neutral axis inside the parallel axis theorem, and not linearly. Intuitively, if you are 2 units from the neutral axis then you should feel an increase of inertia by a factor of 2, but it’s 4. If we imagine the bending of a beam as linear lines perpendicular to the central axis, the ends of the lines move linearly as the beam bends. Send help, please.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-lmmMiRqv0
By the way, I forgot to tell you: do you remember CrusaderKing? He was basically the biggest berrycrunch bootlicker to ever exist. He basically had a melt down when I posted a vid berrycrunch blind lifting his nat’s CC. I won the game, but that was a weird AF move to do, and CrusaderKing was not happy about the implications. Basically, he reached into a hat and pulled out a rabbit. No scouting info. Just blind lifts the cc before an allin comes. Weird. Lucky blind counter I guess. Well. On my new alt, I beat berrycrunch twice in a row with proxy swarmhosts, and CrusaderKing saw the whole thing. He didn’t know it was me, though. Lmao. I am like dabbing on his favorite streamer with meme builds and he’s totally clueless.
Tons of terran players just copy maru’s builds and have no idea how to adapt them to new and wonky scenarios. They just go into that mode that they go into with every tvz where they counter attack with mass drops. That’s their grand solution, to do the same thing they were going to do anyway. Beating swarm hosts is a piece of cake. You make cyclones and a medivac and you always harass the swarm hosts while getting the locusts to drop in bad spots via medivac load/unload micro. It’s not hard, you just have to think a little bit instead of spamming apm. As soon as the locusts drop, you load into a medivac and boost to the other side of the swarm host glob. ez pz.
I am watching EPT NA #215. It’s soo vs hero. ThisShouldBeGood.jpg. Hero proceeds to shade 6 adepts directly into a ling surround, gets 3 more surrounded, loses 5 more yoloing in the main in exchange for 4 drone kills. 3 dts kill 2 drones. All three dts die. Robo finally finishes at the 9 minute mark with no time to defend a roach push. WhY ArE ThErE No PrOtOsS ChaMpIoNs NeRf ZerG!!! Protoss gets to go up to 4 bases anyway because “muh serral” might win another tournament. Hero wins, lmfao.
Game 2. Hero yeets 2 oracles and loses them both. This is the highest ranked korean protoss, ladies and gentlemen.
Imagine for a second if a Zerg rushed out 2 mutas for the same timing and then just yeeted them into a missile turret for free. What’s zerg’s economy going to look like in that scenario? It will be dumpster tier. We’re talking 20 drones max to hit the same timings. Protoss gets to do all that while going up to a fourth base. Wild stuff.
I’ve done 1 base mutalisk on my stream before to show just how insanely bad it is for zerg to go for tech based plays. There was one game where I killed over 100 scvs and barely won by the skin of my teeth. It was vs a masters 1 terran player and I managed to get a gold up with some luck involved. What protoss do in a normal game is just patently insane to imagine a zerg player doing in any scenario except maybe one where the stars align and god himself bows down from the heavens and endows you with 9,000 apm to win the game despite blizzard deleting zerg’s tech options. “Thou shalt make drones and queens until the 8 minute mark.” “Yes, lord blizzard. Thy will by done.”
Protoss is basically HotS-era zerg, massing tier 2 basic units off the back of a monster economy, and just burying you in units, but with faster tech and faster upgrades than hots era zerg could ever dream to have. As zerg back then, you could throw roaches away as long as they killed probes. It literally didn’t matter because your economy was so big you’d just replace them. That’s where protoss is at right now but the upgrade scaling and deathball scaling is way more powerful than the broodlord infestor scaling was back then.
https://i.imgur.com/ZiM7zYa.png
PvZ in GM: 66%
ZvP in GM: 55%.
