One thing I wish there was more discussion on, amidst all this PTR talk and the attendant balance whining, are the things we’ve lost in the game. Units for every faction are simply less lethal than they once were.

The Toy Problem

**“**mommy, daddy, if I’m not allowed to play with X (insert favorite toy here: Pacifiers for Terran, bicycle with training wheels for Protoss, Kerrigan-themed butt plugs for Zerg) then billy shouldn’t be able to play with Y.”

I can give more examples for Terran and Protoss because those are the races I have played the most.

—Protoss cry about widow mine drop, mines get a quad nerf

—Terrans moan about disrupters, 3 or 4 nerfs

—Protoss bitch about EMP, enhanced shockwaves removed and radius decreased multiple times

—Terrans start squealing about storm (energy recharge patch), bye bye killer storm—less DPS less range

It’s a race to the bottom, folks. Give it another five years and we will be tickling each other with workers every game.

Some other examples for Zerg:

1. Banelings used to 1 shot probes with +2

2. Ultras used to be smaller

3. Queens were cheaper and could transfuse off creep.

4. Serral got fungal nerfed cause Maru couldn’t find his infestors

You get the point. Everything generally sucks compared to its former version. And my question is why can we never talk about buffing more stuff instead of nerfing more stuff.

I actually really liked mass warp gate. I could hold down a button and create an entire army in their base. I loved it when you couldn’t break the leash on snipe if you used scan.

I giggled with delight when I loaded up a prism with old storm templar and dropped it on a bunch of unsuspecting hydras or marines. Slowly but surely we are taking all the fun stuff away.

TURN THE SHIP AROUND!!!

I believe the perception of staleness in Sc2 is directly related to this trend of nerfing stuff for a few reasons:

1. It creates predictable games—the lack of explosive interactions means early game advantages become more certain to result in an eventual victory

2. That means fewer comebacks. By far the most exciting games to play and watch are when you find yourself in a rough position and manage to claw your way back to victory

3. Trades and exchanges become less decisive for either side. That means fewer big victories and fewer crushing defeats.

Everything becomes more and more…meh.

Where do we go from here?

Stop nerfing every race man. Give the people their cool units and abilities back even in their most imba form. Yes it makes the game more frustrating but it also makes the game more exciting.

Your friend,

Emotionalvaluable (gotta love the Reddit generated names).

Features cheese, base trades, all ins, weird tech switches. Clutch defenses on both sides.

Figured I’d share it with you guys cause I love this game.

The entire series is pretty sick but if you watch one game, game 2 was unbelievable.

It seems like the patch has killed blink timings or dramatically weakened them—which was always the main threat when you played 3cc. The cost of morphing four gates is 4 stalkers worth of gas.

And it’s probably made it harder to play a sentry opening as well since gas is much more of a scarce resource with the added infrastructure cost of transforming warp gates.

All of this to say: I think you can probably get away with a lot more greed versus Protoss now and not be as reliant on getting damage early on with medevac pressure or banshees etc.

Thought I’d share this with the good folks at allthingdzerg. Interested to hear what other player’s experiences are like with Z.

For reference I’m an M3 Terran and M3 Protoss player with almost no experience playing Zerg. Goal is to match my other races MMR so I can switch to random and terrorize everyone with anonymity.

Currently about 3600 with Z after getting owned during my placement matches and consecutive games until I finally lost enough to win.

ZvZ:

Holy shit I get smoked in this matchup. It seems like you can’t build too few drones, which is a funny departure from the other matchups.

Everyone is all in and if you think they are done all inning boy are you in for a surprise cause they are still sitting on 25 drones.

I have next to no clue how to defend the various cheeses people throw at you. I am vaguely aware that walking your natural is good. Mutas seem OP as fuck if a unit can be OP in a mirror XD.

ZvP:

I’m often left with the feeling that the guy I’m playing against doesn’t have a pulse and is drooling all over his keyboard, and yet I’m still getting destroyed by storms and Skytoss.

Or they are doing some random all in and I had the temerity to build more than forty drones before spamming roaches so I’m dead.

I have had a couple satisfying games where I blindly go spire and it randomly counters a carrier rush.

I want to play hydra ling bane timings but I haven’t figured out how to get there safely yet. I want to be a cool +1 melee guy like Reynor. Any Advice would be appreciated.

ZvT:

As I suspected, mech players are obnoxious as fuck. They love opening marine marine and killing my first ovie.

Helions feel 20x stronger playing against them than playing with them. You live in constant fear you’ll randomly lose the game to a runby. Similar drooling vibes from mech players.

I’ll be honest, and this is where we run into some hard truths, I have no idea why you guys complain about ghosts or bio into lategame. I suspected ultras were fucking awesome and I was right.

It feels so simple to blast them over and over when they try to take a fourth or fifth base. If they start turtling on three base or even four I literally ignore them while I mine the whole map until they get aspirations for more expansions. I have yet to make a spellcasters besides queens and it doesn’t feel necessary in ZvT but maybe I’m wrong.

Random thoughts:

I love burrow
The map vision with Zerg is sick
Hot keying larvae is such a nice mechanic
Queens should be cheaper
Fuck reapers
Fuck mech players

Cheers!