PTR 5.0.15 Patch notes:

General Discussion
64

In fairness to this particular point, Their tech is often part of their wall which is usually necessary - at least against Zerg - in order to hold their natural.

Pretty much the rest I agree with though.

It’s definitely a bit weird. Storm’s calculation should in theory do 120 damage, but having tested it a number of times it adds up to 140 damage. It’s not a huge difference, but it IS different than it should be. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was supposed to be more, actually.

As an aside, there’s a solid reddit thread as to why Storm feels… off

Having played several games against storm on the PTR though, it definitely still feels like storm. A weaker version, but one that still feels like it needs to be respected, at least somewhat; squishy units like Bio and Ling Bane can run through them, but, in game at least, Storm does enough damage that it feels like you must respect it if you don’t have massive amounts of healing.

It’s definitely not the one-button defend-all ability that it used to be, but in the times that I’ve had to deal with it, the threat of storm constantly forced me to either pull back, or charge forward to escape the damage that it was doing. By itself, it’s damage is trivial, however in tandem with the rest of the protoss army - even if it’s just zealots, then the threat of Storm becomes very, very real. And it feels like it lasts forever, due to it’s significantly increased length. It was definitely still capable of zoning surprisingly well.

With all of that said, I definitely still prefer the old storm, and I say that as a Terran player; Storm has been an iconic ability for the last 15 years, and beyond that into Broodwar. As it is now, it just doesn’t feel the same. More pertinently, I personally don’t feel like the problem was Storm, rather the problem was always the presence of Energy Recharge - a problem which, frankly, still hasn’t been addressed with this patch.

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65

Toss have been losing robos and forges and twlights for years and years, in PvT, because they absolutely refuse to put them in sensical locations. But yes, vs Zerg you have to wall and that sometimes means putting it in the wall depending on the map.

I think PiG was right. The engine must apply damage in “ticks” that happen at intervals. If the ticks happen too infrequently, it could be possible to move through a storm without taking damage. Another thing that could be happening is that they are integrating the damage too fast and so the damage per tick is low enough it rounds down to zero.

Yeah, it seems to be that it’s meant to apply a large amount of damage to an army to soften it up rather than being an instant kill on a small cluster of units. It’s confused me why storm was designed to instant kill when toss already had disruptors. I really like the direction but I am skeptical that it’s working correctly. At the same time, we should not capitulate to the whine toss because their perceptions of reality are so biased it’s like they had 3 shots of vodka before commenting on the balance patch. If we have to choose to trust them or the blizzard engineer, I say we trust the blizzard engineer. We’ve done years and years of this trusting of protoss feedback and they keep posting and endless stream of positive win-rates.

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I would personally prefer to see storm reverted to its original state and Disruptors removed; I think Storm is generally better designed than disruptors are due to their general nature. More than that, I think storm is infinitely easier to balance and has a lot more counter-play - assuming that Energy Recharge is significantly nerfed (it’s not, not really) or removed.

I’m honestly a little sceptical about this, if only because the way the patch is written comes across as being written by an AI - and that concerns me greatly, especially given Microsoft’s recent history with AI https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/09/16/microsoft-30-billion-uk-ai-future and their firing of 15000 employees https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-to-15000-employees-fired-this-year-for-that-i-am-/articleshow/122972865.cms in their gaming division to enable it.

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They are more general for sure. A notable way is that they hit air and ground, but that’s part of what makes them busted. They are too general. Normally the trade off to being a hard counter is that it’s a specific, so it loses generality. General units tend to have lower peak strength and that’s the trade off of generality. Storm has high peak strength and is general.

A soft damage ability meant to soften armies is very novel. The game’s never had an ability like this. The worst case scenario is that it’s useless, which means it’s just like microbial has been for the past for years. So, I don’t see a problem with that possibility. Toss players can just deal with having a useless ability. Zergs did. They gutted the infested terran and gave us microbial and just had to find ways around carriers via tempo and positioning.

Yes, that’s an excellent point and may well be the case. I hadn’t thought of that. Asianometry did a video on “deep research” and it’s supposedly cutting into software engineer salaries to the tune of 150 billion per year.

Still, I trust chatgpt more than I trust the previous balance counsel. Chatgpt has never called me autistic, saying I talk slow, because I merely pointed out that toss winrates are impossibly high. The sheer amount of hostility and gaslighting over this issue has really changed my perspective not just on SC2 but humanity in general. I used to be bright eyed and bushy tailed and thought most people were good people doing the best they could in difficult circumstances. I now believe most people are either neutral or evil leaning, and they only reason they act good is because they are scared of the law. Most people could watch you get stabbed and they’d probably just video it and laugh or maybe run away and tweet about it.

