There needs to be a easier to spot visual effect on infestors just like ghosts and DT and observers have, Serral was legit sharking around armies and Terrans had no clue whatsoever , you can easily argue single fungals pushed games in Serrals favor(Finals game nr 2). They are now even easier to get early because of the previous buffs. Fix this now I've made post about this many times before , it is just a matter of time before commentators start talking about it and it will get nerfed , should have been nerfed a long time ago.
Listening to PiG's voice trying to make it sound balanced while watching the most broken way to use a caster to win a tournament sine warp in storms back in early WOL.
Serral is one of the best to ever touch SC2 but with Zerg he is untouchable when he finds tactics like this infestor usage and it is not fun to watch.
It's like Magnus Carlsen vs Magnus Carlsen but one of them has 2 Queens.
Clem had this genius idea against Serral at MC7 that you can actually build missile turrets along your PF / sensor tower / tank lines and guess what, the turrets detect burrowed units
and I totally agree with you, watching ghost cloak and pew pew (free hits just like a locust is a free units) is not fun to watch
probably cloak should be timed, like the reworked mothership, 20s cloak for 50 energy / 71s cooldown. or an other idea someone mentioned lately, no snipe while cloaked.
On February 13 2024 05:04 Drahkn wrote: There needs to be a easier to spot visual effect on infestors just like ghosts and DT and observers have, Serral was legit sharking around armies and Terrans had no clue whatsoever , you can easily argue single fungals pushed games in Serrals favor(Finals game nr 2). They are now even easier to get early because of the previous buffs. Fix this now I've made post about this many times before , it is just a matter of time before commentators start talking about it and it will get nerfed , should have been nerfed a long time ago.
Listening to PiG's voice trying to make it sound balanced while watching the most broken way to use a caster to win a tournament sine warp in storms back in early WOL.
Serral is one of the best to ever touch SC2 but with Zerg he is untouchable when he finds tactics like this infestor usage and it is not fun to watch.
It's like Magnus Carlsen vs Magnus Carlsen but one of them has 2 Queens.
NERF
There might be a legitimate discussion to be had on zerg nerfes, including this particular thing. However: you are suggesting to nerf chess because Magnus Carlson is dominant.
If you want to argue for a specific nerf, you need to argue that it's a generally imbalanced thing. Meaning that multiple people must be able to abuse it. Just arguing 'serral is very strong with it' is not a particular good argument. An argument like this requires proof that using this is (way) easier to countering it, that a whole range of zerg players can use this too effectively and that it generally causes a bad, imbalanced match up.
Here we go again. Serral plays like an absolute god, near perfectly, insane macro, micro, strategy, defense, multipronging, and outplays the shit out of his opponents. Even after the zerg nerfs patch. And people come out after watching Serral play like a god, and say "wah infestor needs to be nerfed". As if ANYONE under 6k mmr is even remotely able to make these plays reliably. As if the last infestor nerfs weren't enough, or that zerg spellcasters are the hardest to use because of no auto attack unlike ghosts and HTs.
As an abandoned ground Protoss, I usually jump right on board with nerf zerg arguments... but Serral straight up deserved those wins against Dark and Maru. The fact that he had the foresight and eAPM to make pooperlords work like that in zvz makes me appreciate that yes, Zerg is the best, most flexibly designed race, but no one can do it like Serral.
The hard part is having like multiple infestors sharking around while you’re still doing everything else, and to set up the traps in sync with an army that can punish it, it’s extremely difficult and we don’t see it too often for that reason. And exploratory scans always have a chance to catch them and you’re pissing away gas if enough get caught.
Zergs really don’t have the tools to break a Maru in lategame god mode without plays like this, I would be wary of over-nerfing.
I do agree there needs to be a slightly more visible effect for that burrowed Infestor movement though.
Burrowed infestors only really played a part in 2 out of 4 final games and in the one where Serral had the biggest fungals (Radhuset), Maru still made it a close game at some points.
If you take away sharking infestors, the TOP Terrans (I speak absolute world class here, Maru and Clem, maybe Byun/Cure) with Ghost Liberator and some splash will trade insanely good if not unbeatably good against Zerg
Even now, for most zergs it's a game of cost efficiency against these guys already. If they're not mining significantly more, the terran always wins.
I can only second the other guys in here: No other Zerg would've been remotely close to be able to do what Serral did against Clem and/or Maru, but that doesn't mean that Zerg's broken. Serral in his best is just clearly above every other player.
What everybody here already has said; there is one person in the planet who can use this cost-efficiently, and by no means that is guaranteed in every game. Its insanely hard to keep track individual infestors, move them, synchronize their plays with your army and still not get sniped or killed before you get to cast anything. Infestors have gotten nerfed like 10 times already, they are by no means OP anymore. Making them immovable would make them even more useless than they already are for 90% of playerbase, if not even more. Please stop.
On February 13 2024 05:49 WombaT wrote: The hard part is having like multiple infestors sharking around while you’re still doing everything else, and to set up the traps in sync with an army that can punish it, it’s extremely difficult and we don’t see it too often for that reason. And exploratory scans always have a chance to catch them and you’re pissing away gas if enough get caught.
Zergs really don’t have the tools to break a Maru in lategame god mode without plays like this, I would be wary of over-nerfing.
I do agree there needs to be a slightly more visible effect for that burrowed Infestor movement though.
I have actually agreed with you almost every post considering Serral and all this *hit-talking and balance-whining in multiple threads, so good work .
But on this one, I must disagree. Why should infestor be "seen". They are terribly slow, clunky units with no abilities to attack or even protect themselves, but burrowing and movement. In addition they cost a lot. They are mostly useful in the endgame if even then. If you make them visible, what on earth prevents terran just kill them with infinite scans ? Like you said yourself; "it’s extremely difficult and we don’t see it too often". I at least havent seen that kind of infestor use never before. Also terran already has a very powerful lategame against zerg, why on earth should we make it even more stronger ? In addition, like you and many others have already said; TvZ seems to be in a pretty good spot and balanced right now. Of course there will always be things to adjust and map balance could be discussed more, but infestor is not the problem in the matchup.
As someone said to me in one of these threads: "Why don't infestors just go head2head with Ghosts, Spellcaster vs. Spellcasters???" Combined with "just surprise the Terran?!"
Fun idea: A slow, low-ranged unit (atleast for Fungal) vs. a High-DPS Unit that can insta-kill the other unit. Which Fungal btw can't do, you still need an army in place to actually kill the Ghosts. But hey, Zerg can just use one of their other Ghost-counters, which are...uh...mhm. Y'know, just yoink them! Oh, sorry, Vipers are also OP so that can't be the solution :/
In reality, if you wanted to remove Burrow movement (and "making it much more obvious" is basically removing it), you would need to either nerf Ghosts heavily or buff Infestors. Like 10% more range and double the speed or splash of Fungal. Which I personally don't think are particularly good ideas, considering that Infestors aren't a problem in any hands but two.
On February 13 2024 09:45 Starcloud wrote: This post must be a joke/troll, right ?
What everybody here already has said; there is one person in the planet who can use this cost-efficiently, and by no means that is guaranteed in every game. Its insanely hard to keep track individual infestors, move them, synchronize their plays with your army and still not get sniped or killed before you get to cast anything. Infestors have gotten nerfed like 10 times already, they are by no means OP anymore. Making them immovable would make them even more useless than they already are for 90% of playerbase, if not even more. Please stop.
On February 13 2024 05:49 WombaT wrote: The hard part is having like multiple infestors sharking around while you’re still doing everything else, and to set up the traps in sync with an army that can punish it, it’s extremely difficult and we don’t see it too often for that reason. And exploratory scans always have a chance to catch them and you’re pissing away gas if enough get caught.
Zergs really don’t have the tools to break a Maru in lategame god mode without plays like this, I would be wary of over-nerfing.
I do agree there needs to be a slightly more visible effect for that burrowed Infestor movement though.
I have actually agreed with you almost every post considering Serral and all this *hit-talking and balance-whining in multiple threads, so good work .
But on this one, I must disagree. Why should infestor be "seen". They are terribly slow, clunky units with no abilities to attack or even protect themselves, but burrowing and movement. In addition they cost a lot. They are mostly useful in the endgame if even then. If you make them visible, what on earth prevents terran just kill them with infinite scans ? Like you said yourself; "it’s extremely difficult and we don’t see it too often". I at least havent seen that kind of infestor use never before. Also terran already has a very powerful lategame against zerg, why on earth should we make it even more stronger ? In addition, like you and many others have already said; TvZ seems to be in a pretty good spot and balanced right now. Of course there will always be things to adjust and map balance could be discussed more, but infestor is not the problem in the matchup.
Glad you agree, someone has to!
I don’t actually think the Infestor is, or indeed will be a huge problem moving forwards, but if it did work out that way I was just proposing for that hypothetical. After all Zergs need some counterplay to a player as good as Maru when they get into their setup with ghosts and sim cities etc. There’s some pretty easy minor tweaks.
It could remain basically invisible while stationary, and a little more visible while moving, probably somewhere between how it is now and an observer. So you can still set up traps and whatnot, just a little more easy for a vigilant Terran to spot, but if it’s as easy to see as an observer top Terrans will just consistently kill them.
Or a very slight delay on casting after a burrow. Whatever the sweet spot is where a Terran is still likely to eat that fungal and reward the Zerg for setting the trap, but maybe they can do a panic split and mitigate it little whatnot.
I don’t think it’s a major issue whatsoever, we’ll see though. Somebody suggested making ghosts not able to snipe while cloaked and tbh I think that’s a better proposed change for a unit that’s a more consistent factor in the matchup than this kind of Infestor plays
If we're going to nerf Ghost, I would like to say that the auto attack or snipe should be nerfed, please do NOT nerf EMP. Nerfing EMP has the side effect of unnecessarily nerfing Mech, especially in TvP.
Please focus the nerfs or unit reworks in a way that target bio play firstmost, and mech last. Mech TvP especially does not deserve a single unnecessary nerf ever again.
I hate when changes are made that are mostly to address bio or standard play, but end up nerfing Mech, and there are easy ways to compensate for that without affecting bio or other MUs but unfortunately because no one left playing/watching cares enough about Mech, there's no one to vouch and implement it i guess...
On that note, I was just thinking again: Was the cost revert for Ghost from 200/100 back to 150/150 really necessary? I tend to hear from casters that Ghosts are expensive, but gas isn't really a limiting factor for Bio is it? It's minerals.
David Kim said that the reason Ghost was changed to 200/100 from 150/150 (way back in WoL) was to make it more costly for Bio to get, while making it easier for Mech to get (since Mech is much more gas heavy and doesn't mind sinking minerals).
I still don't fully understand why the newer balance team reverted this. Their reasoning IIRC was that it makes more expensive, but does it really? I agree with David Kim's reasoning more. We see games where most resources are mined out, and mineral patches are emptied first with mass OC/MULE, while Refineries still have lots of gas.
Raven rework into being more of a early game / bio spellcaster also hurt Mech. I really hate how much the AA missile debuff specifically helps bio's weapons way more than Mech weapons. Now both spellcasters benefit Mech less for the cost compared to how much more they became useful to Bio ;( (Though thankfully with the new Cyclone, AA missile is significantly more useful!) I would be happy if Ghost cost was changed even to 175/125 and snipe slightly nerfed further (maybe 1 sec longer delay before firing? that way the damage is less burst and less potent in battles), that gas is precious.
Lol, am I the only one to think that the recent changes to the infestor were nerfs and not buffs? Like smaller range and less damage to have an infestor spawn with a fungal is a buff? I have never seen an infestor pop in a clutch moment to insta-fungal an army.
Either way, no one is able to sharkfestor like Serral. As everyone has said it looks extremely hard, and against clem in the last finals, if you get turrets, they are useless and zerg just can't trade effectively ever.
Sharkfestors are a much needed tool available for only top top performers.
On February 13 2024 22:46 Infested.rine wrote: Lol, am I the only one to think that the recent changes to the infestor were nerfs and not buffs? Like smaller range and less damage to have an infestor spawn with a fungal is a buff? I have never seen an infestor pop in a clutch moment to insta-fungal an army.
Either way, no one is able to sharkfestor like Serral. As everyone has said it looks extremely hard, and against clem in the last finals, if you get turrets, they are useless and zerg just can't trade effectively ever.
Sharkfestors are a much needed tool available for only top top performers.
No, you are not. Everyone with two braincells to rub together can see that it was an infestor nerf, especially in the late game. A pair of old infestors could blast a clumb of marines, and the damage was enough to chip away at Terran air units. The range nerf also makes them a lot more vulnerable to ghosts, HTs and tanks.
People are just very salty that Maru lost, and have figured out that if sharkfestors didn't exist, someone with Maru's control could have slowly pew-pew'd Serral away with no real counterplay.
On February 13 2024 22:29 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: If we're going to nerf Ghost, I would like to say that the auto attack or snipe should be nerfed, please do NOT nerf EMP. Nerfing EMP has the side effect of unnecessarily nerfing Mech, especially in TvP.
Please focus the nerfs or unit reworks in a way that target bio play firstmost, and mech last. Mech TvP especially does not deserve a single unnecessary nerf ever again.
I hate when changes are made that are mostly to address bio or standard play, but end up nerfing Mech, and there are easy ways to compensate for that without affecting bio or other MUs but unfortunately because no one left playing/watching cares enough about Mech, there's no one to vouch and implement it i guess...
On that note, I was just thinking again: Was the cost revert for Ghost from 200/100 back to 150/150 really necessary? I tend to hear from casters that Ghosts are expensive, but gas isn't really a limiting factor for Bio is it? It's minerals.
David Kim said that the reason Ghost was changed to 200/100 from 150/150 (way back in WoL) was to make it more costly for Bio to get, while making it easier for Mech to get (since Mech is much more gas heavy and doesn't mind sinking minerals).
I still don't fully understand why the newer balance team reverted this. Their reasoning IIRC was that it makes more expensive, but does it really? I agree with David Kim's reasoning more. We see games where most resources are mined out, and mineral patches are emptied first with mass OC/MULE, while Refineries still have lots of gas.
Raven rework into being more of a early game / bio spellcaster also hurt Mech. I really hate how much the AA missile debuff specifically helps bio's weapons way more than Mech weapons. Now both spellcasters benefit Mech less for the cost compared to how much more they became useful to Bio ;( (Though thankfully with the new Cyclone, AA missile is significantly more useful!) I would be happy if Ghost cost was changed even to 175/125 and snipe slightly nerfed further (maybe 1 sec longer delay before firing? that way the damage is less burst and less potent in battles), that gas is precious.
Good points, and as an avowed scumbag mecher at a decent level you have more insight than most of us as to what the actual pitfalls and difficulties of the style are.
Although ultimately I just think Legacy’s pace and how the eco works is really the core inhibitor. Everything else is an additional limiting factor. For mech to be viable you have to be able to say, turtle play defensively and gradually build your defensive position in say, 2 base versus 4, or 3 versus 5, shore up and trade. You can’t really do that because you mine out quite quickly on your initial bases, which forces you to have to keep vaguely equal pace on expanding out, which in turn stretches traditional tank-based mech way too thin. You’re the expert in this field, am I wrong?
The cyclone buff, as I predicted hasn’t really addressed this. At least at the top level, perhaps it’s different lower down. If you’re having success with battle mech on the edges of Zerg territory and dominating trades, the play is to just keep building battlemech and go kill, or at least cripple them. It isn’t to switch over to tank mech and take your hand off the throat. And if you’re not trading well or making a dent, well you have the same problem, only the time where you get swarmed by a very angry Zerg with their eco in full flow is going to be that little bit sooner.
