Indeed, the fun aspect has hardly ever been considered in sc2 updates. I think it's a marketing issue as well. Starcraft always presented itself as the super hard game where fast reactions and nerves of steel are the key factors to success. This has increasily drawn the casual playerbase out of the game, as people preferred to watch pros suffer than play themselves. Playing is just too stressful for most people, especially as the playerbase has grown in age. I mean, I haven't played regularly since 2016 and I still get nightmares about dying from doom drops.
Your opening statement in the solution section of the video about focusing on fun balancing is something that I feel like a LOT of people have forgotten about in this era hyper competitive eSports. Not everything HAS to be completely balanced, but it does have to be fun. If your game isn't fun to interact with, then people aren't going to play it.
It is the complaint that David Kim balancing style has gotten in the past if I remember correctly. He was showing the numbers and saying "See? The win-rates show the game is extremely well balanced" whereas the players were saying "Yeah... But aren't having fun playing these "balanced" matches". Ultimately the game can be balanced and feel imbalanced and at the same time be imbalanced - but feel balanced. Of course at the competitive level the perception is a little bit different, the pro gamers mostly want the state of the game to be one where they win ^^" But ultimately yeah the most important part about balancing should be aiming for the game to feel the most fun to play, and avoid frustrating the player
I completely agree with increasing fun by minimising frustrating mechanics and units (mines, ruptors banelings, maybe protoss deathballs). But another thing to consider is also the viewer enjoyment. Sure, losing to these units is frustrating, but it's also exciting to watch pros split the bio against banes, snipe ruptors or drag mines into terran armies. P.S. I think the new cyclone will be worse than the current one.
Protoss Deathball because gateway units are terrible by themselves. They always loose to Terran units of the same cost unless they are backed up by tech. You gotta deathball.
@@ralphwarom2514 agreed, but gateway units cannot be strong in large battles because of the warp in mechanic, which allows you to get huge amount of units anywhere on the map. They just have to be balanced around this fact.
You are right 100%. Usually to identify the issue you should research when game become completely broken for Protoss on high level. In my opinion it was the charge nerf. But not even one moment. The first thing they did is remove 10 Hp from adepts without any reason, meanwhile buffing marauder and widow mines, now stalker became a core unit in all matchups and only Hero gets somewhere sometimes. Protoss lacks options in army composition it should have!
The only good thing left for the Protoss is that you don't need to constantly monitor the probes to manage them, everything else sucks. The comparison with what a terran can do is embarrassing
Great point- If we worry too much about balance and ones' race being able to win tournaments over fresh, fun and new things, then there won't be any tournaments to win.
Thats why we need the resource as well as a strong mandate from Blizzard to pull this off, its super complicated to make a fun AND balance game. At the moment, there is no chance of that happening, so we just have to live with what we have. Either seeing these small and not very meaningful change, or no change at all, its your choice.
I completely agree. Besides the making the units more fun, I also think there is a fundamental problem with the way macro works. Ofcourse I want the game to be hard and high multitasking skills should be awarded, but think about this. You want to make a baracks. A list of what you have to do: -put your screen on your mineral line -select an scv -put your screen on the place you want to build -press b and b -click -go back to your mineral line -press shift and rightclick the mineral line -go back to your rax and wait for it to start building -select the baracks and shift click it to your controll group -set the rally point This could be made SO much easier, and then you have spare APM to do things that are actually fun and have an impact on the game itself. So many quality of life adjustements could be made that make the game focus so much more on fun instead of chores.
Hi Probe. I think skill level is really a big factor. I dont think you can balance the game for the wide range of skill groups. I absolutely understand that we need to prioritize balance in the upper most classes (for reasons you explained: livelihoods are on the line etc; and the general viewership needs to be enjoying the game when watching and all TvT or ZvZ finals boring to watch long term). I agree that toss has been struggling in the last 2-3 years (or even longer) to win in Korea and especially in Europe. We have Terrans dominating in Korea (ok Her0 won GSL once) and Zergs destroy the scene in Europe (since 2012 that is???). Toss needed a buff but it could cost the dear lifes of poor low - mid masters players who get rekt but disruptors ... :D
I think focusing on the top 1% of players is the biggest mistake you can make to the popularity of a game. The data is not enough to "prove" that protoss is actually worse. It could be that protoss pro gamers just aren't as good as their terran and zerg counterparts, at least at the moment. Everyone seems to forget, that we had periods of time when protoss players were dominating in the pro scene. Neeb, Trap, Stats, Zest are prime examples. Who do we have now? Maybe MaxPax, although I wouldn't put him on the same level as Trap in his prime, Hero had great form like when he won the GSL, but hasn't been very consistent since. My point is you can't put the blame solely on race. However the data we do have and something we can definitely prove is that protoss is more than balanced on the ladder and does not need any help winning games.
That's just not true. No protoss players has dominated for the last 5 years. Trap lost like every final he was ever in. When it comes to the ladder, 98% of players will win half and lose half.
@@jonathanhansson804 Trap is the winner of 3 gsl super tournaments and was beating terrans right left and center, only losing to dark in the finals if I remember correctly. Neeb won countless WCS in 2017 and 2018 so wtf are you talking about? And you still haven't answered my question, which protoss pro currently would you put at the same level as serral, dark, raynor, maru, cure, clem? Just because they are winning tournaments doesn't mean that all the other terrans and zergs can. WTH do you mean with everyone winning and losing 50%? With that kind of logic you could justify everything. The point is there is more %of protoss masters and grandmaters on the ladder than terran and zerg. Which means it is easier to get high level with protoss that is a fact. Less people play protoss than terran yet you have more/the same amount of masters.
@@Mu_tant_ikIf you dont focus on competitive balance, the esports WILL DIE. This is even WORSE than losing some players because thwy think their race is underpowered. Imo this patch is great for toss as toss' weaknesses were Raven pushes were slightly too strong(new change makes them need 20s more starport techlab time so they're delayed/ weakened now but still usable) Lategame ghosts got nerfed, which is good for toss, and mothership rework is good for toss. Only scary thing is disruptor supply increase which makes me slightly scared of spreading my army(which was already hard due to toss armies scaling with size while terran scales less)
@@snowdrop9810 How do you know that balance is the issue? Terrans have been dying/losing to 4 gate blink quite frequently, should we nerf the blink timing now? Time will tell but in my mind the game is complex enough that pros will always find a way, thats why its more important to focus on good design rather than trying to micromanage individual playstyles. Its not like raven pushes are unbeatable, the reason protoss generally dies is bc of greed. Not enough units, heavy reliance on colossi and a third base. This is a dedicated 2 base push out of terran and if it fails he is in a bad spot. So how is it op? Im not a pro but this seems balanced, there is incentive and risks. Compare that to a 4 gate and there is seemingly no risk, you blink in, terran dies or terran lives, but you still trade well and the follow up is fine. The best protoss do it regularly, who would have guessed? Again im not questioning the changes im questioning the approach, if you were to change everything thats slightly too strong, you would have to make a new game.
Explained well, i agree, Some things are balanced but indeed not fun has an interaction. If we can i totally agree we should consider more "fun" interaction when patching the game... but that woyld require somes massives changes to the game.
