Against armored units with 1 base armor, this is still an absurd 18% nerf, and almost every armored unit has at least one base armor. This change will severely cripple Marauders as a unit, such that they are ineffective at their primary role as an anti-armor unit.
Against non-armored units with 1 base armor, this is still a 11% nerf.
If you want to “nerf” Marauders without breaking TvZ, suggest something that doesn’t scale up to a 37% nerf in some cases. Splitting the Marauder’s weapons is definitely not the answer here.
This is a claim you have made. You’re asking me to prove it with math - why don’t you give me an example of where the marauder would do additional damage?
Because that’s not actually how the damage system works.
Currently, a marauder with 1 attack does 20 damage at base vs armoured units. Lets say that unit has 1 base armour. That’s 19 damage.
If that is a split attack marauder, that’s 18 damage, because armour counts twice for split attacks - once for each projectile.
At +1, you’re doing 21 damage against an armoured unit with base 1 armour on a single attack marauder.
At +1 you’re doing 20 damage against an armoured unit with 1 base damage on a split attack.
And so on. All of this is assuming your opponent has 0/0 upgrades. When you’re taking into account upgrades, marauders are always going to scale significantly worse. A unit with base 1 armour has 4 armour at +3, meaning that a marauder at +3 with a split attack loses 8 damage as a direct result.
You are literally never doing more damage (outside of against 0/0 units with dorito dust on them).
Yeah, not gonna lie, I snapped at you a little too, I’m sorry for that, but it’s really, really not hyperbole in the context of doing its job as a stop-gap against the ultras, and I’ve already shown the math earlier for it.
The question was legit in case you were wondering, I’m not gonna screw around, I feel like so much effort has been invested at this point that I should be taking this topic seriously lol.
18% nerf is a substantial nerf I don’t disagree at all and it’s why if you did something like this, you’d need it to go to PTR for testing 1st.
But 18% isn’t going to break the game IMO. I can’t think of a single relationship that the Marauder has with an armored unit that breaks if it deals 2ish damage less per shot outside of cheeses where the Terran shows up with 4 Marauders and a Cyclone in a trench coat.
In practical, non-cheese situations it should just equal to having 3-4 additional marauders in your army or something in lieu of if you’re trying to preserve a timing’s strength. Should. Ideally. Not guaranteed though.
The only way splitting the attack could result in more damage is if something has negative armor. Notably, nothing natively has negative armor in multiplayer.
If the goal is to reduce the Marauder’s initial damage by 2, simply reducing it by 2 would achieve the same result with fewer side-effects. You wouldn’t have a runaway scenario where Ultralisks take 37% less damage just because you want to nerf Marauders a little bit against other targets with much lower armor.
If the goal is to decrease the Marauder’s DPS by a set percentage, then simply increasing the attack cooldown would solve that cleanly.
Because what your saying doesn’t work mathematically or thematically. If you do the math yourself you’ll see. This isn’t for my benefit, it’s for yours. You clearly don’t listen to me so you need to do the math and figure it out on your own and that’s fine. But that’s the approach I’m taking with you from now on lol.
I’ll show u the door but you gotta open it.
Are you saying your issue with 2x Marauder attack is that it scales too poorly into the late game? Because you can fix that pretty easily without all this other weird crap about Ultras and whatnot. Just have to make an upgrade to give Marauders double attack upgrades at the fusion core. Name it depleted Uranium shells or something.
All good, we adults we can snap at one another and be fine. This aint kindergarten lol.
I do think it’s a hyperbole though. If the immortal can lose 15% of it’s DPS and do it’s job then so can the Marauder.
The goal is to make marauders counter their counters a little less hard (in the early n mid game) while simultaneously lowering their strength in TvP cheese.
Ideally late game won’t be impacted but my approach to that is “Well, maybe you shouldn’t be massing marauders 24 minutes into the game” when maybe it should be an upgrade in combination with 2x marauder attack to give them their lost damage back in some shape or form. I can think of a few ways to do this.
Actually not even Roach.
When marauder’s attack was split into 2x 10, they could BARELY beat Roaches 100 vs 100 and they lost to Stalkers (there was a video on Youtube) - something which is unthinkable by today’s standards.
Splitting marauder’s attack would make it completely useless in TvZ, TvT and very ineffective against TvP.
Roughly 10% damage loss, not 15%, unless my math is wrong. 1.04/1.14=0.9122. Which is about 9%, actually. 10% if we’re being generous, but I could be mistaken.