Happy to be corrected of course, but that’s kinda my read on the state of mech, as it were.
Serral is the Flash of SC2, deal with it. If he can make a unit that has been nerfed that many times still be good at the top level it's just a testament to how much of the GOAT he really is.
This isn't (or shouldn't be) about Serral, he earned his victory in a million different ways. But I think there is a legitimate discussion to be had about whether burrowed infestor is OP in ZvTs. I don't really like any unit that can single-handedly end the game with one click. The number of ZvTs I've seen where it's literally fungal, bane hit, then immediate GGs is kind of insane. It's honestly just kind of dumb to watch otherwise really good games instantly end with a single burrowed infestor fungal. The only other unit I can think of with a similar problem is the disruptor, which the balance team has been trying to deal with for years. At least in theory you can split, back away from, or snipe disruptor before they land game-ending damage. Imagine though if the disruptor could cloak, basically you'd have burrowed infestor lol!
You can blow up 40 lings with a widow mine shots or take out an entire mineral line of workers with banes and do a ton of damage, but still won't be GG. But the bigger point is that those things feel like they can be countered with good play (ling splits/drags and timely worker pulls). That game 2 with Maru building turrets and scanning everywhere, sniping 10+ infestor, and still taking fungal bane to the face a million times was almost comical. I guess you could argue that Terrans need to be better at scanning or building and rebuilding a million turrets to counter the burrowed infestor, but you gotta wonder at what point the cost of that insurance policy is too high for it to be a viable winning strategy. We're getting to the point where building a raven or two to follow the armies for detection is no longer a "guy in the chat" meme as the commentators tried to analyze what could even be done to counter this silly secret worm green poop tactic.
The bottom line is that there's really not another unit interaction in this game in which the game basically instantly ends without a super obvious mistake by the losing player. I want to be clear that this doesn't take anything away from Serral's dominant performance and he deserves every bit of credit for his amazing play. This is honestly just how I've felt in general watching ZvT for the last couple of years. The number of times I've been like "man, this is an awesome, strategic, tactical, back-and-forth game!" to then have a single fungal end the game...
On February 13 2024 22:29 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: If we're going to nerf Ghost, I would like to say that the auto attack or snipe should be nerfed, please do NOT nerf EMP. Nerfing EMP has the side effect of unnecessarily nerfing Mech, especially in TvP.
Please focus the nerfs or unit reworks in a way that target bio play firstmost, and mech last. Mech TvP especially does not deserve a single unnecessary nerf ever again.
I hate when changes are made that are mostly to address bio or standard play, but end up nerfing Mech, and there are easy ways to compensate for that without affecting bio or other MUs but unfortunately because no one left playing/watching cares enough about Mech, there's no one to vouch and implement it i guess...
On that note, I was just thinking again: Was the cost revert for Ghost from 200/100 back to 150/150 really necessary? I tend to hear from casters that Ghosts are expensive, but gas isn't really a limiting factor for Bio is it? It's minerals.
David Kim said that the reason Ghost was changed to 200/100 from 150/150 (way back in WoL) was to make it more costly for Bio to get, while making it easier for Mech to get (since Mech is much more gas heavy and doesn't mind sinking minerals).
I still don't fully understand why the newer balance team reverted this. Their reasoning IIRC was that it makes more expensive, but does it really? I agree with David Kim's reasoning more. We see games where most resources are mined out, and mineral patches are emptied first with mass OC/MULE, while Refineries still have lots of gas.
Raven rework into being more of a early game / bio spellcaster also hurt Mech. I really hate how much the AA missile debuff specifically helps bio's weapons way more than Mech weapons. Now both spellcasters benefit Mech less for the cost compared to how much more they became useful to Bio ;( (Though thankfully with the new Cyclone, AA missile is significantly more useful!) I would be happy if Ghost cost was changed even to 175/125 and snipe slightly nerfed further (maybe 1 sec longer delay before firing? that way the damage is less burst and less potent in battles), that gas is precious.
Good points, and as an avowed scumbag mecher at a decent level you have more insight than most of us as to what the actual pitfalls and difficulties of the style are.
Although ultimately I just think Legacy’s pace and how the eco works is really the core inhibitor. Everything else is an additional limiting factor. For mech to be viable you have to be able to say, [s]turtle[\s] play defensively and gradually build your defensive position in say, 2 base versus 4, or 3 versus 5, shore up and trade. You can’t really do that because you mine out quite quickly on your initial bases, which forces you to have to keep vaguely equal pace on expanding out, which in turn stretches traditional tank-based mech way too thin. You’re the expert in this field, am I wrong?
The cyclone buff, as I predicted hasn’t really addressed this. At least at the top level, perhaps it’s different lower down. If you’re having success with battle mech on the edges of Zerg territory and dominating trades, the play is to just keep building battlemech and go kill, or at least cripple them. It isn’t to switch over to tank mech and take your hand off the throat. And if you’re not trading well or making a dent, well you have the same problem, only the time where you get swarmed by a very angry Zerg with their eco in full flow is going to be that little bit sooner.
Happy to be corrected of course, but that’s kinda my read on the state of mech, as it were.
Haha you know the real reason why i like mech
But yes, i totally agree with your assessment. LotV has not been kind to traditional defensive mech play. The way the economy starts and scales means that economy will ramp up exponentially more than Mech can get its tech and production up, because teching is more linear (especially the time it takes to go from your reaper to your factory and starport and first tanks). This has created a much larger early window of vulnerability for Tank based mech than in HotS. When you are trying to hold your 3rd the Protoss can already be 5 Nexus if they're going mass gateway and just throw so many chargelots at you that your Hellbats which are supposed to hardcounter chargelots can't even hold against.
Mech TvP in HotS was actually perfectly viable, because the timings lined up such that if you open reactor hellion you are actually fully safe and can get 8-16 hellions to sit in front of the Protoss's natural and contain them on 2 base until they slowly get 1-2 Colossus to push out, and by then you have tanks defending your third. And if you hold your 3rd vs any kind of push they try, those hellions remain useful as they become hellbats and you have a strong timing where you can attack their 3rd with ~15-20 Hellbats, ~4-5 Tanks, 2 Medivacs, and any Raven/Banshee leftover from your opening. But now you can't do that because Protoss will be able to reach a mass of Blink stalkers early enough that you don't have enough tanks to take your third, let alone be able to have that early buildup of hellions to gain map control and scout and harass.
The new Cyclones thankfully have allowed "Mech" (as in Factory-based comps) to be more interactive and move out more and be less vulnerable early on, especially in TvZ and TvT, but it has only helped a little in TvP. I agree with your assessment with the Cyclone too, it's really too bad how many players saw all the issues with the unit and how much it failed to address, yet it still pushed through. Like you said, Cyclone is more of a tempo based unit so if you fail to outpace the opponent and start getting out swarmed, you have the same problem where tank based defensive play is still weak and realistically you're not going to climb back with that when behind. And if you are outpacing them with your Cyclones, then the way the unit is designed to snowball often incentivizes players to just build even more Cyclone.
There is thankfully one middleground where if your Cyclones in early and mid game do well but isn't enough to end the game, you slowly add in Tanks 1-2 at a time which is enough to support your Cyclones and keep scaling along with their increasing numbers of Roach/Ravager/Hydras or whatever they build. So in that scenario, which isn't too uncommon actually, Cyclone did manage to help cover Mech vulnerability early on and allow it to slowly add in tanks, and slowly slowly it does become more worth it to reproportion your supply to having more Tanks, Libs, Ghosts, and Thors than Cyclones, all of which are more of that traditional positional mech unit comp.
This does still apply a little to TvP, it just really sucks that the main goal of the Cyclone was to help Mech be viable vs TvP, and the main main issue there that LotV introduced is that it's too hard to get your 3rd safely vs blink stalkers, and if you can't get your 3rd quickly and safely then you are always behind from there on and can't get new bases fast enough. It's really really dumb that the Cyclone's new lock on is still specifically countered by Blink back micro, because even though lock-on has 0 cd it also has a shorter range so Blink still counters it lol. And the design team really didn't do anything to try to design a unit that specifically is strong vs Blink stalker early on and gets weaker later on so that you're incentivized to swap to more traditional tank based play. David Kim's torpedo Cyclone idea was much better at negating Blink as much as possible, where it was focused on having a very strong ground rapid fire attack (so Blink is harder to dodge projectiles and even if it does it's just like 4 damage you dodged, and you also don't cancel Lock On), though i know the unit was a bit dumb/busted in its own ways.
Ok i ranted too long, i just like talking about mech too much xD. I bow down to David Kim who looked out for my mech brethren and loathe the newer balance teams. I really respect game devs when they consider other less common playstyles when balancing the game and avoid unintentionally nerfing them via side effects
My 2 cents is please when the Ghost will inevitably be patched again in the future, is to keep in mind us Mech players too
On February 13 2024 22:29 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: If we're going to nerf Ghost, I would like to say that the auto attack or snipe should be nerfed, please do NOT nerf EMP. Nerfing EMP has the side effect of unnecessarily nerfing Mech, especially in TvP.
Please focus the nerfs or unit reworks in a way that target bio play firstmost, and mech last. Mech TvP especially does not deserve a single unnecessary nerf ever again.
I hate when changes are made that are mostly to address bio or standard play, but end up nerfing Mech, and there are easy ways to compensate for that without affecting bio or other MUs but unfortunately because no one left playing/watching cares enough about Mech, there's no one to vouch and implement it i guess...
On that note, I was just thinking again: Was the cost revert for Ghost from 200/100 back to 150/150 really necessary? I tend to hear from casters that Ghosts are expensive, but gas isn't really a limiting factor for Bio is it? It's minerals.
David Kim said that the reason Ghost was changed to 200/100 from 150/150 (way back in WoL) was to make it more costly for Bio to get, while making it easier for Mech to get (since Mech is much more gas heavy and doesn't mind sinking minerals).
I still don't fully understand why the newer balance team reverted this. Their reasoning IIRC was that it makes more expensive, but does it really? I agree with David Kim's reasoning more. We see games where most resources are mined out, and mineral patches are emptied first with mass OC/MULE, while Refineries still have lots of gas.
Raven rework into being more of a early game / bio spellcaster also hurt Mech. I really hate how much the AA missile debuff specifically helps bio's weapons way more than Mech weapons. Now both spellcasters benefit Mech less for the cost compared to how much more they became useful to Bio ;( (Though thankfully with the new Cyclone, AA missile is significantly more useful!) I would be happy if Ghost cost was changed even to 175/125 and snipe slightly nerfed further (maybe 1 sec longer delay before firing? that way the damage is less burst and less potent in battles), that gas is precious.
Good points, and as an avowed scumbag mecher at a decent level you have more insight than most of us as to what the actual pitfalls and difficulties of the style are.
Although ultimately I just think Legacy’s pace and how the eco works is really the core inhibitor. Everything else is an additional limiting factor. For mech to be viable you have to be able to say, [s]turtle[\s] play defensively and gradually build your defensive position in say, 2 base versus 4, or 3 versus 5, shore up and trade. You can’t really do that because you mine out quite quickly on your initial bases, which forces you to have to keep vaguely equal pace on expanding out, which in turn stretches traditional tank-based mech way too thin. You’re the expert in this field, am I wrong?
The cyclone buff, as I predicted hasn’t really addressed this. At least at the top level, perhaps it’s different lower down. If you’re having success with battle mech on the edges of Zerg territory and dominating trades, the play is to just keep building battlemech and go kill, or at least cripple them. It isn’t to switch over to tank mech and take your hand off the throat. And if you’re not trading well or making a dent, well you have the same problem, only the time where you get swarmed by a very angry Zerg with their eco in full flow is going to be that little bit sooner.
Happy to be corrected of course, but that’s kinda my read on the state of mech, as it were.
Haha you know the real reason why i like mech
But yes, i totally agree with your assessment. LotV has not been kind to traditional defensive mech play. The way the economy starts and scales means that economy will ramp up exponentially more than Mech can get its tech and production up, because teching is more linear (especially the time it takes to go from your reaper to your factory and starport and first tanks). This has created a much larger early window of vulnerability for Tank based mech than in HotS. When you are trying to hold your 3rd the Protoss can already be 5 Nexus if they're going mass gateway and just throw so many chargelots at you that your Hellbats which are supposed to hardcounter chargelots can't even hold against.
Mech TvP in HotS was actually perfectly viable, because the timings lined up such that if you open reactor hellion you are actually fully safe and can get 8-16 hellions to sit in front of the Protoss's natural and contain them on 2 base until they slowly get 1-2 Colossus to push out, and by then you have tanks defending your third. And if you hold your 3rd vs any kind of push they try, those hellions remain useful as they become hellbats and you have a strong timing where you can attack their 3rd with ~15-20 Hellbats, ~4-5 Tanks, 2 Medivacs, and any Raven/Banshee leftover from your opening. But now you can't do that because Protoss will be able to reach a mass of Blink stalkers early enough that you don't have enough tanks to take your third, let alone be able to have that early buildup of hellions to gain map control and scout and harass.
The new Cyclones thankfully have allowed "Mech" (as in Factory-based comps) to be more interactive and move out more and be less vulnerable early on, especially in TvZ and TvT, but it has only helped a little in TvP. I agree with your assessment with the Cyclone too, it's really too bad how many players saw all the issues with the unit and how much it failed to address, yet it still pushed through. Like you said, Cyclone is more of a tempo based unit so if you fail to outpace the opponent and start getting out swarmed, you have the same problem where tank based defensive play is still weak and realistically you're not going to climb back with that when behind. And if you are outpacing them with your Cyclones, then the way the unit is designed to snowball often incentivizes players to just build even more Cyclone.
There is thankfully one middleground where if your Cyclones in early and mid game do well but isn't enough to end the game, you slowly add in Tanks 1-2 at a time which is enough to support your Cyclones and keep scaling along with their increasing numbers of Roach/Ravager/Hydras or whatever they build. So in that scenario, which isn't too uncommon actually, Cyclone did manage to help cover Mech vulnerability early on and allow it to slowly add in tanks, and slowly slowly it does become more worth it to reproportion your supply to having more Tanks, Libs, Ghosts, and Thors than Cyclones, all of which are more of that traditional positional mech unit comp.
This does still apply a little to TvP, it just really sucks that the main goal of the Cyclone was to help Mech be viable vs TvP, and the main main issue there that LotV introduced is that it's too hard to get your 3rd safely vs blink stalkers, and if you can't get your 3rd quickly and safely then you are always behind from there on and can't get new bases fast enough. It's really really dumb that the Cyclone's new lock on is still specifically countered by Blink back micro, because even though lock-on has 0 cd it also has a shorter range so Blink still counters it lol. And the design team really didn't do anything to try to design a unit that specifically is strong vs Blink stalker early on and gets weaker later on so that you're incentivized to swap to more traditional tank based play. David Kim's torpedo Cyclone idea was much better at negating Blink as much as possible, where it was focused on having a very strong ground rapid fire attack (so Blink is harder to dodge projectiles and even if it does it's just like 4 damage you dodged, and you also don't cancel Lock On), though i know the unit was a bit dumb/busted in its own ways.
