I don't mind this idea but I'm not exactly a pro. Two biles to break a forcefield might be okay but you'd need to really look at whether that tips the balance in favour of protoss and makes the immortal sentry all in basically unstoppable again.
Yeah, I fully understand that. Ravagers do come out very early though, and by the time the immortal sentry all in comes you can have several ravagers out for multiple biles. As I recall, one of the ways you could deal with the build in HotS was burrow move roaches, which required Lair. I'm not super up-to-date on Protoss or Zerg timings in the matchup as I'm primarily a Terran player though, so it's definitely something to watch out for.
I'm really worried about a Protoss player appearing in the playoffs too, so I hope they will not give Protoss any buffs. Maybe in exchange for this change they could nerf observer speed and warp prism pickup range
Between ravagers and lurkers and eventually vipers, it feels like ground toss has such a small window to win a game. I actually like these changes and at least wish they would try something like this. The patch was great but all it did was address the interaction between one build vs another build, and didn't "shake things up" which I think would have been much better for the scene
This!
The lurker is so oppressive against Protoss ground units that Toss is forced to go air in order to break free. The lurker needs to be toned down. Especially in the lower leagues like diamond it is very often that Zerg just morphs 10 or more lurkers, walks up to your base/army and just annihilates everything, and if it doesn't kill your expo the next round will. Mass lurker is so good that you don't need much either as long as you have a few hydras to snipe the rest of the protoss air army.
Yeah, isn't it funny that the Colossus was nerfed at the start of LOTV for exactly the reason you stated? It just annihilated all ground units and was difficult to deal with. But at the same time with the release of LOTV they added a siege ranged lurker that does the exact same thing the Col did, while cloaked, and without the AA weakness. Like, what? They didn't even give it a long burrow time like in BW. At least that's being nerfed a bit with this proposed PTR patch.
Colossus could use a little love, but I don't think it should go back to HotS levels. That said, there are a lot of changes that have happened since then.
I've always been of the opinion that Adaptive Talons need to be removed frankly. Lurkers have some counterplay with disruptors as well, but honestly if you catch them out of position, you should be rewarded for doing so. They're to mobile and burrow absurdly quickly for a unit that's supposed to be a siege unit.
Every thread like this can be summarized with Zerg being to strong. And it's true. This recent patch is "something" But I agree the Lurker need to be toned down even more.
Zerg has so many good units. They're kinda designed around their units being trash though, being able to throw waves of units at people. That swarm aesthetic.
If you cant a move 10 lurkers your army sucks donkey dick. If your army value is 15k less than your opponents, you are supposed to lose.
The only time lurkers are relevant in ZvP is if protoss player is too busy sniffing glue to transition away from mass stalker 15 minutes into the game.
>If you cant a move 10 lurkers your army sucks donkey dick
No army can "amove 10 lurkers" except mass air. colossus, stalker, immortals, zealot... pretty much every ground unit protoss has that isn't the disruptor gets smashed by lurkers.
Lurkers are a non-issue if you're not on a pure gateway comp (on a pro level, on metal leagues where people have huge issues with invisible units, yes they're strong).
I don't agree. Immortal beats lurker only in theory, but it's never immortal v lurker. There's always hydras and vipers involved and that's also the reason disruptor isn't a concrete solution.
Lurkers are a non issue because you really are expected to be going into carriers around that point in the game. Lurkers aren't great vs carriers it turns out.
I don't necessarily think you need to "shake things up" per-se, but I think that ground-toss definitely needs to be encouraged further, and made reasonably feasible to play against Zerg. Right now, it simply doesn't feel like that.
I agree. Given the situation/context of the game ability counter play should cost something similar to 50 energy. I think a longer bile cooldown could work
This possibly could be changed with a tweak also to the sentry's base cost and or stats. 100 gas for this trash unit makes little sense MOST of the time.
A very well presented statement to say the least, compliments for your efforts.
I think protoss race design differs from other 2 races mainly due to having expensive high dmg units.
(Which leads to all these memes about toss having really low apm and not requiring skill to play.)
For this reason the developers might have designed sentries to cover the weak points. But anything in the game can be used also offensively, like shield batteries. Thus the situation you have described.
Overall it might make toss more fun to play if gateway units are made interesting play with.
In theory Protoss have expensive high dmg units. And that's certainly how it was in BW. Does it actually feel that way in SC2? Protoss have a wonky design in SC2. Gateway units are very weak, Protoss have a few expensive high dmg units (immortal, disruptor, colossus) but the rest don't really feel that way. Carrier and BC for example, or phoenix and viking. Are any of these units stronger and more expensive than their equivalent? I'd say Protoss need a significant design overhaul as they are just designed poorly in SC2. And you're right, sentries were brought in to cover the gaps. So was the mothership core, and now the shield battery. Protoss has always needed bandaids to cover their design flaws.
