13 is way too high. Immortals are supposed to counter seiged tanks but they have only 6 range. What’s more is that they only cost 150/125 whereas immortals cost 275/100. Even brood lords and tempests have a max ground attack range of 10. Otherwise, buff immortal range to 8 and reduce cost to 200/100 and make them fast as stalkers. And shoot air.
Presently, Immortals do counter siege tanks – honestly, they do pretty good against most units tagged with the armor type. They don’t need a dramatic buff, let alone three of them. Specifically, if you run two Immortals (550/200/6) up a ramp into three Tanks (450/375/9), they actually can win the fight, and this continues being true even as you increase the unit count [1], until the Tanks have +2 weapons.
Different races and units are different. Brood Lords and Tempests have 10 range, but can move between shots (2.24 and 3.15 speed, though they have acceleration time), are air units, and twice as expensive. Immortals are approximately twice as bulky as a Siege Tank, and shields are a very powerful racial mechanic.
Siege Tanks additionally do not do so much that they control a match without significant resources of other units (though semi-uniquely, “more tanks” does adequately protect the first tanks from ground threats).
Buffing the Immortal’s range to 8 makes them too strong at sniping down all sorts of things: You wouldn’t be able to defend all sorts of units and they’d just get chunked out of existence immediately with the hit-scan fast-firing nature of the Immortal’s phase cannon. They’d also be extremely hard to engage upon at all, making getting rid of them exceptionally difficult.
Lowering the Immortal’s mineral cost to 200 would let you build extra bases or Zealots, which makes investing into the unit far safer because you will have more stuff than other options of equal deadliness that are currently at comparable prices.
Increasing the Immortal’s movespeed to 4.13 (~30% boost!) would distinctly go against part of the point of heavy equipment - that it’s comparatively slow. You wouldn’t really be able to just “go around” such a nimble walker, which would mean that the unit becomes difficult to deal with or engage except via Air - This is something the Siege Tank does, but in the tank’s case, it is already not agile and siege mode amplifies that flaw to ridiculous.
If your goal is to fix that Immortals don’t counter Siege Tanks - let’s assume that’s true for now - Then the question to ask is why don’t they. Thinking, naively, about the numbers:
The Siege Tank can fire every 2.14 seconds at 13 range. The Immortal moves at 3.15 with range of 6 – Roughly speaking, this means that the tanks will get to shoot two volleys in the time it takes the Immortal to get in range. It takes 3 tanks to kill a lone Immortal before it can attack the tanks if they have a spotter (if they don’t, it’ll get one shot off).
Increasing the Immortal’s base tankiness would affect its match up against much more than Tanks fairly significantly, so I think it’s a nonstarter.
Lowering the Immortal’s cost doesn’t help individual Immortals get to tanks, only when they’re in number - and if the opponent is spamming tanks that justify mass Immortal then switching to air units or Zealots are somewhat easy for Protoss to do and answer the tanks with.
With a low 2.14 second duration, Barrier’s defense is frequently dealt with in professional environments by simply shooting to trigger it then ignoring that Immortal until it expires, so increasing its size would affect fairly little in the contexts where the shield is at its most hard to deal with - and altering the duration wouldn’t help “dies to multiple tanks”. Though as armies get larger, ignoring them becomes less possible and less viable.
So; if our actual goal is to specifically help the Immortal against Tanks, we have to choose some other situation where we are okay with buffing the Immortal.
Giving the Immortal extra base Armor or raw vitals would buff it in all scenarios, and it would have to be fairly significantly to make it matter against the Siege Tank.
Increasing the Immortal’s range by 2 allows it to rip through all sorts of enemies - not just Tanks, it’d make the unit even more incredible against Cyclones, Thors, Roaches, Lurkers, Ultralisks, Stalkers, Disruptors, Colossi, and even make it significantly more powerful against the Light units it’s supposed to be weak to.
Lowering the Immortal’s cost significantly has a large consequence for Immortal rushes and when massing the unit. I’m okay with the latter, since it doesn’t happen, but not really for the former.
Giving the Immortal 30% movement speed at base would make the unit able to decently kite so much stuff that it should struggle against. Maybe if it was an upgrade, but I doubt even then, simply because of how much raw speed the proposition is.
Bestowing the Immortal additional damage vs Armored at base can make a significant difference by letting the Immortal three-shot the Tanks with only +1 instead of +2 weapons. But for that to be so, it’d have to be +4 damage, which actually has fewer change repercussions than I thought otherwise, so that might be a good one.
Increasing the duration of Barrier doesn’t help it get on top of Siege Tanks, since multiple Tanks already pound through the whole thing.