I've thought about this a lot, what if we just buff worker HP by 5. This has a lot of flow on effects, some of which are definitely negative (scv pulls for one), but it would be interesting to see how it would play out.
@@ProbeSC2 Yes. I think a 45 health probe is the way to go, also delay the probe shield regen time by 5 seconds so it has no effect on tvp, and is also a nerf to cannon rushes, ppl are afraid of cannon rush buff from those 5 hp.
Great take, you're dead on the money. These half measures will no doubt improve the quality of life for active players in the short term, but they're not addressing any of the big issues which have pushed players away over the years, or are exciting enough to draw people back in. Toss has needed a major rework since day dot. Warpgate as shipped in WoL and hardly changed since is a fundamentally broken mechanic that requires gateway units to suck and forces the toss race to be brittle and heavily dependent on tech units to function. You mentioned WG as a potential area for changes and honestly I think it's the most important thing to seriously look at. A proper redesign is required but none of the games many custodians have ever had the sack to seriously try rocking the boat. Anyway I switched to Z after 10 years of playing toss and never looked back haha.
There is no problem with warpgate. Any timings that have been abusive have long since been nerfed multiple times. If more timings pop up that are abusive they will get nerfed for sure. Probably in a hot fix. Warpgate is cool. You people need to stop.
@MrMasters1983 the entire race is designed around warpgate. Protoss throughout history have started WG as soon as the core finishes. It's more essential than any other upgrade in the game. Being able to remove unit rallying and the defenders advantage that comes with it is so strong that gateway units have to suck to compensate. Compare a sc2 zealot to a bw one. It's like a different unit in terms of strength. I'm not saying get rid of WG, I'm saying change the mechanic to something more interesting that gives a reason to bounce between Gateways and WG's (short term advantage of warping but better overall production from WG?) Then retool the rest of the race to compensate. It'll never happen but I'm sure it would lead to more interesting gameplay.
@@MrMasters1983 I'm not saying wg needs a redesign because it's too strong, I'm saying protoss needs a redesign because it sucks, and redesigning WG is a good place to start.
I think the adept and adept shade should be slightly slower than it is currently, and there should be an adept speed upgrade that makes the adept and the shade faster
I cannot agree with you more. 110%. And we should not forget that FUN is what keeps a game alive. Of pro matches are not fin to watch, then less people will play, and if it's not fun to play (at the meta leagues >50 GM basically) then the game will die
I don't want to come off as doom and gloom, but I think this is why ZeroSpace and StormGate sound so exciting. If Blizzard ever got its act together and made SC3, I think that would be equally amazing. I think we have just all looked at these same units and same kinds of fights/strategies and they have been so optimized that it is hard to feel fresh without rehauling everything. Maybe that's ok. Maybe SC2 is the game it is and SC3 could be even better. SC1 still has quite the player base despite the enormity of things wrong with the game. Kinda the same thing as Super Smash Melee, it's great, it's not perfect, we have made some other stuff since then, and they can all exist together with their fun little quirks and problems and that is just fine.
Wouldn't it be possible to make newer patches only be playable if they are selected as a special ruleset, like how you can choose between WOL, HOTS and LOTV when playing melee. Then if the feedback and the statistics all look good for the new rulesets the changes can be rolled in. This way you can gather data without jeapordizig pros.
The patch goal is very clear and on point. I wish voidray to be rework just like cyclone, it faces same problem as cyclone, no places in a standard game, only niche usage or meme strategy. Also, I wish liberator is nerf just like ghost, disruptor and baneling, as they create the same problem: massing one type of unit in lategame with almost no counter and punishment, encouraging unhealty game play.
Briefly, I think the last patch showed that the various pros on the balance council aren't doing things that help them personally. Neither does this patch - it is a pro-Maru patch, that makes baneling runbys weaker, and also makes brood lords weaker, while buffing medivac healing and leaving marines and marauders untouched, while making mass ghosts into a skill check. If you're a Terran who can do ultra-late game, sniping elegantly with ghosts, which means 'are you Maru ?', then you'll benefit.
They might also ruin mass gateway protoss vs zerg that hero popularize because of 1) infestor being buffed in midgame which make blink stalkers kite with blink impossible, 2)the lurker having cheaper upgrades with speed burrow which will mean protoss blink stalkers need to kill zerg before the vipers and speed burrow lurker protoss are already at a timer against lurker viper composition using blink stalkers colossus immortal and disruptors unless they switched to ir. Coupled with disruptors nerf it will be harder for protoss to kill the zerg.3)ultralisk buff is also anti heavy gateway composition as ultralisk counter all gateway and robo units except archon and immortal. It felt like the balance team wants only sky toss which is boring. 4)zerg reduction cost for ground carapace will make protoss units already ineffective against equal attack and armour upgrade with protoss as protoss usually benefits from faster upgrades but do not scale well in mid to late game with how protoss upgrade works usually protoss benefits in attack upgrades with +1 base damage +1 bonus damage examples are blink stalker , colossus, adept. Sentries zealots receive +1 base damage and archon immortal and dark templar receive the large increase in base damage and bonus damage. In other words if zerg are equal in armour upgrades vs equal attack upgrades of protoss the upgrade will cancel each other out. Zerg on the underhand will receive +2 base damage per attack upgrades on roaches that cost 75 minerals 25 gas ,ravagers will receive +2 base damage per upgrades , lurkers will receive +2 base damage and +1 bonus damage , baneling receive +2 base damage and ultralisk will receive +3 base damage in other words core zerg units benefit more on each attack upgrades while stalkers and colossus will receive only +1 base damage and + 1 bonus damage. There is also the immortal attack upgrades which do not scale well vs roaches and lurker. with no upgrades immortal will do 50 damage vs armoured in other words they will 3shots roaches and 4 shots lurker while on the +3 immortal will do 65 damage vs armoured they will still 3 shots roaches and 4 shots lurker.
The very statement "fix SC2" implies that the game is broken or something. It's not, it does needs some tweaks and a breath of fresh air, but the balance as it was up to this point was pretty darn good, considering you have 3 very different factions. Btw, I like the patch a lot. They did aim to make unpopular units more attractive. And yes, I am a big fan of the fact that they aimed to reduce the lethality with units such as ghosts, banelings and disruptors.
As much as I agree with the main point of having the wrong incentives/incentive overlap, I have to point out that core units ARE being changed. They pretty much reworked the baneling, this is a hugely impactful change that kind of redefines zerg. It's not just "oh you can't two-shot workers anymore", it's so much more! Marines gun them down quicker, Colossus obliterates them now, (unsure if the ticking of storm also does not kill them quicker) and tanks now one-shot them consistently. This is huge. You can't use banelings anymore and pros have to come up with new ideas for zerg. The ghost nerf is also extremely impactful, because it is an all around unit that is good against everything in the late game (you either go bio with ghosts or mech and then with ghosts). I think protoss got the shortest end of the stick with only the MS being reworked. TLDR: core units such as the baneling and ghosts are being changed. As long as there is a balance council made from different races somewhat equally split, you will make the incentive problem less impactful.
In the balance council people like you or pig should have been there. People like Harstem wants to play it safe as far as protoss changes are concerned and its not helping...