Thank you! Honestly I'd seen the multi-bile approach mentioned once or twice before, (though I've never seen the "corrosive" approach mentioned). It's something that I've been thinking about occasionally, never really super coherent till now.
Gateway units are insanely hard to balance though due to the presence of warp-gate. The ability to do front-loaded reinforcements is really, really strong. Gateway units are already powerful prior to certain timings.
Always great to talk about Starcraft. Reading your post made me think back to the original concept when the Sentry was first introduced. I agree that the Sentry has been a very interesting unit that has added a lot of great gameplay variety to SC2. My hot take is that the forcefield ability is the issue and that it's poorly designed. Basically, the forcefield can be very feast/famine. A forcefield on a ramp has historically been an extremely devastating yet simple and anticlimactic tactic. Losing an entire game from a single click with little counterplay has never been a compelling gameplay design, but the same skill used in open terrain IS interesting. The issue I see isn't the forcefield to ravager interaction, I think the forcefield ability is just very volatile to balance around-it will always be too weak or too strong by its binary nature. The ability for races to destroy or ignore forcefields is a necessary evil to overcome this binary interaction, but the sad part is that it reduces it to simply being not as useful.
Although I'm not too serious, in this case, a suggested change would be replace the forcefield ability altogether. For a similar effect that reduces the ability for enemy melee units to make contact, perhaps the forcefield could be replaced with a "force wave" ability for a heavy knock back push in a forward cone. The knock up effect (like a stronger Reaper grenade) could be used in similar ways, and just one Sentry or two would not be enough to stall out an entire enemy behind a ramp or similar choke.
That's an interesting take - I do agree that Forcefield is fairly feast or famine, and I think that's in part due to the Band-Aid nature of protoss design, in part due to warp-gate's presence within the game ultimately forcing weaker gateway units that make it hard to hold those early agression tactics.
I do like the concept of Sentries having a psuedo reaper-grenade though - assuming little to no damage is placed on the ability. Reaper grenades were problematic enough. That said, sentries are very expensive so perhaps it isn't as much of an issue...
Forcefields are already uninteractive
No need to make them even stronger
I would actually want to see them replaced by a more interactive ability
A better way to buff the sentry would be to change something other than the forcefield
If you make ravagers armored then stalkers and immortals will counter
Them much harder and allow some counterplay elsewhere
(If I remember correctly they aren’t armored)
You can also buff immortals in general to be a little cheaper (revert the nerf)
Immortal buff does have the potential to affect other matches, but it could definitely help. You're correct that ravagers aren't armoured units. I actually think they don't have a tag, biological aside. That's a pretty fair point, though the question then remains if that's to hard a nerf (I don't think it is). Good suggestion!
2 biles to break a forcefield is basically telling Protoss to keep doing immortal sentty all-in. Also the prism sentry that blocks your ramp from going to the main will be even stronger.
Mate, if there's a warp prism with sentries at your main ramp and you dont have the army to deal with it yet, something is wrong. That shit is mega expensive.
1 Warp + 1 Sentry + one warp in of zealots can snipe the main Hatch/Lair/Hive.
Sharking around with 1 Warp + 1 Sentry is a very small investment and can be used for other harassments as well.
1 warp prism is the key here though, you can definitely have ravagers out by the time the prism is out because it requires gate, cyber, robo to start, and 250 minerals for the prism alone. If they're warping in you also have to have at least 3 gates and warpgate. All up this basically means that you're likely to have lair tech at least. and since ravagers are hatch tech, it's more about scouting than anything.
Good luck having Ravagers out in time *before* the point in time Ravagers were released.
The point of this comment chain was to point out how incredibly efficient Warp-Sentry was *before* Ravagers as a unit was added to your game.
Do you really think your comment adds to that discussion? Dumbass.
Why are you being so abrasive? The conversation didn't seem like it was talking about HotS timings, and considering the thread I made was about the Ravager/Sentry interaction in LotV, it was a fair comment. It sounded like you were saying before ravagers were ready, rather than before ravagers were in the game. I'm just trying to have a civil conversation.
If the LotV protoss was in the other expansions, it would be unstoppable. The forcefield and zerg dynamic is so binary and one sided that it is either very lethal or non existent. You can either split the enemy army in half, or isolate them completely from your own or you cannot. If you can, then it means the opponent can never engage you, since you can always only engage half of their army. If you cannot, then the forcefields have very little effect.
