[Meatex]

Well zerg new stuff looks fun, really adding to the matchup.
Nothing I have seen from terran looks interesting from gameplay standpoint
Concerned that protoss additions will encourage deathballing even more

Quick Comments

mGGDaedalus:

widow mines look alright

[faithHunter]

The oracle changes looks great. It's role as a harassment/scouting hybrid is going to be really great. Maybe we will now see people open up with Stargates more in HoTS for scouting.

I just watched the HoTS battle report video. Hydras with their speed upgrade are REALLY good lol. Also, the abduct animation looks dumb as ever.

Also, 22 range? I expect my siege tanks to be able to attack air now. Also make marines deal splash.

[ninja brett]

so excited for this,

[Crankenstein]

I hope they keep looking into the reaper. I wan't reapers to be good so badly and the healing just doesn't do it for me...

[Dingobloo]

Originally Posted by Crankenstein

I hope they keep looking into the reaper. I wan't reapers to be good so badly and the healing just doesn't do it for me...

There's also another change they didn't make a big deal about which is they reduced the time they take to build, it's something they couldn't do while they had the building attack because they'd just go around in big groups hunting town hall buildings so they might be worth having another look at when we get hands on.

[ROOT`iaguz]

My reactions, will try to keep it short but it probably will not turn out that way.

Shit which I like:

Battle hellions the most. Easily. Why? Because marines just got their replacement and I feel like I won't mind going 3 base vs protoss, whereas now I do it with a groan because it means I'm going to die horribly over 10+ minutes.

BUT I don't think battle hellions mean mech necessarily. I believe this because it's cheap to mix them into an army and they only cost minerals. They do shitloads with needing to be upgraded heavily from the armoury. Consider TvP. Currently the only viable units for terran are Marines, Marauders, Ghosts, Vikings and medivacs. Everything else is either for cutesy timings rather then strong macro oriented play or it's just too shit or clunky. Lategame Terran have a huge problem where their armies tend to get incinerated by the mixture of storms, colossus lasers, archons that do heaps of damage and chagelots that never ******* die and a few other units thrown in for jollies. Marines, which do really good against zealots normally, tend to die before they can actually do that so the chargelots never die so the squishier protoss units are never under any real threat from the marauders.

But hey, now we have something that (god willing) roasts the everloving shit out of chargelots! And they even have hitpoints so they can take a few laser beams/storms and keep functioning! I feel like using battle hellions instead of marines once you're getting into the later stages should be a good idea for terran, and it'll reward terrans who can have significantly larger economies then the Protoss but struggle to actually turn that into an advantage because Protoss just roast all your shit anyway without giving the slightest ****. And this is doubly cool cuz none of the new protoss shit makes their deathball stronger (yay!)

And of course it's extremely relevant in TvZ mech, though zerg are geting a ton of cool shit so I still see mech being hard to use. In WoL, hellions are this thing you begrudgingly get in TvZ mech. You get them because you have supply and minerals and it's inefficient not to spend these resources, but you hate it because hellions are a shit unit. They're only good against 1 unit; zerglings, and your opponent stops making those because blue flames make them look silly. Their only other role is to get shot by roaches and tickle everything else the zerg makes, assuming it can hit them, and occasionally run around and roast drones if the zerg fucks up. Battle hellions seem like they can take more of a punch and dish one out better, which is cool because zerg looks ******* scary now.

Widow Mines. I'm actually confused by this unit. What is it really for? It doesn't seem great defensively since there's still a window of time before it goes off and they're very expensive for a role where you need cost efficiency. For example, say I'm worried about a roach/ling all in about to hit me and I have a reactor factory. If I panic make a few widow mines then a careful zerg only loses 2 roaches to 2 widow mines. Or 2 zerglings. That's really not great. Especially if the explosion affects fellow terran units.

If the opponent sees you running around with them they seem easy enough to defuse harmlessly. Protoss have observers, overseers are fairly cheap and terrans.... might build a raven (HA!). So far the best use I can think for them is hiding them in areas where you expect the opponent to move dropships through, which is cool because it's like scourge only Terran have it for some reason.

I guess if they can be used to dissuade creep spread that'd be pretty ****** cool, but I kinda suspect it's gonna feel like nukes, ie, something clunky and expensive and hard to use that every 1/100 times gets you an awesome result so inconsistent bastards keep making them. I dunno, really would have to use that.

