It is the single most one dimensional thing in gaming. Imagine literally just spamming cannon battery which is completely unattackable with an air deathball that no composition in the game can come CLOSE to beating, that also out ranges and eventually kills everything by going tempest.
Juggernaut jason is 100% correct, going air toss is like punching someone in the face.
It’s basically like having a chess match and then you pull out a gun and shoot someone, with no chance of them grabbing it because they were tied to a wheelchair from the beginning. There is no satisfaction, nothing. There are no words to describe skytoss because nothing compares to it.
Letting someone get up to skytoss is the equivalent of that person gaining 7K mmr.
Skytoss is Not that hard to Deal with. Get over it. I Play every Race at Masters Level and No Race has a hard time dealing with skytoss per se.
Every Race has Something that is much much much Harder to Deal with when it Hits a critical Mass or If its a Tech Switch. Be it mech Terran vs zerg or lurkers vs protoss or Ghosts vs zerg or Ghosts vs protoss.
Dude if skytoss was easy to deal with, GM wouldnt be almost 45% Protoss GLOBALLY with hundreds of players in masters/GM with apm less than 150 because all they do is sit behind a shield battery and spam skytoss.
This isnt even viable. If you lose vs someone who just sits behind cannons and shield batteries while building the most expensive most tech heavy and slow to build t3 unit then its fully on you.
Maybe tech to the things that counter skytoss instead of running into cannon/battery with a bad army?
Skytoss relies on storm/archon support in PvT/PvZ to deal with corruptors/vikings, since both of those units beat every protoss air unit/composition otherwise with significantly less investment. Even with storm/archon support, T/Z have tools that still allow them to beat the fight (notably ghosts/infestors/vipers; and/or pre-splitting to mitigate splash. Ultras are also very good vs storm/archons.).
Losing to a 2-3 base turtle into skytoss is 100% just a scouting/reaction issue.
Bare minimum, interceptors should require individual micro like marines. Marines are really bad without micro, and that’s how interceptors should be. What little micro is required is so easy to do that anyone can do it. That’s the fundamental issue of protoss imbalance. The units are too consistent. It doesn’t matter whether an ape or s-tier protoss is in control, the units do the same thing. This means top protoss can’t refine their unit control to get extra value. That means to compete with serral protoss as a race has to be flat buffed. Because every protoss uses the units about as effectively as everyone else, everyone benefits equally from the flat buffs.
Fixing protoss is easy. Remove the automation from the race. Immortal barrier should not trigger automatically. Charge should not trigger automatically. Interceptors should not auto-micro. Interceptors should behave like marines where they are basically worthless without micro. Etc.
It’s very easy to fix protoss. Simply stop automating all the micro out of the race. The day when apes can’t f2 amove into GM will be the day SC2 is saved. Until then it’s going to keep hemorrhaging players because Protoss dominance is a severe obstacle to having fun and that causes players to leave. Looking at historical trends, the more protoss has dominated the more the game’s popularity has tanked. Just stop giving protoss literally every benefit of the doubt. Apply equal scrutiny to each race & you’d quickly conclude top protoss just suck at SC2 & that the premier scene has nothing to do with balance. It’s absurd to prioritize premier tournaments over the player base.
It’s just kind of amusing watching the forums go on about the developers of SC2 long after those lads have moved on to start start their own studios. Beating a dead horse never gets old and I get a kick out of how it never fails to provoke people either!
