I admit the spell is rather underwhelming, that said, if you stack it up to AAM (closest Terran counterpart), it doesn’t seem better or worse, which would be balanced.
Follow up question, though. If we leave AOE in the game, how come Terran doesn’t get to have any?
its not scaling up though. shroud is doing what it says. 50% reduction. the armor of the units is doing the rest of it.
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That is not correct. Microbial Shroud is effectively reducing damage far more than 50% because it applies before armor. If Hardened Shields worked that way in WOL and HOTS, then Immortals with shield upgrades would have taken no more than 7 damage from anything.
In both cases, the additional reduction is abusive and clearly unintended.
that isn’t microbial shroud doing that though. thats the armor doing that. for what you want, microbial shroud would have to provide less then 50% dmg mitigation.
different abilities are different. sorry you don’t like it.
if its unintended, why wasn’t it fixed ages ago during testing? gasp.
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QQ…
20 characters
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Of course it is. The order that Microbial Shroud applies is different than the order that hardened shields applied. That is what created this effect.
No, applying after armor would mean that Microbial Shroud always reduces damage taken by exactly 50%, not 80% for Carriers and 53% for Liberators, etc.
An 8 damage unit attacking a 0 armor unit under Microbial Shroud would still deal 4 damage. An 8 damage unit attacking a unit under Microbial Shroud would deal 3.5 damage (50% of the damage outside of Shroud) instead of the 3 damage that it currently deals.(42.86% of the damage taken outside of Shroud).
Remember that AAM bug that went unfixed for months until the latest balance patch, and the leash range bug on Brood Lords that existed for years before it was finally fixed.
Yeah, Blizzard regularly misses stuff and takes months or years to patch it. That isn’t a surprise.
It is not abusive in any case. If it is intentional or not depends on blizzard not on you
Are we excluding aoe attacks that aren’t spells? Like hellions, hellbats, widow mines, liberator AA, and nukes? And would we count AAM because it doesn’t do damage but debuffs armor, which translates into damage when used properly?
I think this is a fair point, and I’m glad that the AAM bug vs splash damage was fixed, but there is no upgrade requirement for AAM, whereas shroud requires a hive level upgrade to unlock. I think it should either be more accessible/ more powerful/ or cost at least a bit less energy. But it may still be too early to tell given it only just went live on ladder. Maybe if it was a bit more attractive to use it could be utilized, we’d discover if/how it could realistically be used/abused, and changed accordingly. Even tho it’s through testing, it still seems experimental
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I’m not sure exactly how to buff it, but yeah, it needs a buff. Maybe just give it 1.5x its current range, damage reduction and reduce both the energy cost and upgrade requirement. Try everything at once lolz.
What’s about shifting the power between Neural Parasite and Microbial Shroud?
I don’t mind the current state of Neural Parasite as it is (except most whiners), but I think if they want to address the Shroud then they have to remove some power from Fungal or Neural and give it to Shroud. I think Neural is a better candidate of giving power due to both abilities tend to work with late-game air units.
My ideas are:
Neural Parasite
- Unit being controlled can no longer attack or using spell but still be able to move or transform between mode
- Neural Parasite comes by default
This address some stale late-game engagement when you expect to use Neural Parasite on high-tier unit to turn against their own. With the decreasing in power, I think it is better to let Infestor has the ability by default
Microbial Shroud
- Now becomes a target spell, targeting friendly unit and the shroud will move along
- The shroud remains in the location where the unit died until it expires.
- Work on ground units, reducing damage taken from both air and ground units by 50% (doesn’t reduce spell damage).
With these changes, the skill will be more versatile and useful on more situations aside from using it just for Hydralisk or Queens. The problem for the change is that it may give too much power on ground units such as Ultralisk or Lurkers when fight against Bio or Immortal-Archon composition. This feels more like experiment than the first build
Again, I’m not against current Infestors that much, but maybe this should give some extra dynamic we never have on Starcraft 2. Don’t know how it gonna play out, but I would like to see it once.
I don’t think i like the idea of it following a unit around because it will make ling bane ultra even more powerful against terran comps while giving protoss a guaranteed hit on anything in the cloud with storm since it will be nearly impossible to split off a single unit from under the cloud
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