Storm has been fine for 15 years; do NOT touch storm. Protoss AoE has already been nerfed WAY too much; disrupters are a joke unit. Colossus are a JOKE unit that sees literally ZERO play in PvZ and almost zero play in PvP and they’re kinda bad in PvT; Protoss race does NOT function without AoE nor should it cuz this is not sc1.
So FIX colossus AoE so this so called “tier 3 unit” is actually worth the INSANE cost.
In their current state if they cost bout half what they do now it would still be too expensive.
Also lets talk harassments; Terrans have bout 6 different ways of killing their opponent before the 8min mark. As a protoss you have NO harassment VS terran until after the 10min mark and even then its costly cuz we dont get to evacuate our units with medivacs. Give toss the same tools to harass Terrans in the early game as they have for us.
The overall feel of this patch is somewhat strange. I will explain the impression for each race.
Zerg: The patch brings reasonable changes, but Ravagers are excessively expensive and only have an ambiguous skill like Corrosive Bile. Additionally, with the Infestor being buffed, the Viper feels underwhelming, with abilities like Blinding Cloud and Parasitic Bomb seeming lackluster.
Corrosive Bile needs rework to a spell that can only be cast while the Ravager is burrowed. The player selects a target area, and a random enemy unit within that area takes damage every 2 seconds. Also Viper need a overhaul, remove Blinding Cloud and Parasitic Bomb and give it a Remorph spell, When cast on a unit, the target begins a morphing process but ultimately remorphs into itself with fully restored health.
Protoss: The nerf to the Mothership is excessive, and the Protoss need stronger anti-air capabilities.
Restore Cloaking Field of Mothership to its previous version, functioning as an aura that makes nearby friendly units invisible. Replace Strategic Recall of Nexus with Mass Recall. Mothership can use Mass Teleport, which teleports the Mothership and nearby friendly units to the position of a targeted friendly unit. Phoenix’s base damage reduced to 5 (+2 bonus damage) and its attacks remove all armor from the targeted enemy unit upon hit.
Terran: Phoenix should not lift Siege Tank; Viking cost reduction is good, and the 50 gas version is better then now; Liberator needs cost reduction also; Terran needs a new spell to repair unit and structure.
Adjust Liberator cost to 150/100 also increase its air attack range by 2, adjust Viking cost to 125/50 and remove the damage bonus of ground attack, give a new ability to Planetary Frotress to repair unit and structure in a target area.
I cannot express in anything resembling an adequate number of words how turbo absurdly ridiculously broken I feel these leave Protoss.
This is 5.0.2 levels of not okay - though at least it isn’t a cheese thing.
This Storm damage was what I asked be tried, and it felt actually like it killed stuff while being more forgiving than the live version… and then it’s just also insanely huge on top of that. Why?
And more and larger Novas - I just don’t think the Disruptor is a weak unit?
I don’t have biiig thoughts on it - I don’t feel like Stasis Wards last so long as to justify halving their duration though I’ll happily agree that 170 seconds is quite long; and I feel like this is made a bit redundant with the energy recharge nerf.
in practice, this sucks - i don’t have an involved opinion, but liberators can now siege and not be able to shoot something within their indicator because they can’t see it. this is giga anti-quality of life and in a way that makes you have to stare at and baby the liberator to harass with it
i think liberator harass is something that shouldn’t exist in its current state, but this fix looks stupid to play against and barely does anything to solve the ‘problem’ mode. it does reduce the liberator’s range as a harassment unit therefore making it stay in range of ground units more, but it just looks awful to handle even without its range upgrade – which makes it intolerably worse because the circle deploy range going to 7 and total fire range going to 12 means you’re just not getting to use most of the circle when the liberator isn’t tagged with partners.
which i think is a good nerf? i just think it’s also one that ssssucks to play with and not in a “my tool is now weak” sense, in much more of the “my units don’t go where i tell them” sense.
this is giga dumb and counter to the point of the button. this going through is as stupid as making scanner sweep not give actual vision.
they changed it and it sucks now
like it’s a cool indicator. but it looks less hexagon-y and less cyan and therefore less protoss, its sleek and smoothened feel with thin lines and stuff makes me think ‘zerg’ first.
but also the indicator just doesn’t look the same as the other two racial indicators at all now. it’s a cool design, but it’s not style matching to the other indicators and i think that’s not okay.
hi so
no
Haphazardly throwing Shrouds down every 3-4 seconds in a carpet line lets 80 supply of mostly ling-bane with any anti-air beat 120 supply of marine-marauder-ghost-tank-medivac-liberator.
there’s too many units for the libs and everything else deals insufficient damage.
If you halve the price of Colossus, imo, you allow Protoss to afford too many units; since you’re not as tightly bound on tech costs and you get a lot of leeway on the extra minerals for all sorts of production. (And also, er, a Colossus is definitely worth more than an Immortal?)