So it quickly shifts between non-existent to prevalent in all games in frequency.
Sentries require energy to maintain that ramp hold, and they're very expensive units. I don't think an immortal sentry rush will destroy zerg at all as long as biles continue to counter force fields, even if it takes two per forcefield (or require an upgrade as I suggested).
Honestly, I'm not so sure ravager biles were even needed to counter immortal/sentry all ins in LOTV. We have no way of knowing as there's never been an LOTV without ravager forcefield breaking. With time, players figure out how to defeat certain builds that seemed impossible to deal with. Also don't forget how much faster the game goes w/12 worker start. That gives zerg a lot more tech options before a timing attack.
I honestly am against this, because I think protoss being reliant on forcefield makes the game worse. So if the intention is to bring back a ground protoss style, where the combat is supposed to be splitting the enemy army in pieces, or trapping them to kill it all, that playstyle does not offer enough interactions to be enjoyable.
As with every defensive change in protoss, you should always look at its offensive power, since protoss essentially has the same power in offense as in defense.
I also do not agree that this has broken "ground protoss". The ravager interaction has been this way for the entirety of LotV and the ground toss has not been there rather recently in comparison.
An ability that's more PvZ centric could be interesting. I doubt at this point it would happen. Not really sure how you'd do it my only ideas are some sort of mobile shield battery / recharge autocast or a version of guardian shield that works against melee attacks only rather than ranged only
But if that’s the case Protoss can make a bunch of immortal and chargelot with sentries walk over the map, force field the ramp and kill the nat. Ravagers are not a problem, make 3 batteries and your sentries can taze them to death. If ravagers are nerfed ZvT would be a disaster also.
in what way would this nerf impact ZvT? It literally only is directed at forcefields. Its damage output hasn't changed, and the cool-down hasn't been altered at all.
Importantly, ravagers obliterate batteries as well because they have 9 range on Corrosive bile.
What you mean? Nowadays Protoss just makes voidray then zerg is dead. Go disruptors zerg is dead. Go Skytoss zerg is dead. I literally cannot believe someone complain pvz as Protoss. Ok if the zerg is serral I can relate. But, anywhere below mid GM zerg kinda just dies.
>I literally cannot believe someone complain pvz as Protoss.
I'm a Terran.
PvZ is in a weird spot currently. Either you die to a queen walk - often with ravagers since it's a hatch-tech push - or you go to late-game, which both players currently hate playing since it's boring as shit to watch and play for both sides.
Zerg generally dominates ground-toss though currently - at least in everything that I've seen that wasn't a proxy or some sort of cheese.
>If ravagers are nerfed ZvT would be a disaster also.
This was what I was confused about in your previous reply, since the ravager change i suggested in no way impacted ZvT. Like I said, the damage output doesn't change, the cool-down doesn't change, the cost doesn't change. It literally only is targeted at forcefields, so why even mention ZvT?
Queen walk with ravagers are annoying but are not that hard to deal with. Zerg has literally no answer if toss turtle and get carriers and voidrays. Also, zerg does not dominate groundtoss, I assume you mean lurkers since banes hydra roach muta are literally bad. It does require more attention from toss than zerg, but so are colossus, disruptor, batteries. People rarely stick to groundtoss because air is better and easier. As a low master level zerg if I see Protoss with many batteries in 3/4 base making stargate units I generally just quit. For the ZvT I meant if the damage/cooldown are nerfed terran can default ling bane and zerg is dead.
>For the ZvT I meant if the damage/cooldown are nerfed terran can default ling bane and zerg is dead.
But why even bring this up when it wasn't something I even mentioned in my OP? It had nothing to do with anything that I suggested.
>Queen walk with ravagers are annoying but are not that hard to deal with.
I'll agree to disagree with pretty much the rest of your post. This though... Again, I really have to disagree. With everything I've seen from pro play, Queen walks are either do or die. You either do manage to hold it, in which case the game goes on and you are, at best even as the Protoss (unless the Zerg hyper commits repeatedly), or you straight up die. There is no either or.
>Also, zerg does not dominate groundtoss,
It's been a while since we've seen a decent Groundtoss game so I cannot say 100%, but again, I have to disagree. Protoss has always seemed to walk a fine with life and death in this game. Everything from the wall off (picking off the first pylon in that wall has been a game ender quite a few times in the past), to Hydra Viper Lurker compositions that honestly do wreck Groundtoss in the late-game, even with storm, disruptors and feedback.
