For those that don’t know, a unit’s damage point refers to the time it takes for it to attack before it can be given a new command. The vast majority of units in this game have a value of 0.1193.
The hydralisk however has a damage point of 0.1486 and for some reason has an even higher one for its melee attack which is 0.2143.
A unit that many consider similar is the marine, which has an abnormally low damage point of 0.0357, which basically allows you to attack while moving aka stutter stepping.
What I propose is to normalize the hydralisk’s damage point to 0.1193, and the same for its melee attack OR reduce it to 0, which is the same as every other melee unit. Why? Well it’s simple, stutter step marine micro is one of the defining characteristics of this game, both for a spectator and a player. So if micro for the marine is liked, why is micro for the hydralisk inhibited, despite being a similar unit in other attributes? Just to differentiate them?
This goes for the other high damage point units too, as in the thor, hellion, dt, spine, ravager, ultra, and locust, all should have their abnormally high damage points normalized and then we balance from there. I mean, isn’t it better to increase micro potential? I just don’t see the benefit to inhibiting it for these units, wouldn’t this game be more fun to play and watch if these units were more responsive in battle?
You might be right, but hydralisks have approximately twice the DPS of Marines against most units, and about 3 times the DPS vs Capital Air as a Marine, so improving their damage point would make them more effective against “everything”.
Marines have such a low damage point because splitting vs Banelings or Pisionic Storm would be impossible if their damage point wasn’t that low. I’ve proposed giving marines a penalty vs Massive units to balance them and i’ve proposed a price reduction for Hydralisks to 100/25/2 with a removal of the “Light” tag and a 1 point base armor buff on top of all that.
If you make Hydralisks “exactly” as micro friendly as marines, they’ll be too good and too hard to beat in a fight.
But you are right, the comparison to the Marine is blizzard’s ideal .In the original Starcraft: Vanilla handbook, hydralisks are called “Bigger and better Marines”.
a damage point improvement that size would mean Pro Gamer Zergs would average about 30 additional micro actions per minute when using hydralisks. I think that’s pretty signfiicant.
Sorry I used my own APm to calculate that the first time. I reccalculated it for a 300 APM pro gamer. So a 300 APM player could get another 30 micro actions per minute if you lowed Hydralisk damage point that much.
To match the Hydralisk’s animations. That’s the reason and from a balance perspective it’s stupid.
Well for most units that would be nice; but there are some cases you really could not remove the damage point. The Thor’s ground attack is the prime example.
The Thor’s ground attack is a specific case where the damage point is high to make Thors less efficient against squishy targets–The damage point gets “canceled out” in subsequent attacks against the same target, but it delays the first attack on a new target, so it effectively lowers the Thor’s attack rate against squishy units like Marines without much effect against giants like Ultralisks and Archons.
Presumably a biological weapon, such as a hydralisk, could produce chemical propellant and shoot bony spines at hyper-sonic velocities. That’s not necessarily even “fiction” its’ just ridiculously unlikely to happen without intelligent design, just like everything lese in Biology. The simplest explanation that works is the First Cause intentionally Created all Life, and that’s the ONLY way a life form as advanced as humans, much less the Zerg, could exist.
The rate of fire is alos effected by “Range slop” against moving targets, the farther away a target is with “flies to” behavior, the less shots the attacker will get per unit time. But I’m pretty sure Marines actually have “appears on target” behavior which is not blocked by PDD (assuming it was back in the game) but hydralisks have a missile “flies to target” behavior which is blocked by PDD.
“Intelligent design” has no basis in reality. It is just a rebranding by creationists in an attempt to teach creationism in schools after the courts ruled that was unconstitutional.
Most organisms are unnecessarily convoluted, which is a byproduct of random chance not intelligent design:
No one in their right mind would design an eye where a part of the retina is covered by the nerves creating a blind spot. That is how the eyes of all vertebrates are structured; but this is neither sensible or necessary. The eyes of mollusks developed independently and their eyes are wired with the nerves behind the eye so that it does not block vision.
No one in their right mind would design land animals with the Laryngeal nerve. This is a nerve that controls the muscles of the lyrinx, but travels all the way down and around the aortic arch near the heart before looping back up to those neck muscles. The nerve is wired that way as a vestige of when it simply connected to gills in our fish-like ancestors before the development of the neck (at that time this was simply a straight path). As the neck extended and the heart moved back, the Laryngeal nerve was simply caught on the wrong side of the heart.
Not really.
VS units without armor 1 Hydra has 12/0,59=20,34 DPS, 2 stimmed Marines have 2x6/(0,61-0,21)=30 DPS
So Marines have 1,47 DPS of Hydras
VS capital ships (3 armor) 1 Hydra has (12-3)/0,59=15,25 DPS, 2 stimmed Marines have 2x(6-3)/(0,61-0,21)= 15 DPS
So Marines have 0,98 DPS of Hydras
In a battle on equal upgrades and supplies Marines wreck Hydras.