HotS Balance Update #6 10/12/12

Mothership Core

Energize is mainly an ability that caters to the Oracle, so that Entomb can be cast twice at once, right when the Oracle comes into play. We felt that, rather than having to balance spell casters around this ability, it was better to just balance spells on their own. Energize seemed a bit limited, and on the design side, we felt it was not an interesting spell that has many viable uses.

Widow Mine

We’ve increased the Widow Mine setup time from 2 to 3 seconds. We wanted a change to the Widow Mine that makes it slightly more difficult to use them in combat, but we didn’t want to eliminate this usage. Our current goal for the Widow Mine is for them to be very all-around and usable in many key locations on the map, good on the defense, and good in combination with your army. We think the Widow Mine has great potential as the new core unit for the Terran, and we want to be extra careful in making sure that it remains a powerful option even when players start figuring out how to fight against them.

One issue we’re seeing, however, is all-in rushes using early Widow Mines are a bit too much, so we’re trying a couple of changes for the other races in order to help with this specific area:

Protoss Mothership Core’s Purify ability now also serves as a detector.
Spore Crawlers now require Spawning Pool (not the Evolution Chamber).


Oracle

Because Energize is removed, we felt it’s necessary to improve Entomb in order to compensate for their reduced strength.

Revelation has been changed to be more of an army scouting option, due to Mothership Core Purify now being a detector.

Sentry

We’ve been getting a lot of feedback from lower-level Protoss players saying that gateway units are weak because Warp Gates are too good, Force Fields are too difficult to use, etc. We’ve also noticed that scouting in Heart of the Swarm is more important than ever due to new threats out there.

We’re comfortable with the current power level of gateway units and their fit in the Protoss arsenal. It’s not uncommon for mass Zealots or lots of Stalkers to do awesome things. Perhaps Sentries can be a bit difficult to utilize, but this is only because this unit revolves so much around good Force Field usage.

At this time, we feel that removing the research requirement on Hallucination is something we can try in the beta.

Tempest

We’re trying a new direction with the Tempest. With the Fleet Beacon requirement removed, it will be possible to use Tempests as long-range, low-DPS harassers in the mid-game. The counter to Tempests would be to kill the units that are spotting for the Tempest until air units come into play. This is a purely experimental change, so please take some time to play with it and give us your feedback.

Viper

Thanks to a lot of feedback from many of our beta participants, we’ve decided to increase the radius of Blinding Cloud. Please play with and against the new Viper, and let us know how it goes.

Thank you so much for playing the beta and helping us improve Heart of the Swarm. As always, we aren’t trying to solve every single issue and potential issue with this beta patch, and we hope to continue making Heart of the Swarm better and better with each update.