Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Feb 8 2013, 10:34 pm by Ahli.

Bit of a formatting error with the Zerg/Hatchery area.

Envision was already long enough. This just further negates DT harassments and such.
Widow Mines already dealt enough damage to Protoss units. I don't think the +35 translates to Immortals either, so it's not like that does anything.
Overlard speed is underused as it is, and is pretty harmless of an upgrade at this point, so whatever works.
Fungal Growth needs a rework. So does Force Field. That's never going to happen.
Spore Crawlers are now twice as effective versus Mutalisks, Corruptors, Overlords, and nothing else. gj bluzz

I'll put more thoughts into how these actually effect gameplay when I see them play out. IF I see them play out.

+35 shield damage just seems like such a sloppy fix.

Indeed it does, but I'm confused as to where the fix received its justification. Widow Mines were not weak against Protoss before.

No. They totally were. Mines aren't good enough when they can't 1 hit anything.

It makes mines usable against toss, but at the cost of uniformity. I think this is only temporary until they can think of something more creative.

Hey balance team, the engine lets you validate for race and even specific units when deciding to do bonus damage! *over-excited chimpanzee noises are the only response*

They're cheap enough for you to build many of them. Eight Widow Mines could take out a half-sized death ball. You don't see their usage past that point in time, either.

You need a set and a validators for that. The set is required for all damage effects, so adding that is much more work.
Adding bonus damage to shields is a much simpler solution as you just change a value in the damage effect.

The problem remains that it's simply turning the Widow Mine into a hard counter.

But we have that problem with 90% of the units in SCII, so that's nothing new.

Well for starters it would be very bad if they did that as an actual decision, that's the joke.
Unless everyone is already expecting to see +35 damage vs. Zealot and I'm too optimistic.

And I'm not surprised they would know the shortest path, that's been one of their main paradigms til now, just flip a checkbox or delete something instead of redesigning big chunks.

Just because the engine can do something, doesn't mean that is the best way to achieve a certain goal, when it comes to gameplay.

Saying "+35 damage to shields" is nice and generic. Saying "+35 damage to Protoss" or "+35 damage to Zealot" just looks cheap. The other aspect is that because it's +35 damage to shields, if the unit doesn't have any shields it doesn't receive any extra damage...

Well I can't wait for LOTV, gonna be ballin' summoning Mineral Golems from mineral fields or whatever they put in.

Well, you can micro against it:
- Stalker can blink to avoid all damage
- Burrowed mines have a small visible splat. You can avoid the spots where they are burrowed or sacrifice a unit.
- Use scouting units in front of your main army to avoid damage on multiple units or running into a trap killing your whole army.
- If they go aggressive with them, you might be able to run away.
- Broodlords firing Broodlings might activate the mines which will make them fly into the enemy army.
- Splitting your army becomes more important to reduce the damage received.
- If they burrow mines with their army, try to use fast units to kill them with splash. For example, it might be possible with 2 fast overlords to activate them while a few lings keep the other units busy.
- Kill them with long ranged units, if you managed to spot their splats and got a detector to reveal them.

It's possible to deal with this unit, but it has the potential to be very devastating. It's comparable to a reaver in SCBW. But this unit can be massed... :S
Maybe it will receive some nerfs after release when non-pros struggle too much versus them.

I never said it's impossible to deal with them, just that they were turning into a hard counter. The comparison to the Reaver is flawed on several levels, one of which you already mentioned: it's massable. It also has an upgrade that lets it burrow almost instantaneously, making it far more difficult to deal with. I've taken out quite a few people with pure Widow Mines, and I've seen similar things happen at a far higher level of play. I'm not basing my assumptions off of not ever seeing them used.

Marauders and Immortals are hard counters. They're easily dealt with. Widow Mines are also hard counters, although they're a bit harder to deal with because of their upgrade and the silly nature surrounding the concept in general.

What are Widow Mines hard-countering? If it's just too good against a range of things, it's an overpowered unit that needs to be balanced, but it's not a hard-counter to anything in particular.

Yeah, that's what I thought the point of it was.

I fear that the unit will do superduper extra damage when the unit has only 1 shield point.
I don't know how the implementation of the shield bonus damage works exactly.

For example, a Collosus that has 0 shields won't take the extra 35 damage. Obviously units that never had shields to start with won't take extra damage.

@ Ali - I'm pretty sure they would have tested that, as it's a pretty obvious thing to check. If not, I'm sure it won't be released like that.

IMO the claws upgrade that let them burrow in 1 second instead of 3 is massively overpowered. I'm expecting them to change it to 1.5 second eventually.