Ok i ranted too long, i just like talking about mech too much xD. I bow down to David Kim who looked out for my mech brethren and loathe the newer balance teams. I really respect game devs when they consider other less common playstyles when balancing the game and avoid unintentionally nerfing them via side effects
My 2 cents is please when the Ghost will inevitably be patched again in the future, is to keep in mind us Mech players too
Can’t disagree with much of that, although I do feel there’s a ‘we have to make mech viable’ thing at the dev’s end that just doesn’t exist for other factions.
I don’t disagree with trying to encourage divergent styles don’t get me wrong, but for some reason there’s this pursuit of making mech work that isn’t really extended elsewhere.
With Z and P it’s like, do they have the tools to be competitive? There’s less concern about what those tools are.
I’d argue that some pretty bad Zerg metas actually gave us gameplay that was very stylistically similar to mech, but as it’s Zerg doing it rather than Terran it needed nerfed, apparently.
Any time Protoss skytoss becomes strong, it tends to get nerfed too. It’s not perfectly analogous with mech as air circumvents terrain, and I’m not actually against it being nerfed, but it does play quite similarly too.
On February 13 2024 23:01 jpg06051992 wrote: Serral is the Flash of SC2, deal with it. If he can make a unit that has been nerfed that many times still be good at the top level it's just a testament to how much of the GOAT he really is.
Serral is so good he'll make anything work I don't think anything should be nerfed because Serral is a god unless the thing becomes so abusive that the game is dramatically out of balance like with Byun's OG reapers. But I guess I'd ask you this: can you think of a single other unit interaction that simply ends the game without a clear and obvious mistake on the loser's side? There are lots of examples of game-ending damage from bad fights, early game mineral line massacres, big disruptor, bane, widow mine shots, etc., but in almost all these examples there is a clear mistake (failure to pay attention to an incoming attack, failure to split, failure to pull back quickly enough, etc.). I guess you can argue that failure to build enough turrets around the map or failure to constantly scan your army is a "mistake", but at best this is a viable strategy only in late game with a super strong orbital count, and it's not even clear (to me at least) whether this kind of insurance policy is worth the cost.
I know not all and not even a majority of burrowed fungals immediately end the game in TvZ, but it is shocking how often it does, and how often it changes the the position for the Zerg from unwinnable to even, or even to winning. To me it's a structural issue of the match-up in which the Zerg can almost always re-max, and the Terran will take a long time to, if they can at all. I'm okay with that if you lose half your army to bad splits or an ill-advised drop, or because of smart backstabs by the opponent, etc. But losing all your ghosts because you aren't constantly scanning and building turrets around the map doesn't seem right to me.
On February 13 2024 23:01 jpg06051992 wrote: Serral is the Flash of SC2, deal with it. If he can make a unit that has been nerfed that many times still be good at the top level it's just a testament to how much of the GOAT he really is.
Serral is so good he'll make anything work I don't think anything should be nerfed because Serral is a god unless the thing becomes so abusive that the game is dramatically out of balance like with Byun's OG reapers. But I guess I'd ask you this: can you think of a single other unit interaction that simply ends the game without a clear and obvious mistake on the loser's side? There are lots of examples of game-ending damage from bad fights, early game mineral line massacres, big disruptor, bane, widow mine shots, etc., but in almost all these examples there is a clear mistake (failure to pay attention to an incoming attack, failure to split, failure to pull back quickly enough, etc.). I guess you can argue that failure to build enough turrets around the map or failure to constantly scan your army is a "mistake", but at best this is a viable strategy only in late game with a super strong orbital count, and it's not even clear (to me at least) whether this kind of insurance policy is worth the cost.
I know not all and not even a majority of burrowed fungals immediately end the game in TvZ, but it is shocking how often it does, and how often it changes the the position for the Zerg from unwinnable to even, or even to winning. To me it's a structural issue of the match-up in which the Zerg can almost always re-max, and the Terran will take a long time to, if they can at all. I'm okay with that if you lose half your army to bad splits or an ill-advised drop, or because of smart backstabs by the opponent, etc. But losing all your ghosts because you aren't constantly scanning and building turrets around the map doesn't seem right to me.
Any attempt to try and engage a turtling Terran in a TvZ game you can’t break them, only for ghosts to snipe you to death
Scan + obs death into your entire army being EMPed and subsequently pounced on as Toss
Getting your templars EMPed as Toss.
These are just as unforgiving as getting caught with a fungal, and it’s probably harder to set up that 1-2 punch effectively than it is to do some of those mentioned things.
On February 13 2024 22:46 Infested.rine wrote: Lol, am I the only one to think that the recent changes to the infestor were nerfs and not buffs? Like smaller range and less damage to have an infestor spawn with a fungal is a buff? I have never seen an infestor pop in a clutch moment to insta-fungal an army.
Either way, no one is able to sharkfestor like Serral. As everyone has said it looks extremely hard, and against clem in the last finals, if you get turrets, they are useless and zerg just can't trade effectively ever.
Sharkfestors are a much needed tool available for only top top performers.
No, you are not. Everyone with two braincells to rub together can see that it was an infestor nerf, especially in the late game. A pair of old infestors could blast a clumb of marines, and the damage was enough to chip away at Terran air units. The range nerf also makes them a lot more vulnerable to ghosts, HTs and tanks.
People are just very salty that Maru lost, and have figured out that if sharkfestors didn't exist, someone with Maru's control could have slowly pew-pew'd Serral away with no real counterplay.
So I don't buy this argument mainly because in PvT disruptor, high templar, and colossus can help prevent the Terran from EMP'ing the entire Protoss army, and those units aren't cloaked. In fact, in a lot of TvZ fights the infestors play the same role chillen in the back of the Zerg army to prevent the mass pew-pew, even when not burrowed. Plus snipe was nerfed because it was being abused (I was cool with that nerf).
To me a lot of this comes down to a burrow mechanic that is probably fine for every other unit, maybe not infestor. Alternatively, I think they could fix this by somehow nerfing chain fungal but continuing to allow sharkfestor play.
On February 13 2024 22:46 Infested.rine wrote: Lol, am I the only one to think that the recent changes to the infestor were nerfs and not buffs? Like smaller range and less damage to have an infestor spawn with a fungal is a buff? I have never seen an infestor pop in a clutch moment to insta-fungal an army.
Either way, no one is able to sharkfestor like Serral. As everyone has said it looks extremely hard, and against clem in the last finals, if you get turrets, they are useless and zerg just can't trade effectively ever.
Sharkfestors are a much needed tool available for only top top performers.
No, you are not. Everyone with two braincells to rub together can see that it was an infestor nerf, especially in the late game. A pair of old infestors could blast a clumb of marines, and the damage was enough to chip away at Terran air units. The range nerf also makes them a lot more vulnerable to ghosts, HTs and tanks.
People are just very salty that Maru lost, and have figured out that if sharkfestors didn't exist, someone with Maru's control could have slowly pew-pew'd Serral away with no real counterplay.
So I don't buy this argument mainly because in PvT disruptor, high templar, and colossus can help prevent the Terran from EMP'ing the entire Protoss army, and those units aren't cloaked. In fact, in a lot of TvZ fights the infestors play the same role chillen in the back of the Zerg army to prevent the mass pew-pew, even when not burrowed.
You are using PvT lategame as your example of other forms of counterplay to ghosts existing?
You also don't need mass pewpew. You need one broodlord here and there over the course of 40 minutes. I mean we saw how this played out last when Clem managed his anti-infestor play and beat Serral in the past. We've seen it in dozens of Maru lategames vs non-serral Zergs.
Personally, I love the burrowed infestors as a viewer, they lead to a lot of exciting moments. Even though Maru did eat a lot of fungals, there were also crucial instances of him sniping infestors right when Serral went in with the army. A lot more fun than abduct which only ever is interesting in those scrappy 120 vs 120 supply type of situations where the economies and armies have been worn down and the zerg has to land some good ones to win
On February 13 2024 23:01 jpg06051992 wrote: Serral is the Flash of SC2, deal with it. If he can make a unit that has been nerfed that many times still be good at the top level it's just a testament to how much of the GOAT he really is.
Serral is so good he'll make anything work I don't think anything should be nerfed because Serral is a god unless the thing becomes so abusive that the game is dramatically out of balance like with Byun's OG reapers. But I guess I'd ask you this: can you think of a single other unit interaction that simply ends the game without a clear and obvious mistake on the loser's side? There are lots of examples of game-ending damage from bad fights, early game mineral line massacres, big disruptor, bane, widow mine shots, etc., but in almost all these examples there is a clear mistake (failure to pay attention to an incoming attack, failure to split, failure to pull back quickly enough, etc.). I guess you can argue that failure to build enough turrets around the map or failure to constantly scan your army is a "mistake", but at best this is a viable strategy only in late game with a super strong orbital count, and it's not even clear (to me at least) whether this kind of insurance policy is worth the cost.
I know not all and not even a majority of burrowed fungals immediately end the game in TvZ, but it is shocking how often it does, and how often it changes the the position for the Zerg from unwinnable to even, or even to winning. To me it's a structural issue of the match-up in which the Zerg can almost always re-max, and the Terran will take a long time to, if they can at all. I'm okay with that if you lose half your army to bad splits or an ill-advised drop, or because of smart backstabs by the opponent, etc. But losing all your ghosts because you aren't constantly scanning and building turrets around the map doesn't seem right to me.
You are thinking this because:
1. You watch too many Serral games, he's is by far the best user of burrowed infestors. No other Zerg can consistently it do it like him.
2. I can't think of a single game on top of my head now where one good fungal instantly change the position of game from unwinnable for Zerg to instant Terran GG. It may have happened but it's very rare. Vast majority of time the burrowed infestor fungal play is just nail on the coffin rather than a instant game changer. Serral was usually already in a winning position with massive lead, and his Terran opponents were just hanging by a thin thread, then one last fungal hit is what breaks them. That's how it is 80-90% of the time, and why it gives an impression of "one fungal then instant GG", the reality is the game has already ended at that point.
3. You choose to forget so many other games where burrowed infestors got caught many times and got nothing done, or the fungal lands but there are not enough banelings to instantly charge in to take advantage of it, and Serral (or other Zerg) just lose the game because they have no answer to mass Ghosts in late game, even if they also "didn't make a clear and obvious mistake on the loser's side". Do you just think Terran should just automatically win if they don't make big mistakes? What if Zerg also don't make big mistakes? Why should literally every late game Zerg units to be weak to Ghosts?
3. Maru is actually notorious with playing TvZ where by all accounts he should be dead in the water due to early-mid game disadvantages, but he just refuse to tap out, he would trench up at home, put planetary and turrest everywhere, mass up Ghosts, mine out the map and drag the game out for another 20 mins, then still lose in the end. Some times he will pull a miracle and win, but he lost plenty games like this. Burrowed infestors just allows Zerg to have one high-risk, high-reward and high-skill way to deal with this kind of situations.
If you think Maru's unique ability to turtle and not die is part of fair game design, I don't see why Serral's burrowed infestor play is not. No other Terran and Zerg could play like them anyway.
On February 14 2024 00:58 WombaT wrote: Can’t disagree with much of that, although I do feel there’s a ‘we have to make mech viable’ thing at the dev’s end that just doesn’t exist for other factions.
I don’t disagree with trying to encourage divergent styles don’t get me wrong, but for some reason there’s this pursuit of making mech work that isn’t really extended elsewhere.
With Z and P it’s like, do they have the tools to be competitive? There’s less concern about what those tools are.
I’d argue that some pretty bad Zerg metas actually gave us gameplay that was very stylistically similar to mech, but as it’s Zerg doing it rather than Terran it needed nerfed, apparently.
Any time Protoss skytoss becomes strong, it tends to get nerfed too. It’s not perfectly analogous with mech as air circumvents terrain, and I’m not actually against it being nerfed, but it does play quite similarly too.
It's actually funny that Zerg can play a pretty mechy late game with mobile Spores, BLs, infestor/viper, etc. and play that attrition game. Though Protoss can do it a bit too with batteries, tempests, storm, disruptors, etc. I guess it's cool each race has a way to play a bit mech-y to a degree.
Imo at least traditionally, Terran is designed around being split into 3 production types: bio, mech, air. So there is a bit of inherent design where because the upgrades are targetted at each one specifically, it's most ideal to focus your army comp around 1 type, with other units being used as possible support.
The way i see Protoss is that it's split into 3 tech types: templar, robo, and stargate. And with zerg, they're the economy focused race but their units are split between ground and air, and split further into very specific buildings (hydra tech, muta tech, etc.).
I feel that the devs have actually put a lot of effort in successfully making Protoss able to open with or focus on any of the 3 tech choices in all 3 MUs, and pretty much every Zerg unit is usable vs each race. Of course not every choice is viable or standard at high level pro play, but if playing at GM or low level play you can def bring out anything with decent success for fun.
It's true that over time Terran has become more and more of a mixed unit composition race than being very heavily focused on just Bio production or just Mech production. There are lots of different bio mech compositions, and every stargate unit too can provide a lot of nice support. I guess this was actually kinda their goal as I remember David Kim mentioning around HotS that maybe it makes more sense to try to focus on "Terran" rather than sticking to the traditional BW "Bio and Mech" design. The Mech player in me got pretty sad that it sounded like they were giving up until that early LotV patch where based David Kim threw Mech players a huge bone and said let's bring back traditional Mech play and buff the Siege Tank xD
In terms of game design i like allowing as diverse of playstyles as possible, and for the ones that are less fun/exciting for most people I think it's OK to make them a bit weaker, so it's still a thing if someone really vibes with it, without it becoming too prevelant. So I personally also really loved seeing straight to skytoss strategies for Protoss (like, not simply opening Stargate as first tech just for an Oracle or a few phoenixes, but going full out Stargate tech). I think it's still in a pretty good spot though, cus pros still whip it out occasionally with success, and it would be weird if a race can jump straight to mass air units every game.
While its true that Burrowed Infestor is more skill-based than "luck", the idea of having a unit that can do minor splash damage and slow the entire army is not very fun especially against the high mobility army of Zerg. I dont mind if they double the DPS of the spell but cut the slow effect by 50% or so.
What happened in the game on Rahudset was simply that neither side can attack into the other side in a direct fight, and they must find some way to break each other. For Terran its setting up all the defensive structure and keep Zerg from mining more than half of the map, for Zerg its mining more than half of the map as much as they can while setting up ambush when the Terran army move out. Infestor is the best unit for that job, although Burrowed Lurker or Bane can do a similar job but less efficient.
And Serral didnt win before he hit the Fungal shot, he won AFTER he hit those Fungal shot, thats not to say he cant win in other way, but that was the best way for him to win and he execute it well enough.
On February 14 2024 01:22 CerebrateHector wrote: Or maybe, just maybe, get a Raven ???
Funny how toss and Zergs constantly have to bring detection everywhere because of widow mines and ghost. Yet terran think they are entitled to not do the same
In case terrans are wondering, yes protoss also has the bring observers constantly against Zerg’s infestor ( yes it can also do game ending damage to the toss) But do you see Protoss complaining about infestor?
On February 13 2024 23:01 jpg06051992 wrote: Serral is the Flash of SC2, deal with it. If he can make a unit that has been nerfed that many times still be good at the top level it's just a testament to how much of the GOAT he really is.