Sc2 1v1 is now actively developed by the “balance counsel” who have shown a profound protoss bias. Protoss dominates literally every metric except premier tournament finals, and anyone with eyes knows this is because the protoss have a shot at winning but screw it up with bad play, so they rigged balance to practically guarantee a Protoss will win, but still they can’t. Just recently in HSC a protoss had literally unlosable games & threw them because he refused to make anything but zealots. Had he made 1 stargate or 1 templar the game would’ve been won & he would’ve won the tournament. Understanding unit comps is too much to expect of a premier protoss champion according to the balance counsel. Do you think it’s a coincidence that protoss love to mass zealots of all things? Why zealots? Is it because the are the epitome of amove? Amoving is literally the only thing you can do with a zealot, micro wise, and top protoss are obsessed with massing these things. Why is that? Why not mass any other unit? Toss can’t win premiers due to a skill issue and the balance counsel has ruined 1v1 competitive play by buffing all of toss to compensate for the skill issue at the top. Buffing protoss has made the skill issue worse because the players are allowed to be even lazier when playing. It’s to the point it’s a meme where toss players take only 4 gas and throw waves of 20 zealots at the terran until he folds. It’s the epitome of laziness.
To be frank, that is a really dumb suggestion. There is pretty much no situation where a Protoss player would want to try to micro Interceptors like Marines, as they aren’t as important and don’t face the same threats. It also completely misses the reasons why Marines require micro, that requirement is a side effect of the Marine’s low-health, high scaling, and available counters.
Marines need a certain critical mass to trade effectively; they are highly vulnerable to splash even at that point; and in the presence of splash or an army that Marines do not have the mass to beat, they need to kite, split, or run and avoid combat to be efficient.
None of those factors really apply to Interceptors, so the most you would get from the ability to command Interceptors is a-move commands or a possible exploit that would allow Interceptors to launch an attack from beyond the Carrier’s normal range.
Even if you gave Protoss complete control over Interceptors:
They never have the ability or need to kite.
They cannot escape in situations that the Carrier cannot, so there is no point to running. The surviving Interceptors will just return to the Carrier if it gets away.
The Interceptors are not nearly as important as the Carrier itself, so losing Interceptors is not really a big deal. This is just one of the many reasons why the opponent should always focus the Carriers or other units over the Interceptors if they have the capacity to do so, and Interceptor priority was explicitly lowered so that the opponent (Zerg, Terran, or other Protoss) does not need micro to accomplish that.
There aren’t nearly as many sources of splash that can hit air units like Interceptors.
The few splash units that can hit air tend to have problems that would make dodging them pointless with Interceptors. Some sources like Fungal or Parasitic Bomb, have splash radii that are just too big to dodge if you are fighting (Interceptors literally don’t have the range when PB is involved), so these Interceptors are just better off continuing to fight if the Carriers are close enough to be in any danger. Other sources like Javelin Missiles and Archons have small enough radii that the basic scattering done by Interceptors as they idle is enough to mitigate most of the splash damage. Liberators fall somewhere between those extremes, but their DPS is too low for Interceptors to worry about.
An alternative (assuming Carriers actually need a nerf) would be to change Carriers to function a bit more like their Brood War counterparts, where several tricks (such as hold position or manually switching targets when something dies) need to be employed to prevent the Interceptors from returning to the Carrier after killing their current target; however, even that might be considered too cumbersome and it may not always matter much considering the Interceptor’s very long attack cooldown (3 seconds on normal, 2.1428 seconds on faster).
They fill the same exact role. Marines are cheap mineral only units that are carried around in medivacs, used to reach over terrain, and are an efficiency tool for trading minerals for gas. That’s the same exact role the interceptor fills. Interceptors have more parallels than that. They are high DPS and low health, identical to marines which are also high dps and low health. The interceptor is a protoss marine, but it doesn’t require micro while the marine requires a ton of micro. If a terran doesn’t micro, he will lose 100 marines to like 5 banes. Protoss can f2 aclick carriers through even players like Dark and Serral. The interceptor needs to require micro.
It’s the same for interceptors.
It would be the same for interceptors IF interceptors didn’t auto-micro.
And the interceptor should require the same.
That’s the point.
I 100% guarantee that a Protoss will find the “need to kite” after all his interceptors die to 1 fungal.
Which is why it’s an f2+amove unit.
Exactly the issue at play here.