The Colossus being a unit that actually has strong and relevant weaknesses makes it feel a lot worse than High Templar or Disruptors whose weaknesses are much less prominent, but the Colossus being a movable, 9 range, area attacker just. Is a lot of strength already. Every unit should have meaningful weaknesses so that positioning, scouting, and counters actually are important; which makes the game more interesting for their presence. It’s why I’ve complained a lot about “X unit doesn’t exist” or “X and Y unit are countered identically” as I got into actually learning proper game design.
I do think the Colossus could be made cheaper, more damaging, or bulkier without breaking anything and making it feel appreciably better as a unit; but for each of those ideas, a price like 300/150; a damage of 12 (+4); or vitals of 150/250 would each individually actually cover up an appreciable amount of the flaw that the unit has.
A marginal buff to Adept damage or attack speed would go miles here - Going from 10 (+12) to 12 (+11) for example - I know that creates a problem with the Marine, just an example (& i do think Adepts at that damage would only be a minor problem)
I also feel like you’re underestimating the power of stalker kiting on dampening a push, but I know that’s not eeeasy to do and it’s reasonable to be afraid of stim.
hi yes this is called Transfuse and it is on the Queen
Cloaking Field is nasty strong when it has full uptime. I understand that since killing the Mothership stops the cloak and the Mothership is actually a competent attacker on its own this forced auto-fire is not the worst thing; but having downtime on the effect is wonderful for counterplay while still being extremely abusable. It’s simply way more fun than before because by giving it that moment of weakness, it affords the other abilities to not have energy costs, and clicking buttons is fun.
Protoss does not need to be able to warp larger blobs of units home with Nexus recall nor be able to transport multiple tech units forward without risking the expensive Mothership itself?
this is completely insane and distorts the phoenix’s role from being anti-light to anti-things-with-base-armor, except it still won’t be that good at it
all of these are no??? what?
phoenixes being able to disable siege tanks is super important; liberators are not too expensive at all; and terran already has the best repair/heal features!
Vikings are not expensive! Compared to every other air unit, they are completely fine?!
Assault Mode vikings are already kinda lacklustre, and their most common use cases for landing is when they are getting that damage bonus - I do not think that removing it would do anything positive, but make the unit’s attack feel like a pillow.
The lib changes were supposedly asked for by the map maker community because it keeps breaking maps with dead zones. It’s less a balance thing and more a “this unit is bad for map design” thing.
Unless I’m mistaken, the hellbat’s cone splash damage shouldn’t be affected by the Shroud since it’s probably not flagged as ranged damage by the game. So that part of the attack should still do it’s full damage. Someone would have to test the interaction to see how it works though.
It IS flagged as ranged damage by the game. You can test this against the Sentry’s Guardian Shield, which also only affects ranged damage. You can also figure this out by reading the damage effects.
Yep, here is a breakdown of how splash damage units are affected:
Archons and Siege Tanks both deal “ranged” damage to their primary target and splash damage to everything else, so they are “partially” affected.
Hellions, Hellbats, Lurkers, and Colossus all deal “ranged” damage to all targets. One wouldn’t expect any of these units to be affected, but instead they are all royally screwed.
Widow Mines, Disruptors, Fungal, Storm, EMP, Steady-Targeting, Yamato Cannons, and the Cyclone lock-down ability are all "“spell” damage, so those get through.
If you want to break it down for Terran specifically, there are only a handful of unaffected units:
SCVs
Cyclones (lock-on only).
Widow Mines
Spells (Steady-Targeting and Yamato Cannons). The units that cast those spells are still affected.
Cyclones, Ghosts, and Battlecruisers are all still affected whenever they have to use their auto-attack.
Yes, they would have to do that if this change is to go live. Every splash damage unit would needs its damage type changed to “splash”; which is a shadow nerf to Guardian Shield.
I would go even further and argue that Microbial Shroud would need to be fundamentally changed to reduce damage AFTER armor is applied, so it can’t climb to ridiculous levels like 60% or 90%; and I don’t know if that is even possible with this engine.
Take Marauders for instance. A fully upgraded Marauder deals only 6 damage to a fully upgraded Ultralisk under Microbial Shroud, down from 19 outside of the shroud. That is a 68% damage reduction, not 50%; and Marauders have relatively high burst damage compared to most units.
There’s also the question of whether Zerg needs a change like this. Blinding Cloud already hard-counters ranged units quite well. It is a bit awkward to mix Blinding Cloud and Fungal, but that is a heavy counter to ranged units; and Zerg doesn’t need a third spell to stack on top of it. Microbial Shroud only avoided overlap previously because Blinding Cloud doesn’t affect air units.
Holy sh!t how out of touch are you that you actually genuinely think this???
