So after a hiatus week caused by issues beyond my control, I have found that getting back into what I hoped would be a stable saddle can be a bit harder than expected. But anyhow, I also suffer from a small tick of over-promising things that I really want to deliver on, but get short on time, even the Scotty Principle fails me at times, and to my pain last week’s Community Update might fall on that over promising hole, hope not, I’ll try and see if I can get everything inside without needing to go to sleep at 5 am like when I did the for the first blog.

Anyhow, now the disclaimer, just like with the first of these Blogs, the things I’ll speak about are my own general ideas on unit design, balance and level design that I have learned and fleshed out via years of highly competitive mapmaking experience.

Tempest Ability Removal + New Ability Add

For the Tempest ability, we agree that the current state isn’t working out. In response, our process is to first identify the issue (which we believe our community has done well), and then to make changes accordingly. In this case, the current ability was functioning more as worker line harassment, but that wasn’t the intention, and we agree with your points that Protoss already has enough worker harass options. With that in mind, we’ve been testing a few different abilities instead of the current one. We’re currently leaning towards this: Tempest targets the ground, has a 5 second cast time, and then blasts the target location with electricity, stunning enemy ground units in the target area for 10 seconds (these numbers are obviously subject to change). Enemy will be able to see where the Tempest has targeted when the cast starts, and will also hear an under attack warning. This change should keep Tempests focused on the front lines rather than on harassment. In combat, we are thinking something like this is more interesting because the correct response for both players will vary in different engagements. An ability like this will be stronger against units like Siege Tanks or Lurkers, which is what we need to target more so than the mobile units or worker lines. We’re hoping to start testing this right away, so we’ll get the changes out as soon as possible if you agree with this direction.

I find the general ability to be very agreeable, at its core the possibility of counter-play is quite interesting, the ~5 second channel makes for a good timeframe when the Tempests need to be exposed so Terran can try and pick them off, or simply move the affected units out of the way without affecting much the other MU’s, yet the 10 seconds of stun is a very, very long time on a SC2 battle. A big risk for a big reward, yet I find that phrase and axiom to not be a good tenant for an extremely fast paced and competitive game such as StarCraft, because it can very easily create “dumb luck” scenarios, yet, I do think that for this case it would work very well as I have outlined on the previous blog. Nonetheless I would still prefer if the ability did not affect unit movement, or at least didn’t fully rooted units in place (a slow maybe?), yet I still consider it to be a big step forward compared to the initial iteration.

Yet, there is a thing that worries me regarding the implementation of this new spell, and that is the medium in which Terran will counter the ability, a MechvP Terran will fairly easily have at its disposal a considerable arsenal of long ranged ATA units, Vikings have range 9, Thors have range 10 and with its hard impact payload, I can easily see that getting the channeling time and range of the spell on a well balanced place where it works as it should could take longer than what might be expected, but I’m sure the DevTeam is ready for such happenstance.

One thing that I’m almost forgetting to mention is that I consider a good idea if DevTeam spent some time fiddling with having the new spell cost energy instead of it being CD focused, I’m sure you guys know where I’m going, by adding the energy not only DevTeam can experiment with Tempests staking the spell, and adding the Ghost/EMP counterplay layer, but also adding the HT/Feedback interaction for PvP on the table. I personally do not have a considerable amount of PvP experience, yet Tempests for a long time have generated a metagame stagnation on the MU, and I do consider that such an addition might be attractive for the Devteam to explore upon.

Now going a bit deeper into the ability and its relationship with Mech, it is well known that what we know as Mech, the classic composition, on SC2 has an almost overwhelming amount of different counters, even more so on PvMech, Chargelots, Stalkers, Immortals, Disruptors, etc, etc, yet the strongest of them all has always been the 15 Ranged Tempest, with this new spell, Tempests won’t absolutely crush Mech compositions, which is very good, yet, this very same spell still has the potential to really help deny and kill most Tank based Late-midgame mech timing pushes, I do not consider that a positive thing, and I’m sure DevTeam does not either. Because of that maybe considering putting the new spell under a fleet beacon upgrade would be the best way to go around this new spell, yes, it is not as strong compared to the previous one, but its utility on helping stop those ground based Tank pushes could quite easily put mech on a very fragile position when Toss players open with the standard Phoenix stargate.