Nah if toss had to micro all his interceptors like a zerg has to micro his mutalisks, it opens up the possibility to delete all the interceptors for free with 1 fungal and 1 parasitic bomb, which is something that regularly happens in ZvZ with mutalisk play. Carriers would only be strong for players who are capable of doing bait & split micro similar to what a terran does with his marines. Adding micro to Protoss is a good thing.
NOPE. Broodwar has the same issues only worse. Heading towards Broodwar’s design is the absolute last thing that SC2 should do.
This is what I would do. Add a deploy and recall button to the carrier. If you hit deploy, the interceptors pop out in front of the carrier but nothing else. It behaves like the medivac’s unload command. From there the toss has to tell the interceptors what to do or they sit there doing nothing (unless they react to an attack in which case they will return fire). If the protoss does not deploy his interceptors, the carriers easily die. If he does not micro the interceptors, they easily die to splash. If he does not recall the interceptors, similar to a medivac doing a “hot pickup” of marines, then the interceptors easily die. The lack of micro for protoss units is a joke. There is no reason that protoss should get such extreme preferential treatment.
Could you imagine marines that automatically hop out of medivacs, split micro themselves, and then hop back into the medivacs? They got flipping reaper jet packs to help the marines hop 11 range back to the medivac. The idea is just out of this universe absurd, and yet it’s reality for protoss. Protoss design is a horrible joke. Medivacs at least have to risk themselves in order to do a hot pickup and that’s another way the “protoss marine” is just better. The carrier is also a mobile barracks that makes new “protoss marines” in addition to carrying them around. It’s crazy stuff. It blows my mind that people actually lose games with protoss.
The only similarities are that Marines and Carriers can sometimes be used as the core of an army based on the way that their DPS scales, and that the Interceptors themselves (notably not the Carriers) cost only Minerals. Other than that, these units have little in common.
Carriers are slow blimps that generally can’t harass or avoid combat because of that speed. This is opposed to the very high speed (or potential speed) of Marines and Medivacs, which can harass and respond to threats all over the place; so that point of comparison flies out the window.
The “trading minerals” argument is also bunk because of the difference in priority between these units. Marines are a high priority target because of their low health and high DPS; whereas Interceptors are perhaps the worst target you could ever focus because of their high health (80 health each on effectively 0.75 supply), low DPS (4.667 on faster before armor or Microbial Shroud), cheap cost (15 minerals as opposed to 50), and fast replenishment time (9s). Basically, if you can reach any combat unit or caster besides the Interceptors, that unit is probably a better target.
Furthermore, every combat unit that actually counters Carriers can reliably reach the Carriers instead of spending time fruitlessly attacking Interceptors. Corruptors, Vikings, Thors, Void Rays, Tempests, and Battlecruisers can all reach the Carriers rather easily. Other combat units require caster support to compete if the Carriers ever match their supply count, and that is assuming these units can even get close enough to fight back without being denied by splash or ground forces. Even when the Carriers can’t be reached, attacking the Interceptors rather than retreating may just be a losing battle.
That comparison is so far off that it is stunning you can be this wrong.
Individual Interceptors have very low DPS (4.6667) and a ton of health 80 considering that their cheap mineral cost and effective supply cost of 0.75. It is not worth it to attack Interceptors if you have another option. Carriers were explicitly nerfed by lowering Interceptor priority because of this.
Sorry, but that is just wrong.
Carriers are supply-efficient against most ground units and a few air units (Mutalisks, Liberators, Phoenixes) out of the gate, and they sort of have to be because of their slow speed (which typically means no escape). This is assuming that the opponent focuses the Carriers over the Interceptors, as focusing the Interceptors only makes things worse for that opponent.
Carriers are also reliably beaten by their counters even at high supply counts, as their more concentrated health and supply ensures that even projectile units do not waste many shots. For comparison, most projectile units waste shots on Marines in larger fights because of the Marines’ high body count and low health, and this is one of several factors that enables Marines to out-scale their opponents.
