Call To Action: Balance Testing TvZ. - Page 50

On August 11 2012 06:10 BeyondCtrL wrote:

I won't agree because it makes my statement less offensive.

I don't care. Your statement is flatly wrong. It's not a matter of "agreement" or opinion.

Last edit: 2012-08-11 06:11:30

BeyondCtrL Sweden. August 11 2012 06:19. Posts 557

On August 11 2012 06:11 Shiori wrote:

I don't care. Your statement is flatly wrong. It's not a matter of "agreement" or opinion.

I think it's tall and beautiful. It's not my opinion, it's MY fact!

Ktk Korea (South). August 11 2012 06:20. Posts 708

And after all this the Raven is limited by its skills to be a 1-battle momentum-gaining winning trick in the late-game, and as decent speed high-cost detection at other points in the game.

Sure, 6 HSMs and a PDD can win you an engagement, but is this the best course of balancing the game? Looks to me like how ZvP is decided in one battle cough mothership cough, do we want late-game engagements to decided by how well the ravens are used? Really boring unit all around and whether or not it's usable I don't really care because after the "wow no one used ravens and now they are and HSMs are explosive graphics so sick" factor it's going to be almost identical to Vortex vs Brood Lord. EDIT: ok fine your tanks have to be sieged you have to stim and whatever. That's because Terran for some reason is designed to hit 7 controls in engagements then "be cost effective" with splitting and focus firing ~_~

Raven harass is pretty risky and a Terran might do better resource-wise nuking all the bases instead.

Last edit: 2012-08-11 06:23:16

Plansix United States. August 11 2012 06:24. Posts 5372

On August 11 2012 06:19 BeyondCtrL wrote:

I think it's tall and beautiful. It's not my opinion, it's MY fact!

Internet forums rarely containe facts, especially on subjective things like "player skill" and "difficultly".

Nony on PvT: "It's not imbalanced, the protoss wins and then there is a five minute death animation for the Terran"

Shiori August 11 2012 06:27. Posts 2816

On August 11 2012 06:24 Plansix wrote:

Internet forums rarely containe facts, especially on subjective things like "player skill" and "difficultly".

Skill isn't really subjective. Either you're good at something or you're not. You can't really make much of an argument for a Bronze player being super skilled at Sc2.

BeyondCtrL Sweden. August 11 2012 06:29. Posts 557

On August 11 2012 06:20 Ktk wrote:
And after all this the Raven is limited by its skills to be a 1-battle momentum-gaining winning trick in the late-game, and as decent speed high-cost detection at other points in the game.

Sure, 6 HSMs and a PDD can win you an engagement, but is this the best course of balancing the game? Looks to me like how ZvP is decided in one battle cough mothership cough, do we want late-game engagements to decided by how well the ravens are used? Really boring unit all around and whether or not it's usable I don't really care because after the "wow no one used ravens and now they are and HSMs are explosive graphics so sick" factor it's going to be almost identical to Vortex vs Brood Lord. EDIT: ok fine your tanks have to be sieged you have to stim and whatever. That's because Terran for some reason is designed to hit 7 controls in engagements then "be cost effective" with splitting and focus firing ~_~

Raven harass is pretty risky and a Terran might do better resource-wise nuking all the bases instead.

I think the problem is that it doesn't come out of the box as something viable for mid-game strategies. Auto turret is decent and PDD is nice but it doesn't have any real power ability until HSM which must be researched and is expensive both on cost and energy. They all also rely on the enemy on standing still and not microing during the battle. Even then you are right about how it will eventually force a late game scenario akin to PvZ.

Grumbels Netherlands. August 11 2012 06:38. Posts 3415

I think it's a bit silly. Some people propose changes like seeker missile to 100 energy and 9 range to 'encourage use', but if that spell is too strong you can just safely trade energy for resources every time and win in every late game scenario. It'd be like snipe vs zergs again.

Seeker missile really isn't a fun spell. I think Blizzard wanted to have the cool micro trick of selecting the targeted unit and doing something with it, but usually you just run your army away or you stay and fight because your brood lords are too slow regardless. All that it ends up being is a super big explosive ability that can instantly kill all your units, so it's indeed quite like vortex, except that with the current low range it's more of a suicide mission. (which means you have to trade the ravens, ensuring some level of balance)

I don't like the raven in general. I already disliked the cloud of science vessels in late-game TvZ in BW, because it just seemed like there was little zerg could do against the constant irradiates on ultralisks and defilers. I don't want the raven to have the same fate, but it could end up like that if it's buffed too much. I think the science vessel is overall a cooler design, both in visuals and abilities. Irradiate and forces a reaction that's more interesting than "run units away", it just imo does too much damage and shouldn't one-shot ultras. Defensive Matrix and EMP fit well on the unit. PDD doesn't fit well on the raven, since the strength of a dark-swarm like ability really complements a race with melee units, not one with ranged units. In the latter case it's usually just overpowered, requiring a nerf to the ability. Auto turret is cool, but you never get enough ravens for it too matter and it's kid of a poor man's version of infested terran anyway.