I am the opposite. I run towards trouble. I am told I have a hero complex and that I suffer from hyper vigilance, or so they so say.

But anyway I trust chatgpt a thousand times more than I trust SC2 pro players. Those people are legitimately nuts. If they could, they would nerf the other two races into oblivion and they would laugh and mock you for being upset about it. They wouldn’t think even once about the ethical implications. In fact that’s exactly what they did last patch. At this point I really don’t care what the balance patch is. Any patch is better than the last patch. As long as those guys aren’t running things I am just right as rain. Send the patch as is. Do it. I am fine with that. Whatever gets us off this patch. Just do it.

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I don’t, simply because ChatGPT has a tendency to self-affirm and create echo chambers. It’s incredibly problematic for so many different reasons. In ChatGPT’s case, it has a tendency to spit back out something incredibly similar to the user’s own thoughts because of the prompts that tend to be used.

It’s become so much of a problem that there’s actually an associated medical disorder with it because people have begun to have relationships with AI.

Hence, AI written patch notes are almost certainly going to be problematic in numerous ways, and frankly I can’t see any of them being good.

No, what we need is actual people behind balancing again. But not pro players.

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69

diddy has more skill and deserve more respect than any terran player who got loved by this company all this years, so i duno who need to l2p

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lol are you serious?

There’s a big difference between a design chance such as Energy Recharge taking Battery Overcharge’s place and making storm last 3.5x as long while doing 1/2 damage.

And even then initially a lot of these commentators n players weren’t catching on how bad the change is.

To put it into perspective the medevac can basically out heal Psi Storm now…and to get anything approaching decent value out of storm you need the opponent to sit in the storm for longer than most battles last.

There is no realistic game situation outside of silver that someone would sit in the full duration of a storm…or hell, even half the duration of a storm…the terran/zerg player would have to be AFK or not looking at the battle AT ALL.

The nerf to Storm is way too much. Even the supposed revisions I’ve seen leaked aren’t that great (2 radius, 5 sec duration 7 damage per tick) considering the problem with Storm was Energy Recharge which is ALSO getting nerfed.

This is legitimately one of the worst decisions someone has made in terms of balancing. Right up there with Warhounds…except Warhounds were a beta only thing while this made it to the PTR in a game that doesn’t get updates very often.

It’s insane. Fix Storm OR Energy Recharge…then you go from there…not both at the same time when the problems with Storm are an Energy Recharge issue lol.

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71

In the hands of a game designer that is perfectly fine. They can curate ideas for the patch by entering prompts like “nerf protoss” and “mix up the meta for all matchups.”

Yes, I think chatgpt & other ais are now substantially above average human intelligence. Most people’s brains won’t be able to tell the difference between it and a real human.

Humans can be bullied and gaslit by the community and that’s how we’ve ended up with protoss being OP since 2018.

Sure, but it’s fine if they use AI as long as it’s a tool in the process, and not the whole process. It shouldn’t be the judge, jury, and executioner.

72

Blizz straight up deleted infested terrans from the game, and gave zerg a useless spell. We’ve never had an army softening spell before. Worst case scenario, toss players have to be like zerg was with microbial and learn to play around the useless ability. Best case scenario, we get a new ability that is actually really fun, unique and useful. But, whatever happens, for the love of God, do not cause another patch where Protoss post continuous >50% win-rates in PvT or PvZ.

To really make the game fair, Zerg should get a period where Zerg gets to post 63% win-rates, that way protoss can know what it’s like to have your most critical ability gutted, your win-rate tank, and then be gaslit to jupiter and back again that it’s a skill issue; but that won’t happen so we’ll have to settle for simply making Protoss understand what SC2 is like with an equal win-rate, and that will have to be good enough.

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AI’s aren’t intelligent at all though? Like, they can’t actually make judgement calls of any sort, which is, you know, incredibly important when doing things like making patch notes.

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A new update has dropped. I put the “updated” notes below the initial ones.

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This value is directly proportional to the game tick rate, which means they were applying damage ticks too infrequently. Props to pig for figuring that one out.

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My opinions on the updates are below:

This change “cannot” go through.

