ok this is a legit question, i get that the hardened shield was replaced to make immortals weaker against tanks but stronger against their counters, but was it also changed to reduce protoss a-move strength? like replacing a passive behavior with an active ability to allow for more micro? if thats the case then why make the barrier not be able to be activated manually? it seems like its trading one a-move passive for a crappier one.
Whar they say and what they do are two different things. At the end of the day it was a nerff like what they did with each and every Protoss unit and ability.
If that was the intention at any point, it was a dumb idea.
Manually clicking on different units in combat to activate a shield is a tedious task that the game is better off without.
Even if Barrier could be manually cast it should always have the option to auto-cast, and that auto-cast should always be on by default.
Hardened Shields was a broken ability that needed to be replaced. The ability scaled to be absurdly overpowered against units with bursts larger than 20, and a balanced version would have been worthless in most match-ups.
Abilities need a consistent effect in order to be balanced. Otherwise they are overpowered if you don’t scale them to their worst case, but if you do that, the ability will be outright useless in every other case. PDD was another ability that shared this problem and required replacement.
was it op? maybe, but it definetly made the protoss feel like protoss, especially when you had a tank line and a few immortals just ate it.
compare that to protoss now and its just a meme race that u can watch as they suicide into your tank/lib lines after being emp spammed and kinda feel sorry for them.
that and whatever else has been changed that made fighting protoss seem like a fair fight, not just a lib/tank/ghost/raven absolute stomp.
It be op cause a few immortal serve enough to kill heavy tank assault
Not “maybe”. Hardened Shields was overpowered. Period!
It was a poorly designed ability that should never have been introduced in the first place. Protoss is also the last race that could actually need such a hard-counter to siege lines.
Warpgates give Protoss plenty of ways to harass a player using Tanks and force him/her to split his/her forces up or eat the losses; Charge, Blink, and Shade further provide Protoss with options to exploit the Tanks’ lack of mobility and their friendly-fire in combat. That is just focusing on the Gateway units without regard for Drops, Disruptors to kill off the Tanks’ support, etc.
That would be user error. No ground army is supposed to be able to walk through a critical mass of Sieged Tanks without doing something to disable or kill most of those Tanks or their supporting units first.
That is like a Terran player getting mad his Marines die after he marches them right through Storms and Disruptor shots.
A unit that nullifies one unit while otherwise being bad isn’t really overpowered, since it can’t break winrates nor put timers on players. But it is ill conceived and pointlessly restrictive.
Because PvP, naturally. Manual barrier created a 1 base meta at high level PvP where it kinda became like a western style showdown, but with immortals. 9 times out of 10 the reason Protoss can’t have nice things is because PvP.
Except unless you are playing mono battles against tanks, barrier is just better. A lot better. Immortals definitely were winners coming into LotV.
What if Barrier activated when Shields are gone, rather than activating the first time it takes damage? Making it weaker vs Tanks was good, but perhaps making it not activate until Shields deplete would help make it stronger vs Zerg (and Terran Bio why not), since PvZ needs help. Immortal is a low enough tech unit and natural compliment to Gateway units, so it would really help Protoss be able to move out more and trade better with Zerg early on.
Right now, as a Mech player, you can target Immortals (or splash them) to activate their Barrier early, while killing other units. I think making Barrier activate only when Shields are gone would make them slightly better vs Tanks, but they would still only be a soft counter, so it’s fine. If you wanted to trigger Barrier, you would need to do 100 damage to their Shields first, before switching to other units (this would also make EMP more useful vs Immortals again). So it wouldn’t change too much other than make Immortals slightly better vs Tanks.
Vs Zerg, Protoss would be able to move out and poke/pressure Zerg more, without worrying that Barrier will activate due to being hit once, and then it is on cooldown for a while and Protoss wants to wait for it to come back online. And the same thing with Tanks applies here; if the Zerg wants to trigger the Barrier early to waste it, it would need to do 100 damage to the Shield first.
I think reworking Barrier to only activate when Shields deplete would make the Immortal overall more durable (thus helping early Gateway armies), and it would not discourage you from poking often. It would be harder to abuse Barrier by making it trigger early by hitting it once.
I suppose that changing this would decrease micro though. The opponent being able to trigger Barrier is a neat trick, and the Protoss could also avoid this by keeping Immortals further back and using WP pick up micro. Perhaps Barrier itself could just be buffed. The cooldown is a huge 32 seconds, why not make it 20? Or make Barrier last more than a mere 2 seconds… Why not 4 or 5? So you can still micro and force Barrier to trigger early, but isn’t as abusive? If 1 Zergling can trigger Barrier and just wait 2 seconds for it to go away, the Immortal is WAY weaker vs Zerg than back then with Hardened Shield, and PvZ needs all the help it can get.