Last edit: 2012-08-11 06:43:49

suffer by myself in a pool of blissful misery

Plansix United States. August 11 2012 06:39. Posts 5372

On August 11 2012 06:27 Shiori wrote:

Skill isn't really subjective. Either you're good at something or you're not. You can't really make much of an argument for a Bronze player being super skilled at Sc2.

That is not really the argument that is being made right now. I am going to have to disagree about skill not being subjective. TL itself is littered with arguments over what is difficult and what isn't. "Discussions" of the challenge of throwing down perfect force fields vs the challenge of hitting perfect inejects vs the challenge of studderstepping. Each side says their specific task is challenging, while the others say it is easy and takes no time to learn.

"Skill" itself is so difficult to measure that entire events are centered around who is the most skilled at a specific task. The olympics attempt to measure who is the best archer, swimmer, gymnast and other events. Even then after the golds are handed out, people still argue about who was the best, why someone lost, as there an outside reason for somone losing a specific event. They will argue that one person won more medals that specific year, but another athlete won more metals over their life time and then argue over who is more skilled over the course of their life.

Skill is subjective because it is a measure of how well someone preforms a difficult task. The problem is that we cannot agree what is difficult.

Our only recourse dilemma to this is to load up SC2 and play more games.

Nony on PvT: "It's not imbalanced, the protoss wins and then there is a five minute death animation for the Terran"

Viserion Finland. August 11 2012 06:46. Posts 290

Hello TL, I made some balance suggestions and would like your opinion on them. They are linked to the upcoming Raven buff and creep spread while also adjusting a few other things. This is what I had in mind:

Here we go:

1. Raven's Durable Materials upgrade is removed and granted to Raven's automatically.

2. Raven's Corvid Reactor upgrade cost has been reduced from 150/150 to 100/100.

3. It takes for creep 40 seconds to recede. Down from 60 seconds. EDIT: After further testing I've noticed that it takes 60 seconds for a creep to decrease if it's made by Overlord and 120 seconds if it's made by tumor. (Correct me if I'm wrong but this is what I figured out) So here are my new suggested changes:
3. It takes 50 seconds for creep to recede if it's made by overlord. It takes 80 seconds for creep to recede if it's made by tumor.

4. Reapers build time decreased from 45 seconds to 40 seconds.

5. The maximum amount of Larvae on a single Hatchery has been reduced from 19 to 17.

Next suggestion do not affect races but instead on very important aspect of the game: maps! Let's see what I had in mind.

Maps:

1. A neutral supply depot has been added to ladder maps like in tournaments.

2. Antiga Shipyard now uses enforced cross-spawns.

3. Entombed Valley no longer has close-spawn positions (Both bottom or both top ).

Last edit: 2012-08-11 07:23:50

Shiori August 11 2012 06:46. Posts 2816

On August 11 2012 06:39 Plansix wrote:

I don't really think anyone thinks that Injecting/FFing/stutterstepping is "hard" on their own, per se. It's more that they are difficult to do in conjunction with the rest of the race.

I think mechanics of that variety have little to do with pro players. Given freedom to play without anything else to worry about, anyone can hit perfect FFs or Injects. The real things that get taxed in pro games are decision making, multitasking, build orders, and crisis management, along with more particular micro like Marine splitting and so on. From this perspective, we can form critiques of game design based on the notion that decision making and strategy shouldn't be compromised for ease of gameplay. Again, going back to Zerg, it's silly that 1 build works against essentially everything in TvZ and PvZ, because it removes any depth from the Zerg style of play. It's not about it being too easy or imbalanced, or whatever, but about it being stale, stagnant, and requiring essentially less thought than what the other races are supposed to do.

Advocado Denmark. August 11 2012 06:47. Posts 844

I think the change to the raven is at least a move in the right direction. From a slug to a more active unit that doesn't get picked off as soon as support dies. Maybe they will change more, who knows. I can see QXC's point about it takes too long for HSM to become available even with the energy upgrade.

http://www.justin.tv/advocadosc2

AKomrade United States. August 11 2012 06:57. Posts 554

Tried Ravens on the map. Movespeed still doesn't do anything. Getting energy and HSM research are still the problems with the Raven. Both the HT and Infestor start with more useful spells (Fungal/Feedback/Archon morph) than the Raven (PDD is situational, autoturret is garbage) and the time and cost of HSM and energy ups are pretty terrible.

