Starcraft 2 news » Legacy of the Void Beta: Balance Update Preview - April 27

As testing continues to scale on Legacy of the Void Multiplayer, we’re getting more information on what’s working, and what could be improved. With this in mind, we’ve prepared a number of additional changes for the beta that we’d like to discuss.

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New Terran Unit
Before we get into the changes for existing units, we’d like to first discuss the status of the new Terran unit. We’ve been experimenting with various ideas, from a new base defense structure, to an add-on that allows production facilities to change their type. At this time however, it seems we may move forward with a unit from the Starport. There are various ways we’ve been experimenting with this unit:

• High damage, low rate of fire
• Low damage, high rate of fire
• Variable attack “modes” – High damage w/ low range & Low damage w/ high range.
• Small radius area attack w/ high damage
• And more…

In general, we believe that armies made from the Factory or Starport will be more capable as independent compositions in Legacy of the Void. Players will be able to commit to a tech-path specifically, and so we are also interested in splitting out the mech and air upgrades again. We believe that bringing back this choice is a potential improvement for the game.

We would also like to take a closer look at Terran bio play in Legacy of the Void. With the changes to bio and the many buffs to mech, it is possible that the advantage might be tilting too heavily towards mech armies right now. Ideally, we’d like to have a good mix of options by the time we ship the game.

Now let’s move on to the changes we’re planning for the next balance patch.

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Gameplay Changes

New Reaper grenade ability
This activated-ability will allow Reapers to launch a grenade that deals damage and knocks units in that area back. What we’re hoping for on this front is not necessarily to make Reapers a must have in every combat situation, but something that would allow micro with and against the Reaper to be more interesting early on, as well as something that could be a combat bonus in some situations.

Mineral amounts changed from 100%/50% to 100%/60%
We discussed this a bit earlier this week and we feel that the pressure to expand might be too great in its current state. Our goal for Legacy of the Void is still to encourage more aggressive expansions, but we’d like to tune this a little bit in hopes of finding to the correct place.

Protoss: Warp-in duration reverted to Heart of the Swarm.
Our goals on this front were to weaken Protoss Warpgate all-ins and increase strategic decision making for where to use each warp in. The resource changes look to already be getting us into a good spot for the all-in case. Focusing on strategic use however, it currently feels too punishing for the Protoss. We’re finding that you’ll always want to pick the safer warp-in spot for your units. In changing this, we’ll create more interesting decisions for the other player on whether or not to go for the vulnerable units that are warping in, or to continue battling the units already on the field. Therefore, we’d like to see how this works out with just the increased damage and the warp-in time reverted back to its original value.

Adept

• Adept’s weapon’s damage point changed from .4 to default (0.167)

We heard your feedback in that the Adept feels clunky to use, so we made some tweaks in this area.

Cyclone

• Can no longer target air.
• New upgrade: allows Cyclones to target air (fusion core requirement, researched from factory tech lab). 100/100 cost.

The Cyclone is currently too good at stopping early game harassment. This is the opposite of what we want in Legacy of the Void, as we want to see more harassment play happening on both sides. The idea here is to still have Cyclones as an option early on, but not so all-around to the point that most harassment openings can be prevented just by opening Cyclones. In the late game, when the upgrade is researched, we believe players’ bases would be spread out so much that even though the Cyclones themselves become well-rounded options, opponents fighting against them will have numerous harassment options and can more readily find vulnerable positions.

Ravager

• Weapon period changed from 0.8 to 1.6
• Weapon range reduced from 6 to 4

There looks to be some Ravager early game all-ins that are very difficult to stop. While we don’t know with 100% certainty that this is actually a problem, we decided to tone down the Ravager anyway so that we can see more units being used on the Zerg side. We have many more strategies and units that need to be tested and hope this change brings these into play. We chose these specific changes to create a clear distinction between Ravagers and Roaches. In short, Roaches will be better units for cost efficiency, whereas Ravagers are meant to be built in strategic numbers when their ability can prove useful.

Swarm Host

• Cost changed to 200/100/3
• No longer requires to upgrade for flying locusts (flying locusts are enabled from the start)
• Locust health down from 65 to 50
• Swarm hosts can burrow move at 2 speed

We also talked about Swarm Host changes earlier this week. With the Swarm Host, we’d like to explore getting to a good place sooner than with most unit changes in Void. The main reason is that HotS could potentially use a different design of the Swarm Host. We’d like to use the beta as a rough testing ground to see how the unit can turn out in both games potentially. Our goal here was to do the cost/supply cost changes to make Swarm Hosts more accessible. Locust health has also been reduced so that the mass Swarm Host case isn’t so good, and the Swarm Host burrow move change should help them be more effective at harassment.

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Thanks you all for your feedback so far in the Legacy of the Void beta. As always, none of this is final and we will continue to make changes in the beta regularly. So please keep on play testing and keep the feedback rolling in!

Thank you, and see you on the beta!