Serral is so good he'll make anything work I don't think anything should be nerfed because Serral is a god unless the thing becomes so abusive that the game is dramatically out of balance like with Byun's OG reapers. But I guess I'd ask you this: can you think of a single other unit interaction that simply ends the game without a clear and obvious mistake on the loser's side? There are lots of examples of game-ending damage from bad fights, early game mineral line massacres, big disruptor, bane, widow mine shots, etc., but in almost all these examples there is a clear mistake (failure to pay attention to an incoming attack, failure to split, failure to pull back quickly enough, etc.). I guess you can argue that failure to build enough turrets around the map or failure to constantly scan your army is a "mistake", but at best this is a viable strategy only in late game with a super strong orbital count, and it's not even clear (to me at least) whether this kind of insurance policy is worth the cost.
I know not all and not even a majority of burrowed fungals immediately end the game in TvZ, but it is shocking how often it does, and how often it changes the the position for the Zerg from unwinnable to even, or even to winning. To me it's a structural issue of the match-up in which the Zerg can almost always re-max, and the Terran will take a long time to, if they can at all. I'm okay with that if you lose half your army to bad splits or an ill-advised drop, or because of smart backstabs by the opponent, etc. But losing all your ghosts because you aren't constantly scanning and building turrets around the map doesn't seem right to me.
You are thinking this because:
1. You watch too many Serral games, he's is by far the best user of burrowed infestors. No other Zerg can consistently it do it like him.
2. I can't think of a single game on top of my head now where one good fungal instantly change the position of game from unwinnable for Zerg to instant Terran GG. It may have happened but it's very rare. Vast majority of time the burrowed infestor fungal play is just nail on the coffin rather than a instant game changer. Serral was usually already in a winning position with massive lead, and his Terran opponents were just hanging by a thin thread, then one last fungal hit is what breaks them. That's how it is 80-90% of the time, and why it gives an impression of "one fungal then instant GG", the reality is the game has already ended at that point.
3. You choose to forget so many other games where burrowed infestors got caught many times and got nothing done, or the fungal lands but there are not enough banelings to instantly charge in to take advantage of it, and Serral (or other Zerg) just lose the game because they have no answer to mass Ghosts in late game, even if they also "didn't make a clear and obvious mistake on the loser's side". Do you just think Terran should just automatically win if they don't make big mistakes? What if Zerg also don't make big mistakes? Why should literally every late game Zerg units to be weak to Ghosts?
3. Maru is actually notorious with playing TvZ where by all accounts he should be dead in the water due to early-mid game disadvantages, but he just refuse to tap out, he would trench up at home, put planetary and turrest everywhere, mass up Ghosts, mine out the map and drag the game out for another 20 mins, then still lose in the end. Some times he will pull a miracle and win, but he lost plenty games like this. Burrowed infestors just allows Zerg to have one high-risk, high-reward and high-skill way to deal with this kind of situations.
If you think Maru's unique ability to turtle and not die is part of fair game design, I don't see why Serral's burrowed infestor play is not. No other Terran and Zerg could play like them anyway.
1. I mostly watch GSL so I’m actually talking much more so about guys like Rogue, Dark, and Solar than Serral. As I said, I don’t think Serral’s play proves anything. Also said this doesn’t rise to the level of Byun’s reapers since I view this as a systemic issue not a player OP issue. It sounds like maybe you disagree given that you’re attributing this to Serral’s unique play. In which case I presume you feel the reapers should not have been nerfed as everyone understood that no one but Byun could play with reapers like that (it was silly to watch players like Maru try).
2. I also can’t think of a single game that’s ever gone from unwinnable Zerg position to instant Terran GG. Not sure where you found that strawman to argue with.
3. I literally don’t understand your argument here. Plenty of things get nothing done, and plenty of things can be costly, burrowed investors included. As I said, I’m not aware of another unit interaction that embodies the uniquely punishing swinginess of burrowed infestor fungal, and you don’t attempt to dispute that.
3.? So if this were truly a “high-risk, high reward” strat that was designed to exclusively punish turtling, you’d only see it in those scenarios and I’d be a total fan because I hate Maru’s boring ass turtling play. But it’s not. As game 2 showed you can get like 12 infestors sniped and it would be neither too risky nor too costly. A baneling bust or a ravager rush would be a much better example of a high risk, high reward strategy.
I didn’t talk about Maru and I said it’s not about Serral, and you’re going off on weird tangents about both. I described why I find this specific unit interaction problematic. It sounds like you disagree, which is fine, but honestly I have no clue why based on what you wrote.
On February 14 2024 01:22 CerebrateHector wrote: Or maybe, just maybe, get a Raven ???
Funny how toss and Zergs constantly have to bring detection everywhere because of widow mines and ghost. Yet terran think they are entitled to not do the same
In case terrans are wondering, yes protoss also has the bring observers constantly against Zerg’s infestor ( yes it can also do game ending damage to the toss) But do you see Protoss complaining about infestor?
I actually think this Raven point is a good one because I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask Terran to have to constantly scan their army and/or build turrets everywhere to not die to burrow infestor. But it may be reasonable to expect Terran to build a couple ravens. I *think* the reason it’s not is that when your ravens inevitably die, it probably means one or more of your medivacs died, and you can’t reactor out new medivacs while building a new raven without also disrupting tank production since you’ll need one of the factory tech labs unless somehow you’re also playing marauder tech. Not sure all this tech switching is viable versus Zerg remax.
On February 13 2024 22:46 Infested.rine wrote: Lol, am I the only one to think that the recent changes to the infestor were nerfs and not buffs? Like smaller range and less damage to have an infestor spawn with a fungal is a buff? I have never seen an infestor pop in a clutch moment to insta-fungal an army.
Either way, no one is able to sharkfestor like Serral. As everyone has said it looks extremely hard, and against clem in the last finals, if you get turrets, they are useless and zerg just can't trade effectively ever.
Sharkfestors are a much needed tool available for only top top performers.
No, you are not. Everyone with two braincells to rub together can see that it was an infestor nerf, especially in the late game. A pair of old infestors could blast a clumb of marines, and the damage was enough to chip away at Terran air units. The range nerf also makes them a lot more vulnerable to ghosts, HTs and tanks.
People are just very salty that Maru lost, and have figured out that if sharkfestors didn't exist, someone with Maru's control could have slowly pew-pew'd Serral away with no real counterplay.
So I don't buy this argument mainly because in PvT disruptor, high templar, and colossus can help prevent the Terran from EMP'ing the entire Protoss army, and those units aren't cloaked. In fact, in a lot of TvZ fights the infestors play the same role chillen in the back of the Zerg army to prevent the mass pew-pew, even when not burrowed.
You are using PvT lategame as your example of other forms of counterplay to ghosts existing?
You also don't need mass pewpew. You need one broodlord here and there over the course of 40 minutes. I mean we saw how this played out last when Clem managed his anti-infestor play and beat Serral in the past. We've seen it in dozens of Maru lategames vs non-serral Zergs.
No, you were making the claim that there would be no counterplay to pew-pew without sharkfestor. There would be and is in lots of scenarios is my point, including with non-burrowed infestor.
On February 14 2024 01:22 CerebrateHector wrote: Or maybe, just maybe, get a Raven ???
Funny how toss and Zergs constantly have to bring detection everywhere because of widow mines and ghost. Yet terran think they are entitled to not do the same
In case terrans are wondering, yes protoss also has the bring observers constantly against Zerg’s infestor ( yes it can also do game ending damage to the toss) But do you see Protoss complaining about infestor?
I actually think this Raven point is a good one because I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask Terran to have to constantly scan their army and/or build turrets everywhere to not die to burrow infestor. But it may be reasonable to expect Terran to build a couple ravens. I *think* the reason it’s not is that when your ravens inevitably die, it probably means one or more of your medivacs died, and you can’t reactor out new medivacs while building a new raven without also disrupting tank production since you’ll need one of the factory tech labs unless somehow you’re also playing marauder tech. Not sure all this tech switching is viable versus Zerg remax.
Just have an extra Starport with a tech lab. Worst case scenario you can swap it out, or alternatively you have 3x medivac production if you don’t need a raven for infestors.
I have seen some experimentation, and I get there’s less synergy than straight MMM(+M), it seems to me that Ravens would hugely pay off economically by letting you clear creep without burning scans so you can mule that much harder. Plus, in TvZ at least they’re pretty untouchable with a bit of babysitting until hydras are out. Plus you can do harassment with them. At the tip top level you’ll probably get more done with auto-turrets than non-range libs.
Hey, there must be a reason, maybe it’s just too awkward to fit in. Do it early and it’s delaying medivacs and your ability to pressure, too late and it’s too risky to have out on the same field as hydras and whatnot.
Something that drives me insane about the game, going back to the first point is people set up for optimal production for a predicted level of income. Which is fine, makes sense obviously to some degree.
But it leaves gaps for specific situations, this would be one. I feel the biggest is when Toss need both an obs for detection, and some kind of power unit from a robo, or a prism. But are frequently bottlenecked on one robo. You don’t have to constantly pump out units from double robo, but it helps to have the option for an emergency.
I mean players will happily gamble on expensive doom drops, build a million missile turrets, or sac 10-15 zealots on runbys that don’t do anything, what’s the extra cost of a single additional production building, even if it does turn out to be redundant?
On February 13 2024 23:01 jpg06051992 wrote: Serral is the Flash of SC2, deal with it. If he can make a unit that has been nerfed that many times still be good at the top level it's just a testament to how much of the GOAT he really is.
Serral is so good he'll make anything work I don't think anything should be nerfed because Serral is a god unless the thing becomes so abusive that the game is dramatically out of balance like with Byun's OG reapers. But I guess I'd ask you this: can you think of a single other unit interaction that simply ends the game without a clear and obvious mistake on the loser's side? There are lots of examples of game-ending damage from bad fights, early game mineral line massacres, big disruptor, bane, widow mine shots, etc., but in almost all these examples there is a clear mistake (failure to pay attention to an incoming attack, failure to split, failure to pull back quickly enough, etc.). I guess you can argue that failure to build enough turrets around the map or failure to constantly scan your army is a "mistake", but at best this is a viable strategy only in late game with a super strong orbital count, and it's not even clear (to me at least) whether this kind of insurance policy is worth the cost.
I know not all and not even a majority of burrowed fungals immediately end the game in TvZ, but it is shocking how often it does, and how often it changes the the position for the Zerg from unwinnable to even, or even to winning. To me it's a structural issue of the match-up in which the Zerg can almost always re-max, and the Terran will take a long time to, if they can at all. I'm okay with that if you lose half your army to bad splits or an ill-advised drop, or because of smart backstabs by the opponent, etc. But losing all your ghosts because you aren't constantly scanning and building turrets around the map doesn't seem right to me.
Any attempt to try and engage a turtling Terran in a TvZ game you can’t break them, only for ghosts to snipe you to death
Scan + obs death into your entire army being EMPed and subsequently pounced on as Toss
Getting your templars EMPed as Toss.
These are just as unforgiving as getting caught with a fungal, and it’s probably harder to set up that 1-2 punch effectively than it is to do some of those mentioned things.
I get that there are some Terran-favored maps that enable dumb turtle strats, but in general it's on the Terran to prevent the Zerg from mopping the map with creep and taking the extra bases, not the other way around. You can't turtle on 4 bases and win as Terran on most maps because while your trades are efficient they aren't *that* efficient. And you generally can't defend more than 4 bases without incredibly active play that pushes the creep back and denies the zerg the extra bases. In other words, in most cases turtle is not really a viable strategy because if you truly turtle, the creep is out of control, and the zerg is mining out your side of the map as you're attempting to turtle on the 4 bases you can viably defend.
I don't agree that ghost snipe is just as unforgiving as burow fungal simply because of Zerg remax, and especially post snipe nerf. I do agree on EMP versus Toss. Not so much the mana drain EMP effect, which is annoying but rarely game-ending, but the shield drain, which often feels like too much, especially against robo units that can't really be rebuilt effectively. I like the EMP radius reduction nerf and honestly I'd be okay simply not allowing shield reduction with EMP but that might be too dramatic of a change.
For sure you're right that it's harder to keep track of and manage sharkfestor rather than the normal play of having infestor come up from the back of your army and fungal, and yet this is beside the point because I think we know toss would love to have the option of HT shark around with the opponent's army and terran would love to have ghost shark around too, even if harder to manage.
On February 14 2024 01:22 CerebrateHector wrote: Or maybe, just maybe, get a Raven ???
Funny how toss and Zergs constantly have to bring detection everywhere because of widow mines and ghost. Yet terran think they are entitled to not do the same
In case terrans are wondering, yes protoss also has the bring observers constantly against Zerg’s infestor ( yes it can also do game ending damage to the toss) But do you see Protoss complaining about infestor?
I actually think this Raven point is a good one because I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask Terran to have to constantly scan their army and/or build turrets everywhere to not die to burrow infestor. But it may be reasonable to expect Terran to build a couple ravens. I *think* the reason it’s not is that when your ravens inevitably die, it probably means one or more of your medivacs died, and you can’t reactor out new medivacs while building a new raven without also disrupting tank production since you’ll need one of the factory tech labs unless somehow you’re also playing marauder tech. Not sure all this tech switching is viable versus Zerg remax.
Just have an extra Starport with a tech lab. Worst case scenario you can swap it out, or alternatively you have 3x medivac production if you don’t need a raven for infestors.
I have seen some experimentation, and I get there’s less synergy than straight MMM(+M), it seems to me that Ravens would hugely pay off economically by letting you clear creep without burning scans so you can mule that much harder. Plus, in TvZ at least they’re pretty untouchable with a bit of babysitting until hydras are out. Plus you can do harassment with them. At the tip top level you’ll probably get more done with auto-turrets than non-range libs.
Hey, there must be a reason, maybe it’s just too awkward to fit in. Do it early and it’s delaying medivacs and your ability to pressure, too late and it’s too risky to have out on the same field as hydras and whatnot.
Something that drives me insane about the game, going back to the first point is people set up for optimal production for a predicted level of income. Which is fine, makes sense obviously to some degree.
But it leaves gaps for specific situations, this would be one. I feel the biggest is when Toss need both an obs for detection, and some kind of power unit from a robo, or a prism. But are frequently bottlenecked on one robo. You don’t have to constantly pump out units from double robo, but it helps to have the option for an emergency.
I mean players will happily gamble on expensive doom drops, build a million missile turrets, or sac 10-15 zealots on runbys that don’t do anything, what’s the extra cost of a single additional production building, even if it does turn out to be redundant?
I think I'm persuaded by this. I wouldn't be in favor of further burrow infestor nerf until there was some demonstrated case that raven play is not a viable counter.
On February 14 2024 01:22 CerebrateHector wrote: Or maybe, just maybe, get a Raven ???
Funny how toss and Zergs constantly have to bring detection everywhere because of widow mines and ghost. Yet terran think they are entitled to not do the same
In case terrans are wondering, yes protoss also has the bring observers constantly against Zerg’s infestor ( yes it can also do game ending damage to the toss) But do you see Protoss complaining about infestor?
I actually think this Raven point is a good one because I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask Terran to have to constantly scan their army and/or build turrets everywhere to not die to burrow infestor. But it may be reasonable to expect Terran to build a couple ravens. I *think* the reason it’s not is that when your ravens inevitably die, it probably means one or more of your medivacs died, and you can’t reactor out new medivacs while building a new raven without also disrupting tank production since you’ll need one of the factory tech labs unless somehow you’re also playing marauder tech. Not sure all this tech switching is viable versus Zerg remax.
Just have an extra Starport with a tech lab. Worst case scenario you can swap it out, or alternatively you have 3x medivac production if you don’t need a raven for infestors.
