HotS Beta 9/2012

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HotS Beta 9/2012

Post by Falchion »

Here's just the balance notes, I'll post some showcase soon.

ZERG

Hydralisk
- Speed boost off-creep reduced to 25% from 50% (so now it is still slightly faster on creep)

Viper
- Movement speed increased to 2.95 from 2.25

Swarm Host/Locust
- Attack speed increased to 0.8 from 1.2 (technically does 50% more damage than before)
- Range increased to 3 from 2
- Only attacks ground now.

Ultralisk
- Charge now requires an upgrade
- Charge deals one swipe of normal attack damage upon arrival
- Frenzy has been brought back


TERRAN

Reaper
- Reaper health reverted back to 50 from 60 (it was buffed to 60 in the TvZ battle report)
- Reaper's Combat Drugs health regeneration ability no longer requires an upgrade
- Reaper's bonus damage to light increased to 5 from 3, making it do 18 total to light instead of 14 (4(+5) x2) (this means SCVs now take the same 3 shots to kill as probes and drones)
- Nitro packs are back in (yay!) and still require factory

Widow Mine
- Detonate no longer timed
- Detonate target damage reduced to 165 from 200
- Detonate splash damage reduced to 35 from ~50 (though this may have just been an error on my part since this value was never confirmed)

Battlecruiser
- Ground attack increased to 10 from 8
- Redline reactor ability has been removed (temporarily doubled Battlecruiser speed)


PROTOSS

Oracle
- Cloaking field ability has been removed, replaced with 'Revelation' ability that reveals enemy cloaked units within a target area
- Preordain no longer reveals cloaked units

Tempest
- No longer does bonus damage to massive
- Regular damage reduced to 30 from 45
- Attack speed increased to 3.3 from 6 (means it is an overall buff to damage)
- Movement speed reduced to 1.88 from 2.25

Mothership Core
- Health reduced to 150 from 350
- Shield reduced to 100 from 350
- Energize energy cost increased to 100 from 25
- Movement speed increased to 0.47 from 0 (so can now move)
- No longer has Teleport ability
- Purify damage reduced to 25 from 60
- Purify range reduced to 7 from 13
- Purify duration increased to 45 seconds from 20

Mothership
- Vortex reverted back to affecting both ground and air units from only affecting ground units
- No longer has the Stasis ability (new ability that froze air units within an area around the Mothership including the Mothership itself for 20 seconds)


My feelings:

- Out of most bullshit, Zerg is having the lesser flak. The only positive change is having the Swarm Host only attack ground, making countering it much more viable. The rest is just meh, but more acceptable compared to T and P.

- Terrans are definitely out of their league with the Reaper. All that's left now is to bring back the anti-building attack and BAM, here's the new, free insta-kill button for T. Gold melee to below will become a nightmare.

- Widow Mines became somewhat more dangerous without the timer flashing to everyone. But I still think that the timer should only be displayed on the sight of a detector unit, making it value more the Observer/Overseer/Raven in T vs All games.

- The Protoss are getting out of sense. Along with Blizzard! First they give the Protoss a Terran ComSat Scan, then they make the Tempest a ship to go toe-to-toe with the Void Ray!

Blizzard, please, fire Browder and Kim. Even I, a decent player and the most tolerant of people in CC, can't bear this!
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Re: HotS Beta 9/2012

Post by GnaReffotsirk »

So true. Give protoss another ability please.
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Re: HotS Beta 9/2012

Post by Falchion »

GnaReffotsirk wrote:So true. Give protoss another ability please.
One new ability is not enough. Protoss needs a major overhaul of these new units, starting with the *COUGH* Removal of the Tempest *COUGH*, the Oracle being more useful than cockblocking the enemy's income and a unit that can help with the bio masses of T and Z, besides the HT's storm, Colossus and Archon. Something that has a bonus vs Light.

Or, if needs be, make the Phoenix more useful by giving it the Disruption Web. Then we, Brotoss, can be somewhat back in business.
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SOMEONE SLAPPED BLIZZARD!!! YAY!!!

