When is next balance patch? Current patch is very imbalanced

General Discussion
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Funny how people thought Protoss would be “dead” with the current patch when in reality, anyone who was not a Protoss player could tell it was huge buffs for Protoss.

When is the next balance patch/how often are balance patches released?

The current patch is extremely imbalanced in particular PvZ.

How often do the balance patches get released? Can we expect one in the next few months?

I know the balance council decided to just let things slide and “see how it plays out” for certain last minute changes. In my opinion they should have delayed the balance patch instead and left it in ptr longer when they made last minute changes.

Zerg is very weak overall right now, not saying it’s unplayable or anything silly like that but it is weak. I’ve seen some pro players who play Zerg quit the game until at least the next balance patch and I’ve seen others swap to Protoss.

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no one knows when or if were getting anymore patchs. as of right now you know full well already there being done by the balance council which is a bunch of pros. The reason for this is because blizzard pretty much stop patching it for almost a year or so if not more and I dont think they intended to do so. But they community pressured for it and they made the balance council with the pros to do the work. So far we have had 3 by them and frankly the state of the game was far better before they touched it. Due to conflict of interest it seems theres alot of infighting going on so who knows if were gonna get anymore. Now with sc2 tournements slowing down who knows whats gonna happen.

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I don’t play SC2 and for a good reason. Just watching how HM loses to a non-pro GM protoss with very toxic build after the toss losing the battles a lot of times on this sandy map is it King’s Cove - wasn’t this map from previous years? Just endless spam of zealots, stalker colossi and disruptors, and DTs to snipe CC’s that’s all they need

And most of GM’s top places are taken by protoss

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PiG used protoss to beat Byun on stream recently. Byun is 7,000 mmr. PiG is 5400 with Protoss. The mmr equation says 1 / (1 + exp(r1-r2 / 400)) is the expected winrate. The expected win-rate for PiG is then 1.7% and for Byun it’s 98.2%.

If we have a 98% chance of failure, how many times would we have to run this experiment until we had a 50% chance of getting a single success? Byun and PiG would have to face 41 times for a 50% chance of PiG winning once. How many times did they play? Only three. In fact, in PiG’s/Byun’s entire career, there are only 24 games recorded between the two and the only time PiG has won was when he played Protoss.

Toss is absolutely giga busted. Anyone who denies it is blind or crazy.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2402464876?t=2h47m19s

Pig probably would’ve won game 2 as well if he didn’t do ridiculously insane things like fighting into an already sieged liberator position when the terran is already in position with his ground support army. Where is the warp prism? Where is the multiprong? Where are the tactics to get the liberators unsieged? Where are the tactics to separate the ground support from the liberators? We’re just gonna attack into an entrenched position cuz we play toss.

He does this over and over again by the way. He just throws endless units into a liberator+planetery meat grinder and somehow the fights are still close.

He isn’t multipronging either so he keeps losing bases to ByuN who does multiprong.

He is totally winning this game until he refuses to build a phoenix vs liberators, keeps responding to lib harass with a carrier, keeps losing bases to the lack of multiprong, etc, but he’s totally winning. The spot where he loses is when he stops making colossi and instead makes mass archon vs a terran who is already on ghost tech. 2,000 gas evaporates to emp as a result.

Positioning issues. Unit comp issues. Issues with gauging when to take fights. Issues with army rotations. Issues with multiprong. A couple of issues with detection. Issues with mobility vs liberator harass. Still winning vs 7k mmr terran until the archon mistake.

1 Like
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The last patch notes made it sound like there weren’t going to be any more balance patches.

If there are going to be, the notes were worded strangely.

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The last patch notes did? Really? I’ll have to review them.

I thought the patch notes said something more like “We are going to monitor how these changes affect the game” — I swear there was something like that because of the mothership changes or something

Going to check

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yes it says (About Zerg versus Protoss)
—> […] We received suggestions for some experimental changes to address this matchup, but they would require extensive testing, which would significantly delay the release of the patch. Therefore, we will not proceed with any experimental changes for now and will carefully monitor the state of the matchup going forward.

