after not playing this game for yrs i decided to hope on ladder again . being a ex master player but a bit rusty decide to pick up zerg wow what a stupid pick. It seems like terran or toss can just sit in their bases and do nothing all game then push out and now i just played a terran who just teleported all his battle cruisers on top of my main hatchery i mean was the blizzard balance team drunk when they made these decisions. It used to be zerg macroing and terran having to race against the clock now it seems terran and protoss can just do whatever and not have to worry about zerg at all. What has happened to this game its terrible now and all terran and toss does all game is just sit in their base and do nothing until they have a unbeatable army ? man these stupid decisions make me wanna go back to overwatch 2 and overwatch 2 is garbage but i’ll gladly play that over this crap. No wonder people are walking away from this horrible balance. This game used to be about stratagy and skill now it feels like its just a base builder with one attack after 20mins .
Hello Ghosthydra/Metalbeard.
Not saying bc opener is completly rare but its definitely not the meta. Playing and watching a lot of games at high diamond to high masters confirmes my assumptions. Most of the matches i see are pretty active and not those boring turtle styles. There are some that do that but most dont.
What is Ghosthydra/metalbeard ?.
Almost every ladder game i have played toss or terran just sit in their base and do nothing.
The game punishes for letting enemy amass tech and units. It makes sense, if it didn’t punish there would be no reason to go BC, it would be tier1-2 battles only.
In over summary, no.
The Battlecruiser was pretty bad at most levels of play. That’s why they buffed it so much in Legacy - It was just not good.
Tactical Jump, while incredibly weird and difficult to interact with, gives the BC a way to meaningfully contribute. Without it, the BC’s horrid speed made it easy to just dodge away from, but contrast the Thor -
The BC is not exceptionally good against a huge variety of targets, it’s much more hard-countered by certain units and those units are harder to invalidate - again to use the Thor, the Zergling super destroys it, but the Hellbat fairly similarly ruins Zerglings. Corruptors, however, only get truly no-sold by Ghosts*, which are… expensive, gas-intense, squishy, high-micro.
Yamato Cannon allows the Battlecruiser to deal significant damage to targets, but it takes a while before that’s actually accrued a lot of value - In the old system, you’re talking about a 2.5 minute cooldown** against the current 71 seconds. It also is a button that is very hard to use profitably, because the wind up means the BC will inevitably take damage that will take resources to repair up; since Terran really wants to save its BCs - and while cheap, repairs are not free -
Repairing 22 HP to a BC costs 4 minerals and 3 gas at maximum efficiency (1-2 SCVs repairing), which takes time that the unit’s not fighting, and it also means you aren’t mining.
Against Protoss, this is pretty high value - each Void Ray you snag is profitable as long as you take less than ~1000 damage across your BCs.
Against Zerg, a Corruptor flock needs to deal 730 damage per Corruptor lost to break even on gas and they’re Yamato-resistant by virtue of numbers.
This is a fairly extremely wacky thing to have - it’s such a high amount of damage to hit that it’s basically impossible - but while I’m happy to say it’s stupid and frustrating and obnoxious and deserves a why is this a thing; I don’t really think it’s particularly overpowered because a BC is very hard to build and Terran has the worst unit production of all three races.
This feeds into why Protoss tends to counter Battlecruisers with Stalkers instead of Void Rays or Tempests, because those units get countered too heavily by Yamato Cannon. However, Protoss’ bulky units with natural armor, accessibility of guardian shield, and superior ground-army mobility means that Terran doesn’t gain as much from using Battlecruisers until it gets enough of them - and that kind of transition represents a fairly significant moment of relative weakness for Terran’s production cycles.
In contrast, Zerg has difficulty building non Corruptor units that answer the Battlecruiser, so simply forcing the Spire and dedicated money on Corruptors can more easily be a worthwhile investment for Terran.
The fire-while-moving bonus also gave the BC some way to… actually contribute - with just 6 range and 1.875 WoL / 2.625 LotV speed, it simply had great difficulty doing anything whatsoever to units that wouldn’t stand and fight it, making its rapid fire rate not actually be a benefit but instead a detriment because kiting away from it meant it lost so much more damage than basically anything it had to fight.
* Yes, Vikings counter Corruptors. They’re not great at it.
** 125 energy / 0.5625 recovered per editor second = 222, then / 1.4 editor seconds per real second = 158.7 real seconds between Yamato Cannons.
That aside, I also totally agree that the costless tac-jump is a fairly wack ability and I don’t really like how it plays out, but they were trying to find something cool the unit could do that would give it a lot of power without changing its actual single-unit combat stats for LotV’s launch - and like the Medivacs lifting pre-Sieged Tanks idea, they wanted to specifically emphasize destroying economy or key structures, which is why the addition of Tactical Jump came from.
And even after adding Tactical Jump, a whole six years after the game’s launch, then also removing energy costs from the abilities because the unit was still that bad; they found out that the randomized attack delay mechanic in the game was causing the BC to randomly lose fights -
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/starcraft2/22372713/starcraft-ii-balance-revamp-2018
[…] the Battlecruiser’s high random delay ratio to the auto-attack cooldown could cause moments where the Battlecruiser would do less damage than expected. By removing it, we’re increasing Battlecruiser damage per second by roughly 20% […]
A balance affecting almost-bug that had been in the game for six years unnoticed because nobody actually built the unit except for the people who were so dedicated to building it that its actual stats were nearly irrelevant.
That, I think, explains just how bad the unit was at its task, that it took that many buffs to find out that this was even a problem.
Actually, this had been brought up several times on the old forums during HOTS, if not also WOL. I had explicitly mentioned it a few times. The random delay had a minimum of -0.0625 and a maximum of 0.1875. This added an average of 0.0625 seconds to the attack cooldown. Since the Battlecruiser’s attack cooldown was 0.225, this reduced the Battlecruiser’s DPS by about 22%.
There just wasn’t a drive to fix broken units or mechanics before LOTV. The devs in WOL and HOTS were happy enough to let most of the unit roster be useless.
By the way, the standard random delay for units is -0.0625 to 0.125, which adds an average of 0.03125 seconds to a unit’s attack. The higher random delay on Battlecruisers added twice that, which compounded with the Battlecruiser’s fast attack to significantly reduce their damage. And yes, that minimum value is usually “negative”, so units will occasionally shoot faster than their attack cooldown.
When the random delay problem was removed from Battlecruisers in LOTV, Blizzard made a conscious decision to reduce the air attack damage to 5, so that the Battlecruiser usually performs about the same against air units.
The Battlecruiser’s fast attack can also lead to wasted shots at units around 4.5 or more distance because of the fast attack rate compared to the speed of the projectile.
Note: All numbers used in this post are in editor seconds. Multiply or divide by 1.4x accordingly to get the “faster” speed values.