The game is no fun with one side having the ability to instantly win the game with very little effort; this stuff happens EVEN AT THE PRO LEVELS meaning this aint a skill issue as but a giant problem with game balance! This is no big surprise there considering the current balance team favors terrans to a ridiculous amount and seem to simply hate protoss! Even last GSL was pretty much win and lost by mine drops its just silly!
Solution get a non biased balance team and replace the current group or who ever is doing it!
Widow Mines need a rework. Most people hate them, but they still use them, because they are forced to do so in order to compete. I hate those big AoE damage units, like WMs and Disruptors.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Widow Mines explicitly changed to deal 35 (splash) damage to workers, and possibly Observers. Just put a validator in that switches the damage values against those specific targets, and their normal damage values against everything else.
Yeah, I wouldn’t mind that. That alone would solve so many issues and make mine drops not quite as punishing.
Unfortunately mines are kinda a necessity against certain unit compositions though, and you have to be extremely careful about how you nerf them. But I do think they’re a little to good right now. Even a build time reversion back to the slower 30 second build time they had previously would be good.
Yes, they are annoying, but they are not free at all. In 1V1 I build an early observer. In 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 I build both an early observer and a forge and a few canons when I can afford it. The opponent who is sitting with invisible units is now not scary at all, and since we are more players, my investment can easily be accepted since my fellow players can also benefit from my detectors
One thing I don’t really get is that in the last patch banelings were nerfed so they cannot oneshot workers, because “so many times we’ve seen that a protoss player had a perfect defense but one baneling slipped through and killed 20 workers” yet widow mines which can do the same (and then stay alive to shoot again) got a buff (unburrow speed)
That is true, but there are a number of reasons why they probably didn’t nerf Widow Mines.
First, Widow Mines actually need their damage against most other targets. They are a fixed damage unit, not one that is affected by upgrades or armor. For that reason, it is very unlikely that the Widow Mine’s damage would ever be reduced for the sake of workers. That is unless that nerf comes in the form of some kind of damage switch where it doesn’t affect other units, like I explicitly suggested above. Reducing the standard damage wouldn’t even solve the problem, because Widow Mines would still one-shot Probes if any shield bonus is left.
Second, Widow Mines also take a longer time to setup, and they hit a smaller radius than Banelings do. So, when both Banelings and Widow Mines “could” one-shot workers, the Widow Mines were actually the lesser threat. Banelings that rolled in could chase down workers and kill more of them.
Widow Mines also fall off as a harassment unit (relative to other units) in the late-game when bases are more spread out and players can more easily afford to put down more cannons or Spine Crawlers to deal with them. Banelings and Widow Mines are basically “threats” to workers at different phases of the game. Widow Mines are a worker threat early because Medivacs enable them to be dropped at any base early, when there aren’t enough units or cannons to cover every angle. Banelings become a bigger threat later when players have expanded such that they can afford cannons to deal with Mines, but Banelings can roll into pretty much any base on the map.
My last point is that the unburrow speed change probably wasn’t expected to be used for Widow Mine drops. I doubt it would have been introduced with that goal.
Anyway, changing Widow Mines to explicitly deal 35 splash damage to workers would fix the issue.
Game is balanced around win rates.
Basically people with equal skill playing against each other have equal chance of winning.
That means that that while BS-wins when WM or hellion drop kill ~15 probes do happen, chances of Terran player of equal skill to Protoss player winning when such drop DO NOT happen are significantly less than 50%. Something like 33% I would say.
So in order to remove BS like WM drop you need first to imagine how re-design TvP middle and late game in a way that would nerf Protoss MASSIVELY. Are you sure that you want to?
WM have smaller splash radius, need to be controlled (Banelings are shift-click-and-forget sort of thing) and are slow enough for probes to run away from them.
Agree. it’s funny how disruptor, Bane get a nerf (both anti-bio tools btw). But Wm that fits the same pattern. no change, on the contrary even a mini buff. Where is the visual effect?