Yeah youre right on this, the only BIGGER changes that will affect huge things like core units, or mechanical play, WONT be decided by pro's. theres a loophole, but we cant get out of it because blizzard abandoned this harder than a red headed step child
The statis ward vision isn't a "small" increase - it's going from r4 to r7 - instead of seeing 16 x 3.142 = 50 hexes, it'll see 49 x 3.142 = 154 hexes - it's more than tripled
How does that actually change how the game plays out? It doesn’t. No one was dying because their stasis wards had too small of a sight range. You have revelation anyway. Heck, stasis wards are almost always placed where toss already has plenty of vision, because having a stasis ward out on the map means you won’t be in position to take advantage of the units it hits.
@@zaxtonhong3958 If you don't understand the importance of scouting, I'm not going to waste my time explaining anything to you. If a burrowed ling or widow mine got 3 x more vision, protoss would be up in arms about it
@@Tsnafu Widow mine sure, those are things you'd leave around the map. Also it already has good vision range. It'd be pretty op if it had the same sight range as a sensor tower. Zerg already has creep and overlords to fulfill the scouting purpose. Burrowed zergling sight range would be incredibly useless I fully understand the importance of scouting, but if you have stasis ward, you have oracles, which use revelation to scout for you anyway. It's not just me who thinks this. Watch literally any of the big sc youtubers review the patch notes. All of their reactions range from "whatever" to "who's the guy who thought this would do anything?". Are you going to say that none of them understand the importance of scouting?
Personally, as a viewer of SC2 games but not a player myself, we don't need SC2 to be balanced or fixed. We want good games. Interesting games. Surprising games. Tbh, Mothership rush is fun AF. They should do this kind of cyclical patches more often, but not to lose the identity of SC2 at the same time.
I have a genuine question as an outsider who has only really played super casually in Brood War and SC2. Are consistent balance patches even necessary? What would be wrong with going the Brood War route and having most meta shakeups come from new custom maps that top level mappers make based on the ever-evolving meta? It feels so bizarre that games like Red Alert 2, AoE 2 and Brood War have managed to maintain such robust and long-standing communities (Brood War obviously dwarfing the others) whilst not receiving patches for eons. Metas still evolved, new strategies still opened up and things like map pools are so good at giving players new things to experiment with. You're never going to hit that perfect patch, something will always be a little too strong or a little too weak and top level players will always have differing ideas on how things should or shouldn't function. This just feels so futile and pointless not just in the methodology of who is doing the patches like you've described, but in needing to do the patches at all. Surely unless there is something super centralizing terrorizing the meta players can try and just adapt, yeah?
I'll say the main competitive genre I've gotten into over the years is fighting games, which is a genre notorious for giving communities 1-2 patches a year if that in some cases. It's always fun to see a meta evolve over the course of a patch and I find following the comp scene for games like AoE2 and Brood War fascinating as an outsider purely because of how much of that evolution doesn't come from people changing numbers in-game, but actually finding out previously unheard of counterplay potential.
2 things. AOE2 actually gets quite a lot of patches, and new civs. And I guess yeah it's totally fine to go down the route of balancing through maps, if the population is generally okay with the design of units. I don't think a large portion of the community would want to stop here, because there is a lot of annoying things that may be balanced, but don't make the experience of playing sc2 as enjoyable as people hope it to be.
I don't like that the assumption that this entire video is predicated is that it is entirely impossible for the balance team to be unbiased. Despite there not being many actually Protoss changes a LOT of the changes are directly about making Protoss matchups better, possibly at the expense of other matchups (like the baneling change which may negatively impact ZvT). They're balancing the game, not redesigning it
Well humans I don't think can be unbiased, so whatever mechanism (and this may be the only option we have left) that we use to handle SC2 is going to be biased. So because of who pro players are by definition, we get this very incremental approach to 'balance', when I think that is the wrong end goal. They are balancing the game, when we should be redesigning large aspects of it. (And this is also a result of the scary thought that we can't make quick changes because blizzard might not be there to support us).
I want to see widow mines removed not only from the game, but someone to go back in time and remove widow mines from the mind of who whoever proposed them
Yeah they are fuck6.ing cancer unit. I dont have a problem losing, but it makes the game damn frustrating when the opponent starts placing mines everywhere, and they don't even cost much for the oppression they cause. Not even banelings are that annoying
You have to buff stalker damage. Until you are willing to bring stalkers in line with other core units protoss will need crutches to survive the early game. Any "balance counsel" that doesnt address this isnt a balance counsel its an "advocacy for my race counsel".
pretty sure they targeted the least played units for the biggest changes, not for pro players - but because they're the least played units. lol. (in theory biggest room for improvements)
I believed they went way too far on banelings nerfs 😢 bane were already nerfed for their damage before this patch and now damage Vs light and hp are nerfed hard... This unit already trade bad in ressources now it's useless
Problem with "fun." Each person has a different opinion of fun, and if something is only fun, people won't want to just keep on playing it. The amount of fun someone has from playing a game that's designed to just have fun, will fade over time as they get tired of it and the person's personal ideas of what's fun or not changes. Making the game imbalanced in the name of fun will leave nothing left for people to fall back to when it stops being fun. "It doesn't feel all that fun anymore, but I know it's still a lot better game than most, if not all, other games." Looking at balance as anti-fun is an incredibly bad way of thinking about the situation. Balance is the middle-ground between everyone's personal ideas of fun. Make your game all about fun, and you end up with a rotating playerbase, not a core playerbase. There's dozens of examples of that in the SC2 arcade section. If you're going to try to have a following that you're constantly trying to convince into having your own personal ideals, then please think about these things intelligently. Don't be like Artosis, who is still convincing people that retired pro players from the early 2010's are still better than any pro players we have today. While thousands of people who don't know any better, believe it because the guy on the TV said it, and has such-and-such qualifications.
I think the one thing Zerg needs is a corrupter buff, they need something to counter mass carrier a debuff spell that slows attack or range or SOMETHING. I CANT STAND making hydra/festor/ruptor only to cast microbial on my hydras and still watch them all die while the 1 cloaked observer hiding under the carrier ball sees all my festors and wrecks shop in seconds…. Zerg genuinely has no hard counter against mass airtoss late game and I think that’s due to the insanely squishy Mutas and single target damage from ruptors
The "widow mine drops are not fun" argument doesn't sit well with me. I am zerg, and of course it is not fun for me to fight them. I am pretty sure it's fun for the other guy, though. There's many things in this game that are not "fun" for me to play against. Cannon rushes, for example. That doesn't mean that I want Protoss or Zerg to be "fundamentally changed" so that Cannon rush is now fun for me to play against. I also don't think Protoss' problem is in Gateway units. They suck, but all base units of all races suck, I believe. Even marines require a bunch of updates before becoming "good". I think speed zealots are very decent, and . The stalker problem is not that it can be warped in, it's that with blink you can get in an out of enemy bases, and do it better than with marauders. Stalkers are almost a flying unit whose graphic is misleading. What sucks about Protoss is Robo units, imho. Terran units are generalists. Most are good in at least two roles. They attack both air *and* ground, or they deal splash damage to ground in a line *and* can be transformed to do splash in a cone, or are a siege unit *and* can also be used unsieged, or they deal extra damaged to armored *and* they slow things down. Most Protoss units are specialists, but the robo ones are like that to the extreme: only shoot ground, and can only damage light or armored. "Being able to go up and down cliffs" is gimmicky, and gets countered by air units. So supply-per-supply, Terrans are going to be able to do more DPS to any opposing enemy than Protoss, because of this. They tried to address this by making *starport* units more generalists. But it turns out that flying is already a huge advantage on this game. You can ignore chokepoints and vision issues, and you can pop in and out of enemy bases (like the blink stalker or the marauder can). So a generalist unit that can fly becomes too OP very easily. Void Ray was that, so it got nerfed. Oracles are very good, but we need to give them energy, or they would be too good. Tempests need to attack very slowly and be very fragile, otherwise they would be OP. By putting the "generalism" into air, they had to nerf them a lot in order to not make them too. (Carriers are on a different separate category of bad design. Not microable with or against, definetly not fun to play with or against). So yeah, I agree with PiG in that both the Oracle and Immortal need to be more generalist. More base damage, less specialist damage, for example. And perhaps give collosi the ability to headbutt flying units.