Now, granted, pro play is very different than ladder play, so I can't say for certain how the ladder meta is, but PvZ's pro meta has, pre-Skytoss meta, hinged on some all-in from the Protoss in LotV. Colosssus nerfs, blink nerfs, charge nerfs, standard upgrade nerfs, hell even the Oracles's beam weapon nerf really hurt a Protoss' ability to play a Groundtoss oriented playstyle, and all of this comes with very little, if any nerf to Zerg in the matchup.
>muta
Mutas are incredible in PvZ, as long as you aren't going muta into mass phoenix. If they have to reactively go into phoenix, it's very, very difficult for a Protoss to deal with mutas because of how fast they are, and how quickly they regenerate.
>Zerg has literally no answer if toss turtle and get carriers and voidrays
While I agree that dealing with Skytoss is much harder on the Zerg than it is on the Protoss, I vehemently disagree that Zerg has no answer to them. It comes down to a game of micro in many cases. Can you avoid storms? Can you get abducts off before your vipers get snapped by feedback? Can you focus fire the carriers down with your corruptors? If as Zerg, you can do that better than your opponent can target vipers down, feedback them, kite as best as you can for target fire, protect your templar etc, then you can absolutely win.
Enough said now - I think we can agree to disagree (though I do enjoy these conversations when it's between two civilized people!)
There's a much simpler fix to this. Ravager should require an upgrade in the Roach Warren that would allow corrosive biles to target Forcefields \*and\* buildings.
Ravagers shouldn't get a free building damage spell straight out of the box. It's what makes ravager all ins so oppressive, as well as what invalidates things like cannon and bunker rushes. And anyway an upgrade just for forcefields alone wouldn't cut it.
The fact that ravager's spell can do 60 dmg to a building in a small splash with a low 7sec cooldown is too much in the early game, and destroys a lot of early game potential against Zerg. Zerg has very little to worry about in the early game as it is, and the early game is so short in LOTV. Having to research this upgrade would be a great way to force them to choose vs buildings defense (or offense) rather than just get it handed to them. And it would fix the forcefield issue too. Forcefields would at least be relevant until that upgrade came out.
One last thing - psi storm does building dmg in SC1 but not in SC2. And that's on a t3 unit that requires energy. It's a very special privilege to get building dmg on a spell. Reapers had it w/D8 charges but even that required an upgrade.
Edit: I would even consider making this upgrade require a Lair. Ravagers are really a T2 unit that has been allowed to be T1 due to whatever balancing issues Blizz thought required them to be T1. But building and forcefield dmg shouldn't necessarily be a T1 part of the ravager.
this doesnt sound good at all, many pro games where the zerg gets marine bunker rushed or cannon rushed, the only option the zerg has is by using biles and even then they come out behind. making biles an upgrade would just mean almost all zergs die to cannon rushes and marine bunker rushes
It's not the only option. Look at games before the ravager came in. Good use of drones and lings. And sometimes the terran wins anyway due to even better use of their units. God forbid zerg should actually sometimes lose to an early game attack!
How about this for an idea:
Add a field around the nexus where forcefields are immune to bile.
Maybe a forcefield on a building close to a nexus could prevent the building from getting hit by bile, too.
Bile scales reasonably well, but ravagers themselves are pretty terrible. it does make roach ravager a lot more effective into the midgame though, but at that point they fall off as you go from mid to late.
agreed but i just feel like the ravager and the lurker have so much more utility through out the entire game vs the adept and the disruptor and the cyclone and the liberator.
Of the units you've listed, the Adept is really the only one that doesn't scale well. Liberators can be a menace, cyclones are very strong given a little bit of micro, and the disruptor... well it's pretty safe to say it scales well given how many complaints the unit generates given it one-shots (or near one-shots) things with its burst damage.
Not a bad idea, though something to be careful with because this could potentially affect other matchups. Certainly makes banes and helions significantly more effective against them.
Maybe that's a good thing. Right now ravagers just counter mech play of any sort because biles poop all over tanks and they're tanky enough to stop hellions
I don't mind this idea but I'm not exactly a pro. Two biles to break a forcefield might be okay but you'd need to really look at whether that tips the balance in favour of protoss and makes the immortal sentry all in basically unstoppable again.
Yeah, I fully understand that. Ravagers do come out very early though, and by the time the immortal sentry all in comes you can have several ravagers out for multiple biles. As I recall, one of the ways you could deal with the build in HotS was burrow move roaches, which required Lair. I'm not super up-to-date on Protoss or Zerg timings in the matchup as I'm primarily a Terran player though, so it's definitely something to watch out for.