I have seen some experimentation, and I get there’s less synergy than straight MMM(+M), it seems to me that Ravens would hugely pay off economically by letting you clear creep without burning scans so you can mule that much harder. Plus, in TvZ at least they’re pretty untouchable with a bit of babysitting until hydras are out. Plus you can do harassment with them. At the tip top level you’ll probably get more done with auto-turrets than non-range libs.
Hey, there must be a reason, maybe it’s just too awkward to fit in. Do it early and it’s delaying medivacs and your ability to pressure, too late and it’s too risky to have out on the same field as hydras and whatnot.
Something that drives me insane about the game, going back to the first point is people set up for optimal production for a predicted level of income. Which is fine, makes sense obviously to some degree.
But it leaves gaps for specific situations, this would be one. I feel the biggest is when Toss need both an obs for detection, and some kind of power unit from a robo, or a prism. But are frequently bottlenecked on one robo. You don’t have to constantly pump out units from double robo, but it helps to have the option for an emergency.
I mean players will happily gamble on expensive doom drops, build a million missile turrets, or sac 10-15 zealots on runbys that don’t do anything, what’s the extra cost of a single additional production building, even if it does turn out to be redundant?
I think I'm persuaded by this. I wouldn't be in favor of further burrow infestor nerf until there was some demonstrated case that raven play is not a viable counter.
I honestly think the main impediment is just how difficult it is to do, and we’ll rarely see it be as effective as Serral showed versus Maru
But, failing that I do wanna give it some time, see what the Terran lads come up with. And it may push the meta forwards in a good direction, necessity being the mother of invention and all that. I think the Raven is sorely underutilised and has a lot of potential utility, maybe people getting them as counter-play may see further things unlocked.
Hell if memory serves ghosts were initially really only made in TvZ for their anti-casting role, until people started to realise their ability to cloak, their relative tankiness and especially snipe made them a great option in a combat capacity as well.
I mean I thought Toss was out of ideas and shit out of luck in PvZ and the madman herO just decided to build oracles, stalkers and expand at the same pace, if not faster than the Zergs he was facing.
The collective have certainly mapped out a lot of the game, but there’s still discoveries to be made even now, which is pretty cool to think of
Ghosts counter Hydras, Lurkers, Ultras, Brood Lords, Vipers, Corrupters, and unborrowed Infestors. Lings and banes are not particularly strong against them. Even the unit that is able to detect cloaked ghosts is often easily sniped by them.
Then someone uses a difficult to execute strategy to partially counter them and the thought is that strategy should be nerfed. Great terran logic.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
Become meta? It's literally the only way Zergs have been trading efficiently enough to win against Terran in late-game since the patch (assuming they enter on somewhat even footing). What you mean is--Serral beat Maru and used it to win one game where the map was mined out, so must needs nerfz.
The fact that a write-up has been conspicuously absent both years Serral won Katowice says it all. It'd be like ESPN not acknowledging that the Chiefs won the Super Bowl. You can argue that we're not entitled to an article (I guess?), but it's pretty clear why there isn't one. Incredibly embarrassing from this site, honestly, considering that Serral is a transcendent player that's driven so much excitement for this game. And by all accounts, a super nice guy that's always engaged with fans and did so again after his victory.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
All those scans cost Way Too Much Money. Next they're going to want terran to use actual workers to mine out bases in a regular time frame like the other two races. Can you imagine?
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Dark. But even if you disagree, you're effectively arguing that reapers should be reverted (everyone acknowledged Byun was literally the single human who could use reapers in the masterful way he did). So think about whether you're comfortable with that.
On ghost counters, I don't get this argument. Ghosts were counterable before their recent nerf with back-of-army infestor pull-up fungals, broods, and ling-bane-lurker. We don't need to speculate about this, we can just look at all the titles Serral, Reynor, Dark, Rogue, Solar, etc. won against late game ghost play. They even won against the ridiculous mass ghost strats that got popular in the last few years. I support the ghost nerfs, but ghosts were countable pre-nerf with the above-described tactics, and that's definitely still the case now post-nerf without needing to have a cloaked spellcaster that can create game-ending damage basically embedded with your opponent's army.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Are you seriously gonna tell me players like Reynor, Dark , Solar etc are unable to do what Serral did with infestors? Serral is leading the way to what is possible because he is the best Zerg right now. All Serral is doing is opening their eyes to what is possible and opening our eyes to what is obviously way to strong.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Dark. But even if you disagree, you're effectively arguing that reapers should be reverted (everyone acknowledged Byun was literally the single human who could use reapers in the masterful way he did). So think about whether you're comfortable with that.
On ghost counters, I don't get this argument. Ghosts were counterable before their recent nerf with back-of-army infestor pull-up fungals, broods, and ling-bane-lurker. We don't need to speculate about this, we can just look at all the titles Serral, Reynor, Dark, Rogue, Solar, etc. won against late game ghost play. They even won against the ridiculous mass ghost strats that got popular in the last few years. I support the ghost nerfs, but ghosts were countable pre-nerf with the above-described tactics, and that's definitely still the case now post-nerf without needing to have a cloaked spellcaster that can create game-ending damage basically embedded with your opponent's army.
You're talking about different metas, different map pools, different patches where banelings had more hp and broodlords traded differently, fungal had 10 range and upgraded lurkers were faster, so the interactions aren't the same as they are now. Games on this map pool in ZvT tend to go longer due to the size/configuration.
In this patch, if you get behind as Zerg or enter on even-footing against Clem/Maru once they hit the mass ghost/lib stage, how exactly do you trade effectively without landing fungals? How many times have you seen Dark get ground to dust against Maru in the late game? Clem beat Serral 3-1 at Atlanta in large part because Serral couldn't find any openings with his infestors and had to head-butt repeatedly into entrenched positions. How many insane fungals did Serral land against Maru in g2? And he still barely scraped to victory in a map that was completely mined out. Finally, I repeat--that was ONE game.
My primary point--if Dark had won in the exact same circumstances (however unlikely) against Maru, this topic would not exist.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Are you seriously gonna tell me players like Reynor, Dark , Solar etc are unable to do what Serral did with infestors? Serral is leading the way to what is possible because he is the best Zerg right now. All Serral is doing is opening their eyes to what is possible and opening our eyes to what is obviously way to strong.
Pretty sure every one of them didn't have any of their eyes opened; however, it's not Serral's fault they can't reach the same game state where they can even attempt to replicate it.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Dark. But even if you disagree, you're effectively arguing that reapers should be reverted (everyone acknowledged Byun was literally the single human who could use reapers in the masterful way he did). So think about whether you're comfortable with that.
On ghost counters, I don't get this argument. Ghosts were counterable before their recent nerf with back-of-army infestor pull-up fungals, broods, and ling-bane-lurker. We don't need to speculate about this, we can just look at all the titles Serral, Reynor, Dark, Rogue, Solar, etc. won against late game ghost play. They even won against the ridiculous mass ghost strats that got popular in the last few years. I support the ghost nerfs, but ghosts were countable pre-nerf with the above-described tactics, and that's definitely still the case now post-nerf without needing to have a cloaked spellcaster that can create game-ending damage basically embedded with your opponent's army.
I don’t think it’s that relevant how few people can execute a strat, tactic or technique, the pertinent factors for me are: 1. Is it counterable? And is the counterplay at least reasonably equivalent to execute compared to the opponent’s effort put in employing it? 2. Is it the kind of unit interaction that you want to see? (Extremely, extremely subjective)
Byun’s reapers were during my one real hiatus from following the game, and I’m sure it was pretty hype at the time, and subsequently watching it it’s a godlike feat of micro.
But, on the flipside once the novelty of observing such fantastic control, if your counter in many instances is ‘hope Byun messes up his control’, you don’t really have that effective counterplay in your locker. Plus it’s kinda fundamentally silly to me to have a scout/skirmish unit just be massed and snowball provided sufficient control is there.
For me with this Infestor play it’s also hard to execute, but primarily because it’s one of many other things you’re trying to manage. There may yet be effective counterplay to be discovered, and fundamentally I quite like the play, where Zergs have been pushed to work out how to jump on Bio/Ghost balls without being kited to death and trading horribly. Which they’ve found, now the ball has been passed to Terran to counter this tactic.
If over time it starts to be very common and oppressive and Terrans just cant figure consistent counters, as I’ve said before I’m not against some minor tweaks, perhaps to visibility, perhaps Infestors are only visually invisible if they’re stationary, perhaps a very slight delay on cast post-burrow. There’s plenty there as a suitable candidate.
It would be something of a shame though if a pretty nifty tactical innovation got nuked before that process played out.
I’m not a betting man but I’m definitely one for predictions! I think we’ll see some continued success from the Serrals of this world, but Terrans will be more wise to it. Even with those top guys you’ll probably see some games where through improved star sense or blind luck, 15/20 Infestors get spotted and wiped before they can spring a good trap. And probably a whole load of lesser Zergs not quite getting the splitting/army movement and syncing down to make much use of it.
And ultimately it’s less of a ZvT strat so much as an anti-Maru (and Clem to a slightly lesser degree ) innovation anyway. Other players aren’t consistently able to even get to the split-map/borderline split phase in a good position, nor execute that defensive attritional style to the requisite level. I’m slightly exaggerating but it’s almost like nerfing one dude for something he only needs to get out of the locker to beat 2 other dudes with
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Are you seriously gonna tell me players like Reynor, Dark , Solar etc are unable to do what Serral did with infestors? Serral is leading the way to what is possible because he is the best Zerg right now. All Serral is doing is opening their eyes to what is possible and opening our eyes to what is obviously way to strong.
Reynor on song, versus a Maru or a Clem who’s playing well is IMO the one who could replicate it in its totality.
Dark’s spellcaster control is godlike, he’s one of the all-time greats but he just can’t keep up with Maru if it goes lategame, demonstrably in the last couple of years. Ninja InfestorsTM are only really that deadly if you can do a 1-2 punch with banes, and he frequently doesn’t even play ling/bane to begin with. He usually cuts a bit of eco, often goes roach/ravager and tries to cripple his opponents a bit earlier. Which works against most but against the Marus of the world what usually happens is he doesn’t manage it, and starts to bleed out. Sometimes he doesn’t even have the eco advantage where he can win with inefficient trades.
Solar’s an excellent player, he’s just not quite a Serral. While he could employ some Ninja Infestors, can he keep up with everything else? Him versus Maru is one of the more one-sided rivalries in SC2 history and while my recollection may be flawed, almost every game in my mind’s eye is Maru just breaking him before even getting to that really late game phase.
I mean obviously a ton of players could shark some Infestors around and employ the tactic, but can they make it even a relevant factor versus a Maru/Clem on song? Keep up trying to do other offensive moves, not trade too badly and keep up their macro/creepsread and defend against harsssment and pokes?
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Are you seriously gonna tell me players like Reynor, Dark , Solar etc are unable to do what Serral did with infestors? Serral is leading the way to what is possible because he is the best Zerg right now. All Serral is doing is opening their eyes to what is possible and opening our eyes to what is obviously way to strong.
Reynor on song, versus a Maru or a Clem who’s playing well is IMO the one who could replicate it in its totality.
Dark’s spellcaster control is godlike, he’s one of the all-time greats but he just can’t keep up with Maru if it goes lategame, demonstrably in the last couple of years. Ninja InfestorsTM are only really that deadly if you can do a 1-2 punch with banes, and he frequently doesn’t even play ling/bane to begin with. He usually cuts a bit of eco, often goes roach/ravager and tries to cripple his opponents a bit earlier. Which works against most but against the Marus of the world what usually happens is he doesn’t manage it, and starts to bleed out. Sometimes he doesn’t even have the eco advantage where he can win with inefficient trades.
Solar’s an excellent player, he’s just not quite a Serral. While he could employ some Ninja Infestors, can he keep up with everything else? Him versus Maru is one of the more one-sided rivalries in SC2 history and while my recollection may be flawed, almost every game in my mind’s eye is Maru just breaking him before even getting to that really late game phase.
I mean obviously a ton of players could shark some Infestors around and employ the tactic, but can they make it even a relevant factor versus a Maru/Clem on song? Keep up trying to do other offensive moves, not trade too badly and keep up their macro/creepsread and defend against harsssment and pokes?
Gratz to 20k posts They are not Ninja Infestors! Stop introducing new words while Sharkfestor is already established I even had the Shark sound (is it from the great white? not sure but you know what I mean. Dum dum, dum dum, dum dum) in my head watching these games
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Are you seriously gonna tell me players like Reynor, Dark , Solar etc are unable to do what Serral did with infestors? Serral is leading the way to what is possible because he is the best Zerg right now. All Serral is doing is opening their eyes to what is possible and opening our eyes to what is obviously way to strong.
I'm serious in telling you nobody can do what Serral did in that game. Kind of the reason he is the best and he won
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Are you seriously gonna tell me players like Reynor, Dark , Solar etc are unable to do what Serral did with infestors? Serral is leading the way to what is possible because he is the best Zerg right now. All Serral is doing is opening their eyes to what is possible and opening our eyes to what is obviously way to strong.
Reynor on song, versus a Maru or a Clem who’s playing well is IMO the one who could replicate it in its totality.
Dark’s spellcaster control is godlike, he’s one of the all-time greats but he just can’t keep up with Maru if it goes lategame, demonstrably in the last couple of years. Ninja InfestorsTM are only really that deadly if you can do a 1-2 punch with banes, and he frequently doesn’t even play ling/bane to begin with. He usually cuts a bit of eco, often goes roach/ravager and tries to cripple his opponents a bit earlier. Which works against most but against the Marus of the world what usually happens is he doesn’t manage it, and starts to bleed out. Sometimes he doesn’t even have the eco advantage where he can win with inefficient trades.
Solar’s an excellent player, he’s just not quite a Serral. While he could employ some Ninja Infestors, can he keep up with everything else? Him versus Maru is one of the more one-sided rivalries in SC2 history and while my recollection may be flawed, almost every game in my mind’s eye is Maru just breaking him before even getting to that really late game phase.
I mean obviously a ton of players could shark some Infestors around and employ the tactic, but can they make it even a relevant factor versus a Maru/Clem on song? Keep up trying to do other offensive moves, not trade too badly and keep up their macro/creepsread and defend against harsssment and pokes?
Gratz to 20k posts They are not Ninja Infestors! Stop introducing new words while Sharkfestor is already established I even had the Shark sound (is it from the great white? not sure but you know what I mean. Dum dum, dum dum, dum dum) in my head watching these games
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Are you seriously gonna tell me players like Reynor, Dark , Solar etc are unable to do what Serral did with infestors? Serral is leading the way to what is possible because he is the best Zerg right now. All Serral is doing is opening their eyes to what is possible and opening our eyes to what is obviously way to strong.
I'm serious in telling you nobody can do what Serral did in that game. Kind of the reason he is the best and he won
Merci beaucoup! I mean if you can’t spend your 20k post trying to ninja in a clearly inferior bit of slang what can you use it for? Also may have ninjas on the brain as the Turtles are currently in Fortnite and kiddo is rather enjoying playing that with me.
I feel the perfect sound effect combo is the Jaws theme while they’re ninjaing sharking about, with the Metal Gear alert sound when it pops up and fungals.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Dark. But even if you disagree, you're effectively arguing that reapers should be reverted (everyone acknowledged Byun was literally the single human who could use reapers in the masterful way he did). So think about whether you're comfortable with that.