Tank-marine line is already absolutely destroyed by Chargelot-Archon a-click, especially if you add Colossus or Storm on top.
No thank you I prefer a barrier for my Immortals so they would last longer against anything Zerg then they would have with hardened shield.
On the other hand hardened shield would make immortals super bad against marines and since I like bio pushes very much that would make immortals almost harmless. Hmm…
…but they are already super-bad vs. marines. The original design philosophy was to make them super-efficient vs. some units and weak vs, the rest, actually they lost the first attribute and gained not a big deal.
Immortal is not a marine that fights ground and air from GW armies to Carriers. Protoss units usually excel on one spot and suck on the rest, Immortal with that change lost that attribute (mediocre vs. everything),
it was weaker overall but was better where it counted, like vs roaches, roaches deal 22 damage, at 10 attacks thats 120 damage blocked, vs hydralisks 50, vs new banelings about 130, etc, making its strength depend on the situation, and theres nothing wrong with having a unit that can walk all over tank-lib, as of now i can just turtle behind planetaries and protoss has no real way of doing anything apart from poking with disruptors or tempests, which liberators take care of. i dont see the problem in punishing turtle players with an immortal immortal that eats all their crap and forces them to come out and fight, plus it looks cool
I will admit, this line made me chuckle.
That would be a nerf. If your immortal is at risk of losing all shields you want to be already pulling it out of the line of fire ASAP, meaning the barrier would rarely get value.
In a perfect world, you want to use a prism to “blink” back any immortal who’s barrier has been used, and the shields are what give you wiggle room to do so. Though of course, against roach/ravager, the barrier just becomes further wiggle room as dodging attacks with prism blink micro becomes your primary goal.
IMO when playing mech I fear disruptors now very possibly MORE than I would fear hardened shield immortals. Not to mention carriers aren’t bad units anymore. Thus, creating yet another robotics facility mech counter feels redundant.
Switching immortals to barrier made them generally perform better against roaches, ultralisks, stalkers, marauders, and most of all bunkers.
Yes they are a fair bit worse against tanks (though splash has always been able to wear through hardened shields at critical mass) and a very small amount worse against thors, but they are better at countering most things and the strength of barrier is such that immortals are able to perform efficiently against most ground units from hydras to ravagers to adepts.
If you wanted me to point to what I thought of as the 3 biggest buffs for Protoss from HotS to today, I would say prism pickup, zealot speed, and immortal barrier.
I would point out you are assuming +3 roaches, meaning you are assuming they are making roaches with a hive. Unless your Zerg opponent is really tunnel visioned on their roaches, this should be the very least of your concerns against hive tech Zerg. You should be more worried about Brood Lords and speed+range lurkers.
I would also point out another flaw in your comparison is how quickly barrier comes back. The cooldown of barrier is shorter than the time to regenerate 100 shields, so if we have 10 20 damage attacks setting both immortals to 0 shields, then barrier would come up a few seconds before 100 shields, meaning an advantage for the barrier immortal. More importantly, shields will not regenerate until you get downtime, but barrier’s cooldown will begin immediately. It’s not inconceivable that an immortal could get 2 barriers in a single battle, especially in the case of PvZ early-mid game against roach/ling with a prism.
those are actually really good points, and i agree, but i still miss how scary immortals were to terrans turtling behind tanks.
it actually felt like fighting a technologically superior race
But now even scv can trigger shield who cant take 2 shot tank 
Any unit which hard-counters units to such an extreme that they are unusable in a match-up is overpowered. The Hardened Shields Immortal was a broken unit, it just happened to be the case that both Zerg and Terran have competitive compositions that do not include the units Immortals eliminated from play; so the game was still playable despite them.
It is also wrong to characterize the Immortal with Hardened Shields as “otherwise being bad”.
Immortals themselves are a fairly strong unit without Hardened Shields or Barrier. The main factor that limits the Immortal’s use is its competition with other units from the Robotics Facility; a player would need to make extra Robotics Facilities specifically for Immortals in order to produce them as a core unit.
Immortals were broken in that case, period.
You are exactly like the Terran whiners who never got over the fact that the Warhound (which was explicitly overpowered because Blizzard attempted to balance it to break Tank lines) never made it into the game.
While Protoss tech has always seemed advanced (or rather, difficult to understand), it is generally much less efficient and deadly in combat than Terran weapons.
I would like to see it applied to the Ghost/HT/Archon interaction. Unless to the point where Ghosts were required to travel in Medevacs for their incolumity…
I don’t agree that EMP is that extreme against either HT or Archons.