qxc's thoughts: Adepts are too Strong Text by qxc Graphics by lichter



Everything in this article is my opinion unless otherwise stated. As a progamer for several years now, I have a wealth of personal experience and observations to draw upon. That said, sometimes I have to speculate.



The adept is overpowered. It is too strong and has too few weaknesses in the early game. In addition, the adept fails to scale well into the mid- and lategame due to its lack of meaningful upgrades. By reducing the adept’s early game stats and putting more value on its upgrades the adept can be a more rounded unit that is useful, but not overbearing in all parts of the game.



In a recent community feedback (



We just don’t want to be too quick to judge on the Adept strength at this point, because it’s not uncommon for players to overreact when core units are added. One good example here is when the Marauder was first introduced back in Wings of Liberty, for a very long time, even after the game launched, we were getting so much feedback, especially from Korean players, that Marauders were completely broken and needed to be nerfed. We never did nerf them, but they’ve been seen as well balanced all throughout HotS.





While adepts may never rival this, #NeverForget



This statement glosses over some important facts. The first is that at the release of Starcraft II Wings of Liberty, the general skill level in the game was much lower. We figured things out much slower. It takes a substantial amount of time to get even a basic mastery of a game regardless of RTS background and while similar to BW, Starcraft 2 was a significant transition for everyone. The top players of LoTV are substantially better than the best players of early Wings. As players are faster at figuring out strategies and counters balance related issues can be acted on faster. The second issue with this statement is that, while marauders never got nerfed in Wings, a large number of nerfs occurred in situations that involved marauders. See below for a list of changes that occurred around the release of Wings that affected the marauder’s strength in various situations.



For a list of Starcraft 2 patches: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Patches



Medivac: Acceleration reduced from 2.315 to 2.25. Speed reduced from 2.75 to 2.5.

Huge hitpoint increase for Protoss & Zerg buildings

Archon -> massive, range 2->3

Stim 140 -> 170 seconds,

Zealots always hit fleeing target at least once,

Immortal range 5 -> 6,

Ultralisk Speed increased from 2.25 to 2.9531. Build time decreased from 70 to 55. Splash radius increased from 1.5 to 2.5. Splash radius increased from 90° to 180° in front of the ultralisk.

Barracks build time 60 -> 65,



Most recently in LotV, the marauder’s attack became 2 separate attacks so now armor is applied twice. Each point of armor reduces the marauder’s damage by around 5-10%. The marauder was not fine and was not fixed by players getting better at the game alone. The marauder’s reduced strength in Wings came from a variety of indirect nerfs to supporting units as well as upgrades and buffs to its opposition. The adept is too strong in the early game and fails to scale well as the game goes longer and longer.





The adept can threaten a huge range with its shade.



This shows the distance the shade can travel which is more than a screen away.



In Starcraft, upgrades are used so that early game units scale into the mid/late game and keep up with units that are not available immediately. In virtually all cases, the cost of the upgrade is negligible compared to amount of value it delivers. Stim is 100/100 but easily is worth several times that in combat efficiency. Zergling speed is also 100/100 and increases the utility of zerglings tremendously. Upgrades are balanced in a way that the resources serve as a minimum threshold to invest in that upgrade. IE: Getting stim when you only have 3 marines doesn’t make any sense because you don’t have sufficient economy to support it or enough units to benefit from it. The upgrade time is an additional factor which creates timing windows and room for counterplay and scouting. The adept’s lack of scaling is due to the fact that its only upgrade (+50 shields) doesn’t add much in the way of utility unlike many other upgrades such as charge, blink, storm, stim, roach speed and so on.



The adept’s primary strengths are:



- Bonus damage vs Light

- Good scouting unit

- High hitpoints

- Low gas investment

- Low tech requirement

- Not melee

- High threat range (due to shade)



The adept’s primary weaknesses are:



- Low DPS vs armored

- Can’t attack air

- Low mobility besides its shade

- Weak in deathball vs deathball armies (200/200)





The most important thing is that the adept’s strengths are all focused on the early game while its weaknesses don’t factor in until the mid or late game. For each thing that the adept can’t do, it can gain stats elsewhere. The stalker is a great example of a unit that cannot really do anything particularly well, but can be applied in some degree to almost any situation. It has high range, can attack air, decent mobility and relatively high hitpoints. To balance all those strengths out, the stalker has atrocious DPS. The adept, on the other hand, has only 4 range, can’t attack air and is relatively slow. To compensate those downsides, it has much higher base stats. The problem is that the adept dominates the early game where the majority of targets are light, high mobility isn’t as important, and attacking air makes little difference. While it’s true that armored units can stand toe-to-toe with the adept, the early armored units have either too low mobility or DPS to prevent the adept from killing a substantial number of workers. The roach is notable in that it has decent DPS, but it still has issues chasing the adepts around.





