StarCraft 2

Well there isn't a unit like the Infestor in HOTS that completely and totally takes a shit on the opposing player's skill and ability to micro so I don't think it can really turn out that bad. The hard part about balancing the infestor is how much "weight" do you put on the disallowance of micro. If they buff some numbers here and there it will be a lot easier to balance around that.

And Toss can actually go head to head with Zerg in the late game. In fact I'd argue Zerg is on a timer in HOTS because once Toss gets an effective deathball Zerg can throw as many 200/200 armies at Toss as they feel they'll never break it.

Call me crazy but I think, at the moment, HOTS is more balanced than WoL. Terran and Zerg both have some cool things and micro tricks to really try and trade effeciently. Toss is still pretty a-move deathbally but the race has always been like that and I'm not sure what to do to change it. Maybe get rid of Collo and balance around that.

I have a 0% win rate vs terran thus far I just have not figured anything out yet, every opener I can think of just leaves me with no workers left.

I am wondering if infestors need to be buffed again. Either that or void rays need to be nerfed. Zerg does not really have a counter to void rays at the moment. Fungal + hydra can do it but only if the void rays are caught without support.

You need Vipers. Zerg is probably the only race where they introduced a new mandatory unit into their compositions. Viper fills a ton of roles. I've seen many Zergs dismantle VR deathballs with abduct. Roach/Hydra only works because of the Viper. They didn't fix the composition by fixing those two units individually they fixed it by giving Vipers a way to bypass forcefields.

I'd also prefer to keep this thread a bit more clean of "Nerf this, buff this, X is OP" because it just leads to pointless bickering. If you're truly struggling with something present the problem in a thought out post complete with replays. Just saying "This is broken, impossible to beat" is a dead end road.

I am mostly playing protoss btw, zerg is my second race. And I still think VR's seem extremely strong against zerg. I have only played for one day though, so need to play a lot more games.

Now with the ability to activate their charge yeah they're pretty good against spores and bunkers during the time their alignment is activated. Since you can't easily move away static defense they tend to rip through that. But it isn't like queens are armored units so technically the VR is a worse unit against Queens than it was in WoL. Since VRs weren't really busted in WoL in ZvP I don't see how HOTS really changed too much about that other than spores being a bit worse and queens being a bit better.

But I don't play Z or P really at all but I've watched quite a few streams and tournaments and never really thought VRs were a big problem. They make great abduct material and with their increased supply cost makes them worse in late game situations.

Nirgon_sl said:

Everything I read over at TL was people overtly or alluding otherwise for their race to avoid the nerf bat, or the other 2 to get smacked with it. Welcome to gamer nation these days, that's why I come here... less of that . I'm serious, every single post is made on the basis that their opinion will lead to direct changes... maybe they do. Ugh.

Notables from watching games:
3 tempest hits to kill 1 hydra (hit and run)
Void ray looks ridic if someone doesn't know how strong they are charged up
Use hallucinations or cheap shit to trip widow mines
Get blink on stalkers *immediately* if you see a star port. Feedback is good too. The afterburners aren't just deadly for sneaking in, but also getting out after sniping a crucial building.
Oracles 2 shot workers.
Blinding swarm doesn't hit Colossus.


More after I finish campaign and start MPing it up.

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I thought blinding swarm just didn't affect air units? Either way against collosus they are just going to be abducted anyways.

Flank_sl said:

Is the Results Disagree hack/trick new to hots? My match history now shows a loss /cry

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Nah, been around since just about launch, be sure to report the person.

Just finished the campaign and I didn't think it was that bad. It was enjoyable enough even though there were some cheesy parts. I did end up getting that Corpser roach and holy balls that was broken lol. Just 1a roaches (you can do this in MP too!) and you destroy everything. Only thing that could stop you were tanks/flyers, but any amount of MMM would just get crushed and suddenly you just have tons of little roaches.

About the difficulty, it's tough to judge imo. Even in WoL you'd just spam marines and basically 1a around because of how broken they were in the WoL campaign. The only somewhat tough WoL mission was the last mission but even then you just make 50 siege tanks, put about 10 scvs on auto repair and just go watch a tv show and you'll win.

Anyway, good enough game. Even if it sucked balls I'd still pick it up because I get tons of enjoyment out of MP and working on the Map Editor.

I can think of a few missions that were kind of rough on Brutal. The Dig, the banshee mission, all-in ... think I'm forgetting a few others. Basically any mission where you couldn't just use Medic+Marine and micro to beat the entire thing. I can't really think of any missions where I didn't just use Roach/Hydra.

I'll have to test it when I get home but I could have sworn the Collo was affected by Blinding Cloud. Not exactly vital knowledge for me to have not ever finding myself in a ZvP.

Collo are considered flying units.

The train mission on WoL was hard. Banshee mission was really hard until I got better at micro through MP and then beat it. The last mission was very hard until you used that research upgrade to charm 100 mutalisks. The mission to escort the big thor was really hard, but I don't remember if it was a certain achievement that made it hard or not. I just remember failing a million times.