By adding an upgrade to the new spell DevTeam would be creating a new timing window on which a Tank based mech players can create pressure onto his opponent in almost the same way HotS Bio players used to put heavy pressure onto Zergs who were teching to Ultras. While without said upgrade Stargate openings can become a proof way to achieve superiority over Mech compositions.

What I’m saying even when it brings some interesting points, it also isn’t the ideal when it comes to testing, timing pushes such as the ones I’m talking about are very metagame dependent and take a long time to develop. Demands that the balance test map/ladder can’t offer solutions for. Now DevTeam many times before has done things such as releasing units which have higher stats than what would be considered balanced in order to have players exploit the design and strength of the units, and after that period of learning is over DevTeam can fairly easily roll back the unit or spell stats into a more balanced state while keeping the unit on a relatively strong position.

I’m not sure if this approach will work well with this new tempest spell when talking about the part of it that worries me (its stopping power when it comes to ground based mech Late-midgame timing attacks).

Now going the other way around and making the stats of the Tempest’s spell weaker than average and then up the spell stats from there would mean that Stargate openings might become too exposed to Mech timing attacks. Meaning that the normal playerbase or “Metagame free” Protoss players would simply start to prefer other openings in favour of Phoenix->Tempest ones to stop the mech pushes. While doing it the classic way of having spells be stronger than average and back the stats from there would mean that Mech players would not be prone to doing the exact push I’m concerned about (Late-Midgame Tank heavy pushes) simply because the Tempest spell might be too prone to shutting that kind of pushes down, and by metagame development Terran players would stop doing such a push because “it doesn’t work”, even after the natural & expected stat nerfing on the Tempest spell I’m not sure if Mech players would still entertain the idea of spending 20 games into seeing how well do the Tempest holds said attacks, leaving DevTeam without a strong baseline regarding the actual balance/strength of the Tempest spell.

Sadly at this moment this is all that I can offer the DevTeam regarding my knowledge of metagame development and others, I’m sure you guys will have much more experience than I do on this area of “metagame farseeing”, and you guys are probably doing the Tempest testing right now and have been for a while now. On this topic, my ideas go more towards trying to release the spell more or less balanced stat wise and without the upgrade I was rambling about earlier, if the metagame shows to be developing to an area where Tank based Mech players have trouble pushing into the Protoss during Late-Midgame scenarios, I would then advice to put the spell behind a fleet beacon upgrade, until then have the Tempest spell be freely accessible.

Any of the three choices would be a hard from a metagame development/long term balance point of view, I consider releasing the tempest spell in a more or less balanced state and then fine tune it with the upgrade to be the one that has the less drawbacks metagame wise.

Tuning Changes

We’ve also been testing other changes, but for now we’d like to focus on the changes that we can begin testing out as early as next week. First, we’d like to test a slightly slower attack speed for the Siege Tank. We agree that the damage is quite powerful right now, and we suspect it’s better to adjust the attack speed here rather than nerfing the damage. We’re thinking something like 2.8 to 3.

Yes, this change follows the identity of the Siege Tank, will be happy to test, even when I do consider that Tanks are on a fine spot at the moment.

Tanks by identity are not a unit one can easily face head on, and I consider that having Tanks have a higher ROI than other units has more positive sides to it from a Metagame development point of view than the alternative of them being weaker.

The ideal here regarding Tanks would be to allow players to over-expand a meching player, and this way one also allows the non-mech player to trade cost inefficiently into the Mech ball, slowly eroding it, now this atm can’t be truly achieved on the live version, and that enters into the realm of Worker Pairing and economy, which for obvious reasons pops time and time again when it comes to talking about Mech and cost efficiency of units.

Tuning Changes

Second is a slight damage nerf to the Swarm Host. We agree that the buff has been too much in the current pass, and lowering the cost barrier was a good change. However, the effectiveness especially after we upped the swoop range seems too high right now.