Allowing Barrier to absorb a higher amount of damage improves the Immortal’s strength in high-unit count engagements, which is at least a place where the Immortal struggles to see significant usage at higher levels. It would have to absorb 130 or 140, from 100, to let it soak an extra hit - which may make it a concerning amount of total vitality for the Immortal to have in other situations.
[1] though, if you instead add a mixed composition (Marine-Marauder-Tank vs Zealot-Stalker-Immortal), then the Terran army wins rather handily in 20~40 supply fights if you just have the Stalkers blink in and the bio stim and the resource costs are remotely equal.
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Are you actually arguing tanks are legit in its current position when early game defense for terran is setup and forget?
Or most aggresive pushes with tanks straight up win the game?
Give me a break.
Your analysis is biased banter.
uses lore to convey a point “heavy equipment cant have speed”
Yet at the same time, marauders take drugs and run as fast as marines.
The problem isnt the immortal.
The problem is the buffed DPS of a tank. Wich happened quite some patches ago. Before that they where fine. Underutilized in PvT because immortals exist. How it is supposed to be.
Tanks should fight terran and zerg (small) units. Not protoss big bulky strong units and trade this extremely efficiently with the splash DPS.
They literally 3 shot every unit toss has. So 3 tanks = DONT DARE TO COME CLOSE UNLESS YOU CONCAVE + HAVE THE PROPER ARMY.
Not 10. 3. That is a problem. A balance problem you are not understanding due to bias.
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“Heavy weapons” is a specific term. A rocket launcher, despite not being particularly heavy on its own, is listed among heavy weaponry for its explosive potential.
Would you have preferred I use a descriptor of the unit such as “Shock trooper” or “Assault walker”? The point is the same.
The Immortal is a unit whose attributes are specialized against heavy ordinance weapons, whether it’s the Siege Tank, Thor, Lurker, or Colossus. Its job is to be able to take hits and delete low-mobility armored targets from the map. If it was exceptionally mobile, it would either have to get some other nerf (because the unit isn’t underpowered), or it, itself, would become problematically powerful.
This archetype or concept, as both war games and actual conflict go, is called “heavy”, and is characterized by its lower flexibility or mobility, and has been so since the 1500s, with the idea of heavy cavalry. Turns out when you put horses in heavy armor, they can’t run for that long!
If the damage increase of the Tank had been an actual problem; it would have been addressed, because the tank’s damage buff happened in Nov 2016, almost 4 years before the game’s team was downsized. So I highly doubt that this holds any weight at all.
And you are approaching the problem with your own bias and instead of actually engaging with any argument presented before you, repeatedly accusing others that they are unable to see –
Of course we can’t see from your perspective, especially if you barely even begin to explain what your view is.
This is why so many of the walls I write are about things you can check in the unit tester or actually just the game’s raw numbers; because they don’t require context because they are primarily facts.
To explain the example present in this thread:
WildRage has told us that the Tank vs Immortal match up is inadequate, and that Tanks don’t fold to Immortals as well as they should.
My response is iterating that Immortals do completely destroy pure Tanks; and I specified a precise scenario. I even put a footnote on that scenario. I went through the ideas and pointed out how the ideas don’t solve just the scenario, but hugely change something else present, creating a new problem in the process. The rest of that is analyzing solutions that, address the basic issue at hand. My argumentation is about why a given change has problematic other consequences.
Your counter-argument to this is that the Tank does too much damage, with almost no further elaboration.
Do you understand how ridiculous, and not a response to what got said, that is? While, yes, I agree entirely, Tanks deal absurd amounts of damage and would probably be still good if they did 35 (+25) instead of 40 (+30). But two Immortals survive that absurd amount of damage, one gets in range, and has very little difficulty killing three Tanks. The unit loses to the unit that is supposed to beat it.
That sounds like the game working as intended, to me. Immortals beat Siege Tanks is how the game’s supposed to work, and then you go test it and they do.
Additionally, tanks do not three shot every unit in the Protoss army - in fact, it’s a fairly small number of them. Tanks deal 40 (+30 armor) damage, and, let’s look real quick at the total vitals of Protoss’ ground units.
Light: Zealot (150 = 4), Adept (140 = 4), Sentry (80 = 2), High Templar (80 = 2), Dark Templar (120 = 3), Archon (360 = 9)
Armored: Stalker (160 = 3), Immortal (400 = 6), Disruptor (200 = 3), Colossus (350 = 5)
So you say I’m biased but you can’t even be bothered to remember the stats of units?
Oh, but you meant with upgrades, didn’t you? Sure, let’s do that comparison again with +3 tanks dealing 52 (+33 armor).
