All your opponent need to stop your Viking-Raven army is a couple of Thors camping behind Missle Turret, especially when they still have some Vikings left.
And Thors are exactly what people make when they start loosing Viking war.
I’ve lost several games when I tried adding mass Ravens to my army to break enemy defense line even when I was playing from advantage.
IM casting range is kinda small. Plus if target stops being visible while Raven is flying toward it Raven won’t cast a spell.
Nah.
Liberators with range upgrade are just way better as tank line opener.
I would guess that on pro level scenario where one player is camping on 3-4 bases backed by tank lines and a lot of static defense is just not something that happens. On the ladder however…
Infestor is now flying detector with 140 hp and 1 armour.
Raven is now 90 hp 0 armour with burrow move and cast aam while cloaked.
Let’s go further and apply the ptr nerfs and swap abilities!
You think abduct is bad imagine zerg rapidfires IM on every tank/thor/disruptor and can target ht/ghost, ty for giving zerg anti-caster and better abduct!
Let’s increase energy cost of MS like auto-turret, sure! ZERO GAMEPLAY IMPACT.
Swap MS with auto-turret, imagine flying tanky infestor that can spawn structures with instant dps of auto-turret - nerfed into the ground instantly.
Nerf np duration go ahead the fight is decided before the full duration anyway, swap with aam, have fun playing vs ling bling hydra.
Really the fact that you think aam zoning out enemy from fighting for its duration makes it useless is all one needs to disregard everything you say.
If they want to standardize ravens as detectors in tvz they need to give it a way to heal itself, that’s why oracle works in pvz because its shields heal and it can cast revelation then run away, but raven takes permanent dmg from queen every poke and has to stay longer. If it had say rejuvenation from wc3 applicable to only mech it could sustain itself without having to go home as well as the accompanying hellions, almost like the inverse of the oracle in that it can heal and support other units in direct fights but lacks their dps potential. I’d replace IM with this spell as it’s most useless vs zerg and keep the 75 energy requirements across the board to simplify decision making.
Though risky, there’s nothing to stop you from having an SCV hidden somewhere on the map to repair the Raven once it flies to safety, or even call down a M.U.L.E if you think you can take the hit to your income (you can have it grab some random minerals and return to your nearest base once it’s finished repairing to take away some of the sting).
Interference Matrix may be almost useless versus zerg, but the response should be to see if that can be rectified, such as giving Overlords and Overseers the Psionic tag, rather than replacing the ability outright, since it has uses in TvT and maybe TvP at a push.
removes Auto-Turret, with an ability/ passive that restores Hp to raven. can be adjusted from energy cost and HP reg. with option to give it from raven to another mech unit.
why do you want to use IM on Overlords and Overseers?
With all due respect, what exactly would giving the overlord and overseer a psionic tag actually do? Overseer maybe you could stop it from detecting for 8 seconds, but an overlord? That would be almost pointless unless it’s a transport. and even then it only stops it from dropping. It’s a very… niche thing to want it for and seems fairly arbitrary in almost every situation.
It’s more to give them something to target, and yes, to disable the detector and transport temporarily (more useful against Medivacs and Warp Prisms though, I confess). Admittedly the main reason is due to lore, since Overlords and Overseers are meant to be psychic relays.
Look, if your goal is to make IM more useful against Zerg, it would need to actually affect more combat units that matter in combat (such as Lurkers, which would make no sense lore-wise but would be somewhat comparable to disabling Siege Tanks).
I personally don’t think that all of a unit’s abilities have to be effective in all match-ups (the Science Vessel’s certainly weren’t, and that was a much better caster than the Raven), but for a caster to be useful in a match-up at least one of its spells needs to be good enough in that match-up to justify the unit.
You seem to be forgetting that IM is basically useless against Zerg. That is part of the point.
A more apt comparison would be if Zerg’s version of “IM” only worked against Biological targets. No targeting Tanks, Thors, Colossus, Disruptors, etc; just like how IM cannot affect Brood Lords, Lurkers, Swarm Hosts, Ultralisks, etc.
Abduct is nearly a guaranteed kill on a particular high-value unit, if you can get it off; so even though Terran is mostly ranged they could find good uses for it in any match-up. The Viper “can” be lost in the trade if the opponent is ready with certain spells or has a lot of long-range units to pick it off but the ability to pick off a high value unit should not be underestimated.
AAM only increases damage that other units deal, causing no direct damage itself. In practical terms, AAM usually provides significantly less damage than other AOE spells, such as Fungal, Storm, the old Seeker Missiles, etc. The only reason why AAM is a design improvement over Seeker Missiles is that it got rid of the spell-stacking issue. The spell itself is significantly weaker, and you definitely would not want to trade Fungal or Parasitic Bomb for it.
it is a support ability. otherwise you can also say Guardian Shield/ Microbial Shroud is a weak aoe spell because it does no damage compared to fungal and storm…
I understand that, I am pointing out that the AAM spell is weaker than splash-damage spells in terms of the damage it adds (and the only thing it really does is “add damage”. The current AAM (not the proposed nerfed one) requires each afflicted unit to take 10 hits in order to match the damage effect of one Fungal.
Lethe was trying to talk up the Raven as though it was stronger than Infestors and Vipers; which is just not the case.
In the meantime I’m trying to put together an extension mod with my proposed changes, so hopefully rather than just theorycrafting and talking the talk, they can actually be tested. Ideally I want to merge it with the other PTR proposals to see how it all plays out.