They actually massively buffed it this patch. Spore nerf, mothership buffs, ultralisk speed nerf. Skytoss benefits from all these (spores insta-die vs tempest and carrier and zealots; ultralisks can’t get on top of high templar as fast; mothership is buffed in general but it also auto-kills changelings).
The mothership auto-killing changelings is what crosses the line for me. Every other race has to beat nydus lurker using skill (see the changeling, click the changeling, use multiple hotkeys to spread out your army). But toss aren’t expected to do that. The mothership auto-sees and auto-kills the changelings. In the rare event a nydus does go off, the toss just uses recall to deal with it so he doesn’t need multi prong.
They did the exact opposite of what they needed to in this patch. They needed to increase protoss skill expression and decrease the reward of no-micro protoss players. They did the opposite. They haven’t increased the skill expression and they’ve buffed the f2 amove toss players. Toss will continue to be unbeatable on the ladder while they get dominated in tournaments. The people in charge have absolutely no clue what they are doing and need to be removed from the project immediately.
OP skytoss wouldn’t even bother me if it hadn’t been the norm for the past 6 years. But we’re on year 6 of 80 iq protoss apes amoving unstoppable carriers armies. SC2 esports has cemented its fate. It’s buried 12 feet under and had cement poured over it. Adding SC2 to microsoft’s game pass and doing a good balance patch was the last chance this game had at returning to its former glory. The balance counsel fumbled so flipping hard that players are trying the game and then immediately quitting:
https://i.imgur.com/pdoX9ZK.png
SC2 esports is going to devolve to protoss turtling with a ball of carriers above mass cannons and each game is going to take 40 minutes to resolve. In the end, serral will still win because the skill expression was nerfed rather than buffed.
Only way to fix this mess is to make a new RTS game and in the EULA ban the balance counsel members from playing it explicitly by name. Then you can be certain they will exert zero control over the new RTS realm that supersedes this dumpster fire. At that point the only thing they could do to harm the RTS genre is to cry about it from a distance on youtube. You might need to ban some of the youtubers and pro players too because they exert significant influence over the game design. So if someone frequently espouses harmful things for the genre, they’d need to be banned in the EULA.
If you are worried about losing popular youtubers, then don’t worry. For every pro player banned there are a hundred more ready to step in and take their place. Right now the pro players use balance as a means to keep their competitors out of the pro scene and that’s exactly the mechanism creating all of sc2’s issues from A to Z. Get rid of some of the toxic players, at a bare minimum don’t allow them to influence balance, and the game could’ve been taken in a positive direction. Instead we have year 7 of protoss ladder dominance which they’ve done to help toss win premiers but they still won’t win premiers and so it’s just a complete failure from A to Z.
High level terran and zergs are fine with this arrangement because it keeps the tournament victories coming in on schedule while the balance counsel is scared to buff toss due to its ladder and minor tournament dominance. This happens because they don’t know on a fundamental level what is creating the issue. Balance was never the issue for protoss. It was always skill expression. Protoss micro is too consistent – whether it’s a code s toss or a rando from GM it looks the same. You can’t tell the difference between the two. If you look at Maru, you can very clearly see a difference between him and your garden variety GM terran. Toss has a skill expression issue and adjusting balance ironically keeps it from winning.
If I were running the balance counsel, the mothership’s attacks would be extremely powerful, far more powerful than they are currently, but they would require manual focus fire for each beam. A high APM protoss with good focus fire would be overpowered, but a low skill protoss who can’t click fast enough and can’t multitask would miss out on benefits. See? That creates skill expression. That’s what terran has with marine medivac micro and as long as toss doesn’t have it they will never win premier tournaments. The counsel did the opposite of this, giving the mothership automatic attacks that even target changelings automatically. Flat buffing protoss across the whole ladder creates balance issues and doesn’t even make protoss win premier tournaments. These people need to be fired. Give the job of balancing the game to someone who actually knows what they are doing. They’ve had 6 years and tens of thousands of games to identify the problem and they still haven’t figured it out. They are incapable of doing it.
What’s truly amazing about their incompetence is the fact that this has been a known issue for years and a center of discussion here on the forums since basically forever and they still get the answer wrong. Imagine taking a test next to a guy shouting the answers out loud and still failing the test. It can’t be understated just how bad these guys are at game balance. It takes crazy amount of incompetence to have years to prep for a test, people telling you the correct answers, and still getting it wrong. It is either sheer hubris of galactic proportions or they are doing it purposefully aka cheating. Those are the only two options left at this point. It’s probably a mixture. Some of the members are OK with the outcome because it’s good for them, and some of them are too proud to take the advice of their game design superiors.