I think sport should be balanced by the viewers (based on entertainment value) and not the players themselves. They have massive conflicts of interest and ultimately all sports rely on one thing: viewership.
You know what was detrimental to the game, LoTV. It's no coincidence the economy changes and constant and drastic decline in player base happen within one year of one another. Yeah it's cool there's finally another balance patch, it's refreshing, but barely tweaking stats won't make it SC2 again, it'll still just be LoTV. Congrats though
I can't believe they finally did it, it only took 2 years after I tweeted it (Okay I can't remember if it was 2 years ago, but it feels that long ago!)
Protoss doesn't need vast, sweeping changes. It needs EMP to be fixed. And I remain convinced that Disruptor can be fixed by adding a 'selector switch' allowing the player to fire contact det (as original) or timed (as now) - a change that would have little to no impact on the metal/diamond leagues but massive impacts to the pro scene (I'm looking at you, byun).
If you want more drastic overhauls, like the cyclone got but for gateway units, then it seems reasonable to say this patch is a good step in the right direction and you'd like to see more of this. Vague criticisms that you want the game to be more "fun"; want more drastic overhauls despite this patch already having several drastic overhauls, that should probably settle down first; that you want starcraft to be something different... sounds like you're just up for playing a different game to get something fresh. These unsubstantial and unsubstantiated arguments suggest you have neither a concrete wish nor a concrete criticism-- you're just... over it. Which is fine I guess. The problem of pro players being part of balancing was of course a much bigger problem years earlier, when there was more money in pro SC2, and playing a political game of convincing Blizzard your race needed buffs sadly became part of the pro circuit. You're really late to come with this criticism; at this point, for lack of Blizzard interest in sc2, these people are volunteering to work to keep the game fresh, fun and interesting. I think they're doing quite well considering what they have to work with. ...there's also an argument to be made that you're simply pioneering to make your own race stronger (buff gateway units!), without concrete argument or reason (it would be more "fun", the game would be better, if we don't do it the game might be dead in a year) I'd like Protoss to have some more / better toys to play with, and I do think there's a void there to be filled there. It'll require more concrete feedback than clickbait titles and the-game-will-die, it's-just-not-fun arguments.
He wants FUN hahaha. This game is designed to be as annoying as humanly possible, if fun was ever a goal they wouldn't have included nonsense like teleporting or invisible units. Or permanently invisible units that deal huge damage and can also teleport.. My theory is that when designing the game they cared a lot more about how fun it would be to watch than to play.
Honesly, this video seems pretty protoss biased. I don't know about balance for protoss at top level, but saying protoss is "broken" and needs a complete rework to be payable seems a bit exagerated. You lost me there bro...
Fair. Generally this video was made with the context of people complaining a lot about how Protoss is being approached in the patch. The point isn't the balance of Protoss. It's that if we want to make substantial changes to interactions in the game we probably don't love (disruptors, mines, etc), we might not be able to without doing larger drastic changes to Protoss. It is also very very difficult to buff gateway units because of warp gate, because gateways units then become oppressive. We could reach a balanced game state with very small changes but is that going to be most fun game state.
Protoss is still incredibly strong at lower levels, diamond and lower. It's so easy to attack with protoss compared to the other races. I have been struggling with TvP cuz im not great with bio or crazy multi pronged attacks. Zealots and stalkers and archons are so easy to play with and get such a power spike when warpgates and their upgrades come online. Terrans feel desperate to get the damage done, i feel the same when i play T. I fear these changes will scew too much at the lower levels, protoss don't need help there. How do you actually stop 2 base 12 gate +2 chargelot archon warpprism allin vs zerg with less than 300 apm, cuz I havent lost with it yet. Great vs terran too, you just need to be a little more flexible, but if it doesn't work at first, you can always just take the map.. To fight that as terran you need near perfect lib, mine, ghost, bio micro, walling bases you cant defend, near perfect play, before you die to airtoss switch. Seriously Toss is soooo ez, if you cant win with toss, you tossed yourself with defensive baby play.. 100 apm vs 250, no problem what so ever, just make attacking moves in stead of whining, ez ez win, gesus christ.. Best regard (EzMode)PatchToss
Indeed, the fun aspect has hardly ever been considered in sc2 updates. I think it's a marketing issue as well. Starcraft always presented itself as the super hard game where fast reactions and nerves of steel are the key factors to success. This has increasily drawn the casual playerbase out of the game, as people preferred to watch pros suffer than play themselves. Playing is just too stressful for most people, especially as the playerbase has grown in age. I mean, I haven't played regularly since 2016 and I still get nightmares about dying from doom drops.
Your opening statement in the solution section of the video about focusing on fun balancing is something that I feel like a LOT of people have forgotten about in this era hyper competitive eSports. Not everything HAS to be completely balanced, but it does have to be fun. If your game isn't fun to interact with, then people aren't going to play it.
It is the complaint that David Kim balancing style has gotten in the past if I remember correctly. He was showing the numbers and saying "See? The win-rates show the game is extremely well balanced" whereas the players were saying "Yeah... But aren't having fun playing these "balanced" matches". Ultimately the game can be balanced and feel imbalanced and at the same time be imbalanced - but feel balanced.
Of course at the competitive level the perception is a little bit different, the pro gamers mostly want the state of the game to be one where they win ^^" But ultimately yeah the most important part about balancing should be aiming for the game to feel the most fun to play, and avoid frustrating the player
We need more custom mapmakers trying out new ideas and configurations. We could try these out in Arcade and see what sticks.
People tried major changes in the past, the community aggressively ignored them until their small communities all died out.
@@n00b1n8R Well that sucks. I guess it's because using custom maps is horribly implemented in SC2.
@@tarvoc746 I think it was more about them not being the "real" game.
@@n00b1n8R Well Starcraft 1 never had this problem. It had a really active mapping and modding community back in the day. I was a part of it myself.
@tarvoc746 oh custom maps were and are very popular, I'm talking specifically about rebalancing/redesigning mods for the base game.
