First off, I want to say that I know it's beta, and I know that "by definition" that implies that it is imbalanced. Having said that...
The Terrans seem OP to me.
- The Reaper is ridiculous. The thing is available early, it can jump cliffs, it's fast as hell, it's strong, it can harass your eco big-time, and to add insult to injury, it has a ridiculously strong special ability against buildings, and can take them down in no time. The effort required by you to counter this thing early game is not matched by the ease with which the Terran player can deploy this thing and harass your eco to death, as well as take down buildings.
- That Hellion is a nasty early harass unit too. It is strong against early light units (i.e. probes, drones, zerglings, basic infantry) and it is fast as hell. I mean, between the Reaper and the Hellion, the average Terran opponent can kiss the game goodbye.
- Marauders just seem overly powerful to me.
- That EMP shockwave from the Ghost just seems to royally fuck Protoss.
Protoss seem UP to me.
- The Stalker seems too weak in terms of hit points and attack (they drop like flies to Terrans), and blink seems to take a long time to recharge, where as Terrans just seem to spam the hell out of their special abilities.
- The Collossus just seems to be a totally underpowered hunk of junk that auto-explodes every time an enemy unit gets within sight range. I mean, they pop like helium balloons. Weirdly, they seem to have nerfed it even more with their last patch, where as if anything it needed a substantial buff.
I mean, the only time I see a Protoss or Zerg beat a Terran is if the Protoss/Zerg is just a way better player.
Your thoughts?
You got everything wrong here
Terran is probably the weakest race so far, and Blizzard has said that they will likely receive a buff because their win % is less than 50 against both Protoss and Zerg in 1v1. Reapers require a barracks with a tech lab, and they can easily be countered. EMP round just makes PvT a fair matchup. Protoss absolutely destroys Terran in every regard, but especially in the early game. Stalkers also got a buff recently if you haven't heard. Colossi aren't being used correctly at the low levels. If you use them you must use and abuse the cliff walking talents of the collossi. You hug a cliff with your colossi as you attack, and when the ground troops get to it, you take the high ground and melt them. Colossi absolutely DESTROYS MMM, the only real viable Terran strategy ATM. Sentries are totally underused by the Protoss. Your colossus needs protection, it's somewhat of a glass cannon. Sentries create force fields, which you MUST use to divide and conquer the enemy army, and to make shields around your army. For instance, you attack a terran player with MMM, and you have 1-2 colossi and 4-5 sentries. As his army comes out to meet you, you throw a force field into the middle of his forces, then back up a little bit to make sure you're out of range of anything on the high ground, and then you kill the portion of the army you took. You also MUST use guardian shield, which totally effs the Terran. Marauders do marginal damage to you if you have a guardian shield up. The Terran abilities (cloak, emp round, snipe, PDD, HSM, turret dropping, etc) all cost a great deal of energy. EMP round costs the same amount of energy as Psi storm. Ravens lose all their energy pretty quick with one hunter seeker missile, two point defense drones, or three turrets. Helions should NEVER get into your base as a protoss player. You put your first pylon and gateway at your ramp, and then 2-3 zealots will block the ramp before a single helion can EVER reach you. Helions aren't quick. You need a barracks before you can even start building the factory. Oh, and you can use sentries to make a circle of doom against a terran blob so that you can psi storm them repeatedly while they sit there helplessly (The terran bio blob clumps much easier; this is why storm got an area nerf to compensate)
is this an aprils fools joke?
colossus weak? what?
