You can see all of the changes here: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/20975163

When reading the “Major Changes” coming for StarCraft 2 later this year, the first thing that jumped out at me are how different Protoss vs Terran will look. This blog will go into some detail on my thoughts about how those changes could impact the matchup.



Widow Mine change:

- Widow Mines are now revealed while Sentinel Missile is on cooldown.

Let’s think about early game TvP for a moment. Currently, there is a choice to make. Do I keep my Oracle out on the map or send it home to defend vs drops? Do I risk flying in not knowing where mines are? If I lose that Oracle, I’m going to be really hurting at home. What if the Terran made a proxy Factory and Starport? Maybe I should go for a Robo so I can clean up mass Mines more easily.

Now, none of these decisions matter any more for Protoss. In fact, I’m already planning on opening Twilight every single game now. The power of the Widow Mine’s consistent cloak in the early game has truly been powerful. You simply must have detection – Observers or Oracles – no matter what.

With this change, though, Protoss players will simply trade a Probe for a Widow Mine, and happily go about their day.

Now, this all sounds really silly when I outline it like this. What I wrote above is an outline of what this change does alone in our current version of LotV. In our current version, this would be a brutal change for for Terrans. The thing is, we have to look at it in context of all of the upcoming changes, and this change, in particular (with regards to Terran vs Protoss), has amazing synergy with other changes.

First lets look at the Mothership Core, its purpose, and its removal.

I think that many non-Protoss players are happy to see the Mothership Core go, and that many Protoss players are scared of the same prospect.

What is the function of the Mothership Core? Why does Protoss need such a tool?

The Mothership Core was introduced to help shore up early game Protoss defence. The Protoss race, from the get-go, has been about teching up before macroing. If you make more than a handful of Gateway units before going higher up the tech tree, this generally means that you are going all-in, as the Gateway units simply don’t scale well without upgrades or splash damage.

So, if we look at the current role of the Mothership Core in Protoss vs Terran, it will generally help you (with good positioning of Pylons), to defend your bases early game with a minimum of Gateway units while getting out Robo tech, or an Oracle, or maybe even an upgrade like Blink.

The Protoss army has always thrived on working together (a nice way of saying Deathball). While, sure, you could have little harassment groups around the map trying to get things done, if your army isn’t all together and you run into your opponent’s army, you are in a lot of trouble. These types of armies in general are not as mobile as most Terran and Zerg armies, making it a bit scary to move around the map. Counter attacks could come quickly and do lots of damage. This, again, is where the Mothership Core helps out. By leaving an inexpensive unit at home, you would have some degree of defence vs incoming counter attacks, giving you some extra mobility on the map.

So now we have the Mothership Core on the way out. In it’s place is the Nexus, full of new abilities:



Chrono Boost

- Cost: 50 Energy

- Duration: 10 seconds

- Effect: Boosts a building’s work rate by 100%.

Mass Recall

- Cost: 100 Energy

- Effect: After 4 seconds all units in target area are teleported to the Nexus. Units are unable to move or attack during this time.

Shield Recharge

- Cost: 1 Energy per 3 shield restored

- Range: 8

- Has autocast functionality

- Can be cast on units or structures



All I’ll say about the new Chrono Boost ability for now is that it is infinitely more interesting than the Chrono Boost that we’ve been working with lately. There are actual decisions to be made and APM/Rhythms to be used.

Now let’s talk about the Shield Recharge ability.

I love this ability. It is a fantastic idea. In a world without the Mothership Core OR Shield Recharge, Protoss would be forced to make lots of Gateway units nonstop, making sure they always have enough to simply beat what’s coming at them. This would make a horrible situation where everything you do is stifled. It would kind of look like games on Ulrena, if you remember that map, where Protoss would be extra heavy on Gateway units, waiting for an attack that might never come, thus forcing aggressive builds to utilize those units before their value sank too low in comparison to better scaling from the opponent’s units.

So, here we are with the new Shield Recharge. Now, whether your opponent is dropping with a Medivac into your main base or attacking your front with Roaches, you have some support for your early Gateway army. Defence won’t be a single click of a button that makes it mathematically unwise for your opponent to continue his attack, but rather micro-based. Stalkers, Adepts and Zealots fighting, sometimes kiting, being healed as they are focus fired down. I think that it will be extremely hard for anyone to argue that this will be less entertaining or less fun for either side when compared to the Mothership Core.

I also find it really cool that it will work with Cannons as well. You won’t necessarily have to have units at each base to defend vs smaller attacks in the mid and late game.



So now let’s look at Mass Recall:

- Cost: 100 Energy

- Effect: After 4 seconds all units in target area are teleported to the Nexus. Units are unable to move or attack during this time.

It probably isn’t worthwhile to compare this ability with the current Mass Recall on the Mothership Core. The new version is unquestionably better.

Mass Recall probably won’t be used very much in the early game, as it definitely requires a high mana cost, but as the game becomes longer, it should be an extremely strong aspect of Protoss - adding a huge amount of mobility.

And a quick look at the new Stalker:

- Increased Stalker’s Particle Disruptor weapon from 10 (14 vs armored) to 15 (21 vs armored)

- Increased Particle Disruptor’s weapon period from 1.03 to 1.54

- Particle Disruptor now gets +2 damage per weapon upgrade, up from +1

The new Stalker will maintain approximately the same DPS throughout the game, but will take over (in conjunction with the Nexus’ new abilities) the defensive roll that the Mothership Core used to have.