Light: Zealot (150 = 3), Adept (140 = 3), Sentry (80 = 2), High Templar (80 = 2), Dark Templar (120 = 3), Archon (360 = 7)
Armored: Stalker (160 = 2), Immortal (400 = 5), Disruptor (200 = 3), Colossus (350 = 4)
Hm, look at that, it still doesn’t work out. And we’re also ignoring that Protoss units have armor (though it only affects the Archon and Colossus).
Now, of course, we should remember, Tanks aren’t going to be alone. They tend to have support units with them due to lacking in some attributes. Oh, wait, I already commented on that, and pointed out “[T]he Terran army wins rather handily.”
At no point in any of this did I say words such as
The tank is perfectly balanced
The tank doesn’t stop protoss armies
The tank is not an issue
I said, instead, that Immortals counter siege tanks.
You seem to have decided that me addressing the concerns of the original post with things that concern me about its contents means that I have a problem with the Immortal?
I might be biased, and I’ve never claimed otherwise. I consistently mention that I play primarily Protoss for a reason, because it intrinsically means that I am not going to be able to point out a number of things levelheadedly … but on the flip side, it means I can neatly say things like this without being a hypocrite -
The Immortal counters the Siege Tank, and the Siege Tank’s raw damage with minimal secondary support creates problems for multiple Protoss units to being able to engage into a position.
- but I can also, from my vantage of being a Protoss player, offer up that -
And this isn’t a significant issue, because a Tank based army is extremely slow to move due to Siege Mode timers and is very ineffectual when caught out of place. Due to this, you can utilize Warp Prisms or standard Zealot or Adept run-bys to either peel away the army’s attention or to get significant economic damage done. You also have the option of switching to air units - the Phoenix is a great unit for clearing a Tank position, because you can just lift the tanks to guarantee your other units get in safely.
- but, since I play the game a lot as Protoss, I can also then deconstruct that if I desire -
This, however, itself presents an issue: In order to counter Marine-Marauder-Tank, as Protoss, in a safe and effective manner, I require more advanced unit production structures than my opponent does, which means that setting up for this in early scenarios is extremely problematic.
- Which, overall, leads me to the conclusion I outlined somewhere in the middle of my massive block of text the first time:
That it would be really nice, and grease these edge cases without too many knock-on sour spots being added to the game, if the Immortal’s Barrier ability absorbed 30 or 40 more points of damage, because that would let Protoss deal with medium quantities of Tanks without having to have somehow afforded an additional production structure and the units that come out of it.
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It should be noted that Protoss already has the most map-folding abilities that can be used to negate the Tanks’ range advantage, force friendly-fire, etc.
Immortals are a counter to Siege Tanks in a number of situations (catching them unsieged, advancing on smaller tank counts while spread out to mitigate splash, etc), but they aren’t really necessary; and they don’t need to beat Siege Tanks in “all” situations (such as when a decent buffer or terrain is keeping them out of range).
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Oh rly then why do you cry from wol how toss is op and x and y should be nerfed but suddenly when we have terran toy OP it’s “oh but you see” “depending from situation” “will be balanced by maps” and so on why can’t terran get protoss treatment that particular thing “is” “seems” “feel” OP let’s nerf it to the ground or redesign it in such a way that it’s a nerf
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Which Terran unit are you talking about? If it’s Siege Tanks, they were pretty much useless in TvP before the damage buff. They were also struggling in TvZ, at least since the Ravager was introduced.
Tank 1 of many that i wanna see Mega nerfed
Ok, so you want to make Siege Tanks useless again.
Not useless balanced or toss treatment
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You mean useless.
Tanks have a number of factors that balance out their current damage (friendly-fire, immobility, minimum range, etc), and every faction has several tools to deal with them (Ravagers in low counts, Vipers or Brood Lords against larger counts, Blink, Charge, Immortals, Phoenixes to Grav Lift, etc). For most of SC2, Siege Tanks were too weak considering their many counters and drawbacks.
That isn’t a good situation for any unit, Protoss, Terran, Zerg, or otherwise.
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Ure avoiding the question why can’t terran get protoss treatment and get reduced to nothing just cause it feels unfair or too strong why are you special kind of snowflakes who when ever cry get something
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I already answered that:
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Ure avoiding the question why can’t terran get protoss treatment and get reduced to nothing just cause it feels unfair or too strong why are you special kind of snowflakes who when ever cry get something
It wasn’t fair to toss too but we got it why can’t you?
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I did answer the question. Nerfing units randomly because of petty quarrels would make the gameplay worse for everyone. That is a terrible reason to make changes.