Again, I’m happy to listen if you want to show the math. But you haven’t.
For the ultra specifically, the current damage looks like this:
500/(26-7)=~24 shots.
Split attack marauders looks like this
500/(26-14)=~42 shots.
In effect, you are almost doubling the time it takes to kill the ultralisk. That’s with both marauders and ultras at 3/3. This is not a small amount, and it quite literally prevents the marauder from doing it’s job as a stop-gap.
This comes with it’s own balance issues that would need to be addressed as well; not the least of which is how early a fusion core can actually be built.
This is actually a good point too; Stalkers are actually stronger now than they were before the Marauder split too - remember, stalkers got a damage buff a few years back, though at the cost of firing slightly slower.
I trust your numbers, I was going off of the 15% in the patch notes. Probably outdated info at this point?
I did the math in a previous post but for Colossus since someone mentioned stimming forward to snipe it. It goes from aprox 19 shots to 21 shots, variable due to shield and armor being diff upgrades.
For Ultralisks that’s honestly too much lol. I mean you are right, marauders go from OK to “why the hell am I even making these still?” which is kind of why my solution to marauders not being good vs Ultras is a “Ummm, just don’t make them?”.
But if you get caught with your pants down that is going to be so, so, so brutal for any bio player to the point where it’s not really fair.
If the marauder went to 2 attacks it would need to get something like an upgrade that gives it +1 attack from each armory attack upgrade to let it scale properly while also killing it’s cheesey nonsense in the early game.
I can see in retrospect why the Ultralisk relationship is a bit of a problem simply due to if they hide the Cavern there’s a very real chance you could just lose the game if you are still on full bio and that’s not healthy design.
It also slams them with a huge power spike which isn’t ideal. IMO it would be better to have that upgrade give Armory attack upgrades to the Marauder. Easier to control the pace of the power increase and easier to balance if timings become a problem with it. But it would be a buff for marauders super late game in compensation for losing some early game power.
Oh crap, you’re right. In that case you’d definitely need to offset it with something like the upgrade I mentioned to gradually restore that power.
Yeah this probably wouldn’t be the case on the new patch either, given that colossus have more HP than shields on the new patch (100/150, rather than 150/100), so it’s probably a little more. Not that much more - probably only an additional 1-2 shots, but it’s enough that it can absolutely make a difference.
Speaking honestly though, I don’t really think the issue with colossus is it’s ability to live through things (especially with thermal lance), so much as the colossus’ damage output itself. But that’s a whole different conversation.
Completely agreed. My entire issue with Protoss is the half aborted ideas that the devs left around.
Do you remember when the Zealot’s charge damage was supposed to be offloaded onto the Adept as compensation? So the Zealot 8 gate allin lost a ton of power but Protoss as a whole would kind of be OK due to chargelot adept being a possibility?
Yeah neither do the devs lol.
Protoss is filled with this crap as a race, half abandoned ideas that leave units in awkward spots.
I remember, and I’m kinda glad that the adept didn’t get that - I really don’t think that was what the adept needs anyway, and a big part of the adept issue is the shade, which effectively allows the unit to be in two places at once.
Honestly, what Protoss needs is a ground-up redesign.
Side note, I wonder what sort of effect putting the adept shade effect from the campaign into ladder play would be? Units that the shade passes through take additional damage (obv numbers could be tweaked). It would be a balance nightmare almost certainly though.
They would have had to be careful about the implementation and timing so it didn’t buff Adept harass but it would have worked imo. My idea is that while shade is active they lose their bonus damage but gain 35% attack speed. Rough numbers of course, you’d have to number crunch to make sure that didn’t end up in a damage buff vs workers.
Hmm. Maybe. I think that warp fields themselves are problematic with warp gates but I REALLY like warp gates and feel it’s perfect for the Protoss identity. But combining them with “fast” warp in fields creates problems. Big ones.
That sounds fun until Protoss start warping in off of ninja pylons from like 10 different angles and get a shade surround on you as you’re kiting chargelots. If you give someone like Maxpax or another hyper aggressive Protoss player a tool like that it’s going to be naaasty. lol. I’m drooling over the builds you could do with this.
Really though? Want a super simple solution to fixing most of Protoss problems?
Give charge back it’s damage but make it +2 with another +2 per ground attack upgrade, for a maximum of 8 at Attack upgrade 3.