8 minutes is the time limit terran has to kill a protoss in the live version. There’s a reason it’s “All in or die trying” right now, and why 85% of TvPs seem to end in pulling the boys and the Terran either dying because storm, charge, blink etc, or the Protoss dying due to gross incompetence.
Byun’s TvP seems to be the exception to this, as he really seems to be one of the few who is actually playing past that point, even though he loses 95% of those late game situations.
The reason for this is that, beyond the 8 minute mark, Protoss effectively explodes on the map. Everything they could do before suddenly becomes infinitely harder to deal with, because they can - and regularly do if the game goes past that 8 minute mark - hit 7 bases to the Terran’s 4, and there’s basically nothing that the Terran can do about it.
This isn’t opinion, this is what we see in almost every pro TvP game currently.
Widow mine harassment is negligible and nearly irrelevant if you’re not a potato, because you have a fairly solid time to react to them.
Gas first builds are solid right now, but require you to get damage done or you’re just behind.
Beyond that, Terran maybe gets the opportunity to drop. Maybe. Because Protoss has blink timings, charge timings, gatewayman styles, fast third bases and insane econ. They have recall, warp gate, warp in storms, literally infinite scouting with hallucinations, which means that a Protoss should literally never be out of position or caught out in the first place.
Both of these are just… weird changes that don’t need to happen.
One, they really don’t, their AA is already incredible. If you’d said their ground anti-air is weak, I might have agreed, but even that’s not as bad as people make it out to be.
Two, the mothership is actually getting buffed. Yes, the speed is a nerf. No, the health nerf hasn’t happened, however the bug fixes that applied to the mothership ultimately result in it being significantly better than it was (proper - longer - range, properly targeting multiple units, not incorrectly targeting lower prio units etc). It doesn’t need to be stronger.
No??? Same problem as Siege tanks not being abductable. It’s bad game design.
Again, why?
Yeah, have to agree.
170 is definitely to long, I think 120 is honestly better. 90 is… probably a little low.
Which is more frustrating because it seriously reduces their effective range. I get that it’s frustrating but from a gameplay perspective, having base liberators not being able to use their full sieged range, which, I might add, is a tiny fraction of what other siege units can use and hit and see, is pretty insane. It’s fine for Advanced balistics, but on base, unupgraded liberators it’s incredibly stupid.
It’s still incredibly stupid. The unit is 150/125 and at that cost, prohibitively expensive to get out more than a couple at a time; you’re basically only going to use them for harassment early, and this basically removes that functionality. It’s not even a problem as it currently is.
Agree, though I would like observers to just generally be more visible - stationary observers are honestly pretty hard to see even with the animation changes previously.
Can we not, please? Adepts were problematic when they could 2 shot Marines and SCVs, to the point that it made the early game completely unplayable for Terran. This isn’t something that should be considered outside of an upgrade post Glaives.
Yeah not so sure about that tbh. Stripping armour on a unit that can easily and quickly apply the armour strip repeatedly through auto-attacks - especially when you consider that this would negate armour upgrades too - would be brokenly strong IMO.
Oh yeah, also, High templar can now Storm Liberators from within the liberator circle, without being seen by Liberators. Just thought everyone should know that.
Silly for me to think that this patch was going to fix things. I saw a couple of nice buffs for the Spire and thought well of it, but no, this is the company of old, just destroying any competitive integrity the game could’ve had to make it ‘fair’ on the noobs.
The protoss whine cabal cried on reddit and we’re going to be back to another protoss favored patch. If so, the game is doomed. The game already has a branding issue in being way too fast paced. In game advantages favor protoss, so the only way you win is through out of game factors like speed and multitasking. Protoss imbalance magnifies an existing flaw in the game design.
Protoss just set record high winrates, loads of pros and streamers quit because they are just fed up with the game balance, and if they go any higher then SC2 is truly cooked (and deservedly so). Protoss whiners are strangling the life out of the game.
There is a famous quote by the award winning Richard Evans, “We can deny reality, but we can’t deny the consequences of denying reality”. Protoss whiners can deny reality all they want, but the consequences are going to hit them load a ton of bricks. Get ready for PvPcraft 2. I hope you like playing against protoss because there sure won’t be anyone else on the ladder if toss gets buffed on this patch.
I used to stream with ~80 viewers 2-3 times a week, that slowed to once or twice a month, and I haven’t played in 5 weeks. If this patch buffs protoss, that’s it for me. I am not playing this game anymore.
StarBirds and Timberborne recently launched in the strategy category, have a million copies sold, and both have “overwhelmingly positive” reviews. They are base building strategy games where you compete against difficulties imposed by the world / setting. So it’s about building up and exploring, which is definitely different than competitive 1v1 real time strategy games. The little birdie tells me there are even more in the pipeline from more studios, including SC2-style games.