Post by Falchion »

Man, someone pinch me or tell me it's April 1st!

Look at the miracle revealed: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/6571787498
Zerg

Swarm Host
- The locust’s attack range has decreased from 3 to 2.


Protoss

Oracle
- We have removed the oracle’s Preordain ability.
- We have added a new area of effect ability for the oracle called Phase Shield.
- Targeted friendly units are shielded from harmful effects for 5 seconds.
- Fungal Growth, Corruption, Contaminate, Graviton Beam, Concussive Shells, Abduct, Revelation, Vortex, and
250mm Strike Cannons – Phase Shield removes the effect and prevents units from being affected.
- EMP – Phase Shield removes the anti-cloaking effect but not the damage dealt.
- Neural Parasite – Phase Shield will not remove this effect but it will prevent units from being affected.
- The energy upgrade has been removed.
- Entomb’s duration has been reduced to 25 sec, but the health per Entomb has increased to 100.
- The cost per unit has changed from 150/200 to 150/150.

Tempest
- The attack range has been reduced from 22 to 15.
- The damage has changed from 30 to 30 + 20 to massive.
- The ranged upgrade has been removed.

Mothership Core / Mothership
- Recall will now cost 100 energy.
- The mothership core will now start with 50 energy and when upgraded, energy will be set back to 50.
- The range of Purifier Beam has been increased from 7 to 10.

Carrier
- This unit has returned to the game.


Terran

Warhound
- This unit has been removed from the game.

Reaper
- We have added a new passive ability called Combat Awareness.
- This allows reapers to see up cliffs.

Hellion
- Battle hellions can now be built from the Factory. It has an Armory requirement.
- There is a new upgrade at the Armory that will allow transformation between Battle Mode and Normal Mode.

Widow Mine
- We have removed the Armory requirement.
The explanations: Image
Carrier is back!

We continue to receive a lot of feedback from both our community and professional players suggesting that the tempest is difficult to use. We agree that it’s not an easy-to-use capital ship like the carrier, and feel it could be cool to have two big air units in the protoss fleet. The carrier will be the easy-to-use, multifunctional capital ship, whereas the tempest will be a more strategic and positional unit that can’t just be blindly massed. We know how much the carrier means to everyone and think that this is a great opportunity to give the carrier another chance before making a final decision on the unit’s future.

Warhound has been removed from the game

We received a lot of feedback from both the general community along with many pro gamers that this unit was not working in its current state. We definitely agree. The current plan is to remove it from the beta so that we can focus testing other units.

If we locate a better design for the warhound, it will return to the beta; until then, please play the game and give your feedback without the warhound in mind.

Tempest attack range changed to 15, Tempest damage changed from 30 to 30 +20 massive

Now that the carrier is back as the general capital ship option, we are adjusting the role of the tempest to be more specific.

The tempest is now a specific counter-unit against massive units. The plan for the tempest is to be a viable option in the PvZ late-game against broodlords as well as in the PvP late-game against mass colossus.
And the bug fixes: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/6572357553
Bug Fixes

General
- The following options now default to off:
- Simple Command Card
- Show Current Order Waypoint
- Select Larva Clusters
- Team Colored Life Status Bars.
- The following option now defaults to on:
- Allow Selecting Uncontrollable Units.
- An error is no longer generated when attempting to burrow previously un-burrowed units with other units that
are already burrowed.
- The Select Army button now defaults to the F2 hotkey.
- Queens and Mothership Cores are no longer selected when the Select Army button is used.
- Tempest and Oracle now have proper selection sounds.
- Fixed an issue where executing certain queued orders would be delayed if an ability was on cooldown.
- Fixed an issue where certain units were missing flail animations.
- Fixed some missing text in the zerg tab on non-grid hotkey profiles.


