StarCraft 2

General observation based on current community/talking to friends:

I notice a lot of players that just watch streams and are scared to just dip a toe in and grind games.

If people just played more games and went up the traditional route of playing by feel, you'd also have less people run some single (probably cheese lol) build into diamond and then fall flat on their ass and grief themselves off the game. I kind of did this in WoL with toss, I ran either a void ray back door with blink stalker harass that went to 2 base, turtle hard or win depending on success or a 4 gate. But that's exactly what a lot of my wins right now are. I scout someone going for some copy/paste build I've read online, I stop it and they have nothing to go off of after.


Steps I'd take for any returning players suffering from this:
1- Pick a new anonymous tag for yourself, disassociate pride, play 150 or so games based on feel (okay, have a few stronger starting builds to go off of) and scouting.
2- Don't care about what league you're in, don't tell anyone!

That's it.


Steps if I was Blizzard to get people playing more (read: incentives to keep things going):
1 - More skins/icons for wins and levelling. I have a feeling these are comin'.
2 - Free name change after X wins
3 - A way to enter separate ladders for each race (includes random). <- Currently discourages me from wanting to grind toss in ranked games. I'm on the fence with playing them again and don't want this to have an effect on my Terran progression. Not to mention, I'd like to keep track of my ladder progression at least in 1v1 with them separately.
4 - Decals based on rank for each race each season, misc little things like that.

I also think LoL has it right with selling skins. Blizzard'd probably make more money selling things like the Thor skin etc for 5-10 than trying to sell collector's boxes with them. With the right mix of "buy it for wins/rank" or cash, I think SC 2'd take off a lot faster. Plus? If Riot can pull this off, I gotta say Blizzard definitely can. Lots of people just play LoL grind to unlock new heros and certainly comment they wish they could unlock skins doing so. Do I care that much about stuff like this? No. Does a system like this cater to the current "modern gaming" mind set? Absolutely. Not to mention, I think with the current state of balance, a patch could be put off for a bit longer and this could be hammered out.

One other thing that I think needs a revisit is the campaign. Some of the missions need to be made much more difficult. Tune this fucker up appropriately (esp for brutal), have the fixes / new achieves ready for a box price drop. It is a ways off, but it reflects well on them to recognize a very obvious problem and package it in with an inevitable "relaunch" / "readvertise" campaign (no pun intended).

Another thing I missed from WC3 was an FFA ladder. I know the people on top of that were like 30 wins - 70 losses but these guys did tend to stay on top and get back up on top every season. I had a run doing this as human (obvi) and then undead (for the lulz) and gotta say I miss it so bad.

Personal experience thus far:
I played Terran against progressively harder AI until I had strong success with elite AI running a few different builds. I played traditionally and went 2-3 in my placement (fucking cheese and baneling busts!) and landed in goddamn bronze. I've gone about 7-3 ratio on wins, but sometimes 2 games in a row even I get dropped despite not losing internet connection. This has kept me in silver and I feel for the poor bastards I'm playing but, to be truly honest, I still have someone outclass me in Terran v Terran. Anyone saying that going from silver->platinum (let's be a little conservative throwing ranges around now) is just macro might wanna play some of the lvl 90 silvers I've banged into so far, no one is floating anything and has 2 bases early with a 3rd on the way!

Honestly, its a great time to jump in and learn a new race, I was diamond in season 1 when it was the highest rank as toss and currently playing with some anon tag as silver Terran is quite amusing. It gets gully as fuck in the silver league son! I've had some truly lawls games that were just plain old fun.

Strat issues for me:
One transition I'm having trouble making is getting ghosts into my build against toss. I typically scout colossus every time so I'm forced vikings. I want to get some ghosts in there but based on unit comps, it seems like I'd be stupid to not just max up my vikes because you need padding on your #s to deal with blink stalkers. Being a previous toss player, 4 colossus is just an absolute face melter against bio... I just don't see a window in any of my replays that says "ok you're safe on vikes/MMM ball, get a ghost or two"... worse, even if I did get the ghost, he wouldn't have enough energy to emp (had this happen one game I did get 2 out!). Not to mention, EMP seems QUITE a bit smaller than I remember dealing with in WoL as a toss.