I completely agree with increasing fun by minimising frustrating mechanics and units (mines, ruptors banelings, maybe protoss deathballs). But another thing to consider is also the viewer enjoyment. Sure, losing to these units is frustrating, but it's also exciting to watch pros split the bio against banes, snipe ruptors or drag mines into terran armies.
P.S. I think the new cyclone will be worse than the current one.
Protoss Deathball because gateway units are terrible by themselves. They always loose to Terran units of the same cost unless they are backed up by tech. You gotta deathball.
@@ralphwarom2514 agreed, but gateway units cannot be strong in large battles because of the warp in mechanic, which allows you to get huge amount of units anywhere on the map. They just have to be balanced around this fact.
Agree with the balance council issue. Fundamental problem.
You are right 100%. Usually to identify the issue you should research when game become completely broken for Protoss on high level. In my opinion it was the charge nerf. But not even one moment. The first thing they did is remove 10 Hp from adepts without any reason, meanwhile buffing marauder and widow mines, now stalker became a core unit in all matchups and only Hero gets somewhere sometimes. Protoss lacks options in army composition it should have!
The only good thing left for the Protoss is that you don't need to constantly monitor the probes to manage them, everything else sucks.
The comparison with what a terran can do is embarrassing
Great point- If we worry too much about balance and ones' race being able to win tournaments over fresh, fun and new things, then there won't be any tournaments to win.
Thats why we need the resource as well as a strong mandate from Blizzard to pull this off, its super complicated to make a fun AND balance game. At the moment, there is no chance of that happening, so we just have to live with what we have. Either seeing these small and not very meaningful change, or no change at all, its your choice.
i have said this many times since the wol days, the issue is the design of the units.
not only balance.
Spot on
I completely agree. Besides the making the units more fun, I also think there is a fundamental problem with the way macro works. Ofcourse I want the game to be hard and high multitasking skills should be awarded, but think about this.
You want to make a baracks. A list of what you have to do:
-put your screen on your mineral line
-select an scv
-put your screen on the place you want to build
-press b and b
-click
-go back to your mineral line
-press shift and rightclick the mineral line
-go back to your rax and wait for it to start building
-select the baracks and shift click it to your controll group
-set the rally point
This could be made SO much easier, and then you have spare APM to do things that are actually fun and have an impact on the game itself. So many quality of life adjustements could be made that make the game focus so much more on fun instead of chores.
Hi Probe. I think skill level is really a big factor. I dont think you can balance the game for the wide range of skill groups. I absolutely understand that we need to prioritize balance in the upper most classes (for reasons you explained: livelihoods are on the line etc; and the general viewership needs to be enjoying the game when watching and all TvT or ZvZ finals boring to watch long term). I agree that toss has been struggling in the last 2-3 years (or even longer) to win in Korea and especially in Europe. We have Terrans dominating in Korea (ok Her0 won GSL once) and Zergs destroy the scene in Europe (since 2012 that is???). Toss needed a buff but it could cost the dear lifes of poor low - mid masters players who get rekt but disruptors ... :D
I think focusing on the top 1% of players is the biggest mistake you can make to the popularity of a game. The data is not enough to "prove" that protoss is actually worse. It could be that protoss pro gamers just aren't as good as their terran and zerg counterparts, at least at the moment. Everyone seems to forget, that we had periods of time when protoss players were dominating in the pro scene. Neeb, Trap, Stats, Zest are prime examples. Who do we have now? Maybe MaxPax, although I wouldn't put him on the same level as Trap in his prime, Hero had great form like when he won the GSL, but hasn't been very consistent since. My point is you can't put the blame solely on race.
However the data we do have and something we can definitely prove is that protoss is more than balanced on the ladder and does not need any help winning games.
That's just not true. No protoss players has dominated for the last 5 years. Trap lost like every final he was ever in.
When it comes to the ladder, 98% of players will win half and lose half.
@@jonathanhansson804 Trap is the winner of 3 gsl super tournaments and was beating terrans right left and center, only losing to dark in the finals if I remember correctly. Neeb won countless WCS in 2017 and 2018 so wtf are you talking about?
And you still haven't answered my question, which protoss pro currently would you put at the same level as serral, dark, raynor, maru, cure, clem? Just because they are winning tournaments doesn't mean that all the other terrans and zergs can.
WTH do you mean with everyone winning and losing 50%? With that kind of logic you could justify everything. The point is there is more %of protoss masters and grandmaters on the ladder than terran and zerg. Which means it is easier to get high level with protoss that is a fact. Less people play protoss than terran yet you have more/the same amount of masters.
@@Mu_tant_ikIf you dont focus on competitive balance, the esports WILL DIE. This is even WORSE than losing some players because thwy think their race is underpowered. Imo this patch is great for toss as toss' weaknesses were Raven pushes were slightly too strong(new change makes them need 20s more starport techlab time so they're delayed/ weakened now but still usable) Lategame ghosts got nerfed, which is good for toss, and mothership rework is good for toss. Only scary thing is disruptor supply increase which makes me slightly scared of spreading my army(which was already hard due to toss armies scaling with size while terran scales less)
@@snowdrop9810 How do you know that balance is the issue? Terrans have been dying/losing to 4 gate blink quite frequently, should we nerf the blink timing now? Time will tell but in my mind the game is complex enough that pros will always find a way, thats why its more important to focus on good design rather than trying to micromanage individual playstyles. Its not like raven pushes are unbeatable, the reason protoss generally dies is bc of greed. Not enough units, heavy reliance on colossi and a third base. This is a dedicated 2 base push out of terran and if it fails he is in a bad spot. So how is it op? Im not a pro but this seems balanced, there is incentive and risks. Compare that to a 4 gate and there is seemingly no risk, you blink in, terran dies or terran lives, but you still trade well and the follow up is fine. The best protoss do it regularly, who would have guessed? Again im not questioning the changes im questioning the approach, if you were to change everything thats slightly too strong, you would have to make a new game.
100% Agree with you. Also with the fun aspect... most things are not fun to use or deal with...
Explained well, i agree, Some things are balanced but indeed not fun has an interaction. If we can i totally agree we should consider more "fun" interaction when patching the game... but that woyld require somes massives changes to the game.
just imagine for a second widow mines wouldnt oneshot probes anymore
I've thought about this a lot, what if we just buff worker HP by 5.
This has a lot of flow on effects, some of which are definitely negative (scv pulls for one), but it would be interesting to see how it would play out.
great video btw ;) sucks to be protoss these days
personally I switched to zerg because I couldnt suffer through PvT anymore xD@@ProbeSC2
@@ProbeSC2 Yes. I think a 45 health probe is the way to go, also delay the probe shield regen time by 5 seconds so it has no effect on tvp, and is also a nerf to cannon rushes, ppl are afraid of cannon rush buff from those 5 hp.
Great take, you're dead on the money. These half measures will no doubt improve the quality of life for active players in the short term, but they're not addressing any of the big issues which have pushed players away over the years, or are exciting enough to draw people back in.
Toss has needed a major rework since day dot. Warpgate as shipped in WoL and hardly changed since is a fundamentally broken mechanic that requires gateway units to suck and forces the toss race to be brittle and heavily dependent on tech units to function. You mentioned WG as a potential area for changes and honestly I think it's the most important thing to seriously look at. A proper redesign is required but none of the games many custodians have ever had the sack to seriously try rocking the boat. Anyway I switched to Z after 10 years of playing toss and never looked back haha.
