This post is coming from a long time StarCraft fan with not very many hours in WarCraft 3 comparatively, but from what I’ve seen from WC3, it has certain game mechanics that appeal to me, and every once in a while I decide to head over to Azeroth instead of the Koprulu Sector.
However, I’d also like to hear your guys’ reasons of preference. What do you think WC3 does better than SC?
Custom maps and the user friendly map editor. SC2 Arcade may be a lot better now, but it was such absolute trash at launch that it never came close to reaching the same heights as WC3 and it never will. The sucky part is everyone just kind of moved on, so I don’t think Reforged will have a a high population. It doesn’t help that there’s been no news and it’s looking increasingly likely that the game will be delayed (which is fine, but it would be helpful to actually be told this rather than being left in the dark).
the editor is easier to use for example(warcraft 3 editor is easier than starcraft 2 editor). starcraft 2’s co-op is very good which it does better. warcraft 3 however have 4 races over starcraft 2`s 3.
Overall the setting, I never partically liked starcraft artstyle or lore besides the protoss. Also I like the voice action of war2/war3 much more.
Team games (in special 3v3/4v4) are just so much more fun then starcraft 2 team games. I played diamond league level 4v4 in sc2, and it’s just 10 times more braindead then war3 4v4.
I like that you have to “work (aka playing the ladder)” for your warcraft 3 ladder icons, while you get most icons in sc2 for minimal effort.
ladder maps just look such much better and more “natural” then sc2 maps
Heroes and Micro are what make WC3 better than SC. in SC you mass an army and you might micro the army into position, but usually once youre in battle you rarely retreat save or heal up your units. In WC3 a single unit lost is much more important than in SC. in SC you might lose tons of units but that doesnt mean you lost. in WC3 losing a few units will set you quite a bit behind.
Games usually center around a hero (sorta like mobas) which has the strongest abilities in your army. Heroes can level up, gain XP and more abilities, by getting kills. So in a longer match a player might have very strong heroes in the late game, which sometimes can win a game without having a big army
Check out some replays of high skill players here:
IMHO there is very few things that Starcraft does better than Warcraft.
The only thing that i can think of as a point for starcraft is its lightning-fast kill time - but at the same time this is its greatest flaw because the fights are over so quickly that you spend 10 minutes building for every 10 seconds of combat…
Depends on your preferences.
Competitively Starcraft is a faster pace rts.
You build faster, you train units faster, you harvest faster, you have bigger armys on screen at once, but they die faster. Warcraft generally has beefier units, what this does is it slows down fights so you can use your hero units efficiently. (Hero units are basically a unit that has a ton of hp and crushing abilities.
Starcraft does not have pve elements in competitive play. In Warcraft 3’s online games you can really tell that this inspired the moba genre. Once you create a hero unit you will want to run him around the map and kill mob caps that will grant xp. (while building your base at the same time).
So not only are you racing your opponent in army size, you’re also racing against his hero’s xp.
Anyways it’s really up to you, I love both game. One makes me want to play the other honestly. If you hate mobas you probably won’t like warcraft 3 but if you like sc and mobas you’ll probably love it lol.
What made Warcraft III successful is hard to see by just installing the game, I believe. I began to remember when I installed Reign of Chaos Patch 1.00 from our family CD. The Unit Editor in that version is simple, elegant, and straightforward for players. This Unit Editor was inspired by the Warcraft 2 editor and is very simple. It presents a list of game units organized by race, and offers the ability to edit their basic stats. There is nothing too complex in it. There are no “Rawcode Unit IDs” (these are heavily used in our “modern” map development), and you cannot change the ultimate design of a unit. Sheep cannot attack and cannot be changed to attack. Heroes are heroes and cannot be changed to non heroes. Heroes have an inventory and units do not. Units have a set of voice lines per unit that cannot be changed. You cannot Copy&Paste a unit to make a new one, although there is a menu option to launch a wizard to make a new unit inheriting data from an original one, but with a new name.
In this Unit Editor, you cannot make new abilities and you cannot change the text on what abilities claim to do. Its only function besides editing unit stats is to edit items, which are pivotal to the feel of the game and the Heroes. For items there is just a basic list of options that lets you modify what icon they show and what text they display, as well as some other stats such as Gold Cost. You can also give items “abilities” from other items, so you could change Orb of Fire to also give you “Item Damage Bonus (+5)” which is an ability that means the item gives 5 more damage to the hero when carried (on top of whatever it already did).
In that old game version, you can also change the model of a unit to the model for any other unit. It uses the same dialog that the Icon chooser uses, letting users pick the unit to inherit the model from based on their in-game icon.
