I’ve been playing the SC series since ~2002 and played WoL when it came out before taking a long break until LOTV. I’ve never advanced beyond Diamond League despite playing hundreds of games a season, and I’m not sure that I would ever want to. Feel free to discount everything I say because of that, but this isn’t a balance whine thread, more of a retrospective.
I main zerg, but after seeing enough whine threads over the past year, I decided to play as the other races for awhile, to get some perspective. My conclusion is that every race is painful to play as and against, and each race has different things that will absolutely ruin your day if not scouted and prepared for. I get supply blocked as Terran far more often, for example, because I have to go back to my base to make supply depots rather than from my unit hotkeys. I’m not very good at microing, so I frequently lose oracles as protoss. As Zerg, I’m a habitual all army masher, a habit I’ve only begun to break by unbinding the all army hot key, which of course brings with it it’s own problems.
But, here’s my issue with the game: Many, many times, the game is not decided based on excellent macro or micro, but rather on “gotcha” moments. As in, “Gotcha, you weren’t expecting a banshee, looks like I get to kill a bunch of your workers.” Examples of this can be seen in the Adept, Mutalisks, Banshees, Battle Cruisers, Burrow Roaches, Dark Templar, Widow Mines, even zerglings if your opponent decides to bank up two dozen of them in a ZvZ that you thought was going to turn into a macro game. That’s not even getting into proxies of all sorts. The answer to all of those, of course, is to scout, which is why scouting is truly the most important skill of the game, rather than micro or macro.
Therein lies a problem though: In the early and mid-game, the target of your opponent is not usually their army or their bases, but rather, their workers, and workers die to everything. Terran in particular seems to have multiple units at every tech level specifically designed to be hyper-efficient at killing workers: Reapers, Hellions, Widow Mines, Banshees, Battle Cruisers, Liberators. Not that other races don’t have them either: Banelings, Mutalisks, Dark Templar, Adepts, Chargelots will all wipe a mineral line just as fast and be just as unfun to have happen to you. If you manage to kill the harassing unit, great! You just might be ahead now, until the next wave of harassment arrives, usually coupled with other forms of harassment or a push of some sort. You can defend against a dozen harassment attempts and the thirteenth attempt will get through while you’re trying to defend the front, wipe a mineral line, and even if you’ve held the main attack, you’re screwed because your attention wavered or was elsewhere for seconds. Even if you do have a defense in place, say, three queens and a spine crawler at your natural to defend against the first 4 - 6 hellions, it still might be beneficial for the hellions to dive past the queens and kill a few drones just to throw you off and make you chase them around.
Here’s my overall takeaway from trying out all three races: NONE of the races feels fair or fun to play against. They always feel like they’re doing some sneaky, cheap, unfair tactic. As a Zerg, I can’t stand 2-base marine-tank pushes. I’ve lost to it more times than I can count, and have actually gotten pretty good at holding them, but everytime I see their marines and tanks walking over to my third after they’ve turtled up on two bases, I don’t feel like I have options: either I’ve already prepared or over prepared to defend against this, or I get stomped. Sometimes, even if I do prepare, I still get stomped due to a mismanagement of some sort - not flanking, not clicking banes through, not dealing with the liberator in my main, etc. As Terran, it doesn’t feel fair that I have to put so much effort into getting my production set up, microing add-ons, floating buildings back and forth, when Zerg and Protoss have such comparatively easy production. As Protoss, it definitely doesn’t feel fair that all my units are insanely expensive, need to be micro’d well and most of them have some kind of ability (blink, forcefield, etc) that need to be activated at the proper time, in fights that usually only last seconds. Getting hit by spellcasters from ANY race feels terrible and unfun.
Again, this isn’t a balance thread. I’m terrible at the game and will only improve marginally, if at all from this point. This is more of a revelation thread, and the revelation is this: You’re probably not having fun playing SC2 anymore because the game is packed full of fast, harassment oriented game design on all fronts and most games end in a “gotcha” moment of some sort or another. This type of game can be fun to people. There are people that thrive in that kind of environment. But for an average player, it provokes sighs and frustration far more often than it produces fun.