The main reason why units get nerfed to weak state is that they typically have some design issue that makes them difficult to reach a good balance point. Unfortunately,
Protoss has the most of those units, that’s why it is in a bad state. You would have to adjust or rework plenty of units Void Rays, Tempests, Disruptors, etc.
In the case of Colossus, the unit was changed to be more specialized, but it was overnerfed against non-light units.
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No you didn’t you got excuses why can’t you be nerfed to ground and will fix you up in 3y kinda up to some point why can’t you get protoss treatment why are you better than us?
I have answered your question multiple times. At this point you are just being petty, and I see no reason to continue talking to you.
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And i still see no reason why could not you got nerfed to ground and be “mabye” fixed in 3 years
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You need to get OUT of the map tester and INTO the actuall game to understand the actuall balance implications.
Just making tanks in a unit tester vs immortals OFCOURSE IMMORTALS WILL WIN! BUT…
… THIS NEVER HAPPENS IN A REALL GAME!
I gave you a reall simple argument. 3 tanks kill basically every unit out there from toss. doesnt matter how expensive it gets. collosi. stalkers, zealots, sentries, templar, dt, They destroy it in 3 volleys. 3!!!
The mere idea you dont see that as a problem, you dont see my argument that THAT is preposterous showcases you have no clue other then your unit tester map.
In a reall game immortals get EMP’d, units like marauders and marines stand INFRONT of the tanks and KILL the immortals. Concaves, ramps, siege lines with tanks covering tanks from a distance. ALL of them are also REQUIRED to be considered if you are trying to make a point or an argument.
You clearly dont have ingame experience on what immortals actually do vs tanks. Because you only see tank vs immortal in a unit tester, without actually understanding the game.
That alone is a HUGE problem if you talk about balance.
Immortals DONT counter tanks, because they do not get close to tanks. Yet tanks shell from a distance with 0 problem killing everything if focussed in 3 hits. AND DO SPLASH!
Do you not understand that games are won early game merely because people MAKE tanks, and toss CANNOT engage them because they require SPECIFIC tech to even be beat.
Tanks need to be NERFED back to standardized values so units actually have the capability to BEAT them straight up, WITHOUT requiring specific tech that doesnt come out untill the push already is happening.
I have seen countless games where protoss is chronoboosting charge for the life of the player. Literally, they ALWAYS lose if they are sieged on the ramp or near it. (because charge isnt done before that happens, and stalkers cant engage marauder with slow without trading extremely inefficiently)
Yet protoss has no true way of holding off the push before it happens, because stalkers are too expensive, teching blink → charge takes too long, widow mine drops force you to be in your base. marines force toss to tech into collosi. You also need upgrades, you also need a 3rd base to face a 2 base terran on equal economy.
2 techpaths are required to beat a timing attack that happens at 6 minutes, 1 needs to be complete. (collosi).
Do you understand this is impossible unless executed perfectly, without losing a single unit early game, because tech is so extremely timely AND expensive.
Immortals take forever to be built, literally, unable to be built if your obs get scanned and killed(or you play blind), you need a prism for harrass etc.
Then when they do come out, you just lost the game because you have no proper tech vs marines in a 2base tank push and they cant even reach the tanks.
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And in a real game, this isn’t a huge problem, because you have other units to deal with many of the issues that exist from a given unit. The basic intrigue is that you build a complex army that is an answer to each question the enemy’s army proposes.
High Templar beat Marines; Ghosts beat High Templar; though Warp Prisms prevent that interaction; which is dealt with by Vikings, which are beaten with Stalkers; …
This, fundamentally, is how a strategy game works. You need a plan and to focus on how it has strengths and weaknesses, and how to make most advantage of your strengths and predate upon as many of your opponent’s weaknesses as possible.
I agree with the scenario you state being a nearly impossible situation for Protoss to bust through. It’s definitely extremely frustrating to watch equal-resource armies fight and one of them win so soundly.
My point is that not being able to fight into an army that’s specialized in holding a position is not a problem, because you have options to deal with the army that aren’t slamming one army into the other army, such as going around, waiting for an unsiege and diving when it happens, using tech units to prevent the set-up from functioning or simply killing the tanks out of their range.
I’ll readily admit that these are not great solutions, and I also agree that it is incredibly silly that the game works that way, because it’s such a basic move and structure that it really feels like it shouldn’t require such a complicated composition to deal with.
But early timing attacks don’t have enough tanks to totally stop you from engaging, because of how much bulk is present the units natively. I don’t, personally, think that it’s super fair, but I’ve played against it and watched both push and defense executed correctly enough times that I do not think it’s a huge problem.