On ghost counters, I don't get this argument. Ghosts were counterable before their recent nerf with back-of-army infestor pull-up fungals, broods, and ling-bane-lurker. We don't need to speculate about this, we can just look at all the titles Serral, Reynor, Dark, Rogue, Solar, etc. won against late game ghost play. They even won against the ridiculous mass ghost strats that got popular in the last few years. I support the ghost nerfs, but ghosts were countable pre-nerf with the above-described tactics, and that's definitely still the case now post-nerf without needing to have a cloaked spellcaster that can create game-ending damage basically embedded with your opponent's army.
You're talking about different metas, different map pools, different patches where banelings had more hp and broodlords traded differently, fungal had 10 range and upgraded lurkers were faster, so the interactions aren't the same as they are now. Games on this map pool in ZvT tend to go longer due to the size/configuration.
In this patch, if you get behind as Zerg or enter on even-footing against Clem/Maru once they hit the mass ghost/lib stage, how exactly do you trade effectively without landing fungals? How many times have you seen Dark get ground to dust against Maru in the late game? Clem beat Serral 3-1 at Atlanta in large part because Serral couldn't find any openings with his infestors and had to head-butt repeatedly into entrenched positions. How many insane fungals did Serral land against Maru in g2? And he still barely scraped to victory in a map that was completely mined out. Finally, I repeat--that was ONE game.
My primary point--if Dark had won in the exact same circumstances (however unlikely) against Maru, this topic would not exist.
It’s hard to take this analysis seriously when the original claim is about ghosts being uncounterable, and you don’t even mention the ghost nerfs.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Are you seriously gonna tell me players like Reynor, Dark , Solar etc are unable to do what Serral did with infestors? Serral is leading the way to what is possible because he is the best Zerg right now. All Serral is doing is opening their eyes to what is possible and opening our eyes to what is obviously way to strong.
Reynor on song, versus a Maru or a Clem who’s playing well is IMO the one who could replicate it in its totality.
Dark’s spellcaster control is godlike, he’s one of the all-time greats but he just can’t keep up with Maru if it goes lategame, demonstrably in the last couple of years. Ninja InfestorsTM are only really that deadly if you can do a 1-2 punch with banes, and he frequently doesn’t even play ling/bane to begin with. He usually cuts a bit of eco, often goes roach/ravager and tries to cripple his opponents a bit earlier. Which works against most but against the Marus of the world what usually happens is he doesn’t manage it, and starts to bleed out. Sometimes he doesn’t even have the eco advantage where he can win with inefficient trades.
Solar’s an excellent player, he’s just not quite a Serral. While he could employ some Ninja Infestors, can he keep up with everything else? Him versus Maru is one of the more one-sided rivalries in SC2 history and while my recollection may be flawed, almost every game in my mind’s eye is Maru just breaking him before even getting to that really late game phase.
I mean obviously a ton of players could shark some Infestors around and employ the tactic, but can they make it even a relevant factor versus a Maru/Clem on song? Keep up trying to do other offensive moves, not trade too badly and keep up their macro/creepsread and defend against harsssment and pokes?
Dark’s infestor control is legendary to the point where he’s been meme’ing on threads like this by sharkfestoring neural to emp the Terran’s ghosts and generally destroying entire armies (whether T or P) for a couple years now. But like I said, even if you disagree and think Serral is in a class of his own with sharkfestor usage, you’re basically arguing to revert reapers so Byun can abuse them again.
I honestly don’t think people in this thread have really thought through the logic of what they are saying. One the one hand, apparently ghosts are not counterable without Serral’s sharkfestor usage, ignoring all the ways in which non-Serral Zergs have countered the new heavily nerfed ghosts. On the other hand, apparently only Serral has the tactical and mechanical prowess to use sharkfestor in this highly abusive manner, which is okay in way that Byun’s reapers were not because…?
Once you acknowledge the cognitive dissonance, there’s a legitimate convo to be had here that actually gets into the weeds on how these unit interactions work and whether there’s a more stable and interesting ZvT meta that doesn’t require lategame to devolve into a hide-and-seek mini game with sharkfestors.
Just make Sensor Towers show a red indicator on the minimap also for burrowed/cloaked units, this way Terran needs to invest in a forward-positioned Sensor Tower and defend it, but it still would allow for some more defensive positional play as you at least are made aware of the threat of such a unit in the tower radius, but would still require you to actually detect them in order to attack, thus eliminating the element of luck/trial & error, so allowing for a more efficient spending of scans/opt for other means of detection.
I'd call that a great compensation for trash Raven (compared to the good old days of HSM and PDD) and the stationary no-skill mode for Observers and Overseers!
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Are you seriously gonna tell me players like Reynor, Dark , Solar etc are unable to do what Serral did with infestors? Serral is leading the way to what is possible because he is the best Zerg right now. All Serral is doing is opening their eyes to what is possible and opening our eyes to what is obviously way to strong.
Reynor on song, versus a Maru or a Clem who’s playing well is IMO the one who could replicate it in its totality.
Dark’s spellcaster control is godlike, he’s one of the all-time greats but he just can’t keep up with Maru if it goes lategame, demonstrably in the last couple of years. Ninja InfestorsTM are only really that deadly if you can do a 1-2 punch with banes, and he frequently doesn’t even play ling/bane to begin with. He usually cuts a bit of eco, often goes roach/ravager and tries to cripple his opponents a bit earlier. Which works against most but against the Marus of the world what usually happens is he doesn’t manage it, and starts to bleed out. Sometimes he doesn’t even have the eco advantage where he can win with inefficient trades.
Solar’s an excellent player, he’s just not quite a Serral. While he could employ some Ninja Infestors, can he keep up with everything else? Him versus Maru is one of the more one-sided rivalries in SC2 history and while my recollection may be flawed, almost every game in my mind’s eye is Maru just breaking him before even getting to that really late game phase.
I mean obviously a ton of players could shark some Infestors around and employ the tactic, but can they make it even a relevant factor versus a Maru/Clem on song? Keep up trying to do other offensive moves, not trade too badly and keep up their macro/creepsread and defend against harsssment and pokes?
Dark’s infestor control is legendary to the point where he’s been meme’ing on threads like this by sharkfestoring neural to emp the Terran’s ghosts and generally destroying entire armies (whether T or P) for a couple years now. But like I said, even if you disagree and think Serral is in a class of his own with sharkfestor usage, you’re basically arguing to revert reapers so Byun can abuse them again.
I honestly don’t think people in this thread have really thought through the logic of what they are saying. One the one hand, apparently ghosts are not counterable without Serral’s sharkfestor usage, ignoring all the ways in which non-Serral Zergs have countered the new heavily nerfed ghosts. On the other hand, apparently only Serral has the tactical and mechanical prowess to use sharkfestor in this highly abusive manner, which is okay in way that Byun’s reapers were not because…?
Once you acknowledge the cognitive dissonance, there’s a legitimate convo to be had here that actually gets into the weeds on how these unit interactions work and whether there’s a more stable and interesting ZvT meta that doesn’t require lategame to devolve into a hide-and-seek mini game with sharkfestors.
There’s nothing contradictory in anything I said, I thought I was pretty clear with my breakdown.
Ninja Infestors sharkfestors are mere a piece of a lategame puzzle that basically 100% require you to enter lategame playing a certain style, and avoiding too much damage economically so you’re at the very least even, although ideally ahead. The positioning and army movement isn’t trivial, but the real difficulty is just being in the position versus a Maru that it’s even a worthwhile move doing
And which was kept at least somewhat in the pocket for Katowice, where it had great success sure but its early doors.
Byun’s reapers was like build one unit, micro, profit. Like, huge props to Byun’s skill here but if the counterplay is ‘hope Byun messes up his micro’ and just the innate silliness of massing reapers actually being viable, it was a fair nerf.
When Parting’s ‘Soul Train’ basically never failed, it was a little of the same to me, except there were no obvious nerfs that wouldn’t cripple Protoss at the time. Either he got blind-countered, or if he executed to his level he just won. I’m sure a game exists where someone actually held it through some stellar control or some ingenious move, but that was broadly the pattern.
I don’t think sharkfestors are, as yet really comparable. There’s plenty of theoretical counterplay to be explored.
Ghosts weren’t unbeatable either, although they are hard to beat! But I think the last few tweaks but them in a more reasonable shape for the matchup. If sharkfestors start dominating the meta, then likewise tone them down a bit.
I think all but the most crazily biased Serral fans would observe that Serral was just straight up dead in the Katowice finals game 2 if sharkfestors weren’t a thing, despite playing very well.
It’s just rare you get two players of their respective levels, both playing super well and it stretching that long with neither breaking. And you may have a double dissatisfactory scenario where even a player as good as Serral can’t break a player of Maru’s calibre when he’s really set up without [s]ninja[/]sharkfestors in that super late game split map scenario, but even a player of Maru’s calibre can’t effectively counter sharkninjafestors when wielder by a Serral.
Neither of which I find particularly great as scenarios go, but I am reserving judgement to see what people come up with.
On February 15 2024 22:56 Creager wrote: Just make Sensor Towers show a red indicator on the minimap also for burrowed/cloaked units, this way Terran needs to invest in a forward-positioned Sensor Tower and defend it, but it still would allow for some more defensive positional play as you at least are made aware of the threat of such a unit in the tower radius, but would still require you to actually detect them in order to attack, thus eliminating the element of luck/trial & error, so allowing for a more efficient spending of scans/opt for other means of detection.
I'd call that a great compensation for trash Raven (compared to the good old days of HSM and PDD) and the stationary no-skill mode for Observers and Overseers!
It’s also a great way to make an offensive spotting observer pretty close to useless against all but the least observant Terrans. And lategame DTs about as useful as a lace condom.
On February 15 2024 22:56 Creager wrote: Just make Sensor Towers show a red indicator on the minimap also for burrowed/cloaked units, this way Terran needs to invest in a forward-positioned Sensor Tower and defend it, but it still would allow for some more defensive positional play as you at least are made aware of the threat of such a unit in the tower radius, but would still require you to actually detect them in order to attack, thus eliminating the element of luck/trial & error, so allowing for a more efficient spending of scans/opt for other means of detection.
I'd call that a great compensation for trash Raven (compared to the good old days of HSM and PDD) and the stationary no-skill mode for Observers and Overseers!
It’s also a great way to make an offensive spotting observer pretty close to useless against all but the least observant Terrans. And lategame DTs about as useful as a lace condom.
I mean that's the point, after all, don't spoil all the fun for lazy mech Terrans like me, would you? Nobody understands how oppressive burrowed Zerglings at your 3rd/4th are, just attaching a cloaked-forever Obs to an army and never think about that again is also kinda luxurious, don't you think? And DTs are just disgusting Protoss BS all the way.
There have been always possibility to balance all things out - real or imaginary IMBAs:
Just arrange so that players of a match up are obliged to play both races of that match up, and it is purely on luck who starts with race X or Y (in longer run an impact of that luck factor evens out statistically). Players would be by default forced to play every race in every possible combination, including all mirror matches.
It would be about overall SC2 skill then, and impact of possible race imbalances would be minimized naturally. Everyone would play more or less "off-race" all the time. Obvious solution...
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Dark. But even if you disagree, you're effectively arguing that reapers should be reverted (everyone acknowledged Byun was literally the single human who could use reapers in the masterful way he did). So think about whether you're comfortable with that.
On ghost counters, I don't get this argument. Ghosts were counterable before their recent nerf with back-of-army infestor pull-up fungals, broods, and ling-bane-lurker. We don't need to speculate about this, we can just look at all the titles Serral, Reynor, Dark, Rogue, Solar, etc. won against late game ghost play. They even won against the ridiculous mass ghost strats that got popular in the last few years. I support the ghost nerfs, but ghosts were countable pre-nerf with the above-described tactics, and that's definitely still the case now post-nerf without needing to have a cloaked spellcaster that can create game-ending damage basically embedded with your opponent's army.
I don’t think it’s that relevant how few people can execute a strat, tactic or technique, the pertinent factors for me are: 1. Is it counterable? And is the counterplay at least reasonably equivalent to execute compared to the opponent’s effort put in employing it? 2. Is it the kind of unit interaction that you want to see? (Extremely, extremely subjective)
Byun’s reapers were during my one real hiatus from following the game, and I’m sure it was pretty hype at the time, and subsequently watching it it’s a godlike feat of micro.
But, on the flipside once the novelty of observing such fantastic control, if your counter in many instances is ‘hope Byun messes up his control’, you don’t really have that effective counterplay in your locker. Plus it’s kinda fundamentally silly to me to have a scout/skirmish unit just be massed and snowball provided sufficient control is there.
For me with this Infestor play it’s also hard to execute, but primarily because it’s one of many other things you’re trying to manage. There may yet be effective counterplay to be discovered, and fundamentally I quite like the play, where Zergs have been pushed to work out how to jump on Bio/Ghost balls without being kited to death and trading horribly. Which they’ve found, now the ball has been passed to Terran to counter this tactic.
If over time it starts to be very common and oppressive and Terrans just cant figure consistent counters, as I’ve said before I’m not against some minor tweaks, perhaps to visibility, perhaps Infestors are only visually invisible if they’re stationary, perhaps a very slight delay on cast post-burrow. There’s plenty there as a suitable candidate.
It would be something of a shame though if a pretty nifty tactical innovation got nuked before that process played out.
I’m not a betting man but I’m definitely one for predictions! I think we’ll see some continued success from the Serrals of this world, but Terrans will be more wise to it. Even with those top guys you’ll probably see some games where through improved star sense or blind luck, 15/20 Infestors get spotted and wiped before they can spring a good trap. And probably a whole load of lesser Zergs not quite getting the splitting/army movement and syncing down to make much use of it.
And ultimately it’s less of a ZvT strat so much as an anti-Maru (and Clem to a slightly lesser degree ) innovation anyway. Other players aren’t consistently able to even get to the split-map/borderline split phase in a good position, nor execute that defensive attritional style to the requisite level. I’m slightly exaggerating but it’s almost like nerfing one dude for something he only needs to get out of the locker to beat 2 other dudes with
I like your framework here, it’s just that maybe I’d answer the questions differently than you. In general in RTS I don’t think I want to see some kind of offensive spellcaster that is able to shark around the opponent’s army and cause game-ending damage on the regular without a clear and obvious mistake on the opponent’s part unless it also is a very risky and costly strategy. To me sharkfestor is like nukes, but instead of causing game-ending damage 1 out of 1000 times exclusively when the opponent makes a terrible mistake, it’s 1 out of 10 times when the opponent hasn’t spammed enough scans and turrets all over the map. This dynamic is pretty unique to mid-to-late game TvZ for me due to the unique interactions associated with the ability to chain fungal, prevent medivac pickup, complete the ghost genocide, and remax/ship a few waves without much risk. We’ve all watched these TvZs. If the banes hit the ghosts it’s pretty much over. I’m okay with that in general and even in most fungal scenarios like the the normal pull-up infestor move from the back of your army. Sharkfestor doesn’t sit right tho. Maybe you’re right and we’ll see the Raven counter or something that will change my mind. But honestly I’ve felt this way for years now, mostly in relation to Dark’s abusive play, but as I said it’s not really about any one player and more about the unit interactions.
On February 13 2024 22:29 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: If we're going to nerf Ghost, I would like to say that the auto attack or snipe should be nerfed, please do NOT nerf EMP. Nerfing EMP has the side effect of unnecessarily nerfing Mech, especially in TvP.