Adepts kill a lot of scvs while marauders try to stop them.



The adept’s initial stats are just too high, especially when combined with the shade ability. Consider a ground unit that had 20 HP, no attack, the movement speed of an adept and the shade ability. How much would that unit cost? It would serve a role similar to an early observer or a reaper in that you would probably make 1 to send to your opponent’s base and get scouting information. Later on, it could be used as a general map scout / spotter. This ability must cost something. 25/0 or 25/25 seem like a reasonable value considering it would be a pure scouting unit and not the most reliable at that.





A marauder and an adept have a slap fight.



The adept, which is 100/25, has roughly 75/0 or 75/25 worth of resources going just to its stats considering the shade ability is worth something. No other tier 1 unit has any special abilities initially. Which means that a substantial chunk (~15-30%) of the adept’s value should be in having the shade ability to start unlike any other tier1/tier1.5 unit. The adept is a mid game unit masquerading as a tier 1.5 unit (effectively tier 1 with increased worker start in LotV). In game, the adept does not feel like it’s missing a substantial chunk of stats due to having the shade ability. It outclasses every other early game unit in general utility. Although, there are units that it can’t dominate in a straight up fight like stalkers, marauders and roaches, it provides incredible value for scouting and can often get many worker kills while the defender tries to kill it.





The adept’s range allows for a lot of micro potential vs marines.



From a more design oriented standpoint, the adept is problematic because it replaces the zealot for a large part of the game, if not all together in many cases. The zealot has traditionally been protoss’ cheap, mineral heavy tank unit. The adept, with 30 more shields to start, and 80 more after the upgrade replaces the zealot as the tank unit in the protoss arsenal. The zealot, with its recent charge buff (charge now deals +8 damage on hit) fulfills a more damage oriented role. The problem is that the adept’s kit makes more sense on a damage oriented unit rather than a tanky one. The adept does bonus damage to workers and has an ability that allows it to bypass armies and maneuver inside an opponent’s base. All of these traits work better on a dps harass type unit. Regardless, the adept and zealot need to have more separate roles to maintain diversity in the protoss arsenal. One of these units needs to be the tank and the other one needs to be the damage. For this analysis, I’ll be looking solely at rebalancing the adept. I leave the redesign of both units in tandem as an exercise to the reader.



First, tone down the adept’s early game strength. Reduce the +damage vs light to +4 (was +13). Increase its base damage to 11 (was 10). The adept now 3 shots zerglings, marines and workers instead of 2-shotting them and does slightly better vs armored targets. Reduce its shields to 90/70 (was 90/90). This is a ~11% decrease in total HP. Reduce the duration of the shade to 5 (was 7) seconds. These changes should bring the adept more in line with other tier 1 units while leaving its core functionality in tact.



Next, increase the strength and utility of the adept’s upgrades to help it scale better as the game goes on.



Twilight council upgrade: Plasma shields, gives +50 shields, and an additional +12 damage vs light (Adept after upgrade is +17 vs light, was +13).



Templar Archives upgrade: Enlightenment, 150/150: The adept gains a second ‘shade’ ability which has duration 10 seconds. Only one shade may be active at a time.



These changes together make the adept less of an issue early game by reducing its tankiness, killing power and threat range while bringing its strength up as the game goes longer by giving additional damage and more versatility. By having 2 shade abilities of different duration the adept will have more options for mobility.





Combining adepts with a warp prism allows for even more survivability.



Alternatively, if adepts required a twilight council to be built their initial stats could remain unchanged. Then the adepts could gain some of the additional damage from the twilight council upgrade proposed above as well as have a second upgrade on the templar archives.



Note that these suggestions are all theoretical. I do not claim them to be correct, but they are a step in the correct direction. Right now, the adept provides too much value for too little cost to the point of pigeon holing matchups into a very narrow set of choices. Protoss players rarely build anything except for adepts early on and continue to use them to the exclusion of most other units in many games. While the adept has substantial weaknesses (no attack vs air, terrible dps vs armored and somewhat low range/mobility w/o shade), these do not manifest in meaningful ways in the early game. By shifting the adept’s stats around to weaken it early game while giving additional power to its upgrades, the adept can play an important role throughout the entire game without being oppressive.The current adept cannot stay as it is but only further testing and experimentation will reveal the correct balance.





