EDIT2: Since some people on the battle.net forums seem to think I hate all change, let me list some of the changes I like: Goliath -> Viking, great change, turning a good but somewhat bland unit into something interesting. Dragoon -> Stalker, see above Queen -> Queen, take one of the most underused units in SC and turn it into something extremely interesting and "zergy" like this, I love it. So there, 3 units of praise, now get ready for 3 units worth of complaints.. (as a note, most of the other changes I feel neither here nor there about, since I think it was generally good units being replaced by other good units).
EDIT: Initial title of this topic was "bring back the reaver" but it sort of expanded.
No, this thread isn't a petition
Watching the recent TSL finals (if you haven't seen these you should go download them right now here) I realized just how exciting a game involving reavers can be.
Yeah, the games without prominent reaver usage weren't so bad either, plenty of close spots.. But then we had the games with reavers. When reavers are involved you are constantly at the edge of your seat as they are such a high risk high reward unit, there's constant tension as players dodge scarabs while trying to kill eachothers shuttles.
Not to mention the "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh" moments when a scarab is about to run down a pack of probes.. and the ensuing "omg!", regardless of wether it's a dud or a hit. I would say the reaver/shuttle combination is probably in 2nd or 1st place when it comes to creating exciting situations in SC, the other being marines/medics, with perhaps vultures at #3.
In SC2 I'm not currently seeing any unit that fills this gap.. The colossus, which I think is a very good unit and I don't want it removed, does not have nearly the same element of excitement in its design. It would be a crying shame for SC2 to be robbed of the moments of excitement, awe and despair that the reaver brings.
Of course, blizzard has tried very hard to keep the number of units roughly the same (currently zerg and toss have 1 or 2 more units than in the original, while terran have the same I believe) but I can't help but think there has to be a way to include the reaver in there somewhere..
I'm not great at writing things like this but when talking to SoMuchBetter on msn and he asked me why I wanted it back I think I was able to sum it up nicely:
Jonathan 조나단 왈쉬 säger: I want it back because Jonathan 조나단 왈쉬 säger: of the excitement it brings Jonathan 조나단 왈쉬 säger: to the game Jonathan 조나단 왈쉬 säger: I want it back because of the Jonathan 조나단 왈쉬 säger: "aaaaaaah" moments when a scarab chases a line of probes Jonathan 조나단 왈쉬 säger: I want it back because of the Jonathan 조나단 왈쉬 säger: moments of tension in a pvp battle when both players Jonathan 조나단 왈쉬 säger: are dodging scarabs Jonathan 조나단 왈쉬 säger: I want it back because of how pissed you get when your shtutle with 2 reavers die Jonathan 조나단 왈쉬 säger: I want it back because of how happy you feel when your reaver destroys Jonathan 조나단 왈쉬 säger: an entire terran push
This thread is not only about the reaver tho, it's something I've been saying a few times about SC2; it's not that I can't accept that an old unit was replaced by a new one, it's that the old unit was much more interesting than the new one.
This is not always the case, to be sure, but in the cases where it is, the argument that "it's a new game, things change" should not be acceptable.
There are many changes to SC that I'm excited about, such as the introduction of Warpgates, the new terran ghost, the viking replacing the goliath - I'm not all against change by any stretch.
But there are, of the top of my head, 3 unit changes I'm skeptical towards: Reaver -> Colossus Vulture -> Jackal Medic -> Medivac
I don't think the colossus is a bad unit, as I've already said (in fact, out of the three, while the reaver might be the biggest loss, the colossus is certainly the most worthy replacement) but I feel that these 3 changes do very little but decrease excitement in the game.
There are some other units where I feel the replacement might not be as good as the unit being replaced (corsair -> phoenix, although this is very close, I like the phoenix, arbiter-> mothership, but I'm biased, for obvious reasons) but I think the 3 above are of the most concern. Vessel->Nomad, but no biggie.
If we look at how terran plays, removing the vultures would really change it. Yes, the game will change regardless, but do you feel that removing the vultures would be a good change?
In my opinion, the map control the vultures offer complimented the terrans otherwise sort of immobile army very well. In addition, they brought to the game a tactic unique to the terran faction - the slowpush. Neither of the other two races have anything like it, and while it might not be completely gone as long as the siege tank is still there, it will be very different. Does the addition of mobile units such as the viking or the new terran drop pods off-set this somewhat? Perhaps, but I feel there would be ample room for these units even WITH the vulture in the game (seeing as how the jackal is in).