Warhounds. First up shit vs zerg but that's ok don't need 'em anyway. We got hellions for that! As for TvT/P... not sure. When I read the warhounds stats I thought they looked ******* sweet. 150/75, 2 pop for 220 hp, 7 range 23 damage 1.3 atk speed, 2.83 speed and these rockets that do 30 damage to random enemy mech units every 6 seconds. Ok that's pretty good. Except I don't feel like I really need them. Like, if it's TvP why do I get these over marauder/ghosts? They don't deal with colossus, they don't help vs much else and they cost a lot of gas. Plus if I'm massing them that means I'm going heavy factory style so that's a lot of gas investment and ahhhhhhh it seems worse then going marauder/hellion instead!

I also hope they don't make tanks pointless in TvT because tanks are cool.

Reapers. 60 hp and a spot of regen makes them more viable, which is nice. I feel they will make gasless fe an exercise in torture though, which might lead to awkward reaper vs reaper wars. Hmm... micro! And it gives relevance to a unit which you can't really make anymore in TvZ, thank you queendralisks. The loss of speed or the building attack is unimportant since these things weren't great anyway (except for reaper cheese and shit we're ******* terran we can cheese without these things if we have to!)

ZERG

Swarm Host. This unit is also confusing. I don't understand what it's for. I understand blizzard were trying to make a broodlord that you could make in midgame that's not overpowered but I don't really see why you'd want it over infestors which come from the same place. The locusts it makes are certainly strong, sure, but you don't have enough time to wait through huge amounts of their spawns when you're trying to attack someone. When you invest money into an attack you need results and you need them fast. The exception is, well, actual broodlords where you can take all game if you want cuz they're imbalanced but that works because they are the strongest thing you can do. Swarm hosts seem expensive and clunky and shit. Not liking what I see from that unit.

The hydralisk. A lot of you probably didn't play Broodwar so you have no idea what this unit does. The hydralisk was the iconic Zerg unit of the original Starcraft that sadly couldn't make it to Starcraft 2 and was effectively replaced by it's retarded stunted cousin the Roach. The hydralisk was sort of like a marine, it moved around and had a range upgrade and a speed upgrade and you made shitloads of them and you used them to dodge storms and other aoe and they did pretty decent damage. It's incredibly difficult to predict how this totally new unit introduced to Starcraft 2 will impact zerg strategies but I'm excited to find out.

The viper, or the Deflyier so I call it, looks pretty strong as part of that scary lategame zerg ball of death. Abduct looks really gross, blinding cloud and fungal seems ******* absurd and makes me want to play mech (thank god it only works on biological targets!) and consume is... well that's kinda cool too. I wonder if you can abduct motherships...

Ultra charge. Groan....

PROTOSS

Tempest. This unit seems bad. Yea **** you I just called a unit with 22 range ******* awful, what about it? First up cost. 300/300 is tons and the unit is only useful when you're stalemated. The good thing about the unit is that it's ******* great at breaking stalemates. When you have a siege tank in range of something important the other player has to do something about it or lose something important and when they do it's going to hurt a lot because siege tanks are really good. Unfortunately the damage of the tempest is so meagre (45 damage/6 seconds = 7.5 dps. Yup you paid 300/300 for 7.5 dps. Enjoy!) that it's going to take a while for the issue to really be forced. Yea once you have like 4+ tempest shit is starting to get rather real (one shotting scvs, 3 shotting ghosts and vikings etc) but if the zerg/terran gets to that stage methinks he should feel sad.

Oracle. Chriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiist. I'm going to hate this aren't I? This is actually a perfect protoss unit. It's annoying as hell, ridiculous to deal with and adds to the idea that 'perfectly' played protoss should be the best race. Kudos blizzard, I hate you.

So. Preordain doesn't seem amazing, but it's good. Currently it grants detection so I wonder if you can use it on friendly structures to fight cloakshees, thus meaning you don't have to open robo every game? Entomb seems super frustrating to deal with, especially when I'm FE-ing and I don't have a lot of units to spare routinely blowing up trapped minerals. Perhaps a lot of terran builds will require fast vikings just to keep these fuckers back. Grumble.

Oh and it can make all your shit invisible but that's not important. It's got like 0 hp, I have scans and emps and ****** w/e. The mothership's cloak doesn't really effect TvP much/at all currently and I see no reason for that to change. Although I can actually picture it being used with a warp prism to turn a zealot drop/warp in into a budget DT drop and FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK that sounds frustrating.