I outlined my thoughts on the current iteration of the SH in the previous Blog (or at least I remember doing it) I don’t consider the unit to be on a good place, I mean, I do agree with the DevTeam on that a unit is not required to always be useful, yet to me feels like bad craftsmanship to have this happen. Yes, it works “well enough” as an option to mutalisks for a ground based Zerg army, yet they are so map dependent and their spawn CD so long, meaning that locusts must have an incredibly high DPS to compensate for the SH’s CD, that it throws the unit into a limbo between usefulness and unit balance.

SH/Lurker/Hidra the dream comp, isn’t it? Well, on the current iteration I still see it far, far away.

Cyclone

We’re seeing a lot of discussion regarding how the Cyclone currently in the live game (on ladder) is turning out much better than before, players are figuring out cool ways to micro them, and they’re seeing more usage than before. Unsurprisingly, this has led to feedback indicating that we should just revert the Cyclone back to live, and instead discuss buffing to the unit. This is definitely a possibility, but we do see the pros and cons of the live Cyclone vs. the Cyclone being tested. Therefore, we’d like you to focus your discussions around which Cyclone would be the best for the game, especially when considering all the other changes with this major patch.

I apologize to the DevTeam, but I have to say neither, both versions try quite different things, both units fit diverging roles sprouting from a core. Live Cyclone has a strong ATA, while test Cyclone has very lacking anti air capabilities, live Cyclone has a strong focus on achieving high DPS output via unit control, while test Cyclone has a DPS of 60 alongside with a rather strange mix of turret speed/standard damage point and other values which make the unit hard to easily micro.

The model, speed and HP might be similar on test and live but the functions both versions have in the battle field/mech composition and the metagame are very much different, I’m sure DevTeam does not need me nagging them about this, yet there is other thing I must mention, I don’t consider comparing the test cyclone to the live version of the unit to be fair towards the test version, simply because the current test version hasn’t been fleshed out from a design perspective as much as its live counterpart. Test ATA is not reliable atm, and while it does more or less work as a ground unit, it is very unwieldy and can be hard to control.

To further showcase my point, I’m not sure if DevTeam is aware, but current Test Cyclone has a Scan Range of 5.5, 0.5 less than its ground attack range which makes the unit unreliable when it comes to the unit withholding its supposed attack range. DevTeam in the past has showed its commitment to avoid these kind of unreliability on units, and the fact that Test Cyclone has this problem proves that the unit is currently on active development and still has kinks that need to be sorted out.

Now as a Zerg player I have much more fun playing against the test cyclone on Hellion/Cyclone compositions than the live version of the comp, beware that I’m not talking from a balance perspective, just my thoughts from trying to fight the cyclone/hellion comp, from an army vs army perspective (flanking is fun), it also does not apply to some of those nasty hellbat/cyclone TvZ timings which take full advantage of the incredibly high DPS test cyclones have in order to easily take down buildings and town halls, which is something I consider to be highly problematic as mentioned on the previous blog.

If it came to me (it doesn’t), I would choose a cyclone that focused on being a rather fast utility/support unit (which factory lacks) had a medium to strong anti-air attack that could possibly be upgraded to have a splash similar to the one in the Liberator only the missiles arrived slower to the target area allowing avoidance micro, and was able to plant/lay something akin to the Reaper grenades but it costed 15 minerals each and the mines were triggered by enemy proximity.

Yes, that is a very strong rework of the unit, yet because I don’t know the timeframes for ending the design rework we are ourselves on with the Test map I don’t know the value such an idea might have for the DevTeam.

Here’s a small example of the Mines at work, which I consider to be one of the things SC2 Mech is highly on need of, a very cheap map awareness tool which allows Mech to also strengthen positions.

“I hope this video works to get the idea of the unit across.”

Now, that “ideal version” of the Cyclone is out of the way, if I were forced to choose between both Test and Live Cyclones, I would choose a mix between the Live and Test version, leave the Lock-on of live, but only for ground units, while changing the anti-air capabilities of the unit to be a simple projectile based medium range of 7 upgradeable to 8 or 9 anti-armored attack with a mild rate of fire and medium fire rate. Now, making the unit be able to attack air units while moving would in my eyes a dangerous design choice because a retreating high tier air force is not very mobile at all, and such a choice as to make cyclones able to attack on the move would deny any possible retreat from the enemy air army if the ground forces become seriously damaged, this way forcing players to pick and choose their battles even more than they are already, meaning that less aggression would occur.