Even still, I'm not neccessarily saying the vulture has to be kept, but I think replacing an interesting and unique unit with a, somewhat, bland attack-mover is bad, change or not.
Moving on to the medic, aside from how I feel about the medic as a unit compared to the medivac (if you care, I hate the medivac), I think it's a huge negative to not have heal until starport stage. If you've played terran in SC original you'll know how incredibly BORING marine micro is compared to in BW, and this is really an important point to consider apart from balance.
Marine micro without medics is not fun.
Finally the reaver. Do I think the removal of this unit will ruin any matchup in the same extent of the two examples above? No, I really don't think so. But I think the amount of excitement you take out of the game with its removal make up for it.
I want to add that the units they put a lot of time into also don't really add excitement: units like the Thor, bc, mothership are all fairly boring gameplay wise.
One question is how much the cliff system will add. If there are cliffs everywhere, maybe reapers and colossus will be as exciting as mutalisks. In terms of map design, I can imagine cliffs as being available for all 3 races to take advantage of, but water giving Zerg an advantage with mute harass.
I agree with you. A lot of the excitement is out the window in Sc2 with reaver being the no1 loss. There were so many great moments in the history of SC with reavers that it's uncountable. I also agree that the units you used as examples are dull with the exception of the Nomad (IMO currently the best new unit in SC2). Without the aaaaaaaaah moments this game will boil down to just another game (although superbly done) that is micro/macro heavily oriented without the magic(magic as something that made the game so cool,fun,entertaining,enjoyable etc.). As far as the development goes there are very few cool innovative units that could match the great playability/fun/skill factor of Sc1 units.
There arent many heavy investment high risk/reward units, you are right, and that is something that needs to change. Though I'm glad the Reaver itself is out, because since scarabs would no longer have such terrible AI in the more advanced SC2, dodging them with your workers would become nearly impossible and make the reaver a much more reward than risk unit.
A replacement is definitely necessary though, having all attack-move units that are all-around good at fighting (or worse, have some sort of specific "counter") removes a lot of excitment. Good post.
And just to show that I'm not all negative on old units being replaced..
Queen -> New queen = I love this change, very much. Goon -> Stalker, superb. Scout -> Warp Ray, probably pretty good.
The vessel -> Nomad could be argued as a good change but I liked the vessel so I'm biased Firebat -> Marauder, see above.
On June 04 2008 01:22 Atrioc wrote: There arent many heavy investment high risk/reward units, you are right, and that is something that needs to change. Though I'm glad the Reaver itself is out, because since scarabs would no longer have such terrible AI in the more advanced SC2, dodging them with your workers would become nearly impossible and make the reaver a much more reward than risk unit.
A replacement is definitely necessary though, having all attack-move units that are all-around good at fighting (or worse, have some sort of specific "counter") removes a lot of excitment. Good post.
The reaver AI was intentionally horrible (the scarabs, the actual reaver AI I god damn hope they didn't mess up intentionally, since they are useless from certain angles), and would probably be horrible (again by choice) in sc2
I cannot support this thread on principle of the reaver argument. I love reavers, I think they're great, and I'm right up there with everyone else who goes "aaaaaaaaaah" when those scarabs impact and kill 10+ peons, and it's the same with spider mines when they kill a ton of dragoons or probes. However, in many cases, it's pure luck that those amazing situations happen. It's very funny to me how a conundrum has appeared where players want the most competitive successor to SC possible with no random elements (other than cliff miss chance), and yet the most fun and exciting moments in SC are scarabs and mines. Those two subunits do such ridiculous damage but we've all seen scarab pathfinding that's fizzled or mines that look like they're going to run over and explode for amazing damage but instead burrow back down or get killed.
I do agree about the medics, but think of it this way too: when you have medics with your army, you essentially have permanently-stimmed Marines because there is no downside to using that ability. Strategically, this is very poor design and while it does make the medic useful, it makes it more of a necessity to build because each Marine therefore becomes almost-permanently twice as fast and twice as deadly. I love medics too but there's got to be a way for the design team to preserve the initial drawback of stimpack (and please, don't make it a cooldown).
Lower medic max mana, lower medic rate of heal - decent options even though I feel the fun that comes from having perma stimmed marines outweighs any strategical concerns.
About the luckfactor of reavers and mines, yeah there's some luck but it's a weighted gamble IMO. It's like when Goodfriend made that 3 rax build on Arkanoid, 2/3 he will find the zerg and win the game, 1/3 he'll be behind (or at least that's how I remembered it, maybe the last main was scouted via scv supply jumps and it was a luckfree build).