Basically when you secure your 3rd you want to build a Ghost Academy. It is a fairly inexpensive building. Once it is built research Mobius. Once Mobius is about halfway done then you can start your Ghost production. Or if the Toss maintains Colossus then you continue making Vikings. You need to be aware Toss can switch their tech around the time you can safely take a third so you need to have the infrastructure in place to keep up with that switch. In general you don't want to make Ghosts prior to having a third. Their gas cost will prohibit you from constantly producing upgrades, marauders and Starport. Even if the Toss opens up Templar tech you shouldn't really switch it up too much.

The new strategy is to put 1 Ghost with 200 (well ... technically just 150) energy in a medivac and speed boost it over the Toss' army right before engagement, dropping him near the templar and firing the EMPs that way.

For the most part the compositions you want to aim for is:

2 Marines per Zealot
1 Marauder per Stalker
3 Vikings per Colossus
1 Ghost per HT

If the Protoss has 4+ Colossus you need to not worry about medivacs. You need to tear the Colossus from the sky. With 4 Colossus their splash is too great for Medivacs to heal anyways. So it doesn't matter. However that means you should have 12 Vikings. That will 2 shot Colossus. Just bait the Toss into an engagement with a nice ridge for your Vikings and rip apart the Colossus in seconds.

Also an overlooked number is the Ghost damage output against Zealots. They do 20 w/ +2 per upgrade against Zealots. So their damage scales better than Zealot armor scales. It is the only unit out of the Barrack that does that. You'll see people often suicide their Ghosts to deny Storms but get 1000/500 get just swallowed and destroyed and the bio then eventually loses out to the gateway swell.

Yeah I guess I'm trying to get them in while I'm building my 3rd. They always seem to attack when its 3rd time, so, yeah I think I need to put ghosts off until the later game unless he goes hard templar/archon (I've seen this shit lol) over colossus.

I definitely know from being a toss that colossus are exponential in power vs ground to the point that they can just erase everything bio in literally 2 seconds if vikes/corrupters aren't built.

Deathwing_sl said:

They didn't even do the unit introductions correctly most of the time. Or, more likely, I suck at using some zerg units(I'm bad at zerg). Like the intro missions for ultralisks, couldn't even beat the mission on hard using them with zerglings. Rolled it next try with hydras and roaches. Was even able to take out part of the Tal'Darim base because I was looking for that last crystal. Still couldn't figure out how that mission was suited for ultralisks. Especially when hyrdas synergize so well with Stukov's acid attack.

I'm curious how many people bought WoL primarily for single player and how that compares to HoTS.

Click to expand...

Ultralisks don't die from the hybrids because of their big health pool and his health regen. They have bonus damage to the stalkers prevalent on the level, and if you position them correctly a few of them can wipe out all the warping in protoss forces before they actually arrive (and then tank the hybrid without dieing when it shows up a few seconds later.)

About 10 ultralisks, 10 roaches (to make sure things get slowed) and then the rest in hydralisks is enough to completely clean out the map.

Ultras do bonus damage to armored in the campaign? Guess I figured they followed the new HOTS multiplayer ruleset where their damage has no bonuses.

Like I said if you are on 2 bases Ghosts will harm your overall army due to their cost. You will not have the bio units to face off against the (probably) well upgraded Gateway forces and you'll get overwhelmed.

My problem is I think I'm Flash so I just never get Ghosts

For the double!

I just wanted to be able to use these without them having templar, but I feel like what's the point now that I really thought things through. What a shame! Ghost needs a rework imo... in SC1 I'd build templar really every game because you traded power for required micro. I'm just not feeling that pay off on the terran caster units.