The problem with the Microbial Shroud change is that Microbial Shroud’s damage reduction always takes place before armor. This effectively doubles the armor of the unit, which can change that “50%” reduction up to 90% or more in some cases. This amount of damage reduction is absurd, and it was only ever balanced against air because most air compositions could rely on support from casters, ground units, or other means to get around it. Some air units like Tempests and Liberators also dealt damage in such large bursts that the “over 50%” damage was rarely felt. If Microbial Shroud affects ground attacks, then the opponent does not have enough options to counter it. It becomes too oppressive at that point, especially against Terran, which is almost entirely ranged.

Even splash damage units like Hellions, Hellbats, Lurkers, Siege Tanks, Colossus, and Archons deal part or all of their damage as “ranged” damage rather than “splash” damage, so this change will hit them hard as well. Hellions, Hellbats, Lurkers, and Colossus deal “ranged damage”, and Tanks & Archons deal “ranged damage” to their main target.

Adjusting the energy cost or adding an upgrade cannot fix these issues. The purpose of upgrades is to delay something to the point where it is “balanced”, usually because the opponent needs certain tech or a critical mass to counter it; but that is not the problem here. The new Microbial Shroud is just oppressive no matter when it hits the field. Energy cost increases cannot balance the ability for the same reason. It isn’t a matter of how many Infestors you need, or how many Shrouds an individual Infestor can cast. Microbial Shroud is just oppressive whenever it hits the field.

Microbial Shroud would need a massive nerf if it is to ever apply to ground units.

I really don’t get why they are trying to change Storm so much. It was mostly fine until Energy Overcharge.

The Viking doesn’t need a cost reduction. Vikings already perform fine for their resource and supply costs; and they are used quite heavily in both TvT and TvP.

The main “problem” with Vikings is that Parasitic Bomb is such an extreme counter that you can’t have more than a few Vikings at a time in TvZ. This forces Terran to rely on other units, such as Thors or Ghosts to contest Zerg air. You’d be better off weakening some of the Viking’s counters than trying to reduce its cost.

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77

At the very least, they should change shroud to subtract armor BEFORE the reduction, so its (FULLDMG - ARMOR) * 50% instead of FULLDMG * 50% - ARMOR. In the first case, a unit with 3 armor would take 0 damage from a marine if it were shrouded (which is then set to the minimum damage of 0.5). In the second case, the unit would take 1.5 damage per shot.

But I agree the general problem is that it hits some units way too hard, and that just feels like balance that was driven by internal game mechanics, rather than mechanics driven by balance

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78

Protoss obviously have issues landing storms in the right locations and also buying time between warp ins. This is obviously designed to fix both those issues. Additionally, it is designed to fix the issue where marines, banes or other light units instantly die. It is also designed to make Protoss have tech trade offs. Burst damage (disruptor) & consistent damage (colossus) comes from robo. Zoning & stalling & softening comes from twilight. This is obviously being designed by someone who actually does understand SC2 and the problems in it. At a bare minimum they are obviously studying replays or pro games – data not accessible to chat gpt (unless it were manually entered).

Basically zerg ground will counter immortal archon comps. Dodging storms will be very easy using multiprong, drops, and nydus. Additionally, getting banes to connect to templar will be a lot easier. So zerg ground now wins against non robo openers. Disruptors are the obvious solution there but they struggle with the same multiprong maneuvers. It’s a giga nerf to protoss in zvp and a buff in pvt.

Oh, one other thing, mass mutalisk will be stronger because toss have two options for countering it. One is double stargate phoenix. That’s weaker because they are adjusting stargate power downwards and incentivizing robo play. That means tech switch styles will be stronger where you go roaches then mutas, or mutas then roaches. The other option is twilight, blink, archons and storm. Blink is getting massively nerfed because blink requires constant repositioning (something the new storm is not great at) and because storm itself will be very weak to mutalisks and lings which can easily run around it. So ling muta now beats stalker archon. Mutalisks might be viable on this patch as a legit unit comp, and not not solely as a tech switch style.

My prediction on how the meta plays out is that protoss open twilight for blink, they might go stargate first for one oracle but nothing else, then take a third and go into disruptors. Disruptor stalker struggles with mass ling, so they supplement with storm and archon. Disruptor, stalker, archon is the new meta. How zerg responds will be a bit more complicated because most of the DPS comes from disruptors, and you need either spire or hive to deal with that. Vipers and mutas are the most obvious choices.