Furthermore it's luck that can be, somewhat, influenced by both you and your opponent (ie you can confuse the AI of a scarab or a mine with good micro, and you can position your reaver in a way that decreases the likelihood of a dud).
Now sometimes the scarab AI is just.. ridiculous, like so bad it ruins a game, but this has to be fixable without making it overpowered.
Basically I don't view the luck involved in reaver or vulture usage in the same way as I view the luck inherent to an itemdrop in WC3 or an attack with a damage range instead of an absolute damage.
Oh and one more thing is that this kind of excitement comes at a reasonably small price in terms of luck, so I think it's worth it. It's not like rolling a dice, it's more like.. I dunno, taking a risk going for some fancy submission in MMA or taking a long shot in soccer or something.
The only orgasmic thing protoss have now is mass zealot/immortal/dt/ht/stalker warp-in with over 9000 warpgates which is easily distinguished as Nal_rA's arbiter recall.
I agree about most of it. MnM and vultures were such cheap units that were capable of doing SO MUCH damage in their respective matchups. e.g. vultures destroying your economy in TvP or MYM.Raven destroying your entire army in TvZ with one group of marines n' medics.
The reaver is so great, though. I just can't explain why.
I actually slowly am starting to see where they're going with trying to replace the vulture, removing the reaver, adding immortals, nerfing storm (i know they buffed it again but from what i understand it's still not sc1 strength): Biomech for all terran matchups.
Biomech is extremely exciting. They are trying very hard to remove the slowpush it seems, in favor of something more dynamic. They're also trying to make siege tanks not be the focus of the terran army with counters to them (immortals, vikings (combined version of current goliaths with dropships dropped onto the top of siege tanks), etc). I love biomech and seeing it as the standard build would be pretty awesome.
However, I don't know what the hell the jackal is supposed to be for, and the medivac. They should probably remove the medivac. but it could be interesting if they gave it irradiate and dmatrix. I want those spells back, especially dmatrix. I know that irradiate turned around a lot of games but it's actually a really simple game mechanic that's not always that great, idk. plus it's only anti-zerg, it'd be a lot more interesting if it could be viable in tvt and tvp. Maybe irradiate with a nerf (ex. 100 energy?). I know snipe fills irradiate's niche, but the combination of the 2 dmatrix and irradiate creates an awesome dynamic, especially if they're the same cost (do i irradiate or do i dmatrix??). However I wish battlecruisers were no longer in the game. They're so boring, slow etc. I hate big huge slow units, they never give the game anything interesting. Maybe give the medivac the plasma torpedos (or allow it to choose either, yamato or plasma torpedos), dmatrix, and no irradiate... but then it might be too powerful. All of these things of excitement partially arrive out of mobility (speed shuttle, stimmed rines, speedvults). And the thor, get that out of my sight. so boring. Battlecruisers are not iconic of terran, nobody ever uses them. That's like saying that valks are iconic of terran.
However... as a combination I just realized this could be either pretty bad or pretty cool: group of marines in a medivac. turrets on the way to drop site get yamato'd, medivacs then dmatrix themselves to prevent further damage... that would be imba as hell at first glance however i think that could be still done right. Maybe instead of something like yamato, make it similar to irradiate but it can attack mech too but not buildings, so it's not instant and gives plenty of time to react and retains the aoe damage over time of irradiate.
Jackal, idk, it could be rather interesting, if it's done right. Line AOE like lurker can be pretty fucking bad. imagine 12 jackals behind a mineral line, it'd be gone in seconds... it depends on whether Jackals are as cheap as vultures. Also, they'd be a lot more interesting with some kind of special ability for the Jackals however. Vults without mines are weak as hell, part of what makes them so good at mineral harass or harass in general is that you can limit the mobility of your opponent / slow them waiting for obs and attacking mines. Not only did they move faster they could slow the enemy, kill them as they left factories. Maybe give them some small temporary machine gun turrets they drop down that have pretty short range and limited ammunition. They give you map control. Terran's power was never in mobility, Terran's power was in limiting the other guy's mobility.
also, on the subject of shooting uphill doing 75% miss chance, i wouldn't mind that being changed to 75% damage. stupid randomness.
this is just a shitload of random ideas, i might not have thought all of this through well enough...
I have to agree with you, the removal of reavers is definitely a loss. I'd like to point out some additional things that the reaver uniquely brings besides excitement:
The reaver is an original concept. It's a mobile weapons factory that makes scarabs on the battlefield. This is original to starcraft. A generic laser-shooting walker is simply uninspired imo.
