Warhound This unit has been removed from the game.
Immortal Immortal Hardened Shield will now reduce the warhound’s Haywire Missile damage.
Why change the immortal to try and stop the warhound if the warhound is removed? I think the warhound is just removed for a small period of time while they figure it out.
Don't forget Blizzard will remove Carriers again if needed.
The most curious addition for me is the new Reaper passive being able to spot the high ground, that thing is so crucial in aggressive early-game openings.
I really like the reaper cliff vision change; it's a good minibuff to allow it to be a more reliable investment, but it shouldn't make the unit too strong in any direct way. Might be a more reliable opener if you know you're not at risk of just throwing it away should your opponent have a unit on the ledge you hop up.
I feel like it's going to be quite difficult to see where things are going with this patch until a new patch re-adding a "revised warhound" happens. With these changes Terran will have a much harder time going mech in PvT, which they clearly want to make viable. I think the changes in this patch could make for some excellent TvP and PvT mech battles, but they have to actually make mech viable since in it's current form I don't think it'd do much better than it does in WoL. Hopefully the reintroduced Warhound will come along and we'll see some cool new P and T strats.
Hellion Battle hellions can now be built from the Factory. It has an Armory requirement.There is a new upgrade at the Armory that will allow transformation between Battle Mode and Normal Mode.
Sorry for my probably ignorant question but where the hell did you build the Battle Hellion before this, the Barracks o_O? It was just a normal Hellion transformed yes, i.e. it already came from the Factory...
Transformation was built in and immediately available. Now the battle hellion is made separate from a regular hellion with an armory present. The armory also has an upgrade to allow you to transform hellions from regular mode to battle mode. This is to the stop the (potentially) strong battle hellion early game all-ins that terrans were favoring in the beta.
Warhound gone is great, and I like the Widow Mine / Battlehellion armoury requirement switch, hopefully we start seeing early hellion mine pressure, or something equivilantly cool, though I still think the unit needs small buff (possibly just being 1 supply though) to be useful. Oracle spell seems pretty crazy, neutralising fungal and blinding cloud is huge, but having it on such a delicate and expensive would probably balance it out.
Also, what is the damage of Tempest now? 30 + massive?
The Oracle changes seem to be very powerful. Maybe I'm overestimating that ability, but I think it should make stargate play a little bit safer, especially against zerg that are trying to rush up the tech tree to infestors. Hopefully we'll see some minor tweaks to the carrier other than it just being added back to the game. Even just reducing the build time would help quite a bit.
and now some real testing can be done instead of terran win vs everything with warhounds.
Also I wonder what will be the end game composition for zergs vs protoss will be since blink stalkers already do good vs BLs, but they just never get under them or shouldn't. I can now see like 30 blink stalkers just blinking under BLs and killing them with the new oracle just getting rid of fungal, but idk maybe zergs will just spam fungal.
On September 15 2012 03:24 The KY wrote: So much talk about the warhound (so happy) and none about the (also excellent) removal of pre ordain and the new oracle ability.