I suspect vipers will still be better than microbial on this patch, vs Protoss at least, because vipers set the damage taken to your army to 0 while microbial only cuts it in half. Additionally, infestors have no solution to the disruptors, while vipers do. Zergs will go for either roach viper or muta ling bane. The tie breaker between infestors and vipers is the upgrade. Why buy an upgrade that costs the same as hive to get -50% damage when you can go for vipers that give -100% damage, that fly, and that can recharge their energy? They also solve the disruptor issue while infestors don’t. Vipers are obviously better UNLESS there is a very efficient combination between fungal and microbial where you can force toss to fight while taking half damage. I doubt it because disruptors will make zerg move. So yeah, infestors are still going to be pretty useless vs protoss.

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79

Microbial Shroud requires more finesse to use compared to abduct and blinding cloud. If used poorly it can backfire on the user. I would assume Zerglings and ultras would benefit the most/easiest to use with. Hydras and roaches possibly even lurkers are at risk of it backfiring against chargelots. Speed dropping Hellbats onto the MShrouds could be potentially dangerous for the Zerg.

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This is nice.

I would generally agree, down to about 25% - I wouldn’t go less than that tbh.

Ironically, I didn’t find it to bad to play against as Terran so long as you get the EMPs off. However, this was specifically against Ling-Bane Ultra, which meant that the majority of the work was being done primarily by widow mines (due to being spell damage - still need a splash radius reversion on this) and preventing MS from occurring with good EMPs - which is pretty difficult to do all things considered. More importantly, I didn’t find this composition to bad to deal with.

However, where I really began to have issues with it was when I was dealing with anything lurker-based. In this instance, your only answer becomes ghosts due to them being spell-damage. Nothing else is feasible due to the long range and the fact that you have no feasible way to EMP (or feedback, in the case of Protoss) an Infestor using MS to protect Lurkers. There is no actual way to engage them or deal with MS effectively.

This is actually a massive, MASSIVE buff. The damage is down to 130 (from 140 last week), but now it’s ticking much, much faster; the duration is about 5.5 seconds roughly, and the damage difference is very noticeable. However, what gets me is that they have increased the storm radius to 2.25, which makes it the largest storm has ever been - it’s now equal radius to fungal, which does a measly 25 damage in comparison. This is absurdly powerful, and frankly an unnecessary change.

General context to give here, this effectively makes Storm’s tick damage a lot more consistent, while also making it tick much faster. Storm didn’t need to be changed in the first place, and they’re still barely touching Energy Recharge comparatively.

In testing this on the PTR, this actually hasn’t changed at all, it’s still at 350/350. Likely a bug.

I’m sorry, what the actual - Are they INSANE? Larger radius, smaller cooldown for faster rate of fire, on something that ignores armour and is, frankly, still an incredibly good unit - Individually, this and the storm changes are bad enough considering the current state of the game. Both together is absurd.

This is honestly W/E.

Still hate this and want it gone.

I absolutely loathe this change with the very core of my being. Sure, take away the additional vision range it grants while in siege mode, but this literally cuts it’s usable area in half without advanced Ballistic upgrades. While I didn’t test it with Advanced Balistics, given that the unit doesn’t get increased vision anymore in siege mode, this effectively makes almost the entire ground circle out of its vision range.

For comparison:

  • The Siege Tank’s vision range is 11 and attack range is 13

  • The Tempest’s vision range is 12 and attack range 10 for ground and 13 for air (last patch air attack range was 14)

  • Lurker’s vision range is 11 (last patch vision range was 10) and attack range without upgrade is 8 and after upgrade is 10

  • Broodlord’s vision range is 12 and attack range is 10

  • Colossus vision range is 10, attack range is 9

The only one that has equal vision to this is the Disruptor, and that can be manually controlled and has a massive (and buffed) AOE, AND can be fired outside of vision range anyway.

  • Fixed an issue where Liberators commanded to siege in areas inside their range could result in slower execution than being commanded to siege outside their range

About damn time.

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81

lmao to compensate for making storm way better they buffed disruptors?

h ttps://imgur.com/a/WwTUPDX

Liberator harass in 2025. lmao… last 2 patches have been a blast for terrans.

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82

Do not touch storm; its been fine for over 15 years! The problem is energy recharge; REMOVE that from the game and give us back the mothership core or anything else really.

Once again; do NOT touch storm! Do not touch what you do not understand and clearly yall missed the point the past 15 years.

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It doesn’t, but even if it did that would not justify decreasing the damage of nearly all Terran units by 50 to 90%. This affects just about everything except Widow Mines, Ghost spells, and Cyclones.

Hellbats and Hellions both deal ranged damage. They are affected by this change too. These units aren’t nearly as dangerous when they inflict only a small fraction of their damage.

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