There is no problem with warpgate. Any timings that have been abusive have long since been nerfed multiple times. If more timings pop up that are abusive they will get nerfed for sure. Probably in a hot fix. Warpgate is cool. You people need to stop.
@MrMasters1983 the entire race is designed around warpgate. Protoss throughout history have started WG as soon as the core finishes. It's more essential than any other upgrade in the game. Being able to remove unit rallying and the defenders advantage that comes with it is so strong that gateway units have to suck to compensate. Compare a sc2 zealot to a bw one. It's like a different unit in terms of strength. I'm not saying get rid of WG, I'm saying change the mechanic to something more interesting that gives a reason to bounce between Gateways and WG's (short term advantage of warping but better overall production from WG?) Then retool the rest of the race to compensate. It'll never happen but I'm sure it would lead to more interesting gameplay.
@@n00b1n8R Warpgate has been nerfed like 20 times. You cant beat a dead horse forever man.
@@MrMasters1983 I'm not saying wg needs a redesign because it's too strong, I'm saying protoss needs a redesign because it sucks, and redesigning WG is a good place to start.
I think the adept and adept shade should be slightly slower than it is currently, and there should be an adept speed upgrade that makes the adept and the shade faster
I cannot agree with you more. 110%.
And we should not forget that FUN is what keeps a game alive. Of pro matches are not fin to watch, then less people will play, and if it's not fun to play (at the meta leagues >50 GM basically) then the game will die
This is the perspective that needed when rebalancing!!
#BuffTheToss #MakeImmortalsImmortalAgain
I don't want to come off as doom and gloom, but I think this is why ZeroSpace and StormGate sound so exciting. If Blizzard ever got its act together and made SC3, I think that would be equally amazing.
I think we have just all looked at these same units and same kinds of fights/strategies and they have been so optimized that it is hard to feel fresh without rehauling everything.
Maybe that's ok. Maybe SC2 is the game it is and SC3 could be even better. SC1 still has quite the player base despite the enormity of things wrong with the game. Kinda the same thing as Super Smash Melee, it's great, it's not perfect, we have made some other stuff since then, and they can all exist together with their fun little quirks and problems and that is just fine.
This is actually... Kinda a good take. Thanks for the video
Wouldn't it be possible to make newer patches only be playable if they are selected as a special ruleset, like how you can choose between WOL, HOTS and LOTV when playing melee. Then if the feedback and the statistics all look good for the new rulesets the changes can be rolled in. This way you can gather data without jeapordizig pros.
That’s already how it works. It’s just that a tiny percentage of the player base plays it so it’s hard to get the feedback and statistics you need.
The patch goal is very clear and on point. I wish voidray to be rework just like cyclone, it faces same problem as cyclone, no places in a standard game, only niche usage or meme strategy.
Also, I wish liberator is nerf just like ghost, disruptor and baneling, as they create the same problem: massing one type of unit in lategame with almost no counter and punishment, encouraging unhealty game play.
I'm in Diamond last 4 years. All the patches never bring imbalance to my games. And as a human being I love changes once in a while.
no one is talking about the baneling nerf vs terran. the damage nerf vs light comined the hp nerf also makes marines wayyy better vs banes
Briefly, I think the last patch showed that the various pros on the balance council aren't doing things that help them personally.
Neither does this patch - it is a pro-Maru patch, that makes baneling runbys weaker, and also makes brood lords weaker, while buffing medivac healing and leaving marines and marauders untouched, while making mass ghosts into a skill check. If you're a Terran who can do ultra-late game, sniping elegantly with ghosts, which means 'are you Maru ?', then you'll benefit.
This is such bullshit. Terran is obviously the loser in this patch.
Really cool to see your design perspective 😊 very different from other content creators' viewpoints
They might also ruin mass gateway protoss vs zerg that hero popularize because of 1) infestor being buffed in midgame which make blink stalkers kite with blink impossible, 2)the lurker having cheaper upgrades with speed burrow which will mean protoss blink stalkers need to kill zerg before the vipers and speed burrow lurker protoss are already at a timer against lurker viper composition using blink stalkers colossus immortal and disruptors unless they switched to ir. Coupled with disruptors nerf it will be harder for protoss to kill the zerg.3)ultralisk buff is also anti heavy gateway composition as ultralisk counter all gateway and robo units except archon and immortal. It felt like the balance team wants only sky toss which is boring. 4)zerg reduction cost for ground carapace will make protoss units already ineffective against equal attack and armour upgrade with protoss as protoss usually benefits from faster upgrades but do not scale well in mid to late game with how protoss upgrade works usually protoss benefits in attack upgrades with +1 base damage +1 bonus damage examples are blink stalker , colossus, adept. Sentries zealots receive +1 base damage and archon immortal and dark templar receive the large increase in base damage and bonus damage. In other words if zerg are equal in armour upgrades vs equal attack upgrades of protoss the upgrade will cancel each other out. Zerg on the underhand will receive +2 base damage per attack upgrades on roaches that cost 75 minerals 25 gas ,ravagers will receive +2 base damage per upgrades , lurkers will receive +2 base damage and +1 bonus damage , baneling receive +2 base damage and ultralisk will receive +3 base damage in other words core zerg units benefit more on each attack upgrades while stalkers and colossus will receive only +1 base damage and + 1 bonus damage. There is also the immortal attack upgrades which do not scale well vs roaches and lurker. with no upgrades immortal will do 50 damage vs armoured in other words they will 3shots roaches and 4 shots lurker while on the +3 immortal will do 65 damage vs armoured they will still 3 shots roaches and 4 shots lurker.
The very statement "fix SC2" implies that the game is broken or something. It's not, it does needs some tweaks and a breath of fresh air, but the balance as it was up to this point was pretty darn good, considering you have 3 very different factions.
Btw, I like the patch a lot. They did aim to make unpopular units more attractive. And yes, I am a big fan of the fact that they aimed to reduce the lethality with units such as ghosts, banelings and disruptors.
As much as I agree with the main point of having the wrong incentives/incentive overlap, I have to point out that core units ARE being changed. They pretty much reworked the baneling, this is a hugely impactful change that kind of redefines zerg. It's not just "oh you can't two-shot workers anymore", it's so much more! Marines gun them down quicker, Colossus obliterates them now, (unsure if the ticking of storm also does not kill them quicker) and tanks now one-shot them consistently. This is huge. You can't use banelings anymore and pros have to come up with new ideas for zerg. The ghost nerf is also extremely impactful, because it is an all around unit that is good against everything in the late game (you either go bio with ghosts or mech and then with ghosts). I think protoss got the shortest end of the stick with only the MS being reworked.
TLDR: core units such as the baneling and ghosts are being changed. As long as there is a balance council made from different races somewhat equally split, you will make the incentive problem less impactful.
"Balance council can't touch core units!"
bane and lurker nerfs:
I agree! This game needs to evolve...
In the balance council people like you or pig should have been there. People like Harstem wants to play it safe as far as protoss changes are concerned and its not helping...
@7:38 AMEN!!!! glhf fam!
