True I preferred WM drops anyway.
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They definitely have a higher payoff rate!
Zerglings arenât affected much. Blue Flame Hellions 2-shot them either way.
Zealots are affected, but Hellion-mode isnât good at fighting them anyway.
Banelings are not light, so those are unaffected.
The worker harassment is the main thing that âcouldâ become a problem. Hellions themselves are limited by worker harassment potential before balance against combat units.
This is why in my Random Tweak mod (which just has a bunch of random changes I thought would be interesting or make mech more viable) I added an Armory-Tech upgrade on the Tech Lab to increase Hellion/Hellbat health instead of trying to buff their damage.
Maybe lowering the damage and upgrades so that Liberators donât 2-shot Stalkers and one-shot HT/Sentries would help. Damage against Ultralisks can be kept constant by adding an anti-massive bonus. This is just a thought. For instance, 70 (+5 vs. Massive) and +3 (+2 vs massive) on upgrades is about the ceiling where Liberators wonât 2-shot and 1-shot Stalkers and HT/Sentries respectively anymore.
Maybe, but the player would actually have to expand and move for that to apply. In the meantime, the cancel effect will increase the risks of bunker rushes.
The old Javelin Missiles was almost useless against air, excluding Mutalisks. The suggested changes can be balanced, it is just about getting the numbers correct. Javelin Missiles is trading off some range for damage, and that does leave some room to buff it.
Thatâs 50 energy. No cooldown was mentioned, so this might not have one.
The change does open up new opportunities for Sentry, Oracle, or High Templar play, and it allows Shield Batteries to keep healing for longer, so maybe that is enough to compensate.
This might get changed after testing. I do like that Disruptors wonât one-shot Hellbats anymore though. As for PvP, the shield bonus can just be reduced if that is a problem.
The health and shields are getting buffed by 40%, so it will live longer. The net damage is being increased by 166%, if there are 4+ targets in range.
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Blue flame doesnât affect banes, theyâre not light.
Fairly certain the change even nerfs it in PvP against colossus and immortals.
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The Lib change just needs a significantly lowered radius. a 56% increase is dumb. Knock it down to 35% and see what that does. The problem with radius that large is you canât out maneuver them anymore, you just have to charge in and hope for the best.
Eh if you let a terran expand bad things happen lol, itâs a meta game thing so it might not come up every game but 100% people like Special and Maru would abuse salvage missile turrets. I think itâs going to cause problems. Big ones but mostly at the higher end of play. Basically wonât get used below diamond.
Terran shouldnât have answers to everything though, thatâs the issue with the Thor beating down all air units. You have Vikings, Marines, Ravens, Ghosts, BCs, Mines and Libs for AA. Introducing 1 unit to rule them all is just going to bad news all around because youâre now at the point of 1-Aing with Thors into armies that should beat that kind of stuff. Thors need a weakness.
They didnât mention a coodlown but everyone Iâve talked to says it has a 50 second cooldown. Even if it doesnât have one thatâs one hell of a loss early game, holds were already hard vs timing attacks. With this change we might be back into FF the main ramp until Colossus and pray territory, just like WoL. Freaking dangerous change.
Disruptors shouldnât have ever been in the game imo, theyâre a bandaid for a larger issue: Protoss splash damage gets hard countered by dumb crap (AA or EMP). Wish they would have figured out a healthier way to fix the problem than a unit that shoots their load and gets a binary interaction out of it.
The 40% increase of health/shields for the mothership is too little and itâs honestly a nerf, attacking 4 targets because now it canât kill anything whereas before it could. If itâs going to be a cool looking hero unit that has powerful abilities it needs 60% minimum buff to hp and shields. Make it dummy thicc since it canât kill anything anymore.
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At highest levels, the disruptors simply donât connect. It nerfs low level protoss very slightly because they have to have some units to finish off the 1 hp marauders, aka not a big deal at all. It buffs high level protoss because the radius helps disruptors get some damage where normally they would get none.
Itâs absolute nonsense protoss whine. Never in a million years are you going to have a disruptor fighting marauders in a vacuum. Disruptors will be there with other toss units which will make easy work of the 1 hp marauder.
Protoss ground might struggle vs liberators but thatâs where tempests come in. Protoss players now have to build a functioning unit comp â oh no, the horror!
Only affects TvT.
No it wonât. Salvage allows terrans to risk bad positions because itâs less costly to give them up. It makes terran less committed to a position which is equivalent to being more mobile and less turtly.
You canât be serious. Healing a depot is now OP?