With the ATA out of the way, there still are things that would worry me with such a unit and that is the ease at which said unit can snipe townhalls. LotV with its new economic system forces players into expanding while working pairing assures that players will not have more than 3|4 mining bases at any time, because of this, losing one of said bases to a cyclone raiding party can easily mean losing one third, or even half on a player’s economy, which in turn forces aggression from said player for him to not fall far behind, in my eyes LotV economic system promotes a very high degree of volatility, volatility that even while interesting to watch means that a considerable amount of games won’t get to become “great macro games”, which in my eyes was one of the staples of the StarCraft franchise.

Now I fully understand franchises can be changed, and it is only up to the DevTeam to decide that, yet, the volatility created by LotV economy summed up to the dynamic generated by the high DPS vs buildings of Cyclone-esk raiding parties, is the very reason why the unit needs to have such a high supply cost.

I’m getting off the rails here, and I can only hope DevTeam understands the angle which I’m seeing these issues from, yet I can’t avoid but feel that wherever choice is done at the end, it should aim to try and help reduce the potential volatility caused by the “rolling” LotV economy.

Discussions Within the Community

We’d like to encourage everyone to try your best at working towards having productive discussions. Being negative towards something you don’t like is fine, but contributing no ideas and just being negative for the sake of being negative isn’t helpful. We’re definitely seeing good conversations, but also some of the less useful conversations as well. Another thing we’d like to mention is that we totally agree with the feedback that we should be making tuning changes more often towards these last couple months of testing, so we’ll aim for patching at least once every two weeks at the latest.

Would it be possible to know if the DevTeam has a deadline to roll the test changes into the live version of the game? This way I and many others can focus on reducing design based feedback and aim towards less aggressive balance based suggestions. I personally simply cannot afford the time to go into full detail of the many design ideas that I have, I know that said ideas would be very useful for the DevTeam and further increase the quality of the discussion, yet those same ideas take time to discuss, time that could be spent in other areas.

So is the DevTeam/Producers planning to have the test change final around Blizzcon’s end, or is there time to make changes until late 2016? Also, will the Community Feedbacks increase on number? Does patching twice a week mean two Community Feedbacks or just the one? I know that I can’t expect direct answer for these questions, yet it would be excellent to state some timeframes and goals for the testing to keep things tidy, and avoid running into the weeds.

Community Feedback Update – October 7

Not Testing Automating Spawn Larva

We agreed with the many strong arguments towards not needing to test this again. We were impressed with the quality of discussions around this topic, and overall we agree that with the Zerg changes already coming in, it is questionable to also make Zerg easier to play. Also, we thoroughly tested what this change means just last year, and there weren’t strong arguments to go against the conclusions that you guys brought up back then (neither from the community nor from the pro players). Therefore, we agree with the majority of you that going back and testing this again is unnecessary at this time.

Quite agreeable, yet will the feedback from Korean coaches be discarded, or are there plans to make changes to the Protoss and Terran macromechanics to try and “equal the playing field” as mentioned on the last blog?

Next Balance Test Update

The Cyclone, Baneling, and Auto Turret changes we discussed last week will go into testing this week because we haven’t see any alarming issues brought up.

The DPS of Auto-Turrets at the moment is incredibly high, I do agree that the upgrade nerf would help in that regard. Tho I still must say that I’m still confused as to why the Baneling is getting the HP buff mixed on the speed upgrade. I consider that it would be of great benefit for the DevTeam to outline what gameplay outcomes are they expecting from this kind of changes, not only on specific for the Baneling, but for other units as well. DevTeam has improved on this regard immensely, specially on this weeks update (14 oct 2016) regarding the Tempest’s spell. Yet, as mentioned I consider that it would be of great benefit to be clearer regarding what are the outcomes sought after with each unit change.

Protoss

We’ve tested the Stalker change, and feel that it does make Protoss compositions a bit more all-around and Stalker-based. While this might not necessarily be bad, but we’d like to hold off on this change unless it’s absolutely needed We don’t want to lose focus on the goal of seeing a strong diversity of gateway units being used, and we would like to get more feedback around the Zealot changes before pursuing other directions.