And it clearly flew over your head.
That’s a fairly ridiculous expectation.
Marines have some ability to kite against Adepts, Roaches, Zerglings, Banelings, Zealots, and Dark Templar because they outrange them. Interceptors don’t outrange any unit that can attack air, making the decision to “kite” worse for Interceptors than it is for the opponent in all instances. It’s like asking Zealots to try to kite Marines.
Carriers also can’t run, so that ceases to be an option either in most situations. The Interceptors will still be forced to fight.
Which is why players don’t care if you are wasting time trying to shoot down Interceptors. “Theoretically” you might drain some of the Protoss player’s minerals, but you will lose a lot more in the process.
And your change does what? Keep all of the splash the options the same, but make Interceptors a little more vulnerable to some of them?
In exchange, Carriers just received an effective range buff, and they gain DPS due to the fact that they don’t need relaunch Interceptors every fight, and they lose nothing because there is never any reason to recall Interceptors to the Carrier. You just F2+a-move with the Interceptors now.
Brood War Carriers are weaker than SC2 Carriers and they require more micro to keep their Interceptors out.
Every time they kill something you would need to micro them, or your Interceptors would miss a few attacks getting recalled and deployed. The DPS loss from this would be a little less in SC2 than in Brood War because SC2 Interceptors have a higher burst on a longer cooldown, but it would still be significant difference in performance between players who are focus-firing their Carriers and those who aren’t.
Frankly, the only match-up where Carriers performed better in Brood War was against Terran, and that was because of differences with BW Terran in particular.
A combination of factors (weaker economy, more expensive infrastructure, more difficulty getting and holding expansions) made it far more difficult for Terran to transition into Wraiths or Ghosts with lockdown. BW Wraiths beat Carriers even without cloak if you used focus-fire properly, but getting there was a challenge.
The bad pathing made it difficult for Goliaths approach and stack up.
Goliaths were disincentivized because they performed poorly against most Protoss ground units (worse than both Vikings and Thors), so it was easier to be caught unprepared.
This has exactly the problems I expected. Congratulations, you have now buffed Carrier range up to 15, and enabled them to keep their Interceptors out at all times, turning a constant challenge for Brood War players into the Carrier’s default behavior. You do realize that this causes more problems than it solves right?
The current Carrier is limited to a deployment range of 8 and a leash range of 12, and you cannot account for these two different values in your model. Anything within the leash range of the Interceptors plus their own range would be fair game for the Interceptors, allowing the Carriers to stay further back while they send their Interceptors out; and they really don’t care about losing those Interceptors. This is basically the scrapped release-Interceptor ability, active at all times.
Recalling the Interceptors also does pretty much no good, since SC2 Interceptors never repair hull damage inside of the Carrier. You might as well just remove the ability because there is never a reason to use it. Even if you “think” this is about protecting the Interceptors, doing it with Parasitic Bomb will just damage the Carriers, and there is pretty much no combat situation where protecting the Interceptors inside the Carrier will be more beneficial than attacking. You are just taking damage for no reason at that point.
Right. Nearly nothing Protoss has is difficult to deal with. Protoss gets 45% of GM because it fell out of the sky like magical fairy dust. Pros say things like “Terran is the hardest race,” but what could THAT mean? And the average MMR is higher because, again, magical fairy dust.
Meanwhile, I played a BO7 against my GM Zerg buddy off racing to help him with his late game and I completely dominated 4-0 despite giving up 700 MMR (On MY MAIN RACE) to him.
On other responses i pretty much explained it. Carriers alone arent hard to Deal with. Almost any Basic unit can kill Them easily. Whats hard to Deal with is the Support. Like high temps for example.
And No fair representation in top pro Level. Both Points are Important for People in top 0.001% but Not for the Casual Player. For People below that Level its fine.