Everything stated here is my opinion unless noted and/or cited otherwise. As a progamer for several years now, I have a wealth of personal experience and observations to draw upon. With that said, I sometimes have to speculate due to lack of studies/concrete facts. It’s important to note that this patch is only days old.







Previous installments:

Archon Mode

On Preparation and Build Orders

The Disruptor in Review

Liberator in Review

On SC2's Social Features

Re-thinking the Ladder

The Adept

Thoughts on Macro Mechanics

Addressing Blizzard's Community Feedback





The adept is overpowered. It is too strong and has too few weaknesses in the early game. In addition, the adept fails to scale well into the mid- and lategame due to its lack of meaningful upgrades. By reducing the adept’s early game stats and putting more value on its upgrades the adept can be a more rounded unit that is useful, but not overbearing in all parts of the game.In a recent community feedback ( http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/18596068245?page=1#0 ), Blizzard posted:We just don’t want to be too quick to judge on the Adept strength at this point, because it’s not uncommon for players to overreact when core units are added. One good example here is when the Marauder was first introduced back in Wings of Liberty, for a very long time, even after the game launched, we were getting so much feedback, especially from Korean players, that Marauders were completely broken and needed to be nerfed. We never did nerf them, but they’ve been seen as well balanced all throughout HotS.This statement glosses over some important facts. The first is that at the release of Starcraft II Wings of Liberty, the general skill level in the game was much lower. We figured things out much slower. It takes a substantial amount of time to get even a basic mastery of a game regardless of RTS background and while similar to BW, Starcraft 2 was a significant transition for everyone. The top players of LoTV are substantially better than the best players of early Wings. As players are faster at figuring out strategies and counters balance related issues can be acted on faster. The second issue with this statement is that, while marauders never got nerfed in Wings, a large number of nerfs occurred in situations that involved marauders. See below for a list of changes that occurred around the release of Wings that affected the marauder’s strength in various situations.: Acceleration reduced from 2.315 to 2.25. Speed reduced from 2.75 to 2.5.Hugefor Protoss & Zerg buildings-> massive, range 2->3140 -> 170 seconds,always hit fleeing target at least once,range 5 -> 6,Speed increased from 2.25 to 2.9531. Build time decreased from 70 to 55. Splash radius increased from 1.5 to 2.5. Splash radius increased from 90° to 180° in front of the ultralisk.build time 60 -> 65,Most recently in LotV, the marauder’s attack became 2 separate attacks so now armor is applied twice. Each point of armor reduces the marauder’s damage by around 5-10%. The marauder was not fine and was not fixed by players getting better at the game alone. The marauder’s reduced strength in Wings came from a variety of indirect nerfs to supporting units as well as upgrades and buffs to its opposition. The adept is too strong in the early game and fails to scale well as the game goes longer and longer.In Starcraft, upgrades are used so that early game units scale into the mid/late game and keep up with units that are not available immediately. In virtually all cases, the cost of the upgrade is negligible compared to amount of value it delivers. Stim is 100/100 but easily is worth several times that in combat efficiency. Zergling speed is also 100/100 and increases the utility of zerglings tremendously. Upgrades are balanced in a way that the resources serve as a minimum threshold to invest in that upgrade. IE: Getting stim when you only have 3 marines doesn’t make any sense because you don’t have sufficient economy to support it or enough units to benefit from it. The upgrade time is an additional factor which creates timing windows and room for counterplay and scouting. The adept’s lack of scaling is due to the fact that its only upgrade (+50 shields) doesn’t add much in the way of utility unlike many other upgrades such as charge, blink, storm, stim, roach speed and so on.- Bonus damage vs Light- Good scouting unit- High hitpoints- Low gas investment- Low tech requirement- Not melee- High threat range (due to shade)- Low DPS vs armored- Can’t attack air- Low mobility besides its shade- Weak in deathball vs deathball armies (200/200)The most important thing is that the adept’s strengths are all focused on the early game while its weaknesses don’t factor in until the mid or late game. For each thing that the adept can’t do, it can gain stats elsewhere. The stalker is a great example of a unit that cannot really do anything particularly well, but can be applied in some degree to almost any situation. It has high range, can attack air, decent mobility and relatively high hitpoints. To balance all those strengths out, the stalker has atrocious DPS. The adept, on the other hand, has only 4 range, can’t attack air and is relatively slow. To compensate those downsides, it has much higher base stats. The problem is that the adept dominates the early game where the majority of targets are light, high mobility