Or... (hear me out here) give total authority to the Random-players!
They have no bias, and they clearly value "fun". Definitely!
I’m really confused, you said that no core unit ever gets changed, but the banelings is getting nerfed
who is the balance council though? more specifically, which pro's. Does anyone have a source?
Assume every pro, but some have publically said they have left.
@@ProbeSC2 heard this before
Yeah youre right on this, the only BIGGER changes that will affect huge things like core units, or mechanical play, WONT be decided by pro's. theres a loophole, but we cant get out of it because blizzard abandoned this harder than a red headed step child
Those changes fit my playstyle, I think it'll make me have more fun as zerg.
probe wisdom
Baneling got nerfed though. Thats the biggest change in the patch imo.
An example of a change targeting something frustrating, really great to see. The hp nerf probably goes too far though :D
As long as they don't touch the campaigns
The statis ward vision isn't a "small" increase - it's going from r4 to r7 - instead of seeing 16 x 3.142 = 50 hexes, it'll see 49 x 3.142 = 154 hexes - it's more than tripled
How does that actually change how the game plays out? It doesn’t.
No one was dying because their stasis wards had too small of a sight range. You have revelation anyway. Heck, stasis wards are almost always placed where toss already has plenty of vision, because having a stasis ward out on the map means you won’t be in position to take advantage of the units it hits.
@@zaxtonhong3958 If you don't understand the importance of scouting, I'm not going to waste my time explaining anything to you. If a burrowed ling or widow mine got 3 x more vision, protoss would be up in arms about it
@@Tsnafu Widow mine sure, those are things you'd leave around the map. Also it already has good vision range. It'd be pretty op if it had the same sight range as a sensor tower. Zerg already has creep and overlords to fulfill the scouting purpose. Burrowed zergling sight range would be incredibly useless
I fully understand the importance of scouting, but if you have stasis ward, you have oracles, which use revelation to scout for you anyway. It's not just me who thinks this. Watch literally any of the big sc youtubers review the patch notes. All of their reactions range from "whatever" to "who's the guy who thought this would do anything?". Are you going to say that none of them understand the importance of scouting?
Personally, as a viewer of SC2 games but not a player myself, we don't need SC2 to be balanced or fixed.
We want good games. Interesting games. Surprising games.
Tbh, Mothership rush is fun AF. They should do this kind of cyclical patches more often, but not to lose the identity of SC2 at the same time.
I have a genuine question as an outsider who has only really played super casually in Brood War and SC2. Are consistent balance patches even necessary? What would be wrong with going the Brood War route and having most meta shakeups come from new custom maps that top level mappers make based on the ever-evolving meta?
It feels so bizarre that games like Red Alert 2, AoE 2 and Brood War have managed to maintain such robust and long-standing communities (Brood War obviously dwarfing the others) whilst not receiving patches for eons. Metas still evolved, new strategies still opened up and things like map pools are so good at giving players new things to experiment with. You're never going to hit that perfect patch, something will always be a little too strong or a little too weak and top level players will always have differing ideas on how things should or shouldn't function.
This just feels so futile and pointless not just in the methodology of who is doing the patches like you've described, but in needing to do the patches at all. Surely unless there is something super centralizing terrorizing the meta players can try and just adapt, yeah?
I'll say the main competitive genre I've gotten into over the years is fighting games, which is a genre notorious for giving communities 1-2 patches a year if that in some cases. It's always fun to see a meta evolve over the course of a patch and I find following the comp scene for games like AoE2 and Brood War fascinating as an outsider purely because of how much of that evolution doesn't come from people changing numbers in-game, but actually finding out previously unheard of counterplay potential.
2 things. AOE2 actually gets quite a lot of patches, and new civs.
And I guess yeah it's totally fine to go down the route of balancing through maps, if the population is generally okay with the design of units.
I don't think a large portion of the community would want to stop here, because there is a lot of annoying things that may be balanced, but don't make the experience of playing sc2 as enjoyable as people hope it to be.
I don't like that the assumption that this entire video is predicated is that it is entirely impossible for the balance team to be unbiased. Despite there not being many actually Protoss changes a LOT of the changes are directly about making Protoss matchups better, possibly at the expense of other matchups (like the baneling change which may negatively impact ZvT). They're balancing the game, not redesigning it
Well humans I don't think can be unbiased, so whatever mechanism (and this may be the only option we have left) that we use to handle SC2 is going to be biased. So because of who pro players are by definition, we get this very incremental approach to 'balance', when I think that is the wrong end goal.
They are balancing the game, when we should be redesigning large aspects of it. (And this is also a result of the scary thought that we can't make quick changes because blizzard might not be there to support us).
I want to see widow mines removed not only from the game, but someone to go back in time and remove widow mines from the mind of who whoever proposed them
Yeah they are fuck6.ing cancer unit. I dont have a problem losing, but it makes the game damn frustrating when the opponent starts placing mines everywhere, and they don't even cost much for the oppression they cause.
Not even banelings are that annoying
Swap EMP from ghost with interference matrix from Raven.
There, problem solved.
You have to buff stalker damage. Until you are willing to bring stalkers in line with other core units protoss will need crutches to survive the early game. Any "balance counsel" that doesnt address this isnt a balance counsel its an "advocacy for my race counsel".
I play protoss for the cute robots.
I demand reavers!
pretty sure they targeted the least played units for the biggest changes, not for pro players - but because they're the least played units. lol. (in theory biggest room for improvements)
good point
Protoss could use a bit more help still
Antimatterbombs for protoss!
💯
I believed they went way too far on banelings nerfs 😢 bane were already nerfed for their damage before this patch and now damage Vs light and hp are nerfed hard... This unit already trade bad in ressources now it's useless
Fun isn't a concept just for kids.
Problem with "fun." Each person has a different opinion of fun, and if something is only fun, people won't want to just keep on playing it. The amount of fun someone has from playing a game that's designed to just have fun, will fade over time as they get tired of it and the person's personal ideas of what's fun or not changes. Making the game imbalanced in the name of fun will leave nothing left for people to fall back to when it stops being fun. "It doesn't feel all that fun anymore, but I know it's still a lot better game than most, if not all, other games."
Looking at balance as anti-fun is an incredibly bad way of thinking about the situation. Balance is the middle-ground between everyone's personal ideas of fun. Make your game all about fun, and you end up with a rotating playerbase, not a core playerbase. There's dozens of examples of that in the SC2 arcade section. If you're going to try to have a following that you're constantly trying to convince into having your own personal ideals, then please think about these things intelligently.
Don't be like Artosis, who is still convincing people that retired pro players from the early 2010's are still better than any pro players we have today. While thousands of people who don't know any better, believe it because the guy on the TV said it, and has such-and-such qualifications.
4:42 toss is broken? how so?
I think the one thing Zerg needs is a corrupter buff, they need something to counter mass carrier a debuff spell that slows attack or range or SOMETHING. I CANT STAND making hydra/festor/ruptor only to cast microbial on my hydras and still watch them all die while the 1 cloaked observer hiding under the carrier ball sees all my festors and wrecks shop in seconds…. Zerg genuinely has no hard counter against mass airtoss late game and I think that’s due to the insanely squishy Mutas and single target damage from ruptors
The "widow mine drops are not fun" argument doesn't sit well with me. I am zerg, and of course it is not fun for me to fight them. I am pretty sure it's fun for the other guy, though. There's many things in this game that are not "fun" for me to play against. Cannon rushes, for example. That doesn't mean that I want Protoss or Zerg to be "fundamentally changed" so that Cannon rush is now fun for me to play against.