If Blizzard's problem is the potential damage dealt by HSM, maybe they should lower the damage, but at the same time lower the energy cost, time and cost of the upgrades or a mix of the three because getting fungaled isn't as big of a problem as needing 1600 gas worth of full energy and fully upgraded Ravens, which start with lower energy, with higher cost spells, higher cost and the highest build time out of the three spellcasters, to effectively do what four or five HT or Infestors can do with much greater efficiency.

Potential alone should not factor into the cost of a unit.

ALL HAIL THE KING IN THE NORTH! HAIL! HAIL!

4Servy Netherlands. August 11 2012 07:27. Posts 1489

Raven vs lategame zerg is like buying a masserati for a suicide bomber.

pmp10 August 11 2012 07:27. Posts 1389

On August 11 2012 06:57 AKomrade wrote:
If Blizzard's problem is the potential damage dealt by HSM, maybe they should lower the damage, but at the same time lower the energy cost, time and cost of the upgrades or a mix of the three because getting fungaled isn't as big of a problem as needing 1600 gas worth of full energy and fully upgraded Ravens, which start with lower energy, with higher cost spells, higher cost and the highest build time out of the three spellcasters, to effectively do what four or five HT or Infestors can do with much greater efficiency.

Potential alone should not factor into the cost of a unit.

The problem is not the potential of damage (otherwise storm would have similar problems) but that it's damage is instant uncapped AoE. Seeker missiles have the ability to destroy an air army before it gets a shot off and thats why it will either be borderline useless ability (at least against good players) or simply another kind of battle-decider like vortex is now.
The only sensible solution would be to redesign SM so it doesn't deliver all the damage up-front or at least so that it can't stack up that damage indefinitely.
They could also rework auto-turret while they are at it.

Last edit: 2012-08-11 07:29:57

Aurrora August 11 2012 07:38. Posts 31

On August 11 2012 04:44 TheDwf wrote:

Yeah, you try that on CK and you tell me a) if the Overlord dies b) if it does not mess up so bad your build order that it's simply not worth it. Not to mention that's not possible against Zergs taking early gas since you can't afford to lose your 2/3 Marines if he goes ~20 Speedlings or bane bust. But thanks for input, obviously we never thought about trying to kill those Overlords with flying Barracks!

you dont have to do it at the 4 minute mark... do it at like the 8 minute mark. problem solved.

Viserion Finland. August 11 2012 07:41. Posts 290

On August 11 2012 07:38 Aurrora wrote:

you dont have to do it at the 4 minute mark... do it at like the 8 minute mark. problem solved.

People do it.

But it's actually possible to safe the overlord even if you do it.

TheDwf August 11 2012 07:43. Posts 3599

On August 11 2012 07:38 Aurrora wrote:

you dont have to do it at the 4 minute mark... do it at like the 8 minute mark. problem solved.

You mean when you have only one Barracks busy researching Stim in most Hellions/Banshees builds?

Bippzy United States. August 11 2012 07:54. Posts 1334

On August 11 2012 04:16 MasterFischer wrote:
It's like... in order to beat a GM zerg, you need to be pro.

In order to beat a master zerg, you need to be entry level or higher GM

In order to beat a diamond zerg, you need to be master..

and so on

That is literally impossible. If the ladder system puts you in a place where you go 50/50, you will be able to beat diamonds in diamond. The real point you are trying to make(with no real backup, adding some would make you more credible) is that you must be more developed/skilled as terran to be a similarly developed/skilled zerg

LEENOCK LEENOCK LEENOCK LEENOCK LEENOCK LEENOCK LEENOCK LEENOCK LEENOCK LEENOCK LEENOCK LEENOCK

Fungal Growth United States. August 11 2012 07:58. Posts 434

If the issue is late-game TvZ...then raven speed will be irrelevant. By the time it becomes feasable to construct a raven, the game is probrably already out of hand. 20 minutes into a game, the terran is probably 50 supply down and a faster raven zipping accross the map just won't make a difference. If Blizzard wants to balance TvZ late game...they have to address the thousand pound gorrilla in the room...inject larvae. It makes zerg too exponetial or boom/bust. Which creates boring games in which the terran wins off of a two based timing attack or the zerg wins in a game that goes past 18 minutes. Inject larvae needs to be slowed down.

In the late game...everybody has lots of money so the best ways to balance the game are with supply costs, unit build speed and for large maps, the movement speed of attacking units (not specialty units).

Qikz United Kingdom. August 11 2012 08:24. Posts 6712