The reaver takes more skill than a walker. The usefulness of the reaver/shuttle combination increases exponentially with skill. And it will cause you to lose if you don't have the skill.
Like I've said before, the finals with collossi would have been lame.
There are a ton of possibilities for improvements and additions to the reaver. Reavers are mobile factories that produce things. They could potentially make mines/droids/be a mobile shield battery/mobile nexus (resource depository), etc. I guess I just feel that there wasn't enough thought put into this, as can be evidenced by the reaver's 3D model (meh) compared to the colossus' 3D model (very nice and refined) when they were first unveiled.
I could go on and on with cool ideas for the reaver, which is already cool as it is.
Also, I can see reapers replacing vults if the explosives reapers have wouldn't be timer-based or something... unless people have genius timing. I'm not sure. it removes that aspect of laying mines in the path of the chasing opponent.
On June 04 2008 00:43 FrozenArbiter wrote: In SC2 I'm not currently seeing any unit that fills this gap.. The colossus, which I think is a very good unit and I don't want it removed, does not have nearly the same element of excitement in its design. It would be a crying shame for SC2 to be robbed of the moments of excitement, awe and despair that the reaver brings.
Why exactly do you think that? I'm not exactly sure what the colossus stats are, but isn't it really similar to reaver in range and damage per shot? If this is right it could very well replace it in moments of excitement. According to http://www.sc2armory.com/game/protoss/units/colossus/ Damage: 144 (+3) Range: 7 (same as a tower, but it has more health + can shoot from behind objects that reaver can't) Costs: 300/200/6
So it's just a heavier reaver. (same role but stronger + more expensive)
- The colossus can be dropped / microed similarly to a reaver, so those moments wouldn't be gone PLUS they can also walk up/down cliffs by themselves. So when your shuttle is killed (or maybe BEFORE it was done building) you could still be killing workers between main and nat exploiting cliffs.
- The Jackal has weaker damage per shot than a vulture but it can do AOE damage in their normal shots! Imagine if today's vultures, as fast as they are, could sneak in your main run behind your worker line and do lurker style damage to them before defending army can catch up!
- Spider mines are not gone, they just went to a different unit + reapers also has a different type of mine and that's on a unit that can harass without a dropship.
- Dropships might be easier to focus dead than medics but now there is auto-repair for your SCVs + cliff abuse for them. You lose the meatshield protection of medics but you gain drop-micro, put hurt marines in drop them behind, repeat. Isn't that even more exciting than simply placing medic meatshield in front of rines?
I mean, I agree perfectly with you that they should try to keep exciting moments such as reaver/vulture harassments in the game. But I honestly think it's too early to say that the excitement gone. IMHO it seems like Blizzard's goal with these changes are (also) to add more excitement instead.
the medivac is such a boring unit. there are many, many ways to make it far entertaining. the gunboat idea is one of them, but the simple joy of say, boxer's three drop attack, is something that the medivac doesn't really provide as much. Whee, i give heals. boring.
The Jackal is also kind of boring. Zeals rape them, and they do really low damage. Give them like EMP mines. Now that would be cool. You have a infester walking up to swarm when suddenly a mine pops up and boom no mana.
Ooh, another idea! give the jackal a firebat attack! then the "firebat rush" can rape probes! muahahahaha. Or maybe give it flame mines that burn when they get set off. Rape some zerglings and be really damn scary to a running group of zealots.
The Collosus looks really intimidating. I think it actually could be used interestingly if they gave it back the burning laser attack it used to have. You could see some probes dodging all of the beams while stalkers blink in to kill them. you can also have colluses sneak up a ramp.
IMHO a lot of the new units are built for harassing purposes, except for the Zerg units.
the excitement factor you describe is included in one particular new unit at least
i think it can best be described as "the possibility (but not probability) to fuck up tons of units suddenly in the blink of an eye" .. even though it might fail the majority of the time, the fact that you know something devastating could possibly happen always keeps you on the edge of your seat
anyways, the new protoss flyer unit has exactly that.. i think it's a genius unit design and it will create many "ahhhhhhhhh" moments when a protoss is losing but some extremely well timed overload thing brings him back into the game
having that said though, i kinda wish there were more units with that kind of potential.. reaver would be great for that
On June 04 2008 02:04 Integra wrote: Off topic question but I'm willing to risk it.
What was the reason that Blizzard gave for removing the reaver from SC2?
I don't think they gave any, just "the reaver is out of the current build" then nothing more.