Just like mentioned above, I’m not sure what is the DevTeam specifically referring to when mentioning the Zealot changes, writing about Unit Design and balance takes a great deal of time and effort, which sadly on my positon I simply can’t afford, I want to help, but I can’t if I must type 1k worth of words on possible Zealot changes and issues which might not even be of use to the DevTeam.

That out of the way, the Zealot in the test map finds itself on a rather interesting position, it does overlap with Adepts, and rather strongly as we know, yet, it works well inside its new found position as buffer for the army and harassment/mineral dump, it also works well on straight engagements vs Mech, Roach/Hidra and Bio armies given its speed/charge/splash combo.

I personally as an “Open Minded SC Hardliner” would prefer if the charge itself were swapped in favor of a slightly higher speed bonus, this way Protoss players would not suffer from bleeding/losing zealots any time an enemy unit got near them creating a wave of Zealots charging towards their untimely deaths, and promote more fun micro from the Protoss’s side of things, instead of them needing to heavily baby sit their Zealots in order to no lose them vs the enemy army.

As far as Stalker goes, I do agree that such a change should not be trivial, Stalkers find themselves on a rather rough spot at the moment, yet DevTeam as it well knows and recognizes needs to be cautious regarding the stalker damage buff.

For the Tempest, we’d like to get some more feedback because it’s been a bit difficult to tell exactly how strong the fast-teching to Tempests route is. If it is a serious issue, we should definitely look into adding an upgrade or a cool-up time to the ability in order to nerf the time in which the ability hits the field.

…

We haven’t seen a lot of discussion on potential additional Protoss changes, but we still believe that slightly toning up the Disruptor (without buffing it much in PvP) could be a strong direction. In addition, we’ll keep looking at changes to the Stalker to help Protoss against early/mid game options that may arise due to the changes to other races. As always, we’re open to discussing and considering other ideas as well.

I’m sure the DevTeam very well knows the reasons as to why the Disruptor seems to be under-performing on non Mirror MU’s, the unit does not work as a reliable splash damage unit, DevTeam didn’t intended it to, and that’s understandable because Colossus are still on the game and DevTeam doesn’t want the unit to be fully phased out, yet Colossus from a design perspective does not fare well on the highly mobile environment of LotV, the resource/time investment on the unit makes it too precious for it to be used as anything else than a core army unit which must be dearly protected, and its nerfed splash DPS means that Colossus don’t have the burst damage necessary to bring down enemy armies on the required timeframe before the damage from the enemy army brings too many Protoss units down for the battle to have been worth it.

Colossus at the moment are balanced, yet, Colossi from a design perspective, just like the previously mentioned Siege Tanks are units which need to be above the rest on terms of ROI, otherwise the metagame will sort them out, and unlike the Siege Tanks, Colossi are not modular splash units, they can’t be easily fanned out of an army to defend expansions, they can’t be used as harassment, they are simply too expensive for that kind of use, for that kind of risk.

In my eyes as Mapmaker, DevTeam needs to at least partially rethink the position of both the Disruptor and Colossus, the Disruptor gives some very interesting spectator moments, yet in its current iteration it needs to be more reliable for Protoss players trust on the unit reach a point where they feel safe going Disruptors without fearing that a single good split from their opponent might be all that needs to occur for them to lose an expansion, or even game. And Colossi might need to also be retouched, so players can still use them as more niche units that will not need as much babysitting as they do now, but still give a good reliable splash with won’t lead to Protoss players deathballing as hard as they can, so their expensive Colossi are safe from harm.

Addendum: I’m very happy with the LotV Immortal, I as the Open Minded Hardliner that I’m, might not like the Auto-casted shield, it is not what I would call “clean design”, and it might be a tad on the too strong side balance wise, but it works well in-game and it gives Immortals that extra bit more survivability they need, and for that I’m very pleased.

For many of the issues I have with the view of Devteam, there are many others where I consider that they made the right decisions, they are not the perfect decisions, but they are the right ones.

I’m saying this because many times when discussing some of these Design issues, one can be read more aggressively than what was intended. It is not my intention to force DevTeam away from “right decisions” into what I consider “perfect” ones, but to aid the DevTeam into reaching common ground where we both can equally agree that the “right decision” was made.