I also don't think Protoss' problem is in Gateway units. They suck, but all base units of all races suck, I believe. Even marines require a bunch of updates before becoming "good". I think speed zealots are very decent, and . The stalker problem is not that it can be warped in, it's that with blink you can get in an out of enemy bases, and do it better than with marauders. Stalkers are almost a flying unit whose graphic is misleading.
What sucks about Protoss is Robo units, imho.
Terran units are generalists. Most are good in at least two roles. They attack both air *and* ground, or they deal splash damage to ground in a line *and* can be transformed to do splash in a cone, or are a siege unit *and* can also be used unsieged, or they deal extra damaged to armored *and* they slow things down.
Most Protoss units are specialists, but the robo ones are like that to the extreme: only shoot ground, and can only damage light or armored. "Being able to go up and down cliffs" is gimmicky, and gets countered by air units.
So supply-per-supply, Terrans are going to be able to do more DPS to any opposing enemy than Protoss, because of this.
They tried to address this by making *starport* units more generalists. But it turns out that flying is already a huge advantage on this game. You can ignore chokepoints and vision issues, and you can pop in and out of enemy bases (like the blink stalker or the marauder can). So a generalist unit that can fly becomes too OP very easily. Void Ray was that, so it got nerfed. Oracles are very good, but we need to give them energy, or they would be too good. Tempests need to attack very slowly and be very fragile, otherwise they would be OP.
By putting the "generalism" into air, they had to nerf them a lot in order to not make them too.
(Carriers are on a different separate category of bad design. Not microable with or against, definetly not fun to play with or against).
So yeah, I agree with PiG in that both the Oracle and Immortal need to be more generalist. More base damage, less specialist damage, for example. And perhaps give collosi the ability to headbutt flying units.
I think sport should be balanced by the viewers (based on entertainment value) and not the players themselves. They have massive conflicts of interest and ultimately all sports rely on one thing: viewership.
These balance council style patches are more focused on their own little niggles and you don't see stuff prioritised like new maps and fun.
You know what was detrimental to the game, LoTV. It's no coincidence the economy changes and constant and drastic decline in player base happen within one year of one another. Yeah it's cool there's finally another balance patch, it's refreshing, but barely tweaking stats won't make it SC2 again, it'll still just be LoTV. Congrats though
Actually the player base has been consistent and around the same up until this year.
Hey If fun doesnt Matters, Lets remove 2 races for perfect Balance. 😅😅😅
I would honestly say that at least in PvT, they've nerfed the widow mine by making medivacs bigger lol
I can't believe they finally did it, it only took 2 years after I tweeted it (Okay I can't remember if it was 2 years ago, but it feels that long ago!)
Would you honestly say that?
@@ProbeSC2 haha really? Well at least they saw your voidray bug video really quickly, I was surprised how quickly that spread in the sc2 scene.
I really hope that Microspft will ressurect SC2 🙏🏻
Protoss doesn't need vast, sweeping changes. It needs EMP to be fixed.
And I remain convinced that Disruptor can be fixed by adding a 'selector switch' allowing the player to fire contact det (as original) or timed (as now) - a change that would have little to no impact on the metal/diamond leagues but massive impacts to the pro scene (I'm looking at you, byun).
The balance council is actively ruining the game
Protoss is still garbage they need something like - 5 minerals and - 5 gas per stalker or soemthing
Tf2 did a massive balance update based on pros and the community. It was the worst update on record
2 words
test servers.
If you want more drastic overhauls, like the cyclone got but for gateway units, then it seems reasonable to say this patch is a good step in the right direction and you'd like to see more of this.
Vague criticisms that you want the game to be more "fun"; want more drastic overhauls despite this patch already having several drastic overhauls, that should probably settle down first; that you want starcraft to be something different... sounds like you're just up for playing a different game to get something fresh. These unsubstantial and unsubstantiated arguments suggest you have neither a concrete wish nor a concrete criticism-- you're just... over it. Which is fine I guess.
The problem of pro players being part of balancing was of course a much bigger problem years earlier, when there was more money in pro SC2, and playing a political game of convincing Blizzard your race needed buffs sadly became part of the pro circuit. You're really late to come with this criticism; at this point, for lack of Blizzard interest in sc2, these people are volunteering to work to keep the game fresh, fun and interesting. I think they're doing quite well considering what they have to work with.
...there's also an argument to be made that you're simply pioneering to make your own race stronger (buff gateway units!), without concrete argument or reason (it would be more "fun", the game would be better, if we don't do it the game might be dead in a year)
I'd like Protoss to have some more / better toys to play with, and I do think there's a void there to be filled there. It'll require more concrete feedback than clickbait titles and the-game-will-die, it's-just-not-fun arguments.
He wants FUN hahaha. This game is designed to be as annoying as humanly possible, if fun was ever a goal they wouldn't have included nonsense like teleporting or invisible units. Or permanently invisible units that deal huge damage and can also teleport.. My theory is that when designing the game they cared a lot more about how fun it would be to watch than to play.
Honesly, this video seems pretty protoss biased. I don't know about balance for protoss at top level, but saying protoss is "broken" and needs a complete rework to be payable seems a bit exagerated. You lost me there bro...
Fair. Generally this video was made with the context of people complaining a lot about how Protoss is being approached in the patch.
The point isn't the balance of Protoss. It's that if we want to make substantial changes to interactions in the game we probably don't love (disruptors, mines, etc), we might not be able to without doing larger drastic changes to Protoss.
It is also very very difficult to buff gateway units because of warp gate, because gateways units then become oppressive.
We could reach a balanced game state with very small changes but is that going to be most fun game state.
NERF CARRIERS
Just you wait for my next youtube guide, a beginner's guide to Skytoss. I hope I don't ruin the ladder :D
Protoss is still incredibly strong at lower levels, diamond and lower. It's so easy to attack with protoss compared to the other races. I have been struggling with TvP cuz im not great with bio or crazy multi pronged attacks. Zealots and stalkers and archons are so easy to play with and get such a power spike when warpgates and their upgrades come online. Terrans feel desperate to get the damage done, i feel the same when i play T. I fear these changes will scew too much at the lower levels, protoss don't need help there. How do you actually stop 2 base 12 gate +2 chargelot archon warpprism allin vs zerg with less than 300 apm, cuz I havent lost with it yet. Great vs terran too, you just need to be a little more flexible, but if it doesn't work at first, you can always just take the map.. To fight that as terran you need near perfect lib, mine, ghost, bio micro, walling bases you cant defend, near perfect play, before you die to airtoss switch. Seriously Toss is soooo ez, if you cant win with toss, you tossed yourself with defensive baby play.. 100 apm vs 250, no problem what so ever, just make attacking moves in stead of whining, ez ez win, gesus christ..
Best regard (EzMode)PatchToss
Protoss is brain dead, needs more nerfs.