Heaven forbid toss canât f2 amove carriers and win. You still have the range advantage in two ways (air to ground aka tempest, ground to ground aka disruptor). Late game interactions are usually won by the player with the range advantage, unless of course you are using f2 amove micro.
It really isnât. They drop it on the first oracle and it can now litter the map in stasis wards. That means stargate into blink openers will be super op because you will catch bio in the stasis and then blink on the remaining army, killing it, then camping on the trapped units and killing them. This is a buff to early game protoss but only for high levels. Low skill protoss will definitely perceive this as a nerf, and thatâs 100% a skill issue.
Is this a joke? A disruptor can put 8 marauders at 1 hp and then the mothership can 2 tap them. The mothership is also much better at defending a single medivacâs harass, as well has hellion runbies. It is objectively buffed in these scenarios.
Itâs a dual purpose buff to make zergs more incentivized to tech instead of turtle with queens, which I love because I hate âdrone apesâ, and to buff zergâs static defense vs carriers. Doing 20 damage instead of 15 means they can 4-shot an interceptor, whereas, before, it would take 6 shots. This is exponential because the auto micro of the interceptors resets targeting, allowing shield regen to happen. So this is an enormous nerf to the ability of carriers to push into spore clusters. The âTTKâ or time to kill an interceptor is reduced to at least 33% less.
One negative downside to the queen cost increase is that this practically guarantees pool first openers are dead. They took a larva away from inject & gave it to the hatchery, making pool first builds really bad, but now theyâve increased the cost of the queen AND decreased the cost of a hatchery. Hatchery first openers are going to be the undisputed best way to open as zerg. This will make it easier to go 2 base tech builds, but it will almost certainly delete pool first 1 base allins. But then again these allins were already really bad, so nothing of value is lost. It will impact ZvZ most, because those are the most common places for 1 base allins. Another thing it will likely do is increase the prevalence of proxy rax bunker rushes. The reason for this is because these rushes are hard countered by pool first, which zergs wonât be doing. The proxy rax can rely on hatchery first being the case.
While I can sympathize with the need to keep the counsel unbiased, I donât see anything in this patch that indicates bias.
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By the way, buffing blueflame proves my theory that hydralisks are superior at beating mech unit comps than roaches. Iâve used hydra ling bane to amove Ruffâs fourth for years, itâs always a free win, and the blueflame hellions will now be MUCH stronger vs hydras. Clearly the balance counsel is aware of the absurd power level of mass hydralisk strategies vs mech. You can just stutter step through bases after blinding clouding his tanks. If you want to get fancy, you can set up an 8 or 12 hydra drop in their main or natural at the same time so that they are reeling before your final blow. This works particularly well if they have a ball of mech units they f2 to respond to threats. But if itâs a siege and forget type of mech player, itâs better to just go head on because he will be spread too thin.
Blueflame will be really good vs marine globs in particular. Back when I mained terran I loved double factory blueflame openers because you just run up to the bio, hold position, and the marines go by-by. Marauders were the issues, but you dealt with those by making tanks and then medivacs were the issue so you made vikings. It was great. Mass hellion drop styles were insanely good. So 1/2/1 mech openers are back on the menu. The barracks exists only to build the reactor for the factory and the reactor for the starport.
One area this might impact is the repeat-runby. If drones heal a bit, before a new runby happens, they might survive the current hellion but not the new hellion. So chains of repeat hellion runbies will probably be stronger.
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I remember the game that made Ruff give up on his hellion raven playstyle. And yes, this was just after they buffed hydras into a core unit back in 2017. The map was Vaani Research Station and the zerg built pure hydras, no creep spread, only drones and hydras. It was that day he switched to the ghost opening.
Yup this is a buff to active mech players, the set and forget will always just have them in hellbats so theyâd need something like 4 spots in a medivac to bring them out of their shell and to start engaging with their opponent.
It seems to be the flavor of the patch. People are talking about how spores 8 shotting oracles is an overkill but Iâd say itâs necessary. The first oracle will have 150 energy out of the gate, thatâs insane for an undefended mineral line. I also didnât understand how many stasis traps that could drop down. A queen walk on this patch will hit at the 200/200 mark. 
I made a request before for recalled broodlords in a PvZ but I think Iâm going to change that request. Steal a probe, build a nexus, then when you get your infestors and the opponent has HT, purposefully let them FB the unit, go to the nexus energy overcharge and cast a microbial shroud over their HT. Itâs the ultimate power move this patch.
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Getting recall as zerg be like:
