So, here are some thoughts I have had about multiplayer balance for a while now, and I am asking for opinions:
Colossus:
Are these over-specialized, if so, what do you think of the following change?
→ Increase base damage by 2, (10->12), but keep the total anti-light damage the same.
Hellions/Hellbats: Do you think mech could be improved by making these units a bit less specialized:
→ Blue Flame increases the damage of Hellions by +2 (+3 v. light) instead of +5 v. light.
→ Blue Flame increases the damage of Hellbats by +2 (+10 v. light) instead of +12 v. light.
The goal here is to make these units a bit more useful in mech compositions without changing them enough to break any important unit interactions. Hellions/Hellbats the change should not be significant enough that they start beating properly managed Stalkers or Roaches.
Casters (particularly Vipers and Infestors, but potentially also Oracles and Ravens):
→ Add a weak 6 range auto-attack to prevent these units from committing suicide, similar to the High Templar. This change is almost exclusively to help lower-level players.
I don’t mind buffing colossus even more at the expense of removing disruptor. Disruptor is low skill - high reward “hit-or-miss” unit which never worked at pro level - too easy to use at lower levels. If disruptor is removed, colossus can be buffed significantly to compensate for that.
If you mean ladder then perhaps this change is good but if you want to make mech stronger/more versatile it’s not gonna work because of mech’s lack of mobility. With classic mech, terran cannot contest Z/P taking any expansion they want. With battle mech clones and hellions are too fragile. As long as you keep them alive they trade efficiently, the moment when they get surrounded/fungaled/force fielded - it’s GG. That’s why mech (in either style) will never be meta at pro level. For ladder - quite okay.
NO !
Zerg spellcasters are way too powerful to give them attack like this. In fact even HT should not have standard attack. It is Z/P job to keep their spellcasters alive - it’s called skill. Good protoss keeps their HTs in warp prism. Zerg army is the easiest to control. Yet you want to make it even easier by giving viper/infestor attack so it is even harder to snipe these units ? Once again big NOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Oracle doesn’t need it because it has limited ability to attack. And if other spellcasters do not have auto-attack, neither raven should have it - to make it fair.
What toss needs is a siege and forget unit. It’s the one type of unit that toss doesn’t have. The disruptor needed to be a siege and forget unit like the liberator or lurker, but with its own little twist. I’d say make it attack like pylon overcharge, but increase the range and decrease the projectile speed. Also, make it target a location and not a unit. This allows units to dodge the projectile. But, the toss can also fire the projectile at a location as a zone control tool like you would with a fungal.
It would be a hybrid between the reaver and photon overcharge, with the restriction of being unable to move once sieged. This would allow toss players to do the same kind of manuevers that zerg and terrans do, where they place siege units at a location and then stop worrying about that location since it’s well defended. This allows them to focus on other locations. That’s what siege units do: they allow you to pick locations you don’t want to have to focus on, and toss can’t do that because they don’t have any unit in that category.
If disruptor cannot be removed from the game then a good change would be to:
significantly decrease damage but make it guaranteed (like siege tank)
increase rate of fire.
allow it only to shoot when in “siege mode” - forcing repositioning like lurker or tank.
With above changes disruptor would still require skill, yet it’s usage would be much more rewarded and less frustrating both to protoss and their opponents.
Personally speaking I wouldn’t mind it, but disruptors definitely would need to be redesigned/removed, which I’ve actually thought about somewhat.
IMO disruptors are to all or nothing currently.
My personal redesign of it would be to increase the damage radius to 1.75, however you have staggered damage zones.
The 1.35 damage zone does full damage at 145 like it used to.
1.5 damage zone does damage as it currently does (maybe 110 damage to kill stimmed marauders specifically).
1.75 damage zone does 50 damage.
The larger damage radius makes it more consistent while the tiered splash zones rewards better targeting and also allows for some mitigation with good splitting.
Its larger damage radius also makes it arguably worth the 4 supply it currently is.
With your Colossus proposal though, I think you’d have to make disruptors weaker than they currently are as it is.
The main hesitation I have is that we don’t want colossus to be super generalised like it was in HotS. There was never a reason to not make them and they were REALLY good, so you almost need to find a careful middle-ground.
Speaking honestly, I don’t think the problem with mech is the hellbat/helion; I actually think both serve their function well, and this feels very unnecessary IMO.
Mech’s problem is primarily that:
A) It’s slow and immobile and there are also a lot of very, very hard counters to the units,
and
B) It has pretty mediocre anti-air early on.
To some extent, the addition of the Cyclone actually solved both of those issues, but being a tech lab unit does hinder it somewhat. Having said that, the reactored cyclone also proved to be extremely problematic as a unit too.
I wouldn’t mind this, but I would argue that it needs to be 5 range rather than 6 range. it’s a small change but it does mean that good micro is still rewarded, and you can still punish an a-move somewhat by making it marginally easier to target fire down casters that get to close to the front line, without having the casters simply shove themselves into your opponent’s face.