Wasn’t that a goal, just like the mid game in TvP?
and the sad thing is there are so many possibilities:
nerf aoe dmg
nerf versatility → no air targets
nerf radius
increase cost / sup/ build time
height unburrow prio from 19-20
bring an upgrade scaling for the dmg (0/0 WM kill 3/3…)
make wm passive if no other unit is nearby
or increase aoe dmg we also see in TvT mine drop in early/mid game.
That would be a buff not a nerf. Widow mines currently do spell damage, which is why they don’t scale with upgrades at all (armour aside). It’s also why they ignore armour.
However, having mines scale with upgrades means that every upgrade they’d be doing a minimum of 5 damage more in their splash - to 55 damage per shot, while the single target damage would go up the same.
This would actually be a great nerf to it honestly.
Sure, I don’t think that would be liked by Protoss players at all given how it would eat into their HP pool a lot more though.
Gotta be careful how you do this because this was done previously and it completely killed the mine’s usability entirely, which is a bad thing. At the time, it also completely removed the Terran race from play, but it’s a different game now and tanks are a lot stronger. It would really hurt TvP though, a lot more than people think it would IMO.
Mmmm… maybe. Marines are really vulnerable to oracles early on without stim/combat shields. Previously Cyclones were the alternative to mines for early oracle defense, but honestly they straight up suck vs Protoss now, but I could see this being feasible - or delayed to being an upgrade - as long as it’s done with caution.
Depends on how much, but definitely an option. I’ve advocated in the past for a reversion to the build time buff that happened when mines were changed a few years ago. A cost increase wouldn’t go awry either. A little more gas maybe. Numbers can be tweaked though.
Maybe they should simply replace WMs with Vultures from BW. You know, like they could also replace Stalkers with Dragoons and Disruptors with Reavers. -_-
Vultures are too redundant with both Hellions and Cyclones. This doesn’t mean that they can’t be added, but there isn’t much of a place for them apart from laying the mines.
Vultures also perform significantly worse than both units because they have worse stats (in every iteration) and a higher tendency to overkill (worse than Cyclones). Brood War’s path-finding also played a very big role in the BW vulture’s success, both in terms of dragging enemies into Spider Mines, and allowing groups of Vultures to swing by and shoot at enemy ranged troops with minimal retaliation.
Spider Mines are difficult to get working in SC2. The biggest problem is that SC2’s improved AI causes ranged units to shoot Spider Mines immediately as they try to unburrow, which makes the Mines useless unless you do something funky to them:
The SC2 campaign handles this by making Spider Mines invulnerable when they unburrow to attack.
Starbow made Spider Mines operate like suicidal Widow Mines that locked onto targets before committing suicide and firing a projectile that looks like them.
SC2 coop changed the combat priority of Spider Mines to zero, so the Mines are always ignored if something else is present. The last approach arguably only works out because coop friendly-fire is disabled and detection is limited.
Spider Mines and Widow Mines also have very different splashes, which might change their use cases. The Spider Mine’s splash is several times more powerful near the center, but it gets weaker in its 50%/25% radii respectively (depending on if the targets have shields). This could make Spider Mines significantly more dangerous against stronger or higher-cost units compared to Widow Mines.
Tbh I think tweaking the damage would be problematic either way. I personally would like to see a wm nerf in terms of increasing build time and/or cost. That wouldn’t solve mine drop, but it’s a super annoying unit that the terran can just build, burrow in random places on the map and forget about it.
Or maybe nerf the HP of wm it has 3x that of a baneling which had HP nerfed
Honestly this alone would make mines much less dangerous beyond the initial mine drop timing. 4 mines a medivac is frequently seen dropping in multiple mineral lines, so this halves the response that you have to do.
It takes care of the 3-4 widow mine drop but doesn’t stop the insaneness of leaving 1 medivac with 1 mine in a deadspace area to get some cheap ez kills which is arguably just as bad.
I think both changes have to happen together to really put Widow Mines back into a healthy spot…not that they were ever in a healthy spot lol.
it has 3x that of a baneling which had HP nerfed