Mothership Core. I'm a bit nervous on this one. The main part is that you get a really sweet cannon for cheap. Yea it give protoss a get-out-of-jail free card in mass recall which is frustrating, but I feel protoss are going to be super greedy and be fine with their Purifier cannon. Grumble.

The thing about the protoss changes that makes me happy is that nothing they get makes the deathball stronger (though recall makes it harder to kill which is going to be super annoying when I randomly waste stims to not kill anything). Late game TvP sucks. I hate it. I hate how I can feel when a game has effectively ended, where any of my attempts to hurt the protoss aren't going to do anything and it's just one long death animation, as nony describes it. It's pointless how many MMMVG's I make because they're all gonna get roasted and if by some miracle I do win a fight then he warps in a massive round of shit and uses one of his backup templar storms to keep me from actually gaining anything from it and none of my other units are any good. Well, BC's are good but they are expensive and clunky as hell and it's barely viable to stay alive and get enough of them out to make a difference. Except on metropolis where you can actually defend properly.

Zerg look scary. Buffed ultralisks, buffed hydralisks and vipers all look really good and I doubt battle hellions are enough to beat it all!

Quick Comments

	inFeZa:	I think the tempest is made mostly for dealing with broodlords.
	Criven:	Rep for a thought out well informed super-post of sweetness.

[yongming]

if you think spider mines are overpowered, this is worse. spider mines can be defused when triggered, widow mines pretty much dooms the unit when it facehugs. spider mines hit land, widow mines can hit land and air. both are cloaked when burrowed and can detect cloak. so the widow mine pretty much shuts down cloak banshee openings in tvt.

Quick Comments

inFeZa:

maybe you can gravaton beam it to save it?

[ROOT`iaguz]

They can hit cloaked? Now I just wanna throw a bunch around in TvP and randomly kill observers (then once they latch onto an observer I guess they just fly over my mineral line for some Daebak)

[HuT]

Originally Posted by xGKingiaguz

They can hit cloaked? Now I just wanna throw a bunch around in TvP and randomly kill observers (then once they latch onto an observer I guess they just fly over my mineral line for some Daebak)

If they attach to air, they will only do AoE to air.

Also, they don't do friendly fire atm.

[water666]

saw the vids for these cvhanges over say1 and 2 of mlg, some of them new zerg units and toss units just seem excessive and unnecessary... widow mine looks so freaking baller, abduct and burrow charge.... total bs in my opinion and that oracle caster seen so unnecessary but before they bring it out id like to see what pros could do with it... see if they can come up with interesting things that arnt just seemingly troll builds.

[inFeZa]

Originally Posted by xGKingiaguz

Tempest. This unit seems bad. Yea **** you I just called a unit with 22 range ******* awful, what about it? First up cost. 300/300 is tons and the unit is only useful when you're stalemated. The good thing about the unit is that it's ******* great at breaking stalemates. When you have a siege tank in range of something important the other player has to do something about it or lose something important and when they do it's going to hurt a lot because siege tanks are really good. Unfortunately the damage of the tempest is so meagre (45 damage/6 seconds = 7.5 dps. Yup you paid 300/300 for 7.5 dps. Enjoy!) that it's going to take a while for the issue to really be forced. Yea once you have like 4+ tempest shit is starting to get rather real (one shotting scvs, 3 shotting ghosts and vikings etc) but if the zerg/terran gets to that stage methinks he should feel sad.

It may be a good transition from a phoenix/oracle opener since you have the stargate tech, but fleet bacon is expensive too! T_T

[Shieldz]

WOW this is cool but they obviously need to fix some of it soon

[ToxicTiger]

Zerg:

Infestors seem completely useless now.

Vipers seem to be more of a replacement

I mean they can yank big threats and they can blind units to make banes work
Plus they can restore there energy off there own buidings which depending can be a -
but still I cant see pro's using both, and Vipers seem the way to go

Protoss:

I'm really really happy about Protoss I think the race was kinda of unstable as a race in WoL
and HotS seems to fix this very well, plus im zerg and vortex doesn't work on air units now YES!!

Terran: seems pretty good I think spider mines or whatever there call'd are going to add alot of skill
THAT DAMN MOFO'ING WARHOUND STILL LOOKS LIKE SHIT THO GRRR .............
I hope they fix that

Final:

alot of things seem op zerg toss and terran, either this means there's going to be more hard counters,
or the same as WoL things are going to change heavily as the beta goes on so yeah just remember its in beta