Races

Terran
- Simple Command Card has been removed from the Planetary Fortress.
- The Build SCV command card button on the Command Center has been moved back to the top left slot.
- Raven’s Seeker Missile once again costs 125 energy.
- Fixed an issue where the unit icons for grouped hellions would sometimes change.
- Dead marines will no longer display Stimpack’s expiration effect animation where they fell.
- Units destroyed by the widow mine no longer display two death animations when the Reduced Violence option is
toggled on.
- Units launched into the air by the siege tank’s sieged attacks now display properly under Low settings.
- A bug was fixed that caused battlecruiser anti-ground damage to be more than 8.

Protoss
- Unpowered Warp Gates will no longer show as Gateways under the fog of war.
- Protoss structures are no longer invisible through the fog of war if vision was lost just as construction was
completing.
- Mothership and mothership core now play appropriate ready sounds.
- Revealed debuff tooltip for Revelation has been clarified.
- Mineral Shield no longer uses a placeholder icon.

Zerg
- Missile Attack upgrade has been corrected to increase locust damage in increments of 1 instead of 2.
- Banelings will no longer play an incorrect death animation if they are killed while suspended in the air.
- Ultralisks no longer emerge from Burrow Charge slightly ahead of their target destination.
- Burrow Charge now deals the correct amount of damage when the ultralisk has received melee attack upgrades.
- Burrow Charge ability icon now matches the new upgrade icon on the Ultralisk Den.
- It is now possible to set custom hotkeys for the swarm host and viper.
- Viper’s Consume ability no longer uses the Corruption icon.
- Viper no longer uses a high quality death model on Low graphics settings.
- Hydralisk speed on creep is now consistent before and after researching the Muscular Augments upgrade.
- Fixed an issue where drones would not be automatically re-selected after canceling construction of a building.
My comments below!
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SOMEONE SLAPPED BLIZZARD! YIPEEE!!!

Post by Falchion »

- Man, the Carrier's return was a demand! Good to see Blizzard listens to it's fanboys, unlike EA and some other people. *awaiting moderation* UP YOURS KIM!

- Turning the Tempest into an Anti-Massive is quite creative, as it can make countering Colossi, Thors, BCs and Mustaches much more viable.

- I'm curious to see how well this Phase Shield will go against the infamous T and Z bio masses, hehehehe...

- The removal of the Warhound was inevitable, but Blizzard turned into Blizzlard briefly by adding this new passive to the Reaper. Just balance it by making it's demo charges a Tier 2 upgrade, I tell you. This gives players time to react, should they scout.

- Swarm Host's nerf somewhat makes sense. But Blizzard already balanced it when it made the Locusts attack ground only.
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Re: HotS Beta 9/2012

Post by Ricky_Honejasi »

To be honest, I was sure that Blizzard would have been hellbent on keeping the Warhound and ditching the Carrier. So that's quite a surprise.

Also surprised that they honestly try to put any more effort into the Reaper. Combat Awareness might be odd but that alone can prevent leaping reapers into their deaths (50 gas/reaper isn't cheap) just because the enemy already have stalkers or cannons just up the cliff. Back then, it was often the gamble I had to do with Reapers beyond the initial reaper rushes.
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Re: HotS Beta 9/2012

Post by Whiplash! »

Changes are a step in the right direction. Carrier still needs a buff, tempest still needs reworking, oracle idk about still, I think it needs to be cheaper. Small buffs will help toss out, but we really need a new ground support unit. Terran needs another unit to round out mech (maybe ground caster or support) and mine buff (make supply 1 or .5 per mine at least, maybe change the mechanics of how they work a bit), and maybe a bit more tweaking with the armory hellino fix. Oh, and nerf marines of course! Zerg is looking the most stable (they have throughout the beta) and probably won't need many changes, its mainly protoss and terran that need to be looked at.

I've played about 40 games and its pretty enjoyable, but I still wish protoss gateway tech wasn't so weak (i'd even take a warpgate nerf to buff gate units).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Re: HotS Beta 9/2012

Post by Pr0nogo »

I think the only reason more people like the carrier than hate it is because it's so late-game that nobody realises how imbalanced it really is.
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HotS Beta - Hellion is "Hellbat", WTF?

Post by Falchion »

Link: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/6863526811

Heart of the Swarm Beta Patch #6:

PROTOSS:

Mothership Core
- When Purify is cast on a player’s Nexus, it now also grants detection to 13 range.
- Energize has been removed.

