Currently, the Lurker fills a roll of being the Zerg’s splash/siege unit. Someone once called it the Zerg Colossus, in that it does massive splash damage from range. Of course it’s not quite the same since it has to root itself to do damage, but it is still painfully difficult to deal with when it’s buffered by Roaches and Hydralisks.
I have no problem with such a powerful siege unit, but one unwritten rule that’s been around since the dawn of RTS games is that such long-range damage dealers don’t have much survivability if the enemy gets on top of them; such examples outside of StarCraft include the MLRS from Tiberian Dawn and the V2/V3/V4 rocket launchers from the Red Alert series.
That on the surface is a bit of an excuse admittedly, but it doesn’t hide the fact that Lurkers can be hugely problematic in numbers, effectively making a dead zone on the ground - even with detection you probably won’t be able to take them out unless you have air units or something that can outrange them, but then their Adaptive Talons upgrade helps them to dodge such unfavourable situations and relocate. Then again, rewarding player awareness and micro should be encouraged, so I am hesitant to suggest removing that upgrade. However, something has to give given the unit is durable, nimble and high damage. It’s what’s called a Lightning Bruiser, and they can be somewhat dangerous from a design and balance perspective.
With all this in mind, I would like to suggest the following change:
- Reduce HP from 200 to 170.
Though a reduction of 15%, it permits a fully-upgraded Immortal to 3-shot it (+2 weapons unless the Lurker has +3 armour, and +3 weapons will kill it for sure), 3 Ravager biles to kill it and a Ghost to kill it with Steady Targeting if they can get a clear shot and not take damage. It still requires care to avoid their spine waves and to target-fire them over closer units.
On the note of Steady Targeting, I would like to suggest increasing the damage from 170 to 175, so that they can 1-shot Zerg Queens, which may open up an interesting TvZ harassment path in the early and mid-game. When facing Queens en masse, EMP would still probably be better though due their combined energy and the Ghosts probably taking damage from Zerglings etc.