There was nothing in HOTS that I even thought for a second "how do I do this?" The last mission I never even paid attention to when Raynor would attack and coordinate my attacks with his. I just threw units at it by myself and won.

The train mission was hard because I thought I could beat it with MM. Then once I made 3 factories and made nothing but Diamondbacks I almost fell asleep during it. I even took both marauder groups on at once I was so bored.

Yeah the Thor mission was kind of a pain in the ass. Still not sure the "best" way to do that one. I just went marine/tank.

Well, you also know how to play now. I mean if you go watch the SC2 speedrun you pick up a few tricks and nothing is even remotely difficult. You can beat the WoL campaign in one sitting.

The char missions for me were hard on brutal, (went char first), not because of any risk of losing battles but of running out of resources. Straight ling bane against SP tanks is painful on the pocketbook!

I found almost all the missions hard. I cant be bothered to sit and max out on two bases, so have just been fighting constantly and bringing troops as they spawn. Thankfully, Kerrigan can almost solo everything anyway.

Haven't got too far into campaign but it is pretty entertaining imho. Videos are amazing. In-game cut-scenes, kinda good I guess and it does seem easier than WOL.

- Re: "story isn't good" complaints. Uhh yeah, there's maybe 10 video games in history that have great storylines. None of them by Blizzard. What did you expect?

- Re: "cartoony graphics" complaint above. The fuck? Have you missed the past 15+ years of Blizzard games? Cartoony graphics is what they do.

- Re: "too much forced manual upkeep in multiplayer". I completely agree. But I'm not really a big SC2 enthusiast - partially because of said forced manual upkeep. If the hardcore SC2 players enjoy manually clicking their dude every thirty seconds when a cooldown is up, more power to them. I find that kind of shit tedious, but that is why other games exist.

Zaphid_sl said:

Torrid: What exactly do you mean by pissing off the progamers ? They are juggling the game being fun to play, easy to watch and 3 different races being balanced, it's actually really fucking hard. While not even Blizzard denies they could be doing more, eliminating years of balancing in the process seems to be rather short-sighted.

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Sure. Blizzard pretty much committed themselves with WoL and missed the opportunity for more radical changes, that much is true. Although they want to try and sell these expacs as separate games almost to get more profit from them.

Zaphid_sl said:

The multiplayer is deceptively complex and while there is some wiggle room when it comes to balancing, every change can have unforeseen consequences.

Strategy or lack of it due to lot of clicking being necessary, it's rather similar to old school FPS ala Quake and modern brown manshooters, you had way more control and less RNG situations, which let a few people achieve some rather inhuman feats, whereas right now most shooters award frags even to the drooling retard who managed to shoot vaguely in your direction because the stars aligned. Blizzard removed almost all the parts where you had to play around the shitty UI, while keeping the gameplay intact.

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Ok, I'll use the best example: spawn larva. Why is this not autocast? What 'unforseen consequences' would creep up by making it autocast? How does making it autocast break the delicate balance? Autocasting spawn larva no more plays the game for you than a unit training queue or the elimination of the 12 unit selection limit or the F2 key. I'm glad they added the automine on game start option; no automining workers was in fact another example of needless clicking they could have eliminated that I often used to criticize the game. That is hardly analogous to autoaiming in FPSs. Now they need to add a button on refineries that take peons off the mineral line and make the refinery 3/3 in one click.

Time not spent clicking 'v' on your queens is time spent scouting the map or harassing your opponent's units. Instead of beating your opponent by clicking your hatcheries better than he did, you instead beat him by building unit counters or hurting his economy by picking off drones. It's not dumbing down the game-- in fact it's the opposite since even the fastest human will have to sacrifice his attention for brainless easily automated functions. From an esport viewer's perspective, none of the fun and interesting parts to watch can be automated. Not many people watch games to see leet spawn larva clicking skillz. The sad part is, Blizzard seems to understand this to some degree, or why else would they outright eliminate this brainless clicking from the campaign mode?

Zaphid_sl said:

There absolutely is strategy present in lower leagues, it's just that when people meet with different levels of execution, the guy with more stuff wins and strategy is distant second.

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Is this not a bad thing? Win because you time your spawn larva cooldowns better over the guy employing superior strategy and tactics? When's the last time you watched a gold tier player's stream?

^ Yeah I pretty much agree with most of that (except that there is some strategy employed in lower leagues). There should be an option to automate pretty much all casts, but it would be sub-optimal. Then let the pro players manually cast everything for optimal effect if they want. Would make no difference in the high-end game, but might expand the game's audience to those of us who don't find larvae-clicking particularly compelling.

Torrid_sl said:

Ok, I'll use the best example: spawn larva. Why is this not autocast? What 'unforseen consequences' would creep up by making it autocast? How does making it autocast break the delicate balance? Autocasting spawn larva no more plays the game for you than a unit training queue or the elimination of the 12 unit selection limit or the F2 key.

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You're arguing for shit from a zerg player perspective.

You're aware to be good at the game you need to not only remember to do all your necessary macro tasks while executing proper strategy. That is why the game is hard.