The ladder tries to equalize the win-rates by promotion & demotion, so this win-rate split is happening despite the ladder kicking out 1/3rd of the zerg gms. Real winrate split vs an equally skilled opponent is probably 70/30. Let’s get a round of applause for the super unbiased “balance counsel”.
https://i.imgur.com/48sw14f.png
Meanwhile serral’s performance just keeps going higher and higher, and the balance counsel still can’t accept the fact that outliers of outliers have a 0% correlation with balance. This the problem with modern day education. People graduate highschool without being able to understand very basic statistical principles like the IQR test which is used to remove outliers from a set. Instead, they are obsessed with the outlier and ignore the rest of the data. It’s literally an inversion of basic statistical rules. They teach algebra in school but, frankly, statistics is much more important. Algebra and calculus are great if you are dealing with ideal hypotheticals which have no real world equivalent. In the real world, there is luck & chance and noisy data and how are you supposed to make sense of that without the proper training. They just don’t give that training inside schools. This is why public education is such an utter failure. Spending on education, in america, is at an all-time high, but the people who are graduating are dumber than ever. Clearly there is zero correlation between dollars spent and quality of education. If you dive into the origination of the education system, you’d find out it’s based on factory-worker type mental conditioning, that’s why there’s a bell and uniforms. Their goal isn’t to educate, it’s to produce a mindless worker drone who is incapable of moving up in life so that they, the upper class, don’t have to compete against as large of a talent pool. They want you to sit down, shut up, and do your office work like a good little boy, and that conditioning starts in the education system.
The only issue is when you verse the veteran users of swarm hosts that will always control their swarm hosts properly. They also send a few queens in conjunction to spread creep and tickle the medivacs so the counter-play is less effective. I have no issues with swarm hosts design, it rewards good control and has very obvious counter play and depth. It’s 1000000x better than the hots variant.
ooh someone’s getting on the SoO GSL victory hype train? 
Yes the balance counsel is trying to fix the game in a way that will help all involved. David Kim went on and on about this and found it an impossible task.
?
No. As soon as cyclones are in a medivac, the swarm hosts are locked to creep and creep only because they have to be where the queens are. If you stop the creep, the swarm hosts can’t advance without the threat of drop-micro making the locusts fall in a bad spot + losing 1 or 2 swarm hosts to advance close enough to launch. Hellions also plow through locusts like they aren’t even there. It’s not a winning position. I think you are thinking of a nydus, where the queens are literally on top of terran’s production. In that case, terran is toast no matter what.
No, I’ve totally lost interest in SC2 pro play. Zerg is spam drones, protoss is an embarrassment. The only interesting race right now is Terran, they actually have strategical options & high skill players to pull them off, but top terrans struggle in late game vs runbies and struggle vs protoss amoves in general, so the writing is on the wall before the match even begins.
Right, you say that, but they clearly have a preference for nerfing serral over helping the game be healthy. Do you remember how much anti-zerg whine happened back when it was zerg that had 40% gm representation? Non stop crying about “free units” and “zerg requires no micro” and “they can just remake any drones I kill” etc. Who was it doing most of the whining? I’ve come to the realization that 95% of social media posts are by GM/professional/semi-professional players, because they are the only ones who care enough about the game to cry about it online. So the lack of QQ shows pretty clearly where their biases are at. These people are perfectly fine with zerg being 20% of grandmaster.
Zerg has been nerfed to the point where if you prioritize tech over economy you’ll end up in a scenario where the terran has 3cc + tier 3 vs a zerg who has 1 base + tier 2. That’s an enormous gap. If you do anything but make drones and queens, you just fall massively behind. When a race is nerfed, it limits the options first and foremost. It doesn’t start affecting the win-rates until there are no more options that are capable of fixing the issues. So what it does is it restricts win-cons. You end up with 1 win for zerg for every 2 that protoss has. That’s fine for serral because he can reliably hit the 1 but everyone else is like “I don’t want to spam queens and drones every game”.
I don’t think they realize that balance affects not just the win-rates but the strategic diversity too. There is a reason zerg is the least played race and it’s because A) it’s harder to win with, and B) you have zero strategic options except to spam drones and queens, and that is boring as !@#$.
I think they like zerg being underpowered not only because it makes it easier to beat, but because it makes it more predictable. They know the zerg is going to spam drones and queens and so it their own decision making a lot easier. Imagine how much harder their decision making would be if they had to worry about 1 base cheese being as strong as Serral’s macro play. It would make for a very fun and interesting meta, because there would be very diverse games with lots of variety, but the pro players aren’t going to like that because they like consistency and the best way to make zerg consistent is to remove all strategy from it so that you have to spam drones and queens.