Almost every statement that I just made is contradictory to their modern counterparts in The Frozen Throne. Why? Because everything was changed to be more complicated in Frozen Throne to “feed the beast” and to make players more able to mod the game. Blizzard in 2002-2004 tactically eased their player base into understanding the map editor by gradually improving its complexity, and they generally landed on a sweet spot in The Frozen Throne were it was easy to do 80% of the work of making World Editor content pretty quickly in a way that left the user able to test each change and each step and to take joy in their work.
The recent patches push that same agenda for “feeding the beast” even further. Now every unit or object in the World Editor shows its rawcode ID next to it, scaring away new players by declaring that “a World Editor user must be aware of the complications of rawcode IDs.” The game now supports new hacked-in functions to load UI table of contents files in the ancient 2002 format used internally at Blizzard for defining UI. It allows players to hack apart the hardcoded game UI, and makes it possible to make a Diablo 2 style inventory popup on the screen with the injection of table of contents files even though changing heroes to have 9 items per hero inventory instead of 6 per hero inventory is immensely difficult.
Reaching the end of the spectrum where “anything is possible, but everything is complicated” is the reason that I did not like Starcraft 2 modding. If Starcraft 2 had kept the easy edits to the game simple to accomplish, it probably would have absorbed the Warcraft III modding community especially considering that Starcraft 2’s engine has been modded by fans to play a full working replica of the Warcraft III game inside of that engine.
But even knowing that Warcraft 3 replica exists on the Starcraft 2 engine, and that the Starcraft 2 engine is more fully featured, is not enough to bring the Warcraft III community to that game. It is not enough because the Warcraft III map developers probably do not honestly understand how the Warcraft III replica that runs on Starcraft 2 was created because it is too complicated – because Starcraft 2 is itself too complicated to develop maps easily.
So, in my opinion, the future of map and mod development on Warcraft III is grim because Blizzard is willing to give the players what they ask for: complex new modding APIs. By the nature of their complexity, the new APIs bring the game closer to the Starcraft 2 problem.
So, the thing that Warcraft 3 does better than Starcraft 2 is fading. But people do not change easily, so we still play Warcraft 3.
Honestly, I enjoy the Warcraft lore (pre WoW) more than StarCraft lore, but gameplay wise I wish WC3 was more like SC:BW. Elements of SC such as macro play, specialized units, split tactics, and racial identity are significantly diminished in WC3. I don’t mind hero-centric play per say, but I am really missing the feel of an epic massive battle taking place when I’m playing WC3. That and all of the races really just feel the same. All the races have heroes, basic combat units, spellcasters that are mainly just there to buff or debuff other units, a dispel unit, a worker that can repair damaged buildings, usage of items or hero abilities to heal your army, etc.
What WC3 really has over SC is user-friendly map customization. One of the projects I’m working on now is modding the WC3 campaign to reduce emphasis on hero-centric play, to make the races more unique, and to emphasize larger armies to give it a more epic feel.
Heroes units in VS games, not having your resources perfectly laid out in neat little rows, trolls.
More focus on micro rather than macro. As someone who doesn’t care to spend a majority of time hotkeying and producing from buildings and keeping focus in the battles, WC3 is my type of game.
Its the steppingstone towards what ultimately became the MOBA genre.
I don’t know about “better” but WC3 was definitely designed to do some things differently. The ideat was for it to be an alternative to Brood War rather than a replacement. The biggest differences revolve around the focus on hero units.
You need to regularly kill creeps(NPC units) to earn XP and items for you hero units so turtling is less rewarding. Your armies are smaller than in SC and the bigger your army is the more gold you lose to upkeep so you are encouraged not to max out unless there is a big fight coming up. Because you and your opponent gain XP for killing each other’s units it’s more important to keep your units from dying and to try to snipe their units. It’s especially important to keep your heroes alive as you miss out on XP while they are reviving. All races have workers and structures with defensive capabilities so the effectiveness of rushes is limited. There is a much bigger focus on spellcasting especially spells that limit the movement of enemy units and heroes so you can take them out. While your enemy’s army is killing creeps it can be beneficial to sneak in to steal a kill or an item or to attack them from behind while they are still engaging the creeps. Items play a big part and it’s very important to choose the best time to use consumable items like the Scroll of Town Portal. Invisibility is more limited and all invisible units reveal themselves if they attack.
That should sum up the biggest differences.
I like the faster and economic freedom of Starcraft2, large clusters of units duking it out is far more fun for me instead of babying a few heroes and using them to win. I would enjoy this game more without the heroes.
