The state of the game: people going ultra-infestor, SH,

General Discussion
1

marauder rushing, tank dropping and skytoss

Nothing in gaming comes remotely close to this game’s balance and gameplay failure. Even MOBA games that strip the player of agency are better, and I myself am more mindblown than anyone else that I am saying that. Every MOBA is better than this game.

Zerg tier 1 beats 3-3 mech at 12 minutes just build ravagers and swarmhosts and try to pick up an auto win. The ravagers will literally be better than 3-3 mech from the race that is supposed to have better units to compensate for infinitely less map control and economy.

TvT (in lower leagues) is DOMINATED by the equalizer build aka tank drop rush, not OP enough to actually win against me but it can literally kill 15 SCVs before I look and then has the unit that doesn’t lose to ANYTHING on the ground.

TvP is unplayable unless you harass and deal enough damage to prevent them from getting an auto win skytoss army or probably an auto win ground army. When it comes to zerg, it’s even worse, immortals, colossus and archons can just a-move into lurkers.

I can’t wrap my head around a company that thinks imbalance is fun for anyone, I’ve explained in previous threads why imbalance is a negative for everyone all across the board, so are there really “professionals” with insane egos clinging to the idea that putting something OP in the game makes people have insane fun abusing the OP thing? To put it simply, it doesn’t feel satisfying for very long at all and on top it ruins the game competitively because you know that someone who picked the crutch race will always be able to beat you no matter how good you get, and the autowinners just run into really good players and get stomped, quitting the game because they feel out of place. The autowinners have no hope of competing in GSL either since it’s matchfixed and the race isn’t OP enough to carry the noobs who play it against, let’s say, getting unlucky and losing to a drop, harass, a counter etc. and most likely a combination of those in order to actually lose.

We can see clearly purposeful but pointless and beyond counter-productive examples of imbalance in other blizzard games. Mage in hearthstone, mage in vanilla VS warrior etc.

This company wants, so badly, for people to spend years of effort for it to get crushed by someone who picked up the game 2 weeks ago.

2

I can’t believe u stuck in this one unit comp that Terran has so much hard counters to any comp that Zerg can muster.

Problem with ravagers and swarm host is huge pop it take up.

Just build small pop medivacs to pick up Thors or build banshee or liberator.

Banshee to hunt ravagers and swarm host and liberators and Thors would make locust disappear before they can reach them.

You know mass Thors destroy lings and which out side that has no good play outside np

They easily make swarmhost useless

3

Full proof that even after the fall of blizzard, people who think SH are balanced still exist.

“in this one unit comp that Terran has so much hard counters to any comp that Zerg can muster.” lol.

“Problem with ravagers and swarm host is huge pop it take up.”

Z has way more economy and tempo than terran, they will get to the 200/200 faster and keep you down.

“banshee or liberator.”

Congratulations you just admitted zerg tier 1 beats 3-3 ground mech, because that’s how a game should work.

“Thors would make locust disappear before they can reach them.” Already covered this.

SH is moronic game design, nobody should have faith in frost giant knowing that their devs defended SH in an interview.

HotS SH is literally the most prime example of imbalance ruining the game and not being fixed, and ruining competitive play. In LotV, they became even more overpowered.

4

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Stryker’s actually right, perhaps for the first time in his life.

This is a game of counters. Lings are supposed to beat Thors - it’s why a composition is dynamic. You adjust it to what you’re seeing, and potential threats to the core units that you’re making and trying to keep alive. Hellbats for lings. Thors for mutas and swarm-hosts. Medivacs to pick thors up and keep them alive when locusts land, or to retreat them back as necessary. Tanks to deal with Roaches, Ravagers, hydras and Lurkers. Vikings and/or ghosts to kill Vipers.

Just don’t ever suggest bio should be used to supplement mech armies (outside of ghosts), because frankly, it doesn’t work.

Against mech especially, swarm-hosts are almost literally never useless.

Yep, I agree with this statement. Free units are bad design, and will pretty much always be bad design.

Scouting is your friend. Not only is this a game of counters, it’s a game of information, and information denial. If you know it’s coming, you can react accordingly. For Terran in particular - especially in early and mid game where you’re on that 1-2 base setup - that’s extremely important because most attacks will require anything from slight adjustments to radically different responses depending on how you opened.