That’s why pro players aren’t good game designers. Game design is about diversity & pro play is about consistency, and they are totally different goals. By definition, what is healthy for the game is also opposite of what pro players want, and that’s why it’s important to structure the incentives of the game design properly, and unfortunately the people who get to design the game are the ones with the wrong incentives, so I don’t see this issue going away any time soon. Protoss has been dominating GM for years at this point. I will be shocked if the balance counsel has the gumption to truly fix the issues.
https://i.imgur.com/OXxtSaV.png
Six years. That’s how long I’ve been waiting for the strategic diversity of zerg to be fixed. Lmao. It’s never going to happen, dude. This game is TOAST. Protoss dominates gm for 6 years straight, and the balance counsel is like “so yeah, let’s nerf banes to stick it to serral.” It’s like a monte python skit: “Hello sir. I am the new game designer. I’d like to nerf serral. Yes sir, I know Serral has nothing to do with balance. I just want to nerf him. Why? Because I can, sir. I know sir. It will delete zerg from the ladder, sir. That’s fine sir. As long as we stick it to serral, sir.”
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
― Mark Twain
Yes, that is the standard use of swarm hosts. You’re the odd one out that does it off a proxy hatch, the Asian server Zerg players do it off 2 bases and spam queens alongside swarm hosts.
You don’t have to be on top of production, just close enough to threaten production/economy. Terran has it easy because you can just lift things but the players that do it every game have it down to a fine art.
Swarm host play also had a map condition for it. I remember Zerg players winning with it against Terran players on Golden Wall in the GSL and the upcoming map pool has similar map dynamics. Be prepared to bust it out once it drops. I could imagine you taking the gold on their side of the map and using that as a launch pad.
Terran players trying to match the greed of Zerg players is the easiest way for Zergs to take advantage with tech plays. Serral used the same Build in WESG against Innovation that he did against Maru game 1 of IEM. The difference is Inno played a heavily committed 2 base push which allowed him to hold it off and counter attack for the win.
7 years ago Zerg players were saying that Ling bane compositions are non-viable ever since the larvae nerf. That was their excuse as they went roach, ravager f2 a-move and if that fails they spam ultras for the free win. I remember the twitch usernames that made fun of them in 2016. XD
Are you talking about the queen drop? He’s used it against maru several times. I think it was the first time they met that Serral brought that build out. Just another indication that Innovation was much better. Innovation fed Serral the signs that he was expanding, and Serral took the bait and then Innovation punished him for it. He was better at meta gaming.
I do both. There are frankly a lot of ways it can be done. Earlier today, I beat a 5300 terran with mass swarm host nydus + infestor as a macro strategy. You just put speed overlords everywhere, pop the nydus in a random spot, fungal him as he’s moving between locations with burrowed infestors spread everywhere, and mass spines back at home:
https://i.imgur.com/9itoyKa.png
If it’s a 2 base allin variant, then you need the queens to transfuse the nydus as it pops, because if it doesn’t work you are toast. Aka it has to work, is allin, so you send queens too. Back at home with macro variant, queens are needed as an anti-drop deterrent and for injects. I upgrade the locusts so the only thing to tech into with decent DPS is ultras which combo well with the infestors.
You can also do this by opening mutas first, making 12 or so, and then going into the swarm hosts. You don’t use the overlords to spot in that case-- the mutas are there to clear out spotters and place the nyduses.
I definitely look forward to it. I think the maps are the one thing these guys are doing right. I think they are being way too timid though. These maps are more diverse than past maps but are still closer to vanilla than what possibilities there are out there. Actually, I actually agreed with the baneling nerf. Even if the sole purpose of the nerf was to get artosis to quit crying about the baneling. Now it’s like what are you gonna blame. Serral’s rank went up. Baneling wasn’t the issue bro. But there are a lot of “zerg apes” who spam banelings for 100% of their wins and I found it very satisfying to hear them crying on twitch about the nerf. I didn’t care about it because it was a terrible unit to begin with. All it does is bankrupt you. That’s the baneling’s purpose. It helps your opponent win. There is no strategic value. About the only strategic thing you can do is to burrow them, and that’s heavily reliant on luck, same for drops, and that leaves the “attention check” where you base trade and, when he’s not looking, you crash some banes into his marines. But it was very much a unit that was “I have a big eco, I am going to amove and win now” and frankly I am glad it was nerfed. What made the baneling good was that the zerg was good at spamming drones. BORING.