Ghosts aren't a backbone unit in TvP. They're a flair unit. They alone don't do "damage" really. They can't erase supply like Templar or Infestors. So having a bunch won't ever really buy you anything. But when you have a few of them thrown in with a ton of bio their ability to mitigate storms and remove shields suddenly becomes very powerful. But they are not a unit you build your army around. If you try and build an early game army around Ghosts and you get lucky and he goes Templar you'll suddenly have a Protoss with no shields but he'll have +2 armor Zealots (probably even Charge) against your +1 damage bio and nothing but marines that will get shredded.

The game provides 4 difficulty settings... right out of the gate, that is pretty ridiculous... but to have the Brutal difficulty be face-roll easy is just a travesty.

To be able to get 100% achievements complete in 3 sit-down play sessions is a travesty (I'm a gold level player, not pro, master, or even diamond). Every single mission introducing 1 new unit that you mass produce to victory is a travesty. The lack of a true and traditional RTS (build a base, train an army, defend, expand, conquer) missions is a travesty. The fact they give you a OP'd hero unit in every mission is a travesty. They fact that they took 3 years to offer up 10 months of work and charge full game price for it is a travesty. The story was a fucking awful travesty. The game pacing being so stop and stutter, cut-scene here, fade out there, and sit on your hands for this dialogue sequence is a travesty.

They shit the bed just as bad with this as they did with D3. The only redeeming part of any of it is the multiplayer, but even then I am not sure they enhanced the game all that much, they simply didn't fuck it up any worse.

HOTS MP is much, much, much better than WoL MP from both a player and spectator perspective. Even if the changes they did don't sound huge they were pretty huge.

If your micro is up to speed, you can tear any protoss going colossus apart with your first 4 medivacs, because colo tech+range+production leaves them with so few stalkers that you can fly your army in circles around him. Anyway, going colo first without stargate or TC along with it is almost unheard of in the higher leagues, because medivacs are that good. Sure you want like 3-4 eventually, but HTs can actually work alone and charge/blink are essential.

I fully support your ideas about freestyling, it's much more fun than beating yourself over forgetting xyz in your build.

Remove smart casting on ghosts/templars, make them more powerful . Shit, do something. I really don't like the ghost just being this "reactive against casters" unit. With the current emp blast radius, I don't know if making it remove all shields/energy would ruin everything at this point.. probably. They've really tightly balanced things and it'd require some annoying changes to get used to if it all changed in a single patch for many players. Then again, this dilemma of TvP has always existed and I guess the way it is, is better than the way it was.

Most players at the tip top rarely use EMP. Outside of the medivac kamikaze I haven't seen top Koreans use EMP. They almost always favor snipe for many of the reasons you're talking about. It has really been that way since the EMP radius nerf.

I think it needed a radius nerf, but probably an improvement to how much shield/energy it strips , how much energy is costs to fire the emp, or make ghosts easier to mix into your army somehow. Pretty sad lil unit for the micro it takes to really use it. Templar is just as much a pain to get to but its way more useful as just something to mix into your army.

I've always disliked Ghost design possibly because I'm overall pretty bad at using them. That is why I liked the (stupidly OP) upgraded healing beam from the beta. It allowed me to try and out-micro storms without the reliance on this EMP vs Feedback tightrope that I, honestly, find boring.

The HT/Ghost interaction is one of the more retarded things in SC2, in WoL it was overshadowed by Fungal. Now it's just 2 units totally countering each other, if you get feedback off, you win, if you get snipe off, you win.

I'd like if EMP had bigger radius but only removed let's say 1000 (random number) shields and 1000 energy total so it wouldn't absolutely butcher clumped up units, but you would still have it as valuable addition for mid/lategame, or redo it as "can't use abilities" so it's a bit more versatile, like your bio now can't stim and so on.

Browder commented on that a while ago and I had to agree with his logic. If you make it cap out at a certain number you can never guarantee what exactly will happen. So you EMP some stuff expecting all the shields to deplete but then you actually only get a bunch of units with 50% shields (for the sake of argument.) Or you EMP some templars expecting them to have zero storms available but since you hit the cap they managed to get one storm out still. It could cause some confusion and a bit of randomness. And randomness is bad in an RTS.