Biomech is extremely exciting. They are trying very hard to remove the slowpush it seems, in favor of something more dynamic. They're also trying to make siege tanks not be the focus of the terran army with counters to them (immortals, vikings (combined version of current goliaths with dropships dropped onto the top of siege tanks), etc). I love biomech and seeing it as the standard build would be pretty awesome.
I fear this so much. Terran having 2 hugely different modes (metal vs bionic) was soooooo cool..
On June 04 2008 00:43 FrozenArbiter wrote: In SC2 I'm not currently seeing any unit that fills this gap.. The colossus, which I think is a very good unit and I don't want it removed, does not have nearly the same element of excitement in its design. It would be a crying shame for SC2 to be robbed of the moments of excitement, awe and despair that the reaver brings.
Why exactly do you think that? I'm not exactly sure what the colossus stats are, but isn't it really similar to reaver in range and damage per shot? If this is right it could very well replace it in moments of excitement. According to http://www.sc2armory.com/game/protoss/units/colossus/ Damage: 144 (+3) Range: 7 (same as a tower, but it has more health + can shoot from behind objects that reaver can't) Costs: 300/200/6
So it's just a heavier reaver. (same role but stronger + more expensive)
- The colossus can be dropped / microed similarly to a reaver, so those moments wouldn't be gone PLUS they can also walk up/down cliffs by themselves. So when your shuttle is killed (or maybe BEFORE it was done building) you could still be killing workers between main and nat exploiting cliffs.
Dropping a colossus seems pointless when it can walk on its own? Further, I might be wrong but I don't think the colossus attack lends itself to the same awesome shuttle dodging that happened in reaver vs reaver battles. And finally, the colossus fires a 100% hit attack. There's not much excitement in knowing for sure that those 10 probes are gonna die..
- The Jackal has weaker damage per shot than a vulture but it can do AOE damage in their normal shots! Imagine if today's vultures, as fast as they are, could sneak in your main run behind your worker line and do lurker style damage to them before defending army can catch up!
I don't know the stats of the jackal, so I'm not sure what I think about it (I think I said this in my post, not sure). The main issue I have with them is that they are basically mine-less vultures.. We don't even know how fast they are either, if they are still fast that makes me less critical.
- Spider mines are not gone, they just went to a different unit + reapers also has a different type of mine and that's on a unit that can harass without a dropship.
Yeah I did forget about the nomad having spidermines, however we don't know how much use the nomad will see, compared to vultures which were used in every TvP.
- Dropships might be easier to focus dead than medics but now there is auto-repair for your SCVs + cliff abuse for them. You lose the meatshield protection of medics but you gain drop-micro, put hurt marines in drop them behind, repeat. Isn't that even more exciting than simply placing medic meatshield in front of rines?
It has nothing to do with how easy/hard the medivac is to kill, what bothers me is; - It's a high tech unit. - Having a bunch of flying units hovering over your army running back and forth without you asking them to because they are trying to heal that marine that's across the screen sounds like a complete nightmare to me.
If you watch some of the videos linked (ie boxer's immortal marines for instance) you realize this could never happen in a game with the medivac right? It's just too high tech and too clumsy comparatively.
Dropship micro is very nearly pointless with marines because of their very low HP (although with the somewhat higher HP in sc2 it might be slightly less so), overall I don't see it being all that fun. I hate SCV auto-repair btw.
I mean, I agree perfectly with you that they should try to keep exciting moments such as reaver/vulture harassments in the game. But I honestly think it's too early to say that the excitement gone. IMHO it seems like Blizzard's goal with these changes are (also) to add more excitement instead.
While that argument can be made for the medic->medivac change (even though I think it's incorrect), I don't see how the reaver->colossus or vulture-> jackal change would ever lead to "more excitement".
Meh.
I don't think it's gone completely, my title might be a little poor, I just think certain units that they've replaced they made less fun. As I think I said in a later comment, the goliath->viking and dragoon->stalker changes are excellent and will definitely lead to more excitement (blinking away JUST as the scarab explodes [yeah bring back the reaver!!] for instance).
I also hope they design the phoenix so that it's really really really hard to use.. I imagine that for game developers it's very easy to underestimate just how insanely good people will get at controlling that type of stuff, so they should basicly make it impossible to master and whoever gets closest to using it perfectly will become legendary for it
On June 04 2008 02:53 Caller wrote: the medivac is such a boring unit. there are many, many ways to make it far entertaining. the gunboat idea is one of them, but the simple joy of say, boxer's three drop attack, is something that the medivac doesn't really provide as much. Whee, i give heals. boring
Why can't the medivac provide that? That is a simple drop + rine + heal, you still have all those, actually you'll have more rines = more dmg.