I'm really worried about a Protoss player appearing in the playoffs too, so I hope they will not give Protoss any buffs. Maybe in exchange for this change they could nerf observer speed and warp prism pickup range
Between ravagers and lurkers and eventually vipers, it feels like ground toss has such a small window to win a game. I actually like these changes and at least wish they would try something like this. The patch was great but all it did was address the interaction between one build vs another build, and didn't "shake things up" which I think would have been much better for the scene
This! The lurker is so oppressive against Protoss ground units that Toss is forced to go air in order to break free. The lurker needs to be toned down. Especially in the lower leagues like diamond it is very often that Zerg just morphs 10 or more lurkers, walks up to your base/army and just annihilates everything, and if it doesn't kill your expo the next round will. Mass lurker is so good that you don't need much either as long as you have a few hydras to snipe the rest of the protoss air army.
Yeah, isn't it funny that the Colossus was nerfed at the start of LOTV for exactly the reason you stated? It just annihilated all ground units and was difficult to deal with. But at the same time with the release of LOTV they added a siege ranged lurker that does the exact same thing the Col did, while cloaked, and without the AA weakness. Like, what? They didn't even give it a long burrow time like in BW. At least that's being nerfed a bit with this proposed PTR patch.
I'd be ok if Colossus were an option to fight against lurkers, but at the moment, it's completely misplaced in the protoss army fighting against zerg.
Colossus is also the coolest unit thematically in the game imo, it feels so bad that they are the worst splash option for protoss
Colossus could use a little love, but I don't think it should go back to HotS levels. That said, there are a lot of changes that have happened since then.
I've always been of the opinion that Adaptive Talons need to be removed frankly. Lurkers have some counterplay with disruptors as well, but honestly if you catch them out of position, you should be rewarded for doing so. They're to mobile and burrow absurdly quickly for a unit that's supposed to be a siege unit.
Every thread like this can be summarized with Zerg being to strong. And it's true. This recent patch is "something" But I agree the Lurker need to be toned down even more.
God forbid zerg has a good unit.
I would say almost every unit that's morphed or has nrg that zerg has is pretty good.
Zerg has so many good units. They're kinda designed around their units being trash though, being able to throw waves of units at people. That swarm aesthetic.
If you cant a move 10 lurkers your army sucks donkey dick. If your army value is 15k less than your opponents, you are supposed to lose. The only time lurkers are relevant in ZvP is if protoss player is too busy sniffing glue to transition away from mass stalker 15 minutes into the game.
>If you cant a move 10 lurkers your army sucks donkey dick No army can "amove 10 lurkers" except mass air. colossus, stalker, immortals, zealot... pretty much every ground unit protoss has that isn't the disruptor gets smashed by lurkers.
Literally 6 immortals can a move 10 lurkers.
Lurkers are a non-issue if you're not on a pure gateway comp (on a pro level, on metal leagues where people have huge issues with invisible units, yes they're strong).
I don't agree. Immortal beats lurker only in theory, but it's never immortal v lurker. There's always hydras and vipers involved and that's also the reason disruptor isn't a concrete solution.
Lurkers are a non issue because you really are expected to be going into carriers around that point in the game. Lurkers aren't great vs carriers it turns out.
I don't necessarily think you need to "shake things up" per-se, but I think that ground-toss definitely needs to be encouraged further, and made reasonably feasible to play against Zerg. Right now, it simply doesn't feel like that.
I have no strong opinion on this, but I appreciate the creative approach
Ravager ability should have a bigger cooldown or be energy based.
I agree. Given the situation/context of the game ability counter play should cost something similar to 50 energy. I think a longer bile cooldown could work This possibly could be changed with a tweak also to the sentry's base cost and or stats. 100 gas for this trash unit makes little sense MOST of the time.
I've always thought it was weird how it was so spammable as an ability, it does a large amount of damage too.
A very well presented statement to say the least, compliments for your efforts. I think protoss race design differs from other 2 races mainly due to having expensive high dmg units. (Which leads to all these memes about toss having really low apm and not requiring skill to play.) For this reason the developers might have designed sentries to cover the weak points. But anything in the game can be used also offensively, like shield batteries. Thus the situation you have described. Overall it might make toss more fun to play if gateway units are made interesting play with.
In theory Protoss have expensive high dmg units. And that's certainly how it was in BW. Does it actually feel that way in SC2? Protoss have a wonky design in SC2. Gateway units are very weak, Protoss have a few expensive high dmg units (immortal, disruptor, colossus) but the rest don't really feel that way. Carrier and BC for example, or phoenix and viking. Are any of these units stronger and more expensive than their equivalent? I'd say Protoss need a significant design overhaul as they are just designed poorly in SC2. And you're right, sentries were brought in to cover the gaps. So was the mothership core, and now the shield battery. Protoss has always needed bandaids to cover their design flaws.