isn’t as important, and attacking air makes little difference. While it’s true that armored units can stand toe-to-toe with the adept, the early armored units have either too low mobility or DPS to prevent the adept from killing a substantial number of workers. The roach is notable in that it has decent DPS, but it still has issues chasing the adepts around.The adept’s initial stats are just too high, especially when combined with the shade ability. Consider a ground unit that had 20 HP, no attack, the movement speed of an adept and the shade ability. How much would that unit cost? It would serve a role similar to an early observer or a reaper in that you would probably make 1 to send to your opponent’s base and get scouting information. Later on, it could be used as a general map scout / spotter. This ability must cost something. 25/0 or 25/25 seem like a reasonable value considering it would be a pure scouting unit and not the most reliable at that.The adept, which is 100/25, has roughly 75/0 or 75/25 worth of resources going just to its stats considering the shade ability is worth something. No other tier 1 unit has any special abilities initially. Which means that a substantial chunk (~15-30%) of the adept’s value should be in having the shade ability to start unlike any other tier1/tier1.5 unit. The adept is a mid game unit masquerading as a tier 1.5 unit (effectively tier 1 with increased worker start in LotV). In game, the adept does not feel like it’s missing a substantial chunk of stats due to having the shade ability. It outclasses every other early game unit in general utility. Although, there are units that it can’t dominate in a straight up fight like stalkers, marauders and roaches, it provides incredible value for scouting and can often get many worker kills while the defender tries to kill it.From a more design oriented standpoint, the adept is problematic because it replaces the zealot for a large part of the game, if not all together in many cases. The zealot has traditionally been protoss’ cheap, mineral heavy tank unit. The adept, with 30 more shields to start, and 80 more after the upgrade replaces the zealot as the tank unit in the protoss arsenal. The zealot, with its recent charge buff (charge now deals +8 damage on hit) fulfills a more damage oriented role. The problem is that the adept’s kit makes more sense on a damage oriented unit rather than a tanky one. The adept does bonus damage to workers and has an ability that allows it to bypass armies and maneuver inside an opponent’s base. All of these traits work better on a dps harass type unit. Regardless, the adept and zealot need to have more separate roles to maintain diversity in the protoss arsenal. One of these units needs to be the tank and the other one needs to be the damage. For this analysis, I’ll be looking solely at rebalancing the adept. I leave the redesign of both units in tandem as an exercise to the reader.First, tone down the adept’s early game strength. Reduce the +damage vs light to +4 (was +13). Increase its base damage to 11 (was 10). The adept now 3 shots zerglings, marines and workers instead of 2-shotting them and does slightly better vs armored targets. Reduce its shields to 90/70 (was 90/90). This is a ~11% decrease in total HP. Reduce the duration of the shade to 5 (was 7) seconds. These changes should bring the adept more in line with other tier 1 units while leaving its core functionality in tact.Next, increase the strength and utility of the adept’s upgrades to help it scale better as the game goes on.Twilight council upgrade: Plasma shields, gives +50 shields, and an additional +12 damage vs light (Adept after upgrade is +17 vs light, was +13).Templar Archives upgrade: Enlightenment, 150/150: The adept gains a second ‘shade’ ability which has duration 10 seconds. Only one shade may be active at a time.These changes together make the adept less of an issue early game by reducing its tankiness, killing power and threat range while bringing its strength up as the game goes longer by giving additional damage and more versatility. By having 2 shade abilities of different duration the adept will have more options for mobility.Alternatively, if adepts required a twilight council to be built their initial stats could remain unchanged. Then the adepts could gain some of the additional damage from the twilight council upgrade proposed above as well as have a second upgrade on the templar archives.Note that these suggestions are all theoretical. I do not claim them to be correct, but they are a step in the correct direction. Right now, the adept provides too much value for too little cost to the point of pigeon holing matchups into a very narrow set of choices. Protoss players rarely build anything except for adepts early on and continue to use them to the exclusion of most other units in many games. While the adept has substantial weaknesses (no attack vs air, terrible dps vs armored and somewhat low range/mobility w/o shade), these do not manifest in meaningful ways in the early game. By shifting the adept’s stats around to weaken it early game while giving additional power to its upgrades, the adept can play an important role throughout the entire game without being oppressive.The current adept cannot stay as it is but only further testing and experimentation will reveal the correct balance. Progamer Designer of Aeon's End