Then you can nerf scourge speed to 3.75. It’s that easy.
If they have 3.75 movespeed they can kite them fine. As could voids and mutas.
Well they have the capacity to kill the scourge before they deal any damage, thereby protecting the air units. Thors, mines, storm, pb, and fungal would all wreck scourge before they deal damage if you cannot get a sufficient count of liberator, corruptor, or phoenix. Do you think scourge would keep its 100+ bw dmg or something? You can easily bring it in line to baneling levels, 20 (+15 vs light).
They really can. 3.75 movespeed and 20 (+15 vs light) damage, 25/50 cost, 0.5 supply, morph from zergling with spire tech. There ya go, it’s that easy.
No, Scourge would still be a problematic unit based on their ability to obliterate air armies, and the lack of options to protect air armies from them. That doesn’t change even if you slow their speed down; and it results in scourge either being useless or overpowered with no reasonable balance point in between.
Only Mutalisks would reasonably be able to kite.
Corruptors and Liberators both have long attack delays and acceleration issues could prevent them from kiting Scourge effectively even with that mild speed advantage.
Kiting with Void Rays shouldn’t even be a consideration:
The speed advantage would be non-existent until they are upgraded, and then they still have the same attack delay and acceleration problems.
The Void Rays beam attack will further restrict micro. It is one of the worst attack designs possible for attempting to kite.
Void Rays require Prismatic Alignment to deal with Corruptors and other units they are intended to counter. They have no capacity to survive against Scourge and still perform their role.
No, they don’t. Whenever Zerg masses Scourge they can simply overwhelm any normal air army.
Air units with a reliable capacity to kite can protect themselves by kiting scourge for very long distances across the map without any losses. Such that they can deal with any number of Scourge no matter how many are massed. Other units can only be reasonably protected by high amounts of air-to-air splash; which simply isn’t present in StarCraft II the way it was in Brood War.
The Thor’s splash radius is 0.5; and air units naturally split further than that within a second. It is a terribly ineffective tool at dealing with air units unless the opponent is explicitly trying to stack them up; and like most of the options on your list it would require the air units to always hover over a ground army for protection.
Those have limited mobility and a long delay that make them relatively ineffective tools for trying to protect slow air armies from Scourge.
In some cases those spells might kill Scourge, but they would be fairly unreliable.
You need a large pool of casters present to be able to stop scourge with any consistency; and you wouldn’t be able to field air units (other than Phoenixes and Mutalisks) against Zerg without that pool.
If they didn’t they would actually be useless; since they are suicide units. Suicide units need to be more than cost-effective when they hit; but then the relative lack of defenses against Scourge in StarCraft II would make them broken.
Scourge are single-target; so that damage is ridiculously low.
On the other hand, if you gave Scourge splash they would be blatantly overpowered at those numbers. Zerg’s production capacity makes it far too easy to mass Scourge; and air play does not have collisions, forcefields, terrain, and the numerous other defenses against splash that help keep Banelings from getting out of hand.
If you think 3.75 speed scourge with 20(+15 vs light) splash in say a 0.5 radius would “obliterate air armies” you need to get your head checked. My version of the scourge would not be useless either, 35 vs light air splash allows it to be used vs mutas and phoenixes if the opposing player is not paying attention, or in a surround, or compliment corruptors as they dive carriers, but it certainly would not be cost effective vs non-light.
They would kite them fine 100%, you must be really bad at kiting if you think corruptors and liberators would not be able to kite a 3.75 speed melee unit.
I think you need to go into the unit tester and actually try kiting with voids. They kite forward and function very similarly to mutas, stack them, move, hold position, wait for attack animation, move. They can kite without losing acceleration as long as they go forward, maybe they have a bit of trouble changing direction but vs a melee unit chasing them at 3.75 speed they shouldn’t even get hit with proper control.
No they can’t. It’s called air splash. You can say how bw had more all you want, but the game has sufficient options from all 3 races to deal with scourge: thors, mines, fungal, pb, storm, and liberators.
Thors are made vs SH for the exact reason that they can one-shot groups of locusts, which naturally stack, and the same would be true vs scourge.
Mutas are even more mobile and mines are made specifically against them, not to mention mine splash would one-shot scourge.
I was under the assumption that they would deal splash under a small radius, say 0.5. No, this would not be op because scourge would:
Cost twice the gas cost per baneling.
Be more fragile than banes by 10hp.
Be more susceptible to stacking and thus more vulnerable to splash.
Deal damage in a significantly smaller radius than the baneling.
The only thing that have no mean to protect themselves from scourge in BW as i recall is Overlord, Guardian, Dropship.
Units that are hard-countered by Scourge are high-profile units such as Devourer, BC, Carrier. These are self-explanatory as those are units Scourge is meant to be used against.
Units that are favorable targets of Scourge for resource trade is Scout. Believe it or not, a Scout is as costly as a voidray.
Science Vessel, Arbiter and Queen have ways to deal with Scourge.
Wraith is fast enough to outrun Overlord and while being invisible Scourge can’t attack them without Overlord.
Observer is not a favourable target for Scourge.
Shuttle has the same speed as Scourge when upgraded.
The rest of the units: Muta, Valk, Corsair are scourge counters.
Meanwhile the rest of SC2 air are helpless against Scourge where Scourge can just dive into a BC or Carrier or Mothership and there is almost nothing that can be done. Even worse if Scourge surround them.
I agree with most of your statements, but I’ll point out some minor points I disagree on.
Slight disagreement there.
In practice, the Carrier and Devourer’s attacks were terrible for fighting Scourge. Devourers required 2 hits to kill a Scourge and had an atrocious attack rate.
Carriers had to launch their interceptors and their interceptors were relatively slow to change targets and focus them down; so they could not effectively defend themselves.
On the other hand, the Battlecruiser’s laser one-shot scourge and traveled so quickly that fleets rarely wasted any shots against them. An individual Battlecruiser or two might be taken down by Scourge; but larger fleets could shoot down a very large number of Scourge before any of them hit. It would be very expensive to build up enough Scourge to inflict damage on a Battlecruiser fleet. It was also both difficult to control that many Scourge at once, and difficult to prevent such a large group of Scourge from wasting shots on the same “dead” Battlecruiser.
If Protoss researches the Scout speed upgrade, then Scouts can beat Scourge using the same micro that Mutalisks and Wraiths use.
It was stupid that Scouts needed that upgrade to match the micro potential of the other units. That is one of the factors that made Scouts a weak unit.
I haven’t played against other people in SC2, I only play coop
But I did play SC1 and scourges weren’t that great.
75 gas per pair; a-moving makes them suicide into interceptors.
They were good for placing around your base where drop ships/shuttles would come from. Maybe they were also good in the hands of exceptionally skilled people. But the cost of scourges and the micro involved would likely make vipers the easier choice.
You’d be better off asking Blizzard to bring back defilers. Plague would be a very good way to counter deathball in general, not just air.