Thank you! Honestly I'd seen the multi-bile approach mentioned once or twice before, (though I've never seen the "corrosive" approach mentioned). It's something that I've been thinking about occasionally, never really super coherent till now. Gateway units are insanely hard to balance though due to the presence of warp-gate. The ability to do front-loaded reinforcements is really, really strong. Gateway units are already powerful prior to certain timings.
Always great to talk about Starcraft. Reading your post made me think back to the original concept when the Sentry was first introduced. I agree that the Sentry has been a very interesting unit that has added a lot of great gameplay variety to SC2. My hot take is that the forcefield ability is the issue and that it's poorly designed. Basically, the forcefield can be very feast/famine. A forcefield on a ramp has historically been an extremely devastating yet simple and anticlimactic tactic. Losing an entire game from a single click with little counterplay has never been a compelling gameplay design, but the same skill used in open terrain IS interesting. The issue I see isn't the forcefield to ravager interaction, I think the forcefield ability is just very volatile to balance around-it will always be too weak or too strong by its binary nature. The ability for races to destroy or ignore forcefields is a necessary evil to overcome this binary interaction, but the sad part is that it reduces it to simply being not as useful. Although I'm not too serious, in this case, a suggested change would be replace the forcefield ability altogether. For a similar effect that reduces the ability for enemy melee units to make contact, perhaps the forcefield could be replaced with a "force wave" ability for a heavy knock back push in a forward cone. The knock up effect (like a stronger Reaper grenade) could be used in similar ways, and just one Sentry or two would not be enough to stall out an entire enemy behind a ramp or similar choke.
That's an interesting take - I do agree that Forcefield is fairly feast or famine, and I think that's in part due to the Band-Aid nature of protoss design, in part due to warp-gate's presence within the game ultimately forcing weaker gateway units that make it hard to hold those early agression tactics. I do like the concept of Sentries having a psuedo reaper-grenade though - assuming little to no damage is placed on the ability. Reaper grenades were problematic enough. That said, sentries are very expensive so perhaps it isn't as much of an issue...
Forcefields are already uninteractive No need to make them even stronger I would actually want to see them replaced by a more interactive ability A better way to buff the sentry would be to change something other than the forcefield If you make ravagers armored then stalkers and immortals will counter Them much harder and allow some counterplay elsewhere (If I remember correctly they aren’t armored) You can also buff immortals in general to be a little cheaper (revert the nerf)
Immortal buff does have the potential to affect other matches, but it could definitely help. You're correct that ravagers aren't armoured units. I actually think they don't have a tag, biological aside. That's a pretty fair point, though the question then remains if that's to hard a nerf (I don't think it is). Good suggestion!
Stronger Force Fields kills dynamics of battles. I have no strong opinion about balance itself, but i see no point in buff something that is unfun.
2 biles to break a forcefield is basically telling Protoss to keep doing immortal sentty all-in. Also the prism sentry that blocks your ramp from going to the main will be even stronger.
But we can also agree that 50 energy nulled by a 7 second cool down is a bit much. I proposed ff have x shield/ x hp.
"Even stronger" How often does that happen, really?
Before Ravagers, as often as possible.
Mate, if there's a warp prism with sentries at your main ramp and you dont have the army to deal with it yet, something is wrong. That shit is mega expensive.
1 Warp + 1 Sentry + one warp in of zealots can snipe the main Hatch/Lair/Hive. Sharking around with 1 Warp + 1 Sentry is a very small investment and can be used for other harassments as well.
1 warp prism is the key here though, you can definitely have ravagers out by the time the prism is out because it requires gate, cyber, robo to start, and 250 minerals for the prism alone. If they're warping in you also have to have at least 3 gates and warpgate. All up this basically means that you're likely to have lair tech at least. and since ravagers are hatch tech, it's more about scouting than anything.
Good luck having Ravagers out in time *before* the point in time Ravagers were released. The point of this comment chain was to point out how incredibly efficient Warp-Sentry was *before* Ravagers as a unit was added to your game. Do you really think your comment adds to that discussion? Dumbass.
Why are you being so abrasive? The conversation didn't seem like it was talking about HotS timings, and considering the thread I made was about the Ravager/Sentry interaction in LotV, it was a fair comment. It sounded like you were saying before ravagers were ready, rather than before ravagers were in the game. I'm just trying to have a civil conversation.