Oracles do already have an attack though, with pulsar beam, so anything they get would need to take that into account.
About disruptors, at the lower levels, disruptors are like setting a bomb off and crossing your fingers it hits then and you don’t take out your own army. Most of the time they deal about the same amount of damage to your own army as to your enemy. Now yes, they aren’t great at dealing a lot of damage at the pro level, but they’re still good at zoning
Tbh that’s more often than not a skill issue because they’re really not that hard to use. players below platinum do have a lot of really, really basic micro mistakes though. Even in platinum there are a lot of really basic micro mistakes but this is kinda where “effective” micro can actually begin to happen. Macro is still king though, as always.
To be fair, I’m trying to find a change that benefits mech without causing bigger problems elsewhere. That limits what I can suggest for buffs. It is “easier” to find nerfs for some other units, but I am not certain how far that can be taken either.
That’s fine. The point is that the units don’t just suicide into the enemy army. These attacks don’t even need to actually deal damage to achieve that goal.
The full damage radius can be reduced further than 1.35, since there is an even larger outer radius that will add quite a bit of damage even at that lower amount. It would take a lot of experimenting to figure out which 3 radii are best though.
Coincidentally, the Disruptor changes from last patch benefit mech more than Bio, so that’s kind of neat in terms of making mech more viable, even though it obviously doesn’t address “every” issue.
Ghost is kinda weird unit. It is supposed to be spellcaster, yet it has very strong anti-light attack. I think ghost should actually be fighting unit and only use energy for cloaking and snipe/emp should be cooldown based abilities like BC’s yamato. This way ghost would retain their strength as fighting unit but their abilities would require careful management rather than spamming.
Zoning isn’t sufficient enough. You want to KILL terran units, not just zone them. Zoning only prevents bio from maneuvering into specific area. Protoss simply lacks a unit which would be efficient at killing terran bio without blowing up half of their army in one shot.
Considering how important EMP and “Irradiate’s replacement” currrently are, it might have been better to keep the Science Vessel and introduce Ghosts as stealth combatants without lockdown.
Unfortunately, the decision to push the Science Vessel’s roles onto the Ghost and make the Raven its own inconsistent thing early in SC2’s development mean that it is very hard to get the traction to reverse course now.
I think that since protoss needs a buff, colossus is the safest way to do it, shuffling 50 shield with hp does nothing meaningful.
But entering the creative too outside of the expectation range of what the balance council is willing to change, protoss does need a siege unit and making the disruptor a siege unit is an interesting idea, make the casting animation as the siege mode animation.
Colossus: I don’t think over-specialized is the word. Maybe one-dimensional. It needs more microability without strengthening deathballs while still being somewhat a-movable at low levels. Factors that affect that are vulnerability for cost, burst damage, damage point, range, movement speed, and the number of them you have out. So to achieve this, maybe something like this:
Nerf range bonus of or remove Thermal Lance
Decrease cost and maybe supply
Increase speed
Maybe slight tradeoff of higher weapon cooldown for higher burst damage (helps a bit vs high armor targets and makes micro a bit more accessible, could be a potential nerf vs low HP targets so needs testing)
Revisit vulnerability to air attacks according to testing
Basic idea is, “What does balancing a Colossus without Thermal Lance look like?” because the high range puts a lot of limits on what could be explored with it.
Hellion/Hellbat:
If the buff doesn’t meaningfully change any unit interactions, is it worth doing the buff? This could maybe affect them vs Queens in TvZ, but I don’t know if that’s really what we want to mess with.
For full Mech compositions, I don’t know if anything would really help them that doesn’t involve some kind of durability upgrade so they can properly be a meaningful Mineral dump. Make it require an Armory and put it behind a high cost and/or research time if needed, but unless a damage buff is ridiculous for early or mid-game I don’t see it doing much for them in lategame army compositions besides what they already do (Broodling soak).
Casters - I fully support this change. I like the change for HT but I don’t see why they need the special treatment.
I disagree a lot with you there, colossus is a micro heavy unit despite what terrans say, yes it is part of a death ball but it is very frigile and have unique weakness and specific good and effective counters that you really need to micro against.
If you wanna remove colossus range know that protoss only have colossus and tempest as long range units, you’re effectivelly removing 50% of protoss long range options, that’s just forcing them to have only all in armies. I do not agree with your suggestions.
It’s REALLY not. The unit itself takes very little micro to use or be efficient. Stutter stepping is about the extent of it, and in most cases you don’t even need to do that. Pairing the unit with a warp prism doesn’t increase the micro of the colossus, it increases the micro capabilities of the prism.
MMm… 150/100 isn’t fragile but I wouldn’t call it bulky either.
Sure, I can agree with that.
Which, again, doesn’t really involve microing the colossus outside of basic stutter-stepping, it involves microing the rest of the army in focus firing and/or forcing micro on the opponent with disruptors/storm.