While I don't think Terran is way OP, they are much stronger than they were a patch or two ago.A reasonable way to see race balance is checking 'semi-pro' tournaments. Just yesterday, a mini tournament was ran with 16 people, breakdown was 8 Terran, 4 Protoss, 4 Zerg and Terran winning. Terran seems over-represented, however, in a few days a second torunament with same format will be ran with 5 Terran, 6 Protoss, 5 Zerg.A TeamLiquid Europe Invitational(the best from Europe) had 6 Terran, 5 Zerg, 4 Protoss, and a Random(who played phenomenally and lost in the Finals) with Protoss winning.Based on that, if a single race is unbalanced, a lot of top players haven't figured it out yet. That also seems to be supported by the amount of 'omg this is OP' I see on various forums. There of course needs to be some adjustments, but the major problem I see in play right now is people haven't learned(or is impossible now as many top players have said) to micro units so that an army A can beat Army B even though on paper Army B is better.Also, Colossi are very good, and when they get the range upgrade they are ridiculously good. They aren't supposed to take a brunt of the beating in the front line, but like a Siege Tank, sit in the back and lay sown support fire. They still one shot stimmed marines with the combat shield upgrade even after the patch.
Stalkers are meh, but they're the only early game anti-air Protoss has besides cannons. And they did recently get buffed, we'll see how much that really helps them.
What? Then why in over a couple hundred pro replays have I not seen 1 pro ever "counter them easily?" I've seen a couple of pros beat them back with great difficulty and recover, but never have I seen them "countered easily." Anyone under the pro level can just forget about trying to counter them. Mark my words. If this unit stays the way it is, the vast majority of normal online players will never be able to counter them after the game ships, and you are gonna see one hell of a scream-fest on the forums about this unit.
There isn't always a cliff available. And either way, the Terrans have an air unit (forget the name) that just slaughters Colossi. That air unit will render useless any cliff-hugging. I've never seen a colossi not explode instantly the second a battle starts.
What replays are you watching? A couple marauder hits and the colossi just pop.
Actually, it seems to be Zerg who have big problems with hellions. I've never seen a pro Zerg block a ramp. The Hellions come (along with Reapers), the drones are fried, and its GG.
If the game stays largely the way it is, anyone that's not a pro will have to play terran online. That's gonna be an awful lot of terrans.
Vikings counter colossi, but your stalkers will eat through the vikings. Colossi melt through marauders so long as they have a meatshield of stalkers and zealots in front. Helions are only good against zerglings and workers.
the thing with colossi is that you need a few before they really shine. yes one colossus will not make that big a deal of a difference and gets easily sniped, but get three with some sentries (and get hallucination) they really tear everything apart.
for one terran is way underpowered in 1v1 and in helping their team mate in 2v2 early on, blizzard still have to balance things out.
Regarding hallucination: It's a good skill at high levels of play. What makes it good is that you can try to get your enemy Terran mass marines thinking that you have 10 void rays, then your colossi can come in and eat them If you're playing against a noob, they'll just keep going and won't switch tech, so it'd kind of useless strangely enough lol.
Maybe so, but I just haven't seen this happen. I've seen a ton of stalkers (granted, pre-buff) backing colossi several times, and everything just dies . Heck, if the viking is the ship I'm thinking about, I think it just one-shots colossi with that damn missle thingy it has? But terran don't even need that. If they just focus their mass of marines and marauders at the colossus, it instantaneously auto-explodes.
Good against workers? That was my point! It's the second early economic harass unit terran has (next to reapers), and it's imbalanced in that it's far more difficult for the enemy to stop than it is for the terran to employ this strategy. Reapers are the #1 most ridiculous unit, but this thing is #2.
Well I guess anything massed has the potential to kick ass, but otherwise these things just suck. I have seen 3 get taken down very easily. Two are just ridiculously easy to take down. One? Don't even bother building it. I mean, I'm not asking them to be armored like a thor for Christ's sake, but they need to be able to do something other than walk into a battle, and then explode into a heap of flaming junk.
Colossi need the range upgrade. With the range upgrade it is very difficult for marines to target them. Without it they are nowhere near as effective.
Hellions I haven't seen to be much of a problem. Reapers and Maruaders are the hot topic as of now, expecially vs protoss. Protoss can't get stalkers out early enough to stop them.
colossi are meant to be used with sentries and the range upgrade, i find that the protoss armys strength is synergy between units while the terrans for example work good on their own.
use sentries force field to keep melee/short ranged units of you or too have them funnel through a small passage. or to keep them from running away/spreading out.
i have seen replays where the players used forcefields to imprison the enemy army and roasting it mere seconds with the colossi.