Yeah not gonna lie, it feels really, really hard right now. I hate TvP currently, and a big part of that was the mine nerfs effectively being gutted. But it’s definitely still doable, even if Terran feels like garbage in the matchup. You just have to drastically out-play your opponent (even more than you did previously) and keep on near-constant aggression, but it’s a herculean task to do even in comparison to last patch. constant Multi-prong attacks are a necessity at a low Diamond level TvP, let alone higher MMR ranges.

1 Like
5

I don’t… agree? The HotS Host was definitely incorrectly balanced, but the idea of incremental value over periods of time is just what spellcasters do. I think it’s silly to say that the LotV SH is significantly more of a problem than High Templar, Disruptors, Vipers, Infestors, or Battlecruisers; which are all units that have a fairly similar paradigm - they do one thing in a given match-up to a sometimes silly degree but only work strongly into that one thing and can be completely mismanaged into uselessness.

I really like this unit so I’m going to ramble a lot of words:

The Swarm Host is an interesting *idea* at its base concept -

What does a ground siege unit have to do and how do you make that feel Zerg-like? Ground siege has to attack into defended positions and not fear taking damage, but “Zerg” culturally feels like “small units” because that’s what “swarm” implies. The Ultralisk is the unit that is supposed to serve the role of linebreaker in this regard, but it’s a ‘high quality’ unit that isn’t a spellcaster so it’s ‘un-zerg’.

And the HotS Swarm Host neatly answers that question. It provides free low quality attackers to allow you to chip at siege lines - being free leaves you unafraid of the losses.

That it then succeeds at doing literally anything else, and that by its very nature of being an infinite source of health-to-kill, creates a titanic set of problems that don’t need litigation. But the idea of a spellcaster spawning a timed life unit isn’t the problem, it’s that said timed life unit has to have multiple egregious flaws.

The only particularly good example is the auto-turret, which can shoot up and down but is immobile and being short-ranged to cast and a structure makes it nearly impossible to throw down fast or in numbers. The Infested Terran was easy to place tons of and the cast range was long, the Locust is easy to create en masse but “cast from far away” directly decreases its useful duration.

Amplifying this, the HotS Locust is bulky enough to survive pretty meaningful defenses, and its damage is quite high; since it’s intended to not get to attack for very long - the duration being more about letting the Swarm Host be far away from the defensive line you’re sieging, since the Locust’s health gets evaporated before its timer. If the two had been linked (ie. the Locust has 90 health, but loses 3 HP per editor-second), the problem situations where the Locust is used not to bust defensive lines but to capitalize on units that cannot just walk away - the intended method to dealing with the unit being used not in a siege - would be significantly lessened because any amount of chip is meaningful duration loss.

I do happily agree that the HotS Host was badly implemented, but I think that’s critically different from the idea being rotten at its core.

6

Of course not, a flying free unit that has a high chance at dealing incredible damage is perfectly balanced because now it wins in 3 minutes instead of dragging the game for 3 hours.

7

“it’s why a composition is dynamic. You adjust it to what you’re seeing”

This doesn’t seem to make sense. Thank thor hellbat is the final ground comp for mech, exceptions to this are extremely minor/not relevant to this discussion. This comp cannot push against ravager swarmhost, because then even if you have 3-3 at 12 minutes your units are literally infinitely worse.

We aren’t talking about lings although thors do beat lings in high numbers, especially because maps aren’t open fields and because zerg won’t go 200/200 mass ling.

“So if that’s bad, why not use some other thing?” Because you said it yourself, unit comps build on top of each other. If you go pure mass BC you will lose to corruptors. So there are unit comps which need to be used, not just one unit. But if one of the things in this chain of units which support each other is bad enough to lose to free units and biles with extremely little counterplay, both being mechanics which take almost no skill to use but reward the player using them and make them feel like an utter pro for picking zerg, that shows us that the chain is broken because of how weak the mech is even with 3-3.

Hate to say it but he is somehow 100% right, thors in high numbers shoot down locusts and the locusts that do reach you are basically a joke, making them useless. But that’s high numbers, in practice you aren’t just allowed to get to that point, and if you don’t then you will be annihilated by the zerg’s tier 1 AKA roach ravager (combined with SH) and not be able to expand/push to punish or will be barely defending while free units stack the odds in their favor.

I hope I don’t need to remind people that zerg has 10x the economy and map control, so their units literally being better than 3-3 mech at 12 minutes is disgusting. Even with perfect play, biles and locusts would be bizarrely effective.