To be fair, they were right. After the inject nerf, you couldn’t spend your money well enough on 3 base. That’s when mass queen became popular, because you could actually keep your spending low. It was impossible to expand enough to keep your income low and also defend all the bases. The map styles changed too, and the medivac drops were hugely buffed at the same time as well as the mutalisk being much weaker than before. So it was a combination of things but, yes, the inject nerf absolutely did delete the ling bane style for a long time. To this very day, Dark still makes 2 macro hatcheries and Solar spams like 12 queens. Queens helped with the defense, fixing that issue, and they helped with the spending issue as well. In HotS, your budget was so tight that you couldn’t get a single macro hatch (unless you were already ahead). 2 base muta into a third then baneling speed and 1/1 followed by a fourth was the most common build, and you’d barely defend certain timing pushes. It was close. It came down to like 8 mutas and 12 lings to defend the first bio push.
I was actually way ahead of the curve with mass queen styles. I once beat a guy called “Playa”, he was a 6k protoss gm, using mass queens. It’s as simple as this: I am floating money, have no larva, it’s suicide to expand and static defense is useless, what do I make? Ok, queens.
I just watched it. He tricked serral twice. Once to go for the build and once that he was transitioning. Serral allins vs a terran allin, and that’s literally the opposite of what you do vs a terran allin. Serral then followed it up with worker harass vs a guy who is allin on 2 base and what you want in that scenario is unit retainment. Throwing supply for worker harass vs an allin is the definition of useless. He thought Innovation was transitioning. It was pretty obvious that inno wanted to continue the allin since he was clearing creep.
I couldn’t find the maru game where serral used the same build, but I did stumble across a series maru won with mass raven (lmao). Serral reuses a builds basically 24/7. He used the same 5 mutalisk into mass roach ravager build vs Stats several times, and the last time he used it it failed. He basically pinged the immortal shields and rolled in with +1 roach ravager and won. If I recall, the first time, Stats hadn’t seen that before. Second time was disappointing because Stats hadn’t prepared for it. Third time Stats was ready, Stats defended and Serral went broods, Stats counter attacked and lost. The last time, it was virtually the same game but Stats made the timing work vs the broods.
Planetary Fortresses are really good against zerglings, dont know wtf you talking about …
Go watch the iem finals and count how many times maru had a mineral line shredded by a ling runby. It happened basically non stop. Innovation was prophetic when he said that watching the minimap decides the outcome of high level TvZ. Ling runbys have been insanely busted vs terran since basically forever. In the past, lings were neede to control large territories, keep bases alive, and respond to drops. The difference, now, is that zerg has powerful zone control tools (lurkers), mobility tools (drops, nydus), and efficiency tools (vipers), none of which existed to a meaningful degree in previous versions of the game. Zerg has the OP ling runby ON TOP OF everything else. It’s time to nerf the ling runby. The mobility of the ling is no longer needed & it creates severe balance issues when combined with the new tools.
One of the issues that has made lings op in zvt is that they keep nerfing widow mines to make protoss happier, because paying attention and splitting workers is just too flipping much for top protoss to handle. Widow mines are mkre often than not counter productive and deal more damage to the terran army than the zerg army. Top zergs cam totally negate the widow mine and flip its efficiency upside down to a net negative unit. The counter micro is too simple. With how fast lings move, they can easily drag mine fire over the marines or medivacs.
I said it back in 2015 when life won wcs. Ling runbys are insanely busted and zerg will dominate the premier tournaments as long as it remains unnerfed. You could nerf every other zerg unit and serral will still win by slipping lings into a mineral line. Adrenal in particular is just an insanely busted upgrade because it allows cheap mineral only zerglings to punch through planetaries, and it permanently cements an upgrade lead for zerg. It’s like a +5 upgrade and terran only gets +3. It’s flipping wild that this BS has been allowed to go on for such a long time. God forbid zerg players use lurkers in a nydus to bust planetaries.