Heck, if the viking is the ship I'm thinking about, I think it just one-shots colossi with that damn missle thingy it has?
You're thinking of the Battleship's Yamato Cannon. Battleships cost significantly more than Colossi and they are comparatively higher on the tech tree. Yamato Cannon can only be used once every two or three units because of the high cd and high energy cost. Battleships also cost more than colossi. If you're going at your enemy with colossi against vikings/battlecruisers, you will definitely lose that battle. Mass cheap AA units just annihilate BC's. Your army should have stalkers and sentries, which will counter any Terran air combination. Colossi don't die that fast... you just need to shield them with zealots/stalkers/sentries and they'll out dps any terran ground army. In a scenario pitting the perfect army composition Terran army vs. the perfect Protoss army, Protoss come out slightly ahead (assuming EMP round). You have to scout and know the unit counters though. Colossi v. Terran are pretty much only good against infantry. Against mech you need some immortals. EVERY protoss army MUST have stalkers and sentries. Protoss has no great AA unit. Phoenixes are kind of bad because they can only hit air. So, ok. You win the war in the skies, but now you can't be very offensive and capitalize on your victory. The lack of AA is the only thing hurting Protoss players. Zealot spam works really well early game against everything but roaches and marauders. What I can't stress enough is using sentries against Terran players. Guardian shield will really cripple the DPS of an infantry army.
if you have played the first starcraft you will see that a lot of units can be useless like DTs they get pwned by spider mines and Overlords are to many.
There are no more mines, overlords aren't detectors anymore. Terran has the weakest detection IMO, but Dark Templar seem quite ineffective unless you just mix them in with your main force to add dps while fighting enemy zerg or protoss.
The balance is pretty good but I can't imagine how a Protos player can complain.
Yes. Thing about reapers vs. anything (zerg or protoss) is that they can jump right into your base (ignoring cliffs and chokes) and head straight for your mineral line. They are fast as hell - nothing can run away from them. And they can kite like hell or just jump down a cliff and then back up again (or the inverse - jump up a cliff and back down again). The amount of harassment they can deal - if not outright damage - is far in excess of their cost or of the trouble to deploy them.
They are availaible early.
They aren't expensive.
They are fast as hell.
They can ignore cliffs.
They deal good damage.
They slaughter workers.
They have a special weapon that takes down structures in no time.
I mean, this is just too much for a single unit. Something needs to be toned down. If it had all of these things but was slow, for instance, you could at least catch and kill one every now and again.
And yeah, marauders... they just seem to kill anything they can shoot.
EDIT:
@SplitShadow, I wasn't thinking about the battleship, I was thinking about another ship. I think it has a missle (maybe a special ability?) that does tremendous damage. It might be the same ship that can drop those floating defense turrets and do other nasty things, but I'm not sure. I could be wrong on this - maybe it's just a normal terran air to ground ship. But bottom line, terran don't need this to slaughter colossi - their low level infantry and mechanized will do the job just fine.
Each side has very obnoxious units. The Protos can come into your base and build in it with little cost to itself.
The Zerg can form a blob of Mutas that are very hard to deal with (they fly, they kill air and ground).
I don't have reapers to be particularly useful against good players because they really aren't that hard to defend against.
Reapers aren't very fast unless you get the speed upgrade. They also just increased the build times for reactors and tech labs. The economic loss from harassing with one solo reaper will be less than losing that reaper in most circumstances.reapers become very effective when you scout and see the enemy attacking you. You can harass their economy while defending, and possibly make them turn back. Proxy pylons are much cooler. You can warp sentries into people's bases and then blink them out of danger. Also, reapers can't jump up every cliff. On some maps they can't get into your base but at like 1 small area.