Everything tehe 
No, this is wrong. The problem with the SC2 editor is that ctrl-C and ctrl-V DO NOT WORK. You try that on a unit and you get a mess. If it didn’t take me 3 hours of struggle just to try and figure out how to copy a heart of the swarm kerrigan, I would have given sc2 modding more of a chance.
Sounds like I’m agreeing with you, right? Well I’m not. You’re generalizing too much. Think deductively not inductively. The War3 editor still has all its good user-friendly stuff. Ctrl-C, ctrl-V works. There are no hoops you have to jump through just to get a damn unit to work. The small stuff is still fast.
Unit editing turned me off to SC2. It’s just too much work for something that should be done in two seconds: ctrl C, ctrl V. These tags that you talk about? Those are fine, they don’t confuse anything.
So what I’m saying is having more power is fine, but don’t make the simple stuff super tedious in the process. Allow for a lot of things that SHOULD automatically be done to be automatically done. If the user wants to customize things further, they’ll dive into that when they’re ready. Don’t force them to do it. Ctrl-C, ctrl-V. That’s all it should take. Ctrl-c, ctrl-V, NOT ctrl-C, ctrl-V-and-then-spend-a-couple-hours-making-new-actors-and-reconnecting-old-ones-and-trying-to-figure-out-which-ones-need-duplicated-and-which-ones-don’t-just-to-get-one-f’in-unit-out-of-100-needed-for-the-map.
Sorry, a little bitter. I complained about this like day 1 of the SC2 beta.
Three big things, plus lots of small things:
XP makes the game more strategic. I don’t really care that much about heroes, but heroes are the standard place for storing a “resource” like XP. (You could do buildings or something, but heroes works).
Creeps. Having something to do in lots of the map makes battles less linear - it doesn’t have to be creeps, but they’re cool and creep/player/opponent interactions are nicely chaotic.
A slightly more detailed game universe which, among other things, makes the campaign more interesting (although, SC(1&2)'s campaigns are still better than any non-blizzard ones I’ve played).
And the small things:
Ultimately, it’s the mix of RPG and RTS that makes War3 more fun. The art style and its assets allow for a large variety of maps (games) to be created without them looking, out of place and weird.
For many players, it’s not the melee game that kept them playing, it’s the custom games.
I agree. They should have coded the copy system so that it copies anything relevant to that unit too. Sure it bloats the data with more entries but it would be more user friendly.
Heroes is the key difference in the game. The hero fighting creates an extremely dynamic depth to game play in PvP. If you can’t manage your hero’s, you’re not going to win. It adds positive micromanageability to the game that actually extends the game and makes it far more satisfying to win a fight when you kill the opponents heros.
Team fights are also more intense because the battles don’t end before everyone shows up. (usually players stick armies together when attacking anyway, but the last player in line still has a little more time to engage.)
Heroes also play an integral role in attacking mobs, looting mobs, buying items and mercenaries etc.
Which leads me to the editor. Because all of the above exists, the editor is inherently more powerful right out of the gate. Custom games like footman wars still rely on heroes to execute as intended and they’re great because of it.
i’ll just add my opinion…i love both games, and both are completely different in so many ways - namely the rpg influence on warcraft 3 kinda sets it apart from sc2…item collection, hero leveling and such play a huge role in war3 which makes it fun if i’m in an RPG mood i guess.
If i want really fast paced, get huge armies and murder opponent mode, games like sc2 float my boat.
I will disagree with players in here saying that one game is more micro based and the other more macro based…macro (economy control) is important in both games…just a little more complex in war3, since the upkeep system is something most players don’t fully understand til a few hundred games under their belt.
There are times where I feel like war3 is super micro heavy…then there are games where it feels a lot easier to micro. I’ll tell you one thing - I have more control groups and I feel like I use more abilities/micro harder in big battles in starcraft 2 than I do in warcraft 3.
In war3, big battles are pretty easy to micro…I mainly keep an eye on my heroes and have 3-4 control groups…compared to 7 or sometimes 8 in sc2 (i’m a zerg player). so /shrug
to answer the Original topic question…I think war3 is targetted at a larger group of players than starcraft 2. they kinda went the overwatch route and put huge emphasis on professional gaming in sc2, and a lot of casuals felt left behind…war3 however, look at all that’s come out of it. Custom game geniuses created games like aeon of strife/dota and those blossomed into new genres…
Some of the highest viewed war3 streams are custom gamers too…so that’s the strength in war3 over sc2. Just appeals to a larger variety of gamers. My sisters play war3 for customs for cryin out loud lol. that’s sayin something 
It goes to show that RPardo/Tcadwell all those dudes were just light years ahead of their time…look at the company now lol