Stops that dumb 8 gate allin that got charge redesigned and gives Zealots back some teeth so they can handle the more egregious cheeses like proxy marauder into cyclone without wiping out bio completely or massacring Roach balls.
mm this post is bad and meandering sorry
but i don’t want to clean it up
While I agree with your analysis of this trend, please note that the dual attacking Marauders were Nov 10 2015 to May 15 2018; ie. well before current system, back when Blizzard was actually doing the game balance.
To be fair, you can offset this - mostly if not entirely - by increasing the base amount of bonus damage.
To be reductive; suppose instead of 5 (+5) x2, you do 5 (+6) x2 -
VS Zealots that’s a 11% nerf at equal upgrades (9 → 8); but VS Stalkers that’s a ~16% buff before upgrades (19 → 22); At +3 vs +3, it’s a ~10% nerf (26 - 4 = 22 vs 14 - 4 x 2 = 20).
The same’s kind of true for the Ultralisk - I don’t think +2 is sustainable for other matchups, but it’s what it would need to be remotely ‘fair’ - since while the Marauder needs to deal meaningful damage to Ultralisks at cost it doesn’t have to win.*
*
I’m pretty sure Marauders lose per cost to Ultralisks but I’m not in a position to go game-test this. The ratio is 19 Marauders to 5 Ultralisks for cost and 15 Marauders to 5 Ultralisks for supply.
Marauders deal 16-19 into Chitinous a shot, the range/speed advantage means the Ultralisk catches up in like four seconds? Theoretically enough time for 4 shots (~2s with anabolic, 2 shots). The Ultralisk attacks every 0.61s, compared to the Marauder’s 1.07s, and dies in 4 hits, enough time for the Marauder to get in two extra shots if it hasn’t stimmed.
If the Marauder has stimmed, then it can actually kite unupgraded Ultralisks as long as it’s stimmed; and upgraded the Ultralisk will need like 20 whole seconds to catch up without creep. But if the Marauder ever stops being able to run straight away, it’ll die in 3 hits (1.8s) and the 33% splash means a lot if they don’t split out wide.
So, hm, I guess that’s actually way more Terran favoured than I remember.
I don’t think this is as comparable a situation.
First, the Immortal’s particular attack being 20 (+30) compared to the Marauder’s 10 (+10); both the value and the proportion have a big effect.
Second, the Immortal isn’t trying to … split hairs the way that the Marauder does so that it does good with how Terran production is limited. Terran is, for want of term, the most ‘blindsided’ of the races, my observational experience has been it dies the most when it misses something.
I do agree that number of shots matters more than time to kill, and that the Immortal’s change matters less than double-attack Marauders in multiple average cases, but I don’t think that it’s a fair representation; like, Immortal’s analogue to Tank and Cyclone, it’s a ‘tech’ unit that isn’t trivial to get out and is much less of an all-round useful unit.
Except they wouldn’t because… Ultras start with 2 armor, not 7? If Zerg has +3 armor while Protoss is sitting at +0 attack something incredibly hysterical has happened. If the Immortal’s shot was divided, I think the new attack would be probably 10 (+1) (+15 (+2) Armor). Which isn’t quite a 10% loss -
(If it was 10 (+1) (+15 (+1)) then it’d scale up to a 21% damage loss in this particular worst-case scenario; and still to 12% in ‘normal’ situations, vs units with 1 base armor at +3 attack and armor upgrades.)
I do want to highlight this, like, why does Terran get to just do this? Zerg almost always pivots out of Roaches, Protoss play makes it feel like you need a few of most of your tech units, but Terran can keep a MMM based build and somehow be fine for way longer than anyone else despite two of those being their initial unlocks?
(Though, I always feel like that’s coming from “I hate Terran bio” more than an actual point; so I don’t want to too heavily tangent on it)
I think that if both are 3/3 it’s fine because that, directly, means there was enough time for the upgrades to go through. You had time to find out the Ultralisks were coming.
The patch notes always said 1.04 -> 1.14 (9.6% increase).
Will you say the same about your current marauders attack opinion in the next years?
Look at me for example. In 2010 I said ultralisk is OP and I still didn’t changed my thoughts unlike you. This is because im honest with ultralisk balance issue unlike some others.
PS. Flagging opinions is silencing and censorship and because you support and use it then I wouldn’t even give you a “heart thumb up” even if I would agree with you.