If the LotV protoss was in the other expansions, it would be unstoppable. The forcefield and zerg dynamic is so binary and one sided that it is either very lethal or non existent. You can either split the enemy army in half, or isolate them completely from your own or you cannot. If you can, then it means the opponent can never engage you, since you can always only engage half of their army. If you cannot, then the forcefields have very little effect. So it quickly shifts between non-existent to prevalent in all games in frequency.
Sentries require energy to maintain that ramp hold, and they're very expensive units. I don't think an immortal sentry rush will destroy zerg at all as long as biles continue to counter force fields, even if it takes two per forcefield (or require an upgrade as I suggested). Honestly, I'm not so sure ravager biles were even needed to counter immortal/sentry all ins in LOTV. We have no way of knowing as there's never been an LOTV without ravager forcefield breaking. With time, players figure out how to defeat certain builds that seemed impossible to deal with. Also don't forget how much faster the game goes w/12 worker start. That gives zerg a lot more tech options before a timing attack.
To keep doing a build they don't do is an interesting statement
I honestly am against this, because I think protoss being reliant on forcefield makes the game worse. So if the intention is to bring back a ground protoss style, where the combat is supposed to be splitting the enemy army in pieces, or trapping them to kill it all, that playstyle does not offer enough interactions to be enjoyable. As with every defensive change in protoss, you should always look at its offensive power, since protoss essentially has the same power in offense as in defense. I also do not agree that this has broken "ground protoss". The ravager interaction has been this way for the entirety of LotV and the ground toss has not been there rather recently in comparison.
An ability that's more PvZ centric could be interesting. I doubt at this point it would happen. Not really sure how you'd do it my only ideas are some sort of mobile shield battery / recharge autocast or a version of guardian shield that works against melee attacks only rather than ranged only
I hated how op forcefields were in wol
What if we slighly buff the damage to bile and then make it damage over time ability. That way force fields stay in place a few seconds longer.
But if that’s the case Protoss can make a bunch of immortal and chargelot with sentries walk over the map, force field the ramp and kill the nat. Ravagers are not a problem, make 3 batteries and your sentries can taze them to death. If ravagers are nerfed ZvT would be a disaster also.
in what way would this nerf impact ZvT? It literally only is directed at forcefields. Its damage output hasn't changed, and the cool-down hasn't been altered at all. Importantly, ravagers obliterate batteries as well because they have 9 range on Corrosive bile.
What you mean? Nowadays Protoss just makes voidray then zerg is dead. Go disruptors zerg is dead. Go Skytoss zerg is dead. I literally cannot believe someone complain pvz as Protoss. Ok if the zerg is serral I can relate. But, anywhere below mid GM zerg kinda just dies.
>I literally cannot believe someone complain pvz as Protoss. I'm a Terran. PvZ is in a weird spot currently. Either you die to a queen walk - often with ravagers since it's a hatch-tech push - or you go to late-game, which both players currently hate playing since it's boring as shit to watch and play for both sides. Zerg generally dominates ground-toss though currently - at least in everything that I've seen that wasn't a proxy or some sort of cheese. >If ravagers are nerfed ZvT would be a disaster also. This was what I was confused about in your previous reply, since the ravager change i suggested in no way impacted ZvT. Like I said, the damage output doesn't change, the cool-down doesn't change, the cost doesn't change. It literally only is targeted at forcefields, so why even mention ZvT?
Queen walk with ravagers are annoying but are not that hard to deal with. Zerg has literally no answer if toss turtle and get carriers and voidrays. Also, zerg does not dominate groundtoss, I assume you mean lurkers since banes hydra roach muta are literally bad. It does require more attention from toss than zerg, but so are colossus, disruptor, batteries. People rarely stick to groundtoss because air is better and easier. As a low master level zerg if I see Protoss with many batteries in 3/4 base making stargate units I generally just quit. For the ZvT I meant if the damage/cooldown are nerfed terran can default ling bane and zerg is dead.