Please focus the nerfs or unit reworks in a way that target bio play firstmost, and mech last. Mech TvP especially does not deserve a single unnecessary nerf ever again.
I hate when changes are made that are mostly to address bio or standard play, but end up nerfing Mech, and there are easy ways to compensate for that without affecting bio or other MUs but unfortunately because no one left playing/watching cares enough about Mech, there's no one to vouch and implement it i guess...
On that note, I was just thinking again: Was the cost revert for Ghost from 200/100 back to 150/150 really necessary? I tend to hear from casters that Ghosts are expensive, but gas isn't really a limiting factor for Bio is it? It's minerals.
David Kim said that the reason Ghost was changed to 200/100 from 150/150 (way back in WoL) was to make it more costly for Bio to get, while making it easier for Mech to get (since Mech is much more gas heavy and doesn't mind sinking minerals).
I still don't fully understand why the newer balance team reverted this. Their reasoning IIRC was that it makes more expensive, but does it really? I agree with David Kim's reasoning more. We see games where most resources are mined out, and mineral patches are emptied first with mass OC/MULE, while Refineries still have lots of gas.
Raven rework into being more of a early game / bio spellcaster also hurt Mech. I really hate how much the AA missile debuff specifically helps bio's weapons way more than Mech weapons. Now both spellcasters benefit Mech less for the cost compared to how much more they became useful to Bio ;( (Though thankfully with the new Cyclone, AA missile is significantly more useful!) I would be happy if Ghost cost was changed even to 175/125 and snipe slightly nerfed further (maybe 1 sec longer delay before firing? that way the damage is less burst and less potent in battles), that gas is precious.
The Ghost cost is currently 150/125, which I think is a really good cost for it. 200/100 was weird and I think in any regard 200/100 is better than 150/150, because you can just opt out of the Refinery and expand quicker as a Bio player anyhow.
The Raven missile was changed when we had the pew, pew Cyclone, so that is actually why the change made sense. Now it is sadly just a Bio support unit, which is lame, when the original purpose of the unit was positional play AKA Mech play (Auto Turret, PDD with long lifetimes).
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Dark. But even if you disagree, you're effectively arguing that reapers should be reverted (everyone acknowledged Byun was literally the single human who could use reapers in the masterful way he did). So think about whether you're comfortable with that.
On ghost counters, I don't get this argument. Ghosts were counterable before their recent nerf with back-of-army infestor pull-up fungals, broods, and ling-bane-lurker. We don't need to speculate about this, we can just look at all the titles Serral, Reynor, Dark, Rogue, Solar, etc. won against late game ghost play. They even won against the ridiculous mass ghost strats that got popular in the last few years. I support the ghost nerfs, but ghosts were countable pre-nerf with the above-described tactics, and that's definitely still the case now post-nerf without needing to have a cloaked spellcaster that can create game-ending damage basically embedded with your opponent's army.
I don’t think it’s that relevant how few people can execute a strat, tactic or technique, the pertinent factors for me are: 1. Is it counterable? And is the counterplay at least reasonably equivalent to execute compared to the opponent’s effort put in employing it? 2. Is it the kind of unit interaction that you want to see? (Extremely, extremely subjective)
Byun’s reapers were during my one real hiatus from following the game, and I’m sure it was pretty hype at the time, and subsequently watching it it’s a godlike feat of micro.
But, on the flipside once the novelty of observing such fantastic control, if your counter in many instances is ‘hope Byun messes up his control’, you don’t really have that effective counterplay in your locker. Plus it’s kinda fundamentally silly to me to have a scout/skirmish unit just be massed and snowball provided sufficient control is there.
For me with this Infestor play it’s also hard to execute, but primarily because it’s one of many other things you’re trying to manage. There may yet be effective counterplay to be discovered, and fundamentally I quite like the play, where Zergs have been pushed to work out how to jump on Bio/Ghost balls without being kited to death and trading horribly. Which they’ve found, now the ball has been passed to Terran to counter this tactic.
If over time it starts to be very common and oppressive and Terrans just cant figure consistent counters, as I’ve said before I’m not against some minor tweaks, perhaps to visibility, perhaps Infestors are only visually invisible if they’re stationary, perhaps a very slight delay on cast post-burrow. There’s plenty there as a suitable candidate.
It would be something of a shame though if a pretty nifty tactical innovation got nuked before that process played out.
I’m not a betting man but I’m definitely one for predictions! I think we’ll see some continued success from the Serrals of this world, but Terrans will be more wise to it. Even with those top guys you’ll probably see some games where through improved star sense or blind luck, 15/20 Infestors get spotted and wiped before they can spring a good trap. And probably a whole load of lesser Zergs not quite getting the splitting/army movement and syncing down to make much use of it.
And ultimately it’s less of a ZvT strat so much as an anti-Maru (and Clem to a slightly lesser degree ) innovation anyway. Other players aren’t consistently able to even get to the split-map/borderline split phase in a good position, nor execute that defensive attritional style to the requisite level. I’m slightly exaggerating but it’s almost like nerfing one dude for something he only needs to get out of the locker to beat 2 other dudes with
I like your framework here, it’s just that maybe I’d answer the questions differently than you. In general in RTS I don’t think I want to see some kind of offensive spellcaster that is able to shark around the opponent’s army and cause game-ending damage on the regular without a clear and obvious mistake on the opponent’s part unless it also is a very risky and costly strategy. To me sharkfestor is like nukes, but instead of causing game-ending damage 1 out of 1000 times exclusively when the opponent makes a terrible mistake, it’s 1 out of 10 times when the opponent hasn’t spammed enough scans and turrets all over the map. This dynamic is pretty unique to mid-to-late game TvZ for me due to the unique interactions associated with the ability to chain fungal, prevent medivac pickup, complete the ghost genocide, and remax/ship a few waves without much risk. We’ve all watched these TvZs. If the banes hit the ghosts it’s pretty much over. I’m okay with that in general and even in most fungal scenarios like the the normal pull-up infestor move from the back of your army. Sharkfestor doesn’t sit right tho. Maybe you’re right and we’ll see the Raven counter or something that will change my mind. But honestly I’ve felt this way for years now, mostly in relation to Dark’s abusive play, but as I said it’s not really about any one player and more about the unit interactions.
You make some damn fine points here, the only point I would make as a counter is the sharkninjafestor interaction is a bit more singular, a bit more obvious and evocative, and that may skew perceptions a bit. Nailing that 1-2 punch is pretty damn brutal, and it’s super obviously game-changing with even a couple of successful efforts.
An entrenched setup with ghosts tends not to do that, it’s consistently decent to brutal trades that individually aren’t that impactful, but cumulatively add up to rather a lots. In a really intense game with tons going on, a handful of big moments stand out more than a ton of cumulatively equivalent trades.
Maybe a stretch but hey, I think you get what I mean. A monster disruptor hit will resonate more than a bunch of skirmishes where bio squads rinse gateway units when armies are split, but really they’re both kinda equivalent in deciding how a game goes ultimately.
Balance can be tweaked, and we all have our personal biases. I think the Infestor is broadly what a caster should be, and a huge departure from previous incarnations. Spoken as someone who once uninstalled the game after 8 BL/Infestor PvZ games right in a row on ladder.
A caster IMO should be potent on its own, but shouldn’t ideally scale positively with too many additional casters. It should dovetail with the faction’s overall identity and play style and augment it.
In this sense, with my particular bias I think Infestors may be the best designed caster in the game currently, followed by Templar, followed by sentries. A genuinely unthinkable scenario if you talked to 22 year old me as opposed to 34 year old me!
Ravens in TvT can be so potent that having an extra one can swing a game with disables. Vipers fly and there’s less positional consideration as a result, and they basically hard counter mech. Ghosts in TvZ you hit a point where they’re massable and an efficient combat unit, which I don’t think casters should generally be.
I think the question shifts to whether the very specific sharkfestor deployment is too good or not, and as I said I’ll wait and see.
If it does prove overtooled in the next few months, by all means nerf it. My favourite adjustment (if needed) would be to keep it basically invisible while stationary, more prominent when moving. That way you can still setup some traps, but you can’t easily shadow an army and really have to position even better. And if you do shadow an army you can’t point to a Terran not being observant rather than being lucky/unlucky with scans.
I think that would keep it as a viable play, but a little harder to execute on the Zerg’s end, and a little easier to defend on the Terran’s. Whereas a more drastic nerf would borderline eliminate it as an option.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Are you seriously gonna tell me players like Reynor, Dark , Solar etc are unable to do what Serral did with infestors? Serral is leading the way to what is possible because he is the best Zerg right now. All Serral is doing is opening their eyes to what is possible and opening our eyes to what is obviously way to strong.
Ya we are seriously telling you no other Zergs other than Serral can pull off those infestor plays constantly.
We already saw solar reynor and dark try it, let me give you a hint. They sucked at it
Literally almost all the terrans can do the same thing with mass ghosts.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Dark. But even if you disagree, you're effectively arguing that reapers should be reverted (everyone acknowledged Byun was literally the single human who could use reapers in the masterful way he did). So think about whether you're comfortable with that.
On ghost counters, I don't get this argument. Ghosts were counterable before their recent nerf with back-of-army infestor pull-up fungals, broods, and ling-bane-lurker. We don't need to speculate about this, we can just look at all the titles Serral, Reynor, Dark, Rogue, Solar, etc. won against late game ghost play. They even won against the ridiculous mass ghost strats that got popular in the last few years. I support the ghost nerfs, but ghosts were countable pre-nerf with the above-described tactics, and that's definitely still the case now post-nerf without needing to have a cloaked spellcaster that can create game-ending damage basically embedded with your opponent's army.
I don’t think it’s that relevant how few people can execute a strat, tactic or technique, the pertinent factors for me are: 1. Is it counterable? And is the counterplay at least reasonably equivalent to execute compared to the opponent’s effort put in employing it? 2. Is it the kind of unit interaction that you want to see? (Extremely, extremely subjective)
Byun’s reapers were during my one real hiatus from following the game, and I’m sure it was pretty hype at the time, and subsequently watching it it’s a godlike feat of micro.
But, on the flipside once the novelty of observing such fantastic control, if your counter in many instances is ‘hope Byun messes up his control’, you don’t really have that effective counterplay in your locker. Plus it’s kinda fundamentally silly to me to have a scout/skirmish unit just be massed and snowball provided sufficient control is there.
For me with this Infestor play it’s also hard to execute, but primarily because it’s one of many other things you’re trying to manage. There may yet be effective counterplay to be discovered, and fundamentally I quite like the play, where Zergs have been pushed to work out how to jump on Bio/Ghost balls without being kited to death and trading horribly. Which they’ve found, now the ball has been passed to Terran to counter this tactic.
If over time it starts to be very common and oppressive and Terrans just cant figure consistent counters, as I’ve said before I’m not against some minor tweaks, perhaps to visibility, perhaps Infestors are only visually invisible if they’re stationary, perhaps a very slight delay on cast post-burrow. There’s plenty there as a suitable candidate.
It would be something of a shame though if a pretty nifty tactical innovation got nuked before that process played out.
I’m not a betting man but I’m definitely one for predictions! I think we’ll see some continued success from the Serrals of this world, but Terrans will be more wise to it. Even with those top guys you’ll probably see some games where through improved star sense or blind luck, 15/20 Infestors get spotted and wiped before they can spring a good trap. And probably a whole load of lesser Zergs not quite getting the splitting/army movement and syncing down to make much use of it.
And ultimately it’s less of a ZvT strat so much as an anti-Maru (and Clem to a slightly lesser degree ) innovation anyway. Other players aren’t consistently able to even get to the split-map/borderline split phase in a good position, nor execute that defensive attritional style to the requisite level. I’m slightly exaggerating but it’s almost like nerfing one dude for something he only needs to get out of the locker to beat 2 other dudes with
I like your framework here, it’s just that maybe I’d answer the questions differently than you. In general in RTS I don’t think I want to see some kind of offensive spellcaster that is able to shark around the opponent’s army and cause game-ending damage on the regular without a clear and obvious mistake on the opponent’s part unless it also is a very risky and costly strategy. To me sharkfestor is like nukes, but instead of causing game-ending damage 1 out of 1000 times exclusively when the opponent makes a terrible mistake, it’s 1 out of 10 times when the opponent hasn’t spammed enough scans and turrets all over the map. This dynamic is pretty unique to mid-to-late game TvZ for me due to the unique interactions associated with the ability to chain fungal, prevent medivac pickup, complete the ghost genocide, and remax/ship a few waves without much risk. We’ve all watched these TvZs. If the banes hit the ghosts it’s pretty much over. I’m okay with that in general and even in most fungal scenarios like the the normal pull-up infestor move from the back of your army. Sharkfestor doesn’t sit right tho. Maybe you’re right and we’ll see the Raven counter or something that will change my mind. But honestly I’ve felt this way for years now, mostly in relation to Dark’s abusive play, but as I said it’s not really about any one player and more about the unit interactions.
You make some damn fine points here, the only point I would make as a counter is the sharkninjafestor interaction is a bit more singular, a bit more obvious and evocative, and that may skew perceptions a bit. Nailing that 1-2 punch is pretty damn brutal, and it’s super obviously game-changing with even a couple of successful efforts.
An entrenched setup with ghosts tends not to do that, it’s consistently decent to brutal trades that individually aren’t that impactful, but cumulatively add up to rather a lots. In a really intense game with tons going on, a handful of big moments stand out more than a ton of cumulatively equivalent trades.
Maybe a stretch but hey, I think you get what I mean. A monster disruptor hit will resonate more than a bunch of skirmishes where bio squads rinse gateway units when armies are split, but really they’re both kinda equivalent in deciding how a game goes ultimately.
Balance can be tweaked, and we all have our personal biases. I think the Infestor is broadly what a caster should be, and a huge departure from previous incarnations. Spoken as someone who once uninstalled the game after 8 BL/Infestor PvZ games right in a row on ladder.
A caster IMO should be potent on its own, but shouldn’t ideally scale positively with too many additional casters. It should dovetail with the faction’s overall identity and play style and augment it.
In this sense, with my particular bias I think Infestors may be the best designed caster in the game currently, followed by Templar, followed by sentries. A genuinely unthinkable scenario if you talked to 22 year old me as opposed to 34 year old me!
Ravens in TvT can be so potent that having an extra one can swing a game with disables. Vipers fly and there’s less positional consideration as a result, and they basically hard counter mech. Ghosts in TvZ you hit a point where they’re massable and an efficient combat unit, which I don’t think casters should generally be.
I think the question shifts to whether the very specific sharkfestor deployment is too good or not, and as I said I’ll wait and see.
If it does prove overtooled in the next few months, by all means nerf it. My favourite adjustment (if needed) would be to keep it basically invisible while stationary, more prominent when moving. That way you can still setup some traps, but you can’t easily shadow an army and really have to position even better. And if you do shadow an army you can’t point to a Terran not being observant rather than being lucky/unlucky with scans.
I think that would keep it as a viable play, but a little harder to execute on the Zerg’s end, and a little easier to defend on the Terran’s. Whereas a more drastic nerf would borderline eliminate it as an option.
We shall see!