Oracle
- The cost of Entomb has been lowered from 100 to 75, while the duration has been increased from 50 to 60 seconds.
- Revelation has been changed to the following:
- This ability will now also work on buildings, granting 3 vision around every unit it hits.
- The duration has been increased from 45 seconds to 60 seconds, and the cost has been increased from 50 to 75.
- This ability will no longer grant detection.
- This ability will not affect cloaked targets, even if you have detection of them at the time.
- The button arrangement for this unit has been adjusted to list Void Siphon first and Entomb last.

Tempest
- This unit’s native bonus damage to massive units has been removed.
- This unit no longer requires a Fleet Beacon.
- We have added a new weapon upgrade called Quantic Reactor at the Fleet Beacon which will grant Tempest attacks +35 damage to massive units.
- Quantic Reactor costs 200/200.
- The cost of this unit has been changed from 300/300 to 300/200.
- The supply cost for this unit has changed from 6 to 4.
- The scale of this unit has been lowered from 1 to 0.9.

Sentry
- Hallucination no longer requires research.


ZERG:

Viper
- Viper acceleration has been increased from 2.125 to 3.
- The radius of Blinding Cloud has increased from 1.5 to 2.

Spore Crawler
- This unit no longer requires an Evolution Chamber.


TERRAN:

Widow Mine
- The setup time for this unit has been increased from 2 seconds to 3 seconds.

Battle Hellion
- This unit has been renamed to “Hellbat.”
COMMENTS:

- Changes are just getting more imbecile by the hour. And the excuse of 'this is just a Beta' IS NOT AN EXCUSE!!!
- Man, I thought patch 4 and 5 were ridiculous, but this is way over the line. Is Blizzard committed to incompetence with their hearts? And the idiot here, because of Patch 3, thought they were finally going in the right direction!
- I just don't get the logic of removing tech requirements for Spore Crawlers and Tempests. Just don't get it...
- Sentry's change is just an incentive to make people use more Hallucinations. Not good but not bad either.
- If they want Tempest to be more useful than just add the AoE as a VERY long research. Simple as that.
- Oracle is the least altered by internship, to me I believe.

Finally, about changing this to 'Hellbat':

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Re: HotS Beta 9/2012

Post by Pr0nogo »

Tempest should be 200/200, because Blizzard isn't going to make the AoE an upgrade.

I died when they changed it to the Hellbat.
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Re: HotS Beta 9/2012

Post by Ricky_Honejasi »

Initially, the first patch changes did seem relatively fine or I saw nothing clearly wrong.

However, I admit this last one start to be very questionable. Notably changing the Hellion name to "Hellbat" does feel more than unnecessary.

Considering that Blizzard is already under fire for not doing that much for the custom maps situation beyond 1.5's Hosted List, they shouldn't give bad impressions on the melee side with the beta HotS. The developers that gave help and answers on the Blizzard custom maps essentially vanished except an occasional specific one. Hopefully it's only for the duration of the beta HotS.
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Re: HotS Beta 9/2012

Post by IskatuMesk »

"Hellbat"

Says all that needs to be said about HoTS.
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Re: HotS Beta 9/2012

Post by mark_009_vn »

To this day I still have no idea what the shit "Firebats" supposed to mean.... Left alone "Hellbats"
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Re: HotS Beta 9/2012

Post by Falchion »

mark_009_vn wrote:To this day I still have no idea what the shit "Firebats" supposed to mean.... Left alone "Hellbats"
It's an attempt to mix "Hellion" and "Firebat". Quite bloody awfully pathetic, might I add...
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Re: HotS Beta 9/2012

Post by RazorclawX »

Falchion wrote:
mark_009_vn wrote:To this day I still have no idea what the shit "Firebats" supposed to mean.... Left alone "Hellbats"
It's an attempt to mix "Hellion" and "Firebat". Quite bloody awfully pathetic, might I add...
Awfully picky that you'd go out of your way to choose that as the most heinous change.
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