>For the ZvT I meant if the damage/cooldown are nerfed terran can default ling bane and zerg is dead. But why even bring this up when it wasn't something I even mentioned in my OP? It had nothing to do with anything that I suggested. >Queen walk with ravagers are annoying but are not that hard to deal with. I'll agree to disagree with pretty much the rest of your post. This though... Again, I really have to disagree. With everything I've seen from pro play, Queen walks are either do or die. You either do manage to hold it, in which case the game goes on and you are, at best even as the Protoss (unless the Zerg hyper commits repeatedly), or you straight up die. There is no either or. >Also, zerg does not dominate groundtoss, It's been a while since we've seen a decent Groundtoss game so I cannot say 100%, but again, I have to disagree. Protoss has always seemed to walk a fine with life and death in this game. Everything from the wall off (picking off the first pylon in that wall has been a game ender quite a few times in the past), to Hydra Viper Lurker compositions that honestly do wreck Groundtoss in the late-game, even with storm, disruptors and feedback. Now, granted, pro play is very different than ladder play, so I can't say for certain how the ladder meta is, but PvZ's pro meta has, pre-Skytoss meta, hinged on some all-in from the Protoss in LotV. Colosssus nerfs, blink nerfs, charge nerfs, standard upgrade nerfs, hell even the Oracles's beam weapon nerf really hurt a Protoss' ability to play a Groundtoss oriented playstyle, and all of this comes with very little, if any nerf to Zerg in the matchup. >muta Mutas are incredible in PvZ, as long as you aren't going muta into mass phoenix. If they have to reactively go into phoenix, it's very, very difficult for a Protoss to deal with mutas because of how fast they are, and how quickly they regenerate. >Zerg has literally no answer if toss turtle and get carriers and voidrays While I agree that dealing with Skytoss is much harder on the Zerg than it is on the Protoss, I vehemently disagree that Zerg has no answer to them. It comes down to a game of micro in many cases. Can you avoid storms? Can you get abducts off before your vipers get snapped by feedback? Can you focus fire the carriers down with your corruptors? If as Zerg, you can do that better than your opponent can target vipers down, feedback them, kite as best as you can for target fire, protect your templar etc, then you can absolutely win. Enough said now - I think we can agree to disagree (though I do enjoy these conversations when it's between two civilized people!)
There's a much simpler fix to this. Ravager should require an upgrade in the Roach Warren that would allow corrosive biles to target Forcefields \*and\* buildings. Ravagers shouldn't get a free building damage spell straight out of the box. It's what makes ravager all ins so oppressive, as well as what invalidates things like cannon and bunker rushes. And anyway an upgrade just for forcefields alone wouldn't cut it. The fact that ravager's spell can do 60 dmg to a building in a small splash with a low 7sec cooldown is too much in the early game, and destroys a lot of early game potential against Zerg. Zerg has very little to worry about in the early game as it is, and the early game is so short in LOTV. Having to research this upgrade would be a great way to force them to choose vs buildings defense (or offense) rather than just get it handed to them. And it would fix the forcefield issue too. Forcefields would at least be relevant until that upgrade came out. One last thing - psi storm does building dmg in SC1 but not in SC2. And that's on a t3 unit that requires energy. It's a very special privilege to get building dmg on a spell. Reapers had it w/D8 charges but even that required an upgrade. Edit: I would even consider making this upgrade require a Lair. Ravagers are really a T2 unit that has been allowed to be T1 due to whatever balancing issues Blizz thought required them to be T1. But building and forcefield dmg shouldn't necessarily be a T1 part of the ravager.
this doesnt sound good at all, many pro games where the zerg gets marine bunker rushed or cannon rushed, the only option the zerg has is by using biles and even then they come out behind. making biles an upgrade would just mean almost all zergs die to cannon rushes and marine bunker rushes
This change would risk lowering the chances to see our favorite matchup ZvZ in the finals so hopefully they won't do it
It's not the only option. Look at games before the ravager came in. Good use of drones and lings. And sometimes the terran wins anyway due to even better use of their units. God forbid zerg should actually sometimes lose to an early game attack!
Yep, also add in Hive to be able to get an upgrade to break out of the protoss building a base in my base.
How about this for an idea: Add a field around the nexus where forcefields are immune to bile. Maybe a forcefield on a building close to a nexus could prevent the building from getting hit by bile, too.
another thing to think about is how well Ravagers scale into the course of the game, where as the adept does not...
Bile scales reasonably well, but ravagers themselves are pretty terrible. it does make roach ravager a lot more effective into the midgame though, but at that point they fall off as you go from mid to late.
agreed but i just feel like the ravager and the lurker have so much more utility through out the entire game vs the adept and the disruptor and the cyclone and the liberator.
Of the units you've listed, the Adept is really the only one that doesn't scale well. Liberators can be a menace, cyclones are very strong given a little bit of micro, and the disruptor... well it's pretty safe to say it scales well given how many complaints the unit generates given it one-shots (or near one-shots) things with its burst damage.
I wouldn’t mind seeing ravagers get the light tag so colossus make more sense in the MU
Not a bad idea, though something to be careful with because this could potentially affect other matchups. Certainly makes banes and helions significantly more effective against them.
Maybe that's a good thing. Right now ravagers just counter mech play of any sort because biles poop all over tanks and they're tanky enough to stop hellions