Title says it all. Mines are a insta win button, just as disruptors, but require almost no micro and are cheap as fk. The only explanation is anti protoss bias
So actually at the highest level mines do take a good amount of micro. Just look at Clemâs usage of them.
When he uses them for drops he retargets his mines consistently without dropping his macro and usually while managing another drop.
When he uses them for direct combat itâs the same deal: He has to micro them out of harms way, siege them without clumping them (which reduces their efficacy), and target them onto units theyâll be effective against (zealots instead of blink stalkers). Theyâre also much, MUCH more likely to cause friendly damage. Just like in BW, one of the best counter to terran mine fields is to just a-move a couple zealots through it and drag the damage to the terran army. The amount of times in BW Iâve watched a line of siege tank/vulture disappear into nothing because of their own mines is frightening.
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Both units are basically impossible to balance because theyâre binary in their result; they either go off or they donât and from that perspective I think both shouldnât have been created in the 1st place.
Iâd say Widow Mines are more problematic because the previous devs were pretty biased about them. For example; Widow Mines can be used for harass but Disruptor drops? Naw; that had to be removed from the game despite being a later timing and more expensive - but unlike the Disruptor; they can be mass produced fairly early in the game without hurting production too badly so long as youâve a 2nd factory.
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I agree mines r super gey
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Yeah I think we can all agree that the amount of boom-or-bust aoe in SC2 is too high.
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Look, I donât think I have ever seen a Terran player on this forum that supported any sort of Terran nerf, even if it was badly needed. Even during the mass Raven eras, the 3-rax reaper era, times when a balance patch was the only way forward to preserve the long term health of the game⌠The Terran communityâs attitude or response was ALWAYS âlol itâs fine learn to play newbâ, even after the devs had announced that huge nerfs were needed for those strats.
Maybe true, but it still takes more micro to play against mines than with mines. I think mines are fine as are disruptors for the most part, even though they are 100% against the previous balance teamâs philosophy or âno game ending momentsâ. I think if Terran players seriously think the disruptor is fine while thinking the widow mine is fine, this is some serious hypocrisy, but thatâs something we have repeatedly seen in the past.
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99 percent of all window mines are dead before they can fire off in a fight. It is known.
This is absolutely not true and you know it. Stop kidding yourself.
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I absolutely agree with this - plenty of whining about disruptors, but as soon as anyone brings up widow mines, itâs zip silence. Pure hypocrisy at its finest. Iâve made a post about removing disruptor/swarm host/widow mines and adjusting the game from there, but it didnât gain much traction. Itâs whatever, but thank goodness someone else is calling it out as it is.
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Widow Mines are equally as bad as Disruptors. Starcraft 2 would be much better without any of those units. Sudden game ending damage is TERRIBLE. Killing 30 army supply of units in the blink of an eye is beyond ridiculous.
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By who?, the data we have show that widow mines on average are cost efficient, go to maguro stats, you will see that widow mine efficiency varies between 1,1 and 1,4, meaning that as long as you make mines, you will do enough damage, maybe 3 mines will kill barely anything, but the fourth mine will kill a lot.
Pix or it didnât happen.
What I do know is that whenever I have used Window Mines in the past, and when I see them being deployed by streamers and in tournaments, they are always, for the most part, ineffective at dealing any amount of significant damage during a major battle.
The only valuable purpose of widow mines isnât in their ability to deal damage during a fight, itâs as a means of controlling the field of battle. Most players are smart enough to know how to not go charging into a field of widow mines. Most players know how to micro single units to soak what damage widow mines do do. AND Most players know how to have detection and long range damage to destroy the widow mines before they initiate a fight.
Widow Mines, are by far, the most ineffective boogieman this game has ever seen itâs entire history despite the fact that you might have one time, in hundreds of games, not been paying attention enough to not derp-move right into them.
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The only issues they have are primarily due to to them killing Observers in a timing and when used in multi drops.
Theyâre super, super low skill in those situations while requiring a lot of mechanical input to counter - to an unreasonable degree imo.
The 1st part is manageable but the 2nd is a bit dumb; Mines should either get the Disruptor treatment (go on cooldown once exiting a medivac) or they should take up 4 spaces in a medivac.
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Hard to select. Have really bad pathfinding. Donât engage and disengage predictably.
Nah, Iâve found them to be one of the most annoying units in the game to micro.
I agree with this, but at least thatâs fairly consistently true for all splash damage.
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I remember StarCraft II being much worse BEFORE it had those units.
You may not like details about the designs of those specific units ; but without splash damage units that fill those roles (killing off clumps with design features that directly or indirectly discourage massing the splash damage units themselves) the game has a much greater tendency to devolve into death-ball matches.
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Those are all l2p issues
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Of course they are. What is your point? 
Hmmm I see your point but Iâm not so sure about that. I actually think Disruptors in particular and Mines to an extent contribute heavily to death ballish armies that are almost impossible to engage.
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So somehow unit with less range than Stalker, 40 splash damage and 30 second cooldown is the same as unit with longest range in the game that doesnât even need vision to fire at that range, 145 splash damage and 20 seconds cooldown?
Has there ever been a creature more biased than regular Protoss whiner?
Disruptors are realtively easy to balance: just make their ball not kill but put units hit into stasis for 20 seconds or more. Will basically do the same in large fight (Protoss army will absolutely slaguhter half of Terran army) but it would be useless to spam these balls from long range in order to just annoy your opponent.
I would prefer to have proper fire bats and spider mines. But there are some problems that need to be adressed:
- Spider Mines just donât work in SC2 because of how unitâs ai work in SC2;
- Neither SM or Firebat attack air;
- Most important one: WM is one crutch that makes TvP look only slightly unbalanced in toss favour at the very top level. Remove it - and win rate will drop to 10%. You will need to take away from toss all of the OP mechanics that were introduced to them over the last several years, e.g. shield batteries, recall on nexus, blink DTs, supersonic tempests and voids and supercharged chronoboost. Maybe even Blink Dragoons⌠(remember what pice of horse solid wastes Stalker was at LotV release and that Liberators used to 2-shot it pretty much always? I donât think they even needed +1 to achieve that feat).
Yes, WM is a crutch, but an absolutely essntial one. Iâm not a fan of WMs either, but do you REALLY wanât to get into this rabbit hole?
PS. Isnât it funny that every time when we think about how SC2 units can be improved we think about replacing them with BW units?)