One of the problems in early game PvT since the Siege Tank buffs (as well as Liberators in general) was that making Stalkers early on in a defensive manner could be detrimental. For instance, the original Protoss defensive opening of Blink/Observer, was almost completely killed off by the presence of early Tank pushes. You would simply not have the damage or health to fight off a well executed attack from Terran, and thus the build went into obscurity. This forced Protoss into builds based off of a tech unit (most often the Oracle) to slow the Terran down, so that you could buy time to crush an early push all at once. Now:

1. You don’t necessarily need early detection to deal with Widow Mines.

2. The Nexus can heal up lots of damage on your Stalkers.

3. Initial (first volley) damage output from Stalkers are greatly increased.

When you put all of these changes together, Protoss vs Terran, from the Protoss perspective, looks a lot different.

- You are no longer forced into either Stargate or Robo for macro openings

- You are no longer forced to control the early game with just 2-3 specialized units (Mothership Core, Oracle, Phoenix, etc)

These make me think that early game PvT will likely consist of making a few defensive Stalkers while getting a Twilight Council and a Forge or two. Without an overwhelming need for early detection, Protoss can focus on getting ahead on upgrades and having much higher mobility with a larger and stronger early army than ever before. The more we see the matchup skew towards this, the less each individual unit will matter (unlike now with a huge importance on the specialized units).



I think that the direction of Protoss splash actually supports my notions of the new direction of the race:

Disruptor changes

Purification Nova

- Purification Nova now detonates on contact with enemy units (not structures)

- Purification Nova still lasts 2 seconds before detonating

- Damage reduced from 145 (+55 shields) to 135 (+25 shields)

- Cooldown reduced from 21 to 18

- When dropped from a Warp Prism the Disruptor’s Purification Nova will be set to a brief cooldown. As it felt a little too strong vs worker lines otherwise.

Quicker cooldown, but much easier to micro against. Less giant swings due to overwhelming splash damage. The cooldown when dropped from a Warp Prism is shocking, to be honest. This was never and to this day is not a problem in professional play. I don’t think that this was on anyone’s list of things that felt too strong agains worker lines. I disagree with this change wholeheartedly. Disruptor Drops are no longer a viable strategy with this change. Even the other change about contact with enemy units would have nerfed them already, but this is insane overkill.



Colossus changes

- Damage changed from 12 to 10 (15 vs Light)

- Damage per upgrade changed from 1 to 1 (+1 vs Light)

- Range increased from 6 to 7

- Upgrade: Extended Thermal Lance

- Range upgrade decreased from +3 to +2

- Cost decreased from 200 / 200 to 150 / 150

Obviously Colossus will shred Marines even harder than before, and it’s nice to make base range a bit longer as well as Thermal Lance a bit cheaper. That being said, this doesn’t seem like a buff or a nerf to me. Just a slight change in roll, from something that you will always just blindly make, to something that you think about whether or not you want. I might be slightly wrong due to numbers, but it seems like that’s the intended direction at least.

I do want to, for a moment, mention the Ghost change:

- Cloak is now available by default on Ghosts

- Ghosts now start with 50 energy instead of 75

- Moebius Reactor is re-added to the Ghost Academy. It provides +25 starting energy to Ghosts

If, in fact, the Protoss meta does shift as I think it will, Ghosts could be a pretty cool way to keep things in check. Starting with Cloak makes the fast Ghost rushes (that we barely ever see) more reasonable, and just in general force Protoss to not skip detection all game long. I think it’s a solid idea.

From the Terran side, most of the changes don’t seem to greatly effect the TvP matchup. The Widow Mine change is pretty big for the early game. The fix to Liberator vision was probably called for a while ago. The Cyclone initial volley will help push out harass a bit better, which is a good thing. But overall, there’s not a whole lot there. Of course, as Protoss’s overall play changes some, Terran players will have to adjust accordingly. That’s just common sense.

The overall feel that I get from these changes on the Protoss side of things is that the early game will become less volatile, and the basic Protoss army will feel stronger and more mobile. Mid-game map control could easily become Protoss favoured. In short, this new PvT looks like it will be a lot more like the flavour of PvT in StarCraft 1. Based on the overwhelming majority of comments that I’ve read online about the flavour of Protoss in SC2 in the past several years, I would think people will be happy about this general direction.



In closing:

Having the Nexus enable Gateway units (alongside the higher Stalker damage) to be useful on defence in the early game without making them overpowered offensively is awesome and should make the game more enjoyable for everyone, whether playing or spectating.

BONUS!! Here’s some stuff I don’t like at all from the changes:

High Templar

- Added Psi Blast weapon

- Range: 6

- Damage: 4

- Attack period: 1.25

This is so weird. The stated reason is that it will make them easier to control, not running into battle to die.

Who is attack moving their High Templars into battle and losing them like that? This is not and cannot be a change for the pro level, and that I don’t like.

HT attack isn’t the only change like this:

“While we don’t want to make Protoss ability gameplay any more complicated we wanted to try making Observers more useful for ladder players. Currently Observers are selected with the select all army button (F2 by default) which can often bring Observers out of position and to their untimely demise. While we’d like to keep observers in this selection, we are considering adding the ability to ‘deploy’ your observer for increased vision range in exchange for being unable to move.

New ability: Surveillance Mode

The observer is unable to move and gains 25% more vision”

Let me rewrite this one -

“We noticed that people are bad at StarCraft. Many players have developed bad habits and are too lazy to fix them, so we are going to make those bad habits less bad.”

As a turtley macro player, I’m very excited to have 25% more vision on my Observers. This isn’t the right reason to give me that, though. I disagree with the change, but more so with the stated reason for the change. If you want to use the “easy button” to play StarCraft, then that’s a drawback you should have to deal with. Learn to play more cleanly and you will lose less Observers.

Same opinion on the Overseer change which is exactly the same.

OK, so that’s really the end now! I’m on vacation right now, but if I have time I’ll write some more about the other changes soon!