You’re of course right the big moments stand out, and surely skew our perception, but don’t forget the ghosts are supposed to trade brutally in TvZ. This is the setup. Failing to have the trades go brutally in your favor as Terran is the loss condition on most TvZ maps and unit comps. I think for the same reasons we can overemphasize the big moments, we can watch ghosts insta-murder dozens of zerglings and pew-pew premium units without getting touched and forget that Terran is expected to seek out and achieve trades like this in the match-up. I don’t think this makes the matchup easier or harder for one side, it’s just the way it is.
That being said, I do not like ghosts in PvT. I’ve seen too many games end when the Protoss army somehow gets EMP’ed and then it’s bye bye glass cannon. The ghosts should remember the fungal genocide before they abuse toss armies…the one thing they have in common with the Protoss robo tech is that once gone, it’s pretty much T-15 seconds until enemy is in your main and it’s GGs.
On February 13 2024 05:29 FFXthebest wrote: Cool name another Zerg that does this infestor plays as good as Serral or even 50% as good
High skill play gets high reward, unlike widow mines
It is gonna become meta unless nerfed and Terrans are gonna have to invest way to much money into covering the threat of a single infestor that might or might not appear surely you can see the problem
So you neither can name another Zerg who used these as masterful as Serral did in Katowice, nor can't you explain how Zerg is ever supposed to counter Ghosts. Cool.
Dark. But even if you disagree, you're effectively arguing that reapers should be reverted (everyone acknowledged Byun was literally the single human who could use reapers in the masterful way he did). So think about whether you're comfortable with that.
On ghost counters, I don't get this argument. Ghosts were counterable before their recent nerf with back-of-army infestor pull-up fungals, broods, and ling-bane-lurker. We don't need to speculate about this, we can just look at all the titles Serral, Reynor, Dark, Rogue, Solar, etc. won against late game ghost play. They even won against the ridiculous mass ghost strats that got popular in the last few years. I support the ghost nerfs, but ghosts were countable pre-nerf with the above-described tactics, and that's definitely still the case now post-nerf without needing to have a cloaked spellcaster that can create game-ending damage basically embedded with your opponent's army.
I don’t think it’s that relevant how few people can execute a strat, tactic or technique, the pertinent factors for me are: 1. Is it counterable? And is the counterplay at least reasonably equivalent to execute compared to the opponent’s effort put in employing it? 2. Is it the kind of unit interaction that you want to see? (Extremely, extremely subjective)
Byun’s reapers were during my one real hiatus from following the game, and I’m sure it was pretty hype at the time, and subsequently watching it it’s a godlike feat of micro.
But, on the flipside once the novelty of observing such fantastic control, if your counter in many instances is ‘hope Byun messes up his control’, you don’t really have that effective counterplay in your locker. Plus it’s kinda fundamentally silly to me to have a scout/skirmish unit just be massed and snowball provided sufficient control is there.
For me with this Infestor play it’s also hard to execute, but primarily because it’s one of many other things you’re trying to manage. There may yet be effective counterplay to be discovered, and fundamentally I quite like the play, where Zergs have been pushed to work out how to jump on Bio/Ghost balls without being kited to death and trading horribly. Which they’ve found, now the ball has been passed to Terran to counter this tactic.
If over time it starts to be very common and oppressive and Terrans just cant figure consistent counters, as I’ve said before I’m not against some minor tweaks, perhaps to visibility, perhaps Infestors are only visually invisible if they’re stationary, perhaps a very slight delay on cast post-burrow. There’s plenty there as a suitable candidate.
It would be something of a shame though if a pretty nifty tactical innovation got nuked before that process played out.
I’m not a betting man but I’m definitely one for predictions! I think we’ll see some continued success from the Serrals of this world, but Terrans will be more wise to it. Even with those top guys you’ll probably see some games where through improved star sense or blind luck, 15/20 Infestors get spotted and wiped before they can spring a good trap. And probably a whole load of lesser Zergs not quite getting the splitting/army movement and syncing down to make much use of it.
And ultimately it’s less of a ZvT strat so much as an anti-Maru (and Clem to a slightly lesser degree ) innovation anyway. Other players aren’t consistently able to even get to the split-map/borderline split phase in a good position, nor execute that defensive attritional style to the requisite level. I’m slightly exaggerating but it’s almost like nerfing one dude for something he only needs to get out of the locker to beat 2 other dudes with
I like your framework here, it’s just that maybe I’d answer the questions differently than you. In general in RTS I don’t think I want to see some kind of offensive spellcaster that is able to shark around the opponent’s army and cause game-ending damage on the regular without a clear and obvious mistake on the opponent’s part unless it also is a very risky and costly strategy. To me sharkfestor is like nukes, but instead of causing game-ending damage 1 out of 1000 times exclusively when the opponent makes a terrible mistake, it’s 1 out of 10 times when the opponent hasn’t spammed enough scans and turrets all over the map. This dynamic is pretty unique to mid-to-late game TvZ for me due to the unique interactions associated with the ability to chain fungal, prevent medivac pickup, complete the ghost genocide, and remax/ship a few waves without much risk. We’ve all watched these TvZs. If the banes hit the ghosts it’s pretty much over. I’m okay with that in general and even in most fungal scenarios like the the normal pull-up infestor move from the back of your army. Sharkfestor doesn’t sit right tho. Maybe you’re right and we’ll see the Raven counter or something that will change my mind. But honestly I’ve felt this way for years now, mostly in relation to Dark’s abusive play, but as I said it’s not really about any one player and more about the unit interactions.
You make some damn fine points here, the only point I would make as a counter is the sharkninjafestor interaction is a bit more singular, a bit more obvious and evocative, and that may skew perceptions a bit. Nailing that 1-2 punch is pretty damn brutal, and it’s super obviously game-changing with even a couple of successful efforts.
An entrenched setup with ghosts tends not to do that, it’s consistently decent to brutal trades that individually aren’t that impactful, but cumulatively add up to rather a lots. In a really intense game with tons going on, a handful of big moments stand out more than a ton of cumulatively equivalent trades.
Maybe a stretch but hey, I think you get what I mean. A monster disruptor hit will resonate more than a bunch of skirmishes where bio squads rinse gateway units when armies are split, but really they’re both kinda equivalent in deciding how a game goes ultimately.
Balance can be tweaked, and we all have our personal biases. I think the Infestor is broadly what a caster should be, and a huge departure from previous incarnations. Spoken as someone who once uninstalled the game after 8 BL/Infestor PvZ games right in a row on ladder.
A caster IMO should be potent on its own, but shouldn’t ideally scale positively with too many additional casters. It should dovetail with the faction’s overall identity and play style and augment it.
In this sense, with my particular bias I think Infestors may be the best designed caster in the game currently, followed by Templar, followed by sentries. A genuinely unthinkable scenario if you talked to 22 year old me as opposed to 34 year old me!
Ravens in TvT can be so potent that having an extra one can swing a game with disables. Vipers fly and there’s less positional consideration as a result, and they basically hard counter mech. Ghosts in TvZ you hit a point where they’re massable and an efficient combat unit, which I don’t think casters should generally be.
I think the question shifts to whether the very specific sharkfestor deployment is too good or not, and as I said I’ll wait and see.
If it does prove overtooled in the next few months, by all means nerf it. My favourite adjustment (if needed) would be to keep it basically invisible while stationary, more prominent when moving. That way you can still setup some traps, but you can’t easily shadow an army and really have to position even better. And if you do shadow an army you can’t point to a Terran not being observant rather than being lucky/unlucky with scans.
I think that would keep it as a viable play, but a little harder to execute on the Zerg’s end, and a little easier to defend on the Terran’s. Whereas a more drastic nerf would borderline eliminate it as an option.
We shall see!
You’re of course right the big moments stand out, and surely skew our perception, but don’t forget the ghosts are supposed to trade brutally in TvZ. This is the setup. Failing to have the trades go brutally in your favor as Terran is the loss condition on most TvZ maps and unit comps. I think for the same reasons we can overemphasize the big moments, we can watch ghosts insta-murder dozens of zerglings and pew-pew premium units without getting touched and forget that Terran is expected to seek out and achieve trades like this in the match-up. I don’t think this makes the matchup easier or harder for one side, it’s just the way it is.
That being said, I do not like ghosts in PvT. I’ve seen too many games end when the Protoss army somehow gets EMP’ed and then it’s bye bye glass cannon. The ghosts should remember the fungal genocide before they abuse toss armies…the one thing they have in common with the Protoss robo tech is that once gone, it’s pretty much T-15 seconds until enemy is in your main and it’s GGs.
Aye, although I do quite like that ghosts/ravens have different uses depending on mechanical/biological units. Not that it’s always fair but it does make the biological/mechanical or robotic distinction a bit more meaningful and adds a bit of grounding and flavour.
The ghost having a very different role in different matchups is pretty cool, but yeah it is rather strong against Toss to say the least, especially if the Toss makes an era.
I guess SC2 is just a punishing game all round and is full of pretty rough interactions. So long as folks don’t look the other way in ones that favour their preferred races while zoning in on one that negatively impacts them, then we can have fruitful discussion such as this.
If I could wave my magic wand I’d definitely have fewer instances of it, but I can’t see how you could rebalance the game with a skeleton crew to do it!
The bottom line is that there's really not another unit interaction in this game in which the game basically instantly ends without a super obvious mistake by the losing player
Are you sure ? If you get DTs and got no detection its gg...
The bottom line is that there's really not another unit interaction in this game in which the game basically instantly ends without a super obvious mistake by the losing player
Are you sure ? If you get DTs and got no detection its gg...
just get 1 damn Raven and stop whinning
I see surprise DT GGs rarely, and anyway they are like various build order losses that are not very fun to watch but happen occasionally primarily in the early game in all match-ups when one side cuts corners and fails to scout or get detection and the other side happens to choose a build that hard counters. This is the kind of thing that happens in any strategy game with information asymmetry, for better or for worse. The last time I saw any kind of DT build do game-ending damage in the mid or late game was Classic's DT blink meme build against Rogue at Blizzcon in 2019. DTs are interesting units for sure, but because they are slow melee units without splash damage or powerful spells they don't come close to infestors in their ability to do game-ending damage. You don't have to take my word for it, just think about how a pack of ghosts handle DTs versus sharkfestor. The DTs of course would be revealed and sniped before they could get many swipes off, whereas the sharkfestor may die but will still get its fungal or neural-EMP off, either of which could win the game on re-max. Serral, Dark, and Reynor take out Terrans that are otherwise stable pretty consistently in the mid and late game with sharkfestor play. Is it hard to execute? Sure. Is it harder to execute than Byun's reaper play? Probably not.
It may be reasonable to ask Terrans to "just build a raven" (this is Harstem's take), but most reactions to the new infestor nerf seem to welcome it for many of the reasons discussed in this thread. I've been feeling this way about sharkfestor for years now, glad to see the balance council recognizing how problematic this unit is. I agree with some of the commentators who were saying the vision nerf probably isn't enough, but we'll need need to see how it plays out.
Funny how toss always needs to bring obs against terran and Zergs
Zergs need to bring overseer against toss and terran
Yet terran think they shouldn’t bring a “raven” because it’s too slow
Terran are way too entitled and used to having things given to them on a silver platter. They already giving all the most forgiving mechanics ie scans, mules, instant depot drops.
The part where you try to read pigs mind was a bit cringe. Also your entire post seems to be mostly about burrowed infestors, which, did get nerfed. Is this a troll?
On April 13 2024 07:00 goldensail wrote: Here's a game just played between Clem and...PiG...yeah PiG... www.youtube.com
I challenge anyone to say with a straight face after watching this how infestors are *not* OP.
So OP they carry Zerg to tremendous feats in the last few weeks like...uh...lets see...Shin won 2-1 against GuMiho...and then...mhm, Elazer 2-0ed Gerald! Damn those infestors! But hey, atleast PiG won against Clem in an insignifcant game, that clearly shows how OP a unit is.
Stop your whining already, with Serral out of business for a while you won't see a Zerg win anything atleast until ESL Spring and even that will completly depend on the form of Serral (if he is even able to play).
Clem won the match convincingly without ever being in any trouble....
What is the point of the Zerg OP argument? That Pig won a few engagements while being outmined and outproduced?
Zerg should never win an engagement vs Terran, if Zerg wins a single engagement where they come from 2 sides into a full surround and land fungals into clumped up Terran army it means Zerg is OP.
im not sure what you are saying. the infestor is easy to see while burrowed. What you need to do some in inspect the maps. Look at what the ground looks like normally, over time you can tell that it looks different. in fact id argue its easier to see moving than any other cloaked unit. oh ye, lets mot talk about what seems like infinite scans when you get to these points in the game.
anyways, infestors dont just turn up, build a raven, place turrets, tanks are great cover, if ur toss, observers are might as well be free at this point but oracles are amazing. See you arent putting an argument to how a zerg is supposed to deal with a 100 supply balled up army with all the late game 3/3 shit when the other races a similar ability (and better) at their disposal, tanks are the same unit more or less, but guess what their salvos are fucking free! Storms, holy shit, build 6 templar and guess what, you get another unit when all the energy is done to mop up the already fucked units after the storms!
With the state of the game right now, fungals and detection on an expensive ass unit which is slow as all fuck is fine. tell me, when you see an infestor venture over the front lines do you ever see it survive?
Im now doing to watch how 1 fungal which does fuck all damage really turned the whole game. Fungal for me recently has become a zoning tool but damn, im already controlling 3 other control grps, this shit is hard!
PiG outplayed Clem in those engagements, simple as that. Now he never had any real chance for the win, because that would need incredible cost efficiency that only the top Zergs can obtain.
The Burrowing isn't a problem, what is OP is the 10 range on a spell with 2.25 radius. This was what the cabal managed to get in, because we all know ZvP was balanced and must be maintained balanced, and a +1 vision on Pylon is the same as +1 range on Fungal..
On April 15 2024 01:29 ejozl wrote: PiG outplayed Clem in those engagements, simple as that. Now he never had any real chance for the win, because that would need incredible cost efficiency that only the top Zergs can obtain.
The Burrowing isn't a problem, what is OP is the 10 range on a spell with 2.25 radius. This was what the cabal managed to get in, because we all know ZvP was balanced and must be maintained balanced, and a +1 vision on Pylon is the same as +1 range on Fungal..
Here's a question: name one Zerg that looks like they're going to win consistently against Toss right now.
But mb it's a sign of a more healthy state of balance, if 1 player cannot consistently beat an entire player base from another race.
The same guy has (in the last year) a 88% winrate against Terran and almost 95% vs. Zerg (just for the guy who said "If you take away racial imbalance he isn't that good!!1"). So maybe that one guy is just better than the entire playerbase of the game and it has nothing to do with race?
But mb it's a sign of a more healthy state of balance, if 1 player cannot consistently beat an entire player base from another race.
By consistency, I'm saying better than 50% win-rate, which I don't think is an unreasonable expectation for a top-player in one of their best match-ups. For example, Clem or Maru in their TvZs. Or, say, Serral/Rogue/Dark in ZvP. Watching ZvP on this map-pool and current meta seems like a huge struggle-bus from every pro Z I've seen. And then laddering is just sheer frustration. At this point, they could add Steppes and Slag Pits and I'd barely bat an eye.
It's just ironic that they waited until the one guy who was experiencing unprecedented success to leave/get distracted to implement the most annoying map pool in the history of the game. For everyone else to deal with.
He's screwing around, off-racing, tilting and bashing on Protoss players. In a tournament setting he will go right back to crushing every Protoss he meets, might've to resort to cheese, but that shouldn't matter, right? Heck, Rogue might just go and win the next GSL and declare Zerg overpowered.