—> I would argue that the state of the matchup is very imbalanced and it requires a “hot fix/patch up” sooner rather than later.

1 Like
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Ah that’s a good sign.

I saw the “After several weeks of balance testing on the PTR server, we are pleased to release the final set of balance changes” in the intro paragraph which had me wondering if they meant forever.

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thats cause they put out 2 different ptrs on that patch. the first one was so bad they went and tweaked it again, before the live patch, which was a complete blunder in itself.

2 Likes
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I don’t get it, isn’t this the standard for protoss forever ? I know they are imba but what you’re saying doesn’t have to do wth the patch

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and frankly people who dont play sc2 shouldnt even be posting on the forums like they know the game. thats just straight up bs

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Yes it is the standard (it shouldn’t be though) but the difference is with the current patch it’s gone from poorly balanced to awfully balanced.

Currently Zerg in general in EXTREMELY underpowered and it’s not just vs Protoss, it’s vs Terran as well

TvZ has a 58% win rate for Terran and 42% for Zerg
PvZ also has a 58% win rate for Protoss and 42% for Zerg.

According to blizzard themselves (iirc) they say that anything that is 55% or higher is considered unbalanced.

Personally I think anything beyond 52.5% (or even 51.5%) is unbalanced but that’s besides the point.

Certain stats/sites even have Protoss wins as high as 60 to 66% vs Zerg.

I tell that to players and they think it’s totally fine (of course, they’re Protoss players so why wouldn’t they).

Making a race that is easier to play and also stronger than the others in all the different ways is what’s causing this issue.

Protoss currently have the most mobility due to all their warps (prisms, pylons, gates, mothership, recall) AND the most powerful units.

Any fan of Day9 knows that this is unbalanced. Mobile armies are supposed to be scrappy and weaker (i.e. like the Zerg), strong armies are supposed to have less mobility but trade better (i.e. the protoss) — currently the Protoss have both.

The Terran on the other hand are way too powerful when they turtle. You basically can not beat them with a straight on attack so if they want they can just decide to max out their army, kill their SCVs because they can just use mules and max out an even larger army and annihilate the Zerg army and bases in a fel swoop.

Not sure if the balance changes to Terran caused this, but I do think that making the queens more expensive has done a lot more damage to Zerg than the balance council expected/wanted.

42% win rate is awful. It means that 58% of the time, you should lose, except vs. Zerg where it’s obviously 50/50 depending on if you’re good or bad at that matchup.

Zerg are going to have to get a lot better because of this, and let’s face it, Zerg is already a challenging race that requires more reactive as well as proactive play than the other races.

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People always complain about Zerg creep spread and overlords, but they don’t understand that it’s both a blessing and a curse. An overlord getting sniped can be the reason you lose because of a coming attack, and if you aren’t spreading creep you’re going to lose often against Terran or Protoss.

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Once we Zerg adapt to this abysmal balance patch, maybe the next patch will buff Zerg in some way(s) and then the Zerg who weathered the storm (no pun intended) of this patch will be crushing T and P and then you’ll hear about all the “OP Zerg” comments constantly.

1 Like
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used to play* not never played it’s just enough to see nothing changed even though the odds were seen as more even PvT recent years

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The “final changes” were just in reference to that balance patch.

The big issue is that ESL oversees the balance council and the esports plans for this year are all up in the air. Until EWC is figured out everything is going to stay silent.

If the ESL/EWC stuff isn’t resolved I don’t think the balance council can continue. I know the Warcraft RTS team has done balance changes on WC2 and WC3 so I guess they could get involved. Regardless, we’re not going to hear anything at all until the SC2 esports picture is planned out or just dropped.

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wrong, that was in reference to the tweeks made to the initial ptr run that they then issued a second ptr with those tweeks before the live patch went out that was then botched 3 different times.

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I love how everybody says “zerg is underpowered”, “protoss is almost dead race”, meanwhile nobody plays Terran especially on the forum as they gave up long time ago already.

1 Like
16

So true they are ruining the game more