Well, in a normal situation they might be manageable as you say. But the worst situation is on a map where the mineral line is against a cliff that the reaper has access to. Then it's just hell. How many maps are there like this?
I've never seen the top pros easily defend against this kind of situation, and since it's so obvious going into the game on those maps that the terran is just gonna go straight for reapers and do this, you'd think the other player would go straight into "counter mode" from the outset. But since I haven't seen that happen, it leads me to believe it's nearly uncounterable, or only counterable at considerable cost.
It was only reactors. Tech labs still build the same.
And Agent, if a Terran is going early reaper, a protoss can do everything possible and still not get a stalker out fast enough. Was watching a guys stream today who checked the times and doing a 7 pylon fast-gate to core is still 10 seconds behind a 10rax reaper.
You can still kill them with zealots or a quick surround with drones if the T isn't microing very well. Also, by the time the reaper gets to your side of the map, I think having a stalker out is possible.
You can beat anything with anything if you micro well and they dont. However, if both players have good micro a zealot will lose to a reaper every time(unless said zealot has charge).
Also, you think wrong. Orb, the guy I was watching, tested how fast he could get a stalker out. I'm not sure what map he was playing(I think it was lost temple), but taking travel time into account it took 142sec to get a reaper into his base from the start of the rax. It takes 172 seconds from pylon start to get a stalker out even chrono'ing it the whole time. That's why even doing pylon on 7 followed by rush to stalker the reaper still gets there 10 seconds early.
Right. We need to compare apples to apples here.
Yeah. But it's even worse than that. Let's assume something untrue - that a zealot could eventually catch up to and kill a reaper, on an open theoretical "sandbox" map. The zealot still poorly defends the mineral line at great cost, and still goes down, along with workers. Just one scenario - the reaper jumps from cliff to the mineral line and starts blasting workers. The zealot is out of position, so attempts to close with the reaper. It has to go through workers in order to do this, which slows it down and disturbs the workers. Some workers are lost, some hit points are lost on the zealot, the reaper kites for a while and pulls some cheese, and eventually jumps the cliff to safetly.
"Success" our detractors will say. "The mineral line was defended." No. The reaper simply jumps back onto the mineral line at another location, the weakened zealot is again out of position and has to close, more workers go gown, and the whole process repeats itself. Except that even more reapers start appearing.
I have always had an intuitive sense of game balance issues "by feel." I was the guy who pointed out that cavalry were amazingly weak in Rome: Total War, in the face of all the naysayers and detractors and people screaming l2p (A dev eventually posted and said that there was indeed a bug - the cavalry weren't using their secondary attack after the charge. A patch was then released.). It was something that just jumped out at me the second I played RTW, even though it apparently didn't jump out to the hundreds of thousands of other players playing the game.
My point - this reaper thing is just something that "jumps out at me" when I see it. It's good to know someone is actually putting hard numbers to my gut instinct.
If a reaper is knock knock knockin' on your front door, and you have one zealot out, you deserve to lose that game. That is all. Also, reapers require early tech labs, so you know your opponent won't have too many forces guarding his base if you see a reaper that early into the game. I've watched about four hundred games from the Terran perspective (mostly in platinum), and almost none of them go for this supposedly great quick reaper against Protoss. Nostalgiatag will sometimes get reapers to harass, but he usually uses them all without killing more than 4-5 workers.
Are you reading the numbers? Math doesn't lie. It is 99% impossible to having anything but zealots by the time a reaper gets to your base, if the opponent wants to reaper rush. I don't care if the people you're watching aren't doing it - I saw the number 6 platinum toss lose 3 straight times to it. Then he said 'wtf, can I even get a stalker out in time...' and tested it and realized that, no you cant.
So I'll say it again, a reaper can be in your base ~142 seconds after they build their barracks. You're stalkers not coming out til ~172 seconds after you start your pylon. These are hard numbers from his replay. If you want the thread he made about it, here it is. link
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