u/Swimming_Fennel6752

Zerg is the swarmy race. What if larva generation was increased further as well as creep spread speed? To balance tier 1 Zerg units are nerfed in hp and damage.

Terran is the gritty scrappy race. Allow Terran to move all of their buildings except depots. All buildings can be scrapped like bunkers.

Protoss is the warpgate race. Basically revert Protoss back to pre-patch.

I sometimes wonder if identity gets lost in balance patches. Units become too homogeneous and seige units loose their clunkiness to round out the meta. I would prefer if we leaned into racial identity. Make fantasy the priority.

Zerg has received some nice buffs such as the larva buff and has had hatchery and queen costs nerfed. This seems problematic most notably on the pro level as Terran and Protoss are struggling against Zerg. There is likely only one more small hotfix coming that will likely reduce or remove the larva change while leaving the other nerfs in place. This will piss off the Zerg player base twice as hard as if the larva change changes were never introduced in the first place.

Anyway, here we are and it’s not a great place to be. Hopefully, Blizzard takes great care in their next and probably last update for the better part of a year.

I was very worried that the direction the game was going was very bad with the PTRs. After watching the games of pros and playing it myself I think the state of the game is and will be just fine. People love to DOOM. They have been doing so since 2011. Let’s see what happens when the meta settles in about a month.

For instance Queens didn’t get their mineral cost reduced and the Nexus has one extra supply than PTR 2. Would be nice to have some communication rather than shadow changes.

Let's actually walk through why "1.2 seconds" turns into something that matters way more than it sounds like it should.

The thing people forget about the first two minutes of a ZvX is that minerals were never your actual constraint — It's larva. Your starting drones gather minerals faster than one hatchery can spit out larva to spend them on. So in practice, the moment a larva pops, the 50 minerals to turn it into a drone are already sitting in the bank waiting. That means any time you shave off the larva timer converts almost one-for-one into "drone hits the mineral line earlier," with no real lag between the two.

So here's what that looks like across the first 10 larva spawns, live (10.7s/larva) vs. PTR (9.5s/larva):

Larva #	Live	PTR	Drone mines earlier by
1	10.7s	9.5s	1.2s
2	21.4s	19.0s	2.4s
3	32.1s	28.5s	3.6s
4	42.8s	38.0s	4.8s
5	53.5s	47.5s	6.0s
6	64.2s	57.0s	7.2s
7	74.9s	66.5s	8.4s
8	85.6s	76.0s	9.6s
9	96.3s	85.5s	10.8s
10	107.0s	95.0s	12.0s

Look at the 95-second mark specifically. That's exactly when the PTR zerg gets their 10th larva. The live zerg doesn't see their 10th until 107 seconds — almost 12 full seconds later. For that whole window, PTR has a drone mining that live just doesn't have yet.

Add up that last column — 1.2 + 2.4 + 3.6 + ... + 12.0 — and you land on 66 seconds of extra drone-mining time banked by the 100-second mark. Using the standard ~1 mineral/sec heuristic, that's roughly 66 bonus minerals that the live version doesn't have. 66 minerals is more than a full drone.

At the pro level it shows up in some pretty concrete places:

• Pool finishes a few seconds earlier without cutting a worker to pay for it
• Earlier pool → earlier queens
• Earlier queens → earlier first injects, and inject timing is basically everything in zerg macro

By minute 2 it's a free drone. That turns into queens landing roughly 5 seconds sooner, which by minute 4 is something like 6 extra zerglings on the field.

And that's the part that actually decides games — when a reaper or an adept comes poking at your base early, queens and lings being out 5 seconds sooner is often the whole difference between taking zero damage and losing the base outright.

With the improvements to larva and the mineral reduction in producing the queen Terran and Protoss will have a much more difficult time turtling against Zerg. They will be forced to slow down Zerg’s growth or die to endless swarms. In addition, Zerg can also choose to be more active in the early game. Zerg will be fun to play again. 400 IQ move intern. Well played!

Just finished watching Ward’s tournament played on Live. Nothing wrong with the game as is. Sure you can nitpick but generally everything is fine. Let’s just balance with map design. Sound good Blizzard? Blizzard are you listening?

I haven’t been playing Live because the proposed changes on the PTR are so radically different. In the past, most of these changes made it into the Live game. But the PTR is seriously bugged so we are not able to test the changes properly. What’s the plan?

This was the whole point, right? Less reliance on mechanical skill and more VARIETY. It seems to me that all 3 races lost a lot of viable builds.... Convince me of the error of my thinking. Surely, this patch shits new builds?

I don’t think the current testing being done is valid. There are too many game breaking bugs to validate ANY build for any race. The orbital supply bug is a prime example. This amount of change if baby sat would be acceptable. This is clearly not what’s going on.

Here are 5 obvious changes that should happen before it is released to main:

1. Overlord speed increase. They are too easy to pick off now. Can you even dodge biles at all anymore? They feel too slow.

2. Protoss Chrono should be gated somehow to match mule tech. So unlocked after the first gateway.

3. Warp Gate should be moved back to the Cyber. Protoss seems too weak to early aggression.

4. With 3 in place Protoss needs faster unit production out their gateways. Not sure by how much?

5. The Ghost needs to be reverted back a few patches. It’s too much of a generalist right now and in my opinion is currently a stupid design. Keeping the light tag is something to try but with the older ghost.